#yes davey's shirt does say 'save a horse'

[shsl-fander]

Happy pride month to modern au Jack Kelly and Davey Jacobs

[talesofesther]

Through Fields and Meadows - Part 1 (introduction)

Arthur Morgan x Reader

Summary: A mysterious girl joins the Van Der Linde gang just when they are about to leave Blackwater. And as they ride along, Arthur starts to care more than he should about her.

Masterlist with the other parts

A/N: if you wanna be added to the tag list, let me know.

Important notes, PLEASE read:

So guys, this is a story I started writing about a year ago in AO3, I wrote three parts (I'll be posting the next two within the following days) and never really continued it, and I'm still not sure if I will. But as I'm not a fan of posting in AO3, I decided to bring this story here, because it does have a special place in my heart. So if anyone likes this, let me know, and maybe I'll write something more about it ♥.

If I decide to continue this, know that I will stay true to the main events that happen in the original story in the game, but, there are going to be changes. Changes to best fit this story, so keep that in mind. (Especially involving the deaths in the game).

The dust-filled air of Blackwater was almost cold compared to the warmth of the setting sun. Today has been uneventful so far. Y/N was lazily hunched over a bar, drinking some whiskey.

The judging looks people usually gave her just because she chooses to wear pants instead of an uncomfortable skirt were no longer something she noticed. With having to look over your shoulder for almost your entire life, those curious eyes were nearly comforting.

Y/N had been in Blackwater for the past week or so. Just taking a break, or so she told herself. She considered herself to be a wanderer, a traveler. No home, no family. She could refer to herself as a ghost if she wanted to. Just a few people knew her name, her story, and most of them were dead. Most of that blood was on her hands too. And maybe that was the reason she never stayed in one place for too long.

She was brought back to reality by the sounds of two horses galloping on the street. Lawmen, probably Pinkerton agents judging by their fancy clothes.

She had heard the rumors, about the big attack on a boat that was carrying money, lots of money. Folks were saying it was the Van Der Linde gang, no one knew for sure, but everyone was talking.

She took a deep breath and muttered "what the hell".

She tossed a coin to the bartender, got out, and mounted her trusty steed and companion. Carefully following the lawmen.

They rode for a good couple of minutes. Y/N had to keep a large distance between her and the lawmen, otherwise, they could notice her. But she managed to not lose sight of them.

_________

"Come on people, we need to leave. Hurry up" Dutch screamed to everyone on the camp. They were packing things up as fast as they could.

"Dutch, Mac and Sean are still not back. We need to look for them" Arthur was confused, to say the least. Everything happened too fast and Dutch just gave him a poor explanation about what really happened.

"I'm sure they're going to be fine, son. Right now we need to focus on leaving this place as soon as possible. I need you-" Dutch was cut off by a gunshot.

"DAVEY" Abigail tried to run to his side but John held her back.

"GET DOWN EVERYONE" Dutch screamed as he ducked behind a wagon.

Arthur was reaching out for his gun when two other gunshots were fired and the lawmen fell to the ground. Dead.

Everyone tensed up. Looking everywhere for the origin of the bullets that just pretty much saved their skin. But then the horses that belonged to the lawmen went running, revealing a person riding a horse in front of the setting sun. Arthur kept his hand on his gun and squinted his eyes trying to see the person’s face.

Y/N put down her repeater and told her horse to walk forward.

"Stop right there. Who are you?" Dutch raised his revolver to her.

Y/N chuckled and dismounted her horse. She ironically raised her hands and the tip of her hat, revealing her face.

"You're welcome, Dutch"

Dutch slowly lowered his revolver and, with a shocked face, he whispered "Oh my lord"

Arthur looked between to two of them with a worried expression. Until Dutch let out a genuine laugh, leaving him even more confused.

"I can't believe it, Y/N Y/L/N! Aren't you a sight for sore eyes?" he approached the girl and enveloped her in a hug.

"It's good to see you too" Y/N smiled and patted his back.

"Dutch?" Hosea walked up to him with a questioning look. Mirrored by the gang that held the same expression.  

"Hosea, a good thing is finally happening in this cursed day" he smiled at the older man.

"Everyone listen up for a second. This is Y/N, the kind soul that just saved our lives. She is... A good friend of mine" Dutch smiled and Y/N gave the gang a small wave.

"Introductions later. Go back to packing, you all. Come on" Miss Grimshaw came over and took their attention away from the girl.

"You never mentioned her, Dutch" Hosea questioned him.

"I'm afraid she told me not to"

"I did. But still, it's a pleasure to meet you, Dutch talked about you" Y/N smiled and held her hand out for the older man to shake.

Hosea smiled and gladly shook her hand. "Likewise. Now if you’ll excuse me. Davey took a bullet, I'll go see him"

"You do that, old man. Make sure he's fine to leave this place" Dutch patted his back.

"What's happening Dutch? There's talk all around town about a big robbery on a boat, was that you?" Y/N asked with a serious expression.

"Yes, but I'm afraid it didn't go as I planned. We are leaving town" He sighed.

"I saw more horses coming our way, Dutch. We need to get out of here" Arthur stepped in, with a worried look. He eyed the new girl for a moment, she was wearing black pants, a black vest with a white shirt, a black and white bandana around her neck, and a black hat that had a red ribbon around it. He almost forgot how to breathe when she met his eyes. He turned his head quickly and tried to clear his mind. Not the time.

Y/N couldn't help but smirk, this man was intriguing her already. And truth be told he was quite handsome. She watched as he looked around the camp, where everyone was running like crazy packing everything on their wagons as the sun set.

"Let's go then, make sure everyone is ready Arthur" And with that, Arthur left and Dutch turned his attention back to Y/N.

"So, are you finally going to join us, my lady?" Dutch asked her with a hopeful smile.

"You know? I think I am in need of an adventure" Y/N smiled back at him.

As the lawmen approached them, Y/N mounted her horse and followed the Van Der Linde gang away from Blackwater.

[penaltybox14]

DecoFiremen: No happy choice

@zeitheist @darknight-brightstar @squad51goals @its-skadi  Silky is sick in the city, and Josiah has to make some choices, and have some conversations.  Emotions are hard, yo.

It's never good, to see that look on Eddy's face.  His fighter's jaw is set, but his eyes are soft like ships on a dark harbor.  This is the face that bodes bad news, something Eddy can't fix with his hands, a hot cup of coffee or a knock about the ears.  When Josiah sees that look, after breakfast one late winter's day, the first thing he thinks is the state has come to call on Davey again.  He'd taken them in his teeth that day at the gate, and thought if not rid of them altogether, he'd bought them enough time to think of how to put them off for good.  It did wake him, though, to watch the high moon paint his quarters and fear the state might come back, with papers, with authority, with some force he could not bluff. 

(If they were to take Cleary now, he thinks, the boy would be lost forever.  He would be some shadow growing thinner and paler on the back ward of the state hospital, he would settle sure as smoke in that long dark hall of his or drown in the lake below the lawn.  For sure, he would.)

"No," Eddy says, his raw knuckles flexing, catching the rattle of Josiah's thoughts, "no, it ain't the young fella."

"So what is it, then?  You hear from town there's none left of those hot peppers the grocer pickles, that you eat whole from the stem?" 

Josiah's humor falls as flat and pale as vellum in the typewriter, gnawed down by keystrokes.

"Got a telegram from the city, Birchy."  Eddy grips the butcher-block of the back kitchen's table, leans, uprights, and leans again.  "Silky's gone down sick."

"Sick." Josiah has to steady himself.  His bad leg throbs like a bad dream that upends the day.  "Gone down sick?  Who sent it?"

"Hastings at 27.  He's at casualty down at Bellevue, thinking it's pneumonia."

He cannot go.  He cannot go: he is responsible here, the Captain of this house, their grounds.  He cannot go: to leave his post, to leave the lads, to leave the boy.  Worst of all, that: to leave the boy.  What kind of captain would he be then, to leave the newest and the rawest of recruits, who still trembles under the blunt wind of the sear and some days even falls to it?  Some damn bastard, he would be, but his heart and his bent leg howl as the breath of horses, carrying him surely to the city.  He was a coward once who left a hundred thousand words unanswered, the great sulk of an overgrown child.  It was not Silky's fault, was it, after all, that the roof had caved, that his body had broken under the greedy teeth of the timbers? 

But he had never told Silks that, had he.  And he could, now.  He could have the chance to say it again. 

"It's an awful long way, to the city."

"I haven't seen him since the promotion."

"You'd be leaving the boy."

"I know it."

"Do you?"

"I do know it, Eddy."

"Took you how long to answer a simple letter?  How long would you plan on staying?  Til he was well?  Til the dark took him?"

What a bitter kick in the chest, the fury rising up inside him so hard it makes his eyes water.  "Silks isn't going to die.  He didn't die in that damn fire and he won't now."

"If'n you go, Birch, I'll drive you to the station.  But you'll tell Lufty and Monroe and the lads, and most of all, young Cleary, where you're off to."

Lufty, he knows, will understand.  Lufty and Monroe both, are men who have swallowed smoke and coughed out grief in spatters on the sidewalk, ribs heaving under the weight of it.  Josiah was not the first fireman to be ground hard in the blaze's splintering teeth, he will not be the last. 

Though some days he feels as if he is the only fool to lose a brother by his own carelessness and greedy fury.  Fool, to lie shattered, dry and cracked and thirsty for the safe embrace of brick walls and floorboards that creak with midnight steps and men who roll over in starched sheets and roll over again.  Fool that Silks had sat for, holding the hand without the needle, speaking to him from far away through the ether and the lazy dream-fields of poppies and long sunshine.

But the boy, god, the boy. 

Whatever he does, he can't spare the boy.  Would that he could.  For his sear to have broke before his voice, the boy ought to be allowed to live a life of perfect grace, running the field with the lads and catching perch down in the pond, every line charged, every ladder strong, every jake out clear. 

Silks or Davey, he thinks, what'll it be, what choice do I have?

The sun sprawling across the yard has taken on the keener brass of springtime - the snow is still deep, the ice still thick enough to drive a double hitch onto, but the turn of the earth is winning out as she always does.  The lads sweat at their work - Lufty and Monroe have let ladders and ropes ice overnight, and each exercise begins with a clamor of ideas on how to handle the frozen gear.  Bertram and Jules are keen to lead, while Kitson, Jacob, and Lee, the newest lot, scamper about and skitter like fawns.  How funny, to see from the broad steps, that Davey knows nearly as much as a half-year, though he has not the strength yet.  He will, though.  There is an awkward, coltish grace about him.  Something he has not grown into.  Josiah woke one night when the sky was half-silver with stars and Davey was standing in his quarters like a ghost-child, the sear singing in their bones.  A long way to grow, that one.  A long, fine way.

Lufty catches him after lunch.  Lufty is harder at the edges, often, than Eddy has ever been.  Even when Josiah was still stiff about the collar in his new kit, Eddy was all bluff, and quick to mild.  Eddy would brawl for any jake among them.  Lufty was tougher to read, even after he was on the boards.  Lufty Parker was burned once, and badly, in a fire at the piers in Chelsea.  His scars creep up the side of his neck, and cup the back of his head like a brief and tender lover.  They invite no dormitory tales, only an edgy kind of sorrow.  Josiah had heard, in his rook year, that three men had plunged into the East River, but just one had come up.  The oakbellies, he had been told, had tried to make Lufty a captain, and he'd refused to show up for the ceremony.  They'd tried to make him a battalion chief, and he'd hopped the first train to Troy. 

So he had been told.

But Lufty knows the white rooms and white coats at Bellevue and the casualty ward.

"There's not no happy choice to make, Birchy," Lufty says to him in his office.

 "It's just not gonna be so.  That said, it's not about if you goes, I think, it's about if you're coming back."

"You think I won't?"

"I know you will.  But it's not me what needs convincing."

Josiah sighs.  His leg is tight, aching, and he ought to stretch it out.  But he's afraid if he ventures out now, he'll run into Davey, breathless with some discovery.  "What am I supposed to say to him, Luft?"

"To Silks or the boy?"

"Either one."

"I couldn't say.  When I went into the river, I thought we'd all come out.  We had a fire at our heels and the river below us, and the last thing I remember before spitting up black water on the cobbles was Matty taking my elbow and Tom saying it'd be alright."

He's never heard this story, not from Lufty's taut lips and clenched teeth, so he stills like a boy in church and lets the old memory - the smell of creosote, and the greasy river, the snapping pilings and the blinding smoke - shiver on the air and fall as motes of golden dust.  The worst was not the plunge, was it, but the waking.

Alone. 

It's going to hurt them both, but crueler for the boy.

After Lufty leaves him to his battered thoughts, he sits at his desk until the dusk unravels into night.  The dinner mess bell clangs.  The lads thunder about downstairs like wild horses, shouting, stampeding.

He ought to get up now, go to the kitchens, get a bite.  Eddy is always after him to put something more than gristle and spite on his bones.  He plants his hands on his desk, ready to make the effort to stand, when of a sudden Davey's there, in the door.

Josiah has a good look at him, now, under the humming electrics.  Still too thin, for his widening shoulders.  Hair in need of a trim or at least a comb.  (He tries to do it like Bertram Cochrane, slicking the sides down, but the loose black curls are springing free by midday).  A tear in the shoulder of his shirt fixed by clunky, deliberate stitches.  A boy exuberantly ragged at the end of a long day. 

"Capper.  You weren't at mess."

Josiah pins a smile to the corner of his mouth like he means it.  "Eddy send you up?"

"No sir."

"I'll be down soon."

The boy hesitates.  "Capper?  Are you angry?"

"No.  Why would you say?"

"You been up here all day, Capper, that's all.  Eddy said - well I think he said, maybe I just thought of something he did say, you know, the sear said he - well you know.  Eddy's sear is so bright sometimes.  I forget.  Eddy said you used to get your hackles up and hide out in your quarters all day."

Josiah chuckles softly.  "He's right.  I did.  I'm not angry, m'son."

"What's wrong, then?"

"Come sit."  There is not gonna be no happy choice, said Lufty.  And there won't be, but he'd be crueler not to tell the boy. 

Davey comes round to his desk and pulls up a chair, as he does when they read and talk, about things Josiah knows - like radio manuals and floorplans and exit strategies - and things that Davey knows, like checkers and poems and music.  "I told you 'bout my pal, Silky.  You remember, his letters."

"Yes sir."

"He saved my life.  Before I was a captain."

"I dream that sometimes.  Like you know about the lake.  And Liddy."

Josiah picks up a pen and twirls it over the blotter.  His chest is tight, like breathing through a wet kerchief.  "Davey, Silky's very sick.  We got a telegram from his captain."  He takes a deep breath, pushing through it, like crawling under thick smoke, palming every door.  "He's in the hospital in the city."

Davey watches him through a child's lashes with eyes that pierce him like a brother.  Josiah longs for a horse between them, the calming stroke of the soft brush on the soot-dappled back.  He longs for the darkness between bunks, staring at the ceiling.  In the low, fragile light, Josiah sees the dampness welling up in Davey's eyes.  It is too hard to hide. 

Davey knows already.  He is biting his lip, as if he is already a young man. While he lay in a Bellevue bed, a needle in one arm, Silky had bent over the other, murmuring.  Josiah, from his awkward seat with his bad leg locked in its brace, leans forward in one great surge and takes the boy in his arms and holds him tight.  As close as his nightmares, as tight as his memories.  "I will come back.  I will, Davey, I promise you.  I'll come back."

The child's stumbling sear is a raw mess of questions, frantic as birds beating their wings against a low-slung slate-clouded sky.  He is crying.  Good, Josiah thinks.  Good that grief be open. 

"You promise," Davey whispers at last, hoarse with a sob and muffled deep into his chest.  "You got to promise, Capper."

"Promise. I promise, I promise.  As sure as I can't run, m'son, I promise I will come home."

[penaltybox14]

Decofiremen: Davey, Learning to Run

It’s been rather a long week.  @darknight-brightstar @zeitheist @squad51goals

Young Cleary is learning to run.  In his taken-in trousers and the shirt with the sleeves too long, in the boots that he polishes and leaves at the foot of his bed just like the lads, he is learning to run, and he is coming alive. 

For a long time, he would shuffle quietly into Josiah's office, sit himself down, and scuff his shoes on the floor while Josiah did paperwork.  Sat softly with his hands folded, like a boy at school.  Lufty and Eddy had told him to teach the boy his Latin and his manners, but he was not sure how good he had ever been at either one.  He was mostly fists when he'd come to Wynantskill under Captain Parsons, and the daily lessons of Hudson Classical are much further from his mind now than the tutelage of the nights and the bells in the Bronx.  Mostly fists and a set jaw and a young man's bravado, the stubborn set of a fool kid who didn't know yet the kind of magic he carried in his heart.

Captain Parsons had told him it was rather like a box, and the fire was the key.  Eddy, then with more hair on his head and less on his ears, had likened it to the blossoming of kindling in the woodstove.  Lufty Parker, whose hard dark eyes belied his kind humor, told him it was distant bells and shouting in the dark coming near.  The fire would wake it, he said, just as the bells would wake him in the night-time. 

They were eighteen, him and Silky, when they got their brass and shipped down to the Bronx.  He was Birchy, then, and he was braver than he ever would be again in his life.  After the Sear came, after the fever scoured him and wrung him loose and threw him headlong into the sullen dark jaws of a half-century of smoke, he had tempered inside like good steel.  Alone, a man was only foolish.  Beside another, he could be brave.  So he was. 

He sent a letter to the little library in town, asking the librarian for good stories for a young fellow to read, and so she sent along - with regards - a book or two for a week.  They were stories about knights and foreign places, men who fell asleep for a hundred years and woodcutters a hundred feet tall, and young Cleary thanked him softly and then would read while Josiah did his paperwork.

At lunch and after dinner, Josiah would bother him about the stories.  He was no good teacher for a boy, and young Cleary was no forthcoming child.  He would say some things. 

Once, the librarian sent over a volume of horse stories.  Josiah had read it, a lifetime ago. 

"Mother used to read from this," Davey had said, turning the book over in his hands, touching the blue cover as if it would burn him, fingers lingering softly over the print of the horse - nostrils flaring - on the cover. 

"I had it at school.  I used to sneak it under the desk when the master wasn't looking."

"Did he catch you?"

"Course he caught me."

Davey had sort of smiled about that. 

Sometimes he would look out the window and Josiah would feel his Sear, stretching and deepening as the long afternoon shadows.  So used to Lufty and Eddy, and the trainers in residence, it startled him - balky and raw, it was, so unlike the others.  The sound of a stick snapping, boots on the staircase, the smell of grass and wool would startle him, and the Sear would flare like an ache.  It was like man stumbling out of heavy smoke into brutal daylight and blue skies - how the nostrils flared, the eyes strained, caught between a hell's twilight and a blessed daybreak.  It felt like being waked from a grave. 

It felt like Bellevue and the cotton-batting ether dreamlets leaking from between his teeth.

It felt like the trembling air chasing the clanging bells.

It felt like crying, sometimes.

It was the long hallway with the wallpaper.  It was the little girl, far away, who he could not reach. 

It was someone's mother reading stories to her children snug in bed.

Davey's Sear was a cacaphony and a catastrophe, and he still woke, most nights, his fear so brazen it would wake fifty years of horses from their stable sleep.  This end of the hallway dark, that end aflame, and no way out but awake. But awake, the house had fallen, and there was no way back.

Make him a house, Silky had said in his letter, which Josiah had braced in his ribs to read.  He had gasped the way a fish does on the docks or a rook does on his first fire, his first slack and bloodless face.  Make the boy a house to keep the rain and the wind off, til he grows strong enough to make his own. 

Josiah had left his house, on a fair morning, to save another, and the whole damned thing had come down on him, and he had never come back, not even for his own things, which their Captain had brought him when they finally released him from Bellevue.  Make a house, Silky had said, but Silky was still the same bright boy who elbowed him in line and apologized and said the brothers had always told him he talked to much. 

"Young Cleary," he'd said at last, "you got to get outside sometime."

Davey had scuffed his shoes again, heel-toe, kick-shuffle.  Setting aside the book on Josiah's desk.  "Antoine said I ought to come to the yard."

"Antoine's a smart lad."

"Lufty says I'm too young to train."

"Well, I says you're too young to wilt away indoors."

"You do it." The boy says it to the floor, but the flash of his Sear is volatile, like an acid or a snake spitting poison.

Josiah has no answer for that.  It stings, and he deserves it.  It is what Silky would have said.  Build for him a house.  Josiah had built himself an armory and Eddy had had to stomp right upstairs and shake him like a spring-time rug all knotted up with the salts and the sands of winter shoes and dancing. 

"The grown boys, they don't hear it."  The bells.  The sparks.

"They will."

"How will they, Capper?"

"Fire."

"Is it the same, always?"  Do people die?  Do the hallways end in coarse ash and howling loneliness?  Davey's eyes are clear and deep as water. 

"Yes." Everyone dies.  Every house comes down.  You leave the house looking ahead, your arm in the rungs, and you don't look back.

"Fire's a bastard."  He coughs, to hide a little sob.  "Sorry, Capper."

"Fire's a bastard, is right.  But remember how I told you the story?  The point of it all, young Cleary, is we're not alone."

"You haven't even opened the window."

Every house comes down.  No fool builds a castle without a gate.

"Alright, my son, I'll make a deal: you go out and you spend some time getting your boots and your hands dirty, I'll open the window."

"Promise you'll come down, too."

"Tell you this.  We'll go it like firemen: you lead the way, Davey Cleary, and I'll follow.  You run the line out, and I'll crank the hydrant.  You run Antoine so hard he thinks his ribs'll break, and I'll open my window and shout you along, how's that?"

He is grinning.  His heart is wide with teeth.  Young Cleary is alert with something like a first secret taste of cider, as if he sees the two young men who won their brass and set upon the Bronx like cats and snow clear as history and something like a future.  Set a stone on which to place the hearth, and around the hearth you build the house.  

The boy is halfway out the door with a look back, a suspender slouching in eagerness down his arm.  "Capper, you coming?"

The promise is the stone he sets, like Silky says.  To build a house to run to.