Eloquence

In Which Everyone Is a Bit Annoying, Part 2

Kaykoin sprint-wheels Avdol back to the kitchen. There, they find Polnareff looking sheepish, Miss Holly with a confused but unworried expression, Jotaro appearing curious for once in his life, and Mr. Joestar looking utterly livid.

 "Kakyoin," he growls, careful emphasis on every syllable, "what did you do to my grandson?"

"I can explain. Polnareff just took a picture at an awkward moment. Jotaro was modelling for me, since I wanted to practice drawing."

"Drawing, huh. Doesn't drawing usually involve being a lot further away than this?" Joestar thrusts the picture in Kakyoin's face. Kakyoin takes it. 

"I was marking out the pose for next time," Kakyoin states. He glances at the picture, intending to stick it in the nearest candle flame.

But.

The picture... looks really good. Really, really good. Much better than it has any right to. It also looks very bad. Jojo's head is tipped back in relaxation, with Kakyoin's head obscuring the hands placing masking tape near the junction of Jojo's legs. It's easy to see why Joestar got so upset. 

Into the fire it goes, then, or at least that's what Kakyoin tries to do. His hand won't put the photograph near the candle. Instead, it tucks the image away in the breast pocket of his borrowed pajamas. 

He tells himself it's for future reference, so he won't have to put an entire Jojo into place every time he wants to work on the sketch. Jojo is much too big to be casually posed for a five-minute session. 

Joestar turns to his grandson. "Is this true?"

Jojo shrugs. Kakyoin can read in it the easy confirmation - of course it's true, Old Man, if Kakyoin says so - but apparently, Joestar takes the shrug as a refusal to answer. Polnareff speaks up.

"Yeah, that's all that was happening, Mr. Joestar. I thought the same thing you did, when I came in, and since I happened to have the camera in my hand, I just thought, 'why not?' so I could, you know, have some blackmail, but then it turned out that it was just drawing practice. (The drawing's really good, by the way, Kakyoin.) You should see some of what he draws. There's this one of Avdol, right? With Magician's Red, fending off the darkness, and it looks just like it did when it happened, except that he's winning, even though Kakyoin was never even there, but he got the rest of it more right than if you took a picture, and we're lucky he didn't lose any fingers, because then how would he draw anymore?"

There's something very slightly bitter in Polnareff's tone. Kakyoin will have to think about that later. For now, well, Polnareff's explanation seems to have worked well enough, so Kakyoin settles for being grateful in silence. He's got to work on the other drawings now, anyway, since there's no way he's sleeping until the power comes back on.

Kakyoin's instincts were right. The hazy edge of the candlelight is perfect for the image he wants of Magician's Red forging out into nothingness. He draws the darkness as he remembers it, a formless beast that drains life away. Kakyoin is intimately familiar with darkness.

He thinks of the times in the hospital, when darkness was his constant companion. Even the kind nurses who sometimes kept him company seemed to have their voices muffled by the endless night. It seeped into his thoughts, twisting them. He was never going to draw again. He was never going to see anything again. He was never going to enjoy life again. Maybe he should just give up. Maybe, when DIO was gone, Kakyoin should be too. Maybe before. It's not like Kakyoin was doing anything useful, languishing in darkness that smelled of chemicals. Kakyoin drags his pencil lightly across the outline of this feeling. It has no power over him now, and he can look at it without fear.

Eventually, Kakyoin's sight returned, blurry and  faded and painful. The darkness was broken. Jojo helped, afterward, probably more than he knew. He always managed to smell like warmth, like the ocean, like light. Kakyoin watched every motion, read them more easily than ever. Jojo was an anchor. He dragged Kakyoin away from the darkness.

Kakyoin draws that too, the shimmering return of life, at the edges of Magician's Red's fire. He holds up the drawing, examining it from different angles.

It's perfect. It has exactly the energy he'd imagined when he'd first begun drawing it after DIO's defeat.

Kakyoin knows in that moment that the nightmare of blindness has ended.