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It was getting harder to deny that he was getting worse. Seeing him most days tended to soften the blow. It seemed unfair to even consider the metaphor of the boiling frog, he was the one in the metaphorical pot afterall, but the similarities were there. This life was slowly boiling him to death.
Only after he had come back from Guarma had you fully comprehended the gravity of the situation. The symptoms of tuberculosis and being shipwrecked had all blended together, but it hardly mattered, your mind was not on the cause of his state, rather the result. Arthur was going to die.
That simple fact was the only thing running through your head as you watched him; sat on his cot, keeled over himself, forcefully expelling a gut wrenching cough from his throat. It put up a fight, stuck in his lungs like a fly in honey, and it took a while for him to battle it out. You blinked away the tears brimming in your eyes. It was one thing to kill a man, in this life it was commonplace enough, but to watch a man who had lost the ability to fight back fade away was different.
Once his thunderous cough had diminished into wheezes, he regained his composure and was able to claw his way back to reality. “Sorry,” his voice had returned to him in rocky mumbles.
You would have pinned his demure tone to embarrassment if you had not known him better, if you had not known that it was down to nothing more than genuine guilt. He knew how much it hurt you to see him like this. Your whole life you had been prepared for his death, as he was for yours, as an occupational hazard, but this was not to merely die, but to creep out of existence as a ghost. It tore you up that he knew that was how you felt; a brave face could only go so far with a man you had known for the better half of your life.
“It’s okay,” you reassured him as your hand reached for the razor for a second time.
Much to your relief, he had finally let you tame his beard that had grown so much in his absence. It was not pride that had stopped him from allowing you sooner, it was his priorities, and he had decided, once again, that the gang took priority over himself. If it were not for the fact that he looked like a walking corpse, this unconscious decision of his told you his fate.
As you lathered the soap onto his beard, he said nothing, instead he leaned into your touch, letting out a shaky exhale with drooping eyes. You tried to be as gentle as possible, your touches perhaps much lighter than they needed to be as you carved the lather from his gaunt cheeks, reaping a small relief of folded soap and bead trimmings that you promptly wiped from the blade before going in for a second time. Each pass whispered the familiar scrape of a blade that, accompanying the broken scrapes of his exhales, took on a much more domestic light than either of you were accustomed to.
Just as your third swipe of the blade closed in on him once more, a course, yet overpoweringly gentle, hand grasped at your wrist as he once again sunk into a rhythm of misshapen coughs. This episode was easier than the previous, though just as hurtful; even the mere gasps he took in between his hacking spoke of a pain that went beyond his coughing, a pain that, quite selfishly, you seemed to feel in your own chest and up to the tightening of your throat as you turned you wet eyes away from his view.
“It’s okay,” he reassured you this time.
What he had intended to be a comfort made everything so much worse. Trust him to be holding you up while he crumbled to the ground. His unadulterated selflessness was something you both loved and hated about him; a gentleman through and through, yet a bonafide door mat for the world that was beginning to see the long overdue signs of wear.
Bringing his fingertips to your chin, he brought your face up until your eyes met his. You both stared at each other for a second before you reprimanded him through the biting sensation in your throat of held back tears: “Stop it, Arthur… Please.”
As his palm shifted to encapsulate your cheek, he brushed a lock of stray hair from your forehead, shaky hands and all, tucking it behind your ear, “I love you,” he whispered.
You buried your face into his palm, your response implicit, as you finally laid a single kiss on his wrist before dragging yourself away and the blade closer once again.
In all the gentleness you could sum up, you tried to finish as quickly as possible. Each wipe of the blade revealed a starkly polished edge that, upon bringing it back up to his face, was a just as stark juxtaposition with the man in front of you, battered and broken. As you stripped the lather from his face each individual hurt seemed to scream at you; he looked like a bruised apple at the bottom of the basket on market day with eye bags that not even a wagon could carry. You do not think he could manage to look bad even if he tried, not to you, though he looked undoubtedly worn in a way that you had never seen before.
As you finished up, wiping the remnants from his face with a towel that had seen better days, his eyes affixed to you. It was hard not to feel scrutinised under the rumbling discontent of his shimmering eyes, though you know he would have hated to have made you feel as such, to feel as though he were looking straight through you and into the pitying thoughts that shamed you, and would have done to him, to no end.
“Listen,” he started with much effort, “I want you to do something for me…”
Putting the towel down, you held your palms up to his hollowed cheeks. His hands found their place on yours so quickly it must have been unconscious; there was no grand romance to it, just simple comfort of two people who had been around each other far too much. “Anything,” you replied sincerely.
“When I’m gone–”
“Arthur…” you hated to talk about it. Hated it. And though he had indulged you as to avoid it so far, all things must run their course, his strong sense of duty would not let him forget that.
“Listen,” he started once again, “when I’m gone, I don’t want you around here anymore, there’s nothing here for you.”
He looked desperate, his pleading eyes and downturned mouth matched his downtrodden state in a way that, if he could see himself, he would rebuke himself to no end.
“My whole life’s here, Arthur,” you exhaled deeply, “I know you mean well but, it’s just… this is my life. I can’t just go strolling into civilisation like it’s not the very thing I’ve spent my whole life fighting.”
“I know, I know it,” he squeezed your hands, “believe me. But you ain’t a fool, you know this can’t last: us, the gang, we’re done for. Staying around’ll get you killed, you know it.”
You nodded, sniffling away all the while. “Then let’s go.”
Any brightness in his eyes that had followed your agreement fizzled, his whole body, the newly exposed muscles of a working man starved, deflated with a sigh. “You know it’s not that easy… I want to, I do, I really do, but I need to see this through to the end.”
“I don’t want you to see it through to the end,” you replied, all too aware of the bleak double entendre.
“I have to, I hardly have a choice.”
That was not true, of course, not in the literal sense, but you knew the twisted cocktail of duty, honour, and loyalty that compelled him to believe such a thing. Dutch had really done a number on him. You said nothing, there was nothing you could say.
He continued, “I want you to go. John and Abigail, they’re starting anew, go with them. Please.”
You had not realised you were crying until he wiped away hot streams of tears from your cheeks and gently pulled you into his chest.
“They’re going to build a life, a real life. There’s so much you can do and I won’t… I won’t drag you away from it, drag you down with me. I can’t.”
“It doesn’t feel that way… like you’re dragging me down,” you mumbled from your place in his arms.
“It is that way, it is,” he responded, and without the look in his eye, he seemed much more stern, perhaps the sternest you had ever heard him.
You leaned back, unwrapping your arms from him, slow and unwilling as molasses. Brushing a strand of hair from his face, as he had previously done to you, you smiled, “You’ll let me cut your hair next?”
He gave a weak smile, “Of course.”
You ran your hands through it, easing out the tangles you encountered with deft fingertips as you brushed it away from his face, revealing the damage that it concealed. It mentally winded you, like being thrown from a horse, it was something that you would not have time to get used to. But for now, it was his hair that called to your attention, that was one of the few things you could help with.
“You’ll go?” he asked after you had delayed him as much as you could with your fiddling with his hair.
“I’ll go,” you affirmed, letting your hands drop from his hair.
He leaned forward, in his weakened state, exerting himself far too much for an action that, only a few weeks ago, he would have thought nothing of. You met him more than half way, catching his meaning, and bowing down to kiss him where he sat. As simple as it was, you smiled, as giddy as a youngster, the novelty of love had not worn off, and you were scared that it never would.
Your voice came out hoarse, hardly familiar to even yourself, “I’ll miss you, Arthur.”
Bringing his hands up to your shoulders, he embraced you. Your chin rested on his shoulders and your hands wrapped delicately around his torso so as to not aggravate his cuts and scrapes. Though he did not say it, he would miss you too for the time he had left, which, looking at him now, was not long. All he said was, “Thank you,” and that was enough because he had already given all that he could give.