Chapter Text
The space doesn't really feel like it's lived in. It's the sort of tastefully inoffensive you'd expect out of a model condo, the kind of place that the leasing office shows to potential residents to get them to seal the deal. 1200 impersonal square feet of eggshell white and heather gray, plain white dishes that look like they came in a bulk pack purchased online with only function in mind, venetian blinds and fake potted plants. Prints of abstract paintings that were likely AI generated. Fake. It's all so fucking fake and it feels empty.
Jolyne drifts from the guest room to the kitchen and pulls down a glass, jamming into the refrigerator door and listening to the low hum of the motor as her glass is filled with chilly, filtered water. Cold. Cold and plain and lifeless. She takes a sip and leans back against the counter, the stolen button down shirt she's barely wearing slipping off her shoulder as she lifts the glass and swallows. It's so quiet in here she can't think straight.
Five months. Five months she's been staying here and she thinks she's spoken to Jotaro a grand total of twenty times. The place is almost emptier when he's actually in it. He's not even being subtle about it. The way he's avoiding her. The way he can't carry on a conversation with her for more than five minutes without seeming like he might bolt for the balcony. He spends more time at the university than at home. She thinks he might be sleeping in his office, or maybe he's with another professor. Or worse, maybe he's with family he actually likes and wants to see. Maybe he's with Josuke, who Jolyne hasn't spoken to since the guy swooped in to help save the day, all flashy smiles and big hair.
That would make the most sense. Josuke… Another charming Joestar and a man who stole something from her without even realizing it. A man who made Japan a more inviting prospect than ever going home.
It's better than Florida in some ways but just the same, she hates Japan. She can't even get good weed here. Jolyne wishes she'd never followed Jotaro to this godforsaken place to begin with. Truthfully, she'd simply not known what else to do. The dread of watching Jotaro disappear into the distance again was just… Not something she could stomach anymore. After everything, she'd hoped it would be better. That he would be better. That they could be different.
After learning about him, watching snatches of his chaotic memories like a film projected on a blank white wall in her mind, walking through the museum of his life, staring at snapshots of things that were vivid technicolor depictions of where he'd gone and who he'd been, after being damaged and scarred and working so hard to save him, and he her, she thought just maybe.
Maybe.
She slams her cup down on the counter and heads out to the balcony. A half smoked pack of Malboro Ultra Lights and a bic lighter with a pair of airbrushed dolphins leaping from a multicolored sea are waiting for her on the little glass topped patio table. She takes a seat, lights a smoke, and stares out into the hazy twilight of Roppongi at dusk. It's a noisy fucking place. That Jotaro can even afford to live in the district while she and her mother never moved out of that little bungalow in Boca Raton is just another insulting reminder of how separate they've been all this time.
She sighs a plume of smoke and her arm throbs, scar tissue pulling tight in the brisk air of early winter. She traces the shape of her own name carved into her skin, each deep groove silky to the touch and tender. They are intertwined at the soul but as far apart as any two people can be. In the same place but living different realities. Jolyne can still feel snippets of Jotaro's fear, his desperation, his anger, his melancholy, his love for his mother, his attachment to Josuke, his infidelitous behavior, the faceless memories of nights spent in the sweaty clutch of people he didn't love and who would never love him, seeking solace in the bottom of a bottle or beneath someone who would be kind enough to take him right to the brink and squeeze the breath from his throat so he could feel punished in his moment of euphoria. Until he'd reunited with Josuke, Jotaro lived a life of self-flagellation in the form of self-destructive behavior so obscene it would make a whore lose their lunch.
Jolyne had looked where she was never meant to and it's only made his absence that much more apparent. To know that he didn't simply stop existing when he was no longer in her view, that he'd lived a wretched life full of pitiful self-hatred and piss poor coping mechanisms, erased the concept of an unknown father and replaced it with the abysmal reality that Jotaro was just a man. A man with a weak heart who made shitty choices just like anyone else.
Is he avoiding her because when the pain is inflicted by someone other than him, it's then too much for him to bear? Or does he think he's not worthy of the second chance she's trying to give him?
Why doesn't he love her more than he hates himself?
The sliding glass door stands open, letting cold air and cigarette smoke taint the perfectly heartless condo. It'll be an improvement. Maybe he'll get upset enough to say ten whole words to her. 'What were you thinking, Jolyne? For fuck's sake.' She brings her bare feet up onto the chair and shivers, hugging her knees to her chest as she sucks down smog and stares into the multitude of nothingness the skyline has become in her watery vision. All this time she spent missing a man she had conceptualized in her head. A flawed father who was as unloving as the space they now occupied like a pair of ghosts. She used to fantasize about him coming home and reconciling with her mother. Begging forgiveness and swearing that she and Jolyne were the most important people in his life.
I've always cherished you.
The timing was always wrong. There was always a reason. So many missed birthdays.
She wishes the muddled dreams she'd had of Jotaro had been real. Good and bad. They sure beat the stretching silence of rejection. That's what this is. A rejection of her desire to know him with his consent, with his perspective instead of the distilled movie-like clarity of recorded memory. She wants to hear him explain himself. He owes her so many goddamn explanations but here she is. Five months later, tearfully making her way through a length of tobacco that's gone stale from being left out in the cold.
The only comforting thing she discovered when she looked at the disc was realizing that the happiest years of her life, crammed in that tiny apartment near the campus where her parents were attending school, was also the happiest time of his life. New love, new beginnings, and nothing but the promising future before them. It was faintly tainted in Jotaro's memory. Smeared with a red streak of fear that only grew as Jolyne did. As his love for her did. And then he was gone.
Daddy left and he never really came home.
If she was paid a dollar for every time she made jokes about her father leaving for a pack of smokes and that she was still waiting for him to come back, she could have afforded a better lawyer. She could have bought herself a nice valentino bag. She could have bought better friends. She could have bought a plane ticket to Japan to come and find him her damn self years before she ever went to prison.
And knowing why he disappeared is a colder comfort than an ice pack to treat frostbite. It gives her perspective but it's a reason. Not an excuse. And it had all been pointless in the end. All those thoughts of protecting Jolyne not just from his enemies, but from himself, had amounted to jack and also a lot of shit. What would she see if she looked at his memories now? What was he feeling when his skull was split and their eyes met? Josuke's hand reaching across the space between them, breaking that brief moment of contact. Arresting the moment in which he was trying to give her a deserved goodbye. An earned ending to their story of separation. Stolen. Her lungs burn as she thinks about how accepting he'd looked in that moment.
Did Jotaro even want to be alive?
"You're letting smoke in the house," the terse voice behind her sends a jolt through her numb limbs and she uncurls from her chair, looking over her shoulder. It's not him. It's not who she wants to see. There's a tired grimace on the face peering down at her. It's the first time she's seen him since Florida. He looks like he's been aged ten years in the time since. She pulls the shirt sliding off her shoulders more modestly closed across her chest.
It confirms many suspicions but raises so many new questions to see Josuke standing there in the open balcony doorway. He steps through and closes the door behind himself with a snap that rattles the blinds. She watches him drop like a stone into the seat across from her, bringing the weight of his world down upon the weary patio chair. The gas pedal in her heart hits the floor. Why is Josuke here?
"Did something happen?" It's the first question that springs to her mind and Josuke exhales a nasal sigh, lips pressing into a tight, thin line.
"I think that depends on what kind of something you're asking about. There hasn't been any kind of Stand incident if that's what you're thinking." Josuke's grave tone is too telling. Too pointed. Something has happened. She flicks ash onto the balcony floor and he reaches out, grabbing the cigarette from her fingers, snubbing it out in the tray on the table.
"Hey–"
"You're going to have to quit."
"Who the fuck are you to tell me what to do?"
"Someone who gives a fuck. About you and Jotaro." Josuke's use of her father's name stabs at her insides. It twists and shreds, a serrated blade in a sucking wound. It's like she and Jotaro are so estranged from each other, that no one will acknowledge who he is supposed to be to her. Who she wanted him to be. Who he'll never be if he won't come home and fucking face her.
"Just spit it out."
Josuke leans back and the chair gives a groan of ailing metal. He wipes a hand down his face and Jolyne takes in the sight of him properly. His staff badge for the university hanging on a lanyard with little enamel pins that give tiny indications of his interests but it's too dim on the balcony to make them all out
"I need you to make me a promise before I explain this… And… That's to just hear me out to the end." Josuke's eyes are tired, dark circles beneath them, bloodshot like he hasn't slept in days. Her throat shrinks to the size of a pinhole.
"Fine."
Josuke nods and clears the cobwebs of emotion clogging up the inside of his throat. The moment before he speaks feels like the final seconds in a televised cooking competition, a manufactured moment that keeps her hanging on the edge of her seat, anxiety eating away at her like a stomach ulcer. The words he speaks are the last she could have ever expected:
"Jotaro has Lung Cancer. Stage 4."
The world is devoid of air. A vacuum of pressure that makes her ears ring and her head feel like it's about to pop. She can't breathe. She can't fucking breathe–
"I have done everything I can… To convince him to let me help. To buy him more time and reset the clock. Over and over for years I've pleaded with him to get treatment. I found out entirely by accident in 2002 and he swore me to secrecy and always made stupid fucking excuses." Josuke's words come out in a stop start, ten car pile up of frustrated guilt, crashing metal, crunching glass, he's choking on them and Jolyne's chest feels compressed like she's at the epicenter of the wreckage.
She opens her mouth but closes it again. She'd given Josuke her word and she doesn't even know what she would say if she hadn't.
"I went into physics to try and find a way to cure him with Crazy Diamond because he could never justify stopping long enough to get treatment. He wouldn't do surgery or chemo or anything he just kept going and putting it off and he quit smoking for a while but then started again and I–" Josuke sucks in a trembling breath and drops his head into his hands, elbows landing so hard the whole table shakes with the impact. "I can reverse the cancer back to Stage one. I can but he won't fucking let me."
Jolyne knows why that is. She knows better than anyone because she's seen inside Jotaro's mind. She knows what kind of guilt and self loathing he harbors. He thinks the kindest thing he can do for the people around him is disappear and she'd hoped that he was getting better. That he could see it differently now that they were finally at least a little bit together. She'd offered him the olive branch of her presence and he'd accepted it but now that all feels like a falsified acceptance. A manipulation. His coldness and distance make too much sense in this context.
Jotaro is sick in more ways than one.
"How long?" Jolyne's voice is a breathy croak. She hates Jotaro for how his weakness has spread like a virus from his heart to hers. She should just pack up and leave. Its obvious he wasn't really trying, and why had she expected anything different?
"Six… Seven months?"
It's clear as to why Josuke is here when Jotaro is not. Why he has come and invited himself to speak to Jolyne for the first time since Pucci. Jotaro probably wanted Josuke to keep his distance to avoid this exact conversation from happening. He wants to leave her again. And Josuke is a fucking wreck. The poor guy deserves better than what Jotaro has given him. Some of Jotaro's self-hatred is deserved, but it's a bit like the chicken and the egg. What came first? Jotaro's martyr complex and loathing or the behaviors he uses to keep both of those things alive? It's impossible for her to tell anymore.
"What makes you think he'll listen to me?"
Josuke lifts his head and wipes at his eyes with a trembling hand.
"Because he's got a… guilty conscience. A complex. About you. If anyone has a chance of convincing him–" Josuke's voice breaks, a weary warble tumbling through his tone that belabors the kind of love Josuke holds in his heart. A love she envies. That she knows about. That no one was ever meant to discover.
"If I can't convince him?"
"Then we wait until… Until he's weak enough and do it by force. I'll shrink the cancer back to Stage One and we buy ourselves some time."
What Josuke is proposing is unethical. Jolyne knows it's so fucking unethical, to force someone to live when they clearly don't have any interest in doing so. She rubs her hands together. Her fingers are so cold they've gone numb. She shouldn't agree to it. She should do what a good daughter would do, and try to make the most of these last remaining months. Or just leave Jotaro to die alone like he so clearly wants to. Like he must think he deserves. She can try and respect what he wants but as she glances toward the empty, darkened condo interior and thinks about how stalwartly Jotaro has been avoiding her for almost half a year…
She hasn't been a good daughter because he's been a shit father. So why start now?
"Okay. I'll help you."