Chapter Text
Josuke is six, has a key to his house, and walks home. This is all very exciting, since nobody else his age has a key to their house. Walking home isn't as exciting, since his house is just one street down from the school, and either his dad or Caesar will watch him from out the front window. Josuke's friends all think he's very cool for walking home alone, so he decides not to tell them that part. It's not lying, technically. His dad said so.
The front door is unlocked when he gets home. It usually is. This renders his key effectively useless, but it's the actual practice of carrying around a key that's the fun part – he has to stand on his toes and jiggle the key around when he tries to properly unlock the door, and it always presses against his fingers hard enough to leave indents, so he doesn't like unlocking the door much anyway – his dad even let him put stickers on the key too, for the extra cool points.
The house is already overflowing with the smell of different spices and sauces when he opens the door. It wafts just above his head and swims out the open door behind him. He makes sure to shut it, to keep as much of it in as he can – today is a Caesar day, then.
He kicks off his shoes – making sure they don't land on Caesar's, because they're very colorful, and it'd be very sad if mud from Josuke's (considerably less colorful) shoes got on them – and he goes to the kitchen.
The kitchen isn't the biggest in the world, and neither is the house, but Caesar still manages to have two pots going on the stove while he rolls out dough on the counter. Steam is swirling around him, and he almost looks ethereal when it passes by him out the window; Caesar had learned his lesson about not cooking with the window open in their house after he set off the fire alarm and couldn't figure out how to turn it off. He'd just ended up tugging it out of the ceiling, and then Dad made him buy a new one. He leaves the windows open, now. Josuke doesn't mind, since the breeze is nice.
"Are you making pasta?" Josuke asks, pushing himself up against the counter, peeking over the edge and trying to give himself a boost with it. He still can't see over the rim of either pot, unfortunately. It's not fair that his dad gets to be big and he doesn't.
Caesar nods, leaning off to the side to check on the sauce, stirring it until it meets his satisfaction. "I'm also making you another batch so Jojo won't end up making you eat another awful box of anything store bought while I'm gone."
"Thank you," Josuke says. He can't actually taste much of a difference between Caesar's pasta and the stuff that his dad buys at the store, but Caesar always seems so happy with himself that Josuke can't help but thank him.
"Do you want on the counter?"
"I thought you didn't like it when people were on the counter?"
"Only your dad," Caesar says, scrunching his nose in a way that even Josuke knows is just for the dramatics. "Who knows where he's been."
Caesar helps Josuke onto the counter, grabbing him effortlessly around the hips and settling him back down – the kitchen is much more clean and tidy with Caesar than when it's his dad who cooks, so Josuke doesn't have to worry about getting anything on the backs of his pants. Caesar always seems to know what's going on, seems to have a set place for every measuring cup (that he doesn't even use), every eggshell and drop of milk that manages to spill over the edge of the bowl. He cracks eggs without letting them run everywhere, and pulls the flour out of the cupboard without letting it blow up everywhere (which is only slightly disappointing).
Caesar is a weird constant in his life that he's never thought too hard on. He knows that most kid's parents don't have a friend that sleeps over and lives with them half the time. Caesar taking up space in the kitchen, on the couch, even in his dad's bed, sometimes – it's all normal, and he doesn't really remember much of a time before that. It's as normal to him as watching cartoons with his dad, or going to see his mom on the weekends, when she isn't studying for school (which is, objectively, more confusing, because why would anyone willingly go to school when they didn't have to?).
So maybe that's why, a couple days later, when sitting in class with a stubby pencil and a sheet full of tiny print that he can't fully read, that he writes down Caesar's number – the only one he knows other than his dad's, for emergencies – under the mandatory contacts slip that the school gives him during the start of every year. He knows that dad is supposed to be written in the affiliation box next to his dad – Joseph Joestar, which is a much less confusing and easy to spell name than Caesar – so he fills it in and turns it over to his teacher without taking it home, or even thinking too hard on it.