Archive of Our Own ^beta

“I think I swallowed a bug.” Kakyoin said.

Under the tree he had smacked into, Jotaro lay flat on his back, staring at the sun casting emeralds through the leaves. “What?”

“I think I swallowed a bug.” He said.

Jotaro grunted, then decided not to do that again until his ribs felt better. Not just his ribs, everywhere else too. He had a dull ache thrumming throughout every bit of his body to the beat of his heart.

Leaning over him, Kakyoin’s head illuminated in a crown of pale yellows and greens. The white of his eyes were showing, his lips pressed together and thinned out sideways. He looked like a horrified golden frog.

“That s’lot of knives.” He said, barely opening his mouth.

“If you’re gonna yack, don’t do it on me.”

“Mm.” He had gone pale. A sheen of sweat glistened over his top lip.

Jotaro rolled onto his side, feeling something dislodge; he wasn’t sure exactly what had dislodged, but it felt squishy and balloon-like. Maybe an organ. He coughed. The taste of blood overpowered the smell of bile as Kakyoin scrambled to hurl in a nearby bush.

Weary, clutching at a low hanging branch, he emerged to Jotaro sitting upright. Shoulders hunched like a big dog; his figure suggested the darkened silhouette of a great stone spire frozen in the action of collapsing under a hurricane. His eyes were bright and peering iridescent from under his eyebrows.

“Where are we?” He said, but it sounded more like, ‘where is that throat I'm supposed to be tearing out right now’?

Right. Dio. The fight— the blood. Kakyoin’s broken legs, the cold water trailing icy fingers down his back. He placed a hand on his stomach and was met with a trembling breath. He could breathe. There was no water stinging his eyes— no hissing of metal conforming to meet his weight.

And Jotaro, what about him? The sun shone high in the afternoon– not what they had come from. Maybe they were both simultaneously punched so hard they flew over to some far off country, where the time zone was different then in Egypt?

Curled under its sights was the white-hot sharpness of polished steel, speckled with his blood. A line of ruby red oozed out his nose, and Jotaro exhaled sharply to rid it to his lips.

He looked over, stunningly encrusted in gold and green and red. Kakyoin felt a tugging in his stomach, like he was going to throw up again, when he realized he wasn’t wearing his hat. A strand of velvety hair curled over his ear and soaked up the sweat gliding down his neck.

He swallowed.

Jotaro looked like he expected something from him. But for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Looks like a forest.” He pressed. “A national park, maybe?”

“No, the ground is too scattered. There’s no trail either, and with a display like this,” He said faintly, gesturing to the leaves above. “It would be considered more of an attraction, so- uh- trail.”

His head felt fuzzy. Maybe it was the glinting knives. “Before that,” He swallowed again. It felt ragged and glass-like. He cleared his throat. “The knives. Before we go anywhere or try to investigate anything, we both can’t look like hit-and-run victims.”

Jotaro began to say his familiar catchphrase, but he didn’t get past the first ‘yare’ until he tried to pull down the rim of hat.

Looking around, he balled up his fists, as if getting ready to fight an invisible thief. He sat stiffly for a moment. Kakyoin’s approach made him twitch. As he accepted his hand up– which was really a polite gesture if anything because if Jotaro were to actually use him as a support they’d both topple over– he looked down at his palms, lost.

Kakyoin asked him if he was okay. He said his mom sewed his name into the inside sem, when he first started wearing it. He didn’t know what to say; a heavy weight rested in his chest. He patted Jotaro gingerly on the less bloody and bruised bicep.

It must have worked, or Jotaro saw something in his face, because he huffed and turned away. Kakyoin couldn’t see past his shoulder; they raised in the same way they did when he was smirking to himself.

It was a particularly gory next hour or so. Kakyoin realized the only way Jotaro wasn’t going to look like a Halloween special was if those knives were out of the picture. Unfortunately, this also meant twenty minutes of Jotaro being able to muscle out most of them, until his fingers trembled and pushed one of the blades deeper on accident.

“Can’t you- hrrk-” Kakyoin exhaled hard into his palm. “Can’t you call star platinum out or something, Jotaro?”

Jotaro shook his head.

“Can’t you?” Kakyoin was looking away even though he knew all too well the thing making him gag in the first place was the squishy sounds, not the actual blood. In the fight with Dio, he could keep Hierophant Green discreetly in his ears for the most part, and he wasn’t even really conscious for most of his ‘punched through moment’ so it’s not like he could’ve gagged at his own squishy sounds. Which, now that he was thinking about it, should be considerably more upsetting to bring up. It was probably the shock.

Jotaro looked like he was going to say something nasty when he turned back around. Like ‘fuck off’ or ‘fuck you, we’re not even friends’. Which, if Kakyoin was honest with himself, would’ve punched him through the gut all over again.

But he didn’t. He looked up, then looked back down again.

“It-” He grunted, then immediately regretted it. “It doesn’t feel like star platinum, anymore.”

Kakyoin left it at that. Not because he didn’t want to know, or because it wasn’t eating him up inside to ask what the ever loving fuck Jotaro meant by that, but because Jotaro had a sort of look to him like Kakyoin had a net and he was a stray pushed up against an alleyway wall.

Kakyoin had seen that look before, with the fight against The Lovers. If Kakyoin was being transparent here, he had to admit that was the first time he’d seen Jotaro look scared— look affected— by a stand power.

He didn’t want him to feel that way around him, so he dropped it.

Not to say he didn’t regret it, as he pulled another knife out of Jotaro’s back.

“How many times did he get you?” Kakyoin said somewhat unbelievably. This was a bit excessive, wasn’t it?

So was stopping time to play whack-a-mole with his intestines.

Jotaro said something, but he couldn’t hear it. He’d only agreed to do this because Jotaro in turn agreed to put his hands over his ears like a make-shift headset.

But now Kakyoin was more focused on the warm, tan hands resting over the sides of his head.

It was ridiculous. Either be jacked or have soft hands, you couldn’t have both. That was cheating. How did he even have soft hands in the first place? Kakyoin watched him punch through the ground after being set on fire. Did he moisturize? That was even more ridiculous than having both. The mental image, that is. He heard about athletes getting really gnarly blisters and using the lotion farmers put on cow udders. Did Jotaro use cow udder lotion?

He must’ve laughed a little, because Jotaro’s fingers squeezed around his head harder than necessary, cementing the fact his hands were really that soft. Kakyoin felt like he was being held at gunpoint with a pillow.

When the final knife was dislodged, and Jotaro took his hands and his warmth back down to his pockets, Kakyoin set his jaw at what he was going to have to do next.

“Jotaro.” He said gravely.

Jotaro pulled on his jacket, straightening his collar. He peered over the golden chain highlighted in an excessive amount of blood splatter.

“Hm.” He said.

“You need to ditch the coat.”

“What the fuck did you just say?”

Okay, rephrase. “It has a lot of germs.”

Jotaro clutched his coat to his chest, looking like a woman in a loose fitting bathrobe trying to hide her tits.

Kakyoin almost bit through his tongue. He cleared his throat. “Do you think that’s all your blood?”

Jotaro lowered his head and glared through his eyebrows.

“Think about it, Jotaro. The amount of blood and diseases-” Jotaro widened his stance and lowered his center of gravity. Kakyoin talked faster. “Vampire diseases– Imagine the skin cells on that thing! Undead skin cells.”

He was cracking. A wrinkle of disgust shone like a beacon of hope over his top lip. He cast a despairing look down at his sleeve cuffs.

“And, if you really think about it, how many people have died just from touching someone else’s blood? Nevermind an insane, homo-ambiguous vampire. Those blood cells have had two hundred years to curdle and now they’re reproducing in your jacket sleeve, Jotaro.”

The words ‘reproducing’ and ‘homo-ambiguous’ seemed to be the kicker for Jotaro, as he took off his jacket, and hanging limp in his hands he stared down at it like it was his dead childhood. He was curling in on himself a little bit.

Kakyoin had a similar experience when his dad made him throw out all his stuffed animals the moment he turned seven.

It was jarring to see the same crestfallen expression on the human equivalent of an orc. Jotaro was huge, but he looked small now.

“You could,” Kakyoin hesitated. “We could bury it?”

“No point.” He said.

He didn’t look like he was going to put it down, so Kakyoin gently edged closer.

He flicked the chain. “Take a ring off the end.”

Jotaro narrowed his eyes. “Why.”

“Well,” He kept his little plush cat’s tail. Hierophant cut it for him. He’d kept it in a shoe box with his Pokémon cards. “Then you still have a piece of it. For sentimental sake.”

It took them a moment. As Jotaro wouldn’t really be Jotaro if he didn’t somehow kick up a fuss in the most neutral way possible. Kakyoin found it hard to argue with him because he wasn’t arguing. He was just staring at him so sharply the sun was barely visible on his face from the glimmering teal disco-balls in his skull.

He couldn’t have a perfect face and beautiful eyes. You can’t have both, it wasn’t fair.

Jotaro was saying something about his missing hat. Kakyoin pinched his forearm.

That too. He shouldn’t be thinking about Jotaro's perfect face and soft hands. He should be thinking about how he had died— almost died. It was an odd sensation; he could recall his death, but it was more akin to watching a character die in a movie. Yes, there is some surface level sympathy and grimacing for the way they got pummeled however they did. But it wasn’t traumatizing. This should be traumatizing. Why wasn’t Kakyoin traumatized?

And Hierophant Green. It wasn’t answering him. It was there— he wouldn’t be functioning if it wasn’t there, he would’ve just startled like a rabbit and died if he reached out to some extension of himself and was met with the bloody stump of whatever was once there. Judging by the fact Kakyoin was still standing, it was still there. But it was hiding? But it was curled up, somewhere? Underneath his skin? How could he explain his soul's behavior, even to himself? When his soul wasn’t acting right?

It was jarring. Like looking into a mirror for the first time after never being exposed to a reflective surface in your life.

He washed Jotaro’s tank top in the lake. It was nearby, and Kakyoin looked down the entire time, focusing on the stains and the wispy red ribbons waving underwater. Not the clap of Jotaro’s double Ds in the soft summer breeze.

They had to be big. They had to be so fucking huge. But that didn’t matter because Jotaro wasn’t a girl. That didn’t matter because Kakyoin liked girls. It didn’t matter if Jotaro had fat honkers because he was a man and Kakyoin liked girls. Loved him some women. Woo-mama women were great.

“Oi.” Jotaro probably crossed his arms because Kakyoin felt the shift in the tectonic plates.

“Give me a minute.” He said through his teeth.

He, too, took off his coat. It was a vibrant green and had suited him somewhat before when he’d been going crazy under the temporary reign of some homo-ambiguous vampire. But now the cherry earrings were even pushing it.

Thankfully, his pants didn’t look nearly as hello, green with the contrast of a white undershirt.

Jotaro would look a little less crazy, at least. In the time it took to convince him, the blood had seeped into the darkest crevices of Jotaro’s shirt. He’d just look a bit suspicious, is all.

Jotaro was. . . Oddly fine. Kakyoin thought maybe, like him, he was experiencing his physical pain through a weird ‘watching a movie’ way too. Which, if Kakyoin thought about all the Ripleys Believe It Or Not magazines he had read when first learning English, was not ideal. Typically, someone who can’t feel pain doesn’t just not get injuries— they keep using said injured body part until it inevitably decides to break off or something equally as terrible.

Kakyoin too. He had been drenched when his bottom half had been pulverized against the water tower. He didn’t even need to drip-dry. He was. . . Oddly fine. It was almost as if his body had stopped in its own time, like it hadn’t been punched through yet. He had the memory, but no physical qualities. When he recalled it, he didn’t feel the phantom pain in his body, but he knew what it would feel like if it were to happen again.

He handed back the shirt. Jotaro put it on.

“We shhh-” White wet shirt. White wet shirt. White wet shirt. Of course he was chiseled. Of course he was ripped. He had soft hands and a perfect face and a perfect body. Of course he did. “Shhhould get going to find some gauze.”

He didn’t see anything really, but the little bit of skin he did see made him feel like a Victorian gentleman seeing a woman shake her ankles at him. Ridiculous. He liked girls. “There should be a gas station somewhere?”

Jotaro looked around, arms crossed. “A gas station.” He grunted. Huh. He seemed to be able to do that now. Maybe he was healing quicker? That didn’t make sense. But what did? At least this was a positive ‘doesn’t make sense’.

“Yes. I mean, there should be one somewhere.”

There was. Eventually. But it took Jotaro and Kakyoin forty minutes this way and twenty minutes that way and then an hour collectively of walking breaks where Jotaro would stubbornly stare up at every tree that happened to have something dark-looking in its branches.

“My hat.” He would say, and Kakyoin felt too guilty about his coat to really deny him the comfort— however useless it was.

When plastic paneling the color of dirty milk graced Kakyoin’s eyes, he left Jotaro in the bushes where he was squinting stone-faced up at yet another hat-candidate.

It was a gas station conjoined with a diner. A man had propped his motorcycle up against the parking sign; he smoked contently off a thick brown cigar. It smelt of success for Kakyoin. Finally, some food. He had begun to feel less squeamish and more hunger-sick about half an hour ago.

The parking lot was dotted with various cars. But the motorcycle man was the only one outside. The smell of greasy fried something made its way out the screen door, and the sound of children and chatter made Kakyoin miss something. Maybe family? He missed that often, so it wasn’t a new revelation. It still hit him a little harder, now that he was lost. But he had Jotaro. He didn’t need his family— family wasn’t the right word anyway, and if it wasn’t the right word, then what were they to him?

He caught the biker’s attention the moment he stumbled half-blind in excitement out the bushes.

“Hello,” Kakyoin pointed to the gas station. “Do you know if they sell bandages?”

Then he said it again, because the biker looked the other way as if he wasn’t there. He was smoking less contently now. There was a flexing in his free hand, as if he was trying not to curl it into a fist.

He was wearing a bandana over his head. Kakyoin realized it was the USA flag.

“Are we in America?” He said, not meaning to out loud, blown away. America? How did they make it from Egypt to America out of all places?

Not only that, how the hell did Kakyoin out of all people make it to America from Egypt? Suddenly, he was somewhat thankful of his mother’s obsessive English teachings.

“Yeah.” Gravelly, roughly grated with a harshness likely from the cigars. His voice was older than his face. “Make sure you speak like it too.” And then he said something nasty. Something punctuated at the end with a wad of phlegm spat behind him against the dirty milk walls. “Don’t want any more of those here.”

Kakyoin realized then that the nasty thing he had said was a slur. He felt angry, sure, but the rustling of bushes far off behind him where he had emerged reminded him that Jotaro being angry wouldn’t be ideal right then.

He gave him a sour look. In middle school onwards, he was careful to look affected when someone bullied him. Because there was nothing they could do to him, so there was no reason to be scared, but the weak wanted to be powerful more than anyone. When they feel their power slipping, they get nasty, they get violent, and then Kakyoin has to hurt them.

But he had just died— almost died. Jotaro too. He could give less of a shit. He wasn’t in middle school anymore. He had someone to stay alive for, even if he couldn’t admit who it was to himself. A sour look will, what? Make a grown man piss himself? Ridiculous.

Weirdly enough, it appeared so. As he had already flicked his still half-smoked cigar out onto the parking lot. Embers of orange sparked fat onto the hot pavement, and he was on his feet.

Kakyoin felt his face was showing all he had to say. His shoulders were straightened back, his neck lowered. He looked that biker dead on.

Then Jotaro was out the bushes, walking quickly, head forwards like a battering ram, curled over into a mass of muscles and steel bones.

That was something about Jotaro. He was able to scare someone by being smaller, by curling tightly into himself; a coiled spring, ready to take off your nose if you bring your face too close.

「見たくない。」’Couldn’t see.’ He said, brushing past Kakyoin and knocking the biker in the head with one giant shoulder. If anything, Kakyoin felt sympathy for him, if just for knowing what it was like to also only be able to reach Jotaro’s shoulder.

He turned around, impatience in his hands. They twitched as if he were trying not to make them into fists. Huh. Maybe he was more American than Kakyoin thought. 「行ってますか？」’Are you coming?’ He didn’t spare the biker a glance. He didn’t have to, the man was in disbelief.

Jotaro was a sight to behold. He also had suspicious copper stains all over him. The dried blood over his lips had been licked away at some point, but there was a line of dried flakes peppering under his nose. Purple and blue blossomed under his skin over his biceps, the back of his hands. His knuckles scabbed crudely over swollen risen skin. Under one eye was the beginning of more blue and purple; Kakyoin had been so focused on not looking at him that when he did, fully, he realized how fucked up he really looked.

「いや。」He hesitated, looking back at the biker. Kakyoin caught his eyes this time. “Does that gas station sell bandages?” He asked.

Jotaro looming over him, his teal eyes burning stormy and iridescent, seemed to convince him.

“Yeah.” He said, curtly.

They were eating burgers. Kakyoin was eating burgers with Jotaro. Who, from Kakyoin’s side-eye, looked like an angry cat as he threw open his jaws to finish his second.

Lifting up napkins with his mouth still full, he picked up the bag and rummaged through it. Kakyoin tapped his forearm. When he looked down, he held up his half.
That too. Held up. For reasons Kakyoin couldn’t understand or even begin to process, Jotaro was pinning his shoulders up against his side with one meaty arm as he gripped Kakyoin’s jacket so hard a vein was popping out the back of his hand.

Kakyoin, feeling like this might be mostly the knife trauma’s doing, awkwardly propped up his legs on the booth’s hard plastic seat until his ankles hung off the side. Whatever Jotaro was going though, he didn’t mind it enough to try and wretch himself out the steely grasp of a man who was leaning over him to shove the last of his burger into his mouth with both hands.

There were several families in the booths around them. At one point, a rather red-faced mother, bouncing an equally so toddler on her knee, glared over the back of some sleek black camcorder. In response, Jotaro’s shoulders hunched, his head lowered, and he opened his mouth slightly. The skin between his eyebrows and above his nose scrunched up until it shone yellow on his tan face. His lips strained. His pupils contracted. It was there Kakyoin realized he was being serious about this random woman and her kid.

He took a French fry and tossed it in his face.
「やめろ」He said. ‘Stop’. Because whatever concussion infused rage Dio must’ve caused hadn’t lessened in the slightest, and a shimmer of something quick-silver shook behind Jotaro’s massive neck. Star Platinum wasn’t silver. Jotaro didn’t have his emotions broadcasted on his face. Something had happened.

「彼女は何ですか？ねこだよ？」

Kakyoin gave him a more noticeable side-eye, then. When he wasn’t so stuck in the crook of his arm Jotaro couldn’t see it. ‘What is she? A cat?’

“No.” He said, pinching off bits of his burger bun and rolling them around in between his fingers, thinking about how little table manners mattered right now. It bothered him though. It felt like something was different about him, like Jotaro.

Something fundamentally internal; like his DNA was altered. “Cat’s don’t stare at something that will eat them. It’s an instinct thing.”

Jotaro paused stuffing his face, which he had been doing with daggers in his eyes and a certain tension in his forehead.

He softened then. Not in any way glaringly noticeable, but the angry haze settled more under the surface of his skin; bits of mushy bread dyed red and yellow from the ketchup and mustard caught in the corners of his mouth.

He looked lovely, but Kakyoin didn’t know why. There was a heavy weight in his chest. It felt like grief.

He had an impulse. Carefully, Kakyoin picked up a napkin, unraveled it, and tossed it over Jotaro’s head. He ducked a little, squinting as it fluttered down onto his hair and over his head.

Kakyoin laughed, snorting into his hand. He looked ridiculous, like a Russian grandma.

With that fresh image in his head, he cleared his throat, but the warmth in his heart heated his cheeks instead, the more he tried to hold it in, the redder he seemed to get. It set his ribs on fire. When he looked back up, an apology on the tip of his tongue, Jotaro had lifted the napkin out of his eyes.

There must have been something there, something he didn’t want Kakyoin to see, because suddenly he was in the crook of Jotaro’s elbow and he was shoving his face with his second burger.

The woman and wailing toddler and oddly thin camcorder had left now, and a group of teenagers huddled around an equally thin table-top screen.

Occasionally, they’d shoot glances back at him and Jotaro. Except that table-top electronic was . . . Odd. It was too thin to be, well, really anything. And when he had left his fated trip to Egypt, the Game Boy had just recently been popping up among groups of friends huddled excitedly in hallway corridors. They couldn’t have made it that flat and that wide already.

「何ですか?」He said, pinching Jotaro’s forearm. He didn’t feel it.

Kakyoin flicked a piece of gauze on his elbow.

Jotaro choked a little. Lifting up his fist over Kakyoin as if he intended to hammer down on his head like a jury’s gavel, Kakyoin said again, 「何ですか？あれは?」’What is it? That over there?’

Swallowing, Jotaro leaned over the table, taking Kakyoin with him.

Kakyoin flailed around for a minute, trying to get his balance. Who knew what biohazard these floors were, if American television was any indicator.

That too– Kakyoin could barely believe he was in America. Let alone in America with Jotaro.

One of the girls with a strong, square jaw wearing a faux leather jacket with black commando boots. turned around just in time to catch a glimpse of Jotaro squinting intently at them.

More importantly, she caught a glimpse of Kakyoin’s red hair as he struggled for air under the table.

“Uh, hi.” She said, going pink in the face. It dusted her upper cheeks nicely, accenting her heavy set eyebrows.

Which is what Kakyoin would’ve thought pleasantly to himself if he wasn’t also going pink in the face for a completely different reason.

He slammed his fist on the table, rattling the napkin holder and shaking empty ketchup packets onto the floor. Jotaro startled and unlocked Kakyoin’s head from his arm.

It didn’t matter what the explanation was, whether from the underwater battles training his tolerance to ‘not breathing for a while’ or the fact he didn’t have the luxury to ‘take a breather’ throughout any of the stand battles he had participated in before– his quick recovery was spent taking off one of his scuffed brown loafers and hitting Jotaro upside the head so hard with it his teeth chattered.

“Oi?” He snapped, but it sounded more like a question. Probably because he never had anyone hit him with a shoe before, let alone Kakyoin.

“Watch how you’re handling people, meat truck!” If Jotaro thought the insult was uncharacteristic, Kakyoin was even more shocked with himself; he said it like an unfamiliar katakana phrase: 「ミトトラック」’Mito torakku.’ His mother had nearly taken off his head every time he had messed up his Rs and Ls in English class as a kid, so for the habit to suddenly resurface– it left a sour taste in his mouth.

He never got angry like this. He thought he pushed down that blood-boiling icy-ness which cooked him alive and gave him frostbite at the same time.

He thought he had accepted the isolation.

He thought the parent teacher conferences were over.

He thought the whispering was over.

Something had changed.

“Mito torakku?” Jotaro said. Shell shocked. He wasn’t even glaring; the lines indented in his forehead jumped back like memory foam to smooth down his face.

He looked. . . Nice like that. Younger. More like actually his age, besides the hulking mass of muscles.

Kakyoin didn’t say that though, he said “You need a better skin care routine.” Then, under his breath. “And cologne.”

Jotaro looked down at his forearms. Lips stuck out, eyebrows furrowed, like a big dog.

“It’s the cigarettes. You don’t stink.” Kakyoin felt a twinge of guilt until the girl with the leather jacket laughed, and there was more than one voice joining in.

Immediately his hackles raised.

He wasn’t in some shitty fast food restaurant anymore, he was in the school yard. He was surrounded by jesters— he was the joke. He was at home and he was at the feet of his father, bowing with a broken vase on the counter.

「ごめんなさい、音さん。みどりさんは-」He was curled into himself.
‘I’m sorry. Mister Green-’

「みどりさん？誰ですか？馬鹿だはじゃないです！」His father raised his hackles, that’s where he learned it from.

‘Mister Green? Who’s that? I’m not an idiot!’

Who else did he have? No one.

He was in the school yard, he was curled up on the floor.

He wasn’t getting up.

He was surrounded by jesters— he was the joke.

He was the lair.

He was Mister Green.

Destruction was his nature.

He had to get to his feet—

he was Mister Green, raising to knock the vase, to trip over.

He was the joke —he was Mister Green.

He had to get up—

get up—

get up—

Hierophant Green—!

His stomach was a block of ice, but Jotaro was made of the sun. Gagging, the rushing in his ears he didn’t know was there swam around the burning sensation in his stomach. He doubled over.

Accusingly and sharp as a knife, he swung his eyes and pierced Jotaro to them like an insect on a cork board.

“You could’ve-” He shuddered, tensing around his hands wrapped around his waist. “Aimed for literally anywhere else.”

It was then Kakyoin realized he didn’t know if Jotaro even knew about his ‘punched through moment’. He was answered pretty quickly though by Jotaro’s ashen face and the way his eyes lit up so brightly they looked like they were on fire.

There was something stirring beneath his skin; just like him.

What had happened?

He didn’t say anything, he just put his hand flat on his back, and Kakyoin felt as if he touched him twice.

“Hierophant?” He said. Twisting his head to try and catch a glimpse of it.

Jotaro shook his head at him when he turned back around. “It’s changed too.”

Too? “Too?” Kakyoin felt cold.

There was a groove carved into the table. The group of teenagers were pushed back into their seats, wide eyed and pale.

An animalistic click pulsed beside his head.