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[lapidarius]

"This is Kakyoin Noriaki. Please leave a message, I'll contact you as soon as I can."

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Comments

4/2

[silvercrusader]

[Kakyoin has been here for-- what, nine months, now? That's plenty of time for him to accumulate a wardrobe, never mind a boatload of earrings. Versus Polnareff's only been here for less than a month, with nothing but the clothes on his back and the kindness of others to keep him dressed. It's awful, is what it is, and so no one ought to blame him for what he does that morning.

And hey! He leaves a note. More accurately, he writes a message in the mirror's steam, ready to be read whenever Kakyoin takes a shower.

took your earrings
assume thats okay
if not i have them anyway so

-jpp]

text;

[lapidarius]

[oh my god.]

[AGAIN WITH THIS. Kakyoin thought he would have learned somewhere along the line that this was Uncalled For. So, angrily typing out a message with one hand while putting on Polnareff's own earrings with the other (as a matter of PRINCIPLE), an acknowledgement of the message would eventually come:]

YOU HAVE YOUR OWN EARRINGS

WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS

4/4, Very Late

[digiorno]

Kakyoin? Are you awake?

sleep's for losers

[lapidarius]

Yeah, I'm downstairs in the library. Is everything okay?

4/6

[silvercrusader]

GUESS WHAT I TAUGHT STAR TO DO

[lapidarius]

[!!!!!]

WHAT

4/10, ass o'clock in the morning

[mylegacy]

[Kakyoin is a good kid. He doesn't deserve this. And Caesar does actually consider not sending it to him at all, but it's on his mind, so . . .]

[So.]

[So he types out a whole thing about what happened and how he's trying to decide whether to panic or not and deciding whether or not to panic is making him panic and yes, it's after two in the morning, but they should go for a walk or train or something, and on and on for about fifteen texts.]

[Then he deletes all of it and sends Kakyoin a bunch of chart attachments instead — all Italian, of course. Counting to 100, common greeting phrases, and a massive number of grammar rules, including for definite and indefinite articles, noun declensions, noun plurals, adjective inflection, pronouns, verb conjugations in present tense, prepositions, and word order.]

[. . . Happy fuckoff o'clock in the morning, Kakyoin. You entered into this willingly.]

[lapidarius]

[Luckily, Kakyoin was in fact awake at fuckoff o'clock AM. This particular morning-by-definition-only found him in the kitchen with a cup of coffee. And luckily he already had a notebook, so he didn't have to go far to find something to copy that down.]

[Which he did, handing the watch to Hierophant in the process. That way he could write and work out a response at the same time.]

Thanks. I'm copying it over right now.

Can't sleep?

WHO KNOWS but certainly pre-event

[starmark]

Would you still love me if I got a tattoo?

[lapidarius]

What, did you get jealous of Jolyne's?

shortly after the truth event uwu

[digiorno]

noriaki

your favorite color is green right

that's not just misdirection?

/clicks seatbelt

[lapidarius]

no, that's correct

why are you asking?

[silvercrusader]

hey noooooooooooooriaki
i have a question for you

[lapidarius]

What is it? And why do you keep insisting on text when my room is barely a few meters away?

STAR TEXTINUM | THIS IS YOUR 2000TH COMMENT

[starmark]

hi





pudding

I CAN THINK OF NO ONE WHO DESERVES IT MORE THAN STAR

[lapidarius]

[what]

...Giorno?

let's get wrecking that cake and kitchen tbh 1/??

[nextlineis]

kakyoin i need your help with something

2/??

[nextlineis]

well i dont know if you can help me but you spend a lot of time with holly right???

5/10 or so

[starmark]

I need to ask you something kind of weird.

[lapidarius]

Okay, sure. Go ahead and ask, I won't laugh.

action;

[silvercrusader]

[The best thing about this city is undoubtedly the use of text messages. He loves texting. And honestly, if this were Jotaro, he would have this conversation by text; he quite likes having their conversations by text, if only because he can think longer about his responses.

But it's not Jotaro, it's Kakyoin-- and for once, Polnareff is actually seeking out his advice.

It's late-- so late it's going to be morning soon, if he's not careful. He actually was going to wait until morning, but he came down to the kitchen for some soda and lo and behold, he wasn't the only one awake.]

Hey.

[A little smile, but he looks distracted.]

You get any sleep tonight?

action;

[lapidarius]

A little. Enough, I guess.

[In the absence of the pajamas Kakyoin had apparently been the only one with the foresight to bring on a trip to Egypt, he wore loose-fitting pants and a wide-collared black shirt with short sleeves--the latter of which was pulled a little closer around his shoulders to avoid an awkward conversation.]

[Not that he really expected Polnareff's observational skills to notice much in the way of scars, but so it went. Kakyoin pushed his glasses back into place before curling both hands around his cup of coffee, wondering if anyone ever slept in this house.]

Something wrong?

[silvercrusader]

hey so thanks for that japanese pickup line by the way holly was really flattered

[lapidarius]

YOU WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO SAY IT TO MISS HOLLY

WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME

Time Remains Fake

[digiorno]

noriakiiiiiiiii

[lapidarius]

yes, giornoooooooooo

what can i do for you

text; sometime post event probably idfk

[whatitis]

surprise, buddy, you've been "Randomly" "Selected" to do some "Exercises" for "Science"! and by "Exercises" i mean "Science"; and by "Science" i mean "Can You Let Me Look At Hierophant Again Please And Thank You".

a separate invitation for your friend in the tentacles:

[It appears to be a low-res image of a common garden snake, moved to be in the shape of a figure eight. Some new breakthroughs in the study of How Stands Communicate have taken place, evidently.]

time sounds fake to me

[lapidarius]

heaven forbid i should inhibit the natural path of science

name a place and time, we'll be there

you guessed it: shortly after the Dress Adventure

[starmark]

[He takes a little while on his own to think about This. This, with a capital "T", because the more he lingers on it the more he realizes that he really does need to think about it at length; the more he figures out only seems to illuminate how much more he still has yet to consider. Talking it out with Giorno had set him on the right track, but he knows full well that there's a goodly distance of it that he's going to have to traverse alone, and so he gives himself the space and the time to do precisely that.

It's fortunate that his office at the toy store is perfect for that kind of contemplation: it's cool and dark and quiet, and in a place like this no one has the authority to bother him. (People still can bother him, of course, but it's less about the physical reality and more about the significance; the office is His, the way that the subject on his mind is a Thing, and that makes it well suited to This because of it.)

There's a pattern to This — or at least, there's two points from which he can find the slope of a line. Giorno in his nightwear had set him off-guard like this, once; he remembers his reaction had been to hand over his gakuran silently. Kakyoin in his dress, now, had done similarly. And at first blush, the sensation he'd felt in both instances was a desire, on some level, to get away from it — to alleviate matters by having Giorno cover up, or by being left spinning around in the dead space within the perimeter constructed of Kakyoin's feelings.

He takes some time to think about the path he's been on. How far he's come, how much he's walked it since that day on the beach when he'd closed his eyes and pleaded with Giorno to let him keep fighting because he'd started believing there was a better person waiting for him on the other side of that fight. And the first steps of that had been learning how not to feel bad, how to take care of himself, how to transition slowly into an existence where his baseline is quiet satisfaction instead of simmering misery.

He keeps trying to articulate this new feeling, keeps coming up with "weird but not bad". The "not bad" is obligatory, the necessary clarification that he's not seeking to hurt anyone's feelings, because he isn't. But if that weren't a consideration at all...then his kneejerk reaction would be to say "bad", and he doesn't know why that is.

Because...really, it isn't bad. It's just different. And maybe he's afraid of that, he reflects at length. Maybe he's afraid of different because he's happy with the same, and different might be better but it could also be worse and he doesn't want to backslide into worse again.

This is a lot of thinking going into the sight of his boyfriend in a dress. But it's important, so he keeps after it.

But Giorno had pointed out that it's also new. "New" gives him context for comparison, lets him think about other times he's experienced new things and what his reactions have been to those. New and different, weird but not bad — isn't that roughly how it'd felt when he'd been trying to work out his thoughts on accepting Kakyoin's confession at all? He'd never once doubted that the feelings were there, had been able to promise that at some point an acceptance would come. Why had he needed that period of hesitation?

Was it just because it was new?

Different and weird, but not bad. Unbalanced. Like that feeling of falling, the moment after you trip but right before you right yourself.

And maybe — there was something else Giorno had said, too, that made him think. Maybe...maybe it's a question of assimilation. He has context for that, too, and plenty of it: how he reacted to Star Platinum at first but now lives in natural symbiosis with his Stand; how he had to deal with the sudden upset of Kakyoin being alive in this place instead of dead; how he's added family members he never knew he had — an uncle, a brother, a daughter — and that knowledge has changed him, but once he'd learned to harness that knowledge he'd been able to make it a part of him.

Assimilation.

My brother is learning new things today.

But is that so different to what Kakyoin had done by wearing the dress at all, really? Dresses are for girls — he doesn't want to be a girl — then why wear a dress? Because...because a dress is clothes, like love is love, like he doesn't care about Kakyoin being his boyfriend instead of his girlfriend because the point is that he's Kakyoin. Maybe there's no reason to care that a dress is for girls because it's not for girls, it's clothes, it's for whoever puts them on and Kakyoin put it on so it must be for Kakyoin.

Assimilation. If he wants to make wearing whatever he wants a part of who he is, then isn't that his right?

So it's not really about the dress. It's nothing to do with girls and boys or anything in between. It's...it's that moment of "you aren't supposed to" being answered with "why not". Most of the time, he feels like he's pretty good about embracing that, himself. Maybe he's not always as good about it as he thinks he is.

Maybe there's a way he can fix that. Or start to fix it, anyway.

On his way home, he stops and picks up a few things, before heading upstairs to his closet and searching around for a box he knows is there. When he finds it, he retreats to the bathroom and locks himself inside, reminding himself all the while that different isn't the same thing as wrong, and that the best way to understand — for him, usually, anyway — is to explore the experience for himself, on some level.

So he stays in there a while, until he thinks he's ready, and then finds his pocketwatch and sends off a text that makes his stomach coil and squirm — ]


If you have a couple minutes, can you come talk to me about something? In our room.


[ — but he makes himself focus on it, that squirming, and reminds himself to own it. It's not that much different from a fight: either he lets it get the better of him, or he masters it, and of the two he knows which one he's better suited to anyway.]

[lapidarius]

Of course. I'll be right there.

[Which he was--in pants and a shirt this time--completely unaware of any internal conflict. Kakyoin was actually feeling pretty good about the whole thing; from his perspective things had gone much better than expected and he'd looked pretty damn good in the process.]

[So whatever was going on had, for the moment, flown right over his head.]

Hey.

the dress saga part whatever: electric dressaloo

[digiorno]

YOU ARE DATING AN IDIOT

[lapidarius]

i am aware

what happened

you know when

[digiorno]

dear noriaki,

WHAT THE FUCK, NORI, WHAT THE FUCK, WHAT THE FUCK, WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK
WHAT
THE FUCK
EXPLAIN YOURSELF

sincerely,
giorno giovanna
the arbiter of all of your future torments
you ASSHOLE

[lapidarius]

Dear Giorno,

Oh good, you spoke to Fugo.

-ξ◥▶◀◤✧