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Jotaro never truly knew his father. Or rather, he would say that he didn’t know him at all.
Sadao Kujo was never home. Never around, never available— past the age of 6, Jotaro’s only communication with his father were the occasional postcards that found their way to their mailbox with a hastily scribbled “miss you” on the back. While he came home briefly between tours and long recording sessions, he was always busy. His nose in a photo album Holy put together for his return, his ear pressed to a phone as he babbles on and on about his amazing jazz career.
When Sadao’s wife- Jotaro’s mother and light of his life- came down with an unsolvable and unspeakable fever, he didn’t come home. After spending fifty days being stalked and attacked over and over and over, a weary Jotaro came back home and checked the mail.
There were bills, letters from his grandmother, and college admission offices asking if he’d like to apply. Not a single postcard or phone call home from his father.
Amidst his rage that ended with a shattered family photo and countless postcards from France or some other country he wondered if his father would’ve done anything to help him. Anything to help his mother, even. Jotaro knew without a doubt that if it was him who had fallen ill, him who was too weak of a Joestar to manifest a stand correctly, Holy would’ve killed DIO with her bare hands.
He wondered if his father would’ve done the same for him.
Jotaro could probably count the qualities of his father on one hand.
He is rich.
He, according to his mother, is quite funny— but in the way where you would laugh at him, not with him.
He traveled a lot for work.
His child missed him.
It took him a while for him to realize that his father was a lot like Joseph. Rich, famous, world-traveler, stupidly funny, and missed by his only child. His grandfather trumped him by being spectacular and adventurous in his ways and personality.
Jotaro hated Joseph in a way; not literally, of course, but the same way that dogs and cats could somehow get along.
So he supposed he hated his father the same way too.
So he supposed that he didn’t need his father, as long as he had Joseph at his side.
As Joseph’s soul rose from his body and into the heavens, he clenches his fists so tight he suspected that if his nails would dig in hard enough he’d bleed. He fights tooth and nail to get him back, to save his mother’s father and someone he thought was essentially his father too.
When the time comes to figure out Joseph’s inheritance, and he finds out about some teenager in Japan (a place the old man said he hated, mind you), he nearly smashes his desk into two. Not only were the Crusaders risking their lives for Jotaro’s middle-aged mother, but also a sick and delirious four year-old Josuke Higashikata in Morioh, Japan. He was the one to call his grandmother about it, the one to yell at him about his affair, and ultimately the one to clean up his grandfather’s mess.
He’s tense when he meets Josuke. He looks too much like him; his nose, the shoulders, the way the words fall out of his mouth like so.
Jotaro’s even more tense when he meets Crazy Diamond. It looks too much like The World.
He freezes, and time does as well.
“You act like your mother when you’re around them,” Joseph points out to his grandson one day at a Morioh cafe.
He scoffs, laughing into his coffee cup. “My okaa-san? You’ve got to be fucking joking.” He really must be getting old, comparing a ray of sunshine such as his mother to someone as terrible as him.
“I’m serious. They look more at ease when you come around,” Joseph went on, “Remember what, ah, Kakyoin said about Holy all those years ago? How she made everyone around her at ease with her presence? They like you, you know.”
Jotaro only hums. He supposed that if he were to emulate any parental figure in his life, it’d be his mother.
He’s far too busy to scurry back to Florida. The wire that connected the hotel’s receiver to its phone spins around Jotaro’s fingers as he plays with it for some distraction.
“She’s six,” he says, “She can handle it. It’s just a cold.” The wire spins and twirls as his wife yells at him over the phone; something about how it’s been three weeks of his daughter’s so-called “cold” and Jotaro you need to come home and Jotaro we need to talk when you get back to Florida.
But he’s busy. Far too busy. Morioh’s murder mystery and his doctoral thesis called for him. He has become too accustomed to the world of marine life where he assumed that if Jolyne was strong enough- and she was, she was a Joestar after all- she’d get through it just fine. It was survival of the fittest, in layman’s terms.
The call suddenly ends with a shriek of a beep because Jotaro’s thoughts had gotten up and walked somewhere else. It was good they had gone anywhere else— it meant he couldn’t think about his angry wife and his sick daughter and the annoying little group of people in town that wanted to drive him out. It was good.
He’s forty when he sees his daughter. He begrudgingly flies down to Florida in an outfit that screams Joestar because he knows that it’s all a trap anyways and he deserves to have some fun every once in a while.
And she hates him. His daughter hates him and he nods and he’s not surprised because it hits him that he’s evolved into his father— distant and nonexistent. But he’s come back to fix it, to fix his relationship with Jolyne and to fix this annoying drawn-out problem that was DIO and his never-ending nation of lackeys even post-mortem.
He’s still forty when he has to choose between everyone else in the universe and his daughter. He laments over the fact that he could’ve had both if he was just a little faster, a little stronger.
But he chooses her.
He’d choose Jolyne every single time, in every universe.
He laughs to himself as he drowns in the ocean, because he wonders once more if his father would’ve done the same.