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Night on the trail is too quiet for a man with thoughts like Johnny’s.
The fire has burned down to a red, breathing thing. Horses shift in their sleep. The desert stretches out flat and indifferent, the kind of landscape that makes you feel exposed even when no one’s looking. Gyro is on the other side of the dying embers, hat tipped low, one arm thrown over his eyes as if he can block out the stars themselves. He sleeps like someone who believes he deserves to. Johnny envies that. He tells himself he’s only awake because of the cold.
He knows better.
The problem with internalized shame is that it doesn’t arrive loudly. It doesn’t declare itself with banners and accusations. It settles in slowly, disguising itself as discipline, as common sense, as survival. Johnny has always been good at survival. He learned young that affection could vanish the second you stopped being impressive. That admiration was conditional. That love, if it existed at all, was something you earned by winning. And when he stopped winning, when the applause dried up and the chair replaced the saddle he learned something worse: that people would forgive him for failing at greatness before they would forgive him for being weak.
Wanting another man feels like weakness. That’s the lie. It’s a stupid, inherited lie, but it sits in his chest like a bullet fragment. He can feel it every time Gyro’s hand lands casually on his shoulder, every time Gyro leans down close to explain some ridiculous bit of Spin theory, breath warm against Johnny’s ear. The contact isn’t unusual. Men touch all the time, clasping shoulders, grabbing arms, hauling each other out of danger. It’s practical. Rough and acceptable.
But Johnny notices it too much. And noticing feels like guilt.
He turns slightly, watching Gyro’s chest rise and fall. The firelight softens the sharp arrogance of his face. Without the grin, without the constant commentary, Gyro looks younger. Softer. Almost vulnerable.
He remembers a town two days back.Very Narrow streets. Wooden storefronts. The kind of village where everyone knows who bought flour and who drank too much and who’s sleeping with whose wife. They’d stopped for supplies. A few men had stared. Not at Johnny, that was familiar, the pitying glance at the chair, but at Gyro. At the way he carried himself. Too flamboyant. Too foreign. Too unbothered by their quiet codes. Very European.
One of them had muttered something. Johnny hadn’t caught all of it, just enough.
Something, something “Queer-looking bastard.”
It wasn’t even directed at Johnny but he felt the insult settle deep within himself.
He’d reacted before thinking. The man backed down fast, no one wants to pick a fight with an armed racer who looks like he might actually enjoy it, but the damage had already been done. Not by the insult. By Johnny’s reaction.
Gyro had laughed it off later, brushing it aside like dust on his sleeve. “Americans,” he’d said, smirking. “So fragile.” Johnny hadn’t really laughed.
Because the word had lodged somewhere ugly inside him. Not as an accusation from a stranger, but as a question. What would they call him, if they knew?
The thing is, Johnny doesn’t think of himself as that. He doesn’t let himself. He frames it differently. It’s admiration. It’s dependence. It’s the intensity of surviving something brutal together. Anyone would grow attached under these circumstances. Anyone would feel this sharp pull toward the one person who dragged them out of the dirt and handed them back a sliver of dignity.
It doesn’t have to mean anything.
Except sometimes, late like this, when the world narrows to breathing, he lets himself imagine a different version of the story. One where they, or rather he, aren’t racing toward a prize that promises redemption. One where they reach a city big enough to swallow secrets whole. A place where no one knows Johnny Joestar the fallen jockey. A place where Gyro isn’t the loud foreigner with too many opinions and too much flair.
In a big city, you can start over. He rolls that thought around like a coin between his fingers. Start over. As what?
As partners, still, of course. That word is safe. Flexible. Respectable. They’d rent a room. Maybe two beds, maybe not. People wouldn’t ask too many questions if you paid enough, that's surely what Johnny learned in his jockey days. They’d blend into the crowd. Gyro would find some cause to attach himself to, some injustice to fix. Johnny would… he doesn’t know what he’d do. Something quiet. Probably something that didn’t require applause. He couldn't stand working himself up just to lose and lose.
And at night-
Oh God, he shuts the thought down hard.
It’s pathetic to fantasize about cities like they’re absolution. Geography doesn’t change what you are. A lake doesn’t cleanse you. It just hides you.
The shame flares again, sharp and reflexive. He thinks of his father’s voice,distant, disappointed, forever measuring him against anything that is in his view. He thinks of the crowds who once screamed his name, who loved him when he was beautiful and triumphant. Would they have cheered if they’d known? Or would they have turned the same way that man in the small town did, faces twisting into something ugly and righteous?
The worst part about wanting something you’ve decided you shouldn’t have is how ordinary it feels. Johnny had expected, the first time he let the thought form clearly in his mind, that it would feel catastrophic. He'd imagine it like crossing a line drawn in fire. Instead, it had come quietly, almost embarrassingly human, the realization settling over him as Gyro laughed at something ridiculous, head tipped back, throat exposed to the open air without a trace of fear.
It hadn’t felt perverse. It hadn’t felt monstrous. It had felt inevitable.
He had spent years curating himself into something people could digest. Before the accident, he was a spectacle, arrogance and talent wrapped up in silk shirts and perfect posture. After the accident, he became something else: diminished, humbled and tragic. Maybe the world preferred him that way. He learned it quickly. The way eyes softened when they landed on the chair. The way voices gentled. The way men who would have bristled at his former ego now tolerated his silences like they were proof of moral growth.
They mistook restraint for virtue. They thought he had been made safer. Johnny almost laughed at that sometimes. If any of them knew how often his thoughts sharpened into violence just to escape a conversation, how frequently he imagined ending someone mid-sentence with a single, clean shot simply to stop the sound of their pity, they would have recoiled. They would have realized the chair hadn’t humbled him. It had only compressed him.
Gyro, on the other hand, seemed constitutionally incapable of compression. He antagonized guards like it was a hobby, mocked competitors who hadn’t even addressed him, flirted with reckless charm and then refused to apologize when politeness demanded it. He walked into every space like it owed him something, whether it was amusement, resistance or reaction. People disliked him immediately. You could see it happen in real time. The bristle. The judgment.
From the outside, the story was simple;
Gyro was the asshole.
Johnny was the tolerable one.
It almost would have been funny if it weren’t so absurd. Johnny thinks Gyro picked fights because he expected people to fight back. He tested them like steel under a hammer. Johnny could not imagine moving through the world with that kind of faith. He kept quiet not because he was patient, but because he assumed disappointment was the same kind of inevitable. He expected betrayal. He expected cowardice. He expected the worst and was rarely surprised. Since what he gave came back. Because what he gave always seemed to come back to him.
Everything eats and gets eaten, after all. And since he was no longer in the righteous position to devour, he became the thing that was devoured. And what’s easier than pushing a cripple around? Johnny knew, though, that the karma creeping quietly toward him hadn’t started with his disability. It had started the day he killed his brother.
And yet, it was Gyro who kept choosing mercy.
Johnny had watched him spare men who didn’t deserve it, argue for lives that would never repay him, shoulder responsibility that wasn’t strictly his to carry. Left alone, Gyro’s compassion would have gotten him killed. Left alone, Johnny suspected he would have crossed a line and felt nothing at all.
Somewhere between deserts and gunfire and exhaustion, they had become a balance neither of them acknowledged aloud. Gyro pulled him toward something human. Johnny dragged Gyro far enough into reality to survive it. It worked. It kept them breathing.
Johnny didn’t resent Gyro for that. He resented himself for needing it. Because without permission, Gyro had become the only person whose disappointment still had the power to slow Johnny’s hand before he shot. And that was the most dangerous thing of all.
Would anyone have understood him better if he’d been the one gone? If Johnny had disappeared before they ever saw the fractures, before they ever glimpsed the wants that simmered beneath his ribs when Gyro leaned too close, laughed too loud, trusted too easily? Death would have been tidy, neat headlines, a cautionary tale of the fallen champion, a story they could smooth over, trim the parts that made them uncomfortable. Maybe they could forgive a corpse. But he was rather focussing on the fact he didn't have to care.
They could never forgive him alive. Alive, he is a contradiction. Alive, he wants. Death doesn’t scare him anymore, hasn't for a while. Death is simple. It’s final. It doesn’t pry, it doesn’t judge. What terrifies him is being seen wrong, dissected by people who could never hold the whole of him, the messy tangle of pride and shame, longing and desire. What terrifies him most is Gyro seeing it. Gyro believes in him, and that belief is unbearable. It presses against the raw parts he’s kept hidden for years. Gyro sees potential. Sees decency, still salvageable. See him. And Johnny knows, if Gyro ever glimpsed the full weight of what he feels, the wants he refuses to name, something would break that could never heal.
Occasionally, the embarrassment eases. Gyro's chuckle fades, becoming gentler, intimate if Johnny is to believe. He speaks of Naples, sites of execution, and people who didn’t merit their destinies. He places a hand gently on Johnny. In those instances, Johnny senses the urge to tilt, even slightly, to gauge the delicate space he has monitored. However, he has discovered the consequences of people labeling you as bad. They behave more poorly. Allow Gyro to believe he is simply proud, just temperamental, just marked in ways that are comprehensible to the world. Not that. Not this ever.
Across the dying fire, Gyro shifts, hat sliding back, blinking in the red glow. His gaze finds Johnny. “Can’t sleep?” Gyro’s voice is thick with fatigue, softened by the quiet night. Johnny’s heart stutters. “Something like that,” he answers. Gyros eyes linger on him for a while. “ Well, you’re staring,” Gyro says finally, a faint, teasing smile tugging at his mouth. Johnny looks away too fast. “Go back to sleep, Gyro.” Gyro responds with a huff, amused, and settles again, not pressing. He trusts Johnny’s defenses. And for a moment, Johnny allows himself to breathe, watching the embers blur into a red wound slowly closing.
He tells himself he’d never live in a small town, where your past calcifies into identity, mistakes are broadcast, your story written before you can speak. What he really means: he doesn’t know how to live as the man he might be if he stopped running. He doesn’t know whether the greater cowardice is denying it or letting Gyro see it.