Chapter Text
***
“Did I try to kill them? You’re God damn right I did…and I will keep trying until I get it right. That’s how much I love you. Son.”
The love of a father, thinks Jamie, glad to have had a taste of it once in his miserable life.
Garrett tries to pull the gun off him, but Jamie does not relent. For Kayce. He looks him in the eyes – because if he doesn’t, then he won’t know the meaning of loss “because you have to watch ‘em die or you didn’t lose ’em, Jamie.” – and pulls the trigger, deafening them. The world goes deathly quiet then.
Garret’s face twists in pain, but he pulls Jamie closer to him, hugs him so tight his ribs hurt.
It is warm and safe and everything Fathers are ought to be.
They collapse to the floor, clinging to one another.
For Kayce.
“I love you, my son,” Garrett whispers. There is no anger, no hatred, just utter resignation. His last breath is a soft “I love you.”
For Kayce.
Jamie weeps.
They stay like that, bathed in the golden light of the dying sun.
***
“Just wish it wasn’t,” says John, looking into the fireplace.
He did not want the public office, but he had to, to keep it from his son’s greedy hands. Power.
It is all Jamie has ever wanted.
And John was going to thwart him once more. It is a cruel thing for a father to do to his child.
“Dad?” Beth meets his gaze, steadfast. “I’m going to help you.”
Of course you would, he thinks. Anything to spite your brother.
A knock on the door puts a pause to the conversation. Kayce walks in, looking from him to Beth, all expectant.
“Rip is joining us in a bit.”
“Son?”
Kayce frowns. “I got a message from Jamie saying to gather up, that it was important.”
Beth stiffens.
“Daddy! Where’re your guns?”
John sighs. “Honey—”
“Dad!”
Of all the beasts on God’s green earth, his daughter was the most terrible.
Kayce was now on alert. “What’s happening?”
“Beth,” snaps John. “Enough!”
“No,” growls Beth, moving around the room like hurricane. “We need ‘em to defend ourselves. You don’t know what Jamie’s planning.”
Kayce scoffs. “What are you crazy?”
“Jamie wouldn’t hurt us, Beth.” John hates himself for not believing the words. He has to say them, as a father.
Beth snarls. It is a hideous thing. “You know he did, Daddy. You know it. What, you think you have some false connection with him? You think he’s your child?”
Rip walks in slowly, looking between her, Kayce, and John. “Sorry—”
“I’m your child,” continues Beth, pointing at Kayce, “Kayce is your child! Fucks’ sake, Rip is more family than Jamie ever was.”
Kayce stiffens, and he shakes his head. “He’s not the one behind the attack! I talked to him, Beth. I looked him in the eyes and asked his help on finding the one responsible. He looked me in the eyes and wanted to help. He would never hurt us, Beth. We’re his family.”
Beth starts laughing hysterically.
John looks away. He wishes he was fucking deaf.
“Honey,” says Rip. He had moved towards her.
Beth quietens.
The boy is the only one who’d ever been able to quiet her.
From the reflection of the cabinet, John can see that he’s wrapped his arms around her, and his unbreakable daughter looked just about collapse into Rip’s embrace. He wonders then, if it was Rip’s child—
John shakes the thought off. He straightens, meeting Kayce’s disappointed gaze.
They all pause, hearing tyres on gravel, the smooth growl of an engine – too smooth to be used in a farm.
Beth sniffs and laughs a little. She pulls away from Rip.
“Shall we, then? I hope he fucking kills me before he burns me again.”
Rip looks alarmed. “What—”
Beth is the first to leave the room, and they all scramble after her, Rip the first on her heels, the click of his gun echoing.
A moment is all John has, but he pulls a gun off the side cabinet, all too aware of the weight of Kayce’s gaze, of his condemnation.
Little did John know, he was going to lose two sons that night.
***
Jamie throws the corpse before the steps leading to the house he grew up on.
The same steps he’d fallen off once, running after Lee.
He’d been five or six, had scraped his knee.
His older brother had carried him to the kitchen, had wiped his tears and cleaned his wounds. Lee had not mocked him for his tears. He had simply given him a pat on the back and pulled him in for another game of Cowboys and Indians.
Jamie fucking missed Lee.
“What the fuck?”
Beth.
Jamie steels himself. He cannot show her weakness, or she would tear him apart for it. He slams the trunk shut, and turns to face—
It slams into him like a freight train.
He was facing the Dutton family.
John. Rip. Beth.
Kayce.
It hurts less, somewhat, knowing that he did it for Kayce. Garrett would not have stopped – “I will keep trying until I get it right. That’s how much I love you. Son.” – and his younger brother would have died.
“Jamie,” John looks at him in question, “what did you do?”
For the first time in his miserable life, Jamie isn’t hurt by the accusative tone.
It is strange, this emptiness inside. He had never been more acutely aware of it, until then and there, standing before the steps leading to the Dutton porch, the starlit sky above and his biological father’s cold corpse by his feet.
“This is the man who put out the hit on you all,” he says. “He looked me in the eyes and told me he would keep trying until you were all dead.”
Kayce moves first, practically jumping the steps and pulling Jamie into his arms for a hug. “I love you, brother.”
The words are a whisper, so heartfelt, and to Jamie, it is absolution.
Kayce pulls away, smiling, but he stays close, keeps his hand on Jamie’s shoulder.
John is now kneeling by the blanket covered corpse, and he pulls it off to see the man’s face. “This is—”
“Garrett Randall,” says Jamie, cold. “My biological father.”
“Son,” whispers John.
Jamie isn’t looking at him.
He is looking at Beth.
“I looked him in the eyes, and I held him as he lay dying. I lost him, Beth.”
Beth’s mouth twists in contempt.
“Oh,” she says softly, and then she laughs.
It is a small laugh at first, almost curious, like she has discovered something mildly amusing at the bottom of a glass. Then it grows, sharp and sudden, echoing across the yard, bouncing off the porch posts and the stone of the house as if the place itself recoils from it.
Jamie does not react.
Rip shifts behind her, instinctive, protective. Kayce’s hand tightens on Jamie’s shoulder, but Jamie barely feels it now.
The emptiness has spread.
It has weight.
It anchors him.
Beth steps closer, boots crunching on gravel, stopping just short of the corpse. She looks down at it like one might look at roadkill — with irritation, not pity.
“You killed him,” she says. “Don’t dress it up in your sad little feelings. You don’t get to talk about loss like you understand it.” She snaps her gaze up at him, eyes bright, vicious. “You understand nothing. You understand how to kneel. You understand how to beg. You understand how to pick the winning side and call it loyalty.”
John straightens slowly from where he kneels, the blanket slipping from his hands. His face is pale in the starlight.
“Beth,” he says, warning.
She doesn’t look at him, keeps her deadly gaze fixated on Jamie.
“You think this makes you a hero?” she continues, voice rising. “You think dragging him here like some sacrificial offering fixes what you’ve done? What you are?”
Jamie finally lets Kayce’s shoulder go. He steps forward on his own.
“I didn’t do it for you,” he says.
Beth’s smile widens. “Oh, I know.”
“I didn’t do it for Dad. And I didn’t do it for this family,” Jamie continues, each word placed carefully, deliberately, like stones on a grave. “I did it because he was going to kill my brother.”
Kayce exhales sharply.
Beth scoffs. “This is just another version of you trying to crawl back in. Another performance.”
Jamie laughs once — quietly, mirthless.
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
John looks up sharply. “Jamie—”
“No,” Jamie says, and this time he does look at his father. There is no heat in it. No pleading. No hope. “You don’t get to interrupt me anymore.”
The words hang there, impossible.
John opens his mouth, but closes it, at a loss of words.
Beth watches this with interest, like she’s waiting for blood.
“I’m done,” Jamie says. “I did what needed to be done. I ended the threat. I paid the price.”
“You paid the price?” Beth snarls. “You got what you wanted. You always do.”
Jamie shakes his head. “You don’t even know what that is.”
“Oh, I do,” she says. “Power. Protection. Daddy’s forgiveness. Daddy’s love.”
Jamie looks at her — really looks at her — and for the first time, he does not feel the urge to defend himself.
“I don’t want forgiveness,” he says. “And I don’t want protection. I don’t want any of you.”
The words land like a slap.
Kayce turns toward him, startled. “Jamie—”
“I love you,” Jamie says quietly, cutting him off. “But this ends here.”
Beth lets out a low whistle. “There it is.”
John steps forward now, voice tight. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do.”
“You think you can just walk away?” John says. “After everything this family has done for you?”
Jamie’s jaw tightens.
“That’s the lie you tell yourself,” he says. “That everything you did was for me. It wasn’t. It was for the ranch. For the name. For control.”
Beth bares her teeth. “Ungrateful little shit.”
Jamie ignores her.
“I was never your son,” he says to John. “I was your weapon when you needed one. Your failure. Your greatest disappointment.”
“That’s not true,” John says, and he sounds broken.
It is not often that a man like John Dutton is wounded.
Jamie shrugs. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
He turns back to Beth.
“You want to call me pathetic?” he says. “Fine. You want to call me a traitor? Fine. I stood between this family and a man who would have slaughtered you all, and I did it alone. If that still makes me the villain in your story, then so be it.”
Beth steps right up to him now, close enough that he can smell the whiskey on her breath, the smoke in her hair.
“You killed your own father,” she whispers. “And you expect mercy?”
Jamie meets her eyes.
“No,” he says. “I expect nothing.”
She studies him, the eyes of a predator hunting, searching for the crack. The weakness. The tremor.
It doesn’t come.
For the first time, Beth falters — not visibly, not to anyone else — but something in her calculation shifts.
She recovers quickly.
“You think you’re free?” she says. “You think this absolves you? You’ll always be what you are.”
Jamie nods. “Maybe.”
And to think he hated her for so long. He had loved her once. He’d been four when she was born, all pink and golden.
Their mother had placed her in his arms. She had kissed his forehead and told him what a lucky girl she was, to have a brother like him looking after her.
Jamie feels his heart ache.
Kayce steps forward again, desperation creeping into his voice. “Where are you going?”
Jamie hesitates — just for a moment — and that hesitation is everything he has left to give.
“Away,” he says. “Somewhere this name can’t follow me.”
John’s voice breaks. “You’re my son.”
Jamie turns back to him one last time. He smiles. It comes easy to him, all earnest. “Don’t worry, John. I relieve you of the burden of calling me a son.”
Silence falls heavy and suffocating.
Beth is grinning, pearly white teeth all sharp in the night.
“Good — because you were never a Dutton, Jamie, you were just the mistake we kept because Daddy felt sorry for you.”
“Bethany!” snaps John.
Jamie meets her cruel gaze and he smiles. “Hey, Rip—”
If anything, he’d gladly kill Garrett a hundred times over, just to live this moment over and over and over. Beth’s sadistic grin fell, and a sickly pallor took over her complexion, a look of horror in her eyes.
“I need your help, Jamie. I’m in trouble.” The voice of fifteen-year-old Beth breaks. She looks absolutely defeated. He never wanted to see her like that ever again.
Jamie would never forgive himself for making her feel like that.
“—God help you with that one,” he finishes, letting the past rest. “I’ll be happy to dust off the law degree when you divorce.”
For a heartbeat, no one breathes.
Beth’s face has gone slack, as if something vital has slipped loose inside her. Not anger. Not triumph. Something uglier — the shock of being seen and discarded in the same motion. Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
Rip stares at Jamie like he’s grown two heads.
John takes a step forward, instinctive, paternal, too late. “Jamie—”
Jamie shakes his head, gentle. Final.
Kayce swallows hard. “Please, stay,” he says, voice breaking around the words. There’s tears in his eyes, and it’s like Kayce is ten again, pleading with Lee and Jamie to take him with them fishing.
Those words would haunt him for years to come, thinks Jamie, turning around to the car.
Beth finds her voice at last.
“You think you won,” she spits. “You think walking away makes you clean? Pathetic, Jamie! You’re a fucking coward! Let me go!” she howls, as Rip seize her. “COWARD! JAMIE, YOU FUCKING COWARD!”
Kayce started yelling too, cursing at John.
Jamie gets in the car. The engine turns on — smooth, steady, irrevocable. He took a sharp breath, and out of weakness, glanced into the rearview mirror.
John stands frozen on the porch, at last made aware of the cost of mistaking ownership for love.
Jamie drives into the dark, the headlights sweeping past acres of land that generations bled and died for. The house of his childhood gets smaller and smaller into it fades into black, the echo of Beth and Kayce’s shouts haunting his steed. He pushes the gas pedal to the floor, until he can no longer hear them anymore, until the image of John’s devastated face is but a blur.
And for the first time in his life, the silence that follows him is not punishment.
It is peace.