Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

for me there was no audience, no brass music either,

only wet dust, the cheers buzzing at me like flies,

like flies roaring.

Late November brought with it the cold smell of rain. Snowfall came late that year, though lingering morning frosts carried the ever-present threat of it, and the fire escape grew slick with the frozen aftermath of dew. Kakyoin had to remind himself that taking the stairs too fast was liable to leave bruises if he wasn’t careful. He had never been very good at ‘careful,’ and he had the scars to show for it. When he came home bearing the evidence of a fall all his sister could do was shake her head at him, both her exasperation and her worry born of the immutable knowledge that nothing she could say to him would convince him to change. 

Kakyoin almost could have passed for the type of teenager who got into fights just to see what would happen, if you looked at his scars under the right light, saw him standing still and straight and alone. But even the way he carried himself was quiet, his movements a disappearing act. He kept his anger balled up in his chest like tinfoil, wrapped tight with a pointedly docile affect to keep it from making a sound, and the snakelike glint in his eyes always came off like a trick of the light to those who managed to catch it. Far easier to believe it imagined than to reconcile malevolence with such a gentle smile.

He reached the rooftops just after sunrise. Dawn crept across the water, a pink gleam offset by the muted orange glow on the horizon. Kakyoin preferred that particular apartment building for any number of reasons, not least of which was how much he loved watching the light rise across the bay. He also had never been caught up there, as opposed to several previous morning haunts, and it seemed unlikely that he ever would be as long as he stayed smart, given that this time he had chosen one with a fire escape that faced an alleyway rather than the street. 

Still, the times he had been caught, it was only as a well-mannered teenager looking for a place to watch the Osaka sunrise. Easy enough to play that off. More difficult to remember that, technically speaking, it was true.

Rarely ever did he have to divert their attention the hard way.

Mostly Kakyoin just wanted a different place to be alone. He found it helped, to move the isolation around. Kept the solitude from feeling too stagnant, and it wasn’t as though his morning disappearances changed his parents’ opinion of him, only reinforced what already existed. There was no point in trying to pretend he was anything different with them, and the only person he had any desire to fool was the one for whom it was impossible. 

Kana barely even got angry with him these days. Most of the time she would even listen to whatever story her little brother tried to pass off before saying, in a flat and almost bored tone: “You’re lying.” 

It was never a question. She always knew.

He was already in the habit of leaving Hierophant half-unraveled across the rooftop, spreading tentacles in front of both the door that gave access from the apartment building itself and the fire escape he used. He wasn’t sure where he would go , exactly, were he to be caught, but at least he wouldn’t be taken by surprise. Jumping was always a possibility, though Kakyoin had never tested Hierophant’s ability to catch a six-story fall before, and he thought he would rather take the slap on the wrist than find out the limits of its ability the hard way.

Even if he hadn’t threaded himself a warning signal, he would have heard the intruder coming up the fire escape. Whoever it was, they were big, and this alone wouldn’t automatically make them loud, but they clearly didn’t know how to compensate for their size with the relative weight of their footsteps. A graceful way of saying they sounded a little bit clumsy, though not in a way that would be obvious to someone who didn’t know what they were looking for. Something off about the rhythm. An old injury, or someone who had recently become significantly taller and wasn’t quite used to it yet. 

The door to the apartment complex wasn’t a complicated one and it was entirely possible Kakyoin might have been able to force the single bolt back in time to escape before the stranger’s arrival. Any number of things would have ended differently had he not been so absorbed in trying to figure out what was wrong with those footsteps that he forgot he should get out of sight before whoever they belonged to made it to the top.

Kakyoin sighed. He really had liked the view of from this roof. The light caught the skyscrapers’ long windows at a satisfying angle. It would take a while to find a replacement.

At first he didn’t bother looking. They would come to him if he really had been caught trespassing and he wanted to pretend he hadn’t for as long as possible. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the shape of their approach, though he really only gathered how appallingly tall the man was, and it wasn’t until he leaned against the concrete wall next to Kakyoin without speaking that he finally became curious enough to look directly at him.

He hadn’t expected to see another student. Certainly not an attractive one. He noticed this with a degree of detachment, the same way he took in that strange unbuttoned gakuran—was that a chain?—the hard blank lines of his face, the heavy eyebrows and dark hair. His hat threw the upper half of his face into shadow.

Kakyoin stepped away from the wall, arms folded. Slowly he started winding Hierophant back together.

“Can I help you?” he said coldly once it became clear the other boy had no intention of speaking first. He slouched, hands in his pockets, and it wasn’t nearly enough to hide the fact that he was well over six feet tall. It wasn’t clear whether he was trying not to look like a threat, or simply didn’t consider Kakyoin to be enough of one to bother making himself appear intimidating. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough, out of use. A whisper in the back of Kakyoin’s head said carnivore.

“Kakyoin Noriaki.”

Something about the way those eyes blazed made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. It was more than just a trick of the light. A long-dormant instinct reared between Kakyoin’s lungs, dragged to life by the expressionless hunger on the boy’s face, and the whisper became a scream, saying run run run run run RUN RUN—

He jumped back just in time to turn what would have been a fatal blow into a glancing one, but he  couldn’t react fast enough to avoid the second, and he hardly had time to process the fact that the boy was using fists that weren’t his own before he had been thrown halfway across the rooftop. Kakyoin landed on his back hard enough to knock the wind out, calling Hierophant back with a frantic tug. He had never used the emeralds to fight. First time for everything , he thought, watching his attacker approach with narrowed eyes.

Hierophant twisted around him, hands glowing green, and the boy stopped in his tracks. He tilted his head with no change in expression, eyes fixed on the spot where it hovered, almost as if…

“Can you—” Kakyoin stared up at him, too shocked to strike. “Can you see it?”

The boy dropped his eyes to the red-haired figure at his feet. He blinked slowly. Looked back up at Hierophant. Looked back down. He elected to respond with a sharp kick to the ribs, and Kakyoin rolled away with a muffled curse. 

He would have preferred not to take that hit. But he would also prefer not to fight on the roof at all, and that, on the other hand, was something he could control. Kakyoin spun back up to his feet as Hierophant yanked the boy’s legs out from underneath him, meeting his look of faint surprise with a sugary wink. 

As he sprinted towards the roof’s edge, Kakyoin felt a brief twinge of fear, and he had to remind himself that if he was going to be stupid and reckless the least he could do for himself was not think too hard about it.

So much for not finding out the hard way.

He had imagined how falling would feel so often and had managed to be wrong every time, and the scream in the back of his head was repeating something about his neck as he dropped like a stone towards the concrete, something he couldn’t hear over the rush of freezing air, much less understand. If his stomach could tear out of his body of its own accord now seemed the most likely moment for it. The ground grew closer. Kakyoin closed his eyes and braced for the impact.

Sorry, Kana.

The momentum slammed him into the strands with enough force to rip a few of them, but it was a muscle strained by proxy in the place of a broken neck, which seemed a decent enough trade. There was no time to process that he had survived before his attacker plummeted after him, broke his fall with—something. Someone? A body. Purple. The same purple as the fist from the roof.

He tore towards the familiar shape of the ferris wheel, footfalls slapping on the empty street. School shoes were not made for running in the first place, and certainly not for fleeing, but Kakyoin ignored the discomfort. He was light and quick and the other, no matter how strong he was, had too much bulk to outrun him if it was down to agility. But the stranger had something else with him, something humming with light and power that had thrown Kakyoin halfway across the roof with a half-deflected punch to the chest. 

The boy could see Hierophant; Kakyoin was certain of it. He had looked straight at it. Spent ten stupid years waiting for someone to look at it like that and now the first person to do it was some asshole giant with a stupid chain on his coat who was trying to beat him to death for some reason.

Figures.

He jumped the fence with practiced grace, leaping over the sign that read UNDER CONSTRUCTION - AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED, and was greeted with a massive elbow slammed decisively into his back.

Kakyoin scrambled away, barely keeping his balance. He coughed and glared up at it, big and purple-skinned with black hair that flowed like a shampoo ad and far too many muscles. No one needed that many muscles. Some of them had to be cosmetic.

“What the fuck is your problem?” he shouted over its shoulder, addressing the boy who seemed to be controlling it. His eyes gleamed with the same feverish light from the shadows of his face, flat and glittering and empty. A matched set with the purple thing.

The boy remained silent. He looked at his living weapon and pointed at Kakyoin, who rolled with the subsequent punch to his jaw, having anticipated but failed to evade it. Something clicked where his jaw met his ear. He was certain nothing near his skull was meant to be making noises like that. 

His attacks were easy enough to predict, not exactly refined in approach, but that hardly mattered when it was so fucking fast . Six minutes of that later and his uniform was streaked with bloodstains, which he found much more irritating than the very real possibility that his nose was broken. The boy still hadn’t said a single word, no matter how much Kakyoin screamed and swore and kicked at him.

Enough of this bullshit.

It was true that he had never used the emeralds on another person before, but if he was being honest with himself he had always wanted to see what they would do to to a human body. As far as candidates for testing it went, it didn’t seem particularly likely that there would be a better one than this jackass.

Kakyoin pulled back and grinned, wiping blood from his teeth. By the time the boy realized what Hierophant was doing it was too late to stop it. His eyes widened almost imperceptibly.

“Get fucked,” Kakyoin snarled.

The purple thing flashed to his defense impossibly fast, but Hierophant was faster, and the boy shouted in surprise and pain when the wave of emeralds hit home. Kakyoin wrenched away from him, staring at the sharp fragments of green embedded in his shoulder; several of the largest had gone deep enough to hit muscle, if not bone.

One had lodged itself just above his cheekbone, missing his left eye by millimeters, and the boy plucked it out with a slow blink, looking mildly taken aback. The way he held the bloody stone in the palm of his hand was almost gentle.

The way he smiled down at Kakyoin was not.

Dislodged emeralds clattered to the asphalt as the boy took chase. Would have been smarter to take measures to keep them where they were, given the risk of blood loss, but Kakyoin wasn’t about to give the guy advice. He fired off as many as he could stand as he fled towards the ferris wheel, not bothering to check whether or not they were landing.

The Tempozan ferris wheel was gearing up to be an impressive tourist attraction, if they ever managed to finish building it. Towering skeletal over the harbor, the frame alone had a diameter of nearly a hundred meters. It was permanent in its incompleteness, eternally half-built and half-wired. Kakyoin had always wanted to climb it.

This was certainly one way to find out how it felt.

Purple hands grabbed at his ankles as he looped tentacles around the spokes and he kicked the thing in the face for good measure, smirking to himself upon hearing the muffled cry of “ fuck! ” from the ground. His nose was still streaming blood, but at least he had done the polite thing and returned the favor. 

Kakyoin had once used Hierophant to climb a crane at a construction site near their old apartment building, for no other reason than that he was fourteen and it was there; turned out using it to climb a ferris wheel wasn’t all that different. If the giant maniac knew when to quit he might even have a moment to see what the big deal was about the view from the top. Wishful thinking, he knew, even before he felt the structure shudder under the larger boy’s weight. 

He swung into the partially constructed cabin at the peak. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. Was he going to throw the other boy off? Was he going to kill him? Could he kill him?

They stared at each other, the freezing wind whipping at their hair and coats. A miracle the giant’s hat didn’t go flying. Kakyoin wished he had brought a scarf with him. 

He smiled sweetly and spread his hands. 

“Well, you got me all alone now, huh?”

There was a sickly radiance to those empty eyes that raised goosebumps separate entirely from those for which the wind was responsible. Kakyoin ignored both.

“What do you want ?” he demanded, trying not to sound desperate.

By now he knew the tell. The boy clenched his jaw a split second before he threw his punches, like he was trying to lock a scream in. Kakyoin grimaced.

Of course he would be expected to dodge when he’d been demonstrating both his agility and his reliance on it for the past twenty minutes. Of course the boy wouldn’t expect Kakyoin to lean into it rather than ducking away. No one one in their right mind would pull something like that a hundred meters up.

Kakyoin’s collarbone fractured on impact, exchanging the damage for overcompensation. His opponent swung too hard and lost his balance, expecting an evasion that never came, and an instant later Kakyoin had the other boy’s large head caught firmly in both hands. 

“Got you,” he hissed. 

Hierophant’s tendrils unfurled into the boy’s ears and eyes, snaked into his head and locked into place. It had been a while, but he always remembered where to go. 

A chill ran up Kakyoin’s spine, finding dead silence where there should have been an uproar. No one could be that quiet without putting it somewhere else. 

The trick was to be gentle and quick about turning it green, but he felt uneasy within the hushed confines of this mind, could not shake the feeling that something, something in here was horribly wrong, that the silence was unnatural, that it was manufactured, something caused it, something forced it, something is in here—

He ran up against that and found teeth, a jaw that snapped shut as soon as he touched it, and a bang of light purged Hierophant, hurling the two boys back. The cab went white when the back of his head smacked against the steel wall and Kakyoin nearly passed out from the nausea.

When his vision cleared, the tall boy was stumbling back towards the open ledge. He blinked, ears ringing. Not stumbling. Collapsing. He craned to see the eyes. Blank, lights extinguished. He was unconscious. 

They were a hundred meters up and he was going to fall.

Kakyoin almost let him go. The boy had, after all, tried fairly hard to kill him, and he had a feeling that if their positions had been reversed, he wouldn’t have hesitated to walk away. Might even have kicked Kakyoin off for good measure. 

The smart thing would have been to do nothing. Whatever this was, it would end there. He could turn around and go home.

He reached out. Hierophant’s pale tentacles wrapped around the boy’s body, suspending him in place. It would be so easy to drop him. More disconcerting than he had anticipated it being, the feeling of holding a life in his hands.

For once in your life, don’t complicate things.

Kakyoin stared at the huge limp figure and he could think only of what had roared through the boy’s mind as Hierophant was knocked out: an enraged, useless scream. 

I stood dizzied with sun and anger, neck muscle cut,

blood falling from the gouged shoulder.

She picked up on the third ring.

“Hello?”

He exhaled, closing his eyes. “Kana.”

“Noriaki? Aren’t you at sch—”

“No. Remember when you said you’d help if I ever needed to hide a body?”

Coins littered the ground. His hands were shaking; he kept dropping them. The pay phone rattled against his earrings and Kakyoin grabbed his wrist to hold it still. She had been quiet for too long.

“Kana?”

“I—are you okay?”

“I, um.” Had to remind himself it was pointless to lie to her. “Not badly. Hurt, I mean.”

“Where are you?”

“By the—the ferris wheel. The construction site.”

“Okay.” He heard a drawer sliding open, the jingle of keys. “I’m at home. Twenty minutes. Don’t move.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Wait.” She paused. “Is it out in the open?”

Kakyoin blinked. “‘It’?”

“The—you know, the body.”

“He’s not—he’s not dead .”

“Oh,” she said, sounding relieved.

“Did you seriously think I—”

“Do you have somewhere you can, like…” 

He could almost see her, pounding the heel of her hand against her forehead with her eyes screwed shut as though she could smack the right answer out that way.

“…put it. Him. Whatever. Parking lot or something. Can’t have a lot of foot traffic.”

Kakyoin’s eyes trailed back up towards the apartment complex.

“I can do better than that,” he said.

Managing to both make it there from an entirely different ward and check the entire top floor for vacancies in only fifteen minutes should have been impossible, which was likely exactly why Kana had done it, and half an hour later Kakyoin was standing in an empty studio apartment on floor six, staring down at a very large and very unconscious teenager. His cracked collarbone had made dragging the boy back to the roof a pain in the ass, though it would have been worse without Hierophant.

“Thought you said you weren’t hurt.”

He glanced at her sheepishly. “Said I wasn’t hurt badly .”

“Uh huh.” She narrowed her eyes, taking in the swelling around his nose and the way he cradled his right arm. At least he’d had enough time to wipe most of the blood off his face.

She was Kakyoin’s half-sister through their father, but she still went by Shimomori, her birth mother’s surname. In the way of certain older sisters she had a track record of being quietly willing to tear into anything and anyone who so much as breathed the wrong way in his direction, which was why he kept her in the dark about that sort of thing as much as possible. This, however, was a form of trouble she had not yet taught him how to get out of.

“You…” Kakyoin shook his head, suppressing a smile. “You really thought I killed someone, didn’t you?”

“Well,” she said slowly. “The way you said it.”

“You were gonna help me get away with murder.”

“Obviously.” Shimomori rolled her eyes. “You want to tell me what actually happened?”

Clearly she picked up on how evasive he was being, but he didn’t have the time or energy for explaining that the imaginary friend he had complained about constantly from ages seven to nine was back with an extremely specific vengeance, and in fact had never really left. It was difficult, though, to get the message across in generalities without telling her how exactly he had been attacked. How? Well, Kana, his pet ghost punched me in the chest and then I tripped him with my tentacles and jumped off a six-story building.

“He really did a number on you,” she muttered, looking like she wanted to stomp his face in for it. She tilted her head, considering the angle. 

Kakyoin crossed his arms. “ I won,” he said defensively.

“Yeah, I was gonna ask how you did—not saying you’re weak or whatever,” she added hastily, seeing his expression. “Really. But this guy is built like a fucking tank, Noriaki.”

Shit . “I don’t know. Hit him how you taught me.”

“Why are you bullshitting?” Shimomori squinted at him. “What’s there to lie about here?”

“I’m not—”

Their eyes flicked to the floor as the boy’s snapped open.

For a beat the three of them stared at each other in stunned silence. The boy rolled back onto the balls of his feet. Shimomori lurched forward to get between him and Kakyoin. Kakyoin could not tear his eyes from the half-healed scars running down the boy’s cheeks. It looked like he had been clawed by some sort of animal. He had missed that, somehow, before. 

Hierophant swept out from behind him and Shimomori made a strangled noise of surprise. The boy’s lip curled as he backed away from it but Kakyoin wasn’t looking at him, he may as well have not been there at all, because something gnarled and shimmering had crawled out of his sister, something made of mercury and mirrors, with hooves that were claws that were an insect’s legs and a camera lens where there should have been a face. It chirped in a crowded sort of way, like it had a thousand voices and was angry enough to use them all at once.

“ You— ?”

A loud crash and the sound of shattering glass. They whirled on the boy in unison to find he was already halfway out the window. The purple thing appeared to have ripped the entire thing out of the frame rather than bother with unlocking it. The boy did not seem to notice or care that his hands were covered in shards of broken glass. 

He jumped without looking back, punctuated by the sound of a camera shutter going off.

“Shit.” Kakyoin exhaled into his hands, once, twice, three times, until the room stopped spinning. “ Shit. ”

Something brushed past his leg and he glanced down to see his sister’s camera-faced creature bumping against it like a cat. It was hard to tell without a face, but he could have sworn it almost seemed proud of itself. He patted it somewhat awkwardly on what he was fairly certain was its head and it chirped happily. Shimomori herself still hadn’t spoken. Her eyes were fixed on Hierophant, her mouth half-open in surprise. 

She was looking at it. She was looking straight at it.

“You can see it,” he breathed. “You can see.”

Hierophant touched its forehead to her outstretched hand. Shimomori nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I can.”

who brought me here to fight against walls and blankets

and the gods with sinews of red and silver who flutter and evade?

It showed up a few weeks ago, she explained, still poking at Hierophant’s tentacles with fascination as she sat cross-legged on the bare apartment floor. At first it only appeared in the cemetery, crouching silently at her side when she visited her mother’s grave. She had refused to look straight at it. Tried to turn it into something she could only see out of the corner of her eye to convince herself it wasn’t worth thinking about. Which worked, for a while.

“Couple days ago,” Shimomori said, blowing red curls out of her eyes. “Was on the bridge by the port. Minato-Ohashi. And I was kind of hanging off—don’t look at me like that—I was hanging off it just like I always do and it’s always been whatever. It’s always been fine.”

Kakyoin buried his face in his hands. “The ice.”

“The ice.” She nodded reluctantly. “So I. You know.”

“You fell.”

“Yeah, sure, but—I was high up enough that I would’ve died, right. But this thing. Appears out of fucking nowhere . Snaps a picture of the—you know how people fish around there sometimes? There was a net. Down by the water. I heard the camera go off and next thing I know there’s a net underneath me and—and I wasn’t falling anymore.” 

He sucked in air through his teeth. “Holy shit.”

“I know.”

“It teleports things?”

“No. Mimics them. Look.”

A tiny woodswallow unfolded in her palm. He recognized it, though he had last seen that bird in the delicate nest outside their kitchen window at home. The eggs there had only recently hatched. It was strange, he thought, for a swallow to be born in the winter.

The bird hopped into his open hand, and its tiny claws felt real enough when they pricked him. It considered him, all soft gray feathers and beady eyes, until Shimomori snapped her fingers and it vanished into a cloud of paper scraps.

“It just keeps taking pictures,” she said. “Sometimes when I don’t even mean to.”

“Did you name it?”

She dropped her eyes, studying her fingernails self-consciously. “Been calling it Smoke and Mirrors.”

“Smoke and Mirrors,” Kakyoin repeated. He smiled. “That’s good.”

“What’s yours?”

“You can’t laugh at me.”

“I would never laugh at you.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“…about something important,” she added innocently.

Kakyoin sighed. “It’s Hierophant,” he said. “Hierophant Green.”

“I mean…” Shimomori shrugged. “It is green.”

“It was that fortune teller,” he mumbled. “The young guy. Who used to come through Castle Park sometimes.”

“I remember.”

“Right after it first showed up, so I wasn’t—I was seven, I guess. He just stopped me when I was out with Mom one day and handed me the card, was just like ‘this is yours,’ didn’t explain shit. And, you know, I was a kid, and it’s green, so that’s—that’s what I ended up calling it.”

She chuckled. “I like it.”

The cold air coming through the broken window was rapidly turning into wind. If it started to rain, he thought, they should do something to prevent water damage to the apartment. They probably wouldn’t. But it was a good idea.

“Kana, you could have said something.”

“About this ?” She snorted. “How was I supposed to know you’d actually believe me?”

“Even if I hadn’t—”

“Either way you were gonna get worried about it. I wanted to figure out exactly what was going on before I went dragging you into shit.” Shimomori poked his shoulder and he winced. “Why didn’t you tell me ?”

“I tried ,” he protested, trying not to sound petulant. “I tried. I got tired of trying.”

It had been exhausting, the pity. At first they all seemed to find it endearing. Such an active imagination . The adults smiled patiently and heard him out with exaggerated interest, because that was what you did, when a child wanted to play pretend. But Kakyoin grew older, and patience grew shorter; pathetic, now, to be nearly thirteen years old and still vehemently insisting on the existence of an imaginary friend. After a certain point he had simply grown tired of people getting it backwards. Hierophant wasn’t there because he was lonely. He was lonely because Hierophant was there.

It’s not your fault , he would tell it, picking at the rug as they sat on the floor of his bedroom. He tore the fibers out calmly, methodically, rearranging them one by one in careful shapes on the hardwood. You didn’t do it on purpose. I’m not mad at you.

He wanted so badly to be understood. Just once, just for an instant, just to prove it was possible.

“I was thirteen the last time you tried to talk to me about it,” she said. “You could’ve tried again.”

She was the only one who had ever bothered to try. She tried and she failed and she tried and she failed but she told herself she would try and try again until she got it right, because the hollow look that crawled over his face when he thought he was alone felt like a fist in her stomach every time she saw it. No matter how much she cared, no matter how hard she tried, he had always been somewhere she couldn’t reach.

Until he wasn’t.

“Would you have believed me?”

Shimomori looked up at the shimmering green still hovering above them, shaking her head in wonder. It seemed reluctant to leave.

“I don’t know,” she told Kakyoin. “But you should have given me another chance to try.”

He opened his mouth and closed it, at a loss, before nodding with a look of such intense gratitude she had to roll her eyes and shove him again to get rid of the moment. He yelped in pain and she pulled her hand back as though she had been burned, eyes wide.

“You can’t really…do anything about collarbones,” he said through gritted teeth. “Broken ones. Right?”

“ Broken ?”

He explained the truth about the fight as quickly as he could and Shimomori’s expression suggested she regretted not stomping the guy’s face in when she had the chance. Kakyoin watched her eyes nervously after explaining his failed attempt to take the mind over as she picked at a spot on the floor, deep in thought.

“You’re saying you know how to possess people.”

“You…could call it that.”

“Kinda fucked.”

He held his breath until Shimomori grinned impishly up at him.

“Impressive,” she said. “I like it.”

Kakyoin’s relief must have shown on his face, because she added: “If you even think about trying that shit on me, though…”

“Wouldn’t. Won’t. Don’t worry.”

He wish he could have said he preferred not to unless it was necessary, but the truth was that he liked lacing himself through those secret spaces, finding a way to turn everything in the right direction. He was good at it. It felt nice, to do something he was good at, something that meant he was the one deciding what was and wasn’t real. Sometimes, when he made their blood run cold enough, it stopped mattering so much that he was alone. 

Fear was a known quantity. Fear used to be a known quantity.

“Something was wrong,” he said slowly. “Something was really…really fucked up in there. I don’t—I couldn’t explain it. But I’ve never felt anything like that before. Felt like there was someone else in there. Besides me and him.”

His bruised knuckles were beginning to go purple. It would be annoying to hide, Kakyoin realized regretfully. 

“He screamed, I heard him scream, right before the end. But it didn’t feel like…it didn’t seem like he was screaming at me. He did it like he knew no one was ever gonna hear him.”

“But you did hear him.”

“I did, yeah.” He shuddered. “It was like he just wanted to see if he still could. Scream, I mean.”

There had been the sense of molten gold, not the sight, but the feeling, like his veins were being shot full of it. The dread threatened to nail him in place if he didn’t pull away from it fast enough, but he hadn’t pulled away, wanted so badly to get a closer look at a smile so warm it hadn’t mattered that the teeth belonged to a shark.

“Did he say why he was trying to kill you?”

Kakyoin shook his head. “Knew my name but he didn’t say anything else. I still don’t know what he wanted.”

“Hm.” 

Shimomori stood.

“Can’t do anything about it right now, can we?”

He watched her pick up a shard of broken glass and examine it critically. “Not really, no.”

“Can you do something for me then?”

“Probably. Maybe.”

She helped him to his feet. “Stop going to rooftops by yourself until I figure this out so I don’t have a fucking heart attack.” 

Kakyoin considered. “What if I just make you come with me?”

“Ask me when it’s not six in the morning,” Shimomori said, “and I might think about it.”

Smoke and Mirrors crawled across the floor, methodically snapping pictures of each piece of glass. He wondered whether she had tested her limits the hard way yet, or if she still lived in a world where it was possible to put a second sun in the sky, simply because it hadn’t yet been proven that she couldn’t. 

Maybe it never would be. Kakyoin would believe her, if she told him she could. For the space of that heartbeat, smiling up at Hierophant with a familiar snakelike glint in her eyes, Shimomori might as well have been the sun herself.

I turn, and my horns 

gore blackness.

For a week they worked their way towards a new normal as though they believed it would stick. Neither really did, but Kakyoin pretended for his sister’s benefit, and she for his. They crouched together on the slate, watching green webs weave across the rooftops around a mercurial shape that rapidly became familiar in its unpredictability, and he felt untouchable under the cold winter sun. Even more so under the stars, which Shimomori preferred to the dawn, though once he started smiling like he meant it she found it nearly impossible to tell him no.

It almost felt like an echo of their childhood, a bizarre, two-person game of tag. At first he snapped her up in his nets nearly every time, but she learned fast, and soon she was cornering him just as frequently. Out of the various forms Smoke and Mirrors took she seemed to prefer the six-legged deer to the others, though it almost never lasted more than a few seconds. When Kakyoin watched it move, blowing into his hands to warm them, he thought if they could just stay there then they could be safe for as long as they wanted.

Neither Kakyoin or Shimomori had ever been very good at holding still.

At first he didn’t think much of the man sitting down beside him beyond the fact that it was a little annoying for someone to do that when there were about three other empty benches on the path nearby. In the spring Castle Park would be packed full with tourists drawn by the promise of cherry blossoms, but in December there was usually room to breathe. The crowds set him on edge with their elbows and cameras and sweaty impatience, though he would have liked to see the flowers more often. A little ironic, to come to a place he generally avoided for that reason in order to be alone.

“Imagine seeing you again.”

Heavy gold jewelry tugged gently on the man’s earlobes, set off against the red of his robe. Over ten years and he still wore his hair in the same bantu knots Kakyoin had been so fascinated by when he watched him walking through the park as a child.

“Oh.” He glanced up curiously. “Did you come to get your card back?” 

The man laughed. “No,” he said. “But I’m gratified to hear you kept it.”

“So a coincidence.”

“I’m a fortune teller.”

“And?”

“I don’t believe in those.”

The hairs on the back of Kakyoin’s neck had begun to prickle. He sensed no malice from the man, no aggression, but something wasn’t right, something unseen was making him uneasy. But Shimomori would be there soon. It didn’t matter.

Still…

“You don’t believe in them,” Kakyoin repeated slowly. Hierophant rose behind him, sending a thin web of tentacles across the grass and the path in search of his sister. 

“There’s no need for that.”

Kakyoin froze, thunderstruck.

“I’m not a threat to you,” the man said evenly. 

“I—I’m sorry?”

“Is that the Hierophant?” He examined it with interest. “You can put it away.”

He was looking straight at it. He was definitely looking straight at it. Kind of self-important, Kakyoin thought, to just assume that he had named his psychic projection after a card some stranger gave him in the park. Never mind that he was right about it.

Some kind of cosmic joke to be wishing someone couldn’t see it.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He got to his feet, avoiding the man’s eyes.

“Good luck finding them,” he said. “Whoever you’re looking for, but it…it isn’t me.”

Cutting across the grass would be the fastest way to get to Shimomori. She was still too far to sense clearly but he could feel a flicker of mercury, somewhere past the skeletons of the cherry trees.

Still behind him, the man sighed.

“Ordinarily I would give you more space, but I’m afraid I no longer have the luxury of taking my time.”

Kakyoin stiffened. He was about to turn back around and ask what the hell that meant when he heard the unmistakable whoosh of fire.

He whirled, incredulous, but before Hierophant could do anything more than manifest, a shape that Kakyoin barely had time to recognize as a large white tiger bounded across the grass to crouch at his feet. It switched its tail once and leaped towards the tongue of scarlet flame, intercepting it in midair before bursting into a cloud of shredded paper.

Paper?

Shimomori skidded to a halt at his side, out of breath.

“What…the fuck… is going on here.”

“I could’ve handled that,” he mumbled, annoyed.

“If I’m faster than you that makes it your problem.” She glared up at the stranger, who was pinching the bridge of his nose like he had a headache. “Who’s this asshole?”

“No idea.”

“Hey, asshole!”

The stranger raised his eyebrows.

“I don’t know who you are,” she said loudly. “But you pull any more of that shit and I’ll kill you. Walk away.”

Smoke and Mirrors scuttled beneath Hierophant, chirping furiously in what Kakyoin could only assume was agreement. It flipped the camera lens back and showed the stranger its many, many rows of teeth. 

The man looked from Kakyoin to Shimomori and back again. There was no aggression in his eyes, only exhaustion. 

“Siblings,” he muttered. “Both of you. My God.”

Kakyoin blinked at him. “You—what do you mean, ‘both of you’?”

“I apologize,” the stranger continued. “I didn’t intend to hurt you—either of you. I just needed you to take me seriously as quickly as possible.”

Something unfurled from his body, a flaming, humanoid creature with the crimson head of a bird.

“My name is Muhammad Avdol,” he said. “I’m looking for someone.”

As it turned out, Avdol was actually looking for three different people.

He had been following rumors, he explained, once they were safely folded into the back room of a café near the park. It had apparently been reported as a miracle by someone very devout who had happened to witness Kakyoin and his pursuer survive their respective six-story falls. Avdol said it was usually a toss-up as to whether the paranormal enthusiasts or the evangelicals would publish such stories first, though the groups tended to spin the events in quite different ways. Kakyoin felt oddly intruded upon, hearing that someone outside the two of them had seen any part of it.

The description of those involved in the supposed miracle had matched one of the missing Stand users. That was what they were called, Avdol told them. Both Kakyoin’s Hierophant Green and Shimomori’s Smoke and Mirrors were Stands, and they, having been born with the ability to manifest them, were now a target. He spoke about it so matter-of-factly that it almost seemed a natural thing to believe before Kakyoin remembered that Hierophant had been invisible to everyone but himself up until a week ago.

“Dio Brando,” Avdol said. “Does that name mean anything? To either of you?”

Kakyoin and Shimomori glanced at each other. They shook their heads.

“He seems to be targeting born users. Specifically bloodlines that seem to have the ability to produce them, which, being siblings…would put the two of you in danger, once—sorry, your name…?”

“Shimomori.”

“Once he got wind of Shimomori’s abilities. Users are going missing all over and reappearing under his…control. He wants you—well, he wants all of us for himself, but particularly seems to be obsessed with those for whom Stand use comes naturally.”

Shimomori frowned. “Wouldn’t that include you?”

Avdol nodded. “He has tried multiple times to add me to his collection, yes.”

“Hasn’t been successful, I guess.”

“Not yet,” he muttered darkly.

Kakyoin watched thin curls of steam rise from his cup of green tea, now more sludge than liquid. He kept forgetting he had already added sugar and stirring more in. 

“What did you mean,” he said quietly, “when you said they were ‘under his control’?”

“I mean that he has them doing his dirty work.” Avdol shook his head. “He isn’t…‘recruiting’ the users himself. The reason we know the missing persons are under his influence is that they keep returning to attack other born users. Sometimes people they knew, but usually strangers.”

Shimomori watched him out of the corner of her eye. “Attack how?”

“Either the attacker dies, the target dies, or the target is dragged back to Dio, presumably.”

“Dio guy sounds like a bitch.”

Avdol chuckled reluctantly. “That’s one way to put it.”

Kakyoin dropped another sugar cube into his tea with a soft plop . “And what’s your deal?”

“Mine?”

“You don’t seem like the kind of guy who sets people on fire in public for fun.”

“Not usually, no.” A shadow crossed his face, gone as quickly as it had come. “It was—they went missing looking for him. Family friends. An American, Joseph Joestar and his…his grandson. Kujo Jotaro.”

“Describe the younger one.”

“Tall,” Avdol said. “Big. Six foot…four, maybe six foot five. Dark hair. Wears a—he has a hat usually, ripped off at the back.”

Shimomori’s eyes went wide.

“That’s him,” she whispered.

Avdol blinked, looking between the two of them with an expression as hopeful as it was afraid.

“Yeah.” He watched the candle in the center of the table flicker weakly. It looked cheap, the kind of thing you could buy in plastic bags at the drugstore. “Yeah, that sounds like the guy who tried to beat me to death last week.”

“Tell me what happened,” Avdol demanded.

Kakyoin ran through the attack as succinctly as he could, though he conveniently forgot to mention the fact that he had very nearly let Jotaro fall to his death. By the time he fell silent Avdol had dropped his face into his hands, looking nauseous. 

“I don’t know how he’s doing it,” he mumbled, voice muffled. “He’s got people fighting for him who—their families swear they’d never do anything like that. Some of them had never even used their Stands violently before. And Jotaro, he—”

He cut himself off and took a deep breath. “It’s Dio. He does something to them. I don’t know what.”

“Would it help to see him?”

Both Avdol and Kakyoin stared at Shimomori, taken aback.

“See him?” Avdol repeated slowly.

“My Stand,” she said. “Got a picture before he jumped out the window. I can bring him up.”

“Is that how it…”

He unfolded with the sound of a sheet of paper being shaken out, sitting in the unoccupied fourth chair as calmly as anything. Kakyoin jumped, flinching away from the hand resting on the table. 

“…works,” Avdol breathed, staring at the construct. “That’s…extraordinary.”

Shimomori shrugged. “It’s just his body,” she said. “It can’t answer questions or anything.”

“It’s him.” He closed his eyes briefly, as though it were painful to look for too long. “It’s—that’s Jotaro.”

If he hadn’t known it was a fake Kakyoin would have believed it was the real Kujo boy, enough so to be on edge, though this one wasn’t moving, only stared at the same spot on the table and breathed with that same strange half-hitched rhythm he had noticed in the real one when he was knocked out. It caught after the inhale, like there was something in the way.

“Those scars,” Avdol murmured. “They’re new.”

He was looking at the scars on Jotaro’s cheeks, the ones that had reminded Kakyoin so much of marks left by an animal’s claws. They still did, now that he looked closer, though they seemed too wide and shallow to belong to a rodent or cat.

Kakyoin forced himself to look away. “Why did he even go looking for this Dio guy in the first place?”

“Dio is…connected…to his family,” Avdol said, unable to tear his eyes off the scars. “The Joestars, his mother’s side. Both Jotaro and his mother are Stand users, have been their whole lives. So when Dio resurfaced—around the time the disappearances started, their Stands started to…act up, to put it lightly. Though the word ‘berserk’ might be more accurate.”

The false Jotaro blinked slowly. There was one difference, Kakyoin realized, between Shimomori’s replica and the real thing. It was all in the eyes, the absence of that hysterical blue light.

“It’s almost impossible to explain if you didn’t see it happen. It was like there was some…some internal compass going haywire because north kept changing directions. His mother’s Stand, ordinarily she has excellent control over it—the thing started growing gold berries in place of the red ones, they’d burst and be full of acid or poison or some sort of gas, she had no hand in that. It got to be dangerous simply because they couldn’t—their Stands had been known quantities for all their lives, until then. And Star Platinum…”

“Star Platinum,” Kakyoin repeated, looking back at the hands. There were scars there too, though they seemed far older. The attention to detail was beyond reproach.

“Jotaro’s Stand. A thing of immense strength, in my experience.”

“Mine as well,” he said crisply. 

Avdol winced. “Right.”

The chimes hanging from the tearoom door tinkled cheerfully, and none of them realized how on edge they were until they found themselves startled by something so mundane.

“Star began to behave erratically too. Less obviously wrong on the surface than the berries, but it changed…around the eyes. Jotaro, he…spent so much of his childhood learning to keep it on a short leash, it was like all of that was just…gone. Started reacting violently to almost any perceived threat and he couldn’t control the reflex. Breaking point was he tripped over one of Holly’s vines and Star nearly tore the thing off.”

Avdol shook his head. “His grandfather, Joseph, Holly’s father, his Stand is good for tracking. They left together, I intended to join them myself after I had followed through on a few leads, but Jotaro, he—as soon as he had an idea of Dio’s location from Joseph he just…left. No explanation, not a word. I can only assume he meant to take Dio on himself. A seventeen-year-old against…” He shuddered. “But it’s…it’s something he would do. Jotaro, I mean. Joseph tried to go after him and I haven’t heard from him in weeks, either—no one has.”

He looked up at Kakyoin, sounding almost desperate. “Jotaro wouldn’t hurt a stranger like that, not unless he had a very good reason. I’ve known him since he was a child and he…he just isn’t like that.”

Kakyoin stared at the paper shell that looked and breathed like something alive, and he wanted to believe Avdol nearly as much as Avdol wanted to be believed, but he looked at the face and remembered the smile that had stretched across it, euphoric and bloody, and he found it was too much to ask, to pretend that look had meant nothing at all. 

And yet even in moments of peace, he could still hear Jotaro’s scream.

“I’m coming with you.”

He spoke before he realized he meant to say it. Both Avdol and Shimomori stared at him, nonplussed. Kakyoin looked back at them silently, unsure of what he would say if they demanded an explanation.

“No,” Shimomori said after a long moment had passed. Her hand curled into a fist, resting on the table.

“Kana—”

She folded her arms and the look on her face said she had already made her decision.

“ We are coming with you,” she told Avdol firmly. “We’ll help you.”

For a second he looked like he wanted to argue, but he looked back at Jotaro and he set his jaw and it occurred then, to Kakyoin and Shimomori both, that Avdol was a fairly young man himself. It seemed that he had been trying to untangle an impossible web alone for a long time. 

“Why?” Avdol narrowed his eyes. “Why would you risk your lives for strangers?”

Kakyoin shrugged. 

“Don’t know,” he said. “I’m not really sure myself.”

a mistake, to have shut myself in this cask skin,

four legs thrust out like posts.

Steam rising from tea would always curl in a familiar way, it seemed, no matter where in the world Kakyoin found himself. He hadn’t really been aware of missing home until Avdol commented on his tendency to order green tea wherever he could find it; he rarely even drank it, just sat there with his hands wrapped around the hot cup, staring down at the undisturbed surface. Though Kakyoin felt this time he could hardly be blamed for valuing the heat more than the taste, considering the vicious cold that came with Russian winter.

Bryansk was the administrative center of the region, which was why they had stopped on the way through, given that Shimomori would have a much easier time finding identifying papers to snap a photo of in a place like this as opposed to a more sparsely populated area, and crossing the border to the Ukraine would in turn be made simpler once they had their ‘qualifications’ in order. The interior of the coffeehouse where they waited for her was dark, the street almost painfully bright in contrast, though Kakyoin still squinted out at it, watching for his sister and pretending he was not growing increasingly anxious about how long she had been gone.

It had only been a week. It felt much, much longer. They had not said goodbye to their parents, not really. It wasn’t the sort of goodbye either of them knew the words for, and there was no explanation to give them, no excuse that would fit. Shimomori had left a note behind, refusing to tell Kakyoin what she wrote, saying only that she had handled it.

Avdol preferred cappuccinos. It came as a surprise at first, given the steadiness of his demeanor, to see the massive amounts of caffeine the man consumed on a daily basis, but by now Kakyoin was used to it. He had come to rely on it the same way he relied on finding Avdol on the hotel balcony at sunrise, relied on his silent companionship as they watched the light climb over the skyline of whichever city they had touched down in the night before. 

There had been no immediate danger so far, though Avdol warned them to stay on their guard, and the extended period of calm served mostly to put Kakyoin more on edge with each passing day. Every time they arrived at a new hotel Avdol disappeared for roughly an hour to make a hushed phone call that he was firmly evasive about if asked, and they grew to expect that too. He explained that he had reports of   reversed gravity on the border between Russia and the Ukraine, which the witnesses were confident was the work of aliens. Ordinarily he wouldn’t pursue such a vague lead, but it was on the way to their destination; to Avdol’s immense consternation, there seemed to be a lot of trouble-prone Stand user bloodlines in Europe.

Kakyoin looked at the clock. It had been two hours. She had said she would check back in one and a half. “Hey…Avdol?”

Avdol glanced up.

“You don’t think she—”

The door crashed open with such force it was a miracle it didn’t shatter. Shimomori ignored the glares from the baristas and shoved her way over to them, cheeks still pink from the cold.

“You gotta come,” she said breathlessly. “Now. Come with me.”

Avdol stared at her. “Did you get the papers?”

“What? No—I mean, yes, I got them, but that’s not what I—” She groaned. “I’ll explain but we have to—we have to go.”

Her eyes were wild and bright. Kakyoin almost felt relieved, to see some urgency at last.

“It’s not that far,” she told them once they were back on the street, half-running towards the factory district. “She’s in one of the old warehouses. You said it was gravity, right?”

“I—gravity?”

Shimomori rolled her eyes, impatient. “The shit people were saying was aliens. It was gravity getting fucked up. Right?”

Avdol nodded slowly.

“Okay. Yeah. I found her. And she’s in—some guy trying to—I saw her going at it with him. Stand looked like—bile or some shit. Guy with dark hair. Man, he was shirtless , it’s fucking—it’s like, ten degrees under—”

“Shimomori,” Avdol said sharply. “Slow down. What did you see?”

They rounded a corner and found themselves facing a large warehouse yard, stacked with lumber and rusted shipping containers. The entry had once been blocked by a chainlink fence that had been half melted by what looked like acid. 

Shimomori pointed towards the overhang. “That.”

Oh.

Gravity certainly wasn’t working correctly on at least two of the three people already in the yard. Two men thrashed in midair, clearly trying to right themselves, and an exhausted young woman in a blue windbreaker swayed between them in a valiant attempt to stay on her feet. Her face flashed with recognition when she saw Shimomori, just as she lost her grip on the larger of the two and he crashed to the asphalt.

“Shit!” the girl yelped.

“It seems you really do want to die,” the man growled in heavily accented English. “Shall I make it quick for you?”

Inky wings flashed into existence with barely enough time to rip her out of range, the armored silver Stand slashing at her feet as she rose. She hovered in midair, looking anxiously between the two of them. Shimomori started towards her only to run straight into Avdol’s outstretched arm.

“Let me handle this. He sounds French.”

“He—” She blinked, clearly thinking she had misheard. “French?”

“I can’t stand the French,” Avdol muttered darkly. 

His accent was pretty awful, Kakyoin thought, watching the two of them quip at each other for far longer than really seemed necessary. By the time they actually had their Stands out the girl in the windbreaker already had the shirtless man and his yellow bile suspended in some sort of contained zero-gravity state, and there was nothing to do but watch.

Fortune-telling, Avdol said, was as much about performance as it was about skill; it seemed he held the same philosophy when it came to pyromancy. He was enjoying himself, Kakyoin realized, watching him laugh as he sent the silver-haired Frenchman diving for cover with a wall of blue flames. The man was no weak opponent, particularly once his stand shed the chrome armor slowing it down, but as it turned out, when he was on fire it didn’t matter how fast he was with a sword.

For a moment it seemed like Avdol would finish burning him to death and that would be the end of it. When the fire abruptly snuffed itself out, Kakyoin kept expecting him to turn and announce that it was over one way or another, but Avdol stayed where he was, staring down at the unconscious stranger and his disheveled silver hair.

“Something wrong?” Kakyoin tilted his head to get a better look. “I mean, besides him being French.”

“You don’t think he…” He hesitated. “He could have been…like the others. Under the influence, so to speak. I’d rather not—I’d prefer not to…”

Kakyoin squinted at the places where the man’s pale skin had gone red and irritated. He would have expected his burns to be worse. “I can check that.”

Avdol looked at him, surprised. “You can do that?”

“Yeah. Have to wait until he’s conscious, though. Can’t do it if he’s knocked out.”

“I can handle that,” Shimomori said calmly, standing over the stranger. One of his broken-heart earrings had fallen, lying cracked on the ground. “You good, Angela?”

The girl nodded mutely, looking dazed. Her prisoner bobbed gently up and down in midair, apparently unconscious.

They watched Shimomori curiously. She could have conjured a bucket of water, or ice, or an angry cat to drop on him, none of which she did. She just smiled to herself and slapped him, hard, and he jerked awake with a mumbled merde .

Good enough.

Kakyoin dropped to his knees and held his hand over the man’s face. “Don’t move,” he murmured, and Hierophant unraveled into his wide, frightened eyes. 

It had been a long time since he had entered a space like this. He hadn’t needed to take anyone over for quite a while. He had been staying out of trouble, the way his parents thought he always had. Maybe he ought to have been out of practice, but the art of control was an instinct for Kakyoin. It always had been. 

The road on which he found himself was unpaved, stretching long and straight through tall grass. Clearly the thing to do was walk it, though it seemed no matter how much progress he seemed to make, the ocean at his back grew no more distant, the lone white townhouse on the horizon no closer. Which was no more obviously out of the ordinary than the yellow bluebells that lined the path; Kakyoin had learned long ago that the rules of the mind’s landscape were set on an individual basis. Infinite footpaths and wrong-colored flowers might just be how this one manifested, and it wouldn’t have even come close to being the strangest he’d taken charge of.

He heard her before he saw them, the high chime of a young girl’s laughter floating back on the breeze. Unlike the backdrop, the two figures at the end of the trail got closer as he walked, and he kept walking until he was running, kept running until he realized what he was running from. A rush of gold followed him towards them, racing just under the dirt’s surface like a shark under ice.

It was a hushed thing. Nowhere close to the heat wave that had forced him from Jotaro’s mind, but even lukewarm it was something that should not have been there, something just as much an intruder as Kakyoin.

She walked with him as though she were completely confident in her own belonging, even as the gold seeped from her footsteps into the ground. When she turned to face Kakyoin, her hand still hooked around the silver-haired man’s arm, he saw it in her eyes, swirling just underneath her skin, and he knew the only other foreign object in that meadow was the gold itself.

“Who are you?”

The man blinked down at him in confusion. He was in no pain, no distress.

“Why are you here?” he demanded.

Kakyoin looked at him, his high cheekbones and round blue eyes. He looked at the girl, at her high cheekbones and round eyes that, he suspected, had once been blue just like her—

Sherry , the voice said. Sherry.

—brother. Brother, and he saw it now, the dark-haired little girl with a bow in her hair and round cheeks, the dark-haired teenager with a bow in her hair and the same blue eyes as her brother. Jean , she called him. He had a name. He had a name and a little sister and the little sister was a blank space that taught him just how violent emptiness could be, because Sherry—

the body

—Sherry was her name, the sister—

before we found the body

—the last smile replayed, over and over again, she smiled and she twirled her white umbrella and she turned away, she said See you soon , and she lied, she lied, she lied.

she was gone before we found the body

Kakyoin stumbled back. The tears in his eyes were not his own. He took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and he slammed the heel of his hand into the girl’s chest.

Green raced under her skin, overtook the gold, and before her scream of rage was fully formed her body turned to emerald and shattered. The shards fell to the dirt, seeped into the spaces the gold she left behind still tried so pathetically to claim, and then it was emerald beating just underneath the surface like a second heart, it was emerald holding his soul in place. No trace of gold remained; Kakyoin had swallowed it whole.

A warm wind swept through the grass with all the weight of a heavy exhale. The man turned towards him, mouth half open to ask a question he did not want to answer, and Kakyoin released control as quickly as he had taken it.

Back in his own head, he opened his eyes, still kneeling on the asphalt. The silver-haired man sat up slowly, disoriented but awake, and Avdol crouched to the left, staring at something small and shriveled that he seemed afraid to touch.

Kakyoin wrinkled his nose. “The fuck is that?”

“It was in his forehead.” Avdol poked at it. “Shriveled up and fell out about a minute ago.”

“That’s him.”

The man had gone rigid, watching the shriveled thing as though he expected it to leap at him. “That’s him,” he repeated. “That’s his.” He looked up at Kakyoin in disbelief. “You did that.”

“I did.”

“You—you’re just a kid.”

“The kid who just bailed you out of your own skull,” Kakyoin said coolly.

“Right.” He lowered his eyes. “Thanks.”

“You got a name?”

“Polnareff. Jean Pierre Polnareff.”

Jean . Kakyoin shivered. 

“So it is a control system,” Avdol murmured, still gazing at the scrap. It looked like dried meat, a dead scrap of flesh.

“Yes.”

Avdol looked at Polnareff, his expression feverish. “You’re going to tell us everything you know. Now.” 

Polnareff’s eyes stayed on the piece of dead flesh. His mouth twitched in disgust.

“ Avec plaisir ,” he said grimly. “With pleasure.”

His knowledge of the “fleshbuds” was fairly general, rooted mostly in half-remembered personal experience, but it was enough to nail down the basic shape of things. They came from Dio. They could be implanted only by Dio. A failed removal meant death for the host. The host could be killed by them, too, if they were too unruly, if they proved to be too much trouble.

It wasn’t a forced control— he twists the intentions , Polnareff said. There was only one thing that mattered and it was him, it was whatever he decided mattered. Dio was the center of gravity, Dio turned himself into the sun, and they belonged to him. Down to the cores of their souls, they belonged to him.

“I want to help,” Polnareff told Avdol earnestly. “There are more like I was, I want to—I’ll come with you, I’ll help. Besides,” he added, his eyes growing dark, “never did get at the fucker who killed my sister.”

Avdol blinked. “Sister?”

“He got me,” he muttered. “With that, he—he told me he could get me the guy who killed Sherry. I believed him. I wanted to believe him.”

The dark-haired girl from Polnareff’s memories smiled up at Kakyoin, the echo of someone else’s pain. There had never been a good way to brace himself for the intensity of being inside it, no way to anticipate all the different languages of hurt.

Kakyoin looked up at Shimomori, watching her talk quietly with the girl she had called Angela. “Yeah,” he said. “I get that.”

Angela was tired but had no serious injuries, and she seemed immensely grateful for the intervention. They had been chasing her for nearly a week, she said, with an icy glare in Polnareff’s direction. He looked away sheepishly. 

She returned gravity to the man with the yellow sludge-like Stand and he landed in a heap on the ground. Kakyoin chose not to mention that he had seen the man stirring before Shimomori slapped him to wake him up. He hesitated, Hierophant half-unfurled at his side.

“I don’t…” He squinted down at the man’s forehead. “I don’t see one.”

They looked closer, but there was no fleshbud. His will had not, it seemed, been under any kind of outside influence. Shimomori folded her arms and stared down at him, eyebrows raised. The guy shrugged.

“What?” he said defensively. “He paid up front.”

I should have remained grass.

After purging a few more fleshbuds, Kakyoin began to understand the insidious nature of gold. Finding it became easier, uprooting it more natural, though it was learning about him too, it seemed, with each consecutive defeat. He almost felt as though he would know the man behind it if they came face to face, or at least he would recognize the smell of cloves, the oppressive gentleness of his smile. It frightened him, sometimes, to see how deeply Dio convinced the souls he wound himself into that they needed him, so thoroughly that half the defenses Kakyoin had to destroy in order to usurp the gold ended up being formed by the victims themselves.

It used what was already there, and that made it dangerous. The hosts were enslaving themselves; escaping from the gilded cages they built was the last thing they wanted to do. 

Despite this, Kakyoin had no trouble with the smooth-voiced user behind the Lovers Stand, or the young woman named Midler whose strange little High Priestess nearly tore Polnareff’s face off on the train to Warsaw. Truth was he had always been very, very good at getting inside people’s heads, and he had been doing it for longer than Dio. Each time a user was freed Avdol asked what they knew about Kujo Jotaro, and each time they glanced away, avoiding his eyes. 

Midler looked slightly nauseous. “He’s the one that gets sent out when they don’t…they usually can’t be…identified. When he’s done with them.”

“Doesn’t really talk to anyone,” the Lovers’ user said. “Always seemed like he was Dio’s favorite, though.”

“He’ll know you’re doing it by now,” Avdol told Kakyoin in a low voice as they watched Midler duck back into the train station. “He’ll know you can reverse it.”

“So?”

“So you just became a much bigger threat.”

Kakyoin smirked grimly. “I am a threat.”

“Cocky means dead in this line of work.” Avdol narrowed his eyes. “Stay on your guard.”

It wasn’t cockiness, Kakyoin thought, if he had the track record to back it up. He was aware of his own capabilities, that was all. He had been born ready for this war.

More importantly, he felt certain that whatever was in the way the first time he tried to get into Jotaro’s head would stand no chance against him now. The next time they faced each other he would wrench the gold out by the roots. It seemed to Kakyoin that Avdol should be more optimistic, considering how much progress they were making. 

In Poland he finally had the chance to test his theory, when they stopped in Poznań to let Avdol meet with a few estranged contacts. It was a large, flat, old city, the site of Poland’s first diocese, according to Avdol. Kakyoin, being completely indifferent to if not openly hostile towards the concept of learning about Catholic history, did not find it to be a particularly compelling place. Still, Shimomori insisted that even Catholics could have redeeming qualities, if you knew where to look, and since the alternative was hanging around the hotel with Polnareff, he agreed to help her and her Stand search for useful subject matter.

He was grateful for the morning fog, since he suspected the colorfully painted tenement houses lining the old market square would become painfully bright under direct sunlight. He watched Shimomori weave her way through the stalls with cursory interest, faintly surprised by the decently sized crowds despite the early hour. 

When Kakyoin saw him slouching against an archway across the courtyard, he hardly felt any sort of shock or fear, only a tiny prickle of adrenaline deep in the center of his chest. Their eyes met. Jotaro turned away and began walking towards the alley between the tenements and the town hall, slow enough to be clear that it wasn’t flight, but a dare.

Shimomori was watching a vendor show off an ornate switchblade, Smoke and Mirrors scuttling around in search of an angle on it. Kakyoin tapped her on the shoulder. 

“Kana.”

“I—yeah?”

“I’ll meet you at the hotel,” he said, eyes on the spot where Jotaro had disappeared. “Something I want to do.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” she called, too distracted to realize he was already out of earshot.

Jotaro blinked when Kakyoin stepped into the loggia’s shadow, a twitch that was almost the mirthless beginning of a smile. 

“Couldn’t stay away, huh.” 

He didn’t respond. Kakyoin crossed his arms and looked critically at the scars on his face, overlaid now with fresh scratches. He looked—not worse , exactly, but desaturated somehow, like the color was being dragged out.

“You know I’m with Avdol now,” Kakyoin continued, watching him closely. Behind him, Hierophant’s tentacles begain creeping up the wall.

Jotaro’s expression remained flat. When his hands clenched into fists, Kakyoin could see that his knuckles were badly scarred.

“Muhammad Avdol. Friend of yours, isn’t he?”

His lip curled back and Kakyoin pulled out of range just before he lunged, hungry violence rolling off of him like a heat wave. The tentacles climbing towards the window made it to the latch just in time to yank him through what was now a viable entrance point. He hesitated on the other side, considering slamming it shut behind him. Jotaro would certainly break it, and it would be a tactical advantage, to fill his opponent with shards of glass before the fight even began.

Kakyoin thought of the glass stuck in Jotaro’s hands after he punched through the window of the apartment in Osaka. He thought of the scars on those knuckles, and wondered just how long that glass had stayed under his skin.

He left the window open. 

He did, however, have no problem with using Hierophant’s tentacles to launch several high-backed chairs directly at Jotaro’s head the minute he swung through the window. Sympathy could only extend so far when the person in question was actively trying to murder him.

More chairs sat arranged in neat rows beneath the vaulted arches of the hall’s meeting room, and Kakyoin flung them at Jotaro as he backed away, eventually favoring chaos over precision and sweeping his tentacles across the floor to send the lot of them flying into disarray. 

But Christ, that purple Stand was fast . One second it was still punching chairs into splinters, the next it was slamming him back against a pillar, and he could have sworn he hadn’t seen it move between the two positions at all. The fingers dug into his shoulders hard enough to leave bruises. Star Platinum, Avdol had called it.

It was smiling at him.

“Nice to see you again,” he told Star Platinum, and snapped Hierophant tight around its neck. Too slow. Jotaro staggered back, eyes wide, before he let out a strangled snarl and his Stand tore the tentacles clean off. Kakyoin hissed as the skin on his hands split. Easy enough to redirect the damage, but that didn’t mean it hurt any less.

Asshole .

He ducked away as Jotaro punched the pillar into dust, pulverizing the spot where Kakyoin’s head had been a heartbeat earlier. A deathblow, if it had landed. He sprinted for the stairs.

The town hall had been converted to a museum of sorts a few decades ago and they found themselves winding through a long room full of display cases, which created any number of opportunities for blunt force trauma, though it also made maneuvering significantly more difficult. Kakyoin smashed Jotaro’s head against a glass case, Star Platinum picked Kakyoin up and threw him into a grand piano. The strings snapped underneath him, cutting into his arms. Hierophant tore four octaves of bloody piano keys from their base with a beautifully dissonant crash, throwing them back at Jotaro in a splash of green hard enough to embed several in his chest and side.

He needed an opening. He needed an angle , but Jotaro wrenched the keys out and spit and kept moving, the fucker just wouldn’t go down . 

Star Platinum had Hierophant by the arms, twisted hard enough to get a yell of pain when the jolt reached Kakyoin himself, and he might have ripped them off entirely and ended it there if a marble bust hadn’t swung into his face, propelled by a tangle of tentacles.

Kakyoin saw his eyes widen slightly as he saw it coming. He had time to duck. He would duck.

He punched it instead.

A horrible crack announced the harmonized breaking of marble and bone and the bust’s decapitated head rolled across the tile. Kakyoin stared at Jotaro’s bleeding knuckles. He was beyond fast enough to have avoided the attack. He hadn’t even used Star Platinum. He broke his hand…on purpose? 

A few exchanged blows later and it was clear the wound hadn’t slowed Jotaro down at all, even though using that hand had to have been making it worse. His expression remained one of starving rage, not a single trace of pain. Kakyoin backed off. Dio, whatever he was, he couldn’t stop them from hurting. It had to hurt. 

He had to hurt. 

A door at the end of the hallway had been left ajar and Kakyoin raced for it. He crashed through into an office crowded with file cabinets and folders. A middle-aged woman sat behind the desk, pen frozen halfway to the inkwell. 

Shit.

Jotaro kicked the door in. He started towards Kakyoin. The woman said something sharply in Polish, beginning to stand. Jotaro’s eyes flicked towards her and his face twitched. For a fraction of a second, he hesitated.

A fraction of a second was all Kakyoin needed to swipe the inkwell from the desk and fling it into Jotaro’s eyes. He stumbled, blinded, and Kakyoin kneed him hard in the stomach to bring him down. He had never been the type to rely on strength over slipperiness. When you had a stubborn enough opponent the only option was to fight dirty, and Jotaro was very, very stubborn.

Kakyoin knelt in front of him once more. Jotaro’s eyes snapped open when Hierophant began slipping into his head, still smeared with ink, bright and furious like something burning. And he did burn, skin too hot up close like a branding iron, smelling of ash and salt and blood. The brim of his hat covered the fleshbud, but Kakyoin could sense it there, a fever just behind the eyes. 

“I’ll be quick,” he said. 

This time he was ready for the resistance, the heavy set of jaws still closed tight over the heart of it. He met them with a snap of his own, snake teeth sinking through lion skull and wrenching hard enough to splinter the bone. 

The jaws cracked open. A beat of silence followed.

And then it was loud , loud like nothing Kakyoin had ever known. Jotaro’s mind recoiled from him in horror with a high howling, not quite a human scream, the thin stretched sound of an animal in pain, and the sound twisted into a horrible mockery of speech. 

The words came out backwards, so mangled that to recognize them at all felt like a betrayal, and somewhere far in the distance his blood was boiling just from being in proximity to it, this spasming wrath exposed like a frayed nerve ending, power so raw it was vulnerable—

city skyline frozen, distant electric lights gleaming like stars through drops of blood hanging suspended in the air, 

—his entire body shook as he tried to unwind from it—

blood reminds him of something, a handful of red berries from another lifetime, 

—he hardly remembered how to move the phantom limb that was Hierophant, hardly felt he would know his own skin even if he did manage to reclaim it—

the laughter gentle, like a song, like claws tearing through skin.

Kakyoin fell back, smacked his head hard on the sharp edge of the desk. The ringing in his ears built until he felt his skull might burst with the force of it. When he touched his face, his fingertips came back wet. Blood trickled from the corners of his eyes. 

His head snapped up. Jotaro was standing, staring down at him with a look of surprise that quickly contorted into rage. 

Fuck.

The middle-aged woman was nowhere to be seen, presumably having fled the scene when Kakyoin’s eyes started bleeding. Which was a good thing, considering she might not have reacted very well to Jotaro turning her desk into woodchips in the process of trying to bash his head in. 

Close quarters was never going to work. Hierophant fumbled with the window latch, tentacles shaking nearly as badly as Kakyoin’s hands, and he was forced to kick Jotaro in the jaw twice in order to fend him off long enough to climb out of the office onto the building exterior. He looked around for a route up and caught sight of the clock tower.

The gold metal of the minute hand gleamed in the dull light as Hierophant wrapped around it and hauled him up towards the clock face. There was no question as to whether or not they could be seen from the market below, which meant a time limit had been imposed.

He was running out of options. His head hadn’t stopped spinning. Frustrated, he wiped blood from his eyes as Jotaro closed the distance, punching a series of handholds in the stone until it was pockmarked like a climbing wall. It took him longer than it should have; his injured hand could no longer grip things well enough to climb with. 

A liability. A liability he had willfully caused for himself, really, so there was no shame in exploiting it. There shouldn’t have been. Hit the hand then the head and it was done, it was over. But the howl of pain Jotaro let out when Kakyoin kicked his broken hand was familiar enough by now to put a pit in his stomach, and he hesitated, coiled to strike, for a fraction of a second too long. 

Jotaro’s face twisted in—anger? Disappointment?

The next thing he knew he was flying back through the clock face, surrounded by a blast of broken glass with the end of a crash ringing in his ears. Kakyoin hit the ground hard and rolled. The impact pushed glass shards deeper into his hands and they caught in his hair, left a sharp pain in his side that made standing difficult. If his vision hadn’t been swimming before, it was now.

He stumbled back until he hit the wall, breathing ragged. He glanced up at the interior of the bell tower, the scaffolding surrounding them. Jotaro approached and Kakyoin’s eyes wouldn’t quite focus but he could have sworn his expression fell into one of faint regret. His good hand curled back into a fist as Star Platinum reappeared at his side. 

Jotaro took another step forward and the fog broke behind him, framing his head with pale sunlight cascading through the dusty windows like a halo. Perfect. Kakyoin grinned up at him through a mouthful of blood.

“Got you,” he croaked. 

His web of green tentacles snapped tight around the wooden supports and pulled. Jotaro glanced down in surprise, too late to stop them from coming down, and the last thing Kakyoin saw before Hierophant yanked him out of the collapsing tower was a look of something like wonder coming across his face.

He crawled back into the hotel room through the window to avoid stares in the lobby and found, to his relief, that Shimomori wasn’t back yet. After showering and throwing out his bloodied clothes, he looked much less suspicious, though he did still have an impressive number of bruises and a dazzling headache. He had only been gone for an hour. It was another hour before the others returned and took in his battered appearance with equal parts confusion and concern.

“I fell down some stairs,” he told Avdol.

Avdol folded his arms. “That’s a lot of bruises.”

“It was a lot of stairs.”

“The hell did you do to your face?”

Kakyoin reached up to touch the scratches on his cheeks. Fingernail marks. Not deep, but they stung. 

“Did you do that to yourself? ” Shimomori demanded.

He shrugged. “Didn’t realize.”

If Avdol noticed that the marks matched those he had seen on Shimomori’s replica Jotaro back in Osaka, he kept quiet about it. He pursed his lips, and he looked away.

The destruction of the Poznań bell tower was fairly sensational as far as the reporting went. Kakyoin was gratified but unsurprised to hear that no bodies had been pulled from the wreckage. It would take more than that to take Jotaro out, but the recovery should slow him down for a few weeks. Maybe he would back off for long enough to let Kakyoin figure out whatever was making possessing him into a death trap. 

It would be stupid, he realized, to go back in there without understanding it, and it annoyed him, to concede the upper hand on what he saw as his home territory. But no one had ever forced him out like that, let alone twice in a row. He had never met a mind that could make him bleed. 

This one, it seemed, could fight back.

the flies rise and settle. I exit, dragged, a bale of lump flesh.

the gods are awarded the useless parts of my body.

He wasn’t certain why he felt so strongly that Avdol should not come into contact with Jotaro. It could have been the destabilization risk of reintroducing something or someone familiar to a mind that already seemed on an incredibly short leash; maybe he simply didn’t want to have to explain to Avdol why he had dropped a building on his friend. Kakyoin suspected that “I knew he could take it” wouldn’t be a satisfactory answer.

Memories were a dangerous weapon. Potent, but they required control, and Avdol wasn’t someone over whom he could exercise authority. Sometimes the right call was a cruel one.

Kakyoin let the icy water pour over his hand. It had been two days since he brought down the bell tower in Poznań, and the wounds left behind by Hierophant’s torn limbs were still raw. He crossed his legs and gazed at the statue of Neptune overlooking the fountain with eyes of unseeing bronze. The god of the ocean. Poseidon, he thought, was a better name. Rolled off the tongue better. Maybe the Greeks did get a few things right.

At his back, the sounds of a choir drifted through the open windows of St. Mary’s. Marienkirche , as the Berlin locals called it. Why they needed all the windows open in the middle of December, Kakyoin had no idea, and was equally mystified as to why Polnareff seemed so enamored with the place. It was just another boring Gothic monolith like every other European church they had seen over the past few weeks.

Catholics.

Still, Avdol didn’t want them going anywhere alone, particularly not in such a large city with so many opportunities for ambush. So they had been dragged to a church service by the resident Catholic, and Kakyoin lasted about twenty minutes before slipping back out to wait in the courtyard, ignoring Shimomori’s searing glare. They didn’t even speak German. Polnareff didn’t even speak German.

Someone sat down beside him, jostling him out of his thoughts. Someone who took up far too much space. Kakyoin took one look at him and groaned. 

“I dropped a building on you.”

Jotaro glanced at him with his eyebrows raised, as if to say I noticed .

“What’s it gonna take to make you quit ?”

“At least three stories,” he said hoarsely.

They blinked at each other. He hadn’t heard Jotaro speak since before the first attack in Osaka. Jotaro looked nearly as shocked as Kakyoin was to hear himself do it. Kakyoin snorted softly. 

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Kakyoin didn’t want to fight. He was tired of fighting, and he was particularly tired of fighting Jotaro. His side still hurt from being thrown through the clock face. Jotaro looked worse than Kakyoin felt, with his poorly bandaged hand and extensive bruising that he could only assume was from the tower collapse. It felt like being asked to kick a wounded dog.

He bolted, running for the open grass. 

Two days. He thought he’d have at least a week. 

“You’re a persistent little shit, you know that?” he shouted over his shoulder. Jotaro didn’t respond. Star Platinum came towards him. He slapped it away with a knot of tentacles. It kept coming. He kept pushing it back, a flurry of warning shots, nothing with enough force to do any real damage. 

Surprise flickered across Jotaro’s face. Then, anger. As Kakyoin backed away across the courtyard he almost started to look betrayed. Idiot . Did he want to get hurt? Want Kakyoin to throw another statue so he could break his other hand on it? 

He tore through the fountain, lashing water back into Jotaro’s eyes. Star Platinum landed a few hits on Hierophant’s body, wrenched one tentacle so hard it almost tore, but Kakyoin kept slithering away, kept pulling his punches.

Finally he whipped back and wrapped Hierophant’s tentacles around Jotaro’s wrists, slamming him against a skeletal oak tree. The branches swayed slightly with the impact, silhouetted against the pale gray sky like twitching veins.

 “You fucking maniac,” he snarled. “This isn’t—I don’t want to hurt you!”

For a second Jotaro looked taken aback again. He shuddered violently. When he raised his head his eyes had gone flat and bright and furious, and Kakyoin took a faltering step back, pushed not by fear, but by that hard-wired survival instinct that smelled the violence on his breath even with the distance between them, the instinct that looked at Jotaro and said run .

He barely had time to sense the mistake before Star Platinum was reaching around Jotaro to rip out the mass of tentacles binding him by the roots. Kakyoin hissed and staggered back as a wide slash opened from his collarbone to the bottom of his ribcage. Blood began staining through the light brown of his sweater. Had he failed to redirect the damage it might have been deep enough to be lethal, or at the very least, would have impaired him badly enough to make him an easy target. 

Point taken.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Kakyoin repeated in a low voice. Jotaro let out a frustrated growl and started towards him, but before he could get more than a few steps, the tree he had been pinned against was cracking against his head, having been yanked clean out of the ground by the remainder of Hierophant’s unraveled body. Kakyoin looked up with a contemptuous smile. 

“But I will if I have to.”

It would be a lie to say he didn’t have fun getting mean. If that was what Jotaro wanted, that was what he would get. There were more than enough trees around to make things interesting. The city of Berlin would surely make enough money off all those American tourists to finance replanting them by the time spring rolled around.

If they didn’t, well, that wasn’t his problem.

He started towards the tallest landmark he could see, the television tower stretching over three hundred and fifty meters high over the city. Kakyoin was the better climber, and if he wanted the advantage he had to make it about something other than raw strength. Jotaro seemed placated now that Hierophant was throwing trees, despite the way he staggered after being hit in the head a few times. Weird guy. Very, very weird guy.

Kakyoin was kind of starting to like him.

The Fernsehturm was an extremely smooth structure, which made it extremely difficult to scale. An attractive feature, in this case, given that Hierophant, once unraveled, could easily lock around the scattered handholds and allow Kakyoin to pull himself up the side like some sort of tentacled monster from a low-budget horror movie. He ignored the shouts of surprise and alarm from the ground. They couldn’t see Hierophant, of course. No one ever saw Hierophant. 

Except for the boy chasing him up the tower.

What the hell…?

He had expected Jotaro to have no choice but to follow from the tower’s indoor stairs, but in a horrible echo of his tactics on the clock tower, he was punching holes in the steel exterior with Star Platinum and using them to haul himself up. Kakyoin flinched, watching the ragged edges of the handholds rip into Jotaro’s injured hand. He didn’t seem to care. He didn’t even seem to notice.

“Are you fucking insane?” Kakyoin screamed down at him. Unsurprisingly, there was no answer. 

He remembered Jotaro punching the marble bust in Poznań, the hard look in his eyes like he meant it, like he was doing it on purpose. He had the same look now. 

You have to hurt . 

Like a predator caught in razor wire. Kakyoin looked away, nauseated, and kept climbing.

The observation deck was roughly two hundred meters up. Kakyoin shattered a glass panel with a blast of emeralds and swung through. He landed and found himself surrounded by a large group of well-dressed Germans. A black tie event, probably, from the look of it. They stared at him in shocked silence.

“Shit,” he groaned. A tall young woman behind the bar met his eyes, frozen with the rag in her hand halfway to a martini glass. She appeared to have recognized the curse.

“Tell them to get out,” Kakyoin said in Japanese. “Tell them they need to get out now.”

She continued to stare.

“ Please .”

“ Geh raus ,” she whispered. Coughed to clear her throat, then looked around wildly. “ Geh raus jetzt ! Jetzt !”

“Go,” Kakoin yelled, switching to English, which was usually a safer bet. “Get out, go!”

By some miracle, they listened. Maybe it was his bloodstained sweater or the feverish look in his eyes. Maybe it was the second and significantly larger teenager who crawled, snarling and bleeding, out of the hole in the glass. For a heartbeat they stood across from each other, both swaying and out of breath, before Kakyoin flung himself at Jotaro with a wordless roar.

They traded blows with the cold rage usually reserved for those who once meant something to each other, rather than strangers made enemies by little more than chance. Kakyoin smashed Jotaro’s head into the tile with a loud smack, he would have liked to tell himself it was harder than he meant to, but something writhing and venomous was rearing in his chest and he didn’t care. He didn’t care what the story was, didn’t care what the reason was, he just wanted to tear into something, anything, and Jotaro was there, Jotaro wanted blood, Jotaro could take it, so what was the point of holding back? Why had he ever tried?

Jotaro slammed him back against the bar in retaliation, spitting blood with an awful smile twisting his face. Kakyoin looked down at the mangled hand Jotaro somehow had still managed to grab a handful of his sweater with. In another life he might have hesitated.

He jerked forward and bit down on Jotaro’s broken hand as hard as he could.

The ragged scream that tore out of him hardly sounded human. He stumbled back onto the glass, clutching his hand.

“Fucking bastard ,” Jotaro hissed through clenched teeth. Kakyoin smirked. Finally, a rise.

But he was dizzy, nauseous for different reasons entirely. The blood loss from the first attack had finally become significant enough to pose a problem. He tried to take a step forward and his knee nearly gave out. 

Shit.

At point-blank range there was no question as to whether or not Jotaro could punch through a human body. Every crossed wire in Kakyoin’s brain screamed dodge but his legs wouldn’t answer. He could only stand frozen, a deer caught in the path of an oncoming train.

“ Geh zurück! ”

The bartender was still there. The bartender was getting between them. Could Jotaro punch through two bodies at once? Would he?

Kakyoin looked at his eyes, cold and hungry and empty, and he knew the answer. Hierophant reared back. Sorry , he told the woman silently. I can’t save you. I can’t even save me.

Jotaro grimaced.

 Star Platinum’s fist veered to the side, snapped back. It looked like it hurt. Not the effort it took to turn the blow aside, but the decision to do so.

Hierophant’s emeralds hit home. The explosion shattered the section of class under the spot where Jotaro would have been standing, had he landed the blow. Only it hadn’t landed, and it wasn’t Jotaro standing there.

She met Kakyoin’s eyes, her mouth open in a little “oh” of surprise. He lunged for her, legs finally answering far too late. She plummeted towards the ground, two hundred and three meters distant.

Jotaro crouched on the intact glass, face screwed up in pain. He had lost his balance deflecting the punch and he seemed to be having some sort of trouble getting back up. Kakyoin looked down at him. Hierophant’s tentacles twitched closer. He could just snap Jotaro’s neck here and be done with it. To hell with Avdol and his delusions about who could and couldn’t be saved. To hell with saving people.

“God damn it,” Kakyoin muttered. 

He turned his back on Jotaro and dove through the broken glass.

The woman was still in freefall, now nearly halfway to the ground. Kakyoin dropped towards her, unfurling Hierophant as he fell. There was wind resistance. There was a lot of wind resistance. He couldn’t push past it, not with the tentacles. They were too pliable, too snakelike.

Hierophant wasn’t strong enough to catch him at terminal velocity. The tentacles would just tear off. His stomach was back in his throat again. He hadn’t thought about the difference between six stories and sixty when he jumped. He hadn’t been thinking about much of anything at all, and the distance between himself and the falling bartender wasn’t closing nearly fast enough. She was going to hit the ground, and he was going to hit the ground, and what would they be worth painted across the concrete, what was any of it worth —

The ground drew closer. Cold air roared past his ears. He couldn’t see the woman. He was still falling. He couldn’t see the

… 

woman and it almost felt as though

… 

 the fall stuttered, as though he had been brought to a halt midair and dropped again. Hierophant shot out in every direction, locked around tree branches and a water fountain and a street sign. It caught him without tearing.

Kakyoin tumbled to the ground. His head snapped up. He saw none of the expected carnage. What he did see was a large boy with dark hair and a long black coat standing up slowly as the purple shape at his side set a young woman down gently on the sidewalk. She was shaking violently. She was alive.

She was alive .

They stared at each other as she ran for the street. Jotaro took a step towards him, stumbling slightly, but the look in his eyes said he was ready to spring again, and again, and again, until—until what? Until one of them was dead? Was that what he wanted?

Hierophant coiled back into itself and faded away. Kakyoin looked at Jotaro. Jotaro narrowed his eyes. Kakyoin shook his head. 

Jotaro got closer. He got closer again. He circled Kakyoin once, twice, strung tight like a wolf about to strike. Kakyoin folded his arms and set his jaw, watching him, but his body language made it clear that he no longer intended to retaliate.

“You,” Jotaro growled. “I will kill you.”

Kakyoin met his eyes evenly. “I know,” he said.

His frustration was clear, but it seemed, as Kakyoin had suspected, that Jotaro would not attack someone unless he knew they would fight back. After staring at him for another long moment Jotaro let out a snarl of frustration and took a step back, and then another, before turning on his heel and stalking off towards the city proper without another word.

Kakyoin watched him go, eyes on the retreating figure until it disappeared between a high-rise office building and a restaurant. He sighed and looked down at his bloody clothes. This time, he suspected, it would be more difficult to blame on stairs. 

for them this finish, 

this death of mine is a game:

The story was easier to tell than Kakyoin had expected. Shimomori was torn between being furious with Kakyoin for leaving her alone for an hour of Catholic mass and nursing her growing vendetta, though she calmed down a little when he assured her that Jotaro wasn’t in much better shape. When Kakyoin explained the lengths Jotaro had gone to in order to avoid casualties, Avdol nodded, looking pained. 

“That does sound like him,” he sighed.

They reached Belgium a week later. There was no sign of Jotaro, or any other attackers for that matter, save for a strange woman called Nena who changed appearances at least three times over the course of their encounter with her, such that Kakyoin was completely uncertain as to which was the real one. Even inside her own head she was mercurial. It didn’t slow him down. He tore her gold out just like all the rest.

Most of the rest. All but one.

“You know he’ll never leave you alone now,” Avdol murmured. “Dio, I mean.”

His lip curled in disdain as he thought of the soft, sharp laughter. If Dio wouldn’t do any of his dirty work himself then he was a coward. Kakyoin had no patience for cowards.

“Good,” he said.

not the fact or act but the grace with which they disguise it

justifies them.

Of course, being the high-profile target of a functional cult leader was much more difficult to shrug off in practice.

Kakyoin didn’t know whether to be flattered or incensed that he had become important rapidly enough to warrant an assassination attempt so soon, though it certainly seemed to him that four Stand users for one student had to be overkill. Maybe it was a coincidence, and all of them had just happened to be in Ygres in the right place at the right time. Or the wrong one, depending on where you were standing.

There was something disconcerting about fighting for his life on a war memorial, but whatever poetic significance the situation might have had, he did not have the time to process it. 

Kakyoin rolled away just in time to miss a brass-knuckled punch that pulverized whatever name had been carved into the stone panel his head had been blocking. He almost felt bad about it. The Menin Gate was a memorial for soldiers whose bodies had never been found. This was the only grave they had.

Oh, well. Three more panels cracked under the emerald onslaught he sent flying back towards a leather-wearing Stand user. Hopefully the city kept an extra record of the names.

“Oh, come on !” He kicked at another Stand, a meter-long larva with its mandibles hooked firmly around his ankle. “A worm? A fucking worm ?”

The stocky American who had manifested it shrugged, as if to say Don’t look at me .

He slashed a tangle of tentacles towards the two of them only to have his momentum reversed by some unseen force, sending him toppling back against the wall. A static shock ran up his leg where the wormlike Stand had bit him and he looked down, expecting to see the wound changing in some nauseating way, only to find he had brushed back against a metal outlet set into the wall. Electric wiring in a war monument really did seem out of place. 

Europeans.

Cursing under his breath, Kakyoin tried to back away again.

“ Skid Row! ” the user in leather shouted.

Again his momentum reversed and he found himself moving back towards a petite woman who leaned against a pillar by the entrance, watching him smugly. Dizzy from the sudden changes in direction, he glared down at her, trying not to sway on his feet.

“Sorry, honey,” she crooned. “You never had a chance.”

She smiled and tossed a handful of nails into the air, and before Kakyoin had time to realize she hadn’t aimed at all, they were flying towards him as though he were a—

Oh, you’ve got to be kidding.

“Worms and magnets,” he growled, yanking a nail out of his forearm with his teeth. “Really scraping the bottom of the barrel here, aren’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

The sound of Japanese startled him, despite the heavy British accent. He turned to stare at the fourth attacker, a middle-aged woman who looked completely unremarkable compared to the other three. She had closed in without him noticing.

The British woman grinned. “Any spare teeth?”

“Any what— ”

“Mm. No, you wouldn’t. Won’t pose a problem, though. Scheherezade !”

The ocean was on fire.

The ocean…?

Flames licked across the water’s glassy surface as though lapping up an oil slick. Kakyoin could feel the freezing water soaking his clothes. His fingertips were going numb. No land in any direction, only flat black sea and endless fire. His hair and skin, all of it should have been too wet to catch, he should have had time to think, but he was burning, he was burning and Hierophant wouldn’t come, he called it but it wouldn’t come—he tried to dunk his head in the ocean to snuff it out, but quickly he learned how it felt to burn underwater, he could see his skin blistering, and it was impossible, it was impossible—

“ You —?”

Back between the Menin’s pillars, Kakyoin found himself on his knees. Aside from bruises that suggested he had hit the stone hard, he was uninjured. Hallucination , he thought wildly, scrambling to his feet.

“What gives ?”

The Brit clutched the side of her head, glaring accusatorially at a large, familiar figure standing between her and Kakyoin. His stomach dropped.

“Oh, of all the—” He groaned. “Look, if you want a shot at me, you’re gonna have to get in line—”

Jotaro’s eyes focused on something over Kakyoin’s shoulder. “Duck,” he said.

“What—”

He ducked and a purple fist smashed the pillar behind him, bringing chunks of stone and marble collapsing down on the Stand user who had once again been on the point of punching Kakyoin’s skull in with their brass knuckles. Silently Jotaro backed away, towards the center of the arch. 

“What the fuck ,” Kakyoin hissed, “are you do— ”

“You want to live?”

His voice still had that hoarseness to it, as though he hadn’t spoken since the last time they met, but he met Kakyoin’s eyes with a steadiness that was almost serene despite the dark circles beneath his own. Star Platinum coiled back behind him like a snake. 

“I—” Kakyoin blinked up at him. “Well…yeah.”

Jotaro nodded. They stood back to back, facing opposite ends of the arch; Jotaro watching the Brit and the American, Kakyoin the petite woman and the user in leather. He kept waiting for Jotaro to turn on him, to take advantage of his position, but he didn’t look back, didn’t even take his hands out of his pockets.

Well, maybe it didn’t have to make sense.

“Try to keep up,” he murmured.

Jotaro made a soft noise not unlike a laugh, and he barely had time to be taken aback before they had hurled themselves away from each other in a whirl of slashing tentacles and rushing fists.

And it fit. It worked. It should have been impossible, or at least a shock, to get it right the first time, but they found it came as no surprise at all, because it wasn’t the first time, not really; they had been learning each other for weeks, and only now did they have the opportunity to use it to their mutual advantage.  They came together like a double-faced hurricane, immovable object at the side of unstoppable force, Kakyoin punctuating Jotaro’s explosive strength with his own lashing speed as though he had always known how. When they slipped, and they did slip, they caught each other, they compensated, and they never, ever made the same mistake twice. 

Jotaro seemed to be able to read Kakyoin’s intentions before Kakyoin himself even knew which direction he was about to feint in. He became a moving trap, flaying and tripping and thrashing, and behind each snare Jotaro waited with gleaming eyes and blood on his teeth. The first time Hierophant whacked debris away to keep it from hitting him he glanced up in mild surprise, but soon Jotaro was throwing himself into hazards that would have been deadly had they landed, trusting that Kakyoin would make sure they didn’t. 

He found himself smiling after only a few minutes of it, looked over at Jotaro to see that he was—not smiling, exactly, but sharpened, resaturated.  Being alone, Kakyoin thought, was one thing, but being seen had a blast radius .

Finally, finally , it was making sense.

He was almost sad to see it end so soon, but it was hardly a fair fight. Maybe if there had been eight instead of four, or twenty, or fifty. Maybe if there had been a battalion to tear through together it would finally be enough to take the edge off their hunger. But there wasn’t; it was only Jotaro, and Kakyoin, and the four very unfortunate Stand users who served as target practice for the next eight minutes. 

When Jotaro’s eyes unfocused in the way that he quickly recognized as the marker for Scheherezade’s hallucinations, Kakyoin descended on the British woman in control of it with a howl and quickly she was no longer in a position to be skewing anyone’s perception of reality. The other three went rapidly after that; it ended when Hierophant tore the stone lion from the roof and tossed it to Star Platinum, who smashed it into a pillar with so much force that the arch entrance collapsed on one side. It was everything Kakyoin could do to catch the plummeting chunks of marble with Hierophant in time to keep their fallen opponents from being brained.

“Could you—come on, don’t kill them!”

Jotaro lowered his fist. “Why?”

“Aren’t you on the same—you know what,” he muttered, “It doesn’t—whatever. Just don’t kill them, okay?”

Kakyoin looked around at the wreckage with a twinge of guilt. It had been a national monument. Worth it, though, he thought. 

“You switching sides now?” He tilted to look Jotaro in the eyes. “I thought you were all wrapped up in his shit. Dio’s, I mean. Aren’t you?”

Jotaro didn’t respond, cocking his head slightly when Kakyoin said Dio’s name, as though he wanted to argue some point that hadn’t quite been made yet.

“Why do you do it like that, anyway?” Kakyoin rubbed at the blood on his forehead. There was the only part of Jotaro’s strategy he had never understood; he wouldn’t hit anyone without meeting their eyes, stubborn to the point of putting himself at risks that Kakyoin had needed to mitigate in order to do so. “You make sure they can see you before you go for them.”

“It’s not fair otherwise.”

Kakyoin blinked. He hadn’t expected an answer. “But you’re trying to kill them.”

“They should still have the chance to fight for it,” Jotaro told him. He was looking at the collapsed figure of the British woman without much interest. 

“Death is death.” Kakyoin folded his arms. “Doesn’t make a difference how fair it is.”

Jotaro looked at him evenly. “You survived, didn’t you?”

“I—”

“And we’re even now.”

Kakyoin narrowed his eyes. “Explain.”

“Could’ve killed me on the wheel.”

“You were unconscious, it wouldn’t have been—”

Jotaro raised his eyebrows.

“…fair,” he finished slowly.

Up close his total stillness was all the more unnerving. He hardly seemed to breathe, and for a moment Kakyoin half expected Jotaro to lunge again, now that the other threats had been eliminated and they had each other alone. For a moment he almost seemed like he wanted to. One of the scars on his cheek had been scratched open during the fight, and he wiped absently at the beads of blood, twitching as if trying to shake off a fly.

Kakyoin tried to reconcile the boy Avdol described with the screaming thing he knew from experience with the flat expression before him. None of them matched up the way they should have. He wondered what form the gold in Jotaro’s head had taken, how deep its claws sank, which parts of him would have to be ripped open in order to tear it out.

It felt pointless, but still he had to try. 

“Look, I—reason I don’t want you to kill them is I can help them, right? Look at them. I already got someone’s—I know I can do it because I’ve done it before.”

The brief flash of disbelief took Kakyoin off guard.

“Did he—he didn’t even tell you, did he? He didn’t—you don’t even know why he wants me dead so bad.”

Jotaro’s mouth opened silently, like he was choking on whatever it was he wanted to say. Sirens wailed, growing louder, closer. They were running out of time. 

“I can beat him,” Kakyoin told him. “Polnareff, you remember him? Silver hair? He’s with us now. I got it out of him. Others, too. I got Dio out. I can get Dio out.”

He didn’t move, didn’t give any sign that he heard or understood or wanted to, though he seemed to be holding his breath in earnest this time.

“I’m gonna free them, you understand what I’m saying?”

Kakyoin took a careful step forward, closing the distance between them. Jotaro remained frozen, staring at his feet.

“I can help you,” Kakyoin said softly.

Jotaro’s eyes flicked up to his face. For an instant they were wide and almost alarmed, like a startled cat.

“If you fuck with my head again,” he rasped, “I’ll rip your fucking arms off.”

The animal instinct curled deep in Kakyoin’s chest read the look on his face and knew that he meant every word of it. He watched silently as Jotaro turned and began to climb back over the rubble, dislodging the decapitated head of the destroyed stone lion. There was a way to stop him, he thought, watching it roll towards his feet. There had to be a way to save him, but if he tried now, he knew that there was no way for both of them to survive it. The lion would tear out his liberator’s heart. He would snap his own neck on the chains before he let them be unwound.

“ Jotaro —!”

Avdol’s voice. He was running towards the broken arch, just in time and far too late. Kakyoin gazed at a cracked panel on which a partial inscription was still legible.

to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death

At the sound of his name Jotaro squinted in annoyance, as though he had a headache. He shook his head slightly to shake off whatever ran through it.

they shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away.