Chapter Text
In the dawn of 1891 on a beach without a name, the last good man died.
The beach had no name because until very recently, it had not existed. Now the waters of the Atlantic crept inland like shy worshippers, seeking little more than to touch the fringe of the messiah’s robes, yet unsure if they were allowed.
They would be given more than just a touch, much more. They were given a whole corner of cloth, and the entire cape if they so pleased, along with the body and blood of the newest holy corpse.
The waves curled around him almost gently. They drank up his blood with eucharistic reverence, confirming: this, this was the last good man. The heritage of sacrifice, passed down from savior to savior, was honored by their careful tendrils.
Then, the ocean swallowed him whole.
The last good man was dead. With him died a thousand kinds of beauty, of hope, of miracles.
Left behind was Johnny Joestar.
The whole universe trembled with the loss. Or perhaps that was just Johnny trembling, each grief-shaken breath a reminder: the last good man is dead.
Gyro Zeppeli was dead.
The waters receded from Johnny. He was no goodness, no justice, no fit recipient for neither sacred corpse nor fateful napkin. All those blessings were gone now.
There was only him, drenched in blood and sin. Him, and his adversary. Soon, one of them would be gone, too.
Valentine surged up from the ground like he was rising from his grave— what would have been his grave, if Johnny had his way. Watching him, Johnny gasped for air like a drowning man. He tasted salty, holy water.
What had become of the saint’s corpse? He did not know. The Infinite Spin? He did not understand. All that Johnny was sure of was that this man had killed something far greater than both of those forces.
He raised his hand, his weapon. If he had ever had qualms about murder, they too had been murdered.
Perhaps that made him the evil one. But he didn’t care.
He didn’t care that Valentine possessed the corpse, the blessing, the light of God. He didn’t care that he had taken the napkin. He didn’t care that the president’s father had loved him. In killing Gyro, he had rendered all of that meaningless anyway.
From Johnny’s point of view, he could not be staring down anyone but the Devil himself.
But then the Devil did what he does best: he proposed a deal.
—
Not for the first time, Gyro tried to understand infinity with blood on his hands.
He had been told that there was no real beginning or end to anything. That was the principle of the golden spiral: it extended outward endlessly and collapsed inward in the same fashion. It was something his father tried to explain to him many times.
“Death is not the end, Gyro,” Gregorio would say. “Like the Golden Rectangle, life began long before the frame we find it in. And it continues long after the limits of our perception.”
Whether his father truly believed what he said or only meant to assuage his sentimental son, Gyro was never sure. All he knew was that Gregorio reminded him of this most often after executions.
After raising the hood and cleaning the blade, Gyro felt a lot of things and prevented himself from feeling even more. But among those myriad emotions, he never felt like he had not just put a hard end to something. He found ways to justify it to himself, dressing it up in the pageantry of pride and honor, but he could never deny what it was.
“Death is not the end,” Gregorio would say to him. He would turn on the faucet for Gyro because his hands were unclean. “There is no end. That is our family’s legacy.”
Gyro never believed it. He especially did not believe it now, with Johnny bleeding out in his arms.
Their mission had seemed so simple at the start: rescue Lucy Steel. The president’s motives for kidnapping her weren’t clear; Gyro suspected it had to do with the diamonds they'd been hunting across the country, but he wasn't sure what Lucy had to do with it.
It should have been simple. Lucy was just a girl, and diamonds were just diamonds. Valentine could have had many more of both if he wanted them. Nobody should have had to kill, or die.
So why had the president unloaded his gun into Johnny’s body?
Johnny’s precious lifeblood was escaping him, chased out by every beat of his faltering heart. Seeing it flow onto the sand, Gyro knew with chilling certainty that Gregorio had been wrong.
For Johnny possessed eternity: the bottomless want of selfishness, the endless will of determination, the measureless breadth of love. He mastered it, better and more thoroughly than any Zeppeli. He became infinity; he embodied a timelessness that Gyro had never known.
Johnny was infinity, and still he was dying. Gyro tried to understand, and failed once again.
“Just hold on,” he said hoarsely. “Please, hold on for me.”
Johnny’s breath came in soft wheezy moans. He was crying, but his eyes were ever bright, ever fixed on Gyro, as if through his gaze alone he could say all that was left to say between them. An infinity of things left to say.
Gyro tried to push the Spin into his body, wishing for the power that had accompanied him since he was young to stitch back together what he wanted to accompany him from here on out. But something kept interrupting the process. No matter how much he sought the Golden Rectangle, he—
“JoJo!” Gyro barked at him, as if this was something he could control. “Do not—“
Johnny began to move his lips and Gyro went instantly silent. But his voice never came out of his mouth again. All that remained in his power was to form the words that he had no breath to speak.
“Death is not the end,” Gregorio would say. He seemed to think there was some power that could overcome inevitability: the Spin, or infinity, or God.
But Gyro knew that was not true. He had known no power greater than Johnny. There was no power greater than the words he repeated with the last of his strength: I love you.
A tear swelled from one of Johnny’s vibrant blue eyes. Gyro watched it travel down his cheek to his chin, then drop off onto the hand that was cradling Johnny’s neck. When he looked back to Johnny’s eyes, desperate, he found that infinity had ended.
Death killed love. After that funeral… what else was there?
All of the sentiment that Gyro had been forced to swallow in his life was vomited back up in a scream. Rage, pain, fear, sorrow, grief— none of these words could contain it. It was the emotion of apocalypse.
“And next is you, Gyro Zeppeli…”
Gyro whipped around, still clutching Johnny’s body. There he was: their adversary. Death himself, clad in a pink frock coat.
And Hell follows after, Gyro thought. If he did now what his body screamed for him to do— kill the killer— Hell may very well follow, indeed.
But Gyro did not care. Hell? It made him want to laugh. Hell meant nothing to the men left on this spontaneous shore. For one of them, Hell was too light a punishment. And for the other?
The other had no fear of the place. He was already there.
Gyro put Johnny’s body down for a second, telling himself he’d pick it up again soon, cradle it once more. Only a second was needed to finish this; only a second, he swore. He unclipped his last steel ball.
A tattered field flashed before his eyes, like a terrible memory. Valentine moved like a viper striking and Gyro saw red.
It’s over, he thought. Hell— follow after.
Then, Gyro saw white.
Then, he saw blue.
—
“You’re saying you can bring Gyro back?”
“I promise.”
“Gyro, safely and uninjured…?”
“I promise.”
“And then you’ll just let me and Gyro go?”
“I promise.”
Johnny knew better. He knew what the right thing to do would be. Don’t pull on the strings of the universe too hard lest they fray and snap; give up now, give up on the dream of resurrection, and survive. He knew what the last good man would have done.
But Johnny was not that man.
In that moment, he felt he was hardly even human at all. He had come from nowhere— had nobody— was hurtling towards nothing.
Valentine was offering him the only lifeline out of oblivion. Perhaps he was on the path of righteousness, perhaps not. Johnny wasn’t sure it mattered anymore. Even if the President was the perfect liar, even if he was a megalomaniac, even if he was the Devil himself— what else was there?
—
Somewhere on the back side of a memory, Gyro was young. His father was reading aloud. His voice was like stones coming together, forming an edifice in Gyro’s mind.
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita…”
The story unfolded: how to enter Hell, and how to get out again. That was why Gregorio read those words to him, Gyro realized. It was another effort to put a map in his son’s uncharted heart.
Midway in the journey of your life, Gregorio was telling him, you will find yourself lost in a dark wood…
Then the memory turned over, and Gyro saw something that would not allow itself to be inscribed into remembering.
He saw the cells of reality split on the underside of a flag. He saw what was between them. He saw, for a soul-searing instant, the forest that the poet had described.
It was infinity. But rather than being an orderly, spiral-shaped thing, it was a brutal wilderness. Pure chaos, the incomprehensibility of which made Gyro’s thoughts taste like blood.
Not only was there no right path that he could identify, but there were a billion paths, each one no more right than the one next to it. They curled into one another like a myriad of brambles intertwining, spreading apart, then colliding, over and over again.
He was only looking through a single narrow stripe, yet in an instant Gyro understood this: any man who dared to try to freely navigate this savage forest had to be insane. He knew on instinct alone that if he gazed too long at the recursive threads, he too would be driven mad.
A metallic blue hand shot through the hole in reality, grabbed him by the throat, and pulled him in.
—
Valentine cast the flag onto the ground as if spreading a tablecloth. Johnny saw it lay flat on the earth, nothing but the smallest of spaces between fabric and dirt.
“Before I do anything,” he said, one hand poised on the flag’s corner, “you will end the infinite Spin.”
Johnny’s response was immediate. “Like hell I will.”
“Do you expect me to simply trust that you will fulfill your end of our deal?”
“Do you have a choice?”
Valentine's gaze was unwavering stone. Johnny had heard that he was tortured during the war. Was that where he picked up the skill of concealing his heart’s intentions? Or did he just learn techniques?
“Gyro first,” Johnny said. “Then I stop the Spin.”
The President stared at him. His Stand clicked and shuddered with Act 4’s power humming inside of it.
Johnny stared back into those ice blue eyes. He had to blink every once in a while to clear the film of blood and tears. Valentine did not blink.
Suddenly, his gloved fingers tensed. Johnny had to wrestle down the urge to shoot as if it was a wild animal. The flag twitched, then flew into the air.
The next moments trundled slowly across his vision. As Valentine pulled the flag away from the ground, the space between the two changed. It must have dilated, like a pupil in darkness. As the flag retreated, what had once held nothing but atoms spat out the toe of a boot.
“Ta-da,” Valentine said, affectless.
Somewhere nearby, Johnny knew that a corpse sank beneath the waves. He knew it was lifeless when the ocean swallowed it up. He knew that the last good man was dead.
Yet there came the toe of a boot. Then the spur, then the chaps.
There came a holster with one side empty, belt buckle flashing. There came the cape, and the armbands, and the jacket with studs. There came everything Johnny knew, wrapped around the solitary figure of a man. It was on its hands and knees, gasping and clutching the flat ground as if it were the edge of a cliff.
He’s wearing Gyro’s clothes, Johnny thought.
The new man looked up sharply, the familiar hat skewing on his head. Johnny saw long hair, a patchy beard, golden teeth.
He saw green eyes, wide and confused. The same eyes as the ones that had closed under the water, or indistinguishable from them in any case. Johnny opened his mouth, although he had no idea what he was going to say.
It didn’t matter, because the eyes filled with recognition before he could speak. Indistinguishable.
“Johnny!” Gyro exclaimed.
It’s not over, Johnny meant to say. Don’t put your back to him. But he was so overwhelmed with the impossibility of seeing Gyro alive again that all that came out of his mouth was a sob.
Gyro scrambled to mount the small embankment between them. Johnny let his hand fall out of its poised aim and into a clawing grasp. His other hand was still gone, severed, but he could no longer feel the agony.
Johnny grabbed Gyro the moment he was close enough. At first touch, he marveled at the familiar feeling of his jacket between his fingers, a little scratchy from weeks of half-hearted hand-washing. It was dry.
Gyro, he wanted to say. He wanted to savor the name on his tongue. Is it really—?
The man cradled Johnny’s face between his palms, covered in blood and dust. Johnny had no choice but to look at him and it made him silent. It was like being forced to stare at the sun.
“Johnny,” Gyro repeated. “JoJo…”
His voice was hoarse. His face had more blood splattered on it, across his cheeks and even on his lips. Ever more blood; his arms and chest were covered in it, too. But his expression was a blinding combination of confusion and joy— the kind of feeling that knows it should not exist, but that is too thrilled to care.
Move, Johnny was about to urge him. I still need to deal with Valentine.
But as Johnny wrapped his fingers around Gyro’s wrist, the words would not come out. He wanted it to be over. He wanted so badly for this to be the end, for this to mean that nothing was harmed, that everything was whole…
What Gyro did next, however, told Johnny that he wanted in vain.
The man before him pulled Johnny’s face to his, and Johnny tasted blood.
A slick of oil in his heart caught fire. Quick as lightning, bright as a star, but with such noxious fumes that he didn’t know how to breathe.
This is not, he thought, stomach churning, my Gyro.
He heard a click.
Johnny grabbed the person kissing him by the collar and yanked him down, trying to get him out of the way for him to get a nail bullet off. Too late— there was a puff of gun-smoke, a flash of light, and a sound like thunder.
Johnny felt the man jerk in front of him, then a new stab of pain. It reminded him of the rest of the pain hiding in his body, which now poked its numerous, grotesque heads out of every one of his wounds. He looked down and saw a fresh blossom of red on his abdomen, which quickly mingled with the previous ones.
“Jo…”
Johnny looked up. The man before him was white as a sheet. He put his hand over Johnny’s new wound almost tentatively. Then, he put his other hand over the bullet hole in his own chest.
The man’s lips moved soundlessly. He collapsed to the dirt, blood watering the ever-thirsting ground. Johnny stared at what the lack of him revealed: Valentine with another gun in hand.
Johnny’s eye caught the empty gun, its exact replica, where it had been cast aside. With the new man blocking Johnny’s sight, Valentine had been able to get rid of it undetected. He had been able to retrieve its lookalike, like he had retrieved Gyro’s lookalike, and then—
“Tch.” Valentine pulled the hammer back again, the spent shell dinging away. “Missed.”
He never looked remorseful. If anything, he looked disappointed right up to the moment that Johnny shattered his face with a nail bullet. He didn’t even have the shame to look like a man caught in a lie.
But then again, does the Devil lie? Doesn’t he always give you just what you think you want?
—
On the beach with no name, the sinners bled.
Gyro was dying again. His hearing was replaced with a tinny ringing. He could do little more than stare at the line in front of him: ground and sky bisecting his vision, both of them turning red.
Yet he wasn’t afraid. Fear was for people who had hope.
A minute ago, Gyro was one of them. When he lay eyes on the man that looked like Johnny, it seemed like all of his prayers had been answered. The clock had been rewound to before it was smashed.
Unthinking, more joy than reason, he kissed him. It felt like the right thing to do— until he felt the stiffness, the apprehension, the bubbling disgust.
Then Gyro was shot. It came almost as a relief.
The bullet was well aimed. It must’ve struck Gyro somewhere dire to make him collapse that fast. An artery, perhaps. Gyro wasn’t sure, nor did he care to diagnose. It would all be over soon anyway.
Gyro closed his eyes. JoJo…
Someone abruptly turned him onto his back. Gyro’s eyes opened without his permission and he saw blue. First the sky, then two eyes drowned in tears.
Once, it might’ve satisfied Gyro in some terribly selfish way to see those eyes cry over him. But now, it just made him ache.
It’s funny— he cries just like JoJo, he thought. Like JoJo, but…
The man's blue and red-stained lips moved, but Gyro couldn’t hear him anymore. He was starting to fade, like an echo repeated too many times. He could only trace the movement of his mouth with his eyes as he said over and over: I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
Sorry for what? Gyro wondered, then died.