Archive of Our Own

“Bonjour, Mademoiselle Una!”

Aside from being noticeably accented, the voice from the center of the garden sounded like that of a large, grown man; though there was an unmistakable diminutive quality to it. At first Trish tried looking for it around her feet, but quickly her scanning nose came to point at the culprit sitting atop a rock around her shoulder level. She leaned in until their faces nearly touched.

“No, no, Signorito Polnareff! It’s said buongiorno , like this.” Una pinched her fingers in the air either side of her face in the typical gesticulatory Latin way of speaking. “You really should be picking up on things like that by now!”

The rock Jean Pierre was sat upon was filled with holes, out of which a motor-powered artificial waterfall flowed, pooling around his clawed, reptilian feet. He was silent for a moment, trying to convey his emotion purely through the expression of his face. His face, however, was also reptilian, and not particularly built for expressiveness. The very few muscles in his face were mostly dedicated to allowing him to bite onto things very hard. He resisted the urge.

“Shall we go for a walk?” he finally deflected, smiling up at the Sarda as best as he was capable.

“Of course,” she responded, in the sort of way a young girl tended to speak to a tortoise in. She extended her hand into the cool shallows around Polnareff’s feet and he began his slow climb up onto her arm, which had become quite firm in her swordsmanship training. Instructing a human being in the martial arts was very difficult when your only appendage was a beak, but Trish was an incredibly fast learner, and quite willing to “Google” things. Polnareff was not sure what kind of stand Google was, and Giogio was not quite willing to tell him, but he understood. Keeping stands secret, even from allies, was incredibly important, especially in Monsieur Giovanna’s line of work.

“What brings you outside at this time of day?” the rosehead continued, helping Polnareff the rest of the way up to her shoulder before continuing along the cobblestone path. She passed an oleander bush and ran her fingers gently through the leather leaves, picking along the way a vibrant five-petaled blossom whose colour matched her hair almost perfectly. “It’s nearly salad time!”

Polnareff shrugged, which for a testudine was a motion consisting of several sways of the head in a leftward and then rightward direction. A lot of chelonian body language consisted of leftward and rightward sways. “It’s good to break up your schedule by getting out. Surprising yourself is the best way not to get bored!”

Trish hummed in response to this, and lifted a finger to her mouth to play thoughtfully with her bottom lip. She pinched it between two fingers and pulled down, baring her gums as she spoke softly. “Did you do that a lot when you were human?”

The tortoise swayed his head again, this time representing an expression only really capable of being understood by turtles. This was of a kind of question that many dared not to ask, and which Jean Pierre usually preferred not to answer; however he had provided Trish with the special privilege of humouring her whenever she did. An old friend at the Foundation had once told him that it was important for a daughter to have the support of her father when she needed it. Miss Una had spent most of her life without one; then in the space of a few short days, she had found out he was an important figure in the Italian mob scene, that he wanted to meet her and that his enemies wanted to kidnap and torture her, and then that he actually intended to maim and kill her, before finally being forced to watch him condemned to purgatory in an incident involving some of her only friends.

Polnareff frequently found himself feeling more than a little embarrassed about his involvement in the whole fiasco, but it wasn’t out of pity that he had taken to the Una girl. It was simply that any teenager deserved more than that, and God would surely forbid the task go to any of the other old Passionites, who were only children themselves. Polnareff would take the lot of them under his shell if there were only time in the day for it; Giogio was lucky to have two living caretakers, and Jean Pierre frequently tried to convince him to appreciate this fact, but Giovanna seemed intent on looking after himself. Polnareff only hoped Trish would never feel the need to do the same.

“Yes,” he finally replied. It was hard for him to be sure how long he had been thinking for. Though his memories had all migrated into this new vessel with the rest of his soul, the reptile brain worked in a completely different way to his old one. It was hard for him to focus on some things, and altogether too easy others. “I went running a lot when I had Silver Chariot. It was easy to be spontaneous when I was that fast.”

Trish tilted her head, and Polnareff had to scrabble to avoid being thrown from her shoulder in the motion, though he was careful not to get her with any of his dull claws. “Do you ever want to really get out? Like someplace new?”

Halfway through the sentence her voice broke for just a fraction of a second - a microstutter, one half of a waver. A tic that betrayed a sense of lack of agency. Polnareff could tell exactly what it was that she was asking, and it wasn’t whether Polnareff wanted to leave Naples; it was whether Trish would be allowed to leave Naples if she wanted to.

“Like where?” he asked, trying to hide the concern in his voice, but doing terribly at it, not because he was still learning to pull the oral muscles in his new body but because he was a bit of an idiot and had never been good at hiding anything in his life.

“I dunno. I haven’t travelled much. I’ve been on a total one tour of Italy, and most of that time I was sitting inside a tur...tle…”

Polnareff would have pursed his lips if he had any, but he said nothing. Trish puckered up sheepishly.

“How’s the refurbishing going…?”

Polnareff looked in the other direction and pretended to be distracted by a leaf floating by, becoming genuinely distracted by it in the process. “Giogio’s working on it.” The wind whistling through the key-shaped groove in his spine was suddenly incredibly loud, despite his lack of any external ears.

Trish hummed affirmatively, and then trailed away into a silence that lasted a few moments. The pair rounded a corner in the path toward a clearing in the barrier of trees around the garden, allowing them a perfectly-framed view of the shimmering blue Bay of Naples in the distance. Trish moved toward the gated perimeter and leaned unto it with a sigh, emerald eyes darting between the distant dots of boats and birds. “What about an island?”

Polnareff had to pluck his eyes away from another leaf which had fallen into his field of vision. “Huh?”

“You could visit an island.”

He nodded. “We could go on a holiday, together.”

Trish’s stoney stoicism dissolved into a beam, and she nearly threw the tortoise on her shoulder into the dirt underfoot as she swung her head excitedly around to look at him.  “Really? Where would we go?”

Polnareff grunted as he climbed back up her upper arm to his perch. One living in this part of the world was spoilt for choice when it came to island vacations, but he had to take another thinking break to consider the options. His mind went immediately to Sardinia, where he had dreamed of holidaying since childhood. But as he opened his beak to say so, he was awarded the grace of remembering what Giogio had told him. Bucciarati’s Squadra Guardia had visited the Italian island once, with Mademoiselle Una in tow. It had been in search of her father, immediately after he had tried to kill her with his bare hands; and it was there that the first of her friends, a man named Leone Abbachio who Polnareff had never experienced the privilege to meet, had been brutally murdered by him.

Jean Pierre’s train of thought travelled linearly - in the only fashion it had ever been known to travel - to places nearby. The next option was obvious. An island much closer to his own home, which he had secretly begun to miss again; Corsica.

“Corsica,” he repeated, except for the first time out loud.

Trish hummed to herself again, and looked back over toward the Bay. A marble-white cruise liner was coming in to dock, eclipsing the smaller fishing craft around like a full moon among stars. “Where’s that?”

“South of France,” Polnareff replied, unconsciously dialing his accent up to near-incomprehensible levels as he did. “It used to be an Italian island, and the locals spoke Italian until the middle of the 19th century, when the French government made French the official language.”

Again Trish looked at him, her eyes sparkling with youthful zest. “So I would be able to learn about your culture!”

Polnareff caught himself in the middle of an enthusiastic nod as the logistics of getting a 15 year old girl and her reptile guardian on a plane to another country began to dawn on him. But he steeled himself, and did his best to make sure his face betrayed none of the worry. It was time Trish went on a holiday, he had decided. And he, Jean Pierre Polnareff - once a man, a knight for the forces of good and an indispensable ally to the legacy of philanthropist Robert E. O. Speedwagon, now a turtle and a mafioso - would be the one to make it happen.

The main obstacle standing in the way of a member of Passione’s inner circle trying to leave continental Italy was not the authorities, who were already mostly in the pockets of the organisation. It was Giogio, who showed a remarkably professional concern for all of his closest agents. And it wasn’t Polnareff that Signore Giovanna was chiefly concerned about. As far as most Passioni were concerned, Polnareff was a free agent; Giogio had taken it for granted that he would be gone by the end of his first month in Naples. It was Trish that Giogio was worried about.

When accused of flashing organisation cash to get Trish record deals, Giogio has been quoted as saying one of his most blatant lies of all; ‘ we don’t do that anymore ’. The phrase became an in-joke among Passioni; when one gangster asked another how a hit job might have gone, it would not be uncommon to hear ‘ we don’t do that anymore, fratello! ’ parroted back in response. It was true, of course, that Trish had entered the European music scene on her own merit; but it was slowly becoming more and more apparent to the people around him that Giogio had feelings . The boy who Passione assassin Guido Mista had described to Polnareff as a calculating machine geared perfectly toward becoming a caporegime actually cared very deeply about the people around him, and had their interests in mind as he went about deconstructing the toxic legacy of the rose-haired devil he had taken his throne from. Giogio was not going to let Trish Una out of his sight until he was convinced she would be safe.

“I’d be there by her side the entire time!”

Polnareff was sat upon one of the Naples University’s library bookshelves, nestled neatly in a niche left behind by a handful of books Giogio had removed for his own perusal. The blond pushed a finger to one of the pages to keep his place and looked up at him, frowning subtly.

“I know, Jean. But I need you to understand that I mean no offense when I say that you are a tortoise.”

“I’m the most experienced tortoise on the continent! I was there during the Diavolo incident!”

“You struggled to keep an arrow in your mouth from touching the ground.”

The look in Giogio’s eyes wasn’t quite disappointment , but whatever it was were powerful enough to cut into Polnareff’s armoured body like a pair of parallel streams of superheated body fluid regardless. Thankfully the Don chose to relinquish his glare and continue his reading before the beams reached any of Polnareff’s vital organs or feelings. The young godfather had been of late burying himself in a series of thick volumes about Italy’s 20th century war history, and the page he had stopped himself on was densely decorated with photographs of fascist symbology hung up around the Colosseum in Rome. Giorno chewed his upper lip as his green eyes scanned down the page. Polnareff wondered if he was remembering his own Colosseum experience.

“What if we brought Sheila along?” the Frenchman interjected, suddenly feeling bad for bringing up the Diavolo incident at all. “Some company from a girl her own age would do Trish wonderfully!”

Giogio scratched his chin. He was known by most of his subordinates to be usually quite particular about shaving, but a thin white stubble was beginning to form along his jaw. “She’s on a special assignment in Japan.”

Japan? Jean Pierre naturally wondered what business the Neapolitan Mob might have that far east, especially given the stories he had heard from Dr. Kujo about stand activity there; but he knew better than to pry. If it were ever possible for someone to understand what went on in Polnareff’s mind, they might almost get the impression he was getting smarter.

“What about Monsieur Mista? He and Trish hang out all the time!”

Giorno looked back up once more from his tome with a sigh, but there was no vampiric venom in the beryls of his eyes this time. Rather, they curled up at the edges with the glint of a smile.

“So you would leave me defenseless and alone here in Naples as you take my bodyguard on holiday to Corsica, Gianni ?”

Polnareff gave his superior officer a look of amused incredulity that could be understood by any tortoise or human alike. ‘Gianni’ was the Italian nickname Guido and Giogio had taken to using for Polnareff when they intended to playfully patronise him, in much the same way Trish referred to his ‘salad time’. Polnareff was sure they meant no insult by it; rather they were just naturally inclined to speak down to him now that he was a helpless and rather adorable animal. In any case, he took no offense - in fact he seemed to enjoy having an Italian pet name, whether it was because it made him feel more a part of the group or because he was naturally at home in situations where he was a pet.

That wasn’t how he could tell the Boss was joking, though. First of all, he could tell because Giogio never truly seemed to take issue with the idea of being alone for a period of time. Not only had he proven himself perfectly capable of holding his own in any fight, but he even seemed more in his element when he was. Of course, anywhere Giogio went he was protected by a perimeter of armed stand users - in a few short weeks Naples University had become one of the most heavily-guarded institutions in all of Mediterranean Europe - but it was in situations like this, silent and alone in a library with only books as company, Giogio always appeared to be at his strongest.

Secondly, Polnareff knew that even with his closest guard six hundred kilometers away, Giogio wouldn’t be alone for even a second. It had only been a short while since Signore Fugo had been sent on the mission to Sicily intended to redeem him for his former mutiny against caporegime Bruno Buccellati, but Giogio had already allowed Pannacotta right back into his inner circle of associates. Polnareff frequently spotted the two luncheoning together, with or without Guido and Sheila, and once or twice he had even seen the soldato join his Boss in research at the library.

Polnareff did not have to vocalise any of this. Giogio knew that he knew, and he returned the turtle’s smirk in turn.

“Will you guard that girl with your life?” he asked with one eyebrow raised, folding the book in front of him closed and lifting it to the top of the pile of its identically-bound brothers.

Polnareff dipped his scaley green head solemnly. “You know that I would, Parrain .”

Giogio scratched his chin again, and with a frown this time he seemed to notice the growth there, no longer distracted by his book. Polnareff raised his chin again, anticipating a response with bated breath. Giorno rewarded him with a rare genuine smile. “And will you make sure she has the best time abroad that she could possibly have?

Polnareff opened his mouth in what would be the widest possible grin he could make as a human, but as a tortoise was an expression more commonly associated with desire for a lettuce. Giogio seemed to understand it well enough, though, and covered his mouth with one ringed hand to hide a single snort of laughter. Polnareff began to nod so vigorously he nearly threw his whole round body off-balance, and had to claw at the edge of the bookshelf to prevent himself from toppling off. Giogio rose to his feet to pick the reptile up with both hands.

“Then I will arrange for you and Trish to be in Corsica as soon as is possible,” the blond concluded, a shimmering gold arm emerging from his side to lift the books back into their proper place where Polnareff had been. “Shall I contact Trish at her room, or would you like to tell her?”

“ Merci , Monsieur! Merci, merci! I will tell her! Merci, Giorno Giovanna!”

Ajaccio, the administrative center of Corsica, was the ancestral home of the Bonaparte dynasty who famously expanded the European kingdom of France into an empire under Napoleon Bonaparte I. What is less known to many is that the Bonapartes were of Italian origin, a fact that the city of Ajaccio reflects equally in the eyes of an Italian visitor. Many Corsican natives even speak languages more similar to Italian than to French, so between the two of them, navigating conversation and road signs were easy tasks for Trish and Polnareff. Jean Pierre had initially been afraid he would not be able to take in the sights for himself from his six inch stature, but Trish was more than happy to carry him in her arms and lift him up above her head when he wanted to get a better look at something. Fewer passersby gave this mind than Polnareff had expected; perhaps Trish simply had the look of a woman who was known to carry around a pet reptile attached to a leash in leather that matched the colour of her outfit.

Even the food sold in local Ajaccien restaurants was of a distinctly Italian bent. Polnareff had at first been disappointed by this, expecting something closer to the food he remembered from his youth in France; but that disappointment dissolved away the moment he saw how much Trish was enjoying the new culinary experience. Particularly popular in Corsica are stuffed pastas, which were also particularly easy for Trish to, with much amusement, pick up with a fork and place one by one into Polnareff’s waiting beak.

“Do you think if I eat too much,” the Frenchman began, a single lump of cheese falling out the side of his mouth, “my shell will start feeling too tight?”

Trish touched her lower lip for a moment of thought as she chewed on her own food, but quickly shook her head and began to speak regardless of her mouthful of goat’s cheese gnocchi.

“It’s not clothes, Signore Polnareff! It’s part of your body. So I don’t think so.”

Without skipping a beat, she continued to reach aside for a glass of wine with her free hand and washed down the rest of her food with it. A reasonable adult might have taken issue with a 15 year old girl drinking wine with her afternoon merenda , but unfortunately for the teenagers for whatever reason so frequently left in his charge, Jean Pierre Polnareff was far from what might be called a reasonable adult under normal circumstances. Growing up in the 70s and 80s in France, the supervising figures in Polnareff’s own life were more off put when he didn’t have a glass of wine with a meal. More concerning to Jean Pierre was that Trish had ordered a Muscat du Cap Corse ; a rich white dessert wine which was not intended to be swallowed by the mouthful with pasta. But Trish seemed to be either taking it like a champ or numb in the taste buds, and Polnareff hated to criticise her.

“So then I don’t feel it?” He tried to tear his eyes away from the next full glass she was pouring herself. “What happens, then? Do I explode completely by surprise?”

Trish punctuated his sentence for him by placing another whole gnoccho between his jaws. “Maybe we should find out!”

For the twelfth time that afternoon there was a lull in the conversation as Polnareff went through the typical embarrassing open-mouthed process of chewing without teeth, then swallowed with a sigh. “Okay, Trish, that’s enough! You know Giogio says I should only be eating vegetables, anyway.”

“Well, my mother always said…” Una waved a forked pasta around in the air in front of her face and paused a moment, either feeling suddenly nostalgic for her other passed parent or forgetting what she was about to say in the beginnings of tipsiness. “...that pasta was the most important vegetable in a young girl’s diet.”

The rosehead reached for her wineglass as she stuck the gnocchi in her mouth, but the crystal suddenly spun into the air out of her reach before spiralling down into the groove on Polnareff’s shell like a piece of debris caught in a draining sink. The tall green bottle sitting beside it followed shortly after, and the two objects disappeared with a faint clink as if heard from another room.

Trish leaned back and narrowed her eyes at the tortoise in a way that communicated a distinctly teenaged attitude; feigned anger poorly masking apathy. “Anyway,” she continued, allowing her fork to scrape against her teeth as she removed it from her face; “doesn’t this make you think of home, good Corsican food?”

Polnareff shrugged his usual testudine shrug. “To be really honest, this is all a lot more Italian than I thought it would be.” He noticed Trish’s posture sag a little in her seat as he said so, and quickly tried to pick the mood up with a hearty laugh. “But I’m beginning to think French food may not be all my nostalgia has hyped it up to be anyway!”

Trish pouted, but it was with more of her usual youthful curiosity than with pity. “How long has it been since you saw France?”

Jean Pierre had to think a moment about that question, the few muscles in his chelonian forehead all bunched up between his eyes as he pondered the patterned tablecloth beneath his claws. “I haven’t really lived there for over a decade.”

Trish leaned in to spear another from her dwindling supply of gnocchi, but she was slow and thoughtful in her movements now, focusing on Polnareff’s face. “Where did you go?”

Polnareff turned his head to look over one shoulder in the direction of the restaurant kitchens, thinking again. “In 1987, I heard that the man who had killed my sister when I was 17 was in Egypt. So I packed my things and left France to find him and kill him.” Out of the corner of his eye the tortoise could see Trish stop chewing altogether, sitting stock still with one hand pressed gently against her lips. He turned to face her again and looked into her eyes reassuringly. “Don’t worry, I killed him.” Trish dropped her hand into her lap and gave a nervous smile in return. “But while I was there I met a man named Dio-”

Trish swallowed a mouthful of half-chewed pasta and leaned over the table toward him. “I’m sorry- Dio as in, Dio ? Le divinita ?”

Caught by surprise, Polnareff stopped and stared at the girl for a second before replying. “Yeah, I… guess so. Huh.”

“And my dad’s name was…”

“Diavolo, as in, le diable . Huh.”

“That’s kind of weird.”

“That has to mean something, right?”

Trish shrugged and pushed around what was left on her plate with the prongs of her fork. “I mean… I never went to church, so I dunno.”

Polnareff scratched awkwardly at the tablecloth under his feet. “I sure didn’t.”

There was another lull, which Trish saw fit to break off prematurely by spearing a sliver of dried tomato against her tableware. “Anyway! About Dio.”

“Right. Well, Dio was a vampire.” He paused again after saying this, but only briefly, to look up at Trish and gauge her reaction. It had been so long since a vampire had been relevant to his life he almost had trouble believing it himself; but Trish only continued to watch him carefully, eyes wide. She was only a newcomer to this strange world Polnareff had inhabited since childhood - she’d probably believe anything he told her, which made Polnareff feel a little better about himself. “He was doing everything he could to make himself more powerful, and gathering a loyal army of stand users to crush his opposition.”

This, Trish reacted to, though only subtly; she chewed her lip and furrowed her brow, breaking off eye contact for a telling moment. The similarities to her father were becoming apparent to Jean Pierre, too.

He shook it off and continued. “For a little while I was convinced that serving him was a good idea,” he admitted, deliberately leaving the exact nature of his recruitment vague. Thinking about it made his head hurt, like he was stepping into a territory where poison still lingered in the air. “But then I met the Joestar family, and Mr. Kakyoin, and… and others. And they helped me realise that the only right thing to do was kill Dio.”

Trish cast her eyes down at the scraps of vegetable matter she had heaped in one corner of her dish, but decided respectfully to lay her fork down quietly and conclude her meal there. “What happened to them?”

Polnareff swung his head around in the other direction, now peering through the glass facade of the restaurant out at the stereotypically Latin thin, stone streets of Ajaccio. It hurt to think about, but had been anticipating that she asked. “Many of them died. Mr. Kakyoin was like me… Dio had manipulated him. And he paid the price for going against his master.” Polnareff shifted his chitinous chin back up in Trish’s direction; her head was hung over her plate, but she was peering up at him meekly through the veil of fuchsia locks hanging over her forehead. She was not the only one realising how similar their experiences may have been, however many years they were separated by. “I had only known them for a little over a month, but they meant the world to me by the end of it,” he reassured her. “I loved them. They were like a family to me.”

Trish leaned silently back in her seat, and her gaze drifted aside to the wall behind her. Her lips were pursed, which for Trish they often were in some form or another; but Polnareff could see that they were drawn tight to hide that they were quivering. She brought one hand up to her eye and pinched a bunch of her eyelashes between two fingers as if to remove a speck from them; but a single circular stain appeared in her mascara and dripped halfway down her cheek before she stamped it down with her palm and spoke.

“And then… what did you do?” Her voice shook to begin with, but she swallowed and gained her composure quickly, albeit still avoiding any eye contact. “Where did you go, after all that happened?”

“For a little while I returned to France, alone....”

Trish swallowed and turned her head slowly to look at him again.

“But that wasn’t right for me. I spent a few sad months at my old home, but… there was nothing left for me there. The man I wanted to kill for years was dead, and the only family left were my parents. Being alone wasn’t right for me. So I sought out the Joestars… Dr. Kujo had been through exactly what I had been through, so he helped me. He offered to let me help him track down the arrows your father had unearthed in Egypt, and since then that’s what I’ve been doing.” Trish’s eyes had dried as quickly as they had begun to dampen, but her lips were still twisted with hidden emotion. “And that’s how I came to be in Italy!” Polnareff concluded in an attempt to lighten the mood, but Trish sighed and looked him in the eyes as she replied.

“I treated some of Giorno’s friends so terribly while they were alive,” she mumbled, picking her fork back up so she could resume nervously raking pasta dressings around; “and I never got the chance to apologise before they were gone for good.”

The Frenchman was caught by surprise by Trish’s uncharacteristic turning of the topic back unto himself, and was silent a moment before responding. “Does Monsieur Mista forgive you?”

“Yes…”

Trish tried to silence herself by forcing a kebab of vegetable skins between her teeth, but the turtle persisted. “Does Giogio forgive you?”

She chewed and chewed, but it was only so long before her teeth were grinding on the empty air between them. She and Polnareff both knew Giogio went far further than forgiving her; he did everything in his power to make sure she was shielded from anything from her past that could possibly cause her any distress at all. “...Yes.”

Polnareff inserted another silence into the conversation as he stared up into Trish’s eyes, which travelled from restaurant wall to restaurant wall as she tried to work over the feelings in her head.

“Giogio and Guido know what you went through, Patricia,” he added eventually, as Trish’s gaze finally came to rest parallel to his own. “They’re there to help you whenever you need it. And so am I.”

Trish sucked her lips further into her face than Polnareff thought she ever had before, but it was not sobs she was holding back this time; the corners of her mouth were twisting up toward her eyes, which glinted with a familiar smile as new balls of saltwater begun to well up underneath their lids.

Polnareff held out one claw in the girl’s direction - a pose which had taken some practice to perfect, given his new body’s vastly different center of gravity. “Shall we go for a walk?”

Trish kept her mouth shut, but nodded quickly as she dabbed the undersides of her eyes with the heels of her hands.

Crouton Chevrolet

Even the archaic capital of Corsica was rural by the modern standard of Metropolitan Europe. It lacked the multitude of boutique clothing and jewellery stores many considered emblematic of European holiday destinations, and for this reason Polnareff had initially assumed Trish would become quickly bored of the place. Trish was, however, a completely normal and inquisitive 15 year old human being, and was incredibly excited by the options provided to her for day trips in the city.

The pair’s first stop the next day was naturally the Casa Bounaparte , the French-Italian dictator’s childhood home which was in 1967 turned into a national museum. From there the two took a bike tour around town in Napoleon’s footsteps. For her own reasons Trish had neglected to mention until the two arrived at the beginning of the tour that Trish had never been on a bicycle before; but as with most other things, Mademoiselle Una proved to be a fast learner on wheels, and throughout the tour Jean Pierre had to remind her not to get too ahead of herself or allow him to fall from his precarious position at the front of the vehicle.

After lunch the two of them decided to check out Corsica’s natural landmarks. Canyoning was of the mountainous island’s biggest attractions; given that a majority of these tours involved swimming and boating in moving water, few of them were open to unaccompanied minors or terrestrial turtles, but between Polnareff, Trish, and the muscular manifestation of her psychic powers, the tourists managed to make their own way around the canyons’ edges, absorbing the best of the sights will avoiding the more submerged parts.

By the time the nature walk was over dinner was just about due, and as they arrived back in Ajaccio they had well and truly developed a proper appetite, so they stopped only briefly back at their hotel room before heading back out into the town.

Ajaccio had a typically Mediterranean orange glow to it by night, and in proper Latin fashion, the streets were still alive with people in various stages of sobriety. Trish insisted Polnareff retrieve the Cap Corse again, but he stood his ground this time, making it clear that he did not want a drunk girl carrying his fragile little body around during the night, and that this particular wine would be for after dinner only.

“When I was younger, a street like this would still be bustling with people shoulder to shoulder, as if it were still midday,” he had continued, once Trish had stopped pretending to be upset about her alcohol. “It was always a late sleep and a late rise for us French. But things have changed a lot. Americans like working all day and sleeping as soon as they get home, and everyone wanted to be like Americans.”

As much as things had changed, the restaurants were still open late, and after deciding to pass up on the place they had eaten at the other day in favour of something new, they made a beeline to the next establishment along. But as the flickering neon Don Quichotte sign came into view, Trish stopped suddenly in her path.

“Trish? What’s up?”

Trish pressed a finger against her lips and hushed him, shooting a green stare across the narrow street into an alleyway. There were two men standing facing each other in the shadowy end, though their stances were clearly not equal; one of them, who was wearing a black felt hat, was sort of half-hunched against one wall in a defensive position. Trish thought the other man might be in a red suit, but she couldn’t be sure; the soft yellow gas lighting of the surrounding street had seemed to dull to a sinister, dramatic crimson while she hadn’t been paying attention.

The population of the surrounding area was dense enough for the pair of them to go relatively unnoticed as they stood still and stared in one direction, but not quite dense enough for Trish to get any closer without alerting the alley dwellers, so she strained her ears to try to hear what the men were saying. They were speaking rather loudly, but their conversation was in fast French, so Trish looked down to the tortoise in her arms in the hope that his testudine ears might have been uncharacteristically keen that night. He seemed to have suddenly become quite invested in what Trish had found, staring wide-eyed into the shadows of the alley.

“Turn around and walk out of their line of sight,” he muttered quietly, not taking his eyes from the figure in the red suit. Trish took one hesitant step backward. “Now!”

Una spun around and made her way briskly to the nearest potted tree, sitting herself gently on the rim of the urn and turning Jean Pierre around in her hands so his face was pointed at her. “What’s going on??”

The Frenchman hesitated a second, and averted his eyes back in the direction of the alleyway before he spoke. “...I know that man, in the red suit.”

Trish’s pupils shrank to pinholes. “What?”

“I met him when I lived in France. His name is Crouton Chevrolet. He’s another swordsman… a stand user. He was involved with Le Milieu - the French mob.” Trish swallowed. It was a three letter word that struck fear into any Italian’s heart, but she was reassured knowing that not only did Polnareff share her feelings, the two of them had experience overcoming them. “The Corsican mafia, the Unione Corse , they were vital to the movement of drugs through the Mediterranean across to America… Diavolo was probably involved with them somehow in his youth…”

The rosehead chewed her lip. “And now that Diavolo and the old Passione is gone…”

Polnareff turned back to look at her and nodded grimly.

“So what’s his stand like…?” she continued, craning her neck around to try to see what was ongoing around the corner.

“It’s name is Red Chariot.”

“Like… Silver Chariot?”

Polnareff nodded. “In Europe, it was custom to name stands after a tarot that represents our powers. Red Chariot is a lot like my… like Silver Chariot; it’s fast, and he uses it to cut people apart with his sword before they even move. But instead of a metal armour, its strength is its ability to control heat.”

Trish swallowed. She understood, suddenly, why stand users strived so hard to keep their abilities close to their chest; but simultaneously she felt no less at ease now that she knew how powerful this man was. In comparison her own power seemed almost comical in its uselessness. Jean Pierre seemed to know what she was thinking.

“We’re not going to fight him… this is a holiday. He can’t recognise me in this form, anyway. If we keep walking and act like we don’t know what he’s doing, he won’t bother us and we can continue on to dinner.”

For a brief moment, Trish mused on the fact that she actually didn’t know what Chevrolet was doing. But in that same moment, the narrow street echoed with a thump from the direction of the alleyway under scrutiny, and without thinking Trish jumped to her feet just far enough to be able to see what had happened. For a second she thought the cowering man’s hat had been knocked off; but then it became clear that it was the man’s entire head that was now missing. His headless torso remained upright for just a second more before following its pilot to the ground with another thump . Chevrolet was not holding a weapon; his arm was stretched across his chest with his palm open as if he had just completed the arc of slapping someone. But an intense red aura surrounded him - the source of Ajaccio’s sudden dramatic new lighting. The dead man’s neck wounds were sealed shut on both ends, like they had been burned as they were cut. This was Crouton’s stand.

Trish blinked and when her eyes were open again she was staring at another spot on the victim’s body, another sutured wound. It was around his wrist: one of his hands had also been cut off. Again, Trish blinked and the scene played out like a slideshow for her; the missing appendage was dangling precariously from Chevrolet’s loose fingers, and the next time she blinked it had been dropped to the cobblestone earth along with the rest of his pieces

Polnareff could feel the muscles in the arms cradling him tense up as Trish squeezed her fists. “Whatever you’re thinking of doing, Trish, don’t!” But if Trish had been intending to stand back and let the villain get away, Polnareff had spoken too loudly and doomed her regardless. Chevrolet turned his head halfway, so that only one of his eyes glistened in the red-orange beams of the street lamps opposite him. 16 year old boy, 20 year old man, ancient tortoise; Crouton recognised the voice of Jean Pierre Polnareff.

He looked down again briefly to kick the limp set of digits by his foot away from the light, then turned around fully so that Trish and Polnareff could see his whole face. He remained silent, but began to walk slowly toward the pair. The crowd seemed to be thinning with every moment; Trish couldn’t tell if the locals simply knew when to avoid interfering in mob business, or if the adrenaline was tunneling her vision.

The crimson glow of the now-barren walkway suddenly took on a bright pink quality, and all three stand users involved had to squint against the new brightness. On instinct, Trish had projected her stand. Crouton stopped dead in his tracks and stared at the pair for a painfully extended moment before opening his mouth. He spoke Corsican-Italian, but with a thick French accent, not unlike Polnareff’s.

“For a moment, Madame, I thought the turtle in your hands might be your stand.”

Trish shivered. A pair of ghostly pink claws had appeared on her shoulders; Spice Girl’s. Still the three of them remained quiet.

“Where is he?” Chevrolet continued, putting his hands in his pockets and looking left and right, up and down the street.

Trish was starting to quake; she was in no position to have words come out of her mouth. When lips moved, they were Spice Girl’s lips taking over. “Who?”

Chevrolet laughed. “Polnareff! Jeannot !” The girls remained silent, so the man in the red suit quirked an eyebrow. “Though perhaps he is going by a new name now? I heard he did not have much family left.” Polnareff’s claws dug into Una’s forearms, but she didn’t flinch. “No? The man with the silver hair? His stand- Silver Chariot. You would know of it, surely?”

Another moment of silence followed before Trish slowly lowered herself to place Polnareff in the pot of the nearest shrub, then dusted off the front of her clothes as she rose again. “There’s nobody here but you and me.”

Chevrolet frowned, and removed his hands from his pockets to splay them out either side of him questioningly. “You do not seem to speak with a man’s voice.”

Trish did not privilege him with a response; there was no time. In an instant, she had rearranged her boots underneath her so that they sat at 90 degree angles from each other, rooting her body solidly to the ground. Her torso twisted parallel to her left foot, and her left arm threw itself out in Crouton’s direction. Her fingers all curled into a fist save for one; an index which pointed straight toward his face like the needle of a compass. Her lips parted in slow motion, and then in an instant time began to run at normal speed as the yell left her tongue.

“ WANNABEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-!! ”

Spice Girl’s shimmering fuchsia form shot forward, and once more Trish froze in place with shock that it seemed she was going to connect. But Spice’s fist came just a few centimetres from Chevrolet’s chest when suddenly the air around him exploded into a ghost of his own. A burning red knight had appeared where the gangster had been standing only a moment before. Time unfroze again and Spice’s fist slammed right into a red-hot surface. Trish recoiled, back slamming into the wall behind her, and brought the fingers on her left hand up to her face. Skin had disappeared from the back of her digits; embers floated through the air beside her.

“I must have been mistaken,” Crouton stated casually. Trish jumped to the right. The man in the red suit had appeared between Polnareff and herself, examining the nails on one hand as he leaned against the wall. “If Polnareff were really here, he would have dashed to your rescue by now. They always said Polnareff especially loved the ladies.”

Chevrolet took a step closer, and in an instant the wall behind Trish was rubber; she sunk back into it and then released the tension, sending herself flying across the street. Spice readied her fists to soften the stone where they landed; but in the blink of an eye Chevrolet and Red Chariot were there too. Crouton stuck out his foot and Trish was flying again; unprepared this time, she struck hard cobble ground and bounced once before landing roughly and unceremoniously on her back. She didn’t bother turning her head to look up; his voice again appeared from right beside her.

“Who do you work for?” He got down onto one knee and examined her with narrowed eyes. “You’re wealthy… in my day most stand users were wanderers. But you’re not a swordsman like I am.” Trish’s eyes fluttered half-open and she peered up at him through one corner. His stand was holding what did appear to be the hilt of a sword in one hand; but there was no blade. “So who do you work for? My mind seemed to jump immediately to Passione… but of course, there’s no way that new Japanese character knows anything about-”

The secret Monsieur Chevrolet was so confident in his ability to keep, however, Trish was never to find out. While he was distracted, the ground under his feet suddenly became like putty, and he was thrown immediately off-balance. Spice Girl swooped in to finish the job; this time her fist connected with the man’s square jaw and he was the one sent flying down the street, crashing into a plastic table and set of accompanying chairs which seemed to make no effort to cushion his fall.

Trish pushed herself upright with a grunt and placed a burned hand over a bruised elbow. Chevrolet was not quick to jump back into action, but this clearly wasn’t for a lack of strength; his stand appeared above his grunting body poised and ready to go. Trish’s eyes gravitated toward the disembladed handle gripped tight in one of its massive hands. Slowly the arm lifted up toward her, as she had pointed when she had attacked first; then the handle lit up, and a jet of flame shot out toward her. She flinched at first, assuming it to be a projectile attack; but when her eyes returned to the scene at hand, she saw the jet had stopped short. In fact it wasn’t quite a jet at all; it was a flat, static pillar of flame. Red Chariot’s sword was made of fire.

Trish planted one boot behind her and locked herself in place between two of the cobbles of the road, then put both fists up in front of her. A shiver ran up her spine as Spice Girl emerged and struck the same pose. Before she could blink, Crouton was on his feet again. He took one step, then another, then Trish blinked and he was running at her full pelt, Red Chariot’s sword hanging off to one side, ready to strike.

Spice crossed her forearms in front of her right as the sword came down, and became soft right as the hot air sent a rustle through Trish’s hair. The stand shielded her from the cut of the blade; Spice Girl’s whole body flapped in mid-air like a flag being subject to a blast of hot air. With another blink, Chevrolet was gone again. Trish spun around, but he wasn’t in that direction, either. Spice Girl sunk into the ground and turned it to a trampoline beneath her user’s feet; Trish bent at the knees and released, sending herself flying into the air. Her legs flew up behind her faster than her torso, and at the peak of the arc she started to flip. Time went slow again. A blur of red passed under Trish’s arched back and the hairs on the back of her neck disappeared. Embers shot out over her head like a firecracker as she fell.

Another vermillion flash and Chevrolet was right below ready to catch her. Trish stuck out one pointed heel; it made contact with the top of the Chariot’s head, but instead of striking hard it turned its whole body to plasticine. If there was one advantage of Trish’s in this fight, it was that she was the one with forward knowledge about her opponent’s abilities. Red was compressed down to a disc and then shot up like a spring, again launching Una into the air. A third red blur. Red Chariot’s hefty shoulder made contact with Trish’s side, sending her hurtling toward a restaurant wall. She managed to soften the surface as she made impact and slide softly down to the ground, but her skin was abuzz with the shock of physical contact.

A shallow, circular crater appeared in the ground in front of her, but the impact was too fast to see; debris appeared in the soft wall behind Trish’s back and a spider’s web of cracks was instantaneously spread throughout the road’s surface. In the middle of the crater was Chevrolet, back straight, not a scratch on him. One of his arms was abuzz with hot energy, flame sword gripped tight in a throbbing red fist.

“I’d have let you go if you’d just told me who you worked for,” he stated plainly. His chest refused to even heave with effort; instead it hummed faster than the eye could see, like a microwave shaken by the invisible rays bouncing around inside. A thin mist of steam rose from the few exposed patches of his skin; sweat, evaporated the instant it dewed from his pores. “Depending, of course, on your answer. If you had really been from Passione, I’d have killed you on the spot, obviously. But if you had just told me you were passing through… I’d have let you pass. A mafioso doesn’t tend to live in fear of the consequences of being reported to the police, you must know.”

Trish’s chest, in contrast, was rising and falling like a piston. The more he talked, the further his heat crept through the air. Her scalp was squeezing out water like a sponge; her thick eyebrows could only protect her eyes from so much. Her arms ached from fighting already. She clenched her fists. The bare flesh on her left knuckles was numb against the concrete underfoot. The fingers on her right hand touched metal.

The mobster took a step forward and continued. The sword in his hand drooped as he moved, leaving a scorch mark on the stone underneath in a precise straight line. “But now it doesn’t matter, does it? Because now you want to kill me. Even if you told me you were a Uniona … I would still have to put you in the ground, eh? No stand user in their right mind would let another stand user live if they knew they wanted them dead.”

A sword . A sword had appeared in Trish’s right hand. She didn’t know where it had come from, but she didn’t need to look, either. She knew what a sword felt like in her hand. Polnareff had been training her for this. In fact it felt like exactly the kind of sword he had been training her with.

“Girl, you could be a civilian for all I know. God knows they must exist, right? They say stand users are naturally drawn to each other, for whatever reason. The Egyptians like to call it ‘gravity’. But I think that’s just superstition. If all the stand users in the world had met… well, why aren’t we in charge? Why are stand users running gangs from the shadows, instead of running the whole world with an iron fist? There’s gotta be something stopping us. Stand users just in the crowd. Maybe they don’t even know it. Maybe sometimes they touch bottles that explode and they chalk it up to freak happenstance.”

Just a few millimetres into the ground; that’s how far Trish had managed to sink herself. It wasn’t enough tension to launch her anywhere - but it would be enough to get her to her feet quicker than he could stop her. She pressed her left index finger into the rubbery earth, then released, and her whole body jumped to its feet like she had been gently lifted under the arms by an angel.

Even Crouton’s face was moving at lightning speed now; when shock dawned upon his features it was there entirely in an instant, like a switch had been flipped. He had no time to react when Trish dashed straight past him, let alone to pay enough attention to her hands to notice the sharp metal implement that she was now carrying. But she knew he wouldn’t be caught off guard for much longer. She ran full force into the wall at the opposite side of the street and springboarded off it like a wrestler on the cables around a ring. By the time she had flipped her direction of momentum, Chevrolet was ready to attack again, and he was dashing in the opposite direction, straight at her. He pointed his sword forward. Trish pointed hers, and in the same moment she was past him.

But her sword was no longer pointed straight forward in front of her. Her arm was extended normally; but the blade of sword had bent right back on itself to strike the gangster as he went past. The very tip of the weapon scratched his shoulder before whipping back into place with an elastic wobble . It wasn’t enough to seriously hurt her opponent. It probably wasn’t even enough to draw blood from him. But he hadn’t been expecting it, and that was all the edge that Trish needed. Chevrolet was sent spinning completely out of control and crashed face first into the glass facade of the Don Quichotte .

Polnareff was sweating buckets. For tortoises this was a very different process than for humans; because reptilian skin is not porous, a saltwater foam instead builds up from a turtle’s tear ducts. This is not an ideal situation for any animal to be in during combat situations, most likely because tortoises were not animals ever intended to be in combat situations. Polnareff had a secret technique specifically for scenarios like this, however, and it was a technique he had been holding onto since he was a young human: while he was sweating he was also crying. Salt foam was being washed down into his mouth, which was disgusting, but at least he could see what was going on.

What was going on, however, was not exactly an encouraging sight. No matter how many tricks Trish could pull, or even how much damage she could dole out, Chevrolet was at the advantage; he had years on her, physically, in his training, in his experience. Polnareff’s meager claws dug into the soil beneath them. When the two swordsmen had first met, they had been teenagers; but now Crouton looked weathered beyond his years. He was a warrior, and the years of fighting without end had been etched into his skin like stories on the wall of a cave. It reminded Polnareff of someone, but he tried to put the distraction out of his mind. Trish’s little victories thus far had been through her ability to catch the knight off-guard; but the longer the fight dragged on, the less she would be able to that. What they needed was a way to read Chevrolet’s attacks in the way he was starting to read hers.

Again in a blur the gangster was on his feet again, face scraped but not bleeding - he was probably heating his skin enough to suture all of his damage immediately. He took a step forward but stopped short this time, swinging his sword arm forward. Trish flinched again, expecting him to charge; but instead the flames of the blade exploded and began to expand in a jet of fire toward her. She slashed blindly at the approaching plasma with her sword, and perhaps because she was able to soften the heat itself or simply out of determination with the weapon, she was able to deflect most of the flame away from her. But she was sloppy, and would not be able to defend against a similar attack again. Polnareff would have been able to catch the flame in the air with his sword and redirect it with a gust of wind.

The strap of her undershirt broke in half; one of the flames had hit the emerald brooch holding it together. That was all the armour she had, gone.

“That was some excellent swordsmanship,” Crouton admitted, lowering his sword arm again. Neither Trish or Polnareff could tell how sarcastic he was being. “You are a skilled fighter.”

Trish grunted and placed her free hand to the square of skin on her chest that been burned by heated metal. It felt like it had cut right into her heart, but the added energy to her blood only pushed her forward. With a rubbery spring in the ground directly beneath her soles she leapt toward him, sprinting right at her enemy. This time he did not move, and Trish slipped straight past him and went careering back into the wall opposite.

She spun back around. “What’s the matter? Why didn’t you attack me?” she yelled, but Chevrolet was not standing where he had been. Polnareff swallowed as best his chelonian muscles would allow him, and salt burned at his throat. At this part of a fight, Polnareff might have been cocky enough to stop and make a statue of his opponent’s stand out of rock with his sword. But Trish was not cocky, and was only getting less cocky with every second that flew by.

The ground shook as another hole appeared around Chevrolet’s feet when he landed. Trish pushed herself upright. Again the mobster didn’t move. Instead Red Chariot appeared in full form around his shoulders and began to raise his sword up above his head. “You should have attacked me in the alleyway,” he announced, as his Chariot began to grip its weapon in both hands. “In the open I’m at my advantage.”

Trish tried to lock her legs back into a defensive stance, but her knees betrayed her, and she buckled into a squat, keeping herself from falling on her face only by leaning on her sword. Flames began to appear in streams from the ground and the air all around them, swirling up into his sword like water into a drain unplugged. The fire of the blade grew and grew, taking the shape of an immense lily.

“ Tempête… de INCENDIES! ”

In a split second, breathing became impossible. The air in a five meter radius was gone; consumed instantaneously by flame. The sinister red aura surrounding Crouton had become a blinding crimson field. Polnareff couldn’t open his eyes lest the moisture in them instantly evaporate and leave him blind, but with his lids squeezed shut a parallel battle ran at lightning speed in his head. Wildfire Storm … a powerful flame attack super effective at limited range… Polnareff had seen this kind of mastery over heat before… Red… Magician’s Red… Muhammad Avdol! The remaining water in his body was running out of his eyes as he remembered the first time they had met in Hong Kong. Muhammad had been unstoppable; never once had that smirk of confidence left his face the whole time they had been locked in combat, even when Jean Pierre’s swordsmanship seemed unmatched. His Crossfire Hurricane … it would have killed him, if Silver Chariot hadn’t had its armour… Polnareff was the only one who could ever have survived an attack like that… The tortoise screamed blindly into the inferno.

“ TRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISH!!! ”

When the red cleared it shrunk away in the shape of a fleur-de-lis , burned into Polnareff’s eyes like a subliminal image. His vision was clouded with tears and sweat as he squinted into the shimmering battlefield. All he could see was Crouton, crouched down on one knee with his sword still held above his head. But the gangster was shaking; his arms were bent, and his face was slacked in horror like he had seen a ghost. Had he recognised Polnareff’s voice, even through the wildfire…?

But as the mirage began to lift away into the night sky, another figure emerged from the smoke, standing tall in opposition to Chevrolet. Their skin shimmered in the red-pink lighting… no, it wasn’t skin. They were clad in thick silver armour, spotless even within the clouding embers and ash, steam hissing as it spat out from the gaps in the plates. Polnareff blinked once, twice, three times, and if he could have rubbed his eyes with his palms he would have. It was the spitting image of Silver Chariot. Was this his stand, returned to him? Where was Trish?

The armoured figured took one step forward. The way they carried themselves; lightweighted, but lighter than could be reached through practice. The one in the armour couldn’t have been taller than 170cm… a woman, a girl. Younger than 20 years old. A column of purple hair climbing out through the open top of her helmet… the suited knight was Patricia Una.

The knight took another step forward, and Crouton audibly whimpered.

“P-P-P-P-P-Polnareff??”

He had heard Polnareff’s voice when he had cried out for his charge; but he had also been caught up in the same illusion that the tortoise had. The way Trish moved, the way she carried a sword, she had learned it all from Polnareff. Through the red hot haze, she looked exactly like Silver Chariot.

She stopped to look down at her hands, which were gloved with claws like those of a raptor’s tralons, just as confused as everyone else about her sudden transformation. A blue glint ran along the ghostly plating of her arms and reflected in her viridian eyes; but she only allowed herself to be distracted momentarily. She took the miracle for the boon it was and raised her visor to look back at her enemy. He was gone, having taken her momentary confusion as an opportunity to move; but he was leaving a slipstream trail through the ash in the air that gave away exactly where he was going. His sword made contact with Trish’s upper arm; but it could not penetrate the armour, which groaned and hissed at the contact like a machine pumping hot water away from its motor. Trish spun around, sword held out at full extension, and caught her attacker right in the chest.

Crouton cried out. His special attack had taken energy out of him; he had been relying on its ability to finish Trish off, but now the heat had left his body and was sapping his strength from the outside. Trish had expended no such trump cards, and her blade cut right through Chevrolet’s suit and into his chest. He staggered backward and zipped off again. Trish followed his slipstream with careful, narrowed eyes.

Polnareff was grunting and squealing as he tried to climb down from the pot he had been perched on, but Chevrolet was beyond having the time to focus on the sounds of a nearby turtle. Things were starting to make sense to Polnareff, for perhaps one of the first times in his life. It had been a long held superstition among European stand users that a stand was a reflection of a user’s inner self - a belief reflected by the incorporation of Egyptian tarot cards into stand practice - and recent research by the Speedwagon Foundation seemed to more or less confirm this. It had been Kujo that had first discovered that one could reconfigure their stand to their desires by being reintroduced to the virus on the Stone Arrow. A Japanese family named Kira had come into possession of one of the Egyptian arrows, and when Jotaro had tracked it down to their hometown of Morioh, a man named Yoshikage used it to change his stand into one capable of manipulating time to an even greater extent than Star Platinum itself. It had been scary enough hearing Jotaro’s report on the incident; seeing it in action upon Don Giogio’s stand was another experience altogether.

When the Stone Arrow had reconfigured Silver Chariot’s abilities, it was transformed from a fast, offensive stand into one with near-unbeatable defensive ability. At the time the reason for this had seemed so clear. In Egypt, Polnareff had been pitted against a stand user with the ability to transform someone into a younger version of themselves. As a child, Jean Pierre was an easy target; his powers weren’t strong enough to do damage to an adult opponent, and his armour wasn’t enough to protect himself from an adult’s attacks. At that moment he had lamented all the times in his life he had been forced to go on the offensive instead of defend himself; so when Silver Chariot became unkillable in its Requiem form, he had merely assumed it had developed defensive abilities in response to Polnareff’s desire to be defensive.

But now it was clear that things were different. Polnareff had never been interested in defending himself. He would have gone about his life with his stand’s sluggish armour permanently attached if that were true. What Polnareff truly desired to do was to defend others . He wished he could have defended his sister, no matter the cost to himself. He wished he could have defended his friends; he wished he could have put his armour around Avdol and died in his place. So long as he was fast enough to protect the people that mattered to him, in the same way Silver Chariot Requiem had been able to protect that arrow, it did not matter what happened to Jean Pierre Polnareff.

No doubt the turtle’s stand had been the same; Mr. President’s one purpose had been to protect Trish, and now those two powers were acting as one. With Polnareff nearby, nothing bad could ever befall Trish Una again.

Chevrolet appeared from the air behind her, but his breathing was laboured now, and he moved in bursts rather than in a single smooth stream. Every time he took a step through the air, Trish could hear it and feel it in the air rushing through the cracks of her armour. She twisted around to meet him, but he stopped just short of being impaled on her sword, a thin red line appearing in the bared skin of his chest. Trish kicked at the ground between his feet and he was suddenly launched into the air.

She watched him fly above her head and disappear again. The movements in the smoke indicated he intended to land behind her once more. As the heat sapped moisture from his brain he was relying on more and more predictable movements to take her down before he collapsed. Trish rotated effortlessly to meet him; but she was the one taken by surprised when she saw that he had abandoned his sword and now stood poised to attack her with only his fists. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but had to cough out a few wheezing breaths first.

“ Houn …”

Trish furrowed her brow beneath her metal mask. “Huh…?”

Her single syllable was cut short when the air suddenly exited her lungs all at once, spraying out of the grill of her helmet like the first sputterings of an air conditioning unit. A glowing red-hot fist had made contact with her stomach. She looked down at it, then back up at Chevrolet’s grinning face. His eyes were alight with fiery orange anger; but it looked like that might have been the last energy left in his body.

“ Houn!... ” Another fist connected. “ Houn! Houn! HOUN! HOUN! HOUN! ” Trish’s body was again and again shaken by the impact of Red Chariot’s knuckles. “ HOUHOUHOUHOUHOUHOUHOUHOUHOUHOUHOUHOUHOUHOUHOUN!!! ”

Trish’s feet stayed where they were; her armour’s ability to negate speed allowed her to take these punches without being sent flying back. Being off her feet for just a second might be enough for the gangster to regain the upper hand. But she could feel the silver plates covering her body started to buckle and sizzle in the heat. If Crouton continued with this attack, he would probably kill himself; but if Trish stayed where she was she would be cooked beyond repair, and he wasn’t allowing her any time to retaliate. She cried out as a molten fragment of her right gauntlet made contact with her bare skin, and her sword dropped to the ground.

The armour was Polnareff’s stand and he could feel every hit just as much as Una could. Scorches in the shape of knuckle marks were appearing on the plates of his shell. His weak reptilian knees gave out underneath him, and the hardened scales of his breast knocked the air out of his own lungs as he hit the ground. There was nothing he could do… even with all his energy forming a cocoon around her, Trish couldn’t win this fight. He had failed. He sucked hot air into his throat, but his chest was still pressed up against the ground and he could only take in half-lungfuls at a time. All he could think to do was all he had ever done: scream.

“ TRIIIIIIISH!! DON’T DIE, TRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISH! ”

Crouton did not cease his barrage of blows. Red Chariot didn’t even turn its head. But for one fraction of a second, Monsieur Chevrolet thought he heard the sound of Jean Pierre Polnareff’s voice from a direction in which he knew only a tortoise was standing. And in that fraction of a second, his eyeballs flickered to the right side corners of his eyes. A critical mistake. In this state he had only the mental energy to focus on one thing at a time; and in the microsecond it took for his focus to return to Trish, she had managed to halt his assault by grasping both of his fists in each of her clawed hands.

Red Chariot was starting to dissipate entirely. His legs were disintegrating and even his helmet was beginning to fade. But this was not yet a victory. His immense red fists were only swelling and growing brighter; he was focusing every single ounce of energy in his body into his hands. His legs were shaking like strummed guitar strings underneath him, being kept from collapsing entirely only by the adrenaline replacing blood in their veins. Trish could not hold those hands forever. Her gauntlets were starting to melt. Even if Chevrolet died before she was killed, her hands would be bloody stumps by the time his knees knocked against the cobblestone. If she was brought to Naples quickly, Giorno might be able to replace them; but if a medic found her now, there would be nothing to be done. The rest of her armour would continue to burn her skin, and no normal human would even be able to see the problem. She would die of shock or dehydration, with only a tortoise by her side, unable to do anything. God, Polnareff was stupid! He should have listened to what Giogio had said! They should have brought another stand user with them! God, at least even another human!

Polnareff blinked a constant stream of tears from his face and stared forward at his limp front legs, expecting those claws to disintegrate into soot in any moment. The moment passed. He swallowed another mouthful of saltwater. A second passed. His hands weren’t numb. He could move his claws. Just a little bit, but they could move. He was exhausted to the point of nearly passing out… but his hands were okay.

Trish’s gauntlets were not melting. They were turning soft and drooping nearly to the ground, but they were not melting. Spice Girl’s hot pink silhouette sparkled for just a second, then was gone.

In an instant, the drips of silver armour that had nearly begun to pool around Trish’s toes retracted back up into her wrists. Her fingers and palm took proper shape again. All the energy Chevrolet had been sending into her for the last minute and a half was suddenly sucked up into a single point in each of her palms, then shot back out at him like a rubber band released from a slingshot. Red Chariot’s hands exploded into a shower of sparks which lit up the sky like a fireworks display.

Chevrolet’s body began to crumple instantly, lifeless limbs bending whichever way like extensions of a ragdoll. But before his knees could even hit the ground, Trish caught him in one hand by the face, and lifted him up to see into his eyes. There was no mind in him; all that was left of that was now drifting to the ground as embers in the soft breeze. But there was a brain in his skull, with eyes plugged into it; so he could see when she spoke her last words to him.

“It seems the only wannabe here… was you.”

When Corsican police travelled door to door in Ajaccio the next day, checking in on the elderly and parents with children to ensure nobody had suffered immensely from the night before’s freak heat wave, they discovered jutting out of an alleyway across from the Don Quichotte restaurant the bodies of two men. One of them was a butcher, who had unfortunately been rid of his head and one of his hands. The Fratelli butcher had been close to declaring bankruptcy only weeks before, but the family left with the establishment had come into contact with a mysterious benefactor willing to bail them out seemingly the night Signore Fratelli died.

The other dead man was a known local mobster, so authorities knew it was pointless to investigate the obvious murders of either man. But in secret, the corrupt pigs in charge of the local department were scratching their balding heads raw wondering what could have possibly happened to the man in the red suit with the shape of a talon-like hand burned across his face.

Giogio did not look up from his book when he spoke, flipping pages idly with one hand and scribbling messy notes in Japanese on a small lined pad with the other. “Name… Chevrolet, Crouton. Stand name Red Chariot. We’ll look into it, Polnareff. Thank you. If the French really do mean to interfere in my restructuring of Passione, that’s something we’ll really have to focus on.”

Polnareff nodded. “Ah… one more thing. We used to call his stand Petit Chariot Rouge , because he was short in his youth. People may know it by that name.” Giogio raised his head with an eyebrow quirked, which caught Polnareff by surprise to the point that he would have jumped if he had the power in his knees for it. He was used to the blond conducting all of his business with his nose pressed to a page.

“Little Red Chariot?”

Mista interjected. “Like ‘Little Red Corvette!’”

On this particular day the Boss’ favourite table in the library was populated by what had come to be regarded as ‘the whole gang’. Fugo was sat beside him, seemingly assisting him in absorbing the same set of history books Polnareff had seen Giogio reading before he left for Corsica. Once Fugo was in the same room as Signore Giovanna and a book, he never seemed to open his mouth until he got up to leave. Polnareff could only assume the two of them were sharing the words through some kind of psychic communication.

Despite the fact that everyone seemed to agree that it was quite against library etiquette, the middle of the table was decorated with a generous antepasto . The Sex Pistols were treating the plate as a dancefloor as they moved in circles munching on grapes as large as their heads.

Polnareff turned to look at Guido, who was leaning on the bookshelf beside him in his typical ready-to-go bodyguard pose, but licking cheese and olive oil off the flat side of a knife. “What?”

“You know? Like the Prince song.” The letter P saw a spray of dairy microparticles leave the gunslinger’s lips. “‘Little Red Corvette’.”

Polnareff frowned. “Why the hell would you name a stand after a song?”

Guido frowned right back at him, knife still between his teeth.

Trish had attended, too, but had momentarily taken leave to get some fresh air from a nearby balcony. The perspective of the Bay of Naples from the library was completely different to the one from Polnareff’s garden, but the same boats came and left at the same time of day no matter the angle you viewed them from. She was distracted from this view by the slow creak of a door being pushed aside behind her, and spun around to identify the visitor.

“...Sheila!”

Sheila “Eriny” Capezzuto still had a large bag hanging off one shoulder, and her colourful braids were tied up at the top of his head in a large bun. She greeted Una with a grin. “Trish! Giogio told me you’d be out here.” She waved one hand gently around at eye level, presenting a plate of snacks from the library as an offering.

Trish took the plate with a smile and placed it on the railing of the balcony. She blindly picked a piece up, but saw that it was a cube of toasted bread and flicked it into the school courtyard below with a scoff. “How was Japan?”

Sheila approached the railing beside Trish and leaned right over the edge with a sigh. “Oh, you know. Not traumatising or anything.”

Trish tilted her head in the other girl’s direction with an eyebrow quirked, and Sheila laughed.

“Nobody died, I mean.”

Trish hummed and looked down at the brick pavement meters below her, then smirked. Sheila looked sideways at her, caught a glimpse of her bared teeth, and failed to hold back a guffaw.

“What’s so funny!”

Trish sighed and held her breath a moment, but failed to stop herself from laughing a second time. “Nothing!”

Sheila sighed and grabbed a fistful of croutons from the plate and shoved them into her mouth. It was like they were flying out in pieces before she even started moving her jaw. “What’d you get up to while I was gone?”

“Visited Corsica,” Trish stated with a shrug.

“How was that?”

Una turned her head again, examining Sheila’s face with nothing but a smile on her face this time. “Oh, you know. Nobody died.”

Sheila cackled, showering the poor hardworking students making their commute from afternoon classes up to their dormitories with even more pieces of miniature toast. “Good!”

After a few more minutes of casual conversation, Gudio Mista poked his head through the french doors to announce that the Boss was retiring to his room for the evening, Polnareff cradled in one arm. Sheila bid Trish goodnight and left to take her post in a room just beside Giogio’s; Mista turned to leave as well when the tortoise laying against his chest asked to be set down. Jean Pierre trotted slowly over to Trish, who picked him up and waved Mista away, leaving the two of them alone with half a plate of croutons.

“Was that Mademoiselle E?” he asked, placing one claw on the balcony railing as he stretched his neck out to crab a crouton.

Trish frowned. “Who?”

“The girl who just left.”

“...you know Sheila’s last name isn’t really E, right?”

Polnareff chose tactically not to respond to that directly, and chewed his crouton to completion before speaking again. “Did she say how Japan was?”

Trish leaned forward onto the rail with her one unturtled arm, head rested on one palm as she looked down at the Frenchman, who pecked at another crouton.  “Yeah, she said it was fine. She didn’t give me any details, but you know how Passioni types are.”

Polnareff nodded and kept an eye on Una to his side. For a tortoise this was not particularly difficult given that his sides were literally where his eyeballs were located. “Did you say how Corsica was?”

Trish puckered her lips into a smirk. Polnareff was smiling. His testudine facial muscles were not complex enough for him to form a smile physically, of course. But there was a tone to his voice that betrayed a sense of self-satisfaction. Trish knew exactly what it was that he was asking, and it wasn’t if Corsica had come up in her conversation with Sheila. “I did.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That I had a great time,” she remarked plainly, but unable to keep a smile off her face. “And that I got to know my Zio Gianni a little bit better.”

Polnareff groaned and rolled his eyes, but he, too, was grinning still. “I hope you didn’t call me that to Sheila.”

“Why not?”

“She’s the only one who doesn’t call me that!”

Trish shrugged. “Maybe she just doesn’t say it when you’re in the room.”

“Mon dieu!” the tortoise cried out with a laugh. “You children can be so cruel!”

Rolling her eyes, Trish gave him a moment to crane his neck out for another snack. “You know we love you, Signorito Polnareff.”

“I know, I know,” he replied hastily, trying to get bread down his throat as he spoke. “I love you, too.”

Trish laughed and reached to scratch the top of Polnareff’s head. He seemed to be in a turtle and human mind over whether to enjoy it or be embarrassed about it. “So what did you talk to Giogio about?”

He swayed his head side to side. “Just about Corsica.”

“Yeah? What did you tell him?”

 “Oh, just boring Passione things.”

“Uh huh? Like what?”

“Well, he wanted to know about the run-in we had with the Unione Corse . It could be very serious business.”

Trish’s smile faltered into a pout, and she redirected her attention back out toward the Bay with a huff. “Oh.”

Polnareff knitted his scaley brow. “What’s wrong, mademoiselle…?”

“Giogio’s never going to let me leave Naples again.”

Jean Pierre blinked at her sudden swing of mood, but couldn’t help but smirk when he realised what she was thinking. “You’d be surprised!” Trish only paid him a speck of attention out of the corner of her eye. “Did you know Giogio was hesitant to let you out of Naples at all?”

Trish grumbled loudly. “Of course-”

“But!” Polnareff nipped her angst in the bud, placing his claw gently atop her elbow. “He wanted you to go.”

“Huh?”

“He let me take you to Corsica on one condition.” Una’s arm was still enough now to allow him to climb all the way up to her shoulder. “Do you want to know what it was?”

Trish relinquished her lower lip from her teeth and opened up to reply, but the Frenchman cut her off again.

“He wanted me to make sure you had as much fun as you possibly could.”

Trish spent a few more otherwise silent moments huffing and puffing to herself, before straightening her back and turning her chin as far as it would go in Polnareff’s direction. At first she responded to his satisfied grin with an even more prominent pout than before. The first thought to cross her mind was ‘ is it really true what they say about Giorno having feelings? ’. She was immediately embarrassed by this thought. Almost better than any other member of Passione, she knew how caring and compassionate the Padrino could be. Even by her own standards, she found it a little shocking that Giorno might let someone important to him into potential danger just so that they might have a little fun.

But then she thought back to the week preceding the incident at the Colosseum. Just as she had told Jean Pierre, her first ever holiday had been spent almost entirely within the confines of a turtle. It had been for her own safety, of course… but had it made her feel cared for? Quite the opposite, she thought. She had felt stifled, and hadn’t had a moment of fun the entire trip. In contrast, Corsica had put her into unexpected danger, but she had come out the other side feeling happier than she had ever felt before, even if it had, she realised, been the same turtle protecting her the entire time. A smile began to slowly creep into her features.

Polnareff responded with one of his trademark tortoise-seeking-lettuce beams. “Actually, I did tell Giogio another thing about Corsica, now that I think about it.”

Trish picked up the bowl of croutons and placed one between her teeth with considerate leisureliness. “And what was that?”

The testudine closed his eyes, self-satisfied. “That I had fun getting to know my favourite nipotina a little better.”

Trish gasped, and her eyes gleamed. “So you have been practicing your Italian!”

Polnareff stuck his neck out at an angle as if posing triumphantly, then opened one eye just a crack so he could properly appreciate her reaction. “I know, I know. Now, how about we get you something proper to eat before bed, hmm?”

Trish offered the reptile a congratulatory crouton with a laugh. “Okay, okay! It’s probably time for your evening salad, anyway.”

Once the pair had one last glimpse of the sun piercing the horizon, turning the soft red glow of afternoon into a vivid sunset pink, Trish retired herself indoors, knowing that the silver shield of the moon would be watching over her through the night.