Chapter Text
It’s a chilly December day in Morioh when Josuke Higashikata finally decides to confront his stalker.
It’s been a week and a half, and she’s never left his periphery, a mournful figure in her drab school uniform. Standing alone in the snow. He knows the following: that her name is Chiyoko Watanabe, that she attends his school but is a year below him, and that her friends have no idea why she’s following him. One says, slyly, that she certainly isn’t crushing on Josuke, and he isn’t quite sure if the joke is on him or Chiyoko. In any case, he’s had more than his fair share of fans, and this girl is different. She’s all sadness.
After the ordeal with Kira, Josuke decides to distance himself from the innocent public when he talks to Chiyoko, just in case things turn violent. He makes his way to the highway between Morioh and S City after school. He doesn’t look back, but he hears the crunch of snow underfoot a few paces behind. He draws his uniform tighter around him, jams his hands in his pockets. Unfettered by the buildings and trees in town, the wind whips across the open road, over the bare earth. He hears her following. She’s walking slowly. Josuke takes a breath. He spins on his heel, pinning her with his best accusatory glare.
“Wanna tell me why you’ve been following me this past week?”
Chiyoko stops, and he can see the dark patches on her stockings where the snow has soaked through. Her cheeks are flushed.
“You have a great potential for healing, Mr. Higashikata.” Chiyoko replies, and it’s the first time he’s heard her speak - her voice is hoarse and wavering. She looks like hell , Josuke thinks.
“Are you hurt?” He takes a step closer. Chiyoko just shakes her head, dark hair fluttering in the wind.
She doesn’t look okay , Josuke thinks again, taking the opportunity to look at her more closely. She’s frail, and trembling - or is it shivering, in this cold? Her face is pale and drawn, cheeks red and eyes unnaturally bright. Dark rings under her eyes. She hasn’t bothered to put a jacket on over her uniform, or change out of her school shoes, and there are flecks of snow sticking to her all over. Too cold to melt.
“What needs healing?” Josuke tries. Maybe her family is hurt, or something, and she’s sick with worry ? It could be anything. If she heard about his ability, she might be misinformed - he can’t cure illness.
“You do, Mr. Higashikata.” She answers, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“Look, I appreciate your concern… Miss Watanabe?” The formality feels awkward and heavy on his tongue. “I’m fine. Really.”
Chiyoko tilts her head to one side, never breaking eye contact.
“Your family isn’t. They weren’t.”
Josuke feels his anger flaring, despite himself.
“What do you know about my family?” It could be a threat. Josuke doesn't have a lot of family left to lose.
Chiyoko doesn’t answer, which does nothing to assuage his fears. He steps closer again, hostility spiking.
She just stares at him.
And once he comes close enough, she clocks him. Literally.
“You hit me with a fucking alarm clock ?” He yells, but he already knows there won’t be a response. Chiyoko isn’t there anymore. He’s alone amid the snowdrift. In the dark.
It wasn’t dark before, so he supposes she knocked him out, somehow? Left him on an icy highway until night fell? That’s a very roundabout way to kill somebody , he thinks. He’s bleeding, and his head is pounding.
The clock by his feet is dented where it impacted his skull, but the hands are still moving.
Before he can stoop to pick it up, he’s blinded by a sudden, harsh light. Fuck . He stumbles out of the road before the car can mow him down, but it doesn’t. It grinds to a halt in the snow, spinning its wheels and spraying slush in every direction. The driver slams on the horn once, twice. She’s furious.
Josuke steps closer to the car, and inside he can see a woman, near tears and beating on the steering wheel with her fists. In the backseat, there’s a little boy, pale and sweating. Shit , Josuke thinks, I know what’s happening . He feels the woman’s eyes on him, taking in the blood on his face. Mechanically, he removes his uniform jacket and lays it in the snow. He directs the driver, taking care not to look her in the eye. He steps back when the car begins to move, shredding his jacket, and tries not to notice the little boy blinking owlishly at him from the back seat.
And at that moment, the alarm clock rings.
“What the fuck ?” He spits, on his knees in the snow. Chiyoko doesn’t respond. “I remember that, that was eleven years ago, I was just a kid and this guy - Watanabe, what the fuck did you do?”
“You went back, Mr. Higashikata.” There’s an undercurrent of frustration in her voice. She’s cracking. Losing her patience. Great.
He swings at her, and Crazy Diamond hits, but not her, not directly - it hits her stand, and she stumbles back, almost tripping over her feet. She’s numb with cold. Her stand blocked the blow with one arm, as best it could, but it’s clearly weakened.
“This is my stand, Fading Pictures.” Chiyoko tells him, as if she’s introducing him to an older sister. A hell of a lot older , Josuke thinks. Fading Pictures is tall, and humanoid, with a curtain of synthetic-looking dark hair and thick glasses. Her arms are long, and adorned wrist-to-shoulder in timepieces from various eras - stopwatches, digital timers, and everything in between. Protruding from her skull is a sundial, even. But what catches Josuke’s attention is the stand’s body. She’s withered, almost mummified, and seemingly near death.
Later, Josuke blames the feeble appearance of Chiyoko’s stand. He was taken aback, and had let his guard down momentarily after landing a blow. He didn’t want to cause any serious damage - he’s learned the hard way that no amount of fixing can bring the dead back to life. But he’s not paying enough attention.
One of Faded Pictures’ arms shoots out and her hand fastens itself around his throat. He chokes. Crazy Diamond hits Chiyoko’s stand in the chest, hard. She falls back, and Josuke would sigh in relief, but the hand is still around his throat.
“ What? ” He wheezes. Chiyoko approaches, and her stand has a gap where her hand should be, except there’s something budding on the stump. As he watches, a tiny, foetal hand forms, then grows, and matures, until Faded Pictures has a fully functional - albeit young-looking - hand again.
“You won’t choke,” Chiyoko tells him, and sure enough, the grip loosens enough for him to breathe.
“What do you want?” He gasps. Chiyoko frowns, visibly irritated, and replies with an air of impatience.
“I told you, Mr. Higashikata. I want your family to heal.”
-
Josuke ducks into his house, briefly, to change his uniform. The hand is still fastened around his throat, and if what Chiyoko told him is correct, it won’t be going anywhere any time soon. When he looks at himself in the mirror, he sees that the hand has a old-looking watch around its wrist, which he can’t pry off any more than he can pry the fingers from around his neck. He wraps the hand in a scarf, just in case anyone he knows sees him and asks any difficult questions - no-one without a stand can see the hand, but unfortunately for Josuke, everyone he knows is some kind of freak, and they’ll probably flip and go after Chiyoko if they see it.
She doesn’t need that.
He comes back out with one of his mother’s old jackets slung over one arm. Chiyoko is sitting on the footpath by his house, looking even more cold and small than before. He drapes the jacket over her, but doesn’t sit. The ground is wet and thick with slush.
“Remind me again why I should do this.”
“You don’t have a choice,” she responds, sadly. “As soon as you were hit with my stand, your options changed.”
“And what are my options, now?”
“Do or die.”
Josuke sighs.
“That’s always how it is.” He looks down at Chiyoko again, looks at the snow settled in her hair.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” He asks the question even though he knows the answer.
“I don’t sleep, or eat. I can’t stop shaking.” Chiyoko whispers, “I might die.”
-
When he’d finally given up trying to yank the hand from around his neck - he’d tried using Crazy Diamond on it too, to return the hand to Faded Pictures, but that hadn’t worked either - he’d asked Chiyoko the question.
“What the fuck do you want from me? And no cryptic bullshit, Watanabe, you’ve got me with your creepy-ass stand, so just tell me what it is you want.”
“Your family has suffered many tragedies.” That takes him off-guard. Up to this point, he’d thought she brought up his family to provoke him, to nab him with her stand.
“So?”
“So, I can feel it. It’s like anxiety, it’s like insomnia, it’s like a throbbing, crushing, boiling hot pressure building inside my head. The pain in your family line is driving me crazy.” She rubs at her eyes clumsily, like she can barely feel her fingers. “I want you to fix it.”
“...And you’re going to use your stand to make that happen?”
“It’s already happening.” Here, her voice cracks. “It grabbed you, and now you have to fix it. You’re going to go back, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, and if you don’t make it better you’re never going to come back here, not ever - I’m sorry , I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t think of any other way to - I need to - I had to…” She gasps, like she’s running out of air, and Josuke feels for her despite himself. She’s on the brink.
“What do I have to do?”
-
The relentless tick-tick-ticking of the stand’s watch resounds through Josuke’s bones, echoes around his skull like nothing he’s ever experienced. He can feel the timer within himself, counting down to the jump. Chiyoko told him what to do, taught him about her stand and its rules. Gave him his mission. It’s a win-win , she’d said, with a wry smile that said no it isn’t .
And if he fails, he won’t come back.
He wrote a letter - just a few lines, really, to his mother, before he left the house. He doesn’t know how much good it will do. He makes sure to mention Okuyasu, and Jotaro, and Koichi, and even his father. He signs it with a heart after his name, the way his mother would when she left him notes.
Chiyoko is talking to her stand, and she turns to him.
“Where was your father, eleven years ago?”
Josuke’s automatic response is I don’t fucking know, it’s not like I even knew him before I - until his brain finally fires up and he realises.
“1988. In winter, he was in Egypt. He was… doing something.”
“Then that’s where you’re headed first. Pictures says you’ll be locked onto your father, so you’ll be stuck within a mile radius of him.”
“Fantastic. It’s not like I have a complicated relationship with him or anything.”
Chiyoko looks unimpressed, and he can’t blame her. He thinks he might be whining just for the sake of it. Whatever. He’s allowed to be pissy. He’s being sent into the past.
The ticking is getting louder. He’s running out of time.
“Tell my mom I love her, okay? If I fuck it up.”
Chiyoko nods to empty air. Josuke is already gone.
-
Iggy’s missing, and the Crusaders have been wandering around Cairo, half-heartedly looking for him. He’s only going to be found when he wants to be. The oppressive heat and their reduced number is starting to weigh on them. Jotaro stalked off near the beginning of their search, snapping at Joseph so viciously when he made to follow that he was actually taken aback. He’s been uncharacteristically quiet since, and it’s not even his characteristic sulk, the puffed-up theatre of wounded pride he likes to trot out for attention. He’s just walking, and thinking, hat pulled down over his eyes. The similarities between Joseph and his grandson are there, just subtle, and hard to spot.
Polnareff is talking just for the sake of it, but he knows as well as anyone that his words are landing on deaf ears, so his speech keeps devolving into mumblings in French and garbled thoughts. Avdol is keeping pace with him, watching the alleys and alcoves, eyes darting from shadow to shadow. The thought no-one wants to voice is that Iggy could be hurt, or dead. For all they know, Dio is around every corner.
They come to a stop in an open square, and Jotaro soon rejoins them, looking sour. Polnareff sits heavily on the paving stones, warmed by the sun. Joseph makes a fuss when his grandson reappears, but it’s feeble. They all pretend nothing is wrong.
Kakyoin is watching them from down a narrow street. They haven’t noticed him. His eyes itch. He could turn around, at this point, find a phone and call his parents. Go home, and return to his safe, normal, horrible, upsetting, lonely life. Instead, he starts walking towards the group he’d had to leave. Just then, a small shadow stumbles across his path, silhouetted in the harsh sun.
Two things happen at once.
Iggy limps into view of the Crusaders, and they all start towards him. From the other side of the square, another figure steps into view, also heading for Iggy, and everyone’s heads - Kakyoin included - snap to him.
Josuke had thought he’d be incredibly conspicuous in Egypt, dressed in his gakuran, but he sees now that Jotaro (who looks almost exactly the same as he does ten years from now, though a little fresher in the face and unused to his height, like his body is a machine he only vaguely knows how to operate) is also wearing his gakuran, and what’s more, apparently has been wearing it their entire journey? Through Hong Kong, and India, and across Egypt? He’s a strange man. In any case, it shouldn’t be a problem - Josuke is used to getting stares, because his hair is incredible, and he’s very handsome. And charming. It shouldn’t be too hard to win over a group of highly suspicious stand users who have no reason to trust him or even refrain from killing him on the spot.
Then he sees Iggy limping, and any plan he had to introduce himself goes right out of his head. He strolls straight up to the little dog, pushing Polnareff’s arm away when the man tries to grab him by the shoulder and dropping to his knees. Grit on the ground digs through the fabric of his trousers. He holds his hand out by Iggy’s raised, bandaged paw. The little dog doesn’t let his paw rest in Josuke’s palm, but doesn’t turn tail and run, either. Sand dances around Josuke, The Fool poised to attack, but then Crazy Diamond’s hand pops up from Josuke’s own, and its finger taps Iggy’s paw just once. Crazy Diamond disappears, and Josuke straightens up quickly and steps back, hands held up in supplication as the Crusaders panic - they know he’s a stand user now, and they think he’s attacked one of their companions. Joseph’s yelling something incoherent (Josuke’s English is extremely lacking), Polnareff has his stand out, Avdol is asking him something, again in English, but it sounds like he’s trying to remain calm. Jotaro growls, and Star Platinum is behind him, and God, Josuke’s never felt that hostility directed towards him .
“Wait.”
“That voice…” Jotaro speaks quietly, as if to himself, and only Josuke understands him because he's spoken in Japanese.
They turn as one, and see a young man dressed in an emerald gakuran ( another one? Josuke thinks, what kind of circus is this? ), long red hair hanging over a pair of dark glasses. He’s crouched by Iggy, and has taken off the little dog’s bandages.
“His paw is healed. I saw it before it was bandaged, and it was mangled.”
He speaks in English, but Josuke watches Iggy puts his paw down and leans his full weight on his leg, showing no discomfort.
The Crusaders turn to look at Josuke again, and he tries to think of how to explain himself. He’d like to address himself to Jotaro, given how much time they’ll spend together in the future, but he’s still radiating aggression and Josuke’s a little scared of looking in his direction. He speaks to the man in green first, hoping for a translator. He's just lucky there are two Japanese high school students on this nightmare road trip.
He starts explaining himself to Kakyoin, tone apologetic.
“His name is Josuke. He’s Japanese,” Kakyoin informs the group. “Doesn’t speak English, but Jotaro and I could talk to him.”
“What did he do to Iggy?” Joseph demands. “And why are you here?” Avdol elbows him.
“Fixed him. It’s his Stand, he says. It repairs broken things. And I’m here because my eyes are healed.” Kakyoin flashes them all one of his trademark unsettling grins, scars just barely visible past his shades.
At this point, Kakyoin speaks to Josuke himself.
“Can you bring out your stand to show them? They’re suspicious. So am I.”
Josuke nods, and hands still up, summons Crazy Diamond again. His stand waves cheerily at the Crusaders, and Josuke pinches his nose. He digs in his pocket, and pulls out his house keys. He nods at the others, then tosses his keys in the air and has Crazy Diamond punch them into a thousand pieces. He gestures at the mound of metal shavings and plastic that was once his keys (and a cute little keychain charm Okuyasu had made him), then has Crazy Diamond fix them. They’re perfect. He tosses the keys to the nearest Crusader, the silver-haired French one. The man lets out a low whistle, and passes them along the line. Finally, Avdol hands them back hesitantly, like Josuke’s going to bite his arm off once he comes near. Having slid effortlessly back into the group, Kakyoin seems to have embraced - rather smugly - the role of translator, and dutifully translates for Josuke and the Crusaders.
"Well, this is cool." Joseph says. "Wanna come beat up a slutty vampire with us? I'm calling him a trampire."
While Kakyoin is deciding never to translate for a group containing Joseph Joestar ever again, Avdol speaks up.
"Mr. Joestar, every stand user we've met thus far has been in Dio's employ. Do you really think we should recruit a random stranger when we're closer than ever to his mansion? Don't you find that suspicious?"
"Maybe it's fate." Polnareff pipes up.
Jotaro glares daggers at Josuke. He’s a little sweaty under the gaze he’s only ever seen Jotaro fix on murderers and people who don’t cut their beer rings before they throw them out.
"No flesh bud." He grits out, like every word is causing him physical pain.
Josuke decides he never wants to know what the hell a flesh bud is, and by the shadows that pass over Kakyoin and Polnareff's faces, he's not wrong.
"But he fixed Iggy!" Joseph wails. "And I'm so sick of you freaks, I swear to God I'm starting to think I crashed some of those planes on purpose -"
"Maybe we should discuss this in private." Avdol says, wisely. Josuke likes Avdol, even if he clearly doesn't trust him. He's the only one in the group who has any common sense. Josuke wouldn't trust Josuke either.
The Crusaders huddle in the corner of the plaza, while Josuke fixes his hair and watches them out of the corner of his eye.
"I can't explain it, I just really think we should bring him with us." Joseph says, theatrics set aside. "There's something about him. I trust him."
"I agree with Mr. Joestar," Polnareff says, airily. "He appeared for a reason. Perhaps something will go wrong if we don't take him along?"
Kakyoin shrugs. "He's one guy. If we don't leave him alone with anyone, we should be able to take him out if he tries anything. And if he is nice, then we have a healer."
"Don't underestimate him." Jotaro mutters, staring at his feet. "His stand is powerful."
Avdol clicks his tongue. "It's actually his stand that's making me reconsider. Almost every stand we've come across thus far has been oriented around destruction. Even our own."
At this, Joseph snorts. Avdol corrects himself. " Most of our own. But his is centered in reconstruction."
"Your point?" Kakyoin sounds rude, but an eyebrow quirked over his sunglasses betrays his interest.
"My point is that stands are an extension of our souls, and so they reflect our selves. A person with a stand like Josuke's is most likely a very compassionate person."
"And if that's the case, without a flesh bud, he'd be very unlikely to join forces with Dio." Kakyoin muses. Avdol nods.
"I'll be honest, I don't care about any of that." Joseph says, elbowing his way through the group. "I just like this guy."
Jotaro sighs.
When they get back to Josuke, (who strikes a pose when he sees them approaching, showing off his pristine pompadour) Kakyoin stops suddenly.
"We spent that whole time arguing over whether to bring him with us and he never even asked to come."