Work Text:
To everyone else in the world, it was just an average spring day. The hospice facility wasn’t too busy, but one patient’s room was packed - the room belonging to Suzi Q Joestar.
The matriarch of the Joestar family laid in her bed, surrounded by her loved ones. Her husband and her daughter were right beside her, the latter sobbing huge tears as the former tried to hold them back. Others present in the room included her son in-law, her grandson, her husband’s son - his friends had come along too, but they were distracting her daughter and granddaughter outside of the hospice facility - and the former mayor of New York. A couple foundation agents had shown up to pay their respects as well.
Suzi’s breathing was shallow, and only growing weaker, but she couldn’t bear to see all the grieving faces around her. She reached a hand out to stroke her daughter’s hair, her formerly blonde hair greyed by age. Suzi once had blonde hair too, and it seemed to pass on to her daughter. The pictures showed it too…she couldn’t help but reminisce, even at a moment like this.
She turned her head to Joseph next, whose solemn face was betrayed by him holding her other hand like a lifeline. He might not have been the best husband sometimes, hiding things from her and having that one affair of his, but they had loved each other since they were both young and naive. Even despite all the hardships, their love had continued to last.
“It’s alright. I’m not in pain,” she told him with a weak smile. “I’ll be seeing everyone soon. Granny Erina, Madam Lisa Lisa…and Caesar… I’ll meet all…all of your friends, too…”
Joseph nodded, forcing a smile. “Yeah, you won’t be lonely up there. If Polnareff gets to be too much, just go tell Avdol or Kakyoin. Or Caesar. Caesar will keep you safe and happy, I know he will. Mum and Granny will too, I’m sure…”
The names of old friends, family, and love made her heart warm significantly. She’d seen them in her dreams, her fading memory rallying to give her a sight of what she thought they looked like based on all the photographs surrounding her bed right now.
And now, being surrounded by family and close friends, it felt like a luxury. From being a maid in Fascist Italy to becoming the wife of a real estate mogul in New York, her life had become fortunate very quickly. She liked to think it was the blessing of the dead; Holly had told her about Japan’s culture and how they believed that loved ones became guardian spirits.
She nearly died in Italy back then, nearly being turned into a boiling blood bomb, and he had helped save her too. And the rest of the family welcomed her and helped her - surely, all of their spirits had to be watching over them now, guarding and blessing them as the living carried their legacy.
Suzi closed her eyes, enjoying how soft the sheets and pillows were. With so many of the Joestars and their allies meeting violent ends, dying of old age, surrounded by family, wasn’t such a bad way to go out.
The darkness claimed her. She could accept this.
And then, she opened her eyes.
She felt a lot lighter than before. Her body wasn’t suffering, and there was no pain or strange obstructions that she could feel. She actually had energy back. She sat up in the bed, to the shocked looks of most of the people around her.
“Goodness, what on earth was that?” Suzi murmured. “I can- I can remember everything. My memory’s clear. And why am I all awake now? My, how very strange!”
“Er, Suzi…” Joseph quickly got her attention, looking just as startled as most of the group. “You might want to look down. And maybe behind you.”
Suzi blinked, then looked down. Her legs and clothes looked normal. She could see her hands, as well as another set resting on the bed.
She did a double take, and she quickly left the bed as Holly moved back to make space for her. On the bed was a copy of her, eyes closed and not moving. She looked at the bed, and then down at herself. She looked exactly the same, with the same frizzy grey hair and the same comfy nightgown.
“Good grief. Nothing’s ever easy in this family,” Jotaro sighed. Smokey still looked utterly confused at their reactions, unable to see what they could see, but he nodded along in agreement.
“U-Um, Miss Suzi,” Josuke spoke up. “I think, uh, you’ve become a ghost.”
“A what?!” Suzi exclaimed, looking down at her hands. They seemed quite real to her, but there was still the copy of her on the bed - her body? Her dead body? Nothing was making sense anymore. And sense didn’t run in this family in the first place!
Josuke immediately tried to reassure, “H-Hey, it's alright! Ghosts aren’t all that bad, I knew one a few years back! She was pretty nice, and I guess hanging out with her helped me get over my fear of them-”
“Josuke. You’re not helping,” Jotaro scolded. The young man flinched at his tone and backed off, his expression downcast.
Holly looked up at her mother from her position on her knees, her eyes watery. “M-Mama…can you not pass on? Is something…wrong?”
Suzi paused, but then shook her head. “Nothing that I know of, sweetheart. Everything’s been fine with me. Well, besides the fact that I’m dead, but I already knew that was inevitable,” she chuckled.
Joseph sat beside her body quietly as the Stand users - the ones who could see ghosts - were getting caught up in a flurry of chatter. His brows furrowed in concentration as he tried to come up with reasons why Suzi might have stayed. Just like Josuke, he remembered Reimi and her dog, but both of them had stuck around to see their killer brought to justice. Suzi didn’t have a reason like that…
That was as far as his calculations could go. Despite his health having improved since going to Morioh, his mind had been on a gradual decline for years now.
He didn’t notice that Suzi had come closer until he felt her cold touch against his jaw. She tilted his head upwards to look at her, and he was sure he hadn’t seen her that mobile in a long time. Even if she was a ghost, she didn’t seem to be in pain at all.
“All the reasons we could come up with, I don’t think they matter,” Suzi said. “But this way, I’ll at least be able to stay by your side.”
For the first time in a long time, Joseph felt himself smile back at her. “I don’t really understand it either. Maybe we don’t need to understand.”
As Jotaro grumbled about them being sickeningly sweet lovebirds at the back of the room, Holly filled Sadao and Smokey in on what was happening and Josuke looked like he wanted to leave already.
In the end, Suzi’s body was cremated but not buried. It felt wrong for them to mourn someone who was still very much around.
Over a decade later, Joseph’s luck finally caught up to him.
Rather than hospice care, he chose to stay in the comfort of his own apartment. His family didn’t try to force the issue, knowing that Joseph would still find a way to complain and obstruct them despite being on a ventilator.
“It’ll be alright, love,” Suzi murmured soothing words beside him. She held his hand in hers, and was rubbing small circles into the back on his withered hand.
This time, they were the only ones there at his deathbed. His family knew that the end was coming and came to New York - it was just poor timing that it was happening now, when everyone was elsewhere.
“I can still make a phone call, you know. Most of them can hear me,” Suzi suggested.
Joseph weakly shook his head. There wasn’t enough time for that and she knew it. Flickering tendrils of thin vines tried to wrap around her wrist, failing to hold on but succeeded in transferring his feelings to her.
Suzi understood, tucking her feet up onto the bed. “I’ll be right here. It won’t hurt, just close your eyes and let it happen.”
She watched as he weakly nodded and closed his eyes, giving her hand a small squeeze. It was sad that no one else was here, but Suzi knew that it would break Joseph’s heart in two if he saw Holly crying her eyes out.
“Maybe when it’s over, we can both leave together. I’m sure everyone is waiting for us,” she continued. “Madam Lisa Lisa’s been waiting for thirty years, Granny Erina and Speedwagon have been waiting seventy years…oh goodness, Caesar’s been waiting for eighty years! And everyone else has been for more than that… I wonder what they would make of the world now? Caesar probably would have gotten a kick out of that total solar eclipse.”
She kept talking as Joseph’s eyes closed, not thinking for a moment about stopping. She knew that Joseph was the type to hide his feelings for everyone else’s sake, and he wouldn’t be able to relax even in his hour of death if she was upset over what was happening. So, she kept going until his body became still.
Suzi didn’t know what would happen next, whether ghosts would go to the afterlife automatically or if they would rise into the air. She did neither of these things, instead seeing a somewhat transparent version of her husband sit up from his own corpse, like a butterfly leaving its chrysalis.
“Huh?!” Suzi looked from her husband to the door, then back again. “Oh- Oh dear! Joseph!”
“Hm? Is there something on my face?” Joseph’s spirit asked her. He suddenly paused as things started to catch up with him. “Wait… OH MY GOD! I’m still here too?!”
“I thought that- I thought…”
Suzi’s mind screeched to a halt as her husband continued freaking out. But that wouldn’t get them anywhere, so she took a deep breath and calmed herself down.
“So, what should we do?” she asked. “If you and I are ghosts now, and neither of us can pass on, what happens next?”
“I, uh…” Joseph paused for a moment. Then, he let out a heavy sigh. “We call Jotaro and hope he doesn’t get too pissed off.”
Suzi fretted to herself, “What a pity. I didn’t want our descendants to have to see us like this.”
Joseph made his way to the telephone, amazed that he wasn’t hobbling anymore, and called up Jotaro. After explaining the situation, his grandson was understandably upset and exasperated - both at Joseph dying unexpectedly, and at his grandparents unable to pass on - and suggested that they give it some time. After a lifetime of adventures, maybe they just needed to process the shock of finally resting at last.
Months passed, but neither of the elderly ghosts had passed on. Their belongings and last wills had been handled, and the pair were staying with Holly, but the family now had two urns and no answers.
Jotaro came back, telling them that he had one last solution, and brought them to the town of Morioh.
So here they were, standing outside of a house neither of the ghosts recognized. Jotaro double-checked the slip of paper he got from Josuke that had the address, and he rang the doorbell.
After half a minute, a movement of curtains from a nearby window got their attention. No one was there, but it was obvious that someone had been peeking at the group through them. A few more seconds later, the door suddenly opened.
“Good afternoon, Jotaro-san,” Rohan greeted. He looked past the young man, his eyes narrowing slightly. He switched to English, “You as well, Mr. Joestar. Is that your wife?”
“Stop stalling. I called you for a reason,” Jotaro interrupted, changing his language as well to keep his grandparents in the loop. “You wanted to make sure they were ghosts, didn’t you?”
Rohan let out a small laugh. “When you first asked me for help, I thought that brat had put you up to some sort of prank. But nothing’s ever normal in this town, is it?” He moved to the side of the door. “Come in.”
Jotaro led the pair into the manga artist’s house, guiding them to his living room as Rohan closed the door and followed. Joseph and Suzi were seated on Rohan’s couch, and Rohan took a seat on a chair while Jotaro remained standing.
“Let’s review: you want me to read them with my Stand to find out why Mr. Joestar and his wife aren’t passing on?” Rohan asked Jotaro. “Are you sure it’s not a special situation? You’ve told me of your family history - of course, not to a great extent - but perhaps their spirits are reacting to that immortal threat’s influence?”
“DIO and his plans had been stopped for good. I made sure of that,” Jotaro refuted. “The old man and Grandma Suzi died natural deaths. In fact, Grandma Suzi’s been dead for thirteen years. Gramps died only recently.”
Rohan nodded, taking in the facts. Joseph knew that the manga artist was only this cooperative because he respected both him and Jotaro greatly. He had a feeling that an under-the-table deal had been arranged between Rohan and Jotaro as well, but that was a can of worms he didn’t really care to open right now.
“It could just be internal conflict, rather than a grudge. If she died first, then it’s likely not a problem involving Stands.” Rohan turned from him to the ghosts on his couch. “I’d never pass up the chance to read your pages, but this could be solved if I wrote in for you to ‘go to heaven’. A similar command worked on another Stand before…I think. But your souls would have no choice but to obey the command.”
Joseph shook his head. “I don’t know why Suzi and I are still here. But if there’s something still left undone, then it would be better to face it directly. It could even be related to the Joestar family, and Jotaro would probably want to know about that.”
Rohan nodded once. “I see. In that case, lay back and I’ll take a look.”
Joseph nodded in agreement and laid back against the couch, closing his eyes for this part of the process. He’d never been read by Heaven’s Door before, but he’d heard from Koichi that it felt weird, but not painful - unless some pages were ripped out, which Jotaro wouldn’t let Rohan do.
Suzi watched as Joseph’s face suddenly opened up into pages of writing as Rohan stepped closer to him. “Huh?! What is-”
“This is my Stand ability, Heaven’s Door,” Rohan calmly interrupted. “It will allow me to read you both and figure out what’s going on.”
“No need to panic, Grandma Suzi,” Jotaro assured, walking up to the side of the couch and putting his hand on her shoulder. Suzi still looked apprehensive, but allowed herself to relax.
The room fell quiet, save for Rohan’s flipping through the pages and humming in interest. After a few minutes, he stopped and stared at a certain section of information in Joseph’s pages.
“Mrs. Joestar, I assume you also know of a man called ‘Caesar Zeppeli’, do you not?” Rohan suddenly asked.
“Eh?” Suzi sat up straight. “I mean, yes, I do. What of it?”
“It says quite a lot of things here about him. A Ripple warrior who died in the battle against the Pillar Men, and a lover to both of you? Interesting,” Rohan read out as Suzi began to sputter. “But more than that, there’s something odd here. These words seem alright, but the font and lack of other text…it’s like something else wrote in it first. Almost like a yokai’s pages..”
Jotaro walked over to Rohan next, trying to look over his shoulder. “What is it?”
“What are you two seeing?” Suzi exclaimed, trying to peer over at Joseph’s pages. “Let me look!”
Rohan looked over at her. “Nothing to panic about, Mrs. Joestar. I’ll need to read you next to see if anything’s strange here.”
Joseph’s pages closed shut, and he opened his eyes again. Rohan had Suzi lie back as he searched her pages as well, concentrating hard as he searched the pages. Jotaro watched as he took out a pen and tried to write something, but frowned - what he had tried to write had disappeared completely.
“So? What did you find?” Joseph asked.
Rohan sighed, exasperated by their impatience. “I believe I’ve found the root of the problem,” he declared, turning around and going back to his chair as Suzi’s pages closed.
He sat down, and Joseph leaned over to check on Suzi as she regained her awareness. Jotaro never lost his focus, watching Rohan with cold eyes.
Rohan began, “When I was checking Mr. Joestar’s pages, I found some odd text underneath a section about this ‘Caesar Zeppeli’ figure. It was a scrawl that said ‘I want to see you again’. That would seem pretty normal, as the desires of ghosts are stronger than those of the living. You’d desperately want to see a loved one again, especially after a tragedy.”
“Spirits bound by those desires become revenants. Like Reimi, or the geezer in the photograph,” Jotaro added. Rohan gave him a short nod, then continued:
“When I checked Mrs. Joestar’s pages, the same phrase was written with the same scrawl under the same section. I tried to make it disappear, but it rejected my written commands completely. With both of you having this unremovable scrawl, it’s safe to say that this is the influence of a third-party. And likely the cause of you not passing on, of course.”
Jotaro was quiet for a moment, but quickly concluded, “Caesar Zeppeli. He’s the cause.”
“Right. You catch on fast,” Rohan commended, which Joseph knew was a rare thing. “This seems to be a spiritual signal, or something like a curse to keep you bound. And if it rejected Heaven’s Door, then it’s very strong. You’re currently like artificial revenants - it’s not your own doing, but you’ve become bound spirits nonetheless. I’ve known of a painting with a similar curse, but that’s neither here nor there right now.”
As Rohan talked, Suzi covered her mouth in shock. When he finished, she murmured, “I thought he was in Heaven. How could he have…”
“I guess he’s not. He’s probably still on Earth somewhere,” Joseph sighed, looking down at his folded hands. “A ghost, like us. How could we have known? I couldn’t see them until I was in my sixties.”
“You’ll have to settle things with him if you want to pass on,” Rohan advised. “That spiritual signal won’t go away unless he removes it himself.”
The visit to Rohan’s house ended, and the search began immediately.
They started with checking the obvious places where Caesar might haunt: his grave, Air Supplena Island, Rome, and Naples. Then, they checked the less obvious places: the hospice care facility, the Joestars’ loft, the Joestars’ first house in the suburbs, and the Speedwagon Foundation building in Washington, D.C.
Finally, they checked the place Joseph never wanted to return to again: St. Moritz.
Joseph had blocked out most of the route in St. Moritz from his memory from the traumatic final days of February 1939. As a result, they had to go into town to ask the locals for directions to the old hotel. Jotaro had his grandparents wait in the car, as the locals would not be able to see them, and approached an old man ringing a bell in the street.
“Excuse me. Do you know where this place is?” he asked, showing the old man a picture he’d obtained from the Speedwagon Foundation. “It’s supposed to be an old hotel, and I’d like to study it for my research. But I don’t know where it is.”
“Oh…looks like the old Gessler hotel. It’s, ah, somewhere in the Stazerwald Forest. But no one’s ever been there,” the old man answered. “You know, that hotel used to be something of a local legend. My mom had been there a couple times, back when the hotel was in its prime. But after the Second World War, the whole building just went off the map! No one could find it. Of course, it had already gone out of business long before then…”
“I see. Thank you for your time,” Jotaro cut off, and he went back to the car.
He got in and closed the door, and his no-sense-of-personal-space grandfather immediately leaned his whole body into the space between the two front seats. “So, did you figure it out?”
“The old man said that the building disappeared entirely. Not demolished, but vanished into thin air,” Jotaro replied. “It was after World War Two, he said.”
“But Switzerland was a neutral country, I thought. It couldn’t have been bombed,” Suzi pointed out.
“Then maybe…could the place have become like Reimi’s alleyway?” Joseph suggested.
Jotaro was silent for a few seconds. “…It’s possible. It would explain why the locals can’t see it, if a haunting dragged it into a state of purgatory.”
“I suppose we’ll have to see when we get there,” Joseph sighed. “But did you actually get the directions to the site?”
“Stazerwald Forest,” he replied.
“I’ll take that as a no, then.”
Half an hour of driving around hiking trails passed by, but the car eventually stopped outside of its destination. The snow on the ground was thick and undisturbed, and the abandoned hotel loomed over the forest. It looked just the same as it did back then. Joseph felt a cold, hollow ache in his heart.
The three of them got out of the car, taking a moment to look up at the enormous structure.
“It was here, then,” Suzi murmured. It wasn’t a question, but Joseph responded with a silent nod.
Jotaro sighed. “Let’s go.”
Family troubles had to be dealt with and laid to rest - that was the opinion Jotaro held since Egypt. His grandparents had been dead for a while now, and they’d already said their goodbyes to the family before they embarked on their trip. The longer they stalled, the longer his grandparents and family suffered.
Jotaro already had to learn to push down his emotions to deal with problems long ago, but even rage had broken through that. He knew better now. All loose ends of his family had to be tied up. After the trouble with Pucci, Caesar Zeppeli would be the last one…hopefully.
Avoiding the gaping hole in the wall, though Star Platinum could’ve theoretically kept Jotaro safe, the trio pushed the front doors open and entered the building. The smell of dust was thick in the air, alongside mildew and rot. The smell of decaying nature came in through the hole, but was muted due to the winter season.
Amidst all the rubble, Joseph’s eyes were focused on the cross-shaped rock at the bottom of the stairs.
“He’s-” Joseph coughed, though he reasonably didn’t need to, just to hide his voice breaking. “Is he not here? That spot is where…”
“Which spot? Where did he… Ah.”
Suzi’s eyes had gone to the large piece of debris as well. She’d been told of how Caesar died, but had never once seen it in person. It wasn’t just that Joseph had never returned to Switzerland, but he dissuaded her from taking a trip there as well.
Jotaro stayed quiet. He could feel something in the room with them. Someone was here, he just hoped that it would be Caesar.
As Joseph took shaky steps towards the rock, his arm supported by Suzi, a small glimmer from above the rock made the couple freeze and step back from the shock. Jotaro felt the outline of Star Platinum summoning as a precaution, but forced it down when he looked around the room. There was no enemy Stand here.
The glimmer turned into an outline, and the outline became a blonde man covered head-to-toe with blood and wounds. He looked up at the trio, shock and hope mixed in his expression. “Jojo? Suzi? Is that- Is that you?!”
“CAESAR!”
The pair ran to him, nearly tripping over their own feet in the process, and tackled him in a hug. Caesar laughed as he took a few steps back from the impact, opening his arms to wrap them in a hug.
Jotaro had never met this man before, but this was the happiest he’d ever seen his grandparents, even including the time he showed them his newborn daughter. He decided that Caesar Zeppeli was not a threat, and assumed that whatever spiritual signal he sent out might have been unintentional.
“What took you so long?!” Caesar laughed, stepping back to look them over. “How’d you become old all of a sudden?! I can hardly recognize you!”
“Oi, don’t treat us like little kids! I’m, like, ninety-percent sure Suzi’s older than you!” Joseph whined. Caesar mischievously ruffled his hair in response, eliciting another squawk from him.
“Wait, you hardly recognize us?” Suzi repeated. “Then, how did you know it was us?”
“Oh, bella. I wielded life energy when I was alive. Wouldn’t it make sense that I would recognize yours?” Caesar pointed out.
“And we can certainly recognize you by your flirting, you womanizer,” she teased back. Caesar let out another laugh and hugged them both again.
“Fuck, I missed you both. I never thought you’d show up!”
Jotaro decided not to speak, staying near the entrance of the hotel. It was clear that the three of them only had eyes for each other, as odd as it seemed that two elderly ghosts were swooning over a bloodstained younger one, in his opinion.
“We- Ah, we didn’t know that you were even here,” Joseph took another breath, trying not to cry before he could get answers. “Which does beg the question, why are you here?”
“I was waiting for you. I couldn’t really leave.” Caesar shrugged. “I tried, pretty soon after I died. I left the building, but some vampire ran by and bumped into my arm. Uh, it took my arm off, so I put it back on and ran back in here. I didn’t know where the rest of you were anyway, so I figured that I should just wait until someone came to retrieve my remains. If I followed whoever came for me, then I could find where you guys went off to.”
Joseph felt his chilled heart plummet into his stomach instantly. He’d only heard of ghosts having restrictions on what they could do and how ghosts could be affected by things back in 1999, but he never thought that would apply to his own family. Then again, he and Suzi hadn’t left the loft in many years, and Jotaro had taken precautions to make sure they wouldn’t be sat on or otherwise disturbed during their trip.
Jotaro must have known about these restrictions. But then again, Jotaro knew nothing about Caesar. Talking about him had been too painful, even on their trip to Egypt, and Jotaro had told him to shut up whenever he tried to tell those stories anyway. And nobody could have known that Caesar was still haunting the earth.
“That’s not what I meant, love,” Suzi sighed. “Why are you still here, haunting this hotel? We thought you’d passed on, and were spending eternity with your family.”
“A family…” Caesar smiled sadly. “You guys were my family too. I always wanted a happy family, and to regain something for once in my life. So I thought, at least, my family would come back to bring me home, one way or another. No matter if it was my current or past one. No matter if it took a long time. And here we are, I suppose.”
Suzi looked back at Joseph, who was intensely staring at the ground. She turned back to Caesar with tears in her eyes, while Caesar looked troubled at their reactions.
“Caesar…they had you buried in absentia,” she confessed with a sniffle. “They said- They said your body was too damaged to be collected. They made you a grave, and we visited it, but-”
Her words were cut off by a small sob. Caesar was quick to take her into his arms, though his face was downcast.
“I see,” he murmured. He was silent for a moment longer as he looked at Suzi in his arms. “And to think I’d already decided that I was going to wait…some pitiful hope that I wasn’t going to be abandoned again. Why is it that people always have good reasons to leave me behind?”
Caesar chuckled quietly, mirthlessly, as he asked himself that. Joseph found the bravery to look up, swallowing his tears.
“It’s not just that. This place disappeared from human sight after the war; it was dragged into the border between the living and the dead. As long as you waited, no one would’ve been able to find you, even if they wanted to. Even if we knew about you haunting this place before, any Speedwagon Foundation workers we’d send would’ve never been able to find you.”
“Is that so? How did you find me, then?” Caesar questioned.
Joseph closed his eyes. “Suzi and I weren’t able to pass on, so one of our friends looked into our souls for the cause. He said you were letting out a signal that prevented us from passing on, and that’s the only reason we knew you were still here.”
Caesar’s expression became awash with shock as he let out a little “oh” and looked away.
“I…I didn’t realize. I didn’t know I was-”
“I know,” Joseph cut him off with a small nod.
“I didn’t mean to deny you your afterlife.”
“I know. I know.”
“I’m sorry.” Caesar let go of Suzi and took a step back. He looked somewhere between unsure and guilty - something Joseph couldn’t stand to see on his face, and he was sure Suzi couldn’t either.
“Well, if you look at the bright side,” Joseph tried to joke, “that only means you love us so much that it manifested as something physical, right? So, I guess you won’t have to worry about your womanizing!”
Caesar let out a small snort of laughter while Suzi gave Joseph a smack for that. It did break the tenseness just a little. However, there was still more to be said, and all of them knew it.
“I need to apologize too,” Joseph began. “When I heard from Speedwagon that you couldn’t be buried, I didn’t fight it. Because that would mean that I’d have to go dig you up myself, and I…I couldn’t do it. So, I just left you there. Like a coward, running away from the consequences of my actions.”
“Jojo, you’ve got it wrong.” Caesar took a few steps towards him, putting his hands on either side of his face. “It wasn’t your fault. That kind of burden, it shouldn’t have fallen to you. If you had sent someone else in your stead to dig me up, I wouldn’t have blamed you.”
Joseph felt himself tear up and squeezed his eyes shut, feeling hot tears burning at the edges of his eyes. Suzi ran up and grabbed Caesar’s arm, looking up at him with equally wet eyes.
“You really don’t blame us…?” she asked, nearly begged. “Isn’t that forgiving us too easily? You, of all people, have the right to hate us.”
“But I don’t,” Caesar answered simply. “You didn’t leave me behind…at least, not on purpose. And you came back for me. Isn’t that enough?”
The fickle whims of the undead that plagued the living often went to extremes. Jotaro had heard of such stories as he collected research for the Speedwagon Foundation, such as a starved vagrant attacking his killer’s daughter, or Reimi turning her goal from just reporting Kira to the police to weaponizing the purgatory she lived in. For how much wrath he saw, Jotaro never thought the same fickleness would apply to forgiveness. Perhaps love was just like that.
Suzi burst into tears again, wrapping her arms around Caesar’s midsection and burying her head in his shoulder. Caesar let go of Joseph to turn his attention to her, but Joseph was quick to gather both of them in a hug as well.
“Sorry we kept you waiting for so long,” Joseph spoke, forcing his raspy voice into something clearer. “We won’t let you be lonely again, I promise.”
Finally, he could feel Caesar start to tremble in his arms as he finally began to cry as well. Joseph didn’t know if they were tears of sadness or relief, but he didn’t want to see them on either of his lovers’ faces. Wherever they ended up, he’d do right by them this time.
The three of them were so occupied with each other that they didn’t notice their spirits turn golden and smoke starting to appear at their feet. Only when a warmth washed over them did they split apart, looking at each other and down at themselves. All of their forms were golden, and even more amazingly, Caesar’s wounds had completely vanished.
“I guess it’s time to go, isn’t it?” Joseph warmly remarked.
Suzi put her hands on the pair’s arms. “Yes, let’s. We can’t keep everyone waiting.”
“Hah… I’m going to have several apologies to give to everyone up there, aren’t I?” Caesar chuckled, tearfully smiling at the pair.
As the golden smoke rose higher and their spirits began to float, Joseph looked back at Jotaro. He’d nearly forgotten that his grandson was still there, but it wasn’t like him to leave things unfinished. Of course he wouldn’t have left.
“Take care, Jotaro. Don’t get into too much trouble, now. That’s Jolyne’s job!” he joked, making his grandson roll his eyes.
Caesar startled, as if he had only just noticed that Jotaro was there, but he composed himself quickly. He gave Jotaro a silent nod in respect, which the young man returned.
“Look after everyone else for us!” Suzi called out. “Make sure your mother’s well! We’ll say hi to everyone for you!”
Finally, the golden smoke enveloped the trio, and began to pour out the windows of the hotel, which seemed to have been formerly boarded up. It felt as if it had suddenly become easier to breathe in the hotel, like a weight of stones had been lifted from someone’s body.
Jotaro took a few more steps into the hotel, watching the smoke as it left. A solemn feeling had settled into his bones, but under that, he felt relieved. Another curse had been broken; one more step to his family being free from a centuries-long fate.
The aftermath was a simple affair. Once all the golden smoke was gone and he’d paid his respects, Jotaro went back to the car to retrieve a jar. He had Star Platinum lift the rock while he collected the bone fragments and dust of Caesar’s long-rotted body, then had the rock smashed to prevent it from hurting anyone again.
He took the meager remains back home and discussed burial plans with the rest of the family. They agreed to put all of the ashes and fragments into one big urn and bury it under one headstone - Jolyne’s idea, as a defiance of fate that would allow the three to stay together. Jotaro and Holly worked together on an epitaph they were sure the deceased would’ve liked, and the family held a funeral at last.
Finally, everything was as it should be.
In the months afterwards, the family rode the waves of scandal with humour and semi-honesty. Joseph Joestar had been an influential person in life, with a finger in many pies; real estate, research and science fields, politics, and the upper-class population of New York. His wife Suzi had also been a well-loved member of the community. Their descendants were famous too, from a marine biologist who made several scientific breakthroughs to a policeman who changed the legal system to be more fair and properly dispense justice.
So, when all of these businessmen, scientists, important figures, and some journalists visited the grave to observe or pay their respects to the great man and his adored wife, they were greeted with a headstone as bold and carefree as the Joestar couple had been in life:
JOSEPH JOESTAR
SEPT. 27. 1920 – DEC. 4. 2017
SUZI Q JOESTAR
JUL. 25. 1916 – APR. 27. 2004
CAESAR ANTHONIO ZEPPELI
MAY 13. 1918 – FEB. 27. 1939
IN THE FEBRUARY SUN
THREE HEARTS DID BECOME AS ONE
TWO LEFT HOME FOR WAR ONE DAY
ONLY ONE CAME BACK AGAIN