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A spatter of crimson, an omen of impending damnation, and a promise for cold and six feet of topsoil.
The diagnosis was one that was handed more by the reaper than a man of medicine, with the soul it was dictated being on the stand.
Life, was nothing more than a trail. The open opportunity to make good or bad in the world with what time was spent within it.
This, it was a sentence. An assurance that, no matter what was to be done in the days remaining, the life that had been led was always the wrong one.
Twenty years. Decades of blind faith and shed blood. Spent bullets and lost souls parting from his own that kept only going further astray.
Up until this very moment, Arthur Morgan had spent every day of his life believing that he was making the right choices.
That the man he was, while not a horrible one, was something that could be honorable.He was a thief. A killer.But he had always convinced himself in his mind, with his conscience sounding too deep and too much like the man who had supposedly saved him all those years ago, that the life he chose was something to feel confident in.
But now, with his body giving out, with every breath being an agony and excruciating effort, he spends his time stumbling away from the doctor’s office in Saint Denis wondering if any of this has been worth it.If any of this, all of this lying, stealing, killing, of convincing himself he was a good man while only creating chaos and misery for the lives he came across during his own . . . if any of this has been the right choice.
Has he ever done good? By more than just himself?
Has he ever considered and done anything for anyone but the miserable bastard that stares back at him in the mirror?
When did the small boy he used to see, bruised and crying, turn into the very monster he used to fear?The monster who only existed to appease itself, and ruined everything it ever touched?
As he thinks about it now, it’s obvious.
He sure as hell didn’t do right by Eliza, or Isaac...
The poor girl, only nineteen and so naïve. Arthur was only some years older than her, but he damn well knew better.Should’ve known what one night of greed and a few drinks would lead to. But he didn’t think it would matter until a letter arrived to him, the ink on its pages smeared from dried tears as Eliza wrote to him.
She was terrified, thinking that Arthur would leave her to raise her child on her own, that she would be shunned and wouldn’t be able to let her child survive when she was practically one herself.But Arthur, how he only hurt her worse. Of giving her the empty promise of being there for them, for only visiting when he felt like he had the time for them. For his own damn son.And when he wasn’t running around, robbing and killing folk senselessly, he would write them letters.Ones that spoke of this so-called desire to have been able to stay, to be a family with the woman he loved, and the son they brought into the world together.A supposed dream, one that could have been so easily realized, only to ever remain as such when caught in the daze of train and bank robberies.
And Eliza, she had been right. She did have to raise her son on her own. She wasn’t able to save him when it mattered most, all because she didn’t know how.And Arthur. Arthur could have kept both of those fears from being validated.
But he was miles away, drinking and falling in love with another woman. He only realized that something was wrong when Eliza’s letters stopped coming some weeks later.
He had come too late. Two crosses, two lives lost over a meager sum of ten dollars, an unworthy cost.
His son, and his mother. Unworthy of Arthur’s dedication, of anything other than false promises and poor attempts at being in their lives before they were taken.
And Mary...
He never told her about Isaac, or Eliza. By the time he slipped the ring he bought for her onto her finger years later, there was no point in mentioning the two faces that haunted his dreams some nights when alcohol and her presence weren’t enough.
She believed that she was his one and only, swept up in the daydream of romance and happily ever afters. That Arthur would be capable of changing into the better man she needed him to be.
Arthur made the promise to marry her, to be her husband till they grew gray and weathered. To be the other soul always lying on the opposite side of the bed when she woke in the morning, and the shoulder she needed when her tears fell like shooting stars amidst the constellations of moles on her skin.
He loved her, fiercely and with abandon. With her, the world was tinted gold and shined like the sun, her orbit just as encompassing and bright. He could almost forget, with her pulling at him like the tides, about the two graves withering away like the flowers he left at the foot of them.
It’s as though, with Mary, nothing else mattered. Had ever mattered.
But not everyone was as blind and convinced as they were with one another.
On one side, Mary’s father was never accepting of them, especially so when he found out of Arthur’s way of life. And on the other, Dutch gave an ultimatum, especially so when he found out about Arthur considering a new one.
Pulled apart, they were, to be kept separate as they began.
Her family was high class, raised proper and expecting of only perfection. She was never to be with the likes of Arthur, a young man believing he could be a king and rule over himself entirely, answering to no one.
Like light to dark, they were on opposite ends of the spectrum, clashing against together in contrast until they attempted to mix and blend together with hopes of a life so intertwined that they existed as one. But they were far from complementary, and they could never get the shade right.
And so Mary chose her family by blood over Arthur, and Arthur chose his family by choice over her.
He still has the ring, the one that she returned to him the day that she told him she was leaving.
He places it between his fingers when he’s alone in his tent. He stares at the metal, at the jewels placed as precariously in the fittings as his heart was with the woman who broke it.
Sometimes, Arthur wonders what would’ve happened if he fought harder. If he had actually placed Mary above the man who convinced him to stay, despite everything.
The man who told him that his family was with the gang, and not with the mother of his child and son, or his first true love. The man who always gave him a reassuring hand on his shoulder, and promised that the choice he made would be worth it in the end.
But was it? Was any of it, ever?
Was it worth it when he made that choice with you?
You... You had been something else. Crashing into his life and into the gang like a foal on unsteady legs. You were innocent, unmarred and pure for what you were so intent on getting yourself into.
And a part of him was still greedy, still naive as he was when Eliza served him all those years ago in that bar.
He found himself wanting, dreaming of you as though he were the same young man as he was when he experienced his first heartbreak, and then his second. As though he learned nothing when it came to the way your eyes sparkled from the campfire, when the air sang with your laughter, when his heart fluttered in a way it hadn’t in years when you smiled at him.
This old, familiar feeling in his chest, and the way he had sworn to never make the same mistake by giving into it again.
A scarred man, torn in two by the one he wished he was, and the one he was sadly becoming.
And now, a man with his days ticking down and his lungs rotting from the inside out with each passing breath. His fate, given to him so suddenly, gives him no doubts to there not being a future to pursue with you.
How could he? He’s a dying man now. A man dying by his own, destructive design.
The survivor, finally ailing, when he least wants to die.
And you... when you catch sight of him, his eyes bloodshot and purpled underneath, blood staining his chin and paled lips, it only pushes the resolve further.
He is a bad man who karma has finally caught up to, one that hasn’t deserved as many wasted second chances as he has gotten. One that has done nothing more in his life than make others who weren’t deserving suffer. One that ended so many others in ways much more torturous than the cough and disease killing him now.
He cannot let his final act in this world be hurting you in such an intimate way. To somehow earn your heart, but to shatter it with the certainty that comes with only things such as death.
He can attempt to make amends now, with his eyes clearing while his mind clouds further and further. Now that the world seems to be brighter as he dims away.
He will try to do better, will try to be better.
But he cannot be the man to love you, no matter how much he wishes he could be. Sickness be damned, and if he weren’t ten years late.
For it is a cruel, cruel world, after all, and he was only ever a cruel man living in it.