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silly seals from outer space

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— Red Dead Redemption —

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charles!

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Do you guys ever reread your old works or WIPS and are amazed at some of the things you wrote? I was rereading an old WIP that I had abandoned long ago, and I was lowkey blown away with how good some of the writing was, and I wrote it! Like I genuinely forget I can actually write, but I'm so hard on myself for no reason.

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Solace in Silence

Pairing: Arthur Morgan x Charles Smith

Warnings: Period typical racism, blood (small cut on a hand), the tiniest bit of angst

Summary: Charles is having a rough day, so Arthur lends a hand to try and bring the other mans spirits up. Charles realizes how much the other man means to him. WK 1.3K

A/N: I wrote this in one night, so it might be really bad. I also didn't edit it, so any mistakes are my own. I hope you guys enjoy!

This fic is also on AO3

Charles stomped back into camp, his temper and his anger on full display for the members of the gang. He had just returned to camp after doing a supplies run to a nearby town, and some people in town had said some particularly nasty things to him. Everyone steered clear of him as he stormed back to his tent and hid away inside. Nobody had bothered to check in on him either, which only fueled his already worsening mood. He settled on hacking away at a small wooden carving he had been working on, trying to snuff out some of the flames of anger burning away. 

Arthur patted his faithful mare one more time before heading into camp, he had just returned from a bounty hunting job for the local town, it was somewhat of a side hustle for him. He found it to be easy money and none of the folk were too hard to capture and bring to the law. No matter how much they argued or tried to barter with him, Arthur didn’t care as long as he got paid. As he strolled through the camp, everyone seemed to be eyeing Charles' tent, almost trying to tell him something. Arthur was walking towards Hosea and Dutch when Hosea gestured towards Charles' tent. He found it weird, but decided to follow the redirection and check in on the other man. Opening the flap of the tent, he was met with a very furious Charles who was chipping away at a small block of wood. 

“What do you want?” Charles snapped at the cowboy who looked immediately taken aback at his hostility. Charles had always been so calm and collected, seeing him in such a state was almost jarring for Arthur. 

“I’m just coming to check on you, everyone else looked afraid to come over here.” Arthur pointed out. He dared to take a step into the tent, closing the flaps behind him. 

“I’m fine.” Charles huffed in response, he knew it was not convincing whatsoever. 

“Uh huh, right.” Arthur said, a hint of suspicion in his tone. He watched Charles hack away at the wood in his hand, Arthur wasn’t sure how to get Charles to speak when all of a sudden he did a particularly rough stroke along the wood with his knife and ended up cutting through the palm of his hand.

“Shit.” Charles swore, feeling the pain of the knife slice through his skin, anger dissipating at the feeling of the physical pain. He dropped both the carving and the knife, as his hand started to bleed.

“Hey, slow down. Let me help you.” Arthur said in a calm voice, witnessing the incident and Charles started to panic. Charles' gaze found Arthurs and Arthur saw that there wasn’t any anger anymore, only hurt in his dark eyes. He quickly pulled out a bandage and some liquor from his satchel and sat beside Charles on his cot. Charles didn’t even argue with the other man, he was too tired and exhausted from being so angry and in his head. He found a kind of solace in Arthurs presence that helped to clear his dark thoughts from earlier in the day. 

“May I?” Arthur asked casually, and he reached for Charles' bleeding hand. Charles held out his hand for Arthur, and he examined the cut quickly before pulling the top of the bottle off with his teeth. 

“This may sting.” Arthur warns before pouring the golden liquid onto the cut. Charles hissed out a breath as the alcohol made contact with his open skin, and he instinctively tried to pull his hand away but Arthur had a firm grip on his wrist. The blonde dried the wound with one of the bandages he had grabbed, and poured some healing solutions he made from some herbs onto another before wrapping it and tying it neatly over Charles’ wound. Arthur patted the little knot he made before bringing it up and placing a delicate kiss on the clean bandage. Arthur blushed and quickly dropped Charles' hand when he realized what he did. 

“Sorry, uh Grimshaw always did that to me when she patched me up.” He said quickly and awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck. 

“Don’t be, I don’t mind.” Charles replied, finding the gesture endearing. There was a silence that fell throughout the tent, only the muffled sounds from the ongoings of the gang outside. 

“So you gonna tell me what’s got you so worked up?” Arthur asked, breaking through the silence and the waterfall of thoughts going through Charles' head. Charles took a deep breath before saying anything, as the events of earlier in the day came back to him. 

“Just come dumb rich folk in town who think they are better than the rest of us. They had some nasty things to say to me, and I always just brush it off but this time it got to me.” Charles explained and Arthur gave him a sympathetic look. 

“I can’t imagine it's easy for you in the world we live in. I’m sorry that happened to you.” Arthur said, placing a comforting hand on Charles' leg. 

“It’s alright Arthur. It’s not your fault, some folk just aren’t as accepting as you and the gang. I’ve gotten used to it.” Charles sighed.

“Do you want me to go after them?” Arthur offered and Charles shook his head. 

“That's sweet but no, this isn’t something you can brute force.” Charles responded. He was grateful for the gang and how they didn’t treat him any differently for his background and his heritage. Dutch always instilled in the members that everyone was equal, and should be treated as such, Charles really valued that. 

“Where did you get that herbal remedy you used on the bandage?” Charles asked, changing the subject. 

“Hosea taught me how to make it, he was tired of me always using his supply.” Arthur said with a small smirk. 

“I’m assuming you were a little reckless?” Charles asked. 

“Like you wouldn’t believe. I would always come back to camp with some sort of new injury and Hosea would shake his head and scold me while he patched me up.” Arthur smiled fondly at the memories. Charles couldn’t help but smile too anger long forgotten, he loved hearing about those good memories whenever Arthur shared them. 

“I can show you how to make it, if you want.” Arthur offered. 

“Sure, I’d like that.” Charles replied. Another comfortable silence fell over the tent. Ever since the two of them had met and became friends, there had always been something else between them, but both of them had chosen not to label it. They found comfort in each other's company that they couldn’t get from anyone else, and they often gravitated towards each other. They would go on jobs together and they could get any job done, no matter what it was. They always moved in tandem and they always knew what the other was thinking. 

“Thank you.” Charles said, and Arthur looked at him confused.

“What for?” The other man asked. 

“For today. You always seem to know how to make me forget whatever is bothering me, and know how to pull me out of it, so thank you.” Charles replied, a small genuine small graced his features for a moment. Arthur made sure to memorize it for his journal later. 

“Glad I can help, I’m always here if you need anything. You can talk to me about whatever you need, I ain’t any good at advice but i’m an excellent listener.” Arthur said. The two of them made eye contact for a moment before both quickly looked away. They always seemed to find each other in their time of need, and they wouldn’t trade that for anything. 

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colter arthur!! this was so fun to draw

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FUCK. honestly just FUCK. We missed a very important day yesterday.

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Ain't never seen the fella on that poster.

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Having alot of fun drawing these two

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low honor

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mr. trelawny

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The Delineator, Vol LII, No 4, October, 1898

Ladies’ Tailor-Made Suits consisting of Basque with Chemisette and Diagonal Closing and Skirt with Circular Upper Part and Graduated Circular-Flounce Lower Part and Two-Piece Costume with Seven-Gored Flare-Skirt and Single-Breasted Jacket.

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New AO3 spam/scam tactic

Heeeey all. I've posted a lot about the AO3 comments scams that have been going around since late 2024, and yesterday, I shared a well-sourced video that discusses the explosion of long con scams in general since 2020. For anyone who's curious about this kind of thing, those links might be useful for you, but I think they also help explain why this comment I got a few days ago immediately pinged my scam radar:

(Yes, since then, AO3 support has responded to me and confirmed that the account is posting spam. I'm not slandering some random new user)

So, red flag #1: the comment came in on a fic I'd just posted that day. This is very consistent for these seemingly innocuous comments—they'll pop up the day a new work is posted or the day a new chapter goes up. Red flag #2: I don't recognize the user at all. I'm sure this wouldn't work for very popular creators on AO3 who get loads of comments, but I know all the people who comment on my stuff and rarely get new commenters. So that was odd in itself. Red flag #3: the comment is extremely vague and generic. It doesn't mention characters or anything that happens in the fic. That's pretty standard, too. Red flag #4: when I went to the user's profile, I saw that, shockingly, it was a brand new account and completely blank. For a while, these scammers were including weird amounts of contact info in their AO3 profiles (you can see examples in the posts I linked to at the top), but lately, they've been more bare bones. Red flag #5: the comment is such weird overkill. This is probably more specific to the fic I posted that day, but if it had been a long, complex story, I might have just thought the commenter was being extremely generous with their wording. The thing I posted, however, was a 600 word fluffy scene where nothing 'captivating' happens 😂 Like I said, weird overkill.

I think that covers my main reasons for immediately being suspicious. I wanted to explain them because a lot of people I've spoken to about these spam comments don't suspect them right away. And it really sucks having to be paranoid, but here we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As I mentioned, AO3 confirmed that the comment was spam, and they took it down. I also saw another comment from the same scam account yesterday, but by the time I got the reply from AO3 this morning, that comment was gone. So it may be that they're mass deleting comments by those spam accounts now? If anyone has insight on this, I'd love to know.

Anyway, just to give another example of the wording of the comment, here's a screenshot of it:

Vague again, and the fic was a one-shot, so mentioning a chapter is fishy.

I hope this helps prevent a few people from getting sucked into these long con scams. I still don't know exactly how they play out beyond the scammers offering to do paid art commissions, but obviously, they're making money with the comments or they wouldn't be flooding AO3 with them.

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