Work Text:
It’s a warm night at Beecher’s Hope, before the new house is finished, just the frame standing. John won’t stop looking at it, beaming with pride at everything it is, for everything he hopes it will be. A home for his wife and his son to live safely, to put down roots, to grow up and grow old, respectively.
Charles avoids looking at the framework, seeing only bones picked clean and left to bleach in the sun. So much of what is taking place around him leaves him conflicted, feeling split down the middle. He’s happy for John, of course, and hopes that Abigail will come back to him with Jack in tow. John and the rest of them that survived are all the family Charles has and he wants them to be happy, he does.
But it still tastes bitter on his tongue, seeing John take this chance. Knowing that the only thing separating John from deep, true happiness is the pride of two people and whatever hurts they won’t lay aside.
These things are so small, so easy to overcome compared to the impassable wall of the grave.
Just thinking of Arthur’s grave makes the breath seize in Charles’ lungs, burning like he caught the consumption himself before Arthur passed. He hasn’t, he’s been examined by one of the few physicians willing to see a patient with Charles’ skin color and has been assured that he’s in the prime of his health. Charles had almost been disappointed to hear it. At least, then, the time he has to live without Arthur wouldn’t be so long, just a few months, maybe years. Then it would all be over and they could be together again, like they should be.
John pulls Charles from his thoughts by asking his opinion about which part of his land is best suited for grazing and other questions that don’t require too much thinking on Charles’ part. They pass a few minutes that way before John produces a bottle of liquor and Charles surprises him by taking a long pull from the bottle when John sets it down in the dirt.
“Can’t say I’ve seen you drink before, Charles. At least, not much.” John’s tone isn’t judgmental, simply curious. They’ve all been through too much to look down on one another for how they’ve chosen to cope.
“I don’t like to do it too often. My father, he had a real taste for it and it only ever brought the ugly in him.” Charles stares into the flames, watches the sparks dance upward into the sky before vanishing.
“My Pa was the same way. Guess I never had the sense to stay clear of it that way.”
Charles snorts, “Wouldn’t say you’ve got a whole lot of sense, period, John.”
John pelts Charles with a small rock before laughing, rasping and warm, “No, guess not. That reminds me of the kind of thing–the kind of thing Arthur would say when we was kids.”
When Charles glances at John, he has his hat pulled low over his eyes, despite the late hour. His hands are digging at the dirt, almost clawing at it. His shoulders are drawn tight and Charles feels his fingers itch for the bottle again.
He doesn’t know what to say or how to explain away the implications of it. Supposes there isn’t much point now, with only one of them left alive. Rather than searching for a way to explain it, Charles lets the silence hang there and gives John a moment to collect himself.
After a minute or two, John sniffs and clears his throat, “I, uh. I’ve got his things, you know. Some of them; what he had on him when we were running from Beaver Hollow.”
It’s Charles’ turn to clear his throat, to try and swallow down the lump that’s formed there. To breathe around the gaping hole in his chest that he’s lived with for the past 8 years.
“I saw that his hat wasn’t with him when I…found him.” Even just saying this prompts Charles to reach for the bottle again, nearly clinging to it when John presses it wordlessly into his hands. Another long pull, fire burning it’s way down his throat and Charles presses on before he loses his nerve.
“It took some time, finding him. Coming down form Canada alone was near a week and…it wasn’t the easiest place to find.” Charles can’t look at John when he says this, can hardly breathe with the weight of guilt. He should have gotten there faster, before anything had a chance to find Arthur where he fell.
“There was some…some animals had…” Charles feels bile rise in his throat and he sips from the bottle again. John doesn’t ask for it back, doesn’t even try to take it from his hands. He’s silent where he sits, letting what Charles has to say wash over him in waves.
He keeps back the worst of it, not wanting John to suffer the same nightmares Charles still has. Not wanting John to be able to picture Arthur’s body being wrapped in canvas and secured onto Taima’s back like game on it’s way to a butcher’s table. Or the way Arthur’s hair was visible, no matter how many times Charles tried to cover it before vomiting into nearby bushes and mounting up.
John doesn’t need to know how cold and still Arthur was when Charles lifted his body into his arms. That it was a cruel parallel to a trip they’d taken before Arthur had gotten really sick, when Charles had carried Arthur bridal style into the freezing water of the Dakota to wash after a successful day’s hunt.
These things are for Charles alone to bear and he has accepted that. He had promised himself, once he and Arthur had begun what they had between them, that he would see it through to whatever end would come. How natural for Charles’ life for the end to be what it was; how cold and uncaring for the universe to leave him ripped in half, the other piece of himself buried on a mountainside.
You could have let us go together; you could have done that, if nothing else.
John’s voice makes Charles jump, nearly spilling the liquor when he startles.
“I can’t thank you enough for that, Charles. I would have done it myself, if I could’ve, but…”
“You had to get your family to safety, John. I understand. It was right that it was me who did it, anyway. Arthur was…he was my family.”
Charles waits for John’s reaction, knowing, despite as much as he likes to pretend it, he’s not an idiot at all.
“I thought I’d seen him actin’ different, sometime around Horseshoe, before we moved to Clements Point. He weren’t so serious. I mean, he was Arthur, so of course he was serious, but, he seemed lighter, almost. I didn’t say nothin’ ‘cause I didn’t want him getting his back up about it, but I noticed. Abbie did too, I think. She said once that she was happy Arthur had found a piece of joy in his life.”
Charles his surprised by this, hearing that Abigail and John had picked up on a change in Arthur that early on in their relationship. He had thought Arthur was acting differently, but had written it off as nothing more than wishful thinking and overestimating his influence in Arthur’s life.
“It started around then, yes. We kept it up until I went north with the Wapiti. He wanted me to get out while I still could. But leaving him was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. it was like most of me was left behind with him.”
John hums in agreement and Charles supposes he understands the feeling. He’s been living that way since Abigail and Jack left. The knowledge makes Charles ache in a new way, wishing he could fix it for John.
Charles switches track, not wanting to fall too deep down a hole he isn’t sure he could climb out of again.
“You said you’ve got some of his things? Would you mind if I asked what you’ve got?”
John is on his feet in a moment, ducking into his tent to dig around in his belongings. Charles feels his gut clench and he’s not sure if it’s out of anticipation or a desire to run. He doesn’t have anything of Arthur’s, though hes wished a time or two he did. Arthur had given him his heart and the rest of his life, that had always been more than enough.
John returns with a small bundle and places it on the ground in front of Charles slowly, almost reverently. Arthur’s hat is placed next to the bundle gently.
Charles’ hand trembles as he pulls the heavy canvas back and he feels himself coming undone at what he finds.
Arthur’s satchel, looking just as it had when Charles had last seen it. It’s got a decent weight to it when Charles picks it up and he peeks inside. Papers, dried flowers and various other things are tucked away inside, likely not touched since Arthur had last taken them out.
Charles swallows thickly, exhaling a shuddering breath before peeling back a second layer of cloth. Arthur’s tan jacket is folded there at the bottom of the pile, looking exactly like it had 8 years ago.
He’s powerless to stop the noise he emits, a pained sort of groan crossed with a whimper. Raw and wrecked, just like he is. His hands are on it before Charles can think, the tips of his fingers running over the leather, over the patchwork he remembers Arthur doing by firelight at Clements Point. He touches a faded rust colored stain, old blood from their hunting trip to bring down a buffalo in the Heartlands. When Arthur had choked the life out of a poacher, simply because Charles had asked him to after seeing the corpses left to rot, like so many breadcrumbs in the grass.
His eyes run over every inch of the coat, drinking it in, feeling the hole in his chest rip open even wider. Before Charles can stop himself, he presses his nose to the collar of the coat and inhales. There shouldn’t be any scent left, not after so many years of travel and repacking. But, somehow there is. Faint traces of the smell of Arthur’s sweat and skin remain in the fabric and it’s the most wonderful thing Charles has experienced in years.
How long he sits there, clinging to an old coat, inhaling the smell of Arthur, he doesn’t know and nor does he care. John lets him do it, saying nothing at all. When Charles finally, unwillingly, pulls away, the collar is stained with tears he didn’t know he had been shedding.
Charles holds the coat in his lap, staring at it, frozen under the sheer force of his grief hitting him all over again.
“This wasn’t in that pile. It was in his satchel when he gave it to me; I don’t know if he knew it when he gave it to me, but I think you should be the one to have it.” John leans forward, slipping Arthur’s leather-bound journal on top of the coat.
Charles has to close his eyes against it. Against his loss and his memories of all of the time lived without Arthur. He closes his eyes against the cold, stiff corpse he held in his arms, picked at by carrion and stinking of death. Against the sound of Arthur’s body hitting the bottom of the grave he had dug and how Charles had wanted nothing more in the world than to crawl in right along side him. To pull the Earth down over their heads and sleep forever together. He closes his eyes against every sunrise Arthur has not seen, against every night spent in a bedroll or a cot or a bed without Arthur warm and alive beside him.
You should have let us go together. Why couldn’t you give me that, at least? Why give him to me and then ask me to go on breathing without him?
Charles doesn’t know when he started weeping and he feels like he will never stop. He can feel the hot tears run down his cheeks and he closes his eyes tighter, trying not to pray for things he knows he cannot have. For things to be returned to him that cannot be given back.
John’s voice is the softest he’s ever heard it, gentle and so terribly sad, “You really loved him, didn’t you?”
Charles’ voice is raw, his throat ripped near to pieces with the power of his grief.
“Always.”