madimpossibledreamer: Eye from manga drawing. (ace attorney)
[personal profile] madimpossibledreamer
this is kind of a bookmark to Remnants of Stardust.

Main Points:
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure/Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Summary: Jotaro thought he was the only one at fault.  He was wrong.
Word Count: 1479
Rating: Teen (Jotaro swears, + the warnings below)
Warnings: ableism (Joyce), slight racism (anti-Asian-canonically from Joseph, probably-canon but not shown hafu stuff, possibly anti-Asian against Buffy), PTSD

 

         Jotaro doesn’t know what went wrong.
         Well, no.  That’s not quite right.  Just like usual, how annoying, yare yare daze already, he knows, partly, and he still doesn’t get it.
         The problem is this: Jolyne grew up to be Buffy, and she has too much of her father in her, and that’s the problem.  Buffy, according to conventional wisdom, is a bad girl, a delinquent.  Based on all the papers he’s managed to get his hands on before, the facts are these: she was a perfect little girl, maybe a little more like his mom (and who wouldn’t want someone like his mother—exactly like his mother—in their family?
         (He promised to stay away.  He promised not to look.  In the end, that is a promise like any other, fragile in his hands, and just like anything else he touches, it breaks—)
         But yes.  She’s blond, and popular, and loved, and the perfect daughter.  She has parents that are proud of her and love her very much, and even if that’s a stepfather at her side, even if her real father loves her so much he can’t breathe, sometimes, from the weight of the emotion, and words come harder than ever because they’re so much more important than usual and he doesn’t dare voice any of them anyway because he’s trying however imperfectly to keep a promise and he doesn’t want to paint a target on their backs, now that he’s no longer there, even occasionally, to keep them safe—
         And then something goes wrong.  (Everything goes wrong.)
         He’d never burned down a gym.  The reports of fighting are so much more familiar.  He shouldn’t be proud, probably.  But his little girl can take care of herself.  He imagines the kinds of bullies he’d dealt with, that Giorno had dealt with.  Dying her hair to fit in, and punching people when that didn’t work, because people can be absolute assholes, and simply changing a name isn’t enough to hold them at bay.  Maybe that’s something Joyce should have—would have—disapproved of, if she’d known.  She saw a bit, here and there.  Bruises, a little scrape.  Knuckles with easing calluses and scars.  All his scars.  But he’d been trying to clean up his act, for college, and she hadn’t seen.
         He made sure she hadn’t seen.  When he could.  To keep the dangers away from them.
         That’s why it went wrong in the first place.  Where it’d started.  With him, anyway.  Because she wanted him there, and he wasn’t.  And he wanted to be, but he’d tried that once, protecting people when he was there, and it hadn’t worked out even if he could stop time, so maybe he was just bad luck.  Maybe he shouldn’t have gone along with it in the first place—
         Nah.
         He can’t regret Buffy.  Everything else, maybe, because he hurts people.  It’s what he does.  It’s not collateral damage anymore, not with fists anyway.  His evil spirit isn’t possessing him anymore.  It’s the other way around.  Instead, it’s the things Holly understood and apparently no one else did—
         No one else still living, anyway.  Polnareff never understood.  Sometimes the old man tried, but despite his best efforts, he never quite did.  Got close, though.  Which still is nice, given that the old man never bothered before.  Too foreign for his classmates and teachers, too Japanese for his gramps.  Growing up, it felt like he couldn’t get anything right, and it wasn’t even something he could change, like the things he said, or did.
         Not like those were easy to change, now or then, but still.  Nothing he could do about how he was born, the blood in his veins.
         Some things never change.
         So, anyway, fights and arson.  He thinks, her Stand, maybe.  Tries not to think about a fortuneteller’s fire Stand as a possibility.  He wonders whether he should have told Joyce, warned her this might happen.  Probably not, given what Buffy tells him, after.  She tried to treat him like he was normal, and he’d believed it, because he’d believed it when his mom did the same.
         They weren’t the same, obviously.  Joyce was sharper, would argue back, and he remembered a redhead, years ago.  Stubborn.  A good match, people said, and he believed that, too.   So he’d thought she’d accepted him as he was, weirdness and all.  That she’d be able to do the same for their daughter, even when he wasn’t there.
         But it turns out Joyce thought just treating everything like it was normal could fix everything.  Could change reality itself.  Maybe it’s a good thing she never got hit with a Stand Arrow, because he really, really doesn’t want to know what she’d do.  It’d helped at the time, he’d thought.  Made him feel not quite so broken, not quite so alone.  But it was just like living in timestop.  It didn’t fix anything, just had them ignoring reality, like it was just that simple.
         So she wanted normal, so much she was willing to do whatever she had to do to achieve it.  And if that was he case, she found the exact wrong man to marry, because Jotaro has no illusions there: his whole damn family is far away from anything you could call ‘normal’.  And it’s fine; he wishes her happiness, even if ‘normal’ ended up being a picket fence and a small town and contests about who managed to fulfill the Platonic ideal of ‘normal’ the best, even if that ends up being the cliché of the husband having the affair and leaving with the secretary.  She’d wished for ‘normal’, after all, and that was statistically, anecdotally normal.
         He can’t see why anyone would want that, any of it, discarded any aspirations of ‘normal’ even if he’d ever had them when he was seventeen and attending his best friend’s funeral.  He doesn’t have to understand, though.  Joyce wants it, and he wants her to be happy, so he hopes with everything he has that she can achieve it.  But not at the cost of hurting their daughter.  If it means throwing himself into the line of fire, he absolutely will, because he deserves it and Buffy absolutely does not.
         Because it’s not a call for help.  It’s not an out of control Stand.  It’s not the itchy, restless feeling or the fact that everyone knows when they’re getting to him and just have to keep going, the bastards
         It’s because Buffy inherited all the best and the worst of him, and even then managed to make the sum of the parts greater than the whole.  It’s because she has the heart of a Joestar, that impulse that says ‘I have to save the world or at least that civilian there’, the one that makes them all reckless and makes people worry.  And that’s not her only legacy, though he hasn’t quite managed to get a straight answer as to what a Slayer is, yet.  He will, though.  Putting in the work’s never really scared him, or he wouldn’t have a doctorate.
         The fear nearly chokes him, sometimes.  Because he nearly lost Buffy before he’d even gotten to know her.  Because she’s strong, stronger than he is, but even the strong can fall.  But smothering her will just make her unconscious.  It won’t help.  And pretending the enemy isn’t plotting anything won’t help anything (will just get people you care about killed), so.  No.  Buffy Summers might not have the Joestar name any more than she has Kujo, anymore, but she’d have to carve out her own heart to stop being a hero.
         They’ll probably reconcile, his ex-wife and his daughter, whenever Joyce gets her head out of her ass and stops mourning the fact that Buffy isn’t the perfect teenager (which, honestly, it’ll be more abnormal if she was, because he’s no expert on anything other than marine wildlife, but he’s fairly sure ‘perfect teenager’ is an oxymoron and even under ‘normal’ circumstances, he’s pretty sure it doesn’t actually exist).  She’ll figure it out eventually, when she doesn’t feel like she has to be responsible, doesn’t have to answer questions about how any of this happened.  Honestly, Buffy seems more well-adjusted than both of them, and she’s still on edge, ready for a fight around every corner and still spooked from having died, however much she tries to hide it.  If anyone will make it work, it’s his daughter, who has that same ability to act like everything’s normal and make everyone else play along, only she does it in a way that doesn’t ignore reality.  She knows full well how things are.  She just doesn’t accept it.  She’s going to change things with her own hands, she’s going to bring the best out of people and her situation and she’s stronger than he’ll ever be.  And he’s so goddamned proud.

 

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