Axl RO

Axl is a man of middle years, taller than most and moderately built. A dark, mask-like marking frames the upper half of his face around the eyes, its hooked tribal lines curling down to his cheeks amid a scatter of dots. He layers a netted, rounded military helmet over a loose draped rag, wears a heavy wide-collared shirt marked with four dark rectangles along each sleeve, drapes a V-shaped panel of hanging squares across his chest, and finishes with tall dark combat boots.

Axl is a broken man weighed down by what he did during the American Civil War, seeing himself as a sinner. To dull his own torment he offloads that guilt onto others through his Stand, a selfishly cruel act of making others suffer for his mistakes. Even before the war he battled a depression born of deep loneliness and leaned on alcohol. Yet a thread of fairness runs through him, since he openly told Gyro how to shut down Civil War, and he stays fiercely loyal to Valentine, likely out of old soldierly habit. His cowardice is real too: given the chance to die for his unit and a town of civilians, he held back.

His Stand, Civil War, is guilt given form. To unleash it Axl must effectively kill himself, a requirement that seems to echo his wish that he had sacrificed himself long ago. Once active, the Stand can also turn enemies' own past wrongdoing against them, dragging out their buried remorse.

Axl once dreamed of becoming a musician before the draft pulled him into the Civil War in 1863, most likely on the Confederate side. Posted alone in a tree as a lookout over a remote town, he drowned his isolation in drink, with a single duty: light a lamp to warn nearby soldiers of any enemy advance. The night it mattered he had overslept from drinking, and waking to find enemy troops directly below him, he chose not to light the lamp, unwilling to give away his position and die for it. He finished his drink and watched in silence as the town and its garrison were slaughtered, a failure that opened a long run of defeats for his side.

Ever after he searched for a way to atone, and the sheer weight of his grief seems to have birthed his Stand. Valentine eventually hired him and set him on Johnny, Gyro, and Hot Pants to claim the bulk of the remaining corpse parts. When Johnny shot him, Civil War revived Axl and dumped his sins onto Johnny as the ghosts of the soldiers who once died, and though Johnny evaded them at first, Axl stabbed him fatally through the neck, only for Johnny to be revived and the guilt to rebound.

Out of options, Axl swings an axe at Johnny and is abruptly shot through the neck from behind by Valentine himself. The President explains that because he technically rescued Johnny, the act counts as self-defense, so Civil War cannot rebound onto him; the shooting, he admits, was simply insurance for keeping the Saint's Corpse. Valentine drags the relic away and orders the dying assassin to stall Johnny, but Axl never moves, whether from his wounds or fury at the betrayal, and he bleeds out on the church floor murmuring Valentine's name one last time.