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Jotaro jerked to attention at a sharp, sudden pain in his side, pulled from the place between wake and sleep. His lips parted around a gasp that he wasn’t sure was ever actually voiced. It felt more like a noiseless sound leaving his body, though his ears rang loudly enough that he couldn’t be sure. His throat felt raw, like sandpaper scraping over inner membranes as he heaved. The pain continued to blossom in his chest, and he curled up, tangled in his bedsheets as he located the source of it (left upper chest, he noted), above where he had initially been grabbing for it.
As soon as the worst of it passed, Jotaro sat up. He gritted his teeth and sucked in a deep breath and felt around for his pulse. One hand gravitated to his chest, and the other to his neck, where a few fingers pressed together to root around underneath his jaw. At some point, Star Platinum had emerged and was scanning the room. His stand moved out from him and peered around desk corners and into his closet before it looked back at him, meeting his gaze as Jotaro tried to find proof of life.
His heart wasn’t beating . Or he just couldn’t find it. Jotaro slipped a hand under his shirt, pressing harder at the left on his chest, moving his hand around and pressing it firmly against his skin for several seconds before he moved it. There . The feeling of his heart, a quick, rabbit-like pace throbbing beneath his palm. Seconds later, his fingers found the place on his neck where they could dig in and feel the pulsing blood. He held his position, stiffly sitting in bed while he felt his heart from two separate locations.
Then he turned his full attention to the room. The light was on overhead, and he had no memory of turning it on. That meant that either Star Platinum had turned it on when he had gasped awake, or that he had never turned it off in the first place. Judging by the book, face down on his covers, with a crumpled page that Star took to straightening out and setting on his bedside, it was likely the latter.
Jotaro raised both arms experimentally, though he was reluctant to take his hands off his pulse, and was relieved to notice no unusual pain or stiffness in either of them. Keeping his arms up, he took a deep breath, in and out, enough that his chest visibly expanded with the motion. Nothing felt off. In fact, his shoulders felt better, looser , than they had when he had when he had passed out some time ago. He let his arms back down as he continued to go through a mental checklist of his body. Nothing strange in his neck either, besides where he had been digging his fingers into the skin a moment before. It was just his chest, feeling uncomfortably tight and ballad up right around where his pain had sparked from, that gave him any worry. It didn’t hurt any longer, but it felt strange. Bizarre . Like something was wrapped around it but not yet constricting. ( A fist poised -)
He felt for his pulse again, and located it faster the second time around. It wasn’t that fast, as far as he could tell. Counting in his head wasn’t the best way to check how many beats per minute he was at, but he did it anyway, juggling the seconds and number of beats. Star made a noise and went to dig around in a drawer across the room.
No skipping beats, nothing too close together, it felt normal. Regular. A steady rhythm. Star Platinum hadn’t even detected anybody else in the room.
Shuffling to the edge of his futon, Jotaro swung his legs off the mattress and set them on the floor, distractedly accepting the watch and the hat that Star handed off to him before he murmured for his stand to check outside the window. Jotaro checked his pulse again, using the watch.
“Ora!” His stand called. Nobody outside, either.
It was 3am. 0300. A perfect time to wake up. Not that he really remembered going to sleep. Instead, he recalled drifting in and out of consciousness between the pages in his novel less than an hour ago. He couldn’t identity a user anywhere if it had been a stand to wake him up. Nor did he notice anything out of the ordinary except for what was coming from his own body. The pain hadn’t resurfaced, though it continued to feel tight beneath his skin.
He considered the idea that he was having a heart attack, and tried to recall if he knew how long the pain lasted during those, or if it ebbed and would come back stronger, but no facts came to mind. Besides, his pulse had been steady when he checked it.
He ached. Star made a mournful noise next to him, less of an Ora and more like a hum, and Jotaro snapped back to attention and sucked in a breath, realizing that he must not have been breathing, based on how lightheaded he felt.
His heart pounded, faster and faster (but still steady), and he took deep, measured breaths while Star Platinum made exaggerated motions of breathing (he didn’t think stands needed to breath, but Star was making noises like it was, and was holding one of Jotaro’s hands to its chest while it expanded with each inhale, and he remembered how Justice had been consumed by Star) next to him as he struggled to get up and walk (stagger) out of his room.
His leg hurt when he put weight on it, feeling numb below the knee. It was like he had been resting it on something long enough to cut off the circulation, except that he had been sleeping with that leg towards the ceiling, and had done nothing to cause that sensation. A book laid in the hall, having fallen from a table at some point the previous day. He stopped in the hallway with the intention to push it closer to the wall so that his mom wouldn’t trip on it out in the middle of the walkway. Muscles spasmed and twitched in his leg, and he wound up giving it more of a light kick than the nudge that he had intended, and he grimaced and continued to walk.
Mom’s room was the first one he checked, and he passed by each of the doors, ignoring their occupants in favor of standing outside of his mother’s room to ensure her safety first and foremost. Her stand, while awakened, was not suited for combat. Additionally, Jotaro hated seeing her use it, and would rather that she did so as little as possible. Star poked in past the door while he stood in the hall before it retreated back to him with a quiet noise, indicating that he could continue casing the rest of the house.
A hand was kept on his neck as he traversed the halls, and he made an effort not to favor either leg despite the fact that nobody (he knew of) could see him. Star Platinum checked crevices that he couldn’t make himself investigate as he slowly walked past them, taking stock of which windows had already been locked, and where each chair had been moved, but nothing was out of the ordinary. Even the cabinets and refrigerator showed nothing out of place, besides the fact that they needed more juice from the store.
Jotaro walked; nerves alight with a manic energy. Like a shark requiring constant movement to stay alive, he was filled with some burning need to check everything , to make absolutely certain that there was something wrong with himself and not the world around him.
The koi pond was peaceful, and the rocks around it were still in place and undisturbed from how he had stacked them the day prior. Star Platinum couldn’t see anything in the perimeter of their yard, so he walked back inside and did another sweep of the house, quicker, in case someone could outrun his slow pace. Unused rooms were checked, and the spaces behind doors and inside pantries were carefully examined.
At some point, Jotaro pulled out each drawer and methodically pulled out each utensil, stacking them on a towel in the center of the table. Forks, knives, spoons, smaller spoons, steak knives, bread knives, eggbeaters, spatulas, bowl scrapers, arranged by usage and size and then by color (they had a single ladle covered in lime-green silicon that bothered him greatly, since everything else ranged from grey to black.), before he carefully placed them back into their respective places.
Finally, Jotaro turned down the hall that his mother and guests resided in, though he stopped in the mouth of the hall, reconsidering it. He could do another run.
While his room was down an adjacent hall, and he had already checked the door to the room his grandfather was sleeping in, the one next to his own room that wasn’t used for storage (the most he had been able to do without proof that excused going in and waking him was Star Platinum listening at the door for his breathing. It had been clear and undisturbed), whilst the rest of their guests were down the hall neighboring the one his mother was in. To his left by a foot or two, was the hall where Avdol, Polnareff, and Kakyoin were slumbering. The former two had decided to share a room ( to keep Ms. Holly from having to clean more than one for them, they had claimed), which meant that Polnareff, the most likely of them to be attacked based on his track record, had somebody to keep him in check. Further down was Kakyoin.
Jotaro considered getting Kakyoin up, but the other had probably just gotten to sleep, having been with Jotaro until maybe an hour before the pain had awakened him. They had sat in Jotaro’s room chatting (Kakyoin had been explaining the plot of a novel that was being adapted into a movie) until his grandfather had banged on something in the next room over and had called for them to go to sleep.
Besides, Jotaro didn’t need someone to watch him just because he got a little anxious about some chest pain. There wasn’t even a stand nearby, and there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was just him . Several minutes had passed. (A glance at the watch that he had been clinging too, slipping in and out of his pocket instead of wrapping it around his wrist, squinting through the dark at the numbered face). In fact, he had spent long enough scouring the house with no apparent signs of pain, so he doubted that anything as time sensitive as a heart attack was going to make an appearance.
But he knew that he wasn’t going to get back to sleep.
He glanced at the door he was nearest to in the hall over, stepping back so he could see into both. He wanted nothing more than to go wake someone else up, to go inside-
Except that he didn’t want that and Star was doing it anyway
His stand vanished into Avdol and Polnareff’s room. A moment later, it faded back into him for the first time since he had woken up.
Stiffly, he stood where he was, concerned that anymore noise he could make would alert anybody that Star Platinum might have roused. Maybe there was something on the television, a movie he could pretend to have fallen asleep to, but then Avdol opened the door, and Jotaro immediately felt guilt freeze him to the spot. The other man looked like he had just rolled out of bed. A scarf covered his hair and he stood in the hall in long, billowing pajamas. Avdol had always put his arms back on, the metal glinting in the light from the window. He stood stiff and poised, frowning at Jotaro, and then past him, up and down the hall with a suspicious look on his face.
“Did something happen?” He asked sharply.
Jotaro stared at him, and it took an embarrassingly long time to kick himself into gear enough to shake his head and yank his hat down.
The frown deepened, the only part of the other man’s face he could still see from under the brim of his cap. Jotaro tried not to look like he had been prepared to stay up the rest of the night in the living room (where people would gravitate to first), or worse: in front of his mom’s door. He used to do that a lot, sitting outside of her room until she woke up. (He could never get to sleep, and could never stay asleep when he was younger, so he had sat outside his parents’ bedroom door until one of them could help with breakfast. He hadn’t been able to reach the ingredients or even a clock without a chair, until his father had purchased him a wristwatch and had given him instructions on which arm to keep it on, and how to keep from damaging it.) According to his mom, he had occasionally been out there as early as 4am. 0400, staring in at them before he closed the door back and sat down outside of it. His dad had hated it when he had been in the house to witness the event.
Avdol gestured to the doorway. “Come in, Jotaro.”
He hesitated, but the other man simply continued to motion him in, so he stepped inside.
Polnareff was sitting up, rubbing his face. When he looked at Jotaro, his expression turned into something downturned at the lips that Jotaro was too tired and amped up to decode. “Was there a stand?”
Jotaro shrugged. He hadn’t seen one, though he had yet to check this hall more than once, having figured that having several strong stand users in one area (and close to his mom) would have been safe as long as he could case the rest of the house first.
Still, Polnareff got up and strode into the hall without a second thought, Silver Chariot morphing out next to him.
Avdol moved, catching his attention as he let the door shut. “Jotaro?”
“My chest hurt,” Jotaro blurted, hating instantly how childish it sounded, though he was unable to come up with anything else.
He didn’t know how to convince Avdol that it was anything to be taken seriously, that it was an issue. He couldn’t even convince himself that it was, even though there had been nothing in the house and he was simply overreacting to a strained muscle or something. It had just… startled him. Jotaro had had to stop and restart his own heart and the members of the Speedwagon foundation that had found him crouched over a vampire’s body had pulled him and his grandfather aside, equating the action to that of adrenaline restarting the heart. They talked about possible complications, skipping beats, blood clots, or heart murmurs that needed to be tested for, told him that he needed to pay attention to any irregularities. One had wanted to put a pacemaker on him, and several others took turns hanging onto his wrist and staring at their watches as he walked around restlessly, shooting each other looks whenever he snapped at them.
His chest had hurt when he fought Dio. The adrenaline hadn’t been enough to mask the aching pain and strained muscles that he had gathered over the course of their journey. It hadn’t numbed the horrible bruising that The World had left on him, nor did it erase the phantom feeling of bruises layering over his hands from Star Platinum. Stopping and restarting his heart had been the only thing he could think of to do in the split second he had before Dio came at him again, and sometimes he could still feel the sensation of a pulsating mass in death throes beneath his fingers (the only thing that moved. He had held the rest of his body unnaturally still). The knives and the gravel imbedded in his skin had stung and felt like death sentences and during the occasional moment that he still stopped time, in a dimming world where everything but him flowed like molasses, for some idiotic thing like catching his mom’s favorite mug or pulling someone back onto the sidewalk from the road when they stepped off too early, or to get away from touchy, grabby, high-pitched girls, he could hear a deep, timbre voice counting -
“Jotaro,” Avdol snapped, and Jotaro stared at the man’s face, suddenly very close, his own held in Avdol’s hands. They were surprisingly warm for being made of metal.
Jotaro sucked in a breath. Then he breathed out, long and shaking. He took another, careful not to let his breath hitch.
Polnareff returned, glancing into the hall once more before he shut the door. “I didn’t find anything.”
Avdol nodded, stepping away from Jotaro. But he reached back to take one of the teens hands. “Thank you for checking, Polnareff. I do believe it was something else, though.”
Polnareff watched, blinked, and then he nodded.
“Where were you going, Jotaro?” Avdol asked gently, his voice smooth. Calm.
“... mom’s room,” he replied slowly.
“Were you going to see her?”
“We could wake up Miss Holly if you need,” Polnareff said.
Jotaro opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “I was gonna sit outside her door.”
Avdol nodded. “Would you like to sit with us instead?”
Jotaro shrugged. He reached up to feel his pulse in his neck again, using the hand Avdol wasn’t holding. It was slower. He took a deep breath, suddenly feeling exhausted. Lightheaded.
Avdol directed him to a small couch, and he sat when prompted, crammed between them. He watched as Avdol pulled out a book.
“Does your chest still hurt?” Avdol asked. Jotaro simply stared at him for a moment, and the man spoke again, catching his attention. “Jojo?”
“No,” Jotaro murmured, shifting his gaze down at the ground, hoping his face was sufficiently hidden under his hat. “Felt weird a while.”
“Does anything else hurt?”
His leg, still. His body felt too jittery. He could tell he was trembling, but he didn’t know how to stop it, or how to address it. He didn’t know if it was unrelated or just because he was awake and had been awake too long and was anxious about things that didn’t even matter.
“No,” he lied, and rested his head on Polnareff’s shoulder, reminiscent of times during their trip to Cairo.
“Okay.”
“We’ll watch you,” Polnareff assured, and Jotaro choked back a noise in return. He didn’t know when he had decided that he was going to die in his sleep, but he had. He needed someone to make sure he didn’t. And they would. He knew that. Star knew that.
So he relaxed a bit, and drifted off.