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If we decay, it’ll be divine;
flesh to flower, your hand in mine.
The weight of Gyro’s death crushed Johnny like the sole of a boot crushed a bug.
Johnny has fished Gyro’s body out of the receding lake, waterlogged and limp, and for a moment as he held the other’s body in his weakened arms he felt an urge to lean forward and never come up for air again from the water. But Lucy, who was fourteen and had been through enough, had been there to place a hand on his trembling shoulder and help him carry Gyro’s body away from the lake where he’d died.
Johnny took Gyro to be embalmed, and he was given back Gyro in a coffin nailed shut to be taken back to Italy.
He’d dreamed of going to Italy ever since Gyro had told him about pizza and gelato, about Naples and Venice. He’d told Johnny of the Tuscan countryside where no one else lived, where they could live, unbothered, alone.
Stupidly, Johnny had let himself imagine that life, despite knowing since the beginning of the race that he or Gyro could die. He’d filled his head with fantasies of Italian coffee in the mornings and rolling fields of green for cloud watching. He’d tried to imagine what waking up next to Gyro would feel like– the feat of prying himself from bed in the mornings when Gyro was so warm and smooth under the sheets, how his golden hair would fan out over the pillows like a halo of light.
Johnny had loved Gyro. Johnny had loved Gyro quietly and yet so loudly at once. He hadn’t deserved Gyro, and yet he’d loved him all the same, and Gyro had loved him back. Johnny remembered the time they’d sheltered at an abandoned church; how under the watchful eyes of a crumbling statue of God Himself he’d kissed Gyro so hard his nose had smushed into the Italian’s cheek.
It had been so gross. He’d been on his lame knees on the floor of a dirty church, his blue lips kissing green ones belonging to a man, his pale and clammy hands bunched up in purple fabric. He’d traced the letters of Go! Go! Zeppeli! on Gyro’s golden grills with his tongue and he’d relished in the feeling. He’d tasted the rabbit they had for dinner, plain and gamey, on Gyro’s lips and he wanted to throw up and keep going all the same.
He remembered pulling back and shoving Gyro away. “This is so fuckin’ wrong…” he’d cried, and he’d felt the eyes of God staring down at him, at his sin. A born Christian, Johnny had felt like throwing up even as his heart had soared higher than when he’d ever won a horserace, than when he’d ever kissed a girl.
“Is it?” Gyro had asked, so quietly Johnny wouldn’t have heard him if he hadn’t been a foot away.
“Fuck off! Don’t ask stupid shit, of course it is!” Johnny had yelled, even as his throat closed up.
That had been the first and last time Johnny had entertained what he had felt for Gyro Zeppeli. What he still felt.
The night was foggy and damp. Johnny stood by the window of his cabin on the voyage ship he was on, the course charted for Italy. Gyro had been dead for a week, and his body lay in the coffin next to Johnny’s bed. Outside the window, Johnny watched the seagulls perching on the railing of the deck.
“We land t’morrow, Gyro.” Johnny said to the empty room.
He looked over to the coffin. Since it’d been nailed shut, he hadn’t actually seen what Gyro looked like after being embalmed. He was… curious. And he felt like he deserved to see what his best friend looked like.
One by one, Johnny pried off the nails from the top of the coffin with his old knife. A faint, unpleasant smell filled the cabin. Not one of decay or death, but more chemical-like. Johnny guessed it was the smell of the stuff the mortician used to preserve Gyro’s body.
Johnny shoved off the lid of the coffin and looked down.
Gyro laid on his back, with his arms stiff at his sides. His face was neutral, and void of his signature green lipstick. He was paler than Johnny remembered, and lacking his hat and usual attire. They’d dressed him in a white undershirt and brown slacks. His hair had been tied to the side.
“Aw, they got you fucked up,” Johnny said wryly, crouching down to look closer.
Gyro’s skin looked fake. He generally looked fake, though Johnny was sure it was his mind still denying it was really Gyro who’d died.
“Don’t they know y’hate havin’ your hair tied back?” Johnny laughed, and with trembling hands, reached into the coffin and pulled loose the hair tie in Gyro’s hair. The golden locks were dull now, and almost stiff, but Johnny did his best to arrange them neatly like a halo of gold.
“And they didn’t get your lipstick.” Johnny added.
He got up and walked over to his own luggage. While he was doing the Zeppeli family the courtesy of bringing their son’s body back to them, he was selfish and wanted to keep Gyro’s things to himself. He pulled out the small green lip product Gyro used to use.
Johnny returned to Gyro’s side, crouching again, and uncapped the lipstick and twisted it open. He stared at it for a moment.
Gyro used to put it on every morning. Or when he was nervous and needed something to do with his hands. He’d twist it open and apply it with practiced ease over his lips, and…
Johnny blinked. He pressed his fingertip to the green product carefully. It painted his fingertip lime green, and he looked at the familiar color for a moment before sticking his tongue out and licking his finger clean.
It tasted bitter, though he wasn’t sure what he expected, but he felt a dirty, almost perverse sensation shoot through his veins from the action alone despite the taste. Maybe it was because Gyro’s lips used to touch this very product, but Johnny found himself licking the lipstick directly, bitter taste be damned.
What the hell was he doing? He was already wrong for opening up a dead man’s coffin, and now he was lapping at his makeup like a dog?
“Sorry.” Johnny mumbled, and then pressed the damp product to Gyro’s closed lips and painted them green, as they were supposed to be. It turned out a hell of a lot messier than when Gyro used to do it, but to hell with it.
Johnny had already lived a life of dirty, dirty sin, so when he found his arms bracing himself over the edge of the coffin to kiss Gyro’s cold lips, he couldn’t really care anymore. His father hated him, his brother was dead, his best friend was in a box, and Johnny had nothing left to lose as he made a bigger mess of Gyro’s lipstick.
“You’re a fuckin’ piece of shit.” Johnny mumbled, lips pressed against Gyro’s chin. Sin never tasted so delicious. “Dying without me. Dying before me. Asshole. You’re a fuckin’... shitbag…”
Johnny was crying now. His tears ran down his freckled cheeks and onto Gyro’s leathery skin.
He missed Gyro so badly it was hurting him. He couldn’t breathe; he was heaving and whining and whimpering over this cold body of Gyro’s like a child throwing a tantrum. It wasn’t fair. He’d loved Gyro and gave up Heaven for a kiss in a church for nothing. His mother had told Johnny when he was young that it was better to love and lose, but Johnny wished he’d never loved at all. Gyro should’ve sent his ass away when he’d first met him, told him to fuck off for having limp, lame legs and being so weak.
“You’re a bastard, Gyro Zeppeli.” Johnny sobbed, cupping Gyro’s gaunt face. He pressed a kiss to his cheeks and eyelids, crawling over the sides of the coffin to now straddle Gyro’s body.
“Fuck you. You fuckin’ left me! You taught me to walk and then fuckin’ leave me like the bastard you are!”
Johnny pressed his face into the crook of Gyro’s stiff neck and wept, his hands falling down to Gyro’s own and feeling how cold and hard they were. He could feel every callous still, every faint scar. Johnny nestled himself into what little space was left in the coffin and laid beside Gyro, still crying.
“You should’ve never let me love you. I should’ve never… let this happen. I’ve sent us both to hell, Gyro.” Johnny mumbled, closing his eyes as he rested his head on Gyro’s chest.
He took a pause and pictured it. He and Gyro had seen each other naked plenty of times when they bathed out in the wilderness, but Johnny pictured Gyro safe in the confines of a warm bed and blankets, bare and warm and so toned and handsome. Johnny had had sex before, but he’d never made love, but he thought the closest thing he ever came to it was when he’d kissed Gyro in a church.
It was so dirty and egregious, the thought of Johnny running his hands over Gyro’s bare sides and abdomen in a more intimate setting, but he thought it anyway as he absently did just that to Gyro’s rigid form. He remembered how Gyro used to say his name, soft and in that accent of his, and Johnny wondered if he would’ve ever even been able to make Gyro feel good like that.
“You… you make me feel things, Gyro. Even after you’ve died.” Johnny whispered. “I didn’t mean what I said. I don’t hate you. I hate that I couldn’t have you. Or maybe I could’ve but I was… I was a fuckin’ coward.”
“I’ll go with you, Gyro.” Johnny said, finally getting up from the coffin. “They’ll dig two holes in Italy, side by side. I don’t care. I don’t wanna see my father again. I wanna rot in hell with you. The worms will eat our gross-ass bodies and… no one will know.”
No one would know how Johnny desecrated Gyro’s body on the voyage back. No one would know how Johnny and Gyro had kissed under the judgement of God in the American Midwest. No one would know how Gyro gave his life for the man he’d loved.
Gyro Zeppeli was buried a week and a day after his death in a public cemetery in Italy. His family seemed indifferent to the news, and put their boy in the ground with little memorial. They’d end up packing their things and leaving Italy not long after.
And as for Johnny Joestar, his body was found over the fresh grave of Gyro Zeppeli and buried with the belongings on him in the empty plot beside Gyro’s, under the shade of a stone pine tree. Johnny was buried in his riding gear and with a notebook of jokes, a raggedy teddy bear, an old knife, and a feather. The cause of death as announced by the mortician had been rat poison consumed via a bottle of wine.
At the turn of the century, 1900, the land of the cemetery was sold and paved over to build a plaza. What remained were two stone pine trees; the one previously there had died, but not before sprouting two trees which grew so close together they twisted around one another. Developers in charge of the project concluded the trees would stay, since they couldn’t find a way to cut one tree down without the other dying.