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Jolyne’s nightmares have always been, in a word, bizarre. Normal people, she’s heard, dream of normal things like movie monsters, serial killers, terrifying beasts. But Jolyne dreams of monsters she’s sure she’s never seen or heard of, images strange and terrifying. Corpses turning into trees, invisible zombies, a rainfall of poison frogs. The only, occasional, theme she can pick out is gravity - assaulted by bullets in a zero-gravity room, falling sideways down a road, the weightlessness of being in the ocean and unravelling. Always unravelling. She wakes up with the taste of salt and blood in her mouth, hands clenched into clammy fists, screaming a battle cry that rings loud in her mind but emerges as only a tiny, quiet noise.
At 5, she had awoken once from one of these nightmares when her father was around. She had been napping with her head on his lap when she jerked awake, useless punches flailing, mumbling ora ora ora oraoraora until he’d shaken her fully awake, shouting her name. He’d stared at her, hands on her shoulders, with a look of anger and fear in his eyes that she’d never been able to forget. The specifics of the dream had fled from her, but the panic remained, coiled in the pit of her stomach, a simple certainty: They were in danger, the two of them. “Are we safe?” she’d asked. And her father had stared at her, just long enough to make her think she had done something wrong. Then he had stood up and left the room.
Jolyne’s father is a marine biologist, and when she dies in her dreams, it is always in the ocean.
When Jolyne is eight, on a rare day where her mother is busy and her father is close enough to watch her, she falls off her bike and catches her knee on a sharp rock. In the car ride to the hospital, he is silent like always. Her father always lets her sit in the front seat of the car, though her mother says she’s too short, it’s unsafe. Jolyne likes to think that he’s indulging her, letting her have fun, or maybe that he trusts that she’s grown-up enough to handle it. But she knows that it’s far more likely that he just doesn’t care so much about her safety.
Jolyne has never gotten stitches before, but it gives her a dizzying sense of deja vu. On the way home, she runs her fingers lightly across the ridge in her knee, over and over.
“If you keep doing that, it will get infected,” her father says, dispassionately. If she’s doing something dangerous, shouldn’t he be angry, if he cared? She runs her fingers over the stitches harder, glaring, but he doesn’t warn her again. Jolyne wants to say something mean to him, to hurt him, but she doesn’t know what.
“Sometimes I dream that I’m made of string,” she says, instead, surprising herself. She already knows that her father doesn’t understand a single thing about her, but she thinks, somehow, that he will understand this.
“You’re made of cells, not string,” he answers. Jolyne scowls. She knows about cells. She wonders if her dad is so stoic that he doesn’t even dream at all. How sad.
“Yeah, but in my dreams , dad, which are not real , I’m made of string. Like I can make strings from myself.” She wiggles her fingers dramatically and makes a little sound effect to demonstrate.
“Like Spiderman?” he asks, a hint of a smile on his lips. She doesn’t see him smile often, and she wants to say yes, because it would be funny, because it would make him happy. But that would have been a lie, because Spiderman can make as many strings as he wants without falling apart, coming undone.
“No, not like Spiderman”.
“Oh.”
“It’s for fighting ,” she says.
Her father says nothing for long enough that she sighs, rests her head on the car window, closes her eyes. When he speaks he does so quietly, uncertainly. She’s never heard this tone from him, and she hates it immediately. “What do you fight for? In your dreams?”
You .
“Nothing. It’s stupid”, she mutters.
She wants him to ask her again, ask her more questions. She’s relieved when he doesn’t, and she watches the palm trees pass in silence.
“If you dream about falling, it means you’re afraid of letting go,” Jolyne’s friend Dolly declares authoritatively. They are 11 and on the playground, and Dolly has just gotten a book about dream symbolism, reading sections aloud as Jolyne and their other friend Nora toss a baseball to each other, back and forth. They’re at 44 throws (Jolyne always counts, and doesn’t know why it feels important, why it makes her nervous).
“What about falling sideways? Instead of down?” Jolyne tries not to sound nervous, but she feels exposed, asking this.
“Um, it doesn’t say. Maybe it means you’re only a little afraid of letting go?”
Jolyne scrunches up her face. Throw. 45. Catch. 46. Perhaps it was a strange thing for her to mention, but Dolly hadn’t questioned it or made fun of her. Maybe it wasn’t that big a deal, even if she didn’t get a good answer. So she asks something that feels more important:
“What does it mean if you dream about strings?”
“Hm.” Dolly flips through her little book, scanning the pages. “If you’re tied to something, it means you’re attached to it. Pretty obvious, right?”
“No, it’s like...what if you’re turning into string?"
More flipping, and Dolly shakes her head. “That’s really specific, it doesn’t have that. But it says if you lose hair or teeth, it means you’re afraid of losing money.”
Money is nice to have, but Jolyne knows that isn’t it.
Nora, who doesn’t often speak up, tells a story about how one time, her sock had a loose thread and she pulled on it and it kept going, until the sock was all unraveled and there was only a pile of strings. Nora, who doesn’t often philosophize, muses: “You know what’s really crazy? If I could sew it up into a sock, it’s like it wouldn’t even be the same sock ”.
Jolyne suddenly gets an uncomfortable feeling in her chest. “You guys are useless.” She fumbles the ball at 99 - just her luck - and ignores the thrill of fear that she always gets when the streak ends.
Jolyne has seen her father in her dreams more than she has in real life. Her mother appears in her regular dreams, and her father hardly ever does, which is of course how things should be. But in the strange dreams, the ones that feel like impossible memories, it’s her stupid, absent father that’s there instead. And she has to save him instead of the other way around, because her dad can’t even be a responsible adult in her dreams . And the worst part is that she cares. In her dreams she understands him, forgives him for his absence. She fights for him and feels so certain. This dream self, she hates her, she envies her, she pities her.
Maybe it’s good that it’s not her mom in the dreams instead. At least she doesn’t have to dream about her mother shot, bleeding, unconscious.
Dead.
The image of his face split apart passes through her mind, sometimes. She doesn’t know what to do with this fragment of a thought, so she lets the dark thought float through until it sinks away. He’s alive , she snaps at her own brain, annoyed, and whatever part of her conjured him shrugs. Why him? she asks, and gets no response.
It’s not just her father dying in her dreams. There is a whole cast of characters, nameless and faceless, surely a generic construct that her brain weaves into these dark scenes so that she has more people to worry about, more people to mourn. They die in nearly every combination. Jolyne wakes up with her arms reaching out, calling out a name that slips from her memory, just as the word dies at her lips.There is often a child in the dreams, which in Jolyne’s opinion is fucked up because the shit her brain comes up with is gruesome and even a faceless dream kid doesn’t deserve to deal with all that. But at least that one always survives. She doesn’t think she could handle it, if the kid ever died like the rest of them.
When she first meets Hermes Costello, Jolyne feels drawn to her, but mostly in a mundane, recognizable way. When she first meets Anasui, she doesn’t particularly feel drawn to him at all. She meets them on the same day, at a party that a friend of a friend is throwing, and meets other people as well, and nothing interesting happens at all.
That night she dreams of dying, and Hermes and Anasui die with her, no longer faceless. She feels that it’s been them all along, even though it couldn’t be, she’s never seen them before. Dreams are weird , she shrugs to herself, whenever she is in danger of ascribing meaning to these things. Yet she worries, occasionally, that these dreams are prescient, hinting towards a devastating fate, rolling like a boulder down a hill, picking up speed.
But Jolyne is not superstitious. She believes dreams are meaningless. She befriends Hermes and Anasui anyway, moves in with Hermes, just because they like each other, they get along well in the waking world, that’s all.
Jolyne is 19, and this winter the dreams are worse than normal, and come almost every night. She wakes up sweating, snarling. She feels caged in her room, in her body. She goes to the kitchen at 2 in the morning and finds Hermes there, leaning against the counter, eyes shadowed by the darkness. She’s clutching a mug of tea so tightly that Jolyne is surprised that it doesn’t shatter in her hands. She learns Hermes has nightmares, too.
They don’t want to talk about it, so they talk about other things. Something starts to bloom between them in these quiet morning hours, precious and delicate. Hermes doesn’t like to think about the future, and Jolyne doesn’t like to think about the past, so they stay in the present together, defiantly, desperately. They ignore the sense of dread they both feel, let it lurk in the shadows.
When they kiss for the first time, it doesn’t feel like the first time at all.
One morning, in late March, something snaps inside of Jolyne, suddenly and violently. For a moment, she can’t breathe. A wave of dread crashes over her. Then a wave of peace. Then one of release, of freedom. Something she’s been holding onto all winter - maybe all her life - floats away and dissolves. She looks at Hermes, who looks back, mirroring her shocked and confused expression. They can’t describe it, or interpret it, so instead of talking they go for a drive, Jolyne turning the wheel in whatever direction her gut told her.
Her whims take them to a road where a strange kid is standing and sobbing. “ Fate ,” she and Hermes whisper at the same time, and then they snort at the same time, but Jolyne stops anyway to ask if he’s alright. The kid calls out their names and asks if they remember. What a strange question to ask someone you just met . He tells them his name is Emporio. He tells them what Jolyne is sure is the saddest backstory anyone could ever come up with, far too melodramatic to be real. Self-raised in a prison? Please. Only an idiot would believe him.
But she believes him.
“What are we going to do with him?” Hermes asks, because they can’t leave him there, obviously. Jolyne opens her mouth to say that they’ll take him to the police, take him to an orphanage, take him to her mother, she’ll know what to do. But every fiber of her being is telling her to say something else. And Jolyne listens to the fibers of her being.
“Let’s take him in, Hermes. At least for a little while.”
From the look on Hermes’ face as she says yes, she’s even more surprised at herself than Jolyne is.
Emporio is used to living among ghostly things. But now lives with this new Jolyne, this not-Jolyne, and he’s the one that feels like a ghost. He feels ashamed, whenever his mind thinks of her as a fake, as worse somehow, not his Jolyne, although she is so much the same, painfully the same. In fact, she’s better, because she’s a little happier, a little more carefree, and it’s the least of what Jolyne deserves. But the real Jolyne never got what she deserved, and never would.
Not-Jolyne has been kind to him, taken him in, played games with him. Not-Jolyne doesn’t ask too many hard questions, even when he disappears for a while, or produces things out of nowhere, or starts to bring up a story from his past and stops suddenly, stops talking for hours. Not-Jolyne, with a lot of swearing, fills out paperwork to sign him up for school in the fall, still months away. (“We’re not gonna make you start in April , it’s basically summer already”, Not-Jolyne says).
Every time he sees her and thinks Not-Jolyne , he corrects himself and says Jolyne . Every time Jolyne does something nice for him, something he’s sure he can’t deserve, he sees her unravel, dying for him, and he feels such monstrous guilt for wanting her and not-Hermes to remember.
A month or so after Emporio moves in, Jolyne comes home grumbling and swearing, holding a neatly packed box. Jolyne explains that her mother just had to clean out the fucking attic for the first time in a million years and for some reason she’s the one that has to fucking deliver this box of stupid old shit to her father, who is coincidentally also full of stupid old shit. It’s such a Jolyne thing to say that Hermes and Emporio decide to go along with her, and also because she had said “Wanna come? I don’t wanna go alone, so your only options are yes and fuck yes .”.
Part of Emporio - most of Emporio, honestly - doesn’t want to see Jotaro Kujo. He’d met him only briefly, on the worst day of his life, and watched him die (he’d watched them all die, he’d watched them all die … ). But he also feels like it is some sort of duty, as the only one who’d witnessed the sacrifice they’d made, that they’d never make. He had to see them all, alive, in this universe, at least once.
And Jotaro could stop time, even if it hadn’t been enough, even if it hadn’t worked in the end. If anyone could remember anything , Emporio thinks, it would be him . And Emporio, a kid who thought he knew the unique shape and heft of every type of lonely feeling there was, is learning that being the only one left - the only one to remember - is lonelier than anything he’s ever felt.
Jotaro’s office is in a small wing of a large building on a large campus. The hallway is set up like a little aquarium: a few fish tanks are inset in the wall, interspersed with posters about starfish and dolphins and plankton (Emporio can’t bear to look at that one). There are no fish tanks in prison and in another life Emporio might have been mesmerised by the lazily swimming creatures, but now he doesn’t like to think about the ocean, or the creatures who live and die within it.
They arrive at Jotaro’s door. He opens it on the first knock.
“Jolyne”, he says.
He takes the box Jolyne angrily shoves at his direction, and he nods nearly imperceptibly at Hermes when she gives a small and awkward wave. Jolyne vaguely gestures in Emporio’s direction: “We took in a kid. He was raised in a prison”. She obviously intends to shock him, but he doesn’t take the bait, if he even recognizes it as such.
When he glances at Emporio, the child looks into Jotaro’s eyes, searching for something like recognition, anything. But If an expression is discernible on the man’s face at all, it’s mild confusion, or perhaps boredom. So I really am alone, then . And Emporio almost says nothing, he almost lets the door swing shut. If he asks, he might have to tell them everything. Emporio has decided that it would probably be wrong to do so - that this was his burden alone to bear.
But Emporio sees the anger and disappointment in Jolyne’s face at the meaningless and banal interaction. He remembers how Jolyne and he had fought for each other, carried each other, died for each other, for the world, for him.
“Do you remember anything, Dr. Kujo?” Emporio blurts out.
“Emporio, that question doesn’t make any sense-” begins Hermes.
“Sorry dad, the kid’s kind of weird sometimes but-” begins Jolyne.
“Remember what?.” Jotaro spins around to face Emporio, eyes narrowing. The child flinches - he’d forgotten how large and intimidating the man was, and his glare was piercing. Emporio stammers and wrings his hands, regretting asking him, regretting asking anyone. Jotaro looms over Emporio and asks a little louder “Remember what ?”
“Dad, he’s just a kid , don’t be an asshole -”
“Is this some kind of memory-based Stand attack?” Jotaro interrupts his daughter again. Ah . Emporio recognizes this emotion: sometimes when adults are afraid, they act angry instead.
“Not anymore”, Emporio answers.
“Is the user dead?”
“What the fuck, dad - “
“Yeah.” confirms Emporio.
Jotaro looks at his daughter, then crouches, eye level with Emporio. “Was Jolyne involved?” His voice was rough, nearly trembling. Emporio had witnessed the man’s death, but had never heard him speak in a tone other than gruff, urgent. He supposed that he hadn’t had time to express other feelings, then.
Emporio nods; Jotaro hisses from clenched teeth. He straightens abruptly and motions them into his office. “Tell me about the Stand,” Jotaro sits behind the desk. “What did it do?”
Emporio doesn’t tell the whole story, because it’s too long, because it would hurt too much. But he tells them about the priest and his discs, and how he’d framed Jolyne and got her sent to prison. He’d sent minions after them, they’d defeated them one by one, and -
“Wait, if we could fight all these guys why couldn’t we just escape?” interrupts Hermes.
So Emporio tells them how the priest had taken Jotaro’s memories, how Jolyne could have left, could have been free, but had gone back to find the discs. To save her father’s life. Emporio waits for Jolyne or Jotaro to react, to say something to this, but they just sit in an uneasy silence. Emporio skips ahead to Cape Canaveral.
“His Stand evolved so that gravity was pointing in his direction all around him. But then it evolved again to...to speed up time. It kept going faster. His goal was to run out the whole universe so it would restart and in the new universe, everyone would know what would happen because it happened before. He said that was heaven.”
Jolyne lets out a low whistle. “So how’d we stop him?”
They all, even Jotaro, look at him expectantly. Like he has an answer. Emporio sinks back into his chair.
“We didn’t.”
They pause to absorb this statement. Jolyne shakes her head. “But wait, if he actually...restarted the universe...and did what he said, we’d know what was going to happen, right? But it’s not like that.”
“I never know what’s going to happen!” Hermes adds cheerfully, but her eyes are nearly frantic.
“In this universe, I killed him before he could activate it. It’s complicated. I...used a disc.” Emporio is grateful that they don’t ask for further details.
“So...the people that were us - that you were talking about - aren’t the same us?” Jolyne asks haltingly.
Emporio nods. “You’re really similar. But...not the exact same.” He doesn’t say that the real - the old Jolyne is tougher. He doesn’t say that the new Jolyne smiles more. Jolyne still looks a little hurt.
“Something doesn’t make sense,” Jotaro jumps in, tapping his fingers on his desk. “If we were all there when he activated his stand, why are you the only one who remembers?”
Emporio swallows. “In the original universe, I...I’m the only one who survived.”
The three adults draw in breath at once, absorbing the news of their own deaths. Emporio wonders distantly if it would be better if he had died, if the not-Emporio would be happier.
“How did I fail?” Jotaro asks quietly. “I should have been able to stop him. It would have been hard, but I should have been able to stop him.”
“I don’t even know - it happened so fast. I’m sure you tried your best,” Emporio says carefully. “We had a plan - one shot to attack him, and - suddenly there were all these knives around Jolyne-” Jotaro flinches, then - “and - Anasui and Hermes were dead - and then he killed you too,” Emporio stammers, a sob bursting out of him. “I think you didn’t have time, and - he attacked Jolyne so - you used that time to save her”.
Jotaro and Jolyne look at each other carefully, for a few seconds. Then they look down at the desk between them.
“How did you survive, Emporio? Pretty cool that you managed to get away, huh?” Hermes tries to break the tension, smiling weakly at him.
“Jolyne…” he turns to address her, blurry in his vision. You saved me, Jolyne.”
Jolyne swallows. “And then?” she asks like she knows the answer.
It all happened in a second.
You were smiling.
You were ripped to shreds.
The water exploded with blood.
Emporio swallows painfully. “You died.”
Jolyne looks off to the side, furrowing her brows, before asking, hesitantly: “Were...we in the ocean?”
Emporio’s jaw drops. She remembers she remembers she remembers! “You-”
“It’s not like I remember all of a sudden or anything”, mumbles Jolyne. “I just have...weird dreams, sometimes, and every time I die it’s in the ocean for some reason. It happened in the old universe, I guess, so maybe it’s like...sort-of memories. I don’t know. But sometimes there’s a kid in my dreams and I save him and...maybe that’s you.”
It was something, it was more than Emporio could have hoped for. They were in the ocean, he tells her. “You saved me,” he says again, because it’s true.
Jolyne nods thoughtfully and looks down at her hands. “Were there...were there strings?” she asks, almost shyly.
She doesn’t elaborate, so neither does Emporio. “Yeah. Yeah...there were strings.”
She smiles at that. Then frowns, suddenly, scrunching up her face. “Were there...snails?”
“Ugh. I don’t wanna talk about the snails.”
They laugh together. It’s a miracle, Emporio thinks, that he gets to laugh with Jolyne about the snails.
“Why don’t I get weird snail dreams?” Hermes complains. “I guess I dream about being in prison sometimes but that’s like the most boring thing in this whole story! And zombies, but that’s probably normal, right? And like...plankton? Snoozefest!”
“That’s...actually relevant.” says Emporio. He feels like his heart is going to explode with relief. Hermes remembers too, at least part of it. They can talk about the details later. He’ll be okay. They’’ll be okay.
“What about you, dad? Do you always die in the ocean in your dreams?” Jolyne asks. “That makes it pretty fucked up that you’re a marine biologist, huh?”
“I die all sorts of ways in my dreams. You die all sorts of ways in my dreams.” Jotaro answers plainly. Jolyne opens her mouth, then closes it.
“...So”, says Hermes, jumping back to the lighter tone. “Emporio, what’s the most badass thing I did in Universe Prime?”
“Um, I wasn’t there, but you got revenge for your sister in a pretty intense fight that Jolyne described as ‘super badass’?” Emporio answers.
“Shit, what happened to my sister?”
Emporio is still not used to giving bad news from alternate universes. “Um. She was...murdered. A while ago. In that universe. I’m sorry?”
Hermes narrows her eyes, and nods. “Good thing other me got her revenge then. But I think I like this universe better, even if I’m probably way more lame.” Hermes’ eyes suddenly light up. “Hey, what’s the most badass thing Jolyne did? Like a cool thing,” she quickly amends, “Not like a tragic dying sort of thing.”
Emporio thinks for a second - “there’s lots of stuff,” he says, and Jolyne pumps her fist in the air - then responds “We were fighting this weird enemy that goes after cold spots on your body, so Jolyne set herself on fire”.
Jotaro makes a strangled sort of noise, which is drowned out by Jolyne’s quiet “ whoa ”, which is drowned out by Hermes’ much less quiet “ Hardcore! ”
“So this version of me must be pretty pathetic to you, huh? Never set myself on fire even once,” Jolyne teases Emporio, and he matches her smile, one with a bit of sadness.
“No! I mean, um, I think you would be able to do all the stuff you did then if you had to now, because...you did. But...you don’t have to. And that’s better.” Emporio wishes he were better with words. While he’s at it, he wishes anyone in the room was better with words.
“I guess…” says Jolyne. “I just have one question about this whole thing. Dad?”
Jotaro swallows. “Yeah?”
“What the fuck is a Stand?”
Oops. Perhaps Emporio should have started with that explanation. Hermes and Emporio stay for Jotaro’s basic, terse overview of Stands. Then they stay for the basic, terse overview of an enemy Jotaro had fought long ago, back when he was even younger than Jolyne was now. Emporio fills in the blanks, tells how the priest had known this enemy, and he notices how Jotaro stiffens whenever Dio’s name is said.
“Stand users attract other Stand users,” Jotaro says, with a rehearsed cadence. “Stand users are always in danger. That’s why…” he pauses for a moment, turns to Jolyne. “I have always tried to protect you from facing those dangers.”
“By...leaving?”
Jotaro nods. “So anyone going after me wouldn’t go after you.”
Jolyne looks shocked for a moment, then glares, gesturing loosely to Emporio. “Well, it sounds like that didn’t fucking work, did it? I literally died .”
Emporio suddenly feels like an intruder here, feels like this boiling tension is his fault. Before he can stammer out an apology, Hermes rockets up from her chair and scoops up Emporio so inhumanly quickly that he thinks for a moment that she’s manifested some sort of speed-based Stand. “WE’RE GOING TO GO LOOK AT THE FISHES NOW GOODBYE” she half-yells, runs out, and slams the door.
Jolyne might have laughed at Hermes’ flawless execution of the world’s Most Tactless Exit, if she were not also sitting in what felt like the world’s Most Humorless Room.
There is a minute or two of silence. Jolyne wants to see how long it will take for her father to break it, but she isn’t particularly keen to run out the time span of another universe, so she continues: “You were gone my whole life, and it sucked , and I died anyway. So what was the point?” She hates being this vulnerable, admitting that she’d cared about his absence, but if she’s going to say stuff like this at all, it’s going to be now.
“I truly did what I thought was the correct thing to do. Maybe it would have happened anyway. Or earlier. You were involved with these enemies in the first place just because you were related to me.” Jotaro’s tone is flat.
Jolyne hates this, all of this. Would it be so hard for him to just say sorry? The worst part is, she feels herself beginning to understand. She shores up her anger before it can fully slip away. “You know, what I don’t get is that it sounds like your Stand thing is powerful as all hell, apparently? And you can stop time? So if you were there, you could have just...protected me, still. But by being there.”
“Were you paying attention? I was there when you died. I failed to protect you.” He sounds angry, or at least annoyed, which is good - Jolyne wants to yell, she wants to fight - but then his voice softens. “Even at my strongest, I couldn’t protect everyone I cared about.” His eyes shift sideways, to the little corkboard of pictures that sits on the corner of his desk. So he’s lost other people . Who is he looking at, who is he thinking of? He’s never told her. She doesn’t know anything about his life.
“Maybe if you were there from the beginning, it wouldn’t have happened the way it did.” Jolyne counters, and she hates how her voice sounds small and pleading. “In the last universe.”
“Maybe,” says Jotaro. “There were also times I really was needed elsewhere. And it would have been even more dangerous to take you with me.”
“What, for your lame job? Like when you fucked off to Japan for a year to look at dumb starfish? Unless the starfish were evil Stand vampires too or whatever?”
“I was investigating and defeating a stand-using serial killer,” Jotaro answers, matter of factly. “I looked at starfish in my spare time.”
This really takes the wind out of Jolyne’s sails, but she can’t help but be at least a little interested. “Wait, what about when you went to go study jellyfish in Australia?”
Jotaro looks a little sheepish. “I was just studying jellyfish.”
They were getting away from the point again. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. Did you even want to be there for me? Or was this whole Stand danger thing a real convenient excuse for you to fuck off? You could have called ! Or - or something . Anything . If you gave a shit, about me, at all!”
Jotaro sighs, closes his eyes, and then takes off his hat. He runs his fingers through his hair, tiredly. He puts the hat back on and looks at her. “I’ve always cherished you, Jolyne.”
He says it simply, without fanfare, and Jolyne hates herself for how quickly even this makes her feel the sting of tears. “That’s bullshit,” she protests. “You don’t even know anything about me. You don’t even know what music I like!”
His eyes again move towards his corkboard of pictures, and Jolyne wonders which one of her he’s looking at. The one of her as a baby, grinning madly, face covered in cake. Her favorite school picture, from third grade, where she had scowled furiously for every photo. The picture of her striking a pose in her prom dress, pointing right at the camera. She’d always assumed the pictures had been perfunctory, just to display to his coworkers the illusion that he was a loving father. She imagined him, sticking them up with a thumbtack, three pairs of her eyes watching him, silently.
“I know your favorite animal is butterflies,” he begins, still not looking at her. Jolyne rolls her eyes - she has a tattoo with a butterfly, a stranger could have guessed that - but he continues. “I know your favorite color is sky blue. When you were a kid you loved to rollerskate, and play fight, and come up with stories. I know you’re impulsive, but tough and clever. I know that if it came down to it, you’d fight for the people you’d care about with bravery and determination. I know you’re a strong person, who has more resolve than anyone I know.”
“Gross”, Jolyne mutters, sniffling a little. “You don’t have to be so mushy.”
“I’m sorry,” says Jotaro, and she knows that he’s apologizing for everything, and that he knows that it’s not enough. Jolyne’s been waiting for something like this - in the past, she’d imagined herself throwing his apology in his face and storming out - but now she can’t find anything to say, anything to do but stare down at the desk and keep her face still, blink away tears, and wait.
For the first time Jolyne has known him, Jotaro breaks a silence: “I guess I never really said anything like this, but I’m - proud of you.” His voice breaks, and his eyes meet hers, and they’re shining with tears. Seeing him cry is just too much for her - it’s unnerving, it’s devastating, like a punch through her gut.
“Gross ,” Jolyne repeats thickly. And then she’s bounding out of her chair, hands curled into fists, and Jotaro stands up, raising his arms, preparing to let himself be punched. Instead, Jolyne throws her arms around him in a violent hug. He stands stiffly for a moment or two, but then he lowers his hands to her shoulders and hugs her back, tightly.
Jolyne swallows against the lump in her throat - even with all this, she thinks, it would be too embarrassing to cry in front of him. But then she feels Jotaro’s shoulders shake just a little, hears his breathing hitch, and she breaks, dissolving into tears. They let themselves cry together, silently, in each other’s arms, then break apart. They shift away, and the moment is lost.
Jotaro clears his throat. Jolyne sniffles, and coughs lightly to cover it up. They look at the ceiling, the walls, anywhere but each other.
As usual, Jolyne speaks first. “You still don’t know what music I like”.
“I’d like to know,” Jotaro says in earnest.
Jolyne suddenly feels shy. How can she talk about casual things like that, after they’d learned what they had today? So she defers: “Hermes is a really good cook. Now that Emporio’s around, we kind of have...family dinners, sometimes.”
“That’s not something about you,” says Jotaro, and the confused look on his face is so funny that Jolyne almost laughs.
“If...if I invited you over sometime, would you come? We could...just talk about stuff, regular stuff. I mean, I know you’re busy all the time with work and apparently crazy secret missions, but...name a day.” She expects him to say he’s busy, to say his schedule is full, he’ll get back to her later, and-
“Friday after next.” he answers immediately.
“Ok.” says Jolyne.
“Ok.” says Jotaro.
Jolyne turns to the door - perhaps it would be abrupt to leave now, but she can’t handle the two of them getting all emotional again. She takes a step, then turns back. “You know, I don’t know much about you, either. I bet you have tons of badass stories you never told me. Like, non-tragic ones, even.”
Jotaro actually smiles a little, then. “A few.”
She returns his smile, shaking her head. “You’ve really been holding out on me, old man.”
“Old man? ” he repeats incredulously, eyes wide.
Jolyne chuckles. “Yeah dude, you’re ancient . See you Friday after next, you can tell us some of those stories if you haven’t crumbled into dust by then!” she flounces out the door and meets Hermes and Emporio at the far end of the hall. They seem to be playing a rather frazzled game of “say as many things as possible about this one single fish”, which they look rather relieved to be rescued from.
“Let’s go home,” she says, and they do.
On a Friday night, in the soft warmth of spring, Jolyne will hear her father tell magical, bizarre stories. On another night, they'll talk about music. They’ll make fun of each other a little, and not mention the time in another life when they died together, or the time in this one when they’d cried in each others’ arms.
As spring turns to summer, Jolyne will realize that her dreams are calm and peaceful most nights. Of course, the strange and violent dreams will happen occasionally, as they always have, but that’s alright - even at their worst, a thrumming feeling in her chest tells her that she’ll wake up to a better, kinder world. And she always does.