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The foundation of partnerships doesn't necessitate from attachment.
What has driven her to start one with him is from desperation and callous practicality. While Diego favors settling matters by himself, he doesn't mind utility when it's openly offered to him; albeit for ends that don't quite align with his own. Still, it comes off more aloof and transactional, and he likes it that way.
Besides, Hot Pants is too stern and monotonous to be a liar, despite the nondisclosure of her gender; a decision which he can't quite fault her on when her built is set stout and masculine. Though in a different angle, he will often rethink about the matter and praise his observations for being too astute for their own good when his eyes can trace the subtle outline of her breasts.
It's no mystery to Diego that she is a woman from the start. He can already tell by the way she rides her horse, and oddly enough, through her scent.
Regardless of Hot Pants being a man or woman, it doesn't matter as long as she’s useful. She bets her odds just to prove this to him at this very moment.
"So I take it you're accepting the deal," Hot Pants assumes, and he's tempted to return it with a petty jab of his own: what makes you think I'm accepting it at all?
Though Diego goes against it when he's already made his decision, finding her boldness a little amusing than he's willing to admit.
There is calculation in his slaughter and a decisiveness that is excessive in violence and meticulousness, unfound by animal instinct alone. Diego Brando is this monstrosity at his barest; shaved off a pretty face, with his androgyny traded for the sharpness of steel, sharper perhaps that pierces bone-deep, through the dark allurement of a more primal crooked smile. Never without its rage, its greater appetites.
Lesser beasts know not of grandiosity; he is his own creature.
Even beneath his smoother façade, molded in epicene features and muscle, he’s more upfront about these things, obnoxiously loud and so full of himself, because he wants to make it known as if the world owes him everything.
Hot Pants thinks transparency is better than the beguilement of him not being one at all. It makes him a little uglier, and ironically, a little more human. Human in a way his eyes are blue and corrosive and prideful. It paints him with a different shade of vibrancy than the one-note fraud of a man that she has always seen him to be.
It's never enough to redeem him and he might as well be damned for good, but he acknowledges what he is.
It counts for something, Hot Pants supposes.
Habits can't be fixed. The flow of their pattern uninterrupted and aligned, like needlework to the fully fleshed-out tapestry of a person. Diego prides himself for tracing back each texture and fingerprint on her being, no matter how even the lines of her face are or how voiceless her thoughts are when she speaks.
Layers can be skinned off, torn-open to the very marrow. It almost makes him salivate. Diego always looks forward to the prospect of peering into what lurks underneath, whether it should serve him well or not.
There is a graveness to her eyes that swallows everything it touches. There is no hunger in them that he can recognize in himself, or in others; only resolution—for whatever purpose. Her mouth is still closelipped about that.
His fingers grow out of his leather glove, curving into sharp claws on the beaded string of a rosary around her neck. Diego tugs at it curiously.
It looks like an old relic. Diego mulls over it for a second before he rethinks with a wry smirk: ah, like a noose.
Hot Pants remains unmoving. The stillness is a reaction, but he finds her apprehension too tedious to be amusing.
"Is Hot Pants your real name?" asks Diego.
"No."
Hot Pants isn't lying, but she isn’t being honest either.
There is no such thing as an honest woman. Women love their games, their riddles, though Hot Pants is more straightforward in her furtiveness than most.
Diego compares it to commitment; one suffusing through her stubbornness. A stubbornness that builds around her resolve, callousing edges that should be softer like her stride, the blunt tips of her fingers, the stern shape of her mouth. He might argue the latter to be salvageable though he decides to let it go. She can keep her secrets as much she likes, but it'll gradually bleed out of her.
Because if there is anything Diego is able to read from the way she tightly holds onto that rosary, it's that he sees a woman who is a slave to her faith.
Ever since Hot Pants has set foot in Gettysberg, she hasn’t had a wink of sleep in the first few nights.
The hawthorn trees, the rockweeds growing on the rubble, the blood between its crevices . . .
Some dreams have become more lucid than most when her brother’s ghost carves a flesh-trail deep in her bones.
Hot Pants is restless again so she prays. Prays for the living who are lost and weary, prays for the dead who can no longer hear them.
There are moments in these dark hours that Diego ignores her. Sometimes, he regards her quizzically, born from boredom and an entirely different outlook that goes against her convictions.
When Diego asks why she prays, his tone isn’t without an edge of derision, and this tone stays when he’s gotten an answer; one he bites off with a snort, but doesn’t make him delve too deeply on to start an argument.
Diego doesn’t believe in redemption the way she desperately does.
His sins are piling against the other, but his sins are what he defines as a means to an end. It isn’t a sentiment Hot Pants can’t understand. But. She wonders how he sleeps soundly at night with all that blood on his hands, and he comments on it with a wide reptilian grin, “like a baby.”
Hot Pants concludes that he’s more despicable than he makes himself out to be, though that’s nothing new.
What isn’t is that she starts praying for him too.
“I’ll kill him.”
Diego doesn’t quite understand what goads him to voice out his intentions aloud though there is something consoling about her impartiality that makes their conversation one-sided and inconsequential. When she doesn’t comment about his bastard of a father, he decides to nab for a different response.
“Have you ever killed, Hot Pants?” Diego tries, glancing at her from the corner of his eye.
Hot Pants looks as if she isn’t there; too faraway and caught-up over the unspoken history shaping in her silence. She stares at the distant river from the horizon, stained with the violent colors of the evening; scarring the vast landscape like a lesion to a dead body. Rocky hills and skeletal trees occupy the forest around it, and she searches for something through its emaciation.
When their eyes meet this time, Diego senses the gravity in hers and is pulled towards them the moment she finds her words.
“Killing is an unforgivable sin.”
Diego isn’t sure if that’s a reprimand or a thinly-veiled answer.
Between their routines and halfhearted company, there is a middle ground of some sort.
Diego wakes up earlier than she does, and Hot Pants makes coffee to start the morning. She brews enough for two cups nowadays.
Somewhere along the lines, Diego remarks how pleasant it is that she isn't making a fuss about it.
Hot Pants puzzles on the hidden gripe behind his reply but dismisses it when it isn’t directed towards her. For awhile, she can appreciate that he sounds too genuine and too content to ever break the comfortable silence between them.
Meals aren’t quiet affairs.
It starts when Diego complains about her cooking and her for berating him for his lack of manners when he scarfs down his supper.
Diego accuses her for having a larger portion of their shared meal, and so the following night he drags the ravaged carcass of a deer by the clench of his jaws, having the audacity to growl back at her: “Be grateful. Unlike you, I’m generous.”
Hot Pants looks tempted to retort back something when her mouth hangs open and inviting, though she quickly disappoints him when she doesn’t protest and proceeds to prepare a stew from his prey with a complacent sigh.
After Diego has had his fill, he watches her gawk at the creature across the fire.
There are only bones and scraps of meat left dangling on its mutilated body. When her hand rests on the expanse of red flesh formed over its ribs, Hot Pants pulls it back and stares at the blood on her palm. Even under the darkness of the forest, he can see the slight tremble of her fingers.
“I didn’t think you’d be squeamish,” Diego comments, and she turns her head back to look at him.
His eyes gleam—in amber or blue? She’s so used to seeing one from the other that he can’t tell which.
“I’m not,” Hot Pants says. “Are you going to finish this?”
“So you are a glutton,” Diego says, amusing himself over the furrow of her brows.
Hot Pants ignores his remark. “Are you?”
Diego shrugs noncommittally. “No. I don’t feel like it.”
Hot Pants then places her hand back on the carcass and it contorts and writhes from her touch when the flesh is being sapped by her fingers.
Captivated and disgusted by the nature of her Stand, Diego can’t help but mull over the vividness of her expression once she has committed the act, as if she has stolen something important. As if she can never return it back forever.
Behind every withering stare, there is a slight curl of the lip.
Hot Pants has been very keen on hiding it from him after throwing an exchange of petty offences from this and that.
Diego loves to start pointless arguments to a fault, and the last thing she’ll reward him for that behavior is a rare smile.
There is a certain way she gazes at Johnny Joestar.
Diego tries not to contemplate about it for too long when it begins to turn into a vexing thought.
For all his ferocity, Diego is kinder to horses. When a storm approaches, he is at their side. When dawn breaks, he is the first to tend to them.
Hot Pants has heard too oftentimes that there is an inexplicable bond between a horse and its rider. She hasn’t ridden long enough to have a firm grasp of the trust that he puts in such a high pedestal between him and Silver Bullet, though the telltale signs speak for themselves when it comes to his experience.
However, Diego isn’t without his exclamations that he is a self-made equestrian for fame and fortune, too; all grand aspirations, rusting in gold.
“But why do you ride?”
“I did it for my mission,” Hot Pants says, stroking her horse’s neck with a grooming brush.
“That isn’t what I meant,” Diego crosses his arms petulantly. “You know how to ride a horse than any of those country hicks that joined in the race. That must have come from somewhere.”
Hot Pants almost stops brushing at the thought. Somewhere . . .
“When I was younger,” she starts, uncertain where the words lead when her childhood is a sentiment lost to her. There is a steepness in the memory; one filled with murk, from years of contrition and divine services.
“We had an old horse my father often rode to go to town. Every night, I used to sneak to the stables with,” then her heart lurches, words strained, but she pushes on, “with my brother . . . and I’d always try to ride that horse until I could.”
Until I killed him.
Hot Pants doesn’t realize the breath she’s been holding until she is hauled back by the sound of his voice.
Diego studies her face for awhile, though she suspects he has read enough of her to pick up on the trails himself.
His eyes never learn to waver. “And? That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Diego has always been lustful in his fury. His new jowls urge for more than just a taste. Perhaps for gore, for vengeance.
Diego isn’t certain where all the vehemence has stemmed from when it all blurs between the old aggressions rising forth through an inhuman snarl and the poison that runs black and spiteful in his veins. There are times he resents it, and on others, will run over it, carrying the idea that he is still a man driven by his darker passions.
This part of him overrides him from the heat of a scuffle, craving for something to rip open from the deadpan in her eyes. Lackluster, unaffected, pitying. This bluster of indifference, this holier-than-thou attitude she imposes, skin-deep and pathetic.
The futility of his attempts mocks him; the futility in her, even more so.
All Diego can think about is how he can destroy this front when she tells him nothing.
“You’re hopeless,” he says through the harsh bite of his tone. “Even if I were to kill you, you’d still not have emotions.”
Diego has never believed in it, but he wants to wrest something out of her, and when he does, he forgets about the rain, the clap of thunder, the shudder of the forest she towers over with the shadow falling over her solemn eyes.
“I’m not devoid of emotion,” Hot Pants finally says. “All my life, I’ve wallowed in them. Atoned for them,” and it stops by a stutter, stuck on her throat when those sacred beads choke out her voice by the taut clench of her fist.
Heaving out a tired sigh, she only turns her back against him. “For someone who thinks he's above everything, I don’t understand how this matters to you at all.”
The last one is nothing more but a grumble, an afterthought of her indignance, yet for a mere blow of words, they bruise.
They encounter an inroad in Lambertville.
In this cross-continental race, powerful adversaries have only ever hardened Hot Pants over time, and to some extent, has strengthened her faith through undergoing each tribulation. The Lord must be testing her again. Nothing could have prepared her from almost watching him struggle in a fight.
Diego is many things. Arrogant, ambitious, dangerous. A creature of chaos.
For such qualities to overturn him, almost threaten to take his life; he, who has everything to lose, doesn't come out of the fight unscathed and returns to her side as half-man, half-monster. Half-dead.
The blood of their assailant is still fresh on him, and this savagery glints from the edges of his teeth and the fatal lesion on his chest. The fatigue breaks through the adamance of his hind legs, slogging out of unconsciousness through the last rasp of his breath: “I told you that it is I, Dio, who will win . . .”
A weak growl of more senseless nothings, and then a clawed hand brushing against the wound on her neck; a shallow graze of a bullet. His fingers remain where they are, as if attempting to stop the bleeding there, until their resolve slides down to her lap.
“—s’ve me. Please, save me,” gurgles out the other man, choking on blood and tears that fall like dark rivers against his open throat. “I-I don’t want to die . . .”
Her hand rests heavily on his head, and at the forefront of her mind, it seizes her through a cold unrepentant thought that she’s drought out of mercy.
His flesh is immolation. Her desperation is a sin. It is from the start.
She takes.
There is no honor in it, Hot Pants reflects before moving on in her crusade. There are too many bodies carried by her shoulders as of late, and the weight of Diego Brando among the rest is a sentiment she decides to never think about.
When Hot Pants heals him, she almost catches herself believe that the light in his eyes is forgiveness.
The winding road stretches on forever and there is still more ground to cover before the sun sets and the night lies awake and prowling in the dark.
Diego is part a nocturnal creature; a monstrous change in him that he’s eased into assimilating in his life. Somehow, the night offers an unlikely sense of solace to the predator slumbering under his skin.
Though we should start a fire soon, Diego thinks before realizing that the cold doesn’t bother him anymore like the way it does to her.
Hot Pants starts unlacing her boots, then her clothes. All worn leather and woolen fabrics and sordid thick layers pooling on her ankles like dark clumps of skin. She dismisses the thought after she picks up the laundry in nothing more than her underclothes.
The convent has taught her to swaddle herself within the modesty of a nun's habit and that baring flesh is encouraging the most carnal of temptations among men. There isn’t a day she forgets about her virtues, filling her mind with meditations of abstinence, of invocations, of sacred vows – a lifetime ago.
Familiarity overtakes her with windstorms and gravel and the whirring perpetual motion of chase. Even stillness confounds her by its rarity nowadays. Hot Pants once has learned to seek it through penance, and now, in the sun that lights a line of fire against her naked arms; a sensation of wakefulness that jolts the languor in her bones.
Hot Pants decides to peel off her leggings. The small indulgence still stings of reprehension with the way they slide down her scarred calves. She accepts them, ruminates over them, but gradually, learns to ignore them when her feet dips into the shallow mouth of the river. Her ankles are swallowed by its waves, but they are more welcoming underneath.
She sinks a little over her reflection; ragged and blistered to be anything deemed devout, and even when she cloaks herself in piety, the pain never sleeps under her skin.
Embraced by the breeze, she can only liken its respite to grace.
Then Hot Pants occupies her mind with mindless diligence, as she always has, washing her clothes against a boulder. The blood doesn't spare the fabric, but the tears are mendable with a needle and thread. Drenched and sprawled, the colors bleed between soap lather and her fingers clenched within sunburnt brown and bone-white and pink and . . . blue, like iridescent scales.
Something fast scampers back, whipping the strands of her hair.
The heap of new clothes startles her for awhile before realizing he's been a breadth close without her noticing.
"I know you're there."
Then as if summoned, Diego surreptitiously lifts himself out of the shadows of the trees in his truest nature.
Hot Pants can appreciate that it sets the illusion of a prudish boundary between them when he is likely naked. She, however, has long since forgotten to fuss over propriety when she wears close to nothing, and it painfully shows.
"You could've just told me," she chastises.
Leering in his distance, Diego doesn't answer. Perhaps, in this form, he is incapable of mustering out an intelligible sentence. Perhaps, he’s better speaking with his eyes. A loud glass of amber marbles over blue, glistening of animal cunning, cruel mischief, and hunger. The latter reflects the brightest, like a row of crooked teeth that starves for more than it can devour. Hot Pants almost sees herself impaled within their sharp edges.
Her hand doesn't reach for Cream Starter by her side. Her first thought isn't one of caution, she realizes. Hot Pants draws in a short breath.
The rosary hangs loose between her breasts, pressed beneath her thin undershirt.
She isn't afraid, even when he catches her staring back.
"And what would you understand about guilt?"
Diego scoffs. "Guilt is just the burden of someone who can't forgive himself."
For a glaring moment, the words cut-open her chest, and the disfigurement left behind mesmerizes him in a way that makes him want to run his tongue all over it.
The hot tide of blood beneath her flesh is a course he traces by a slow idle finger. There are many sloping paths and places, where Diego can search for her amidst this human-shaped misery, though he stops at the soft seam of her mouth. Then he tries again, taken aback by the mindfulness of his voice. "But really, a nun?"
He pries a little more, parting her lips for a reply; more like a sigh that whispers of an unheard prayer.
“Diego.”
Her admonition has never sounded like an invitation.
On slow meandering days, they spin like turning spokes of a wheel. Somehow, in these times, full of vacancy and excursions, the roads are broader and made of tar when time melts like thick wax and Hot Pants loses a bit of herself from it when the night falls between her fingers as she counts how long it has been since the start of the race and the end of her goal.
There isn't a time Diego looks ahead of her, of the path and what tidings it brings for the both of them, though when he doesn't plot for a better route or tactic, he is calmer.
Diego has been for a quite awhile now until Hot Pants realizes that she no longer tenses when he comes up behind her as he usually does.
Then there are days that sweep in a flurry; charged, rapturous, beneath the glare of the sun. The race is an impatient one. Diego doesn't relent finishing in first and he won't wait for her when they remain as competitors.
The banners flourish, the dust scatters, and her chest stammers from the rush of adrenaline though from the line, all Hot Pants can hear is the holler of her name from his mouth. She decidedly picks up the pace behind him, as she always does.
The softness of a mattress has always troubled him for years. His body, while powerful and adaptive, is hardened by poverty, and it embeds deep in him with knots that contort the back of his spine, coiling and cramping against its rigid tail, when this kind of luxury only serves to make him squirm further.
That, and perhaps, because the bed is shared.
The lodging tonight is full, providing only one room, one bed. Concessions are made between them when days in the wilderness have worn them thin, and while no strings are pulled, no compromises are breached, the tenseness of the space between them makes his nerves fraught, hot and awake.
Diego attempts to find consolation from the shaft of moonlight from the windowsill, though her startled breathing distracts him; a wisp of a despondent song. Her pulse trembles, too. Against rustling sheets, against the crane of her neck.
For once, his eloquence fails him and Diego grapples for words that don’t disfigure their meaning from the crudeness of his tongue. He is proud, too proud, and his language is bold and unbent to the blandishments of intimacy.
Still, he seeks for cues, for signs, for something when he is lost to the ambivalence of her gaze. The storm first, then its poetry.
It's a manifold of things all at once. Diego waits for the rain, but it never comes for him. An unvoiced part of him remains uncertain, and the other, perhaps, covets. He gives in to the simpler persuasion of his fingertips, brushing along the angle of her jaw.
There is a shiver, but his stare only meets the quiet strength of her expression, unwavering.
His question doesn't make sense to him. "Are you praying?"
"I did awhile ago."
Diego rolls his eyes at that.
But Hot Pants catches a glimpse of him and turns away, reluctant and conscious as he is. Her hair sways with her, and the slightest movement grazes against his knuckles like a fleeting caress.
Diego isn't sure if this is the answer he's been starving for. The emptiness of his hand still aches.
So he reaches.
There is dry blood stained under his fingernails though Hot Pants learns to look pass them and read the roughness of his palm; callouses of humbler origins and long meandering roads carved in through years of hard work and riding horseback.
Diego always insists on hiding his hands beneath expensive gloves, or the veneer of raptor claws to compensate for what lies thin and scarred in his skin.
Hot Pants never pursues on the matter. There is a delicacy to it, she understands, though she settles for the heat of his hand brushing on her collarbones, slung by a listless arm over her shoulder. He presses himself too close to her side tonight.
Then she threads their fingers together, but she knows better not to linger.
No one lets go until Diego seizes the chance to disentangle his hand from hers.
There is his pride and there is her thoughtfulness. Had Hot Pants withdrawn first, he will have let her either way.
Though Diego realizes he struggles with the weight that comes with that decision when he’s divided between ploughing on the race and holding her warmth longer, strewn together like sinew. Nothing cures the stubborn sentiment.
But, for both their sake, Diego doesn’t press on the issue.
The silence of the chapel is familiar but a cold welcome. The marble eyes of the saints see her as something prodigal, iniquitous, and like a docile child, Hot Pants lowers her head and bends her knee on the pew, hoping she stays longer for the evening vesper, when all her urgency does is move her in ways that exhaust her of options but one.
Perhaps, this is retribution. The endless search for absolution.
Outside the stone steps, Diego greets her. “You look like you’ve seen better days, Sister.”
Looking back at him, she has. “Don’t call me that.”
Nothing speaks truer to him than power. Diego covets for its promises; his revenge, his prestige, and the holy corpse.
Then his thoughts fall back into a dull distant echo when he feels a nudge on his knee. Without sparing him a glance, Hot Pants returns back his mended shirt and he accepts. Accepts too many things from her as of late.
Hot Pants doesn’t expect gratitude though it always goes without being spoken. How they share everything, crossing these borders side by side.
“After the race, what are you—”
“After I return the holy corpse,” she corrects, steadfast for a second, before faltering at the last crippling note. What are you going to do?
The silence festers between them.
Diego grips his shirt tighter, pressing his thumb over her stitches. He wants everything.
Hot Pants takes as a testament for her old sin.
Diego teaches her to take more, and when she lets him, she finds herself as starved as he is.
Salvation isn’t lost to her so Hot Pants clings for it in this mission, though it has a different taste from his lips. He bites more than he can kiss though the burn it leaves never changes. It’s more human than what she anticipates.
On another day, it will be a moment of weakness, but for now, it doesn’t matter when her piousness isn’t put into question from the impulse of her mouth sealed against his. By the second brush, her resolve ignites back with fire and brimstone, and it smolders gently from the lap of his tongue.
It’s a fainting spell that Diego doesn’t dwell on for too long, though the recurrence almost borders to obsessiveness.
When his hand stretches out to the world alone, but meets its fullness halfway when it is joined by hers, and as if beckoned by the flow of something great and infinite, he doesn’t resist.
Fate is mysterious and nigh-impossible to comprehend though it always ends with her ardently consuming his thoughts.
Forgiveness is a long trek forward the morning after.
The golden horizon beckons those who gaze upon it to chase after the sun, though for an interval, Hot Pants finds it brighter in his eyes. She pretends to not notice when he glances back, reflecting something similar. Almost there.
Together, they move on.