[It's strange. John describes this fantasy, and it's oddly small and cozy for a man who talks about ten billion kills like its nothing, someone who can manipulate souls. He is struck by the notion that it doesn't feel like a god, and it clicks at the back of his mind suddenly that John said when I was a kid. In all the legends of the Brother gods he's ever heard, there's never been mention of their childhood. It makes him feel more like a person. That was the point, of course -- it's what he'd been looking for when he'd asked. And yet it's jarring, to find something he can relate to in all this, though it makes sense. He had people he was close to even here, before he decided to drag them all into his fistfight with Mariana.]

As someone who used to live in the woods? Vastly overrated.

[That's how he starts, buying time with a joke as hew chews on this further.]

But I dunno, taking care of your people's pretty big responsibility on its own, don't you think? These boys who run around fighting pirates, they gotta have a place to go back to at the end of the day, right? Someone who's gonna watch their backs during the fights, get 'em a good meal and a warm place to sleep before they get back to it the next day.

[It wasn't nearly like that, with the bandits. You pulled your own weight, or you'd be thrown to the Grimm. Peter's adventures with these lost boys sounds a lot gentler. That John so identifies with it is something that gives Qrow some pause, before he adds:]

We've got a lot of stories like that, of people coming together and taking care of each other. But I think I always got more out of the ones where it isn't so easy.

[For Qrow, he's never quite had the luxury of it being simple to be with others -- as a harbinger of misfortune, a spy, a soldier in Oz's war. Struggle has defined too much of the way Qrow has lived for those stories where it's easy and without worries to be meaningful to him.]

One of the ones that stuck with me the longest was Infinite Man.