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“You look different."
Josuke blinks. “Huh?”
Jotaro doesn't say anything for a minute. He just sits there at his desk and stares at Josuke like he's solving the world's most intricate game of spot the difference. It's not malicious by any means, but Josuke still finds himself squirming on the slightly-too-stiff couch, tightening his grip on his lukewarm iced mocha.
Jotaro's eyes snap down.
"Did you take off your nail polish?"
"My–?" Josuke glances down. "Oh, uh, yeah. I dunno. I just thought it looked a little weird on me."
It's pretty innocuous, as far as their conversations go. Sometimes they talk. Sometimes, Jotaro just hands him a few bills and tells him to go get some coffee, black for him and whatever Josuke wants with the change. Josuke doesn't mind. If Jotaro really had a problem with him crashing in his hotel room, he'd either say it or kick him out himself.
Usually, this would be the point where Jotaro would grunt and go back to the behemoth of papers piled up on his desk. He doesn't this time.
"Didn't you just put it on?"
Josuke falters. "I mean, yeah? S'not that big of a deal though. I just figured I'd change it up a little, you know? Try to look a little more mature and all that."
“Mature,” Jotaro says. “You’re sixteen.”
He doesn’t know if it’s just Jotaro’s natural affinity for social skills or what, but this is starting to feel more like an interrogation than a casual conversation.
“Well, yeah,” Josuke mumbles. “But like, nail polish isn’t really the thing right now. I mean, for some guys, yeah, but. You know. Not people like us.”
Josuke really wants this conversation to be over now. Unfortunately, Jotaro’s decided that now’s the time to start becoming a real fan of intense, prolonged, and completely uncalled for eye contact.
“There’s plenty of men that wear nail polish.”
“You don’t.”
Josuke snaps his mouth shut the moment those words slip out, but unfortunately, it’s just a little too late to take them back. Because out of everything that he wouldn’t want Jotaro to hear, that is probably on the top of the list.
The thing is, Josuke’s used to being the odd one out. He was the tomboy on the playground, then the hotshot gym girl, then the freshly christened delinquent with a new name and the bulk to defend it if need be. For most of Morioh, queer and Josuke were synonyms. He didn’t look like any specific subculture. Every element of queerness that people could identify just happened to look like him .
And then Jotaro came around.
Josuke’s had his fair share of insecurities. Whether or not this shirt looks good with these pants, if this jacket makes him look like a moody twelve-year old or at least a little fashionable, if he might have accidentally cut his hair too short and if he can maybe convince his mom to try and fix it before he has to go to school tomorrow. What he puts on, what he shows off, those are all things he puts some thought into.
Alone, Josuke looks just fine. But compared to Jotaro, the cracks couldn’t have been more obvious.
Jotaro has the kind of deadpan gravitas to him of a guy that has coffee and cigarettes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He’s stoic, intimidating, built like a truck and hits just as hard as one too. Jotaro doesn’t swing his arms when he walks, or cock his hips when he’s standing around. He doesn’t pitch his voice up when he’s surprised, or laugh in the open, touch-feely way that most boys don’t exactly do, or linger in the makeup aisle in the department store because he still remembers how to do his eyeliner, and even if he’s not supposed to find it fun anymore, he’s still tempted to buy that nice liquid one because he knows he can make a sharp wing with it if he got a good angle.
Jotaro walks and talks and dresses like someone who knows what he is and deserves to be taken seriously regardless. Because he does. And he is.
That’s just what real men like Jotaro do.
Condensation beads on the flimsy plastic cup, dampens the palm of his hand. He’d go to take a drink from it, but it’s mostly half-melted ice by now.
Jotaro just keeps staring at him. It gets to the point where Josuke seriously considers excusing himself and hiding in his room for the rest of the week before Jotaro finally says something.
“Do you like wearing it?”
Josuke’s grip tightens. The cup nearly slips from his grasp entirely. “I don’t mind the way it looks.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
It’s not like there’s a wrong answer, but with Jotaro here, it really, really feels like there is.
“Yeah,” he finally mutters. “I guess.”
“Are you getting problems because of it?”
“I mean, not anything new.”
Josuke’s not like Jotaro. He hasn’t had the chance to look around and dive into the kind of culture that he’s a part of. Hell, he barely has the vocabulary to even describe what he is half the time. So he knows he’s going to sound a bit juvenile explaining himself. There’s no way around it.
“It just makes me look kinda girly. Girlier.” He hesitates, for just a moment. “You know what I’m talking about. It gives people the wrong idea. And if someone’s gonna call me on it, I’d rather be called a faggot than a dyke.”
Jotaro gets it. He knows Jotaro gets it, and there’s a part of him that wants to die because Jotaro gets it, and he’s clearly figured out how to move past it too.
“I see.” Just that alone is enough to make Josuke grimace. “If you think it’d be safer to keep it off, I don’t blame you. But if you want to wear it, you might as well.”
“It’s like I’m not even taking myself seriously if I did though.”
Jotaro quirks a brow up, and Josuke can pinpoint the exact second he fucked up.
“What does taking yourself seriously mean?”
“You know,” Josuke says, just a bit desperately. “All of this. I can change my name, and my hair, and my clothes and all that, but it doesn’t really mean much if I do some girly shit on top of it. I mean, I’m kinda asking for it at that point.”
“Wearing nail polish doesn’t make you a woman.”
“I know, I just—”
“I used to wear it too, when I was a bit older than you.”
Josuke blinks.
“I wasn’t a fan of anything that wasn’t black. But I still wore it during my first few years in college, after I moved to America.” There’s something knowing in Jotaro’s eyes. “Do you think I wasn’t taking myself seriously either?”
The answer is no. Of course it’s no. There’s nobody in the world that takes transitioning more seriously than Jotaro.
But for some reason, when he tries to picture it, that kind of androgyny, there’s a quiet voice in Josuke's head that thinks of what men are supposed to look like. How much work it takes to look like that for men like him. It thinks about why men like that get to toe the line while everyone else puts in the effort to look the way they should, and says yes .
Because why did those men get to flaunt what they should have been trying to hide?
Quietly, it says that's not enough. Quietly, it says they don’t deserve to be called men, if it’s not enough. Quietly, it asks: what makes you think you’ve done enough to be called one too?
Josuke’s throat clicks. He knows, logically and morally, what the right answer is, and he knows what his gut reaction was too. And he knows that the discrepancy isn’t right. At this point, it’s safer to just keep his mouth shut than to keep digging a grave right out from underneath his own feet.
The thing is, Jotaro’s smart. And he knows when silence is an answer.
“I’m not going to lecture you on how anyone can wear what they like. Because right now, that probably doesn’t mean much to you.”
Josuke sucks in a breath like Jotaro just slapped him clean across the face. It’s not confrontational, but by god does it feel pointed. Something about that must come across to Jotaro too, because after that, his eyes look a little softer.
“It took a while before it meant something to me too,” he finally says. “You’re still young. And you’re learning. It’s easier to stick to what’s already been established for other men. Safer too, sometimes. I won’t blame you for trying to emulate that. But I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“You don’t have to sugarcoat it,” Josuke mutters. “I know it’s fucked up.”
“It’s learned,” Jotaro corrects. “It won’t do you any favors if that’s what you try to live by though. Nobody’s going to reward you for passing. It’s always going to be difficult. You might as well do what you like while you’re at it. Do you want to wear nail polish?”
The answer is acidic on Josuke’s tongue, like acetone and glitter.
“Yeah.”
“Then wear it. Someone might try to break your fingers for it, but I doubt they’ll sit there and wipe it off for you. Don’t put in the work for them.”
Josuke’s not the smartest person around. Compared to Jotaro, it’s not even close. It doesn’t feel right, tackling that squeamish, cagey part of him that’s setting up the lopsided framework in his head.
It’s hard, actually. Really hard.
It takes a long while before he can even pinpoint that voice that’s picking out what parts of himself are too feminine, what he needs to tamp down and prove to show that he’s actually a man. But when he comes back to Jotaro’s hotel room a week later with a black coffee and an iced mocha in hand, his nails are a dark navy blue.
It doesn’t feel right, but there’s plenty of things about himself that don’t feel right either. That prickly sense of insecurity is something he can learn to take in stride too. So Josuke keeps his head up and keeps it pushing.
The way real men do.