Work Text:
As far as vacation destinations went, Hong Kong definitely wouldn’t have been at the top of Jotaro’s list.
Rohan had insisted on going, though, and when he got like this there was nothing Jotaro could possibly have done to dissuade him. When he had asked if Jotaro had been before, Jotaro had given a noncommittal answer and shrugged. It wasn’t a lie, really. He hadn’t been for pleasure.
And it had been a very, very long time since then.
Still, that hadn’t prepared him for the wave of apprehension that washed over him as the two of them strolled through Tiger Balm Garden. Yet another one of Rohan’s ideas—the unusual architecture was an ideal subject for his sketching, and he had already used up two rolls of film documenting the setting on top of that. It had to be for an upcoming arc of his manga. He was never this meticulous about anything else.
Despite the intervening decade, the ground still bore scars from Avdol’s fire. Jotaro scuffed one of the marks with his foot, remembering the older man’s easy, self-assured smile. The heat of his flames. The wisdom of his words.
“...Jotaro?”
He looked up distractedly, and blinked in disbelief. “No way.”
“It is you! I woulda recognized you anywhere.”
Of all the ghosts of his past, this was the last he had been expecting to see today. Jotaro found himself confronted by a grown-up Anne, a foot or so taller than the last time he’d seen her, but still unmistakably the same girl, with her scattering of freckles, gap-toothed grin, and torn jeans.
“Give me a fucking break,” he muttered under his breath.
“What?” Rohan said distractedly, lowering his camera. “A friend of yours, Jotaro?”
“Not exactly.”
Rohan smoothed away a loose strand of hair and extended his hand. “Kishibe Rohan. I doubt Jotaro is going to introduce me, so…?”
“Anne Murray.” She grinned, taking his hand. “Nice to meetcha.”
Jotaro pulled at the brim of his hat. “Murray?”
“It’s my married name. Want to get some tea and catch up? My treat. I figure I owe you one.”
There was no way he was getting out of this gracefully. Jotaro shrugged, raising an eyebrow at Rohan.
“Fine with me,” Rohan replied to his wordless question. “I could sit down for a bit.”
“I know a great place right around the corner.” Anne gestured, and the two of them followed, wending their way slowly through the garden’s labyrinthine paths toward the exit. This, at least, Jotaro was glad to leave behind. Even if the excuse for doing so came with its own baggage.
“Who is she, really?” Rohan muttered as they trailed behind Anne, who was gesturing animatedly as she indicated various points of interest.
That was a harder question to answer than anticipated. Jotaro frowned, sizing her up.
“Someone who was there for Egypt.”
“You’ve never mentioned her before.”
Jotaro shrugged. “She wasn’t...important. She wasn’t there for the whole thing. She was just a bratty kid who wanted to tag along. We put her on a plane home before things got really bad.”
“I see.” Rohan pursed his lips.
“I heard you call me a brat,” Anne called back over her shoulder. “Watch it, or you’re paying for your own tea.”
Jotaro snorted, pinching the bridge of his nose. Despite everything...it was actually kind of good to see her. Life had a funny way of continuing on, even when he didn’t expect it to.
The promised cafe was a ten-minute walk from Tiger Balm Garden. The three of them took a table under the sidewalk awning, half-shaded from the relentless afternoon sun, and Anne ordered milk tea and a small assortment of sweets. Jotaro had to chuckle at that, too. He could still hear her complaining voice from the backseat of the car, begging Polnareff to pull over so she could get a candy bar from the gas station.
“This is more like it,” Anne said with a grin, taking a sip of her tea. “Twelve years, huh? You really haven’t changed a bit.”
Jotaro folded his arms. “Look who’s talking.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She laughed. “I’ve got a job and everything, you know.”
“You think I don’t?”
“It’s hard to imagine you doing anything besides smoking and sulking, to be honest.” Anne stuck out her tongue at him. “What do you do now, anyway?”
“I’m a marine biologist. Got my PhD a couple years ago. You?”
“Paralegal. I want to be an attorney, though. I’m still in school.”
Jotaro drained his teacup. “Definitely not the answer I was expecting from you.”
“Backatcha.” Anne turned to Rohan, who was watching the two of them with interest, his chin resting on his fingertips. “What about you?”
“I’m a manga artist,” Rohan answered, without pretense for once.
“Oh really? What do you write? Anything I’ve read?”
“Pink Dark Boy.”
Anne’s eyes went wide. “No way.”
Rohan nodded.
“Hang on a second—” Anne leaned over, digging through her purse. “Got it!” She pulled out a volume of Shonen Jump and leafed through it until she reached a chapter with Rohan’s familiar masked protagonist on the cover. “This? This is you. Really?”
“Really.” The ghost of a smile flitted across Rohan’s lips.
“Is it weird if I ask you to sign it?”
“Not at all.” Rohan took the book from her, producing a pen seemingly from nowhere, and inked an elaborate signature accompanied by a sketch onto the page in less time than it took Jotaro to pour another cup of tea.
It was always like that with him. For such a misanthrope, Rohan really was fond of his fans. It still caught Jotaro by surprise sometimes. It was rare that he got recognized while the two of them were out around Morioh these days; most people already knew who he was, and the novelty had worn off quickly. Chances were that Rohan would spend most of tonight at the hotel furiously inking pages, buoyed up by the motivation this interaction had given him. Even though Jotaro was the one who would lose in that scenario, it was hard not to be glad for him. He felt a strange sort of pride from the outside. Rohan’s manga had nothing to do with him, really; he’d been writing it for years before the two of them met, and Jotaro had stopped reading Shonen Jump a long, long time ago. But there was something about watching something Rohan had worked so hard on pay off that made warmth spread through his chest.
“So,” Anne said cheerfully, tucking the signed issue back into her bag, “Where’re Kakyoin and the others? I gotta admit, it’s weird seeing you without them. You guys were all attached at the hip.”
Jotaro’s face darkened. In the periphery of his vision, Rohan cast an uneasy glance in his direction. Watching to see how he would react.
Jotaro gripped his teacup more tightly than was necessary, choosing his words very carefully. “Polnareff still lives in France. I see him once or twice a year.”
“Pff. Boring.”
Anne seemed not to have noticed his change in demeanor. Or maybe she was just used to him looking like this. Jotaro hadn’t exactly been a ray of sunshine during that trip, after all. It had taken years for him to even begin to understand how deeply the events of those fifty days had affected him. If he was being honest with himself, he probably still didn’t have a full grasp on it now.
Taking a petit-four from the tray and chewing it with her mouth open, Anne raised an eyebrow at Jotaro. “What about everyone else?”
Jotaro took a deep breath. “Kakyoin...died in Egypt, not long after we split up. Avdol, too.”
Anne stared at him for a moment, slack-jawed, before suddenly seeming to remember the half-chewed dessert in her mouth and swallowing it hastily. “What the hell happened?”
“It’s hard to explain.” Jotaro shook his head. “I’m...sorry.”
Under the table, Rohan placed a reassuring hand on Jotaro’s thigh. He covered it with his own, giving it a squeeze.
This conversation was never an easy one to have, but it did get marginally less painful every time he had to have it. Jotaro had spent the better part of a decade doing everything within his power not to speak the words or even say their names, as if verbalizing any part of it were going to make it happen all over again. Hiding from their ghosts.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Anne demanded, blinking back tears. Jotaro could still see the little girl in her, the angry stowaway, in that expression. Desperate not to be left behind.
“You hitchhiked all the way to Pakistan. How were we supposed to track you down?”
She sniffed. “You could have found a way.”
“...Yeah, we probably could have,” Jotaro admitted. “It’s not a good excuse, but there were other things on my mind.”
“You’re a jerk, you know that?”
“Yeah.” Jotaro struggled with himself for a moment. “Kakyoin is...buried in Osaka, if you’re ever in Japan. We weren’t able to retrieve Avdol’s body, but he has a plot in Polnareff’s family cemetery.”
Anne nodded slowly, wiping ineffectually at her eyes with her sleeve. Rohan dug in his pocket and passed her an embroidered handkerchief—an unusually kind gesture, for him.
“What about gramps?” Anne asked several minutes later, finally having managed to somewhat fix her running makeup and been poured a cup of tea from a fresh pot. Jotaro thought of Kakyoin with a bittersweet pang as he left the lid askew.
“The old man’s doing great. He’s still living in New York, managing his real estate company. He and my grandma adopted a baby a couple years back.”
Anne made a face. “At his age?”
Jotaro shook his head, chuckling. “You don’t know the half of it, trust me. I think it’s been good for him.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess.” Anne sighed. “I can’t believe I missed so much.”
“Be glad we put on you on that plane when we did.”
“I could have helped!”
“You could have died. Believe me, I’m grateful that’s one conversation I didn’t have to have.”
There were several minutes of strained silence in which Jotaro and Anne stubbornly refused to meet one another’s eyes and Rohan sipped his tea languidly, watching the two of them with interest.
Jotaro was the one who broke first. “Listen, I...It’s good to see you now. Really. I’m glad your life is going well. It’s good to know that at least one person didn’t get fucked up by that trip. That’s all.”
It took a moment, but the stiffness went out of Anne’s shoulders, and she rolled her eyes at him. “You sound like such a grandpa.”
“I’m only five years older than you.”
“And it shows.”
Somewhere across the city, a bell was tolling. A flock of birds took to the sky, winging their way through the maze of buildings. Anne glanced at her watch and swore.
“I am so late—gotta get home to the missus.” She dug through her bag and slapped a fistful of bills and loose coins down on the table. “That should cover the tea. I should really make you pay, being as you made me cry, but I guess I did promise.”
“Yeah. Sorry.” Jotaro fiddled with the brim of his hat.
“Oh, and—” She fumbled around in the bag again and pulled out a business card. “This has my phone number on it, okay? So you won’t lose track of me this time.”
Jotaro took it, nodding.
Anne stood, slinging her bag over her shoulder, and put her hands on her hips. “You better call.”
“Don’t worry, he will,” Rohan said idly.
“Good.” She flashed a toothy grin and then held up her middle finger. “Next time you see Polnareff, give him this for me, would you?”
Jotaro snorted. “Sure.”
“Catch you later, Jotaro.”
Anne pecked him on the cheek and then she was gone, hurrying off down the street toward the nearest train station.
Jotaro watched her until she vanished around a corner, the strangest sensation of hope swelling in his chest as Rohan discreetly interlaced their fingers and leaned his head against Jotaro’s shoulder.