Archive of Our Own

It's a good morning, all things considered. Kakyoin wakes up to blue light spilling through the cracked curtains and birds and traffic and Jotaro's face smushed into his collarbone, the cool morning not yet burned away by Morioh’s late-spring heat. He even has time to convert a page of his labyrinth of notes into a couple paragraphs of his dissertation with the help of extremely bad hotel instant coffee before they head out for the day.

They're meeting at Cafe des Maigots to discuss a handful of minor leads and check in with each other. The boys are late, of course, and Kakyoin’s already ordered breakfast for them and abandoned his own cappuccino in favor of stealing sips of Jotaro’s tea by the time they arrive in a cacaphony of noise and yelling and the clinking of Josuke's million bag charms. None of the leads seem particularly compelling until Okuyasu finally breaks into the conversation, more hesitant than usual.

“I kinda forgot about it, 'cause I haven't looked at his stuff since uh. But if you guys want, you can come look at all of Keicho’s notes and stuff. Since he had the arrow, y'know, he had a bunch of other books ‘n stuff that might help you guys.”

Kakyoin and Jotaro exchange a look. There's not much of a chance that some Japanese high schooler has anything that the SPW don’t already have on Dio, but it's worth a look. More important is the possibility that he left notes on the people he'd shot, who they should find or who's been reported missing. If there's anything on what stands they possibly have, that would be worth even more.

Josuke shivers across the table. “Ugh, your house gives me the heebie-jeebies, man.”

“Hey, rude,” Okuyasu protests. He's stealing a slice of bacon from Josuke's plate, which in Kakyoin's estimate undermines his authority on rudeness. “Yeah, me too. But it's my dad, you know? I couldn't really… you know how it is.”

“They might be able to help.”

Okuyasu looks at Kakyoin and Jotaro, startled, and then startles again when Kakyoin raises an eyebrow at them both. It's very funny how nervous he is around him.

“Have you asked ‘em yet? You super should,” Josuke continues.

Oh, god. Kakyoin doesn't know shit about parents. That’s, like, one of the few things he’s really bad on actually. Well, he can help Okuyasu sign for an apartment or something if he needs to, but he's really not the best for advice on anything else past ‘don’t answer their calls’ or ‘figure out what they want from you and then pretend really hard,’ and it's not like Jotaro is either, Holly being an outlier in the complete opposite direction.

Okuyasu gives them another look, conflicted, appraising. “Well. If you're coming over anyway, um,” his voice is hesitant, more awkward than usual. “My dad is, like. Some stand thing happened to him a while ago, and he's, uh. Weird now. I dunno, you might know somethin’ about it.”

Huge relief. That he can do. Stands? Weird stand shit? He’s good at those.

“Sure,” Jotaro replies, easy. “What's wrong with him?” 

Okuyasu makes a face and keeps his eyes fixed on his hot chocolate. “It's, uh–”

“Maybe we can talk about this after we eat?” Koichi breaks in. “It's pretty gross.” 

Josuke chimes in his agreement with another exaggerated noise of disgust, and Kakyoin notes Okuyasu’s tension tick down, filing that away for later.

“Sure.” 

The conversation lapses awkwardly, and Kakyoin pivots back to asking the boys about their classes instead of pressing Okuyasu on topics that upset him for now. His excitement returns at complaining about their geometry classes while Koichi simultaneously defends them, and it's almost enough to smooth out the looming, uneasy pressure of Morioh’s summer heat.

It doesn't come up again until they're on Okuyasu's front porch. Josuke nudges Okuyasu, mumbling something to him, and Okuyasu sighs at it, anxiously messing with the hem of his jacket.

“So, um, I probably should let you guys know first, so you don't get like, jumpscared. My dad is, uh. Josuke told me you guys know about Dio.”

Kakyoin feels the smile slowly slide off his face and can't particularly be bothered to care. Oh, he wasn't expecting that. 

“Or, y'know, you probably know more than me. But, um. According to… according to Keicho, cause he knew more about all this than me, but he said that our dad used to work for Dio, and he put something in his head, and then after Dio died it… something happened? And it turned him into a weird, uh. He's. Not really human anymore?”

Ah. Hahaha. What the fuck? Oh, that's no good. That's not– he scans Okuyasu again, but there's no sign of anything that suggests he knows, thinks he's saying anything that's that big of a deal. This would be an incredibly fucked up joke to play, but Josuke's face is scrunched with distaste still.

He's not joking. Jesus.

“I dunno if you guys maybe… you know more stand stuff, maybe you could help him,” Okuyasu continues, stilted.

Of course Josuke didn't say anything. Of course Okuyasu didn't– they don't know. They wouldn't have done this on purpose, they just don't know, because Kakyoin is almost thirty years old and he's been meticulous at keeping his skeletons in their fucking closets for over a decade now, even though it feels– he still can't believe everyone doesn't know, can't feel all his messy sordid issues bleeding off him. 

“He… there was that thing in his forehead, and one day we came home from school and um. It had, it had started to take over his body? Kinda? So he’s not– he wasn’t always like this. Like he is now. He used to be normal, I swear. Well, shitty anyway, but not, y’know. Just a normal monster.”  

Jotaro starts to speak, and Kakyoin cuts him off.

“That’s extremely interesting. We know a bit about Dio, but I’ve never heard of anything like that happening before. We’ll see what we can do, but I’m afraid I can’t make any promises.” 

There's bile rising in the back of his throat.

He's being very obvious right now, he's afraid, but Okuyasu's stammered explanation is echoing between his ears and things he's worked very very hard to put past him for a very long time are suddenly, violently reappearing. When he tries to take a deep breath, it happens too jerkily to pass off as normal, so he tightens his core and tries to not let his shallow, badly-suppressed hyperventilation catch any attention. 

Okuyasu's father used to be like him. Okuyasu's father worked for– for Dio, and a vague, faintly-tinged hysterical thought flits through his mind of whether Mr. Nijimura went to Cairo too, his imagination putting a mean, middle-aged, besuited salaryman standing stolidly in Dio's dark sultry den of silk and skin and opium smoke, Dio's buttery green lipstick smeared on the shiny balding forehead of some asshole who's dime-a-dozen at the rush hour trains and late-night bars in Sendai. If Okuyasu’s saying anything right now, it’s filtering through his ears like sound traveling underwater, muddled and barely-there.

This is stupid. It's a stupid mental image, and Dio would never have thought the man was that interesting, that desirable useful, even if he did have a stand. Certainly not important enough to keep him in his mansion, and there's a little corner of his mind that's still detached enough from the dread to go hey, can you believe you survived him? That's fucked up! just like it has regularly for the past ten years, whenever some new fucking atrocity of his comes to light and he and Jotaro are inevitably informed.

Ah. Jotaro. That's what he was forgetting. 

He chances a glance at Jotaro through his bangs, and it's the same kind of settling as stepping from a boat onto dry land when he catches Jotaro's eyes locked on him. His hands are in his pockets, but Kakyoin can tell his knuckles are probably white from how hard he's clenching his fists, and the concern splashed across him– his face, the way he's holding himself, the look he has fixed on Kakyoin's face– he's so easy to read, Kakyoin still holds by this just like he has for the past ten years. It's comforting. He's suddenly, painfully glad someone knows him, and that's a feeling he hasn't felt for a while either, because Jotaro has had his fingers on every page of Kakyoin's book since he pulled that thing out of his– oh, also a very bad train of thought to be having now, he's going to stop that one. He's just extremely glad Jotaro is here.

Kakyoin gives him a wry corner of a smile, something like well, this fucking sucks, but what can you do, (it's horrible, more like a twitch of rigor mortis, but it's something).

 Jotaro exhales a tiny huff of a breath back, between amusement and upset, and he sees Star’s blue-purple shimmer slant over him. It kind of sucks that they're around stand users, because if they weren't, he'd be getting a Splatinum bear hug right now.

He's fine, though. He's fine. He can do this. Easy. Nothing new about gritting his teeth and getting through something. None of the kids know about his sordid past, or whatever, and he's keeping it that way. They don't need to think about that shit when they think about him. 

He tries not to listen to whatever Okuyasu's saying as he keeps talking and instead stare at the house as they walk through– it's a really shitty house, he really should sell it and get an apartment instead, because the maintenance on a place like this would be a pain in the ass for anyone, and he knows that delinquent high schooler Okuyasu Nijimura doesn't know shit about or have time for tearing out knob and tube wiring or clearing out gutters or checking that your foundation isn't going to collapse. God, the heating costs once it gets cold must be astronomical. 

Hm. He'll ask him about it later. The kid looks miserable too, honestly, shoulders tense and higher like he's trying not to hike them up and failing, shame radiating off him despite how he's trying to hide it. Everything’s dusty, lights strung up with loose wiring and uncovered bulbs dangling from ceiling outfits, a single white ceramic mug standing lonely guard in the kitchen sink, and that’s all the nice parts of it. Everything else is ancient and paint-peeling at best, boards splintered and bloodsplattered at worst. The stairs are steep as hell and creak ominously when he puts the weight of his crutches on them, so he lets Hierophant hold one and carefully navigates up with a hand tight on the also-splintering railing behind the boys as they mumble their own discussions back and forth. The prospect of splinters seems better than breaking his back a second time, probably. 

The white-knuckled, desperate grasp at trying to not fucking lose it lasts really well, actually, until Okuyasu unbolts the attic door with a grim look and swings it open and Kakyoin sees what’s inside.

It’s worse than he thought. His hands tighten, fingernails digging crescents into the pads of his crutches instead of the meat of his palms, and then he fights back his gag reflex at on the acid in the back of his throat and the rancid smell of the room.

The thing that is or maybe was Mr. Nijimura is grunting and scrabbling around the floor for something like a pig, if a pig was piles of green, semi-decaying flesh, bulbous and misshapen around eyes and a sullen, toothless mouth that melts off his face like it melted in the heat. His nails claw at the edge of the baseboard, like he’s snuffling for something. Bugs, maybe, his mind supplies hysterically, and he pushes the thought back, and then Nijimura grabs something from the edge of the wood, quick, and shoves it into his mouth. Oh, he doesn’t like being right. It’s not– this isn’t him being rude. This is something he’s– It’s not good, whatever this thing is.  

He has never seen something like this. He’s seen– he watched Enyaba die, the fleshbud’s tendrils multiplying and writhing through the bloody pulp of her body like so many worms, and that made a nice home in his nightmares for years, and he watched against his better judgement as Jotaro pulled it out of Polnareff’s head. This is something worse in a way he can’t pin down. Being dead would be– not ideal, really, he likes being alive more than he ever thought he would when he was a kid, but being dead is at least easy, would be better than being. This. 

It– he looks soft. Squishy, even, like a festering pile of whipped cream, flesh folded and blistered and riddled with lumps and hairs. His eyes are dull, barely anything behind them, and that’s easily the worst part. 

There's a heavy chain piled in a corner, leading to nowhere in particular. Okuyasu sees him looking at and laughs uncomfortably.

“My brother used to keep him chained up,” he explains, “but he doesn't really… he's not violent, y'know, and he never leaves the room, so it's not. It just seemed kinda awful to do to him.”

Kakyoin might respond. He thinks his mouth is probably moving. It feels like he is, but whatever he says is on complete autopilot, zero awareness necessary.

He can't stop it, just like he can't stop staring at Okuyasu’s father moving like an animal. 

Someone distantly asks something, about how this happened, and he tries to latch onto Jotaro's voice as he answers the question, familiar and low and even, but he slides off it, can't even tell what the hell he's saying. Oh god. What if it's contagious? What if there's still– what if there's residue in his brain, he's been right all along and he's never been able to wipe Dio out of his brain thoroughly and now that they're in contact it's going to be him next. What if he loses everything that makes him him, dissolving into a stupid, disgusting pile of meat that does nothing but force people to take care of it?

He already did that once, sort of. The hazy, animal feeling of Dio’s control is still a memory that pushes to the front of his mind to haunt him like clockwork every so often. What if that happened again? What if it didn’t stop, his mind slowly dissolving into meal under the weight of Dio’s presence until he’s reduced to a pile of instinctive functions like a fucking dog, everything important to him washed away again until he was unaware of his own thoughts or actions? 

He can't breathe again, vision blurring with the tightness in his chest. Did Nijimura feel like this? What does it feel like when there's something lodged in you– 

Nevermind, he knows what it feels like. What is he talking about? It's the one thing he knows best; what it feels like to have Dio's flesh lodged in your brain, sunk into the meat of it. Still easy to remember even when everything else about it’s nothing but a swirling haze. What did it feel like? Does it feel like he feels now?

He feels hyperaware of himself, the drifting dissociative feeling that could just be normal or could be Dio's fleshbud wrecking his mind, the ten-years-faded bite marks and punctures scarred into his wrist aching beneath the careful loop of one of the emerald tree boas tattooed over them.

Distantly, he realizes that if any of the boys are particularly insightful, they could note the tiny scar on his forehead and something similar against the lumpy surface of Nijimura’s head and draw some interesting conclusions. They probably won’t. They don’t have– any reason to even consider that. They weren’t even born when this was happening. But still, Josuke is Joseph's son in blood at least, and he knows from experience how razor sharp Joseph was when it came to reading people, even buried beneath ten layers of bluster and obfustication, and he really, really doesn't want the teenagers to know about this. It would be so humiliating.

It’s not obvious. He knows it isn’t. There’s a terror slowly crawling up his throat, though, something base and consuming that he knows, in a detached sort of way, will start choking him soon. It’s just– it’s funny, in a sick sort of way. This is the kind of thing he’s had nightmares about for years, the kind of fear that he’s put work into relegating to the irrational and impossible bin, like the paranoia that clung to him the first time he went back to Cairo after… after everything even though he knew Dio was dead as hell. It’s not fucking fair.

Nijimura comes closer, and it takes all of Kakyoin’s self restraint to strangle an upset noise and not back away. He can’t– not in front of Okuyasu, who’s already looking miserable. 

It's just– his skin is crawling being in the same room as this thing, hairs on the back of his neck raised, and he can't even bring himself to feel bad about it. Green skin is sloughing off soft and ragged on a warty arm and he isn't usually affected by things being gross, has seen enough that it takes a lot to get to him, but this is– it's different. It's not that he's yucky, or physically scary. He's seen a million things worse than this, in theory. The thing is just. This could be him. So, so easily, this could have been him. Could still be him, an awful little part of his mind whispers close in his ear like Dio’s iron-sweet breath, and he fails badly at strangling it.

What if it's contagious? What if– he knows Dio's cells can recognize each other, speak to each other even without that fucking voice in his head. What if whatever merged with Nijimura can sense him, can feel the residue lingering in the scar tissue of his brain. There's no way that Star got– every single cell out, right? There could still be something lingering, dormant, waiting just for something like this to happen, ready to activate.

In some extremely far and removed part of his mind that's only working on spectator mode right now, he knows that's ridiculous. It feels like a realer possibility than anything else right now, though. He might throw up. If he doesn't. If nothing else happens to him first.

Okuyasu's words filter slowly through.

“I don't… Josuke tried fixing him once, but that didn't work. I dunno if you guys have seen anything like this?”

Jotaro probably is trying to communicate with him, but Kakyoin is not looking up from his intense scrutiny of the far corner of the room. He can't– he just can't. If he sees the look on Jotaro's face right now he's going to break something. He needs nobody to be looking at him right now. He needs to smash his head open against something and draw little patterns in the blood. He can't fucking– doesn't trust himself to open his mouth right now. He regrets speaking over Jotaro earlier. Rude of him. Rude and proud and it's always his own stupid fucking pride that gets him– he's going to slowly degrade into a misshapen thing with the cognitive function of a mouse and he's going to lose everything he's worked for and treasured the past ten years and Holly is going to make Jotaro show her what happened to him and she's going to be so so sad. Oh god.

There's a moment of silence before Jotaro responds. “... Maybe,” he says, voice reluctant. “Similar things, nothing quite like this. I can see if the Speedwagon Foundation knows more.”

With that, he moves towards the door, and Kakyoin breathes what he thinks is probably a careful sigh of relief as the boys follow. All of Keicho's papers are in a dusty office a couple rooms down, and he squeezes his eyes shut as he leaves Nijimura’s…… cage. Enclosure. Whatever it is. He doesn’t pay attention to Okuyasu bolting the door shut from the outside behind him. He doesn’t.

He also doesn’t pay attention to a single word they’re saying– Josuke hauls himself up on top of the desk, leafing through a binder, and Okuyasu immediately gets distracted with whatever they’ve found. It gives Jotaro an easy window to make eye contact with him, eyes sharp and worried.

Kakyoin has no idea what he looks like right now, but he’s sure Jotaro can see how carefully he’s trying to keep himself together. He shakes his head, miniscule, in response. Call him stubborn or stupid or whatever, but he can’t– the boys haven't noticed him acting weird yet. At least, he doesn't think so; they’re still obliviously caught up in their own world together. Koichi gave him a weird look as he followed them in, but he’s pretty sure that that was just him checking that he didn’t die on the stairs up, and not anything else. And he just– jesus, he doesn’t want his own stupid fucking dirty laundry to be something they have to say. They don’t know any of it, and he doesn’t want them to. If he ends up turning into something awful then they can deal with that then and he won’t have to see their faces. He’s literally fine. 

Jotaro frowns at him, but leaves it. They’ll… Jotaro can call him stupid later. When they’re not– when there’s not important things to do. Hey, maybe there’s something in these wrinkled piles of computer printouts that only he can understand and if he doesn’t get to it before the fleshbud remnants in his brain dissolve his consciousness into mush and Jotaro has to clean out his room in their apartment they’ll never know what it is!

Trying to focus on anything here is, unbelievably, incredibly useless. His brain slides off every other word he reads, blurring and unfocusing and refocusing and all mixing together into nothing in his mind. Just like Nijimura, his brain supplies helpfully, and he’s– he clenches his teeth and tries to keep his eyes fixed on the page in front of him as he efficiently spirals harder than he has in recent memory. There’s just– there’s so much. He didn’t. Know that that could happen, doesn’t know anything about it, know how many other fucking people that happened to, what triggered it, even– wouldn’t him dying just make his cells die? no sunlight? what if he still has Dio in his brain, just waiting, and as soon as he does something he’ll trigger it.

It’s unfair. It’s so incredibly stupid and unfair. The only thing keeping him from digging into his skin or scrabbling at his forehead right now until the scar bleeds open again is the extremely clear knowledge that he is spinning into the worst and messiest and most miserable fucking tailspin of the year in front of three fifteen year olds. 

He was just. He was past this. He was fucking– some part of him that’s not dizzy with some nebulous shapeless dread and the phantom sensation of Dio’s fleshbud tendrils writhing down his throat to choke him is miserable and tired and angry that this is something that’s back, the crawling dread that Dio’s still in him and is going to be in him forever. He strangled that years ago. It’s fucking unfair, and stupid, and static is rising in his ears and he if he cries in front of Koichi and Okuyasu and Josuke he’s going to. Do something.

Hierophant bumps into him. Oh. He gets the feeling that this is maybe not the first time that they’ve tried to get his attention. They’re. Fuck. This concerns them, too, if he, if this is another fucking Dio thing– he knows what it felt like for them, while he was under his influence. He– that can’t happen to them again. He’d rather die. 

They shove him harder at that, an insistent pressure in the back of his mind. Sorry, he thinks at them, spooling out into an endless litany of sorrysorrysorrysorryohgodsorry before their frustration washes sharp over him. What do they mean he doesn’t have anything to be sorry for. He’s– It’s– he can’t think, everything is hot and tangled and stifling and the more he can’t fucking think the more he knows it’s happening to him and the more he knows the more panic boils in his chest and and and what if he just lets– ohhhh.

Oh, that’s what Hierophant was getting at. There’s barely even any lagtime between understanding and agreeing, grateful and desperate and pleading. He needs to– they can fix this. They can– yeah. Yeah. He needs to not be doing this– whatever he’s doing (panicking badly, they supply) in front of people right now.

That would. That would help.

Feeling Hierophant's cool tendrils settle into the winding mess of his brain is like a wave of reassurance, cold water over a burn, and their vision blurs and doubles as they settle into every fold of his brain, visible proof that there’s nothing in there (that he can tell, at least, nothing there yet). They haven't done this in a while– not in front of people, in public, at least. 

God, Kakyoin can barely even remember the last time they did, back when he was much, much worse at managing his shit and much more freshly fucked up, or something. He would be embarrassed if he had it in him to feel anything more than relief making his head spin.

His– their body's breaths slow back down until he's getting oxygen in his system again, and letting all of this fall to Hierophant is like finally sitting down after he's been standing for hours. He's more than happy for his lungs not to feel like they're his right now, and his head too, and his hands as Hierophant flex their fingers and settle into a looser hold on the grips of his crutches. He’s just… along for the ride now. It’s a good disconnect right now, nothing like Dio’s hazy, high detachment from everything around him. Of course Hierophant knows that. 

Their distress, (worried about him), and their faint feeling of confidence and amusement washes over him. Them both. 

It doesn't really talk– doesn't like to, doesn't need to, and the only time he can remember when it did is when they were maybe eight, ten years old, and Kakyoin had freaked out at something a shrink had asked him, frozen paralyzed with dread until he'd felt Hierophant's annoyance and fear and the right words had fallen out of his mouth without him knowing anything, disconcertingly aware of the feeling of his throat and tongue and the movement of his jaw. It had been what she'd needed to hear, and they'd stayed home instead of being sent to inpatient for… whatever reason. He doesn't remember that anymore, just the way Hierophant had curled in on themself and hid and refused to come out afterwards for days. Kakyoin had gotten better at lying after that.

 There's really no reason for them to need to talk with words, though. Why would they need to, when they melt and overlap with each other like watercolors and he can feel every wordless thing Hierophant's thinking, the color and shape of its sympathy and distress and angry need to protect him like a weighted blanket wrapped around him? 

It's easy to let them shoulder the weight and nod his head politely and look engaged with the conversation as he curls up in the back of their mind and lets himself sink into the fuzzy mess of fear that he knows is going to instantly feel so much worse when they're gone. He tries to focus on thinking of nothing at all. He'd be digging his nails into his palms if he could, but he doesn't have his hands right now, so instead he just concentrates on filling his mind with as much static as possible. 

He's fine. He's not thinking about it. He's not thinking about anything. The conversation around him filters out into muffled, melted noises in the background. Hierophant would let him know if there was anything really of value happening. 

He barely registers it when they make excuses, confusion emerging and then slipping back out of his grip like soap in his hands, and leave the room. It could be a couple minutes later or half an hour. Time feels like taffy, spilling and stretching slow then fast then slow then fast around him. They’re in the study, and then they’re not, and then they’re in– a coat closet? Somewhere dark and small and the space is comforting to them both, and then the door creaks open with a slice of daylight, then shut again, and Jotaro sits down across from them.

“Hey, Hierophant,” Jotaro says. His voice is quiet. “Can I talk to Kakyoin?” 

They wrinkle their nose. Kakyoin can feel its amusement and relief and annoyance overlapping with his own mess of feelings before he's suddenly partly in control of their body again. It's always a weird, sudden feeling, like coming to the surface to breathe after swimming.

He can feel Hierophant leaning on him, their annoyance very clear. Maybe played up a little to distract Kakyoin. It does kind of work. 

“They're mad that you can tell us apart,” he says, trying to sound arch and joking. If it comes out a little wobbling around the edges, neither of them comment on it.

Jotaro snorts like it's ridiculous. “Good grief. Of course I can.” 

“They said you have to tell them what their tell is sometime.”

He huffs a tiny breath of a laugh again, makes a dunno sound, like it’s obvious or something.

The silence stretches in between them in flagrant contradiction of his request to talk to Kakyoin. He doesn't mind. Jotaro just sits there quietly, legs crossed, gaze flicking across Kakyoin's everything. He's content to let it be. Jotaro is very good at a silence that doesn't feel awful. 

Time is still blurry and confusing and it still fucking scares him, but he blinks and Hierophant finally gives him himself back the rest of the way with a soft fuzz so he can scoot over and collapse into Jotaro. And he does do that– jerkily, awkwardly, letting his arms come up around him and pull him in close. Their coils spool around him too, coiling around both of them in a bear hug so tight he's trembling from it. 

He feels Jotaro free a hand from where it's fisted in the back of Kakyoin's jacket to run a thumb along Hierophant in greeting, feels the little huff of breath when Hierophant nudges him back to his hold on Kakyoin.

Kakyoin pushes back the urge to touch his forehead again, digging his fingers tight into Jotaro's sides where he's wrapped around him hard enough that he can almost feel the bones of his ribcage. Jotaro's breath doesn't even hitch at it and Kakyoin is miserable and a kind of stupid animal afraid he hates and hasn't felt in years.

His chin is hooked over Jotaro's shoulder, something he's grateful for because he hates being fucking seen like this, messy and idiotic and embarrassing and fucked up over nothing, and he bites his lip so hard he tastes blood and squeezes his eyes shut against the hot tears that keep ignoring his orders to not exist and inhales the cherry blossom scent of Jotaro’s hair. His shampoo, borrowed, which makes something twist sharp and fond in his chest. 

They stay like that, tangled and white knuckled and warm and quiet until the itching in Kakyoin's brain at how Hierophant isn't in his head, can't tell if anything’s happening in there, how he can't see doesn't know has to check and make sure has to do that right now right now right now becomes a skincrawling shriek that he can't ignore and he loosens his grip on Jotaro with a mumbled sorry, hushed and indistinct as Hierophant spins back into itself and winds back into their brain.

“Shut up,” Jotaro grumbles back, easily letting him detangle himself from him, and Kakyoin's once again grateful that he's here even as his vision doubles over with Hierophant's, the knowledge refrain of nothing, nothing, you're good, you're fine untwisting the knot in his stomach marginally with relief. He's rubbing at his forehead before he realizes he's doing it, and then realizes, and then he keeps worrying at the faded smooth scar that he knows is there because Jotaro's seen him do a million more stupid things than this. 

“It’s just. I can’t imagine anything that could be worse,” he makes himself say, halting and unsteady. “Than being a fucking… animal. I just. That’s so– that freaks me out. Bigtime.” 

It’s the world's biggest understatement, but it’s all that he’s capable of saying, all of his easy shiny words splintering on his tongue at the idea of it. The abject, animal horror of it. Jotaro understands.

Jotaro is silent and Kakyoin knows they’re thinking about the same things. Knows he’s thinking about seventeen year old Kakyoin’s messy hospital outbursts and his sharp bitter fear and how much it fucking terrified him to become physically incapacitated like he did. He sees Jotaro’s teenage face in his mind, illuminated by blue TV light in the dark hospital room playing off his bruises and baby fat, face twisted with fear and hesitation and care. “You could still kick my ass,” he said then, awkward and filled with conviction, and even now he’s not sure if Jotaro knows how much that helped him.

“I know,” he says eventually, quiet, leaning forwards so their foreheads knock into each other, sea-blue eyes fixed intently on his, so close that he can feel his coffee breath fanning across his cheeks with the words. He’s almost as intense as Star.  “You won’t.” He says it like a fact, which Kakyoin knows objectively that it is, but the confidence is still comforting, “and if anything does happen, we’ll fix it again. Did it once.”

Star shimmers into view in front of him at the words, barely able to fit in the small space, and their face is all furrowed with upset too. 

They cradle his head in their big hands, almost able to just hold him like a melon, but they're so careful about it. Kakyoin hates feeling– small, powerless, useless, like he's lesser for any of a million different reasons, being treated like he's any of that. He's spent years cultivating the way he moves through the world so that people don't think that shit about him. 

For some reason that's never been a problem with Star Platinum, who's huge compared to everything and always handles Kakyoin with the same delicate care that they handle sea stars and crabs and sandpipers and jellyfish and who falls asleep with their big head heavy in his lap if he braids their hair during a movie. Their fingers brush over his forehead, night sky eyes sharp and penetrating like a pin through a moth’s abdomen, something intent and searching swirling with the stars in their depths. Nobody’s ever been this good at looking at things.

Kakyoin knows what they’re thinking about now, too. For a moment he’s a teenager again, on his back in Holly's sprawling sunny house with Jotaro’s weight on his stomach and Star Platinum pulling Dio out of his brain. They tilt his face a little bit back and forth and he lets them inspect until their eyes meet again. The intensity of their gaze has him caught for what feels like minutes, incapable of thinking about anything except it, and then they grin, sudden and bright and sunny, and squish his cheeks one time with a happy ora!, and let go. 

He can’t help huffing out a tiny breath of laughter, even though there’s still tear tracks on his face probably. “That mean I passed the inspection?” 

They nod with another ora!, ruffling his hair like they do to Jotaro. It does make him feel a lot better. No matter how little he trusts himself and his stupid fucking brain sometimes, he’d have to be dead before he didn’t trust Star with his life.

He exhales, shaky, and lets them pull him into their chest, encompassing him in their big arms. His stupid fucking brain swirls immediately back to Nijimura and Dio and blood trickling down his forehead and foggy, blurred memories that make nausea roil in his stomach, but, like. It helps. Being pulled even a little bit from the circling drain of his catastrophizing mind is so much– so much better than earlier.

Time passes in a swirling haze. Minutes or hours, he doesn’t know, but eventually he makes himself pull back away with a shuddering breath. “You should get back to the kids. Before they fall into a woodchipper or something.”

Jotaro’s eyeroll is subtle, barely noticeable. “We didn’t get into that much shit in high school,” he says, complaint running through his voice, and Kakyoin can’t help the laugh that pulls out of him.

“Yeah, we were way worse.”

Jotaro snorts at that but doesn’t deny it. “You sure?”

He’s not talking about the shit they got into as teenagers. And Kakyoin isn’t sure, really. All he wants to do is keep hiding in this coat closet with Jotaro and Star holding onto him and keeping his stupid brain from completely melting down again for the next five hours. They’re adults, though, with stupid bullshit like responsibilities, and as much as he’d like to be selfish, he can’t.

“Yeah,” he mumbles, eyes fixed on his hands, ignoring the nausea rises in his stomach at it. “I’ll be fine. I’ll meet up with you guys later.” 

Jotaro reaches over to push up his glasses where they’re crooked and slipping off his nose, then flicks him on the forehead. He won’t push more than he has, Kakyoin knows, and he’s always grateful for it. “Okay. At four.”

If he was less… less, he would yank Jotaro’s hat down in return, or flick it off his head, or muster up something less fucking miserable than the exhausted nod he manages. Jotaro gives him another look, and reluctantly leaves.

He can’t stay in Okuyasu’s shitty house’s closet all day. God. Hierophant tightens their hold on him, and he lets himself sink into the feeling for another couple minutes before he hauls himself up.

The rest of the day is– incredibly fucking bad, really, but nothing happens. Nothing happens. Not– with him, or with him, or with the boys or any stand users, and Hierophant’s smile and his own easy lies when they meet back up for an entirely useless attempt at tracking down the arrow at four convinces them that he’s perfectly fine, and by the time they’re back at the hotel, it’s so much later than he wants it to be.

His glasses get clumsily folded and tossed onto the side table with a dangerous skidding noise, but he can't bring himself to care about breaking them. More important is pushing the heels of his palms into his eyes until patterns dance in the dark behind his eyelids. His pinky brushes over the smooth, well-healed scar on his forehead and he does so good at noting the sensation and then calmly moving on without thinking about it.

It's literally fine. It's stupid. It's over. He didn't cause a public scene and none of the kids saw him sobbing like an idiot and he's so ready to move onto the being done with this stage of having a bad fucking day. He needs to stop thinking about it. 

On autopilot, he organizes his folded clothes in the tiny hotel closet, and spends five minutes staring blankly at a page of one of the books piled by his side of the bed and trying to remember if his vision fuzzing out into a blur was something that happened to him when he was under Dio's control before realizing that he's not wearing his glasses. 

Jotaro's at their shared desk, messing absently with an earring with one hand and hovering over something with a pen in the other– Speedwagon bullshit, maybe, or something faxed in from his lab, or a printout of a recent paper, miserable tension evident in all the lines of him. Kakyoin feels kind of guilty that Jotaro knows he needs space and is giving it to him and kind of even more guilty for being relieved about it. He just– needs to not be looked at, for a couple minutes. Needs to scrape all the gross awful bits of himself up off the floor. Fuck.

He tries to reach up and pull out his hairband so he can comb his hair so he can go to bed, god, the panic’s mostly retreated and left a hollow, fragile-feeling exhaustion like the ghost of saltwater in the wet sand at low tide and he wants to curl up under every single blanket in this room and hug Jotaro and not think about anything. The problem is that when he does this, his back flashes with a stab of pain that lights his vision up white for a second. Ow. Shit. Fuck, fine, he's not doing that.

Shit. He really doesn't want to have to deal with snarls in his hair tomorrow, when he knows he's already going to feel like shit. And it's probably not helping with the tired burn pulsing at his temples.

He tries again, wincing and swearing as the pain spasms again, this time lingering in his muscles. Fine, god, maybe he shouldn't have sat curled up on the floor for hours today or walked around for two hours straight. But he really doesn't– he hates not being able to at least go to bed all settled. Habits or rituals or whatever. And Hierophant is curled up like winding spaghetti in his brain and neither of them want him out of there.

“Hey, Jojo.”

Jotaro's there with a speed that betrays the way he's been listening to Kakyoin's movements behind him this whole time, pen still caught in between two inkstained fingers, blue eyes alert on him. He doesn't say anything other than mhm?

Kakyoin makes a face. Hesitates on the words behind his teeth for a moment. “Could you help me with my hair?”

Jotaro freezes. You'd think it's hard to tell, with how still and quiet he is in general, but it's not. Not to Kakyoin, at least. He can see everything play out on Jotaro's face like a window. 

“...Yeah, of course,” he says after a minute. Doesn't ask if Kakyoin's sure, which makes a wave of fondness rise in his throat. 

His fingernails are short and blunt, and his hands are warm with their long scarred fingers and when he sits behind Kakyoin his movements are carefully efficient. It's nothing like… it's nothing but Jotaro. He sets a palm to the curve of his skull, holding the hair there so it doesn't tug at his scalp as he pulls the hairband out through his long curling mess. He's done this before, more often when Kakyoin was still freshly healed and a fucking mess, has helped him dye it in a hospital bathroom sink and washed blood out of it before, but not– usually, he hasn't had ten straight hours of sobbing flashbacks to– this is just different. Is all. He keeps his breathing very even and doesn't think about anything.

He keeps his eyes stubbornly open, fixed on the bedspread in front of him and his own hands as he picks at the cuffs of his sleeves. 

“Want me to comb it out?”

Kakyoin doesn't respond immediately, and Jotaro doesn't press, just sits quietly and waits. The only thing he does is tap on the back of Kakyoin's hand for him to flip it over before depositing the hairband in his palm. 

He should, is the thing. He likes having everything done right and properly and the feeling of checking off all the steps in his routine is settling and he likes the feeling of Jotaro's knuckles brushing against him and the warm heat in his chest knowing that he's careful on purpose because Jotaro knows everything there is to know about him, and he knows his hair’s a mess from him being fucking crazy all day.

But. There's still bile sitting ready in the back of his throat and memories that he's trying to push back very very hard and he's flinchy and tense and so fucking tired. He doesn’t want to press his luck. Fuck all that shit. Just for once.

“Mm. S’okay,” he mumbles. “I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

Jotaro hums in assent and tilts forward until he's leaning against Kakyoin's back with a fraction of his weight, face smushed into the back of his neck. His hat knocks against Kakyoin's ear and Hierophant flashes out to pull it off his head, depositing it in his lap. 

“Hey,” he complains, voice muffled. He doesn't move to reclaim it as Kakyoin starts absently messing with the pins.

 Eventually he tosses the hat across the room, landing it on the desk where it sits on top of their piles of note binders, turns around so that he's sitting facing Jotaro now. 

“Hi,” he says, quiet, avoiding his sharp blue eyes to stare at the soft dark halo of hair that’s freed itself from his bun.

Jotaro brings his hands up to frame Kakyoin's face, palms warm against him, fingertips steady at the hinges of his jaw. Tilts his own face in until their foreheads touch, breath mingling with the scent of toothpaste mint. His eyes are like seeing the Caribbean sea. “How’re you feeling?”

His voice is at least as low as Kakyoin's was, rough around the edges, concern bleeding through the flat delivery. Sometimes Kakyoin thinks about how he would have felt if Jotaro had done this the first time they met. Probably would have exploded.

Kakyoin wrinkles his nose. “Bad.” 

There’s more he could say, but he doesn’t… he’s tired of thinking about it. He doesn’t want to pick the scab off and start talking and end up fucking spiraling again. He knows he could.

Jotaro nods in understanding, and Kakyoin’s eyelids slide closed as his thumbs brush over the faded scars slicing through his eyes, dragging gentle against the thin skin there and brushing up against his eyelashes. He’s so careful. He couldn’t be further from Dio if he tried.

“How are the kids?”

“Mmn. They're good. Told ‘em you had a work thing ‘n I’m pretty sure they think that means the yakuza called you up.”

Kakyoin snorts despite himself, letting himself relax more until Jotaro’s hands cupping his face are all that’s keeping him from faceplanting. “It’s just so fucking funny, Jojo. I can't shatter their hopes and dreams.”

“Their hopes and dreams of thinking you’re a gangster?”

“Mm, exactly. What other source of excitement do they have in their poor lives?” 

Jotaro’s eyelids slide open to give him a look. He pulls one hand away to flick him on the cheek before settling back. “The serial killers could count.”

“Ahh, you’re just jealous that they think I’m the scary thug and not you,” he grins, helpless against Jotaro’s sleepy amusement and how fucking funny it is that Koichi’s still intimidated by him. Who gives a shit about– other stuff. 

“That's because you are a scary freak.” 

Kakyoin hums contentedly. “You're so nice to me.”

“I am,” Jotaro agrees, satisfied. Then he flops onto his back, hauling Kakyoin with him until he's practically on top of him. 

“Rude.”

Jotaro agrees to this too. “You're the one who stole my hat though. Pretty terrible.”

“Mhm, I told you, I'm evil!”

He opens his eyes again, fixing Kakyoin with a look. His gaze flicks to the faded scar that sits on his forehead and back to his eyes. “Never said evil, just weird as hell.”

Kakyoin snickers helplessly. “Important distinction.”

“It is,” Jotaro agrees mildly, his voice dead serious even though Kakyoin can see the amusement glimmering in his eyes. “Like the Bowie album. Super creep.”

He exhales a laugh again, lets his eyes fall shut. He can feel Jotaro’s heartbeat. It feels sort of impossible to imagine something bad genuinely happening right now, like this, warm light glowing through his eyelids.

Jotaro's hand is warm and heavy between his shoulder blades, up high enough that he's not touching any of his scar tissue, because he knows that it's just something Kakyoin’s weird about, makes him uncomfortably aware of himself when he doesn't want to be sometimes even though it's fine other times. It's absentminded, easy, like he doesn't even second guess anymore, doesn't mind Kakyoin's weird labyrinthine mess of shit in his brain or his inconvenient preferences or his everything. He kind of loves him so much it’s unreal.

The energy crash is hitting hard and making him stupid. He wants to sleep for months and never think about Dio again. Everything still feels awful, aching and hollow and tired even though he's mostly– better, out of the shitty spiraling loop for now.

He smushes his face further into Jotaro's shoulder, forehead pressed against him, Jotaro's cheek resting on his hair. He smells like clean laundry and Kakyoin's shampoo he's been borrowing, like home, and when a hand comes up to smooth over Kakyoin's hair, palm slow and flat and gentle down his scalp to like he's petting an animal, he feels something tight loosen and dissolve in his chest. His eyes lid closed, and he doesn't actually care that they're on top of the blankets or that he hasn't brushed his teeth. He's warm and sleepy and Hierophant is a quiet, reassuring presence tangled up in his mind, keeping him grounded. He has shitty day privileges. 

He's almost asleep when he realizes something. He raises his head instantly, dislodging Jotaro's hand in the process. Jotaro's eyes fly open too, hands immediately retreating so he's not touching him except for the whole Kakyoin's using him as a full body pillow thing. He raises a finger to point at Jotaro's face, and his hands are barely shakier than usual anymore. Look, he's doing so good. “Okuyasu cannot keep being–” he stumbles for a second, trying to find a way around thinking about– that, “his guardian. That's so fucked up.”

Jotaro, to his credit, just blinks once before agreeing. “It's a really shitty responsibility to have on top of academics, yeah. And also full homeowner stuff, probably, and his… brother. I can't imagine it's easy or good for him. Want me to call the department tomorrow?”

Jotaro is offering to make a phone call for him. A phone call which he could easily make on his own, even. Jotaro. Willingly calling the SPW. For him. Kakyoin is suddenly, violently filled with affection. Visions of shaking him, sleepy eyed and dark hair spilling into his face and worrying the spacers in his bottom lip, back and forth like a dog with a plush toy briefly fill his mind. He wants to crush this guy into a tiny paper ball and throw him into the stratosphere.

“...Only if you want.”

“Yeah, sure. He can't be the only person who that's–” he pauses, visibly mentally rewording things, “they'll know what to do.”

Whatever else he's going to say gets forgotten as Kakyoin reaches around clumsily to find his hands and pulls his arms back up around him. Jotaro not touching him is pretty much the opposite of what he wants right now.

Jotaro gets the message fast, wrapping him up almost bone-crackingly tight. This time, his palms do slide over the disaster of his back, shirt pushed up and fingers splayed warm over a ragged border of metal and scar tissue, thumb brushing back and forth over it. The feeling is half-lost to the weird map of areas where he's mostly lost sensation and areas that mostly only feel things to be a bitch and hurt and usually he doesn’t even want to be reminded of it but the pressure and the contact is still good, grounding, and Kakyoin hums in contentment at it. He knows it’s something that’s comforting to Jotaro, too, and the idea of that feedback loop between the two of them is nice to think about.

“He shouldn’t be living in that death trap of a house, either,” he mumbles into his hair, because if he doesn't say that he's going to say something extremely embarrassing and sappy.

Jotaro snorts. “Sure, mom.”

“Holly is a very wonderful woman,” he replies archly, or as archly as he can when he’s melted into half asleep soup on top of Jotaro. “It’s very flattering to be compared to her.” 

There’s a big sigh below him as Jotaro concedes the point.

Kakyoin can’t say he’s wrong, even. He was thinking about Holly earlier. He does want to be like that. Not in terms of parenthood, just in terms of seeing kids who are having a bad fucking time and helping them– he kind of gets it more, now, seeing Okuyasu with his nightmare of a family and the guarded look in his eyes and defensive hunch of his shoulders and Josuke with a black eye and a bandaid over where a stand made him try to stab his own eye out with a pen (and doesn’t that bring back memories) and a bit of a limp from when he jumped off that bike and skinned half his leg a couple weeks ago. They’re barely younger than he and Jotaro were when things started breaking bad for them. 

They’re such good kids. He doesn’t know where the hell he’d be if Holly hadn’t strong-armed him into practically living with them when he’d gotten back from Cairo a busted mess, once she’d found out he’d rented a place rather than go back home. If she hadn’t driven a miserable eighteen year old to the tattoo place twice a month for a year and a half, and taken him out to lunch, and come into his doctors appointments with him when he’d hesitantly asked, and made him watch every single horror movie in the house with her on the argument that Jotaro was boring to watch movies with. He wants to be like that sometime. For someone.

The thought train sort of drifts off into nothing in particular, washed out by another wave of tiredness that crests over him. He's almost out when Jotaro ruffles his hair, pulling a sleepy-annoyed noise out of him.

“Want to change before you fall asleep?”

Hmmm. He should say yes. He hates his gross daytime outdoor work clothes touching stuff, which is something that he knows Jotaro quietly finds amusement in because Jotaro’s work is the one that leaves him covered in fish water and residue almost a solid hundred percent of the time but Kakyoin’s way more particular about that stuff, even though the worst things he’s likely to come in contact with are, like… dust. Ancient stone residue. The SPW’s evil miasma. Maybe some students’ tears. 

This time, though, the feeling that wins out is the exhaustion that’s soaked through to his bones and the warm grounding comfort of getting to nap on top of his boyfriend after the worst fucking day he’s had in ages and his absolute tired unwillingness to do literally anything else tonight. He’s twenty-eight years old. He can sleep in his clothes if he wants to!

He makes a sleepy noise, shaking his head a little, and he can feel Jotaro snort underneath him, but he doesn't press the issue. Hmm. He can feel the easy rise and fall of Jotaro’s chest, his heartbeat slow and even. his breath catching in his hair. It's pretty cool. He's really, really glad Jotaro is alive. He's really glad they're both alive. That they both made it here.

There's a motion behind him that he can't see, with Hierophant not out, but he barely blinks as Star Platinum whisks the weighted blanket they brought from home on top of them. He'd have to be more fucked up than this to be scared by Star, to not be able to feel his presence almost as comforting as Hierophant's. Star brushes a big hand down the line of his back too, firm and heavy for all his gentleness, and his eyes slide back shut at it with a hum. He would be so happy getting flattened by the Star Platinum hydraulic press. Hmm. He could get Jotaro to squash him, but that would entail... moving. Maybe later. He frees a hand again, reaching back until he can grab one of their hands. He brings it to his cheek, fighting to keep his eyes open. “Thank you,” he mumbles, quiet. “For. Y’know. If it was anyone else, I wouldn’t…” he trails off. Would still be trying to figure out how to cut his skull open to check for Dio’s cells, probably. Would be dead in the first place. Would be dead a billion times over, probably.

They ruffle his hair with another ora, fond, and tug the blanket over his head. 

“Lights on or off?” Jotaro’s voice is quiet too, edges soft and rough in a way that makes his own brain feel warm and mushy in a good way for the first time in the past twenty-four hours, and the only response he can scrape up is another noncommittal hum, half-muffled in the silky waterfall of his hair. He can feel Jotaro’s breath of amusement at it. 

“G’night,” he mumbles. “Thanks.”

“Shut up.”

“Neverrrrrr.” He draws it out with a sleepy smile, and it’s a testament to how worried Jotaro was about him that he doesn’t even try to suffocate him with the blanket. God. Today sucked. Insane that he gets to end it this, and not crying himself to sleep in an empty dark room. Maybe they’ll find the killer behind all this Morioh shit tomorrow and he can go home and never think about Dio again. Hopefully. That can be a tomorrow problem.