Work Text:
Loneliness is kind of like a drug. After a while, Jotaro can’t really say when, he became numb to it, came to expect it, to need it in order to feel normal at all. The feeling of yawning emptiness, stretching out, in every direction. He’s been an island for so long that it’s hard to recall the last time someone actually touched him. He misses intimacy, despite his complicated and unpleasant relationship with it. He misses sharing a bed. Misses morning breath and sweat and sex. He can't have any of that. He's not allowed to. He doesn't deserve the comfort of a one night stand, let alone a lover. His hands aren't made for tender care or soulful caresses. But he misses the time and place and the person he was when he did deserve those things.
Maybe that’s why he keeps having these damn dreams.
The first one came as a shock. A blank spot in his scant few hours of actual sleep, followed by the screech of his alarm and a wet patch between his legs. Annoying, but wholly normal for a healthy man. Except Jotaro isn't a healthy man. He pushes aside the concern and moves on from the self-directed disdain for doing something so stupid and juvenile when he's in his forties. It's not like he can control what his mind and body decide to do during REM sleep. It's just a thing that happens.
The second comes the next night. This one is worse. It wakes him in a cold sweat, his skin feeling clammy and everything around him is damp. Perspiration soaked into the sheets and a sticky mess between his legs. Jotaro can’t even really conjure up the images that lead to this outcome. It’s a blurry mess that flits across his vision every time he blinks. Swathes of gold and rouge, a deadly and sumptuous palette of colors and sensations that have his chest heaving with every desperate inhale. He hasn’t had a wet dream since he was a teenager, but the evidence is there.
It’s especially difficult to get out of bed. The night wasn’t restful, his limbs feel uncoordinated and heavy as he goes through his morning routine and he feels dehydrated. He should drink more water, not just after the night of sweating out a fever dream, but in general. Instead he has a breakfast of coffee and a cigarette, showers, then heads to work, trying not to think too hard about the last time he even got aroused or had an erection at all before these dreams.
It's been longer than he'd like to admit.
His tongue feels coated in cotton wool by the time he gets home.
He falls asleep with papers spread across his coffee table and the television on, droning in the background. The mumbling tones of a late night cooking show re-run lull him to sleep. Or something like sleep. The thing about sleep and Jotaro is they haven’t been friends in years. He developed idiopathic insomnia at age twelve and trauma only made that more severe. When sleepless stretches go on long enough, hallucinations start and Jotaro thinks that this is what he must be seeing when he blinks awake from his sofa slumber and a shadow passes across the television screen. A blip of darkness in the darkened living room of his modest fifth floor apartment.
Even with the television as the only souce of light inside his home, it shouldn’t seem quite so inky beyond the borders of his heather gray area rug, slightly askew on the hardwood floor. Is that loneliness creeping in at the corners? Is he dreaming or seeing things? The glittering skyline of Miami doesn’t penetrate the blackened bubble encasing Jotaro in this weird waking sleep. He can’t move. His arms are too heavy, his head won’t lift from where it’s slumped along the back of the couch, his eyelids feel frozen in time. He can’t blink and the shapes on the television are distorted smudges in his periphery.
The dark around the edges flexes outward and contracts, like the room is breathing and sweat breaks on Jotaro’s brow.
Words. Jotaro hears his own voice but his mouth is tingling like he’s been shot up with novocaine. He can’t feel himself vocalizing anything and his tongue feels swollen–
Why is it you?
The words make no sense.
A form melts from the darkness and passes in front of the television again, so quick it’s nearly imperceptible but Jotaro could swear it was closer this time, just beyond the coffee table. Pages flutter as it passes. Jotaro feels his pulse jump and the swollen heat he feels in his face squirms down his throat, like fingers pressing down on the back of his tongue and saliva floods his mouth. This has to be a dream. It has to be. He chokes on an intrusion he can’t see and coughs. Red. He sees red, and at first he thinks it’s blood as it tumbles past his lips. The floating ruby smudges seem nearly weightless. Jotaro tries to get his eyes to focus, make sense of anything he’s seeing.
Petals.
Flower petals.
His lap feels warm and wet and his eyes swivel, trying to look but his body still won’t move, won’t cooperate. Sleep paralysis has him by the spine and everything is stuck. He struggles to get his lungs to fill. He can see in the cool blue dance of light from the television a dark stain spreading, wider and wider, oozing over his thighs, onto the couch, dripping off the sofa and down to the floor. Red. It’s all red all the way down to his toes, hot and slippery, and this he knows is–
Jotaro’s back is screaming when he wakes in the morning. He’s slumped on the sofa, neck throbbing from the awkward angle it's been stuck at for hours, his extremities cold, and his work clothes soaked through beneath his arms, all down his spine, and across his chest. Once again, between his legs is sticky, shameful evidence that something occurred while he was sleeping. Something… His memories are hazy. He can't really piece it together. He sits up slowly and pops his spine with a hand to the small of his back and an arch that makes every muscle in his body whinge in protest.
The television is off.
Jotaro goes to the bathroom to shower, stripping off his sweat stained clothes, grimacing at the salt tang and musk of his own body odor. When he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, arms still half tangled in his shirt, he stills. What he sees there isn't what he expects. He wants to brush it off as simple exhaustion but he swears he looks thinner than he did yesterday. The divots between his ribs seem somehow more pronounced. His cheeks are hollow, his eyes sunken, darkened beneath with ghostly, purpling shadows like he got socked in each eye while sleeping.
He sighs and gets into the shower, scrubbing the remnants of the night before off his skin. What does it matter if he's lost some weight? He's retired for the most part. Right?
Halfway through his post-shower coffee breakfast, he glances at his digital calendar and is reminded of an appointment he'd been looking forward to, if only for a break in the routine of students, faculty, and nights alone with paperwork. Now, he finds himself dreading this encounter. He fears what kind of horrible remnants of his nighttime pleasure-terror might be visible on his skin.
He has a lunch date with Josuke.
Jotaro downs his coffee and burns his cotton-coated tongue.
"Are you alright? You look like hell." Josuke's to the point observation the moment Jotaro takes a seat at their table, having arrived exactly on time despite the slow start to his morning, cuts Jotaro to the quick.
"I feel like hell. Sleep paralysis. Happens sometimes," it's all the explanation Jotaro is willing to offer. It doesn't seem like the usual run of the mill sleep paralysis. Not really. He's not about to divulge the unpleasant details of just what's happened to him thrice now. Josuke's mind would likely jump to the worst case scenario (sickness or a Stand user, it's a toss up which would be the first Josuke would assume given his dual professions) and he'd want to fix it. Something nags at Jotaro, a tiny bell ringing in the back of his mind.
He can't be discovered.
But why does he feel that way?
He picks at his lunch and asks Josuke how he's been, steering the conversation toward more palatable waters than Jotaro's less than tasteful dreaming. It's not until Josuke's asking for the check that Jotaro realizes he's cleared his plate even though he can't recall how anything tasted.
He can't even recall how he got to the restaurant in the first place.
He does not hug Josuke goodbye.
Jotaro needs sleep. He knows he does, but he doesn't want to. He doesn't know why he's so afraid of what he'll find behind closed lids, but his heart races wildly in his chest every time he stops pacing his apartment to look at the clock and sees far less time has passed than he'd been hoping. He's left every light on. He's never been afraid of the dark, he's not really afraid of that specifically now, but it feels like the thing he ought to do. Chase away the shadows. Stay awake with all the lights on. Don't turn on the television. When had it turned off? Was it ever on to begin with? Did he really fall asleep while grading?
He has four missed calls, two from work, one from his dentist's office, and one from his mother. He listens to the voicemails just to feel some kind of tether back to humanity so that he doesn't drown in his isolation and the shadows it's brought him.
Wait… What was that thought?
Jotaro stops, his socked feet sliding across the hard wood at the sudden loss of momentum and he glances around his empty apartment. It's silent and seems far too large for all the light that floods it.
It's because you're alone.
You're vulnerable.
Jotaro's thoughts feel foreign to him, as if they're in a language he doesn't speak but the meaning of them rings clear and true.
You're not the only one who's lonely.
There are so many lonely people.
You're just lonely and crazy.
Jotaro rubs at his forehead with his fingers, trying to push away the thoughts as if enough pressure could force them from his skull and scatter them into the ether. Words with wings, floating and flying away, gone forever on imperceptible wingbeats. It's senseless but he swears he can hear them. His fingers are wet.
He draws his hand away from his face and looks. Thin, watery, pink. Is it sweat? Is it blood? Could it be both? Jotaro swallows down a building knot in his throat but it feels like a horse pill weddged in his esophagus, a phantom feeling of something stuck there, pushing uncomfortably, slipping up and down but never dislodging no matter how hard he swallows so is that pill really there at all? Or is it just a phantom? A ghostly memory of a pill? The sound of plastic and tiny objects clattering to the floor startles Jotaro out of his reverie and he tears his eyes away from his fingers to look at the floor where a bottle of over the counter melatonin is spilled, little white pills littering the floor.
Jotaro blinks and they seem to double in number. They're buzzing and crawling, rolling around on the floor, little white bodies moving in a mass to swarm his legs and then he blinks again and he's sitting on the floor of his shower, naked, with cold water pelting against his skin.
Was he awake or asleep? When did it happen? When did he fall asleep? He must have. The water that swirls around the drain is tinged with pink. Jotaro stares at the tiny vortex, watches the way the water moves and disappears into the dark, the twirling dance of clear liquid suctioned into the floor and away. A red petal drifts across the current and down into the dark. Then another, and another and Jotaro doesn't know where they're coming from. He can't bring himself to look, but he watches as the floor of his shower floods with red petals and they clog the drain. Water rises and spills over the lip of the shower stall, spreading red petals and pink tinged water out into his home, beneath the meager gap in the bathroom door, sloshing against the walls like a rising tide.
He's still sleeping. He must be. Right? He tries to get to his feet, red petals clinging to his damp, chilly skin as he gets out of the shower, opens the bathroom door, and then he's on the balcony. It's a balmy night, the seasons are turning and he has no idea how he got here, or when he put the bath robe on, but there's a cigarette in his hand, poised and waiting for a light. His wet hair makes him shiver in the breeze.
"Let me get that for you," a voice to his right. Jotaro turns and sees a field of gold. Gold hair, gold eyes, a golden robe, a stitched together neckline, a visage from the past, monstrous in his beauty, but it's blurry and as his eyes come into focus, he realizes he's not looking at Dio at all. He's looking at someone else. An extension but not. He recognizes the young man before him though he looks older than he did in the photograph sent to him by the foundation a decade ago. He looks older than the last time Jotaro saw him in 2011. He must be what… Twenty-six? Twenty-seven now? How much time has passed? How stalwartly has he avoided this very thing? Being alone with –
Giorno Giovanna lifts a lighter, an old beat up zippo. Jotaro's own zippo that he swore he lost some time back while in the Caymans on a research sabbatical. The familiar clink and snap of the lid flipping back and the flint being struck make Jotaro jolt. He stands as still as he can as Giorno, if it even is Giorno at all, lifts the lighter, hand cupped around the flame that reflects in his eyes. His eyes… Weren't they green? These eyes are the color of crimson on snow, a vivid carmine splash in his tanned face, beneath thick wheatfields, lashes that curl toward the heavens, hair that rolls downward like a fall of molten gold. Jotaro leans and inhales, taking smoke into his lungs.
"What are you doing here?" Jotaro exhales as he asks this, watching his smoke curl into the air and dissipate, caught on a breeze that he swears makes the sky itself ripple. He must be really out of it. He feels awake. Doesn't he?
"Answering your call," Giorno's reply sounds calm, almost too calm. There's an emotional distance, a coolness that Jotaro can't quite get comfortable with. It sounds too much like Jotaro's own carefully chosen tones when speaking to people who wish he'd call more. People like Josuke, who make a point to come to him, to travel out this way, but these days Josuke visits Jolyne more than him and Jotaro feels so fucking alone. But he chose that.
So why would he choose Giorno?
When did he call him?
Is he actually awake?
He looks at his hands and tries to count his fingers. He has no idea if it’s true, but Jolyne was a big fan of that stupid werewolf show and it was playing some time ago when he stopped in to visit, last year maybe. Has it really been a year since he last visited her?
In a dream the number of fingers is always wrong. To take advice from a teen drama seems about as insane as anything else he’s seen in the last few days. Who could he call and ask for advice? Who would bother listening to him ramble about his sleep issues or the fact that they’ve been the source of three pairs of soiled undergarments in less than a week’s time. Was it Giorno?
“There’s ten,” Giorno’s slim fingers reach and close around Jotaro’s own. His skin is feverish. Jotaro jerks his hand away from that touch and turns his hand over, back and forth, looking for evidence of a burn, raised, reddened, blistered skin, but it’s the same as it ever is. A little weathered, callouses all in the same places, a little chapped across the knuckles from scrubbing cumstains out of his underwear in the sink.
He feels sick.
“How did you know what I was doing?” Jotaro looks up from his fingers and into Giorno’s eyes. They’re the color of an open wound, deep, frothy red, reflecting the skyline but the reflections are all wrong. It's not Miami. He sees steepled buildings, deep canals with moonlight warped across them, white buildings and cobblestone, flowers blooming from twisted and mangled bodies that cry out for mercy, an adult wailing like an infant while the infant in their arms shushes them–
Jotaro is sitting on the edge of his bed, watching a column of ash fall from the end of his cigarette and onto the floor beside his bare feet. He stares down at the ash as it curls and melts to become one with the cheap, blonde wood that is scuffed from multiple occupants over the years. His building is older. Maybe it’s haunted. Or maybe Jotaro himself is haunted. He looks up from the floor and sees Giorno standing there, his beautiful golden curls a curtain around his shoulders, undone and free, full of red petals. His body is lean and naked, kissed by the sun, blush pink across his curved hips. Twin scars stretch beneath his pectoral muscles, wrapping around his ribs. His face is placid. He takes a step closer and Jotaro finds his hands suddenly occupied.
Giorno was across the room but now his fingers are interwoven with Jotaro’s. Ten for ten. He can feel each one.
“You wanted this. So here I am,” Giorno’s voice is inside Jotaro’s head. His lips don’t move as he descends, dipping forward, his hair spilling around them both, shutting out the rest of the apartment as his motionless lips press against Jotaro’s own. Delicious febricity bursts from that single point of contact, a cascade of petals, soft flowers, brushing over every inch of Jotaro’s skin, settling between his legs. The wrongness of this affection feels like it’s too far away. Jotaro reaches for disgust but finds only the suppleness of longing in his grasp. Sweet succor for his lonely heart. Wet and yielding to his fingertips, a warm and willing body, the nectar of fresh arousal dripping down his knuckles. He opens his lips and is filled with the sound of a sigh, a moan, a warbling desperation that rattles his skull and thrums through his teeth, humming like a tuning fork, freshly struck.
Yes.
Giorno’s voice is soft and small but it is inside Jotaro’s very being, filling out every inch of him as he curls his fingers and thrusts deeper. When did he slip them inside? When did he release Giorno’s hand to touch him in ways that he shouldn’t. Not simply because they’re related but because he murdered Giorno’s father with these hands and was too much of a gutless coward to ever confront him personally. Three conversations over the phone over the course of a decade, one brief encounter in person when getting Jolyne released from prison, an agonizing stretch of guilty self-isolation and now this. Now Giorno rocking into his hand, rubbing himself shamelessly against Jotaro's palm and panting into his mouth, the taste of his breath like a humid honey-suckle sunshower in summertime. He tastes like forbidden fruit. Jotaro’s knees feel weak and he isn’t even standing.
Lie back on the bed.
Jotaro’s fingers feel cold for the absence of Giorno’s body surrounding them and the sudden view of the ceiling is completely disorienting. A shift in perspective, a loss of his robe, the world is a formless shadow beyond the boundaries of his california king. Giorno seats himself astride Jotaro’s hips, envelopes him in wet, sucking heat, an open, bleeding gash, a sultry and willing accomplice, a lover with a knife at Jotaro’s throat– His opening squeezes around Jotaro, pressure that makes his toes curl and Giorno’s hands dig into his chest. His fingertips sink, dipping into the essence of Jotaro’s being as he rocks and tosses his head back, that golden mane sending a shower of red petals through the air, lost to the darkness beyond.
Jotaro’s pulse is like a bass beat between his legs, thrumming so frenetic and insistent. Can Giorno feel it? The rhythm of his lust and lonesome selfishness? Jotaro wouldn’t call this comforting but wetness slides across his lap, grinding against his pubic bone and he’s buried to the hilt in the cushiony bliss so deep he feels like he might just disappear inside Giorno, swallowed whole by the way those soaking wet walls tug at him, suck him deeper, suck him dry…
“What… Is this?” Jotaro’s throat feels dry, his words coming out hoarse and stilted. It’s like choking up glass and sand and he breaks into a sweat as he rocks his hips up toward the openness waiting for him. Giorno’s nails rake down his chest as he bends and the curvature changes, the depth shifting, the pressure making Jotaro’s sex pound like a swollen bruise and the weight of Giorno above him is leaden. Jotaro tries to inhale but he may as well be breathing through a straw for all the air he can actually take in.
"An exchange," Giorno whispers it as he dips his tongue past Jotaro's lips. Merlot and gunpowder. Acidic and carcinogenic. Jotaro burns. The slap of skin on skin, the sting of it marries well with the taste of intoxication slithering down Jotaro's throat. His body feels tight and he's suffocating. He needs air. He needs something. Anything at all to orient him.
He needs to wake up.
Am I… Going to die?
Giorno withdraws and arches, his claws digging divots into Jotaro's abdomen, drawing blood, piercing nerves that make his body ache for release. He's so close. On the razors edge of total devestation. Giorno's moan is long, loud, so satisfied and melodic, like the swell of strings, a first chair cello, the dark resonance that upholds an orchestra and Jotaro can't take his eyes off the sight of his sin and succulence colored skin. Red and gold, lips dripping wine and cunt squeezing so tightly that Jotaro feels it all the way up his core. Giorno grinds against him, bounces in his lap, digs rivers into his skin and cries out a sound of ecstatic fruition that is unmistakable. It's a crashing wave, an undertow that pulls him in.
Fear discolors the edges of this vision of superrnal scortation. Dark tendrils creep in and wrap around Jotaro's frozen limbs, around his throat, pinning him to the blood stained and petal covered sheets. He's so close.
Give it to me. Give in to your delirious, lonesome relief. Give me life.
Jotaro doesn't want to die. He's long since lost his attachment to living but he has a purpose and a duty and alive but alone is better than dead and unable to act–
"All men die," The world goes quiet as Giorno speaks. The only sound is his voice and Jotaro's wheezing, ragged breath. Hushed. Still. A reprieve while sitting on the precipice of oncoming peril. "But you won't. Not this time."
Jotaro wakes in an empty bed. He feels damp from head to toe, sweat and sex, the scent of it hanging heavy in the air. Grey, early morning sunshine pours through his windows, spilling across his sheets. He rolls, stiff muscles protesting, and curls in on himself. There, on the bed beside him, is a single red petal. The hour turns over. 06:59 to 07:00.
He doesn't have the strength to reach and silence his alarm. But the sound at least lets him know he is awake.