starmark | IC Inbox | prismatica

I don't-

[ He doesn't want to say it. He can't say it. It's cruel to make him say it. His mouth presses thin and wide before it splits open like a fruit full of teeth in that way it always does when he's about to complain but the next sound isn't his voice.

It's a crack. High, almost melodic. He flinches, knocking the complaint out of him and making him coil more tightly around Jotaro. Crystal glass ringing with impact, echoing just slightly until the noise fades.

Where did Polnareff say that Avdol was?

(He didn't. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to, because Polnareff's silence is a language that only has the words for one answer.)

(Mr. Joestar has a fucking brick of a telephone that hasn't worked anywhere outside of the very centre of major cities. But they're in a major city, now. They're in an area affluent enough that people just have the signal that the phone uses as a luxury, so that they can show off their wealth. It works. It works and Polnareff is on the other end of it, speaking with the doctor who treated his own eyes. Va te faire cuire un oeuf, he doesn't have time for emergency treatment. He's just here because someone had to carry Avdol. He has to go back.) ]

-You have an altar for him.

[ He says, which isn't the same as saying that he's dead. He doesn't have an answer, not from that night. ]

Hey. Shhhh, hey.

[It's instinct, the way his hand moves to Kakyoin's hair, petting slowly through it with as much soothing care as he can muster. He could make this easy, he knows sadly. He could make this so easy, he could snap and it would be done and no one would ever know the difference, but if he does that, then how is he any different than any other would-be god shaping the world according to his own will?

He's not. He's something, sure, but he's not a god. He didn't remake the world to his own preference. He just — fixed it, is all. The surface tension is still there. He just tilted the glass.

That's why Kakyoin has to do this on his own, however much it hurts. Because it can't be him. It can't be him doing it, or it's all wrong.]

Yeah. I know.

[The altar is still there. He hasn't looked yet, to see whether it's changed or not. Maybe it won't. There's still plenty to mourn about that night, either way.]

He put Iggy in the curtain, right? Like a backpack. So he could carry them both at once. Like Galahad. "His strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure."

He-

[ There was a curtain drawn, keeping light from entering the hallway.

There was a curtain missing, and he had to stuff the mouthy little vampire into a sack to keep him from the sunlight.

Both of those things are true. He remembers both. He remembers neither in perfect detail. ]

-he wanted to keep the curtain, but the hospital threw it in the biological waste. With my uniform. They threw away my uniform.

[ He asks for his uniform back, because of course he does. They don't have it anymore. They had to throw it away, because it was ruined and covered with blood and viscera and the mostly-digested contents of a late breakfast and

and he asks for it back, some time after it's ruined and stripped from him and sent away for incineration.

That can't be right. He can't have asked for it back. Someone must have collected his things and found it missing. His parents, maybe. Or Jotaro and Mr. Joestar.

(They have to take out his earrings so that nothing gets caught on them. Jotaro takes them for safekeeping. Someone has to, or they'll get lost in all the transfers between wards and surgeries. Jotaro has them.

Is that why he's wearing studs? Should he ask for them back?) ]

-when did you tell me that they threw away my uniform?

After you woke up.

[His voice is soft, so very soft, and thick with an emotion that's deeper and sadder than just relief — because he remembers, of course, the other half of the fast-flipping coin, the side where he never told Kakyoin anything because there was no Kakyoin left to tell.

He could make it, he knows, so that he forgot too. So that it really was like it never happened, and no one would know any different.

But he won't. It's his job to remember. That's his responsibility, as the one who survived in both timelines.]

Your throat hurt from the tube they put down it. I was holding Hierophant's hand.

[He laughs weakly, and it wobbles.]

You wouldn't put him away. You kept him out the whole time. Out of spite, I told Polnareff. Remember...? He was trying to get me to go take a nap.

[ The crack rings out again. It isn't painless. But it's sharp, at least. Over quickly. Not like the tube. Not like Star's large, precise hands pinching closed arteries to keep him from bleeding out.

(Short-range, except when he needs to not be. Except when he's not acting on Jotaro's explicit instruction but instead upon something else. Except when he fetches things like comic books and cans of beer and boys snatched out of the air before what remains of their bodies break beyond repair against the skyline of Cairo) ]

Everyone was trying to get you to take a nap. I heard you talking to your grandmother, you know. People were trying to get you to take a nap in at least two different countries and four different languages.

[ Somehow, that's what sparks recognition. Jotaro refusing to take a damn nap. And he still remembers water. Still remembers twisted metal wrapping around him like a mockery of an embrace, still remembers thinking that the torn sheet metal carrying his weight was the most loving way he'd ever been held.

But only vaguely. Because he remembers flying backward but into Star's arms. He remembers slapping his hand desperately against Jotaro's watch because his breath was coming too jagged and red to speak. He remembers masks and tubes and concerned mumbling that seemed so far away that it couldn't possibly be about him and waking up every few hours to announce that it stops time. ]

What- did you need to tell me?

[ Somehow it doesn't seem obvious. Jotaro's just told him to make a list of things that happened. ]

I never did replace that watch.

[He brings his hand away from Kakyoin's hair, just long enough to put it between them and twist so that his sleeve rolls up — and there sits his Tag Heuer, its face shattered, stopped forever at 5:15. The casualty of that night in Cairo that Noriaki Kakyoin wasn't.

Before he can think better of it, he leans in close, lightly bumping his forehead against Kakyoin's from a pervasive need to be near him, while the truth and the sadness and the secrets come pouring out of him like water escaping from a broken tower.]

It's okay, if you don't understand why I need to tell you. Don't let it drive you crazy.

[He nudges back, just a fraction, and presses a kiss to Kakyoin's cheek, high on the apple of it near the scars still bitten into his skin.]

"I fixed it." That's what I needed to say. Everything else...can wait for later. We've got all the time in the world.

[ Noriaki Kakyoin likes things that he understands. He likes answers. Proof. He likes secret alters that he shouldn't know about and broken watches. Pieces of evidence. Things he can use. Truth-finding tools.

An altar to living people. A broken watch. Two answers to the same question. Two tools, each perfectly calibrated to lead to a different truth. ]

You know perfectly well that it's going to drive me crazy, Jotaro Kujo.

[ He is grumbling about not understanding. And he is alive. And maybe he is dead. But he isn't the horrible in-between thing that he had been for seventeen years before he met Jotaro. And it's hard to maintain grumbling when he's so easily mollified with closeness and delicate little kisses. ]

I wouldn't let you get away with it if I didn't love you, you know.

You love it when I drive you crazy. That's why I do it so often.

[If he were bolder, braver, he'd reach down and rest his hand against the place that he remembers, the hard green crystal jutting out from Kakyoin's belly with all his organs swimming around in it. Maybe it won't be there anymore, if he reaches for it. Maybe it still is, and it's just filling in different wounds that ran a terribly close call but still proved not to be fatal.

He didn't shape the world into an ideal. He didn't craft it to some whim or desire. He just — adjusted, here and there, little things to wipe away the horrible injustices of a too-cruel world.

No one got out of that night unscathed. But they all got out alive.]

Star's the one you should be thanking. Make sure you give him a kiss, too.

[He pauses, though, as that thought reminds him again of their separation, and at length he takes a tentative step toward bridging more of what might have happened while he was gone.]

Did — how bad...was it, while I was gone...?

Do I really need to tell you that we missed you?

[ He does, of course. He wants to say it, if nothing else. Not because it's important, just because he wants to be saying things to Jotaro at all possible times and it's a thing that he can say. He missed him. Something took him away and anything that wasn't immediately following felt like swimming through ice water. But he swam. He swam and he clung to Adrian and pulled his head above water.

(It's the cold that kills you, not the drowning.) ]

The Moon Knights are unhappy about everything. They've come to ask questions a few times, but they haven't come up with anything solid enough to act on yet. I- might have gagged him once or twice to keep him from confessing.

[ Might have. Because Adrian is a self-destructive mess who actually possesses a conscience and what use would they be if Jotaro needed them and he was in moon-jail. The admission jostles something free in his broken-glass insides. He holds tighter. Hides his face in Jotaro's neck. ]

He's been a mess. I wasn't expecting- I didn't think it'd be quite that bad. I told him- told him that you'd need him awake. Awake and well and not locked away and-

[ He trails off. And he doesn't know what he'd have been able to do if he didn't have that to say. ]

-we would have found you. That's how I know. Because we'd have found you or he'd have destroyed himself trying, and I wasn't letting him do that.

I asked because...I know he didn't just miss me.

[That was always the nightmare scenario, wasn't it? That Adrian would love him more and harder than he'd ever loved anyone before, and then something would happen, and it would be history repeating itself all over again. Like father, like son. Grief enough to raze a world in fire and blood — or just enough to seal himself up in a tiny dark box and wait the eternity it would take to die.

But he had Kakyoin. This time he had Kakyoin. And maybe it wasn't even enough, but —

But it was more than it could have been. Someone still there. Just like back in the beginning, holding his hand and keeping him awake and trying to remind him of a reason, any reason, to live.

Kakyoin isn't even the one who fell in love with him, and yet he stayed and kept Adrian's head above water. Not as a favor, not out of obligation, but...because. Just because. So that they'd both be there when he found his way home to them again.]

...Remember a while back, that time when we all changed our stuff around by mistake. You had Star and he had Hierophant and I was a vampire for a while. Remember...?

I remember. You thought it was going to fuck me up, that you were a vampire.

[ He says it like the idea is laughable. Like he hadn’t spent the week prior being fucked up by every little thing. It seems more distant, now. He remembers the taste of bile, having to sprint to the bathroom not long after arriving, but not what it could possibly have been about. A stomach bug, maybe. ]

And you offered some constructive criticism with regard to where I keep my blood.

Mmhm.

[He tucks in against Kakyoin, nuzzling gently against his hair for a minute or two. His hands, too, are moving lightly — touching, reminding, reaffirming. Whether that's for Kakyoin's benefit or his own, he isn't sure.]

I thought it would scare you to see me, so I tried to stay away. But you told me to come home. You said it once and I just barely managed to...resist, I guess. Then you said it again. And I came home.

[He closes his eyes, exhaling slowly like he's letting out a drag on the cigarettes he doesn't smoke anymore, but could without any health ramifications whatsoever, if he wanted.]

That's what love does to him. He can't help it. He can't...he can't stop. Even if he knows better. Even if it hurts him.

...I don't know what he's told you and what he hasn't, about...what he is. I don't know what you guys talk about when I'm not there. But — I just, what I'm trying to say is —

[...]

You did the right thing. Keeping him safe. Stopping him when he needed to be. However bad it got, whatever you had to do, if you stopped and thought — if you felt —

...You were right. Is. What I'm trying to say.

We don't really talk about it. About what he is. It pisses me off when we do, and I think that it pissing me of makes him feel like he needs to apologise for what he is or justify himself and that's the whole problem and- ugh.

[ He keeps being wrong. Grumble grumble grumble. But fine. Fine. That's not the point. The point is that something physiological inside Adrian makes him experience everything with much more intensity than anyone was prepared for. ]

I don't know the details, but I know it was hurting him. And I was scared, I suppose. That he'd do something stupid. That he'd run up to the nearest Moon Knight and demand to be locked up for that whole mess. Or that we'd go to sleep and I'd wake up and he wouldn't.

It's not- I'm not saying it was trouble, or that I mind it. I was just- It was hurting him. And there wasn't anything I could do.

Yeah, I know. I do. It's — easy to get scared. When he's like that.

[Because he remembers, of course, when Adrian disappeared. When he came back with welts in his flesh and guilt in his eyes. How he'd hidden himself and begged for space that Jotaro ached to give. How he'd blamed himself for disloyalty when he'd been the one most blameless of anyone.]

He wants someone to love him like you wanted someone to see Hierophant.

[He closes his eyes, nuzzling down into Kakyoin's hair again.]

But you kept him awake. Not just anybody could've. It wasn't just the things you did, Nori. Some of it — is because it was you doing them.

I-

[ He's not sure what level of called the fuck out he should feel right now, but it's absolutely an amount of called the fuck out that is greater than zero. Because Jotaro understanding how desperate he's always been for someone to see Hierophant makes him feel seen in a way he's not used to being seen, even by him. Because Jotaro catches on immediately that it's not just his usual fear of being powerless at play here but something else. A fear of being not just not good enough but of being entirely the wrong tool for the task. Of being unable to help Adrian because he's just the wrong thing entirely.

Jotaro's breath is in his hair, warm and soft, and the last few days melt out of him. Safe. They're safe. Adrian isn't going to do anything stupid and he's very good at lying to law enforcement and after days of it taking everything he had just to keep himself calm enough to be of any use at all to Adrian, trying to regroup enough to find Jotaro-

-they're going to be okay. The end isn't just in sight, they reached it and didn't even notice. The tension leaves him and he just hangs limply from Jotaro's neck, exhausted and boneless. ]

-I missed you. [ It feels incomplete. Not enough. Like everything for the last week has felt not enough. But harmless in its uselessness. He can say it and it doesn't matter that it doesn't come close to communicating the whole of it - that he's been terrified in ways he hasn't even been able to process for the last few days, that he's been so buried in attempting to mitigate the disaster that is Adrian that he's had no time to even start to be the disaster that is himself, that what would he do, what would he do if Jotaro didn't come back - because Jotaro already knows.

His eyes are damp against Jotaro's neck. ]

[He feels it, the wet heat of Kakyoin's unshed tears against his skin, and just like that, the composure of a boy with the power of a god shatters.

He's held it together for so long now, because he had to. Even after things changed for the better. Even after Kakyoin was dead and wasn't again, and Speedwagon showed up from the past with his charge to hunt the Corpse Parts, and jumping from this rift to the next and the next, different times, different eras, different people — he'd held it together, because he had to, because there was still work yet to be done.

Then he'd gone back over it all like a gardener with his bonsai, trimming here and there, making the slightest changes to the existing tree to make it divert where it needed to — never an upheaval, never a roundabout, but little interventions as simple as he held on a little longer, help got there in time.

And now he's here. Back in the arms of the people he loves, giving more of himself — and willingly, utterly, tenderly — to them because they need him, making sure they're all right, bringing the world back to equilibrium once again —

And Kakyoin whispers I missed you, and finally Jotaro Kujo gets the gift of being allowed to break.

His hands scrabble at Kakyoin's clothes, digging into the fabric with more desperation than before as he shifts from holding to clinging and his breath turns ragged, and maybe he ought to be loath to let anyone see him cry, but that's a problem that doesn't even come close to being on his radar right now.

His voice is thick and choked. He's crying, too, not that anyone can see it — a secret pressed against Kakyoin's hair for safekeeping.]

M-Missed you too...

[He doesn't get to break. He doesn't get to be weak. He doesn't get to be anything but the person everyone depends on, the pillar of support they all know will stand sure as stone.

Except that this time he does. Wrapped up in his living not-dead not-zombie not-gone boyfriend on a rooftop in a city in the middle of no-one-knows-where, he gets to stop and breathe and cry.

And he does.]

[ There’s an equilibrium to it. A push and a pull. Call and response. The tension leaves him and twists into Jotaro, both for the same reason. Makes him limp and boneless in a way that dead bodies never are. Makes Jotaro's breath tear its way out of him like it’s barbed. And he’s not quite crying and Jotaro’s not quite crying and really neither of them are crying because crying is a verb and a verb implies action. This isn’t action. What they’re doing is stopping. Letting themselves not be strong. Surrendering to gravity. The tears are just happening, no more a result of their actions than the fact that their feet are touching the ground.

The fact that Jotaro’s feet are touching the roof, at least.

He reaches up, because it’s Jotaro’s arms holding his weight really. His own are superfluous. His arms feel like lead hands on the end of thread-arms spun from dust and spiderwebs, but eventually he settles a hand at the back of Jotaro’s head. Strands of thick, dark hair curl around his fingers, bones hidden in long grass. ]

Let’s go inside. I only came up here to give the two of you some privacy.

Hah...thought you did it to steal my roof.

[There is nothing, he thinks absently, nothing, nothing, nothing that he could ever do or change or create with all the power that Star Platinum has at his disposal, nothing that would turn out so right as the feeling of Kakyoin's fingers threading through his curls right at this moment.]

I love you. That's the future I want. The one where I get to love you, and you love me back.

That's-

[ They don't talk about the future. Never. He knows, vaguely, that Adrian talks about it. About finding Jotaro in the future. Staying with him ever when they leave this place. He knows there's a woman in Jotaro's future, one who cares about deeply enough to bring Jolyne into the world.

For some reason, he never saw himself as being part of that. It always felt like he was only ever meant to be a transient part of Jotaro's life. Like this was impermanent. Like they were going to go home and- he doesn't know how to finish that sentence. Pretend like nothing happened, maybe. Jotaro's future was always a thing that wasn't for him. He's never pictured himself in it.

(That sound again. Glass breaking, muffled by layers of clothing. It feels like being punched in the stomach.)

His eyes are still wet. Water trickles down the side of Jotaro's neck. His voice is warm, soft, only slightly strained. ]

-it's going to be annoying, you know. All the hospital nonsense.

Yeah. And you're gonna be pissy about it the whole time, aren't you.

[He shifts his head, just slightly, and gently brings his hand back to the back of Kakyoin's head, cradling it like it's permission to stay hidden against the column of his neck.]

Well. It could be worse.

[He brushes his fingers up and down the shallow length of the nape of Kakyoin's neck, between where his hairline ends and his shoulders begin.]

Sooner or later someone's gonna have to tell your mom about me.

Fuck, she'll hate you.

[ Or maybe she won't. Maybe she'll be happy for him. He never was able to pretend well enough to keep her from worrying about his inability to connect with other people. Maybe that'll be what she sees. That, not her son being dragged off to Egypt by a delinquent. Maybe she'll be so glad that he made it home that it won't matter. ]

Maybe a little less, now you're not smoking. It's funny, she thinks that other people can be a bad influence on me. Like I'm not the bad influence just because I'm at the top of-

[ A long pause, tinged with slight horror. ]

...I've not attended school since it began again after summer. I'll be at the bottom of the class. We missed the university admissions test.

[This he says, frantically, horrified, to the person who — as it has just been established — not only loves him with every fiber of his being, but who can literally remake the universe as he sees fit, and could with one swing of his Stand's mighty fist remedy the entire issue wholesale.]

Yup.

[BUT HE'S NOT GOING TO DO THAT, BECAUSE WHY THE HELL WOULD HE]

We're totally fucked, Nori. It's the end of the line for you.

[He says, barely able to keep his laughter back.]

[ He hasn't worried about this since he came here and he's not sure why. That test was the last thing that would really hold meaning for him before he had to choose something from a list of things he's always known wouldn't make him happy. One last thing to perfect and he's fucked it up.

It stopped mattering. It stopped mattering the moment he met Jotaro, but he just hasn't been able to think about that until now. First it was secondary to Holly's survival. And then there was no sense in thinking about it because it was one more thing Dio stole from him.

So now he has to figure out how he feels about it very quickly. Because if it doesn't matter? If it doesn't matter then he's not perfect. He's not even striving for perfection. And all he's ever had to define himself outside of that is loving Jotaro Kujo.

(And loving Dio, once. And not quite loving Adrian, in the same way that he was never quite about to reach perfection. But trying to. Working his way toward loving Adrian in the same way he'd try to master any skill, through study and practice and regular testing.) ]

You're a terrible influence. She really is going to hate you. Fuck.

[ He shakes slightly, but the breath that accompanies it moves outward sharply, not inward. Laughter, not sobbing. It doesn't matter. It's stupid that it mattered in the first place. ]

But she'll be happy, I think. That I love you.

If she hates me, then we'll just go somewhere else. We can move to America. Or France, and be near Polnareff. She can hate me from half a world away, like Jiji hates my dad.

[A future. A plan for the future, for all of them, because they all have a future now. They're all going to move forward into it, together.

It startles him a little, to realize how much he really wants that. To look back on the last time he'd arrived in Lunatia and remember how empty the prospect of the future had seemed, just a bleak darkness ahead and sharp thorns behind and his whole body and soul too exhausted to want to move another inch.

Now he craves it. He wants it so bad he can taste it. He wants Kakyoin and Adrian with him. They can all be happy, he's sure of it.]

American universities won't care about entrance exams. Adrian's going to need a fake identity anyway. We'll fake all your records, too.

[These aren't even real plans; they're just dreams. Whimsy, babbled on the edge of laughter, because it finally feels okay to laugh again.]

No you will not.

[ Have any four words ever sounded as furiously grumpy but also uttely, completely adoring? Probably not. He strokes his hand through Jotaro's hair, carefully untucking his head from under his chin to look up at him. His eyes are bright and rimmed with more red than his eyelashes alone can account for, and he's doing his best to look stern instead of loving. Failing, but at something he doesn't mind so much failing at. ]

If I get accepted into anywhere it will be because I am fucking brilliant and for no other reason.

IC Inbox | prismatica

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insert disclaimer about rendering this non-canon if alba isn't on board here

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