starmark | IC Inbox | prismatica

It's important to know these kinds of things. Just in case.

[ Okay, so maybe he learned this just in case he needed to impress a classmate rather than in case he needed to escape from a vampire or drag a friend away from a stand in a mirror. But still. Just in case.

And he is kind of doing this to impress a classmate.

(That's only now starting to sink in. Soon, this will be over. He transferred schools while he was under Dio's control and maybe that's going to be an impossible commute from his parents' home but he can figure out how to make it work. Get a part-time job to rent a room somewhere in the city so he can finish the school year with Jotaro. It sounds like it would be worth the effort. It sounds nice.)

The engine doesn't roar to life so much as it complains itself to life, but life is life. Kakyoin fiddles with the radio, trying to find the wavelength that Mr. Joestar said he'd be using Hermit to speak over. ]

I forgot to ask if you know how to drive.

[ He half laughs as he says it, until Joseph's voice crackles into the car's radio. He's left the building. He's following you.

He stops laughing. It's not a matter of 'if you know how' anymore. It's a matter of 'start fucking driving'. ]

I don't.

[He says, deadpan, as he slams down on the gas, and the poor abused car squeals off onto the road. Whether or not he's lying is anyone's guess, but all things considered, it's not like driving in and of itself is that complicated. The wheel steers, the pedals make it go and stop. It's only if you care about things like traffic laws or other motorists that you have to know the rest of it, and right now, he doesn't.

He remembers, vaguely, how to get to the park. Again, not according to traffic laws. Just general directions, but that's all he's about to care about for the moment; Star Platinum can take care of making sure they don't have a collision along the way.]

It's better.

[He says it under his breath, but there's no doubt it's meant for Kakyoin.]

Better that it's us. We'll get him.

We will.

[ He clambers out of his seat, swinging his feet over the gear stick and into the back of the car she he's sitting backwards to see out of the rear window. Hierophant manifests in front of him, arms outstretched, ready to drive off anyone trying to follow them. So far, though, it's just angry road users who disagree with Jotaro's awesome driving philosophy.

There's no way that Dio is fast enough to keep up even with a shitty car like this on foot. If he were, they wouldn't have escaped into sunlight so easily. So far, nothing. ]

Nothing yet. Anything on your side?

Driving.

[He doesn't have time to check his mirrors at a moment like this!!! What do you think he is, a responsible driver???

While he's focused on the road, however, he does send Star up to take a look behind them on the driver's side, letting the information filter unobtrusively down into the back of his mind rather than actually trying to see what Star is seeing, and risk getting disoriented while he's behind the wheel.]

Rooftop. My side. He just dropped down below — he's gonna try to cut us off. This road must circle around and connect with the one he's on.

I meant the front window! The one you're looking out of!

[ Not that it matters. The misunderstanding's got them information, Star's eyes being better than his own and Hierophant's combined.

And if the road does circle around in that way, then Dio will be in the front window before long. He turns back around, cursing himself for seeing the buildings around them as barriers rather than just minor obstacles to be hopped over. He's still seeing the world like a human does. Dio's still seeing it as a god. ]

Keep as much distance as you can. Hierophant and I will try to keep him back.

[ They turn a corner and sure enough there he is, dropping from the top of a building. They're approaching him from the front. He'll have seen their faces through the windshield, even at this distance. That's information that he wishes Dio didn't have, but here they are. ]

Fuck —

[The speed at which he has to swerve in order to keep to Kakyoin's direction for distance is...pretty high, all things considered, which means they both have to bear the brunt of inertia throwing them against one side of the car as he cranks the wheel and weaves them away. They're going to have to take another route if he's blocking them from the front, and there isn't enough room for a full about-face on the narrow street.]

Hang on.

[No room to turn, so he slams on the brakes instead, grinding the transmission as he heaves the car into reverse the instant it's able and slams on the gas again, sending them hurtling back from whence they came.]

[ Hierophant fires off a volley of fluid. It hardens into glass as it flies toward. It's hard to tell if it's slowing him at all. Dio pauses to deflect each round of fire, but he does it casually. As if it's nothing.

(The world freezes for a fraction of a second at a time. Stops and starts each time Kakyoin fires like a record skipping.)

Dio grows smaller. Smaller. He's following them, yes, but only at a walking pace. Something else follows them along the road, growing after them. ]

Why is Hermit-? Mr. Joestar shouldn't be-

[ It isn't Hermit. Inside himself, Kakyoin screams to a him that isn't going to listen that Dio is two people combined. That he has a second stand. But it isn't time. He doesn't figure that out yet. And so it's a sickening, stomach-dropping shock when the thorny vines overtake them, slicing into the car's tires. ]

Shit!

[And now they're being thrown around for an entirely different, and infinitely more malicious, reason. Sparks fly as the tires shred and metal begins to grind into the asphalt underneath them; in moments, Jotaro realizes, the vines will grow up further and dig into the body of the car itself, and they'll be trapped like birds in a cage, their escape route morphed into their prison.]

Hold on! Star Platinum!

[With a roar, Star appears in front of their car, momentarily obscuring the distant figure of Dio as his bulk overwhelms the front window; in a flash, he rears back and swings mightily at the front bumper of the car, hitting it with enough power to utterly crush the engine and hood, and sufficient force to send the car flying backwards, breaking it free of the snare of the vines.

Of course, now they're in a flying deathtrap of a metal prison, but it's better than waiting around for Dio to catch up.]

[ So maybe their driving wasn't as great as he thought it was.

They've attracted attention, is probably not the first thing he should take note of but the world slows in that way it does when everything is going wrong and there's nothing you can do to stop it. From the outside, people see a car that moved desperately to avoid hitting an intensely muscular pedestrian, only to have its tyres burst so hard that it caved in the front and sent the vehicle flying. Hierophant webs tightly through the front of the car to keep either of them from being flung around inside the car.

Joseph's voice comes in and out on the radio but he can't quite get his mind to focus on it. And then the back of the car strikes the road and everything speeds up.

The car bounces. Rolls. It's lucky they were going backward, because it's the back seats that cave in when the thing that was a car skids to a stop. Upside-down, a mess of tangled metal gouging long wounds into the asphalt. The sparks it tore out of the road bounce a few times, fainter each time before dying out. He wasn't wearing a seatbelt and so he's caught in Hierophant instead, suspended like a fly in a spiderweb, battered and knocked around but spared anything worse than scrapes and what's going to be some ugly bruising by the fact that he did fall out of his seat and into Hierophant when the car flipped.

Everything feels oddly serene for a few seconds, hanging upside-down, watching through the broken windshield as the little road-stars burn out. Mr. Joestar's shouts are still coming through the radio. He wants to know what the fuck that noise was. They can't answer, Mr. Joestar, he wants to answer. This is a one-way communication system.

Dio is a good distance away, now. But he's moving closer. He's not the only one. A few daring people are moving toward the car to check on them. People are moving between them and Dio. Fuck.

That's what snaps his mind back to the present. He crawls free of Hierophant, out through the broken front window. ]

Fuck off! Get the fuck away from the car, we don't need help!

[ It isn't perfect. It isn't how he talks to people. It's desperate and furious and unpracticed and in mixture of Japanese and English and the couple of Arabic curse words they convinced Avdol to teach them. ]

Break the radio!

[It's an odd thing to fixate on, at least at first. But Dio is advancing toward them and it very much is a one-way communication system, and the last thing they need right now is Dio taking the car and seizing an unexpected advantage over an unknowing Jiji because he's still just yelling into the radio and potentially giving himself away. The radio is useless to them now, so they might as well at least make sure it's useless to everyone.

But that's something that he's going to have to leave to Kakyoin. Kakyoin's the one who can be in a hundred places at once if he needs to, and Jotaro can only be in one — which means he needs to move to the only place where he can feasibly do any good, and trust Kakyoin to do the rest.

Star Platinum rips the driver's side door off the car; he half-stumbles, half-rolls out and gets himself to his feet, aching all over from the bruises of the landing. Something to worry about later. Right now, he has somewhere he needs to be.

And so, off he goes, shoving passerby out of the way as he moves to put himself between the wreck and Dio — one last threat, one last obstacle for their nemesis to surmount before he can reach the car and take them.]

[ The crowd doesn't disperse. Not as he'd like it to. Jotaro's presence scares off the ones who are just there to gawk, but some people are just genuinely helpful when faced with injured kids in a strange country. It's infuriating. And they don't leave. Not when he shoves a well-meaning helper aside when they grab at his face to examine the place where his glasses cut into the flesh. Not when he yells. Not even when some force they can't see tears through what remains of the front of the car and rips the insides of the radio apart.

So great, his attempts to scare off a crowd that might be hurt by Dio have only succeeded in whittling them down to the people who deserve to be hurt the least.

The rooftops. The ones Dio used to get ahead of them. He was able to get up there in a single bound because of what he is. Hierophant can get them up there. There's no chance, now, of luring Dio somewhere without people. But they can still lure him up there, a place where nobody else can get to.

Well. They can do that if they survive the next twenty seconds or so.

Those thorny vines stretch out from Dio, flying toward Jotaro. Hierophant catches some of them, green glass slicing through stems. They've seen his stand now, if not its full potential. Long-range, like Hierophant or Hermit. Strong enough to cut into the metal of the car, but made for controlling an area and not for direct combat.

(No, screams him-inside-him. That's not his stand. How the fuck could he miss it? That stand looks like the one consuming Miss Holly. It looks like Mr. Joestar's. He knows that Dio is hijacking the body of Mr. Joestar's grandfather. How could the connection not occur to him? It's worse than not knowing. He thinks he knows, and he's wrong.)

Hierophant reaches upward, even as he continues to shoot at the oncoming vines. Makes himself into a rope, one end connected to the rooftop. He stops firing as his hands unravel, becoming the other end of the rope, curling around Jotaro's wrist. The thorns don't stop. The ones he cut regrow, multiply, growing rapidly toward Jotaro. ]

Not yet —

[He's speaking under his breath because he knows Hierophant will hear it anyway, because he knows all it takes is the slightest of vibrations for Hierophant to reel the words in and deliver them back to Kakyoin. He knows, and hopefully Kakyoin knows, that he isn't out here right now to fight. He's here to be a threat to Dio's approach, to force the maestro of their imminent demise to turn his attention away from the innocent passerby because he can't ignore the danger that a Joestar at the ready poses to him.

Not yet. Not yet. Something in him knows this is too easy. Something in him knows that this is wrong, the same way that something in him felt reassured by the sight of the blond doctor treating Avdol, even if there was nothing in him that could possibly explain why. Something in him is resonating, shaking him from the inside out, warning him that this is only the prelude to the real horror, that something much worse and much more disastrous is still lying in wait.

Not yet. Leave him here as the bait. Leave him here until the last possible moment, because it hasn't gone wrong enough yet to run.

I can't beat the shit out of him without getting closer, he thinks, even as Star Platinum's arms shimmer into view around his own while the rest of his Stand stays concealed, giving his limbs the armor they need to help bat away the vines as he keeps walking forward, keeps up the pressure, keeps forcing Dio to deal with him because doing it means that he controls the pace of the fight for even a little longer.]

[ Not yet.

He knows what Jotaro's doing. Of course he knows what Jotaro's doing. It's likely even Dio himself knows what Jotaro's doing, if only because he's too proud to comprehend the idea that someone might try to fight him without having some ulterior motive. As long as Dio's attention is upon him, as long as the Joestar is imminently within reach, he has no reason to even look at the people gathered around the thing that used to be someone else's car.

There's nothing he can do down here. This isn't the kind of fight that Hierophant is made for. It's barely the fight that Star is made for. He pulls himself up onto the rooftops and prepares to pull Jotaro out of danger when he needs to and then Dio stops.

Just over six feet away, Hierophant measures for him, still coiled around Jotaro's wrist. About either of their heights in distance, and just out of Star's range. He speaks. Talks about the line of messy stitches by a woman with two right hands that circles his throat. Talks about blood. The blood of his original body. Joseph's blood. Jotaro's blood. And then he takes one more long stride forward, and he catches Star's fist. Not Jotaro's fist, smaller behind the gloves of the purple image. But Star's.

(Because he has a second stand. He can touch Star because he has a second stand that he's hiding inside his body. That's why he could touch Hierophant's projectiles to deflect them. Why is he not making the connection.)

He wants to pull Jotaro back. Whether it's time to or not. Hierophant goes taut, prepares to tug him up onto the roof. But he can't.

They've been knocking the vines away from Jotaro, not destroying them. That means they've gone past him, like parting a sea of thorns. Those vines coil back upon themselves now, forming a prison that he can't pull Jotaro free from without shredding him to nothing on the thorns in the process. Each fraction of a second the gaps grow smaller, until he can barely see through them at all.

He should withdraw Hierophant. Pull him back, try to shoot his way through the prison. Help him from the outside. But he doesn't. He can't. He can't leave Jotaro alone, with Dio, in a cage woven from the things that are killing his mother.

Hierophant was invisible once. He can be invisible again.

His stand vanishes, pulling itself too thin to be visible to even the enhanced sight of a vampire. Thin enough that it has no difficulty at all pulling itself through the tiny gaps in the cage. It doesn't reform itself there. No. Instead, it does what it's always done, what it did when this all began. It hides. ]

Oh? [ Inside the cage, Star's fist still caught in his own, Dio looks at Jotaro's wrist. At the place where Hierophant was until only a second ago. There's nothing there now. ] It seems you've been abandoned.

[There are two Jotaros inside the one standing there in that moment on the lamplit Cairo street, and when Hierophant disappears, both of them remember the same thing.

It's distant, for one. Dreamlike, almost — a faraway thing that he doesn't altogether remember happening, but that doesn't seem like the sort of thing he would make up in wild imaginings. For the other, it's far more concrete: sharpie lines slithering down his limbs, starbursting out from his throat and his heart. Kakyoin. Hierophant disappears, and Dio thinks he's been withdrawn, and Dio is wrong.

Because Hierophant is there, still, and he can't feel it but Star can, because Star knows when something is inside him that shouldn't be. And that means that Kakyoin knows, even without speaking a word to him, that this isn't a situation he can flee from. It can't be. And that means the only thing that's left for them is to fight.]

I don't need any help to beat the shit out of you.

[He has to keep Dio's attention on himself. Not that it's hard to do, but he has to make sure that Dio sacrifices attention to his surroundings in favor of getting high on his own self-importance. If he starts to gloat, he'll miss things. He'll leave openings.

Hierophant is good at finding openings and taking advantage of them.]

Pretty stupid of you, trapping yourself in here with me.

[ Dio thinks he'll break faith. He turned his back on Dio, and he thinks it's because of his own disloyalty. That's why Rubber Soul imitated him. Why Death 13 chose him as the first target. Terence outright said it - he's the one Dio expected to abandon the others. He turned his back on someone once, he'll do it again.

It's good. It's good. No matter how much the shame of it burns like bile in his throat. It means Dio won't question why he isn't trying to break Jotaro out from the outside. Dio thinks he's afraid. Dio thinks he'll run. Dio thinks that of all of them, he's the link that will break. Let him.

Hierophant doesn't make any effort to control Jotaro. It goes completely limp, letting itself spread through him. Its branches go cell-thin. Thinner. Dio's minions forced it to learn how to travel through blood, once. It can do that again. Move through every little capillary. It can wait. He doesn't say anything to Jotaro. He doesn't need to ask him to trust him.

Dio grins. ]

You're stalling me, Jojo. [ The way he says the name is sweet and barbed and affectionate and venomous all at the same time. He swings his free arm as he speaks, swinging for Jotaro's ribs and striking him hard enough to throw him back into the wall of woven thorns. ] You think he's gone to find help, don't you? That he's going to be coming back with the old man and Polnareff.

[ The thorns begin to coil around Jotaro's limbs. ]

You should be happy for them, Jojo. With your blood, they'll be the first to witness Lord Dio rising, whole and new.

[It's important, it's imperative, that Dio only think he's fighting a Joestar, Jotaro tells himself as the punch makes something crack in his ribcage, as the thorns dig into his flesh when he hits them and puncture little holes to well up with blood when the points are withdrawn. He has to fight as though Kakyoin isn't with him. He has to give every appearance that he's in this alone.

It's vital, because if he looks like he's setting up a surprise attack, Dio will notice. That means he can't help. He just has to act on his own, and hope that Kakyoin will take whatever opportunity arises, and that it will be enough.

So he struggles slightly, even as the vines begin to crucify him, opening his body up to make it easy for Dio to come after him. But if he's going to take his blood, then he's going to have to get close, and that's when Star Platinum will be waiting.]

The only thing they'll see when they get here is your useless corpse.

[Let Dio think he's right. Let him think he's slipped, and the plan is now out in the open.]

How harsh. You were so much kinder a century ago, Jojo~.

[ Fuck. There are disadvantages to Hierophant's hiding place, and all of them are happening at once. Something breaks in Jotaro, breaks in Hierophant, breaks in him, and then thorns are tearing into all of them. He swallows back whatever noise he was going to make, curling his hands into fists and gritting his teeth. Any sound he makes, Dio might pick up. Jotaro's enduring. He can, too.

They're going to have a chance. One chance. When Dio's fingers break skin, he'll give Hierophant a chance to move from Jotaro into him. He'll get close enough for Star Platinum to strike him. Hurt him. Occupy him for the few seconds it'll take for Hierophant to get into place.

The vines tighten as Jotaro struggles. Kakyoin can feel his own fingers going cold from lack of circulation. His own heart beating faster to try to compensate. More blood moving more quickly through the body. All the better for something to pull it free of the skin.

Dio moves closer, into Star Platinum's range, either thinking himself safe or thinking that whatever trap he's going to spring he can endure it. And Kakyoin recognises the borrowed sensation of an almost-loving tap-tap-tap-tap of four fingernails against the side of Jotaro's neck. Like someone drumming their fingers against a table. It's familiar. Almost pleasant. Being dirt, knowing that something beautiful might grow from you.

And then Dio's fingers break skin. ]

[A century ago? What the fuck. What the fuck is this crazy piece of shit vampire talking about, a century ago. He wasn't alive a century ago. Is he talking about Jonathan Joestar? What the fuck.

He's got to hit him. He's got to hit Dio, that much is for certain, but he has to trust that Kakyoin is up to something. Has to time it to leave enough of a window for Kakyoin to act, but then he's got to take his turn himself.

One. Two. Three. Four. Four nails against his neck, above the place where his star birthmark sits.

He has to wait. Has to wait. Has to give Kakyoin a chance.]

...!

[The fingers gouge into him, sucking awful things in search of his blood, hungry to draw the life out of him and claim it for his own. One Jotaro is consumed by the hurt of it, the terrible anguish racing up and down his neck like wildfire. The other is furious, disgusted, enraged, because his neck and his blood belong to a different vampire, and this is a transgression he refuses to abide.

But he has to hold on. A few more seconds. A few more seconds.

Until at last, he can only hope that it's enough, and Star Platinum swings, piercing a hole straight through Dio Brando's abdomen.]

[ Where the sensation divides the past and present Jotaro, the secondhand echo of it unites Kakyoin. He remembers it on a level he can't quite describe, and it's not pleasant but it feels right. It feels like cleansing. Like draining a wound in reverse. Pulling out all the worthwhile parts of him to save them, make them into something better, so that the rest can be discarded safely.

Eventually, maybe, it'll occur to him that this isn't what it's meant to be like.

It focuses him.

Hierophant moves through the blood. Out of Jotaro. Into Dio. He spreads like an infection, branching into each finger and up the arm. And something takes notice. Something almost reacts. Even through the blinding certainty that he's won, something in Dio can sense an invader when it encounters one. He tenses. His fingers start to withdraw and then Star forces a fist through his body.

Dio flies back, and Hierophant takes those few seconds to pull the rest of its body into him. For a fraction of a second the vines flicker in and out as Dio focuses only on the fact that someone got a hit in, a good one, that someone has damaged his almost-perfect body. (And because he almost healed that line of stitches on his neck. That stand isn't his. Once that body is his own, he loses it.) They don't quite drop Jotaro. Instead a new one snakes around his neck, squeezing.

His attention is all on Jotaro now. On the man he thinks Jotaro used to be a century ago. The invader is forgotten, even as the stolen blood knits the hole left by Star's fist back together layer by layer. ]

That was a mistake, Jojo. [ He spits. It's wrathful, not like an angry god but like a child who plucked the legs from every fly they could catch before encountering a wasp. And maybe Dio can feel his muscles seizing up as Hierophant fights them, searching for a way to force him to dismiss the stand, but the rage distracts him. ] I don't need you alive to take your blood.

[ The vine tightens around Jotaro's throat. Tightens. And then Hierophant lances up through Dio's spinal cord and into his brain, activating every nerve at once. And Dio screams.

He doesn't stop screaming as the vines disappear, dropping Jotaro to the ground. He doesn't stop until it sounds like something in his throat is torn, because this noise is going to have to suffice as their signal to Joseph and Polnareff. When he does stop, when Hierophant relaxes and focuses only on maintaining control of Dio's body and not on assaulting his mind with too many nerve signals to maintain a stand, Dio's arms fall limp at his sides. He looks like an oversized suit of skin worn by something much smaller. ]

I win. [ He says, and the voice is Dio's and it comes out of Dio's mouth, but it's softer. Quieter. A little more detached. ]

[He's going to have scars, he thinks wildly as the chokevines snare around his throat, and it never occurs to him that that's an odd thing to consider because it presumes his survival. There's no reason to think, in that moment of panic, that this isn't going to kill him, and yet — it doesn't strike him that it will. He'll get through this, in the end, and when it does help he'll have scars like Dio's. One more thing to make him identical to Dio.

...

Wait. What?

Why would he think — why would he ever think — that he and Dio had anything in common?]

K...Kakyoin...

[His throat hurts. It hurts, it hurts, Dio was going to cut his head off, he's surprised his heart didn't stop from it.]

H...Have you...got him...?

Yeah. [ Dio's voice again. He doesn't dare use Hierophant to talk, use him to do anything but force Dio still.

The vines reappear, aiming themselves for Dio himself now, ready to rip him apart if that's what it takes to pull Hierophant out of him. But he's figured out how to dismiss them now. Set off every nerve. Force his brain to process every possible sensation at once, until there isn't anything left to manifest a stand. It's probably torture. He thought he'd want it to be torture, but right now he doesn't care. It's just what works, the mechanics of the flesh bud evolved and turned on Dio himself.

(It's funny. He knows what he is. He knows he's cruel. And yet he doesn't have the stomach to suppress Dio with agony for more than a few seconds at a time. He's the worst kind of cruel - enough to be willing to hurt, not enough to be effective. If he were a monster, if he kept this up constantly, Dio wouldn't be able to maintain a stand for even the fraction of a second it takes to stop time. If he were a monster, it would end here.) ]

I've- I've got him. I can hold him until Mr. Joestar gets here. [ He should reach out for Jotaro. Do something to try to slow the bleeding. But he isn't going to reach out with Dio's hands and his own hands are a good sixty feet above all of this. So he just stars still. Offers the sort of sympathetic grimace that looks most out of place on Dio's face. ] Sorry. You can use me as bait next time.

[ He means it as a joke. Because he thinks that they're done. That there isn't going to be a next time for any of this. ]

Like hell I will.

[Right. Jiji. Jiji and Polnareff were on the radio, they'll be tracking them. They'll be coming to catch up. But it'll be fine when they get here, right? Because Hierophant is inside of Dio, so they've got him trapped. They did it. They're safe, for the moment.

If Jotaro were a monster, he wouldn't just stop there, with Dio beaten. He would follow through right here, would tell Kakyoin to get Hierophant out of Dio's skull and then grab hold of him by the head and pull until it ripped off along that ugly scarred seam. He would deprive him of everything and crush him underfoot and keep crushing him and crushing him until there was nothing left, and then they would all be safe.

But Jotaro isn't a monster. Jotaro doesn't step on the weak for his own gain.

Jotaro takes his eyes off of Dio Brando for one second, and glances in the direction he thinks the cavalry is coming from, instead.]

[ He thought he might gloat. He thought he might hold it over Dio’s head, that he’s not what Dio thought he was. Not a coward. Not weak. He doesn’t. In the end, he doesn’t really want to pay any more attention to Dio than he has to. He just wants to keep his eyes on Jotaro. On the bleeding. To make sure that he’s still moving and talking and breathing. Soon, Mr. Joestar will be here. That sunshine-lightning he likes to do tricks with will pass harmlessly through Hierophant and do to Dio the same thing that it did to the parts of him that he put into himself and Polnareff and Mr. Joestar.

He smiles. His shoulders sink. It’s a weirdly relaxed posture for Kakyoin. It looks fucking ridiculous on Dio. ]

Bet I’m better bait than you are a dri-

[ He can feel it, now. It’s hard to put into words what he’s feeling, but he can tell when Dio’s about to try to call his stand again. Hierophant activates the nerves again

The thing about nerve signals is that they aren’t instant. They travel. They take time, even if that time is fractions of percentages of a second. And so in stopped time, they can’t reach the brain. They can’t overwhelm it. They can’t force the new stand away.

This part is new. He never saw this. He doesn’t belong here. But Jotaro does. Jotaro was here for this.

The new stand is humanoid. It appears in front of Dio, reaching out its hand to touch the hole in his shirt where Star punched through it. And then it forces its hand through the same still-healing hole. Through Hierophant.

Through him.

It doesn’t hurt. Not yet. The nerve signals can’t travel. It doesn’t feel anything at all as the new stand reaches into Dio and wraps its fingers around a handful of strands. Hierophant is ugly as the stand pulls him out of its master. A clump of thin strands, bleeding a trail of bright green that hangs in the air. From Kakyoin’s high vantage point, it looks like the new stand is pulling clumps of hair from a shower drain.

Dio wasn’t paying him much mind before. He was a strategic concern, not something worthy of his wrath. That’s changed. The new stand throws the ugly clump of Hierophant onto the road. ]

Useless. [ He snarls, his stand driving its heel into the mass of tendrils. It’s hard to say what part of Hierophant maps to what part of him like this. He can hear bone cracking. Joints popping out of place. He doesn’t feel it yet. He won’t until time starts again. ] As worthless to them as you ever were to me.

[ Dio is talking at him, of course, not to him. He can’t hear any of this. He doesn’t remember any of this. He’s just borrowing from Jotaro’s memories.

Time restarts.

It hurts.

He falls forward as Hierophant writhes under the World’s heel, plummeting down toward the streets of Cairo. ]

[Useless, he hears Dio say. Useless, both halves of him hear Dio say.

That's the reason Kakyoin, the Kakyoin sitting safely in a VR pod in a room in the alien city of Lunatia, safe and alive and far, far away from this awful night, is able to hear what Dio said at all. Once upon a time, Dio said something to Noriaki Kakyoin when he killed him, but there was no one there to hear it, and so those words are lost to the sands of time.

These ones aren't. These ones exist because the half-turned Jotaro has just discovered that he can't move his body, but his eyes froze in place just close enough to still see Dio in his peripheral vision. He still sees him. He still hears him.

Both Jotaros know, in the same moment, that Dio Brando has a second stand, and right now it's killing Noriaki Kakyoin.

The last time the universe bent just a fraction to the left, it was to make Avdol turn around just a little bit faster. That's all it took to keep him out of harm's way, and the cascade of events that had followed it had saved Iggy's life in its turn. He didn't even have to do anything more than that little twitch, that slightest push. One small thing gone just a hair's breadth different, and everything turned out differently because of it.

Now, now, it happens again. The faintest touch. The slightest course correction.

This won't kill him.

That's all the change he makes, the Jotaro who wields the unfathomable powers of the god Dio wanted to be. He doesn't wipe Dio off the face of the earth. He doesn't punish him with an eternity of perpetual torment. He could end it right here, right now, in the blink of an eye, but he doesn't.

One touch to the water's surface. One ripple in the pond. One beat of a butterfly's wing.

Kakyoin isn't going to die like this.

Kakyoin plummets, but Jotaro isn't there to catch him, because Jotaro is already rounding on Dio and throwing his Star Platinum at him with everything he is. But someone will get there in time, one-half of Jotaro knows. Someone will reach Kakyoin and hold his broken body together with his bare hands until help can arrive, because this isn't the way his story ends anymore.]

[ It's hard to tell how far away the crash of metal comes from. He uses Hierophant to measure, and Hierophant can't right now. Hierophant is hurt. He recognises what it is a fraction of a second before he feels his blood freezing against metal.

Even in the middle of Cairo, even before the heat of the sun has risen up out of the roads and buildings, Chariot moves so quickly that frost forms on his metal bones from the chill of the air moving past him. In the distance, he can still hear the discarded armour rolling to a stop.

We havn't lost anyone yet. Polnareff says, and he's trying to sound cool but his voice is already choked with emotion because he's a fucking baby. You don't get to be special. They come to a stop hidden behind the wreckage of the ruined car, and Polnareff's voice doesn't raise above a very profane french whisper.

(Polnareff's made himself so vulnerable. He'd have stood a chance, maybe, with Chariot armoured. But his speed means nothing in stopped time. Polnareff's made himself too vulnerable to win this fight. Given up on glory so that someone else's victory can be a little less bittersweet. He learned that from someone, didn't he?)

Hierophant has pissed Dio off, but Jotaro is the bigger danger. Dio's pragmatic enough to realise that. The World kicks Hierophant away and it vanishes once it's free. Hides inside Kakyoin. Forms tubes between ruined blood vessels. Pushes air in and out of him.

Dio knows what it sounds like when a body strikes the ground. He knows that the absence of that sound means something. But his attention is on Jotaro and Chariot is too fast even for his eyes. He doesn't know what it means. ]

I was hoping to avoid staining The World's hands with filth. You aren't worthy of my stand. [ Dio sighs dramatically, like having to use his stand to fight Jotaro is the worst thing to happen to anyone today. ] But it's appropriate, isn't it? Your family always were given everything, whether not not they were worthy.

IC Inbox | prismatica

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