At 8:45 AM, Jotaro knocked on the door to Room 328 of Morioh General Hospital.
"Josuke? Am I allowed to come in?" he asked, though he might as well never bothered, since he walked right in anyway. The room was filled with balloons and flowers from Josuke's friends and classmates, with little messages saying Get well soon! in various fonts and colors. In the middle of it all was Josuke, laying in the bed with his face hidden behind his hands, making a noise like a slowly deflating balloon. At this point, it was a normal sight for Jotaro to see. It had been five days since Kira's death, and Josuke had been severely injured in the battle. He was admitted into the hospital almost immediately as the situation ended. It was about day three when Cabin Fever, or whatever the hospital equivalent, set in. Jotaro pulled up a stool next to Josuke.
"Good morning."
"I am okay with death now."
"Excuse me?"
"If I died here and now, I would be okay with that." Josuke repeated.
"Don't." Jotaro said in his flat monotone.
"But everything hurts!" Josuke whined, "But everything's also numb an' my legs got pins and needles an' GOD DAMMIT! I just wanna go to the pachinko parlor or play video games with Okuyasu or go to the cafe with Koichi... Y'know normal stuff. Not this BS!"
Jotaro merely folded his arms. It was all that was really needed to get the message across. Josuke knitted his brows together as mumbled something under his breath. Maybe it was sorry, maybe it was jackass. Jotaro stood up and grabbed at his wallet.
"The doctors said you could be released in two more days. You're almost out of here. Then you can do 'normal stuff.'" Jotaro said. He added, "I'm going down to the lobby to get something from the vending machine, you want anything?"
When Josuke shook his head no, Jotaro shrugged and left, not noticing that a piece of paper had slipped from his wallet. But Josuke noticed. He couldn't reach the paper on his own without worry that he might reopen the wound in his gut, so he ended up calling out Crazy Diamond to pick it up. (He was not proud of this at all. Who uses their Stand for mundane things like that?!) Crazy Diamond faded away, leaving the piece of paper in Josuke's hand. Or picture, rather. It was a picture taken with a self-developing camera of five men and a dog standing somewhere in a desert. Josuke immediately recognized Jotaro as the young man standing in the back with his hands in pockets and the corners of his lips suggesting a faint smile, though he failed to piece together the identities of the other four; a shorter man wearing the same uniform as Jotaro, a dark skinned man wearing robes, an older man Josuke guessed to be somewhere in his fifties holding a Boston Terrier, and a young man holding the older man's chin up.
Josuke stared at the picture for a time, long enough for Jotaro to return with a can of coffee. As he saw what his uncle was holding, Jotaro snatched the picture out of Josuke's hand.
"Where did you get this?" he barked.
"You dropped it!" Josuke responded in defense. Jotaro was infamously hard to read, so he wasn't sure if his nephew was actually mad or not. Still, better safe than sorry."I was just curious what it was."
"It's a picture from 1989." Then, low under this breath as if to himself, "Or 1988...? Was it still December when we took this?"
"1989? That's when you defeated that DIO guy, right?"
"M'hm." Jotaro replied. "Just how much do you know about that?"
"Not a lot." Josuke admitted, "I know DIO, or whatever, was bad news. I know he's the reason me an' your mom got sick. He's also the guy Keicho and Kira's Dad got the arrows from. And I know you killed him."
Jotaro took a sip of his coffee before responding with, "Do you want to hear about it?"
The question caught Josuke off guard. Jotaro was not a particularly chatty person, nor was he someone you could pry information from easily. But on the other hand, he was genuinely curious about the events ten years ago, and conversation was an easy escape from his Hospital Fever. He nodded and Jotaro handed the photo back to him and pointed at the young man in the school uniform.
"Noriaki Kakyoin." Jotaro's finger traced up and down the photo as he pointed to each person present. "Jean Pierre Polnareff. The Old Man. Muhammad Avdol. The dog's name was Iggy."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa! That's Mr. Joestar?!" Josuke yelled in disbelief. In his mind he tried to equate the fragile little man he knew with the man in the photo, but just couldn't do it. "Holy crap, he looks so young! What happened?!"
"He got old." Jotaro replied."The Ripple might have something to do with it, though."
"The Ripple?"
"I don't really understand it myself, but it's a power even rarer than Stands. Apparently if you train with it, it can keep you young for a long time."
"I see."
"Where should I start?"
"Huh?"
"Where should I start the story?"
Josuke gave his nephew a look. "The beginning?" Where else would you start? he added in his mind.
Jotaro took a deep breath and began, "That same year I also developed my Stand, though at first I thought it was an evil spirit..."
Now, Jotaro was never a good story teller. He told things in a very blunt, clinical manner, and unless he was directly involved in that particular part of his tale, the details were sparse at best and non-existent at worse. (Joseph's battle with The Empress got the shortest end of the shaft on that front. "Turns out the sore was a Stand," he said. "So the Old Man defeated it.") However, Josuke was nonetheless enthralled by it, and for two simple reasons. The first, was that despite the sparsity of detail, the descriptions of Stands were near perfect. In only one or two sentences Jotaro gave an explanation what a Stand did and what it looked like that paint a pretty good image in Josuke's mind. A yellow slime that could change into anything. A man with the head of a bird that could control fire. A sword that could possess people. Josuke thought about how he would fight them, or who his own Stand could create a deadly combo with, which was entertaining in its own right.
The second reason wasn't as apparent at first, though as Jotaro went on, Josuke noticed it more and more. As Jotaro talked about the other members of the group, something changed in his voice and it took Josuke a moment to figure what it was. It was affection. Be it that he was speaking about Avdol's skill with his Stand, Joseph's constant swearing, Kakyoin's cleverness, or Polnareff's antics, there was genuine affection towards them, making it all the more apparent how upset Jotaro was as they fell one by one, and all the more bittersweet when so too did the vampire fall. Eventually, Jotaro finished, looked at his watch, and stood up.
"I need to get going." he said. "I still need to finish that thesis."
"Hey, thanks. That was kinda cool."
"You're welcome." There was a beat of silence as Jotaro dropped the now empty coffee can in a waste bin in the corner. "I ran into Koichi on his way to school earlier. I think he said he and Okuyasu were going to visit around three."
"Oh, great! And maybe I won't tempted to tear off my own face." Josuke half-sacrastically joked. It seemed that the Hospital Fever had almost immediately sunk back in. Jotaro grabbed the bill of his hat and pulled it down tight.
"Good grief."