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Johnny does not pray anymore.
Not properly. Not with words lined up like soldiers. But some nights, when the desert goes quiet in that judging way, he still presses his palms together out of habit. Muscle memory from a life where he was good. Or at least useful.
Religion was never something Johnny wore openly. Not like the people out here, all loud faith and louder certainty. Johnny is selfish. Stubborn. He wants things, and when he wants them badly enough, morality becomes flexible. Looking back, it almost makes him laugh.
When he was younger, he wanted horses. Then women. Then victory, never stepping off the podium, never being forgotten. Then everything was taken from him right in front of his eyes, and now all he wants is the most basic human function imaginable.
To walk.
That is where religion creeps back in.
Johnny does not take his body for granted anymore. He races like he does not care if he gets hurt, but a gut wrenching fear settles in his stomach at the thought of losing another ability. Every fight with a stand user. That would be the worst thing. A functioning mind trapped in a body that will not listen.
He thanks God every day that he can still feel his upper body, and curses Him just as often for taking his legs. Gratitude and resentment braided so tightly he can’t tell which comes first.
Ironic, really. Johnny has fucked so many girls he lost count. He has killed people. Johnny sins every single day.
Gyro, Johnny’s racing partner, was a strange man.
“You know,” Gyro says one evening, voice light as he polishes a steel ball,the glow of the dying sun catching the metal, sparks flickering across his hands, “if God’s still keeping score, I’m definitely already screwed.” Johnny snorts despite himself.
Gyro has also always rather been…close to Johnny. Johnny told him to knock it off at first. He decided it must be a European thing. Europeans are queer. Not really a complaint. Just a fact he can’t stop noticing…………Diego as an example.
Anyways!
In the beginning of the Race their bedrolls started out just touching. Then overlapping. Then the distinction disappears entirely, night after night.
They are deep into the race now past the point where days blur together, past the point where stopping feels optional. The desert stretches wide and exposed.
The desert usually cools sharply after sundown, the heat bleeding out of the sand until the air feels thin and exposed. Johnny is always aware of Gyro’s body beside his. The weight of him. The warmth. The soft scrape of fabric when he shifts. Sometimes Gyro’s hand finds Johnny’s wrist in the dark. Sometimes his fingers trace Johnny’s forearm, slow and absentminded, like he is mapping something familiar.
Johnny used to be all sharp, had somewhat masculine lines. A jockey’s body. Light. Narrow. Now his shoulders are fuller, arms thickened by necessity. Gyro traces scars, pale arm hair, muscle grown uneven from use. Johnny flinched at first. Eventually, he stopped. If Gyro needs this, then let it be
In the morning, Gyro never comments on it. Neither does Johnny
It’s almost as if Gyro simply couldn’t care about what he was implying. No matter how many times Johnny caught his lingering glances, he kept doing it, completely shameless
And hell, they are both men. Gyro sure as hell shouldn't make Johnny feel like the woman. Johnny briefly wonders if he should compensate somehow, if he owes something in return, a stubborn thought of “Hey, yeah, let’s make Gyro feel like the lady! I could be charmin’ him right now” Creeps in, but the thought disgusts him and he throws it away. He will not indulge that.
Still, the closeness stirs something in him.
Johnny is a cripple. He has been treated like one. And then this European queer comes along and Johnny feels like a whole person again. Out in the open. Visible. Under God’s eyes. By feeling alive, Johnny is defying His will. And God- God must have made that Person a man. A man to punish Johnny for even daring to feel alive again. He’s dismissing God's punishment;
Every time Johnny pulls away, every time he talks loudly about women, every time he tells Gyro about some faggot who hit on him and watches Gyro’s jaw tighten, the desire only sharpens. He wants Gyro to look at him differently. To desire him in a way only a man and a woman could.
Johnny hates that part of himself most. The wanting. Maybe even yearning.
It makes him cruel. Makes him sharp. He leans into it, like if he names it ugly first, it cannot hurt him. He talks about women. Loudly. Casually. Bodies like trophies, mouths like objects. Preferences like big tits, darker hair. That one threesome. Blah blah. Gyro listens with that infuriating half smile, like he assumes Johnny is lying but will not call him on it. Johnny hasn’t once lied about his sexual encounters. Gyro probably knows that.
“Good for you,” Gyro once said. “You always did have good taste.”
Johnny waited for jealousy. For a comment. For something. Nothing ever came.
And it digs under his skin. Because if Gyro does not react, Johnny has nothing to push against. No excuse to say, “Do not act queer. See? This is wrong. This is shameful. This is filthy.” Without resistance, he has nothing to push against. Then it’d be just his thoughts.
….
The race nearly kills him that day.
Every Stand encounter feels like bargaining with God. Take this instead of that. Leave me this. Let me keep this. Survival weighed against limbs, against skin, against the heart. And God- it hurt. When they finally stop for the night, the desert looks bruised. Purple shadows, burnt orange sky. Matching Johnny and Gyro in their bruised, exhausted forms. The wind carries the faint smell of dry sage and horse. Johnny’s hands shake when he pulls off his boots.
“You pushed too hard,” Gyro says. Nothing more. Gyro couldn’t drag a dead racing partner across the country.
“I was fine.”
Gyro hums and kneels anyway. His fingers close around Johnny’s boot, sliding it off inch by inch. His knuckles brush Johnny’s calf. Johnny grips the edge of his bedroll hard enough to make his hands ache. A sigh escapes him before he can stop it. Heat gathers low in his stomach, a traitor.
Gyro does not pull away when the boot comes free. He sets it aside carefully. His hands linger at Johnny’s ankle, thumbs pressing lightly into (probably) sore muscles. He traces downward, slow, deliberate, until his palm covers Johnny’s toes.
Johnny cannot feel a thing. Nothing except a phantom touch. One he can’t even be sure he didn’t imagine, a memory of sensation from before his legs went numb.
“You should pray,” Johnny mutters.
Gyro pauses. Just for a moment. “For what?” He tilts his head, hair falling over his shoulders, eyes reflecting the dying embers. “Forgiveness?” There it was; that expression Johnny couldn’t place.
Johnny swallows. He does not answer. He presses his palms against the ground. Every heartbeat echoes deep within his chest
Gyro is done, sits back on his heels. For a moment he just looks at Johnny, a quiet curiosity in his gaze. The firelight flickers across his angular features. Johnny looked right back, Gyro is a prideful man.
But even then he lets himself linger. Gyro has a face that feels impossibly split, the most feminine and masculine thing Johnny has ever seen. He carries everything that makes a woman beautiful and a man handsome at once. His nose has a bump, imperfect and masculine, but his lips are full and soft. His jaw is sharp, undeniable, yet his lashes are long enough that any flings would say it’s unfair. The desert air grows colder
God, it hurts to look at him. This is the yearning Johnny means, the thing he cannot name without making it ugly. He wants to make Gyro his woman. He has never really dated anyone, not properly, but God, he wants to hold him. Wants to run his hands through Gyro’s hair while he curls against Johnny’s chest, safe and devastating. To feel safe against him. To rest the weight of years and failures on him. Maybe build a farm with him. That would be great. A place far away from lots of others. But it wasn’t just the imagination: “What if he were a woman” no... no, it was worse than that.
God has already forsaken Johnny. No, he has cursed him.
“I will get water,” Gyro simply says, and gives him space. Realistically not abandonment. More so a test. A letting-be. Gyro knows Johnny will wrestle with desire, shame, and the ache of proximity, and he leaves him alone so Johnny can feel it fully. Every phantom touch, every imagined scrape of skin against skin becomes Johnny’s own confession. But fuck, Johnny is afraid the taller man might never return. It’s a foolish thought…
Johnny exhales like he has been holding his breath all day. He hates himself for missing the phantom touch of warmth on his foot the second it is gone and in that absence, every nerve fires: the shape of Gyro’s hand, the imagined pressure, the slow, deliberate care.
….
Later that evening Gyro settles beside him again. This time he does not touch. That is somehow worse. The guilt arrives first, heavy, settling in Johnny’s chest before he can name it. Nothing has happened. Nothing has been said. And still his body leans forward inside itself, already adjusted, already waiting.
He knows the direction this is going. Not in detail. Not in images. Just the pull. The way his breath catches when Gyro shifts. Wanting comes first, sharp and criminal, and Johnny has learned that wanting is already sin.
If Gyro crossed the line, he could push back. But Gyro does nothing. He just stays. And Johnny’s body responds anyway. That makes it his. The guilt sharpens because it is premature. Because it is policing something that has not yet happened. He hates that he cannot pretend innocence when nothing has technically occurred.
Heat gathers where he cannot ignore it. A slow, humiliating betrayal that makes his jaw clench. He goes still, afraid that even the slightest twitch will give him away. Afraid because he knows Gyro would notice. God dammit!!, he isn’t a pent-up teenager… though maybe that part of him still exists.
As long as he feels guilty enough, maybe he can still stop himself. He has been cruel to Gyro before, sharp when Gyro’s own perverted hands reached for him, rejecting what he could not name. And now the desert is wide and he realizes with a sting of shame that the perversion is his own, the lust that used to make him recoil now driving him, raw and unrestrained. Gyro is quiet, patient and settled with an unusual stillness Johnny cannot escape.
“You did well today,” Gyro breaks the silence.
Johnny scoffs. “I almost got us killed.”
“But you did not.”
Gyro shifts closer, careful not to jostle him. Their shoulders brush. There it is. The touch. Johnny’s mind, despite every vow he swore, forgets itself entirely. The faint scent of leather, of sweat, of something uniquely Gyro lingers in the space between them. Something painfully male.
“I…” His voice comes out wrong. Tight. Strained. He swallows. “I am not a good partner for you,” Johnny says suddenly, the words tripping over each other. “I am selfish. I am cruel. I am not the kind of man people end up happy with.”
Gyro hums softly. “That sounds like a confession.”
Johnny laughs once, humorless. “Do not start.”
Gyro’s expression twists, familiar and sharp. Johnny recognizes it now. The same twist from arguments, from teasing, from all those moments Johnny tried to push him away. When Johnny tells him to stop acting like a fag. When Johnny pretends not to understand what he is really saying. Dense on purpose. Cowardly. Maybe Johnny was only brave when it was selfish. When it was about something he knew he wanted.
“I…” Johnny tries again. The word sticks. He hates how small he feels. Hates how easy it is to mean. “I want to…” He stops. Every syllable drags something heavy up his spine. “I want things I should not want.”
Gyro tilts his head. He already knows. Johnny can see it in his eyes. Even from the way he acts. “And what might those things be?”
Johnny swallows hard. It's stupid Johnny isn’t that religious. Johnny makes a sound he does not recognize. His chest heaves. Even as his body arches closer, an unsettling fear flickers sharp and desperate. “I should not feel like this,” Johnny whispers, breaking. “I do not care about God, who the corpse is, I do not care about the dead, so why does it feel like this?...How do you do it? You are Christian.”
Gyro’s hands slide along Johnny’s sides, close enough to promise, far enough to wait. Johnny repeats it, this time more desperate. “I should not feel like this.”
“You feel good,” Gyro says simply. He presses a kiss to Johnny’s neck, feather light. “That is enough.” There is want in Gyro’s eyes. Clear and unashamed. Johnny is very aware that Gyro would give into any queer perverted act he asked for... Every act of sodomy.
“I want you,” Johnny says finally. The words taste bitter and forbidden. “And I know it is wrong.” His fingers curl against his stomach. “I should not. It’s wrong”
He lowers himself, hovering beside Johnny, nearly lying on his side, but propped up on one arm. His body curves toward Johnny’s, shoulder still brushing, chest close enough to feel the heat radiating from him. Right now Gyro would be the woman. “Wrong in whose eyes?” Gyro murmurs. His hand hovers near Johnny’s shoulder, tracing the line of muscle. Gyro is basically caressing him, but he doesn’t stop it.. “Yours? Mine?”
Johnny closes his eyes and every nerve screams. Every scar, every tense muscle thrums alive in a way it hasn’t since the race has started. The places Gyro's fingers are tracing are burning. The desert, the emptiness, the endless miles behind them, all of it presses into him. Right now. “All of them, Gyro,” he whispers. “All of them say it is wrong.”
Gyro smiles faintly, soft, almost cruel in its patience. “Then let’s say it’s… inevitable.”
His body aches to lean, to press into Gyro, but his mind screams that it’s a trap. Every rule he’s been taught, every lesson about what’s ‘wrong.’ Yet the longing claws deeper than fear, sharp and insistent. He wants Gyro’s hands on him, the weight of attention, the proof that he still exists. Wants to feel needed. Wants to feel alive. Wants to feel human. Wants no- he can’t blame it on years without touch. He simply wants Gyro. That is all.
Gyro’s hand finally settles over Johnny’s chest, just above the heart. Light, deliberate. Johnny is sure Gyro can feel his pulse. Through fabric, through skin and bone, warmth spreads, and he wants more. Wants to scream that he wants more. But all that escapes is a small, strangled sound, shamefully close to a moan.
“You’re shaking,” Gyro says quietly. His other hand hovers just above Johnny’s hip, hesitant. “Do you want me to stop?”
Johnny shakes his head violently. “No,” he breathes. His voice cracks. “I… don't"
Gyro’s other thumb brushes lightly over the protruding curve of Johnny’s hipbone, then drifts upward, tracing the bridge of his nose. A gesture of patience, of understanding, of something almost dangerous in its intimacy “Johnny, I’d do anything you’d ask me to right now, you know that, right?”
The weight of God’s eyes, his father’s expectations, his own internalized disgust all blur into a single thought: he wants this, no matter the cost, and God made this man for him. To punish him. To show him what sin looks like. But if it's wrong, why does it feel so right?
Gyro leans closer. Their breaths catch together. Johnny doesn’t pull back and for a brief, unbearable moment, it feels like the world has shrunk to the two of them, and maybe it was never meant to hold anyone else. His fingers twitch toward Gyro’s nape, threading through the fine hairs at the hairline, aching to prove this is real.
He is alive, and it hurts and it fulfils him, and it feels like punishment and salvation all at once.
(Then they had gay cowboy sex. Johnny tops after this he was just shy at first)