sameforme | [intro]

[intro]

Fuck South Dakota.

And fuck Gordon for dragging her here. She was done with all of this, she's been done with it for years. More than years. A fucking lifetime.

Diane drains the last of the vodka from the glass and waits for the bartender to fill it up again. She's been hard at it since she woke up this morning, but it's not like there's much else for her to be doing while the others are up to god knows what and she's left in this shitty hotel staring at cowboy kitsch and waiting to be needed again.

She sighs heavily and takes a sip from her newly topped up glass, tapping her fingernails along the rim.

Sleep hasn't exactly been easy to come by since Gordon and Albert dragged her along on this fucked up field trip. Not since she saw...him. Her brain recoils from the memory and she feels the nauseatingly familiar ice in her veins. All she wants to do is go home and forget it all, but part of her knows how unlikely it is that that will ever happen. That tiny, annoying part of her that never lets her completely delude herself no matter how hard she tries to drown it.

Finishing her drink again, she pushes the glass away and stands up for the first time in what feels like hours. She sways just a bit on her feet and realizes she's probably been at this for longer than she thought.

Checking her phone she sees it. 2:53.

"Jesus," she says under her breath. Definitely longer than she thought. Time for a little fresh air.

She nods at the bartender and grabs her purse, making her way to the bar exit that leads directly out onto the street. She's in absolutely no mood to be dealing with the hotel lobby and the possibility she might run into one of her FBI keepers.

Pushing the door open, she stumbles slightly on the small step down to the sidewalk and drops her pack of cigarettes. When she looks down to retrieve them she sees...sand?

It crunches under her feet as she turns around to find the bar gone. The hotel gone. Her breath comes hard and fast and she begins to shake uncontrollably, her knuckles gone white from her grip on her purse.

"No." She shakes her head and backs away from the spot where the door she'd just exited should have been. "No fucking way. No. Not again. I'm not doing this again."

Diane squeezes her eyes shut and tries to clear her head but it's like all the alarms in the world are going off at once and it would be impossible to think past the noise even if she wasn't completely losing her shit. Even if she was a lot more sober.

With a sob she drops down like her strings have been cut, ass landing hard in the sand next to the cigarettes she'd momentarily forgotten about. She taps one into her violently shaking hand and it takes a few tries before she can manage to get the lighter working, but the first drag helps. Mildly. So she just sits there, smoking, staring out into nothing because what the hell else was she supposed to do. Because she should have known this was how it would end the minute they showed up in her fucking living room asking her to remember all the things she'd never wanted to remember and pulling her right back into all their bullshit. She should have said she wouldn't go. She should have done a lot of things.

"Fuck."

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Roland remained calm in the face of it all. He was familiar with this demon. It almost was a comfort, dealing with something he was familiar with.

"It is not him," he said, not needing to know who it was. Seeing Diane shaken was enough to know the demon had chosen a powerful face.

He stepped in front of her, drew both guns, the heavy grips in his hands an extension of his own flesh, it seemed. He aimed not with hand, lest he forget the face of his father. h He aimed with his eye. Bth guns fired at once and the demon exploded from man-shape into the cloud of red and black once again.

She hears the words but they don't register, not when she's face to face with that thing wearing Coop's face like a mask. All she knows is that she can't fight him and she can't run and it's just like it was before because she's so fucking terrified. And she hates herself for her fear because it's what he wants and she just keeps giving it up to him again and again.

Then Roland is moving and the shots are so loud they rattle her bones. It's possible she screams, but she's not really sure because she can't hear anything over the ringing in her ears and she's tripping over herself as she stumbles back away from him. From all of it. Her back hitting a tree the only thing that keeps her from falling to the ground.

It's the grey spots dancing on the edge of her vision that make her realize she's hyperventilating and she's really not sure how to make herself stop. Especially because there is a tiny part of her that thinks it's a pretty reasonable response under the circumstances.

The cloud swirled and roiled, then suddenly vanished and in its place stood a boy. A thin boy off about 11 with dirty blonde hair and a smear of soot on his face.

"Roland," he said. "Roland, why did you let me fall? Why did you let me die?" he asked plaintively.

"You are not Jake, demon," Roland said coldly, firing his gun. The shot hit squarely, and the boy vanished, replaced by a large, regal man. His short cropped black hair was shot with silver and his voice an rumbling bass. "You have forgotten the face of your father, boy..."

Roland released a volley, shot after shot until both barrels were empty. The demon evaporated then.

He paused, watching for it to return, but it did not. He turned to Diane and took her in one arm to hold her tightly.

What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck....

She doesn't want to be touched and for a minute she thinks she's gonna push him away but then the minute is gone and she still hasn't done it. She can't stand her own weakness and she can't stand to be pitied but maybe that's not what he's doing. Maybe he needs some kind of comfort as much as she does. Maybe.

When she can get enough air to speak, she says "We're dead, aren't we. That's what this is. We're dead and this is how we're gonna be punished."

"If it were only so easy," Roland said. "We are not dead, Diane. This is life, hard as it may be. Fear not. I will not let the demons near you if I can help it," he swore. "Now come, we should see if we can find the river I hear. Water will lead us somewhere, I'm sure."

Way too numb and shocked to argue, she lets him lead her wherever it is he wants to go. She's pretty sure he's wrong, though. No way is this real life. She's lived real life and this sure as shit isn't it. If they aren't dead then either she's having the most vivid nightmare ever, or it's the blue rose. Again. She should have known she could never really escape it.

She grabs his hand with her shaking one and holds on tight. If he doesn't like it, he can obviously pull away, but she grips him hard enough that she really hopes he gets the message and doesn't. He feels warm and real in a way that nothing else in these woods do and she needs that. "How do you know we're not dead, Roland. How can you be positive?"

"If we were dead, there would be a turtle," he replied, serious as the grave. "I do not believe the Crimson King would allow my death so far from the Tower. And you feel quite alive to me," he added, giving her hand a squeeze.

Moments later they broke through the trees to find a river. It was clear and deep, the surface still as could be. The bed of it was hardly dull, instead it glittered with precious gems and gold.

"A turtle."

Her voice sounds as serious as his right up until she starts laughing. But it isn't hysterical or dismissive laughter, at least not this time. She's just...laughing. Partly because of all the things she expected to come out of his mouth that wasn't even within a thousand miles of the list, and partly because it's legitimately one of the most ridiculous things she's ever heard. And she kind of likes it.

"You are completely batshit crazy, you know that right?" She looks at him fondly when she says it, though. Not letting go of his hand. Whatever else she was gonna say is forgotten as soon as she lays eyes on the river. "Whoa."

"There is a fell presence here," he said, pulling her hand to keep her close. His fears were visceral, and not entirely unfounded. The mirror-like surface began to ripple, and up bubbled the form of a woman, easily two meters tall, entirely formed of water.

"Visitors," she bubbled. "Come in. Find your fortune. Riches beyond measure...yours for the taking..."

Roland drew his gun again, aiming at the water spirit.

Maybe she's run out of adrenaline or maybe she's just suffering from too many shocks in too short a period of time, but whatever the reason, Diane has had enough. More than enough.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me," she says in a voice that doesn't hold even a hint of the fear she'd been feeling back in the woods when he'd appeared. Now she just sounds finished with it all and more than a little bit annoyed. "You were right, Roland. We're not dead. I refuse to believe the afterlife is this absurd."

She drops his hand when he raises the gun, moving slightly behind his shoulder, close enough that her chest touches his back every time she breathes.

The gun explodes with a puff of smoke. The bullet crashed through the water with a spalsh, but did nothing. The woman only laughed, a bubbling and light sound.

"Puny man, your gun is weak."

Roland realized there was nothing he could do, but it seemed she was limited to the water. He looked at Diane and said simply,

"...Run."

Then with a firm hold on her hand he turned and bolted back into the forest, all but dragging her along.

She has no idea how far they've run but she's definitely out of breath by the time she tugs on his hand to pull him to a stop. A pack a day habit will do that to a person and it's not like she ever has to go anywhere at more than a comfortable walking pace in her normal life.

"Hold up," she pants out. Other hand on her side where the stitch has started. "There's nothing following us."

She doesn't bother adding that she can't go any further because it's kind of obvious just looking at her.

They'd gone not so far as Roland would have liked, but he could see she was in no shape to carry on. He stopped to listen to her wheeze.

"Rest," he said, laying a hand on her back to give her something to help her ground herself. The last thing he wanted to do was have to pitch her over his shoulder and carry her back to civilization.

Breathing in a few big gulps of air, she can feel her heartbeat start to drop back down to something that feels much less like impending cardiac arrest. It's another long minute before she's sure she can talk without sounding like a 90-year old climbing 10 flights of stairs.

"I'm not even going to ask you what that was back there," she says finally. Pleased at how normal she sounds. "At this point I don't even want to know and I probably wouldn't understand if you told me."

She holds up a hand to stop him from saying anything while she considers his face. His clothes. The way he looked firing that gun. And she doesn't think before she asks, "How many people have you killed?"

"Too many," he replied. More than he could count. "It would be easier to lay under the sky at night and count the stars, than to try to remember them all."

Too many. Thinking of the town of Tull, how he'd killed every last one of them, and all the Can-Toi and Taheen, not to mention the men and women who had fallen to his guns. He couldn't even recall everyone.

If he was expecting her to be horrified, he was going to be very disappointed. She wasn't entirely sure what she was feeling, but it certainly wasn't horrified. If she had to give a name to it, it was something more like awe. The kind of awe she thought maybe people were talking about when the bible tried to explain angels. Diane certainly isn't religious, but it's really the only comparison that seems to fit.

Maybe that's why he was the one to find her here. Maybe he is her awful angel.

Like most of the questionable things Diane does in her life, she doesn't stop to think about it first. She just moves forward and kisses him. Hard. Hand on the back of his head, waiting to see if he'll kiss her back or push her away.

It had been so long since a woman had kissed him with fervor. He'd laid with folks from time to time, and he'd been taken by that demon in the Stones, but Roland was not a man many looked to for carnal pleasure.

But she kissed him with a hunger, a need, and Roland found it irresistible. he slid a hand around her waist and pulled her close, tight to him with a squeeze and he plundered her hungry mouth in return.

Definitely not pushing her away. This was the first good thing that had happened to her since she'd woken up this morning. No, even further back. Since Gordon and Albert had shown up at her door.

Her heart is pounding again, but this time it's for a much more enjoyable reason, and she pulls back just far enough to speak. "Those cabins we passed back there. Are any of them empty?"

He was delicious, there was no doubt about that, but she wasn't about to get naked in these cold, creepy woods if there was any alternative.

"One or two," he replied. His hand snaked to the curve of her waist, then climbed up over her breast and then onward to her cheek. "We need to find our way out of the woods first. Come. We'll go slower this time so as to not exhaust you completely."

She thinks that might have actually been a joke which is surprising enough that she can't help but laugh. Maybe not a robot after all.

He also doesn't strike her as the kind of man who gets lost very often. She'd be willing to bet he could find his way out of these woods with a bag over his head and his hands tied behind his back, so she's not overly concerned.

"Have you actually seen any other people?" He hadn't seemed all that surprised to find her on the beach so she just kind of assumed, but she also hadn't seen any real evidence of anyone else, so she figured she might as well ask.

"Of course. There are several who sleep in the dome. Several others have taken shelter in the cottages. One woman, so far as I can tell. And a sly fella who has long hair and puts on his lips. I've been watching them. They seem to do as they please, none mucking about in anyone else's business," he explained as they walked. Not far ahead the trees opened to the shore, and just beyond was the small village.

The Dome. So that's what they're calling it. Makes sense since it's a dome and all, but the name gives it a weird scifi vibe that she's not sure she's emotionally ready to deal with. Not after the day she's already had. She puts it away in the same place with the giant wardrobe full of clothes that fit her, the water lady in a jewel lake, and...well, all the rest of it. Puts it away, and closes the door on it until later. Or never. Too soon to say.

"And where do you stay? Because I can tell you right now, I'm not really the group living type. I even hated it in college and that was --" she stops herself and huffs a quick laugh. "-- let's just say a long time ago and leave it there."

"I sleep in the dome barracks with Spencer and Lyric and a few others," he replied. "A bed is better than the ground. I have not had need to find other shelter, ye ken?"

Twenty yards more and they broke through the trees. Nearby were the cottages, and up to the left stood the dome, menacing with its brutal architecture.

"If you would like your own home, I can show you the empty cottages for the taking," he said, taking her by the hand to lead her to a door. The place was in decent shape, a bit run down from disuse. Inside it was just as cold as out, but there was an iron stove and a pile of wood next to it. Dust clung to every flat surface and there were cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling. A quick look around lead them to an office, a kitchen, the living room, and a bedroom with dust, but mysteriously fresh bedding.

"Barracks are definitely a no," she says in a tone that leaves no room for argument. "I mean it's not like I'm thrilled at the idea of living in a dusty cabin, but it's definitely a step up from barracks."

She takes a look around and wonders at her sanity that she's already thinking of ways to work the whole 'rustic chic' thing. This isn't going to be a home. It can't be. She has a home and she's going to find a way back to it.

It's the shock. It has to be the shock.

When she sees the clean bed she raises an eyebrow and looks at Roland with a half-smile. "Do you think this place is trying to tell us something?"

"Fair shake it is," Roland said with just a huff of a laugh. He shrugged off his overcoat, leaving him in a brocade vest, chambray shirt, and fitted trousers. His guns hung heavy on his hips, the belt fully loaded with extra ammunition hanging low on his trim hips.

He crossed to her then and took up where he'd left off, Bending his neck to meet her mouth in a ferocious kiss. Any other woman he might have been more gentle, but Diane had proven she could weather the storm of passion.

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