Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I see skies of blue and clouds of white
Bright sunny days, dark sacred nights

Josuke’s breakfast today is a peanut butter/Captain Crunch sandwich because his husband isn’t awake to steer him away from bad decisions, eaten while perched on the kitchen counter. It is a terrible decision, he’s realized, but he’s halfway through and there’s no turning back now.  He is nothing if not committed to his mistakes.

If Okuyasu were up and about, he’d probably be having a cappuccino and cornetto right now in the Italian style.  He’s shifted away from his Italian influences in his professional career, currently working in an obscenely trendy noodle bar that’s nearly impossible to get into unless you line up an hour before it opens, but when it comes to what he prepares at home, Okuyasu prefers to stay true to his roots and eat the foods he learned how to prepare in Tonio's kitchen all those years ago.

Making cornetti and, similarly, croissants (Josuke’s still not completely sure of the difference between the two except one is Italian and one isn’t; he just knows that he wants to stuff both of them in his mouth), it turns out, is hard. He likes to watch his husband –hair tied back with a scrunchie straight out of the 80s, apron around his waist- fold, cut, and roll dough, always careful, always precious.  Josuke's helped before, but the rest of the process is, frankly, intimidating and there’s so much waiting. That’s the reason why Okuyasu -though his recipe is truly life changing and has personally improved Josuke’s existence- doesn’t make them at home very often, preferring instead to buy them by the box at the bakery.

There aren’t any croissants and/or cornetti today, alas, and Okuyasu cleaned out fridge the yesterday, so he didn’t even bother to try rummaging around in it while scrounging up breakfast. There isn’t much of anything left in the house except the beds, several boxes they haven’t moved over to the new house yet, and Josuke’s extensive array of hair products and makeup.  He’s just going to spend the day unpacking, but he still has to look cool, you know?  His pride as a beautician depends on that.

“Josuke! Hey, Josuke! Josuke!” comes a voice directly next to his ear and he’s so startled that he sends the box of cereal skittering across the floor as he vacates the counter.  Shizuka materializes into view, looking not a bit sorry.  Shizuka delights in catching people unaware.  It's her special talent, an art she's carefully cultivated.  Josuke wishes, not for the first time in his life, he was still an only child.

“Shizuka, you little shit, I’m going to feed you to a lion.”

“You can’t do that. I’m a baby. You can’t feed a baby to anything; that’s illegal. Are you a criminal, Josuke?”

“Babiest bro,” he says conspiratorially as he fetches a broom and dustpan to tidy up the spilled cereal, “the reason I’m here is because I used to be the leader of a punk-rock gang of stand users back in Morioh and I had to flee the country after my identity was exposed.”

“Pfft, you’re pop-punk at best,” Shizuka says, and then her nose wrinkles in contemplation.

“…There aren’t really any stand gangs in Japan though, right? That’s not actually a thing? Is it?”

“Isn’t that a mystery? Anyway, did you need something, bro, or did you just want to be a brat?”

“I was going to tell you that my better bro brought back food last night if you wanted that but then you ate all my cereal.  How could you do that, bruh?”

To that, Josuke takes the cereal still remaining in the box and tips it into his mouth, staring directly into her eyes all the while. She howls something about him being a complete monster and lobs the jar of peanut butter at him, which Crazy Diamond bats away.  Shizuka sulks and fades back out of view, but Josuke is pretty sure, even if he can no longer see her, that she’s making a rude gesture at him.

Shizuka is every inch Joseph Joestar’s daughter and the rowdiness that entails: a tiny bundle of moxie, frenetic energy, and muscle. Josuke’s not sure how Holly was raised by that man and turned out so nice and sweet and absolutely not inclined to leap out at him in a dark hallway and put him in a Yes Lock.

He disposes the contents of the dust pan in the trahs can, puts away the broom, makes a mental note that he’s either going to have to take out the trash or, on second thought, just have Okuyasu vanish everything with The Hand again.  His husband has (not often these days, no, but it’s happened before, always in the early hours of the morning before the sun comes up when nothing stops their minds from wandering) contemplated what it means about him that his stand is so potentially lethal, but honestly, being able to eliminate messes on a whim is just useful.

“What’d he bring?”

“I’m not telling you, you monster.”

“I guess I won’t buy you a peppermint mocha later.”

Shizuka materializes, eyes narrowing.

“Make that a gingerbread latte with extra gingerbread and a cake pop.”

“Deal. Did he bring back something from the restaurant?” Josuke asks hopefully. They have ginger-scallion noodles on the menu and while he objectively knows murder is Wrong with a capital W, he would personally destroy the owner and everything he loves if they ever stop offering it. Shizuka shakes her head and crushes his dreams in the process.

“No, but he told me he’s going to bring back some fried chicken tomorrow.  He also told me not to tell you because it’s a surprise, but bro should know better by now than to trust me. Anyway, he stopped by Carota’s and brought back some pasta and stuff?  I called dibs on the garlic bread already, sorry.”

Carota’s is operated by an Italian chef who Josuke thinks may be in Passione’s pocket if not a Passione operative himself, though he admittedly doesn’t know much about the organization other than Jotaro’s warnings to stay away from it.  Okuyasu and Matteo sometimes trade food from their respective kitchens on their way back home from work: oxtail soup for buridda; shiitake buns for bruschetta.

Stand users attract other stand users.  Chefs attract other chefs.  On one hand, they probably should keep a wide berth of anything and anyone remotely connected to that shady Italian organization -once the mob, now evolved into something newer and stranger- whose tendrils creep into crime, politics, and so much more.  On the other hand, Matteo makes really good garlic bread.  Josuke knows where his priorities rest.

“You can’t call dibs. I already called dibs on all garlic bread in this household like a week ago.”

“Well, I called dibs on garlic bread a month ago.”

“I called dibs before you were even born.”

“I called dibs an infinity ago.”

“There’s only one way to solve this, little buddy. I’ll arm wrestle you for it.”

Josuke does not get garlic bread today.

And I think to myself
What a wonderful world

Chapter Text

Josuke’s life is packed in boxes laid out in the empty den, labeled with Okuyasu’s shaky writing in blue marker. Some of these boxes are from his move from Morioh to New York, never unpacked; some of those are even from his stint in medical school before-

He does not finish that thought because nothing good ever comes from finishing that thought.  He sets it aside in a recessed corner of his mind as he puts the battered old box full of textbooks in the very back of his new closet. Everything has its place in his house.  Sometimes that place is somewhere it can be forgotten.

The new house is his but it doesn’t feel like his yet.  It’s empty and dark and unfamiliar, and honestly, he never really feels at home unless Okuyasu is losing at Mario Kart in the background.  The old apartment had been his home since his first day in New York…no, no, that’s wrong, it had been their home, his and Okuyasu’s.  It was small and cramped, it was located too far from both of their places of work, the heating never worked properly in the winter, and it was theirs.

Joseph offered them his swanky downtown apartment when he first moved to the city chasing Okuyasu because it’s not as if he was even living there at that point, but Josuke never felt fully comfortable in such an ostentatious place.  When it came time to sort out Joseph’s will, Josuke hadn’t wanted to accept the gift of this new home (not as lavish as the Joestar residence Shizuka grew up in, but grander than anything Josuke could have afforded on his own) from Joseph.  He wanted to sell it, maybe use the money for Okuyasu to start his own restaurant.

But then Emporio came into the picture.

Once it was determined that he and Okuyasu would be his new fathers, Josuke couldn’t really say no to the gift of a new house.  And besides that, there was Shizuka to consider; Shizuka who already lost one elderly parent and then the other in short succession; Shizuka, whose only other family lived in Florida or a continent away.

Shizuka, who is currently digging through boxes with wild abandon trying to find something.

“Where is it, Josuke? Where is it?”

“We don’t even have the television unpacked yet, buddy,” he says, trying to steer her away from the box of kitchen goods she’s currently dismantling in her search for videogames. At least, Josuke assumes she’s looking for her games. At any given time, Shizuka has only three things on her mind: wrestling, video games, and videogames about wrestling.

“I know where the television is! But my record player isn’t where I put it!”

Crazy Diamond scoops her up before she can do further damage to his organizational system (he had all those boxes labeled nice and neatly, and now they’re in thorough disarray) and fixes the torn box as he goes, depositing her neatly a foot away.

“I don’t think it got put in with Bro’s mixing bowls, little dude.”

“Okuyasu put one of your canes in with the box that’s got all my headbands! That record player could be anywhere!”

“Well, yeah, it’s purple, your headbands are mostly purple, you know? Same color. It makes sense.”

“…Josuke, do you ever listen to yourself talk?”

They work together as a team unloading boxes until it gets to the point that Shizuka gets antsy for lunch and his bad leg aches too much from all the lifting and kneeling.  Okuyasu and Josuke both wear scars from their childhoods: Okuyasu on his face and on his side, Josuke in a leg that gives out on him and throbs whenever it’s cold.

Shizuka makes tea and they warm up the rest of the leftovers minus the bucatini with Okuyasu’s name on it.  Shizuka grabs the spaghetti and meatballs, and Josuke takes the shrimp linguine with a spicy sauce he should know the name of by now but doesn’t.

“You know, I just remembered something,” he says in between mouthfuls of pasta. “I left a few boxes in the bedroom, so I bet your record player wound up there. Okuyasu’s gonna bring those when he wakes up.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” he says, spearing a shrimp, “things got a little mixed up while I was packing, but if it’s not here, then it’s gotta be there.  He’ll be here before long, don’t worry.”

“Alright. Alright. Alright, alright, alright.  Uh. I kinda want to play the first song in this place, so, like, could you be a bro and just like…not play any music in here until I get my record player back?  It’s dumb but I really, really wanna do that.”

“That’s no problem, dude.”

“Cool.  Cool beans, then.  Chilly beans, even.  Ice cold beans.”

His sister pokes through the remains of her meal before pushing it aside in favor of sprawling out on the couch, fishing her cellphone out of her pocket.  She’s not big by any means (and especially not in comparison to him; he was a tiny thing until puberty kicked him like a sack of bricks and he shot up to 6’3”) but she still has a remarkable habit of taking up every square inch of space on any surface she inhabits.  It’s fine, Josuke has the chair.

“You texting him?”

“I’m not texting someone every time I get my phone out, you know.”

“I can see you texting from here,” says Josuke. “ Look, you just got a message. You just got another one.”

“Fiiiiine. I know they’re having their trip and I don’t wanna, like, intrude on their time together or whatever, but I texted Emporio and told him to send me a picture of Mickey Mouse.  I guess they’re at Magic Kingdom today or whatever.”

Since he entered their lives (since he entered their universe, something Josuke is still wrapping his head around...but it’s not as if he’s entirely inexperienced with alternate timelines, even if he doesn’t remember Bites the Dust), Emporio has alternated between staying with Jotaro and with Irene, but…

Jolyne died.  She wears another name.  Jotaro died.  He wears another life.  Okuyasu is not the only Higashikata who thinks about the nature of stands in the dusk hours, and Josuke knows that whatever he fixes with Crazy Diamond is never exactly the same as before.  It’s close, yes, and when he has calm and peace of mind, few would notice anything different, even him, except on microscopic examination, but Okuyasu still has a scar, however thin and faint, where he mended his destroyed side.  Perhaps this is just how mending things works. You try to revert it to how it was before but it still leaves cracks.

Emporio Alniño grew up in prison.  Emporio Alniño watched all his friends die, watched an entire world in its death throes, and witnessed the birth of something new.  Josuke doesn’t know if he’s fully equipped to raise Emporio (is anyone ever ready for fatherhood?), but hell, he’s going to do the best he can and hope that’s enough.  Maybe that’s all anyone can ever really do.

“It’s not intruding. You’re family.”

“Well, I mean, yeah, but I’m not-”

Shizuka makes a vague hand gesture in the general direction of Florida.

“-I’m not part of the apocalypse crew, you know?  They’ve got this thing and geeze, wow, that’s kind of a big thing, isn’t it?  But, like, that thing is becoming a new thing or, like, it’s already been a new thing, I guess?  So it’s an old thing that became a new thing and now that new thing is becoming a new new thing and, like, changing things is complicated, you know what I’m saying? You wanna make the most you can of that squiggly time between the old stuff and new stuff ‘cause if it gets taken away too fast, then, like, wow, it’s all sudden and shit, uh, sorry, sudden and stuff and you’re like whoa, things sure are happening, so you wanna vanish or… uh, actually, sorry, forget I said anything, bro, that sounds dumb as heck.  I just, I just don’t wanna distract him too much while he’s spending time with Irene and friends or whatever, like go meet Rafiki, little dude, that’s a normal child thing.”

“Hey…hey, listen, Shizuka,” begins Josuke, the right words so close but he’s not sure if he can quite capture them.  People often misinterpret his sister, take her boisterousness for callousness, take her roughness for emotional stupidity, and while driving her to yet another Saturday detention, he’s often wondered if people would have the same reaction to her were she not a girl.  She’s raucous and unruly and at the end of the day, she means well; she’s a Joestar through and through.

But because of this misinterpretation, Shizuka, more often than not, wraps up her more sensitive feelings in a veneer of uncaring and flippancy, perhaps convinced that if she’ll be misunderstood anyway, she might as well not even bother. When something emotional is on the line, she never has any faith in her words, embarrassed over every stumble and falter, and pokes at but never quite wants to reach what she’s really trying to say.

“You’re not dumb.  I feel what you’re saying but…we might not have that experience with Emporio, yeah, but you’re not intruding on him.  So if you wanna call and say hi for a sec, I bet he’d really like it that he’s got a cool aunt checking up on him.  And you’re not intruding on me, for the record. We’re all a crew.”

Shizuka makes a small noise, draws her legs up to her chest, then laughs.

“We’re the wicked sensitive crew, haha.  Um. I guess I will in a bit.  I think they’re going on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad right now.  Emporio sent me a picture, see?”

She surrenders her phone to him (an act of trust because she doesn’t even let Okuyasu touch her phone and he’s pretty sure she would take a bullet for him if push came to shove.  Okuyasu has that effect on everyone he meets) and he takes it.

Emporio clutches the largest stuffed Stitch Josuke has ever seen in his life, a shy smile on his face.  He imagines the people in the background are Irene and her new girlfriend, but it’s honestly hard to tell because it’s a blurry cellphone shot and he mostly just sees their legs.  Josuke’s only met Hermes the one time but if things work out (and he suspects they will), then he supposes that’s going to change.

Josuke does not hide his grin.  This is his kid and he can’t wait to hear about Disney World.

Chapter Text

Okuyasu is taking his time getting here.  Josuke isn’t worried but he craves every moment with him, wants to spend his day with him instead of this tedious unpacking and arranging and rearranging of furniture.  His husband is a chef, an excellent one, and on the weekends, he works long into the night and wakes up late, curled up in bed while the less nocturnal members of the family go about their business.  He doesn’t do this for fortune or fame (though Okuyasu's moving swiftly up in the culinary world; Josuke clips every magazine article mentioning his name) but because it’s his art and he's a damn good artist.

Josuke's never more attracted to his husband than when they’re curled up on the couch together, the television a dim thrum as Okuyasu describes a dish he’s planning on making in lavish detail.  Josuke has a husband. The word tastes like honey in his mouth.  Husband.  When no one else is around, he repeats it to himself, marveling at the sound of it, at the reality of it all.  When he was still sixteen, before Okuyasu made the first faltering move on him, Josuke often hoped but he never thought it would actually be something he’d be able to say.

Okuyasu is my husband, Okuyasu is my husband, Okuyasu is my husband.

It’s a sentence that sounds sweet no matter how it’s said.

He’ll be here soon enough.  Josuke just has to learn patience, however hard that might be.  Okuyasu wakes up late because he’s a chef.  Josuke wakes up early because he’s a beautician and every grandmother in New York books a 7 o’clock appointments at his salon because they love his pompadour and orchid lipstick.

“I’m going to go get coffee,” he says at last, more because he needs something to do that isn’t unpacking boxes than anything else.  Besides, he did bribe Shizuka with Starbucks, and if he reneged on his promises, he’d never be able to get her to do anything at all.

His leg will disagree with walking out in the cold, already aggravated from moving boxes around, but it’s not enough to dissuade him from going out.  No matter how kindly he treats himself, it always hurts in winter.  Sure, sure, it may not technically be winter yet, but if the wind howls and the snow falls down and the ice sticks to everything, it’s well and truly winter no matter what it might call itself.

Kira died under an ambulance’s wheel years ago and left him with a bad leg and recurring nightmares of watching his future husband die.  It’s not the same as what happened to most of his victims (he’s alive), but Josuke resents that he’s marked by him even now, resents that Shizuka grew up without her first mother, resents that Okuyasu almost died.

Shizuka is no longer searching for her record player, content to wait for Okuyasu to bring the rest of the boxes, but she has begun search for her NES.  Joseph kept his youngest daughter well-supplied in every top-of-the-line console, but she finds something alluring in pixel graphics, and quite frankly, she plays "Kirby’s Adventure" like they’re in Egypt and her soul is on the line.

She looks up from rifling through a box of towels that her console absolutely isn’t in.

“Do you need help carrying stuff or are you good?”

“Nah, I’m good, bro. Crazy D’s got my back.”

Shizuka is absolutely destroying all his work of folding those nice and neatly.  So much for all that effort.

“Also, you’re folding all of those back up.”

“Pay me $20 and I'll stop.”

“Not on your life.”

There isn’t a coffee shop far from the house –his house, he reminds himself- because they pop up like mushrooms around here, one right after another. He puts on his winter jacket (or rather, one of many winter jackets because Josuke is Josuke and possibly the only person alive on earth who’s more into planning outfits is Rohan) and heads out, though not before begging Shizuka to please clean up whatever mess she might make as her hunt continues.

When he walks outside, snowflakes fall and cling to his eyelashes (“They’re so long”, his mother once said. “You don’t appreciate how lucky you are.”) before the heat of his body melts them, his breath a cloud of white.  Josuke hates the winters here, never the biggest fan of the season at all.  The sky turns dark too early; the cold settles into his bones.  It reminds him of sweat and fever, of huddling in the backseat of his mother’s car.

Deterred by the snow, not as many people roam the streets as they typically do on a weekend, but even still, the city bustles on.  He turns his collar to the cold and onward he goes.  He’s walked this street before, of course, when checking out the house previously, but this is his first day officially living here and he’s not yet intimately familiar with the businesses and residences that line it.  He knew the neighborhood of the old house like the back of his hand, so perhaps in time, he'll know this place just as well.

There’s a frozen yogurt place.  Shizuka will like that and he will too, though Okuyasu perpetually laments their popularity.  It’s not that he dislikes frozen yogurt.  It’s just that if it’s readily available, he can and will spend entirely too much money on compiling a monster cup resplendent with gummy worms, sprinkles, three kinds of chocolate, boba, cookies, and strawberry sauce and it will make him sick.  Okuyasu is a man who orates on the delicate taste of fiddlehead ferns in spring.  He’s also a man that’s regularly caught eating sugar cubes by the mouthful.

He passes a gym, and wonders if he ought to look into their membership prices since the one they currently attend is a ways away now, but then he remembers that the only thing Okuyasu loves more than him is the weight rack at their current one, so he shelves that idea.

A bakery he’ll most likely visit in the next couple weeks.  A pizza joint he’ll definitely visit in the next couple weeks.  A laundry.  A corner store.  He makes notes in his head of where they are, what they are, and onward he goes.

Josuke regrets not taking the car, even if it’s just a relatively short distance, but lessons learned.  Just a few more minutes until he can warm up, however briefly, while he orders before heading back to the house.  It won’t be long now.  He passes by an alley and thinks little of it, but in the edges of his vision, he catches a flash of red on white snow.

He doesn't think in situations like this.  His body takes over, mind a comfortable blur.

A quick glance to assess the situation. One man with a knife, no gun in sight, no visible stand.  Another man huddled on the ground, skin bloodless white where it’s not red, red, red.

Cane to the assailant’s arm, knocks the knife away, wet with someone else’s blood.  Crazy Diamond manifests, jerks him away from the fallen man, grabs a handful of hair, throws him aside with a resounding thud.  Gargled curses.  With the strength of his stand pinning him to the ground, he won’t get up for a minute, he thinks.

If anyone happens to pass by and notice the altercation, they give no indication.

Later that night, Josuke will think about this incident and, old memories rising in his throat like bile, panic that something like this happened so close to his home, but if he learned one thing from his childhood, it’s that terrible things happen anywhere, no matter how seemingly safe.

You do your best to stop them, and if you can’t, then you do your best to help however you’re needed.

Josuke cannot tell if the man on the ground lives or not, cannot tell where exactly the wound is because his entire midsection is awash in blood, soaking the fabric of his pants as he curls inwards on himself.  He crouches to better assess the situation at eye-level, though his leg protests.

(and every time josuke sees blood, he’s sixteen again and he’s losing okuyasu before his eyes and this fucking serial killer is gloating in front of him and he feels so helpless and there’s so much blood and they’re just children, reimi was just a child, okuyasu was supposed to have a better life than this and he’s losing him, it’s not fair)

“Hey, are you…” he says and the words suddenly dry up in his throat because it seems so flippant to start off with ‘hey’ when there’s someone who could very well be dead if he’s not actively on his way there.

“He can’t hurt you anymore. You’re going to be just fine, okay?”

And Josuke does not trust the words that come out of his mouth because he’s increasingly sure he’s too late, but then the man trembles, does not gasp for air so much as gag on his own blood, and Josuke knows that while there is still breath, there is still hope.

Crazy Diamond does not need to punch to mend things.  Josuke likes to punch things, if only for the unadulterated thrill of uppercutting a record player back into working order, but it’s not necessary.  Just a touch, a brush against his hand, and that’s all he needs.

He restores what’s torn.  Slashed wounds become smooth flesh.  The pavement is bloodied no more.  A thread of reality perpetually grasping towards what’s supposed to come next finally reaches its ending, and far away in Italy, a woman feels a trembling in her heart and knows that something’s finally reaching its end.

An arrow pierced Giorno Giovanna’s Gold Experience and it sang its Requiem, but the change in Crazy Diamond, the power to restore the intangible in addition to flesh, cannot be attributed to such an explanation.

He thinks about Reimi sometimes, thinks about the ghost girl with the back too horrifically butchered for words.

He thinks about a young boy who died a senseless and agonizing death, thinks about parents perpetually waiting for Shigechi to come home.

He thinks too often about Kira’s parting gifts to him: dread seizing his lungs right when he thinks he’s finally over everything; numbness settling into the deepest parts of him; the nagging feeling that he peaked when he was sixteen and everything after that has been a slow climb downwards ever since.

Lately, he thinks a lot about his son, a boy who visits the ghosts of places and now people, and he wonders if his stand changed to compliment Burning Down the House long before he ever met Emporio  Josuke’s been thinking a lot about everything recently.

Whatever the reason, Crazy Diamond bridges the damaged gap between cause and effect, listens to a Requiem and tells it no with just the smallest whisper of a chime as he reaches into the spirit to restore him to what he was before or, at least, the closest he’s going to get without a body.  This is the power of Crazy Diamond’s Division Bell.

Josuke immediately knows that something's up because there are only a few specific scenarios where the Division Bell rings out instead of Crazy Diamond’s standard healing.

He’s a wild-haired punk whose aesthetic he’d take a moment to admire if not for the fact that he’s trembling in the cold (‘the lace and fishnets are sick as hell but where is his shirt did the mugger take it he can’t have gone out in this weather wearing only that could he’) and his blood was more out than in only seconds before.  There’s a horrified “what the fuck are you?!”, the noise of someone trying to get away as quickly as possible, and then the assailant flees the alley.

Well, that’s not ideal.  That’s not ideal at all.  Josuke doesn’t like the thought that there are attempted murderers in his city and so close to his house, doesn’t like the thought that someone else might get hurt, but he still has a handful of his hair and the number of half a dozen stand users in the East Village alone, so tracking him down shouldn’t be an issue.

“It looked kinda hairy there for a second, man, but see?  Right as rain.”

The man had been curled up so tightly against himself that Josuke struggled to even see his face, but at his words (or maybe just at the realization that he’s not bleeding to death anymore), the man runs a shaky hand down to the spot where he gushed blood just seconds before and, finding nothing, lifts his head up (and he can tell now that he’s his age or just a little bit older) to stare with dawning horror not at Josuke but a little to the left and behind him, his pupils pinpricks.  Several, in fact.

Josuke is used to confusion from those he heals.  How can people not be confused?  You’re dying, then you’re not. You’re bleeding, then you’re not.  You hurt, but then it’s like you were never in pain at all.  It might as well be sorcery and maybe it is.

It’s just that most people can’t see Crazy Diamond.

“Vaffanculo! Non ti avvicinare!”

If the man was trembling before, he’s quaking now and not just because of the cold.  Josuke lets Crazy Diamond dissolve into the aether.  No sense distressing him any further.

“I’m sorry.  I’ll leave.  I hope that you feel better now,” Josuke says once he remembers the words.  He learned his Italian secondhand from Okuyasu (his husband is hard on himself, thinks he’s stupid, but he has a knack for linguistics and can tell someone to get wrecked in no less than nine languages) and while the trip he took to go to Yukako’s wedding in Naples helped, he’s rusty.

He rises to leave, but then the man calls out to him, frantic and pleading.

“Do not leave me.  Please.  Please do not leave me here.  You, you speak Italian, American?  I haven’t heard it in so long.”

“I speak Italian poorly but I do speak it,” Josuke replies.

As far as he’s concerned, he’s not American, he just lives here at the moment, but he sees little point correcting him right now.

“Does anything else hurt? Do you need any more help?”

The man pulls his knees up snugger against himself, presses his palms tight against his eyes, shutting out even the suggestion of light.  Josuke isn't sure but he thinks he might be crying.

“You cannot, you cannot help me, I don’t feel anything, I don’t understand what’s happening, why is this…why did it stop?  How?!  What did you do to me?! ”

“I fix things and I fix people and sometimes I fix souls,” says Josuke. “That’s the power of Crazy Diamond.  I didn’t mean to scare you with him but I couldn’t let you die.  I didn’t know you could see him.  Most people can't.”

And if he can see stands, then that means he has one, albeit one that he hasn’t materialized yet.  This could be dangerous, Josuke realizes, but he still has to take the chance to help.

“You cannot fix my soul,” the man mutters and then he shivers even harder and now he’s definitely crying and Josuke thinks that he isn’t supposed to be witnessing this.

“It wasn’t meant to stop, it wasn’t meant to stop, this cannot be real, this is not reality, it wasn’t meant to stop. I’ve been dying for so long.  Do you understand?  I’ve been dying over and over and over again.”

And now the man is wracked by sobs.  There's nothing pretty or delicate about the desperation of someone who knows that crying -the sort of crying that scorches the lungs and leaves an ache deep in the ribs after- won’t make him feel any better but who is powerless to stop it.  Josuke sees people crying and his first instinct is to hug them and tell them it’s going to be okay like his mother used to when he skinned his knees, but he doesn’t know this man at all, and anyway, he plead with him not to come closer.  He respects that.

Josuke doesn’t know what to make of his words.  Dying over and over again?  A stand attack?  His assailant fled within seconds of him healing the man, so perhaps he saw Crazy Diamond and grew fearful, but then again, watching a man you’ve stabbed suddenly heal with little explanation is probably terrifying, though probably not as terrifying as actually being stabbed.

“I’m not sure but it’s over now.  Everything is going to be okay.  But, listen, you’ll get…chilled, that’s the word, without a coat.  Please take mine, alright?  It’s okay.”

The man quiets, lets his hands fall to the side so he can blearily look at him, eyes bloodshot, dark lipstick smeared.  Josuke offers him his coat and he looks at it as if he’s afraid it’s going to reach out and strangle him, but after a moment’s contemplation, he takes it, drapes himself in it.

“…Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.  Do you need help getting up?”

The man’s eyes dart between the spot where Crazy Diamond had been a short time ago and his outstretched hand.  Josuke’s breath comes out in white clouds but the punk on the ground is breathing so shallowly that there’s nothing at all.  It seems he comes to a decision at last and reaches out towards Josuke.

His hand passes right through him.

His hand passes right through him and he feels a chill settle into his bones colder than the snow on the ground, colder than the grave.

‘I’ve been dying for so long. Do you understand? I’ve been dying over and over and over again.’

When he heals with Crazy Diamond, he mostly knits the tangible back together with a punch or a touch, but sometimes –rarely, rarely, but sometimes-there’s the soft sound of bells as it reverts something broken in the soul.  He frees the cursed; he brings relief to spirits.

(you couldn’t tell if he was living or dead you healed him and hoped for the best while there’s still breath there’s still hope but was he ever actually breathing at all the Division Bell rang out he was dead all this time)

Josuke reaches into his pockets to put on the gloves he should have been wearing all along.  It takes more than mere cloth to warm a ghost-touched hand but he needs a barrier between himself and the spirit when he tries reaching out again.

The Italian strokes his own hand, fingers brushing upwards to his wristbands.  Pats the ground, finds it solid.  Hesitates.  Punches the earth and sinks into it past the elbows before pulling himself out.

“Spirits don’t have to think to touch objects,” explains Josuke. “Otherwise, you’d sink into the ground every time you stopped concentrating on walking.  If you think about it, then you can pass through.  People are different.  You’ll pass through automatically, and if you aren’t careful, the intersection of their soul and your soul will tear you apart.  I don’t know why it’s like that.”

“…Then I am dead at last,” the man says with tangible relief. “I’ve been dying all the ways a man can die -thousands and thousands of times- but I have never been able to find escape. Thank you.  Is this…is this all there is? Is this all? I thought…but perhaps that was hell.  Are you dead as well?”

“Me? No, no, I’m alive,” Josuke says with a small laugh. He died horrifically once in an explosion but he doesn’t think time loops caused by stands count towards your mortality status.

“I’m just a magnet for the weird, so I’ve talked to a lot of ghosts.  Here, grab my hand now. Gloves help.  It’s easier to touch with a barrier in the way.  I can't hurt you that way.”

He reaches out again and Josuke can feel the cold of the void through his gloves as the spirit rises to his feet.

“So, listen, ah-”

“Diavolo.  My name was Diavolo of Sardegna, and when I lived, I thought myself to be an emperor of all I touched, but I was just a fool and now I am dead and in an alley far from my home.”

Now is not the time to say it, but holy shit, that is the coolest name ever.

“Josuke of Morioh.  I dress hair and talk to ghosts.  Listen, I don’t know the circumstances that led to you coming to this alley and maybe that’s none of my business, but you should move on as soon as you’re ready for it, okay?  It’s not good for you to linger here too long, but if you do, keep these things in mind.  You can freely enter empty rooms but you need permission to enter any place occupied by the living. Most people can’t see you.  You can touch the living but if they touch you, it’ll rip your spirit apart, so stay away from places where people might brush up against you.  You’ll also want to avoid...”

When Josuke departs the alley, the spirit lingers behind, still clad in his coat though it cannot warm him. His leg aches in these temperatures; his ghost-touched hand burns coldly.

Jotaro believes in avoiding other stand users as much as possible but Jotaro also wears anaconda-print pants with track jackets, so that really tells you all you need to know right there about Dr. Kujo.  Josuke knows the value of making friends.  Community's an ongoing effort.  Sometimes you have to fight nearly to the death before you earn their friendship (which is how a worrisomely large amount of lifelong friendships in his peer group started) but it’s worth it.

A quick call's made to Birdie Fitzgerald who works at that speakeasy that Yukako likes when she visits.  She should be free this time of day and her Pathetique is suited for what needs to be done.

It’s simple enough to track the assailant down with a handful of his hair and Crazy Diamond.  Josuke can’t go to the cops with this because attempted murder of the dead (or those perpetually caught between death and life, as the case may be) isn’t illegal, though morally shady, but also Josuke avoids the NYPD on moral principle.  When they find him at last, Pathetique ensures he’s incapable of harming another person again lest he feel it himself.

Later, as he walks home in a borrowed coat with those coffees at last, he makes eye contact across the street with the ghost of Diavolo, still lingering. He gives a nod as he passes and heads back to his husband.

Beauty, talent, fame, money, refinement
Top skill and brain
But all the things you try to hide
Will be revealed on the other side

Chapter Text

 You know if it comes true
I'll be so good to you

One summer night, Okuyasu proposed to Josuke with a calamari ring in the kitchen and Josuke thinks about it every time he eats squid now.  That’s just the kind of person Okuyasu is and he loves him for it.

His husband went completely gray by the time he hit twenty-five.  Josuke started dyeing it for him the last year of high school (really just an excuse to run his fingers through his hair, which in retrospect, really should have been a giant indication that he was gay, but you live and learn), but Okuyasu eventually decided to stop and embrace his natural color.

Josuke’s glad of that because Okuyasu looks good like this: head thrown back, grey curls brushing the sides of his face, laughing while he dips Shizuka as they dance together to the dulcet tones of "Eat It".

Oh.  That’s why she was so desperate to find her record player.  Shizuka inherited the entirety of Joseph’s record collection, the complete discography of Weird Al included.  When she was a toddler, he’d sit her on his knee and they’d listen together.  She plays at least one Weird Al Song every day since he passed a few months ago.

Okuyasu’s going to be such a good father.  He is.

“Hey, Mr. Higashikata.  Babiest bro,” Josuke says, closing the door behind him. “I come bearing coffee-flavored sugar. Sorry it took so long.”

Okuyasu smiles every time Josuke calls him Mr. Higashikata.  Josuke smiles every time Okuyasu calls him Mr. Higashikata.  Sometimes he’ll call him that name and then Okuyasu does it right back and it just becomes a loop of the two calling each other Mr. Higashikata that usually doesn’t end until they start kissing or, alternatively, one of them starts giggling and they both succumb to laughter.

Josuke likes sharing a name with him.  He likes sharing everything with him.  Okuyasu deserves everything he has, all of him, and more.  He didn't start off life well and that makes Josuke all the more determined that the life they're building together should be filled with nothing but happy moments, as many as possible.  Romance is the glint of your husband’s wedding ring and the patter of your heart when he laughs at silly songs.

“Mr. Higashikata, you’re looking-”

Okuyasu is interrupted by an irate teenager stomping her feet.

“Dude, what the fu- frick, Josuke, it’s been like two hours, I thought you, like, died or something.”

He sets the coffee down on the coffee table, which is, wow, that’s the first time he’s actually used that thing for its intended purpose, isn’t it?  The coffee table is usually just the place he dumps mail he promises to sort through and never does.  Sometimes he props his feet up on it as he plays videogames even though he scolds Shizuka for doing the exact same thing.

“Mmhm, which is why you’re dancing instead of roaming the streets looking for me.  You monster.”

“I mean, if someone killed you, what the heck am I supposed to do about it: turn invisible at them until they change their wicked ways?  I was dancing for my own safety, my good dude.”

“Sure, sure, Shizuka.  Monster.”

He peels off the jacket he borrowed from Fitzgerald and hangs it up on the coat rack.  It’s white with oddly-placed cutouts like something that belongs in Rohan’s closet.  At least, it looks like something Rohan would wear, but then again, Rohan's notoriously picky about fashion, which is really remarkable since he dresses like someone’ s pen-loving grandpa half the time.

He drapes the scarf in its designated place, followed by his gloves and then his cane.  He doesn’t carry it with him every day, but between moving boxes, the cold, and entirely too much walking, his thigh burns with every step and he really just wants to flop onto the couch and not move for a few hours, which is very doable.

He’s going to call his son before he becomes a lifeless bump on the couch.

He has a son.

He has a son.  He and his husband have a son.  He has a son and he has a husband and he has a bratty little sister who steals all his snacks.  Kira left him with scars and nightmares and a prescription list, but fuck him wherever he is, Josuke has a family and he’s never going to take that away from him.

“You okay, bro?”

And then there are strong arms around his waist and the brush of Okuyasu’s lips against his neck and he smells like aftershave and home.  Josuke leans into his touch, twines his fingers with his, feels the life entering back into his hand.

“It’s been a weird day but yeah. I’m okay. I am super okay, dude.”

And he is.

I'll never treat you cruel
As long as I've got you around