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junosmindpalace · 10 days

Text

FOR YOU, FOREVER AGO

🎧 take a piece of my heart and make it all your own.

pairing: arthur morgan x gn!reader

wc: 1.7k

synopsis: arthur, and the notes he leaves in the books he gifts you. who could have figured love can transcend time?

content: established relationship, reading, reading and some more reading (together), soft and playful love, fluff with some angst at the end (arthur's death mentioned). reader is briefly said to be wearing a chemise.

a/n: i said i wouldn't write him again and here i am. writing him again. because this game has taken up so much of my writing headspace...

There’s an old saying that Arthur has heard retold in various different ways, and it went along the lines of “an idle mind is the devil’s playground.”

It derived from Proverbs 16:27: “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” something he later found out upon overhearing the phrase from the Reverend’s mouth during one of his rare sermons. Arthur doesn’t believe much in any sort of sacred text, but he could, to an extent, believe in that phrase.

It’s a belief Dutch and Miss Grimshaw hold in especially high regard, and their incessant nagging to do away with him loitering about in the camp proved that. And while he agrees that it is necessary for everybody to do their part, Arthur spends much of his time out involving himself in all kinds of tough and weary business, and like anyone else, sometimes the enforcer needed a break.

Though it seemed so to quite many people, Arthur’s mind was not solely fixated on his life of crime. Like many other people he was a man of love, who enjoyed reveling in Mother Nature’s beauty, and memorializing its likeness in his journal in gorgeous detail, too. He enjoyed lingering in on conversations that took place around him; mundane things like about rumors and town happenings, though they weren’t always pleasant. And above all else, he enjoyed being around you.

Scare was the time to enjoy such leisure with your responsibilities, however. Often, he would return to camp well into the dead of night or during wind down time you had permitted for yourself (because Lord knows Grimshaw wouldn’t) to entertain your mind. Borrowing from the collections of books around camp was one of few forms of amusement you relied upon for some sort of satisfying stimulation.

Arthur couldn’t help but sometimes be jealous of this. To enjoy the leather cover of a book against his fingertips and the patches of sweetgrass and lavender enclosed around him like a makeshift bed was a luxury he could rarely afford. Yet still, he found ways to incorporate his own amusement to look forward to when he did have the off time to enjoy it.

The habit, at first, was a means of compensating for his long absences. It was almost his way of giving you a piece of his heart to hold to your chest, fill your mind, make your own with your wild imagination while he was away for sometimes frightening days at a time.

Arthur provided you with literature of all sorts, from dime novels to hardcover books, when he encountered them on his travels. Mythology retellings, exaggerated tales of the fictionalized Wild West, dramatic historical fiction with royalty, castles, and dragons, and the sort of philosophy books Dutch enjoys reading passages aloud from that critique civilization. Each one, though unique in content, held a message with consistent love that made your heart swell and your lips stretch into a pleasant smile at the intent behind them.

Couldn’t resist.

Thought you’d like this one.

All my love.

Thought of you.

For you to enjoy when I’m away.

To keep you preoccupied while I’m gone.

To make up for lost time.

It's late when Arthur finds time to enjoy the stories with you, propped up on his side in the while his other arm is draped loosely around your waist as you lay in the same position, holding the book the two of you were enamored with in one hand. The firelight illuminates the pages for him to read from over your shoulder, his fingers brushing over your stomach and arms absentmindedly as he immerses himself in the world along with you.

“This gentleman sure is a character.”

“Ain’t he?” you snicker, taking the comment as an indicator to turn to the next page. “Almost reminds me of someone.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” he raises a brow at you, observing your expression with a tilt of his head.

“Nothin’ at all.” you hum innocently, pretending to fix your attention back onto the pages. He catches your bluff when he teasingly curls his arm around your waist and presses you closer against his chest, invoking a squeal of laughter from you as he ruffles your chemise.

“Just turn the page.” he chuckles with a slight shake of his head and a roll of his eyes, but when you meet his playful gaze with one of your own, any further teasing dies on his tongue as his breath becomes lodged at the sight of your glow in the firelight.

“Okay.” you tut with a raise of your brows, resituating yourself and leaning further into his grasp, to which he responds by hugging you closer.

When your time wasn't spent under the stars, it was in your tent. Accompanied in your shared bedroll was a book from a marketplace stand you had picked out together when scouting around town. One of Arthur’s hands holds it on his stomach with his fingers at the bottom, while his other holds your shoulder soothingly. You lay your head over his heart, listening to its steady pulsing, and following the small text with tired eyes to lull you to sleep.

Sometimes he read to you, when your eyes grew too heavy to look up at him, and your brain was too exhausted to form coherent enough thoughts, let alone conversation. He'd read with his free hand, voice gradually becoming husky with thick exhaustion of his own the more he read on.

“Why’d you stop?” you murmured to him as you lulled you head up to look at him, briefly slipping into fuller consciousness when taking note of the absence of his voice amidst the evening chill.

“Thought you’d fallen asleep,” he replied, rubbing a hand up and down the side of your arm before planting a kiss on your forehead. You only shook your head.

“A little more?”

Arthur peered outside through a crevice in his tent to the pitch black, redirecting his attention back to you with a sigh. “Alright. But only a little.”

Sometimes you read to him, when he returns to the campsite with his brain scrambled from the hat and madness of his travels, and longs, almost on autopilot, for your presence and an extended period of rest. With his arms wrapped firmly around your waist, legs tangled on your sides and head snug against your stomach, you propped up one of the books you had borrowed from Mary-Beth, a romance that you could always rely on to knock Arthur out, with one hand, while the other carefully threads through his locks of brown hair.

“That sounds like a nice place to live, don’t it? In a house with a white picket fence and a beautiful garden.” You had asked him quietly one of those nights, looking down at his still figure, who merely hummed in response against your stomach. “Maybe outta the country.”

“And go where?” he replied drowsily, peering up at you through small eyes.

“I don’t know…surprise me.” you teased, and Arthur chuckled.

“Maybe someday, sweetheart.” he placed a kiss on the fabric of your night wear, letting out a sigh as he adjusted himself against you again. “Maybe someday we’ll go somewhere real nice.”

Amidst ever changing lives—periods of transition and transformation and hard feelings and new hopes and dreams—you made sure to often revisit his little notes kept in between the first few pages of a book picked out with you in mind and written with all the care you had to offer to one another. Nights apart we’re spent tracing the loving words with your eyes, running a nail through the loopy font. It reminds you that you lay under the same stars, the both of you wishing to reunite sooner than later upon one of the billions that twinkled in the sky.

When Arthur had passed under the dying night sky, the menial, but important, declarations of love became lost to you.

Focusing on anything outside of survival seemed impossible afterward, and the grief was all too fresh and thought consuming. Most of the time was spent rebuilding your life to the best of your ability, something not quite what you had envisioned in hopeful late night conversations with Arthur, but more bare minimum. No beautiful porch with a nice garden, no homey furnishings. Only a simple bungalow with a creaky bed and a bag of few possessions you managed to snag in your abrupt departure.

At the bottom of the bag one day, you find something, no, many things, you had not laid your eyes upon since before the hope of a new dawn was extinguished within you.

It had been the first time you had felt an urge to be productive. For most of your days were spent in melancholy and anxious paralyzing thought that kept asking, what’s next?

You held them in your hands carefully, turning them over before opening them curiously, only to have your breath hitched when your eyes landed on the front.

Couldn’t resist.

You scrambled for another.

Thought you’d like this one.

Another, and then another. All of them until the reminders brought you to tears.

All my love.

Thought of you.

For you to enjoy while I’m away.

To keep you preoccupied while I’m gone.

To make up for lost time.

The rest of the night became dedicated to remembering all that you once had, and that you were once determined to have. Reading stories that always seemed as fantastical as your dreams of a sweeter life, perhaps where they even derived from. The inspiration and hope they fuelled gradually returned with each memory you recounted of your shared dream with Arthur.

He had given it to you in the end. Taken you some place nice, even if he wasn’t there himself to enjoy it with you. He’d given you a piece of his heart all those years ago, and you made it your own. Given you the resources—just enough money and a whole lot of love—to help you realize a life you always wanted. He was there; in the blooming flowers, in the magnificent dawn and dusk, in the pages of books you held carefully between your fingers. And you’d remind yourself of it every night with a trace of your fingers over his scrawled messages of adoration.

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#i am slowly transitioning to writing more character fics #which you can find on my ao3 #so feel free to follow me there :)#im currently working on two (2) very lengthy rdr fics #one being centred around the women of rdr2 and another basically inserting adult jack into my own fictional 1910s world #with tati helping me a lot with #so look forward to that!#arthur morgan x reader #arthur morgan oneshot #arthur morgan fluff #arthur morgan angst #red dead redemption 2 x reader #red dead redemption 2 fluff #red dead redemption 2 oneshot #rdr2 x reader #rdr2 fluff #red dead redemption 2 angst #rdr2 oneshot

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