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There had been three bodies by the time Jotaro received a call from the Speedwagon Foundation, and a fourth less than a week later, when he and Josuke found their way to a small double room at a hotel in town near the coast. They had caught separate flights in, coming from points on near opposite sides of the globe, but close enough with their arrivals that Jotaro waited for Josuke so they could grab a cab together to make their way to their hotel.
Josuke greeted him near baggage claim, with a jaunty two finger salute and his carry-on slung over his shoulder. His smile was familiar enough even if the bags under his eyes signposted a weariness, likely from the trip over.
“Rough flight?”
“It was sixteen hours not counting the layover,” Josuke grumbled. “There was a child on board. Both flights.”
Frowning in sympathy, Jotaro offered, “We don’t have to officially start until tomorrow.”
“But I’m sure you’ve already memorized the case file,” Josuke replied without turning, scanning the luggage carousel for his suitcase.
“I’ll give you your copy in the cab. There isn’t much to memorize.”
“One of those, then,” Josuke responded vaguely, but Jotaro understood.
Cases typically fell on either side of an easy divide—a straightforward fight, some dipshit with a newly acquired Stand and too many ideas with how to use it, or something less concretely defined. Drawn-out investigations, unusual circumstances. Stands that felt altogether different from Jotaro’s own, complex abilities with niche triggers that signaled some sort of fundamental break between how he saw the conceptual limits of his own Stand and what others seemed capable of manifesting. Complexities that made him feel just on the edge of obsolete, belonging to an era quickly becoming more of a memory than a reality. But in the end, when Jotaro eventually hunted the problem down, it ended in a fight with some dipshit user regardless.
“All set,” Josuke announced, pulling Jotaro from his thoughts.
He nodded, before tilting his head to signal the exit where cabs were already lined up near the sidewalk. It was a weeknight, and the off-season for this kind of place. They got one with little wait.
By the time they reached the hotel, it was late, raining—the sky was a purple-grey as Jotaro stood by the cracked window to smoke, a coffee cup he had snagged from the front of the room working as his ashtray.
Josuke sat on the bed, a small frown on his face as he bit his lip and scanned the slim contents of a pale blue file.
He was rereading the case notes, scant as they were, but Jotaro understood the urge. The case lacked coherence on paper, no conspicuous details to suggest a natural lead, but the timing of the latest body combined with its condition produced the sense of a timer counting down, and there was no real assurance they could muster against such a feeling. Once they reached a calibre that caused Speedwagon Foundation intervention, cases involving Stand users were usually of a nature that didn’t self-resolve. With four bodies in two months, the pattern was clear, and they could only assume it would continue.
Behind four meager profiles on their victims came a general dossier on the area, including potential places of interest for the investigation. When Jotaro glanced over again, Josuke appeared to be skimming the page, his thumb in between his teeth as he read. Josuke lingered on the page, and Jotaro thought he could guess why.
Jotaro could just catch a hint of it, hidden by Josuke’s other hand where it rested on the file. White stone, jutting up out of the ground to cut against a background of grey-blue sea and an equally washed out sky. An old lighthouse—older than the town itself, supposedly—and their only true location of interest, and consequently their only true lead.
Josuke’s index finger tapped out an uneven rhythm as he flipped the page, and he hit the end of the file—sooner than he wanted to, judging by his small huff of annoyance.
“This really all they have for us?” Josuke asked as he flicked his eyes up. They were dark, an almost purple-black in the yellow light of the room’s lamp. Twin grey smudges, made deeper by the low light of the room, lined under his eyes; Jotaro supposed a long flight in the wrong direction could have that effect. “This is even worse than usual.”
He glanced briefly at Jotaro’s cigarette, frowning a bit deeper but not commenting. Jotaro suddenly remembered an email, written a little less than a year ago: he had told Josuke he was trying to quit.
But Jotaro was always either trying to quit or justifying to himself why he didn’t have to. A tense, drawn out divorce after a year of separation made the habit feel well-deserved, and the months following had presented no reason good enough to try and summon the effort to break it once again. He had passed thirty with little in the way of fanfare; now he felt set in his ways, and this was just one of them. Jotaro knew he could be worse things than a nicotine addict.
“The bodies, their location—it’s essentially all we have to go on at this point.” Jotaro ashed his cigarette as he spoke. “Small towns like this—they don’t always like to share information. Tourist season is coming up. We’re outsiders. Reasons like that.”
Josuke hummed in vague displeasure in response, flipping back a page and then another so he could tear a photograph from where it had been stapled to the paper underneath it. He ripped the page as he did so, flashing Jotaro a sheepish smile before looking back at the photo. “I’ll fix it.”
Jotaro nodded, taking one last drag of his cigarette before stamping it out with a little too much force. It was just too fucking humid with the rain; the moisture changed the weight of the smoke in his lungs, gave the drag something damp and unpleasant. Similar to the feeling of smoking out on a boat, but with none of the salt to temper the humidity.
Bereft of anything else to do, Jotaro felt his eyes drag back to Josuke like he knew they eventually would. He watched as Josuke worried his thumb between his teeth as he stared at the photo, something sympathetic—reflexive and troubled—catching in the lines of his expression.
“This is the first?” Josuke asked, and Jotaro nodded again. “It seems…” he trailed off, but Jotaro just waited. As far as casework went, this was just Josuke’s way.
Jotaro had called Josuke up on the odd case over the last several years; weird ones with inexplicable circumstances, occurrences just abnormal enough that Josuke in particular felt like a safe bet to have around, someone Jotaro could trust to piece him back together if things went sideways. He was no detective, not really; Josuke excelled more in quick and creative combat than he did pouring over files or parsing through evidence. He often still lacked patience, even if that explosive temper of his seemed to mellow with age.
A second set of eyes was just that, though, and Josuke had a natural intuition that served the more unusual cases well. He preferred to talk through his thoughts aloud, reaching conclusions as he puzzled his way through whatever happened to catch his eye, often unsure where he was going until his seemingly directionless questions got him there.
“It’s the least complex,” Josuke observed, “and it seems almost… unrefined.”
Jotaro nodded, frowning out at the rain as he put together his thoughts.
“Could mean he got his Stand recently,” because that was often how it worked. Some users understood their abilities intrinsically, intimately, but usually there were growing pains. Possibilities being tested out, nuances that could only be learned through experience. “Or he had never killed with it before. Maybe his Stand evolved—that’s more common than we used to think”—a headache to consider in its own right, but it fell firmly within the category of problems Jotaro refused to dedicate time to unless they found themselves in front of him directly.
Josuke flipped another page before ripping out a second photograph. It made Jotaro wince even though it really didn’t matter. But Josuke would do these things without thinking—break something apart with full confidence in his ability to put it back together.
“You’d think the wounds would be…” Josuke trailed off, voice gone contemplative. “More consistent?”
Jotaro hummed. “Maybe. We don’t really know how the ability manifests, just…“ Jotaro paused, looking at the photos held together in Josuke’s hand.
“Not really something that could be anything except a Stand, yeah?” Josuke finished for him.
Jotaro grunted in affirmation because that was really what it came down to—why both of them were here. There was evil all over, but this was the kind Jotaro concerned himself with, or made himself responsible for.
“Still… that little detail is going to bother me,” Josuke said conversationally, tossing the open file back onto the bed before lying back himself. He stared up at the ceiling, absent introspection crossing his expression, and his thoughts seemed further away than his words suggested. “Though, it’s not like we have enough to say that it is particularly unusual.”
He gave the photos one last glance, before letting his hand fall back near the file, the photos in his grasp taking on a muted glow. Then, it was just as he said—pages untorn and photographs stapled down as if they had never been anything otherwise.
Josuke hummed as his eyes slid shut, his whole body relaxing into the bed. “Could be a long one, I guess. We really might be here for a bit.”
Jotaro dipped his head in agreement, though Josuke couldn’t see it. And while Josuke’s words were true enough, his tone held an inflection like—anticipation, or a version of it, tempered by something else Jotaro couldn’t quite identify. He could read Josuke, but only up to a point, and often it felt that line was receding ever further away from him.
Jotaro could think to do nothing but let it.
It had rained through the night, but in the morning, the storm broke. The sky cracked open, and the sun spilled out white, slung low in the sky. It reflected off the ocean and the grey sand of the Atlantic, and everything sat bright, overexposed and brilliant, so that Jotaro had to tug down the brim of his hat just to make out Josuke’s displeased grimace.
Jotaro watched as he patted around his jacket pockets a moment, the motion looking somehow practiced and clumsy at once, before he pulled out a pair of round sunglasses with a muted flourish. Perching them on his nose, Josuke turned toward Jotaro, tilting his head just enough to look over round rims and give Jotaro a quick wink.
“I sort of expected something a bit moodier from a lighthouse, y’know?” Josuke waved his hand in a vague, absent gesture. “Dark and stormy or something—last night was a better fit. But I do like these shades.”
“…Yeah,” Jotaro replied, because sometimes even Josuke’s most basic chatter felt like a strange code, and if there was something he hoped Jotaro picked up on, he didn’t. He didn’t dwell, either, seeing no reason to play at being able to crack open Josuke’s speech into something he could readily comprehend. He lacked the capability outright, and more damning, he didn’t trust himself to reach an answer closer to the truth than what he’d want to hear.
“Well, let’s get going then,” Josuke declared, with just a breath less of energy, nodding toward the lone structure a little less than a kilometer up the beach, perched on an outcropping of rocks.
Jotaro dipped his chin, shedding his thoughts of Josuke in favor of focusing back on the matter at hand. It was simpler, in some ways, and somehow less dangerous too, though Jotaro was proficient enough at avoiding self-reflection to keep from acknowledging why.
As they walked toward the lighthouse, picking their way through the rock clusters that grew increasingly frequent, Jotaro considered the case as it stood.
Four victims. So far, only two had positive ID, but they both lacked significant interpersonal connections to justify prioritizing interviews. They were loner types, and furthermore outsiders to the area, which meant eventually he and Josuke would have to make their way into town proper, questioning the locals and hoping they had anything to add.
Jotaro resisted the urge to sigh.
Over the years, he had gone through the process of canvassing enough to feel capable, but he’d never be comfortable with it, and he knew his wariness toward strangers was unlikely to ever settle. Not only that, but the discomfort often proved mutual. He was too tall, too quiet, too serious—he made others uneasy without meaning to and didn’t know the unspoken code to alleviate that effect.
He was suddenly hit with a sharp sense of relief for Josuke’s presence, who understood the operations of connecting with unknown others even if Jotaro could tell he didn’t exactly enjoy it. But it remained one of Josuke’s natural talents—his enduring empathy, how easily he found himself in others—although it sometimes proved a double edged sword.
Josuke had never gotten out of the habit of having his heart on his sleeve, and the right combination of unfortunate circumstances could cast that quality in sharp relief. He would let his sensitivity bleed all over his own mood, sending him into a melancholy that Jotaro had never developed a strong sense for how to address. He was tender in a way Jotaro had never been, and Josuke was better for it, but—
Jotaro bit the inside of his lip.
He had somehow let his thoughts wander, the slide so natural he had not even recognized it as such. It was easy to try and justify—the details they had were scant, less than useful without a lead to cohere them to. Cases often began that way, unfocused and intangible, the supernatural character of the occurrences and the Foundation’s unofficial jurisdiction combining to leave even some of the most basic details of a case blank until Jotaro arrived in person.
But he knew it was also just that—a justification, or an excuse. Because regardless of his better judgment, when it came to Josuke, Jotaro had developed the bad habit of allowing himself to be distracted, and the worse one of pretending he didn’t know why.
He had watched his relationship with his wife whither away under a similar philosophy of interpersonal avoidance and self-directed ignorance, and he was apparently making no effort to change that pattern of behavior now. But this felt—more delicate, or at least his wariness more prescient. Jotaro knew that the unspoken weight between he and Josuke was not prelude to an argument but a rupture, a total collapse if Josuke so chose it, and Jotaro could hardly see any reason why he wouldn’t.
“Right at this group of rocks,” Josuke suddenly spoke, breaking Jotaro from his reverie. They had traveled more than halfway up the beach without his noticing. For fuck’s sake, he thought, if only because he couldn’t afford to say it out loud. “Here was the first body?”
He just needed out of his own head, or at least into a part of it that felt less precarious. Belatedly, he gave Josuke a curt nod. He turned toward the sea, using it to orient his understanding of the surrounding geography from the case notes.
“The second one was about twenty meters south, closer to the lighthouse.” He gestured toward where the shore between the ocean and the lighthouse could be seen. “The last two there.”
“Like they’re getting closer?”
“Could be,” Jotaro agreed, but the placement wasn’t certain. “Or it could be working toward the shore. The location itself could also be largely incidental. The coast in this area is rocky in general, so this stretch of beach is easier to navigate. We don’t know if the user wasn’t simply acting out of convenience.”
“It’s sorta a bit obvious for that,” Josuke replied. “Like, why choose the only place around with some big landmark? It makes the whole thing stand out more.”
Which was why they found themselves starting here, even if the connection was tenuous at best. As far as leads went, it was hardly one at all, and not likely to be useful unless they somehow caught the user in the act on location—also unlikely. The first body had appeared just over two months ago, the last three within the last several weeks. It was an odd—and more troubling, increasing—pattern. As the first two bodies had initially not been treated as related incidents, they were late to the case and with a dearth of knowledge to reflect it.
It meant treating every piece of information they did have as vital, which translated into assuming the Stand user was either smart enough to realize the conspicuous nature of the lighthouse and unwilling or unable to change locations, regardless, or too stupid and soon to fuck up as a result. Neither prospect was particularly promising; they had none other to hang their investigation on. Jotaro found himself in the same frustrating spiral Josuke had performed aloud at the hotel last night, spinning thin evidence until it petered out and having no option but to do it again.
Giving up—on both the mental exercise and the work of holding in his frustration—Jotaro exhaled a long, slow breath as he looked up and let the ocean catch his gaze. He let his eyes wander along the lines of far-off waves, content to just watch for a moment.
The water continued to reflect the light of the sun so that it was almost painful to look at, but Jotaro didn’t really mind. He imagined a boat, just a fleck of nothing barely visible on the horizon. Or maybe it wasn’t even there, instead so far out to sea, it was beyond finding its way home at all.
The ocean could do that, Jotaro knew—swallow human hubris and sink it down into nothing, not even a warning left. Get close enough to the shore, and reality found a different expression. The space was liminal, caught between two worlds, and it seemed to drag everything from both toward it, encouraging the worst extremes, the most deplorable contrasts; everything ugly could eventually find itself washed up on the sand.
“Jotaro,” Josuke called quietly. His hand hung awkwardly in the air, like he had considered reaching out, but had decided against doing so at the last moment.
Jotaro shook his head, frowning at himself. He needed to sleep more, or maybe just think less—at least about the things not right in front of him. He didn’t have a head for problems that weren’t tangible enough to touch—to hold down or break apart or crack open into a different, uglier problem—and usually he knew better than to dwell on such abstract, meaningless shit as though he did.
He shook his head again, trying to physically dislodge his dark mood; he was doing that too much, too—letting himself slip into self-pity because the process itself felt natural, almost correct: to sink low and then chastise himself for being there.
“We don’t know exactly what we’re looking for in here.” Jotaro cast his eyes to the lighthouse as he stated the obvious, pretending his momentary lapse had never occurred. “So keep your eyes open. Anything… abnormal, I suppose, even just a feeling. You know how it can get with these cases. Depending on how long it takes, we can go into town and conduct interviews afterwards.”
Josuke nodded, but he was looking at the lighthouse. “It looks kind of lonely up close, you know?”
“What?”
“You know, like—” Now Josuke sounded a bit flustered. “It’s like—the only thing on the horizon, right? That’s already kind of lonely. But up close, it’s worse. It’s worn down. You can see it.”
Jotaro cut Josuke a flat look.
“You done?” He held his expression, keeping it deliberately flat and blank until he let it break at the last moment, giving Josuke the barest smirk. Josuke rolled his eyes, understanding Jotaro’s humor for what it was and matching Jotaro’s small twitch of the lips with a wider grin of his own.
“Yeah, whatever, asshole. Come on already,” Josuke replied, waving a dismissive hand with an affected annoyance as he walked ahead.
“We should make our way up together, and then walk the perimeter afterward,” Jotaro said, his mood dropping back into something more appropriate for the task ahead, eyes following a line up from Josuke toward the lighthouse. Up close, the lighthouse didn’t seem more imposing so much as more present, its sovereignty over the surrounding landscape becoming total. Jotaro thought of their most recent victim, found only a few meters from where they stood. He wondered how she felt about dying here. “I don’t want us splitting up yet.”
“Feeling cautious?” Josuke asked, not disagreeing, but his head tilted back curiously from where he had made his way right up to the threshold, shoulder to the door.
Jotaro let his eyes trail up the tall, white column of the lighthouse, attention catching on the reflection of the sun against the glass structure for the light itself.
“Yes,” he said simply. Staring straight up like this, he felt something like vertigo, the sense of a free fall directly into the sky. The feeling swooped low in his stomach where it settled, casting his caution with a shadow, a muted dread.
He couldn’t think to attribute it to anything. The sun was too bright and the scene too mundane to inspire anything concrete. But he felt it like a strange warning, and he wanted Josuke on his guard. He wanted him in his line of sight, only a few paces away, even though by now Jotaro knew Josuke was more than capable of looking after himself.
Josuke only hummed an absent noise in response, waiting briefly for Jotaro to take his eyes from the crown of the lighthouse to follow him through its door and into the dark.
Even in the early morning sun, the inside was dark and just a bit damp, smelling like wood and salt and stone. There was a chill in the air, just enough to feel unpleasant, and the room itself was bare once Jotaro’s eyes adjusted. There was a window a few steps to the left, but the time of day and the angle of the sun meant it gave little light, essentially cast in shadow itself. Against the far side of the wall, a spiral staircase that wound itself up along the stone of the lighthouse began. Given its height, Jotaro thought the lighthouse couldn’t have more than two landings, and then above those the light itself. It was no longer in use, the case notes had detailed; Jotaro had no idea if it even still worked.
The only object of note was a framed drawing on the far wall. It was a botanical illustration, and Jotaro stepped closer to study it in the low light. The illustration depicted a short flower with a wide petal, and papaver somniferum was written delicately up the length of the stem. The name itself meant nothing to him, but Jotaro recognized the flower as a type of poppy. His mother used to grow a Japanese variety to keep in the house, or maybe she still did. Jotaro didn’t know.
The drawing was careful, precise. Judging by the paper, it was also incredibly old. Jotaro lacked the sort of aesthetic knowledge needed to judge the work as a piece of art, but the clarity of detail indicated a level of technical skill that he could appreciate. The illustration was unsigned, though that wasn’t unusual given the style and its subject.
Jotaro noted the drawing, but otherwise found the room unremarkable. It felt strange, but only in the way all old, empty places felt strange—like the past left to ferment, sitting around until it soured into something that could no longer be ignored or rotted down back into the ground. He’d find his way there long before this lighthouse did, Jotaro knew, but the thought failed to leave any particular impression on him.
“Spooky enough for you?” he asked, pulling out a pocket flashlight and tossing it to Josuke without thought. They probably wouldn’t need it. The lighthouse had more windows as the tower crawled its way up, but he knew Josuke preferred to have something in hand when an investigation hung open, wandering into empty air. Jotaro didn’t think they were walking into any sort of fight, but the unknown left in the absence of that possibility produced its own sort of disquiet.
“Mmm,” Josuke hummed, light and airy and at odds with its own slight echo against the walls, the way the sound came back more hollow, less real. “To be honest, I’m surprised there’s not a bunch of litter and beer cans lying around. This place has local delinquent hangout written all over it.”
“Speaking from experience?”
“Remind me again which one of us has been arrested.” Josuke paused, because he always chose drama over getting to the point. “Multiple times.”
Jotaro conceded the point with a light huff, before jerking his head toward the staircase to subtly direct them back on track. Josuke nodded his understanding, and Jotaro took point, leading them up the stairs with a firm but cautious step.
But this place was empty, he already knew.
On the first landing, Jotaro blinked, his eyes adjusting to the sudden influx of light from the window. At first, the visual input refused to register, and the exact nature of the abnormality of the sight took on the character of an optical illusion, as if cast by the sun, caught at a strange angle by the lighthouse itself.
The room was a perfect copy of the entry below—everything except the opening in the floor that the stairs drew down into. On the far side of the room hung the same illustration, the same careful script of latin marking the length of the flower. Papaver somniferum.
It was eerie, an uncomfortable affirmation of his earlier disquiet. Not because of a superficial similarity, but because it was—the same. Exactly, down to the feel of the room itself, as if they had unknowingly stumbled back into where they had started. Jotaro thought he could line up where scuff marks streaked unevenly across the walls, or trace the same crack through the windowpane as it climbed up the frame.
“Now this is kind of spooky.” Josuke walked over to the window, peering down before turning back to Jotaro and shrugging. Nothing unusual there, then. “You think it’s a Stand thing? Somehow related to the case?”
“Don’t know,” Jotaro replied. “Their connection would only be circumstantial at this point, but two independent Stands is also unlikely. The way users are drawn to each other, the timeframe… we would have to consider two users together. That would complicate things significantly, and at this point, would be based on an assumption.”
“Still…” Josuke trailed off, letting the hanging silence speak for him.
Jotaro grunted in response, taking a cautious lap of the room, but it had the same dead air as the rest of the lighthouse, and nothing changed. He jotted down a few short notes, feeling their insipid inability to reflect the oddness of the situation. There was nothing to record, not really, but Jotaro felt like he was somehow mischaracterizing the evidence regardless, refusing it the context that would allow it to produce meaning.
He stood silently, studying a familiar discoloration under the window. It was so uncannily the same, but it wasn’t enough to feel—more than that. There was no intention, no hint of an extraneous presence. Just the slight catching of an old record as it turned, hiccuping on the same slice of a melody. Jotaro didn’t like the barren feel of the walls, the empty quality of the air, but that’s all it was—an absence made conspicuous by the desire for intentionality.
“Should we try the next floor?” Josuke suggested, otherwise quiet as Jotaro made quick, short notes in his notepad. He had Star replicate the second sketch, but if the illustrations bore discrepancies, they were minute beyond the ability of his Stand to reproduce.
Jotaro nodded, but he paused just before the staircase, struck by an uncomfortable premonition. The notion of one floor after the other, the same again and then again, spiraling up toward eternity. Or the two of them would inexplicably spill back out on the ground floor, brought back to the beginning for no other reason than there was nowhere else to go. He could see both, superimposed, one atop the other, as if they could both hold true at once. The impossible made tangible, though Jotaro knew that wasn’t so strange.
“…Jotaro?” Josuke asked, but his voice was subdued. He tapped the side of his own head before nodding to him. “Care to share with the class?”
“Hm,” Jotaro said, not elaborating. Josuke looked patient, content to wait him out.
Jotaro’s eyes flicked back to the staircase, then Josuke. His eyes then slid past him, out the window. From this angle, the beach crawled up toward the horizon until it was cut off by the curve of the sea, the two falling together over the edge of the Earth.
The vision of an endless lighthouse remained in his mind, sharing a strange sort of kinship with the scene beyond the window. It felt real, or at least possible—familiar, like revisiting a notion he already understood.
Because time could be strange like that, Jotaro knew. It came back for you.
Hotel room to hotel room. One lecture hall to the next. And here he was again—somewhere, nowhere, on the edge of a town he’d never see again that was the same as every other town just like it; not in appearance, but in all the ways that were real. Places meant to make ghosts; little dots on an imaginary map that Jotaro had come to haunt.
He had the same nightmares. The same stilted conversations with his daughter, if she actually wanted to speak to him when he called. A scar on his hip from Egypt with a new scab cut through it from a Stand encounter just last month; wounds stacked atop each other, reinscribed with just enough difference that it felt like the exact same bullshit except Jotaro hadn’t even learned anything from it.
He was making the same mistakes, wearing down the same lines. Coming up against the edges of the same shadows and losing to their presence. As though he’d spent more than a decade wandering white-hot sand outside Cario, and he was just waiting for when he’d stumble back into the city to find himself still sprawled out on the concrete, heart in hand, counting the missed beats until he got up or died or somehow both, because somehow it always felt like both.
On and on again stretched out in front of Jotaro until—what? Until it stuck, he supposed, and that moment always seemed somewhere in the next few breaths, or inconceivably far away. He didn’t think he dreaded it anymore. Back in that endless past, he could find himself, injured and furious and impossibly young, and he could know better this time. He could reach inside his own ribs again to keep his grip from ever letting up. He could do for himself what no enemy ever seemed able to manage.
But it was an abstract notion, almost liminal. A series of recurring sensations—the feeling of a phantom desert sun on his neck; the smooth warmth of the muscle that lined the chambers of his heart; the spider web cracking of concrete against his back—beyond Jotaro’s ability to articulate to another. Hardly relevant to the moment at hand, and not at all to the case. So he didn’t attempt to explain it to Josuke, because he wouldn’t understand, and a part of Jotaro didn’t want him to.
“No.” Jotaro shook his head. “Just—nothing yet, no.”
Josuke didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t press. He frowned at Jotaro thoughtfully, but in the end he only nodded, not saying anything.
Jotaro led them up again.
He had been right; there were only two upper landings, and built into the ceiling of the second was the door that led up into the light.
And the room itself—
It was a child’s bedroom. At least, it in every way resembled one.
The furniture was a light wood, neat and clean. Well-worn and well-cared for, and all undersized in a way that Jotaro recognized from helping his wife put together a new bed set that Jolyne had practically begged for a couple years ago for her birthday. It all sat oddly in the room, corners matching up awkwardly with the rounded walls of the lighthouse, but otherwise the image was total, complete—a stark reproduction of childhood inscribed in careful arrangement.
Below them, the empty floors hung heavy with silent implication, and Jotaro tried to reconcile the two disparate portraits together. There was something so solid—present—about the room before them, but it structured a concept so totally belonging to the past that Jotaro found it illusory, lacking a reality at least the absences below didn’t feign.
The contrast evoked that same sensation as earlier—a pale glare reflecting off the ocean, difficult to look at, or a sudden vertigo, the realization of looking up into an unanticipated expanse.
“Whoa,” Josuke intoned behind him, drawing out the word. Jotaro nearly startled, so lost in thought he had almost forgotten Josuke’s presence. “This is definitely one of your weirder ones,” he continued, as if somehow the strangeness belonged to Jotaro.
“We should search the room,” Jotaro decided. He handed his notebook off to Star again, summoned without thought, and had his Stand start to sketch out the room from multiple angles, as detailed as possible.
He should have brought a camera, but he hadn’t thought—
“Do you—does this place feel familiar to you?”
“No.” It was an exact replica of a concept he knew, but there was nothing familiar about it in its own right. Even the furniture—its American sensibilities—telegraphed a foreignness that failed to align with his own childhood experiences. He looked at Josuke carefully. “Are you saying it does to you?”
“I don’t know, man,” Josuke said uneasily. “There’s just something almost… nostalgic about the whole thing. Reminds me of being a kid, I guess. It feels like I should know it.”
“Hm.”
“Still, this is weird as hell, right?” Josuke walked across the room, running an absent hand across the bed’s headboard. “It’s new, or really well-maintained. But there’s no way someone lives here.”
Jotaro nodded in agreement, walking over to the far side of the room. A small chest sat by a bookshelf filled with old books. Robinson Crusoe. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The Green Child.
He recognized the first two from a set of children’s classics the old man and Suzie Q had gifted Jolyne a few years ago. He had never heard of the third.
“Anyways,” Josuke continued, as if he had never stopped, “wish I brought my camera. I thought about it, but there’s no way it would have fit in my carry-on, and I don’t trust like that when it comes to baggage claim. They’re always losing my shit.”
Jotaro took a moment to process Josuke’s words, stalling out for a beat too long. “You’re into photography?”
When Jotaro looked over, Josuke was rubbing the back of his neck self-consciously, a small, awkward smile twitching at his lips. “Uh, sort of? I needed an arts elective a few terms ago, and I picked an intro class on a whim. I’ve kept up with it a bit.”
“I see,” Jotaro said, because he wasn’t sure what else to say.
“It’s not like—super useful, or anything—”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Jotaro cut him off sharply, surprising even himself. “Still, what is it about the room? I can have Star replicate it in a sketch.”
Josuke paused, either trying to assess his answer or just the words to articulate it. “It’s—difficult to say. I’m… not super sure what it is, exactly. It’s something about the composition, or the inconsistencies. Maybe both together. It draws you in, you know? I’d want to try to capture that—the feeling of it.”
Jotaro blinked. He wasn’t really sure he understood, but Josuke seemed to believe he would. He cast a quick look around the room, attempting to tell if he felt drawn, or pulled, toward anything. Any response to the room greater than the sum of its contents. He mostly felt like he wanted to leave.
“I don’t have your artistic sensibilities,” Jotaro said honestly. For some reason, this made Josuke flush, a deep crimson that was no longer easy to draw out of him. Jotaro’s lips twitched. He hadn’t been teasing Josuke initially, but he almost felt the urge to do so now. He tampered it easily enough.
There were—limits to what Josuke wanted from Jotaro, and he knew one wrong step and Josuke might shut down completely. It was a new dimension to a boy Jotaro remembered as primarily reactive, volatile and bright, honest to his core in all his responses. He still wasn’t entirely sure what had changed, and he didn’t like the hypotheses that came to mind when he allowed himself to think about it.
“Oh, fuck off,” Josuke mumbled, the words lacking heat as he turned in a show of inspecting the different knick-knacks that lined a small desk near the bed.
Jotaro finally let his expression break into a small smirk, the action infinitely easier now that there was no one to see it. But it felt too fond, regardless, like taking too much.
“We should check out the light,” Jotaro decided, in an effort to redirect his thoughts.
Josuke whipped around, all embarrassment disappeared. “Oh, fuck yeah.” In his impatience, he brought out Crazy Diamond, already having the Stand get to work on the ceiling’s hatch, opening it with ease and hastily pulling down the stairs latched to it. “I won’t lie, this is the part I really came for.”
Jotaro shot him a bemused look. “You’ve never been in a lighthouse before?”
“We’re not all like—sailors, or whatever, dude. Standing on the beach and brooding and shit.” Josuke waved a hand absently as he peered up through the hatchway, playing as though his words were thoughtless, not meant to rile. But Josuke had always been a shit actor.
Jotaro played along regardless. “Is that what you think I do?”
“It isn’t?” Josuke asked innocently.
“Brat,” Jotaro said, rolling his eyes to give Josuke the reaction he wanted. Josuke grinned, shooting him a cheeky wink before turning around and making his way up the ladder.
Jotaro followed right after, pushing himself up and onto the platform that surrounded the room that housed the light. The platform crawled a narrow path around the structure, with only an old railing separating the walkway from open air. In the center, the light rose up to crown the lighthouse. Even in its disuse, the light had an air to it—this was the center of the world.
“Can we go inside?” Josuke immediately asked.
Jotaro considered the question, peering into the glass casing that enclosed the light. It was smaller than most he’d seen—older, too. “You’ll have to find the latch for the door, and then you’ll need to break the lock.”
Josuke waved off the comment, wandering around the platform to find what he was looking for. Jotaro heard a high metal clang, and then the sound of old hinges, disturbed after a long period of remaining static.
“You coming?” Josuke called, sounding impatient.
“Go on ahead, Josuke,” Jotaro responded. He didn’t have any particular aversion to small spaces, but the fresh, saline air was doing wonders for the pounding behind his eyes, and he wanted to stay with it a moment. He could also use a moment alone.
Josuke didn’t reply, but Jotaro heard the sound of ambiguous clanking that suggested he had found his way inside the lantern room.
Turning toward the ocean, Jotaro leant against the rail.
He briefly considered a cigarette, but discarded the notion just as quickly, not wanting to waste one, as he planned on having them leave as soon as Josuke was done having his fun. He needed to organize his thoughts, but he couldn’t quite feel at ease enough to do so now. They had too much new data, and no easy paths for understanding it. Somehow, the case appeared even more opaque.
Jotaro let his thoughts wander off, mind going blank as he stared out over the Atlantic. The sun shone down hot overhead, but a breeze accompanied the elevation and brought with it a decent chill. Together, the two weren’t uncomfortable, but it made it impossible to feel a true equilibrium. It was one and then the other, each taking its turn to steal his attention and overwrite the former before capitulating to the next—a process of cataloguing similar sensations over and then again as his body memorized and forgot and then memorized anew.
He let his eyes trace along the sea, leaning himself more completely against the rail. The water had taken on a blue-green cast, deepening as it stretched out toward the horizon. Calm settled in, and he let his mind empty until it was just the sound of the waves, the hint of green in the water. He was nothing but sensory data, singularly tangible. It was something close to peace, and Jotaro let it stretch out for as long as it would exist.
A loud bang of metal on metal sounded behind him, and Jotaro felt the queasy drop of his body becoming aware of his mind once more.
“You didn’t want to see inside the light?” Josuke asked as he settled beside Jotaro on the railing. The words had an ironic lilt to them, and Jotaro got the sense that Josuke wasn’t really looking for an answer to his question, though by the careful look in his eye, he was asking something.
“They all pretty much look the same on the inside,” Jotaro replied, taking Josuke’s question at face value because in the absence of anything else, it was easy to fall back on.
“I’ll keep that in mind next time I get the opportunity to compare.”
Jotaro let his shoulders drop just a fraction, settling into the light conversation for a span before suggesting they leave.
“They’re not so common anymore, old ones like this. Might be a while.”
“Damn,” Josuke sighed. “Would have been nice to squeeze one in.”
“Busy schedule coming up, then?”
A pause stretched out between them before Josuke laughed awkwardly and began tapping an unsteady finger against the railing. “Not much. I’m not—I don’t. You know I don’t keep too busy,” he emphasized unnaturally, giving Jotaro a significant look. “No crazy plans or anything.”
Not much, a non-answer. Basically nothing. Jotaro would have rather Josuke said no outright, or refused to say anything. At least then it wouldn’t feel like Josuke was somehow pitying him when he said these things, clamming up with a sort of abstract awkwardness that even Jotaro knew how to read: stop asking .
“I see,” Jotaro echoed from before, somehow incapable of anything more substantive. He hated empty, pointless talk, but it seemed to be all he could manage these days.
“And you?” Josuke asked stiffly, his index finger still playing out its irregular rhythm. He fidgeted, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, cutting a quick glance toward Jotaro and then looking away again.
His discomfort felt painfully present, and its transparency made Jotaro feel somewhat ill. Were things between them that fucking bad?
Jotaro was well-acquainted with his own sorry excuses, but in moments like this, he could hardly understand Josuke’s rationalizations for continuing to join him on cases. If Josuke was really so desperate for Stand related work, Jotaro was sure the Foundation would let him take on cases alone. Field agents were spread thin as it was, and Josuke had more than proven himself an asset in casework. Jotaro knew this, but he was loath to suggest it. And perhaps there were other independent agents they could pair Josuke with, but Jotaro wanted that even less.
He could justify it as a general anxiety regarding Josuke’s safety, but why lie to himself? He was selfish, possessive, implicating himself in own nonaction and too aware of his guilt not to feel it as bile rising in his throat. He knew the truth, no matter how he tried to dress it up. He wanted Josuke with him. He wanted—
Fucking hell. He needed a cigarette, and then a metal pipe to the softest part of his brain.
“About the same,” Jotaro replied because this, at least, he understood. The conversation was dead before it really started; he could at least do it the kindness of not dragging the corpse around trying to pretend otherwise. “We should head back.” He pushed himself off the railing, back toward the ladder. “There’s still time to go into town.”
“Yeah.” Josuke’s voice sounded strange, and Jotaro wanted to turn around, see if he could understand his expression well enough to guess at what exactly he was hearing. But he didn’t; he couldn’t justify the impulse, and even if he could read Josuke well enough to tell, he knew better than to think he’d like what he’d see, regardless.
Taken in reverse, the composition of the lighthouse was no less disquieting, and it made Jotaro eager to leave already, find somewhere he could sit down and begin to properly examine his notes. He ushered Josuke along, rushing him where he seemed inclined to linger.
“Yeah, yeah,” Josuke swatted at him absently, finally moving away from where he had wandered back over to the desk and toward the stairs. They took the steps without pause.
Back outside, Jotaro felt better, even compared to perched out on the lighthouse’s walkway. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and motioned for Josuke to follow him back up the beach, taking the route around the lighthouse so they could get a sense of the perimeter.
Josuke gave him a reflexive smile, smaller than usual and almost shy, and something in Jotaro relaxed, though all he could manage in response was a light tug on the brim of his hat, casting his eyes away and toward the rocks.
As the day bled forward, high tide had come in and left again, and in its wake were a number of newly formed tide pools they had to pick their way around in addition to the rocks. Josuke hugged the shore, apparently interested in taking his time and peering into as many as they crossed. He had completely shaken off his discomfort from before, taken in by the next curiosity easily enough. But Jotaro had always thought of that as Josuke’s way—exactly as adaptable as his Stand would suggest.
Josuke crouched down by a particularly large tide pool, and Jotaro was quietly pleased for the lingering. His attention was caught between the pools and Josuke’s own fascination with them, leaning directly over the water until the light from the sun reflected in his eyes, turning them a near violet. Jotaro was struck with that same troubling thought from earlier—every buried thing eventually washed up on shore. Exposed, Jotaro knew, for whoever happened to find it.
Jotaro looked away, focusing on the tide pool at his feet. It had a vibrancy, even in the washed-out palette of late winter. A self-made world, thrumming with its own existence.
“They’re so different from the tide pools outside Morioh.”
“It’s the Atlantic,” Jotaro said automatically. “And we’re further north.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a jerk of movement and then a flash of silver and pink. By the time he realized his mistake—he had reached out just with his hand, slow and half a second too late—Crazy Diamond was already adjusting Josuke on his perch, a few centimeters back from his position where he had nearly fallen in.
“Watch it, kid.” He sounded too stern, even to himself, but he continued, the thought itself belated, “Transition ecosystems are delicate. You’d fuck it up falling in.”
Josuke snorted. “Thanks for the concern.” Then his mouth twisted down, and Jotaro caught the split second hesitation before he added, “And don’t call me kid.”
Jotaro felt his teeth click shut and could only hope the accompanying sound wasn’t audible to Josuke. He wanted to grab his hat again, resisting only because Josuke was looking right at him and not half as oblivious as he sometimes liked to pretend to be. “Sorry,” Jotaro mumbled, meaning it, though he wasn’t sure if it was for Josuke’s sake or his own. “Habit.”
Josuke huffed, mood changing on a dime, giving Jotaro a lopsided smile just a little too charming to be casual. He rubbed the back of his neck, clearly uncomfortable again. “Don’t worry about it. Overreacted, I s'pose.”
Jotaro nodded, a curt jerk of his head. He cast his eyes down the beach, back toward town. He didn’t really trust himself to say anything else, wasn’t sure what he would muster up even if he did.
From behind him, he heard Josuke sigh. “I guess we should move on already. Might as well get lunch.”
He checked his watch, and it was nearing one. Lunch made as much sense as any other next step, and Jotaro had gotten into the habit of foregoing breakfast in favor of coffee since he was old enough to make the switch. Food was probably the right call, though Jotaro couldn’t say for sure he was hungry. He didn’t have much of an appetite these days, and he mostly relied on routine to dictate the schedule of his meals.
Again, Jotaro only jerked his head in agreement.
As he stood from his crouch, Josuke gave him an assessing look, eyes openly tracing over his face as he searched for something. But he didn’t seem to find it, and he didn’t say anything, much less whatever it was he was looking for, instead walking past Jotaro to lead the way back up the beach. Taking the reprieve whether it was consciously offered or not, Jotaro trailed a step behind, hands shoved in his pockets, eyes caught between the movement of Josuke’s shoulders and the skyline, his thoughts feeling far away, strung out on the wind.
Lunch found them in a small, washed out diner, staring down at menus likely older than both of them combined.
Jotaro didn’t care for American fare, but he was familiar with it to the point that he could pick something absently from the menu, setting it aside quickly in favor of pulling out his notepad from earlier. He liked to do periodic reviews of his notes, even before the day was over, marking things off or adding minor addendums as he began to work his way more systematically through his observations.
“Anything worthwhile?” Josuke asked as he continued to study the menu, reading down one side before flipping it over and repeating the action. This was his second run through the process, as if the meager options might morph themselves into something more appealing if he persisted in his stubborn displeasure with the menu’s offerings.
“Just give up and get a burger,” Jotaro said. He tapped his pen against the table, pretending not to notice Josuke’s light flush. “Anyways—it’s hard to say. There’s no real evidence of anything, but we can’t dismiss it as a place of interest. It could be as simple as the lighthouse itself attracting the user, with that determining the geography of the case.”
“Weird attracts weird?”
“Something like that,” Jotaro agreed dryly. “We saw it in Morioh, too. These things can start to get recursive, especially without a known origin point. Do certain locations attract Stand users, or does a place change in response to a high concentration of Stand energy? Places with a higher density of users always end up different for it. We might as well be classified as an invasive species.” Jotaro leveled Josuke with a flat look. “If I recall correctly, you and your friends certainly did a number on the local topography of Morioh.”
Josuke made a noise of surprised indignation, gearing up to argue the point.
“Regardless, I don’t think we should prioritize exact causality here,” Jotaro continued smoothly. “It’s enough that the lighthouse was conspicuous outside of just its general location. It is unusual, and that leaves it as our best lead.”
“Definitely. We should ask around about it while we’re out on interviews this afternoon,” Josuke suggested, setting aside the menu to prop his elbows on the table. He steepled his hands and then rested his chin on them, the pose somehow affected and natural at once, a strange and paradoxical grace that Josuke excelled at. “Place was creepy as hell, so I’m sure locals have to shit to say about it.”
Jotaro snorted, not really meaning to.
“Good idea.” He glanced back down at his notes. He felt his eyebrows draw together, considering the lighthouse in light of their previous information. “The bodies—they’re also abnormal, but it doesn’t fit well. Or I don’t see how it does. All of our information right now is circumstantial to each other.”
At the mention of the victims, Josuke frowned, his expression taking on a more introspective shade. Without speaking, Josuke lifted his chin and reached out a hand, plucking the notebook from Jotaro’s grasp without asking.
Not much of a notetaker himself, Josuke liked to look over Jotaro’s notes and double down on any observations that had also stuck out to him. It was technically somewhat sloppy, and it meant that Jotaro always wrote up the case report, but he found he didn’t mind on either account. It was a good system for them—Jotaro being detail-oriented and Josuke’s natural intuition—with details they both noticed usually having more relevance than often first seemed true. It worked, this kind of partnership. It felt natural, or at least Jotaro thought so.
Josuke had never commented on the matter one way or the other—was conspicuously reticent on the subject—but he never turned down the Foundation when Jotaro had them reach out to him, so he supposed that had to be answer enough on its own.
With Jotaro’s pen—also stolen without comment—Josuke underlined a few points, humming softly as he flipped through the pages, going through the process twice over. When he handed the notepad back, Jotaro doubled back himself, and he found his attention snagging on a short phrase, underlined and then starred for extra emphasis: furniture has been moved recently.
When he looked up, Josuke was already staring at him. “That’s what all that scuffing around the upper room was, right? On the floor and along the walls. And there were lighter patches on the walls, where stuff used to be.”
Jotaro nodded. He stared down at his notes in quiet thought, mumbling off an absent “same as him” when a waitress came by to collect their orders. He hadn’t actually heard what Josuke finally settled on, but Jotaro didn’t really care what he ate.
Snagging his pen back from Josuke, he tapped it lightly against the notepad as he thought.
“It was—uneven, too,” Jotaro decided. “Like there wasn’t the right furniture for how the scuffing appeared. Or… there used to be more. It had all been moved around a lot. It’s difficult to say.”
“This is all really fucking weird,” Josuke concluded, and Jotaro could only nod in agreement. There were too many little oddities, none of them adding up, nothing cohering into anything meaningful.
“I think we’ll need to go back,” Jotaro decided, though he wasn’t sure exactly why. They had been thorough, and it wasn’t an ideal place to try and stake out. They could theoretically try to wait out the Stand user, see if they got lucky if he wandered back, but that felt too sloppy, too dependent on chance. But he couldn’t shake the feeling, like he missed something, or he needed to see it again, as though—
“Yeah,” Josuke agreed easily, but he was staring out the window, towards the beach, though it wasn’t visible from here. “Yeah, I think so too. I want to go back.”
A silence settled in after Josuke’s words, heavy and strange, and when their food came, they ate quickly without speaking.
Jotaro wasn’t proud of it, but when Josuke offered to take the initial canvassing detail—walking into shops, putting out feelers—Jotaro took the proffered out for what it was and found a place to sit outside with his notes again. He had a cigarette perched between his lips—his one for the day, he had already decided—and was comparing the small additions and emphases that Josuke made with his own impressions so far.
He felt like he was looking at an answer that he couldn’t yet conceptualize, some combination of mundanity and peculiarity caught together at the intersection of their own oddities, obscuring something simple. Basic.
But try as he might, Jotaro could only reach the same conclusion again: they had to go back. There was something they were missing, or some other factor that had yet to make itself known.
And the bodies—they didn’t fit in at all. Or the lighthouse didn’t. It felt like two competing sets of evidence, juxtaposed in such a way that they both came out more opaque for the comparison.
A little more than an hour later, Josuke caught him still staring at his notes, thoughts circling aimlessly. He sat beside Jotaro without a word and two to-go cups of coffee in hand. He settled in for a moment, passing off a coffee and then just staring off into nothing, seeming to decompress. After a moment, Josuke sat back up, turning to Jotaro more energetically, and he gave a run down of what he learned. His account only confirmed Jotaro’s suspicions, or at least reaffirmed his instinct for their next move.
“They both were seen around the lighthouse. Multiple times,” Josuke explained as he dug around his pockets for the case photos, ripped out from the file once again. He pulled out the two most recent victims, handing both pictures to Jotaro. He tapped one. “This woman, our most recent one. Apparently she was really into portrait sketches and stuff, you know the type.” Jotaro didn’t. “But she’d spend all day trying to get down the lighthouse from different angles; she talked to the barista”—he lifted his cup in the air and gave it a slight shake for emphasis— “about it a few times before she went missing.”
Jotaro nodded. “And the other?”
Josuke paused, flipping to a different photo. “Then, our other one. He’s a little harder to be certain. Not a lot of people wanted to admit to having seen him around, but I could tell they recognized him. He was a bit of a drifter, or something like that. Big backpack, kind of wild looking. But some local punk said he thought he spent a few days squatting at the lighthouse before moving on.”
“Some local punk, huh?”
“Oh, this again? Got something against the youth, old man?”
“Thirty comes quicker than you expect, Josuke,” Jotaro replied, removing the lid from his coffee to drink. It was just on the side of too hot, and Jotaro enjoyed the slight scorch as he took a long sip. “We can compare notes on the youth when you finally catch up.”
“Yeah, yeah.” The words were dismissive, but under them was something almost sour, like Jotaro had struck a nerve without even realizing.
Jotaro bit the inside of his lip, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t understand his misstep well enough to address it. Instead, he considered their next move.
The investigation was at a natural lull, at least in terms of the day’s field work. They could head by the general store, then find another underwhelming restaurant for dinner. Back at the hotel, Jotaro would need to organize their current thoughts into something coherent enough for an initial check in with the Foundation. He needed to catch up on his work email, too. And Josuke was in the middle of his semester; no doubt he had coursework he was neglecting.
Case work was essentially a side gig, but it always felt like sticking another full time job into a space that could hardly accommodate it. They would both be working well into the night, only to wake up the next day with the feeling of only giving half their attention to the work that truly mattered. But right now, they were spinning wheels. With some cases, the most valuable resource was time. They needed at least the night to process what they had unearthed; then, they could tackle the beach from a more effective angle.
“We should get back soon,” Jotaro decided, preparing to stand. He looked briefly to Josuke, who was staring down at his coffee, looking tired. Jotaro softened. “This was good work, Josuke.”
When Josuke looked up, his smile carried the same fatigue as his eyes, but Jotaro thought it still looked real enough.
That night Jotaro laid the pictures of their victims out across the small table that sat shoved into the corner of their room. He felt his brow pinch as he considered them. Their first victim, two months ago: they had a positive ID, autopsy notes, and a rough timeline of his time in the town courtesy of the local police. For the remaining victims, they had an uneven combination of the three for each, rendering even a basic timetable nonexistent.
The Foundation confirmed they would pass along more information as they obtained it, but their assistance always relied on the order of their priorities and their rapport with local authorities, and Jotaro knew this sort of case would find itself on the lower end of the scale on both accounts.
“None of the bodies were actually in the lighthouse, just the general area,” Jotaro stated aloud, catching Josuke’s attention from where he was staring absently out the window. The sun was just below the horizon, the sky streaked purple. There were clouds hanging heavy in the distance, and Jotaro briefly wondered if it would rain again.
“And we can only be kinda sure that one of the victims was ever even inside it.” Josuke picked up his line of thought easily.
Jotaro stared down at the photos. It was the first one that caught his attention again.
“Our first guy,” he finally said. “If we treat the lighthouse as a point of origin, he got the farthest. He was halfway up the beach before he collapsed.”
Josuke’s eyes widened. “You think they were—running?”
Jotaro nodded, rubbing his brow as he thought. “His liver was nearly crushed, but that wouldn’t kill him instantly. And the resulting heart attack… that could have been from the shock.” Jotaro tapped a finger against the table, near where the other photographs remained. “The other three had much more extensive wounds. Their organs forcibly removed. Why the difference? Even discounting the question of scale, the lack of removal—it almost feels like a different M.O.”
“If they’re running, maybe he just got away quicker?” Josuke suggested, his eyes trained on the photos as well. “If his liver was crushed, then removal could have been the next step.”
“It’s possible,” Jotaro conceded. “But the actual sites around the removed organs were undamaged. They were practically cauterized, though maybe interrupting the… process would account for the disparity.”
“Let’s go with that, for now. But then, how are non-Stand users putting up any fight at all?” Josuke asked, voicing the question that had lingered unspoken. “Enough to create this amount of variance? Or are we assuming they are users?”
Jotaro let out a harsh rush of air. “We just don’t know enough yet.” He rubbed a hand against his brow, trying to press back against the beginnings of a tension headache. “It might be good to consider another sweep of the town, checking with the locals again. Broaden our line of questioning.”
“Ugh.” Josuke leaned back, hanging his head over the back of his chair and staring up at the ceiling. “I hate that you’re right.”
Jotaro shot him a sympathetic look. Josuke really had done a lot today. “I’ll take point next time.”
Josuke waved a hand, leaning his chair back precariously on two legs as he did so. “S’not really a big deal. I know you hate that shit, too.”
Which was true enough, but Jotaro didn’t keep Josuke around just to hand off the things he didn’t want to do himself. “We’ll figure it out tomorrow,” he said instead. “There’s nothing else for us to do about it tonight.”
Josuke let his chair fall forward, the legs thudding softly against the floor. Jotaro wondered if they had downstairs neighbors. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
He didn’t seem inclined to say anything else, but he didn’t move either, eyes still trained on the evidence laid out before them.
A palatable silence filled the space between them, and Jotaro cast around, trying to grasp at—something. Josuke could get maudlin when cases stalled out, and although it had only been a little more than a day, their progress was worse than usual. They could both use a break, and Josuke a distraction.
“How’s school going?” He settled on, underwhelming, the question hanging in the air just as awkwardly as the silence.
“Oh, you know,” Josuke replied with a wave of his hand, except Jotaro didn’t. When it came to Josuke, he felt like he knew very little, and he couldn’t help but to ascribe it to Josuke’s own intentions. He was cagey, holding himself at a distance that Jotaro found difficult to trace back to a particular source. At some point he had put down an invisible line in the sand, and Jotaro felt clumsy, guilty, constantly stumbling into it. But he never pulled back entirely—found ways to justify to himself why he shouldn’t—and for that he felt even worse.
“Hm,” Jotaro said in response, a moment too late, with nothing else coming to him.
“I’m not—“ Josuke shrugged, self-conscious. “I’m no academic, but I’ll graduate. And who knows what, then? I don’t have strong feelings about what I do next, and besides Stand stuff, I’m not really good at anything in particular.” He cast his eyes to the side, out the window. “Other than these cases, I feel like I don’t really—do much. Like meaningful shit.”
When he looked back at Jotaro, there was something so earnest, so honest, in his expression. He wanted Jotaro to understand something, but Josuke’s words settled in his lungs like lead.
“Don’t say that,” Jotaro ordered instantly.
Josuke startled back, almost recoiling. “I’m—sorry. That was—sorry.”
“I—don’t apologize.” He tried to redirect his response, the harsh, reflexive no at what Josuke implied, as if there was anything worthwhile to be had from cobbling together an existence between one case and the next. But he took pains to soften his tone, though he was hardly proficient at it. “You’re smart, Josuke,” Jotaro said honestly. “Don’t feel like you need to—prove anything. Or make decisions based on preconceived expectations. Chasing down Stand users, it isn’t everything. Don’t live your life like it is.”
The words felt awkward in his mouth, primarily because he felt like he no longer knew Josuke well enough to discern the source of his self-deprecation, and knew it all made him sound like a massive hypocrite on top of even that. Ultimately, he couldn’t tell Josuke what to do, but he couldn’t bear the thought of Josuke making the same mistakes as him, and for—what?
Meaningful had come to feel like empty philosophy to Jotaro, or a vacant promise, and Jotaro didn’t want Josuke to rest everything on something so fragile as that.
Josuke huffed a humorless noise, sagging even further into his hunched posture, looking away again. “Yeah, I guess.”
Jotaro grimaced, thankful Josuke had at least turned back to staring out the window. He remembered that summer, playing at being a mentor figure to Josuke, trying to guide him into the world of Stands in a way that would balance the knife of keeping him safe and keeping him right in the head, because it was so easy to fall off the edge of either. Either dead or so thoroughly picked apart from the experience, the difference felt negligible.
But Jotaro had chipped away at the illusion of his wisdom with his own hands, a steady degradation spun out across the years, and now they were here, with the confirmation that there was very little left to be said between them if there wasn’t even that.
On the table, the photographs stared back up at him, a silent accusation. Jotaro reopened his notebook, bereft of anything else to do, and began the process of working through the evidence again. Josuke mumbled something about coursework, pulling a notebook and a stack of textbooks from his bag, and they spent the next few hours working together in silence, though it could hardly be called comfortable.
That night, Jotaro dreamed of the lighthouse, or its inverse, swallowed into the ground.
He wandered down its steps because he wanted to know if that hatch was still there, if there was any reason to lead to a light that had no use. He guided himself with a palm against the wall, the light of the open door disappearing completely after the first floor. It smelled like salt and stone and the ground; as he travelled down further, the rough cobblestone against his hand began to smooth. It felt like losing data—meaning—the context he could use to remember where he was, but he didn't stop. He wanted to know.
The steps continued downward, and Jotaro never questioned their depth, even as the miasma of salt and stone disappeared and the stench of earth overwhelmed his senses.
He woke up when dirt filled his lungs as the lighthouse collapsed in on itself, taking the beach with it.
Lying in the dark, his breathing was uneven; he still felt like he was choking up sand. He thought he could reach down his throat, pull pieces of the lighthouse from his lungs, find that he brought it all with him. He had the strange and powerful urge to return to the beach—to see what was still there. He ignored it, though it felt as though it took more from him that it should have, and the simple act of keeping still drained him as much as the dream.
In the bed next to his, Josuke slept on his side, facing toward the door. Jotaro watched the slow rise and fall of his shoulders, and he matched his breathing to it reflexively. His lungs began to clear; the phantom stench of salt—the beach and the lighthouse and the past—finally dissipated.
Eventually, he turned over, staring out the window at the passage of night until the first hints of dawn broke unevenly across the sky, scattered by the clouds. Soon after, it began to rain again.
Jotaro drank his morning coffee as he watched the increasing downpour take over the sky outside. Heavy lines of water streaked down the hotel window, washing out everything into a series of abstractions and muted colors.
On a hunch, Jotaro had called the Speedwagon Foundation the night before and requested a detailed account of missing persons and suspicious deaths near the town, particularly those tied, even precariously, to the beach. While Josuke still slept, Jotaro had gone downstairs to receive the fax, which also included a more comprehensive autopsy report of the third body. In terms of raw page numbers, their case information had tripled.
Between the weather and the new paperwork to digest, Jotaro decided to postpone their second trip to the lighthouse, and he and Josuke holed up around the room’s small table to try to puzzle their way through what they had so far.
“What’s it look like?”
“Eight missing persons in the last ten years. Six inexplicable deaths, though there was a two year gap between the last one and our set of victims. Three of each can be tied to the beach. Four, if you include the body found out past the sandbar.”
“And how does that stack up?”
“For a place this size?” Jotaro pushed back from the table, leaning back as he briefly removed his hat to run a hand through his hair. It was getting long in the front again. “Unusual but not extreme. It’s also much more mild than the timeline for our current victim pattern.”
But something else was bothering him. He flipped over one of their photos, where Josuke had written his sparse, messy notes from the interviews.
drifters not unusual—grocer
“It would be better if we could have a sense of people traveling through here. Drifters, hitchhikers, the like.”
Josuke’s eyebrows shot up. “You think there are more than we know about?”
“Could be. It’s likely, all things considered.” Jotaro shrugged. “But it would be best if we could know for sure.”
“And could that account for the difference in victim density?”
Jotaro rubbed a rough thumb across his bottom lip. “If we accept that, then the variances in mutilation can’t be ascribed to inexperience. We’d have to reject that in favor of some other factor, although the new autopsy information does more to confirm it. But having two incompatible theories isn’t too bad. It means we can judge new evidence in relation to both.”
Josuke let out a long, exaggerated sigh. “So, just to sum up: we still only have half the information we need, we can’t confirm anything about the user or his familiarity with his Stand, and we still haven’t factored in the lighthouse.”
“We’re also out of coffee,” Jotaro added, tone as dry as possible.
Slumping over, Josuke collapsed onto the table, propping his head up on crossed arms. “I think this one has us beat, Jotaro.” He cast a conspiratorial look his way. “We could quit while we’re ahead. We’ve still got tea, even if it's some garbage American brand.”
“Hm,” Jotaro replied, noncommittal, as though considering the offer.
Josuke grinned, lopsided and reflexive, sometimes so easy to please. “I thought that might convince you.” He leaned in, leveling Jotaro with a mock-serious stare. “But I can sweeten the deal.”
Jotaro raised one eyebrow.
He leaned closer, speaking in a stage whisper. His eyes were charmingly bright, his smile endearingly warm. “I’m an expert at making tea from shit brands.” He reached a hand out, and it stuttered slightly near Jotaro’s on the table, before he knocked a deliberate two taps with his knuckles against the wood as he stood, punctuating his words with his restless energy. “So I’ll be the one to make it. Just sit tight. We need a break anyway.”
They lapsed into silence as Josuke prepared the tea—it was black, though they both preferred green. Their only option to heat the water was the room’s coffeemaker. Josuke liked a bit of honey, and there was only sugar.
But a comfortable lull settled over the room, finding its place in the near quiet. Jotaro simply sat and enjoyed it for a moment, feeling an unusual peace. He knew better than to let his thoughts wander to consider if Josuke felt it, too.
They took a true break soon after as Josuke volunteered to brave the rain in order to go pick up some food and more ground coffee for the room. Josuke’s jittery leg-bouncing, his tapping fingers—Jotaro figured he just needed time out of the hotel. He got antsy when cases stalled, or when they couldn’t immediately put an already decided plan into action. Letting him work off a little energy was in both their best interests.
“Whatcha want? I don’t think I can do diner food again, so I was gonna see if there’s anything worthwhile at the grocer.”
“Whatever’s fine,” Jotaro replied, exiting the bathroom with the handles of both their mugs hooked inside his index finger. He leant against the doorframe as they spoke, crossing his arms, careful not to jostle the mugs. “Just get me what you get yourself.”
Josuke made a face, though Jotaro couldn’t imagine about what. When Jotaro said nothing else, he merely sighed, turning away to locate his jacket (which had somehow made its way under his bed).
Meanwhile, Jotaro found the fresh set of hand towels, laying one out on the dresser to set their mugs on to dry. Hotel living was so… confined, Jotaro thought, but there was an unconscious sort of domesticity to the current scene that made his chest ache. It was almost lonelier for the realization that this sort of cohabitation was something he missed, and that it wasn’t really his to claim even now.
Lonelier, and perhaps worse things. For transposing that feeling onto Josuke without his knowledge, and then for taking solace in it regardless. It was a one-sided comfort, but Jotaro soaked relief from it nonetheless, resigned to the notion that even his most superficial intimacies were stolen indulgences, and thus polluted from even before the moment of their inception.
Josuke stood, triumphant and ignorant, holding his jacket in hand. Jotaro handed him his own scarf; he had come underprepared for the weather.
“Okay, I’ll be back then,” Josuke said at the door, tossing an absent wave over his shoulder. But then he caught his foot between the frame and the swinging door before it fully shut, turning back around and poking his head back into the room. He jabbed a finger in Jotaro’s direction. “Don’t do any work while I’m out.” He paused, eyes narrowing. “And I’ll know if you do anyway and then lie about it, so don’t try it.”
He didn’t wait for an answer, the door clicking quietly behind him as he left.
While Josuke was gone, Jotaro made an unfocused effort to get through a backlog of academic journals he’d had piling up, but soon gave up in favor of spending the time chain-smoking by the window. He had told himself he was going to limit his smoking to one a day for this trip, but just breaking that rule once, it made it easy to justify standing by the cracked window and watching the rain come down, sucking down smoke even as the humidity from the downpour prevented the drag from hitting quite the way he wanted it to.
Still, he eventually got to where he wanted—his mouth too numb to taste the ash, his lungs oblivious to the scorch. It became pure action—drag, ash, repeat. It was soothing in the worst way, and the knowledge of that was good, too.
He didn’t want to think about the case, but he wanted to think about Josuke even less. That left his bad habits, but he found them exactly as he always did—familiar, obliquely necessary—and even the stray thought to pick up the phone and call back—to his ex-wife’s home. To check in with Jolyne. The thought of the likely outcome stretched out before him like a gaping abyss, and he rejected the notion outright, certain he was in the sort of precarious mood where he might finally find it in himself to just fall in.
But even with everything else compartmentalized away, it was difficult to direct himself toward anything useful, and his thoughts kept catching on the realization of how little he knew Josuke, and how exactly it had happened. By the time Jotaro realized Josuke was putting up walls between them, they had already outstripped his ability to address them.
He could think of a number of reasons why Josuke would want nothing to do with him, and no adequate defense for himself if he attempted to address the issue directly. It seemed best to let the matter lie—to allow Josuke to draw whatever lines he saw fit and to adhere to them, even if the logic structuring the mix of familiarity and distance often felt opaque to him.
He thought about their sparse, infrequent emails, which functioned as their one thread of direct contact between cases. Josuke sharing vague details, lackluster updates, and Jotaro felt inadequate to the task of anything except adhering to that preestablished convention.
He knew Josuke kept regular contact with Holy—long, aimless phone calls that Holy recounted to him and that had become his main source of information on Josuke’s life, even accounting for their stilted, awkward conversations when cases brought them together. But this was only if he didn’t cut off her updates altogether, feeling somehow as though he was overstepping. Because apparently Josuke had no reluctance to sharing parts of himself, so he could only conclude that he was disinclined to tell these things to Jotaro in particular.
It was an incomplete set of evidence Jotaro was working with, but the conclusion seemed apparent regardless. Stop asking, Jotaro thought again, and then more firmly, he doesn’t want you to.
A door opened, interrupting the downward spiral of his thoughts, and Josuke stood in the doorway to the room, a bag in each hand, and the outline of his Stand’s grip on the handle slowly fading. There was a healthy flush to his face, probably from the cold, and his hair was damp, though he seemed uncharacteristically unbothered by the fact.
In the last year or two, Josuke had taken to a shorter, messier rendition of his preferred hairstyle, but he still required near categorical control over the execution of said aesthetic. Loose strands of hair hung down to frame his face, and it rendered his entire aspect softer, highlighting his youth.
Jotaro blinked, cutting his eyes down to his smoke, where his hand rested against the rim of his mug. He paid careful attention to stamping out the cigarette, attention that wasn’t strictly needed, but that Jotaro found entirely necessary.
Josuke held up one hand and shook the bag lightly, drawing Jotaro’s focus back to him. “Sandwiches. It was the best I could manage.” Then, he kicked the door closed behind him, stepping into the room to place the bags on his bed. With a more triumphant flourish, he pulled a bottle of wine from the other bag, presenting it to Jotaro. “Look—it’s that brand you like.”
And it was, though Jotaro had no idea how Josuke remembered. It was an offhand comment several years past at this point, when Josuke for the first and only time went to visit his old man in New York. Jotaro had managed a layover that coincided with the visit, and it was the last time they saw each other in person for purposes unrelated to a case.
Jotaro was often too busy for Joestar holiday gatherings, and Josuke had become increasingly adept at claiming to be. Despite this, he knew Josuke had gone to stay with Holy on separate occasions, but these were visits he had learned about after the fact, and from Holy herself.
He focused back on the wine bottle, held up as if on display in Josuke’s hand.
Jotaro didn’t know if the brand was local or obscure or just his poor luck to find it difficult to come across, but it was a rare preference of his, given an overall unrefined palate regarding alcohol, a fact only more true with wine in particular.
Berth 24, the brand was called, the label a black and white sketch of an empty wharf, an older variety that simply didn’t exist anymore. Jotaro had considered perusing the selections when they stopped by the grocer yesterday, but he dismissed the thought as superfluous. But it seemed Josuke had read Jotaro’s desire without trying, and had answered to it better than he could—or would—himself. The thought sat uneasily in his stomach.
Jotaro pursed his lips, perched to say no.
“Come on, Jotaro,” Josuke cut him off before he could speak. “We’re not getting anything else done tonight. We’ve gotta get back to that lighthouse first.”
Which was hardly untrue. Jotaro knew their disparate leads would only start to coalesce once they returned and he got his eyes on the lighthouse again. It was hardly scientific, but that was often the case with Stands and their users—intuition was its own evidence, and if there were answers for them, Jotaro thought they would find them on that beach.
“One glass,” Jotaro relented.
Somewhere between pleased and triumphant, Josuke smiled. “Mug, actually. We don’t have any wine glasses.”
Jotaro sighed.
Two mugs—and one sandwich—each later and Jotaro felt the pleasant sort of heaviness that only came from nice wine. He didn’t feel at all impaired, or even particularly relaxed, but he felt—content enough. Like the bone deep sigh after collapsing into bed after several long days of work.
When Josuke, trying to be inconspicuous, made a move to fill their cups again, Jotaro halted him with a light glare. Hands in the air, Josuke surrendered easily, a recognizable cast to the light in his eyes, because sometimes part of the joy of the act was the prospect of getting caught. There was something warm about the sight—Josuke’s simple mirth, and it felt contagious, like it could be Jotaro’s to share.
He cut his eyes down to his mug, almost empty, and considered acquiesce to a third serving if only to have something else to put his attention toward. When he finally looked back up, Josuke was already staring at him, an unexpected resolve accumulating in his expression, marking some sort of unknown intention.
Jotaro tensed reflexively, and because he was a coward, he briefly considered escape. Josuke truncated the thought, however, blurting out his question before Jotaro could commit to any particular form of retreat.
“How are you doing, Jotaro?” Josuke asked, voice quick and just a tad high, his tone taking on that obscure texture, like he was speaking in code, asking more than his question entailed. He continued, slightly more subdued, “I mean… how have you been? With—everything?”
“Busy,” Jotaro answered automatically, and though it wasn’t a lie, he knew he was avoiding anything more honest, too. He considered a bit further into the future, feeling the weight of it settle on his shoulders. He picked through his options before landing on something familiar—and safe—for them both. “There’s some evidence of an arrow in Central Europe, so I’ll probably be following up on the Foundation’s research into it this summer. Things like that.”
Josuke blew out a harsh noise. “I don’t give a shit about Stand arrows. I asked about you.”
“I moved into a new apartment,” but he had no interest in discussing the reason why, not that Josuke wasn’t already well aware of at least the outline of the fallout of Jotaro’s family life. “It’s grant season,” and he was spending all his time on Foundation matters instead. “I’m teaching an overload class next semester,” although he hardly had the time, but when the department asked him, he agreed. The one thing Jotaro knew how to be was busy.
Jotaro listed these details off, unsure exactly what Josuke was looking for. He knew his academic life wasn’t particularly interesting to those outside it. He wasn’t willing to talk about his recently imploded home life. Josuke already knew the vast majority of the work he did relate to Stands. What did that even leave?
Frowning, Josuke tapped a light finger against the rim of his mug. “You do keep pretty busy,” he conceded, though Jotaro didn’t think the information should qualify as anything worth special emphasis. Josuke already knew this.
Jotaro nodded, unsure what to add.
“And you’re... liking—it?” Josuke stumbled out, seemingly unsure how to put together his question.
“I’ve always been busy. There’s always—a next thing. I’m used to it.” The words felt clumsy on his tongue, but two glasses of wine wasn’t enough to justify it. It was his own inability to articulate himself, but he had no other logic of operation, and no other way of expressing it. “It’s fine.”
Josuke grimaced, and Jotaro resisted the urge to mirror the expression. It was a shit answer, he knew. He would have been better off saying nothing, brushing off the question like he usually would.
“You could—“ Josuke cut himself off, suddenly looking away. He stared down at his mug, then out the window. His posture seemed to deflate, and he didn’t look as though he’d finish his thought. Then, his eyes suddenly cut back to Jotaro. His expression was unreadable—fierce and tight and daring. “You—that arrow. Would you—you’d want backup for that kind of thing? Seems like that stuff always gets pretty dicey.”
Jotaro considered the question. Arrow hunting was always long, drawn-out work. It usually meant finding the hostile epicenter of a new hotbed of Stand users, and Jotaro had never had it not end in some sort of ugly fight. He was planning to set his entire summer aside, again. “It’s going to be a long case,” he landed on, which wasn’t really an answer.
“You said you’re going in the summer. The timing’s fine. Good, even.”
“I think you should probably focus on graduation.”
“I could handle both, if… if you needed me to,” Josuke said earnestly, and Jotaro hated that he knew he meant it. Josuke never turned down the opportunity to help, but that didn’t mean Jotaro should—take advantage of that kindness. “You said it yourself. It’ll be a long one.”
“This kind of case load isn’t sustainable once you graduate.” And probably wasn’t even now, Jotaro stealing occasional breaks and odd weekends from Josuke. He had considered it distantly before, but the truth of it was more present, confronted with it now. This particular arrangement between them was always going to be temporary. Maybe that’s why Jotaro had always been so good at justifying it to himself. “There aren’t many careers that accommodate taking off weeks at a time.”
“What exactly are you saying?”
Jotaro stood, collecting both their mugs to take to the sink. “That I’m not asking that of you, Josuke, so don’t worry.” Several unreadable emotions flickered across Josuke’s face, too quick for Jotaro to even begin to parse their meaning. “There’s—the Foundation won’t bother you once you graduate. They know a lot of consulting arrangements are temporary or conditional.”
Josuke’s expression shuttered entirely. He didn’t respond, and soon after he made his excuses to go to bed.
If Jotaro dreamed that night, he didn’t remember it. But he woke tired, unrested, and it left the feeling that he should have. That there was something he was forgetting.
It was one of those mornings where the horizon cut across the sky like a gash, the sun bleeding up red from the ocean and reflecting back on the waves as they moved toward the shore.
Josuke spent the morning quieter than usual, not even his usual litany of chatter and idle observations filling the space between them. In the wake of yesterday's downpour, a starker chill had settled in, and Josuke wrapped his arms around himself, compensating for a thin, leather jacket. It added to the silence, making him appear completely closed off, and Jotaro lacked the courage to try and breach Josuke’s subdued mood.
The trek across the beach felt nearly somber; the reds across the ocean reflected in Jotaro’s eyes like an omen. Low tide receded from the beach like a breath, taking all the air on the inhale. High tide was hours away.
“We should split up,” Josuke said suddenly as they stood together before the lighthouse.
“What?”
“From the interviews... the victims were always alone, right? We need to replicate that,” Josuke explained. It was sound logic, though Jotaro didn’t like it. It felt like baiting the circumstances of disaster, but in the absence of a more concrete lead—or even a better plan—it had a certain appeal.
“I’ll take the interior,” Jotaro decided. “Keep to the perimeter—avoid the back right, it’s essentially a blind spot for the surrounding area.” Jotaro flipped his arm to see the inside of his wrist, checking his watch. “We’ll give it half an hour, alright? After that, we should meet back up.”
“Alright,” Josuke dipped his head in agreement before looking up, casting his eyes toward the light at the head of the tower. “You’ll go all the way up?”
Jotaro nodded, letting his eyes trail up to the crown of the lighthouse, which reflected the whites and pale blues and reds of the morning around it with a dull certainty. For a moment, they didn't speak, though Jotaro felt the urge lodged in his throat, coming back up against his will, like choking up seawater. But he had nothing to say—nothing that could matter—and it felt like drowning on dry land.
When they parted, it was with the sense of something fundamental remaining unsaid.
Inside, the lighthouse hadn’t changed, and upon the stairwell, Jotaro experienced the same disorienting sensation, like he had wandered into something far more expansive than he realized, and that time itself could stretch out to accommodate the premonition. He was uneasy, remembering his unnerving dream and letting it shape his mood. He thought about diving deep into the earth, unaware of how expertly gravity had conspired to pull him down.
But in every way, the lighthouse remained consistently unchanged, and Jotaro knew the truth was that he remained entirely alone.
The journey up the lighthouse was calm, quiet—it set him on edge, if only because he no longer knew how to not anticipate a fight, and he’d rather be cautious than caught off guard. He found himself studying strange details—the particular curve of a petal on the botanical illustration, then the faded line of paint on the second floor windowpane. Briefly, Jotaro found himself standing before the small desk in the child’s bedroom, eyes wandering along the trail of trinkets that lined it and wondering what sort of impression they had left on Josuke.
He began to realize he was stalling, even if unintentionally.
It was natural, he supposed. Everything had gradually narrowed down to just the light and its surrounding platform, and he’d have to confront the possibility that he’d either find something or he wouldn’t—that his intuition understood the situation or it didn’t. He checked his watch, noting the time, before making his way toward the hatch at the room’s center, carefully bringing it down and its ladder along with it.
Outside, the day was humid and chilled, and the sun lurked behind a wispy clump of clouds strung up high in the sky. The air felt oddly quiet; the sea held an unusual stillness. Jotaro looked out over the edge of the railing, but he couldn’t see Josuke. A brief surge of anxiety shot through him, but his position hardly afforded him a complete panorama of the area surrounding the lighthouse, especially as his eyes moved away from the sand into the various croppings of rocks.
After briefly peering in, Jotaro walked a slow path around the circumference of the lantern room, trying to house his disquiet in something more concrete than its presence alone, seeking out a tangible piece of evidence for the muted sense of anticipation creeping up his spine to cohere to.
On the far side of the walkway, the glass structure that housed the light gleamed in the sun, and Jotaro finally noticed something that gave him pause. The lock to enter into the small room was unfixed, ostensibly since Josuke broke in when they were up here the day before last. Which wasn’t like Josuke at all, and the detail snagged in Jotaro’s mind, and he reached out for the handle to the door.
And then—
Then it was like falling.
And then—
Josuke sat at the desk, sixteen and fresh and shining like a yellow sun. In his hand was Jotaro’s notebook, and he idly flipped through its case details and tidal observations and the various notes Jotaro kept for himself, because this was Jotaro’s desk, or it had been once. A fever dream summer several years gone at this point, caught in the upper tower of a lighthouse. Or Jotaro was caught, trapped without effort because he had the thought this isn’t like Josuke and had pushed open the door to look.
Josuke didn’t move from where he sat, and his smile widened when Jotaro met his eyes. Somehow, it was only with this image in front of him that Jotaro realized how tired his Josuke looked. Weary, almost, as though a product of more years than he actually had. Surrounded by every little detail he seemed to be endlessly aware of about Josuke, he wondered how he had missed that.
Jotaro tore his eyes from this younger Josuke, trying to regain his bearings.
The room itself was… not the Grand Morioh, but it wasn’t the lighthouse either. It shone strangely at the edges, bleeding into bright white, the details slipping away from his mind when he tried to focus on any particular artifact of the room enough to understand it. But Josuke was clear, bright—so easy to let his eyes land on and stay with.
“Jotaro.” He smiled as he spoke, but Jotaro could hear it in his voice too—the easy way this Josuke said his name, his uncomplicated mirth at seeing him. He looked down at the notebook in his hand, and then back to Jotaro. “Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be nosy or anything.” He rubbed a sheepish hand against his neck as he sat the notebook down. “I just got bored while waiting for you to get back.”
“Back?”
“Yeah, I knew you’d come back,” Josuke replied easily. “You did, too. How soon did you decide you just had to return?”
The lighthouse.
“The Stand user—“
“I’m not interested in that, Jotaro.” Josuke pouted at him, draping his arms over the back of his chair and resting his cheek on them. The action was boyish, young, marking Josuke as so painfully his age. He looked at Jotaro expectantly.
Jotaro took a step back, and he could feel it, the glass of the lighthouse, even if it seemed swallowed up into the edges as they disappeared into white.
“Don’t be like that.” Josuke stood, and as he stepped closer, Jotaro felt along the edges of the glass, trying to locate the door. He needed to leave. He needed to find his Josuke. This one was pouting again, but looking more like he meant it as a prelude, like he wanted Jotaro to indulge him his performance. He still approached Jotaro slowly. He looked so—familiar, more like a perfect memory than the real thing, and Jotaro needed to leave.
“Like what?” Jotaro asked, stalling. He tried to look away from Josuke, but it was hard. The room didn’t make sense; it made his thoughts feel far off. He could feel the glass at his back, and he only refrained from shattering it because sometimes exiting a Stand’s ability the wrong way was a worse death than not getting out at all.
He needed more information, and he needed to be careful about getting it.
“Cautious,” Josuke replied, as though reading Jotaro’s thoughts. He frowned, brows drawing together sympathetically. “Like you’re worried what I’ll do.”
“And I shouldn’t be?”
“I’ve never hurt you,” Josuke said, and it sounded so earnest. So honest, almost petulant, in its total transparency. “I’ve never wanted to. I’d help you, if you’d let me.”
Josuke took a step closer, and Jotaro could only keep his head from spinning by holding his eyes on him. That was dangerous, too. The glass at his back wavered, as though it sensed his slipping. He didn’t know if it was disappearing or if he was.
“Then how do I leave?”
“Door’s behind the desk.” Josuke jabbed a thumb behind him, unconcerned with parting with the information. “I’m sure you noticed the room still exists. It’s just a little… bent right now. S’what happens. It meets you where you are.”
Which meant that Jotaro could trust neither his current senses nor his memories of the lighthouse; he could probably make exactly one attempt at escape, and only if Josuke wasn’t lying to him. Jotaro cut a quick glance to the desk and then back to Josuke.
“And the user?”
Josuke shrugged, ending it with a wave of his hand, dismissing the question. “I’m just here for you.” He paused, eyes flicking briefly to the floor. His voice grew quieter. “That’s been true for a while, I guess.”
Jotaro’s breath hitched, and he hated himself for how compelling he found the slight tilt to Josuke’s head, the quick cut of his eyes as he looked to Jotaro and then again the floor. It was such an endearing shyness, a dangerous facsimile of the real thing, something that stoked Jotaro’s fondness even against his better judgment.
His tongue felt heavy in his mouth; his eyes lidded like he had lost all his recent sleep. His temple was beginning to throb, and Jotaro was weak. Weak to even the barest suggestion that there was one thing for Jotaro that could be as simple as it once was.
Sensing his internal conflict, Josuke stepped closer. “You could stay.”
Jotaro’s eyes widened. He felt himself stumble back only to hit glass a second time, but he couldn’t recall having stepped forward. “What?”
“You could.” Closing the gap again, Josuke touched Jotaro lightly on the arm as he spoke, and the gesture itself should have been casual, familial, except he stood too close. His eyes said too much. He was offering Jotaro something much more dangerous than nostalgia. “I wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t a chance you’d want to.”
But Jotaro had so denied himself this—even the feeling of it, the acknowledgement of its existence—that temptation was the wrong vice to wear him down with. It sat on his shoulders at all times, and he knew it better than its absence. Jotaro felt more himself weighed down by the shame of knowing he had to stay his own desires than he could ever envision reaching through actually indulging them.
Whatever this Stand was, whatever it wanted to tempt him into, it chose wrong. His daughter, even his ex-wife—he could understand, though he’d find them equally illusory, but at least the promise would be of something he had once believed he could have.
But before him stood the one thing Jotaro knew he would always be able to deny himself because to even want was a transgression, and to have—it would merely be the confirmation of every selfish urge, every deplorable thought. It would be an acknowledgement of every ugly part of Jotaro, and it would destroy everything in its wake.
“You’re too much in your own head, Jotaro,” Josuke said lightly, tapping a finger against Jotaro’s temple before he smoothed it down his face, letting his palm rest against his jaw. He stepped in closer, his other hand moving, settling itself on the outside of Jotaro’s ribs, warm and solid. “That’s been true ever since I met you.”
The room was too bright, and he was losing focus. He couldn’t look anywhere else but Josuke. His eyes were striking; this close, they seemed to contain all the light of the room. Jotaro wanted to mirror the hand on his cheek; he wanted to trace down Josuke’s jaw and find his fingers at his lips.
He wanted—
He needed to leave, and there was nowhere to go.
“Josuke—“
“Not that anyone would accuse you of being particularly introspective at first glance,” Josuke cut him off again, the words light and—cruel. In a way Jotaro knew Josuke could sometimes be, even if he wasn’t proud of it. “But you’ve always been full of surprises.”
There was something sweet to it—the slight edge to Josuke’s words. They felt real for the easy way Josuke could cut Jotaro down. It lent the moment something tangible, a solid weight under its unreality. Like even at the edge of a dream, Jotaro deserved shame for what he saw when he peered in.
Somehow, it tempered the urgency, as if the notion that Jotaro could still feel the guilt of his desire meant he somehow remained capable of resisting it.
“Josuke,” Jotaro repeated, softer.
“I don’t think you understand exactly what I’m offering you,” Josuke spoke as gently as ever, leaning closer. This close, and his eyes were nearly black; they had swallowed everything around them. This close, and his lips—
Jotaro experienced a sharp moment of belated agony, his mind catching up to realization of pain only after it had consumed him completely. Then, Jotaro felt where something had lodged itself into his ribcage, digging beneath bone.
It was so sudden, so total, Jotaro could hardly breathe. He felt like his ribs were pressing down on his lungs, like the room was crawling toward him, the light inside his skin. Somehow, he still felt Josuke’s hand on his cheek, and he dropped his forehead to Josuke’s shoulder, simply trying to endure.
He breathed slowly, and Josuke stroked an idle hand down his cheek. He didn’t speak, but Jotaro wished he would. Maybe to chastise him, for reaping the consequences of getting too close to something he knew better than to think to have, or maybe just to tell him the pain would end, regardless of whether or not it was true.
The sharp edge to the agony eventually dulled, though it didn’t disappear, and then Jotaro felt it—a gentleness that haloed the pain. The soft brush of fingers as a hand settled against the lining of his lung. There was a tender pressure, just enough that Jotaro felt every inhale, and he couldn’t escape a hyperawareness of his own breathing.
“This isn’t quite the same, is it, Jotaro?” Josuke asked, closer than before, because how could he not be? The words were whispered against the shell of his ear, but Jotaro felt them in his marrow, or somewhere deeper than that. Back in his past, where Josuke had reached into without effort. “But I sort of wanted to put my own little spin on it, if you will.”
“I don’t—“
“You could stay,” Josuke repeated, the solid weight of his fingers curling with the words. “I could give this to you.”
And Jotaro felt as though—maybe, he could. Because Josuke was right—this was the same, or it felt familiar enough to claim the notion. He’d finally wandered back toward his own death, waiting for him like he always knew it would be. But Josuke’s touch was soft in a way Jotaro hadn’t expected, and this was the kindest version of an old certainty he was ever going to get.
It would be easy, Jotaro knew. To lean down. To meet Josuke’s lips and press closer. The hand against his lung was already constricting his breath; he felt lightheaded, ephemeral and absent. He knew exactly what he was consenting to if he chose anything but to run.
Everything felt warm. It could already be too late to escape. The pain had almost faded completely, but that gentle pressure remained. It didn’t feel at all like a prelude to what Jotaro knew it was.
He took a quiet, drawn out breath. He felt the weight on his lungs for what it was, and it was nothing like swallowing earth, the hard scrape of choking up dirt. And Josuke’s eyes were deep; they still looked kind, as though this was Josuke’s own way of fixing things, if Jotaro would simply put himself into Josuke’s care to let him.
Jotaro leaned just a fraction closer, settling into the warmth. Josuke’s eyes crinkled, another simple tell—that Josuke was happy, that his kindness would persist until the end. Perhaps because Jotaro had chosen him, or maybe it was merely the enduring logic of the dream.
The hand in his ribs shifted, and—
Jotaro stopped time.
With Josuke frozen before him, Jotaro allowed himself—a moment. He touched a light hand to Josuke’s cheek, didn’t trust himself for anything more.
Then he threw himself across the room, toward the desk. He was bleeding; he could now feel it—wet and warm coming down the side of his ribs. But if there was any pain, it was secondary to the pounding in his head, the white light contracting in his temple. His face was wet; briefly, he thought he might be crying, but when he touched his cheek, it was blood, too, coming from his eyes and capitulating to the pressure of the room.
Jotaro dived into nothing, and the world contracted. He stumbled out into the sun and had a split second of uncertainty before he took several steps in reverse, falling backwards over the railing. Because the lighthouse looked like it was—swallowing itself. Jotaro had no other words for it.
Then he hit the ground, and he thought nothing at all.
“Jotaro.” Someone was grabbing his face, then shaking his shoulders. Grabbing his face again, digging nails into his skin. “Jotaro, look at me already. Jotaro.”
It took a deep inhale to realize his lungs were no longer screaming. In Josuke’s hold, in the lighthouse, Jotaro had accepted the feeling of his chest caving in on itself, his whole being reduced to the singular reality of Josuke’s touch. It was only now that Jotaro understood he had probably stopped breathing altogether; he had been closer to death than he realized, at least relative to how close he had willingly chosen to be.
He inhaled again deeply, felt more tangible for it. But it never let up—that sensation of hand pressed gently against the curve of his lung. It remained as a phantom touch, a new scar of Jotaro’s own making.
Above him, Josuke hovered, his hands still pressed to Jotaro’s face. “There are you.” Naked relief colored his tone, and Josuke smiled at him, tired and honest. He pulled back enough to cast a wary glance around them, before turning back to Jotaro. “How are you feeling?”
Jotaro had no answer to that question. He tried to sit up, but he groaned, a wave of nausea sweeping over him.
“Not sure you should try that just yet,” Josuke said gently, guiding Jotaro back down by his shoulders. He wasn’t sure if it was an aftereffect of the Stand or just the acute combination of fatal injury and Josuke’s healing, but Jotaro let his head thud back against the sand, closing his eyes and taking a few steadying breaths to try and calm the way the world seemed to lurch sideways, spilling itself all over the horizon.
Eventually, he opened his eyes again, nodding to Josuke that he was fine. He sighed in relief, before collapsing beside him, sitting back roughly on the sand. Jotaro cataloged quickly: his jacket was missing; there was blood on his shirt, but not enough to be immediately dangerous. He looked better than Jotaro felt, though he still looked worse for wear.
“I’m fine,” Josuke said, reading Jotaro’s intent. “Better than you, at least. You were pushed?”
“It was more of a strategic fall,” Jotaro corrected, although it was a strong description for Jotaro’s actual recollection of the events. “I thought you were probably right. The Stand needed us to be alone.”
“So you took a three story dive off the top of the lighthouse?” Josuke sounded incredulous, voice low and tight. He kept his gaze on the ground in front of him, like he couldn’t even look at Jotaro. When his eyes finally cut up, his expression stood out stark against the backdrop of the beach. Jotaro had never considered the sea dead, but Josuke looked so startlingly alive, so singularly incandescent, it dulled to something inert behind him. “How did you even—you could have died, Jotaro. That should have killed you. You don’t even know what you—”
“I trusted you to find me.” Jotaro could no longer read Josuke’s rapidly shifting expressions; it felt like the white light of that false room—difficult to even look at.
“I thought—you didn’t see yourself. I thought you were already—” Josuke cut himself off, but the meaning hung heavy in the air regardless. He scrubbed the back of his hand roughly across his face before hunching over himself to stare back at the ground.
“Josuke,” Jotaro said. “Look at me.” After a moment, Josuke listened, and there was a heady and weightless relief just in that alone. “I trusted you,” he repeated because he didn’t have an apology for this, not one that could feel honest. It was the option he saw in front of him at the time, and sometimes that was just how these things went—no good choices, only painful ways out. “I wouldn’t have made it out otherwise. I was already too injured. I had to trust you.”
Josuke nodded, mollified if not totally forgiving. The tension in his body collapsed under itself, and Josuke’s entire body sagged, his head coming to hang between his knees. He seemed to give himself over to his deferred grief—belated, and with nowhere else to go—shuddering two wet breaths before he scrubbed a hand across his face again.
When he looked at Jotaro, his eyes were rimmed red, but he had lost his frantic edge.
“We should get the fuck out of here,” Josuke stated. “I still don’t know—exactly what happened. We should regroup.”
But the lighthouse jutted up in Jotaro’s mind, unwilling to be ignored completely. His gaze shifted, and he looked to it, looming close by. It had lost its otherworldly character, but Jotaro could still sense it—a nightmare that had somehow created itself.
They were the same, he realized. Drawing people in until they escaped as something worse, if they got to escape at all. And now, they shared Josuke too, committing the same crime of trying to hold on.
“It’s the lighthouse,” Jotaro said roughly. His throat felt raw, though he had no injury he could attribute it to. “The lighthouse is the Stand. There is no user.”
“Like—the cell tower in Morioh?”
“And others. It’s rare, but not extraordinary,” and so painfully obvious, now that Jotaro understood. They had focused on all the wrong details, missing so many subtle clues. He sighed, turning to look straight up, eyes caught in the expanse of grey-blue above him. “You have to go back. You have to be alone. I’m not sure if there are other conditions, but these types of Stands always have specific stimuli.”
“It’s about desire,” Josuke said with certainty. “You have to want something you can’t have. It has to be able to tempt you into staying. That’s why the injuries—they vary. Some people resist better than others.”
Jotaro’s inhale caught in his throat. He felt those phantom fingers again, crushing his ribs, outlining his shame. Offering him—an out, and using the worst veneer to give it to him. And Jotaro, he had—
“Jotaro,” Josuke said, serious. Steady. He suddenly returned, looming over Jotaro and filling his vision. Josuke was hardly stupid; the evidence was hardly subtle. “What did you see?”
He placed one hand on Jotaro’s shoulder, the other by his head. Jotaro could escape, but he didn’t feel like he could, and Josuke’s eyes were hard, searching. Jotaro knew there was something on the line here, even if Josuke wouldn’t say it directly. Something fragile caught between the words of Josuke’s question, but Jotaro couldn’t trust his honesty not to be the thing that broke it.
He wanted so much, but he always wanted wrong.
“Josuke—”
“Enough.” Josuke sounded not angry, but—pained. His breathing was ragged, but Jotaro had no idea if that was from the Stand or himself. If he had done this to Josuke, too. “Just—tell me. For once, just tell me what you’re thinking.”
Jotaro was a coward, so he closed his eyes, sucking in a tight breath to answer.
“It was you,” he confessed, his rib cage caving in on itself once again. “Back in Morioh, that summer.”
“Keep talking.” He sounded more in-control than Jotaro had ever heard him, putting voice to a composure Jotaro couldn’t match. He felt unmoored, or cracked open. Battered against the rocks and sent back out to the waves. Jotaro opened his eyes, and Josuke’s gaze burned bright, beautiful and dangerous. Even from this angle, Josuke’s eyes swallowed the sun.
“You were—waiting for me.” Jotaro could still see it. That Josuke superimposed over the present, and the contrast cut deep. Every line of Josuke’s expression was tight, coiled like a wire. Except in Jotaro’s mind, that other boy—his simple delight—existed nowhere at all. “You were—happy to see me. That’s what I saw.”
Josuke’s expression crumbled, and he sagged his weight, falling against Jotaro. “I fucking hate complicated Stand shit like this.” He spoke into the curve of Jotaro’s neck, his breath ghosting against Jotaro’s jaw. They had never been this close before; Jotaro had made sure of it. Jotaro could feel Josuke’s heartbeat against his own. “Would just rather get the shit beat out of me and be done with it.”
Jotaro huffed a laugh, though it wasn’t really funny. It brushed just up against something he found himself increasingly aware of—the sense of growing outdated, of belonging to a class of abilities losing out to the present. It was odd to think Josuke felt in any way the same.
Josuke suddenly sat up, hovering over him again. His expression had cleared, and he looked calm; smiling shyly at Jotaro, he looked fond.
“Okay.” He reached out, brushing a thumb against Jotaro’s cheek. “Okay, I’m going to kiss you now, Jotaro.”
Jotaro’s eyes widened. “Josu—”
But Josuke didn’t give him the opportunity to finish. He landed a light brush of lips against Jotaro’s jaw, and then tilted his head a fraction, allowing him to press his mouth to Jotaro’s, solid and careful and certain. He pressed his hand to Jotaro’s cheek, and Jotaro was surprised to realize Josuke’s fingers were rough. His thumb traced a gentle arc, and he kissed without urgency.
It was too slow, too soft, too much. Not nearly enough, and something close to everything. Jotaro wanted Josuke’s hand to sink in, to finally rend him from the inside out like he had promised.
Jotaro pushed him back gently, holding him at a distance by the shoulders. “Josuke…”
“Don’t.” Josuke’s gentle hold tightened, but he wasn’t looking at Jotaro, instead at the ground by his shoulder. His nails dug painfully into Jotaro’s cheek, and he briefly thought about telling Josuke to grip just a little harder. “Don’t—lie. At least don’t lie.”
“I won’t,” though even confessing that felt like too much. Whatever ambiguity Jotaro had tried to maintain, it couldn’t survive this. “But that’s not—that doesn't mean we should—”
“I chose you,” Josuke grit out. He moved both his hands, balling his fists into Jotaro’s coat. There were two small cuts against Josuke’s foremost knuckles, and he lifted Jotaro’s upper body easily, bringing them closer together again. “Over him. I chose you, so don’t make me regret it.”
“Him?”
“You were really fucking rude as a teenager, Jotaro,” Josuke said against his ear, like the truth but also like a joke. He caught Jotaro’s ear with his teeth before continuing, and Jotaro could feel the smirk in his voice from how it caught him off guard, caused his breath to hitch. “But he looked at me. He wanted to kiss me.” Josuke scraped his teeth down Jotaro’s neck, spoke his next words into Jotaro’s pulse. “I think you do too, but he would actually do it.”
Jotaro tightened his grip without thinking, felt an ugly spike of nausea at every implication that could be drawn from the action. Too observant, Josuke laughed against his neck, before trailing his mouth back up to Jotaro’s ear. “I need you to kiss me, Jotaro. I need it to be you.”
Jotaro put his hands on Josuke’s face, pushing him back so he could meet his eyes. Josuke looked certain, desperate. He looked like someone drowning. His fingers twitched against where they still gripped Jotaro’s jacket, though Jotaro wasn’t sure if it was nerves, or anticipation, or just Josuke’s need to touch exceeding his ability to contain it, peeking through the edges of his control.
“This is what you want?” Jotaro asked, and he felt wretched for it.
“Of course.”
Of course, he said. Like Jotaro should have known, as though there was no possibility of any other truth. It was the last wire cut, all of Jotaro’s resistance collapsing on itself. He felt pained, gutting himself open, but he stroked a thumb along Josuke’s cheek, an echo of Josuke’s action from before.
He trailed his hand down, touch light, his thumb catching against Josuke’s bottom lip. And worse, Josuke let him, his mouth falling open slightly, a soft exhale leaving his lips.
“Jotaro,” he whispered, and he was asking, but Josuke wouldn’t close the gap himself. With eyes lidded and gaze expectant, he waited for Jotaro to implicate himself in his own desire, and Jotaro was too weak to do anything but comply.
Jotaro drew him in slowly, pressing their mouths together softly. Josuke made a quiet noise, a facsimile of being cut open, before pressing back more insistently, sliding hands up to grip Jotaro at the shoulders, pressing him back down onto his back and crawling more fully on top of him.
The cord snapped on Josuke’s tenuous patience, and he hunched over Jotaro, using his weight to press him into the ground. His hands gripped Jotaro by the hair, and he tugged on it to pull Jotaro’s face up and to the side, scraping their cheeks together as he made his way down to Jotaro’s jaw, licking up the line of it before biting right below his ear.
His mouth edged up, and he laughed, breathy and bright. “I’ve kind of waited forever for this,” he confessed, not waiting for Jotaro to recover before he continued. “I thought you knew.”
Jotaro pushed a hand up into Josuke’s hair, dragging him back to crush their mouths together. He wanted his tongue in Josuke’s mouth, or his teeth along his pulse. He wanted to bite until Josuke bled, licking the blood up himself. Jotaro thought he could crawl inside the wound and just stay there, if only Josuke would let him. Closer, he wanted closer. Judging by the tight grip Josuke used to hold Jotaro by the face, somehow, impossibly, he wanted it, too.
Josuke thrust his tongue into Jotaro’s mouth, once and then again, and Jotaro caught it between his teeth, sucking, sloppy and gagging for it, feeling more than hearing the moan Josuke let out in response.
Jotaro dragged his lips from Josuke’s to mouth at his ear, pulling at the lobe with his teeth. “Like this?” he asked, holding Josuke in place as he bit down and worried at the edge of his jaw, even as Josuke whined and twitched in Jotaro’s grip, sensitive and desperate, hips stuttering an unmistakable hardness into the inside of Jotaro’s thigh. “Would he have kissed you like this?”
“He seemed pretty fucking eager,” Josuke replied, pulling back enough to look Jotaro in the eyes. His pupils were liquid black, blown wide and glassy. His hair a mess, his lips swollen—he looked like he’d already been fucked. “It was pretty hot, too. Even his bad attitude.” Josuke kissed the corner of his mouth, licked a line up his cheek. It was filthy, and Jotaro groaned shamelessly when Josuke did it again. “You could be pretty fucking mean.”
“Is that what you want, Josuke? You want me a little mean?” He trailed his hand down, cupping Josuke roughly through his pants. Josuke let out a breathy noise that didn’t really convey anything except continue. “It feels like you do.”
“Jotaro.” Josuke sounded desperate, needy. His hips twitched against Jotaro’s hand, little micro-movements that seemed less than sovereign, as if he simply couldn’t help himself. “Please.”
He looked like he’d let Jotaro fuck him right here, semi-public and a stone’s throw from something they still didn’t quite understand and that almost killed him. That certainly still would if they gave it another chance.
Jotaro considered it—rolling Josuke over and pressing him into the sand, burying them both here under the weight of their indiscretions. This ugly, awful thing had finally been dragged from Jotaro, and he thought to memorialize it, condemn the offense to the burden of its own weight. He could cast it from himself to the shore, let the tide own what it unearthed even as he claimed it for himself, again and again, thrusting into Josuke—
“Up,” Jotaro decided, a rough hand on Josuke’s chest pushing him forward even as he spoke. “Let’s get back to the hotel.”
Once Jotaro got Josuke back to their room, he dropped to his knees the moment Josuke kicked the door shut behind them. Shoving roughly against his hips, Jotaro had Josuke with his back pressed to the entryway and his pants halfway down his thighs before Josuke stopped him, a hand on his shoulder drawing his back up.
Panic and shame shot up Jotaro’s spine; for a brief, mortifying instant, Jotaro thought he had overstepped, misreading Josuke even now, given everything.
But Josuke merely ran his palm along Jotaro’s cheek, cradling his face in his hand, soothing the dread back to a more familiar degree, his self-mortification receding to something that would allow him this tender moment, but only if he didn’t forget the truth of it—that Josuke was his uncle, and his junior by more than a decade. That once Josuke had looked up to him, had seen him as someone worth looking up to. And though that had never particularly aligned with Jotaro’s perception of his own character, that hardly mattered in the face of all the ways he could fall in Josuke’s estimation, had likely already managed to do so.
Josuke used his hand on Jotaro’s face to guide him closer, drawing him in to kiss him again, slow and lingering. Somehow, Josuke was good at this, too—making the transgression itself feel like absolution. Josuke sighed into the kiss, slumping his weight against Jotaro, letting Jotaro hold him up.
When he pulled back, Jotaro noticed a small cut, just hidden by Josuke’s hairline.
He raised a hand and traced it absently, without thought.
“Thankfully, I didn’t throw myself off a building, so my injuries were pretty light. I think being Stand users made us more… resistant?—to the Stand’s effects. And I wasn’t actually in the lighthouse.”
“Probably,” Jotaro agreed, biting the inside of his lip before forcing himself to ask anyway. “Did I—he do that?”
“It depends,” Josuke answered, laying his head absently on Jotaro’s shoulder as they talked. Jotaro could feel the rumble of his chest as he spoke. It was… soothing. “Are you going to hold me accountable for your crushed lung and three story drop?”
Jotaro rolled his eyes. Point taken.
He pulled back from Josuke, looking him in the eyes. Pushing him gently back against the door, he pressed them together for another lingering kiss. Because right now he could; he felt nearly adrift, lost in the moment’s undertow. All his guilt and better sense caught above the waves, and he could hear it well enough to be certain that he was ignoring it. It would find him eventually, but for now…
The pent-up, electric urgency of near-dying—of feeling the line of Josuke’s body pressing him into the sand—was still there, but Jotaro knew he needed to… savor this more, as the one opportunity he would get to do so. Jotaro broke the kiss, and he brought one hand up to brush a thumb against Josuke’s lip again.
Josuke nibbled at it lightly, eternally a menace to Jotaro’s fraying sense of decency. He smirked at Jotaro like he knew this, and that Jotaro would indulge him, regardless. Jotaro huffed out an exasperated sigh, if only because Josuke was right.
“What do you want?” Jotaro asked. He accented his question with a nip at Josuke's neck, another creeping closer to his ear. “What would you like me to do?”
“I want to take care of you, Jotaro,” Josuke’s voice was pitched low, like a confession. He had grabbed Jotaro’s hand where it fell from his mouth, and he stared at Jotaro without reserve as he kissed the palm of his hand, a barely there chaste press of lips. “Will you let me?”
Jotaro hesitated. Josuke rested a cool hand against the back of his neck, not speaking, just waiting. But Jotaro didn’t know what Josuke could mean, and he wasn’t sure it was something he could accept, regardless. The solace of Josuke’s touch nearly hurt to acknowledge. Josuke’s gentleness—Jotaro couldn’t endure the pretense of acting like he deserved it, even with the justification of merely giving Josuke what he wanted.
The few times he had thought of this—guilty and self-loathing and so fucking hot, one hand on his dick and the other in his mouth, teeth biting down on his own palm to keep quiet though there was no one else around to hear—he had envisioned nearly the opposite. A slow, methodical taking apart of Josuke until he was nothing but a live wire of his own pleasure, calling Jotaro’s name. Or Josuke, hovered over Jotaro, directing his actions, simply using Jotaro to wring his own desire from himself.
What Josuke asked for… Jotaro felt—rapacious, like he had tricked Josuke into letting him take too much. But he understood what Josuke was really asking: Do you trust me? And he did. Enough—enough for this.
“Alright,” Jotaro acquiesced. “I’m… in your care.”
Josuke hardly remained unaffected by his agreement, taking a moment to close his eyes and rest his forehead against Jotaro’s shoulder. He pressed his lips to Jotaro’s neck, not so much a kiss as mere contact. Intimacy in its simplest form.
Then he said simply, “Get on the bed.”
Jotaro nodded, pressing a brief kiss to Josuke’s forehead, solidifying his decision with the touch. He maneuvered around him toward the closest bed—Josuke’s bed.
He stripped out of his coat, followed by his shoes and belts, and then after a brief pause, his black turtleneck and pants as well. He left his boxer-briefs on.
He sat on the bed, shifting back to lean against the headboard. For a moment, he closed his eyes, tilting his head back. He tried not to think. If he did, he might come to his senses. He might get up and leave, and he was selfish enough not to want to.
He felt a soft touch on his cheek.
“Mm, don’t go anywhere, Jotaro,” Josuke said, before tapping Jotaro on the temple, making the intention of his vague statement more clear.In lieu of a proper answer, Jotaro exhaled a long breath through his nose.
Accepting the silence, Josuke crawled onto the bed and into Jotaro’s lap. Their position reversed their usual height difference—several years and Josuke never quite caught up—and Jotaro looked up at Josuke, waiting. Beside them, Josuke threw a small bottle of lube and a single condom onto the bed.
Jotaro shot Josuke an assessing look. “Rather prepared.”
Josuke only wrapped his arms tighter where he had slung them around Jotaro’s neck, pulling himself closer so he could whisper in Jotaro’s ear. “Is that how it looks?”
“I'm sure you can imagine."
Josuke kissed open-mouth along the line of Jotaro’s jaw, his pace agonizingly slow as he made his way to Jotaro’s mouth. “Do you want to know what I had planned?”
“Tell me.”
Hovering right above his mouth, Josuke pressed their foreheads together. He locked eyes with Jotaro. “I was gonna lay in your bed and jerk off when you left.”
Jotaro inhaled a sharp breath, and Josuke leaned in to kiss him, using his surprise to slip in his tongue, roughly licking against the roof of his mouth.
“I’m going to ride you, Jotaro,” Josuke pulled back just enough to whisper. “I’m going to take you apart.” He cupped Jotaro’s face in his hands. “But I want you to tell me you want it.”
Jotaro’s jaw locked, and he could feel a nervous muscle in his cheek twitch on reflex. Because the only thing worse than indulging at this point seemed to be admitting to it, to inscribe his shame twice over by recognizing it as such. By giving it a name.
“Tell me, Jotaro,” Josuke repeated, his words gentle and firm.
Jotaro leaned forward, resting his forehead against Josuke’s shoulder. Josuke ran a light thumb along his brow, before smoothing his hand up and into his hair, a slow, gentle carding of his fingers.
Jotaro shuddered. This was somehow worse.
“I do.” He turned his head, pressing a kiss into the space under Josuke’s jaw. He continued, dryly, as if unaware of the lump lodged in his throat he had to work his words around, “I thought that would be obvious at this point.”
“I like hearing it,” Josuke said honestly, a slight flush coloring his cheeks.
“I want you.” The words tasted like glass, felt like vomiting up his insides, the worst of himself, now on display for Josuke’s judgment. “Too much, Josuke. For too fucking long.”
But Josuke looked—adoring, maybe. Something inexpressibly gentle. It made Jotaro’s lungs constrict; it made him feel worse. But Josuke smiled. “I want you, too.” He laughed, lightly, like a little joke. “It’s nice to have things work out that way for once.”
Then Josuke sat up slightly, awkwardly shimming out of his boxers while motioning for Jotaro to do the same. When he settled back down, he had the lube in his hand, and he gave the bottle one rough jerk downward against his palm. He shot Jotaro a sheepish look. “Almost out.”
Jotaro rolled his eyes. “Should I be jealous, or just disgusted?”
“You should get your fingers inside me, already,” Josuke quipped easily. He shot Jotaro a look somewhere between filthy and challenging. “Or maybe you’d rather watch while I do it myself?”
The suggestion was too much; as soon as Josuke said it, Jotaro wanted it. He wanted to watch—Josuke, slow and thorough, taking himself apart; Josuke, gasping on his own fingers, wishing it was Jotaro.
Jotaro took the lube, popping the cap and pouring a liberal amount onto Josuke’s fingers. “Show me.” He guided Josuke’s hand back himself, the angle awkward with Josuke in Jotaro’s lap, but so good for it, because Josuke’s slight gasp landed against Jotaro’s temple, his hand to steady himself clutching at Jotaro’s neck. “I know you like to perform. I'm sure you want to even now.”
Jotaro remembered that very clearly from his time in Morioh. Josuke liked feedback—praise. He liked knowing Jotaro was watching when he did something correct.
The memories of a younger Josuke churned in his gut, mixing with his arousal and self-reproach. It settled heady and electric, the shame sparking up his spine and making him feel lightheaded for it. For Josuke.
With a slight flush making its way down his face and neck, Josuke reached back further and began to finger himself open. Jotaro watched his face, the way his shoulders hitched. The slight increase in his breathing as time stretched out.
Josuke hunched forward, panting shallow breaths against Jotaro’s cheek. He slipped closer, breath ghosting along Jotaro’s neck as he smirked into Jotaro’s skin. “Like what you see?”
Trailing a hand down, Jotaro settled it on Josuke’s hip. “I think you’re ready for another.”
“I think—ah,” Josuke cut himself off, breath stuttering out as he listened to Jotaro. “I think you should touch me.”
“Hm,” Jotaro hummed out, letting his thumb start to rub light circles into Josuke’s hip. With his other hand, he grabbed Josuke by the hair, roughly pulling him forward, chest to chest. It had the effect of lightly brushing their cocks together, a slightly too dry rub that felt something like perfect, and more importantly, it caused a long, drawn-out shudder from Josuke, who began panting more heavily into Jotaro’s ear. “Like this?”
“Don’t be a dick, Jotaro.”
Jotaro’s hand twitched on Josuke’s hip, just brushing it against Josuke’s cock where it was pressed between them. “I got the sense that you liked that, actually.”
Josuke whined. “Jotaro.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” Jotaro continued, finally relenting to grasp Josuke loosely in hand. He let his grip trail up and then down, lazy and slow. He thumbed at the head of Josuke’s cock, pleased with the noise it drew from him. “You’ve been a needy brat since I met you, always begging for attention.” Jotaro let his hand slip down from Josuke’s hair to grip the front of his jaw, forcing eye contact. He kissed Josuke, just long and deep enough to make him whine when Jotaro pulled away. “You’ve got my attention now, Josuke. What are you going to do with it?”
“Fuck me,” Josuke said instantly, flushing from his own words. He trembled, forehead knocking into Jotaro’s, resting there even as the movement of his shoulder and arm continued. “I’m ready. Fuck me already.”
“You’re sure?”
Grabbing Jotaro’s hand, he drew it back behind him, bringing Jotaro’s fingers to meet his own, pressing them in impatiently. “See for yourself.”
Replacing Josuke’s fingers, Jotaro pushed past Josuke’s rim, biting into Josuke’s shoulder to keep himself from making any noise, just from this. Josuke was loose, open—he was whining into Jotaro’s ear; he was begging to be fucked.
“Get the condom.”
Josuke complied eagerly, ripping the packaging with his teeth, rolling the condom down onto Jotaro’s cock without being asked. His hand lingered, stroking lightly. Jotaro put his hands on Josuke’s hips, but Josuke batted him away lightly. “I’m taking care of you, right? Just sit back, Jotaro.”
Jotaro felt himself collapse back against the headboard, watching as Josuke lifted his hips and took his cock in hand. Just that was enough to make Jotaro bite his lip, holding in a tight, desperate noise.
It had been too long. Intimacy felt nearly abstract to him, but Josuke looked at him like Jotaro was burning him up, like it’d hurt to be close. Like he couldn’t imagine wanting anything else more. It had been too long and it was Josuke, guiding Jotaro’s cock into himself, sitting down fully and wrapping his arms around Jotaro’s neck, bringing their foreheads together, biting at Jotaro’s bottom lip even as he twitched in his lap.
“How do I feel, Jotaro?” Josuke asked. He ran his hands up and into Jotaro’s hair, gentle and soft, before he gripped and tugged hard , pulling Jotaro’s head back enough for direct eye contact. Jotaro’s head hit the headboard, and the echoing pain was so sweet, it made him groan. “Say it.”
“Josuke—“ Jotaro ground out. “Move.”
“I suppose that’s answer enough,” Josuke said lightly, before lifting his hips and dropping back down into Jotaro’s lap.
Josuke’s pace was slow, torturous. He forced Jotaro to maintain eye contact, his hands on Jotaro’s face pushing his head back and against the headboard, nowhere to escape to.
“Put your hands on my hips,” Josuke ordered. He seemed to know, intuitively, that Jotaro needed just a hint of pain, of something rough. He needed to feel bad; needed Josuke’s teeth in his shoulder and then on his neck, his hand in his hair so he could tilt back Jotaro’s head and whisper harsh instructions in his ear. “Don’t move them unless I say to.”
Josuke wanted Jotaro to talk, kept pressing Jotaro for more words as he raised himself and brought himself back down on Jotaro’s cock, again and again. Somehow each time deeper, hotter. Tighter. And Jotaro had never been good at that, never knew the words to bridge the gap between what he thought was obvious and what others needed explicitly.
But he found it easier when he was doing what Josuke asked, answering his questions directly, letting out a stuttered, “good. Good, Josuke. You feel so good,” when Josuke halted his pace and sat in his lap until Jotaro spilled out everything he wanted to hear.
He wouldn’t let Jotaro touch him—not until he was right on the edge begging for it himself. “Please, Jotaro, come on, please,” and Jotaro held out just a moment too long because he was afraid of the ground he knew was just on the other side of pushing himself and Josuke right over this cliff. He didn’t want to imagine the moment past this one, with Josuke’s movements gone sloppy and frantic until he was relying on Jotaro’s hand on his hip to keep his pace.
When he came, it was with Josuke’s cock in his hand, his lips on his neck. Josuke was still pleading, begging Jotaro for something, and at that moment he would have given it to him. Anything at all, but Josuke only repeated his name—all he wanted was Jotaro.
Josuke followed soon after, Jotaro still buried inside him, pressing Jotaro’s own name into his lips.
For a moment, they laid together, still and quiet except for their rough breathing. Josuke had collapsed against Jotaro, arms around his neck and his come drying on their stomachs between them.
He lifted his head from where he had buried his face in Jotaro’s shoulders. Josuke kissed him softly, and Jotaro let him, aware of the moment even as it slipped away, the singular peace it contained.
“I’m going to get a towel,” Josuke said quietly. Jotaro only nodded; he could feel his brain already turning to static. A litany of reprimands shoved their way under his skull, each more reproachful than the last.
Fucking his kid uncle because he had so thoroughly destroyed everything else in his life, it only seemed fitting to finish the job. And Josuke wasn’t even a kid anymore, not really, but it hardly felt like mattered, just an excuse to justify everything else deplorable about the act—allowing himself the luxury of an intimacy so warped and wrong because at least he had held himself out against the worst version of what he had wanted.
Something like bile crawled its way up Jotaro’s throat, burning without reprieve. The full extent of his self-disgust hit him so suddenly, he felt lightheaded with it, and Jotaro had to shut his eyes against the sensation. Disgusting.
Fucking hell, what the fuck was wrong with him?
When he returned a few moments later, Josuke had already cleaned himself off, and Jotaro felt a distant pinprick of guilt as he softly toweled down Jotaro’s stomach, then gently wiped the sweat from his brow. But it was only a drop in a vast chasm sprawled before him.
With his hand on Jotaro’s jaw, Josuke lightly wiped the cool towel against his face. He met Jotaro’s eyes, smiling softly, and Jotaro grimaced reflexively, having to look away. Josuke’s movements stuttered, but only slightly.
Josuke threw the towel across the room toward the bathroom, just barely missing his mark. He crawled into bed next to Jotaro, and Jotaro wrapped his arms around him as he scooted up near the headboard. It was so easy, almost instinctive, even with an awful sickness growing in his gut. The silence felt like a noose.
“Sometimes, you’re so obvious,” Josuke whispered, his head lying against Jotaro’s chest. “It’s not too hard to get a general sense of how you’re feeling, but sometimes it’s all over your face.” He tilted his head up, and he looked—sad. Empathetic. “I’m sorry you—regret it.”
The phantom weight on Jotaro’s chest grew heavier. He tightened his arms, closing his eyes. Too many transgressions stacked up before him—wanting Josuke; acting on it. Letting Josuke reciprocate, and then making him feel less than for it. “It’s not that.”
“It is.” Josuke shook his head lightly. “But I get it. It’s pretty fucked up.”
“You seem remarkably unbothered,” and the words were just a bit too harsh, almost unfair. It was Jotaro’s responsibility to hold himself in check—and apparently, Josuke as well—and he had succumbed at the first instance of true temptation. In some ways, Jotaro always knew he was weak. But this was a particular low, to know he wouldn’t really even fight at all.
“It’s not that. I just—” Josuke paused thoughtfully. His hand crawled across Jotaro’s chest, searching until he found Jotaro’s and giving it a light squeeze, letting go just as quickly. “I know you’re not happy, Jotaro. I’m not—doing so hot myself, to be honest,” Josuke confessed, and Jotaro made to interrupt him because— what ? But Josuke halted him with a sharp look. “But I like being with you.” He waited a beat. “Even when you’re an emotionally-repressed dick.”
That seemed like the least of what he deserved, so Jotaro accepted the comment without protest.
He bit the inside of his lip, intent on addressing exactly what Josuke had tried to gloss over. “I didn’t know,” though in retrospect the evidence was there, if only Jotaro had tried to see it. That strange weariness Josuke carried, the muted character to his air. He had read everything the wrong way, ascribed it to himself, content to hold on to the image of a more radiant Josuke who existed only in places Jotaro couldn’t see. “I’m sorry for not—realizing.”
“S’not your fault,” Josuke absolved him readily, more easily than Jotaro deserved. “I wanted you to notice, and I didn’t. It’s hard to explain.”
But Jotaro thought he understood, at least enough to drop the subject for now. Josuke’s voice had gone distant, and Jotaro found it difficult not to fall into old habits, to let Josuke slip away at the first sign of his wanting to.
Instead, something else had been bothering Jotaro, and he gave voice to a question that had been slowly forming at the back of his mind. “Why do you think that’s what it—the lighthouse—showed you?” he paused. “A teenage version of me you’d never known?” It was the type of small detail that would nag at Jotaro endlessly until he picked it apart. “Do you think it was specific to you, or something about the Stand’s ability?”
“Were you really thinking about that Stand while fucking me?”
Jotaro honestly couldn’t tell if Josuke’s indignation was feigned or not. “No. Just answer the question.” He paused, injecting a slight humor into his voice. “Consider it necessary for the case report.”
Josuke exhaled a laugh. “God, you’re so fucking weird,” but he paused thoughtfully, giving Jotaro’s question proper consideration. “I guess I knew as soon as I saw him,” Josuke stated vaguely. “I’m pretty cocky. I was pretty sure I could get you if you weren’t going to be a martyr about the whole thing. You’re not always subtle, just—confusing, sometimes. And that was tempting, a version of you who would give me what I wanted with none of the baggage of getting it.”
“Not wanting to fuck my uncle doesn’t make me a martyr,” Jotaro replied curtly, unsure how much of his affront was honest versus the only sensible response to Josuke’s abrasive overconfidence.
Good fucking grief , Jotaro thought because if he didn’t he’d find Josuke’s cheeky grin just a little too endearing, a little too close to convincing him this all wasn’t fucked just because Josuke appeared to have already rejected feeling bad about it.
“Ah, but you do want to fuck me,” Josuke paused, “or did—or I hope you still do. You know—again. I wouldn’t say no to round two.”
His words were crass, his traveling hand even worse, but Josuke’s eyes were soft, almost hesitant. He bit his lip, and he looked young and insecure and waiting.
“Besides,” Josuke continued, softer than before, as if confessing something, “it was a compelling fantasy. Being older. Having more answers for once. But that’s what made it easier to… resist. There was no—history. Us. I wanted that, too.”
His hand settled on Jotaro’s hip, rubbing absent circles into the new scar there. Josuke had healed the old wound when he found Jotaro outside the lighthouse. The realization made his throat tight with an emotion he couldn’t name, some sort of tenderness spilled out over his shame.
When he didn’t speak, Josuke did for him, tone lighter, more playful. “And you? Fantasizing about a teenager, you dirty old man.”
Josuke was obviously joking, but Jotaro still grimaced. It wasn’t like he was wrong. A fresh wave of self-loathing welled up inside of Jotaro, and he wanted to crawl inside it. It felt like where he belonged.
Still, he knew he owed Josuke—something. The same honesty, at least.
“I think I just—knew where I stood then. With you.”
It wasn’t the whole truth, but Jotaro didn’t know that he could touch that. Exactly what that young Josuke had offered him, and just how compelling it had been. It felt like a new, ugly truth about him, and he could hardly look at it himself, much less hold it up for the scrutiny of another. Even Josuke.
Still, he could practically feel Josuke’s confusion. “I don’t understand.”
Jotaro bit the inside of his lip, wanted to tug down on a hat that was tossed aside on the floor somewhere.
“I thought—these last few years—you’ve been avoiding me.”
“You— What?”
“I don’t even have your phone number, Josuke.” Jotaro knew as soon as he spoke the words they were too pointed, nearly accusatory. Like he had held onto the information, kept it like a grudge. It was too honest; it revealed too much about him—his petty, possessive need.
Josuke’s response was so quiet.
“I wanted you to—ask. It’s so stupid when I say it, but I wanted to know you… wanted me. Just around, you know?” He laughed, soft and without humor. “Actually, I want a lot of things, Jotaro. From you. But I also wanted to be the one person who didn’t. It’s a shitty combination, I guess.”
Jotaro was silent, unsure he could speak through the sudden tightness in his throat. Somehow, Jotaro had done such comprehensive work of convincing everyone who mattered that he didn’t want to be around instead of that he felt that he shouldn’t, and he couldn’t think of any compelling reason to give himself the benefit of the doubt when it came to the distinction.
It was nothing new, Jotaro’s interpersonal clumsiness, but it felt raw, freshly painful, with the past so seemingly close at hand.
When Jotaro didn’t speak, Josuke huffed a noise too flat, too tired to be something close to a laugh. “You don’t even ask me yourself on cases. I always hear from the Foundation first.”
“I thought—” but Jotaro wasn’t sure it really mattered. “I do. Want you—around,” he could only say. It was the one thing Jotaro was certain Josuke needed to hear. “Even if I don’t—I’m not—”
Josuke snorted. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
Cutting him a quick glare, Jotaro moved his arm up from where it was wrapped around Josuke’s shoulder to flick him lightly on the forehead. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
Josuke settled down from his indignation with Jotaro’s question, and he nodded. Then said, “Yeah, I do. Of course I do.”
Jotaro nodded, feeling gruff and clumsy, trying to extract from an abstract web of need and shame and cowardice something Josuke could understand, even if he wouldn’t forgive Jotaro his logic. “It already felt like… taking too much. Having you be around when you didn’t seem to—want to be. Outside of cases. I was trying to respect that, but,” Jotaro paused. He felt oddly feverish, burning up from the simple confession. “But I’m selfish.” Greedy. “I couldn’t—” He huffed out a harsh breath. “I’m here, even though I knew better.”
Josuke put a hand on Jotaro’s jaw, tilting his head to force eye contact. He rolled his eyes, speaking ironically, fondly, “But you’re not a martyr.”
He had never felt like one. Because he was always already failing to be what others needed of him, wanting too much of the wrong things, though Jotaro was starting to understand that Josuke wouldn’t exactly see it that way.
Josuke was offering. He was telling Jotaro to take. He wanted things for himself. He wanted Jotaro.
At least for right now.
And right now, things weren’t so difficult—with Jotaro’s job and Josuke at university, their breaks lined up neatly, and they could see each other as often as Jotaro could justify having Josuke partner on cases. But soon Josuke would graduate; he’d find a job not so accommodating, and what sort of life was Jotaro thinking to offer Josuke, regardless? Josuke was a—several times—self-proclaimed romantic at heart, and Jotaro was working through the logistics of what essentially amounted to a workplace affair.
“Come on, Jotaro,” Josuke said easily, a little impatiently. “Get out of that head of yours.”
Jotaro startled, but only slightly, so taken by how close this Josuke’s words were to the other’s.
“I don’t know what I can… offer you,” Jotaro confessed, halting and guilty. “I don’t want you to expect too much—change.”
“So we’re not going to run away together, leave all the bullshit and Stand work and everything else behind?”
Jotaro huffed, but he felt less abject. More present. “Brat,” he chastised regardless.
“But seriously,” Josuke said, taking Jotaro’s face in his hands and turning Jotaro to look at him. “I don’t—I’m not trying to ask for much, Jotaro. I want to be close—I want you to let me. Whatever that means.” He pursed his lips, a sudden thought making its way across his face. “Actually, I want you to take me on that arrow hunt this summer. I do want that. Specifically.”
“And that’s worth it?” Jotaro asked—sidestepping the matter of that summer, for now—because he couldn’t imagine it. It seemed like a half-life, a shadow playing at something real. “That feels like a choice you won’t regret?”
“That other you—It wasn’t real. Just an illusion, you know? But it confirmed—what I already knew. What I’d want to choose,” Josuke’s voice was a murmur, and he sounded older than he was. Probably closer to how he sometimes felt. “And this is realer than that,” he whispered against Jotaro’s lips, and the words were almost less ephemeral than the touch, wholly solid, material, for at least a moment.
And it was close, Jotaro supposed. To that feeling of a palm against his lungs, the promise of his heart squeezed between familiar fingers. It could hold a similar weight—words not quite a promise spoken into a future that he could just envision, like possibility streaked along the horizon.
It felt just as tangible, something waiting to be touched. So perhaps Josuke was right—and it felt real enough.
Case Report for File #KJ011203
Active Agents: Kujo Jotaro, Higashikata Josuke
Location: S——, Maine
Status: [Closed]
Stand Name: Remarkable Diving Feat [n. Higashikata Josuke]
Stand Description: [Stand Class 2B]
A location bound Stand tied to an abandoned lighthouse [Appendix A1-A5] in the North Atlantic outside the town of S——, Maine. The lighthouse remains fixed and lures in victims following the adherence to three (and possibly more) conditions: (1) Repeat Visit, (2) Alone, (3) Harboring unfulfilled desire. These three conditions must remain in effect for the Stand’s ability to remain manifest. The Stand combines perception- and reality-altering processes to contain victims during consumption [Appendix A6]. To some extent, this allows the lighthouse to change its form and appearance to its victims, likely including the inside presentation of the rooms. If successful, it is probable the lighthouse consumes its victims entirely [Appendix B1, B2]. Otherwise, victims escape with major, often fatal, injuries, including damaged and/or harvested organs [Appendix C1-4]. The exact range of the Stand is unknown; however, potential victims inside the lighthouse or within a five meter radius will be affected if previously detailed conditions are met [Appendix A7-A8].
There is currently no known weakness for this Stand except to escape its illusion before consumption.
Additional Notes:
*The rate of victims is variable and contingent on meeting requisite conditions. It is likely the lighthouse’s victims span numbers and years back further than initial research suggested.
**See attached case notes [Appendix A1-A8, Appendix B1-B4, Appendix C1-4, Appendix D1-4] for timeline of the investigation and suggested follow up procedures.
***Request Higashikata Josuke personnel status update—Temporary Class 3 to Part-Time Permanent Class 2 Employee.