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Josuke blinks a few times, taking in his surroundings, severely confused.
One second, he was in the park, about to try and touch a turtle to cure his fear of the damn things before heading to the first day of school, but he got distracted after he glanced at some weirdo with his face deep in a map, wearing the weirdest outfit he’d ever seen.
(An all-white trench coat with a matching hat and TWO BELTS, with extra belt loops added on for them too? Who the hell wears two belts??)
He only looked at the guy for a second, but he suddenly got hit with the feeling that if he stuck around for any longer, that guy would notice him, and he would kill him. Josuke scrambled away from the turtle, barely remembering to grab his bag before dashing in a blind panic, shoving through the crowd of older students he hadn’t noticed approaching him.
And the next second, he was standing against the wall in a nearby alleyway, trying and failing to catch his breath, with his guardian spirit standing protectively in front of him.
His guardian, Godly Diamond, looked… weirdly shaken, for some reason. Completely unlike his usual smug look that always made him look like he knew something you didn’t. Instead, for nearly a minute, all Josuke can feel from Godly’s side of the connection is a mixture of intense fear and bone-deep anger before he completely closes the bond off and desummons himself.
With the bond goes the vast majority of the fear he had been feeling, meaning it must have been coming from Godly somehow.
This whole sequence of events, of course, causes Josuke to check his surroundings carefully. If there's some kind of danger approaching, he needs to be prepared to fight it, with or without Godly Diamond's help.
Josuke shoots a question-danger-where? towards Godly but receives nothing but a dismissive all-good-no-danger in return, and suddenly his guardian is pushing his shoulder blades to get hurry up and run to school, which- OH SHIT HE’S GOING TO BE LATE FOR SCHOOL!
During the day, he almost forgets about the earlier strangeness of that morning, being more caught up with trying to pay attention to his new teachers than stewing about suddenly being fearful for his life. Out of all the strange things he's seen and experienced, seemingly random and unprovoked fear of Some Guy has to be one of the strangest so far.
On his walk back home through town, though, he remembers it again, due to seeing the white hat guy exiting a store, conversing with someone hidden behind him and the doorframe. When he spots the man again, he is flooded with this perplexing, almost overwhelming feeling of fear for his life.
He practically throws himself into the alley he had been walking past, sheltering behind a dumpster the farthest from the alley entrance. He hesitates for a second, not wanting to mess up his clothes or hair with whatever the hell is on the walls and ground, but he can hear someone coming closer to the alley’s entrance, so he hides himself as best he can.
When he hears the Hat Guy and his companions pass by the mouth of the alley, Josuke clamps his hands down over his mouth, trying to mask the sound of his panicked breathing. This effort is greatly aided by GD’s hands coming out and overlapping with his, silencing the noise completely.
After a few minutes of hiding like this, nearly overcome with a strange fear for his very life, Godly starts trying to calm him, sending him safe-nows and all-clears, trying to get him to start heading home again before it starts to get dark and his mom starts wondering where he is.
Eventually, Josuke gets coaxed up, mostly through the promise of some hot cocoa when he gets home, and the lingering fear that the group of terrifying strangers might double back for some indiscernible reason, and being in a different location is better than sticking around and being found.
The latter of the two causes him to practically sprint down a back road, taking the extra-long way home to distance himself from the hat guy.
When he does finally reach home, he enters in through the back door to lessen the chance of being seen by the man in the white coat, puts his shoes at the front door, then grabs a snack and the hot cocoa he had been promised and settles in to play video games.
After a few hours, his mom comes in and scolds him for not getting his homework done, but stops after Godly emerges.
The two of them have a hushed conversation, his mom whispering and Godly writing quickly in his notebook. Afterwards, his mom walks away and makes dinner, not bothering Josuke until dinner’s ready.
That night, Josuke triple checked the front and back door locks, as well as the locks for all of the windows. He only stopped to rest when Godly Diamond physically picked him up and put him in the bed, threatening to sit on him if he didn’t stop being irrational and go to bed.
Despite the supposedly irrationality of that fear, Godly still moved to stand guard at the edge of his range, and didn’t move from that spot for a long time, even after Josuke finally passed out.