came up with the headcanon that charles is the gang’s grave digger. he carves the crosses, digs the hole, lays the body in the grave, buries it. not just because he’s the strongest, or the most used to seeing death, but because i think he needs that formality. he needs to see a body to make sure they’re dead.
the way he stopped to stare at lenny while they were running on the roofs of saint denis. the way him and abigail snuck into the morgue to get hosea and lenny’s bodies. the way he went back, not just to camp for grimshaw, but also across the damn mountains, just to track arthur’s body to bury it.
charles needs to make sure someone is dead. needs to make sure that, yes, the world did take something else from him. yes, there is nothing he can do about it, except bury them and move on. burying them is his way of grieving, of seeing them one last time as they were, albeit whatever injury caused them to die in the first place.
i think arthur’s death hit the hardest, though.
grimshaw’s might have also hurt, mostly due to decomposition and the fact that she was just an innocent women, but arthur’s.
all of the bodies that charles buried in the game were fresher. at most, a week in a morgue, which would’ve taken some measures to prevent speedy decomposition. arthur’s body, though? it was months old. nails and teeth would be loose enough to pull off. bones would be visible. his skin was yellow, body bloated, eyes most likely pecked out by birds.
charles wasn’t given time to grieve. he was too busy helping the wapiti to grieve over the fact that arthur had left, that he wasn’t going to see him again. he wasn’t even given the satisfaction of seeing his body as it was, even if it was sickly. he couldn’t grieve arthur while he was alive, or while he was dead.
i think that’s why charles spent so much time on arthur’s grave. adding flowers, carving in a quote, forming the grave much more complexly than a simple cross, finding the most gorgeous place possible that he knew arthur would’ve liked. it was his way of saying he was sorry. he was sorry he couldn’t bury arthur in time for him to decompose properly. he was sorry that some of arthur’s nails fell off of taima’s back on the ride there, because they were so loose that they couldn’t stay in. he was so sorry, and he couldn’t fix it, and now arthur was dead, and charles was alone.
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