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
Arthur stared out the window of Tori's pickup truck, deep in thought. It had been years since he'd thought about Annabelle's death, and for some reason the raw pain of visiting John's grave had made him remember that day as though it were yesterday. Like John, Annabelle was innocent when she'd died. Like John, she'd been murdered.
He could picture her laugh, her smile, her mumbled Gaelic curses when things didn't go her way or she was irritated about something. He could remember the way her thin, pink lips pursed when she concentrated on something, and he could practically smell her perfume on the air. Worn ragged from emotion, Arthur resented the memory.
It had taken him several minutes to calm down at John's grave. He didn't know that he would've been able to if it wasn't for Tori. She'd held him without complaint and let him cry embarrassing, hot tears until there were none left in his body to cry. The convulsions that had wracked his body with each sob had sapped all his energy, not that he felt like talking anyway, and his throat was rough and scratchy. In melancholy silence, all he could do was stare out the window as the first snow flurries began to dance through the massive pine trees.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Tori asked quietly.
"Ain't nothin' to talk about," Arthur said quickly in a short, hoarse voice.
And there wasn't. Nothing that anybody would have cared about, anyway. This was a living nightmare for Arthur, but no one ever seemed to understand it completely. Not even Francis, at times. Sure, he pretended to care for Arthur, but even he was just doing his job. Arthur had grown tired of people asking him what it was like to live as he used to, and then immediately steering the conversation away from that topic when they grew bored or uncomfortable. Though Tori might have pretended to care, she didn't. Not really.
And even if she did, she could never understand what he'd gone through, what it was like to be there in his final moments with John and Dutch and Micah, to go from one shootout to another, not knowing whether his illness or a bullet would kill him first. He'd been so sure he was moments from death so many times. Yet, when he seemed to talk about that bit to folk, it simply went in one ear and out the other. Either that or they pretended to relate it to their petty life stories as though they knew how it felt to watch their friend's brain leak out of his skull or to try and patch up a man with a gut shot in the middle of a blizzard.
They also could never comprehend how it felt to have a machine breathe for them, getting no choice in the matter and instead relying on a thick, rubbery tube shoved down their throat to keep them alive, feeling as though they were perpetually suffocating or drowning, and yet unable to die.
At the same time, Arthur was tired of pretending everything was lovely when it had never been anything of the sort. Sure, he was sometimes happy, especially when around Tori or Cheyenne, but each night, as he prepared for bed, he dreaded sleep because each night held new horrors for him, in his dreams.
