Twenty-Three-
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2, Roland
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The furniture, once nice and now all terribly faded, was covered with a thick layer of dust. The bookshelves, the desk, the computer, the industrial carpeting, everything was growing indistinct underneath the dust that sifted down, year after year, and settled, and was not disturbed. Or, at least, it was only slightly disturbed. A clear footpath led from the door to the cracking leather desk chair and back, the path starting to take on the look of a trail blazed through the wilderness. The chair was also largely free of the dust, as was the statue standing by the desk's edge.

He'd been a large man, once, with a leonine mane of curly hair that touched his collar in back. Now he was a sandstone statue forever gazing out one of the massive plate-glass windows, one squarish hand raised to shield his half-closed eyes from the sun. It was certain that the sun had been the last thing he ever saw.

Indeed, he was looking at it now, if anything still looked out from those eyes. The sun was a wobbling coruscating hole punched in the sky, so black that violet and blue tones slid across its surface like an oil slick. The city that its light slid over was a dead thing, brown and gray and completely still, silent as a tomb except for the whining wind. Sometimes buildings cracked, or caught on fire, or just collapsed--but this one was still standing, and by some miracle had retained about half of its windows, including these. Some of them were cracked here and there, but so far, none of them had broken to let in the wind.

The sun crawled another half an inch through the deadened sky. It was noon, now, and once upon a time that would have meant the streets were thronged with people. Now it meant that to go outside was death, because nothing human could withstand the sun.

"And how are you this fine day?" the man in the doorway asked, before stepping boldly into a pool of sunlight and barely flinching. "Still the same? Good to hear it, good to hear it." Following the trail he crossed the office and threw himself into the chair, the sun-ravaged leather cracking just a little further under his negligible weight. Roland grimaced and dug into his pants pocket, in search of his hip flask.

"I bet you're surprised to see me," he told the statue, even as he dug out the flask and unscrewed the top. Eschewing the polite little cup, he threw his head back and drank straight from the flask, baring his teeth in a grimace afterwards and huffing a little. "Used to have to wait until it was dark lest I be Cuvier'd, right? Well, surprise, surprise."

He faltered, then, and took another drink, turning his hand over to watch the weird blackened symbol shiver and fade as the alcohol took hold. The strident voice in the back of his mind dimmed, as well, fading out behind a curtain of whisky fumes. "Doesn't matter any more," he told the statue, wagging the flask at him. "Turns out it's only humans who have to worry!" Roland thought about that, then snorted. "Well, all right, animals too, but as an author I reserve the right to omit details in the name of dramatic necessity."

He paused to take another drink. "'Dramatic necessity'. Ha," he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "As if I were an author any more... hell, I'm not even human any more."

The statue said nothing. Roland almost preferred him this way--he was the perfect audience. And even now, Roland still craved an audience. So as the sun oozed across the sky and shifted across the dust Roland sat in Marcus' cracking desk chair and regaled him with the tale of the demon virus, and how the Lokapala had stolen it from the Karma Society, and how, eventually, he'd taken the burden on himself, and how it had hurt, oh fuck, and on, and on, until his hip flask was empty and his eyes were sodden and half-shut behind his glasses.

"So fuck you, Mister Sun," Roland concluded, flipping off the black disk through one of the cracked and dusty windows. "Fuck you and go to hell." He closed his eyes and rested for a moment, not quite drunk enough to stop marveling at the unfamiliar feel of sunlight on his face. Even this sick approximation. For a long while, then, he was silent, watching the city, trying not to think--his own thoughts, or another's.

Once the sun had dripped off the edge of the world and the night had come on, Roland finally shifted and broke the spell of silence. "I know we wouldn't have lasted much longer," he said, his voice soft. "Three, four more months and you'd have thrown me out. You wouldn't have been the first. And I'd have sneered and called it 'material' and gone on and found someone else, and you'd have probably found some other guy and gotten married and raised corgis or some shit--" forgetting that the flask was empty Roland threw it back again, getting only a single drop of whisky that sank into his lower lip before he could lick it up "--but now here we are, aren't we, statue and demon, and isn't that just exactly what I deserved?"

Marcus still said nothing. After a moment Roland heaved himself out of his desk chair and went to him for the first time, pulling a wilted handkerchief out of his pocket and gingerly brushing the worst of the dust from Marcus' face and shoulders. "Drunk and feeling sorry for myself," he said, flicking the handkerchief against Marcus' upraised arm. "Doesn't that bring back memories? ...no, I guess it wouldn't, not for you."

Putting his handkerchief away, Roland recapped his flask and trudged back along the worn footpath to the door, pausing in the doorway. "I don't miss you," he said, "but I think that I probably should."

And then he left, leaving Marcus to watch the rising of the moon alone.

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