Chapter Text
The trail wasn’t all that hard to follow. The blood— Arthur’s blood— served as perfect trail markers, bright red beacons winding a wide trail away from camp, across the Montana, and right back to that wretched place.
Those dumb bastards were still there— a dozen or so green-neckerchiefed hillbilly pieces of shit — still lingering, still muttering, worried about what Colm would do when he found out that they’d lost their captive.
Dutch was more than happy to put those worries to rest.
A little more than a dozen of Colm’s boys were holed up in the area and Dutch had lead enough for all of them. He saw to it they each died painful and slow, and that every goddamned one of them got a taste of the fury that was waiting for Colm.
He asked after the man, when he could find a spare breath, and unsurprisingly none of these chickenshit cowards had the faintest idea. They whimpered the names of other camps— other strongholds— in the area, as if that might save them. It didn’t.
By now, the sun had just begun to rise, but Dutch couldn’t care less if he tried. He was too focused. Too enraged. Too determined to make good on that faux promise of peace— even if he had to personally kill every O’Driscoll to do it. Something had to come from this.
He cleared the house, then the shed, and finally came to face those cellar doors and the stairs that fed down into their depths. He stood at their top a moment, hesitant. Unsure.
The reek of infection and gunpowder still hung in the air, wafting up from the darkness. Sunlight followed him down into those depths, illuminating the horrors that had played out below. Blood was painted on every surface, collected in a slowly coagulating pool at his feet.
On the wall, shackles.
Dutch stared, aghast, disgusted, trying to make sense of what he’d already long since figured out.
This is where they’d kept Arthur. Locked up like a dog, here in this cramped basement, damp, alone, dark. They’d left him here for days, bled him out like a goddamned pig, and Dutch didn’t do a damn thing about it.
Dutch retched, vomiting in the corner, only adding to the mess and misery that clung to these walls.
He saw to it the entire place was ash before he left, starting with that fucking cellar.
And set off to check the other strongholds, after the other O’Driscolls, calling for Colm’s head at each of them.
He stumbled back into camp empty handed a few days later.
What a sight he must have been, soaked and spattered in blood. He’d tried to clean himself up, just a little, but some stains were set enough by the time he bothered. The gang was deathly still; gawking. Exhausted, overburdened, a thousand fucking things and not one of them something Dutch could do a damn thing about.
He’d barely swung himself off of The Count’s back before Grimshaw was on him and had gathered him up, yanking him hard by the collar and pulling him painfully close.
She slapped him hard.
“Where the hell have you been?” she snarled, furious in ways Dutch hadn’t seen in ages. It set the hairs on his neck on end.
And Dutch couldn’t find it in him to respond. He was too lost, staring at Grimshaw’s face. Christ, she was exhausted, her eyes dark and rimmed red like—
Like she’d been crying.
But not because of Arthur. There was no way. Undoubtedly, the man was already back on his feet. He never stayed down for long, never took a hit without hitting right back. He was fine. He had to be.
Still Dutch’s heart squeezed to a standstill, mouth agape, trying to find the words to ask the question he had no right to.
“Is—” he stammered, “Is he—”
“Well he sure as shit ain’t good!” Susan shoved him back hard, shouting loud enough to crack her own voice, “You goddamned idiot, while you were off doing God knows what, he’s— he’s—”
Something broke over her face, something Dutch could feel mirrored in his own.
“He’s going to die, Dutch,” she admitted quietly, “We… we done all we could, threw everything we had at him, I-I even sent out for the good stuff but he… he ain’t waking up.”
“What?”
He heard her wrong. He refused to believe anything contrary. Arthur wasn’t dying. It just wasn’t possible.
“He ain’t waking up. He— he was okay, for a while, but he went down and… He’s just getting worse. Goddamn it, Dutch, we—” Grimshaw swallowed against tightness in her throat, “Nobody knew where you went. We all thought you’d come back to a funeral— but ‘least now you’re here to help bury him, right?”
“Miss Grimshaw, I—”
“Save it,” she snapped, gesturing with a single, trembling finger, “You go see your boy, Dutch Van der Linde, ‘fore you can’t no more.”
He didn’t need to be told twice. Dutch crossed Clemens Point in just a few bounds, his ears ringing like church bells and mind roiling with all the worst-case scenarios. He earnestly had no idea what to expect when he pulled aside the flaps of that tent— last he’d seen, he’d been injured, sure, but nothing a few stitches and some rest wouldn’t fix. Nothing Arthur wouldn’t come back from. How wrong he was.
He pushed into that tent to find Arthur, his chest bared to the air, mottled with every color imaginable stark against the pallor of his skin. Bruises painted his ribs, some accompanied by oozing burns or scabbed-over cuts. Some clearly in the shape of boots— others, hands.
And then the shoulder, which itself seems to have spread far beyond what margins it had before— so much was hidden by the tattered edges of his union suit that now were revealed, cavernous and raw. Weeping, bright-red, and swollen, as if his entire left side had been fed through a meatgrinder. Flayed open— burnt.
Cauterized, Dutch realized, and it sickened him all the more. He knew the horror that accompanied such a procedure. He could remember it all too well— his own hand brushed gently over his stomach, and Dutch traced the outline of a nasty scar of his own, one leftover from his own brush with the barbaric treatment.
Arthur’s left arm twitched oddly; inhuman. Even in the hold of unconsciousness, his face was twisted with pain, lips parted like a dying fish, accompanied by the gasping wheeze of tattered lungs.
Arthur’s right hand was held tight in Hosea’s grip. The man looked nearly as poorly as Arthur— clearly worn and beaten himself. Hosea didn’t so much as look in Dutch’s direction, obviously furious. He was fussing over the wound, dabbing it with some tincture or other. It wasn’t helping. After a moment, he admitted quietly:
“This ain’t right.”
Dutch’s throat squeezed at that, feeling as though he’d swallowed a damn stone. His lip parted, wordless, unsure what to reply to the most obvious goddamned statement in the world.
Hosea’s breath shuddered, too small, too soft, as though he were verging on tears that refused to fall quite yet, “A boy shouldn’t die before his father, Dutch. I— I shouldn’t have to— ”
It was grief, Dutch realized, plastered across Hosea’s face, hanging from his shoulders, curled into every crevice of the man. Grief unwarranted because Arthur— Arthur was alive, so what gave Hosea the right to—
“He was asking for you.”
Dutch balked at the sentiment, “He… what?”
“Callin your name, trying to warn you. Imagine that…” A desolate sound, like half of a laugh, breathy and inhuman, “Got himself beat to hell and he’s still trying to look after you.”
“Hosea, if— if I had known he—”
Hosea sighed, his eyes remaining firmly on Arthur’s face, “I know. I know. You didn’t know— none of us did… but we should have. We should have done better. We fucked up, Dutch. This… This is on us.”
Dutch averted his eyes, washed with shame and regret that he couldn’t quite explain. He couldn’t will himself to take even a half-step forward.
“I know,” he lied.
Because it wasn’t on them.
It was on him. Dutch was the only damn one here to blame for any of this. He’d been slipping— he’d been careless, and now, now Arthur—
“Is…” Dutch’s voice wavered, broke, “Susan said he— he’s—”
“Not if we can break the fever,” Hosea said simply, as though that were all there was to it. As if that weren't the heaviest ‘if’ in the goddamned world.
“And his… his... arm?”
Dutch couldn’t help but stare at the unnatural way that limb was held; the odd way it moved without Arthur willing it to. How destroyed the shoulder was. The flash of white amidst the carnage. A thought drifted to the front of his mind and held, but he refused to acknowledge it. He didn’t know medicine, after all, so even suggesting such a thing would be fruitless. Overdramatic.
But judging by the look that came over him, Hosea suffered the exact same thought.
“One thing at a time,” Hosea said a little too quickly, “We… We need to break the fever. Then... then we can... “
“He won’t have it, Hosea,” Dutch warned.
“You think I don’t know that?!” Hosea snapped, finally turning to face Dutch, teeth bared, “I ain’t giving up on him, so don’t you dare go makin’ assumptions like that, you bastard! ”
“I… I didn’t mean anything by it, friend, I just… Whatever it takes, Hosea, to get that boy back in working order. I mean it. I— even if we have to sell everything we have to pay for it, I want him back in one piece.”
“Working order,” Hosea breathed, looking as though he were about to laugh, or cry, or scream, or all of the above, “Working order?”
“I— you know what I mean, just get him well.”
“... get out, Dutch.”
“What? I— Hosea— ”
“ Get out, ” he repeated, quieter this time, “... please. Just go. He— he needs space. You know how he is, he— please. He can’t… With you here, he can’t— ”
Dutch took a stifled step backwards, then another, stumbling over his own feet as he forged a path back to his own quarters, finding them blessedly empty. He didn’t know where Molly had gone, but in that moment he didn’t give a shit.
He laid on his cot, straining his ears as if he might hear the stuttered inhale of Arthur’s breath over the whispers of the gang.
Tomorrow, he would work. He’d work himself to the grave if he had to. He’d quiet every damn one of those whispers, settle those stomachs, and make goddamned sure Arthur could recover in peace without those vultures set upon him, begging for scraps.
He quietly swore to himself, then and there, that he’d do better. Desperately, hopelessly, this declaration would unravel. Sooner or later, as days wore by, days of exhaustion and bickering and hunger, and failures piled high atop his shoulders, Dutch, too, found himself undone.
For now though, he would merely sit in that near-silence and drink.
_______
Consciousness was gentle this time. Softer. Welcome, for once. Arthur’s eyes opened a bare sliver and nothing more, the feat still herculean. The gentle sunlight of dawn was cast across the ceiling of his tent and for a moment that’s all there was.
His mind buzzed, numbly, heavy with— with morphine, he realized, but more than that, heavy with thoughts. Vague worries of Dutch, of traps, of Colm, but he can’t put form to any of them. Not quite.
Lurking there, too, is something else. A memory of fur and teeth— of gleaming golden hide, limping, stained near-black with blood, stalked by a beast black as pitch with eyes that burrowed into him with fathomless hunger. A dream, or a nightmare, or something else. It unsettled him the same.
He couldn’t remember how it ended, or if it had at all. The more desperate he became to recall it, the more it slipped through his opium-heavy hands.
It didn’t matter, he supposed, listening to the buzz of camp. To Dutch, somewhere beyond these canvas walls, shouting orders to the rest. To the lap of the lake along the shore. To Hosea’s steady breath, the man sleeping soundly in a chair at his side.
Arthur’s right hand was grasped hard between Hosea’s, held as though it were the only thing tethering either of them to this place. And it damn well might have been. Though his muscles ached and groaned, Arthur tried to rest his left hand atop Hosea’s, to return the gesture, to offer some reassurance that he was still here, still fighting.
But he couldn’t.