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He isn’t Tenmei anymore. If he ever was. If there’s a version of him that was meant to be a girl, it’s not something he carries with him here. Yet, sometimes, like now, Noriaki wonders what she would do. If she were a real person, and not a version of him that never fit right, a version of him he had to kill to become Noriaki.
There’s a reason Noriaki wrote the hiragana alongside the kanji on the note he left Jotaro Kujo when threatening to kill him. It’s a reversal of where the name Noriaki even came from – the kanji can be read either way, and he wasn’t particularly eager to give his sworn enemy his deadname. He’s spent so long defining himself as Noriaki and not Tenmei, never Tenmei, never again, that here, in a shared bed next to his enemy turned ally turned most trusted companion, that when his best friend admits a matching secret, voice soft, Noriaki almost doesn’t know what to do for a moment.
Noriaki has spent almost unhealthy amounts of time wondering who Tenmei would’ve been, could’ve been. Now, oddly, he gets his answer. Tenmei would’ve been the odd girl out. Fidgeting in uniform, adjusting the skirt hem to be inches longer than necessary, shoelaces undone. Hierophant Green a silhouette just the same as Noriaki. Tenmei would understand, would know, that very specific kind of isolation that Noriaki gave away; sad girl isolation, weird girl isolation, girl who doesn’t know how to make any friends isolation. Tenmei would paint her nails cherry red and swear like a sailor and, just like Noriaki, she would be good at video games. Her laugh would be soft and high, and she would be beautiful, but most importantly, the shape of her loneliness would be so, so different from his.
“I understand if you’re not comfortable with me anymore,” Jojo’s saying. Jojo, because she’d told him that she didn’t want to use Jotaro anymore. That it was a nice enough name, but it wasn’t hers.
“Be hypocritical of me, wouldn’t it?” Noriaki says drily, sitting up. Hierophant flicks the lamp on the bedside table on, and it fills their hotel room with dim light. “When I’ve got the same demons?”
“Huh?” Jojo looks at him.
“I was born Tenmei Kakyoin,” he offers up. He doesn’t tell people this, but it feels like an equaliser, for all the time he’s spent using his best friend’s birthname without realising that she was someone else altogether. “Look at this.”
Hierophant’s shifted over, grabbing his extra satchel, which he hands Jojo. She peers in, too cautious to touch any of the vials, so Hierophant pulls a glass bottle of T out, handing it to her, and she looks at it. “You,” she says, swallowing nervously. “You’ve been DIY-ing your hormones.”
“I had a little help from Hierophant,” Noriaki says, and he gives Jojo a smile which she returns a little shyly. We could do the same for you, he almost says, thinking of how easy it’d be to sneak out E, how he thinks he could figure out exactly how to help her, how it’d likely be similar enough to his own transition process that he could figure out how to support her in all the parts that were different.
“How long?” she asks, putting the bottle back in the bag and handing it to him.
“Since I was fourteen,” Noriaki says. “The hormones, I mean. I’ve been telling people that Noriaki’s my name since I was seven. If anybody gave me any trouble, I’d use Hierophant for payback. Or I’d bite them. Whatever was easier.”
That startles a laugh out of Jojo. She smiles, but there’s something sort of sad in her eyes.
Noriaki waits for her to say something, knowing better than to probe.
She says, eventually, “You’re lucky, you know?”
“Oh?” Noriaki asks, quizzically. He hasn’t told her about how his parents disowned him for this, how his cousin Ryoko’s parents ended up taking him in when he was sixteen, how he finally got an actual prescription for T that he used for a few months before Dio abducted him and it was him and Hierophant against the world, stealing hormones out of necessity all over again.
But Jojo isn’t talking about any of that. “Your name. Noriaki. It was just in your kanji. I… I want to keep the ‘Jojo’, but I can’t…” she swallows. “I can’t be Jotaro.”
Noriaki doesn’t say you can keep the name Jotaro and still be a girl, because he couldn’t have kept the name Tenmei and still been a boy. He knows people who can, people who didn’t change their names even as they transitioned, but that isn’t him, and clearly, that isn’t Jojo either.
He nods. “I couldn’t be Tenmei either. It’s a beautiful name, but it wasn’t ever mine.”
Jojo nods. Noriaki would’ve offered to help her find a name regardless of everything, but she looks so sad that the last bit of shyness, of wanting to hold himself back and respect her space, the last thing keeping him silent disappears. “I can help you think of a good Japanese name, if you want?”
“Please.” She sighs. “I can’t seem to think about it without feeling overwhelmed. It’s too much.”
Noriaki hums an affirmation. Hierophant’s begun to card through Jojo’s hair, a comforting gesture, and he leaves them to it, thinking of all the girls he’s known. His neighbours, his classmates, his parents’ friends, his current guardians’ friends, people Ryoko knows. Big sisters, little sisters, grandmothers, strangers whose names he’s heard yelled in a parking lot.
“Mijoka?” he suggests.
Jojo hums, thinking. “That’s a little unusual, isn’t it?”
Noriaki shrugs. “I think it’s cute.”
“I guess so,” Jojo allows. “But it doesn’t feel like me.”
“Jorii?”
Jojo smiles. “Sounds like something I’d name my daughter. Not something for me.”
“It’s interesting that you’ve thought so far ahead,” Noriaki says, smiling a little. “Joa?”
“I’d prefer something with more syllables,” Jojo says. “Doesn’t make sense for it to be shorter than my nickname.”
Noriaki frowns. “Marijo?”
Jojo’s quiet for a moment, thinking it over, forehead scrunched over in thought. “Kujo Marijo,” she says to herself. And then she’s smiling, and her expression is warm and joyful. “Yeah. I think this is the one.”
“It suits you,” Noriaki says. “Kujo Marijo, I mean. It sounds like you.”
She smiles, and the room’s a little too dimly lit for him to be certain, but it looks like she’s blushing. That checks out – Noriaki remembers when he’d first discovered the male name hidden in his birthname, remembers the way he’d felt thrilled and joyful and disbelieving, giddy with happiness to finally have a name that actually fit him. Something of his own, something true. A way to make the feeling in his chest of who he really was, who he wanted to grow up to become, a tangible, solid, observable thing. Kakyoin Noriaki, just a boy like any other boy.
He knows she’s feeling the same comfortable, world-changing happiness. Kujo Marijo, sitting across him, smiling a real smile that makes her eyes sparkle, looking somehow lighter and unburdened, more relaxed than he’s ever seen her. He loves seeing her like this. He loves her; but they’ve had their fair share of confessions for tonight. He can tell her that tomorrow.
They curl up against each other the way they’ve begun to do ever since that fight against the Lovers, taking comfort in each other’s presence without needing words. As he’s falling asleep, Marijo murmurs, sounding half asleep herself, into his hair, “You think Jotaro’s gone wherever Tenmei went?”
Does she think about herself like that, too? Noriaki wonders. Does she wonder who she could’ve been, as well?
He’s too sleepy to voice that thought, to start a new, long-winded conversation, but he can’t just stay quiet either.
“Yeah,” he says. “Definitely. They’re keeping each other company somewhere, somewhere where they aren’t the wrong versions of us.”
He hears Marijo’s soft chuckle, muffled against his hair. “They’re like our ghosts.”
“You really get me.” It’s the last thing he remembers clearly from that night, succumbing to sleep as he finishes saying it. He isn’t sure, though, but he thinks he hears her say something like, “I’m glad to hear it, but I think it’s you who gets me.”
It’s good we found each other, he’s thinking, as he falls asleep; his last coherent thought for the night. And when he wakes up to find Marijo’s still holding him, curled around him like she’ll never let go of him, it’s his first coherent thought for the morning, too.