Disclaimer: I don't own Horton Hears a Who.
A/N: I had to write another one of these stories though this is a bit of a ramble, I needed to get this thought out of my head so I could start thinking up actual plots. In any case I hope you enjoy it. A little insight on Jojo.
The who man was his father.
The who man was also the mayor.
Most people would think this made his first child something special, and they would prance the title around with pride, next in line to be the mayor! But Ned's first and only son, Jojo, did not feel that way.
In fact he had still been pretty young when his father first mentioned it and hadn't thought much of it then but in the next year the mentioning had become repetitive-
It would be at dinner with his twelve sisters and at breakfast when he was trying to eat his green eggs that the current mayor would just start… talking.
"Your going to be the mayor." Jojo would open his mouth to speak and his father would just blurt on oblivious to his son's opinion. "Your going to make me so proud!" His dad had his mind wrapped around his son's set future and couldn't consider what the young who boy had to say.
So Jojo tried less and less to say it…
It didn't take long for him to find his knack. It started out small like fixing his sister's broken toys. He didn't know if his parents ever wondered why the little girls came complaining to them less and less as he fixed their problems more and more.
Then it was on to inventing new things. When things broke people threw them out and he gathered the pieces and scampered up to his room. He would throw the remains of no longer functional items onto his floor with a series of clangs and soft thuds that inspired him as nothing else could to create new things and find new sounds in his surroundings.
Each item would have it's own sound, sometimes multiple sounds and Jojo would test each way to find it. Taking things apart and putting them back together till they sounded just right. It had only been small devices then, flutes and whistles like he saw in the stores in town but they soon grow into something far more elaborate.
His father had come up one day when curiosity had him follow the noise. It must have been puzzling to find his son sitting among a pile of rubbish with this huge smile on his face when he came in.
The smile might have gotten smaller but didn't vanish. Jojo had been willing to share with his father, to let him know what he was interested in. He didn't think his father quite understood what he was trying to show him by blowing into the whistle he made though.
"That's neat… Jojo? But you should practice your mayoral skills get out and talk to the whos! Meet and greet the citizens of our lovely town!" Ned ruffled his son's hair messily and chirped up "but now I got mayoral duties to perform!" and he would rush off, nearly tripping over the first step of the stairs in his haste.
So… his father was only interested in him being the mayor?
He humored Jojo's interest but wasn't amazed by it in any sense, he thought he should be talking to the citizens of Who Ville instead of inventing? Well his father just couldn't understand that he wasn't interested in doing what he wanted him to do.
He wished he could just say it but his father was always expecting great things from him, he didn't want to crush his father's wishes.
He couldn't stop inventing either though… it brought him enjoyment where he couldn't find it otherwise. He just have to do so in secret then and not let anything slip that would let his father know.
Now where could he keep his many sisters from stumbling in?
Jojo didn't know when it occurred to him.
He had trudged behind his father one day into town so Ned could perform his 'mayoral duties' so his father had been chatting away with someone and he had been zoning out.
Who Ville was really loud, how could anyone here hear anyone else with all these disturbing sounds?
A conversation had caught his attention that day someone had mentioned the abandoned observatory…
His eyes drifted toward the hill, it was far away and high enough that the sounds of the noisy town shouldn't carry. A small smile began to creep up on his features-- that was perfect. No one would check there, after all there was supposedly no way to get up there.
"Hey, Jojo-"
He waved his hand half-hearted at his father.
That very night he discovered the tree next to his window that made it easy to sneak out, unnoticed, in the middle of the night.
In no time at all he devised a device to take him up to the observatory so everyday he would humor his father by standing by when he blabbed on about being the mayor… In any case he only had to listen for a few seconds or so. Then every night he would sneak out to work on his inventions.
More siblings meant the less attention his parents would pay to him.
They never noticed him leaving in the middle of the night or sometimes coming home in the early hours of the morning. They probably never even noticed that he looked tired after a full night of 'sleep' when his father was rambling on at breakfast.
They never forced him to speak but he wasn't sure if that was because they respected his silence. One day he remembered overhearing his mother tell his father when he mentioned it one day, that "Jojo is just going through a stage. It'll pass."
His father was always busy being mayor and his mother with his ninety something sisters… so he was busy causing items to go missing though they never commented on it when they saw him walk past with a bundle in his arms. With their big family did they ever have time to question? Not really. It wasn't like they could really look into his reasons with such scarce free moments, so he didn't blame them for this fact.
His parents might have been clueless but even so he couldn't hate them for it. He could refuse to speak, but he couldn't refuse to listen. It was to the hope that one day they would suddenly understand so he could speak again, he wanted to be listening--
when they finally caught on.
A/N: Well… You guess should wait for me to write another story and tell me what you think of this one in the mean time.