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Arthur was four when he'd lost his mother.
He had already started grieving her for a good year before that, though, when she had first fallen ill, and they'd known she wasn't going to be around for much longer.
His father had never been kind about it. Every tear Arthur had shed in front of him met with a harsh word, or if the drink had him feeling crueler, a hit to the face.
So, Arthur hadn't dared to let more of his grief slip through the cracks when he was around.
It made it harder to sit with her those last few weeks.
She never looked like herself anymore. Her skin always ghostly pale and dark circles under her eyes, as if she had already left them.
Despite her rapidly worsening condition, she always smiled still when Arthur would sit with her.
She'd smile, and her soft, bony hand would come up to cradle his cheek, and any tear that he couldn't hold back was quickly swiped away with her gentle touch.
The last night that Arthur remembered with her, they had spent just like that. He sat on the chair by her bed, and he held her hand for hours, not daring to talk, terrified of what would come out if he did.
She must've known, somehow, that she wouldn't be around for many more days after that because it had been one of the very few times she directly acknowledged it to Arthur.
"You're gonna be strong for me." She'd said, voice weak and broken, but so sure of the fact, as if it were as easy as that.
Arthur barely managed a shake of his head, "Ma," He whispered, fighting to keep his voice from breaking, "ya can' leave me." He hated how small it came out. How desperate and weak he sounded. He knew his father would've surely hit him again for it.
His mother just smiled.
"But I'm not."
Arthur's eyes were swimming in shameful, hot tears again. She reached up to put a soft hand on his cheek.
"My sweet boy. I'm not goin' anywhere. I'm gonna be up there," She nodded her head up towards the night sky, covered by their wooden roof, "with the stars, where you can always find me."
Arthur carried her promise with him as he grew.
He carried it with him when she passed, staring up into the dark sky for hours, wondering which one of those infinite shining stars was his mother. Comforted by the fact that at least at night, no matter how much he suffered over the day, she would always be there to watch over him.
He carried it with him when they hung his Pa too.
That first night that he spent sleeping on the dusty streets of his hometown, his only company, the stars above him that had once been his parents.
When he'd first fallen in with Dutch and Hosea, his days were long and exhausting with so many new lessons to remember and the constant travels and riding.
He hardly had the energy anymore to spend his nights awake the way he had when he'd been smaller. Besides, he was older now. He wasn't stupid. He knew people who died didn't come back, better than ever. When you died, you were truly gone for good, and now that he was the one behind the guns and knives, Dutch and Hosea had made sure that he was well aware of that. Only kill, who needs killin'.
Arthur was freshly 20, when Dutch and him shot down a scrawny little boy from the rope.
The kid was more dirt than a person, and more bones than meat.
They took him in, they fed him, washed him, and clothed him, and Hosea took to dressing the nasty burnes and bruises the rope had left behind around his neck.
The whole thing had left Arthur a little naseaus, truth be told, images and memories of his father hanging from the gallows flashing back to him unprompted over and over and he couldn't stay sitting around the camp fire as they took care of the boy.
Despite how much of a nuance he turned out to be, and despite how much Arthur reminded him of the fact, John ended up taking a liking to him anyway.
Maybe it was the fact that they'd both been taken in as these small street rats the same way, maybe the fact that they were still the youngest people running around their little gang, or maybe he was just like an annoying little pet in that way, clinging to the one person who didn't want him around the most, but Arthur just couldn't seem to get the kid away from him.
It had only been a few months since Hosea had fallen back in with them, after his time away with his wife Bessie, and Arthur would be lying if he said he wasn't relieved.
He knew it was probably selfish to feel like it, and he'd still always had Dutch there, but with Hosea leaving, it had felt a little like losing a parent all over again.
And he knew John at least felt the same as, for once, he'd spent the next good week always pestering Hosea and Bessie instead of Arthur.
He must've, in fact, really missed them because Arthur didn't think he'd ever seen him actively asking for his reading lessons before.
Arthur was 23, when they lost Bessie.
It hit all of them hard. Of course, it did.
She'd been with them almost as long as Arthur had, and she was the closest thing to a mother he'd had since his real one.
John, too.
And because Hosea had turned to the bottle for all his waking moments now, and Dutch had never been one to be their source of comfort when sad or sick, it fell to Arthur to be there for the boy, the best he could.
Because, no matter how much he managed to get on Arthur's last nerve, he knew how much it hurt to be left alone with grief that big.
John had been plagued by near constant nightmares ever since they'd taken him in, but with Bessies passing, they'd reached a new height.
Near every night after, he came crawling over from his own cot to Arthur's at some late hour.
Most of those nights, Arthur would just let him lay close and put a hand over his outward facing ear, so at least he wouldn't have to hear all the commotion everything had brought to their gang.
But that wasn't always enough to settle him back to sleep.
John shook at his shoulder all but frantically, stringy hair falling into his pale face, and he'd clesrly been scratching at the old, faded scars on his neck again, making them an angry red.
Arthur lazily reached up to hold his hand down and stop him from doing so.
"Quit it, Marston." He croaked out roughly.
The kid let out a miserable little whine, "I can' breath, Arthur."
"Yes, you can. 's jus' the nightmare. C'mon, lay down."
"Will you go outside with me? It's so— I can' breath in here." He insisted again, and Arthur let out a long groan.
"Will you go ta sleep after?"
John nodded fiercly, and so Arthur pushed himself up, beside the tired burning behind his eyes and let John walk ahead out of their shared tent.
It was a warm night, spring just turning into summer, but John was still shivering something fierce.
He rubbed at his eyes, clearly exhausted but still too alert to let himself get any real rest.
Arthur put a hand on his head to stur him towards the camp fire, still burning softly despite the late hour.
He dropped himself down on one of the logs, and John sat next to him, as close as humanely possible, and stared down into the flames.
"Better?" Arthur asked, and he got a little nod back.
They stayed quiet for a while, just listening to the soft cracks of the fire and the wildlife surrounding their camp. Even Dutch and Hosea's near constant arguing nowadays had finally died down.
"I keep thinkin' 'bout her." John suddenly admitted, his voice so soft it made Arthur cringe.
"Me too, kid," He rasped out, "It's alright to miss her, you know?"
"I wish 'Sea wouldn't be drinking all the time." That hurt Arthur even more than John's first confession.
It hurt so much because he knew exactly how he felt. He felt it too, and he hadn't felt that way since his own father.
He still remembered him turning to the bottle the same when Arthur's mother had passed, all too well.
He just hoped with Hosea it wouldn't stick the same.
He'd always been so different from Arthur's real father, so much kinder, gentler, and more patient with both him and John, Arthur didn't want to even think of them as being similar.
He rested his hand on John's back.
"Ya know what my ma told me? Before she died?"
John looked up at him curiously, and he looked so young, in the dying light of the fire, Arthur felt his stomach tie up in a knot.
"She said that when people die, they'd come back as a star. So you could always see 'em at night. And I could always talk to 'er if I missed her."
John's head turned back, up towards the sky, and Arthur looked up too.
"So, you think Bessie's up there now?"
"Reckon, she is."
"I like that."
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The years kept passing, and Arthur had grown more than used to losing people in this life. But John being gone, it was different.
Arthur had been grieving his brother for a year now.
Almost every night of which he'd spent staring up into the sky, wondering if his mother and bessie and annabell were watching over the stupid boy now. If John had joined them in the night sky.
They'd all pretty much accepted that John was probably caught or dead a good few months ago.
Abigail had been taking it hard, little Jack had been too small, really to understand what was going on, and Arthur had pushed the grief for his little brother so far down that he thought it surely would've had to stop hurting now.
But when the stupid kid had came stumbling in one night, not more then a scratch on him, as if nothing ever even happend, it had all came back so aggressively, with so much force that it had taken over Arthur completely.
The intense all-consuming anger, at least was easier to deal with than the gut-wrenching grief.
So Arthur just let it take over.
It had ended with a broken nose for John and bloody and bruised knuckles for Arthur.
And it hadn't stopped hurting.
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Arthur had started wondering if he'd get a star.
He didn't imagine people like him deserved one, but still, he hoped at least John would see him up there when this was all over.
They shared a quiet night by the fire again, like they hadn't in a really, really long time.
Beaver hollow rarely felt very warm or homely, and Arthur barely spent much time in camp at all anymore.
But now that they had John back from his time in prison, and things were closing in faster than ever, he found himself wanting to spend as much of the little time he had left with his stupid, idiot kid brother.
John had been nursing the same bottle of beer for the entire night, eyes constantly locked on the night sky above them.
"Ya know what I'd always think about? At Sisika, I mean." He suddenly rasped into the quiet of the night, and Arthur frowned at him.
"Wha'?"
"I thought about whatchu said when we was kids. How people turned into stars, or somethin' when they died."
Arrhur huffed a rough chuckle that quickly turned into a cough.
"Yeah. Been thinkin' 'bout that, too."
"I reckon 'Sea's up there now. And all the others."
Arthur only hummed in agreement, throat tight at the mention of Hosea. Lenny. Sean. Kieran. Molly.
It had been too many.
No more.
And certainly not John. If he had any say in it.
"You gonna stay strong, Johnny. You know that,"
Now, it was John's turn to frown at him.
"Even when I'm—"
"C'mon now, Arthur—" The kid choked out.
"I mean it, John. No matter what happens."
He watched John swallow around the lump in his throat. "Alright. "
"Good."
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John was 26 when he lost his brother.
Arthur had told him, no matter what happened, to not look back.
Do anything to get Abigail out. Get Jack out.
And he would.
He would.
At the very least, there'd be some point to all of this.
But the grief was so overwhelmingly strong that most days, John didn't think he could do it.
It was so much more than anything he'd ever felt before. So all consuming and pointless, that it felt impossible to keep being strong.
He sat awake night after night because every morning he had to wake up in a world that his brother wasn't in, felt like losing him all over again.
Abigail sat with him sometimes. She understood, or tried to at least, and it helped, sometimes.
But mostly, John could just stare up into the sky and think about if Arthur was watching over him now.