#korgan

But still— as amusing as the doodle is, Arthur can’t draw. Or, at least, nothing is coming out well in his eyes. It’s been weeks now. Flat and lifeless, crooked lines. Between hauling bags of grain, he crouches next to the chicken coop, watches the birds scratch at the ground. He sketches one of the chickens, and then aggressively scribbles over it when the texture of the feathers looks, too on-the-nose, like chicken scratch.

“What’re you drawing?”

Kieran asks like he’s been rehearsing the simple sentence in his head for too long, and still, his voice cracks at the end as Arthur fixes him with a look over his shoulder. He always forgets how tall Kieran is until he’s sitting somewhere in Kieran’s vicinity, and he has to look up to meet his eye. He doesn’t carry his height well, perpetually slouching, unless he’s dealing with the horses. Then he has to draw himself up, if only to get them to behave.

“Nothing.” Arthur admits with a grumble, because it feels like he’s been drawing nothing over the past few days, just series of lines and shapes that don’t connect together into anything tangible. Kieran’s smile goes uneasy, baring his teeth with uncertainty as he takes a step back and away from Arthur. 

“Sorry to bother—“

“No, no, it’s fine.” Arthur rushes to clarify; he hadn’t realized his tone had been rough enough to have sent the other man almost scurrying off. Kieran flinches, stands and stares at his hands. “Frustrated with myself, is all. Nothing’s coming out right.” He hesitates, for a moment, before he turns and moves in closer, so that Kieran can see. His eyes go a little wide, glancing up towards Arthur’s face before he looks at the proffered journal.

“It all looks real fine to me.” Kieran says, almost sweetly, hesitantly flipping back to a previous page. Makes something in Arthur’s gut twist. “I- I think you’re being hard on yourself, is all. I could never get anything to look like that.” He taps below one of the sketches of the horses, careful not to actually touch it, “That’s a real nice one. Nell?”

“Yeah,” Arthur confirms, huffing out a chuckle. “Stands still long enough to sketch. Just like Uncle, actually.”

Kieran laughs, genuine, the corners of his eyes creasing, tucking strands of hair behind his ears. Arthur laughs, too, even if it’s not the funniest thing he’s ever said, but its infectious when he hears it from him. “It’s true,” Kieran says, “Oh, he can be real awful, even if he’s a sweet horse. Always rolls around in the dirt after I brush him through...”

Arthur flips through his journal, showing Kieran a past page of Uncle in various states of sleep around camp, his face an exaggerated, comical caricature, drool from his lips. Kieran laughs again, hides his mouth behind his knuckles pressed against his lips, setting the edge of his teeth against the cracked, rough skin there.

Kieran’s always busy working. Arthur is, too, even if Dutch don’t see it, browbeating him whenever he lingers too long in camp, the moments in-between where Arthur catches his breath. He stays for a day or two, at the cusp of outstaying his welcome, then heads off; hunting, carriage theft, house robberies, whichever the road takes him towards. Keeps his hands occupied with violence instead, hoping once he’s sufficiently wrought enough destruction he can create something again.

Camp pulls him back, like it always does; he cleans before he returns, for Grimshaw’s sake, but ice cold river water can’t rinse off the dark shiner he’s sporting before he rides into camp and leaves his horse in the pasture. He has to walk through camp to reach the stewpot, loading up the cleanest bowl he can find with Pearson’s pottage. By the time he’s finished eating standing  next to the fire, spitting the most inedible bits of gristle to the ground, someone’s left a salve by his cot. A metal tin promising pain relief, among a long list of other cures, the label blurred under the oils of nervous fingers ceaselessly worrying the paper. Arthur rolls it over in his hands. Mulls over who gave it to him as he smears the thick lotion around his eye, under his shirt and the deep bruises across his ribs. The greasiness sticks to his fingers, and is an easy excuse to blame when he settles back into his cot that night and his pencil slides uselessly over the pages, and it snaps in half between his fingers.

The next morning, Kieran leaves him another gift when he tacks up Arthur’s warhorse, tucked into his saddlebags. Arthur doesn’t notice the two pencils wrapped carefully in a scrap of fabric, pre-sharpened, until he’s nearly in New Hanover.

Arthur returns a week later with he sun at his back, his shiner healed. He doesn’t draw attention to himself when he makes his way to the tithing box, pulling a stack of cash and two watches from his satchel. He has a necklace, too, delicate and brilliant glass beads, but he puts that back into his satchel when it comes out tangled with the watches; that’s for Tilly.

With the sun setting, there’s precious few hours of light left in the day, though they’re longer and longer with each sunrise. Arthur hates the heat that clings to his brow, but loves the hours of daylight summer brings. Sweating oneself dry was a small price to pay for more hours in the day. But they’re running thin, the sun disappearing in a fireball beyond the water’s horizon; Arthur has only a few minutes to find Kieran. He wasn’t in the pasture when he dismounted his horse; he’s not at the scout campfire, either, and Arthur’s hands feel sweaty in his gloves. He almost misses him, on his second walk through the camp; near the chicken coop once more, sitting beneath the large tree there, quietly smoking in its roots.

“Kieran.”

Kieran looks flushed, the ember of the cigarette throwing his face into stark shadows. His eyes shift upward as he stubs it out against the bark. “Arthur?”

“‘Fore the sun sets,” Arthur starts, trying to calmly stress his limits, the strange feeling that their time was quickly waning. It doesn’t make much sense; Arthur could always show him tomorrow. But there’s an urgency that’s gripping his lungs, as he reaches for his satchel, “Look.”

Kieran stands, using the tree as support for his wobbly legs. Arthur opens his journal, paging to the ribbon holding his place.

He has to rotate his journal, and Kieran pulls in close, looking over his shoulder. It’s hard lines in some spots and soft smudges in others, thumbs and knuckles used, the side of his pencil washing shades of grey. The soft shadows mottled underneath Kieran’s eyes, purple and blue, somehow rendered perfectly in the soft smudge of lead across the page. The greasy knots of his hair. Kieran’s smile, crooked and easy. It’s all there.

“Oh.” Kieran clutches at Arthur’s sleeve, where he’s rolled it up to the elbows, in the folds of fabric there. Buries his fingers in and scrunches his grasp in tight. “Oh. Arthur, I—“