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The fire had burned low by the time Dutch realized he was talking to himself.
The others had gone to sleep hours ago. Javier leaned against a log with his hat tipped over his eyes, Micah snored somewhere in the dark, and Bill muttered nonsense in his dreams. The forest around camp hissed with rainwater dripping from pine branches. Somewhere beyond the trees, an owl called once and went silent.
Dutch sat alone near the coals, staring into the orange glow like it owed him answers.
Arthur had always sat across from him.
Not every night. But enough that Dutch still found himself glancing up, expecting those tired blue eyes watching him through the smoke. Arthur never interrupted much. He would just listen while Dutch spoke about plans, futures, destiny. Sometimes Arthur agreed. Sometimes he argued.
Toward the end, he mostly looked disappointed.
Dutch rubbed his palms together against the cold. They trembled now more than they used to. Age, perhaps. Or nerves. He no longer knew the difference.
“Damn fool,” he muttered.
He could not decide if he meant Micah or Arthur or himself.
The memory came whether he wanted it or not: Arthur standing on that mountain, battered and bleeding beneath the red sunrise. Coughing into his hand. Looking at Dutch like a son waiting for his father to wake from a nightmare.
“I gave you all I had.”
Dutch shut his eyes hard.
Those words had followed him for months now. Across rivers. Through towns. Into sleep. Sometimes he heard them clearly. Sometimes they tangled with Hosea’s voice. Sometimes with Annabelle’s.
But always Arthur’s eyes.
That was the worst part.
Not angry. Not hateful.
Just tired.
Dutch stood abruptly and paced near the edge of camp. Mud sucked at his boots. The world smelled of wet earth and woodsmoke. He reached for a cigarette, then remembered he had smoked the last one yesterday.
His fingers still searched his coat pocket anyway.
The gang had become ghosts wearing familiar faces. Nobody laughed much anymore. Nobody believed him the way they once had. Even Javier watched him cautiously now, like a man studying cracked ice before stepping forward.
He told himself Arthur had poisoned them against him. That was easier. Easier than admitting the truth creeping through his mind during quiet nights like this one.
Maybe Arthur had simply seen him clearly.
Dutch stopped near the horses. One shifted nervously as he approached.
“You think I wanted this?” he whispered to the dark.
No answer came except wind through trees.
For years he had built himself into something larger than life. Dutch van der Linde: philosopher outlaw, protector of the lost, enemy of civilization’s rot. Men followed him because he spoke like scripture wrapped in gunpowder.
And for a long time, he believed every word.
That was what frightened him now. If he had been lying from the beginning, he could dismiss it as survival. Manipulation. But he had believed in the dream once. Truly.
Tahiti.
Freedom.
A better world.
Then everything started slipping through his fingers. Blackwater. Hosea dying in the street. The Pinkertons tightening around them like a noose. Every plan failing. Every speech sounding hollower than the last.
And Arthur—
Arthur had changed.
The sickness stripped something away from him. Pride maybe. Fear. Toward the end, Arthur Morgan became the kind of honest man Dutch had spent his whole life pretending to be.
That realization gnawed at him worse than grief.
Dutch crouched beside a supply crate and opened a bottle with stiff fingers. Whiskey burned down his throat. He welcomed the pain.
“You left me,” he said softly.
It sounded childish immediately.
Arthur had not left. Arthur had died. There was a difference.
Yet Dutch could not shake the feeling of abandonment. Hosea gone. Arthur gone. Even John, in his own way, gone too. Men he had raised, protected, shaped into outlaws and sons. All vanished.
Maybe they escaped him.
The thought struck like a knife.
Dutch drank again.
He remembered a younger Arthur: broad-shouldered, angry, eager to prove himself after a bar fight in Chicago. Barely more than a boy. Hosea had laughed after Arthur knocked a man unconscious with a chair.
“This one’s got spirit,” Hosea had said.
Dutch had seen potential immediately. Loyalty. Strength. A wounded animal desperate for purpose.
He had given Arthur that purpose.
Or maybe he had simply used him.
The whiskey no longer warmed him.
Dutch sank onto the crate and buried his face in his hands. For one brief, terrible moment, he allowed himself to imagine a different ending. One where he listened. One where he walked away from Micah. One where he trusted Arthur on that mountain instead of pride.
He imagined sitting beside a river somewhere while Arthur sketched birds into that journal of his. Hosea reading nearby. John arguing with Abigail while Jack laughed.
A ridiculous fantasy.
Men like them were never meant for peace.
Still, the image hurt.
Dutch inhaled shakily and looked up at the stars emerging between storm clouds. Arthur used to watch the sky during night rides. Said it made him feel small in a comforting sort of way.
Dutch had never understood that.
Feeling small terrified him.
That was the secret beneath everything—the speeches, the grand plans, the anger. Dutch feared becoming insignificant more than he feared death itself. Civilization was swallowing men like him whole, and he fought against it with every robbery and every bullet.
Arthur had accepted the world changing.
Dutch could not.
Maybe that was why Arthur found peace at the end while Dutch remained trapped inside himself.
The fire crackled behind him.
For a fleeting second he heard boots approaching and nearly turned with hope rising sharp and painful in his chest. But nobody came.
Only memory.
Only guilt.
Dutch stared into the darkness until his eyes watered.
“I did love you,” he said quietly.
The words disappeared into the trees.
He wondered if Arthur had known.
Not through speeches or promises or manipulations, but truly known. Beneath all the madness and vanity and failures, Dutch had loved that boy as close as he knew how.
But love twisted by pride became something ugly. Possessive. Demanding. Blind.
He saw that now, far too late to matter.
Rain began again, soft at first.
Dutch stood slowly and pulled his coat tighter around himself. Dawn was still hours away. Another cold night. Another uncertain road waiting tomorrow.
He glanced once more toward the empty place beside the fire where Arthur used to sit.
Then he walked back to camp carrying a grief too heavy for a man who had spent his whole life believing himself untouchable.