Work Text:
When she pulls her knees up to her chest, the warm sand almost immediately finds a way in between her toes. Jolyne wiggles them, which does little to make the grainy sensation any less uncomfortable. If anything, it only makes the sand stick. She changes her mind and stretches her legs out so that her feet touch the lapping waves instead.
“Dad, was Mom your first love?”
Her father takes such a significant amount of time to acknowledge the question with a quiet hmm that she almost accepted he was ignoring it.
“No.” He eventually replies. He tips the brim of his hat, obscuring his eyes from her field of vision, and gives no further elaboration.
“Oh. I see.”
Jolyne’s fingers find a small seashell next to her and begin to trace around its rough swirls. Even surrounded by the airy ocean breeze, the tension is unnervingly thick, and a million awfully familiar, increasingly furious voices start to swarm in her head — My father is such a conversationalist. I’ll never be able to talk to him. I don't understand how my parents ever–
“There was– I had one before her. Just one.” Her father’s sudden voice cuts through her thoughts like a knife. Oh shit, the conversation’s not over yet?
“You had one girlfriend before Mom?”
“No.” He shakes his head, and she notices the hat dip even lower. “A boyfriend.”
“What!?” Jolyne exclaims, springing upwards and staring at him incredulously.
“What?”
“What do you mean, what? Holy shit, Dad. I did not know you swung that way!”
“It was just once.” He shrugs, but his shoulders appear unmistakably stiff. She does not miss the way he swallows thickly, like there is glue in his throat, before he mutters, “It was short-lived, anyway.”
“...What happened?” Jolyne asks, before quickly clarifying, “Um, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to, though–”
“He died.”
Oh.
A pang of guilt instantly hits Jolyne like a brick. Right. Knowing the life he has lived, she should have seen that coming from miles away.
“His name was Kakyoin. Noriaki Kakyoin.” The name sounds fragile on her father’s tongue, as though he's scared that even the act of saying it aloud would cause it to dissolve into the air and be lost forever. “We were seventeen when we fought Dio together.”
That mention, inescapably, sends a shiver racing down her spine. Jolyne vaguely recalls the image of a redheaded boy — one in a blue, no, green school uniform — that she saw when she read her father’s memory disc all those months back. “Was it during the trip you went on with great-gramps?”
“The very same one.” He nods like a robot. “He didn't have to come with us, though. He could have continued going to school like a normal student.”
“But he chose to follow you.”
“Yeah.” Her father looks into the far-off distance, where the waves are dancing in shades of shimmering ultramarine. “And then we fell in love during the trip. Although, thinking back, I don't know how much of it was love. Maybe we were just two lonely kids who only had each other to rely on. I didn't have any friends before him. Neither did he. But we’d patch each others’ wounds up at the end of each day and what not.”
“Oh. That's very sweet." Jolyne offers a sympathetic smile that goes totally unseen by the other party. Instead, there’s a distant, glassy look in her father’s eyes now, and she gets the strange sensation that he's not here with her anymore, but in a faraway country where there is no sun relentlessly scorching their skin, where there is no sea sipping at their feet.
“We promised we would stick together after we defeated Dio.” The voice that reaches her ears no longer sounds like the steely, invincible man that has everything, always, under his control. It sounds small, like that of a lost child. Seventeen. He was only seventeen. He was younger than me when I first gained a stand. He was still a high school student, and not even a senior at that. “Not marriage, no — we couldn't possibly get married in that era. But something close enough. Move in together. Continue sharing a room like we did on the trip. Come back home to have dinner… Those kinds of things.”
Her father lets out a sigh that might as well carry the weight of all humanity. It probably does. “And then he died in seconds flat when Dio punched a hole through his body. The end. That's how our story ends.”
Many of his stories end like that. Not for the first time Jolyne wonders how many lifetimes of grief sit atop his shoulders, how many lost friends and family have permanently burned themselves into his heart, buried underneath his stone walls and decades-practiced poker faces.
“What kind of person was he like?”
There's a short pause. Her father clears his throat and his large, coarse hands, adorned with a million scars and stories, fiddle with each other. “He was, ah, smart and talkative. And he was very fond of sarcastic jokes. But he was also gentle, and noble. He loved to help people.”
“Do you still miss him, Dad?”
“Every day,” he murmurs, extremely softly, as if he himself is afraid of hearing those words.
After another moment’s pause, he shakes his head, and suddenly he's visibly back from the faraway land and in Florida, U.S.A., on a littered ocean shore with his twenty-year old daughter. His eyes flicker towards her, a fraction wider than usual. Paranoid. “Don't understand me the wrong way, Jolyne. I loved your mother when we got married. And I still love her very much. I have never stopped loving her. Although I don't think she'll ever accept it again, after all that I've done.”
“No, it's okay, I understand,” Jolyne sighs. A feeling of immense sorrow pools at the bottom of her guts. Her father is, without a doubt, a man ensnared by tragedy, and the most horrific types of loss trail behind in his wake. Even now, after the end of it all, she wonders if a time will ever come where he'll be normal again. A time when he no longer throws fearful glances over his shoulder every few minutes. A time when she can wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and see him sleeping soundly in bed, not hunched over in darkness on the living room sofa, eyes bloodshot and body trembling.
The words tumble past her lips before they even reach her brain. “Dad, did you ever… regret having me?”
The atmosphere is heavy.
“No. But there were times when I regretted marrying and starting a family. I regretted believing that I was safe, that it all ended in Cairo when I was seventeen. I put you and your mother in grave danger just by being related to you two. It was reckless.”
“You couldn't have known,” Jolyne protests. Her eyes feel unbearably hot and frustrated. “There's no way you could have known that.”
“So? That doesn't negate the fact that I abandoned you both when you needed me. I'm a terrible man, Jolyne. And I don't deserve either of your love anymore, after how much I hurt you two.”
In this moment Jolyne is overcome by the desperate urge to throw her arms around his large, hulking shoulders. His whole being is stiff, unmoving, as if unsure how to reciprocate this sudden affection.
“I told you I forgive you already, so shut up!” She cries. “You’re safe now, Dad, we are safe now. So shut the fuck up about this whole ‘undeserving of love’ bullshit you keep going on about. You know you can lean on us instead of staying all aloof? There are no more battles. You don't have to hide from us anymore. It's over already.” There are tears streaming down her face, salty like the seawater.
“And what if it's not?” He challenges her. His voice cracks. “What if there's somebody else? What if I get another call from the Speedwagon Foundation tomorrow, or the week after, or next year?”
“Then let me join you. Let me fight with you.”
“I want you to live a normal life, Jolyne.”
“And what about your own?”
“I have nothing to lose anymore. You have a bright future ahead of you, Jolyne. There are many things you have to look forward to. I already paid the price of my life when I defeated Dio in 1989–”
“Stop talking like your life is already over.” Jolyne grabs his shoulders and clutches, clutches them so hard she wonders if they will break. “Please, Dad!
Only then does he finally look into her eyes. Just briefly. And what she sees is the exhaustion that engulfs his — immense and eternal. His gaze is laden with fear, but not the fresh kind; rather, it is an aged fear that has settled in for decades, unwavering, like an old temple that has been built with broken hands, one bloody brick after another.
He breaks their eye contact and grumbles something noncommittal under his breath.
Jolyne withdraws from the hug — well, if that violent, one-sided embrace even counted as one — returning to her original sitting position beside him. She draws her knees up to her chest once more. The grainy sand in between her toes feel like little knives.
“But… never… you.”
Words fall hurriedly out of her father’s mouth. She does not catch them on the first try. She suspects he might not have wanted her to.
“What?”
“I have never… regretted… having you.” He murmurs, sounding almost shameful. “Not once.”
“Oh."
Jolyne fiddles with her loose bangs.
A silence befalls them. Suddenly, every breath either of them take seems particularly loud. Jolyne redirects her attention to the glimmering waves, focusing on their rhythm — forwards, backwards. Forwards, backwards.
“…I love you too, Dad.”