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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2022
He could hear Tori sigh next to him as the dawn woke him that morning. It had been a month since the envelope had come from the NPS, and after consulting a lawyer friend of Jackson's, the three of them had decided to proceed with the sale of the ranch, including their property in Ambarino. Things were looking up, but Arthur and Tori remained on edge for a couple of reasons. One being that Sadie was due to be born any day now.
Not surprisingly, Tori was ready to be finished being pregnant. Thankfully, she was able to manage her gestational diabetes quite well and all her ultrasounds and tests looked normal, but Arthur knew neither of them would relax until Sadie was born a healthy baby.
In many ways, though, Tori's pregnancy seemed easier to Arthur than Eliza's had been. She hadn't constantly thrown up in the beginning like Eliza, and she didn't complain about her back hurting her as much. Her feet and ankles were swollen and tender so she didn't spend much time on them, but she moved around less than Eliza had towards the end of her pregnancy as well.
Arthur found his mind turning to Eliza and Isaac a lot lately. They came up in a lot of his therapy sessions with Francis, and he found his emotions strung out and tense lately because of it. Apparently, he'd underestimated how much trauma their deaths had caused to him, but therapy helped him work through some of the things that frightened him most, the things that kept him awake and sleepless at night, holding Tori in the dark for dear life.
He felt like a deer in cougar country, waiting for a predator to pounce at any moment. The slightest twitch of a blade of grass, the most innocent person standing too near him when he went into town, set him off. He'd yelled at an elderly man for following him and Tori in the grocery store the other day, for example. The man had just been trying to get a look at the items Arthur was standing in front of.
Still the memories of his old family continued to haunt him. He remembered teaching Isaac to ride that sweet, little pony of his and taking him fishing in the creek beside the cabin. He'd nearly broken down crying the other day when he recalled the latter memory as he walked beside the small stream that ran through the middle of the valley and had the thought that it might be fun to take Sadie fishing for bluegill in it someday.
Thankfully, he'd managed to swallow the tears and continue on, wallowing in the intense fear that, like Eliza and Isaac, Tori and Sadie would be taken from him someday by the likes of Levi Cornwall. He found himself staring off into space a lot, so lost in very, very vivid memories that he often didn't rouse himself until hours later. His work on the ranch suffered, and he knew Jackson and Tori whispered about him behind his back.
He didn't care, though. He loved Tori and he knew Tori loved him. They would get through this together, just as they'd been through hardships together before.
There was also the slightly silly idea that Tori might die in childbirth. He thought it a somewhat irrational fear because of modern inventions like antibiotics and the existence of highly trained medical professionals. He'd been horrified to learn, though, that women still died having babies occasionally, and babies still died being born. Modern medicine had nothing to prevent horrific hemorrhages or amniotic embolisms, and placentas could still find themselves wrapped around the baby's neck with no recourse except a dangerous, painful c-section.
