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First Jolyne breaks his favorite mug, and then she says, horrified, "Oh my fucking god, are you dying?"
“My mug,” Jotaro says.
Jolyne makes no move to fix it, sweep it, or show even a hint of a little regret after shattering his lumpy dolphin mug that she’d made him in third-grade pottery class. It took two months for him to learn how to wrap his fingers around the dorsal fin in a comfortable but secure grip. It took another five months for the beady red eyes to stop unsettling Star Platinum enough that it would be willing to take it out of the cupboard whenever it made him coffee.
The mug had taken him on a journey of acceptance and a reevaluation of beauty. Now it’s shattered into—Star Platinum manifests to count—342 pieces.
Jotaro wonders if he has a cause to call Josuke over anytime soon.
“You’re literally dying.”
He sends Star Platinum for a broom and yesterday’s newspaper, along with a plastic baggie. Best to keep the pieces, just in case. “I’m not dying.”
“Yeah, you are. You tripped. And you sneezed. I’ve never seen you do that. That’s doomsday signs. That means you’re dying.”
“Give me a fuckin’ break,” he mutters. You show one sign of vulnerability to your daughter.
Star Platinum finishes sweeping up the pieces into the baggie and disappears, leaving it on the kitchen table where his papers and Jolyne’s scattered school notes cover the surface so thoroughly that it makes for a new layer of tablecloth. For obvious reasons, neither of them eat there anymore. Nor do they work there. He’s not sure why they don’t bother cleaning it up at this point.
They should stop eating on the couch, Jotaro thinks. His back has started to ache in protest, because he’s forty-one years old, and bodies, Jiji had told him with the gleeful joy of a man who knows he’s about to be joined in mutual suffering, only go downhill from there.
But Jotaro still wakes up at dawn. A long time ago he did it as a show of solidarity for his wife, who had to deal with a hyperactive kindergartner Jolyne at the time, and then it had shifted into a necessity because certain schools of fish only mobilized at dawn, and now it’s become something like a habit that brings him largely pain and suffering each day.
He’s become a man of habit in his age. The seventeen-year-old him would’ve punched the shit out of people like him.
There’s a silence. Jotaro shakes out of his thoughts in time to find Jolyne staring at him. It’s startling how much her gaze pierces into him—not unsettling. Just surprising.
“You say something?” he asks.
At this, Jolyne frowns. He doesn’t know why. “Sit down,” she orders. With that expression, she looks extraordinarily like her mother, and also a little bit like his own mother. It’s the eyes, the way her face crinkles up as if she’s eaten something rotten. “I’ll be back, okay? Don’t you dare go anywhere.”
“Where would I go,” Jotaro intends to say, but she’s already left the room for—somewhere. Maybe her room. He’s heard from Josuke that university can be hard these days, although he doesn’t know how much of a change has been made in curriculums in ten or twenty years.
He sinks into the couch, sighing, and slings an arm over his eyes.
He doesn’t know how much time passes, but he’s startled out of his impromptu nap by something plastic shoved into his mouth. Star Platinum immediately yanks it out for him, and Jotaro sits up to find… a thermometer.
“Well, don’t just stare at it,” Jolyne says impatiently. Her mother’s frown and his temper—sometimes it’s strange to realize how genetics work. In terms of luck of the draw, Jotaro thinks that sometimes she hasn’t been the most blessed. “Come on. I wanna check your temperature.”
“I’m not sick,” Jotaro grunts, or tries to. Stone Ocean unravels its strings to jab the thermometer under his tongue the moment he opens his mouth, and then keeps the strings locked around his jaw as if he’s incapable of using a thermometer by himself. It’s vaguely humiliating. He’s certain he’d be more annoyed if his pounding headache disappeared, but all he can manage is a faint sense of discontentment.
Jotaro narrows his eyes at his daughter. She just stares defiantly back, lips pursed.
The thermometer beeps. Stone Ocean retracts with a little pat to his cheek. Jotaro doesn’t know if he should feel offended.
“Well, shit,” Jolyne says after a moment, sounding strange. “You got a 103 fever.”
It takes a moment for him to convert it to Celsius. Years of living in the States can’t fix that.
38… No. Calculations are wrong. 39.3.
“Ah,” Jotaro says, the number registering a beat late.
“Ah? You got a 103 fever and all you have to say is ah?”
“Were you expecting a speech?”
Stone Ocean unravels in a frenzy, the strings shooting out around the house. Jolyne doesn’t even seem to be conscious of it as it retreats into the cupboards and the kitchen and the direction of his study for whatever reason, because she’s too busy glowering at him. “You’re sick. Did you know?”
“I’m not sick,” Jotaro says again, but Jolyne just rolls her eyes and waves the thermometer in his face. Following the motion makes his head spin, so he pushes her hand away and then flicks her on the forehead while he’s at it.
It does nothing to dissuade her. “Hello?” she demands. “Do the words 103 fever mean nothing to you?”
The last time he’d gotten sick, Jotaro had been seventeen in a hospital in Cairo. The fever had been the least of his worries then. But he doubts that Jolyne would be happy to hear that, so he settles for a shrug. “Lived with worse,” he tells her.
“That—“ Jolyne cuts off. Her expression flashes through a spectrum of emotion so quick it’s like a burst of fireworks. He doesn’t know how she does it. Then she’s inhaling and shaking her head, saying, “Nope, not today. I’ll think about how horribly sad that is later—“
Horribly sad. Jotaro puzzles over this and reaches no conclusion.
“—but right now, you are marching straight to bed. Come on, mister, get your big lug off the couch.”
“You just told me to sit down.”
“And now I’m telling you to move!” She grabs his hands and yanks at him; the only reason he forces himself to his feet is because he knows that she’d dislocate his shoulders otherwise. She grins at him, leaning up to pat him on the cheek. “Good, good. Off to bed you go.”
Jotaro thinks about telling her: I am forty-one years old. I am your father. I can stop time. Then he thinks about it some more. He heads off to bed without another word.
**
The first time Jolyne had gotten sick, she was six months old, and his wife had been on a business trip. It hadn’t seemed possible that a baby could run so warm, but there Jolyne was in his arms: wailing with her scrunched-up face one moment, and falling quieter than countryside night in the next.
“It’s concerning, but she’ll be okay,” his wife had said on the phone. “Babies get sick easily because their immune systems haven’t been built up. She’ll get through it. If it doesn’t get any better in a few hours, take her to the clinic.”
Jotaro had married her because they understood each other. He never told her about Stands or his family or the story about Egypt, but he never had to, either. When she traced the knife scars over his ribs and the burn marks from Kira’s bombs on his chest, she just asked, “Is this something I need to know?”
“No,” he had said, then paused. I hope you never know, he wanted to say, but couldn’t find the right words.
“Okay,” she’d said. Her fingers fell away from his skin, petal-light.
Jotaro didn’t think of her as insensitive or cruel. But something about the calmness in her voice made him unbalanced. She wasn’t the one holding Jolyne, so it could’ve been that she didn’t know the full extent of it.
“She’s really sick,” he said again.
“I know. It’ll be okay.”
Jotaro had wiped the wet tears from Jolyne’s face. She stopped crying long enough to stare at him with hazy eyes. His pulse thundered in his ears. Suddenly, he was seized with the certainty that she was going to die—there was no real reason or evidence for it, but it was just a feeling pooling deep in his gut, festering and sick.
He hung up. One breath later, Star Platinum tore out from his skin to track every minute motion of Jolyne’s chest, the expanding of her little lungs inside her body. The dread had settled into Jotaro’s throat like a pooling vat of oil.
He stood in her room for hours. Paralyzed. Waiting.
When Jotaro checked her temperature a few hours later, the fever had died down. He sent his wife a message, partially for her ease of mind but mostly to convince himself: She’s okay. Fever’s gone.
Jolyne’s tiny hand gripped his pinkie. It was a feeble hold that he could’ve pried away with ease, but instead he fell asleep sitting up against her crib.
The next morning his wife had returned home, checked on Jolyne. She’d told him, “Look. She’s gonna be okay. Just like you, you know? Resilient.”
Jotaro had said nothing. His mind was static. I thought she was going to die, he wanted to say, and I couldn’t move.
But those weren’t the right words either.
Two months later, he sent over his side of the divorce papers. He left Jolyne to her.
**
“Okay,” says Jolyne, “here’s a cold compress, some medicine, and blankets.” She follows this up by dumping the load on him like garbage into a landfill, giving herself a self-satisfied nod.
Jotaro nudges the pile of blankets crushing his legs and counts the layers. “Did you bring all the blankets in the house?”
“Nope. Why? Do you want me to?”
Jotaro’s headache grows sharper. “No. Why did you bring out the entire drug cabinet?”
“I didn’t bring the entire cabinet,” Jolyne protests. “Just, you know. The contents. So you could pick and choose what medicine you want. I don’t recommend the cherry, by the way. Tastes like ass.”
At the mention of cherries, the memory of Kakyoin’s pale face stumbles into his head. Jotaro had come to visit a day after visitation had been opened, and three days after his eyes had been scarred deep. Jotaro didn’t need to unwind the bandages over his eyes to know Kakyoin was exhausted, stressed. They all were; it was like a ticking time bomb that they all shared.
Kakyoin was a demanding patient, surprisingly. Or maybe not. He was always the kind of bastard you least expected, because the rudeness only came out the moment you became accustomed to all the manners. Then he’d switch right back to polite, just to leave a guy disoriented.
He refused to turn on the TV while they were there. After forty-five days on the road, they’d exhausted most topics—so at the hospital, they discussed medicinal flavors.
Rank your favorites. Mine is cherry, obviously, Kakyoin had said, and when Jotaro had recoiled at the thought of it, he’d traced the grimace on Jotaro’s face with the pad of his thumb and laughed. What? I’m serious, Jojo.
“—lo?” When Jotaro blinks, Jolyne is snapping her fingers in his face. “Hey. Where do you go in your head?”
Oh. “I was thinking.”
“About what? Fish?”
“No,” Jotaro says. Jolyne opens her mouth, but he cuts her off to say, “I don’t remember. It’s fine.”
Again with that face—like she’s about to tear her hair out or punch him in the face or tackle him, and the only thing stopping her is her inability to decide which one to do first. “Sure,” she says after a second, voice tight. “Whatever. Pick your drug of choice and sleep until you feel like a human being.”
“What am I feeling like now, then?” Jotaro asks, bemused.
Jolyne considers it. “A harp seal.”
They’d watched a documentary together a few days ago, after she’d emerged from her two-day post-exam hibernation coma. The harp seal. A strange animal. The mothers, according to the documentary, care for their pups for the first twelve days of life to the point of self-neglect. After that, they abandon the pups and leave them stranded on the ice for the next month and a half.
The young harp seal, the narrator had intoned, is unable to swim until the eighth week. As such, many do not survive this period of their lives.
“Adult or kid?” Jotaro asks.
Jolyne picks up a bottle of medicine and tosses it at his head; Star Platinum catches it, and her mouth falls into a tight, flat line. “Figure it out, old man,” she says.
Jotaro looks down at the bottle when she leaves with a slam of the door that leaves his ears rattling. It’s cough medicine: cherry-flavored.
**
“You’re not a very good dad,” his wife had told him once.
A marine biologist like him, they’d done countless of case studies and field research in the four years they’d gotten to know each other between undergrad, lab, and the days out on a rocking ship. She liked to hum when she made a discovery: trophic overlap between these species is low after coastal storms. Did you know you have a scar on your upper thigh, on the back? You're not a very good dad.
It was how Jotaro knew that she was stating an observation, not an opinion.
The TV provided ambient static in the background. It was tuned into a show that they had both stopped watching hours ago, though neither of them had bothered to turn it off. He was lying on the couch, nursing a can of beer that long gone lukewarm, and she was curled up on the dining room chair with her legs tucked into her chest.
She resembled Jolyne to a startling extent. Jolyne liked to sleep in the exact same way even at three-years-old, all shrimplike and tiny.
Jotaro couldn't remember if his wife had migrated to the chair because there was no space on the couch, or if she just preferred to sit there.
It had been six months since he'd last visited Florida. In his absence, she'd painted the wallpapers glass-bottle green.
"I don't think you're trying to be a bad dad," she said.
Jotaro knew his fair share of terrible fathers, but that statement confused him. He turned it over in his head, trying to parse through the words. "How does a person try to become a bad dad?" he said eventually.
"Well, you know my father." She'd moved in with him during his senior year of undergrad; she never said it outright, but he'd seen bruises on her skin, and she wasn't particularly a clumsy sort.
Is this something I need to know? Jotaro had asked. Star Platinum manifested behind him. The looming protector.
In response, she'd smiled at him and kissed him on the cheek. You're sweet, she'd said. Where do you keep the towels?
"Yeah, I know," Jotaro said.
Her gaze swiveled to him, a lighthouse in the night, and lingered on his face for a moment. Then she lowered her head and rested her cheek on her knee. She always got crease marks on her face from papers or clothes that way. "That’s what I mean," she said. "You're not a good dad, but you're not trying to be one."
"A bad dad," he clarified, slowly.
She shook her head. "No," she said. “You’re not trying to be a dad at all. It's a little regrettable. I'm pretty sure that if you wanted to be a good dad, you'd be a great one. Jojo loves you. She hates it when you leave. Last time she didn't stop crying for two days."
His wife had a voice like lakewater: smooth, clear, neutral. Even when she was upset it was hard to tell.
"Are you upset?" Jotaro asked.
She blinked at him. "Do you care?"
"You're still my wife."
"Who you're trying to divorce," she said, smiling.
Jotaro didn't let himself feel regret, because he didn't feel bad about putting an end to their three-year marriage—he couldn't, not when he had his reasons. But he felt strange that she never asked why.
"I’m not upset,” she said. “I knew from the beginning you'd be the type to leave. No man who goes out on that many trips likes to stay in one place. I'm kind of the same way."
"But you're staying here anyway."
"I am."
"You resent me for it?"
She fell quiet at that. In steps, she unfurled, like the bloom of a coral reef in summer sun: first she raised her head. Lowered her arms. Set down her legs on the hardwood and rose out of her chair to approach him. He shifted to make room for her on the couch, but she shook her head and stood there, still. A beat passed.
Finally, she sat on the floor and leaned her head against his chest. He didn't love her the way husbands should’ve loved their wives, but he still liked her. It was instinct to stroke through her hair.
A sigh left her lips, soft.
"You're sweet, you know." His hand slowed, stopped. Fell back to his lap. She didn't move. "Say goodbye to your daughter when you leave this time.”
It was as if he was going to vibrate out of his skin with how tensely he held himself. Either his wife didn’t notice, or she didn’t care.
"Don't worry. I'll sign my end of the papers and send it to the courthouse before you're out of the country. I actually don’t know why I haven’t done that yet. Maybe I just liked being Mrs. Kujo,” she mused. A pause where he could’ve filled in the silence, but didn’t. After a second she spoke again. “Promise me you'll pick up my phone calls every once in a while,” she said. “For Jolyne."
"Okay," he said. It was another promise that didn't last.
**
Jotaro wakes up again at noon with his shirt plastered to his skin, the blankets wound tight around his legs. He'd thrown them off sometime during his nap.
It takes him a moment for his surroundings to sink in. The curtains have been drawn over the window by his desk in the corner, blacking out his entire room except for a trickle of sunlight coming in from the cracked door. There’s a figure in the doorway.
His vision is hazy when he tries to focus, not to mention the way his depth perception is even worse than normal. One functioning eye tends to do that to a person. He manifests Star Platinum and waits until Star Platinum taps him on the cheek. It's Jolyne.
"Lunch?" His voice comes out like a rattling fork in the garbage disposal. Jesus fucking Christ. “Shit.” He coughs, and it’s searing fire all the way down his throat, like the horrible fucking third-rate whiskey that his grandfather had slid over to him somewhere around Hong Kong. “Give me a second."
The moment Jotaro peels himself away from the mattress, Jolyne is there to half-herd, half-shove him back in. He goes down, all the air in his lungs fleeing in his wheeze.
"Stay down," she snaps. She looks frazzled, he thinks. It's hard to tell in the darkness. "I'll get you some water. Fuck, how are you this sweaty?"
"It's hot," he tries to explain—to an empty room. Jolyne has already left. He closes his eyes and slumps into the bed, his head spinning. Nausea rolls in his gut.
He can still feel Star Platinum hovering over him. The presence of a Stand is unmistakable in that way, like someone stepping on your shadow.
Near the end of his stay in Morioh, the kids had thrown a competition to catch him off-guard. He never found out what the prize was because every time someone tried to scare him using the silent footsteps of their Stand, Jotaro had sensed it the instant it manifested, Star Platinum ready in full force.
"I don't know about you, but I sure as hell can't feel it when someone steps on my shadow," Josuke had said, wide-eyed after Jotaro had explained it to him.
Jotaro had frowned in response. "You can't feel it?"
"What the fuck.” His face was an odd cocktail of terror and awe. He looked shockingly like Okuyasu with that expression. "Are you sure you're not like, some kind of ninja, Jotaro-san? Don’t you study dolphins? Is that even possible?"
Jotaro resented the way Josuke said that. "You can study dolphins and sense Stands."
"I'm not insulting you or anything, it's just—" Josuke flapped a frantic hand in his general direction. "You know? I don't know anyone who can sense that. That's kind of—”
"—sick," Jolyne's voice says. A cool hand presses against his forehead, and Jotaro opens his eyes to see the blurred features of his daughter's face twisted in a scowl. She's sitting on the bed, where Stone Ocean waits behind her, holding a glass of water and some sort of tray in its hands.
Josuke’s face flashes in his head. The words come out before he can think twice: "Can you feel it when someone steps on your shadow?"
"What are you talking about?” Jolyne says, confused, and then, “Sit up."
He barely has the strength to reach for the glass after he forces himself to sit upright. Star Platinum has to help him hold it. He stares at it carefully to be sure, but there's no mistake about it—his hand is shaking. Huh.
It’s unnerving to feel so weak. He thinks about his mother, suffering for forty-five days, and immediately erases the thought from his head in favor of draining the glass. When he looks at Jolyne, she's frowning again.
Compared to both her mother and him, she's expressive. It's a mystery where that side of her came from.
"Fuck," she mutters.
The only thing stopping him from flicking her on the forehead for her language is the fact that he doesn't think he can make it, and she's twenty now anyway. He'd lost the right to correct her language long ago. Not to mention the hypocrisy of him, of all people, correcting anyone's language.
There's no strength in his body, so he makes Star Platinum keep him upright in the bed even as the walls stumble around him. If he closes his eyes, the swooping sensation in his stomach is like being on field for research. He's plenty used to unsteady land, in that case.
"What?" Jotaro asks, because she’s still staring at him.
Jolyne's jaw is clenched so tight that it makes his teeth ache just looking at her. "What do you mean, what?" she bites out.
"You look like you have something to say."
"So you're paying attention to me now?" Her voice is scathing. Jotaro blames his lack of hat for the way she can see his expression go carefully blank, shutters closing. She opens her mouth again, and closes it.
Mirrors of each other: they both turn away to face the wall in unison. Jotaro hears her sigh from what feels like underwater, more than he sees it.
"Sorry," she says after a moment. "I just—I'm stressed. You're sick."
Her words sink in through layers of tar. "Why are you stressed?"
"You're kidding, right?"
His stomach recoils. He hasn't eaten anything all day, and faintly he's relieved that Jolyne hasn't tried to force him to eat, either. He's certain it wouldn't stay down. His hands grip the blankets in a white-knuckled grip. "No," he manages to say.
"It's just." Jotaro hears her inhale, sharp, and let it go in a half-composed whistle, like taking a drag off a cigarette and blowing the smoke out. "Okay,” she begins. “We're trying this father-daughter thing, and obviously it's... functioning. Like I don't think you hate me most days, and most days I don't really hate you, but sometimes it's hard, okay? I don't know what you're thinking.”
It’s not very complicated: I’m thinking you were right about cherry being the worst flavor.
“You love me, probably,” she goes on, “but I don't know if you even like me. And you being sick is—it's weird. All my life, you've been this huge figure, and then you leave, and the next time I see you, I'm in prison and you're in a coma. So I save you, because it’s just what I have to do and I get why you abandoned me but that doesn't make it okay or anything, and maybe just once I want to punch you in the face. Like, I learned how to throw a really good punch in jail, and I can’t waste that, right? And then you come back, and that's—fucking great, except you're bleeding out in the ocean now, and—and then you're in another coma, and it's like I can't do anything. Like I’m a kid and all I can do is wait.” A pause, and then she says quietly, “It's unsettling. I don't like it."
Jotaro tries to focus, but his head is a static radio in a car that's driving through miles of desert, and only half of her words filter through. He sucks his breath in through his teeth. The habit of it from battle alone makes his pulse spike enough to clear a little of the fog in his head.
"I don't hate you," he says after a second.
Strangled laughter. Star Platinum passes her to retrieve a trash can to place beside his bed, but she doesn’t seem to notice, too bent on being—furious. That’s the face. "Well, that's fucking great!” Jolyne shouts. “You got any other groundbreaking revelations you wanna tell me? Like, you know, why you never tell me anything? Or why you always change the subject when I ask you about your past or anything at all? Or why the hell you’re a shit dad, or why Pucci got the drop on you twice when you can stop time, or—or—”
Acid lurches in his throat. “Fuck,” he mutters, and then he’s heaving over the side of the bed into the trash can.
**
"You can't do that to me again," Jolyne had said in the hospital, after he woke up the second time. She didn’t specify what.
Her face was buried in his itchy hospital gown, her tears soaking into his neck. He'd always remembered her as a wailing type of crier, but she had learned to do it silently in his absence. He wondered when—if it was jail. A boy. Jotaro himself. Maybe something entirely unrelated.
His ribs ached beneath her weight and the haze of morphine. It was disorienting to look at her properly with only one eye, so Jotaro breathed out, let the tension of battle fall away from his shoulders, and held her tighter.
"I won't," he said.
**
When the nausea passes enough that he can lean back against the bed, drained, Jolyne is talking into the phone. “How soon?” she’s asking in a knife-edge voice. Jotaro eyes her, the way she’s pacing in tight circles. Two meters, maybe—the length of a jail cell. “No, I’m serious. I think he’s dying or—I don’t know, okay, it’s bad, he just threw—”
Star Platinum plucks the phone from her grasp. A tinny voice is screeching in the receiver, but he ignores it to glance at the display.
Uncle Josuke, it reads.
He stares at her. Jolyne at least has the decency to look a little sheepish even with the stubborn set of her mouth, so his exasperation must’ve gotten through somewhat. But just in case it’s not enough: “I’m sick,” he says, slow and loud enough for both of them. “Not dying.”
“Jotaro-san!” Josuke screeches immediately. Time hasn’t changed that earnest attitude of his. “If you’re dying, I can be over in sixteen hours and fix you right—”
Jotaro jabs the end call button and tosses the phone back to Jolyne.
“I don’t want you to die,” she says in the silence, almost defensively.
“I’m not dying. It’s just a flu.”
“People die from flus!”
“Not me. Go do your homework.”
Her nostrils flare. “I’m on break, and I’m trying to take care of you!”
“I’ve had medicine and water,” he points out. “I’m taken care of. You can go.”
“Do you hate me?” Jolyne demands.
It’s such an about-turn that he’s left speechless, blinking in the face of this guerilla conversation.
Jolyne seems to take his silence as confirmation, though, because she just steamrolls on, the fury in her voice palpably rising with every word. “Like, okay, I get it! I’m not a great daughter! I steal cars—or I stole, past tense, a singular car, I guess—and I have a girlfriend you don’t approve of. And every time you say something, I have to leave the room because I get so pissed off at you, but I’m trying, okay! And if you don’t want to try either, then why the fuck are we even here? You sure as hell don’t want me around! I can’t even take care of you while you’re sick without you kicking me out the door! Why did you even tell Mom you wanted me to stay with you for the summer?!”
She stops, the sound of her livid panting ringing in his ears.
“I wanted you to stay with me,” Jotaro says. It comes out tired because he can’t manage much else, but her mouth parts anyway. She stares at him—it strikes him then that she’s only twenty. So young. “I don’t disapprove of Hermès either,” he says, after a moment.
“And. And the stolen car?”
“What type of car?”
Jolyne sounds lost. “A… A Mercedes? I also tried to blackmail my ex into giving me his Ferrari, but he gave me a helicopter instead. So…”
“Ah.” He thinks about this. “It’s a good car.”
“It—” Jolyne gawks. It lasts all of one second before she’s storming back to enraged. “Is that all you have to say? I stole a car and a helicopter and—and went to jail, and all you have to say is, ‘That’s a good car’? Are you fucking serious?”
“It’s similar to what my grandfather said to me when he met me in jail.” The talking is making him want to slip back into bed, but he can sense that this is a conversation that’s long overdue, so instead he just leans his head back against the bed.
“You... What?” Jolyne’s stare digs into the side of his head. “You went to jail? Why? Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
There’s too many reasons. He settles for the simplest, honest ones: “It’s not an interesting story. And I never wanted to be a bad influence on you.”
Sometimes he thinks about the certainty in his ex-wife’s voice when she said, You’re not a very good dad. He realized later that if he wasn’t trying to be a bad dad, then that just meant that he was a bad father by nature. Something that ran in his blood.
Nothing he did would ever make him the father that she deserved. He wasn't a good son, a good grandson, a good father, or even a particularly good husband.
Jotaro wasn't the type of person that did well with other people. There was probably a reason why his Stand froze time for everyone but him: he'd walk alone.
That was what it meant to carry the power of the world.
"Why did you come back then?" Jolyne asks. She looks vulnerable even as she stands with her shoulders pushed back, head held high. She’d looked the same way when he came back just in time to snatch her out of death’s hands. "You didn't have to. You could've left again."
But Jotaro's already shaking his head. "I've always cherished you. I just wanted you to know that. After that—” He shrugs. "You would’ve had enough of me after one summer. That’s why I asked you and your mom only for these few months.”
For a long moment Jolyne stares at him. A cloud must pass over the sun outside; the room falls darker still, and he can’t tell what type of face she’s making. But when she speaks, her voice is thick. “Alright,” she says.
“Alright?”
A stiff nod. “Yeah. Just—go to sleep. We can talk about this when you’re not sick.” He doesn’t move. There’s a sigh, and then she’s flicking him in the forehead. Payback. “I’ll be right here, Dad,” she says.
Star Platinum disappears. The tension seeps out of Jotaro’s body, drop by drop, and Jotaro does as she asks, slipping back into bed while Jolyne keeps steady watch. Her presence doesn’t grate like a Stand but it isn’t nonexistent, either. It just is. Neutral. Simple.
Jolyne’s hand slips into his. She squeezes his hand, the grip cool and firm. Jotaro closes his eyes—and for once, he doesn’t dream of anything.
**
When Jolyne was born, Jotaro’s mind was full of white noise, a passing traffic of cars like Miami during rush hour. He thought that she was small, ugly, and a loud crier. He thought that he’d do anything for her. I’m glad I lived, he thought finally, and it surprised him because it was the first time he’d thought that and meant it, deep inside.
**
At dawn, Jotaro wakes up. The blankets have been wound around his legs again, and his head is pounding even worse than a hangover from his college days, but he’s not sweating, which comes as a relief.
Someone is holding his hand. He blinks, squinting in the darkness of the room—depth perception is still shot. It doesn’t matter. He recognizes that figure now; it’s Jolyne, curled up on the bed beside him.
A knot in his stomach loosens at the sight of her.
He thinks: One step.
This time, he won’t be late.