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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2021
Days passed at the Double L Ranch, slowly turned to weeks, and then somehow became months. Arthur continued to recover from his tuberculosis nicely, but his recovery from PTSD was much more difficult and did not seem possible at all sometimes.
Arthur did not particularly care for therapy very much; Francis Sinclair was nice enough and the treatments he tried seemed to help a bit, but Arthur still often felt empty inside. The emptiness gnawed at him, tugging at horrid memories he tried to keep buried at all costs, until he experienced panic attacks, vivid nightmares, or some combination of the two.
At Dr. Sinclair's suggestion, he had begun journaling again. Keeping a journal was something which had sorely helped him to organize his thoughts in 1899, and although he doubted it helped with his mental illness much, it felt good to do. Next to his journal entries, he also penciled in small, intricate drawings of things he found interesting or that plagued his thoughts.
Drawing almost seemed to help soothe him more than journaling. Mainly, his drawings were merely new things he observed in daily life, like an airplane or a pickup truck. Sometimes, he drew animals and plants as well. His sketches of Cheyenne were always larger and rife with the smallest details, such as the way her forelock always fell to the right side of her face, or the way the sun shone in her wide, intelligent eyes in the light of a warm, spring afternoon. Arthur hadn't been this close to a horse since Boadicea, and it made him miss the kind, old mare so much at times. His brief time riding Dakota had also been enjoyable, but there was just something about Cheyenne that stood out from the other horses. She was like him: trapped in a world where she didn't belong. There was constantly a wild look in her eyes which begged Arthur to remove her tack and set her free to live her life in the wild. Although born in captivity, the mare had the heart of a mustang, and it broke Arthur's heart to pen her up at the end of each day.
Besides his horse, Arthur also drew people. The drawing helped him make sense of the strange clothes everyone wore these days, and it also helped him organize his thoughts about certain people as well. He drew Micah nearly every day, for instance. His old enemy still haunted his thoughts constantly, mocking him from the shadows like a jackal. At night, Micah was nearly always there in his dreams, to the point where Arthur dreaded laying down in bed. Most nights, he got five hours or less of sleep, although frequently he only got two or three. It depended on the severity of his nightmares. Since he'd nearly strangled Jackson, the dreams hadn't been as vivid or real, but they still petrified him with fear. Nearly every morning, he'd wake up, sip his coffee on Jackson's front porch, and draw the version of Micah he remembered from the previous night.
Arthur often drew both Jackson and his sister as well. Both Lintons had quickly become very near to his heart. Six months after first setting foot on the ranch, Arthur began to think of them as family. Although they couldn't have any idea what he went through on a daily basis, they tried to understand and never treated him like a burden or hindrance to them. Twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays, the three ate dinner together. Tori usually cooked on Sundays, and Jackson cooked on Wednesdays. Arthur was generally a terrible cook, so he was quite content to eat whatever the Lintons set in front of him. When he cooked for himself, his meals usually consisted of a variety of canned vegetables and a pan fried piece of meat such as a pork chop. Meanwhile, both Jackson and Tori were amazing chefs, and Arthur never left the dinner table hungry on those two nights of the week.
