It had rained for three days straight, the kind of rain that sank deep into your bones and stayed there, humming low like a fever. The trenches bled with it—earth turned slick and soupy, the color of rust and bile. Everywhere the scent of mildew and iron, soaked cloth, old blood. Men coughed through it, sang through it, prayed through it, their voices thin and wavering like smoke in a wind. Jack Marston sat against the packed wall of the trench with his rifle across his knees, drenched to the skin and so tired he felt carved out, his mind drifting to nowhere in particular.

Sometimes he thought of New Hanover in the spring, of his mother humming in the kitchen and the air smelling like wild onion. But even those memories were beginning to feel false, like a dream you try to grip upon waking only to find it's already gone. Here there was only the squelch of boots and the soft, constant dripping of rainwater off helmets, the occasional faraway whistle of a mortar. A man two feet down the trench had stopped speaking this morning. His eyes were open but he wasn’t seeing. Nobody bothered to move him yet.

Then came the sound—first like thunder, but too sharp, too fast. The sky cracked open. A shell burst not ten yards away, spraying gravel and gore into the air, and the Germans opened fire behind it. An officer shouted, voice already swallowed by chaos. Men scrambled, stumbled over their own limbs, boots skidding against the ladder-boards. Jack moved by instinct—he’d done this before, maybe too many times. His hand found the ladder, then the next rung, then—

A white-hot spike of pain shot through his shoulder, as if something had yanked him back mid-step. His vision tilted. He hit the trench floor hard, his face pressed into the mud, the breath knocked clean out of him. All he could taste was dirt and copper.

Someone was shouting. Not at him. About him.

And then your hands—firm, gloved, already soaked—pulling him backward. “Got you,” you murmured low, like the war had to be whispered around. “Stay still.”

He knew your face. Couldn’t recall your name. New, maybe. Quiet. You didn’t ask him anything, didn’t flinch at the blood that slicked your fingers. You pressed a wad of cloth into the wound, wrapped it tight. He hissed at the pressure, teeth gritted, but you didn’t apologize. You only checked the bandage again and again, like what mattered was doing it right.

Others had always looked at him like a relic, like a name with history soaked through it. John Marston’s boy. Van der Linde. You didn’t. You didn’t ask about his past, or his family, or what made him join. You didn’t say a word at all. Only worked.

When the shooting slowed, you pulled him further under the cover of sandbags. You sat with him, shoulder against shoulder, the sky above a bleak smear of gray. Mud crept up the sides of your boots, your hair stuck wet to your brow, but you didn’t seem to notice. Jack tried to speak. You hushed him softly.