Chapter 5: The Things Left Behind (847 words)
Low Honor!Arthur Morgan x Odette Ward
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cw: sexism, period-typical attitudes towards women, hostile work. summary: arthur's gone. the saloon has changed hands. odette wants out of town.
Weeks passed after Arthur left. Odette kept expecting him back at first. Every time the saloon doors opened, her eyes lifted before she could stop them. Every horse approaching town pulled something tight beneath her ribs. It irritated her enough that she stopped sitting near the windows altogether.
Still, absence settled into the town slowly.
The newspapers arrived more frequently when spring started. Men would gather around the general store each morning, talking too loudly about robberies and missing payrolls. Names drifted through town like smoke.
Van der Linde gang. Dutch’s boys.
One morning, Odette unfolded a paper left abandoned near the saloon counter and saw it there. Arthur Morgan. The letters sat ugly against the page; wanted in connection with robberies and violent acts. She had known who he was, she'd already seen old papers.
Odette stared at the ink longer than she meant to. Then folded the paper carefully and pushed it away. The memory of him standing beside the river with coffee in his hands felt strangely distant now. Softer than the man described in print. Maybe both versions were true.
That unsettled her more than anything.
The saloon changed hands not long after. Mr. Coates left town quietly, muttering something about bad business and worse winters. The new owner arrived in polished boots and city cologne, all sharp smiles and sharper eyes.
He took one look at the piano and called it “depressing.” By the end of his first week, the lanterns were replaced, cheap gold fabric lay across the stage, and the girls were pushed into tighter dresses with feathers in their hair.
Odette hated every inch of it.
“You want men spendin’ money,” Roy told her one evening, holding up a crimson costume she refused to touch. “You gotta give ‘em somethin’ worth lookin’ at.”
“I already do,” she answered coolly.
Roy’s smile thinned. “Singing ain’t enough anymore.”
Singing was all she wanted. The piano player, an aging man named Walter who smelled faintly of tobacco and cedar polish, looked near heartbroken the day the phonograph arrived.
“Machine don’t got feeling,” he muttered while packing old sheet music into a worn leather case.
Odette sat beside him on the edge of the stage. “Neither do most men here.”
“You leavin’ too?” he asked quietly.
She hesitated. The truth had been growing slowly inside her for days now.
“Yes,” she admitted, Walter, nodding like he already knew.
That surprised her enough to look up.
“You’re too soft for what this place is becoming,” he said. “Don’t let ugly folk harden you.”
Something in her chest ached unexpectedly. Before he left that evening, Walter pressed a small bundle of folded sheet music into her hands.
“Old folk songs,” he said. “Some hymnals, too. Thought maybe you’d keep ‘em alive a little longer.”
Odette swallowed hard around the lump rising in her throat. “Thank you.”
“Saint Denis’ll suit me better,” he said with a shrug. “Too old for mountain winters.”
“You write me when you get there.”
Walter smiled gently. “Only if you write back.”
Once she decided to leave, the town seemed to notice before she said a word. The stable hand fixed the broken clasp on her suitcase without charging her.
Mrs. Greene from the boarding house wrapped two sandwiches in cloth and slipped them into Odette’s satchel with a quiet: “Train food’s dreadful.”
The general store owner refused payment for extra ammunition. “Just in case,” he muttered.
It struck her then, painfully and all at once, that she had mattered here. Not in a grand way. Just enough that the town noticed her leaving, which almost made leaving harder.
The morning she left arrived grey and cold. Fog clung low between the mountains, swallowing half the tracks beyond town. The train station looked smaller than she remembered, little more than weathered wood and drifting smoke.
Odette stood on the platform with one suitcase at her feet and Walter’s sheet music tucked under her arm. Today she wore neither a flower nor painted lips.
The train whistle echoed through the valley moments before the engine finally appeared through the fog, iron wheels shrieking softly against the rails. For one terrible second, she almost turned back. Not because of the town.
Arthur Morgan had left without a goodbye, yet somehow he still lingered everywhere:in the smell of rain,in the quiet between songs,in every road leading out of town.
Odette hated that part most.
The conductor called for boarding. She drew one slow breath and stepped forward. The train groaned beneath her boots as she climbed aboard, warm air and coal smoke wrapping around her immediately. Passengers settled quietly into their seats around her, tired faces blurred by steam and early light.
Odette paused near the window before sitting down. Outside, the mountains stood dark against the pale morning sky.
The whistle sounded once more. Then slowly, with a shuddering groan of iron and smoke, the train began to move
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thank you once again for reading, it really does mean the absolute world to me! 💞 this has been queued & i'm gonna be disappearing for a short while ☹️
