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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1891
Author's Note: This chapter is pretty graphic and kind of disgusting. If maggots bother you, maybe use caution when reading this.
Arthur awoke, trembling from a combination of the cold and of grief. It may have only been autumn in North Elizabeth, but the nights were as cold and unforgiving as ever. The grief, on the other hand, was just as excruciating as the temperature of Arthur's body.
He was still covered in blood. It had been a week since he'd murdered Anthony, and the filthy, stinking remains were still lying on the ground over the top of Eliza's grave, a feast for the animals. After the pack of coyotes had come the vultures, and then the rats. Luckily, no bears or wolves had been attracted to the smell of the carion just yet, but it was only a matter of time.
Now, the carcass belonged to the maggots. There were thousands of them, rolling and wriggling over what was left of the pile of meat that had once been Anthony like the waves of the sea. Arthur let them do it. Soon there would be nothing left of his body but the bones, and he figured the animals would take care of those.
Still, Arthur refused to leave the graves. There were a few maggots on him, too. He could feel them wriggling in his hair and on his skin, eating the dried blood left there. In his grief, however, they were only a minor annoyance.
His whole body felt numb, and the only pain he felt was the pain of his grief, the pain of knowing that his little boy lay dead in the soil beneath him and that it was all his fault. He lost track of the number of times he'd cried in the week since murdering Anthony. He didn't eat, and only drank a few sips of water from his canteen every once in a while, when something in his brain that was attuned to survival forced him to. Still, he was massively dehydrated and his head hurt terribly, along with his stomach.
Along with his grief came the crushing, debilitating guilt of knowing this was all his fault, that if it weren't for him, Eliza would still be alive, and Isaac would never have existed to be murdered in the first place.
The smell of Anthony's body and of his own no longer bothered him. Towards the end of the week, he began to wonder if he would die soon, too, and be consumed by nature as well. He felt like death and he smelled like it as well because of all the blood in his hair and on his clothes. His hair, particularly, had become a matted carpet held together by blood and maggots, rotting alongside Anthony's body. He resembled some sort of zombie in appearance and demeanor, only alive because his heart refused to stop beating and his lungs refused to stop drawing breath.
He thought it was a dream when Hosea and John came to him. He could hear them talking as they rode up. Arthur lay on the ground with his eyes open, refusing to move and barely breathing as he had been for the past few days. At first, they thought he was dead.
"Jesus," he heard John say softly over the sound of soft hoofbeats. "What the hell happened here? Arthur?!"
"He's dead, John," Hosea said softly, dismounting his horse. "Look at him."
