Chapter Text
Jotaro was getting really tired of staring at the same bland painting of a flowery field in the doctor’s office.
The one on the other wall, a harbour scene with more vibrant colours, was a lot better. Despite the numerous occasions he’d seen it in the last few months, he still wasn’t sick of it like the other one. But he had to turn his head to look at it, whereas the painting of the field was right in front of him when he sat on the paper-covered exam table, and it was just so fucking lifeless. The colours were all washed out, and it was nothing but static. Static, bland, and boring.
Maybe he hated it because it summarized the current state of his life just as well.
“Hello,” the doctor said when he entered. He pulled a wheeled stool out from under the counter by the sink and sat down, unlocking his tablet so he could look at Jotaro’s file.
This was the same doctor Jotaro had been seeing for years; he liked him because he wasn’t overly friendly and got right to the point, rather than trying to make some pointless conversation to start. That kind of bedside manner probably rubbed some people the wrong way, but for Jotaro, it was perfect.
“So unfortunately, I can’t conclusively say it’s angina based on your results,” the doctor said after a moment, looking up from the tablet briefly before he went back to scrolling through the screen. “Overall, your heart looks healthy for your age. There’s a bit of narrowing and some plaque, but nothing too serious. About what we’d expect.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Well, it could still be angina. I’m not going to rule it out as a possibility entirely. But there might be a simpler explanation, in this case.”
“What’s that?” Jotaro asked, doing his best to contain his irritation.
He’d already been agitated before he got here; he’d had tests and appointments almost every week for the last two months, sometimes multiple ones back-to-back, and his patience had run out a long time ago. He really didn’t want to hear that after finally giving up smoking for good, the one thing that would’ve helped him deal with the stress of this, his heart wasn’t even the problem—but that was where it seemed like it was heading.
“I think it may just be anxiety.”
It took a moment for the words to even register, and an even longer one for Jotaro to manage a response.
“Anxiety?” he blurted. If it sounded like he thought that was ridiculous, well, he couldn’t help it, because it did. “From what?”
The doctor shrugged. “There could be any number of causes. It’s hard to narrow in on one, but when we talked about potential stressors before, you said there hadn’t been any major life changes recently, correct?”
“Right.”
“So it’s probably more of a general mental health issue. I’m going to give you a referral to a psychologist. Of course, you can find one yourself, but if you give her office a call, they should be able to book you relatively soon. Others might have a longer wait list,” he said, scrawling a name and number on his prescription pad. He tore off the paper once he was finished, then handed it to Jotaro.
Jotaro took the paper reluctantly and looked down at the therapist’s name, frowning. “But you don’t know for sure if it’s actually anxiety.”
“No, that’s not my speciality. That’s why I’m giving you a referral.”
“Angina’s more serious though…I smoked, right? Shouldn’t I still be more concerned about that if you can’t rule it out? I don’t want to wind up in the hospital in a month because I had a fucking heart attack.”
“Obviously with your history of smoking, you’re at a higher risk, but all your test results show that you’re not in any immediate danger. Everything’s within normal ranges, and since you’ve stopped smoking, that risk will only keep going down. We tried you on the medication, but you said it wasn’t relieving your symptoms. Typically nitrate is very effective in relieving the acute pain, especially in milder cases. That’s why I’m leaning toward the cause being anxiety.”
“What about that activity-log thing I had to do?” Jotaro tried, still desperately searching for another way out of this. “What did that show?”
“Well, that was what initially led me to consider alternate causes. It doesn’t seem like there’s a regular pattern for your symptoms being brought on. Usually the main trigger is exercise or strenuous activity, but you didn’t mark down any incidents of chest pain while you were exercising. It’s possible to have unstable angina that appears more erratically, but that typically means your heart is having a hard time keeping up with basic activity. If that were the case, I’d expect some of the workouts you said you were doing to be next to impossible, and it would definitely show up in your test results.”
There was a short pause as the doctor took another look at his tablet. Then he looked up briefly, asking, “How are you sleeping?”
“Not the best, with all this going on,” Jotaro admitted, trying to keep a sigh from his lips. It wasn’t like he’d wanted the other answer, but at least it was something he could deal with. This—not so much.
“I’ll give you a prescription for a sleep-aid then. We’ll do fifteen for now. Just try using them as needed. Same pharmacy?”
“Yeah.”
Jotaro stood up, putting his coat back on and getting ready to leave. The doctor followed suit a minute later, but before Jotaro was out the door, he handed him a pamphlet from one of the cubbies on the wall.
“Phone her office as soon as you can and they should be able to get you in within a few weeks. In the meantime, this has some resources online you can look at. You can try some home remedies that lower your stress too. A lot of people find something like meditation helps, but it’s really up to the individual. Just look at some recommendations and try a few out to see what works.”
“Sure,” Jotaro said. It sounded like the least appealing thing he could do with his free time, but if he had to.
“Come in for a follow-up in another month. And if you do feel like your symptoms are getting worse or you have new ones, go into emergency. Don’t try to wait for an appointment here. But most importantly—don’t start smoking again. You might think ‘once in awhile’ doesn’t make a difference, but it does.”
“Yeah. I know.”
The doctor finally opened the door and released him after that. Jotaro almost wished he hadn’t. He hated that painting, but sitting in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant with a decaf coffee to calm his nerves while he phoned the fucking shrink’s office wasn’t any better.
“So what did you do with your birthday money?” Jotaro asked after his conversation with Jolyne had lulled for an amount of time he knew his ex-wife wouldn’t approve of. It was just them at dinner tonight, so that was inevitable. At least the food was almost here.
“Well, I was gonna get a new tattoo,” Jolyne said, straightening up. “But then I found these shoes. Look.”
She flicked through her phone for a moment before thrusting it across the table so Jotaro could see the pair of neon platforms on the screen.
“Nice shoes,” he said, nodding. “What are those for?”
“For looking hot with the girls,” she replied, now back to her phone.
“Is that who you’re texting?”
“Yeah. Sorry,” she said, though she didn’t put her phone down for another minute. Once she had, she took a sip of her drink, twirling the straw around the ice inside. “So Mom said you quit smoking?”
“Yeah. I’d mostly quit already. It’s not a big deal.”
It was, actually. He hadn’t been this stressed since she was born, when he’d had to figure out how to juggle a newborn and finals all at once. At the rate this was going, it would kill him long before the cigarettes would’ve had the chance to.
“Sure. Like I mostly finish my assignments,” Jolyne said sarcastically, smirking at him.
“You shouldn’t just say that shit to me because you think I won’t do anything about it. It’s not hard to drop into a conversation with your mom.”
“Wow, grumpy,” she muttered. “Is this what it’s gonna be like now? I thought it couldn’t get any worse.”
It was probably supposed to be some offhand comment—she really didn’t look that bothered, especially once the food finally showed up—but it didn’t feel…great.
Jotaro knew she’d resigned herself to tolerating him after high school, rather than turning everything into an argument, now that she was preoccupied with all the extra freedom adulthood and college was affording her. And overall, they were getting along pretty well. They still weren’t that close, but she lived with her mom and had a whole life that didn’t revolve around him, so were they really supposed to be? She was growing up and figuring herself out, and that was fine. It wasn’t going to be like when she was a kid and looked at him with stars in her eyes.
It was just the moments like that, when the mood suddenly shifted and it felt like the progress they’d made ground to a screeching halt. Like they hadn’t actually made any at all. Like all that resentment was still under the surface, and she’d only be able to play nice for so long before she gave up on him. And he was still too worried about breaking the weak little bridges they’d built to actually address it.
“Well, that’s good, right?” Jolyne said a few minutes later, piercing the silence that had settled back in as they started eating. “Better for your health and stuff.”
“Yeah.”
Jotaro hadn’t told his ex the reason why he’d quit for good, so obviously Jolyne didn’t know either. When the chest pain had really started bothering him, he hadn’t seen the point in telling anyone and worrying them when he didn’t have an answer for what it was. Now he was immensely grateful he’d held off. To have to backtrack and explain what the problem had turned out to be when it was so fucking stupid would’ve been humiliating. This way, he could just keep it to himself, and no one had to know. It would all stay between him and the therapist he was supposed to be seeing in a week.
They returned to their food, and a few more minutes went by. Jolyne was the one to speak up again when it had grown stifling. Jotaro was too busy getting wrapped up in the spiral of dread he felt whenever he thought on that upcoming appointment for too long.
“So is Grandma coming to visit this summer?”
“I was thinking I might go see her,” Jotaro replied absently.
He hadn’t been in a few years, and it might be nice. A proper vacation where he could actually tune his thoughts out for real. His mom always took care of everything when he was there, so he wouldn’t have any responsibilities nagging at the back of his mind. He could just relax, and he didn’t even have to feel guilty about it, because technically it was what the doctor had ordered.
“What?” Jolyne asked, her voice a lot sharper than Jotaro had heard it in awhile. He looked up from his plate to find her staring daggers at him, clearly pissed. “Are you serious?”
“What’s wrong?”
“When were you gonna tell me? When you’d already bought the fucking tickets?”
Oh. Shit.
“I hadn’t made up my mind,” Jotaro said, diverting his attention back to his plate and the side salad he was picking his way through. “I was just…thinking about it. Hadn’t decided on anything.”
He really hadn’t gotten that far yet—it was just where his mind had started wandering recently, looking for a reprieve from everything else. So he hadn’t thought about how Jolyne would factor into it either, but that was careless of him. He’d made that same mistake before, and he should’ve known fucking better. When she felt excluded from things, whether or not he’d intended it, it led nowhere good. It just hadn’t occurred to him with everything else going on, and if he’d actually started making concrete plans, of course he would’ve asked her then. It was just…
“Well thanks for that,” Jolyne said, stabbing at a runaway crouton on her plate. “I have plans to make too, y’know. There’s shit I wanna do this summer, but I don’t wanna miss out on seeing Grandma, either.”
“Yeah. Sorry. Just keep it in mind. I’ll try to figure it out in the next couple weeks and let you know.”
She only grunted at that. Despite her outrage, she really didn’t look like she’d want to spend an entire day trapped with him in a series of airports and planes, even in a couple months, but so long as they didn’t get into a blowout before then, it would be fine. Right now, she just needed some time to cool off. This was her gut reaction to this kind of stuff, and it wasn’t as though it was unwarranted. It had happened before, and despite Jotaro’s efforts to keep from making the same mistakes again over the years, she wasn’t obliged to trust him.
They didn’t talk too much after that. Jolyne went back to her phone, Jotaro paid the bill when the waiter finally showed up again, and then he dropped her back off at her mom’s.
“Try to keep the end of July free, I guess,” he said before she got out of the car.
“Yeah. Sure,” she agreed.
“Okay. Goodnight,” he said with a nod.
“‘Night,” she replied, hopping out and shutting the door.
And that was that.
The video call started out of desperation.
Nothing had been going right recently. It wasn’t like things had been that great up until this point, but the last few weeks had really been something else. Maybe it just felt infinitely worse because whenever shit like this had happened before, Jotaro had cigarettes to fall back on. Now he had nothing, absolutely fucking nothing, and he’d never come this close to locking himself in his apartment and pretending like he didn’t exist for a week.
Arguably, this was one of the few times a year he plausibly could, what with the short gap from the end of July to the middle of August, between the summer courses he taught and when he needed to start prepping for the fall semester, being when he was most reliably free. But he didn’t want to fucking do that. He just wanted some way to relieve all this stress that kept compounding and compounding, and feel like a fucking person again.
The call rang for a minute, which was expected. Jotaro had just looked at the short list of contacts in the app on his laptop and abruptly decided he was going to do it, once ignoring the mounting frustration in favour of work had started making him feel like he’d actually explode. He hadn’t even messaged them ahead of time like he normally would’ve, so it was possible they wouldn’t answer at all. But the status next to the icon was a yellow ‘Away’, which meant someone had been on the computer recently. And it was around eight o’clock their time, so they were probably still making dinner. When they were home, they didn’t go out that much anymore. Everyone was getting older, not just him.
“Ah—ah, allô?” someone on the other side finally answered.
Jotaro couldn’t tell if the connection was choppy or he was just being weird, as usual. Now that they’d been living in out in the countryside for so long, away from any urban centres where tourists and non-native speakers were more common, his English skills could be hit or miss until he was fully immersed in it again. Then the camera flicked on, and Jotaro was greeted by the view of tight white pants and a large onion taking up one side of the lens.
“Jean, can you move the camera so it’s not pointed at your fucking dick,” Jotaro said, leaning forward with his elbows on the desk, rubbing at his eyes in exasperation.
“Hold on. You just call out of the blue—what do you expect? Muhammad say to me, ‘Oh, the Skype is ringing!’ and his hands are wet, I’m holding the knife—” Polnareff jabbed it at the camera a couple times to illustrate— “and I have to find somewhere to put the computer!”
Tirade complete, Polnareff swore under his breath, scolding the dog that had been yipping off screen.
“Hello, Jotaro!” Avdol called from somewhere off to the side.
“Hi,” Jotaro replied, still rubbing at his forehead. This definitely went against his better judgement, but they were really the only people he could talk to about this, since the attempt at therapy had failed so spectacularly.
Polnareff finally pushed the laptop back further and tilted the screen so the camera pointed higher up, providing a wider view of their kitchen and Avdol occasionally popping into the frame—and most importantly, his face, not his fucking crotch. His silver hair was pulled back and he was wearing a black tank top, like he usually did. They certainly had the weather for it right now in the south of France. Would’ve been a nice place for a vacation too, if only Jotaro had known his initial plans were doomed to fall apart.
“What are you making?” Jotaro asked as Polnareff started in on the onion he’d noticed earlier.
“Chicken!” he exclaimed, quickly splitting the onion apart.
“Just chicken? Nothing fancy?”
“No, just good chicken. Some herbs, some lemon, and mwah,” he said, making a kissing gesture with his hand. “We killed it this morning.”
“Oh, I see,” Jotaro said, straightening up. That farm shit always caught him off guard.
“Kushari too,” Polnareff added after another moment. “Earlier we have some wine, so we have cheese, salad… Lots of veggies in the garden. Good to use while we can.”
“How are you, Jotaro?” Avdol asked, leaning back into view momentarily, his gold earrings jangling as he did. “I’m stirring right now. My apologies.”
“Been better.”
Avdol had disappeared after asking that question, but quickly showed up again, staring at Jotaro before he exchanged a weird look with Polnareff. They’d known him long enough to know his reply being anything other than, “Fine,” was out-of-character.
“Really?” Avdol asked slowly. “What’s been going on?”
“Few things,” Jotaro said, toying with one of his pens on the desk. “I was supposed to take Jolyne and go visit my mom last week, but we had to cancel our flights pretty last-minute. My father suddenly decided he needed to come back for those two weeks.”
“Right. That’s what Mr. Joestar had said you were doing. Well, I’m sorry to hear that. That’s very unfortunate, for both you and Jolyne.”
“Fait chier,” Polnareff chimed in, now rapidly slicing the onions into long strips. “That’s shit, man,” he elaborated. “I’m sorry.”
“Is what it is,” Jotaro said, shrugging. “So you’ll still be in New York in a few days?”
“Oui!” Polnareff answered jovially. “That’s why we kill the chicken now, you know. One less for our neighbour to feed.”
“Does it really make that much of a difference?”
“No, he’s kidding,” Avdol reassured him. “We just needed enough time to use the meat.” He stooped to hand something to the dog, who finally quieted down, then asked, “Does that mean you’re coming to New York instead?”
“Yeah, if that works.”
“Of course!” he said happily. “It’ll be good to see you. Obviously we were disappointed when Mr. Joestar said it wouldn’t work with your schedule, and visiting Miss Holly is just as important, but if it ends up this way, we should make the best of it.”
“Yeah,” Jotaro said, nodding.
He watched them bustle around cooking for another minute, Polnareff handing off the onion slices to Avdol and taking some dishes away, presumably to the sink, before he returned with a glass of wine he’d retrieved from somewhere. Jotaro had been trying to work himself up to asking what he needed to next, but Polnareff started talking again before he managed, never one for a prolonged silence.
“So that’s why the call with no warning?” he asked, taking a sip. “You wanted to check what our plans are?”
“I need some advice,” Jotaro finally admitted.
Polnareff paused with the brim of the glass to his lips, staring at the camera out of the corner of his eye. Obviously he was trying to surmise if Jotaro was fucking with him or not.
“You want advice?” he asked incredulously. “From who? Pas moi, non? You can’t be serious…not that I won’t give it to you, of course! I’m honoured, Jotaro—truly, I am,” he said, brushing a fake tear from his cheek.
“Va t’faire enculer,” Jotaro said, flipping him off. It was one of the swears he’d committed to memory, since it served its purpose pretty well.
“Well, ask away!” Polnareff said cheerily.
“Mon amour, I think he may have meant from someone else,” Avdol pointed out from off-camera. “There are two people in the room.”
“No, screw that, he asked me first!”
Jotaro sighed, the annoyance rearing up again. Forty-six years old, and he still acted like a child half the time. The worst part was that he actually was the person he needed to ask about this.
“Listen,” Jotaro said firmly, tired of dicking around. “I stopped smoking, okay? I had some health shit, so I stopped, but it’s really starting to fuck with me, and I just need a way to deal with it.”
Polnareff looked at Jotaro blankly—he probably hadn’t been expecting him to spill all that—before he said, “Well go and get fucking laid.”
“Don’t do that,” Avdol quickly interjected.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Jotaro replied dryly. “Look, I just need something that’ll get me through the days right now, preferably before school starts again. I tried going to this therapist the doctor recommended, but I hated it. It just stressed me out more. But I remembered you saying you had that therapist friend in New York, so I was wondering if he might be able to meet with me once or twice while I’m there. I know they’re normally all booked up, but…I don’t know. If he had a cancellation or something…I just thought it would be easier to see someone you recommended. Maybe he could give me some tips that’ll give me results faster than having to sit through ten fucking sessions minimum like the rest of them. You know, the kind of shit they don’t tell you when they just want to get as much money as they can.”
“Woah…okay. That’s a lot, man,” Polnareff said, taking another sip of wine and nodding to himself. “I’m sorry. That’s rough.”
“You have a therapist friend in New York?” Avdol asked.
“I do not,” Polnareff replied easily.
Jotaro sat up abruptly, frowning. “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. Unless he’d been totally out to lunch when he heard Polnareff mention it before—but he swore that’s what he’d said. “You were fucking complaining to me about him that one night when you were drunk.”
“Uhh…and what night was that again?”
Jotaro rolled his eyes. Of course he had to be more specific with that criteria.
“Last year, before Christmas. You went to that fundraiser with the old man and you called me up drunk, complaining about ‘this bitch who thinks he can say whatever he wants because he’s a fucking therapist,’ or something like that.”
“Ohhh…shit,” Polnareff said, throwing his head back into a laugh. “Non, non, non, non,” he said, still laughing and shaking his head, waving his hand at the camera as another way of expressing that Jotaro had apparently gotten it all completely wrong. “No, he’s not a therapist. I say he think he’s a therapist. Although…” he said quietly, pausing to consider something.
“The fundraiser last year? With the art department?” At Polnareff’s nod, Avdol continued, “Who are you talking about?”
“Eh…I don’t know if I’m supposed to say. He tell me these things ‘in confidence,’ you know. I shouldn’t break my word.”
“Well now I’m concerned,” Jotaro said.
“So am I,” Avdol agreed.
“Fuck you, it’s not bad,” Polnareff retorted at both of them. “But if you want less stress…I think he can help you with ‘less stress.’ It’s like…uh…what’s the word I’m looking for...”
Jotaro took a moment to register what that implied before he snapped into panic, saying, “Holy shit, Jean. You are not setting me up with a fucking prostitute, are you insane?”
“I’m sure that’s not what he meant,” Avdol tried to reassure him. “That’s not what you meant, right?” he asked Polnareff pointedly.
Polnareff shrugged his shoulders. “What’s the problem? It’s not a bad thing. It’s fine, you know, it works. Some people need things like that. It’s good. Just a service,” he said, sipping at his wine again.
“I wasn’t saying it was a bad thing, Jean. That’s entirely beside the point here. Jotaro was asking for our advice on a very serious topic, and bringing up something like that as a solution is completely inappropriate. It makes it seem like you don’t understand the gravity of what’s being discussed.”
“No, I’m taking it serious!” Polnareff snapped, smacking his hand into Avdol’s chest as he gestured. He was clearly getting animated about this. “That’s my serious suggestion. He ask for a quick fix, I say go get laid. That’s what everyone else does: drink, smoke, or fuck. First two don’t work, do the last. All of them, if you can.”
From Jotaro’s limited view on the other side of the camera, it looked like they were entering a stand-off now. He would’ve felt bad for instigating the fight in the first place, except Polnareff always did this to himself.
“Not appropriate,” Avdol finally reiterated.
Polnareff just shook his head and scowled, finding solace in another sip of wine because no one else was on his side.
“When are your flights?” Jotaro asked, thinking it’d be better to just move on. Polnareff’s whole revelation had nipped his idea of cheating the system in the bud, but it would be worth it to go to New York anyway. He needed the vacation at the very least—sitting around here wasn’t doing him any fucking favours.
“We get in on the twenty-fourth, then we leave on the tenth, right?” Avdol replied, looking over to Polnareff for his reluctant confirmation. He still wasn’t talking, opting for the silent treatment instead. He could be such a fucking baby about shit.
“Okay, so I’ll look at coming in on the twenty-sixth, or the twenty-seventh, then,” Jotaro said, checking his calendar. It was short notice, so he’d probably have the best luck booking on a weekday.
“How long are you going to stay?”
“Uh, the two weeks, I guess.”
The tenth wasn’t a bad day to come back. It was enough time for him to go into campus and set things up for the new semester, without leaving too many extra days to torture himself in the interim. Hopefully it would be enough of a refresh for his mind overall that he wouldn’t be having the same problems when he returned, but who knew.
“Wonderful,” Avdol said with a beatific smile. “I’m sure Mr. and Mrs. Joestar will enjoy that as well.”
“Yeah,” Jotaro said with a nod.
The call ended after Avdol’s apologies on his and Polnareff’s behalf for not being more helpful, and the promise that they could talk more about things when they were in person. It wasn’t like Jotaro minded: he hadn’t been expecting them to magically solve this shit for him, especially when he’d failed so spectacularly at doing it himself, and just the promise of an escape was enough to calm his nerves and let him focus again. Of course, now there was a mounting doom from anticipating the inevitable return to normalcy, with the added dread of wondering if he might just end up feeling fucking worse afterward, but what else could he do but try?
Well, he could start looking for other therapists like he was supposed to, but that was being reserved as the very last resort.