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Jotaro had intentionally booked suite 89 of the Morioh Grand Hotel for his stay. The windows were wide, well polished, and overlooked the vast, glittering ocean. There was a balcony, as well, the only thing marring the neat steel rails being a slightly rusted ‘no smoking’ plate nailed on. The small iron table outside didn’t quite have enough space to bring his work out into the fresh air, so he reserved it for having his coffee and kept his papers inside.
It was a small regret, a minor inconvenience that buzzed in the back of his mind every now and then as a faint imitating echo of something far larger looming over him.
There was a reason that Kira’s capture and subsequent death hadn’t been his cue to return home, reporting back to whoever had survived during the time he had been away. Of course, he had made a formal phone call back to headquarters to report needing more time for cleanup and continuing to investigate the town, but his phrasing could have been more… truthful.
He would continue investigating the town, but it was more about cleanup than anything. Ensuring that the startling headlines and shaken gossip faded off the page eventually, allowed to be acknowledged just enough to satiate the ever so human thirst for the macabre and then erased.
But it wasn’t just about the public, either.
There was a lie in the silence, the answers cut short by a simple yes or no, when there was more to be said. He could feel how it hung in the air, the anticipation beginning to sink as every witness realized he would not elaborate– and Jotaro would let the conversation end, no more information gained than needed. He would always drift right back, almost magnetically, to the quiet calm of waiting for the other to speak, the usually suspenseful air feeling like home to him.
The silence may have been one of his worse traits, but it concealed his worst.
Jotaro remained at his desk one evening, basking once again in the veil of quiet, letting the distant churning of the waves wash his mind clear of any concern that grew too sharp in his mind, pointed glass worn down into smooth, harmless pebbles by the constant drift in and out. He flipped over the sheet of notes he had been annotating, glancing up to see the sun was already beginning to set, and turned his gaze once again back down to his work.
He completed another page of notes before the sun had completely vanished, reaching over to take one of his textbooks from the other side of the desk when he heard the handle of the hotel turn.
Remaining frozen for a moment, the sound of waves were drowned out by his own thoughts– somebody was entering his hotel room, and they hadn’t knocked. Though the hotel staff had access to his room, he always kept the do not disturb hanger on his doorknob. He had received two keys, one which he kept in the inside pocket of his coat…
And there was only one other person who he had given access to his room.
It had taken Josuke a while to get to the hotel. Usually, he would have said it was because he was distracted by the sunset, taking the more scenic route down by the ocean to stare out over the waves, watching them begin to cover with a sheet of gold. But he hadn’t actually taken that way, he had walked directly up the street to the looming building, casting a long shadow back over the houses.
Walking by the ocean would have taken too long. It was only a five minute detour, but today it would have been fifteen. It had been a week since he had been allowed to go home, but the white walls never left the corners of his vision, the taste of cherry jello lingering in the back of his throat. And the pain hadn’t left either.
He had been granted permission to walk around again, thanking God it was still summer break. Humiliating hypotheticals swam in his mind, those of sidelong glances in class, the quiet way teachers spoke after pulling him aside in class, the feeling of being perfectly fine until somebody asked if he was okay.
Josuke ran his fingers over the edge of the keycard in his pocket as he stepped through the wide automatic doors of the hotel, wanting to hurry past the judgemental glare of the front desk attendant but knowing he would feel nauseous if he walked too fast. And he didn’t really mind it anymore.
The first few times he had visited Jotaro, he had felt anger spark in his chest at the way the attendant’s lips pursed when she saw him. It was understandable to glance a second time at a teenager wandering into an extremely fancy hotel alone, he realized, but at the very least, it was incredibly awkward to either keep walking or clumsily explain that he was visiting his nephew who just happened to be ten years older than him and a prestigious scientist.
But now there was something comforting about the lack of pity, being able to feel the annoyance bury into him from the desk as he headed for the elevators. After two weeks of being constantly monitored, treated like he was a day from dying, and then spoken to like he was glass by people he loved for another week, he needed somebody to silently call him a stupid little kid who didn’t know what he was doing. She probably assumed his limp was from a skateboarding accident, tripping over a gate after graffiting someone’s house.
The odd need for somebody to not care about him was the exact reason he had decided to visit Jotaro, staring at the keycard in his hands as he stood in the elevator. There was a young man in a suit clutching a folder behind him, and even then Josuke felt how his gaze drifted to the brace around his knee, then flicked away. Pity, the same as always.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy to have them, though.
He was grateful, and could truthfully say that they were good people for thinking of him, but he just didn’t want it. It was just disgustingly complicated and explaining that he always felt something the tiniest bit short of human was messy and would just make them more worried.
Josuke forgot to knock as he slid the keycard in the slot of Room 89, the green light flickering on as he turned the handle. The do not disturb sign swung as he pushed the door open, but Jotaro once told him that he always had it there. The same day he had given Josuke the keycard, pressing it into his hand and explaining to visit if he needed to.
Josuke had no idea what counted as ‘needing to.’ He didn’t need anything. The pressure wasn’t so strong that he was on the verge of doing something stupid, he was healing fine and had managed to get to the hotel in a relatively reasonable amount of time. He was perfectly alive and had people he loved around him. He wasn’t really happy, but that was unreasonable.
It had been a day about as good as any other, and yet here he walked into Jotaro’s hotel room unannounced. Maybe he really did have a death wish, as many times as he had decided that he was pretty okay with living.
He didn’t check to see if Jotaro looked up at him from his desk as he closed the door behind him, slowly crossing the room to curb the slight blurriness that invaded his vision when he walked.
There was a big comfortable couch by the armchair, facing the coffee table and with the bright harlequin light from the window flooding over the side of his face. He and a friend of his had visited one of the other suites when he visited from Hawaii and stayed there, talking about how the lighting at sunset made every photo look like a professional photographer had taken it.
Josuke wondered if he looked like that at the moment, what with his sunken eyes and the stray strands of hair falling loose over his face. He did what he could with his hairstyle, but the pain meds made his hands shake and he didn’t accept help with it anymore.
He pushed his mind away from the memory, instead focusing on a loose thread in the carpet beneath the low table, or a magazine title, or the cup rings marking the wood with the faint stains of black coffee.
Jotaro was still in the room, his pen scratching on paper and occasionally flipping the page of one of his five-inch thick books, but the room was so quiet Josuke would have believed himself if he told himself there was no one else in the room with him. So he didn’t say anything either, letting the warm sunlight bake into his cheek and sinking on the couch.
A moment later, though, Jotaro’s pen stopped moving. There was another silence, Josuke waiting for the man to tell him to leave, explain that he was busy and leave Josuke to wander back down the halls to the elevator, back through the lobby and past the irritated glare of the woman at the front desk, and back home. Maybe he would make the trip more quickly this time.
But there was still quiet, and Josuke felt something shift in the air, Jotaro finally turning in his chair to look at Josuke. He was pulled slightly more out of his thoughts under the searchlight gaze of too-dull eyes, shifting awkwardly on the couch.
“You said to… come visit. If I needed to.”
The brief possibility that it had been one of his many hallucinations crossed his mind before he realized that he had the keycard. Jotaro would have noticed if he had taken it.
“Sorry,” Josuke tacked on, unsure of what else to say.
Jotaro let out a long breath, tucking his gaze away as he pulled his cap further over his face and turned back to his work. He didn’t kick Josuke out, surprisingly, so he let himself stay, slumping back on the couch and letting his gaze trace the paintings of the sea on the wall.
In another moment, the resident of the suite had vanished again, his form taking up so much space but disappearing so easily in the quiet. Josuke looked upon it with a sudden jab in his chest that he recognized as jealousy. A moment, there. The next, ignored and blending in like anything else in the room.
It must have been another few minutes later when Josuke looked up, staring at the figure across the room, and spoke again.
“How do you do that?”
The scratching of the pen stopped, but Jotaro didn’t reply, and Josuke sank back into the silence, grateful for it. Talking probably wasn’t a good idea at the moment. A few all too long seconds later, though, Jotaro spoke.
“...Do what?”
Josuke looked up, stuck between wanting to brush it off as nothing, hurrying a quick ‘nevermind,’ and continuing what he was going to say. He was about to mumble a nonanswer when he suddenly felt the shadow of a gaze over his shoulder, reminded of the ever-growing feeling of being noticed , worried about when he just wanted things to be back to normal. The sun on his face didn’t feel that warm anymore.
“Stay so quiet.”
Jotaro didn’t respond for too long, his head still bent low over his work and expression hidden by the shadow of his cap. Then he spoke again, voice low and resonating more than Josuke’s, shaking only slightly and raspy from speaking so little over the past few weeks.
“Why do you ask?”
“I dunno,” Josuke mumbled, folding his arms across his chest. His shoulders still faintly ached, still from being in a sling for weeks, but it was pretty well numbed at this point. The rushing of the waves down by the shore filled the room as he waited for Jotaro to reply, but he never did, so Josuke figured it was okay to keep talking.
“...Seems kind of nice. To be able to do. To just shut up and not worry about fucking something up.”
Slowly, Jotaro set down his pen and Josuke usually would have tensed, but the most he could feel was a distant stir of regret mingling with every other wish to erase what he had done. He had proven his point, really, about how shutting up was a good idea, but no matter what he went through, he apparently couldn’t just keep his mouth shut.
“How’s your arm doing?” Jotaro asked, catching Josuke off guard. It wasn’t too uncommon, even, for the man to ignore a conversation or change it entirely.
“Um–” Josuke felt a dull pang of frustration at it being brought up again. He had long grown tired of talking about it. He just wanted to move on from it. “It’s fine,” he mumbled, hoping to brush it off. It really was fine, and his biggest problem was that everyone else just wanted to keep talking about it. “Doesn’t bother me anymore.”
“Think you’ll be able to go back to school?”
The question would have made Josuke feel sick, but it didn’t, really. He just felt tired, what little energy he had being drained by the idea of having to face everyone he knew like this. He already knew that there was more to their concerns than what he could fix with pain meds, and the worst part wasn’t that he couldn’t prove he was okay. Being asked over and over again what hurt, if he was eating enough, if he was taking breaks– it was frustrating, but he could say that he had walked around earlier. He had done all of his stretches. He had eaten breakfast.
But he had a feeling that Jotaro’s question was about a little bit more, what Josuke figured the rest of his friends were scared to ask about.
“...Josuke?”
“Yeah. Probably.”
“Looking forward to it?”
Josuke stared at the carpet, turning the question over in his mind. Feeling like every movement was to convince himself he was still alive was tiring, so maybe he needed some change. But then again–
“Might be nice to be excused from P.E,” Josuke replied, though dread curled inside of him at the notion of being forced to sit out in front of a class of people he knew. “Ms. Olsen might stop yelling at me for talking so much.”
He could already imagine it, the glances of suspicion at first that he was up to something, a few days later coming to realize that Josuke, her stupid chaotic class clown of student always whispering to other kids in class, had changed over the summer. That he wouldn’t talk anymore, would do his work, and didn’t have to be asked to be quiet. And she would never have to know that it was all a part of just surviving.
He looked up wearily as Jotaro got to his feet, wondering if he should be scared, but the man only walked over to the coffee table, movement slow but strides crossing the room in what felt like an instant.
He sat down on the sofa next to Josuke, sliding a magazine off the coffee table that Josuke had been staring at mindlessly. “Thought you decided to drop physics.”
“She teaches bio as well.”
He heard Jotaro sigh, flipping open the magazine and letting Josuke drift off slightly, sinking over to rest his chin in his hand, eventually letting his eyes sink closed. It was familiar, back when he used to sleep in class for no other reason than his first period being too early and he had stayed up playing video games.
“Don’t let her push you around too much,” the man replied, and Josuke almost laughed. He could barely imagine himself standing up to anybody at the minute, save quickly regretted, annoyed remarks to people who were only trying to help him. He didn’t even consider it his own anger, more just a bothersome side effect of the medication.
His attempt at a laugh left as a tired half-chuckle, and Jotaro looked over to him.
“Sorry,” Josuke muttered, looking back at the ground. “Just don’t really… see myself doing that.”
“Too tired?”
“I guess. And that’s assuming I’ll feel better than I do now,” he sighed, half-realizing that he had said another one of those thoughtless things, the accidental prelude to a discussion he didn’t want to have.
“Mm.”
Jotaro fell silent, Josuke waiting and letting his head sink back against the couch, eyes shutting again. It was peaceful in a distant, tired way, the room mostly unfamiliar– nothing to compare to what he had before. Not only was it nice to be in a room with someone who didn’t really want to talk, but there wasn’t the overwhelming feeling of seeing how things had changed. A stuffed animal he had cherished his whole life now made him nauseous to look at, the soft image not feeling like it belonged in a mind now marred and warped with shockwaves from explosions.
“It’s not going to go away,” he suddenly heard Jotaro say, slowly opening his eyes. The man’s head was turned away and expression again tucked beneath his cap, voice as solemn as ever.
Josuke didn’t reply.
“It’ll get easier, but it isn’t going to go away.”
Josuke felt his throat close up, the familiar voice so quiet, but filling the still air with something Josuke hadn’t heard from anybody who had talked to him since he first woke up in the hospital. He realized slowly that Jotaro already knew why he had come there, swallowing and staring across at the tall, hunched frame.
“...It’s tiring,” Josuke meant to sigh back, but his voice crumbled, only able to manage a rasp. “I’m just waiting for it to be over.”
Jotaro only slowly shook his head. “Don’t expect it to be the same as before. It won’t be.”
Josuke pulled his arms to wrap around his abdomen, pulling weakly at the dull ache in his shoulder and staring up at the biologist. He realized that was what he had wanted, more than anything.
For it to be normal again. To walk to school with Koichi and be a stupid teen, to complain about his teachers, to go home and have his biggest concern be whether or not they had orange juice left. But he couldn’t go back to it, and he knew that. Not without lying.
“I know.”
“You’re seventeen.”
“I know.”
“Your stand isn’t made to fight.”
“I know.”
“It was never meant to be so complicated.”
“...”
Josuke stared down into his lap, exhaustion tugging his head down. He knew Jotaro was right, that he had gone through a lot, but every time people talked about it they avoided it completely, and Josuke almost felt like it had just been a weird thing that happened, to blend in with everything else in his life. But as his brain blotted out more and more of the story, and as the rest cemented itself in his head, saved to crawl to the front of his consciousness when he tried to sleep, it began to dawn on him that it wasn’t.
“I’m… I’m tired of being upset over it. I know it was a lot. I know I can’t forget it. But I want to move on. I want–” He swallowed, letting his eyes sink close again. “I want to stop feeling like everything I do is just to survive a little longer. Waiting for it all to go away.”
Jotaro finally looked over to meet Josuke’s gaze, expression set but something in his eyes feeling… different. Different than anything else he had seen, far from pity or sadness that Josuke had ended up this way. There was something distantly pained in the expression, a regretted understanding that made Josuke feel like he had said something either very right or very wrong.
“I know,” the man mumbled, pulling his hat over his face with a slow nod. “But it’s important. Surviving. You shouldn’t have to learn it, but you have to make it a habit.” Jotaro’s voice waved only slightly.
Josuke was too bewildered at the way Jotaro spoke to recognize the heat slowly building behind his face. He pushed it back, already sick of crying. He didn’t want to be fragile anymore. He didn’t want to give people a reason to care anymore.
“It feels… so much bigger than it was before,” Josuke replied shakily. “Every day. Forever. Just trying to get through it.”
“Then don’t think about it that way,” Jotaro sighed. “Go day by day. Task by task, if you need to. Get through the next ten minutes, and be proud of it. You got through a week, you can make it through another.”
The thought of it made Josuke feel even more tired, but there was something about the way Jotaro said it, the words of somebody who had repeated it in his head over and over again, who knew every verse by heart, had engraved the mantra into himself. And then he didn’t speak again.
“How do I do that?” Josuke asked, trying to keep his voice above a croak.
“Find things to do. Try to stay in contact with people. Get a hobby. Get a job. Remember you’re a person, not just a heap of regret.”
Josuke stared down into his lap again, the urge to cry beginning to pound in his skull as it usually did. It barely even came with feeling anymore, just the physical response getting confused at the lack of emotions to spur it. “I know. I just feel like that person got… lost. I know about things I like and care about and all that shit, but–” He pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes. “It’s hard to remember who you were when you’re just trying to pick up the pieces of who you are now.”
“Not who you used to be. You can find new things. It makes change feel more allowed. Learn how to grieve for that person and move on without forgetting them.”
Josuke fell quiet, letting it slowly sink in that it had been Jotaro talking to him about this, the last person he expected to be willing to actually discuss it. He had been looking for someone to not pay attention to him being in the room for an hour, and instead Jotaro was sitting next to him, explaining how to remember to keep living.
“...Jotaro?”
“Mm.”
“That’s the most I’ve heard you ever talk. You’re usually so quiet.”
Jotaro let out a sigh, closing the magazine in his lap. “I like listening to the ocean,” he mumbled, pulling his hat over his face and beginning to get to his feet. “It blends in, but you’d notice if it stopped.”
He walked back over to his desk, the towering figure reminding how much taller Jotaro was when he wasn’t slouching. He sat back down at his desk, picking up his pen again and switching on the light in the fish tank next to his lamp. Before he got back completely to work, Josuke looked up.
“Can I stay here for a little while?”
“Does your mother know you’re visiting?”
“Yeah.”
“Go ahead.”
They lapsed into silence again, Jotaro hunched over his work and Josuke taking the magazine Jotaro had been reading to flip through himself. The sun had almost completely set, the light from the fish tank on Jotaro’s desk feeling brighter as it cast white light over the desk, and the warm glow from the hall under the door stretched further over the carpet. Jotaro’s pen continued to scratch, and though Josuke didn’t understand half the words in the magazine he was reading, it was interesting to see what Jotaro read about in his free time.
It felt like they had both disappeared again, blending into the quiet. But Josuke would have noticed if either of them stopped.