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“You came here by yourself?” Jotaro has to pinch the bridge of his nose to ease the migraine that’s starting to build there. Has been building there for the better half of this month. “I thought I told you to pair up if you go out.”
It’s barely even six, school just got out, rush hour’s in full swing, every bus line from here to the coast is packed full, and the sun hasn’t even set yet. That’s what Jotaro’s expecting to hear, because that’s what Josuke says every time he toes the line about just how careful he really needs to be.
Josuke doesn’t say any of that this time. In fact, he doesn’t really say anything at all. He just leans against the doorframe of Jotaro’s hotel room, arms crossed and mouth shut.
Looking pale. Suspiciously pale.
When Jotaro leans in closer, he can make out the shaky, pointedly controlled inhales Josuke takes in, like he’s out of breath. He doesn’t look flushed like he’s been running, but there is a light sheen of sweat that beads right around his hairline, sticky strands of jet black hair falling out of his fringe and mussing up the otherwise clean outline of his pompadour.
“Are you sick?”
Josuke jolts, then clamps his lips shut tight with a twist to his face that suggests that his stomach might not be ready for that kind of sudden movement. “Me? Nah, I’m good. Just, uh. M’just a little tired. Long day, and all that.”
Jotaro can only imagine.
“We can talk later then. Go get some rest.”
“But you said you wanted to go over those papers the Foundation sent you.”
Josuke can take things seriously. He’s more than capable of assessing the gravity the situation around him, even if he isn’t quite as good at assessing the risk that puts on himself as a result. He’ll push, if he really thinks there’s something he can do, but this doesn’t feel like that.
Jotaro sighs. “I need some time to go over them myself. There’s no point in having you here anyways if you’re not focused.”
“I’m focused,” Josuke protests.
That’s absolutely not true, and Jotaro honestly doesn’t know why Josuke keeps acting like he’ll buy it. He doesn’t even know if Josuke’s convinced by his own performance.
“Just go home. Come on. I’ll walk you to the bus stop.”
“Hold on—”
Jotaro holds the door open and steps through, already reaching out to nudge Josuke to the side, but he stops before he even gets into the hallway.
Despite the warm orange of the overhead lights, there’s almost no color in Josuke’s face. While he normally comes close to Jotaro’s height, he’s a little shorter now, shoulders hunched in and jerking with these sharp, staccato breaths he’s taking in. When he looks up at Jotaro, his eyes are unfocused, hazy, and just a tad panicked.
Which makes sense, given the fact that he absolutely reeks of tobacco.
Jotaro sighs.
“How much did you smoke?”
Josuke whips his head up like a deer in the headlights, then has to catch himself against the wall when he starts leaning too far back with the momentum.
“I don’t smoke.” He hesitates when Jotaro just stares at him. Josuke clears his throat and pointedly stares at the wooden trim on the door. “I mean. It was just like. Five cigarettes.”
“Today?”
“While I was walking here.”
Which translates to: in the span of twenty minutes.
Jotaro tips his head back, takes a long, deep breath, and opens the door again. “Come in.”
Josuke hesitates, eyeing the door like Jotaro’s waiting for him to get close enough so he can slam it shut in his face.
“Are you sure?” he mumbles. “I can just walk back. Really. I just need like, a minute.”
Jotaro doesn’t bother to deign that with an answer. He just steps to the side and waits for Josuke to get over himself.
After another, long moment, Josuke carefully inches his way in like he’s two seconds away from keeling over, and with the way he looks, he just might be. He yelps when Jotaro presses his fingers against his neck, but he’s not nearly coordinated enough to step back without flailing over himself in the process.
“Wha—?”
“Mm. You’ll be fine.” His pulse is a little fast, but it’s steady. Nowhere near dangerous enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room, even if there’s some quiet part of him that wants to drag Josuke there anyways. “There’s a spare toothbrush in the bathroom. Brush your teeth and wash your hands. Go lay down when you’re done.”
“Wait, where’re you going?”
“To the lobby. I’ll be back in a minute.”
He leaves before Josuke can get another word out. It’s for the best. If Jotaro sticks around, then Josuke’s going to run himself into the ground trying to either apologize or explain himself, and that might just be the thing that actually gets him to throw up more than the nicotine itself. Better he has a minute to compose himself.
The Morioh Grand is too nice to have a vending machine in the lobby, but apparently they’re fair game to having one just outside the parking lot instead. Jotaro shells out just enough hundred-yen coins for a plastic water bottle and ignores the fact that he still has half a pack and a lighter in his coat pocket.
He doesn’t have to ignore it. Josuke probably expects him to be gone for a few minutes anyways. But if Jotaro stands out here on the curb and smokes while Josuke goes through his first case of mild nicotine poisoning, he might as well just leave entirely.
He wonders, not for the first time, why Josuke trusts him to handle these kinds of things.
When he gets back to his room, it’s dead silent. The door to the bathroom is half-open, a toothbrush left on the sink and beads of water dotting the pristine mirror. Josuke’s uniform jacket is splayed over the top of the couch despite the fact that the air conditioner’s running hard enough to leave the whole room just a little too cold. Josuke blinks up at him from the couch in just his t-shirt, where he’s curled in on himself as best as his stature would allow and digging his forehead against the stiff wooden foundation of the armrest.
“Jotaro?”
Jotaro leans down to drop both bottles on the floor just next to Josuke’s head. “Drink it slowly.”
Naturally, Josuke doesn’t even try to touch it.
“How much was it? Like, a hundred, two hundred yen? I can pay you back for it.”
“Josuke.” Jotaro pulls the blinds down on the windows, just enough to filter the harsh summer sunlight that’s streaming in above them. “Shut up and drink the water.”
Josuke doesn’t say anything else while Jotaro fiddles with the air conditioning unit by the desk, but he hears the quiet crinkle of the bottle being picked up and the cap being snapped off before Josuke takes a few tentative sips.
By the time Jotaro pulls the desk chair out and turns it around so that he’s facing the center of the room instead of the window, Josuke’s managed to pull himself into a half-sitting, half-laying position against the armrest, picking at the label on his bottle with his nails.
It makes him look younger. Or maybe it just makes him look his age for once. Jotaro can’t tell.
“M’sorry,” he mumbles.
Jotaro blinks. “For what?”
Josuke shrugs, like that’s an answer enough.
“I wasn’t trying to get out of meeting up with you or whatever. Honest. I really wanted to help you out. I didn’t think you could get sick from just, you know. Smoking.”
Jotaro feels like he should touch on the first half of that explanation, and whatever that implies on what exactly Josuke assumes Jotaro thinks of him, but Josuke’s already muttering to the carpet and still looking a little queasy. There might be a time to press, but it isn’t now.
“It happens. If you haven’t built up a tolerance for it, too much nicotine too fast can make you sick. I don’t think you’ve had enough to overdose. It’ll just take some time for your body to process it all.” It feels a little strange, looming over Josuke while he’s curled up on the couch, so Jotaro ends up slouching a bit himself. Just to make them a little more equal. “Is this the first time you’ve smoked?”
Josuke tenses.
“Not really,” he starts. But he hastens to follow that up with, “I mean, I don’t smoke like, every day or anything like that. Seriously. I swear I don’t. I just got a pack a few weeks ago.”
“Does your mother know?”
Now, Josuke looks at him.
“She’d kick my ass if she did,” he says. “M’sorry. Fuck, I get it if you wanna tell her, but can you just like, wait a few days if you do? I don’t know how to explain it to her. Any of this.”
“This?”
“You know. Kira.”
A few tattered scraps of the label flutter down onto Josuke’s lap and wedge themselves between the couch cushions. “M’not stupid. I don’t wanna be drinking, or high, or anything while all this is going on. Crazy Diamond’s gotta be able to move if something really goes down. It just, I don’t know. It helps me think straight. And I need to be able to do that, especially now.”
“You know that’s not good for you in the long-term.”
“What, you talking about getting cancer or something?” Josuke slowly eases himself onto his back and brings his arm up to cover his eyes. Jotaro can’t tell if it’s from exhaustion or apathy. “Feels kinda like a moot point. S’already a pretty good chance that I might not live long enough to have to worry about that kind of stuff, you get me?”
Jotaro does. He’d thought the same thing at seventeen, and he thinks the same thing now at twenty-eight.
For someone like him, Jotaro thinks that might be a natural progression. Hearing that coming out of Josuke’s mouth makes it feel like a story in the newspaper though, one of those preventable tragedies that everyone likes to talk about.
“Sorry,” Josuke says quietly. “I didn’t mean it like, like that. I just mean, things are already bleak enough. Figured this wouldn’t make much of a difference, in the big picture.”
“It won’t.”
Josuke pauses. Behind the cover of his clammy hand, Jotaro can see him peeking out at him, brow furrowed with the kind of quiet confusion that feels a little too familiar.
“I know this has all been sudden, but there’s not much else we can do until we can find Kira. The Foundation has counselors, if you want a referral, but I don’t think you’d be interested in that right now, right?” Josuke shifts, glances away from Jotaro. “I understand. Talking doesn’t tend to be very helpful in the middle of a crisis.”
Josuke keeps squirming like he knows what he’s doing isn't exactly healthy or mature, but what right does Jotaro have to dictate how Josuke should be handling himself when he’s walking around wondering which of his friends might end up dead next? Smoking won’t save you from being killed on the street, but deep breathing and mindfulness won’t do much for that either.
There’s worse things Josuke could be doing. If he’s not starving his way through school, or leaving pockmark burns on his legs when he puts his cigarettes out, then that’s about all Jotaro can ask of him.
“I’m not mad at you for picking this up. I’d just rather it doesn’t become a habit before you can’t quit it. It’s easier to become dependent while you’re still growing. I won’t tell you to stop smoking if that’s what gets you through this,” Jotaro says. “But I’ll ask you to. If you really need to, you can smoke with me. I’d rather you do it with supervision, if you’re going to do it at all.”
Josuke doesn’t move, but Jotaro can feel the weight of his eyes on him.
“You’re really not mad at me?”
Should he be angry with him? Tomoko would be, undoubtedly, in the kind of jagged ferocity that lines her love. Joseph might be out of sheer exasperation, if he’s forced to deal with one more troubled youth in his well-to-do family.
Jotaro can’t say. But when he was where Josuke was, he was angry enough with the world for demanding so much of him and angry enough at himself for falling short of what everyone seemed to need from him.
Even if they never speak of it, despair runs thicker than love in their family.
“You’re doing what you can. I won’t be angry with you for that.”
The low hum of the air conditioner seeps in through the silence. Jotaro isn’t offended by the silence. Even if Josuke still can’t quite look at him, Jotaro knows he’s not being snubbed. Some things take time to mull over.
When Josuke reaches up for his jacket, Jotaro’s almost surprised by the fact that he can even move at all. He’s still sluggish though, patting blindly around his pockets before he finds whatever it is he’s looking for.
With his arm draped over his eyes, Josuke holds out his still-pristine pack of American Spirits.
“I know I should just toss them. You can, if you think it’d be better. But if you’re really serious about all that, can you just hold onto these for me?”
It’s a tentative offer, and one that makes Josuke falter like he’s not quite sure what to say. Jotaro doesn’t take his pacing for hesitance. Josuke just doesn’t have the vocabulary just yet to know how to ask for help.
Jotaro didn’t either, before. He won’t let that inexperience deny Josuke this time around.
He stands up and takes Josuke’s cigarettes.
Josuke doesn’t ask for them back the next day, or the day after that. A week passes with no new leads, but Josuke keeps coming by regardless, asking what he can do to help out.
Two weeks after that, Jotaro walks him to the bus stop a few blocks away from his hotel. They both end up sitting on the stiff plastic bench, slouching under the burnt amber sunset and feeling the full brunt of the summer humidity on their shoulders.
Jotaro doesn’t think much about it at first when he lights up, but he’s not blind to the way Josuke’s leg keeps bouncing, how his eyes keep darting around the street like he’s waiting for someone to get the jump on him if he doesn’t cover all his blind spots.
It’s not ideal. Nothing about any of this is ideal. But Jotaro still goes through the pack of American Spirits he doesn’t even smoke and passes his lighter to Josuke.
There’s better ways to cope. Ways that Jotaro hasn’t had the privilege of learning just yet, and ways that he could never expect Josuke to pick up now. Josuke deserves better, but all Jotaro can do is wait for the bus with him and keep the rest of his cigarettes in his pocket.
It’s about all either of them can do.