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fandoms I've written for .・ in the past I've written for bleach, genshin, and jjba. some of my newer stuff includes that's not my neighbor, twisted wonderland, more jjba, and some itsv i wrote when it first came out. however, check out the current interests section to find out different fandoms I might write for in the future

current interests ゜・ started playing honkai star rail recently, honestly really enjoying how interesting the character stories are. some manga I'm currently reading include blue lock, jjk, sakamoto days and jjba. I read a wider variety of manhwa and novels though, including orv, lookism, how to fight, return of the mad demon, solo levelling, concubine walkthrough (really recommend this one), legend of a northern blade... I can't list them all since I've read over two hundred lmao (please ask me for fic recommendations I've got so many) in terms of my other hobbies since I do have a life (I hope this is obvious) I like art, history, and the sciences (fuck I use so many science metaphors in my work...), so if you ask for scientist!reader... yeah you know what's up

things of note •. yeah don't follow me or interact with my work if you're racist, homophobic, ableist, or if you don't believe in a free palestine. idc who you are that's an immediate block.

requests + asks ・゜ my ask box will be open for just discussions or other things :) requests are currently closed!

what I'm currently up to <3 currently studying for finals as of april 2026 :) updates will be more sporadic I fear

OLD MASTERLIST ゜・★･ﾟMASTERLIST

“—listen to me, you stubborn ass-mule. Had Raskolnikov simply kept his mouth shut, with his illness diagnosis, he would’ve gotten away with the murder!” 

Except, naturally, for the argumentative tone of Zeppeli interrupting your careful scans of the blissfully quiet surroundings. 

“But that wasn’t the point of the story! The point was that it was a commentary on the growing lapses of morality in the youth, and about the systems that cause it!” Johnny argued back, impassioned. 

“Well, he did a piss-poor job at that. Reading that dull drivel was so uninspiring I almost fell asleep—and when I finally did, I had nightmares of its bleakness,” Zeppeli shuddered. 

“It’s meant to be bleak!”

“And what I’m saying is that he spent the majority of the story playing word-games with the detective, only to repent because of a Bible story? Ludicrous,” he scoffed. “He had the perfect excuse to not be a suspect, and he shot himself in the mouth at every opportunity. A most unsatisfying story.”

[Foot. It’s foot.]

“It’s not meant to be satisfying!”

You watched, incredibly entertained, at the prospect of the King’s executioner appearing to defend a fictional murderer: a criminal who would’ve almost certainly been punished with the full weight of the blade had he been in the Kingdom of Naples. 

“He could’ve at least owned his actions! Why get sick with regret not even a whole hour later—why throw away your spoils—why deliberate the murder and not the consequence!”

You sobered slightly. 

“Guilt is a strange idea,” Johnny replied, sounding somewhat deflated. “The text isn’t meant to be picked up as a light read or entertainment, but rather a lesson about not just the lawful punishment for the crime, but the impacts it has on the psyche of the person forced into the circumstances to commit such a thing.”

The other man wasn’t stupid. He considered the words, regarding Johnny for a long moment, before he shrugged. 

“Whatever, man. Just don’t recommend me such depressing books again,” he acceded, and it was a defeat of sorts. Unfortunately, Johnny didn’t look remotely satisfied—just contemplative, like there was something unpleasant ruminating in the back of his mind. 

The silence didn’t last long: broken by the sound of liquid sloshing inside a metal flask. The executioner carefully measured a dram or two out into a small cup and passed it along to Johnny, who took it without saying thank you. 

“Want some?” 

You looked at Zeppeli skeptically, and he poured out another measure into a different cup without waiting for you to respond. 

“Try it,” he encouraged, lagging behind slightly so he could pass the mug over. 

You looked at the pitch-hued liquid, then back at him. 

“This is tar,” you said disbelievingly, tilting the cup this way and that. It was viscous, somehow. “You’ve created a non-Newtonian fluid.”

“I’m impressed,” you added as a quiet afterthought, but the genuine awe in your voice earned you a vicious glare from the flaskbearer. “What is it?”

“Coffee,” he answered venomously, and you took a tentative inhale of the concoction. “Nothing like the dirty water they serve here. Pretenders, the lot of you.”

There was a rich aroma coming from the roast, but it was so unbelievably strong that your eyes couldn’t help but water a little. But it was only a few mouthfuls. You took a deep breath, bringing the cup up to your lips behind the fabric, and chugged the coffee. 

“So?” he asked expectantly, while you tried not to cough at just how concentrated the flavour actually was. You swallowed, feeling your lungs burn slightly. 

“Well, that’s definitely woken me up,” you muttered, handing the cup back, and he took it with a self-satisfied grin. 

“I make a mean cup of coffee, yes?” 

“Very mean,” you acquiesced, and you could see Johnny’s shoulders tremble slightly at the acknowledgement. 

“Quality coffee,” Zeppeli insisted. 

“Even just a whiff blew me away,” you admitted. This time, Johnny’s shoulder trembling was punctuated with a short cough that was masquerading as an exhale that had attempted to hide a laugh. 

“Yes yes, exactly,” he nodded emphatically, stowing his mystery liquid back into his container. 

You missed the watery coffee back at the office: the different syrups you and Diya had once spent an entire afternoon sampling; the paper cups that burned the shit out of your hands when holding them; and the kettle that had a thin layer of perpetual limescale on it. 

Cheap instant coffee: the mighty beverage of interns. 

[Absence truly does make the heart grow fonder, I guess? Yuck.]

You sighed. 

“The fuck?” 

You looked up at the muttered imprecation, and the same thing immediately crossed your mind at the sight of a strung-up cow carcass, half-gnawed by beasts and sporting a massive hole through its side. 

Zeppeli didn’t waste any time. His hand was already holding a knife when you glanced at him, and you recoiled at the sight. “Want some?” 

“Absolutely not,” you replied immediately, studying the punctured carcass. In this warmth, with who-knows how many flies and creatures had nibbled on that thing, there was no way you were consuming this suspicious meat. 

“Gyro, I wouldn’t touch that—there’s an owner.” From your peripherals, Johnny was pointing at some spot on the carcass, but you had ridden around to examine the bullet hole more closely. It looked as though it had been shot clean through with a rifle round, judging by the diameter of the exit wound. Who had strung it up? Where had it been shot? Your mind couldn’t help but latch onto these questions, even if they were ultimately useless. 

“Look at this closely, Johnny… the coyotes already ate most of it. I’ll just take a half-kilo or so—before it’s all gone!” Zeppeli tapped his head with a pragmatic sort of composure, and you grimaced. Yuck. 

You backed Group Four up, wheeling her towards the forest. “Stinks here. I’m going to go ahead.”

“Suit yourself. Don’t come begging after— you’re leaving me here too, Johnny?” Zeppeli asked, appalled at the sight of Johnny following you. “It’ll only take me a minute or two!”

His incredulity was ignored. 

“I’m not touching that shit personally. Who knows if it’s poisoned?” you muttered to the jockey. “What happened to his distrust for free food?”

“Yeah… he’s got meat on the brain,” Johnny pulled a face. 

You inhaled the air that no longer smelled like dead cow. 

“Dumbass,” you sneered: a punctuation mark to end the discussion. 

“What did you say?” Zeppeli’s voice cut in at that moment, sounding somewhat out of breath as Valkyrie jogged to catch up to the two of you. There was a faint crinkling as he slid oiled paper full of the looted meat into his bag. “I think I misheard.”

“No, you heard right. Don’t be surprised when you get attacked for eating someone else’s spoils,” you retorted, and he had the audacity to grin in your face instead. 

“You worry too much.”

“You think too little.”

His smile turned into a momentary scowl. “Are you trying to start an argument?” 

You considered the question, and thoughtfully pieced together your response. “No, I’m just trying to have the last word.”

His scowl deepened. “What is wrong with you?”

“I’m not the one eating suspicious meat,” you noted politely, and you heard his teeth grit in frustration. 

“Guys, shut up,” Johnny said, and his urgent tone interrupted whatever insult Zeppeli was about to unleash upon you. 

“There’s someone there.”

. 　⁺ ✦ 

(You play with the cigarette carton your mother left behind in her coat pocket, lining up the sticks against it and knocking them down again. And again. And again.)

(The same question repeats in your mind: a sickening, recursive laugh-track that someone’s left on loop in the theatre of your mind. There’s no way to turn it off, no way to calm yourself to the point where you can think through it rationally.)

(Your fingers find the sleeve of her woollen coat, tugging it in the way you used to when you were a child. There’s no resistance. No force that roots her in place, for she does not exist right now. Not here. You can’t ask her if she’s guilty. You can’t even ask her if she’s real.)

(The past is made up of mere fragments. Like glass, they’ve shattered in your mind, and you must brave cutting your fingers, to pick them up and make them whole again.)

(The memory in question is from the year after you found Dr Amsa’s body in that cramped alleyway. She’s gone for a month—no notes, no indication whatsoever that she still remains on the mortal plane.)

(When she returns, she’s almost a completely different person. Colder, if that were even possible. Her movements are far more calibrated. You don’t dare to ask where she was.)

(You should have.)

(Instead of suffering through microwave dinners in silence alone, fork scraping against porcelain, you should’ve plucked up the courage to ask the most basic of questions long before any of this happened: who are you?)

(Before, you could at least count on an irregular meal. She’d take her time with the meals, slicing into the meat and vegetables with a detached, mechanical sort of grace. After that month, however, she was hardly home. You’d find traces of her after you rose from your bed and padded around the apartment, yet the waking world never welcomed her home.)

(When your bouts of insomnia began, she seemed to dissolve into the wind. Calls went unanswered. She faded in and out of your life like smoke. Fleeting. All too short.)

(Is she a criminal, though?)

(You wonder. Factually, you know she’s not. There’d be some sort of indication, surely, but you can’t prove it. You can’t ask her, either. She’s a ghost in your life.)

(You don’t know why you reacted so strongly to the implication. It’s natural for children to defend their parents, but there is nothing to defend except an expensive coat and the cigarettes resting on top of it. There’s no proper relationship tying the two of you together, no obligation you feel at this moment to care for your mother.)

(There’s nothing.)

(You curl up within the thick coat as though it were a shield, inhaling its fragrance to mimic what it might’ve felt like to be held as a child. You cannot remember for the life of you.)

(It works. Somewhat. You grow drowsy, and dream of rain.)

(You’re cold. Water drips onto your face mercilessly, and you watch the sky with empty, unseeing eyes. You know this day like you know your hand: achingly so.)

(You can’t sit up. The body prevents you from doing so—sluggish, corpse-like. You lie there, motionless, staring up at—)

(There’s the barrel of the gun. You haven’t quite seen this perspective before, and you focus on the smoke dissolving in the pelting downpour. It leaks into your lips, and you taste the acrid, disgusting sting of gunpowder.)

(The city lights peek through the crevice between the two buildings, flickering with empty promises of politicians to fix them. But they’re enough to shine a light on the manicured fingers that hold the trigger, they’re enough to spot a glimpse of a face that is no more than a wandering ghost.)

(What’s your mother doing here?)

(The question flicks through your head before you remember how cold it is. It’s a terrible sort of chill, but it’s dissipating quickly in the face of an endless weightlessness.)

(You shut those dead eyes, and smile at this peaceful darkness.)

. 　⁺ ✦ 

“Look, it’s him—he’s coming this way,” Johnny warned, and your head snapped up to the person approaching. Who?

You squinted.

“What the hell does he want? Is there anybody with him?” Zeppeli muttered. 

Johnny peered at the speck on the horizon with his telescope. “He’s a lone wolf. An American, with his age and real name unknown. On a good horse, too. No hillbilly, by the way he carries himself.”

Who?

“Should we talk to him?” Zeppeli asked sceptically, and you finally saw ‘him’ come into focus, in all his pink glory. You lit up.

“No, just ignore him,” Johnny whispered as the rider approached, holding three… ropes?

“Hot—”

Your greeting was interrupted by the swish of rope as three nooses dangled from the branch of a tree, tossed over expertly. 

“Good day to you three. Let’s skip the chit-chat and get straight to the point,” he said in his rough, clipped voice. He leveled an even stare at each of you in turn, though when his eyes met yours, he looked almost disappointed. 

[The hell?]

“I will now ‘hang’ you three from this tree.”

There was a stunned silence. 

“You ate my cow, didn’t you? It was a cow that I paid for in advance to graze on this course. The penalty of cow theft is to be ‘hanged’. Put these ropes around your necks,” he established matter-of-factly, as though he were making the small talk he so hated. “There’s no need for a trial.”

You shot a glare at Zeppeli, but he was looking at the freeze-brand on Hot Pants’ horse. There was a visible bead of sweat on his face, and he swallowed audibly, holding up his hands. “Ho— hold on, I don’t know the laws of this land too well, and…”

It seemed he, too, was trying to excuse his crime while feeling guilty. It would’ve been more fascinating to watch, had you and Johnny not been lumped in with his sins. 

“Look–” he tried again, but it was too late. Hot Pants had vanished from his saddle, and reappeared above Zeppeli. He had leapt through the air in a whirl of pink, and Zeppeli’s immediate lunging for his spheres was met with a torrential downpour of pink, flesh liquid that merged his hand and weapon together. 

Neither you and Johnny were safe, either.

“What the fuck is happening?”

Hot Pants deftly moved between horses, spraying both you and Johnny in the face with the— flesh? Stand user!

You had no time to react, desperately activating the slot in your mind to reverse the numbing blindness and blockage of your throat. 

Come on, come on, you prayed, listening to the sounds of viscous scuffling. 

“Shit— and he’s spraying the flesh onto me!” Zeppeli swore loudly, and you heard a loud collision. It was silent, and you heard a painful sounding crack. 

“Johnny—now! Shoot—I’ve locked both of his arms!”

[First slot activated: Personal Jesus. Countdown has begun.]

“Fuck— hurry— or Mercury— shoot because my breathing’s about to stop soon!”

You gasped. The relief was immediate, but incomplete. The flesh was aggressively worming into your face, and the only thing you could do was fight it off on your mouth to get an air supply. You were still blind, forced to rely on pure hearing to work out what was going on, but you were hurriedly scanning through all the questions you gathered when examining the carcass. 

“Hot Pants— there was a bullet wound on the cow. It was already dead!” you yelled, and you heard the rattle of that damned lighter as it creaked in his hand. And then, there was the careful whizz of shots as Johnny fired into the dirt. A warning.

“You have a gun,” he gritted out, and you could feel the accusation and something else dripping in his tone. Disappointment? Resentment? Begrudging concession?

“The exit wound had too large of a diameter to be from my pistol,” you argued. “That was a hunting rifle, which none of us possess. It’s a few inches across! Even point-blank, it doesn’t have that much ballistic power! Besides, we came across it recently—the wound was old enough that coyotes had already picked it mostly clean!”

Your words were hurried and garbled, interjected with Johnny’s fervent adlibs that backed your point up. 

“For fuck’s sake, shoot him! I can’t even scratch this shit off—stop wasting time begging!” Zeppeli shouted desperately, but the red-tinted flesh from your vision had cleared. 

You breathed heavily, watching Hot Pants stand there—who, in turn, regarded the three of you with a suspicious silence. The brassy lighter flipped in his hands, and he slung it easily into the holster at his side. “True…”

“But you did eat the meat. You ate my cow! So, I’m not going to apologise.”

You fought the urge to kick Zeppeli while he was down, but by technicality, he hadn’t eaten any of the meat either.

[Yet.]

It was a very precarious ‘yet’.

“What an odd group,” he added, and his eyes turned to you. “Why are you with these fools?”

He didn’t wait for a response, mounting his horse swiftly with threats of hanging under his breath, towards whoever had shot his cow. 

“Wait!” Johnny called out after him, and the rider slowed slightly, glancing back with a serious gaze. “Where did you gain that Stand ability? Was it in the Arizona desert during the second stage? Devil’s Palm?”

He turned his head more fully now, looking Johnny up and down with a critical eye. “Not that I’m really interested, but… are there others like that?”

Answering a question with a question—it seemed, characteristically, that he would keep his cards close to his chest. 

“Well… we don’t know. Not a clue, really,” Johnny lied smoothly, and Hot Pants merely scoffed and kept riding. You watched him disappear past the hill in the distance, and only when he was out of sight did Zeppeli finally speak. 

“I would have shot him. What if he was tricking us?” he kicked the ground in frustration, practically tearing at his hair. It was clear the sore loss had ripped the wind out of his sails, and he mounted Valkyrie with a huff. 

“We could’ve been toast, but it doesn’t seem like he knows anything about the corpse. He doesn’t seem to be an enemy, nor a terrorist or from the government,” Johnny interjected. He looked resigned as he said it, acknowledging each of your weaknesses with his words. 

“Maybe. One thing’s for sure—I hate his guts,” Zeppeli seethed, then turned his attention to you. “You know this guy?” 

“I saw him several times before Syracuse. We camped together for a night. He’s a straightforward person,” you thought aloud, and Zeppeli’s expression only grew more sour.

“Yeah?” He came closer, jabbing a finger into your sternum. “You sure took your sweet time talking then, didn’t you?” 

You took your time in watching his expressions cycle between frustration and pure malice. It was clear that he hadn’t expected such a quick defeat: for the three of you to be overpowered so easily by a single person. It was humiliating—over meat. You weren’t enough of a dick to start gloating, even if he did take some. After all, only Zeppeli had taken it (and hadn’t yet eaten it). Hot Pants had indiscriminately attacked without verifying any of the facts. 

Inhale.  

You were frustrated too, damn it. 

Exhale. 

You grabbed his wrist, wrestling with his wiry strength to direct his index finger away from your solar plexus. He froze, off-guard, which allowed you to force his hand back to his side. You brushed the dust off your jacket, levelling him with a cool expression. 

“You weren’t the only one with flesh stealing his air,” you countered, and your tone was cold enough to leave his mouth opening and closing like the fish he wasn’t able to catch. There was no malice in your cadence, though: merely a detached neutrality that hit him more than an argument could. His throat bobbed as he swallowed. 

“There’s another thing, though,” he muttered, rubbing at his neck. His right eye flashed a blinding gold as he directed the light at his arm. “I realised it thanks to him, when I was checking his spine with the spin scan…”

[Was that what cracked?]

Depeche Mode seemed mildly horrified, as were you. You watched the letters coalesce on his sleeve with no small amount of trepidation. 

“In Latin, turbō can mean ‘cyclone’. But there’s no such word as ‘turbō’ on our route anywhere. There doesn’t seem to be any name it can be associated with, and I couldn’t figure out why it was turbō in the first place… but then it occurred that maybe the word itself isn’t the clue.”

He held his arm out, and both you and Johnny drew in closer to look at the patterns inside the letters. It looked remarkably like—

“Binary,” you realised aloud, and though Zeppeli didn’t look up, you could see his eyebrows raise faintly at your proclamation. “Base two numbers.”

“Exactly,” he murmured softly, tracing each letter with a reverent finger. 

“Okayyy…” Johnny drew the word out in a drawl, looking between the two of you with a strange expression on his face, as though he was trying to figure out where he was being left out in this equation. “What in tarnation does that mean?”

“Our current decimal system is a base ten system—so it uses exactly ten numbers to represent all numbers…” Zeppeli trailed off, still not looking up. He was simply staring at the numbers and muttering, and you decided to explain what you’d learnt in your programming lessons instead. 

“The binary system uses two numbers instead—twos and ones. With the decimal system, you have your ones, your tens and your hundreds and so forth. Ten to the power of zero is one, ten to the one is ten, ten to the two is a hundred—ten is the base and forms each ‘place-value’ that then gets added together. In the same way, a base two system has two to the power of zero—one—then two to the power of one—two—then so forth, getting four, eight, sixteen, et cetera. The zeros and ones indicate which of these place-values is turned ‘on’, and then you add them together,” you explained slowly, pulling out a notebook from your bag and a pen to jot down the things you were saying. “It’s an addition game. You can have practically anything as a base—like, the Babylonians used a base 60 number system.”

“Right,” Johnny nodded slowly, but you could tell his mind was whirring at a speed a bit too quick to actually absorb what you were saying. “I… kinda get it?”

“Give me that,” Zeppeli said, and you handed him the notebook wordlessly so he could draw the word out. He worked quickly and precisely, with surprisingly neat handwriting, tongue out the entire time in his focus. “Thirty-nine… six… twenty-four… ninety-four… six… forty…”

“Coordinates?” Johnny guessed, and the answer was clear when Zeppeli pulled his map out and shoved it towards him. 

“Look it up—I’ll read it off. The ‘T’ at the beginning means ‘horizontal’ line in Latin, so…” He furrowed his brow, and you watched quietly, somewhat amused. 

“Thirty-nine degrees, six minutes, and twenty-four seconds North… ‘B’ means next, so… ninety-four degrees, forty minutes, and six-seconds West—” He looked up at Johnny, who was tracing the map with similar focus. “—where do those numbers meet?”

Johnny’s eyes widened, and you leaned forward over Group Four to look at the map. “Kansas City! It’s at the finish line of the fourth stage—really close to it!”

Zeppeli narrowed his eyes. “Looks like it ‘matches’ with the route of this race. And that’s the location of the next part.”

His gaze drifted to you, tilting his head. “Will it be your turn to host a corpse part?”

Soft hands seemed to trail across your arms, scratching at you with their papery surfaces. You thought back to the purple arm that you held: its fragility, its constant exploitation, the promise of death that had never reached it in the end. A wave of sadness washed over you, and you swallowed. 

“We’ll see,” you may have said, but your tone suggested that you didn’t accept the very notion of this happening. 

“But… is it possible for an old saint to know about latitudes and longitudes?” Johnny asked worriedly, and your shoulders slumped in relief as Zeppeli turned to him. 

“Numbers have a constant quality. The base system has existed for many epochs, and it wouldn’t be far-fetched to have a saint with the gift of prophecy.”

“Ah—Dio! Will he realise the same thing with his left eye?”

“Unless he’s a lazy idiot, but that’s probably not the case. We should anticipate that he’s come to a similar conclusion. But! The terrorists won’t know—our only goal is to finish in first place.” Zeppeli lowered his head, resolutely looking forward. With the breeze tugging at his long hair, he almost looked heroic in a way. It was hard to believe he’d been pocketing someone else’s meat just a half-hour prior, and now he’d pulled it out and begun finishing it off. 

“Kansas City it is, then. The next corpse part,” Johnny muttered quietly, and the goal hung in the air between the three of you. You wondered if this meant that you were now obliged to spend the rest of the stage with them, and you really hoped that wasn’t the case. 

The next corpse part.

One step closer to Valentine. 

. 　⁺ ✦ 

“We’ve passed this house before,” you remarked dryly. 

It was a rickety old shack, utterly nondescript. The light wood had blended perfectly into the dusty dirt-trail winding through the forest, and you originally hadn’t paid it much thought. That was the problem, though. You should’ve paid it greater attention, now that you were squinting at the broken shutters and wondering if you were hallucinating. 

Zeppeli scoffed. “Houses around here, y’know—they’re built all the same.”

“The windows were broken the exact same way,” you pointed out, irritated by the heat and the landscape. “Same mailbox, same broken railings. You led us back to the same place.”

“No, you must be confused,” he bared his teeth threateningly. 

“Look— Gyro!” Johnny’s startled yelp caused his face to drop, and he snapped his head to where the jockey was pointing. As did you, feeling nothing but incredible trepidation at the cry. You squinted, and rubbed your hands over your eyes in disbelief. 

It was that damned cow that had gotten you into this mess. 

“Damn it—we’re back where the meat is!” Johnny cursed, and his blue lips had turned down into a trembling frown. “We’ve come back the road we came from!”

“Shit—wait, wait, wait, wait…” Zeppeli pulled his worn map out of his pack to study it incredulously. “Where the hell did we go wrong! Shit—that stronzo went to the right when he left, and we followed like damned fools. We were going the opposite direction!”

He looked up and around him, and cursed as he saw you staring at him impassively; the choice words he might’ve otherwise shot at you died on his throat as he looked back at the map. No, he had to resort to muttering under his breath as he tried to figure out exactly where he’d gone wrong. “That guy is a plague! I can’t believe this—is this what I get for eating just half a kilo of meat?”

“In that case, why are we here alongside you?” you deadpanned.

“Shut up,” he glared, and your sneer hid itself in fabric. 

But you had a point. Had this been some elaborate revenge plot, only he would’ve been affected. No, there was something wrong, not just an ordinary misdirection. 

“I swear, that fucker is stealing my luck,” he groused.

“But, we know the location of Kansas City thanks to him, right?” 

“Johnny, are you on his side or something?” Zeppeli stared at him dubiously, turning his head to glower at you for good measure. “I’ve already got one traitor here—this was all his scheme! He went right on purpose to trick us! The correct direction should be that way.”

His pen made experimental marks on the map. 

“We’re going back. Straight through this orchard…”

You balanced on your saddle, picking a stray plum from a tree and eating it. There was no point in worrying. Not yet, not when you’d been the only one to realise it so far. The gut feeling you had was yet to be proven wrong. 

“...turn left at the end of the road…”

Its aftertaste was bittersweet. You left a stroke of ink against the birch you passed, and its bright carmine hue looked like blood. 

“…left again…”

It was too hot for this. The breeze was nowhere near enough to cool your sweat-dampened body, and you fervently wished for ice water to dump over your head.

“...and finally, ‘right.’”

You looked at the carcass, and back at your navigator. Had he realised it yet?

[Realised what?]

A short exhale left your throat. You know. How could it not know? 

It was you. Your puppet. Your puppeteer. 

“What the hell? Is that the same cow? The same piece of meat? Why are we here again?”

Johnny scanned the map pressingly. His hands blurred across the parchment, so fast you could barely see the fleshy afterimages. “Maybe we didn’t go back on the same road—perhaps we went through smaller paths in the orchard, and we happened to go through those without realising we were coming back to where we began!”

A flimsy explanation. It sounded ridiculous even as he spoke it, yet his pressed lips gave away a determination that didn’t want to be wrong. You kept silent, studying the monotonous journeys. 

There had been no indication of a ‘cut’. You were travelling on a Mobius strip of a journey, forever continuous. 

“That’s impossible,” Zeppeli firmly rejected the possibility. “We only turned at three corners. Look—there are our hoof marks; we’ll follow the tracks back and find the right way.”

He leaned forward and spurred Valkyrie on, swearing all the way. “Shit—another twenty minutes lost! Forty minutes total! We’ve wasted forty minutes in a single day—Dio’s going to get way ahead of us!”

There it was again in all its glory: that rickety house. You exhaled. The worry you’d been suppressing was back, stabbing painful pinpricks in your chest. 

“You’ve got to be kidding me! We’ve only turned once on the road we’ve come—we’ve just been looping around!” 

A loop. 

Sweat seeped through the seams of your gloves, and you gripped the reins tighter. Your teeth were chattering, and you were both too hot and too cold. 

A loop. 

Space and time was warping once again, and this time, you couldn’t even pretend to have a semblance of control of the situation. 

“Are you two lost, too?” The rough voice of Hot Pants came from behind you, and you almost cried tears of joy at the sight of him several horselengths away. The strip had introduced a new variable. “How many times has it happened?”

The very air seemed to still, bearing down upon the four of you with its oppressive weight before Zeppeli raised his finger to point: trembling with an incandescent rage all the while. 

“Stop right there!” he barked out commandingly, yet his body betrayed his hesitation at reengaging with a futile fight: leaning decidedly away from the pink rider. “Don’t you dare come any closer—this is a warning!” 

From his pocket, Hot Pants drew out a compass, and Zeppeli flinched: hand instantly moving to rest on the sphere on his left hip. He watched warily, as the once-enemy glanced around the eternal landscape, then back at the instrument in his hand. 

“I’ve lost nearly an hour here. No matter which path I take, I come back to this spot. The plums here contain a fair bit of iron… could be the reason the compass isn’t pointing in the right direction.” His grey horse paced in place, taking a cautious step forward, and Johnny’s hand shot out—much like Zeppeli’s. 

“Hot Pants! Don’t come any closer—we’re thinking that you could be tracking us!”

You sincerely doubted it. The two of them were grasping at straws—trying to rationally explain this irrational phenomenon. There was just no way he was tracking the three of you—from the little you’d seen of him, he was the type to do things directly. Besides, what purpose would tracking the three of you even serve?

You met his gaze, and you could almost see your exasperated expression reflected in it. 

“This is the fourth time I’ve come back here. Look at my tracks—they pass through here four times, don’t they? Why? I’m the one that wants to know,” Hot Pants continued, half-speaking to himself; his eyes continued to train themselves on your person, watching how you kept quiet rather than accuse him.

“What’s that to us? Get lost already!” Zeppeli gesticulated angrily. “We’re never going to trust you anyways, got it?”

Those fuschia eyes still hadn’t left you. A thick brow raised. 

“Then, I’ll be the one to trust you,” he decreed, and his face was proud and stern. “The three of you don’t seem to be bad people. If you were, I’d already have killed you. How’s that?”

[What a way to put it.]

Yeah, you thought grimly. 

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Zeppeli muttered to Johnny, and his furtive gape swivelled momentarily to you as he tracked exactly who the rider was looking at. 

“We’re all lost, so we might as well work together to find an exit,” Johnny thought aloud, and Zeppeli’s glare transferred viciously to him at the idea of cooperating with the cause of his humiliation. “I’ve said it before, but I really don’t think he’s our enemy.”

“Tell him to go eat shit, Johnny,” Zeppeli bit out. He looked agitated: hackles raised, mouth open in a snarl, and hands kept defensively by his sides. 

He looked cornered. Not scared, necessarily, but you’d never seen him so defensive before. It was a good look on him. 

“Tell him yourself,” Johnny dismissed.

“Are you scared?” you taunted, and he wheeled his scowl onto you, before dejectedly cupping his hand around his mouth. 

“Eat shit, asshole!” he hollered. Each word packed an impressive amount of hatred. “Fall off your horse!”

Hot Pants looked rather tired. He waited for Zeppeli to finish his tirade before he cleared his throat. “Aren’t we looking for the same path? Let’s just cooperate until we find the main road!”

Zeppeli’s chest rose and fell rapidly after his fervid outburst, and he seemed to have lost the steam to continue his yelling. Green lips pressed together in displeasure, but he appeared to be weighing his options—no longer shaky after he let his emotions out. 

[One can almost respect him for it.]

Begrudgingly, you mused. 

“So, let’s say we do trust you,” he began, far more composed than you assumed he’d be. “What’s in it for us if we cooperate?”

Quid pro quo. You laughed at the simplicity. 

This was the language that Hot Pants spoke fluently. Out of his pack he pulled a paper parcel, tossing it like he’d expected this question—which he most likely did. “I’ll let you have some quality food if you’re with me.”

Zeppeli caught it easily, unwrapping it with a hungry expression. Was food truly that valuable to Hot Pants? Would they only give or receive it in exchange for a more formal allyship? It was precise: mechanical, even. You raised a brow. 

“Holy shit—is this what he eats every day? A roast beef sandwich, with onions and eggs?” Johnny muttered incredulously, and Zeppeli was gaping alongside him. Almost reverently, he wrapped the food back up and placed it in his bag, seemingly not daring to consume it yet in the event it would disappear. 

“There’s no poison,” Hot Pants affirmed, but it was almost unnecessary. Someone so fastidious about their food wouldn’t commit the mortal sin of poisoning it; besides, his prowess in battle showed that it was almost entirely unnecessary. 

It was comical, but comedy was ill-suited for a place like this. You sobered. 

“That house… looks like there’s someone inside,” Hot Pants announced, pointing to the shack that you’d passed, over and over. The sight of it unnerved you. It had been the ‘cut’ in the continuity: the marker of another loop. The cow had been an accidental mark—the ink splatter on a river birch, another. This was the only original thing in the environment: an anchor to bind this place. “Looks worn out, but it must be inhabited.”

You bit your lip. The words bad idea formed looping patterns in your mind, iterating and repeating with no real solution. 

“Let’s ask whoever lives there for directions. We’ll just be stuck here otherwise,” he continued decisively, already moving to press his horse on and approach. 

“Hold on,” you murmured, and your voice carried in the rustling quiet of the forest road. “There’s something off about the house.”

“Well, surely whoever’s in there must know the ‘trick’,” he rebutted, arching a flinty brow. 

“Perhaps. Why would they share it, though?” you countered back, wracking your brains to find any scrap of information that you could distill into a proper deduction.

“Then what do you suggest we do?”

You looked up, startled at the lack of argument. He’d simply accepted your words without any pomp and circumstance, and was listening without fuss. But your head dropped in shame. 

“I don’t have any suggestions as of now,” you admitted, twining the braided reins around a finger. He let out a long exhale. “However, we’ve been on a continuous loop, and that house has been the ‘burr’ in the fabric: the counter that breaks us from our stupor. We’d be wise to tread carefully. There may be no ‘trick’, but rather a deliberate phenomenon that was designed to keep us here.”

You glanced up, and he locked eyes with you. From his expression, each twitch represented another conclusion drawn. His rosy lips compressed into a thin line.

“Are you insinuating that this is a Sta—”

“Shit—here, again? That son of a bitch—this same place again!” 

Hot Pants straightened, clamming up as another rider emerged from the bushes. He wore almost entirely tan clothing, and his face was partially covered by a sombrero. A light sheen of sweat covered his face, and his eyes swivelled wildly across the forest before they landed on your quartet. 

He was terrified. 

“You guys—are you guys lost too?” he almost pleaded, and though his hands on the reins urged his horse to still, the steed was pacing and breathing terribly hard. 

“Hey, hey, who is this?” Zeppeli muttered under his breath, and his face was wrought with suspicion once more. 

“‘Gaucho’,” Johnny answered immediately. “Finished tenth last stage.”

“Look at you,” you marvelled, and Johnny suppressed his smile in the gravity of the situation. 

“That son of a bitch again! Always at the curtain by the door… that damn curtain—I’ve asked him over and over again… how to get out of this damned orchard…” His breathing was spiraling into hyperventilation, and his irises shook as he stared at that shack. “…’n this is what he says each time: ‘You’ll find your way out after you kill me.’ “

You swallowed. 

[Stand user?]

Gaucho? Don’t think so, you thought, but you had a sinking feeling that he wasn’t the person Depeche Mode was talking about. 

“That’s it!” Gaucho ground out, and he dismounted from his horse with shaky legs. “I can’t stand this—I’ll give him what he wants!”

“Wait—” you tried, but your warning was lost to the wind and his roar, and the back of Zeppeli’s hand that caged you in place. Better him than us, it seemed to say. You tasted hot iron as you bit into your cheek. 

“Get your ass out here, you liar—I’ll shoot you dead, just as you wish! Show yourself, coward!” 

The breeze accepted the challenge, rustling the curtains beyond the broken window in a soft invitation. From the dark house, a hand emerged to still the fabric, and a man appeared in the doorway. 

He was a pale ghost amid the shadows shrouding him, draped with garments that shone almost silver as he emerged from his mausoleum. Though his gloved hands carefully held a newspaper, everyone had turned their attention to the heavy pistol that peeked out from behind it. 

Gently, he folded the paper, and tossed it onto a chair. He took his time adjusting his gloves, and took his time once more to straighten. His eyes were like a placid lake as he observed his opponent. 

It was an intimidation tactic. 

It worked. 

“Then…” The stranger had no need to shout. The quiescent atmosphere was enough to hark his words, however little he had to say. “I humbly suggest that we begin.”

You could feel the weight of your own gun pressing at your hip, but your desperate look was met with a firmer press against your sternum by Zeppeli’s hand. 

It was clear. Gaucho had initiated a ‘duel’, and under the merciless heavens, he had to face it alone. 

“Don’t fuck with me! If you want to be killed so badly—I’ll do it! This is your last chance; tell me the ‘real path’ that’ll get me outta here!” 

He was agitated. Shooter he may’ve been, with a rifle on his pack and a pistol at his hips, but his shoulders were en garde and his legs were unsteady in his confusion. He wasn’t a Stand user. The stranger on the other hand…

“I’m no liar,” he asserted calmly. The wooden planks of the stairs creaked under his weight as he took measured steps downwards, away from his tomb. “If you want to get out of here, you must kill me. That is the path that is to be taken—a decision that must be made eventually.”

Those eyes of his reflected the firmament above him as he traced them over his challenger, and at the four of you far behind him. It seemed that Gaucho was not the only one being addressed in his guidance. 

“He’s not normal,” Johnny murmured under his breath, and his teeth worried away at his lips as he assessed the situation. 

No, he’s not, you thought. Was this the singularity—the anchor point—of this loop? 

Over his shoulder, you made eye contact with Hot Pants, and for once, he seemed wary. 

“Is that what I think it is?” Johnny kept murmuring, but any response was drowned out by Gaucho’s yell. 

“Ha! Your hands— your hands are shaking!”

And indeed, they were. The stranger’s right hand was experiencing tremors, yet the provocation was met with the same tranquil stare.

“Yes. You are right… perhaps it is because of fear,” he acknowledged thoughtfully, yet he kept his focus trained on his opponent the entire time. “It is possible that the excessive strain on the body could cause it to freeze against one’s will. The decision must be made.”

His eyes wandered to the pistol still in Gaucho’s holster. “But allow me to speak of something equally important. That gun on your hip is an eighteen-seventy-three Colt. With this much distance between us… hmm… our bullets would likely not reach their targets.”

He spoke with the offhandedness one would employ when perusing a menu, and now, he would speak his recommendations. 

“I need you to take five more steps in this direction,” he invited in his low voice, though he himself was still on the lowest step of the shack. “Although I’m in your range, the distance will cause your bullet to land approximately ten centimetres to the right. It will take you five more steps to accurately hit me. Your chances, as they stand, are limited when you are ‘five steps behind’.”

Gaucho’s breathing was becoming more and more erratic. 

“What will it be?” 

He shook in his boots. 

“Were you lying when you said you’d shoot me?”

“This looks serious,” Hot Pants breathed, yet none of you could move. 

Two opponents, two guns. 

“It’s your decision, should you choose to quit. But in that case, you would be the liar, not me,” the stranger rationalised, and it seemed to be the final straw for Gaucho. 

“I can’t stand this any longer!” he thundered, drawing his gun, and lightning-fast, the stranger did too. 

Bang. The first shot grazed his shoulder, shattering the lantern behind him. 

“Gyro—” Johnny yelled out, but what could Gyro do?

The four of you were transfixed by the sight: the bleeding stranger, who still pointed his gun straight, even as Gaucho charged at him with a last-ditch scream. He shot once, twice—and each bullet missed its mark. 

And then, the pale ghost cocked the hammer of his own pistol, and fired. 

It was a clean shot. A hole appeared on Gaucho’s chest, and he collapsed into the dust, coughing up blood desperately. 

Your heart jumped into your throat, watching the stranger callously examine his own wound in what appeared to be complete apathy. 

“‘Five steps’,” he iterated, glancing back at his felled opponent. “The shots are accurate from this distance. Alas, the ‘power’ is weak; the resistance of the muscles and chest bone slows the bullet down, and although it has reached the heart, it didn’t destroy it completely.”

He let out a sigh, disappointed.

“One more step,” he promised, and his foot did as he said. He raised the gun that had dropped next to his thigh with his hand. 

“Hey—stop, youuuu!” Gyro yelled urgently, but it was too late. 

Two shots rang out. Gaucho had fired, but his weakened muscles forced the bullet into the dry ground. The other shot barrelled into where the initial one had been. 

Twice-pierced was Gaucho’s heart, and he curled into himself, no longer moving. 

You stared and stared at the blood that seeped into the Earth, and finally felt Zeppeli drop his hand from your sternum. It’s over. 

It was over for the rider.

[Don’t.]

Your tense body stayed in place, watching the stranger shakily take a bow to the corpse. 

“I thank you,” he panted. Just like that, he turned on his heel and strode into the shack once more. The door slammed shut behind him. 

There was a stunned quiet in the forest. 

“Bloody hell—who’s that guy? What’s he doing in that house?” Johnny muttered, and his eyes flickered between the dead man and where the stranger had disappeared. “A racer was just murdered! Gaucho! What the fuck is going on?”

“A Stand user?” Zeppeli murmured, and his widened eyes locked with yours. 

“He must be the one linked to the loop,” you responded morosely. It wasn’t a solution. The four of you hadn’t gotten anywhere closer to escaping, and the only thing you had to show for it was Gaucho’s dead body. 

“‘Murder’?” Hot Pants finally replied to Johnny’s delirious ramblings. “None of that was against the law.”

“You know, we really don’t give a shit about that,” Zeppeli glanced in his direction derisively. “If you want to get involved, go right on ahead. In fact, he’s probably the one who killed your cow, judging by the rifle strapped to his horse.”

He sat up straight, reining Valkyrie to turn her away from this accursed place. When he spoke next, his eyes landed only on you and Johnny. “Come on, you two—we can’t stay here forever. Let’s get out of here!”

“And what if that man was telling the truth?” You held his gaze, and the question seemed to tug on his nerves. “What if he’s actually linked to this cycle?”

“Do you want to try your hand?” he shot back irritably. But then, his eyes fell onto the holster by your side and your stillness, and he shut his eyes and let out a long exhale to calm himself. “Actually, don’t answer that.”

You did not, in fact, answer. 

“There must be something we missed,” Johnny chanted to himself, and you didn’t think he was aware that he kept repeating the words. 

“There’s nothing we can do here now,” Hot Pants murmured to you, as if he was concerned after you didn’t seem to acknowledge what Zeppeli had said. “Confronting that man again should be our final resort.”

You let out a noncommittal noise. 

“Let’s go. Andiamo,” Zeppeli announced, and the futile journey began once more. 

“Yo, Hot Pants, at this point it’s useless to trace the hoofprints. We’ve been passin’ the same place over and over—our prints are jumbled together now. The compass won’t do shit either,” he commanded, and Hot Pants sighed before sitting back up in his saddle. You quietly followed. 

“Every time we make a turn, we’ll ‘mark’ a tree. Where are we getting lost, exactly? We’ll move carefully and precisely,” Zeppeli directed, and you heard Johnny let out an affirmative grunt. 

“After we go straight through this path that’s in front of the house, we’ll go left at the next corner…”

Dutifully, Johnny marked a tree. 

“And then we take the next left again…”

And another.

“And then, finally, a right…”

And another. 

The four of you stared at the map, and back at the shack that loomed ominously ahead. 

“Shit!” Zeppeli cursed, and the parchment crumpled in his enraged fists. “Johnny, we’ll try this again—we’ll definitely get out of here! We need to follow the ‘marks’ on the tree; we’ve already lost two hours!”

He swung his head around, but continued glaring at the map as if it had personally wronged him. Which, it had. 

“I’ve.. I’ve already found it,” Johnny mumbled, and the strained quality of his voice prompted your head to snap in his direction. “It’s this tree—the first mark is on this tree.”

Beads of sweat were beginning to coat his face, and he looked utterly lost. “But… I don’t understand—what’s going on? I have no idea what’s happening. When we made that turn, this was the only tree that I marked.”

Nobody responded, waiting. 

His fist banged against the trunk, and he repeated himself. “This is the only tree that I marked at this turn!”

And there was the problem. The four of you stared at the junction, and each tree bore Johnny’s carved signature in the trunks. 

“Johnny, what the hell are you doing?” Zeppeli had almost completely destroyed the map by now as he yelled. “I told you to only make a mark when we turn!”

“He did,” you spoke up then. “It takes some time to etch one. How could he have gone through all these trunks in that time?”

Johnny looked grateful at the defense, but the situation quickly dampened his smile once more. 

“What the hell?” Zeppeli pinched the bridge of his nose, and his tone had shifted to wariness behind the anger. “Who made these other marks, then?”

“I have no idea—” Johnny choked out, and he let out a ragged gasp as he traced another mark. “It’s… it’s all my handwriting! I made all of these marks! How could I have made a mark on each of these trees?”

You had a bad feeling. 

“And they’re all pointing in different directions!”

You had a very bad feeling. 

“So… our enemy is that man in that house, correct?” Hot Pants interrupted your brewing premonition, and he sounded far too matter-of-fact about it. “A ‘Stand’ attack, yes? One that creates these loops, manipulating our perception of space.”

You swallowed. 

Space. It felt familiar. 

“I don’t know what his motive is—why did he have a shootout with Gaucho? If he is an enemy, why the fuck would he want us to get lost?” The mind of Zeppeli was whirring, and you could see the cogs clash against each other. 

Lost. But, were you really lost? The space was not warping in on itself. It was the same space, marked to remember each loop, but it was not continuous. 

What went hand in hand with space?

[Time.]

The pocket watch on your hand burned, but you could not be sure. Your mind was ravaged by the very possibility of it, and you didn’t know whether you felt scared or hopeful.  

[Don’t.] Depeche Mode’s voice inside you was subdued, and you wondered what exactly it meant. [It won’t work out the way you think it could.]

“Then, what do you propose we do, Gyro Zeppeli? Do you want to roam around here for a bit longer? How many more rounds do you want to make?” Hot Pants pulled you back into reality, and you glanced between the two with uncertainty. “If you want to go, fine… but I’m not going to wander around anymore. That man told Gaucho: ‘You cannot leave unless you kill me.’ Yes? No, wait… ‘unless you kill me’, was that it? What did he mean by that? Well, let’s go back and have him explain!”

His eyes were shadowed by the brim of his hat, and he looked uncharacteristically evil. Or maybe that was just Hot Pants for you. 

“If we’re convinced he’s our ‘enemy’, we’ll take him out, ‘four against one’... good plan, yes?” 

The slightest shiver shook Zeppeli’s back, and he could not help but stare at the man, somewhat on edge. “I thought I told you that I don’t trust you.”

Hot Pants furrowed his brow, and he looked angry at the obstinacy. 

“Gaucho was killed. This is no time to be talking about trust and fairness.” Each word was steeped in a gravity that forced Zeppeli to shrink a little on Valkyrie. “We should do what we can, with the minimum risk… if we’re going to kill him, all four of us must do it.”

“Gyro. If this keeps up, we’re going to be here when the sun sets—and we have to avoid that at all costs…” Johnny whispered hastily. “I don’t know where Dio is at, at this time, but he’ll be a full day ‘head of us if we waste any of the time we have now—he’ll get to Kansas before us.”

Zeppeli looked defeated. Though he was muleish at times, the truth had become abundantly clear, and it was time to proceed to the ‘last resort’.

“Anything… anything but that! No way—especially not by him!” Johnny practically begged, but you could see the other man had already been convinced, purely by how his spine had lost its prideful set. 

“Listen, once we know for sure he’s an ‘enemy’, we ambush him. I’ll take care of that, while you three distract and talk to him,” Hot Pants instructed, and his voice carried no wavering. “While you do that, I’ll take his back, and finish him off. Four against one. Are you fine with that?”

“You’ll take his back?” Johnny probed. 

“You can really do that, huh? He’s not a sleeping cat, you know,” Zeppeli commented wonderingly. 

In response, Hot Pants had already deftly pulled out his brass lighter, spraying the flesh while his left hand shrank in on itself. A long, pink rope stretched from the metal, and when he flung it, it boomerang around itself and stuck to the wooden roof of the house. You let out a low whistle. 

The hand reforming itself on the roof seemed to give a thumbs-up. You felt strangely encouraged. 

“‘Cream Starter’—my ‘hand’ will get behind him. Now, go talk with him… let’s get this over with, and let’s leave.”

The stranger was digging a grave when you approached alongside Zeppeli and Johnny. Hot Pants had lingered near the other side of the house, and the stranger cast an eye over the four of you.

“Who are you?” Zeppeli asked warily. “You’re going to have to tell us your objectives. Why did you kill Gaucho?”

You breathed in not air, but rather the caustic scent of gunpowder and dried blood. 

“If we are to converse, I would prefer it to happen one at a time,” he spoke politely, setting down his shovel. Within the hole, you could already see the half-buried body. “Would two of you kindly move back, to where the other gentleman is standing?”

You felt sick. 

“Listen up. Whatever you’re trying to pull—we don’t care, got it?” Zeppeli canted his head, staring down at the man. “Just answer my goddamn question.”

The stranger’s placid expression grew chillingly cold. “If we were to engage in a shootout, you would not be able to defeat me.”

His eyes traced over you and the gun at your hip, and he scoffed lightly, almost smiling. Then, he looked to your left at Johnny, and his expression shifted once more. 

“The gentleman on the ‘left’ stands a chance. So you, kindly step back. The one I’ll converse with is him.”

No one responded to him, and he tilted his head.

“This is for your own good… step back. Would you like me to explain it a bit more?” He seemed somewhat baffled that his good advice wasn’t being taken. “The gentleman on the left has a ‘dark determination’—he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me, if the situation called for it.”

He examined Zeppeli closely. “But you are not the same way—this is your ‘nature’. You hesitate where it counts. Move aside. That is my reason.”

“That’s a Chamelot-Delvigne 1874 at your hip.” His gaze had affixed itself onto you now, and you didn’t dare look away. “It’s a good weapon, with a good marksman.”

He shook his head ruefully. “There is an emptiness within you. Cultivate it well, and your aim would be perfect with the flourishing of killing desire.”

Bile rose in your throat. 

“With time, you could have a fighting chance,” he continued. “But not now. And maybe not even then. It would be a hollow determination, and you would be a mere puppet to it.”

There was a faint ring of pity in his cadence, and he shook his head once more. 

With time, you could have a fighting chance. 

The words looped, over and over, in your mind.

“You are trying to figure out a ‘countermeasure’ lest I attack. That is what has been ingrained in you.” He trained his gaze on Zeppeli again, with a more profound derision. “On a level of skill, you are very talented… but mere ‘self-defense’ will not be enough to defeat me. Passive ‘observers’ are not needed here.”

His fingers stroked the wooden grip meaningfully. It was a warning. 

But it was too late for him. 

A twig snapped underfoot, several metres away; with inhuman reaction speed, Zeppeli unclipped his holsters and flung the green metal sphere. In turn, three bullets pierced his body, and you were about to trigger the slot when—

Nothing. 

He looked harrowed, with his hand still on his holster. Hadn’t he heard the signal? What happened to his bravado? His body shone with the light sheen of sweat, and his breathing had become quick and desperate. 

What was that? 

“What the hell do you want from us? Are you a terrorist? Are you linked with the government?” Johnny called out, brows drawn together in a defensive knit. He looked nonplussed, and thus you wondered what the hell raced through Zeppeli’s mind to be behaving like this. 

Had you missed something?

“I apologise for the delay, but allow me to introduce myself.” The stranger bowed his head momentarily with the meaningless platitude. 

“My name is Ringo Roadagain. I am a ‘Stand user’, and I developed my ability three years ago in the desert. I call it ‘Mandom’. Please recognise it as such.”

You inhaled sharply. Here it was. 

From nothingness bloomed a featureless face, with golden pins marking each intersection that criss-crossed its head. The rest of its body seemed to be a leathery strap that mimicked a watch’s, and the Stand curled silently around the stranger named Ringo. From its docile body were pink tubes that punctured the man like veins and what appeared to be a clock hand, but just as quickly, the Stand shimmered out of sight. 

“Only ‘six seconds’. Not a second more, not a second less. For precisely six seconds I can rewind time. That is my ability,” he continued.

Rewind time. That was the only thing that had stood out to you, and your mind was racing with excitement as—

As, what? What would rewinding time do for you? What would six seconds do for you?

A heavy weight pressed inexorably onto your shoulders. The crushing despair took the breath out of your lungs, and it was all your fault for getting your hopes up in the first place.  

[Press it. Now.]

“While you were on your horses, all I had to do was rewind time, for only those six seconds. Yet, you didn’t realise this subtle oddity—but still, you retain the memory of having travelled the whole way…” he explained patiently to his horrified audience. “That’s why, instead of turning at the intended route, you turned in front of it, and since you couldn’t tell the scenery apart, marking the trees had no effect. Instead of the tree you intended to mark, you marked a tree in the spot six seconds before, and then took the turn. And this is repeated… as long as I left more than six seconds worth between my rewindings of time, I could continuously keep on turning the clock backwards.”

You did as you were told. The familiar whirr calmed you down, even if you didn’t know exactly why Depeche Mode wanted you to execute its command. 

[We’ll be testing if the ‘time’ is the same for you and him. Now that we’re aware of it, the perception could be attuned to this.]

Depeche Mode had hidden itself, miniscule, in the folds of your jacket, and you assumed it didn’t matter which one came up. That was good. Far from acting out of terror, it was the sensible thing to wait and make your observations, testing its hypothesis. 

[Slot one activated: Personal Jesus. Countdown has begun.]

The countdown. Would the seconds turn back? Would that be your indication of the time leaping back? Or would you be unaware that the seconds had brushed forward in the first place?

You swallowed. 

4:58

“And that is why you will never be able to escape from this orchard,” he finished gravely, and his words felt utterly punitive. 

“What’s your objective? Why would you want us to get lost?” Johnny stalled. 

“I want you to attempt to ‘kill’ me. A fair duel will allow me to grow as a human being. Devoid of pettiness… a murder attempt with the darkest of intentions…” He seemed to savour the possibility, and the last shreds of sanity you thought he had vanished into the wind. “It will raise me towards new heights. I am yet incomplete, as a human. These are things I must overcome. ‘Divinity’ is a pursuit—and that is why I have not hidden anything from you. My ability, my objectives; I have no reason to lie.”

How could you even begin to respond to that?

“I humbly request your cooperation. What will you do? The choice is yours.”

[Mind the seconds.]

You didn’t quite know what that entailed. Breathing deeply, you focused on the pulsating beat of your heart, then past it. When you weren’t paying attention, the passage of time went unnoticed—but now, you surged past it and grappled with the syncopation of the seconds. 

The clock was ticking. You simply had to focus on it. 

“This is the true man’s world. Do you want to condemn it as backwards? This world we live in—it seems our values are leaning heavily towards one of spoiled indifference.” 

You disagreed. Spoiled indifference was ignoring the plight of the dying, and mindlessly benefitting from the systems that brought gain at the cost of the poor and weak. What did senseless killing prove? 

3:56

“Hey, I quit—let’s go! He’s obviously lost his mind, and if we keep going slowly, we’ll definitely be able to make it out of here without making mistakes!” 

It was Hot Pants.

 “I’m not putting up with this shit anymore—don’t indulge him any further,” he continued, but as Ringo looked sideways at him, you realised that his acting was incredibly and unfortunately terrible.

But it was enough. 

The distraction did its job, no matter how poor it was. Cream Starter dropped from the roof and sliced his hand off at the wrist, and his gun crashed unceremoniously against the floor. 

“Alright—I’ll leave the rest to you guys! Don’t let him pick up the gun with his left hand! Do it!” Hot Pants yelled, but Johnny had hesitated, seeing his face so twisted in pain. 

Too late. 

“Don’t let him get the gun!” Hot Pants called out, desperately, but Ringo had already dived while Johnny was distracted. On his broken hand lay a watch that you hadn’t noticed before, and your mind slingshotted back to the countdown. 

3:05

Johnny fired, but the bullets never reached the—

You blinked, feeling a disgusting static in your hand and head. Checking the time, nothing seemed to stand out to you: three minutes, eleven seconds left. There was an absence of anything, save for the slight resistance you’d felt in your hand. 

“I’m not putting up with this shit anymore—don’t indulge him any further— what?” Hot Pants spun on his heel just as Ringo sidestepped the Stand that had just dropped from the roof. 

What? Your eyes were glued on the hand that lay uselessly on the ground, trying to comprehend how he’d known. 

Unless—

[Idiot! He’s rewound! You won’t be able to see it in the countdown, but if you pay attention, you should feel the rejection!]

Rejection. Depeche Mode, in its haste to scold you, had given you a clue that you would have to chew on for a while to decipher it. 

Depeche Mode was inextricably tied to function. Even if it could be overridden, the purpose of the countdown was clear—to mark the time limits of your slot ability. If time wound back, the ‘real time’ your body experienced would be six seconds more than what was shown in the countdown. Thus, these two conflicting ‘times’ had created a dissonance—and forced a resistant static in your body. 

“What the— that was? He just—” Johnny spluttered, aghast at the unfolding situation. 

“Impossible! What was that? My spray definitely got him!”

Their voices coalesced into a haze behind a veil as your mind raced. Your mind wouldn’t be privy to the time changing, no, but your body remembered, just like he’d said. 

With time, you could have a fighting chance. 

“Six seconds… I can rewind six seconds in time. I was ‘fair’, and have already explained to you, in all fairness. I merely twist the knob on this wristwatch the correct amount. That is the trigger for my ability, Mandom,” he interjected stoically. “I will ask as many times as it takes—what do you choose? You will never be able to escape, unless you kill me!”

Calmly, he raised his pistol and shot the fleshy hand that was lying motionless on the ground. A piercing scream tore from Hot Pants’ throat, and you didn’t dare move. 

The hairs stood up on your nape at the sudden chill that you felt coming from your side. 

Johnny. When you looked at him, his gaze was clearer than you’d ever seen it: pure, unmasked hatred. All the abhorrence he held for the world and its denizens had coalesced into a look so full of malice that rooted you to the spot. 

He raised two steady hands, and Ringo aimed his own gun.

“Johnny—” you choked out as the jockey fell backwards off Slow Dancer. There was a crater right on his forehead, and his eyes were distant as he slumped into the ground with a sickening crack. 

He aimed once more, calmly, as Hot Pant slung Cream Starter in his direction, and the rider collapsed into the broken wooden railings behind him as his body was pierced once more.

Desperately, you pulled out your own gun, but there was a sudden pressure in your wrist, and then an intense blooming of white-hot agony. 

You fought back the guttural scream of pain that threatened to tear past your lips as Personal Jesus began its urgent attempts to mend the mangled flesh. 

Group Four surged at the sound, as if she were convinced if she ran fast enough, she could take you to safety. She couldn’t. It was futile; her jolt had dislodged you, and you couldn’t hold on. You slipped off the saddle and crashed, hard, into the ground, but Johnny was in a far worse position. 

You heard Zeppeli shouting something, but all you could focus on was crawling to the broken Johnny, despite the metal pooling into your mouth, despite the colossal waves of darkness that were urging you to let go and bleed out into the warm autumn light. 

A divine hand had stretched out to the collapsed mortal in the dirt, and Depeche Mode bridged the distance between the two of you.

[He’s alive.] It sounded unusually grave. Your arm burned. 

Precious seconds slipped past your fingers as Depeche Mode assessed the damage and began the arduous work of stabilising his head. The bullet was lodged in his skull, and the flames were beginning to spread across your torso. 

Through bleary eyes, you watched as two shots rang out violently. Zeppeli was on his knees, but Ringo was missing an ear. 

Your mouth was full of molten lead. 

“Gyro Zeppeli… as I thought—you are a mere conformist!” Ringo’s disappointed tone was verging on anger: so uncharacteristic that your hazy eyes briefly focused on him rather than the man lying unconscious before you. “You threw those weapons, even when you were out of range! You threw them out of range for losing your friend—disgusting! You will never be able to kill me with something like that!”

The seconds pulsated like war drums in your mind, warring with the rapid beat of your heart. 

Your body was callously brushed aside as Ringo grasped Johnny’s leg, and you weakly clawed at his clothes to try to stop them. 

With time, you could have a fighting chance. 

You did have a version of time, but it had proven to be utterly useless. 

“J–Johnny—” Zeppeli coughed up, and you could hear the wet sounds as blood dribbled past his lips. 

“I still have one shot left in here—but I am only inclined to kill those that desire to kill me, with that all-encompassing ‘dark intention’… there is no need for me to waste my time in finishing you off.” Ringo cast a cursory glance at the scattered bodies before him, but he hadn’t seemed to notice Depeche Mode that was still hurriedly trying to stabilise the jockey. 

“There is no need for me to waste my time in finishing you off…,” he continued, and his voice was filled with contempt. “Get out. I will release you from these orchards.”

It was an escape—but at what cost? You could feel your consciousness ebbing and flowing, and you wondered if you’d make it out alive, even with his concession. 

“My only objective is in my training: to become a human, worthy of being useful to this world.” His voice had lowered, as though he were thinking aloud. “And to the man who valued my stand ability, to the man who sent me here. I am indebted. The corpse part that Joestar has—I will take it and return to him.”

Valentine. Who else could it be?

A surge of loathing overcame you, and you stared and stared and stared at his retreating figure with something primal and vehement. Precise abhorrence washed over your drowsiness. You were more alert than ever, more responsive to the waves of pain that battered your arm and mingled with the incandescent heat of the injury. 

“I thank you.” And he bowed after his performance, twisting Johnny’s body into an awkward angle. It had been a sickening show, and the curtains shut with the creak of the shack. You could feel the bilious film of vomit coat the innards of your throat—

[Too far.] Depeche Mode phased back to your side, still wearing its stupid Personal Jesus getup. Out of range. You could feel its focus drift to your wrist instead, where the veins and capillaries began their slow knit together. You gasped at the sensation, and a shadow fell over you. 

“He’s still alive?” There was only one answer Zeppeli would accept. 

“Somehow.” 

“That gun was an 1874 Colt. Its firing range had been a step farther than Johnny. His brain could still be intact. The bullet should have stopped, lodging in his skull,” he muttered, like he was trying to ground himself in this reality. 

His eyes were bloodshot, and he’d somehow gotten to his feet with bullets lodged in his torso. Depeche Mode glanced between the two of you, and hesitantly drifted over to begin healing his more grievous internal injuries instead. Yet, his raised hand stopped your Stand from approaching.

“No,” he rejected quietly. “Not yet.”

You let out an affirmative noise, shakily rising to your feet yourself. You could feel your wrist tie its sinew and flesh together, but the fierce heat remained. 

“You’re staying? Coulda left trouble behind if you left now,” he slurred slightly, from where the thick sanguine had filled his mouth. When you didn’t move, his expression shifted to something you couldn’t quite pinpoint—before it morphed again into something terrifying. 

There was an utter coldness in his eyes as he stared at the door. 

“He’s going to die,” he said in a low voice, before he tilted his head with a frightening calm to amend his previous statement. “I’m going to be the one to kill him.”

00:00

His time had come to an end. 

“—I’m far from being a sentimentalist! That bastard thinks I’m a conformist? Pig-headed asshole talking big—” 

He seemed slightly delirious, staring into the sky like it could give him answers. And then, his seeking gaze turned its attention to you: aware of your presence once again. 

“Your theory was correct,” he said bitterly, but his cadence lacked the desire to argue. “He was the epicentre of the loop. Did you figure anything else out?”

Despite his despondent expression, there was still a desire to fight in his eyes. You could not fault him; it was entirely mutual. 

“There’s a dissonance between my countdown and the time he winds back—like an aftershock, almost. Something here lags when the countdown is ‘forced back’; there seems to be resistance when it tries to fulfil its function,” you explained hurriedly. He listened without interrupting, without blaming you for being unable to catch it earlier. “He doesn’t seem to continuously use his abilities either.”

“Can’t, or shan’t?” 

“If he was being truthful, six seconds is the unchangeable limit. Turning time back multiple times in a row would violate that rule,” you reasoned, but your mind was anything but rational. Johnny’s mutilated body was floating through your brain, staring lifelessly at you. 

From the ground, you picked up your dropped gun and secured it in your holster. It was still full, as though it had never been used in the first place, and its weight was extraordinarily heavy. 

You could feel two green eyes affixed on your face, staring at the worry that had formed between your brows. 

“We’ll win.”

His low voice sounded inexplicably like a reassurance, and your brow furrowed even more, incredulous. You had no way of replying, so you didn’t. Instead, you quietly pressed the big red button in your head, already knowing what your chance would land on. 

The familiar whirr was comforting. 

[Second slot activated: Words Like Violence. Countdown has begun.]

The soreness in your arm bled away as the tapes wrapped tightly around each finger and around your wrist. Time seemed to slow as your adrenaline spiked even further, and your body dissolved into transient smoke. You felt almost shamefully light, but you knew your time was limited. The boundaries of Words Like Violence had been breached by you to extend past ten minutes, but there were still walls to this ability. 

“Mm.” Your hum sounded distant to your own ears, as though you were drowning in endless water. 

His eyes drifted down, and a bloodstained hand clasped your limp wrist, closing the loose digits into a tight fist. Your heightened senses could feel every scar, every sword callus that had been etched into his palm, and you swallowed thickly. 

“Are you doubting yourself?” 

You hesitated. 

“Are you doubting me?” he asked, stung by your lack of human response to his attempts at motivation. 

You grimaced, and your eyelids pressed together into sceptical crescents. “A little.”

“Well, don’t,” he sneered, and his hand knocked your clenched fist into your ribcage with a dull, fleshy thump before he let go. Your fist stayed upright in a parody of a guard, and he turned on his heel with a swish of his cape. 

“We’ll win,” he repeated, and in his hand spun a green sphere, embedded with an ocular centre. His right eye shone with golden, righteous fury. “I’m already getting the sensation of our victory.”

And he flung it. From its coating blossomed a metallic, verdant humanoid that disappeared into the wood of the shack just as quickly as it had its genesis, and you blinked. Zeppeli’s stand?

In the shadows from the roof, the sphere hovered in midair, and Zeppeli had stilled almost completely as he observed the situation inside with the corpse’s eye.

“He’s definitely still alive— that map— Kansas City? He knows where the next corpse part is!” Zeppeli muttered to himself aloud, tone coated with an unmistakable urgency. You watched him with similar urgency, wondering when he’d succumb to the iron seeping out from him. 

“Does it matter? None of us can back down—the first to make a bad move will lose,” he continued, scoffing wryly. 

And he flung the other sphere that had idled away in his holster. Its path was inevitable: crashing in through the rotted wood before it spun into Ringo’s face and—

You froze. Zeppeli wound his arm back to lob the other sphere, and you could feel your heart palpitate at the static coating your arm.

“Time—” A strangled squeak escaped your lips, and Zeppeli furtively glanced at you before his gaze turned back to the house, hardening. 

“Still here… your actions are meaningless to me. I’ve already expressed this,” Ringo called out, and the wood made no attempts to stop his words from seeping through, like poison circulating through blood. “I can rewind time for six seconds…! I can do it as many times as I wish. My employer would likely tell me to dispose of you, but doing so is worth nothing to me. I will let you two leave this orchard alive. Take the unconscious gentleman with you.”

It was strangely honourable, if honour could be extended to those working for Valentine. 

“Go, go!” he urged emphatically. “Return to your race—do as you wish.”

Do as you wish.

You made no move to flee. 

“Y’know, it may just be me, but I’m getting the feeling you’re looking down on us. You said you fiddle with your wristwatch to turn time back, but… I threw that steel ball to check your body,” Zeppeli drawled, and the sphere with the eye was now in his hand once more, blinking towards the dilapidated house.

“I’ll tell you, to be ‘fair’,” he continued, measured despite his words slightly slurring with the beginnings of delirium. “My steel ball scan found an old wound in your left collarbone. In my next attack, I’m going to aim for that collarbone. And that impact, to that old wound, will most definitely paralyse your whole left side. And I don’t think you’ll be able to turn the knob on your wristwatch with a paralysed left hand.”

You couldn’t see Ringo, but you felt a strange calm listening to Zeppeli’s words. 

“Not just your left arm, but your left leg. Even your left eyelid will droop. You won’t even be able to speak. Even if you wanted to, there would be no redo. No more six seconds back in time. The paralysis would stop your heart, located in the left side of your body.” His fingers spun the ball, tossing it experimentally as he delivered his threat. Languid. His behaviour was coated with it, like he’d returned to being an executioner faced with a crushing verdict. 

He approached the house, climbing the worn stairs slowly, and you followed. There had never been any other option. 

Glancing to your left, you saw Hot Pants still sprawled over the railing: chest rising and falling in the merciful hold of slumber. You fought the urge to run over; what could you even do without Personal Jesus activated?

The door splintered as he kicked it down, stepping through the crushed glass with sickening crunching sounds.

Behind Ringo’s expressionless form, you saw Johnny still bleeding out on the panels. You could feel your breathing spiral, and the small waves of anger and uselessness you’d felt had now coalesced into a monstrous tsunami. Cold wrath had tempered your hesitation.

Johnny.

“And from this distance, nobody will miss.” Zeppeli’s words were equally as furious, but they were tightly restrained as he towered over Ringo, who stood from his kneeling position over Johnny. He stared at the Zeppeli: face a mask of unwavering indifference. “We can’t back down. It no longer matters what we wish anymore.”

The silent man slowly canted his head until he could see you from where you stood a pace away from the other man. 

“What about you? I really would prefer for this to be one-on-one.”

You found it all ludicrous. Did it matter? He had an arbitrary view of honour and dueling, for what? All to work for the scum of the Earth? To find his so-called ‘true man’s world’, through senseless killing? 

“He is a passive observer,” you said contemptuously, which earned a swift glare from the man in question. “I am a mere puppet. Neither of us are good enough for you to duel against, but what about together? Do we measure up to be a worthy opponent, if we’re two unworthy halves?”

He soaked in your words, mulling them over with his mouth slightly parted: tasting each syllable, the spiked cadence of it all. He took in your stance, your healed wrist, and the tapes over your hands. 

Would he be amenable to your reasoning? Did it even matter if he wouldn’t be?

He let out an exhale, a shade too polite to be an exasperated sigh, but it was close enough. However, his expression had shifted. There was a sliver of respect in his eyes where there hadn’t been before, at least at your willingness to exchange verbal arguments before resorting to physical ones. You had that much decency, at least. 

“I suppose it doesn’t matter, either way. I gave you the option to leave, and you scorned it. The two of you will die, never worthy, without seeing the end of your race,” he finally answered, almost sounding disappointed. “It will be a shameful, dishonourable death.”

Three people stared at each other in that room, savouring the last second before carnage. 

And the silence broke. 

You were lunging, body exploding with repressed tension.

Where your fist connected with bone, you felt the spin of a metal green sphere as it cracked against Ringo’s collarbone. Searing, wet heat bloomed through your chest: pain exploding with the brutal realisation that you had just been shot. 

You collapsed, and the pale ghost in your claws collapsed with you: left side now seizing, just as Zeppeli had warned. You ignored the pain, you ignored everything as you loosened your tapes to tighten them around his neck. Asphyxiation. Unconsciousness was the last mercy you could give him before he died.

It was dishonourable. He’d want to die standing, knowing his time was nigh, but death was not an actor on the stage he danced on, and didn’t behave like one. 

Your body was barely cooperating, and that was your error. 

You could feel his arms twitching, but you were too late. Too naive. Too foolish. 

You could feel it before you heard it: the abrupt bang that spun back the knob, the calculated move to shoot a wristwatch with the hand that wore it. 

The time—

Three people stared at each other in that room, savouring the last second before carnage. You panted, feeling the pressure of your heart force blood out of your nose. 

And the static—it was awful, pressing into the walls of your cranium with no mercy. 

“—it’s gone back!” you choked out, but there was no need. 

Ringo’s face had gone slack as a faint afterimage lunged forth and hit his collarbone, and wound fabric around his neck. It was weak enough that he only stumbled, but there was a red mark around his throat, and he clawed uselessly at the mirage before it vanished. The static had turned to faint buzzing, and you felt horrified at the feeling of Depeche Mode smiling in your mind: pleased with its evolution at fighting a time-based stand. 

“You—” His tone was, for the first time, incredulous. 

With time, you could have a fighting chance. 

“I now have time,” you gritted out, pinching the bridge of your nose to attempt to quell the blood flow. 

The incredulity gave way as he realised what you meant. You and him were alike in the worst possible way for him, but you were incredibly unlike him.

“You won’t ever kill me,” he breathed, lucid and critical. Yet, it was utterly ludicrous.

“I don’t have to kill you,”  you rasped. “Nor do I wish to.”

There was one more enemy he had to deal with, and said man was looking more and more irate. 

“One more time!” he yelled, interrupting the stare-off you were participating in. 

“Both of you are ‘conformists’! Even with the chance you created, you did not attack while you were aware of the slippage,” shouted Ringo, his eyes still fixated upon you and your guarding hands. 

“That’s not for you to decide! None of us will back out now!” Zeppeli vociferated, angry. His words echoed in the quiet, and three faced each other once more in a second of peace. 

The whir of the steel ball was the only warning you got before Zeppeli was shot through the chest and the metal collided with Ringo’s collarbone. And there was a searing pain in your throat, except—

He’d missed. The pain bloomed in your shoulder and forced you to crash back against a wall, several feet away from where Zeppeli had landed. 

Shit, you cursed as Ringo lowered his lips to his trembling arm, except he couldn’t. His arm was pinned to place against his chest by a large shard of wood that had splintered off from the door when Zeppeli had kicked it in. 

But he was almost—

You scrambled from your collapsed state, fighting through the tears and pain of your shoulder that screamed out in agony, and tackled him, wrapping around him just as—

It was too late. The duel had been bastardised into a game where the winner only had to be a little faster, to ignore the pain and it would be forgotten just as the knob was turned—

And it was. Your collision had wrenched his arm slightly more upwards with a nauseating snap, and through his sobs of pain he managed to close his lips over the metal.

But you were ready. You imprinted your body with the memory of ‘moving’ by pressing forward, and his other hand jerked upwards with the gun, firing just as time—

You existed in two places at once. You were moving, falling forward towards the spectre as the phantasm of yourself restrained him like a marionette. There was no need for your reflexes, as your mind had remembered the time, even if unconsciously. 

The afterimage of you contorted his body like a marionette, and was fading away into wisps when his hand was forcibly raised and he misfired under the faithful guidance of his puppetmaster. 

A strangled, guttural scream tore through your throat as the bullet lodged itself in your ribs, and just before you fell, you felt something press against your hips and lighten; the pistol, robbed from its leather cage, was wielded by Zeppeli as he held it up and fired without hesitation. 

Once, twice. Three times he shot Ringo, as black ebbed and flowed across your vision and hot iron leaked from your mouth. 

His arms had been rendered completely useless, and his body was jerking uncontrollably as he bled out in his tomb. You couldn’t celebrate, no, for you were in a similarly awful position: collapsed on the dirty floor and fighting to stay breathing and conscious. 

“Perhaps…” He drew in weak, rattling inhales. “Perhaps I was wrong. I was one step behind you, after all.”

“If you hadn’t been guarding yourself with one arm, you would’ve definitely hit our vitals. Someone as capable as you…” Zeppeli muttered, and you heard a dull thud as he leaned against the wall, then a metallic ringing as he dropped your pistol into the rubble. 

“That— would’ve brought the match to a ‘duel’—” the dying man wheezed. “And it would’ve never ended. Though… it seems like those six seconds— are already… up. A gun suits neither of you, in the end.”

His head lolled onto his shoulder, and he made considerable efforts to lift it. 

“Stop it. You don’t get a second shot,” Zeppeli panted, sliding down the wall onto the broken floorboards. “Don’t try anything funny. I’m satisfied—there’s no reason to finish you off.”

He could’ve ended it, clean to the head like he did to Ferdinand. Your hand twitched with faint phantom pain, and the memory of the metallic stench seeping into the sand. 

“That’s why you are a conformist! Find the ‘path’ of light! The shining path one must tread…” he hacked up, and his eyes were beginning to dull. “These are societal values and also, a ‘true man’s values’. They used to be synonymous, but no longer are. Man and society have evolved to have completely different ideals, but the true road to victory requires embracing the true man’s values. The two of you should be able to see it now… Continue the race, and find out for yourself… the path of the light… That is what I will pray for. And… I thank you.”

His hand twitched, and the reflex caused his gun to fire once more into the floorboards: a final tribute to the man known as Ringo Roadagain. 

He drew in a weak breath, and you knew it would be his last. 

“Welcome… to the ‘true man’s world’.”

The sun peeked into a broken home, warming your face as you finally slipped into your own, temporary unconsciousness. 

. 　⁺ ✦ 

“—heal him, damnit! You’ve done it before, why can’t you do it now? Depeche Mode, was it? Your user is on the verge of—”

There it was—the familiar baritone that washed over you in your faint lucidity. 

“I can’t! They need to activate the slot themselves—without that, I can’t do anything!”

The monotone Stand sounded strangely impassioned. You stirred faintly, and a pained sigh left your lips.

“You’re useless, damn it. Hey, stronzo—wake up. I’ve put Cream Starter into Johnny’s wound and that bastard’s, but yours is in too deep to simply push out—”

A hand brushed against your forehead, and it burned. Everything burned, licking at your body with neverending flames. 

“—could use Zombie Horse, but these are far from ideal conditions to operate. If I use some strong liquor, it should allow me to anaesthetise you without too much—”

The same calloused hand forced your chin up. In the background, you could hear the faint sloshing of liquid against glass. Your parched lips suddenly felt wet and cold, yet the burn left on your tongue persisted, and then your throat as a thumb circled around it to force you to swallow. 

Ow. 

“—shit. Your stupid scarf is stuck to your face with blood. Sorry not sorry, I’m going to have to remove it and see your ugly mug—”

Something was peeled off your face, and you sighed at the cold air washing over your damp, sticky skin. 

“What?”

His voice was quieter now, and his hands stilled, but each sensation was growing fainter by the second as the warmth fired up every vein and stole you away. 

His soft voice bade you luck, and you acknowledged it with a doffed hat. 

The mornings came quick. Autumn had not yet announced its presence to the grass of Colorado, and by the second day, you had gotten used to the sun-baked stalks faintly crunching under Group Four’s hooves. 

[Ahead.]

Depeche Mode had been more reticent in the past few days. It was as though the mannequin didn’t want to stay in the company of the swirling thoughts in your head, which meant you were the one to stay with them instead. 

You raised your gaze from a small prairie dog ducked behind a rock, and followed the horizon until you locked onto the back of a rider. You squinted, attempting to place the faint pink you saw, or at least the grey horse they were on. Nothing came through, not even a subconscious inkling of recognition. They were simply too far away, and you hoped it would stay like that. 

The rider and horse remained a speck in your sights for the rest of the day. You kept Group Four at a steady pace, as yesterday you’d let her take control for the course: allowing her to frolic in the softer grasslands that had received ample shade from the trees around it. 

The sun had long climbed past its apex, and was now sluggishly approaching the horizon when you realised that the rider had details now. A golden deerstalker hat with a singular spike at the top, a flowing pink blouse with a striped suit beneath it, and a stony expression hidden beneath cropped magenta hair. He looked how you felt as you passed by, and you gave a cursory nod as a greeting.

“Good day,” you offered as a second-thought, to be on the safe side of politeness. And you went back to assessing your map for an appropriate campsite for the night. 

“Good day.” He spoke with clipped, rough syllables and a slight accent you couldn’t place. “Your pack has come loose. Affix the straps properly before it becomes an issue.”

Surprised, your eyes darted to the rider, then to the backpack behind you. It was indeed loose, from where you’d haphazardly tugged your map out of a side pocket without looking properly. You tied your reins to the horn of your saddle, twisting your body to retie the straps clamping the pack securely. 

“I didn’t even notice,” you remarked, speaking your thoughts aloud. 

“Don’t be careless next time,” he replied brusquely.

“Thank you,” you said off-handedly, and he merely grunted in response. It was a swift full-stop to an already swift conversation: perfect. Almost too perfect—you’d spoken to someone, and they hadn’t plotted to kill you. As a matter of fact, it had taken less than a minute to meet them, and then move on; something you hadn’t had the privilege of doing for the past three stages. 

And when you looked back, he wasn’t following you, or doing anything apart from riding straight ahead from where you’d diverged.

[Amazing.] Depeche Mode had commented dryly. 

Amazing, you thought, most agreeably. 

. 　⁺ ✦ 

You saw him exactly four times on the third day. The route you took allowed you cover in the sparse trees, winding through the aspens as you tried to not wither from boredom. 

The first time, you spotted a flash of pink through the layers of golden light cascading through the leaves, and you wondered for a brief second if he saw you too.

The next encounter, the routes you were taking converged at a singular point around a hill, and the two of you exchanged brief nods. 

By the third meeting—this time in a small copse by a remote barnhouse—you exchanged names. Hot Pants. The person who’d placed first in the last stage by a whole two hours: who didn’t even deign to compete in the rabid rush to the finish line. You respected it, you really did: the lack of general talking, the wide berth you gave each other, and most importantly, the lack of attacking from him. 

It was perhaps one of the most enjoyable encounters in this damned race. 

The sun touched the horizon without any fanfare. There were no fights exhausting you to the bone: only the minute crackling of a fire as you cooked something close to stew, with rehydrated beans, herbs, and some of the dried meats you picked up in the small town. 

Group Four was grazing a good several metres away when you saw her looking up in your peripherals, and you squinted at the approaching rider. Lo and behold, it was Hot Pants, and in the flicker of the fire, he almost looked like he was smiling in greeting. 

“Evening,” he spoke first, and nodded his head in acknowledgement. “Do you mind if I use your fire for a while?” 

You thought about the dense stretches of spruces and aspens and various other trees that populated this space, and the fact that you’d found one of the only spots nearby that didn’t carry the risk of being a fire hazard. 

“Go for it. I’ll be done cooking in a moment.” You stirred the ingredients dubiously, wondering whether the beans had truly cooked through. You didn’t have a bad gut feeling about it, but you could never truly be sure. 

“I’ll be gone in around an hour,” he replied mechanically, vaulting easily off his horse and grasping a small, hard case with him. When he opened it, the dead eyes of a rabbit stared right at you. 

You could feel your appetite slowly vanish like the thin wisps of smoke dissipating in the evening air. 

“Ah, that’s— fine,” you murmured, glancing away as he began skinning the game. 

There was no small talk as you moved your pot onto a wooden stump, ladelling it cautiously into a metal cup. Rather, you watched the neat way he chopped up various tubers and the lean cuts of rabbit, making a stew for himself in a well-worn pot. For how large the pot was, there really didn’t seem to be a lot of food in it, and you felt bad. Somewhat. 

You shook your head, biting down on a particularly umami-rich spoonful of beans. Pity got you nowhere. 

But…

“I’ve got some extra stew,” you began hesitantly. “If you’d like some, of course.”

“No, I’m fine,” he replied curtly, eyeing the slight char on his meat with a critical eye. You couldn’t even find it in yourself to be offended by the sudden dismissal; rather, you shrugged and turned back to your food. 

“Some advice to repay you for the fire,” he added, blunt as a tree branch to the noggin. “If you give undiscerning charity out to people like this, you will be taken advantage of soon enough. Don’t do that in this race. Look after your own back.”

Insultingly, you felt yourself being pitied in this moment: as if you were some hapless fool with a bleeding heart. You had been struck dumb—rendered completely speechless save for the small hum you let out in acknowledgement. 

I don’t do that, do I? The thought swam across your mind, and Depeche Mode’s silence felt utterly damning. 

Despite his earlier words, however, it seemed that the faint burning meat smell coming from his pot had dampened his proud proclamation. His nose twitched—once, twice—and the glances at your proverbial feast in comparison, which he probably thought were utterly surreptitious, were anything but. 

Tactfully, you didn’t say anything. Though Hot Pants was a blunt contrarian, he at least hadn’t brought Stand users to your metaphorical doorstep. 

For that alone, he ranked highly in your Do Not Insult list. 

. 　⁺ ✦ 

“Cattail roots… cattail roots… cattail roots…” you mumbled to yourself on repeat as you stood in about a foot of mud, digging for the thick roots that would be your dinner tonight. 

It was the noon of the fourth day, and you had spent the morning learning how to read and ride: parsing through the foraging handbooks on your vPhone on Colorado’s edible flora. 

Your hands found a cylindrical, horizontal tuber, and your eyes lit up as you cut off the root: holding out the prize. It had not yet reached the size that it would’ve in winter, but several of these would be enough to fill you up. 

The lake was heavily populated with them on this side. The repetitive digging, cutting, and tossing the roots to the nearby bank was enough to force your mind to drift: thinking of anything and everything. Dinner, the glaze you could make for the roasted tubers, your itinerary of sewing a button onto your pants tonight. 

A fat bumblebee was cossetted by the wind in your direction, and you watched its lazy movements: completely and utterly mesmerised. It briefly landed on your shoulder before flying off, and you were roused from your stupor. 

You glanced down at the sizeable mountain of roots you dug up, and almost dropped your knife in surprise at the quantity you’d thoughtlessly tossed onto the grass. Hurriedly, you wiped the soaked knife on your pants and folded it into itself, before clambering out of the silt to check out your harvest. 

Wading past the forest of cattails, you didn’t see the figure knee-deep in the lake just a few dozen metres out until you heard a jubilant caterwaul and a deafening splash. 

“Got you— fuck off—” 

You turned your body just to see Zeppeli wrestling with a fish before it slapped him and jumped ship into the water. 

Unfortunately, he was looking around embarrassedly when he spotted you counting your tubers: no longer hidden by the long cattails. The silence was broken by the distinctive sound of water parting for someone approaching you. Fortunately, however, your veil had been attached firmly to your face to avoid inhaling any of the small insects buzzing near the water. 

You stood up from where you were crouched in the shallows, unwilling to have to look up at this upstart. 

“You just can’t stay away, can you?” He bared his teeth, and the chest-to-chest proximity allowed you to see the faint letters embossed on the golden molars. He smelled like sudor, masked by the mineralic quality of freezing lakewater. 

“I was here first,” you retorted, keeping your brows even as you met his challenging stare. 

“Yeah?” he scoffed. “Where’s your proof of that?” 

You glanced back at the cattail roots, and your muddy hands, and a slow smile spread across your face, hidden by fabric. 

Lazily, your hands wiped the leftover silt on his undershirt, getting both your palms and the backs. He stiffened, eyes darting between you and the dirty fabric—and you savoured the look of sheer, utter incredulity he gave you. 

“There,” you added, and his mouth opened and closed speechlessly. 

“Oh, you’ll regret that,” he threatened, and quick as a bullet, he tossed a steel ball at the water. Seamlessly, he stepped deeper into the lake, and in the same moment, the icy arc spun into the air and doused you: tearing an undignified yelp from your throat at the glacial shock to your sun-warmed skin. 

“Fuck, you bastard,” you seethed, chasing after him to sweep water, yet he dodged each of your attempts. In between his swerving, he managed to get you twice more before you gave up—almost. 

It was time to put away your pride, and accept that you had been completely drenched through. Zeppeli was a few feet away now, tossing the sphere up and catching it menacingly, practically daring you to approach. 

You inhaled, crouched, and immediately began your front crawl: barreling into his side and hoping for the best. While he didn’t fall into the water, he stumbled, and that was all the advantage you needed to sweep his leg out from under him and topple his obnoxious self into the waves. 

He waved his arms around to steady himself, but there was nothing to latch onto except your body that had darted out of the way. A billowing cloud of sand swallowed him whole before he broke the surface: gasping and looking absolutely affronted by your audacity. 

But you were already turning away—half-swimming, half-running—back to shore, soaked to the bone and aching from mirth.

“Stronzo, get back here,” he yelled, and you collapsed onto the grass bank beside your tubers, curling into yourself to catch your breath. 

A shadow fell over you, and when you glanced up, you were met by a cupped handful of water being tossed half-heartedly at you. His face was flushed, filled with a sort of joy that you’d never seen on him before, and you couldn’t muster up the exasperation you were feeling prior to this. 

“Asshole,” you protested weakly, sitting up to attempt to unpeel the wet undershirt clinging to you. 

“I won.” The sun glinted off his golden grin, and he said it with an almost uncontestable tone. You, naturally, contested it. 

[He did win. You missed every time apart from the end.]

Shut up, you thought, swearing you heard the mechanical grating of what appeared to be a laugh in response. 

“No, you didn’t,” you coughed, wringing your shirt out and watching the entire lake and fish drain out of the material. “I smoked you in the end, man. Total knockout. You had to use those balls.”

“It’s called having technique, loser. You, however, played dirty with that ambush,” he challenged, shrugging off his waterlogged undershirt. You watched the lean muscles of his arms tense as he twisted the fabric, slinging it over his shoulder as he eyed your roots. 

“What are those for?” he prodded. “Poison?”

“What’s your deal with me and poisoning people? That’s my dinner you’re accusing,” you retorted, flicking open your pocket knife to peel the tubers. 

“If you can’t accept your loss, who knows if you’ll try anything with these?” He crouched down, inspecting the fibrous ends coming out of a root by unceremoniously poking at it. 

“Who says you’re getting any?” you queried incredulously, raising a disbelieving brow. 

“Well, are you going to eat all this?” He took the knife from you, effortlessly skinning a root with a concentrated expression. His tongue stuck out from the side of his lips, and you resisted the urge to poke it. 

“I could.” You picked out the mud from your fingernails, retrieving the small pot you brought from your pack and leaning over to fill it with water. “I would, even.”

Pressing the big red button in your mind, you hummed to yourself as it spun. 

[First slot activated: Personal Jesus. Countdown has begun.]

“Hullo, boss,” Depeche Mode spoke, and Zeppeli’s head snapped to the side as it floated. 

“What did you bring it out for?” he nodded towards the mannequin distrustfully. 

“Water purification,” Depeche Mode replied blandly, already dressed in its nurse cap and holding its trademark syringe. 

Zeppeli stared between you and your Stand, still mindlessly peeling the tubers. He watched as the syringe passed through the pot, regarding each and every move with an eagle eye. “Against cholera?”

“Cholera, and every pathogen between,” you murmured, feeling the immediate discomfort ease as Personal Jesus took care of your soaked clothes: gradually enough that Zeppeli didn’t notice the dry fabric while he sat in his drenched trousers and drenched shirt over his shoulder. At least, that’s what the distant expression on his face said: filled with a begrudging sort of respect as your kind of science aligned with his own. “Any insect eggs, anything detrimental to its function as water.”

“Done,” he exhaled, and you held out the cleaned pot for him to dump the tubers in. 

“And my payment?” he held the now-folded knife out after he tossed the last one in, and you took it with trepidation. 

“What did you expect for that?” Depeche Mode snarked, floating to inspect the peeled roots. 

“Dinner,” he announced proudly. “I’m famished.”

“I wonder why,” it commented. Even with its monotone drone, the biting sarcasm was hard to miss. Zeppeli glared at the head. 

“Can you stop that?” He turned to you, still glaring. “And can you speak for yourself?”

You squinted, swirling the pot around. “But that is me.”

“You know what I mean,” he shot back, easily rising to his feet. He paused, then held his hand out with a strange sort of pridefulness. “Come on.” 

You used the leverage to pull yourself up wordlessly, making sure to not drop your pot. 

“Hey— how the fuck did you manage to dry yourself off so quickly?”

. 　⁺ ✦ 

It took approximately three minutes to reach the campsite. Neither you nor Zeppeli spoke, too exhausted in the late afternoon breeze to shoot quips or insults at each other. 

“Group Four?” you asked, absolutely flabbergasted at the sight of the mare, who was supposed to be two minutes in the other direction, grazing between the other two horses. She looked up as she saw you, shaking her mane out, before she went back to eating without a care in the world. 

“She found her way here. Not in distress or anything, so I knew you were safe nearby,” Johnny shot you a faint smile. Then, his gaze scanned Zeppeli from head to toe: the bedraggled, soaked state of him; his shirt covered in mud and water on his shoulder; and his drenched pants. And his eyes darted back to you again, where you stood helpfully with a pot of roots and a completely dry, clean outfit. His mouth opened and closed in disbelief, and he glanced down at the small pile of dandelions he’d seemingly foraged. 

“Gyro,” he began, somewhat dangerously. “Where the hell are those fuckin’ fish?” 

Zeppeli shot you a desperate look, and in true you fashion, you ignored it. 

“He was busy being the fish,” you supplied unhelpfully, and Zeppeli’s expression turned into one of unadulterated wrath. 

“Traitor,” he hissed. “That was your fault.”

“And yet I completed my objective,” you added, even more unhelpfully, setting your pot down to walk over to where Group Four was to unload your bag. Johnny glanced over at the almost overwhelming pile of cattail roots, and sent a withering look Zeppeli’s way. 

“Didn’t you say you’d bring in a big catch?” 

“That’s not my fault,” he retorted, somewhat sheepishly, and you could feel the heat of a glower concentrated between your shoulder blades. 

“I’ll cook, Johnny,” you said glibly, coming back to the fire with two containers of leftover stew, some molasses and vinegar, a frying pan, and other various assorted seasonings. 

“Prick,” Zeppeli whispered as you walked past him to start preparing the roots.

“Fuck you,” you whispered back, savouring his irritated expression. “I win.”

There were glazed, roasted tubers on the menu tonight, with bean stew, dandelion salad, and some nettle tea you’d foraged for when you were still properly in the Rockies. 

As you flipped the roots frying in drippings, Johnny spoke up from where he was mixing the dressing in a bowl with the ingredients you’d handed him. 

“Your hands,” he commented, matter-of-fact as he stared at the gloveless appendages. With only your undershirt on, the colourful lines of the tattoo were visible on your forearms, clearly leading to your palms. 

Your mouth dried somewhat, and you prayed that Zeppeli hadn’t seen them in the dark when you had poured his drink all those weeks ago. 

But no. He looked over with interest from where he was dutifully watching the stew burble, but there didn’t seem to be recognition as you flipped your hands over. 

“My hands?” 

Your voice was surprisingly neutral as Johnny leaned over to see the details better, tracing the decorative lines of the pocket watch and slot machine with careful attention. 

“I haven’t seen these before—” He paused as a minute hand shifted slightly. “—they move?”

Zeppeli leaned over, too, shooting Johnny a weird look. “You must be seeing things.” 

“No, I swear—”

“They do move,” you stated casually. “They’re part of my Stand.”

Alarm bells rang in your hand as you considered what exactly to reveal, but they knew. They’d seen you in your rawest, most painful form: standing over a dead body with blood on your hands and throat hoarse with unshed screams. You decided to unpeel the coagulated layers on your fingers, just a little. 

“You didn’t show us when you were talking about it, all those days ago.” Zeppeli’s brows were furrowed as he stared you down, but for once, the discovery of a secret of yours seemed to not be a personal attack from you. Instead, he appeared to be thinking deeply, and your throat constricted at the slightest possibility of recognition sparking in those hawkish pupils. 

There was none. 

“I forgot,” you admitted honestly, and he regarded you with somewhat of acceptance. 

“There’s still a ‘one’ on your hand.” Johnny’s breath ghosted over your palm as he inspected the skin closely. “What’s that for?” 

“Slot machine,” you murmured. “It’s still on the healing ability as it’s what was used last, but it’ll disappear soon enough.”

“Does it hurt?”

You shook your head, bending down to move the pan of roots out of the hottest part of fire. “No. It feels warm sometimes, though.”

“Can I feel it?” 

You held out both palms wordlessly after leaning back on the log, and a curious finger traced the lines marking your ability. He switched hands, and he snapped his head up in surprise. “It’s ticking.”

“Yeah, it’s a watch. They do that,” you deadpanned, and his eyelids lowered in exasperation. 

“Pass,” Zeppeli suddenly interrupted Johnny’s ‘that’s not what I meant’, and Johnny, curious, passed your hand over to your other side. Two fingers pressed where your pulsepoint sat on your wrist, while his ring finger stretched to feel the steady passage of time. 

“It’s different,” he remarked, letting go after a few moments as though he’d been scalded. He returned to stirring the stew with a spoon, though his eyes remained focused on your hand. 

“Well, duh,” you said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Two matching scowls stared at you. 

“Does the dissonance not bother you?” Zeppeli’s inquisitiveness cut through his own annoyance, and you could feel the questions radiating in his head. “The sound of your pulse versus the seconds passing—no wonder you act like you’ve lost your mind.”

“You arse,” you scowled back, and then you concentrated thoughtfully: feeling the contrast for yourself. “But no. The watch remains localised and skin-deep, while I’m not hyperaware of my pulse constantly.”

“What do you even use it for?” He left the spoon, leaning forward on his palm as he stared at it lazily. You swallowed, thinking of the cold pocket watch that had started all this and had become a part of you. 

“Well, the slot has a time limit,” you replied carefully, wracking your brains for what you could honestly divulge. “It helps me track when I can next—”

“Gamble with your life?” Zeppeli prompted unhelpfully, and there was a faint look of distaste playing on his lips as he glanced back to the fire. 

“You could say that.” You rubbed at the watch with your other thumb ruefully, feeling somewhat attacked. “It gives me a cool party trick, though.”

“Which is…?” he shot back sceptically. You closed your palm, concentrating on the passage of time in your head. How much time did you have, really, until the confrontation with Valentine?

“It’s currently four fifty-eight, and seven seconds,” you offered with a proud smile, and Zeppeli stared, dumbfounded. 

“That’s not a party trick—” he spluttered. “You were just looking at your hand, stronzo! Of course you know.”

“Even without looking, I know,” you tapped your head meaningfully, and bent down to finally take the tubers off the heat. 

“Bullshit,” he muttered under his breath. You heard that. You heard Johnny’s low snicker, too. 

Jackass. 

You ignored them, pouring the dark, sticky glaze over the roasted roots. It began thickening almost immediately and filling the clearing with its sweet aroma. There was a sharp inhale from behind you, but neither dared to speak: perhaps finally realising to hold their tongues, at least until after they were sated. 

It actually tasted edible. Even with you winging the recipe and a vague understanding of the culinary arts, it had enough balance that, try as he might to suppress it, there was an expression of enjoyment plastered on Zeppeli’s face. 

“S’good,” he complimented begrudgingly with his mouth full. “You know your stuff.” 

You let out a noncommittal sound, spearing through a dandelion leaf that had been drowned in sauce and glaze. 

It had a distinct homemade taste: uneven, warm, and the slightest bit dissatisfying. You had expected a somewhat different flavour profile, and it irritated you to no end that the exact balance was absent. 

“Still think it tastes kinda funny. Could still be poisoned,” Zeppeli burped, and when you glanced over, his metal bowl had practically been licked clean. 

“You have dandelion in your teeth,” you replied, and it was his turn to be snickered at by Johnny—his turn to glare, speechless, at the audacity of ignoring what he said.

 “Alright, alright,” he nodded vindicatively, running his tongue across his teeth. You raised a brow. “What’s the time?”

It was clear that he meant to catch you off guard. Without missing a beat—hands neatly crossed on your lap, palms down—you rattled off a number: 17:09. You held up the palm like a magician would a card.

“Interesting,” he responded, still nodding as if he had something clever to say. “What’s the point of the physical reminder then?” 

You thought of the watch from the desert, absorbing into your skin. You thought of the time spent, trapped in a void with no control of the outcome: the way the inked lines seemed to mock you for your inability to travel forward. There was a clever, depressing answer you could give back, but that would be a bit too honest. 

You shrugged. “Looks cool, I guess.”

A heartbeat passed at the once-more ignored provocation. 

“And there’s still food between your teeth, by the way.”

. 　⁺ ✦ 

Kansas was everything Dorothy dreamed of. Grey skies, grey cornfields, grey roads—it was enough to put a smile on your urbanised face. It wasn’t even raining; the state was just perpetually downcast as you crossed into the prairies. All the landscape was missing were fast-food chains and high-rises, and then you would truly feel at home in the soulless environment. 

No, you lied. While autumn had begun robbing the land of its colour, there was still a lively charm to its picturesque views that you, too, wouldn’t forsake for Oz. You spent half a day tailing a group of bison in the far distance, keeping them at the proverbial arms-length. You spent the lunch hour observing cranes as they migrated across the heavens, and your rice grew cold and soggy at your inattention. 

There was no one for miles out. You could ride with your face to the wind and not feel the biting dust pelt your face, for the ground had become soft and malleable: rather than dry and cracked. 

Only when Syracuse made itself known to you—circled in shiny, grey graphite on your worn map—did you finally cover yourself once more. There were things to be done here: supplies to find, people to write, and inns to sleep in. 

You were somewhat grateful that Group Four couldn’t read, since one of the only decent inns seemed to be unfortunately named The Lucky Night. There was a single tense moment when a stablehand welcomed you to the inn, but you were quick to shake your head and hold a finger to your lips to defuse the potential aversion of the mare to the name. 

There weren’t any other horses you recognised, and for that you could only breathe a sigh of relief that tonight would, in fact, be your lucky night. 

“Brisk-and-Irate? Candidate C-141? There was a hawk for you.” The stocky attendant at the front desk was one of the many lookalikes who seemed to simply spawn at each checkpoint, accompanied by a weedy man nearby who seemed to be loaning out his inn for the race. You took the tiny slip of paper that was rolled up, leisurely unrolling it to see Martha’s familiar, neat scrawl: Alphonse Barracks. Supplies. I predicted you’d choose this inn, at least ironically. You turned it over several times, even holding it to the warm lamp in your room, but there was nothing else. No secret messages, no code, nothing to decipher apart from what she’d promised. 

You let out a short laugh. Even the very bag handed to you at her specified location was exactly that: supplies. There were hard feeds in the sack, tins of dried grains and various assorted necessities like string, bone needles and something that seemed to be tallow. It was so incredibly, beautifully simple. You practically skipped back to the inn, carefully laying the spoils onto your bed as if they were treasures beyond comparison. 

And with that, she’d saved you a good few dollars that you now pocketed. There was time to wander around for a bit, rather than haggle over the various items in the night market like you spotted a scattering of people doing from your window. Nothing had particularly caught your eye in the stalls, and you doubted the vendors would pass up the opportunity to raise their prices in the wake of so many riders passing through. 

Instead, you slunk into the small saloon at the end of the dirt road. There was a heady scent of tobacco mingling with the scent of dust, and you were thankful for the fabric on your face blocking out most of the fumes and particulates. It was decently-sized, featuring a bar and several tables where patrons were dabbling their hand at what seemed to be Faro and bone-dice games. 

You took in the heavy casks behind the barman, and the chalkboard nailed to the front of the bar that boasted proudly of its wares. There were the standards—single malt, single pot still, single grain—all whiskeys that nodded to the population that frequented this area of Syracuse the most. There were also drinks that you’d never even heard of: firewater, bug juice, Kansas sheep dip, and redeye, among the few you could spot in the dim light. You grimaced. Even one whiff of whatever those were would probably knock you out instantly, for the next few days at least. You had no intention of killing yourself with rotgut. 

“Single malt,” you requested, sliding into one of the stools near an overhead lamp. Wordlessly, the barkeep held up several fingers to indicate the price, and you tossed a few coins on the polished counter, taking out some sheets of parchment and a pen to write letters while you drank.

No thoughts were flowing while you waited, and you decided to let your eyes wander to loosen up your brain a little. To your right was a surly man clad in dusty workwear, and to your left—

Your eyes almost bulged out in shock when you looked past the small gaggle of people surrounding the person two stools away. You could recognise that ugly teal jacket anywhere, and unfortunately (even with your head snapping back to paper immediately), you knew for a fact that he had most definitely seen you. 

Yet, he did not say anything. There was nary a glare shot your way. It was only when you took in the scene once more—saw the sycophantic flock of fans, as well as the small crowd bustling in between tables, placing their bets—that you realised the crowd was a well-placed, well-timed buffer. He had a public image to maintain, and you had letters to write. While the stream of patrons flowed in, you had ample time to drink and enjoy the intoxicating inspiration flowing through your veins. 

Thunk—the tumbler of golden liquid was placed squarely by your hand, and you thanked the barman briefly before you took a sip. It had a richness you’d grown accustomed to, yet your nose picked up faint fruity notes that evaded the tip of your tongue. 

You hummed in approval, tapping your pen on the wood before you began writing. 

Thank you for the supplies. They’ll be mightily appreciated. Group Four is doing exceedingly well—she continues to surprise me, day after day. 

It was a short note, matching the length of Martha’s. You knew she’d want to hear all the juicy details in person, and you respected it enough to not burden the hawk with a lengthy work of prose detailing your travels so far.

Dear Bersha,

You nursed your drink as you considered what to say. It wasn’t like you were close friends with the man, and finding the appropriate words seemed far too difficult sober. 

I’m not quite sure what to start this letter off with. 

Honesty was the best policy.

I’ve gotten into a few more scuffles since I left the hotel. I miss the (somewhat) peace I found back in Arizona, and I miss your company. Trouble seems to find me wherever I go, though I’m glad I was able to (mostly) escape it all those nights ago.

The chaparral ointment worked like a charm. As thanks, I’ll send over some dried leadplant leaves I found here in Kansas. Native Americans use them as analgesics, eczema treatment, and to treat intestinal worms. Interesting stuff! 

I’ll visit you once this race has reached its bitter end.

Your friend,

Mercury

It felt incomplete, but for the life of you, you couldn’t figure out where. Surveying it, you decided it was good enough for a first letter; Bersha’s response would dictate the flow of exchange, and your penned words were (most likely) perfectly acceptable in the grand scheme of things. You bought yourself another drink.

The third blank sheet was the hardest to face, and the pressure was made worse by the studious prickle you’d get in the side of your face every few minutes. It had the weight of Diego’s glare, and you made the wise decision to ignore it. Or at least, try. 

Dearest Vincent and Dolly, you wrote carefully, taking your time to deliver the neatest penmanship. The scent of alcohol tasted like memories of a different bar. 

I miss you guys. The food I cook doesn’t taste the same without the two of you. The days go by more slowly. The blazing sunset is far duller. There’s so much more ground to cover, and it all feels so heavy. 

I’ve been told to trust Group Four more by several other riders, so no worries there about not heeding your instructions, Vincent. I haven’t made any friends, per se, but I think I’ve found a few people that I can count on. Somewhat. 

Trouble seems to find me, no matter how hard I try to avoid it. But I’m tougher than I look, and I think I look pretty tough in this get-up, in any case. 

You swallowed the last mouthful of liquor, feeling it burn your throat fiercely. 

There’s no need to worry. I’ll make it out, and I’ll ride back across America to see you guys again if I have to. 

The most beautiful lies worked on the person telling them. 

You signed the letter off, savouring the sting remaining on your tongue. The aftertaste remained sweet, and you gathered your stuff easily. It had been quick enough that the crowd was, in fact, swelling; Diego no longer had the opportunity to send a taunt your way. 

It was time to send the papers off. By the time you’d rattled off each address to the attendant at the front desk, you were utterly exhausted. Yet, your words to Vincent were almost prophetic: trouble seems to find me, no matter how hard I try to avoid it. 

[You’re being followed.]

The corridors in The Lucky Night inn seemed labyrinthine in the dimness, and your hackles raised at Depeche Mode’s words.

Where? How many?

[No, not followed, exactly. There’s someone being followed by someone else, and they’re heading your way.]

You furrowed your brow, intentionally walking a little faster to get to the staircase quicker. But it was all for naught. 

[‘Why the fuck is she here?’]

Depeche Mode provided the faint snippets of what appeared to be crazed mutterings. It didn’t seem to be an exchange—at least, not if one party was being followed. 

[‘Don’t avoid me… I’ll get it out of you one way or another… The London Evening Standard won’t take me back, and I know it’s your—’]

You rounded a corner, and heard the rapid pattering of footsteps. A door slammed open, a flash of teal flew past, and you cursed your tipsy brain at not reacting sooner as you were pulled into a broom closet and plunged into darkness. 

Something cold and sharp pressed into the side of your neck, while a large, clawed hand gripped your left arm. You swore mentally. 

“Don’t move,” your assailant breathed, and you could do nothing but stare through the gaps of the wooden planks that made up the door in despair. “Don’t speak. Don’t even look.”

Of course, you had no intention of heeding the last command. Through your lashes, you watched as a dishevelled, haggard-looking woman stalked through the corridor. Her blonde hair was matted, and her severe woollen suit looked almost appallingly dirty, as though she’d been walking through mud for several years. 

“Diego Brando—when I catch you—”

She traipsed past, zombie-like in her belligerent stupor, and your mouth dried. 

“How dare you treat me, an Elton, like that—”

There was a definitive sting at your neck now. Blood had been drawn, and he inhaled sharply behind you, before almost loosening his hold entirely. You could no longer see her, and could no longer use Depeche Mode to track her delirious ramblings. 

“Spurned paramour?” you muttered, and the knife seemed to tremble in rage. Yet—

“You won’t stab me here, Brando. You can’t afford to get your hands dirty right now.”

“Shut it,” he hissed. Your nose wasn’t as good as his, but you could smell the sweet notes of sweat as he grew more agitated. This was new. This was new, in the sense that his agitation had finally gotten to him. That woman had exposed a crack in his perfect mask, and Diego Brando had become clumsy. Diego Brando, after nursing his own drinks bought by his fans, had grown vulnerable—the hot, shallow exhales he let out were undeniable proof of that. 

Now, there was one burning question in your mind: how could you use this information?

Elton. You filed that name away for later. 

“If she sees or hears us, she’ll have a scandal out by tomorrow.” 

The room was packed full of cleaning supplies, and you were growing more and more claustrophobic at having to share the crammed space with this abhorrent person-reptile. Yet, if Diego was this on edge, this person was either disgustingly tricky to deal with, or had dirt on him that had evidently spooked his drunken self. 

“So?” you asked boredly. “She’s gone.”

The knife moved to your neck again. You grimaced. You could have fought him off in close quarters like this easily, but his grip on you had some wiry strength that would buy him some time to seriously injure you. Besides, you didn’t know when an opportunity would come again to probe at what appeared to be his mistake. 

I know it’s your—

It wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks of what she was implying. Elton had been let go from her job, and she was blaming it on the man behind you. 

“No, she’s not,” he slurred. “She’s rabid—gone deeper into the inn to check.”

You thought back to what Johnny had said about Diego wanting to murder you, and then noted the stench of cheap rotgut that he’d drunk. Enough of the heavy fumes in the saloon would confuse a sensitive nose, and even a mouthful would clobber a tank right over the head. It was a wonder he was still standing. It seemed he was lucid enough to remember his hatred of you, on some instinctual level, while drunk enough to entertain your questions. 

You gave up. 

“That’s still not my problem,” you intoned dryly, hand on the doorknob. His claws dug into your arms, so tightly you winced. 

“Well, it will. She’s— hic— desperate enough to do a big comeback by unearthing information about all the prominent riders,” he seethed. It seemed to be a warning, but not out of goodwill. In fact, it appeared he was trying to paint her as a common enemy: someone so crazed as to do anything to get her spotlight back. But—

[He’s stupid when he’s drunk.]

—her anger seemed to be real. If Diego had planned to hinder her based on what she’d unearthed about him specifically, then he’d done a piss-poor job about it, and he’d tipped you off in the process. You almost laughed. 

“You can hide from her,” you said, and before he could process it, your elbow shot out to nail him in the liver, and he gasped, doubling over. You took the opportunity to spin his body, pressing the front of his torso against a shelf as you twisted his arm painfully behind his back. His knife had been neatly confiscated in the scuffle, and you pocketed it as a souvenir. 

“Word of advice,” you murmured into his ear, and almost smiled as you felt his breath hitch sharply—afraid now that the tables had turned, no doubt. You had to bend down somewhat to speak to him, and you felt a vindictive sort of righteousness at the fact. “If you’re going to use scandal to intimidate me, I could not care less.”

[Is that meant to be a flex?]

You ignored your Stand. 

His neck stiffened, and he turned his face slightly to glare at you—and at the proximity, he immediately looked disgusted and yanked his head back forward. 

“And don’t make plots while drunk. It’s unbecoming,” you added, and let go of the dumbfounded man. With your adjusted eyes, it was easy to locate the doorknob and slip out: still knowing Elton was out of Depeche Mode’s range, which meant she wasn’t nearby whatsoever. He could wait until she left the inn of her own accord, while you were going to sleep. 

The knife lay heavy in your pocket, destined to be unceremoniously dumped into the deepest recesses of your bag forever. 

. 　⁺ ✦ 

“Do you know an ‘Elton’?”

The early morning dew had brought with it a pounding headache and a hoarse throat for you, and you’d barely managed to roll out of the warm bed to wash before hitting the road again. By coincidence, you had somehow timed your departure to coincide with Johnny and Zeppeli’s from Syracuse, and you’d reluctantly joined the two, if only for a short while. 

“Elton?” Johnny’s brow furrowed, and he gave a sleepy shrug. “Dunno. Why?”

“Diego decided to kidnap me yesterday—”

“Say what?” Zeppeli, from where he’d been leading the way on the morning-damp trail, whipped his head back to stare at your deadpan expression. “Elaborate.”

“I was going to, before you interrupted me,” you scowled, and Johnny coughed to stifle his shock. “Me and him ended up at the same inn, and when I was walking through it, I think he was being chased by someone and didn’t want me to give his location away—so he pulled me into a broom closet to hide with him at knifepoint.”

You took in a deep inhale of fresh morning air to make up for the rushed explanation. 

“That’s certainly… bold,” Johnny commented, and his brow raised. “Why in tarnation was he so desperate to hide?”

“Or what?” Zeppeli added, and you could almost see one of his ears swivelled permanently to eavesdrop. 

“Well, he tried to explain it as her wanting to uncover everything about prominent competitors, and trying to create scandals,” you thought aloud. “But he seemed startled. I think he already had some things uncovered by her.”

“It’s unlike him,” Johnny murmured pensively. “Even if she had information on him, he would’ve gotten rid of her already, or charmed his way out. Why hide?”

“Well, he was inebriated,” you countered, switching your reins to one hand to scratch your chin in contemplation. Johnny raised his brow. “And, I think he already tried.”

“How so?” Zeppeli probed curiously, and his voice was muffled by the swift breeze. 

“I think she said something about—” you ransacked your brain, trying to pick out what your tipsy ears had heard from Depeche Mode. “—the London Evening Standard? She got let go, I think?”

Johnny’s expression stiffened, and his hands seemed to clench around his reins. “What did she look like?”

You leaned back slightly, startled by the strange agitation he was exuding. 

“Blonde. Woollen suit? Pointed face, but I couldn’t really see properly,” you rattled off, feeling quite interrogated. 

“West London accent? A reporter?” he pressed. You thought carefully, and nodded once.

“I’ve met her,” he said grimly. “Judith Elton. She tried to interview me on a train, eager to get a ticket to fame by provocation and a juicy story.”

It seemed that Diego had been telling a half-truth, then. You didn’t try to pry into what Johnny meant, not when his face was so ashen.

“And Dio? What’s his connection?” Zeppeli asked the question that was still on your mind. Johnny’s face that had been housing a storm calmed, somewhat. 

“He’s got a shady past. Well-known rumours. She might could’ve gotten hold of some evidence, or just bluffed her way to provokin’ him for a story. In any case, she overestimated her ability, or underestimated what he would do to strip her of her journalistic connections,” Johnny answered seriously. “He probably didn’t expect her to be so persistent.”

“She seemed to have nothing to lose now. With her dignity in tatters, getting one monumental story would be crucial to ever showing her face in her circle again,” you remarked, and those blue lips pressed together in irritation. 

“She’s a quack. If she had truly stumbled upon something other than just rumours, Diego wouldn’t have let her off so easily.”

“Maybe,” you conceded. “But it doesn’t explain why he seemed so off yesterday.”

“You said it yourself earlier,” Zeppeli grumbled. “Man, for someone with healing powers, you’d make a shitty doctor.”

You glared at his back, and Johnny cracked a small smile. 

“He does hold his drink well, though,” Johnny defended you for once, and Zeppeli looked back to squint at you.

“Well? How much did he have?”

You recalled the crowd of fans around him, and the distinct scent of low-quality, powerful liquor on his breath. 

“He stank like rotgut,” you thought aloud, and Johnny shuddered.

“He drank that willingly?” 

“Maybe he was already tipsy when someone bought it for him. The haze in the saloon was thick enough that at that point, he may not have been able to smell it properly,” you proposed, and felt a glimmer of pride when Johnny nodded at the conjecture. “It would get anyone drunk.”

“Makes sense. Then, Elton didn’t have any proper leads after all,” he commented after a long moment, and suddenly narrowed his eyes at you. “So don’t go looking for her. She won’t have answers.”

You swallowed, mentally crossing out her name from your notes. “Well, I wasn’t going to.”

“You weren’t?” he glared. 

“No?” you shrank in your saddle, lying shamelessly through your teeth. 

“Well, you do ‘attempt’ to stay outta trouble,” he murmured ponderously, regarding you with an almost pitying gaze. “You do a really bad job at it.”

The meaning in your raised brow was clear: whose fault is that?

[Partly yours. I think you would halve the trouble you run into just by keeping your mouth shut.]

Johnny, sensing his imminent victory, chose to accept it gracefully by at least turning his face away to smile. 

“We’ll be in Dodge City soon,” Zeppeli suddenly called out from the front, but ‘soon’ for him seemed to routinely mean very different things. You straightened your posture a bit. 

There he was, backlit by the lonesome moon. He clung to the rock like a tick: small and annoyingly out of reach. You stood and watched as his body curled around his hand, but you couldn’t summon any inkling of hatred for him. No, there was only a general apathy, alongside an all-consuming loathing towards yourself. 

And he leapt, falling backwards from the spire: twisting and turning in a way that made the smile on his face visible, above which the lost eye buried itself in his grinning countenance. 

“Dio has— he has the left eye!” Johnny sputtered, pointing a trembling hand at the man half-transfigured into a dinosaur. His tail lashed out against the grey rocks, cracking sharply, but the only thing you noticed was the contemptuous glance he shot before disappearing past the vertices of the cliff. 

A soft hiss drew your meandering attention, and you watched as the ashen guard of the eyes dissolved into the surrounding sand. Its job was done. The eyes had found new hosts. What is a guard without its charge?

“Dio’s transformation hasn’t gone away—” he continued his wild ramble, scraping his forearms on the rough stones as he pointed into the chasm the jockey had leapt into. “—he was under Ferdinand’s control; we have to chase him or he’ll take away that eye!”

[He’s gone.]

“It’s too late,” you commented blandly, rocking back on your heels in the sand to alleviate the pressure on your knees. Your voice came from far away, and you spoke with mechanical rigour. “He’s not here anymore.”

There was a faint prickle on your face, and you could feel something scanning your unfocused gaze. 

“That’s right,” Zeppeli replied after a long beat. Remorse, if he even had any, was undetectable in his tone, and you wondered if it even mattered. Was there anything that he could even say to erase what he did—what you did? “Dio got us at the very end… or maybe we should say he got the eye and its power brought back the dinosaur transformation that had disappeared as his ‘talent’. Half to my steel ball, half to his Stand ability—that’s what it seems to be.”

“The ‘dinosaur’ ability…” Johnny trailed off, then seemed to realise something. “Dio may not have been a terrorist—but if he’s got one eye, then he’ll want the other!”

“He knows about the corpse now,” you murmured, dread settling in your stomach through a thick veil of detachment. 

“I can’t believe he took half—he doesn’t just desire victory! He longs for authority and eliteness—” Johnny muttered. “He’ll come for you, Gyro. For that eye. For my arm. For the other corpse parts.”

“Most likely…” It was matter-of-fact. “We were able to find the location here. Neither Dio nor the terrorists know how we found it.”

A low whir interrupted the thoughtful quiet, accompanied by the sudden glow of gold, and your head jerked up to focus on the man before you: hunched over his hand as his right eye projected a luminescent stream of characters on his hand. 

Your brows furrowed in mild curiosity. 

“This must reveal the next corpse part location. ‘Turbō’—could mean hurricane or cyclone. Could it be that again? A constellation named Turbō? Mount Turbō? Turbō Rock?” He mulled the words over, tasting them as though they would reveal new notes of flavour. He tried a few more combinations, like they were secret passwords, to no avail. His hand dropped against his trousers with a dull smack. 

“Little off topic, but there’s one thing bothering me about what that crazed guy said—the corpse was nineteen-hundred-years-old.” Johnny glanced between Zeppeli and you as he probed around his point. “Just a slight mention—what do you think?”

He had the tone of a student asking a question they knew was stupid. 

“Must’ve heard wrong,” Zeppeli answered instantly, blithely. 

“I’m sure of it,” Johnny insisted. “You’re the one rememberin’ wrong. He said: ‘hard to believe… something-something… nineteen-hundred-years old’.”

“Then he must’ve said it wrong,” Zeppeli shot back. “Probably meant a hundred-and-ninety-years-old.”

You watched, mildly entertained. 

“Come on, no way it’s possible. You never listen anyways—why bother now? I’m trying to figure this code out,” he continued, squinting his eyes in a picture of puzzlement. 

“Is it really impossible? The terrorists know who it belongs to. Zero B.C.—was there really no-one who came over to this continent back then? The natives have always been here—there were people there!”

Zeppeli was silent, as though he couldn’t believe his ears. But Johnny was looking straight at you this time: arguably the authority on this subject. Unfortunately for him, your expertise was laughable. You made notes, examined a few skin flakes on slides, and listened to your Dr Ferdinand natter a bit about the body part. 

“There’s no evidence—”

But unfortunately for Zeppeli, you knew more about it than him. 

“You’re assuming the saint was taken here when it died,” you interjected coolly. “In those two millennia, it could have well been transported anywhere in that time.”

“Right!” Johnny’s eyes seemed to light up a bit in the darkness, spurred on by his imminent victory in this argument. “The terrorists must have proof of its age—that’s why they’re holding this race! The terrorist is this country, as well as the race itself!”

[He’s right on the money.]

You regarded Johnny with a new sort of respect. 

“Right, now that the expert has spoken, it’s alright of course,” Zeppeli bit out, evidently miffed by the ganging-up on him. You could not find it in your heart to feel sympathetic. “Could you tell us who the saint is then, O Enlightened One?”

“I know what I need to know about the corpse,” you repeated your words from when you held the arm for the first time in the desert. “That doesn’t mean I know everything.”

“That’s a first,” he snorted. “Do you at least actually know how old it is?”

“Ferdinand was correct in that,” you said evenly. Radiometric dating was highly accurate, though you couldn’t say for certain whether it had been invented yet or not. “Highly conclusive evidence.”

“Which would be?” he scrutinised. 

“Highly classified.”

Exasperated, his mouth opened to say something, but he was interrupted by the sound of villagers waking from their sleep after being transfigured. He shook his head. 

“No matter how powerful the corpse parts are, their power won’t tell you how to become rich, or how to make chicks happy. Or set free a person sentenced to death.” He gazed off into the prussic horizon, wind rippling his person into a painting. It would’ve been more impactful if he hadn’t just changed the subject to avoid losing an argument. “It’s still the race that’s important. Even if it’s the race itself that’s a terrorist.”

He gripped the edge of the rock tighter as he began his climb downwards. 

“I need at least a hundred points at this stage no matter what—that’s what’s of most importance! Sixty kilometres until this stage’s goal—andiamo!”

[Are you actually going to go with these lunatics?]

. 　⁺ ✦

(She’s intimidating. You shift from leg to leg, a mere pace away from Dr Amsa, even though the other woman is still a whole auditorium away.)

(Her sensible shoes command the attention of those milling about and talking: not so much by the sound, but by the diplomatic, steady vibration that instinctively makes one straighten their back. And you do, awkwardly—in that gangly phase where you grow with no sense and the room first begins constricting.)

(“This the kid?”)

(Her voice is sharp, but her gaze isn’t: eyes crinkling with a faint good-humour, as though she approves of your very existence. It’s a warm look, and makes you feel strangely abashed with yourself.)

(“Top of the class,” Dr Amsa nods, and it’s enough to make you take a half-step forward. Out of her shadow. Just a little.)

(“I didn’t understand much of what you said, but it was an interesting lecture,” you say, with the particular honesty of a child that has not quite mastered social grace.)

(“There’ll be time for that,” Dr Ferdinand smiles, and the incisive lines of her person soften. “Learn what you can, but remember to be a kid first.”)

(You nod, but you wonder what exactly she means by it. You mull it over while the two Doctors discuss isotopes, spectrometry, and everything in between the two. It does not help.)

(It is your first time meeting Dr Ferdinand, and you want to be just like her when you grow up.)

. 　⁺ ✦

(“Like this?” You tilt your laptop with the correctly aligned graph towards her, and she scrutinises it for a long while. Each axis label, the data-to-ink ratio, the caption formatting. Her pupils switch foci between the table of results and the graph so fast you wonder how she’s not getting dizzy. You’re getting dizzy yourself from swivelling around in the office chair. Then, finally, Dr Ferdinand squints and gives you a brusque thumbs-up. Well done you.)

(“No, like this,” she says, pointing out the mistake you just made while accidentally selecting the wrong element standard to measure your optical spectroscopy peaks against. With a deft click of the mouse, the peaks no longer look disturbingly off. You adjust your lab goggles sheepishly, and accidentally take in a large inhale of sediment scent and chemicals, coughing loudly. She merely grimaces, and side-steps you to recheck the spectroscopy equipment and its calibration.)

(“How do I use this?” You hold out an old hand lens one of your professors had given you, and she takes it with a practised ease: weighting it experimentally. She explains it all: identifying mineral assemblages, the alterations that may have occurred to the sediment, how to correctly identify the right grains for bulk geochemistry. She explains it all, like she always does, and you listen in the heat of the desert, ignoring the burning plasma of the sun hanging above you.)

(“What if I do it like this?” You load the gun methodically, raising the sights to the target. The hammer clicks, and a bullet aligns itself.)

He wore a pink suit, hair curled in distinct presidential rolls that made bile spill onto your tongue. And when he turned, he had no face.

Inhale.

You gripped the gun tightly, finger pressed on the trigger as you aimed. 

Exhale.

You squeezed, and the bullet pierced clean through. Wood, you thought, listening to the sharp crack and watching the doll head splinter. Red seeped through the empty visage, soaking the tresses, but it was so garish that you weren’t moved by it. It was ink on paper. Crimson paint on canvas. 

He swung like the flat targets on the shooting range, sliding forward across the metal tracks until he was discarded with the rest of them, ready to be replaced by the next target. 

You took a deep breath, cocking the hammer, and aligned the sights once more.

This one had a face, but it was swimming in your vision. What did the president look like, anyway? You’d seen so many portraits, but there never seemed to be a single depiction. 

The shadows hinted at a nose. Perhaps an eye or two, and you felt the same emptiness as you squeezed the trigger, politely creating an empty ring in the perceived area of where a pupil could potentially have been. 

The president slid forward again, and dropped. 

You took aim again.

Valentine crumpled into a mountain of other Valentines by your feet. 

Again. 

This was getting ridiculous now. You stopped looking, but you could feel the weight of each wooden body as it clattered against the others. 

And then, something warm nudged your foot. Heavy. Still-warm, with the thick reek of arterial blood. You glanced down: familiar red velvet roses, blond hair curled loosely around his face. 

He stared up at you with his eternally bottomless eyes, sclera already dried from lack of moisture. 

Ferdinand. 

Your skin crawled, and instinctively you took a step back. But who could shield you from him?

His hand clamped around your ankle before you could do anything, still staring at you with soulless eyes. 

And you stared back, unable to move, unable to say or do anything. Brain matter was oozing from the back of his head onto your shoe, and the smell was indescribably sweet. And still he stared, forever unmoving save for the shackle around your foot.

Your vision blurred, chest heaving with a sudden lack of air. When it cleared, the blond hair had been pulled back into a severe bun, and the body wore a lab coat. 

Her thin lips pressed disapprovingly together, set in stone by rigor mortis. 

Dr Ferdinand. 

The legs that had been barely supporting you gave way, and you crashed hard to the blood soaked ground.

There she was. 

Had you killed her? Had you erased her very existence by eliminating her ancestor?

There she wasn’t. 

She was no longer existent, and you were staring at Dr Amsa’s stiff corpse.

Then, there was nothing. No wooden pile of bodies, no shooting range, no warm gun in your hands: only the faint smell of your mother’s cigarettes and the stupidly expensive perfume she wore. 

And that too, just like her, disappeared into the wind. 

. 　⁺ ✦

“Hey, stronzo.” An irritated voice jolted you awake, and you canted to the left: body aching from unlocking the art of sleeping while Group Four was cantering. “Stop muttering in your sleep.”

“Zeppeli,” you greeted, clipped with something. Resentment? Betrayal? Your chest was heavy with a foreign weight that you knew would stay with you until your bones turned to dust. 

The rocky paths had long since turned to rolling grasslands, and you wore your goggles around your neck: letting the breeze sting your eyes and provide an excuse for the salty tears rolling your face. The pre-dawn darkness hid the tracks, but perhaps he still saw them. 

Twenty-five kilometres until the third stage goal. 

The two of you rode side by side for what felt like too long. For someone so talkative, it seemed he could not find the right words to say. Johnny, tactfully, was keeping two or three horselengths ahead, and the wind had picked up enough that it would keep a secret to itself. 

Cold metal pressed against your hips as you adjusted your posture, and you could feel your head smart with memory: cursed to recall every moment in excruciating detail. The sleep hadn’t helped. A deathly stench hung over you like a shroud: cloying sweetness, mixed with a sickening bloody reek that wove itself in the crimson of your jacket.

Your lower lip wobbled in consternation, and you fought to keep any more tears from squeezing out. Furious ones, ashamed ones—the salt on your tongue bled with bitterness and a rough, acrid taste. 

Did he die in the original timeline, too? Just like that? Was he shot through with Johnny’s nails? Was he mauled to extinction by cougars? Did Zeppeli simply execute him?

There was no way of knowing.  

Would…

Your mouth formed a question. You stared hard ahead, and you could feel that golden eye scanning you: analysing the defensive set of your shoulders, the glossy tracks on your face that were just-there in the pre-dawn light. 

If…

Words scrambled and were strangled in your throat, as though you still had prehistoric vocal cords: severely unoptimised for human speech.

It was stupid. You felt like you knew the answer already, and the weight of it forced your head down: giving up, letting it fester. 

Yet Zeppeli had a talent for observing human behaviour: surgically precise, blade stabbed in the most poignant part of your hesitation. 

“Even if you hadn’t been there,” he spoke slowly, making sure his enunciation wasn’t lost to the wind. From the corner of your eye, you saw him wave his hand in some sort of gesture: shaking an open palm slightly, then squeezing it open and shut in a spasm-like movement. It was the universal gesture of grasping for words—feeling out the weight of language spilling out in your head. I don’t quite know what to say, it told you, and you focused instead on tracing the kaleidoscopic shapes of wind tugging at everything. “He would have died. By my hand, by Johnny’s. Maybe even by Dio’s. Or the cougars would’ve gotten to him—revenge for turning them into dinosaurs.”

The air was cold, and if you looked closely, there were faint wisps of condensed breath coagulating in the folds of your veil. 

“I forced your hand,” he admitted, and the acknowledgement was enough that you glanced at him briefly, watching the currents cosset him and his stupid cape and his stupid hair. He met your eyes steadily before looking forward: allowing you to rock into his words, to either accept them or toss them to the capricious zephyrs. “Was it your first?”

First kill. 

A body flashed in your mind. Dr Amsa. The jockeys and their horses screaming behind you on a bridge that was never meant to support anyone else. The ghost of your mother. Ferdinand. 

And now, perhaps your Dr Ferdinand. But no. There was still hope for her existence. 

First kill. 

Here, the bullet had a comet tail, pointing straight at you as it shot through the skull of your first victim. You felt sick.

“Yes,” you said hoarsely. You cleared your throat. “Yes.”

Zeppeli remained silent for a long time: a kilometre’s length, perhaps even two. 

“You were not ready. However, you would’ve never been.” It was the gentlest tone he’d ever taken: a rich baritone, squashed into something like a brusque almost-whisper. “You can’t ever prepare for it. Not unless there’s something wrong inside you. It is the last option you must take—figuratively, physically, medically.” 

The silence stretched out again, and you could feel him mull something over: hesitating before speaking. It was so unusual you looked at him sidelong again. 

“I won’t apologise.” He met your eyes once more, and the sharpness of his gaze softened with something close to understanding. You thought of the rusted sword they buried him with, as well as the neatly folded uniform of the King’s Executioner. You understood, too. “I won’t be sorry for living. Don’t be sorry, either, for surviving someone trying his hardest to kill us. If you feel like you’ve sinned, blame me—that’s where the fault primarily lies.”

The weight didn’t lessen, not one bit. Yet the words in themselves were enough to give your mind something to chew on, instead of replaying what happened after the smoke cleared and before the gun dropped. 

He was right. Technicality be damned—he had been the one to press the trigger. If that even mattered.

“However, you are not infallible,” he continued, and you watched him frown as he mouthed to himself different words, squinting between each one as though he’d misspoken. “You are not guiltless.”

Braided reins cut through your leather riding gloves and dug into your skin as you gripped them tighter, not daring to speak. He was right. Fuck, he was right. 

“You bought yourself a weapon, and you’ve evidently trained enough that it’s more than lethal,” he spoke, words measured, though not accusatory. It was an observable, irrefutable fact. “Why did you choose to purchase it?”

“In case I needed it,” you replied defensively. “It’s like your spheres.”

He let out a dry laugh—short and so loud that Johnny heard it over the gale, briefly glancing back before minding his own business again. 

“No,” he said simply. “These spheres don’t kill. In fact, they allow me space to manoeuvre without killing, much like your stand.”

He shook his head, and the humour in his face vanished. “I worded my earlier question wrong. Why do you wave the gun around?” 

You swallowed, already knowing the reason. It was smoke and mirrors, designed to allow yourself room to defend yourself without your stand. You had the order of operations reversed to keep your cards close to your chest, and it had backfired this night. 

His heavy gaze searched your avoidant eyes, and he made a sound that sounded a bit like a sigh. It seemed he had figured it out. 

“A word of advice,” he commented, and Valkyrie paced closer, until you were almost shoulder to shoulder. “You should only point that at somebody if you can reckon with the fact that you’ll kill them. If you want to keep your secrets—fine. But be prepared for people to die over it. A race where you can’t kill those who will kill you—”

“I could,” you protested, and this time he didn’t laugh at the absurdity. No, he almost seemed to pity the half-truth leaving your lips.

“—you couldn’t. You didn’t, not tonight. In fact, you still haven’t really killed anyone. You shut your eyes, and I pulled the trigger for you,” he refuted, and it didn’t help at all. “You are not a murderer. Pulling the trigger yourself won’t change that.”

Valkyrie surged forth a noselength, and Zeppeli looked back briefly as he rode to catch up with Johnny. “But don’t avoid the responsibility you chose to bear, when you decided bullets were better than divulging your secrets.”

And he left you alone, head swimming with excerpts of the conversation. 

Distinctly, you could hear Johnny turn his head towards his friend, and traced out his faint words. “Good talk?” 

No, you thought. Decidedly not. 

. 　⁺ ✦

“We are now heading downhill on the Rocky Mountains of the third stage! Cannon City—five kilometres in front of the goal! And we witness this strange effect as we approach; it’s like the riders are ‘human magnets’! Although they ran five-hundred and ten kilometres with an estimated race time of seven days minimum, as the sun rises, all the talented racers gather together! Their scattered distances shrink—this will inevitably be a heated battle!”

The weather balloons were barely audible over the heavy drum of hoofbeats battering the soft grasslands. Your hands were beginning to go numb: from exhaustion, coldness, and everything in between. 

“With the Rocky Mountains in the background, the distance to the goal has shrunk to only three kilometres! In the front of the crowd, we have Pocoloco from Georgia, followed by the barefoot Sandman! From the Mongolian horse-riding tribes, we have Dot Han; Gaucho from Mexico; Baba Yaga from the Russian military! With some space in between, we have Gyro Zeppeli, Johnny Joestar, Mr Brisk-and-Irate, and England’s Diego Brando!”

You tuned the commentators out, feeling each word cause palpitations in your heart. The organ had overworked itself, and you felt every jitter as it pumped you full of adrenaline: begging for a break. It didn’t get one. Not when Diego was hot on your heels, proverbial jaws snapping at your legs. 

[“Dio, on that mountain—he’s come to understand his ability! Is he going to attack us here?”]

Depeche Mode helpfully transmitted the conversation between Johnny and Zeppeli that the wind had robbed from you, and you listened with trepidation. 

[“No, Gyro—there’s no way he’d risk being disqualified right in front of the goal, where the balloons are watching! He’s planning on defeating you in this stage without breaking any rules. To him, moving past you is as good as moving past Sandman, which would lead him to victory—it’s his fighting intuition!”]

If you were being honest, you were a bit too tired to care about placing in this stage. Thus, you tuned out Depeche Mode’s transmission too, as well as the crazed ramblings of the said Diego behind you. Instead, you hovered low over Group Four’s neck, nudging her out of their paths and into a stream of your own. Zeppeli briefly shot you a confused glance, eyes no longer mismatched but settled into their usual verdant state, but you ignored him. 

Rather, you stared at the expanse ahead of you, and Lake Cannon in the middle of it all. 

“Now—right before the goal, we have Lake Cannon with a circumference of three-thousand and nine-hundred kilometres. Let me explain the lay of the land:

“If the racers choose to go ‘right’, they will be taking the waterside route! It’s flat, but there’s a fairly lengthy twenty-four-hundred metres until the finish lines!

“If the racers choose the ‘left’ route, it’ll be seven-hundred metres shorter, but that road’s on a cliff with many ups and downs! Which route will they choose? How will it affect the ‘muscles’ of the horses that have been travelling through the mountains for five days?”

You didn’t even have to think about it. Group Four, though her head had turned somewhat to observe the cliffs, was unable to yank her way towards the challenge: exhausted enough that she could only give a few weak tugs against your firm hand. 

“Don’t even think about it,” you clicked your tongue disapprovingly, guiding her towards the waterside. 

You were distracted by the sound of splashing water.

“What a surprise! A third route—Diego Brando follows Gyro Zeppeli into the lake! But it may not be the wisest of choices—the water resistance will wear out the horses like nothing else!”

You didn’t bother looking. It was none of your business. But still, you controlled Group Four a bit more, forcing her into jog rather than a canter. 

“And yet Dio, the genius jockey, has chosen that route! The distance is a much shorter four-hundred-and-fifty metres—it may just be the fastest route! The race has just gotten a hell of a lot more interesting; a damn battle right in front of the goal!”

You lied. You were curious, and when you looked, Johnny had dived in after Zeppeli, and appeared to be yelling at him.

[“I am being clear—you will lose to Dio! I can tell—you can’t beat Sandman either… I can tell from experience. You may have thought your previous losses were troubles and accidents—but that’s not it!”]

You slowed even further, straining the range of Depeche Mode’s hearing. 

[“You’ve learned and inherited from your country and parents; you’re running this race with technique and energy. I understand you’re cornered in a situation, where you have to save an innocent sentenced to death, but those are things you’ve ‘inherited’—Dio is different!”]

This was definitely none of your business, but the mention of Diego had your ears piquing. You wanted to know about the jockey you’d never heard of in your history: more about his motivations, his mindset, the way he held grudges. 

[“He has stolen everything: from his horse skills, to his social status, even food. Ever since birth, Dio has been a person who has even stolen destiny! He is ‘someone who has hungered’, while you’re just a ‘successor’! I’m not saying either is good or bad, but the difference will show in these desperate moments; that difference will steal your victory and eat you up!”]

Your brows furrowed, and you wondered how his circumstances had shaped him into someone so viciously clawing to life. The way Johnny said it may have been an insult—after all, you could not tell what his tone was from the monotone buzz of Depeche Mode—but those words, unfortunately, did not debase the jockey further in your eyes. 

[“Is that what you’re trying to say, Johnny? That I’m a spoiled brat of my parents, and a coward? Is that it?”]

[“You can’t win unless you hunger. But not like Dio—you need to ‘hunger’ in a much more noble manner.”]

Group Four meandered on as you turned the words over in your mind. Noble. Had Diego even been afforded the luxury of hungering in a noble manner?

[“I’m going back to shore. Sorry, but I’m taking the route to the ‘right’.”]

[“Johnny— you fucker…”]

Your attention snapped back to the race, and you pressed your legs against Group Four, urging her on. 

“Howdy.” Johnny’s drawl broke through your concentration, and you glanced back to see him gaining on you—only a horselength behind. 

“Johnny,” you inclined your head, allowing Group Four to lengthen her stride, now that she had Slow Dancer to compete against. 

“Hold on,” he murmured, and you weren’t quite sure what he was referring to. The answer revealed himself when he drew close and wrapped a soft hand around your cold, tense one. “Relax.”

“Ah,” you mouthed, loosening the deathgrip on the braided rein. 

“She knows what she’s doing,” Johnny continued, letting go and raking his lazuline gaze across the rider-horse pair. “You’re killin’ her momentum when you rein her back.”

His hand reached out to stroke her wither, and she let out a tired nicker in response. 

“Let her stretch her legs; she knows where to go. Relax and enjoy the smooth terrain—know what I’m sayin’?” he rasped, and you nodded soundlessly. With the wind in your clothes and the soft patter of hooves against grasslands, it was easy to lose yourself in the stream: uploading your consciousness to spectate from above, rather than struggling on the ground. 

He kept a critical eye on your form, and after a few minor tweaks, his gaze curved into something that approximated to a smile. “Good. Just like that.”

“You didn’t want to go with Zeppeli?” you questioned, stifling a yawn, and the preening sort of pride you felt at the praise. 

He pulled a face: raised brows and a half-sneer. “He’ll learn that taking a shortcut isn’t the determining factor for victory.”

You nodded sagely. 

“Are you desperate to win this race?” he asked within the next breath. It was a casual question, but you could sense a critical sort of curiosity embedded in it. The notion that you wanted to win was already presupposed. 

“Not particularly,” you shrugged it off, keeping it ambiguous. 

“Good,” he said, words hard with an edge you couldn’t quite place. “Desperate people do some of the most foolish things.”

“Is winning foolish?” you wondered aloud, and he looked at you for a long while, gauging the angle from which you approached the question. At least, that’s what you thought. And you looked back at Johnny Joestar, brow raised. 

“Winning makes fools,” he commented, but his expression held a trace of bitterness as he looked back on the track. “But regardless—”

“And it looks like Dio’s finally back on land! Dio is in the lead—five-hundred metres remaining!”

Johnny whistled, a low thing that perked both Slow Dancer and Group Four’s ears. 

“—I reckon we should stop the chat and get a move on.”

“Pocoloco has also cleared the cliffs! Johnny Joestar is closing in on Dot Han—as is Mr. Brisk–and–Iraaaaate!”

You could taste the scent of sweat sticking to your and Group Four’s body; see the foamy flecks of green on her bit; hear the collective breathing of a mass of humans trying their damn hardest to be number one in this stupid stage. 

“And Gyro Zeppeli’s back on laaaand! And he’s beginning to accelerate—now running at a tremendous speed!”

The finish line was close. You could see it, breathing in the dust and crowd screaming as the jockeys approached. 

“It’s like he’s a hunting dog going after a rabbit—right on Dio’s trail!”

And then—

“Good Lord! He’s beginning to throw his luggage off his horse!”

You watched, appalled, as he lobbed his soaked belongings behind him: wondering exactly how he was going to wash the dust and horse-shit and the trampled hoof-marks out. And still it wasn’t good enough—he included his jacket and his cape in the growing trail he left behind, muscles tensing in concentration as he observed his opponent in front of him. 

“Crazed fool,” you muttered under your breath, and Johnny flashed you a grin.

Zeppeli could accelerate no longer. 

“He can’t shorten his distance any more! He can’t catch up! And now—he’s slowing down, with two-hundred metres left! Both are feeling the strain from taking on the lake, but Dio is managing to stay ahead!”

It was laughable. Even with his saddle, clothes and belongings strewn on the track, Zeppeli was straying behind. 

“The gap is widening! Pocoloco has just passed Gyro—and Dio continues to stay ahead!”

Dot Han was now on Valkyrie’s tail: you and Johnny on his. And then Zeppeli was streaming water, wringing his body out; you saw his twisting skin, withering him like desiccated husk. 

“Here he comes—accelerating once more! And he finally takes the lead—”

Johnny’s voice was suddenly in your ear as he leaned over. “Watch closely and follow me.”

He rocked into the urgent gallop of Slow Dancer, pulling past Dot Han and creating a slip stream that Group Four funnelled into. 

“—Valkyrie is wobbling—she’s losing her balance, and Gyro Zeppeli is fumbling! Thirty metres— ten metres!”

The roar of the crowd caused tremors in the very earth’s bones.

“Gooooooooal! Johnny Joestar—what a turn of events! Johnny Joestar, Mr. Brisk-and-Iraaate, Diego Brando—followed by Pocoloco, Sandman, Dot Han, and Baba Yaga!”

Johnny’s sweaty face turned back to glance at you, and the light almost made it seem like he was smirking: what did I say?

“There was an incident right before the goal where Diego Brando stepped on a ‘small rock’, which happened to hit Gyro’s horse—and during that time, the two racers lost their balance due to this incident, and Johnny Joestar, with Brisk-Irate hot on his heels, came to take the lead!”

There was a prickle from your side, and the burning gaze of Diego made himself known as he glared at you. And then, he turned his eyes to Johnny, narrowing them as Slow Dancer slowed to an easy jog to bask in the cheers of the crowd. 

“It was only by ‘chance’ that Dio happened to step on rock; no proof of intentionality, hence he will not be disqualified.”

Instinctively, you looked at Zeppeli. It was almost definitive that whatever Diego had done, he had done it purposefully—and here he was, getting away with it, unlike Zeppeli in the first stage. Yet, Zeppeli didn’t look angry. No, his brow was furrowed and he looked at Johnny with contemplation: sat on the ground with his thinned arms holding the reins. He looked determined, sure, but not angry. 

“At this point, the fourth stage has already begun! Johnny Joestar is the one who conquered the dead heat battle just now, but an hour ago, ‘Hot Pants’ had already passed, taking first place!”

“What the—” Zeppeli muttered audibly enough to be heard over the clamour of the crowd, and there it was, freshly pasted onto the board for all to see. 

First place, Hot Pants. One-hundred points. Second place, Johnny Joestar. Fifty points. Third—you. Forty points… you did some quick arithmetic: a hundred and twenty points total for you. 

“Therefore, the placements for the third stage are as listed on the chart to the right of you good folks! Hot Pants receives a hundred points and a one-hour time bonus!”

Hot Pants. 

The name was unfamiliar. This person did not exist in your directory of the past or future. 

A single question remained. Will they be a friend or a foe?

. 　⁺ ✦

“Fourth stage….” you muttered, rolling out your weathered map on the table in your motel room. It was five minutes past midnight, and you’d been knocked out since around eight in the morning, dead to the world and all that it entailed. Your body still ached faintly, but the day you spent sleeping had restored some life into your weary bones and gave you enough energy to boot up Personal Jesus and fix some of the lingering damage left over. 

“Thirteen-hundred kilometres… around twenty-one days long,” you chewed on the edge of your pencil thoughtfully, staring at the possible routes revealed in the lamplight. You made a few tentative marks on the check-points where you’d gotten in contact with the Boston Equestrian Corps for supplies. The business card you’d been given in the first stage had come in handy after all (after being soaked through by water in your bag and having to be restored by Personal Jesus). “Syracuse, Dodge City, Hutchison, Kansas City.”

You felt better. 

Your clothes had been freshly washed and ‘restored’ to dryness, you were clean, you were rested and sated. There were new supplies of grains, herbs and dried foodstuffs in your bag. Group Four had been hosed down and fitted with new shoes after she threw one in excitement after being greeted by a trail of carrots. 

And your mind was clear. The guilt you’d been feeling had been replaced with a quiet sort of acceptance of the responsibilities you bore. Death would be an ever looming part of your journey: and in the end, your goal could not just be limited to making sure Valentine was unable to get the corpse. 

No, you would have to kill him. There was no other way.

You stood from the cramped stool and stretched your lethargic body out, listening to the whistle of the breeze through the cracked window. Sitting on the ledge, you tried to muster up more exhaustion so you could get in a few more hours before you set off at dawn, but there was nothing. Everything had been neatly sorted in these past thirty minutes. 

Your gaze landed on the holster carefully placed on top of your clothes. It weighed on your mind, but not as much as you expected. Still, as you stepped out with a loose bandanna protecting your face from the night chill, you left it in your room, unwilling to even think of using it tonight. 

The only person downstairs was the receptionist, and when he saw you, his eyes lit up. “There’s been an eagle for you, Mr. Brisk-and-Irate!” 

You paused in the lobby, eyeing the paper envelope on the counter as though it might suddenly shoot you. “From who?”

“Err—” he said, flipping it over. “From a… Dolly Wilkes and Vincent Cosgrove?” 

You took it with shaking fingers, trembling profusely as you thanked him and excused yourself to the porch. Sitting on the first step, in the glow of the motel and a gas lamp, you greedily tore into the thin parchment, scanning the paper hungrily. 

Hey, kid, it read, and you burst out laughing at the gruff words written in Dolly’s childish, looping cursive. Had Vincent dictated the letter for her to practise her writing?

We got your letters, and we’ve been keeping track in the papers of where you’re at. You’ve done well. 

The simple sentence misted your eyes, and you wiped them harshly with your sleeve. 

You trusted Group Four in the first stage, and that’s commendable. Keep doing that, and forge an unbreakable bond with her. Don’t close your eyes, though—that’s stupid. Be prepared, and don’t let her deal with all the obstacles by herself. 

Martha’s gotten your regards. In fact, she’s even begun a fan club in your honour. She’s been in contact with suppliers, so keep an eye out in the checkpoint cities for resources. 

Stay out of trouble. If you can’t, stay alive and well instead. 

There’ll always be a place for you here. 

Vincent (and Dolly!)

P.S: Thanks for the souvenir packages!! I didn’t expect the Rockies to have such yummy hot cocoa!

The ink blurred, and you buried your face momentarily in your hands. How the hell were you supposed to leave them behind? 

“Can’t sleep?” 

The boards creaked behind you as wheels pressed against the old wood, and you glanced up to see Johnny, haloed in the light. He wasn’t wearing his trademark blue-starry look, but a simple linen outfit that seemed to be his sleepwear. 

You looked away, blinking hard. “No, I slept enough.”

A dull thump resounded, and in the next moment, he was sitting next to you, legs tucked neatly beneath himself. If he saw the stricken look in your eyes that you were desperately trying to rid yourself of, he didn’t mention it. 

“All patched up now?” he asked, gazing into the darkness rather than looking at you. It was the universally nice gesture of minding his own business while you schooled your face into a less pitiful expression. 

You let out a noncommittal grunt, tensing your muscles to feel for any sharp aches that you could still get rid of. There was nothing, save some general stiffness from sleeping in one position for too long. “Yeah, pretty much.”

“You got the worst beating out of all of us,” he commented, leaning back onto his palms. 

[Had me working overtime. Why can’t you behave yourself?]

Because I have you, you thought. 

“Well, no surprises as to why,” you remarked dryly. “I seem to have made a rather gnarly enemy.”

Johnny let out an exhale that sounded suspiciously like it was disguising a laugh. “You think?”

You folded the letter neatly in your lap, smoothing its crumpled edges. When you looked at him, he was staring at you: humour gone from his face. 

“That man brings misfortune to others wherever he goes,” Johnny murmured, and his fingers picked at the edges of his undershirt, tugging at its frayed edges. “Even if he doesn’t have a grudge against you, it’s in his nature to simply take.”

You continued gazing at him, and he smiled wryly. “But he has a grudge against everyone. You, however, have put a target on your back.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” he countered, raising a pale brow. “You’ve seen the public persona when he hates someone. If you underestimate him, you’ll drown in the deep water of his schemes.”

You were silent.

“He wants to kill you.”

“I know.”

He hesitated, testing the waters. “What in tarnation did Dio mean… earlier?”

“We ended up at the same hotel for the night in Arizona,” you thought aloud, counting the rough timeframe in your mind and on your fingers. “Like—right before the desert gave way into the mountains. And he thought I was stalking him, and I was insulted by that so I insulted him, to his face and in front of the hotel owner, then I bought everyone a drink, I insinuated he was into humiliation, I called him a lunatic.”

“You’ve right near lost your mind,” Johnny breathed, aghast. “No wonder he wants you dead. He’ll probably do it personally, too.”

“I also came across him when he’d fallen off his horse. Potential concussion. I tossed him some ointment and some bandages,” you recalled, trying to gauge whether he had that sharp, minty chaparral scent about him. “Which I don’t think he used.”

He exhaled, and you could tell he was slowly losing the patience he’d had previously. “...Why?”

“I… felt bad for his horse?” you trailed off, squinting one eye in a sheepish wince. 

He watched you, speechless. 

You scratched your ear, feeling self-conscious. 

“You—” he paused, and his expression was something you hadn’t seen on his face before, not so clearly. Pure, unadulterated exasperation, mixed with one part annoyance. “You’re a fuckin’ idiot.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t my proudest moment,” you snarked, tipping your head back to feel the breeze better. 

“Have you even got any?” he shot back, and his hand reached out to flick your forehead. It stung, sharp and brutal and betraying the raw strength in his arms. You glanced back down and glared, rubbing your prickling forehead.

“What the hell was that for?” you seethed. 

“I’m jogging your memory. In case you don’t remember, your goal is making it out of this race unscathed, and you’re actively impeding yourself by making an enemy of someone so ruthless,” he retorted. 

You were silent, unable to come up with any sort of rebuttal. 

[He got your ass.]

The quiet dragged out, almost peaceful if you forgot about the chaos of tomorrow. 

“But that was kinda funny,” he added thoughtfully.

“Yeah, it was,” you replied immediately, and his lip trembling in an attempt to stifle his laughter wrenched a snort out of your throat, then a full blown cackle. He cracked up too: his own laughter being significantly more quiet than your obnoxious gasps. 

And it was quiet once more.

“You’re still an idiot.”

. 　⁺ ✦

(“Yo, coach,” you greet as you walk into the small gym, inhaling the scent of chalk and sweat and salt.)

(“Have some more respect for your coach,” the man scowls, flicking your forehead. “Stand up straight when you greet me.”)

(There’s no actual bite to his words, and you catch his stony face cracking into a faint smile, just a little.)

(It feels like a good day. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and your face is warm with anticipation. Will you see her today, too? You don’t notice the hateful gaze of another student as they glare at you—too busy changing in the locker room, carefully tying your hand wraps like she showed you.)

(“You know what you did,” he accuses, and at first you don’t realise he’s talking to you. You hum in vague acknowledgement, and it’s not good enough. Your head slams against a metal locker as he pushes you against it.)

(“What the hell, man?” you gasp, attempting to catch your breath. You feel like you’re about to puke, brain spinning from the contusion.)

(“Lorelei’s gone because of you!” he grits out, and his tight grip around your collar is beginning to crush your throat.)

(“What?” you mumble, reeling from the accusation.)

(“She said her parents are pulling her out of classes here because your ma’s a criminal,” he sneers, and you stare and stare and stare.) 

(“That’s— that’s not true,” you fumble, shaking your head vehemently. There’s a crowd forming—other students, people you were laughing with just yesterday—but they’re not on your side right now. No one here is. “She’s not!”)

(She’s not a criminal. What the hell do any of these idiots know about your mother?)

(“You refuse to follow any of the rules here, fighting dirty, and we’re meant to believe you don’t share the blood of a criminal?” someone in the mass of people cries out, and their words are at the forefront of jeering.)

(“I don’t know them because I’m still new!” you call out hoarsely, but your voice cracks and is drowned out by the roaring din of the jury. You have been deemed guilty.)

(You can feel your brain turn cloudy from the lack of oxygen, and with it, a faint light appears as the harsh overhead lights glint off the fist of the boy gearing up to punch you. With the last ounces of your strength, you become dead weight: forcing his punch askew. It’s enough. Time seems to slow as you duck beneath his arm that’s loosened its grip on your collar, and with a resounding crack, his hand mauls itself into the locker.)

(You don’t think. Rather, your brain is moving a million miles a minute with every single instinct you have as you slam his teetering body into the locker, face first. There’s another crack, and you’re running: not even bothering to take off your tapes or pick up the bag that you left behind.)

(There are yells behind you, but you don’t look back. You can’t.)

(The phone call comes not a full hour later. You stand in the hallway of the apartment with the landline: held as though it were an imminently detonating bomb.)

(Two stitches. A broken nose, and a boxer’s fracture in his right hand. Your coach lists off the damage, but he doesn’t sound angry. He sounds tired as he clicks through the grainy footage someone had recorded: each angle of your absolution documented. The kid’s parents wanted to press charges, but Coach had shut it down quick.)

(You don’t speak, chewing the hangnail on your thumb. One of the wraps lies discarded on the floor in front of your front door—the other, somewhere in the dirty streets for rats to gnaw on.)

(He’s talked to a contact of his in another gym, if you wanted to continue taking lessons. You think of Lorelei and her huckleberry-red boxing gloves, you think of the two weeks you spent trying to make friends, and you feel sick.)

(No thank you, you say, and the call ends there. You slide down the wall next to the small foyer table, and for the first time in a long time, you let yourself cry, swaddling yourself in one of her stupidly expensive coats.)

“What– what the hell is this? He’s a Stand user– he– he transformed into this thing,” Johnny yelled out fearfully, and Zeppeli turned from where he stood in the doorway. 

“Johnny,” you whispered frantically. “Shut the fuck up.”

Though the blond was the one who had made the biggest racket, the raptor’s head had swivelled around to survey you and Zeppeli. If – if – he was truly without his usual brain, then surely he’d treat you and Zeppeli the same? Uniform discrete probability. A fifty-fifty chance, in layman’s terms, of getting attacked. You sweated nervously as he seemed to reach a conclusion. 

“Mercury,” Zeppeli murmured, slowly inching away from you. “Is it just me, or is that thing looking right at you?”

The Diego-saur took a long inhale of the air: sampling the profile, experimenting with the various olfactory flavours of the wind. 

You swallowed. 

His eyes honed in right on you. Fuck what Johnny said about poor eyesight. 

You resigned yourself to your fate. 

“Wow,” Zeppeli noted sardonically. “Even now, he really fucking hates you.”

How were you supposed to know your attempt to throw off any people with ties to Valentine would lead to this? 

“You think I don’t know that?” you hissed back. “Yo, take Johnny, warn the villagers, and get to a less populated area. He’s going to focus on me until I’m dead, mauled and mutilated, so get the fuck out of here.”

It wasn’t a noble sacrifice. You had no chance with your bare fists – that skin was stretched taut over steel sinew and muscles, it was virtually impossible to constrict or use your fists against. You weren’t sure a gun would be of much use either; the lead would probably be more like bee-stings than anything. 

Wrestling with that would be like tussling with a small truck. 

Zeppeli lingered a few feet away from you. 

“Go,” you snapped. 

“What, and wait for our turn to be attacked?” he snarked back. “Don’t let your pride cloud your rationale, dottor.”

You didn’t even have a chance to reply. Diego’s tail whipped round – as fast as the crackling plasma you’d seen in the lab – and struck you square in the torso. Blood pooled in your mouth from the impact– 

And you were fucking weightless: floating through time and space just like your encounter with the Void. 

A corporeal form, scratching and tearing past the fabric of this miserable place. Rocks and branches caught at your clothing and skin: a haunting prelude to your demise. You could distinctly feel each second pass by in your palms. 

Finally, your body slammed into the side of a stone cliff just past the courtyard. 

It hurts. 

You fought to keep conscious. 

It hurts so much. 

Copper bled past your lips, and the acrid stench of sweat dripped down your face. With blurred vision, you desperately slammed down on that small red button – waiting, waiting. It was too late to worry about revealing your cards to Diego; he didn’t seem fully lucid, and you were eighty percent certain you had at least two internal ruptures from that collision. 

The rolling of the slot machine was taking far too long. 

You staggered to your feet, clawing your mauled fingers against the stone cliffs while your pulse thrummed everywhere except for your heart. God, you were pathetic. 

[Second slot activated: Words Like Violence. Countdown has begun.]

Crimson seeped past the colourful tapes on your fingers, then receded slowly – viscously – as though honey was dripping in reverse. You swore just as colourfully; this ability was useless when it most counted. 

This was a valuable experiment for looking at what a ‘prime fighting state’ entailed, but what good was that? When you could still feel each burning sensation, each throbbing agony flash in distinct points across your body – what use was fucking data? 

“Fuck,” you swore loudly with each painful step back to the small house. Though the pain hadn’t receded, you could ignore it somewhat with the IV drip of adrenaline right into your bloodstream through the ability. 

Hey, isn’t this really dangerous?

This wasn’t good. Your thoughts were beginning to get loopy as Words Like Violence affected you: so clear yet so detached at the same time. 

You brushed past the dead bear as though it was a mere ant pulverised against the concrete. 

“Mercury– about damn time you showed up again,” Zeppeli grinned mirthlessly. Johnny had somehow teleported to the window – evident scrapes on his face – while Zeppeli stood by the door with one of his steel spheres missing. Neither looked as banged up as you felt, and you supposed that was for the better. 

“None of our attacks are fast enough nor powerful enough to dent him– wow, you look like shit,” he commented blithely. The man narrowly dodged a lightning-quick swipe from Diego’s tail, before he backed out further into the courtyard. Slowly. 

“No sudden movements,” he breathed. “Just like that.” 

It seemed like the raptor was sensitive to kinetics. That sonic speed had all but dissipated – as Zeppeli moved one step back, he crept one step forward. That was, of course, until he tasted you on the air once more, and his eyes swivelled back onto you. 

“Yeah, thanks for your advice,” you bit out acerbically. “Go screw yourself.”

“Is it my fault he fucking hates you?” Zeppeli ground his teeth. 

“I wasn’t talking to you at the end there,” you lied. 

“Sure,” he deadpanned, but you ignored him.

Was this how adrenaline junkies felt? Nothing but your racing heartbeat and crazed grin made itself known to the world. Notice me, it yelled to the abyss. And then the abyss yelled back – filled with a rush in your blood and a faint awareness of this space. 

[Don’t go overboard.]

You ignored the fading rationality. 

[I mean it. Seriously.]

Pain was left inside the pages as the story came to life. You rocked back and forth on your feet, keeping eye contact with the Diego-saur. 

Thump, thump. Each heavy aberration left you reeling in a dazed high, and your eyes unfocused slightly. 

“Hey, hey, I don’t like that look in your eyes,” Zeppeli muttered under his breath. You ignored him too. Like crosshairs, both you and Diego were finely attuned to the sight of the other. He slowly stalked towards you, while you led him backwards into open space. Just you, him and the Rockies. 

You coaxed him, just like you would a skittish bronco. Though, instead of a halter, your hands were half unwrapping the tapes around your knuckles. 

Just like all those nights ago, you’d play him like the cheap plastic yo-yo he was. 

“God he’s an idiot.” Faintly, you could hear Zeppeli talking to Johnny. “He’s going to get himself killed.”

“Stop him, then! Gyro, I know Dio–”

You tuned them out, until the only frequency you could hear was your breathing and the rasp of talon against stone. 

“–bad idea–”

(“He really fucking hates you, doesn’t he?”)

(“I hate you, so much.”)

Abhorrence. Loathing. Hatred. It was not a novel feeling. 

Come hither, your fingers crooked – beckoning. And like the cheap plastic yo-yo he was, Diego lunged. 

You might’ve heard a shout in the background. You couldn’t be sure. You couldn’t be sure of anything right now, not when you were nanoseconds away from impact. 

This time – this time – you were prepared. Somewhat. The world had paused for a few fateful moments as the raptor crashed into you, and your body went into overdrive. 

Between your hands, the tape took the form of makeshift reins as you twisted your arms and the conjured fabric around his scaly neck – once, twice. You didn’t know how successful the constriction would be, but it was your only bet at surviving this. 

Blood spewed out your mouth as you hauled yourself onto his back using the brief window of leverage you gave yourself. He kept twisting – phasing in and out of this plane as though he were nothing but a virtual hallucination – but somehow, somehow, you managed to wrap your legs tight around his long neck and hang on to your tapes for dear life. 

Was this a bad idea?

Definitely, as Zeppeli had narrated so astutely earlier. 

But what choice did you have?

He was a disgustingly tough bastard. Even with the phantasmal conjured tapes that somehow weren’t tearing apart, you couldn’t sense any changes in his breathing that would indicate asphyxiation. In fact, his wild bucking just indicated more agitation, more energy as he put everything he had into getting you off his back.

Your head rang. Your vision was just slightly swaying – Words Like Violence couldn’t do much about this sort of damage, not without massively eating into your stamina. 

Its efficiency had all been poured into maintaining a stable ‘fighting state’, after all, not into healing all your wounds and scrapes. 

“Just– go– unconscious already–” you grunted, each exhale being punctuated by you pulling him into a stranglehold. You would’ve shot him in his gaping maw had he not attacked you like this; nothing about this situation was going your way, not even a tiny bit. Kinetic logic be damned – you were moving even slower than Zeppeli, yet his hatred had transcended his damned lizard brain and attacked you regardless! 

You were pissed. Like clockwork, the two of you had seamlessly entered a business partnership with the sole intention of pursuing a more efficient mutual hatred. You understood the overwhelming feeling, you really did. But this– 

Fuck whatever this was. 

Sharp pain blossomed in your ribs as he jolted in his heavy lunging for a moment. When you looked up from the tape slowly indenting cerulean scales, you could see what caused it. 

Two of Johnny’s bullets shot by your nose; three pierced straight through his jaw. Just as you suspected, they barely drew blood. Actually, it made the situation worse – now, his neck was beginning to get slippery, and you were slowly losing your grip. 

It was only when you saw the twisting sphere push into the raptor’s side that you figured out what had actually caused the man beneath you to jolt. 

Accusingly, you looked up, just to be greeted by Zeppeli’s outstretched arm and Johnny’s concentrated face. 

“You guys still haven’t left?” you yelled, too exhausted to lower your voice as you were swung about. It wasn’t like it would make a difference if you kept your mouth shut; the dinosaur was focused on you, and only you in this situation. At the very least, you could tire the creature out. 

“Yeah, you wish.” Johnny’s grin was crazed, borderline feral as he lowered his star-speckled hands minutely. 

“You’re as arrogant as ever,” Zeppeli scoffed. “We need to put some distance between us and him if we want to survive tonight.”

It was a nice sentiment. Us and him. As though you were part of something, much like in your previous life. 

It didn’t last long. 

The barely-conceivable pattern of Diego’s turning and tossing paused. You could feel it in your gut – that imperceptible change in the air as he shifted. Your mouth was dry as you attempted to figure out what his instincts would guide him to next; what other rodeo would he take you on? 

His spines dug uncomfortably into your torso as he began lowering – slow enough that you recognised exactly what he planned to do. Just like the wild broncos you’d seen on Martha’s ranch, he was planning to roll and crush you beneath his three hundred kilogram weight. 

You weighed your options. 

Too late. 

Your mind went blank as he dropped suddenly, and you scrambled. Skin tore, and you bit your tongue hard; the hot, metallic liquid dripped down your gullet, and you fought to keep your head from pounding with agitation and blood. 

“Ow,” you groaned, too out of it to notice you’d been flung off onto the cold stone of the courtyard. No, you had noticed – you’d simply resigned yourself. 

It would be over soon, anyway. 

Just like always, you’d fucked things over for yourself and now you would pay the bitter price for it. 

You could hear each of his steps reverberating through the frigid ground. You closed your eyes. 

Faintly, the yells of Johnny reached you – as though the sound waves had hit the harsh frontier of deep water. 

“–damned overgrown lizard–”

“–don’t make any sudden movements, before you get him killed for real–”

Something heavy and sharp pressed against your collarbone: a talon. You winced – breathing distorted into something churning and ragged. Yet, contrary to your expectations, it didn’t unseam you from shoulder to opposite hip bone; rather, a crushing pressure had locked itself around your ribcage, and you could feel his slow, methodical breathing against your cheeks instead of his jaws tearing into your throat. 

The surprise forced your eyes open; and there you were, staring at the gaping maw of death as it stared directly at you. 

You hadn’t properly noticed before, but the markings on his azure body reminded you of the ugly clothes he wore. If you squinted, you thought you could make out his name – DIO – repeating over and over, etched into his tail. 

His scaly corpus quivered slightly above you as those hate-filled eyes gazed into yours. 

“You gonna kill me?” you slurred deliriously. The adrenaline, slowly but surely, was wearing off, and you couldn’t tell how far along it was until you could use Personal Jesus. 

“God, I hope your silver tongue doesn’t piss him off any more than it already has,” Zeppeli’s whisper was sharp enough that it snuck past the whistling breeze and made itself apparent to you. 

Diego merely scrutinised you – or at least, that’s what it felt like. 

Your breaths came shallow, as you scrutinised him back. Upon closer inspection, those scales were much smaller than you thought; they rippled and shimmered like rich fabric. It was a pity that you only saw them under these circumstances. 

The two of you were locked in an impasse: a staring contest. 

It was funny. 

It really was. 

Blood continued its steady trickle past your lips, and despite it all you continued this childish competition. He couldn’t see the crimson liquid, but you knew for sure he could smell its acrid tang. 

His eyes hardened into slits. 

You braced yourself for an impact that never came. 

“–I can’t watch this shit any longer–”

A can rolled next to your waist: a regular, aluminium can you had stored grain in to cook later. 

You watched, entranced, as it came to a smooth halt upon touching the edge of one of his talons. 

Then, the metal promptly curled outwards – each fringe as beautiful as a blossoming flower – and couscous spewed everywhere. 

Sensational. 

Out of the chaos spiralled a familiar green sphere, careening right into where the raptor’s ribcage would no doubt be. Another spiral joined, just as quickly. 

It had jostled the dinosaur with enough momentum that its foot was no longer pressing into your torso.

“I put the steel ball into the can,” Zeppeli commented in the distance. “How I actually got it in there is a secret.” 

And with that tiny bit of leeway – and the pitiful scraps of adrenaline still coursing through your veins, electric – you wriggled free from your prison. The ribbons of your jacket bled sanguine with you; you seriously needed to fix the tattered garment, you noted absentmindedly. 

Before you could regain your bearings, a firm, calloused palm closed around your wrist and pulled you into the stone house. 

“Do you flirt with fucking everyone who tries to kill you?” Zeppeli asked you incredulously, all while trying to hurriedly lock and barricade the door. He let you go, and you could only reel in revulsion from his words. “Is that how you piss them off to the point where they decide point-blank to murder you?”

“What?” you snapped in disgust.

“What?” he retorted back icily. “Do you never think about the circumstances you’re in? If I hadn’t thrown my spheres, would you have kept gazing at him while he tore your heart out?”

Probably. 

You stayed silent. 

“Wow,” he scoffed. “Real resolute guy we’ve got over here, already preparing to die while we do his dirty work.”

“Hey,” Johnny interjected – the mediator. “We can discuss this later. Let’s get out the back first.”

“Look,” he snapped, holding up your limp wrist – blood was visibly soaking through your gloves and dripping down your wrists. With his other hand, he briefly pinched the cloth of your veil – bloodied as well – before finally jabbing his finger into your sternum, where wounds littered you all over: gouges, scrapes and the beginnings of angry swelling. He said nothing about the internal injuries, but you knew he had guessed as much from the way he’d avoided pressing against them. All culminated in his fuming, pressed green lips and stony face. “You think these can be as easily healed as hooks in skin?”

“Yes.” Your voice was tired. Resigned. 

“So why aren’t you healing yourself?” His hand dug further into your bruised wrist, but you refused to wince. 

“I’ll get to it.” You yanked your arm out of his grasp. 

It’s cold. 

You worried at your lips with your teeth, glad he couldn’t see the motions beneath your veil.

If you categorically looked at your body, you had several plum-sized bruises on your legs and at least a sprained left ankle. Moving upwards, your tailbone definitely had gotten injured, while both your collarbone and your upper right ribs had been cracked slightly. That didn’t account for the spinal bruising you’d gotten whilst getting slammed into rock, nor did it account for the various ravines in your skin that spewed blood.

“So get to it,” he crossed his arms. “Unless you can’t, for whatever reason – and you went there knowing you couldn’t heal yourself at that moment?”

You looked away at the door. Why is it any of your business if I’m hurt? You weren’t going to die. Until your goal was reached, you’d get back up again, over and over, until you’d achieved it. 

“I won’t die,” you replied, but he didn’t budge. 

“Which is it? Can you heal yourself currently, or are you purposefully bleeding out?” 

“Whatever I get is based on luck,” you shouldered past him. “You think I enjoy this?”

“What?” he called after you, syllables jagged and sharp with anger. “You just gamble with your life?”

You locked eyes with him, just as the slow, forceful thudding against the wooden door began. 

“What choice do I have?”

The side entrance jostled open, and just around the corner was that poor, mauled bear – in another universe, it was you there bleeding out with flies covering your cadaver. 

“Tell me, Zeppeli,” you repeated one last time. “What choice do I have?”

Life was a gamble. It was frustrating that he couldn’t grasp that. Every day, each mundane action could lead to one’s death. For a race like this, the chances rose exponentially with each step closer to the finish line. What the hell does he expect?

“Hide against that bear.” Your voice was quiet – out of exhaustion rather than caution. Perhaps that was why Zeppeli didn’t deign to reply. “I’ll bait him to think I escaped round that cliff.”

You peeled off the soaked-red undershirt and wrapped it around the dirty ethanol metal flask you’d carried since earlier. The chemical–sweat combination, while not the prettiest, smelled like you, while the bloody scent on your body had the more generic tang of just injury. 

It was a close call. 

You’d thrown the scent grenade far outwards, getting pulled down into Johnny just as Diego had turned the corner of the small house. He was warm, so unlike your frigid palms that you allowed yourself just the briefest of respites wedged against him. 

[First slot activated: Personal Jesus. Countdown has begun.]

The pain distracted you from the spattered viscera by your face. 

Zeppeli was right, in a very minute way. It was taking far too long for your internal wounds to heal. 

But in that time, you were still and silent as a corpse as Diego tasted the air. This time, you were covered with such a thick layer of grimy scents – dead bear, fur, Johnny and Zeppeli, coagulated blood, dirt, stone – that he turned his great head from the pile of bodies by the stone house and in the direction of the cliffs. 

You didn’t dare breathe. You didn’t dare blink. 

And when he left in the direction of your infusion, only then did you exhale. 

“What the hell is he, anyway?” Johnny’s voice ghosted into the air, so lightly you thought you’d imagined it. “Is it a Stand?”

“It’s a dinosaur, Johnny – his body’s been fused with a dinosaur’s ability,” Zeppeli whispered back, keeping his eyes on the edge of that cliff in case the raptor decided to resurface. 

“‘Dino-sore?’ What’s a dino-sore?” 

You kept your mouth tactfully shut. Though, watching his curiosity despite this situation was endearing, in a life-threatening sort of way. 

“They’re huge creatures, bigger than elephants – in the late 1830s, the scholar Owen coined the term and started calling them that.”

“Well, this one’s smaller than an elephant,” Johnny remarked. 

“Shut up,” Zeppeli bit back. “Anyways, they existed before mankind was born to the Earth.”

He then paused, looking at you briefly. The words that had left both of you lingered heavy and dark in the air. “Have any secret knowledge on this topic too?”

A few heartbeats passed without anyone speaking. 

“He’s fused with a Cretaceous period Utahraptor ostrommaysorum,” you finally conceded with a drawn-out sigh. “They’re named after Utah, the state – and these mountains cross over state lines, so no wonder fossils of it could be found here.”

You pressed your lips together, holding back a wince as you felt your bones weld together. 

“You can’t outrun it. It’s carnivorous, and it’s the most dangerous of the raptors,” you choked out, digging your nails into your palm as your organs shifted in their positions and your spine realigned itself. “I didn’t hold interest in palaeontology though, so my knowledge is limited to what I picked up from my mentor.”

“I was kidding when I asked, but fuck you’ve got a freakish arsenal,” Zeppeli muttered, tapping his head with a finger. It wasn’t an apology. Far from it. He eyed you cynically, but commented no more. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re making it all up, but you’ve always got such a serious frown on when you do.”

I wonder why I’m frowning when I talk to you.

An uneasy truce lingered. 

“Well, it’s better than Gyro’s knowledge, anyway,” Johnny remarked acerbically. 

“You little–” Zeppeli sighed, then seemingly noticed something with a small ‘hm?’ once you’d sat up and gotten off the disgusting hideout. It was a wonder you hadn’t thrown up. 

“Johnny – your arm!”

Movere crūs. 

The night sky was beckoning. 

The corpse is near. 

. 　⁺ ✦ 

You weren’t surprised when the dead bear turned out to be alive and secretly a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Really. Really. When it rumbled to life behind you and you heard the startled yelps of the duo still on the lifeless thing, you accepted it with the indifference that yes, something like this would inevitably happen as long as you stuck by them. 

You were only slightly surprised when Zeppeli pulled his wits together to match the pinpricks of light inside the words of Johnny’s arm to the stars in the night sky above. Seven stars – seven letters in movere – formed the Big Dipper constellation that arced low into the ground; the singular, pearly-bright North Star nestled into the curve of the ‘c’ in crūs. 

“The location where the Big Dipper dips into the ground – that’s where it’s pointing at! Combine the constellations with the mountain and the ground. The shape and placement are the very same – the crūs is at the North Star – while the corpse is on the hill where the Big Dipper points.” 

At his words, both you and Johnny had glanced at each other, then at him. 

“Wow,” you finally got out. 

“So you can use your brain,” Johnny had added. 

“Watch it,” he had snapped back indignantly. “Without me the two of you would’ve been screwed twice over. You especially, dottor.”

You weren’t surprised when Zeppeli managed to flatten Johnny and you with one of his spheres to escape the aforementioned Tyrannosaurus Rex. Really. 

Look. That one was a lie. You were mildly surprised when his body compressed into a neat sheet and slotted through the iron bars, and even more so when yours did the same. 

You were more taken aback, if anything, by the sudden reappearance of the dinosaur you three had tried so hard to avoid. 

He lunged at you, just as you entered the long, cramped stone tunnel. 

Before you could even blink, Zeppeli pulled your wrist and dragged you further inwards where Diego couldn’t reach. You couldn’t even wince from your still-sore body, not when he met your eyes in a challenge: I dare you to say it hurts. 

“That’s a third time,” he whispered, and let go just as promptly, as though he’d been seared by your bruises. 

“What the fuck is this?” Johnny muttered incoherently. “Dio’s ability – he killed that bear – it became a fucking dinosaur!”

“Who knows?” Zeppeli scoffed back. “Hurry and go deeper.”

It was cramped. It was dusty. That little waterway smelled like stale air, but it wasn’t long until your ramshackle trio saw the midnight canvas of the sky. Well, not long until your trio and a small band of tiny raptors saw the midnight canvas of the sky.

“That rocky hill at the Big Dipper is on the cliff across the canyon – the corpse should be somewhere in the dent of the peak, only a two-three hundred metre climb! We’ll get down this cliff and up the canyon in the dark,” Zeppeli muttered his plan slowly to the two of you as you’d dragged yourself through the tiny space.  

In these circumstances, it was the most solid plan out of the many you’d run through and discarded.

“Right,” Johnny mumbled back. “We’ll get the corpse from the mountain and get out of here.”

He paused, and you could feel him turn around in the dark to stare at Zeppeli. “But… Gyro. What about our horses? They’ll be eaten by Dio!”

“He wouldn’t do that.” As much as you wanted to refute Zeppeli’s words, you unfortunately couldn’t find fault in his words. If you, who was only an impromptu jockey for the past three or so months, couldn’t bring yourself to leave an unknown horse without a rider for too long (even if that rider was the infamous Diego Brando), then he who had ridden for the past decade or so definitely wouldn’t be able to harm a horse. 

“Dio’s goal is to get your ‘left hand’, and our lives–” here he glanced at you, as if to remind you of your encounter with the crazed raptor. Because I needed the reminder. “–and a guy like him who’s made his life as a jockey wouldn’t kill a horse.”

If he did, then he truly was beyond redemption. 

“Valkyrie will come find us in the morning.”

“I think Group Four will come looking with her, then,” you murmured, half to yourself. “She’s stubborn to a fault.”

“She’s just like her rider, then,” Zeppeli remarked under his breath, and you elected to ignore it. 

“I sure hope they find us.” Johnny, ever the cynical ray of light he was, had either chosen to ignore the other man or he hadn’t heard anything. Not like you had. 

You heard a rustle behind you, and your hand was immediately on your holster. Quickly, with slightly shaking hands, you filled the gun with ammunition and cocked the hammer, waiting. 

Neurons were awash with paranoia – after getting caught off guard once already, you were keen to avoid any other surprises. 

“You hear that, right— woah, what the hell?” Zeppeli cursed, glancing behind him as well. “There’s a bunch of smaller ones right behind us?!”

You could barely see them in the faint moonlight, but you could make out a dozen or so little raptors scurrying along the waterway like rats. 

Maybe they are, you realised, casting your mind back to the bear, then regarding their size – about a forearm’s arm’s length or so. 

That didn’t bode well. 

What were the conditions for turning things into dinosaurs?

Were people included in the roster?

“Why are you hesitating?” Zeppeli questioned. “They’re nothing but creature-turned-raptors.”

“I’m thinking,” you bit at your cheek. “He might be able to pinpoint a severed connection to him, or he might hear the shots of a gun which he knows I bought.”

And…

“And, we’ve no way of truly verifying if they’re creature or human.”

Your morbid deduction put an even further damper on the mood. 

Not that there was much of one to begin with. 

“But these should be alright. They’re grey, and much too small to be humans,” you finally added. 

Johnny fired his own shots first at your words, but the little raptors evaded his clumsy bullets. He’s inexperienced. “They’ve got the same dynamic vision–” his blue lips parted in surprise. “–and my ‘Tusk’ isn’t hitting them at all!”

[Tusk is one interesting name for a Stand.]

So’s Depeche Mode, you noted. 

Your humour didn’t last long. 

The ammoniacal smell of urine filled the musty air, and you lost any sympathy you had for the rats. 

Johnny missed them due to his lack of training. You wouldn’t make the same mistake. Using the flash of the shots, you pinpointed them scurrying – leaping and twisting through the cramped space with a speed reminiscent of comets. 

Breathe. 

No bullets were wasted as you nailed each rat-dinosaur clean through. Though they weren’t bullseyes like you’d hoped, they were more than fatal. 

You exhaled. 

“Maybe you should teach Johnny marksmanship as well,” Zeppeli suggested dryly. 

You gave him a withering glance. 

“There’s more of them.” His face suddenly changed into one of revulsion. “I think they’re tracking the scent of the piss.”

Lovely, you grimaced. 

“We need to get the hell out of this gutter,” he continued, furtively glancing behind him before tossing his spinning sphere to crush around four more of those rat-dinosaurs. “Cling onto the rocks in the shadows and be as still as you can – we need to finish them off before climbing down the canyon!”

You were at the rear of the group, so of course you hadn’t noticed any problems at the lip of the cave. 

Johnny had paused in his movements, so much so that the sudden stillness of Zeppeli wedged in between you caught you off guard. 

“No– we can’t go.” You could hear his grimace in those hesitant words. “Down that cliff… there’s no way we can cross the canyon and get to the hill…”

You pressed onwards. 

There, below the jagged ledge protruding off the cliff, were significantly larger dinosaurs that had started their slow ascent. 

You recognised the brightly dyed fabric that hung off their reptilian bodies. 

That crimson cape, those scarlet ribbons – even that jaunty cap you’d spotted on that one kid who had attended your demonstration. 

It was a grim realisation. 

Your conjecture had once more been proven correct. 

“We’re surrounded,” Zeppeli cursed under his breath. “The villagers. They’ve already been turned into dinosaurs.”

A third party had not yet shown itself. 

This was the worst time for your other conjecture to be proven wrong. 

“They’ve been turned using his ability,” Johnny sweated. “It turned everything – human and animal – into dinosaurs under his rule.”

Gone was the anonymous antagonist who’d shown up with clear motives to take the corpse and hinder competitors. No, in their place was someone who’d thrown a wrench into your plans: Diego. 

Was he fully in control of himself? Had he abandoned his precious dignity to subject himself to the instinctual urges of a dinosaur?

Your thoughts were in a disarray. 

Your breathing came ragged. 

“If Diego’s purpose is to side all the villagers with himself… and take my left arm,” Johnny began speculating. Don’t say it. Don’t. “The ‘infection’ will spread, even through a scratch caused by Dio’s claws – that’s the way it spreads.”

The two looked at you. 

You looked back. 

There was a tightness in your chest that didn’t stem from just panic. 

. 　⁺ ✦ 

See, you knew this would happen. From the marrow of your bones to the uppermost dermis that covered your flesh, you knew sticking with the Troublesome Two would bring you just that: trouble. 

It wasn’t enough that the three of you had thrown yourselves off that ledge and hit side of the cliff on the other side; yes, Zeppeli had wrung a tree into a makeshift rope using his steel balls, and no, you weren’t hallucinating the droves of dinosaurs that plummeted after you. 

It wasn’t enough that you’d accumulated more injuries that you couldn’t even heal. 

It wasn’t enough when Depeche Mode was instead focusing all its efforts on the driving back of the slow cracks that were beginning to emerge on your skin. 

No, what finally pushed your mind into teetering the fine line between disbelief and madness was the reappearance of the Devil’s Palm. 

If you looked at the positives, there was only one – the fact that only you and Johnny had gotten hit by Diego, and both his corpse arm and Depeche Mode were able to stave off the infection. Temporarily, that was. 

If you looked at the negatives, they were experiencing exponential growth. 

There, shrouded by the shadows of the night and lit only by the fire of the Big Dipper – resplendent against the midnight tapestry – were those curling, crooked fingers. Those digits, as per usual, beckoned unfortunate travellers to their fates – just like what happened to you all those moons ago.  

“Fuck,” you breathed in despair. “I’m never travelling with you two ever again.”

You meant every word. Fervently. Most ardently. If you could pack any more meaning into each insufficient syllable, you would have done so. 

And though it likely took every ounce of self-restraint from Zeppeli to not let out a melodramatic monologue, he didn’t – or rather couldn’t – refute your words at all. You were right, as you oft were. 

Standing there was rather surreal. In the place where it all started – again and again and finally again. Rather than orange sand, rather than yellow sand, it was grey; grey all over, just like your mood. 

And amidst the swirling wind, there it was. 

It was a dirty-silver humanoid, set with two discs over its ears like cymbals. Its body curved and twisted into itself – not unlike the modern art exhibitions you’d occasionally witnessed being installed before the Institute. Though its exterior looked hardy, the Stand (for it could be nothing else) cushioned something ever so tenderly in its calloused palms. 

No. It wasn’t dirty-silver, and it didn’t have a tough shell. That was the sand – covering and shaping the energy cloud in its midst into something that could be perceived. 

“There’s something in the part shaped like a hand!” Johnny exclaimed. 

Two eyes. 

Browned with age, they stared unblinking at the sky: so utterly glazed over and dull that you couldn’t help but draw comparison to all those previous pairs you’d witnessed in the future. 

“Get them,” Zeppeli insisted. 

You wished it was that simple, you really did. 

With your skin slowly crackling over your joints, and your nails extending painfully in your gloves, you watched. The twists of fate were never so unburdened – rather, they knotted and burred at every opportunity they got. 

And this opportunity they took. 

“Dio–” 

He emerged like a flash flood; you, as a human against a force of nature, could hardly respond with your sluggish reflexes as he pounced on the grey Stand. What were you to even do? The absurdity of it all made you laugh. Here you three were, steps away from acquiring another corpse part, when suddenly a third party who absolutely hated you became involved in the very thing you were trying to not get him involved in. Really, was there anyone with more terrible luck than you?

His clawed hands cradled the eyes as though they were a most precious commodity, to be treasured and adored and worshipped, as though they contained all the pulchritude in this world.

It was terribly ironic. Something so morbid as a cadaver shouldn’t have been venerated. This body should have been buried and left at peace. 

Your lips twisted downwards in a grimace. 

Even after death, this holy figure remained to suffer. 

Sacrifice, sacrifice, and more sacrifice. 

After your death, what would become of you? Would you be cursed to never rest just like him?

You scoffed. So much for the sanctity of the dead. 

Yet, inexplicably, implausibly, the Stand remnant didn’t appear to care. Rather than act as a guardian – an Anubis guard to the tomb of this saint – it curved itself and slithered to where Diego’s inner ear rested. 

You watched in silence. 

There was nothing you could do. 

“That– thing–” Johnny choked out, clearly still out of it from the sudden seizure of their promised victory. “It’s– whispering… same as with my left arm! The Stand is whispering words to Dio!”

But, more horrifyingly…

“The letters on my arm are disappearing! There’s no more use for these – since that thing is speaking the location of the next ‘part’ to him!” He hurled out that last syllable as though it had personally offended him – so packed with unspoken vitriol you almost recoiled. 

The dinosaur in question began morphing. His hundreds of pounds of steel cord-like muscle rapidly condensed in on themselves; the mass shifted in ways that defied whatever you knew about physics. 

It was his hair that changed first – the yellow spikes protruding grew in number, then became longer and rippled more in the wind. His longer nose flattened, and the stance he’d assumed as a dinosaur – torso bent parallel to the ground on two thick legs – streamlined itself into a y-axis. Though his mouth was unsettlingly wide, and his body was still scaly and blue, he looked much too close to being human once more. 

You grimaced. What you’d tried to prevent – his involvement with the corpse – was slowly spiralling into a situation you could no longer salvage.

Well, that was wrong. As long as he didn’t know how you were connected with the President, you still had an edge. 

Your pulse was increasing at an alarming rate. You prayed he couldn’t hear – though, judging by how engrossed he was with the eyes, it seemed like for once he was preoccupied with something other than attempting to maul you to death. 

But fuck – though it wasn’t the worst-case scenario, it certainly wasn’t the best either. 

Before you could pull out your gun, Johnny had already fired six shots through the humid air; blue streaks of light glowed radiant in the haze.

“I won’t let you have that corpse!” he yelled desperately, with a heaviness that came with a complicated interpersonal relationship. You pitied him, you really did: in a distant sort of way, through the miasma of reptilian instinct that was beginning to poison your body. 

“Tsk, tsk,” you heard from the distance. It carried such familiarity, such clarity despite the wind that instantly you became alert. “Hey, Johnny…”

It was instinct. Your spine snapped to attention: straightened by the particular cadence of a disappointed tone. 

“Yes, you there–” It continued insistently, getting louder and louder. “I’m talking to you, Johnny Joestar. What did you just do? You threw it away, didn’t you?”

The smooth, methodical lope of each word shackled your feet to the grey rocks: nose twitching at the heady scent of esters that bloomed within the bloody stench. 

[No way.]

Way. 

“You littered that ‘nail’ of yours on this ground?” 

Silence threaded through the scene, incredulous on both Johnny’s part and your own. 

“What?” he sputtered, propping his body up in the sea of grey. The same thought plagued your own mind, but for reasons vastly different. 

That imperious expression. Thin lips pressed together in contemplation, or derision: you could never really tell. Sleek blond hair, pulled back in a severe bun. And then, your eyes refocused and it was no longer the Dr Ferdinand you knew. 

“Don’t be throwing away those sorts of dirty things. The fact that you carelessly throw away such trash like that ‘nail’—well, it’s proof that you don’t respect this ‘ground’,” he continued, perched on a yellow, mottled beast. “Are you that great? Are you greater than this gracious ‘Earth’?”

Your mouth was still dry with instinct: far too receptive to this tone of scolding, even after months of going without it. However, your eyes hardened at the flimsy logic in his words; were those nails not organic? Were they arguably worse than the fecal matter his legion of dinosaurs left behind? 

A deep frown clouded your face, and you felt the skin around your eyes crack even further. 

Diego leapt from where he stood, spheres proffered obediently in those monstrous claws. He did not glance at you, and you found no more traces of that human hatred within him: only the pure, animalistic instinct of a cowed beast. Submission. 

“You’ve done well, ‘Diego Brando’,” your beloved supervisor’s ancestor remarked coolly, and you felt the shiver of contempt and longing war within your aching body at the tone in which he spoke. “Your plan and decisiveness in jumping across the cliff… I was right in turning you into a dinosaur and making you the leader.”

Fingers wrapped in velvet plucked the eyeballs from Diego’s outstretched hand with no small amount of reverence. Time stilled, and you came to the unfortunate conclusion that this was the stand user you’d be forced to fight. Unless…

Was he working for the president? Or was he a free agent like yourself? Surreptitiously, your hand curled around your gun, mimicking the crooked posture of a fledgling: the half-dinosaur beast that was bound to be under his control soon. Beside you, Zeppeli had had the same thought: hidden in the shadows of a spire well enough that you could mistake the slats on his hat for cracks on his skin. 

Cogs spun in your head, and you could almost hear his own, whirring and spinning with mechanical precision. You were in no state to attack, and Zeppeli was in no state to defend against hordes of prehistoric beasts. 

“Huh? Who the hell is this guy?” Johnny muttered, lips parted in a perpetual gape. 

“I’ll take your left arm, Johnny Joestar,” he continued, words so empty of acknowledgement that it was downright disdainful. “But, let me not forget my manners, even to scum who does not respect the Earth. My name is ‘Doctor Ferdinand’, a geologist and biologist of ancient creatures. I acquired this ability two years ago in Arizona, while searching for the Devil’s Palm.”

The inner flesh of your cheek was scraped raw with how quickly you bit it: hot iron pooling on your tongue. Just like you. Was it fate? 

You swallowed. Would your Dr Ferdinand even remain if you did manage to defeat this lunatic?

“I’ve named this ability ‘Scary Monsters’, transforming Diego Brando into a dinosaur to collect that left arm, and then I traced him. Then—” here, his eyes swept over the crowd of transfigured humans, only pausing briefly—disinterestedly—over your and Zeppeli’s hunched forms. “—he infected the entire village. I wasn’t expecting you three to find the next corpse part… these eyes are for me, naturally.”

A cold, caustic rage trembled beneath your bruised skin. This man was nothing like her. 

“So— you were the stand user— this wasn’t Dio’s ability, it was your rule!” Johnny furiously got out, straining his cracked face to deliver his words. He only received a small, withering smile in response: the kind that your Dr Ferdinand used when she read over a particularly obvious proposal. 

He didn’t even deign to give him a response, electing instead to examine the eyeballs in further detail. 

“What a brilliant corpse,” he murmured. Even from this distance away, you could see his hands shaking as he held them up to the bright moonlight. “‘San Francisco Javier’ the evangelist has not yet rot… but this… this far surpasses that… hard to believe they’re from a nineteen-hundred-year-old corpse…”

He lost himself in the musings, and you repressed the disgust that roiled in your gut as he took on the same mannerisms of your Dr Ferdinand. 

“Nineteen-hundred? What are you talking about? This continent wasn’t discovered then,” Johnny interrupted, and his voice carried a note of caution: the sort employed when talking to those who’d lost their minds, just a little bit. 

“You… you were after these without knowing anything? Not even who this corpse belongs to…” he trailed off, scornfully holding Johnny in his stare. “I may have said something unnecessary there. No matter, you three shall die on this earth.”

Johnny spat a mouthful of blood on the sand, inching forward on his elbows. “What the hell are you talking about? Who are you terrorists, anyway? Geologist—”

Here, his eyes darted to your general direction, and you could feel a sneer on your face at your grouping with this maniac. 

“—that ain’t an ordinary terrorist. Two years—are you government related? Is the terrorist this nation itself?”

The question posed would determine the fate of the man before you. Cold metal pressed against your crushed body as you hid the gun in the tattered jacket half-mangled off your body, poised to shoot. 

“Tsk, tsk. What did you just do, Johnny Joestar? Were you listening, at all? You just spat, didn’t you?” His eyes filled with self-righteous condemnation, looking at Johnny as though he opposed nature himself. “I thought I said to respect the Earth! The world is full of people just like you.” 

“Do you know why the dinosaurs perished when they were prospering on this Earth? It’s because they were idiots who didn’t understand the concept of respect! Anyone who violates the Earth will only penalise themselves! I’m talking about something of scientific significance—that deep causal relationship can’t be understood by their pathetic brains—” he rambled, and Johnny glanced at you. Blood flowed through the cracks on your body.

It had long been ten minutes since Personal Jesus had been activated, and you had not gambled since with fate. Despite the haze slowly taking over your brain, you poignantly understood three things. One, Johnny’s eyes were darting around the surroundings: analysing the situation like you would disassemble a particularly long, gruelling question. Two, Zeppeli’s eyes lodged on you, as though he were goading you to take this madman head-on: scientist-to-scientist. Johnny needed a distraction to properly think, it seemed, and Zeppeli had chosen you to take the diplomatic route first; Ferdinand still hadn’t answered the question of his allegiance yet. You took a deep breath, wincing at the pain, and the roaring in your ears that was canting you lower. Figure that out. 

Three, you’d heard enough. 

“You’re wrong,” you spoke, words measured despite their slurring as your vocal chords adopted a deep rumble. With each step forward, your skin shed in chalky flakes, and the pain receded into something close to a buried ache; you had no other option, much like a trapped bear, to rip out your paw and carry on your slow march to survival. 

“You,” he replied, scanning over you. His mouth opened as though to taste the air, and his teeth shone in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “I’ve seen you through his eyes. A fellow scientist—why would a mind like yours join these fools in their bid for suicide?”

His eyes. That demonstration you gave had been witnessed by an uninvited guest, after all. Perfect. You would command his attention until Johnny was ready. 

“As opposed to working for the government?” you probed, but your question didn’t seem to land as he continued staring at you.

“How could this truth be wrong?” he asked sharply, and you could feel his mania beginning to crest once more. 

“There is no objective truth to science,” you mulled over your words slowly, letting him hang on each word. There was a faint rustle in the sand behind you, but you made no acknowledgement of it as you gestured. His eyes followed your hand, and you swallowed with difficulty. “Science is an iterative method for finding models that are increasingly more accurate. We can only approximate, not find some universal explanation perfectly encompassing everything.”

[Keep going. Keep talking.]

Depeche Mode didn’t transmit what was going on behind you, but you had enough sense to take its warning. Each word, however, felt imprisoned in your constricted throat, slowly becoming more and more garbled. 

“Dinosaurs died due to a catastrophic mass extinction event triggered by an asteroid impact and unfavourable climate conditions,” you continued, and immediately the air turned a few degrees colder. 

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he scoffed. “Outlandish theories? Really?”

Shit. You bit your tongue, brains furiously wracking to figure out when exactly the smoking gun for the theory had been presented. You were at a loss, presenting anachronistic explanations, and your mind was only growing more cloudy by the minute. 

“Even so. How do you define respect?” you asked, desperately digging sharp, elongated talons into your palm to fight off the urge to rip his throat out with your teeth. “While humans defiling the Earth has a reciprocal event, why does organic matter like blood and nails returning back to the soil count as a violation?”

“Honour the Earth like you would your mother!” he gritted out incredulously, sounding incredibly disappointed at your reasoning. “Would you spit on her? Would you shoot at her?” 

“Would you kill on her?” you countered. There was no use in trying to dismantle his analogy, not with the disturbing reverence he held in his voice. “Gouge at her face with dinosaur claws?”

He was silent for a few seconds, and you saw a frown marring his sanctimonious expression. 

“I’m telling you as a peer: if all the parts of this corpse come together, it will become the ‘corpse that is respected by all’. ‘Respect’ is ‘prosperity’. The one who collects all the parts of this ‘corpse’ will receive true power and eternal kingdom!” he instead replied, eyes glazed over with a particular venerance. “It is not disrespectful for the Earth to help me in this.”

“Who collects it?” you pressed, searching for the slightest weakness in his crazed armour. 

He did not answer. 

“What makes you any different from us, then?” you slurred, and he turned the same scornful gaze on you as he did Johnny. 

“I know the significance of the corpse. You fools do not.” And it was laughable, his confidence at being so loud and so, so wrong. You grinned a disgusting dinosaur grin, and its jagged vertices stretched beyond your ragged veil. 

“Your… logic issss… flawed,” you hissed, and you raised your gun: consumed with hatred over seeing him desecrate the image of your Dr Ferdinand. The meter was ticking closer to severance with humanity, and you no longer wanted to stop it. “You… are the true… fool.”

“Dio!” he ordered scathingly, sensing your hesitation to actually pull the trigger. “Collect the left arm and deal with this bastard— huh?”

You kept him in your sights, not daring to look at what he was looking at. The breeze rippled at your injured back, tracing a path of someone once there and now not—

“Left— arm?” Ferdinand sputtered, backing away, and you shot clean through his leg. Each wave of screaming hit your ears with deafening acuity, but it was cut short by his startled yelp as blue clouded your vision. You were just as gobsmacked at the sight of a grey Johnny’s back, leaping through the air: a stone statue with the features of a dinosaur. 

“I let it go—” he gritted. “Was fixin’ to jump with this tail—before my heart was totally controlled!”

The heavy blue appendage stuck past Ferdinand and Diego, lashing out in a wide arc, and you lunged out of the area of attack. 

“Reverse the dinosaur infection with these!” Johnny tossed two objects at you, and you barely had the wits about you to catch one: diving to grasp the soft organs. The second rolled over the sand several metres away, and you fumbled.

It was a split second decision. What could you even do with the eye? You were already on the brink of death, and when you met Zeppeli’s eyes, it was a no-brainer. 

With a reserve of strength you didn’t know you still possessed, you cupped the eye like you would a baseball, and lobbed it in his direction, hitting him square in the chest. 

“You idiot!” Johnny yelled, and when you turned back to him, Diego had him pinned. “Why would you do that?”

“Dio! Finish off both of them, now!” Ferdinand hollered desperately. You panted desperately, aligning your poor sights with his head. You couldn’t miss. He froze. 

“Call… him off.” The three words took extensive effort to force out, and when they finally erupted, they were a garbled mess from a throat that had no business imitating human speech. “I… will… shoot—”

Your vision blurred briefly, before you finally pressed your button. Personal Jesus, you vehemently prayed, but then you sensed the ripples of air distort, and a flash of green crashed into the geologist in front of you. 

The air thickened once more with the explosive stench of iron: your body couldn’t help but react. A pained groan left your lips as you lapped up the scent, but—

[First slot activated: Personal Jesus. Countdown has begun.]

—you hadn’t lost your humanity.

[You’ve lost your mind. Why only now?]

“—I can see amazingly well! I can even see pieces of teeth—”

“—the corpse went inside of your right eye!”

You tuned them out as you fired quickly in succession, feeling your organs shift once more as Depeche Mode began its undoing of the extensive internal damage caused. Big, clumsy hands gripped the gun, and you were exceedingly careful to aim at where your nose pointed at, rather than where your poor eyesight led you. 

“—protect me from them! Encircle and protect me! Don’t forget, your dynamic vision is beyond any creature in the universe!”

One shot through Diego’s shoulder, forcing him back off Johnny. Another shot in the sand, and the legion behind Ferdinand scattered briefly, before enveloping him in their folds. You sagged, lowering your gun as your arms stiffened. You were becoming a statue, mindlessly beginning to obey the order: protect Ferdinand.

[Focus, idiot!]

“It’s as if there’s a camera on the spinning wheel! The corpse must’ve pulled out a deeper ability to my steel balls!” 

Depeche Mode frantically pivoted to reverse the damage the transformation was doing to your psyche; in that instant, the pain almost made you pass out, but you raised your gun once more, only to—

“Where is he?” your words felt muffled, but your throat could finally handle being a person. 

“Shit!” Johnny swore loudly, and your head rang with his volume. 

And they swarmed, rushing with garbled voices. 

“How dare you, Gyro Zeppeli?”

“Johnny Joestar, how dare you?”

“You buffoon, I thought you were better than this!”

“Did he turn into a dinosaur, too?” Johnny asked frantically, head swivelling: watching the horde circle and having no other option but to do so. You pointed the pistol this way and that, feeling a great deal of trepidation. Two bullets, with low effectiveness unless you aimed precisely for soft vitals. 

“I don’t think so. If he could’ve, he would’ve already!” Zeppeli shot back, and with your blurry vision, you could vaguely make out the sheen of gold surrounding his right eye. 

“He’s the commanding head—he has to keep his wits about him to do so,” you interjected, and your tongue was leaden in your mouth. “He’s hiding somewhere.”

“Stronzo,” Zeppeli swore, and his arm created an arc as he lobbed a green sphere into the ground. Your skull vibrated from the impact, and not a second had passed before he murmured a soft I see that you wouldn’t have heard had your body not been attuned to a dinosaur’s capacity for hearing. 

What the hell does he see?

[Echolocation?]

“There!” he yelled, and you and Johnny fired in tandem at the gaping maw of the creature—one shot through his shoulder, and a plethora of nails peppering his face. 

His body was flung out by the force, hurtling and tumbling into the sand, and you felt neither pity nor dread as you watched him, but rather relief at the sudden absence of his legion: as red clothed villagers began to take shape beneath your swimming gaze, lying in peaceful sleep beneath the sky. 

You lowered your gun. 

One shot left. 

“Well, well,” Zeppeli mocked. “Looks like your dinosaur ability is all out of fuel.”

Ferdinand let out a strangled moan, and you watched the rivers of blood wash away his sins. 

“Who sent you?” You limped forward, intending to get answers, but you were rigidly halted by the rough hand yanking you back. 

“No use. He’s a babbling idiot. Kill him, quick,” Zeppeli muttered, and you reeled back, horrified. “You were ready to do it a few minutes ago. What changed?” 

“I can get answers after heal—”

“Have you lost your wits, you crazed bastard?” His raised voice in your ear caused your head to ring, and your eyes dazedly shook between staring at the gun and the man gurgling at your feet. “You’ve got severe internal injuries and this man is bleeding out! You would grant a slow death to him and yourself to appease your own guilt, rather than give him the quick mercy of a shot to the head, after he tried to kill us all?”

His body curved around you, right arm flush against your own. His palm rested steadily around the back of your hand, uncomfortably pressing your trigger finger. You swallowed heavily. 

“You bought the gun,” he murmured it this time, and you could feel that eye of his scanning you: the sweat and grime and blood caked on your face and veil, the tremble of your shoulders, and perhaps even the thoughts racing beneath your skull. “Use it.”

“No— I—” You were interrupted by the sharp scrabbling of claws against rock, and you looked up to see three cougars prowling towards the bloodied Ferdinand, who could only scrabble for purchase in the blood-slicked sand to get away. 

“Fanculo,” he swore, and scoffed derisively. “Close your eyes.”

“Zeppeli, what the hell are you—” There was a low warning in your voice, and you couldn’t help but desperately shut your eyes as he pressed down on your finger.

The trigger was squeezed. 

Executioner.

It was not your fault. 

No.

You squeezed the trigger. 

It was your fault. 

Executioner. 

The low growl of the cats and the sound of something heavy being dragged away were muffled by the death knell in your ears. 

Executioner.

“He’s gone,” Zeppeli commented brusquely, and his sudden departure from your side invited the boreal chill to crash in surges against your body. “Start thinking hard and fast about whether you actually want to survive this race or not. I won’t be there to hold your hand for each shot.”

Death left its fingers on your body: a bloody stench that lingered even as Depeche Mode mended your tattered clothes and cleaned you wordlessly. You knelt in the sand, staring at the trail of blood that disappeared before your eyes, staring at the gun that you had purchased for this exact reason, staring at Johnny, who looked at you with something you thought could possibly be pity. 

“We did it,” he murmured to the wind, carrying the gentle croon of his voice to your ears. You did not react. “We got the second corpse part.”

It was a victory. You were hollowed with ecstasy. You felt everything. You felt nothing. 

“Zeppeli,” you croaked hoarsely, finally finding your voice. His eyes found yours instantly: one that acerbic lime-green, the other shining the hue of old parchment. His brows had knit low over them, neither apologetic nor pitying, but rather a heavy thing you couldn’t fathom. “There were two eyes.”

Johnny’s gaze, too, had found you as soon as you spoke, and now he looked up at Zeppeli, too, finding the mismatched pair.

The victory was torn away as fast as it had arrived, and you laughed. It wasn’t funny in the slightest. 

“Where’s the second eye?” 

Fuck. You’d made the fatal error of meeting those lime-green eyes: a rookie mistake that cost you everything in that moment. 

“I could get enough of your company, actually,” you sighed, distraught. “Don’t mind me and just ride faster.”

Zeppeli wore a lopsided grin, jaunting his head in your direction that forced his body into a precarious position on Valkyrie. Secretly, you hoped he’d fall off, but it was nothing but a vain wish. If there really is a god, take me from this situation. Every time you came into proximity with them while riding, something happened. Even a mere brush with their persons signified utter and irreconcilable disaster, as demonstrated by the fateful encounter with Diego Brando. 

You’d done statistics briefly in university, figuring out distributions cumulatively and discretely. The numbers rolled neatly in the narrow confines of your calculator. As it stood, there were currently no test statistics where an encounter with either Johnny or Zeppeli didn’t lead to an unpleasant scenario. None. Not a singular one. 

The null hypothesis had proved right time and time again: staying near them reeks of trouble. 

“But that would suggest we’re on bad terms – don’t you think so too, Johnny?” 

The aforementioned jockey grunted his assent, looking back at you briefly to smile with those pretty blue lips. 

“You and I are on bad terms. Every time I’m near you, a disaster occurs,” you deadpanned. Over your veil, your scowl was exceedingly prominent. 

“Ah-ah,” he tutted, slowing Valkyrie down a pace until you could clearly hear him against the wind. “Have you considered that your presence is bringing us disaster?”

For a minute, you actually considered his words. You cast your mind back, then your scowl deepened even further at his blatantly wrong argument. 

“Proven false by contradiction.” You rattled off the names of Stroheim, the Boom-Booms, Mrs Robinson, and that peculiar grey man who’d come to claim the bounty on Zeppeli’s head. “I’m not the one with the bounty on my head.”

That didn’t deter his melodrama either. Though his brow furrowed at your (correct) point, and his verdant mouth pressed together into a straight line, you could see his brain working to devise new ways to irritate you. 

“So shouldn’t you be supporting me in these trying times?” 

Faintly, you could feel the muscles surrounding your eyes twitch. 

We’re not friends. “At the expense of my own skin? You’re awfully optimistic.”

“Then, at least help poor Johnny read the map. You’ll do it for Johnny, won’t you?” Zeppeli wheedled, brandishing the rolled up parchment like a dagger. He swiped your arm twice, lazily, before proclaiming his paper victory (“See, you’ve lost – you need to play nice now.”). 

“I wasn’t the one holding it upside-down,” Johnny muttered scathingly, looking as exasperated as you felt. You shot him a look dripping with pity. 

“Ignore his cruel words. But seriously, we’re close to the next part. See that, over there–”

“Fifteen kilometres away is the mountain mentioned,” you interjected boredly, numbed after spending a good hour staring at the map earlier. “There. I helped.”

“See,” he crowed. “I knew you had it in you.”

Then, his brows relaxed and his face became an impassive slate once again. “Like I said, if you want to achieve your goal, then you might as well help out, at least from behind the scenes. You don’t want to reveal your hand, cool, but you can keep an eye out for suspicious movements. We won’t make it to that mountain today, so we’ll stop at whatever town’s nearby.”

What am I, your lackey?

Still, that was a pretty sweet deal. You’d keep your hands clean, while simultaneously coming a bit closer to your goal. With a raised brow, you nodded. “We don’t know each other, by the way.”

“‘Course not.” With newfound vigour, he spurred Valkyrie on to catch up with Johnny. The wind tugged and snarled his cape – it fluttered as though it had a life of its own. 

It only took another minute for the tentative peace to shatter. You’d seen it coming, of course, just not who. Looking back on it, you didn’t know why you ever had the notion that this would be easy. It must’ve been the sugar from the agreement, clouding your judgement beyond recognition.

It started as the restlessness of Group Four. Her pacing grew a touch more erratic, something you wouldn’t have noticed as a novice rider but certainly did now. You’d been through enough life-and-death situations with the mare that you could read her like a book. 

“Something’s wrong – you feel it too, girl?” You mumbled softly. When Zeppeli’s head swerved round to look at you, you knew he felt it too. 

Your eyes said it all – lowered, so incredibly exasperated. This is why I don’t like involving myself with you.

“Look forward. We don’t know each other,” you hissed, preemptively jolting Depeche Mode awake within your consciousness. 

[One rider, one horse, around two-hundred metres away from the bend.]

You furrowed your brows. Continue. 

[It’s strange – the horse’s breathing is normal. But for the jockey, the breathing system is more avian than anything. Luckily, your subconscious – me – actually paid attention when Dr Ferdinand was talking about these things.]

Lucky you, you exhaled. So the jockey’s a goddamn bird?

[Not bird. You remember when we travelled back in time initially?]

Shuddering at the memory, you did your best to suppress the despair that you’d felt at the time. How could you forget? 

That hopeless inertia. That screw-up that shot you first into the Jurassic Age, then to Apollo XI’s takeoff—

Your jaw went slack. Armstrong got sent back in time too?

[No, you fucking idiot.]

I’m joking, you placated the spirit. Don’t swear at your maker. 

[Don’t call yourself that, I beg.]

Your gaze hardened. Judging by the vital clue Depeche Mode had left you – Jurassic – it seemed you were in deeper shit than you’d thought. Continue what you were saying about the breathing systems.

[It sounds extremely efficient – the breathing’s quiet though, and slower than usual. For a human, that is. It sounds like partitioned lungs – something I heard briefly when we first warped to the Jurassic period.]

Well, fuck. You wracked your brains furiously to earlier: those fossils you’d spotted when passing by a certain injured jockey. No, surely not. Suppressing your chattering teeth, your posture became ramrod straight and your eyes honed themselves right ahead. 

Did he fuse with a fucking fossil? Is he part dinosaur now? If you and Depeche Mode’s deduction was correct, it explained the skittishness of the horses. But unfortunately, you didn’t have a chance to tell either Zeppeli or Johnny. You just hoped they wouldn’t make any rash moves. 

“Gyro–” True to your agreement, Johnny’s eyes slid over you like water. It stung, just a little. “The horses are freaking out!” 

Grimly, you slowed Group Four down, trying your utmost to reassure the Appaloosa beneath you. 

The stage has been set. It was time to face the ringing applause. Hooves struck rocks and geometric teal diamonds criss-crossed your vision. 

Diego. You were right, as your calculations oft were. 

“Johnny – it’s him! It’s Dio! He looks pretty aggressive, unlike before – so don’t let your guard down and don’t let him pass you,” you picked up Zeppeli whispering to the blond beside him. What sage advice. You could certainly feel his glare burning though your crimson jacket, pulsing along your spine and through your stomach. 

You doubted it was possible, but somehow, somehow that despising gaze had upped in its intensity in the week you’d been apart. Yeah, you’d royally pissed him off at Bersha’s, but had he been stewing in vitriol and disgust the past few days? Was he thinking about you to an extent that his burning hatred had gone through exponential growth?

Don’t blame him, you shook your head slightly, concentrating on the rocky climb ahead. Damn. Wrong move. His glare had reached white-hot levels of hateful, and you were starting to sweat nervously. Just a bit. Wow. It was impressive, almost. And scary. You didn’t think you’d ever felt such a disgusted and rage-filled glare. If looks could kill, his sweeping scowl would definitely be in the nuclear weapon ICBM range. 

[If you make eye-contact with him, I think you’ll explode.]

That stupid quip in the middle of this terse situation forced a disbelieving laugh out of you. Shit. Your shoulders shook noticeably. That heat on your back now literally sizzled – his fury had turned supernova. 

You dickhead. 

[Oops.]

You composed yourself – as though Medusa herself was peering into your eyes, your body turned stone-like and silent. 

“You too, Mister,” Zeppeli glanced back at you, warning both silent and stated. “Be careful.”

Will do. 

“Hey, come on guys, don’t take it that way!” Diego’s rich voice was now directly to your right. Though he addressed the collective, his piercing eyes were trained precisely on you. You could hear perfectly well the tightly restrained anger behind his pleasant facade; that disdainful look was one thing that would never change. Imperceptibly, you shivered – his platitudes were much more terrifying than scathing vitriol. “I’m done for today, since the sun’s setting.”

He came closer to you, still looking directly at you even as his words enveloped the rest. You made sporadic eye contact to check for any opsoclonus – the fluttering movements of eyes during a concussion. Nothing. Though brimming with anger, his gaze was frighteningly clear. 

“There’s a small village up ahead, is there not?” It didn’t sound like a question. “Let’s stay there.” It didn’t sound like a request. “Camping out is a really bad idea.” It didn’t sound like a well-intentioned warning, either.

His tone was at utter odds with his pleasantries.  

You eyed him warily, holding his gaze for more than a few seconds this time. 

“Don’t be so shy.” Diego’s sharp grin held too many teeth. He didn’t have any of your bandages on him, nor could you pick up the intense smell of chaparral. Perhaps that was for the better. He looked radiant, you begrudgingly admitted – was it a side effect of his transfiguration?

“Have we not already spent the night together?”

You choked, coughing madly as you turned your face away from him. The only indicator of Johnny’s shock was the sudden stiffening of his shoulders, but Zeppeli wasn’t so lucky; his eyes snapped backwards to meet yours in a look that demanded you explain yourself. 

This was payback for the encounter at Bersha’s, wasn’t it?

Whatever. If he’d intended to embarrass you, he failed. If need be, you could be far more shameless. 

“You must’ve enjoyed it, if you’re bringing it up.” You were digging your own grave in front of Johnny and Zeppeli, with the context being nonexistent. It wasn’t like you could explain yourself either, not when the three of you were acting strangers. “I didn’t know you were into humiliation, but that explains why you stuck around where you clearly weren’t wanted.”

[I respect your commitment to the bit.]

You were dreading the imminent confrontation later, you really were. 

“Wow, it’s almost commendable how much you lack social grace. You brought me a drink, and now you’re callously trampling on your goodwill?” he scoffed, distorting the events even more until they hinted at some sort of thing between the two of you. You ground your teeth. If he fell for the ruse and believed you and the two in front weren’t acquainted, there was no point in explaining yourself without turning this into a soap opera, and without rousing his suspicions. 

Besides, there was no explaining you needed to do for Diego’s sake. His ploy was evidently to trample on your reputation and self-esteem like you absolutely decimated his. 

The trouble was, unfortunately, that your self-esteem was already low, and you didn’t particularly care about your reputation in the first place. Well, you did, but this sort of reputation would only help your goal be achieved. 

Should I argue back, or argue back with an explanation? 

It took a total of two seconds to settle on the secret, third option. 

“I am trampling on my goodwill callously. So what?” If you had a social reputation to uphold, maybe you’d get annoyed, or maybe you’d get irritated at that moment. But, if you knew how Diego got pissed off, then this was the best situation – utter shamelessness. 

I did do what you’re talking about. And? 

It worked. His mouth paused from its formulation of a reply, and he simply stared with utmost incredulity and disgust. He’d tried using your low-blow tactics of public humiliation against you, but that didn’t work on someone who’d simply go lower. Vincent had taught you the finer points of bluntness; they served perfectly for this situation where lack of tact was crucial to success. 

Zeppeli whistled at a low enough frequency that Depeche Mode picked it up. Wow, it seemed to represent – a closing period to your wonderful performance. 

Diego had won with his logic and words, but you knew it sure as hell didn’t feel like a victory. Because fundamentally, you appeared as serene as a picturesque lake – that was to say, you Did Not Care. These were rudimentary troll tactics, ruthless against opponents like him. 

In the battle of emotions, you were the victor, shaking your laurels in his face with zero decorum. 

Naturally, he moved on, ignoring his sore loss like you would a stubbed toe – with gritted teeth and a wounded pride. 

“There are beasts in this area,” he spoke nonchalantly, recounting his anecdote with a miffed cadence. Not to you, of course – Silver Bullet had long since zipped past you, leaving you as the straggler to a group you’d never wanted to be in. “The other day after sundown, I got surrounded by them. A few cougars and a few rattlesnakes – both on the sides of the road, blocking my way out.”

Half-heartedly, you listened. If there was nothing good about him, at least his voice was nice to listen to – filled with his own snobbish convictions, but strangely compelling nonetheless. 

“I was thinking about how to get out of this predicament; but for some reason, I was able to pass by one of the groups unharmed. Which side do you think it was?” 

Despite his hatred of you, he seemed pretty neutral to the two in front of you. You were almost impressed at his ability to insert himself into situations like these – where nobody wanted him. If he didn’t intimidate you when you first met him (and now, just a little bit), you would’ve found him pretty pathetic. 

“The answer is the rattlesnakes – because they were assssleep, and ssssnoring on the side of the road.”

You were at a loss for words. Did he seriously get a concussion from earlier?

“Huh?” Zeppeli looked as dumbfounded as you felt, whereas Johnny tactfully chose to keep his silence and his sanity. 

“Hey, come on – it’s a joke. Then maybe they woke up and started sssslapping each other in their facessss… get it?” 

Is he… feeling alright? The utter one-eighty in his behaviour was more unsettling than hilarious. Ordinarily, you might’ve scorned his lack of taste in both jokes and clothing – but something about him was rapidly evolving into incomprehensibility. 

“Damn I feel good – so refreshed. Maybe it’s because I fell back there, but my body feels splendid.” He let go of the reins, rocking easily with Silver Bullet while he stretched. He’s lost it. 

Irrevocably, he’d dropped and left his mind behind when he took that fall. 

No, maybe it’s his other ‘changes’. 

“Get away from us, Diego Brando. We won’t be travelling with you,” Johnny bit out, though you spotted that thin sheen of sweat that both exertion and nervousness gave him.

“Johnny Joestar,” he mimicked the tone the jockey had taken. “I applaud your performance in both the first and second stage. I heard you got injured, but what a grand comeback this is!”

His eyes were wild with crude delight – by the looks of Johnny’s stony face, there was history held in this brief exchange of words. 

“Hey – you two–” You didn’t miss your exclusion from ‘expert horse-riding’. “–are experts on the horse, but can you do this?” 

He wrapped his arms around the barrel of Silver Bullet’s belly; the Thoroughbred continued her canter, nonplussed, as he manoeuvred his body into impossible positions – limbs flipping and legs pointed straight upwards. He spun in the air; like a stunt rider, he was all over the place as his horse kept moving. 

“Johnny.” Zeppeli stared, open-mouthed, at the display before him – you really couldn’t blame him. “Are genius jockeys always this wacky?”

No, he’s just insane. 

“How should I know?” he replied through gritted teeth. “He was never like this back when I was on the circuit. But something’s strange – we thought he was badly injured back there – but now…”

Now, he’s become a dinosaur, you wanted to interject, but you kept your mouth firmly shut. 

“Gyro,” he hissed. “Are we really gonna be with him tonight?”

Surreptitiously, Zeppeli flicked his eyes in your direction – you gave a subtle shrug. Do what you want. It wasn’t like you’d reach the corpse part today. 

“Well, even if we try to avoid that, there are wolves out there – it would be too risky for the horses, so village it is,” he whispered back. 

“Yep! The wolves are still roaming about – that’s the safest!” Diego called from several metres away, and Zeppeli whipped his head round to stare at you. You knew what he was thinking – this guy’s got hearing just as freakish as you. 

“Dude, he can hear us,” he mouthed to Johnny, and that was a warning in itself. Don’t say anything incriminating. 

You didn’t know what would happen, but you knew one thing for sure. 

It would be a long night. You didn’t mean it suggestively, like Diego was attempting to implicate. You meant it as depressingly as possible. 

It would be a long night. 

. 　⁺ ✦

You didn’t think you’d received such a warm welcome anywhere, in all your pitiful human years. This was such a novel experience you thought you’d somehow stolen someone else’s body. On the outskirts of that small town, nestled in between the grey mountains and hewn from that same lifeless rock, the villagers had congregated in the twilight with their small lanterns and shawls and slippers. 

They waved, cheering as the four of you dismounted. It was unmistakable – this race, however dangerous or immoral it was, however insane Stephen Steel was for proposing it, had let some light into their lives. Here, you could witness its effects directly – with your own eyes. 

And looking at their joyous faces, you decided to give old Steel a pass. After all, they didn’t know the sight of crushed riders beneath horses, nor did they know the sound of a jockey’s death rattle. They didn’t know any of that, and you supposed those who signed up knew the risks. Such was the world – nobody really expected death. Everybody expected glory, even these people tucked away in the mountains. 

But that wasn’t the only thing that surprised you. A gaggle of children had surrounded you and Group Four – the former, you, staring on incredulously, while the latter stood docilely. There were about three or four who wore a similar face covering to you, and the cogs slowly turned in your mind as you saw brightly-dyed scarlet streaming from their shoulders. 

There were, of course, a few stragglers surrounding Johnny, Diego and Zeppeli – but yours had about a five-child difference between the groups. 

“Hi,” you awkwardly greeted, trying your utmost not to fidget with your hat strings. 

“Crimson Whirlwind!”

“Mr Brisk-and-Irate!”

“Mister Jockey!”

The children swarmed you; they bore the gift of nicknaming you – the majority of which you’d never heard of. Pleadingly, you looked at Johnny for help – since he was a professional jockey, wasn’t he – only to find him trying not to laugh at you. Traitor. Scoundrel. 

“Yes?” you weakly replied. It was barely noticeable, but your fingers curled tighter around Group Four’s reins. Just a little. 

“We’re your fans!” I can see that. 

“You may not place first, but you’re our favourite!” Ouch. 

“Your jacket is dyed by our dye!” Okay. That was interesting. Glancing around inconspicuously, you did notice not just the children, but the adults wore some form of red in their outfits.

“You are taking excellent safety precautions!” When your brows furrowed, the kids stumbled over themselves to explain. “You stand out well against the grey mountains.”

“I do…” you trailed off, glancing down at the exact shade match of your sanguine jacket with the people here. Fascinating. With a whirring mind, you noted that some merely had a red handkerchief on their person – those wore more greyish clothing, to blend into the mountain. Hunters? The youths wore more of the vibrant garb in their ensemble, to protect them even further. 

Huh. With there being many wolves in this area, it was no surprise. The creatures were colour blind and only had two hues available to them – blue and yellow. Therefore, for the kids lost and roaming the mountains, finding them quickly was imperative. 

“Could we please get your autograph?” It was a small girl who spoke up this time – she’d tied off a black woollen scarf on her face, and the effect was rather comical. Actually, this whole situation was comical. Since when did you have fans? 

“Ah, sure,” you took their charcoal sticks and crayons, messily scribbling Brisk–Irate and smiley faces inside journals and on spare scraps of paper that looked like they’d seen better days. It was monotonous, and it left your hand with a slight cramp – but you couldn’t deny the delight in their faces warmed your heart. 

Your eyes crinkled. You hoped they saw the smile in them. Though you were a horrible role model, you prayed this at least bought them a good childhood memory. If your youth was filled with moments like these, it wouldn’t have felt so burdensome to take each step towards the future. Like Atlas, you bore the weight of the firmament with joys far and few between. Children are to be protected. The thought was bittersweet. 

As you signed the last little notebook, they scampered back to their parents with toothy grins to give in their spoils of war, and then scampered back to bombard you with questions. 

The elders – clad too in that vibrant red – gesticulated to where you could find free lodging and the stables, but they did nothing about the swarm of miniature humans. Those wrinkled pairs of eyes merely creased warmly at your plight. 

“Ack–” you stumbled into Group Four, but she too did nothing as you nervously peered round the little semi-circle. 

“You and Mr Johnny have horses that we have in the mountains too – Appaloosas! Why’d you choose her? Why’d you name her Group Four?” 

Over the crowd, you made eye contact with Zeppeli – who merely shrugged with that indifferent smirk of his. Help, your creased brows pleaded silently. You’re on your own there, his callous smile replied. Though the others had their own minute press conferences, yours was the most sizable – not because you were a particularly skilled rider, but because these villagers saw you as relatable. 

Ordinarily, you might’ve felt a tiny ember of pride within your withered heart – but now, here, you felt intimidated by these small humans.

“I– uh…” Peering up once more, you saw Diego laughing boisterously at one of the questions posed at him. When he met your eyes, his eye-lids lowered triumphantly, and his smile only grew sharper and wider at your fumbling. You looked down at the respective child who’d asked you, and thought carefully before you answered. 

“I chose her because I felt that she needed an opportunity to prove herself,” you answered quietly, and that was partly the truth. She’d gotten sick through no fault of her own, and it was likely she would’ve passed away without experiencing anything remotely similar to this. Even if she was bought hastily for the Steel Ball Run, you highly doubted that she would have healed like she did under your care. “Even a horse has pride, much like we do.”

“As for her name–”

You paused. 

Group Four, consisting of titanium, zirconium and hafnium, is generally considered a transition metal group. Transition metals have incompletely filled d-orbitals that allow them to both donate and accept electrons easily from other molecules. 

In other words, transition metals are used to spark reactions through lowering activation energy of reactions. 

They’re catalysts. 

A catalyst. 

“–chemically, it represents her ability to bring me victory.”

Question of Time: reject his victory. 

“Woah, you know chemistry? And science?” The boy who asked had his eyes blown wide, and you were suddenly reminded of that one day all those years ago. A dull classroom, a vibrant teacher, and the sparks of curiosity fueling your mind. Chemistry. The source of your present struggle, and your past salvation. It was a paradoxically complicated relationship you had with the subject. 

“I do know chemistry and science,” you replied, eyes forming crescent smiles above your veil. 

“You a scientist then, mister?” A girl of no more than twelve piped up this time. Her face glimmered with curiosity – so familiar yet so alien to you. The scent of mandarins weaved through the gaps in the veil – the odour of summer and those hewn-stone front steps of your high school accompanied it. 

Dr Amsa – can you see me right now? 

“Yeah,” you affirmed. “Yeah, I am.”

“Wow… what do you do as a scientist?” You didn’t know how the conversation had moved past horse riding, cultural habits and settled onto science – but if you knew one thing, it was the lattermost topic. With your back turned to them, you didn’t notice how the three you came with had finished their fan meetings and were now listening in on yours while pretending to be busy checking their equipment. 

“Well – I did geotechnical substance evaluation–” 

[Dirt analysis? Really?]

“–a little bit of advanced analysis on the spatial distribution and concentration of elemental constituents within geological materials–”

[Mineral concentrations within rocks…]

“–and conducting comprehensive research on the composition, structure, dynamic processes, and various phenomena of the Earth,” you finished, heaving slightly. “But that was just my job – I wanted to do forensic chemistry and chemical engineering when I was younger.”

You could feel three pairs of eyes boring into your back.

“Wow, mister…” the kid blinked. “You sure use a lot of big words.”

“Shh, this is a secret, but–” you leaned down, whispering. “–don’t let anyone tell you that science is just fancy mathematics. Half of it is words that break your brain, while the other half is letters and words pretending to be maths.”

You heard a startled, stifled cough from behind you that might’ve been a laugh. 

“A lot of science is looking at stuff and being like hmm what happened here and why did it happen here and why did it happen in the first place. All those fancy experiments and pieces of equipment you might’ve heard about are just tools to help us figure out those questions. You could probably do science here, right now, with nothing but the things you already have, honestly,” you admitted, too into your little speech to notice your audience growing more and more enraptured.

“Mister– mister! Can you show us some science?”

[Those chemistry class demonstrations have never been more useful.]

“Ah–” you broke out of your stupor. You only registered the question a few seconds later – by that time, the eyes of the children had already widened in hopeful expectation. And honestly, those chemistry demonstrations in class had stayed with you even years later. 

Could they see the devilish grin beneath your veil? Could they see the wild look in your eyes? Generations of chemistry teachers and their legacies flooded your marrow. 

“I’m gonna show you guys some real magic.”

. 　⁺ ✦

As far as experiments went, this one was extremely impromptu. It was already evening, but that was all the better. 

I’ll finish this in ten minutes. Then, I’m going straight to bed. 

You’d drawn a crowd around your glass apparatus: a container with spirits in the bottom. It would be a simple flame test experiment, perfect against the backdrop of the night sky. God bless freshman chemistry. 

By real magic, you meant setting the alcohol on fire while you sprinkled in some metal salts. With your goggles strapped over your eyes, and your jacket acting as your lab coat, the outdoor amphitheatre almost felt like your high school laboratory. 

Johnny and Zeppeli had scored themselves front seats for your haphazard performance; you couldn’t see the half-dinosaur anywhere, but you could sense him in the vicinity and it unnerved you. 

Honestly, while you were doing this partly altruistically, you’d also hoped for an opportunity to speak with the two without being eavesdropped on. Sourly, you stared at the stone walls, before looking back down at the containers containing the metal. There wasn’t much to work with – some impure copper, strontium, aluminium, tin, and iron – but it would do. 

“Hurry up,” Zeppeli called out rudely, immediately getting booed by the kid behind him. 

You glowered at your interrupter, glad he couldn’t see the small smile you suppressed. God, you felt like a fucking magician. 

“As I was saying–” You took a match and struck it, touching it to the surface of the liquor quickly before jerking your hand back. The glass immediately displayed the light blue flame – complete combustion, you noted – and your little crowd let out mixed noises of approval. “–the question we’re asking today is what metals we have in these containers.”

It was the easiest time you’d ever had holding attention – about two dozen pairs of eyes watched as you sprinkled in the various metals. As your grand finale, you created a haphazard mixture of the various salts and gradually poured the whole grains into the glass. 

You weren’t watching the multicoloured flames – blue–white, green, crimson – you were watching the faces yelling in delight. Even Zeppeli and Johnny sat with matching looks of surprise – with no standardised science curriculum, you doubted they’d seen something quite like this, unless they specialised in firework making. 

Quietly, you began packing up the loose material as the flames continued shifting their hues. If you used Depeche Mode – concealed by the edge of the stone table – to surreptitiously keep the metal burning a little longer (two conflicting intentions that only prolonged the combustion for about a minute – fuel or spectacle), then nobody was any the wiser. 

The children were ushered away with promises to see you the next morning, and you were left alone in the cold amphitheatre. A heady, ethanolic scent still lingered, and you couldn’t help but feel bittersweet. 

Can you see it, Dr Amsa? How I’m passing the torch on, just like you did all those years ago. 

Well, not quite alone. Those two were still there: still staring at the now-cold glass, still observing the scientist behind it, still mulling over the questions you could see spark to life in them. 

Questions. That was what it meant to be a scientist: finding all those answers to the unexplained. Even the mundane answers – strings of data that bored and exasperated you – were part of a larger trend that explained something, no matter how exhausting and dull it was. 

Question of Time. You wouldn’t find the answer to that one anytime soon. 

“You get weirder by the hour,” Zeppeli finally said. “But that was cool.” 

It wasn’t a question, but an observation. 

“Got any more cool tricks like that, signor scienziato?” And when the question did come, it wasn’t what you’d expected. You blinked. 

“If you pay for the equipment, my time and the materials, sure,” you flippantly replied. 

“Nyo-ho – the second thing I’ll use the prize money for, then, is renting you out a lab for a day and letting you go crazy,” he offered smugly. The notion made you pause. Would you even be able to use the antiquated relics for modern-day experiments?

“What’s the first thing?” Johnny interjected, leaning his head into his palms lazily. 

“I haven’t decided yet.” 

“So you’re a cheapskate? You won’t just buy me a laboratory?” you scoffed jokingly, pouring the impure ethanol into a metal flask through a funnel. You’d purify it in a later place – away from any walls, or ears. If he had the senses of a dinosaur too, he could potentially sniff out the sudden change in the flask and investigate, and you couldn’t have that. 

“Hey, hey – you’re getting a bit bold there, aren’t you?” His eyes rolled at your mockery – the second question. 

“And you just… learnt this in school?” The third question. This, at least, was something you’d expected. It came from Johnny; those cynical eyes of his had lit up with that trademark inquisitiveness – he’d get his answers. “I don’t think we ever looked at science, apart from maybe some biology.”

“You should be a scientist too,” you murmured, half-serious, half-not. He had the drive you’d seen in your university peers; an unwavering desire to pick something apart until he understood it completely. Even in that terse situation with the Boom Booms, he had the gut to demand answers from Zeppeli as to why they’d targeted your ragtag group. 

“Sorry?” 

“No, you’re right,” you answered truthfully. “These were routine demonstrations from my tea– mentors at school.”

You’d warp and embellish the past-future tapestry, just a little. 

“Just, in a darn classroom?” His cadence had turned incredulous, enough that you could hear his Southern burr get thicker. 

“Back home, this was the simple stuff,” you answered, this time elusively. “The colour changes look flashy, but they’re the easiest to qualify.”

“Simple?” he echoed. Your eyes shifted from his to Zeppeli’s briefly; though he didn’t show it, you knew he was listening and compartmentalising you in his mind. You were an anomaly, after all – someone so bizarre that you evidently didn’t belong in a race like this, and in a place like this. 

“The colour change just shows if something’s present or not. For the real answers, there’s a lot of maths involved – different constants, different equations,” you explained. “For something as mundane as boiling water, I could calculate the energy given off into the surroundings – and from that I could tell you the wavelength of the heat vibrations. It’s just about pulling apart the fundamentals of what makes things the way they are.”

Perhaps that was why you were drawn to it. Why is my life the way it is? What had you done to warrant growing up the way you did? 

You hadn’t found answers to the most important questions you had, and you hadn’t stopped looking for them. 

“And you chose to race instead of getting a cushy job?” he looked at you askance: a mixture of scepticism and as though you were an idiot. Of course, he knew this race involved your ‘goal’, but you hadn’t given him the details of what that goal entailed – apart from that it involved the corpse. 

“See, that’s what I told ‘em too,” Zeppeli nodded his head sagely. 

“Why?” he wondered. 

I want to go home.

“I wanted to try my luck.” A gamble. You against Valentine – who would win against fate?

“And I want to see my family with my head held high.”

It was meant to sound as though you had to prove yourself, rather than this race being the actual, physical key to catapulting you back into your own time. 

The walls have ears, after all. 

Though you’d said it for that effect, there was a small part of you that had that motivation anyway. Prove yourself. For Dr Amsa, who’d been the adult you needed as a kid. For Dr Ferdinand and Diya, who’d too suffered under the silent purges of the Valentinian era. 

And for the one you called ‘Mother’. 

If you changed the future, would she finally return your calls? Would she finally knock at your apartment door? Would she finally look at you, as though you were her child and not just some offspring?

You didn’t know. 

You really didn’t know. 

. 　⁺ ✦

“Pretty nice place they gave us, huh,” Zeppeli whistled lowly as he rode into the small stable connected to the set of rooms they’d provided the three – four – of you. 

“Where’d he go?” Johnny’s head jerked round, scanning the perimeter for any traces of Mr Diego Brando, the bastard in question. “He wasn’t there for the demonstration–”

Oh, he definitely was, you thought. It wasn’t enough that you’d sensed that oily presence in the vicinity – Depeche Mode had picked up on those odd lungs of his. Strangely, there seemed to be faint interference from the transmission you got; as though there was an overlap. 

You took a mental note, then promptly cast it from your mind for the movement. 

“–but honest to God, if he’s sleeping in the same place as us… I’m not falling asleep. He’s the lowest of the low – putting poison in the horses’ food, damaging our harnesses, that’s all second nature to him,” Johnny gritted his teeth.

“I know – we’ll keep watch of our horses like we do when we camp out,” Zeppeli replied, slipping off Valkyrie, then turning to you. “Just keep an ear out with your freakish hearing.”

“So I’m just the watchdog then?” you muttered, flinching as he picked up on the low words and grinned. 

“Yeah, actually. You might as well be,” he replied thoughtfully, still with that shit-eating smirk. “With all your other jobs and positions, I’m sure you can fit that in somewhere.”

“Add in prick to your name, then I’ll consider it,” you replied scathingly. 

“Whatever you say, cane medico,” he ambled off, pausing only to glance at the small furnace in the next room. “I’ll go get some firewood, and you can use those fancy cooking skills of yours to help us make dinner.”

“Still salty over that time you had to eat those grains while Johnny got some of my good food?” you raised a mocking brow. “You’re salty ‘cause your grains sure weren’t.”

He scowled. “I’m going to set fire to those stupid nuts you were foraging for.”

“I’m going to put poison on specifically your plate,” you threatened, shaking the ethanolic metal salts in your metal flask. With the combination there, you were sure enough of this would be enough to put at least one person in a coma. 

His scowl deepened, and his hands touched on his twin holsters briefly. “Just try it – my hand might slip.” 

“So will mine.” You widened your stance, just a little. 

Johnny stared the two of you down incredulously from where he sat. “Are you guys seriously going to fight right here?”

“Absolutely,” your voice was stone-cold serious, though your posture relaxed. “Zeppeli, you can eat shit.”

“I’m leaving, you irritating donkey.” He turned on his heel and slammed the wooden door behind him. Johnny’s eyes turned on you, and you responded automatically. 

“I wasn’t actually going to fight him.”

“I know.”

“I’m not making food for him.”

“I gathered that.”

“I’ll make food for us though.” 

That made him stop short for a moment. “You will?”

“Why not?” you shrugged. “We’ve shared a meal together already, and I’m as decent a cook as I am a chemist. Don’t ask me to bake, though.”

With basic knowledge of acids and alkalis, you could easily finetune a recipe to give it its perfect flavour. Cooking was, essentially, a big experiment in which messing up was a lot safer than it was in chemistry. Baking, on the other hand, allowed for no fuck-ups. 

“Unless,” you paused. “You don’t want to try my cooking?”

“No, no,” he quickly interrupted. “It’s not like that– I would really–”

His stumbling over his words, paired with his opening and closing blue lips, made you laugh; almost doubling over, you clutched at the stone counter for support. 

“Don’t worry, I get it. I don’t mind cooking for an extra mouth, I really don’t.” You’d helped Vincent prepare the massive pots of soups and stews on some mornings, after all. You’d taught him the trick of sprinkling just a bit of baking soda to caramelise onions faster – the base broke down the acidic onions and browned them easily. “I’ll use the pine nuts Zeppeli’s so kindly decided to roast for us.”

He broke out into a messy grin at that – all teeth and pale cerulean. “You really have a way of pissing him off.”

“It’s ‘cause he pisses me off too,” you shook your head, walking over to where the small kettle was. Before you decided what to make to eat, you needed the hot, bitter coffee to keep you going for a bit longer. “So it’s like an anti-symbiotic relationship. We mutually anger each other.”

You thought about it a bit longer. 

“Actually, I piss a lot of people off,” you commented wonderingly. Johnny coughed fiercely – the pattern sounded a bit too close to a laugh. “Johnny, do I piss you off too? Be honest.”

He gasped for air, clutching desperately at the stone countertop as he steadied himself. “You kidding me? Being a bystander to the show is better than any comedy.”

[This guy’s got some real potent darkness in his heart.]

“Wow,” you remarked sardonically. “You’re a real sadist, you know that?”

You received a pointed look in return from him. “You’re one to talk.”

“Well, you know what I am–” you shifted the kettle onto the glowing furnace. “–shameless.”

Poking the slowly-greying wood inside the metal hatch, you fed another few pieces of wood to it from the dwindling pile beside you. 

“And besides, it’s not like I do it on purpose,” you stifled a yawn, surreptitiously checking the time. 21:19. “I’m just defending my honour.”

He gave you another look, one that seemed to imply your veritable lack of the aforementioned abstract concept. 

“Woooow, Johnny,” you frowned, dumbfounded. “Woooow.”

“I didn’t say anything,” he swilled the little kettle around, averting his eyes now that he’d been confronted. 

“You implied it.”

“You always need to get the last word, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” you agreed shamelessly. 

(Time has elapsed to twenty-one hours, twenty-one minutes, and twenty seconds. The coffee has been brewed. The stage has been set. One key actor is missing, but another actor who was not invited is in the limelight.)

You looked up as you poured, suddenly remembering the information you were going to relay to the pair – only to find Johnny’s stricken eyes facing straight out of the window. Curious, you followed his gaze. 

Johnny glanced at you fearfully, once, twice, but he ultimately couldn’t draw his stare away from the sight before the two of you. 

Mr Diego Brando, esteemed ‘Prince of Jockeys’, on his knees in the dark corner of the courtyard. The sight was comical, but not for Johnny.

Of course, you supposed the sight of him eating rocks just did not make sense. To Johnny, that was. It was so preposterous, so utterly and ludicrously inconceivable that of course Johnny’s face glistened with fearful sweat. 

Unfortunately, it only confirmed you and Depeche Mode’s joint suspicions. You only felt that tired resignation that the conjecture had been proven right. 

It was a shame. You knew if Dr Ferdinand were around to see this, her eyes would light up – she’d eagerly study his anatomy, his makeup as both human and dinosaur. 

It really was a shame that this opportunity had gone to the one who appreciated it the least. 

Rather than examining his body, you merely noted that spontaneous dinosaur-devolution was impossible with the biological laws common to both timelines – therefore it had to be the work of a Stand. 

Whose Stand is it, though? You doubted Diego had consciously chosen to turn into a dinosaur. His dignity had just been severely compromised: by two sets of witnesses, no less. He wouldn’t willingly choose to gobble down rocks, would he?

You paused. If you took into account his strangely masochistic tendencies and willingness to undergo public humiliation – not once, but twice! – well. You glanced at the half-man worriedly. This isn’t good. 

His head whipped round, and Johnny hit his head on the stone shelf beside him with a dull thud. 

Diego moved as though in a trance, smelling the air before making his way towards your direction. 

“Smells like coffee – are you making coffee? What a pleasant aroma…” he trailed off. You furrowed your brows; though his tone was perfectly lucid, he wouldn’t normally come into your vicinity like this. No, he totally would, you realised. If it were to rile you up and taunt you, he absolutely would and had done that; the actual unusual thing about his demeanour was how polite he sounded. 

“Whatcha doing there, Dio?” Johnny couldn’t hide the trepidation leaking through his cadence. It was obvious he was on edge; you would’ve been riding right out of here if you hadn’t pieced together the puzzle that was this situation. There were a few missing components, but you sure as hell had grasped this event a lot better than Johnny had. 

“Nothing.”

“Hey – don’t come in!” Johnny sat up straight and pointed an accusing finger right at the man. He ignored the limb and swivelled his gaze until it settled on you. 

You swallowed. Those eyes burned with fervent hatred, enough that you backed up into the stone counter behind you. Transfixed by the glossy sheen, you barely noticed how close he got. 

“You smell just like the things you left behind for me,” he murmured, voice thick with barely controlled anger. He took several deep inhales, like he was immortalising your scent in his olfactory memory. 

“Sorry?” you choked. You hadn’t expected him to be so close, and you certainly hadn’t expected him to bring up that – the moment of weakness where you’d felt bad for Silver Bullet. 

“Stay away, you bastard,” Johnny’s hands twitched where they were placed in his lap. You shook your head silently at him – the man before you wasn’t in his right mind, but you could handle yourself. 

“Did it amuse you?” Diego gripped your wrists suddenly, diverting your attention back to you. “You pitied me, didn’t you? For the object of your hatred, toying with them is as easy as breathing, is it not?”

His words dripped with loathing, so utterly contemptuous. You gazed at him wordlessly – while this sudden onslaught was definitely due to his lowered inhibitions in this state, these were his actual subconscious thoughts of you. 

“I hate people like you,” he seethed, still digging those hands of his into your flesh. You could feel his nails slowly elongating; the tips sank into the skin and were a few punctured cells away from drawing blood. “I hate you, so much.”

What could you even say to that?

I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you. His eyes seared those words into you. He was rapidly losing composure, enough that his mouth was slowly widening as he leaned in to take a bite–

Your expression changed; you had to delay his inevitable transformation for as long as possible to get him away from the village.  

“For your information, I did it ‘cause I felt bad for your horse, not you,” you scowled, twisting your wrists neatly out of his ironclad hold. Your skin burned with friction, but you refused to let up. “She was pacing around with her loyalty, refusing to leave your side. You think I actually felt bad for you? Use your brain for once, and come down your high horse. Not all of us are heartless pricks who don’t care about animals.”

Catch him off guard. 

He stumbled backwards, eyes only hardening into an anger that was cold as steel this time. 

“Bastard,” you muttered under your breath while you rubbed your wrists. You knew he heard. You hoped he heard. In any case, his transformation had reversed – just a little – with the slits in his mouth slowly receding. 

I hate you too. 

He was a hypocrite, no matter how self-righteous he presented himself as. As soon as he got your weakness, there was no doubt he’d expose it torturously slow – dangling ‘hope’ to and fro and utterly wearing down your fighting spirit. 

You clenched your fists, stalking to the next room to cool your head. There was no real present danger of him transforming quite yet – the gauge had yet to leave amber and enter the red zone. 

[Don’t go too far.]

I know. 

Angry tears pricked your eyes. You’d never asked for this. You’d never asked for any of this, so you used your pieces and pawns to survive and ensure a better future not just for you, but for the people you loved and cared about. 

And you didn’t know him. Neither from a social context, nor a historical one – there was not a trace of his past that you knew. He could very well have his own reasons for manipulating others into doing his work. You understood that. But continuously acting as though he were the only one entitled to play this massive chess game – that was what infuriated you. 

Everyone has their own circumstances. 

You hated him, so you fueled his own hatred to use him. In a way, it was an awfully hypocritical and destructive relationship. You were a hypocrite when you were next to him, and he was a hypocrite when he was with you. 

Neither of you were good people. That was fact. 

Like and like repel each other. Perhaps that was why the two of you despised each other so much. 

Roughly wiping your tears away, you sat quietly in a corner and used Depeche Mode to eavesdrop for a distance. Diego would no doubt look at you with scornful smugness if he saw the glistening tracks on your face – a situation you absolutely abhorred the very notion of. 

[‘You haven’t changed. You’re still the ass you were in England.’] 

[‘Neither have you, Joestar. You’ve still got your emotions all written all over that face of yours.’]

There was no transmission for a few heartbeats. 

[‘You wondering what that exchange was about? Struck a nerve in you, did I? He hasn’t told you anything, has he? Don’t glare at me like that, he can tell you if he wants, since I respect his privacy, and all.’]

Your hands curled around the hem of your red jacket, while your teeth gritted beneath your veil. Prick. 

[‘Oooh… or were you wondering why I was eating those rocks?’]

You could picture Johnny’s stony expression.

[‘It’s for digestion, Mr Joestar. Don’t you know? Helps the stomach digest by crushing what you ate. It’s called a gastrolith – a health method… learned from birds and alligators.’]

And dinosaurs, you silently added. 

[‘You’re making coffee, aren’t you? It hasn’t quite got the aroma of Blue Mountain No.1, but it still smells good. Mind if I have a cup?’]

[‘What about that wound you got from falling, Dio? It looked terrible when we saw you.’]

You had a sudden, terrible premonition about his next words.

[‘I told you, I’m doing great. No pain anywhere.’] Your shoulders slumped in relief. [‘I have my dear Mercury to thank for that.’]

The heartbeat pounding within your chest ceased momentarily. 

That liar. 

That scoundrel. 

That bastard. 

You ground your molars together. In your mind, you could see those blue lips pressing together as he made his own assumptions. It was your own fault for not explicitly stating what occurred, but it wasn’t like you were in a situation where you could explain yourself. And with the addition of the nickname Zeppeli had given you, you were royally fucked for later. 

[‘Why aren’t you taking off your gloves?’] Johnny instead chose to change the subject, which meant he was definitely grilling you later on. 

[‘October nights in the Rockies get pretty chilly. I’ll take them off when I wash my hands. Now, come on… let me have some coffee!’]

[‘I don’t want to travel with you – let’s make that very clear. The coffee’s right in front of you. Drink it and go to a different empty house, got it?’]

It was silent for about half a minute. You were considering getting up and taking a look, but you clenched your fists and stayed put. 

Not yet. 

[‘Uhm… could I just ask? Which one can I drink?’] 

You were getting a bad feeling. 

[‘Which one? There’s only one cup there… Dio, you can’t see it? The rest are cans…’]

Neurones were being fired off at startling capacity as your brain absorbed the new information. He’s losing sight rapidly, while his other senses are getting stronger. 

Shit. 

His transformation is accelerating. Some of the dinosaur variants had poor eyesight – it hadn’t been as bad earlier. While you didn’t want your presence to aggravate him any more than it had to, you needed to monitor the situation way more closely.

Hurriedly, you eased yourself into the doorway; he’d no doubt smell you, but that didn’t matter right now.

“Can’t see?” he scoffed. A gloved hand shot out instantaneously into the air, and he clutched something. Releasing it, you saw it was a fly: unharmed, dizzily flying away. He just… plucked it out the air, as though he were picking a ripe apple off a tree. “Yeah right. I can see great. Both my eyesight and performance are at their best – I can see even better as it gets darker.”

Heightened sense of movement and better reflexes. Weak eyesight in the light. Keen sense of smell. 

“But which one is it?” he smelled around the table, knocking over the cans of grains you were going to use as his hands searched for the mug of coffee. Your mug of coffee. You scowled. 

“I told you, there’s only one cup, right here!” Johnny pointed exasperatedly. 

Horrified, you looked on as his mouth slowly but surely widened sideways in a crescent grin. Teeth began poking out in places they shouldn’t be – bony-white against sanguine flesh. 

While he pressed the tin cup to his lips, pre-occupied by your drink, the coffee dripped through the gaps in the teeth and dribbled onto his ugly teal sweater. 

“Johnny.” You appeared like a ghost beside the jockey; he almost jumped out his skin with how nervous the sight of Diego was making him. Your voice was low – so carefully quiet you had to press your lips right next to his ear. 

He shivered. The sound of buzzing grew louder. 

“Trust me, and get out of here,” you continued, warm body against warm body. “I’ll get you on your horse, so warn the villagers–”

“What the fuck are the two of you doing?” Zeppeli burst in through the door. In his arms, there was a sizable bundle of twigs, while in his wake, streams of flies were slowly following. “There’s a fuck ton of flies – coming through the window and the door to the courtyard.”

The earlier argument brushed aside, he turned to you. “Medico, close the windows and doors–”

You shook your head. Maybe it was the resolute set of your brows. Maybe it was the imploring look in your eyes. Whatever it was, he stared at you for a good minute, before striding past you to look at the door leading into the small plaza. 

But before he could walk past you completely, you grappled your hand onto his shoulder. Whirling round, he met your eyes with a glare. 

“We need to get out of here,” you warned, low and with such impact in each syllable that his green lips opened and closed. He didn’t nod, nor did he affirm your words in any way; rather, he shook off your hand and continued on regardless.  

“Fuck,” he swore. With one foot out the doorway, he suddenly glanced back in revulsion. You could only rush forward in trepidation; his sclerae were almost completely showing white in his eyes. “What the hell’s going on here?”

(Blood on the ground. It’s seeping copper; running parallel to the petrichor scent of rain.) 

Just like back then, sanguine stained your boots. The stench of exposed flesh and death hazed the air, so goddamn overwhelmingly you couldn’t breathe. 

It wasn’t Dr Amsa lying there. 

It wasn’t, but the circumstances were eerily similar. 

Your body shook as you stared down at the bear. Macerated viscera stained the wall, while its brain oozed out of its skull. Long, thick ribs pierced its own flesh – the macabre picture was washed over in flesh-pink, with moving, buzzing flies adorning the carcass. 

Vomit rose in your throat, but you forced it down. 

That wasn’t there twenty minutes ago. 

“Its flesh has been eaten off…” Zeppeli trailed off in morbid fascination. “A human couldn’t have done this.”

You’re wrong. 

He was wrong. 

There was one ‘person’ who could’ve done this. 

A dreadful silence settled over the room like a blanket; the only sounds left was the incessant buzz of the flies and the steady drip, drip of the still-warm bear blood. 

Slowly, you turned behind you. 

There was not a trace of the human left. 

Even if it was all a mistake, even if you weren’t meant to be in the past, this universe had created that possibility in the first place. Out of all the possible parallel worlds, your particular, insignificant incarnation had been put into an entirely new loop. 

You’d accept the judgement passed, no matter if you failed or succeeded. 

There was hope in hopelessness. 

You left the hotel quietly, with a promise on your lips to Bersha and a winged haste on your boots. 

Mercury.

And so you took flight once more. 

Leaving is supposed to be quick. That way, the distance between two particles would be clean; no residue would form and there would be no regrets. 

But just like Orpheus, you couldn’t resist looking back at the imposing structure behind you. Nestled in the dunes, it had been a home away from home. That amber light, spanning from your small apartment funded by the Ferdinand Institute, to the bar at Vincent’s, to the cosy hotel room – the boundaries you’d set for yourself in regarding the past were slowly being overcome by the incandescence. 

And just like Eurydice, you thought you could see a figure against the vast walls of the Underworld. 

I won’t see him ever again. 

If this all went the way you wanted it to, you’d leave all the memories of this past and return to your bleak future. 

It’s strange. There were people who’d kill to be in your shoes. Those seeking to repent for their unfortunate decisions. Those seeking epistemic solace amidst relics not yet destroyed. Those seeking an escape from the oppressive regime of Valentine. 

Yet like a fool, you wanted to return to the future. That unwelcoming place, where the monotonous daily routine was the only thing that forced your pulse to continue. 

You couldn’t turn away from that lonesome Eurydice: a mere dot against the vast sandstone. Bitterness washed over your tongue. 

No matter where you went – whether you stayed here or left – you had to make sacrifices. That was the price you paid for the hope of one day attaining your own happiness. 

This is why you hadn’t wanted to form these meaningless attachments in the first place. After you returned to the future, you’d leave yet another set of people behind. The dead would stay dead, and you’d be on the banks of the Styx; unable to move with the living. 

The future was no guarantee. With every change you made to this timeline, who knew what consequence it would have? There might not be a place for you anywhere. Not in the past, where your existence was anomalous within itself. Not centuries later, where you may not even exist. 

Is it even worth it?

As long as you trod this path, the question would keep plaguing you. No matter what you did, that nagging possibility would constantly clutch your sternum and refuse to let go. 

Should I have done this differently? Should I have stayed in the past? Should I really return to the future? 

So you rode fast: sand cutting at your face and wind washing away your worry. One step at a time, you’d leave the questions behind in the desert and bear the pain. With the heavy gun at your hips, and a churning freedom on your tongue, you kicked Group Four on. 

Pandora’s box had been opened. Anger, worry, lamentation – the vices had escaped, and lingering in the unsealed jar was hope. You’d hope you made the right decisions. 

The mountains were a breath away. Metre by metre, you were slowly approaching a goal you could barely comprehend. 

What choice did you have?

How could you possibly turn away?

. 　⁺ ✦ 

(I don’t want to.)

(The words almost leave your lips as you stare, teary-eyed, at the woman you call mother. But they don’t. Because she loves you, as she places you into another martial arts class. She loves you, as you’re beaten down by the other, tougher kids. She loves you, as blood splatters the mat and metal floods your mouth.)

(You love her too, you think. She wants to protect you, doesn’t she? You’ve read about this kind of affection countless times in storybooks, so of course it’s applicable to real life, right?)

(It’s a dangerous world. You know it. She knows it. This neighbourhood is rife with violence from the purges and a fear that has no name. Almost indiscernibly, there’s a permanent metallic stench in the air that can’t only be from the buildings.)

(Even a young child knows just how corrupt this world is.)

(That’s what love is to you. A snarling beast, tearing your muscle and sinew, twisting the bruised bones to the point of breakage. Your body is reforged just as often as it encounters its cataclysm. That’s love.)

(She used to kiss your cheek as she asked. Now, her lips wobble slightly. And that’s love, you think. She can’t hold onto you, not in this grey world filled with corpses of the disobedient. She can only imprint the bloody struggle of survival onto you.)

(She’s letting you go, but you can still see the claw marks she left behind: wounds fresh and so utterly tender.)

(“Which one will it be?” Like a child in a candy shop, she offers you that choice. Systema or close-quarters combat? It’s one of the only mercies she can leave you – an illusion that you truly have free will as her descendant.)

(You don’t know a single thing about her besides the fact you two were once connected by an umbilical cord.)

(She asks, you answer.)

(But if an inquiry breached your childish lips, would she grant the same courtesy?)

(Or is her well-meaning illusion of choice the only candy-like thing about your encounters?)

(“Close-quarters,” you sniffle. You think she might berate you for the tears streaming down your cheeks, but the only movement you see is the twitch of her hands.)

(Plastic rustles. You’ve long gotten used to the menthol scent that clings as she takes a weary drag from her cigarettes. She lights it easily; the glowing dot now serves as a period, a full-stop to an ill-fated conversation.)

(There are many things you don’t know about the woman named ‘Mother’.)

(As you stare at her – grey curtains fluttering against the grey sky – she’s a lot less imposing than you originally thought.)

(Not once does she look back at you.)

(The two of you remain in stasis for a very long time.)

. 　⁺ ✦ 

You really didn’t know what was crueller. Those scalding lessons, seared into your body until you sobbed and panted, or her silence all those years later. 

Where did you go?

She couldn’t be tied down to grey buildings and the rained-on city. She couldn’t be tied down to you, her offspring. Anywhere, as long as it was away from you.

Why did you go?

Who knew? It certainly wasn’t you who had that ability: knowing what ‘that person’ was thinking. 

What was the point in all of that, then?

That burdensome torrent vanished just like that. Perhaps you’d been moving forward all this time with your eyes shut. The blind leading the blind. You’d been swept up like a ragdoll, unable to think for yourself as she prepared you for a future beyond your understanding. 

And then, silence. 

All that static, just for the radio to cut off before the signal even hit it. 

“Fuck,” you exhaled uselessly. The expletive was drowned amidst the mountainous air: clean, so utterly unlike the filth that left your lips. 

From Monument Valley to Canon City, the distance spanned over five hundred kilometres. The winding path wove through the Rocky Mountains, boasting those picturesque views you’d never gotten the chance to visit. That packed-dirt road leading to the peaks was a sight you didn’t think you’d ever forget. 

You’d never felt so small. 

Those grey giants in the distance took up half the sky, so unlike the squatting, toddler-like high-rise apartments that plagued the modern world. Dusted gently on the tips was clean snow – a far cry from the grey slush of winter you were accustomed to. You felt intimidated by their magnitude, but it served as a reminder. 

There were things you could never move. From the mountains to the great lakes, you could use all your strength and all your wits. Despite your best efforts, you’d lose. Undoubtedly so, you wouldn’t be able to beat the sheer immovability of nature. 

But those proud mountains reflected true in your glassy eyes. Though you couldn’t create miracles, you could create a new possibility in this timeline. Just as one small gust of wind from a butterfly could lead to a tsunami, a human’s meddling had the potential to be far more catastrophic. Even your existence here itself would lead to unintended and incomprehensible ripples that you could neither predict nor prepare for. 

The leather reins in your fingers loosened with the slack you gave them. Group Four picked up on the sudden relaxation in your shoulders; her pace slowed from the punishing gait it had been in the desert. 

With the sprawling greenery of the forest around you, your guard couldn’t help but slip, just a little. The wind was on your side, as were the chirping birds, as was the clear rush of water in the brooks.

You were alone with your thoughts. This was the end of the world, the edge of the limits of the map. 

If you slipped past the borders of life in this tranquillity, you wouldn’t mind. 

Here, you were away from people. Cruel hands couldn’t reach you here. 

Deftly tying the reins to the pommel of your saddle, you slid off the leather and onto weary feet. Beneath brown boots, the feathery grass held strange comfort that soothed your soul in balmy verdure. You grasped your hat off your head and untied your veil: wind on your naked face and a free smile pulling your lips. 

You wouldn’t run into anyone here, not if Depeche Mode could help it. Any disturbance for a good while was carefully digitised and computed in that hollow head. It was just like you; startling at the slightest noise while you slept, moving on auto-pilot as you methodically combed through your apartment at the small hours of the night. 

Was it a subconscious manifestation? Always being on edge, always feeling that tight coil compressing in your chest. Here, surrounded by not a single soul save the creatures and fauna that roamed these unfettered environment, the winding spring finally returned to its equilibrium. 

Simple harmonic motion. That ticking in your sternum had stilled. Second by second, an impending fate loomed ever closer – but not today. The perpetual motion had returned to zero. You felt at ease, much more than you had anywhere else, in any time period. 

Here, time was on your side. Here, all those grandfather clocks and their swaying pendulums had been brought to a still, lonesome peace. Here, you could breathe the clean air and there was absolutely nobody to worry about save yourself. 

There wasn’t any of that choking, asphalt smell of the highway as you drove past the desert. No burning tires, none of those grey walls you so detested. The clamour of the city didn’t yet exist. 

This grass felt just as soft as the one from all those years back. Huckleberries in hand, gently macerated in bored hands. The air hadn’t smelled like this, though – more piney and cold and reserved than it had been in the town. There was no evening traffic, nor any trace of an orange, smog-filled sky. There were no bags of trash next to benches, nor was there the smoky odour of cigarettes as teenagers crowded the crumbling play structures. 

It’s beautiful. 

You were mesmerised, hands clenching and unclenching around fluttering stalks as you kneeled. There was a certain pulchritude in this picturesque scene. With your silent amble, you could distinctly hear each steady hoofbeat of your steed. One step behind the other. 

You dipped your hands into the rushing stream, splashing your face. Once, twice. It’s cold, you savoured. Cold, clean. There was no oily residue, shimmering rainbow like residual fuel on concrete. No plastic, leaving its malicious touch behind. Just water and small pebbles from the bed of the brook. 

Depeche Mode. 

[On it.]

You cupped your hands, swallowing the drink as the smaller impurities ceased to exist. 

It tasted better than any liquor. Beside you, Group Four’s neck dipped to greedily swill down the liquid too. 

“We could stay here.” Your arms crossed over your folded knees, face pressed into the crook of your elbow. Your voice was muffled, but you didn’t doubt your companions knew what you meant. 

Depeche Mode kept mum. 

“I could abandon my goal,” you mindlessly continued. “Live in this place forever.”

And then what? 

They’d bulldoze your bones and ashes. They’d turn this mountain to a filthy factory town. This clear water would become sludge. Those chirping birds would cease their chittering as heavy machinery clanged all day. You’d seen it happen before. It would happen again. 

Out of sight from the rich in the Capitol. All for the prosperity of America. 

You traced a small, meaningless pattern against your knee. 

“Nevermind.” Your voice was almost silent. “I’ll do what I need to do.”

You’d fulfil your duty quietly, change the future quietly, and die a death just as quiet. You’d mourn the friends you made, the mare you’d befriended, and the life slowly blooming here. You’d bury it all with yourself. 

Would you finally be at peace then?

There was a grim acceptance in your walk as you continued upstream. 

The pendulum felt its displacement once more. 

. 　⁺ ✦

Snap.

Snap. 

Snap. 

Thrice you held a bundle of thin branches, and thrice you threw their broken remains into the avaricious, crackling flames. You watched your fists fold and unfold, replaying that scene from a few days ago in the theatre of your mind. Knuckles against flesh, teeth scraping over your skin as the bloody bones bore their way into the man’s jaw. 

Nothing but a snarling, convoluted fight for life at the cost of his own. 

With a dull throb of realisation, it was apparent you weren’t particularly remorseful. The blood wasn’t on your hands, but the splatters on Zeppeli’s hands still stained you with their crimson residue. Should you have felt worse? Should you have grieved like you’d pitied that foolish thief right before the Steel Ball Run began?

You were no stranger to death. For a darling, precocious kid, their childhood was ushered out with a gradual increase in responsibilities and support from those close to them: a foreign concept to you. Your childhood had been shot down like the nine suns; crashing and burning at ten at the sight of blood in an alleyway, flesh mangled and charred almost beyond recognition. 

In the neighbourhoods you lived in, there was always that metallic smell that the richer districts lacked. 

You grew up. You got a job, an apartment, and a monotonous routine you clinged to with voracity. Peace. That was your peace. Regrets still simmered below the surface, but for once, copper didn’t tint the air you breathed. 

As an adult, the only corpses you saw were the excavated cadavers against sterile white tile. Life went on, and the violence of your childhood retreated into a neat little box you presented to the underground therapist. You had almost gotten used to the America presented to the rest of the world; a golden, bustling utopia where the President actually cared about the people. 

Dead organisms were treated clinically as you grew older. Mottled purples and greys, no lifeblood on still-warm skin. Specimens. All sorts of bones and limbs ended up at those sandy doors – Dr Ferdinand couldn’t turn away from the influence of her ancestor. 

You, too, grew accustomed to perceiving death as though you were peering at it through a microscope. Glass upon glass, dividing you from the scene in front of you. 

Still. That putrid fear remained, nestled deep in your throat. It was locked – oily substance as it was, impervious to your desperate attempts to breathe freely – in a childish toy box. A mutated remnant of those ‘halcyon days’ you’d longed for. As much as you thought you’d gotten used to the absence of life, those emotions resurfaced through a terrible chill in your marrow. 

You were not a murderer. But if you continued to mess with the future, you had to be ready to pull the trigger. Blond locks would stain red, dripping onto a pink suit – it would be the catalyst for your very own Big Bang, hurling you back from whence you came. 

You couldn’t force your allies to dirty their hands to keep your own clean. The morals you thought you had tasted shameful at your indifference to that man’s death: phantom hooks ghosting over your arms, scraping against skin. 

Had they ever existed in the first place?

Detachedly, you retreated to the half-open tent. 

Maybe, as the sparks drifted into the darkening twilight, your face glistened with a stray tear. Like ink on a new page, it blotted the earth packed beneath you. 

There was a lot to think about. Your brain continued mulling over your options long into the night. 

Snap. Snap. Snap.

It happened on the second night you were in the mountains. On a lonely mountain, in a lonely pine grove, the fog whispered and murmured as you sought lunch. 

There was still a variety of cured meats and long-lasting grains buried deep in your bag. You rummaged through the polyester layers, past the waxed paper packages, and finally, your fingertips brushed against a cold and smooth object that could only be your phone. 

As though burned, you jerked back with the oblong in hand – the shiny black rectangle winked in the dappled sunlight. 

“Fucking hell,” you swore with a low laugh on your breath. Now that had done it. Had you not heard the steady breathing of the Appaloosa grazing several feet away, you would’ve mistaken this moment for a regular, modern-day hike. Not that you’d ever been on a proper one; Dr Ferdinand had tried to drag you along with her many times, yet all her enthusiastic attempts had ended in bitter failure. 

You held your breath as you pressed the ‘on’ button. 

Nothing. 

No familiar buzz, no blinking ‘V’ on a black screen. The vPhone remained lacquered and unresponsive, reflecting your furrowed brows and dejected expression. 

I’m an idiot. 

Incredulous laughter spilled from your lips. 

“Who am I?” 

An idiot. 

[An idiot.] Depeche Mode affirmed at the same time you thought those words. A scowl etched itself onto your face. 

The lines adorning your palms and arms reminded you exactly of what you were capable of. 

Five long minutes passed, clock slowly moving from the ‘45’ notch to the ‘50’. Second by second, you tapped your knees impatiently, summoning and retracting those stupid tapes from Words Like Violence. When there was no adrenaline washing over you, every jostle of the clock hands felt like an eternity. 

14:50

With zero restraint, you slammed your proverbial palm down onto the red button flashing up at you. 

Don’t fuck with me, you gritted your teeth. You hadn’t felt so frustrated for days as you did for those five minutes. 

And finally, finally, you felt the familiar clink of the slot machine as it rolled to its fateful stop.

[First slot activated: Personal Jesus. Countdown has begun.]

Fix my goddamn phone, you requested, and the omnipotent and benevolent Depeche Mode granted you your wish. 

The cold screen buzzed to life, flashing its logo against the cerulean sky. It was a modern trailblazer; such a ridiculous concept, so absurdly out of place you couldn’t help but feel agonising laughter wrack your stomach. 

“Ha!” you coughed, watching the familiar apps materialise into this plane of existence. Full charge. No signal. No internet. No data. The search bar remained stagnant: an ode to a noodle recipe you didn’t have the heart to refresh. Not that it would ever refresh. 

If I keep rejecting it, the battery will never die. That was good. That was progress. 

Almost robotically, you checked your call log. Diya. Diya. Dr Ferdinand. A failed call to the one named simply ‘Mother’. Your finger hovered over the green button. 

(Is it too much to hope for comfort? Your evasiveness is the only constant about you.)

You pressed the home icon. If there were any chances of somehow tracking your device through the ages, you weren’t going to take them. 

Had you been transported to the past, truly? Had you been spirited away to some parallel universe in line with your time on Earth, displaced through the fourth dimension? You couldn’t trust anyone nor anything. 

With each deleted social media app, you could feel your ties to your past crumble. You could feel your throat constrict. 

Face identification disabled. Retina locator disabled. vTracker disabled. Biometrics deleted. Just to be sure, you stuck a thin sliver of metal into the signal receiver – if any time-travellers attempted to use their devices to connect to yours, your device wouldn’t even register. 

Who knew if you were the only one to return to this point in time?

Heading into your tent, you systematically went through your barren gallery, then the various data sheet folders you had, then the downloads. Jackpot. 

Guide on Surviving the Desert. 

Flora and Fauna of America. 

Wilderness, Emergency, Safety. 

You hoped Dr Ferdinand could feel your thanks. That sly woman. After pestering you about it for a month or so, you’d finally given in and downloaded her Holy Grail of hiking treatises. Another month later, you’d attended a seminar on first aid at her behest. Had she predicted this? Just like your teacher, just how far had she peered into the future you could never catch a glimpse of?

I can’t see the future, she might’ve replied. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Might as well be prepared for anything. 

It would be a night of long reading for you. 

You’re right, Dr Ferdinand. You didn’t know whether you’d succeed or fail in this timeline. You had one shot, and little of your knowledge would be of use. 

Prepare. That was all you could do on the slow march to fate. 

It was the third day that you stumbled across the duo you’d abandoned so callously in the sand. 

“He who does not die, sees himself again.” Zeppeli raised his flask at you from where he sat, sprawled against a log with fire licking at his boots. His voice was light, drunk on the clean air and dew, just like you were. 

“What?” You scowled, pulling Group Four to a precise halt. 

“Long time no see,” he smiled, razor-sharp with your blood welling on its edge. He didn’t move a limb; observing you much like how a hunter analysed the trap it set. No matter how relaxed he appeared, you could read each strand of taut muscle as though you were reading a well-worn story. 

“It was much too short of a time apart.” You knew he could see the smirk in your eyes; the muscle surrounding the spheres created laughing crescents that belied your snideness. 

“Mercurio…”

Your fingers twitched against the reins. Damn that nickname.  

“Don’t wound me so.” Despite his forlorn words, he was perfectly unaffected – he proclaimed his feelings in a sing-song cadence that had you reeling from the dissonance. “Dottor Mercury.”

“Where’s Johnny?” You slid off the saddle, carefully tying off Group Four’s reins against a branch. You could see him clearly now: wheat-gold hair glinting in the dappled late-afternoon sun, cadmium-yellow lashes fanning around arsenic irises. 

“You could at least pretend to care about me,” he sighed, gesturing to the area past the spread of pines. “He’s gathering firewood. Or attempting to. He’s got a knack for finding sticks with hidden damp inside them.”

“Is he feeling any pain from what happened?” 

“He’s fine.” His syllables became more clipped. Just slightly. “You would’ve known if you’d stayed until he became fully lucid.”

“I see.” Your answer was just as short. I don’t have any obligation to either of you. You paused. 

No, you did have an obligation – a future debt in the cards. Johnny would keep the cadaverous arm safe, and would be one of the pieces that would eventually check the rosy King. He’d be a bishop. 

You watched the man before you briefly, his body slipping into a languorous ease that denied your presence. He’d be a knight. Unusual. Taking an unorthodox path that paid well if you knew what to do with it. 

You exhaled, pressing a gloved palm to the rough bark of a lone tree. “And you?”

“Am I just the afterthought?” he laughed wryly, taking a swig from his flask lazily. Amber dripped from his emerald lips – gemstone against gemstone. This conversation was strange. You found it strange, extremely so. In that moment, those sentences conceptually shifted your idea of honesty. 

He kept his secrets. Though you may have peeled back the epidermis and observed the bones of his past, there were countless layers in between. He’s an executioner. He’s a surgeon. He takes lives. He saves lives. 

He kept his secrets, and you kept yours. Your face, your hands. Your past, your future. 

Who am I?

Who are you?

(“He’s my brother,” Luisa Zeppeli wrote in her memoir. “He was, is, and will continue to be my brother.”)

(“He was a person,” Dr Amsa had thoughtfully commented. “Bound by his own circumstances, he was a person before he became a simple case study on the effects of capitalism and the Steel Ball Run in the late modern period.”)

(“Who’s that?” Diya had scratched her head when you asked. To some, he wasn’t even a footnote in history.)

Who knew if he was truly expressing his feelings in this grove? 

Who cared?

In this moment, with the snark leaving a green mouth and a rueful smile in your eyes, it felt like casual truths were being exchanged. Nothing earth shattering, nothing that would alter the grand web of fate. It wasn’t a polite conversation. Nor was it a friendly one. 

Like two, dead, spiralling leaves in autumn, the two of you conversed through the wind with no malice – it was simply a turn of nature that was cataclysmically neutral. 

“Yeah.” A branch snapped beneath your boot, and your voice remained nonchalant. “You’re an afterthought, Zeppeli.”

Somewhere, in some abandoned plain, within some lonely crevice of your mind, the scales tipped towards him being a friend. But that was mere conjecture. 

You left the preposterous notion amongst the pine. 

“Boo.” You hadn’t snuck up on Johnny, ambling carelessly through the thicket; it was a fruitless attempt to imitate the practised swagger of Zeppeli. His head shot up at the first leaf rustling – hand already raised like a gun and dropping the branches into his lap. 

“Huh?” he mumbled, staring at you with those blue eyes of his. His wrist went slack. “Whatcha doing here?”

“Racing.” You brushed off a stray pine needle on your crimson garb. You hoped he could see the smile in your eyes, hear the grin in the brief word you uttered. 

“I know that,” his mouth floundered for words. “I– you…”

“Me.” You raised your palms in supplication. 

“You healed me, then left– you fucker,” he swore, several times in quick succession. Just like with Zeppeli, there was that element of truth, a lack of politeness, and a lack of malice. 

“I did do that,” you grinned beneath your veil. Could he see your face shift beneath the fabric? His eyes narrowed. He could. 

This lightness in your sternum. Was it his doing too?

“How’s your arm? Arms. Plural. Three arms.” You corrected and recorrected yourself. Were you safe? Will you continue being safe? You survived this race in the timeline I read about. Will you survive here too? The words went unspoken; to be unheard for the rest of eternity. 

“Fine.” He really does take after his friend. “Just great.”

“You sulking, Johnny?” An incredulous laugh was forced down. The twitch of his brow indicated that you were unsuccessful. 

“I preferred when you were more reserved,” he groaned. There was no real bite to it. 

“Did you now?” 

Seize this transient moment and shackle it to memory forever. You brushed past this happiness, and wrenched it for yourself. If you had to return, you’d rather fill this empty space with laughter rather than hollowness.

“No,” he admitted defeat much too quickly. Your bishop was too feeble. “You’re too elusive. I thought Gyro was hard to pin down, but you’re so much worse. I’d barely opened my eyes and you were gone without me even being able to thank you.”

I have a debt to pay to you.

“I’m just like that,” you shrugged his words off. Yes, this was better. You’d fill your days without regrets, but without deeper ties to the people you knew. There were already too many strings tangled with yours. 

“Right.”

You won’t be my friend, Johnny. Neither will you, Zeppeli. 

 Despite that, these memories will still shine bright in my mind. 

“Will you be leaving again now?”

“I might.” The late afternoon firmament was slowly being dyed a fine azure. If you pushed it, Group Four could continue another mile or so. 

Just like that? His raised eyebrows spoke for his mouth. That brief exchange of words, a mere several minutes of an encounter; and after, you’d leave like a wisp of smoke dissipating on the harsh wind. You could see his mind working away. 

“I might also stay for a bit. Gather some piñon nuts. Forage.” There were two experiments at play here. Firstly, a test of Depeche Mode’s abilities to extract the nuts from the pine cones if that was their usage – to be food – as well as your own ability to follow the pictures in the flora identification guide. The second test had a much flimsier question. 

Do you want me to stay?

“You should do that, then,” Johnny coughed, turning his body to gather kindling once more. “I’d like to hear from you too, just what you did to heal me. Plus, I heard you’re strong, so it’ll be a bit safer at night.”

“Haven’t you already heard it all from Zeppeli?” you wondered aloud. “If you’re not surprised by me knowing about your… uh… hand, then surely he must have told you what happened?”

“I’d rather hear it from your perspective. Why should I listen to him talk about you when I can just ask the source myself?”

You nodded sagely. Makes sense. 

“And you’re telling me you’d rather chat with him and have him pass your words on to me, rather than talking to me?” He raised a pale brow. You grimaced. 

“Yeah, no.”

“Good. Considering he’s already seen your Stand twice, and you’ve seen mine twice too, I’d like to see the spirit that healed me as well.”

He’s becoming more assertive. 

“You’ve got a lot of demands,” you commented thoughtfully. Before he could open his mouth, you continued your flow of words. “But that’s good. You’re safeguarding something important for me, so I’ll acquiesce.”

“Safeguarding…” He looked slightly perturbed. “You’ll take it from me at the end?”

“God, no,” you scoffed. “I guess Zeppeli kept his lips zipped about that. Keep the damned hand–”

I’ve seen enough dead bodies.  

“–and any other parts you find.”

“Wow,” he remarked blandly, but there was an acerbic kick to his syllables. His face was completely deadpan. “You’re so noble and selfless, leaving this all to me.”

“Oh yeah.” Likewise, your face was stony. “I’m using you to hide something that you want anyway, so you might as well use this opportunity to gain strength.”

It was out in the open now. It wasn’t quite allyship, and it was far from friendship. 

“I’ll take it.” Blue lips parted in a smile, settled in reassurance. You understood. Free lunch was never truly free. In this dog-eat-dog world, his dull eyes reminded you of the blood reflected in yours. “I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

There. There was that cynicism in his gaze. It had always been present, now that you looked at him fully, but today you recognised it as a mirror of your own. This world never changes, it seemed to say. 

“Anyways.” You crouched beside him, peering at the piñones growing on the lower branches amidst the needles. “Will you want the long story of how I bravely vanquished the knave that trounced even the mighty Zeppeli, or do you want me to summarise it in two words?”

His eyes widened minutely.

“I’d like the long version, but I’m curious about the second option.”

“Well…” You paused. “He lost.”

Had it been from the very beginning, when you’d fooled the fool? Had his fate been determined then? Was it when those tapes met your knuckles? 

Actually, none of it mattered. 

He lost the fight and his life. 

It might’ve been you, in another universe, on the other side, with a cold barrel pressed to your temple. 

. 　⁺ ✦

It was a fast, aggressive technique. Three bodies surrounded you, glassy porcelain faces on two, whereas the ringleader had those haunting clock eyes. All three had the qualities of a mannequin. 

“Again,” Depeche Mode instructed, and you shakily stood once more. It may have been a dream, and you were sure it was, but each collision with your body hurt. 

“Two of them have a knife. One has a gun.”

And so they did. 

“Who do you go for first?”

You began opening your mouth.

“And don’t assume the gunman won’t shoot blindly if he’s allied with the two. Assume the worst.”

You closed your mouth. You really weren’t built for this. 

Take care of the gun first. 

Depeche Mode played the part of a slightly inexperienced gunman well. The weapon was trembling as it pointed at your brain, wavering to and fro as you stared it down. 

This is only a dream. 

(Red blood split on grey pavement. Petrichor and copper taints the air; you’re reeling, slowly losing your mind.)

“Surrender.” Its monotone voice took on a human quality. Your hands raised.

(There’s an arm laying limp by your feet. Whose face is painted with eternal slumber?)

It was a basic modern handgun. If you unfocused your gaze, you could visualise any late modern firearm and it would still work in this scenario. 

Your left hand shot out to grab the barrel, pointing it past your shoulder and onto the ground as you shifted to lower your centre of gravity. With your right hand, you simultaneously pushed into the hollow of Depeche Mode’s glassy elbow – the two opposing forces wrenched the gun out of its grasp and you spun the weapon in your hand to take hold of the grip properly. 

It took less than two seconds for the two with knives to react, and by that time you’d already used the metal of the gun as a knife of your own, twisting the knife guard of the one on your left and forcing the weapon to drop. 

You shot precisely, aiming right at the brain.

One down. 

There was no blood. There was no rain. 

Liminal space. 

You propped up the limp body to use it as a cover against the other knife-wielder. Lining his weaving and ducking body through the sights, you shot twice – once in the stomach to force the body to double over. The second bullet went right through the crown of its head. 

Two down. 

That left Depeche Mode, who took your distraction as an opportunity to nimbly pick up the knife and alter its stance. 

Will you kill me too?

Gripping the wrist of the mannequin, you flung it forward. The Stand dodged as though it was truly a phantom, stabbing upwards and precisely into the space where your chest was. Unable to block the momentum, it sank into your chest, dripping with a viscous sanguine that didn’t smell of anything in the dream world. 

“Still too slow.”

Too slow. Too slow too slow too slow too slow too slow too slow too slow. 

(You’re always too late when it counts. There’s the pitter-patter of rain that sounds just like time slipping away from you. You can never get her back. Life has already left her eyes. Blood stains the hair tie on her wrist.)

[You failed.]

“ –wake up–” 

A heavy weight pressed itself against your back – splayed palm, warm body temperature, non-lethal restraint – and you reacted automatically. Twisting your torso, you used the force from the spin to push the assailant and wrap your legs around their waist: back pressed against your chest and neck invited warmly into the crook of your elbows for a chokehold. 

It was a classic jiu jitsu choke: one you’d seen only in manuals and were never actually able to recreate. 

Until now. 

“–Basta,” His voice was white noise, slowly buzzing into coherent words as you finally felt the wheat-blond hair brushing your cheek. “What the fuck?”

“Zeppeli,” you uttered hoarsely, arms now slack by your sides and legs dropping beside his hips. He rubbed his neck, swivelling his head to look at you incredulously.

“Remind me to never try to wake you up again,” he scowled. “Were you really unaware of all your thrashing? Your tent was shaking, you incorrigible sleep-stealer, and now you’re trying to kill me? What if it had been Johnny who tried to wake you?”

“I’m sorry.” Your voice was a mere harrowed whisper, bile spilling across your tongue as your chest tightened. “I’m so sorry.”

How many more will die because of you?

He regarded you, taking in the sweat that dampened and trailed down your veil, the tear tracks by your eyes, the wild panic jostling your pupils. His body was radiating a molten-red body heat that pressed right into your solar plexus. 

“Accepted. I don’t think that was a particularly conscious decision.”

You stayed quiet to his probing. 

“Was it a nightmare?”

You paused. Had it been a nightmare? Only your memories had made it such. “Close to one. More my thoughts than anything.”

You didn’t explain further; you didn’t need to. His silence was his answer – green irises glazed far away in understanding. I get it, they seemed to say. 

“That’s not boxing,” he commented, brushing around the topic yet still lingering in it. “You’re just filled with surprises.”

“I never said I was a boxer,” you repeated.

“I’m staying far away from you when you sleep, even if you accidentally destroy your tent.”

It was an indirect promise of a ‘next time’. You didn’t acknowledge it. 

When he left, glancing back once with a thoughtful glare in your direction, the heat left on your skin dissipated as though it was struck by winter rain. 

You clenched your gloved fist, nails no doubt making half-moons in the flesh beneath your glove. 

There won’t be a next time. 

. 　⁺ ✦

“So that’s how it was.”

Johnny’s words echoed as you set off on the trail: bag heavy with the spoils of your successful experiment. After intense meditation, you’d successfully extracted enough piñones to feed a small legion. It was the first step in grasping the intricacies of Personal Jesus. 

“There was a real probability of me dying back there. But you saved me.”

You. You saved a life. The net balance of souls was ticking towards zero. 

Personal Jesus. That was another clue about your Stand. Miracle. It wielded a state of ‘perfection’ as its weapon. One half of your stand was filled with flaws: tape bruised with blood over torn knuckles. The other had the power to erase your sins: one by one, you’d repay your debt to the people you’d lost. 

“I think you’re one of the few decent people in this race. You could’ve just gone on your way and avoided that freak, but you chose to fight him regardless.”

That was the one thing he was wrong about. You shook your head. Despite all his cynicism and those eyes that shone dull on occasion, he was exceedingly naive. I didn’t do it for you, you thought. You know I’m using you. 

You stayed quiet about the intricacies of Personal Jesus. 

You lied, once more. 

“Don’t worry, I won’t say anything about your healing ability.”

There was a sort of hollowness that filled you when he said that. 

The less he knows, the safer he’ll be. Of course, not knowing anything didn’t guarantee safety. Nor did safety guarantee fulfilment. 

You knew the effects of not knowing anything very well. 

The pines grew more sparse as you continued on the trail; even the very branches were stripped bare of their green needles. There was nary a whisper of wind accompanying the slow trot of Group Four; Depeche Mode’s hearing acuity didn’t pick up on anything unusual. 

That was why it was strange. 

It was quiet. Too quiet. 

You’d left the campsite later than the trouble-bringing duo. If they ran into anything, they would’ve taken care of it so you wouldn’t dirty your hands. At least, you hoped they were that considerate. 

By all means, there was little likelihood of running across an enemy or something weird if they cleared the path first.

So what was this foreboding feeling?

It persisted. 

For a kilometre, and the next, there was the awful premonition that something was going to happen. 

No, it was no premonition. 

It had happened before, and now you were just feeling the echo of the past resonate through your skin and flesh as though it was a gamma ray. 

These bad feelings – and maybe you were just extra sensitive – had to be taken seriously. Cautiously, you kept your eyes peeled as you rocked back and forth in a canter. 

You wanted to deny the dread welling up. 

God, you wanted to ride hard and fast, until the landscape blurred around you and you could see nothing but the grey-packed path ahead of you. 

So you did just that, but the feeling got stronger and the path got narrower, until you approached your fate at an irritated walk. 

[Two o’clock.]

[Crunch. Crunch. That’s a horse pacing around, by the way.]

[Honk. Shoo. Honk.. shoo. That’s my imitation of the person lying over there. No, I’m lying. Whoever it is, they’re barely making a sound.] 

Great, you seethed. Great. Great. Torn between guilt and fury, you anxiously awaited the advent of the tragic hero. Who was it? Should you just go past them? Should you give them first aid? Should you just shoot them?

You saw the horse first; it shone a particular shade of tan that irritated you immensely with its familiarity. No way… Silver mane, check. Blue saddle cloth, unfortunately so. You could feel tears of anger well up as you finally spotted that star on its forehead. 

He’s unconscious, right? I’m going straight past. 

There really were no limits to the insanity you kept experiencing. 

I’ve seen him more in a month, than my mother in the past decade. 

You scowled, turning your face away from his general direction. As much as you disliked him, you really couldn’t stomach seeing whatever state he’d found himself in. Besides, even if you did lose your mind and lobbed Personal Jesus at him, he’d gouge your eyes out. You’d provoked him enough to point his suspicions in the wrong direction by making him absolutely incensed. 

You weren’t going to face him. 

You weren’t–

It really wasn’t your fault! 

Fine. 

It was your fault. You’d be a jerk to say you wanted to see him suffering, but a jerk you were. You ignored the trace amount of empathy and compassion building in your system. 

His head was bleeding. A lot. He’d curled into himself on his side, one arm wrapped around his chest and the other covering his face. 

Your brow twitched. 

Don’t look at him any longer. 

You stared as though you were watching a train wreck. Something so entirely morbid, so terrible, that you couldn’t look away. Bear witness.

It was strange. He’d always been seeping with arrogance; a sneer was eternally playing on the edge of his visage. You got it, kind of. Maybe he was compensating for something. You couldn’t be truly sure, but it pissed you off regardless. Did he think he was the only one with goals and a past?

To see him like this – it was ridiculous. It didn’t make any sense. 

Your fists clenched around the reins. You swore Silver Bullet looked at you then, raising her mighty head from her pacing. 

Fuck. 

Fuck. Nothing ever went your way. Gritting your teeth, you tried to move on – you tried to, goddamnit – but then that Thoroughbred softly nickered and–

Look. 

Look. 

You weren’t going to use Depeche Mode, on the off chance he too had awoken a Stand. It was best not to give him any more clues about who you were; if he figured out your goal as well, he’d be a terrifying liability to have. The man was a double-edged sword – if you used him correctly, he’d make his own assumptions and draw attention from your actual mission. 

But on the slim chance that he’d see through you – you shuddered to even imagine it. 

I can’t, and I don’t want to heal him with Personal Jesus. You wouldn’t. That was as non-negotiable as it went. You didn’t know when he’d wake up. 

Rummaging through your pack, you found the first aid kit in forest green, narrowing your eyes at the contents. Normally, you would’ve transferred elastic bandages and paracetamol in case of a concussion. No ibuprofen or aspirin. But you couldn’t do that here – and it wasn’t like you had any leftover paracetamol in the first place. The polymer bag, too, was too anachronistic to avoid scrutiny. If it were traced back to you, who knew what would happen? 

You had gone under the radar in the future; the closest you’d ever gotten to Valentine was through his lawyers and aides when they visited the Institute. You’d do so here too – you’d be so utterly undetectable that they wouldn’t see you coming at all. 

Pulling out an empty oilskin wallet, you eyed the boiled-linen strips packed neatly by Vincent. They weren’t totally sterile like the plastic-sealed bandages in the first aid kit, but you both didn’t care and didn’t have any other options. In the wallet they went, then you added leftover chaparral ointment and some willow bark right on top.

Surveying the makeshift pack intensely, you deemed it perfectly average. He could take the items or leave them; it wasn’t your problem anymore. Really, the only reason you were doing this was because of the imploring eyes of Silver Bullet. 

He didn’t ask for help. Therefore, you’d keep your lips shut about this too. He didn’t owe you anything – it left a sour taste in your mouth to even do this much. 

And I don’t want to feel guilty over him of all people. 

One.

Two. 

You lobbed the pack his way, watching as a negative parabola traced its motions in front of you. Graphically, it was perfect; it smoothly landed just a few feet past him, still holding onto its contents with a ferocity that puzzled you. Hope nothing broke. 

But, it was strange. 

The more you looked at it, the more those rocks surrounding him looked like fossils. Where your pack was hooked, the chalky stone beneath it resembled a Jurassic skull. You squinted. With your minimal archaeological interest, and your mentor’s overwhelming interest, you could at least identify the rough species if you looked at it closely, but you wouldn’t approach Diego nor the fossil even if your life depended on it. 

You cast it from your mind, then left. 

He’s no longer my problem. 

Group Four seemed terribly eager to make it out of these mountains, and you really couldn’t blame her. Maybe it was the too-quiet atmosphere, or maybe it was just Diego’s presence, but this place was slowly starting to give you the creeps. 

Many minutes later, your map crumpled at your fingers as you traced your route through the mountains. Two days until we’re out the Rockies. You’d travelled over three hundred kilometres over the past five days, from desert to plateau to mountain. 

This view. 

Wind brushed past your veil, and you suddenly pulled Group Four to a slow halt. 

If I ever make it back…

You’d treasure Diya and Dr Ferdinand a hell of a lot more. 

I should show them this view. 

Would you even exist in the future? Who knew? You certainly weren’t going to think about it too much lest you lost your mind.

Your surroundings were clear. Switching on your phone, you snapped some pictures: shots of the imposing mountains, the greenery, the lakes in the distance. It was while you were looking through the lens that you saw it. 

The mountain shaped like ‘crus’ was in view. 

Grimly, you continued your march onwards.

. 　⁺ ✦

There was a dull ring in his ears when he came to. His head was clear, yet there was an incessant, disgusting pounding that refused to let up. 

What the fuck is that smell?

His eyes shot open, groaning at the bright midday sun as he sat up. What the hell happened? He couldn’t remember; the only thing he could grasp at was the jostle of his reins, followed by the weightless sensation of falling, falling. 

There was a voice too: a weaselly sort that irritated him to no end. And if he really tried to hold his memory tight, he could see blond hair and red flowers. Was he losing it? No matter what he did, he couldn’t make sense of the what, how or why. Looking around him, all he could see were the mountains, some strange bones, and you.

No, wait. 

Bile rose in his throat out of revulsion. You were nowhere to be found. Had he really gone mad, enough to be hallucinating you?

His hand clenched around a white stick that was much too smooth to be chalk. That’s right. He was going insane with this injury, blood matting the back of his soft blond hair with a viscous oozing that was causing him to see things. 

These bones were shaped weirdly, unlike any mammal he’d seen before. An elongated skull, four clawed limbs and a spiny tail – it was an alien creature to him, but he ignored it. He was no biologist, nor a zoologist. He simply did not care. 

His head moved, and that’s when he caught it again – a flash of you that seemed too clear to be a mere phantasm. Jaw clenching, he snapped his eyes this way and that, but there was nothing out of the ordinary: just an odd bag lying on the skull of whatever animal he was lying against. 

Fuck. 

He shook its contents out, getting hit by that smell again. That ointment you’d been wearing, the loamy trace of leaves on your person, that faint scent of chemicals and something else – it was like you were pressed up against him and he was moving his face against your skin, breathing you in. 

That image disgusted him so profoundly that he sat and stared at the medicinal kit for what felt like half a year. 

He could smell his own blood, the tang of sweat on Silver Bullet from her pacing, and even the flavour of the wind. Maybe the concussion had given him a heightened sense of smell, but that only confirmed it further. 

This stupid satchel was yours. Had you clambered down these rocks to give it to him?

No. As far as his new senses told him, you hadn’t disturbed the natural landscape. This was too far of a distance from the main trail to drop. He’d gauged that from how far Joestar and Gyro Zeppeli had strayed from him – you were no exception. 

So if, and this was a big ‘if’, you hadn’t dropped it, nor left it with him, then the only other thing you could’ve done was throw it. And, judging by the scuff marks on the small bag, you’d done exactly that. 

The question now was why. He’d believe it if you were aiming directly at his head, but if that was the case, why had you filled it with supplies to patch him up?

The only rational explanation was that you’d snuck something into the herbs under the guise of helping as an anonymous good Samaritan; there was no way you would help him like this willingly. 

He wasn’t a fool. 

Pinching the small pot of the ointment, he’d noticed it was the same that you’d worn from its intense, mint-like smell. What had you called it? Chaparral? He’d seen it slathered on your wound – was it a congealant? He frowned. 

Diego’s eyes darted to the roll of bandages – they were free of any traces of chemicals or strange smells. There was only that clinging scent of your hands and the slight must from your bag. 

Scowling, he clenched the woody bark in his hands and stopped short. He’d chewed enough of this in his youth to recognise exactly what it was before he could even see it properly. Willow bark. Painkiller. 

This condescending fuck. 

These were all the real deal. Had you felt pity as you rode past him? Had your bleeding heart twinged at the sight of him in his moment of weakness?

God, he loathed you. 

Way to rub it in. With your character, there was no way you were doing this out of the generosity of your shrivelled heart. 

It’s not like they knew I had my sense of smell enhanced, a small part of him argued, but it was quickly silenced by the growing, snarling anger that broiled within him. 

“That fucker asked for that bloody ointment in front of me,” he seethed. His nails dug crimson half-moons into the flesh of his palm. Had you planned this? Had you been behind this attack? Rationality be damned – that previous blond, rosy mirage he’d sensed before his unconsciousness was clouded with his fury. 

He threw the bag far, far away.

“I’ll kill you,” he vowed. “I’ll beat the shit out of you during the race, then I’ll fucking kill you.”

Slowly, bit by bit, the cracks began forming on his skin. 

Snap. Snap. Snap. 

The tethers tying him to mundanity were inching towards severance. 

What I always keep in mind whenever I write is how I want the words to feel to readers, and adopt a different, consistent style for each. I think of the appropriate colour to describe the mood: deep Prussian blue, a soft, foggy pink, etc. Maybe even a song, which I'll play on repeat as I write and brainstorm. For dialogue, I also draw heavy inspiration of how it should flow from whatever series I'm watching, such as House and IWTV. Each piece of writing I create feels more worthwhile than the last, because I'm shedding that old style to create a new feeling in my writing.

and above all, it must be beautiful. the vocabulary you see is pilfered from onelook thesaurus and an ever-expanding glossary of words I like.

life experiences also play a large role in how you disseminate the information present within your writing. as you mentioned, my chosen field of study (mechanical engineering) has consciously influenced the styles of characters I write, but also the world-building. Every change you make to a world has a butterfly effect, from physical laws to cultural phenomena, and I think the maths part of my education has taught me to look at the resolution (how small the details are) and find a good approximation to stop. On the other hand, the history I've studied as a subject allows for an examination of the people within that world, and the ripples that have formed from the changes. Having a good holistic knowledge of science and humanities allows for an integration of both in world-building, and affords you far more detail to explore.

On a bit of a tangent, this mixture was most prevalent when I was writing lament of ouroboros, and I firmly believe I could've gone into more detail regarding things like the court systems, other religions present, the elitism within its society, and literally everything concerning the physics of magic etc. However, while writing, I also had to keep in mind that this was still background information. I think the biggest lesson I learned when worldbuilding was that there's a fine balance between exposition and dumping information, and that leaving information implied allows for bites of information to be hinted at, while still not being integral to the plot if the reader just glosses over it. Additionally, throughout writing I've been deceptive and have taken full advantage of the power of imagination to write less descriptions (e.g. when describing a painting, using a few pretty words to describe one or two key details and leaving the rest up to imagination), as the mind fills in the blanks and makes it "perfect". Another example is when someone describes music, they don't take the time to write the melody out, but rather the emotions felt upon listening to it. Apply that same principle to descriptions in general, and then you've got a wonderful illusion of detail.

I mentioned this briefly before, about having inspirations in writing, but I'd like to mention it again. I read a lot of high/epic fantasy a few years prior, and I think it's been a cornerstone of the approach I take to writing. One such author is Robin Hobb, who has some of the most complete worldbuilding I've read so far. idk I conceptualise her work as a very solid mouthful of bread or some other food, something ordinary existing as something very tangible. Of course, that may be because I'm a sucker for realistic historical development. I also used to watch worldbuilding series on youtube as a kid which probably also subconsciously hammered into me the seeds of writing.

I'll also quickly discuss how my creative process typically goes. Anon request/one-off idea > brainstorming while going about my week, listening to music and just consuming different media to try to get inspiration > researching different imagery and how it fits into theme > researching the location and season > vague plot > writing it out. When it's creating a different world, it's lowkey vibes-based and dependent on how much detail/what parallels I want to draw. E.g. in ouroboros, I wanted minoan greece for the visual aesthetics and athens for the court structure and ancient calendar so I wouldn't have to think up my own names, and I borrowed archetypes in theatre as well as playwrights for Ratio's siblings etc. It's not really a case of perfect worldbuilding as it is researching what you don't want to create yourself 😭😭unfortunately I'm terrible with creating a detailed plan for stories hence whenever I encounter hiccups in the process I turn to research to find some sort of referential loophole, and if that doesn't work then I create a loophole with some plausible world-building explanation - and it works because it's a one-shot or confined to multiple chapters. For some reason it always just clicks in the end but I think that approach to something longer would backfire spectacularly

For dialogue, I lowkey have no control over it, which is why I used it so sparingly back when I first began writing. I watch the interaction in my head and the script isn't necessarily up to me, but rather a product of the emotions/tensions I want to see in the actors, i.e. the characters. Improv at its finest, though sometimes I'll get a line that they absolutely have to say and then the interaction will centre around that. Then after some time has passed, usually several months, I'll reread what I wrote with a critical eye to see what exactly compelled me to read all that again, and use it in my next work. Hence, it really does become iterative.

holy yap