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To his dismay, Arthur woke up.
He blearily blinked his eyes open, groaning quietly to himself as he tried to breathe properly. It was like sand had been lodged in his windpipe, blocking any sort of clean or clear air from entering his lungs. His heart pounded in his chest like the rumbling of hooves on dirt, fear and pain crashing through him in a raging tempest. Fever-like sweat clung to his skin and dripped down his forehead, too hot and too cold all at once. There was pain all over his body as he tried to wake up some more, the ache overwhelming to the point of pulsating numbness.
Gone were the days where he could wake up without feeling like the world was closing in on him and crushing him like an ant under a boot, when he could breathe in and out without so much as a tickle in his throat. On cue, he coughed hard, a severe itch in his throat as he beat on his chest and desperately wished for water, whiskey, moonshine, hell, anything to soothe his throat.
And as if by magic, or some kind of divine providence, a tin mug was pushed to his mouth.
He barely got over the surprise before he was drinking clean water, tasting slightly of the tang of metal, a gentle hand cupping his jaw to tilt his head up. He realised, then, that he knew those hands (for Christ’s sake, Morgan, wake up) and knew that gentleness too.
“Drink, I’ve got you,” Charles’ disembodied voice murmured, and good lord, he must really be out of it now to think of him in what felt like his last moments. He kept drinking regardless, savouring the imagined feeling of that kind, calloused palm under the scruff of his beard.
What happened to him slowly and feverishly came back to him. He was dead, surely, because Micah beat the shit out of him and left him to succumb to his wounds. He’d watched the sunrise and died that morning, slumped against a rock wall and breathing his last ragged breaths. He’d been ruined by the fists of a traitor and the negligence of a father, and slowly began decomposing on a mountain, far from the west and far from any sort of place he could call home.
“I died,” Arthur wheezed out, sounding as pathetic as he felt. Like pushing a bagpipe with more holes in it than you could count, a small whistling din that was more noise than real words. The hand moved from his jaw to his cheek, tender and caring as a thumb lightly traced his bruised cheekbone.
“No, you didn’t,” Charles’ voice told him, and Arthur wished he could see him, see that beautiful mouth move around the syllables even one last time, but he was powerless, incapable of opening swollen-shut eyes. “You lived, and you’ll keep on living,” Charles continued, voice wavering slightly. Arthur wondered when his hallucinations had gotten so real, to imagine emotions he’d never seen the real man express.
“Don’t think I will,” Arthur muttered, eyes heavy again as he struggled to stay awake. There was a press of lips to his forehead, soft and supple in the way he remembered Charles’ lips to be. He missed him dearly and hoped that he was able to safely escort the natives north, though he knew in himself that Charles was beyond capable. He also hoped that Charles wouldn’t have to be the one to find his body, and that he’d have been long picked apart by birds or coyotes or some other wildlife before he did. Let his body be of some use to the world around him after his passing, he thought deliriously. Yeah, Charles would appreciate that.
“You’ll be fine,” Charles’ voice told him soothingly, but it sounded wrong, like he was assuring himself just as much as he was assuring Arthur. “Didn’t drag you all the way here just for you to...”
Charles trailed off, and he felt the hand on his cheek begin to tremble slightly. Arthur desperately wished he could open his eyes and see this real-not-real Charles, memorise the details of his face past what he already knew, let that sight guide him through whatever afterlife he ended up in, if he deserved one.
“You’ll be fine,” Charles repeated firmly, palm sliding against his scruffy cheek. Before Arthur could even think of a reply or consider how real that touch felt against his cheek, the world went quiet, and he slipped back into the embrace of the void.
He dreamt of nothing.
That wasn’t right– it was everything and nothing, somehow. He dreamt of the people he’d harmed, too many to name and too few still alive today. He dreamt of his hands, covered in blood that was dripping from the dark, starless sky and bathing him in hot droplets. The droplets became waterfalls, soaking him down to his bare skin, clothes permanently stained in the blood of those he’d killed in the name of cruelty and greed and blind faith.
He found himself in a lake of blood, the waterfall pushing a harsh current through to fill it, perhaps to drown him. A lone buck wandered closer to the lake, not paying him any mind as it drank from the lake of blood. Arthur watched it drink, calmly lapping up the deep red as if it was water, and realised that he could taste it, could feel it running down his throat in large, thick gulps.
A lone wolf creeped up from the forest that had materialised around the lake. It was limping from some unseen injury, and eyeing the buck with desperate hunger. The buck continued drinking, either unaware or uncaring of the predator in its midst. The wolf came closer, and before Arthur could even move to warn it or jump in its way, the stag turned to the wolf, lowered his head, and charged.
“Arthur,” a voice called out, pulling him from sleep. It didn’t feel like sleep, because he felt just as tired as he was before, but he must’ve been out for some time, groggy and disoriented. “Arthur, wake up.”
“What?” Arthur grunted, slurring in his speech as he finally opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was a face, dark and wide and framed with black hair and the most beautiful eyes he knew he’d ever seen, the breath leaving his broken lungs. “Charles? Is– is that really you?”
“Yes, Arthur, it’s me,” Charles murmured, lips moving slowly around the words, eyes losing their shaken wideness as they softened. His hair had grown out a little, sides no longer shaved close to the scalp, but not as long as before the bank job. His face was otherwise the same, though a little more tired around the eyes than Arthur remembered from before they’d last seen each other.
Arthur could feel tears pricking his eyes, a panicked relief settling into his bones as he extended a trembling hand to touch Charles’ cheek. “Y-you’re here?” He asked shakily, lip quivering as he looked up at Charles. “You’re really here?”
Charles smiled at him, the sad sort that made his heart ache, kissing his forehead and embracing him as gently as he could to his chest. “I’m here.”
Arthur was quiet for a moment, until he wheezed out a laugh, ending in a wet, itching cough. When he finally caught his breath, shakily inhaling air, he chuckled in disbelief. “Thought you left. Why the hell’d you come back?”
“That’s not even a question,” Charles chided, a smile evident in his tone, still holding him. Arthur hoped he never remembered to let go. “I never could stay away from you for too long, you know.”
Arthur laughed again, a sad noise that sounded as beaten down as he felt. He tried to steady his shaky breathing, tears running freely down his cheeks and soaking Charles’ dotted shirt. “Charles Smith, you damned fool.”
Charles brought Arthur’s head closer to his chest, fingers carding through his hair. “I know, I know. I missed you too.” He breathed in against Arthur’s forehead, despite the drying sweat and the scent of fever palpable in the air. “You should eat. I tried feeding you the few times you were awake, if you can even remember that, but...” He trailed off, gesturing to a newly cleaned bucket to the side of the bed. “Couldn’t keep it down. You think you can handle eating now?”
Arthur winced, wondering how it was that he was so blessed to have a man as caring and determined as Charles to care for him at his worst. In the middle of his ponderings, the state of Arthur’s stomach made itself known, audibly grumbling. Charles chuckled softly, letting go of Arthur to get up. If he noticed the wet stains on his shirt, he didn’t seem to care. He wiped his own cheeks of tears before turning to Arthur, a soft smile on his face that Arthur wanted to rediscover every part of. “I’ll be back. You stay here, alright?”
“Don’t think I can do anything or go anywhere without—” Arthur coughed suddenly, wracking through his chest like a thief through a rich fool’s pocket. “—Without causin’ a racket. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
Charles’ smile mellowed out, falling slightly. He turned away and disappeared through the door frame, giving Arthur the time to survey his surroundings. It was familiar to him, filled with various hunting and trapping memorabilia and taxidermied animals, as well as fishing equipment and little trinkets. Not long after spotting a stuffed wolf head on the wall, he realised that this used to be Hamish’s home, from before it was abandoned on account of his passing. There were some items around the house that seem to be his and Charles’ things, like a quiver full of arrows and the bear claw belt buckle he always wore, but he’d been in this cabin enough times to know that he and Charles were the first people to shelter here since Hamish’s untimely death.
On the nightstand, he saw his revolver, nearly as sparkling as the day he’d gotten it with an oiled rag sitting next to it. Beside the nightstand was a chair with a blanket draped over it, cushioned but unlikely as comfortable as the mattress he was situated on. He guiltily wondered if Charles had been sleeping there while he was—for lack of a better phrase—dead to the world.
Charles came back in not too long after he’d left, carrying a bowl of some kind of meaty stew. It looked similar to Pearson’s, though it smelled far better than the brightly coloured mud that was the camp cook’s signature stew. “Sorry if it ain’t much. Never was any good at making stew, but I figured you might take it better than dry meat or baked beans.”
He took the bowl with no little gratitude and moved to sit up, despite his body protesting with every movement. Charles, angel that he was, noticed and helped him sit up, careful not to jostle or exert him too much in the process. Not for the first time, Arthur knew that he owed it all to Charles. “Thanks,” he said, taking the proffered spoon as Charles took a seat, before beginning to eat. Despite the stew’s apparent similarity to Pearson’s, it tasted nothing like it, on behalf of there being actual taste rather than just texture. His stomach ached somewhat from being reintroduced to fine dining after so much time, but the nausea had mostly abated by his fifth bite, until he successfully swallowed down every spoonful of the frankly tasty stew.
Charles watched him eat, which made Arthur’s skin prickle slightly from the scrutiny, though he couldn’t tell if it was the attention or the dried sweat of sickness that made him feel so exposed. Possibly both. “So...” Charles began after Arthur put the bowl down on his lap, the careful hesitance obvious in his tone. “I think I can guess, but... what happened on that mountain?”
Arthur looked down at his empty bowl, trying to put all his scattered thoughts together. It felt almost like the aftermath of that time he’d been kidnapped by Colm O’Driscoll; his mind was clouded, most parts of the fighting unclear and a blur, only remembering the broad, important details. He remembered telling John to get gone, grappling with Micah on that mountain, being beaten and overpowered, reaching for a gun, and Dutch materialising and stopping him from blowing the rat’s head off. He remembered Dutch’s face, the way he stared down at him with a look on his face that Arthur had seen only twice before, for Anabelle and Hosea. He remembered telling him... something, something raw that ripped his heart in two, vision swimming with tears. He remembered the sunrise, the light approaching, and making peace with the mess he’d made of his life.
“... Maybe another time,” Charles murmured quietly, taking the bowl—gripped tight between fingers that had lost their strength—and putting it on the nightstand. He settled back in his chair, crossing his arms as he and Arthur stared at each other.
Arthur cleared his throat, though it did little to clear his mind. “You been sleepin’ there?” He asked, nodding his head at Charles’ chair.
Charles rolls his shoulders a little, folding his hands on his stomach. “Mm, yeah. Most nights I do, other nights, I sleep outside.”
Arthur tried not to squirm, though part of him always felt that urge whenever Charles trained his gaze on him– which had been, and still was, pretty often. “Lotta space on the bed. Could probably fit you, enormous as you are.”
Charles regarded him with a soft twinkle in his eyes. “Probably could, if we tried,” he replied, smile widening just a little. Arthur didn’t realise how much he missed his smile until it had been too late, and there was nothing but the consumption left. “So long as you’re alright with it.”
“I been more than alright! I been—” He abruptly cut himself off, coughing into his fist as he turned his head away, his hands clenching into fists as he tried to get through the worst of the hacking. Charles reached over and rubbed his back, and while it didn’t do much to stop his coughing, the familiar comfort was still more than welcome. Arthur cleared his throat afterwards, thumping his chest twice with his fist. “I been– alright with that since the moment I met you. Ain’t stoppin’ now.”
“Since then, huh?” Charles asked with a worried smile, still rubbing his back soothingly. Maybe it did help a little, just feeling his touch. “That’s a lot of trust for someone you’d just met.”
“Maybe I just knew you’d be one of the good ones,” Arthur replied, voice scratchy. He leaned back into Charles’ touch, trying to control his breathing to rein it back in, looking at Charles all the while. God, he really did miss him. He thought back to how Charles had only been gone for less than a week before it all broke down, and how much he wished he was up north with him rather than following the man he saw as like a father to his own grave, nearly taking John down with him.
He suddenly thought of John—Christ, how could he forget?—and felt his chest constricting as the worry settled in, curling around his throat just as viciously as the consumption. “Did– did you see John? If he got out? I-I don’t...”
“Hey, hey,” Charles soothed, his gentle hand grasping Arthur’s. He carefully rubbed the back of Arthur’s neck, even damp with sweat as it was. “I didn’t see him anywhere around the mountain. I saw Old Boy and Misty on the ground and thought the worst but... I didn’t see him.” His hand moved from Arthur’s nape to his hair, gently pulling free some knotted strands. “Breathe, Arthur. Like how I’m breathing.”
Arthur’s eyes dart all over Charles’ face before landing on his eyes, dark as the earth. He tried to match the deliberate slowness of his breathing, focusing on that and the hand in his hair. A part of him felt downright pathetic for needing this kind of coddling, but a bigger part of him, right now, was simply thankful beyond words.
“I’m sure he’s alright, Arthur,” Charles told him, without an ounce of dishonesty in his words. “John’s not that big of a fool. He knows what he’s doing, even if it don’t look that way.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Arthur muttered quietly, having calmed down a little. He wasn’t sure what it is, but something about Charles just effortlessly soothed him; his collectedness, maybe, that easy confidence that came with the territory of a man used to keeping to himself, a self-assuredness that Arthur wasn’t familiar with. Or maybe it was that other feeling that Arthur didn’t know what to do with, the part of him that saw Charles as something more, something bigger than life– a north star worth following to lead him home.
Charles kissed his cheek again, releasing his hold on Arthur’s hands and picking up the empty bowl from the nightstand. “Try and get some more rest, alright? I won’t be far if you need me,” he said, getting up from where he was seated on the bed. Arthur hummed his understanding, feeling too exhausted to put up a fight about getting up and moving around.
“Hey, Charles?” Arthur called out right before Charles left the room, watching through tired eyes as the man stopped in his tracks, looking at him from the doorframe. The words came easy. “I love you.”
Charles gaped at him for the better part of a second, just as he always did whenever he heard the words spoken aloud, before he smiled widely, eyes crinkling. “I love you too.”
After a week and a half of bedrest, sitting and laying and doing next to nothing, Arthur finally snapped.
“You need any help there?” Arthur asked eagerly, watching from his seat on the porch as Charles chopped firewood. His new journal—acquired from Hamish’s cabin, following the loss of his journal to John—was splayed open on his thigh, two pages worth of the man in front of him sketched in various poses onto the clean paper. Charles paused and looked at him with a raised brow, wiping his forehead.
“Help with chopping wood?” Charles questioned with a small smile, holding the axe against his shoulder. “I think I’ve got that covered.”
“Aw, y’know what I mean! That, or something, or other... things!” Arthur exclaimed, gesticulating broadly with his hands. The movement caused a stab of pain to go through his shoulder, to which he tried to hide his wince, but Charles was nothing if not sharp-eyed in most cases but particularly for any signs of hurt or fatigue on Arthur, so the aborted flinch didn’t go unnoticed.
“Sure,” Charles said slowly in that scrutinising, unbelieving way of his, but he seemed to relent regardless. He gestured over to the trough by the hitches, Taima and Buell—who’d wandered back to Hamish’s cabin somehow, despite having been left in the woods near Beaver Hollow before it all went to shit—grazing on the grass not too far from the posts. “How about you go and change out the water?”
Arthur didn’t know how dirty a trough could really get after a couple of days, considering the troughs back when they camped out only got a change of water every week or so, but it was something to do and he was more bed than man nowadays, so he nodded and got up with only minor difficulty. He’d lost a lot of fat and muscle to the consumption, and his lungs were likely to still give out on him any day now, but compared to how he was after Micah nearly killed him, he’d say he was improving.
He grabbed the bucket from the side of the cabin and approached the two horses, bereft of their tacks. He gently patted Taima on her neck, eternally grateful that she had carried both her rider and his weight down the mountain after Charles found him, smiling as she leaned against his touch. Then he moved to Buell, offering his hand out first for the temperamental horse to take a sniff, before patting his neck and pressing his forehead against it, silently thanking both Buell and Hamish for all they’d given him and Charles. His morning greetings to the horses finished, he got to work.
Kneeling down in a way that didn’t jostle his still-recovering middle too much, he tipped the trough over to the side and let the old water drain out into the dirt, before picking up the scrub and getting to work. It was mindless work, something Arthur had done countless times before, back when it had just been him, Hosea, and Dutch. He tried to ignore the sharp sting of the thought, of being reminded of Hosea bleeding out on the streets of Saint Denis, and of Dutch betraying him when he needed his help most.
Because that was what it was, wasn’t it? A betrayal, from the man he loved like a father, whom he thought loved him like a son. He lost him at some unknown point of his life to– what, exactly? Power, greed, infamy, freedom? To Micah, he wanted to say, but Dutch had been changing even before Micah ever wormed his way into their lives. He was a disease that infected Dutch with his dangerous plans and self-serving ideals, but Dutch had already been sick with something else long before they even laid eyes on him.
He lost Hosea to Agent Milton and his Pinkertons. He lost Dutch to the selfish poison in himself much longer ago than that.
He got up to fill the bucket with water from the lake to rinse out the scrubbed trough. There wasn’t any use to think about the past anymore, about what he could’ve done differently and about the people they’d lost. Dutch wasn’t dead, but he’d been lost to Arthur a long time and both of them were as good as gone now. Hosea was dead, buried far from the virgin forests of the west, far from that little home he’d made with Bessie all those years ago. So were Jenny, and the Callendar boys, and Sean, Lenny, Molly, Susan– dead, bound to be forgotten as the years went by. Those that escaped would live on, haunted by the ghosts of everything that had happened in their time with the doomed Van Der Lindes.
Arthur looked up when he realised he wasn’t hearing wood chopping anymore. Charles was bent over, picking up the wood and putting them into a sling to carry inside the house. A light sheen of sweat caused his hair to cling to his skin, but what caught Arthur’s attention was the soft, calm look on his face. Unworried, for the first time in a long while, and content. Noticing Arthur and looking up, eyes locking with his, Charles smiled brightly, the way he never would’ve smiled in the time before. Arthur found himself smiling back, entranced and grateful and so madly in love.
Somehow, some way, he knew it was going to be alright. So long as he had Charles by his side, everything was going to be fine.
It was six whole weeks after Charles saved him when they finally decided to move on.
They didn’t have a lot of belongings to pack, so they made quick work of getting ready to leave. Arthur felt a twinge of sadness at abandoning Hamish’s cabin to be picked over by scavengers and left to rot with no one to care for it, but that was just the way of things. It was likely that it would begin to fall apart without upkeep, to be reclaimed by the earth over time. Or maybe, someone else might move in and make a home out of it. Arthur would never know, because he’d be far away from here by then, and maybe that was enough– to know something that had saved his life would find some more use afterwards, even if he had no idea how and when.
He knew that he and Charles would look like an odd duo; two rough-and-rugged men travelling together, one driving a small cart wagon filled with belongings, the other on a horse, armed and certainly dangerous. That was all fine to Arthur, though– where they were going, far up north past the horrors that were civilisation, past the mountains that were nearly his gravesite, oddness was the least of his worries. He was more worried about being recognised, even after a rather drastic weight loss and a change in haircut and scruff and the loss of the hat he’d always had since his Pa died.
The decision to leave hadn’t been made until a couple of days ago, when Charles had come upon some shocking information after a day trip down to Valentine to pick up some supplies; on his way out of the general store, he’d heard a newsboy hawking about gangs and shootouts and arrests. He’d bought a newspaper then and read the whole paper for himself, before taking it home for Arthur to read.
O’Driscoll and Van Der Linde Gangs WIPED OUT! The end of the age of the outlaw, the paper said, before going into further detail on the fall of the two gangs: apparently, following Colm O’Driscoll’s hanging and the massacre of O’Driscolls at Hanging Dog Ranch enacted by ‘unknown assailants,’ the remaining O’Driscolls that had been scattered around the area rallied behind one of Colm’s lieutenants and went after a big score– another train, like the kind they tried to hit in Colter, owned by one Leviticus Cornwall. This led Cornwall to point his Pinkertons in the direction of the O’Driscolls, taking the heat off of the remnants of the Van Der Lindes, until Dutch’s final, failed gambit.
Mere days after the O’Driscolls’ mediocre train heist, Dutch, accompanied by Micah, Javier, and Bill, attempted to sneak into Blackwater to get the money they’d stashed away during their escape following the botched ferry job, falling right into Agent Ross’ trap. Dutch and Javier were arrested, their executions scheduled for a week after the paper’s posting. Bill was shot and killed by a Pinkerton right as they triggered the alarm. Micah, to the Pinkertons’ shock, was shot by Dutch–one shot, straight through the eye.
Arthur had supposed that he should feel something about all this– grief, anger, disappointment, maybe even relief. He couldn’t say he felt anything at all, reading the words on the page, and said nothing at all as he put the newspaper down, or when Charles held his hand. Later that night, after bedding down, Arthur had finally said his unspoken question out loud.
“D’you think, after everythin’, he decided he regretted it?” Arthur murmured, wrapped tight in the cocoon of Charles’ arms, fiddling with the soft ends of Charles’ thick hair, let down from the braid.
Charles had pressed his lips against Arthur’s hair, speaking softly. “Would it change anything if he did?”
Arthur sighed, burrowing his face into Charles’ bare chest, fighting the urge to cough. “No,” he said solemnly, after some time, “no, I don’t think it does.”
They left two days after that, heading north to meet up with the Wapiti tribe, planning to sojourn with them for a while until they could get back on their feet. When the Wapiti were more or less settled, months into the future, he and Charles were going to settle down somewhere, to live honest lives far from the poison of Dutch’s dreams. And maybe someday, when things were better, when they’d finally left that life behind and become new people, they could seek out the survivors of their family, make sure they were alright, that they were living free and living happy.
They didn’t know what could happen. It could turn out for the worst– they might get caught crossing the border, get arrested or shot, or Arthur might still die from the rattle in his chest, or some other terrible fate they couldn’t foresee.
Anything could happen, but at least they had each other. Arthur couldn’t ask for anything better than that.