Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Night falls, a melting, oily type blackness. It feels different in the city. Impenetrable, like a tight lid has been put over the world. There is something about it that feels unnatural, and secretive.

With daylight banished, it feels that all kinds of horrors are now to be permitted. Acts of unsettled, inhuman depravity, to which god refuses to bear witness. He has heard tell of robbed graves and mysterious killings. Recently dead that have been exhumed not for their trinkets, but their organs - their bodies. Then, sold to the highest bidder. He has seen the bounties posted all over town, citing a group of men that would go further still. He recalls the names Hoare, Roche, and Gault. The three men committing murder to proccur the freshest of cadavers for their clients. The posters claim they have been known to perform vivisections on those most unfortunate.

There are whispers of a killer, known only for gouging his victims throats out. Sundering their flesh from bone so thoroughly, that the cause of death can only be labeled as ‘partially decapitated’. He has come across strange poems, if they can be called that. The details of a bizarre and opaque incantation that will make the author mortal again. Something about a circle being opened. An odd name, and a pining for the blood that belongs to a sweet maiden. It all carries the same tortured romanticism of one of May-Beth’s novels. Perhaps, if he indulged in these same fictions he might unearth some captive pleasure from all of it. Perhaps, he would be more receptive if it felt less like he was already living between the pages of such a novel to begin with.

As he walks, Arthur’s footfalls bounce off the cobbles, and aside from the labors of his own breathing, the street he finds himself wandering is barren, and quiet. Above, street lamps guide him towards no particular destination. Their orange light bleeds weakly, soaked up in the night’s heavy fabric. A phenomenon that seems unique to most cities. Although the factories have closed shop, their furnaces bedded down and slumbering, he has found there is a sediment that never truly dissolves, ashen and clotted. It sticks to the moisture in the air, sticks to faces and hands of the workers, sticks to clothes, to his lungs, to everything it touches.

Even now, the effect remains absorbent and cloying. Sounds bend strangely, and it makes him nervous in a way it never used to. His shoulders crowd around his ears, and he turns his head back, an almost compulsive gesture that he can’t be shaken of. Disembodied voices caress him, trailing fingertips, that beckon from darkened alleys. Dogs bark around every corner. A door slams, and he hears drunken, rallying cries of laughter, spilling like rats out of a cellar. Most likely the close by tavern, temporarily voided of actual rats, thanks to his timely assistance. Arthur had waited for Sadie there, but he must have caught her out a day or two early, for she never showed, before the day darkened.

With his present state of mind, it is probably for the best, he imagines. Any other day, and he would surely appreciate her company. Her crass humor, her earnest, but no-nonsense type manner. Even her rampaging bloodthirst is mostly admirable to him. He admires her will to keep living, even if it is a decision made more out of restless spite, than anything. That fire she keeps burning - it is a mourning pire. A living monument to the love she has lost. It will only last for as long as she lets it, until the vengeance spent fuelling it is entirely expended.

But he is not the same, not in the slightest. Grief has only made him despondent, and diminished. And now that his time is near finished, it seems that he has gone and lost his appetite for life - the little that he has left of it. Consumption is certainly a fitting name for the disease, that much he can just scarcely acknowledge. Thinking much beyond that only fills him with an implacable terror, if he lets it. Much like staring into the sun, there is a deadly, and captivating draw to it. But instead of a blinding effigy, a violent and brandishing giver of life, it feels that he is confronted with the opposite. Accepting his own mortality feels like he is looking into something empty. A black and ceaseless hole that only wants to devour him - to make him into complete nothing, not even bones or ashes left. Nothing to mark his thirty six years of existence, nothing at all left to define him.

Besides Sadie’s absence, he was lucky in other circumstances. Despite a marked degradation in his appearance, the barkeep recognised Arthur’s face well enough, and pliantly sustained his questionable thirst without comment, or a tab attached to it. Additional gratuity towards his ‘pest control’ services, the man called it.

In retrospect, Arthur almost regrets succinctly vomiting his earnings back up, all over the establishment’s front pavement. Selfishly, for the rupture of pain the act caused him. Bile gnaws caustically at an already ravaged throat, and his eyes sting viciously. He is exhausted. The effects of the morphine injection has long since faded, and it hadn’t done all that much for his vitality to begin with. It eased the pain some, but at the cost of feeling foggy and tilted. His body strains to hold him, and he can’t stop from shivering. But he keeps walking. Knowing that if he stops, then he will need to decide whatever it is he is doing. A fork in the road. He will need to decide how he intends on living, and how he intends on dying.

He is not ready.

Trudging on, feet like anchors dragging under him, Arthur rounds another corner, and is confronted with a hulking stature. The church of the Holy Blessed, gazing down upon him. An encompassing shadow that forcibly denies him from ignoring it. It commands his attention, and he lets it. Call it some religious superstition or not. Either way, he stiffens, held like a statue, watching and being watched by it. The front plot slices steeply into the surrounding bâtiments, a pointed arrowhead that is wisely skirted. A drooping willow, stands dutifully within its walled entrance, ceding to the immense spire that climbs above it. Inspiring and terrible, it dominates the skyline in every direction, lean and precise as a dagger, striking the heavens.

Eyes sinking back down, his gaze settles on the courtyard. Murky, underwater blooms of light radiate from a pair of wall mounted sconces. Held like bookends, either side of the curved entrance. He thinks of the young Brother Dorkins, and that kindly Sister. He returned her cross just here, only a few weeks ago. At different points, both had called him a good man for his deeds, unknowing that he didn’t, and doesn’t deserve it.

It had been a strange time, and only now can he truly recognise it. That day was when Edith Downes also re-entered the forefront of his consciousness. Shameful as it is, her husband, her son, and her predicament hadn’t entered much into his mind before that moment. Too distracted by his own issues, by his own family dramas to waste minutes dwelling over what happened to her once the books on her husband’s debt had been settled.

A cruel and unexpected reality to be faced with. He has seen that sort of desperation on enough faces to know it. For a long time he lived with it, wore it himself. That darkened period following his father’s demise, and before Dutch and Hosea. He knows that life, he knows how much it takes as penance. The way that living on the streets both hardens a person, whilst turning them brittle and damaged. He will never forget the hunger, and what that type of hunger, that type of desperation did to him. The ticking anxiety of a life without any type of safety net. Such a narrow existence. No past, no future. Only the next meal, the next step towards surviving another measly minute, another hour, without much other purpose.

There are times he still feels it, still acts on it, as though living that way changed some fundamental chemistry inside of him. He hordes things out of habit, and without reason. Even now, his satchel carries a jingling, secret mess of rings and trinkets, gold ingots. Shiny bits of scrap, that ought to be given to fill the camp's coffers, and yet he cannot stand to part with. Based on a formless anxiety that he might later need any of these possessions. He might need that misdirected letter, he might need that gold plated circlet, that set of earrings, that belt buckle.

He wonders how bad it must have gotten before Mrs. Downes had sold her pride, her body, just for living. Not long after they parted ways, if he had to judge. Her hair stringed with grease, her complexion blotchy and spotted. Marks that take time to settle, like the first blooms of rot, rising to the surface. Perhaps it was an omen, a herald of something more significant that their paths should cross at that precise moment. A nun’s crucifix held in one hand, and a life that he ruined presented to the other. Perhaps learning that he is a dead man has just made him morbid.

Arthur looks up, emerging on the other side of these ponderings, blank and disoriented. At some point he must have started up walking again, because the cathedral faces its back to him now. A street clock stands to his right, reading quarter to two in the morning. He frowns, as though the passing time is something he carelessly misplaced, and might be found again if he simply looks for it. It was around ten pm when he quit the bar. How is it he’s been out for close to four hours, and not noticed anything? It is no small wonder he feels so wretched. Bone cold, his joints puffed up and throbbing. Apparently his condition does not discriminate against any part of him. The doctor mentioned something about inflammation spreading across his body, Arthur can admit at the time, he wasn’t really listening.

So much for getting a good night's rest before reconvening at Doyle’s tavern in the morning. He sighs, and turns on his heel, but a clutched pain in his chest stops him. He holds himself very still, in a breathless panic. Eyes watering. Not now, he begs. He hasn’t the reserves, the strength to weather another bout of coughing. Heart shivering in his chest, he looks about his surroundings, wearing the same glazed look of urgency as a sick dog. Mouth wide, and panting. He can feel it coming. A high ringing in his ears. His hands clammy, and tingling.

Arthur stumbles, and his body pulls him to the closest lamppost, a pitching beacon atop a blackened sea. A blinking refuge, a promise. Trembling, his fingers lace around the calloused beam, scaled with rust, and bobbled layers of paint, intended to stave it. An unpleasant sensation biting his palm, he scarcely notices it. His lungs buckle, and he starts coughing. He hunches over his knees, with one still elbow hooked around the lamppost - the only reason that he is still standing. There is no resisting the tide. His whole body heaves, vision dancing. The world dimming to nothing. He has seconds to regain his breathing. If he fails, he will collapse, and no-one, or someone terrible might find him.

He thumps his chest with his free hand, and manages a small intake, not enough before his ribcage squeezes it out of him, and then he is gagging. Head between his knees, he wretches so hard that he is weeping. Then, at last something dredges itself out of his lungs, and with a lunging, hacking cough, he spits hot, red copper, onto the pavement.

Once it is done with, he closes his eyes, and takes a long time just breathing. His forehead gleams with sweat. He is pale as a skull, but miraculously, he is still standing. He raises his head, and looks about, tired and despairing. Without witness, he scrubs the heel of his hand across his mouth, and straightens his back, wheezing softly. He doesn’t know what comes next, so he decides to keep walking. He half staggers off the street, into a courtyard for no other reason than it calls to him. The space is checkered with square, little tables. Each topped with a dripping candle, set into the bellies of old wine bottles. A bistro of some sort, he ponders. Either side, two townhouses hold the paved square, like bookends. Their high, enclosing walls bleed water, and the candlelight paints them a waxy, hot yellow. French shutters line the northside, latched together like married couples. A vaulting second floor gallery looms to the left of him. Facing opposite, a squat, brick entrance, beckons to another courtyard, or alley, or some other strange architectural dissection.

He has given up any effort to make sense of this city’s topographic disorder. A land founded on water, it almost makes sense that this place would be designed to flow in just the same manner. Streets splitting out like arterial branches. Pooling lobbies, and yards that fracture in a madness of different directions. Staged levels, tumbling wood-rotted stairs and cast-iron ladders. Winding corridors that shrivel and dry up into nothing. Sprawling thoroughfares that float a wearisome parade of trams, clanging and rattling along like paddle steamers. St. Denis is a city that exists beyond any sort of logic, as though it simply brought itself into life - rising out the mudflats, and sinking in its feelers, like some roiling, primordial creature.

Arthur moves to one of the tables. Steadying his hand on the knotted, damp surface. He considers delving further. His curiosity is a current that he would usually follow without preamble or reservation. But not now. Not tonight. He is so tired.

With a wan grimace, he pushes off the table and sets back the way he came. Then, a sound clatters. A restrained squeak, like the beginning of a scream that has been swiftly stoppered. He unholsters his revolver, and listens. Blood pulsing in his ears. His breath pluming in soft, white clouds before him. He curses, and turns on his heel towards the sound, despite every fiber of his being protesting the endeavor. He holds his gun high, and jogs around the table settings, through the square entrance, and rounding the corner. At first sight, he has been deposited into a dead-end corridor. The same prolonged dimensions as a shoe box, or a casket, he supposes. His head flicks about in confusion. Chest heaving, his gun lowers.

“So, you found me then?” A voice questions, without any discernible location. Echoing through the chambers of his head, the speaker could be lurking at any great distance, or he could be breathing down Arthur’s neck, and he would be none the wiser. Hairs stand taut along his arms, and Arthur doesn’t answer. He cannot describe why, but the voice instills some deep horror. Ancient and dessicated, as though the speaker is dead, or should’ve been dead, long ago.

He squints down the alley, for a source, and a black, tented figure unfurls itself. It’s motions fluid and bearing no substance, smoke in a bottle. A man, or something in the shape of one. At his feet, a bloodied jumble of rags. Limbs like bent sticks, the balled up corpse of a spider. Arthur’s gut clenches. He turns his attention back to the murderer. His head is pale, like something drowned. The image of a bobbing moon, cradled in dark water. He studies Arthur, like a predator assessing danger. Then he stoops his neck, embracing his prize, in an almost loving like gesture. Arthur watches the whole engagement with a writhing expression, his brow furrowed in equal parts revulsion and fascination.

“Hey…w-what are you doin’?” He gestures, weakly. So unsettled that his brain discards any primary notion of self preservation.

“Stay back, for your own sake.” Again, that voice curls like fingers in his head. The texture of paper, yet buoyed by a southern twang that seems so out of place as to be comical. A corny vaudeville, a performer caked in stage makeup. “I walk with the undead!”

Arthur scoffs. Maybe dying has made him stupider, or more reckless, or simply suicidal. “So what, you’re a vampire?” He takes steps towards the figure, boot heels singing on the cobbles.

The killer pauses. Only mildly irked, or maybe, amused even. A teacher being posed a deliberately asinine question by a student. “Oh, I have been called many names over the centuries…Now go, or I’ll feed on you too!”

Arthur almost laughs. This entire production is getting ridiculous. Centuries old, as if such a thing could be possible. “You’re a goddamn idiot!” He blithely holsters his sidearm, chest quaking in amusement. “An honest to god vampire, you almost had me goin’ there, mister!” He chuckles, which makes him fold over. Coughing. The sound richoteting like pebbles. Wincing, he thumps his chest, over and over. So distracted, he doesn’t notice the figure straighten, nor the silvery dagger, slicing towards him.

“I’ll suck you dry!” The vampire charges him, in the pulsing corners of his vision, clearly failing to share in his amusement.

“Oh shut up,” Arthur snaps. Then he looks up, to find the shadow already on top of him. His eyes widen, and what little breath he has, leaves him. “Shit, shit,” he fumbles for his revolver, but the grip jumps out of his fingers, and the metal skitters across the pavement.

His eyes bound after it, desperate. Then a sharp force cuffs him across the cheek, and his vision closes like a curtain. His head thunders, and before he can recover, he is levered off the ground, and held there. He snarls, cutting and snapping in the air like a hooked trout. Eyes round, and whited. His toes glance off the ground, and he levitates en pointe, like a ballerina.

The grip doesn’t yield in the slightest. It crushes his throat, stretches it out, and exposes it. Arthur thrashes even harder. He can scarcely see. Only flashing pulses. His attacker’s bulbous head floats, flickering in and out, like some ghostly afterimage. He, himself, is fading. Begging for oxygen, the veins in his neck push to the surface, and that seems to stir something in his attacker. The iron clasp around his neck loosens, and for a giddy, shuddering moment Arthur thinks it might be over.

Then something pounds the air. A set of jaws fasten around his neck, and he is bitten. An impaling force that ripples and bursts the layers of his skin, like a pitchfork, spearing a ripe tomato. He shrieks. The pain is immeasurable. A snakebite compounded by the power of hundreds. In horror, his whole body slackens. Wretched, slushy sounds of his flesh being devoured. Arthur whimpers. Hot, runny blood soaking his collar, and painting his shoulder. His assailant only latches harder. Dully, he feels a grinding, masticating pressure. It feels like his whole neck is being scrambled. Then, a terrible, greedy suction. As though everything in him - his bone, his organs and sinew is being vacuumed up through a pinhole. Everything he knows, everything he is, ending.

Then, just as swiftly, he is abandoned. A retreating gust as he falls. His face makes a wet crack on the pavings. The sound followed by a spit of curses, “Damned fool! Your blood is tainted!” A skewed cutout in his peripheral, the vampire hobbles away, lips wound back over his pale gums, gagging.

Lost in his own struggle, the words glide over him. Unable to look down, he cups his throat, and tries to plug the bleeding. His hand, jerking and sliding. The image of a skillet and a darting, hot knob of butter. It isn’t working. He pulls away, feels sinewy, red strings drooling between his fingers. Quaking, Arthur wipes his hand down on his shoulder. He can see very little. He raises his face, and listens. Someplace, his attacker is still choking. Half senseless, he scrabbles forwards onto his elbows. Mouth agape, his throat drizzling a bloody spittle. His hand knocks into something hard and metal. His sidearm. Bumbling fingers brush the stock, and he grips it - tries to find the hammer.

Behind him, it is gallows quiet. His mind and his heart both gallop in terror. He is going to die here, he can feel the chase of invisible shadows - the figure at his back, pulling closer. Legs tangled behind him, Arthur flips onto his back. No time for thought. He sits his gun atop his stomach, and aiming down the length of his nose, he thumbs the hammer, and fires.

An igniting pop behind his eyelids, and when he reopens them, the figure is splayed dead, almost upon him. Arms outstretched, gnarled and clutching. Kicking the limbs away, repulsed by their contact, Arthur sets down his head and shudders. He is alive, but freezing. Teeth clattering in his mouth, he lets out a ghastly whistle, which then turns into more coughing. He cannot brace it. Wasted from exhaustion, his whole body arches, as though each forced exhale is a hook yanked sharply under his sternum.

Arthur coughs until it feels that he cannot cough any longer. Only then, does the grip around his chest slacken. He closes his eyes. In the distance, he hears the choppy, accusatory trill of police whistles. The skirling shrieks of tom cats, fighting. The tortured sound of his lungs failing.

Perhaps, it was meant to be like this, he thinks. Perhaps, the violence of such a life can only be overwritten by an even greater violence, in death. He hopes that this was enough. Part of him truly hopes that this is the end. If only, so that he needn’t wake, only to be faced on the path of dying all over again.

Chapter Text

Arthur rides back into Lakay, with his head sitting precariously on his shoulders. His neck pulses, sickly. But other than two bruised coloured pustules, more shrunken and healed than they have any reason for being, there is no other worldly indication of that night’s passing.

It hardly makes sense. As he remembers it, he ought to be dead. Torn to slivers, his neck unraveled like a cord of rope - but a shredded pulp of viscera left. As it is, he feels no worse or better than he had done, before this mess. Exhausted, yes. Lost in his heart, and lost in his purpose, yes. Frozen to the bone, despite his plentiful layers of dress. Weepy eyed and oversensitive. But all this is the sum of his condition. The devouring presence in his chest, and for the lack of meat to cover him, nothing more, or less.

It’s funny, if not for the meagre state of bodily evidence, and the decorated dagger lifted from his attacker, Arthur would consider the whole ordeal nothing more than the internal ravings of a fever sick brain. Deranged musings of a dying man wishing he could already be dead, but too cowardly just to end it.

Whatever truth happened, doesn’t matter he supposes. He woke in that alley, deigned by some higher or lower power to keep living. He wiped down the crusted collar of blood around his throat, buttoned his jacket over the mess that became of his shirt, and used his ‘kerchief to disguise the rest. Then he met with Sadie, as they originally planned. Although, little else went according to plan beyond that. Never in his life has he been party to something so fantastically terrifying, or ridiculous, and that is with dozens of Hosea’s schemes to call back upon, as reference.

Hosea.

Arthur’s heart squeezes, at that. Tears, that he hasn’t had the time, or energy to be shed of. So he carries them in his chest, like his disease, like everything else gone wrong and lost, and never to be spoken of. He shakes his head, as if to be free of the threatening grief that takes him. He at least hopes that whether death put him, the old man got a kick out of his torment. He can imagine his unchained amusement at hearing such a story. Of very few people that know, or once knew, the two things that Arthur won’t ever freely admit to being deathly afraid of. Heights, and goddam alligators.

And to be a hot air balloon, of all things. Up to this point, Arthur scarcely entertained that such frivolous, and frankly hedonistic methods of personal endangerment ever existed - least of all to be engaged in by the likes of him. But then, for crass minded folks that possess neither the riches, nor the idle imagination to embark on such endeavors, often the best thrills are those that are simplest. Facing down a barrel of a gun, or being the one to point it. In his own experience, either suffices.

Arthur sighs. One hand looped around his reins, the other, palm splayed under his sternum. Just holding it. Despite a fitful night’s rest, his chest cavity is still tender. This morning, a fleeting inspection showed his ribs, and he expects the majority of his back, splashed in livid shades of bruising. The results of his and Sadie’s rather improvised landing, and likely a penance for more needless blood shedding. At least he got out with his life, he supposes - little value that he holds to it. Not like poor Archibald, or whatever that silly fool’s name was.

Almost back now. He ducks under a swagging bough of moss, winces in pain from stooping his neck, and nudges Zenobia across the drowned boardwalk. She slows, neck arched and snorting. But she tramps through the boggy mess. Her hooves stutter to find purchase on the other side, she does well, and Arthur praises her for it.

Reaching camp, he sees that no guard is posted. Little use for it, he supposes. With a fickle feeling of humor, Arthur tips his hat to the mounted skull, as he passes. He dismounts, and holds a stilling palm to his girl's flank. Taking a moment just to breathe, eyeing up their temporary lodgings. The two main structures tread off the ground. Slumped and staggering on their uneasy footings, as though trapped in a slanted half-escape, from the landscape that assails them. Either that, or fleeing from a slow, reptilian invasion, or the Nite Folk, or even the Pinketorns, to come for a second go of it. A steaming fog pushes off the Kamasa, bunching low at the ankles of every building, The peeking hems of a lady’s underskirts. Cyprus trees stand, sentinel tall, all around him. At eye level, their splayed, bell-bottomed trunks appear as sets of legs, almost. Traversing the landscape like the gathered remnants of ancient, elephantine mammals.

The exploded wreckage of Pinkerton’s raid still stands unattested. It is utter chaos, and little has been done to mend it. Too overwhelming a task, and much like guard duty, there seems little motivation to tackle something that seems so overwhelmingly pointless. It’s as though a coarse and childish hand has scooped up the settlement, churned it about inside their fingers as though to render a new creation, but then swiftly gotten bored with it. The ground peaks and falls, pouched with water. A claggy, half-kneaded dough, that has been slit with deep, angry slashes where the maxim made a meal of it. Jagged staves, shattered crates and barrels, point out of the muck in every which direction, like teeth stand in a soft and rotted gum line. Where the mud is set enough, it crawls with bullet holes, like some sort of infernal ant mound. Where it isn’t, jellied pools of blood stand stagnant. Impressions of limbs, corpses, and god knows what. His boot kicks a curved wooden rib to one side, once belonging to a barrel. He looks up, and feels defeated in a way that knows no limit, like whatever life he might have sought, it was always going to end up here, at this moment.

It’s just the way he chose it.

Now, it’s over. He is dying, and he has no choice in that, and maybe none of them do. Maybe they are all dead, in the water. Time only has one direction, one destination, for everyone. And isn’t it possible that every single person takes his or her own life, the moment they are born, the moment their parents are born, and so on? His father chose to be the man that he was. He chose to wound his wife and child, and his mother chose to stand by him, regardless. She died for that choice. Just as his father did, when Arthur chose to let him die, on the gallows.

Then, Arthur chose this life. He chose Dutch. He chose things that he wanted, and never before had. He chose family over loneliness. He chose security and he chose purpose. He chose food in his belly, and clothes on his back, and he chose to rob and to kill for these things, because in the end, what other choice did he have? Then, he chose to beat Thomas Downes. Just as Downes chose to be beaten, by signing a loan that he had no means of ever repaying. Downes chose his death by working himself towards it, and by dying he chose to ruin his family. And maybe his wife knew a hard truth in saying that he didn’t have a choice in that. Maybe none of them living, and struggling to live do. Maybe it’s all one great wheel, turning and turning, and any illusion of breaking the cycle is nothing but that. Hung up on its axis, the wheel has no direction but forwards. Always moving, but never going anywhere different.

Arthur adjusts himself, suspenders biting hard into his shoulders. Tightened to compensate for the give in his trousers. Making do, he won’t buy new ones, or waste the effort to get them retailored. He leaves Zenobia saddled. Call it superstition, but he expects they’ll be riding out again, before the day is over. He walks up to the main structure. Not much in the way of friendly faces to greet him, but he finds Miss Grimshaw sorting piles of lank, and yellowed washing.

“You seen Dutch around?” He inquires, from a polite enough distance.

She sets her work down, with a faint twist of impatience. But then she eyes over him, and evidently sees something enough to make her soften. “Of course, he’s out on the jetty.”

Arthur shifts under her watch, downcast and silent. Something in her manner puts him in the place of years gone. When things were more simple. Appearances hadn’t been so set, and she could afford to be kinder without needing to portion it. Warm tinted reminders of all the nights he came back drunk and jilted, from some fraught engagement with Mary. The other nights he came back drunk and no less jilted from some brawl with some stranger, just for the sake of it. All the times she could have admonished him, doused his wounds in salt, but some knowing sense in her made that she didn’t. And it is a bleak sort of comfort that she feels he warrants such care at this moment. That she sees something so fragile in him, and he sees that she sees it, and this moment is likely as close as either can bear to acknowledge it. Any of it. The direction this all headed. The pains they have endured in service of this gang, in service of protecting it. The love lost, the years sacrificed. Their trust and their loyalty. All of it paid out to Dutch, without any type of receipt or insurance.

“Appreciated.” He says, eventually. Tipping his hat, hiding his face in the shadow of it. “I imagine we’ll be moving on soon enough.”

“Then that’s the way of it.” She dusts her hands. The same sort of terminating motion as clapping shut the covers of a book. It shakes them both out of it. “I’ll make a start on preparations, you take care now, Mr. Morgan.”

“You too, Susan.”

***

Taking his leave, Arthur hears Dutch, before he finds him. The man’s voice, a low, trawling drone that seems as at home in this setting as the burbling honks of pelicans and egrets. The drilling chitter of cicadas, the whirling chirp of crickets. Further still, a dog’s faint barking. The near silent sluice of a skiff’s oars, and the fisherman aboard, humming. The gossamer whir of his line being cast, the leaden plunk of the sinker.

Curious now, he keeps listening. Tuning his ear to the landscape, as though dialing some mechanical instrument. Fiddling with it in increments, until it produces a pure type of clarity. From behind, he can hear the horses uniformly cropping. The shearing tug of vegetation. The ruminations of their jaws, grinding their meals up like stony mortars and pestles. He hears the dry switching of their tails, even the fuzzy agitations of the horse flies that cloud about them, refusing to be banished.

Fascinated, he can’t help reaching out, even further. Like planting feelers in the ground, his sense of the world changes and expands beyond his capacity, beyond his comprehension. He hears the miserable, overencumbered trundle of wagons passing. The racket of their cargo. He hears the clang of metal. The thrumming, mechanical heartbeat of the city. He hears voices. Birds rising, the sound of their wings, like the dry, airy thump of hung linens. Water lapping. Somewhere far off, the cavernous echo of a gunshot.

He clutches at his head.

It is too much. Everything, all of it, becoming so close and directionless, that it feels every sound is coming from inside of him. Arthur spins about, aimlessly. Trying to concentrate. But it is like trying to pick out a single voice in a body of hundreds, all of them talking one impossible, garbled monster of a language. He ducks out of reflex, the low rush of trees conspiring above him. His boots clunk, like someone is slamming a chest of drawers inside his head. He hears a man, his calloused hands tooling something. He knows by his rhythms, this man is Charles. But, how does he know this? He turns around again. His panic reaches a fever pitch, and now there is nothing but the soggy rasps of his own breathing. The thunderous swells of his heart, crashing and receding against the shore of his chest. Why won’t it stop? There is no longer any detail for him to make out. Too many layers on top of layers. All of it compressed into a shrill, and ceaseless ringing, and just when he thinks his skull might burst from it, that this wall of sound might well crush him, there is nothing. A gulping rush of silence, like dipping his head underwater. Then, he breaks the surface and the world returns to him.

“White to D4…Black…to F5. White to G3.”

Arthur blinks, utterly lost in himself. A cold, dank sweat staining his forehead. Hand shaking, he wipes at it. He is frightened to move, lest it start up again. But he has to. Wincing, he takes an over exaggerated step forwards, placing down the wedge of his heel first, then his toe following tentatively after. Of course, the sound is normal, insultingly so, and he stands there, staring down at his feet, feeling that he has surely been made a fool of. By what or who, it’s impossible to say, but he supposes he ought to be grateful that he suffered no witnesses to such madness. As it is, he puts the thought out of his head, and marches along the gap-toothed walkway, in some weak show of defiance.

“Knight…to F6,”

He walks unsteady on the decking. The bleached gray boards beneath him, uneven and curling. He uses the clapboard structure on his left, and the rotted railings on his right, to guide him. Following his mentor’s voice, puncturing the haze, like a siren’s calling. Approaching from behind, he finds Dutch, perched at the jetty’s end. The corner that hugs the body of the attached building. His hat, round and black as a punctuation mark. His waistcoat, a bloody paint stroke across the center of a tea stained canvas.

Oblivious to his presence, Dutch continues with whatever it is he seems to be doing. His legs planted firmly atop a crate, his arms gliding - almost tracing each syllable as he sounds it. He faces out, to the water, and it’s hard to tell where his gaze lands, or indeed if it lands anywhere at all, this trance-like state that is induced in. Arthur follows his line, and looks out, over the bayous. This close to the water’s edge, the fog pushes firmly against his eyes, and whatever Dutch might see, remains as opaque as their surroundings. He grips the railings edge, for want of something solid, more than anything. The morning light is pretty enough, he supposes. The horizon is but a vague impression. A hesitant pencil scratching, not yet resolved to being solid. Where the sun manages to breach the dense foliage, it gleams, streaks of honeycomb yellow, atop the mossy green surface of the water.

He coughs once, spits over the edge. Then, turns to face Dutch, square on. Arms crossed over his chest, eyeing the man in vague consternation. “You…okay, there?”

“Working it all out. Once and for all, Arthur.” He pronounces. Throat thick with a gravel, that makes Arthur wonder how long precisely he’s been at it. Reciting the same chess play, like it is some sort of oblique incantation.

“Mm. What now?” Arthur finds the railing, and presses his back to it.

“We’re back.” Dutch’s arms swing wide open, shaking his balance, and the chair holding him aground teeters on its hind legs, precariously. Arthur’s chest clenches, eyes sticking to the thing like that might yet hold its wobbling joints all together. His concern is not shared, apparently. Dutch carries on, unawares, or simply disbelieving that the laws of gravity should ever dare apply to him. “And I’m sitting here, and I am contemplating the great journey of the sun, and considering a famous chess move.” He draws his arms in, and like a hinged trap, the chair snaps down on all fours, sharply.

Arthur finds himself exhaling, along with it. Running a self soothing circle across his chest. It would be just his luck if the damned fool accidentally toppled himself into the Lanahachee, by the mere act of over-gesticulating. But then, it wouldn’t be the first time he’s dived into the waters, and so recently. He doesn’t know, but he hopes the boy - Jules, made it. Inversely, he hopes the bull gator that maimed him didn’t. Or at the very least, he hopes it sustained enough injury that it keeps to whatever hellish depths it spawned from, for the time being. Grimacing, Arthur shifts uncomfortably, and tries to pick up on whatever it is now that has Dutch so incensed.

“Those oily enactors of a mediocre justice, the Pinkertons, and their benefactor, the depressing millionaire, Leviticus Cornwall…They want us, Arthur! They want us, and they are going to have us!” Dutch says, his eyes burning wild. His arms pumping up and down, like overfired pistons. Vaguely terrifying, as it is ridiculous. And in another life, perhaps Arthur would have been startled at this enactment. Moved into a rush of action, or some preemptive appeasement.

As it stands, he answers coolly, “Well maybe they ain’t the problem.”

Dutch’s voice catches, “Meaning?”

“I don’t know.” Arthur shakes his head, already deeper into this mess than he much cares for. “It’s just…well, I can’t help but feel we would’ve been better runnin’ off someplace else.” Quicker than Dutch can answer, he takes a few steps off to the side. After everything, still unable to shake the inbuilt avoidance, that comes as a given whenever he talks back to Dutch.

“But the, the game ain’t over, Arthur.” Dutch says, eyes glazed and incredulous. “I mean I ain’t…I ain’t even played my final move, but…”

“Well, I guess I’m more interested in savin’ folk, than winning at chess.” Arthur flaps his hand, exhausted, dismissive.

“Then maybe life ain’t such a thing to cling onto so tightly.”

“No doubt.” Not for him, it’s not. “But what about the women?” Arthur presses, hard as he dares now.

Dutch takes a long breath, “You sound like Hosea.” Then, silence. His chin lifts, angled just so, in the sunlight. His eyes turning flat, and distant. “I miss…him.”

Unmoved, Arthur watches him. Even in grief, there is something manicured, and insincere about his manner. Maybe it is genuine, and maybe it isn’t. Arthur is hard pressed on deciding whether at this point, it makes any difference. “I asked you a question.” He says, holding stubborn.

A pause, and Dutch actually turns to look at him, for perhaps the first time in this entire conversation. “What do you think?”

“We can’t stay here. That much is obvious.” Arthur takes a breath. “But where we gonna run to? I mean they chased us from the west, they chased us over the mountains, they ran us into the sea,”—

“Arthur,” Dutch stops him there. His brow notched, as though he is just coming into understanding of something unpleasant. One hand picking idly, at his temple, his eyes turning sharp and pointed as needles. “Do you have my back?”

“Always, Dutch.” Without missing a beat, Arthur answers. “But there’s more than your back to worry about.”

Evidently, not the answer Dutch was searching for. His head drifts - all of a sudden disinterested, and that just makes Arthur fight all the harder. His voice raises, “Look, we need more money. We’ve been on the run for months now,” He leans over, in a frustrated attempt to get through to him. “And I seen you killin’ folk in cold blood, like you always told me not to!”

At that, Dutch pushes up, abruptly. Shaking Arthur off, like he might be rid of a stuffy winter coat in summertime. He steps over the crate where his legs rested, and makes for the railings.

Unremitting, Arthur chases after him. Furious and desperate, and his chest buckling with a fresh bout of coughing. “And I’m sorry but I can’t help but think that if,”—

“There is country,” Dutch snaps, disregarding him, “in Roanoake Ridge, past Butcher’s Creek I believe we could hold.”

“Okay,” Arthur breathes out, conceding. He feels heady with adrenaline, the belated, sick feeling of a fight gone too far. No winning. While Dutch reclaims control, with a restrained type of fury. The owner of a yapping dog that wants for a good kicking.

“And you, and Charles. You could take folks up that’a way.” He says, curtly.

Arthur is silent.

Stooped over the railing, Dutch shakes his head, disappointed, maybe. His voice sinks to a new low, thick and dangerous sounding. “Micah…and I need to do some reconnaissance. I ain’t got a final plan, yet. He glances Arthur’s way. A brief candle flicker of fragility, “Arthur, I ain’t got a…” he cuts himself off, and it vanishes. “I just need time. I need time, and no…traitors.”

Arthur takes a step back, doused in a cold feeling of what? Hurt? Regret? He blinks down, and with nothing to say, he leaves Dutch to his planning. Arthur walks back the way he came. Finds Charles, almost immediately. Settled on a stack of crates. Focused on his work, he sits wide, and easy. A blade rested on his lap, and a whetstone fitted in his palm, snug as an eye in a socket. His hair, clean and tight as braided rawhide, cuts a tidy line down the center of his head. Chasing his spine, almost brushing his hips. It’s grown, since he last noticed.

Arthur clears his throat, in announcement, and in a failed attempt to shake whatever else he is feeling. “Charles…will you ride with me?”

The man glances up, and rises without hesitating. “Always.” He takes his weapon, a cruel, blunt headed thing, called a tomahawk, if Arthur remembers correctly, and secures the strap to his belt, where it swings, menacingly. “Where we headed?” He asks, reaching for a revolver. Not his, one of the camp's spares. He permits it a cursory once over, before he decides it’ll do, and claims it.

“Up past Butcher Creek.” Arthur says. His voice rougher than he’d like, tired and weak sounding.

“That’s Murfree Brood country.” Charles stands stock still, uneasy.

“That’s why I’m asking you to ride with me.”

“I understand.” A pause of consideration. He discards the revolver, in favor of his shotgun. Thumbs the latch, and with a practiced flick, he checks for chambers for shells, before closing the barrels back up, and holstering it. “What are we doing there?” He starts walking, and Arthur follows him.

“We’re looking for a place to hold up. Even the law won’t follow us up there, too willingly.”

“Yeah…I did some scouting up there, while you boys were away.” Charles strides ahead, and Arthur skips over an oblong mass, hopefully a plank, or rotted log, and not a dismembered limb, belonging to some Pinkerton.

“And?” He wheezes, still struggling to keep pace with him.

Charles slows, already at the horses. “…You’ll see.” He tosses over a dark look, before turning, to fit Taima’s saddle.

“Right.” Arthur mutters, more to himself than anything. An outstanding condemnation if ever he’s heard one. He sighs. Facing Zenobia, he stands her stirrup, and with a lurch, hauls himself into the saddle. The day’s not over yet, clearly.

Chapter Text

“It’s quite a ride up there. I saw some canoes near the bridge up river, which would take us right up to Butcher Creek. Might be quicker. What d’ya think?”

Charles looks over, wearing that same painted concern he sees in every face that looks back at him, now. The sort of look that makes Arthur want to give in and tell everything, to anyone that will listen, and at the same time makes him want to suffer his sickness in complete isolation. As always, he can’t settle for either, instead he lands awkwardly between the two, on the ledge of wan humor. “I dunno…Think I might’ve lost my sea legs somewhere along the Caribbean. So if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather stick with the horses.”

“Of course.” Charles makes a vague sound of assent. Arthur thinks he sees the man’s lips quirk in dim amusement. It is gone too sudden, as with anything joyful and worthwhile seeing these days. His face slides into a stern non-expression, gray as stone, it stays there.

For a while, neither of them say anything. The landscape passes them by, and they both let it. The Kamasa, the curled finger that guides them. A scaled serpent, undergoing all its varied layers of transformation. Shedding from the glass bottle green of the bayous to a steely toned, as they cross the state line, into New Hanover. Then, motley browns and sulfurous yellows. Arthur dreads to think what, leaching from the poisoned earth - a weeping sore, that wretched mine in Annesburg.

Arthur watches the land change, the bulbous cyprus trees and their listless tendrils, ceding to their bright, and lively cousins. Broad bellied oaks, and fluttering sycamores. It ought to be beautiful, but he watches the leaves rise and rattle in the winds, and feels that there is something hostile in the way this place greets them. A warding hatred towards man, and the blight he has wrought upon this slice of nature. He sees it in a ragged looking doe, raising her head at their passing, with eyes, white and silted. A bank washed with dead fish, their flesh bubbling with pulpy mutations. The stench of sulfur. They pass littered wastes. Shattered deck chairs. Gutted suitcases, vomiting up their ruined contents. Knotted forms that from his present vantage could present either as bodies, or tossed bedrolls.

They drive on. There is a smoky chill in the air, the closing in of autumn. Huge, humped clouds, the dark and gritty texture of coal smoke. They drive across the sky, like the shapes of bison, rearing and stamping, in formation. Of course, his mind would supply him with that memory, in particular. Their hunt on the plains, it is polished like a stone, for the number of times he has turned it over. Arthur looks over at Charles, the man he was, and the man he is, riding besides him. Thinking on the passing of time. He thinks on the day they first met, regarding each other with the stilted weariness of strangers. Their next true encounter, the hunt in Colter. Dewberry Creek. The cornfields. Their standing embrace upon his return, the first solid touch he felt since landing aground, in America.

So much feels changed, so much feels different. They have both emerged - turned almost unrecognizable, by all that happened between the bank robbery, and Guarma. There was a moment, before all this mess, that Arthur felt their paths were almost joined together. Or more, that Charles had shown him another way. A path towards something gentle, and kinder. The type of wilful compassion that he never expended much effort in cultivating, before. Sure, he might have indulged in the occasional act of charity. An extended palm to some poor soul, in the stead of a closed fist, or a brandished gun. But he never properly considered the merit to sowing the seeds of such altruistic behaviors, nor sustaining their growth in the days, and weeks after. After all, why bother teaching a fool to fish, when said fool can go rob another fool, and then pay a real fisherman for his efforts, whilst being generally no better or worse off than how he started.

This is how his mind always worked. He never questioned his journey, never saw much point in debating the means to the end, so long as he got there. To him, it didn’t matter the impact he caused, the lives he hurt, and the generations that might feel that hurt after. He has killed so many men, all of them sons to a mother, and some maybe husbands, or maybe fathers. It makes his head hurt to think how many lives he has ruined without knowing it. How much pain he has spread, and how it leaves unseen marks on the world, like rings inside a tree, ever growing outwards. And no-one ever really posed whether he should be different, or think different about his actions. As though such mental faculties were beyond his very nature, like educating a baby on the subtleties of Mozart, or trying to teach a dog how to speak german.

But it was Charles that saw the potential in him. It was Charles that showed him what it meant to be accountable, how to take ownership of himself, and his actions. At Dewberry Creek, he didn’t flinch when Arthur snapped at him. Charles put a mirror to his anger, and held it there until his own reflection bore a hole in him. He exposed the transparencies of Arthur’s hatred, the way that he points it at the world, when he cannot stand to keep pointing it at himself. Ever since that day, he has wanted to act like the man that Charles thinks he is. He wants to believe that he might be capable, or worthy of such an assessment.

Whether he has succeeded or not, is still up for some debate, and likely will be, up until his dying breath. But he is trying, and there is still time. Maybe not time enough to fix everything, seeing as he would surely need several lifetimes to achieve a feat such as that. But, he can fix some things. He can see John and his family safe. He can encourage others to see their own way of this mess. He can help Charles, help the Wapiti, and he can help the folks that he has wronged, and some others besides.

Life has given him so very little, all while taking away so much, and maybe that’s fair, and maybe that’s not. Maybe, there are no good endings, for anyone. Out there, in the world, everybody is losing somebody. Ain’t a life lived without grieving the end of somebody else’s. But doesn’t that mean it’s important just to make the best of it? Sister Caulderon said it about right, there is good and bad in the world, and in people, both. But good things aren’t born of nothing, all it takes is looking hard enough to see that love exists, that it will always exist, irregardless of him still being alive to witness it.

Maybe it is seeing the end to his journey that has got him understanding what he needs to do before he gets there. But he sees it clear now, being good and kind is not a pre-existing road, he can simply hop on. It is not, and will never be that simple. Compassion takes thought, and effort, and determination, and it is a journey that looks different for everyone. It is a path that must be forged only by the one walking it, and that is just the way off it. Life is a gamble, and with his last hand dealt he’ll be damned if he doesn’t play it with a flourish.

Arthur clears his throat, winces at the misstep in his lungs, but pushes on regardless, “It’s good to see you again, Charles.”

Charles looks over, then softens, “Yeah, you too.”

His new look is severe, and still unfamiliar, but his smile is the same as ever. Achingly genuine. Arthur feels his cheeks redden, despite himself. He nudges Zenobia forwards, so they ride abreast and continues, “Thanks for what you did in St. Denis. Real brave, drawing ‘em of us like that.” He fumbles with his reins. “I was…I was worried that you and Abigail had both got yourselves killed, I’m real glad it didn’t come to that.”

“Likewise.” Charles answers. “For a while a lot of us believed the worst, myself included. Hard not to, after reading all the stories in the papers.”

“So, how’d you get out of the city?” Arthur broaches. Anxious to know it, after weeks adrift, sustained by his own terrible imaginings.

“I found a spot to lie low for a while, then managed to get a ride with a wagon of workers heading out to the fields. Abigail said she somehow managed to slip away, when they grabbed Hosea.”

“Well, you did good gettin’ the others outta there. Keeping everyone together,” Arthur acknowledges, without acknowledging Hosea.

A sleight which either Charles doesn’t notice, or allows to slip by, on purpose. “Everyone was pretty shaken up when I got back to Shady Belle. It was…a tough few days. I couldn’t have done it without Sadie.”

Arthur hums. After all, he too, is indebted to her. It is by her ingenuity and determination that retrieving John may yet be possible. It feels between the three of them, they might yet salvage something out of this situation. “So, how did you find that spot back there? I assume the skulls on sticks weren’t an addition of yours?”

“Hah, no. Old Strauss knew about it. The locals are terrified of the place. So we figured that might buy us some time. And it did…until one of you brought the law with you.” There is a pause, and he twists around in his saddle, “And where did you end up again? Cuba?”

Arthur shakes his head. “Not exactly. An island off of there, called Guarma. Landed ourselves in a heap of trouble.”

“Really? A tropical island…isn’t that just what Dutch wanted?”

“Mm. I guess it didn’t exactly live up to his ideals.” Arthur grimaces, feeling uncomfortable. An itching heat under his skin. He can’t place it. He adjusts his hat, so that his face is better shaded. “Anyway…I ain’t always sure Dutch knows what he wants anymore.”

“Perhaps not. But he’s always managed to figure things out in the past.” Charles says, bleakly optimistic. Arthur has to wonder if he believes a single word, or if the man is just being kind, for his own benefit.

“I know…you’re right. I’m just…it’s been…” his vision falters. A quick flash of darkness, like the shadow of a bridge, passing over him. Gone in an instant. “Sorry, I uh, I guess I just miss Hosea, and his wisdom, y’know?” He blinks heavily, recovering.

Charles studies him, frowning. “So, how are you managing, with everything?” A question that clearly intends on addressing the elephant in the room, without so much as naming it.

“Oh, you know, I’m fine. I,”— Arthur stops rigid. Turning his head away, he coughs once, sharp, into his elbow. Then, comes another. In a furious effort, he clamps his mouth shut, and holds his breath, demanding that it be over. A squeezing pressure. His body shudders, of equal and opposing desire to win out. He thinks he hears Charles say something. He can’t discern what. Eyes closed, and holding a look of immense concentration, Arthur swallows down the clod of mucus and blood in his throat. He can feel Charles, poised in his saddle, holding ready. But, he shakes his head. “Sorry, that was…I’m fine, really.”

Charles clicks his tongue. A strained and brash look about him. Jaw clenching. Clearly wanting more substance than that, but being forced to accept that Arthur can’t or won’t give it. “For now, maybe.” He exhales, and tries a different tack, “How’d it go with Sadie, any progress getting John back?”

Arthur snorts, “He’s still alive, so I’d say he’s doin’ about as good as the rest of us. Saw him out there, working the fields with a whole bunch of fellers.”

Charles makes an acknowledging sound, and then his brow furrows, “Wait…how on earth? Ain’t Sisika on an island last I checked?”

“Well sure,” Arthur drawls, suspiciously chipper. Charles tips his head, and looks over. Sensing that he is being led, playfully, into some type of ambush. Like the time Arthur told him about the menagerie of dressed up animals he retrieved, for some blustering, equally dressed up Englishman. The zebra that was a mule, the cougar that was a tiger, and the lion that was, well…a lion. Or, his encounter with the stalwart university woman that has hung her life and reputation upon the bones of some fantastical, and highly improbable dinosaur. Then, the writer to a dime novel, beholden to a very different type of dinosaur. A dusty, old shootist by the name of Jim Boy Calloway. The relic to a bygone era, that folks apparently quite love reading about - if only a single word could be extracted from the drunken fool, and penned onto paper. Enter Arthur, commissioned with chasing down the story, quite literally, by chasing a bunch of boorish and mostly disagreeable shootists. A patched quilt of encounters that speak to the bizarre, seemingly inescapable magnetism Arthur that possesses. Charles huffs, and awaits the next installment.

“That’s what the hot air balloon was for.”

There it is.

“Hot…air…balloon.” Charles weighs each word in his mouth, completely vexed by their combination.

“Mhm. You ain’t never ridden in one?” Arthur chuckles, eyes betraying him, with an amused sparkle. “They’re all the rage, apparently. Although, I imagine my overall opinion was somewhat affected by the prison guards shooting at it. Along with the rather…untimely loss of the pilot, on account of the O’Driscolls, also shooting at it.”

“…Right.”

“Then, there was the crash landing, on account of there being no pilot left to pilot it…” He tails off, frowning. “But don’t let any of that put you off, I’m sure that it’s ordinarily quite a rejuvenatin’ experience.”

Charles opens his mouth as though to say something, to express some chained amusement or exasperation at Arthur’s penchant for ridiculousness. Instead, he shakes his head, “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

***

It is plain dark, by the time they reach their destination. An inky tone, like they are riding under water. They pass through the settlement Charles mentioned, Butcher’s Creek. A jumbled sprawl of shacks, that looks like it’s been swallowed and regurgitated by the neighboring river, at least ten times over. There are vague attempts at fencing in areas, as though divided by a child’s hand, each plot is sketchy and vastly misshapen. Arthur shifts in his saddle. The residents peer at them, vacant and distrustful. The uneasy feeling of traversing a walled up herd of cattle. Arthur mumbles a few greetings, but none are returned back to him.

“C’mon, they’re not going to help us.” Charles urges, “I’m pretty sure it’s to the north, up the road here.”

Arthur nods, with a gruff sound, and they continue. The horses dig up the steep incline, and they leave the bizarre little village behind them. Steep slats of moonlight make a tally of the trees on either side of them. Their tall shadows like steel bars, the holdings of a jail cell.

“Cheary place.” Arthur stands up his collar, little good that it does him. He feels cold as the dead. His hands, the color of paper, held out in front of him.

Charles slows, focused on divining the path ahead. Arthur holds up at his side, in a former life he would have taken such a chance to take in a cigarette. Fog pours off the hills, and lingers, gray and impenetrable as a curse, before them. Except that he sees plain through it. Like pulling back a gauze curtain, his eyes cut holes in the gloom, and he points out an orange haze, to the right of them. “Think that’s them?”

Charles squints in the direction. “Must be.” He concedes, nudging Taima a few paces, “best stay quiet.”

They dismount a few feet into the foliage, Arthur shoulders his bow, and on second thought, his shotgun. Then, they both start up a beaten game trail, in silence. The light grows stronger. A devilish summoning, beckoning them towards it. The source is two men, a torch held up between them. Charles makes a familiar, slicing gesture, one they’ve used before, when hunting. Providing a curt nod, Arthur draws his bow, and together they dispatch the scouts, seamlessly.

“Good job.” Charles praises. “We must be close now, let’s stop and take a look from the top of the hill, there.”

Arthur follows, sparing a brief glance at the fallen bodies. One wears a fouled set of dungarees, the front panel stiff as a board, and swinging like a door hatch from its fixings. The other’s torso is completely naked. Face planted in the dirt, his shoulder blades stand out like pinioned wings, and his skin crawls with sores, leaking a creamy, gruel like liquid.

He joins his companion. They both stand the hill while Charles sets his binoculars to his eye sockets. The cave entrance glows a hellish, ember red. Yawing like the mouth of some infernal coal furnace. A primordial, inhuman type fury, placed inside a box that could never possibly hold it. The campsite is strewn with detritus. A stagecoach lingers at the outskirts, a picked carcas. Nearest the cave entrance, there is a fashioned cage, lashed together from stripped branches. Empty as of now, but it is hard to know if that is a good or a bad thing, in this instance.

“That’s the stagecoach that went missing,” Charles hands the binoculars over, grim and without any further elaborating. Arthur lifts the binoculars to his own face, and takes to searching for whatever it is that has Charles so rattled upon sighting it.

It is incomprehensible as it is horrific.

Suspended from an archaic, altar-like construction, hangs a flayed corpse, decapitated. Scarcely human, but for its hands, the distinctiveness of its fingers, curled in pitiable last defense. Below sings an open fire, licking greedily at the body’s blackened fingertips. It must have been cooking for hours. The charred flesh gleams, basted in blood, a burnished, cherry red. Around the corpse, a wreath of trinkets, and other dismembered limbs decorate it.

“…Jesus.” Passing back the binoculars, Arthur buries his nose into his elbow. The stench is insurmountable. An acrid, metal reek of burnt hair and blood. The cloying waft of fat, thickening the air, coagulating in his throat. Arthur gags. Mouth gouted in saliva, his eyes burn, and he swallows down the decisive urge to vomit. Charles presses a sympathetic hand to his back. Arthur angles his head and expunges a steaming gobbet of phlegm, before announcing, “Alright, let’s get this over with.”

“How do you want to approach it? We can head into the cave, or flush ‘em out with dynamite.”

Arthur shifts his weight, standing on one knee, whilst he thinks on it. “Let’s surprise them. Gotta be at least a dozen men down there by the sounds of it.” A comment that earns him an odd look, as though Charles is deeming he might finally have lost his mind, what little there is remaining of it. The thing is, Arthur doesn’t know why he said such a thing, or why he knows it, but he tries at correcting himself, regardless. “I mean, if I had to guess, I’d figure about that many. Y’know, hypothetical like.”

Sparing him the indignity of lingering on his apparent strangeness, Charles starts forwards, and Arthur has no choice but to follow. Advancing at a lopsided crouch, he fumbles through his satchel, and retrieves the necessary equipment. He checks behind him, and Charles provides him a nod of encouragement.

“Alright…here goes nothing.” He steps up while lighting the fuse, and chucks the stick into the cave’s gullet.

Without checking to see where it has landed, he rushes for cover. There is a sizzling delay, as the spark gnashes down the fuse’s length. Arthur tucks himself behind a tossed crate, and waits, legs splayed, back pressed into it. An intake of silence, and then the explosion hits him with the volcanic surge of a sun, gone supernova. The light presses like glowing coals against his closed eyelids. And the heat, it roars past his ears, enough to slough skin from bone, if he was caught in its center. He hears a bedlam of screams, one or two men, it’s impossible to tell, their shrieks stretching and melding like putty, together.

He exhales, head rattling, and cautiously peers from his vantage. Past the black, choking, wall of smoke there is a muffled din, from deep in the cave’s belly. He turns, pushing himself upright, in a clumsy scuffle. Then yanks the strap of his shotgun over his head. It’s do or die. Now or never. He charges. Two shadow-caked figures rush him, immediately. Firing from the hip, Arthur gut shots both of them. There contorted visages, briefly highlighted at the flashbulb pop of each slug firing.

He feels Charles behind him, and he kicks his way past the bodies, down the left side fork of the cavern. Droves of men pour from the cave’s fetid entrails. Scrabbling like rats in a bucket, to reach him. Arthur curses. He clumsily dodges the cleaving swing of a machete, and jabs the wielder over the nose, which cracks, wet and snotty as a raw egg under the butt of his shotgun. The man grunts, blade lapsing in his fingers, and he drops like a sack of grain, to be stamped upon by his rabid compatriots.

Arthur tries to step back from the rest of them, and then he feels rather than sees the whistling shriek of an arrow, rending the air as it passes him. With a terrifying compound force, it lances one of the Murfrees in the throat, and the tip emerges, slick and victorious, upon exit. The wooden shaft vibrates up and down, while he totters about, tugging at it, like a mechanical doll trying to twist the key that winds him. Skinny ropes of blood spurt from his neck, and then his motions seize, and he falls, in a disassembled heap beside his companion.

There are still two more. A demented carousel of shadows plays across the cave walls, as they advance upon him. No time to reload, Arthur unholsters his sidearm, and swings it wide, spraying a round into both their torsos. He takes a slogging breath, clutching his chest. But not for long. At some point, Charles must have pushed past him, and he hears more gunshots whine, and ricochet about the cavern.

“Goddammit.” He wipes his forehead, and scuttles down the narrow slope, in what he hopes is the vague direction of their origin. The ground buckles and heaves under him, loose scree and gravel, that makes it feel like a rug is being constantly pulled out from under him. He pauses at a lit juncture, multiplying branches, in every direction. It is a senseless maze, like spilled entrails, passages coil back on themselves, or congregate, piling all atop each other. He selects one, and starts doggedly down it. Jamming a fresh group of bullets into the revolver’s chamber, as he runs. He shouts for Charles, but the only sound in his ears is the panicked lumber of his own breathing.

At last, the ground seems to level, and at a distance he downs a group of stragglers, at the periphery of whatever havoc Charles is battling. He skips over their tangled corpses, and turns another corner, entering into a dim and smoky grotto, a workspace of horrors. More cages, dissected wagons, and bodies, in varying lengths of decomposition. Oblique mounds of viscera, at certain angles appear torched alight, in reflection of hung torches and fallen lanterns.

Silent, and harrowed, his tunic striped with blood, Charles comes up beside him. “I think that’s all of them.” He says, wiping his handaxe on his pant leg before stowing it. “C’mon, let’s get that poor girl out of the cage.”

Arthur nods blankly, and holsters his own weapon. He feels dizzy and encumbered. The air is unbearably close down here, yet thin, like vapors. So much blood. Fresh, steaming pools of it, bearing a ripe, almost vinegary pungence. Not wholly unpleasant. Almost like a wine, if he had to compare it. He works his jaw, and frowns in perturbance. Then, joins Charles, approaching the rudimentary prison. Both their hands raised slowly, in denotations of caution and peaceability.

The occupant shrinks from their approach. “Please don’t kill me!” She stands herself at the rear corner of her penning, the furthest point she can possibly place herself away from them. Her eyes are wild and ghosted. She wears a thin cotton slip, slaked in grime, the same mote gray color as her exposed arms and legs. A ruddy mane of hair stands matted around her shoulders. Young in her face, early twenties if Arthur had to guess. Far too young for any of this.

“It’s okay, Miss.” He promises.

“Stay away from me!” She shrieks, and for a conflicted moment Arthur looks back to Charles for a penny of guidance. But his friend shrugs, just as lost as he is, in how to deal with this. Sighing, Arthur reaches for his knife, and shears at the twine binding the entrance. She cries and hollers in response, battering about like a small bird in terror.

In a rush, Arthur opens the door, and sheathes his knife, in the hope of calming her. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he flaps his hands, but if anything the gesture only fans her ire further. Internally, he curses, and in a burst of manic desperation he lashes his arms around her in a staying embrace. She squirms and whimpers, and he mumbles low words of reassurance to her, and some part of her shudders, then relaxes. His grip softens. He joins in her relief, however temporary, breathing deep and steady, and that is when it hits him.

The smell of her.

A rich, and bountiful feast, offered up on a gilded platter. Crackling pork, dripping and tender. Buttery, fluffed potatoes. Soft poached fruits, honeyed and fragrant. His mouth waters. For the first time since his sickness, he is ravenous. He closes his eyes. A delightful scratching in the base of his skull, he twists his head and drinks the air, like a snake tasting scent trails. He can feel her tug in his arms, his grip an iron cage, battened against her. Her body sings with panic. Her skin burns afire. He can feel her heart, like it is inside of him. A deep, and almost toneless resonance. The same heavy, gut sundering timbre of kettle drums. Stampeding horses. A thundering drove of hooves, sinking into one continuous rolling, shudder. Arthur pulls into her, honed and intent, like a compass needle. Wholly unawares of what he is doing, and incapable of any diversion. He wets his lips, in anticipation. Then, a startling, sharp pain in his mouth, like someone has filled his gums with scissors.

He reels back, eyes wide, and pupils crushed tight as pinholes. He feels a white, hot pain, as something snags his lower lip, slitting at it, like a letter opener. A runny heat pours down his chin, and he stoops over. One hand cupped to his face, panicked and fumbling to staunch it. He tries to apologize to her, but he cannot shape his mouth around the words, let alone speak them. She shoves him, putting a good foot of distance between them. Her chest heaves, but otherwise she exudes a hateful and mutinous type of composure. She has been through worse than this, and yet her eyes slide down him, and silently curse him for a devil. She passes, calm and detached as anything, and he lets her. Strained looking, Charles murmurs a few words to her. Then, he steps into the cage, where Arthur paces, like some demented, craze stricken animal.

“Arthur?” Charles catches his shoulder. He shakes his head, a jerking, electrified staccato, and keeps walking. Charles plants down, a wall before him. “Arthur!” He flinches, like he has been dashed with scalding water. “…You good?” Charles searches his face for some kind of answer.

His eyes dart in his skull, pale, and rid of color. “I…gotta,” His thoughts are a ruin. Fractured pieces that slash his palms as he tries to pick them. “J-Just need some fresh air. “ he says, ragged and panting. He tucks his chin and swallows, terrified of voicing anything else. The repugnant truth of it. The slaking thirst that consumes him, that still pulls on his throat, like he is no better than a dog for disobeying it. The horror of it. He hunches over, onto his knees, and vomits. Lips peeled back, in a smiling grimace.

Then, he is coughing, and coughing. Everything dimming. After that, he doesn’t remember much else.

Chapter Text

It’s been a few days since settling down in our new camp. High in some nasty country, badlands as bad as we can find this far to the east.

Me and Charles cleared out its previous occupants, a truly nasty bunch - The Murfrees, or some other such nonsense.

While we was scouting, we saw the remains of that missing stagecoach. Not much to be done by the time we arrived. Saw none of the family that was riding in it, like they straight went up and vanished. Eerie business. Part of me hopes those poor souls didn’t suffer too much. Whilst another, more realistic part of me fears they suffered a great deal more than what I dare to imagine.

We came across a young girl inside the caves, still caged up, and still alive, for the most part. I will not guess why they was keeping her, instead of killing her. But there is only one reason for bad men to keep a woman around, and I shall leave it at that. She was terrified of us. Maybe, she had a good reason to be. I tried to calm her, but something happened to me, and I think I came close to killing harming her.

I don’t know how to describe it, but something is deeply wrong with me. I am hungry, like nothing I have ever known, and yet I cannot stomach a crumb of food. Nor can I keep it down, for much longer than an hour or two. Keep getting these headaches. Rashes, if I stay too long in the sun.

I know what it all sounds like, and it sounds downright foolish. Weren’t some creature of the night that bit me, just some sick, deluded fool. I should know, being one, myself.

Rabies?

Whatever it is, the whole situation has got me nervous. I have been keeping my distance, especially from young Jack, as a precaution.

I am still sick, I am still coughing. If I was a vampire changed, then surely that would not be the case any longer? Guess part of me was hoping I could still be saved. Although, the prospect of eternal life sounds goddamn awful, truth be told. Maybe I don’t want salvation. Part of me has always longed for death.

Well, here it comes, I suppose.

***

Arthur blinks down, at the opened pages. The last passage scribed looks like nothing familiar to him. His thoughts, his fears, documented by some stranger. A quaking and jagged hand, indecipherable hieroglyphs, the letters scrabble across the page like a bird’s tined footprints.

Arthur lifts his head, and presses his journal closed. But he doesn’t shift from his perch, not for the moment. The days are long, and he is not lasting through them like he used to. Every aching part of him longs to sink back down into kind and protective nothingness. To forget his troubles, to no longer be conscious in this world, to feel them. Instead he shifts on his cot, and tries to breathe around the overstaying houseguest in his lungs - tries to find some semblance of peace, in the morning quiet. The first few hours of light, during which he needn’t feign strength or confidence, in front of the others. As soon as he rises, they come flocking to him, terrified and pecking for crumbs of reassurance.

His friends, his family. The people that have filled his life with so many moments of joy, and laughter, and adventure. His mind keeps clutching to images of the past. The gang as it was, in the good days. Before death chased them like a hound, over the horizon. But how will the gang remember him once it has inevitably parted? Will anyone think of him, and what image will their minds conjure? A good man? Or a vague attempt at one? Does it even matter, when he will be dead, and unable to remember or care about anything ever again? He doesn’t want to leave them, he doesn’t want to be forgotten, even as he urges those that still stand a chance to leave him - to run, and to never look back.

Arthur looks out, and not for the first time, he is grateful for the cover of his wagon. Even yet, with the day stretching its arms out, he can feel the sun’s coy, prodding attempts at breaching his little haven. Gray stiles of light wheel around the tree cover. A scrolling fog that both illuminates and obscures everything in its presence. He squints his eyes, like some elderly vestige of himself, stricken starry with astigmatism. Cross hatched lines made of light, scarring his eyeballs. He thinks he sees John, and Sadie across the ways, heads lowered, convening in some silent vigil. The John figure raises a hand in his direction, and Arthur makes a half hearted gesture back. Getting John back to his family - at least that is one type of weight off his chest, even will all that Dutch had to say about it.

Arthur sighs, fixes his hat, and then his gloves, readjusts his neckerchief, cowled around the exposed band of his nape, just so. He is aware that it is ridiculous. He looks like a scarecrow, parceled up in his clothes. But for the sake of comfort, he keeps with it. That, and he thinks it hides some of the weight he has shed.

He levers himself off his cot, and walks out, feeling the day smacks him like a concussion, in his head. He passes his mirror. A pale disk of light. His reflection appears gray and indistinct, like it is being filtered through a smudged filmy lens of a cataract. Arthur turns the corner, and almost loses his composure, caught off guard by one Reverend Swanson, nested on a camping chair, like some scraggly beat-up pigeon.

“Reverend,” Arthur stamps his chest with his fist, in ways of greeting him.

“You ok, Mr. Morgan?” The man looks up, from whatever tome he is reading. Places his free hand atop his dotted forearm, in a force of habit, Arthur supposes.

“I don’t know, Reverend.” Arthur answers, more bare and over honest than he ought to.

“These are challenging times…for all of us,” Swanson stands, and meets his eyes, calm and steady in the process. One of those rare and disarming instances, in which he carries himself like a proper and dignified clergyman. Arthur looks at him. Soft, puffy pouches under his eyes, skin wrinkled and sallow. His brick colored hair, striped at the temples with chalk. Faded shades, like he has been put through the wash too many times over. But he looks clean, and respectable. Less like his skeleton is trying to eject itself from its fleshy bindings, and more like an honest to god person.

“Yes…very challenging.” Arthur tips his head down, and kicks at the ground. Mustering about as much graciousness about the matter as he can manage.

“You don’t seem yourself, somehow. I’ve always felt…” The Reverend pauses, grappling with some raw and unruly tide of emotion. He wrings his hands, while holding himself with an almost cowed type of commiseration, in Arthur’s presence. Apologetic, maybe. For being seen to get better, in the presence of one who cannot. “I’ve left the morphine, sir. I’m,”—

“Arthur!” Dutch’s voice cleaves the air, and plants like a cannonball between them. Swanson’s expression scrunches in a vaguely pained shock, and Arthur feels a fiery pang of annoyance at the interruption. “Reverend Swanson, would you excuse us a minute?” Rolling up like a train, noisy and brash, and broiling with hot air, Dutch hails with a wagging hand, for Arthur to join him.

“Of course,” Swanson politely excuses himself, and Arthur makes a rushed gesture of frustration and acknowledgement, before parting in Dutch’s direction. The man parades into his wagon, and takes up a seat, and Arthur sits on his cot, faced directly, like he is being conducted in some bizzare type of interview.

“New York,” Dutch says, and he holds out both hands, as though fending back an inspired bout of applause. Arthur looks at him, blankly. “We are gonna go to New York. Now they have been chasing us south, and east, and west. We’re gonna get a boat, we’re gonna get on a river, and we’re gonna go north.”

“New York?”

“Then Tahiti, the Fiji Islands, or this place, New Guinea. Dancing girls, freedom…” It all flows from his lips like the wistful conjurings of a fairy tale. Bound together by some dream logic that doesn’t transcend into the real world. “But first we have to make a whole lot of smoke, a whole lot of commotion, and then we disappear.”

“We need more commotion?” Arthur questions, sharply.

“One score, and one whole hell of a lot of noise,”—

Turning his head away, Arthur cuts him short with a bitter chuckle, “We ain’t so good at doin’ scores any more, Dutch.”

Then, silence. Dutch’s eyes dissecting him like he is some fascinating and unpleasant insect, “Are you feeling alright, Arthur?”

“…Sure, I’m fine,” Arthur glances outwards,  his mouth pinching shut. He watches a band of figures peel out from the trees, vague apparitions cloaked under foggy wells of sunlight. He recognises Charles first, by the broad cut of his figure. Karen and Javier, acting as escorts. Then, Eagle Flies, his voice calling.

“Pardon me for interrupting. I’ve brought a friend, Arthur.”

Arthur’s heart plummets. He and Dutch rise, simultaneously, and he half raises his hand towards his mentor, in a staying gesture. He needs to get ahead of this. He steps forwards, and meets the young prince with a clutched, and fervent handshake.

“Dutch, this is Eagle Flies, his father is a great chief.” Arthur turns back, and introduces them.

Dutch approaches, wearing a detached and sinister air about him. Face locked in its internal workings. A series of scarcely concealed plottings being formed. He nods minutely to himself, as though sealing some type of conclusion in his mind, and Arthur feels a cold spill of dread pass down him. “Charles and I, we erm…pretended to be mercenaries,”—

“Did me a great favor.” Eagle Flies interjects, sternly.

“Dutch van der Linde.” He reanimates, and waves away Karen and Javier, in silent dismissal. They both stalk away, somewhat reluctantly, their long arms shouldered. He then extends a hand to their visitor, in a rigged and overbearing enactment of chivalry. “How do you do?”

Eagle Flies takes him up, bare faced and earnest, “Not well, sir.”

“Well, I am sorry to hear that.” Dutch rejoins, tilting his head with a languid, poison laced charm.

Made a captive audience, Arthur catches Charles’ eye, sharing in a look of fraught consternation. “How’s your father?” Arthur clears his throat and steps into the conversation, anxiously.

Eagle Flies head twists. He faces Arthur with a sharpness fringing on betrayal, as though he had expected, or rather hoped for him to say something different. He turns back to Dutch, and says, “Father has confused wisdom with weakness. His people, my people…we’ve suffered too much, been lied to, too much. Now, they’ve taken our horses.”

“Who?” Dutch nudges.

“The infantry division posted at Fort Wallace.” Charles answers.

“Why?”

“Colonel Favors is a liar and a murderer. His people won’t sleep until we’re all dead.” Eagle Flies shifts in place, fidgeting venomously. “Without horses, we cannot hunt. Without hunting, we will starve. This is another act of war.”

“I see that.” Dutch answers.

“You men have helped me before, and I have money.” Eagle Flies produces a meager fold of bills.

“Put your money away, son.” Dutch sweeps his offer away with one hand. Refusing with the easy charity of a person that has everything to gain. He has already won, and he knows it. “What do you think, Charles?”

“You know I told your father I will not fight over some horses.” Charles directs his answer to Eagle Flies, stiffly.

“But I made no such promise.” Dutch purrs. “Come along.” Arthur’s face falters with objections, but already it is done. Eagle Flies skips a giddy half step towards Charles, gripping his arm in sealed victory, as he passes.

Charles falls in place, beside him. He talks in a growled whisper, “Arthur, we must go with them to try and stop things from getting out of hand.”

“I guess…” Arthur looks out, helplessly. “Come along.” They fall into step, making their way towards the hitchings. Eagle Flies eagerly sits atop his horse, with Dutch beside him. The two of them, already melded together in dubious conspirings. “We can get them more horses,” Arthur mutters.

“I know. I understand that Eagle Flies is angry, but I don’t see how this will help anything.”

“Especially not with Dutch whipping him up into a frenzy.” He says, rubbing his chin, pensively. “We got enough folk coming after us, without adding the army to the list.”

Charles hums in charged agreement. Presses a palm into Arthur’s shoulder, then goes to saddle Taima.

Arthur hunches over. Wondering what on earth there is to be done, about any of this. He doesn’t know how to compete with Dutch, and all that he is offering. He sees faint repetitions of himself in Eagle Flies. The same patterns, coming closed in a circle. He sees the reckless agreeability of a young man, that has been entranced by a person like Dutch. An older man that still appears enigmatic and virile. The type that poses himself as a friend, in place of another stifling and outmoded parent. A sympathetic ear, and a proponent of rebellion and excitement. Providing what every young, confused, and angry boy wants - freedom to act like a man, without any of the repercussions.

Arthur knows, because he was just the same. He knows the inner confusion of youth, and the attractiveness of purpose. Then, a son’s doctrine to rebel against nature. To build an identity that is wholly original, and in no way derivative of his father. Rain Falls is nothing like Lyle Morgan. But Arthur can understand the direction of Eagle Flies’ anger - his anguish at being rendered so inert, and powerless. He bears the weight of an entire people on his shoulders, generations both present and past. Countless humiliations and injustices, all that deserve retribution, or at the very least, some type of acknowledgement.

Not so long ago, Arthur would have seen their plight as something to be fought and raged against. He would have seen the Wapiti’s Chief as someone weak and pathetic. His inaction, his indurate pacifism as something to be reviled, even hated. But he knows now, it is not so simple as that. Arthur thinks of the gang’s predicament, and how much worse it has been made for the blood they keep spilling in the name of it. He wonders how many more of them would still be alive, if they had just done like they said, and run, and left it all behind them.

He is coming to see that every act comes with a debt, and there is no knowing when it’ll come due, or even what it is being paid towards. But it is all there, accounted for. Scrupulous as Old Strauss marking tabs in his ledger. And the Wapiti’s situation is far more complex, far more loaded than anything Arthur knows how to manage. Any minute action at all against the military is about the same as flicking matches at a powder keg. Then, there is Dutch, aiming with a stick of dynamite, for the sake of creating more carnage.

Maybe it is already fated. So long as there are people born and in search of themselves, there will always be others waiting, to guide or misguide them. It took him near twenty years to see through Dutch’s bluster, and to take Hosea’s wisdom beyond a simple face value. Arthur reaches his horse, and steps into his saddle. Perhaps there is nothing he can do. But in the same vein, perhaps the smallest act of good can change fate, in the other direction. And Charles is right, if there is the slightest chance of bettering this situation, then they have to try. This much, he knows for certain.

***

They wait along the graveled shore until nightfall. A choice that Arthur doesn’t argue against, he sets himself away for some rest, as best as he can find it. Folding himself away from the others, small and shriveling against the beach’s steep incline.

The late sun peers through the fog, a bleary and petulant eyeball. Bulrush and cattails stand the ground sharp as clusters of arrows. The horses graze, invisible but comforting, from his present angle. His eyelids flutter. His thoughts slow to the dull, hollow clunkings of the staked canoes, knocking into each other. Eyes slitted, Arthur feels more than he sees the vague shape of Charles setting up his station close to him. He hums, conveying a vague sentiment of telling him not to bother - He is fine by himself, honest. Charles ignores him. Austere and implacable, and thoroughly beyond any dissuading. He lights a cigarette, and smokes it. On each exhale, he lofts his chin, and channels the smoke into thin, coiling wisps, above both their heads, where it diffuses.

Arthur makes another, even less intelligible sound. Throaty, bear-like grumblings. The dark odor of tobacco paints his nostrils. A scent made of craving, and home, and nostalgia. His head, and his mind list sideways, and he topples off into unconsciousness.

***

Charles gives him a nudge, and Arthur surfaces with a viscous inhale, from his otherworldly wanderings. Half-blind and disheveled, and his mouth filled with a salty, bitter taste, that he thinks must be blood. It is blue-dark. He frowns at the day’s changing. “What time is it?”

“Nearly midnight.” Charles answers, breath pluming.

“Y’all should’a woke me.” Arthur mumbles, running a slackened hand down his face. Still lost and feeling like he must have missed out on doing something. Ground hitching the horses, testing their canoes for leaks, counting ammunition - something.

He looks about. The fog is so dense, it is like he is still wandering in that never place, dark and uninhabited, just beneath consciousness. To the north, he sees a dim orange halo hovers over the town of Van horn. Gas lamps burning. Not much to be seen beyond that. The lighthouse stands as a sentinel. A smudged stick of charcoal, between them and the town proper. Charles shrugs, and offers out a hand, which Arthur accepts, stiffly. Then, they both make their way to the shoreline.

Eagle Flies, and his brother in arms, Paytah, claim the right side canoe. Pushing off the bank and hopping into their vessel with the ease of deftly slipping a foot into a shoe. The three of them, on the other hand, fare a lot less graceful. Sliding about like oiled sardines, in a can not quite befitting of them. Charles sits the point, Dutch at the rear, and Arthur is appointed as oar man, between them. Not quite sure how he was deemed the best fit for this position, he lifts the oar from under the seatings, and starts dredging it through the water. Either side of their passage, the bay is studded with craggy, black boulders. A crescent around them, the formations rise and collate like small mountain ranges, then dissolve back down into nothing.

Arthur pushes on. Rowing in time with his frail breathing. Solid ground, a memory beyond conjuring. The open water is terrifying. No landmark, no stars, no horizon upon which he can lay his eyes as an anchor. A dark, inverted rendering of an arctic tundra. The moon lies banished up high, somewhere. Eagle Flies and Paytah peel ahead of them. At some point, Dutch starts talking, and he stops listening. So it goes. Arthur stokes the oar, and angles the canoe better towards their quarry.

The steamboat emerges from the blue toned abyss, waiting for them like some malevolent omen. Its holding cabin and bundled masts, the coughing tower shape up like a floating, hodgepodge town in the darkness. A miniature rendition of St. Denis’ skyline. The same forms, compacted within a smaller body. The tribesmen pull alongside the boat’s hull, tide sloshing. Eagle Flies boards first, whilst Paytah rows back to shore. Then the rest of them climb up, in messy tandem. There is a soldier across the decking, leaning over the siding. A lantern at his back casts him dripping orange light, like some waxy figurine.

Charles whispers in his ear, “Try not to kill anyone.”

Arthur nods, and moves forwards. To his left, a paneled wall rises, the stables fashioned for holding the horses. The others seek cover behind some well placed stacks of cargo. While Arthur rounds on the man, crouching and plotting his trajectory. Spring-stepped, he pushes off his heels, and latches on, ferociously. A sloppy squabble, hot, breathy grunting, their conjoined bodies sawing back and forth, while Arthur throttles him. The man bucks hard, and his hands travel like disjointed spiders, clawing up his throat and around the back of his own head, trying to reach Arthur’s. Tightening his hold, Arthur averts his face, lest he get his eyes scratched out. Then, the man slumps over. His unconscious body flops about unpredictably in his arms, like a human shaped water bladder. Panting, Arthur steps aside and allows the weight to slide free, unceremonious.

Then, he grips the siding, knuckles blanched, everything spinning. He motions the others, and they advance past him, silently. Arthur breathes for a while, looks out onto the water. Above his head, he senses faint stirrings. He doubles back, and finds a ladder to the roof of the stables, climbs to investigate. Squatting once more, he sidles by a group of metal housings that carry the smoke stack, idly coughing. Skulking around the corner like some hobble kneed, nocturnal creature. Directly ahead, stands the pilot house, and the captain, just outside of it. Occupied with nothing, slouched over the railings. Arthur closes on him, footfalls swallowed by the tide slopping, the muted hissing and clanks of the boat’s furnace.

He lunges at the man and grapples him. Except this time, his captive twists, and there is a silvery, minnow-like flash, at the edge of Arthur’s vision. Out of instinct, Arthur’s body leaps back, whilst the
man flails, his hand with the knife, slicing about blindly for some scrap of flesh to punish. Beneath them, the remaining soldiers commune over a sluggish game of poker. Bored and complacent, and wholly unawares of the battle waging above them. They rock side to side, in an ungainly two-step, Arthur mincing and dodging, and tiring for his efforts, all too quickly. The man’s face turns a ripe shade of purple, and a spittle leaks from his smacking lips, and still his hand keeps on slashing. Arching his back, he hauls all his weight onto this man’s neck, as though he intends to drag them both down through the floorboards, all the way into hell, while he’s at it. With his off hand, he crosses over the man’s body, and tries to slap the knife free, but he cannot reach it.

Arthur snarls. By this point, he can scarcely see, for the effort of breathing, and in a desperate bid, he kicks out one of the man’s legs, from behind him. It works. The man’s head bumps off the railing with a wet sounding crunch, and the knife clatters off the ledge and sails someplace down below them. Arthur curses. In a futile rush, he chases after it, draping himself off the railing, like a wind blown shirt, and almost losing his hat, in the process. Too late. He watches the blade stand on its tip, making a wobbling, dart-like, thunk in the decking. At the same moment, the men drop their game, and their heads focus on the displacement with a disturbing and synchronized focus.

Arthur scuttles back, dropping himself on hands and knees, and there is a moment of perfunctory silence, before the shooting commences. He curses again, and joins in with the scene, the red muzzle flash of guns, like buckets of paint splashing. Cotton balls of smoke, drifting sideways with the steep breeze off the water. He sees Charles charge one of the remaining soldiers, and he raises his pistol to deal with it. But then the soldier’s head disappears. Plain evaporated by the blast of Charles’ sawn-off. That’s it, that’s the last of them.

Arthur exhales, withheld by an uneasy reverence, and then he holsters his sidearm. There is another ladder around the port side of the pilot house, which he uses to rejoin the others. He heads for the stables, but Dutch turns him around and he is made to deal with the anchor. As if he knows better than anyone else how to work such a torturous looking contraption.

He returns the way he came, forced into a confrontation with the dead men. Three, or four in total. The table is turned over, and their playing cards lay scattered. Tarred in their pooling blood, corners sticking out, bright as feathers. Arthur edges around them, face burrowed in the crook of his elbow. The smell sets a fire in his mind, and he feels that pain again in his mouth, like he is chewing on shivs of metal.

He shakes his head. He tries pushing past it, like leaning into a hard wind, but gradually, and without awareness, he stops walking. His arm drops, and stares at the horror show, like it is an opulent and delectable banquet. A lavish dinner setting, laid with fine silver, and wine goblets, and overburdened candelabras, dripping with hot, scented wax. An open chair, inviting him to partake in the sheer, overindulgent spectacle of it. Arthur tries turning away, but it is like his feet have been nailed to the floorboards, and his arms row, and he totters in place, torso folding over. Warring within himself, both giddy and tormented. In the background, he can hear Dutch’s incensed shouting, but he cannot answer. There is only one calling that reaches him. Only one answer, to the rotten, starving thing inside of him.

Yet, Arthur still cannot provide it.

Some half-consumed portion of his brain denies him. In possession of some private knowledge that by crossing this border, there will be no returning to his former state. But what other way does he have to stop this torture in his head? He almost cries out, in anguish. Instead, he uses his hands, and shears a jagged slit up the sleeve of his jacket. Wrenching the fabric, to expose a pale, marbled block of flesh. He leans in, stoop-necked, scarcely human enough to comprehend what he is doing. His shadow staining the white river of skin, laid out before him.

Then he throws down his head, and bites into it. His features all smashed up, for how tightly he is pressed into the appendage. Twin tracks of blood race down his forearm, and his jaw grinds the meat. Masticating tendon and bone, until his arm no longer feels solid. More a gelatinous gruel, concocted of gritted bones, and sinewy wires. His blood pours faster than he can drink, and his throat jumps like an overclocked piston, trying to keep up with the deluge of it. Some breaks through the seal of his lips, dribbles down his cheeks and chin. He doesn’t care in the slightest. Tears leak from his squinted eyes. The taste is all wrong, but that there is a taste at all, and that he can stomach it, sends his mind pleading for more. He sinks into a steady rhythm, his eyes close, in heady reverence.

Then, Dutch calls, all but shrieking, “Aren’t you dealing with that anchor?”

Arthur chokes. Blood showers from his lips, and he flings away his arm, like it is some foreign assailant, and not something still attached to him.

“Arthur!”

“I got it, Dutch!” He answers out, voice sounding strange, and not his. He scrubs dementedly at his chin, and straightens his posture. He looks about, rattled and shamed, but he is still alone on the deck, just him, and the corpses. He looks down at his forearm, what is left of it. Hanging limp from his elbow, the limb looks more like an oil soaked rag, from his vantage.

Arthur closes his eyes, to stop from looking at it. Then, he makes a woozy turn towards the anchor, and dubiously examines it. A leering contraption, all jagged teeth, and reels, and two chains, each as wide as man’s bicep, running parallel to each other. He pokes around for some kind of lever, some mechanism, but there is nothing even remotely discernable as such, revealed to him.

“Reckon I’ll have to blow it!” He warns the others, rifling painfully through his satchel. Fairly positive that he has at least one stick of dynamite left, after blowing the caves at Beaver Hollow. He locates it, and wedges the explosive into the metal intestines, lights it, and jogs to what he deems a safe enough distance. He stands flattened against the stable wall, tentatively peeking around its corner. All the while, the fuse chomps down to its terminus, and the anchor makes a ruptured groaning sound, as the explosion transforms it. A hot skelter of sparks erupts, and vanishes. Behind him, the horses shriek, and clatter about in their holdings, like there is a devil amidst them.

Arthur's head knocks against the paneled siding, and with a rheumy exhale, he slumps against it. Scarcely a second passes, and then the boat suddenly lurches, like it is alive, and wounded. Bolting forwards like a stuck boar, with no mind but to escape the pain trapped inside of it. His legs scuttle under him, and Arthur clings to the wall, inching himself towards the deck like a blind man, to try and get a sense of the chaos now impending.

He looks up, and inside the pilot house, Dutch stands over a device he can only assume is the throttle. He places his hands on two bronze levers, and angles them forwards. The boat rumbles, picking up a deranged velocity. The prow collides with a hidden swell, and it detonates like a landmine. The boat rears, and a blast of white spume screams past him. Sharp and cold as pins, it leaves his face tingling. Arthur ducks his head, and scrambles for some kind of footing. He raises one hand, and waves frantically, “We seem to be goin’ pretty fast, Dutch!”

“I’m trying!” He snaps. With both hands, Dutch clings to the handles, thrown about like a bull rider, atop the frenzied beast bucking under him. He concedes, and braces for impact, “We’re heading for those rocks, hold on!”

Arthur twists his head around, urgently. Sheets of gray mist whip all around him. But just beyond, he sees a cliff standing out of the fog. A stone giant, staking itself in battle against them. The ship’s bow twitches like a needle, honing its course to near certain oblivion. Arthur curses every curse he knows of. Stranded in the center of the deck, there is nothing for him to hold to. Nothing fixed down has either scuttled off or been shattered beyond recognition. He braces his legs, and flings his hands out in front of him.

For a moment, nothing. Then, a thunderous crash. A spire of foam climbs for heavens. The tortured, metallic screech of the hull, tearing asunder. Arthur’s head snaps, and he is physically rent off the ground, and chucked sideways. His vision snaps to black. But everything else, still working. Just an empty, roaring tunnel. Next he knows it, his back is slamming into something hard, and he bounces off the surface. Landing down on his face, woodenly. He rolls over, and convulses. Making dead, little raspy sounds in his throat. His hands scratch at his chest, like he might open the door to it. He flops back over onto folded elbows and coughs up a spume of fiery liquid. He groans, head hung low between his shoulders. Spits out a clot of something, after which he manages a few little gulps of air, to stay him over. His wounded arm drips fat, red coins of blood. For now, he ignores it. When he is mentally ready, he stands on wobbling legs, and finds Dutch, still perched atop the throttle, like some stricken little bird, feathers all in disorder. His black eyes bulging, vapid and faintly dazzled.

“W-What is wrong with you?” Arthur splutters. Looking up, in the faintest hope of an answer. Dutch blinks at him, then sinks down into some obscured, and quiet corner. Arthur scowls, and stomps across the vaulted and buckled deck, towards the others. “You boys alright back there?”

The boat is already half-sunk underwater. He wades towards the stables, and Charles almost falls into him, reeling from the ship’s titled angle. Arthur shies back, guarding his tattered forearm.

“Yeah, I think so.” The man breathes out, a sort of wild air about him. A nasty gash on his head, but relatively unharmed, apart from it. He slides a quick hand through his hair, and gestures, “But there’s a huge hole in the boat. The horses are spooked, and we’re taking on a lot of water.” He blinks, then seems to come back into himself. “You good?” He glances over Arthur, for something amiss. Not quick enough to find it.

“Sure, not like this ain’t my first shipwreck.” Arthur lowers his head, and strides past him, with an air quick and purposeful. The dark might be his friend, in this instance. But he can’t count on it obscuring the blood all over him, nor his wound, forever. He cannot think to process it. All he knows is that he needs attention off of him. He needs this over with, as soon as possible. “Now c’mon, let's get the horses outta here.” He unlatches one of the gates, by way of example. Charles huffs, but he goes and sees those still latched shut. He and Eagle Flies ferry the horses out onto the open water.

Arthur hangs back, and Dutch emerges. He almost doesn’t stop before leaping overboard, but Arthur forces him. “Well whatever else is wrong with you, you’re quite the best pilot I’ve come across.”

Dutch halts, and turns to him. His face travels a road with no destination. He is silent, just as before, and again, Arthur is left with feeling an anger he has no outlet for.

He scoffs, and they both leap into the water.

Chapter Text

Arthur floats a hand over his bitten arm, like he is some inscribed tablet. A forgotten language, half eroded by time, just faint braille like indentations. The skin healed within days, now almost completely weaved over. He pokes at the flesh, mutely unsettled. Trying and failing to parse some arcane understanding about his transforming condition. What he did that night on the boat - it was deranged behavior, and it scares him that hunger as a vehicle, drove to such a fruitless act of mania.

It’s been near a week since he was bitten. About five days since he’s eaten anything like a meal, proper. Running the numbers, feasibly, how much longer can this last for? Before he plain withers into nothing, or succumbs to some other fate, much darker? Questions that beg answers, to which he is not the holder. He supposes the true question is, how far is he willing to go, in the name of survival? What would he dare to sacrifice? He has been given a key, a way to be freed of his tuberculosis. But in attaining this one salvation, might he also unlock the gates to his own personal damnation, in the process? To drink blood, human blood - perhaps death truly is the answer. Better to die a man, than give up his heart and his soul in becoming a monster.

Arthur buttons down the sleeve, and crawls out of his tent. Lumbering off his hands and knees, dusting off his pant legs. Night, again. It is getting less and less comfortable to travel under the sun’s watchings. But at night, his eyes work clear and unhindered. Adjusted to viewing the world through a different, and more sensitive spectrum. Less shades of color, and more shades of contrast. A cyanotype image, or something similar. He makes a quick survey. A sliver of moon rides the sky, thin as a fingernail. The stars form dense, flakey clusters - absorbing the darkness, like expanding formations of crystals.

To his left, a leery bubbling, followed by a ferocious, misted explosion. Then, a tranquil, pattering rainfall. It’s his first time at the springs, he’s never seen anything like them before. Bleeding rings of color, like irises. Pigments raw, and elemental. Sulfur, and cobalt, and red ochre. Zenobia flicks a solitary ear, but otherwise remains loose, and settled. She looks him over, a plaintive inquisition. She wants to be moving. She wants to feel the ground tear under her hooves, she wants to see new scenes scrolling past her.

Arthur apologizes, “Ah, I’m sorry, girl.” He’s been lingering, he knows it. Haunting about Ambarino, after meeting with Rains Fall, and aiding him with the requisition of the tribe’s sacred artifact. They rode together, and spoke of the state of things. They spoke of Dutch, and Eagle Flies, and this terrible situation they are all combined in. All of them fathers and sons, bound in each other's undoings. That day went and took a lot out of him. Left him with much dwell on. Stirrings of the past that have left him feeling groundless, and unsettled. Dusty recollections. He spoke Issac’s name for the first time in a decade, maybe longer. Might be the last time he says it - before he joins them. His boy and Eliza. Then, they shall die anew, when he, and his memory of them die too. At least, they will be together. A cheerless sort of solace, in that.

Arthur dismantles his camp, and gets briskly moving. He was meant to meet John at Bacchus Bridge two days ago. He mounts Zenobia. His feet swing in his stirrups, and he inhales steeply. The air slices his throat, tannic and frozen. A clean and revitalizing type of discomfort. He huffs, and guides his reins, in turning motion. Then squeezes in his heels, and they set off, towards the old train station.

***

It is past midnight by the time he crosses the river, and scales his way back up the mountain pass, on the right side of the bridge - where John is waiting.

The moon lights the trail, like a silvery, crimped ribbon. No sound but the loose gravel packing under Zenobia’s hooves. A rubbing, crunching sort of texture that he feels close in his ears, for lack of any other sounds to closet it. His eyes drift. The sky is so great and vast above him, it feels like he is floating, almost. Falling off the world, and into that wide, open oblivion.

He is in an odd and various state of emotions. The stresses wrought on his mind and body have him ricocheting in strange directions. There are times that fear seems to rule every part of him. Cold and empty nights. No campfire songs, no rallying laughter, no catty squabbles to stave the darkness back. When the fear of dying burns through him so intensely that he feels it like a claustrophobia in his chest, and he has to sit up and breathe the panic down, and convince himself he is still alive yet. Other times, when the blaze runs itself out. His internal landscape razed to ash, and he is leveled out to a drugged sort of indifference. He is not sure which he feels now, but a trailing sort of dread, he supposes. This plan Dutch has conjured, it will surely mark the end of them.

Zenobia trudges past the boarded station. Stooped and weary in her motions. Not a fulfilling ride for her. The mountain trail is a taxing one, and Arthur wasn’t acting a very attentive rider. He makes his apologies again, strokes her withers, and steers her towards the roadside. A balding patch of green. Specklings of wildflowers. Old tools, and rotten piles of lumber. He notes a hand cart, parked on the tracks, waiting like an omen.

John quits his fussing over the wagon, and calls over, “Get lost on the way, did you?”

Arthur slides off his saddle, and remains silent. Turned from John, he holds to the cantle, and feigns examining a blemish in the leather. Vision spotted with black stars, legs distant, and weak under him. Head rushes are becoming a common occurrence. Less oxygen to reach where it is needed. Figures his constant state of hunger might also have something to do with it. He throws the reins over Zenobia’s head, and ground hitches her. Then steps around to answer, “No.”

“Could’ve fooled me. So we doin’ this now, or waiting ‘till sun up?” He stands pointed, and ready. His impatience is annoying.

“Christ, just…gimme a minute.” Arthur makes it over, and leans heavily against the wagon bed. Fingers curled around the edge, white and bloodless. He pushes his shoulders back, it helps open his chest some. He feels John angling to say something, and he flaps a hand, like a poor magician’s way of distracting him, “So, how are you doing?”

“Nervous.” John answers. He fishes a packet of cigarettes from his coat pocket, and doles them out, one for each of them. Arthur shrugs, and accepts the gesture without protesting. “But I’ve been nervous for a while. Had a lot of time to think in that jail…and I feel like I just don’t know Dutch no more.”

“You ain’t the only one.” Arthur rasps, slipping the cigarette between his lips.

“And this plan to get us out, it just feels…” he pauses, and flits his hands about in uneasy turmoil, as though Dutch might well hear his doubting from here, and come swooping in to correct it. “I don’t know,”—

“Like he’s stringing’ us along?” Arthur interjects, tiredly. “I know.” He leans into the match John has cradled, like a baby bird in both hands. Then, both their heads lift in a synchronized attack of rationality. They straighten, and fling their cigarettes outwards, with neither one making a comment to it. The crate of dynamite sits between them, almost a tinge of disappointment to it, denied its craving for destruction and excitement.

John clears his throat, and loosely gathers his bearings. “I mean killing in cold blood, revenge, we all do bad things, but…he seems to enjoy it now. It’s like he wants to create more enemies - more chaos!”

Arthur shakes his head, a grave sign of agreement. He is relieved to hear some good sense come out of John’s mouth, even as he regrets the circumstances that have clearly borne it. Between Jack’s kidnapping, and his stay in Sisika, it seems the man has uncovered some truer part of himself. But then, fear is an almighty motivator, he supposes. As is the love that conceives such fear, to begin with. Two sides of the same coin, but flipped now, to yield a much different perspective. Instead of driving John away, as it once did, it seems to have drawn him closer to Abigail and Jack - to what truly matters. Well, good then.

He looks John up and down. Fidgeting and incencessed, in a fizzled temper that is singular, and achingly familiar. He thinks of all the times he has talked John down from chasing some panicked, half formed notion without pause to consider the consequence.

“Yeah, I know…I know.” Arthur cajoles, of a sudden mind to defuse the human shaped explosive, stood right in front of him. He twitches his head towards the dynamite, indicating it’s probably time for them to get on with it. John concedes, with a frustrated sound, and they both heave the crate off the wagon. Hunch backed and crab legged, traipsing it over to the hand cart.

“I mean, I love Dutch. He saved me a long time ago.” John says, pulling them along, with his elongated way of striding. Arthur grunts. Boots sliding, uneven footing on the train tracks. Together they make a swing of their arms, and awkwardly lob the explosives onto the hand cart. John dusts his hands, and turns to look at him. An uneasy, guilt-ridden set about his shoulders, a conspirator about to admit to treason. “I feel like in St. Denis, when I got arrested…maybe he could’ve done something.”

Arthur grimaces for a bitter moment, and absorbs those words, for as long as it takes him. Realizes he isn’t all that surprised to hear them. “I think you should take your woman and child, and get lost.” He leans forward, and gestures to John. A frightened and frightening resolve, in what he is saying.

“Do you?” John eyes him, shocked, and yet strangely inscrutable. Hard to tell, in the moonlight.

Arthur licks his lips, and nods vaguely. “You can…you could give somethin’ to Jack.” He says, taking a few tottering steps off of the train tracks. “It’s that or…well, I don’t see no way outta this.”

“What about loyalty?” John presents, like that ought to stop him.

It does. Arthur halts, and twists around sharply. “Be loyal to what matters.”

In the ensuing silence, he looks up at John - his brother, and in his heart of hearts, he knows what he must do now. He sees it, his whole life’s rotten journey, stricken anew with purpose. Every hardship, every loss that he has suffered, shown to have some predestined importance. His mother’s death, his father’s, marking the forward impetus that pushed him towards Dutch and Hosea. The three of them, finding young John, and making the choice to raise him. The passing of years, markings of good and bad. Learning firsthand the foolishness of young love, with Mary. Losing Eliza and Issac, so that he would know that loss, and know he would do anything to spare his brother of the same sorrow. The perpetual forging and dissolution and reforging of his and John’s brotherhood, so that fifteen years later, at the precise time needed, Arthur would be ready to save him.

Now, he sees the choice he has been presented. Sell his soul to keep his body and mind alive, or give everything he is, in sacrifice for John and his family, and whoever else that stands a real chance to live a good life - to get out of this. Maybe this is how it feels to properly believe in something, to see ‘the bigger picture’. He doesn’t know for certain. All he does know is that he is sick of living, and never deciding. Never taking agency in the writing of his own story. Never demonstrating a voice but the one given to him. Well, no more. No more will he let another hand direct him, be it fate, or Dutch, or this devil’s bargain he has been trapped in. Funny that both his first and only real choice in this life would be to choose on dying. Funny how easy a choice that is, for him.

Before his eyes, John falters. Looks him over, like a stranger. He blinks several times, then follows down the verge, after him. “What are you gonna do?”

“I-I’ll be okay. But do it, for me. It would…make me feel good.” He rubs his chin, and admits, in an earnest muddle. “If that makes any sense.”

John frowns, like it doesn’t. “A little, but,”—

“Listen to me,” Arthur urges. “When the time comes, you gotta run, and don’t look back. This is over.”

“And now?”

Arthur huffs, and makes a half-hearted gesture, “Now…we gotta help Dutch give the army one final tweak on its nose.”

“Yeah, come on.” John says, the air turned somber. “Help me with the rest of this.”

They load the last of the dynamite onto the hand cart. Then, peddle the thing out, a decent enough distance. Out in the open, the wind runs high and sharp up the barren void below them, biting his nose and ears, with little remorse for the discomfort of men, clearly. John holds his hat to his head, and jumps off the cart in a fluid motion. Arthur rubs his hands, and shuffles down with a degree more caution. He can feel the bridge stir and jostle under him, like a roped beast slowly working to be free of its holdings. Not a particularly comforting observation.

John takes the lead, and allows Arthur the easier task of roping and lowering the crates, while he sets the charges. For once, Arthur accepts the kindness for what it is, and doesn’t argue it. Instead, he grips the fencing and simply looks over the country, for a minute. Stacked cliffs stand left and right of him. Coloured black in the night, threaded with pale, torn looking scars. The bridge reaches like a set of arms between the stone edifices, as though fording back a pair of quarrelling siblings. Or maybe it is bringing them together, he isn’t too certain. Without turning, he hears the numbing crash of the waterfall behind him. Could almost swear he feels the mist pouring off it, and condensing on him. Through the gorge, the river burns white, like a smelted vein of mercury.

He breathes, and for the first time in a long while, he feels an internal sense of calm about him. A sort of worldly understanding that he can put no words to. Merely an acceptance of how things shall come to be, he supposes. He turns, and John emerges at his side, and together they pump the hand cart back to its original placing. They walk over to the detonator. Stand to look at it a while, then the bridge, then back at the plunger.

“You want the honors?” Finally, John says. Arthur shrugs, and fixes his hands over the boxy instrument, then pushes on it. A stagnant delay, and then a chain of explosions leap across the bridge’s midsection. Churning balls of lava that scald his eyes, hot and red as miniature suns in the darkness. Then, a cacophony of clattering. Dirty gray clouds dispersing. In the clearing dust, the bridge folds like some child’s matchstick construction.

Arthur steps back and adjusts his hat, a sort of sealing gesture. “Well, I guess old Dutch got all the smoke he wants.”

“Well, let’s hope so.” John moves on, and Arthur follows him.

They talk some more, Arthur escorts John back to the wagon. Watches him rattle away, into the blue nothing. Some strange sense about things, a change in the wind, maybe. He looks away. He feels a squeezing ache in his chest, and in preparation, he drags himself over to an old barrel, to sit upon. He coughs into his hand, looks down and feels a deep weariness set upon him. He swipes the bloodied palm down his jacket, and sits there, thinking.

Chapter Text

Arthur squats on his heels, and washes his face and chin in the river. Big cupped handfuls of water, spilling pink and cloudy between his fingers. He rinses his mouth, and spits, two times. Then, wipes his chin of any clinging viscera.

The dead doe lays several feet from him, her slender neck like a ruptured hose, vile and twisted and leaking a black, sluggish substance. Her head is mostly unscrewed from her body, but she doesn’t bleed, for there is no blood left within her. Otherwise, in appearance, she is quite normal. Her leather nose, still wet, and the smooth, brown grain of her fur, laying flat and without interruption. He looks into her eyes, like polished balls of onyx, containing the whole world inside them. He spits in the water. What a waste of life, he thinks. But she is not the first, in an ever mounting crusade to keep his body functioning, a little while longer.

It was riding back from the bridge job when his hunger decided again to try and hijack him. There had been another lone rider passing on the trail. An old, wiry feller with a gumpy straw hat squashed so firmly on his head, it gave the impression of a cork, thumbed down the neck of a bottle. The old man hawked out a mistrustful greeting, which Arthur returned in the shape of a wan grimace. Their horses slowed, abreast of one another. The man passed, and then before his mind knew it, Arthur halted his horse with an abrupt motion. Furious pains, gripping his stomach. He sat, keeled over his saddle horn, whining, and jolting with seizure like tremors.

He closed his eyes, and mumbled some internal mantra. Maybe it was a prayer, although if it was, no-one listened. His hunger laughed at him. Took him like a hand around the back of his neck, and kept stuck to him. It steered him like a puppet, and he steered his reins under its direction, and Zenobia was steered by his hand, and he faced around and followed the man, keeping pace with a patient alertness. The same as it was, in the caves at Beaver Hollow. He had no power over himself, like he was the background inhabitant of a dream that did not belong to him. All the while, the rider kept riding, and Arthur kept riding with him. The smell of his blood and meat carried back, like an encouraging whisper. Beneath him, Zenobia tensed and shuffled, but he drove her on, without a thought to her cautioning.

Then, he heard the spectral calls of wolves, followed by a blurring of shapes, yipping and dancing around the man’s horse, while the poor beast stamped and kicked out its hind legs in terror. The old man made no sound, just flapped about like a loose rag caught to his saddle. Two of the wolves bullied and pestered the horse on its flankings until it grew sweated and tired. All whilst the third lunged and nipped at its forelegs, and finally it managed to catch one and started janking on it like a chain, and the old man’s horse folded over with a whinnying shriek - at which point it was over. Arthur watched as the rider came ripped off his saddle, making a shortened cry, which at last got him moving.

Stupid with panic, he swung his legs over, dismounting while Zenobia turned and fled for a copse of trees, behind him. He sprinted, wheezing and coughing, with his sawn off unholstered. Shot two of the wolves dead before they caught wind of him, but the last one had about time to wheel around, while he was stuck reloading. It met him, with its tail held aloft, and its head fixed low on its jacked shoulders. Its ears stood pointed like horns. Its yellow eyes like captured flames, and its hot, rank breath bellowing from its unlatched jaws, like smoke from a furnace. They each stood, beholden in the other's presence. Then the wolf jumped, and landed on him like an enraged, fanged carpet.

They both fell, and the wolf stood on top of him, and dipped its head, troughing at his stomach. He fought his damndest against it, but the creature’s muscles and bones slid about under the loose casing of its skin, making it impossible to keep a grip on it. Desperate, he pushed his palms into its forehead, but the wolf kept driving for him. Teeth clacking like a pair of deranged castanets, and its skin pulled back off its skull, eyes bulging and whited. Arthur’s terror was everything. His arms shuddered, and boughed like saplings, and he closed his eyes in preparation of what he thought was the inevitable.

Then, something changed in him. The hunger barreled out of the darkness, and it took his body for its own devices - to rescue itself, above everything. He roared, and twisted, and in some monumental effort managed to duck under the wolf’s carriage - its chasing jaws, swinging with fat, gobby strings of spittle. Then he got both feet together, and he kicked it hard in the ribs, and the wolf tumbled, then righted itself in an intense scrabble. It turned to leap at him again, but this time Arthur dived at it, and pinned it down by the thick rim of fur, collaring its neck. One hand placed at the base of its skull, the other just above its shoulder. The animal made an indignant yelp, and Arthur snarled, and breathed hard, in rejoinder. The wolf went stiff as a log, and desperately panted. Breath venting in big puffs from its cheeks, its ribcage shuddering. Arthur looked down on it, empty and impartial. Watched its ears retreat into its head, its single eye darting, in semi calculated panic. Even animals know death, when it looks at them.

With both hands, he stretched out the beast’s vertebrae like rolling out a table setting, for dinner. The wolf squirmed a little, its paws making faint tracings, and it let out an upsetting, dog-like whimper. None of it mattered. Arthur leant down and he parted the wolf’s guardhair, and its soft down undercoat, like parting a thicket of reeds, to pass through it. Even then, it was impossible to fasten his jaws to the beast's neck, like trying to latch onto a tree trunk. So, he used his teeth to open up a plug sized hole, which he then used to drink from.

He has killed many more animals since then.

None quite so brutal as that first one, but it is turning into quite a mounting collection. Enough to make him question, how much value does one life hold when weighed against another? Human or animal, does it matter? Does the fullness and potential of a single soul mean any less for the body it inhabits? Some part of him doesn’t think so. Perhaps he is a fool to question at all. To feel so guilt ridden over these ‘lesser’ lives that most men would not lose a wink of sleep over. But the exchange doesn’t feel fair, or equal. A good kill could sustain the gang for close to a week, if they were careful. He has been feeding once, sometimes twice in a night, just to feel normal.

So it seems with most things, there is a price for easy solutions to difficult problems. This method of survival - it is like trying to live off a diet of water. It might keep him alive a little while longer, but it won’t stop him from eventually succumbing to starvation, and it won’t stop the consumption. It hasn’t stopped. He is getting worse with each day, and he knows by some internal scripture that only human blood will save him. Just as he knows by curing this respiratory ailment, he will only be trading it for another. Walk this path, and he will become more than this half-transitioned creature, and he will never return to any other state that came before. He won’t be human. It will be irreversible.

He looks out over the river. Faint, ghostly shapings. Reflections of dawn’s first light, like a network of pale eels, sluicing atop of the water. He stands, but doesn’t know what direction to walk in. He sees it again, this fork in the road. Stag and wolf. Good and evil. These devils are at war inside him, and he has no choice but to choose one or the other. The vampirism would heal him. It would give him a second go at existence. But what good is more time, without hope of living it any different? Without hope of growing, and becoming any better? Forever thirty six. Forever outlawed. Forever a killer. The TB is far simpler. It promises him the virtue of death. It promises him redemption.

He looks about for Zenobia. The doe’s dead smell already turns his stomach. Arthur turns, and leaves her for the scavengers. No point returning to camp with her. Aside from attempting to explain her unlikely demise, there is no more Pearson to butcher her. The camp cook left sometime yesterday, he can’t quite say when. The man’s absence passed unnoticed until supper time, when it became apparent there was no supper going to be had. He feels ashamed it took so long as that. Pearson had been with them just about as long as anyone, and looking back, Arthur can’t say he knew anything personal of the man, besides his navy tenure, and the contents of that one letter Mrs. Adler gleefully recounted, quite some weeks ago now. He supposes Miss Grimshaw might take up the mantle, as required of her. In another life he might’ve proclaimed some amusement at the sight of her weilding a soup ladle instead of a shotgun. But after watching Molly’s wretched end, the notion doesn’t settle right, inside of him. He should go back and check their state of provisions. Disregarding his own dietary restrictions, the other gang members still need to eat, what few is left of them.

Arthur finds his horse, drinking, some yards off, down the river. He walks up, and mounts her without preamble. He doesn’t know where this day will lead him, but it is time that he faces it, regardless.

Chapter Text

Arthur returns to camp, out of a sense of dire and reluctant obligation. Whilst also nursing the faintest of hopes that he might sleep a short while. Give the sun some time to run its course towards an alignment more palatable. The camp looks empty upon arrival. But he knows folks are about, just hiding like mice in their burrows. He understands. There is a sense of fear in the air that never quite passes at Beaver Hollow.

He walks past the main fire, and he notices forlorn and skittish looking Trelawney, seated at the table. Alone, but for the battered suitcase that cowers at his ankles. So it goes. Arthur sighs, and makes his way over. They talk. Mostly, Trelwaney blathers, while somehow managing to say even less than usual. But the sentiment comes out clear enough, and Arthur knows he feels the same. All else said and done, he is going to miss the odd and exuberant magician. They say they’re goodbyes, and Arthur watches him go. Glad to see it happen, but feeling a consummate regret, or maybe it is just failure.

If only he had done better to protect those that mattered. If he had recognised what mattered to him sooner, then maybe this all could have gone different. He coughs hard, and he gingerly stretches his legs out, and rests his elbow on the table. No strength in him at all, he just sits there and wavers. He inhales and he coughs again. Coughs until his body decides it is done. Not a moment sooner.

“Found a friend looking for you.”

A voice he knows in an instant. A voice that stops his heart, for his need to hear it, and his dismay that the owner of this voice should appear now. When he is of no mind to be witnessed, by anyone at all, least of all him. Arthur raises his head. He watches Charles walk towards him, while a second figure dismounts his horse, and tethers it.

“Mr. Morgan,” Rains Fall comes closer, and Arthur stands up at his arrival, because it feels proper to do so.

“Sir.” He greets, with a flimsy smile. Still hovering over his seat, while one hand remains, tied cautiously to the table.

Rains Fall stands before him, and makes no comment. Poised and gentle and patient. He wears a wide brimmed hat, with a neat, understated feather nested into the band. Threads of mauve and emerald and deep navy woven together. A raven feather, Arthur is quite certain. He wears an austere looking frock coat that cuts his figure so straight and rigid that he almost looks like a pallbearer, awaiting a funeral. In a manner evoking his name - the man’s hair falls down his shoulders like sheets of water, slate coloured. A foolish part of him wonders about that. Whether fate designed it so Rains Fall would grow into this name, as he got older.

“How are you?” Rains Fall asks, and his voice crackles and fluctuates like muffled thunder.

“A little better,” Arthur lies to him, slow, and careful.

“I hope so.”

A deep pause shared between them, in which Arthur clears his throat, and frowns at the table. “So uh…how can I help you?”

“I am very sorry to impose on you again…but I believe I’ve made progress brokering peace.”

“You have?” Arthur tips his head, and his eyes flick like darts towards Charles, honed and incredulous. Charles shakes his head, as though warning him against it.

“I believe so.” Unaffected, and earnest, Rains Fall continues. “Colonel Favors has agreed to a meeting to discuss, and maybe resolve his alleged grievances and mine.” Arthur blows out his cheeks, and stoops down to find his seat again. Lands with a firm grunt of exertion. “Now, he has lied to me more times than I care to remember. But maybe this time…he must want peace. Why could he possibly want to humiliate us further.”

Rains Fall looks at him. A genuine loss in his expression, and Arthur doesn’t know what to say, to make it better. To heal the wounds this man and his people have endlessly, and needlessly suffered. He presses his lips together. Pushes off his knees, and darkly mutters, “We’ve got words for his kind, but they’re colloquial.”

“Perhaps, I could make one last request. My men are not allowed to carry arms,”—

“You want me to keep the peace?” Arthur finishes, already regretting his answer.

Rains Fall nods, a faint relief in the loosening set of his shoulders. “It’ll be a lot of dull talk, and ceremony. But, I feel with some non tribe members present, their chances of lying or worse will be reduced.”

Arthur makes a face, and Charles, knowing him, knows what it means, and he intervenes in an astute manner, “Will you, Arthur?”

Arthur fights a battle inside himself. Incapable to answer. In helping Rains Fall, his actions thus far have been contained in the shadows. By stepping into the light, and attaching his likeness to the tribe’s cause might he become more of a detriment to them? His face is known by all types of government officials, who is to say the army doesn't know of him, or his association with the notorious Dutch van der Linde? Instead of keeping the peace, what if his presence instigates some flash of reactive mayhem? Does he want that blood on his hands? Does he want to be held responsible?

Arthur doesn’t know what is best anymore. He hates to be so cynical, but he is convinced that no action will pacify this Colonel Favors - other than seeing the tribe’s thorough and exhaustive extermination. He shakes his head. He hates himself, more than ever. “It ain’t my business, brother.”

Charles looks at him, and maybe there would be anger there, if it wasn’t for the pleading, in Arthur’s expression. “No, I know.” He crossed his arms, stern and sober. “But it is mine.”

Arthur turns his head, and squirms under the cranking pressure. Silence, whilst his companions still wait for him to answer. What is wrong with him? Why can’t he say yes? Why can’t he just be good, and kind without undergoing some mental form of torture? He knows he is wrong, that he is acting a terrible fool for thinking he might turn the Wapiti chief down, for even a moment.

Arthur looks between the two men, and he looks down again. It feels like his head might fracture, with all the parts of him arguing amongst each other. He breathes out. Fidgety, and overwhelmed, like a caged animal. There is too much to think of, too many pieces cluttering the chess board, that none of them can move in any direction. He has the gang, he has the women, and John, and his family to think of. Then, what of himself? What of his situation? His body is not his own. It fights him around every corner. What if he were to collapse? What if the hunger were to come out, and steal him again? What then? And what if this is all just some elaborate excuse for him to give in to his feeble nature? To relinquish culpability, because he is too weak willed to fight for what is right, when it matters?

Maybe, that is it. Maybe the deepest, truest part of him is the part that is a coward. The part that only wants to give up. The sad, lonely man that wants to set down the cares he carries on his back, and instead, to be cared for. That wants to be told he has done enough in this life, that he is allowed to stop, so he can spend his last weeks, days, on this earth in a way that is gentle, and restful.

He is so tired. The pain in his chest is inescapable. The hunger, unassailable. He begs, “Charles, I got,”—

“I’ve saved your life.” Charles cuts in, looking at him for a long, terrible moment. As though weighing the virtue of his soul. Some hidden hope, some deep expectation. “Do it for me.” He says.

Arthur closes his eyes. Nursing a sorrow in his heart that is his to keep to himself. Well, that’s that then. “Sure…come on.” He shamefully mumbles. Charles starts for the horses, and Arthur follows. “You owe this man,” he turns to Rains Fall, “You should have him do your negotiations.”

Charles makes a dismissive sound. Strained, cracked humor. “Let’s go.”

***

This meeting with Colonel Favors goes about as favorably as can be expected, which is to say not favorably at all. The ‘negotiation’, if it could even be called that, was a flagrant and undecorated insult, from start to finish. Whilst all he could do was stand and bear witness to such an inflated display of impotency. Never before has Arthur felt such rabid contempt towards a single human being, and all that he has done, and all that he stands for. His mind set blazing with such violent, abhorrent imaginings of Favors demise, and unable to act on a single one of them.

If it had been Dutch sat at the table, instead of Rains Falls, no doubt Colonel Favors would have ate a bullet for his insolence, no different than Cornwall. Yet, Rains Falls did not retaliate. He simply got up, and left the table. And in that same turn, Arthur truly began to comprehend the strength it takes to deny such anger, its self righteous passage. To disengage with an impossible situation, as opposed to beating it into the ground, like he once did, with Thomas Downes, and so many others. Of course, blood was still paid out. Since it’s the only currency any of them seem to talk in, anymore. This wretched conflict in which there is only one participant, only one player. For the military hold and the cards, and they know the dealer, and they know in which way the deck has been favored, in which order the future will unfold. It was only by dumb luck that Arthur got a peak at the army’s hand. The Colonel’s so-called ace in the hole - one Captain Monroe.

Perhaps he is a fool, but he couldn’t let it play out. He couldn’t let a good man be used like that - made to take the fall. Perhaps he sees some similarity in their situations, compelled to the service of leaders that do not care for what is good or right, unless it serves their ego. So, he and Charles fought their way out, and now they send the Captain off at Flatneck Station, with a handshake, a billfold, and a mutual sense of things lost, or summarily unfinished. They all know Monroe was the tribe’s best shot at a clean way out of the mess they’ve been trapped in. Now, well…Arthur supposes it’s up to him and Charles, to finish with what the good captain started.

They watch him board the train, he and Charles. The air feels like gunpowder, and neither of them bear any intent on disturbing it. Whilst it was a good thing they saved him, it doesn’t feel like it, just now. They both know the cost, and they both know it will be the Wapiti to pay for it. Charles shakes his head, and looks at Arthur, lost and tired in a way that hurts to behold. He gives Arthur a light touch on the back, “Meet you back at camp.” He says, and steps off the platform, and makes his departure.

Arthur nods, but that is all. He waits for Charles to disappear around the building corner, then he lets go of the cough that he was holding on to. He thumps his chest, and he steps forwards, his legs carrying him, like water. Then, he hears a voice call, “Mr. Morgan!” He stops to look around, and a familiar monochrome figure appears to him. Sister Calderón. She smiles at him, and waves him down, encouragingly. “Are you ok?”

Arthur blinks, and tries to get a hold of himself. His eyes water, but he holds his breath to stop coughing, and he waves back at her. “Never better,” He says, and manages to make it over, fumbling and scuffling, like a geriatric old man cradled into himself. He cannot carry himself straight. His body curls around the pain, like he has been stuck with several knives, and his rib cage has been styled into a rack, for keeping hold of them. He motions, and cranes his neck to look at her. “So…what are you doing here?”

“Well, I’m on my way down to Mexico. They’re finally sending me on a mission.” She explains, and she smiles, with a touch of something ludicrous, but also genuine, in her excitement as well. “Brother Dorkins is very jealous.”

Arthur nods along, murky with pain and just about treading water. He opens his mouth to laugh, except that he folds, and he starts coughing, over and over. Like a drowning man, his hands hold out, blind and clambering for something to steady him. The Sister provides herself without pause, and she guides him like a stubborn little tugboat, towards one of the benches.

Arthur hunches over the headboard. His spine arched like a heaving cat, while he awkwardly tries to keep it away from her. One hand held palm flat, like a cage door over his mouth. The Sister stands behind him and keeps both her hands astride his shoulders. She pats and rubs his back, unflinching in her care, like a mother. Then, with her guidance, he sets himself down on the seat. Exhausted and veering wildly to one side, like a ratty old scarecrow.

They sit a while, and she waits anxiously for him to recover himself. Then, she asks, “What’s wrong?”

Arthur frowns, all while considering what to tell her. He clutches his bloodied palm to his knee, and for once, lets go of all pretense, and tells her, “I’m uh…I’m dying, sister.”

“…Okay,” she answers, cautious and doubtful.

Arthur swipes at his chin, and his hand drifts down, while he lets those words sink in. It’s the first time he’s told anyone. Perhaps she recognises this, for she allows him his moment of silence - jointly contemplates it, like they are twinned in some sort of mourning passage.

But then he can feel her focus on him, the pale cowl that holds her face, glowing bright as the frame around a photograph, in the corner of his vision. “Yeah, I got TB.” He adjusts himself in his seat, as though that might ease the burden, both physical and metaphorical. “I got it…beating a man to death, for a few bucks.” He glances over, then shakes his head. He can’t even look at her. “I’ve lived a bad life, Sister.” He finally says, as though that about makes the sum of it clear - that he deserves this.

Arthur feels her bunch in closer, “We’ve all lived bad lives, Mr. Morgan. We all sin.” And for a moment, she, too, looks away from him. Her expression obscured under a great avalanche of feeling. A deep compassion and sadness for his circumstance - for how the world is, for how men have made it, and how they are born into such suffering, to begin with. Then, she bestows her hand upon his arm, and lightly shakes him. “…But I know you.”

Arthur waves her off, blithely, “You don’t know me,”

At which she hums to herself, puzzling him over. Then her eyes alight, and she sits up, like a little revelation has popped off inside her, “Forgive me, but…that’s the problem. You don’t know you!”

For a confused and processing moment Arthur forgets everything else, and he tips his head at her, “What you mean?”

“I don’t know…” she pauses, and pans about for the words she needs to express herself, “But whenever we happen to meet, you’re always helping people, and smiling.”

Arthur huffs, and he doesn’t know if he feels proud or embarrassed that this is her defining observation of him. It makes him happy…he thinks. But it doesn’t feel right, and his mind won’t rest until he corrects her - until he bares all those black corners of his soul. Or at least, most of them.

“I had a son…he passed away. I had a girl who loved me, I threw that away.” He pauses, thinking his life over. “My momma died when I was a kid, and my daddy…well, I watched him die, and it weren’t soon enough.” He presses his lips together, over that last bitter rumination.

“My husband died a long time ago.” She answers, unexpectedly. There is a sadness in her words, but a distant one at that. A truth softened by time, made into a story. “Life is full of pain, but there is also love, and beauty.”

Arthur sighs. He wants so hard to agree with her. But how can he, when his life has not shown him much love, or beauty, to believe in? He raises his hands, in a lost gesture, “What am I going to do now?”

“Be grateful that for the first time, you see your life clearly.” She says, plainly.

“…Sure.” He mumbles. She only knows the half of it. If only it was so clear. But he doesn’t know when, or how he will lose control again, and he doesn’t know who will be caught in the crosshairs. Maybe he should just consider an early exit, and be done with all this internal conflict.

“Perhaps you could help somebody? Helping makes you really happy.” She tries again, peering into him, as she does, like some type of oracle.

“But…I still don’t believe in nothing.” Arthur closes his eyes. Everything hurting.

“Often, neither do I.” The Sister answers. “But then I meet someone like you, and everything makes sense.”

Arthur reddens. Her esteem in him is an uncomfortable thing, and he shakes it off with a crackling, congested bout of laughter, “You’re too smart for me, Sister.” His laughter wanes, as does his color. “I guess I…I’m afraid.” He says, broken and sobre. A hollow feeling, like silence, but inside of him. The reality of what he is facing. His feeble heart crumples, for realizing just how poorly prepared he is, and for baring this fear, in front of another.

Arthur turns his head and he finally, properly looks at the Sister. Her soft crêped cheeks, the color of dark, tanned leather. Her eyes sewn into the soft fabric, like dark, polished buttons. He sees her face as a story written. Each mark telling of some piece to her history, her character. Her joy, her sorrow, her knack for people, her humor. All that deserves some kind of reverence - a testament to living, and surviving long enough to see things for how they are, and coming to some sort of acceptance. Good and bad - the mess of the world, and somehow charting a course through it. She is a woman that knows herself, and he sees in her the same planted stoicism that he sees in Rains Falls - that he would sometimes see in Hosea. The type of self assertion that comes with age, that comes with a whole lifetime learning to get along with oneself.

Before the prospect of dying, he never thought of old age as a milestone he ought to consider attaining. More of a nuisance than an accomplishment - an enduring and pointless torture. But now he only wishes he had more time on this earth to find some deeper familiarity with himself. To reach some definitive conclusion about his life’s story, without being rushed to. The Sister is right - he doesn’t know himself. Or rather, he doesn’t know all of himself. He knows his anger, his grief, and his hatred plenty well enough. But what of his potential for kindness? His love of the world, in all its strangeness? His slim hope to be loved? His belief in love, as a savior?

Who could he have been, if he never beat Thomas Downes? If he never got bit by that vampire? If he had never been molded into a certain shape by Dutch and Hosea? Does it matter? Either way it goes - dying, or becoming a fully fledged monster - aging is a rite of passage that will forever be denied to him. He will be frozen in darkness eternal, one way or another.

“There is nothing to be afraid of Mr. Morgan. Take a gamble that love exists.” Calderón tells him, snatching him out of his stupor, and the train whistle blows, and the conductor makes his final calls, and that is their conversation over. Arthur stands with the Sister, taking up her luggage, to carry for her.

“I shall try.” He assures her, and they walk hand in hand, to the train carriage.

“I know you will.” She answers. She steps up and takes back her luggage. She squeezes his hand, imbuing it, then releases it. He stands back. The train makes an offloading hiss, and then a slow metal hammering as it picks up momentum, departing the station. “Goodbye! Goodbye, Mr. Morgan!” She waves and smiles, and he can’t help but smile, in the face of her enthusiasm. He makes a shy little salute, and watches the train until it is no longer a train, but a wobbling apparition, and then it is nothing.

For a while, Arthur just stands there, alone in his thoughts, and not sure what to make of them. The station is all but voided. Only the clerk, obtusely minding his business, and the old, broody codger that seems locked into a perpetual, and solitary game of dominos, everytime Arthur passes through Flatneck Station. A low, cool wind passes by him. Brushing up a coiling, sandy dust across the wooden platform. He turns his head north, towards the vague direction of Beaver Hollow.

Take a gamble that love exists.

Before all this, he would’ve considered it an impossible wager, for he has only ever lost at love, in all his life of putting it on the table. But maybe, he is simply looking at it wrong. Maybe, it takes a life being denied of love, to know love’s true value, when it is presented. Maybe it takes great pain to understand the importance of kindness. There is beauty to be found in this world, and once it becomes revealed, it is impossible to stop finding it. Looking inward, to see it reflected outward, or something of that measure.

He sees it everywhere.

He sees it in Abigail, and her love for Jack. He sees it in John and his determination to make amends for what is past. He sees it in Charles and his selfless determination towards the Wapiti, and their predicament. If it weren’t for dying, would he ever have come around to realizing this? Or would he have continued down the same murderous path until he got caught, or likely murdered in a befitting manner, as a consequence? Just another accomplice in the world’s suffering, for as long as the world continued to make him suffer it.

Arthur hesitates to think it, but maybe all of this warrants some kind of purpose. God, or some other kind of divine providence. Maybe fate made this his path to walk because it was the only one that would lead him towards finding himself? The memorial version of himself that will remain, at the point of his journey’s terminus. He knows how he wants to be remembered, and he knows what he needs to do, to get there. Help as he can, and leave all the rest. Forget Dutch, and Micah. Absolve the remaining debtors. Help Charles and the Wapiti. Get John out. Whatever the cost, do that, if only that, and maybe it all will have been worth it.

Whatever happens, whatever he…becomes by the end, he will keep fighting as long as he is able, and he will keep fighting for love, no matter what fate decides for him.

Chapter Text

Went with Charles to save Eagle Flies.

Might be the last time that just me and him ride together. Seems like things are finally closing in. Let slip that I was sick. Not sure why I told him, or if I feel better or worse for having him know. But it’s done now, I suppose. He told me it was a gift to know, and have time yet to decide how folks will remember me.

The man has an interesting way of looking at things. Seeing the good in me, the good in a bad situation.

Got me thinking.

I ain’t about to seek no glory nor vengeance for the mess I have made of things. I’ll save that for Dutch, and those that are still blind to follow him. But Charles is one of the few folks that I hope looks back on the times we had, and thinks of me kindly. I reckon that would be enough for me, it’ll have to be. I think that…he means a lot to me. Maybe in another life, we could’ve had something. Not that it matters. No time to dwell on could have beens.

They was going to hang him, Eagle Flies, I think. Rescued him out from Fort Wallace in a storm.

I don’t feel so good. I see clearly and I see nothing at all. Whole place has gone to hell. Dutch talking nonsense, and folk undecided as to if they see him as the only hope, or an anchor dragging us all to the bottom of the ocean.

***

Arthur puts aside his journal. It has been a long few days since his conversation with the Sister. But he thinks he is managing a little better, in his personal struggles. The hunger still exists in him, moping about like some spoiled and denied creature. A glum and subjugated old mutt, that Arthur will not be made a fool for. Everytime it comes hopefully slinking over, he banishes it, to some murky corner.

It is tired and weak of fighting, as they both are. But it is not done yet. Arthur can sense the creature’s dull eyes watching him, backed with simmering hate, and waiting to turn on him.

He just has to be careful.

He stands on stilted legs and sets into motion. He passes the dreary campfire. Ahead, Bill and Javier sit at the table. Necks sunk into their collars, like vultures. Javier sticks his knife in the wood, and levers small notches out of the surface with a studious petulance. In lieu of greeting, he pauses while Arthur passes by them. A cold air descends. His silence speaks volumes.

“Javier, Bill.” Arthur nods to each of them. Bill ignores him. He takes a sup from the bottle he is holding. He swills it in his mouth and then spits it out, making clear that something, or someone has offended him. Javier snorts, and his eyes flick up, contemptuous, and catlike in their determinations.

Arthur’s jaw tightens. His heart crawls into his throat, but he won’t be cowed by either of them. He holds his back tall, and keeps moving to his destination. Behind him, a shuddering thunk, as Javier stands his knife in the table. He exhales, and his eyes take in the tableau before him. The openings to Dutch’s tent, like wings, pinioned. Seated inside, Dutch drapes himself in postured repose, like some greetian statue. Micah, stands at his side, like some loyal and pandering consort, at the foot of their king’s table. Lower still on the chain of things, sits Micah’s friends, or posse, or whatever he would call them.

Both, equally unpleasant. One pale, and pinkish in his colorings. Gaunt, and pinch faced, like some naked mole rat, that habitually dwells in darkness. The other holds a misshapen, and blunted profile - mallet like, in its crudeness. His hair drips down his face, and he carries a half obscured tattoo across his chest. Blueish and smeary, from this distance,
like inky dabbings that might be gleaned upon some cave wall. Years old, and mostly indiscernible.

“So why are these two still here?” Arthur settles a hand over his gun belt, and gestures between the two intruders.

“Old pals of Micah’s.” Dutch commends, like they are quite clearly men of honor.

“They’re gettin’ real comfortable.”

Micah tips his head, viper-like, in his machinations. “We need guns for what’s coming.” He drawls, dark and languid, like some creeping poison. “Cleet and Joe know how to fight, it’s lucky I bumped into ‘em.”

Arthur turns to Dutch, and searches his face like he is trying to assemble a mismatched puzzle. “What’s going on, Dutch. What’s happening to us?” He accuses, “What’s happening to you?”

“You show him some respect.” Micah bullies into his space, jowly, and dogged.

“Excuse me?”

“Mr. Van der Linde! Mr. Morgan! Charles!” Eagle Flies interrupts them.

Arthur twists in place, and the young prince arrives with a crop of young men. Many bare chested, garbed in dyed sashes, and painted markings. “They tried to kill my people for oil. For oil!” He rides in a tight circle. Whipping up his men, whipping up Dutch into a frenzy. “Today we ride once more. Ride with me, ride with us. Ride with us, against the factory!”

“I love your courage, son. It’s a thing of great beauty.” Dutch strolls along, his arms open and inviting. Arthur files behind with the rest of the gang, all in varying states of unease and curiosity.

“Stop! Everyone stop!” Another voice cuts into the fray, and Rains Fall emerges from the sidelines. He holds one hand high, like some warding incantation. “My son, my last son…don’t.” He dismounts, and hobbles towards the grouping.

From his standing, Dutch crosses his arms. His head reared back, and calculating. Arthur holds himself, an awful and inevitable sense of disaster, dawning upon him. While Rains Fall continues speaking, “When I was your age, I fought. I saw death, I have killed. The men I knew were slain. My first born, your brother, had his head smashed by a drunken soldier. My wife had her throat slit,”

Atop his mount, Eagle Flies writhes with restless fury. Listening to his father, without care, or attention. A forced prisoner, simply waiting for his sentence to be over. Still, Rains Fall tries to reach some inner depths to him. He keeps on trying to peel back his son’s layers of indifference, and Arthur’s heart breaks for him.

“We made peace. I knew not to trust, yet I had no choice. Maybe you were right…maybe the slow death is worse than a fast one. Maybe, none of these men are good. Maybe a world in which they came to us, is a world that we cannot endure. But endure, we must.”

“Father, you are tired.” Eagle Flies disregards him.

“Do not die for pride, my son. We have suffered too much in this trick!” Rains Fall lofts his fist, in a show of raw, and cutting emotion. Arthur lowers his head, shame-ridden, and his eyes find Charles, for a fleeting second. “The earth, the water, they have no pride. They endure, and we must endure. My only boy…my precious boy…do not mistake my strength for weakness. As your chief, I implore you,”—

“Your words mean nothing to me, father.” Eagle Flies snarls, and postures in front of his riders.

“Don’t,”—

“Ride with me! Now!” Eagle Flies rears his horse, and his followers join with him, a stamping river of motion, with Rains Fall, engulfed in its center.

Arthur steps forward. Nervous to get ahead of Dutch, and his apparent designs for mayhem.

“Please…Mr. Morgan. After you helped me, after we spoke,” Rains Fall wobbles towards him. “This is just a trap. My son, my people, will all die.”

Arthur nods, and looks down the verge, in rumination. Churned into a peaked, boggy sludge. Small disks of water, about the size and the shape of saucers, filling the myriad hoof prints left by so many riders.

“You helped this feller, Arthur?” Dutch leans over, picking at him, like a vulture.

“Please,”—

“What of it?” Arthur bristles.

“What else you been doing behind Dutch’s back?” Micah waddles in, leering and spiteful. Dutch regards him, uncomprehending, and with a faint quality of revulsion.

“What?” Arthur looks between the two of them, and almost laughs, out of sheer, unbridled frustration.

“The wars are over, we have lost. These young men will be annihilated. Please,” Rains Fall skirts around their idle bickering, and moves their conversation.

“I’ll see what I can do.” Arthur breathes, and recenters his emotions. He calls out, with no pause for hesitation. “Charles? Who else will come with me?”

“Oh…I’ll ride, Arthur. Who knows what other secrets I’ll learn about.” Dutch spreads his arms and makes a slow, gratuitous little revolution, “Who else?”

“I will.” Sadie answers. Then John, followed by the others.

***

They reach the fields. All of them lined up together, and yet all of them, divided in their motivations.

It is utter carnage.

The derrick turned into a roaring column of fire. Coughing up a dark, oily funnel of smoke, and starry embers. The air flares and ripples, like torn paper. He spies Eagle Flies through his binoculars, and he makes his position clear - saving the boy is all that matters to him. Dutch makes some trite comment, and peels off, towards the factory building. Arthur watches him. Then he addresses those few that still remain with him.

“Go with Dutch, try and help there,” he clears his throat, sharply. “…I’m better off alone.”

“We’re riding with you.” Charles interjects, solemn and faintly urgent. Seeing a man that is half-transparent. Close to his end, and likely seeking death before it comes and lays proper claim to him.

Arthur sighs, both fond and exasperated. Still, he feels Sadie’s and Charles’ eyes stuck on him. Of a joint mind to bear witness, lest he do something foolish - to keep death from his door, and to keep him from opening it. “C’mon, then.” He says, and squeezes in his heels, and Zenobia jumps forwards, like a hailed semaphore. The rest follow, and like a thunderous tidal wave they roll forwards.

Before long, the violent chorus of bullets and explosions sends the horses standing in panicked ovation. They drop their mounts, and charge on foot, to join in the bloodshed.

The battle is like nothing he has ever experienced.

A red inferno, made of blood, and fire, and violence. Everywhere, dead men, in varying states of human definition. Some still wear their faces, young and old, some in the middle. All of them, once individual - but death has rendered them the same, now. He sees some turned into scorched bundles of charcoal. Others, spined with arrows, like pin cushions. He shoots two more men from behind cover. They bumble off the raised boardwalk, to be devoured by the yapping flames below them.

Arthur exhales, and falls slack, for a moment. Breathing hard, and shallow. While Sadie, and Charles dispatch the remaining soldiers. He looks back to them, and nods his silent appreciation. Then he gets off his knees, and wobbles towards the bridge, ahead of them. Arthur hops onto it, and it feels like he has entered into some hellish tornado. Up above, the sky darkens. Great reems of smoke pass over the sun, like curtains. The blackened boards shriek and crack like tortured bones under his boots. The heat is incredible. His eyes feel like hot stones set in his skull, cooking the soft skin that surrounds them. He can feel tears leak down his cheeks, in desperate, ceaseless procession. None leave his face before they run dry of moisture. Pristine track marks etched into his sooted skin, like dainty fingers. Eyes slitted, he shrouds his face with his elbow. Coughs wretchedly, his throat shrunken to a convulsing pinhole.

Arthur pushes hard. The wood beneath his feet bellies, and whines, like he is treading over a wounded animal. Some of it buckles, and coughs up a scorching clout of embers. He hops from a plank to plank, and reaches the other end of the gang walk. Mercifully, the ground turns solid, and mostly level. Across the way, a high bridge crosses over the dirt thoroughfare, adjoining one of the towers. He glances up, and to his immediate right stands a cabin. On the porch, he sees Eagle Flies, locked in mortal battle with a soldier. Time slows, encased in immortal amber. He raises his rifle, and aims true, and the man lifts off of Eagle Flies in one swift movement, like he is being carried sideways on a track runner.

The young prince flips himself over, sleight and graceful. “Arthur?”

He nods, anxious and stiff mannered. “Get up.”

“Thank you, all of you.” Eagle Flies stands, and addresses all of them. He appears physically uninjured, but behind his painted visage, the boy is shaken. For all his former bravado, Arthur suspects this is his first battle waged in blood, as opposed to ink jotted on paper. Eagle Flies jogs down the stairs. A military rifle cradled up to his chest, like a newborn.

“We need to go,” Arthur mills about, in an anxious circle. He looks behind him. The others gather themselves, quietly. Grimy with oil and soot, and a look of weary reticence about them.

“Where are my men?” Eagle Flies doesn’t move a muscle.

“We saw some fighting by the factory.” Charles admits, half-reluctantly. “That’s where Dutch has gone.”

The look Eagles Flies shares is unmistakable. One of muddled fear, and determination, and responsibility, that Arthur knows for carrying a similar look himself. He is torn. He made a promise to the boy’s father, but in his heart, he can’t just leave the others. Arthur instinctively looks to Charles for guidance. But his indecision ultimately decides for him. Up above, a paper chain of reinforcements unfolds along the raised scaffold. Arthur inwardly curses.

“Let’s go, quick!” He motions his arms, and the shooting commences. One, then two tumble over the edge, like bottles. Arthur squints down his rifle, lands a crude body shot on one, barely skims another. Again, Sadie and Charles clean up after him. He is losing it. All that he is, all that he was, running like sand between his fingers.

Arthur tries not to think on it. He stands, and together they move on, towards some army type of barracks. Tents and cabins, crated supplies - motley denotations of habitation, all strewn about like litter. Running, they turn a sharp corner. Their path leading in steep delineation, back towards the main structure. Except, not quite. A train blocks their way, and one of the carriage doors rumbles open, leaving a perfect square of black, in its absence. Then, a bronze coloured muzzle noses its way out of the darkness. Followed by the slow, dread inducing clank of a Gatling being wound into action.

A racing pinwheel of sparks begins to tear off the barrels. Arthur shouts a belated warning, and they all dive into cover. Meanwhile, the sound racks up, moment by moment. The delirious whirring of mechanism, turns quickly into a catapulting onslaught. The gunshots tear forth like cannonballs. Thumping the air, rending it permanently out if shape, like it is some form of malleable metal. Unseen, the gunman dips the muzzle, and the Gatling bites the ground, and starts pulling holes out of the surface, like a strip of sea mines, being detonated in rapid procession.

Arthur cups his ears, and buries his chin into his breastbone. A choir of snatched screams, twist and bend, horribly. The sound of men’s souls being divided from their bodies. A scree of dirt and bullets hails, and then, a distrustful silence takes over. Arthur peeks out of cover, like some sort of dubious rodent. He can just about see the lone gunman, plugging a new cartridge belt into the gun’s chamber.

He lifts his rifle. Checks the breach, then snugs the butt into his shoulder. Doesn't trust his hands to keep steady, so he rests the forestock on a barrel. He shutters one eye, sights down the scope, and nudges the crosshairs into position. He exhales, and crooks his finger over the trigger. A dry crack. His shoulder kicks hard, and a pop of white smoke stands motionless, over the gun’s barrel. Arthur cycles the bolt, and the spent casing flips like a small medallion, and rolls away into some quiet oblivion. He watches for movement, down the scope. But the gunman lays face down. Arms spread forwards, his fingertips lipping over the carriage edge.

There is a whooping cheer, from someone.
Arthur lifts himself up, and he is running again. All of them together, they ford a crossing through the train carriages, and emerge in front of the factory, and into a blurry haze of more fighting. Arthur loses count of all the men that become bodies, by his hand. There is no end. His aching joints cry with each pull of his rifle’s trigger. His fingers fumbling and leaden, for each time he must pause and painfully reload the chamber.

Reaching the delivery bays, he comes upon Dutch and all the rest of them. They make a driving circuit around the factory’s perimeter, until finally, there is a hesitant intermission, and it seems all is silence. It is over. They regroup. Arthur joins Dutch, and they go to retrieve the bonds, or papers, or whatever it is they supposedly came here for. They search the office, and come out carrying their prize, and a shaky sort of feeling of armistice, between them. Arthur follows down the stairs after Dutch, they deal with the remaining soldiers, and cross back to the way they come.

He almost makes it.

But something in the air stops him. A shuddering, bowel-like movement, that seems to sound all around him. Before he even realizes what it means, there is a distended groan of ruptured metal, and then a shrieking jet of steam erupts on top of him. Arthur cries out. One arm snaps up, to shield his face. His legs scuttle on the slickened ground, and he lands with his back, jolted. The heat dives into his skin like hot knives. He keens, and rolls about in the ground, clutching his face. Inconsolable with pain, and completely blinded. He hears a drove of voices, giddy and excited. Then, there is a weight, like a sandbag has been dropped on him. Adjoined by a hot lick of light, that he just about recognizes for a blade, capturing the internal blaze of the furnace.

Both his arms jump up in an instant, and lock rigid like two jointed mechanisms. Even then, the knife sinks towards him, with intractable purpose. An anchor, being dropped to the bottom of the ocean. Arthur bares his teeth, and spits and whimpers. His muscles seize with fatigue. A searing heat, that slowly ebbs into a distant and lolling numbness. His grip slackens, for just a moment, and the knife tip jumps another inch, almost kissing his breastbone.

In one last desperate burst, he calls for help. He calls for Dutch, over and over. His eyes dart rapidly in his skull, seeking his mentor. He sees that Dutch is far ahead of him. Caged under a yellowish cone of light. Not moving. The man’s arms hold stiff and slightly parted. His shirt sleeves glow like lowered wings. But he doesn’t help, despite Arthur’s calling. Instead he turns, and becomes gray with the gusting steam, and disappears, like a ghost fazes through physical material.

Arthur watches it happen, with a cold, broken horror. That’s it, then. It’s over. He closes his eyes, and waits for the knife to end him. Instead, his ears flinch to the airy pop of gunfire. The crush on him lifts, and the knife clatters someplace off, in the distance. He opens his eyes, and there is another man. Not Dutch, but Eagle Flies, come to be his savior.

The young prince reaches an arm to help him, and an army man rounds from behind, and shamelessly shoots him. The bulbous nosed wretch, Colonel Favors. Arthur roars. He snatches for his sidearm, and in one listing motion, he drags the sight over the man’s chest, and fires. The old man falls. Dying as he lived - in pathetic, and ignoble obscurity.

Arthur scrambles on his knees. This is everything he feared would happen, and it all happened by meticulous and inevitable design, like cards falling. Eagle Flies, kneels, motionless and curled softly around his torso, like a bird roosting.

“Ah, you silly fool,” he laments, and rushes over to him. He raises Eagle Flies’ arm, and looks down at the hole in him, and his heart freezes, and he wants to curse everything. Eagle Flies looks up at him - his reaction, and his expression turns at once acceptant, and despairing.

“C’mon.” Arthur grunts. Ignoring his own panic, he lifts the young man. Hooks his arm around his shoulders, and they make in a lumbering pile, towards the exit. Arthur gasps and wheezes. The sound scrapes his ears like rusted tools, and he can taste warm iron on his tongue. He grimaces, and swallows it. As they pass, the furnace paints their sweated faces a wet, gloomy orange. Eagle Flies shifts painfully in his holdings. Fighting with something.

“You saved my life, more than once…to give my life for yours, it’s as it should be,” He wastes precious breath, in telling him.

“Come on,” Arthur kicks the door, and a sharp slice of air hits him. Blue and smoky. Dark is closing upon them. He scans about. The stragglers and their horses harbor about in a nervous settlement, just beyond him. Lopsided and veering, Arthur traipses with the boy, while his eyes seek Dutch, furious and single minded.

The man stands by his mount, loose and complacent. Arthur’s blood rises. He shakes with rage, and pain, and anguish. “You...you ran away,”—

“I did no such thing.” Dutch lies. Righteous as God, before a viperous apostate. Meanwhile, Charles walks up, and quietly claims Eagle Flies off of him. Arthur scarcely notices. And Dutch, carries on like his word is the end of it. “Don’t be a fool, there could be back here, any minute.”

Arthur stares at him, in silence. Completely devoid in expression and feeling, except for a pall of faint nausea. While Dutch turns away, and addresses those still loyal to attend him. “We did it gentlemen, we got some money, and with the train job…well, we got a whole lot of money.”

Arthur turns his head in disgust, and his eyes find Eagle Flies, arranged on the back of his faithful Zenobia. His head tips heavenwards, and his lips are snatched in a grin of deep pain that Arthur feels in some half measure, just for existing adjacent to it. Paytah stands below. He grips Eagle Flies’ hand, and his lips move, in some silent and soothing sacrament.

“…Everything is coming together, exactly as I planned.” Dutch prattles on, and Arthur closes himself to it. He steps down towards the horses, and passes Dutch, a cold glide of air passing along with him.

“I’ve got to take the boy to his father.”

“As you wish…” Dutch bows his head, and contemptuously flourishes. “Usually is, nowadays.”

“Sure.” Arthur stalks past him. He mounts his horse, and feels Eagle Flies’ hands lace woodenly, around his waist. “I’ll be back when I can.” He grips his reins, and tries to find his bearings.

“I’ll stay with you.” Charles stands in his passage.

“And me, of course,” Paytah adjourns from Eagle Flies’ side, and mounts his horse, in one liquid motion.

“And so will I,” Sadie, stubborn as rocks, joins him.

“No,” Arthur’s voice breaks, desperation straining it. “Get outta here, please. This ain’t gonna be nothing nice.”

Sadie concedes. Charles slips atop Taima, and follows after him.

***

The journey to the reservation slides past like a bad dream, and they arrive at their destination as though just waking from it, glazed and shaken.

There is a fragrant smoke in the air, and the scattered tents bloom like glowing hearts, in the darkness. All is silent. None of them dismount their horses. Arthur takes point, and they ride through the reservation, in a stiff and mortuary procession.

Some figures gather at the side lines. It takes a while for them to recognise their young prince, and to recognise the grievous state of him. A dreadful grief ripples through all of them. A few elders bow their heads. A woman starts wailing. Arthur squeezes his heels. He can feel Eagle Files grip on him waxing.

Ahead, Rains Fall exits his tent, and stands under an open campfire, his face lacquered the color of red mahogany. A corkscrew of embers, in slow ascension to the heavens.

Arthur dismounts, and with Charles at his side, they catch Eagle Flies, and carry him. He moans in pain. His breath plumes, like gray phantoms. The rest of the tribe watches. Thin in their numbers, they form a loose net, while Arthur and Charles carefully lift Eagle Flies into his father’s holdings. Inside, the warmth is thick and stifling. Arthur holds a cough, and crab legged and shuffling, they lay him down, on a soft pile of bedding. Rains Fall kneels beside Eagle Flies. He spares them a brief, harrowed look, and says nothing.

Grief-numb, Arthur and Charles step out of the tent, and allow father and son to join, in final, heart rending communion. Together, they linger, for a lost moment. “W-What are they gonna do now?” Arthur looks down at the ground, and mumbles.

“They must move, and fast.” Charles answers. He takes an instilling breath, “I’ll stay and help them.”

Arthur nods gruffly to himself, “Yeah, I’ll stay too.”

“No, my friend.” Charles turns him down, tender and gentle. He rests a hand on Arthur’s shoulder. “You have others who need you. Good people.”

Arthur’s blinks, and he presses his lips together. Charles is right, of course. He has John, and Abigail, and Jack, and all the rest to think of. He knows this, and yet his heart begs for him to choose different. Even as his duty still holds him accountable. Arthur opens his mouth, but sound comes out. He frowns, and his chin dimples. Then, without warning or preamble, Charles pulls him into a hug. Their bodies crush together, and Arthur stiffens before he knows what to do, and then it is over. They seperate, and he turns away, diminished, and fully heartbroken.

He isn’t ready to say goodbye, and yet he walks to his horse, like some automaton. With each step that further separates them, he feels increasingly lightened. Like pieces are dropping off him, with rapid abandon. Until he reaches Zenobia, completely hollowed. Shed of everything, but a small and hardened stone - his resolve to see John and his family through this, and his own personal resolve to stay human.

Chapter Text

John is dead.

He is dead, and he wasn’t there to see it. He couldn’t stop it.

Arthur drops the sack of army payroll. He stands, slack, and half folded over. Unseeing to the world around him. His mind chases itself in circles. How could this have happened? After everything, how can this be the way that things have ended? Rescuing John from the wolves, in Colter. Breaking him from Sisika. Finding him - a nameless child, with a noose burned around his neck. Maybe his life could never be saved, just like the rest of them. Jenny, Davey, Mac, Sean, Keiran, Lenny, Hosea, John, and soon, Arthur sees that he will join them. Maybe he was a fool to even try and fight it. To try and change the course of things that have already been decided.

His stomach clenches. A viscous, constricting pain, that makes his whole body seize, like his bones are being crumpled inwards. He can hardly stand for the pain, the incomprehensible fire of it. It is so quick. The hunger rises, a jubilant devil, inside of him. Arthur clutches around his stomach, and holds on like slamming down a rattling lid on top of the thing inside him. Not yet. He can’t let it win. John may be gone, but he can still save Abigail, and Jack. He still has a reason to fight it.

The pain abates. It turns tail and sulks, temporarily accosted. Arthur exhales, and draws himself up, a little. His hands cautiously ride either since of his hips, desperately frail, but not quite bested. Through slatted eyes he watches the others mill about, purposefully avoiding the pitiful sight of him. Dutch wheels the Count about in a rigid and impatient circle, evoking a gray sweep of dust. Arthur turns his head down, and pointedly ignores him. The sack of army payroll lays at his feet, obdurate, and perverse as a dismembered torso. He gingerly stoops down, and scoops it up. Then, hefts the weight onto his shoulder.

Atop her burnished turkoman, Sadie risks him a glance of fraught caution. Arthur staggers past her, and chucks the meaningless prize onto Zenobia’s rump, to store it. Sadie clicks her tongue, and walks her horse a few paces. Taking his silence for what it is, a need for some time in private. Eventually, she leaves, departing with others. Arthur can’t find it in himself to care. He mounts up, and snatches out his reins, in stifled anger. But nonetheless, turns his horse, and follows behind the rest of them.

***

By the time they return, the day is waning. Beaver Hollow rises like a bear to meet them, a shaggy pelted mound, with runnels of golden light, trickling like water down its back. Their horses make a messy pile at the foot of the hill, and Arthur arrives a half beat behind the rest of them. He cranes his neck, but he cannot see, he can only hear some uneasy type of commotion.

“They came and took Abigail!”

Tilly’s disembodied voice carries down the verge, then she physically arrives before them. She sits sidesaddle, with a little bundle nestled into the yolk rich yellow of her dress. “I saved Jack…We hid, but they took Abigail,”

“Who did?” Dutch asks her.

“Agent Milton and his men,” Tilly halts her horse in front of him. A spoked halo of light, turns behind her. “Took her to Van Horn, to be put on a boat and tried for murder,”—

“I am very sorry to hear that,” Dutch practically interupts her. His head twitches back and forth, as he looks down - inside of himself, or maybe just to avoid looking at her. “We gotta let her go.”

Micah hums, a ponderous, rapsing sound that Arthur thinks is meant to sound regretful. “John’s a…well sorry, son.” He smacks his lips, and makes a wasteful gesture. “Without John, she’s just bait. Got a bunch of money, Dutch…”

Dutch turns sharply to him, as though the word ‘money’ has some enthralling hold over him.

“She’s just a girl, they won’t do nothing to her.” Micah tilts forwards, working his way into Dutch’s head, like poison. “But me and the boys know, we need to keep riding on this one, Dutch. You know it…every man here knows it,” He turns back to his foul and rotten pair of disciples, and they mumble and grunt in affirmation. Dutch frowns, then slowly begins to nod, agreeable and supple. Arthur watches, in stone cold horror. It is like watching a snake being molded to the whims of his charmer.

“So we just gonna let the boy be made into an orphan?” He hurriedly interjects. Casting about a panicked glance with a few others around him.

“It ain’t like that!” Dutch snaps. He bats his arm, like Arthur is a petty hindrance. A fly tainting the chef’s broth. A splotch of ink, perverting a clean sheet of paper.

“What is it like?” Arthur begs, for a straight answer.

Dutch scowls. The muscles in his face repeatedly twitch, as though some internal mechanism has jammed, and won’t stop smacking about, in halted entrapment.

“I wanna live, cowpoke.” Micah uses the opportunity to take over. He cocks his head, and puffs his jowls, and looks Arthur down with a sanctimonious detachment, “I still got the choice.”

Arthur’s face twists in disgust.

“Dutch, it’s just a girl…” Micah continues, snuggling up to him like a worm, and Dutch yields. Any resistance left in him, melts into butter.

“You’re right,” he says, and Arthur’s ears are sounding like clappers. Just a girl. It rings all so familiar, just like the one in Blackwater. He dismounts, and stumbles over to Dutch like a blind man trying to navigate a world that has been closed off to him.

He clings to Dutch’s saddle, but the man shakes him off, like a feather. “It pains me to say it, Arthur. But…he is right.”

“Dutch!” Arthur implores, all but hanging off his person. His heart is weeping.

But it is no use. Dutch sheds him, and everything else he ever stood for, and drives his horse forwards with the rest of his followers, “Come on, boys!”

Arthur takes a forced step back from the stamping entourage. The clout of dust kicks up a fit in his lungs, and he coughs, and he hacks up a ball of blood in the dirt, and some might think he is conjuring up a curse against them.

“..,Well, I guess that’s that then.” Arthur manages to straighten up, and starchily dusts off his trousers. “All them goddamn years…”

“C’mon Arthur, let’s go get her.” Sadie peeps, uncharacteristically demure, and quiet. “You and me is all we need.”

Arthur stands very still. He cannot think at all, it’s like the contents of his head are on fire. But there is sense in her words, and it helps him to douse the flames, and keep focused on what matters.

“Miss Tilly…” He walks, and grabs the sack off of Zenobia, and transfers it over to her. “Take this,” Panting for breath, he pauses and gropes about desperately inside his satchel. “You take this too,” His hands are shaking, and he pulls out a ludicrous wad of notes. He gives her all the money he has, puts it away, safe, in her saddle bag. “Take Jack…and you wait at Copperhead Landing for Abigail, and Mrs. Adler.”

Tilly nods, somber and gracious. Still clutching Jack to her chest, she looks down and says, “Thank you, Arthur.”

“You’re a good girl.” He says, looking up at her. She is so young, and smart, and he is so proud of her. His younger sister. “You live a good life now, you hear?”

“Alright, Arthur.” Tilly promises him. She inhales with her whole body, “I‘ll miss…I’ll miss,”—

But she can’t speak the rest. She swallows, stuffing down her tears, and Arthur gently takes over. He nods, and smiles, and tells her, “Me too, sweetheart. Me too.”

Then he shuffles forwards, and Jack looks at him, small and uncertain, while Arthur reaches out and tries his very best to reassure him. “Jack, come here…be brave, son. I’m gonna go get your mamma.”

It is not clear if the boy fully understands all that is happening around him. But Jack gives him a doll-like nod, and Arthur departs for his horse, besides Mrs. Adler. He snaps his reins, and lets out a war cry of sorts. This is his battle, and he will fight it till his last breath, maybe without John, but with Sadie still beside him.

***

Together, they save Abigail.

Agent Milton is killed by her hand, which feels justified enough. Arthur feels a monstrous little thrill seeing the man’s life end, and having them both know it was him to go first, even if by a short measure.

They move quick, through the township. A wintry chill comes about with the sun’s setting. The air plumes white, where there are corpses. Ghostly blooms, like some essence within, is silently ascending. They leave Van Horn. Sadie takes his horse, while Arthur sits off the saddle and cleans up any stragglers, foolish enough to take after them. The horses push hard, and the sky and the ground run together, like ink, without boundary. A kingdom of golden light, like some fabled tapestry.

Along the way, Arthur has to stop. The pain in his chest demands it. He raps urgently at Sadie’s shoulder, and she reluctantly slows. “La…Ladies…I-I’m fine, jus’…hold up a moment,” He holds out one arm, and falls to his feet once the horses have stopped moving.

“Arthur, there’s no time.” Sadie watches him, half irritated, in her anxiety.

“There’s…there’s time,” he gasps, and he totters over to Abigail. No breath to talk, he makes a stubborn grabbing motion, which Abigail takes to mean something suspicious, and her expression wrinkles.

“What happened to John?” She looks between them. Her slate coloured eyes mark the absence of Dutch, and the others, and of course, her husband.

Sadie turns her head, and looks to the middle distance, grim-set, in her expression.

“Where’s John?” Abigail asks again, with an escalating wobble. She glances hurriedly between them.

“I-I don’t…I think,” Arthur makes a face. He stops, and he grabs for her again, and Abigail makes a half-disgusted face of disappointment and sorrow. But she plants her hands on his shoulders, and allows herself to be manhandled down, on to his level.

“Arthur…” she says his name, softer than he deserves, and he struggles even though he knows it is him that must deliver this news, however painful.

“He…” his voice trembles.

“What?” Abigail frowns, and from behind her Sadie dismounts, and takes up close to her, in anticipation.

“He got killed, or he got captured.”

“No,” Abigail sobs with her whole body, it is like she has received a physical blow of devastation. She crumples, and Sadie catches her, caging the newly made widow in her arms.

“I-I’m really sorry Abigail…I was on the train, and I didn’t see it.” Arthur tries and fails to find the proper words to explain it to her.

“No,” she repeats herself, like if she keeps saying the same thing it might stop this moment from progressing any further. The bedding sun coppers her face, and her tears turn the color of fire.

“Listen,” Arthur draws in closer. He says the only thing that he knows will pull her out of this spiral. “We got Jack, he’s safe. Mrs. Adler will take you to him, but John…” He pauses for a moment, and thinks of his brother. All that he was, all that he could have been. Nothing now. He deserved more time to get his act together. “I want you to know this. He loved you. He loved you and Jack, he did. He wasn’t perfect, but he did. Now…you gotta get that boy.”

Abigail shivers like a trapped sparrow. But the reminder of her son calms her heart a little. She turns still, and like drawing water out a well, she retrieves her internal strength and determination.

Arthur feels satisfied enough with that. “Go on, get outta here.” He starts grabbing Sadie and prodding her towards Bob, and Sadie mounts her horse, albeit ruffled and disgruntled.

“Arthur, what are you doing?” She scrunches her face at him.

“I got to go have a little chat…before I get much sicker.” He reaches again for Abigail, and she starts sobbing anew, and thrashing weakly against him.

“Oh Arthur,”—

“Don’t you ‘Oh Arthur’ me,” he pulls away, gruff and injured. He can’t do with sympathy. He can’t lose his resolve, this is it. It’s over. “Neither of you two, now. You both know.”

Of course they know.

They were both there, when he inadvertently let it slip, to Agent Milton. They all know what it means, to be sick with consumption. He inhales, and lifts Abigail up onto Bob’s rump, and it is done. Abigail slowly adjusts her seat, and wraps her arms around Sadie’s middle. They’ll be alright, he knows it. Arthur looks up to both of them, in a greater sense - they are both strong, and formidable. “You’re good women, good people. The best.”

Both Sadie and Abigail attend him in respectful silence. Arthur shifts about, not quite sure how to part ways from them. He’s never had much chance to do it before. Most goodbyes in his life have been sudden and forced affairs, with no time for pretty words, or any type of closure. “You go get that boy. There’ll be time for sorrow later.”

He turns to his horse, but Abigail catches his attention. She retrieves something out of her blouse, and hands it down to him. “If you’re headed back there, take this. I don’t need it anymore.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s a chest in them caves, in the back, to the left. Hidden under a wagon. Dutch’s chest, with all our money.” She tells him. “I know John told you I knew where it was.”

Arthur takes the key, and turns the brass weight, between his stiffened fingers. Beholding it and the woman that stole it, with faint wonderment. “Abigail Roberts…”

“I always was a good thief.” She grants him a watery smile, and she takes up his free hand. Her touch is like a warm blessing, and Arthur smiles up at her.

“That you was,” he squeezes her hand, then releases it. “Go on, get outta here.”

Chapter Text

Arthur turns away from Sadie and Abigail. He walks, and he does his best not to look back, with a notion that if he does, he might well give it all up, and follow them. He waits until he is sure they are both gone, and it is just him, and his shadow, and Zenobia.

Then, he mounts his gentle mare, and he digs out his hat from his satchel. He fits it on his head, and it feels like a marking, of sorts. A weight that he feels, much as he feels the reaper’s hand, resting on his shoulder. Arthur doesn’t think he’s the type to imbue objects with any special aura or potential, but this hat has witnessed all manners of death, both profound, and unsentimental. It is the hat his father died wearing on the gallows. The hat he will die wearing, now. Except, he won’t die for nothing. He won’t die rotten and afraid, and without purpose, like Lyle. He will die having given something back into the world - a second chance for little Jack, and Abigail.

Alone, it occurs to him he could leave, find some quiet place to rest his head, eternal. But he can’t. There is one last debt to be settled. A debt owed to himself - to stand against Dutch, and to take a stand for what truly matters. He squeezes his heels, and then he is moving. This is the way it needs to be, and so he takes the road back to the end - to Beaver Hollow.

Arthur arrives, and their camp is already shredded. Picked clean for scraps, the rest discarded. His eyes seek out his lean-to, his home for twenty years and he feels a spent grief in his chest, upon witnessing the state of it. His shaving mirror has been knocked down, a leering grimace cracked through the middle of it. His cot is askew and his clothes chest has been disemboweled and upended.

Arthur closes his heart to it, and makes his presence known. What few are left, acknowledge him. They all stand, pieces set on the board. Bill and Javier flanking the edges. Micah, at the center, and Dutch, squared safely into the back most corner. Micah makes some snide and diminutive comment, but none move, as though all waiting for some invisible hand to decide their plays for them.

Arthur takes a step forward.

A smoky chill cloaks the air. A belt of fire bubbles on the horizon, as though the world is a lit cauldron. It seems to be devouring itself, melting down, as though the times of judgment have finally fallen upon them. A dark, apocalyptic light. The sun sets, rage-filled and violent, and the sky is turned into a battlefield. Great surging clouds, like warring armies, in collision with one another. Their bodies blown open with great, meaty slashes. They spill their rich tidal innards, bright as blood, all across the heavens.

Arthur addresses Dutch. He tells the truth of everything, and it splatters like a ripe corpse between them. While Micah talks like a preacher to Dutch, and Dutch is carried away by every word, like a man already converted. Arthur raises up his pistol, directs it at the snake, and there is a frenzied chorus of hammers being raised, like an eerie chitter of insects. The air doesn’t move, like time is shut off, and when all seems over, a voice belonging to a dead man rises, and it is like the ground stops existing, below him.

It is John.

He cannot believe it. Arthur almost turns his head. But he feels Micah shift in his skin, and instinct tells him that he must stay planted. In his periphery, Dutch makes some empty proclamation that convinces no-one, and it would seem, not even himself. The old Dutch is gone, if he ever truly existed.

Susan joins his side. Arthur feels her resolve like a storm. He hadn’t thought to expect it, but her support lifts him up, just as he needs it. The rest happens so very quick, after that. As though time suddenly remembers itself again, all at once, everything lurches forwards. Javier rushes in to announce Pinkertons, and in the heartbeat of confusion, Micah shoots her down. Arthur sidesteps neatly at the sound, before he realizes what has happened. Then she falls, and she howls and writhes on the ground, in horrific torment. A black, guttural sound, like a butchered animal. In that instant, the air snaps tight and razored. Dutch roars. He unfurls both his arms, and glides amongst all of them. Still dying, Susan moans, and holds in her spilling midriff. But no-one can be spared to witness her, lest they meet a fate similar.

Made into the eye of the storm, Dutch spirals, and his guns wag around wildly, like foundless accusations. He points to everyone and no-one. Blind, or possessed of a certain vision, unknown to the rest of them. John sidles up to Arthur, lopsided and clutching his shoulder. Whilst the others, Bill and Javier, hoop them in, and they are nudged like a pair of nervous sheep, towards the cave entrance. Another gun fires - the Pinkertons, announcing themselves, like saviors. They all scatter, like marbles. Dutch and his men flee into the woods. Arthur ducks behind a crate, and finds his repeater.

It is an unsatisfying and sluggish standoff. The Pinkerton agents take cover in the trees, and they all take turns, like children throwing rocks at one another. Neither party dares inch closer. The campsite is too open an arena. A deserted island, in the center of a battlefield. Still, their hold weakens. The upturned table Arthur is using as cover is slowly being reduced to a mist of splinters. He looks back, and sees that John has come to a similar conclusion. He waves his arm, and shouts, “C’mon, Arthur! Into the caves, quick!”

Arthur wavers, and looks reluctantly to the dark, motionless pile that is Susan, like a tousled congregation of ravens. A lone bullet howls past his ear and he ducks and scuttles after John, into the darkness. The cave walls glitter with a rank moisture, like saliva coating an animal’s gullet. A slimy, dripping palace. He glances up. The ceiling arcs high and cavernous, church like in its expansiveness. John gallops ahead of him, and Arthur lags behind, expending a great deal of effort. He doesn’t feel real, at all. While he is running there are long, black moments in which he cannot see, or hear the world outside him. Just a windless sort of gushing, like his head is being held underwater. He thinks this is it. He will die soon.

“Stay with me, Arthur!” John shouts. Loud, but invisible. Arthur staggers, and follows his voice like a rope, in the darkness. The ground bucks, and tumbles under his feet, like he is treading on a slippery ocean. One foot slides away from him, causing him to gasp sharply, which then starts him coughing. An ugly, inescapable sound, that smacks all around the cave walls, like a ball does.

Up ahead, John’s voice is calling, and behind he hears the Pinkertons’ barking. Trapped in the middle, he is forced to keep onwards. He wheezes, and he pushes to his feet again, limping forwards. Further along, the cave roof splits open, and pale coins of moonlight travel like clouds, slow and impassive. Together, he and John ascend a series of switchbacking ledges. At the end, waits a falling rectangle of light, framing a bone coloured ladder. John hangs back, like a parent. Ensuring that he climbs up first. Arthur can’t find the energy to comment on it.

They surface into a shock of blue dark. It feels like a cold, wet sheet has been slapped over him. They both scrabble down a lumpy embankment, back onto the main trail. John whistles for their horses, while Arthur squats, and coughs, and hawkes up a tumorous clot of viscera. John, in such a state, leaves him to it. He paces up and down, in a compulsive and agitated circuit. Arthur wipes his chin, and tries to flag him. But John doesn’t notice, and he is forced to shuffle towards him, like a stoop-backed hermit. Even yet, John keeps dancing, and Arthur grunts in frustration, and tugs at his sleeve. He needs to deliver his message.

“Abigail…Abigail’s safe…so’s Jack.”

“Where are they?” John stops, and looks at him, wild faced, but all of a sudden, with a sharply listening.

Arthur clings onto him, frail, and veering, “They’re with Sadie…at Copperhead Landing.”

Something in John changes. Almost shocked. Then his expression opens up, bare, and earnest. He reaches out, and hesitates. Then takes Arthur’s hand and clasps it, “Thank you, brother.”

Arthur nods, mute and feeling a faint tug of relief at fulfilling his promise. Maybe he really can get John out of this. There is a rolling sound, and pressing through the gray fog, a suggestion of the shape of horses. John sees them, and he goes to leave, but Arthur remains latched to his arm, an uncanny strength about him. That sort of fleeting, almighty conviction that possesses a elderly person, on their deathbed.

“I want you…to not look back.” He says, and squeezes John’s arm, to cement it. “Like I said.”

John observes him, stark and vaguely perturbed. A forming realization, not quite come solid. Arthur doesn’t let him dwell on it. He lets go of John and breaks away, towards the horses. They mount, and ride across a misty sea. A ways off, Dutch, and the others scorch the air with shouts and bullets. It seems in every direction, a net of Pinkertons emerge out the gloom, to ensnare them. They turn the horses, and flee everyone and everything, until a walled up shape blocks their progress.

They dive off the road, and John leads them on through a scrubby patch, on a manic chase, upwards. More Pinkertons stand along the hill’s crest, like buzzards on a wire. The blockade was a trap, and leading them here was clearly intentional.
Before either of them can react, there is gunfire, and Arthur feels a harrowing lurch, and Zenobia drops like she has been cracked with a hammer.

He is flung several feet in the air, and lands in a reeling heap, panicked and gasping. He shoots down three men, and all he can think about is dear Zenobia. He doesn’t check for any more, before he is skidding back down the verge, towards where his mare has fallen. Her dark eye points to the heavens, and roams about sightlessly in her head. She cannot move. Her breathing is short and razored. Arthur shifts closer, and cradles her head in his lap. He strokes her nose, and eases her wordless, animal terror. She is so scared, and he watches her die, and silent tears drip down his face, while he pays vigil to her.

His beloved companion. All her strength, and her grace, and loyalty, she gave to him, and he couldn’t even save her. She shudders painfully in his arms, and then her eye turns to a flat disk, and she is just a blank shell. No life, left inside of her. Arthur lowers his head. He tells her thank you, and then he stands, and rejoins his brother.

In a brief moment of weakness he mentions the money. He thinks of all their efforts combined, their lives, and for what reward? But John turns him down, as he should, and Arthur lets the matter go. All of it stolen, it was never their money to begin with, he considers. He exhales, and follows after John, but every step is a battle. It feels like the ground is sucking at his heels. Greedy hands tugging him down, like he has already overstayed his welcome. He squints up at John, already halfway up the ridge’s spine, and inwardly crumples. John bellows out some encouragement, and Arthur shuffles along the gravel pass. The air scores his lungs, like daggers. They meet near the peak, and Arthur takes several long minutes to recover.

“C’mon, let’s get up this cliff.” John waits as long as he can, and anxiously gestures.

Arthur shakes his head, but somehow, he manages it. They climb again, and the sky lifts up with them. The fog clears, and there is a blue hole in the clouds, like a downcast eye has opened up, to watch upon them. Across the gorge more Pinkertons accost them. They clutter along the cliff side like seamen on a galleon. Their gun muzzles glow and cough white smoke, like miniature cannons fired across an ocean. It is a lost battle, Arthur can scarcely stand, and John is injured, so they flee and turn around a rocky corner. John takes refuge under a jutting shelf, and then faces him, proper.

“Alright, Arthur. C’mon, let’s go.”

“…You go.”

“Keep pushing, Arthur.” John pleads, but Arthur shakes his head again, and hunches over. He coughs up a violent spray of blood, and it is like a door closes shut, inside of him. He can’t do it. He can’t make his body go any further. He wipes his chin, grimacing. “No…no…I think I’ve pushed all I can.”

“C’mon,”—

“You go.” He insists, shambling over.

“C’mon, we ain’t got time for this, not now.” John whines, like this is all some kind of unwarranted performance, if only so he needn’t make peace with the alternative. Arthur takes off his hat, and the moonlight shows him for what he is. A dead man, gray, and wasted.

“We ain’t both gonna make it.” He says, and John turns stiff, and remains silent. “I’ll hold them off.” Arthur tries again, soft, and plaintive.

John frowns, and his lips purse. A tearful, and childish defiance in him. Arthur almost rolls his eyes, and he takes his hat and stuffs it on Marston’s head, like that might instill some sense into him. “It would mean a lot to me.” He urges, “Please.” Then he lifts his satchel over his head and pushes it into John’s chest, forcing him to take hold of it. “There ain’t no more time for talk.” He removes his hand, and John clutches onto his bag, with a tethered sort of helplessness. Arthur hums, and elects that it is sorted.

“Arthur…”

“Go to your family.” He says, and tries to make it easier, their parting. He turns away from John, and studies the granite incline, as though determining how best to scale it.

“Arthur!”

“Get the hell outta here, and be a goddamn man.” He raises his voice, and John gawps at him, faintly astonished. He doesn’t look back, and the moment stretches between them.

“You’re my brother.” John says before Arthur can leave, so quiet and honest.

Arthur slumps, and is almost obliterated. These past weeks have marked such a change in their relationship. It feels the closest they have ever gotten to healing their wounds. The great many pains inflicted upon each other. He sighs. There is so much more to be said, but no time left to say it.
“I know…I know.”

He lifts his gun, and steps up the mountain, and already he misses John, watching him vanish.

***

Arthur crawls up the summit and picks out his last stand, before the swarming mass of Pinkertons. He unloads his pistol, and shouts like a two-bit criminal, to keep them all baited. They scurry up the hill like mice, and like he has been trained, Arthur puts down every last one of them. They make a dark puddle, just ahead of him, and Arthur breathes, and tries to retrieve his bearings.

Then, a roaring dumbbell tackles him from behind, and Arthur drops to his knees and doesn’t even have time to cry out before he is turned over. Micah straddles him, and pounds his face like he intends to erase it. Arthur sputters and makes a sloppy grab at his throat. He manages to turn them both over. They topple off the ledge, and fall like toys from a baby’s cradle. Arthur and the ground meet like a clap. He lands on his back, and his lungs implode like paper bags, inside of him. He moans in his throat, and curls into himself - a leaf, frail and quaking. Without seeing, he can feel Micah swagger drunkenly beside him, and before he knows it, they are both standing, and they are fighting, and he feels something else awaken inside, fighting beside him. The hunger lifts him up like a hand, and guides him. It defends him, but it also claims him.

Micah tackles him, like a woozy bulldog. He grips the lapels of Arthur’s jacket, tight as two handles, and throws him about, snarling. Arthur makes a wall of his arms, and fends Micah’s blows until there is a sliver of opening. They break apart, and face down one another, walking a tight circle. Arthur lunges, and throws his fist into Micah’s face, with as much force as he can manage. He hits, again and again. Dull fleshy smacks, until his opponent staggers woodenly backwards. Micah swipes a hand down his cheek, and observes the red dipped fingers with curious detachment.

Arthur watches. He feels his blood rise in response - like a calling. A depthless, barbaric desire, stronger than he has ever known it before. The hunger smiles, and suddenly, it is all wrong. Everything changes. A black curtain falls, and the monster reveals its rightful form. It unfurls its limbs, leathery and batlike. Its eyes aglow, like two flaming garnets, hammered into its pronged skull.

Arthur can scarcely withstand its presence. A complete, abject terror. His mind writhes, like it is being squeezed and gobbled by a mass of pulsing tentacles. It is indescribable. Some diabolical being, beyond any human’s, or creature’s frail comprehension. The imprisoned realm, guarded behind a mirror. A howling tunnel, with no beginning nor end. The unfathomable life cycle of stars, and solar systems, and entire galaxies. It crushes him. A terrible revelation, that he chose to make himself blind to. But, he was always blind. Blind to Dutch’s metamorphosis. Blind to Strauss, and the disguised evil of his work. Blind to Downes. Blind to the world’s pain. Blind to its kindness. Blind to everything. So be it. He achieved what he aimed to. He saved John, and his family. He did a loving act, all the while knowing he could not save himself. Too far gone, and not much left to be considered worth saving, anyhow.

Arthur launches, and his hand strikes Micah’s throat like a viper. He lifts the man off his feet, completely inconsequential. His fingers tighten and he feels rings of flesh bulge between them. Micah’s eyes widen. True fear, bubbling behind them. Arthur feels his hand squeeze harder, and Micah makes a weak, squelching sound. His lips dully smacking. One eye is smoothened completely shut, like a scoop of wet clay has been gently molded over the socket. His entire face is ruined. Lopsided and bulging. An upsetting landscape of mounded swellings, like a raw, sweating dough, wrapped in cheese wire. Arthur regards him, consumed by such a fearsome loathing towards everything he is, everything he represents. Liar. Traitor. Coward. An agent to thousands of ordinary evils, that demand recompense, but rarely ever receive any notice.

Arthur bares his teeth. He thinks of everything Micah has robbed from them, the lives destroyed. He thinks of this dreadful and inevitable journey. What shape could the future have taken if he had simply let Micah hang in Strawberry? If Dutch had never met the wretch at all, and never run afoul to his tawdry bargainings? Arthur forgets about John, and Abigail, and Jack. Rains Falls, Charles, Sister Caldéron. All those people that showed him a better way, he turns his back on them. He forgets love, and he falls into hate. A cruel and lustful desire to ruin things, to no other end but basking in the satisfaction of it. To dance amid the lashing flames, and become the very devil that he has battled against.

There is a power in that.

Micah bunches and squirms in his grip. It is revolting, and Arthur smacks him against the granite rock face, to stun him. The body turns limp. A ripened prize, dangling between his fingertips. Arthur bows his head, and adjusting his hold, opens the path to Micah’s neck. The flesh is pale, and jumping with veins, like nobbled branches. He bites down. Twin holes rupture through flesh. A red seal blooms from each wound, and Arthur’s fate is sealed in the same instant. A half lost piece of him thinks of course it would be Micah, to give seed to his destruction, to lower him down, into the pit of debasement. Then, he drinks, and he doesn’t think at all.

The blood strips his mouth, paints it in a layer, thin, and hot as whiskey. Only, the taste is impossibly different. A rich and salt-laden tang, better than any meat he has ever tasted. Lush and delectable, and invading every part of him. Such a desperate, ravenous craving - consumed and consuming. He cannot stop. He doesn’t want to. For weeks he has been starving. He has been dying. He has been made to endure a living hell, and finally, he has been released from it.

A gunshot rips the air, and Arthur resurfaces. Micah’s blood paints a scarlet bib down his front, and he staggers back, like a bottle has been smashed over his head. Horrified at everything - horrified at himself, most of all. What has he done? What has he become? He scrubs fearfully at his chin, like there might be some available tool to undo the sin he had committed. In a fitting response, the body falls at his feet, like a rotten spool of intestines.

Then, a viscous pain lances him. He falls, and writhes on the ground. It feels like he might boil, or melt, like his body has been flooded with acid. He can feel it changing him, reassembling him. His heart screeches. It thrashes about like a rat in a barrel, like it is trying anyway it can, to claw its way out of his chest. Arthur can feel it rise up, a balloon swelling in his gorge, closing entry to his lungs, like his body is some tainted realm to be sealed off from the world. He clasps at his throat, trying to evict the poison he wilfully ingested. But new pains rack through him. He convulses. His fingers spasm like pale lightning bolts, and his back arches like a hook has snatched him.

In some back corner of his head, he thinks he hears footsteps. A shadow paying one final visitation. Arthur gleans the shape with foggy eyes, but he cannot know if Dutch is truly there, or just some charlatan’s conjuration. He blinks, and the figure wavers, like the shadow of a fish rippling in water. He thrashes about weakly on the ground, scarcely cognisant, scarcely human. His gums throb, like he is chewing on barbed wire.

“Dutch…” He moans, but the figure doesn’t answer. It simply stands over his death, his transformation. Then his face travels in profile and looks at Micah. The mess left of him. His expression hardens in judgment, like God’s wrath is being borne down upon him. “I gave you all I had,” Arthur cries out again, wretched sounding. “I did.” He licks his lips, and tries to shepard what little words he can through them. “Please, you gotta…end it, before I,”

Dutch glares down at him.

“You gotta kill me…please, I’m begging you,” Arthur gasps, “I can’t, I didn’t mean it. I couldn’t,” His whole body seizes. It snaps inwards like a bear trap. It wants him to stop talking. Impassive as marble, Dutch considers his request, then slowly retrieves his pistol, and aims it like a finger, at Arthur’s forehead. Arthur turns very still, and his eyes follow the weapon, glowing with a vengeful and divine light, like mercury. He looks up at his mentor, like a dog to his master, trustful and submissive. Despite everything, he just wants to be witnessed, to be redeemed by the man who made him. That is all the hope he has left. Instead, Dutch’s arm falls, and denies him his exit. The gun climbs back into its holster, and the man exits his field of vision, without comment.

“Dutch!” Arthur shrieks, a caged vessel of fury and anguish. He claws at the dirt, and kicks his legs, like he is being burnt into ashes. His heartbeat drones, so fast, like an enraged beehive in his chest. It pitches out, and snaps like a cord, and then there is only absence. A groundless feeling, like he is falling, or being launched back inside of himself.

Arthur retches, and washes up, like a beached chunk of driftwood. Disoriented, and flailing, even with the ground below him. He blinks, and pats about his person, like he is searching for some misplaced thing, a coin, or watch, or trinket. Except it is his heart that is missing. He can no longer feel it residing in the empty cupboard of his chest. He inhales, and there is no sense of anything. An unnerving stillness. No life, but there is no pain, either. Arthur inhales again, like a dusty bellows, just to test it. But it is gone. The TB is truly gone. Completely snuffed out. Caved in, like a miner.

He closes his eyes, and reels his head back. For a brief moment, he almost rejoices. He could cry, in relief or anguish. Without the TB rotting his body and mind, he feels alert, nearly ascended. Such a vastness of feeling, and yet he cannot escape this sense of great loss - a deep and lonely silence, locked inside of him. His body feels like an abandoned factory. No background humming, or whirring. All the machinery has been shut off, and he is all alone, only his mind left to wander, aimlessly.

Arthur stands, and his legs respond, almost pridefully. Strong pillars beneath him. He flexes his fingers, and looks over the land. Birds call. A pale hem of light sits on the horizon. Dawn rises, like the last trumpet call. His final sunrise, and he cannot bear witness to it. The faintest dustings of sunlight, and already he feels his skin shrivel, like lizard scales. No time to waste. He won’t die again tonight. He turns his back on nature’s scene, and walks out of the light, into the darkness.