Work Text:
The mood in camp was dark.
It was only days after they'd buried Davey and Jenny, and there was no guarantee that death wouldn't visit them again.
It had been two days since him and Javier had brought John back. Two days of Abigail running in and out, trying to split her time between Jack and her errant husband. Arthur had seen her crying a couple of times, but the women seemed to have closed ranks around her, seeing off Micah and Bill whenever they got too riled up. And Arthur was damned if he was getting in between Miss Grimshaw and her charge.
Because Abigail was taken up with Jack, it had been Hosea who was mostly shut up with John.
Dutch had been in and out a couple of times. But he'd always been awkward around illness. Arthur remembered that Dutch always seemed to make himself scarce when one of them was sick with something.
Always on a job, or off hunting. A distant presence, bringing in money, or meat, but never the one with his hand on a feverish brow.
Hosea had let slip, though Arthur had only been able to draw him out on the subject with liberal application of gin, that Dutch's mother had not died easy.
That he had taken the slowness of it hard.
Dutch dealt with it the same way he dealt with everything, by not dealing with it at all, but Arthur had also seen the way Dutch would leave packages of medicine stuffed beneath Hosea's bedroll when the nights were particularly damp.
John, Arthur didn't know how to deal with himself. He couldn't seem to calm the rage inside himself. The betrayal he felt. Though he couldn't any longer separate the betrayal he felt on behalf of Dutch and Hosea, and the disgust he felt at John's treatment of Abigail and Jack.
It was all bound up together in his head and in his heart, and he couldn't forgive it. He couldn't find it in himself to.
He knew how the others talked. What they talked about. He knew that the consensus was that it was simple jealousy.
John, always the prodigal son, could do no wrong, and Arthur, dependable Arthur, resented Dutch's joy at John's return.
And maybe there was something in that.
But Arthur knew in his heart, that that wasn't the case.
Arthur couldn't forgive him the look on Abigail's face. On Hosea and Dutch's too. After they figured out that he hadn't been caught in some misfortune. Had walked out on his own two feet.
Most of all, he couldn't forgive him for Jack. For making that boy think for one second that he wasn't wanted.
Arthur knew that feeling. Knew it intimately. Knew the other side of it too.
And he knew that John was a damn fool for every moment he hadn't been by that boy's side.
But he knew also that he didn't want John to die, and certainly not without trying to make some peace with him.
And that was what caused him to interrupt Hosea's vigil, late one evening, when he was certain no one would notice him slipping in.
He hovered in the doorway.
There was a fire made up high in the cabin's fireplace. Stuttering smoke back down into the room with the wind outside.
Hosea hadn't noticed his entrance. Had one elbow up on the chair arm, leaning his head in his hand.
Arthur wondered if he perhaps was asleep. But Arthur cleared his throat, and Hosea looked round too quickly for that.
Hosea smiled tightly. "You need something, my boy?"
"Just thought I'd check in."
Hosea nodded, and turned back to John, huddled up on his back in the threadbare sheets.
"I can't seem to get him warm," Hosea said. "He's… he's sweating like he should be burning up with fever, but his skin is cold."
Arthur didn't know what to say, settled on "he's a strong kid."
"That he is," Hosea answered, with what sounded like no faith at all.
He broke off, suddenly, coughing into his hand.
A hard cough, violent and rough.
Hosea was getting worse, up too high in the mountains. Arthur looked around, and found a water jug on the side, snow left in the warm cabin to melt.
He poured a cup, and passed it to Hosea.
"Thank you, son," Hosea said, when the fit had passed, gesturing around them. "It's the smoke from the fire, it hangs in the air."
"I'll sit with him, if you wanna get some fresh air."
“I… err…”
Hosea trailed off, and Arthur laughed. “You still don’t trust me, old man?”
Hosea looked at him, that way he did. Arthur was sure he could see right through into men’s souls when he did that. God knew, Arthur had never been able to hide anything from him.
“I trust you more than any man on this earth, son,” Hosea said, finally, and it was a shade too sincere for a trite response.
Thankfully, Hosea pushed himself to his feet and stopped him needing to find any answer.
“Call me if… well, just if.”
He laid a hand against Arthur’s shoulder as he passed, and Arthur watched him go, before finally turning back to John.
He looked him up and down. Somehow he looked worse with the bandages across his face. Arthur guessed that’s what imagination did.
Thankfully, he’d already seen the damage, so he didn’t have to let his mind run riot over what lay behind the blood stained cloth. Still, John looked thin, and weak, laid out like a corpse at a wake.
Arthur could kinda see why Dutch couldn’t bear a bedside watch.
That imagination again.
Dutch had the uncanny ability to just snuff it out like a candle. If he didn’t think on it, it wouldn’t happen. It wasn’t happening .
The opposite of Hosea, now Arthur came to think of it. Hosea had always clung on with bloody palms, no matter what, like he himself could hold a man’s soul to earth if he just willed it enough.
Hosea looked , just as hard as Dutch looked away.
And Arthur, well, Arthur just did as he was goddamn told.
He sat, finally, in the chair Hosea had left.
"You better live, John. You broke everyone's hearts too many times already." John didn't move, didn't wake. "And that poor woman? She's spent too many nights cryin' over you, boy. Though why she thinks you're worth it, I ain't got any idea."
John's breathing was shallow, and fitful. But he wasn't gasping yet. Arthur had heard enough dying men, and it didn't sound like this. Not yet, at least.
"And your boy. He deserves to know his father, no matter what a sorry sack of shit he is."
"Mmmm?"
Arthur snapped his head up. "John?"
John shifted a little against the bed, pulling the bandages away from his cheek. Arthur wrinkled his nose at the smell of old blood.
"Hey," he reached out and tugged the bandage gently into position, "be careful."
John mumbled something Arthur didn't try to catch. It was probably nothing that would make any sense anyway, John wasn't awake.
"You hear me, Johnny?" He asked anyway.
John was still again.
Arthur sighed, and glanced around the room. There wasn't much to occupy himself with. Not much up in this mountain anyway. If he cleaned his guns any more he was going to rub clean through the metal.
Hosea had left a book on the side, and Arthur wavered over picking it up. But that was something neither him nor Dutch had been able to pass on.
It all sounded false as far as Arthur could see. Men and women writing about things they ain't ever seen, or felt. Trying to put the best of themselves down on paper.
Arthur weren't too interested in that.
He pulled out his own journal, but he couldn't find it in him to fill that out either. That felt false too, writing about John, until he knew the ending one way or another.
He thought briefly that he could draw him. But if it turned out bad, he wasn't sure he wanted to capture it on paper. Though he couldn't say he was a religious man, there was something blasphemous about that. Giving form and substance to death.
He flicked to a sketch of a perched eagle and gave it a mountainous backdrop, out of his own mind and nothing more.
"'M sorry."
Arthur'd got so engrossed in the bird that he damn near dropped the pencil.
"John?"
John had his eye open, the one that Arthur could see, though it was near swollen shut with blood. His breathing had picked up, but only a little.
Arthur scraped his chair across the floorboards as he dragged it closer.
"John?" He said again.
“‘M sorry,” John mumbled.
“You’re sorry?”
“Mmhmm.”
John lifted a hand to his face. Arthur caught his wrist. “Stop. You’ll upset your stitches.”
John tugged at his grip for a second, but gave up all too soon, and Arthur suddenly understood what Hosea meant about getting him warm. He started rubbing at John’s hand on instinct, trying to rub some goddamn heat into his skin.
John’s gaze was flickering over nothing, never really settling. “M sorry.”
“It’s Arthur, John.”
Christ, Arthur didn’t know who he thought he was talkin’ to, but he sure didn’t want to hear it.
But John just hummed like he knew. “I’m sorry, ‘bout the boy.”
Arthur frowned. “‘Bout the boy? So you damn well should be.”
“I know you didn’t… I know…”
“What you talkin’ about?”
John suddenly started shifting about more intently, tugging his hand away from Arthur’s grip and pushing the blankets back to pool around his waist.
“Hey, hey! Where you goin?”
“Wanna… wanna see you.”
Arthur made a grab for him again, one hand against his shoulder and another on the single patch of unmarked skin on his jaw. “I’m here. I’m right here. Ain’t goin no place.”
“Arthur?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Now lay back.” Arthur gave him a quick shove to get him to move and then dragged the blankets back up to his chin. “Hosea’ll have my hide if I just let you freeze to death in here.”
He kept his hand where it was, resting against John’s shoulder, because it seemed to keep him settled.
John’s breathing slowed again, as he seemed to melt back into the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
“It’s alright,” Arthur said, without thinking, because if god forbid, this was John rallying before the end, Arthur didn’t want his last words to be beggin’ for forgiveness.
However much he deserved it.
“They bury him already?”
“Bury him?” Arthur frowned. “Who? Davey?”
“Was a good kid,” John mumbled.
That didn’t seem to make much sense, though what in hell made sense to a fevered mind, Arthur didn’t know.
“Was sorry to hear of it.” John had closed his eye again.
“We all were,” Arthur played along. He stood up. “Now, you want some water before you go back to sleep?”
“Real sorry,” John said again. “Least… he’s by his momma.”
Arthur halted, with his hand on the jug. He suddenly felt as cold as John.
“What?” He said, though he knew exactly what memory John was reliving.
“She was… real pretty… real…”
Arthur curled his fist around the jug’s handle and closed his eyes. “That was, what? Ten years ago.”
“Was sorry, real sorry.”
Arthur breathed, deep, for a handful of seconds. Trying to resist the urge to just smash the jug between his bare hands. “It was years ago, you hear me? Now,” he poured out a cup of water, “you just have a drink for me, and then you go on back to sleep, you hear?”
He sat back down on the bed at John’s side, and squeezed his arm behind John’s back to drag him upright. “Come on now.”
He could feel the cold from John’s skin all down his chest, and resolved to chop down every fir tree on this goddamn mountain if he had to, to keep the fire burning in this fucking cabin.
John’s head lolled back against his shoulder. “Was a good kid. Wasn’t your fault, you know that?”
Arthur wished he’d just shut the fuck up.
He remembered John saying the same thing at the time, when he was lost in grief and whiskey and apathy.
It was about the only time in his life when he’d wanted to die.
Not in any serious way. Not with any intent.
He just remembered the crushing heaviness of everything, and the dull way he realised he didn’t want to carry on anymore.
John had sat with him, into the long hours of the night, taking shifts with Hosea… and Dutch, for that matter. He mustn’t have been alone in days, and it was only later that he realised that that must have been planned on their part.
He didn’t miss the weight of all that grief. Not one fucking bit.
But he realised that he did miss the easy companionship he’d felt with John.
They were different. Had always been different, since the day they’d met, but in that moment, John was the only one he’d really wanted as a deathwatch companion.
Dutch needed to fix everything. Needed to fill the silence with talking, and philosophy and a whole heap of big words, designed to distance them from any real feeling. And Hosea needed him to talk, wanted to help bear the load of all that he was thinking.
Dark thoughts, that he didn’t really want to share with a soul, and for which he couldn’t find the words anyway.
John was content just to sit, and let him be.
And it was John that had made him laugh, that first time, after everything. When he’d have been content never to smile again. Some story he couldn’t even remember now. Just somethin’ stupid…
He missed having John as a brother.
He missed how easy everything had been once.
He used the arm that was holding him up to jostle John a bit, try to get him awake enough to get some water in him.
Hosea would want that.
But John was a dead weight across him, and the best he could do was to try and trickle water into his open mouth, slow so it didn’t choke him.
The water seemed to rouse him a little. He lifted a hand to steady the cup at least. Managed to swallow at least half of it before he let his hand drop again.
“There you go,” Arthur said, for something to fill the silence.
“Arthur?” John said again, his head lolling back against Arthur’s shoulder again. “I… I think I messed everythin’ up. I messed it all up…”
Arthur wanted to tell him that he had. That he’d fucked it all up for no goddamn reason at all. That he oughta thank all his stars that he still had a woman and a son and a goddamn family.
But he didn’t.
John might be a goddamn fool, but Arthur was a stubborn asshole. If he carried on this whole thing then it might never have an end.
And for the first time, Arthur kinda wanted it to have an end.
For the first time, he kinda thought he might get that prodigal son story.
John had fallen limp against him, but Arthur could tell he was still awake from the way he was breathing.
“Maybe,” Arthur answered, finally, “but you got a chance to put it right.”
“Mmm,” John mumbled, again. “”M tryin’.”
“I know,” Arthur said, because he did know. And he was gonna try too. Because there were a hell of a lot of things he couldn’t fix, but maybe he could fix John. “Now, go back to sleep, ‘fore Hosea skins us alive for stayin’ up too late talkin’.”
John breathed a little harder against his chest, and it was a second before Arthur placed it as a laugh. “Been a long time since those days.”
Arthur smiled.
“Yeah,” he settled himself back, so that the headboard wasn’t digging too hard into his back. “Yeah, it has been, hasn’t it?”