Work Text:
–
It’s around lunchtime when Jolyne starts to notice that she feels uncomfortably cold.
Which, in of itself, is weird. She doesn’t think much of it given her peanut butter sandwich is much more important to her right now; but even in mid-December, Florida is off-puttingly warm to most. Her school’s air-conditioning is sufficient enough to be passable, but it’s not chilly.
It’s halfway through eating that aforementioned sandwich that her stomach starts to hurt, and she realizes that she isn’t really all that hungry anymore. That sets off alarm bells in her head; and after a few minutes, she finally asks to go to the nurse’s office.
Upon sitting down, the nurse takes her temperature. It’s somewhere in the low hundreds, she thinks, but the number isn’t quite important enough for her to remember or really care about.
She doesn’t think much of her Dad coming and picking her up ten minutes later, either. Jolyne actually finds it to be a perfect opportunity to take a short nap in the car and start her winter break early, which is fine by her.
It’s when she wakes up again, tucked in bed in her pajamas and shivering uncontrollably, that she figures that something might be wrong.
–
“She’s sick?”
Dolly’s voice drones familiarly across the phone line, as bad as the connection is. She doesn’t sound accusatory. Just surprised. Maybe tired, which Jotaro attributes to her working so much lately. She’d looked uncharacteristically frazzled and unkempt when he last saw her dropping Jolyne off last night, so it probably really shouldn’t come as anything remotely similar to a shock.
“The nurse said it wasn’t uncommon for kids to get a fever this time of year.” He leans uncomfortably against the kitchen counter, beige receiver squashed up against his ear. “Should only last a few days. Might be best for her to stay here until she feels better, though.”
There’s a tired sort of mumble of uncertain agreement that he can make out from the other end, and then some shuffling. Given their schedules, he assumes that she’s getting ready to come home from work; though he’s not entirely sure. He’s a bit more certain of himself when he hears tinny jingling of what is– presumably– car keys.
There’s a yawn. “That’s fine. If she needs me to come over…”
“I know,” he soothes half-heartedly, “I’ll call.”
Dolly is mostly succinct for the rest of the interaction, which Jotaro appreciates. She finally lets him go after some talk about agreeing to take Jolyne’s temperature frequently, which leaves him putting the landline back into one piece as he contemplates his next move. Kid Tylenol, probably.
It hits him suddenly that they don’t have children’s medication. The regular kind should be fine to hold her over as long as he gets the dosage right, but Jolyne hasn’t gotten sick before. He’s heard that the first few are the worst. Maybe it’d be best to stock up for the future.
It’s convenient that Kakyoin is off getting groceries, seeing as they were both supposed to go to the supermarket together before the call from the school had derailed everything. He hesitates for a few seconds before dialing his cell number from memory, mostly just trying to think of if there’s anything else that they need.
…Soup. Sick people need soup, right? Jolyne likes soup. The shaped Campbell’s ones with the cartoons on the front, at least. That’s easy enough. He can do something with that. And maybe something to make her a nice breakfast with tomorrow. One that she’ll like.
He plugs in the last few digits before letting the other end ring, mentally cycling the extra additions to their list to ask for in his head to recite aloud later.
–
Jolyne’s fever hadn’t gone down overnight, which wasn’t particularly shocking. A solid 101. Not quite close enough to be high-grade, but still damn near concerning.
He’s not that worried about it. It’s normal, as far as Jotaro is concerned, albeit with another degree or two of error higher where the nurse said that it’d be best to call a family doctor just to be safe. Not that they have one that he’s aware of. Not after moving to America, anyway.
Might be time to get one.
Even then. She’d still been rather energetic upon being jostled awake, uncooperative and wiggly for about all of a minute as he’d tried to stuff the thermometer into her mouth. It took wrestling a hand to press her down by the chest and one of his own legs tossing onto the bed over hers to get to that point, but he’d gotten there eventually.
He started on breakfast shortly after; which wasn’t too monumental in of itself, although he hadn’t made pancakes in… a while. It’d mostly just been rushed cereal and sandwiches since finals week. Whatever was fastest. He didn’t think of himself as terribly great at cooking anyway, but he could sure as hell read directions off of a box.
He sprinkled some of the blueberries from last night’s grocery run into the batter of one for good measure shortly before flipping it over, the resulting hiss making the sleep-deprived half of his brain wince. Loud. Too loud.
Kakyoin began to stumble in not long after, blinking hazily and dropping nearly all of his weight into the cushion of Jotaro’s back despite his glasses (which Jotaro is ninety-percent sure that he’d forgotten the existence of in the moment, judging by the pained noise he unhappily coughs out as he settles). His arms slink around him, not unwelcomely, and he instead decides to punctuate his existence with a sigh as he eyes over the broad curve of his shoulder.
“Smells good,” Jotaro hears him say, sounding distant and far away despite the fact that he’s actively nestling in closer beside the junction of his neck and shoulder. “The food, I mean.”
“Mm.”
It’s quiet for a few more moments. “Do you need any help?”
And honestly, he doesn’t think that he does. He doesn’t need it, anyway. Jotaro stares at the pan blankly as he uses a spatula to flip the pancake over onto its uncooked side with little effort, shaking his head as he does so. He contradicts himself almost instantly afterwards– albeit not thoughtlessly.
“Eggs,” he decides arbitrarily, since adding something more on the side couldn’t hurt. “...You can set them out. I’ll cook them in a bit.”
Kakyoin hums assentingly, but he doesn’t move. He hears the shuffling of what he figures are cupboards opening in different areas, which he assumes is Hierophant. He might as well just use Star Platinum to cook at this damn point. Something about that inherently feels like cheating, though.
In his periphery, he sees a bowl set down to his left; the large half-empty gallon of milk and carton of eggs he’d already had set out with it. Kakyoin finally shifts away from his back, arms retracting as he makes his way to the counter narrowly beside him, humming a short few notes as he does his own thing.
His suspicion about Hierophant hadn’t really been anything with any doubt in it to begin with, although the abruptly tightening pressure coiling around his waist speaks for itself enough. It’s nice. He can’t find a reason to want to complain about it.
Jotaro pauses.
Absently, he lets Star Platinum seep out from the abscess of his consciousness– or a disembodied part of it, rather. It’s only fair to return the gesture, he reasons, the phantom feeling of the small of Kakyoin’s back ghosting over the corresponding hand cradling a wooden spatula. He simply ignores the smile and eyes crinkling at the corners that are targeted toward him once he notices them.
Jotaro is in the middle of putting the first finished pancake onto a plate as Jolyne pads in, one of her assorted bright fleece patterned blankets in tow and draped over her head. He hasn’t been keeping count of how many she’s accumulated over time, not anymore, although he pays it the slightest bit of attention as he almost unconsciously turns around to meet her presence as she fights her way onto one of the island stools.
“Well hello there,” Jotaro hears rather than sees Kakyoin speaking as he turns back around to their work-in-progress breakfast, frowning. “It looks like our little slacker is awake.”
“Hi,” she drawls exhaustively in response with what Jotaro dreadfully thinks is her head hitting the countertop, but she doesn’t say much else. There’s some forced melodrama in her voice, he can tell, although he can’t really bring himself to care.
Can’t possibly imagine where she’d picked that up.
“Oh, you sound rough. Are you feeling any better?”
“Mm-mm.”
Their voices ebb to background chatter as he opts to start in on the second, pouring some more of the batter into the pan as he lets it sear into shape. He eventually vaguely registers Kakyoin turning back around, working on getting ready to pull out and presumably crack an egg before spinning and stopping shortly in a cursory movement.
“...What is it?” A pause. “Jolyne?”
For some reason, that catches his attention.
When he turns, it’s initially halfway; just to get a good read on what’s going on, if there’s anything worth noting at all. It doesn’t really seem like there’s anything at first– nothing in the slightest– and he’s half-debating going back to making sure that the pancakes don’t burn before hesitating.
Jolyne sitting up as straight as an arrow is what finally catches him. She doesn’t look pale, not necessarily, but she’s clutching on tightly to the sides of her blanket (which, for some reason, he can’t help but think that he shouldn’t be letting her wear knowing how she’s burning up) before seeming to snap back to life. He turns away from the stove fully, dark brows furrowing deeper onto his face.
One of her hands raise, shaking as if it’s taking everything in her small body just to do so, pointing in the exact direction of the ghostly black-and-blue formation of Star Platinum’s hand still resting on Kakyoin’s back.
She falls.
–
Ironically, the situation might have actually been funny if it were any different.
It gets progressively less humorous the longer that he thinks about it. Nothing about it bodes well, doesn’t sit right in his stomach, and he wants nothing more than to have a smoke because of it. It’s too damn early for any of this.
He has questions; most of which he’s vaguely sure that a six year-old could decipher with most accuracy and understanding, but the fact that Jolyne has been out like a light for two hours and counting now doesn’t do much to soothe his nerves. There’s not much humour to find in that.
She saw Star Platinum. Maybe Hierophant Green, too.
Maybe. Maybe she saw Star Platinum. Because maybe she was pointing at something else that neither one of them had seen, maybe because they were both facing away from the countertop. It could have been something to make her faint, something gross, except he knows regrettably well that Jolyne likes gross things and she wouldn’t pass out because of– a damn spider, or a rat, or whatever.
He feels more idiotic the longer he thinks up excuses that don't lead to ‘Stand user’ or ‘will be a Stand user’. He’s somewhat certain that this is making him lose braincells.
She’s sick, his mind continues, entirely unhelpful. There’s something about that nagging at him. He wishes that he knew what the hell it was. There’s something more to it than that.
A more rational side of him tells him that it’s probably time to call a damn doctor. Maybe that’s the ‘more’.
His fingers brush over her stomach, back and forth over the curve of her comforter right as her breathing hitches and sputters. She doesn’t wake up, just shifts and kicks uncomfortably, and something about watching her do it makes him uncomfortable by proxy.
Sick.
(Why is she sick?)
The creak of the floorboards near the doorway is something he technically acknowledges, although he doesn’t move or adjust to account for the new presence at all. His thoughts continue much in the manner of that of a bullet train, a constant stream along the blurred lines of ‘it’s just a bug’ and ‘familiar’.
“How is she?”
Jotaro shrugs rather than answers. It’s not like he has a good response, after all.
He could come up with some. Burning half to death. Hasn’t woken up.
It’ll come with time, he’s sure, but he’s beginning to wonder if he should take her temperature again. He hopes to god that it hasn’t gotten higher. He runs his palm over her forehead, brushing away her bangs in the process, although he doesn’t get much beyond a handful of sweat. Wonderful. Time to get a cold pack.
Kakyoin shifts unsteadily. “Do you think that she saw them?”
He doesn’t know what else it is. Was. Would be. Whatever. He shrugs again, just out of stubbornness at this point. He sure hopes that she didn’t.
His thumb brushes down over the side of her face, and then down near her shoulder where her birthmark lies.
He really hopes so.
“No,” he lies, because he thinks of himself as a realist. It could be something else. It should be something else. He doesn’t know much about born-Stand users, but he’s sure that none of them got theirs this damn late, and it took his family’s weird connection to DIO to bring out his own anyways.
Later on, Dolly will call during the middle of her workday solely to ask how Jolyne has been, and Jotaro won’t be quite sure what he’s even supposed to say on the matter. He will narrowly dance around the little fainting incident, and after that conversation is over, he will be thoroughly and utterly exhausted.
Shortly after, Jolyne will start crying, and he’ll return to her room with Kakyoin at his heels after being drawn to the sound. When he finally fights her comforter off of her legs, Jolyne too worked up to properly respond to the question of ‘what’s wrong’, they will be nothing but bright blue coiled string from the thigh down.
–
An unhelpful half of his psyche tells Jotaro that normal doctors aren’t going to help with the fact that his daughter’s legs have turned into psychic silly string.
He’s not quite sure what to do. The fever could be something entirely unrelated, he hopes to whatever god that’s listening that it is, but he won’t know for another day or two. He’s not sure if he should do something now; and even then. Who the hell would he call? His grandfather’s connections with the Speedwagon Foundation? Avdol?
Avdol seems like the safest bet, since he generally seems to know the most about Stands out of all of them. Kakyoin, for better or for worse, is just as lost as he is. The Speedwagon Foundation is generally comprised of normal people, to his awareness, and it’s not like they were able to do much for-
-his mom.
He takes a very long drag on his cigarette. It burns a little, given how he hasn’t actually smoked in a while.
He almost chokes on it.
It had taken a while to calm Jolyne down. They didn’t have any good excuses to give her as to why any of this was happening in the slightest, and being in her ‘why’ phase didn’t do much to help either. She seemed entirely normal otherwise, obviously having the energy to cry and scream it out, but something about that feels even more off-putting than it should be.
It took putting on a children’s cartoon station and swaddling her in a blanket for about another hour to finally do it (probably in part with Kakyoin warming up the only surviving blueberry pancake from that morning that she proceeded to devour), although Jotaro has a sneaking suspicion that her passing out again was mostly what had done it in the end. He’s not really sure if she’s napping or just… unconscious, really.
He wouldn’t blame her for being tired. The poor kid had been through too much shit at once in one day.
There’s a cold palm being pressed to his forehead, just barely tipping his hat up by the brim. It makes him feel stupid. Like a large, oversized baby.
“You’re sweating too.”
Jotaro sighs slowly, taking a long exhale off of his cigarette after he cocks his head to the side to avoid directly blowing all of the smoke into Kakyoin’s face. “I wonder why.”
“Not like that,” Kakyoin’s eyes narrow at him where Jotaro watches him scrub his hand off onto his pants. Something tells him that he’s probably restraining from saying something far less polite. “You’re overheating. I can literally feel it coming off of you.” Another pause. “You usually run cold.”
Jotaro’s brows knit. He doesn’t feel bad or particularly under the weather. Maybe it’s something normal after all, and he just– caught the bug. Bad timing, maybe.
“...Doesn’t matter,” he mutters, swallowing thickly.
He can feel Kakyoin staring at him; but if he wants to say something, he doesn’t, given it’s quiet for the next minute or two. It’s not exactly peaceful, though, considering the tension hanging in the air. That and the unaddressed knowledge of Jolyne developing a Stand.
He’s not sure what the next step after that is supposed to be. Explain what they are, maybe. He’s sure that Kakyoin doesn’t know, given none of his other family members are Stand users to the extent of his awareness. Holly’s and his own transitioning into normal life with Stands was smoother than expected after DIO was taken care of, considering Holly didn’t much mind her own (inasmuch as semi-sentient brambles could have a personality) and she already knew about Star Platinum at most length.
All he knows is that he isn’t happy about it. There’s some sort of hollow feeling settling in his chest that’s come from it, although he wouldn’t quite describe it as dread. But it’s damn close.
He figures that having the capability of an ability like that means nothing good for the Joestars in the future.
“I know we won’t know yet,” Kakyoin starts slowly, almost distantly. “But if her fever is related to her Stand.”
Another drag. “Wouldn’t know.”
“If,” he continues, “If it is. When your mother was sick, Avdol told me that he’s seen cases similar to hers. We could always ask him. It’s been a while since we’ve seen him, anyway.”
“We’re supposed to see him in New York next week.”
“You say that like pulling up to Christmas and asking if both of you being sick half-to-death is normal wouldn’t ruin the holiday spirit, Jojo. You absolute Grinch.”
Jotaro sighs again. “I’m not sick.”
Come to think of it, he can’t really remember the last time that he’d gotten sick. He rarely does, and when fate eventually has it, it usually hits him hard. He assumes Jolyne’s swerving avoidance to catching even something as mundane as a cold prior to now is from him, although he’s not entirely sure if that’s a good or bad thing anymore.
He’d felt a little off when he initially obtained Star Platinum, though that was likely it being needlessly violent. The feeling had mostly subsided after defeating DIO, and while still sometimes unpredictable, it was a lot easier to control now. Still. That doesn't feel like it counts. He just figured that he was bad at using his Stand at the start. It wasn’t very noticeable.
Kakyoin shrugs at him, almost as if to say ‘suit yourself'. Jotaro works his jaw. He stubs his cigarette out on the balcony’s ashtray, where he is promptly given a quick kiss and told that he smells like a chimney.
–
It’s the third day when Jolyne’s temperature has gone up a degree where he begins to get worried.
He stares at the thermometer for what’s probably a minute or two too long, rereading 102.1 a few times over before Jolyne asks him if there’s something wrong. He says that there isn’t. She’s not a stupid kid, he knows.
It’s not getting better.
(She needs to go to the hospital.)
The nurse had told him 102.2 was where they should worry, really worry, and especially watch out on the third day. If it’s still bad on the fourth, then something is wrong. By all means it’s normal, just a bad fever or a case of the flu or something similar, but he can’t help the nagging feeling that something is wrong. He swipes at his forehead with the back of his hand.
He decides to retrieve a cold pack and warm some of the shaped chicken noodle soup from the last grocery trip and come back, although she’s not happy about it. She keeps insisting on being cold, but managing to compress himself inside of a bed that doesn’t fit him and resting her on top of his chest while they watch cartoons for a bit seems to satisfy her enough to where she doesn’t really fight against it.
Kakyoin comes in and checks it for him after an hour or so. It’s still the same. He looks distressed, but only mildly. Something tells him that it’s from strained effort that it’s not an expression containing anything stronger.
“You smell bad.”
Jotaro then proceeds to call Jolyne a brat and leaves the room shortly after. It’s actually half because he realizes that it’s just cigarette smoke clinging to his clothes. He hadn’t changed last night. Hadn’t thought about it at the time.
He calls Dolly at twelve and says with utmost calmness that Jolyne hasn’t gotten better. He’s not sure who’s going to make the call about the hospital if they have to, but she works late tomorrow, so they decide that it’s best for her to stay home for now. She says that she’ll come visit if her temperature hasn’t broken by then.
They don’t see her Stand again, whatever it is. He figures that they’ll explain what they are to her when they do. Her legs had gone back to normal sometime before she had gone to sleep the night before, out like a light for a concerning total number of hours. He reasons that she’s just sick. Kids sleep a lot. Jotaro hopes that she hadn’t actually passed out again.
He wonders for a while if he should just get the Stand explanation over with, given it might cause less of a panic the next time it happens if she understands what’s happening (lest there be a next time). If he shows her Star Platinum and she sees it for sure, then– well. Then they’ll really know if she’s developing one. That or she sees Kakyoin using Hierophant for mundane things by accident and freaks out because he’s an unsettling shiny melon-looking manthing. Or snakething, depending on how he feels that day.
Shortly after calling Dolly, he finally calls Avdol. Overseas calls are expensive, but whatever. He can pay for it. God bless the Joestar inheritance.
He’s not entirely sure what he’s supposed to ask. He’s not sure if he’ll even answer, honestly, because he and Polnareff hop around from place-to-place (although typically in France) for as far as he knows. They might be in New York already, god forbid, and just decided to stay with his grandparents early. Maybe tour around a bit. He doesn’t think that Polnareff has been to New York yet, seeing as they usually just end up having Christmas in Japan.
It’s on the third ring or so that the other end is picked up, although it isn’t Avdol.
“Hell-oo?”
Polnareff, tinny and sing-song on the other end.
Jotaro’s lips purse.
“...Hey,” he starts, slowly. “Is... Avdol there?”
“Jojo! You asshole!”
He pinches at the bridge of his nose.
It's not as if he isn't happy to hear his voice– to an extent, of course– given they haven’t actually talked in… a while. Not terribly long, but they don’t exactly have weekly phone calls. While he doesn’t care much for useless conversation and is horrible at contributing, he wouldn’t necessarily mind hearing the other end of it if the circumstances were... not this.
There’s slight ruckus on the other end. He doesn’t even really want to understand what might warrant it. It sounds vaguely like pots and pans and some shuffling, although he can’t say for sure.
He finally answers again, repeating himself, extremely clipped. He doesn’t know how else to respond. “Hey.”
“–You could put some effort into dropping a line once and a while,” he continues haughtily, as if he’s taken permission to go off from Jotaro saying a single word. “You call my number, and you ask for Avdol as if I don’t exist. What the hell, Jojo?” And in addition, “I even got you and Kakyoin a complimentary snowglobe for the next time we see each other.”
“You got– alright,” he sighs. He counts to three. Complimentary snowglobe. He scrubs his hand over his face. He really isn’t in the mood for this. “Is Avdol there or not? I need to talk to him.”
It’s quiet for about a minute, and he hears what he thinks is the sink running and some chatter (reprimanding?) given how muffled it is. Polnareff must have put down the phone at some point, he realizes. He suddenly really, really wants to sink down into himself and die.
He leans into his shitty office chair as far as it can tilt without tipping backward, sighing. He finds the tin of altoids resting on his desk, the location more instinctually ingrained into his head rather than saw, hands shaking as he pops one into his mouth and rubs his fingers over his lips. He ignores it.
Polnareff finally seems to have slowed down when he returns to him. “...Yeah. Why? What’s so important?”
He falters, despite the momentary relief he feels. He’s not sure if he should explain anything or not. He’s reaching the end of his line, and this isn’t anyone’s business except his own and– whoever he shares it with. He’ll explain later if he has to.
If she’s sick because of her Stand, it’s going to be my fault.
“Doesn’t matter. Put him on.”
He hears some mumbling, something about ‘geez’ and ‘Grinch’. He’s getting extremely tired of being called a Grinch. He hears Avdol’s name, loud volume clear on the other end, and some back-and-forth that he doesn’t care to pay any attention to.
About a full minute later, Avdol’s voice eases into his ears in a sort-of rumble. He’s not sure whether to be anxious or grateful. “Jotaro.”
He realizes very belatedly that it’s probably somewhat late in France. Explains a lot.
“Hey. I…” he starts, unsure. It’s best to be blunt, isn’t it? How is he supposed to explain this?
It’s best to bite the bullet.
“It’s about Jolyne.”
–
He somehow walks out of the conversation feeling even more stressed out.
He’s not sure if it’s for better or for worse that Avdol agrees with Kakyoin in terms of her high temperatures being related to her Stand. And himself, despite the fact that he hadn’t said it aloud. He has seen this happen before, although the stretched period of silence following across the line before being given confirmation doesn’t sit right with him. He hasn’t been given anything to do either, which doesn’t help.
Overall, he’s ended up with a big fat zero– beyond Avdol saying that he’ll be over to Florida to come and scope out the situation, which actually eases him less. There’s some promise of making Polnareff take a plane to New York by himself, which he finds some humour in, but barely.
That aside, Jotaro hates absolutely everything about where this is heading.
He ends up deciding to walk into Kakyoin’s studio at some point unannounced while he’s doing… God knows what at his desk since he doesn’t look, he’s not quite sure what, leaning into his back as he wraps his arms around his front and sides and closes his eyes without a word.
He gets a shower later. He doesn’t eat beyond a few more altoids and a cup of scalding coffee with the sole purpose of keeping him awake. He makes minimal progress in catching up on some missed class assignments, since he can’t find himself focusing long enough to get anywhere.
He goes back and squeezes in with Jolyne again in her room while she lays on his chest again after replacing her cold pack, taking a nap this time.
He waits.
–
103.2.
Jotaro is pretty sure that this is hospital-worthy. He’s pretty sure that they had crossed that line already, actually, give or take a day. He puts the thermometer back onto the nightstand rather ungently, fingers coarsely running through his bangs and pulling up slick while Jolyne sleeps soundly.
She stirs a little, kicking weakly at his stomach through the feet of her onesie.
He has to call Dolly, he realizes; though it's more of a knee-jerk reaction than a thought-out one. He’s not entirely sure if she’s awake yet, let alone if she’ll even answer, but. Screw it.
For a while, he just lays there. Hesitating. He has to take her to an urgent care, or something. It’d be a bad idea not to. He doesn’t think that they can do jackshit about Stands, but they could probably at least stabilize her.
But what if they can’t?
Jotaro pauses.
He grabs the thermometer again, balling up and using the dark red sleeve of his turtleneck to wipe off the end (cold) before sticking it under his own tongue long enough to where it beeps.
103.2.
“Fuck,” he mutters, scandalizing himself in the process while Jolyne shifts. “Fuck.”
As gently as conceivably possible, he tries to slip out of the bed. He’s too damn big for it, both too wide and too tall (the strain in his ankles as his feet hit the floor is evidence enough of it), and he winces at the creak of the frame as he settles Jolyne back down into the sheets. She looks more uncomfortable the longer he looks at her, small face scrunched up into an expression clearly unhappy, although he’s not quite sure if she looked like that before or not.
Maybe that’s why she was kicking, he puzzles together, slowly. And maybe that’s why I woke up.
(I’m not sick.)
He exhales heavily. He paces forward smoothly for a few steps toward the door, more coherent than he actually thought that he’d be upon waking up. He’s not sure if the realization would classify as a relief, really, given he finds no comfort in it.
He stops halfway, although not of his own volition.
“...Daddy,” Jolyne protests, distant.
There is a gentle tug on his sweater.
She hasn’t moved from her spot by the time that he turns around to face her, not beyond now laying on her side and blinking at him blearily in-between rubbing at her eyes. She doesn’t exactly look like she’s hurting, but she still seems uncomfortable somehow. Maybe confused.
There’s another tug. He turns his gaze down to see a small, ghostly blue hand, somewhere barely near the size of his palm curled into a tiny fist as it yanks at the fabric of the turtleneck.
And for some reason, he isn’t surprised.
…He breathes in deeply.
He counts to three again. Breathes out sharply, probably louder than intended, and he paces carefully back to the bed.
He kneels down. He has absolutely no damned clue how to explain the existence of what are essentially fighting ghosts of varying stature and type to his kid, let alone impromptu at (he has to take a cursory glance toward the nearest clock) four in the morning. These are not the kind of talks that he should be preparing for.
With unconscious effort, one of Star Platinum’s hands suddenly comes to grip around the wrist and palm of the hand clinging onto him; although not tightly. He wrings it away, grasping it lamely in the air as if an example, where it becomes impossible to miss the way that Jolyne immediately grips around her own mirroring fist as she tugs it tight to her chest with wide eyes.
“Do you see it?” He says calmly, not dangerously. When she continues staring at him, blank and glassy, he corrects himself with a light shake of the hand in his hold. “Do you see this?”
Jolyne nods slowly, gaze shifting silently between Jotaro’s face and the hands floating nonsensically in the air.
Jotaro buries his face into his hands.
What a goddamn pain.
–
He doesn’t end up going to an urgent care. Not yet, anyway.
He tries to call Avdol again early in the morning while Kakyoin is taking his turn on making breakfast (and currently giving him the world’s largest side-eye) sometime around six, which is an anomaly given their usual habit of waking up later on in the day. Polnareff answers again; who is in fact very pissed to have his beauty sleep interrupted– and in the same breath reveals that he thinks twelve in the afternoon is early– but he informs Jotaro that he’d actually left last-minute last night on a plane without much explanation.
“Oh. Hey,” he adds, nonchalant like nothing is wrong in the world. “By the way. He said to stay home, whatever that means. I think your Grinchy-ness is rubbing off on Avdol. You’re still coming to New York, right?”
“Don’t know,” he says through biting his lower lip, and it isn’t a lie. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to skip out, which is mildly shocking considering how he doesn’t give a shit about Christmas in the slightest and has almost always viewed it as money-grabbing bullshit, but he doesn’t mind meeting up every year. And Jolyne loves it. God only knows that he wouldn’t know how to improv set up a goddamn Christmas tree.
“What?”
He slams the phone back onto the landline very shortly after.
Kakyoin sighs at him. “You’re a terrible liar, Jojo.”
“I’m not.” He hesitates, seemingly debating something. “I bet your soul on a bluff once.”
His eyes crinkle at the corners. “I still don’t find that funny.”
He doesn’t either. He wasn’t lying.
It’s quiet for what feels like minutes, although Jotaro guesses that it couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds by the time that he finally speaks back up. Tension hangs heavy in the air, his palms cutting into the edge of the countertop as he leans his weight into it from behind.
“I’m serious, Jotaro.” The electric stovetop clicks off, and Kakyoin turns to face him in the view of his periphery. He doesn’t bother making eye contact. “How bad is it? You called Avdol, right?”
He tugs at the brim of his hat.
“...What part?”
“I don’t– I don’t know.” There’s a pause. “Both of you. I just want to know how sick she is. I mean, it’s about a Stand, isn’t it?”
He sure as hell guesses so. He opts not to respond, not entirely sure what to say.
“How bad?”
Jotaro laughs, although it’s entirely half-hearted and blithe. It probably can’t even really be called a laugh. It sounds more like a huff that’s been punched out of him.
“One-hundred and three. I’m gonna call Dolly in an hour if it doesn’t go down.”
“My god, Jojo,” he mutters. There’s a momentary pause, like Kakyoin is picking his words manually. “And you haven’t taken her to the doctor?”
“I was going to later. Avdol said to stay, I guess.” He scrubs at the sweat collected on his temple again. “I don’t think taking her anywhere would help. I’ve been giving her that medicine. Hasn’t done anything.”
“When is Avdol supposed to get here?”
“Probably around one for Paris to Miami.” Not exact.
“Shit."
–
It doesn't go down.
He ends up calling Dolly sometime around seven-thirty, and it reads the same as it did the last time. Not a surprise. One-hundred and three point-two, Kakyoin reads back to him, where Jolyne wiggles carelessly under the covers of her blankets and cold pack as she stares at her TV.
She seems to think that Jotaro shovelling oatmeal down her gullet afterwards is the funniest thing ever.
Dolly says the earliest that she can get out is four, stress and dismay practically dripping from her voice when she finally calls him back after talking to whoever takes care of her schedule. It’s an improvement from eight. He says that it’s fine. It gives them time for Avdol to do– whatever the hell he’s going to do, so he doesn’t mind.
His temperature is the same when he checks it, standing locked inside of the upstairs bathroom. He still doesn’t feel sick. That’s not a lie, either.
Avdol actually ends up arriving somewhere near two in the afternoon, random and without any forewarning. He doesn’t carry any luggage with him– he’s just there, sort of imposing in their doorway with his presence as he’s more gestured than instructed up the stairs and followed.
He doesn’t stay in Jolyne’s room particularly long, which already begins to worry him a bit. Jotaro stands with his hands glued to his pockets in the doorway, Kakyoin with his arms crossed farther off to the side.
Jolyne doesn’t even seem to see an issue at all. All she seems to care about is her Uncle Avdol visiting early for Christmas. Kid priorities and all that, apparently. Avdol certainly seems fine with playing along with it.
His main takeaway, if he had to guess, mostly just seems to be that she doesn’t know what a Stand is; which ends up earning Jotaro a sharp glare and an awkward shift of the weight of his legs in response. This mostly culminates in him getting grabbed roughly by the right bicep and taken back down the stairs, Kakyoin unnervingly quiet while trailing behind.
Avdol releases his arm. “You saw it. What did it look like?”
“What, you’re not going to drag it out?” Avdol’s gaze narrows at him. Jotaro narrows his in return, because it only feels fair.
“–If it means anything,” Kakyoin interjects flatly, “it turned her limbs into thread.”
“And is there anything else?”
Jotaro hesitates.
He appreciates the effort of him coming all the way here, at least. The fact that he’s been storming around with little elaboration, however, doesn’t settle particularly right– and none of it is doing absolutely anything to soothe his nerves.
Something is wrong. Something is very wrong.
“...I saw a bit earlier,” he adds, a bit more weight added to his voice. “Just a hand. She didn’t want me to leave her room.”
Avdol exhales, sounding laboured. He shakes his head.
“Sit.”
The awkward silence upon seating themselves– in the kitchen a room over, again, and it’s making Jotaro dizzy– hangs near stagnantly for a good minute or two while Avdol seems to collect himself as he leans against the black granite of the island.
“You should be aware of this already, however... oftentimes,” he starts, slowly. “When an individual is not able to handle their Stand, whether it be because of a lack of will to fight or the simple inability to, it often ends up harming or killing them. It may not be caused by an outside party.”
…Ah.
Harming or killing them.
Lovely.
“It is something I have seen multiple times,” he continues. Jotaro’s fists curl tight against the countertop, the blunts of his nails leaving crescent indents in their wake. “It’s common in these circles. I suspect that it is why there aren’t very many Stand users that most people know about.”
That’s what’s wrong. She’s dying. It’s killing her and she’s dying.
“To the extent of my knowledge, the innately capable are simply born with them,” he gestures vaguely towards Kakyoin, who Jotaro pointedly avoids looking toward. “It’s not uncommon for a Stand to materialize afterwards, nor is it unheard of for there to be a struggle long after obtaining one, although...”
Kakyoin’s voice falters. “They usually die.”
He's not quite sure what to make of that.
“Jotaro,” he doesn’t even bother lifting his head at being addressed, “you’re sick, aren’t you?”
He breathes in and out shallowly. “Just the fever. Same as hers.”
He hears rather than sees Avdol shifting in his seat, arms crossing. Kakyoin is staring pointedly toward him– he can feel it and it’s pissing him off a little, which he feels uncomfortable acknowledging– the atmosphere in the room taut and thick.
“...Stand users parent to another Stand wielder have intimate connections,” Avdol says, stiltedly, like the words are near painful to get out of his mouth. “I believe that her body is sending emergency signals to yours. Because of it, you may be more alert and tuned to small changes in her; particularly her state of health, although you may not experience any of the symptoms yourself.”
His head lifts. “So I’m not actually sick.”
“No. I don’t believe that you are.”
“...So, then–” he hesitates. “What… should I do? How do I help her?”
A lapse in speech, painful, like a pin dropping.
“You don't.”
–
It isn’t that Avdol isn’t entirely an optimist. He wraps up their session with a simple yet dreadful promise that she might be able to bounce back, that it may not even be related after all or there really is something out there tangible that can fix it, although that doesn’t mean jackshit to him once the knowledge that his kid is dying hits him like a brick.
Avdol gives him a slip of paper and tells him to call the hotel that he’s staying at on the way out, one that Jotaro knows and is only a few minutes downtown, room number provided if something more were to happen. He doesn’t see the point in it if he can’t help.
The rest of the talk sounded like they were signing Jolyne’s damned will. Something about making her comfortable and doing things that she might like that won’t strain her too much. Maybe to still come to New York for Christmas. He doesn’t know, seeing as he sounded it out somewhere near the middle. Kakyoin didn’t contribute much to the conversation either, as far as he’s aware.
Fifty days at best, huh.
Unlucky number.
He basically collapses onto the couch once he finally finds himself in the living room again. Knowing what’s actually happening feels hollow. Something about it all is so much worse this time around, if only because there’s nobody to really take it out on except himself.
The main thing that had gotten him through the trip to Egypt was the motivation to save his mother and the unbidden overwhelming want to tear DIO’s throat out, to tear apart anyone in his way, which he remembers becoming progressively more disconcerting the longer that his mind would wander on it at the time. He was so angry, and even if he hadn’t actually ended up going that far, it hadn’t really mattered.
There’s none of that here. There’s no real corporeal threat to stop, not one that he can touch with his bare hands. Just looming danger without much of a chance at relief.
He’s angry at himself, if that’s even possible. He knew that something like this would happen. Just not this early.
He uncrumples the small sheet of paper balled up in his hands, the door shutting with a rattle of the door frame and hinges somewhere in front of him. He doesn’t bother looking up. It’s easiest not to. There’s nothing for him to find there other than Kakyoin’s retreating form.
An address, some numbers. There’s a faint outline of darker text on the back, so he turns it.
The Emperor: reversed. The Star: reversed. The Hanged Man.
Avdol is psychoanalyzing him without his permission. What a wonderful asshole.
–
“How’s Dolly?”
“Asleep,” Jotaro mutters, sliding the screen door shut behind him. He pats around his pockets for his Marlboros. “Not sure if I should tell her about…”
He trails off. It doesn’t matter. He shakes the box a few times, and with some pressure from his index and thumb, he manages to force a cigarette between his lips.
Kakyoin smiles wryly at him. “Jolyne is her kid too.”
The comment somehow feels backhanded coming from him. It’s probably meant to be.
He’d actually set out some new blankets and pillows in the guest room prior, although she’d still ended up crashing in Jolyne’s room in the end anyway. It doesn’t surprise him. Maybe nothing should at this point, considering.
It takes a few tries to get his Zippo to ignite, probably because of the shake to his hands that he’s extremely adamant on ignoring. The first drag feels like a godsend, sharp and jagged as he leans most of his weight into the railing of the balcony.
“...I guess,” he starts, quiet. Calm settles into his lungs. “I’ll call a doctor tomorrow. Take her to one, maybe.” A long respite. “See if it’ll help.”
Hell of a lot more of a sane way to tell Dolly that her daughter is dying. And he won’t have to do it himself. He’s such a damn coward.
“That’s if you don’t send yourself to an early grave first.”
A long drag. Smoking kills, Jojo. The jab isn’t very thinly veiled. “It won’t matter.”
Kakyoin goes quiet at that. Something in Jotaro feels bad for saying it.
–
Explaining the concept of a Stand to a six year-old isn’t very fun.
Again– and he knows this well– Jolyne is not a stupid child. She’s wildly intelligent for her age, if a bit naïve. But she is very much a six year-old child and not much else, and the amount of insisting and staring she does will not change this fact.
“They’re ghosts.”
Kakyoin looks mildly uncomfortable when his lips curl into a smile. “Kind of, but…”
Jotaro sighs. He rubs at his temple. He is not having a repeat of his prison inmate teenage dilemma with his own kid. “No.”
Dolly has reluctantly run off to work today with the promise of a doctor being called– she has no vacation days and her boss is the biggest bitch in the world as far as Jotaro is concerned– and there’s only so much time in the day to explain what the hell this kid’s weird… fighting… spirit… thing is to her, god forbid another silly string-esque incident happen again.
It’s not a spirit, Jojo. You’re contradicting the exact point you’re trying to make.
Her temperature hasn’t improved, but it hasn’t gone up either. It’s the little things in life at this point. Jotaro isn’t really sure what he’s supposed to be looking out for in terms of ‘good signs’.
Kakyoin rubs absently at the lower half of his face, although he still looks remarkably patient. Just thoughtful. “Think of it this way, Jolyne,” he starts. Awkwardly. “Stands are manifestations of your living spirit. Ghosts are... dead people. You aren't dead.”
Not yet.
Jolyne’s brows furrow. “What does ‘manifestation’ mean?”
They are getting absolutely nowhere with this, he thinks.
Remarkably, though, they do actually get somewhere after a few minutes of prying. They eventually manage to link up the connection between Stands and why Jolyne is feeling so down somewhere in her head– that or she’s just saying ‘ohhh’ repeatedly so she looks as if they have– and that she shouldn’t freak out if something odd is to happen to her body. Again. Mostly. They don’t want her sounding as if they’re both endorsing the existence of what is a sort of hallucination.
They, however, avoid the topic of the possibility that one might be killing her. He’s not even sure if he plans to tell her yet.
Jotaro still isn’t fully sure what kind of doctor he’s supposed to call on the matter, either. He hasn’t looked into any actively working for families in the area, which is probably something he should start on, but he has absolute squat on that. Even then, he can’t really think of many that would lend equipment or come to their house. Not unless he paid them out of his ass, bless the American healthcare system.
Which he isn’t entirely against.
There’s always the Speedwagon Foundation. As far as he’s aware, they have a public number for the main headquarters in Dallas; but he’s not really sure how to go about calling them and communicating with the people who actually have any knowledge of Stands given they mostly seem to be a normal research organization otherwise. It’s worth a shot.
God only knows how the old man did it.
It doesn’t take very long to look them up in a phonebook and actually dial the number once he’s safely seated in his office. Small talk, on another hand, is still the worst experience known to man; made even more stressful by the fact that the line goes quiet after he states his name to whoever operates his call. He’s transferred to somebody else who has apparently heard of him, although he has no clue who the bastard he's speaking to is.
He realizes belatedly that he has no idea how to explain the situation. He doesn’t want to expose everything out in the open to a stranger that he’s never met, either. God forbid he gets any pity.
He sighs. He eventually asks for absolutely anyone that helped Holly Kujo in 1987.
–
“You have a Stand,” Jolyne remarks, wiggling under her bed as if they hadn’t pointed that exact thing out earlier. It’s not much of a deduction.
“It has a name.”
They’d told her Hierophant Green and Star Platinum’s both earlier, actually. Jolyne can’t quite pronounce Hierophant’s (who they had actually used as an example and she had responded surprisingly well to), seeing as she’s missing a front tooth and kept pronouncing it as ‘High-Elephant’. Something tells him that it was actively killing Kakyoin every time he tried to correct her at the time, given he looked as if he were going to break down in a laughing fit any other second, but he supposes that it doesn’t matter.
It’s noteworthy to add that she had also very aggressively turned down the more simple suggestions of ‘Hiero’ and ‘Green’. Very stubborn, she is.
“What’s Star like?”
Jotaro shifts uncomfortably, contemplating the damp washrag in his hands. “You’ve seen it a few times.”
She has, technically. He knows that she’s going to be unhappy with the answer– avoidance isn’t what she’s looking for and she’s searching for something else– but it still holds more truth than what she probably realizes. Disembodied hand aside, he’d been around, she just… hadn’t noticed it. Hadn’t been able to at the time.
“That’s not what I mean,” she protests, only fussing slightly as Jotaro presses the rag to her forehead and scrubs. His lips flatten into a line. “What’s he like?”
He isn’t entirely sure how to answer that. How he looks? Acts? Both?
Star Platinum is just… himself, kind of. He’s never thought much about its individuality. There’s definitely something in it that acts of his own accord in the same way that Kakyoin’s Hierophant does whenever it decides to be a little shit and hide anywhere in the house that it can manage, although he’s sure that derives from Kakyoin being inherently introverted in some way. Star had shown it more at the start, hoarding things that Jotaro found interest in– toy cars, exercise equipment, a new guitar. Something to play music on and an assorted backlog of things to read, albeit relevant to his concerns at the time. A busted up jacket and some sewing equipment. Some new track shoes in his size, even though he’d quit the team the year prior for a multitude of reasons.
He’s not entirely sure what his Stand even says about him. He doesn’t particularly care much to think about how Star Platinum reflects back on him, given the thing just seems to be a shitty hoarder that yells and punches things sometimes.
He dabs the rag against Jolyne’s cheeks. “Depends.”
In that regard, he hasn’t really bothered using it frequently since defeating DIO for a few branch-offs of that reason; because as far as he’s concerned, Star Platinum’s main purpose serves to be violent. The culmination of his soul had been apparently similar enough to a shitty 100 year-old vampire’s, who was, at the time, trying to kill his entire family– which he doesn’t think that anyone could even conceivably be a fan of in light of the situation– so. He’s tried not to think about it.
Still. It isn’t necessarily as if Star Platinum is evil like he’d initially thought, given it’s only gone as far as to protect all of them in the past. It’s strange. It's definitely not stoic, but it's not too far off from himself. It reminds him more of how he’d acted when he was younger before getting hardened to the world at some point during high school.
Which is a very, very strange thought to have. He figures that it's more of a guardian than anything else, really. That’s always sort of what it's come off as. Kakyoin typically likes to compare it to a big dog.
Jolyne’s arms flail and flop back into her lap, visibly frustrated. He sighs, pulling back the rag and folding it into a makeshift square as he sets it onto the nightstand.
Jotaro decides that it can’t hurt. She might as well get acquainted with his existence at some point, and. Well. The Speedwagon Foundation said that a few of their representatives wouldn’t be over for another few hours, hopefully with equipment that might help. She had already met Hierophant, even though she’d semi-directly insulted him by saying that he looked weird at the time.
“...Do you want to meet it?”
She stares at him blankly, expectantly. “Pretty please?”
Well. At least she’s polite about it.
Silently, he takes a seat beside Jolyne on the bed. The mattress dips and wobbles heavily under his weight, something that he doesn’t particularly really notice or care for in the moment. He settles her on his lap where she fidgets comfily, nose bumping the back of her head as he tries to focus. Tries. It isn’t necessarily hard to.
Come on.
Star Platinum appears in a flourish from his own body with little jetlag, although not exaggeratedly so. There isn’t much of a point in it making a grand entrance. Just a small, unimportant flash of light and the sound of air in the room shifting to accommodate for his presence. Big. Intruding.
Jotaro knows that his Stand is larger than life. It has been since the day that it'd first appeared properly in his prison cell, powerful and intimidating. It’s a little bit less striking to look at it like this, all three meters of it compressed at the calves under its thighs to fit in the compact comfort of Jolyne’s room at the foot of her bed.
She doesn’t seem scared at all, either, when he focuses back into reality.
“Woah.” An awed pause. “He’s huge!”
It’s about the reaction that he was expecting. He hums assentingly, just in time to get smacked in the face by one of Jolyne’s pigtails as she turns her head toward it, pointing as if he’s blind.
It is, by all means, nothing new. Star Platinum is just goddamned sitting there, expression entirely dead-slated. It isn’t that he blames her– though he does think that she may be a bit quick and easy to become impressed– but she’s already fighting off of his lap and to the floor like she was never sick in the first place.
Jotaro isn’t entirely certain if his Stand knows what to do with this kid, let alone in a situation like this. He’d figured that it might be something innate, something that it would just know by default, but. Well. He’s unsure. Star Platinum isn’t exactly meant to babysit; even if she’s technically also its daughter by proxy.
None of that changes the fact that Jolyne is suddenly sandwiching both of its cheeks between her chubby little hands like nothing is wrong, Star’s own hovering halfway in the air awkwardly. He figures that it’s alright. His confidence wavers a little when she starts tugging on handfuls of floating hair while the resulting small spikes of pain echo onto his own scalp, though.
He doesn’t mind it. Somehow.
“He’s pretty,” she says, aimed at nobody in particular. There’s a few beats of silence, as if she’s contemplating something. “And sparkly.”
Star Platinum’s hand then proceeds to envelop the entirety of her face. The cost she pays for calling him sparkly. Apparently.
And for a moment, Jotaro startles. Albeit not for long, given Jolyne starts laughing shortly after, voice muffled by the fabric of his Stand’s glove at the palm as it begins to swerve her head from side-to-side, not ungently. Entirely on its own.
…It’s playing.
Which is puzzling. Star Platinum does not play. Maybe. He thinks so? He’s beginning to feel a little bit stupid and extremely out of the loop all of a sudden.
He thinks again of times where Hierophant has tried to be annoying seemingly on purpose. Kakyoin never particularly seemed to mind, coming off as accustomed to it. Jotaro just thought that it had the duality of being a conniving little asshole and then curling up beside or around one of them where they sit in the same breath, as long as he’s in a spot that he considers safe and hidden from sight. Which probably still holds true, but.
Jotaro blinks slowly.
Reflection of you, his mind repeats, unhelpfully. Guardian. Always came off as a guardian.
He swallows thickly. His throat feels tight. Star Platinum is smiling.
–
The blue string appears again about thirty minutes before the doctors are supposed to arrive.
Jotaro isn’t entirely sure what to do. He isn’t even sure what kind of damn Stand ability it’s supposed to be.
It is, for some reason, both of her arms as opposed to her legs. It’d happened at some point while she was colouring to the extent of his awareness, although he couldn’t have been farther than five feet away while struggling to focus on missed coursework. It feels like he’ll never get his doctorate at this rate, really.
To Jolyne’s credit– she doesn’t cry. Her lip wobbles and she looks terribly confused, but she doesn’t cry. He’s halfway through trying to puzzle what the hell her body is even doing when he accidentally tugs at the string and pulls too hard, and she instantly wails and starts kicking at him.
“Stop it! It hurts!”
Which is only barely helpful to know. The string doesn’t unravel as soon as he pulls on it, but it crawls further up her arms about a minute or so after. He’s not entirely sure what to make of that.
(Their Stand often ends up harming or killing them.)
He thinks back to how Holly had looked with her fever, brambles crawling up and digging deep into her back and neck while she slept. He hadn’t been around nearly long enough to see it in its later stages, although.
Was it actually, physically, harming her? Did it turn against her?
He wonders if this is her Stand’s way of doing it. Just– differently. Self-destructing. Unravelling her body.
Maybe all of it. Maybe there’s a limit that she isn’t supposed to reach beyond, and her body is trying to push her. God knows he’d probably explode if he tried to stop time for too long or some shit.
He exhales shakily, suddenly pulling her flush to his chest. He can see tears finally welling at the corners of her eyes the instant that she begins to cling to his sweater, and he can’t really even blame her. She tried.
“I know, sweetheart.” His voice wavers, just barely. He despises it. “I know. It’s okay. I know.”
He lets her cry. He’s not sure what else he’s supposed to do.
–
Seeing her strung up on medical equipment makes Jotaro ache.
There’s something in him that just isn’t quite able to tolerate nor handle it, he thinks, which feels like a building byproduct of the stress of the past four or five days. He doesn’t like acknowledging it. He’s decided that he much prefers grinding his teeth and clenching his jaw in such a way that it makes the entire atmosphere of a room tense around him.
It’s been almost a week. It’s been almost a week and it isn’t getting better.
(We still have to call about New York.)
The doctors are just as lost as he feels. They’re aware of the existence of Stands, but none of them are actually users themselves. Knowing it pisses him off a little, but he holds his tongue. The people are here to help, after all, even though they’ll probably be doing a lousy job of it.
He remembers what Avdol had told him about making her comfortable. This feels like the opposite of that advice. He kind of feels like a piece of shit for it, but. Well. He feels like he’s already crossed a line at this point. They’ll probably have Christmas at home for the first time this year, and he’s not entirely sure what Dolly plans on doing about it.
He’s not even sure how to explain that they aren’t coming. He knows that he’ll have to. Maybe Avdol will pull some excuse out of his ass to cover for him if he goes begging on his doorstep at wherever he’s staying for long enough.
If he wasn’t already an asshole, then this is all probably the icing on top of the shit-misery-sundae. It might be her last Christmas, and he isn’t even telling anybody. Not even letting her see anyone. He doesn’t plan to, either. He plans to keep her in the dark for as long as humanly possible, which he hadn’t expected to possibly involve last minute tree-shopping, but whatever.
It doesn’t help that Jolyne doesn’t seem to understand much of why she’s being hooked up beyond the concept of ‘sick’. She’s terrified of the IV needle, at least initially, although Jotaro finds it more of a relief than anything else that she had reobtained the right to opposable arms before anyone had gotten there. Wouldn’t be sure how to explain it.
Everything about this pisses him off. It just isn’t fair.
There’s a certain quietness that haunts the house when Dolly finally manages to get off of her shift and makes it known halfway through. She seems alarmed at the fact that there’s multiple other people in the house– that he’d managed to wrangle an actual handful of doctors to do the prognosis entirely in the comfort of Jolyne’s own room, almost impossibly.
It’s when she’s asked to step outside with him that Jotaro can see the worry plain as day on her face, wracked by stress and exhaustion as they’re both sat down. The doctors aren’t succinct at all when they start to explain what they think is happening, at least in an abridged way that a non-Stand user might understand, which irritates him even more.
They say something along the lines of that her immune system is fighting, but it’s shutting itself down just as equally in response. That alone isn’t inherently fatal– although her steadily declining health and the lack of stability in her body is.
Jotaro can tell when they make up something about how she’s developed a seemingly life-threatening autoimmune disease they haven’t seen in anyone before. Her body isn’t meant for something like that, they say, not yet; especially not so young.
They say that she has a little bit over a month at best.
Dolly cries. Jotaro lets her, too.
He comes out of it after they leave– equipment still gratefully left behind– still not sure what to do. He feels like an asshole. He could have chosen to tell her himself. To explain everything. To not lie his way through the situation by the teeth. It likely would have made him sound mentally unsound, but at least there’s some honour in not pretending to hear that his daughter is dying for the first time. So. Whatever.
He can tell that she’s trying not to fall apart when she reenters Jolyne’s room, slowly brushing her fingers through her hair while she’s asked questions in a meek, squeaky voice. There’s a slight strain in her own that he can’t quite put a finger on, although he’s not sure if he should find some solace in the fact that Dolly is also avoiding the topic of any sort of mention of death as much as he has thus far.
That’s probably something that they’ll talk about later. He’s not entirely sure if he’s ready for it. All he does is stand by the door, arms crossed, before leaving the room without saying a word. It’s better that way. Dolly deserves some time with her alone, at least.
He ignores hearing Jolyne ask why he’s leaving.
He ends up finding himself collapsing into bed face-first, jostling Kakyoin (who had impulsively decided to be nocturnal shortly after demonstrating Hierophant Green as a result of a rather impromptu all-nighter the day prior) as their shitty box-spring protests underneath nearly all two-hundred pounds of his weight. He has been scolded for doing this multiple times.
He more feels Kakyoin squinting at him than sees it, even though his face eventually squashes up against the side of a pillow to face towards him. Jotaro can tell that he’s half-awake. He’d feel bad if he weren’t so tired.
Kakyoin ends up asking what time it is. He just shrugs. Lost track. Eight, maybe. Nine? He doesn’t remember when Dolly got here, but that’s usually when her shift ends. She hadn’t gotten off early today.
Kakyoin plucks the hat off of his head and stretches to toss it onto his nightstand. It leaves him feeling unnecessarily exposed, but he doesn’t stop him. “You need to start learning how to take this off.”
“Mm,” he drones, although he’s not really listening. The words phase through him.
It’s made up for when spindly fingers start brushing through his hair, gentle and chaste as they undo a few knots and tangles. It feels nice. Jotaro lets his eyes drift shut. He feels a little bit bad, though, seeing as it’s a little bit greasy because of how damn much he’s been sweating. He’s still running a fever. Just. Doesn’t feel like shit about it.
“How’s Jolyne doing?”
Jotaro shakes his head, burying his face again into his pillow. His refusal to talk might as well say enough for him. Kakyoin seems to notice, god only knows how he can read him like a damned book, humming softly. He’s not entirely sure how he can put up with him like this.
“I’m assuming the doctors came while I was asleep,” he says, and he’s not wrong. He kind of wishes that he hadn’t called them at all. “How did that go?”
Bad, he wants to say, but he doesn’t. Shitty. As good as realizing that my own kid is probably going to die painfully can go.
“...How are you doing, Jojo?” Kakyoin tries again, softer and quieter this time. And that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?
His position shifts. He lifts his head from the comfort of obscurity, glancing over toward the face staring at him– remarkably flat. It feels forced, somehow, in a way that he can’t really describe. Forced seriousness. It’s almost funny. Almost.
“I need to go tree shopping,” he responds bluntly, entirely dodging the question.
Kakyoin’s brows knit, a semblance of humour lighting up his features. “And why would that be?”
Jotaro sighs. “Don’t think we’re going to New York.”
That’s already how it seemed that it would go, anyway. They were technically supposed to fly over on Friday, but. Well. Machines on wheels or not, it doesn’t necessarily seem like something comfortably achievable. Considering.
“Ah.” A pause. “Is she…?”
Dying, his brain fills in. Actually dying. Final nail in the coffin. Hard to ignore it now.
The mirth in Kakyoin’s expression dissipates, although he doesn’t particularly seem shocked. Just a bit more grim. He doesn’t blame him.
“Yeah.”
The bedroom settles into deafening quiet. He can hear vaguely what he thinks is Dolly shifting in the room next over, maybe arranging some blankets and pillows for herself to sleep in by Jolyne’s bed. He knows that she has the next two days off, so there’s the possibility that she can finally get some rest. He doubts it.
“Oh.”
It’s flat. He avoids eye contact, even though it’s burning directly into him.
Kakyoin urges him to his chest silently, slowly, fingers still combing through his hair. He can listen to the rhythm of his breathing hitch and unsteady without prediction if he listens closely enough.
–
It takes another day without improvement for him to muster up the courage to finally call Joseph and his grandmother and tell them that they aren’t coming for Christmas. He’s half-convinced that Kakyoin was ready to do it himself, but putting the responsibility onto him still doesn’t feel quite right.
They’re confused. He doesn’t explain. He simply says that they can’t make it, and that everything is perfectly alright. He feels himself teetering on the verge of breaking something when he finally hangs up the phone– up to the point that he nearly busts out the windows on the sliding back door when he goes out to smoke again afterward, Star Platinum prickling at the back of his neck and fingertips like a ghost.
Dolly comes and sits out with him while he does after a while, silent as she slumps into one of their garden table’s chairs. She looks unusually defeated. Jotaro can’t possibly imagine why.
“You’re chain-smoking again,” she says, and that’s mostly it. It’s a simple observation. Flat, devoid of much meaning. It doesn’t annoy him or bother him, not really.
It’s something that he did often while they were dating, though he’d started nursing off of the habit once they’d come to realize that Jolyne was on the way. It’s a regression. Kakyoin had pointed it out the night that Avdol had visited albeit indirectly, and he’d burnt out several more after, but he hasn’t said anything about it since. He figures that there’s worse things to worry about.
He breathes in slowly. “Yeah.”
It’s quiet for a good while. Jotaro takes a look at her momentarily and considers asking if she needs to borrow a shower, but he doesn’t want to come off as if he’s judgemental. He doesn’t think that Kakyoin would mind her using some of his haircare products. Their upstairs bathroom is full of a bunch of assorted bottles that he typically doesn’t touch, half out of courtesy and half because he doesn’t know what the majority of them are. Everything beyond basic shampoo and conditioner is practically foreign to him.
“What–” she starts painfully, voice faltering slightly midway before she breathes in and out to collect herself. “What should we tell her? When?”
He doesn’t want to answer. It’s the question that he’s been dreading for nearly half of a week now.
“...Not yet,” he says, and they both drop the topic. It’s probably not the best time anyway. Not that there is one.
Not much had happened the day prior. Cooked breakfast mostly in silence. Ate in Jolyne’s room while she watched cartoons, blissfully back to normal and energetic again. He’s not entirely sure how she’s doing it. She napped once midday with the occasional cough and hiccup, although Jotaro is half-sure that it was another one of her fainting spells. Gave her some children’s Tylenol when she mentioned her tummy hurting after waking up, which shockingly actually worked.
He still has to go tree shopping. Vice versa with wrapping presents. He’s done some, but… not much. Jotaro wonders if he can force Star Platinum to do it.
Kakyoin lingers around, sleep schedule be damned; albeit mostly in the form of fleeting touches and the occasional check-in. Most of the day is spent sprawling out on the floor catching up on more coursework while Dolly lays at Jolyne’s side, either reading to her or engaging in other various activities where she doesn’t have to move far from her bed.
He feels a little bit bad about it.
“If it’s alright with you,” Dolly says to him at some point, “after– after work tomorrow. I might– stop home and get some clothes, you know. Stay here for a while, since…”
He knows. He just nods and brushes it off. They still have a guest room for a reason, even though he has the lingering feeling that it’s not going to get used very often.
There’s a point where he ends up finding himself cooped up in Kakyoin’s small studio with him, staring blankly at the unwrapped half of Jolyne’s presents that he’d pre-bought. He’s still not entirely sure what he’s working on. Jotaro is sure that he’ll tell him if he really wants him to know. Mostly.
Kakyoin asks if he needs help with them. He grumbles out a ‘no’.
(He does. Hierophant and Star Platinum help.)
Polnareff’s and Avdol’s are scattered somewhere within the mix, the same applicable to the rest of his direct family. He stares at those, too, albeit for entirely different reasons. Of course, they’re the ones that he’d bought by himself in passing– he’s not sure if Kakyoin has his own for them hidden around– but. Well. There doesn’t feel like much of a point in wrapping them anymore.
He still does anyways. He doesn’t know why.
Jolyne asks for him to sleep in her room that night, too. Dolly plainly communicates this to him for her, and Jotaro assumes that it’s because he hasn’t been in there for the past two nights when she had already adjusted to them essentially sharing a bed prior. He ends up leaning uncomfortably against the side of her bed with crossed arms, but he finds himself getting a surprising amount of sleep that night.
Inevitably, another two days later and on the day that they were supposed to leave for the holidays, he finally goes shopping for a damned tree. Not a real one, though. Just some dinky shitty fake one with the itchy plastic adjustable branches. He ends up buying a tall one with some built-in multi-coloured lights. It takes absolutely zero effort to fluff it out and plug the thing in, which he appreciates, even though they don’t have any ornaments.
…Nothing about it all feels very Christmas-y. He isn’t sure if it’s the nature of the situation or the fact that they live in Florida and it’s nearly sixty degrees out. Jolyne is delighted when they take her downstairs for the first time in a while though, even if it barely makes up for the disappointment she expresses once they tell her that New York is a no-go this year.
She ends up asking why shortly after. They concede that it’s because she isn’t feeling well, where she then proceeds to insist that she feels perfectly fine, thank you, and Jotaro actively sees Dolly tensing up while Kakyoin stares blankly at them all in his periphery.
–
“Jolyne wants me to dye her hair.”
Jotaro nearly does a double-take. Why?
Per Kakyoin’s insistence, he has been forced to sit on the sidelines today. He feels like a damned child put in timeout. It gives him time to catch up on work, yes (he still doesn’t know what the hell to write his thesis on), but he doesn’t feel very productive all things considered. Kakyoin had finished working on… whatever project he was doing, apparently, which apparently means that he just has all the freetime in the world now.
Which is both a blessing and a curse in its own right. Case in point.
He whirls around in his spinny little office chair to look toward the direction of the face staring blankly at him, deadpanned and entirely serious, and he only feels mildly like a supervillain for once as he chews on his altoid. Hair dye.
Huh.
Kakyoin is standing there in the doorway, still bearing into him, and he only feels mildly intimidated. Mildly. He says nothing more, as if he’s waiting for an answer, entirely prepared to leave the room as if nothing had ever happened once he gives him one.
It’s not as if he sees any harm in it. He knows that Dolly’s is dyed blonde (her original hair colour was actually just a lighter and more vibrant shade of brown than his own), vice versa for Kakyoin. Which he mostly only knows because he’s seen the roots peeking through and helped redye it himself every once in a blue moon.
The purple eyes being natural is something he never quite got though. Who the hell has purple eyes?
Jotaro blinks. Once, twice. Kakyoin blinks back at him.
Dolly isn’t here, so it’s not like they can just– ask all parties at once. He’s not sure how she’d feel about it, honestly. Jolyne is six, so something tells him that something like the– temporary? Chalk sliding hair dyes? That he’s seen on TV would be better. He’s not entirely sure how her taking in all of the chemical-y smells would go, either.
Personally, he could care less as long as it’s something that makes her happy. Can’t really hurt either, considering. Whatever.
“Sure,” he says, even though he is entirely unsure.
They’d all done worse things with their hair back in the eighties. He still has a mullet. He thinks it looks good. Kakyoin had taken the arguably wiser and more well-aged route of growing his out.
Kakyoin scuttles away immediately, closing the door behind him. He has no clue what he has just done.
A few hours later, he stares down at Jolyne after being called into the upstairs bathroom; who is proudly staring back up at him with new bright neon-green bangs as if looking at him without blinking is a contest that she is going to win. IV machine once again on wheels be damned. Something in him stutters.
It’s not that it looks… bad, per say. And he doesn’t really care about the principle of dyeing your kid’s hair if that’s what they want, because as far as he’s aware, the people who usually are tend to be stuck-up Bible-thumping assholes anyway. He never really understood that. He prides himself as someone capable of minding his own business.
It is just a very bright green.
He looks over at Kakyoin, who just raises his hands partway into the air as if to say ‘not my fault’ and shrugs his shoulders. He’s more concerned about the fact that he hadn’t heard him leave, so–
“...Did you have this on hand?”
Which wouldn’t surprise him. He’s aware of the fact that he’s wanted to try out other different wacky colours before in the past, so he just has… an assortment of dyes that he hasn’t used stashed underneath the sink with the cleaning supplies.
He shrugs again. “She wanted green.”
That does not answer his question, and he is now more concerned about the more-than-slight probability that Kakyoin might have sent Hierophant on a little journey to steal some hair dye from the nice supermarket down the block solely to avoid leaving the house. Jolyne’s eyes are still burning into him.
Jotaro sighs. He really shouldn’t care, honestly. God knows he’d stared his way into his fair share of illegal cigarettes and alcohol from young cashiers asking for his ID back in high school.
“Do you like it?” Jolyne asks him, sudden and edging on nervous, as if she’s been put out by his reaction somehow.
His focus diverts. She’s picking at the sleeves of her pajamas– they’re purple and they’re My Little Pony themed and they’re absolutely the most six year-old thing ever– and something about acknowledging it makes him soften impossibly.
(She’s so little.)
Jolyne stares up at him, her eyes uncomfortably wide. Expectant. He adjusts the dark brim of his hat to shadow over the majority of his features silently, betraying the slight tic up on both ends of his lips.
“Yeah,” he says, and he means it. “It suits you.”
He brushes off the way that she beams at him. It makes him feel better.
–
Dolly reappears from work later on with a massive bag of luggage in tow, which Jotaro is genuinely surprised at the size of. She explains that some things are Jolyne’s from home, which explains a lot. She ends up dumping most of her stuff in the guest room.
She takes the hair dye debacle surprisingly well. He didn’t think that she wouldn’t, but she genuinely appears to be over the moon about it. She tells Jolyne that she thinks it’s the cutest thing ever and proceeds to pinch her cheeks into oblivion.
“You should have told me you were going to!” She had said at some point. “Then we could’ve matched!”
He tries to imagine her with big, curly green hair. He cannot.
Jotaro takes it upon himself to prepare dinner, mediocrity be damned. It doesn’t come out terrible. Holly had taught him most of the basics of cooking before he went off to America for college, so. He’s thoroughly trained. Somewhat.
(It’s just chicken curry.)
He thinks again about his mother. How she must have felt when she was sick, mostly alone besides Suzie; who had only come to visit at the end. His father hadn’t even known that she was sick, hadn’t even known that there was a trip to Egypt or an illness to begin with, and Jotaro figures that Holly had avoided telling him anything for his benefit. So he wouldn’t worry. There wasn’t a real reason for him to need to know.
Which had worked at the time.
Dolly still takes the food gratefully, and Jolyne seems excited to have something solid that isn’t soup. He leaves them alone again. Sits in his office after stopping by Kakyoin’s studio again and giving him his serving. Thinks as he fixates on the filter of his personal fish tank. He’s not very hungry.
He’s poking at his plate when he hears doors open, a phantom sensation wrapping around his ankle, which he looks down at instinctually. It’s just Hierophant. Kakyoin enters the room a sum total of ten seconds later, flopping onto the white couch against the wall with his dinner in hand. It somehow manages to be a graceful action.
They don’t exchange any words for another minute or two. Jotaro does finally take a bite of his portion in the hopes of looking more put together, though. It’s lukewarm by now. Decent.
“You’re quiet.”
“I’m always quiet,” Jotaro mutters, forcing another spoonful into his mouth. “I’m eating.”
Kakyoin is making a scrunched up face when he looks at him from the corner of his eye. “Yeah, but–” a pause. “You’re… advanced quiet.”
What the hell is that even supposed to mean.
He is not in the mood to be therapized again. He sighs heavily, letting his spoon drop into his bowl with a clatter as he leans back in his chair. Hierophant is currently having the time of his life, curling around and extending up his leg. He doesn’t care.
He’s not irritated. He’s not– he’s just. Hm.
“–I saw her Stand today,” Kakyoin resumes, the subject changed entirely. The point still gets across. I can see right through you. It’s nonchalant, another one of those ‘double-meaning’ things that he does sometimes. Kind of aggravating. “When I was doing her hair.”
Oh. Forget all of that. He turns in his seat.
“You saw it.”
“Just for a second.” Kakyoin takes a bite out of his meal. “It has sunglasses,” he adds, like it’s unremarkable.
Jotaro soaks that in. Sunglasses. Why sunglasses? That’s his takeaway?
“Hm.”
Kakyoin shrugs. “They were just sitting on the tub. Minding their own business, I guess.” Another bite. “They disappeared shortly after I looked at them.”
“...Can she even do that subconsciously?”
“It’s what you did with Star Platinum, isn’t it? When he first appeared?”
He hadn’t really thought about it that way. He guesses so. He’s more intrigued by the knowledge that she’d been able to– presumably– have the strength to fully manifest it at all, albeit probably only in just a short flash like Star Platinum had been at the start.
Which, for all intents and purposes, had been terrifying at the time. It still kind of was. A few short glimpses of blueish-almost-white after a switchblade had come too close to his gut, a cacophony of broken bones shortly in suit immediately after. It only figures that he’d think that it was an evil spirit.
“I figure all Stand users do that at some point, anyway,” Kakyoin hums before laughing, although not very warmly. “I suppose I wouldn’t know. My parents have already told you that they thought I was haunted as a baby.”
They had. Shortly before Jolyne started going to school, actually, on a visit to America. He’s not entirely sure what they’re going to do about them for Christmas. They usually at least pop in when they go to Japan for it. It was awkward, but it had been a relatively good dinner until the drive home.
Hierophant squeezes around his mid-thigh for good measure; like proof that he’s there. Jotaro ends up running his palm over the tendril clinging to him. Kakyoin seems to relax in his periphery, for some odd reason.
“I guess that’s the consensus.” Being haunted, rather. Possessed.
“Mm.”
Jolyne’s situation, he supposes, is much like being haunted. He sees the resemblance. There is something clinging to her that is killing her, not with any real reason or logic or discretion. It is inherited, similar in the way of a curse, and she can do nothing about it except wait.
He’d probably think the same thing if he didn’t know any better. In a way, he thinks that he does.
Parasite.
Murderer.
–
Jotaro decides that he can find the situation kind of funny.
Jolyne hadn’t been unwanted, but she had been unexpected. Which feels entirely bitter to think, and he kind of feels like an asshole for it, but he is getting too goddamn tired to care anymore.
Of course she would get sick like this out of nowhere. Of course she would. Everything about this damn kid is spontaneous. Like the bright neon green hair dye. He’s not sure why he didn’t expect any of it, even if he figured that something would happen eventually– there’s no DIO to be a threat, or whatever, but she is a Joestar. She needs an equivalent. You know, to get your ass beat at some point before you turn twenty.
Kakyoin poking him directly in the chest with his index finger and telling him to get out of the house is also pretty spontaneous. Which, down to its barest essentials, sounds rather horrible when he thinks about it objectively. It really isn’t.
It’s the 22nd. Two days and he still has no damn clue what to do. He had bothered with putting presents under the tree yesterday, family included for aesthetics alone, which really didn’t add to the festiveness of their living room at all when it came down to it.
He pulls a scowl, although mostly a pained one. Not out of anger or annoyance or anything. “She’s hooked up to two machines.”
Kakyoin stares at him with that blank, piercing look again. “And do you think that they’re doing anything, Jojo?”
He doesn’t. They haven’t really stabilized her fever at all– he’s still been checking– and they haven’t had the doctors over since the prognosis. They just serve to make her uncomfortable, for the most part.
“No.”
“Then take her out,” he says, adjusting the popped collar of his jacket (black, comfy) like it’s his personal life mission to do so or something. “Just for a night. If you’re going to lie to her through your teeth, at least make her think that she’s okay.”
It’s backhanded again. Jotaro narrows his eyes at him. Kakyoin acts as if he doesn’t even notice.
“Dolly–”
“–Said that it was fine,” Kakyoin interrupts, cutting him off. “We are capable of handling ourselves, you know.”
He hesitates. Jotaro peers silently downward, not having much of a rebuttal; even though he really wishes that he had one. His gaze turns away when Kakyoin tries to meet his eyes. Doesn’t like eye contact. Feels weird.
Awfully insistent about this.
“...Okay.”
“Thank you,” Kakyoin sighs, smoothing over the wool on his shoulders. “Now go get some ornaments or something. Buy me a snickerdoodle.”
He snorts, shaking his head. “Sure.”
Kakyoin hands him his gloves, which feels stupid, since they’re still in Florida and it’s at least fifty-degrees out. It’s nothing even comparable to Japan, where it would typically dive below zero multiple times throughout winter. He puts them on anyway. Kisses him. Christmas spirit or some bullshit and all that.
He doesn’t mind it. He’s still chilly, probably from the fever. He bundles Jolyne up when they call her down and unhook her from her machines, too, which she is thrilled about. She seems happier to actually go out with him somewhere. Jotaro genuinely isn’t quite sure why.
He ends up carrying her on his shoulders for the majority of the walk, given they just wander around for a few blocks to see what’s open. It’s busy, albeit dark out. She insists on walking on her own after a point, which is fine, even though he forces her to hold his hand. She doesn’t really seem to care.
Jolyne stops dead in her tracks early on, which immediately sets off alarm bells in his head until he turns around. She’s pointing into the window of… something, but she looks more fixated than afraid like she had the last time. He figures that she’s fine.
“What’s this?”
Jotaro blinks. He stops, taking a few steps backward, and peers into the large window of the store. It’s all decked out in Christmas-y shit, red and white, fake snow plastered in the window. His first thought is ‘homey’, but then he notices the sweets and realizes that it’s probably what caught her eye.
“A bakery,” he answers, eyes trailing past the display shelf. “...I think. It looks like a bistro.”
“What’s a bistro?”
“A small restaurant.”
“Oh.” She pauses before glancing back towards the display window, as if seeming to think something over. “I’m hungry.”
They eat there. It’s good. It smells overwhelmingly of cinnamon, but it looks nice. Rustic is a better word to describe it. Jotaro assumes that it’s family-owned.
Jolyne gets a big chocolate cookie– more than one, actually– and he doesn’t stop her. He gets himself a cinnamon bun, which is actually something that also ends up being huge. He gets Kakyoin his snickerdoodle. Dolly gets gingerbread, which he specifically remembers her liking because they had initially gotten together around Christmas.
The next stop ends up being some dinky souvenir shop. It just seems to be for Florida merch as a whole, but it’s decorated and selling assorted junk for the season. He has Jolyne pick out the ornaments– most of them don’t look great and they’ve got some branding or other random shit plastered on them, but he doesn’t care. He buys a fruit-flavoured candy cane and chews to fight off the cigarette itch.
Which, for the most part, he thinks covers the trip. He has to hold her back from buying other random junk that she shakes at him, because she has Christmas presents, and he is not going to spoil her on overpriced tourist traps.
Petting a stranger’s dog seems to make her feel better about it, though.
He lets her ride on his back again the way home, even though he assumes that they couldn’t have been out for longer than an hour. Maybe two. It only makes sense that she’s tired out, really. It was already late to begin with, and god only knows how long it’s been since she was outside last.
You’re making yourself feel worse, Jojo.
He crushes a bit of his candy cane under his teeth. Just because.
It’s when he turns the block and comes into eyeshot of their house that he hesitates, faltering slightly as he walks. There’s a car that he doesn’t quite recognize in the driveway– two, actually, parked considerately enough as to where Dolly can still back out for work whenever she needs to. Which is, quite frankly, odd.
Jolyne nestles her head sleepily into the junction of his neck and shoulder, cushioned by the thick fabric of his coat. She doesn’t seem to notice or care. He doesn’t expect her to.
“Bright,” she mumbles, voice small and quiet as Jotaro stops at the door. It’s the only sign that she’s even awake, he thinks. Must have been trying to sleep. “Daddy, s’bright.”
What a brilliant deduction. He responds, voice soft, with a simple “yeah.”
He’s not really sure how to balance all of the damn bags he’s carrying and keep Jolyne on his back together if he moves his hands any, so he ends up settling on lightly knocking his foot against the door. Kakyoin and Dolly should be home, anyway. It hits him belatedly that he could’ve just used Star Platinum. Whatever.
The door opens with a flourish. It isn’t actually Kakyoin who answers it. Not Dolly, either.
It’s his grandfather.
What in the actual fuck.
–
Kakyoin helpfully informs Jotaro that this is– mostly– Avdol’s fault. And also his own, to an extent, which feels like a big fat ‘eat shit’ directed toward him in the most kind and polite manner conceivable. Dolly was also, in fact, fine with this. Lovely.
(She helped decorate. He ends up filled in on this later.)
The inside of their house has been equally bastardized; garland has been strung up and pinned to each of the walls, and he thinks that he even sees a mistletoe hanging in the kitchen doorway. Which is stupid.
He doesn’t actually mind it.
It’s more gobsmacking, he thinks, that they’d managed this within the timeframe of nearly two hours. It was apparently pre-planned– albeit rather sloppily and last-minute– but schedules lined up perfectly well, seeing as they were all supposed to be in New York by now. His mother is here. His father, too, which is only slightly surprising. And Polnareff must have gotten that solo plane ticket that he was teased about, which he finds something close to hilarity in.
And Jolyne– Jolyne is thrilled. All of her favourite people are here, for the most part, and it’s worth it somehow to see her startle fully awake and scramble off of his back to go see her grandparents resting on the couch with sudden energy that almost flounders him.
The initial stupor slowly ebbs out, however, and he’s left with the knowledge that she’s on a time limit again. This all somehow manages to be both pleasant and welcome and salt in the wounds both.
He bites his lower lip close to bloody as his grandfather laughs and pats his back through guffaws and words in English that he isn’t paying attention to, can’t focus on processing despite how easily the language comes to him and always has, his grandmother sitting over on the couch with his parents who he hasn’t even spoken to yet.
They don’t know.
None of them know.
“Jotaro!”
Joseph is snapping his fingers in his face when he comes to. And he thinks bitterly, senile.
“Are you alright?”
“Fine,” he lies.
Thirty-eight days.
He pushes through the front door, leaving Joseph confused and bewildered behind him.
–
Polnareff ends up on the porch with him, somehow.
Jotaro doesn’t really find himself caring that much.
“Well, Jojo,” he starts, seemingly unbothered by any change of events that his sudden departure might have caused. “You are officially a party-pooper.”
He grunts flatly in response, nearly biting his cigarette in half as he rolls it between his teeth. He can see Polnareff patting around for something– probably his own pack– before brandishing one in a brand he doesn’t recognize and shaking one out of the box.
“Gimme a light, mon ami.”
Jotaro shakes his head dismissively. He still fishes his Zippo from his coat pockets anyway, striking the ignitor a few times before holding the newly-produced flame up to the tip of his cigarette once Polnareff settles it in his mouth. He stashes it away into his coat shortly after.
They stand there like that for a while in silence, uninterrupted.
Jotaro, at some point, ends up slouching against the surface of one of the house’s exterior walls before slumping fully to the ground in a crumpled heap. Blue eyes are on him, burning.
“So,” he starts, slow and with a sort of exaggerated seriousness that he’s only heard from him a few times. “Jolyne, I take it?”
He sighs. Loudly. “Avdol told you.”
“Kakyoin, actually.” A moment of pause where it looks like he’s finally putting thought into his words for once. “I suppose Avdol came later. They both told me to go and pester you, and I couldn’t resist.”
Jotaro’s upper lip pulls into a scowl, revealing the barest hint of teeth. “Give me a break.”
Polnareff shrugs at him. Jotaro decides that he’s nearly five minutes away from regressing so far into himself that he knocks somebody’s teeth in, preferably the ones of the man next to him, but he refrains. He’s very proud of himself for it. He can feel Star Platinum itching a little bit again, though, which he can’t quite help.
“Well? What’s wrong with her? A bad flu, cold?”
Polnareff takes a drag in the corner of his vision, blurry. The ensuing silence isn’t necessarily tense, per say, but it still feels... uncomfortable.
There isn’t much of a point in not telling the truth, considering. Oh well.
“...She’s dying,” he says, after a moment; working the words out of his mouth as if it physically causes him pain to do so.
“Oh.” Quietly, “shit, Jojo. You haven’t told anyone else? What–?”
He shakes his head. “Stand.”
“‘Stand’? ” He sounds confused, like he hasn’t quite puzzled things together– he’s answering rather mono-syllabically, after all, but he suddenly stops. “Wait. Like when your mother had nearly…?”
He shrugs. Takes a deep breath and lets the nicotine fill his lungs. Breathes it out.
“Doctors said a little bit over a month.”
“Mon dieu,” Polnareff mutters, almost as if scandalized. Jotaro huffs out a sort-of laugh.
It isn’t funny.
“You should tell everyone,” he says quietly, seriously. “She looked fine to me when you came in.”
From the outside-in, Jotaro thinks, she does seem fine. Excluding the fainting spells and the high fever. The occasional coughing. Chills. Her Stand seeming to rebel against her. It’s easy to hide. Something in him wishes that it weren’t.
“I mean it, Jotaro.”
“Probably will after New Year’s.”
Polnareff shakes his head, stubbing out his cigarette under his heel prematurely. He thinks that his ultimatum is agreeable. It doesn’t make sense to ruin the mood like this, as painful as it is for nobody else to know.
For a while, Jotaro fixates on the road across from the house; the occasional car passing by despite how late he can imagine it is by now. Polnareff seems to stand there for a while as if contemplating something, hands stashed in his pockets.
“You should spend your time with her wisely, if that’s the case.” He sounds unnaturally grim. “I know that I wish I would have.”
Sherry, Jotaro thinks absently, taking two fingers up to his lips and pulling his cigarette from between his lips. It’s not difficult to tell who he’s talking about, albeit however indirect. He wants to say that it isn’t the same. He would if it wasn’t, knowing what he does.
He hums, though. He’s been trying to. He just– doesn’t know what to do about it. And he knows that Jolyne isn’t stupid– he’s sure that she’s realized that something is wrong by now, something a little bit larger in scale that they’ve all been letting her in on. He feels like she’ll ask him directly if they start treating her differently all of a sudden.
Something in him, he thinks, is scared for when that’ll happen.
“Take her to Disneyland, or something,” Polnareff jabs, immediately a little bit lighter in tone. “I hear that’s what they do for Make-a-Wish kids. It’s nearby, right?”
It is. Disney World is, anyway. The joke doesn’t make him feel any better (it actually kind of pisses him off), but he does roll the thought around in his head for all of a minute before remembering the fainting spells and the inconsistent occurrences with the string ability her Stand appears to have. Not a great idea.
Jotaro adjusts his hat, sighing again. Tonight has thoroughly tired him out. He hasn’t even spoken to anyone inside yet; not that he’s much of a conversationalist to begin with, but it’d be at least nice to say a simple ‘hey’ to his parents for the first time in god knows how long. It isn’t exactly like he calls or sends cards. He supposes that he’s a bit shitty for that. He was never really the best son.
This conversation hasn’t exactly made him feel any better about any of it.
His cigarette burns down near its end. The ash burns smoulders against his fingers, where he drops the remains onto the ground and adjusts himself with the sole purpose of squashing the entire thing underneath his heel. He can practically feel his hopes of finally kicking the habit flush down the drain when he does.
He avoids looking at Polnareff, but he knows that he’s still focused on him. That, too, pisses him off. “Come on, Jojo. You should come and see everybody.”
Remarkably, he concedes. He stands up, brushes himself off, and goes inside.
–
Christmas Eve comes quickly. Uncomfortably so.
Jotaro, by all means, had not consented to having their house used as the designated reunion place this year. He doesn’t look forward to cleaning up any of the food, decorations, or… whatever they plan on doing. Still.
He doesn’t mind it, exactly. It’s better than not seeing any of them at all. Jotaro has always been succinct, recalcitrant; both unconsciously and purposefully driving others away depending on the situation, and keeping what handful of people he can is something of one of the world’s wonders. He’s still not sure how any of them are able to put up with him.
But it’s not terrible. Jolyne gets to have a good Christmas this year because of it. Because somehow, miraculously, they still all give enough of a shit about them both. He doesn’t think that he could mind it if he tried.
At least, he thinks, that none of them had to stay over. To go upstairs and get a glimpse of Jolyne’s room with the door cracked, newly unused medical equipment taking up the area beside her bedspace. His grandfather had the decency to pay for hotel rooms for both his parents and himself (Grandma Suzie included), and Polnareff just seems to have a habit of bunking with Avdol at this point. Whatever that means.
Dolly has both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off. She had explained to him at some point the day prior that she considered inviting her parents over, but. Well. She wasn’t entirely sure if they would actually come, even if she explained the situation to them. They weren’t… wonderful people to begin with, per say, but they had essentially all but disowned her once she had announced her pregnancy.
It was hard to watch at the time.
She hadn’t spoken of it for very long after mentioning it. He didn’t force her to. She looked sad in a way beyond words, bone-deep and melancholic, even though she passed most of it through a strained smile and a positive lilt to her voice. Nothing about this is fair, his subconscious remarks snidely.
He feels weirdly out of place, even now, standing awkwardly in the living room late in the evening with a thing of fruit punch in a shitty red cup. And an unpeeled orange, which he’s slowly been slaving away on. Holiday or not, he still somehow feels like he’s invading. This isn’t for him. None of this is meant for him, even though it technically sort of is.
Mom had brought in fruitcake. Not the shitty kind, though. Good fruitcake. Grandma Suzie barely managed to fit her charcuterie board through the door– Joseph had helped make it, apparently, which he was very proud of– and Polnareff came in with… something. The materials to make French hot chocolate, he thinks. And something else. He never thought of him much as a baker, but he knew that the actual food he brought in was supposed to be sweet.
When his eyes finally track the room, Jolyne is sitting in the corner with her grandfather and great-grandmother by their remarkably cheap and last-minute tree, which has since been decorated with the absolutely horrible branded ornaments they’d gotten from that overpriced shop the other day. They’re reading… something. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is blasting over the television. He knows that Polnareff and Joseph are with Holly in the kitchen. Must be helping cook something. He probably should be too, but he isn’t.
He’s not sure where Avdol and Kakyoin are. Dolly either. Something about that makes him anxious.
There’s more presents under the tree, and all he can think about is that he’s suddenly grateful that he’d gone through the effort of preemptively wrapping and putting everyone’s under the tree before he even knew that they were coming.
Jotaro forces some more fruit punch down his gullet, which is harder than he thought it’d be. His throat is tight. It’s certainly not spiked– he would have killed whoever would have done the deed of doing so if it were– but it doesn’t come smoothly. Maybe it’s his nerves. He can’t help but feel anxious. He hasn’t been anything but on-edge for the past two weeks.
Two weeks exactly, his mind echoes to him, the realization seeping in cold and slow as if he’s been dunked underwater twice over. His fingers tighten around the cup to the point the plastic crackles and dents underneath them. Nobody seems to notice.
He hears cursing. He thinks it’s Joseph, and then he hears reprimanding, which he realizes is from Grandma Suzie suddenly yelling into the kitchen behind her– but he’s immediately snapped out of his reverie by weight leaning into his shoulder. Any humour he could have found in it is regrettably cut short.
“You look like someone whose date ditched them at prom,” Kakyoin croons into his ear, sudden and unexpected, and he almost jumps. Almost. The jab sounds stupid coming from him, considering they never actually had a prom. “Did anything happen while I was away?”
He swallows thickly. “No.”
Other than their kitchen being taken over. Their entire house has been taken over, really, which is far beyond the point. It’s not like it’s new like Kakyoin asked for.
“Where’s…?”
Kakyoin shrugs. He steals a sliced piece from his orange while he isn’t looking, but he doesn’t really care once he notices. He’s not exactly hungry. “Dolly went to get some of Jolyne’s presents from home. I think Avdol went to help her load up.”
Ah. That explains a bit. He hums absently, half-listening and half-not, sobering only a little once Kakyoin sneaks himself underneath his arm with a little bit of manhandling. It makes him feel a little bit more normal, in the grand scheme of things.
Jotaro squeezes him. Kakyoin huffs out what he thinks is a little laugh, equally as tired and somehow just as knowing.
“Where were you at?”
“Cleaning,” Kakyoin says, nonchalant. “Upstairs. You know. In case any wayward six foot-tall men and their associates get too drunk to drive.” A pause. “Polnareff snuck in schnapps and vodka. I just told him to stash it in the cupboard for now.”
Jotaro pulls a face. “He didn’t–”
“Put it in anything, no,” Kakyoin gestures to his cup. He swirls it stiltedly with a flick of his wrist. “I told him not to. Until we put Jolyne to bed, at least.”
He goes quiet. His eyes peer into his cup, red liquid around sloshing at the sides. It’s about halfway downed. He’s cut close to saying that Polnareff, for all intents and purposes, is a terrible influence; before remembering that they’re both twenty-eight so viscerally it hits him like a punch to his gut. Not like he would have cared at seventeen.
Eighteen either, for that matter; which had been both funny and potently tense at the time when Polnareff ended up chipping in to buy him a cheap blueberry muffin from one of the cafes in the town they were staying at and proceeded to stick a lit cigarette in it for his birthday. And then he got to kill his great-great uncle barely a week later. One hell of a coming-of-age story.
Avdol can’t drink, his mind provides, and he can’t even think of why he’d thought of it. I could say he’s a bad influence for that.
Anything to bully Polnareff, he supposes.
“You know,” Kakyoin says slowly, voice a few hitches gentler. Quieter. “This was around the time we met. I think.”
Jotaro pauses. He supposes so. The cup in his hand stills as he thinks it over, trying to remember the day that he was put in jail and how long he stayed, stubborn and scared and unmoving, and it hits him.
“Huh,” he says, somewhat surprised. “I guess so.”
Kakyoin hums beside him, warm and unbothered as he squashes his cheek into the side of his chest as if he can get any impossibly closer. He smells slightly like cleaning supplies. Kind of like the pricey cologne he bought him for his birthday that he mentioned liking. It’s nice.
“You know, it’s the pinnacle of romance.” He snorts derisively. “I try to kill you. You pull the evil brain-eating worm out of my skull. Your family abducts me for two months and we nearly get ourselves killed multiple times in the process. Love story for the ages.”
Jotaro’s lips purse. It’s funny, in a messed up sort of way– because he isn’t entirely wrong. He still doesn’t know much about Kakyoin’s life during the months that he was possessed, and he hasn’t exactly bothered coming out and telling him. Maybe he just doesn’t remember. Maybe the fleshbud gave him brain damage, or something, which he would feel slightly bad about. There’s not much of a point in prying when it’ll only bring back bad memories anyways.
Egypt doesn’t really hurt to think about anymore. It was worse when it was all fresh; barely sleeping and scraping by, and even when he did manage, he typically woke up with the phantom sensation of broken bones and knives being launched deep into his muscle. He still can’t hold a steak knife without trembling.
Not that time stopped the nightmares entirely. They’ve both had their fair share since they started sharing a bed. It’s only natural.
“You decided to come with us,” is Jotaro’s takeaway. It’s not in a way that blames him. It’s just a simple observation. He’s still confused about why he had, honestly.
“Abduction, voluntary choice. Same thing.”
His brows furrow. “They really aren’t.”
His gaze catches in the corner by the tree again, watching silently as his father turns the page of the book he’s reading to Jolyne. She stares at the pages with hazel eyes as wide as saucers in rapt attention, pointing suddenly as if she’s found something important within them. How the Grinch Stole Christmas, he finally notes. He winces underneath his cap.
(It is entirely because he’s been called a Grinch for the past two weeks straight.)
“Oh well,” Kakyoin sighs from beside him, exaggerated. “It’s one of the stories I was thinking up to tell my parents when we initially got back.”
“For the best that you didn’t.”
A short laugh. Another slice of Jotaro’s orange disappears. “Probably.”
For a few moments, it’s quiet again beyond the chatter of indistinct speech and rustling around. Jotaro takes a moment to soak it all in. He can hear his mother going back and forth to his grandfather in English, the language change seamless in his brain once he tunes into it. It’s nothing special. Just light bickering about how to make a pot roast.
And then he looks at Jolyne again, still sitting on his father’s lap (who, he thinks, he should probably go and talk to eventually) as Grandma Suzie stays curled up beside them. She’s entirely focused on her book, not even seeming to notice that he's there at all.
This is her last Christmas, he thinks, and he doesn’t really have a doubt in his mind about it. He watches her cough into her sleeve before proceeding as usual, unbothered.
She is your daughter, and she is dying, and you cannot save her. There is no way that you ever could have saved her.
“I’m glad that I met you, Jojo,” Kakyoin says, voice uncharacteristically soft as he leans further into him. “I mean it.”
Jotaro almost breaks.
Almost.
–
Dolly comes back, Avdol in tow, at around nine– right after they finally put Jolyne to bed. Which wasn’t particularly the most easy task, considering she had spent about five minutes flailing in Jotaro’s arms up the stairs and into her room before passing out almost instantly after she hit the bed.
One of the funnier ways for her to have a fainting spell, probably.
The aforementioned presents end up slipping under the tree, which is beginning to look like a wrapped hellscape with the quantity of shit stuffed underneath of it. His grandparents have arguably gone overboard– even though he can’t really say much himself. This year was… expensive.
Polnareff comes out brandishing a few trays of madeleines, which Kakyoin immediately snatches one from without permission (to his utmost dismay). And, after getting the go-ahead, the smuggled schnapps; which are immediately poured into the poor fruit punch.
He drinks some of it. It tastes alright. He doesn’t end up having enough to inhibit him any.
When they finally end up eating, Jotaro doesn’t find himself finishing anything beyond a single plate. He can see Holly watching him from across the table with what appears to be concern and unease in her eyes, but if she’s thinking about something, she doesn’t comment on it. Maybe she brushed it off.
For a while, though, he feels better. The conversation– as much as he still hates small talk and chatter that doesn’t mean nor contribute anything– manages to block everything else out for a while. Kakyoin and Polnareff end up bickering over… something, up to the point where Avdol eventually has to butt in, although he only serves to poke more at Polnareff’s expense.
It ends too quickly.
He finds himself standing awkwardly in the kitchen afterwards, staring down at the dishes ranging from half-empty to entirely-empty. He’d saved a bit of everything for Jolyne– save the forbidden punch– and prematurely stashed it away for leftovers.
He’s not entirely sure what to do now.
Jotaro’s gaze turns to his mother, who is humming and doing dishes that he should probably be assisting with instead of currently glaring at them unhelpfully. His fingers itch to say something, to do something, but everyone else is sitting out in the living room (save for Dolly, who had already turned in for the night upstairs shortly prior) and he doesn’t want them to hear if– if he tells her.
It’s a bad idea. He doesn’t know how she’d react. Crushed, probably. He can’t do that to her. Can’t.
(Won’t.)
He ends up taking a few of the emptiest plates and setting them on the counter beside her silently, settling in to start rinsing them as she shuffles to make space for him. She looks happy. She gives him a short look and a little smile that he doesn’t meet, but the effort is there.
“...Jotaro,” she starts, quietly. Not unkindly. He doesn’t think that she could muster that. “Sweetie, is... there something wrong?”
Game’s up, some nagging voice in the back of his head says. It’s kind of a shame how she manages to understand everything that he’s feeling even when he doesn’t show it.
He continues washing the dishes without answering for another minute or two, gripping both rag and porcelain so tightly that his knuckles turn white. He bites his lip so hard that the skin nearly splits.
She needs to know. She should know. She’s one of the only people that would get it.
“Honey, you’re going to break it.”
Jotaro looks down at the plate in his hands, which now has a newly formed crack in it.
Answers the subconscious manifestation question, he thinks bitterly, because he can’t remember summoning Star Platinum. The manifestation of its hands ghost over and envelope his own in a sizable bluish-and-black hue, accents of gold just barely visible before he shoves them back down into the corner of his subconscious where his Stand lies.
Bastard.
He forces his grip on the plate and rag to relax, albeit nearly to the point that they both slip from his hands. Holly is staring at him again and he can feel it; and somehow, it doesn’t manage to be obnoxious. Maybe he’s too tired. Stressed out, maybe. One or the other.
The faucet runs.
He barely processes Holly’s fingers coming to graze over his cheek, fleeting as if hesitant and prepared to be pushed away at any moment. He doesn’t bother. His shoulders slump unconsciously, eyelids drooping. Tired, he decides. It’s the ‘too tired’ option.
“Sweetheart,” she says, a bit more insistent this time. “What is it?”
Jotaro hates the way that his throat knots up again. There’s a weird anticipatory sensation welling up in his chest, body feeling both far too tense and far too slack all at once. He still doesn’t meet her gaze. He finishes up scrubbing the dish he’s holding and settles it onto the drying rack, the new crack more evident than he’d thought the second he gets a second glance.
He sets the rag on the edge of the sink. His hands grip the countertop tightly, and he forces Star Platinum down consciously this time.
Want to break something. It only makes sense.
His voice comes out in a waver instead, a terrible sense of déjà vu overcoming him, and he finds himself hating it. “Mom.”
He doesn’t know what he wants to say. Your granddaughter will be dead next month?
Before he can make a conscious decision, his arms are around her. He’s crushing the air straight from her lungs, he imagines, and Holly is clearly confused. He doesn’t care.
She hugs him back. Slowly, gently. Her palm rubs into his back soothingly, shushing him quietly despite the fact that he isn’t even crying. He’s unable to. Which is both a blessing and a curse, considering he a) does not want to ruin this by being an emotional mess and b) simultaneously feels like an emotionless prick all of a sudden.
“I know, sweetheart,” she whispers, “Oh, I know. It’s okay. I know.”
He shakes his head, burying it further into her hair. It’d been cut short a few years ago, he knows, but he doesn’t really think that it matters. It’s an old habit, another regression, but does he really give a shit anymore?
He only lasts like that for another two minutes before finally breaking away, avoiding looking anywhere near her face.
She doesn’t pry. She tells him that he can tell her anything if it’s bothering him. She may not understand, but she’ll listen. And if he really needs anything, she’ll be back tomorrow morning.
He doesn’t tell her.
–
Joseph and Grandma Suzie leave at around eleven-thirty, which ends up being about the same time his parents leave. Avdol and Polnareff linger a little bit past midnight, but they eventually get ready to leave. Avdol plans on driving them back to their hotel, since. Well.
Polnareff is, unsurprisingly, inebriated to an almost idiotic degree.
They essentially have to toss all six feet of him into the back seat of the car, which Avdol is perfectly capable of doing by himself (and, in fact, does). Polnareff half-slurs and half-wails things that Jotaro very much does not pay attention to up until the car door slamming finally shuts him up, although Kakyoin is particularly enthralled and will likely use it as blackmail in the future. So he imagines.
He’s halfway through the door– Kakyoin already inside and pacing farther inward– when Avdol stops him with a strong, heavy grip on his shoulder.
“Jotaro,” he says, and he immediately hates the way that his voice sounds. Slow, deliberate. “How are you doing?”
It sounds too much like he’s walking on thin ice.
He doesn’t respond immediately. It’s half out of spite, really. He does have questions, though. Mostly what the hell is with the tarot reading? Why not just ask how Jolyne is? Why do you have so much audacity? Where else have you seen this, and what aren’t you telling me?
His lips curl into a smile.
“Fine.”
He closes the door in his face.
–
If you make me have to restart a heart again, he thinks to himself bitterly, I am going to have Star Platinum plant a bullet in my skull.
Jolyne woke up late. Which didn’t end up being particularly beneficial to any of them, considering that he had to wake up to Dolly violently shaking him by the shoulders and telling him as much (wouldn’t wake up, she’d worded it) while nearly hyperventilating herself to death.
It only took her about five minutes to spring up after he was led into her room. It was fine.
He remembers, though, something about how his mother had gone into a coma when they had started to cut things close near the end. He isn’t necessarily looking forward to that. He doesn’t even know when that’ll be.
Four weeks, he guesses. Three, maybe.
It doesn’t matter, because Jolyne is bounding down the stairs the second they take their eyes off of her. Late-twenties being rather young or not, he still feels far too old to keep up properly, and he doesn’t exactly put full effort into doing so. He probably would have thought the same a few years before. He simply does not have the energy.
She’s far beyond extremely disgruntled upon being finally informed that they aren’t opening presents until everyone gets here, because what the hell, Dad? Why go through the effort of waking her up at all? And– honestly, he’s not entirely sure. It wasn’t as if it was his choice. Huh.
Dolly informs Jolyne that she can open one early as long as it isn’t one of the bigger gifts.
Jotaro did not consent to this. Not that he cares.
It ends up being some funky-looking Barbie that Dolly got for her. Butterfly Art Kira, or something. He has to squint to look at the box, and he’s still not entirely sure if he’s read it right. He doesn’t know much about them other than the basics (probably more than some in his demographic would know) since his mom had started collecting them at some point in the late seventies, but whatever.
Jolyne shakes the box in his face, and then Kakyoin’s once he finally manages to drag himself in. He’s pretty sure that he’s read it right by that point.
Everyone starts slowly filing in about two hours later, although he’d finally opted to warm up last night’s leftovers and offer them to Jolyne nearly twenty minutes prior. Her not being very hungry doesn’t surprise him. She devours the majority of the remaining madeleines, though.
Jotaro gets a few books once they finally start unwrapping. Every single one of them is about the ocean– other than one or two his mother and father had bought, which actually focused on the making of planes and ships and even cars– which he only finds slightly funny. The promised dinky snowglobe from Polnareff for both him and Kakyoin comes early on, although he doesn’t pay much attention to where it originates from. A new coat from his grandparents, which is white, and he finds odd. They then clarify that it’s a lab coat, which makes more sense considering the profession he’s going into. He’s never really worn white. He’s not opposed to trying.
He isn’t proud of the ones he’s bought for everyone else. Kakyoin had input on them when picking them out, of course, so he feels slightly better about it once he remembers. Barely, though. Jotaro still feels as if they’re not much to be satisfied with.
There’s some new books for his mother from an author he remembers her liking. A brass instrument cleaning kit for his father. A shitty leopard print hat for his grandfather, which he both absolutely hates and loves, and a new dress and pair of earrings for his grandmother. A sketchbook and some premium mechanical pencils for Polnareff, but only because Kakyoin had admitted to him that very vaguely remembered hearing him say something about wanting to be a comic book artist. Jotaro feels as if he’s biased somehow.
A scarf for Avdol. A tapestry of the box cover of the original Rider-Waite tarot deck.
Jotaro scrubs at his lips as soon as Jolyne starts opening hers. The gifts start small; a colouring book or two, some clothes, a 64-set of crayons. They escalate into things like dolls, from him and Dolly both; and she ends up with around eight new ones altogether from both ends. One or two are from his parents and grandparents. He remembers buying her the Sweet Treats one that she flourishes in the air (Polnareff whoops and hollers like it’s something to be proud of and he quite frankly finds it stupid), but he can’t really remember much else.
He does, however, remember consulting Dolly about the dreamhouse. They had split the pay on it and agreed that it would be used at her house prior, which doesn’t seem like the case anymore. Her eyes light up when she sees it. Holly forces her into a photo with it– it’s half her height and he’s not entirely sure where it’ll fit into her room in the grand scheme of things– even though they don’t unbox it.
The last one is the Nintendo 64 that Kakyoin had insisted on. Jotaro is fifty-percent sure that he was held at gunpoint to buy it solely so they could share it (read: hog it from her), but he doesn’t care. They ended up getting a copy of Super Mario 64 to go with it, although he ended up finding himself feeling extremely stupid in a long line at Walmart by himself holding a copy of the new F-Mega game and nothing else later on.
It is, overall, not a terrible experience. It helps him forget about things for a while, and he ends up enjoying watching Kakyoin struggle to hook up the new console to their absurd rear-projection television. Jolyne seems to be obsessed with playing with a few of her new dolls– the boxes all newly ruined and preemptively thrown into the trash– while Polnareff exaggeratedly plays along in all of his six-foot muscleman glory. Forced girlish voice included.
It’s nice. He very blatantly ignores Avdol coming to barely fit himself on the couch beside him, because he has decided that Avdol is being an asshole.
“Jotaro,” he begins cautiously all over again, and Jotaro also equally decides that he hates hearing his name coming out of his mouth for the umpteenth time.
“I will literally knock you out in front of everyone here if you ask me how I’m doing again.”
Avdol is quiet for a few moments. He’s not entirely sure if that’s actually what he’d intended to say or not, but it still shuts him up for a bit anyway. He can see his head turning in Jolyne and Polnareff’s general direction from the corner of his eye, where his own drifts to Kakyoin still struggling to manuver his way into plugging in the AV cords without moving their shitty dead weight of a TV. He eventually just ends up watching Hierophant materialize and cheat his way through it, the shitty little helper he is.
It eventually ends up working out. So he guesses, given Kakyoin is now staring wistfully at the power brick as if he has absolutely no clue what to do with it.
“...The tarot cards,” he finds himself uttering slowly, unconsciously. Curiosity killed the cat and all that. “The reading. What did it mean?”
“I take it you saw it?”
Jotaro crosses his arms. “You wrote it in sharpie,” he says, because he would be stupid not to have.
“That I did.”
His brows knit.
In all truth, he could have just looked the meanings up in a book somewhere. God knows he has squat on what anything in tarot means. Was never his thing. He could have asked Kakyoin, maybe, considering he’s vaguely danced around mentioning having a sort of occult phase in the past. And Hierophant has been… well, Hierophant for ages now, to the extent of his awareness. He has to know something about it.
It makes him feel better to ask in person, for some reason. There’s that and the fact that he’s been procrastinating on it in the back of his mind whenever he thinks on his own for too long.
“The Emperor reversed,” Avdol starts, “symbolizes abused power. This can mean both shying away from it and taking it by force, although both connotations are negative. Rigidness. Lack of control. A parental struggle.”
Jotaro’s eyes narrow, since that feels very direct and also very Assholish with a capital 'A', and he finally turns his head to focus his attention on the voice rumbling beside him with certain confidence. He’s still looking pointedly at Polnareff and Jolyne, who haven’t noticed his staring yet, but.
“The Star reversed,” he continues, “symbolizes perceived hopelessness. Loss. You feel as if the world has turned against you.”
You, he notes absently. They're getting too specific for comfort.
“The Hanged Man symbolizes sacrifice and prophecy.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
Avdol’s focus diverts to him. There’s an odd sort of look in his eyes that he can’t quite put a finger on, distant and only somewhat cold. A little knowing, maybe, which is making him feel uncomfortably stupid. He shifts nervously.
“I asked the cards how this would turn out,” he says, and then he continues. “For you.”
Which, now that it’s out in the open, explains a decent bit. The constant asking how he is, mostly. The words ‘sacrifice’ and ‘abused power’ don’t settle well with him, and the small jab at ‘prophecy’ makes him feel even worse about it all. He feels like he’s come out of this knowing even less.
“Sounds cheery,” he mutters under his breath, attention caught as Kakyoin brings the television to life; wincing viscerally as the voice of the disembodied head of the mustachioed man on their screen blares through their speakers. For whatever reason.
And there’s that– that hand on his shoulder, again, and he’s so close to fulfilling his promise of clocking Avdol even though things feel infinitely more justified all of a sudden. He still kind of thinks the tarot reading is bullshit, even if it hits too close in a way that makes him feel a little nauseous. But whatever. Screw it. Whatever. He’s seen too much weird shit already. He’s related to a dead, slutty, slutty vampire. Psychic cards telling any accuracy is the least of his concern at this point.
“You will be alright.”
He wishes that he could believe that.
He really does.
–
Not much happens after Christmas is said and done with.
He and Kakyoin ended up exchanging gifts later on in the day, mostly just for the sake of privacy. Kakyoin gets his copy of F-Mega X (which earns an ungodly amount of excitement that he doesn’t quite get) and a pair of off-white earrings similar enough to his current ones that he dished out a good bit for, whereas Jotaro gets a nice new turtleneck with a brooch pinned onto the front.
There’s also the culmination of the project Kakyoin had been working on a while ago– the one he pulled a small allnighter for– which is a medium-sized painting plastered onto a thick canvas that he enjoys the look of. It’s for his office, he admits to him when he explains, because he’s going to become an ‘oceanographer or whatever’.
It’s also because it has a starfish in it and it matches. He loves it. It’s stupid, but it invokes a sense of calm and it's well done, and he adores it. He plans on hanging it up that weekend, at some point.
He gives Dolly the developed polaroid Holly had given him of Jolyne and the dreamhouse, along with her gingerbread cookies from the other night. And about two-hundred dollars in cash, which he feels mildly stupid about giving as callously as he does, but it’s under the agreement to be used for her and Jolyne both to go wherever they want to go.
She laughs about it, but not bitterly. You couldn’t get me anything personal?
It is, Jotaro thinks, entirely personal.
It’s quiet, though. When everyone leaves. For some reason, it makes him weirdly uncomfortable.
This was how it was supposed to be. No one was supposed to ever come over for the holidays, and he hadn’t expected them to. He’s not quite sure why. He ends up finding himself thinking it all over as he finally starts cleaning up the decorations, although he doesn’t take down the tree just yet. That’ll stick around until New Year’s, he decides.
Avdol and Polnareff said something nondescript about sticking around for a while longer, god even knows what they’ll even be doing. Touristy shit, probably. Joseph and Grandma Suzie regrettably didn’t exactly have the time to be around for much longer, vice versa for his parents.
Holly had given him a weird, sorry look before leaving. And a hug, which he didn’t even bother trying to refute. He didn’t find himself minding it at all, really.
She told him to call if he needed anything. He told her that he would. He doesn’t particularly plan on it.
And for an entire week, he doesn’t.
They’ve decided to stop bothering with the machines entirely. They aren’t doing anything to stabilize or improve jackshit, and even though they take her temperature and give her medicine– when needed– there’s still no upswing. He’s kind of given up on searching for one at this point.
Dolly had taken her out shopping at some point. Said she was fine beyond needing to sit in the cart after a while and the occasional coughs. It’s nothing new anymore.
He still smokes. It’s an unconscious effort. All of his clothes smell like tobacco again, which sucks, but it’s really the least of his priorities. Kakyoin had ended up complaining about it one day when he refused to do his own laundry and stole one of his assortment of sweaters as a poor excuse for pajamas, which he really could not find himself caring about either.
They didn’t do anything special for New Year’s. Mostly just watched the ball drop for 1999. It felt incredibly bittersweet, but that was the extent of it.
Jolyne is wandering around the house again, though, seeing as they aren’t confining her to her bed anymore. She’s technically supposed to go back to school soon. It resumes the coming Monday, he’s pretty sure, but that’s certainly not happening. It’s just a bad idea.
Right now, she’s sitting in his office– doing… something. He hasn’t checked to see what. That’s probably considered shitty parenting, somehow. He’s been fixated on coursework for the past few hours, sitting in the same shitty chair that’s making his back hurt as he rocks back and forth in it with all of the give that it has. In the corner of his eye, he checks.
Just one of the colouring books that she’d gotten. There’s some Barbies laying forgotten on the ground, which is something of a mess, but nothing unfixable.
“What are you doing?”
Oh. It’s her turn to get into his business, then.
He grunts unhelpfully, dodging the eyes trying to meet his. “Work.”
They lapse back into silence for a few seconds, as if Jolyne isn’t entirely sure how to really talk to him. She’s awfully communicative otherwise.
If anything, he thinks that she probably relies on talking to others. She’s not much like him in the way of keeping the majority of his words in a lead box, and he’s seen her get anxious when people aren’t around for a while. He tends to get agitated when he’s pestered by them. They are certainly not the same in that regard.
He’s only somewhat jostled out of his thoughts when she appears miraculously beside his chair, staring up at him for all of five seconds before clambering into his lap. He doesn’t stop her.
“I’m bored.”
“Hm.”
She shoves her face directly into his chest and stays there. Her arms splay limp at her sides exaggeratedly, and she makes an odd sort of groaning noise that reverberates against his skin. He almost laughs at it. Almost.
Her head tilts up once he buries a few fingers into her hair, somewhere between both of her pigtails. She looks despondent. It’s a little bit silly.
“I wanna see Star again,” she drawls, equally as dramatic as before.
Jotaro tenses.
He thinks back to the incident with the dishes during Christmas, pen clicking as he taps it against one of his textbooks in his spare hand. He hasn’t exactly bothered dragging them out since then, which had still been an accident, and he feels wildly uneasy just thinking about it.
His lips purse. “I don’t know about that.”
Star Platinum has never been the most easily predictable Stand, even from the start. It's clearly just a reflection of his subconscious state– which, as of right now, is inarguably a confirmed mess (thanks Avdol)– which is even less reason to trust having it run on autopilot as far as he’s concerned.
He can remember Hierophant setting himself up as a tripwire after Kakyoin got pissed at him once. He really isn’t in the mood for taking risks right now.
It’s also just stupid to have his kid play with his Stand again, probably, seeing as Star Platinum is meant to... punch things. He assumes that’s what she wants to do. Play. At the same time, though, he’s not sure when he’ll be done with this; and Jolyne is bearing into his soul with her eyes and something in him is crumbling at a rapid pace.
Christ's sake.
There’s that gust of wind that he knows is Star Platinum releasing from his soul again, and Jolyne is suddenly crawling off of his lap and behind him to where he can only assume it is. The only con of this is that Jolyne is now talking nonsense to his Stand and grabbing at it, and he has no clue if he’s going to be able to focus on his work anymore.
You should spend your time with her wisely, if that’s the case. I know that I wish I would have.
He clicks his pen again. Once, twice. It’s easier to distance himself, though. Might as well prepare himself for the future. Maybe he’d think differently if he weren’t so shit at this.
“Daddy, he’s squeezing me.”
Jotaro whirls around in his chair.
Jolyne is, in fact, being squeezed. Compressed against Star Platinum’s chest and arms both, basically. Her voice is very tiny, although she doesn’t really appear to be distressed. Just winded.
Distancing himself seems harder than he thought all of a sudden, considering the unironic embodiment of his soul apparently has the quite literal overwhelming need to cling onto her. He sighs. What a pain.
He forces Star Platinum to put Jolyne down.
–
Things are relatively normal over the next three days, inasmuch as they can conceivably be. Which isn’t saying much.
They’re still at a big fat zero on improvement– again, not a shocker– and just about everything else. Dolly works. He works, albeit on his doctorate. Shit sucks. He can barely sleep still, probably half in part because of the fact that his body temperature is all out of wack. A few recurring nightmares have made their guest star reappearance. It’s lovely.
It’s not surprising when Jolyne tosses herself onto their bed after one of her own. He’s shocked that she hasn’t had a bad dream yet, if anything.
To her credit, Jolyne doesn’t yell when she wakes him up. Or cry. Or scream, which is a new development compared to the last time that she had one of these. He wakes up after a few minutes of shaking and whispering, and he honestly isn’t even quite sure how he woke up at all.
He wonders if it’s because he isn’t sleeping with her again. She seemed to fuss about that before.
“Can I sleep with you?”
Figures.
He grumbles in a non-answer as he grabs her and forces her under the comforter, flopping gracelessly onto his side to sandwich her between where Kakyoin is laying with his back turned in the process. Can’t really bring himself to say no. Probably should have.
She wriggles a bit, head barely peeking out from underneath the thick blanket as she adjusts herself up by his chest again. He spoiled her, he thinks, the first few years where he let her hog the bed with him instead of sleeping in her bassinet at the apartment.
Not much he can do about that now. Kakyoin stirs slowly beside him, rolling onto his side before faltering. Oops.
“Oh,” he says, looking at Jotaro and then Jolyne in that order, “hello.”
Jolyne rolls onto her back. “Hi.”
Jotaro just shakes his head.
They settle after a while. It’s awkward and it’s quiet, because none of them are actually sleeping yet and they’re all sort of just lying there, but Kakyoin is playing with Jolyne’s bangs and he finds himself unsure of what to do as his palm rests on her stomach. Something about it is extremely vulnerable. He can count the rhythm of her breaths per minute if he really wanted to, just as equally as he could probably cover the entire width of her torso with his bare hand.
You were a little baby, he thinks for some reason, and it suddenly feels as if he’s being choked out.
She was, though. Holly had told him at the time that he was about the same size the first time she saw Jolyne after the birth, which had been entirely unexpected. He can only think of how he turned out, really. He’s practically the size of a minivan. He’d already broken six feet before his first year of high school.
I wonder how big you’d get to be.
His train of thought is abruptly cut short as Hierophant circles around his wrist– god knows when he’d gotten there– and brings him crashing back to reality. Which, once he’s sobered, is something he’s minutely grateful for.
Hierophant hasn’t solely circled around his wrist (which is currently being lifted away and set off to the side), seeing as Jolyne is settling into being wrapped around burrito-style by what is essentially a neon green glowy snake. She doesn’t seem to mind. She seems comfy, actually, fingers poking out of the top of the wrap as if she’s been set to rest in a sleeping bag that simultaneously serves as a living nightlight.
Blue catches his eye the farther down he looks.
He nearly chalks it up to Star Platinum materializing against his own volition again, but it’s too vibrant of a hue to be them. Jotaro pauses and he falters, because hadn’t Kakyoin said something about sunglasses?
Oh.
He pauses.
…Why does his kid’s Stand have to look so damn weird.
Which, once he finally halts altogether, he realizes sounds unnecessarily cruel. All of their Stands look a little bit odd, he thinks. It’s much in the way of how he’d jabbed at Hierophant Green during their first meeting, but this is… different.
It’s small. About Jolyne’s size, give or take. Maybe a bit bigger. There’s bits and pieces that he notices have an uncanny similarity to Star Platinum, particularly in the knuckles and shoulder pads and… ear. Things. He’s never been quite sure what those are supposed to be. Muffs, probably.
It is, however, very bald.
Odd.
Jolyne doesn’t seem to notice, nor does she appear to care. Her eyes are closed even though she’s absolutely not sleeping yet– Stands, to his awareness, aren’t capable of forming from their user when asleep– where it’s laying on top of her chest with its side towards him.
It’s weirdly off-putting. He can’t even tell if it’s looking at him or not.
With an odd sense of hesitance, he decides that he can let Star Platinum out again. It can’t hurt, considering it's the only one left out at this point. It’s a little bit awkward when it actually manifests considering that it's over nine feet tall and somehow even wider than Jotaro is, but. Whatever.
Jotaro lets it curl around his side with some peculiar shuffling, and he can only imagine that being stuck in the position he’s in now for the rest of the night will only do terrible things to his back in the morning. A broad arm stretches around him and around Jolyne’s Stand both, who at this point, he’s wildly intrigued by. Neither of them move or react.
Still. It’s late. There isn’t really a point in figuring out what the hell is up with it. He doubts that figuring it all out will do much good, anyway.
He ends up being the one to fall asleep first.
–
It only makes sense that things would spiral downhill eventually.
It doesn’t shock him on the eighteenth when Jolyne’s limbs have once again dissolved into string. It doesn’t shock him when she’s visibly distressed despite the fact that they’ve explicitly told her not to be in the past. It doesn’t shock him when he realizes that he can’t just keep lying about this to her anymore.
It does shock him, however, that they don’t turn back to normal.
He supposes that it shouldn’t, though. She only has a little over a week, after all.
Dolly doesn’t see it. Jolyne is ready to tell her at any moment, he knows, just to get it out of her system; but she keeps looking over at him in such a way that nearly resembles intimidation before stopping and stammering just as she’s about to. He doesn’t think that there’s any reason that she should be looking at him that way.
Jotaro can’t deny that it makes it easier for him to stay away in the end, though. He doesn’t want to scare her. It’s a good excuse.
Retroactively, the fever initially starting with her arms and legs initially feels like something of a premonition in hindsight. This is about how he expected it to go. Her Stand killing her. Because that’s what’s going to happen, right?
And why do I have to watch?
It’s not as if it gets better in passing hours. It’s not noticeable, not really, but he swears that he can see the thread unravelling farther up her body if he looks for long enough. She’s a brave kid for not panicking more than she does in actuality.
I can’t watch you die.
But there’s nothing else that he can do, is there? If he had the possibility, he would redo Egypt in a heartbeat, if it were warranted. The desert and the heat and the pain and everything that came with it, the stitches and the nightmares and the blood, but.
There’s nothing for him to do.
And it scares him.
–It scares him! Because what’s the goddamned point in anything, at this rate? This isn’t fair. It wasn’t fair when he was seventeen, scared for his mother and out of his own wits and far from home, and it certainly isn’t fair now. Because it could never be fair for her, and she's not even what half his age was and maybe if she was she could handle it then, and she's terrified–
The worst part, maybe, is that he leaves her alone.
He’s not sure if he’s more pissed at the universe or himself about it all.
Himself, probably. By all means, he is the reason that she’s dying. She inherited this from him. He knew this would happen to her from the second she was born, and he waited, and he grew too attached. Too close. And he’s reaping the consequences in the most pathetic manner conceivable. He has no goddamned clue how he got to be this big of a dumbass.
Jotaro has always been so good at emotions, really. As far as he’s concerned, this is as good as killing her himself. Probably.
“What happened to the railing?”
Jotaro’s eyes slip to the black metal fencing lining the balcony. Huh. There’s a big, gaping hole wrenched in the middle. Who could have possibly done that.
He takes a slow drag on his cigarette. “Busted it.”
Kakyoin sighs behind him, and he can hear what he thinks is the sound of the door sliding shut. He runs the pads of his fingers over his knuckles. They’re pretty badly split. He’ll have to run some alcohol over them later.
“...Did you see–”
Jolyne. He knows.
“Yeah.”
There is weight leaning into his side again. Hair tickles the side of his face, and the feeling of it irritates him more than it probably should. He watches in silence as Hierophant Green tugs at the torn metal, wiring it back into place to the best of his ability with a few tendrils with a cringeworthy sort of screech. There’s still a big ugly split in the middle. He doesn’t really care.
“She’s…”
“Got a week,” he fills in unhelpfully, because he actually has no idea what Kakyoin was going to say. There’s a pause where he mulls something over. “I get it.”
“I was going to say terrified, but that too. She’s barely conscious.”
That’s new. He hums. Ignores the guilt that suddenly wells up inside of him and claws at his stomach. Just because.
“You should go in and see her,” Kakyoin says, in an odd sort of tone where he can’t quite tell what he’s thinking without honing in on it. “You know. Spend time with her.”
“That’s… a bad idea.”
A scoff. “Bullshit.”
It probably is. He knows it is, actually. But it’s for the better, he thinks. For both of them.
It doesn’t matter. They lapse back into silence anyway.
And neither one of them notices the unravelled thread shut in the door before it’s pulled away.
–
They never really got to sort out the whole ‘hey, you’re dying’ bit, seeing as Jolyne fell into something of a coma the morning after. Her fever spikes to 107.6.
He regrets everything that's gotten them to this point. How the hell even.
It’s horrible to look at, really. She’s strung back up on medical equipment that he knows won’t help. There’s doctors in her room that none of them know by name. Her body is falling apart at the seams, and nobody can even see it.
Parasite, he thinks again. I’ll fucking kill you. I’ll rip your throat out the next time I see you.
There isn’t really a point in being angry, considering that Stand and user are supposed to be one in the same. The thought just serves to make him feel nauseous when he actually considers it for longer than ten seconds.
He just feels defeated.
No one talks. He doesn't think that they sleep, if it matters.
He smokes.
He breaks the railing again when his thoughts slip for a bit. Star Platinum’s fist splits open on the metal. Odd, considering it's not supposed to hurt him. It still makes him feel better.
Barely.
–
Dolly has gone nonverbal by the second day that Jolyne doesn’t wake up. Jotaro knows in stored knowledge alone that she’s supposed to be at work. He knows in inference that she hasn’t showered and isn’t going both, judging by the matting in her hair and the timeframe.
She slumps over the bed and doesn’t move.
Jotaro takes it as another out. Leaves for a bit to buy another pack of cigarettes. Some snacks. He’s not sure what else to get. He stares a little too long at one of the bakeries on the way there. Star Platinum ends up screwing up the sidewalk and a random car on the way back, for some goddamned reason, which he thinks is stupid.
It’s not a very productive day. The railing doesn’t get fixed even when Kakyoin seems to notice it.
He just sits there.
Jotaro does not set foot in his daughter's room.
–
There is no technical law saying that a nearly 108-degree fever cannot go back to an average 96-degree temperature overnight.
Goddamn Stands.
He’s woken up just about the same way that he was on Christmas morning, that being shaken awake and being directly greeted by Dolly’s face shoved in his own. It’s with the opposite news, however, that she’s woken up. Somehow.
Something in him pities the way he scrambles to his feet and into Jolyne’s room.
She greets him with a wide smile that reminds him of his own.
She’s safe.
And that’s all that matters.
(Other than the fact that this feels like it was all for nothing. Something about it doesn't sit right with him.)
–
They end up going down to the beach the week after, which is a remarkably short drive considering they live on the coast. It’s not her first time, but they haven’t been there in a while. She can’t quite remember when the last time was.
Jolyne is very explicitly told, though, that she is not allowed to stray too far off from them once they get there. She is not allowed to pick up random objects other than seashells. It’s still early January, and that means it’s jellyfish season, and she can get easily stung.
She ends up launching herself into the sand the second that she’s out of the car. Nobody stops her. She can see the faintest outline of Hierophant catching up to her feet as if he’s ready to trip her for a moment, but he retreats shortly after.
“Are you going to wear your coat at the beach the whole time?”
Noriaki, she thinks. She doesn’t care to listen to some bickering about something as mundane as clothes. She thinks that she’s very merciful for that choice, considering her Stand is apparently nosy enough to be able to eavesdrop on others’ conversations.
“It’s white. It won't absorb the sun.” A pause. “We wore black in the middle of the desert.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
She’s somewhat intrigued by that, though. Desert?
Jolyne doesn’t get much time to think about it, seeing as a towel is suddenly tossed down at her side. And then another one, followed by a large umbrella piercing into the ground in one swift moment that she’s seventy-five percent sure is Star Platinum; judging by the sudden flash of white and blue that only appears for the sum total of a second.
Hm. Much to think about. Mainly a cool weirdly-shaped rock that she sees in the corner of her vision that she’s suddenly rushing to pick up.
There’s footsteps, and then Noriaki is setting something down on the ground all of a sudden before walking off towards the shore. A cooler, she reminds herself as soon as she remembers the word. She picks up her rock. She’s not really concerned about what’s inside of it, either. Popsicles?
Her dad sits down on top of one of the towels, scrubbing at his face and adjusting his hat before looking over in her direction. He looks… tired. Not unhappy, but tired. She’s not able to read him very well yet.
She walks over with the rock and plops down beside him. He doesn’t say anything. His gaze is diverted from her the second time she looks over at him, his eyes seemingly fixated on the tide slowly moving in and out against the sand. She thinks of asking him many things. Like if he’d want to build a sand castle. If he wants to see her cool rock.
…She doesn’t remember him looking this tired before. But she hadn’t remembered him sounding so tired since the night she had overheard him talking, either. All she really knows is that she almost died. They haven’t exactly talked about it.
They haven’t really talked at all since, now that she thinks about it. It’s unlike him.
“Have you thought of what you want to name your Stand yet?”
Oh.
“Um.”
Jolyne flounders a little. She glances down at the large stone in her hands, a sort of conch-shell looking indent pressed into its face. She wonders if she can find any more of these, if she can stash them away in her bucket– all until she realizes that she’s caught herself in an entirely different topic and that now is not the time.
“Stone,” she says confidently.
“...Stone.”
Her face is heating. She glances off to the side indignantly, dropping the rock onto the towel as she crosses her arms over her knees and stares off into the general area that Noriaki had gone off to. It looks like he’s picking up shells, or something. She can’t quite tell, but she’s pretty sure given the way he keeps bending over to grab things.
Her dad’s shoulders shake as if restraining laughter, although his expression doesn’t shift.
“There’s… usually more to it than that.”
“It’s my Stand. I’m naming it Stone. Rock, even. Rocky.”
“Don’t force yourself.”
“I am not.”
She is. She’s pulling up blanks. She stares into the distance for a little bit longer as if something will come to her eventually, even though she’s been trying to think of a title ever since the topic had originally surfaced. Nothing good had come out of it, though.
There were a few ideas that ended up contributing to the weird melting pot that became inspiration for Stand names, although the main one that stuck seemed to be something about tarot that vaguely reminded her of Avdol.
It had been shut down quickly.
“Stone…” she continues. “Stone Ocean. I guess. Because.”
Rock, water. Whatever. She was getting tired of this. Her Stand was water-coloured anyway, wasn’t she? A few rock-y grays tossed in there? Screw it. Ocean. Dad likes the ocean. They live by it. It works.
She shrugs.
“Just because I want it to be.”
Jotaro looks at her. Her hands fidget and pick in her lap as she turns her gaze up towards his face for approval, and she finally meets his eyes as they crinkle up in the corners in the far mimicry of a smile.
“Stone Ocean it is.”