ommg wb!! Can I please get some johnny and diego jealousy hcs! Tysm:33
HIII đ anon!!! Iâm also gonna include Gyro because I love writing for him lwk đ
Also I went off tangent with this one⊠cuz like⊠what if their jealousy finally became externalized during a fight đđđđ but with an enemy stand user whoâs crazy about readerâŠ. đđđđđđđđ are yall catching my flow⊠đđđđđđđđđ
Also have mercy on me when it comes to the action scenes⊠guys Iâm a newgen âčïžđ
Tags: Gender neutral reader, SFW
You hadnât asked to ride alongside him. Thatâs what Johnny remembers most - everyone else whoâd tried to attach themselves to his route across this godforsaken continent had wanted something. A share of the prize. Protection. A body to deflect bullets.
Youâd pulled up alongside him somewhere in the flats of Kansas and simply said, âYour water supplyâs loaded wrong. The weightâs going to fatigue your horse before the next town.â
Heâd told you to mind your business.
Youâd shrugged and fallen back, and by the hourâs end, his horse was struggling.
He didnât apologize. He doesnât do that easily. But the next morning when he found his supplies rearranged and balanced - youâd done it quietly, before dawn, without asking for credit - something shifted behind his eyes. He watched you mount up with that calm competency, like you werenât doing him any favors, like it was just the obvious thing to do.
âYouâre still here,â he said.
âRace isnât over,â you answered.
And that was that. You became a unit of three: Gyro, Johnny, and you. The arrangement didnât get a name. It didnât need one.
What Johnny didnât tell anyone - what he was barely honest enough with himself to admit - was that from that morning forward, he always knew exactly where you were. He tracked you the way Tusk tracked his nails. Without thinking. Without stopping.
The land is relentless. Sand, riverbed, rocky plains - terrain that doesnât care what your body can and canât do.
Johnny handles it. He handles it the way he handles everything: with his jaw set, his silence a wall, and a sharpness ready for anyone who lingers too long with a pitying look. He doesnât want your help. Heâll tell you so directly if you offer it wrong.
You figured this out fast.
You donât offer your hand. You donât hover. When his chair gets stuck in sucking mud near a river crossing, you donât rush over - you look at the terrain, look at the angle, and say, âThereâs a firmer line about six feet north. See the color change in the ground?â And then you ride that line first, demonstrating, letting him make the call.
He takes it. Makes it across. Doesnât thank you, but his shoulders drop about half an inch from where theyâd been locked.
What he notices - what burns into him in a way he doesnât have a name for yet - is that you never make him smaller. You donât carve out a lane of diminished expectation for him. You argue with him. You roll your eyes at his stubbornness. You expect him to keep up and then reorganize whatever obstacle is in the way so that he actually can.
No one had done that in a long time. Not since before the fall. Maybe not even then.
One night, he catches himself watching you mend a torn saddle strap by firelight, your hands practiced and sure, and he thinks: I donât want you to look at me like Iâm broken. And then, quieter, twisting into something almost painful: You donât.
He looks away before you can catch him staring.
Gyro Zeppeli has the eyes of a man who has studied human nature the way other men study anatomy - with scientific precision and deep personal amusement.
He notices the way Johnny watches you explaining something to a local about the race route, talking with your hands, laughing at something they say. He notices the very particular way Johnnyâs expression flatlines into studied neutrality. He notices the grip on the wheel of the chair tighten.
âYou know,â Gyro says conversationally, spinning a Steel Ball on one finger, âif you stared any harder, youâd need to start paying rent on the view.â
âIâm not staring at anything,â Johnny says. âIâm keeping track of the group.â
âThe group.â Gyro grins, slow and delighted. âYes. Your extraordinary concern for the group is very moving.â
Gyro lets it rest. He is, underneath all the theater, a person of actual warmth, and he knows when to push and when to simply plant the seed and wait.
But later, much later, when youâve gone to check on the horses and itâs just the two of them by the dying fire, Gyro says more quietly: âTheyâre good for you.â
Johnny doesnât answer. His eyes are on the middle distance, somewhere in the direction you went.
âDonât wait forever,â Gyro adds. âThis race has a way of making âlaterâ disappear.â
Johnny still doesnât answer. But he doesnât tell him to shut up, either.
Itâs a small thing. Objectively. A rider from another team - handsome in a generic sort of way, clearly taken with you - positions himself near you at the waystation well. Heâs making you laugh. Heâs leaning in to look at your map. His hand hovers near yours on the paper.
Johnny watches from twenty feet away and feels something cold and irrational move through his chest like a steel nail.
Itâs nothing, he tells himself. You can talk to whoever you want. Youâre not his. Thatâs not a thing.
He pushes himself closer anyway. Casually. The way a person just happens to drift in a direction.
âWeâre moving out,â he says flatly, appearing at your elbow. He doesnât look at the other rider.
You glance at him. âWeâve got another thirty minutes before-â
âI said weâre moving.â The words come out harder than he meant them to. He hears it himself. Something in his face goes carefully blank as he adjusts.
The other rider reads the room - or reads Johnnyâs jawline, which is communicating quite clearly - and finds somewhere else to be.
You turn to Johnny with a slight raise of your brow. âWe absolutely had thirty minutes.â
âRouteâs getting crowded. Better to go now.â
A pause. Youâre reading him. He hates that you can do that.
âSure,â you say finally. And you fold up your map without making him explain himself.
He spends the next two hours riding slightly ahead of you, convinced that if he doesnât look back, the strange tight heat in his chest will dissipate.
There are nights that belong to no particular incident. Nights that are just the three of you, fire low, the dark enormous and quiet, the race suspended for a few hours in the space between exhaustion and sleep.
You tend to stay up later than Gyro, who drops off with impressive speed and even more impressive volume. So it falls to you and Johnny in the small hours - not talking, mostly, but in that particular quality of silence that has stopped being uncomfortable.
Heâll catch you looking at the stars. You do this sometimes, tipping your head back with something unguarded in your face, something he only sees when you think no oneâs watching.
He should look away. He catalogues the angle of your jaw instead.
âWhat are you thinking about?â he asks once. The words surprise him as much as you.
You consider it genuinely. âIf the stars look different at the finish line.â
âThey wonât,â he says. âStars donât care about finish lines.â
You turn your head toward him, smiling slightly. âIs that a Johnny Joestar motivational speech?â
He makes a dismissive sound but something in him - something he keeps in a room with a closed door - turns toward you like a plant toward light. Automatic. Without permission.
âWhy are you doing this race?â he asks. A real question, not a deflection.
You look at him, surprised by the sincerity. Then you tell him. The real reason, not the easy one. And he listens - actually listens, the way he doesnât for most people - and when you finish, heâs quiet for a moment.
âThatâs not stupid,â he says.
Which, from Johnny Joestar, is approximately equivalent to thatâs one of the most profound things Iâve ever heard.
You seem to understand this, because you smile at the fire and say, âThanks, Johnny,â soft enough that it does something irreparable to a room inside his chest.
A fall. Nothing dramatic - your horse spooked near a canyon lip, you came off hard, rolled, came up with a gashed arm and gravel in your palm and a slightly dazed look.
Johnny is there before he decides to be. Thatâs the part that unsettles him later - the way his body moved toward you without the instruction of his mind.
âIâm fine,â you say, standard-issue and automatic.
âYouâre bleeding,â he says. He doesnât say it gently. He says it with the clipped intensity of someone who needs you to stop minimizing things.
He ends up cleaning the gash himself. His hands are steady - steadier than he feels. You make a small sound when the cloth touches the worst of it and he has to actively suppress the urge to apologize for something that isnât his fault, which is an urge he almost never has.
âYou should have kept tighter control of the reins on that approach,â he says instead, because tenderness disguised as criticism is the only currency he currently has.
âI know,â you say. No argument. His hands slow slightly.
âPay attention next time.â
âI know youâre not actually angry.â
He ties off the bandage. His hands stay on your arm a beat longer than necessary, and he knows it, and he still doesnât move them immediately.
âFinish lineâs a long way off,â he finally says, which means: donât scare me like that again. You seem to understand.
He doesnât sleep well that night. He tells himself itâs the terrain.
After the fall, Gyro pulls up alongside Johnny on a long empty stretch and says nothing for an impressive duration of time. Johnny knows this is a setup.
âGo ahead,â Johnny says.
âYou held their arm for about twelve seconds after that bandage was done,â Gyro says pleasantly. âI counted.â
âI was checking the tightness of the wrap.â
âIâm not saying anything.â
âYouâre always saying something. You literally donât have an off switch.â
Gyro is quiet for three seconds. Then: âYouâd put yourself between them and a bullet.â
Itâs not a question. And it lands differently than the teasing does - flat and true, like a Steel Ball finding its mark.
Johnny doesnât answer. His jaw works silently.
âI know,â is all Gyro says, and drops back, leaving Johnny alone with the horizon and the specific, inconvenient truth of it.
His name doesnât matter. What matters is his Stand.
You encounter him at a river crossing three days west of a waystation - a lone rider, moving with unhurried confidence, watching your group approach with an expression Johnny immediately dislikes. Not aggression. Something more patient than aggression. Something settled.
âGood afternoon,â he says. His voice is pleasant. His eyes donât move from your face. âIâve been looking for you.â
You frown. âI donât know you.â
âI know you,â he says. Simply. Like a fact of geography. âIâve known about you since the start of the race. Iâve been tracking you.â
Something goes cold in the group. Gyroâs hand moves toward his Steel Balls. Johnny goes very still.
âIâd like you to ride with me,â the man continues. Heâs still not threatening, and thatâs worse - thereâs an absolute certainty in him, the certainty of someone who doesnât consider refusal a real outcome. âYou donât need these two anymore.â
âTheyâre not going anywhere,â Johnny says. The words come out low and immediate, a reflex without any deliberation in it.
The man looks at Johnny for the first time. Thereâs something in that look - not hatred, just a mild, disdainful reclassification. An obstacle assessment.
âThat,â he says, âwill be addressed.â
The Standâs ability is territorial - it creates invisible barriers, channels, rooms of space that it controls absolutely, cutting the battlefield into isolated zones. Gyro gets pinned in one. Johnny gets cut off in another.
And you are alone with the man in the center.
Johnny can see you through the shimmering air of the barrier. He can see the man circle you with that patient, possessive calm. He can hear him talking to you - voice low, words Johnny canât make out - and he watches you hold your ground, jaw set, hands ready.
He puts Tusk through the barrier wall. Once. The nail comes back mangled, the wall intact.
âA little rough?â Gyro calls from his own cage, and even his voice has lost some of its lightness.
Johnny doesnât answer. He tries a different angle. Another. His fingers are bleeding. He doesnât register it.
What he registers is the moment the man reaches out and puts a hand on your shoulder - possessively, like heâs demonstrating ownership - and you flinch away from him.
Something breaks open in Johnnyâs chest. Not breaks - cracks. Wide enough that everything heâd been keeping carefully sealed behind his ribs comes flooding out in a rush of heat and clarity and something that is not quite rage but is rageâs hotter, more desperate cousin.
He doesnât think about the mechanism. He doesnât calculate angles. He just moves - Tusk at maximum, nail corkscrewing through the barrier not at the wall itself but at the specific seam between zones, the structural logic of the Standâs layout rather than its brute shell - and the wall comes apart.
Heâs through before the pieces finish falling.
The fight ends. Gyro deals with the logistics. Johnny doesnât watch. Heâs watching you.
Youâre shaken - composed on the surface, the way you always are, but your hands are unsteady and you keep glancing in the direction the man had come from, even though heâs gone. A particular kind of shaken. The kind that comes from being looked at like a thing.
Johnny wheels to you and stops. He doesnât have a speech. He doesnât have the language for what just came apart in him on the other side of that barrier.
You look at him. Thereâs something open in your face right now that the steadiness usually covers, and he is looking at it directly and not looking away.
âHe was tracking me,â you say. âHe knew my name. He knew - a lot.â
âHeâs not going to come near you again.â
âYou donât know that.â
âI do.â Said with the flatness of absolute intent, not bravado.
You look at him for a moment. Then, quietly: âYou got through the barrier.â
A pause. He could explain the mechanics. He chooses honesty instead, the rare, painful kind. âI needed to get through it.â
The way he says it - needed, not wanted, not had to - lands in the space between you like something dropped. You hear it. He knows you hear it because your breath changes slightly.
He doesnât say anything else. He canât, yet. The door isnât open wide enough and he is standing at it with one hand on the frame, not ready to walk through.
But he doesnât back away from it either.
Gyro is asleep inside the abandoned farmhouse theyâve sheltered in. The fire is outside, low and amber. Youâre sitting against the outer wall with a blanket around your shoulders, still not quite warm, and Johnny comes around the corner and just - stays.
He doesnât offer an explanation for why heâs outside at this hour. You donât ask.
He maneuvers close - not far away, the way heâd usually leave a careful buffer of plausible distance - and stops near enough that the blanketâs edge is almost at his wheel.
âYouâre still shaken,â he says. Not a question.
âItâs not weakness,â he says, and the words come out strange, almost careful, like heâs testing their weight. âBeing unsettled by that. Itâd be the wrong response not to be.â
You glance at him sideways. Itâs a surprisingly generous thing for him to have said, and you both know it.
âThat might be the kindest thing youâve ever said to me,â you tell him.
âDonât make it a thing.â
Now you both are, slightly, against your better judgments, and the fire pops and the night is very big and very quiet.
His hand moves - nearly imperceptibly, almost certainly involuntary - to the edge of your blanket, just the corner of it, his fingers barely touching the fabric.
He doesnât take his hand back. You donât move away.
âThat man,â he starts. Stops. âThe way he looked at you.â His jaw tightens. âI didnât- â He stops again. Johnny Joestar, who weaponizes language like most people use fists, is struggling with words, and the struggle itself tells you something that the words hadnât managed yet.
âI know,â you say quietly. Because you do.
He doesnât look at you. He looks at the fire. But his fingers curl into the corner of the blanket - just barely, just the smallest tightening - and he doesnât take them back all night.
Heâs up before you. He usually is.
You find him at the horses, running a practiced check on the tack, and something about the geometry of the camp is different. The space heâs claimed relative to yours is different - closer, in a way that wasnât there before, in a way that isnât exactly conscious from him but is completely legible.
He glances up when you approach. Something in his expression catches for just a second before he neutralizes it into his usual mild terseness.
âYou should eat before we move out,â he says.
âGood morning to you too.â
âItâs not a bad morning. Thereâs jerky in the left pack.â
You take the jerky. You sit on a nearby rock. He goes back to the tack, and the quiet between you is the campfire quiet from all those nights, the same particular texture of it - but inside that silence now there is something new. Not declared. Not named. Not yet.
But something that was pretending not to exist has stopped pretending.
He finishes the check. He maneuvers back and stops near you, and he looks at you in the honest morning light - no fire to soften it, no exhaustion to excuse the looking - and his face does something complicated and briefly, genuinely unguarded.
âYouâre slow in the mornings,â he says.
âYou like it,â you say back, and it comes out slightly softer than you intended.
He holds your gaze for three full seconds - an eternity for Johnny Joestar, who deflects most eye contact like a reflex - and then he makes a sound that is not quite a scoff and not quite a laugh and turns away.
But as he goes, thereâs something easier in his posture. Something that has set down a weight it had been carrying for a long time without admitting to it.
Gyro appears from the farmhouse door, takes one look at both of you, takes one look at the new and specific quality of the air between you, and begins grinning so broadly itâs almost architectural.
âNot a word,â Johnny says, without looking at him.
âI wasnât going to say anything,â Gyro says, absolutely delighted.
The race continues. The finish line is still far. The continent stretches enormous and indifferent ahead.
But the distance between you and Johnny Joestar, as the three of you ride out into the morning, is measurably, undeniably less.
And if his horse drifts a little closer to yours as the day opens up - well. The terrain is unpredictable. Thatâs all.
It starts with a steel ball.
Not for any useful reason - he isnât practicing the Spin, isnât warming up, isnât doing anything that requires a steel ball at all. He simply sees you across the staging ground on the first morning of the race, talking to someone with the kind of easy authority that makes people lean in when you speak, and without thinking about it, he begins running a Steel Ball across his knuckles in a long, rolling figure-eight.
The person youâre speaking to notices. You do not. Youâre looking at a map.
Thatâs the thing that hooks him. Everyone notices Gyro Zeppeli when he wants them to. You simply - donât, yet, and the yet becomes a project he doesnât consciously sign up for.
When you finally do glance over - the steel ball catching light, the movement too fluid to ignore - he grins with every tooth he has. The gold ones catch the morning sun.
âBeautiful morning,â he says, in English first, then Italian because some things are better in Italian. âAlmost as beautiful as the view.â
You look at him with the expression of someone who has heard that sentence approximately nine hundred times and found it slightly less interesting each time.
âYour horseâs left rear shoe is loose,â you say. âYouâll lose it by the first checkpoint.â
He looks down at the horseâs left rear shoe. It is, in fact, loose.
He fixes it, and he is grinning the whole time, and he does not fully understand why.
Within three days you know the following things about Gyro Zeppeli: he has opinions about cheese that border on theological, he can sleep on a horse at a full trot and consider this a normal life skill, his singing voice is genuinely excellent and he knows it, and he will tell you a joke in the middle of any situation regardless of how badly the timing serves him.
He is the loudest person you have ever traveled with. He fills silences the way water fills a vessel - completely, immediately, as though silence itself is a problem to be solved.
What takes longer to notice is the other thing. The way the jokes land differently depending on whether youâre laughing. The way he tracks you with his peripheral vision, always, the unconscious calibration of his position relative to yours. The way the performance - and it is a performance, brilliant and warm and almost entirely genuine - has a seam in it, a place where something quieter lives that he mostly doesnât let out.
Johnny notices before you do. Johnny, by this point, has learned to read Gyro the way sailors read weather - not by looking directly at the thing, but by watching what changes around it.
âHeâs showing off,â Johnny says to you one afternoon, watching Gyro demonstrate a Spin technique to a cluster of strangers who definitely hadnât asked.
âHeâs always showing off,â you say.
âYeah,â Johnny says, in the flat specific way he has that means: thatâs not what I said.
Thereâs a man in Missouri - broad-shouldered, easy smile, genuinely funny - who attaches himself to your group for a half-day stretch. He rides near you. He makes you laugh twice. He asks for your opinion on the route ahead with the studied casualness of a man who knows what heâs doing.
Gyroâs response is immediate and completely transparent to everyone except Gyro.
He does not go quiet. He does not go cold. He expands.
Within four minutes he has inserted himself between you and Missouri-Man through sheer social momentum, is telling a story that requires several demonstrations and therefore requires your full attention to follow, has somehow acquired a regional fruit from a passing vendor which he presents to you with the gravity of a royal gift, and has redirected the entire conversational current of the group toward himself with the professionalism of a man who has been performing since childhood.
Which he has. He actually has.
Missouri-Man falls back. He isnât pushed. He simply finds that there is no longer any available space.
Later, riding ahead, Johnny says: âSubtle.â
âI donât know what youâre talking about,â Gyro says.
âI was just telling a story.â
âFor forty-five minutes.â
âIt was a long story.â
Johnny doesnât respond. His expression does something that might, if you looked at it from a specific angle in good light, be a smirk.
There is an afternoon in Kansas - flat, golden, enormous sky - where the three of you stop at a creek and the silence isnât a problem for once. Johnny is asleep against a rock with his hat over his face. The horses are drinking.
Gyro is sitting near the water, steel ball idle in his palm for once, and youâre beside him close enough that your shoulders are almost touching.
He opens his mouth. A joke is ready - he can feel it at the back of his teeth, fully formed, the setup and the punchline both in position. It is a reliable joke. It would make you smile.
âMarco,â he says instead, and then stops, like he surprised himself.
He looks at the water. âThereâs a boy back home. Heâs-â He pauses, searching for the architecture of an explanation. âIâm out here because of him. Because thereâs something I have to do before I can go back.â He turns the Steel Ball in his fingers. âI donât talk about it a lot.â
He glances at you. âYou know?â
âYou only go quiet when itâs something real,â you say. âYouâre very loud otherwise.â
He laughs, short and surprised. âThatâs - thatâs not wrong.â He looks back at the water. âI just thought you should know thereâs a reason. That this isnât just-â he gestures at himself, the grin, the gold teeth, the performance of it, â-all the way down.â
âI never thought it was,â you say.
He doesnât answer. He turns the Steel Ball one more time, and then, with what appears to be absolutely no premeditation, he leans over and bumps his shoulder into yours. Gently. The way youâd bump a friend.
It doesnât feel like a friend thing. You donât say so.
There is a man at the bar in a waystation saloon. He is not even particularly remarkable, this man - heâs simply near you, refilling your water, asking about the race, angling his body toward yours with the universal geometry of interest.
Gyro registers this from across the room.
He does not come over. That would be too obvious even for him. Instead, he sets up shop at a table with a clear sightline and begins performing for an audience of four strangers, but calibrated - every story, every demonstration, every flash of gold teeth - calibrated to a specific person across the room.
Johnny sits across from him watching this with the expression of a man observing a very slow-moving geological event.
âYou know they canât actually hear you from here,â Johnny says.
âIâm entertaining these fine people,â Gyro says, not looking away from the bar.
âThey laughed,â Johnny says.
The Steel Ball in Gyroâs hand makes a specific sound against its partner. âAt what.â
âDonât know. Something he said.â
The steel balls click again. Gyro turns his full attention to the strangers at the table and begins a story that is extremely funny and slightly too energetic and does not acknowledge the bar at all.
You come over twenty minutes later, water refilled, bar-man forgotten. You sit next to Gyro. Your arm presses against his.
He finishes the story. Everyone at the table laughs. You laugh.
The steel balls go quiet in his hand.
There, something in him says, embarrassingly sincere. There.
Itâs late. Youâre asleep. The fire is dying down.
Johnny and Gyro sit with it in the way they do sometimes - not talking, not performing, just two people who have survived enough together that silence doesnât need to be filled.
âYou know,â Johnny says, eventually.
âI know a lot of things,â Gyro says. âNarrow it down.â
âYou say everything except the things.â
Gyro is quiet for a moment. He picks up a steel ball. Sets it down. âIâm aware of that, yes.â
A long pause. The fire pops.
âBecause I have things I have to do first,â Gyro says. âThings that arenât done. And it doesnât seem-â He stops. Tries again. âIt doesnât seem right to ask someone to-â Another stop. He laughs, short and humorless. âThis is why I donât talk about it.â
Johnny looks at the fire. âThe race is going to end,â he says. âOne way or the other.â
âWaiting for it to end before you say anything is just a different kind of not saying anything.â
Gyro turns to look at him. âWhen did you get wise.â
âI was always wise,â Johnny says. âYou just never shut up long enough to notice.â
Gyro laughs - a real one, tired around the edges. He looks up at the sky.
âThey deserves someone who knows where heâs going,â he says quietly.
Johnny doesnât answer. He pulls his hat down over his eyes.
He does not say: I think that might already be you. But he means it, in the way he means most things - flatly, completely, without any decoration at all.
Your horse pulls up short on a rocky descent and you go forward over her neck, hit the ground in a controlled roll, and come up with a gashed palm and the wind knocked out of you.
Gyro is off his horse before youâve finished rolling. This is not a normal response time. This is the response time of a man who has been unconsciously tracking your position in his peripheral vision at all times and is therefore already moving before the conscious part of his brain has processed the event.
âDonât say youâre fine,â he says, arriving on his knees in the dust in front of you.
âDo not say youâre fine.â
He takes your hand - the injured one - and the doctor in him comes forward, the real one, the one that predates the jokes and the performance. His fingers are careful and certain in a way that is different from every other way he uses his hands. He reads your palm the way he reads a patient.
âNot deep,â he says. âYouâll keep the hand.â A beat. âDid you want a joke about that or are we not at that stage of recovery yet.â
âLater,â you say. Still catching your breath.
âLater,â he agrees. He doesnât let go of your hand.
He wraps it with the focus and economy of someone who has done this many times in circumstances worse than this. He doesnât fill the silence. He doesnât explain the feeling that is sitting very large and unhelpful in his chest right now. He just wraps the hand and then holds it, both of his around yours, and looks at you with something that isnât performing anything.
He nods. He lets go. He stands up and extends the hand again to help you up, and when you take it and stand, he doesnât quite release it immediately.
âOkay,â he says again. Differently. To himself.
He comes out of the heat haze of the Arizona desert like something that had always been there, waiting.
He is elegant in the way of people who have never had to perform elegance - it simply sits on him, default, undeniable. He looks at your group with the assessing calm of someone deciding how long things will take.
His eyes find you. They do not move.
âIâve been parallel to your route since Arizonaâs border,â he says. His voice is pleasant and completely without warmth. âWatching. Youâre remarkable.â Heâs speaking only to you. The other two have been reclassified into background. âIâd like you to come with me. The rest of this-â a gesture at Gyro and Johnny, at the horses, at the race itself â-is unnecessary.â
âTheyâre not going anywhere,â Gyro says. His voice is different. Still level, but the performance is gone - whatâs underneath it is not softer. Itâs harder.
The man looks at Gyro for the first time. He takes him in. The gold teeth. The steel balls. The riding clothes, the road dust, the easy stance.
Something moves across his face that isnât hatred. Itâs more dismissive than hatred.
âThe clown,â he says. Simply. Like a classification. âSpinning toys, protecting something that isnât yours.â He looks back at you. âYouâre better than the company youâre keeping.â
The steel balls in Gyroâs hand click once, sharp and deliberate.
âLast warning,â Gyro says, and there is nothing behind it but the Spin, and the road, and the distance between you and the manâs outstretched hand.
The Stand is mimicry - it copies what it sees, turns your own movement against you, creates a double that is slightly faster, slightly stronger, operating on a half-second delay. Against most fighters it would be decisive.
Gyro is not most fighters.
He also isnât thinking clearly, which is both his liability and, eventually, the entire point.
Johnny gets separated - Stand-double drives a wedge between them - and then itâs Gyro and the Stand user and you in a closing triangle, and the man keeps talking while his double fights, this specific and poisonous kind of calm commentary.
âYouâve been following them for weeks,â the man says, Steel Balls crashing against his doubleâs mimicked hands. âYou must know by now. Theyâre not something youâre equipped for. What are you, without the tricks?â
The Steel Balls deflect. Gyro repositions. The Spin hums.
âWhat are you, really?â the man continues. âA joke with good timing. A performer with nowhere to perform.â
Gyro doesnât answer. Heâs watching the doubleâs tells, the half-second lag, looking for the seam. He finds it. He lines up the shot.
âI already knows,â you say, from behind him.
Both of them - Gyro and the man - still for a fraction of a second.
âHe doesnât know anything about you,â you say, to Gyro, direct and certain. âDonât listen to it.â
Something happens behind Gyroâs eyes. The Spin comes out of his hand like a decision.
The Golden Spin doesnât care about copies. It unravels what things are made of. The double comes apart at its seams.
The fight ends shortly after, in the specific decisive way that Gyroâs fights tend to end: fast, improbable, and at an angle no one quite anticipated.
Heâs sitting on a rock when you find him. The Steel Balls are still in his hands. Heâs looking at them.
You sit next to him. The sun is going. The desert turns colors it doesnât have a name for.
âBrilliant,â he says. The word comes out wrong - the timingâs off, the gold missing from it.
âThe clown thing,â you say.
âIt doesnât.â He turns a Steel Ball. âThe thing is - he wasnât wrong about the tricks. I do have good tricks.â He pauses. âIâm just - I donât know if thereâs something underneath thatâs worth-â He stops himself. Looks up. âForget it.â
âIâm not going to forget it.â
âIâm asking you to, as a personal favor.â
âI donât do favors when people are being wrong about themselves.â
He looks at you. Really looks, the way he doesnât let himself very often, with the performance actually down, just the tired honest face underneath it.
âYou talked to me,â he says. âIn the middle of the fight.â
âYou didnât have to do that.â
Heâs quiet. Then: âWhy did you.â
You hold his gaze. âBecause it was true,â you say. âAnd because you needed to hear it from someone who meant it.â
He looks at you for a long, unguarded moment. His jaw moves.
Then he says: âWhy did the Steel Ball go to therapy?â
âBecause it had too many issues to spin on its own.â He holds up the ball. It glints.
You stare at him. You cannot believe this is happening.
âThat was-â you start.
âTerrible,â he agrees. âI know. I panicked.â He lowers the Steel Ball. His voice goes quieter. âI panic. When itâs real. Thatâs the thing. I fill it with-â he gestures at the space between you, at the invisible architecture of every joke heâs ever told to avoid something. âThat.â
âYou know,â he repeats. Like it keeps being a surprise. Like he keeps forgetting that you do, in fact, pay attention.
The sun finishes going down.
âThe thing in the desert,â he starts, and stops.
âWe donât have to do it now,â you say.
âNo, I-â He exhales. Runs a hand through his hair. âIf I donât do it now, Iâll make it a bit. Iâll turn it into a thing I say at parties. Iâll tell Johnny it went well when it doesnât exist.â
âOkay,â you say. Waiting.
âI think youâre-â he starts.
A bird calls somewhere in the desert. Gyro closes his eyes briefly.
âI think youâre possibly the most-â He stops again. âThis is - I have a speech. I had a speech. It was very good.â
âIt had three parts.â
âThat sounds thorough.â
âThank you.â He exhales. âI like you,â he says. Simply, finally, without a punchline. âI have for a while. And I didnât say it because I was waiting until the Marco situation resolved and I knew where I was going and whether I had anything worth offering, but then a man in a desert called me a clown and you told him he was wrong and I think thatâs possibly the most-â His voice cracks slightly on the last word. He recovers fast. âRomantic thing thatâs ever happened to me. Which is very embarrassing given my history.â
You look at him. Everything you want to say is arranged behind your teeth, and itâs your turn now and you know it.
âThat youâve been waiting,â you say. âAnd why.â
âIâve been watching you for weeks too,â you say. âI know what it looks like when youâre not performing. I know the seam.â
âSo,â he says. Carefully.
He looks at your hand - the wrapped one, the one he bandaged. He takes it, gently, and holds it the same way he did in the dust after the fall: both of his around yours, certain and careful.
âOkay,â he says. Quietly. âOkay.â
You sit until the stars come out, and Gyro, because he is Gyro, eventually breaks the silence with a story about a Neapolitan fisherman and a very confused pelican that is genuinely one of the funniest things youâve ever heard, and youâre laughing so hard by the end that youâre leaning into him, and his arm comes around you without discussion, without announcement, without any performance at all.
He doesnât say anything when Gyro comes back to camp with your hands loosely joined and an expression that is trying very hard to be normal and completely failing.
âNot a word,â Gyro says.
Johnny looks at the fire. His expression does something that is, depending on the light, possibly a smile.
Heâs already awake when the sun comes up. This is unusual. Gyro does not willingly engage with early mornings.
He is sitting with his Steel Balls and a small piece of bread and an expression that someone who didnât know him might read as calm. You know him. You read it as a man who spent several hours not quite sleeping because something too large and too good was occupying the space where sleep was supposed to go.
You sit next to him. He offers you half the bread without looking.
âHowâs the hand?â he asks.
âGood.â He turns a Steel Ball. âIâve been thinking about what I said last night.â
âI stand by all of it. I want that on the record.â He glances at you sideways. âI also want it on the record that the therapy joke was a low point even for me.â
âIt wasnât your worst.â
You tell him. He winces. He nods with the gravity of a man accepting a fair verdict.
âYeah,â he says. âOkay. That was worse.â
The morning opens up around you - the plains, the horses, the enormous indifferent sky. The race is still out there. The finish line is still far. Marco is still waiting.
Gyro looks at all of it and then looks at you, and his face does the thing it does when heâs not performing: open, a little tired, more than he usually lets show.
âThank you,â he says. âFor last night. For - the thing you said. In the fight.â
âI always hear you.â He says it simply, no decoration. âI know it doesnât seem like it because Iâm usually very loudly hearing myself, but.â
He shakes his head, smiling, helpless. âYou always know.â
âYouâre not that hard to read,â you say. âUnder the tricks.â
He bumps his shoulder into yours. You bump back.
âRide with me today,â he says. Not a performance. A question.
âI always ride with you,â you say.
âYeah, but.â A pause. He holds out his hand - the one not holding the Steel Ball - palm up. An offering. âToday specifically.â
You put your hand in his.
The race continues, the continent enormous and indifferent and full of things that want to kill them, and Gyro Zeppeli rides into the morning with a steel ball spinning on one hand and your fingers threaded through the other, and he is, despite everything, grinning with every tooth he has.
The gold ones catch the morning sun.
It feels, for the first time in a long time, like enough.
You notice it on the fifth day of the race, somewhere in the flat white monotony of the Midwest terrain where the heat makes everything waver at the edges like a half-formed thought.
Diego Brando does not look at people. He assesses them. There is a difference, and you feel it the first time his eyes find you across the rest stop - a slow, downward scan that starts at your horse and ends somewhere around your face, like he is calculating your market value and arriving at a number he hasnât decided how to use yet.
He doesnât smile. He doesnât nod. He simply looks, and then looks away, with the unhurried indifference of a man who has never needed to perform interest to earn it.
You think nothing of it, at first. Half the riders look at each other this way - reading for weakness, cataloguing threat. You look back, hold it exactly as long as he does, and then return to your work.
What you donât see is that he looks again.
Not the predatory sweep of the first time - something shorter, involuntary, like a hand reaching for a cup that isnât there anymore. A reflex. He catches himself doing it somewhere around the third time and the expression that passes across his face is not desire. It is not warmth. It is the particular, tight-jawed look of a man who has found an unexpected variable in a calculation he had already finished.
He does not like variables.
He files you under irrelevant and moves on.
He does not look at you again that evening.
He looks at you six more times before you both make camp, and he is furious about each one.
The word companion is a generous one. What you and Diego Brando actually are is two people moving in the same direction for reasons that have nothing to do with each other, who have arrived at a silent agreement not to make each otherâs lives harder than the race already does.
It began practically. Your supply routes overlapped. He had information about the terrain ahead; you had a contact in the next town who could source feed. The exchange was transactional, clean, and perfectly comfortable for both of you, because neither of you needed it to be anything else.
What it has become is harder to name.
He rides near you. Not beside you - Diego Brando does not ride beside anyone, does not position himself as an equal in a shared column. He rides slightly ahead or slightly behind, always at an angle that suggests coincidence and is never coincidence. If you fall back, he finds a reason to slow. If you push forward, the gap between you compresses within the hour.
He would tell you this was tactical. Mutual visibility. Efficient use of shared information.
You have started to suspect it isnât, but you are not stupid enough to say so.
What you do instead is hand him half your dried provisions one evening when the supply wagon is delayed and his jaw goes tight in a way that has nothing to do with anger, and say, simply, âYou can pay me back in Kansas.â
He takes the provisions. He does not say thank you.
That night he rides slightly closer than usual, and you both pretend not to notice.
It starts the second week.
Youâre watering your horse at a shallow river crossing and he appears beside you, already critiquing the angle of your approach before heâs fully stopped - something about the current and your horseâs hock stress, delivered in that flat, precise tone that makes everything he says sound like he is explaining something to someone who should have already known it.
âYour left rein was overworked this morning,â he says, not looking at you. âYouâre compensating for something in the way she tracks. If you donât correct it by Kansas, youâll lose a day to lameness.â
He is not wrong. You knew about the tracking issue. You had a plan for it.
He makes a sound that is not quite a scoff and not quite acknowledgment, and then says, âYour plan is inefficient,â and explains a better one, which is, in fact, better, and which you hate him for, slightly.
This becomes the pattern.
He finds fault in your campsite selection. He finds fault in your water rationing. He finds fault in your judgment of other riders. What he never does is ignore you.
You begin to understand, slowly and then all at once, that Diego Brandoâs attention has two modes: nothing, and this. The criticism is not contempt. The criticism is the only vocabulary he has for I am paying attention to you that doesnât terrify him.
You start listening to it differently.
You do not tell him this. But the next time he critiques your approach to a climb and you adjust your line based on what he said without being asked, and he goes very still for a moment before saying nothing - you think maybe you understand each other just fine.
SebastiĂĄn Reyes is a Spanish rider, twenty-sixth overall, handsome in the easy way of men whoâve never had to work for anything, and he starts riding near you in Colorado.
It is not subtle. He slows to match your pace. He offers water from his canteen when yours is not empty. He laughs at things that arenât funny in that particular way men laugh when they are performing confidence at someone they want something from.
Diego does not look at SebastiĂĄn Reyes for longer than it takes to categorize him.
On the second day of Reyesâ proximity to you, Reyesâ primary girth strap develops a crack that somehow no one caught in his morning check. It doesnât fail - it almost never actually fails, these things - but it slows him down, makes him cautious, keeps him off your left side for the better part of a day while his team inspects the equipment.
On the third day, a rumor circulates among the supply network - the kind that moves through race infrastructure the way water finds cracks - that Reyes has been misrepresenting his horseâs bloodline to attract sponsors. It is specific enough to be damaging and vague enough to be impossible to disprove quickly. His lead sponsor requests an audit.
Reyes falls back twelve positions dealing with it.
Diego rides beside you that afternoon. He says nothing about Reyes. He says something cutting about the gradient ahead and the inefficiency of your current pace.
You have no proof. You will never have proof.
You do notice that whenever Reyes manages to recover ground and appears again near the front of the pack, something else goes wrong for him - never catastrophic, never traceable, never anything Diego Brando could possibly be connected to.
You notice. You file it away somewhere quiet.
You do not know what to do with it yet.
Gyro Zeppeli misses very little, which is inconvenient for Diego and irrelevant to Diego in roughly equal measure.
He catches you and Diego at the edge of camp one evening - not a scene, nothing as dramatic as that, just Diego standing slightly closer than necessary while he tells you something about the following dayâs route, his voice at its usual clipped, authoritative register, your head tilted toward him in a way that is so unconsciously attentive that Gyro almost feels like an intruder.
He says nothing. He watches Diegoâs hand almost touch your shoulder when you start to move away - almost, hovering for a half-second before withdrawing, a gesture Diego himself probably didnât consciously make - and Gyro files this away with the particular satisfaction of a man who has identified an extremely compelling puzzle.
âBrando,â he says simply.
Johnny looks up from his wheelchair with the weighted patience of a man who has learned that Gyroâs singular-word statements require interpretation. âWhat about him?â
âHeâs in trouble,â Gyro says, and he sounds genuinely, almost compassionately amused. âThe bad kind. The kind heâs not going to see coming.â
Johnny follows his gaze across the camp to where Diego is ostensibly cleaning his kit and not watching you talk to one of the supply runners.
âDo they know?â Johnny asks.
âThey suspect something,â Gyro says. âThey donât know what yet.â
Gyro considers this for a long moment.
âNo,â he says finally. âAnd thatâs what makes it interesting.â
Johnny watches Diego for another moment - the rigid set of his shoulders, the too-deliberate focus on work that is not actually requiring that much focus - and makes a sound that might be sympathy and might be resignation.
âThatâs going to go badly,â Johnny says.
âMagnificently,â Gyro agrees.
There are things Diego Brando does not permit himself.
He does not permit himself to wonder what you are thinking when you go quiet for long stretches of road. He does not permit himself to notice the specific way you sound when you laugh at something genuinely funny versus when you are being polite - not that you are often polite when you could be honest, which is one of the things about you that he has catalogued under irritating and revisits compulsively. He does not permit himself to calculate how long it has been since anyone handed him something without wanting something back.
He does not permit himself to want.
He grew up in a world where wanting was a vulnerability that got exploited before it got satisfied. You learned, fast, in that world, that the moment someone saw what you needed, they owned the space between you and it. His mother had wanted too much, too openly, and the world had taken everything from her in the end. He had stood at the edge of that and decided, with the cold clarity that poverty teaches children early: never.
What he does not have a protocol for is this: the specific, low-frequency pull of you. It does not announce itself. It does not feel like the wanting he knows - the sharp desperate kind, the kind that makes you weak. It feels like gravity. Constant, directionless, indifferent to whether he acknowledges it.
He notices when you arenât there before he notices when you are.
He knows the particular way your horse moves when youâre tired versus when youâre alert and he cannot explain how he acquired this information.
He cannot make you flinch, and he has tried.
That, more than anything, is the problem.
He understands a world that flinches. He does not understand one that holds.
It is raining in Nebraska, the kind of flat, relentless Midwestern rain that has no drama to it, no thunder to give it shape, just grey and cold and wet that gets into everything.
You find him at the edge of camp where he shouldnât be - Diego Brando, alone, not working, not reading, not performing any of the productive things he uses to justify his existence to himself, just sitting against a fence post with his head tilted back slightly and an expression on his face that you have never seen before and that he will absolutely deny ever having.
He looks tired. Not physically - his body is a machine he maintains with frightening discipline. He looks tired in the other way. The way that doesnât have anything to do with miles ridden.
You sit beside him. Not close. Just near.
You donât ask whatâs wrong. You donât offer anything. You just sit in the rain with him and look at the grey flat nothing of the Nebraska distance and let the silence exist without trying to fill it.
This is what undoes him: the not asking.
He is prepared for questions. He is prepared for concern delivered with that particular mix of pity and self-congratulation that passes for compassion in people who want credit for caring. He is prepared to rebuff, to redirect, to cut.
He is not prepared for you to simply be there without needing anything from it.
He doesnât say anything for a long time. When he speaks, it is not about what he is feeling. It is a quiet, precise observation about the weather pattern and what it means for the terrain ahead. Practical. Useful. His voice stripped of its usual performance.
âYou should sleep,â he says eventually. âWet or not. Youâre burning reserves.â
You look at him. There is something in the way you do it - not pity, not anything he has a word for - that makes the back of his throat feel strange.
You stand, and leave, and take your warmth with you into the dark.
He sits in the rain for another twenty minutes.
He files this moment in a place that is not where he files useful information, not where he files tactical data, not where he files things he needs. He files it somewhere with no label. Somewhere he returns to, involuntarily, more often than he will ever admit.
It is not about possession. Diego Brando does not possess people. People are not things to be possessed and he does not deal in sentimentality and he is not -
He stops this line of thought and watches the rider from the French contingent lean over his horseâs neck to speak to you about something, and his hand, at his side, closes once and opens.
He does not act on it immediately. He never acts immediately. Immediacy is what amateurs do - what people who are ruled by feeling do. He watches, and evaluates, and when he moves, he moves with the kind of quiet precision that leaves no trace.
The French rider, he discovers, has been operating with route information from a source that has since become unreliable. A word in the right ear - not Diegoâs ear, never directly - and the misinformation circulates before dinner. The French rider spends the next morning verifying his maps. He is late to the start. He loses the proximity to you that he had been building.
Diego rides near you that morning and says nothing about it.
You ride together in the particular silence that has become its own language between you.
âYouâre in a good mood,â you observe, because his silences have different textures and this one has something underneath it that is almost satisfaction.
âIâm in a neutral mood,â he says, flatly. âDonât project.â
But something in the corner of his mouth moves, almost not at all, and is immediately suppressed.
His name is Cresswell. You learn this after the fact, from race documents and then from Johnnyâs careful, understated account of what happened in the canyon.
What you know in the moment is: he is waiting for you.
Not for the race. Not for anything tactical. For you, specifically - he has been in the race for weeks, running an unremarkable pace, and it becomes clear in the first ten seconds of the encounter that the race was never his objective.
His Stand manifests before he speaks. Something sensory, invasive, that wraps around perception and makes the borders of yourself feel uncertain. You feel it before you see it.
Cresswell is calm. That is the most frightening thing about him. He has the patient, satisfied calm of someone who has been waiting for a long time and has arrived.
âIâve been watching you since the start,â he says. He is not ugly. He is not monstrous in any visible way. That makes it worse. âYou move through this race like youâve already decided something. I wanted to know what.â
You donât answer. You are trying to manage the pressure of his Stand, which works on something adjacent to attention - hijacks it, redirects it, bends your self-perception toward his.
âYour companion,â Cresswell says, conversationally, âis interesting. The way he orbits you. Very territorial, for someone who would tell you he has no claim.â
You donât have the chance to respond to this because Diego arrives.
Diego processes threat in a way that is almost entirely nonverbal - it is in his body, the way he shifts from whatever he was before into something else, something that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with what he survived before he learned to perform anything.
He takes in Cresswell, and the Stand, and you - and something crosses his face that is not the cold assessment youâre used to. It is gone before it fully forms. But you see it.
âThere it is,â Cresswell says, pleasantly. âI wondered how long it would take.â
Scary Monsters activates. The transformation is never comfortable to witness - the particular wrongness of it, the biological rebellion, the way Diego becomes something that is still Diego in its stillness, in the precision of it, in the complete absence of wasted movement.
But Cresswellâs Stand is adaptable. He turns it toward you.
âHe wonât say it,â Cresswell observes, to you, almost thoughtfully, while Diegoâs Stand pressures the edges of his influence. âHeâll never say it. The kind whoâd rather cut you loose than admit heâd go to pieces if you left. Itâs a boring kind of cowardice.â
Diego moves. It happens between instants - territorial and exact - and he is between you and Cresswell before you have fully processed that he moved at all.
The message of his body is not subtle.
You donât get to talk to her.
Cresswell smiles. âYouâre protecting something you wonât name. Doesnât that bother you? To be so obvious to everyone but yourself?â
âWhat it is,â Diego says, and his voice is very quiet, âis none of your concern.â
The fight is vicious and brief. He fights like a man who learned very young that the goal is not to win dramatically but to end the threat as completely and efficiently as possible. He fights with everything, and he ends it.
When it is over, he turns back to you.
He doesnât ask if youâre alright. He checks - eyes moving over you, fast and thorough and completely at odds with the cool disinterest he usually performs - and when he has determined that youâre unharmed, he looks away.
âYour stand for the night is compromised,â he says. His voice is steady. It has cost him something to make it steady. âCome.â
Not a question. Not a request. He starts walking, and because he is Diego Brando, he does not look back to see if youâre following, but his pace is calibrated to yours, and when you fall slightly behind on a rocky section, he slows without appearing to.
Eventually, when the fire is low and the night has gone quiet, you say: âHe knew.â
Diegoâs jaw tightens. âHe was observant. Itâs not the same as knowing anything.â
âHe said youâd never say it.â
A pause. The fire pops once.
âHe was right,â Diego says, and the flatness of it is its own brutal honesty. He doesnât deny that there is something to say. He doesnât deny that Cresswell identified something real. He simply confirms, without looking at you, that he will not say it - and the confirmation itself is more than you expected from him, and more than heâs ever offered anyone.
You look at him for a long time. He does not look back.
âIâm not going anywhere,â you say, quietly. Not a declaration. Not a weight placed on him. Just a fact, stated plainly, the way youâd state a weather observation or a distance.
The silence that follows is the longest of the race.
Three days later, in the grey-gold light of early morning, you wake before the camp does.
Diego is already awake - he is always already awake, you have never once caught him sleeping - and he is crouched by your horse, working.
It takes you a moment to understand what youâre seeing.
He is checking her hooves. Quietly, methodically, with the kind of practiced efficiency that suggests he has done it before. Your horse, who is not always easy with strangers, stands perfectly still for him, and he works through each hoof with a pick and a small brush, checking the frog, checking the shoe setting, cleaning the crevices. He does not know youâre watching. He is not performing this for you.
He is simply doing it - in the dark, before the camp wakes, because yesterdayâs terrain was difficult and your horse has slightly softer soles than his and he noticed. Because three days ago in a canyon he stood between you and something that wanted to unmake you, and the only vocabulary he has for what that means is this: the small, quiet maintenance of something he cannot afford to lose.
He sets the last hoof down and stands, and thatâs when he sees you.
His face does the thing it does - the compression, the withdrawal, the reassembly of the mask. He picks up the pick and brush and says, not quite looking at you: âHer left front was starting to pack. Youâd have noticed it by midday.â
You would have. Heâs right.
He nods, once, and walks away toward the water.
You watch him go, and you think about a man who grew up with nothing, who learned that warmth was a weapon others used on you, who has spent his entire life making himself into something that nothing can reach - and who got up before dawn to tend your horse so you wouldnât have to.
You donât say anything. You wonât say anything.
But you think: I see you.
And somewhere across the camp, in the particular quality of the way he doesnât look back, you think maybe he knows.
You are not in love yet. Neither is he.
But the race is long, and he keeps showing up, and that - for Diego Brando - is the whole of it.
