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John didn't know something could hurt like this without killin’ him.
All the other pain he's accumulated in his twenty-four years of living--all that made sense. The hot burn of a bullet ripping through his stomach; the time he shattered his wrist, bucked off his horse; the rope round his neck pulled tight. That kinda pain flared up, hit his bones, and then settled, easing out over the rest of him.
This. This is nonsensical, in its intensity. It don't settle. It echoes inside him, any time he sits down for a moment of quiet, til it fills him right up and his head says stop, stop, make it stop, oh God, she's gone, she’s gone, I swear I'll go with her if I could just hold her again.
He cracks a tooth in the back of his mouth once, grinding his teeth together in those moments, trying to stop it all spilling out.
Abigail ain't like that. Abigail is loud in her grief. Abigail in the evenings presses her head into Mary-Beth’s shoulder and calls God an awful son of a bitch, through gritted screams. Little echoes of the noises that haunt John’s memories, the shattered screaming that woke the whole camp four days before, she ain't breathing, she ain't, help her, GOD, NO, NO, NO--
John doesn't know how to sleep anymore. He doesn't know how to look at Abigail anymore.
He put that awful look in her eye. He gave her something the world could take away from her and he ought to have known it’d do it.
(Jack is confused, John knows he is, but the rest of the camp’s taken over watching him and John don't have the energy even to feel guilty for it, most of the time.)
He wakes up one morning from a nightmare where she was seven years old and smiling, and he feels like he’s gonna lose his sense of what's real if he don't go out into the woods to where Hosea and Abigail and Charles built a grave too small for anything to be buried in.
The walk there’s long, and he’s only traveled it once. Gets himself nearly turned around a few times and feels so helplessly stupid about it that he nearly goes back, say his sorries to her by downing another bottle of gin--
He finds the little winding path eventually though, up to the top of a hill. Little clearing cut out of the woods.
He stumbles in, and he freezes, and he stares at Arthur Morgan drawing in his little journal.
“Oh,” Arthur says hastily. He tucks the journal into his bag and dusts his hands off on his jeans. “Sorry, I’ll leave you to it.”
John stares at him as he rises.
“What’re you doing here?” he asks, and it comes out harsher than he meant it to, honest.
Arthur looks away from John. Looks at the little circle of stones, the carved-out name that says Rachel Marston, 1897, cause they only needed one year for it and it makes that pain kick up again, from somewhere too deep inside him to pull out.
“I just,” he mumbles, way he does when he’s embarrassed. “I used to get these fool thoughts, once we moved so as I couldn’t go visit where he was buried. Thinkin’ about him being all alone.”
All at once all the anger John didn’t know he was carrying around in his body drains right out of him into the earth below.
He was only seventeen when Isaac died. Arthur didn’t talk much about it, then; talks about it never, now. John doesn’t think anyone who weren’t there knows about him. Arthur don’t even like having the name in his mouth, it seems, and John misses the times he didn’t understand why not.
He remembers how it changed Arthur, though. The couple years he had a son, he was a softer man. Not that Arthur ain’t always been soft, much as he doesn’t think so, but it came up to the surface, then, pulled outta him somehow. Then it was gone, and it all got shoved down so deep under anger and gunsmoke that John started thinking it weren’t there at all, for a while.
It came back. Ain’t that just the magic of Arthur. It always came back.
“Sorry,” John says. “You don’t--you don’t gotta leave.”
Arthur stays still. John tries to walk over towards the grave, but his heels feel stuck in the ground.
“I know it hurts, John,” Arthur says, and he’s still not lookin’ at John, staring at the ground between them instead.
Hurts seems like too small a word, but John ain’t sure anything would cover it, so he nods.
He makes himself take a step. Just one. That’s easy enough. Another one. Heavy footfalls, walking right up to the edge of the stone circle. Little angel halo, Abigail had said. That’s what she wanted.
“She only got six months,” John says. He’s shivering suddenly, as if it got cold, but it didn’t. “That ain’t enough.”
Arthur’s next to him suddenly, his hat clutched tight in his hand. “It ain’t,” he says.
“She was real pretty. She was gonna take after her momma.”
“Oh, I bet she was.”
“I think I’d die if it’d bring her back.”
He doesn’t remember starting to cry, but his cheeks are all hot all of a sudden, and there’s these big fat tears falling down onto his shirt, and Arthur’s got an arm around his shoulders and tips him into his body and holds him there while he shakes and the pain, it echoes.
After a couple minutes, or more, or less, it fades. Nonsensical.
“Can I see what it was you was drawing,” John asks, and his voice sounds like it’s all far away.
Arthur hesitates. He hasn’t showed John anything in his journal in years, now--not since he was fourteen, maybe, learning with earnest how to read and Arthur’d let him read some about what Arthur got up to when he weren’t in camp.
“Yeah, sure,” he says, and fumbles with the journal. It falls open to the most recent page.
It’s a little image of the hill she’s on now, and the rocks ‘round her, and a bird perched on top of them. Underneath, in that script Arthur’s got, a large and sloping R.✝
John wants to say it’s real nice, or when’d you get so good at drawing, or thank you, but his throat’s all blocked up, and he’s tired already of crying.
He shuts the journal and hands it back to Arthur. Arthur puts it away without a word.
After another minute, with the sun starting to come up in earnest, John says, “You should come see her whenever you want to.” He blinks his eyes til they clear up. “I don’t want her gettin’ lonely, neither.”
Arthur exhales.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, ‘course.”
John nods, and he ducks underneath Arthur’s arm, and he walks himself back to camp with his arms wrapped tight over his chest.
Abigail’s sitting by the fire when he gets back, and he looks at her--really looks at her, for the first time in almost a week, and it sends little shards of glass buried deep into his heart, but he sits down next to her anyway cause he owes her that much, at least.
“Hi,” he says.
She looks so small, in a way Abigail Roberts don’t ever look.
“Hi,” she says back to him.
They stay there til the rest of the camp starts to stir around them, and he goes and brings back two bowls of soup, two mugs of awful coffee, and he tries to press down the rising dread in the back of his head, the voice that says, you can’t ever do this to her again, the voice that says, you’ll hurt her again some way or another if you stay, the voice that says, so go.