Chapter Text
* New York, New York, US *
* Mid-March, 1999 *
They haven’t all been together in years, and what with Joseph getting older Mohammed really doesn’t think that’ll change. He sees Jotaro whenever he shows up in New York. They usually meet for lunch, discuss business in vague terms. They usually take a walk to the little plaque Joseph had made after Iggy died. He payed some obscene amount of money to get it put into Central Park where the dog used to run wild. Mohammed stops by at least once a month to ensure it’s clean.
They’re friends in the most distant sense of the word, the only way either of them have been able to handle since they left Egypt. Held at arms length. Pleasantries and the occasional glimpse of vulnerability before walling it back up after a firm hand on each other’s shoulders. And then the void of absence, welling up loud and inescapable until Jotaro lands back in New York, an excuse ready to defend against an accusation Mohammed will never make.
No one else would understand either of them like this.
It’s cold out today, so there’s not many people walking in the park. Mohammed searches for something to say, as he’s already exhausted his short list of life updates over their meal. Nothing really changes for him, not fast. His most entertaining anecdotes involve office parties at the Speedwagon Foundation and breakthroughs in stand research that mean incredibly little to anyone. So he settles for dusting off their shared history.
“Have you seen… Kakyoin?” Mohammed asks, the tails of his scarf lifting in the breeze as they walk. He puts his hands in his pockets, more habit than need with the unfeeling metal prosthetics. Both of them know he’s being polite. That who he really wants to know about is… well.
“No,” Jotaro’s voice is guarded.
Well. They’re on the same page there.
Jotaro’s hardly been back to Japan beyond business. And now, with his divorce looming, the mention of a high school crush seems like an obvious blunder. He won’t be answering Mohammed’s underlying question, especially when he can’t even say Jean Pierre Polnareff’s name out loud.
Jean Pierre Polnareff.
Even thinking his name sends a wave of feeling through him that he has to push down. Memories of their final days together in that hospital in Cairo come unbidden to the surface, strengthened by the effort to banish them.
He remembers, above all else, the last night, when Joseph was packing to leave. He would go to Japan first with Jotaro, see his daughter, and back to New York with his wife.
Mohammed would be in New York when he returned.
“What about your shop?” Jean had asked, among other things surely, but that’s the question that sticks with him. Because Mohammed couldn’t stand on the street without seeing his horrible shadow. Couldn’t approach the market without trembling so badly he couldn’t continue walking.
So he didn’t offer an answer to the question. To really any of the questions Jean asked. But least of all that one.
“I’ve got a job lined up in New York,” he had said.
Not a total lie, at least.
“What if you came to France instead?”
“Mom’s talking about moving to Florida,” Jotaro offers, blissfully interrupting the memory before it gets worse. Before they separated, Mohammed with a pack of coffee-flavored chewing gum and Jean with a promise to come to New York in a few months time.
They haven’t talked since then.
Not for lack of effort on Jean’s part. He had the Joestar number and passed messages along, but Mohammed kept his responses cool and impersonal. Jean wrote to the Speedwagon Foundation, the only address Mohammed could be traced to, but had his mail mysteriously redirected to France. He visited New York in the spring, only to be met with Mohammed’s sudden departure to an urgent matter of business in Newfoundland.
The weight of that presses heavier, especially with Jotaro silently walking by his side. He shouldn’t have ignored him, but Mohammed couldn’t refuse him. Not again.
But after the initial cooling of their romance Mohammed should have reached out. At the very least he should have asked Mr. Joestar how he was. What did his new life look like? Why had he wanted to make space for Mohammed in it? Was there even room for him?
Instead he let the silence continue.
He didn’t call when Iggy died. Fifteen. Old for a dog, he thinks. He’s never had a dog, so he wouldn’t really know. But Joseph called, apparently. It seemed right that everyone should know a Crusader had died. Mohammed arrived at the Joestar penthouse one day to both Suzi and Joseph sobbing over a Polaroid of Iggy biting Polnareff on the ass (a photo Mohammed himself is responsible for taking) and a large, beautiful blue bouquet.
That’s the last evidence Mohammed has of him. It’s hard to obtain more without having to say his name, Joseph seems to have taken his continuous silence as disinterest, and Jotaro is just as isolated as he is.
“Holly’s good,” Jotaro says, and Mohammed looks up at him. Jotaro raises an eyebrow, the closest he’ll get to asking Mohammed if he’s alright. He’s being weird and quiet. It’s usually his job to keep the conversation moving while Jotaro broods.
But Jotaro also doesn’t usually come up in the winter. Mohammed has his suspicions.
He guesses it’s probably Joseph Joestar's bastard child.
Every carefully crafted inch of peace in Mohammed’s work for the Speedwagon Foundation imploded less than a week ago with the revelation that Joseph Joestar cheated on his wife somewhere over sixteen years ago. How this information even surfaced is unclear to anyone but the two most involved, and Mohammed is sure if he even wanted those details he’d be deafened by Suzi’s screams. All anyone else knows is there is a highschooler somewhere in Japan walking around with a star-shaped mark on his shoulder.
So it’s not really a surprise when Jotaro shows up out of his normal pattern. His usual quiet is only amplified by a sense of purpose, one that seems to slightly calm the old man.
“Avdol,” Jotaro sighs, finally giving in as they reach the bench with Iggy’s plaque. Mohammed nods to indicate he’s listening and pulls out a stale piece of coffee-flavored gum.
Jotaro grits his teeth and closes his eyes. “We found something… on the arrow,”
That is much more than he could have anticipated. All of the research he’s done after work hours and suddenly… a lead.
“That’s…” Mohammed swallows and clears his throat. It’s not really good, per se, but finding it means having a chance to isolate it. To study it. To destroy it, maybe.
“There’s something bad there, we think. The old man’s spirit photos were blurry, but… they didn’t look good, that’s for sure,”
“You’ve been searching with Hermit Purple?” Mohammed is a bit disappointed that he’s putting his infirm grandfather to work, but also shocked he never thought to try.
“No,” Jotaro grimaces. “That’s the problem. He found it without meaning to. He was… he was looking for his son,”
“Fuck,” Mohammed says, though he is generally opposed to profanity.
“Fuck,” Jotaro repeats with an emphatic nod like he’s agreeing.
“Where to?”
Because there was never a chance he wasn’t going.
* Morioh, JP *
* April, 1999 *
Mohammed is violently ill for his first two days in Morioh.
A combination of jet lag and a new found aversion to airplane travel that hasn’t reared its head until his thirties.
Joseph tries to call them the second they dock in the port of Morioh, and again when they arrive at the hotel.
Jotaro doesn’t accept either call.
“You head on up and get settled, I’m going to go check something out,” he says, handing Mohammed the keys. It’s his first time being away from home in nearly ten years, though, and he does habitually check everything over for the presence of stand users.
He claws his way out of bed on his third morning in Japan at a respectable 10:00am, only to be met with Jotaro, wide awake and dressed, staring dramatically out at the city.
“What’s the matter with you?” Mohammed laughs weakly, taking a gulp of water. He should make it a priority to eat more than dry crackers and the hard candies Suzi had stuffed his bag with.
“I was worried,” Jotaro grumbles, prodding Mohammed up to get dressed.
He’s got a weird edge to him that Mohammed doesn’t recognize as they head down to eat a peaceful and near silent meal in the hotel’s restaurant.
Jotaro drops his chopsticks midmeal, which from anyone else would be simple clumsiness.
From Jotaro, it’s cause for concern.
“Jojo?” Mohammed says, forgetting all about the empty gurgle of his stomach and the remaining vertigo from so long in the air.
Jotaro turns with a pinched face. He looks so small, almost seventeen again. Like when he was smoking on the hospital’s loading dock, just lost.
“Higashikita… he’s dead,”
Mohammed’s eyes widen, and he forgets his own chopsticks, his own half-finished bite of food. How long has Jotaro been waiting to be speak to him about this?
“What, before we came out here? He must be no more than fifteen… were we too late?”
Jotaro shakes his head.
“His grandpa, just this morning. Kid’s alive, but… the old man is gone. That stand was nowhere near him until I…”
Jotaro breaks off and tugs his hat down.
“What do you mean? You found Angelo?”
“Josuke did,”
Josuke. Oh god, that’s Joseph’s son isn’t it?
“And he… he’s fine?”
“Alive, but… his father figure’s dead. The only person he’s got other than his mom…”
Mohammed’s stomach sinks. He has suspicions about Jotaro’s feelings about his family. The distance between him and his own father, the relative tolerance he gives to his grandfather. How he saved his life in Egypt.
Jotaro’s reeling, dropping chopsticks from shaking hands, because this all looks far too fucking familiar.
And sure, Mohammed can detach himself from that bit. Can acknowledge that a single stand is not enough to take them down, but that’s not all this is, right?
The status report sounded dire over the phone. It is dire, Mohammed is beginning to realize. All they had before they landed was the name Angelo and the island of Morioh. And meddlesome Joseph Joestar, who could be an asset or a hindrance in the same moment. But now? They have a body count and two Joestars.
“You found him, at least,” Mohammed says with a hope he does not feel.
Jotaro shrugs.
“What’s our next step?”
“Funeral,” Jotaro says, scratching his cheek. “We gotta wait for that, and then we’re planning on staking him out,”
“And you think Angelo will wait?” Mohammed asks.
“No, that’s… uh… he’s got a water-based stand. You think you and Red could keep him off our backs until they’ve at least had the chance to bury the old man?”
“I think we can manage,”
*
Mohammed doesn’t know why he lets Jotaro deal with this all alone. Perhaps it’s something in the tenseness he has around the funeral, or maybe it’s because when he approaches the young Higashikita kid he’s too riddled with grief for Mohammed to want to force himself into his home.
So Mohammed monitors for any sign of Angelo’s activity away from the home. He scopes the town out with the help of a map. Or at least tries. Morioh is larger than he anticipated, and his Japanese is a great deal rustier than he realized.
At the end of the day he sprawls across his bed in the hotel room, staring at the empty space across the room where Jotaro would be rigidly moving the pillows just right and folding the covers over at a perfect ninety degree angle before crawling into bed and sleeping, silently and as still as death.
It isn't until the end of the worst rainstorms that Jotaro shows up in the hotel room again. He looks exhausted, and maybe a little dehydrated, but he’s alive.
“Definitely an arrow,” he sighs, hanging his coat up in the closet and kicking his shoes off. “Seems like we might be here for a minute. I’m thinking about getting a second room, unless you want to head back to New York,”
“Second room?” Mohammed looks around at the two queen beds.
“We need a place to work, and I’m sure you’d like your own personal space,”
You’ve lived alone for ten years. Jotaro doesn’t say.
“That… sure. That would be nice. Thinking of using Joseph’s generous offer to get a suite?”
Jotaro snorts.
“Sure, if that’s what they’ve got. We can spring for something nice for you, too,”
“Do you want to tell me about what happened this week?” Mohammed prods. If Jotaro is committing to a long term stay in this town, Mohammed is certain that much more happened at the Higashikita residence than he’s letting on by his brief mention of the arrow.
“Tomorrow,” Jotaro sighs heavily. “There’s a cafe Josuke recommended. We can go over what we know and where to start. Tonight… I need a fucking shower,”