i'm a ride hosea matthews won't survive

I have a feeling this is from a personal spot, I am sorry for your loss Anon :( I hope these bring a little comfort.

Arthur would be sad about it too. He keeps Boadicea's shoe, and still groups Copper's photo with his mementos of his parents' all these years later. The absence of pressure he feels with animals mean his bonds with them grow fast and strong. He did not approach nor befriend you for your pet, of course, but hanging out with a little creature is always a plus. It's the most vulnerable you will ever see him.

Arthur is the type to sit with you, first and foremost. There is not much that can be said about loss, and there's nothing to fix it. He is certainly not poetic enough to try his hand at either. There is always work and talk and survival to tend to, so even just sitting in silent grief with you tends to his own unhealed wounds.

If he does try to or you want him to talk, he will mainly talk about Copper or attempt to get you thinking of better times with your cat. What you loved about them, what they loved about you. Grief is love with nowhere to go, but sometimes the memories can give it a space to rest.

Otherwise, he offers as many distractions as he can. He slacks on work so you must pick it up. He retreats from doing what chores he helps you with. He asks for help with things he does not need it on. He will outright say it's all to give you something to put your mind at rest with, not to abandon you; if you need the opposite, Arthur's probably the best man for the job, still.

Tags: post-canon, major canonical character death, grief, stream of consciousness character study aka just some bullshit I wrote; referenced VanDerMatthews, Bessie/Hosea, VanDerShea; implied VanDerBell and substance abuse everyone fucking each other AND themselves (over) Words: 779 A/N: I want to write a post-canon fic but I struggle with post-canon Dutch so I'm retroactively calling this practice so that I look more intentional with the words I fart out on here. 100 emoji 100 emoji.

Not much has its place in his life. The only shelves to lay on come down every few months, sometimes days. He does not waste time stocking them anymore, save for his cigar tin. The grief of his mother's loss — hers of life, not his of her — having found nowhere else to rest has curled its way around his inanities as an Aesculapian to caduceus, all save for what made her beloved to the very end of life; the loss of potential is greater than that of his father's face, but even this he finds clinging onto the yet more immaterial thing that is fatherhood.

Oh this is fantastic... More pondering than headcanons here, if you listen close you can hear the gears of my brain turning despite the dust collected on them.

Spoilers for the game, based on this ask I presume you know their endings.

Tilly grows bitter towards Molly posthumously, apparently because of her betrayal and yet Molly's insistence on not working, her prejudice against the other women, and her general misogyny — the main reasons the other ladies don't care for her — were not enough to sway her distaste beforehand. But having seen that Dutch has strayed from what she once thought of him as, she has an easy time not only leaving the gang, but the outlaw lifestyle altogether. It's not necessarily moral opposition that imbitters her to someone, but their actions.

Molly is prone to entertaining people who want very little to do with her. Her relationship with Dutch grows more frantic and intense the less interested he becomes in her, although it is mainly one-sided in its uptick. At the same time, special attention, whether it is sincere or not, makes her shine.

If Molly had not been executed, perhaps had committed less severe of an infraction, and instead the dislike for her throughout camp had grown due to some town embarrassment, Tilly would start to dislike her, at first without enough vehemence to be overturned. She has grown disillusioned enough with Dutch over the course of the past month that Molly's reactive abuse means very little to her, as one might expect considering his importance to her, but the gang is another story.

Molly does not respond well to pity, and though Tilly considered her often, she's not the kind of woman to express it directly to her, especially when her closest friends and those she respects are well beyond that point themselves. Abigail has tried and failed to save Molly's dignity and future; Karen has tried to save the woman from shame and guilt; Mary-Beth is concerned with Molly's sadness. We all know how Susan felt on the matter of Miss O'Shea. Seemingly, they grow angrier the deeper Molly falls into the pit, but Tilly cannot say the same despite it all.

If she were to be pushed to the point of speaking, Tilly would not broach it as a concern for Molly's dignity or standing in the gang and this is why it might work, aside from Molly being at her breaking point and willing to accept mostly anything at all from anyone at all. She is this and that and much else, but Tilly cannot help seeing in Molly that young girl who was lied to about the glory of a life that can no longer be lived. Anymore, she feels lied to herself.

Ultimately, Molly wouldn't be capable of standing on her own after leaving the gang. She would be in shambles, not only from the hurt of being unloved but the realization of how much time she spent chasing Dutch and the approval of the others. It's the sort of shame that kills. Tilly is kind, but she is not going to teach a white woman how to work and cook and sew her own clothes. She thinks Karen's distaste for her on the basis of her upbringing wasn't all that unjustified, at times — Molly is immature, even if Tilly sometimes confuses her own trauma with maturity. But two is a much better number than one, and so they end up committed to one another whether they like it or not.