Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When it happens, Jotaro and Polnareff are in search of one of the arrows, following its trail of destruction through the countryside of France, and they’ve finally cornered the Stand user who has been terrorizing the nearby town in a church.  It’s pouring rain, Polnareff has already narrowly escaped being skewered to death in a bathroom, and this isn’t how Jotaro expected to spend his spring break. His patience is nearing its limit.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t see the second Stand user sneaking up behind them.  Polnareff has the first Stand user cowering with Silver Chariot’s sword to his throat when Jotaro glances over his own shoulder.  Perhaps he heard some sound he didn’t consciously register, or perhaps it was pure instinct, but in any case there’s a hulking mountain of a woman in a zebra-striped great coat standing behind them.  In the next moment, Jotaro and Polnareff are blasted backward through a stained glass window.

It’s right as Jotaro is eye-to-eye with some haloed saint that he thinks, I could stop time.  It would be easy; he can already feel Star Platinum tensing in preparation.

Jotaro lets himself hurtle through the window, shattering the beneficent smile of the saint and his vacant-eyed animal companions.

They don’t win.  Or, they do, but it doesn’t feel like much of a victory.  By the time they climb back through the mess of broken glass and twisted metal, the second Stand user has disappeared.  The first goes down quickly under a hail of punches--without the element of surprise, his Stand is no match for either of them individually, let alone both of them together.  Unfortunately, he turns out to know nothing about the arrow, stammering meaningless excuses and apologies until Jotaro knocks him unconscious just to get him to shut up.  There’s no sign of the woman and no clues as to where she might have gone.

They’re waterlogged from the torrential downpour by the time they make it back to the hotel.  The concierge takes one look at them, squeaks, and scurries into the backroom while Polnareff calls the Speedwagon Foundation to update them on their progress.

Jotaro’s coat protected him from most of the glass, but Polnareff’s right shoulder is a mess.  While Jotaro bandages his own minimal wounds, Star Platinum floats behind Polnareff, picking shards of glass out of his shoulder with a pair of tweezers.

“You don’t use your timestop much,” Polnareff says, apropos of nothing.

Jotaro grunts, focused on his split knuckles.  He’s learned basic first aid out of necessity, but his bandages always look sloppy in comparison to his Stand’s.  Function is more important than form, but it’s impossible to look cool with a wad of cloth wrapped around one hand.

Polnareff is tapping his foot, an impatient staccato that keeps jostling Star Platinum.  

Jotaro turns to look at Polnareff, raising an eyebrow.

“Okay, Jotaro,” Polnareff says in an exasperated tone, “why don’t you use your timestop much?”

Ah.  So that was intended to be a question.

“Don’t need it much,” Jotaro replies, even though it feels like an obvious statement.

Polnareff scoffs.  “It’s the most powerful Stand ability we know of and you don’t need it much?”

Jotaro does not stop time, but he does stop.  He keeps perfectly still for a beat, two, three.  His mind grinds to a halt.  It’s not static, because static is fuzz in the absence of a signal.  It’s not whiteness, not blank space, not a yawning void waiting to be filled.  It’s nothing.  It’s absolutely nothing.

He moves: a breath in, a breath out.  Time resumes.  (For him, at least.  It never stopped for anyone else.)

“No,” he says, and his voice remains as steady as it always is.  “I don't.”

***

Jotaro has read an awful lot about Stands since he came back from Egypt.  As soon as he got home, he asked his grandfather to get him access to the Speedwagon archives.  He had to take a bus to a train to another bus to get to the ones in Tokyo, but at least it gave him somewhere to go and something to do.  Without the relentless march toward Cairo to keep him occupied, he had felt unmoored, so off to the Speedwagon archives he went.

The point is, Jotaro has read almost everything that the Speedwagon Foundation has collected on Stands.  Jotaro has a reputation to maintain, but his grades are good.  He has “an analytical mind,” as one of his teachers once told him, even if he “isn’t always the best communicator.”  He’s read everything he could on Stands and integrated it with his own personal experience to create a unified theory. 

He understands that Stands are theorized to be a manifestation of a person’s will.  He’s never been good at metaphors, but he’s thought about how the Stands of the people surrounding him might reflect something about them.  Joseph is easy--foresight and surveillance, a vine to ensnare and grasp and connect.  He’s heard his grandfather’s stories and seen him in action enough times to know that Hermit Purple is just an extension of him, him but more.  Polnareff is also easy--chivalry, knighthood, speed and flash over raw power.

Jotaro knows a lot about Stands, more than most people in the world, but he doesn’t know what it means that his will manifests in the same exact way as DIO’s.

***

Jotaro summons Star Platinum after it's all over--after DIO is gone and all their injuries are treated, after Jotaro's adrenaline has finally crashed and the weight of the past fifty days has hit him full force.  His wounds were bandaged hours ago, although not willingly.  “I’m fine,” he’d said over and over, shoving the fussing medics off of him.  “Leave me alone.  Go look after the others.”  The minute the last bandage was applied, he pulled his coat back on, crossed his arms, and glared at anyone who tried to approach.

Now he's sitting alone in a chair in the corner of an empty hospital room, coat pulled tightly around himself.  He desperately wishes that he could smoke, if only to give him something to do with his hands.  He's not afraid of being caught--what worse can they do to him at this point?--but his packet of cigarettes fell out of his pocket at some point during the last twelve hours.  He's covered in grime and sand and sweat and dried blood, but he can’t move to clean himself up.  It feels safe wedged into his chair in the corner.  Or, not safe.  Nothing feels safe right now, not this chair or this hospital room or his fists that won't unclench.  It feels...less dangerous.

With his hands gripping the armrests, Jotaro summons Star Platinum.  It stares back at him, unblinking.

When Star Platinum first began to manifest, its scrutiny had felt threatening.  A stare has always been a prelude to a fight, but there was no possible way Jotaro could fight an evil spirit and win.  Now the weight of Star Platinum’s gaze feels familiar--not welcome, but something he has grown used to, like his grandfather’s theatrics or his mother’s smothering affection.  He itches beneath it, instinctually tries to dodge it, but knows he would miss it if it were to disappear.

“Did you know?” he asks.  His voice comes out hoarser than he's expecting.  He forges ahead anyway.  “That we could stop time?”

Star Platinum doesn't respond.  Jotaro isn't sure why he thought it would.

Maybe Star Platinum was just as surprised as Jotaro was when they wrestled control from DIO.  Jotaro doesn't know if it's possible for his Stand to have knowledge he doesn't.  Jotaro doesn't know if he's had this ability all along or if he unlocked it somewhere along the way.  Maybe he evolved from sheer rage.  Maybe he stole it from DIO.  He doesn't understand how any of this works.  After all, the first time Jotaro saw Star Platinum he thought, Evil spirit.  In hindsight, he admits it wasn't a bad guess.  He'd seen the news, been handed those pamphlets on the spirit world by the new religious movement that had set up a spiritual training center downtown.  A purple ghost that wouldn't leave him alone and beat the shit out of anyone who tried to lay a finger on him?  Occam’s Razor.

It was somewhere in the middle of the ocean, drowning and encrusted with barnacles, that he first looked at Star Platinum and thought, Protector.  He understands that his Stand is an extension of himself, his own will made concrete, but Star Platinum has its own agency.  Its intentions align more and more with Jotaro's the longer he is aware of its presence, but Jotaro is reminded of its autonomy every time it drops a packet of cigarettes or a magazine into his lap.  It's an odd sort of symbiosis, but one Jotaro can live with.  They fight side by side, Star Platinum with a vicious joy that never fades and Jotaro with the grim determination of experience.

Jotaro looks at his Stand in the fluorescent light of a hospital room in Cairo, eyes bleary with exhaustion, pulse pounding in his ears, and thinks, Evil spirit, once more.

Star Platinum doesn't defend itself.  Jotaro isn't sure why he thought it would.

***

Jotaro visited his great-grandmother in California for a Joestar family reunion when he was nine.  The plane ride is a bit of a blur, but he remembers stepping through the front door of her enormous house, suitcase clutched in his hand and his mother at his side.  His great-grandmother had taken one look at his fading black eye and recently healed split lip and said, “When they push, you push them back harder.”

“Grandma!” his mother scolded, putting an arm around his shoulders.  “Jotaro is a good boy. He’d never hurt a fly.”

His great-grandmother ignored his mother, her gaze boring into him.  It made his skin crawl--like being sized up by playground bullies, like catching the tail end of a whisper, like hearing a snicker behind him that stopped as soon as he turned around.

Jotaro had read once that if you come face to face with a predator like a bear or a mountain lion, you should make yourself look as big as possible.  He resisted the urge to hunch his shoulders and hide and instead lifted his chin and kept as still as he could, meeting his great-grandmother’s gaze.  Even at nine years of age he’d learned that sometimes it was better to fight back with his sheer presence than his words.   Pull yourself to your full height, he’d thought, and wait for them to flinch first.

After a few tense moments, his great-grandmother smiled.  It was just a quirk of her mouth for the briefest moment, but Jotaro saw it.  “Exactly.  Like that.”

(She’d taught him to throw a punch the next day, when his mother wasn’t looking.  “If you make a fist that way you’ll break your thumb,” she’d said, lips pursed and hands remolding his.  Her hands had been rougher, stronger than he’d expected.  She’d never asked any questions, but, then again, neither had he.)

Jotaro went up against DIO with makeshift armor made of old copies of Shounen Jump.  He went up against him angry, because being angry was easier than being scared.  He had no real plan and no knowledge and no guarantee that he’d make it to the other side alive.  His victory was no strategic triumph--he still isn’t sure how he managed to pull it off.  Desperation, maybe.  Dumb luck, probably.  DIO had pushed and Jotaro pushed back harder.

***

Jotaro tries to stop time once after he returns from Egypt.  He's heard of people performing incredible feats in adrenaline-fueled desperation, and he can't be sure that this wasn't a similar fluke.  The first two weeks back he can’t get out of the house, constantly roped into one family obligation or another.  His mother is slowly getting back on her feet, but she still needs help with so many things and pretends that she doesn’t.  His grandmother wants to spend time with her grandson and his grandfather is annoyingly clingy and for one reason or another he can't get away for two weeks.

It’s in his third week back that he goes out into the woods behind his local shrine--he knows he isn’t supposed to be back there, but it’s the most isolated place he can think of in a busy city.  The first time he tried to climb over the stone fence to see what lay in the shadowy grove, his mother scolded him and told him he’d be cursed if he walked into the territory of the gods without an invitation.  Now he steps over the low fence without a moment of hesitation.  If the gods want to curse him, well, let them try.  He’s already being haunted--what worse can they do?

Once he’s sure there’s no one else around he summons Star Platinum.  “Okay,” he says to his Stand. “Let’s go.”

His Stand, as always, doesn’t say anything in response.

Jotaro stops time in the middle of the shrine forest.  The first time he had done it against DIO it had been hard, like clawing for purchase on a slick surface, like running straight up a sheer cliff face.  It’s easy now--like snapping his fingers.  Or maybe it’s like riding a bike--now that he’s gotten the hang of it, he’ll never really forget.  One moment time is moving and the next it is stopped, everything around him supernaturally still.  He is the only thing breathing within his field of perception.

He was the only thing breathing.  He’s holding his breath now, bracing himself against...what?  He’s the only thing moving in these woods, and he can’t breathe.  He can’t bring himself to breathe. Everything is still and he is frozen in place, every muscle in his body locked.  An enemy Stand, he thinks, and Star Platinum turns with its fists raised, searching for threats, but, no.  There are no enemies here.  It’s just Jotaro and his Stand in the middle of the silent woods.  Just Jotaro and his Stand and the churning feeling in his stomach.

How long has it been?  Five seconds?  Two?  He should have started counting right when he started, but now he’s lost track.  How long can he hold this?  Or, put another way, at what point should he know something has gone wrong?  (At what point is panicking justified?)

Time resumes suddenly.  Jotaro breathes.

A cat saunters past.  It gives him a dirty look, as though it knows he’s not supposed to be back here.

“You’re not supposed to be here either,” Jotaro tells the cat defensively.

The cat doesn’t respond, because it is a cat.

It’s another ten years before he tries to stop time again.

Chapter Text

After Cairo, time becomes, for lack of a better term, strange.  Days bleed together, and weeks seem to stretch in front of him toward eternity.  When he tries to think ahead, his mind skips like a faulty record, jumping ahead, jumping back, jarring him from his train of thought.  When he thinks back, he sinks.  He tries not to think back, but it’s hard facing toward a future that melts like mist when he stares at it too long.  He starts wearing a watch--it’s solid around his wrist, its ticking constant and even.

November comes again, and he carries tension in his shoulders, in his spine, in his fists that won’t unclench.  He stays tense until mid-January, braced against a threat that never comes, that already came, that will come again.  It happens again the next year and the next and the next.  His body remembers anniversaries even when his mind forgets.  The year circles back on itself, the same dates repeating even if the days are different, time eating its own tail.

On days when Jotaro wakes too early and carries unease in his gut, Star Platinum drifts behind him, unseen and ever vigilant.  Perhaps his Stand is rubbing off on him, but Jotaro keeps noticing things--unconsciously tracking where people are in rooms, catching movement in his peripheral vision, filing away information even when he’s so tired he can barely keep his eyes open.  He knows who sits behind him in lecture and who doodles in the margins of their notes and who keeps clicking their pen intermittently in chemistry lab.  He pays attention because he can’t not pay attention.  “Detail-oriented,” his professors call him, and Jotaro thinks that is an unnecessarily roundabout way to say “cursed.”

***

“You’re no good at one-liners, are you?” Polnareff asks.

Jotaro’s driving for once--Polnareff declared that he was taking a nap before ceding the driver’s seat to Jotaro--and that’s the only reason he doesn’t take his eyes off the road to glare at Polnareff.

“I’ve heard of all bark and no bite,” Polnareff continues, “but you’re all bite and no bark.”

“You’re distracting me.”

Polnareff falls silent.  It’s a good sixty seconds.  Too good to be true, if Jotaro’s honest.

“‘Taste my fist,’” Polnareff says in a frankly awful impression of Jotaro’s voice.  “‘I’m going to punch you. In the mouth.’”

“I did punch him in the mouth,” Jotaro says defensively.

Polnareff howls with laughter.

“It’s not that funny.”

“Sorry, sorry.”  Polnareff doesn’t sound sorry at all.  “I forgot about ‘I hope you have insurance for your face.’”

“Shut up.”

“Oh, or ‘Avdol, say something cool.’”

I couldn’t think of what to say, Jotaro doesn’t say.  I felt like I had to say something.  He’d been mocked once or twice in high school: “Jotaro looks so tough,” they’d say, “but when he opens his mouth, he sounds so stupid.”  Once he’d beat the living shit out of a few guys, people stopped caring whether he was eloquent.  Actions speak louder than words, and Jotaro is very good at acting.

Still, he’d heard the whispers.  “Does he know how to speak Japanese?” they’d ask, when they thought he was out of earshot.  “Since he’s...you know?”  It made him angry--angry for his mother whose Japanese was better than some of his classmates’ and angry for himself.  It made him want to break something, punch someone, shout until they knew that he understood every word they said.  He bottled that impulse up and only vented it when someone picked a fight with him; if he threw a punch at everyone who looked at him funny he would have been fighting all the time.  He may have been a juvenile delinquent, but he had better things to do with his time.

“‘You’re going down,’” Polnareff adds, voice breaking on a giggle halfway through, “‘but not on the elevator.’”

“Listen,” Jotaro says, but then he realizes that he doesn’t know what he wants to say.  "Listen."  He has to say something, but he doesn’t know what.  He gambles.  “I can do the cigarette trick and you can’t.”

“Ohhhhh,” Polnareff says.  “True.”

“And the...the thing with the beer,” he adds.  He doesn’t remember the English word for it.

“Shotgunning?”

“Yeah, that.”

“That was one time,” Polnareff protests, “and I barely inhaled any of it.”

“Sure.”  Jotaro smirks as he turns his attention fully back to the road.  “Keep thinking that.”

***

There's something comfortingly simple about academia.  It's high-stress, yes, and the pay isn't great, but Jotaro thrives under pressure.  Pressure forces him to work himself to exhaustion to meet deadlines, occupies his waking thoughts with memorization for class and data analysis for lab.  Deadlines carve his time up into something less hazy and looming and give his future structure--three days until his lab report is due, one month until the paper revisions, half a year before his qualifying examinations.  He can handle stress as long as he has some concrete goal to throw himself at single-mindedly.  He feels unmoored during breaks, so he schedules part-time work with the Speedwagon Foundation.

He brings his work home with him.  The fourth-hand couch in his living room looks more like an eldritch horror, buried in papers and collapsing under its own age.  His bed, too, is covered in careful charts and meticulous diagrams--Star Platinum’s handiwork.  (He still hasn't worked out if Star Platinum doing his homework technically counts as plagiarism or if that is even a relevant question to ask.)  He doesn’t have anyone over, so he doesn’t need to worry about what others might think of the chaos.

The first time Jotaro falls asleep while working, Star Platinum tries to carry him to bed, which goes well for the first five seconds and then doesn't go well for either of them.  Nursing matching bloody noses, they work out a deal: Star Platinum can put a blanket over Jotaro if it is worried, but should not “help” him otherwise if he’s unconscious.  

A week later, Jotaro wakes up with a ratty blanket covered in cat hair draped over his shoulders.  Jotaro doesn’t own a cat--he’s never owned a cat.  He isn’t even sure anyone in his building owns a cat.  “Put this back,” he tells Star Platinum firmly.  Star Platinum leaves him a mug of steaming tea in penance the next time Jotaro wakes up with his lab notebook stuck to his face, and while that's not strictly allowed, Jotaro has a pounding headache and can let it slide this once.  (The mostly full bottle of whiskey that appears without warning on his office desk warrants more questions.  “You know that I can get deported for breaking the law, right?” Jotaro asks, but if Star Platinum understands, it doesn’t give any indication.)

But despite all that, academia is comfortingly simple.  You study and you either pass the class or you don't.  You do research and you either get publishable results or you don't.  You submit your paper for publication and you're either accepted or you aren't.  You apply for funding and you play the waiting game with everyone else.

Jotaro is not tensed for an enemy that isn't coming.  He can make mistakes--declare lizards to be a type of duck or that plankton are capable of sentience under the right circumstances.  The stakes are low.  At worst, he loses some credibility that he can earn back later.  No one loses their sight.  No one loses an arm.  No one loses their life.  Manageable stakes.  He is not foolhardy but he does not fear failure, not in this arena.

“Academia is just so cutthroat,” one of his colleagues grumbles over lunch.  “You never know who might stab you in the back.”

Jotaro doesn’t bother to disguise his snort.  At his colleague’s sour expression he says, “I'd take it over a real knife in the back any day.”

***

They’re unpacking in a hotel room outside of Barcelona, moving slowly under the weight of a day’s drive worth of exhaustion, when Jotaro asks, “What if Stands are ghosts.”  Or, he tries to ask, but it winds up coming out as less of a question and more of a statement.  Jotaro wishes they’d gone to the bar, like Polnareff had suggested, because at least then he could blame the question on inebriation (even if he never drinks to that point, even if Polnareff knows he doesn’t).  As is, he has no cover, and the moment the question leaves his mouth he regrets saying anything at all.

Polnareff grimaces.  “Ew.  No.”

Jotaro considers letting it drop, but his curiosity gets the better of him.  “Why not?”

“Don’t like ghosts.  They’re too,” he gestures vaguely at his entire body.  Maybe it’s the exhaustion, or maybe he’s just talking with his hands with infuriating imprecision.  “You ever see that movie? With the ghost?”

“There are a lot of movies with ghosts.”

“It had that guy in it,” Polnareff says, as though that narrows it down.  “Anyway, if Stands are ghosts, wouldn’t it have to be some specific person coming back to haunt you?”

“If that’s how ghosts work.”

Polnareff starts, “Who’d Star--?” and Jotaro answers, “Jonathan Joestar,” before Polnareff can finish the question.

Polnareff blinks at him.  “The guy who DIO killed on the boat?”

“Yeah,” Jotaro says, as though the thought is occurring to him for the first time.

“Well, okay,” Polnareff says.  “Boring, but okay.”

“How--”

“I think Silver Chariot would be a king,” Polnareff interrupts.  “One of the ones who got guillotined maybe. Oh, or one who was really good at sword-fighting.”

“Why,” Jotaro asks flatly, “would you be haunted by a king.”

“Why would you be haunted by your great-grandfather?”

“Great-great-grandfather,” Jotaro corrects him automatically.

Polnareff mutters, “Whatever, close enough.”  He crosses his arms, deep in thought.  After forty-five seconds of deliberation he declares, “Maybe I’m descended from royalty.”

Jotaro snorts.

“It’s possible!” Polnareff declares with the certainty of a man who knows it’s not.  “I could be descended from Louis XIV’s love child!”

The rest of the evening is wasted on Polnareff coming up with increasingly convoluted conspiracy theories for how he could be secret royalty while Jotaro pokes holes in them.  “Maybe I’ve been the shadow monarch of France the whole time; you can’t prove I haven’t been!” Polnareff insists, and Jotaro rolls his eyes.  It’s a stupid argument, they’re both exhausted, and Polnareff’s rebuttals grow in both volume and incoherence, but it’s still one of the best evenings Jotaro’s had in a long, long time.

***

His mother used to take him to visit the family grave.  They’d gone at the equinoxes and Obon to sweep away leaves and sponge down the slab of black stone.  “Say hello, Jotaro,” his mother prodded as she offered incense, and Jotaro had given a nervous greeting.  He’d tried not to fidget as his mother respectfully relayed whatever had happened in the last few months to whomever might be listening.

Jotaro never met his paternal grandparents--the only family he’s ever known is his mother’s.  “They’re not here,” his mother had explained when he’d asked.  “This is Dad’s family grave.”  When he’d asked where the Joestar family grave was, she’d laughed and explained that they didn’t do family graves in America.  It had seemed sad at the time--all the past generations of Joestars scattered and alone with nowhere to return to for Obon.

Now Jotaro can’t understand what would compel his mother to remain so loyal to generations and generations of people she’s only related to by marriage.  He feels no obligation to a family he’s never met, people who never even heard of his existence.  He doesn’t need the Kujo family cheering him on or judging him or whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing in the afterlife.  His mother brings fresh flowers for the family grave, his grandfather talks about the Joestar family legacy, and Jotaro wants none of it.

He goes with his mother for Obon once, after he gets back.  He pays his respects, offers incense, even delivers a stilted update to the empty air, but Star Platinum doesn’t so much as flicker.  

Then again, it is the Kujo family grave.  Jotaro doesn’t even know if Jonathan Joestar ever got a proper grave--there was no body to bury, but that’s never stopped his family before.

(DIO has no grave--the Speedwagon Foundation made sure of that.  Jotaro isn't sure if he's supposed to be thankful.)

“Tell me what I’m supposed to do,” Jotaro tells his Stand, but if Star Platinum knows what it needs to be put to rest, it never volunteers the information.

***

“You got a new coat!” his mother says as soon as she sees him.  He’s in town for a conference, and his mother has come to meet him at the airport.  He'd told her not to, and yet, here she is, as she always is.

“Yeah.”

“And a new hat!”

He grunts.

“You must really like that style,” she says, beaming up at him.

In that first month after he’d come back he’d barely ever taken off his coat.  He felt exposed without it, naked and vulnerable, like he was baring his throat to the world.  He’d even slept in it a few times, pulled it tight around him in his futon.

His mother had caught him.  She’d asked about it the first time, and when he’d snapped at her, she hadn’t asked again.  He doesn’t know what she thinks about it.  He doesn’t care what she thinks about it.  It isn’t something she should be concerning herself with.

Even now he feels unbalanced without his coat.  There’s something about the weight on his shoulders that’s comforting.  He knows it’s not effective armor--a layer of wool won’t do anything against knives or bullets or acid.  But, still, it makes him feel safe.  Or, not safe--better prepared to face down whatever is coming.  He has his coat and he has his hat and he has his Stand.  Maybe it’s pure superstition, but he hasn’t died yet.

“It’s fine,” he says.  “Can we go?”

***

“I spy with my little eye,” Polnareff sing-songs, “something that begins with an S.”

It's spring break again, but this time they're entering hour fifty of a warehouse stakeout in Dallas.  There have been reports of potentially supernatural activity for the past few weeks, and, more importantly, someone had caught a glimpse of that woman in the zebra-striped great coat, carrying what might have been a bow.  Polnareff and Jotaro were both in the area on Speedwagon Foundation business anyway.  “It won’t take long,” Polnareff had promised, so they’d gone through a drive-through and then settled in to wait.

The remainder of Polnareff’s shake has long since melted.  The most exciting thing that has happened in the last fifty hours is a raccoon rooting around in the garbage before getting bored and sauntering away.  That was thirty-six hours ago.

Polnareff started the game of I Spy almost three hours ago, and they’re running out of things that can be spied.  They’re down to process of elimination at this point.  That, and Jotaro caught Polnareff glancing down at his own feet in his peripheral vision.

Jotaro doesn’t even look away from the warehouse.  “Shoelaces.”

Polnareff splutters.  “How--?  That’s cheating!”

“You were being obvious.  My turn.”

“No way!  You cheated so that doesn’t count!”

Jotaro resists the urge to rub at his eyes.  He’s reached the stage of sleep deprivation where his eyeballs feel itchy and his head pounds.  Polnareff has slept a few fitful hours here and there, but Jotaro has only napped for about an hour total in the last two days.  He can’t sleep, not really, not when he should be keeping his eyes (and Star Platinum’s by extension) trained on the scene outside.

Not that he can sleep much anyway, even without a stakeout.  When he’d first gotten back to Japan, he’d been in a perpetual state of exhaustion.  He’d close his eyes and drift into a semi-conscious state, and then would startle awake at the slightest sound, Star Platinum already shielding him from an attack that wasn’t coming.  He tried sleeping with earplugs in, but then he’d wake up because of the noises Star Platinum heard, which was worse.

His mother must have noticed and said something to his grandfather, because the Speedwagon Foundation offered him sleeping pills.  He’d refused out of pure stubbornness at first.  In the end, they hadn’t worked.  Or, they had, sort of.  He’d pass out for four hours and then jolt awake, pulse racing.  It was arguably better and experientially worse, so he’d stopped.

“The nightmares are the worst, aren’t they?” Polnareff had casually remarked once when they’d both woken up exhausted after a full night’s sleep, and Jotaro hadn’t known how to tell him that he doesn’t get good enough sleep to dream anymore.

“Okay, I’ve got one,” Polnareff declares, and for one confused, heady moment, Jotaro thinks Polnareff has solved his insomnia problem.  “I spy with my little eye...something that starts with D!”

“It’s my turn.”

“I spy with my little eye something that starts with D!”

Jotaro sighs.  “Good grief.”

“I spy--”

“Dust,” Jotaro interrupts before Polnareff can repeat the whole damned thing for a third time.

“No.”

“Dirt.”

“Nope!”

“Dust...mote.”

“Wrong again!”

“Door.  Doorknob.  Derelict warehouse.  Dog.”  Jotaro can’t see a dog at the moment, but Polnareff had picked “raccoon” three rounds ago on the logic that it was something they had spied recently even if they couldn’t see it right now.

“All incorrect!”

Jotaro pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Are you admitting defeat, Jotaro?” Polnareff asks gleefully.

“Yeah, fine, sure.”

“It’s ‘dad’!” Polnareff crows.

Jotaro stares at him blankly.

Polnareff wilts slightly.  “Dad?  It’s...you?”  He sounds hesitant.  “Shit, the baby was born, right?”

“Oh.”  He’d forgotten momentarily.  It had felt like the two of them back on the road again, the two of them against any enemy they might possibly face, so he’d forgotten.  “Yeah.”

“And she’s healthy?”

Jotaro had held her first, and she had felt so small in his arms, fragile bones and paper-thin skin and delicate fingernails.  He hadn’t expected her to be born with fingernails, for some reason, and couldn’t stop staring at them.  Star Platinum had inspected every inch of her too, like maybe if it knew every whorl on her fingertips, it would be able to protect her from the world.  “Yeah. She’s fine.”

“What’s her name?”

“Jolyne.”  Jotaro’s mind had gone blank when he’d seen her, so her mother had picked the name.  “She can inherit the family nickname this way!” she’d said, and Jotaro had hoped that she wouldn’t.

“That’s a good name.”  Polnareff is gazing off into the distance, misty-eyed.  “I always wanted a big family.”  Jotaro wants to prod him back into watching the warehouse, but there’s nothing there to watch.  There’s nothing to watch and yet Jotaro can’t stop watching.  “A beautiful wife, a dog, a bunch of kids--at least three, no more than six.”

“How's that working out for you?” Jotaro asks automatically, most of his attention still fixed on the lack of anything interesting happening outside.

Polnareff laughs, but it sounds hollow.  The sound startles Jotaro enough that he glances sideways--he’s heard Polnareff laugh hundreds of times, but never like that.  “Well,” he says, “I’m here, aren’t I?”

The woman in the great coat appears in front of the warehouse with an audible bang, saving Jotaro from answering.

Chapter Text

Jotaro stops time in Morioh, and he keeps breathing.  It’s been ten years and he does it instinctually--holding time in place for a moment to avoid Josuke’s swing.  He doesn’t count the seconds or consult a watch, but he can tell that his timestop has gotten shorter in the past decade.  Time had felt interminable in the shrine forest, but here it’s just a few beats of his heart.

After Angelo is dealt with, after Jotaro is safely back in his hotel room, it strikes him that if he fails to utilize his timestop long enough, it might go away entirely.  The thought fills him with unease.  He still doesn’t want it--using it rattles him, even if ten years of distance have reduced the impact.  But he can’t shake the feeling that he might need it, that he has needed it the past few days.  Something feels off in Morioh, but Jotaro can’t tell if that’s a hunch or paranoia.

Jotaro can feel Star Platinum’s gaze prickling at the back of his neck--perhaps he summoned his Stand unconsciously or perhaps it emerged on its own.  For all he’s researched, he still doesn’t entirely understand how this works.  He doesn’t turn, and Star Platinum stays where it is, watching his back in all senses of the word.

“Okay,” Jotaro says to an empty room.  “Okay,” he says to himself.

He finally turns to face his Stand.  It looks no different than the first time Jotaro saw it, still ghostly and looming and muscular.  He still itches under the weight of its stare, instinctually wants to dodge and flinch away.  They’ve become familiar with each other in the past decade, but familiar doesn’t mean comfortable.  Theirs is a relationship of necessity--and thinking of it that way unsticks Jotaro's tongue long enough for him to ask, “Truce?”

Star Platinum doesn’t respond, but Jotaro doesn’t need it to.

***

He’d just started third grade when his mother signed him up for the chigo procession to celebrate the end of construction on the local shrine.  “It’ll be fun!” she’d said.  “I’m sure all the boys in the neighborhood will be doing it.”  At the time he’d taken her at her word, but now he wonders if it had been her clumsy attempt to give him a normal Japanese childhood.  She’d always tried so damn hard to fit in, even when she never could, and tried to make him feel like he fit in, even if he never did.  Perhaps this was just one more attempt to make Jotaro feel more like a normal Japanese boy from a normal Japanese family.

It hadn’t been fun.  The robes had been heavy and uncomfortable, and his mother kept gently pulling his hands away from his face to stop him from smudging his makeup.  Almost all the other children had been younger than him; he was already tall for his age, and positively towered over the crowd of three- and four-year-olds.  It started drizzling halfway through, so it had been less like a parade and more like a bunch of adults trying to herd unruly preschoolers around the route as fast as possible so they could get back inside.  The ceremony back at the shrine had felt interminable, one priest after another droning on in archaic Japanese while Jotaro tried not to shift in his chair.

What does stick out in his mind is the moment when the object of worship was transferred into the new building.  They’d all bowed their heads, but it had taken so long that Jotaro had looked up--just a peek to see what was happening.  “Don’t look,” his mother had whispered to him, but he had only seen the long, white curtains concealing whatever was within from prying eyes.  “What’s that?” he’d asked, and his mother had shushed him.

His mother had explained to him afterwards about the object of worship the god of the shrine resides in.  As she’d cleaned the makeup from his face, she’d told him that the object had to be shielded from human eyes, and scolded him gently for trying to look.  

Jotaro doesn’t know what it means that Stand users are referred to by similar terminology.  The “main body,” they call the user, as though something supernatural has temporarily alighted in a human form.  Maybe it’s just a coincidence.  Maybe it isn’t.  “We have to find the main body,” they say when they’re up against a long-range Stand, and Jotaro thinks of the slow, silent shuffle of white curtains. 

Maybe it's because he's using the timestop again or maybe it's because he's back in Japan with its fortune tellers in the train stations and Jizo statues on street corners, but his mind keeps circling back to the nature of his Stand.  He tries to focus on the dissertation, but it gnaws at him.  In a fit of procrastination, he makes a list of possibilities: ghost, possessing spirit, superpower, or some combination of the above.  He justifies that he should know who he’s allied himself with--what he’s allied himself with.  “Don’t look,” his mother had said, but he can’t stop looking, hypervigilant even without his Stand’s assistance.

***

They had holed up for the night in Singapore when Jotaro finally figured out how to phrase his question.  “Kakyoin.”

Kakyoin looked up from his book, some slim paperback he picked up at a used bookstore earlier that day.  It was in English, and Jotaro felt a jealous twinge at how quickly and easily he seemed to be breezing through it.  Kakyoin’s expression was that carefully attentive, politely listening face he so often defaulted to.  “Yes?”

He’d practiced this question dozens of times in his head, turned it over and over until it was perfect, but now the words felt ungainly in his mouth.  Still, he’d broached the topic, so he forged ahead. “Are Stands like...people? Are they like ghosts or just...part of the user?”

Kakyoin smiled, still polite and polished.  “Are you asking for a professional opinion or my personal experience?”

The latter, Jotaro wanted to say, but instead he said, “Both.”

“Well, I’m not a professional,” Kakyoin said, quickly dropping into his lecturing voice, “but I’ve been speaking to Mr. Joestar and Mr. Avdol about the research that’s been done on Stands, and it seems that they’re understood to be a manifestation of the user’s will.  So maybe it’s best to think of them as a reflection of the user’s inner self, made concrete.”

“Your inner self is a gross tapeworm,” Jotaro said incredulously.

Kakyoin smiled again, but there was an edge to it this time.  “And yours is a giant, screaming, mostly naked man.”

“I thought Star Platinum was an evil spirit when I first saw it,” Jotaro confessed.  He wasn’t sure why he wanted Kakyoin to know that--it wasn’t like he’d talked to anyone about it since he found out the truth--but he did.  “I thought I was possessed.”

Kakyoin laughed, not his restrained laugh hidden behind his hand, but that odd squeaking wheeze he let slip sometimes.  “I can see why you’d think that.”  He closed his book and set it aside.  “I can imagine that suddenly waking up with a Stand would be disorienting.”

Jotaro couldn’t remember when he first realized that Star Platinum was there.  It wasn’t that it suddenly appeared one day.  Jotaro became aware of its existence in bits and pieces: an attacker going flying before his fist made contact, a lukewarm can of beer suddenly appearing next to him.  He doesn’t remember the moment when he first thought, I’m possessed, but there must have been a moment.  It must have been before he started raiding the second-hand bookstore for every spiritualist self-help book he could get his hands on--most of them were bunk, but if there was any chance of answers he felt that he had to try.  It must have been before he decided to stay in jail.  He just couldn’t remember that moment.  It must have been disorienting.  It had to have been.

“It’s always seemed natural to me for Hierophant Green to be there,” Kakyoin continued, without regard for Jotaro’s silence.  “In truth, it’s hard for me to imagine what it would be like to live without a Stand.”

There was something about the way Kakyoin and Hierophant Green moved that Jotaro found both beautiful and unnerving.  They moved together--not simultaneously, but as a single unit.  Hierophant Green flicked out to grab things for Kakyoin before he even reached for them, slithered around Kakyoin’s ankles and wrapped around his shoulders without him ever reacting.  The Stand moved as a perfect extension of its user, or maybe the boy was the human extension of his Stand.

“On the plane,” Jotaro said, “you said that your Stand loves ripping things apart.”

Kakyoin’s smile froze slightly, growing brittle around the edges.

Jotaro didn’t know how to put words to his question--it was still percolating, but if he didn’t ask now, he didn’t know when he would.  “Does Hierophant Green have...feelings?”

Kakyoin shrugged, uncharacteristically quiet.

“I mean, if Stands are an extension of their user, wouldn’t that mean that you love ripping things apart?”

“Why do you want to know?” Kakyoin asked, expression guarded.

“I just.  I wondered.”  

Kakyoin considered him.  That was something Jotaro appreciated about him--he watched and listened and read between the lines.  Jotaro didn’t have to keep explaining obvious things to him, because he understood.  “Do you like punching things?”

Jotaro wanted to put his fist through a wall sometimes.  Through a wall or maybe through someone’s skull.  He had thought about it in detail, the crunch of bone, the mess of blood and grey matter.  He got so angry sometimes, so violently angry.  He had seen Star Platinum and thought, Evil spirit, because it had been easier than seeing a resemblance, all his darkest impulses personified.  There were some days when Jotaro watched Star Platinum trash an enemy and it felt like catharsis.  “Yeah.”  He cleared his throat.  “I mean, sometimes.”

“Well then,” Kakyoin said, as though that settled it, and maybe it did.

***

Josuke is a creative thinker, compensating for what he lacks in brute strength with hairbrained plans that somehow still mostly work.  He takes after his father in that way, as loath as Jotaro is to admit it.  He uses his environment to his advantage, smashing walls and rebuilding them behind him just as quickly.  Using Crazy Diamond seems like second nature to him--he accidentally drops a plate and has reformed it in his hand before Jotaro can even think of reaching for a broom.  Star Platinum has hair-trigger reflexes too, but its lightning-speed reactions don’t feel like they’re Jotaro’s, not fully.

Maybe that’s where the difference lies between them.  Josuke has had Crazy Diamond almost as long as he can remember, but even after a decade, Star Platinum still feels like an anomaly.  Jotaro’s used to its presence, of course, but they don’t move in that unthinking synchrony that Jotaro sees from so many users who gained their Stands in childhood.  Josuke uses Crazy Diamond like an extension of himself, like Kakyoin used Hierophant Green, while Jotaro uses Star Platinum like a weapon that was suddenly thrust into his hands.

Then again, maybe Jotaro is just an outlier.  There’s a tentativeness Jotaro has seen in Koichi’s interactions with Echoes, but it’s hesitation born of unfamiliarity rather than uneasy truce.  Koichi’s never tried to exorcise himself.

“Have you ever used Star Platinum to cheat on a test?” Okuyasu asks idly while they're waiting for Koichi to arrive at their rendezvous point.

“No.”  He’d thought about it once during an organic chemistry exam.  The professor had called sixty seconds remaining, and in a moment of pure adrenaline-fueled desperation, he’d considered it.  

He hadn’t, in the end.  It wasn’t like five seconds would make much of a difference.

Okuyasu looks dubious.  “Seems like a waste. I would if I could stop time.”

“Okuyasu,” Josuke hisses, smacking at his arm.  “You can’t just say that. He’s a teacher.”

“Oh shit,” Okuyasu says at the same time as Jotaro corrects, “Grad student.”

“You teach though, right?” Josuke insists.

“Yeah.  Sometimes.”  It’s been a while.  He almost misses it.

“I’m just saying,” Okuyasu mutters, “with a Stand like that I’d get perfect scores on everything.”

***

When Jotaro first learned about Stands, he thought he was one in a hundred million. His Stand was so powerful, his mother's Stand so dangerous, he could not imagine more than a select few bearing that kind of power.  He carried a nuclear bomb, but was secure in the knowledge that few others did.

Morioh makes him rethink.  It feels like half the population--restaurateurs, middle school students, rodents, even infants--has Stands.  His constant vigilance feels justified in a way it never has before, not when the only Stand users he regularly crossed paths with were his own family and the occasional weakling left in the wake of the arrows.  Before, he was a graduate student who sometimes went looking for Stand users on school breaks; now Stand users are inescapable.  They have allies--for reasons Jotaro can’t comprehend, Josuke seems to befriend just about everyone he meets, even the ones who try to kill him--but there’s still so much evil simmering beneath the surface of this idyllic small town, banal and omnipresent.

He came here to study starfish, not save anyone or anything.  But maybe he has no choice, never had a choice, will never have a choice.  Maybe this is the Joestar legacy his grandfather talks about so often.

“I thought we could come visit,” his wife says with no preamble when he picks up the phone.  It’s one of the things Jotaro likes about her--she gets straight to the point.  It saves time and his patience and, most importantly at the moment, money, since international calls are expensive.  “JoJo gets out of school next month and work will let me take time off.  We have enough saved up to come visit for a few weeks, at least.”

“No.”

“She misses you, Jotaro,” she says.  “And it would be good for her to see Japan.”

Jotaro can’t think of a better excuse, so he tells the truth.  “It’s not safe.”

“...aren’t you doing dissertation research?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Complicated because of the research?”  She sounds dubious.  “We can stay out of your hair, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’m doing some work for the Speedwagon Foundation.”

“Is there some kind of environmental issue?” she asks, because of course she’d jump to that conclusion.  Jotaro’s a marine biologist, Morioh is a coastal town, of course she’d assume that he’s been called in to fix something poisoning the bay.

It would be easy to just say yes.  The excuse has been ready-made and handed to him on a silver platter.

“It’s complicated,” he says, after a pause long enough to be suspicious.

“JoJo,” she says, and hearing her call him by the same nickname as his daughter is abruptly too much.

“I have to go,” he says, clutching the receiver so hard that the plastic edges dig into his fingers, and he hangs up before she can respond.

***

“You’re really chill,” Koichi says.

Jotaro raises an eyebrow.  He’d met Koichi, Josuke, and Okuyasu after school let out to debrief them and somehow had been strong-armed into joining them at a cafe.  Now they’re all crammed around a corner table, sipping tea and eating slices of strawberry shortcake.  Okuyasu keeps jittering, his knee knocking against Jotaro’s under the table.  Jotaro suspects that he’s only been invited so he can foot the bill.  

Koichi shrugs.  “Just...I’ve never seen you panic.”

“I do sometimes,” Jotaro says.  Josuke’s certainly seen him do it.  He’s pretty sure Koichi has too.

But Koichi’s frowning at him, uncomprehending.  “You never seem fazed by anything.”

That’s because I’m too tired, Jotaro doesn’t say.  He’s constantly on high alert, so when his telephone explodes or an enemy Stand attacks, it isn’t surprising.  It feels like catharsis--like maybe all his watching and waiting and holding himself at attention has served a purpose.  Or maybe it feels like the inevitable--the other shoe dropping, the punchline of a joke that’s been going for years.  He’s not going to waste his energy reacting to something like that.

“Yeah!” Okuyasu chimes in, barreling through Jotaro’s silence.  “Jotaro’s the strong, silent type!  Just always,” Okuyasu sets his jaw, gazing into the middle distance ferociously, before making a series of incomprehensible noises while wildly karate chopping.  

Koichi easily ducks Okuyasu’s flailing arms, but Josuke accidentally gets thwacked in the face, which leads to a brief wrestling match.  

Jotaro doesn’t bother to intercede.  He’s seen enough roughhousing between them to know that at some point one of them will win or both of them will get bored.  He does pick up his plate and saucer, because he’s not stupid.  A moment after he does so, Josuke collides with the table hard enough to make Koichi’s tea slosh out of his cup.

“Man, I bet girls dig that,” Okuyasu says wistfully when he finally disentangles himself from Josuke’s pseudo-headlock.  “Do you think you could give me some tips?”

Jotaro puts down his plate a little harder than he needs to.  “No.”

“C’mooooon, you’re killing me here!”

“No.”

“I just want to be cool,” Okuyasu pouts.

“You are cool,” Josuke says at the same time Jotaro says, “I’m not cool.”

The boys stare at him, their expressions spanning the range from skeptical (Koichi) to clearly disbelieving (Okuyasu).

I’m not, Jotaro doesn’t say.  He tried to be cool for so long, but all he’s ever managed is quiet and imposing.  He stops being cool the moment he opens his mouth, as Polnareff has reminded him a hundred times.

“Jotaro,” Josuke says, and he’s speaking tentative, carefully pronounced English, which can herald nothing good, “you’re one cool cat.”

Jotaro takes a deep breath.  “Did Jiji teach you that,” he asks, flatly.

“No!” Josuke says in a scandalized tone that says Joseph absolutely taught him that.  “Maybe I learned some American slang on my own!”

“Nobody says that anymore.”

Josuke visibly deflates.  “Oh.”

“Shit, that sounded cool, though,” Okuyasu said.  “No idea what you said, but.”

Josuke perks up again.  “Yeah?”

“You sound like an eighty-year-old man,” Jotaro reiterates.  He needs to dissuade Josuke from ever uttering the phrase “cool cat” again, but from the grin on Josuke’s face he’s fairly sure it’s already a lost cause.

(When they go to the register to pay, Josuke suddenly realizes that he has no money, and Okuyasu tries to cover him before realizing that he’s also eighty yen short.  Koichi offers to pay for both of them, but grimaces when he looks in his wallet.  Jotaro can’t tell if this is the greatest con ever pulled or if they’re all genuinely financially incompetent, but he winds up paying for everyone anyway.)

***

Jotaro has never been one for elaborate plans. Even before he had a Stand, he always relied on brute force.  Step one: beat the shit out of the guy.  No further steps necessary.

Star Platinum is explosive violence condensed into humanoid form.  It’s strong and fast and precise, but most importantly, it’s straightforward.  With Star Platinum, Jotaro can pummel his enemies into submission without breaking a sweat.  Sure, sometimes he has to switch it up in the middle of a battle, but he’s not incapable of thinking on his feet, even if he’s not as nimble as his grandfather.  It’s just that 90% of the time he doesn’t need to do anything other than get close enough for Star Platinum to punch as hard and fast as it possibly can.

He’s never been a long-term planner anyway, not before everything and certainly not after.  He can think a few steps ahead, but mostly he takes it moment by moment.  Step one: go to Morioh.  Step two: find Josuke.  By step three his plan is already derailed, so it’s just as well he didn’t plan ahead.  Less work for him to redo.

Jotaro’s never really learned how to plan ahead with anyone else, either.  Polnareff has been fighting by his side so long that they move instinctually, watching each other’s blind spots and covering each other’s backs.  The plan isn’t usually much more complicated than “you go right and I’ll go left.”  Jotaro has enough strength to take down any enemy, so as long as he can get safely within striking range, the battle is over.

Jotaro’s current plan with regards to the serial killer is “find him and beat the shit out of him.”  The problem is, that’s a one-man plan.  They don’t need a whole village to track someone down, and yet Josuke calls everyone, even some Stand users who Jotaro’s pretty sure aren’t actually their allies.  Josuke’s acting like this should be a group effort, but Jotaro knows better than to needlessly involve people who are liable to become cannon fodder.

Jotaro can track down this guy, whoever he is, and then Star Platinum will beat him into submission, same as they’ve done with dozens before him.  It’s one thing to take his uncle out rat hunting--it’s another to put him in the path of a murderer who’s already killed another Stand user.  Jotaro faced DIO with no plan and no allies and no idea what he was doing, but Josuke doesn’t need that kind of trial by fire.

“You’ll let us know when you find out more, right?” Josuke asks, and Jotaro doesn’t answer.

***

Fact: Ghosts apparently exist.

He’d seen the tacky billboards and handbills as a teenager: “See into the spirit world!” they’d said, with a “spirit photograph” of a blur that was probably meant to be a ghost.  “Speak to what lurks behind the veil! All your questions answered!”

He’s spoken to it now, and she hasn’t been particularly helpful.  “I don’t know,” Reimi says in response to almost all of his questions.  “I don’t really know how it works.”

Fact: Ghosts can apparently have Stands.

Jotaro nearly crosses “ghost” off the list.  Then he thinks better of it.  He tells himself that it’s because they don’t have enough evidence either way.  He tells himself it has nothing to do with sentiment for someone he's never met, who never even knew of his existence.  He tells himself many things and even manages to believe some of them.

***

“You asked in Singapore,” Kakyoin had said, after they’d deposited the baby in the nearest village and were making their way to the coastline.  “If I liked ripping things apart.”

Jotaro remembered the conversation, vaguely.  “Yeah.”

Kakyoin lifted his chin, although Jotaro was too tall for Kakyoin to look down at him.  “I do,” Kakyoin said, like it was a challenge somehow.  He looked like he was ready for Jotaro to swing at him, or maybe like he was ready to shank someone.

“Okay.”

Kakyoin didn’t relax at all, body still vibrating with tension.  “...that’s it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yesterday you all thought I had snapped and now you’re just...fine with this?  You’re not going to call me crazy and kick me out of the group?”

Jotaro shrugged.  “I’ve killed people.”

“That’s not what I’m--”

“Isn’t it?”

Kakyoin held himself ramrod straight, hands clenched, chin still raised.  He would have looked imperious if Jotaro didn’t know better.  He would have looked disdainful if Jotaro couldn’t see the nervous tremor in his throat when he swallowed.

“I don’t really get Stands,” Jotaro said, “but I get wanting to put your fist through something.”

Kakyoin took a deep breath.  “Okay,” he said, but his voice remained high and tight even if some of the tension eased out of his shoulders.  “Yeah, that’s.  That’s close enough.”

The next time Kakyoin jabbed Jotaro in the ribs with his elbow out of annoyance, Jotaro shoved back twice as hard, and Kakyoin laughed right in his face, teeth bared and voice squeaking.  

Jotaro still thinks about it sometimes, Kakyoin with his sharp elbows and sharper smile.  He thinks about Hierophant Green writhing in joy, and his user filled with similar sadistic glee.  He thinks about the two of them moving as a seamless unit.

He thinks too about Kakyoin shying away from possessing anyone after that first day they met.  “I don't need it much,” he'd said, with a smile that was too tight around the corners of his mouth.

If his Stand is an evil spirit, then what is Jotaro--the spirit medium or the victim of possession?  He can look at Star Platinum and see his desire to put a fist through a wall writ large, but Star Platinum: The World?  That’s something else.  That power comes from outside of himself--it has to.  So: an evil spirit.  He cannot exorcise himself, but he can cordon it off with words, separate it from himself through disuse.  The World will always be DIO’s, even if Jotaro has had its power longer than DIO ever did.  It’s fitting, somehow, Jotaro carrying DIO’s last words in his head and the last of his power in his Stand.

He doesn’t know if Kakyoin would understand, but he likes to imagine he would.

***

Josuke invites Jotaro over for dinner, once he gets out of the hospital.  “I’ll make curry!” he says.  “It’ll be like a going away party!”

As it turns out, by “I’ll make curry” Josuke means “my mom is away for the weekend and I don’t know how to read recipes.”  

“How hard can it be?” Josuke asks blithely, and Jotaro demotes him to vegetable chopping duty.  He’s surprisingly competent as long as he’s given directions--“Mom makes me help her in the kitchen,” Josuke explains, when Koichi asks about it.  Okuyasu’s also a pretty decent cook--“I do all the cooking for me and Dad,” he says proudly, and starts telling them about the time he almost managed to make flower-shaped carrots for his bento--so Jotaro lets him be in charge of the pot.  Koichi, as far as Jotaro can tell, has never set foot in a kitchen and barely knows how to hold a vegetable peeler.  “Haven’t you learned anything from Yukako?” Josuke teases, and Koichi blushes and fumbles a potato, dropping it straight onto the floor.

“How did you get so good at this anyway?” Josuke asks Jotaro, as though making curry is somehow more complicated than cutting things up, throwing them in a pot, and stirring them occasionally to make sure they don’t burn.

Jotaro shrugs.  He started cooking in college, but he can’t remember when he became competent.  Sometime after the vinegar incident, he thinks.  Definitely after the bean incident.  “Practice.”

They somehow manage not to burn the house down.  The curry tastes fine too.

“Can you train your Stand?” Josuke asks while Okuyasu shovels food into his face.  “Could you make it stronger by making it do a bunch of push-ups? Or faster if you, I don’t know, had it practice grabbing a grasshopper out of your hand?”

“I thought that only worked in movies,” Koichi says, because he’s the only one of these teenage disasters with a good head on his shoulders.  “Can you do that in real life?”

“Kung-fu exists in real life,” Josuke retorts.

“Oh, right,” Koichi says, and Jotaro reconsiders his assessment.

“Oh!” Okuyasu says through a mouthful of rice, spewing grains across the table.  “What if you, uh, what if you got a bunch of bricks and you lifted those with your Stand?  Would it get stronger?”

“I don’t know,” Jotaro says.

“Have you tried?” Josuke asks, and there’s something forced about his casual tone as he pushes his curry around his plate.

“No,” Jotaro admits.

“Okay, but you started being able to stop time in Egypt, right?” Josuke asks.  “Was that because you trained? Or was it like Echoes evolving?”

Jotaro pauses for the briefest moment, mind blank, but then forces himself to take a breath.  In, out.  He pries his tightly clenched fingers off of his spoon.  “I don’t know,” he repeats.

“Okay, so if I trained, Crazy D could level up, maybe?” Josuke asks eagerly.  “Crazy Diamond Act II?”

Okuyasu and Koichi are glancing between the two of them, eyes wide.  Uneasy comprehension is dawning on Koichi’s face; Okuyasu just looks on in rapt attention.

Jotaro isn’t good at being comforting.  There’s a reason he and Kakyoin got along--Kakyoin mean on purpose and Jotaro unkind through sheer social clumsiness.  His grandfather, for all his faults, is more empathetic than he is, better at knowing what people need to hear.  Jotaro saw his grandfather pull Josuke aside when he was discharged from the hospital, caught the quiet, “None of that was your fault.”  Even Tomoko had swept her son into a hug and said, “You did well,” after giving him a vicious dressing down.  Jotaro had pretended he hadn’t seen Josuke tearing up, because he isn’t heartless.

There’s no way for him to be kind about this, though.  He doesn’t know how to make his words softer, so he just says, “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

Josuke says nothing, but his face says everything.

“You don’t need to,” Jotaro says.  “Level up.  Get stronger.  Faster.  Whatever.”

“I--” Josuke starts, but Jotaro cuts him off before he can finish.

“Your Stand is already powerful.”  He doesn’t know the right words, but he soldiers on anyway.  “And its power is...kind.  You can do something no one else can.  You can fix things.”

“Not everything,” Josuke says.

“Nobody can fix everything,” Jotaro agrees.

“Besides, that’s what we’re here for, right?” Koichi adds nervously, still glancing between the two of them.  “To help?  None of us can do it alone; that’s why we have to work together.  Right, Jotaro?”

“Yeah!” Okuyasu chimes in.  “With all of us we’re unbeatable!”

“Yeah,” Josuke says, voice caught in the wobbling range between a laugh and a much wetter emotion.  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

Chapter Text

When Jotaro gets the call about Polnareff he does not stop time.  His voice does not quake when he asks for details, and his hands do not tremble when he hangs up the phone.  He only holds his breath for a moment.

Polnareff has always been bigger than life--loud and over the top and demanding attention--yet now he looks small.  He’s physically smaller, of course, but his presence seems to have contracted.

Maybe it’s that Polnareff has always seemed, in some way, fundamentally unkillable.  All three of them had survived Egypt, technically, but Joseph had died, however briefly, and Jotaro’s heart had stopped, clenched in Star Platinum’s fist.  Polnareff, on the other hand, had never died.  He’d come out missing a few fingers and toes, but otherwise seemed undiminished.  Maybe that’s just who Polnareff is--someone who is flung headlong into tragedy and comes out the other side still swinging and joking and coming up with increasingly convoluted secret handshakes.  Maybe that’s how Polnareff has survived so long.  

Jotaro doesn’t know.  He doesn’t know a lot of things, he realizes, as he hovers in the doorway of the hospital room.

“Hey,” Polnareff says.

Jotaro doesn’t know what to say.  When he tries to reach for words, they aren’t there.

Jotaro looks down at Polnareff in his hospital bed, in pants that are empty below the knee, a bandage across one eye--and, oh, Jotaro has been here before, gripping a pair of hands groping toward him.  He’d wanted to say something, but he couldn’t figure out what.  “I’m sorry,” perhaps.  “I should have been faster,” maybe.

“Did you get him?” Kakyoin had asked, expression inscrutable.

“Yeah.”  He cleared his throat.  “I pushed harder.”

Kakyoin smiled slowly, wide and thin-lipped.  “That's the best I can ask for.”

Jotaro snarled in frustration.  “Maybe you should set your sights a little higher than not going blind.”

Kakyoin shrugged, elegant and careless.  “It wouldn't be the end of the world.”

“It would be--” forced its way out of Jotaro’s mouth without his permission.  He took a deep breath, rephrasing.  “It would be the end of this, though.”

Kakyoin's eyes visibly narrowed behind his bandages.  “Good thing they'll heal and I'll be able to rejoin you in Cairo.”

“You don't have to,” Jotaro said, dropping his hands.  He couldn’t bring himself to look at Kakyoin's face to see what might be reflected there.  Anger?  Disgust?  Hope?

“JoJo,” Kakyoin said in that tone that broached no protest.  “Look at me.”  A moment later he added, “Please.”

Jotaro looked.  Kakyoin’s hair was flatter than usual, dulled by sand and bleached by sun.  White bandages crossed most of his face.  His pajamas looked as stupid as they always looked, but they suited him somehow.  “You don't have to either, you know,” he said, with the ghost of a smile playing at his lips.

“No.”  Too much was at stake and they were almost certainly walking into a death trap, but Jotaro didn’t plan on going down alone.  He had Star Platinum, if no one else.  His grandfather would come, because this was his quest and his family, and he'd always cared about protecting the people he loved.  Polnareff would stay because he was pure tenacity, and now that he had set his sights on DIO, nothing would stop him until he got his revenge.  Avdol could walk away--he wasn’t too embroiled to not be able to just turn around and disappear into the sunset.  Jotaro knew he wouldn't, because he’d laughed in Jotaro's face when he’d tried to broach the subject.  “I didn’t come back from the dead just to leave again,” he’d said.

Jotaro hadn't even tried to reason with Iggy.  He'd be there or he wouldn't, and that was about all anyone could know.

So that left Kakyoin, temporarily blinded but stubborn as he'd ever been.  “Guess we're stuck together then,” he’d said with no humor in his voice.  

“That bad?” Polnareff asks wryly.

Jotaro still isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say, so he blurts out, “I’ve seen worse.”

Polnareff laughs, and for a moment he looks the same as he always has.  “That’s not actually comforting, you know.”

“I’m shit at being comforting.”

“I know.”

It strikes Jotaro that he doesn’t know when they grew up.  He went to Egypt a teenager and came back changed; he hadn’t felt older so much as different, like he didn’t fit anymore.  Polnareff hadn’t seemed much older than Jotaro when they traveled together--he had more years of experience, yes, but in terms of maturity?  Polnareff felt like a peer.  He’d changed too, after Egypt, but not in the way Jotaro had.  Polnareff had mellowed, rough edges blunted and impulses curbed.  Jotaro had seen him, again and again, a week here and a month there, sandwiched between months of minimal contact.  Polnareff had been recognizable every time he’d seen him, but now he realizes that at some point in the past decade, when he wasn’t paying attention, they’d both grown up.  Now they’re two adults separated by three feet of space and so many things Jotaro doesn’t know how to say.

“I’ll be up and about again in no time,” Polnareff says.

“Sure.”

“The Speedwagon Foundation is sending someone next week to fit the prosthetics.”

“Good.”

“Then I can get back on the trail--”

“No.”

“I have a better idea of what we’re up against now,” Polnareff says, as though that matters.

“I’ll go,” Jotaro decides.

“We don’t have enough information.”

“We can gather information.”

“I can gather information,” Polnareff insists.  “You have to go back to the States.  You have a job outside of this.”

“I’m a graduate student,” Jotaro corrects him, even though he knows that won’t be true for much longer.

“You have a family.”

Jotaro can’t find a response.  “That’s why I should be the one to do it” feels like the wrong thing to say.  “That doesn’t matter” feels worse.  So Jotaro says nothing.

Polnareff settles back on his pillows, clearly convinced he’s won the argument.  “Anyway, who is going to watch your back without me around?” he jokes half-heartedly.

“Star Platinum,” Jotaro answers automatically.

Polnareff looks upset for the first time in the conversation--he’d looked tired, Jotaro realizes, and he’d looked diminished, but not upset.  “You can’t watch your own back, Jotaro.  Not even you’re that powerful."

“There isn’t anyone else.”  His grandfather is too old to go out searching for the arrows, and Jotaro wouldn’t take him even if he weren’t.

“What about any of those kids in Japan?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t Mr. Joestar’s son have a punchy Stand?  He was telling me about it. Diamond...something or other, right?  The Diamond?” Of course his grandfather would tell Polnareff about Crazy Diamond.  Of course.  Jotaro has overheard their conversations on occasion--it’s hard not to, when his grandfather yells into the phone as though his conversational partner is as hard of hearing as he is.  (Not that Joseph Joestar hasn’t always shouted half of his conversations, hearing loss or no.  Still, it hasn’t helped.)  He hasn't heard Josuke's Stand come up, but then again, he isn't surprised that it would.

“They’re kids.”

“You and Kakyoin were seventeen,” Polnareff points out, as though this is somehow a rebuttal.

Jotaro’s stomach clenches.  “They can barely look both ways before crossing the street.”

“Sounds like they did fine to me,” Polnareff says.  “They got two arrows and took down a serial killer.  That’s pretty good for a bunch of teenagers.”

“No,” Jotaro says.  “We’ll figure out something else.”

***

“Professor Kujo” fits him, not like the familiar weight of his coat, but like something that he could grow into given time.

Jotaro becomes legendary on campus for being preternaturally aware of what’s happening in his classroom at all times.  “It's like he's got eyes in the back of his head,” his students whisper when they think he's out of earshot.  His teaching evaluations are mixed--some students hate his brusqueness while others appreciate his no-nonsense attitude.  If there are any Stand users in his classes, they’re very good at concealing themselves.  Jotaro stays on high alert anyway--Stand users are drawn to each other, after all, and he doesn’t want another Morioh on his hands.

“You can't deny Kujo is good at what he does,” his colleagues say.  They treat him with respect if not familiarity, but Jotaro’s fine with that.  He’s no good in faculty meetings, but his work speaks for itself.  “Meticulous,” they call his scholarship.  “Workaholic,” they call him.  He doesn’t feel like disputing either point.

He keeps scheduling work for the Speedwagon Foundation over breaks.  It feels strange not to, at this point.  Plus, there isn’t anyone else to do it.

“It won’t kill you to delegate,” Polnareff says the next time he calls, as though he’s ever delegated anything in his life.  “You sound like you’re burning the candle at both ends, if you know what I mean.”

Jotaro doesn’t know what he means.  He isn’t any more tired than he usually is.  He isn’t any less productive.  He hasn’t had a full weekend at home in three months, but that just means he’s been keeping busy.  Busy is good.  Busy means progress.

The first time he falls asleep at his office desk, Star Platinum wakes him.  Normally he can’t sleep without a locked door between him and the rest of the world, but he somehow manages to doze off on a Thursday morning in February.  Maybe it’s because he’s finally got his own office with a door he can close rather than having his desk jammed into the corner of a shared space.  Maybe it’s because he hasn’t been sleeping well at home.  Maybe he really is burning the candle at both ends.  He startles awake as soon as Star Platinum shakes him, scanning for enemies even in his confused, half-asleep state.  “Thanks,” he mumbles, trying to blink himself into consciousness.  He registers the word a second later, but it’s too late to take it back.

The second time he wakes up at his desk, mug of coffee gone cold and a crick in his neck, Star Platinum is floating between him and the office door, silently keeping watch.

***

“That’s an explanation, not an excuse,” Grandma Suzie had said, when Joseph tried to rationalize Josuke’s existence to her.  Jotaro doesn’t remember most of the rest of the conversation, since his attention had been focused on trying to get out of the room and away from his stupid, dramatic family, but he remembers Grandma Suzie pulling herself up to her full height and still having to look up to make eye contact with his grandfather.  He remembers the sheer anger contained in her voice, in her perfectly straight back, in her bitterly cold stare.

Jotaro thinks about that--not Josuke’s existence (although he does think about that), but the difference between explanations and excuses.  His grandfather speaks in excuses disguised as explanations, words slippery and everyone but him to blame.  Polnareff also has a tendency to speak in excuses when he’s feeling guilty--a hundred reasons why he went ahead alone, opened the door, pushed the button that said “do not touch.”  

Jotaro doesn’t make excuses but neither does he give explanations, except when they’re absolutely necessary.  He's like his mother in that way, although she fills silences with empty chatter while he lets them sit and fester.  Fewer words means less wasted breath.

“I have to go,” he says.  It’s a statement of fact, no further justification needed.

Jolyne’s face falls every time, and Jotaro hopes she never understands.  Understanding would mean knowing--about the danger, about Stands, about her father fighting a hundred battles to keep her safe--and the whole point is for her not to know.  Explaining properly would mean her knowing, and explaining improperly would become an excuse.  So Jotaro just says, “I have to go,” full stop.  When he says it that way, it feels more like a strategic maneuver and less like running away.

***

Jotaro doesn’t have a choice in sending Koichi to Italy.  That’s what he tells himself, anyway.  There’s no one else who can do the job--no one else he would trust, in any case.  Koichi has a good head on his shoulders, and there’s nothing to suggest that getting a skin sample from a teenager will be life-threatening.  He’ll be safe.

(He wonders if this is what his grandfather thought about him.  He wonders if his grandfather thought about it at all, and, no, that’s not fair.  “You can't let them go after him,” Joseph had told him after Shigechi’s death, and Jotaro had known that his grandfather wouldn’t have dragged him to Egypt if he’d had another choice.  But still, he’d taken Jotaro--he’d taken them all.  He doesn’t get to dodge responsibility for that.)

Jotaro keeps his instructions short and to the point.  There’s no point in overburdening Koichi with information.  There’s no point in unearthing ancient history.  There’s no point in picking at his own wounds until they reopen.  “Get a skin sample,” he says.  “I need the Speedwagon Foundation to check his genetic material.”  He could say more, but he doesn’t.  Koichi will get a spring vacation abroad, Jotaro will get the information he needs, and the past will stay firmly where he left it.

***

Jotaro had been dragged to the shrine by his mother for yakubarae when he was twenty-five.  He’d thought it was pointless--there was no reason to believe that twenty-five would be less lucky than any year that came before it.  He was only back in town for a few days, too, so it seemed like a waste of his limited time.  But his mother had insisted, and even managed to drag his father along, so Jotaro had gone begrudgingly.

It was early March but the inside of the shrine had still been bitterly cold, even with the space heaters aimed at them.  He'd felt uncomfortably exposed without his hat, but his mother had insisted that wearing it inside would be unspeakably rude.  

The priest had told them to bow their heads in order to be purified, and, for a split second, Jotaro had panicked.  

Or, not panicked.  Panic was anxiety, and he was not anxious.  This was an emotion closer to hope--hope but sharp, like a knife between his ribs.

In hindsight it seems ridiculous, thinking that waving a branch over his head would somehow hurt his Stand.  He’d tried it once, back when Star Platinum first appeared, with the logic that anything was worth trying once.  He’d sat in a sandy patch in the garden and stumbled through a purification rite, tripping over unfamiliar words as he read from a book he’d found in the bargain bin at the second-hand bookstore.  

He had felt no different when he finished.  Well, maybe he felt more foolish, but otherwise no different.

He’d thought of trying it again, after Egypt, after some fragment of DIO lodged itself deep in him or after his will had become twisted enough to resemble DIO’s.  He hadn’t bothered, in the end. If it hadn’t worked the first time, there was no reason to think it would the second.

He’d raised his head when the priest prompted.  He’d sat quietly for the rest of the ceremony without fidgeting.  At the end, the priest had told him that he was purified and protected from ill fortune for the coming year, and Jotaro had felt no different.

Koichi calls to confirm Jotaro’s suspicions.  DIO’s legacy lives on past his death, past his utter annihilation.  DIO lives on in someone other than Jotaro, in something other than Jotaro’s Stand.  Jotaro knows he should be afraid, but in that first moment, all he feels is relief, sharp like a knife between his ribs. 

***

“You're a turtle now,” Jotaro says flatly.

Polnareff laughs uproariously.  “Looks like it! In a turtle at any case.”  He's propped up on his elbows to survey Jotaro from the jewel implanted in the turtle’s shell.

“And you're...fine with that.”

Polnareff shrugs.  “Better than being dead, my friend.”

“You are dead, though,” Jotaro says, and the clarification feels like sand in his mouth, scratching against his teeth and threatening to slip into his lungs.  Polnareff is the unkillable one.  Polnareff was the unkillable one.

Polnareff flicks a nonexistent piece of dust off his incorporeal shoulder.  “I'm less dead that I could be, and that's what matters.”

“That something you know a lot about? Ranking levels of death?”

“More than you do, I think. If that Japanese ghost girl hadn't run off into the light, she might give me a run for my money, but since she's out I think I have the crown.”

“The boss might,” a voice pipes up, and both Polnareff and Jotaro startle.

There's a girl leaning in the doorway, snapping bubblegum and inspecting her nails.  

Maybe after everything that has happened, every piece taken away from Polnareff’s body until the body itself was gone, maybe all of that has weakened his perceptions.  

Jotaro has no real excuse.  There’s going soft and then there’s sloppy.

“The boss might what?” Jotaro asks.

“Know about death,” Polnareff answers for her.  “Come to think of it, we still haven't probably shared all the information we know about the spirit and what happens to it when it dies.  C’mon.”

There’s an easy camaraderie that Polnareff has with the gang.  Or maybe not camaraderie, per se.  It’s not how Polnareff was with them on the trip to Egypt, when they were all crammed together so long that they simultaneously drove each other up the wall and would die for any other member of the party.  It’s not how Polnareff is with Jotaro either--good-natured, familiar teasing and unspoken, unspeakable trust.  The gang looks up to him, treats him like a mentor and an advisor and a voice of reason, and Polnareff shoulders it all with a grace and comfort that’s hard for Jotaro to comprehend.  There’s respect there, but also genuine affection.

Maybe Polnareff would have been a good dad, Jotaro thinks, and the realization leaves him cold.

***

Giorno Giovanna is very young.  That’s Jotaro’s first impression.  He’d known his age beforehand, of course, but seeing him he’s struck by it anew.  Koichi is small, but Giorno is young.

He’s incredibly courteous, charming even, but it’s courtesy wielded like a weapon.  Giorno knows when to smile, when to drop his gaze, when to open up his body language and utilize every bit of his perceived naivete and inexperience.  Giorno reminds him of Kakyoin, who used politeness as a shield, held himself at a distance with his words.  Giorno reminds him of himself, squared off against the world, but armed with charisma instead of his fists.  (He thinks of being stared down, of pushing back twice as hard.  His great-grandmother had taught him to throw a punch, but what if he’d never learned?)

Giorno also reminds him of DIO.  He’s never seen DIO as anything other than poison and violence and pure, vicious hatred, but seeing Giorno he can understand why so many pledged themselves to his father’s service.

“He’s a lot like you,” Polnareff says, when it’s just the two of them again.

Jotaro waits for him to elaborate.

Polnareff glances toward the closed door, as though expecting Giorno to pop out from behind it.  “You’re both survivors.”

“I’m not.”  Polnareff’s the one who survives, was the one who survived.  Jotaro just persists.  There’s nothing laudable about outliving everyone around him.

“You both have Stands that will bend reality to keep you alive,” Polnareff says.  “I’m not an expert, but if a Stand is an expression of your inner self, don’t you think that says something?”

“When did you get so wise?” Jotaro jokes, because the alternative is being gutted.  He sounds stilted, but Polnareff smiles anyway.

“Being dead gives you a lot of perspective.  Maybe you should try it sometime.”

Jotaro manages to choke out, “I’d rather not.”

“See?” Polnareff says smugly.  “My point exactly.”

***

(That night, for the first time in years, Jotaro looks at Star Platinum hovering behind him protectively and wonders if he has misunderstood.)

Chapter Text

Jotaro thinks of his great-grandmother teaching him to make a fist.  He thinks of his grandfather flying across an ocean to enlist the help of a teenager for a battle their family had been waging since before either of them were born.  He thinks of his mother suffocated by a fate outside of her knowledge or control, his uncle prepared to sacrifice everything for the place and people he loves.  He thinks of Jonathan Joestar sinking to the bottom of the ocean, his adoptive brother's head cradled in his arms.

He thinks of all the bodies that have been left in the Joestars’ wake.  He thinks of all the bodies that have been left in his wake, specifically.

He thinks about Jolyne.  JoJo, her mother calls her, although the nickname leaves a bad taste in his mouth.  He looks at her and sees a legacy too heavy for her to shoulder.  She has her great-grandfather's impulse control and her father's temper.  She has the birthmark and she has the family nickname and he desperately hopes she doesn't have a Stand.  He looks at her and sees a Joestar in all but name.

Jotaro knows he is not kind like Josuke.  He is not good with words like his grandfather.  He does not have his mother’s unconditional love or his great-grandmother’s spine of steel.  He only has his own body, taut with tension, and his Stand floating behind him, ever vigilant, ever ready.  

It’s better this way, he thinks.  His grandfather dragged him to Egypt, but he’d had no other choice.  There was no way for his grandfather to take down DIO alone, not with Hermit Purple, so he’d had to get others involved.  He’d had to hand off the Joestar legacy to Jotaro, but Jotaro has no intention of Jolyne ever being anything other than a Kujo.  His Stand is much more powerful than his grandfather’s, so he can handle this on his own.  When it’s just him and Star Platinum, there’s no one else to lose.

(Still, he builds a contingency plan for Jolyne.  If something happens to him, if he can't get to her fast enough, she needs to be able to protect herself.  If the world needs a Joestar and Jotaro's gone, it can burn for all he cares.  But if Jolyne needs a Joestar...god, he hopes it never comes it to that, but he’s ready if it does.)

***

“Where do you go?” his wife asks, leaning back on the park bench.

He wraps his coat tighter around himself despite the humidity hanging thick in the air.  Jolyne is running laps with her soccer team, pushing her recently dyed bangs out of her eyes.  He hadn’t commented on the change, but, then again, neither had she.  “Away.”

“Anywhere good?”

“Sometimes.”  Rome had been surprisingly pleasant, all things considered.  Morioh was back to being a sleepy coastal town where nothing much happened.  Monterey had been unpleasant, but that was because his research assistant was incompetent, not because anyone had died.

“Anywhere we could come with you?” she asks in a tone that makes it clear she already knows the answer.

“Someday, maybe.”  Jolyne would like Monterey Bay Aquarium, incompetent assistants aside, and her mother would like the town.  He can already imagine her roping them into riding a Surrey bike, Jotaro and his daughter getting into a silent pedaling competition.  Morioh, too, would welcome them.  He can imagine Josuke’s joy upon meeting his great-niece and then the horrible hell they'd raise the moment any of the responsible adults turned their backs.  His wife would find the town quaint and charming, and try to befriend Jotaro's acquaintances, language barrier or no.  His daughter isn't going anywhere near Giorno, so Italy's off the table for the foreseeable future.  “When it's safe,” he decides.

“When it's safe?” she asks, clearly prodding for more.

“When it's safe,” Jotaro repeats.

Jolyne’s team has moved to drills, passing the ball between them with a surfeit of enthusiasm but very little precision.

“Penny for your thoughts?” his wife asks, eyes never leaving their daughter.

Jotaro takes a deep breath and tries to think of a convincing thought.  “She's gotten taller.”

“You've been away a while.”

“I know.”

The silence stretches between them.  It's not uncomfortable but it also isn't companionable.  For all that they're married, she doesn't know him well, though not for lack of trying.  The lack is on Jotaro's side if it's anywhere.

She's never pushed him for details on where he goes.  She's well within her rights--she was there when Josuke's existence came into explosive light--but she'd told him point blank, “I don't think you're cheating on me.”

“I'm not,” Jotaro confirmed, feeling momentarily off balance.  The thought hadn’t even occurred to him.

“I don't know where you keep disappearing off to on ‘research trips,’” she'd said, “but as long as you keep up your end, I won't call foul.”  She took a deep breath, forging ahead with her characteristic bluntness.  “You know you can talk to me, right?  Whatever it is you're doing, you look like you’re off to the gallows.  Maybe it would help to talk about it?”

“I don't know what to say,” Jotaro had said.  Even if he did, he wouldn't tell her.

He hadn’t thought this through, in hindsight.  Or maybe he had, but he didn’t have all the information he needed to make an informed decision.  Or maybe he had known it was a bad idea and done it anyway.  It doesn’t matter, in the end.  Explanations, not excuses.

“When are you leaving again?” she asks.

“Thursday,” he says.  “For a while.  Probably a few weeks.”

“Have you told Jolyne yet?”  She inclines her head toward their daughter, who is juggling a soccer ball with her knees to the hoots and cheers of the kids surrounding her.  Jolyne meets Jotaro's gaze and grins, making her motions bigger and more ostentatious.  In that moment, she reminds him of his grandfather, and he looks away.

“No,” he says.  “But soon.”

He doesn't.  Maybe he forgets, time moving in a shape he can't discern or hope to replicate.  Maybe he stalls so long that forgetting becomes an easy excuse.  Maybe he is just unkind.

As he climbs into his car, he hears the shriek.  “He left! He didn't say anything and he fucking left!”

Jotaro turns the key in the ignition and pulls out of his driveway for (what he doesn't realize yet is) the second to last time.

***

His grandfather had called him “inscrutable” once.  They'd stopped for lunch somewhere near the border of India, and over lukewarm soda and tasteless sandwiches his grandfather had called him “my inscrutable grandson.”

Jotaro hadn't recognized the English word but assumed it was an insult.  He glowered at his grandfather from underneath the shadow of his hat.

“I don't think JoJo is that hard to read,” Kakyoin had said, confirming Jotaro's suspicions.

“Are you kidding me?” Polnareff butted in.  “He's a fucking sphinx.”

It's something he's heard again and again over the years, even if not in those exact words.  He has a killer poker face.  He never emotes.  He's a black box.  He feels fucking transparent, and yet everyone around him apparently disagrees.

Well, almost everyone.  Kakyoin could read him pretty consistently.  Polnareff has gotten better at it over the years.  And then there’s his mother.

“Couldn’t sleep?” his mother asks when he stumbles into the kitchen.  The sun is barely peeking above the horizon, but between the jetlag he still hasn’t gotten over and plain old garden variety insomnia, he had woken up too early and then been unable to fall back to sleep.

“Why are you awake,” he asks, sounding like a surly teenager.

“I thought you might be up early.”  She doesn't look up from the green onions she’s mincing with speed and precision that nearly rivals Star Platinum’s.  “I didn’t want you to wait for breakfast.”

You didn’t have to, Jotaro thinks, but he knows she’ll laugh it off if he says it.  

Neither of them even knew he was going to visit until yesterday.  He’d come back for business in Morioh a week ago, but his flight back to the States had been cancelled by a typhoon.  He’d been planning on crashing at a hotel, but his mother called to tell him in no uncertain terms that he was spending the night with her.  He wants to blame his grandfather, but Josuke is the more likely culprit. 

“You should be sleeping,” he says.

She smiles at him.  The rice cooker has begun its final countdown.  There’s a container of pickled plums sitting on the kitchen counter--they’re the small, sour ones Jotaro prefers rather than the sweet one his mother favors.  “And miss spending time with my favorite son?”

“I’m your only son.”

“And my favorite!  Aren’t you lucky?”

Jotaro looks away. “Good grief.”

His mother shushes him.  “I’m almost done.  Be patient.”

Jotaro leans against the refrigerator to wait.  His mother looks older than the last time he saw her--more wrinkles, hair gone completely grey--but she still moves around the kitchen with the same purpose and efficiency of movement that he remembers from his childhood.  While her back is turned, Jotaro tries to sneak a pickled plum from the container.

Before he can even touch it, a vine wraps around his wrist.

“You’ll ruin your appetite,” his mother says, not looking away from the miso soup she’s stirring.

Jotaro breathes.  He tamps down the urge to rip his arm away.  He opens his mouth and then thinks better of it.

“Oh.”  His mother turns to face him, retracting her Stand.  “Sorry, I forgot you’re not comfortable with her.”

Jotaro’s hyperaware of the circle the Stand pressed around his wrist--not hard enough to hurt but with enough strength to remind him that it’s a threat.  “I'm fine.”

His mother’s eyes flick over his shoulder to where Star Platinum has manifested, and Jotaro wishes he were as inscrutable as his grandfather once claimed.

The first time Jotaro had seen his mother’s Stand extending green tendrils from her back, he’d stopped dead in his tracks.  For one awful moment, he’d seen flowers blooming along her vertebrae and thought, She’s still dying.

He knows now that her Stand isn’t killing her.  The vines that had once constricted her body now curl around her harmlessly.  Still, the first few weeks he'd been on high alert, searching for the slightest waver in her step, even a split second of dizziness.

“I'm fine,” his mother had insisted, but she'd said that last time too.

“Papa, we match!” she'd exclaimed, when she showed her father her Stand.  (To his credit, the old man had looked as uneasy as Jotaro had felt.)

“I like her,” his mother had said of the parasite that had nearly taken her life, smiling as a green tendril wove its way through her hair.  “She helps me out around the house.”

Jotaro doesn’t care if his mother’s made peace with her Stand or not.  He doesn't care if it keeps her company in their huge, empty family home.  He doesn't care what abilities it has.  He doesn’t like or trust it.

(He's seen less and less of it over the years.  He wonders sometimes if that is unfair to his mother, but then again, he's never told her to hide it.  She's spent his whole life pretending that everything is normal, so he doesn’t expect her to stop now.)

“You’re a lot like her, you know,” his mother says when the silence has stretched too long.  “Grandma Lisa Lisa.”

Jotaro tries to look casual, to relax his stance and unclench his jaw, but his Stand still has its eyes glued to his mother, watching for the first hint of movement from her Stand.

“She was quiet too,” she says, and her gaze flicks up to Star Platinum before settling on Jotaro.  “She had a hard life and spent a lot of time alone, so I don’t think she ever got used to saying all the words in her head.”

From what Jotaro can remember of his great-grandmother, she had no issue speaking.  She wasn’t demonstratively affectionate, like his mother and grandparents, but she had a sharp tongue and wasn’t afraid to use it.  Jotaro is quiet because he doesn’t have the words to say what he wants to, but his great-grandmother never had that problem.

His mother sighs.  “I think she was happy in the end, though.”

“Good,” Jotaro says automatically.  What else could she want him to say?

His mother’s gaze flicks up again to Star Platinum still floating behind him, solid and unwavering.  Jotaro's standing in the kitchen with the one person he's sure would never hurt him, and he's afraid to dismiss his Stand and leave himself defenseless.  Something is wrong with him, he knows.  An enemy Stand, he thinks nonsensically, and he can feel Star Platinum ready its fists behind him, but, no.  There are no enemies here.  It’s just Jotaro and his mother in his childhood home.  Just Jotaro and his mother and the churning feeling in his stomach.

His mother turns toward the stove again, deliberately slow.  Her back is just cloth over flesh over bone, no foliage obscuring anything.  “I hope,” she says with blistering sincerity, “someday you’ll be happy too.”

“I,” Jotaro says, but he has no idea what the rest of that sentence is meant to be.

The rice cooker chimes, and he startles.  His lungs are suddenly burning, like he just broke the surface of the ocean after too long submerged.  He doesn't remember holding his breath, but he must have been.

His mother reaches for him blindly, but this time she clasps his wrist with a hand made of flesh and bone.  “Come help me with the eggs,” she says, manhandling him in front of the stove.  “Star Platinum can help too, if he wants.”

***

“This isn’t working,” his wife says when he returns to Florida a week and a half later with a wrecked hat, a fractured rib, and three bruises on his back the exact size and shape of a men’s size-eight steel-toed boot.

“I know,” he says.

***

Jotaro doesn’t know how long he’s been awake.  He’s not at his limit yet, he knows that much.  His eyeballs feel itchy and gummy at the same time, but he’s still moving.

The phone call about Jolyne had come...an hour ago?  Two?  He can’t keep track, time made meaningless in the face of the case before him.  There’s an arrow in Tokyo, he’s sure of it, and if he could just put all the pieces together, he could track it down and be on the next flight back to the States.  But something is eluding him, no matter how closely Star Platinum examines the evidence or how many times he goes over the timeline.

His mind just keeps looping back to the same conclusion over and over: He has to find the arrow and bring it back to the Speedwagon Foundation before anyone else gets hurt.  He’s seen how much destruction an arrow can wreak in a small town like Morioh--how much worse would it be in the most populous metropolitan area in the world?  People could die--people may have already died.  He has the most powerful Stand in the universe; if he can’t handle it, who can?

“Don’t,” Jotaro says, before Star Platinum can even move.

Star Platinum watches Jotaro, completely still.  This is how it always is, waiting to follow his lead unless he’s in imminent danger, obedient only when he orders it to be.  It’s his shadow and his protector and Jotaro is abruptly tired of it.

Jotaro pulls himself to his full height and waits for his Stand to flinch first.

It doesn’t.  It doesn’t even blink.

It occurs to Jotaro that he might be playing a game of chicken with himself.  The alternative is that he’s playing with a supernatural entity.  He’s not sure that’s any better.

Jotaro is saved from a staring contest he can’t possibly win by the sound of a body colliding with the wall in the next room over.  He barely shifts his weight, but Star Platinum is already in front of him, fists raised.

Laughter leaks through the wall.  Jotaro takes a breath: in, out.  He forces his hands to unclench.  He tries to relax his guard and fails.

Despite his best efforts, Jotaro still does not know if he is haunted or possessed or channeling forces beyond his control.  He does not know if Star Platinum is the ghost of Jonathan Joestar, a chunk Jotaro carved off of DIO’s soul and absorbed, or a piece of Jotaro himself, spun out and given physical form.  All he knows is that in this moment he is alone in a hotel room in Tokyo while his teenage daughter sits in police custody.

Star Platinum tries to move toward him again, and Jotaro spits out another, “Don’t.”  

He does not want to be comforted by his fucking Stand.

And that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it?  The uneasy relationship between them, decades of tension, all born of Jotaro’s discomfort.  If Star Platinum has qualms about the timestop they stole from DIO, it’s never voiced them.  If Star Platinum doesn’t want to be connected to Jotaro--haunting him, born of him, bound to him, whatever it is--it’s never given any indication.  It's not some faceless, egoless, superpowered entity that does his bidding.  It isn’t human, doesn’t act like a human, but still it keeps trying to help--gifting him things it thinks he wants or needs, fighting his fights for him, standing by him even when he slings accusations and questions it might not be able to answer even if it wanted to.

Jotaro’s never wanted help.  He doesn’t want to rely on anyone else, but Star Platinum has never given him a choice.  

Jotaro had looked at his Stand and thought, Evil spirit, because he didn’t have other words for its existence.  It had possessed him like the shamans he'd read about, but the shamans had chosen and Jotaro had not.  Kamigakari, then, involuntary spirit possession, often of a long-duration.  A human speaking in the voice of a god; an ancestor residing once more in his descendant’s mortal body.  Ironic, something taking possession of him when he habitually has so few words and it has even fewer.  Then again, actions speak louder than words, and Jotaro has always been good at acting.

He has so many words for Star Platinum’s existence now, but he still doesn’t know which, if any, are the right ones.  

Maybe he’ll never know.  Maybe there’s something about this that will always be fundamentally unknowable.  That doesn't sit right with him. “Don't look,” his mother had said, but he had anyway.  He'd seen nothing because there had been nothing to see but white curtains, but he'd still had to know.  What did it look like in that partitioned space?  Was there a mirror, a sword, some flat piece of wood?  Was there anything there at all?

He scrubs a hand across his face.  He needs to sleep or he needs to solve this.  Probably he needs the first for the second.

Step one: try to sleep.  Step two: he’ll figure it out when he gets there.

His Stand watches his back as he prepares for bed.  Its vigilance does not make him feel safe, but he can’t remember when he last felt safe.  It feels dependable, familiar.  No matter what happens, he’ll always have his Stand.  His Stand, he supposes, will also always have him.

“I can't get rid of you, huh,” he says to an empty room.

For once, almost imperceptibly, Star Platinum nods.

Jotaro inhales sharply.  It feels nothing like relief, but stabs him all the same.  “You little shit,” he says, and Star Platinum feigns incomprehension.

Okay, he thinks, hands still clenched, shoulders still tight with tension.  Okay.  

He’ll face this tomorrow.  He’ll face it the day after and the one after that too.  He’ll face every day of the unforeseeable future one at a time, and he will keep moving.  That’s who he is, who he was, who he always will be.  He can be the last of the Joestars, but at least he will never walk alone.

***

“No,” he’d said, and his voice had remained as steady as it always was.  “I don't.”

“Suit yourself,” Polnareff had said, shrugging as Star Platinum continued to float behind him with a pair of tweezers held delicately in one massive hand.  “But just between you and me, it seems like we could use all the help we can get.”