Chapter Text
“Does it hurt?”
The question from Charles comes as Arthur’s pulling on his coat, and, despite the fact that doing so in the middle of the snowy landscape (as they currently are) is a very bad idea, he pauses in the middle of redressing. Asks, “The—the changin’ thing?”
It’s been years, and still Arthur has no idea how to say it. His father called them pwca, descendants of shapechanging spirits. Men and women who could take the forms of beasts, something touched with fae magic, the kin of myths.
As for the law, it calls them monsters. Arthur tends to settle somewhere in the middle.
Charles sits back on Taima’s saddle. “Yes,” he says, and then, “I mean when you rearrange your entire body.” Arthur doesn’t know Charles well, not when they’ve only had half a year running together, but it sounds nearly sarcastic.
“Nah,” Arthur says. “Strange feelin’, sure, but you get used to it.”
“It isn’t pleasant to look at,” Charles replies, and the laugh that bubbles up in Arthur’s throat is something he can’t control.
“You’re tellin’ me,” he shoots back, and works already cold fingers over the buttons of his coat.
Even with fur, Colter is miserable. If there were ever a time to feel lucky about what he is, Arthur figures it’s when he can curl up in front of the fire when the rest of the gang are shivering even through layers of coats.
Hosea is pretty sure John isn’t dying, not when the wounds are wolfpack caused, threatened by his smell, and the bullet from Blackwater had been a normal round, not silver. Still, Arthur can hardly stand to be in the same room as him, the smell of infected wounds heavy on the air. As angry as he still may be at John, there was something comforting about not being the only animal in the room, in feeling another wolf lay next to him in front of the fire, even if Arthur would snap at him if he got too close.
But Arthur had just pulled John off a mountain, sick and half-frozen, and the werewolf parts of him are buried deep under layers of pain and fever. What they’ll do when the full moon comes, Arthur has no idea, but he’s sure he’ll be stuck with it, either the event or the aftermath.
It’s cold, and miserable, and those who aren’t injured from Blackwater are sick, and those that aren’t sick are grieving, and Arthur had been near stir-crazy enough to lose his mind. So, when Pearson pressed him to hunt and Charles offered to accompany him, he acquiesced with minimal fuss.
Arthur likes Charles because Charles doesn’t have an issue with silence.
They’re running low on feed for the horses and so, before they can make a trip out to the Adler ranch to see what hay might remain, it makes sense for Arthur to carry his own weight. The shape of a short, drafty pony he’d picked up about a decade back works well enough to move out into the wilderness and haul deer carcasses back, large hooves cutting fine through the snow.
Arthur can’t rightly move vocal cords that aren’t there, and so things had been quiet on their ride out. A few murmured directions, Charles alerting Arthur to some sign in the landscape before wheeling Taima the right way. If he were a wolf, Arthur would’ve been able to help, but his nose isn’t built to assess trails as a pony, not when the most important things in a horse’s brain are the threats around it.
And, so, when Charles speaks, it still feels unusually bright in Arthur’s ears, a warm sort of thrum. He’s just managed to button the last clasp on his coat when Charles passes him a bow.
In lieu of taking the weapon, Arthur gives Charles a look. “Ain’t sure what you expect me t’do with that.” It comes out too harsh, too standoffish, and yet Arthur can’t help that part of him that bristles involuntarily.
Luckily, Charles seems to take it in stride. He gestures with the bow again, until finally Arthur closes his fingers over the polished wood. “Use a rifle, and you scare off game for miles. Isn’t like I can use it right now, and we need this food.”
The off-white bandage on Charles’s hand stands stark against his skin, and Arthur huffs a sigh.
They do need food, is the thing. Arthur can go without, but they got a kid, injured, sick, all folks that need to keep eating if they need to stay alive. Problem is, Hosea’d always used rifles, and it was Hosea that taught him to hunt. “Hope you ain’t expectin’ any sorta skill or nothin’.”
“Never,” Charles replies, but there’s a touch of humor in his voice. He’s dismounted Taima now, letting the appaloosa stand with her reins knotted up so they don’t slip and trip up her hooves. He’s examining the snow, the wind drifted mounds that lie heavy this time of year.
They haven’t talked much, Arthur and Charles. Arthur, like Charles, doesn’t have an issue with silence, but it means he knows little about his hunting companion. What he does know would fill less than a page in his journal: Charles is part Native, part black. He is a skilled robber, and an even stronger huntsman. He is kind to the women, to the animals, to Jack, but tolerates no disrespect from the likes of men like Micah or Bill. They need Charles, that Arthur knows. Folks strong in the way Charles is are a rare find, someone who can be an outlaw without being swallowed by the violence and disregard for others that would make one just a plain criminal.
Arthur also knows Charles doesn’t recoil at things civilized folk would call unnatural, and that’s something. Sure, most folk wouldn’t balk at the small spells used around camp, seeing as they’re just as much as the standard hedgewitch would have in her pocket, but those were a far cry from seeing a man transform into a beast, as both Arthur and John had cause to do.
It’s enough to make a person wonder, especially with as little as Arthur knows about Charles. He finds himself asking, almost unconsciously as his eyes follow Charles’s careful movements through the snow, “You been touched by magic, Charles?”
Charles turns to look up at him, and Arthur almost feels pinned under the weight of his eyes. It’s not an unpleasant feeling, not when Charles’s brown eyes are warm, but he still feels himself still, stiff-limbed until Charles shrugs, turns away, says, “No, not so much as anyone else has.” A pause, and then, “My mother, her tribe, they had some, but it was mostly gone by the time I was born.” And then his eyes are back on Arthur as he asks, “Some reason you want to know?”
Arthur rolls his shoulders, can’t help dropping his gaze away. “Seems most of us have, some way or another. Dutch has a nose for it. ‘sides,” Arthur gestured to the way Charles seemed to be following a nonexistent trail, “ain’t never seen no one what can track like this.”
There are only two men who can change their shape in the Van der Linde gang, but plenty more have magic somewhere within them to varying degrees. Micah Bell doesn’t need bullets to fire his gun, Sean MacGuire always seems to narrowly avoid death through luck alone, Tilly Jackson made a name for herself in her previous gang for the way she was able to get into near any room, Karen Jones always manages to make marks fall for her, and all among so many others. Not everyone in the gang has something unnatural about them, but Arthur would be more than willing to bet that they have one of the highest concentrations of the unusual outside of covens and other regulated communities.
And there are the rumors, larger in scope than they could ever hope to embody. The law, the papers don’t know just how much of the unnatural they possess. That, the Irish, black, Native, Mexican folks in the gang’s makeup, all make them seem more dangerous to civilization than the plain old outlaws they are. Larger than life. And that isn’t even getting to Dutch himself.
The blood inside of Arthur is his father’s. Some Welsh line, carried by his grandfather into the new world. A thing to be proud of, according to Arthur’s father, but the man only seemed to use it for robbing folks blind as long as Arthur had known him.
Arthur watched his father die.
It isn’t a sad memory, per say. Lyle Morgan was one of the worst men Arthur had known, and, even now, he’s glad to be rid of him, to have grown up in the care of Dutch and Hosea. Still, even up to his twenties, he was woken with nightmares of how it happened, the barking of dogs, the snapping of bullets. He’d managed to slip away, invisible in the way children often are, without the men realizing he was the whelp of the man they were hunting, but not before he heard the bubbling, bloody noises of his father dying, watched his torn throat bleeding out into the dirt.
Civilization isn’t kind to the unnatural. Arthur knows that to his core.
Arthur is clumsy with the bow, but he manages to take down two does with minimal fuss. It’s not graceful, but at least his aim is true once he figures out just how much pressure to put on the drawstring. The does don’t suffer, one arrow for each, and that’s about as much as Arthur can ask to be true.
He’s carefully pulling the arrows from the second doe’s hide to store back in Charles’s quiver when the man says, quietly, “Surprised you use guns to hunt, anyway.”
It’s not a particularly funny statement, and yet Arthur snorts under his breath, tilts his head. So many of his habits feel ingrained, and maybe it’s no surprise they stand out to someone unfamiliar to the way things go. “Ain’t got much beyond a wolf that might be able to take down a doe, and wolves are pack animals besides. Maybe if John was here, but, even then, we’d need somethin’ weaker n’what could feel all ‘em folks if we wanted t’stand a chance at takin’ it down.”
That, and it was a particularly brutal thing to bring down a deer with teeth only. Arthur would rather end an animal’s suffering with a quick bullet than allow them the panic of being stalked, worn down by fear and snapping jaws. Better to save that sort of thing for men, who often deserve it.
Arthur shoves that line of thought away, rolls his shoulders. Says, lightly, “‘sides, too many folks complain about spit in their food and y’start learning how to shoot a rifle.”
Charles gives a little hum at that, and Arthur expects him to leave it there. But, instead, he glances away, tapping the arrow Arthur has handed him against one gloved palm. Says, with care, “I heard stories, when I was young. Men and women who could change their shape at will. My mother’s tribe called it a gift, thought folks like that were something to be celebrated, though they were a rarity. That’s why—that’s why, I suppose. Why this isn’t strange.”
Arthur doesn’t need the explanation. Doesn’t need to know why Charles settled in with their merry little band of strangeness, not when so many folks have their own reasons. Still, there’s something in Arthur’s chest, some hard feeling that comes with what he is, what he has, being considered a gift.
But then, quietly, almost like a side thought Charles wasn’t expecting to spill out of his mouth, “I always figured they wouldn’t eat meat.”
Arthur huffs a breath, a sound he tries to make into a laugh, except the weight of it makes it stick in his chest.
Most of Arthur’s forms are carnivores. This was not a conscious decision, but one that fits Arthur all the same. Dogs, wolves, even cougars, all easier to pull a con with than a stag or a boar. Maybe if some of Arthur’s forms had interesting colors, the kind of pelt that would lure men out with the temptation of slaying, but most of them are drab enough to be average.
That, and it’s safer. Too many men with guns roam the woods. It’s not like a stag couldn’t put up a fight, of course, but with so many men intimately familiar with how to kill a deer, it’s safer to take the form of something with teeth, something that can shred flesh.
Maybe it’s fitting, though. He is, after all, a monster.
Arthur runs a gloved hand over the dead doe’s pelt, mulling it over. When the answer comes, his voice is quiet.
“Ain’t no better than the wolves, Charles. Ain’t sure why I should pretend to be.”