Chapter Text
The sunrise is real pretty.
Arthur’s gone through so much in his life – lost people, killed people, drove people away – but this is what makes him the saddest, he thinks. The sky is so pretty like this, dark clouds giving way to red hues, black and pink mixing together to create a beautiful array of colours you don’t see anywhere else.
He’ll never see it again.
Not after he’s died.
As Arthur’s breath leaves him, he thinks he sees people. Sees John walking away from him on that mountain, Sadie and Tilly and Abigail and Jack riding away into the forest. He sees Thomas Downes collapsed on the ground, blood on his chin and a cough in his chest.
He sees the stag in a forest, lifting its head gently, slowly, gracefully.
It looks at Arthur for a moment, and then puts it head back down again.
It almost looks approving. Arthur doesn’t know why.
Maybe it thinks the sunset is pretty, too.
It’s a real good one. Red like his veins, purple like his lungs. Arthur would give anything to see just one more, he thinks.
But that all comes too late.
By then, his heart has slowed. His breath has fallen.
Arthur is dead.
Hamish remembers the first death he saw.
It was a kitten he and his sister had found one day as children and smuggled home, convinced they were doing the utmost to keep it a secret from their parents and delighted in having their very own pet. Then one day Hamish came home to his father smelling of alcohol, as he usually did, but this time he was leaning over a barrel of water, fist plunged into its depths and holding a squirming ball of fur.
Hamish had tried to wrestle the kitten out of his father’s hand and only got himself a slap on his face and a dead pet at his feet.
Decades later, that death seems so small and insignificant, though it had broken him as a child. He had no way of knowing how much death he’d yet to see.
He loses his sister and his mother, never finds out what happens to his father after the man just up and leaves one day. Loses friends when he moves to Ambarino, loses comrades and fellow soldiers in the war. Loses his damn leg.
You would think, after a while, he would grow used to it. That it would no longer phase him, that he would come to expect it – and he does, in a way. Every person he meets, every creature he gets to know, there’s a little voice in the back of his head reminding him that he knows very well how mortal all beings are. But the pain is still there when he loses yet another friend.
At first, he doesn’t think much of Arthur’s absence.
The man has a habit of coming and going – Hamish can tell he has some kind of duty of care, a family or just some folks who need on him. It’s a duty Arthur seems to both love and hate in equal measure; he always looks reluctant to cut their time short but he never hesitates, either. He has people depending on him, and Hamish knows what a blessing and a curse that can be. He lets Arthur go without protest.
But the man checks in on him. Either because he’s lonely, or because he’s worried about the old man in an old cabin on a cold mountainside – which is frankly ridiculous, because Hamish survived a bloody war, several bears that thought they were smarter than him, and, most impressively, he deals with Buell on a daily basis – and his company makes time go by faster, makes the clock tick quieter and the clouds move peacefully. Hamish has grown used to, every few weeks, seeing a familiar dark steed and a well-worn gambler hat round the lake in front of his cabin.
Arthur’s been gone for a while, and that little voice in Hamish’s head goes off again.
He ignores it because there’s no profit in pain. No profit in deliberating over a man who might just be busy, not when there’s hay to lug and roof leaks to fix and Buells to bully into the stable, just once, please just once, can you get in there without throwing a massive hissy fit first?!
But then he hears the gunshots, the yells of the lawmen running up the mountain, the hoofbeats on the cold, stone ground, and that voice gets louder and louder.
He doesn’t set out with the intention of finding Arthur. No, his main goal is to find whatever poor bastards those lawmen rounded up like cattle and drove through the forests – see if any of them are alive, if they have any last words they want to be heard or any final letters they want delivered. That’s the most he expects; those gunshots were loud and rapid, those yells and screams violent. No way in hell anybody lives through an attack like that.
He wishes someone had done that to him, when he was lying in the mud and baking in the sun. The leg had been the least of his pain, it turned out, compared to the hot, clammy grasp of summer weather. It took him days to crawl out of the battlefield and into the view of a soldier, so he does his best to ride up that mountain and ensure no-one goes through what he did.
There’s blood and viscera, more dead bodies the further he goes up. Two dead horses left to rot amongst the dust. It’s all things he’s seen before so he isn’t too phased, kicking Buell when the horse decides to put up a fuss. “I’ll make sure you end up like one of ‘em if you don’t shut up,” he promises, and Buell gives up with a low huff.
At first, he doesn’t realise it’s Arthur.
Even from a distance, he can see the blood on the ground and the body, the stillness of the chest. Hamish stifles a sigh as he climbs off Buell, already gearing himself up to check the body over for any letters or packages or family heirlooms. Then he walks closer and sees the familiar shirt and vest, that scar that never let his beard grow fully, that hair that curled under his hat.
Hamish never had a son, but all of a sudden he feels himself losing one.
He forgets about his leg in the hurry to Arthur’s body – it trips over a stone, rattles his entire body and squeaks threateningly. He ignores it and runs forward until he’s close enough to touch Arthur’s face. It’s slack and limp, red around the eyes and mouth. Hamish isn’t stupid, he saw the coughs Arthur had tried to stifle, the blood-shot eyes he hid beneath his hat. There’s bruises on Arthur’s skin that go beyond sleepless nights and an illness in his veins. By his side, his fingers are twisted at odd angles. His nose is at an odd angle. It looks like a painful death.
Hamish places a hand on Arthur’s wrist, expecting a stone-cold touch, a missing pulse.
There’s a beating beneath the skin.
Slow but there.
Arthur is alive.
The ride back to his homestead is a blur. He remembers lifting Arthur and worrying about how light he is, remembers Buell sniffing temperamentally at the new weight added to his back, remembers glaring at the rainclouds gathering on the horizon. But other than that it’s a haze: a distant memory, a half-faded photograph, a childhood story your parents told you but one you didn’t remember.
He knows he rides Buell down the mountain. He knows he carries Arthur into his cabin. But he’s too busy listening to that voice saying dead, dead, DEAD to pay much attention to it all.
Arthur does not get better. Not at first, at least.
Hamish eventually recognises it as tuberculosis. It’s what one of his comrades died of, years after the war – they had fought together and bled together, but this was a battle Hamish had not been allowed to be a part of. The man perished with blood around his mouth and a glaze over his eyes, and every day Hamish prays to whatever cruel god created this world that Arthur does not meet the same fate.
He doesn’t. Hamish has no idea how it happens, but Arthur gets better – maybe it’s the doctor that Hamish dragged to his cabin, who looked him over and recommended sleep and rest and over-charged Hamish for all sorts of colourful bottles and pills that the old man was sure did nothing. If not that, maybe it’s the clear air above O’Creaghs Run, the rejuvenating lake nearby and the fresh-smelling flowers that are growing as winter slowly meets its end. And if not that, maybe it’s just Hamish’s presence – waiting, thinking, not willing to leave Arthur alone for longer than however long it took to scare the coyotes outside away or bully Buell into being quiet.
At first, Arthur is eerily still in the bed. Then he starts to sweat and cough quietly. Then his quiet coughs turn into endless fits; he opens his eyes for the first time during one of these and they’re filled with tears. The coughing fits subside and are replaced with a fever that Hamish spends days weaning away. Then, once Arthur is finally well enough to sleep instead of simply pass out, the nightmares come.
They’re full of names and places Hamish doesn’t recognise. He hears a dirty rat at one point, a Dutch at another; at that last one, he asks a neighbour heading to Valentine to grab him a newspaper and reads about the undetermined remains of the shattered Van der Linde Gang.
He reads the words carefully, then looks at Arthur sleeping in his bed. Arthur is a dangerous criminal, a man who has – according to the newspaper – taken the life of hundreds and made widows and orphans of even more. He has robbed people, homes and banks, has stolen valuable treasures and threatened valuable people. His head is worth five thousand dollars.
Hamish throws the paper in the fire and gets along with his day.
It’s not just tuberculosis Arthur is recovering from, either. He’s clearly been in a fight – his nose is broken, as are several of his ribs. There’s cuts and wounds all over his body, scars that Hamish doesn’t want to know the stories behind, bruises that look like they were left by a rabid animal with a vengeance. Tending those wounds, treating his TB and taking care of his own self is a tall order, taller than anything Hamish has had to deal with in years, but he takes the responsibility with a sigh and keeps tying the bandages.
The first time Arthur wakes coherently is a few weeks after he drags the man off the mountain. Hamish has just gotten in from brushing Buell’s coat – not that the bastard is any grateful, he’d been eyeing a patch of mud as soon as Hamish put the brushes away – and he walks in to Arthur looking blearily around the cabin. When he spots Hamish, he narrows his eyes and rasps out, “'amish?”
Hamish grins. “Arthur, you’re awake! Thought you mighta been a goner.” He pulls a chair up to the bed, waits for Arthur to finish looking around the cabin. “Found you on a mountain not too far from here. You looked pretty beaten up. As did all the men around you.”
He gives Arthur a look with the last comment, one that causes Arthur to avoid his eyes. The man squeezes his hands on the cover, feeling along its material like it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever seen. A cough rattles his chest and Hamish fetches him a cup of water that he takes gladly.
“Thought I was dead,” Arthur says eventually. “Felt like I was dead. Made my peace, said my rites and everythin’.”
Hamish laughs. “Well, sorry to disappoint but seems we still need you on this Earth. You got some strong angel looking out for you, Arthur Morgan.”
Arthur snorts derisively. “I don’t deserve no angel, Hamish.”
Hamish only hums. Arthur is a good man, this he knows, but it’s always harder to convince someone of their own greatness. Maybe Arthur isn’t a great man; the papers certainly don’t think so. But Hamish has watched Arthur whisper sweet nothings to his horse and offer to do the cabin chores enough that he’s pretty confident he’s right.
Arthur closes his eyes and leans back against the pillows. Hamish has been sleeping on the floor while Arthur recovers, his body getting used to the harshness of the ground despite it being years since he’s had to bypass the luxury of a bed. The fire keeps him warm and that’s good enough for him. Arthur seems to melt into the bed though – his head sinks into the pillows around him, his body lost among the fabric of the cover. He looks so small and frail all of a sudden, and Hamish feels a pang in his chest.
He clears his throat and asks, “got anyone you want me to write to?” When Arthur shoots him a questioning look, he adds, “to tell them you’re not dead. Like I said, you were pretty beat up – and that was weeks ago. Wouldn’t put it past your friends to think they’d lost you.” Wouldn’t put it past your friends to think that’s not a possibility, he doesn’t say, because he imagines the life of an outlaw isn’t a kind one.
Arthur shakes his head. “Naw. Everyone else is gone, if they know what’s good for them, or… well.” He sighs. “Got no-one left for me anymore.”
Hamish would argue against it, but Arthur’s already starting to fall back into the bed. His eyes start falling and a yawn escapes his mouth, and it only takes a full minute of bullying before Hamish has him horizontal and falling asleep.
Over the next few days, Arthur wakes up more and more. He stays awake longer each time, is more coherent and aware of his surroundings. Hamish even notices the disease getting better – it’s slow and agonising, but his coughs subside and his face gradually regains its colour. His eyes aren’t so bloodshot anymore and his body not as clammy. He has no idea how the hell that works, last he checked tuberculosis didn’t just go away magically, but at some point in life Hamish learned not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Hamish starts helping Arthur out of the bed. Arthur can’t go far, his balance is worse than even Hamish’s so they settle for stumbling across the cabin and collapsing him into the nearest chair. He likes to sit by the fire and watch the flames while Hamish does the chores. Clean the dishes, wipe the floor, load the hay. It’s all done in a shared silence that grows more and more comfortable as the days progress.
“You’re getting better,” he tells Arthur one day after watching him cross the room with only a few wheezes. “A month ago you wouldn’t have been able to do half that distance. You ain’t dying on me just yet, Arthur.”
“Never said I would,” Arthur grins and settles into his chair with a hum. He holds a hand up to the fire, seems to consider it for a moment. “The doctor I visited had been sure I’d be dead real soon. Said the only hope I had was a dignified exit. Get some place dry and warm.”
“Well, Ambarino may be dry but it’s definitely not warm,” Hamish hums. “I told you, you have an angel watching over you.”
Arthur shrugs it, but this time his eyes are thoughtful.
A week later, their tiny haven is broken. Not for long, but just long enough to put the caution back in their bones.
Hamish has just come back from riding Buell around the forests, letting the beast work out his attitude and his endless energy, and spots a pair of horses left on the side of the path. He looks sharply to see two smartly dressed lawmen talking quietly before the homestead. The door doesn’t look like it’s been opened, but Hamish hurries to meet them all the same.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” he calls out, and his voice could be called icy.
One of the men startles and holds up a reassuring palm. “You the owner of this house?”
“I may be.”
He nods and steps forward with a badge. “We’re Agents Carlyle and Scott of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, just asking around about some outlaws spotted around this area.”
Hamish frowns. “Round here?”
Carlyle nods. “There’s been a few reports of suspicious activity in the Grizzlies. I assume you’ve heard of the Van der Linde gang, Mr.…”
Hamish sizes them up – they look proper and confident enough to probably know how to use the guns on their belts real well, and even if they didn’t Hamish is just a single man. There’s not much he can do against them. He casts a subtle look towards the cabin; there isn’t a single movement from inside.
“Hamish Sinclair,” he offers, and the men gesture for him to get off his horse.
They question him about his every move for the next few minutes – where he’s been, where he’s going, if he’s noticed anything out of the ordinary, if he’s noticed anything not out of the ordinary, what he had for his damn breakfast. Hamish plays the line between ‘clueless citizen’ and ‘cranky old man’ well enough that they make their excuses soon enough, their horses galloping down the mountain.
Hamish hitches Buell outside the house then runs inside as quick as he can. It’s empty upon entry, and for a second his heart skips a beat. “Arthur, you there?”
There’s a beat, then – “Are they gone?”
Hamish looks around the cabin but can’t spot Arthur. “Yeah, they’re gone. The hell are you?”
Arthur pushes himself out from under the bed. His face is red and his shoulders hunched – there’s that misty look in his eyes again, the one that always preludes a coughing fit. And they’d been doing so well, too.
“Had to… hide,” he croaks as Hamish helps him up. “Saw the hats and panicked, but… but they didn’t see me. Did they bother you?”
“Not too badly.” Hamish sits Arthur on the bed, pats his shoulder as he starts to collapse in on himself. “What kind of mess have you gotten yourself into, Arthur Morgan?”
The man sends him a tense look. He waits a moment, then says, “Hamish, I gotta tell you something. And you gotta promise… Well, I can’t make you promise that. You should get rid of me, if you’re still half-sane. But… Well, I’m an outlaw.”
There’s a beat of silence. Hamish raises a brow and gives Arthur an unimpressed look. “I’m aware.”
Arthur blinks. “You are?”
“Course I am! You think I’d be hiding you away in my cabin if I didn’t know that? And that ain’t the mess I was meaning, I was meaning your lungs. You couldn’t just hide behind the door or something?”
Arthur blushes. “Like I said, I panicked.”
“There’s an outhouse right outside, you know. No windows or nothing.”
“Panicked,” he says again, and settles into the bed like he’s wishing it would swallow him whole. “What were they doin' here?”
“Interrogating me,” Hamish sighs. “All them lawmen always seem to think the quiet, old men are hiding a thousand secrets. Never leave me in peace if they see me in town.”
“You are harbouring a fugitive,” Arthur says, his voice amused, and Hamish scratches his chin with a laugh.
“So I am. They said they’d gotten some reports about activity in the area, but unless you’re sneaking out whenever I have my back turned – and trust me, I’d notice – I have my doubts about that. Like I said, it’s not the first time I’ve been questioned: things like this happen every few months, lawmen barking at my door to ask about some petty criminal that’s already probably left the country. I wouldn’t worry myself too much, if I was you.”
Despite his words, Hamish is concerned. While he didn’t exactly lie – lawmen do come around with hopeless investigations – he’s never been interrogated by a Pinkerton Agent, and never about something he's letting sleep in his bed and eat from his cupboards. It’s possible one of Arthur’s ex-gangmates has been running around Ambarino and stirring up attention; Hamish doesn’t read newspapers unless he’s actively looking for something, and recently he’s been too busy with Arthur’s health to pay attention to the world around him.
After that, they’re more careful. Hamish takes less trips out, stays home longer. Arthur flinches at the slightest sound outside like he’s expecting an enemy around every corner. Hamish wonders if he’s ever had to live like that before, and for how long. He remembers coming back from the war and never trusting silence.
He makes sure to always fill the cabin with his tall tales and Arthur’s warm laughter.
Arthur should be dead, but he’s not, and he isn’t too sure if he’s grateful for that.
He’s been in Hamish’s cabin for a few weeks now and he’s starting to get restless. There isn’t much for him to do here other than stoke the fire every now and then and help out with the dishes when he can. He can’t push himself too far otherwise he’ll set off a coughing fit. Ridiculous things set them off, too – if he moves too fast, moves too abruptly. Sometimes he’ll just be sitting in bed when his chest seizes and coughs rack his ribs. There’s no clear pattern he can avoid, no answer he can easily look up, and it’s grating on his nerves.
He’s avoided death, but if he’s honest it doesn’t feel like that sometimes.
He sits around a lot doing nothing. There’s no camp to keep in order, no gangmates to do chores for. His horse isn't around for him to take care of anymore, and his journal’s lost to him forever now. He can’t even write. It feels wrong to just sit there and accept treatment, but Hamish won’t abide by anything else. Resting and healing, he says, which makes Arthur snort. Doin’ a shit load'a nothin’, he says back, and Hamish just shrugs.
The most entertainment he gets out of the day is Buell’s various antics and his own wandering thoughts. Buell’s bound to do something to piss of Hamish at least once a day: rolling in the dirt an hour after he’s been brushed down, chewing through his rope and running off into the woods, stomping his hooves at every animal that dares to be within a mile of him. Half the forest is terrified of him, Hamish reckons, and Arthur figures that’s not too far off. He’s a little scared of Buell himself, though he’d never say it out loud – half because he knows Hamish would never let it go, half because he thinks Buell would understand it and turn his torment onto Arthur. Somehow.
His thoughts are… less pleasant.
He mostly thinks of the gang. It hurts. He thinks of sweet Mary-Beth and pitiful Karen, wonders where they ran off to in the dead of night. Thinks of Reverend Swanson and the man he grew into, a man Arthur was proud to see yet sad to see so late, and of Strauss and how Arthur kicked him out into Murfree Brood country without a lick of protection. He’s ashamed of that, he’ll admit, but at that moment he had been so blind with rage he couldn’t think anything straight through. There’s Trelawny and his hushed goodbyes, Pearson’s lonesome songs he started singing by himself, Charles and the hug they had shared the night he left with the Wapiti. Jack and Abigail, gone wherever the hell they went to, and John, who he’s sure he’ll never see again.
He thinks of Dutch, too. He always thinks of Dutch.
If he just had his damn journal, it wouldn’t be so bad. Hosea had been the one to get him his first journal, a tiny, scrappy thing to write down all those loud thoughts in your head, I know they’re in there somewhere. They’re everywhere, actually, and that’s the problem – he can’t get away from them. Journals had allowed him to take things that wouldn’t leave him alone and put them on paper. He could be at peace once he had put his wonderings down somewhere.
Arthur’s not sure he’ll ever feel peace again, to be honest.
But that’s not quite true. He feels peace, or at least something like it, in moments with Hamish.
When Hamish returns from chopping wood and nods happily at Arthur, like he’s visiting to go hunting again and not because he’s some dead weight taking up his bed. When Hamish pulls out some beer and pops open two bottles for them, an old war story already half out of his lips. When Hamish helps him move around the house so he can look outside and watch nature march on by while he stays still, unable to go anywhere.
Hamish reminds him of Dutch, before the man went crazy. Or – no. He reminds him of Hosea. Yeah. Hosea.
It’s a bright morning, birds singing in the distance and squirrels scuttling in trees. From the window, Arthur watches a fox sniff around the wood stash curiously, poking its nose here and there before lifting its leg to piss on a log. Arthur snorts. He’s sure Hamish will appreciate that when it’s time to bring the firewood in.
Arthur settles into his chair at the table. There’s a half-finished plate of food he can’t stomach; his appetite’s gotten better with time, but it’s still not great. He picks at what he can but any more and he thinks he’ll be sick. It’s game Hamish has hunted, slipping out whenever Arthur is sleeping and returning the moment he wakes. Arthur never thought he’d miss the godawful salted offal Pearson gave him for long journeys, but the table seems somehow empty without Pearson’s shitty cooking.
“You whittle?”
Arthur looks up, blinking. “What’s that now?”
Hamish is sitting across the cabin in his own chair, taking a moment to relax after dealing with Buell in the morning. Arthur’s honestly not sure what they’d been doing, just knows there had been a lot of yelling and cursing and that Hamish had come back to the covered in mud but satisfied. They had been sitting in soothing silence for a good while before Hamish spoke.
“I said do you whittle?” Hamish points to Arthur’s fingers, moving restlessly by themselves on the table’s surface. “Hands can’t sit still for more than two minutes. Figured you used to whittle or something, I can get you some wood so you won’t be so restless.”
Arthur laughs under his breath. He forces his fingers to still, feeling the ache in them to move, to create, to just do something. But his journal is long gone, safely in John’s coat as he fled to wherever the hell he was posted up now. Or at least that’s how Arthur is thinking of it; he doesn’t dare imagine that something had happened to John, his brother in all but blood, the man who had his back when he probably didn’t deserve it.
“Nah, I don’t whittle,” Arthur says – then, before he can stop himself: “Had a friend that whittled. Made all sorts'a pretty animals, bears and birds and wolves. Man would sit in silence for hours at a time, payin’ the folks round him no mind as he worked. Gave me a carvin' of a stag, once, one we’d hunted.”
Hamish smiles. “Where is it now?”
“Gone,” Arthur swallows. “Friend’s gone, too. They’re all gone.”
The cabin is silent for a moment, and Arthur feels the urge to bite his tongue. Back in Beaver Hollow, he had wanted nothing more than to leave the damn gang behind – he’d felt weighted down there, chained, wanted to run free and escape and go somewhere warm and dry where the TB wouldn’t take him. Camp had gotten bleak and miserable. No more of Javier’s guitar playing, no more of Sean’s drunken yelling at three in the morning. Tilly wouldn’t fondly roll her eyes at the boys’ antics and Miss Grimshaw wouldn’t push everyone to bed when it got late enough.
What used to be a bright, joyous place for the gang to relax in became a suffocating cage. It was like an old picture whose colour gradually bled away, delicate shades of greys and beige turning into stark black and whites, scratches visible on the surface and creased in the corner.
Arthur had folk there, folk who depended on him, folk who he would never abandon – but God, did he want to run away and never look back sometimes.
And now, when he’s miles and months away from his past life, he seems to not be able to do anything but think of them.
There’s some shuffling on the other side of the room and Arthur looks up to see Hamish determinedly put his leg on. He gives the thing a few careful knocks, shaking it briefly before nodding and walking across to room to pick up a fishing rod. “You look like you’re about to jump out of your own skin, Arthur,” Hamish says. He extends the fishing rod to him. “You haven’t forgotten how to use those legs of yours, have you?”
Arthur takes the rod after a moment. He hates fishing, always has, but right now the prospect of going outside and away from these pressing four walls around him overrides that. Still, he has to ask. “You sure it’s safe to be out there?"
“Pinkertons ain’t been around in ages.” The man digs out another fishing rod and settles that one against his shoulder. “Like I said, they likely asked me because I look old and stupid, not because they saw you. We’ll be just fine out there.”
Arthur’s protest had always been half-hearted - he practically jumps out of his seat to leave the cabin.
They help each other walk to the lake, probably looking like a pair of fools. Hamish, hopping around on his one leg and struggling to balance himself on Arthur, who is still hunched over and tensed because every inch of his body hurts – an old, familiar hurt, one he has grown accustomed to, but a present one none the less.
Arthur remembers exactly when the last time he’d been outside was: when he was dying on that mountain, watching the sunrise for what seemed like the final time. The world around him looks more beautiful than ever, now, and he doesn’t know if it’s because he’s been cooped inside for a few eternities or if it’s because he’d been sure he’d never see any of this again.
There’s the blue sky, fairly clear and sunny save a few determined clouds. Spring is steadily on its way and the trees around them are thickening. Brown or dead leaves have turned emerald green, the colours pretty against the brown bark of tree, and Arthur’s fingers itch to draw it. It wouldn’t matter anyway – he hasn’t had coloured pencils for ages now, and a simple black and white sketch of the scenery wouldn’t do any of it justice.
They get to the lake and sit on the dock with a sigh. Arthur takes a moment to catch his breath while Hamish prepares the rods – he pulls out his special lure, shows it off to Arthur and rattles off all its unique pieces, then starts spinning tales about the fish in the water.
“It’s been a lot quieter since we took out the Tyrant, but it’s not silent." Hamish aims his rod at the lake, reeling it in slowly and expertly. Arthur stalls as best he can, content to sit and listen rather than actually fish, but Hamish’s good-humoured glares eventually get to him. “I swear, I saw a bluegill twice as big as my hand the other day. Couple more months and we’ll have another beast on our hands.”
Arthur cracks a laugh at that, tugging on his rod as best he knows. “Seems like you attract the biggest game, Hamish.”
The man hums. “Heard tale of a big boar that’s apparently been roaming around here. Figured once you got well enough to be on your own I might grab a rifle and see if I can track the beast down.”
“I’m fine,” Arthur says. “Seriously, I can eat and sleep and breathe all on my own now. Ain’t a baby. You want to go hunt that boar, you should do it.”
Hamish looks him up and down. “You sure you’d be okay on your own?”
“Sorry to disappoint, Hamish, but I ain’t dyin’ any time soon. Think God missed His chance by a few months on that one.”
“Try not to tempt Him again.” His words are teasing but his eyes seem almost far away, already making plans and thinking far ahead. “I’ll probably make a trip of it, then. No measly boar is going to scare me away from hunting.”
“There’s the man I’m used to,” Arthur says cheerily, then shakes the rod in his hands. “Now show me what I’m doin’ wrong, I been holdin' this thing for near five minutes now and I ain’t got one bite yet.”
Despite Hamish’s promise, it takes a good few weeks until he risks leaving Arthur alone. It reminds him of Miss Grimshaw a little, or Dutch and Hosea when he was young – they’d hover around him whenever he was sick, including one time he came down with a fever and had been stuck in bed for a week. He remembers Hosea holding his hand whenever he woke up from hazy dreams, Dutch checking in on him in the dead of night. Both of those men are dead now, though in different ways. Miss Grimshaw’s gone too – she had always been a tough love type of woman, more likely to bat you around the ears for scaring her than to hug you in relief. He wonders if anyone has buried her.
Weeks pass of Arthur shuffling around the cabin as best he can and Hamish never leaving him alone. He goes out a few hours a day to work Buell, isn’t always inside on account of having to do chores for the house, but it feels a bit like an annoying, buzzing fly. Arthur’s going to snap, he knows, and he’s going to snap soon.
“I’m fine,” he insists for what must be the hundredth time that day. He’s just had another coughing fit after some laughter caught up in his throat. They’re getting less and less common these days, not rare but not as overwhelmingly present, and he’s sure this is just a minor setback. Hamish has a stiff muscle in his jaw, though, and Arthur’s been around him long enough now to recognise his fisted hands as anxiety.
“We’ll see about that,” he says. “You’ve been real lucky, Arthur, but that luck has to end sometime. I’m not taking any chances unless I have to.”
Arthur’s pretty sure his luck ran out as soon as Dutch turned his back on the gang, or maybe the moment they picked up Micah. Things would have been a hell of a lot easier without that little rat. Or maybe they wouldn’t have been, and Dutch’s demise was inevitable. Arthur doesn’t really like to think about it.
“Hamish, I ain’t a patient man,” he bemoans. “Now get outta this damn house before I set Buell on you or somethin’.”
The man snorts. “Now there’s a threat. You really think you’ll be fine?”
“I ain’t chokin’ on my knees here, am I?”
He’s sitting by the fire, his fingers itching restlessly to do something, anything, and growing increasingly annoyed when he can’t. He hasn’t asked Hamish for any paper partly because it’s slightly embarrassing, but also because it feels – wrong. He drew when he was bored at camp, when he had a morning off from jobs or when something interesting had happened and he needed to get it now then and there. He remembers drawing things for Mary-Beth; the girl was so earnest in her writing, asking Arthur to read her stories and teasing him gently when some complex metaphor went over his head. When she was particularly proud of a page Arthur would try to draw out the scene. Vague figures, blurry backgrounds. They were never anything impressive but Mary-Beth always loved them.
Drawing here, in a cabin he doesn’t own, after what should have been his death, after all of that – it feels wrong, somehow. Like he’s not allowed to be happy.
Arthur rolls his eyes at himself. Near-death has turned him into a drama queen, clearly.
It eventually takes a sighting of the boar itself to convince Hamish.
They’re drinking coffee at the kitchen table, exchanging stories as they go, when Hamish stands to stretch his legs and freezes in front of the window.
“Woah,” he drawls. “They weren’t lying.”
Arthur looks up curiously. “'Bout what?” he says, and Hamish waves his hand almost urgently. He stands up and looks where Hamish is looking. Out by the outhouse stands a large, fat boar gorging itself on the grass by its feet. It’s fur is a discoloured brown, hairs out of place and unrulier than even Arthur’s beard, and two sharp tusks point out of its mouth.
Arthur wheezes out a breath. “Holy hell!” he laughs, and beside him Hamish nods.
“I saw some cattle gorged the other day but I didn’t think it was possible.”
Arthur looks at Hamish’s face. There’s nothing that brings people together more than living in close quarters, which Arthur knows well. He knows things about his gangmates – ex-gangmates, a voice in his head reminds him – he’s sure no-one else would ever even think of. He knows Tilly has a sharp tongue in the morning, that Charles plays his harmonica until the moon has begun to fall. Bill can sleep through any amount of noise whereas Kieran was the easiest person to scare awake in the entire state, Arthur’s pretty sure. Jack used to demand bedtime stories before he went to sleep, and not one person had escaped the duty when called upon – Javier, Karen, Miss Grimshaw, even John. Even Dutch.
The point is that Arthur has spent the last few weeks, likely even months now (he’s not been so good at keeping track of time recently) living with Hamish. He knows the man’s expressions like the back of his hand by now – and this, a quirk in his brows, a shiver in his leg, means he’s plenty excited.
“Go on, then,” he says good-naturedly, and Hamish turns to him. “I can tell you’re chompin’ at the bit to go after the bastard, get goin’.”
Hamish looks at the boar carefully, then Arthur again. “Promise you won’t die while I’m gone?”
“So long as you do the same,” Arthur snorts. “I’ll be fine, now run after that thing before it gets away!”
Hamish sends him a grin he hasn’t seen in a while – the grin tells of a hunt, an adventure, the largest fish he’s ever seen and a wolf that almost outsmarted them. Hamish isn’t a brooder in any sense, not like Arthur is, but it’s good to see him in such high spirits again.
Hamish grabs the nearest gun and throws the front door open. He brings the scope to his eye, waits a moment and then shoots, but his aim is off and the bullet misses. The boar turns around furiously and, seeing Hamish’s gun, flees.
“Damn, I thought I got him!” Hamish doesn’t look too disappointed, though, and instead turns for the back of the cabin. “I’ll get Buell and run after him,” he tells Arthur as he passes. “You stay good and hidden, got it?”
“Got it,” Arthur calls back. He watches as Hamish mounts the meanest horse alive and takes off into the trees.
He snorts before walking back inside the cabin. The door he shuts firmly, locks it like Hamish had showed him, and reclines into the bed to rest his weary bones. He looks around the cabin to do something; he’s too awake to sleep and there’s not much else to do.
Hamish will be gone a while, Arthur reckons. He decides to throw away his nerves and starts looking for some paper and a pen.
Buell’s not too happy to be broken so suddenly from his rest, but luckily for him Hamish doesn’t really give a damn about that.
Buell puts up a fuss as the tack goes on and tries to bite Hamish’s fingers once or twice, but other than that he’s fine. Hamish knows he likes the hunts, really – a good way to work out excess energy, chasing something going as twice as fast as him – but Buell, being Buell, has to put up a fight to save face.
They climb up the hill by the cabin to try and get a glimpse of the boar, but it’s nowhere in sight. Hamish stifles a sigh and instead looks downward. In the dirt and gravel there’s hoofprints, fresh and too large to be any ordinary animal. He makes a triumphant noise and follows them.
They lead around a bend and to a pile of rocks underneath a mountain. The rocks are broken and scattered like they’d fallen in an avalanche, but the ground is steady enough that Hamish knows not to worry about that. Instead, what worries him is the two piles of pig shit on the ground – there’s a pile leading up to the mountain and another leading further down the path, and he can’t tell which is fresher.
As Hamish turns over what to do, Buell grows fussy below him. He swishes his tail and stomps his hooves, snorting loudly enough to be sure to catch Hamish’s attention. “Yeah, yeah, you big bully,” Hamish says. He tugs on Buell’s reins a little, just to remind him he’s not the only one who knows how to be annoying, and kicks the horse up the path. “Don’t you try buck me off again, you old devil – I got a gun with me, you know, and if I’m not using it on the boar I’m using it on something.”
Buell doesn’t seem impressed by the threat. He snorts derisively but follows the direction Hamish gives him. If Arthur were here, they could split up and cover both directions just in case, but on his own Hamish will just have to hope he gets lucky.
As the trees around him thin out and the landscape gets rockier, hoofprints start appearing on the ground. He laughs when he finds some he’s sure are recent – the beast is around here somewhere, he knows it. It’s been a good while since he’s been on a hunt like this, stuck in the cabin caring for Arthur, and it feels better than he thought to be on the chase again.
Just around a large boulder, there’s a bloody carcass on the ground. Hamish brings Buell up to it and has only just identified it as a wolf cub – poor thing, but also a testament to how much of a beast this boar is – when he hears a low, guttural sound behind him.
Buell sprints into gear before Hamish can even look over his shoulder. He grabs the stallion’s mane in pure panic and it’s the only thing that keeps him in the saddle as Buell soars across the path. “Damnit!” he cries, then straightens himself and looks over his shoulder and—
Yeah, that’s the boar alright.
It’s big and ugly, plenty of mean judging by the sharpness of its tusks. It’s gunning for them like hell, jumping out of goddamn nowhere and coming right behind them. Buell kicks out at it and it only grunts, picking up speed like it’s encouraged by the blood now seeping from its mouth. It’s got enough scars and bruises that it’s probably true.
Hamish brings his gun up and takes a breath. It’s hard to aim on a horse, let alone one as unsteady and devilish as Buell, and sure enough his first shot misses. It flies past the boar’s head by a mile. The animal makes a deep, angry noise and snorts. It speeds up again. Hamish aims again and tries to lock his body. He pulls the trigger and hits the boat in its shoulder – the thing stumbles for a moment, but a moment only. It gets right back up and starts moving again. Hamish curses, wonders how thick the boar’s hide is, and turns around to kick at Buell’s side.
Under him, the horse is not at all happy. Angry huffs are coming from his nose and his ears are pinned to the back of his head. Hamish feels dread building in his stomach, recognises the warning signs of Buell’s buck, but kicks his heels and tugs on the reins to try and restrain Buell.
It doesn’t work. The boar gets just a bit too close, a bit too eager, and Buell decides enough is enough.
They’ve just made it to the bottom of the hill when Buell digs his hooves into the dirt and comes to a standstill. Hamish feels his body float in the air a split second before the world comes crashing back down: him falling from Buell’s saddle, sailing through the air and then landing on the ground. He lands on his shoulder and cries out, and it takes him less than a second to realise his leg is gone, too. He hears a high-pitched neigh from behind him and his heart seizes. He turns around, but Buell isn’t hurt or impaled on the ground – instead, he gives the boar one good, final kick to its stomach before sprinting into the distance and out of sight.
Despite his position, Hamish breathes a sigh of relief. Buell’s safe and gone, at least – even if he isn’t.
The boar looks in bad shape now. It may have thick hide and more determination than most things on this Earth, but no animal can survive so many horse kicks, especially not from Buell. And Buell just happens to be one of the things most determined on this Earth.
The boar, bleeding from its head and stumbling on its legs, turns its gaze onto Hamish. The man tries to scoot back and call for Buell. There’s no response. He casts about for his gun but it’s too far away. The boar huffs low and loud, smoke coming from between its teeth.
It locks up its body and charges. Hamish closes his eyes.
Just before the boar collides, he hears a gunshot and something drop to the ground.