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The sun rose over the Grizzlies as it did each morning, and Arthur Morgan watched with long-wakened eyes. The rush of the river below and the birdsong in the trees above were the only sounds that accompanied the sunrise, and the outlaw was grateful for their consistency, their perpetuity.
Everything was going to pieces. The O’Driscolls were getting brave across state lines to keep up with them. Cornwall was dead but the Pinkertons continued to run on the fumes of the cash he had burned to catch the Van Der Linde gang. Escapades with the Wapiti had put them on the army’s radar. Every one of the cops in Saint Denis knew every one of their faces. This was Murfree country. Tuberculosis was fatal. And on top of it all, Micah’s whisperings had Dutch so high-strung that even his philosophy books hadn’t stopped his vocabulary being compressed to four words: faith, loyalty, plan, and doubt. Always with the doubt, he continued to tell Arthur.
Arthur was beginning to doubt himself. He was beginning to doubt that he was who he thought he had been all these years, beginning to doubt that getting John, Abigail, and Jack to safety would make up for the loyalty he’d continued to have faith in despite the ever-wilder plans.
He sighed, running his thumb over the half-filled page in his journal, the leather binding soft against his palm. He rolled his pencil between his fingers for a moment, contemplating a mad scribble across the words, the hard truth, staring up at him fresh from his mind. Instead, he lifted his gaze to where the sun had fully escaped the horizon. It floated freely, unbound by any laws that weren’t physics’, yet still it blinded any who wished to stare in reverence, burned any who too long bathed in its light unprotected, killed any who got too close.
His hand moved of its own accord, his thoughts elsewhere though his eyes tracked the movement. When a drop of rain stung his wrist, he took in the bottom half of the page where there now sat a halfway-decent sketch of the sun over the foothills, the vagaries of a face at its center. There was no clarity to the face, no expression nor familiarity, just the blurred implications of some semblance of humanity nestled between solar flares and shadows. He snapped the journal shut and returned it to his bag, telling himself it was to protect the pages from the intensifying rain.
Arthur cradled the bag in his lap, thoughtful of the fact that it was not waterproof, and did not move. His feet dangled over the cliffside, the river’s churn a backdrop to the rhythm of their leather-booted natural swing. Damp and chill began to seep through to the tops of his thighs, his forearms, his shoulders, but he didn’t mind. He’d be getting sicker regardless. His hat grew heavier, and for a moment he focused his eyes on the droplets falling from its brim. A few rolled along its underside, down his nose, over his lips. They flew violently outwards when he suddenly hacked a cough. He spit over the side, watched the stark red disappear into the seething blue. The movement left his head at a tilt that allowed the rain to wet the ends of his overlong hair – he knew he needed a haircut, but such a thing seemed embarrassingly trivial in the face of dissolving bonds and looming mortality – and run down the back of his shirt, tracing a shiver along his spine. The rain beat down on his head, his back, his knees, the tops of his feet. As it got heavier, it almost became soothing. He focused on the feeling, the changing noise the drops made as they filled puddles into the rock’s crevices.
“Arthur?” He heard the voice faintly, dismissed it as nothing, a trick of the rain’s drumming in his ears.
“Arthur!” The call came again, clearer this time, and he knew he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t real. He tucked his satchel into his jacket as well as he could while it was still slung across his chest, but otherwise did not move. When the call came a third time from somewhere above and behind, he lifted his head so the brim of his hat returned to cover the nape of his neck. Now it was only the residual water in his hair that dampened his collar.
“Arthur, you’re soaked.” The voice was by his ear now, soft and anxious, and a sturdy hand was on his shoulder. He turned his chin ever so slightly.
“Ah, don’t worry ‘bout me, Charles.” He resented the fact that he had to clear his throat after such a terse statement. “I’m right as rain out here, heh.”
There was a brief silence at his side, the grip on his shoulder tightening marginally.
“Arthur. Being sick doesn’t give you permission to get yourself killed faster.”
Arthur scoffed in spite of himself.
“A little wet ain’t gonna kill me. ‘Sides, I don’t need no permission to die. If I want to, I will.” Hearing the sharp intake of breath despite the rain and anticipating Charles’ inevitably concerned and likely reprimanding response, Arthur quickly added, “I don’t. Want to, that is.”
The sighed exhale brushed the shell of his ear, and he turned his chin back to its previous position.
“Good.” The firmness in Charles’ tone startled him. “‘Cause you ain’t got my permission to die. Not just yet.”
The sincerity was so shocking that Arthur found himself involuntarily turning to fully look at Charles. Without a hat, rivulets of water rolled from above his unyielding gaze to the hard set of his jaw. His long hair was loose from the tight braid he had recently been wearing it in, giving his expression a dark frame that only made its genuineness harder to ignore.
“Now let’s get you dry.”
Reeling, Arthur allowed Charles to loop an arm under his own and pull him to his feet. Once he was standing, Charles disentangled himself, but kept a hand on Arthur’s shoulder blade as they climbed the hill back to the main camp at Beaver Hollow. Halfway up, a coughing fit came over him, and Arthur had to stop for a moment to get through it. He spat blood into the rain-soaked grass and tried to ignore the wave of embarrassment that followed when Charles rubbed his back and waited patiently for the fit to pass. Neither said a word.
At the top of the hill was Mrs. Sadie Adler on watch duty, her rifle slung casually over her shoulder as she looked down on the dying man and his escort. She stood beneath a tree for the miniscule covering it gave her, but otherwise didn’t seem bothered by the rain. The embarrassment returned when Arthur realized she must have seen what just happened, but she only gave him a small smile before exchanging a nod with Charles. Embarrassment flared to anger at the notion that they were treating him like some wounded foal, but self-awareness reminded him of his own doubts and the anger faded to resignation. He noticed that Sadie appeared to be wearing one of his coats – stolen, obviously – and for once enjoyed the fondness it made him feel.
Camp looked deserted with everyone huddling in their tents for warmth, some likely still asleep and unaware of the early morning rain at all. The logs around the fire pit sat empty, the bonfire itself reduced to a pile of wood darkened by moisture, the hitching posts just stakes stuck in the ground without the horses, now sheltered in the caves. Charles led Arthur as far as the threshold to his tent. When he’d awoken before dawn, Arthur had rolled up the canvas sides as was his daily routine, but now they were unrolled and tied down, leaving his cot dry and his possessions untouched by wind or water. He didn’t have to wonder how that had happened.
“Change out of those clothes or you’ll catch cold.”
Charles crossed his arms and leaned one shoulder against the wagon Arthur’s tent extended from, his glare patient and concerned but firm nonetheless. Lifting the flap, Arthur thought about the now inexorable dissolution of the Van Der Linde gang, the people who had been his family since he was old enough to properly shoot a gun. He thought about all those years, the people, the ones who weren’t already dead, who seemed to be turning their backs on him or running away. Dutch, Javier, Bill. Pearson, Swanson, Josiah, Uncle, even Mary-Beth – he couldn’t blame them for leaving, not when hope was buried with all their dead.
But there was Sadie, still keeping watch like the danger was coming from the outside, like the biggest threat to all their lives wasn’t huddled in his rat hole slowly nibbling through the final strands of Dutch’s sanity. Sadie, who had barely been with them long enough to see the family they used to be.
And here was Charles, with them less than a year, bringing him in from the rain and worried about him catching cold like he wasn’t coughing up blood and losing weight faster than he’d been able to put it on even when they weren’t on the run and scrounging for scraps like stray dogs. Charles, telling Arthur he didn’t have his permission to die just yet.
Charles, who kept coming back despite the Wapiti needing him more than ever. Charles, who still went out and hunted game to keep young Jack well-fed as he grew. Charles, who didn’t care how the rain and cold soaked through him so long as he could get a dying Arthur Morgan dry and warm.
Though he doubted himself, Arthur knew where their loyalties lay, and though he feared his plan required the allowance of his own end, he had faith that there were still some people left to see it through.