Work Text:
Jotaro doesn’t get it.
Josuke knew he wouldn’t. Doesn’t. Josuke can tell from the look on Jotaro’s face, the instant his sleeves are pulled up and Jotaro sees the mess he’s made of himself.
It’s not like he expected him to understand, anyways. He didn’t start because he wanted understanding. He’s not doing it for attention and he doesn’t want somebody to come running and telling him that it’s bad for him.
There’s a reason why he’s always in his uniform. There’s a reason why he stitched the sleeves a bit too tight around his wrists, making sure they wouldn’t ride up. He doesn’t want them to know — Okuyasu and Koichi and even Yukako. He doesn’t want to think of their faces if they found out, the confused tilt of their heads, their furrowed brows.
They wouldn’t understand. Jotaro doesn’t understand. None of them do, but Josuke at least has to try now that the secret is out. He can’t let Jotaro – cool, strong, always composed – think he’s some kind of weak loser; someone who cuts their wrists crying while listening to sad music. Josuke isn’t that kind of person. He’s got his reasons.
“I – uh, I can explain,” Josuke says weakly. Shit. Not like that.
“I can explain,” he repeats, more confidently. Yeah. Less like he’s about to cry, a little stronger in volume. “I don’t – I’m not sad, or anything. I don’t have problems. I’m just, just . . . ”
His voice trails off. His mind is blanking, the words refusing to come to mind. He doesn’t know how to explain himself. Jotaro’s hands are loose around his wrists, the warmth radiating off of them erasing every coherent thought in Josuke’s brain. He doesn’t think anybody’s held him like this since he was a kid.
Jotaro’s voice is quiet when he asks, “Did you do this?”
That’s easy. Josuke gives a jerky nod, because there’s no way he’s getting away with this. The cuts are too evenly spaced, too deep to pass off as an accident. They don’t have any pets at home, and he knows Jotaro wouldn’t believe him even if he said he came into contact with a Stand.
“Why?”
There’s the million-yen question. Why? Why did he do it? Why does he keep doing it? Why can’t he stop? Why does it feel like there’s no choice at all?
Josuke can’t say it. His mouth won’t move. His eyes won’t stop moving, flicking between Jotaro’s face (mouth drawn in a tight line, eyes so tired and shadowed) and Jotaro’s hands (warm, rough). The silence stretches on too long and Jotaro sighs and pulls away.
Josuke tries not to miss the touch when it leaves. Fails. Is too busy being angry at himself for it and almost misses Jotaro gesturing for him to sit on the couch. He sinks into the cushions and wishes it would swallow him up, bringing him to a world where this conversation isn’t happening.
“I ordered room service earlier,” Jotaro says. His expression doesn’t change. “You can tell your mother that you’ll have dinner with me.”
Josuke twitches. “Why?” What does Jotaro plan on doing that’s going to take longer than an hour or two? Does he seriously want to interrogate Josuke for that long? Is he going to try and get Josuke stuck in the looney bin?
“You didn’t have lunch,” Jotaro answers, like that explains anything.
“I didn’t – I would’ve had lunch if you hadn’t come by,” Josuke says before his brain can catch up. He cringes, anticipating the scolding before it comes, but there’s nothing. Only a lengthy pause.
“You’re right,” Jotaro says, and it’s so weird, so uncharacteristic of him that Josuke wishes he’d been scolded instead. This entire situation is weird. Bad. He wishes he were anywhere but here.
“Still,” he mumbles, like a sulky kid.
“I don’t think you want to go back to your mother right now,” Jotaro says, ignoring him. “You can wait here until you’re ready.”
The annoying thing is that Jotaro is right. Josuke doesn’t want to go back home with his sleeves back down, the healing cuts itching under the fabric. He doesn’t want to play normal in front of his mom and pretend like everything is fine when his worst secret has just been revealed to the last person he wanted to know.
Going home is bad, but staying here is worse. Staying means explaining himself which he can’t seem to do for some reason; it means more uncomfortable pauses and Jotaro’s tired, tired gaze on his arms.
The guilt that rushes in when he meets Jotaro’s eyes again is overwhelming. The tea table next to the couch is covered with disorganized piles of papers, walls of tiny printed text and handwritten annotations. On the far wall are photos and labels pinned up, clues and potential leads on Kira. Every inch of this hotel room is packed with evidence of Jotaro’s busy-ness, and Josuke has no room to be intruding on it.
He knows: the dark circles forming under Jotaro’s eyes, the hunch of his shoulders, the perpetual pinch between his eyebrows that’s growing more pronounced by the minute. Jotaro is busy. Jotaro has no time for Josuke’s crap, childish stuff that doesn’t matter and he can sort out alone anyways.
His breath shudders out in a pathetic wheeze. His fingers twitch, a vague attempt at gesturing his way into the truth, the truth that he can’t even understand enough to voice.
“It’s alright,” Jotaro says in that way of his, like he’s the sole authority on the topic and everything will be alright as long as you do as he says. Josuke wishes, not for the first time, that were actually the case.
Again, with a slight hesitation before opening his mouth that Josuke didn’t even know Jotaro was capable of: “Did something happen?”
“No!” Josuke blurts out, because at least that’s true. Nothing’s happened. Every Stand user they’ve come across they’ve managed to defeat some way or another. He still goes to school and comes back home and plays games until his mom yells at him to start his homework or come down to dinner.
“I mean, nothing crazy,” Josuke continues, because obviously the thing with Kira is still ongoing. He has to be a little more cautious when walking around town these days, hyper aware of potential surprise attacks. “My mom’s still fine. My grades are kind of slipping but it’s not that bad I don’t think, it’s not like I’m going to go to some fancy college anyways, right? I’m just — I’m going to stay in Morioh for my whole life and everything will be back to normal once we catch Kira.”
He knows he’s rambling and he can’t stop. Jotaro doesn’t stop him either, listening intently like what Josuke isn’t just spewing out whatever comes to mind.
“It’s stupid, anyways, it’s whatever. Sorry you have to, uh, deal with this. And you don’t have to,” Josuke says, tripping over his own words. “I’m fine, we can just pretend you never saw and it’ll be fine. I don’t mind. I would — I’d probably like that better actually, I know you’re really busy right now and it’s not a big deal. . .”
He trails off at that because Jotaro’s mouth has been growing progressively tighter and he’s starting to get really freaked out by the lack of response. Usually Jotaro will at least chime in a word or two to show that he’s listening, only this time it was probably Josuke who was speaking too fast to let him interject. Stupid. Good thing he remembered how to shut his fucking mouth before he could say something that would make him sound even more pathetic than he already is.
Jotaro gives him a look. Not quite pity, not quite anger. Josuke doesn’t know what to make of it.
“I’m not that busy,” Jotaro says, flat-out lying. “It’s not — you’re not in trouble, but we should talk about it. You.”
That’s exactly the kind of thing that adults say when you’re definitely in trouble and they’re just trying to wheedle a confession out of you. Except Jotaro’s not really like any other adult Josuke’s met, mostly because he didn’t grow up in Morioh but also because he’s Josuke’s nephew/mentor/whatever and he stands a head taller than everybody and he saved the world once. That’s Kujo Jotaro, marine biologist, possibly the world’s strongest Stand user, man who can stop time itself.
Kujo Jotaro shouldn’t be sitting in his hotel room with an uncle twelve years his junior, trying to figure out why Josuke can’t just be normal for once.
“We’ve been talking,” Josuke offers quietly. His brief outburst has already passed and he’s back to wishing somebody would stitch his mouth shut for him.
“Yes,” Jotaro says carefully, “but not in the right way, I think.”
Right. They’ve been dancing around the topic. It. The elephant in the room. Josuke can’t name it because then it would be too real, realer than it already became when Jotaro caught his sleeve when he was walking out the bathroom and tugged it up to reveal the scabbed over mess.
“Will you tell my mom?” is the only thing Josuke can ask in response. If his mom finds out, everything will go collapsing in on itself. If his mom finds out, there will be real consequences – she’ll take him to the doctor because she’ll probably think he’s got some worm in his brain that made him like this, and then when that doesn’t work she’ll take him to the only psychiatrist in town and then everybody will know he’s fucked in the head.
Josuke can’t let that happen. He thinks that he would rather die than let this get out any further. He also thinks that now is probably not the best time to voice this thought aloud.
Too late. There goes his mouth, running ahead of his brain again. I’d rather die. If his goal was to make himself look even crazier, he’s succeeded. Passed the test with flying colors, full ride to Kyoto University.
Jotaro frowns. “I won’t. Not right now, at least,” he amends, dashing the springs of hope rising in Josuke’s chest. “I had some bad habits, too, when I was your age.”
Josuke really does not want to hear about Jotaro’s wild delinquent escapades right now. It’s bad enough that Jotaro knows, probably thinks he’s some kind of freak now. He opens his mouth to tell Jotaro as much, but Jotaro is already rolling up the sleeves of his coat, folding them over his forearms.
The thing is – Josuke’s always known that Jotaro has scars. His hands are covered in them, small criss-crossing cuts that have long since silvered over. His knuckles are thick with the type of scar tissue that Josuke knows comes from punching something too hard for too long.
All these things, Josuke noticed and dismissed, filing them under his general image of Jotaro as the toughened battle veteran. He’s never really thought hard about it, why it’s always just him and Jotaro wearing long sleeves even as the summer weather drags on.
He didn’t think at all. He didn’t think it would be this, Jotaro turning his arms over to expose an entirely new mess of old wounds. Josuke knows these scars aren’t like his – they aren’t nearly as uniform, straight lines up and down, but.
But Jotaro raises one shoulder and says, “During the journey to Egypt, there wasn’t anything I could do to relax. My mother was dying and we were running out of time. So I found other ways to . . . cool off.”
Jotaro hardly ever talks about himself. Even his description of his entire quest with Josuke’s father and several other stand users to defeat the evil vampire DIO (seriously are vampires real?) lasted for a maximum of ten minutes, a brief summary of the events with none of the specific details Josuke had wanted to hear about. For Jotaro to be sharing anything, much less something this personal about himself is weird. Uncharacteristic.
And it’s all for Josuke’s sake. The thought makes him want to shrivel in on himself even more, his shoulders hunching inwards.
“I smoked too much,” Jotaro says – which, yeah, Josuke can see that. He’s seen Jotaro smoke a cigarette or two when he thinks none of them are around and stub it out before he’s even halfway done. “I was reckless. I picked too many fights.
“And,” he continues, pinching at a particularly round scar – a cigarette burn? “I was a little like you. I don’t think it was for the same reasons, but. It’s not so strange for you to be . . .”
A vague gesture, hands splayed open. Josuke’s always liked Jotaro’s hands, even if the first time they met he got socked in the jaw by one. Jotaro’s fingers are long, not particularly thick but clearly strong. Josuke used to think it was funny, how Jotaro would always put his hands in his pockets even as Star Platinum hurled punch after punch at whatever enemy Stand user of the week.
Josuke’s always known that Jotaro’s hands were scarred – he liked it, even, in the completely opposite way from how he thinks of his own developing scars. He isn’t sure why one is different from the other. He thinks that might be the point Jotaro is trying to make.
“It’s alright,” Jotaro finishes, keeping his sleeves rucked up. Now they’re matching, him and Josuke. Finally something they have in common, and it’s over something like this. Josuke doesn’t even know what he would do if he were Jotaro in this situation, confronted by the stupid problems of a kid ten years his junior.
Except Jotaro isn’t acting like they’re stupid at all. He isn’t looking at Josuke with the disgust he’d expected, watching and waiting quietly instead. It’s weirding Josuke out. Everything is seriously getting weird, and he isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do.
Is there a right answer to what Jotaro’s said? Is there a magic word that will throw Josuke back in time before this all happened, before he decided it would be a great idea to use his arms as a cutting board? Is there anything Josuke can do to fix this, make it so nothing happened at all, everything pristine and as new as the day it appeared?