Work Text:
On the journey to Egypt, he asked for little. His requests were trivial, inexpensive and simple, compared to airport cigarettes for two, moisturiser, coffee flavoured chewing gum and enough suncream for an army.
Kakyoin just wanted pencils and a pocket-sized notebook for the inside pocket of his gakuran. He burned through dozens in the last months of his life, spending car journeys in silent, listening to tyres beating along gravel dirt roads and sketching.
He’d draw the scenery out of the window when he could, sketching outlines of the landscape as they passed through, but most of the drawings were portraits, capturing the moments in overcrowded transport with sketches. He’d sharpen his pencil with his pocket knife and had shocked everyone the first time he pulled out the blade. They’d thought he’d seen an enemy, instead of breaking the lead.
They grew used to pencil shavings littering the footwell of the cars they travelled in, as accustomed to them as they were cigarette butts and wrappers from food that never found their way to a bin.
The potraits were small, sketched in haste and refined with more precision. His use of the stubby pencils was immense, and the drawings held a sense of urgency in turn with more profound emotion. Although he never outwardly showed Jotaro, or Polnareff what he had drawn, both men seemed to realise that the redhead could capture a moment in graphite and that was more special than they could articulate. You never knew what would happen whilst travelling, and eventually, self portraits without the garish scars which struck his face looked wrong. He’d struck fierce lines through the brows of his potraits, sometimes vigerously enough to tear the page, sometimes with such power that the scars distorted the otherwise soft face he’d drawn, reaching past his eye sockets and toward his cheekbones.
It would take a few days to fill up a pocket-sized sketchbook, he tried his best to preserve as many as possible, mailing them to Holly so he could collect them upon his return. Drawings of the moments, so fragile and fleeting they could be missed, filled the pages of dozens of books that would land on Holly Kujo’s doorstep.
That was enough for Kakyoin, after all, some good pictures had been lost to injury, disrepair or ruin of their mode of transport. But that was to be expected, at least slightly. After all, from the minute the first plane crashed, there was no way that the trip was going to be simple.
A few days after he’d been discharged from the hospital, Kakyoin started a penultimate sketchbook, drawing the profile of the seventeen-year-old boy that sat beside him on stone stairs, burning through another cigarette, spending more time with it between his fingers than hi slips. Kakyoin spent hours stealing glances at Jotaro, carving each detail of the taller boy’s face and body onto the page. He wasn’t sure what bought him to the conclusion that that was necessary, but whatever it had been was evidentially worthwhile.
The product of these immensely detailed drawings, where close ups of his best friends face, of how his brows curved upward when he was concentrating, and how there were so many single stray hairs which reached onward his forehead but none stood out against his skin. Every coherent swirl in his blue eyes was drawn with a fierce concentration needed for the most intricate of art. Even without the pigment to fill Jotaro’s iris, it was apparent that his subject had clear, bright eyes., Kakyoin fantasised about how much woeful mixing he would do trying to reach the clear, bright blue that was Jotaro’s eye colour would be like a perfectly cut diamond, impossible to replicate in any form other than the original.
Each sketch that’s stretched across the pages was like a photograph, accurate in every instance, even the unfinished, unrefined images perfectly encapsulated the body, mind and emotions behind Jotaro Kujo.
Jotaro, however, didn’t ever get to see the sketchbook filled with portraits of him. Instead, when he returned from Egypt, he was faced with dozens of sketchbooks filled with friends that were no longer with them. Avdol was drawn with sharp, dramatic lines with soft shading, Iggy was drawn softly with surprising details in the fur.
He kept the sketchbooks, refusing to part with any of them. He filled his desk drawer with those sketches, memorised the curvature of the signature that found itself in every corner of the pages, traced it with his fingers until he could have drawn it himself. He wished he could part with the artwork that filled those pages, let go of the memory and emotions hidden within the pages.
He was desperate to be rid of them but couldn’t pass them up at the same time. A sense of wonder had settled within him, unsure of what to do with them. Was it better to keep them, and never look at them, or should he pass them on, give them to the people who probably needed them more. Like his parents.
His parents had only found one sketchbook, the final one, with pages covered in Jotaro, every detail of the taller boy’s face. They, like Jotaro, had memorised the details of the muse. The dark haired boy that their son had drawn, dozens of time, each expression careful and refined, even if he’d only seen it for an instant.
They would never know how their son felt, how desperate they had been for an answer. Who was he? Why did their son draw him so intently? Why were there so many drawings of him? What was the nature of their relationship? Why did their son die with all of those portraits in his gakuran?
They wished for answers but all they had were the sketches, and like Jotaro, they traced their son’s signature in the corner of each of the images. Whoever this boy was, whoever their son had decided to draw so often, he was clearly special.
They would never know their son’s feelings. Jotaro would never know his best friend’s feelings. All they had was the portraits.