Chapter Text
“Jojo, dear! Wake up, it’s time to get ready for school!” Jotaro’s mom, Holly, called out to her son’s bedroom.
As if on cue, the wooden and paper door of the Japanese home slid open to reveal the already fully dressed, giant 6’5” 17-year-old known by all his friends and family as Jojo.
“Yare yare daze; you couldn’t have waited a few more minutes, I was brushing my hair.” Jojo’s almost bored voice called back to his mother.
But Holly, ever the optimistic woman, didn’t mind her son’s negativity. Despite his stature, he was still a growing, maturing teenager. Although she hoped her son wouldn’t get any taller.
“Have any plans for after school today, dear?”
Aside from the sound of sizzling bacon and wind chimes outside, there was silence.
“Nervous for the new school year, Jotaro?”
Jojo nodded passively. As brutish as he appeared, he was really a soft and nervous guy at heart.
“Oh, don’t forget, your Jiji is coming to visit us in a month. Make sure to give him the same respect you’d give anyone else.” Holly chirped, clearly excited to see her father.
“So beaten into the ground without mercy?” Jojo smiled, grabbing his bowl and chopsticks off the highest shelf.
“Jotaro! Don’t you even think about fighting your Jiji! I don’t want either of you going to jail again!”
Jojo smiled but didn’t say anything. He loved his mother and grandfather and would give his life to save them, but he’d never say it out loud. He had a reputation to uphold.
Grabbing his backpack, Jojo headed to the bus. He was used to people staring at him as he walked, usually either because he was so tall or they wanted to fight. He was unfortunately also used to teenage girls at his school gawking at him and offering to walk with him, talk with him, sit with him at lunch, walk him home, etc.
His first class was Literature, no big deal. Jojo was smart enough to breeze through many of his classes with little to no effort, considering he had never really met his academic equal.
As he sat in the too-small chair, leaning against his too-small desk, he noticed an unfamiliar mop of wavy white hair sitting a few desks in front of him. Jojo tried to get a look at this new students face, as he surely didn’t recognize him. To his dismay, this new student stayed facing forward the whole class. Jojo sighed, it was probably all for the better anyway. He was sure this new student was probably stuck up and a know-it-all. It would be fun bringing them down.
After the class as everyone was packing up to leave, Jojo noticed a surprising absence of high school girls hanging around him, begging to walk him to his next class. Not that he disliked the silence, but he realized very quickly why this was the case.
“Oh, Atticus! Would you like me to hold your bag?”
“Hey stay away, I saw him first!”
Jojo looked up to see that all the girls were flocking to the new, arguably handsome student with the white hair. Now that they were all standing, Jojo could get a clear look at his new rival.
The student was tall, maybe around 5’11”, which was quite tall in Japan, although that didn’t matter since the student was very much not Japanese, with almost translucent alabaster skin and curly white hair. He had a swimmer’s body, with broad shoulders and a lean torso, although he seemed almost curvaceous at the hips. That may have been part of Jojo’s imagination, though. He didn’t seem that out of place from the rest of the students, in his black uniform and accompanying shoes, but there was something about him that made all the girls fawn over him.
And for the first time in a while, Jojo was jealous of someone else.
The rest of the day went about the same. Jojo breezed through his classes, although when he stopped during lunch to survey the area, he noticed the new student, Atticus, looking like he was trying to hide from something. He thought it was funny. Upon spotting him, Atticus gave Jojo a friendly wave, which only served to surprise the taller man, as he was truly expecting Atticus to be a stuck up prick.
At the end of the day, as everyone packed up to leave, Jojo spotted Atticus walking towards one of the bus stops, chatting with a very attractive girl. There was something about the sight that angered him. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something in him that wanted to be where the girl was right now; to be the one receiving attention from this handsome new student. Jojo suddenly felt lonely, and in a surge of frustration, felt something almost cosmic leave his body. It felt like his spirit decided to up and leave him, leaving a feeling of near emptiness inside. For just a second, Jojo saw a male-like figure rush towards the girl and fling her into oncoming traffic. The sound her bones made when she hit the ground would terrify Jojo for months to come.
He could hear Atticus screaming, but Jojo was frozen still, his already frigid posture becoming stonelike as he tried to get a grasp on what he has just seen, no, what he had just done. He hadn’t done that, right? He was just standing there; something else made her fly into those trucks… right?
He crossed his large arms defensively as he realized that there must’ve been other people to see the accident. Sure enough, there was a crowd of morbidly curious onlookers, including Atticus, who was leaning against a wall, trying to regain his breath.
In a sweep of confidence and a little bit of horniness, Jojo figured this would be the right time to speak to Atticus.
“I take it you’re not from around here.” Jojo deadpanned to the other teenager.
Atticus whipped his head around and stared Jojo dead in the eyes, as if not noticing his presence before.
“Huh? What, Who- Oh, you, you’re from my Literature class, right?” Atticus gasped, his breath slowing.
“Yeah, I am. I’m Jojo. You’re Atticus, right?”
Atticus raised an eyebrow, looking up at Jojo’s stoic face. “Yeah, I am. How do you know that, though?”
Jojo’s brain froze for a second. Shit, how would he explain that he had been more or less spying on Atticus throughout the day?
“Uhhh…”
Very smooth, Jotaro.
Atticus side-eyed him with a glare. It was obvious that Jotaro wasn’t about to be praised with a shining smile.
“Well, I’m not just going to stand around and get interviewed by some weirdo. See you tomorrow!” Atticus huffed before grabbing his backpack and storming off.
Jotaro blew it. His one chance to introduce himself to the handsome new student and he made himself look like an idiot.
On his way home, Jotaro was flocked by the usual gaggle of high school girls, but this time felt even more useless than the last. He knew that if he really wanted to he could get with any of the girls at his school, but he never felt the need to. He probably wasn’t gay, at least to the extent that he had never had any real sexual thoughts about another man. But there was something about seeing the new student, Atticus, that purged any previously heterosexual thoughts from his mind.
As Jotaro unlocked the door to his home, he felt something slightly strange. He could hear his mother through the door, humming to herself as she did when she was alone; and she often was. Jotaro’s father was never at home, always touring with his jazz band, and since Jojo was doing his best to keep up with his schoolwork, that meant his mother was always left at home all day. Jojo could tell that the loneliness was getting to his normally cheery mom, who always made sure to mask everything with a smile. No wonder Jotaro was the way he was; he masked his feelings with an almost stereotypical sense of stoic manliness, while his mother made sure she never appeared unhappy.
“Oh, Jotaro, I didn’t hear you come in!” His mother called from across the kitchen. She was hunched over a counter, scrubbing away at an already clean tile.
“Just cleaning the house up before your Jiji gets here!” She huffed, wringing the sponge out into a bucket.
“Yare yare daze, Mom, the old man isn’t coming for a month, you don’t have to clean everything now.”
“I know,” Holly blushed, “But I want to make sure that my father, who traveled half-way around the world to see us, has a nice time.”
Jojo smiled quickly and retreated back into his usual dark humor. “Well, mom, if you really want the house to be spotless, you should clean my room too!”
Holly whipped around and punched Jojo once lightly on his giant chest. “Jotaro Kujo, if you want your room cleaned so badly, you can do it yourself! I’m not letting you have any friends over until that room is spotless!”
“You’re going to tell me that I’m almost a grown man and that I should be all caught up on these skills already, right?”
“And you should’ve caught up on these skills already, you’re almost a grown man!” Holly continued until she realized Jotaro had used the Joestar Prediction Technique™, “Jojo, don’t use my own father’s technique on me! Do you know how hard it was to do anything with a father that could predict your every move!”
Jotaro apologized between tiny giggles and sat down at the dining room table. At school, he always felt like he had to uphold his super-macho-no-care-bad-boy attitude, but at home with his mother, he felt like he could truly relax. He took his homework out of his backpack and started working.
As time went on and the sun’s orange rays shone through the paper doors, Jojo picked up his head from rigorous studying to see his mom setting a hearty steaming bento box next to his scattered papers. She kissed him gently on the temple and went back into the kitchen to prepare her own dinner. Absentmindedly, Jojo began downing his dinner as he read over his notes from Mathematics.
“Jotaro!”
He looked up, chopsticks in his mouth, to see his mother holding her own dinner.
“You’re supposed to wait for your mother, silly boy. Do you like it at least?”
Jotaro nodded happily, mouth full of food, before setting his chopsticks back down.
“Hey, Mom, how did you know you liked Dad?”
Holly stopped eating and stared at the table for a moment. “Well, your father and I met nearly a quarter of a decade ago. Let’s see, I believe it was on one of your Jiji’s business trips that he decided to take me and your grandmother along to see the sights in Japan.”
“Were they nice?”
“Oh, yes. He took us to so many restaurants I thought noodles would come spilling out of my ears!” Holly chuckled, obviously remembering some good times.
Jotaro smiled as he watched his mother remembering her past. He almost envied her, the daughter of a wealthy businessman who took her everywhere in the world. To be fair, it wasn’t that Jotaro’s family wasn’t rich (they very much were, mostly thanks to his grandfather), but with his father gone all the time, he and his mother never had time to take any trips of their own.
“But then your Jiji took my mother and I to a jazz club, which is when I saw him,” Holly continued, “He was playing the saxophone up on stage and I thought he was just so handsome! I introduced myself, and now here we are.”
“Eating dinner without him.”
Holly’s face softened and she looked almost sad. Jotaro kicked himself for bringing that up. He didn’t want his mother to become any more sad than she already was.
“Oh, by the way, what made you ask, dear? Have you finally met a nice girl?”
Jotaro quickly resumed eating, hopefully with a mouth full of rice he wouldn’t have to respond.
“Is she cute?”
Jotaro shoveled his food in faster.
“Are they a boy?”
Jotaro choked on his rice, both because of the question and because he opened his mouth to breath while still eating.
After a bit of coughing into his elbow, he made eye level with his mother.
“What makes you say that?” Jojo cautiously asked. He technically wasn’t “out” to his mother; although to be fair, he wasn’t out to himself either.
“Well, I remember back when you were a… back when you were little, you had a crush on a man from one of my fashion magazines. You thought he was so cute, it was adorable.”
Jotaro grimaced and ran his fingers through his hair. “That was a long time ago.”
Holly shrugged and put her hands up in a pseudo-defensive stance. “It’s not my place to judge, Jojo. You’re my son and I love you, no matter who you love or how you see yourself.”
Jojo put his hands over his face, trying to cover his surely reddened cheeks and slowly wettening eyes from his mother. He felt his mother's arms rest on his shoulders. When she got up from her chair, he didn’t know, but he was glad for the maternal comfort she brought.
“So, are they a boy?” Jojo’s mother asked, rubbing her son’s very broad shoulders, “You know it doesn’t matter to me who you like. I just want you to be happy.”
Jojo nodded but kept his hands over his face. He didn’t want to show his mother that he was crying, but a small whimper escaped his throat, alerting his mother to how he felt.
The rubbing of his shoulders continued and it was enough to prompt Jotaro to take his hands off his face, exposing a lip-trembling, tear-stained visage, which was only amplified by Jojo’s shaky breathing.
“Oh my son, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize you’d be this upset,” Holly gasped, cupping Jotaro’s chiseled face in her petite hands, “We could go back to just eating, if you’d like.”
Jotaro looked up at his mom’s kind, warm face and genuinely smiled, something he was not used to doing. “No, I’m sorry, Mom, I just got a little caught up in my emotions.”
Holly chuckled. “Yeah, you don’t usually do that. But I’m glad you were able to tell me that you’re gay. It’s taken the weight off of me trying to find you a nice girl.”
Jotaro’s head shot up at his mother’s words. “Wait, no! I’m not… I’m not gay! At least I don’t think I am. I mean, I like girls, there are lots of pretty ones at my school!”
“And how many of them would you actually seriously consider dating?”
Jojo stopped to think. His mom was right. There had only been a few girls in his life that he ever liked, but there wasn’t really any at his school that he had seen that had really interested him. The only person to truly make him feel something was the new student, Atticus.
“You’re taking long enough to think,” Holly stated, placing a hand on her hip, “It’s alright if you’re gay, Jotaro. I won’t treat you any differently, and your father… well… he won’t really be around enough to ask…”
Jotaro thought over his mother’s words. It could be possible that he was gay. But he had liked girls before. Could there be a middle ground?
“Hey, mom?”
“Yes?” Holly replied as she started to clear the table of Jotaro’s schoolwork.
“Is there… is there a way I could be both gay and straight? I mean, I do like girls, and there was that incident with the magazine guy and… today…”
Holly stopped cleaning and thought for a moment. “Well, after you were born and your Jiji came to see us, I remember him saying that he had learned a term at a club in New York City. Apparently, people who like both men and women are called “Bisexual”.”
Jotaro thought it over for a moment and crossed his arms. “Makes sense.” Holly could already see her sensitive son slipping back into his macho persona.
Holly giggled happily. “Hey Jotaro, wanna talk about boys? I want to hear all about whoever was so cute that you saw that you were this emotional.”
Jojo instinctively went to tilt his hat down to cover his eyes, only to forget that he had taken it off before eating.
“Maybe later. I want to finish my homework and then do some reading. In my room.”
Holly smiled as her son packed up his things, cradling a mountain of papers and his backpack on his giant biceps and forearms. She loved her son, even if he hadn’t always been that way.