Chapter Text
The atmosphere at Clemen’s Point is strange as Arthur heals, or perhaps that’s just the fever. Charles brings him harsh, bitter tea to chase away the pain, changes his bandages and irrigates the rotten wound in his shoulder. Arthur sleeps fitfully and wakes with panic in his throat, lashes out at Charles when he tries to wake him from awful dreams. There are mornings that Arthur thinks that death would be kinder to the both of them.
“Hush,” Charles says. “I’ve spent too much time with my hands in your blood to listen to you talk like that.” It’s not any kind of soft reassurance; Charles is eaten up with anger and his words are jagged, sharp. Arthur has seen that anger, over the putrid carcass of buffalo months ago, but this tastes different. At Arthur’s foolishness, more than likely. He was caught easier than one of the fat hares Charles’ brings back from his traps.
“Sorry,” Arthur mutters. Charles says nothing, only rubs a fresh poultice on his wound and rewraps the bandages.
“You lived,” Charles says, before he takes his leave. “You don’t have anything to apologize for.”
It’s not a month before Miss Grimshaw starts to moan about the state of the donation box, and Pearson starts to snark about the lack of fresh game. Arthur goes to saddle up one morning, gritting his teeth against the tightness in his shoulder, wondering if he should rely on the bow Charles made him; the recoil on his rifle will likely reopen the wound, and Charles will skin him alive if Arthur undoes his work.
He finds Roisin at the hitching post, the black Arabian nuzzling him warmly. It was her, what got him home, half dead as he was. He presses his forehead to her cheek, breathing in the sweet hay smell of her. She wickers softly, lips at his shirt for sugar cubes. “Missed you too, you single-minded wretch,” he whispers, digging into his satchel for some old peppermints.
“Kieran,” he calls after a fruitless ten minutes spent scouring around for his tack. “Where’s my saddle?
“Sorry, sir, Mister Morgan. I -” He’d been seeing to Branwen, a horse brush still clutched in his nervous hands. “Mister Smith, he said - it weren’t me who did it, he just figured you might, well, and it seems he was right - I - ”
“Spit it out,” Arthur sighs, though he can see where this is going.
“He took it,” Kieran says, flinching back. It’s been a long time since Arthur was the brute that harangued a boy tied, half starving, to a post in Horseshoe Creek, but Kieran’s more like a scalded dog than not. Arthur knows he ain’t a good man, and Kieran’s nervous wincing makes it hard to forget. “I don’t rightly know where he put it, but Mister Morgan, you’re awful pale, and maybe it’s the best you stay in camp, sir -”
“God dammit ,” Arthur says, adding “Not you, boy,” when Kieran cringes back. “Everyone in this god damned camp thinks they know doctoring.”
Kieran flips the brush in his hands nervously. “I’m real sorry, Mister Morgan. We ain’t got much spare right now, neither, and - you’re just so pale, Mister Morgan, maybe you should - ”
Arthur waves this away. Good lord, Charles must’ve put the fear of God into the boy for Kieran to be fretting about Arthur so.
“Leave it,” he growls and spins back into camp. The movement leaves him out of sorts a moment, the ground slamming violently around beneath his feet. In a moment, Kieran is at his side, bracing against Arthur’s dizziness, saving at least some of his dignity before his staggering ends him up in a pile of manure.
“Not a word, O'Driscoll,” Arthur says, but with enough self deprecation that Kieran laughs just slightly, rather than getting riled.
“Can I help get you back to your tent?”
“Not on your life,” Arthur says, disentangling himself from Kieran’s support. “I got the picture of it. You see Mister Smith , though, you tell him to see me.”
"Yessir, Mister Morgan, sir.”
Arthur’s heart still clangs unsteadily in his chest; nothing like the full way it tends to when Charles catches his eye over the campfire, his eyes dark and seeing him down to his marrow. No, this feels like his heart is just pumping water through his veins, his blood thin and weak. The wound in his shoulder don’t reek any more, but his body’s turned coward in the face of this damn healing, shrinking back from things that should be easy. If he ain’t moving, he’s dead weight, and he won’t be the burden that puts them in the Pinkertons’ hand. There are good people here, he reckons, and there ain’t much decent work that Arthur is good for, but he can keep them safe, or he can try to.
He thinks about Charles, the taste of his sweat, and hauls himself back to his tent.
*
They’d talked about Dutch, once, after Blackwater and all the hell that had followed after. Charles had asked if he wanted to hunt elk in the Grizzlies, and Arthur had followed in his wake; it was a brutal cold snap, frigid and biting, but it had never occurred to him to say no. On the third night, the cold drove them into a hunting cabin that had been shut up for winter, which they made warm with a fire and their bodies huddled close together. It would be weeks, yet, before Charles touched him for the first time, his coarse hands wrapped sure and warm around Arthur’s cock when they shared a pup tent against a late spring snow. But, when Arthur follows the thread of this thing of theirs back in his mind, he thinks of that night as a beginning.
The snow around the cabin had melted some, during the day, refreezing in a fine glaze when night rolled back in. By midnight, the world was draped in crystal and silver, shadows cast as deep and long as those cut from late afternoon sun. But Arthur’s sketches of that night lingered on the curl of Charles’ hand around the bottle of brandy they scrounged up from some forgotten cupboard, and the way the bright light of the moon had shone on the ice and the inky spill of his hair.
They had drank the brandy dry between them, passing the bottle back and forth between half-numbed hands.
“You trust him, then?” Charles had asked, after Arthur had told a rambling story about a heist they’d pulled when he was still so young his voice cracked when he told the guards to stick up their hands.
“Don’t got much choice in that, do I?” Arthur had said with a strained sort of laugh. “Man raised me in all the ways that matter.”
Charles had said nothing, taking a deep drought before passing the bottle back to Arthur. His eyes had been dark, moonlight throwing the planes of his face into sharp relief, and Arthur had been distracted, nearly letting the bottle slip through his fingers.
“Don’t think it works like that,” Charles had said, carefully enunciating. The bottle, by then, had been more than half gone.
Arthur remembers bracing for the wave of defensiveness that always crashed when men questioned his loyalty, questioned Dutch. But, when the moment had come and gone, all he had felt were the ripples of worry that had been echoing around his own skull the last year.
“Don’t got much choice,” Arthur had said again, less cavalier. He had taken a long drought from the bottle and stared into the fire. “Was different, I think. ‘N the old days. Plans seemed to come together easier. The law was always a bit farther behind. Hosea weren’t so worried all the time.” He had closed his eyes, had given into the liquor and the half-formed ideas it conjured, and sagged into Charles’ warmth. It had been a bit uncomfortable, their lines pressed against one another at awkward angles, until Charles had raised his arm to drape across Arthur’s shoulders, letting him fit into the vulnerable curve of Charles’ side. With the heat between themselves and their shared blankets, the cabin had almost sweltered. Sweat had beaded on Charles’ neck, rolled slowly down his throat and into the loosened collar of his shirt.
“The gang’s got good people in it,” Arthur had said, finally, when the only sound for long minutes had been the pop and hiss of the fire. “People that need protectin’, otherwise they might follow one a Dutch’s plans off a ledge without lookin’.”
“You’d stop them doing that?” Charles’ voice had been soft, almost admiring, where it was pressed against Arthur’s ear
Arthur had passed the bottle back and looked down at his hands, busted knuckles, dirty nails, scared with the life of sinning he’d led for so many years. “With my last breath, if I had to.”
*
Arthur's cleaning the camp’s miscellaneous guns, putting what little he can do to good use. Charles is silently conspiring with half the camp, it seems, to keep him in his sick bed. Karen says she don’t rightly know where his spare clothes have gone, she’ll have to see if any other the other girls did that laundry. Kieran’s still at a loss over what happened to his tack. Lenny and Sean say there’s no jobs he’s needed on, to sit down, old man, before he falls down.
What Charles said to get them all falling over themselves to worry about him, Arthur don’t know. He’d ask the man himself, but Charles’ been gone from camp more often than not, these days, waking Arthur early to inspect his wound before riding out with the sun still half below the horizon. When he’s in camp, most of his time is spent with his head bowed low with Sadie or Karen or Sean; Arthur had even woke one night to nature’s call, only to find Charles having some tense discussion with Hosea by the campfire. Both men had gone silent when they’d noticed him hovering, no explanations asked or offered.
All this nervous fluttering all over a wound that’s now the rosy pink of new skin, healing up healthy. There’s some acting normal, at the very least. Miss Grimshaw ain’t too impressed with him still lazing around, nor Pearson, who’s now onto haranguing Charles about the lack of game he’s brought in lately.
And Dutch. Dutch is still the same. He’d come to see Arthur once or twice, before Charles had brought his fever down, had sworn revenge on the O’Discolls. Had told Arthur of upcoming plans that he needed Arthur for, some bloody work and men that needed killing, a big score that would buy them those boat fares to Tahiti.
“Trust me,” Dutch had said, his face swimming in the drunken swirl of Arthur’s fever. “You made an error, getting run down by those vicious bastards, Arthur, but I shall set this to rest. We’ll toast over their graves together, and soon. You mark my words.”
An error. That was putting it kindly. Arthur had grown sloppy and booked himself early passage to hell for that particular mistake. Now here he was, lame and useless around the camp, while good men, men like Charles, pushed themselves twice over to make up for his weakness.
Three days was a long time to spend with bad men; they’d left Sean with the bounty hunters for longer than that, true, but those had practically been lawmen. No picnic, but less likely to butcher a man to see the color of his blood than Colm O’Driscoll.
And, he thinks, unwillingly, they’d gone to fetch Sean soon as they could, sneaking back into Blackwater with guns unholstered. There had been a rescue planned out, for Sean, almost from the first moment they noticed him missing.
There’s a sour taste in Arthur’s mouth, his gut churning. He’s been living on black coffee and Charles’ tea, that had to be it. Time he got some real food in him to settle his stomach.
“Why so grim, my dear boy,” Hosea says, sitting down across him at the camp table, his eyes warm as he inspects the gun disassembled across the rough hewn planks.
“Just thinkin’,” Arthur says, sliding the rifle back together with deft hands.
“Brooding, more like,” Hosea says. “How’s that shoulder treating you?”
“Honest? Would do better if I were allowed to use it some.” Arthur glaces up at him, glaring a bit. “Seems every time I try to get outta camp, though, my things keep goin’ missing. Next thing, you’ll try hiding Roisin under your hat.”
Hosea sighs and spreads his hands. Arthur recognizes this expression as Dumb Old Man Who Didn’t See Nothing, a frequent player in Hosea’s cons. “Sure I don’t know what you mean, Arthur. But, perhaps it’s for the best. You reinjure that wound now, all that hard work Mister Smith has done might be for naught.”
There’s a tone there that Arthur don’t like; he never got so good at double talk, not like Hosea who is so fine with his words. Words in the mouth of a man like Hosea were treacherous; the man could condense down whole unsaid volumes into a turn of phrase and a twinkle in his eye.
"He knows his herbs, that’s all,” Arthur says. Doesn’t talk about the blank-faced way Charles had tended to him, his body rigid with what maybe was fear. The wound had looked ugly, at first, red lines branching out from the mess of it to his neck and his chest.
“We’re lucky to have him,” Hosea says easily. “And lucky to have you, too, my boy. Seemed there were some hours there when it didn’t seem so sure.”
“You’d’a done well enough without me,” Arthur mutters. “We got plenty of good men these days. You’d’a been fine.”
He glances up when Hosea stays quiet, finds the man turning a glare on him so fierce that Arthur jolts back to when he was fifteen years old, caught dodging his schooling to go practice his aim.
“What?”
“I raised you smarter than that,” Hosea says, sharply. “You think I’m worried about our numbers ? Good god, Arthur, when Roisin dropped you back here, I swear I thought she was bringing us a corpse.”
Arthur remembers when Bessie died; she’d gone in her garden, heart giving out to deposit her in the tulips planted round her door. That’s how Hosea had found her, wrapped up in petals, gone to greener pastures without any pain. Hosea’s grief then had been aching, not vicious. It was a gentler end than any of them ever expected for themselves, and there had been a smile on Bessie’s face, it seemed, the night they waked her. Hosea’s grieving was tempered with the joy of the years they’d spent together, and they’d laughed more than they sobbed the day they finally laid her to rest.
This ain’t that. That’s pain, there, etched in Hosea’s features, and it seems deeper than anything Arthur’s words had brought on. Arthur can’t read people near as good as Hosea can, he’s too simple to have picked up the knack, but what he thinks he sees in that worn, kind face, is more guilt than grief. It stuns him silent, the gun left forgotten on the table.
“Hoesa, I -”
“You’re fooling yourself terrible if you think you’re just a body to this family,” Hosea says, but his eyes snap to where Dutch is talking loud with Micha, praising each other over some upcoming heist they got planned. “Though maybe that isn’t your fault.” Hosea sighs, bringing up his fingers to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Not entirely, anyway.”
Arthur doesn’t know what to say to that, so he says nothing, slowly picking up the pieces of the rifle and clicking the last pieces into place. Hosea sits with him a while, the easy presence of the man stirring half-forgotten memories from when Arthur was just a boy, and it was the three of them raising hell through a simpler, wilder word. He loves Hosea more than he could ever have brought himself to love his useless drunk of a father, and Arthur’s hurt him somehow, now, just with his words.
“You be easy with yourself,” Hosea says, standing once Dutch and Micha’s business seems to be finished up. “And....be easy with Charles. L- concern can make us short, with one another.” Hosea smiles, self-deprecating. “As I have certainly just demonstrated.”
“I will, Hosea,” Arthur says, real quiet. They ain’t got much use for coddling in this life of theirs, but the gentle pressure of Hosea’s hand on his good shoulder loosens the twanging knots in his chest. Comfort was a rare thing; just because Arthur didn’t deserve it, don't mean he didn't grab it with both hands when offered.
“Dutch,” Hosea calls sharply, turning away. His voice seems cold, but that’s none of Arthur’s business. “A word.”