Work Text:
Egypt is hot during the day, cold during the night, and cool in the evenings when dusk rings through the world.
"Rohan," Noriaki asks, rolling over on his bed and snapping his book shut, "when do you think the group Dio-sama mentioned will arrive?"
Kujo Jotaro and some others, he recalls, from the minute information D'Arby gave them before sending them off to a hotel in Cairo. Noriaki has his doubts about the whole thing, but if Rohan says it'll help them survive in the world, then he has to follow Rohan.
He's survived this long by following Rohan, after all. Rohan is the only one that gets him, and he's the only one that understands Rohan.
"I don't know," Rohan mutters, focused intently on his sketchpad and an insect in a jar he captured while browsing the market for paper. Not looking up, he adds, "Stop being so anxious, Noriaki. Read your book. Live your life. Not like we'll have a good one, so enjoy the one you can get."
"Did Pink Dark say that in the latest chapter?" Noriaki pokes wryly, picking up his book nonetheless with a sigh. He flips to the page he was on, fingers the worm bookmark Rohan gave him on his fifteenth birthday, and slides it onto the table.
Rohan's pencil stops, just for a moment, as he turns to him. "I wrote shonen, not life advice, thank you very much," he huffs. How like him to only get offended when his beloved manga gets passed through word of mouth. "I've told you Noriaki, I despise those people who squeeze the most cliché things ever into their work. Don't they understand-"
"That their work is a reflection of their soul, yes, I know," Noriaki finishes for him, multitasking as he skims through the rest of the English words printed on the page.
He flips the page, reads, and stops when he realizes Rohan's pencil has stopped moving.
"Well," Rohan says from his armchair in front of the desk, "how about we go outside to see the dusk, Noriaki?"
Noriaki blinks. "Pardon?"
"Are you deaf?" Rohan huffs, snapping his sketchbook closed and standing up. He gestures to the window, then to the hotel door. "I said, let's go see the dusk, Noriaki."
"I heard you just fine," Noriaki says mildly, hardly daring to believe it. Kishibe Rohan, willingly going outside to look at the sky instead of gazing at it from outside a window with his pencil until he drags him out? Has the world truly changed? Is this the influence Dio spoke of when enchanting Rohan with his words?
"I heard it from the locals," Rohan explains further.
"Oh?"
"It's called golden dusk."
It's aptly named, Noriaki realizes as he gazes upon the golden dusk of Egypt. Being a painter, it almost seems surreal, as if the gods themselves painted the heavens with watercolour and brush alone. Like Mother Nature let her brush of gold and butter-yellow, yellows ranging from the softest creamy buttercup to a colour between orange and amber, swerve across the canvas of a sky and let the colours flow until they slowly shaded to pink, then the faintest dregs of purple like a spiralling conch shell.
"It's named accurately," he comments, but Rohan remains silent. When Noriaki looks over at him, he notices the expression on his face, and he gets to delight in the most beautiful light of them all.
Like a moth to flame, like the sun to the horizon, he knows he'll get swallowed up by the dusk. Noriaki knows the flame burns, and he knows the beautiful dusk only heralds his demise until his rebirth, and he knows following Kishibe Rohan will only lead in his broken pieces like a shattered china plate, and yet-
-just as the moth burns by the flame, and how the sun is devoured by the dusk, Noriaki finds himself swallowed by the being that is Kishibe Rohan, and accepts it.
Golden dusk, perhaps, is the only time that they stand on equal footing; the sun and the stars, and Kakyoin Noriaki and Kishibe Rohan.