John Marston had never been good at staying where he was needed. That was the truth of him, no matter how many times Dutch tried to dress it up as something nobler. Loyalty. Brotherhood. Fate. John had heard all of it before, said it too when it suited him, but it never changed the fact that he always seemed to end up somewhere between leaving and returning. The Van der Linde gang was the closest thing he’d ever had to a family, and even that had always been messy. Dutch took him in young, when he had nothing but a name he barely understood and a temper he never learned how to fully control. Arthur Morgan had been there too—older, steadier, always watching like he expected John to either survive or ruin himself, depending on the day. Somewhere along the way, John stopped trying to prove himself to them and just… started existing in the space they left for him. Then came you.

And everything after that got harder to explain. You weren’t part of the gang in the way the others were. Not like Sadie, not like the men who rode out on jobs and came back bloodied and laughing. You stayed in camp, keeping things together in the background while the world outside kept trying to tear it apart. You had Jack. His son. At least that’s what everyone called him, even when John struggled to say it himself in moments he didn’t want to admit later. Because being a father had never felt natural to him. It felt like something he was always arriving late to. And with you—it was worse.

Because there had been love there once. Real love, or something close enough that it hurt just the same. But love didn’t fix him. It didn’t stop him from disappearing for a year when things got too heavy, when the camp collapsed and the law closed in and John decided that running was easier than facing what he was supposed to be. When he came back, it wasn’t clean. It wasn’t heroic. It was just survival again. And you didn’t forgive him easily. You never did.

The gang had found a temporary home in the ruins of an abandoned building near Saint Denis—half-collapsed stone walls, broken windows boarded up with old wood, lanterns hanging from beams that shouldn’t have held weight anymore. It wasn’t safe, but nothing they did ever was. Still, there was something almost peaceful about it at night, when the city lights flickered faintly in the distance and the swamp air pressed in heavy and warm. Most nights, John stayed outside longer than he should’ve. Fixing gear. Cleaning weapons. Sitting too far from the fire to be fully part of anything.

And when he did come inside, it was usually quiet. Not because things were calm. But because nothing between you and him had been for a long time. Inside the makeshift room that had become yours and his by default rather than agreement, the air always felt tighter than the rest of camp. A bedroll in one corner, a small crate of belongings stacked neatly nearby, a few personal things that made it feel less like ruins and more like something temporary pretending to be a home.

John stood near the doorway now, hat still on, shoulders slightly slouched as if even standing fully upright required more effort than he wanted to give. He didn’t look at you immediately. That was a habit now. Like direct eye contact might force him into saying something he couldn’t take back. You were already there. Awake. Of course you were. You always were. Jack had been returned recently after everything that happened—the confusion, the chaos, the silence that followed like a bruise nobody wanted to press too hard. John still didn’t know what to do with that either. Relief sat uncomfortably beside guilt in his chest, neither one strong enough to fully take over. He finally exhaled, slow.

“You don’t gotta sit up waitin’ for me every night,” he muttered, voice rough, tired from a day that probably didn’t matter in the long run anyway. A pause. He shifted his weight slightly, glancing toward the floor before finally letting his eyes lift toward you—just briefly, like it cost something.