![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madimpossibledreamerJojo's Bizarre Adventure/Buffy the Vampire Slayer AU
Chapter Summary: The User of Back in Time steps up his game.
Word Count: 1056
Rating: Gen
Note: HERE THERE PROBABLY BE BUFFY/JJBA SPOILERS.
When he opens his eyes again, he’s hiding in some bushes. That’s an awfully convenient place for the Stand to drop him, which makes him instantly suspicious. If he’s in some bushes, he won’t be seen, which is the exact opposite of the point of the Stand, so there’s some sort of trick here. Still, no one’s looking at him directly, which means, for the moment, he has the advantage.
This is the time to look for the enemy. He still feels that gaze on him, which means the User has to be close by. He’s not sure of his window of time, but he’s not just going to wait and try again. Not when it’s jeopardizing the ones he loves. For all he knows it’s not going to go consistently forward in time and will teleport him to his wife’s funeral—or, worse, the hospital beforehand.
Whoever or whatever is stalking him has to be hiding in the same way he is, or they would’ve been noticed, too. Unless the User going unnoticed is a characteristic of the Stand itself…but no.
The User can’t be invisible. That would make the Stand invincible, and no Stand is invincible. It could be that he just has to make it through all these jumps without changing the past, but he’s not willing to wait that long. If nothing else, he’s had close calls the last two times. He can’t keep relying on luck to keep him from breaking the past as he remembers it.
Unfortunately, they’re either hiding in bushes or behind that concrete wall over there, so he hasn’t spotted them yet. He nearly starts to get up to check and maybe get some sort of reaction from the User, but he hears footsteps and gets back down just in time.
An unfortunately familiar blond man walks past, and his hairdo stands on end with the force of his hatred, but he wills himself back. It’s only the fact that he knows he pounded Kira’s head into the pavement and then the monster got run over by an ambulance that lets him stay calm and in place. He doesn’t have his comb to get his hairdo back to normal, either, but movement would probably draw attention right now and he can’t afford that, despite the urge to make sure everything’s in place.
And then someone else he recognizes jumps over the concrete wall, and his heart jumps into his throat and he can’t quite hide the gasp of pained surprise. It’s Shigechi, alive. The guy could sure be annoying when he was alive, but then he’d died, yet another of Kira’s victims, and Josuke’d realized that he should’ve been nicer. He and Okuyasu had been thinking about how to trick him and use him and—seriously, using someone else’s friendship like that was anything but great.
“Found it. Why does someone I don’t know have my sandwich?” Shigechi asks, and yeah, of course he’d still be obsessive and stubborn about his food and—really? Was that what it took to find Kira? Where had he been hiding, anyway? Had he been—had he been five feet from them at the time and none of them knew? Yeah, okay, maybe Kira would’ve killed them all, but—
Maybe, maybe they might’ve saved Shigechi? Is that what this Stand is showing him?
He’s biting his lip hard enough to draw blood, and oh yeah, there’s still blood crusted on his face, and he can’t interfere, can’t—
Harvest just pulled that bag apart. That’s a hand. That’s one of Kira’s—what the hell, who does that, who just kills people and carries around their hands in a paper bag meant to contain food—
Criminal scum like Kira, that’s who.
Shigechi’s just as freaked out as he is. And actually asks a good question, about who carries around hands in bags, and gets a creepy feeling about Kira, and even if he hadn’t been intelligent, he’d sure had a lot of common sense. Maybe even more than they did, back then.
And then Kira starts telling Shigechi about the little, mundane details of his life, and Josuke tries to hold his breath, because the suspect only ever does that if they know the hostage isn’t going to make it or if they have an ego and Josuke suspects it’s a little bit of both. Those mundane details are a decent way of tracking down a suspect.
He clenches his fists when he hears that the serial killer says he has no stress. And that he wants to live a quiet life, because he doesn’t deserve one, at all. And he talks about elimination, and Josuke is completely, utterly still, because he can’t risk moving.
Shigechi’s a second from killing Kira, slicing the carotid, but the killer tricks Shigechi into taking the coin, and Josuke knows, knows without a shred of doubt, that it’s been turned into a bomb, and Shigechi gets exploded.
“No!” he screams, and a second later realizes what he’s done. Shigechi’s bleeding face turns to his, disbelieving and confused and in agony, and Kira turns, too, shocked and a little angry, and the next thing he knows he’s falling to his knees, barely catching himself with a trembling hand. The sheer screaming pain that slices down every nerve leaving an inferno in its wake leaves him breathless, and Crazy Diamond fades back into him.
He finally manages to take a breath, and it subsides to a new kind of pain.
The pain is different than anything he’s ever experienced. If he had to name it somehow, he’d say it’s the pain of a phantom limb, only he’s not missing any limbs. It feels more like he’s missing part of his soul. He glances down and his arm is already seethrough, like a ghost.
(Calm down, Josuke-kun, it’s not like you’re turning into one of those creepy ghosts from a haunted house. More like…Reimi-chan. And it’s temporary; it has to be. It’d be too powerful otherwise. Though I probably only have until I disappear completely, if that American movie was any indication. I just have to figure out how to beat it and this’ll all go away. The User’s still a good bet. I just have to beat up the User. This isn’t the end. I won’t let it be.)
