ommg wb!! Can I please get some johnny and diego jealousy hcs! Tysm:33
HIII 🍊 anon!!! I’m also gonna include Gyro because I love writing for him lwk 😭
Also I went off tangent with this one… cuz like… what if their jealousy finally became externalized during a fight 👀👀👀👀 but with an enemy stand user who’s crazy about reader…. 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀 are yall catching my flow… 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀
Also have mercy on me when it comes to the action scenes… guys I’m a newgen ☹️💔
Tags: Gender neutral reader, SFW
You hadn’t asked to ride alongside him. That’s what Johnny remembers most - everyone else who’d 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.
You’d pulled up alongside him somewhere in the flats of Kansas and simply said, “Your water supply’s loaded wrong. The weight’s going to fatigue your horse before the next town.”
He’d told you to mind your business.
You’d shrugged and fallen back, and by the hour’s end, his horse was struggling.
He didn’t apologize. He doesn’t do that easily. But the next morning when he found his supplies rearranged and balanced - you’d 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 weren’t doing him any favors, like it was just the obvious thing to do.
“You’re still here,” he said.
“Race isn’t over,” you answered.
And that was that. You became a unit of three: Gyro, Johnny, and you. The arrangement didn’t get a name. It didn’t need one.
What Johnny didn’t 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 doesn’t care what your body can and can’t 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 doesn’t want your help. He’ll tell you so directly if you offer it wrong.
You figured this out fast.
You don’t offer your hand. You don’t hover. When his chair gets stuck in sucking mud near a river crossing, you don’t rush over - you look at the terrain, look at the angle, and say, “There’s a firmer line about six feet north. See the color change in the ground?” And then you ride that line first, demonstrating, letting him make the call.
He takes it. Makes it across. Doesn’t thank you, but his shoulders drop about half an inch from where they’d been locked.
What he notices - what burns into him in a way he doesn’t have a name for yet - is that you never make him smaller. You don’t 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 don’t want you to look at me like I’m broken. And then, quieter, twisting into something almost painful: You don’t.
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 Johnny’s expression flatlines into studied neutrality. He notices the grip on the wheel of the chair tighten.
“You know,” Gyro says conversationally, spinning a Steel Ball on one finger, “if you stared any harder, you’d need to start paying rent on the view.”
“I’m not staring at anything,” Johnny says. “I’m keeping track of the group.”
“The group.” Gyro grins, slow and delighted. “Yes. Your extraordinary concern for the group is very moving.”
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 you’ve gone to check on the horses and it’s just the two of them by the dying fire, Gyro says more quietly: “They’re good for you.”
Johnny doesn’t answer. His eyes are on the middle distance, somewhere in the direction you went.
“Don’t wait forever,” Gyro adds. “This race has a way of making ‘later’ disappear.”
Johnny still doesn’t answer. But he doesn’t tell him to shut up, either.
It’s 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. He’s making you laugh. He’s 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.
It’s nothing, he tells himself. You can talk to whoever you want. You’re not his. That’s not a thing.
He pushes himself closer anyway. Casually. The way a person just happens to drift in a direction.
“We’re moving out,” he says flatly, appearing at your elbow. He doesn’t look at the other rider.
You glance at him. “We’ve got another thirty minutes before-“
“I said we’re moving.” 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 Johnny’s jawline, which is communicating quite clearly - and finds somewhere else to be.
You turn to Johnny with a slight raise of your brow. “We absolutely had thirty minutes.”
“Route’s getting crowded. Better to go now.”
A pause. You’re reading him. He hates that you can do that.
“Sure,” 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 doesn’t 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.
He’ll 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 one’s watching.
He should look away. He catalogues the angle of your jaw instead.
“What are you thinking about?” he asks once. The words surprise him as much as you.
You consider it genuinely. “If the stars look different at the finish line.”
“They won’t,” he says. “Stars don’t care about finish lines.”
You turn your head toward him, smiling slightly. “Is that a Johnny Joestar motivational speech?”
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.
“Why are you doing this race?” 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 doesn’t for most people - and when you finish, he’s quiet for a moment.
“That’s not stupid,” he says.
Which, from Johnny Joestar, is approximately equivalent to that’s one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard.
You seem to understand this, because you smile at the fire and say, “Thanks, Johnny,” 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. That’s the part that unsettles him later - the way his body moved toward you without the instruction of his mind.
“I’m fine,” you say, standard-issue and automatic.
“You’re bleeding,” he says. He doesn’t 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 isn’t his fault, which is an urge he almost never has.
“You should have kept tighter control of the reins on that approach,” he says instead, because tenderness disguised as criticism is the only currency he currently has.
“I know,” you say. No argument. His hands slow slightly.
“Pay attention next time.”
“I know you’re not actually angry.”
He ties off the bandage. His hands stay on your arm a beat longer than necessary, and he knows it, and he still doesn’t move them immediately.
“Finish line’s a long way off,” he finally says, which means: don’t scare me like that again. You seem to understand.
He doesn’t sleep well that night. He tells himself it’s 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.
“You held their arm for about twelve seconds after that bandage was done,” Gyro says pleasantly. “I counted.”
“I was checking the tightness of the wrap.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You’re always saying something. You literally don’t have an off switch.”
Gyro is quiet for three seconds. Then: “You’d put yourself between them and a bullet.”
It’s not a question. And it lands differently than the teasing does - flat and true, like a Steel Ball finding its mark.
Johnny doesn’t answer. His jaw works silently.
“I know,” is all Gyro says, and drops back, leaving Johnny alone with the horizon and the specific, inconvenient truth of it.
His name doesn’t 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.
“Good afternoon,” he says. His voice is pleasant. His eyes don’t move from your face. “I’ve been looking for you.”
You frown. “I don’t know you.”
“I know you,” he says. Simply. Like a fact of geography. “I’ve known about you since the start of the race. I’ve been tracking you.”
Something goes cold in the group. Gyro’s hand moves toward his Steel Balls. Johnny goes very still.
“I’d like you to ride with me,” the man continues. He’s still not threatening, and that’s worse - there’s an absolute certainty in him, the certainty of someone who doesn’t consider refusal a real outcome. “You don’t need these two anymore.”
“They’re not going anywhere,” 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. There’s something in that look - not hatred, just a mild, disdainful reclassification. An obstacle assessment.
“That,” he says, “will be addressed.”
The Stand’s 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 can’t 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.
“A little rough?” Gyro calls from his own cage, and even his voice has lost some of its lightness.
Johnny doesn’t answer. He tries a different angle. Another. His fingers are bleeding. He doesn’t register it.
What he registers is the moment the man reaches out and puts a hand on your shoulder - possessively, like he’s demonstrating ownership - and you flinch away from him.
Something breaks open in Johnny’s chest. Not breaks - cracks. Wide enough that everything he’d 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 rage’s hotter, more desperate cousin.
He doesn’t think about the mechanism. He doesn’t 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 Stand’s layout rather than its brute shell - and the wall comes apart.
He’s through before the pieces finish falling.
The fight ends. Gyro deals with the logistics. Johnny doesn’t watch. He’s watching you.
You’re 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 he’s gone. A particular kind of shaken. The kind that comes from being looked at like a thing.
Johnny wheels to you and stops. He doesn’t have a speech. He doesn’t have the language for what just came apart in him on the other side of that barrier.
You look at him. There’s something open in your face right now that the steadiness usually covers, and he is looking at it directly and not looking away.
“He was tracking me,” you say. “He knew my name. He knew - a lot.”
“He’s not going to come near you again.”
“I do.” Said with the flatness of absolute intent, not bravado.
You look at him for a moment. Then, quietly: “You got through the barrier.”
A pause. He could explain the mechanics. He chooses honesty instead, the rare, painful kind. “I needed to get through it.”
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 doesn’t say anything else. He can’t, yet. The door isn’t open wide enough and he is standing at it with one hand on the frame, not ready to walk through.
But he doesn’t back away from it either.
Gyro is asleep inside the abandoned farmhouse they’ve sheltered in. The fire is outside, low and amber. You’re 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 doesn’t offer an explanation for why he’s outside at this hour. You don’t ask.
He maneuvers close - not far away, the way he’d usually leave a careful buffer of plausible distance - and stops near enough that the blanket’s edge is almost at his wheel.
“You’re still shaken,” he says. Not a question.
“It’s not weakness,” he says, and the words come out strange, almost careful, like he’s testing their weight. “Being unsettled by that. It’d be the wrong response not to be.”
You glance at him sideways. It’s a surprisingly generous thing for him to have said, and you both know it.
“That might be the kindest thing you’ve ever said to me,” you tell him.
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 doesn’t take his hand back. You don’t move away.
“That man,” he starts. Stops. “The way he looked at you.” His jaw tightens. “I didn’t- “ 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 hadn’t managed yet.
“I know,” you say quietly. Because you do.
He doesn’t 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 doesn’t take them back all night.
He’s 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 he’s claimed relative to yours is different - closer, in a way that wasn’t there before, in a way that isn’t 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.
“You should eat before we move out,” he says.
“Good morning to you too.”
“It’s not a bad morning. There’s jerky in the left pack.”
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.
“You’re slow in the mornings,” he says.
“You like it,” 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, there’s 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 it’s almost architectural.
“Not a word,” Johnny says, without looking at him.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” 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. That’s all.
It starts with a steel ball.
Not for any useful reason - he isn’t practicing the Spin, isn’t warming up, isn’t 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 you’re speaking to notices. You do not. You’re looking at a map.
That’s the thing that hooks him. Everyone notices Gyro Zeppeli when he wants them to. You simply - don’t, yet, and the yet becomes a project he doesn’t 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.
“Beautiful morning,” he says, in English first, then Italian because some things are better in Italian. “Almost as beautiful as the view.”
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.
“Your horse’s left rear shoe is loose,” you say. “You’ll lose it by the first checkpoint.”
He looks down at the horse’s 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 you’re 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 doesn’t 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.
“He’s showing off,” Johnny says to you one afternoon, watching Gyro demonstrate a Spin technique to a cluster of strangers who definitely hadn’t asked.
“He’s always showing off,” you say.
“Yeah,” Johnny says, in the flat specific way he has that means: that’s not what I said.
There’s 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 he’s doing.
Gyro’s 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 isn’t pushed. He simply finds that there is no longer any available space.
Later, riding ahead, Johnny says: “Subtle.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gyro says.
“I was just telling a story.”
“For forty-five minutes.”
Johnny doesn’t 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 isn’t 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 you’re 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.
“Marco,” he says instead, and then stops, like he surprised himself.
He looks at the water. “There’s a boy back home. He’s-“ He pauses, searching for the architecture of an explanation. “I’m out here because of him. Because there’s something I have to do before I can go back.” He turns the Steel Ball in his fingers. “I don’t talk about it a lot.”
He glances at you. “You know?”
“You only go quiet when it’s something real,” you say. “You’re very loud otherwise.”
He laughs, short and surprised. “That’s - that’s not wrong.” He looks back at the water. “I just thought you should know there’s a reason. That this isn’t just-“ he gestures at himself, the grin, the gold teeth, the performance of it, “-all the way down.”
“I never thought it was,” you say.
He doesn’t 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 you’d bump a friend.
It doesn’t feel like a friend thing. You don’t say so.
There is a man at the bar in a waystation saloon. He is not even particularly remarkable, this man - he’s 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.
“You know they can’t actually hear you from here,” Johnny says.
“I’m entertaining these fine people,” Gyro says, not looking away from the bar.
“They laughed,” Johnny says.
The Steel Ball in Gyro’s hand makes a specific sound against its partner. “At what.”
“Don’t know. Something he said.”
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.
It’s late. You’re 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 doesn’t need to be filled.
“You know,” Johnny says, eventually.
“I know a lot of things,” Gyro says. “Narrow it down.”
“You say everything except the things.”
Gyro is quiet for a moment. He picks up a steel ball. Sets it down. “I’m aware of that, yes.”
A long pause. The fire pops.
“Because I have things I have to do first,” Gyro says. “Things that aren’t done. And it doesn’t seem-” He stops. Tries again. “It doesn’t seem right to ask someone to-“ Another stop. He laughs, short and humorless. “This is why I don’t talk about it.”
Johnny looks at the fire. “The race is going to end,” he says. “One way or the other.”
“Waiting for it to end before you say anything is just a different kind of not saying anything.”
Gyro turns to look at him. “When did you get wise.”
“I was always wise,” Johnny says. “You just never shut up long enough to notice.”
Gyro laughs - a real one, tired around the edges. He looks up at the sky.
“They deserves someone who knows where he’s going,” he says quietly.
Johnny doesn’t 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 you’ve 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.
“Don’t say you’re fine,” he says, arriving on his knees in the dust in front of you.
“Do not say you’re fine.”
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.
“Not deep,” he says. “You’ll keep the hand.” A beat. “Did you want a joke about that or are we not at that stage of recovery yet.”
“Later,” you say. Still catching your breath.
“Later,” he agrees. He doesn’t 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 doesn’t fill the silence. He doesn’t 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 isn’t 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 doesn’t quite release it immediately.
“Okay,” 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.
“I’ve been parallel to your route since Arizona’s border,” he says. His voice is pleasant and completely without warmth. “Watching. You’re remarkable.” He’s speaking only to you. The other two have been reclassified into background. “I’d like you to come with me. The rest of this-” a gesture at Gyro and Johnny, at the horses, at the race itself “-is unnecessary.”
“They’re not going anywhere,” Gyro says. His voice is different. Still level, but the performance is gone - what’s underneath it is not softer. It’s 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 isn’t hatred. It’s more dismissive than hatred.
“The clown,” he says. Simply. Like a classification. “Spinning toys, protecting something that isn’t yours.” He looks back at you. “You’re better than the company you’re keeping.”
The steel balls in Gyro’s hand click once, sharp and deliberate.
“Last warning,” Gyro says, and there is nothing behind it but the Spin, and the road, and the distance between you and the man’s 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 isn’t thinking clearly, which is both his liability and, eventually, the entire point.
Johnny gets separated - Stand-double drives a wedge between them - and then it’s 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.
“You’ve been following them for weeks,” the man says, Steel Balls crashing against his double’s mimicked hands. “You must know by now. They’re not something you’re equipped for. What are you, without the tricks?”
The Steel Balls deflect. Gyro repositions. The Spin hums.
“What are you, really?” the man continues. “A joke with good timing. A performer with nowhere to perform.”
Gyro doesn’t answer. He’s watching the double’s tells, the half-second lag, looking for the seam. He finds it. He lines up the shot.
“I already knows,” you say, from behind him.
Both of them - Gyro and the man - still for a fraction of a second.
“He doesn’t know anything about you,” you say, to Gyro, direct and certain. “Don’t listen to it.”
Something happens behind Gyro’s eyes. The Spin comes out of his hand like a decision.
The Golden Spin doesn’t 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 Gyro’s fights tend to end: fast, improbable, and at an angle no one quite anticipated.
He’s sitting on a rock when you find him. The Steel Balls are still in his hands. He’s looking at them.
You sit next to him. The sun is going. The desert turns colors it doesn’t have a name for.
“Brilliant,” he says. The word comes out wrong - the timing’s off, the gold missing from it.
“The clown thing,” you say.
“It doesn’t.” He turns a Steel Ball. “The thing is - he wasn’t wrong about the tricks. I do have good tricks.” He pauses. “I’m just - I don’t know if there’s something underneath that’s worth-” He stops himself. Looks up. “Forget it.”
“I’m not going to forget it.”
“I’m asking you to, as a personal favor.”
“I don’t do favors when people are being wrong about themselves.”
He looks at you. Really looks, the way he doesn’t let himself very often, with the performance actually down, just the tired honest face underneath it.
“You talked to me,” he says. “In the middle of the fight.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
He’s quiet. Then: “Why did you.”
You hold his gaze. “Because it was true,” you say. “And because you needed to hear it from someone who meant it.”
He looks at you for a long, unguarded moment. His jaw moves.
Then he says: “Why did the Steel Ball go to therapy?”
“Because it had too many issues to spin on its own.” He holds up the ball. It glints.
You stare at him. You cannot believe this is happening.
“Terrible,” he agrees. “I know. I panicked.” He lowers the Steel Ball. His voice goes quieter. “I panic. When it’s real. That’s the thing. I fill it with-“ he gestures at the space between you, at the invisible architecture of every joke he’s ever told to avoid something. “That.”
“You know,” he repeats. Like it keeps being a surprise. Like he keeps forgetting that you do, in fact, pay attention.
The sun finishes going down.
“The thing in the desert,” he starts, and stops.
“We don’t have to do it now,” you say.
“No, I-” He exhales. Runs a hand through his hair. “If I don’t do it now, I’ll make it a bit. I’ll turn it into a thing I say at parties. I’ll tell Johnny it went well when it doesn’t exist.”
“Okay,” you say. Waiting.
“I think you’re-” he starts.
A bird calls somewhere in the desert. Gyro closes his eyes briefly.
“I think you’re possibly the most-“ He stops again. “This is - I have a speech. I had a speech. It was very good.”
“Thank you.” He exhales. “I like you,” he says. Simply, finally, without a punchline. “I have for a while. And I didn’t 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 that’s possibly the most-” His voice cracks slightly on the last word. He recovers fast. “Romantic thing that’s ever happened to me. Which is very embarrassing given my history.”
You look at him. Everything you want to say is arranged behind your teeth, and it’s your turn now and you know it.
“That you’ve been waiting,” you say. “And why.”
“I’ve been watching you for weeks too,” you say. “I know what it looks like when you’re not performing. I know the seam.”
“So,” 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.
“Okay,” he says. Quietly. “Okay.”
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 you’ve ever heard, and you’re laughing so hard by the end that you’re leaning into him, and his arm comes around you without discussion, without announcement, without any performance at all.
He doesn’t 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.
Johnny looks at the fire. His expression does something that is, depending on the light, possibly a smile.
He’s 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 didn’t 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.
“How’s the hand?” he asks.
“Good.” He turns a Steel Ball. “I’ve been thinking about what I said last night.”
“I stand by all of it. I want that on the record.” He glances at you sideways. “I also want it on the record that the therapy joke was a low point even for me.”
You tell him. He winces. He nods with the gravity of a man accepting a fair verdict.
“Yeah,” he says. “Okay. That was worse.”
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 he’s not performing: open, a little tired, more than he usually lets show.
“Thank you,” he says. “For last night. For - the thing you said. In the fight.”
“I always hear you.” He says it simply, no decoration. “I know it doesn’t seem like it because I’m usually very loudly hearing myself, but.”
He shakes his head, smiling, helpless. “You always know.”
“You’re not that hard to read,” you say. “Under the tricks.”
He bumps his shoulder into yours. You bump back.
“Ride with me today,” he says. Not a performance. A question.
“I always ride with you,” you say.
“Yeah, but.” A pause. He holds out his hand - the one not holding the Steel Ball - palm up. An offering. “Today specifically.”
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 hasn’t decided how to use yet.
He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t 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 don’t 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 isn’t 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 other’s 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 isn’t, 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, “You can pay me back in Kansas.”
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.
You’re watering your horse at a shallow river crossing and he appears beside you, already critiquing the angle of your approach before he’s fully stopped - something about the current and your horse’s 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.
“Your left rein was overworked this morning,” he says, not looking at you. “You’re compensating for something in the way she tracks. If you don’t correct it by Kansas, you’ll lose a day to lameness.”
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, “Your plan is inefficient,” 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 Brando’s 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 doesn’t 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.
Sebastián Reyes is a Spanish rider, twenty-sixth overall, handsome in the easy way of men who’ve 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 aren’t funny in that particular way men laugh when they are performing confidence at someone they want something from.
Diego does not look at Sebastián Reyes for longer than it takes to categorize him.
On the second day of Reyes’ proximity to you, Reyes’ primary girth strap develops a crack that somehow no one caught in his morning check. It doesn’t 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 horse’s 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 day’s 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 Diego’s hand almost touch your shoulder when you start to move away - almost, hovering for a half-second before withdrawing, a gesture Diego himself probably didn’t consciously make - and Gyro files this away with the particular satisfaction of a man who has identified an extremely compelling puzzle.
“Brando,” he says simply.
Johnny looks up from his wheelchair with the weighted patience of a man who has learned that Gyro’s singular-word statements require interpretation. “What about him?”
“He’s in trouble,” Gyro says, and he sounds genuinely, almost compassionately amused. “The bad kind. The kind he’s not going to see coming.”
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.
“Do they know?” Johnny asks.
“They suspect something,” Gyro says. “They don’t know what yet.”
Gyro considers this for a long moment.
“No,” he says finally. “And that’s what makes it interesting.”
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.
“That’s going to go badly,” Johnny says.
“Magnificently,” 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 aren’t there before he notices when you are.
He knows the particular way your horse moves when you’re tired versus when you’re 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 shouldn’t 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 doesn’t have anything to do with miles ridden.
You sit beside him. Not close. Just near.
You don’t ask what’s wrong. You don’t 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 doesn’t 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.
“You should sleep,” he says eventually. “Wet or not. You’re burning reserves.”
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 horse’s 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 Diego’s 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.
“You’re in a good mood,” you observe, because his silences have different textures and this one has something underneath it that is almost satisfaction.
“I’m in a neutral mood,” he says, flatly. “Don’t project.”
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 Johnny’s 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.
“I’ve been watching you since the start,” he says. He is not ugly. He is not monstrous in any visible way. That makes it worse. “You move through this race like you’ve already decided something. I wanted to know what.”
You don’t 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.
“Your companion,” Cresswell says, conversationally, “is interesting. The way he orbits you. Very territorial, for someone who would tell you he has no claim.”
You don’t 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 you’re used to. It is gone before it fully forms. But you see it.
“There it is,” Cresswell says, pleasantly. “I wondered how long it would take.”
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 Cresswell’s Stand is adaptable. He turns it toward you.
“He won’t say it,” Cresswell observes, to you, almost thoughtfully, while Diego’s Stand pressures the edges of his influence. “He’ll never say it. The kind who’d rather cut you loose than admit he’d go to pieces if you left. It’s a boring kind of cowardice.”
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 don’t get to talk to her.
Cresswell smiles. “You’re protecting something you won’t name. Doesn’t that bother you? To be so obvious to everyone but yourself?”
“What it is,” Diego says, and his voice is very quiet, “is none of your concern.”
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 doesn’t ask if you’re 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 you’re unharmed, he looks away.
“Your stand for the night is compromised,” he says. His voice is steady. It has cost him something to make it steady. “Come.”
Not a question. Not a request. He starts walking, and because he is Diego Brando, he does not look back to see if you’re 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: “He knew.”
Diego’s jaw tightens. “He was observant. It’s not the same as knowing anything.”
“He said you’d never say it.”
A pause. The fire pops once.
“He was right,” Diego says, and the flatness of it is its own brutal honesty. He doesn’t deny that there is something to say. He doesn’t 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 he’s ever offered anyone.
You look at him for a long time. He does not look back.
“I’m not going anywhere,” you say, quietly. Not a declaration. Not a weight placed on him. Just a fact, stated plainly, the way you’d 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 you’re 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 you’re watching. He is not performing this for you.
He is simply doing it - in the dark, before the camp wakes, because yesterday’s 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 that’s 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: “Her left front was starting to pack. You’d have noticed it by midday.”
You would have. He’s 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 wouldn’t have to.
You don’t say anything. You won’t say anything.
But you think: I see you.
And somewhere across the camp, in the particular quality of the way he doesn’t 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.
