Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first time it happens, he thinks he's gone mad.

Now, going crazy at seven might not be the most ideal of scenarios given the circumstances of his upbringing, but then again, if there's ever anything he could give the older Marston credit for, it was for finally making someone else anything but dead.

The first time it happens, he thought of it more as a dream - a pretty daydream if you will - he hears it before he sees it.

It's the story of the donkey, the same one she always told when it came down to storytime with all the other kids when their mothers were working, and their father was either too drunk to care that one of the women weren't actually working, or he was spending the money on games and drink faster than they could haul anything in.

The story she tells in his daydream, two days after she passed and they'd pushed her casket deep down under with a few flowers and tears, and his father had sent her boys on their way, starts midway through and carries on 'til the end.

He doesn't realize anything wrong with the daydream until he remembers that that's not how it goes.

He's seven years old, not exactly bright, but he does have a knack for remembering things.

She was his mother when his own didn't live, and he had nothing to remember her by, so when Lily told the story wrong for the first time in all the years he'd known her, he perks up and mumbles to himself and taps the side of his head, as if that can clear his jumbled mind, before realizing that this isn't a dream.

Luke, Sara's boy, stares up at him from where he sits on the floor, the man made from matchsticks close to crushed in chubby fingers, and he scrunches up his face in a way that tells John that he hadn't heard a damn thing.

They stare for a minute. Then the story starts from the beginning, and John walks out the door and catches the hem of her skirt, disappearing behind the corner of the butcher's shop.

"Miss Mac!" He calls, because who else had such a voice and way with stories and could make the children listen without a complaint?

The first time it happens, he thinks he's gone mad. And in later years, when so many others he cares about are gone, is he even sure that he hasn't, finally, gone off the end?

She stands there in her shift, and blue skirt draped over it, hair curled all nice and that little smile on her face that was only ever reserved for the children.

John’d always found her pretty, especially so when there’d been nothing smudged on her face. It’d just made her look all pale and wrong. (and dead)

But, now, of course, she does look all pale and wrong, because how in the Hell is she even here?

"Oh, darlin' John." She says, crouches to his height just because she was almost as big as Papa, and he can't reach that far and lets a pale finger hover over his cheekbone. She doesn't touch him, and he also supposes that she can't, but he almost leans into her, just to feel something again.

"You told it wrong." He says, and leans back instead, away from her, because something in her eyes ain’t right and he ain’t dumb, don't matter what Papa says. She smiles all sad again and takes back her hand as if she just then realizes that she had, in fact, told it wrong.

"Are ye a witch?" He asks and takes a step back because he's heard the stories of witches from her lips, and if she is, well, then he's in a very wrong place. She tilts her head and shakes it, but she looks so unsure of herself when she does that, he isn't sure either.

"No. I--, I don't think so." She whispers, sounding almost shy, and she looks at him with her blue eyes that always reminded him of the sky. Now, they just look like the harbor at night.

"We buried ye. And he sent Thomas and Nigel away." He whispers back, and suddenly her breath falters, and she falls back on her rear, landing in the muck without a sound. There's no splash from where she lands in the pool behind her, and there's no mud on her skirt, and maybe that's when he should've run off, but he doesn't.

"Where?" And he starts to mumble a reply, his heart suddenly quick in his chest, before she shakes her head again and stands up, a hand over her own. "The boys. Where did he send my boys." She isn't asking, and she doesn't have to, because John doesn't know and so only shakes his head.

"Away." He says eventually, and he stares up at her with sudden fear and takes another step back because now she looks mighty mad, and he knows what people can do once they're mad.

But, she doesn't look at him, looks away instead, and he knows she's not mad at him, but the way her eyes burn doesn't seem to tell any difference.

"Why are you here, Miss MacIntosh?" He asks, eventually, once her fire has faded, and she’s crouched to his level again. She seems to almost shrink in size, looking so much smaller than when she there before.

"A dinnae ken." She whispers, the accent bleeding through no matter how many times Papa tried to wash it away, leaving a strange sound in the women's throats that was neither ‘American’ nor Scottish.

To say that John's father was a lousy teacher was like saying that the priest down the shithole street of theirs wasn't as crooked as his spine.

John has heard the stories of those who's come back, hauntingly pale and with the voices of doves, but never did he think he would encounter one.

"Perhaps ye're a fae!" He exclaims, suddenly – loudly – and Miss Mac seems taken aback, her nose scrunched up funnily when she hears just how loud he was.

"I doubt that, little one." She says, her eyes still a little angry and, if John isn't seeing wrong, a little red. "I don't know where he sent them, but I know the others will be very happy to have ye back."

She looks at him, sad-eyed, and shakes her head. "I dinnae think it will be good for me to be seen with ye." There's a little gold her hair when the sun shines, and John remembers how they always thought her hair was the one spun of gold, rather than the maiden in the very old, very dark, stories.

She still shakes her head when he asks why, and later, when they wander back, and she remains in the corners, he thinks he understands why.

There are very few of them, none other at all; in fact, that has felt the cold chill that ran down John's spine or heard the story being told back to front and both other ways.

She stays, doesn't seem to wish to stray far, telling him little stories in the nights when he can't sleep or when she asks him to tell stories to the others when the colic sets in on the little ones and when Luke dies from the fever that came with winter.

Papa comes down with that fever too – when he's as drunk as he's blind – and he can hear Miss MacIntosh laugh until the law comes and takes them away and pulls them apart.

Mary, Michael, and Susan goes up the street and disappears into one house or the other and don’t come back, be it in John's head or before John's eyes.

Be it that he forgets them, he doesn't know.

Big John, Little John, and Charlie go down the street, and the Misses disappear somewhere else. Not Miss Mac, however, she stays, and she sings and lulls him to sleep, puts him under a spell they would have all named wicked at this been other times, but these are the times that shouldn't be.

And then he's ten years old, Little John is eight and Charlie is not much younger, when he hops out the window and tears down the street like the bat out of Hell that he is, ignores Miss Mac's plea of him bringing the boys along, and disappears around the corner.

And, then he's eleven. Eleven on the dot, trapped in an alley with a satchel full of something heavy and hopefully valuable, and a gun waving around his face; he wants to reach out, but before he can, there's a violent shudder in the man, a chill down John's spine and then the gun fires twice.

Once. Miss. The bullet hits the wall and digs itself snug into the mud.

Twice. It's a hit.

And, then, John tears out of the alley as fast as he can – cold to the bone, and the sound of the man trying to breathe past the blood in his throat – and then there's a lawman gripping his arm.

"It weren’t me." He says, voice not yet strained and used, and kicks the lawman's shins. He scurries off, all knobby knees and long fingers, satchel still in hand, and hides in the chimney sweeper's home until the law has decided that a kid in a place where city was too loose of a term, wasn't worth much of their time when the dead man was a woman hitter and a rich snob.

(he gets caught once, but there's still some coin left from the dead man, and he looks starved enough that the lawman looks the other way and lets him run off,)

he's lucky until he isn't,)

Miss MacIntosh isn't there, still mourning the boys he don’t fully remember when he gets himself trapped in a house where there's suddenly too many people.

He kicks, bites, and pulls the knife from his britches before it's taken away and thrown between the floorboards where it'll remain until someone tears them up some ten decades later.

He spits and hisses, tears the man's shirt at the elbow and kicks mud on the woman's skirt, and then there's a rope around his neck, and then it's all red and panicked.

"No." Is all he says, peeling his fingers between the rope and his neck until they pull them back and ties them too, his breath trapped in his throat and threatening to choke him before the rope does.

"If He'll give ya another life, then maybe you'll think twice about stealing." The man says, growls low in his throat, and gives John a somewhat wide-eyed look when he tries to see through the swollen eye John's wild fist gave him.

John tries to snarl through the tightness of the rope but doesn't get further than a terrified gulp, and he all but shoots a pleading look toward the wife. She stands further away, arms crossed, and doesn't break under his plea.

The rope is tossed, and John wishes, begs, for Miss MacIntosh, but she's nowhere in sight and nowhere in feeling – the cold chill gone from his spine.

Miss MacIntosh is gone, but there are horse hooves loud in the dry earth, and then a bang and then his feet lands too hard, too stiffly, on the ground, and he stumbles face first and gets a mouthful of dirt.

Now she's there, eyes as dead as every other time and her lips are curled the wrong way up, and John wheezes past chapped lips; "where the Hell were you?" but the question falls on deaf ears when two men and a boy charges past him, one reaching for him and the other man and the boy pointing guns in the faces of those that tried to kill him.

"Last time I witnessed a hanging, it was from due diligence by the law." The man spits, clean-shaven and black-haired, and a voice rimmed with anger. John still wheezes, clutching absentmindedly on the man's arm until he realizes what he's doing.

John shoots back, scrambling to his unsteady feet and prepares to run when the boy seizes him by the neck, the man with the gun nodding his head back toward their horses and shoulders him over there, tosses him up and locks his hand over John's skinny leg. John wishes he'd fight them, but he's more scared of the man with the rope than the man with the gun, and it is still so terribly hard to breathe.

Even if the reason why has changed significantly.

"Breathe, kid. We'll be outta here soon 'nough." The boy grumbles, suddenly a man, and John forces his hands to stop shaking by twisting into the gray mare's mane. She stirs in annoyance, soothed only by the boy's calm voice, his eyes never leaving the scene unfolding before him.

Miss MacIntosh still stares, still mourns, and John wishes, for once, that she'd go away.

He stares at her more than the scene and is startled to life when the boy hoists himself into the saddle, seating himself behind him, and turns the mare to the road.

"What’s your name, boy?” The black-haired man with the gun asks – Dutch he later learns – and John replies as strongly as he can, just barely getting his name out without a tremble.

“John Marston, sir.” He says and doesn’t know that he leaves her staring holes into his back.

Chapter Text

Bessie Matthews was warm.

She was kind, stern, and had gentle hands and brilliant eyes, but most of all – the part that John loved best – she was warm.

It didn’t matter if it was a figure of speech, something Mister Matthews – “Hosea, for the last time, dear boy” – had tried very hard to teach him, or if it was that her hands were always so warm. As if she had stood close to the campfire before taking his hand, combed his hair in precise and harsh strokes when he was too tired to argue or had simply taught him the proper ways to hold a needle.

She was always warm. And warmth was something John didn’t realize he’d lacked until he’d joined their merry band of misfits. There were few of them, more men than there were women, and John had quickly found himself curling and hissing in a corner as if he was one of those feral cats he had encountered more than once in the alleys.

He’d curled and hissed like that until Hosea had coaxed him out with the promise of learning something that wasn’t reading or a simple bowl of food. He’d remained like that until Arthur had wrangled him by the neck and tossed him onto the back of the gray mare, taught him how to ride, and tried to teach him how to draw.

(Arthur really was a lousy teacher, sometimes,)

Dutch taught him the guns, the stealing, and Hosea came with the sweet-talking and the charades. Miss Grimshaw taught him to cook and mend.

But, Bessie taught him to feel real.

He hadn’t thought much about it before he came to them, always moving from one place to the next in a city not big enough and still too small and taking what he needed with the internal hope that he wasn’t going to hang for it.

(he almost had, but that was as close as he was going to get to it, promised Dutch around the campfire when they switched stories back and forth,)

He’d taught himself how to be himself, but Bessie was always behind him – one step behind him should he ever step away – and he guessed that after a while, he had simply started to think of her as a constant.

She was another mother, when both his own and Miss Mac had passed on, and none of the other Misses were there anymore. That they weren’t suitable to be mothers was another matter entirely.

Miss Grimshaw tried to be a mother, she keeps trying, but she’s not as warm as Missus Matthews was.

So, maybe it isn’t much of a surprise that John disappears for two days once Missus Matthews stops coughing, and Hosea grows so, so quiet.

It should be Hosea that gets out, runs, but that will never be how any of them do things. It’s only how John does things.

She finds him on the second day before he decides to come back, and John’s already crying when he feels that familiar chill down his spine. It’s been a few years since Miss MacIntosh went away, but he’s seen and felt others. He knows the signs.

“So, this’s what you’ve been doin’.” She says, hands folded in front of herself. John wipes his nose on his sleeve, seventeen and stumped in growth and apparent brilliance, according to Arthur, and he locks his eyes on the hem of her skirt.

“Thought you’d move on.” He says and laughs over how ridiculous it sounds and shoves his thumbnail between his teeth. 

“Thought I told ya to stop that.” She says and swats at him, and he quickly shoves his hand behind his back, away from her hands.

He knows without knowing that her hands are colder than the Illinois winter, and he flicks his eyes up and then down and sees an incredibly interesting blade of grass.

She sighs loud in his ear, ruffles her skirts, and a few more tears leaks past John’s eyelashes. She crouches down, just out of reach, and John sniffles some more, so incredibly miserable, and he begs her not to touch him.

He’s already cold.

She’d taken his hands before Hosea’d taken over, and John had almost wished to drown himself in the bottles Miss Grimshaw had hidden in the woods with all their money, already knowing what an event like this would bring out.

She had taken his hands, and she had still been so warm, so kind and so loving.

She wasn’t warm anymore.

“Ain’t it easy?” He asks and picks the blade of grass between dirty fingers, yet again having denied Miss Grimshaw’s request of taking a bath. 

“Ain’t what easy, lad?” She asks and twirls a finger in her gray curls.

“Passin’ on. Or, whatever it is you do.” He says and finally, finally, looks to her.

Not at her. Just to her.

There’s a smile on her face, not big and not small, teeth barely shining through. Her eyes are still brilliant.

Dead. But brilliant.

“I think it is, John. I think it is.”

“So, why don’t you?” He always asks the question. Sometimes out loud, sometimes in his head. Most times, they don’t answer at all and simply walk away – John’s heart, not a single beat lighter, and his mind not a bit clearer.

Some just frown, whispers a name or debt, or something that could be a pain to leave behind and leave it at that. John doesn’t quite dare to ask any more than that.

“I think you know why.” He nods, smiles without joy, and wipes his eyes.

“He’ll be fine, Missus Matthews.”

“Eventually.”

It takes some time – some unfinished conversations and then some unsolved doubts – but soon enough, Bessie gets him to move on back to camp.

Starvation has claimed a permanent place in John and so now only makes his reappearance at camp look dirtier and wilder, and the coat that was a size too big on Arthur once upon a time must be at least four on John.

Dutch greets him, soft smile, and a gentle hand between his shoulder blades, and tries to steer a muted conversation about a homestead not too far away that could be perfect for the boys, but John can still hear the undercurrent of grief.

All the more, he can hear Hosea’s drunk, mumbling voice coming from his tent – Bessie long since gone – and it seizes his heart in another crushing grip. He nods to Dutch’s suggestions, agrees to ride out the next day with Arthur, and leave the mess that is Hosea Matthews to those that know him best.

He doesn’t go to Hosea, only nods once again to Dutch, and travels around him. He smiles at Miss Grimshaw, tightlipped and cold, and almost brushes against Arthur once they pass each other by the horses. The other boy simply shrugs, fabric against fabric, and tips his hat in greeting; John looks, eyes saying enough.

He finds him grazing in the woods behind camp, his light coat standing out like a sore thumb. He approaches slowly, lifts a hand, and shushes. The gelding whips his head up, blows out harshly through his nose, and flicks his ears, but as soon as he sees the familiar face, he leans his head forward, the old promise of sugar cubes always fresh to mind.

“Hey, boy.” He says and pets the horse’s velvety nose, the warm breath of the animal tickling the palm of his hand. The gelding lifts his lips, testing innocently if there’s anything but dirt and twigs in his pockets and hands. Finding nothing, he soon sinks his head down, eyes still flicked forward in both awareness and greeting.

John traces his fingers over the pelt, scratches where he knows he loves it the best, and smiles when the gelding’s head rises and his upper lip curls and plays.

“I sure will miss him.” She says, and the cold and the wind startles the horse enough to send it skittering, but seeing nothing, it soon enough comes back to investigate. Bessie simply laughs and traces the air where she could’ve touched him, perhaps imagining what once was.

“I know he’ll miss you,” John mumbles and crosses his arms as he looks to the other horses, the simplicity and peace of the world distorting the picture he’s painted for himself over the last two days.

“I’ll miss you too.” He says and looks at her this time, and she meets his eyes with another smile. 

“Good. I ain’t  just passing by.” John scoffs at that and shoves his hands into his pockets instead, the grief making his hands shake a little.

She knows, though. Oh, Bessie Matthews always knew.

“Can I ask you for a favor, John?” She asks and turns to him, only the rustle of underbrush drawing the attention of the gelding. “What?”

“Look after him.”

“‘Course I will, ma’am. Always.” He promises a little too easy, a streak long since adopted when he lived by the harbor, and the little kids would climb him until he agreed on some scheme or other.

There’s something else on his mind, and he almost unconsciously knows what she wants to ask. She’s always been modest, and John’s never liked touch, but this he can do for her.

“It’s alright.” He says and nods, something like fear too close to his voice. He’s felt enough ghosts, mirages, somethings, pass through him to know why he hates water, but if there’s one thing Missus Bessie Matthews taught him, it was how to be kind.

He doesn’t offer up his arms – he’s too scared of having another fit of hitched breath and frozen limbs in the woods – and so only reaches out with his right. She looks ready to cry, so old and so alive and so dead at the same time that he almost starts crying again, and she grips his hand slowly.

She was never cold. Not even when it was winter, and they’d spent hours riding with bad gloves and frostbitten fingertips had she been cold. She is now, and it takes his breath away. Just a little, but enough to make him wonder if that fit is crawling its way up his throat.

She holds it as tight as their existences allow, shakes it up and down like they’d done when he’d been new, and he can see the few, shining tears that snakes their way down her cheeks.

Her eyes are still brilliant, her hair is still gray, and her smile is still wide.

But her hands are cold, so cold and her voice so slow, careful and full of everything but regret and anger, and John knows she’s only there to see for herself.

She knew; she always did, but now she knew for sure that her leaving was just another saloon on their way to something new. She knew her husband had two choices, and that he’d eventually wrestle his way back to them.

She goes with her brilliant eyes, that promise he gave her and those cold, cold hands.

Back at camp, Hosea starts to sing.

Chapter Text

John almost falls into the small stream he’s camped next to when Davey Callander sneezes into the crook of his arm.

He almost expects the man to have followed him up here, in search of him or lost lawmen, but Davey hadn’t been breathing right when John had left them, and his breathing is anything but labored right now.

He curses under his breath, brushes snow from his britches and watches as the water from the stream freezes on the shafts of his boots, but he soon enough looks up and sees that same old smile on Davey’s face, a smile he’d have whether he was alive or not.

John looks away because that pain in Davey’s eyes is something he recognizes all too well; he was either not expecting to die just yet, or he’d been prepared for it and almost wished for his brother to have been the same.

In some cases, it could be both.

“He ain’t here, Davey,” John speaks first, a small hint of grief in his voice, and he pokes a stick in the fire to keep it alive. Davey crouches beside him and looks tempted to stick his hand inside the fire, just to see what burning feels like. John, used to the antics of both Callanders and ghosts, whips his stick across Davey’s hand, watches as it passes through, and then how Davey still retracts his hand because even ghosts can feel something.

The wind refuses to die – much like Callanders – and John forces some salted venison down his throat, grimacing at the frozen taste and the way it makes his teeth ache to bite into it.

All this while the dead man stands somewhat like a guard with his hands shoved into his pockets, collar popped against what he can’t feel, but eyes scanning a horizon neither of them can see.

Davey hears it first, seeing as he's not the one sitting huddled by a fire in the last of Abigail's pelts and trying not to shatter his jaw with his teeth. John thinks that he must've gone deaf in the cold because he can't hear a damn thing until he becomes that much colder, and Davey forces his frozen limbs to spasm, and he rolls out of his bedroll.

“What the f-,” He tries to say, fails, and looks for the man, but Davey just stands further away with his eyes wide and jaw slack.

“Get up, John.” He says, and John tries to look through the wind and the snow, but all he sees are shadows that bear no names, and he goes to ask what it is Davey sees, when he finally, finally, hears it.

It’s quiet at first, distant in a way that only the wind and the isolation can create, and so John doesn’t think too much of it until he sees the shadows morph into solid shapes and his insides, somehow, freeze even further.

It's giant.

And, it's angry.

And, John is frozen.

Davey stands still, knowing already that him touching John won't help the still-breathing man to keep breathing without sending him into a state of shock, but a part of John knows that the wolf can't see him.

But, it can see John just fine.

“Shit.” He mumbles to himself when his horse catches sight of the thing, tossing itself against its hitched position by the trees, and successfully breaking loose just as something howls in the distance.

But on a mountain, there’re very few things that are distant; another wolf is nipping at the horse’s heels before the sound has fully settled in, and John is busy drawing his gun when yet another wolf closes its jaws around the horse's throat, the mare squealing and kicking. She hits the wolf in the ribs with a foreleg, sends it sprawling, but John knows there's no saving her when the only thing he sees in the snow is blood.

“We gotta go, Johnny,” Davey says and stares, just as wide-eyed as John, on the form of John's dying horse, and he almost reaches out, and then John is aiming; positions his revolver in his frostbitten hand and squeezes the trigger at the kicked creature.

It cries out, dies, and then there's a wall of black crossing his field of vision, and now he's on his back, so deep down in the snow that he can barely see anything but the glint of wet teeth.

The snow presses inside his clothes; soaks clean through what little he owns, and it presses into his ears and makes him deafer than before, the world a vacuum aside from the form pressing him deep down where no one will ever find him.

He doesn’t think about how cold it is or how wet he is or how sick he’ll be; he only thinks of those wet teeth snapping at his throat and the hands he uses to keep the jaws at bay, and the way the wolf is clamoring for him with stretched claws and soon enough he wishes that he couldn't feel anything.

The thing is feral; born wild and so it shall remain, and he cries out beneath it when it sinks the first of its claws into his cheek, cuts him open down to his throat and then a little further and now his mouth is filled with blood.

He cries out again, the added weight of one wold on another – ready to take its share –but the black wolf is not a kind one, and so it snaps at its packmate and leaves John to die.

It’s back before he can, however, closing in again and latching its teeth into John's leg, pulling him up and down, wanting something to rip loose.

When nothing gives, and John is simply dragged along, it starts to tear, and it is a Goddamn miracle that John doesn't pass out then and there.

John screams, then; howls at the wind as if he was one of them, and he finds his gun pressed beneath his hip and the snow, pull it up and squeezes the trigger again. Now, it's the black wolf's turn to howl, and it does, in the moments before it dies.

He breathes for a moment, blood pooling in his throat and coating his tongue, and he knows he needs to get up, but he can’t.

And then Davey's there, hair frozen in the wind and the snow, and he looks about to speak and reach, but John lifts his gun arm and rolls around, just now feeling exactly how cold the wind is after the blood has frozen and made his head spin.

The wolf is gone by the time John gathers enough breath to pull himself out of whatever hole it’d pushed him into. He would’ve laughed, hadn’t the action required so much movement.

The wolf is gone, but for how long, no one knows.

He doesn’t want to stay, so he doesn't, and he runs and runs until he swears he can hear them again and then he runs some more, up the cliff sides and down the slopes, desperate, bleeding fingers creating tracks in the snow, too easy to follow. He passes his dead horse at one point, the poor thing running for the sake of it, but it’s long dead and so John just bolts past.

He takes a tumble, falls face first, and now he cries.

Fear of death has always haunted him, figuratively and literally in the sense of those he knew, but he has never been as afraid as he is now.

He’d been afraid of dying when Dutch had shot the rope, and he’d been afraid of dying when he’d gotten himself shot down in Blackwater, but neither of those times were anything like now. Those times had been certain.

This was not certain. Anything can kill you if you try hard enough.

This was a Goddamn nightmare.

~

Davey’d always been too good at listening, and John had always thought far too loudly, so perhaps John shouldn’t be too surprised when the man crouches to his level in the snow and looks at John with eyes that had once made them laugh, and that now only made John a little bit more afraid than a living Davey Callander trapped in gunsmoke.

“Ain’t nothin’ to worry about, brother.” He says, voice barely audible over the wind, and John raises his head from the snow to look at him, leaving blood-soaked snow and frozen tears behind, and wishes he could scowl, but the wounds hurt too much for that.

“Nothin’ to worry about? You’re fucking dead.” He tries to say, but his voice is shaking, and he can’t speak much past the blood in his mouth. Davey closes his own, looks askance, then back and shrugs.

The fucking bastard shrugs.

“Why’re you here, Davey?” He asks and pushes himself up, feels the bite of the wind and the salt of his tears in his face as he does, and he crawls the last bit up the slope as best he can; desperation to get away stronger than the need to die, don’t matter where in the world he is.

“‘Cause apparently I’m ‘fucking dead,’ idiot.” He sneers, and John chokes on a laugh caught in his throat, and then there’s very little he can say because there isn’t a Goddamn wall before him; it’s a drop, perhaps not far, but the snow and the wind has made the sky white and unforgiving and made it look like there was some alright shelter from the wolves. It is an alright shelter, but it’s a Goddamn nuisance and Goddamn useless.

He falls with half a shriek and wails for half a moment when he tumbles and locks his leg beneath himself, and he hears how Davey has the audacity to laugh.

(they always was odd, them Callander boys,)

He stares back up at him, sees how he seems to breeze in the wind and John wants to speak, but there’s another howl, and John’s heart is ready to burst in his chest when he hears it, so he closes his eyes, breathes, and when he opens them again, Davey Callander is gone.

He tries to get back up, that he does, but his leg won’t let him, and he can’t reach the ledge enough to grasp at anything but loose snow, and by now he’s shaking hard enough to not feel a Goddamn thing, so he stays, listens, and tries to breathe.

He thinks he’s asleep when he hears his name, but whether it’s in dreams or not, he ain’t too sure until he pries open his eyes and stares right into a glistening pair of dead ones.

“What in the Hell, Davey!” He yelps and jolts his bad leg and hisses through the pain that follows. There’s a chuckle, full of mirth, and John blinks up at the see-through thing.

He’d recognize that laugh anywhere, has heard it too many times, and he chokes on himself, “Mac?”

It’s barely a whisper, his voice raw and hardly there, and the man crouches again, further away, and looks at him with a cocked head.

“You don’t look too good there, Johnny.” He says, and John thinks that’s the understatement of the new world because he probably looks as well as he feels; neckerchief soaked through, collar popped uselessly against the wind and with ripped parts of his shirt trying to keep himself from dying on a Goddamn cliff face.

John doesn’t ask how the man died, doesn’t really have to, because he’s seen that look in dead people’s eyes before. He’d seen the victims of bullets, both before and after, and Mac and Davey are so similar, so the both of them dying to bullets and fruitless escapes seems only fitting at most.

He leans his head back, finds the rough cliff, and closes his eyes again, squeezes them shut, and hopes that he’ll die soon enough.

He listens to the Callanders bicker about something – a girl in Blackwater and another someplace further south – and John can just imagine them sitting side by side, feet dangling, unafraid, from the ledge and it’s enough to bring a small smile to his aching face.

John doesn’t say anything, because soon enough there’s another voice coming through the wind, however much time after the wolves caught flight and he took a tumble, and he feels as if though he could cry again.

Because never in his whole Goddamn life had he been happier to hear Arthur Morgan’s voice than he is right now.

He yells back at them, hollers as loud as he dares without jostling the wounds to his cheek and throat, and he gets their attention alright because soon enough, he’s on Arthur’s shoulder and almost to an exit when those fucking wolves come back again.

It’s Mac’s turn to chuckle, so much like his brother.

“They your friends, John?” Mac asks when Arthur does much the same, and John has to bite his tongue to keep from screaming at those Goddamn things to leave him alone or kill him already.

He ain’t too sure which, just yet, but he’d almost gladly have them kill him because leaning on Javier is not going to work. The man does his best to keep him going, but there must still be snow in John’s ears because he can’t hear a Goddamn thing he says.

And then they’re all dead, and John tries his best not to fall off, but it’s hard when things are turning sideways, and he can still hear the laughter of two dead boys that caught the same bullets that he had and passed while he lived. And now he somehow survived this, too.

He does cry again, later, in pain rather than fear, when Swanson and Miss Grimshaw clean him up and makes sure he doesn’t join the Callanders, and he doesn’t think he tells them of Mac, doesn’t think they know, and instead mutters about black wolves and cries again when Abigail comes to him when Jack’s gone to sleep. He cries into the folds of her coat, holds her close, and hopes that no one comes barging in and demands his attention because he doesn’t function right now.

Hosea comes more often than Dutch and Arthur, and that’s alright he thinks because he can’t stand Dutch’s planning and scheming about going back to Blackwater and figuring out what happened to Mac because John knows and doesn’t say.

(it’s safe to say he hates himself later when Arthur comes to their new place and announces it to the whole damn camp, his voice as loud as the wind had been,)

Now, it’s alright because Hosea reads to him as if though he was still a sick child, and helps in the more dire and private moments, and the older man has seen John cry before and so he just wipes his tears with the warm cloth across his forehead when the need arises.

(sometimes, John wonders why he seems to rely more on Dutch than Hosea when moments such as these have nothing to do with plans and guns and trains,)

The whole time, from his terrible limp from horse to bed and into that black sleep, he can see the Callanders straying their odd little family, eyeing them and most likely doing whatever they used to do, just in a different way. He thinks he sees them laughing at Bill’s terrible joke when he stands guard and the door swings open and shut, and he can just barely hear them, and he thinks he sees them favoring an empty bottle at a distance since the idea of touch has gone somewhere else in the moments where death turns real.

It had always been those boys, even after they’d joined them, and so John’s not very surprised when he wakes up, and they’re moving, and neither of them are anywhere close.

He thinks he whispers a question (“where’d they go?”) when he’s loaded into the back of Dutch’s wagon, but he doesn’t think he gets an answer and then he sleeps until he wakes up when the wagon is tugged about in the stream, and someone yells at whoever’s driving to take it easy.

John tries not to look in the weeks after when Arthur announces Mac’s death and instead stares at his own hands. His right hand is a little scarred after the wolf, and he thinks he sees a shake, but it’s nothing compared to the sights on his leg and face, his leg bouncing up and down by its own command, both agitation and damage he suppose and his face permanently trapped in half of a sneer.

He does look up when Arthur joins him, and a part of John knows that Arthur knows he knew, but neither speaks for a moment.

“I know.” He says, though, when Arthur’s gotten what he wanted with his long, empty gaze, and the other man just shakes his head and leaves, and John knows he could’ve spoken up about it, but the dead speaks more for themselves than for him.

Fear, in those few nights he does sleep, has now taken the shape of black wolves with dead Callander eyes.

Chapter Text

“You’re such a kid, John Marston.”

He winces as Abigail tilts his head back, a small, stubbed knife in her hand as she tries her best to remove the last of the stitches from his face. John would’ve laughed at her, hadn’t it been for the fact that the knife is awfully close to his eye.

“And you're as charming as ever, Abigail.” He shoots back and earns a stubborn smile, pressed down only be her concentrating on the last threads.

“Ain’t much left now, so hold still.” She replies, nods her head at him to turn a bit more to the side, and she damn near cuts him when he jumps.

Annoyed now, she places a hand against his temple and forces him to stare into the wood of the wagon he’s leaned against, but he still strains his eyes to see the figure again.

He stands not too far away, but far away enough that John at first doesn’t see anything different about him other than that his hands are empty.

Sean rarely had empty hands, always playing with a blade or a bottle, jokes shooting out of his mouth faster than he could shoot a gun, but now he’s empty.

Eyes and hands alike.

John doesn’t speak, just stares, and that’s always been enough to get the other man’s attention. 

“How’d we do, Johnny-boy?” He asks and steps forward, and now John lets his eyes widen because now there’s no one there who can see him properly.

Most people he sees appear unhurt or have injuries that no one can see. Some choose. Some, like Sean, simply don’t seem to know.

Yet.

He wears the same hat he always wears and rarely removes; his skin is as pale as ever, and his eyes… well. The eye that’s still there is as blue as always.

The other is most likely forgotten in that Goddamn town.

“Whatcha lookin’ at?” He asks, drawls, and John winces again when Abigail releases her hold on his head and looks down at her work triumphantly.

“Still ugly, I expect?” He questions her, ignores Sean for a moment, and she only huffs and punches his arm and leaves. John sneaks a glance over to Jack, but the kid only looks at him, smiles, and then tries to pronounce Hosea’s words back at him again.

“What happened?” He stares at his hands now, braces them against his knees and gets up. He nods once, and Sean follows him with a puzzled look. Before they reach the outskirts of their camp, however, Sean tries to reach out and grab Karen’s hand and passes right on through her.

John knows she’s now chilled to the bone, and she shakes like a leaf when she scurries off to join the women by their lean-to. Sean turns to call, but John takes a breath and grabs for his arm and forces the dead man to follow him.

“What happened?” He asks again and watches the remaining half of Sean’s face travel a journey of a thousand emotions all at once. Eventually, he stops at one, cracks a smile and cocks his head; “I’m expecting I was mighty drunk, my friend.”

John’s frowning and the odd look seem to give the kid other thoughts, and he soon enough lowers his arms from where he’d been gesturing.

John knows before he hears Bill’s voice, but forces himself to stay. Leaving the dead to be dead ain’t always the best of options, something he discovered when he left a woman in the streets of Blackwater, and she tried to make him put a bullet in himself.

The Pinkertons’ shot him before he could, but his own bullet rendered him deaf for most of the flight out of town.

“What happened in Rhodes, Sean?” He asks, emphasizes the name, and Sean’s face finally settles into one of dread. 

“You know my memory, John.” He chuckles, but they both know that Sean has a hard time forgetting even during the times he’s been piss-drunk well into the hours of noon. For some reason, he has a better memory then, than he does at any other point during his stay in the gang.

“It ain’t that bad.” He says, and he watches as Sean puts a hand to his head, as if maybe then he can remember. 

“Well, I can’t remember anything right now, brother. Ask me again later, and maybe then I’ll have an answer for ya.”

John takes a breath, and turns his eyes to camp where someone is crying.

“You’re dead.” He says and looks back because now the crying has reached Sean’s ears too. “‘s that Karen?” He asks instead and moves away, and the only thing John can do is follow.

~

The scene is worse than he’d imagined.

Micah leans against the hitching post – his weight enough to make it sway dangerously as he tucks his thumbs into his gun belt – he stares but doesn’t seem to see, but there’s no hint of remorse on his face.

Bill tries, and mostly fails, to explain to Dutch what’s happened, all the while the older man is trying not to strangle Bill.

Dutch is rarely angry, really angry, so seeing such a look on his face almost makes John afraid. Tilly has wrapped her arms around a grieving Karen, whose voice is now muffled in the other girl’s shawl, and Mary-Beth looks about ready to pass out.

Abigail has Jack in her arms, his face in her neck, and Hosea’s pulling Sean gently off the horse with the O’Driscoll’s help.

Sean is quiet, both the form beside John and the body by Hosea, and when John throws a glance his way, the boy is swaying dangerously. John would’ve said that he was sorry if he’d still had a voice, but the voice is gone, and John can only listen to Karen.

“Cad an ifreann.” John doesn’t understand enough Irish to know what he meant, but he knows enough to know it’s not a question.

The back of Bill’s horse is slicked with blood, blood that’s now coating both Hosea and Kieran. “Where should we bury him, Dutch?” Hosea asks, voice laced with something dangerous, and Dutch seems to contemplate for a moment, but soon enough, Bill’s taken up the mission to bury him further away. They don’t put him back on the horse, and instead, Bill grabs most of Sean’s weight while Kieran does his best to guide them through the trees and not trip.

“So’s that what I look like,” Sean says, and John wishes desperately for a way to be able to strangle a ghost.

~

John doesn’t go with them, purposely trying to wheedle information about what happened from a pissed Micah and a forgetful ghost. When they come back, Hosea is so Goddamn loud that John wonders if any one of them will be able to get any sleep tonight.

(he doubts few people will sleep anyway,)

If there’s been few times he’s seen Dutch truly angry, it’s been ever fewer times where he’s seen Hosea really pissed off. He’s quieted a bit by the time Jack grows sleepy, but John knows that both Bill and Micah will be doing the shit jobs for at least a few days because an angry Hosea’s not someone to talk back to.

John even doubts that Micah dares to talk back to the man, no matter how many times he stalks the edges and tries to get a jab in at the wrong angle.

Sean stays behind, and John rides out as much as he can, just to get away from the smothering he gets from being the only one able to see him. He rides out and about in pretty much the same directions as Arthur, but he doesn’t encounter the man even once, his exploits seemingly pulling him further away from them.

Figuratively rather than spiritually, if he could be one to speak about such things.

They greet in passing, one leaving and one going, plays some poker here and there with stolen chips and pass cigarettes between them when it comes to their turns at the watch. It feels a little more real, a little more like before, the only difference being John’s scars, a giant gap between them, and the hauntings of an annoying Irish ghost.

~

John’s alone at the watch when Sean tries to kick a rock into the trees passes through it harmlessly, and plops down on the ground, looking so much more like a kid than either of them ever were.

“How come you can see me jus’ fine and no one else, ‘ey?” He asks and stares at the rock as if it has offended him. John shrugs and takes a drag from the cigarette. “Ain’t sure. I wish I didn’t.”

“Ye’re real fuckin’ funny, y’know that, John Marston?” Sean says and looks up at him, where John leans against a tree.

“The court jester.” He mutters as he stares into the distance, the sound of hoofs growing louder. “Who goes there?” He calls, and Sean doesn’t make a move, remaining still and quiet in the middle of the path.

“It’s me.” Comes the voice, and both John and Sean open their mouths to greet them, but soon enough, Arthur comes barreling through the trees on his horse, straight through Sean’s apparition. The horse makes an almighty sound in discomfort, tosses its head, and turns on a dime, Arthur’s eyes glaring right through Sean’s shocked face.

“Well, look who’s back.” John mocks lightly as Sean starts to sputter incoherent sentences, and Arthur keeps scanning the ground for a snake or an ill-begotten rodent that’s taken up attacking cantering horses.

“I figure we ain’t got much time before them agents show back up,” John says and tries to sway Arthur’s attention away from the waving hands he can’t see and the confused Irish that he can’t hear and animals that currently do not exist.

“Sure. Dutch says anythin’ ‘bout leavin’, yet?” Arthur says, leaning against the horn of the saddle.

John shakes his head and grips his weapon tighter just to keep from whacking Sean in the head. He wouldn’t feel it, but he would stop shouting.

John had learned a long time ago, back before Abigail and Jack and that whole mess he stirred up by leaving, that sometimes animals picked up on ghosts easier than humans. Which was probably why he wasn’t the most well-liked of people around Copper and why Arthur’s horse was currently trying to dance away.

And, he figured, animals picked up on these kinds of things easier because humans were just plain dumb.

“Ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” He says, earns a nod, and finally gets to whack the butt of the gun against Sean’s back, the man’s mouth snapping shut.

“He can’t hear ya, so stop your whining.”

“He passed clean through me! Do you know what that feels like?”

“I have an inkling.”

~

Sean is busy shouting directions when John and Arthur take Shady Belle, his fingers clearly itching to pick up a gun and help, and when they’re finished, he’s busy shouting praise and things they could’ve done differently.

“How come you haven’t left yet?” John asks, slowing Old Boy to a walk as he hears Micah’s drawl from further up the road.

Sean looks up at him and stops, crosses his arms, and taps his foot. “Don’t know the answer to that one, Johnny-boy. Maybe there’s somethin’ I’m meant to do. Whaddaya say ‘bout that, huh? Sean MacGuire; heroic outlaw.”

“Dead heroic outlaw, in that case,” John says and waves an arm, earning Dutch’s wave as confirmation. “Why you gotta be like that? Let me have one thing.”

“How ‘bout ‘dead outlaw,’ then?”

Sean just huffs on the way back to Shady Belle.

~

John’s chuckle is almost a little hysterical when they get Jack back, and Sean is all but crying over the fact that he can’t have any liquor

He’d been whining in Saint Denis.

He’d been whining on the cemetery, and then grown scarily quiet when he’d encountered other long-dead people walking around, seen their wounds, and then whined some more.

John supposes Sean deserves to be at least a little bit hysterical, given that he hadn’t been when he’d first discovered he was dead, but hearing him whining about liquor on Jack’s first night back brought some unexplained, tipsy, laughs from a not-too-drunk, John Marston.

But, the drinking and the laughing, and the smiling die down in the days after, and Sean and Arthur are the ones who comment over John's skittish behavior. Something ain’t right; something keeps flickering, but he’s never been good with whatever this bullshit of a thing is, so he doesn’t know until he does, and so all he tells Arthur is that he’s just waiting for Bronte’s other shoe to drop.

It’s partially true, but it’s not the whole of it.

~

Mary Beth is the first to ask. Sean is the second.

Kieran is the third.

And then it doesn’t matter who asks what anymore.

Kieran is still shouting in confusion and fear when John grips Jack under the arms and shoves him into his mother’s hold, brandishes his own gun and prays to God, or whoever that the next on his list of visitors ain’t either Jack or Abigail.

But he doubts God listens to murdering fools, and so he levels his gun at the O’Driscolls’, pulls the trigger and watches them drop; one after one, until he forces his legs to move, his family to get safe, and shouts for Arthur to make his retreat back into the house.

He listens, albeit a bit reluctantly, and John curses stubborn idiots.

Before Arthur shuts the doors, he can just faintly hear Sean shouting slurs at the cowering O’Driscolls’ and Kieran pleading for something that can’t be changed.

“Goddammit.” He curses again, breaks the windows, and fires once, twice, and a hundred more.

John watches as Arthur passes clean through Kieran, who drops like a sack of potatoes and covers his head with his hands. Arthur doesn’t seem to notice the shower of ice water he just got and instead fires from behind their little blockades, holding off those too stupid to turn tail.

And when they do, John finds himself looking at Kieran’s corpse rather than Kieran himself, whose head isn’t literally in his hands and who is breathing unnecessary, uneven breaths. John dares a glance at him and watches as Sean positions himself in front, effectively shielding Kieran from seeing what everyone already knows.

No one gets drunk that night, except Karen and Bill, when Hosea and Swanson come back, hand-waving indicating where they put him down and that no more O’Driscoll boys milling about.

John leans in the back porch, away from their chatter, and watches Abigail gently rocking Jack in her arms, while Sean stands even further off and tries to tell Kieran things Sean himself doesn’t even know about being dead.

There’s a gesture toward him, and then Kieran’s dark eyes are on him, mouth open in a little ‘o,’ and John simply raises his hand to his hat in a salute and waves it outward; discreet to those alive, but clear as day to those gone.

Kieran seems to sulk a whole lot more than Sean does and is, somehow, increasingly more annoying, despite his attempts at not being annoying.

Kieran all but shits his pants twice when the ghost that Swanson keeps seeing appears and disappears on the other side of the swamp, making Sean laugh until he trips and falls into the murky waters.

(he climbs out with ease, clean as he ever was, but he still complains about almost being eaten by a gator,)

“If I promise to look after your horse, will you promise to stop with the sulking?” John asks him when it’s his turn to guard the gate, Kieran staring wistfully into the distance, and Sean once again trying to kick rocks at Lenny further down the avenue. Kieran looks up at that, everything dead about him hidden apart from the occasional blood spill from his neck and eyes

“You should get that under control,” John says and waves his fingers, motioning at his face. Kieran coats his fingers in blood, wipes it on his pants, and looks back up; “I ain’t even sure where he is.” He whispers, and John nods instead of answers, because the horse that he rode in on wasn’t Branwen, and God knows where the rest of the O’Driscolls’ could be now.

“And I ain’t sulkin’.”

“Sure, you ain’t.”

~

Sean’s there when Dutch drowns Bronte and is there when they plan the robbery, and he’s there when Dutch looks at him, turns away, and flees up to the roof.

John doesn’t think he’s ever seen Sean as mad as he is then; Hosea’s gone, not here, Dutch is gone and not here, and John is being shoved to the ground, arms behind his back in a grip that could close enough to call breaking, and he’s there when John’s pushed into an office.

Kieran’s there too.

For the last part, at least.

John spits and curses, twists, and yells, but nothing he says is of any use. He sees them both reach, shakes his head once, violent enough to cause cramps in his neck, and he thinks he sees something else at the edges of his vision.

(he begs it not to come now,

not here,

not today,

he begs it to let him stay in blissful, painful oblivion when they drive him to prison after prison and threaten to shoot his foot off or cut out his tongue if he doesn’t speak, and he begs it to stay far away

it does, for a while

but then it’s Sisika,

and Sisika’s no fun at all,)

Chapter Text

He’s chained to the wall of a would-be prison cell, bars on two sides, and the rest plain, cracked stone.

Some sunlight filters through and brings with it the smell of shit and sticky warmth, his mangled dress shirt sticking to his body by sweat and blood. He breathes slowly, in through his nose and out through his mouth, and does his best to keep from letting the keening sounds he wants to make, turn into a jumbled mess in his mouth.

The agents were brutal but effective. Or, as effective as one could call them, considering that John hadn’t said a damn word to them since they’d caught him in Saint Denis.

His head leans heavily against the wall behind him, the chains rattle beneath his forever-starved frame, and he thinks of everything and nothing.

Everything being Abigail and Jack and Arthur and Hosea and Dutch and everyone else in their little ragtag family. Everything being everyone being safe and sound and as happy as could be.

Nothing being that both Kieran and Sean stopped talking to him a few days ago.

That or John has gone deaf from his own screaming. He can still see them, still feel the chill down his back whenever they wander too close, but he’s too tired to give a damn about Irish-bred ghosts at the moment.

He’s still leaned like that, thinking, when the outer door swings open, slams against a wall and forces him to open his eyes to meet the ugly face of Agent Milton.

“You ain’t done yet?” He rasps past the lump in his throat and tosses his head as much as he dares, hair leaving his eyes as he does.

“Oh, I don’t think we’ll ever be done, Mister Marston.” Agent Milton states and waves for the other feller to open the door.

Before he knows it, rough hands grip his arms and neck, forces a shinier and much more bloodless pair of chains around his wrists, and then there’s just one more ride before he knows for sure that he’s going to die.

~

He’d been given a promise at twelve by a man that spoke like the world was his, and their lives were infinite.

He’d been given a promise that, yes, maybe he could die from a bullet or a blade or a fall, but never; never, would he be hanged. Never again would there be a noose wrapped around his neck, and never again would he have to have his heart squeezed bloodless in his throat.

And, now, here he is, staring up at the next man waiting to be hanged with John’s own fear trapped in his dark eyes. John stands there, mouth dry and breath trying so desperately to be still, to be calm.

He knows he fails, but he knows that others do too, because in here they’re all alike.

For the most part.

Some have murdered their wives and their daughters, someone’s taken a liking to another man’s wife and killed him for it, someone got it in themselves that animals were fine brides and on and on the list went until you landed on the people such as John Marston.

Robbers. Murderers.

But only he had the thing that made him the worst of the lot; he was a Van der Linde boy. And the Van der Lindes had killed an awful lot of people, prisoners mused in the exercise yard and out in the fields.

(the guards thought it too, but they simply took out their pleasure in kicks and whips and the occasional freshly used gun muzzle against the bare, raw skin on his ankles, neck, and wrists,)

And here he stands; twenty-six, nameless in all but what his father and Miss Mac came up with on the spot and scarred in all the ways his new fathers named him and stares once again at a noose that crawls ever closer.

But there’s one thing he’s never been surer of, and that is that it doesn’t matter how many times John counts the scars on his face and hands or traces the ways the claws tore his leg a bit too much to the right; he wouldn’t have chosen any other life, had he been given the choice again.

He does regret it a bit, though, when he hears Sean’s hollering, Kieran’s gurgling shame where he still tries to breathe through a severed windpipe and sees Hosea step through the fields and call him a fool.

John, fueled by an anger he hasn’t felt since the Pinkertons’ dragged him away and threatened Abigail’s life, whacks the pickaxe a little too hard against the ground and shoots rocks in the direction of his neighbor. The neighbor’s only reply is to drive his own pickaxe a little too close to John’s foot.

It had already been crowded in the little room that was supposed to be called a cell when there had been three living and two dead, even though only one of them could see them, but now it was downright suffocating.

John, having drawn the short straw both in build and the act of drawing actual straws, had been given the bed closest to the door and furthest away from the light. He was also the closest to Joe Beatty’s feet, but he chose not the think too much about it until Sean comes along and points it out once every hour when they aren’t outside.

It was awful then; it’s worse now.

He has, in a way, grown used to the chatter of Sean and Kieran’s fear, even if the boy started to loosen his tongue a little more to try and encourage John in some useless way or another.

Now, however, he isn’t quite sure what to do.

Before, he could’ve run off somewhere to be alone with his thoughts and try to filter whatever came out of dead people’s mouths, but in prison, alone is the one thing that you never is.

John was as lucky as he could be when Beatty was the one out in the fields, and Lorimer was half deaf anyway, and furthest away from John’s bulk of a bunk, so talking and trying to sort out his own mind wasn’t too difficult at the very least twice a week until Hosea, and – to John’s grief – Lenny decided to start a book club from memory to the only two illiterate people in the gang.

John’s heard the stories before, numerous times, and he knows just the way Hosea moves his hands when he speaks and the way he changes the pitch when he jumps between the characters, but that doesn’t stop John from smiling and hiding his laugh in the crook of his arm.

He chimes in when he can, remembering the way Jack read some of the paragraphs with the imagination only a child could have.

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.” Hosea quotes at one point, and John buries his face in his threadbare lump of a pillow to keep the grimace out of sight.

~

“Keep up, Marston!” The guard calls, twisting dangerously so that the muzzle of the gun is pointed to John’s already tender side.

“Alright, alright. Ain’t exactly easy with these chains on.” He mutters and regrets it instantly and grips the pickaxe in his hands hard enough to whiten the skin, and he waits a bit for the blow to come. Except it never does.

Instead, he watches as the guard goes white as a sheet, fumbles the gun, and has the damn thing under his own chin before another guard rips it away from him and asks him about what the Hell he’s doing.

John and the others just stare, and John catches a glimpse of bright, red hair just beyond the rookery of a barn further away.

For a bit, John thinks that Sean has finally gone off the end, but the man in question catches his eye.

There are no red eyes staring back at him, only the evidence of death.

John has had few times where he’s genuinely liked Miss Molly O’Shea, but, evidently, he’s liked her well enough for her to allow him one tiny bit of saving grace.

The second saving grace is, as unfathomable as it sounds, Arthur Morgan in a hot air balloon.

~

He won’t ever admit it, but he was damn near crying when he heard Arthur’s voice come from outside the walls. Not just because he was nearing his final day, but because it was Arthur.

He tries to act surprised when Arthur and Sadie tell him about Lenny and Molly and tries to grasp just why Molly would save him further pain if she was the one that sold them out and got him put there in the first place.

Then, Arthur talks about Dutch and his reluctance to getting John back, and the voices in his head grow eerily quiet.

He doesn’t quite believe them until he gets there, slides off of Bob, and Abigail takes him in her arms, tears of joy and frustration fighting equally.

And, then, Dutch comes, and John believes every word they said.

There’s a different pitch in Hosea’s voice then, solemn and grief-stricken, and John doesn’t think he’s heard such a horrible sound come from his father since Missus Bessie passed and he went mute for a month.

John thinks, in the split second where Dutch charges forward with fury and thunder in his eyes and Hosea sputters about morality and mortality, that the biggest mistake they’d ever done, was love him.

Dutch is loud and confused – one of the two which he has been so many times before – and Hosea reaches again but doing so would lead to nothing for either of them, so John moves a hand, the arm across Abigail where she’s more than ready to growl, and hold them both off while Arthur breaks through and Hosea’s gone, barely smoke on the breezed air where anger hangs like the noose meant for John.

He’s not gone long, of course – he couldn’t ever stray far; he always came back, but Lenny’s well and truly gone, it seems, and for the moment it’s not something John thinks too much about.

Because Micah’s now too close to any of them, and Abigail drags John away before he can launch himself at him and join Hosea in staring at what once was.

There’s poison in Hosea’s dead eyes, and John doesn’t blame him.

John strips himself of the striped rags, washes as best his sore limbs allow and pull on other rags tucked neatly in the still-packed bags, and when he’s done, Hosea looks to him again.

John wishes his heart would stop dropping to the core of the Earth every time he looked at him like that.

Abigail’s gone and would return moments later with some of Pearson’s stew, but for now, he’s alone with the last ghost of their botched farewell tour, and he bites his tongue to keep from speaking.

“Why am I still here, John?” Hosea asks, sounding so unimaginably tired, and John just looks at him, curls his lips into a sneer, and shakes his head.

“I don’t know. I don’t know why either of you is still here.” He says, avoids names, and looks up in time again to catch his eyes and see Abigail tuck the tent flap away and hold the bowl steaming in her hands, Jack tucked between her legs.

“Hey, Jack.” He says and does his best to crouch when Jack untangles himself from Abigail’s skirt and throws his arms around his too-small father.

John rocks him gently, holds him steady, and now he damn near cries when he tucks his face into his son’s hair and breathes him in, Abigail and Hosea looking at them with equal softness.

The tent flap opens in the breeze, and then Hosea’s gone.

John keeps rocking Jack in his arms before he also reaches for Abigail because John can’t bear to listen to the way Micah’s voice floats through the air – just as foul as Karen’s alcohol-laden breath – and how Dutch nods and hums, and John knows that Hosea’s standing too close, trying his best to get the living to listen to the dead.

It’s never worked, but John doesn’t blame him for trying.

He’s not quite sure how he knows, just that he does, and what he knows now is that Lenny’s gone somewhere else, perhaps to join his father and that Sean seems close enough to leave too.

Kieran, though, just looks at them all, inches away from the horses and miles away from the living, the same as it’d always been, and John’s never been more confused by someone who’d died in such a terrible way. They either leave real fast, or they stick around for too long. John was afraid over what the latter would do to him, should he choose to stay behind.

He looks at Charles once he enters, living eyes in a frozen face – frozen in the act of concealment – and sees Hosea flickering around Dutch’s tent, looking all but ready to choke the life out of Micah.

John would more than happily join him, but doing so would put him in the same position that Hosea now occupies, and John doesn’t wish to die just yet.

(although, he doubts anyone wishes to be dead in moments such as these,)

~

John has been shot before.

He’s fallen before.

He’s had ghosts screaming in his head before.

He’s had Arthur look at him like that before.

But never, never, has he felt what he feels when The Count’s tail swishes out of sight, and John digs himself out of the mud and the twigs, rocks stabbing him with their sharp edges.

Never has he heard words such as those leave two of the gentlest people he’s ever known’s mouths, and never has he had such an urge to scream.

Chapter Text

"Humans are curious by nature, Mister Matthews." The doctor had said, shoved a pipe between his lips, and lit it in a flurry of movements.

“Had to be sure, ‘s all.” He’d replied with a hand on the handle when the doctor had spoken up again, voice muffled by the pipe.

“This feller; he close to you?”

John had turned, caught Hosea’s eyes, and nodded; “he’s my brother.”

The secretary had shown him out, and John’d tried to keep the doctor’s eyes from finding his face, knowing damn well that he wouldn’t be able to keep it straight until he got back on Old Boy.

He’d known.

He’d known for a while, he supposed.

John’d always felt a little too cold when he happened upon those who were dead, but sometimes, on rare occasions, he would happen upon those who weren’t dead yet.

And now, later, with Kieran finally gone after that debacle with Missus Adler, Arthur, and a whole heap of O’Driscolls’ at a ranch out by Strawberry, John was frozen solid in instances where he wouldn’t normally be.

The cold he felt now was almost worse than the cold of the mountain and the occasional moment when dead things had different ideas than himself.

And, it was all because this time it was Arthur’s hand on his shoulder, Arthur’s hat on his head and Arthur’s eyes that were dulling every moment he spent close by.

“We ain’t both gonna make it.”

And, it hits John like a Goddamn train.

It don’t matter how many times people called him an idiot and a fool; John Marston was brighter than people gave him credit for, and he already knew the words that would come out of Arthur’s mouth before Arthur knew it himself.

He knew the outcome of this story.

He just didn’t want to believe in it.

Hosea peers over the edge of the mountain, sees something or other, and shouts back at them that they need to move.

But John can’t because Arthur can’t, and it’s not until Arthur waves him off that he starts to understand what it is Arthur’s actually doing.

It’s redemption in its truest form; he knows after having listened to all of those philosophy books Dutch used to read, and Hosea used to quote, and he knows it ain’t his to change.

John’s head is messed up, sure, but he’s not magic; he can’t magically make someone better.

(he can only make them a little less alone,)

“You’re my brother.” He says, and Arthur replies in the only way they both understand.

Short and nothing much to it. Except that there is. There’s too much said in two words that ought to mean nothing at all.

But, in the end, there doesn’t need to be much more to it than that.

He reaches Copperhead Landing in the early rays on daylight, clinging to the hope of a painless end for a constant part.

Forgetting the pain doesn’t make it go away.

And, yet, he grits his teeth and takes the offered whiskey. It’s still too dark outside to see more than shadows and smoke, but he’ll take what he can get.

Jack cries into the folds of his mother’s skirts, Tilly holds the whiskey and the lantern while Abigail grips his shoulders.

Sadie presses the knife into his skin, gouges the bullet out as cleanly as can be done in the growing light.

He grits his teeth. There’s little else for him to do.

He falls asleep sometime before the morning fully comes.

Hosea reads to him – and Jack, who plays by his father’s bedside well into the afternoon – from far-forgotten memories, and it feels, distantly, like a time so long ago.

Hosea’s gone, he knows, by the time he wakes up. He’s far too warm and far too uncomfortable in a ghostless space than he’s been since Miss Mac passed from one hand to another, and Missus Matthews took her place all those years later.

Hosea’s gone, and John Marston goes back to sleep.

~

Miss Grimshaw sits by his bedside by the time he wakes up the next, and he is, once again, damn near frozen solid.

He’d expected her to be like Arthur; to move on and don’t look back, but Miss Grimshaw’s always been the stubborn kind.

She holds her hands to herself, fidgeting with forgotten rings Dutch’d once upon a time given her, and waits for him.

There passes an understanding, unspoken and unthought.

(it remains as real as any dragon)

There’s no real thought to death, no real waiting. The waiting part is only for those left alive.

~

Micah Bell will, one day – no matter how much passes between – die.

But, not today.

There are Pinkertons in Murfree Hills and Murfrees full of glee and just waiting to take the Hollow back.

(the hills are made of chaos,  so it don’t matter much for the latter ones who pass on through)

Micah is a promise – spoken and shaken upon. But, there’s little else to do but wait, however long.

John’s got a lot of years, he hopes, so he’s content with waiting. For now.

Tilly goes first, promises to keep in touch if possible (it’s not, not yet at least, but false promises are better than broken ones). Sadie stays for a minute longer and doesn’t go until John’s read them all about the Yukon and the gold, and then she leaves for the South.

New Austin has all but forgotten her, and Blackwater doesn’t know her, but they still leave goodbyes for another time.

They’re halfway to Canada when Arthur meets them – meets John – in a wooded area just outside the border. They haven’t passed yet, but John almost wished they had.

Maybe then he would’ve left all his ghosts behind.

It’s early morning, foggy as all Hell, and so he almost mistakes the shape from between the trees for a stranger.

But, Arthur Morgan never was much of a stranger. Not even to those that barely knew him.

“Who-?” He starts and swallows the rest of the words once his eyes see clearly through the transparency of the figure. He bites them down, swallows bile down an unused throat that’s known drink a little too long for such a short period of time, and speaks again.

“What the Hell are you doing here?” It’s almost a whisper and sounds just as rough as one, and Arthur stops.

(dead in his tracks,)

“You ain’t supposed to be here.”

“Then, where the Hell am I supposed to be?” 

John doesn’t have an answer for that. It’s easier to stare and imagine a time when things were different. A time when they were boys on the open plains and their only enemy was John’s sudden growth spurt and not a time when one was dead and another was not.

Arthur starts forward, and John knows before either of them really do, what he is about to do.

“You ain’t here,” he says. His voice is thick, but he doesn’t bother clearing it.

Arthur frowns. He doesn’t look as sick anymore. Just as pale, not as small.

They stare again. The nerve above Arthur’s right eyebrow starts twitching, the way it always does when he’s about to get real mad, but he remains stock-still. Just staring.

“Whatchu mean ‘ain’t here’?”

“You ain’t as dumb as all that. You know what I mean,” John says. He moves, and Arthur follows. Perhaps subconsciously, unknowingly.

Arthur knows long before he has to say it.

The silence remains deafening, even as they reach the border, and he trudges behind, flickering like smoke in the wind. Sometimes ahead, sometimes behind.

But always there.

Always constant.

~

“What happened up there? With the Pinkertons’?” John asks one of the nights. They’re still aways off from promised riches, three more families added to the ragtag group they found just before the border.

Perhaps trusting people in a time like this weren’t their smartest move, but most people that recognized them were either dead or too far South to head North just yet. Weren’t too many posters with John’s face either, so North might just be the way to go.

“Micah.” He grumbles, flicking flying embers toward the dark sky. They float like tiny fireflies around his head.

Tiny stars in an enormous sky.

“Is Micah why you’re still here?” He mumbles. Johnson or something of the like looks up at him for a minute. John waves him off. The world around them is loud as it is.

“Sure. Or, that’s what I think,” Arthur sounds doubtful. “Dutch’s there. Left soon enough.” He pauses, and John looks to him.

“Broke my damn heart, if one can be as sentimental as that. Don’t remember much else,”

“It’ll come back. Or it don’t.”

“How come you can see me?” Arthur says and breaks the silence that exists solely between the two of them.

“Don’t know. Always been like this.” He shakes his head. There’s nothing much to say about it.

“So’s this why you’ve been all kinds of weird in the last few years?” Arthur waves a hand around John’s head. John almost chuckles.

“If you mean me almost shootin’ myself more times than most others; yeah. But that ain’t just because of me.”

“That ain’t what I meant, but yes.”

“We’ve lost a lotta people, Arthur. And, I’ve seen most of ‘em go. Some never showed up. I’d hoped you’d be one of them.” He sighs and looks back up at him.

The strange paleness is gone, and there are no bruises around the eyes. He’s not as lean anymore either, for that matter; he looks more and more like he did back at Blackwater than he ever did after Colter.

“And what happens if I stay?” Arthur asks. John leaves the warmth of the hearth and moves toward the deep heaps of snow they’ve shuffled around their little camp. Arthur follows.

The snow remains untouched around Arthur’s feet.

“Depends on you, I guess.”

~

They come across a town, and John spends what little earnings he has left from the old job in the town’s saloon, gets himself shitfaced, and spends the night in jail.

Arthur reads the bounties and peers over the sheriff’s shoulder and John knows Arthur would laugh at his luck, hadn’t it been for the gun he’d loaded up and started spinning.

Arthur, brave, old Arthur – Hell, sensible Arthur – had been too wary of the gun going off if he attempted anything short of a rescue, and had simply resorted to talking.

Now, Arthur was good with a gun, but talking weren’t his strong suit.

In hindsight, John knows he probably should’ve thanked him. He talked a lot of crap and a lot of sense, but very little makes a difference when you’ve got a gun in your hand and a bottle in the other.

He weren’t scared.

Not of dying.

Dying is the easy part. But what comes after? Oh, Boy, there ain’t no power in the world able to tell him what happens after.

~

“We ain't those kinda folk, no more, John,” Arthur says, years later when John is discussing the past with one dead bastard and two living ones sleeping the night away in their bedrolls.

He’s a little drunk, but when John looks at him – really looks at him – he sees just how dead Arthur’s eyes are.

(he’s been here too long, something whispers,)

“You ain't no kind of folk,” he says, and Arthur hums, inclines his head to the ground and nods, because he accepted this far earlier than John did, and he’s always been good at that.

Had always been good at that.

(the man accepted; he was just too stupid to understand sometimes,)

“Don’t stay too long,” he says. It’s been years since the mountains and the wolves and the shitshow that came after, but he keeps saying it.

“Most can’t do it. Out of those I’ve seen, anyhow,” he corrects and thinks of Miss MacIntosh and her velvet dress and her dead eyes, before she up and vanished before the noose could claim John’s life.

(‘took her long enough,’ he’d thought once she was well and truly gone when her dead eyes no longer stared holes in the back of his head when he weren’t looking, and he reminded her too much of her poor, dead sons.)

He thinks of Annabelle –

(‘oh darlin’ Annabelle ’ he hears Dutch say in that mournful way he’d used to say things until nothing much seemed to matter to him anymore,)

– and how she’d looked before Dutch took the next one to his bed and left the O’Driscolls buried in their own shit while Colm still breathed.

She didn’t stay long, but she stayed long enough for John to see the fire burning in those dark eyes, once alive and then dead, and the moments when she’d wished for something real to wrap her hands around.

She hadn’t left until John had damn near begged her to. Seeing Dutch bleed in a dirty street after a stray bullet had seemed sufficient enough, for some reason or other. She’d left, but if it was out of mercy or satisfaction, he never knew.

“What happens?” Arthur asks, silent and cold in all but voice, and John sighs and bites his cheek because sometimes it's better not to know. “You go mad. Sometimes.”

“Who didn’t?” He asks, and John knows that they both already know the answer.

“Sean. Kieran. Lenny left once you got me outta Sisika, don't know why, but no one's ever got much of a reason to stay most times.” He stops.

“Hosea?” Arthur asks, still quiet. John looks past Arthur, sees what he can't, and shakes his head. ‘

It's slow and sad, and Arthur draws an unnecessary breath of distress because it didn’t quite sound like Hosea.

“He saw Dutch. Went spittin’ mad the first time. He ain't used to not bein’ listened to, so seein’ Dutch like that must’ve made whatever this is get too much.” John waves a hand toward Arthur.

They’re silent for half a minute. Charles shuffles in his sleep. A fox cries in the distance.

“Ask,” John says, eventually, when the act of staring into the fire has become dull, and Arthur's silent contemplation becomes too much for John's tired ears.

“Did you know?” Not much of a question, but John stares him right in the eyes, and looks past the dark death looming there.

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“Went to a doctor.”

“You? Went to a doctor?”Arthur tries it as a joke, but he’s sullen enough that John knows that eight years have done him little good. He might turn out kinder than Miss Mac was right before she went, but he’s still a sullen one.

“Went askin’ once you'd gotten me out, and Abigail would let out of bed.” He says. Arthur stares as he kicks open his bedroll.

It’s an old conversation they should’ve had years ago, but John’s tired of constant company with late questions.

Quite a conversation stopper, he thinks before he falls asleep.

The bedroll suddenly becomes unbearably warm.

~

Arthur stops dead in his tracks when Charles takes a bullet, and Sadie hollers for them to take cover, and John makes the mistake of veering too late. He gasps for breath when he pushes through Arthur and almost trips over his feet, repeater gripped tight in his hands and the cold seeping into his bones.

“We gotta move.” He hollers back, aims the repeater, and fires once they get close enough for true aim.

Arthur stands like a frozen statue in the middle, eyes still glaring at where the man had been, and John grumbles as he moves past him because that has always been the way to get Arthur to move. Charles only urges them to move, and they push up the side as best they can in the high snow.

Sadie’s confusion over the droppings of dead men is the reason why she takes the knife to the chest earlier than she would’ve.

Still, it’s also the reason why the man dies earlier.

Arthur is a heavy breeze around them, a presence that could best be described as a shield, even if the shield can’t take the wounds for you.

John shouts for Micah, kills even more of his deranged men, and finds a cabin where only a rat could live.

But, just when Sadie struggles to keep Micah’s gun away, Arthur mumbles something about someone else being close by, and John can just hear how the wind dies when Dutch steps outside.

Arthur had, eventually, remembered what had happened on the mountain.

He remembered the way Dutch had looked at him – dying as he was – and he remembered listening to Micah’s talk that seemed to mean nothing. But, it must’ve meant something, now that Dutch points yet another gun at his youngest son and Hosea’s not there to yell at Dutch from beyond the grave that what he’s doing is madness.

John looks to Dutch in a sense of desperation, to try and see what he so hopelessly knows isn’t there anymore, once Micah’s finally taken one last step. They were family, once, but what he sees in Dutch’s eyes is so much brighter now than it was when he slid off Bob’s back and faced the fury he’d only heard about.

Dutch doesn’t speak, only stares, and he does seem to linger a bit in the space where Arthur stands, as quiet as the wind, and then he simply walks. He walks, and John ain’t too sure that he’ll see the man again.

(he does, but it has little to do with the money he uses to pay off the loan, buy the cattle and marry Abigail good and proper,

it has everything to do, however, with the final act of someone who never quite learned what an honest life was until he wants it too much to cover up the past,)

Chapter Text

She’s born in May.

She’s a small thing, smaller than Jack was and, in Arthur’s own words, a little bit bigger than Isaac had been. Her hair is just like Abigail’s, dark and thick, and with a penchant for standing on edge. Her eyes are blue, just like Abigail’s too, and John holds them both throughout the night and lets Uncle and Jack take care of most of the chores around the farm and the house just to stay behind and watch them.

He has his boy. And, now he has his girls.

She doesn’t have a name until she’s almost two weeks, and Uncle’s gotten tired of saying ‘baby’ over and over when referring to her.

Jack’s list of names has run out, and, so John looks through some books he comes across whenever he’s in Blackwater, asks a couple of ladies what they find as a fitting name for a girl with lungs that could scream for days.

Still, he doesn’t get much of a fitting answer.

Eventually, he finds himself flicking through Arthur’s journal, the man grumbling in the corner and staring out the window. John can only imagine what goes through his head, and most of his thoughts go to Isaac and his momma. Maybe he’d have named her Eliza – it’s a pretty enough name – but it didn’t seem so fitting since the man who’d loved an Eliza was stood close enough to hear every thought in his head.

“Y’know, you could just go.” He says and lowers the journal a little to look at him, and Arthur’s dim eyes find his, and he lifts the corners of his lips just a smidge; enough for a smile, not enough for a full reply.

John doesn’t expect one, and so doesn’t bother prying for one.

He goes to close the journal and go back out to Abigail with what little imagination he’s found when something peeks out from behind the pages. He picks it out with gentle fingers, afraid to crumble the thin paper, and finds a small drawing made on perhaps the thinnest piece of paper John’s ever seen.

“You drew this?” He asks in a mumble, and this time Arthur moves and goes over to him, peeks over his shoulder and musters a huff. He’d grown solemn since the whole thing with Micah and Dutch.

(the former had thankfully had enough brains not to show up and get into a forever-fight with Arthur, and John had learned not to expect too many words out of his mouth,)

It’s a drawing of a woman. She looks kind, with a rounded face and almond eyes, hair behind her head in a loose braid with soft curls wisping about her face. There’re no colors, but he can, in a way, see the blue of her eyes and the dark of her hair, and he knows who she is before Arthur finds the voice required to speak.

“‘s my momma.” He says, the smile on his face telling John all he needs to know. “It’s a good name if you're still lookin’.” He adds, the creases on his pale face disappearing when he’s once again lost in memories of times long since passed.

“What was she like?” John asks, curious because even if Arthur’s willing to part with his momma’s name, it doesn’t mean John has good thoughts about the woman who died before Arthur had joined Dutch and Hosea on the road.

“Kind. Didn’t matter what I'd done. She was always kind. Harsh when she needed to be, but she didn’t have a mean bone in her body, I reckon’. Least not ‘til my daddy had the stomach to turn up drunk.” John smiled at that, whispered her name, and nodded.

“If you’ll allow it.” He says, and Arthur nods. 

“That little girl better be nothin’, but good, Marston, or I’ll haunt ya ‘til the day you die.” John simply scoffs, puts the drawing carefully back in the book, and closes it, leaves it on the nightstand, and turns to find Abigail on the porch.

He finds her there, nursing, softly cooing at their little girl. Her black hair is hidden in a little hat, the brim folded up over her forehead to give her eyes access to the whole world, something John is more than willing to give her. Abigail looks up at him when he comes out, smiles brightly, and rocks them both back and forth.

“I’ve been thinkin’,” she starts and locks her eyes with his. “How about Susan?” She asks, and even though her smile is still bright, it’s a little tired. Tired of being up at every hour of the night, and perhaps tired of picking and choosing when the world is full of names.

Jack had been easy. It’d been simple; John Marston Jr.

John became Jack, and that was that. And, since John had left them for a year, it didn’t seem to have made much of a difference; there would always be a Marston at camp.

This one was, hopefully, much smarter than his father.

“It’s pretty.” He says and lowers himself in the chair next to her and traces their daughter’s brow gently with his fingertips. “But…?” She asks, head bent in question.

“Beatrice.” He says, and there’s a moment where the world goes quiet, and he’s ready to turn back and suggest that Susan would be perfect when Abigail laughs and nods down at their little girl.

“It’s perfect.” She whispers and tucks the girl against her chest, hugging her tightly and looks up at John, still nodding.

“Beatrice Susan Marston.” They say, fumbles a bit with it, and then there’s another moment where there’s only the three of them in the whole world.

And, then, Uncle shouts from the barn for Jack or John or God to come help him with the jugs of milk.

“Leave it, Uncle. Come on over here.” John calls and watches how Uncle almost topples the jugs in his escape to freedom while Jack pours out the rest of the chicken feed and jumps the fence.

Uncle looks almost dazed with joy about being let out of his required misery, while Jack almost seems a little sad to have had to leave the chickens, but John thinks little of it when he waves them up on the porch once Abigail’s covered herself up again.

“You got a name for her, Pa?” Jack asks, knowing almost immediately what that smile on his mother’s face means, and leans over the banister.  

“Beatrice,”

“Beatrice,” Jack repeats once he’s taken his sister from his mother’s arms, and the baby blinks up at him, reaches a chubby hand, and grabs at his nose with greedy fingers.

It’s Uncle that breaks the tender moment by clapping his hands once, and declare that the rest of the day should be spent resting in celebration of the “new arrival.”

“Once you’ve cleared the pails on the wagon and driven it into town, sure,” John says while  Uncle grumbles, and he can just faintly hear Arthur laugh in the back.

~

October’s always been a wretched month, and this one’s not any different.

A storm rips a branch far enough to wreck a hole in the roof of the barn that takes them over a week to fix and breaks a fence post that has them search the woods for three days for a missing bull.

The crops survive – what little they know how to plant – and Arthur is as helpful as always by simply yelling directions in which the bull might’ve gone or how John might do next year with the sowing of his crops. He only scoffs at John’s offer of a bullet in the foot if he doesn’t shut up.

The house survives with only a shattered window, and they don’t think much of anything past that which they already know how to fix.

And, then, comes the coughs.

It stops John dead in his tracks just as it does Arthur, and they both turn, at the same time, to look at the small body kneeling in the dirt with a stable built of twigs laid out on the ground and horses made out of pinecones.

The make-believe sounds of horses and hooves come in intervals with the wet coughs and the smearing of snot on the back of a small hand.

“You alright, sweetheart?” John asks and approaches, bending down to his daughter’s height. She’s two, so close to three, and she smiles just as crookedly as John does and laughs just like Abigail, but the voice is so unmistakably young Jack’s.

“I‘m fine, Pa.” She says and looks back down to her ‘horse.’

“You sure? Think momma should have a look at that cough.” He says and grips her under her armpits and lifts her into his arms. She’s hot to the touch and for once doesn’t squirm and complain, and simply leans her head into his neck, something she so very rarely does.

“Little tired.” She mumbles, the pinecone still in her hand. John takes it from her and sets it down just inside the door and calls for Abigail down the hall. She’s there in moments, already knowing that it’s time to put Beatrice to bed, but John’s face has her stop in her tracks and tilt her head to the side.

“She was coughin’ outside. Little too hot, too.” He says, and Abigail steps forward and presses a hand to her daughter’s forehead and sees how her little eyes are a bit glazed.

“How you feelin’?” She asks and bends to see her properly, and the little girl pouts a bit and sniffles. Admitting things to momma will always be most kids’ favorite past time while admitting to Pa was at the very bottom of things to do together with fishing and hunting.

“Well, then we’ll fix you up a bath, and then you’ll go right to bed, alright?” Abigail says and takes her from John's arms, their eyes meeting worriedly over her head as the girl takes up the same position in her mother’s arms as she had in her father’s.

John meets Arthur’s eyes over both of their heads, and he’s seen Arthur multiple times looking the way he did before he met them up North, but never, never, has John seen him look just like that.

~

She’s sick for a week. And then she gets better.

And in January – a few months before Edgar Ross makes his reappearance – John Marston carves a marker out of the finest wood he could find, and fights the flow of tears that never seems to stop.

There’s no valve to turn to make it all stop; it comes as it pleases, and there isn’t anything he can do to stop it.

His knife slips once or twice, cracks the wood he’s sawed out, and he curses his own craftsmanship more than necessary when he suddenly feels the soft breeze of something cold against his cheek.

He stabs the knife into the ground, wedges it into the space between the cracked wood and the dry earth, the barn forgotten for now and begs.

“Please. Please, Beatrice.” He pleads, and the wind dies down for a bit before something jostles on the ground and forces his eyes open and makes him peer between his fingers. The wood moves slightly, just so that it shifts around on the ground.

“Why are you sad?” She asks, and John rocks back on his heels, away from his knees and ends up on his rear, hands turned into fists and tears flowing ever freer now. He refuses to look, can’t look, and he shakes his head from side to side when the cold creeps up his spine like ice water, and he keeps begging.

Begs her to come back. Begs her to go.

“You shouldn’t be here, Beatrice.” He whispers, and he feels how the wind stops again. 

“You’re here, Pa.” She replies, and John shoots to his feet in a flash and is across the room before he realizes that maybe he shouldn’t have done that when his dead daughter, who’s never witnessed a bad thing in her life, stands there and expects him to have an answer.

“Your Pa needs some time, ‘s all, sweetheart.” Comes another voice, and John turns away from the pen he’s leaned himself against and sees Arthur’s broad back shield him from the sight of his own daughter. He hiccups into his fist swallows the lump in his throat and tries to keep looking when Beatrice speaks up;

“Who are you?” She asks, so young and innocent, and John wishes that he was dead too. Maybe then he’d have taken Arthur’s place. Perhaps then he’d have been the one comforting his daughter. But right now, she was the only one that didn’t need comfort.

That was Abigail and Jack and Uncle and John, Missus Barnes and her kid down in Blackwater who’d now lost a playmate, and it was also Reverend Johnson because he had to come to Beecher’s Hope and perform a sermon, witnessed by both the living and the dead.

“I’m your Uncle Arthur.” He says, and John can hear the sound she makes from in front of him, all young innocence and understanding that neither of them most likely had at that age. She knew of him, but how much, no one could be quite sure.

But she still knew him.

“Maybe we oughta leave yer daddy to it, huh?” 

“Arthur,” John says, and the man turns to him. John nods, briefly.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” He says and leans back down on his knees. She steps around Arthur, head cocked to the side, and those wide blue eyes so full of innocence that John can hardly stand it.

Innocence shouldn’t have to stay, yet here she is. 

“About what?” She asks. She’s barely a foot away now, and the warm night has already chilled him to the bone.

“About a lot,” he almost smiles. His smile is an almost, hers is a certainty.

He can almost imagine her alive when she throws herself against him, just barely catching on in solid form rather than smoke, and he holds her as he would when she was still here.

He can stand the cold and the shock, if only it meant he could have a little more time.

~

The wind’s nothing more than a whisper now.

He’s standing bent by the pen for a bit after Arthur and Beatrice left, when he hears the barn door creak open and a lantern dances in the dark.

She’s dressed in her nightgown, shawl over her shoulders, and her hair a mess. Beatrice had always looked like Abigail, but never had Abigail looked so much like Beatrice than right at this moment.

She lowers the lantern to the floor, and she holds him, her tears dry, while he weeps into the crook of her arm. She doesn’t comfort, doesn’t soothe, just holds him like that until he’s quieted, and they’re both kneeling on the floor.

John wants to apologize. He just doesn’t know what for.

“Should we do it together?” She asks, her voice a raspy whisper in the dark, and they both grip the knife he wedged in the floor and carve out the words on the last piece of plain wood John has left.

It’s not perfect, but neither are they.

But she was.

John thinks, later when they’re in bed and they listen for the sounds that won’t ever come back, that even if they weren’t perfect their children were made from the only perfect parts of them.

They were as perfect as could be; some just happened to be better than others.

And the children were, almost, always better.

~

John lowers a flower onto the grave, burrows it into the small hole Abigail’s dug by the marker and buries it up with dirt, and steps back. The lily, white as cotton, stands out among the blue daisies Missus Barnes put there and the dark wood of the marker and the dirt on which all of it stands.

(the dirt which now holds his daughter,)

He’d spoken to Arthur the day after; had taken Rachel and her foal on their very delayed morning ride. He’d spoken to Arthur then, who had reassured him more than once that Beatrice wasn’t there.

That he’d seen her off himself and that she didn’t seem to know what had happened or why John had been the way he was; she had simply smiled like only a child could and had shaken his hand with childish grace and that’d been it.

John had seen few children go, especially someone as young as that, so he wasn’t quite sure whether or not Arthur was telling the truth.

But John had taken his word for it because Beatrice was nowhere to be seen on the day the Reverend came, and John found it a wonder that he still had a tear left to shed. He felt drained and broken in ways no one should be.

He idly wonders how many times he’ll find himself up here – be it night or day – and how many days it’ll take him to fully comprehend that Abigail will only have to call three of them to dinner and wake two of them up with the smell of coffee in the morning – coffee being something Beatrice had liked just fine.

She’s not there anymore.

And, maybe, that’s a mercy in itself.

Chapter Text

John had seen a lot of people go in his time; friends, family, enemies. Some had stayed behind, some had left, some had never arrived at the apparent last stop before eternity that was John Marston.

Some were smart. Some were just plain stupid.

And John was adamant in his belief that Arthur was among the most stupid folk he’d ever met.

At least until he met Bill Williamson again, aimed a rifle at him and pulled the trigger.

Bill’s always been a fool, a bigger one than them; it seemed most of the time, but John didn’t know he could be this Goddamn stupid. It takes him three days to locate John, voice full of wrath and cold, and neither John nor Arthur are quite sure why he’s still around.

“You come to kill me, Bill?” John says, halting Bill’s tirade of old friends and unpaid debts.

“If you have, then good luck.” John knows the dead man hasn’t seen the other dead man leaning in the corner, arms crossed, and brows furrowed in cold bemusement, and he waits as patiently as he can for the reaction to come.

It’s been years of John fighting and Arthur picking up the pieces only he could use, and by now, they’re anything but unorganized.

But, then again, they’d always been like that; the two of them against the rest of the world when the walls of the camp weren’t there, and there was only you, yourself, and a gun.

It’s a little trickier when the other person’s dead, but Arthur doesn’t seem willing to leave at any point, so John has stopped questioning him.

Bill’s dead eyes darken under bushy brows, and he waves a hand in a motion that could be considered threatening, but falls away once he sees just exactly who is glaring daggers into his back.

“Arthur?” He says, and he suddenly sounds real small, as if he hadn’t ever imagined that the man was still around or even dead at all. 

“Hello, Bill. Thought you’d move on from this by now.” Arthur almost muses.

“Ain’t you supposed to be dead, old man?” Bill seethes and whips around, hand reaching for his empty holster. 

“Sure, I am, boy. So, are you.” Arthur takes a step forward around the end of the bed and stops short of Bill. 

“But we’re both still here. How’d you think that happened?” Arthur nods his head once to the side, and Bill’s eyes travel from Arthur and over to John and then back again.

“What’re you talkin’ about? Him? He shot me!” Bill’s voice rises, and Arthur smiles, grim and tight-lipped, and nods. 

“That he did. Shot Micah, too.” Arthur takes another step and claps Bill over the shoulder, freezing momentarily over the act of actually being able to touch something again, and locks his eyes with Bill’s. “He coulda shot Javier, but he’s actually not as dumb as he looks.”

“Now, I actually believed you for a while to be smarter than Micah and stay as far away from this little stop along the way as possible, but seems I was wrong.” He says, and John quirks a smile in the corner of his lips. 

“So, why don’t you tell us where Dutch is holed up and then scurry off into whatever hole they put you in?”

Bill all but stutters, looks around for something or other for some means of escape, and eventually seems to decide that stepping back is as good as it gets. “I don’t know where he is.”

“You sure about that? Ross seemed sure that you or Javier did, and Javier ain’t talkin’.” John raises from his chair and cocks his head to the side in thought.

“Now, we have a lead, but I’m not gettin’ my family back unless I get Dutch. And right now, you’re the only one I can talk to.”

John pauses but doesn’t look away from Bill. Faltering now would only bring that crazed, dead look in Bill’s eyes to a full stop, and God knows what would happen then, “you said you’d fucked her. Seems sufficient enough for you to care.”

There’s a wall of ice pressed against John’s chest, and if the dead had any breaths, then John would smell all kinds of awful things coming from Bill’s open mouth. It only lasts two seconds, and then he’s being hauled back by the neck by Arthur, the embers glistening in his own dark eyes.

Arthur tosses him as best he can, given that Bill is significantly bigger in body mass than Arthur ever was, and John takes short, curt breaths to keep the chill from fully taking over the lungs he needs to speak.

“Yeah, I fucked her. But that don’t mean nothin’.” He spits and looks John over with a look of disgust. They’d never had the highest of opinions of each other, but that wasn’t a look John was too familiar with when it came to Bill Williamson

“We asked you a question, Marion, now cough it up.”

“I already said; I don’t know where he is.”

John’s never known how to expel a ghost; they only ever did whatever they pleased when John was around, but he really wished for something at this point. “Why’re you even here, Bill? Hate me that much, do ya?”

“What does that mean? I’m here just like the rest of ya, only I never saw you on the guest list.” He turns and sneers at Arthur, who chooses only to scoff in reply.  

“You said I shot you. I did. Fatally.” Bill, ever the blockhead, frowns again and keeps reaching for a gun that isn’t there.

“You’re dead, Bill. So’s he.”

Let’s just say that there are better ways to break those kinds of news to someone who was just shot by a former brother.

~

They find Dutch and John is almost prepared for Hosea to step around the corner and demand peace and the first steps of an escape plan and for Arthur to prepare the dynamite, but no such thing happens, and then there’s a dead girl in John’s arms, and Arthur’s out the door.

John has half a mind to call out to him but decides against it, and he follows him out with the law on his tail and chases after the man he’d once trusted above all else. Arthur keeps raging at nothing when the automobile is wrecked, and Dutch is gone.

And then Dutch’s there again – in Blackwater again of all places – and Arthur is prepared to have another shouting match before John coaxes himself and the professor out a back door and toward the road to freedom. Arthur meets him again later, and it’s been a long time since John has seen his brother look so broken.

“We’ll get him.” John says and looks for Arthur’s eyes, who meets him after seconds of hesitation, and says, “that’s what I’m afraid of,” and disappears in the breeze.

John’ll never understand the ways of being dead, but he sure as shit ain’t looking forward to it.

~

It’s Dutch.

It’s always Dutch.

Dutch with the words and the ways and the promises and the world. Always been, always will be.

John didn’t believe in much after the gang and after Beatrice, but he’d always believed in Dutch. One way or another.

Dutch had been called a messiah by some, and someone had once called him a prophet, but to John – and to Arthur – he’d only ever been a father and a friend. Then a snake lured him to the finest of apples, and now here they are.

Arthur had told John as much as he remembered of the time before life became vacant death, and so John isn’t too surprised when Arthur hangs back and watches. It was a mountain, a chilled wind, and the promise of something lost and never to be regained.

Few things are justified in their world. Even fewer things are forgiven.

But what John sees in Dutch’s eyes before their guns are gone, and Dutch delivers yet another truth, is something calm and collected; the knowledge of defeat isn’t there.

It’s only the simplicity of life that they both see. Because if there is one thing Dutch Van der Linde oftentimes seems to be, it is right.

Neither of them lost. Neither of them won. They simply drew a ceasefire in an unwinnable war where everyone’s an enemy.

Their time’s passed. It’s been for a very long time.

~

John’s learned to stop expecting dead folk to simply move on, so he’s more annoyed than angry when he sees Dutch kick around the few crops Uncle managed to salvage.

“Y’know, I was never really sure about Uncle’s value half the time, but I think this settles it.” He says and John walks past, shakes his head, and hefts a haybale under an arm on his way to the new cattle. Arthur seems to be doing a better job at avoiding Dutch by simply standing next to him and ignoring every word that leaves his mouth, while John throws the occasional glance his way for fear of this being yet another lie.

Yes, they’d both loved him, but that didn’t matter much when time had turned him into a damn nuisance.

“I think I prefer Uncle better.” Arthur mumbles more than once, something that is always followed by; “I heard that.” and John’s imagination of Hosea’s chuckling.

~

He was mad when he was alive, and he remains mad once dead, but his eyes are still, quiet and almost looks more alive than most others. His voice is quiet, lips mouthing hidden truths, and John can’t escape the smile that plays there when he sees Ross cross the border to his home and Uncle crumples to the ground by Jack.

"You're useless." John bellows at Dutch, not caring one tiny bit over the men shooting at him hearing, and the man, the mirage, just throws out his arms and laughs because, of course, he's useless. 

"I'm dead, son! Ain't nothin' I can do for you now that I would have done then." And now John scowls again and wishes he was shouting at someone living, but everyone still alive is against him and they don't exactly take orders from him anymore. 

Arthur – being as helpful as he's usually come to be – shouts directions where he can’t pick up arms, and he seems just about ready to throw Dutch from the silo when the mirage laughs once a bullet tear a hole in John's hat.

“Either shut up or do somethin’, old man,” Arthur calls back, flickers out of John’s sight, and in the next instance, two agents drop the ground in violent enough spasms. Rarely had he seen ghosts so at work, and now that he does, he’s mighty glad that the one doing it is on his side.

The living against the dead. How’s that for philosophy?

Dutch is still shouting outside the door, and Arthur tries his best to get the man to do other things than preach to men who can’t hear him when John kisses Abigail goodbye and shoos them out of the barn. He shuts up, though, when Arthur appears in the barn, and all John can do is look.

“Alright.” He whispers to himself and presses flat palms against rough wood. He sees, but doesn’t look, locks eyes with Arthur once again and they nod as one.

He’s afraid. Maybe he’s always been.

But at least he ain’t alone.

They’re brothers. Even after one is gone, and so Arthur claps him on the shoulder, smiles that telltale half-smirk of sadness and joy he usually carried around and tells him it's time to go home.

Chapter Text

Beecher’s Hope is home until it’s not.

Pa and Uncle are gone, and Ma’s always sad, and Jack tries, he really does, to be the man Pa wanted him to be; good and with a heart.

But Jack learns – when the new Reverend in town talks over momma’s grave and Missus Barnes puts down one of the yellow flowers that grew along the road – that a gunslinger with nothing but revenge on his mind has no place for goodness and hearts.

Maybe, when he’s done, he’ll have that. But, not right now.

He remembers little of the time before it was just the three of them. He remembers enough to have some kind of fondness for those long gone, but it’s not enough to save him from remembering the awful things.

The good clouds the bad, someone said to Ma once they’d buried Pa, but in Jack’s mind, that was nothing but horseshit.

But, he remembers enough of Uncle Arthur’s jokes and Uncle Charles – who hears of Pa’s passing and comes running like someone set his rear on fire – and the kindness of Uncle Hosea to know that once upon a time, it had been better.

He doesn’t remember Aunt Karen’s drunken singing, Young Lenny’s laugh, or the calmness that used to follow Uncle Dutch’s music. But, he does remember Mean Micah’s scolding and the last yappings of a dog that never came once called, and he remembers the men by the lakeside.

Jack believes enough – that’s something that can be said – so he believes in what little he remembers of Reverend Swanson’s tirades of the possibilities of something that would come after.

He believes enough to see home, as it was; tents, campfires, parties, and laughter. The smiles and the drinks. Jack can almost imagine having grown up like that instead of running for his life and having to bury Pa on their own land.

(Jack remembers Uncle having said something about the big saloon in the sky, laughed himself silly and knocked himself out against Mister Pearson’s wagon, and if Jack could hope for others; well, that’s what he hopes,)

Jack shakes hands, nods in greetings, and goodbyes, and thank yous’, and goes back inside.  Takes his gun and Pa’s hat, the photograph of Ma, and Pa, and himself, and Beatrice and tucks it into Uncle Arthur’s old journal and leaves on the horse born the summer before Beatrice passed.

Beecher’s Hope is home until it isn’t.

~

It’s not difficult to find Ross. It should be, but it isn’t.

Retired and old. All the things Pa should be but never were.

Memory is a fragile thing that will disappear once you think too hard. Mistakes are the other way around; think about them, and they just might be worse than they actually are.

Jack remembers Ross. Ross remembers Jack.

Jack and Ross remember Pa.

(they both remember Uncle Arthur)

They both shoot a gun, and only one of them dies, and Jack is suddenly so very, very cold, but he turns his back, holsters the gun and rides off into what is no more.

The world is coming back from its slumber beyond the hills, where no memory exists and where people such as those Jack Marston once knew are long gone. He rides and meets the future somewhere along the way.

He wanders the streets of Saint Denis in search of potential bounties and nothings, and stumble upon a woman who calls him his father’s name. He tips his head, shakes it and leaves her alone, the little girl tucked into the folds of her skirt.

She calls him his own name, but by then, he’s long gone.

~

He stumbles more than runs, straight into Missus Sadie on a job near the border.

The War’s done and over, and he has scars so similar to his father’s now that it seems to take her a moment to see that it’s Marston Junior bent double in front of her from where she kneed him after he took a tumble over her camp.

She’s older, but so’s he, and there’s a scar across her cheek and over her knuckles, no doubt from a brawl or two in a South American pub. She laughs and stretches out a hand, shakes it once, and asks questions of life.

She doesn’t ask about death, but something still hovers over Jack’s shoulder when she stops for breath. It feels almost as if though the wind wishes for him to speak for it.

Jack can’t speak ‘wind,’ so he simply gives her a smile and accepts her offer of a campfire to rest by and even some meager food collected from the scarce provisions she owns.

She knows Pa’s dead, and Uncle too.

Ma had told her as such, but Jack’s the one that tells her that Ma’s gone now too and that the bastard Ross floats down the San Luis.

She says she heard about Ross. She doesn’t talk about Ma, and Jack is grateful enough to accept the rabbit she shoves into his hands.

He leaves her there and goes back North, meets the strange Missus who introduces herself as Mary Gillis-Johns, and Jack knows he’s heard the name before, but he doesn’t ask her why.

(he reads Uncle Arthur’s journal later, in the lamplight of Saint Denis, and chuckles lightly over his uncle’s visions of love for a woman that seemed to love him still,)

~

It had been the Great War.

The War to end all Wars.

Horseshit.

He’s built himself a cabin in the woods of Missouri when the letter comes to his postbox in town, and he breaks a hole in the door.

He shouts loud enough for the neighbor further up the path to come sprinting to see whether or not Jack’s finally gotten himself killed in his ill-fated attempts at shooting the wolf that’s been hunting their cattle for the last month, but they both simply wave letters in each other’s faces, ponders over throwing them into the fire and eventually accept, over far too many bottles of whiskey, that at least they’ll have a familiar face to punch if it gets too much.

He writes Charles, something he’s tried to do since Ma’s death, and tells him he’ll go save the poor bastards in the East and he gets nothing but guilt in reply; Charles’s son is going. His daughter’s husband’s going too.

(Jack Marston breaks his knuckles when he punches a second hole through the door,)

~

Jack’s never been to Uncle Arthur’s grave, but he does finally go when he stumbles, yet again, into the path of Missus Gillis-Johns, a widow twice over.

She offers to take him there, she knows the path well enough by now, and they both find a grave that was never meant to exist all the way up here.

Jack remembers Uncle Arthur’s love of the West.

The East isn’t where he belongs.

(neither does Jack, but he’ll go anyway,)

There are flowers planted, yellow and orange and blue and white, and Missus Gillis-Johns cries even after all the time, and Jack can’t quite understand what it would be like to love someone still, so long after they’d gone.

(he supposes momma had an idea, but she only spent three years without Pa, and she had grieved him long before that,)

He says goodbye to her, shakes her hand again and is tugged into a hug, the old woman stronger than he would expect of her. He lets himself be held, breaks just a little over other matters than Uncle Arthur, and says goodbye to her again with the wave of a hand over the brim of his father’s hat.

It might be the last time they meet. It might not be.

He doesn’t know life, death, or time enough to tell.

It’s still weeks before he’s off to Basic; before he’s forced to protect something he’s not quite sure he believes in, and he borrows a horse from the stable in Blackwater and rides across what’s left of the plains to get to what once was home; because getting there on anything but a horse sounds a bit like making Pa twist in his grave.

The house still stands, a little lopsided and a little less home, and Jack finds himself lingering. There’s nothing left in the house for him, nothing he wants, so he simply trudges past and up the hill.

At one point, he’d decided that something should be built around them. He’d always been a poor woodworker – a bit like Pa –, but he’d built enough of a fence for people to leave the graves alone. There are still some flowers there, though, planted by those that knew them or simply wished to be kind.

Beatrice’s marker is a little broken, the plaque barely holding itself up in the dusty weather of West Elizabeth, and Uncle’s and Pa’s both have crooked spines. Ma’s is still standing, its backbone as straight as hers always was, and Jack brushes twigs and leaves from hidden bones.

What once was home is no longer home, but something remembers; something remains. Something’s still here, something as light as a breeze and as cold as ice, even when the heat is otherwise stifling.

But Jack Marston’s been cold his whole life; always bundled up during spring and autumn and covered in every blanket in the house come winter. The wind’s not the thing that tries to speak to him; it’s simply a messenger.

Jack Marston’s clever, always been, but not enough to understand.

“Sorry, Pa.” He whispers and traces his father’s words, gets up, and leaves the way he came.

A wolf howls further away once the breeze dies down.