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The days immediately following the end of the battle pass in a haze for Joseph, numbed by painkillers and fever. Despite his victory— hard fought for, and momentous in and of itself because Joseph genuinely believed he’d die fighting Kars— he’s never felt more numb than before now.
It’s definitely the shock of the fight. Even now, Joseph’s arm still feels there, even though the stump is wrapped tightly in bandages and hurts with every breath. Suzie Q has careful hands; she’s so caring in her touch when it comes time to change the dressings over Joseph’s wounds, but it hurts even then.
His hospital room is far too quiet. Just a few days ago, Joseph went to sleep happy, believing that when the fighting came to a close, he’d be able to be with his friends, teacher and family again. Like an optimistic, naïve idiot, he thought there would be a happy ending for everyone.
Caesar is dead. The bed that he should be lying on is empty. His voice, a warm echo in Joseph’s mind, will never fill a room again. All those times they came back from training all bloodied up and injured— they’re just happier memories in a cesspit of grief now.
Caesar, who Joseph grew to love so very quickly and deeply, gone. Snuffed out. Maybe, if he’d lived, he’d be here with Joseph, complaining about his wounds and picking Joseph’s appalling fight strategy apart mercilessly. If he lived, he might have even congratulated Joseph on pulling that impossible victory out of the depths of hell.
Instead, he only has the silence to comfort him.
Nobody should celebrate a pyrrhic victory. By defeating the Pillar Men, Joseph knows many lives will doubtlessly be saved, but… well. Painfully, he sits up, propped against the cold wall as he stares at the bed opposite his own.
Despite everything, he just… can’t. It doesn’t feel right to.
Hell, it was his own fault that Caesar ran off in the first place— he ran his mouth without truly thinking, as always, and Caesar paid for Joseph’s mistake with his life.
Joseph grimaces, biting back a hiss of pain as the stump of his arm throbs in agony again.
What’s he meant to do now? The Pillar Men are dead; their legacy in the Stone Masks crumbled to rubble. What the hell is Joseph meant to do now? No competitions, no battles, no drive— just the painful reminder of his failures in the silence and the blood on his hand.
Almost hysterically, Joseph thinks- maybe this is the universe trying to get back at him for all his years of ridiculous plans working out, or maybe this is just some generational curse on the Joestar bloodline. Watching his loved ones die, with their deaths a stepping stone for his own victory.
Because Caesar never deserved to die. He should have gotten to live a happy life once the Pillar Men were defeated, and Joseph would have stayed at his side and gone through thick and thin with the smug bastard until they grew old.
What the hell happened?
How did this happen? It doesn’t make any sense. In their Hamon training, Caesar’s control was always impeccable where Joseph was erratic and wild. Where Joseph is cunning and deceptive, Caesar… was always so passionate and righteous and strong.
If anyone had to die, it should have been Joseph. With the poisoned rings locked around his heart and throat, a promise to the grave, he should have died.
“Joseph…”
The soft, worried voice snaps him from his reverie. Joseph looks up, alarmed at the blurriness of his own vision— because this is not the first, and will not be the last time he cries for Caesar’s memory— and meets her eyes; her hands. Briefly, she caresses his face, and the touch is so gentle that he fears he may well cry.
But he doesn’t. Not yet, at least. Until he returns to Uncle Speedwagon and Granny Erina, he can’t waste more energy crying over the past. Healing comes first.
“Sorry, Suzie. I was just thinking. What were you saying?” His voice is raspier these days. A little bit quieter, dragged down by grief that feels centuries old and the curse of his bloodline resting upon his weakened shoulders like a death knell.
Warm and gentle, Suzie wraps her hands around Joseph’s. Her nails drag softly against the calluses in his fingers, and while he’s so, so cold, she is warm and bright. Absently, Joseph wonders if she’s an angel— so soft-spoken with a laugh like bells— but she could never be. She’s kind, her eyes shine bright with poorly veiled concern but she’s just as human as Joseph, shedding tears for him when he never deserved them.
No angel that Joseph is blessed to meet survives much longer, clearly.
“Your wounds are healing well,” she murmurs, brushing errant hair from his face to check on a nasty cut above his hairline. She frowns delicately. It’s a look that placates Joseph’s ragged heart into submission. “You were so bad a few days ago, and you’re healing very quickly.”
“Thanks to you.” In more ways than just one, Suzie saved him. Not only in her tending to his numerous wounds, but how she’s helping him navigate the storm of his emotions.
“What were you thinking about?”
Is it embarrassing to cry over things in the past?
Not at all.
“I miss him,” Joseph murmurs. The tears come to his eyes unbidden, just like the tremor in his throat as he chokes around the noose those words tighten around his neck, but he lets the grief wash over him. He’s only eighteen, after all. Granny Erina always tells him how much of a child he is.
Suzie grips his hand slightly tighter, enough so that the warmth of her touch seeps through the chill of the night.
When he closes his eyes and allows his consciousness to drift, the past and the present blend like the sunset hues into the dark of night— and, before he slips beneath the surface of sleep, Joseph can almost taste the sunny memories of those days with Caesar returning to comfort him.
Suzie stays with him at night. It’s a silent gesture, and one that touches his bleeding heart— and while he greatly appreciates each ounce of care she carefully tends to his wounds with, he isn’t blind; every time he wakes up with a scream on his lips and Caesar’s name on his tongue, he sees the tinge of fright in her eyes.
Joseph is a broken man, carved to pieces by the loss of the man who was once as brilliant and bright as the sun in the morning sky. Caesar, all draped in hues of gold and sunlight, was too good for Joseph. Too bright and too strong. It’s a cruel irony that Joseph would ruin someone so beautiful.
And he misses him. Joseph misses him as bitterly as the moon misses the sun. Caesar’s absence is a piece torn from his soul, bleeding black and gold, and it shouldn’t be possible to feel as if he’s dying from the loss of one man, but he does. And his breaths feel like treading water; his eyes never seem to be freed from the burden of the tears he lacks the energy to shed, and the pain ebbs and flows with all the grace and violence of the ocean tides but-
But.
The grief in his chest is an ocean, deep and merciless— a cavern, even. Too deep, too dark to explore without drowning in the weight of it.
It won’t go away. No matter how the days pass, light and dark merging and flowing as a river— until Joseph’s wounds are an afterthought, sewn shut by his Hamon, and he shows up to his own funeral with Suzie as a reassuring presence by his side. She’s comforting without words ever needed— even though she seemingly forgot to remind everyone that Joseph himself hadn’t perished fighting Kars.
It’s the shimmer in Lisa Lisa’s eyes that reminds Joseph that he was not the only person to lose Caesar— to his teacher, she lost both of them. Seeing his own gravestone drops a stomach into Joseph’s gut; an omen of forgetfulness that undoubtedly will hit back hard when he knows its cause, but he focuses on the family who thought they’d lost him for now. Granny Erina caresses his cheek. He has to bend down for her to do it, but… it’s as comforting for him as it is for her.
“Joseph…”
“I’m sorry, Granny Erina,” he croaks faintly. Dammit. His emotions have always been an uncontrollable wildfire, but now? “Genuine mistake. Didn’t mean to make any of you worry about me.”
Granny Erina smiles— though it’s awfully faint— and pulls him into a hug. There’s murmuring all around him, but he pays it no heed.
“I’ll always worry about you, Joseph.”
He wishes she wouldn’t. Granny Erina has been through enough— she doesn’t need the disasters that nip at Joseph’s heels to contend with as well. But she’d never hear that. Fierce and kind, Erina Joestar would never listen if Joseph dared say that aloud. With a tired smile, he turns his attention to his pale-faced Uncle.
“Did I make you worry too, Uncle Speedwagon?”
“I’m lucky I’ve already turned grey,” he croaks out hoarsely, “because if I weren’t already, I would be now.” He’s… been through a life of hell, as well. Losing Jonathan Joestar and then nearly Joseph.
He lost Caesar, too. Even if they didn’t know each other too well.
Damn it. His eyes wander back to his tombstone, the solemn letterings and the scent of the freshly overturned earth heavy in the air.
In his absence, he must have missed Caesar’s funeral. He can’t breathe.
He meets Lisa Lisa’s eyes once more. His pain must be visible, because she dips her head, lips pressed thin.
He doesn’t need any words after that. The ‘funeral’ wraps up, and Joseph has never felt both so loved, and so lost— Erina notices his struggle, of course, and her support is invaluable to him but he feels faintly sick from his thoughts.
“JoJo? Are you alright...?” Another friend from a chance encounter— Smokey’s eyes are wide and worried, clearly seeing Joseph for the mess he is right now. Finding a smile to reassure him is impossible, so the best Joseph can do is nod.
“I’ll be okay, Smokey. I’ll be okay.” Not today, and certainly not tomorrow. But maybe, hopefully, some day in the future.
And with some closure.
One final trip later sees Joseph in Italy, following Lisa Lisa blindly through a foreign countryside. They walk in silence. Birdsong blends with the soft rushing of wind through tall grass to create quite the lullaby, soothing his ragged mind. Through fields and trees, until finally, Lisa Lisa stops at the foot of a steep hill. The golden fields at its base are stunning from the ground, so from up there… it must be a sight to behold.
But his legs don’t seem to be able to move.
“Joseph.”
A flash of hot nausea barrels through him. Momentarily, he’s afraid he might make a fool of himself and double over.
Perhaps it’s best he doesn’t think about how exactly they retrieved Caesar— if they did at all. The uncertainty is dizzying, choking; for all he knows, he might be going to visit a grave with no body within it. But the thought haunts him. Another notch in a bedpost of trauma.
As if a man possessed, Joseph’s unsteady feet bring him towards the single, proud gravestone; the marble pristine and bloodless-white against the backdrop of the field. It’s a peaceful little place, tucked away and protected by the Speedwagon Foundation’s branch in Italy— and the sun shines gold over the land below.
It’s a place Caesar would love. It’s a shame that he’ll never see it. Joseph swallows back his tears; his grief and the dull ache of loss that’s tightening around his windpipe and aorta far more dangerously than those poison rings ever could.
Caesar shouldn’t have died. He should be here, he should be alive and he should have lived.
Joseph grits his teeth tightly. Lisa Lisa remains silent. When Joseph makes his surreptitious attempt to gauge her feelings, he’s met by a stone-blank facade of calm collectedness, the same one she wore before that light fell through the broken wooden slats to grace the tricklings of Caesar’s blood from under that rock-
Why is it so difficult to breathe? In a moment of hysteria, Joseph is sure that it’s Wammu or Kars back from the dead to kill him, too; wrapping their hands around his throat and squeezing.
But the wind shifts delicately, the grass swaying with it. There’s nobody behind him. Lisa Lisa definitely would protect him if he were being attacked. Instead, her mournful eyes are locked on the name engraved in the stone.
It would be wrong to speak. In Caesar’s last words and in that blood bubble, he’d said everything he’d ever needed to— the Hamon keeping the bubble intact conveyed everything Caesar had felt without words ever being needed. Pride, sadness, determination, relief- guilt. Caesar felt guilt, and then comfort in his final moments.
He never should have died. Caesar…
It shouldn’t have been him.
Joseph looks down to the grass poking around the edges of his boots, to the morning dew glistening in silver-gold sunlight, and pushes his hands into his pockets with a contemplative frown on his face. It’s a prettier mask than the ugly, raw emotion he actually feels. Maybe when Lisa Lisa isn’t here, he’ll allow himself to break— even through everything, she’s remained so… collected. Wouldn’t it be a little inappropriate to break down so spectacularly in front of her? He looks up.
This doesn’t feel real. This solitary, lonely gravestone is the final testament to Caesar’s existence— that, for now and for eternity, this will be the place he rests. It’s too silent. The guilt buried into Joseph’s heart sinks in further, closing its fist around his lungs and squeezing tight.
But the wind is real, brushing against Joseph’s cheeks like a gentle caress of a hand, wiping away his tears. The biting cold is real, and he can’t feel his fingers anymore because of it.
The grass is damp with morning dew, shining in the morning sun— it’s cold against Joseph’s knees, but he pays it no mind.
For all the time he’d spent practising to keep his breaths steady, that training is down the drain and far, far from Joseph’s mind as he takes in the words etched into the gravestone. The reality of it all.
“I really thought we’d both make it.”
His words, spoken softly, dissipate into the wind. If Joseph closes his eyes, allows the breeze and the sunshine to wash over him— he can almost imagine Caesar standing opposite him, that damnable smirk firmly in place. Taunting softly, just to goad Joseph into a petty argument.
“I really, really thought we’d both pull through that mess together.” A laugh, this time, small and tinged bitter. Because he did. Joseph didn’t take into account the possibility that one or neither of them would die before the Pillar Men were defeated. Like an optimistic, naive fool, he didn’t consider it and left himself open to be blindsided by that cruel twist of fate.
Carefully, and with all the practice from those weeks of Hamon training with Caesar and Lisa Lisa, Joseph exhales— steady and slow, like a calm stream. The rush of energy warms his blood just enough to fend off the bitter cold.
Joseph crouches low and brushes his hand against the shining gravestone, feeling the drag of metal across marble through the prosthetic. It’s probably cold. He can’t feel it, not through his hand. A tiny laugh escapes him unbidden, small and sharp in the chilly air.
“Damn it… I wanted to hear you again, you cocky, insufferable ass.” If he could just see or hear Caesar once more… he’d be happy. That’s all.
When he turns on his heel away from the grave, a little bit of him dies inside. An ocean of static has opened up to swallow him whole, and really- Joseph never was the best swimmer.
He was always better at running.
This wound is just slightly too raw right now. When he turns away, he’s not even aware of how his shoulders shake. His thick jacket wards off the cold well, but the shivers run through him regardless.
He should be surprised when Lisa Lisa pulls him down, his head to her shoulder in a stiff hug. Because his Hamon teacher is strict and cold and merciless.
But Lisa Lisa is a woman who lost her student, someone who was like a son to her. Of course she’d be hurting, too. His numb arms respond to the hug before his mind does, reciprocating weakly.
Sincerely, Joseph wishes he could visit this peaceful little place more often. Monthly visits seem both excessive and insufficient. But time flies by before he can account for it, and before long, the years are passing with frightening speed. Almost a year passes before Joseph decides on something for his next visit.
For all the natural beauty of the land surrounding Caesar’s grave, it’s far too empty. This is the final resting place of Joseph’s dear friend and, if they were blessed with more time, maybe something more.
Unlike Uncle Speedwagon, Joseph has always been good with plants. Maybe it was an unconscious use of his Hamon as a child, but plants seem to flourish around him, even when they should have died. With a huff, he sets down the small trowel and the bags of plant seeds and flower bulbs down beside him, kneeling at the edge of the tombstone.
“Hey, Caesar. I brought a few gifts this time. I… figured you’d like some more colour around here.”
The wind whispers through the leaves. When Joseph closes his eyes, he can picture Caesar now; leaning against the stone with the soft smile on his face that Joseph only ever saw after they both pulled through particularly hellish training.
“You’d be surprised, but I’ve had a green thumb ever since I was a kid. I’m good at keeping plants alive.” It gives Joseph a solid reason to continue returning here, too. The greenery could overgrow or die— and he isn’t about to let Caesar’s grave fall victim to the erosion of time. “A lot of these flowers would really complement your eyes.”
It’s been a while since he’s practised his Hamon. Mostly because Joseph doesn’t want the longevity it grants its users. He very much wants to grow old and die with Suzie, so despite how Lisa Lisa wasn’t exactly pleased, it’s his choice in the end. But for little things, like this? There’s no harm in it. Carefully, Joseph slows his breathing, controlling it tightly until the familiar warmth of Hamon rushes through his blood.
Hopefully, it will keep these flowers growing strong until his next visit. His hands are caked in mud and dew, but he doesn’t care for the mess at all. Next time Joseph visits, Caesar will have all the colours he loved surrounding him. He loved sunflowers. And he’ll continue to pour his fractured heart into making this resting place beautiful.
Years later, his wishes are slowly fulfilled, with flowers of radiant hues commemorating the fleeting beauty of Caesar’s life blooming all around his resting place. Joseph makes his way up the hill slowly, careful of the little hand resting in his as he helps her climb the cobblestones.
The leaves, blown down by the harsh autumnal winds, dance to the ground— dressed in brilliant hues of emerald, amber and crimson rubies, the scene is beautiful enough to take the breath from Joseph’s lungs and leave him swallowing down his emotions all over again.
Unbidden, he thinks of Caesar. His hair, sticking up at angles that he can barely remember the image of by now. His smug smiles and the way the corners of his eyes would crinkle when he grinned. And Joseph knows now— he’s spent long enough loving Suzie to know that the flustered, broiling emotion he embraced back then, training with Caesar, was the same kind of love. Beyond platonic and into something much, much more— he had loved Caesar all the way back then. He just couldn’t figure that out. He never was particularly sharp when it came to his own emotions.
A tug at his hand. Joseph looks down, and meets Holly’s eyes— and despite only being five years old, she seems to know how special this place is in Joseph’s heart. Her wide, curious eyes follow the falling leaves with an innocent type of childhood thrill that softens his very soul, despite the tired grief that washes ashore whenever he visits. Suzie’s grip on his metal hand tightens.
“Holly would have loved him.”
“I know.”
They come, and they go. Just like the years— the ache of loss fades, but never fully disappears. Grief is insufferable like that. Despite how busy and packed his days become, and how he sometimes has to visit every few months now, Joseph will keep visiting until he no longer can.
He wonders if Caesar would be proud of him. The life he’s living now; his family. Holly grows into such a kind soul, all empathy and sunny smiles. She and Suzie are the lights of his life, truly. Sometimes, she goes with Joseph on his visits— and she even helps tend to the dozens upon dozens of plants Joseph gifted Caesar over the years with newfound understanding in her eyes.
Before he knows it, it’s been thirty years since the battle against the Pillar Men. Thirty. It passed so quickly, but so blissfully slowly at the same time.
“You know, you… you brought out something in me that I’d never seen before. If this were a sappy romance movie, I’d even say you brought out the best in me.”
The wind doesn’t bear Caesar’s voice, nor does it offer any solace; but then again, it never has, and Joseph is left with the stark reminder that he’s a man crouching down to a gravestone on private land, running his fingers along the moss creeping up the marble and the erosion left by the rain.
Has it really been so long?
He can barely remember the tenor of Caesar’s voice, by now— the rises and falls of it like gentle ocean tides, melodic and soothing. The battles, sharpened by adrenaline, he can remember those with ease. But the smaller details, the most important ones… they’re beginning to escape him.
Really, he’s losing Caesar all over again. It hurts as much as it did the first time.
“I got a grandkid now. Little Holly is all grown up, has a kid of her own- she called him Jotaro. He’s a quiet little thing.”
She was so happy when Jotaro was born. So was Joseph. When she cried, he did too.
“I wish you could have met them.” He might even have been part of their family. Joseph smiles wryly.
Thirty-four years. The ache of Caesar’s loss never fully healed: it comes and goes in waves; some days leave him wading through old memories, and others drown Joseph in his grief.
“I’m an old man now, Caesarino. In a few years’ time, it’ll have been half a century since I last saw you.”
Half a century. A lifetime.
“I’ll meet you again someday. I’ll tell you all about them.”
Joseph leans against the trunk of the young tree just a few metres away from Caesar. With tired eyes, he watches the sun on the horizon— slipping lower, bathing the gold fields in amber and bloody crimson.
“Wait for me, will you? That’s all I want.”