Chapter Text
The hotel room you are sharing is dingy, lit only by a lamp in one corner. It’s a fairly familiar sight. You and Hol Horse have stayed in a good number of them on your mission to defeat the Joestar family and company. The adrenaline from almost dying and subsequently surviving said almost death is wearing off, and you are coming to the realization that your mission is impossible. Those freaky teenagers and their chaperones are just too damn hard to kill.
“Third time’s the charm, then?” Your partner asks, kicking off his boots and wincing. The parts of him that aren’t currently bleeding are probably bruised to hell. You’re slightly better off, thanks to him, but you’re sure the full-body beat-down the two of you just got from a purple punch ghost isn’t something you’re going to be able to sleep off anytime soon.
“It’s more likely that Avdol guy will just incinerate us on sight the third time,” you say, trying to match the joking tone of his voice. It doesn’t really work, since you’re talking about something that has a very real possibility of happening very soon. “I’m honestly surprised they let us live this time.”
He laughs and flops down on one of the beds. “Fair enough, but we always pull through. ‘Sides, you’re the one who got us out of there, babe.” The pet name falls naturally from his mouth. He took to calling you babe, baby, sugar, and numerous other atrociously embarrassing endearments ever since he found out using one would make you turn and look at him with a raised eyebrow and a ‘sorry, what?’, which he seemed to find very funny.
“Could you be a dear and get me some bandages for my... everywhere, sweetheart?” You sigh. There he goes again. I can’t deal with this, you think. One day, he’s going to call me something so horribly sweet that I’ll just have a heart attack and die on the spot. Emotions aside, you can’t ignore that he’s hurt, so you kneel down and fish through the bag you set down at the foot of the other bed for the first aid kit. With it in hand, you stand back up and hand it over.
“You know you don’t have to do that, right?”
“Do what, hun?”
“You don’t have to pretend to flirt with me. I’m your partner, and I care about you. We haven’t been traveling together for very long, but we’ve been through a lot already. I trust you, and I want you to be able to trust me. You don’t have to pretend you’re attracted to me to get me to do stuff for you. Just ask me and I’ll be happy to help you out.”
“Oh, honey,” he says, so softly and gently that those two words alone could fill several days of you lying awake at night yearning for someone to care about you enough to say something like that to you. “Where’d you ever get the idea that I ain’t attracted to you?”
Every thought in your brain comes to a stop all at once. Then you have many thoughts all at once. Mostly abort mission, abort mission, abort mission, abort mission-
You try to laugh off his question, even though this particular joke of his has gone a bit too far for your taste. “You’ve met me, right?”
He just smiles, like he was waiting for you to ask, and props himself up on his elbows. “I’ve met a very handsome an’ strong guy with one helluva stand. An’ you’ve got real pretty eyelashes. Why wouldn’t I be flirtin’ with you?”
You did not plan for this. You already want to crawl very far away, find a hole, and die in it. At this point, this man is going to get the reasons why whether he wants to or not. Self-sabotage powers, activate. Looking away from him, you take a deep breath and try to gather your thoughts. “I’m fucked up and I can’t do anything right. I took this job because you need money to live, and the only thing that makes me useful is my weird magic power that can fight other weird magic powers, and I just screwed that up, too. So now I’ve gone halfway around the world for this freaky DIO guy who sits shirtless in his mansion all day who basically said I’m dead if I can’t kill this family that he hates or whatever, and they’re still alive, so I guess I don’t have to worry about a retirement plan, but because you were with me now you’re going to be dead too, so what’s the point? Also, I get like this all the time, which is a lot to deal with. And I don’t have pretty eyelashes.”
Hol Horse, who usually cuts you off when you talk about fucking stuff up all the time with an incredibly bad knock-knock joke or comment about a rug ‘uglier than sin’ that was on display the last town you traveled through, is uncharacteristically silent. He sits up on the bed and starts applying bandages where you’d guess his most painful wounds are. There’s silence in your shared room, and it hangs for a long time. Guess I fucked this up too.
He finishes with the bandages and sets the first aid kit down on the floor.
“You okay with hugs?” He asks suddenly.
“What? Yeah, I guess,” you reply.
“Good, ‘cuz the hug train just pulled into the station, an’ I see somebody who needs to get onboard,” he says, shuffling off of his bed and heading towards yours. He climbs in beside you and pulls you into his chest. His arms slip under yours and come to a rest on your back. He’s sweaty, hasn’t showered in far too long, and there are spots on his bandages where the blood from his injuries has started to seep through. It’s the best thing you’ve felt in a long time, and you collapse against him.
He talks, and you can feel his breath on the top of your head. “I’m afraid out of the two of us I’m the authority on your eyelashes, honey, ‘cuz I’m the one who’s been lookin’ at ‘em all day. I can personally attest to your weird magic power being cool as hell- and hot as hell, when you’re about to hand someone their ass on a plate. ‘An you wouldn’t even be here right now if you couldn’t do anything right, ‘cuz that DIO doesn’t send just anyone out after the Joestars, y’know. But speakin’ of him, who says we gotta go back and tell him it didn’t work? We got a good thing goin’, pumpkin- what do you say we take it to the other half of the world and let them work out their business themselves?”
“You’re gonna make me cry,” you mumble into his chest. “If you’re- if you’re still messing with me or something-”
“I ain’t messin’ with you, darlin’, I’m tellin’ the truth,” he murmurs while his hands start to trace light circles on your back. “I don’t ‘deal’ with you, ‘cuz I like bein’ around you. I like wakin’ up at the ass-crack of dawn in shitty hotels and goin’ to find breakfast to bring back for you before you wake up. I like hearin’ you laugh and makin’ you laugh. I think you’ve got pretty eyelashes, eyes, and just about every other part I can think of, and you better get used to it, ‘cuz I don’t plan on changin’ my mind about you anytime soon.” He finishes his speech with a kiss to the top of your head.
“Alright, cowboy, that’s enough out of you,” you say, trying to steer the conversation back to the back-and forth banter that you know how to deal with. “We can talk about this in the morning.”
“Sounds good to me, honey,” Hol replies, wrapping his arms tighter around you. “Sounds good to me.”