Chapter Text
Arthur used to think that how you felt about another person and how you therefore acted was simple.
If you liked them you were friendly. If you disliked them, less so.
If you hated them, it shortened the path of resistance to the idea of putting a bullet in them. And if you loved them, specifically, you were loyal. No matter the cost, no matter if it ground you to dust, you were loyal. Always.
He learns that isn't exactly so over the course of a life lived. He learns that after countless sleepless nights, innumerable arguments and fights and bruises to ego and body. He learns things aren’t simple, that one person can ruin you and who you thought you were and what you thought you wanted.
How you feel about a man and what transpires between you; that is made up slow and inexorable, and almost entirely against your will.
Told on the scale of moments, of years.
You couldn’t remember all those moments if you tried, and many you didn’t want to. And that’s just how it was.
Maybe it’s that Hosea notices how hollow Arthur is.
He doesn’t tell a soul at camp about Eliza and Isaac–names too painful to even think, let alone say aloud. But Hosea knows him, and when the weeks of hard drinking and stupid risks burn through a quarter of a year like fire through dry brush, Hosea just seems to know. He lets Arthur play it close to his chest, but his considering looks turn to knowing ones and Arthur can feel the weight of them.
It’s better that way he supposes–he doesn’t hide things from Dutch or Hosea. Ever. But this is just a thing that cannot be said. Better his fathers intuit.
This is different from losing Mary, for many many obvious reasons. It’s a thousand times worse than a pang of heartache. Mary had made the right choice on him, and that was easy to accept–that he wasn’t good enough (because he isn’t,) that he couldn’t provide the life she deserved, (because he couldn’t.) Mary was still out there, happy, he hoped–Eliza and Isaac he’d robbed of any chance of that now, thinking he could have both lives. Outlaw and family man.
He knows his fathers well, and they know him–every ugly part of him, every bad deed he’s ever done, most of which were done in their name. Every foolish tendency and prideful folly and deepest shame.
So he’s not surprised when Hosea says “I'm sorry, son,” one night when it's just Arthur left by the fire, bottle in hand and jaw screwed up tight and the acrid smoke of too-green wood burning his eyes and his nose. Hosea puts his knobbled hand on Arthur's shoulder warm and fatherly, and it takes everything in Arthur Morgan not to spill over then, though he is a man that does not cry, that accepts the harshness of life and nature and his place in it.
If he were one drink deeper he no doubt would regardless.
Instead he blinks and chews the side of his tongue and fights to untense his shoulder under Hosea’s kind hand, but finds he cannot.
Hosea is speaking blessedly quiet–though the others are sleeping, canvas does not do a whole lot to keep out sound. “It's a terrible thing. You don't have to tell me but I hope that one day, you will. In your own time.”
Arthur doesn't acknowledge the words, but his knuckles go white around the lip of the crooked wooden bench he's sitting on.
He imagines it, everything flowing out of him, a white frothing torrent scummed pink with his blood and his sorrow–but something like this. Something like this. He can’t–It would never stop.
He’d drown.
“You have to keep going, Arthur,” Hosea says softly, somewhere on the edges of his swimming vision. “We need you here.”
Arthur looks up at Hosea with his bloodshot eyes and it's the first time he sees pain writ large in his surrogate father's features that has been put there by himself. Worry. He wonders if Dutch knows, too. Pictures them talking in hushed tones about him in Dutch’s tent.
He sobers up in that moment fast as the crack of a whip.
Arthur Morgan does not worry them–he’s supposed to be a sturdy, reliable constant. Let them save their worry for the others, but not him. Never him.
This family, his first family. They need him.
He’ll live for them, he’ll choose them. He’ll get up in the morning for them. He’ll wring every last drop of sweat, blood, and bitter tears from this body for them, always, always, until it’s his time to sleep in the dirt and let time bleach his bones.
“Okay,” he says, choked. His eyes are on the verge of watering though it’s half from that fucking smoke of green wood on the fire, and he blinks that away with one sniff, wiping his nose.
“Yessir. Okay.”
Hosea nods once meaningfully, the acknowledgement of a deal struck–and squeezes Arthur again before separating to their own tents. He sees the kid–Marston–scraggly like a weed watching him from the dark mouth of a tent half-across camp.
He scowls and the boy closes the tent flap, fast.
The next morning is the first he can stand to see himself in the mirror in a long time. He shaves, washes up, and gets to work.
Arthur will be the gang’s workhorse, guard dog, mother hen, son, brother, whatever is called for until the day he takes his last rattling breath.
Folks at camp, the new ones which accumulate to them here and there along the trail, they see him as a simple, mostly decent man of few words put here to do as Dutch tells him and drink and cheat cards only a respectable amount.
And that suits him just fine. That’s a thing to keep living for.
Time passes. There’s still that guilt in him. Not something he thinks consciously about, much–easy to avoid by constantly working, constantly moving, constantly looking to the camp’s next need and the goals of Dutch and Hosea, which are by extension goals of his own.
But a man can’t be moving every moment of the day–a man must pause on a hard ride to rest his horse. A man must look out on the beauty of the countryside he loves. A man must lay down to sleep, and even bone-tired there’s a period of consciousness to reckon with. And when Arthur does stop there it is, barely under the surface.
That vague guilt, constant companion, a thing that makes his chest ache so that it rises up into his throat too, poisoned air he keeps swallowing down, grating like a rock on the way back up again and again.
He learns to live with that.
The scar tissue closes round the hole in his heart, protects it. When he sketches it exorcizes what remains from him, the achey miserable feeling. Through the ritual of focus and the stilling of his breath he buries the pain, til he’s just muscles moving a pencil and eyes seeing what must go on the page and his hearing whittles down to muffled noise like listening to the world through muslin.
The journals he keeps are the only place that his erstwhile family ever comes up, and even then it's short, factual. A mention of the wild tiger lilies sprouting in the prairie hollows in the mid-summer that Eliza so loved, ones he’d pick a clumsy handful of and bring to her bent stemmed and crumpled to hell in his saddle-bag and how still how she’d smile and clasp them to her breast and kiss his scruffy cheek. Waking up from a dream of Isaac asleep in the trundle bed, face pinched by nightmares and drawing it fast as he can, because he’s afraid of forgetting, needs to be able to see that face just closing his eyes in penance for the rest of his days.
Arthur’s too much in his pain, the ignoring of it leastways, to see John as a brother the way Hosea and Dutch want him to. A nuisance, sure. Family, yeah. Same as any of the rest of this flock that the older men shepherd and that Arthur plays collie too, nipping at their heels to keep ‘em on the safe path.
He’s fond of the kid, but that’s what he is still–a kid–and there’s a kind of bitterness to watching him grow up with his own son cold in the ground. Lucky, always lucky.
So when Dutch and Hosea start sending John out on some of the more basic tasks with Arthur–things they would have kept him firmly at their side for, before–it rankles.
“He looks up to you,” Hosea says simply with a sad smile when Arthur presses him on it. Hosea and Dutch’d both taught Arthur the basics of everything he knows, hunting and fishing and tracking and yes, even killing. They’ve done much the same for John up til now, but he’s at that age–rebellious and half a man, looking to impress without paying attention to his or anyone else’s safety.
“He looks up to you ‘n Dutch…” Arthur starts to protest, trailing off at Hosea’s firm look.
“Dutch and I are older. You’re closest to his age.” Hosea puts a hand up to halt Arthur’s protestations at that– “I know you’re an adult Arthur, you’re still the youngest. He can see an easier path to being you than to being me or being Dutch. That’s a valuable thing for a young man that’s been through what he has.”
He moves his hand to pat Arthur’s arm. “I’ll still be showing him things, but I want him taking your example, too. We all have to pitch in.”
Arthur grunts, and frowns, and gnaws at his lip. But ultimately he acquiesces and bows his big head in deference to his fathers’ wills.
John Marston starts, to him, a burden.