squidproquoclarice

[squidproquoclarice]

Friends, Fiends, Fiesty Ones...

I have been quiet here. Too quiet.

Over the past few years, I've battled some unexpected medical turns with family, with kids, with myself. My life became so chaotic I had to set aside projects I loved, but my brain never closed those doors entirely...

That said, I've decided to restart my comic work -- Most noticeably, Pirates of Panem, which was exclusive to Tumblr, will be continuing again.

To do this, I of course need your support! And those that are able to, I encourage you to take a look at my new patreon;

www.patreon.com/chistudios

Not only will Pirates of Panem be uploaded there, but new pages will be added, character images that I never uploaded will be going up, and I also have 5 other series -- never uploaded or posted anywhere -- that will also be going live there. You'll also get to see the behind the scenes images, my storyboards, and all the things I didn't post when I was working on it before!

If you were a fan of Pirates of Panem, of my work, if you feel like encouraging my adventures in comics, please consider supporting me there! And if you can't support financially, please share, get the word out, reblog reblog reblog!

#hunger games #pirates of panem #chi does fabulous work y'all #fanart #webcomic

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Sadie Adler and Arthur Morgan both know two things for sure: attending your ex's wedding is bound to be bittersweet, and ghosts are something not only found in old houses. A fic/art collab between me and @justalittlerayofpitchblack for the @rdrbigbang Mini Bang 2022 challenge.  

#sadie adler #arthur morgan #sadithur #rdr2 #modern au #fic from the parking lot #writing #rdr mini bang

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Yeehawgust Day 31: Git Along Little Dogies

August 1890

Rainbow Junction, Nebraska

Bessie understood losing a child, or at least, she did in some sense.  She and Hosea had lost some babies, one of them achingly close to being born, and every time, she’d cried.  With George, there was an actual grave.  One she still thought about, even near twenty years later.  Pieces of her heart and soul carved out and stitched together only with the most deliberate care, leaving the scar all the same.

But even she didn’t fully know what it was like.  What she’d lost had been mostly the dreams, the hopes, the potential.  Arthur…he’d lost a child fully in the world, named and known and to judge from helping raise her sister’s kids years ago, one who’d already very much started to show a clear personality and self at four.  No, technically three.  Arthur had last seen him alive at three.  Dreams and potential, yes, but so much heartbreaking reality as well.

Three months now since he’d come back and said he found them buried, and soon enough he once again smiled and laughed and did all the usual things within their small family, but she saw that emptiness in his eyes when he thought nobody was looking.  Knew that I’m fine facade for the act it was.

Something else there too, something bleak and hard that unsettled her, but if he wouldn’t talk about his boy and the woman who’d borne him, he wasn’t going to talk about whatever happened afterwards.  She knew Arthur so well now after almost thirteen years, learned his moods and tempers and kindnesses, but he’d gone somewhere she couldn’t follow.

He’d always tended to ride off for a while to be by himself, even before he’d been making trips to see Isaac, but now sometimes those trips ended with him coming back drunk or else in the local jail for getting into a bare-knuckle brawl.  Things that would have felt like youthful idiotic high spirits in a man with energy and temper in abundance now felt like something so different. 

Dutch said Arthur just needed work.  Bessie frankly thought Dutch was full of shit on that point, but wouldn’t say so.  She could see he was so impatient for Arthur to just come back to himself.  As usual, trying to nudge things along, make them into the reality he wanted, and he probably meant well by it, but it was like trying to force a man who’d been gutshot onto his horse and demanding he go holler Git along you little dogies at the cattle and round them all up, claiming it was just for his own good.

She found him out in the barn, on the heap of feed sacks they’d put in to start to prepare for winter.  A book opened and placed facedown on his chest, and him instead staring up at the ceiling as if it had something profound written on it.

She took a deep breath, and knew this would probably either help or shatter him completely, but she couldn’t just stand by helplessly and wait.  Or shove more work at him like Dutch.  Or shove more books at him like Hosea.  Or cluck and fuss over him like Susan.

Arthur heard the whimper from the puppy she was carrying and sat up, though he put the book aside.  Still a man who valued reading enough to not carelessly throw a book to the floor and risk damaging it.  Sat there, looking at her and said, “Found another wayward critter, huh?”  An edge of rueful humor to it, the self-deprecation so familiar to her.  

“Yeah, in town.  This one was the runt.  Man was threatening to drown him, if you can believe it.”  True enough.  Though it had been in a weirdly joking way that she knew wasn’t serious, but which she couldn’t find funny all the same.

“I can believe it.  World’s a shitty place, Bessie.  My pa threatened to drown me plenty of times.”  Said with an offhanded humor, but she couldn’t find it funny either.  The puppy snuffled, wiggled, cuddling closer to her.  “Figured maybe you wouldn’t mind a late birthday present.”

His brows knit together in confusion.  “You and Hosea got me that nice shaving kit.”

“Now, Arthur.  I took the poor boy on and we all know who’s best with animals in this family, and don’t think I don’t see you petting everyone’s dogs and cats given half a chance.  So please just play along with me here.”

Also not untrue.  But hopefully he wouldn’t see what lay beneath all that.  The notion she’d had, looking at that poor last remaining puppy, that what Arthur truly needed was someone who needed him, someone to give some love to, someone to give him some happiness back.  Yes, Boadicea did some of that, but people always had a more complicated dynamic with their horses, given the dependency of a working relationship involved.  Dogs and cats?  It could be much simpler.  

He sat back a bit, shoulders easing, and she saw the faint twitch of a smile.  One of those moments he’d managed to forget the pain, to let it recede, and she thanked God for that.  She’d made the right call here.  “You got me there, I suppose.” 

“Besides, it’s been a while since we had a dog.  What, five years?”

“Seven.  We lost Midnight seven years back.”  A gleam of humor entered his eyes.  “It’s fine, we got little Johnny as a pet instead.  Now, he shits where he ought, but he still ain’t gotten the hang of not yapping all the time, though.”

“Arthur.”  She couldn’t help but chuckle all the same.  “Here.  Besides, don’t I owe you for beating me at dominos this winter?  I always said we needed something to mark the occasion should you ever manage it.”

He was smart enough to know some of what she was doing, but thankfully, he seemed to believe it was just her being a soft touch, and both of them knowing he was every bit as much of one when it came to animals.  She handed over the dog, his fur the color of a newly-minted penny, and watched him cradle the puppy close to his chest.  Already half in love, by the look of him, and laughing at the dog’s boundless energy.  “OK, there, Copper.  Yeah, you’re a good boy.”

“Copper?”

“Coloring.  And hell, we got enough lawmen sniffing out our trail at times–might be nice to have a friendly copper around for once.”

Copper seemed to agree, licking Arthur’s face.  She felt a spark of hope at that.

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #rdr2 #bessie matthews #arthur morgan #copper the dog #cw: child loss #thanks for another year of yeehawgust y'all

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Yeehawgust Day 30: Spellslinger

“Pass the Doritos, please?”  Sadie handed them down to Javier without looking, eyes still on the town map laid out in front of them on Hosea and Lizzie’s living room table.

They’d come to the town of Huckleberry, the six of them, nestled in the foot of the mountains, chasing a vague lead about a crooked mayor and an advertising campaign about it being a health resort that people never seemed to return from.

“Cult,” had been Lenny’s immediate opinion.  Sadie herself might be that skeptical, but her bard, Lara Lucinia, wasn’t nearly so credulous.  Lara firmly believed in sunshine and rainbows and the healing power of song and love.

OK, so Sadie was basically playing a sweet Sailor Moon-slash-Magical Girl character in a fantasy Western, and it was a riot.  They’d all gotten together and agreed to play more or less a tropey character from a non-Western concept, and the fun challenge would be to see what happened with those ideas across a long campaign by playing them straight.

Lenny clearly took his ranger Eggolas Strider from Lord of the Rings.  Javier’s artificer came from Batman, a brooding gadget-wielding millionaire from the Big City whose parents had been killed when he was a kid.  Molly’s druid, with her wild shape abilities and obsession with an alien invasion, was from Animorphs.  Mary-Beth’s barbarian was a quintessential 80s action movie hero, right down to the quips and the testosterone.  As for Arthur, his paladin earnestly drew from Captain America. 

They were a hell of a band of misfits. It’d be a riot, if Hosea didn’t kill them all first, though he seemed as amused by the challenge of seamlessly weaving all this batshittery into his campaign setting as anything.  To his credit, he’d done a hell of a job of it so far in the three sessions they’d had, which saw them get off the blizzard-blocked mountain where they’d begun, stuck there while fleeing from pursuit by black-clad riders during some major upheaval in the region.  For what, and how they’d all individually ended up in Midnight River in the first place to have to flee, they didn’t know just yet.  Hosea was leaving it up to them to come up with that story.

So in the saloon now, gratefully having a drink after a hair-raising couple of weeks on the run, imagining the moment, Sadie could just about feel Lara relax.  She’d done her best to keep spirits high with her inspiring songs and words.

Hosea spoke up.  “Then an older man who’s been sitting at the bar nursing what looks like sorrows as well as a beer looks at you.  It’s not every day that a group comes into Huckleberry.  He gestures you over.  Does anyone go talk to him?”

“Side quest,” Molly said with a snort of amusement.  

“Is there any other NPC to focus on in this entire establishment?”

“Arthur…”

“Fine.  I go talk to Obvious Plot Hook.”

“I’ll go with him.”  Obvious Plot Hook introduced himself as a writer, desperate to finish his story, but unfortunately stuck in Huckleberry due to the recent upheaval of things.  “You look like a capable bunch.  Do you know anything about the legendary spellslingers like Benny Dawn?  Black Bessie?”

Sadie sensed a guest NPC coming in for Black Bessie, played by none other than Elizabeth Matthews herself.  Lara turned to Arthur’s character, Lee.  “Oh, Lee, we should help him.”  Lara was in favor of any chance at all to help people.

“Lara, he hasn’t even told us what exactly he wants.  He could want us to go fight all of them.  Or we’re being sent to assassinate them, for all I know.  I’m not that type, buddy.  I’m here to help protect people, not hurt them for no reason.”

“No, no,” Obvious Plot Hook hurried to reassure them.  “I mean, if you want to fight them, that’s on your own time.”

“I hardly see the need.  What’s dueling a spellslinger get you?  Death or glory?  Nah.  Besides, they’re old farts.  They were the stuff of legend when I was a kid.  What honor is there in fighting someone like that?”  

“OK, OK.  I can see you’re a man of principles.  Like I said, I’m a writer.  What I need is stories about the old days from those folks, about their exploits and duels and whatnot.  And since you can’t hardly go past the Huckleberry town limit these days without the Black Riders coming after you for one reason or another, here I stay.  But your group looks a lot hardier adventurers than me.”

Lara clapped her hands and looked over at Lee, beaming.  “Let’s do it.  I’ve always wanted to meet Black Bessie.  And it’ll give us something to do.”  

Not to mention some gold in their very empty pockets.  Lara might be a Magical Girl, but she was nobody’s fool.  She realized you couldn’t eat sunshine and rainbows, after all.

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #rdr2 #sadie adler #arthur morgan #javier escuella #hosea matthews #that dnd au

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Yeehawgust Day 29: Jolene

He’d known the new volunteer, Mary-Beth Gaskill, was a Dolly Parton fan.  She made no secret of it, and if anyone dared to say even one thing against Saint Dolly or her music, the dreamy demeanor disappeared and showed that this kitten did indeed have some claws.

Not that Arthur disliked some Dolly himself.  Good music, great philanthropy to boot.  But looking at the tags on the kennels as he did the initial morning walk, all the shelters in the county probably hurrying to take on some of the dogs from the recent puppy mill bust, no matter how full they already were, he saw that the six they’d gotten had come in under Mary-Beth’s watch.  He and Sadie had been off for the weekend camping, so this now was the first he’d seen of the new arrivals. Consequently, the Ambarino Animal Shelter now offered for adoption a rather interesting musical assortment alongside the eight they’d already had.  All of them mixes of goldenlabradoodleschnorgihund or whatever the hell it was, and in his mind the crime of trying to charge a thousand bucks for a fancy name for what amounted to a mutt–and nothing wrong with mutts at all, best dogs he’d ever had–paled alongside all the crimes that came from running a puppy mill.  An ethical misdemeanor, as it were.  But he hated it nonetheless.  Because honestly, that sort of thing was how puppy mills thrived, seeing they could charge hefty prices for a mix if they just slapped some cutesy portmanteau on as a supposed breed.  People would pay for it, so the mills would just keep on churning.

At least these six would be cared for now.  All of them some kind of hound and retriever mix, if he had to guess, with maybe some terrier from the beard on one

So with treats and kind words, he said hello to Hard Candy Christmas, Nine to Five, Coat of Many Colors, Islands In The Stream, I Will Always Love You…

Well, at least she hadn’t gone for Why’d You Come In Here Looking Like That.  That would just be a little too close to home for the poor newly rescued dogs with their sad eyes, ragged coats, and too-thin flanks. 

The last one, in the kennel at the end, offered him her plush bunny toy and wagged her tail furiously.  “Hey there, Jolene.”  Of course there had to be a Jolene.  Of course.  Though given her fur was reddish, he supposed it fit.

Candy, Niner, Coaty, Island, Jolene, and Iwaly–they’d had a hell of a time coming up with a good call name for that poor boy–settled in more and more as the days went on.  They were so hungry for love, in that way that had once broken his heart, but he’d seen it so much now that it no longer shattered him, but only made him ache for them, and love them all the harder for it.  Telling them that they were safe now, that they’d have people that would treat them right.  That they’d gotten out of hell and it would only improve.  

The capacity of an animal to still find a way to so earnestly trust and love after so much of a shitty life never failed to amaze him, and make him think there had to be something good in the world.

Jolene especially seemed to attach to him.  Sometimes as firm as velcro, at that, but she was such a sweet soul he could hardly deny her.  Even when her frisking around him sometimes, delighted at walks and the fresh air and the outdoors, threatened to hogtie him at the ankles with the leash.  How could he deny her? 

Sadie, heading into the shelter, saw the two of them out for another walk and just laughed.  “How’s the girlfriend, Arthur?”

Jolene headed over to Sadie, tail waving about as fast as an airplane propeller.  Arthur might be her favorite human, but Sadie was a close second.  “Good, good.”

“Now, I’d worry that Jolene might have come in and taken my man, true to form,” Sadie teased, reaching down to tousle Jolene’s floppy ears, “but hell, I can’t even be mad at her.”

“She does make it impossible to be pissed off at her.”

“Unlike your human girlfriend.”

“You do make it possible to be pissed off at you.  Possible, and fun.”

She grinned and winked at him.  “Likewise, Mr. Morgan.”  She gave Jolene another scratch.  “Tell your boyfriend that he needs to hurry up and adopt you.  All three of us know you aren’t going home with anyone else.”

He’d been thinking of it, given how attached she was, and how much he’d come to adore her.  And he’d been without a dog for over a year now, since he’d lost Copper.  But hearing Sadie say it that casually told him she was on board too.  “Well, then.  Welcome to the family, Jolene.”

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #rdr2 #arthur morgan #sadie adler #that animal shelter au

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Yeehawgust Day 28: Cattle Call

May 1894

Tumbleweed, New Austin

Tumbleweed, in Eliza’s opinion, seemed very aptly named.  The place looked dried up and dead, and like it was liable to blow away in the breeze.  She could see that perhaps ten, fifteen years back there had been some juice in it, the signs of a town that had life and pride and loyal people.  Carefully constructed buildings, bright cheerful paint on signs.  But the sun and sandstorms had scoured away all that care and color, and about all that was left were weathered grey boards, and weathered grey people.  Not all old, by any means, but even the younger adults had that worn look to them, and the fact she saw almost no children said just about everything.

“Hosea,” she said, turning to him sitting next to her on the wagon, “this ain’t gonna be much of a starter.  Looking at these folk, they likely don’t even have pennies to spare for fun.”

His sharp eye looked over the town, and she suspected he’d already come to the same conclusion.  “Then maybe we set up for a few days,” he said thoughtfully.  “Tell them it’s us practicing a new show, so they can be our audience for free to let us know where we need to fix things.  Run the usual, they won’t know otherwise.”

Free entertainment, and pumping a little cash into the town by buying supplies and the like.  They would have to be careful about it so it wouldn’t smack of charity, but it would help.  She nodded to herself.  Hosea might pretend he was hard as nails, but they all knew otherwise.  And of course nobody said otherwise.  They all knew how to act, after all.

Arthur was more like his mentor, and honestly his father in all ways that mattered, in that than he probably ever cared to admit.  But she’d had the measure of him pretty early.  Knew that he was tough, absolutely, but there was a good and gentle heart in there as well.

She never could have expected that when she’d been just a waitress in a Wyoming saloon after the man who’d persuaded her to run off together to a blissfully romantic future disappeared on her.  But she loved this life, and the people in it.  

Setting up just past the edge of town, they busily spread the word that first day, but in that way of not making it too obvious.  Eliza and Abigail headed for the general store, because their supplies genuinely did need help.  The desert was tough territory to cross, because of the lower margin for things to go wrong, and the distance between towns.  Though she wasn’t sure how much they could actually buy here.

Not everything they needed, but enough to get them to Armadillo, which she understood was a far more bustling town these days.  As she and Abigail were busy shopping, she heard a commotion, as a woman stormed in, went to the counter, and wasted absolutely no time in telling the shopkeeper, “Fred, that son of a bitch who ran off last month deserves to be skinned.  I just looked in the sacks of cattle feed.  It’s half stones and sand.  Stitched up neat as you like.”

“Shit,” Fred the shopkeeper said.  “Sadie, I…”

The woman calmed down some.  “I know you ain’t got the money to pay it back, thanks to him emptying the safe.  And I expect you ain’t got the supply neither.  Call for a cattle roundup in Armadillo in two weeks, and so every store from here to the West Elizabeth border’s probably sold out of feed to fatten them up on top of the grazing.  None left for a couple of dairy cows.”

“Sadie, I sure am sorry.  I’ll give you back what I can.”  The misery in Fred’s voice was deep as anything.  “I know the work’s done until harvest but it’s gonna be a tight few weeks, can I give you…”

She sighed.  “Never mind it, Fred.  We all got cheated.  I don’t expect nothing from you that’ll leave you broke.  I just..temper got the better of me.”  Abigail exchanged a glance with Eliza.  Eliza gave her a small nod in return, acknowledging the idea she expected the two of them shared.  Abigail gave a little tilt of her head to indicate the woman neither of them had turned to gawk at, telling Eliza it was hers to handle.  

One thing Eliza would say for near ten years on the road with a theater troupe, learning all the subtle cues that a person could use onstage that the audience wouldn’t notice–it made having some conversations between them without words damn easy.

She exited the store, leaving Abigail to handle the purchases, and followed the woman, seeing from the back only a blond braid and a well-worn shirtwaist and skirt.  Caught up to her two doors down, given the woman had a head of steam up with either temper or embarrassment or both, and was charging ahead like a warhorse.  “Ma’am, I don’t listen in deliberately, but can’t have helped but overhear…”

The woman turned to her.  Amber eyes, sharp and full of a frustrated fury, freckles spattered across that face like a kiss of gold dust.  Older, closer to thirty than twenty for sure.  Eliza had judged that from that smoky voice, but seemed she’d been right.  “I ain’t looking to get scammed again,” she said very clearly.

“Ain’t.  I’m with the theater troupe that just set up,” Eliza waved a hand, “right past town.  We decided to stop here a bit and work on our new show before heading east for the circuit.  Place seemed quiet enough to not get interruptions and bother, you get me?”

The blond woman laughed, and at least it was rueful rather than bitter.  “You don’t get much more quiet than Tumbleweed these days.”

“Be that as it may.  We’ll manage all the parts day of a performance, but sometimes we’re running a few scenes at a time with folk separated, so we could use a couple people to fill in and read some of the lines.  Especially for smaller parts.”  Trying hard to remember exactly what Bessie had said, long ago, to cajole Eliza herself into that caravan camp.  “Fred there at the store said you had a couple weeks before your crops came in, so I don’t know if you and your husband,” because she’d spotted that wedding band, “might want to help out with that.  Grub and a little bit of pay for it.  We ain’t rich, but we don’t cheat, especially them that help us.”

Those amber eyes narrowed for a moment in thought.  “We ain’t acted before.  I mean, not since I was a kid playing Egyptian queens or Joan of Arc with my sister, you know?”

“Nobody said you had to be good,” Eliza assured her with a laugh.  “Just that you got to show up and read the lines so we can learn the scene.  Anyway, practice starts tomorrow at eight.  Hope you’ll both take us up on it.”  She stuck out her hand.  “Eliza Morgan.”

The other woman took it.  “Sadie Adler.  See, I’d like to, but Jake and me got a little girl to look after.” 

“Great.  Bring her along.  Plenty of eyes to keep watch on kids.  And Arthur–my husband–and me have a little boy.  Trust me, he’d love to have someone to play with.”  Isaac really would, at that.  The trouble was that she and Arthur were the only ones at the age to have a kid.  The others were still so young.  It might be nice to have Sadie Adler and her husband–Jake, was it–and their daughter around.  It got lonesome sometimes.  Eliza loved Abigail, but she was still so young that sometimes it made a difference.  

Sadie nodded at that, and actually smiled.  “All right.  You got yourselves a deal.  See you tomorrow morning.”  It said a lot about her, and the marriage she was in, that she didn’t hem and haw and say she needed her husband’s permission.  Apparently he trusted her enough to make decisions.  Then again, Eliza had judged her to be a formidable type from the way she’d charged into the store, snorting fire.

She grinned, heading back to the store.  Once the Matthews Traveling Theater Troupe saw you might need to get away from the life you had and got you into its circle in any way, you tended to stick.  With any luck, the Adlers might find what she had, and what others had.

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #rdr2 #eliza mccready #sadie adler #abigail roberts #that traveling theater au

[squidproquoclarice]

Yeehawgust Day 27: Rawhide

May 1899

Spider Gorge, Ambarino

The plan, Dutch kept saying.  Come up with another plan.  Tilly had heard Dutch and Hosea talking, when they thought nobody else would hear.

Whatever plan that was, Tilly didn’t know.  Only that it had been Blackwater, then a cave near Strawberry, then running north across–what, probably some more borders there, as they headed up into the mountains, finding more and more remote-looking and tortuous trails.  Sometimes ones that barely looked like a wagon could be driven across them at all.  Hosea admitted at one point that he had no idea whether they were in Ambarino or Owatonna, only somewhere near the border.  

They were in a position like that, being in some space between states.  In between places.  In between plans.  In between safe haven and disaster, waiting to see which way the sweep of the blade would cut.

In between life and death, for Jenny and Davey.  Though for Jenny, that had finally turned to the one way this morning.  They’d stopped here in this high-walled canyon to bury her, no matter that it took hours, even with the men taking turns in digging.

They’d buried her with little to say.  What was there to say?  She’d been a girl they’d found by the roadside last fall, exhausted and in need of help, having walked across half of Montana already.  

She’d been just seventeen, the youngest of them except for little Jack.  She was sweet and shy and had a ringing, beautiful laugh, somehow coupled with the croaky singing voice of a crow.  Pale blue-grey eyes and ink-dark hair, and the winter near Blackwater had put some flesh back on those too-skinny bones of hers.  

She’d loved Lenny, though Tilly was the only one besides them who’d known it wasn’t just Lenny having an unrequited spark for her.  Bad enough for him to want her.  That was no trouble in the gang, but out in the world?  Even him wanting her was dangerous enough and could have ended up with him dead.  If the world got the notion that a young pretty white girl loved a boy whose dark skin loudly proclaimed his parents had been slaves, who chose his company over any white boy…well.

She’d wanted her grave to have flowers, Jenny.  So only about fifteen minutes away, Tilly had taken a horse and ridden back to find her some, and Hosea had let her go.  They were sending out enough people on short rides as scouts that she could get away with it.  The sparse and eerily quiet funeral they’d given her had bothered him too, she could tell.  But what was there to say?  Sorry you died before you ever much lived.  Sorry you died after two days of pain getting jolted along in a wagon after getting shot in the gut doing–well, most of us don’t know exactly what happened, and those that do ain’t saying nothing.  The silence about that scared Tilly the most, perhaps.  She’d seen jobs go sideways before.  Never as catastrophically as this, true.  But even so, they grumbled, dusted themselves off, and carried on.  This fearful silence, along with Jenny dead, Davey dying, and Sean and Mac both missing, told her nothing would ever be quite the same.  

She stood there at the grave, seeing the splashes of color there.  She’d dug up what plants she could, pressing them there into the cool muddy ground, and they bravely stood there, fragile and beautiful and colorful.  Stood there and hoped the flowers, at least, would live.

The walls of the gorge rose steeply, one of unyielding granite and the other of unyielding ice.  But it wasn’t the chill of the ice she suddenly felt.  A cold wind, and she would have wanted to stay, but something in it told her to go.  The weather seemed to have come out of nowhere, clouds where she swore there had been none just an hour ago.  But here they were.  

By the time she reached where she’d split off from the wagons, the first snowflakes were falling.  She urged Lilybelle on.  She might not have grown up with the snow, but she’d endured enough of it since she’d been found by Hosea that she’d learned its danger.  And her shirtwaist and skirt for a spring day, with a light jacket thrown on as concession to the cooler mountain air, wouldn’t keep her through the snow if they got lost.  

She felt a stab of fear as she hurried on, balancing not pushing too recklessly on treacherous paths versus the risk of losing their trail entirely beneath the rapidly-falling snow.  Felt the lash of the ice that came along with the snow, the wind whipping it into a sort of stinging cold frenzy that would scour any exposed hide it found, human or animal, raw and red.

The good news, she supposed, was that the gorge meant there wasn’t much place for them to go other than along its length, so all she had to do was follow.  But she didn’t know how long the gorge was, and after it opened up, she could lose them all too easily.  She surged on and on, trying to keep her head clear as much as she could, to make what time she could.  

She found them still in the gorge just as the light started fading, as it did early in the mountains, and even more so in these sheer, steep walls.  Found them already all bundled up in winter gear they’d put away six weeks ago in Blackwater, and found Karen had dug out Tilly’s scarf, gloves, and coat as well.  Gratefully bundling herself into them, she ended up sitting in the wagon with Abigail and Davey, grimly judging that they’d be burying him soon too.  If they could get through the snow.

They might all be dead within the week, the way this was going.  She felt Abigail’s hand touch hers, and she gripped the other woman’s fingers with all of her strength, knowing she must be scared to bits with John injured and dragging Jack through all of this.  “We’ll get by, Abigail,” she said in a low voice.  “We’ll get by.”  She said it as much to convince herself as Abigail.

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #rdr2 #tilly jackson #jenny kirk #abigail roberts

[squidproquoclarice]

Yeehawgust Day 26: Vaquero

September 1903

Chuparosa, Nuevo Paraiso

It wasn’t exactly the life Karen had imagined for herself.  Though “imagined” probably wasn’t the right word.  That implied possibility, a chance of it becoming reality.  The life she’d dreamed for herself, then, back when she was a kid.  Even when she was firmly no longer a kid and dealing blackjack and scamming fools at a saloon near the border in Arizona Territory.

She’d dreamed sometimes of somewhere settled.  She and Momma had moved around so much, first to Missouri with the Jasper gang, and then from town to town in Arizona.  Then even after Hosea and Javier found her in that saloon, she’d been so much on the move with the Van Der Lindes over the next few years.

Being here in Chuparosa was settled.  She had a bedroom that was hers, not something rented, or borrowed like a crab’s shell, to be discarded eventually.  Granted, not permanently, because she knew the money wouldn’t last, because the work was still sporadic, but it was more settled than she’d been in a long, long time.  Her compass had stopped spinning wildly, and while it might be the next town eventually, or even back across the border, there was a sharper focus to it, rather than just an aimless notion of somewhere, I guess. 

She’d dreamed of someone who’d stick by her and stay true.  After her mother told her she was old enough to handle herself, and ran off with another man–always hoping for the one who’d stay, and wasn’t she just Geraldine Jones’ daughter in that–she’d dreamed.  Sean was maybe the closest she’d come to that, but she’d never known how it was between them at its core.  Never truly been able to let down her guard.  There was a reason they only came close enough for anything to happen when they were drunk.  He was a romantic fool beneath that non-stop mouth, oddly tender for all he was sometimes clueless, but somehow…somehow she thought he would have left in the end too.  Found someone sweeter, skinnier, younger, prettier, like all men wanted.  Didn’t mean she hadn’t still fallen to pieces after he got shot in Rhodes.

Arthur had insisted she not see Sean’s body before he got buried.  She’d been furious at the time, feeling like the man she’d seen as a brother of sorts was being high-handed and heartless, denying her the chance to say goodbye.  It was only a long, long time after that she realized he must have done it to spare her the sight of what had to be a headshot.  She’d seen men killed violently before.  But he was right.  She hadn’t needed that.  Her dreams were haunted enough. 

It wasn’t a lover who’d stuck by her and stayed true.  After Sadie and Arthur found her in Tesoro Azul two years ago, they’d dragged her home with them to Chuparosa, dried her out, fussed over her, and generally made it clear they wanted her to stay.  That she was no unwelcome burden, tolerated by two newlyweds no less, who’d really rather have not had the chore.  Any implication she was anything like that got Arthur’s back up and he’d practically bark at her that he wanted her there, and if she actually wanted to leave for somewhere else that was fine, but she’d damn well better not run because she worried about their view of things.

Well.  Arthur knew what it was like to feel like he was only there on someone’s sufferance as well.  There was a reason they’d both been sad, bad drunks, recognizing too much in each other.  Same reason she’d never made a play for him, aside from the fact she’d quickly seen he showed pretty much no interest in any woman.  It would have been too much like romancing herself.  He might have found his forever love, and she hadn’t, but that was OK.  

They’d seen her about as pathetic and forlorn a figure as a woman could be–drunk and working the liquor tab off between dealing cards and dealing sex in Tesoro Azul, and pregnant besides by whichever man it had been, though she didn’t know that yet.  Completely shattered, and yet they loved her completely.  They welcomed her.  They teased her and got annoyed with her and she gave it right back.       

She had them, a brother and sister she loved, and their kids who adored her.  She had her son too, and Danny helped so much.  Someone who truly needed her, someone whose love for her shone so simple and pure it damn near took her breath away.  Someone who showed her that something good really could come from her.

She didn’t have a man of her own, no.  Maybe she never would.  But Arthur stayed, steady and true, and helped raise her boy as his uncle, and that was more than enough.  They’d chosen to stick together, her and Sadie and Arthur, without any of Dutch’s ties binding them together anymore.  That made it real.  Real enough to believe in, and eventually, to trust.

She had family now, for real.  Arthur and Sadie, their little Bea and Mattie, and most of all, Danny, were hers to keep.  And she was theirs.  She felt like that was walking on solid ground after years and years of treacherous footing.

Didn’t mean she didn’t dream sometimes still.  Especially after seeing Arthur and Sadie some days, those little smiles and small touches and loving light in the eyes that spoke volumes.  But a gal had to have something.  So if she thought occasionally about some handsome earnest vaquero or quiet yet dashing woodsman sweeping her off her feet, managing to not tell herself that sweeping off her feet was something for a woman probably fifty pounds lighter, that was all right.  They were sweet, silly, soft little dreams that she could smile at, not her forlorn hopeless heart aching so much.

The Karen Jones who’d left Beaver Hollow four years ago, drunk and broken and aimless, who’d wandered all the way down into Mexico and only cared about what liquor she could find en route, could never have imagined this.

Life wasn’t perfect.  She never imagined it would be.  But it was more than all right. 

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #rdr2 #karen jones #sunrise'verse

[squidproquoclarice]

Yeehawgust Day 25: Sea of Dunes

Group chat between Arthur, Hosea, Sadie, Molly, Mary-Beth, Lenny, and Javier

AM: So I know we did one shots to help pass the time during the worst of the pandemic and had fun with it, and you all said you wanted to run an actual campaign.

LS: As long as it still fits with my classes, yeah.  Law school loves to try to kill you.

MG: So call it a brain break, Lenny.  You need them!

AM: You know how picky Hosea gets and says he won’t run a game unless it meets his standards.  

HM: The likes of “Hoard of the Bunny Revenant” was funny for a one-shot.  And what’s wrong with having standards?  Things go haywire if the plan’s terrible to begin with.  

SA: Oh God, is this going to turn into “Back in my day when DnD wasn’t cool…I have seen things you children can’t imagine”

JE: Careful, Sadie.  Your character might die in the first session.

HM: The horror is called 4th edition, and yes.

MO: I don’t know…

MG: Come on, Molly.  You never had time before for anything because of DUUUUUTCH.  

LS: What kind of guy calls himself Dutch anyway?  Was he even Dutch?

AM: He was Dutch.  Or at least, his last name was.  His ancestors were here for a while, since his great-whatever died at Gettysburg.  

SA: Which he always liked to remind us about.  

LS: But that’s like you calling yourself ‘Welsh’, Arthur.  

JE: Have to say it now that you kicked him to the curb, Molly.  He wore a *fedora* and called you ‘m’lady’.  That should have been a sign. 

MO: Ugh, if you’re all just going to make fun of me, you can bloody well find your own cleric this time!

MG: She’s right.  We’ve all made some terrible decisions in dating.

AM: So if anyone brings up Mary right now, I swear I’m leaving you a bag of flaming horse crap.  We broke up before we got married, all right?  I was twenty-one.  We haven’t gotten back together and we won’t.  Sue me.

HM: Children, children.  So about that.  I found a campaign.  It’s called “Sea of Dunes”.

LS: And it involves…spice and giant worms?

MG: I don’t know about you, but I’m excited for pumpkin spice season.

MO: Absolutely.  Fall is the best.

HM: It’s a 5e fantasy Western, set around the turn of the century.  There’s a ragtag gang of travelers, and the overarching story is about the march of progress and the rise of the new gods of technology and super-wealth.  But it’s a really open concept.  Depending on how you want to take it, I could write content for you to be a band of thieves in a world that clearly doesn’t want you.  Or for you to be bounty hunters trying to protect the innocent.  Or revolutionaries against the rise of the gods of so-called progress.

JE: Sounds cool.  Lots of possibilities.

HM: There really are.  I could do a lot with it.

LS: You sonuvabitch, I’m in

JE: Is Rick and Morty still cool?

LS: Is your mother still cool?

JE: (a string of emojis, including angry faces, table flip, knives, and a middle finger)

HM: SO AS I WAS SAYING

AM: Everyone shut up and listen to Hosea.  Can’t take you people anywhere.  Even online.

HM: I’ll run it.  But I want to challenge you all.  You can’t play your usual character type from our one-shots.  Arthur, you can’t be a barbarian, because I know you can do more than just hit things.  Molly, no cleric or bard.  Lenny, no wizard–in fact, no sorcerer or warlock either, because those are pure casters too.  Sadie, no ranger, but druid is OK, since yours died so unfortunately.  Javier, no fighter.  Mary-Beth is the only one of you with any character imagination, apparently, so she gets to play whatever she wants.

MG: Yay!

HM: Get in touch with me privately to discuss character concepts, and I want you to think about what kind of gang you want to be and discuss that here.  Let’s plan on trying to be ready to get the gang’s wagons rolling in two weeks.

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #rdr2 #that dnd au #arthur morgan #hosea matthews #sadie adler #molly o'shea #lenny summers #javier escuella #mary-beth gaskill

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Yeehawgust Day 24: Distant Howls

December 1911

Fortune’s Favor, New Caledonia

When Jack was born, down somewhere in Utah the year before it became a state, John had been twenty-two.  Been busy at the saloon little more than an hour from their camp.  He’d bolted about as soon as he knew for sure she was giving birth.  Downing shots of whiskey and playing poker, but absolutely trading no glances with any of the soiled doves working there.  Alternately telling himself he was getting away from all the nonsense back at camp and resenting the hell out of the bridle they all wanted to force on him because it was none of their Goddamn business, and being terrified to hell that Abigail would die in childbirth.  She’d die like his own mother had, and he couldn’t be sure that kid was his–or at least he kept telling himself that–and then that would be the thing that would tell him the baby had absolutely been his.  He’d killed his own mother in being born, after all.  If she died, the sheer awful symmetry of it would say everything.  Not to mention Arthur would never, ever forgive him, even if that looked like a distant prospect to begin.  But he was every bit as stubborn as his older brother, and he was in the right here, dammit.  

It had just been some fun, that was all.  They were both young and both enjoyed a good tumble and if she talked a bit here and there in a way that indicated she might well be sweet on him, he knew she’d see sense soon enough.  She’d been with other men in the camp too, right?  Who was to say he’d been the only man warming her bed when the kid got conceived?  If she died…if she died…but Abigail Roberts was made of stern stuff.  She was.  He might be pissed off with her, but she was tough.  

It was Arthur and Hosea who found him there a day and a half later.  Arthur spoke first, looking at a half-drunk John with a tight jaw and green eyes hard as chips of ice, slapping his gloves down on the bar beside John’s latest glass.  “Congratulations, Marston.  You have a son.”  Practically spitting the words, dripping with angry contempt.  “So get your ass up.”

They looked tired and half-soaked.  Had ridden through the rain to find him.  Guilt flared for a moment, and then that contrary streak in him that always wanted so much to push back whenever Arthur got high-handed reared its head.  “Don’t see what business it is of mine.”

Arthur cursed, grabbing John’s shoulder, and Hosea looked at him and said, “Go outside, Arthur.”

“Hosea!”

“Go outside before that temper of yours makes you do something real stupid.”  Arthur had let go and stalked off, a man trailing the air of looking for a killing if anyone would just be dumb enough to give him a reason, and Hosea had sighed.

He had to know, and he couldn’t ask it with Arthur and his angry disgust there.  But he heard the plaintive note in his voice as he asked Hosea, “Is she alive?”

“She’s OK.  The kid too.  Just…come back, John.”

He’d come back.  Left again, and never quite been there for far too long, but they’d gotten it right in the end.

When Gracie was born, up in the Yukon territory, he’d been twenty-nine, and stayed in the room with Abigail initially.  Insisted on it, feeling like he’d needed to make up for past sins.  Ended up just feeling even shittier, seeing the suffering it brought upon her, and imagining how it must have been with Jack too.  It was a Goddamn wonder women let a man anywhere near them.

Abigail finally barked at him to go somewhere else, a messy and yet magnificent spectacle, saying he was just making things worse.  And he’d skedaddled, and it had been the doctor who found him at the saloon later that night, hoping to hell this one wouldn’t kill her and tell him that there was nothing forgiven nor forgotten.  Not drunk at all, just pensive and waiting through what seemed like endless hours. 

He’d looked at the doctor’s beaming face after he said, “Mr. Morris, mother and baby are just fine, and you have a daughter.”  Alongside the relief and elation, knowing that there would be no Arthur this time, because Arthur was dead and gone, and the grief rose within him so high he could taste it.  Wanting so much for his brother to see he was trying so hard, that he was hoping to get it right, that he and Abigail were making this new start.  

Gracie.  Sweet sunny baby girl that she’d been.  Never could quite escape the shadow of the past that hung so heavy even over two years later, and it felt like that darkness came and claimed her as its debt as she breathed her last.  

Now they were up in Canada again, but the prairies of New Caledonia, not the mountains of the Yukon.  He was thirty-eight now, thirty-nine in two months.  Two weeks to Christmas.  

It had been a hell of a year.  Sometimes he still woke in the night tense with the knowledge of how closely they’d avoided the ax.  Seeing too many things–Dutch’s dead body on the ground at the foot of that cliff, a sweet young woman coolly executed in Blackwater, Edgar Ross’ smug fucking face knowing he had John exactly where he wanted him.  But once again, his brother had bailed him out.  He’d gotten over the resentful hurt pride of it, and at this point, all he could feel was grateful.

Nowhere to go with all this snow, and the doctor, same one who’d treated Arthur’s TB down in Mexico, was in the room with Abigail, as was Sadie.  He and Arthur sat there in the parlor, and had for several hours, not saying much, but there wasn’t tension to it between them.  Only the patience of waiting.  This time, he didn’t worry she’d die.  Especially after everything they’d been through the previous spring and summer, he had faith there was no damn way it would happen.  Abigail was tough as nails.

He couldn’t resist one pinprick of contrariness, looking over at Arthur and saying accusingly, “I expect you was in the room with Sadie every damn time she gave birth.  Holding her hand no less.”  He could damn well see it–well, not imagining Sadie in labor in detail, thank you, but of course Arthur being there with her.  Expecting that though he didn’t say anything, Arthur judged all the same that John’s commitment was somehow the lesser for not being in that room of travail and worry.  Somehow unintentionally managing to put an edge in his voice that suggested Arthur was henpecked for it, and knowing his brother wouldn’t rise to the bait.

Arthur shrugged, smiling a bit at some private memory, reaching for his mug of coffee.  “Yeah.  But that’s my way and Sadie’s.”  He gave John a wink.  “Though I always made sure there was no gun in reach, cause you seen as much as me what that woman can do with one.  Especially with Mattie, I think she wanted to murder me.  But look at you.  Nervous as a sinner in church.”  He leaned in and lowered his voice.  “She kick you out last time or what?”

He found himself blushing.  “Yeah.  Told me I was just making her upset, so I needed to get lost.”  

Heard Arthur’s roar of laughter at that.  “Pissing Abigail off?  You do have that effect on her, Johnny.  Always have.”

“Shut up.”  But it was comfortable between them all the same, and he found himself smiling all the same.  Sitting there in the parlor of this new house, whiling away the hours, sometimes with Jack there too.  Listening until he heard the distant tiny bleating howls coming from upstairs, and felt himself relax.  So maybe he hadn’t been as entirely confident as he’d told himself.  She’d be all right.

They’d be all right.

Arthur leaned over and gave him a clap on the shoulder, and a smile.  Sadie came downstairs soon after, amber eyes aglow and practically beaming, and told him, “You and Abigail got a baby girl, John.”

He barely registered the words before he’d popped up to his feet, and was racing upstairs to see the both of them.  

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #rdr2 #john marston #abigail roberts #arthur morgan #sadie adler #hosea matthews #a softer epilogue y'all #sunrise'verse

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Yeehawgust Day 23: Mirage

July 1899

Clemens Point, Lemoyne

There was a certain usefulness to lovers’ squabbles, at least in the books.  It gave them something to overcome, and something to move the plot along.  After all, what kind of story would it be for people to just fall in love, and live happily ever after, just like that?

All the same, reading all that in a deliciously written novel was far different from living next door to it.  For so long now it had been Abigail and John and their back and forth, and Mary-Beth had utter faith that they were meant to be together, and that John would come around.  He just needed to realize what it was he had to fight for, right?  Life would show him that eventually.  

Though when she’d tried to explain that to Arthur once, hoping to ease the fight between the two men, he’d looked at her like she was crazy, and then just shook his head and laughed.  Not in a mean way, more just in the world-weary way that told her that he saw her as hopelessly starry-eyed, and the way he’d told her, “Don’t change.  World’s tough enough as is,” told her the world had taken plenty from him.  Exactly what, she wasn’t sure.  But there was enough sadness in Arthur Morgan that it told her plenty, even without details.

John and Abigail seemed to be getting along a bit better, at least.  But now it was Dutch and Molly picking up the slack, and much like the Roberts-Marston arguments, the Van der Linde-O’Shea ones could be heard throughout camp.  Granted, there was no way to argue quietly in this gang.  Part of why she tried not to, because she wanted her business to be her business rather than pulled out for everyone else to examine.   

She’d liked Molly well enough at first.  Stylish, a lady, a poet, and throwing herself wholeheartedly into things for the love of a dashing, mysterious rogue.  It was something straight out of one of Mary-Beth’s novels.

But this was no novel.  Molly didn’t seem to know how to be around the women now.  She’d been fun, early on, back when she’d first been around, and when everything was a grand adventure to her.  Now?  Karen and Abigail and Tilly just got the Irishwoman’s back up like a wet cat, their plain talk and ready laughter too much.  Sadie Adler, walking around in her pants and with a gun on her hip, got Molly’s incredulous stares like she was some kind of strange being dropped into their midst from who knew where.

Mary-Beth was about the only one Molly seemed to still halfway like, and even then she got huffy sometimes when Dutch talked to her.  Mary-Beth understood.  Worrying that her man wasn’t her man, but she needn’t have worried.  

Truth be told, Mary-Beth was a romantic.  She didn’t deny it and she didn’t feel embarrassed by it.  Surrounded by a bunch of grumbling cynics and hard cases, she’d chosen to see the world differently.  Find some goodness in everything where she could.  

Now, Hosea was an utterly compelling tragic figure, mourning his Bessie so deeply even still.  But even she couldn’t make Dutch van der Linde into a romantic hero, at least not when it came to women.  Twenty-one years old, been here three years now, and she’d already seen two women come and go before Molly, brief candles in the scheme of things.  He talked sometimes about a dead woman named Annabelle killed by the O’Driscolls, but something about it didn’t ring true.  If he’d loved her so, mourned her still, doing what he was doing now made no sense.  Running through women like they were just the fashions of a season like she and Tilly liked to look at in ladies’ magazines when they could pick up one in a town.  One fall it was overlays of beaded lace and Rosemary, by next summer it was all tall collars and Francesca. 

And by the sound of it, Dutch was already getting tired of Molly.  All she wants is to love you, she wanted to say to him.  She gave up everything for you.  It makes me real sad seeing her…  Seeing her what?

Fading out, she supposed.  It was like the shine and sparkle of Molly O’Shea, the laughter and bright eyes and loveliness of her, was going.  And in its place stood this uncertain woman, snappish and nervous, recognizing she had no place with them except as Dutch’s latest woman, and that the man she’d staked everything on wasn’t the figure she’d made him out to be.

Like Molly was beginning to realize her grand romance was just a mirage, and all it would leave her was heartbreak and a ruined reputation.  

No, reading about heartbreak was very fine and well, because it would always come right in the end in books.  But watching it happen to women right in front of her hurt too much, because while she always liked to believe the best, even she knew that this was no fairy-tale and it wouldn’t end neatly and sweetly.

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #rdr2 #mary beth gaskill #molly o'shea #could be read as pre-mollybeth if you like #mary beth sees more than people realize i think

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Yeehawgust Day 22: Reach For the Sky

April 1897

Pinetree Gulch, Ambarino

They’d never experienced anything like it.  Winter was a vaguely remembered notion to Jake, given his family had left Pennsylvania when he was only five, and given how close to the Maryland border they’d been–and not that far away from a town named Gettysburg that became a major concern when he was only four months old–he knew those winters probably had been on the milder side.

After that, he’d spent the rest of his childhood and grown to manhood out in western New Austin, in the desert near Tumbleweed.  Enough for the memory of snow to fade into something like a dream, a child’s fantasy.

Sadie had left Pennsylvania even younger, just a month or two old.  Even if they hadn’t, he imagined neither of them could have been prepared for Ambarino.  The way the skies opened and pummeled down snow like some angry God-sent strike, over and over and over.  Until not only were the paths buried to the point that digging out to the woodshed and to the barn became like excavating a canyon, sheer snow walls alongside, their little cabin had got buried too clear up to the roof.  He supposed that it had its benefit in providing some insulation from both cold and noise from the howling winds that tore their way down the slopes of the mountain.  They’d howled like angry monsters early on, rattling the cabin to the point he and Sadie worried about what parts they might have carried off in the night.  

Thank God they’d brought far more nails than they’d expected to use in several years, because they’d triple-fastened everything by early November.  They’d also found out the many, many small chinks between the logs from the snow squeezed into the cabin, and spent plenty of time trying to dig into frozen soil to make some mud to crudely plaster it with from inside, keeping a bucket of the stuff by the front door for repairs and new leaks.  It wasn’t as though they could just rush down to Strawberry to get some clay and sand to make the chinking job stronger.

By February, the sound of the chinook winds got muffled by the snow to a dull roar, and the cabin stayed snug enough, and they’d finally been able to breathe a sigh of relief.  Gone a little stir-crazy after months in that cabin, both of them used to having to range far and wide pretty much daily to make a living in the rough lands of Gaptooth Ridge, but they got by.  It meant they got to spend time together, time that they all too often hadn’t these past years struggling to carry the weight of both their families’ farms.

Frightening as those first months had been, boring as they sometimes were, they’d known spring would come.  A damn near thing, and they’d known that to misstep here this far in such harsh lands meant no forgiveness.  Eyeing the dwindling supplies, admitting their naivete again in far too little firewood and tearing down some of the fences built with so much toil in the autumn to keep themselves warm.  But they’d learned.  They’d be stronger next winter, and they’d have months to prepare now instead of about six weeks to try to build an entire homestead.

Spring felt like the reward after the suffering.  The sky felt so blue it almost hurt the eyes, the air fresh and clean, wildflowers popping up in an ecstatic burst of color everywhere.  Animals everywhere.  The tall sentinels of the trees and the mountains loomed large and reached for the sky, something that had lasted far longer than Jake had been alive, and would be here long after he was gone, and strangely that comforted him.

Sadie came over then, pausing in her usual bustling energy to follow his gaze into the distance, and then just sat down on the fence beside him.  She was a hell of a woman, his wife, and he couldn’t help but smile at her sheer relentlessness.  But she hadn’t lost that ability to marvel at the smaller things too, and that relieved him.  Tumbleweed took so much out of both of them.  Years they might have been already married, hopes and money and family and heartache.  Left them poor and past their youth and tired.  But it hadn’t taken everything.  They could still dream, and work hard with the excitement of it, hoping so much to build a good life here.

She had their list in hand, the ever-lengthening list of things they’d found they’d need to buy on the next trip down to Strawberry, and God knew how they’d pay for all of it.  Chances were he’d have to ask Chip Cooper for some further credit, much as he hated it.  But for right now, that didn’t matter.  He wouldn’t let it matter.  They’d survived the winter, and they’d keep building things together, and that was what was important.  

Reaching over, he took her hand in his, and they sat there for a good half-hour or more, no need to speak, just delighting in their home with all their senses.      

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #rdr2 #jake adler #sadie adler #jadie

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Yeehawgust Day 21: Desert Paintbrush

March 1912

Paradise Run, New Caledonia

They’d gotten the assignment to draw something for class, and chores done for the day, she finally turned towards it.  Put it off in favor of assignments that felt easier, and that even included math.  But math was simple enough.  It was or it wasn’t, matter of fact.  Draw something.  Sounded easy, but it wasn’t.  So many possibilities out there, and all of them running through her mind, ideas examined and picked over, and nothing seemed right.  Looking out the window of the farmhouse, seeing the endless sea of white snow under a heavy leaden grey sky, Bea had to think the long, long winters here on the edge of the Canadian prairies didn’t help either.  Nothing much to see until you went into the forest, and there was a beauty to that, but she didn’t want to draw that either.

Sitting by the fireplace, hearing the wind roaring outside and rattling the frost-dusted windowpanes, she found herself picking up the pencil and starting to draw what felt like the furthest thing from.  

She’d been born all the way down in Nuevo Paraiso.  Gone from Mexican desert to Canadian prairie, and that seemed like one heck of a jump to her.  Didn’t remember much about Chuparosa, because they’d left that house when she was only two, gone on the move with the circus for the next few years, before settling down here.

All the same, there were wisps of images in her mind, and something in her wanted to try to put them on paper before maybe even they faded.  So she sketched, sitting there with her hot cocoa, and ended up with a sweeping rock formation on her page, a hole in its underside, turning it into an arch.  Cactuses and the like dotting the landscape, she imagined.  They must have been there.  She started to draw one, not remembering them too clearly.  She looked at it and hated it, seeing it looked more like the winter-bare maple tree in their front yard than anything, and moved to erase it.  But redrawing it, trying to make it stockier, just made it look like a shapeless blotch of nothing.

“There’s a face,” Dad said, passing through the parlor, and obviously having glanced her way.  “You’re looking at that page like you want to cuss it out, just about.”

“I’m drawing,” she said, scowling at the stupid tree-cactus-thing.  “But it ain’t working.  I don’t see it clearly enough and it just looks stupid.”

Coming over, he leaned over, gave a low whistle.  “Ojo del Diablo,” he said.  “No, you got that right, pretty well.  You remember that, huh?”

“A little.  Just got a picture of it in my head.  Not sure why, but it’s there.”

He smiled at that.  “Your momma and me used to take you out there for picnics sometimes if the weather weren’t too bad, and we had a day off from whatever work we was doing at that point.  Took both you and Mattie after he came along.  Guess you remember a bit of that for it to have stuck.”

That made sense of it, and when he said it, she felt like there was a flicker of memory too, of Mom sitting on a blanket, laughing and reaching up to take Bea in her arms.  “Don’t remember what them plants in the desert looked like,” she admitted.  “And so my cactus just looks dumb.  And there should probably be other things there and I ain’t…”

He gave her a quick pat on the shoulder, and gestured for her to hand over the pad of paper and the pencil.  Headed over to his chair near the fire and flipped to the next page of the paper, sat there, one booted foot crossed over the other knee, pencil scratching in quick, confident strokes she could only envy.  She knew he drew some too, had seen little doodles and the like that he made, and wished she could get something to look like that.

Sitting there sipping her cocoa, she could only wait, wanting to go and peek, a bit fascinated at seeing the look of intent focus on his face, caught up in whatever he was seeing in his own head.  After a good while, he handed it back.

He’d drawn a whole page of plants for her, a few strokes somehow giving the look of them in a way she could almost see them in her mind, alive and real.  Labeling them too in his neat handwriting.  Cactuses, trees, even flowers–she hadn’t thought about there being flowers in the desert, but there had been.

Barrel cactus

Desert paintbrush

Chuparosa

Desert sage

Saguaro cactus

Desert chicory

Ironwood

Nuevo Paraiso thistle

Buckhorn cholla

Prickly pear

Mesquite  

She looked up at him, unable to help a grin.  “Those are real fine.”

“Well, I had more years than you to study plants in the desert,” he said teasingly, reaching out and tapping the tip of her nose with his finger.  “Sadie had even more than me, growing up in New Austin as she did, but unfortunately you’re stuck with me as the one scratching out drawings.  But maybe that helps, all the same.”

It helped.  It helped more than she could say, and it made her eager to get back to the drawing now.  “Thank you, Daddy,” she said, already studying the buckhorn cholla intently.  

Heard a low chuckle from him in reply as he headed out to whatever he’d been on his way to do before.  “Welcome, Beanstalk.”

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #arthur morgan #bea griffith #sadithur if you squint #rdr2 #sunrise'verse

[squidproquoclarice]

Yeehawgust Day 20: Fields of Gold

October 1898

Eagle’s Bluff, Wyoming

Please.  Come home, for good.  He felt like something was tearing his heart out from his chest at those words from Isaac.  Impossible dreams.  Things had been long since set between Eliza and him, and he didn’t see that budging.  But Isaac wanted to believe it so much.  He should ask.  Couldn’t lie to the boy about doing it.  But in the end, all that would happen was his son would get hurt.  Wanting so much some idea that his mother and father could be together, and…God.  Goddamn himself, in truth.  He should have had the sense to just send money, rather than make implied promises to his boy that he couldn’t keep.  Eliza was right.  

“I’ll ask.”  He had to do that much.  He owed Isaac that much.  “But don’t be getting your hopes up, all right?”  Said it as gently as he could, knowing already that it would do no good, that the boy’s head was full of dreams where they all probably ran gleefully together through golden fields of wheat, or corn, or whatever, in some idyllic fairy tale life.  

It ain’t stupider than dreams of some utopia that civilization can’t touch.  And how long you been hoping for that, every time Dutch says it’s gonna happen?  Since you weren’t much older than Isaac.  Land in California that they’d looked at earlier this year, no less, but Dutch hadn’t liked it, for some reason or another that he wouldn’t quite say.  And Arthur was thirty-five besides, not twelve, and still wanting to believe that they’d find some peaceful place nobody could bother them.  No, he couldn’t fault Isaac for hoping.

But as he followed Isaac back to the cabin, he felt a bit like a man walking to the guillotine.  Or the gallows, which could easily still happen in reality.  Eliza had served him notice tonight that this was the end.  Dug in her heels on it and he could see she was serious, and immovable.  Understood that if he left and went over the Grizzlies for a year or so, this time he’d best not bother coming back.

Christ.  He’d been here all of half an hour, it was late, he was tired and his back and shoulders ached from a long ride, and Eliza hitting him upside the head with that hadn’t produced the most charitable response from him.  To put it lightly.  He couldn’t remember a time in twelve and a half years that he’d ever snapped at her.  Been so damn careful to never be like that, both because of his own memories of his bastard of a father screaming at his mother, and because he realized every time he was only there on her sufferance, so he’d best not start throwing his weight around besides.  

Though the fact she merely put up with even the best, politest version of him said something.  She’d seen the edge of a deeper reality tonight, his willfulness and his temper both, and what would she think about that? 

Here he came back again for more of it, and he’d say it was humbly with a hung head and hat in hand, except the hat was on a hook on the wall, where he’d put it when he and Eliza started to talk.

He glanced down at Isaac, practically vibrating in excitement.  Wished to hell he’d proved less of a disappointment, that this wouldn’t be probably the last time he saw his son so happy with his bright shining hopes, let alone probably the last time he’d see him at all.  “Isaac,” he said, putting a hand on his son’s shoulder.  “Your momma and me need to talk alone.  And that don’t mean you listening in from the porch.”  He’d figured that must have been where Isaac had eavesdropped before.  After all, he’d done his own share of sneaking and listening as a kid.  

Isaac nodded, a quick jerky motion, and Arthur saw the nervousness hiding behind his hopes.  “OK, Pa.  I’ll go…uh, clean Boadicea’s saddle, I guess.”

As good a task as any to keep him away from the cabin for a bit.  Presumably so even if an outright shouting match started, he was far enough away to not hear.  Wearily he climbed the steps, and maneuvered the crooked front door that always stuck open once again.  

She was busy scrubbing the table furiously, agitated as a cat’s twitching tail.  But then, she always kept busy when she got upset by something.  Better than the results of him being in a temper, he supposed, where things likewise got done, but usually far darker things than chores. 

She heard the door, of course, and looked up, dropping her scrub brush, and eyeing him with an air of hesitation.  Saw her glance towards the door, and suddenly understood that she expected him to serve her notice now that he was leaving, and wouldn’t be back.  Looked on the verge of tears herself, and he wasn’t sure whether it was tears of fury or not, but it hit him hard all the same.  Everything he’d done, all the ways he’d failed her, and she’d never, ever cried.

He tried to think how to say it.  Our boy said I can stay, but only if you approve.  Yeah, that’d go over well.

It was the young dumb fool he’d been with Mary Gillis, of all things, that gave him a path.  She’d always said it wasn’t him, it was the life he led.  Though she sure as shit seemed to sharply criticize his personal habits as well as his profession, for all that.  For so long he’d seen the two things as damn well inseparable.  He was what he was, and that was an outlaw.  Like he’d told Isaac, didn’t seem to be any other way.  But maybe there was.  He had to ask, at least.

He'd thought about it now and again, years ago.  When Isaac was still so young, when the pull of the son he loved kept bringing him back and back, and riding away got harder and harder.  But he hadn’t.  Because he’d known Eliza didn’t want him there.  He’d known it.  In the years since that pain of leaving had worn into him to where it settled down to a resigned ache, but it was still there.

If she’d let him stay…he’d always told himself the matter was settled, that he gave Isaac as much as Eliza would accept.  But if that chance was there, for real, how could he walk away?  

He owed so much to Dutch.  Always had, probably always would.  But it felt like he stepped outside the whole thing and looked at it coolly, dispassionately.  He’d given Dutch everything he had for twenty-one years already.  When was that debt ever paid?  Dutch was a grown man.  Isaac was a child.  Sons were supposed to grow up and leave their fathers at some point, weren’t they?  Maybe still be nearby, sure, but distinctly making their own lives.  Why hadn’t he ever done that?  Dutch needed Arthur in the gang, yes, but Isaac needed him as a father.  Dutch had to be able to replace him, and wasn’t that what he’d feared every time Dutch brought some new gun hand back to the gang?  Isaac couldn’t replace him, and Eliza obviously hadn’t found a man either to be his father.  Didn’t he owe more to this woman and his own child, if only they’d take him up on it?  

Looking at it from the outside, what would he think of any other man who clung to his daddy's plans and left a woman in trouble, and later their child, picking up the slack?  He'd call them a cowardly piece of shit who was more a boy than a man, most likely.  And maybe that's what he was, and always had been.  He’d wanted the security of blindly following, rather than taking up being responsible for himself and making his own way.  He'd been loyal, but not to where it was most due.  Bitter knowledge, that, and it felt so stupidly obvious now, and so shameful.

It still galled him for a moment to be here, more or less begging Eliza, flickers of pride and temper saying that if she didn’t like him, if she wanted to stand in judgment, then she damn well could be fully rid of him.  He took in a breath, told himself he owed better to Eliza than to draw the ghost of the mess with Mary onto her yet again.  Tried to put it as plain as he could, trying to define a difference he had never really believed in, but which seemed to be of absolute importance to both Isaac and Eliza.  Tried to find some way to believe in that difference himself, because that seemed like the only way forward.  That maybe he could become someone worth something.  That maybe this place could become home, rather than an awkward guilty separate life he always felt somewhat bad about not fully doing right by.  

“There’s a thing I got to know, Eliza.  Is it…me you object to, that you wouldn’t marry all them years ago, or is it my being an outlaw?”

She looked at him, fine silver-grey eyes going wide, and seemed to realize what he meant by that.  Hand going up over her mouth in shock, then she did actually let loose a few tears.  “Arthur.  Shit.  You ain’t serious?  You blessed fool, trouble’s always been you being an outlaw.”

There ain’t no poem or song that begins like this, he thought, but all the same, he felt compelled to step forward, to put his arms around her, to hold her close for the first time since a night neither of them could remember.  It felt strangely right.  “I have that effect on women, I guess,” he said, trying to make a wry joke.  She laugh-cried at that, but she held onto him rather than stiffening or even pushing him away, and that kindled the warmth of hope within him too.

Maybe it wasn’t too late.  Maybe they could make this work.  Maybe he could make a choice, somehow work to become someone different.  

Maybe not all dreams were stupid, hopeless ones. 

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #rdr2 #arthur morgan #eliza mccready #continued from the previous two #although not in order lol

[squidproquoclarice]

Yeehawgust Day 19: Dead of Night

May 1899

Pine Grove, Minnesota

She had learned in the past months to sleep through the disturbances of another person in the same bed.  But tonight Eliza woke in the dark at the feel of Arthur climbing out of bed, and then the quiet sound of the bedroom door opening and then closing again.  She lay there for a minute, debating whether she ought to leave him to it.  People got moods sometimes, and wanted to be alone with their thoughts.  God knew she did at points.

But it was the dead of the night, and if he was that disturbed by his own mind, he probably hadn’t slept.  She’d seen the newspapers today in town when they went in to do their shopping, and their headlines about a bloodbath down in Blackwater.  He’d never told her much about his outlaw gang, in all the years since they’d met.  She’d never really wanted to hear, he’d never wanted to bring that inside the old Wyoming cabin to Isaac and her, and after last fall, he’d put it aside entirely.  She’d tried to avoid knowing too many details, because some knowledge was just going to be poison.  She’d listen whenever he needed to talk about it, and take that onto herself, because he shouldn’t bear it alone.  But asking him to drag all that out for her would be cruel.  

The look on his face, stricken, said plenty.  She knew enough to know he’d been with the Van Der Lindes, and the names in the paper that meant very little to her meant a lot to him.  People who’d had far more of his life than she and Isaac had to this point, for all he’d finally changed that.

Dutch van der Linde himself, dead, and that would be the end of that gang.  She couldn’t help but thank God Isaac had spoken up last October, somehow breaking up the logjam of things between her and Arthur that had existed for so many years, assumptions and self-criticism and habits all so worn in they never would have gotten out of it.   

If Isaac hadn’t done it, she had the sense that Arthur would have gone over the Grizzlies, and she would never have seen him again.  Another dead man in Blackwater among dozens, or on the run under keen scrutiny that would never die down.  A bank robbery or whatever might blow over.  Clearly they had that Arthur had been on the outlaw trail for so many years.  This?  Something like this would stick.  They’d be hunting down the men left from it.  She knew it in her bones.

Making her decision, she got up out of bed herself, and found him on the porch, leaning on the rail in the darkness, head down, shoulders tight.  She reached out, put a hand on his shoulder, and said what was simply the truth.  “I’m glad you wasn’t there.”

“I know.”  He pushed himself up off his elbows, hands now on the rail, straightening a bit.  “Can’t help but think if I had, maybe it would have gone different.  Or maybe not.  A man’s always got to have some notions in that direction, I expect, no matter who he is.  It don’t mean that I wish I’d been there, not here…”  He paused, and she waited, sensing more words to come.  He added, voice thick with regret, “It just sounds like one hell of a mess.  Innocent folk dead.  They said Dutch himself shot a woman in the head after holding her hostage, and…Jesus.  I swear to you, that weren’t the man I knew.  Not how it went with us.  We did things, but nothing like that, not ever.”

“I know.”  She echoed his own words there.  She believed him.  There were hard edges to him, and they were still finally learning the way of each other after all these years.  Came to the notion over the long winter in Wyoming snowed in, him there for months for the first time, that perhaps they could stick together for each other as well as for Isaac, and that was a work in progress.  This fresh start in Minnesota where they’d settled just last month had done both of them good, and Isaac as well.  “I know you done things that weren’t nothing pretty.  You can…talk about it when you need, Arthur.  Just cause I don’t know all them details of it don’t mean I’m here pretending it never happened.  I ain’t some naive schoolgirl imagining it was all harmless adventures.”  Her younger self probably wouldn’t have been able to accept him as a killer.  But everyone grew up eventually.  She’d done some terrible things herself, and she could see the toll his life had taken on him.  

“It was, for a while.  Only folk we harmed were rich bastards, and only in their wallets.  But something changed.  And it just seemed like a horse that went and bolted, no reins to it.  Can’t guide it, can’t jump off it.  You’re just holding on and committed until it either runs itself out or throws you.”  Kept talking, and he needed it for sure tonight, and this was the most he’d ever told her about that life.

“No matter what you done, Arthur, there’s a good man in you still.  And I see more of him every day.”  She’d learned.  About his wry good humor, about his kindness, that it wasn’t just politeness put on as a show.  He cared about people, much as he still liked to claim he didn’t, and liked helping them.  Worked himself hard, and not just to impress her or Isaac, but simply as the way he was, compelled to look after people.  Had a temper, yes, and a scathing sarcastic tongue sometimes, but never turned on someone who couldn’t bear it.  Regret and melancholy, a man who could get caught up in his own head, and she’d seen that even long ago.  But there was an unexpectedly earnest nature to him too, something touchingly willing to believe in people and be fierce in his loyalty, and to atone for what he’d done.  Tenderness too, and she’d had only a mere flicker of a drunken impression from long ago on the night that resulted in their son, and she knew now that sweetness hadn’t been imagined. 

He’d chosen Isaac in the end, and chosen her by it too, and this Blackwater news just told her he’d gotten out before it was finally too late.  She’d be there for him as best she could, because sorrow was sorrow, seeing the unlovely finish of the life he’d lived for so long, the deaths of people he’d loved.  She wouldn’t expect him to keep it tucked away.

Keeping her hand on his shoulder, she told him, “Come back to bed.”  Telling him by it that he wasn’t alone, not any more.  He reached up, put his hand over hers, and squeezed her fingers.  Turning towards her, turning away from the dark.  She kept hold of his hand, leading him back to their bed, intending on holding him until he finally fell asleep.  Even if that took all night.  They were in this together now, committed to it.  They weren’t foolish young things anymore, too sad and too stubborn to believe it could ever change.  This was no bolting horse, but the two of them pulling as a team together, something patient and steady, and that made all the difference.      

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #rdr2 #eliza mccready #arthur morgan #continued from yesterday's #the 'isaac sets his parents straight' au

[squidproquoclarice]

Yeehawgust Day 18: Bandolier

October 1898

Eagle’s Bluff, Wyoming

As he came back to the cabin from where he’d gone and brushed down his father’s pretty Appaloosa mare, Boadicea, he heard them talking, and not just usual pleasantries.  Meant something was up.  They never talked too much, his mother and father, unless it was about him.  Sometimes Isaac felt like he could fill ages with the things they never quite said, for all their silences had the comfortable well-worn air of familiarity to them.  “It’s coming up on winter real fast.  We’ll be headed up over the Grizzlies, so…”

“The last we’ll see of you till spring.  I see.”

“Or even later.”  Pa sighed heavily.  “Look, I know you don’t want to hear about no particulars.  But…by the sound of it, we’re planning to stay east of the mountains for a time.”

In other words, I don’t know for sure when I’ll be back.  He’d heard time after time when Pa rode away, making some vague forecast of when he might return again, and Ma always took it with polite acceptance.  Pa left, Ma and Isaac turned back to the rhythms of their lives, and then Pa would come back at some point, and Isaac could never help the leap of excitement he felt at it even now.

The way it seemed between the two of them, comfortable yet formal, a well-settled habit, Isaac was surprised to hear her pushing back this time.  “Arthur…he’s getting older.  Twelve now.  It was one thing for you to miss things real early when he was a baby and he didn’t realize, but you’ve been here regular enough ever since.  He’s come to count on that.  He’ll be a man soon enough.  He needs a father maybe more than he ever has, not you off doing God knows what…”

“What of it, Eliza?”  Pa had a temper on him, which he fully admitted, but Isaac rarely saw any of it turned on either Ma or him.  Just bits and edges of irritation, but there was something like actual anger in Arthur Morgan’s voice now, a raw rough edge to his deep voice.  “We had this little talk already twelve years ago, and you made it damn clear you wouldn’t have me.  The boy’s a McCready, ain’t he?  In all them years, not a single thing’s changed, we’re just the same as we both was then, and now you want to tear a strip off me for it again?”

A McCready, whose father “Arthur McCready” seemed to go on a lot of awful long cattle drives and the like, despite that being a dying way of making a living.  But people in town accepted it, more or less.  He’d never heard people talking about it in a nasty, speculative way.  That helped.  Mostly they clucked their tongues in sympathy that Mr. McCready couldn’t seem to find steadier work rather than being a relic doing the same job he’d done a dozen years ago, and Mrs. McCready kept having to wait tables in the saloon to make ends meet.

“I said I wouldn’t come join your outlaws, yeah.  You’re his father,” she insisted back, her own voice rising.  “You ain’t done that bad by him, but you just want to up and vanish out of his life now?  He loves you.  If you’re just gonna hurt him in the end, I wish to God I’d stuck to my guns and told you to just get lost that day you came back.”     

“Hell, you probably should have.  Better for the both of you.”  Words all low and fierce, and then Pa pushed his way out the door, cursing at the way it always stuck, and stalked off, a tall figure whose long black duster coat blended into the gathering darkness among the trees quickly enough.  Not seeing Isaac standing there near the door, heart suddenly in his throat at the notion of getting caught.  

Feeling curiously like some veil over things had gotten ripped away, and Ma was right, he was getting older, because he could never go back now to childish assumptions.  Odd as the arrangement was between his parents, how his father being an outlaw and unable to settle down had been about the only explanation he’d got, it had always seemed warm and friendly enough between them.  But now all he could see was that there was hurt and even fury in it for both of them, going back years and years.  And he was the cause of it.

Before he could think much about it, he’d followed his father’s path, knowing where he’d probably be.  That same old rock near the river where they liked to fish.  A good place too for some quiet when he was alone.  Apparently Pa thought the same, because as Isaac came up on the rock, he saw him standing there, arms folded over his chest, staring out into the distance like all the answers to the world were written there.

Isaac must have made some sound, because just like that, Pa had whirled around, hand sweeping towards the butt of the gun at his hip.  For just a moment, Isaac saw the man his father must be away from here.  Someone fearsome, deadly, quick with a gun, who he’d seen today even had a bandolier tucked away in his saddlebags for having more ammunition in whatever situation he found himself in.  Isaac couldn’t imagine exactly what in God’s name that kind of battle might be to require that many bullets, but he was pretty sure it was nothing nice.  

Pa saw who it was, and sighed, rubbing a hand down his face.  “Don’t tell me you heard all that.”  Sighed again, nodding.  “Of course you did.  Wouldn’t be out here otherwise.”

“Pa…”  Now he didn’t know what to say.  Suddenly a burst of inspiration struck.  “If you got to go, just take me with you, all right?  I ain’t much of a kid no more, I could ride with you…”

Pa came over, and took him by the shoulders.  “Isaac.”  He said the name gently, and the words that followed, soft but spun with a core of steel to them that Isaac could tell meant he wouldn’t give an inch.  “That ain’t gonna happen.  The last thing I want is you turning out like me.”  He gave a low, bitter laugh.  “One thing your ma and me agree on, I expect.  It ain’t a pretty life.”

“Then why do you even do it?”  The words came out before he could help it, demanding and sharp.  “If it ain’t good for you?”  

It took Pa a moment to answer.  “Things got set for me real young, even younger than you, and just…well.  I ain’t sure I chose it, but it’s the life I got.”

He looked at his father in that fading light, seeing more now with clearer sight of things.  Saw the lines around his green eyes, the weatherbeaten look of him.  Seeing not some fearsome outlaw, or the affectionate father who taught him things, but just a tired, sad man growing old before his time. 

He might not always love his life either, but he at least had Ma, and Pa when he was here, and this cabin.  Thought about the pallet Pa slept on all these years, on the porch if the weather was fine, in the kitchen if not.  He’d grown up with that, so it hadn’t seemed strange to him, but it did now.  Both he and Ma had a bed, after all.  He belonged.  He had a home.  It struck him like a fist to the belly to realize that Pa probably didn’t.  “You ain’t had no other place to go?  Nowhere that’s home?”

“Well, I got some people…”

“Didn’t ask if you got folk, I asked if you got a home.”

 “Not really.”  He paused, adding in a softer voice, almost to himself, “Never really did.”

His breath caught at that, something in him aching for the loneliness of it.  Hearing the admission that Pa knew he’d never belonged here, but that could change, couldn’t it?  All someone had to do was welcome him.  And it couldn’t be Ma, because it seemed like things between them had gotten stuck in a rut years and years ago.  “Then stay here.”  Hating the crack in his voice at the plea, but wanting, needing so much to ask.  Not willing to let him slip away, perhaps forever, and wanting so much to believe that perhaps he was enough to make him stay.  “Then if I can’t go with you, I want you to stay, OK?”

Another of those tired sighs, and his voice took on the tone of explaining something obvious, like Isaac was a stupid little boy.  “Your momma’s put up with enough nonsense from me over the years, coming to see you.  I don’t think she’d like me hanging around for good.”

“You think that, but you ever ask her?  Maybe that’s what she wants.”

“Son.  When a woman in trouble turns you down flat, you’d best take the point she’s making–no, never mind.  That’s all old business between Eliza and me.  No need to bring you into it.”

“Yeah, well, I got born into the middle of it.”  Snapping the words, and maybe there was something angry in him about all of it too, and that felt both terrifying and satisfying all at once.  “So I’m involved, ain’t I?”

Pa stared at Isaac, and some expression he couldn’t quite place passed across his father’s features.  “Goddamn,” he said, almost under his breath.  “You really did go and grow up.”  Pride and melancholy all at once in his words.  

“I heard what she said.  She said she wouldn’t go be no outlaw, but that don’t mean she wouldn’t let you stay.”  The anger was slipping from his grasp, and the edge of fear came back, but mostly Isaac just felt the sense of rightness in saying it.  “You got a choice, Pa.  Just…ask her.  Please.  Come home, for good.”  

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 #rdr2 #isaac mccready #isaac morgan #arthur morgan #eliza mccready #that au where eliza and isaac survive #and isaac is dang well gonna fix this or else #things were always going to come to a head over isaac eventually #let's face it

[squidproquoclarice]

Yeehawgust Day 17: Trick Roping

August 1892

Meriton, Illinois

The rope sailed through the air with a neat flick of his wrist, dropping around the fleeing man’s head, and Arthur gave it a jerk, pulling the loop tight and the line taut.  Ended with the runner on the ground, and Arthur headed for him, growling, “Oh, no, you aren’t leaving so soon, Mr. White!  Not until you answer for what you’ve done.”

John, wriggling like a worm on a hook with his arms pinioned by the rope, turned enough to look up at him with a scowl.  “Shit, Arthur, you actually yanked the damn rope.”

“Quite your whining,” he said affably, loosening the lasso and reaching a hand down that John grabbed to pull himself to his feet.  “It’s that or you do better making taking that fall look real, cause from where I’m standing, it won’t fool a damn chicken.”

“Bessie,” John protested, looking over at her.  “Help?”

“Bessie, he’s got to learn.  He ain’t gonna make a convincing pageboy no more,” Arthur pointed out with a sigh.  Nineteen now and too old for the boyish roles he’d played since the Matthews theater troupe found him south of Chicago seven years ago.  The same roles Arthur had worked his way through after being taken on at fourteen out in San Francisco.  Though to his mind, playing the leading man, all too often a romantic figure, wasn’t that much better in some ways.  But then he’d long since given up the notion of being bothered with the difference between reality and a facade.  When he was acting, the man he played was as real as any.  Everybody put on some masks one way or another, every day.

Bessie eyed the two of them.  “John, you do need to sell the fall better.  Arthur, you need to not be taking such glee in tripping him up.”

“What, me?  I was just acting, Bessie.  Defending the honor of my poor fiancee Geraldine,” he gestured over to where Eliza waited in the cabin scenery, wringing her hands and looking appropriately helpless and in need of defending.  Horseshit.  As if his wife had ever needed that.  She didn’t spit fire, Eliza, but she was tough as nails.  Bessie had taken to the nineteen-year-old waitress with a real shine years back when they were out in Wyoming, recognizing another girl who’d apparently had dreams far beyond a small village.  When she brought Eliza back to the theater caravan, and Arthur met her, well…they’d found something together, in time.

Eliza shot him a look, coming over.  “Don’t think I don’t know when you’re not acting,” she said in an undertone, putting a hand on his shoulder as she passed.  “You enjoyed that.”  

“He can stand some humbling.  Too big for his britches these days,” Arthur returned, equally quietly, stifling a chuckle.  Yeah, he’d been just the same.  But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t enjoy taking John down a notch or two when needed.  Brotherly prerogative, so far as he was concerned.

Rubbing his shoulder, John scowled at them.  “Christ, can you two leave off the flirtations?”

Tempted as he was to lay a big smacking kiss on Eliza just for that, he just winked at her instead and grinned.  She winked back.  “John, if you think that’s flirtation, you got some lessons coming to you about talking to women all romantic.”  She clucked her tongue in a sorrowful way.  “And you Hosea’s son, no less.”

Bessie chuckled at that.  “What can I say?  He won me over with Shakespeare, but he kept me with all sorts of lovely romantic nonsense.”

“Still going to this day, my love,” Hosea said with good cheer.  Walking over from where he’d been studying the scene from his favored post leaning against his and Bessie’s caravan, he issued the orders briskly as usual.  Bessie was the real person in charge in the end because Hosea worshiped the ground his wife walked upon, but the two of them together made for pretty good directors.  “Arthur, go a bit lighter on the lasso.  But John, if you can’t take the fall right, we’re gonna have to put some padding on you.”

John sighed, accepting that.  “All right, all right.”  He put his hands up.  “I know when I’m beaten.”

Hosea put a hand to his chin, stroking his thumb over his lower lip.  That thoughtful look he always got when he had a notion, and this time was no different.  “You know, that could work.  The rope trick’s flashy but maybe too dangerous–”  He put up a hand, looking towards Arthur.  “Much as I have faith in your abilities.  So how about Leroy White gets chased to…the edge of a cliff.  Sees there’s no escape.  So he turns back to Hal Trent, puts his hands up, and he says…”  He gestured to John, a rolling again motion that they were all utterly familiar with from years on the theater trail.  Sometimes for hours.  Hosea Matthews was nothing if not a perfectionist.

“I know when I’m beaten,” John said, hands back up again, and as opposed to the irritability there had been before, he said it with the right mix of anger and resignation.  So maybe his little brother had more acting abilities, the notion of getting inside the head of someone else entirely, than Arthur had counted upon.  Or maybe he was just growing up.

Hosea and Bessie exchanged glances.  “Perfect,” Bessie said, beaming at all of them.  “White surrenders, Hal ties him up, you still get the impressive sight of Hal hauling a hogtied White back to face justice.  Let’s change the scene.” 

#yeehawgust #yeehawgust 2022 rdr2 #arthur morgan #john marston #bessie matthews #hosea matthews #eliza mccready #that au where hosea and bessie run a theater troupe