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Winter in Morioh is undeniably beautiful. That's what comes of living in a quaint, suburban sort of town that tends to get snow in the last months of the year; the days grow shorter, the lights come on sooner, the scarves and thick woolen socks come out of storage. Shoveling snow becomes the prevalent homeowner's outdoor chore, replacing the wider variety of summer activities — trimming bushes, cultivating flowers, keeping the lawns green and clipped short like the clean-cut lines of a baseball stadium. There's danger of slipping on unseen ice or being snowed in without power overnight, but things are better in Morioh now, it's a bigger town with a bustling populace and gone are the days of emergency services being too far to reach in a snowstorm. Winter in Morioh is inconvenient at times but beautiful in other respects, and it's a sleepier time of year that's more suited to staying indoors than venturing out to engage with the handful of bundled-up citizens who do take to the streets and sights in order to go about the business of their daily lives.
Winter in Morioh is so quaint that Rohan is pretty sure he's going to stab someone. Preferably Josuke.
Actually, no, he's fairly certain that it's going to be Josuke, because lately Josuke has been acting strangely in ways that he has absolutely no business to. He watches, sometimes, as Josuke goes walking past along the sidewalk in front of his house, which frankly ought to earn him a knife to some reasonably vital organ because not only is he walking on freshly-fallen snow that hasn't been shoveled yet and making it exponentially harder to remove later with the way his footprints are tamping it down, he's got absolutely no reason to be walking down that sidewalk in the first place because this isn't his way home from school and there are no other venues around that he could possibly be going to otherwise. Which means that Josuke has to be doing it on purpose, which is why Rohan's heat bill is proving to be so high these days, because every time he sees Josuke walking past with his scarf pulled up to his nose and little puffs of steam collecting in the frigid air where his breath hits it, his impulse is to go to the thermostat and turn it to a temperature better suited to a sauna, and revel peevishly in how warm and snug he is in comparison to that idiot he's watching through his fogging-over windows.
Sometimes he doesn't even come alone. Sometimes he brings Okuyasu with him, and then there's two of those idiots making a mess of his sidewalk, laughing and clutching each other and making a mess of the snow on his lawn, destroying its otherwise pristine layers with body-prints and scuff marks and deep scooping indents where they've snatched up handfuls to throw snowballs at each other. They're a menace, and they always take time out to stop and look deliberately up toward his house, straining to see like they're trying to catch a glimpse of him through his windows, and he refuses to ever give them the satisfaction.
They do this regularly. Always turning up, always loitering on his sidewalk like they're waiting for something. At first it comes like clockwork, at roughly the same time of day and on a handful of days in a week. Then things start to change; the frequency increases to every day, and that's when Okuyasu starts coming regularly, too, presumably because two hooligans trespassing on his property make an exponentially larger nuisance than just one. Eventually, they start coming at different times of the day; that just makes it all the more obvious that they're doing it on purpose with some malicious ulterior intent, because now they're going out of their way to stalk his house at various intervals. He could stab Josuke with an icicle and bring it in the house with him, and the evidence would melt down the drain and no one would ever know.
Once, just once, he spots Koichi walking past his house. Unlike the other two, he's respectful of the property he's walking on, and doesn't muss the snow or call attention to himself or make a mess of things. Like the other two, Rohan sinks lower in his favorite armchair and ignores the way he stands on his tiptoes to peer up at the house, because Yukako Yamagishi is with him and the way they smile at each other brings an inexplicably bitter taste to his mouth. He'd let Koichi in if it were just Koichi. He'd entertain him like a proper guest, even, and probably wouldn't make any more than a token complaint about how doing it was cutting into his work time. They'd have coffee and talk and Koichi wouldn't be outside in the freezing cold like he is now, it'd be doing him a favor so really it's his own fault that he's stuck out there, because he doesn't even seem to notice that it's cold when he's flashing smiles up at Yukako, so he can freeze to death for all Rohan cares, that's no business of his.
So his house stays warm and the snow keeps falling, and he's so far ahead of his deadlines that it's sort of making him miserable; there are manila envelopes filled with finished pages stacking up on the shelves above his work desk and it'll be months before anyone even looks at them, months before people appreciate them and comment on them and think critically about the ideas he's advancing through them. He could go out, and he almost does, but for some reason the thought of seeing the footprints and indentations in the snow on his sidewalk makes his stomach turn, and he doesn't know why.
It's absolutely not that he's lonely. He doesn't get plagued with that strange, insidious sort of loneliness that's born of standing on the outside looking in at things. He doesn't want to fall in the snow or listen to Josuke's raucous laughter or try to fight Yukako Yamagishi for an ounce of Koichi's time and attention. He doesn't know what he wants, frankly, except that it's not this, and that doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon.
But it's not loneliness, which is why it's got to be a fit of insanity that makes him open his front door on the one day when Josuke finally gets daring enough to venture all the way up the walk and ring his bell.
(It is, however, satisfying pettiness that makes him wait there in the cold just to the point of turning to leave before Rohan finally opens the door. And of course, he doesn't invite him in, because Josuke is covered in snow and the house is approximately the temperature and humidity of the Bahamas in summer, and he'd melt all over a rug that's probably worth more than the four years of tuition Rohan knows he's been saving up for lately.)
"Rohan! Holy shit, you're actually here. Where've you been lately?" Josuke blurts out when at last he swings the door open. "...Damn, it's like a furnace in there. You're not sick, are you?"
"Are you going to tell me why you're wasting my time today?" Rohan finds himself retorting instead, which feels oddly like peeling off a scab — sharp and pleasant but distantly painful, too.
To his distinct annoyance, it makes Josuke laugh and shuffle his booted feet in a way that Rohan knows has very little to do with the cold; the snow that's been clinging to his windowsills and collecting around the edges of his porch is rapidly melting away into puddles from the force of the hot air escaping through the open door, and it makes him scowl because it means there'll be ice there later. Maybe it'll freeze over and the next time Josuke comes to knock on his door, he'll fall and break his neck.
"Ah, yeah, actually — I'm supposed to ask you something. Um. So, uh, Christmas Eve? It's coming up, and a bunch of us, we all thought it'd be cool to go out together, you know? Like, as a group, skating and maybe we'll get a cake or something, and —"
And all of his words muddle together into meaningless sounds, because what's really arising out of them is something much more obvious and infuriating; it's phrases like fifth wheel and words like pity, and Okuyasu is waving at him from the street like a monkey swiping at low-hanging fruit in a tree just out of its reach, and between that and the lazy smile on Josuke's face, his answer is already all but made for him.
"Get off my porch," he snaps in a tone that echoes with I refuse, and steps back just far enough to slam the door in Josuke's face.
He doesn't peek out the windows to watch him leave, but he knows Josuke goes; he can hear the crunching of footsteps through the snow and the boisterous chatter that erupts when he rejoins Okuyasu near the street, and gradually the cacophony of their existence fades away into silence, leaving only their bootprints and scufflemarks as evidence that they were ever there at all. Even those will be gone soon, too; it's starting to snow again, and perhaps overnight those prints will fill in. He'll need the walk cleared somehow, but the lawn will be perfect again, and every sign of those idiots will have disappeared without a trace.
And good riddance, Rohan makes himself think, and goes to make himself a perfect cup of coffee to melt away even the slightest hints of the winter's chill that might've slipped inside his mouth while he'd had his front door open.
His prediction, quite unsurprisingly, proves true. It snows again overnight, and when he wakes up his lawn and sidewalk are pristine. His house is warm, his supplies are full, his deadlines are adequately surpassed, and no one comes to destroy any of it.
(He stares at the phone sometimes, and his fingers itch. He placates them with swift strokes and the grip of a pen instead, and it does absolutely nothing to help.)
On Christmas Eve, there's a knock at his door. It comes just as afternoon is waning into evening, but in December it's so close to the solstice that nightfall always strikes unusually early, so there's no way to tell just from the streetlights and the glow of people's own decor coming to life in the twilight; he's making himself coffee again and he carries it to the door with him, not bothering to look in the hall mirror because he knows already that he looks immaculate and comfortable in a knitwork housecoat lined in silk, with embroidered house slippers to match. It's clearly Josuke, come to be obnoxious again. Rohan's already mustering up his best haughty refusal as he swings open the door, eyes narrow and perfectly-painted lips set in a disgruntled line.
He's not expecting it to be Jotaro idling there on the doorstep, bundled up against the cold in a smart white peacoat with black buttons and black leather gloves.
Jotaro, evidently, isn't expecting him, either, if the perplexed look that crosses his face is any indication.
"You're not ready to go?" he offers instead of a hello, which Rohan decides ought to bother him but for some reason it doesn't.
"Go...where, exactly?" Rohan snaps back, though he already knows what's coming; the snowy walk leading up to his house is crisp and broken only by a single set of footprints that concludes at Jotaro's boots, and the rest is all perfect, exactly the way he's wanted it to be each and every time some frustrating idiot has come by and destroyed it. It irritates him, absently, that Jotaro has been careful and the snow still looks so pristine, because he wants to be furious about it being ruined but it's not ruined and that leaves him with nothing to do but hope, idly, that when Jotaro turns to walk away he won't slip on the ice that might still be underfoot on the porch.
But Jotaro is frowning slightly, and he's hardly slow on the uptake, so more likely than not he's already worked things out as well, himself.
"Josuke told me you were coming," he explains, and reaches up to pull his scarf a little more securely around his neck. "We're meeting the others at the rink? Supposed to be."
"You wasted a trip," Rohan tells him, before he can think better of it, before he gets too tempted to say something pathetic, like how if he wanted he could be dressed and styled in ten minutes because getting ready is an art form, his own personal tour de force. "I have more important things to be doing, and I told him as much when he turned up here like a lost dog last week, begging for the same thing."
Jotaro's quiet a moment, and then finally offers a steady, "You're sure?", which very nearly does his resolve and his stubbornness in. But he tells himself that it's warm in his house and it's obviously freezing outside, and that's just one more reason why refusing is the superior option, it's so undeniably the better course of action, no matter how many thoughts of snickering at Josuke and stealing Koichi away from Yukako and gliding expertly across the ice with both his arms wrapped around one of Jotaro's go slip-sliding through his mind's eye.
"Good evening, Jotaro," he says, when he knows he should've said "good riddance", and closes the door quietly when he really means to slam it.
(It's stupid to be acting like this, when he's warm and snug and secure and successful and happy and sliding down the inside of his closed front door, down to the floor with his face in the hand that's not holding his coffee cup and maybe Jotaro's still on the porch, maybe he hasn't left yet maybe the offer didn't expire when he shut the door and he can still say wait but he doesn't, he stares at his knees and hopes that Jotaro has enough manners to not try and peek in the windows like Josuke would, and starts memorizing sensations to help calm himself down, because he's never had much interest in writing romances or tragedies but if he ever wants to, the things he's experiencing right now are going to prove invaluable.)
Jotaro doesn't knock again. He's intelligent and competent and knows how to take a hint; he takes this one, clear as day, and when Rohan eventually gets up to look out the peephole in his door, his stomach twists when he notices that Jotaro left as he came, quietly, and walked in his own footprints on the way back out to minimize the damage he did to the snow on the walk.
The evening ends up quiet. He plans out a schedule of things to keep himself preoccupied; he'll finish his coffee, eat a light dinner, take a bath that lasts an hour at the minimum. He'll take his usual ten minutes to think about Reimi, and when he does his customary drawing of her tonight, he decides he'll sketch her in charcoal for the interesting change of medium. Upon that decision, he amends the schedule to place the sketch before his bath; it'll be more efficient, and he'll get clean of the smudges without repeated washing of his hands. After the bath, he'll read three chapters of a novel he's been working through, drink two cups of coffee, touch up the paint on his toenails, and once dry, go to bed. That's his evening. It's a perfectly fine way of spending an evening. He's not missing anything, and he'll go to sleep content.
He's settling into his chair, wrapped in his bathrobe with his coffee and his book, when someone knocks at the door again.
He's hesitant to answer it; he's fresh out of the bath and his makeup isn't done, but somehow making whoever's on the other side wait on his pleasure while he pulls himself together doesn't have the appeal that it usually would. He settles for rubbing his eyes to clear them of any tiredness and fussing over making sure his hair, at least, is perfect; it's not styled but it's at least dry and fluffy and he's a very naturale form of perfectly presentable, which is what gives him the last push he needs to pull open the door.
It's Jotaro, waiting there. He's lightly dusted in snow, and he's holding a white paper box.
"Listen," he says, before Rohan can greet him, before Rohan can actually say a word, even, because with the hand that's not holding the box, he's leaning his weight against the open door and trapping it so that it can't be closed in his face again. "Just listen. Okay?"
And Rohan doesn't have the time to speak then, either, but he must make some sort of sign of affirmation, because Jotaro goes on, "Josuke said you'd already agreed to come tonight. That's what he told me. So I showed up because I thought we were going to get to hang out tonight. I wanted to see you. But then you didn't come."
And Rohan's about to say something, really he is, but Jotaro's not going to let him, not as he lets free a faint noise of frustration and keeps going, "So I went. And the kids are all having fun, they went skating and had a snowball fight and I was bored out of my mind, but that's fine. They're at the cafe right now eating cake, and being about as cute and ridiculous about it as you'd probably expect."
Rohan's pretty sure he's never heard Jotaro talk this much in his life. The heat from the interior of his house is melting the drifts of snow around the door again, and he doesn't even notice.
The white paper box comes up, like it necessitates his approval. "This is cake," Jotaro says, in a voice that's oddly adamant for someone talking about a baked good. "There are strawberries on the top. I don't know what it is you're doing that's keeping you so busy, but I'm pretty sure it's nothing you can't put on hold for a half-hour if you wanted to, and the only reason you're not is because you're stubborn. That's fine. But I'm here, and this is cake, and I thought I was going to get to see you tonight and I didn't. So I'm sorry that Josuke was stupid and it pissed you off, but can you at least not take it out on me?"
And then it's quiet, and the silence hanging in the air between them is expectant, and all of the heat is still escaping from the house but Jotaro's leaning on the door like it's a lifeline, as though Rohan can refuse all he wants but Jotaro's not going to let him, not this time.
It occurs to him, in that moment, that what Jotaro's doing without realizing it is somehow, exactly, the one subtle irrational petty stupid frivolous mortifying significant thing he's wanted.
"...I would've asked you to come in if you'd said 'hello'," he ends up saying, sort of quietly but still with a touch of acid, like fine old paper that's beautiful because of the imperfections beginning to eat away at the edges of the page. "It's cold outside, and you're letting out all my heat."
He lets Jotaro inside, and accepts the box of cake with a glance in the hall mirror and the idle thought that he could be presentable in short order if he can come up with a way to stall Jotaro for the duration, but the notion gets lost in his approval of the way Jotaro's shaking the snow off his coat and boots before he steps on the rug like the proper sort of houseguest that some people who share his bloodline aren't.
"You need to shovel your walk," he says as Rohan disappears into the kitchen to find plates and silverware, following along after once he's shed his winter wraps down to casual clothes that Rohan's honestly never seen him wear before, sturdy pants with pockets all down the sides and a hooded sweatshirt with drawstrings that makes him look ten years younger than he actually is. "Before I leave, I'll do it for you."
"In the dark?" Rohan answers with more than a little incredulity, eyebrows arching as he can't help but look up from the cake he's unwrapping.
Jotaro shrugs. "In the morning?"
...
...Oh.
He'll have to turn down the thermostat, Rohan decides as he busies himself with meticulously slicing into the cake, because now that he considers it, the heat is frankly getting intolerable and that's precisely why he can feel it collecting beneath the surface of his cheeks, and Jotaro's probably used to high temperatures like that but he'll just have to suffer and find an alternative method of staying warm if he gets cold, because this is Rohan's house and in the end he'll keep it at whatever temperature he wants.
Winter in Morioh, he concedes silently, might have its own unique perks. As someone with a personal mandate to explore any and all experiences to their fullest, he'd be remiss if he didn't take full advantage of them when they arose and presented themselves.
...Especially if they were going to do it with Christmas cake.