Chapter Text
The first thing Mohammed Avdol sees is the Stand. He hears the ring of the bell as the door closes behind them and makes his way to greet the customer. He is instead confronted with a silver body hanging in the air above the door. He’s not even certain the man is aware he’s drawn it, especially when he sees how unfocused his eyes look. He’s battered, a thin layer of grime sticking to his clammy, pale skin. A bead of sweat runs down his shoulder, and the metallic apparition vanishes.
“Hello,” Mohammed calls, trying English first. He isn’t certain why, nothing about this man seems to indicate a particular dialect beyond the pale severity of him. But no, his skin is not one unbroken shade of white now that Mohammed is looking. No, that is broken up by flushes of red from the sun and freckles. So many freckles.
He swallows dryly then, finally looking at Mohammed, blinking in the dim light of the shop as if he’s only just heard someone speaking to him. And those eyes… those eyes are nearly enough to break Mohammed’s professional resolve. So filled with mistrust and wariness, so open and raw. So… blue.
“Hello,” the stranger parrots, voice thick and hoarse. Heavily accented. It only takes Mohammed a moment to place it. French. Very French. He knows the language, knows it almost as well as English, but he proceeds in the latter language.
“You look lost,”
He nods meekly, adjusting the leather sack over his shoulder. His hair is white, so fine that his eyebrows disappear into his skin, and gelled up in a style Mohammed might normally consider ridiculous. Well… he still does. It’s absolutely still ridiculous, but it suits him. He’s young, or maybe he’s not. That part confuses him, actually. He’s fairly good with ages, usually, at reading people in general. It’s part of his job after all. But this man… maybe he simply seems older with the way he carries some deep sorrow, slung across his back.
“Some water, maybe?” Mohammed offers, reaching under the counter for the water cooler and filling a disposable cup. The Stand flashes back in, a second shadow in the dark confines of the shop. He’s suspicious.
No, not suspicious.
Scared.
“Please, sit,”
And in a moment of utter vulnerability (that could be described as stupidity), Mohammed sets Magician’s Red free.
He doesn’t show strangers his Stand. He’s aware of how dangerous that can be, especially with Dio on the hunt for people he can use. But he does it anyway.
The man’s eyes flick up to where Red is hovering above Mohammed, the flames warming his back. He makes sure to hold the arms high, talons held wide in a clear gesture of peace. His jaw slackens, furrowed brow easing just a little.
“We are often drawn to one another,” Mohammed says in what he hopes is a calm and easy voice.
“Are we?” the Frenchman asks, eyes still locked on Magician’s Red as he stumbles to the counter.
“We are, perhaps that is why you are here?”
“N-no,” he perches delicately on the stool, finally letting his eyes fall back to Mohammed, then to the cup of water on the counter.
Mohammed places it on the surface and the stranger takes it, draining it without further protest. He refills the cup as the man runs a hand over his face and groans. “Is it always so damned hot around here?”
And Mohammed can’t help himself.
He laughs.
“In Egypt? Yes, I’m afraid,”
The man takes the second cup with a sheepish smile. His stand evaporates once more and Magician’s Red fades into nothing, leaving the shop a few degrees cooler.
“I… I came in because it was loud and… and it’s a lot, that street,”
“I can imagine for someone who has never been to Khan el-Khalili before,”
He nods, glancing around at the densely packed walls with an easiness that was not there before.
“Who are you?”
“A fortune teller,”
“Not what. Who,” the man says, though his inflection remains light.
And he should lie. Should tell him a fake name or dodge the question entirely. It isn’t safe. Hasn’t he heard that enough from Joseph? Joseph who would already be in a state, knowing that he showed his stand to this man.
“My name is Mohammed, and yours?”
The man’s mouth curves into a mischievous smile. It fits his face perfectly, much better than the suspicion and fear. He leans in and Mohammed knows he should take a step back, maintain some air of professionalism. But all he wants to do is get closer.
“If you’re a fortune teller, shouldn’t you know?”
Mohammed resists the urge to tell him that isn’t how it works, isn’t what a fortune teller is. Instead he smiles and leans his elbows on the counter, raising one eyebrow.
“To do that, I need to read you,”
That smile stretches into something almost child-like in its glee.
“Read away,”
“Your hands?”
He complies, offering them without taking his eyes off Mohammed’s face. He is handsome, that much is undeniable at this proximity, and these hands are not smooth like an easy life would give him. They are not fortunate hands either, though he doesn’t say that. No one wants to hear what their hands reveal to Mohammed.
“Hmm,”
“Can’t tell, then?” he smirks.
“I can tell you one thing,” Mohammed reaches to the left where his tarot deck is, drawing a card from the center. He places it face up in the space between the stranger’s upturned hands.
The Chariot.
“I…” the man swallows hard, nearly stumbling off his stool. He’s closing up again. “That… that means nothing-”
“ Je ne vous veux aucun mal ,” Mohammed says, slipping into French. I mean you no harm .
“You… you know who I am?”
“No, you have an accent,”
“I… I’m Jean,” he mumbles, closing his palms into fists. Pulling away. Mohammed wants to reach out again, but he restrains himself.
Professional.
Be fucking professional.
“What brought you here, Jean?”
“I’m… I’m looking for someone,” he says, bowing his head against his hands.
“Someone I can help with as a fortune teller?”
Jean shakes his head.
“Perhaps… as a Stand User?”
He shrugs and Mohammed sighs.
“I am no help to anyone who will not ask,”
“I have nothing to offer you,” Jean whispers, head still lowered.
“Then take my good will. I can answer you one question for free, Jean,”
He looks up, eyes suddenly blazing with a rage that was not there before. The cerulean storm in his eyes looks more like fire than anything Magician’s Red has ever made. They singe Mohammed’s soul.
“Where is the man with two right hands?”
A chill runs down his spine, not just at the harsh set of the man’s jaw and the turmoil in that look. But because he knows. He knows who Jean is looking for, and he knows what happens to anyone who crosses him. Who even tries to approach.
“You don’t want to know that,”
“I do,” he looks almost feral now.
“This man, he is not-”
“He killed my sister,” Jean snaps, but the anger is thin. Misdirected. His Stand does not even appear. And Mohammed is silent, unsure of how to proceed because now there are tears streaming down the stranger’s face. A stranger who has given himself up, who has let his guard fall so completely.
J. Geil will kill him without hesitation. He will not survive the encounter. And it is not a prediction, it is a guarantee. A guarantee from a man who can see the future in more than palms and cards. Because he can see this death when he closes his eyes.
It has been years since Mohammed had a vision with such clarity. They’re rare, and they have only ever happened for his family. A horrible train wreck he couldn’t warn his mother about in time. A sense that he should leave the city with his father right before a sickness swept through. And now, for this stranger…
He sees a street, sky clearing of clouds even as the ground is puddled with mud. He sees Jean and the silver blur of his Stand, desperately slashing at nothing, stumbling. Bloodied. He’s shouting, spit flying from his mouth from the force behind his words. He sees the gun, sees it as if he were the one pointing it. Sees the way the bullet sails through the air and embeds itself between those bright blue eyes. Sees Jean stutter in his movements and fall flat to the ground. Sees the blood pooling around him in the mud.
And then he’s back, trembling slightly as he stares at the flat top of his head. His very much still moving body.
“ Ce… ce connard …” Jean spits out, shoulders shaking as he curls into himself. That bastard , or at least Mohammed thinks. He isn’t so good with the curses. Or thinking. Right now the thinking is especially thin.
“There, there,” Mohammed tries, reaching for him as if he can reassure himself it wasn’t real. As if he can know why he’s so affected by his death before it even happens, or why he saw it at all. He reaches with one hand, and Jean holds back, fingers tight around his wrist. It’s only later that Mohammed realizes he offered him his right hand. That in that moment he had no reason to think he wasn’t the man he sought to destroy. That if he had thought at all, he would have offered his left.
“There’s… there is a man… someone said he may know,” Jean gasps between sobs.
Mohammed does not like where this is going.
“Dio?”
He lifts his head, no mark between his brows. Not a scratch on him.
Mohammed forces himself to take a deep breath.
Visions are not a guarantee.
Visions are a potential.
I can stop this.
“Y-you know him?”
“Do not go to him, Jean,” Mohammed moves his other hand over the man’s, holding them together like a prayer. “He is not a good man. He will not give you what you seek if you are not of service-”
“You will not tell me where to find the man who killed my sister?”
“I cannot-”
Will not.
“Then you give me no choice,” he withdraws his hands. It seems almost painful, the way his face twists. He turns his back on Mohammed.
He only has one choice left.
“Jean, I am a fortune teller. I am telling you seeking this man out will… it will kill you,”
He sees the way Jean’s shoulders stiffen, the stumble in his step. He lifts his head, giving Mohammed one last look.
“I don’t care,”
Jean leaves his shop, and Mohammed believes him dead before the curtain even falls closed behind him.
***
When Dio finds Mohammed, he doesn’t immediately think of Jean. His first thought, in fact, is run.
And Mohammed is great at running. In every sense, really, but especially in the physical sense. He’s fast and he knows his way around the bazaar better than most. It doesn’t hit him until he’s in the taxi to the Speedwagon Foundation’s Cairo headquarters that someone should have followed him. That while the market is maze-like, it was empty and tracking someone would have been easy for a vampire. .
There are only two immediately obvious options. First, and least likely, is that Dio could not catch him. This option wouldn’t bother him much; maybe it was too close to daybreak, maybe his Stand is short-ranged and he didn’t want to exert himself beyond its capabilities. But the second option is far more disconcerting: that Dio didn’t try.
By the time that he’s dialing Joseph, he’s got a vague theory. He gets transferred from the Speedwagon Foundation in New York to the Joestar residence.
“I’ll be right back, Suzi!” Joseph shouts before a door shuts behind him. “Mohammed Avdol, to what do I owe the-?”
“Dio came after me,” Mohammed blurts without hesitation.
There is a long pause on the other end. Then he hears Joseph distantly speaking to someone else.
“I’ll be a bit longer… No, no don’t keep them waiting,” there’s a rustle and Joseph speaks much quieter into the receiver. “Are you safe? You made it to Speedwagon, at the very least-”
“Yes, I escaped…”
“You seem… unhappy?”
“He… he didn’t chase me.”
“Not that you know-”
“No, he didn’t, Mr. Joestar,” he says, hearing the way his own voice trembles.
“And you have an idea?”
“It’s…” Mohammed takes a deep steadying breath before continuing. This is Joseph, Joseph who uses the most inane metaphors he has ever heard. “It’s like a tiger letting a mouse run across his paws. If I pose no threat to Dio, why would Dio lash out at me?”
Joseph makes a thoughtful “hmm” that makes Mohammed feel nauseous.
“Or he knows you work with the Speedwagon Foundation,”
And that, surprisingly, does calm Mohammed down. The Joestars are at the center of the universe, Mohammed is secondary. Unimportant. Safe, in that he is so unattached to the Joestar bloodline and therefore unremarkable.
“It isn’t safe for you right now, not alone,” Joseph continues. “And seeing as you’re more well-versed in the business of Stands than I… perhaps you could lend me a hand while we work this out?”
So he does.
Mohammed closes the shop, takes what he can carry, leaving the rest with the foundation, and flies to New York.
***
Things are transient once he becomes Joseph Joestar’s right hand. He’s hardly in New York for two months before there’s some sort of emergency in Japan. A family emergency.
A statement from his daughter sends Joseph into a panic, one that he only poorly conceals from his wife Suzi. She asks Mohammed to call when they land safely and to keep an eye on “the old fool.”
And all that fear amounts to nothing, to simply a seventeen-year-old grandson who won’t leave the jail cell because he doesn’t understand his own soul and body. He rails against Mohammed, spitting and kicking like a feral dog until they are out in the daylight.
For his part, Mohammed thinks the kid is a bit of a brat at first. An overgrown, incredibly strong brat, certainly, but he greets his mother with a swear and his expensive coat smells of cigarettes. He’s all rough edges and sharp teeth, snarling like he’s cornered.
Until they return to the Kujo residence. Until Holly leaves to prepare a room and Joseph slips off to relieve himself. Until Jotaro’s shoulders slump forward and he removes his hat. His eyes have dark shadows underneath and the moment no one’s looking at him, he caves.
He’s not a rabid mutt. He’s just a kid.
***
Mohammed has to acknowledge he likes the youngest Joestar. It may even be mutual, what with the way Jotaro actually listens when he speaks. He’s learning to interpret the sharp way he speaks as utilitarian, the quickness to violence as a rough history rather than spoiled rebellion, his silence as companionship.
Perhaps that is all thanks to Noriaki Kakyoin.
Mohammed thinks, perhaps, that changed something. Or at least his perception of something. Removing the flesh bud for a near stranger, accepting him on their journey without even so much as a grumble of protest. These are things his mother would be fiercely proud of. Tease him and call him her “sweet little Jotaro” while he smoldered and pleaded for her to stop.
But maybe there’s something more than selflessness here. Maybe he didn’t recognize it in the chaos of Holly taking ill and the plane crash, in the jostle through the streets of Hong Kong misguided by Joseph Joestar’s awful Cantonese. But it’s something he recognizes in the restaurant.
A look. A tiny glance as Kakyoin tips the lid off the teapot. Kakyoin notices and explains it’s a custom in Hong Kong, but Mohammed sees the way Jotaro tugs at his hat, a nervous gesture he recognizes by now.
It’s what he’s focused on when a man approaches their table, asking Joseph about the menu in stunted, clumsy Japanese. He’s behind Mohammed, who knows so little Canton that he can’t even order himself lunch, and therefore thinks little of it. But when Joseph offers the man a seat, Jotaro snaps at him to “get lost.”
Really, what Mohammed notices instead of that sharp phrase is how he turns red around the ears and hunkers down in his chair, like he doesn’t want the newcomer to come between him and Kakyoin. It’s… endearing.
Mohammed shifts his chair and another is pulled up by…
Jean.
There’s a moment where everyone is rearranging and Joseph is ordering that Mohammed openly stares, mouth agape at… certainly that must be him? Fine white hair in a characteristic style, broad shoulders… but his eyes. Mohammed needs to see his eyes. It isn’t until the food is arriving that he manages a glance. They’re that same blue, certainly, but they’re…
Cold. Empty.
Jean’s eyes were expressive, so expressive. They bore down into Mohammed’s soul, they haunted him for weeks after their encounter. He had hoped he’d see them again, sure, but not devoid of that… vitality that drew him in.
Not like this.
When he carefully lifts the star-shaped carrot off the serving platter, Mohammed knows he found Dio after all. Or at the very least thinks he knows. He’s ready before any of the others seem to realize, on his feet before the full silver of his Stand materializes. Jean turning out like this was his mistake. He will be the one to remedy it.
He didn’t see the full form of Silver Chariot in his shop, so the shock of it slicing his flames in half are genuine.
And then those blank eyes lock on Mohammed in a way that is nothing short of sinister. They are targeted, hyper-focused. And then he says his name, a name he shouldn’t know.
And now it clicks.
Dio didn’t chase Mohammed because he didn’t need to.
He already had someone to do it for him.
***
Mohammed snuffs the flames out the moment he hears the knife clatter to the ground, tries not to be too quick about how he turns the body over. Tries not to look too tender or frantic as he digs through the man’s hair. As he hopes that the man he met in his shop isn’t the same one who just tried to kill him. As he hopes against hope that there’s something left.
There.
The tendrils lash against his fingers and he nearly shouts with joy. Because Mohammed wants to save Jean. He wants to save him more than he understands. But he can’t lose his place in the group, can’t attract derision or suspicion by being so openly soft for someone who is very much a stranger.
Jotaro kneels beside him, chews his lower lip thoughtfully as his eyes track Mohammed’s fingers. He notices the care with which he’s holding him and one of his eyebrows arches up.
Don’t ask.
Jotaro, thankfully, doesn't.
“Hold him still?”
Mohammed nods, heart in his throat. His hands are steady on either side of Jean’s temples, and Jotaro braces himself against the dirt before drawing his stand. It feels like he’s removing it for Mohammed, pulling the thing for him, saving him .
And then he stands and walks away like it was nothing. Like the fleshy thing didn’t try and bury itself under his skin. He leaves Mohammed cradling a slowly waking Frenchman, hellbent on revenge.
“W-what…?” he chokes, one hand going to his forehead and rubbing at the trace of blood in his h air.
“Jotaro removed it,” Mohammed says gently. “You’re safe,”
Tu es en sécurité , he doesn’t say.
“I… t-thanks… Avdol, was it?”
Mohammed’s throat catches as Jean’s eyes take on their life again. No, it’s Polnareff. That’s his name.
He doesn’t remember.
“Yes, I… where can I get you back to?”
Jean… Polnareff lets out a little huff of laughter and rubs his head.
“I… uh… hotel?”
It takes some time, but with the help of Kakyoin and his map they manage to find the place. To safely remove him from their path.
***
Mohammed isn’t letting Polnareff go alone, regardless of what an idiot he is. He feels the hairs on the back of his neck prickle as the rain stops, feels an odd sense of unease as he recognizes the street they’re on. But he’s never been here. He sees blood pooling in rips on Polnareff’s clothes, sees him stumble and slash at nothing. He sees the man raise a gun and level it at him, adjusting his aim.
His body feels cold as he sprints towards Polnareff. To knock him over, to change that vision. To do something.
He hears the crack of the bullet and an impact. He doesn’t hear anything else.