rdr2 multimuse | PRIVATE AND LOW ACTIVITY. est. 2019, written by vee, 30+, GMT+1.
primary muses: arthur morgan | mary linton | charlotte balfour

pixel skylines
dirt enthusiast
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

★
Stranger Things

Kaledo Art
Mike Driver
trying on a metaphor
tumblr dot com
Today's Document

oozey mess
we're not kids anymore.

#extradirty

Love Begins
Cosimo Galluzzi

JVL

if i look back, i am lost
h

seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Japan
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Poland
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom

seen from Germany
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
@westpromised
rdr2 multimuse | PRIVATE AND LOW ACTIVITY. est. 2019, written by vee, 30+, GMT+1.
primary muses: arthur morgan | mary linton | charlotte balfour

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
"I don't want to be a burden to you..." (( katie for charlotte! ))
"Oh, nonsense, you're never that! Please, stay a while. Sit. Eat. Rest." She waves an arm about, encompassing the quaint little lodge behind her and the land she's staked out as her own. Well, she and Cal did, truth be told, but she's already told Miz Castillo just what had transpired with regards to dear old Cal.
"There's plenty of space and I'd be grateful for the company. Honest."
Either she's learned nothing or she hasn't had nothing to learn from. With the sheer dumb luck of the unbaptized outdoorsmen (and women), Charlotte has yet to contend with a visitor with ill intentions. Can you believe it?
You trust too fast, Lottie, Cal might say. Your heart's in the right place, but your head has some catching up to do.
Well, a fat lot of good it did him, didn't it?
"In fact…" Charlotte muses out loud. "In fact, if it hadn't been for my last visitor, I very well might not be here anymore."
"desperate people are the most dangerous." (( katie for mary! and we can assume katie has an alternate fc c; ))
"You callin' me dangerous?"
Through snot and tears, a van smile momentarily haunts her face – haunts it, because it doesn't quite light it up. There ain't a thing that can light her up now. Sat on the porch of the doctor's office in Saint Denis, Mary sees the blurry outlines of shapes - folks milling about, a carriage passing by - beyond the tears still hanging thickly from her lashes; but close up, the woman's face is as clear as a full moon on a cloudless sky.
Hísemtuks, she thinks, because it's one of the few words her mother got to teach her before the yellow fever took her.
Night-sun.
It ain't too often that Mary comes across a face such as her own, and when she does, it inevitably fills her with equal parts anticipation and dread. She can't barely look away, just sits there wearing down a handkerchief between her fingers, hoping for –
– for what, exactly?
A reversal?
A change in course?
A different life?
"My father's dyin," she shrugs. And looks away, lest her face betrays her – lest the guilt washes away, and leaves behind an indictment: relief.
' old woman .. ' arthur scoffs at the label she's chosen for herself. truth be told, he's never seen her more beautiful than she is now. sure, youth has its merits, but the sharper angles flecked with imperfection, evidence of hardship, is altogether breathtaking. mary has come into her own despite all of that complicated living, and as has he, but on opposite ends. suppose they're two sides of the same coin, or so he'd like to think so.
it would be awfully silly of them to give up that ghost now, to squander this miracle of a third chance after everything they've been through respectively. there's so much to say, but where to begin? the disappointment mary had expressed in that farewell letter after he'd returned from guarma echoes at the back of his mind, each word as plaintive and painful as ever; the feeling of dread, the way his throat had constricted with swelling emotion. his mind swimming, and then nothing at all.
so, why not go through life together from here on out? and so what if he is charity work? at least he's a work that's wanted and loved at the end of the day, and not just by any old individual, but the woman he'd set himself on marrying a lifetime ago. the one he'd let slip through his fingers time and time again, but if there's one thing he knows he is, it's that he is a fool and he's played the role for most of his life. so why not be her fool?
she needn't explain any further. just the confirmation that he's been yearning for is enough to elicit movement, sure-footed as ever, to meet her where she stands, hand registering hand and slipping palm to palm, perfectly imperfect. he decides not to plant his hat atop his head, but to set it aside, forfeiting it for in favor of both of mary's hands. this is what hosea was referring to so many years ago with bessie, and since then he'd always wanted that for himself.
always at odds with himself.
' well, miss gillis, ' arthur begins, brushing his knuckle against the height of her cheekbone and regarding her with a unique tenderness that is and has only ever been reserved for her and her alone. somewhere within the crow's feet that delineate both of his eyes is that same young man who'd fallen irrevocably in love with her, and never ceased thereafter. never entirely.
arthur smiles lopsidedly, as if harkening back to their yesteryear. ' i'd say you you're awful at quittin' in general. you see things through, and i dunno .. i don't think too many people care to. but then again, what do i know? ' he brushes against strands of dark hair framing her face, and then thumbs thoughtfully over the shell of her ear.
' then i'll stay .. if that's what you want, for as long as you'll have me. ' for as long as he's able to draw breath and do right by her. ' i'll stay. '
"I would. I would have you stay."
And there, then, is the intercession their paths have led them to, entwined in this moment as they seek for an absolution they have never dared hope for. What sweet, what bittersweet revelation: to know it's been in their hands all along. That to absolve is to wash clean, the way Arthur's words wash over her, the way a simple I'll stay becomes the river she can take her regrets to for a drowning.
But what will the neighbors think?
There are no neighbors worth the mention.
What will Daddy say?
Daddy is in his grave, may God and the Devil do battle over his soul.
What will the word be in town?
To hell with town. To hell with anyone who wants to have words.
The only person in the world whose good opinion matters to her now is Jamie, and Jamie's gone west. If she ever sees him again, he'll be a different man than the boy who set out nigh a fortnight ago. And whatever ruts life will groove into his face, she prays it won't carve the kindness out of him.
It's a kindness he learned from her, mostly, but essentially from Arthur too. She stands still and meets the honest gaze of his eyes then, lets his hands trace her face and lets herself tremble under them but disallows herself the notion of closing her eyes. She looks, instead, at him – into his soul, it feels like, where that selfsame kindness he's often denied himself has tried to blossom time and again. That good man inside him that she's once told him is fighting a giant.
"I would have you." A third time then, for the charm it is. Her hand slips against the nape of his neck, pulls him close. Miss Gillis, he called her in lieu her wedded name, and with her lips on his Mary seals the end of a chapter and the start of a new one.
No, they ain't young anymore; but that kiss is still like a homecoming. He tastes like Arthur. He tastes like freedom. Mary lets him engulf her and then pulls back before she dissolves completely.
Her forehead against his.
"And so David bests Goliath once again."
"take your time and be sure." (( arthur for mary! ))
"But I am sure!"
There's conviction and there's conviction. One is surety, the immovable fact of a noun; one is malleable, the act of being brought into existence. Of convincing, rather. Mary, bless her soul, reckons on account of her advanced age of twenty-seven that she has outgrown the folly of the latter – only it's a fool who thinks a lack of common sense comes with an expiration date.
"Arthur–"
There's convincing in his name, too. There always has been; much good that it's done her. Sometimes she curses herself for that – more often, she curses him. Two truths that she holds self evident in her heart: to curse him and to love him are sides of the same coin.
It would be a kindness to choke on it now – anything, really, rather than a second act of conviction.
She flaunts her raised hand in front of him – no, flaunts the ring, really. And it ain't the one he got her, neither.
"He already asked. I already said yes."
Oh, to choke on that double-headed beast inside her chest instead.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
“This is my law. I carve it thus, in ruin.” (for Arthur)
He looked like half a god and half a creature made to bend. He held himself tall, all straight and tense and strummed taut, a dignity in bones that had to be bred, not learned. Arthur knew this. Arthur had been taught this – and then the world had moved on.
That was what they had failed to see, in Gilead fair in the high spires and in cold parlors: that what they feared, had already come to pass. Not for them, no; but for the common folk? Was nobody out here wouldn’t set their watch and warrant on it. And what was bred into bones could be broken, unmade and made anew.
His sneer, he liked to think, he had carved for himself to taunt a world that did not want him. He took a deep drag of his smoke around it, never taking his calculating gaze of Roland, and exhaled with a leisurely indifference that bordered on cruelty. “Ain’t your fault you got your father’s eyes, boy.”
"Do you ever imagine what it's like to die?" (( starting off strong, katie for arthur! ))
"Now, why would I have to imagine that when death waits for me round the corner sooner rather than later, anyhow?"
He throws his head back and laughs, and his eyes catch sight of the crow prancing along a cedar's weathered branch. There's a metaphor in it somewhere; only Arthur can't think of it in such terms yet. It may come to him later, when he curls up under a thin blanket on the cot that's his mighty abode, and the murmuring forest battles the dying gasps of the campfire embers for attention.
The inevitability of it all. The fallacy buried deep in every enlightened reason Dutch wants to sell them as the underpinnings of their new future.
There's a time he came so goddamn close to abandoning it all, then thought abandonment equated a loss too weightful to carry.
He broods, his thoughts like raven's wings that come instead of nightly prayer, and thinks of chances taken and chances missed.
"it's what we were meant to do." (( arthur for charlotte! ))
"Oh, I'm not sure I can agree with that. If every man is beyond redemption, then it stands to reason that no man is born with a clean slate. I like to believe it's nurture over nature; we are who we are not by providence or luck, but by the grace of hard labor and self-determination. How else could you explain that I'm here, and still among the living?"
Of course, following her own argument, Charlotte would have to concede that her own husband then wasn't up to scratch. She'd rather eat nails than admit out loud to a fault in Cal in the presence of a strange man, but one could reckon he was, perhaps, not the brightest light under God's green firmament.
Certainly not under the canopy of God's wild, green woods.
May he rest in peace, her dear late man.
"If you're dead certain that you're headed for the hangman's noose, I sure can't explain how you ended up my savior. It doesn't add up, you see? These were not the deeds of a vile man." Her arm made a sweeping gesture describing the homestead upon whose porch they were installed, drinking tea like civilized people in a place of deathly paradise.
Deathly paradise he helped her understand, if not wholly then a little bit better: Empty rabbit snares leaned against the wooden planks of the house, waiting to be employed. The herb garden was, if not flourishing, at least sprouting.
And far and wide, there was no sight of a bear.
@westpromised replying to this from forever and a year ago.
how strange it is to belong to one place. to be stationary. to belong to only one person of which to answer, but perhaps a piece of him had always belonged to her. how strange it is not to discover himself under some stretch of canvas, the interminable wheeling of the heavens overhead, or laid out upon the unforgiving ground, his bones aching for somewhere gentle to rest his head. his mind rattling with a deluge of unanswered questions.
he doesn't remember precisely when, but at some point he'd stopped sleeping altogether. days bled into weeks and time had been hemorrhaging at such a rapid pace that he had felt as if any second might have been his last. & then came an endless dream, and then a hopeless nothingness, just the pitch of death behind shuttering eyelids.
at the end of it, arthur had considered who he was if he wasn't under dutch's thumb, peddling his rhetoric about freedom and the evils of the modern world. all of those hats he'd been encouraged to wear to the benefit of others, and yes, sometimes even to himself. a prison, he discovered, comes in all shapes and sizes and with a variety of life sentences. like mary, in her own prison for years, living at the behest of those around her and making do with what little she could within the confines of her own station.
' mary, i .. it don't sound unreasonable, don't get me wrong now. i mean, why the hell'd i come all this way—to die on your doorstep? no .. i just .. ' arthur fumbles to pitch the right words, swallows any remnants of protestations that could easily slip forth in the heat of the moment. he begins searching anew, determined to make sense of things instead up giving up.
deepset creases reveal themselves in the lay of his forehead, in the frown lines abutting his wind-chapped mouth. who else knows him that isn't hundreds of miles away or six feet under? with mary, words aren't necessarily a necessity. with mary, he's rediscovered the boy he'd left behind in that field so many years ago, wrestling with a broken heart and wanting something that had never been meant for him in the first place.
arthur wrings at the brim of his gambler out of nervous habit, searching for the known grooves, the nicks, the wear and tear often attributed with living multiple lives, with the grazing of thumbprint. the floorboards upon which he'd been loitering for the past several minutes have apparently grown tired of his indecision and have begun to lament their plight with a more persistent groaning. decide. ' i wanna stay. i would like to stay, if you'd have me. '
sister calderon's words are slow to percolate to the surface. he's ashamed of considering the easy way out, to leave a good woman like mary, a good thing for a conscience that might not ever be clean, as he's come to terms with, but more importantly, a second chance at life.
' i am too .. ' he sweeps his hat from side to side before clutching it again. ' tired, i mean, ' he adds. ' and i just want you to know that i do wanna be here with you. properly with you, like maybe we oughta done, but maybe a little less naive about things? ' arthur laughs breathlessly. ' i just needed to know, i guess, that i'm not some .. charity work or—uh .. just someone to settle for. i don't think you could do any worse. '
and there's that self-deprecating charm.
"Less naive," she draws up an echo, fascinated and amused in equal measure by the spectacle he offers her: the nervous fingering of the hat, the smile laced with self-deprecation, the stammering tongue. It occurs to her that she's seen all this before and dredges it up from memory – distant and recent – not as a specter this time but as a guest she'd like to stay. It's a metaphor that doesn't need far and complex extending in order to make sense.
This man's haunted me for nigh twenty years, Mary thinks. And I him.
Perhaps it's time to put the haunting to rest. Let their ghosts sort out any grievances they still hold.
But the souls, captained by a present mind?
Like maybe we oughta done.
"We ain't children anymore, Arthur. I believe 'less naive' is in the cards now. Whatever it entails." It's Mary's turn to be predictable, in the way she wrings her hands under the pretense of wiping off the last of the corn starch. Arthur knows her just as well as she knows him – does he anticipate the way she opens her palms to him, a gesture of universal benevolence and supplication? Does he know her words before they come to her lips on account of how they're written all over her face? Does he fear, for a moment, that the same wild gleam in her eye comes over her that burnt him to a cinder in that wildflower field half a lifetime ago?
Not children anymore, she's told him, and stands by it: cannot but. There's a deep-seated weariness in her that only age can spring on you, and –
Yes, she's tired too.
"You're not charity work." Her voice is low but firm. "Not to me, you're not."
She reckons he mighta been, once upon a time; perhaps not all too long ago if she's awful honest with herself. Mary's been ever a masochist like that; it was Arthur's folly to mistake her cruelty as a weapon pointed at him, and it was her own to not correct him. Now, she's the woman who waits with a rag in her hands when he brings his bloodied footprints to her door.
Age. Perspective. Whatever the opposite of naive is.
It's Mary who reaches for his hand first, gentle so as not to spook him, like she does with yearlings when she first puts a halter on them. "I'd like that." And yet it's her voice that's easily spooked by two little words. "If you stayed with me."
What's done is done and what's said is said and if she knows her Arthur, he won't say more than needs said, but she's ever been voracious in her appetite to express herself. Hence the letters. Hence the wringing hands.
"Only I'm an old woman now, Arthur." Thirty-seven. "I'm tired too. I do wanna settle, only – no, hear me out, it ain't like I'm settling on you, just – with you, maybe. If you stayed. I mean it, Arthur – how could I ever quit you now?"
Here, together, tucked away between the sweeping plains and rolling hills of the homestead that's her inheritance, her life's lodestone. There's horses in the barn outside – and not a day goes by she looks at them and fails to think about the man who was once a boy who raced her for the fun of it, for the joy of it. For the zest of life.
Perhaps she ain't so old after all, if she thinks about that.
"I think I was never good at quittin you in the first place."
Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi, from "Gratification to the survivors of daily damnations"

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Anthony Thomas Lombardi, from "self-portrait as murmuration"
Ilya Kaminsky, from “Galya's Toast”, Deaf Republic
It’s not about knowin where you are. It’s about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody’s. You don’t start over. That’s what it’s about. Every step you take is forever. You can’t make it go away. None of it.
(please don’t reblog)
we loved once and true. @westpromised

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
“I lie on the lawn in the dark, my heart a blue cup fallen from someone’s hands.”
— Dorianne Laux, from “What’s Broken” (via thebluesthour)
“I wait and ache. I think I have been healing. There is a great deal else to do.”
—Sylvia Plath, from The Collected Poems