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“Hey, Johnny.”
The moon is high in the sky. There’s something so emancipating about the crisp night air, so comforting about the encompassing black wholeness, the simple-to-understand fact that space doesn’t discriminate or disappear or falter. It just is.
For all of the worries that Johnny Joestar and Gyro Zeppeli have, they’re only human. They’re only two men, riding across the awesome stretch of America’s graveyard prairies.
And Johnny can’t stop staring at the sky tonight. His bedroll is tatty and thin and his back’s resting on a small pebble underneath it just enough to be noticeable (and therefore annoying), but not so much so that he wants to ease his weary body off to fish it out. He pulls the roll further up to cover his mouth, making his reply muffled when he says, “yeah?”
“What are you thinking about?” Gyro asks, without missing a beat.
Weird question. Johnny frowns, raises a hand to knock his hat off and run his fingers through his hair. His forehead is warm where the garment had been, and his hair’s flattened underneath, plastered against his scalp. “I ain’t thinking about anythin’.”
He hears rustling across from him. When he cranes his neck up to look at the interference, he sees that Gyro’s propped himself up on one arm, his sleeping bag still around his form. They’ve long since put the fire out, so the solitary disc of the moon serves as their only guide to one another’s faces, but it’s enough for this sort of altercation. The stars look down upon them, too, with twinkling smiles.
“You can’t fool me, Johnny boy.” Gyro’s eyes are half-lidded and he’s not wearing his hat. “You’re always thinking. You’re a little thinker, you are. And I know you weren’t sleeping because you weren’t snoring.”
Johnny scoffs, indignantly. “I don’t snore.”
A laugh rises from the Italian. He finds something funny in getting these little rags out of him, because he’s a terribly observant person and delights in letting others figure it out. When he settles, he rests his cheek in the mellow curve of his hand. “So the rumbling of the night is the doing of an earthquake, hm? You’ve got a bear in your throat.” He mimics one, too, batting a curled hand, going grrr.
And it’s hard not to snicker himself. Johnny can’t quite believe he’d been intimidated by the other man when they first met; they’ve never exchanged exact numbers but he can only approximate him to be five-foot-nine (still tall for an impromptu jockey, as if Valkyrie is encumbered by it in any way). The melting sun that day had been blocked out only by the other man’s shape looming over him, and he’d looked quite formidable, crazy jade eyes and pompous lettering etched into his grills. At least, whatever sort of emotion Johnny had felt for him at the time isn’t nearly as strong as what he has for him now, and whereas he’s heard before that fear will always overwhelm the positive he’s unsure, even just fleetingly, if it’s necessarily true. This sort of feeling blooms in his chest and up his neck, languid, luxurious and nigh lazy in its heat, a slow crackling chewing away at firewood as if it’s the most delicious thing on the planet, savouring it, loving it with all the exuberance of two people wrapped in one another’s arms for the end of eternity.
“Anyway,” Gyro continues, inspecting his once-clawed nails, “you didn’t answer my question. What’s going on in that little blond head of yours?”
Johnny pauses for a moment. There’s lots of things he can tell him. The bluegill they’d had for dinner was delicious, crispy on the outside, soft and flaky on the inside, a pair of them shot by Johnny with a couple of nail bullets. If he’s quiet and concentrates, he can still hear the river rushing in the background. Or he can remark on the day that went by, which was all-in-all somewhat unceremonious; they’d been travelling through Kansas earlier which was mostly grasslands, had even seen a herd of wild buffalo grazing which Johnny pointed to Gyro, revere in his voice (“that’s no big deal, Johnny. We have water buffalo; we use them to make mozzarella”, and then, “wait- water buffalo? Do they have gills?”, and, cackling, Gyro’s explanation that they merely liked marshland). The coffee he’d made this morning to wake the both of them up was always a treat, when Johnny had sat sipping it slowly, admiring the way that Gyro’s skin glistened in the dulcet tones of the sunrise as he shook sugar into his own copper mug.
“I guess I was just looking at the stars,” he says, eventually. Gyro straights up when he speaks, and arches a brow when the question elicits an answer he finds disinteresting. “What, can’t you sleep either?”
“Not really.”
It’s not like him to lose sleep – at least Johnny thinks so – and he also likes to think that he knows a lot about Gyro. There’s some sort of quiet solace that comes from moving with someone across the plains as one, as two people but one group, one soul. Johnny and Gyro. It sounds perfect in his head. “Why’zat?”
“I can’t sleep in the quiet so I usually fall asleep to your snoring. Or your voice.”
He says it with so much nonchalance and it makes Johnny stare. It makes him think of the other night, when Gyro had fallen asleep in his grasp, still sat upright. All-in-all he’d thought little of it by the morning (because on top of getting good sleep, Gyro has the inane ability to fall asleep anywhere he wants and wake up at the flick of a switch) but to have him say it at loud now is jarring, makes Johnny’s skin prick hot to combat the cool night air that breezes over the small forest clearing they’re situated in, a hug washing over his own skin that he wishes would’ve come from another source altogether, the feeling of another pressed against him.
“Nyo-ho! Is that so hard to believe?” Gyro grins at him, all chapped lips and teeth the colour of sulphur catching gold lines of moonlight and wrinkles in the corners of his eyes, and it’s a brighter sight than any of the stars in the sky. “You’re catching bees in your mouth, orsetto.”
Johnny closes his mouth. He didn’t realize it was hanging open. “The expression’s- it’s- I’m catchin’ flies.”
“Bees, flies, wasps, beetles. A cub like you eats them too quickly to tell the difference.” He stretches his arms out, yawning overtly, and lying back down, hands tucked behind his head. His eyes close. “Keep talking to me about your silly American idioms, why don’t you?”
Johnny sighs and rolls himself onto his side, off the pebble boring a hole in the fabric of his sleeping bag, facing Gyro more easily now. Part of him doesn’t want to keep talking - he wants the Italian to stay awake forever in an endless night so they can keep lying like this, just like this, and it wouldn’t matter how cold the night got because they’d have each other for warmth, fingers intertwined (he can play with Gyro’s hair again, he thinks), noses brushing, lips locked, and he’d sigh, fingers wandering, legs wandering too because in his head the Corpse was there and they’d move to Italy and it wouldn’t matter that Johnny couldn’t speak the language because he could learn, yes, in the frozen time, in their endless night--
“You’re creepy when you get quiet, you know, Johnny.” Gyro’s eyes are still closed. “You’re scheming.” He pouts; Johnny can see the gentle dip of his Cupid’s bow. He’s wiped his lipstick off. “I pour my heart out to you and I get no reciprocation. What can I do to stir a little banter, eh?”
“Nothin’.” His voice is more insistent than it was before, pressing, firm, and it doesn’t dawn upon the American that he’s on the defense now, waving a pitchfork around as if to dissuade anyone from getting near to the treasure-chest of his thoughts. “You think there’s somethin’ I wanna offload but there isn’t.”
“Supposing I did think that,” Gyro says, stretching out the last syllable, his eyebrows raised where his legs are stretched out on the bedroll, “maybe it would help to go first. Let’s start easy.. My favourite colour is red and my favorite animal is.. Erm.. Alpacas.”
What a bizarre topic, Johnny thinks, resting one arm on the ground and letting his cheek rest in the crux of his elbow. They aren’t five years old. “Why red?”
“Glad you asked, Johnny! Because it’s the colour of a good napoletano, of course– nyo-ho!” There’s a pause between them. “That’s pizza, by the way.”
“Oh.” Johnny’s not entirely sure what pizza is either, but dejects asking. “I guess I like the colour blue. My favorite animal’s prob’ly a mouse, but only the white ones, you know, with the red eyes.”
“A mouse and an alpaca,” Gyro muses.
If it weren’t for his lips moving, Johnny could have mistaken him for being asleep. He looks peaceful like this, happy at the discussion of such an easygoing topic. It’s not like Johnny can blame him, considering what they’ve been going through on a day-to-day basis as of late; hell, he envies the other man for being able to take this so casually, because that’s the main difference between them on nights like this. Gyro allows himself to let go if only for a couple of hours. Johnny supposes it’s what’s kept him going for this long – he can’t say he truly understands the motive of doing this for the sake of a child he doesn’t even know, but it’s important to him. If something that heavy were to be placed on Johnny’s own shoulders, he’d be crushed.
To be placid now is Gyro’s harbour, keeping him grounded. It’s not just Johnny himself that reveres moments like these.
“Ain’t it.. The Chinese that say everyone has an animal that corresponds to their personality? Like a yearly thing?” he murmurs, raising his head when he hears Gyro stirring, then opening his eyes, then smiling again.
“I think so. Well, if you’re a tiny mouse, and I’m a handsome alpaca, I’d let you ride on my back. Just keeping you safe and all.”
Johnny purses his lips. It doesn’t take a lot to sate Gyro’s need to be humored. “Yeah? What if we came across an elephant, huh? It’d be me saving us from gettin’ trampled.”
“An elephant? In Italy? Not likely, Johnny boy, unless it was at a circus.” The Italian sits up, then, running his hands through his hair before stretching, long and luxurious, a yawn pushing past his lips. He grabs the sides of his bedroll and begins the arduous process of scooting it closer to Johnny; they’ve never slept particularly far apart to begin with (as if the circumstances of the Run would allow it) but when he lies back down he’s less than an arm’s length away, lying on his side, facing Johnny. Both of his hands are tucked under his cheek, as if to shelter it from the thin fabric of the sleeping bag. “Have you ever been to one?”
Johnny’s face is warm. How splendidly he yearns to reach across and place his hand over the minute curve of Gyro’s hip over the bedroll. It wouldn’t be difficult, not in this proximity. Fleetingly he wonders how the other man would react. “Um.. No.”
“But you’ve seen an elephant before?” And when Johnny nods, he continues, “mia madre took my brothers and I to Antonio Franconi when I was eight. You should’ve seen the horses there - so clean and shiny I could’ve eaten food off them had the workers permitted! Nyo-ho!”
He’s quiet for a moment, as he usually is when he gives Johnny the chance to toss him a witty remark. But Johnny doesn’t have anything to say, and can only watch silently as Gyro’s smile falters, as his Adam’s apple bobs between the lines of his collar. These moments of silence are easy to fall into on the road; there’s not always something at hand to discuss, after all, between the mental plotting of what Johnny can assume to be Gyro’s next gag and the American’s own brooding, although lying beside one another, listening to nothing but cicadas and the steady rhythm of each other’s breath, makes for a whole new type of beast.
When Johnny finally speaks up, it’s soft. “Do you miss home?”
His eyelids flutter, looking down, then past Johnny’s shoulder. “Well, I guess I miss the girls, and the weather, and beds - and the food. Cold beans and unseasoned meat aren’t my idea of luxury, you know.”
A smile pulls at the jockey’s mouth, although he’s unsure what it’s for. “Italian girls, huh?”
Gyro coos. One of his hands wriggles its way free from where it’s trapped beneath him. He presses the knuckles against his forehead, exhaling deeply. “Mama mia, Johnny. You should see ‘em. They’re still not as good as the food, though.”
What that means is anyone’s guess, but it has Johnny huffing a dry laugh again. To move to Italy together, to sit back on a big wooden crate on the ship there, legs swinging, staring up at the clouds. How great that would be, he thinks, with no demands than Gyro’s job (but he’d quit it quickly afterwards, in his mind) and all the money from the Steel Ball Run’s labefactions plentiful on their shoulders but doing nothing to weigh down their heads, which would be held proud and airy with thoughts of one another’s company. Their sweet endless night.
“I believe you. Surely not as good as a nap- napo-”
“Napoletano.” Gyro’s eyes are half-lidded. “All this drooling is making me sleepy. I guess your breathing’ll have to do instead of your voice.”
Johnny can’t lie to the bottom of his soul, which rings with a faint disappointment hearing that the reason he’d moved closer was for the sake of getting some shuteye. It’s soon quelled with the sight before him, though, at Gyro’s closed eyes.
“I’ll go buy you one after the Run’s done, Johnny, if you’ll visit. I’ll even take you to the circus.”
“Yeah?” He sounds calm, but his heart is pounding.
“Yeah. You can come meet my brothers. And if I die before that, well..” Gyro’s brows knit in thought, “you can sell my teeth to buy the entry fee, so it still counts.”
“That’s gross, Gyro.” The Italian grins anyway.
Johnny watches him roll onto his back, one hand on his stomach and the other behind his head, fanning his hair out behind him. “Your loss. I’m sure they’d be pretty valuable, you know - I’m a sought-after man.”
“You sure are.”
Johnny hears him snoring not long after that. He knows nights like these in one another’s presence can never truly last forever – all good things must come to an end, after all – but to have them in his memory almost fills the gap that reality can’t.