Chapter Text
oOo
New York is humid. And boring. But so is Japan. No distractions, either. This isn’t normally an issue, but now there aren’t even enough cars outside to watch from the window. Jotaro’s foot taps, his fingers rub at the chipping paint on the sill.
And anyway, he thought it’d be weird holing up with the old man at his place. Mutual, maybe. Joseph wasted no time in bringing him here the moment he fished him out of the airport, helping him lay out and unpack the essentials. The place would be bare if not for the tiny table in the apartment’s kitchenette (courtesy of the tenant Joseph said could no longer cover the rent), some vintage sofa in the corner and a mattress with a blanket in the main room, alongside a tv set with cable that Jotaro hasn’t even touched yet. Oh, and the wi-fi box. That’s it. Everything else is luggage full of clothes and useless chinaware his mother packed that he couldn’t be bothered to use or wash after using. It’s an old building, too, just like all the other buildings his grandfather owns. The carpet creaks and the toilet takes forever to do what it’s supposed to.
It’s the old man’s sentimentality, Jotaro thinks, that makes this an issue, still sprung on the years when phones had coiled wires and his hair still grew out long and brown.
Still, there’s privacy now in all the places privacy hadn't existed in Jotaro’s world. Getting to have an actual lock on his door, for example. How, even though he’d just started his second semester of college and only recently aged out of his teens, his mother still left faces on his pancakes and obsessed over him staying at home instead of the dormitories. So, yeah. Maybe it isn’t so bad, this shitty lockdown. Maybe leaving Japan and his incredibly convenient home gym behind for the next couple of months is a small price to pay in exchange for a taste of adulthood.
He lets out a breath, flicking what’s left of his cigarette down into the alley below. He leans, watching it land into one of the wastebins. New York is dirty. Trash bags are strewn, some torn open and others just left there to rot or to fatten the rats. It reminds him of Osaka, how some of Osaka has buildings as high and as crowded as these, a far cry from the isolated villa he was brought up in.
Doesn’t matter. He’s fine with the trash, fine with close buildings and surviving off of one dumbbell and microwave food, long as he does not have to deal with his annoying mother barging into his room.
The sun lifts a little higher from the clouds, just an hour before noon. If the air was stuffed before, it could only be a lot worse now. He wipes his brow, feeling gross in his skin while mindlessly flipping through the movie icons on the tv. He hasn’t showered since arrival but he really can’t be bothered to dig through any suitcases. Did he even pack soap? Whatever. He sighs, feasting on his fourth banana of the morning.
The icons on the tv run out. The last fruit in the bowl disappears. He’s still sort of hungry and the room has become uninhabitable. He stands, unlatching the locks of the window and lifting it open. Fresh air wafts inside. It’s only the fourth day in this city of concrete but already it feels like a month. He wonders if boredom could actually kill someone, how long it would take him to scale up the building with just his hands and a washrag, if in a week the old man would finally notice that he hasn’t texted him back.
He toes off his socks and folds his arms on the sill. The person living across him must have been suffocating, too. The window’s wide open, green gauzy drapes pushed to the side, a showy contrast amongst all the brick. Jotaro glares, resting his cheek on his knuckles. There’s some kind of glint to the drapes, like fine silk or glitz. They don’t look cheap. They billow excessively with the occasional breeze, and there’s a stupid little collection of plants on the ledge, one in particular that overflows like a vine from its pot, tangled and grazing the beam of the window below it. It’s not like he bothers to lean closer for a better look or anything, but he thinks he can see a fancy desk to the side of this person’s room, an open laptop and a toppled collection of coffee cups which clutter the surface.
A caffeine addict, then. With a bad taste in art, seeing as how the wall above their mattress is framed with a giant abstract painting of some green guy.
...Not that he took the time to analyze it. That’d be weird. He looks away, focused now on the alternating colors of the traffic lights.
Pretty boring, he’d say. For a first neighbor. He’s about to chuck out his tenth cigarette of the day but the buzzer of the front door interrupts him. He ties the loose strings of his sweats. He’s not even wearing a shirt yet. He heads to the door and unlocks it.
“Ah, Jotaro!” shouts Joseph as if he hadn’t expected for Jotaro to exist in the place where he left him. “Already making yourself at home, eh?”
It’s a rhetorical question. He saunters in, not quite taking off his shoes nor wiping his feet on the welcome mat. He smells like food, courtesy of the takeout he’s brought along. Jotaro’s stomach snaps to life. Burgers. Definitely burgers.
“Oi, jiji.” He points at the bag. “Fifty-fifty.”
Joseph pauses halfway through some rant (long lines at drive-thrus, how the guys on the speaker never hear him the first time), grinning with the aforementioned bag dangled on one swaying finger.
“Forty-sixty. Really gonna let an old guy starve?”
Jotaro glares. “Fifty-fifty. Keep the side dish.”
His grandfather rubs his chin. “Tempting. But the side dish isn’t great.” He shrugs, unfussed, as if copious amounts of protein weren’t on the line between them. “Cheddar fries just aren’t my thing.”
It’s not a lie, the old man doesn’t like good food. He can smell the cheese. Hot, buttered… Jotaro thinks he feels his gut begin to eat itself.
“Forty-five, fifty-five.” He adds, “The fries don’t count. Also, you broke mom’s rule.”
Joseph makes a face. “What rule?”
“You’re old. You’ll get sick. I’m supposed to grab shit for you.”
It’s a low blow, he knows, but Jotaro is almost eighty percent sure that Joseph is not that hungry.
“Hm.” It’s grim, a sound in the face of defeat. “Not bad, Jotaro.”
They sit, making use of the apartment’s over-soft carpet.
The sizes aren’t bad. Apparently, Joseph has a pretty good idea of how much Jotaro needs to actually eat. No dumb rituals about it, either, and no having to remember to wipe his mouth every couple of seconds.
He stuffs his face freely. And despite his grandfather’s normally unrestrained personality, is somewhat surprised to see that he is careful and neat with his chewing and eating, still set in all the English habits Jotaro did not really inherit.
“Look at you,” pokes Joseph, wiping a crumb from his lip, “almost as hungry as I was when I was still the hottest catch in town.”
Jotaro raises an eyebrow. “Almost?”
His grandfather cackles. Jotaro sucks on the straw of his soda.
“How do you like the city? Different, eh? Who knew it’d take a national freakout to make you come visit.”
Jotaro shrugs. “It looks like a city.”
Joseph looks like he’d smack him, were he fifty years younger.
“Well. Yes. Not the greatest situation, having you cooped up in here, otherwise we’d be all over Manhattan. Shame this whole thing’s got people by the balls.”
“It’s not balls. It’s science.” Jotaro puts down his soda, crossing his arms.
“Meh.”
“It was a bitch finding a flight.”
He can’t help it. it’s one of his favorite words.
“Hey, language, young man! That Holly. I knew that deadbeat guy would rub off on my grandson—”
And so it starts. Jotaro almost wants to one-up him, telling him this was his mother’s idea to begin with, that he was forced to recite a sticky note on the phone, threatened with having his subscriptions cut off. It’s a dark thought, and ostentatiously petty, but it slowly begins to remind him of how nauseous with worry his mother actually is, that the old man’d likely keel from the sheer isolation, or the virus itself (seeing as how outdated and stubborn he is), in a world where grandma Suzie no longer exists.
Jotaro sits for a moment, and guesses he could’ve done without the word ‘bitch.’
“Alright, alright.”
Joseph’s left eye is twitching, red in the face with all the spite an old man with a mustard stain on his mustache can muster. Jotaro opens his mouth. It’s difficult, and very annoying, but he forces the word out of his throat:
“Sorry.”
It works. Joseph calms down and some of the lines on his face disappear. It’s pretty dramatic. Jotaro takes a slurp of his drink.
“Point is...” Joseph wipes the stain with a napkin. His fingers are shaky. “It’s good to have you here, Jotaro. It’s not always easy having my only daughter and grandson live on the other side of the planet.”
His tone is off. Jotaro waits to abandon the subject. He doesn’t like when the old man is like this, all wishy-washy, like he’s a hundred miles away. He opens the lid of his drink and snacks on the ice, asking where he got all the food from. He gets a ten-minute spiel in response. The mood shifts. Slow, but it shifts.
Jotaro leans back after a while, stretching his legs. Time goes as it does when he sits there listening to his grandfather laugh about things that aren’t funny, imagining the faces of people he’s never met and somehow believing like maybe he has, a common aftermath of his grandfather’s autobiographical stories.
The sun is setting. The heat of the day starts to wear off. He glances over at the window and catches a glimpse of those same green drapes from earlier flapping around.
...Lame. Purple’s always been a superior color.
oOo
It’s dark when Joseph leaves, and even darker when Jotaro kicks the blanket off the mattress and attempts to fall asleep.
He tries face-down, then on his back. His eyes keep opening, his fingers drum random patterns on his thigh. He usually has no problem nodding off, but the jet lag from Tokyo is pretty severe. It’s humid again, courtesy of the old man fussing over leaving the window open after nightfall.
He glares at the ceiling and stuffs his hand down his crotch. He’s not horny or anything, just desperate for something to work.
He feels something for about five seconds, then gives up. He stands, trudging directly to the window and sliding it open. Cool air sighs on his face, chilling the faint film of sweat on his chest. The night is so quiet. The streets are still and the occasional flicker of a faraway streetlight mimics the undulating glint of the stars.
Something else glints with the stars. He peers ahead, that same window from before as open as it’d been for most of the daylight, except this time the drapes are still and there is a candle on the desk. Faint music plays from the laptop. If he tries hard enough, he can sort of make out the lazy knells of a piano, the whiny slither of strings, all of which he has always found unexciting. He’s surmising whether or not he should just shut the window and stop toeing the line of a creep at two in the morning, but then he sees a man walk into the room, holding a mug and blowing at it before sitting down at the desk.
He...didn’t expect that. The cherry hair, anyway. Or the sharp jaw. Either way, he certainly looks the part, that one snooty art kid who burns scented candles in the middle of the night. He makes a noise in his throat and takes the last stick from his cigarette pack. He holds his dying lighter to it, watching the smoke squirm into shapes in the air.
Thoughts slink away. His gaze alternates on its own between the glittering skyline and the window across him. He’s typing now, whatever his name is, occasionally sitting back in his seat. He may be talking to himself, Jotaro can’t really tell. He only knows that there are moments when he smiles before quickly going back to murdering the keyboard.
...Whatever. He sucks in a drag, realizing he’s burned the cigarette down to its filter. He’s about to whip out his reserves (a box of Black Russians he nabbed at the airport), but the sudden absence of the orchestral music stops him from lighting the tip. He looks over to the neighboring window. The man has stood from his desk, tall and symmetrical, allowing Jotaro to catch a generous glimpse of his face. A full moment passes before Jotaro realizes that the guy is in the process of closing his window.
“My bad,” he calls like an idiot.
The block is so eerily still that the scratch of his unused voice travels effortlessly to the opposite building. The man pauses, looking at him.
“It’s a hideous habit.”
Huh. He expected a thinner, more measly voice. He clicks off the lighter, turning his neck to pretend that the exchange never happened.
“It’s Bach, by the way. The music.”
Jotaro lifts up an eyebrow, failing but trying not to let his gaze wander back to the source of the voice.
“It’s why you were standing there watching me for the past half an hour, right? The Art of Fugue. An unfinished jewel, and the last that he wrote.”
Jotaro glares, ditching the act.
“I don’t care about Bach.”
“Interesting. That is the exact thought he was met with for the larger part of his life.” The man pauses. The warm light of the candle shifts on his face. It’s what allows Jotaro to see the coy grin on his lip. “Now, more than two centuries later, even peeping neighbors may find an opportunity to stargaze to the sound of his music.”
Jotaro feels like he’s been caught naked. A vague sweep of heat casts on his neck. Who even talks like a book? He makes a testy noise in his throat, regretting any previous guilt of smoking his cigarette.
“At any rate, bonne nuit, stranger. Perhaps consider a healthier habit.” He takes a step back, beginning to slide in the glass of his window.
“I just moved here.”
Fuck’s sake. Since when does he talk so much?
“Yes... I can tell by the accent.”
This guy. If he weren’t a literal building away, he’d really be asking for it.
“What accent?”
The man chuckles. “My mother is from Japan.”
Jotaro squints. “You don’t look Japanese.”
“It has its uses.” He tilts his chin. “Like right now.”
Jotaro swallows without realizing it. He also presses closer to the window without realizing it.
“You can call me Kakyoin. With the climate of things, please let me know if you need anything.” He straightens, completely composed. “Have a good night—”
“Jotaro.” He bites his own tongue and swears he’ll punch himself later, “Jojo. Whichever.”
The candle’s so dim now, and the glare of the moon interrupts, but he thinks he can see Kakyoin smile again before he finally closes the window.
It takes him too many seconds, but Jotaro manages to do the same thing, nearly snapping the frame in the process.
He lies there with his phone in his hand. He almost never has his phone in his hand.
He lowers the brightness and in the covert privacy of his room, lets his thumbs glide across the virtual keyboard.
He apparently spells most of ‘Bach’ and ‘fugue’ wrong, but the results look convincing. He taps on one of the videos. A familiar influx of noise begins to quietly play from the speaker. It’s the same as before, a collection of timbres that are alluringly soft. He puts his phone next to his pillow and allows the music to play on its own.
Time passes. He eases into a fog of vapory half-thoughts, slipping out of consciousness just before the end of the score.
oOo