"Daddy!"
"Papa!"
"Dad, and –"
"Pops, and –"
"JoJo."
He dreams of his little girl again that night. She is laughing at something he said, her plaits bouncing in the wind as she runs towards – or is it away from him? He wouldn't normally approve of kids dying their hair, but she looks so cute with the little green braids and the blue buns. She has butterfly hairclips and the cutest smile he ever saw…
He wakes up with tears on his face.
Even fewer students have turned up for his lecture on the digestive systems of echinoderms than usual. It's a little depressing: every year the same studious nerds take pity on him while the others go out doing… whatever it is they do in their free time. On an early Monday morning, probably sleeping; he doesn't blame them. He's barely awake himself.
Good grief. He had been one of the studious ones, once, and now look at him. A washed-up university professor with a cool hat talking about fish guts. (No, he reminds himself firmly, echinoderm guts.)
Still, there's never usually this few. He can at least normally count the attendees with two hands, rather than one.
"What's going on?" he asks. "There a big event or something?"
There's a buzz from a phone in the back row. He glares at the disturbance, but the student ignores him and gapes at the screen; Giorno was never particularly good at following the classroom rules. In the front row, one of his brightest students – Koichi, another blond – coughs and shifts nervously in his seat.
"Erm, Professor Kujo… could you turn on the news?"
He frowns at the kid – barely out of high school, must be, and he usually comes in with his scary girlfriend – but does as Koichi asks.
After a few minutes, he lets the rest of the class go home.
She stands on the edge of the river with her boots sinking into the mud, watching the butterflies flit past her head: it's just the right season to see almost all of the different types, and she stares in wonder at the colourful patterns.
"I want to study butterflies," she announces to him. "They're really cool."
"If you want to, go ahead. There's nothing stopping you."
She smiles at that, a massive grin from ear to ear, still as cute as when she was tiny. She lifts a hand to point at one of the butterflies and her bracelet jingles. "That one's a Monarch," she says. "And that one's a swallowtail."
"Ah," he nods. "And what's that one, Professor?"
She giggles. "That's my hair-clip, silly!"
For a couple of hours, he sits in his office pretending that he has any idea what to do in this situation. The… things are cropping up all over the place, apparently – in the South China Sea, near Greenland, at the mouth of the Amazon. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to where they are placed, except that they are invariably somewhere near the ocean. There's one a couple of hours away from him, apparently, just to the north.
Grading papers takes his mind off things for a while, but after a few minutes he sees a diagram of the structure of an octopus tentacle, and immediately thinks of slimy things emerging from the depths. It's weird – he's a marine biologist, for god's sake, he shouldn't be afraid of the ocean, but –
He goes home for the day.
The traffic getting home again, of course, is hell; he gets side-swiped a couple times by maniacs panicking and running towards the edge, the front, anywhere that would get them to where they want to be. He gets it, really, but he just wants to lie down; instead, once he's safely in his living room, he calls his mother.
"Yeah, Mom, I saw it. No, I don't know anything more than you do. Yeah, in the ocean. Weird. M-hm. Yeah, I'm fine… Just tired, I guess. You? Mm. Okay. Stay safe, okay? Yeah. M-hm. Love you too. Okay. Bye."
He puts down the phone and stares at the TV screen dully. It's too big for him, as is his house, as is his entire life. Even a guy like him, who towers over most people with ease, isn't big enough to fill the space that's left in this lonely, clean-lined house. He never needed it – he had insisted that he only needed an apartment, but his mother and his grandparents are convinced that something might happen for him. They want the best for him.
The news flickers gently on the screen. More disturbance in the streets; lootings; fires being started and graffiti proclaiming the end times. Riots. Some people down in Southeast Asia or wherever the fuck setting off fireworks like idiots, convinced that the things are here to save them. Some punks in Rio di Janeiro burning an effigy of someone.
The night is lonely, and full of half-remembered secrets.
She dresses up as Spider-Girl for Halloween one year and goes running through the house in her costume making noises as if she's slinging webs back and forth. She pretends to swing off coat racks and door handles, flinging an imaginary web out into the void.
Of course, they have to wear matching costumes: he's supposed to be Aquaman, but the costume showed too much skin, so he's Batman. The other person – they were going to be a Spider, too, but they change their mind at the last minute because they have the perfect costume for a member of the Fantastic Four.
Later that evening, she gets sick from eating too many sweets, and the Fantastic Four costume is ruined.
"It's all right, sweetheart," the other person says. "Let's just get this cleaned up, shall we?"
He nods and gets the Bat-Mop.
For lack of anything else to do, he goes back to work the next day: the world must go on, even if the things are still there. Not that any of the students have come back, of course: he didn't really expect them to. He goes back to his research.
There's a knock on his door. Good grief, he can't even get a break in the apocalypse.
"Come in."
The man who enters is stiff, muscled, with short cropped white hair and an eyepatch; a military man of some kind, with a stiff, formal walk and a couple of bodyguards. Not the kind of guy that he normally has in his office, but then this isn't exactly a normal day.
"Professor Kujo," says the officer. He has a vague but distinguishable German accent. "My name is General Rudol von Stroheim. I need to speak to you about something. In confidentiality."
He gestures towards the seat in front of him. "Be my guest."
Stroheim sits tensely, leaning forward and staring at him for a while; at last, the officer pulls out a phone from a pocket. "I need you to identify this creature for me."
With that, Stroheim turns the phone towards him, and he sees a blurry black-grey shape in whitish mists.
"That's not enough to go on," he grunts. "Even if it was, it wouldn't be useful to you anyway; it wouldn't tell you where the thing had come from."
"How do you know we needed to know that?"
He rolls his eyes. "Because everyone wants to know that. That and, 'are they dangerous'."
Stroheim snorts. "You're goddamn right about that part, at least. Everyone and his mother is terrified they'll zap us to kingdom come. Confidentially speaking, that is."
"Of course."
"So…" Stroheim stands again. "You can't identify it? I suppose I'll have to go to your rival, then, won't I."
"You could," he agrees, evenly. "But Dio Brando couldn't help you with this either. If you want my advice, you should ask someone to come with you. To help in the identification process."
Stroheim snorts. "And that would be you, of course. Well, Professor Kujo, I won't take up any more of your time."
"Indeed. And – General Stroheim?"
Stroheim turns at the door. "What?"
"Before you make your decision, ask Professor Brando which species he would classify a Portuguese Man-o-War as."
"Portuguese Man-O-War?"
"Mm. Oh, and do me a favour and call him a neoclinus blanchardi for me, will you?"
"I'm not your errand-boy, Kujo," sniffs Stroheim.
He goes back to looking at papers. "Trust me. It'll be very… enlightening."
She tags him quickly, sprinting away across the grass. "You're it!"
"I'm coming to get you!"
"Not if you can't catch me!"
He hears footsteps running behind him and turns around suddenly, but the other person is too fast for him; before he can see their face, the other person is putting their hands over his eyes.
"Gotcha. Guess who?" they tease. "I won't let go until you've guessed."
He feels himself smile under their hands, and twists around suddenly to put his mouth against theirs, his eyes shut tight. They kiss him back, their mouth lower than his but stretching up to reach: that's a good enough guess for him, at least.
"Ew, gross!" She's standing there in front of the two of them, wrinkling her nose and sticking out her tongue. "I don't wanna see that!"
He untangles himself from the other person's hold and walks towards her, holding out his hands. "Come here, you. You get a kiss, too."
She snorts. "As if. You're still it, remember?"
He laughs aloud, the sound echoing through the fields. "All right, but I'm warning you, you won't get very far!"
He spends the evening at home, as usual; the TV shows the same news stories it was showing yesterday, with no development on what, or who, has come to visit the Earth. At last, he turns it off with a sigh.
As if on cue, a helicopter passes low over the house, and – wait, is it landing? Here? Shit. He goes out to meet them. General Stroheim looks pissed.
"Jellyfish," Stroheim grunts at him. "And I suppose you're here to tell me that's wrong."
"The Portuguese Man-O-War," he replies, "is a siphonophore, a colonial organism made of specialised individuals that happens to look a lot like a jellyfish."
"Asshole," says General Stroheim. "You knew he couldn't do it and you knew he'd flip out at me accidentally calling him a 'sarcastic fringehead'. That's the last time I trust a scientist."
He folds his arms. "Well, looks like you might have to break that promise, Stroheim, because someone needs to identify that creature. Isn't that why you've come?"
"Damn you." Stroheim shakes his head. "Yes, but we don't have much time. You have five minutes to pack."
"Give me ten."
Stroheim grunts. He takes fifteen minutes.
"I'm going out, Papa," she says. "With some friends."
"Which friends?"
"Narcy. Herm. You know, the usual."
He gives her a stern look. "How late are you planning on staying out?"
She shrugs. "We'll see. If Herm invites me to stay the night, I'll call you, right?"
"Promise?"
She nods. "I promise."
"And if you feel bad about anything –" He gestures to the phone. "You can call and have us pick you up at any time, all right?"
She smiles again, a little more guarded than she was before puberty hit, but nods. "I will. Thanks, Pops. See ya."
"Bye, sweetie. Love you." The door clicks closed behind her.
Stroheim growls at him as he gets on the plane with his bag. "Took you long enough."
He shrugs and finds a seat. "I needed some notebooks that were hard to find."
Stroheim frowns, then gestures at the helicopter's only other passenger, a red-haired man about his own age with violet eyes and cherry-shaped earrings sitting in the row ahead of him.
"This is Professor Noriaki Kakyoin. Our cunning linguist."
"Excuse me?"
Kakyoin gives a small cough and pushes up his glasses. "General, I would much rather you didn't call me that. Just because I'm an expert in the field of linguistics…" The helicopter begins to take off, and he can't hear anything else. Kakyoin gestures for him to put on the headphones; he obeys and hears Stroheim's voice whining through the speakers.
"Come on, don't you get it?"
Kakyoin rolls his eyes - there's a unique pair of parallel scars bisecting them, and Jotaro wonders what kind of trouble an unassuming man like Kakyoin might have got into for marks like that – and shrugs. "I've heard it a million times before, that's all. Anyway –" Kakyoin's gaze turns back to him – "I haven't heard your name yet, Mister –"
"Kujo." He stretches out his hand. "Professor Jotaro Kujo. Marine biologist. Just Jotaro is fine, if you want."
Kakyoin nods and turns in his seat to take Jotaro's hand. "It's nice to meet you, Jotaro. That's an interesting bracelet."
The plain metal bracelet with its single simple inscription jingles, and Jotaro withdraws his hand. "It's… an heirloom."
The 'cunning linguist' smiles. "So, anyway. What's a marine biologist doing on an expedition like this, huh? You could be at home spending the apocalypse with your family."
"No, thanks." He frowns. "What's a linguist doing on a trip like this, huh?"
"Don't avoid my question with another question. It's not cute." Kakyoin tucks a long, stray lock of hair behind their ear. "To answer your question, that idiot –" he gestures to Stroheim – "thought I could translate an alien language just by listening to one fragmented recording out of context. He was wrong, so I'm coming to try and communicate with them properly."
"You too?" he grins. "Seems like the military overestimates scientists' capabilities all across the board, doesn't it?"
Kakyoin snorts. "You still haven't told me why you're here."
"He thinks I can help identify the creature and tell them whether it's a threat or not just by a picture. As if I could even come close to understanding a new species without extensive study and research." Jotaro rolls his eyes. "So, yeah. Pretty much the same as you."
The 'cunning linguist' grins at him. "Brilliant. Why don't we be friends?"