#squishie's the one who has kept consistent effort in keeping touch with me outside of our triad's discord server

[themagical1sa]

ykw?

it would be incredibly funny if crushie liked me back too late

especially when i might be starting to like someone else

[frodos-bizarre-adventure]

@gingerreggg whee it still continues

Heads Up- Part 7 (Joseph x Bust!Caesar)

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"You sure this is the right place?" Joseph asked Suzi as they toured the art supplies section of the local shopping center.

"Sure! Loggins and Messina are Professor Lisa's main suppliers of art materials! They also offer them wholesale for cheap prices. We're gonna need it..." she whimpered, eyeing her wallet sadly.

"Professor Lisa?" Joseph asked. "As in...Elizabeth Joestar?"

"Oh, you know her?" Suzi exclaimed.

"She's my mom, I didn't know you were a student of hers..." Joseph sighed, Suzi apparently not having made the connection with the Joestar surname. Having his mother be a renowned professor in the field of visual arts was quite a burden on Joseph. He wasn't especially close to her, and the few memories they had together were of her being strict and of high expectations. She was distant both physically and emotionally, yet the weight of her achievements rested heavily on Joseph's shoulders.

He was glad to have a little apartment to himself once he turned 18. A small place he could call his own, and have a little freedom to express himself.

Though as of the moment, it was no longer a home solely his.

"I wonder how Caesar's doing back home, alone." Joseph whispered to Suzi.

"Oh, relax," she laughed, as she felt the types of clay on exhibit trying to find one matching Caesar's consistency and texture. "I made sure the door's locked and he has stuff to keep occupied, he'll be perfectly safe."

--------

Caesar cautiously thumped his way across the house. It was the first time the clay bust had been left home alone since the day he came to life, and he felt uneasy.

He'd promised Suzi and Joseph he wouldn't cause any more trouble after last night's fiasco. Still, Suzi felt it was better off to be safe than sorry, and spent the early morning Caesar-proofing the house. She removed any platforms low enough for Caesar to jump up on-- she'd measured his highest jumps at five inches-- to keep him from trying to climb up dangerous places, and she'd also put bubble wrap on hard objects such as table legs and sharp corners in case of him bumping into things.

Caesar frowned. He felt he was being infantilized, treated like a baby. He chuckled snarkily to himself in hindsight, given that he was after all only a week old, and whether that would classify him as a baby, even with a grown man's mind and personality.

And besides, as much as he detested admitting it, he knew what Joseph said the previous night was true. He indeed was just a helpless, limbless chunk of clay. He could only bounce his heavy, squishy torso slowly across the floor with much exertion, and hardly anything more. Who knows what could happen if he'd found himself alone outside?

Yet he still felt a sense of yearning for the great forbidden outdoors, as he looked dreamily out the window. He wondered how far he could possibly go. He'd managed to make it to Joseph's lawn last night, and couldn't think how much further he could have gotten if Joseph hadn't caught up with him. Hopping on his neck was slow and hard, sure, but if there was one upside to being made of clay, it was that he never felt tired or sore from moving the way he did, and briefly contemplated if he could have explored a good distance in his new world hadn't it been for Joseph's advantage of legs.

But each little squeak of his varnished torso with each hop reminded him of Joseph's painstaking effort he took the previous evening to repair him. How he'd gone out of his way to make sure Caesar wasn't in pain, and was always in tip-top condition. How he'd shown him genuine friendship even if the artist was silly and exasperating at times. Hell, the very fact that he'd kept Caesar at all instead of disposing of him or destroying him out of fear was already something the stubby clay being was already very grateful for, and he felt that, after all he'd done for him, it was better off not giving poor Joseph any further heartache.

He turned his eyes toward the books and art supplies that Suzi left behind for him on the living room floor. Perhaps there was a better use of his time than getting himself into trouble.

------

"This much for a dollar?" Suzi cheered with glee. "Sure, we'll take it!"

"How much clay do we need?" asked Joseph, lugging several other blocks in a heavy basket. Suzi had insisted on different types of clay closest to the kind that Joseph had made Caesar from, to test which one would suit him the best.

"Not enough to make a whole body, of course!" she giggled. "At least not yet."

"So do we like, start by giving him an arm? Or some pecs?" Joseph giggled mischievously, imagining the possibilities.

"We'll get there bit by bit," Suzi reassured. "Soon he'll be a complete person!"

"I hope so," mumbled Joseph doubtfully. "I hope we complete him in time for me to graduate..." Joseph scratched his head.

"Well, I think we better get going home now." Suzi said, double-checking the supplies to make sure they had all they needed. "I'm sure Caesar's been waiting."

------

"Hey, Cae," Joseph announced as he entered the house. "Sorry we took so long."

There was no familiar greeting thumps this time, however, so Joseph went to the living room to investigate.

And then his jaw dropped.

Caesar, during their absence, was painting.

He'd found Joseph's art box, the same one he'd meddled with on the first morning, and, using one of Suzi's paper sheets on her clipboard as a canvas, was using a watercolor palette. Joseph watched in amazement as Caesar, dexterously gripping the paintbrush in his lips, dipped the brush into the paint, and with a coordinated rotation of his head and a flexing of his mouth, he streaked the brush across the paper, forming a line of color on the sheet.

The painting itself wasn't much: it was little more than an abstract mess of different, haphazard streaks of color looking like a cross between a kindergartener's doodle and a Jackson Pollock painting. But the fact that it was made by someone without limbs and only a few days old was a tremendous achievement in itself, and Joseph couldn't hold back a tear of joy.

Caesar was so preoccupied with stroking the brush, that he scarcely noticed Joseph entering the room until Joseph called his name. Caesar flinched in surprise, dropping the brush as his mouth popped open in shock.

"Joseph! I-I didn't know you were here! I'm sorry," he said apologetically, making a few hops on the floor to turn himself to face Joseph. "I was just bored and wanted something to do, I hope you don't mind."

Joseph gestured to the painting with great amazement. "I didn't know you had such a talent for art!"

Caesar looked up at Joseph and grinned.

"I am art," Caesar said proudly, trying to stand as tall as he could, which was just a bit more than Joseph's knee-height.

"How did you do it?" Joseph asked.

"A lot of patience, a lot of persistence and a lot of bouncing," Caesar replied with a chuckle. Joseph couldn't help but notice, as Caesar smiled, that his nose had flattened slightly and his front teeth were slightly crooked, likely from their unintended use as substitutes for fingers.

"You've done a wonderful job, but I think you overdid yourself," Joseph said, gently lifting up Caesar off the ground. "You need just a little bit of fixing," Joseph said, imagining the struggle of Caesar having to use his nose and teeth to move things around.

It was hard being just a head.

-----

"Okay, this won't hurt a bit," Joseph said, as he gently squeezed Caesar's soft clay nose back into shape.

"Ah, that's better," the bust replied, as he sat once more on his birthplace: Joseph's working table. "I couln't help but squish my nose a bit to push that art box of yours along."

A wide grin crept across Joseph's face.

"Well, the good news is that you won't have to do that anymore!" he said, gesturing to a large block of clay on the opposite end of the table, still wrapped in a thin layer of plastic.

Intrigued, Caesar carefully bounced closer. "What-- what's this? What does this mean?" he asked, perplexed.

Suzi followed into the room with a huge smile, carrying another clay block.

"We're making you a body, Caesar!"

Caesar's eyes grew wide with surprise. "Could...could you really do that?"

Joseph shrugged. "I don't know, but I think it's worth a try!"

"We're gonna experiment a bit on how to pull this off," Suzi said, peeling off the plastic covering of the clay block. "We guessed we'd build on you bit by bit so you gradually get used to having more of a body."

"Gee, I never thought," Caesar said, gratefully. "Let's do this."

-----

The two artists began with a stub of a right arm, all the way up to an elbow. Perching Caesar onto the workbench, they began to outfit him with the stump, using Suzi's anatomy reference guide to scale and sculpt the limb.

"I wished I had that book sooner," Joseph laughed, as he smoothened Caesar's newly attached arm nub. "Then I wouldn't have settled for making only a bust."

Soon the stubby appendage was tacked on, and Joseph began to paint. He stroked and blended with the same amount of dedication he'd given Caesar's head, shaping it as to merge with Caesar's shoulder seamlessly, texturing it perfectly as to look almost like human skin, until at last, painted and sculpted, it looked perfect, like a natural outgrowth of Caesar's rudimentary body.

"Go on," Joseph said encouragingly. "Try to move it."

Caesar strained and struggled to do just that, staring at the new limb intently, with determination, but the elbow-length stub refused to budge. Not even a wiggle or a twitch, no matter how hard Caesar tried, the arm stub remained a motionless deadweight.

Caesar looked at Joseph, clearly worried.

"Jojo...I can't."

Joseph felt a sinking unease. He reached out to touch Caesar's skin. His head and neck felt oddly warm like always, warm like a living person's skin despite being textured, and having a consistency, like clay. But there was a sharp divide where the new arm met his torso-- beyond that line, the clay of the arm felt cold and lifeless to the touch. It felt dead.

"Something's wrong," Joseph said. Suzi came over for a closer look.

Pulling out a pin from a box of supplies, she sharply poked the arm stub. "Feel anything?"

"Nope," Caesar sighed.

"How about this?" she asked, poking a bit higher.

"Still nothing."

Suzi poked the arm higher and higher, but Caesar felt nothing. But after several pokes, she reached the line where the warm, living clay met the useless stump.

"Ouch!" Caesar cried as Suzi jabbed him finally at a spot he could feel.

Suzi shook her head. "Maybe it's because it's incomplete? Should we try finishing a complete arm and hand?"

"I'm not really sure how sentient clay bust anatomy works," sighed Joseph, "but I suppose it's worth a try. After all, Caesar only came alive once I completed his head."

Caesar shuddered at the prospect of coming alive before his head was completed, but sighed in relief that he only did animate once it was.

"Just hold on for a while, alright Cae?" Joseph said in an attempt to reassure the anxious bust. "Hopefully you'll soon have a body."

Joseph sat down and ruffled his brown messy hair in frustration.

This, as it turned out, was a lot more complicated than it had first seemed.

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