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blasphemings · 5 years ago

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until i see you again (part 2): midnight sun

cineri gloria sera est // glory paid to ashes comes too late.

originally there was not going to be a part 2. there is a part 2 now. timeline in which jotaro died and kakyoin survived/timeline in which both survived/brief mention of the canon timeline, 12k words, can read it on ao3 here

your lips were like a red and ruby chalice warmer than a summer night

Kakyoin stared vacantly at the wall. It shouldn’t have surprised him. Of course they would be similarities. They were relatives. They were family. He ought to have braced for this.

Water stains streaked the plaster, visible underneath what appeared to be a recently applied coat of vanilla-toned paint. He didn’t have the heart to be discontented. If the hotel needed to cut some corners in order to keep prices where they were, he had no reason to get hung up on appearances. Besides, it wasn’t as though he intended to stay in Morioh for longer than a few days.

Families had things in common. Families shared the color of their eyes, the shapes of their faces. Tempers, senses of humor. Voices. Smiles. Laughs.

Three weeks ago, when Kakyoin picked up the phone and heard Joseph’s strained voice on the other end of the line, he hadn’t given much thought to the fact that any son of Joseph’s would have been Jotaro’s relative too. He had been more concerned with the immediate problem of Josuke’s existence, and the raised voice of Joseph’s wife in the background. Kakyoin couldn’t really make himself blame her, after Joseph explained to him in sheepish euphemisms what had her so angry. He insisted that he hadn’t known, and now that he did…

Joseph tripped over his words. “I wouldn’t…if it weren’t—I would consider Holly, but given the—the…circumstances, I—”

“I’ll go,” Kakyoin said, cutting him off.

“I just thought you—what?”

He closed his eyes. “I’ll take care of it, Mr. Joestar.”

The circumstances being that they’d had no way of knowing whether Kakyoin was going to receive confusion, anger, or a punch to the face. Responses which, in his eyes, would have been justified enough for him not to hold any of it against the kid. He did understand why Joseph had come to him first, and he certainly understood why Joseph had come to him before Holly.

It could be worse, he thought. Josuke could have inherited their eyes. Joseph understood why Kakyoin couldn’t look him in the face. A teenage stranger wouldn’t. He was glad no one had had the nerve to say anything about time heals everything for a long while. He wasn’t certain he would be able to control himself if he had to hear it again.

Josuke had been suspicious, which was a good sign. Showed he had an edge Kakyoin sometimes felt his father lacked.

“Who are you?”

“I’m your—I’m a friend of the family.”

His what? What are you to him?

Whoever Josuke’s mother was, Kakyoin felt he owed her some gratitude. Josuke seemed to take after her far more than his father’s side of the family, enough such that he could meet the boy’s eyes and explain the situation to him as steadily as could be expected. He very nearly got out unscathed.

Then the nervous laughter, a sound almost like coughing. Struck him like a punch to the stomach and when he turned to look at Josuke he half expected to see someone taller and quieter, with greener eyes. For a split second, he almost thought he did. It was only after Josuke called out to him in sudden concern that he realized he had stopped breathing.

He waved the boy away, feeling hot and cold and a little bit nauseous. I’m fine, long flight, think I’d better be going back to the hotel. He hoped it didn’t show on his face.

I’m fine. What a load of shit.

Kakyoin fell back on the folded blankets, still untouched. Jotaro would have been Josuke’s nephew. He almost smiled at that. Jotaro would have thought it was the most absurd thing on earth, to have a sixteen-year-old uncle.

A sixteen-year-old uncle who shared the awkward, coughing laugh that almost sounded like crying if you weren’t paying close enough attention. The first time hearing it Kakyoin had thought that was what it was. He had thought Jotaro might finally have snapped. Not that he would really have faulted him for doing so.

You’re not fooling anyone with that, Kakyoin had told him, much later on. You might as well hold up a sign for everyone to see that says I don’t want to be here.

Jotaro shrugged, smiling slightly. Maybe I just want them to know.

Alone in the hotel room, Kakyoin pinched the bridge of his nose. Jotaro would have known what to say to Josuke. Or, if he didn’t, he had always known his way around having nothing to say at all.

Kakyoin tried. He had been trying. The absolute silence Jotaro left behind had never been his to fill.

the clouds were like an alabaster palace rising to a snowy height

The sky was always the wrong color in his dreams. It wasn’t as often that the ocean matched it, frequent as his dreaming of water had become. Kakyoin watched the place where violet sea met yellow sky, wondering if he could still call it a horizon. The air smelled of salt and lavender and some sort of spice that brushed at the back of his mind, as though he knew he should remember it, but couldn’t. On a beach below the cliffs, purple waves crashed into sand as white as the tall grass that surrounded him, throwing it up in impossible clouds.

“Looks like snow.”

Kakyoin hugged his knees closer to his chest, not looking up when the much larger man sat heavily at his side. “Or like bones,” he said.

“Even the dust?”

“Bone dust.”

“Kind of dark.”

Kakyoin rested his chin on his forearms. “Yeah. Well.”

Sometimes, in his dreams, Kakyoin enjoyed speaking to him as if he were really there, although ordinarily he didn’t have so much trouble meeting Jotaro’s eyes. He imagined the face he would see were he to turn his head and his stomach clenched like a fist had closed around it.

“I always could find you here,” Kakyoin murmured.

Jotaro paused. “Well, I love the ocean,” he said.

“Loved.”

He shook his head. “Still do.”

A flock of black manta rays wheeled across the beach and Kakyoin tilted his head to get a better look at them. “They’ve never done that before,” he muttered, half to himself.

“I don’t know,” Jotaro said. “They do it all the time for me.”

“The mantas?”

“Yeah.”

Kakyoin lifted his face slightly, considering. “Didn’t you—wasn’t it you who said that?”

“Said what?”

“That the…that manta rays look like they should be flying.”

Jotaro chuckled. “Probably. Yeah. I told you that when we were on the—”

“Boat to Singapore,” Kakyoin finished slowly, raising his eyes at last. “I remember now.”

He glanced at Jotaro, looking away rapidly as though had opened his eyes too quickly in a bright light. This time Jotaro wore a black sweater and white pants, appeared to be late twenties or early thirties. Seeing him older than he had been when Kakyoin knew him wasn’t uncommon, either, but something about the way the lines of his face fell set him on edge.

“You look different,” he said. “Than you usually do.”

Jotaro watched him curiously. “Usually?”

“When I think about what you…” Kakyoin half expected sunspots to burn into place when he forced himself to look. “What you would’ve…if you’d got older. What you’d be like, I never…I don’t imagine you with more laugh lines than—”

He gestured vaguely at Jotaro’s face.

“—than frown lines. I knew you better than that.”

Jotaro’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly. He looked at Kakyoin’s hands, seeing only unfamiliar scars, and forced himself to stop holding his breath. Pointless, he thought distantly, to keep up appearances for a dream. “You’re speaking in the past tense.”

“Well, yes,” Kakyoin said. “That’s generally the way one addresses the dead.”

each star its own aurora borealis

suddenly you held me tight

The end of that life was too fast. Too quick and loud and bloody and so deplorably easy. He would have said it was over in an instant, but he lost Jotaro in the space between heartbeats, and to say it took an instant would have made it seem far too long.

Kakyoin poured his full concentration into shaping the shimmering barrier. If Dio moved, they would know. He knew his own capabilities well. The barrier was fragile but it never lied. Kakyoin just had to provoke him into using his Stand and it would answer. It always answered.

I’ll never lose to you again.

Jotaro stood on the same rooftop a few feet away, his eyes fixed on Dio.

What, exactly, is the cost of keeping that promise?

“Get ready,” he murmured. “Be ready for anything.”

Kakyoin raised his hand as though holding the strings of a marionette.

“I can do this.”

What are you willing to pay?

Jotaro smiled, though it couldn’t warm away the angry worry in his eyes.

“I know you can,” he said.

Who will pay it for you?

It had been a long time since he had tried to produce such a wide blast radius, but the disgust and rage he felt building in his chest every time he looked at Dio’s sneering face gave him more than enough to draw from. He felt dread and he felt certainty. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.

Kakyoin sucked in a breath meant for a scream and a wave of emeralds tore free from Hierophant before he even realized he had decided it was time. Finally, Dio laughed and called for the World—

I could see the midnight sun

—and before Kakyoin could let that breath go, it was forced out of him as Jotaro’s back slammed into his chest. The two of them went flying across the rooftop, slowed only by Hierophant’s tentacles frantically snatching at the base of a nearby water tower. Kakyoin grunted as the farthest of them started to rip under the strain, screwing his eyes up to brace for the impact, but something half-solid caught him in time to break the fall.

He looked down at the violet arms wrapped around himself and Jotaro in time to recognize them, but Star Platinum flickered out of sight as quickly as it had appeared. Kakyoin scrambled to his feet, whirling to look for Dio, but he was nowhere to be seen. They didn’t have time, Jotaro was taking too long to get up—what the hell is wrong with you—Kakyoin reached down to pull him to his feet, as he’d done God knew how many times over the past month.

“What the fuck ha—”

Jotaro stared at his hand blankly, making no move to reach for it.

“—ppened…”

He had managed to push himself into a sitting position against the water tower’s legs, but given the state of his body, it didn’t appear that he would be doing much more than that. All things considered, it took Kakyoin a remarkably long time to notice the blood. He looked at the wound without seeing it the way you might look at an approaching mirage, waiting for the lie to fade, because it wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true, less that a minute ago he had been standing there completely intact, he had been smiling—

“No.”

He dropped to his knees at Jotaro’s side, ignoring the blood soaking into his pants. Every detail thrown into harsh relief by the rooftop floodlights.

“Oh, no, no, no, no.”

The impact that threw them back—but Jotaro had been at least a meter away. He hadn’t been between Kakyoin and Dio. He shouldn’t have been between Kakyoin and Dio. There had been no time for him to get there.

“How did you get—how did you—you were, you weren’t—what did he do?”

Jotaro’s hand twitched and Kakyoin reached for it, clutching it in both of his own. His heart dropped when he felt the icy skin. Jotaro always ran hot, complained that Kakyoin was the cold one. Everything was backwards. Everything was wrong.

“How did you move—how did either of you…how did you…you got in front of me. Did you do that? Did you…”

Kakyoin stared at him in horror, seized by the paralyzing certainty that he had made a mistake, and that Jotaro had paid for it.

“He was aiming for me,” he croaked. “He—you…”

Jotaro met his eyes with what appeared to be a great effort. He shook his head very, very slightly.

“Jotaro, you fucking—” Kakyoin punched the ground weakly, trying not to scream. “What the hell is wrong with—what were you thinking?”

He screwed his eyes shut, trying to force a clear thought through the mess of static. Names floated to the surface. Joseph. Polnareff. Where…? He needed to find them. He needed to get help for…

Jotaro. Jotaro. Warm wind pushed at their hair, gentle and horribly out of place. Kakyoin stared down at his knuckles. Blood began to bead along the edges of the scrapes left behind by the stone.

“I’ll help you.”

Jotaro shook his head again, more insistently this time. His nails dug into Kakyoin’s hand, eyes wide and desperate.

“I know, I—it’s okay. It’s okay. It’ll be—” Kakyoin looked around wildly. Where was Dio? Where was he? “Just—just hold on. Please. Please.”

The hoarse sound forced free from his chest could barely pass for a voice, much less for Jotaro’s. Kakyoin looked down at him as something cold and heavy settled around his heart. He felt as though he might vomit.

“You’re okay,” he said, cursing the break in his own voice. “You’ll be all right, you—”

Jotaro ripped his hand out of Kakyoin’s and clutched the front of his uniform. He yanked him down to eye level with surprising strength. Kakyoin stared first at his fists, then at his face, confronted by rage that grew from someplace deeper than he had ever known to reach. For a moment he wondered if Jotaro might hit him.

“Go,” he rasped.

The next thing Kakyoin knew Star had thrown him from the roof and he was once again in freefall, body dropping too quickly for his heart to keep up with. As he threw Hierophant out to catch him, the air just above seemed to be disrupted, as though space itself faltered.

Hierophant hurled emeralds blindly in the direction of the harsh laughter that rang out above while its user stumbled out of the dirty alleyway in which he had landed, coughing up only dust at first, then everything else. Kakyoin wiped his mouth with shaky hands that quickly turned to clenched fists as his eyes rested on a yellow-framed figure backlit by a wash of white light. Jotaro’s message was clear: stay away from him.

Kakyoin gritted his teeth. Don’t ask me for that.

Ask me for anything, ask me for the world, but don’t you dare ask me to leave you alone.

I can’t explain the silver rain that found me or was that a moonlight veil?

“You shouldn’t have come with me.”

His voice came out muffled. He didn’t remember hiding his face in his hands, but he must have done it at some point.

“You shouldn’t have come,” Kakyoin repeated as though he were reciting from a script. “You wouldn’t have—”

“I didn’t.”

He looked at Jotaro blankly. “What?”

“I didn’t go with you,” Jotaro said. “I should have. I didn’t.”

The laugh lines. He wasn’t old enough to have real wrinkles yet and he wouldn’t for quite some time, if he was lucky. The thought of Jotaro living long enough for a record of his smile to show on his face hit Kakyoin hard. He had a difficult time imagining him smiling enough to create those lines in the first place. He had only known Jotaro serious, sometimes melancholy, sometimes afraid, but during those fifty days, he had never really been happy. Kakyoin couldn’t blame him.

He remembered thinking that he would like to see what Jotaro was like outside of all of that.

“What do you…” Kakyoin narrowed his eyes. “You did go with me.”

“No.” Jotaro shook his head. “I let the old man go with you.”

He watched Kakyoin closely. Jotaro hadn’t imagined he would ever need to look for a stranger behind such a familiar face, but there was distance to the tighter angles, the way Kakyoin’s eyebrows pulled together in a permanent frown not unlike his own. Kakyoin usually met his eyes so intently that Jotaro often had to look away before the feeling in his chest reached critical mass. This man stared straight ahead with a dazed look, as though he expected to turn around and find he had been speaking to thin air after all.

Jotaro dug his heels into the dirt, which somehow had stayed the right color. “You got…because I wasn’t there. Hurt. You got hurt.” He took a deep breath. “Worst mistake of my life, I—I should never have let you go up there alone. You almost…God, you almost died on me.”

This time, Kakyoin looked down. He had no right to be so familiar with the product of a future that he alone had been responsible for the truncation of. It may as well be empty space he was talking to, for all the good it would do him in the end.

What he saw was a convincing phantom, but a phantom all the same.

He smiled to himself and glanced up. “Almost?”

“Hmm?”

“You said almost died on you.”

“Yeah…I did.”

The should-be-familiar smell of spice grew stronger with the wind. Kakyoin squinted at Jotaro. Was that him? Jotaro hated cologne. That couldn’t be right.

“We got lucky,” Jotaro said calmly, though his hands, Kakyoin saw, had curled into fists at his side. “We got lucky. Seems like…maybe you didn’t.”

Kakyoin laughed, low and exhausted.

“I’ve never had a dream like you before,” he muttered. “I really haven’t, I…you could almost pass for him if I squint, you know?”

He had never liked phrases like eyes burning a hole into the back of your head. He found himself feeling they were too cliché to mean anything, no matter how pretty they sounded. Now, though, with the weight of Jotaro’s eyes on him, Kakyoin felt more sympathetic.

“I could say the same thing to you,” Jotaro told him.

His voice was deeper, too. More worn. Warmer.

Something ripped free in his chest when he reached for Jotaro’s hand. He told himself he was trying to wake up. He told himself he would be able to tell as soon as he touched it, the cruelest possible ghost, that he would wake up alone but at least the isolation he had come to find comforting was something more than an elegant lie.

Hesitantly Kakyoin rested his fingertips on the back of Jotaro’s hand. His strangled gasp made the other man flinch, but Kakyoin didn’t notice, Kakyoin didn’t see, Kakyoin couldn’t feel anything but the heat of the hand underneath his own, recoiling from the memory of how cold that skin had been the last time he touched it.

“Give me a break, Noriaki,” Jotaro said, half-smiling as he wrapped both his hands around Kakyoin’s in what appeared to be an attempt to warm it. “Still got hands like ice.”

Kakyoin didn’t answer, wouldn’t look at him. He had clamped his free hand over his mouth as though he were as afraid of retching as he was of speaking. His other hand tightened around Jotaro’s like a vise, testing to see if the feeling would leave as soon as it had come, half hoping it would. Something about him had more weight than a dream should, and it drew the grief up out of Kakyoin’s heart like it was coaxing out a toxin.

The dirt didn’t quite catch his tears. They disappeared, as things often do in dreams, halfway to the ground. But Jotaro still watched Kakyoin screw his eyes shut against them, watched them well up defiantly despite this, clinging to his eyelashes like tiny jewels. In the right light, he thought, they might look like emeralds.

Jotaro felt heavy-tongued, unsure as ever of the right thing to say to when he found himself staring down someone else’s heartbreak. Despite appearances, his chronic loss for words almost never came from an inability to understand; often, he was struck silent because he understood far too well.

He could say anything and everything and it would never be enough. It felt hollow to try. Useless. Still, the look on Kakyoin’s face hit him like a backhand. He opened his mouth, hoping the blanks would fill in if he just tried to say something. Just to get that look out of his eyes.

Jotaro squeezed his hand. “It’s…okay,” he said lamely.

Kakyoin opened his eyes, wiping at them with his sleeve. Through the remaining tears, he threw his head back and laughed.

“It’s not.” He smiled angrily, still staring straight ahead at the water. “It’s not. It’s—it’s not.”

“Well…” Jotaro shifted uncomfortably. “Want me to tell you something else?”

Kakyoin laughed again, tired rather than frustrated. “God, you—you’re still so bad at this.”

He shrugged. “I know I can’t say the right thing. I don’t see the point of saying the wrong thing on purpose.”

Kakyoin considered him. “You saying I’m still…you’ve still got me around.”

“Yeah. You could say that.”

“And I never got you better at this shit.”

Jotaro chuckled reluctantly. “You…gave up on it. Sometimes I think it’s your fault.”

“My fault,” Kakyoin repeated

“Could blame it on living with you.”

“Living with—?”

“Never really have to explain myself since you pretty much know what I mean the first time.”

Kakyoin stiffened, stricken. He looked darkly down at his hands.

“If only that were true,” he murmured.

the music of the universe around me or was that a nightingale?

Kakyoin remembered reading, once, that pollution made for more colorful sunsets. He wondered if the same thing might be true for the sunrise; Cairo had a beautiful skyline, punctuated by high-rise buildings and minarets framed by the reflected city lights. The dawn must be stunning.

Still, the light pollution bothered him, even as the pale orange haze that hung between the city and the sky made it easier to watch the movements silhouetted against it. He could barely see a single star, let alone constellations. Could never orient himself under a sky like that.

He looked down. It occurred to him that he should have started using Hierophant’s tentacles for traversal like this a long time ago. Easy to keep out of range, easy to launch himself between lampposts and rooftops, easy to get a good targeting angle, which he took advantage of at every available opportunity, flinging barrage after barrage of gleaming green projectiles at the flickering figure beneath him.

Of course, none of those advantages mattered, given that Dio just wouldn’t fucking move.

Kakyoin hardly cared about the man himself. He could have disappeared into thin air and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference. The only thing that existed to him was the growing pool of blood around the crumpled figure at the base of the water tower, the figure that Dio stayed just within range of, watching Kakyoin’s helpless thrashing with delight. He kept too much distance to do any significant damage, couldn’t get to Jotaro without going within range of…something.

The armored mass of a stand appeared occasionally to bat emeralds away like a bored cat, watching him with the same contempt he saw in the eyes of its human counterpart, but he couldn’t glean anything about the ability that had allowed him to attack Jotaro completely unseen. Paralysis? Memory manipulation? Was it all in his head? Was he the one bleeding out?

Wishful thinking. Unrealistic. Focus.

He tore his eyes away from Jotaro to scan dark streets for silver hair, found his frustration becoming increasingly violent when he came up empty yet again. His hand curled into a fist when he thought of Polnareff. If he could have stopped being a selfish bastard for one night—for one night…

“I almost feel,” Dio drawled, “as though I ought to thank you, Kakyoin.”

He folded his arms and leaned back against the rusted steel bars, studying his manicured nails with detached concentration.

“For making it so easy,” he added, flashing Kakyoin a smile so perfectly engineered to charm that it turned his stomach.

“Shut the fuck up,” Kakyoin said hoarsely, voice raw from screaming. “Shut your ugly fucking mouth.”

“Oh, come on now.” Dio held one hand out, an invitation. “Is that any way to speak to your friend?”

He shuddered so hard his teeth chattered. If he hadn’t been so damn lonely that night, if he had walked away instead of scrambling for the first open hand he set eyes on, then Jotaro wouldn’t be lying down there with a hole in his stomach. Risking himself over and over again to save Kakyoin’s life without a reason, without even knowing why.

Jotaro.

Pathetic, to crave being seen so badly. To want a friend so badly, like a frightened child. Seventeen years of practicing being alone made obsolete by a single word. He should never have been tricked into thinking it was an option.

You should have killed me.

You should have let it kill me.

The streetlights glowed deep yellow, creating misty halos where the fog curled around them. Kakyoin wished it were harsher, brighter. Yellow felt too much like the hazy light of a dream. He tried and failed to breathe, wiped sweaty hands on his already filthy coat.

“Poor Jotaro.”

Dio smirked.

“He’s in bad shape, you know,” he remarked, voice syrupy with manufactured concern. “And he thought you were his friend, surely?”

“You don’t know about us,” spat Kakyoin, bracing himself. “You don’t know ANYTHING!”

Dio slapped the lashing tentacles away as though they were a swarm of bugs barely noticeable enough to be annoyed by. Kakyoin stabbed through a shoulder, felt the flesh tear, only to have the tip of the puncturing appendage snapped off like a twig an instant later. The searing pain of Hierophant’s damaged limb was punctuated by the thundering of blood in his ears and Dio’s howling laughter; by the time his eyes refocused, the injured shoulder was already whole again.

“Is that all?”

His smile grew wider.

“So glad Jonathan isn’t here to see how pathetic it all turned out, you know.” Dio nudged at Jotaro’s leg with the pointed toe of his boot.

Jotaro would tell him not to be stupid. Jotaro would tell him not to fall for it.

“Don’t touch him,” Kakyoin tried to say, but his dry throat caught the words. Nothing came out. All he could see was a white hand, sharp nails, a mocking smile.

“Do you think he’s realized you aren’t coming?”

To see red, to really see red, you must first successfully be baited. Like a bull in the ring, drawn towards the matador as easily as waving a flag.

Dio’s hand rested on Jotaro’s head, stroking his hair in a sick parody of comfort. He knew he would see it every time he closed his eyes, afterimage etched there as though he had stared too long at the sun. It was the only thing he had ever seen. It was the only thing he ever would see.

You let that happen. You let this happen.

Bullfights are not designed with the survival of the bull in mind. The phrase itself, seeing red, can only ever be the last burst of rage that sends him hurtling towards an end already written, with nothing left but the need to make it hurt.

“I said,” he snarled, “don’t touch him.”

You’ll die.

The bull is dead the moment he steps into the ring.

So what?

Nothing existed but the need to reach Dio and Jotaro, boiling from the top of his head to the pit of his stomach. He charged towards the gap. A heartbeat and he would finally be within striking distance. Kakyoin had always been fast. He only needed to be fast one last time.

He would, however, never have the advantage as far as strength was concerned, and certainly not when it came to Star Platinum.

Kakyoin stopped just short of slamming into its chest. Jotaro’s stand balanced carefully on the gutter, blocking both his view of Dio and his way forward. He groaned in frustration, struggling to get loose, but Star held tight to his shoulders, staring at him intently. He could see the ragged patch around the middle where its body had begun to dissolve into shimmering dust.

“Stop,” he pleaded. “Please. Please. Let me.”

Star shook its head slowly. For the first time, he saw no aggression in its eyes, no anger, only heavy, bottomless grief. How different from the first time, Kakyoin thought, remembering the vicious smile and white-hot self-righteousness. He would have done anything to get that violence back. He would let the starlight kill him, if he needed to.

“You don’t—don’t do this. You don’t have to. I just—let me go, Star. Star?”

He had never addressed it directly before. It showed no sign of recognition upon hearing its own name. If it heard at all.

“Jotaro.” Kakyoin closed his eyes. “Let me go.”

Across the gap, by the tower, Jotaro’s eyes focused on him. He shook his head, jaw set. Kakyoin felt nauseous all over again. He was right there. He was right there.

In the distance, a siren sounded. An emergency, somewhere. Someone else’s disaster.

Star started to pry one of his clenched hands open and Kakyoin let him, watching silently as he carefully placed something small and misshapen into his palm. With a jolt he noticed that its hands shook.

He looked down at the broken watch, cold enough to burn his skin. Jotaro’s watch, crushed beyond repair. He narrowed his eyes, taking in the shattered glass, the still hands. He tried not to take in the blood.

“A keepsake?” Dio laughed. “How touching.”

But Kakyoin could only stare. The watch hadn’t been broken during the attack. He must have done it himself. Jotaro never said anything unless he had no other choice. He only ever said exactly what he meant.

“Now—”

When he heard the thick crunch of a breaking bone, a wild moment passed during which he thought Dio must have tired of waiting and finished Jotaro off himself. But Star hadn’t disappeared, and Dio paused in what first appeared to be surprise, his mouth still open. He opened it wider and a flash of silver caught the floodlights. Kakyoin’s heart leaped.

Polnareff’s eyes rested on Jotaro, his face pale. Chariot’s sword had pierced the base of Dio’s neck and impaled him straight through the back of his mouth. He stood just on the other side of the tower, having thrown his detached blade in a maneuver Kakyoin had only seen him use successfully once.

With a wet growl of annoyance Dio wrenched it free, shaking his head as if to clear it as he spat a stream of blood down into the alley below.

“You again,” he grunted, snapping the sword in half.

“Polnareff—”

He turned towards Kakyoin’s voice.

“—don’t let him get near you…!”

Polnareff looked from Jotaro to Kakyoin and back again. He took one step back, then another, then began to run. Dio watched him with a sneer for a moment before he threw his head back, snorted, and followed.

Kakyoin lunged towards the gap once again only to find that Star had not loosened its hold in the slightest. He’s outside his range, he thought dazedly, aching to the bone with terror. He’s too far, he shouldn’t be pushing himself, he needs to…

“Why?” He looked up at the stand, speaking through tears at last. “Why did you do this?”

Star Platinum placed its hands on either side of Kakyoin’s face. The stand’s touch was like a heavy shadow, a solid mist. It pressed its forehead against his; even now, it was warm.

He had never really touched it like this. He had been struck by it, shielded by it, thrown by it, but never held. Now, confronted by something so much gentler than anything he had come to know, the realization punched ragged through his chest like a matching wound, and Kakyoin began to shake. He didn’t want to understand, didn’t want to finally see what it was he had failed to notice, now, at the last breath, with no way to tell him I know, I know, me too.

To find him here, with no choice but to lose him.

Kakyoin stood hesitant, as he had always been, to hold any part of Jotaro close to him, but when Star finally stumbled, he was there to catch it. Holding it was easy enough to break his heart. Its breath hitched and he thought if he could pin this moment down, make it stay, the loss would never reach its conclusion. The light would never change hands.

Don’t go.

What was left of Star clung to him and Kakyoin clutched it tighter, trying desperately to help it hold its body together. His heart flickered like a hummingbird. He wondered if Jotaro could feel it. He bit back what might have become a scream, or a crazed sob.

Cold, empty dust flew through his fingers, and Star Platinum went hollow in his arms.

I’m sorry.

The streets ran bright with people who knew nothing about the teenage boy who had just lost his life beside a water tower. They knew nothing about the star on his shoulder, the way he ripped the backs off his hats for reasons no one had ever really understood, his set of cigarette tricks that dazzled bored children. They knew nothing about his friend on the rooftop opposite, his growing nausea and horror as he realized there was no waking up, why he looked at the sky as though he had just watched the extinguishing of the sun.

He opened his eyes. The night hung motionless around him, tepid and vacant. A warm breeze ruffled his matted hair and the bloody hem of his coat. And Kakyoin was alone, standing with nothing but fragments of light in his hands, like the remnants of a shattered star.

and then your arms miraculously found me suddenly the sky turned pale I could see the midnight sun

“So you got stuck with me.”

“Yeah.” Jotaro rubbed a piece of bone-white grass between his fingers, watching it crumble into dust. He wondered briefly whether this was his dream or Kakyoin’s. “Well, we both made it, I—it wasn’t…wasn’t always so simple.”

Kakyoin nodded thoughtfully. The silent plane ride back to Japan had stayed with him for a long time, and even now he often found there was nothing more to say, no reason to meet their eyes. “I can’t imagine it would be.”

“Can’t imagine any of it without you now, though.”

He caught himself holding his breath. “We…live together?”

“With Jolyne,” Jotaro corrected him.

“Jolene?”

“My daughter.”

“Your daughter,” Kakyoin echoed. He leaned back, unsure how to judge the nature of the feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. Why he felt like giggling, he barely knew.

Jotaro looked at him with a strange expression. “What’s funny?”

He waved a hand in front of his face. “Kujo Jolene. Did you—was it on purpose?”

“Was what on purpose?”

“Another Jojo.”

Jotaro paused. Reluctantly he smiled. “It…I always liked the song.”

Kakyoin snorted. “Oh, you’re so full of shit.”

“It wasn’t not on purpose—hey!”

He laughed, easily catching his balance. Kakyoin grinned like a teenager, looking more than ready to shove him again.

His smile faded slightly. How easy it was to remember why he had felt the way he did. How easy to feel that way again. Jotaro was almost sheepish when he smiled, as though every time he remembered he was happy he was realizing it for the first time. As though he had allowed himself to be talked into it but still wasn’t certain he had the right to be…it almost seemed true, that he might have turned out like this. Given the right reasons.

Kakyoin wondered whether he might be one of them and slammed the thought shut as soon as it formed. The pit in his stomach grew so deep he felt in danger of falling in.

Meanwhile, Jotaro watched the ocean. It must be his, Kakyoin thought. He was always talking about how things were the wrong color in his dreams. The stars, though, looked familiar; constellations that were either false or more true than anything else, depending on whether or not he chose to believe his dreams ceased to exist when he opened his eyes.

“You still love it.”

He glanced at Kakyoin, feeling eyes on him. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “I ended up…well, I don’t have it yet. I’m working on the doctorate now.”

“Doctorate?”

“I—” Jotaro laughed awkwardly. “It feels…I mean, telling you about it like you don’t…” He shook his head. “Sorry. I meant—marine biologist. That’s what I do.”

Kakyoin exhaled long through his teeth. “I see.”

Like everything else about him, it felt true. It felt like being reminded of something he wished he had been able to know.

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“What happened to you?”

He flinched and Jotaro shifted uncomfortably. “Sorry, if you—”

“It’s all right.” Kakyoin pressed his lips together. “I…travel a lot. For the Foundation, you know.”

“You work for them?”

“Yeah.”

Should have guessed. The shadows under his eyes did not belong to a man who had moved on. Still Jotaro felt the hollow in his chest fill with a strange sense of loss, one that was both impossible to claim and intimately his own.

“And I…”

Kakyoin coughed quietly, looking slightly embarrassed, of all things.

“I’m registered as a substitute teacher,” he said quickly. “In some districts. Art classes.”

“I remember that.”

He looked up, frowning. “You—?”

“Sorry, I guess that’s not really the…” Jotaro scratched the back of his head. “My you. Does that too.”

Kakyoin dropped flat into the grass with a soft thud. “Do I,” he said, muffled by the arms he had thrown over his face.

“Yeah.” Jotaro leaned back on his elbows. “Your art’s—you’re good at it.”

“It was…” He sighed. “It was what I…it was the only thing that made sense to me.”

“And you’re…you’ve been alone.”

Kakyoin cracked one eye suspiciously, moving an arm to look at him. “Sorry?”

“You’ve been alone all this time,” Jotaro said. “Haven’t you?”

He fell silent for so long Jotaro wondered if he would turn to see Kakyoin had vanished altogether. When he did feel the body beside him shift, Kakyoin had pushed himself into a cross-legged position, no longer attempting to cover his face.

“I couldn’t forget you,” he said flatly. “I couldn’t forget what happened to you because of me.”

“Noriaki.”

He screwed his eyes shut. “Don’t.”

“I make my own decisions. Whatever I did—”

“If you try to tell me it wasn’t my fault.” Kakyoin laughed harshly. “I know you mean well, I know you do, but you’ll be lying to my face, Jotaro.”

He wanted to look away. He couldn’t keep meeting the eyes of the dead, full of life as they seemed to be.

“It wasn’t,” Jotaro said firmly.

“Really? Okay.” Kakyoin smiled, wide and almost bright enough to be convincing. “Tell me where I got hurt, then.”

“You—what?”

“You said I got hurt, right? When I was up there without you, in Cairo? You said that’s what happened. Where did I get hurt? How did it happen?”

A muscle twitched above Jotaro’s locked jaw. He stared straight ahead, silent. Whether unwilling to say or unwilling to remember, it would never be clear.

“On the rooftops,” Kakyoin continued cheerfully. “I was—I fucked up. The barriers, I was wrong, I was all wrong about it. That’s where it happened. Sound familiar?”

Jotaro flinched when Kakyoin reached to press a hand against his sweater, marking a fist-sized area directly underneath his lungs.

“Straight through,” Kakyoin said. “Right here. That’s the hit you took for me. Understand?”

Jotaro shook his head vehemently despite having gone noticeably pale. “You would’ve—you would’ve done the same damn thing for me. You almost did.”

Kakyoin looked down at it, the place where Dio had struck him. To see Jotaro whole again, to imagine a world where he might have had the chance to keep him that way…

“I would have done anything to keep you alive,” he said.

He folded his trembling hands into fists, watching the knuckles go white rather than look back at Jotaro’s face.

“And if you had the chance,” Jotaro said calmly, “if it had been you. You’d agree that it was my fault, then.”

“You messing with me?” Kakyoin sat up straight, glaring at him. “Of course it wouldn’t be your f—”

Jotaro raised his eyebrows.

“…Ah.”

He suppressed a smile. “Got you.”

Kakyoin huffed in disbelief. “Still a jackass, are you?”

“Well, I do have you to practice on.”

It’s not the same. He wanted to shake Jotaro by the shoulders and scream into his big smug face that it’ s not the same, it could never be the same, the world needed you.

Salt air ruffled their hair and Kakyoin blew his bangs away from his mouth, irritated. It was all very accurate, the sea breeze, down to the way it fell heavy on his tongue and left his hair stiff. He half expected he would still smell like seaweed when he woke up. Must be his. Kakyoin dreamed of the ocean, but Jotaro seemed to be on a first-name basis with it.

“I do want to know one thing.”

Kakyoin glanced at him. Jotaro frowned at the patch of grass he had methodically uprooted, all traces of a smile vanished.

“Dio,” he said darkly. “My mom. Is she…?”

“Mrs. Kujo is fine.” Kakyoin paused. “Well, she’s…alive.”

Jotaro’s eyes remained unreadable. “Is she okay?”

“Physically she’s all right.” Ten years and the memory was still as fresh as it had been the day after they visited Holly at that sprawling house. “I was there when Joseph…when he told her.”

“Told her—oh.” He looked down at his hands. “Yeah.”

“Thought she’d snap, and she would’ve—I would have understood, if she had. But she just…she just looked at us. Looked at me, and she said she knew as soon as she woke up that he—you…that you weren’t…coming home.”

“Was it you?”

Kakyoin blinked. “Was what me?”

“Dio.” Jotaro stared into Kakyoin’s eyes, his own feverish and bright. “I’m asking if it was you.”

He had seen that look in his own eyes, in every mirror, every storefront window, every photograph taken since that night in Cairo. Slowly, without looking away, Kakyoin nodded.

“It was me,” he said.

Jotaro felt no surprise. It was right there on Kakyoin’s face, in the tired eyes, the shaking hands and clenched jaw. Jotaro wasn’t the only ghost haunting him. The second one, grinning sharp and golden, was a ghost they shared.

“How?”

Kakyoin looked at him steadily this time. “You mean how did I kill him.”

Jotaro nodded. “Your stand—”

I ripped him into pieces.

“I bashed his head in.”

I drowned him in the sun.

Absently he traced a tiny star in the dirt.

“You helped.”

was there such a night it’s a thrill I still don’t quite believe

“I should have started killing your friends in front of you earlier!”

Kakyoin gasped for air, clinging to the side of a four-story building with Hierophant’s tentacles. Briefly he thought to himself that if he ever reached a point in his life where breath came easy he would never again take the ability to catch it for granted. He stiffened as the silhouette popped into view and pulled himself away, using his stand’s limbs like some nightmarish, bloodstained octopus.

He caught sight of Dio, now across the street, and screamed his name. With no time and no extra energy to conjure emeralds, he had resorted to ripping up chunks of cement and flinging them with Hierophant’s arms instead. The undersides were scraped raw, and each time new abrasions appeared on Kakyoin’s palms, his bloody knuckles, the insides of his forearms.

“Look at you,” Dio crooned. “Can’t you feel it? You’re alive!”

Dio saw it coming, because he always saw it coming, and an instant later the cement pieces struck empty pavement and Dio was once again too close to him. He flew back again, dodging one of his own projectiles that the World had launched back at him.

He had learned its capabilities in that respect the hard way. A tentacle wrapped around his midsection as a makeshift brace, although he suspected broken ribs usually required different treatment. Once Dio had worked out Kakyoin’s tactics he had stopped with that, though, and started using his ability to warp closer and closer to him every time. Kakyoin knew the ranged nature of Hierophant Green was the only thing keeping him from joining Jotaro.

Jotaro.

He knew, with the same certainty, that he was no match for this man. Dio’s equal died alone on that rooftop for all the wrong reasons, the light changed hands for all the wrong reasons, and Kakyoin could not win. Polnareff and Joseph, wherever they were, could not win, though a pang shot through him when he thought of them.

Dio rushed him as soon as he made a move towards Jotaro’s body. He had protected Kakyoin to the best of his ability by holding him away until the end. There had been no sign of his grandfather or of Polnareff. Kakyoin was well aware what that might mean, though he did expect that Dio would have used their deaths to mock him by now, were that the case. His only hope laid in the fact that he had not.

Dio took a different angle.

“It really is a shame,” he said cheerfully. “Despair looks wonderful on you.”

Kakyoin wiped at the blood on his face. “Shut up.”

“If only you had more friends to kill.” Dio tilted his head like a playful cat. “But you don’t, do you? Not like Jotaro.”

“Don’t,” he snarled, “say his name.”

“Jotaro’s?”

“Shut UP!”

Though Kakyoin was angry enough for real emeralds this time, Dio didn’t even bother warping away. He pulled one free from his eye with a bored expression, waiting for the wound to seal itself.

“Never know who you are,” he purred, “until you lose what useless little thing you think matters the most, and recognize that it was simply in the way.”

Kakyoin fell back further, breathing heavily. He clutched at the broken watch in his pocket.

You only ever said exactly what you meant.

He looked up at the skyline, scanning for the water tower where Jotaro rested.

So what was this supposed to mean?

“If only Jotaro could have seen you like this.” Dio grinned. “A shame that his time ran out so quickly.”

Kakyoin froze, hand curled around the watch.

His time.

He looked down at it, at the frozen hands, the stopped time. Dio’s movements that seemed to take no time at all. Simple and impossible.

I understand. I heard you. I heard you.

When Dio chuckled, Kakyoin scrambled back to see that his pause had cost him the opportunity to put that critical distance between himself and his pursuer; Hierophant dissipated while his concentration was elsewhere. Dio stalked across the asphalt, into striking distance, his damaged eye already whole again.

“Slippery, aren’t you.”

He smirked and threw up his arms triumphantly.

“The Wo—”

What emerged from Kakyoin could hardly be called a scream. No words to it, only a sound so harsh and guttural it may as well have been a death rattle, a sound that had been building in his chest and in his lungs since the moment he realized who that punch was meant for. Rage defined by grief, grief weaponized by rage.

I can do this.

The last time he saw Jotaro smile flashed to the front of his mind.

I know you can.

Kakyoin looked at the flecks of asphalt suspended in midair. He looked at the blood from his own wounds, perfect round droplets flung away and stopped in place. Finally he turned and looked at Dio, whose look of shock registered in Kakyoin’s eyes as a weakness he could not afford not to exploit. Moving within what could only be stopped time compressed his chest to such an extent that he felt his heart might burst, his head such that his skull might splinter. It didn’t matter to him.

Take what you want from me.

He looked down at his hands. The shards of light Star Platinum had left behind hadn’t dissipated. They had been absorbed. Kakyoin flexed his fingers, watching the light crackle from his fingertips to his shoulders with something like wonder.

The light formed arms with a familiar shape and weight, pulsing with a bloodlust that combined with his own. He curled his hands into fists and Star Platinum’s arms moved with him, connected to Kakyoin’s body at the shoulder.

Just let me take him too.

Somehow he had expected the skull to be thicker. It crumpled in like eggshell, spraying blood into Kakyoin’s face, his clothes, in the air. Only the arms he had crushed Dio’s head with remained unstained.

He kept hitting, long after time began to move again. And hitting. And hitting, and hitting, until there was nothing left of that head, nothing left to mock or speak, remind him of what he had done, what had been done because of him. He wielded that strength mercilessly, knowing it did not belong to him, knowing it never would.

Only when what was left of Dio’s head was splattered across the intersection did Kakyoin finally release the extra arms to call back Hierophant. Only then did he see what had stopped Dio’s movement long enough for him to gain the advantage.

At first it was difficult to gauge the shape; Kakyoin could only see the sharp spikes emerging from various places around his torso. Once he had pulled the body apart, flinging the pieces as far as possible while still ensuring the sun would reach them, the jewel clattered to the ground: a star-shaped emerald that had torn Dio’s heart into ribbons from the inside out.

Kakyoin stared at the star for a long moment, holding it gingerly as though he feared it might shatter at his touch. He sat carefully on the road divider, a piece of concrete clutched in each of Hierophant’s eight accessible limbs, and he waited for the head to regenerate.

By the time dawn reached Cairo, all eight pieces had been smashed into the spot where Dio’s head fell. Kakyoin stood on cracked concrete, watching bone and tissue dissolve into ash at the touch of a sunrise as bloody as the street. He stayed there until he was certain every shred of the body was dust, then turned on his heel and started for the water tower. Later that morning they were found there: two bodies, and one heartbeat.

but after you were gone there was still some stardust on my sleeve

“You…”

The wind by the beach had grown cold, insistently whipping at their hair and clothes. Jotaro ignored it.

“You stopped time?”

Kakyoin shook his head vehemently. “No.”

“You said time stopped.”

“It did.”

“So you—”

“I didn’t stop it,” he said. “It stopped…for me. I don’t know what I—I didn’t do it myself. I certainly never did it again.”

Jotaro watched him closely. “And the rest of it?”

Kakyoin hesitated, and for a moment it seemed as though he might not answer at all. When he did at last raise his arm, holding it palm up for Jotaro to see, a perfect copy of Star Platinum’s right arm unfolded from his shoulder to rest above it, carved out of translucent white light. He flexed his hand and Star’s arm moved with him. Jotaro stared, stunned into silence.

“I don’t…” He cleared his throat. “I don’t really use them. Not unless I—you know, sometimes there isn’t another choice, but it…it just feels like digging up your grave. Every time.”

Jotaro closed his eyes. His teeth were on edge for a week when he first used Star to stop time after Cairo. He still felt strange calling it his own, rather than the World’s, and even ten years later he refused point blank to use it in front of Kakyoin. “I know what you mean.”

Kakyoin paused. “That’s…not all.”

At first Jotaro barely even recognized that it as the same stand, thinking it was just another strange element of the dream, something one of them had coughed up just beneath the surface. He eyed it curiously as it curled around Kakyoin, staring back at him with lidless, unblinking eyes.

“Oh,” he breathed.

Kakyoin nodded, avoiding his eyes.

Jotaro stood, squinting slightly against the harsh sea air and the pale glare of the rising sun. It had breached the horizon as Kakyoin spoke tonelessly, telling the story of Dio’s other death with blank eyes. Kakyoin recognized the look of it, knowing from experience that dreams would pull themselves from memories whether he wanted them to or not. It was a sunrise he thought of far more frequently than he would like.

Hierophant rose with him, unwinding itself from Kakyoin’s body. It tilted its head, drifting closer by inches. It almost seemed afraid. Although, Jotaro realized, for the stand it had been a while since they had seen each other.

“How long…?”

“A few years after you—after Cairo.” He glanced up. “It took about ten months for it to get…like this.”

So accustomed to looking for green, Jotaro hadn’t registered the shape of the stand at all. It had retained its original form, but white and jade were replaced entirely by gold and a deeply familiar pale violet. He started to reach for it; caught himself, pulled his hand back.

“I guess you’d need a new name,” Jotaro whispered.

Kakyoin smiled bitterly. “I just call it Hierophant,” he said. “Or Hierophant Green, still, if I want to fuck with people.”

Jotaro snorted in quiet disbelief. A soft radiance melted through from somewhere beneath Hierophant's skin, as though it had swallowed a star and could never get all that light out. The pale yellow glow that surrounded both Kakyoin and his stand was unmistakable, though Jotaro knew it as his own, as Star Platinum’s.

“The emerald star,” Kakyoin continued, getting to his feet with careful disinterest. “That’s the only one I still use. It’s decent at close range but I can’t really—I’ve never hit the heart dead-on like I did with D—”

“All this time you’ve carried me.”

Kakyoin froze mid-breath. Hierophant dissipated as he stared at Jotaro with an expression more suited for suddenly recognizing him as a threat.

“You have,” Jotaro said, and it sounded more like an accusation. “Haven’t you?”

Kakyoin allowed himself to exhale. “Where,” he muttered, teeth gritted, “where, exactly, do you imagine I would find a place to put you down?”

“It’s heavy,” Jotaro murmured. “Isn’t it?”

Kakyoin stared at the ground, watching the long grass blow in the wind. It really did look like bone, he thought.

“I’ve learned to cast your shadow very well, Jotaro.” He willed the burning at the back of his throat to stay down. “The light that casts it…that’s what’s left of you. I don’t know what happens if I step out of it.”

His eyes snapped open when he felt Jotaro’s hand on his arm.

“Look at me.”

Kakyoin shook his head. “I can’t. I can’t.”

“I know you can.”

He had always found the color of Jotaro’s eyes impossible to describe while he was alive. A memory could be flattened, compressed into a word. Looking at him now, Kakyoin knew he would never be able to do it right in his absence. He knew he never wanted to try.

“Even now,” Jotaro said slowly, “even now, even where I am, you carry so much of it. Of me. I don’t…I don’t think that part of me would leave you. I don’t think it can. Even if I were gone. Even when I am.”

His eyes rested on Kakyoin’s hands, his forearms. “Light like that burns from the inside out. It takes everything you have not to be consumed by it.”

“How?”

Jotaro lifted both his hands and held them by the wrist, palms up, until Kakyoin relented and uncurled the fists. Together they looked at the ragged scars left behind by the Cairo streets, wounds he had never been able to stomach stitching shut. He swallowed.

“You can’t feed that fire with pieces of yourself,” Jotaro said quietly. “You have to find me somewhere else.”

“Where?”

Kakyoin yanked his hands back angrily and turned away.

“Where?” he repeated, feeling, for some reason, on the verge of laughter. Pathetic. “I don’t know where to—where could I ever find you again?”

Jotaro paused. He shrugged. “I would have left it with you for a reason.”

“Left it?”

“Well, yeah.” He smiled slightly. “Who else would know how to use it?”

For a moment Kakyoin stood frozen, unable to speak. Their sun turned the sky the color of roses, though it wasn’t quite bright enough to drown out the stars.

“I’m glad you’re happy, wherever you are.”

“I’m learning how to be.” Jotaro looked up at the sun, the clouds. The wind had, at last, died down. “You’re the one who taught me to believe in that.”

“And do you?”

“Believe?”

Kakyoin nodded.

“I try to,” Jotaro said.

Something pulled tight in Kakyoin’s chest, a feeling he hadn’t needed to get free from in over a decade. He looked back at Jotaro from a distance he never had the chance to learn how to cross. He had wanted to reach him. He had wanted so badly to reach him.

I miss you.

“Don’t go.”

It came out choked, the burning in his throat finally making good on the threat. Jotaro stared at him, taken aback.

Kakyoin grimaced. “I don’t…want you to leave again.”

He stiffened in surprise when Jotaro pulled him in. There was a distant familiarity to being in his arms, as though he were remembering someone else’s memories. His warmth reminded Kakyoin of a different time, equally hopeless attempts to hold on to him, although he tried still in spite of it, as he always had.

“I never did,” Jotaro said, resting his chin on the top of Kakyoin’s head. “I never will. Wherever I am, wherever you are, I—you couldn’t get rid of me even if you tried, understand?”

He closed his eyes. “Jotaro?”

“Yeah?”

“You…you knew I loved you, right?”

Jotaro pulled away slightly to look down at him. It had been a long time since he heard Kakyoin’s voice shake.

“I never got to say.”

He smiled and nodded slowly. “It’s always you, in the end.”

Kakyoin’s tears wouldn’t fall. They never did.

“Cineri gloria seria est,” he murmured. He reached up to rest his fingertips lightly on the side of Jotaro’s face, trying to memorize the shape.

“Glory paid to ashes comes too late.”

the flame of it may dwindle to an ember and the stars forget to shine

Jotaro stared at the bedroom wall, waiting for his heart to slow. Again. He shook his head hard, trying to dislodge old visions of bursting water towers and bloodied school uniforms. Familiar scenes of violence. Nothing new.

He leaned his head on his forearms, watching condensation grow thicker on the door to the porch. Through the clouded glass Kakyoin’s red hair was just bright enough to be visible; he had paused with his sketchbook lowered, hand halfway to the mug of coffee on the table beside him. He raised his eyebrows upon meeting Jotaro’s eyes.

Jotaro waved a hand dismissively as he reluctantly left the warmth of their bed. If he had jerked awake abruptly enough to worry him, that was Kakyoin’s issue for being so inconveniently attuned to it all.

Still, it was almost nice to have someone so vehemently committed to their concern for his well-being. Generally he wouldn’t consider giving anyone the opportunity, but Kakyoin hadn’t exactly left him a choice.

He had, however, left hot coffee on the kitchen counter, so Jotaro figured he could forgive him for being insufferable. At least for the morning.

“Watch out,” he mumbled, sliding the porch door open. Kakyoin leaned out of the way in practiced avoidance of Jotaro’s large frame, and produced a small, warm smile before silently turning back to his sketchbook.

For a short while they sat without saying a word, as they often did when it was early and cold. Jotaro watched Kakyoin’s breath fog up the air, catching dawn’s last rays as the sun finally broke free from the horizon. Sometimes he remarked on Jotaro’s fascination with watching him breathe, but he never teased about it. More than once he had caught Kakyoin watching his chest rise and fall when he thought Jotaro was asleep.

He curled over his pad and paper with a blanket over his shoulders, frowning slightly in concentration. Jotaro shuddered, remembering the same frown on a different face. Kakyoin glanced in the direction of the movement but did not raise his head.

Usually, in his dreams, it was Kakyoin who was dead. Strange to imagine it might have gone the other way, although the way it was explained to him on the cliffs had been frighteningly plausible. When Jotaro thought about it, if he had been there, if he had realized he could move…if protecting him had been an option…

Any of number of ways they could have lost each other. Any number of ways they should have lost each other. Maybe ways they did, in another life. Jotaro cleared his throat and Kakyoin leaned back, looking at him curiously.

“Remember last week?”

Kakyoin placed his drawing pad face down on his lap. “I remember parts of last week.”

“I mean when we talked about—when you asked me about you being the one who lived.”

He paused for a long time. When Jotaro looked over at him, he stared straight ahead, his hand balled into a fist around the pencil he still held.

“I have not forgotten that, no,” Kakyoin said evenly.

“Had a weird dream last night.”

The old wood creaked as he shifted in his chair, eyeing Jotaro with brighter conviction now. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Yes. No. I mean—” He groaned, dropped his face into his hands. “I want to,” he muttered through them. “I don’t think I can.”

Kakyoin nodded, unsurprised. “Do you want to try?”

“It was you,” Jotaro said. Kakyoin looked him steadily in the eyes when he lifted his head and he thought of the other, visibly struggling to meet them. As though he were ashamed. “It was…another life…but you. It was you all the same. Honestly, I—I think that’s what made it so…made it worse.”

“Worse?”

“Well, he was…” He studied the alternate set of scars lacing the surface of Kakyoin’s hands. “He was the one who lived.”

A long moment later Kakyoin exhaled heavily and Jotaro realized he had been holding his breath.

“…I see,” he murmured, so quietly that were it to anyone else he might as well have said nothing at all.

“He was so…” Jotaro rubbed at his eyes. “He was…weighed down by it. By what happened to me, I…could see it crushing him. And he was…”

Kakyoin reached for his hand and gripped it tightly. His fingers were cold, even for him. During any other conversation Jotaro might have accused him of expressing what looked like affection for the ulterior motive of hijacking his body heat, but this time it felt more like offering him something he knew how to hold on to.

“I don’t ever want you to be alone like that,” he said fiercely, watching Kakyoin’s eyes as he would watch the sky for signs of a coming storm.

Kakyoin looked away, watching a solitary sparrow hop across the far end of the yard. His expression betrayed nothing but a dark certainty that Jotaro had seen many times before, ever since he first slid through the infirmary window making death threats with a smile on his face.

“I would do anything to keep you alive,” he said, still staring straight ahead. “Don’t you ever ask me to put limits on that.”

Jotaro’s stomach turned. For an instant there was no difference between the man he had dreamed of and the man sitting at his side apart from that single shifted verb tense. I would have done anything to keep you alive.

He wanted to tell him no. He wanted to say it wasn’t Kakyoin’s decision, that he’d done enough, that he’d done more than Jotaro had ever asked him to, more than he ever would. Kakyoin tilted his face back mulishly, daring him to argue.

Across the grass, a second sparrow joined the first.

If Kakyoin were the kind of person whose mind he could change about this he wouldn’t be the person who had been able to find Jotaro over and over and over again. He had told him not to do anything more, that it wasn’t his decision. And Kakyoin laughed in his face, he stayed all the same. Every time, he stayed.

He had once told Jotaro you’re the kind of person who only ever stays until you remember you know how to leave.

And what does that tell you?

I’ll learn how to find you. I’ll find you every time.

He inclined his head towards the pad of paper still lying in Kakyoin’s lap. “What are you working on?”

Kakyoin blinked, taken aback by the sudden evaporation of what had appeared to be a sharp retort. He looked down at it thoughtfully, considering whether or not answering the question was a good idea. It was a bad idea, he decided, and he flipped it over, tilting the paper for Jotaro to see.

“Is that…”

Jotaro trailed off, eyes widening. He saw a light sketch of himself in profile, looking up as if at the sky, or some other distant light. It was Jotaro, but something familiar was off about the eyes, the tired angles of his mouth. The shadows of frown lines where he saw the beginnings of laugh lines on his own face. A sadness he remembered, despite having never felt it.

“I had a strange dream too,” Kakyoin said.

and we may see the meadow in December icy white and crystalline

Two young women sat at the edge of a rotting boardwalk, bare legs dangling over the ocean in hopes of catching the salty water on their skin. Jade green waves crashed against the dock beneath a sky that threatened lightning, hard enough that each girl had independently wondered whether it might collapse.

The woman on the left had a star-shaped birthmark and a permanent scowl, half-dyed hair in two buns and a braid. The woman on the right had bleached her entire head nearly white, though the roots implied it had once been dark. She wore her own hair long, hiding most of her face behind it.

“I like your hair,” she said. Her voice was low and smooth.

“Thanks.” The girl with the birthmark looked at her curiously. “How’d you keep yours so soft looking?”

“Soft?”

“Like, because it’s bleached, right?” She untied her braid, shook it out. “Mine gets all wiry.”

“Oh.” The white-haired girl thought for a moment. “You gotta get that conditioner you can leave in there. Helps a lot.”

“Cool. Maybe I’ll remember.”

They leaned back, watching a thick layer of storm clouds roll in.

“You have a name?”

The girl with the birthmark shrugged. Weird dream, but it didn’t matter, in the end. Might be a little silly but nothing bad ever came from telling the truth in a dream.

“Jolyne Kujo,” she said. “You?”

Her companion froze for a beat. She laughed. “Kakyoin Jolene.”

“No way.”

Jolene held up her hands in surrender. “Swear.”

“Like the song?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Jolyne said. She grinned. “We got that one difference, then.”

Jolene raised her eyebrows. “Which is?”

“Mine’s spelled with a Y.”

“Weird.” She paused. “No one calls me Jolene except my dad anyway. Most people just call me Jo. It’s fine.”

Jolyne chuckled. “My mom’s the only one who doesn’t call me Jolyne.”

“Don’t have one of those.”

“Oh, god.” She covered her mouth with one hand. “Oh, I’m—”

“No, no, no.” Jo waved her away. “Not like that. Adopted.”

She pushed her hair away from her face to get a better look at Jolyne, revealing dark almond-shaped eyes and a spray of freckles. She remembered parts of herself from her waking life, the parts that this dream fit into like puzzle pieces. Her expression grew curious. Both women opened their mouths to speak at the same time.

“You said Kujo—”

“You said Kakyoin—”

They stared at one another, not without mutual suspicion.

“You first,” Jo said quietly.

Jolyne narrowed her eyes, and Jo thought she had never seen such a clear green before. “You said Kakyoin,” she repeated. “Is that your name?”

“Family name.”

“Can you…what’s your dad’s name?”

Jo blinked. “Kakyoin Noriaki.”

“See, I didn’t even know I remembered that.” She shook her head in disbelief. “This is a weird fucking dream.”

“Remembered what?”

“Name of my dad’s dead best friend.”

Jo snorted. “No fucking way.”

“Why?”

“What’s your dad’s name?”

“Kujo Jotaro.”

She laughed again. “That’s my dad’s dead best friend.”

Jolyne fell back on the wood, ignoring the ominous creaking. “See? Weird dream.” She sighed. “Not like I’m in any hurry to wake up, so, whatever, though.”

Jo laid on her back beside her, more carefully such as to avoid splinters. Second nature, though she knew in the back of her mind that it wouldn’t make a difference, in a dream. “Oh, yeah?”

“I mean, I’m…” Jolyne groaned. “I’m in prison right now, actually.”

“Oh.” Jo fell silent, watching the dark silhouette of the hand she held up against the sky. Even full of thunder, these clouds were bright. “That’s…me too.”

Jolyne lurched into a sitting position. “You serious?”

“I could be lying.” Jo propped herself up on her elbows. “Whether or not I am, it’s kind of moot, right?”

“Moot.” Jolyne rolled her eyes. “You sound like my dad.”

Jo brushed her hair out of her face again, wishing she had thought to put on a hair tie before she went to sleep. Did she have a hair tie with her? Did the prison allow that? She couldn’t remember. She looked back at Jolyne and stifled a gasp.

“Is that your…” She swallowed. “You have a stand?”

“Stand?” Jolyne tilted her head. “Um…”

Jo pointed at the pale blue shape half-manifested over her shoulder. “That.”

“Oh. Is that what it’s called?” Jolyne allowed her stand to wrap its arms around her shoulders. It seemed to look straight at Jo, and she had only seen her father’s Hierophant a handful of times, but it was enough for those eyes to be familiar. The marks through them could easily pass for vertical scars in low light. “Yeah…I guess. I don’t know. It’s kind of a…new development.”

“What’s it called?”

Jolyne hesitated. No point in keeping secrets. “Been calling it Stone Free.”

Jo held her hand out towards Stone Free as though offering it to a cat. It stared down at it, unmoving. “How’d you learn to bring it in?”

“In?”

“To the dream.” She rolled her wrist. “I had to practice to get it right, for like…months. But my dad was pretty serious about getting me to do it. Said you might think you can let your guard down when you go to sleep, but you can’t.”

“I don’t think I did anything special. It just came with me.” Jolyne put her arm around her stand absently. “Guess it knew what to do?”

“Really.” Jo snorted. “God. I’m jealous.”

“You got one too, then?”

“Yeah.”

Jo held her hand up, and the stand took it, pulling her to her feet. Stone Free followed suit with its own user, largely due to Jolyne’s stark refusal to stay below eye level, though Jo’s considerable height made this a tricky goal. Let alone the height of her stand.

“Whoa,” Jolyne breathed.

Jo smiled, warmer than before. “This is Midnight Sun.”

“That’s funny,” she said faintly. “My dad loves that song. Only one I ever heard him sing.”

Midnight Sun was nearly six and a half feet tall, with black-gloved hands and pale green skin. The dark mane of hair seemed familiar, though Jolyne couldn’t think of where she might have seen it before. The stand rested its chin on the top of Jo’s head, armored arms draped over her shoulders, and it eyed Jolyne curiously, following her with eyes she had known all her life.

“I don’t know if this is a weird thing to say,” Jolyne murmured, “but that thing kind of reminds me of my dad.”

Jo shook her head slowly. “No,” she said, eyes on Stone Free. “I was really about to say the same thing about yours.”

The two stands watched each other silently. They said nothing, they only ever said nothing, but Midnight Sun inclined its head and Stone Free almost seemed to smile, as if to say of course it’s still you.

It’s only ever been you.

but oh my darling always I’ll remember

when your lips were close to mine

and we saw the midnight sun.

#jjba #jojos bizarre adventure #jotaro kujo #kakyoin noriaki #jotakak #im allergic totheir ship name but i dont have a choice i guess even though its not like #its not like *romance* its just love #anyways. here it is

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