all-american :: jotaro x reader

piece one :: behind us

She didn't want to be here.

With every single fiber of her being, every breath she took, every single skin cell wanted to be at home watching cartoons. Scrubbing the windows, even, licking the toilet just to get out of this place and return to a normal life.

The metal architecture, the people, the look of sorrow on her mother's face and the odd amount of joy on her father's - it caused a steady stream of tears and snot come running out of her face, even though she was well over too old for her to be crying in such a manner.

Airports were a new and rare experience for her, one she never hoped she'd encounter. Her classmates talked of riding airplanes to the far corners of Hokkaido or over to China, but now she was leaving. Escaping from Japan to a new place called America.

Her dad happily slung their bags onto the metal scales the airlines required them to, her mother wiping at tears of sadness, unbeknownst to the girl she hadn't even gotten to say a proper farewell to her own parents other than a simple phone call.

The girl whined and cried, her father ignoring her and her mother's sorrow, looking forward instead to the house they had bought in the land of Los Angeles, California, and the fact that their house here in Japan was already sold. She hated him for it, and she could tell her mother did, too. She wanted to scream and cry and hit him, asking what she did to deserve such an event, such a father - such a plane ride.

Things were already bad. But they were worse for the girl.

All her live she'd lived in Japan, chasing cicadas, drinking hot tea under the kotatsu during cold winters, eating mochi in fall, speaking Japanese - the bare minimum English she could muster sounded awkward and clumsy, the verbal equivalent of a baby taking its first few steps.

She could only muster to image what it was like for her mother, an inhabitant of Japan for over three decades.

What bothered her the most, though, were the people she'd be leaving behind.

More importantly, one certain one.

She couldn't even fathom to remember the sheer look of horror he wore when she told him - she couldn't even begin to think of what was happening to him right now, playing alone at summer, bugs uncaught and an empty basket waiting in his room just for her. Him walking into school and hearing her name not called during roll call. Sitting next to an empty spot at lunch.

She wanted to turn around and run as fast as she could go past the security guards, through the glass doors and the yellow cabs and back into the city, and run into his arms and cry and yell "I'm here, I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying."

But the bundle of plane tickets her mother and her father were handing to the airline attendant said otherwise.

All she could do was watch as her future was altered, tarnished by a mere transaction, and hope that her life was in the hands of someone else.

Someone else who cared.