This is a really delayed @rdr-secret-cupid piece for the wonderful @alwaysbeliev. This one got re-assigned pretty late, but I do hope you enjoy. I wrote a little piece about how Arthur got into art. I included a little drawing of Arthur’s first sketch, since it was so late, I hope you enjoy!
“What the hell were you thinking?” Hosea growled, releasing Arthur’s arm as they approached a bored looking horse.
“The guy started it!” Arthur argued, rubbing his arm.
“We were supposed to be scouting only, now we gotta move on, they are gonna be on alert now.” Hosea couldn’t look at the boy and he stepped into the saddle.
He thrust out a hand for Arthur, who climbed sullenly onto the horse. The ride back to their camp outside of town was silent.
“Oh, you’re back early!” Bessie looked up from her darning, putting her work down as Hosea and Arthur dismounted.
Her smile fell as she looked up at Hosea’s face, her eyes slowly moving to Arthur’s shrunken form behind him. “Is everything alright?”
Hosea scowled and turned to face Arthur. “Why don’t you tell her about our trip to town.”
The kid held his hat in his hands, a sheepish and pained look on his face. Hosea turned and took the reins, leading Amelia off to get her settled with the rest of the horses. Bessie patted the crate next to her.
“Come and sit, tell me what happened.”
Arthur plopped heavily beside her, his heels digging into the soft earth as he pushed his lanky legs out in front of him. He had grown so much in the last couple years, Bessie thought, looking down at him. She knew what this was about, he had started another fight, blown their cover.
“So, what was it this time.” She said gently, picking up the pair of trousers she needed to mend.
“It weren’t all my fault!” Arthur started, his voice cracking.
Someone requested I post a video of Hosea drawing. First part of the video is an argument between Dutch and Hosea. Drawing seems to be something that relaxes Hosea. Yes, I do think this is in part where Arthur gets his love of sketching from.
Summary: Dutch and Hosea are trying to teach John how to read but he runs off after they got frustrated and Arthur goes deep into the woods looking for John.
Word count: 2298
Notes: mild cursing | brief scene despicting an almost hanging | feedback is appreciated!!!
Happy late Christmas and Happy new year! I’m sorry I’m so late, this took me forever; I’ve been giving it a long thought and decided to comply to your second item in your wish list!
2) i love DUMB ASS John Marston and his better looking brother Arthur; give me a slice of life with the two of them pre-canon, or a story about them helping the other thru a tough time.
I’ve decided to combine both ideas and so this story came to be.
When Arthur was twenty-three, he saw a boy—dirty, savage and with a look in his eyes that had given up on living. This boy was with a rope in his neck, ready to be hanged. Dark gray with no reflection but death itself; no tears, no regret. Dead Eyes that held onto dear life with a fierceness reflected in his fists.
Next to the boy, an unnamed man spoke words of dead wisdom and nonsense which to the eyes of Arthur was meaningless.
“We have come to see the of law enacted. We will not sit idly by as people take the law into their own hands!”
Heavy kind of bullshit that Arthur didn’t enjoy a bit.
The crowd of the town roared loudly in excitement and agreement. For them, it was only entertainment, a show that made Arthur’s gut churn with anger. He tilted his hat lower and turned around, ready to move on. However, Dutch’s hand landed on his shoulder and stopped him.
“He looks like you did, a while ago,” Dutch said with a smirk before the gun in his hip shot the rope on the boy’s neck.
“He doesn’t.”
The boy’s shine returned in a glimpse that Arthur caught with both his eyes and heart. A will to fight and survive, to get the hell out of the mess that was about to start.
“What the hell Dutch?!”
“He was not meant to. Not yet.”
A sense of relief in his chest appeared with a long deep breath. He was glad for the boy that had gotten a chance to live, what was Dutch and Hosea thinking when they brought him into camp?
Arthur got wounded in the dirty fight they had in town for freeing the boy and he was resting in his tent, with Susan on his side cleaning his injuries. When Dutch and Hosea walked in, he asked: “What took ya’ so long?” with a warm grin that quickly faded into disbelief.
The boy stood between the two men, pouting his lips, frowning and crossing his arms as means to make himself more intimidating. The way Dutch smiled, looked and treated him with his gentle gestures and Hosea had given his jacket to protect him from the chilling breeze of that night was so familiar to Arthur; he had been in that place after all. What was that boy doing in camp? Similar to himself in the past, why did they needed to bring someone as intense and dumb as him? Wasn’t one dumb enough? He wondered.
“What’s your name, kid?” Arthur asked after he noticed Dutch’s gaze on him.
The boy stood silent.
“Come on boy, tell him.” Dutch crouched to his side and whispered words to him that Arthur wasn’t able to hear.
He remained silent.
When Arthur was twenty-four, he met the boy. A month had passed from his rescue and Arthur’s birthday quickly arrived with the cold and mean air of winter. There was no snow landscape yet, the skies had become dark and gray like the boy’s eyes and the fallen leaves
“John Marston,” the boy said with a mean streak that left Arthur with a bad taste in his tongue.
“Arthur Morgan.” He extended his hand to greet but John had already abandoned and left him with the words unsaid in his lips.
Arthur sighed and placed his hands on his gun belt; he could see John’s silhouette far away, hiding somewhere where he thought no one could see him, and grinned. A part of him still refused to acknowledge John, prouder than a bull and wilder than a cougar in a midnight sky, and another part of him found itself in that boy who slept with a knife under his pillow.
“John, come here!” Dutch called the next morning.
Arthur was laying in comfortably in his bed, with his worn-out leather hat covering his eyes, thinking about what to draw in his journal. A bird? A flower? An herb? His imagination was as dull as dishwater and his brain couldn’t tell skunks from house cats. Boredom was partly guilty of the dullness, too.
“John, come on.” From his closed tent, Arthur saw how Hosea’s figure grabbed John’s arm and took him somewhere beyond the reach of their shadow. A loud growl, from the boy, echoed through the whole camp that Arthur scoff. The boy was that stubborn?
The blue-eyed man closed his journal, stood up from his bed and walked out of his tent to do the chores of the day. As he chopped wood, he could see Dutch and Hosea, with John between them, sitting together in one of the round tables near the food station with a book in hand. This was going to be fun to see, Arthur thought.
“Okay, let’s try this again,” Dutch said firmly. “Read this part here.”
“No,” John scowled.
“Why not? It’s not that hard if you try. Here. The king in his…” Hosea slowly talked
John went silent.
“Boy,” Dutch lowly growled.
Arthur swung his axe over the log and splat it in half. When he was putting the wood aside, he peeked at John. The boy had his arms crossed, frowning and giving the book in the table a deadly gaze. Did he hate reading that much? Arthur laughed to himself and got caught by Hosea who looked at him with disapproval. Oh shit, oh shit, ohshit. He tried to slowly walk away, feigning ignorance, but the older man approached quicker than he predicted and grabbed him by the shoulder.
“Arthur.” Hosea squeezed hard the shoulder blade and grinned in a way that created grimace in Arthur’s expression, “wanna’ join us? I thought I could show you the new book I got!”
Arthur grunted.
Justgreat. He knew Hosea’s way of scolding Arthur and thinking about it annoyed him, however, he didn’t expect to see Dutch vexed, red-faced and squeezing the book with both his hands, yelling to John.
On the other hand, Hosea was perplexed. He dragged his hands over his now tired face and sighed.
“He wasn’t this troublesome!” Dutch said to Hosea, referring obviously to Arthur.
Something in that statement made Arthur chest puff in pride. Oh boy, he really liked that. Even if he refused to acknowledge this feeling to everyone else, he liked it when Dutch or Hosea praised him.
Arthur remembered the days when Dutch and Hosea were teaching him to read. Hot summer days, mosquitoes everywhere and that smell he couldn’t forget, berries and lemon, which brought his mind ten years back, when he was a thin, small and young boy. He grinned to the loveable thought and looked at Dutch fighting with John.
“Dutch, what’re ya doin’!? Don’t ya’ grab him like that and rub his head!”
“I know he can do it, but he’s not even trying!”
Something Arthur knew is that Dutch would take as “true” whatever he assumed; and hardly took back his words—standing for what he believed, a true blessing for the wise and a curse for the ignorant. Later on, Arthur didn’t know which of those Dutch was. A true mystery until the very end.
“Dutch, calm down, you’re gonna scare ‘im…”
“But I know he can—"
“Shut up, you pair of dimwits!” Susan yelled from afar as she sewed one of Arthur’s shirt.
And before any of them could say any further word, John slammed his hands against the table and ran away into the woods that surrounded the camp.
“Get back here, boy!”
What a mess. When Arthur saw no signs of Dutch calming down or Hosea backing down, he decided to look out for the now goner.
“John! Where are ya’!?” Arthur yelled as he stomped over some broken sticks. Definitively John.
“Ya’ damn bastard, dontchu’ ever get tired?” he whispered to himself, wondering as he furrowed his brows and rushed his pace.
As he walked deeper into the woods, the stars that normally would be faded under sunlight, had come out without any shame, telling Arthur to hurry. The breeze got colder and the sky darker and even if he found clues of where he could have gone to, the boy sure knew how to keep out of sight. He was going nuts; what the hell was the kid running from?! He had nothing to run from and nowhere to go, what was he thinking?
“John!” He called once more before he heard a gasp to his side.
The moment he turned his head, he saw a terrified boy who had fallen into the ground. Unlike the first time he saw him, fierceness shone in his eyes despite of the fear that his thin body could not hide—however, that didn’t mean it wasn’t agile. He quickly got up into his feet and started running towards the glowing moon.
“Oh no, you ain’t!”
He could hear John’s broken breathing and how he gasped for the air he didn’t have; it broke Arthur’s heart.
“Watchu’ running from, kid?!”
Arthur got closer with every step he took and grabbed without any restrains John’s wrist to stop him, quite brusque for his liking but there was nothing he could do. Those iron eyes gazed at him with the loathe and anger he deserved which left a sour flavor in his mouth. John struggled to free himself from Arthur’s grip but it only got stronger.
“Lemme ask you again, kid. Watchu’ running from?”
John struggled again and Arthur grabbed his other wrist. He took a deep breathe and closed his eyes for a moment. Was it this hard for everyone else to deal with him? Being a kid in the streets wasn’t easy, it roughens you up in a way that shatters what you truly are, breaking and eventually rotting every corner in your mind. But he was no kid in the streets no more, he could finally begin living and not just survive.
“He wanted to kill me,” John replied in a quick low whisper.
Arthur raised a brow. “Dutch was shootin’ his mouth off and by now Hosea and Susan must have given ‘im a black eye for that.” He tried to sound reassuring.
“Let go!” John fought with all his strengths to free himself; Arthur tightened his grip.
“Listen to me, kid. You got nothing to run from; here you got a bed, food and people who want ya’—”
“Dead…” John interrupted.
“Let me finish! Goddamit—as I was saying. None of ‘em want ya’ to be a goner.”
“How can I trust you? They all said I was an idiot, useless. They all hate me and they’ll kill me. It’s better if I’m gone.”
“We’re family.” Arthur meant it. He had found a part of himself in the little black-haired boy that wanted to keep running; running to never look back, from all the things he didn’t deserve.
“We ain’t.”
“Listen to me you little piece of…! You became part of us the very moment Dutch cut that rope on your neck and brought you into the camp.”
“Still; that doesn’t mean I can trust you guys. You’re outlaws.”
John wasn’t buying a single bit of what Arthur was saying. Shit. At this rate he was gonna run off by himself and God knows what would happen to him.
“They took me in when I was your age.” John’s eyes widened in curiosity; “I… well, my momma died when I was real young and my daddy… let’s say I wish he did too. They taught me how to read and Hosea taught me how to draw.”
Despite of the nervousness inside him, Arthur took the journal out of his satchel and gave it to John without letting go of one of his wrists. He eagerly flipped through the pages and stopped to look at some of the drawings it contained; some of the graphite stuck into his fingers, but it didn’t stop him from eyeing with detail each illustration.
“Why didn’t ya’ read? Back then, when Dutch and Hosea asked you to.”
There was a long pregnant pause. “I did—read it, I mean. I, uh, wasn’t sure to er, say it out loud.”
“Really?” Arthur smiled from ear to ear. “See? You’re smart, John! Ya’ ain’t that bad, there’s potential.”
John blushed at Arthur’s praise and kept looking at the drawings until he reached the last one, that page that had remained blank for the whole day.
“They are family to me. Family is everything; I’d die for it.” His voice didn’t shake even once.
John closed the journal and gave Arthur a gaze full of admiration that Arthur wasn’t worthy of. He could be one nasty son-of-a-bitch, rash to anger and emotions; unfamiliar to giving inspirational speeches like Dutch would do or smooth-talking like Hosea the Conman.
“And I will…” he stuttered, “I, uh…”
“You what.”
“I won’t let them kill ya’; just in case.”
A mischievous grin appeared in John’s face. “That won’t stop me tho.”
Arthur had let his guard down. John escaped from his grip and started to run the fastest he could. Where the hell was he going to and, most importantly, where the heck had he gotten all that damn energy from?
“Cuz’ I’ll kill ya’ myself, you little piece of shit!”
“Thank you, brother” John screamed in the distance.
“You ain’t got the right to be my brother!” Yet, he wanted to say but kept it to himself.
That day, when Arthur was twenty-four, his family grew by one member. Even if mocked him every now and then and behaved like assholes, it was the most important thing to Arthur. It was everything he had—not like money or gold; those two could go straight to hell unless Dutch and Hosea gave the word.
My followers on instagram voted for him to be drawn, so here he is. The quality is a bit.. questionable, but its really just to protect my art from getting printed. So I keep the hd version of it. Drew him slightly younger than he is in the story.
