Arthur Morgan did not intend to survive when he gave his hat to John Marston and stayed behind to gain his redemption. As he crawled towards his final resting place, he never intended to wake up again.
But he does wake up. Thanks to time travelers F...
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Quick note from Alex: I'm changing the format a bit. Squeezing two different time periods into one chapter makes them entirely too long and difficult for me to write two per week, so I'm changing the format up. Now, I'm posting one chapter from before Arthur almost dies of TB and then using the next chapter to focus on the events that occur in 2021. To avoid confusion, I'll write the date at the beginning of each chapter. I'll go back and fix the earlier chapters when I'm done with this story. Let me know what you think about it with a comment!
1883
Arthur sat beneath a familiar live oak tree on the shore of Flat Iron Lake, drawing in his journal. The cool breeze of the lake gently brushed across his skin, and he was forced to hold the pages down to keep them from turning in the wind. Boadicea stood beside him and to the right, munching grass. Tied to the trunk of the tree behind him stood a little, Shetland gelding, perturbed about having been made to stand in the same place for two hours.
The little, sorrel pony pawed a hoof impatiently and chomped at his bit. His long, shaggy mane flopped in his eyes as he tossed his head. "Quiet, you," Arthur grumbled softly, putting the finishing touches on his drawing.
The sketch was of the Evans boys. Such bad luck that Arthur should fall in with their cousin. Dutch and Hosea hadn't been pleased with Arthur when he'd told them. Finally, Arthur felt it prudent to tell them exactly where he had been disappearing to the past couple of weeks, now that it was sort of his fault about the bounty hunters knowing the gang was nearby. As a result, Hosea and John were currently furious with Arthur. The wild card in all of this was Dutch.
Dutch acted like he couldn't care less. "Let the boy fight his own battles, Hosea," he'd said nonchalantly, thumbing through a book of poetry. "Way I see it, they ain't got a clue where we are, and every man ought to fall in love at least once in his life."
John still wasn't speaking to Arthur after the debacle at camp when Arthur came clean about his dealings with Mary. The two young men shared a tent, but in the evenings when it came time to sleep, John always rolled over in his cot and refused to even look at Arthur.
Arthur's pencil bit into the paper as he shaded the drawing a bit to aggressively. The lead broke, leaving a small trickle of dust on the paper. "Damn it," he hissed under his breath, trying to save the drawing by using his thumb to blot up the extra pencil dust.
"What are you damning?" Asked a familiar, feminine voice. Arthur heard the soft steps of a small horse that could only be a Morgan. They stopped nearby, and the horse's rider jumped down off its back. Mary settled down beside Arthur, taking his arm and putting her head on his shoulder as he stared at his ruined drawing.
"I broke the damn pencil," Arthur grunted, snapping the journal shut.
"It's ok," Mary reassured him. "Anything I could ever draw would look terrible compared to your drawings, even if you drew them all with broken pencils."
