Chapter Text
It’s the inverse of the scene you and he have played out so many times before.
As you unbutton his shirt, you follow every inch of revealed skin with your mouth, trailing a line from his collarbone to his belt. His breath catches in his throat when you palm his erection, the familiar sound now cause for dread, what once signified arousal now a warning of the cough to follow.
You worriedly glance upwards, but Arthur shakes his head before you can speak.
“I’m good,” he says. “Keep going.”
So you lower your eyes again. You kneel before him as he sits on the edge of your bed. The wooden slats of your floor are digging into your knees and leaving pink imprints, but no matter, no matter. He is touching your face and running his thumb across your cheek, he is sighing shakily as you take him into your mouth, as you drag your tongue against the length of him and part your lips around the head of his cock.
It’s not long before he stops you. “Not gonna last with you goin’ at me like that.”
You roll your eyes. “That’s the point of it.”
“C’mon, get up here.” He pats the space beside him on the bed. “Want to be inside you again.”
“You are inside me,” you reply, flicking your tongue against him again.
“Cheeky.” Arthur says, grinning. He lightly pinches the side of your face. “You know what I mean.”
“Help me with my dress, then.” Turning your back to him, you stand between his legs and rest your hands on his knees. Facing him is the column of white buttons like a spinal cord, running from the nape of your neck to your lower back.
He undoes them the way he always has: top to bottom, clumsily pushing each button through its corresponding eyelet. “Never liked these things,” you hear him grumble from behind, but there’s no real resentment in it.
You’ve always suspected that he takes a certain satisfaction in undressing you this way. You both prefer the easy convenience of your usual clothes, but the gradual reveal that your more elaborate dresses provide has an appeal all its own. It’s indicative of a side of him, you think, that takes a slow delight in things. A side few others, if any, have ever seen.
When he’s finished, Arthur slips the dress from your shoulders and pulls it down your hips, lets it fall in a pool of grey cloth at your feet.
“Nothing underneath?” he runs a hand from the curve of your waist to the flare of your thigh and you close your eyes, shivering at his touch. “You make a habit of dressing this way or is this just for me?”
You turn to face him. “Just for you.”
He’s silent as he drinks in the sight of you. Even now he regards your naked body with a look of quiet disbelief, as if he’s being gifted with a sight reserved for better men.
But then the moment passes. The lazy grin returns. He presses two fingers along your slit and you stiffen with surprise.
“Arthur! You —”
When he pulls his hand away, his fingers are shiny with your slick. “This for me too?”
You impatiently yank at his sleeve in response. “Hurry up and take off your clothes already.”
“Easy, girl,” he says, shrugging off his shirt. “Ain’t hardly been here a full hour and already you’re givin’ me orders.”
“That’s right.” You put your hand on his shoulder and give him a playful shove. Arthur falls exaggeratedly backwards onto your sheets, landing with a soft whump against the mattress. “But that’s how you like it, isn’t it?”
“That I do,” he says softly.
He lifts his hips to let you shimmy him out of his trousers, pulling them down to his calves. Then his boots, his socks, until he’s laid as bare as you are.
Now that you’re able to get a good look at him, you realize he’s lost even more weight than you’d originally thought. The slight curve of his collarbone now a steep incline, the shadow of his ribs faint beneath his skin. Paler than he should be, his eyes dark with exhaustion.
You touch the scattered bruises spread along his left side. Mottled violet fading to green, days old. Even in this state, Dutch is still sending him out. The old condemnations weigh heavy in your mouth, but you bite them back. There’s no point in it, not when he’s long since made his choices known.
“Must really look like shit if even you’re lookin’ at me like that.”
“Yeah,” you admit, skimming your fingers over his stomach. “But your mind’s made up, isn’t it?”
He nods. There is a small, tired smile on his face as he gestures towards himself. “C’mere, girl.”
You make your way up to him in increments, starting with a kiss to his thigh, then another to the ridge of his hip, letting your lips linger on the jut of bone there, once hidden under muscle but now so prominent beneath the skin. Your thumb traces over the thin, jagged scar that spans across his torso, and you follow its path with your tongue.
Then you pass your palm gingerly over the dark bruising on his side, the scabbed over cut along his forearm, the myriad scratches and scuffs that litter his body, injuries building up little by little until he’s more a patchwork of scars than a man.
Lightly, delicately, you touch the ugly scar across his shoulder, the bullet hole encircled by the gunpowder burn, pressing your mouth to it as you finally straddle him. You run your thumb along the diagonal set of scars on his chin and lower yourself against him, careful not to put any pressure against his chest as you put your hand between your thighs and fit him inside.
The smooth glide, the enveloping warmth so feverishly sweet and intense, has him squeezing his eyes shut to endure it. He makes a low, guttural noise in the back of his throat as he bucks up, but you stop him, pushing his hips down with both hands as you sit up and hold him still.
“Let me,” you say, soft but firm.
“I ain’t an invalid —”
“Arthur, please .”
He hears the brittle urgency in your voice and relents. Arthur sighs, rolling his head back and gazing up at you with his dark blond hair ruffled against your pillow, then raises his hand to your face and brushes his knuckles across the wet glimmer of your cheek. You close your fingers around his wrist and turn to press your lips to his palm, then bring it to rest between the valley of your breasts, laying the flat of it against your sternum.
“When this is all over,” you whisper. “I’m gonna take care of you. Just like this.”
Then the slow lift of your hips. A pace so deliberately drawn out that you can count the beats of your heart in between each rise and fall. And through it all his eyes are fixed on the join of your bodies, the easy back and forth of it, taking in every inch of you the way he would a passing doe or a heron in flight. Something lovely but fleeting, gone in the next second. Nothing left behind save the afterimage, immaterial as air but in his mind’s eye the essentials of it sharp and clear. Touching your skin like he’s tracing the lines in a book, reading with his fingers the whole of you, so intent and with such solemnity that you immediately recognize the meaning of it.
He wants this moment to last as a frozen instant to call back upon later, a final image to dwell upon should he meet his end. The realization swells like a palpable thing in the confines of your breast, and you are full to bursting, heavy with grief and dread alike —
Then Arthur meets your eyes, gazing at you with such frank tenderness that all your words die in your mouth, forgoing speech entirely in favor of pure emotion.
“My beautiful girl,” he murmurs. “I love you so much.”
You whimper, squeezing your eyes shut tight against the prickle of tears. A choked sob rises high in your throat that you try, and fail, to swallow down. And it washes over anew, the bitter futility of it all, the bottomless fear that, even with him held inside you and pressed firm against your hips, that even now he is slipping away, little by little, like grains of sand in an hourglass.
“I love you too,” you whisper, voice hoarse with emotion. “And that’s why I’m so scared that you won’t… th-that you won’t…”
You bite your lip and shake your head. Some small, superstitious part of you is convinced that giving voice to the mere possibility of his death will give it further hold on him.
Arthur braces an arm against the mattress and raises himself up to meet you. He holds you steady, his hand cradling the back of your head as he presses his mouth to your own in a long, lingering kiss. And he is warm against your skin, calloused and scarred and torn, the marks of a life hard-lived rough against your palms as you clutch at the broad plane of his back.
He shifts his hips upwards and the raw ache of him twinges deep between your thighs, the sudden pang of sensation enough to coax from your throat a high, fluttery gasp.
“Ah, there it is,” Arthur says, a faint smile tugging at his lips. “Never could get tired of that noise.”
You wipe your eyes with the back of your hand, grinning reluctantly. “That so?”
“Wouldn’t lie to you for the world,” he replies, his voice so earnest that you decide not to bring up your tumultuous second encounter, during which he’d lied profusely.
He lays you down beneath him, the warm weight of him heavy against your hips as he presses deep, breathing harsh as he starts up a hard, steady rhythm.
“Wait, you’re gonna wear yourself out—”
“Let me,” Arthur growls stubbornly. Left unsaid is the latter half of the sentence: while I still can .
The bedsprings creak with familiar protest as he works you over, squeaking shrill and constant under the force of his thrusts. Twisting slow come the first, nascent ripples of pleasure, rising warm and persistent through where he’s joined with you. You appeal to him with an urgent whimper, gripping him tight as he kisses you again.
When you come, it all coalesces — the rough scrape of his stubble against your lips, the raw satisfaction of having him sunk deep inside, pressed so close and so dear… then the rise and fall afterwards, the warm and honeyed feeling of relief flooding soft through your veins. And with it, that momentary state of thoughtless bliss, of naked vulnerability so sweet and unguarded that the words slip out before you can stop yourself.
“Arthur,” you murmur. “Finish inside this time.”
He freezes mid-thrust, takes a long, shuddering breath. But in his eyes is reflected the same desperate, awful want, and you can feel the quickening of his blood, the rush of his own instinctual urge.
“Can’t,” he says weakly. “Couldnt… couldn’t risk leavin’ you alone like that.”
“I know.” Turning your head, you bite your lip and will yourself not to cry. “God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have —”
“But when I come back… ” he interrupts, his voice a hoarse, unsteady whisper. “I’ll make it up to you. As many times as it takes.”
When he comes back . Only a possibility of a possibility now, that minuscule chance that you’ve held onto so fiercely, flickering and waning and dying bit by bit with every trace of blood in his breath. He’s a fool for saying it, and you’re a fool to believe it, but it’s all you have, god it’s all you have —
“Promise me,” you plead, the ache of your words sharp and bitter as gunpowder in the back of your throat.
“I promise.” He presses his mouth to your neck, and in his lovemaking there is a fervency now that edges upon desperation, his motions jerky and unrestrained. “I swear it, because I want it too, god knows I’ve dreamed it —”
Arthur pulls away with a ragged gasp, and his come streaks wet and warm against your belly as he takes himself in hand, panting hard as he wrings from himself the last, weakening pangs of his own release. Then he collapses beside you, chest heaving as he tries to catch his breath.
It takes him a good minute. When he speaks again, it’s with his throat raw and rough, his words punctuated by the strain of his failing lungs.
“First thing we’re doing when we get out west is getting a decent bed.”
He says it with such casual conviction that it hurts with all the sharp, slivered pain of a knife. As if the narrow possibility of his survival were a certainty, a palpable thing ready for the taking.
But if this is the last time, why drag the ugliness of reality into it? At least for a little while, you want to be soft and foolish with him. A pale simulacrum of domesticity. A reprieve, an idyll.
“Let's get one we can both actually fit in,” you say. “Like the big one in that Strawberry hotel.”
“But not too big. Gotta have room left over.”
“For what?”
“For a crib,” he replies, turning to you with a smile so wistful and sweet that your heart flutters in your chest like a caged bird. “Might need to add a couple other rooms too, in time.”
The early evening light is filtering through the window, tinging everything it touches with shades of rose. Under it, the pallor of his cheeks is eased, the dark circles under his eyes no longer so prominent. Under it, he looks almost his old self again.
Settling yourself against him, you tuck your head against his shoulder and lay your palm across his chest, taking quiet comfort in the constant thump of his heartbeat. “Yes,” you say softly, allowing yourself the brief luxury of hope. “Yes, I think you’re right.”