Work Text:
“So, why did you come out here anyway?”
Overhead, the Cairo sun beats down like it's got a grudge and all it serves to do is remind Polnareff that he's forgotten sunscreen, again. Three years have done nothing to temper the country's sweltering heat—he will be genuinely surprised if he doesn't burn to a crisp on the walk to the hotel. He tries to tell himself they didn't have to start here so his irritation has a different cause than the one it undeniably does; they could have started somewhere north and meandered their way back around to the desert. Ultimately though, this city was both the beginning and the end, and now it will be a beginning once more. Hopefully, Polnareff thinks, for a better story than the last time. “These days I hear you're busy being all scholarly, color me astounded.”
To his left, Jotaro cocks a brow at him from under his cap—a white one this time, to match the rest of an ensemble Polnareff still deems ridiculously overdressed for a desert—and adjusts the strap of the schoolbag slung over his shoulder. Three years have done a bit more to him, Polnareff reflects, but—as Jotaro tugs the brim of his hat down in an all-too-familiar gesture—not that much. “Why wouldn't I come?” he asks, and Polnareff nods in grateful understanding.
As much as he hopes for otherwise, all of the old habits crawl back in through the proverbial cracks as soon as the door to their room is shut and locked fast behind them. Polnareff offers Jotaro the shower first, (“How you haven't sweat yourself to death in that thing is beyond me.”) a thinly masked suggestion that he cover the blind spot that a second door creates. Jotaro merely agrees and sheds his coat. This door shuts, but doesn't lock. Polnareff lingers on the other side in a knot of tense, high-pulse energy, listening through the wall while he scans the room with his eyes, ceiling to floor and corner to corner. When he hears the water running, he checks the places his sight couldn't reach—but the fridge is stocked only with drinks, and all that's under the bed are clots of dust and a hairpin or two. He straightens up just as Jotaro leaves the bathroom ten minutes later, dressed as casually as Polnareff has ever seen him. “Shower's free,” he informs him, and Polnareff nods his thanks, switching places while they both pretend they won't check back over each other's work, just to be absolutely sure.
Even with that paranoia sated, the night proves sleepless. Polnareff lays wide awake in the right-hand bed, staring at the ceiling fan while his brain disgorges streams of memories that he persistently tries to ignore. They don't hurt so much now, but he still doesn't want every single one of them here, on this new adventure that surely couldn't go the way the last one did. They know more. They're more prepared.
They're stronger, if it comes to that.
Polnareff turns his head to watch Jotaro holding vigil near the window, studying the city four floors below, tall and rigid as a statue and twice as silent. The ashtray on the sill counts the dead ends of two cigarettes—a third sits between his lips, the ember at the end flaring with every measured breath.
“Hey,” Polnareff calls over to him. He can only tell that Jotaro glances his way because the spark sways towards him the tiniest bit. It's always little things with Jotaro, though—like the tapping of his fingers in time with the ticking clock on the wall, unconscious until he realizes he's doing it and curls his hand against the wood. Polnareff sits up, tucking the undone strands of his hair behind his ears to keep it out of his face. Outside his own head, the room is wholly peaceful, but it still feels too much like then for it to register as such. “You feel like a drink?”
The tapping stops, starts, and stops again. Polnareff wonders if the gears turning in Jotaro's head are threaded anything like his, and counts it as a victory when he gets a soft 'yeah' in confirmation.
Jotaro talks more, after two and a half cans of cheap hotel-provided beer. It's not something Polnareff knew or would have guessed about him. Three years ago, getting drunk was inadmissible, when they knew they were being hunted down and needed their wits about them at all times. As such, the experience is a novelty.
They'd turned the TV on in the first hour to provide a distraction—getting drunk is easier when you're not paying attention to how much you have. After, it stays on mainly because the room would be dark if they turned it off, and the light switch is farther from the foot of Jotaro's bed than the fridge is. A fridge that Polnareff reports as empty two, maybe three hours in, as he walks back over and sits himself back down in the middle of the colony of cans that have grown up from the floor like mushrooms, taking care not to disturb a single one. There's a lot of them; at least ten, and most of them probably Jotaro's. He's had more than too much, in all likelihood, but Polnareff is in no state to stop him. He sort of doesn't want to, listening to him talk about his studies has been nice. So he passes the last can over and observes the way the sharp shadows from the TV's glare dance over him and make every motion fascinating to watch—the idle crook of his finger to crack the seal; the shapes his mouth makes when he thanks him; the clean, unbroken line of light from jaw to throat that shows when he tips his head back and downs half the thing in one go.
Showoff. Polnareff grins when he pauses with a gasp for air. “Damn, you drink like a fish,” he teases, sipping at his own. “You even buzzed yet?”
Jotaro stares directly ahead with a narrow-eyed expression Polnareff recognizes as the same one he gets when he's thinking something over with great care, though his slouched posture is somewhat less familiar, the knee drawn up to his chest is new, and his fingers have matched the clock's rhythm again, keeping time on the sparse carpet by his ankle. He tilts very slightly, but it's enough for gravity to capitalize on how slack intoxication has made him, pulling him down until he's shoulder to shoulder with Polnareff, too heavy to be moved with any finesse. If he tried, he's pretty sure Jotaro would just carry on to the floor in a sprawl of long limbs. “Very,” is Jotaro's eventual answer, when he hasn't seen fit to sit himself back up either. His voice is soft and stripped of its usual gruff bite; it makes him sound young and guilty to impose.
Polnareff only chuckles, setting his drink down so he can take the can from Jotaro's loose grasp and set it out of reach. Not that Jotaro doesn't protest that. He reaches over to retrieve it, fumbling on the floor for the one can in that mess that isn't empty. The process involves the brim of his hat digging into Polnareff's throat rather uncomfortably, so Polnareff relieves him of that as well, at which point Jotaro abandons his quest for his drink and paws drunkenly up for that instead, grumbling a sulky curse at him when the angle he's reaching from makes that impossible. He gives up with a disgruntled noise when Polnareff flicks it onto the bed behind them, apparently deciding that getting to his feet to find it was either too much effort or just beyond him at the moment. His hand drops like a stone on Polnareff's far shoulder and stays there. “Dammit.”
“Don't be mad.” Polnareff smirks at the frown he gets for that. “Finish telling me that story about the urchins.”
Despite genuinely wanting to hear the conclusion, the alcohol has caught up to him and he's too tired and too drunk to pick and choose what to focus on. Instead, sensation guides where his mind wanders—the words Jotaro speaks less important than the deep drone of his voice and the heat of his body leaned on Polnareff hard enough that his arm's starting to fall asleep. It's familiar, happy-familiar, like a game of cards on the train with menial chores as betting chips, or lukewarm instant coffee at the crack of dawn in some far-flung wilderness. He has a vague memory of this—this proximity, Jotaro using him as a pillow—happening before, though he's sure it was because Jotaro was exhausted and not thoroughly inebriated. Or it could have been the other way around, but he doubts Jotaro would let anybody use him as a pillow. Or he could just be misremembering. He couldn't say.
Jotaro has stopped talking. Polnareff has no idea how long that's been the case. Long enough that his arm has completely lost feeling. He opens his eyes (when did they close?) and rolls the shoulder Jotaro has his head resting on. “You asleep?” His answer doesn't come in words, but in the gradual realization that he can feel Jotaro's fingertips trembling where they press hard into his skin; that, this close, he can hear how uneven his breathing is.
There's a lot going on in his head, when he recognizes those quiet signs for what they are. Emotions that he's in no state to parse, tangled and overlapped as they are. Pity, absolutely. Guilt, possibly. Something larger, more ingrained from his past, an indistinct impression of a lifetime ago, when he was still an older brother.
This too is familiar. He curls his numb arm around Jotaro's shoulder, turns his head a fraction to press a kiss to Jotaro's hairline, where the tail end of a pale, slender scar disappears. Jotaro starts and sluggishly shifts in his hold, maybe to struggle free and hide himself, maybe to claw himself further into the embrace. “Come on, you big trainwreck,” Polnareff slurs with tender fondness, as though he's one to talk. How long had it taken him to remember what that journey taught him, that life is better faced together than alone? A lesson he can, hopefully, pass down. “Let's get to bed. Plenty of time to hate ourselves for this in the morning.”
Though, when the sound of his voice seems to calm Jotaro, he finds he's perfectly okay with falling asleep exactly where he is.