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
"Good morning," Arthur murmured into Mary's hair. It was around eight in the morning, and the first shaft of real sunlight peeked through the window of the room, falling across Mary's sleeping face. He gently kissed her sleeping lips and smiled as she stirred drowsily next to him, snuggling against his warm body. There was a fireplace in the small room they shared together, but it had burnt to embers hours ago, leaving the air in the room cold and uninviting.
It was now December in Deer Creek, Montana, and the snows of winter had long since come to cover the world in ice and snow. It had been an unusually harsh winter already, with two blizzards and a blue norther dumping several feet of snow on the abandoned trading settlement the gang now called home.
Arthur's thigh wound had been fully healed for about a month and a half now, excepting a nasty scar, and he now had a new scar on top of that: a really ugly one on his chin from a bar fight involving Mary's honor, Mac, and something about Hosea's saddle being stolen. That wound, too, had somehow become infected, and although healed now, had given Arthur another stay of bed rest while he fought another fever.
After that had come the snows, and Arthur had been trapped in camp since. Fortunately, Susan and Bessie had been given plenty of time upon the gang's arrival to order supplies and they weren't in danger of starving, but money was running low. There had been a few jobs on the journey north, but the money from the disastrous mining shares scam had long since run out. When the thaw came, they'd be very poor. As it turned out, feeding two extra mouths was difficult, and as the gang grew, so did its need for provisions.
On the bright side, no one had heard any whispers about Colm O'Driscoll in months. It seemed he was finally behind them, and Dutch and Hosea had started relaxing a bit more. In any case, he would have been crazy to try and track them in this snow. It was shaping up to be an unusually harsh winter, but Arthur was happy. He had Mary.
To Arthur, Mary seemed happy as well. Their relationship continued to deepen as the snow piled up at the door to the cabin their room was in. Jamie had his own room in the cabin because there was enough space, and that meant Arthur and Mary received plenty of alone time.
Both Mary and Jamie had settled in well to this place. The weather was too bad to make a run into town, so Miss Grimshaw had finally left Mary alone and stopped giving her grief about refusing to sell her body for money. There were whispers Arthur had picked up on from Mac, Henry, and Bessie that Miss Grimshaw still wasn't pleased with Mary, but it didn't bother Arthur. She was the perfect woman for him, it seemed.
He couldn't imagine himself with anyone else. His outlaw life was far less lonely with her around to warm his bed. She was an excellent cook as well, and most of the gang seemed to like her. In all his twenty years, he had never felt this way about a woman. Despite all the saloon girls, working girls, and the others he'd had in his life, he felt an attachment so strong to her that he hated leaving her behind when he went out to do something.
