The world is really a small place
- Hey, Caesar. I was wondering…-, Jonathan started to say.
- Yes?-, Caesar answered, taken by surprise.
He wasn't expecting to be called out like that; it made him wonder what he elder Joestar wanted to tell him.
- You know, I once met a Zeppeli in one of my travels-, the man started.
- I had to go to Rome for a conference, but I had decided, with my colleagues, to make some brief stops during our travel whenever we arrived to some interesting place. We arrived in… I think it was called Liguria-, he continued, and Caesar had to fight the urge to laugh at that terrible pronunciation, but he managed to remain serious.
Everyone he had spoken to had had probably the same urge with his English – which, by the way, wasn't actually that bad- so he wasn't going to judge.
- There we met this good man. He was a fisherman and he owned a boat. We spoke a bit with him and he made us hop in and he took us on a tour of the isles-, Jonathan finished.
- Oh, I see-, Caesar said.
Well, his grandfather did start as a simple fisherman, before he founded his own company, and he lived in Liguria, but Caesar wasn't still completely sure it was him the one Jonathan was talking about.
- Do you remember how he looked like? His name?-, he asked.
- He must've been on his forties at the time. He had blue eyes and dark hair. His name was… William, if I remember correctly-.
Oh, that really was his grandfather.
Who could have thought that he and Jonathan had met before?
The world was really a small place, as they say.
- It's him-, he said, - It's my grandfather-.
- Oh-, Jonathan replied, surprised to hear that, but not displeased.
- Really? And how is he doing?-, he also asked.
- Well…-, Caesar started, looking away from him.
- Now he lives with us-, he said, - He's old, and the death of my grandma didn't do any good to him, but he's managing-.
"We're trying our best to help him" he wanted to say but didn't.
Maybe it should have been better to say "everyone but me is doing their best to help him".
He had never forgiven him for the little attention he had given to them.
Now that he was older and more mature he knew that, whatever his grandfather had done while apparently ignoring his family, he always did it for them, to make them live a more than decent life, but he was also aware than now it was too late to try to make peace with him.
It was pretty obvious that the old man was going to die very soon, but now he didn't want to think about that.
Thankfully Joseph finally arrived with his typical cheerfulness, even though he was usually a bit grumpier in the morning – but he never arrived at Caesar's level of "morning grumpiness".
He managed to make the guy temporarily forget about the problems he had left in Italy, but deep down he knew that, sooner or later, he would have had to face them.
Author's notes: what is this, you may ask. This is a random idea that I got at university, but since it was too late to add it in the main fanfiction, I decided to put it here.
Since Jonathan and William know each other in the original series, I thought it would have been cool to make them know each other here too.
Oh, also Liguria is an Italian region from which the Zeppelis are from (Genova is in Liguria).