Chapter Text
In a half-emptied flat overlooking Marseille, a dead man sips whiskey and muses on a time before death. His memory is stagnant on nights like this, when everything is so, so still. It sits thick in his throat like a nosebleed and heavy like pennies in his lungs. The bulging, empty sky is blue-black as a fresh bruise and it makes the dead man’s teeth ache, tasting of sour engine fumes and the fading burn of cheap alcohol.
A laugh track cuts clear and harsh through the sharp night, breaking the dead man’s reverie, if for a moment. It’s the next flat over. The TV glow seeps from the balcony doors and is lost in the maw of the night. It’s a kid that lives there, he knows; a mother, working nights, and her son, too proud to tell her he’s afraid of the dark.
In the tight-lipped hour of the early, early morning, this city is no different to any other sort. It wallows on its haunches like an old beast, waiting, watching. It is a concrete cage full of people hiding to escape the rain, though the skies overhead are clear, the dead man thinks. Another tinny laugh tears raggedly through the silence and he reckons those voices are all dead, too. The dead man wants, suddenly, excruciatingly, to know that little boy in daylight, unafraid. He wonders if the horrors of the night have made him a gaunt, lonely thing – the urge to cradle this child he has never met is so abruptly stifling that he chokes on it. Imagining pitching forward like a drowning man welled with emotion, the dead man stays entirely still.
He knows he shouldn’t be drinking. He’s supposed to be trailing some pair of half-cocked stand users just powerful and just loud enough to be worth the hassle. They’re living somewhere in the next block of flats over, if the manila folder the dead man had abandoned in favour of whiskey was to be believed. It was; the information he receives is rarely wrong but beside that, the dead man had surreptitiously spied them earlier in the day through a pair of binoculars. He hopes, belatedly, that his temporary neighbours just think he is particularly into birds.
The phone rings just as he begins considering which birds specifically his targets would be if they were, in fact, birds. It cuts short and sharp through the claustrophobic early-morning stillness, rings once, twice. The dead man puts down his empty glass, takes a breath like it’s his last and slaps his knees. Wavering slightly, the low, aging deck chair groans beneath the strain of his palms as he tries to stand, head just on the wrong side of swimming. Running a hand through his loose hair, the dead man finds that the humidity has curled it about his ears. The dampness of his skin unsettles him; in the dark, he thinks, there is little distinction between sweat and blood.
The phone is still ringing. He mutters under his breath about overtime and ridiculous hours of the morning, but picks up the thing despite himself. Never has the dead man hated a piece of technology the way he does his wretched Speedwagon Foundation-standard Nokia 3310 in that moment, completely and unfathomably unable to find the call button through his somewhat drunken stupor.
“What?!” He snarls, very tired, slightly drunk and inordinately angry at everything but particularly the telephone, which he briefly fantasises about setting fire to. It does, somewhere in the far reaches of his mind, occur to him that this is likely a work call and he should be more polite. “Kakyoin speaking. Now what is it? It’s three o’clock in the morning.” Still, some hostilities are not unreasonable.
“Hi, Kakyoin.” All of a sudden, the dead man is rather upsettingly sober.
Kakyoin remembers what it had felt like to die. The wetness of it. The way the days of his life had trickled away from him like sands in a glass, that no matter how hard he grasped had slipped seamlessly through his fingers. He had counted the days he had lived and thought maybe if he counted enough of them, he could pretend they were worth something. He was everything he had ever been and was quickly becoming nothing at all. See? He was twelve now, his skin too small for him and his voice not his own, see? He was eight, it was all a bad dream and he could hear the TV still on in the living room, his parents were laughing. See? He was six and his heart was not so heavy. He was still alone. See?
Seventeen years old, his breath had become a noose around his neck, his lungs wind tunnels for the breath he couldn’t catch; that his blood was not fast enough to staunch. Lead weights were carved from his legs, too weak to drag him from the mouth of the metal coffin that spat around him. The water washing over him like a blessing had soaked through his skin like a prayer. His eyes had been so, so heavy, Kakyoin remembers, but he had needed sleep like he needed a bullet in the brain as his consciousness was cut roughly from squelching meat and splintered bone, flensed from the fat like a half devoured corpse. There was less of him then than there had been that morning. He wanted to see the cherry blossoms one more time, he wanted to smell the rain. At seventeen years old he knew that that was as old as he would ever be.
When he had woken from death, it had been a bit of a surprise. Kakyoin had never intended to be dead, but he’d never intended to live on, either. Faintly, beneath the sickly sweet haze of the morphine, he knew that he was only ever meant to exist within those long, hot Egyptian nights, with friends who were always meant for greater things than him.
He had dreamt when he was dead, he remembers, in incomprehensible flashes. His eyes had been open and watching with bated breath. Existence had been split apart like an orange, left to rot on the skin of the linoleum floor and shared out in segments with figments of his own grief. There had been a sad creature, a boy, at the end of his small bed. Weeping, his soul had bled out of his pores and pooled at his feet, too weak to coagulate. His palms were upturned. In prayer? Had prayer existed in that liminal world? There was a wrongness about the notion, in the dream. The boy was a naive thing that thought god could smell his sins in prayer. Instead, he begged. He begged, there, for the dead man’s sake. Colours had sloughed from the air like rotten flesh, turned liquid. There was gold, behind his eyelids and nestled in that boy’s cap. Those palms were upturned as well.
Awake, Kakyoin’s head had been a leaden weight of morphine-soft memory, his body a cut of meat pressed into casts and metal cages that nipped at his skin like the wire teeth of a hungry beast. There seemed no texture to him then. Swaddled, the painkillers sanded down his teeth and let him float away on nothing at all.
Beside his bed had been a plastic chair in which no-one sat and a vase on the bedside with a stained rim but no flowers. Machines that he could not see tittered and sang to one another in a symphony of soft beeps and chitters that he couldn’t hope to understand.
Kakyoin had woken and known that he had been left behind. He wasn’t sure of how long he had stopped existing for, how long he had been dead, but the sun bleeding through the slitted, white blinds warmed his bare skin in a way that Cairo’s January sun never had. An unexpected rage had fluttered beneath his broken ribs then, had spread like cancer through his sewed-up lungs. It had clotted and clagged until he feared his heart might stop with it.
Had anyone visited, mourned when he was dead? The sterility of the room, with its stench of carbolic, had burned away any evidence either way. With it, any past, or future, had been ground down until Kakyoin had felt he might go insane within the infinitely expanding present. There, he came from nowhere and would never come from anywhere else again.
Eventually, a nurse told him that yes, three men had visited, often and diligently at first, before having to leave him behind. It was barely a week before he came-to, she said. Yet for all the time he spent in that starched-white room, he never saw the men he’d travelled half the world with again. Not while imprisoned there. A letter or three were written, short and guilty and never from Jotaro, to which he rarely replied. It was difficult; he was more of an open wound than a man.
He had almost begun to believe it was all a dream, that he truly had always existed in that room, that he had always been a dead man. The puckered hole in his chest became alive and hungry with the rage of it. It festered. No matter the fresh organs and old skin it had been filled by, he knew that it was not full. In garbled words it spoke to him in sleep and laughed, promised to swallow him whole. When he was at last flayed from his casts, Kakyoin found that it had all but devoured his legs. He had bit at his lip to keep from biting his tongue from his mouth, then. His skin had itched. He wanted to scrub himself raw. It filled him with the urge to get his jaws around something and bite until it bled; nothing soft, like an arm or thigh; something that would crunch. Something that, to an extent, could break his teeth right back. He had asked for a bowl of apples, eating everything but the pips.
“Feeling may still return,” a doctor had told him kindly. “There is a lot of inflammation still. The surgeries might yet take.” Kakyoin knew that they would not. He knew that what the hole inside him swallowed would not be given back. Though, while that wretched hole hungered, Kakyoin had become ravenous.
The doctors gave him crutches for him to drag his legs behind like loose meat. Step, step, fall. He hit the porcelain-tiled hallway with his fist and watched red blood stain carbolic white. The nurse that bandaged his knuckles flicked her eyes across his face, in search of… something. She said nothing. He said nothing.
It took months to perfect utilising Hierophant Green to reconnect his spine. At first, the only feeling that returned to him was pain; so sudden and searing that it sent him into a fever for days. Slowly, slowly, it subsided. He could take gentle, slow steps. Two, at first, then four, eight, twenty. He began to run, early in the mornings when the nightmares surfaced, and with them his rage. He would not let his life so easily go to waste. There were white-hot nails in his back with every step, every movement accompanied by the crunching squelch of his spine moving irregularly against itself between the tendrils of Hierophant Green. By the time he returned to Japan to complete his end of year exams, to garner a diploma and his freedom, he had learned to grit his teeth and stride.
Jotaro had been conspicuously absent from all the places he should have been. Kakyoin caught the briefest of glimpses of him during their shared exams, Kujo and Kakyoin landing them in nearby seats, but it was not until the second month back in Japan that he spoke to him. It was accidental, in the end, as most things often are. Kakyoin had taken a walk, claustrophobic in his parents’ house. Wound his way into town and ended up in a corner shop, idly picking through instant ramens. Turning the corner of the aisle, there he was. He looked softer than Kakyoin remembered him, in worn jeans that were fraying at the bottoms, though his hat remained firmly on his head. Jotaro’s eyes had bored into him without looking quite directly, but Kakyoin had met his head on like a challenge.
“Hey.” He had greeted simply. Jotaro had said nothing. For Kakyoin, life had been nothing but a litany of small deaths, rushing back to him like old lovers in the moments before that last, final death, but what sort of death did that make this, he wondered. In the early days after his death, the dead man had opened his eyes and been cleaved in half by his own loneliness, and now there he was again, with the manifestation of the killing knife. Except he was already dead. He had been dead for a long time, he reckoned, perhaps even while he was alive. Could he still experience such death, even then? He supposed Kujo Jotaro had always been one to make the impossible a reality. He said nothing else to him, and the two moved on with their shopping, their day, their lives.
Kakyoin left Japan soon after, the Speedwagon Foundation eager to take on experienced hands and he just as eager to escape the newest cage he had found himself in. His feet had begun to itch. The travelling suited him well, slipping from one place to the next and never staying long enough to begin to twitch. He met with Polnareff, whenever the man was near, whenever Kakyoin had a job in France. It soothed some of the rage in him, he found, to compare war wounds. He did not see Jotaro again.
“Hi, Kakyoin.”
It had been ten years. Over a third of his lifetime and the equivalent of the time he had known the man at all twenty times over, and yet. Drunk, tired and out of his mind drowning in his own syrupy nostalgia, Kakyoin had recognised his voice. All of a sudden it is 1989 and he is angrier than he’s been in years.
“Kujo.” The name leaves a poor taste in his mouth. “It’s three a.m. How did you get this number? Better yet, why are you using it?”
“Three—? Ah. Time zones... I got the number from the Speedwagon Foundation,” he offers this meekly, it sounds wrong in Jotaro’s voice, an ill-fitting suit. The telephone line crackles like a sob, “I’m sorry–”
Kakyoin laughs at that. It surprises him, the force of it, as it bursts from his chest like a haemorrhage. “What do you want? You wouldn’t call me after so many years to apologise, Kujo. Don’t pretend like this is a social call. What, and I will not repeat myself again, do you want?”
There is another silence over the line, he considers hanging up the phone altogether. Years ago, in a foreign hospital in a foreign land, surrounded by people who informed him day after day, in broken Japanese, that he should be dead, he would have given almost anything to speak with Jotaro again. But he is not that child any longer. He licks his lips absently, feeling the edge of the scar that carves through its left side, cutting a jagged line right down across the plains of eye and cheek, reaching farther than its right-hand counterpart. He has not been that child for a long time.
The line fizzles, “I’m… Kakyoin, I didn’t – look,” his breath whistles through his teeth, “I’m in trouble. I need to ask you a favour.”
Kakyoin finds he’s almost relieved, not quite sure what he would have done had Jotaro genuinely called to apologise; if he had phoned up and asked him to go out for drinks, catch up, maybe bring Polnareff along? If he had tried to pretend that there was not a chasm between them far older than their friendship ever was. This was good. He could work with this. He could warrant the near-uncontrollable rage that screamed under his skin. “What?”
“What?”
“What is it? What is the favour?”
“Oh–” The line goes quiet again and Kakyoin imagines wrapping his fingers around Jotaro’s throat until he wheezes. “I, ah. Would you marry me?”
Kakyoin allows the line to go completely silent. Lets the hum of the night rush back into him as though the liminal hour of the morning might wash over him like the tide and take this entire conversation away. He wonders faintly if this isn’t all a dream, if he had died back in Cairo and gone to hell, this his long-awaited punishment. “What was that now?”
“You see–” Jotaro rushes to explain, “I have a daughter,” I know, Kakyoin thinks, Joseph told me years ago, “my ex-wife is trying to get full custody of her. If– if she did, Jolyne would be completely unprotected against people potentially trying to get at me. This is my cock up, I know, but I can’t– Kakyoin I know what I am asking of you but I can’t let anything happen to her. My solicitor reckons that I’d have a better chance at winning full custody if I had a partner. If–” His voice fades off.
“If you were married,” Kakyoin finishes for him. His voice is steadier than he feels it should be.
Hoarsely, “Yes.”
It had been Polnareff that informed him of Jotaro’s wedding, in the spring of 1992. Neither had been invited and Polnareff had taken it like a gunshot to the chest, bleeding out irritation to hide the more egregious injury of genuine hurt, a knife to the gut. He didn’t know how Polnareff had discovered the wedding, Joseph most likely, and couldn’t find it in him to care. He was glad they had not been invited, imagined what his role there would have been, whether he would have smiled politely at the man he nearly gave his life for yet hadn’t spoken to in years, if he would have thrown rice as he rushed past with his beautiful American bride. Kakyoin had wondered what Jotaro would wear, a large part of himself unable to imagine him in anything but the grotty school uniform he had travelled half the world in.
A child had, of course, been the next obvious development. Kakyoin remembers the photo that Joseph had shown him of Jolyne, only a baby then, but with sharp green eyes that had reminded him so much of Jotaro at the time, and the ruddy purple birthmark on her shoulder, in just the same place as Joseph, as Jotaro. She must be what, seven, now? He calculates, counting back the years like weights on his back, like metres in the chasm. He knows full well that the star on her back may as well be a shining target, a curse or an honour depending on the pride she held it with. “Just tell me one thing,” Kakyoin tells him through gritted teeth. The least he can do is make the bastard beg.
“Anything.”
His lungs seize, just a little. “Why are you asking me, Kujo. Of all the people you could ask. It’s been ten years since we last spoke in any capacity, surely, surely, there is someone better that you could ask this of.”
“There’s not,” Jotaro says simply, “There is no one else.”
He wants to say no, he wants to tell Jotaro to leave him alone and forget that they ever knew one another. He wants to be free of his rage. “God you’re a fucking idiot. Fine. For the sake of Jolyne, and for Jolyne alone, I will help you fix your cock up.” He hears Jotaro release the not insignificant breath he must have been holding. “But. You listen to me, Kujo Jotaro, you owe me, do you understand?”
“Yes-”
“No. You owe me. And you will repay that debt by, once this is finished with, and your daughter is safe with absolute certainty, you will never speak to me again. Do you understand that? Not for anything, ever again. Even if I am the only person who can help you, even if the entire world is crumbling down, once this is done, after however many months it takes, I never want to hear your voice ever again.”
He can’t quite read the tone of Jotaro’s voice as he states, clear as a bell, “Agreed.”
“Good,” Kakyoin says, and hangs up the phone, ending the conversation as abruptly as it was started.
His head is spinning. The alcohol and anger slosh about inside him and it’s nauseating. Kakyoin drops the phone on the table with a clatter and bolts for his small bathroom, knees hitting the grotty tiles with a sickening crunch he will regret in the morning. Cradling the toilet bowl like an altar, the whiskey burns the same way on the way up as it did down, stripping him down until memory bleeds from him into the soiled bowl as well. His entire body trembles, toilet seat jittering under the press of paled fingertips, and he hates it. Hates feeling like a child again. He isn’t this anymore. He had severed this weakness from himself like an immobile limb years ago, torn it out and left it to fester in the fading memories of life before death. He had been a dead man for so long now, he doesn’t think he could stomach being anything else.
When his stomach is empty, he slides bonelessly from his altar and cradles his knees against cool porcelain. He press, press, presses his forehead into the cold but all he wants to do is smack it until it bleeds, until the tiles splinter. He hits it with his fist instead. Again. Again. Until he hears the satisfying snap, the crack of porcelain relenting beneath flesh. Kakyoin looks down and briefly cannot make sense of the mess there, cannot tell where his bloodied hand ends and the bloodied tiles begin. Everything drains from him then and he slides back against the bath. He sits there for a long time.
The sun rises and brings with it the clarity of regret. Kakyoin gets up, cleans the tiles, his knuckles, bandages where the skin has split and bloomed in rich purples, thinks maybe he should just stop drinking altogether. Once the tiles are clean, some near-expired superglue injected into their cracks and shining as white as the bandage swaddled about his hand, Kakyoin leaves the bathroom and closes the door with a resounding click.
It can’t be later than five o’clock and Kakyoin’s eyelids weigh him down like lead. He tries to count the hours he has been awake and gives up at twenty four. The bastard phone is still where he left it, abandoned haphazardly on the kitchen table, although it may as well be well-polished rock for all it refuses to turn on. He unearths the charger and plugs it in on the countertop.
Kakyoin runs through the evenings events the way a butcher might his catalogue of meat cuts, hands busy with the smaller machinations of his morning routine. Kettle filled, boiling, bread sliced and toasting, he washes the pots from the previous night’s dinner of pasta and shop bought carbonara sauce. Puts them away with care. He doesn’t feel that terrible, all things considered; the whiskey had all been expelled, leaving his hangover thus blessedly absent. Still, there is a hot, tight nausea bubbling around his intestines, devouring him from the inside out.
Jotaro had called. Jotaro had proposed. Kakyoin is halfway to certain he’d hallucinated the entire situation as a result of the whiskey and his nostalgic mood, before his Nokia, resurrected, beeps cheerfully at him. Harsh against the small, green-glowing screen is a text from an unrecognised number. There is an address with a Japanese area code, a date, four days from then; 18th March, and a simple acknowledgement; thank you. I owe you.
He calls Polnareff.
It rings, rings. Polnareff picks it up just before the fourth. “Noriaki! How are you doing mon ami?”
“Jean,” he says without preamble, “I need a favour. You’re back in France, yes?”
“I am, I am. Drove out to Lyon yesterday afternoon.”
“Is there any chance you could come to Marseille. I need a favour. I’m on a job but,” he pauses, rolling the situation around on his tongue. “Somethings come up.”
Polnareff hums in affirmation. “Of course, anything for a friend. Should I ask…?”
Kakyoin's head throbs. “I’ll explain when you get here,” he tells him. “Call me when you’re in the city.”
Four hours later, the abrupt tilling of his phone stirs Kakyoin from an uneasy sleep. Fumbling around in the half dark, blinds drawn across the French doors, he is quicker to the phone this time. “That was fast,” he says, spying the clock across the room.
“Eh, I didn’t have to pack.” The bastard sounds so cheery, Kakyoin thinks. “Shall we get brunch?”
“So,” Polnareff mumbles through a mouthful of tarte tatin, “What was this favour you needed, hah?”
They’re sat on the terrace of a small boutique cafe just outside the city centre, the sort of place that is more kitchen than diner and knows half its customers by name. Kakyoin is grinning at him like the cat that first got the cream and then absconded with the dairy cow, arms crossed and teeth bared in amusement. He hums and stretches his legs, watches Polnareff’s eyebrows inch ever higher on his brow. His cane, a beautifully hand carved piece of Egyptian acacia gifted to him by Polnareff himself, knocks against his knee with the movement.
“I got a call last night,” he says, “care to guess from who?”
Kakyoin doesn’t think Polnareff’s brows could get higher if they were ripped off and pasted to his hairline. He guffaws, gestures incredulously at him, “I am not a psychic man Noriaki. Could have been Jesus Christ for all I know of it.”
Kakyoin snorts. “I shouldn’t tell him that, Jean.” Despite the joke, he scrutinises the man across from him with genuine interest, searching for any hint of feigned ignorance. Jotaro had said that he was given the phone number by the Speedwagon Foundation, but not who specifically. It could have easily been Polnareff. Unlike Kakyoin himself, he knows the two are still in relative contact; it would have certainly been easier than the slow and arduous process of requesting information from the foundation directly. He sips his coffee.
“Non? Who is him then?”
Kakyoin finds himself rather shocked to genuinely discern no trace of a lie in Polanreff’s face. Jotaro had given him an out, had he declined the proposal, nobody else would have known. It would have been as though he were never asked. “Jotaro Kujo,” he says plainly. Polnareff sprays crumbs across the table.
“Jotaro? Mon dieu. Is this what the favour’s about?”
He twirls his fork deftly between his fingers. “You could say that.”
“I think I would have been less surprised if you had said Jesus Christ, Noriaki.”
Kakyoin hums, “I think I would have been as well.”
They fall into a somewhat bewildered silence, Polnareff opening and closing his mouth a few times as if to speak, then closing it with a frown. He scrubs his hands over his face and sighs. “So. What did he call you for?”
Kakyoin smirks, licks his lips and catches his tongue between his teeth to keep from snorting. “You’ll love this,” he says, “he asked me to marry him.”
Polnareff’s jaw all but unhinges. Bug-eyed he gesticulates derangedly with spasming palms, “Jotaro?” As though that encompasses the entire sentiment. Kakyoin’s eyebrows rise and fall in quick succession, an acknowledgment and a resignation. There is something terribly knowing behind Polnareff’s wide-eyed stare, behind the shock, pity writhes like a nest of snakes and Kakyoin wants to wrap it around his throat like a noose. “What the fuck did he do that for?!”
“Oi!” He laughs through the knot in his throat, “I’m not a leper!”
“No, no, of course. But you must admit, it is sudden, no? He has not spoken to you in what, nine—”
“—Ten.”
“—Ten years. And now,” wafting his fork about, he finishes lamely; “this.”
Kakyoin allows him to stew in desperate confusion for a moment longer. “He’s in a losing custody battle for his wholly unprotected daughter and thinks that marriage might up his chances.”
“Ah.”
“Mm. Ah indeed.”
“So? What did you tell him? Will you be the next Mrs Kujo?” Kakyoin’s face pinches in disdain. “Oh, this is priceless, you are, aren’t you?”
“It’s not—“
“Oh, mon ami, this really is priceless! I beg you, let me be your flower girl. I would be such a good flower girl.”
Kakyoin throws a napkin at him and misses. “I guess that’s fair. I need you to cover the rest of my job first though.”
“Aah,” Polnareff leans back, chair complaining, “so that is the favour, yes?”
“Yes. Yeah.”
“That’s fine. For flower girl. I cover your job as long as you let me be your flower girl.”
Kakyoin snorts and shakes his proffered hand. “Just eat your fucking tarte already.”