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Dutch was averse the first time Hosea fell sick. Only the two of them on the road, himself sure to get the same cold and handle it with less than half the grace Hosea had, the man snot-nosed and pitiful in the same way that stray animals warm the heart. Little fun had to be found in struggling to breathe through mucus when the August humidity made it difficult to start with. Fought it until it was bad enough to put him on his back, hacking up both lungs and leaving a whistle in them when he breathed that, at night, Dutch listened to the slow dissipation of for a month afterwards.
They'd traded roles in a day or so, just as soon as Dutch had swallowed how womanly it felt to care for someone else. He knew only how a mother comforted her son, felt too soft tracing his fingertips over Hosea's forehead to feel the fever. He knew only how to be the son, really. He's unsure if he caught Hosea's cold or if he merely sought familiar attention after exerting so much compassion.
It was still distasteful when Arthur became fevered enough to relent to illness. Like father, like son, Dutch might think, if either were the boy's father in anything but fanciful daydreams. He hadn't yet grown comfortable with cooking food — that he didn't hunt — for a sick child before Arthur began vomitting whatever was fed to him. Hosea had coughed for a few days, and Dutch felt it in his head for a while, but something was eating at the kid.
This worried them.
Dutch was certainly not comfortable enough to be asked: "Stay?" His voice is quiet. Nearly the same, baited thing it was when the two of them first pulled him off the street. Arthur asks most things as though he will be hit for asking, even if Hosea's never thought it and Dutch has never done it.
When Dutch turns from the closed tent flap, he looks as small as he sounds. Nearing sixteen, built-up well from the runt they had rescued and yet still he can seem to sink into the bedroll with expert slimness, to shrink in on himself so far as to become a child again. He's never turned and thought poor thing before; he bites his tongue before something that gentle can leave his mouth.
"You want me to stay?" He asks. Of course that's what Arthur wants. He asked while Dutch was leaving the tent. Else, he might think he meant only to stay around camp.
He nods. Poor thing is the best name for it, the boy's softened-up face gone gaunt with two days' worth of rejecting food. He looks twenty-something and ten all at once, if only for the open vulnerability in his eyes. Dutch cannot say he isn't afraid, in the back of his mind, that whatever Arthur's got is contagious.
He's young and while not strong, yet, he's strong enough. They haven't discussed what happens if, contagious or not, Arthur gets worse. There is no reason not to besides the fact they don't want to, for he's only gotten worse.
"O'course." Dutch stands for a moment, until the way Arthur is looking at the man's shoes is palpable. It's bright enough in the tent's light shade to see his eyes held too-wide, perma-panicked the way they've been for days.
Is he expecting him to leave anyways or is he pulling him in however he can? Feels like the latter with the tension that strikes the air, and Dutch lets him have it with the sinking thought that it may be the last of a handful of things for Arthur. He hasn't heard many good stories that begin with forcible starvation. Cross-legged on the grass beside the bedroll, knee a palm's length from a boney shoulder pressed into the thin blanket. Not pity, but something kinder, warmer. He checks his forehead, first, and it's cool to the touch.
A sudden lack of fever has been the oddest part of today, and one that makes him very nervous.
"You feelin' any worse?" Asking the opposite isn't worth the time. It's been only a few minutes since he asked before, but he struggles to think of why Arthur might want him, last minute, to stay.
"Nah." It's forced out on one breath, and another deep one comes through his nose. Arthur looks at the canvas above them more than anything else, squinting as if it's too bright, before turning over to stare at the dirt on the sole of Dutch's boot. Self-inflicted and yet he feels guilty that this is what Arthur focuses on. Dying children should watch the sun over flower fields, or something else beautiful; not the rocks stuck in an old man's treads. He ignores the sudden decision that Arthur is dying which paranoia makes for him. "Jus'..." He looks as if he struggles for words, then gives up.
Dutch doesn't push it. It's easy to pick out what he might mean: just want you here. The fact Arthur asked at all is concerning in and of itself for how infrequently he shows any of this need. His own mother was a violent coddler and Hosea's was a sweethearted one— Dutch has trouble admitting that a boy Arthur's age, according to anyone but two men raised like themselves, ought not to want for comfort this way. He reaches out to brush stray hair back from Arthur's eyes, smooths it over the sweaty, pillow-crisped hair of his temple, and remembers with great shame how he longed for his mother to do the same before Hosea had filled whatever hole in his heart called for her touch. He'd been twenty-one and not nearly this ill.
He remembers her often since Arthur began to act out and get sick. They were two of his own favorite passtimes as a child. If stealing livestock or change or canned goods could not get his mother's attention, coughing was a surefire way to.
Despite her sneering, she wanted him alive. He abused it greatly.
Arthur kicks and thrashes more often than he had. A wily street-cat taken in to a hearth-warmed house where the walls are only made of potential disappointment, the likes of which stings worse than being switched for running away when the door opens too wide. Of the two of them, Hosea is more like the child that cradles the hissing thing in his arms and insists he's the favorite.
Maybe he is, when Dutch thinks about it. He's off fetching dinner for Arthur to eat and throw up again, or else it'd be him who was asked to stay. Hosea, with hands that know a lot more and a heart that feels things more wisely, even if the man insists he's nothing but a lucky fool.
Competitive or self-conscious, Dutch lays a hand on one of Arthur's that's splayed on the grass. It's clammy. He had paid more attention to the canvas than Arthur's face while he thought, but looking now he sees him close his eyes, mouth still tucked into the deep-set frown that ages him those ten years. Thin fingers uncurl beneath his palm. Not grabbing, but opening. He must feel worse. He absolutely must.
"Tired?" Dutch asks, softer than he ever has.
"All th'time," is slurred from pouting, dry lips.
He fights the urge to shake the boy into alertness and demand another hour, demand that Hosea be here if things really do go wrong. In the corner of his eye, Dutch sees a gnat crawl over the thin cotton of Arthur's shirt. Looking, eyes careening to the side, it disappears. The comfort is minute and the fear shifts inward.
"Get some sleep, son."
He intends to leave when he's unconscious, but Arthur's finger twitches enough to make him stay, even as he snores and the pain of sitting hunched, watchful blossoms stinging along his lower back and his nape. He will be fine come tomorrow morning, once Dutch has fretted enough for Hosea to spend the night at his side, but for the time that he watches the shallow rise and fall of Arthur's chest, Dutch thinks only of the night his mother left him, ill, to soothe himself in his cot.
He wakes up to an empty cabin. Clutter crowds out any idea that he is young and confused, as he so often woke up in those years, instead of old and alone. Micah must be gone, since he can't be heard. Lingering, the stench of eighteen-seventy-seven's ending summer clears itself from his chilled nose as he presses it to his coat's fur collar, inhaling the musty scent of old animal hide.
Freezing into his own chapped, rouged knuckles is Hagen air that's put a familiar rattle into the blond's chest. He was displeased to know that he still breathed like some hungry dog. Maybe catching breakfast is where he is, if he knows what's good for him.
Up in a moment without the energy to support it, he stumbles around a crate-turned-table with a ratty cloth draped over it. Damned thing only hits his shins. He needs to bring in one of the others from outside, now that they've emptied out one of the boxes that held old trash. Feminine touch, Micah called the excuse for a tablecloth. He told him he was welcome to eat the splinters on his lonesome, and the latter part of it seemed the most unappealing to the man. He frowned and replaced the corner of it that he had lifted up saying touché, and Dutch hadn't the wherewithal to inform him that wasn't even close to a suitable usage of the word.
Looking into the webbed cupboard that holds a sorry little bit of canned food, he teeters between utter disgust at the idea of reliance forming ever again between himself and another man, and a more reasonable fear of poison.
His own, hoarded food supply was at first taken in small bites until it hit his stomach and proved itself virignally clean of intoxicants. A can of beans waits on him this morning which he sat out last night. It was done in some poorly veiled attempt to continue taunting the gummy-mouthed Micah to actually give him one good, hard bite worth shooting for. He cannot prove that he has any teeth left but he strongly suspects it, even though the can is sealed tight and does not smell abnormal beneath his nose. It would make him feel better if he had teeth left, now that he's grown so many of his own.
He does not accept smokes from Micah, either, although he ran out of cigars months ago and would like nothing more. He has lost several weeks of sleep waiting for him to pass out, usually drunk — never changed, God scorn his heart — because he knows they are all too alike. Sleeping men are easy to strike. He has given this thought a lot of his time, whenever the deprivation does not make the world a much more active place to live in. Time stops up here; his mind fills the blanks with spiders and voices who all seem distantly nostalgic.
The most tenderness he has shown is tracing his fingers along the man's slumbering throat in search a feverish vein. Stubble crawled down below what had been allowed to grow of his greyed beard. Pushing until he woke up, stupidly, and Dutch insisted that he was merely dreaming of his own fears. Cabin fever gets you bad up here, Micah, and it had taken little else to convince him but another repetition of real bad, up here and a wistful shake of the head, the way all aged fools emphasize their truest stories to younger ones.
He wonders if he will wake up with Micah pressing on any arteries anytime soon.
It's likely. Very likely.
The gnats are back and collect themselves in his food. Hosea might tell him they cannot live this far north— too cold. Without anyone to rely on, the insects leave only of their own accord.