#rdr2 timewarp au what if: sean dies first

[verdemoun]

what if hypothetically…darragh went to seans funeral in the timewarp…

I know you asked for different angst but I’ve been sitting on this one until I was in the mood.

Sean’s funeral was a mess. Lenny and Sean’s wedding was the first big wedding the gang had to organize. Sean’s funeral was the first funeral they had to arrange.

Following advice, Lenny and Karen impulsively chose open casket. It made sense; they’d all seen corpses before, and the idea of a final goodbye sounded pretty. Instead, they all felt nauseous. Sean wasn’t meant to be still or peaceful. He was meant to be alive. There was so much make-up on his face they couldn’t see all the faint marks on his face. The moles were there, but the little scars and blemishes that made him look real were hidden. His hair was too well maintained, combed back the way Lenny always loved him wearing it but Sean never would because it wasn’t him.

Midway through eulogies, Darragh staggers in, the sort of drunk you can smell. He takes a seat at the back, poorly trying to straighten his blazer and unironed shirt. Everyone is trying not to cry, including Arthur during his own speech remembering the proper old days, but Darragh is doing a significantly worse job. Him trying not to cry was its own wail of deep, primal, animalistic mourning, pushing everyone closer to their own breaking point.

Hosea ends up dragging him outside, apologizing profusely because he has never been in the situation where he needed to bury a son, but warning him to pull himself together. For Lenny's sake, the gang's sake, for Maeve's sake, when Maeve barely understands Sean isn't waking up or coming home, he needs to hold himself together and if not he can stumble back to whatever bar he just left.

Darragh takes a breath, and agrees. Goes back in, and Hosea quickly takes a seat beside him in the back. He saw Darragh twitch, like the strike of a match. It was the same angry glower Sean would get, the moment Hosea knew a grudge would never be let go. Darragh's angry and looking for a fight.

With every speech, Darragh looks more like a slowed down explosion. His face is turning red, skin raw from wiping tears away, hunched over with every breath an expansion of his entire body. The gang is healing, telling stories of good times, remembering Sean so warmly they're actually finding comfort in the morbid spectacle they were denied so often in canon.

When they ask if anyone else has a few words, Hosea grabs Darragh's wrist in the same second the old irishman goes to stand. To his shock, Darragh actually simmers, but not without a hissed 'he was my son'.

Eventually, it's Hosea and Darragh alone, far into the night, standing at Sean's grave - because Hosea knows better than to leave someone that angry, and bitter, and isolated, completely alone. Darragh pulls out a scrap of paper from his pocket.

Darragh, through gritted teeth and tears, told a story about a 5 year old Sean, climbing trees far too tall because he knew his da was there to catch him when he inevitably fell. That was his son: brave but not naive, fearless but not reckless. As far as Darragh knew, Sean Macguire, his son, died in 1889. Darragh didn't know the stranger he bumped into in a bottle shop with his son's face, or the lives others remembered so innocently. His son wasn't the sort of repressed idiot who lightened the mood with drunk antics, or burned tobacco fields, or got women pregnant. His son wouldn't be stupid enough to walk home alone at night and get shot in a robbery gone wrong. None of them knew his son, and he's sorry they didn't, because his Sean was brilliant. He was sorry he was standing over a stranger's grave, because he'd never get the chance to know what happened to make his son change into someone else, or get to know his son again.