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“Hey cuz!” a girl’s bright voice chirped directly into Jolyne’s ear. She jerked away in shock so dramatically that she bumped into Hermes, sitting on her other side, and whipped around to see who’d addressed her.
There was nobody there, just an empty seat at one of the long prison caf tables. Hermes was looking at her with an air of vaguely amused concern.
Then, as she watched, a girl faded into existence out of thin air, leaning nonchalantly on the table. She was Asian, with wavy, pitch black hair cut off shortly above her shoulders, and she was wearing a pair of sunglasses that looked like they cost about the same amount as a new car. She looked about thirteen or fourteen, a few years older than Emporio but definitely too young to be in prison.
The girl smirked, bright and unashamed, and tipped her head to look over the tops of her sunglasses. There was a lump of bubble gum in one of her cheeks, and she was wearing a leather jacket at least a size too big for her lined with an ostentatious fur ruff. She was, notably, not wearing the standard prison uniform jacket.
“Whaaaaat the fuck,” Jolyne said.
“Hello!” Foo Fighters waved from across the table, apparently unfazed by a girl materializing out of fucking nowhere. To be fair, they had all seen weirder, but. Not by much.
The girl flashed her a peace sign before turning back to Jolyne. “So, listen. If my dad is your great-grandpa, how are we related? I’m like, your great aunt, right? Great great aunt? Or is it just cousins, but like, four times removed?”
“What the fuck?” Jolyne said, again. The girl blinked. Her eyes were bright behind her sunglasses, and they were either black or very dark purple.
“Oh, I forgot! I’m Shizuka!” Shizuka introduced herself, holding a hand out. “Shizuka Joestar!”
Jolyne was still staring. Hermes leaned around her to look Shizuka over suspiciously, and was met with a beaming grin.
“Sorry, go back, what the hell are you doing here?” Jolyne asked once her brain had rebooted. “You’re like, twelve.”
Shizuka made a face that could only be described as ‘aghast.’ “Hey! I’m thirteen!”
“She’s right, dude,” Hermes spoke up through a mouthful of unappealing prison food. “This is a high security prison. Why’d they put a kid in here?”
Shizuka shrugged, still grinning. “I’ve never been in a jail before!” she said, as if that was an answer, looking around with something a little like wonder in her eyes. Jolyne followed her gaze, but only saw the same bars, drab paint, and lines of despondent prisoners as always.
“If you’re related to me, how come we never met before?” Jolyne asked, suspicious. Green Street had taught her to be suspicious most of the time.
Shizuka stole a soggy French fry off of her tray. “Cause your dad is a paranoid asshole who didn’t want you to have anything else to do with the rest of your family cause we’re all weird as hell?”
Hermes snorted loudly. Foo was still watching the whole exchange with a vacantly curious expression.
Jolyne decided she liked Shizuka.
“Hey! You!” one of the guards shouted, pointing at Shizuka and starting to approach them, moving one hand to rest on his nightstick. “Where’s your uniform?”
“Whoops! Gotta blast,” Shizuka said, sliding back off the stool and bouncing to her feet. “Hey, did your dad ever tell you about the family secret technique?”
“No? Hey, wait a fuckin’ second-“
Shizuka whirled and abruptly disappeared, the sound of her sourceless laughter accompanied by the slap of sneakers on cheap linoleum as she sprinted away.
It was not the last time they’d see Shizuka Joestar. Not even close.
---
Hermes was in trouble. More than usual, that was- which was to say, not the kind of trouble that meant getting tossed in solitary for a day for punching a bitch out in the courtyard. No, this was the kind of trouble that meant a pair of guards sprinting down the corridor after her, machine guns out and ready to fire.
She turned a corner, swearing desperately under her breath, and was abruptly yanked sideways into a small alcove in the wall by a small but deceptively strong hand around her wrist. Already keyed up for a fight, she drew back to punch her new attacker automatically, but paused when she recognized the girl in the sunglasses.
Shizuka winked behind her shades and brought a finger to her lips in a ‘ssssh’ gesture before suddenly vanishing. Hermes could still the pressure of her fingers around her wrist.
The guards rounded the corner, moving cautiously down the corridor, talking to each other in low, suspicious voices. Hermes braced herself to fight or flee- she wasn’t sure which- but Shizuka’s hand held her firmly in place.
The guards passed the alcove- and didn’t even pause. Hermes was barely breathing. How were they not seeing them? One cast his flashlight directly at them, looked straight at Hermes, and then moved on.
“She’s not here,” his partner said. “Must have found someplace to hide. Let’s backtrack.”
Before long, the clumping noise of heavy boots on the floor was nothing but a fading echo. Hermes let out a shuddering, relieved exhale, shocked by her good fortune but not about to question it, and raised a hand to wipe the sweat off of her forehead. And froze.
Her hand was in front of her face, she was sure of that- when she waved it, she could feel the breeze from the movement against her skin- but she couldn’t see it. She was just beginning to panic when Shizuka said, “Okay! I think they’re gone,” and between one breath and the next she could see her hand again.
“Why were they chasing you, anyways?” Shizuka asked, leaning up against the wall, apparently completely untroubled by the machine gun that had been pointed straight at her barely a minute before.
Hermes grinned at her, sharp with relief, and tugged her vest aside to reveal a key ring tucked into the lining. “Fumbled my grab, tipped the guard off,” she explained.
“Ooooooh,” Shizuka said, eyes going bright with mischief. “Do you have a key to the contraband impound there?”
“Uh, yeah, I think so,” Hermes said after examining the keys for a few moments.
“Perfect,” Shizuka said. “How do you feel about black-market profiteering?”
Hermes, who had once gotten surgery specifically so that she could smuggle more money into prison, said, “Keep talking.”
---
It was an outdoors day, pleasantly sunny and unpleasantly hot. Foo Fighters was sitting under the spray of the grass sprinkler, idly watching Jolyne and Hermes bounce a basketball back and forth across the court, drinking in the moisture on her skin.
“You’re really, really fascinating, did you know that?” a voice with no body attached said casually.
Foo glanced to her right. The voice was originating from an outline of a person, defined by the droplets of water clinging to her skin. It made it look like a ghost or a sprite was sitting beside her, someone not-quite-real built out of negative space.
“Oh, you’re Jolyne’s cousin,” Foo said, unfazed. “Are you a ghost?”
The girl flickered into translucency and then opacity, revealing she was wearing a purple swimsuit and a pair of sunglasses with their lenses decorated by water drops, and tipped her head thoughtfully. Her damp hair hung around her face in messy tangles. “Well, I don’t think I’m dead, but I’m invisible and I haunt people, so I guess I could be!”
“Cool,” Foo said, nodding in approval. “I’ve never met a ghost before.”
“Me neither! You could be a zombie, you know,” Shizuka said.
Foo blinked slowly, eyes rehydrating. “What’s a zom-bie?”
Shizuka brightened- literally, her body sliding into slightly sharper definition and bolder color, becoming more visible, as she clapped her hands. “A zombie’s like a dead body,” Shizuka said enthusiastically, “that’s reanimated by a powerful force! Kinda the opposite of a ghost. So, you!”
“Zombie,” Foo said thoughtfully, looking down at Atroe’s hands. “I like that. Are there any other zombies I can meet?”
“My dad has a lot of good movies about them,” Shizuka offered. “I can show you once all this is over.”
“I think I’d like that,” Foo decided, and then, belatedly registering the second sentence, “All what?”
Shizuka grinned, disappeared, and her water-speckled silhouette said, “You’ll see.” Her smile persisted a moment after the rest of her, hanging in midair, before it too was gone.
A moment later, the basketball Jolyne and Hermes were playing with vanished in midair just as Jolyne launched it at the basket for the winning shot. The ensuing streak of cursing was strong enough to turn the air blue.
“FF, did you see where that went?” Jolyne shouted.
“I didn’t see anything,” Foo answered with perfect honesty.
---
The list of things Shizuka Joestar kept on her person at all times included: a pair of sunglasses, a deck of cards, lockpicks, a good pair of sneakers, a lighter, a pen, twenty American dollars, twenty euro, and two thousand yen.
The deck of cards was what was important at the moment.
“Come on!” she said, shuffling the cards without looking down. “Just one game?”
“Nah,” Jolyne said, her tongue between her teeth as she carefully painted her toenails, her feet propped up on the lunchroom table. “‘M busy.”
“Come onnnnnn,” Shizuka persisted, hitting the whiny, pleading note that all children under fourteen innately have mastered. “I’m bored.”
“Couldn’t you just like, leave?” Jolyne asked, painting the last nail and capping up the polish.
“Well, yeah,” Shizuka said, and didn’t elaborate. She slid the deck over to Jolyne. “Cut?”
Jolyne pulled the top third of the deck off and set it down. “Well?”
Shizuka stacked the deck back together and went back to shuffling. “Well what?”
“Why don’t you walk outta here?” Jolyne asked. “I would, if I were you.”
“Nah, you wouldn’t,” Shizuka said confidently. “You wouldn’t abandon your dad like that.”
Jolyne blinked. “I- well, yeah, but, you don’t have anything like that keeping you here.”
“Sure I do!” Shizuka answered brightly. “You and I are family, remember?”
Jolyne frowned. “Wait. Are you saying you’re here because you’re- what, looking after me?”
Shizuka shrugged, her smile unwavering, as Hermes dropped gracelessly into the seat next to Jolyne, eyeing the cards. “You guys playing poker?”
“Yeah!” Shizuka said before Jolyne could say otherwise. “Five card draw. You want in?”
“Sure, deal me in,” Hermes said, and Shizuka shot Jolyne a slightly triumphant look before distributing cards to all three of them.
“What’s poker?” Foo Fighters asked, following after Hermes and sitting down beside her.
“It’s a card game, Foo,” Jolyne said. “It’s like, uh…”
“Here,” Hermes said, leaning over to show the other girl her hand. “FF, you can be a team with me. I’ll explain as we go.”
They fell into a comfortable pattern, gambling for cigarettes and spare change as Jolyne’s nail polish dried and FF slowly began to grasp the rules. Shizuka won several rounds in a row, her ever-present smile widening with each victory as Jolyne’s eyes narrowed with frustration.
“So,” Foo said slowly, “you get all of your cards from the deck, right?”
“Yeah, FF, we’ve been over that part,” Hermes said, slightly exasperated.
“So the invisible cards Shizuka is pulling out of her sleeves don’t count?”
There was a long, long beat of absolute silence.
Then Shizuka abruptly vanished, accompanied by the entire pile of change she’d been in the midst of gleefully pulling towards her, followed by the quickly-retreating sound of sneakered footsteps.
“Motherfucker!” Jolyne shouted, shoving herself to her feet and bolting after her.
---
“I need a favor,” the girl said. She was wearing a fur jacket, sunglasses, and a smile, and was sitting on the back of the piano, kicking her legs absently in midair. She looked like she was a year or two older than him.
Emporio blinked, glanced behind him at the door. The door that was invisible from the outside, and that no one else should be able to enter. “How did you get in here?”
“This is a nice place!” she said instead of answering, casting a look around the ghostly music room. “I like the windows. There isn’t enough sunlight in this prison. Makes me miss Italy.”
“Italy?” Emporio echoed, feeling lost.
“Yeah, it’s where my mom is from!” the girl answered. “Sometimes I stay there with one of my cousins. Once we’re all out of here, you guys should come visit with me. You ever been to Naples?”
“I’ve never been outside this prison,” Emporio admitted.
The girl’s eyes widened behind her sunglasses before narrowing in determination. “Alright, that settles it. Once this is all fixed, you’re coming with me to Naples.”
Emporio tried to steer the conversation back to a manageable place. “Sorry, who are you?”
“Oh! Right. I’m Shizuka Joestar. Jolyne’s cousin. I need your help to stage a breakout and sabotage Father Pucci’s doomsday plot.”
“A- the- what?” Emporio stuttered. He didn’t know what he’d expected from a girl who’d suddenly appeared in his room- a room that should never be accessible to strangers- but that wasn’t it. “Father Pucci’s what?”
“Don’t panic,” Shizuka said, sliding off the piano. “It’s gonna be fine. Joestars deal with this stuff all the time! Jolyne and Jotaro aren’t escaping the family reunion that easily.”
Emporio sucked in a breath, released it. “Okay,” he said, a little helplessly. “How can I help?”
(It involved a skeleton key, the phantoms of a few long-demolished hallways, and a hammer.)
---
“Hey, cuz,” a voice spoke up from behind Jolyne, and it spoke volumes about the amount of times she’d heard that specific voice speak out of thin air that she didn’t even startle. “Do you know how to hotwire a car?”
Jolyne blinked, turning around even though there were even odds on there being nothing behind her. “Yeah, why?”
“Great!” Shizuka said, flickering into existence, waving a familiar disk in the air triumphantly. “Cause I don’t. Grab your friends and let’s go. Pucci’ll be finding out what happened to his office about, uh-”
She was interrupted, with exquisite timing, by the blaring of an alarm, the emergency alert lights suddenly turning on and strobing red.
“Now!” Shizuka announced, grabbing Jolyne by the hand. “My Stand’s noncombat, so you’ll have to do all the punching on the way out, ‘kay?”
Jolyne didn’t even hesitate for a moment before she grinned, all teeth. “I can handle that.”
---
Jolyne and her dad hugged for a long, long time, both of them shaking a little in the way that meant they were desperately trying to restrain tears but not entirely succeeding. Emporio was looking out at the ocean with wide, starry eyes. Shizuka wondered if he’d ever seen so much unbroken horizon in his life.
When they finally broke apart, Jotaro turned to look over the motley collection of friends Jolyne had collected in prison before his eyes landed on Shizuka, and he audibly sighed.
“What are you doing here?”
“Hi, Jotaro!” Shizuka said with a bright smile and a wave.
“Shizuka,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Interfering,” she answered, dark eyes crinkling up in amusement for a moment before elaborating. Because it was true, but also not the full answer.
“See, Mom asked me to make sure you guys were going to come to the family reunion this year, since you never do. And, like, sure, I could’ve called, but I figured, why not visit cause I’ve never met my badass cousin before! So I got down here, tracked Jolyne down and thought I’d hang out with her and her friends in jail for awhile, and then I found out there was this whole conspiracy thing going down, and it was like, I couldn’t just leave after that! And now here we are!”
Silence hung in the air for a moment after she finished speaking, until Jotaro said, “You were bored, weren’t-”
“I was bored,” Shizuka admitted before he could finish. Jolyne snorted. Jotaro sighed and tugged his hat down, but Shizuka was pretty sure he was hiding a smile.
“Good grief,” he said. “You’re so much like your dad.” He paused. “That wasn’t a compliment.”
Shizuka grinned. “Yeah, it was.”