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Recently, Arthur puts pencil to paper and the results don’t come out the way they’re supposed to. It’s not that he’s never seen something in his head and have it come out different on the page— that’s nearly every time, that’s what drawing was, trying to sketch his best approximation. But everything that’s coming out is wrong, a disconnect between his hands and his brain. Even things he used to be able to sketch quite well don’t seem—right. They’re off. The horses’ legs are crooked, the flowers look flat, the landscapes are lopsided.
“You’ve had your nose in that thing for ages,” Marston calls, too close behind his head. Arthur startles, perched on a covered crate in front of the fire, though he doesn’t close the journal in time, not before John’s gotten a good look. “Who’s that supposed to be, anyway?”
Arthur huffs in annoyance. “Trying to draw you, actually.”
He’s drawn John and Tilly, Hosea and Dutch, even Grimshaw more times than he can count. They’ve been together so long, their faces are intimately familiar, even when he’s not staring at them like he usually does when he sketches. But on this page, Marston looks lopsided and uneven, his brows furrowed and his scars lost to the smear of lead.
“What the fuck, Arthur.” John responds first with anger, and then almost barks out a laugh as he leans over him to look closer at the page, bracing himself against Arthur’s shoulder with near-sibling familiarity. “You made me look like Bill.”
Arthur shakes his head, pinches the bridge of his nose and tries to swallow a peal of laughter that threatens to escape down. “What?”
Sketch-John has a stern countenance, though with Arthur’s current inability to draw, its less stern than sour, like a child trying to act tough. His eyes are uneven, too. Arthur idly tries to correct it as John looks on, but it just makes sketch-John look like he has one black eye, his pencil scratching uselessly against the page.
“Yeah, yeah.” He tries to lean over and press a finger to the page, but Arthur’s sitting up and angling away from Marston before he can smudge a greasy finger on it, holding it just out of arm’s reach. When John reaches out again, Arthur swats at his hand. “I ain’t that ugly and my beard don’t look like that.”
“What beard?” Arthur snaps his journal closed, looking over his shoulder at Marston’s frown. “You can grow one of those? I thought that shit on your face was from the dog.”
“I could say the same of you!” John shouts, unsuccessfully, because Arthur is staring at him with raised eyebrows and an amused smirk that’s only just visible beneath the mustache in sore need of a trim, before the hairs curl over his upper lip and into his mouth. He doesn’t have to say anything, barely gets out a giggle before John’s hands are thrown up into the air, “Look, I don’t have to deal with this.” And he stomps off with Arthur’s laughter at his back.
He keeps that sketch, at least. Will probably tear it out and leave it on John’s pillow, when he finds the time, just to antagonize him a bit; all in good fun, until Dutch tells him to play nice because his favorite son is cussing and stomping around instead of choring.
But still— as amusing as the doodle is, Arthur suddenly can’t draw. Or, at least, nothing is coming out well in his eyes. Flat and lifeless, crooked lines. It’s bothering him more than it should. Between hauling bags of grain, he crouches next to the chicken coop, watches the birds scratch at the ground. He sketches one of the chickens, and then aggressively scribbles over it when the texture of the feathers looks, too on-the-nose, like chicken scratch.
“What’re you drawing?”
Kieran asks like he’s been rehearsing the simple sentence in his head for too long, and still, his voice cracks at the end as Arthur fixes him with a look over his shoulder. He always forgets how tall Kieran is until he’s sitting somewhere in Kieran’s vicinity, and he has to look up to meet his eye. He doesn’t carry his height well, perpetually slouching, unless he’s dealing with the horses. Then he has to draw himself up, if only to get them to behave.
“Nothing.” Arthur admits with a grumble, because it feels like he’s been drawing nothing over the past few days, just series of lines and shapes that don’t connect together into anything tangible. Kieran’s smile goes uneasy, baring his teeth with uncertainty as he takes a step back and away from Arthur.
“Sorry to bother—“
“No, no, it’s fine.” Arthur rushes to clarify; he hadn’t realized his tone had been rough enough to have sent the other man almost scurrying off. Kieran flinches, stands and stares at his hands. “Frustrated with myself, is all. Nothing’s coming out right.” He hesitates, for a moment, before he turns and moves in closer, so that Kieran can see. His eyes go a little wide, glancing up towards Arthur’s face before he looks at the proffered journal.
“It all looks real fine to me.” Kieran says, almost sweetly, hesitantly flipping back to a previous page. Makes something in Arthur’s gut twist as he lets Kieran reverently touch the corners of his pages. “I- I think you’re being hard on yourself, is all. I could never get anything to look like that.”
He taps below one of the sketches of the horses, careful not to actually touch it. “That’s a real nice one. Nell?”
“Yeah,” Arthur confirms, pleasantly surprised at the recognition, huffing out a chuckle. “Stands still long enough to sketch. Just like Uncle, actually.”
Kieran’s laugh is genuine, the corners of his eyes creasing, tucking strands of hair behind his ears. Arthur laughs, too, even if it’s not the funniest thing he’s ever said, but it’s infectious when he hears it come from him. “It’s true,” Kieran says, “Oh, he can be real awful, even if he’s a sweet horse. Always rolls around in the dirt after I brush him through...”
Arthur flips through his journal, showing Kieran a past page of Uncle in various states of sleep around camp, his face an exaggerated, comical caricature, drool from his lips. Kieran laughs again, loud enough that the chickens startle and scurry away from their feet. He hides his mouth behind his knuckles pressed against his lips, setting the edge of his teeth against the cracked, rough skin there, and Arthur’s eyes are drawn to that point, and the space in between.
Kieran’s always busy working. Arthur is, too, even if Dutch don’t see it, browbeating him whenever he lingers too long in camp, in those scant moments where Arthur tries to catch his breath. He stays for a day or two, at the cusp of outstaying his welcome, then heads off: hunting, carriage theft, house robberies, whichever the road takes him towards. Keeps his hands occupied with violence instead, hoping once he’s sufficiently wrought enough destruction he can create something again. He’s not an artist, and the journals he keeps are a self-indulgence, besides. He reminds himself this frequently, mutters it hushed under the fabric of his bandana pulled over his lips.
His responsibility to the tithing box pulls him back, like it always does; he cleans before he returns, for Grimshaw’s sake, but ice cold river water can’t rinse off the dark shiner he’s sporting before he rides into Clemen’s Point and leaves his horse in the pasture. He knows he’s looking rough; not even Swanson bothers him when he strides through camp to the stewpot, face grim. He loads up the cleanest bowl he can find with Pearson’s pottage, eats it hunched and voracious, standing by the fire, spitting inedible pieces of gristle to the ground. Caine’s the only one brave enough to approach, though only to snuffle near his feet for scraps. He barely sniffs at Arthur’s fingers when he reaches down to pet him, trotting away when he finds his hands empty to leave him to the dregs of his stew.
When he finally drags himself to his tent for the first time in a week, there’s something amiss; someone’s left a salve by his cot, on the edge of the small table, next to his mother’s orchid. A metal tin promising pain relief, among a long list of other cures, the label blurred under the oils of nervous fingers ceaselessly worrying the paper. Arthur rolls it over in his hands. Mulls over who gave it to him as he smears the thick lotion around his eye, under his shirt and the deep bruises across his ribs. The greasiness sticks to his fingers, and is an easy excuse to blame when he settles back into his cot that night and his pencil slides uselessly over the pages, and it snaps in half between his fingers.
Kieran wordlessly tacks up Arthur’s warhorse before he leaves in the quiet, blue hours of dawn the next day. Arthur doesn’t notice the two pencils in his saddlebag until he’s nearly in New Hanover, setting up his tent on the plains for the night. A gift, wrapped carefully in a scrap of fabric, tied off with a length of faded, frayed ribbon. He sharpens them with his knife, until the point of one almost draws blood when he touches the lead. Almost, but not quite. Drawing by firelight isn’t ideal, but he feels compelled by something entirely outside himself, squinting over his journal, the coyotes yipping in the distance.
Arthur returns a week and a half later with the sun at his back, his shiner finally healed. He doesn’t draw attention to himself when he makes his way to the tithing box, pulling a stack of cash and two watches from his satchel. Dutch only commends him once the box shuts with an audible snap, his face turned to his books. Arthur doesn’t reply.
With the sun setting, there’s precious few hours of light left in the day, though they’re longer and longer with each sunrise. Arthur hates the heat that clings to his brow, but loves the hours of daylight summer brings. Sweating oneself dry was a small price to pay for more hours in the day. But they’re running thin, the sun disappearing in a fireball beyond the water’s horizon. Arthur has only a few minutes to find Kieran. He wasn’t in the pasture when he dismounted his horse; he’s not at the scout campfire, either, and Arthur’s hands feel sweaty in his gloves.
He almost misses him, on his second walk through camp. Kieran’s near the chicken coop once more, sitting beneath the large tree there, quietly smoking in its roots. He’s obviously not expecting anyone; he looks nakedly tired, the lines around his mouth deepening as he takes a slow drag, the heaviness of his lids.
“Kieran.”
Kieran looks flushed, the ember of the cigarette throwing his face into stark shadows. His eyes shift upward as he stubs it out against the bark. His neckerchief is loosened and his hat is off his head, balanced on his knee, and without it he looks decidedly underdressed. “Arthur?”
“‘Fore the sun sets,” Arthur starts, trying to calmly stress his limits, the strange feeling that their time was quickly waning. It doesn’t make much sense; Arthur could always show him tomorrow. But there’s an urgency that’s gripping his lungs as he reaches for his satchel, “Look.” Unsaid, but implied in his tone: please.
Kieran stands, using the tree as support for his wobbly legs. Arthur opens his journal, paging to the frayed ribbon holding his place.
He has to rotate his journal, and Kieran huddles in close, looking over his shoulder. It’s hard lines in some spots and soft smudges in others, thumbs and knuckles used, the side of his pencil washing shades of grey. The soft shadows mottled underneath Kieran’s eyes, purple and blue, somehow rendered perfectly in the smudge of lead across the page. The greasy knots of his hair. Kieran’s smile, crooked and easy. It’s all there.
“Oh.” Kieran clutches at Arthur’s sleeve, where he’s rolled it up to the elbows, in the folds of fabric there. Buries his fingers in and scrunches the material tight in his grasp. “Oh. Arthur, I—“
He sounds almost on the edge of tears, maybe. Or some other emotion swirling thick in the back of his throat. The sun slips slowly beyond the trees, the fat clouds drifting overhead speeding up the pace of darkness falling over Clemen’s Point. The campfire has been allowed to dwindle down further than it should, and it barely casts any light far enough towards where they stand, behind the coop and the shadows of the trees.
Kieran fists his hands into the front of Arthur’s dress shirt, twists and pulls; he steps forward, and Arthur steps back, allows him to box him up against the big oak, the bark rough against his lower back where his shirt has bunched up and revealed skin.
Kieran tastes like tobacco mostly when he kisses, parts his lips to let Arthur lick into his mouth. Arthur brushes split knuckles against the scruff of Kieran’s beard, sucks on his bottom lip until Kieran whines and his knees buckle against Arthur’s legs. He wraps his arms around Kieran, his journal still in hand, the spine of it pressed to Kieran’s hip. When they part, Arthur’s eyes opening, it’s almost too dark to see Kieran’s smile, the redness splotching across his cheeks; Arthur tries to commit it to memory.