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Dutch had had it all planned out. A long speech to distract the lawmen as they edged towards the edge of the cliff. He’d gesture and nudge Arthur, and together they’d jump, land safely in the water, and be gone by the time the lawmen processed what happened.
But he hadn’t taken into account the waterfall.
“You can’t fight…” he nudged Arthur back, his own heels dangling over the ledge, “Gravity.” and with that Arthur, quick on the draw as ever, twisted and jumped.
They hit the water so hard it knocked the breath from their lungs. Dutch only just managed to keep from inhaling water, and he was just close enough to clap his hand over Arthur’s mouth to keep him from doing so.
They broke the surface with twin coughs, Arthur spluttering while Dutch coughed.”See son?” he laughed, flailing more than swimming as he dodged one of Arthur’s kicking feet, “I told you to trust me.”
“Sure Dutch,” his boy choked as a wave caught him in the face, “Real pretty.”
He laughed as Arthur was thrown ass over head, righting himself with a splutter, near-hysteric with the rush of survival.
“Dutch?” the man struggled to reorient himself, “Dutch!” Arthur’s eyes went wide, and Dutch’s bulged to match when he saw the source of the noise.
Rapids. Jagged rocks erupting from the river. Frothing white waves crashed across them, dashing the unlucky fish that were caught in the tide.
“Shit!”
Shit indeed.
“Swim son, swim!”
If Arthur weren’t too busy struggling to fight the tide, he’d have said ‘no shit, Dutch!’ but the river was pulling them closer and closer, exhausting them as they fought.
As foam filled his mouth, Arthur had just enough time to think ‘this is going to suck’ before he was slammed into the rocks.
He choked, cried out - and got a mouthful of water.
Arthur was there one moment, and gone the next. Dutch shouted his name, surging through the water but regretting it when he barely dodged a protruding stone, the thrown up water burning his eyes. “Arthur!” he squinted against the pain, kicking off an oncoming rock, barely managing to keep his own head above water.
But he couldn’t see him - not even a flash of his shirt, or his blond hair, and his head never broke water. He tried to call his name again, though what that would do he wasn’t sure, but he felt he needed to do something and he couldn’t dive under to save him, he’d never come up again and maybe, just maybe, if he called for him he’d hear him?
Arthur never disobeyed him.
Well, not until recently. But that was neither here nor there, because when it came down to the line, when it truly mattered, Arthur always obeyed him, always came when called. But Arthur was disobeying and just for a moment there was a flash of anger - that unsettling anger that had become to common to him as of late - and then it was drowned out by the chill of horror, because Arthur had been under too long and if he wasn’t responding… no, surely he’d been washed further downstream, surely he just couldn’t hear him over the crashing of the waves and the roaring of the rapids.
Because the alternative… well, Dutch didn’t want to think about it. And then he couldn’t think about it, because he was slammed into a sharp boulder and agony lit along his ribs and he cried out, swallowing water and spinning through the water like a piece of cloth in a modern day washing machine, barely managing to thrust his head above water long enough to catch a breath before he was being tumbled again. And he understood John’s deep rooted fear of the water, and his refusal to learn to swim, and his ‘hidden’ panic when he saw Jack on the shore back at Clemens’ Point and Shady Belle. Granted, the second had been warranted on account of the gators but - well, that didn’t matter at the moment, considering he couldn’t breathe.
He tumbled and spun, clawed frantically as he abandoned all the lessons Hosea had given him in swimming (and would he be seeing Hosea soon? he couldn’t help but to wonder as his chest squeezed and his lungs burned) to instead flail desperately, the energy draining from his body, beginning to slow and weaken as he grew painfully heavy—
—and then his head broke water and half his breath was water but, though it burned and he choked and coughed, he couldn’t have cared less because it was blessed air, air that loosened the iron grip on his chest and returned life to his limbs, and he twisted and had enough breath to scream as he tumbled over the edge of the waterfall, seeing his death before him because he’d seen men hit water and break every bone in their body, had personally put down a young boy who’d leaped to avoid a train and shattered everything, something had gone wrong inside him and he hadn’t been able to breathe and it had been kinder to shoot him.
He still hurt for it, Jasper had been a good young man, but he’d been dying anyway and a death of choking on your own blood was a long, painful death and so he couldn’t regret it.
But somehow, impossibly, he hit the water and sunk, only the briefest of pain from the impact and a shooting pain in his side where he’d struck it, and then his head was breaking water again and he could breathe, could get the breath that gave him the strength to strike out for the shore that was so, so close, and when he struck it it hurt, pebbles and sticks digging into his skin but it might as well have been a caress for how relieved he was, clawing up the bank and there was some pain there, yes, as his palms tore open and his nails were pried off by the stones but when he collapsed on the shore, even his feet free of the water, it was a welcome pain because he’d made it. He’d escaped the water, managed to survive—
where was Arthur?
—he jackknifed up, scrabbling at the stones and having to take a moment to bend trouble, coughing and choking as he cleared his lungs of the water, burning eyes snapping this way and that, darting first to the water which grew shallow not long after the water pooled beneath the waterfall, and he feared seeing Arthur splayed across those rocks, feared he’d not had Dutch’s luck and had hit the sharp stones, feared seeing his blood darkening the water and his limbs at horrible angles.
But he didn’t - pink water was trickling, a ribbon that spread slowly across the pool, but there was no body broken on the rocks and his eyes followed the ribbon to a blue lump that bobbed in the water, something he couldn’t make out with his blurry eyes but he knew, Arthur had landed in the pool too but he wasn’t moving, wasn’t trying to get to the shore, was floating motionless in the water and he didn’t even remember getting to his feet, lurching through the water to paw at the lump until he managed to find an arm and flip him over, his head finally breaking the water and thank god Arthur could breathe as he slung the arm over his shoulder, grabbing the other and awkwardly swimming back for shore.
He laughed a hysterical thing, breaking into coughs as he managed “I told you — I told you son — we made it!”
But Arthur didn’t laugh, or respond in any way, and Dutch didn’t want to look but he had to.
A pale face, blue lips and far-away eyes looked back at him and his heart skipped one-two-three-four beats, because Arthur was never still, even in sleep he moved, twitched and shifted and curled in on himself, but Arthur wasn’t moving — his chest wasn’t moving — he wasn’t coughing or clearing his throat and vomiting up water, he was laying there like… like a corpse and Dutch refused that, he’d already lost Jenny, Mac and Davey, Sean and the O’Driscoll boy (Kieran, his name was Kieran, he deserved as much as to be called by his name), Lenny and poor Hosea and he couldn’t lose Arthur too.
He drew Arthur up, fumbling him when he was far lighter than he expected because Arthur had always been a big man, not since he’d been young and terrified of them had he been this light, even when he and Hosea had half-carried him across camp when he’d returned after the parley they’d struggled under his weight.
But picking up Arthur was easier than lifting his saddle and his heart jumped into his throat, he’d have worried more but Arthur’s head lolled in a way that could only be accidental, water trickling from his mouth but he didn’t cough or so much as clear his throat and Dutch hurried to prop him up, leaning him over his knee and beginning to thump him between the shoulder blades as hard as he could. His ribs screamed as he struck Arthur harder and harder, the man’s body jolting but only producing small bits of water from his mouth and he began to count in his head because how long had it been since Arthur had breathed?
Too long, even Arthur who seemed superhuman couldn’t hold his breath so long.
He set Arthur down more heavily than he’d meant to, cringing at the clattering of his body against the rocks. He threw his coat down, taking just a moment to tug Arthur onto it, before shifting to kneel awkwardly over his prone son, lacing his fingers together and beginning to push on his stomach in rhythm, trying to work the water out of his lungs. With each push water trickled from the corner of his mouth and he leaned forward, tilting his head to the side so he wouldn’t choke.
“C’mon son, come on!”
(“Do you trust me son?”
“...Always, Dutch.”
“Then just follow my lead.”)
Something cracked beneath his hands and he groaned, leaning forward and pressing his mouth to Arthur’s, blowing a breath into his mouth and pulling away with the taste of brackish water and metal on his lips, pinching his nose and trying again when his chest didn’t rise and this time it did with a horrible gurgling and he pulled back, beginning to push down on his chest over and over and over, bones crackling with the force of it, counting off fifteen (or was it supposed to be twenty? thirty?) compressions before leaning forward, alarmed at the taste of blood as he gave him two breaths, praying to a god he didn’t believe in as he returned to his compressions.
He’d lost so many people, he couldn’t lose Arthur too.
Annabelle... Hosea… so many he’d considered family.
He’d raised Arthur up from a boy, just a young thing, scared and cowering as Dutch helped him off the ground. From a kid that cowered when they raised their voices and flinched when they moved their hands, to a father, to a man who stood tall and proud, the backbone of his family, always at his side—
“With you watching over us, I’d walk into Hell itself.”
—always there, no matter what. No matter how angry he’d gotten, how frustrated he was—
“We each got... fifteen dollars. Oh, and a quarter. Don't forget the quarter.”
“Shut up, Arthur.”
—he’d always been there. Even when Hosea had left them for a time, wanting to start a proper family with Bessie, he’d cried, and hidden, but never left him behind. And he’d paid for it, hadn’t he?—
“So, I met up with Leon. That situation with the workers is dealt with. Captured, tied-up, beaten…”
“Poor bastards.”
“No, that was me.”
“I told you it was a set-up Dutch…”
“My boy… my dear boy, what?”
“They got me… but I got away.”
“Yeah… that you did.”
—more, probably, than he’d been rewarded. Always crawling home to lick his wounds, digging out bullets and stitching wounds, having to be wrestled into bed to keep him from going right back out and doing it all over again. How many times had one of the girls come to him because they found blood on his clothes and they’d found Arthur hiding a wound so he could ride out again or join them on a job?
But he wouldn’t let Arthur suffer this time, he’d make sure he was rewarded. But to do that, he’d have to breathe breath back into his lungs, uncaring of the blood he tasted on every rescue breath, of the crunching of broken bones shattering beneath his hands. He could fix broken bones, could let Arthur rest for as long as he needed to recuperate, if only he would breathe.
His arms buckled, each breath shooting pain through his ribs, his hands sinking into Arthur’s chest so much had he broken his bones, his muscles burning from the force of the compressions and his chest tight with how hard he blew breath into his boy’s lungs. Each time the man’s chest rose hope soared in his own, but he crashed back to earth as he never did continue breathing.
Dutch crumpled atop of Arthur, arms giving way and gasping for breath, shaking his head even as he did so. “No, Arthur, please…” but Arthur, of course, couldn’t respond.
A month later, Dutch developed a cough.