Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She starts ripping up the warped linoleum in the kitchen during a Judge Judy commercial break. It’s been peeling at the seam where the lip of the threshold meets the living room since they moved in, the humidity breaking the seal and puffing it. She has toed it and watched it curl back. She pauses on her way back from the bathroom, rubs her damp hands on her tank top, and pulls.

It breaks free two feet in and the kitchen chairs squeal against the floor. After that, she cranks the volume on the TV, finds a screwdriver under her father’s bed, and sets to work.

It has been four months since she has had to put her body to use. Stone Free shimmers over her as blue translucent armor, fluttering like crumpled wings free from the chrysalis of her skin. It feels like being naked. She shoves her stand back into her body and uses her own arms, her own strength, and sweat gathers on the creases of her body from the effort.

She stops only to pick Emporio up from school, and he doesn’t ask. He sits in the living room to do his homework and watch the Discovery channel until her father comes home with takeout. It’s hours later at 10 PM, with Emporio in bed and half of the kitchen floor torn to shreds, that her father says more than hello.

He leans against the doorframe and holds a can of Coke sweating in his hand. She doesn’t really notice or care about his eyes on her back.

“Want a soda?” he asks, saying soda like そうだ and it throws her for a moment.

“Sure,” she grunts. She rips at the linoleum with her hand and a dissatisfyingly small piece pulls away. She tosses it on the pile behind her.

He taps the can against her shoulder, leaving drops of water, and she takes it. It was the one he was drinking from, so they must be running out.

Dad goes back to leaning against the doorframe, and when she finishes drinking most of the can, she belches and hunches over to survey the stretch of stippled white plastic still glued in place. The ground beneath her isn’t cement, but reminds her of it; gritty and grey but dirtier, sticking to her shaved thighs with lotion and sweat. Her body is sore in a way that makes her mad, because she hasn’t done shit all day, and that’s the point of this. She’s barely made any progress at all.

“Your great-grandfather wants to give you a gift,” he says.

“Yeah? What for?”

He doesn’t say anything so she looks back, and he’s pinched his mouth to the side. He watches the moths whap against the screen over the window, above the sink, attracted to the light inside.

“Dad, what’s the gift for?” she asks again.

He blinks and rubs his hand over his mouth. The sound of his day-old stubble against his palm is loud.

“I didn’t tell him much, but he knows what you did,” he says.

“Huh,” is all she says before picking up the screwdriver again.

She’s trying to wedge the chisel tip between the seal of linoleum and floor, forcing her weight behind it, until it jerks free and she stumbles.

“Fuck!”

“He’s giving you money to go to Japan.”

She turns again and this time, he’s looking at her. His gaze bounces between her, her hands, and the floor.

“I...who else is going?” she asks.

“Just you. Should I tell him no?”

“No, uh,” she shakes her head, lose hair clinging to her sticky face. “Uh. Yeah. Ok. To visit Baba, right?”

“And Josuke.”

She frowns, and shifts her stiffs legs on the floor with difficulty.

“How long am I going to be gone? I don’t want to -”

“- It’s fine.”

The frown turns into a glare. “You’re being weird. What’s going on?”

“Two weeks. One with Baba, one with Josuke,” he says. The line of his mouth shifts, and his head tips to the side as if he is judging the weight of his next words.

“Josuke asked.”

“Huh. Really?” A nod. She lifts her shoulders in a weak shrug, looking at the jagged line where the linoleum meets the bare floor, half finished and exhausting. She doesn’t remember how long she zones out for but Dad never presses for her to continue; he’s patient.

“Yeah. Alright. Sounds fun,” she says, and slowly unfolds herself to stand.

It feels like shit. Her joints set off like fireworks, popping as she twists her body to stretch away the stiffness that settled in. She hates what is left around her: a half finished mess created with good intentions.

She moves to the massive pile to scoop up the torn sheets by hand, but Dad’s fingers touch her elbow.

“I’ll do it. There’s food on the coffee table.”

Part of her wants to fight him and say it’s her mess to clean up, but she must look out of her mind if he’s offering. She sighs, dramatically, and clasps her hand around Dad’s arm. He smiles a little just before she lets go and shuffles out of the kitchen.

The house is open. Fat beetles pepper themselves throughout the rooms and Baba calls them her friends, along with the country cats yowling for the birds chirping in the yard. The dog that Jolyne finds on her bedroll one morning is, she assumes, another friend. A Kai Ken who yawns, teeth snapping shut and gazing at her with foxlike eyes.

“Who’s fuckin’ dog are you?” Jolyne asks.

The dog blinks.

“Right. You’re Japanese,” she says, and it’s too early to relearn a language. She bumps her wrist against her forehead, eyes screwed shut. “Dame? Ike?”

Nothing. She pulls herself and the dog from the bed, groaning at the aches blooming in her body, and the sweaty t-shirt clinging to her back cooling slightly in the free air. Her loose hair falls around face her in stringy clumps, curling in the humidity.

“Baba!” she shouts, dragging the dog with her. “Baba, what’s the word for go away?”

Her grandmother’s voice is faint when it calls back to her, and she can’t make out the words. Based on the light pouring in through the open walls, it’s late morning on a sunny day. The cicadas aren’t screaming yet, but small bugs fly around in the sun, turning into daytime drifting stars from the light catching their wings through the gardens. Her feet stick to the cool wood floors, and the heat is already dense and a struggle to walk through; the dog hates it, too.

She is surprised she remembers the house. It folds open and shut like a wooden puzzle, every inch of it explored in her early childhood, small legs running the length of the floors and shoving aside doors with loud clacks. It was a toy, a novelty, large and sprawling with luminous paper walls she would watch shadows move behind. Mom would be back home in Florida finishing classes for her Masters during those summers. Jolyne would lean her face on her hands and watch Baba cook dinner, handing her slippery slivers of raw fish. Dad would arrive smelling of salt from his long commute from the coast, emptying sandy pockets of shark teeth and baleen.

She forgot about that.

Baba is in the yard, just outside the gate of the high garden fence in the wide fields. She waves brightly in her dirty overalls and the hose in her hand is fanning out a high shower of water, rainbowing in the mist. Jolyne steps into the sun and it’s begging already to brown her skin.

“Good morning! Who’s this?” Baba says.

Jolyne stops on the stone path to keep away from Baba’s hose, and the dog sits. She groans.

“You don’t know? He was in my bed this morning.”

“Well, don’t tell your father you had a boy over,” she winks, and points the hose behind the fence, watering something.

“Baba, what do we do with him?”

“Just let him be. He’ll find his way.”

Jolyne isn’t convinced. She lets go of the collar, and the dog settles down against her legs, heat escaping from his black fur and into her skin. Shaving him would be a kindness, but he doesn’t pant. He loves the warming stone path baking in the sun.

She scoffs and walks forward to see what Baba is doing, to find her grandmother watering the wildflowers growing against the fence. The ground is wet and specks of mud and grass cling to her feet as she walks further into the field.

She remembers pushing the boundaries of the yard beyond the fence. She’d run through the grass when it grew tall and watch pale butterflies flutter with a net in her hands, and toe the line of the property to the dark, thick woods. The dense black of the trees melted into darkness, growing like a wave threatening to crash, her head knocked back in wonder of whether it would finally fall. Her father would say a sharp don’t, and she’d turn around to see him standing at the fence gate when he wasn’t there before.

“Sleep well, honey?” Baba asks.

Jolyne nods. The woods are still there. She was worried they wouldn’t be, after the drive from the airport revealed all the new developments in the land. Maybe the Kujos owned it.

“Do you want breakfast?”

“Yeah,” Jolyne says softly. The sound of water hitting the fence stops and she snaps out of her thoughtless state. “I mean, yeah, sure.”

“Good! I bought American cereal, just for you!”

Baba steps around the dog as they go into the house. Jolyne nudges him with her foot but he stays still, so she keeps walking to follow her grandmother into the kitchen.

The cabinets open to reveal an entire row of sugary American cereals, and Jolyne leans back as Baba lists off what’s available while stirring something in a pot over the stove. Jolyne just reaches over her and grabs the box of Froot Loops, making Baba laugh.

The table is already set, with more small bowls and dishes than the two of them need. Jolyne’s already on her second bowl when Baba brings over the pot she had been tending, and pours a stream of amber soup: miso, homemade, not the instant stuff from the stiff white packets Dad buys from the store. The lids of the other bowls are lifted to reveal a full Japanese breakfast.

“You’re going to eat all that?”

Baba laughs. “I made a little extra. Help yourself.”

She sits down and Jolyne hastily slurps the last of her cereal to try the rectangles of fried tofu drizzled in a black, syrupy sauce. Baba starts with a bit of fish, and Jolyne watches as her grandmother’s old hands pick around needle white bones with ease.

“Y’know, Dad tries to make this sometimes,” she says as she chews. “But it all tastes really bad.”

“I can mail him some better ingredients,” Baba says, fretting. “Oh, I knew he’d get homesick. I should see if any Japanese places in Florida serve breakfast -”

“- Baba, he’s an old dude,” Jolyne says. The tofu is good and she holds back on eating all of it. “We don’t even get Japanese that often, it’s too expensive.”

Her grandmother’s face falls, as does the piece of fish she had between her chopsticks. Jolyne starts shaking her head and putting up her hands.

“No, no, it’s fine, we -”

“- Oh honey, I can teach you! Don’t you want to know about your culture?”

Jolyne frowns. “I don’t - I dunno. It’d be cool to, like, speak Japanese? Like I used to, but. I dunno.”

It all seems pointless. This is her first time back in the country since she was twelve, and that had been an obvious attempt to keep the family together. By then she had the vocabulary of a five year old. A surly five year old, who spent half the trip shouting all the curses she picked up from her father at her father. At least when he was around to hear them, because she can only remember seeing him at the beach.

Baba at least doesn’t try to do something - something weird, Jolyne doesn’t know what, some obscure Japanese shit she isn’t sure Japanese people even do - but picks up her food again with a thoughtful look.

“Well...we can teach you Japanese some other time. There’s a man in Morioh that can help you with that. He gave your father Italian.”

Jolyne pauses picking up a lump of rice with her fingers.

“Lessons?” She offers the word to end the sentence.

“Hm?”

“There’s a guy in Morioh who gave Dad Italian lessons?”

“Oh. Right. You haven’t met him.”

Baba’s gaze drifts away and Jolyne shoves rice into her mouth. She tries to eat one of the fried eggs with chopsticks when Baba gasps, finds whatever she had been trying to spot with that distance look, and Jolyne flings yolk over the table.

“I’ll show you the Kujo family history!”

The room Baba brings her to is in the back wing of the house, closed to the bugs and summer air until they barge in. Together they remove the walls and shoji, the light dust blanketing the room kicking to life and swirling in the sun like a drunken swarm, disrupted by the real insects that sweep in. Each wooden clack transforms the room, each movement bringing them closer to a new place.

In the fresh light, her eyes land on the samurai armor against the wall. The room isn’t cluttered with ancient junk like the basement back at her mother’s house, and is open instead, the back wall a simple shrine that looks to be out of use. There are a pair of dressers against another wall with framed photographs and knick knacks piled on the tops. Pushed next to the closet door is a line of grey filing cabinets.

Baba claps her hands to brush them off and beams.

“I know you never get to see your grandfather, and I doubt Jotaro talks about him much,” she says, and looks around the room with bright eyes, love filling her lungs instead of air. “But, this house belongs to the Kujos. They’ve been here since the Edo Period.”

“Are we samurais?” Jolyne asks, finding it hard to pull her eyes away from the armor.

Baba laughs. “Once! But from what I’ve found, the family backed the modernity of the Meiji period very quickly. It’s amazing this has survived, and I’ve had it restored since.”

Jolyne goes to it, looking at the funny black mask with the bristling mustache, tentative in touching the golden ribbing lining the chest. Her sweaty fingers leave a ghost trail on the metal as she drags them across.

“Some of what’s here is stuff I’ve found myself, doing research. Sadao doesn’t have much interest and has me as the head of the estate now. Under my Japanese name, of course, in case some distant relatives surface and find out I’m the one in charge. But,” she laughs, and walks to the dressers. “I think that only happens to the Joestars.”

“No kidding.”

Before she can ask to try it on, Baba is gasping and laughing. Jolyne turns around to find her holding one of the frames with her hand over her mouth.

“Jolyne, honey, come look.”

She goes to see what the laughter is about and grins when her eyes land on it. She’s seen plenty of baby pictures of her father to know what he looked like as a child, and the picture is of him. He is standing proud with the samurai helmet on, fists on his hips. His father is kneeling behind him with the mask on. Baba keeps tittering with squeaky laughs and flutters her hand in front of her face.

“I forgot we had this.”

“How? It’s probably the best picture in the collection,” Jolyne says. Baba laughs some more, and Jolyne looks at the man behind her father. Her grandfather is a small man, shorter than Baba, and in his youth he was lean. With the mask on, he could be a stranger.

“Hey, Baba? Dad and Sofu, they get along, right?”

Her grandmother’s grin fades into a smile, eyes still locked on the picture. She sets it back down on the dresser, then clasps her hands over her heart; the sigh she releases is heavy.

“Oh, yes. They get along fine. Just...,” she trails off and her eyebrows tip up, touched with sadness. “Sadao is never home much. It costs a lot to maintain the house, so I knew from the start he would be away. Your father was very young when he asked me if I was happy, being married to a man that left so often.”

She laughs lightly, and leans forward to search for more photos to pick up.

“I said I wouldn’t change a thing. Jotaro has told me he’s more like a friend than a father, which I suppose is true. It’s a little unconventional, but that doesn’t make it bad.”

Jolyne nods, trying to understand. Sofu calls sometimes and with her limited Japanese, she can eavesdrop enough to know her father and grandfather’s conversations revolve around music and Baba. The tone of her father’s voice is warm and when he hangs up, nothing has changed, unlike the phonecalls from Baba. She insists now on speakerphone and Dad’s voice is full of exhausted sighs as they talk. He always hangs up with I love you, talk to you soon, bye, but Jolyne can tell he means it. He is still her son no matter how old they get.

“Oh, here we go,” Baba says and lifts a new photo. “I forgot I had framed a copy.”

Five men stand on the cracked ground of a landing strip, asphalt dusted over with the sands from the desert surrounding them. They all look out of place in the landscape save for the one man dressed in long, light fabrics, neck adorned in gold. They all look out of place together, their differences jumping forward more than their similarities. She has seen the photograph before.

“Dad has this on his desk,” she says. “It’s been in the house, like, forever.”

“Oh, good. I’m glad he keeps it. I keep a loose one in the family shrine, but I might replace it now,” Baba says, and taps her finger against her lip in thought.

“Dad never - I mean, I figured it out. I know Uncle Polnareff and Gramps and Dad, but, um.”

She freezes and starts twisting her fingers. She has heard the names once, when her father struggled to explain how a family legacy landed in his hands at age seventeen, and she’ll probably fuck them up, saying them now. Her blood feels thicker and harder to pump. It seems rude.

“Are the other two, uh, Avdol? And Kakyoin, right?”

Baba’s face lifts with mild surprise, then she’s smiling. “Yes. He told you?”

Jolyne shrugs and looks at the picture. Her father and Kakyoin are thin, gawky, the pair of them mostly arms and legs. Her father is almost smiling, but even under the shade of his hat, his eyes hold an anger that is warding off exhaustion. She’s seen the same look in her mugshot.

“He didn’t say much,” she admits.

Baba nods in understanding. She rubs the dust away from the top of the frame with her finger.

“When they came home, my father told me most of what happened. Jotaro would mention it, sometimes...I think I was the only one he talked to about it.”

“Can you tell me?” Jolyne asks, so sudden she surprises herself.

Baba looks uncertain. Then, like her father, she leans her head to the side and makes up her mind. She nods.

They go into another room together, Baba carrying the framed photograph. It is sparse and even with the humming cicadas it feels somber and still, a room not meant for living but for passing through. It is already open and reveals a view of the central garden. The sun is high above now and the dog is wandering to each tree and shrub, panting mouth drooling and sniffing. With a light jingle of his collar, he jumps into the room and flops down at the ledge of the floor.

Baba brings her to the wall with the simple, clean shrine. The popping of their knees when they kneel times with a pause in the cicada’s song, and a need to apologize for the intrusion raises the hair on the back of  Jolyne’s neck.

“I keep this up,” Baba explains. She pulls the loose photograph from Egypt from where it was leaning against a flower vase, and places the frame down in its place. “It was for the Kujos, but, Sadao said I could add to it after Uncle Smokey died. That’s him, right there, with my father.”

The picture has the same feeling of the one from Egypt, two different people thrown together, juxtaposed and strange. Gramps throws his arm around a smaller man, clean in a navy suit that is rumpled by her great-grandfather, smiling with a quiet presence. Gramps is all messy, greying hair and dimples, his own outfit a collared shirt and undone tie limp around his neck.

“I didn’t know he had a brother,” Jolyne says.

“He was never in good enough health to travel, so your father never really knew him. But he was a very smart man. A politician.”

“Explains the suit,” Jolyne says. Baba laughs.

“And here, this is my grandmother,” Baba says, and points to another picture. The photo is coated in the dull gloss of golden age Hollywood stars, the woman in the portrait dripping with silver and black glamor. Her grey hair is sleek, swooping high over the curve of her face that has been gently touched by time. A cigarette grows a plume of smoke in one of her gloved hands.

“Elizabeth,” Jolyne knows. Pictures of her adorn the Joestar penthouse in Manhattan. Jolyne remembers mimicking her portraits with the stems of eaten lollipops.

“Right! And then, here,” Baba places the picture down and points to the one they came to discuss. “Kakyoin and Mr. Avdol. I don’t really know where to start, so, what would you like to know?”

Jolyne opens her mouth, and finds it has run dry. The opportunity to ask questions about anything never arises. She finds she doesn’t know how to ask, and thinks, struggling to remember a time where she hasn’t demanded answers with a raised voice.

Baba’s face is sweet. It’s like she was born to be a grandmother, with wrinkles that frame the corners of her smiles and her blue eyes.

Jolyne sighs, and with the air comes the words.

“What did my dad do in Egypt? Mostly he just said Kakyoin and Uncle Polnareff used to work for Dio, but Gramps, Avdol, and Dad helped them. They fought a bunch of stand users and then killed Dio together,” she says.

A crack in Baba’s smile forms and spreads slowly like a chip in a windshield, spidering out and touching every corner of her face. Jolyne wants to take it back.

“Your father killed Dio, honey. He did it alone.”

Air rushes into her lungs and she holds it there, eyes wide, shaking her head, looking at the picture of her father. Her grandmother’s face grows more concerned and Jolyne exhales explosively.

“Alone? He was a teenager! How the - how’d he not die, huh? Wasn’t Dio super strong? I know Dad’s got Star Platinum and all, but - Jesus!”

“Jolyne, calm down, it’s ok. He had some help, but he handled Dio himself. He was never really alone in Egypt,” Baba says and places her hand on Jolyne’s knee.

“Huh, that must’ve been nice,” she mutters and rolls her eyes. Baba squeezes her knee and the panic starts to fade when she pulls her hand back.

“He saved my father’s life, and mine, too. So did Mr. Avdol and Kakyoin. I only met them briefly but they were both very gentle, very kind people.”

Jolyne nods even though it’s difficult. She stares at the picture and bites the dead skin on her lip.

“How old was Kakyoin?”

“Seventeen, same as your father. They attended the same high school.”

“Jesus,” Jolyne mutters, because he looks it. The seams on his shoulders sag a little. His presence in the picture is quiet and pale like him, and his sunburn is bright against the color of his hair.

“Did, um,” she starts, did Dad see him die, then stops. “No, never mind.”

She doesn’t have to know. The backseat of a stolen car at the end of the world feels like it happened in a different time, one separate from her life but somehow, defining it. Leaning her cheek into the mesh of Annasui’s shoulder, and not having the strength to cry her burning eyes out over Weather Report’s death; a memory that feels like it might not have happened. The only feeling beyond mourning was the unwavering faith that Dad would know what to do.

He did. They talked through sleepless nights on the apartment balcony, him with a beer she would steal sips of, and pour her heart out about why the night was so sleepless. He wouldn’t say much, but it was always what she needed to hear.

“Uncle Polnareff was ok, right?” she asks to cover up all that she doesn’t want to mention. Instead, she focuses on how strange it is to see Uncle Polnareff so young, and with his body. He is basking in the attention of the camera.

“Oh, yes, he had only minor injuries. He visited many times, after they met and before they went to Egypt again.”

“Again?”

“I never heard much about it,” Baba says, and it’s clear the gaps in her knowledge upset her. “It was when you were two, and that was when Polnareff lost his legs. I remember because I was with you. You had the chicken pox and your father called from the hospital in Italy to tell you not to scratch.”

She doesn’t remember that. She never heard about it.

“Do you know what they were doing?” she asks.

Baba shakes her head. “It was something to do with Dio, that’s all. And it was important enough for your father to leave. I think it helped him, being able to come back from whatever happened, to you and your mother. He walked in and held you for so long, you started to hit his face.”

Jolyne snorts half-heartedly. That sounds right, and she wants to ask for more, more about the trips and what her father has done, but different words are on her tongue. They trip out clumsily.

“What was - um. What was he like, when he came back? T-the first time, I mean.”

Her grandmother is silent. She holds her hands together in her lap, expression blank. The openness she usually exhibits does nothing, like a door opened to let in the breeze but there is only stale air. Her lips part, slowly, and the words step out.

“Restless. He didn’t know what to do,” Baba admits. “He had to go back to school and that was when he started to like it - he really pushed himself to get his grades up. He started helping around the house. But then, I’d hear something break, and find him cleaning it up, and telling me not to worry. His stand was always out, as if he didn’t have enough room in him to put it back.”

She sighs. It’s Jolyne’s turn: she places her hand over her grandmother’s, and Baba gives her a smile.

“Things turned around when he decided to go to college. I don’t think he would’ve settled down if he hadn’t gone to school in Florida. Being away helped, I think.”

Her grandmother is crying. Not the usual dramatic tears that pop up when she looks at her family for too long or when a dog in a movie dies, but the soft kind people brush away to pretend they’re not there. Baba chuckles wetly and uses the hand Jolyne isn’t holding to rub her eyes.

“I’m sorry I brought all this up. I didn’t mean to upset you,” Jolyne says.

Baba laughs, and shakes her head.

“No, no, don’t apologize. It makes sense you’d want to know.”

Her eyelashes are still laced with tears but she is smiling, looking at the picture again.

“You helped him a lot,” Baba says.

Jolyne is shaking her head before she realizes how surprised she is to hear it. Baba doesn’t catch it, and sighs, fondness filling her chest.

“You take after him.”

Jolyne breathes in sharply and squeezes her hand. Suddenly, the temperature gets to her, and the heat trapped under her unwashed hair makes her feel disgusting. If it weren’t rude, she’d free her grandmother’s hand from the sweat of her palm. She would live in a shower if she could.

“Um, I think that’s enough for today,” Jolyne says, and pulls away her hand. “You told me a lot and, uh, I feel kinda sweaty so I think I’ll shower. Thanks for talking to me about all of this, Baba.”

Her grandmother is pulled from her thoughts and catches up with Jolyne’s hurried speech. She is left bobbing in the wake of Jolyne’s sudden need to go.

“Oh, it’s no trouble at all, honey. If you have any more questions, just let me know.”

She’s so sincere it makes Jolyne’s face burn hot and greasy; the red in her skin is physical. She forces a smile and jerks her head toward the hall.

“Can you show me how the bathrooms work here?”

With that, Baba is smiling and laughing again, chattering like a bird on the walk out. She is wrapped up in comparing Japanese and American bathing standards. It allows Jolyne to spare a departing glance at the room, her eyes drawn to the shrine shifting to the dog, who raises his head, and meets her gaze. She turns away.

Jolyne lies on top of the blanket. The soft mounds pillowing around her body fill with heat, and she shifts, dragging her stretched arms and legs onto cooler territory. There is no wind tonight, with only the sounds of grasshoppers chirping in a small cacophony of white noise, drifting in through the open walls. Somewhere in the garden, a bamboo pipe fills with water and calls out a stream of hollow knocks, in time with itself. She can’t sleep.

Baba had done her hair after her bath. She couldn’t figure out the braids, so Jolyne kept two simple buns all day, and helped with chores around the house. It was easy, mindless work; maintaining a good house was easier than fixing a cheap and shitty apartment.

They made dinner together and ate it in the garden with the dog that stuck around all day. He ate anything they handed him but never wagged his tail or begged; Jolyne called him an asshole, while Baba called him proud. He was never sent home but he seemed to disappear after they went into the TV room, and Baba fell asleep during the movie they watched.

Jolyne gets up when the heat becomes too much and she convinces herself that a snack would help. She hopes it’s jetlag.

The night is a dark blue she never sees in Florida, where the neon and streetlights compete between pink-purple and dull yellow to color the air. It’s darker than she’s used to, but it isn’t quite black; it is easy to walk down the path of floors through the walls of bare beams. It is the skeleton of a house.

It hits her as she enters the kitchen that it doesn’t feel like a home. It’s just a place and a time that doesn’t exist anymore for anyone but Baba and Sofu. For her, it’s a foreign playhouse that almost became normal. For her father, she doesn’t know. Maybe a place still covered in photographs of the person that died in Egypt and came back, because it was what he was supposed to come back to.

Jolyne opens the fridge and grabs a pinch of cold rice leftover from dinner, and it tastes like water. For no reason she cares to find, she leaves the kitchen and steps out into the back garden.

The dog is there. She almost misses him as he blends into the blurry-edged plants, and he turns his head when she steps onto the porch. He keeps his gaze steady somewhere in the pitch black of his face.

Then, he trots out of the garden through the open gate fence. Baba must’ve left it open for him to come and go, and Jolyne follows to shut the gate behind him. Someone must be missing him and he should go home.

She peeks out into the fields just in time to see the dog break into a bounding run for the woods, and she pulls her hand from the gate.

The woods are like the dog, silhouetted and looking right at her. Hermes would call her crazy for thinking it, but she knows in her gut she’s right. She also knows she has to check it out.

It’s not like sneaking out of a window, but Jolyne look back at the house anyway for fear of being caught. The step into the field is nothing like landing on her knees in the cactus planted in the front garden of her childhood home, no bleeding skin from the jump, no fear of doing the wrong thing. The trimmed, damp grass greets her with cool relief against the heat. The vibrations of her lazy walk kick up moths and send them and their heavy wings flying.

At the edge of the woods, she can’t hear her father say don’t anymore, but it feels like he is still behind her at the gate.

The woods in Japan are lush, unlike the scrubby plants and palm that form small islands among the pavement back home. The ground bounces beneath her feet, the darkness laid on a bed of moss. The tree trunks are thick and plants seem to grow on top of each other. The entirety of the dark canopy hums with a thousand quiet lives of green, silent hearts.

She doesn’t go far and sits on a large rock being swallowed by a tree trunk, allowing her feet to rest on a high arch of root that is webbed with strings of more roots belonging to other trees. She feels them with her toes. She knows the woods are short and across from her start is the end, feeding into another field, similar but different, with another old home belonging to another old family.

She can see the Kujo house from here framed by the woods. In the dark it is a silhouette of short, long rectangles; the idea of a house. She can imagine the child her father used to be living there.

Chapter Text

“Hello?”

It’s Emporio’s soft, high voice that answers the phone, and Jolyne’s face bursts into a grin. God, she misses them.

“Hi Emporio!”

“Jolyne!” he shouts, and in the distance she can hear her father and Hermes, Jolyne?, Hey, about fuckin’ time--. “Hermes, can you turn down the TV?”

“How’s it going? Did you just come home from school?” she asks.

Baba turns around from the counter where she is cleaning a fish for dinner, and mouths, Emporio? Jolyne nods and Baba puckers her lips in a kiss.

“No, I got home --”

“-- Baba says she loves you,” Jolyne says and Baba nods enthusiastically. “Sorry, what were you saying?”

“Oh. I love her too! And I came home an hour ago.”

Jolyne shifts her mouth away from the phone. “Baba, Emporio says he loves you, too.”

Baba laughs and Jolyne puts the phone back to her mouth.

“I’m always an hour off, I shouldn’t’ve reset my phone to Japan time. Tell my Dad it was a stupid fuckin’ idea,” she says, and keeps talking, because Emporio would never. “How’ve you been? Have I missed anything?”

“Ummm. No. It’s been really quiet with you gone. Huh?”

She can hear her dad’s voice rumbling. Emporio doesn’t know to hold his hand over the receiver and talks into the phone.

“You want to talk to Jolyne? Can I talk to her after? Ok, thank you. Hey, Jolyne?”

“Still here, buddy,” she says, and tries some natto again, just to see if she’ll have acquired a taste for it since yesterday. No dice.

“Your dad wants to talk to you but I’m gonna talk to you right after, so don’t hang up, ok?”

“Got it.”

“Ok. Here’s Mr. Jotaro. I love you!”

“I love you too!” she says, but she’s sure Emporio has handed the phone off before she could reply.

There is a pause of silence. Inside of it she can hear the TV, and Emporio talking with Hermes. It’s all a mess of muddled tones that just carry the cadence of their voices, but she can imagine all their words. The plaid living room couch cushions are dipping low with Hermes and her father on either end, Hermes with the remote, her father with his work in his lap. Emporio sits on the floor in front of the coffee table, breezing through his homework.

“How is it?” Dad asks.

Jolyne shrugs. “S’nice. I forgot you grew up in the country, you goddamn hick.”

He’s probably laughing. Baba sure is.

“Also, natto still tastes gross. Remember that time you ate it with rice and raw eggs, like some kinda fucked up soup? I can’t believe you didn’t puke that.”

“How’s Baba?”

She sighs. He’s never fun.

“Good. Duh. She’s got like twice my strength and energy so don’t even worry about her. We’ve been having a great time.”

“Good.”

She lets the silence settle and picks at the natto again. It is something she has been practicing: keeping quiet. It makes Dad have to talk and allows her to slow down. It’s a different enough change that Baba even turns around to check on her.

“What room are you staying in?” he finally asks.

“It’s one room over from the living room, the North wing, I think? It’s close to the TV.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“That was my old room.”

“Huh,” she says.

She almost puts more natto into her mouth before taking a piece of fried tempura batter instead.

“Well, it gets no air and feels like a hot box, so, I guess it makes sense why you wear wool in Florida.”

He snorts into the phone, staticky and loud, and it’s a laugh. Jolyne grins.

“Want me to say anything to Uncle Josuke when I see him tomorrow?” she asks.

The silence is long enough before her father says, “Yes. Tell him you want to learn Italian.”

“Uhhhh...huh. Is this, some, like, code or something --”

“-- He’ll understand. Tell Okuyasu and Shizuka I say hello.”

She grins. “But not Josuke? Got it.”

“Him too.”

“Fiiiiine.”

“I’m going to put Emporio back on. Tell Baba I’ll call her tomorrow on my way to work.”

She knew it. She knew her dad called his mom every day, or at least, tried to.

“Ok. Love you.”

“I love you too. Bye.”

Chapter Text

Okuyasu is still holding her suitcase in the kitchen, while Baba chatters on with him about gardening and catching up. He can handle the weight, but the shape of it is awkward and he keeps lifting his knee to balance it. Shizuka sings along to the high-pitched theme of a commercial on the TV. Oji is pacing from the living room to the kitchen with his hand on his hip, cellphone at his ear, trying to call someone and cursing.

It’s loud. It was loud the second they opened the door that evening and Baba started spitting Japanese from her lips as if she couldn’t get it out quick enough. Everyone’s voices boom and the accents from Morioh are carried through wide, open mouths, words falling out half-pronounced.

Jolyne leans her arms on the island in the kitchen, watching the people that live in this house and the way they handle her lying on the track of their lives. Okuyasu still hasn’t set down her suitcase.

“You know what? Fuck that guy,” Josuke says in Japanese, and she can understand it. She laughs as he shoves his cellphone into his back pocket.

He looks at her and jerks his thumb towards the door. When he speaks to her, it is always in English.

“Hey, we’re gonna visit someone real quick before dinner. I won’t let it take long.”

“Yeah? Why am I going?”

He does the same thing Baba does, that her father does: tips his head to the side as he weighs his words before answering.

“No time to explain,” he says, and even through his anger he winks before turning out the door.

She follows him out of the small house, into the short front yard. The lawn is patchy but the gardens lining the house are beautiful, the myriad of flowers still in bloom covering the plants that have already withered in the spring, or will come in the fall. The rows of trumpeting tiger lilies glow in the light above the front steps.

Josuke shoves his hands into his pockets and slouches as they walk down the sidewalk, his lip curled back and teeth bared like a dog. He’s such a weird guy.

The trip from the country to Morioh was long and sleepy. Baba read while Jolyne got used to the stares of passengers on the train, for her height, her tattoo, her hair. They left in the afternoon and arrived at the station in time for the world to be silhouetted black against a dying purple sky.

The city of Morioh remains unknown in the dark. Nothing is familiar from the scant trips she remembers, all of it foggy and cloaked, revealed only through Josuke’s knowledge of every crack in the sidewalk or the scarce streetlamps. Each patch of hanging light illuminates a house, the wires webbing the sky from telephone poles. They could be on any street in the world if not for the kanji painted on the pavement at intersections, thick white paint jumping out of the black like a comic book sound effect screaming -- something. She can’t read it.

Josuke walks a little quicker than her, his jerky steps betraying the weak restraint he has to keep from stomping. It doesn’t take long until they’re in front of the massive silhouette of a house. He bounds up the steps of the porch with pronounced wooden thuds, and pounds his fist on the door.

Then, he starts shouting.

A voice from inside the house shouts back. Josuke’s stand pops out of his shoulders and it’s jarring to see so quickly. He turns his head and Crazy Diamond’s fist rises.

“Hey, step back, ok?”

Jolyne hurries backwards and ends up on the stairs when her uncle wrecks some guy’s door, breaking it off of the top hinge and shattering the lock. It splinters open and he walks inside, still shouting.

“Hey, uh,” Jolyne says, grinning, following after him into the dark hallway. “You sure you’re a cop?”

“I’ll fix it,” he laces between all of the Japanese.

The faded lamplight outside pours into a dark foyer, dying into an unknown abyss of black. The other voice echoes down the long, split level staircase that leads to the only light on in the house, dim gold radiating from a door left ajar. They have crashed a house straight from a horror movie, and her uncle doesn’t give a shit. Josuke stomps up the stairs and stops on the first landing, his face turning a bit pink as he yells.

A man appears at the top of the stairs. His long, bony arms are fitting themselves through a white jacket, hastily buttoning the front before his fingers fly up to his limp hair, shoving it out of his face. He yells at her uncle the whole time, until somewhere in the mess she hears Josuke say Jolyne! Jotaro’s daughter!

The man stops yelling and looks down the stairs to her. He adjusts his headband with his index finger and turns to Josuke, saying something calmly.

They talk. All of the tension in their shouting match leaves the house and she can catch the word stand repeated in their conversation. Josuke abruptly turns to her as the man goes on a tired rant.

“Ok, Jolyne, this is Rohan. He’s a stand user, and your dad asked him to teach you Japanese. Don’t worry, he’s a little sleazy but he won’t do anything weird, I promise.”

“Uh,” Jolyne starts, and her eyes flit between her uncle and Rohan, who is annoyed with being interrupted. “What’s his stand do, exactly?”

She starts climbing the stairs. Josuke continues, and Rohan quickly leaves them behind when he disappears into the illuminated room.

“He can read people. It’s like, he turns you into a book, and he can write inside it to make you do anything,” Josuke explains at the top of the stairs. “It’s fucked up.”

“Yeah, Christ.”

Rohan flatly shouts to them just as they walk into the room. Josuke scoffs and rolls his eyes.

It takes her a second for her eyes to adjust to the new light. The back wall has windows but the shutters are closed, as are the curtains, only allowing the lamplight from the drawing table to fill the room. The desk has a few large sheets of paper on it, neatly stacked among pens and brushes that look purposeful in their littered arrangement. There are a few bookcases, many framed drawings on the wall, and that’s when she rolls her head back as the realization comes over her.

“Oh you’re Rohan!” She says. “My uh - friend - no, fuck it, my son, my son loves your comics.”

From his desk chair Rohan looks at her, then to Josuke, says something, and Josuke sighs explosively.

“Let’s just get this over with,” he says, and grabs a free chair in the room, dropping it in front of Rohan.

She hurries to sit and grabs the seat of the chair with her hands, trying to keep Stone Free from fading into view. Friendly run-ins with stand users were rare, and sitting still to let one be used on her feels unnatural. Stone Free hums a scream in her throat and Rohan stares at her, disinterested.

The pictures of him at the start of the volumes Emporio owns don’t look like this, sour and unfriendly. His expression remains until his eyes start to jerk back and forth, volleying over the features of her face. His expression shifts into light curiosity before it flares like a gas fire in his gaze. His hand starts to reach for his desk, until Josuke sharply speaks.

His hand and frown return, and Rohan rolls his eyes as his stand appears before his face. Any fear she has dies as she starts laughing.

“You made the hero of your comic book your stand?”

Josuke laughs too and Rohan shouts, she doesn’t know what, because the room goes black.

It feels like the World. She comes back and knows there are seconds missing between the time of then and now. Josuke’s hand is on her shoulder and his face is in front of her’s, with Rohan nearly shoving his chin into her uncle’s forehead as they stare at her.

“Well? Say something,” Josuke says, and the words fall clear out of his mouth like water.

“Something,” Jolyne says.

The smiles spread on both of their faces, wider on Josuke’s out of relief, and Rohan’s thin with arrogance.

“I told you. I would never dare to hurt Jotaro’s daughter, or dishonor his request,” Rohan says. Now that she can understand him, his voice is nasal and flat, peaking only when he uses I.

The novelty wears off when his words land in her.

“My Dad asked you to do this?” Jolyne asks. She can hear the words come out of her mouth like snapping charcoal, crisp, light, and chichi rolls off her tongue like it used to. Her mouth feels new.

Rohan nods before turning away to rummage through the drawers beside the table. Her new talents don’t impress him.

“Oh, yes. Said it was a gift, or something.”

Josuke scoffs and it gets no response from Rohan, who is pulling out pens and pencils to tuck into a bag on the floor. Her uncle squeezes her shoulder and looks at her, his annoyance drifting away as he breathes in a smile, warm and honeyed like Baba’s. It isn’t the way their cheeks dimple like their father’s; it’s the purpose behind their teeth. It takes Jolyne a moment to realize that he’s proud of her.

“Your dad felt bad you couldn’t speak it anymore. He wanted you to visit so Rohan could give it to you,” Josuke says.

She shakes her head, eyebrows coming together in a hard frown.

“He said that?”

Josuke’s smile fades and his lips pucker in confusion. He shrugs.

“He didn’t have to; it’s just what he meant.” He says it with so much ease and confidence that she doesn’t find it impossible to swallow.

His hand lifts away only to come back down with a little force, shaking her shoulder and grinning.

“Anything else you want? This asshole never does anything for free, so now’s the time to ask.”

She already knew fuck off so the flavor of understanding Rohan’s mutters has no newness. She smiles anyway and thinks, before remembering.

“Italian,” she says. “Dad said to ask for Italian too.”

Josuke’s eyebrows raise and he grins. “Oh man. You’ll have a blast in Naples. C’mon, Rohan, hurry up, I don’t want to be late.”

She can’t ask what he means about Naples before he gets into another fight with Rohan.

She is surprised when they walk to the restaurant instead of drive, but it turns out Okuyasu’s car is only used for emergencies. Shizuka holds onto Okuyasu’s hand for a block before drifting away, merging through the group to the outside of the sidewalk where Rohan walks on people’s lawns. Words tap and slip over their perfect teeth; everyone Josuke knows have perfect smiles.

He is in the lead, Okuyasu hovering behind and keeping an eye on Shizuka while Baba talks to him. People putting their garbage out on their warm driveways all know Josuke, wave and say good evening, and his hand keeps pulling out of his pocket to wave back.

They might as well have never left the house, when every street they walk is a hallway in a massive home.

“How far are you?” Rohan asks.

Shizuka swings her arms, tugging absentmindedly on the strap of Rohan’s bag.

“I’m at the flashback, in America. You drew the Brooklyn Bridge wrong.”

“Excuse me?”

Shizuka giggles and bumps into Okuyasu to shrink away from Rohan’s glare. Okuyasu secures his hand on her back to make sure she doesn’t trip, and turns back to Baba.

“I’m trying to wean the cat off of fertilizers, y’know? Organic just seems healthier, and since he can’t go to a vet, I could use the chemicals as medicine. Is that weird?”

“Oh, nooo, it makes perfect sense.”

The way they talk is lyrical, each mouth knowing when to speak and laugh and fall into time with the vocal ticks unique to each person. It is jarring when Oji speaks up.

“Hey Jolyne, come walk up here in the front, I want you to see the town,” Josuke says over his shoulder.

She hadn’t realized she was walking in the back of the group, and walks around them to her uncle. He smiles with satisfaction and looks ahead, his profile dark against the light from the houses opposite them. He looks like he could be her father’s brother.

“What did you want me to see?” she asks.

He shrugs, runs his hand over his hair, and keeps it raised to wave to a neighbor quickly before tucking it back into his pocket.

“It’s just a nice walk,” he says. “Thought you might like to know where things are.”

“Oji, I dunno if you noticed, but it’s real fuckin’ dark out.”

He laughs and shrugs again, fluid and easy.

“Guess I just wanted to walk with my niece,” he admits. She knows it’s the truth. “But I’ll show you around during the day sometime.”

She knocks her shoulder into his and realizes he’s just a little shorter than her dad.

At the front with him, she can see the city of Morioh laid out as the land dips into shallow hills, the dark studded with gold wreaths of light. The pattern of houses thins until she can spot the cemetery, facades of gravestones pale little dots cropping out of the ground. Before it sits the sign of Tonio’s, and she realizes the square building across from the cemetery is their destination.

A woman with long hair kept loose on her shoulders stands outside, smoking with a blank, bored expression glowing off her skin in the light of the front door. She turns when she sees them, and a smile that feels rare crosses her face before sliding back to indifference. She waves.

“How late are we?” Josuke asks as he steps up to her, hand touching her back, her arm on his shoulder, quick kisses exchange on the cheek.

“Late. Tonio knew. He just started on the appetizer,” she says and the same treatment is given to Okuyasu, then Rohan who grits his teeth and bares the contact, though he is adamant on exchanging the affection.

“Great! How was your trip?” Okuyasu says. The woman leans down and taps Shizuka on the nose, plucks at the hem of her shirt, and seems to be quietly complimenting her. Shizuka laughs. “Is Koichi inside?”

“Of course he is,” The woman says as she stands. “And the trip was fine. I spent it on the beach while Koichi was in meetings. I’m glad to be back home.”

“Why didn’t Koichi call when you came back?” Rohan says.

The woman shrugs, disinterested, and a low rumble of annoyance vibrates in his throat. She is too busy greeting Baba, who opens her arms to the woman’s slight surprise, but she accepts it and the kiss she receives.

“Yukako! It’s been too long,” Baba says, and gestures to Jolyne. “You remember Jolyne, right?”

“Mr. Kujo’s daughter, of course,” the woman, Yukako, says, and wraps her arm around Jolyne in a quick half-hug that is over before Jolyne can return it. “You were the flower girl at my wedding.”

“Oh, right! I remember you. Uh, nice to see you again,” Jolyne says. She barely remembers her but says the pleasantry anyway, but Yukako doesn’t seem to care for it. There is no polite smile in return.

“You can call me Yukako,” she says, and the current of the group brings them all inside, separating her from Jolyne as she walks into the restaurant.

It feels like stepping into a sauna, thick with hot oil leaping from skillets and herbs flavoring the air. The small room is cluttered with decorations and extra furniture shoved away for the long table forced into the room diagonally, and it feels like they’re going to eat in a living room with the fireplace in the corner, and photographs cluttering the walls.

She takes a moment to spot people she recognizes in the pictures before bumping into Josuke’s back as he tries to shrug off his jacket, and he is yelling to Shizuka, who is tailing Rohan to the table where he accosts a short, blond man already sitting there. Beside him is another man with long, white hair who is eager enough to reach across the table to hug Rohan; Jolyne doesn’t miss the way his arms extend unnaturally. Okuyasu is shoving his way around the table and hollering to the back kitchen, rolling up his sleeves, while Yukako helps Baba find a seat.

Josuke elbows her again and she grabs the back of his jacket, yanking it from his shoulders.

“Oh, thanks,” he says, then looks down to Shizuka. “Don’t follow Rohan around, Shizuka, I don’t want you to pick up his bad habits.”

“But he’s funny,” she whines. “And Oji said it was ok.”

“Yeah, well, Oji’s stupid, so don’t listen to him either. Just listen to me.”

“I’m gonna tell him you said that,” she says, and darts away.

“No, I didn’t mean it!” he yells, and Jolyne laughs and watches Shizuka almost slam her hand onto the swinging back door before stopping when someone comes out.

It is a man with blonde hair peeking out from under a stiff, white chef’s hat, his smile so wide his eyes shut from the force of it. He rubs his hands clean on a rag and immediately leans down to greet Shizuka. Okuyasu steps out behind him with a bottle of wine in each hand and a grin on his face.

“Okuyasu, come sit next to Jolyne, yeah?” Josuke shouts over the din and suddenly, everyone moves without acknowledging Josuke to take their seats, still wrapped up in their own conversations. Her uncle places his hand on her back and leads her forward.

“Ok, you remember Koichi, right? You were the flower girl at his wedding,” Josuke says, pointing to the small man across the table, now wedged between Yukako and Rohan, who is rolling his eyes while shoving Shizuka’s seat closer to the table beside him.

“Yeah, I remember. We met only a few times?” Jolyne says to Koichi.

“Yes, but I’ve heard a lot about you,” he says and she is thankful that he extends his hand from across the table and gives a handshake. Both his hands wrap around hers and he gives a kind smile, communicating a genuine pleasure to see her and a silent apology for all the noise and ridiculous surrounding company.

“And this is Mikitaka, I don’t know if you met at the wedding? We probably kept you away from him,” Josuke says about the man now sitting next to him.

Jolyne is ready to ask what the hell is up with his sick nose ring when he is leaning across her uncle’s lap, pulling her into a hug while pinning her arms to her sides.

“It’s so good to meet you! I wasn’t supposed to talk to you then, but I’m very happy to now!,” he pulls back and grips her shoulders, and up close, he looks like he is in high school. “Thank you for saving the universe!”

“Uh, you’re welcome?”

“Mikitaka,” Josuke hisses and elbows him in the chest, pushing him away.

“I’m sorry, Josuke, I could not help it. I am too grateful.”

Okuyasu leans over her as he pours wine into her glass, patting her on the head. “You wanna tell her or should I?”

“Tell me what?”

“Mikitaka is uh,” Josuke pauses and rubs his fingers into his eyes, sighing shortly. “He’s...he’s an alien.”

“I knew they exist, holy shit I fucking knew, hey wait, does my Dad know about this because --”

“Miss Kujo!”

She quickly turns her head toward the soft, firm voice that called her. Okuyasu shifts away from the chef who now stands behind her, his palms together in preparation to bow gently.

“I am Tonio, the owner of this restaurant. It is a pleasure to meet you and serve you as the guest of honor,” he says, and his accent is so strange but so damn familiar, and she can’t place it until he gives her a quick kiss on each cheek.

“Oh, man, you’re Italian,” she says.

He nods, enthusiastic. “I am, as is the food I serve. I have known your uncle for a very long time.”

“He’s got the best restaurant in Japan,” Josuke says, clapping his hand on her shoulder, where it is still warm from all the other hands gently passing their excitement, their energy to her since the evening began.

“He’s being too generous, but I do hope you enjoy the meal,” Tonio says and smiles once more before going back to the kitchen.

Okuyasu finds his seat to Jolyne’s left and she turns to her uncle, who has his arm on the back of her chair, his gaze glassed over, deep in thought and stuck on her. He blinks it away and smiles.

“How do you like it all so far? It’s not too much for the first day, is it?” he asks.

Jolyne does another once over of the restaurant, the table. The room feels smaller now that everyone has found their space but richer for it, people and places boiled down and thickened and louder. Wine glasses clang against the plates and the conversation is a loud lull, words blanketing her ears until they turn red with warmth.

A laugh bubbles up from her throat, and shakes her head. “No, it’s great. It’s really fun.”

By the time the entree is served, the separate conversations pool together into one extending across the whole table, fewer voices climbing over each other while still speaking loudly. The whirl and pulling of everyone floats softly to settle together. Everyone moves as parts of a whole.

Shizuka kicks Rohan under the table when he comments on the sauce collecting on her face, and Jolyne nearly chokes laughing on bread, while Okuyasu slaps his hand on her back. She guzzles down wine and scrapes the taste of it against her teeth.

“Rohan, don’t be a dick!” Josuke shouts in Italian, making Tonio, who was forced to join them at least for wine in between courses, gasp.

“I know what that means!” Shizuka says brightly.

“Who -- who taught you? Was it Dad?”

Jolyne laughs and Okuyasu’s hand pats her back again. She brushes him off with a wave of her hand and he returns to eating.

“Is it always like this?” she asks.

He shrugs, smiling and talking with his mouth full. “Oh, yeah. It’s waaay louder when Tomoko is here - oh, uh, Josuke’s mom, I dunno if you’ve met her. And when your dad used to come around more, it’s louder then, too.”

“Huh. Really?”

He jerks his head sharply up and down in a nod.

“Uh huh. I think it’s ‘cause Josuke gets to be a kid again. Y’know, not look out for everybody? Like he’s doing right now,” Okuyasu says and gestures with his fork to her left.

She glances and watches as Josuke rattles off rules to Rohan for what is and is not appropriate to say to Shizuka, while he also refills Tonio’s wine glass; his free hand is holding Mikitaka’s shoulder to keep him from twirling his fingers over the candle flames, as he had been playing with them since the appetizer.

“When his mom is here he just gets embarrassed,” Okuyasu says and shovels more pasta into his mouth.

“What’s it like when my dad’s here?”

“It’s kinda like -- hm.” Okuyasu chews and flattens out his lips as he thinks, face screwed up in concentration. He swallows and slowly nods. “Ok, we all really respect your dad, right? Like, a lot. But Josuke’s always trying to take care of everyone and he’s kinda that way with your dad, too. It’s pretty funny.”

She cracks a smile, trying to envision it. “You take good care of Josuke though, right?”

“Aw, yeah, ‘course. He barely knows how to take care of himself,” Okuyasu says and smiles into his sip of water. “He’s an idiot.”

“Not talking about me, are you?” Josuke says, reaching across Jolyne’s shoulders to tug on Okuyasu’s ear lobe.

“Nah, man, never. We were just talking about your nephew,” he says, and swats Josuke’s hand away.

“Oh, yeah? What about him?”

“I wanted to know what he’s like in Morioh. Oku said he comes to these dinners and I know he hates going anywhere with anybody,” Jolyne says.

Josuke laughs and nods.

“He just comes so he can catch up with all of us at once, instead of doing it one on one. He’s pretty quiet but he doesn’t really hate it all that much. But you know that.”

His confidence in her is strong and that makes her waver. Does she know? She knows her father likes the loud and abrasive company her and Hermes make together, rounded up with Emporio’s quiet presence at the heart of the apartment. She doesn’t know much else.

“How long has he known you guys?” she asks.

Josuke lifts his eyes to the ceiling and his fingers start to count off, but the answer comes from across the table.

“Coming up on thirteen years now,” Koichi says.

“Shit, that long?” Okuyasu says. “It’s flown by.”

“Wait, how old were you when you met my dad?” Jolyne asks Josuke, but most of the table replies with the same answer: sixteen.

“We were all starting high school,” Koichi says. “None of us were even in the same classes, really. We all met because of your father.”

She had been twirling her fork into her pasta, but she stops, and holds it limply in her fingers. The conversation continues around her, her father’s name folded into laughter and the soft-edged voice of memories. There is some regret that he couldn’t be joining them at the table, but no one has room for sadness here. These people have never missed him with a whole bodied ache.

Josuke’s hand on her arm pulls her back to dinner. His dark eyes are wide and, if not for the color, match Baba’s with all their concern.

“Everything ok?” he asks.

She nods.

Dinner ends with Yukako lighting a cigarette at the table and, when Rohan tells her to put it out, she stubs it into his coffee. Nearly everyone is laughing except for Koichi, who rushes after his wife when she goes to step outside. As if that had been the cue he had been waiting for, Josuke stands up and the rest of the table follows.

The walk back is quieter, and less lights burn in town. Josuke drapes his jacket over Jolyne’s cold shoulders as the chill of night sets in, and Okuyasu does the same for Shizuka. Their group dwindles as everyone leaves, branching off to return to their own homes, and the goodbyes are warm and lazy.

Sweat cools her temples, her hair sticking to her cheeks, and the muscles in her legs twitch from all their effort from the grand, all-day tour of Morioh. Plastic bags heavy with convenience store snacks noisily hit her thighs, the handles thinned around her left wrist, while she licks the bottom of a popsicle, tasting green tea and wood. The sun, oppressive all day, is finally hanging in the sky where it should at 6 PM, tangled in the telephone wires and climbing down from the tops of trees.

The light bounces off of her uncle’s golden heart ring around his finger, shining in her eye as he eats his own popsicle, carrying extra bags of sweets.

“I’ll pay you back,” she says, for the snacks.

One of his thick eyebrows raises nearly into his hairline, tongue out and dripping purple-colored spit.

“You paid for a few. And they’re a gift, from me and you to Giorno.”

“Why do you think I’m going to see him?”

He shrugs.

“Your dad wanted you to learn Italian. He doesn’t just say useless crap.”

“He hasn’t even said anything about it. And what do snacks have to do with Italy anyway?” She asks, lifting up the bags on her wrist and shoving them against his shoulder.

He leans against her, elbowing her arm out of the way and she stumbles, laughing, even as her feet ache and sweat in her sneakers.

“You’re going to visit Giorno. He goes apeshit for convenience store junk,” he says. “I once traded him fifty different kit kat bars for a Louis Vuitton bag for my mom’s birthday.”

Jolyne laughs. “He’s so fucking weird.”

“Yeah, and, so’s your dad. I swear he’s gonna call you and say you can go if you want,” he says.

Her sigh sounds like it is the most labored sound she has ever made, and he cracks a smile as he bites his popsicle. She looks at him out of the corner of her eye, squinting against the light that rims his profile and the way he does and doesn’t look like her father. He is lighter: he moves with confidence that lets him float on his love for the people in his life.

“Hey, Ojisan,” she says. He hums. “How often did my dad come here when you were in high school?”

He shrugs and finishes the last of the pop, keeping the wooden stick between his teeth as he thinks, before pulling it out and tapping it against his mouth.

“On and off. He’s always been like that. He just visits when he’s around, calls when he can’t check in,” he says, and finally tucks the wooden stick into a bag. The distraction gone, he sobers up. “He lived in the area for a while.”

“He did? When?”

He doesn’t look at her. She notices it’s deliberate.

“After he divorced your mom. He came to live here for a few months.”

He glances at her. She just nods, understanding, because the divorce hit her hard and he’s trying to be kind. He doesn’t need to be.

“You can talk about it, y’know. It doesn’t bother me anymore,” she says.

“Yeah?” he says, unconvinced. “And you know about...everything.”

“Yeah, sham marriage between friends, did it for the benefits, I was artificially inseminated, blah, blah,” she says, and shoves the last of her popsicle in her mouth. As she chews, spit flies. “S’weird and I don’t know how they do it, or did it. They still talk and like...like each other.”

“Love. Your parents love each other, just, it’s not--,” he struggles to find the words and his gaze drifts across the street as they walk. “It’s not romantic or anything. But your dad loves your mom, I know he does, just like he loves all his friends.”

What friends? is on the tip of her tongue but she forces it back for another question.

“Did he tell you?”

“Yes. Yeah. I mean, kinda.”

“God,” she huffs in English. It just has the right meaning, then she switches to Japanese. “Is this like, another one of those things? Where you’re just like, sooo damn confident about nothing anybody’s actually said? Or done?”

“Woah, Jolyne, if I said something wrong, just let me know and I’ll apologize.”

“No! You haven’t, it’s just, like...what do you even mean? What do you know about my dad?”

He bites his lip and looks across the street again. He worries the skin between his teeth and Jolyne feels her arms flex with the weight of the bags, Stone Free doing most of the effort. It hums under her skin like a cold sweat pushing through her body. She doesn’t like Josuke’s expression.

“When he moved to Morioh, I mean he just stayed in the hotel in the city for about five months. And I visited a lot, I had night shifts back then and Okuyasu did the day shift, so I basically got to watch your dad just like...I dunno. He worked a lot and we’d get lunch every day, and just sitting across from him, it was like...he wasn’t the guy he was before.”

She didn’t know about that. Her mother told her that her parents needed distance, Dad was moving out and away; she said Japan but in a way that implied maybe, who knows. He was always gone, and in the time after the divorce, Jolyne refused to talk to him.

“He talked a lot about you and your mom. I don’t even think he meant to,” Josuke says, and looks at her now. “Every time your mom would call him, he’d tell me what she said, because he had nothing else to say. He just had his research and the Foundation bullshit.”

He runs his hand over his hair, slicking the loose strands back into place, the bags in his hand hitting his arm. He sighs.

“Y’know how sometimes your dad just says some crazy shit? Like, something really damn sad, and it’s like he doesn’t even know how sad it is, because that’s just his life? That’s just normal for him?” He asks.

“Yes,” spits out of her mouth in achey agreement but also, loving exasperation.

Josuke doesn’t smile between the sadness they both feel, like how she does.

“Your dad talked to me a lot, just because he was around, because my dad asked him to be here for me and my mom since he couldn’t. And man, I love your dad. I used to see him as like, a hero, some noble guy, and then I got older and he just fit in differently. I was so floored when he introduced you to me and called me ojisan. I thought I was gonna be aniki.”

Now he smiles, shakily. His teeth are slightly crooked.

“He doesn’t say much but he only ever talks because he has to say it. And he’s a stubborn bastard. You really think he wouldn’t have married your mom if he didn’t care about her?”

She shrugs, and smiles, feeling a lightness in her chest that never existed when talking about her parents as a whole. It’s different, but not bad.

“I guess not.”

“Yeah!” Josuke says, nodding. “And, if he really hated being around people, he wouldn’t ever come here. He’s like, the most popular guy in town.”

“You sure that’s not you?”

He laughs quietly and looks away. They turn down another street, the shadows shifting to walk in front of them, the setting sun warming their backs. She licks her popsicle clean and tucks the wooden stick behind her ear. Josuke’s smile gradually fades into bittersweetness.

“I know it’s hard, not having a dad around. When I found out how...gone your dad was for you, I got really mad at him,” he says. He scrubs his hand on the back of his head and sighs. “When I met my dad I was really...Well, I didn’t want to meet him. Anybody who doesn’t take care of their kid seemed like a real bastard to me.

“It took me a long time to give him a real chance. During his first visit here, I started calling him Dad just because, I dunno. Felt like the right thing to do. But he didn’t really feel like my dad until way later. I just had to get to know him.”

“How long did it take?” she asks.

He shrugs. “A year, year and a half. It was during his second visit. He came alone, without Jotaro. We talked a lot, and I got to know him as a guy, not just some bum idiot who didn’t know he had a kid for sixteen years.”

The resentment still tinges the edge of his voice. He seems to notice and shuts his eyes tightly for a moment, as if to blank out the feeling, and start fresh.

“It’s different. I think I realized my mom was somebody other than my mom when I was young, y’know? Like, Higashikata Tomoko, not just my mom. And I grew up with some really weird idea of what a dad was, since my mom loved my dad. I thought he was going to show up one day, because she sure as hell did. But then...”

He swings the bags in his hands. The arch of them grows, and like soaring too high on a swingset, the items inside crash noisily when they swoop low. He stops after a few moments of this, and Jolyne waits, not wanting to pressure him.

“It’s not too normal around here to have a single mom and no idea where your dad is. People asked. I didn’t know what to say, and I became a bitter kid. I don’t know if that’ll ever fully go away, but I’m trying, because I love my dad. I do.”

He stops walking. Jolyne stops, and the rattling of their bags ends to leave the sounds of Morioh to fill their ears. Distantly, kids are playing the next block over. Their shouts melt into laughter and Josuke crosses the street to follow them.

“Neither of our dads had very easy lives,” Josuke says. They turn up the street, backtracking from the way they came, and his pace is just slightly quicker. “Don’t tell your grandmother any of this, ok? I don’t know how much she knows.”

“Tell her what?” Jolyne asks.

He sighs, and just before she thinks he will lead her down the street to the kids playing, he pauses. He looks around, eyes scanning for the best path, lined with shortcuts through yards and maybe hopping a fence or two. He goes straight.

“Before the whole, like, Egypt thing,” he says, and she’s surprised at how uncomfortable he is saying it. Maybe she knows more than him. “My dad went to Italy and learned Hamon. It’s like, some weird martial art, and his grandfather knew it too. And his mom, but, uh...”

He shakes his head. Rewind.

“Ok, but, there were these guys. They were vampires. Really old ones.”

He looks at her to check her reaction. She just nods, too engaged in what he is revealing, and hits him lightly in the arm.

“Yeah, and?”

“Oh!” he says, blinks rapidly, raising his eyebrows. “Wow, you need way less convincing than I did. Well, guess that’s ‘cause...you’ve seen some shit.”

She laughs. “Yeah, I have. Keep going.”

“Ok, ok. So, the vampires. There were three of them, and my dad had to kill them all. So he had to go to Italy to learn Hamon, and that’s where he met Suzie and his mom. My dad didn’t meet his mom until he was 20, and before then, he thought she was dead,” he says.

“Woah. Seriously? That’s nuts,” she says, and thinks back to the few times Gramps has ever mentioned his mother. Always by Lisa Lisa, him and Suzie, speaking with respect and admiration deserving of someone great. Someone who wasn’t just a mother.

Josuke nods hurriedly.

“The vampire guys, they were really dangerous. Y’know, like Dio, I guess, but Dad only fought him for a little bit. But, um, that’s - that was different. This though, it was still hard. Y’know. He nearly died. He lost his hand. Even Suzie got hurt, really bad, too. Other people fighting, they died, or nearly died, and my dad had to see it happen. But. Um.”

He runs both of his hands over his hair. The bags hit his arms and face but he is adamant on the motion to soothe him, and Jolyne tries to be patient. The sun is in their eyes and the two of them look down at the sidewalk, at the shadows stretching out to greet them.

“Ok. My dad met this guy in Italy who helped him learn Hamon. They only knew each other for about a month, but, well. He died. He died fighting for my dad. And they were in love.”

Jolyne stops walking. Josuke stops before her, and turns around, worrying his lip between his teeth. The air is so hot and she forces it into her lungs, dense and wet and not wanting to let her breathe right now. She jerks her fists and the bags shake.

“Gramps was in love with a guy? For a month? In Italy?!”

Josuke exhales explosively and tips his head back, shutting his eyes, and nods. He nods hard and then shakes his head, and rubs his fingers into his eyes.

“Jolyne, dude, it was so hard. It was so hard to hear him talk about the guy, he cried and cried and I had to hold him while he did it,” Josuke’s voice cracks and Jolyne knows if he starts crying, she’ll start crying, so she hopes he doesn’t. “I think...I really think he was the love of my dad’s life. I mean, he loves Suzie, but this was different.”

He sniffs, and rubs his eyes again. Jolyne feels her throat ache and she rubs her sweaty palms over her shorts, watching her uncle with the light behind his head. She doesn’t know how he does it, how he carries the burden of his father’s sadness.

The street feels dead in all the air surrounding them, and she can hear the sound of his eyelashes against his cheek as he rubs at his eyes. But the kids are still playing. Cars are drifting on their path home. Josuke tries to remember how to breathe evenly.

Jolyne asks, “What was his name?”

He lifts his head. His eyelashes are laced together with unshed tears and he looks at her like he is surprised she’s still there.

“Caesar Zeppeli.”

“Oh.”

The street is still, and they don’t look away from each other. She does not know how much time passes before he straightens his shoulders, rolling away the stiffness there, and clears his throat. He just nods his head up the street and they fall back into step together, towards the sun.

They pass the street where the kids are still playing. She glances and watches them dig in the dirt on the sidewalk, toys tossed around the yard.

The silence doesn’t feel relaxing. It feels loud, begging to be filled, and she bites her tongue before speaking.

“Have you ever seen my dad cry?” she asks.

He startles, and eyes wide, shakes his head.

She looks away. Something in her throat feels like it will leap out if she speaks, and her heart beats on, pushing against her bones, back and forth rapidly from her spine to her breastplate. It’s so hot out. It’s like home.

“He cried when we raced him to the hospital, after the apocalypse. I don’t think he noticed and he was losing a lot of blood, but. He cried.”

Josuke reaches his arm up and wraps it around her shoulders, pulling her into a tight hug. It’s hot and sweaty, her breath against his neck burning her face, but she hugs him back. His hand pats her hair unlike how anyone else has ever held her, because he’s the only one besides her dad who is tall enough to reach it.

“It’s ok. It’s ok for it to be complicated, you know?” he says. She nods into his shoulder and then they pull away.

They keep walking. The thickness in the air surrounding them thins, and she finds it easier to breathe.

“I think about it a lot. How nice my life is, even with all the weird stuff, just because of what our dads did for us,” he says. “Caesar died and my dad has to miss him, but I get to live here. I’ve got Okuyasu and anything I might worry about, he takes care of.”

He picks his head up, and looks around abruptly, gaze bouncing back and forth as if he’s never been on this street before. Jolyne looks around too, and it’s just a normal intersection. A car door shuts and someone walks into their home, and Josuke looks at an unknown place in the middle of the road.

“I don’t think anybody would’ve mentioned it to you, but, when your dad first got here in...I think it was 1999? 1999. There was a serial killer in our town.”

“What?”

He nods absentmindedly. “Yeah. He was a stand user. We - me, your dad, Okuyasu, Koichi, the whole gang - we fought him. Okuyasu was technically dead for a few minutes, the guy nearly killed him. I just about lost it completely, I mean, I was dragging - wait, no, I shouldn’t - I won’t go into details.”

Before she can say it’s ok, he rips his eyes from the street to look at her. He jerks his thumb back.

“The serial killer died here.”

She blinks. She looks at where he is pointing, then back at him.

“In the street?”

He nods. “We dragged the fight out here, and an ambulance ran him over. We trailed him for months, but in the end, that’s what did him in.”

She doesn’t know what to say. It seems content here, on this road, where people still live normal lives. A sprinkler arcs high in the air, the mist rainbowing on the slight breeze. The sun is beginning to sink behind the houses as if it, too, wants to settle down in Morioh for the night. She can’t see whatever Josuke must see.

He stares at her now. He looks like her father, and his father, her grandmother, and her. She gets the feeling he’s thinking the same thing.

“Giorno said this to me when we first met, and I’ll always remember it; everyone has some moment that defines their life. There’s always some event that makes things into before and after. It’s like... the world shifts, and we’re the only ones who notice. And we carry that.”

She nods. She knows what he means, of course she does. She doesn’t notice the tears until they fall and she mutters shit under her breath before brushing them from her cheeks. Josuke steps up and pulls her into a hug again. This time, she keeps her arms limp by her sides, and he squeezes her like he is putting her back together.

“Hey,” he mutters into her hair, where his words are warm but she likes it. She likes knowing Japanese again. She nods and he continues, “It feels weird to say it, and I should’ve earlier, but thanks. For all you did back there. It wasn’t easy.”

She nods again. She breathes hot and heavy and tries to rub her tears into his shirt.

“It wasn’t. But I had to do it.”

“I know.”

He holds her, and she wonders if she’s ever admitted it before. It wasn’t easy. It feels almost stupid to say, because of course it wasn’t, it wasn’t supposed to be. Everyone in her way made sure of that. All the pain was deliberate.

But it feels good to say.

Josuke squeezes her one last time before letting go, but his hand slides down her arm, cupping her hand in his. The bags on their wrists bang together and they turn around, and walk back home. Okuyasu’s shift must be over, and he’ll start dinner. She looks forward to it.

Their shadows lead them on, and he still holds her hand. She remembers trips to Morioh and now remembers the town after so many days, and she remembers Josuke in his school uniform, holding her smaller hand in his own. They look different now, a different Josuke and a different Jolyne and a different world, but that doesn’t make it bad. It is just new.

Chapter Text

They have to whisper at night, to make sure Shizuka stays asleep when she has school tomorrow, so they sit out in the backyard to talk freely. Okuyasu is fighting sleep to spent time with Jolyne, but his beer makes him sleepy and more confident in calling her his niece, since she asked him to. Josuke leans his head on Okuyasu’s shoulder on the back steps, while Jolyne paces on the short lawn, phone to her ear.

After three rings, Hermes finally picks up her cellphone.

“Wow, aren’t I special,” she says, and Jolyne’s smile hurts her cheeks. She misses her voice. “A direct call for me.”

“Maybe I just forgot my dad’s number, hm?” Jolyne says.

“Alright, bitch, what do you want?”

Jolyne doesn’t have to reply, and just cackles. Hermes laughs breathily through the phone and she must be walking, with all the sounds of cars rushing past in the background.

“What are you doing right now?” Jolyne asks.

“Well, it’s about 6 PM. I’m coming back from a trip to the store because Emporio and your dad are sitting out on the sidewalk, since it’s nice out and an ice cream truck started coming through town.”

“What?! No way!”

“Jolyne, babe,” Josuke says, whispering, his eyes shut as he keeps his head on Okuyasu’s shoulder. “Keep it down.”

“Sorry!” she whispers, then returns to the phone. “All the good shit happens when I’m gone.”

Hermes laughs. “Emporio didn’t even know what one was. Your dad’s never gone to one either, so I treated them.”

“No way. What’d they buy?”

“Emporio got a King Cone and your dad got a Tweety Bird one, y’know, with the gumball eyes?”

“Aw man can you get a picture? I bet Emporio looks so cute.”

“I’ll try. Can’t make any promises though, Emporio was really goin’ to town on it when I left,” Hermes clicks her tongue. “What else...I got off of work early, and I got my midterm back from Econ. 93.”

“Woah, congratulations! Are you gonna celebrate?”

“I guess I’m doing it right now. I told your dad I was running to the store to get smokes, but I just bought some sidewalk chalk for Emporio and a couple green tea Arizonas for us all. Turns out your dad loves ‘em.”

Jolyne can almost hear Hermes’ sneakers hitting the sidewalk. The sounds of cars die down.

“You want to talk to your dad? I’m about to get back home.”

“Yeah, that’d be nice. Talk to me after, though?”

“Of course. And, hey. I miss you. S’not the same with you gone,” Hermes says.

Hermes isn’t sentimental, and Jolyne feels lame when her hand automatically presses against her heart.

“Next time, you’re coming with me. Me and you, we’ll storm Japan,” Jolyne says.

Hermes laughs and in the background, Jolyne can hear Emporio saying hello.

“I’ll hold you to that. I want to meet your Uncle. Hey, Jotaro, got some stuff for you, take this.”

Bags rustle. Hermes sighs roughly and she must have sat down beside her father on the curb, and thin cardboard rips.

“Emporio, this is sidewalk chalk. You wanna draw with it?” Hermes says.

Emporio shyly says ok, and Hermes chuckles. Cans pop open, one, two.

“Thanks,” her father says.

“Don’t mention it. And here, it’s Jolyne, she wants to talk to you,” Hermes says, then finally, “Hey, Jolyne, here’s your dad. Talk to you later, love you.”

“Hey, bye--” Jolyne says, and the love you sticks in her ear. That’s new.

“Hello?”

“Hi Dad,” she says, then shakes her head. “Wait! I fucked up! Listen, listen to me: こんにちはお父さん.”

He laughs. It’s quiet, but he laughs, and she stomps her feet quickly into the grass, balling her hand into a fist. Stone Free hovers over her skin and makes her movements stronger.

“I see you met Rohan-sensei,” he says in Japanese.

She laughs wetly, and tears overflow, landing in the grass. She can understand him. She can talk back.

“Thanks. They told me you asked, and just...thanks. It would’ve been impossible to be here otherwise.”

“Are you having a good time?” he asks.

“Oh, yeah, it’s great. Hot as balls though, Josuke’s gotta call in someone to look at the central air, so we’ve just been eating popsicles and ice cream to cool off.”

“Ha. Sounds like Josuke.”

“Yeah. Also, hey, I gotta ask you something.”

“Alright.”

She hears him take a sip from his can. She wishes she could be there, with all of them on the sidewalk, drawing with Emporio. She wonders if he knows what hopscotch is, and how many jump rope rhymes Hermes must know, and how much they can all teach him together.

“It’s just something Josuke put into my head. He thinks you’re gonna send me to Naples after this, since you told me to learn Italian, too.”

Silence. He belches and Hermes’ laugh is harsh and abrasive as always.

“Sorry. Yes.”

“Yes? Yes what?”

“Yes, I booked a flight for you to Naples. Only if you want to go.”

She turns around and looks at her uncles, asleep against each other on the back steps, the beer still held in Okuyasu’s limp hand tipped over and dripping.

“Wait, why? To visit Giorno?”

He clears his throat and takes another sip.

“And Uncle Polnareff. I mentioned you were visiting family in Japan and he said he wanted to see you. Giorno agreed. He booked you a hotel.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“Soon. The flight is in a three days. But only if you want to go.”

She sighs and holds her hand up, letting her finger unravel, lets the string touch the grass, then draws it back up and together again. Like a fucked up yo-yo.

“Do you want me to go?”

He sighs shortly. “Of course I’ll miss you. I miss you right now.”

Words dam up in her open, shocked mouth, and then she laughs.

“That’s touching, but what I really meant is, you’re cool with me hanging out with Giorno?”

At this, he grunts a little. She can hear his finger tap against the can in dull, metallic thumps. She waits.

“I don’t want you around any criminal activity. I know you don’t want to be either. He understands. He’s made arrangements for it and...I trust him. He won’t get you into trouble.”

She nods and looks at her uncles again. Josuke has his head in Okuyasu’s lap, and Okuyasu is blearily awake now, patting his hand through Josuke’s hair.

“Far cry from this upstanding duo here, huh?” she says.

“They’ve never broken a law a day in their damn lives,” her father mutters, and she laughs so hard she might wake the neighbors up. Josuke certainly does.

“Between me and Giorno, I’ll be safe. I promise.”

“I know. I trust you,” he says. “Give him a call tomorrow. Josuke has his number. I’m going to put Hermes back on.”

“Ok. Thanks, Dad.”

“I love you.”

Chapter Text

Aeroporto Internazionale di Napoli translates automatically in her brain, and she wonders, vaguely, what her accent will be as she walks around the baggage claim, looking for anyone. Giorno wasn’t specific on the phone.

She wanders to the long glass row of exit doors, where the late morning sun is reflecting, turning the panels into sheets of bright light. They shift as she walks down the line and there, outside, she sees a man dressed in all the colors of a blood orange, touched with royal blue. His dark skin glows in the sun. He slouches, relaxed against all the tight-backed people loading into cars, the police officers glancing at the open trunks. He stands like he owns every street corner in Italy.

He doesn’t, but his best friend does. Smiling, Jolyne shoves her hand on a door and walks out to greet him.

“Buon giorno!” she shouts, waving her arm high in the air.

His face bursts into a grin and his arms stretch, collapsing her into a hug and thumps his broad, flat palm on her back, and when they pull away, he slaps her arm one last time. She has never had a fluent conversation with this man.

“So, let me hear it,” he says, looking her up and down, trying to spot the change in her. Words knock around his mouth lazily before spitting out missing their middles, condensed, instant, and dulled. She wonders if this is what all of Naples will sound like.

“I haven’t tried it yet. Do I sound ok?” she asks in Italian.

He tips his head back in a loose roll and laughs; the way he moves feels different now, anchored with words. He’s more relaxed than she thought he would be.

“You sound like a politician! Josuke has the same problem,” he says, and his hand is on her shoulder again, reaching up to grab it. “I’ll never be able to take you seriously.”

“This is our first conversation and this is what I get? Bullshit!”

“Oh Christ, even your swears suck. We’ll teach you at the hotel. We’re on a schedule, so let’s get going. I’ll be driving,” he says, and gestures to the black car parked right on the curb. The police officers standing at the mouth of the airport overlook it and all the tinted windows.

“A Fiat Freemont? I was expecting something flashier,” she says.

“You sound like shit when you insult my car,” he says, and slides his hand on the handle before opening the door for her. “And most days I drive a custom painted 2012 Citroen DS9.”

“Why am I sitting in the back?” she asks.

Mista stares at her like he didn’t hear the question. He gestures for her to go in.

“You’re a guest of my boss, who runs this country. You sit in the back. I drive.”

“Five star treatment, huh?”

His ease with cracking smiles almost seems like it is gone, but his teeth glint in the sun and he nods.

“Giorno said nothing but the best.”

He winks, and shuts the door. She watches him through the dark green tint on the windows as he places her suitcase into the back, and he walks to the driver’s seat, pulling the keys from his back pocket. She decides to stretch out once he starts the car, her limbs sore from lack of use and she sprawls them out across the back seat.

Mista looks in the rearview mirror at her as he merges into the exit off of the airport pickup.

“Our plans are a little complicated today. Just don’t worry about them or ask too many questions and they’ll go smoothly.”

The hotel room is dark and smells of sleep and lavender. Light leaks in through the gaps in the curtains over the tall windows, glowing dully like the wire coil of a dying lightbulb, casting far enough to remind her of where she is. Most of the room rests in a murky darkness, shapes grand and impossible to figure out with her bleary, jet-lagged eyes.

The sheets and comforter, gold from what she remembers, are shoved across the queen-sized bed. Groaning, she sits up and rubs her eyes to adjust. She has no clue what time it is; she feels like she might not even know the year anymore.

Something thumps against the bedframe. It hits again, and she leans over the edge, eyes scanning the floor until a round mass shifts and she reaches for it with Stone Free. A turtle. The turtle.

She crawls out of bed and finds the tank it should be in on the dresser, and places it back inside. Warm and sleepy, she looks around the room again, eyes landing on the closed door. She can’t leave, Mista told her not to, so she reaches her hand inside the tank and knocks her fingernail against the center key on the shell.

Uncle Polnareff pulls himself out of the turtle and he smiles, leaning his arms on the shell. She mimics the pose on the lip of the tank.

“Good evening,” he says. His voice is quiet and gentle. “Did you just wake up?”

She nods. “Any clue when they’ll show up?”

“No idea, really. If I were you, I’d keep sleeping.”

She hums and shuts her eyes. He chuckles.

“Would you like to visit me?”

She opens her eyes and tries to find his form in the dark. He is faint and small and she stares down at him, and tilts her head to the side.

“Uncle Polnareff, how tall were you, before you were in the turtle?” she asks.

Her question doesn’t offend him, though his mouth hangs open for a moment before breaking into a smile.

“I was roughly six feet tall. Taller with my hair,” he says, reaching up and brushing his palm against the top of his head. She laughs. “Why do you ask?”

“Just thinkin’ about it. I’ll climb right in.”

He nods and disappears back into the turtle. She hesitates and wonders about putting the turtle back on the ground and stepping inside, but then it would be out of the tank - exactly how Mista stupidly left it. She sighs and prepares Stone Free to hover over her skin before reaching her hand into the key.

She falls in arms first and braces for the impact with her stand, crashing and rattling glass and cupboards. It doesn’t hurt, but she rolls onto her back and stretches herself out on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.

Uncle Polnareff chuckles from his seat on the couch.

“What an entrance! Are you alright?” he asks.

She nods and cracks a smile, brushing off her shirt and soft pajama shorts, and twists her head around to get a view of the room.

“S’nothing I haven’t done before. When I used to sneak out before I had Stone Free, I’d usually fall on my ass in the cactus in the front garden before Mom ripped it out.”

“I think I remember that. Pink flowers?”

She nods again and takes in the room. She has been inside a few times, back at the family reunion two months ago, crowding in with her father and Giorno. It has the feeling of a windowless room in the center of a house, and the lighting made her head ache if she stayed inside for too long. To ward off the feeling of being in a cage, it is decorated with photographs and personal belongings. Giorno and his closest friends seem to keep their things inside, as she spots a bright pink suit jacket, tailored with a checkered hem, tossed on an armchair.

“How’ve you been?” she asks and pulls herself up, grunting.

“In general, good. These past few days have been challenging,” he says. “And you?”

“I’m fine. Jetlagged and shit, but I’ve been having a good time. What do you mean by challenging?”

She sits at the other end of the couch, foot slung up over her knee, sprawling out. The room is weird and so is her uncle but she might as well be comfortable as she slowly wakes up. Her uncle drifts his gaze away as he hesitates to find a good answer.

“Giorno was having a difficult time, but it should be finished today. We’re all sorry it has to be so complicated right after you’ve arrived.”

She shrugs and tips her head back on the couch cushions, closing her eyes and smiling.

“Good answer. My dad doesn’t know about this, right?”

He sputters and Jolyne laughs.

“Please don’t tell Jotaro. He’d murder me, and it was hard enough convincing him to let you come.”

“I won’t! Jeez, you think I’m some kinda rat?” she says, and lifts her head and opens her eyes. “D’you think he didn’t want me to come because Giorno creeps him out?”

“Giorno doesn’t - well, a little,” Uncle Polnareff rocks his head back and forth as he speaks, contemplative. “I mean, I thought he was a little unsettling too, once I found out...”

“Oh, Uncle Pol, I was just kid--”

“...So I guess it must be harder on Jotaro, because sometimes, Giorno reminds me of him, too. All you Joestars, really--”

“--What?” she says louder, and her uncle’s voice dies. They stare at each other for a moment before she leans forward. “What do you mean?”

He closes his mouth and his gaze drifts around the room, as if trying to find the meaning behind her question. Lost, he shakes his head and frowns.

“What are you asking?” he says.

“What you were just saying, how Giorno is like Dio,” she notices the slight flinch at the name, and speeds up. “Why would that weird out my dad? It just makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, I meant he’s like his father, but he’s also like a Joestar. I think the similarities make Jotaro a little freaked out. He doesn’t want to be reminded of how they’re similar.”

She narrows her eyes and scrutinizes her uncle. He is still at ease, relaxed and looking at her, expecting her to keep the conversation flowing. She isn’t sure she understands his meaning, because her father is short and terse with everyone, and the way he speaks to Giorno is the same as anyone else. Why would he be upset at the idea of being similar to Giorno?

She slowly opens her mouth as if her words, dangerous and reluctant, have rusted her jaw.

“Do you mean my dad doesn’t want to be like Dio?”

Uncle Polnareff’s eyes dart away from hers to the corner of the room, flitting around his gaze at everything other than her. His thumb runs along the underside of his eyepatch.

“Well, who would?” he finally settles on saying. “I think that’s a natural fear to have. Not wanting to be a bad person.”

It’s a weak reply, but she plays it off like she accepts it. No reason to get in deep with this, not with her uncle, not while they kill time before dinner when Giorno returns. She shrugs and hums, and she can feel the mood of the room settle with Uncle Polnareff’s sigh of relief.

“Hey, sorry, for saying Giorno is weird. He totally is but, y’know, might’ve come off a bit rude,” she says.

He laughs and the last of the tension in the room cuts. She looks at him, looking at her. Neither move to talk. He has a soft smile on his face, the rare kind she will catch her father making when he stands still in the kitchen, looking into the living room while her, Hermes, and Emporio shout at the TV. Unlike her dad, it’s up close and on a younger face. Even with the strange eyepatch and the fatigue he died with, etched into his face forever, he still looks young.

The softness of his smile stretches, crinkling his eyes and elongating the dimples framing his mouth.

The moment is cut when the room rattles and a muffled bang reaches their ears. Jolyne jumps to her feet and looks around, frustrated by the lack of windows and doors. Her eyes go to the ceiling.

“You should stay in here,” her uncle immediately says. His hands grip the couch and he wants to stand, but he can’t.

“I’ll just check it out -”

“Jolyne, no, stay - Jotaro will -”

“I’m just gonna pop out! What if the room’s on fire or something?” she says, and reaches her arms to the ceiling. “Then we’ll both be fucked and dead in a turtle corpse. C’mon, Uncle Polnareff.”

His eyes frantically scan the room as if searching for a better way, then he bites his lower lip and drags his hand down his face. He sighs and deflates, his back hunching, becoming smaller. He looks up at her and nods.

“Just, don’t tell Jotaro about this,” he says, and she grins and starts to pull herself up. “Wait!”

She pauses and hangs from the exit, her hands already outside, looking at him. He points to her and his lips are tight in a thin line.

“You had better come back.”

She grins and nods, and pulls herself out.

The hotel room seems the same, immediately pulling her from the light of the turtle and into the quiet dark from before. She manages to propel herself out of the shell and the tank to land heavily on the floor. Even with a second look around the room, nothing is touched, as if it would never be.

She wanders into the room a bit, kicking the bedpost and other legs of furniture. Mista brought her here, where Uncle Polnareff was already waiting for them. The room was just for her to sleep off jet lag, and when Giorno finished his meeting, they were going to dinner. After that, she would be brought to a new hotel room, for your safety as Mista put it. She isn’t concerned about any danger. She doubts anything Giorno dealt with could be worse than Pucci.

Done toeing the edge of a curtain, she walks back to the tank to return to her uncle, but freezes. Thump thump thump trails down the hallway outside the massive double doors of her room. Footsteps.

Stone Free rips itself from her body and hovers in front of her. She tenses up, fingers curling into fists.

The doors burst open and stream in the golden light from the hallway, shadowing the front of the figure that shoved them in. It takes a moment of slowed time punctuated with his breathing for her to see Giorno’s face in the shade, and the charred hem of his navy suit jacket. She looks on, squinting against the harsh light, sluggish with sleep while he exists in sped-up motion, moving with the desperate heaving of his chest and shoulders, to the beads his eyes have become as they jerk his gaze around the room.

“We need to leave,” Giorno says in Italian. His eyes flit up and down at her stand, and he rushes inside.

“What’s going on?” she asks as he walks past.

“Where is your suitcase?”

“What’s going on?”

“Ah, here.”

He bends down, and it pisses her off that he is trying to be so calm while still trying to catch his breath. He lays his hand on her suitcase and it transforms it into a massive black animal, the mouth opening to rows of long yellow teeth and a bright pink tongue, and the jaguar her suitcase used to be stands.

Giorno pats it on its back leg and gets up, ripping open the curtains to the long windows, and shoves one open.

“Hey, Giorno, what the hell is going on?” she shouts.

He taps the windowsill and the jaguar hops out, somehow, and he leans to watch it land. He turns to her and is backlit again by the center courtyard outside.

“I am under attack by a long range stand user. I need to get you and Polnareff out of here as safely as possible, and that would best be done if you are in the turtle with him.”

“What’s the stand do?”

He gestures to the tank. “Jolyne, please. There isn’t time to talk.”

“Ok, so it tracks you,” she guesses. “Who is trying to find the user?”

“Jolyne.”

Her smile is quick.

“Oh, me? Great, should’ve said so sooner.”

He sighs and shuts his eyes briefly, and she wonders through her grin if this is what having a sibling is like. He hangs his head, nearly tipping it onto his shoulder and keeping his gaze on the floor. His lips part and his eyebrows pinch, and she knows he is taking the moment to think of how to convince her to join her uncle.

Movement outside the window catches her eye. A dark, thin line travels through the air, cutting into the shapes of the hotel facade boxing in the courtyard. It hovers for a moment before turning sharply toward the window, and she can see the flare of spikes adorning the back, and the glint of metal on the front.

“It’s outside!” she shouts and jerks forward. Her hand slams the back of Giorno’s head to shove him to the floor and Stone Free stretches a thread of skin out to the stand, wrapping around it and dragging it into range to hit.

“Don’t touch it!”

She feels the vibration of the explosion before the pain, charring her thread up to her finger. Bloody holes in her arm open up and drip red from the damage and she reels herself and Stone Free back inside with a yell.

She stumbles and looks at Giorno on the floor.

“An arrow?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says, rubbing the pink skin on his forehead. “From what we’ve determined, the user is the bow and can send out as many arrows as they want to track their opponent. All of them have exploded upon contact with anything they touch,” he says.

She nods and helps him up, his hand in hers slick and stained with the blood dripping into her palm. He holds it and turns her hand, checking the damage.

“So, smart enough to know who the target is, too dumb to know who to kill,” she says, and watches Giorno rip a button off his jacket while still holding her hand. “Great for civilians. Who is looking for the user?”

“Mista. This will hurt.”

“What will?”

He holds his free palm open to reveal a small mass of flesh, like a terrible, parasitic animal, then quickly presses it into the biggest wound on her arm. It stings, hot and metallic as it melts into her skin, and Giorno whispers shh before lifting his hand off. They watch as Stone Free webs the thread of her skin into the new.

“You son of a bitch,” she says, and chuckles. “My stand can make skin stitches. Don’t bother next time.”

“I make no promises,” he says, a shadow of a smile passing his face, and he pulls his hand away. Her blood glues their palms together and the break is audibly sticky.

“Fine, more ammo for me,” she says, and in demonstration unravels her finger. “So, let’s get out of here then?”

“Yes. I’ll carry you and Mr. Polnareff.”

“Jesus Christ, not that again,” she says, rolling her eyes.

He is brushing his palm of her blood on his jacket while she walks past him, knocking their shoulders together, and going back to the window. She scans the courtyard for more arrows, seeing the residual plume of black smoke hazy before her eyes. The night is still and quiet again, as if nothing had happened. She can hear Giorno and Uncle Polnareff talk behind her, but all falls deaf as she leans out the window.

There is an arrow shooting up from the cobblestone ground.

“There’s another! Giorno, we gotta go,” she says, slamming the window shut, the glass and panes rattling.

She turns around and he is already holding the turtle, hovering by the door. He hesitates.

“You’re not going to get in, are you?” he asks. She shakes her head and he sighs shortly. “If this person doesn’t kill me tonight, your father will.”

She barks a laugh and follows him into the hallway. He breaks into a sprint and so does she, smelling smoke and alarms screaming far away in another section of the building. Eyes peer out at them behind doors as they run. Others hang open, and she remembers hundreds of cars abandoned on the I-95 North highway; everything becomes a fast relic the moment people abandon it.

Stragglers rush by, none moving as quick as her and Giorno. They laden themselves with suitcases but all travel with them in the same direction, and she finally sees why: the elevator is found when Giorno turns right, and he slams to a stop in front of the dam of people swarming, shifting like a frantic hive before the cold metal doors.

He spares a glance back at her and cradles the turtle to his chest, then slips with ease between a sudden gap of people right before it swallows him up.

“Fuck,” she hisses and tries to do the same, but she’s too big, too tall.

She pulls out Stone Free’s arms for extra elbows, and starts slamming them hard into the crowd. She is out before anyone tries to hit her back or step on her barefeet, and Giorno is waiting, ready to run the second she is free.

He brings her to the stairwell and by then the alarms are going off across the whole building, the ones closest to them screaming with life and making the crowd at the stairs flinch together before shoving their way down the stairs again. He turns at the threshold and gives her his hand, still stained with her blood. She takes it.

Together they step into the flashing red lights of the alarms in the stairwell and the crowd traveling down. As they walk, holding their joined hands above the crowd, she realizes his plan: exit the hotel and draw the fight away from civilians.

After moving with the crowd for two flights, Giorno suddenly squeezes her hand and pulls, ducking beneath the people and shoving his way through. She is dragged along until she does the same, pushing her way past and rushing with him. They travel eight flights before they reach the bottom, and the alarm lights no longer bathe everyone in candy red; the yellow light of the lobby beacons their exit.

They land on the shining marble floor, the lobby honeyed with amber light, and she rushes to his side, the pair of them ready to slip out the front doors.

“Boss! Jolyne!”

They both turn and Mista is running to them through the crowd, gun in hand with his stand flying around his head, reminding her of birds in cartoons spinning around someone after being punched. His eye is swollen and cut.

“Mista, you’re hurt,” Giorno says and drops her hand, gingerly touching the soft flesh of Mista’s eye.

“Yeah, I know, how are you? Why isn’t she in the turtle?” Mista says and gestures to Jolyne with his revolver.

“She didn’t want to go in. Any leads?” Giorno asks and pulls his hand away.

“No. I can’t figure it out, and the Pistols and I scanned everywhere. I’m beginning to think the user isn’t in the hotel, maybe they’re on a rooftop nearby.”

Jolyne steps closer to them both as the crowd drifts around them, like a stone in a river, water bunching and swirling behind them, confused by their stillness. No one stops or cares to tell them to move for their safety. A vase crashes, the bouquet of flowers and reeds spilling and crunching, and she spreads her gaze across the lobby. The security cameras twitch back and forth, being the expensive kind that follow the crowd.

“Hey,” she shouts, and waves her hand in between Giorno and Mista to grab their attention. “Hey, who said the stand is automatic?”

There is a pause filled with the cacophony of the crowd. She keeps her eyes on the camera.

“No one, I guess,” Mista says.

“What if the user needs to see you to get the arrow to hit? Look at that.”

She points to the camera and the two of them look, Giorno bouncing up on his toes to see. Understanding dawns on their faces.

“We just need to find the security room and we might find the stand user. Giorno, I can go with Mista,” she says, and jerks her thumb over her shoulder to the front doors. “Since the arrows are following you, you can -”

“- They’re following both of us,” Mista says.

“Alright, then you two leave and -”

“- Not a chance,” Giorno says.

“What?! This isn’t the time to argue, we need to keep everyone safe.”

Giorno lays his hand on her shoulder. His eyes on her, dark and near black, pauses her frantic need to get them and herself moving. To keep from freezing up, she lays her hand top of his.

“I need to keep you safe. We will all go. Mista,” he says, turning to him. “Do you know where the surveillance is?”

Mista opens his mouth but one of his Pistols darts in front of his face, number three, narrow-eyed and angry.

“I saw! This floor, behind the lobby desk!” it shrieks.

“Let’s go. Pistols!” Mista says, and his stand clings to his gun as the trio shoves back into the crowd.

People push against them as they divide through the current, trying to reach the long lobby desk. Security guards stand behind it, monitoring the evacuation, and Jolyne bumps into Mista’s back as he stops just before it. She watches as he glances at Giorno, who gives a nod, and Mista raises his gun in the air, aiming blindly over his shoulder.

The shot is loud in her ear but she still notices the shrill, excited yell of a Pistol, sending the bullet to ricochet off a light and make the bullet look like it is coming from another direction. Jolyne wiggles her fingers in her ears and watches the guards point to where they think the bullet came from, and they clear out.

The three of them quickly hop the desk and slide behind it, and Giorno, still holding the turtle, gestures for Mista to open one of the two doors to reveal a closet. Jolyne goes to the next and the handle wiggles; it’s locked.

She slams her fist against it and the wood splinters, ripping it open to reveal a short, grey hallway with a low ceiling. The trio rush in and start ripping open more doors, leading to more halls, before Mista shouts at number three to guide them. The Pistol zips past her ear and tugs her hair, pointing to the left of the forking hall.

“This way! Last on the right!”

Bang! rattles the floor and the overhead lights flicker, stuttering before returning, muffled screams following them through the lobby and the open door. Jolyne looks back and Giorno is shutting his eyes tightly, while Mista swears in a dialect she doesn’t understand.

“We’ll help them later, we have to move!” Mista says, shoving his hand on Giorno’s back.

“If the user is in the security room, they’ll see us coming,” Giorno says. “They might’ve left, and they might bomb the whole hotel.”

“We might’ve lost them through the crowd!” Jolyne says.

“We’ll only know if we check it out, now let’s move!” Mista shouts, slams his hand on Giorno’s back once more, and runs.

Before he can get to her and she loses the lead, Jolyne turns and sprints down the hall, following the directions number three gave her. The last door on the right is black, labeled security, and with her heart beating against her fingers digging into her palms, she kicks down the door.

She can hear the silence inside. The room is dark and the TV monitors face her, silhouetting the figure that stands up, knocking the desk chair to the floor. They raise their arm and she sees the curve of a bow, and it’s all the confirmation she needs.

Stone Free charges forward before her and she feels it again, the metal in her fists, her heart bleeding in her throat and spitting hot blood into her screams, skin under her knuckles. The cold light of the monitors reaches the face of the user, long black hair in a neat ponytail gathered at the base of the neck, cattish black eyes. They stumble back into the control panel and some of the screens die as their hands scramble against buttons.

“Who are you?!” the user shouts through blood. “You’re not Una!”

“Fuck you!” she shouts, and raises her leg, pain stretching in her inner thigh right before Stone Free slams it down, but the user rolls out of the way. The control panel sparks and metal crumples around her heel, shards cutting her skin.

“Do you work for Passione?!” the user says.

“Fuck you!”

The user spits blood to the floor and raises their arm. The string of the bow threads through the user’s wrist, the curve of the bow itself materializes as the stand forms, and the user’s arm morphs into an arrow. They draw the arrow back with their elbow bending, holding it still right before her face.

“Jolyne!” Giorno shouts, and she hears him and Mista scramble into the room.

“Jolyne?” the user repeats.

It happens too quick for her to move, the gunshot ringing and the user diving, screaming, the arrow shooting over her shoulder and exploding into the monitors. There is less light and more heat, and the user knocks the back of her knees, bringing her to the floor.

She rushes to right herself but the user grabs her hair and a fist is brought down into her mouth, she can feel her teeth slip into flesh and she bites, squirting blood into her mouth. A sharp hard something rattles into her throat and the user rips their hand back, and with Stone Free, she kicks them in the head. Her ankle bounces against their neck as they crash to the floor, twitching.

Jolyne sits up and hacks, coughing, the sharp thing landing with a tinny sound on the tile floor along with the wet splatter of blood and spit. Giorno suddenly has his hand on the back of her neck, sweaty and slick, and she watches Mista press his fingers under the user’s jaw.

“Still alive,” Mista says. “Where to?”

Giorno speaks and it is mangled in her ears, again, she realizes, a different dialect. She catches her name among it and his thumb rubs back and forth on the base of her neck. She doesn’t care what he could be saying; she rubs her fingers over her lips, sticky with blood, and spits again.

“Ok. Trish is circling the block. I’ll take care of this,” Mista says.

“Thank you. Jolyne?” Giorno says, voice soft and firm against the still-blaring alarms. “Can you walk?”

“Yeah. Honestly, I’m good,” she says, her words round and full from the pain in her mouth. “Just let me lean on you.”

“Of course.”

He fits his hand under her armpit, and she stands. Pain flares in her right foot from the open cuts, but she knows that it isn’t broken, that Stone Free kept her strong. Giorno’s arm stretches across her shoulders and she does the same, resting her weight against him. She glances down and sees the turtle still pressed to his chest.

She takes in the room and the damage. The door is slanted on its hinges, leaking in the grey light from the hallway. Only three monitors work on the wall now, the rest sparking and spilling out black smoke like a volcano belching the scent of melted plastic in the air. The control panel looks the same, the harsh trench where her foot hit it buckling and flinging guts of jewel-colored wires into the air.

She laughs, wet and popping in her throat.

“Man, I wrecked this place, huh?” she says.

Giorno glances up at her and allows one of his small smiles to stretch his lips, and she notices the faint hint of dimple in his left cheek, like a thumbprint pressing into a marshmallow. She laughs again and knocks her temple against his, and they walk out together.

The breeze runs over her skin and smells like shallow sea water, tepid in the sun. Her eyes struggle to open, crusty with sleep and swollen and sore, and she remembers the punches. She groans.

“Ah, Jolyne? Hello?”

She frowns and shifts her body, feeling the cool sheets surrounding her, sinking deeper into the softest mattress she’s ever felt in her life. The voice laughs lightly.

“Jolyne, if you’re awake, it’s Trish.”

She groans again and flexes her fingers. They’re bruised and her knuckles crack painfully as she tenses her hands, trying to loosen them up. With that pain, the other wounds in her body bloom, her pulse pounding right against the edge of her skin. She wonders, when she will open her eyes, if she will see her veins bulging and twitching against the backs of her hands.

“Ugh, do I even want to be awake?” Jolyne mutters.

Trish laughs, and Jolyne gives in. Trish is the first thing she sees, further away at the edge of the bed than she thought; it is massive and Trish leans her arms on the mattress, smiling. Her hair is wet from a shower, combed back from the usual, artful mess Jolyne remembers. Her face is clear, as if she hadn’t sped through the streets of Naples all night, while Jolyne drooled on the leather seats of Mista’s Citroen, piled onto Giorno’s lap.

“I take it you feel terrible?” Trish asks. Her accent is different from Mista’s and Giorno’s, her r’s rattling against her tongue longer, like an engine.

“Yeah. Bet I look worse,” Jolyne says, and touches her eye gently with her best hand. She is surprised when it isn’t as swollen as she thought.

“Nothing a little foundation won’t fix. I’ll go get the doctor,” Trish says and stands. She leans over Jolyne for a moment, then bends down, patting her shoulder and kissing her cheek.

“It’s good to see you again,” Trish says with a smile before leaving through the tall, glass doors already slid open, letting in the air.

Jolyne now takes in the room, noticing through the gentle, soft arcs of the white curtains rising on the breeze, that the doors lead to an outdoor deck. She can see flickers of Giorno and Mista seated at a table, and beyond them, a cyan sliver of the sea. The room itself, cool in the shade, is decorated with lemon light laying warm patches on the floor from the windows and skylight. The objects in the room look old, decorative and encrusted with floral carvings on the dressers and armchairs.

The closet door is open, and reveals clothing, both on the hangers and cluttered in a pile on the floor. She realizes it isn’t a hotel. This is a home.

Giorno steps in from the glass door, shifting in and out of view from a billowing white curtain. His hair is down and in loose curls around his shoulders, the light hitting it from the back and turning it nearly white. He wears a white button down, tucked loosely and the collar unbuttoned.

“And how is my lovely cousin?” he asks, walking to the side of her bed.

She laughs, harsh and loud, and her lips are dry and cracked. He smiles and sits on the edge of the bed next to her, and she can see up close how tired he is.

“May I?” he says, gesturing to her arm.

“Knock yourself out. Gonna use buttons again?”

He shakes his head and laughs. “No. We have better supplies here.”

He holds her wrist with one hand and leans forward to the dresser, opening the drawer and pulling out rolled up wads of gauze. He places them on the bed and holds one in his hand, letting her watch as his stand transforms it into a thin strip of flesh.

He presses it to the delicate, deep scabs in her forearm, and she sucks in a cold breath through her clenched teeth. His face remains passive.

“The threat is over,” he explains. “We, and most importantly, you, are not in any danger. I’ve sent money and the best doctors to those with injuries from the attacks - no one died, thankfully.”

His voice is calm and even, like he is reading from a newspaper article. She tries to remain still and focus on what he says.

“That’s good. What happened to the stand user?”

His eyebrows rise a bit but otherwise his expression doesn’t change. He keeps healing her wounds by changing the gauze.

“It’s been taken care of.”

She frowns. “Did Mista kill the guy? It’s fine, you can say so. I’ve done it before.”

He tugs off a quickly made bandage, one she had forgotten he tied on her arm in the car, ripped from the lapel of his jacket. He turns it into a long-stemmed flower, the petals pointing upwards like small wings, deep pink unlike the navy blue fabric it had been. It looks like a butterfly and he places it in her other hand.

“Last night was terrifying. I have never intended for anyone, especially you, to be so close to that danger,” he says. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather keep you separate from my work.”

She sighs, and looks at the flower, twirling it between her fingers.

“Yeah, I guess,” she says, and looks around the room. Might as well change the subject. “Where are we, anyway?”

“My private home, near the coast. Mista, Trish, and Mr. Polnareff also live here,” he says. “I felt it was unwise to bring you to the other hotel, if that’s alright with you.”

“Well, it’s fucking nice as hell here, so yeah, I don’t mind.”

He smiles with satisfaction and places his fingers gently on her healed arm, before pointing to his lips.

“Could you open your mouth? I believe you lost a tooth,” he says.

She swipes her tongue along the ridge of her teeth and feels the gap in the upper left corner, where her canine should be, and she screams with her mouth shut. Giorno looks away and smiles, and she whacks his knee with the back of her hand.

“I nearly swallowed that during the fight! Did you pick it up from the floor?” she asks.

He shakes his head and his smile fades, replaced with his usual calm expression. He rips off a corner of gauze and it changes into a tooth in his hand.

“Hey, wait, can you make it into a gold one? That’d be cool,” she says.

“No, I can’t. The point is to make sure your father never finds out. Open your mouth, please,” he says, and grumbling, she complies. He pushes up her lip and she can feel the new tooth gentle against her raw gums. “Which reminds me: your father expects you to be at a hotel. If you could keep up that charade, it’d be the best for both of us. Now, this will hurt.”

“Uhst oo it,” she says, and he shoves the roots of the tooth into her gum, a bolt of pain rocketing from her mouth and up to her brain.

She screams and feels blood squirt warmly into her mouth, and she clamps her lips shut, forcing Giorno to pull his fingers back. She keeps whining as the pain dies and Giorno grabs a glass of water from the bedside table, empties it out on the floor, and hands it to her. She spits the blood out and moans.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Can I give you something for the pain?”

She massages the gums above her new tooth and pulls her fingers away, stained with a thin orange film of blood and spit. She coughs.

“Jesus Christ. Is it too late for Josuke to visit? You’re a fucking hack compared to him,” she says.

He laughs, his same light, breathy laugh that has no voice behind it. She thinks it’s infectious because it’s so stupid, so cautious and delicate, and she ends up laughing too. He holds his hand out to her.

“Come, there’s food on the deck and Mista and Trish are excited to see you.”

She knocks his hand away and sits herself up, sore and aching but stubborn enough to do it on her own. Giorno stands and his nose curls, and he looks down, lifting up his foot. She shifts to the edge of the bed and sees him standing barefoot in a puddle of the water he tossed out of the glass.

She laughs at him and steps in it too, and the pair of them track wet footprints out onto the warm deck.

Two days pass until she sees Giorno again.

Trish and Mista fill her time with shopping trips on Giorno’s dime, hours spent outside at cafes where Mista orders five different wines for her to try, and Trish ladens her arms with clothing. They see Giorno in the morning, drifting down a hall with a coffee in hand and the other buttoning his shirt, preparing to leave with another man named Fugo.

She asks, and the answer is the same: he’s busy. You’ll see him soon.

Now, he is finally free for a dinner. She rides to the cafe on the back of a Vespa with Mista, Trish on her own trailing behind. The night is warm and the air still, the three of them drifting through it like silk. They dart through the streets she can’t keep track of, lacking names and hardly wide enough for cars, the tires of the scooters stuttering down short stairs that Mista doesn’t let up the speed on. She stretches her arms above her and laughs each time.

The restaurant looks no different from the other narrow homes on the street they stop on, and there is no sign. A few wrought iron chairs are pushed against the facade where Giorno sits, the turtle placed in the chair next to him. He stands at their arrival and picks up the turtle.

“Waiting long?” Trish asks, pulling at her hair and tugging the top of her fitted dress up. Jolyne does the same, adjusting the round sunglasses she wears to hide her black eyes, and smooths her hands over the long cotton dress Mista paid for.

“No, not at all,” Giorno replies.

“So, yeah, a while,” Mista says. He tugs the hem of his tank top down, tucking it back into his pants.

Giorno smiles and it doesn’t reach his eyes. He tugs open the door for them, and they all file in.

The inside is packed and loud, simple with barely any decoration on the stone walls. None of the tables and chairs match. Jolyne wonders if this is normal, for homes to open up and welcome in customers, because the place reminds her of a rustic Tonio’s. She hovers close to Trish as an older woman comes up to them, grabbing Giorno’s shoulders and kissing his cheeks.

“The usual table?” she asks. “We can move people around for you, Giovanna.”

“No, no, I’d prefer some privacy tonight. Is the table out back open?” he asks.

Jolyne notices his hand on her shoulder, and the way he tilts his head to smile; how his hair is arranged in a tight french braid, his pastel blue suit immaculate. She supposes he must be charming. The woman blinks for a moment then nods.

“Are you sure?”

“If it isn’t any trouble.”

“Of course not! Follow me.”

The woman leads them through the dining room, past the sweltering kitchen and out a backdoor, into a small backyard enclosed by a tall fence on two sides, finished with the wall of the building. Vines grow wild on a trellis over a small table with wrought iron furniture that matches the chairs outside, the table covered in a white cloth. Hanging from the trellis are small amber lights, like blooming bulbs among the green.

A chef stands out there, smoking. He quickly stubs out his cigarette and starts apologizing, bowing, but it is in the same dialect Jolyne can’t understand. Giorno waves his hand and takes no offense, stepping aside as the man leaves.

They sit, Jolyne next to Giorno. The woman pours them wine and says, the food will be out shortly, and Jolyne remembers Tonio’s again.

Giorno turns to her and smiles, clasping his hands together on the table.

“How have you been?” he asks.

She shrugs and leans her elbows on the table, swirling her wine in her glass before taking a sip. She wishes it was beer.

“Good. Napoli is beautiful, and Trish keeps trying to find me a date at every cafe we go to.”

“I don’t need to try, every waiter thinks she’s so charming,” Trish says, winking.

“I’ve been telling them off,” Mista says to Giorno.

“He’s been teaching me how to swear, and I’ve been getting a lot of practice,” Jolyne laughs.

“Oh, no,” Giorno smiles and his shoulders shake but there is no sound of laughter. “Please don’t get her into any more trouble.”

“I find it all myself,” she says.

The conversation flows as Mista and Trish fill it, their excitement infectious and making bubbling laughter, painful still on Jolyne’s bruised mouth, pull from her lips. Giorno is quiet, happy to listen and ask questions where they are needed to keep his friends talking. He says nothing about what he has done or why he was so busy. He sits, detached, contented with his company, and his smile touches only the corners of his mouth and no where else.

Jolyne waits until the conversation quiets as the appetizer hits the table. Before Giorno can explain what they are eating, she turns to him and smiles.

“Hey, so, what were you up to?” she asks.

The fake smile drops for a moment before returning. He takes his time, sipping his wine, brushing the edge of his mouth with his thumb.

“Business,” he says.

“So, you’re not going to talk about it?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “We had an agreement, correct?”

“No, I just let it go,” she says, cracking a grin, and Giorno’s expression wavers into a quiet, dark annoyance. “I’m gonna keep asking.”

“And I will not answer,” he says and the smile he gives her now is tight.

Her grin is genuine and tests the limits of the fresh scabs on her lips, and she licks them, tasting a hint of metal. A thought must pass in Giorno’s head that calms him because the tightness in his face relaxes, and he shuts his eyes. He smiles and his lips part to show a white line of teeth, and when he looks at her again, she sees how tired he is. The lines under his eyes cut deep and his eyelashes sweep heavily over his gaze.

“Am I allowed to change the subject for now?” he asks, weary.

She laughs and nods. “Yeah. Tell me what we’re eating.”

“Thank you,” he says with a sigh, and then launches into an explanation of the food, as if he had been in the kitchen to see it made.

She listens and relaxes, drinking the wine to make her sleepy and letting her speech slur in her lazy, tired mouth. Her throat grows raw with laughter and she pays attention, making sure Giorno drops his half-hearted smiles for genuine ones. With the charade gone, he punctuates the conversation with yawns, sparking Trish to take out his braid and shake out his hair to make him comfortable. He almost swats her hands away but lets it happen, allowing his friends to care for him as the dinner grows longer, lasting for two hours.

They leave, and Giorno apologizes when they step inside the empty, closed restaurant, the chairs stacked on the tables. The owner waves them off and he gives her a warm hug.

“Mista, I’m too drunk to drive,” Trish says and leans against him heavily. She draws circles on his shoulder with her index finger where they stand in front of the building. The sparse streetlights in the square across from them color them in the dark, the light dispersed like wet ink blotting into paper and they hover just on the edge.

“Yeah? What do you want me to do about it?”

“I can drive,” Jolyne says.

Trish shakes her head, her hair falling over her face. She slaps her hand on Mista’s back, hard.

“You’re our guest. He’s driving. Giorno can drive you.”

“I’ll drive Giorno, but not you. You hold my stomach too tight, I’ll throw up,” Mista says.

“No I don’t!”

When Mista pulls his keys from his pocket, Jolyne rips them from his hand. His face scrunches up in displeasure and Giorno chuckles behind them.

“My license back home is gone for another year until my probation lets up. C’mon, this is like, my only chance,” Jolyne begs.

Mista groans and pushes Trish off of him, throwing his hands in the air and sitting on his Vespa. “Whatever. Giorno, you’re with me, not Trish.”

“Mista, you’re a bastard,” Trish says and goes to lean on Jolyne, wrapping her arm through hers. “And I didn’t want to ride with you anyway.”

“Whatever.”

Trish and Mista shout more insults at each other, and Jolyne watches as Giorno smiles at the exchange, sleepy, contented. He doesn’t snap out of it until Mista shouts his name three times over his shoulder.

He waves to Jolyne and Trish, and they get on their own Vespa. Trish lazily explains the controls and leaves it to Jolyne. It is nothing like a car, but the handles vibrate under her hands, the small engine groans as she revs it.

“It’s a scooter, not a racecar,” Mista drawls.

“Fuck off. I’ll bet you five bucks I’ll beat you back.”

Mista opens his mouth, but Giorno beats him to it:

“Make it twenty.”

He grins, leaning back on the seat, hair long and blazer unbuttoned. Jolyne shouts yes! and Mista peels out before her, Giorno’s hair and jacket flaring like wings on the wind.

Trish is screaming go go go! in her ear and Jolyne screams too, windows in the homes surrounding them glowing with light as they wake up the neighborhood. She leaves no chance for the neighbors to yell at them, gunning down the same street as Mista and Giorno, and Trish grips her stomach and shrieks laughter in her ear.

Jolyne remembers, she has done this before: nights on Florida’s swampy backroads, fourteen and surrounded by her friends, older than her and smoking out of the sunroof as she sped under black leafy canopies. Naples is different. Her heart is calm. No chill of fear runs down her spine at the thought of being caught. There is no chance of it happening, not here in this still place, not with Giorno.

He looks back as Mista makes a wide turn, his hair flying around his head, eyes wide and bright in the dark. He smiles with his teeth and Jolyne returns it, taking a different street as they pass each other. She hopes she is taking a good turn.

“We’ll see you later!” he shouts, just before he is swallowed by the city, sliding between the buildings, and she will meet him at home.

Chapter Text

Her foot is healing nicely. The shorthaired oriental rugs lining the long hallways feel good and cool under her feet. The windows to her left are tall, stretching to the high ceiling, and hang out and open to give a view of the clustered homes encrusting the sandy white coast. The Mediterranean is a brighter blue than the jeweled sky that bows to touch it.

She crumples the twenty euro in her hand as she paces, and uses the other to press the cellphone Trish gave her to her ear. It’s her second time calling.

“Hello?” her mother’s voice says.

“Finally! I’ve been calling forever!” Jolyne says.

“Jo - Jolyne?! Jojo, is that you?”

“Yeah, Ma! Who else calls you?”

Her mother sighs and Jolyne grins. She missed that.

“I didn’t recognize the number, I’m sorry. I’m actually at lunch with your father right now.”

“Oh, really? Huh. Tell him hi for me I guess.”

The phone crackles and she can hear her mother faintly say, it’s Jolyne, she says hi. The phone crackles again; what Trish gave her was cheap.

“He says hello. How are you? How is Italy?”

“It’s amazing, Mom, you’d love it here. It hasn’t been humid and I’ve been here for four days and it’s just so damn sunny. It’s - it’s like, the light’s brighter here, y’know? I’m looking out the window right now and it’s all yellowy.”

“Oh, Jojo. It sounds beautiful. Has your cousin been showing you around?”

She nearly drops the phone before remembering her father is apparently there, sitting with her mother. She fucking hates this; she wishes Dad had mentioned whatever the lie was.

“Oh, yeah. He’s been great. Translating everything for me,” Jolyne laughs.

“I’m so glad you were able to meet him. And I’m sure he was happy to meet you, too.”

“Y-yeah. Definitely. He’s a really nice guy.”

“I’d love to meet him sometime. It’s so nice that he sought out his biological family like this. It’s so sad that he grew up alone,” her mother says, sighing.

Jolyne shrugs. “Well, he’s got really good friends. We’ve been hanging out.”

“I’m glad,” Mom says.

There is a soft silence and Jolyne wonders how to fill it. Talking with her mother is the opposite of talking with her father: growing up her parents, together, were quiet people with a loud daughter. Years alone together made her mother want to fill the silence left by Dad’s business trips, Jolyne and her growing their voices, spreading their conversations around the house. Mom was talkative. Silence made her mother’s smile fall into worried frowns.

“Jojo, you’re happy, right?” Mom asks.

Jolyne’s mouth is open and for a moment, no sound comes out. She wonders what her father must look like right now, and her voice sputters in the back of her throat.

“What? Yeah, of course I am,” she says.

“I just - I worry. You know. Everything is so different since you were released, and I just hope it’s not - oh, what am I saying. Ignore me, I’m just worrying needlessly,” her mother forces a laugh. “Your dad is frowning at me.”

“No, Mom, go ahead. What were you saying?”

“Oh, I just worry. Everything feels so good now, now that you’ve come home. I’m so proud of you and your father, and Emporio is such a sweet kid. I just hope that you’re not...well, I hope you’re not forgetting to take care of yourself.”

“Mom, I’m fine. Really.”

“I know! Just remember to take care of yourself. I’m so glad you’ve been on these trips - I really think you needed a vacation.”

Jolyne snorts and turns at the start of the hall, walking quickly down to the end, where the back wall turns into a door to the deck.

“Yeah, four months out and no job, really, I’ve been working sooo hard,” she says.

“Oh, Jojo. Please. Be nice to yourself.”

Mom sounds upset, and she hates it when her mother is upset.

She stops at the end of the hall and looks out the glass doors, where the remains of breakfast on the table sit, the tablecloth fluttering in the breeze. Giorno has been missing since she woke up, off doing God knows what.

Jolyne sighs and nods.

“Ok Ma,” Jolyne says and turns away from the doors to the set at the end of the hall. “I’ll try.”

“That’s all I ask. Do you want to talk to your father?”

“Yeah,” she says, and crouches to her knees before the double doors. Trish gave her a quick tour of the place and mentioned that this was Giorno’s office. She fits the twenty euros under the doors.

“Ok. I’ll put him on. I love you so much! Have fun!”

“You have fun too, even though you’re with the world’s grumpiest guy,” Jolyne says as she stands.

“Oh, I’ll be fun enough for the both of us. I love you.”

“I love you, too. Bye, Mom.”

“Bye, Jojo!”

Chapter Text

Another day passes without sight of Giorno, and Mista and Trish talk of a trip to Rome. Jolyne stays in bed and doesn’t move when they come to knock on her door, hiding under the sheets and waiting for them to leave.

By 11:00 AM she drags herself from the bed, damp with her sweat, and she sneaks down the hall to the bathroom with the help of Stone Free to check for voices. The bathroom always surprises her and reveals the real quality of the house: it is old.

The tiles on the floor are decorated with a yellow and blue pattern, old and slick with their varnish, the light from the small, high window warped over each crack and shift in the floor. The spackled ceiling is spotted with water damage. The clawfoot tub is flecked with missing coating and the drain is ringed in rust. Trish keeps it looking new with all her lotions and soaps lining the marble counter, and the towels on the racks are plush and warm.

Jolyne leans her palms around the sink and looks at herself in the mirror. All that remains of her black eyes is a sickly yellow on her greased skin. Her mouth is still mottled with more purple than yellow and she scowls at herself, impatient. She is healing, but it is slow; her smiles still hurt. 

She showers, and afterwards steps out into the hallway expecting to be caught, but finds it is empty. The only thing in the hall is the wind, falling in from the ever-open windows.

She rubs a towel through her hair and pauses at her bedroom door.

She drops the towel in the hall and rushes inside, rummaging through the suitcase she left open on the floor, spilling over with clothing like a boiling pot. Buried at the center is the core, a plastic bag full of Japanese snacks. She grabs it and rushes back out, walking down the hall as quick as she can.

Stopping in front of Giorno’s office, she unravels her foot and slips the string under the door.

She feels the voices more than hears them. The vibrations travel through the string, into her skin, stronger with a voice she can tell is Giorno’s and weaker with Uncle Polnareff’s. She reels the string back and knocks on the door with the side of her fist.

“Hey, Giorno, open up!”

She stops to press her ear to the wood. A sigh, then light footsteps, and she reels back for Giorno to let her in.

From the small gap he opens, she can see he is perfect. His suit is a pale gold, each crease and fold catching the light in soft curves of shined fabric, a satin embroidered with flowers along the hems. His hair is freshly sculpted and pulled back in his braid. He is dressed for work.

Meeting his gaze she feels it again, the weight of ice blocks on her shoulders, chilling her skin on the back of her neck. She hasn’t felt it since they first met.

“Good morning, Jolyne,” he says. It’s the same cold bullshit voice he uses for work, and she doesn’t bother to hide the roll of her eyes.

“Yeah, nice to see you too, finally. Can I come in?” she asks.

He steps aside and pulls the door with him.

His office is small and packed, a square room with the large, dark wood desk shining in front of the glass doors leading to the deck. The right wall is taken up by a massive glass tank for the turtle. She can see it toeing into a well of water, Uncle Polnareff hidden inside, she guesses at Giorno’s request. The rest of the space is taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, mismatched and intimidating. The shelves have gaps and some aren’t filled with books, though those that are there are liked haphazardly and without order. In the open spaces, stacks of paper and manilla folders rest, hundreds of them.

Everything in the room feels as if it has been touched in the last five minutes. The air hums with an urgency not present in Giorno.

“Please, sit,” he says and gestures to the armchair in front of his desk, made of forest green leather and crackling with age.

She stands beside it, and watches Giorno watching her out of the corner of his eye while he walks behind his desk. He hesitates by his chair before sitting, and instead of keeping his posture straight, he slouches and tips back, resting his head against his index finger.

His desk is messy with papers and framed photographs she can’t see, along with a massive bouquet of flowers stuck in a small vase. She knocks over a picture when she upends the plastic bag on the surface, letting the snacks and sweets topple out in plasticky crackles and thuds.

“There,” she says, shaking out the bag for the noise of it, then dropping it to the floor. “I was going to give those to you sooner, but I haven’t seen you around. Like, at fucking all. And, since I’m leaving in three days, I figured I’d give them to you now, if it’s convenient for you.”

His eyebrows rise and he looks bored, reaching out a hand to pick through the pile, assessing each snack before tossing it back. She falls into her chair with a huff from both her mouth and the air leaving the cushion.

“Thank you. And I suspect I should send my thanks to Josuke as well,” he says. He pulls out three types of the same candy bar and tucks them out of sight into a drawer. “And I should apologize for being so absent. Please understand I don’t want to be.”

“Giorno, come on. Pull the fucking stick out of your ass and talk to me,” she says. “I should apologize for being so absent? What the fuck is that. Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”

He doesn’t crack. There is no smile or sigh of exasperation, just a mask of porcelain laid over his face. He leans forward to lift up the picture she knocked over, and his movements are so embedded with calm that they feel inconsequential, unnoticeable. He puts the picture right.

“I am trying to be cordial. I’m expressing my regret to you. If it seems I’m not being genuine, I’ll make it up to you.”

She scoffs and rolls her eyes, slouching deeply into the chair.

“Ok, then hang out with me? And Mista and Trish?” she says. “Your friends are awesome and even though you can be a fuckin’ freak, I like you, too.”

He opens his mouth to reply but a phone starts vibrating and beeping against a hard surface. They both stare at the pile of snacks and the slight jittering of the wrappers. Giorno stands and shoves the snacks out of the way, hands scrambling for the phone; it’s another cheap grey flip phone like the kind Trish gave her to use.

He squints at the caller ID before pressing it to his ear, and turning his back on Jolyne to stare out the window.

“Buonjuorno,” he says, and Jolyne knows it’s that different dialect again, but he switches back to standard Italian when he says, “Do you speak Neapolitan? If possible I would like to speak another language for this conversation.”

He tightens the grip on his elbow and he nods his head. “No? Of course. Are you foreign? Ah. That explains your accent. Where are you from?”

When he smiles at whatever the person on the other end says, his eyes flicker back to Jolyne. She glares at him and places her elbow on the armrest, leaning her head into her fist. She isn’t going anywhere.

“You’re from Morocco? Oh, a beautiful country. I have a very good friend who has family there. Now, I am sorry to cut our pleasantries short, but has there been any developments about the house?”

As he listens, his smile and charm wipes clean from his face, leaving nothing in its wake. His fingers grip tighter again at his suit.

“Squalo has called off their men? Good. Stay there. I will call you when you can be relieved. Do not call this number again. Good bye.”

He hangs up and turns back to his desk, and breaks the phone in half. He tosses it under the desk and it lands in a bin she can’t see, but hears.

“What was that about? Is that what’s been keeping you so busy?” she jumps to ask.

Giorno leans his hands on his desk and stares at her, emotionless. Part of her wants to punch him, just in the arm or something, or wrestle him to the ground in a headlock until he tells her what the hell is going on. It’s her first instinct to curl her fists, her demands coming before or after they manage to land a hit.

But normal life isn’t like that. It’s not like hell and it’s not like prison, it’s just sitting across from Giorno and biting into his life, locking her jaw, and not letting go.

He shuts his eyes. His chest expands with a silent, deep breath, and he releases it as he sits back down in his chair. When his eyes open again, he seems to thaw, gaining softness back in his face.

“Yes. I have been taking care of properties belonging to deceased Passione members,” he says.

She lifts her head off her fist, and stares at him, and at the weariness he tries to push off. Mentions of death always put her on edge and she tenses her body, before realizing it is hardly enough information to explain the past few days.

“I do this with everyone who dies while working for Passione. The list has shortened in recent years, but this case is special to me,” he says. He laces his fingers together on top of his desk. “It is important that these people aren’t forgotten.”

She nods slowly, trying to fill in the gaps he is leaving her with.

“So some people want to disrupt that? Another gang wants the property?” she asks.

He is still for a moment as her words land and then, he smiles gently.

“You’re very smart. It’s dangerous,” he says with a laugh.

She grins. “I know I am. Now don’t change the subject with flattery, I’m smarter than that, too.”

He shrugs as if to acknowledge that his attempt was worth a try, and his eyes drift across the framed photographs lining his desk. The glass doors behind him light the back of his head and she remembers seeing the same thing at the hotel, him bursting inside and frantic. Now, smoothed over and made of cold marble, there is just a light shine.

“I am sorry. I’m sorry that my work has taken a precedence over your visit. I just need you to know that it is a very serious matter, and nothing but this would pull me from spending time with you,” he says.

He doesn’t look at her while he speaks. His eyes keep moving to different photographs.

“And you can’t talk about it. Ok. I get it. It’s personal. But you could’ve just said so. I would’ve dropped it sooner,” she says, and is happy when the corners of his mouth twitch with a smile. “Who’re you looking at?”

His eyes finally lift to hers and they are wide with surprise. He blinks and shakes his head, then lifts a picture up to show her.

“A picture of my mother.”

A woman sits under the shade of a cafe awning, her mouth forming an o as she lifts a cup to drink. The picture is fuzzy at the edges where people are walking through the street, and her eyes are frozen in the act of watching them drift by. There is a lack of clarity in the image, on her face, and Jolyne can’t tell how old she is; she is swept clean from age in the blur.

It is unsettling, how the picture was taken without her noticing. Giorno turns it back around to stare for a moment before putting it back.

“You still - I didn’t, um. I didn’t know you kept in contact,” she says.

Whatever warmth softening his skin before starts to harden again. His eyes turn glassy, oil slicks instead of irises gazing out at Jolyne without really seeing her there. He looks like the woman in the photograph.

“I don’t. But I do take care of her,” he says.

Jolyne frowns and her skin pinches with goosebumps. She notices now that her hair is dripping at the ends, leaving wet splotches on her shirt and puddling in the dips of her elbows, chilling her. She rubs the drops of water into her skin.

“Why?” she asks.

Giorno’s head tips as if he is going to shrug, another movement of well, it was worth a try, before he stills.

“She and my stepfather knew about my inclusion into the gang. These things are just known here when they happen, and I suspect someone from my old school saw me and notified the faculty. They knew not to look for me, though I think they wouldn’t have bothered.

“A few years after I joined Passione, my mother divorced my stepfather. She has no career to fall back on. She waitresses at a cafe on the island of Procida, where I bought her a house.”

Jolyne stops touching the wet tips of her hair and sits up straighter. His tone isn’t the flat, clipped one used for work, used earlier on her; it is empty. His voice rings in his throat as if it were made of metal, hollow and echoing without an end. It only stops when his mouth closes with finality.

Jolyne’s fingers flex into her palms, squeezing a few times before resting limply on her thighs.

“Your parents didn’t look for you? Didn’t you join when you were a teenager?” she asks.

He nods. “Fifteen, yes.”

She mouths it, fifteen, testing the shape of it to make sure she understands, and the word storming out and leaving her mouth open in anger. It takes her a moment to feel it.

“Let me get this straight: your parents didn’t give a shit when you disappeared when you were fifteen, and years later, you buy your mom a house?”

Giorno frowns. “In so many words, yes. Why is this something to be mad over?”

Jolyne jerks her head back and shakes it, rolling her eyes quickly and tossing her hands in the air. “Why? Why am I mad? Because your parents sound like a pair of assholes, and you rewarded your mom with a house? Giorno, seriously, what the fuck? What about your stepdad?”

He stares at her. He leans back slowly, straightening his back and unfolding his hands, laying them flat on the desk. Jolyne settles as well, letting down her hands and curling them back into fists for her own peace of mind. It feels right to have them there.

He rocks his head from side to side, weighing his words. He unfolds.

“After the divorce, I visited him personally. I won’t lie: I did not handle the encounter as...maturely as I could have. I ended up giving him money to leave the country for good. He resides in Switzerland, last I checked.”

“Maturely...Wait, did you beat him up?” Jolyne asks.

Giorno grimaces, and looks at the desk, at his hands. Jolyne’s mouth drops open and she only closes it when she feels pain in the heels of her palms, looking down to find her fingernails are digging into them. She flexes her fingers to shake it off before speaking.

“Giorno, why? Why the hell did you give them money if they neglected you?”

“It was just the right thing to do.”

“What’s right about it?” she says and her voice rises without her noticing. She watches him open his mouth to reply and she can’t let that happen, so she keeps yelling, “Why did you pay your stepdad to leave the country? What did he do to you?”

“What was I meant to do? Punish them for the pain they gave me? I chose not to. I chose to give them and myself peace and distance.”

“You gave them more than that. You gave them a fucking vacation, after they didn’t give a shit about you,” she spits.

It happens quickly: Giorno stands and Stone Free matches it before Jolyne can finish the motion herself. Gold vibrates over Giorno’s body, his eyes green, the full body of his stand shifting forward before falling back in a crashing wave of motion.

She can hear Giorno breathing though he is immoveable, and she tries to do the same, forcing her lungs to expand painfully until she exhales, doing anything to keep her from panicking. Giorno’s expression doesn’t move but she can see it now: he is frowning.

“I think we’ve exhausted the topic,” he breathes out, words too heavy to bear much longer, though there is reluctance: he doesn’t want to set them down yet.

She understands, he has to, and this isn’t a fight she wants. She nods, and leaves, and finds herself pushing her back against her bedroom door without remembering the walk through the hall.

“Jolyne. Jolyne, wake up.”

She rolls over when the hand on her shoulder pulls her towards the edge of the bed. Her eyes open and in the dark, Giorno is crouching by her bedside, his face close to hers. Warmth from his palm ebbs into the thin sheet covering her shoulder.

“What’s going on? Is something wrong?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “No, nothing is wrong. I would like to take you on a drive, if that’s alright?”

She rubs her eyes, using her free hand to dig her fingers and thumb over her eyelids. She opens them, and he slides back into focus. The room is lit with the pale blue light of the moon slanting in from the windows, lighting Giorno’s face in the dark. The shadows behind the light are pitch, the room laid out in sharp contrast of black and near-white. It is so harsh a difference that the room seems still and Giorno a statue.

“Jolyne?” he whispers again. The way he moves against the light makes her thoughts cloudy, and she sits up, his hand falling away to rest on the mattress.

“I’m up. Where are we going?”

He stands when she slides her feet to the floor, scratching her fingers into her hair in an effort to wake up. She looks up at him when he doesn’t reply, and sees him looking away. His eyes are on the window and the curtains that billow over the wind, still warm and honeyed with the golden light of day even in the night.

She is too tired to ask again and it feels too awkward. She hasn’t seen him since that morning, and he is here now; pulling her from bed with his hair down and white shirt wrinkled. He grips the navy blazer tossed over his shoulder in his fist like he needs it, a security blanket with a black checkered hem and ladybug buttons.

He looks down at her and blinks as if surprised she’s there.

“Where are we going? It’s...,” he trails off, and his eyes look at her like she is a window. He blinks again and his focus is back. “Just dress for a drive. It will just be me and you.”

“Alright,” she says, and stands.

She searches for clothing to wear in the piles on the floor, and looks back at him before she changes. He is looking out the glass doors now, so she steps into a pair of shorts and worn sneakers, and tosses a jacket on for warmth.

Before she can say anything, he glances at her, sees she is ready, and nods before turning abruptly to leave. She whispers a swear and kicks her toes to the front of her shoes, and follows after him.

The wall of windows in the hall divide the blue night; the stars spill across it with a child’s clumsy hand, tipping them onto the surface of the sky. The window panes move as she walks like reams of film flickering by. In front of her Giorno leads the way, half his body cast in black, stretching to the floor, tossing his shadow on the wall as it glides over the doors and cracking paint. The light is striking on him in the dark labyrinth of the hall.

She follows the long, blond sway if his hair in the dark, and it feels familiar. She doesn’t realize she has fallen into a trance of thought, wondering where this image came from, and why it feels so embedded into her bones and blood. It breaks when he looks back at her at the door, his hands hovering over the rack of keys on the wall.

His smile is nervous. It isn’t familiar.

“Do you have a preference?” he asks.

She shakes her head and his smile slips away with a nod. He pulls a set of keys from the rack and they step outside, onto the gravel driveway lined with cars. He presses a button on the keys, and the red and orange lights of the powder blue Guilietta Spider blare into life with the click of the doors.

They step inside, and Giorno takes a moment to peel back the roof. The night is quiet and she has no want to talk, but watches instead. Her eyes stay on Giorno’s hands as he turns back the lock on the roof, pushing the white canvas back until it rests and locks into place. He adjusts the mirrors, stretches his legs under the wheel, clicks his seatbelt across his body.

It is strange to see him doing these things. These are the actions she knows in the dark: she is the one who disrupts silence with the ignition of an engine and the crunch of wheels over gravel. She has never seen anyone besides old friends do this, ones she chooses to forget, ones who forgot her first. The warm salt air would glide through their hair, the only thing she had in common with those people.

She drifts her hand out the window as Giorno drives down the zigzag roads, and the sea rises until the line of the horizon glides up, the tide swallowing half the sky. They drive parallel with the water, and the roads are smoother. The buildings grow with newly painted facades mocking the colorful homes. They try to be quaint and familiar but are imitations slapped with signs, advertising hotels and resorts and jet ski rentals.

Giorno parks the car at the top of a hill, pulling to the side of the road in front of one of the tall buildings. He sits, his fingers holding the keys but not turning the car off, and Jolyne takes the moment to look down the hill. The valley meets a steep cliff of rocks that drop off into the water.

A lone house sits almost in the sea. It looks painful there, with a wall extending down into the water, where the high tide is gentle against its side, sore with barnacles. A dock bridges out from the house to rock on the waves, wet with decay and coated white with seagull shit, destroyed by the nature it was stretching out to greet. The house is dwarfed by the new developments surrounding it.

Giorno turns off the car and the lights die. They both step out, and she watches him tug on his jacket, and make their silent walk down to the house.

The wood on the front steps is soft beneath their feet. There is the golden tab of a zipper sticking out of the doorknob, and they both stare at it silently. Giorno shuts his eyes and breathes in, resting his hand on it. When he exhales, it turns into a red flower rounded with hundreds of short petals; she thinks it is a zinnia. Giorno pulls it out and tucks it into the breast pocket of his jacket.

He digs into his pants pocket and pulls out a small ring of keys. She notices now the row of locks above the missing handle, and Giorno fits each key into each lock without making a mistake.

The door pops open, and Giorno pulls the hole where the doorknob had been, letting her inside.

She stands in the dark until he follows in after her, clicking on the light hanging over the kitchen table. It casts a dim gold over the small room, designed to be a kitchen and living room, but somewhere the line blurred between the two. The couch is threadbare, and the kitchen counter has a massive record player resting on it, coated in a film of dust.

Giorno locks one lock to keep the door shut, and stands beside her. He looks at the room as if he is sad to find it empty.

He says, “This.”

He touches the curving back of a wooden kitchen chair with the tips of his fingers. Jolyne flexes her own, letting them brush against her thighs. She tries not to move, because even the dust feels untouchable here, and any print left would be a reminder of what is there, and not what has been.

“This is what kept me away. Another gang, Squalo, wishes to buy the land here and pave it over for a boat drop off. They own most of this coast now, for laundering money through the jet ski rentals. They pay a tax to Passione for the territory. But I refuse to give this up, and they sent the stand user you fought after me. It was just a message. It wasn’t meant to kill me.

“Mista did kill them. The stand user. He also destroyed the security footage. They heard your name and I couldn’t let them know about you.”

She nods and tries to swallow the truth that a death occurred because she exists, and not because she had taken the life herself. She remembers her father and her throat tightens, and she wonders, trying to swallow spit, how many people he has had to fight to keep her safe.

Giorno drops his hand from the back of the chair and it swings at his side. The weight bears on them both.

“This house is important because the man who owned it died to save our friends, and place me as the head of Passione.”

He digs into his pocket again, this time on his jacket, and pulls out a folded white paper. He hands it to her, and she unfolds it to find a black and white photograph. She recognizes Mista in a group of young people sit on a shallow set of stone steps. Some look like they are just starting high school, but looking at one of their hands she can see the toughened skin embedded with scars. They all dress as if they are trying to outshine one another, kids with heavy paychecks spending it on begging for attention.

Giorno points to the thin man in white, the curve of his black hair falling into his hollow cheeks, doing more to highlight his fatigue than hide it. The myriad of zippers shining on his suit could pull apart, and are the only thing keeping him together.

“Bruno Buccellati. This was his childhood home. I’m not even sure he returned here after his father died, but he kept the property,” Giorno says. His eyes scan the room again. “I met his mother once, at his funeral. She said she didn’t care what I did with the house. I’m the only one keeping it here.”

The Buccellati in the picture feels stunted. She knows he must be near her age, fresh from being a boy and new to his height. All the people in the picture have the same problem, even Mista, all of them crammed into the frame and stuck in this moment in time. They are children, all of them.

She realizes she can hear the lap of the sea against the house. Her voice is quiet when she speaks.

“How old was he, when he died?”

“Twenty.”

A year older than her, and Jolyne says, “He doesn’t look it.”

Giorno sighs and smiles, and rubs at his eyes.

“Buccellati assisted in my acceptance into Passione when I was fifteen. I told him I wanted to use the position as boss to get rid of the drug trade, which was rampant in the country at the time. The men in the photograph were involved in the coup, as was Trish.”

He turns to her, and looks down at the photo in her hands, which shake and she can’t stop it. He points to two more people.

“Narancia and Abbacchio also died. They didn’t leave much beyond a pair of apartments close to our old headquarters. I had an ongoing investigation to find Narancia’s relatives, but the trail ran cold. Mista took care of Abbacchio’s things. He bought a vineyard in the countryside. We plan to retire there.”

She swallows thickly.

“So all these people put their hope on you? A fifteen year old?” she asks.

He shakes his head.

“It was Buccellati. They put their faith in him, and he put his faith in me. I don’t know if they realized that I was always intended to be boss, but they followed him. I think if they had all lived, they still would; they would work under Passione, but only with Buccellati. Always for Buccellati.”

He takes the photograph from her hands. It folds slowly against his palms, and he places it back in his pocket as he speaks.

“I only learned after he died that he never wanted to be a gangster. I had spent my childhood dreaming to be like him, but he was forced into the work. I realize now that what I wanted was to be a good person, and make the world good through my influence: I never wanted to be a gangster either.

“I work for the dreams of the friends that have died, not my own. My only ambition is to make history never repeat itself. I do not want to see another Buccellati, Abbacchio, or Narancia swept into a life without a chance to be the people they could have been.”

He turns to her and rests his hand on her arm, his fingers splaying over the faded color of her tattoo. He stares at it, and she stares at the small white scars lining the backs of his hands. She sighs and feels the weight of the world on her lungs.

“I was fourteen when I got that,” she says. His hand squeezes. “I joined a gang, y’know. They stole cars. I don’t know why I did it; I think I just wanted to belong to something that wouldn’t let me down, y’know?”

He stares, and heat crawls along her face, embarrassment burning at maybe saying the wrong thing. A group of people who hijack cars was nothing to the syndicate Giorno ran, was nothing to the culture of criminals in his country. Before she can apologize, he nods.

“I think I wanted the same thing.”

He looks out at the room and she places her hand over his, breathing through the difficult weight on her chest. If he cries, she will.

“Thank you,” she says.

“Thank you for coming,” he says, and turns to her with a smile trying to break through his sadness. “I know it’s late. I’ll get you back to bed.”

“Oh, it’s alright. I’m awake now. Unless, of course, you want to go?”

He slides his hand down into hers, squeezing her palm and pushing her fingers together at the knuckles, unlike the necessity in guiding her down the hotel stairs. He needs it, and she squeezes back.

“I think it’s time we leave. Would you like to drive back?” he asks, and pulls his hand away.

“You don’t mind?”

“No,” he says, and unlocks the door, pushing it open for her to walk out. “Not at all.”

She steps out into the blue night and he follows. He goes through the motions of turning all the keys into all the locks, and finally, pulls the red flower from his jacket pocket. He tucks the stem into the door and it turns back into a doorknob, the zipper still in place.

They walk back up the road, and when they reach the car, she leans her arm on the edge of the windshield when Giorno doesn’t open the door to the passenger’s side. She sees him staring down at the house, frowning.

“You don’t have to keep it, you know,” she says.

He nods. He sighs and gets into the car.

Without Giorno, the return to her bedroom feels singular: she is the only one, in the only room, with the only lamplight on in the filled and heavy darkness. The edge of her bed is the edge of a greater feeling she sits on, the sleeves of her jacket rolled halfway down her arms, huddling next to her bedside table lamp to feel unalone with the light. She waits. She holds the car keys in her hands.

The feeling had crawled in as she drove back. She turned off the headlights and let the moon be their guide through the winding streets, following Giorno’s index finger and voice gritted from overuse. He called out sinistra, destra, sinistra, destra, driving her around the village. The snaked roads grew their bodies longer and she realized he was turning her down wrong turns to let her take her time. To let her drive, when she ached to do so.

Now she sits and perks her head up with the light sound of his footsteps down the hall. He returns to her with his arms laden with manilla folders, thick and bound with black clips. He sets them on her bedside table with a soft groan, and stands up, tucking his hair back behind his ears.

The rooms feels better with him here. Now, it isn’t her huddling to shrink and hold the space around her as if it could bring her comfort. She has him, and the lamplight is too weak to fill the room in all its wide, dark corners.

“What is all this?” she asks, and reaches over to run her thumb along the labeled tabs.

“Information. It is a lot, and I don’t expect you to read it all. But I thought it might be of interest.”

He doesn’t stop her when he hand reaches for the top folder.

Clipped in front of the massive stack of papers, saturated with small, black text, jittering like a swarm of insects before Jolyne’s eyes, she sees two pictures. Trish glares out behind lashes gummed with mascara and thin eyebrows, the flesh of her face filled with teenaged anger. Trish Una 2001 is scrawled across the white bottom.

Above her is a separate picture, the black and white color harsh on the plaster face that tips in the frame to the left. The lighting is deceitful, and her eyes see the truth that it isn’t a casting, but a mold. She has to strain to see it, but it is there, the indentation of the face stuck in the surface of some rocky siding. Not a man, but a memory of one, listed as Diavolo face mold 2001. Her eyes shift back and forth, seeing the mold to seeing the cast and back again.

She asks slowly, “What is this?”

“It is a copy of the information I gave to your father, to give to the Speedwagon Foundation. We met shortly after I became the boss.”

“Is that how you met my dad?”

“Yes, in a way. Mr. Polnareff informed me of my father, and contacted Mr. Kujo to visit and explain. Of course, he also wanted to meet me, I’m sure to make sure I wasn’t abusing my power.”

Jolyne nods and tugs the picture of the face cast away, holding it between her fingers to read the document.

An account of the coup to overthrow Boss Diavolo of Passione, occurring between the days of March 24th and April 6th, 2001, written by Boss Giorno Giovanna, born Haruno Shiobana (Joestar).

There are more pictures after the first page, where Giorno wrote an introduction explaining his mother, his father, how he came to Italy and went to school. The amount of information is overwhelming, and her eyes keep darting to the thick paragraphs of swarming text, supplemented with pages of Giorno’s messy scrawl. There are mugshots of the boys she recognizes from the photograph Giorno showed her earlier.

She is staring at an eighteen year old Mista when the bed creaks, and she looks to the weight down the line of the mattress to find Giorno sitting there. He holds a folder and looks apologetic.

“Do you mind if I stay?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “No, of course not. But aren’t you tired?”

He shrugs and turns to the folder in his hands, flipping it open. “A little, but I haven’t looked at these since I received them.”

She hums and nods. She watches him open the folder, and lean back, lifting his legs to toe at his heel to kick off his shoes. They fall to the floor with the sound of worn leather, and he slides back onto the bed, the white sheets puddling around his body.

It looks nice. She slides off her jacket and shoes, and does the same, resting among her pillows until she is nearly lying down among them. The night is no longer about sleep, but reading.

The stack of papers have backgrounds on the members of the group referred to as Buccellati’s Gang, and she reads through the deceased members first. The longest one belongs to Leone Abbacchio, detailing his childhood, even locations on where to find his school records, which the other members lack. There are massive gaps missing in their lives, from birth certificates to family members. Most of the information has been meticulously collected from police reports for minor theft and ditching school.

There is no family listed for Mista. Just Giorno’s handwriting filling the blank section on Relatives/Guardians, reading: Guido Mista believes he was born to Moroccan immigrants in Naples, and his parents left him to be raised by relatives. At some point, he left the family and began living on the streets; he suggested child abuse for the reasoning of his departure. Does not want to find biological family.

The reasoning for Trish’s picture at the front of the document becomes clear at the start of her profile, but Jolyne can’t bring herself to voice her questions yet. She glances at Giorno, who is engrossed in the file he holds, lying on his side now while he reads. She looks back at her folder and flips behind Trish’s background, finding the biggest section of the folder belongs to thick papers titled The Coup.

The section begins with a list of the deceased, and a note from Giorno, saying, the backgrounds of the members of La Squadra de Esecuzione are attached in a separate file.

She has to flip back, her fingers sluggish in their spread among the pages, checking back on the dates. Fourteen days. In fourteen days, a suggested twenty-three people died, and Giorno met a man whose childhood home he loses blood and breath and sleep to keep. In his own accounts, his handwriting cracking with the departure of childhood, Giorno’s understanding of the coup stretches thin. Desperation to survive the into the next day, the next hour, the next step across hot stone streets is written in the text with a tangibility that makes Jolyne’s hands numb.

Giorno killed Trish’s father. She wants to ask him about it when she closes the file on her fingers, holding it under the stack of papers at the end, knowing she hasn’t read it, not really. A second mouth sits in her heart, wanting to know how time changed when he was close to dying, and wanting to spill out the way her skin was pulled from her in a string when time jerked forward, and she had to tug time back.

She sits up and Giorno is asleep, sprawled out by the foot of the bed horizontally, lying on his side. His head is burrowing into the tuck of his arm, and his heavy eyelids press his lashes against his cheeks. The file he was reading is laid out in front of him.

She stares at him, and a dark smudge in the folder catches her eye. Stone Free takes it for her and it comes to her fingers.

It is an old photographed portrait, the height of her index finger. The man inside gazes out with eyes brightened by an unseen flash behind the lens, behind her now, taking a light she can’t see that strikes the circles of his pupils and irises. He is smiling. She has never seen this man. She knows his face should not be quite so soft at the edges. She turns the picture around, as if to find his real self there, but finds words written instead:

Dio Brando - Hugh Hudson Academy Portrait - 1888.

Jolyne turns it back and brings it closer to her face. His eyes follow her as if he could blink, but he is held still. Rust eats at the edges of the picture, trapping him in time. A desperation sits behind the part of his lips, behind his teeth, wild and cagey and restrained in the bulge of his neck against his old suit collar.

She looks up at Giorno. He was born with nothing his father has, not even the gold spun into his hair.

She puts the picture away, and closes the folder, placing it back on the stack with the one she has read. Sliding onto the bed, she lies parallel to Giorno, tugging pillows from their massive pile at the head of the bed to lie on. It is the biggest mattress she has ever seen, and she can stretch her arms and legs and still not touch him or the edges.

Stone Free turns out the light. Jolyne nudges pillows above Giorno’s head.

She lies there, letting the darkness shift into the hidden light of the moon drifting in on the billowing curtains. The molded pattern on the ceiling slowly forms out of the dark, and she stares until it disappears again behind the static of her eyesight. She can hear the wind, the faint whisper of the sea, and Giorno’s breathing by her side.

The world grows small and big in between Giorno’s breaths. She closes her eyes, and matches their breathing as she falls asleep.

“Where is Boss’ Boss? Where?! Where is Boss’ Bo -- oh, there he is.”

Jolyne groans and her bedroom is filled with the dark light of dawn. Like flies, two orange blips flit around her field of vision before she remembers the owners of the shrill voices.

A pillow blocks her view of Giorno across from her, but she can hear his voice, trying to be ringing and clear despite the sleep crusting his words.

“What is going on?” he says.

“Boss saw you weren’t in your bed, he sent us out to find you, he’s in the kitchen ready to fight whoever --”

“-- That’s alright. Tell him I am safe, I am in Jolyne’s room, and I will see him in the kitchen in a minute. Both of you.”

“Roger, Boss’ Boss.”

Their vibrating hum leaves the room, and before silence settles again, Jolyne breaks it with a high noise from the back of her throat. Beside her, the bed shifts, and Giorno rises up from the horizon of the pillow hiding him. He sits and slouches, eyes heavy with exhaustion.

“I will sort this out. You can stay in bed,” he says, and reaches forward, movements mechanic, and wraps his hand around her ankle. He shakes it slightly before standing and letting go.

“Wait, I’m up,” she says.

He is stretching his curled hands above his head while she struggles to pull out of the glue of sheets and pillows. Sleep coats her, the open and close of her eyelids sounds with clicks, her bones loosening with cracks and the toothy yawn of her jaw. Giorno catches the yawn behind the back of his hand, meeting her eyes in a silent agreement to walk out of the room together.

She gazes out the windows in the hall as they walk to the kitchen. The day is bleeding at the edge of the horizon, a thin cut of light promising to burst in an hour, infected with a thin myriad of clouds. The time of day reminds her of her father, coming home at dawn, always surprised to find her sneaking downstairs to see him step inside. Dawn is always about arrival.

They step into the kitchen where Mista is pacing and Trish is leaning against the table, and they both spring to life at the sight of Giorno. Mista rushes to him first, palms pressing the sides of Giorno’s face, shaking it slightly.

“We thought you were kidnapped!” Mista says.

“I’m sorry for making you worry,” Giorno half-whispers, smiling, his hands wrapping around Mista’s wrists.

Trish walks behind Giorno and hugs him, her arms wrapping around his chest. Jolyne hovers at the threshold of the kitchen, watching, feeling like the Pistols that float around the trio. Everything falls away and leaves only them.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Mista presses. “And where are the keys to the Spider? I thought it was stolen, too.”

“Jolyne has them in her room.”

“Jesus Christ, Giorno,” Trish mutters, her voice warped by the press of her cheek into blond curls. “Apologize, we nearly died of panic.”

“I’m very sorry. I am. I really am.”

They hold each other a moment more. One of Giorno’s hands lets go of Mista to pat Trish’s arm around his middle. Jolyne tries not to stare and wants to walk back to bed. She sees now how time binds them, how their hands sink into each other’s bodies. There was no mention of desperate clutching at the end of the folder she read last night, but she thinks of their wet eyes spilling into each other’s shoulders in Rome.

Mista gently slaps Giorno’s face and smiles at him, sad with relief, and they all pull apart. Trish goes to the coffeemaker on the counter.

Mista glances at Jolyne, unsurprised by her, and says something in Neapolitan again. Giorno replies, Mista’s eyes grow wide, and then he digs his knuckles into them when Giorno finishes speaking. Mista nods.

“Ok. Don’t leave without telling us next time,” Mista says, slapping his hand on Giorno’s shoulder, and looks back at Trish. “Well, I’m up for the day. Breakfast, Trish?”

“From where?” she asks. She pulls out four cups from the cabinet.

“Nothing is open. We have eggs, right?”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to cook,” Giorno says.

“I can make scrambled eggs! Fuck, give me some credit,” Mista knocks a light punch into Giorno’s arm, and walks to the refrigerator. “Are you staying up?”

Giorno hums. The coffeemaker hisses and spits into the awaiting cup, filling the room with the tangible darkness of coffee. The light from the open refrigerator fills the room. Giorno looks over his shoulder to Jolyne, raising his eyebrows.

She shrugs. She wants to go to bed but she hasn’t seen Mista and Trish for a full day, spent hiding out and berating Giorno. She has to stay.

Giorno turns to Mista and nods. “Yes. Just coffee, please.”

“I already cleared those sweets from your desk,” Trish says, sliding another empty cup under the stream, sipping from the first. “Which do you want?”

“The dorayaki, please. You remember which one that is, right?” Giorno asks, his voice, like theirs, soft and raspy and never as loud as they are during the day. He turns to the kitchen table, pulls out a chair against the window, and sits. Jolyne follows.

“The little sandwiches, yeah. How many?”

“Three.”

“No eggs, Boss?”

“Never, Mista.”

“Christ, you can at least be nice about it.”

“It’s amazing he’s eating three snacks, don’t push it. And I’d like a poached egg.”

“Po -- how the fuck do you do that?”

“Oh, Mista, I don’t know, look it up on that phone you love so much.”

“Is Polnareff up?”

“Yeah, he’s -- oh, right here. Trish, seriously, how do you poach an egg?”

“Jolyne?”

She jerks, her chair coughing its wooden legs against the cold tile floor, and she notices Giorno’s sleepy eyes looking into her own. She doesn’t remember sitting down beside him, only the dull push and pull of the trio’s voices, like waves against the sandy edge of early morning, the clinking of pots against the stovetop like shells rattling. All background noise, all static.

“Yeah?” she says.

“Would you like breakfast? Coffee?” Giorno asks, voice gentle.

Jolyne shakes her head, meaning a nod. “Oh, yeah. Coffee and uh, the Premium Roll Cake? In the golden wrapper.”

Giorno’s face pinches slightly with confusion before repeating the order to Trish. He turns back to Jolyne.

“You know I don’t speak Japanese, right?” he asks.

She nods, and cleans the crust from her eyes. “Yeah. Why?”

“You said...something, just now. In Japanese.”

She blinks and shakes her head, not remembering, not hearing it. The sounds of the gas clicking to light on the stove fill her ears, and the coffee splashing into the cups. Trish carries over two cups, the snacks, and the turtle tucked under her arm, setting them all on the table.

“I didn’t mean to. Must be a, uh, defect. From Rohan-sensei,” she says.

“Oh, of course. I forgot, Josuke and your father have the same problem,” he replies, sliding her coffee and cake over to her.

She takes them, and holds the cup between her palms. The room is warm but she has goosebumps lining her skin. Lights turn on, one above the stove, another above the wooden kitchen table. Trish hovers by Mista, her fingernail tapping against the white glow of the screen of his phone, while he clatters a fork in circles through eggs in a bowl.

Giorno taps on the turtle’s shell and her uncle appears, stretching as if the room his body turned to has stunted the length of his arms.

“Buon Giorno,” he says with a smile, and then to Jolyne, “And good morning to you, angel.”

“Good morning, Uncle Polnareff,” she says, sighing.

“I see the night was as long as I thought it would be,” he says, turning to Giorno. “Did you keep her up?”

“Yes, of course. I showed her the files,” he says. She watches her uncle’s brow rise, and Giorno pauses, sipping his coffee. “I wanted to clear up any questions.”

“And did you ask her if she still has any questions?”

Her uncle’s tone surprises her. He asks as if she isn’t there, speaking for Giorno’s benefit to learn how to speak himself. She thinks of a teacher with a child before realizing it couldn’t be right, it wasn’t a fair comparison, not with the way Giorno’s expression flashes with a want to roll his eyes, then melts into resignation. A parent and child.

“I didn’t, no, because we fell asleep reading a lot of very dense, very heavy information, which she still has in her bedroom,” Giorno says, and sips his coffee.

“Ah, I see. Well, Jolyne,” her uncle says, turning, and behind his back, Giorno does roll his eyes. It makes Jolyne’s chest ache and she brings her hand up to cup her collarbone, bringing the heat from her palm into her skin.

“If you do have any questions, please. Ask them. You have a right to know,” her uncle says.

Jolyne nods. She can’t find her voice right now, knotted up in sleep and a longing for, she decides, her father. The comfort in the breaking of a schedule, of pre-dawn breakfast, watching the people in this home locking together with seams that are obvious, like a child’s puzzle, the picture clear even when the parts of the whole are separate. She misses home.

But as she watches, noise and words dull in her ears, the longing is sharpened for Giorno. For all of them, for her uncle to see her father, for these people she realizes she loves to be in her life and her lives, all of them: as a daughter, a niece, a friend.

She wants this, everywhere in the world.

It is in the late afternoon, the sheets falling around her legs like the white foam of waves, the sun blazing through the windows in a sweat-tinged fever dream, when Giorno shakes her awake again.

She opens her eyes to the incredible brightness of the sun, and him, the red indentations of his pillow still marbling the skin of his cheek. Behind him, the room is the stack of manilla folders, untouched since the early black hours of that night.

“Are you awake?” he asks.

She groans and buries her face in her pillow. “Yeah.”

“Stay for another week. Come to England with me.”

This raises her interest and her head. She looks at him and they both squint at each other in the light. He is tired, and so is she, but the idea grips her. She knows why they are going.

“Ok. Let’s go,” she says, and lifts her hand into the air. 

He cups it, and squeezes, and she squeezes back.

Chapter Text

The phone rings once, and her father picks up.

“Hello?” he says.

“Hey, Dad, it’s me,” she replies.

“This is a different number you called from before,” he says, immediately.

She sighs and rubs her eyes. It is an hour since Giorno made her the offer, and she is sitting up in bed, the sheets pooling around her body like a nest. She doesn’t know if this will be easy, but it is necessary; necessary, a feeling she knows, and is tired of. She realizes in the silence that the drive of her life has been necessity for months, not her wants, not her needs. She doesn’t think she’s ever acted on her own.

It seems obvious. She wonders why she hadn’t seen it before.

“Jolyne?”

She snaps out of it.

“Right here, Dad. And yeah, Trish gave me a new phone. Burners, y’know?”

He hums, gritted low in his throat. She hears the swinging of the screen door and she guesses he must be leaving for work.

“So, I still can’t call you back from this number, either?” he asks.

“Yeah, don’t bother, because. Well. I’m staying for another week.”

The following silence is different from the others. It isn’t the absence of words, but the loss of them, and her father doesn’t know what to say. She bites her lip and knows she can’t be the one to break it.

“Why?” he asks.

She exhales a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. She can hear him set his thermos, filled to the brim with black coffee, tap against the roof of his car. She knows this. She knows the way the roof must be hot, even in the early morning sun, how he has his arms resting on it, refusing to move until he gets an answer. His coffee is probably speckled with grounds; she usually makes it, he makes shitty coffee. She closes her eyes and sighs.

“Can I just say that I have to? I have to stay,” she says.

This quiet is the sorting of words and answers. She slouches, relieved, and listens to the staticky shuffle of his head tipping as he thinks.

“Are you in any danger?” he asks.

“No. None.”

He hums.

“If you are, let me know. I can be there in a few hours. Or wherever you are.”

He can, and he will. Now isn’t the time for crying though the breath she pulls in is difficult through her tight throat, and she nods.

“Thanks. I’ll remember. Tell Emporio and Hermes for me, ok?”

“Sure.”

“Tell them it’s not because I want to. I have to. That’s the important word. Have.”

“I know. I understand.”

She nods again, and knows, somehow, he does. Her eyelashes catch the start of her tears like nets.

“Ok. I’ll let you get to work. Thanks again.”

“I love you, Jolyne.”

She pulls the phone away from her face to whisper a cried, “fuck,” to the ceiling, and brings the phone back to her mouth.

“I love you, too.”

Chapter Text

No, it does not exist for you. You exist for it. You have come because it exists.

- Everything Is Illuminated

Snow lays in a thin translucent layer over the muddied ground. Her footprints are black and wet in the slurry, and she walks in circles beside the train, watching Giorno pretend to smoke a cigarette for character. St. Moritz is too cold for the shorts and jacket she wears, even in summer. Her long, dark brown hair sweeps against her back, trapping heat against her neck like a scarf.

Gold Experience’s hands drift through Giorno’s auburn hair, turning it black. It is strange to watch him become another person as he tries to smoke, his arm crossed over his stomach, looking tired and bored. She is supposed to be keeping a watch for the other passengers, but no one has bothered to walk around the opposite side of the train to stand on the first step of a mountain. He has their fake passports and multitude of identities, crafted for their safety during travel.

“What’s my new name again?” she asks.

“Irene. I’m Ambrogio,” he says. “You’re my cousin, visiting from America on vacation from university, and we are going from Italy to Paris.”

“Alright,” she says, and the word leaves her in a puff of breath.

He looks up at her and blows the smoke from his mouth into the air, narrowing his eyes. She stops pacing under his gaze. He frowns at the last half of his cigarette, and she snorts.

“You look like you could be my dad and Josuke’s little brother,” she says.

“Funny. You look like Elizabeth,” he says.

She raises her eyebrows, surprised, and grins. In the hours between the sleepy start of their journey through and out of Italy, they filled their train compartment with all the documents of their family history. A familiarity drifts through the past and the present as they use first names, talking of these people as if they know them.

“Do you want this?” he asks. He holds the cigarette out to her.

“I thought you needed it,” she chides, and takes it.

“I’ve made the decision that Ambrogio, like Giorno, doesn’t smoke.”

She smokes and it smoothes down her throat. It’s been ages since Hermes came home with a pack, the two of them sharing like they did in prison, leaning out of their bedroom window to avoid getting caught. She likes the intimacy smoking brings more than the act itself.

Giorno runs his fingers through his newly blackened hair. The circular curls he parts to the side of his head are gone, but twist, even as he tries to slick it all back. His frustration huffs out of his mouth in a white cloud.

“Have you read about Gramps yet?” she asks.

He shakes his head and starts to dig through his pockets.

“This is where he fought those vampires when he was my age. St. Moritz,” she says.

He pulls out a pocket knife. Gold Experience takes it and starts to hack away his hair, which he catches in his cupped hands like he is catching oil.

“Uh, Gio -- Ambrogio --”

“I can grow it back whenever I like,” he says. “Continue telling me about Joseph.”

“Fuckin’ warn me next time, Jesus, you look like a lunatic right now.”

“What about the vampires again?”

She groans out a sigh at his blunt ways of evasion, and she can see his cheek curve in a smile when he tips his head forward to shake out his hair. Gold Experience scrapes the knife along the nape of his neck, shaving down the hair.

“He just fought one here, and Caesar - you’ve read about Caesar?” He nods, and she continues, “He died here.”

“Mr. Joestar has told me about him.”

“Really?” Jolyne asks.

Giorno lifts his head. His hair is a short, curled mess, shapeless and dense and curling over his forehead, over his ears. Instead of a mass of strands in his palms he has a blue and black bird, that startles with a song from being born, and flies frantic from Giorno’s eggshell hands. He lifts them to his hair and shakes, smaller hairs flying out.

“He wears his emotions frankly. I liked that about him, and mentioned I had lost important friends, too. We had an understanding.”

“I get what you mean,” she says, and smokes again, remembering her father and the unspoken grief he shared when the burden of death kept her awake at night. Weather Report, F.F., mourned on the balcony with their names falling into the air.

He rakes his hair to the side with his fingers, trying to tame it. She stubs out the cigarette on her tongue and spits the ashed saliva into the snow. The pierce of the train whistle screams and makes the both of them jump.

“Do I look ridiculous?” Giorno asks, holding his hands up by his hair, waiting to attack it again.

She shrugs. “I think it’d look normal if I didn’t know you. It’s fine.”

“Really? I guess that’s all it needs to be,” he says, dropping his hands and they begin to walk around the train.

“It’s weird though. When we get to England, grow it back out,” she says, and roughly grabs the back of his head, rubbing her hand into his hair.

He turns to swat at her but she is already jogging back down the train, ripping open the locked train door to their car with Stone Free, and stepping onto the first step. She grins and breathes, the mountain air thin and textured with snow in her lungs, and he rushes to her, laughing.

It is raining through France, and in the minutes after she wakes up, she keeps her temple pressed to the window and watches the water snake rivers down the glass. The countryside is grey on grey, the hilly stretches of land showing no breaks in the thick clouds. Cows crowd under a tree to hide from the water.

“Awake?” Giorno says gently across from her.

She looks at him, and when she shifts to sit up, papers crinkle around her. The room they have on the train is small, with two seats across from each other, below two hanging beds. She has to curl her legs to fit on the mattress and it reminds her of prison.

Giorno has his black hair parted with rose scented pomade, clean and neat, a contrast to the wrinkling of his shirt and slouching back. The floor and seats are scattered with papers and photographs, jittering with the roll of the train, looking like they have shed fall leaves off of their family tree.

“Who’re you reading about?” she asks.

He lifts the folder for her to read the front, labeled Jotaro Kujo. Her mind is wiped clean like her father’s hand swiping cool glass, still and clear, leaving a faint ghost of fingerprints sighing away. She drags sleep from the corners of her eyes.

“Can I ask you something?” she says. Giorno raises his head. “How did you meet my dad?”

Instead of answering, he pulls a photograph from the folder, and stretches across to give it to her.

It is another copied polaroid of Dio from 1987. Frayed and creases white with bent corners, the copy is of a worn polaroid, unlike the cleaner ones inside the profile on Dio himself. Dio Brando is written along the bottom in the copy, but in newer pen ink beside it is written, Giorno Giovanna copy.

“That is the picture I had in my wallet. After I headed Passione, Polnareff saw it. He told me about the nature of my real father, and then contacted yours in a panic,” he says. “Polnareff was surprised to find Mr. Kujo already knew of me.”

The corners of his mouth are soft in their turn upwards, and she notices the faint hint of dimple in his left cheek again.. The cold tone of his voice still echoes inside her ears and she stretches her legs, knocking her toes against his shin with gentle purpose.

“How did it feel when you first found out?” she asks.

“How did it feel?” he repeats, and she nods, having made no mistake. He shrugs a little, and looks out the window.

“I was horrified. Scared,” he says. His voice hits the glass, the fog like blood showing proof of the pain in his words. “It was a week after the funerals for our friends, I barely had time for sleep, I wasn’t eating. And then Polnareff couldn’t look at me.”

His smile shakes under the weight of his sadness.

“Though, that lasted for only a few hours. Polnareff apologized and, well. I cried on his couch and he held me as best he could,” he says, and splays his fingers over his mouth, as if to cage it and the struggling smile. “I couldn’t believe the pain, the man I had carried with me my whole life, had brought him.”

“He’s not really your father, Giorno,” she says, and sits up, resting her hand on his knee. “He’s not your responsibility.”

His whole body sighs, and he rests his fingers over hers, handing her his melancholy smile.

“I had placed many dreams on that photograph. Before I decided to be a gangster, my hopes were on him to come to me,” he says, and pulls his hand away. He rubs his fingers under the collar of his shirt, over his left shoulder. “In a way, he did. But guilt is cruel that way. It doesn’t have to make sense.”

She mimics his action, her warm fingers on the base of her neck, edging at the raised skin of the birthmark there.

“Polnareff contacted your father, and he came to where our headquarters was located at the time. A very nice villa, outside of Rome, where Diavolo had operated out of. He told me more about Dio, and it was...awkward, for him, I think.”

Jolyne shrugs. “Well, yeah. He killed your biological father, and I don’t think he’s ever made a good first impression in his life.”

Giorno smiles and the heaviness of the air lifts a bit.

“He was very deliberate. I won’t pretend to know him well, but your father is not a calculating man, but everything he does is deliberate. Not once did he call me Mr. Giovanna,” he says, and his smile stretches to allow a brief flash of teeth, like the laugh at a hidden joke.

“Sounds like he was rude,” she says.

“No, no. I was sixteen, and so buried under work and grief, I didn’t even notice. His visit helped anchor me, I think. It helped to learn about Dio but also the man who won. We share more genetics to each other than I to Dio; he was the first relative I had ever known outside of my mother.

“It was a relief to know that there was a person in this world, with the same potential as my father, who was a good man. An admirable one.”

Jolyne’s body jerks into tensing up, every muscle and bone frozen but her heart. Her blood runs far and away down the roads of her veins, racing, trafficked, beating so wild as if it is moving for a way out. Giorno doesn’t seem to understand what he has said.

“The same potential, what do you mean?” she asks quickly.

“The time stop.”

“What about it?”

Giorno’s calm daze breaks. His eyebrows pinch with confusion and worry, and he sits up, papers rustling.

“Both of our fathers had the ability to stop time.”

Understanding weighs on her chest like a fist and her mouth opens, rolling her eyes to the ceiling, at herself. She knew this. Why didn’t she pay attention?

“That’s what Uncle Polnareff meant,” she says. “That’s what he meant when he told me my dad didn’t want to be like Dio. That’s...wow.”

She can tell by the grimace on his face that Giorno doesn’t know what to say. Her panic begins to settle, and she sighs out of her puffed cheeks, resting her head on her shoulder.

Once Dad asked her if she ever wavered in her fights; if the voice of Pucci ever slithered into her ears, down to her heart, coiling within her layers of doubt. If the idea that she could be wrong had ever entered her, and she knew the answer: no. Never. She remembers her father’s gaze at her then, his smile breaking over his face, and the way his voice rumbled like thunder praising lightning: you’re my kid.

She wonders if she should think about it. The only times she discusses the end of the world are with her father. Maybe she should discuss it with herself, too.

She steps out of her thoughts and back to Giorno in the train car, who is staring at her with worry.

“Sorry. I just never really thought about it like that,” she says. “Stopping time was just a lucky thing my dad could do the few times I really needed it. I’ve never seen him use it unless I was in danger.”

Giorno smiles, showing his teeth and stretching his one dimple deeper into his skin. Self-consciously his lips close over his teeth, but he doesn’t fight hiding his happiness. He nods and he looks far away, filling his eyes with a silent awe of a memory.

“I asked him to show it to me. I have experienced strange phenomena of time, but I felt that I had to know what my father had been capable of. It was a feeling of responsibility; one to Polnareff. Because it is terrifying, to deal with the consequences of actions you never see, and I had to know.

“We were in the atrium of the villa. He stood across from me, and he did something I still think is remarkable.”

Jolyne’s voice is soft when she asks, “What?”

Giorno touches his hand to his cheek and his eyes narrow as if he is staring at the sun. He lowers his eyes to her and there is a youth there, shining, and he is not twenty-seven, but sixteen.

“He stepped backwards.”

The room is silent, but their look between each other is so still that it should have a sound, filling the room. His eyes nearly shut with the force of his smile.

“He stepped backwards,” he repeats. “He had the power to do whatever he wanted and all he wanted was to let me be.”

The car was waiting for them at the station in Kent. She drives it with all of the windows rolled down because the late morning in England is radiant with sun. Giorno’s hair is golden and long, fluttery and bright and moving like light scattering itself on water. Her own is bundled and braided, black and green. They are Jolyne and Giorno.

The map sprawling over his knees rattles in the wind and they shout to each other over the roar of it, trying to find their way. Crossing the border from Kent to Surrey was easier on the roads, drifting, lazy rivers of asphalt over the hills, currenting them out of the cities and into the countryside. The streets are cracked with holes and she drifts into the right lane without noticing, Giorno jerking her elbow up, yelling, forcing her hands to turn.

“You’re no fun, Giorno!” she shouts, grinning at the way he blanches, and at the miraculous feeling of wind against her teeth. “We’re the only ones on this road!”

He shouts something in an Italian dialect she doesn’t understand, and jerks the car back into the wrong lane, making him yelp. She laughs at him and he tugs on her ear, smiling, rolling his eyes.

The whole ride is this: loud for the sake of being so, the wind raising its voice so they must follow it. They bicker on the country roads without names. She pulls over, Giorno leaning out of the window, into the sun with the map to read it, while she looks at the miles of green hills. The engine rattles, and in the rearview mirror she notices her bruises are gone, and they drive off again.

The asphalt dies suddenly, without warning, and she can see Giorno glance at her as the line of it approaches. She doesn’t ask for permission at the end of the road: she drives on, onto the unknown dust of it. Giorno looks down at the map.

The dirt road is one road. If the streets out of the city were rivers, this is a creek, burbling the car over the bed of rocks and holes. Dust flares up behind them and the car is louder than before.

At the apex of a large hill, Giorno hits her arm, shouting her name.

“Jolyne! Jolyne!”

She shouts what?! as she rips the keys from the ignition, and the car dies, and the air is quiet with the distant songs of birds.

Giorno’s eyes are wide as he looks out the windows. He looks down at the map, up at her: these actions are loud in the silence, amplified and significant.

“We’re here.”

She grips the keys in the sweat of her hand and breathing seems unnecessary. She looks out of the window behind Giorno’s head, and thinks: we are here.

They step out and the sound of the doors shutting is violent in this place. They stand by the car, not knowing how to make their introductions. After a moment, Giorno walks forward to the thin wooden fence drawn along the road, and Jolyne decides it is where she wants to be, too.

Their hands rest on the warm and splintered wood of the fence. The grass around the posts grows tall and brushes against her bare shins, as if it is reaching out to say hello.

The land is laid out before them the way a sheet billows out and over a bed. The sweeping hills ripple the earth, verdant and breathing, like the peaks and valleys of some timeless ribcage. Trees burst at the edges of the fields for the dark shadows. It is a place perfect for anyone brave enough to walk in the sun, or those who prefer the surrounding shade of leaves, waving to them in the undergrowth.

The sky is impossibly blue. Clouds pepper it and the land with their shadows crawling across the hills.

Jolyne takes off her shoes without looking away from the fields. She leaves them at the fence and swings her legs over it, stepping in, with Giorno following.

The ground is soft and her feet sink. Silent, they walk down the hill and into the valley, the sun tanning the backs of their necks. They can see it better down the slope, how up ahead on the crest of the next hill is a wound on the land.

Their foreheads shine with sweat as they make the climb up the hill, their breaths soft and weaving in and out of each other’s, and it should be harder than it is. The air here is denser and packed and fills her lungs with a sweetness that tickles the back of her throat.

There is a memory of a house at the top of the hill. The grass of the fields is trimmed but here it grows around the wreckage, wild, peppered with white flowers that nod their petaled heads. There are only a few wooden posts, shortened with age and worn smooth, the tallest one reaching her chest. The ground is littered with mossed-over rubble, chips of scratched tile, scratched, beige chips of marble. The size of it all is small, as if the land has only remembered one room instead of a mansion.

But striking through it all is a thick tree, right beside the tallest house beam, laying the remains in its shadow. The trunk twists like an old spine, like growing was always a struggle out here, on the top of a hill, fed with soil imbued with ruin.

Giorno rests his hand on the bark. She can’t see his face.

She steps inside of the room that isn’t there and the grass runs its thin green fingers up her thighs. There was a fire here once. She closes her eyes and tips her head back for the sun to blaze against her eyelids, seeing red and orange, soaking her skin in heat.

The end of the world happens like this: her father stops time and there is a knife in her side. She is dying before she knows it.

Nobody on earth remembers it except for those that were there, that were always there, with the stars ripping their skin and begging them to Cape Canaveral. And if the world doesn’t remember, why should she dwell on it? Because she can move within moments that time forgot to measure? A clock can’t bear to tick back to what it has lost, and so she ignores the way she is older than everyone else, by days and days that last seconds, where the sun becomes an arc of light in the sky.

The light is hot and wants to boil the sea, but beneath it, she opens her eyes. Her father raised her to believe the sting of salt was worth the price of sight and it saves her life. Do you know, Jolyne, a dolphin rides with a person on their back so they won’t drown, his voice in her ear, saves Emporio’s.

A priest dies under her fists, and his life, killing hers, is forced out. If he has made himself bigger than the world then she will stretch her body as far as it will go to beat him. She is half thread and half fingers when she chokes the life from his body, his eyes crying blood.

The world rewinds. She floats on her back and doesn’t move for the pain, for staring, for watching the arc the sun has become wind back to a line of hundreds of flat disks in the sky, dozens, spinning madly backwards and scorching her eyes. The world has never given back a life it has taken, and it needs to learn something new: how to live again after knowing death. She hopes it isn’t impossible.

Then, the warm sea rolls her body to shore. She is missing an arm and misses more when, she doesn’t know why, she stitches her knife wound shut. Butterflies drift overhead and their wings should be melting in this acidic sunset, but they don’t. They beat on.

Emporio is tethered in her strings on the shore. He nets it on her body, and she is laughing while he cries and it hurts them both more than anything. She has her arm again and Emporio puts it to use, hugging her, painful and tender.

Somehow she finds herself standing, heavy with water and shaky with new life, taking her first steps toward her father like she did when she was a year old, and with that she knows the world is turning the right way again. She wouldn’t waste her first steps on anyone else.

Everything in the sea is alive. Her father is still bleeding and the sounds of living scream in her ears and in her throat.

With his head on her lap in the back of the stolen car, chased by the police all the way to the hospital, her hands are in his wet hair, and he tells her he loves her, and is proud.

She climbs the knotted tree at the remains of the mansion and sees that in the valley behind it, there is an island of trees in the open field. Giorno’s hands are open for her on her way down, palms on her back, hand on her elbow. She leads him to what she saw.

The trees grow inside and outside of the short iron fence, rusted and bent with age, shaded in the leaves. They step into the mausoleum the canopy makes. Giorno turns the crooked gate into a small, flowering tree, and with the coaxing of his hand, the branches bow to the side.

The graves on the plot are worn smooth, like skeletons, all of the information of the people left there missing. They sink into the ground, crooked grey teeth, age spots of lichen and grass burying them, tall, wispy.

One grave is at the end, the surface still shined and the names crisp in the stone. A smaller grave sits beside it. The grass has been roughly hacked away by some kind hand, letting the flowers planted along the edge have the freedom the grow. She wonders who keeps this place; who could remember, when she didn’t even know?

Decaying items decorate the ground before the grave: soggy toys, a stuffed dog, medals of valor in the shape of Victory’s wings. A rusted bundle of wire could have once been round-lensed glasses. A bottle of wine, frosted with age, is wedged deep into the earth. Jolyne guesses the empty glass is meant for the wine, or to water the flowers.

The youngest item there is a lighter, left on the edge of the grave. The plastic body has been bleached in the light from black to white. She lifts it and Giorno says nothing, watching her thumb beat against it, gaining only a fitz of a sound. She places it back where her father did, whenever he visited years ago.

The grave reads JOESTAR. It is a family grave, the names listed and always together. Jolyne kneels and Giorno follows, and they read the grave together.

George Joestar 1835 - 1888

Mary Joestar 1836 - 1854

Jonathan Joestar 1868 - 1889

Dio Brando Joestar 1867 -

Erina Joestar 1868 - 1950

George Joestar II 1889 - 1921

“You said you knew of him, right? Jonathan?” Giorno asks, voice hushed, eyes never leaving the names.

“Yeah. Great-grandpa Joseph has a copy of his wedding picture in his house. I used to pull it out of the frame all the time.”

Jonathan and Erina’s faces were small in that picture, the two of them huddled together, smiling in that slight way early photography allowed. As a child she thought they looked sad, and had no clue why.

She has seen other portraits now, the handful left and the copies made from them. The matching university portrait of Jonathan is of a shy man. His eyelids were heavy, sweeping long dark lashing over dark eyes, sleepy and gentle like a calf’s. He was all slightly askew, from the single dimple in his left cheek and the wrinkling of his clothing. The gaze of the lens made him uncomfortable.

She says, “It’s so strange. Like, even if we didn’t know about him, we still knew he existed. We’re proof he existed. We always knew he had to be here, or else we wouldn’t be born.”

“We’re here but he’ll never know,” Giorno breathes out. “Who could have predicted us?”

Jolyne frowns and her chest twists with the scent of grass and dirt. She nods.

Giorno reaches for the blank space they both stare at. She glances at him, and his face is stern and timid at the same time. His fingertips just hover over the smooth surface of the grave, and she wants to hold his wrist, press his palm against it. He is allowed here. His body could never taint something he belongs to.

Instead, she pulls out Stone Free. Giorno removes his hand and looks at her stand, at her inside the body, and watches as Stone Free puts its hand forward.

It hurts, but her will is strong, and she carves 1988 into the space that has been waiting for it. It is crude and tinged with her blood, her teeth clenched and pads of her fingers raw, and Giorno cups his hand on her shoulder.

Finished, she sits back, her blood gentle as it drops from her fingers.

The leaves flicker in the wind like old lungs rattling from the world’s first breath. The small kingdoms of the grass buzz and click with their lives, and birds speak across the hills, voices swinging into the valley. The land talks, and says: it is over, and we continue.

They sit in their car in the parking lot of Heathrow Airport before her flight, windows down and the buttons for the radio greased from their fingers flipping through the stations. They both push their seats back and lift up their feet: Jolyne on the dashboard, Giorno out the window. The sun is setting golden, flooding the parking lot and making it beautiful. He balances a box of McDonald’s chicken nuggets on his stomach while he eats and steals her fries, and she can’t believe it’s happening.

“Gimme one of those,” she says, and reaches to grab at his food.

He swats her hand away with Gold Experience. “You’re on your second Big Mac, you’re not hurting for this.”

“I’m a growing girl!”

He laughs when she uses Stone Free to take a chicken nugget and shovel it into her mouth. It’s a real laugh, his voice ringing like a bell. It makes her laugh every time, makes her want to shake him until it rings harder, stronger.

“I can’t believe you even know what a Big Mac is, let alone eat this stuff,” she says after she swallows.

He shrugs. “We have them in Naples. When my parents forgot to pay for my food card at school, I would steal a car and some money and drive anywhere to eat. I still like it.”

“I used to do shit like that, but I’d just ditch school and walk. You ever have McDonald’s breakfast?”

“You mean the cafe?”

“No, breakfast. Served until 10:30 AM?”

He stares at her blankly and when she explodes, yelling, he laughs again.

“Oh man you’ve never had their pancakes? Ugh, they’re so fucking good! And the, fucking, like, hashbrown slab? You’ve never had that?” she shouts, grinning, hitting his arm with the back of her hand.

He shakes his head. “No, never.”

“Jesus! You’re really missing out,” she says, the end of her laughter dying.

They both pause to sip their massive drinks. The clock on the radio tells her she should go into the airport soon, but she wishes she could drive. Giorno could navigate them across the ocean and they can keep the radio on, sucking the last of their sodas until they rattle ice into their mouths. It would be hot and the windows would be down, not her stuck alone on a plane.

Giorno is smiling. He turns it to her.

“I would love to eat breakfast at McDonald’s if I ever visit Florida,” he says.

She stops drinking and holds her straw between her teeth, stunned. She doesn’t think a single relative has visited her family besides Baba and Uncle Polnareff, both years ago. Her homes always felt empty and missing bodies she never knew how to find.

She nods, and bites the straw as her grin spreads.

“You mean it? You want to visit us?” she asks.

He nods. “If it’s alright.”

“Of course it is. Of course! It’s no hotel, but the apartment’s got a couch, you and Mista can fit on it,” she says, and her mouth moves as she thinks. “Trish can sleep in my bed and I can sleep on the floor. Dad won’t mind sharing with Uncle Polnareff, his room has an empty fish tank in it -”

“- We could rent a hotel room. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you,” he says.

She twists her face up into a flippant scowl and rolls her eyes. “Since when are you an inconvenience? Look, we’ll make it work. You’re coming and that’s that.”

He laughs and nods. “Alright. I give in.”

They sit quietly together. Another minute passes, then another, the two of them not moving; just enjoying companionable silence. She bites down the last of her burger and crumples up the wrapper with a sigh.

“Guess I’d better go,” she says.

“Oh. I guess you’re right.”

They collect their trash and bundle it into the paper bag, silent as they get out of the car and she pops the trunk. Giorno pulls her suitcase out and pulls up the handle. It sits between them. The parking lot is hot, but not as hot as Florida, and she wants to mention this to him but her voice is caught in her throat.

He lifts the suitcase and puts it aside, stepping forward, opening his arms.

Like a wave that has been building, cresting for years, it finally crashes down with a sigh of relief from their mouths, into their shoulders. The hug is tight. The white fabric of his shirt is cool against her face, and her palm presses against the damp sweat of his back. She can hide her eyes in the dark of his neck from the sun, lighting them both in fresh gold, gilding their hearts.

They pull away and laugh when they find each other teary-eyed. He squeezes her shoulders before rubbing at unfallen tears.

“Thanks,” she says, forcing out all that she means into one word, because too many would cheapen its meaning.

He shakes his head, grinning. His smile dimples in his left cheek like his father’s.

“No, thank you. I’ll see you soon,” he says, and digs into his pocket, pulling out a piece of paper. “Call me when you land.”

She didn’t even know he had a line available for calls outside of work. She takes it in her sweaty palm and grips it, giving him one last hug good bye, and walks into the airport.

The lights of the airport are white and her shadow is pale on the floor, as if the place is so bright that shadows are being burned from it. The glimpses she sees outside show the black of midnight, spotted with dots of colored lights like stars sinking down to the land. She can’t walk fast enough to the baggage claim.

She pauses at the mouth of the hall that feeds into the massive room and pretends to be a stranger. Her father stands like her, head and shoulders above the rest, but he doesn’t see her yet. She doesn’t know what her father looks like at a distance.

A weight rests on him that is visible. His presence catches the crowd’s gaze, flickering up and down and trying to spot the man behind the high collar and hat brim, then drifting away from his life and back into their own. She sees the way he dresses, the way he holds himself: he is hiding as best he can. He knows that a hero’s presence likes his broad shoulders as a home and he is strong enough to carry it, but he dislikes attention. He stands despite it.

She notices Hermes pacing beside him, her weight hopping from foot to foot, wearing the athletic shorts and tank top she usually sleeps in. She yawns behind her hand, tired after work and classes. Her eyes lock onto the conveyer belt they stand beside as it rattles into movement and waits for Jolyne’s bag.

Emporio is hard to see among the people. He fidgets and bounces on his feet before turning to her father.

Dad looks up. She waves, and she is so grateful that he can he wave back.

Emporio reaches her first across the floor, crashing into her legs, his face pressing into her stomach with his hat flying off his head. She laughs and struggles to bend down to her knees to hug him properly, the right way, reaching behind him when his face buries into neck to pick up his hat.

Hermes comes next and kneels on the floor with them, wrapping them both in her long arms. Emporio’s sniffling turns into laughter as she jostles them all and shouts it’s about fucking time you came back!, and Jolyne kisses Hermes’ cheek with her lips and teeth. Jolyne realizes they must look ridiculous all on the floor of the airport and she loves it; she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Emporio takes her bag and Hermes looks out at the conveyer belt when they break apart, and Jolyne goes to her father.

His arms lift and the mouth of his coat parts like his body is ready to speak, and she fits her arms inside, wrapping around him. When his arms stretch around her, his coat swallows her up in dark blue. She presses the shell of her ear to his chest and his heart beats.

“Good to have you back, Jolyne,” he says.

At 3 AM they sit on the balcony of their apartment. Behind them, Hermes is asleep on the couch in front of the TV quietly spitting infomercials, while Emporio struggled to go to sleep, begging to stay awake for as long as Jolyne. They finally put him down in her bed.

The kitchen floor is still half gone, half in place. Dad leans his arms over the railing of the balcony like her, and sips his massive, sweating can of green tea.

“I left it because I didn’t know what you wanted to put down. We can go to Home Depot tomorrow and pick out a new floor,” he says.

She shrugs and sips from her own can. Their view was never stellar but it was always theirs, and she can’t pull her eyes away from it. The surrounding buildings and street lamps glow dull yellow against the purple hue of the night, fading off into real pitch black over the sliver of ocean they can spot in the gaps of buildings. The rush of cars melts into the sound of the water.

“Maybe. If you’re not in a rush to fix it, it can wait a day. I might need it to unwind,” she says. She pauses to stretch her back and it pops nicely. “We could go to the beach tomorrow, if it’s nice.”

Dad hums with his can against his mouth, and the sound vibrates into it.

She thinks about him returning home all those countless times. The humid air feeling like a sweaty embrace, the relief of the air conditioner in the living room, the sodas in the fridge, the couch armrests fraying, the knobs on the bathroom sink turning the opposite direction of all the other sinks and splattering water when trying to turn it off. Familiar and his, familiar and hers.

She finishes her green tea and taps the can lightly, debating if she should crush it, and deciding not to. Instead, she just holds it over the edge of the balcony.

“I think I’ll take some online college courses,” she says. “I might get a basic degree, just to have it. And on the side look into any work the Foundation might need done; just stuff going on in the area.”

Instead of tensing up, instead of saying no, her dad stays still. He swirls his can for a moment and then, as if the sloshing of the liquid told him something, he nods.

“Alright. I’ll put you in contact with the people I know.”

“Yeah? Thanks.”

He hums again and finishes the last of his drink. Star Platinum’s arm sets in on the floor and Dad stays still, fingers lacing together, staring at the sky.

They don’t have the talk. Silence from him is ok sometimes, when there is too much to say and it is too late and the night is too nice for words. She will tell him about England and ask him about his visit there someday. Now, they look at the sky, at the few stars that shine against the beating of artificial lights below them. Above and below they are two figures on a balcony, sharing the gift of time without measure together.