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The thing is, he'd believed in ghosts long before he and the others ever met Reimi Sugimoto.
The sky overhead is open, blue-gray, and vast. It's chilly here; by now, summer has faded into autumn, and the change of the seasons has made his surroundings nothing short of breathtaking. It's strange to think that he'd been in Morioh long enough to watch the spring burn away into summer; now all of a sudden it's well into fall, and winter is starting to creep in around the edges. The better part of a year has flown by. Strange how it seemed to go by fast this time, when more than a decade ago fifty days had seemed like a perpetual yet breakneck eternity.
He's not the only one who believes in ghosts. That is, he's not the only one who believed in them before any of them ever met the girl who called herself Reimi Sugimoto — Rohan's old babysitter, a sixteen-year-old girl who actually still managed to be older than he is himself, thanks to a subsequent fifteen years of full stop that she'd been languishing through in some haunted hidden back alley in her hometown.
Polnareff believes in them, too. It came up once, years ago, on a day when Polnareff was driving and he was in the passenger seat and Western Europe was flying by outside the windows. Polnareff told him that day that he'd seen Iggy and Abdul after they'd died, before he'd found his way back through Dio's mansion to rejoin the rest of them. He said that they'd waited for him, those first two of their fallen comrades. They'd waited to say goodbye, and then he'd watched as they'd made their way up into the clouds, into the west, into the sky where the sun was just beginning its descent toward the horizon.
Polnareff believes in ghosts, because he's seen two of them. Jotaro believes in them, too, and between his grandfather in Cairo and Reimi on the streets of Morioh (well, and Kira's father, of course, but he's going to try and forget about that damn old man as fast as he possibly can, quite frankly), he's seen his share of them, too.
The difference, though, is that Reimi stayed because she had something left to do. That's the way it looks as far as he can tell, at least. Reimi Sugimoto wasn't willing to move on to the afterlife, not while her killer was still alive and living somewhere in Morioh. For all that she'd been a sweet and seemingly mind-tempered girl in appearance, it had been her anger that had kept her tethered in that alley for so long past the time when she should've moved beyond. She'd waited until justice could be done. She'd refused to go until she'd gotten it.
The parallels used to nag at him, sometimes. Rohan had confided in him once, late at night in a moment of rare almost-vulnerability, that seeing her sometimes rattled him because of something he'd learned that she'd done on the night that she died. She'd given her life to continue his, Rohan had explained with a tremor quaking in the underpinnings of his otherwise even voice, and hadn't realized that he was confessing it to someone who understood all too well how it feels, to be the one who survives because someone else thought that the sacrifice was worth it.
The air is crisp, clean, and cool. There's no snow on the ground yet to crunch beneath his feet, but he's got a long scarf wound around his neck anyway, pulled up to cover the lower part of his face where the collar of his jacket would be, if he were wearing his own — which he's not.
It's sort of stupid that he's even here. There are other, better, more important things he could be doing, probably. And even Jiji had conceded that the likelihood of him finding anything is slim to none, all things considered. It's the same reason why there's no point in going back to Cairo to check around the place where a water tower once stood, not far from the once-broken clock tower that's long since been repaired and restored to its former glory. Reimi Sugimoto stayed because she wasn't done; unfinished business was the anchor that kept her in Morioh for all that time.
Kakyoin's business was finished. Abdul and Iggy's was, too. And besides, somebody'd had to be waiting for Jiji up there at the figurative gates when he'd tried to join them too soon, to hold him at bay and throw him back down when his blood flowed back in and his heart started beating once again.
Still, he's here. He came because Jiji asked him to, no different than when he'd gone to Morioh because Jiji had needed someone to. His grandfather is old, hobbled, more feeble every day. He's still far more clever than he shows on the surface, of course — he wouldn't be Joseph Joestar if he weren't running that kind of deception, no matter his age. But he's been calling his grandfather "old man" for more than a decade, and in recent years it's been getting harder and harder to spit out, the more and more it's become true. His grandfather isn't the strong, capable man who led their ragtag band of Stand users halfway across the world to challenge the vampire that was killing his daughter; now he's the hunched, unsteady octogenarian hanging on to his son's arm while he tries to get to know the unexpected addition to their family that he'd fathered all those years ago.
So he does it, because he's all of the things that his grandfather isn't. He's strong, he's capable, he's young. Star Platinum will never let anything hurt him. He's far better suited to this than Joseph Joestar is, save for the fact that he's two generations removed from his ultimate goal and he strongly suspects that he's not going to find anything there even when he arrives. The truth of the matter is that he's lacking the faith that Jiji has in the attempt — and no matter how much Jiji might try to pretend like he's not expecting anything to come of it, deep down he's hoping for a miracle. It's there in him, buried deep but there, and has been from the moment they both met Reimi Sugimoto.
He knows it's there in Jiji, because for a few seconds he'd wanted to believe that Kakyoin might be waiting for him at the former site of the water tower, too.
A breeze picks up and plays at the ends of his scarf as he comes to a stop a few meters from the entrance to the decaying hotel, abandoned for decades upon decades and showing it in every rotting board and broken window and crumbling brick. There's not going to be anything inside, he thinks. He's wasted a trip — or at least, he's spent one chasing wishes and dreams instead of reality.
He walks inside anyway, because he'd promised Jiji that he would.
He doesn't see the attack that comes hurtling toward his face until it's far too late, but Star Platinum does.
Before he can blink, much less before he can even begin to register what's happened, Star Platinum has assumed a defensive position with his mighty arms crossed in a block; he feels the blows land distantly instead of firsthand, filtered down through the connection he shares with his Stand, who grunts and roars his own fury against their unseen foe. Whatever it is, it's aggressive, hammering against Star with the rhythm of something accustomed to fistfighting and the inelegance of a rage that burns with the fire of the Cairo sun.
Nobody could stay calm after seeing something like that, he remembers thinking once, all those years ago. This feels like that: it's not just anger, but blind anger, arising out of something so powerful and emotional that it overwhelms everything else.
That, to him, says two things. The first is that he's going to have to trade blows with this...thing, whatever this is that's mounting the attack against him.
The second is that whatever this is, it isn't an enemy Stand.
So he fights. He fights, and he's not afraid even though he supposes that would be the natural thing, to be afraid or at least apprehensive of an enemy like this. But in a strange sort of way, it's a relief — not because he likes being attacked, obviously, but because the manner of attacking is at least familiar and, to some odd degree, relatable. This isn't calculated, it isn't planned; whatever he's fighting couldn't possibly have known he was coming or plotted against him. It's just angry, maybe at being disturbed, maybe at being found.
Anger was what kept Reimi Sugimoto tethered to this world. It's strangely optimistic to find it in a place where someone's been hoping secretly, deep down, that he'd find anything at all.
What ends the skirmish, ultimately, is foresight — though it's probably more accurate to say that what ends the skirmish ultimately is Rohan Kishibe. It's Rohan's doing, the thing that gives him the ability to stop this, because it's thanks to Rohan's intervention that he may just be the first and only person in the world who's fluent in a language he never learned, all thanks to a few strokes of a pen. When he'd heard what it was that Jiji wanted him to do, he'd taken it upon himself to ask Rohan for the favor. He'd suspected it might help.
He'd been right.
"Stop fighting me!" he snaps, the Italian vowels and consonants rolling off his tongue in a way that feels different and wrong, practiced despite the fact that he's never once practiced them. "Back off and hear me out!"
At first, nothing changes. But there's really nothing he can do here, no threats he can make — what could he possibly do, threaten to kill someone who's already dead? — and no real leverage he can deploy, so he simply keeps Star striking and blocking while he spits out the same imperatives over and over and over again.
But eventually, in his stress and his mounting frustration, he changes tacks, takes a gamble, and yells, "You made a promise, Caesar!" — and that's what ultimately gets the whirlwind of blows to fall silent.
For a few seconds, there's nothing, and there's no telling whether that means that the hurricane has really lost its gale-force energy, or whether this is simply the eye of the storm. He's breathing hard from the tension, and on some level from the energy that he and Star have both been expending trying to keep up, but for a while that's the only sound left to fill the silence in the otherwise still and abandoned room.
Then, gradually, a figure fades into view. He looks the same as Reimi used to, when they used to see her do it — usually when they'd meet with her outside her alley and she'd stray too far from its entrance. He remembers the way the light used to filter through her, turning her translucent and then transparent, like they were all given the rare opportunity to watch her tangibility seep away right before their very eyes.
He doesn't look anything like Reimi besides that, though. He's tall and solid and blond. There are wings in his hair and blood on his clothes, which seems strange; Reimi had kept her wounds, but not the blood that surely must have accompanied them. He looks angry and exhausted and oddly defeated, but his eyes are as clear as emeralds and as hard as them too, focused the way that they are on his Star Platinum, on his face. His confusion is palpable, and it's hard to fault him for that. His expression is the same as Jiji's had been, the night after they'd said goodbye to Reimi and this whole impossible adventure had ended up coming out in the first place.
It's the expression of someone who knows better than to hope, yet can't quite extinguish one single persistent infinitesimal spark of it anyway.
"Who are you?" the blond answers, his own Italian rolling smooth and easy off of his tongue in a way that Jotaro's probably never will, intervention from Heaven's Door or not. "Get out. What the hell do you know about promises I made?"
He takes a slow breath, keeping Star Platinum at his side and on his guard. There's a massive crumbling stone visible through the semi-transparent shape of his adversary; it's lying on the ground there, about waist-high, and the way he's standing in relation to it is a posture that suggests defensiveness. They must look like mirror images right now, he thinks, despite looking nothing alike. There are two phantoms in this room, and two solid things.
"My grandfather thought you might be here," he says quietly, lowering his chin slightly to hide his mouth behind the raised folds of his scarf. "He's an old man now, and couldn't make a trip like this. If he'd been the one who came through that door instead of me, you probably would've killed him with an attack rush like that."
It occurs to him, briefly, that talk of killing might've been the wrong thing to invoke. He regrets it almost immediately, but there's nothing he can do about it. It's not as though anybody sends him on tasks like this because they expect him to be good at talking, anyway.
"I guess in 1939 he would've been around twenty years old," he continues instead. "He lived in New York with his grandmother. That's where he went back to, too. When he was done here."
"Jojo," the ghost whispers in a tone that sounds as hollow as an open grave.
"He thought you'd be here," he repeats, which he also figures is as good as an affirmative. "He's too old to come here on his own. But he sent me with a message for you."
"I don't want to hear it," the ghost snaps, and turns away as he starts to fade from view in a way that's reminiscent of a child throwing a tantrum — like little Jolyne, sulking and pouting and kicking her feet.
And he's going to lose him for good, Jotaro thinks, if he doesn't intervene fast — but split-second interventions are something that he does well these days, and this one is hardly an exception.
"He says, 'Suzie Q healed her ugly wounds'," he replies quickly, rapidly, and knows full well that every word will land a direct hit on this long-dead man he doesn't know, because every word comes verbatim from the mouth of Joseph Joestar and his grandfather has always, always been the paramount model of how to read a person and beguile them in a mere matter of words.
Sure enough, the phantom stops cold. He doesn't turn back around, but he stops.
He takes that as his cue to press on with the rest. "He says, 'she kept her half of the promise. We haven't kept ours until you come home again too.'"
"And how the hell does he expect me to do that?" the ghost snarls, as one of his fists comes crashing down to vent his sudden burst of rage against the waist-high stone he's facing. "That stupid, naive bastard — doesn't he understand that I died?! How the hell does he expect me to come home?! Something like that — doesn't he understand that it's impossible?"
And for a minute, then, he catches himself wondering why it is, how it is, that death is so fickle like this. What is it that really decides why some people die and why some people stay behind? Why was Kakyoin gone but Reimi was still around? Why was Josuke's grandfather dead for so much shorter a time than Jotaro's before his grandson tried to save him, yet the one with hands of healing failed and the one with the twin soul to a vampire's succeeded? Why were Abdul and Iggy done? Why is Caesar Zeppeli still here? Who decides, who chooses what makes salvation impossible for some but within reach for others?
"It won't be the first impossible thing I've ever done," he says eventually, and strides toward the stone with Star Platinum already moving into position for an attack. Reimi Sugimoto was anchored to her alleyway, the weak point between life and death that was created when her soul stayed clinging to the wrong side instead of the proper one. Caesar must be anchored to something, too, and maybe it's this hotel, but maybe it's not — and maybe what it is he's tethered to is something that can be made portable enough to allow him to keep his promise after all these years, after all.
Caesar is looking at him again, with that same expression as he'd had before — the bitter one, the exhausted one, that still wants so desperately to cling to hope.
That's Caesar's half of the battle, he thinks, and sends Star Platinum forward to begin shattering the already-crumbling stone, fully intent on making good on his own half of it as well.
~
It's funny, how the whole way back to New York, Caesar continues to insist that there's no earthly way that Suzie Quatro could possibly be his grandmother, while he keeps insisting that she absolutely is. It gets to be something of a game between them: he'll offer Caesar a true fact about the future they live in, and Caesar will adamantly deny that it's true, and then they'll have fuel to bicker about for hours and hours on end. It reminds him of those car rides with Polnareff, hunting Stand users around Europe for the better part of the decade. It reminds him of a trip that lasted fifty days, too, and a similar cadence of shooting the shit with a friend being contrary more for the sake of being contrary than anything else.
It's comfortable, and yet a little strange. He doesn't have grounds to worry about Caesar the way that he worries about so many other people; there's no possible way that his proximity to Caesar could potentially get Caesar killed. He's already dead; who could possibly hurt him?
But sometimes, the merriment fades away into solemn, slightly-desperate inquiries, and sooner or later Caesar's questions always run to the same common thread: how old are they; how many years has it been; how close are they to the end of the long and happy lives they've led.
At first, he thinks it's because that spark of hope is reigniting within Caesar again — like he's eager to take their hands, his Jojo and his Suzie, one of theirs in each of his and all go on to their destined afterlife together. It's only after a while that he starts to realize that Caesar isn't dreaming of happily-ever-afters, and in fact he's still carrying with him the secret awful assumption that he won't be going to the same place that Jojo and Suzie do, once it's time for all of them to depart.
He doesn't want to have to watch his friends die. That's something Jotaro can sympathize with, certainly.
It's only when they're in the backseat of the car that's taking them from the airport to the Joestar mansion in upstate New York — which means that Jotaro's in the backseat with his luggage in the trunk and a carry-on duffel at his side (the one that everybody assumes contains clothes, but is actually housing the chunk of stone that Star Platinum broke off from the cross-shaped section of fallen ceiling in that abandoned hotel in Saint Moritz) — it's then, only then, that Caesar finally gives up what's been lurking in the penumbras of his mind ever since they left.
"They've lived their whole lives without me," he says softly, eyes fixed on the window like he's marveling at the sights of a nation he's never seen firsthand before, when really Jotaro knows it's to keep from having to look at him while he admits this. "What if — fifty years, sixty years. There's no room for me...is there. Not really."
In the silence that follows, Jotaro finds himself thinking of Josuke — of the storms that had rocked the house when something virtually identical to this had happened not so long ago, some important figure from the past had risen up out of nowhere and become a part of their lives whether they'd liked it or not. Of course Grandma Suzie had been furious, but it hadn't been anything about Josuke himself that made her that way; she'd been right to be mad, from the years of lies and secrets and a long-buried infidelity. Grandma Suzie, he muses, is good at placing responsibility where the responsibility is due. One person's sins don't get dropped onto somebody else. And family is bigger than the sum of its parts; painful as it might be to transition, it can stretch to accommodate a change without going brittle and shattering.
But Caesar makes a valid point, too. Hadn't Reimi Sugimoto ended up feeling lost and out of place in a world that had moved on without her while she'd stayed the same? The four-year-old child she'd played babysitter to had grown up into a young man. People she'd attended school with had taken jobs, started families, bought homes and possessions with their salaries. It's hard to imagine what it must be like, to return to a world where the hole that had been left by the space you'd once occupied has closed up and covered over with scar tissue. People's lives are what they are. It's not wrong to wonder if it might be wrong, to try to open up that hole again.
But some people, he thinks —
Some people are like him, which is to say that their holes don't close up. He still has holes in him left behind from a January night more than a decade ago, and it doesn't seem as though they're going to go away anytime soon. He's tried to fill them over the years, to varying degrees of success; he's had to learn the hard way that some spaces are sized specifically to one person, and that it's unfair to try to cut and squeeze another person until they manage a fair imitation of patching over it.
Caesar, he thinks, has his holes, too. One of his is sized for his grandfather as a youth, not the hobbled old man he is now. Another is for his grandmother as a girl, but Jotaro suspects that somehow, that one isn't likely to come with any difficulties — not when his grandmother is the sort of person who adapts to any occasion. She'd expand or contract to fit any hole left behind for her, no matter its size. He suspects she's already done so at least once already, in Jiji's life, so it wouldn't surprise him in the least if she ended up doing the same for Caesar.
But still. That's not really what Caesar's looking for, or so he thinks. What Caesar is looking for, deep down, is something else, and he thinks he knows what it is. He thinks it's the same thing that Kakyoin wanted, once upon a time, when he'd looked for the one person in the world who could see his Hierophant Green and meant that he was looking for the one person in the world who could take him as he was, and not just the sides of him that were easy to see.
He'd been able to offer then, too.
"There's room with me," he answers after a time, and watches Caesar go rigid all the way down his spine.
So he repeats the sentiment again, with different words. "Whatever happens. However it goes. You can stay with me," he says.
Caesar turns around to look at him, hard, with the same kind of scrutinizing expression that tends to blossom on his face when he's not sure if he's being fucked with, and when he doesn't want to hope for something, and when deep down that's a lie and he really wants to hold on to hope more than anything.
"You do realize I'm dead," he says, short and brusque and almost a little bit sulky, like he's daring Jotaro to disprove him and yet secretly wants to be disproven.
He shrugs. "Some of my best friends are dead," he answers without thinking, and means it to be a joke, except that then the truth of it sinks in and all of a sudden he's not sure whether it's really funny or not.
For a minute, Caesar just stares at him.
Then, all of a sudden, the tension breaks as he laughs like a jackal, throwing his head back and barking his amusement in a way that, of all things, ends up reminding Jotaro of afternoons spend in the backseat with Kakyoin while their car gradually ate up the dusty kilometers that remained between them and Cairo.
Kakyoin would've thought it was funny, too, wouldn't he?
"I guess I take back my doubts about you being related to Suzie," Caesar says through his laughter, flashing his grinning teeth like a wolf. "Seems like you get it from both of them."
"Fuck off," he answers, surprisingly good-naturedly given the way that his face is burning so hot with mortification, and within seconds they've dissolved back into waging yet another verbal war — a battle that lasts them the rest of the way to the estate where his grandparents are waiting.