cowt 11 sett 7 M6: or just a new quest after all (dark tower, eddie/roland, pg13)

[janie_tangerine]

 Eddie doesn’t know how he knows that New York is wrong.

 

Or better.

 

New York is right, but.

 

But he isn’t.

 

Since he has an awareness of his surroundings, he feels like he loves it but that at the same time it’s not where he belongs. The Brooklyn Bridge looms over the city since he can remember, and it feels like it belongs there and he doesn’t even if he thinks every piece of iron in it is beautiful and he can walk through it over and over and it never feels right.

 

He grows up and the streets of Manhattan are equally familiar and not right, and the Empire State Building towering at night over the city is eerie and right for it but the sight of it just feels strange, and his house feels like it’s not his, and it’s not until he’s fourteen and he passes through the intersection with 2nd avenue and 46th street that he feels a shudder run down his spine and he thinks, this place is also wrong but different.

 

There’s an abandoned lot.

 

Nothing grows in there.

 

He goes back home, which isn’t even home.

 

It doesn’t feel like it.

 

Also, the visceral dislike he feels for his brother each single time he talks is something else that has been with him since he can remember, and he can’t quite pinpoint why, and whenever he complains that he can’t do anything because of him, Eddie just shrugs and tells him he can take care of himself, and it pisses Henry off and it makes Eddie happy to see it.

 

And his mother — she just glares at him.

 

She feels wrong, too.

 

When he’s fifteen, Eddie dreams of a tower in a field of roses.

 

That — that place feels less wrong, but still not right. It looms over it like the Empire State Building or the Twin Towers, but in a different way, and he likes the smell of the flowers in that dream, it’s so vivid and they look so red, so bright, like blood —

 

He wakes up.

 

He knows down in his bones that that tower exists somewhere.

 

He knows he belongs where it is.

 

But —

 

But it doesn’t feel quite right.

 

Not yet.

 

Not yet.

 

He’s seventeen when he goes to watch a Clint Eastwood movie at a retrospective, it’s For a few dollars more, and —

 

The face of the man is familiar in a molecular way but it’s still not right, quite close but not it, like Eddie is supposed to know someone who looks like that or is very similar to him and he doesn’t and it’s driving him crazy, and he doesn’t tell Henry that he thought the guy was insanely attractive, and he moves on with his life and feeling like he doesn’t belong anywhere his feet touch, not in his house, not in his room, not in New York’s streets, not —

 

Not anywhere, and every time he passes through that lot at the cross between 46th and 2nd he feels that shudder, over and over and over again —

 

Until one day he’s twenty-two and he’s walking there because he woke up at four in the morning after dreaming of that tower and he felt a pull to go there, and when he shows up at six in the morning after a subway ride where he felt like throwing up every other moment, he reaches that street and sees that there’s an open door floating in the air in the parking lot, and a guy who looks like Clint Eastwood except with drake hair walks out of it, guns and jeans and cowboy hat and all, and —

 

And suddenly everything, as their eyes meet, feels right, and he remembers, oh he remembers everything, memories of fifteen other lives hammering into his brain at once and making his shoulders shake, and when he raises his stare and meets the other man’s blue eyes, those bombardier eyes that look slightly warmer right now, he can only come closer and open his mouth and —

 

“Roland?” He whispers.

 

“You — you remember?” The other man — no, Roland, asks.

 

“Yes,” he says, “yes,” and suddenly he’s brought forward and they’re hugging in the middle of the street and people are looking at them but they don’t seem to be seeing the door but Eddie doesn’t care because he knows he’s about to step inside it and —

 

And it feels right.

 

Now —

 

Now he belongs, he thinks, and it wasn’t someplace, it was with someone, and —

 

“I do,” he whispers, “shall we? You can tell me everything later,” he says, and Roland nods and grabs his hand and —

 

Eddie steps into the door, on a beach that feels way more familiar than New York ever did.

 

He smiles.

 

Now things are right.

 

Now they are.

 

 

End.