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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1883
The sound of songbirds woke Arthur gently. The sun was still below the horizon, but it was that grey hour of the morning where nothing moved, except the last of the nocturnal animals and the first of the small, frightened cactus wrens and sparrows. It was this bird chatter that roused him from the quietest and softest of dreams. Here, in the cool of the morning, he was happier than he'd been in a good while.
Mary slept next to him, her chest rising and falling slowly as she breathed, still ensconced in whatever dreams played behind her soft, gentle eyelids. Arthur didn't move for a moment. He was content to watch her sleep, and he knew the slightest movement ran the risk of rousing her.
Jamie wasn't there for a change. It seemed the whole camp was quite taken with him, and Annabelle had persuaded Dutch to let him sleep in the house with them for the night. Dutch wasn't very fond of children, but Annabelle absolutely loved Jamie, and Dutch dared not refuse her any of her heart's desires.
Dutch, too, seemed happier than Arthur had seen him in years. He smiled more than Arthur could remember in recent memory, and he'd even begun to sit around the campfire and tell stories in the evenings like he had when Arthur was still a boy, and the entire gang consisted of Arthur, Dutch, and Hosea. It seemed wrong to attribute Dutch's newfound happiness entirely to Annabelle (Arthur suspected it also had something to do with the newfound wealth from the mining shares scam and the open, wildness of the New Austin desert), but there was no denying the effect Annabelle had on the man.
In fact, it seemed nobody disliked Annabelle. She was good and kind to everyone, and she had grown especially close to Mary. It was rare to see the two women separated from each other as they did camp chores, and Annabelle was the only person besides Hosea who Mary trusted to watch Jamie while she was away from camp for any reason.
Not that Jamie complained. He loved Annabelle. She sang to him in Irish and played silly games with him to keep him busy. She loved children, and hoped to be a mother herself someday. In fact, according to Mary who had sworn Arthur to secrecy, Annabelle and Dutch were secretly trying for a child in spite of the fact that they were not married. It seemed strange to Arthur and Mary, but both recognized it wasn't their place to judge Dutch and Annabelle's strange relationship.
Arthur continued watching Mary sleep. As he did so, a bird landed on the open window of the horse stall they made their bed in. Out of the corner of his eye, Arthur could see it was a blue jay. He'd always loved blue jays. They were his mother's favorite bird, and some of his earliest memories were of her mimicking their calls out in her front yard, and leaving little scatterings of corn and milo for them to eat.
He'd been thinking about his mother a lot lately, Arthur realized. In fact, he'd been thinking about his entire childhood more than he normally did. Perhaps it was his new pseudo-family in Mary and Jamie that caused the thoughts, or perhaps it was the insanity of the damned desert heat. In any case, Arthur found himself remembering more about his mother each day.
