[Is he still annoyed about the Bug Chariot thing? Yeah, kind of! Is he more preoccupied with how this is going to go down? Oh, yes. Is he using one to try and not think about the other? Assuredly.

It takes him another half-hour to get back home, but his eyes lock on Kakyoin the instant he walks in. How does he start this? Hey, remember that guy who killed you? Well, guess who's kid I ran into . . .]

Hey.

[Oh boy. Polnareff comes to sit next to him.]

Uh. So. I ran into the kid . . . a guy who knows me from the future.

[Know that Kakyoin has spent this hour just sitting and staring, since he's pretty sure that the second he decides to do something else while he waits, Polnareff will walk in the door. That's the half hour he has.

Anyway, thrill him. The future is already a bit raw as topics go, all things considered. He waits a beat, putting that emotion away, then-]

Alright. And?

And . . .

[He rubs his mouth, his eyes flicking around Kakyoin's face.]

So I guess I help him fight someone. I give him strategic advice. We defeat this evil together. And, uh . . . I mean, no shock, right? Turns out I still fight thirteen years later, who coulda guess. But the kid, he--

His name is Giorno. Giorno Giovanna. He used to live with his step-father and his mother, cuz his real father died not too long after he was sired.

[. . .]

In Cairo, in 1989. Killed by five different men.

Oh, him.

[Does it surprise him that Polnareff goes on to defeat more great evils? No, not at all. Is he immediately distracted by the memory that Giorno drank piss once? Definitely, which is actually a little lucky, as it softens the oncoming blow at least a little.

So, thanks Giorno Giovanna, for being a goddamn freak. Kakyoin sits back and looks at the ceiling, thinking about it. Should he also put this emotion neatly away...? Maybe not.]

Do you believe him? About the future.

Yeah.

[It's based more on a gut feeling than anything proper, but aren't a lot of their decisions? Jotaro trusting him, trusting Kakyoin . . . it was based on gut feelings, nothing more.]

He doesn't feel like DIO. There's not the same . . . I don't know. He just doesn't feel the same. I think . . . I think if he was lying, he would've been a lot slicker about it.

He's... perplexing.

[He drinks weird things and does mysterious things with bread— although, actually, Kakyoin knows all about the Polpo test now, so that's less strange in retrospect.

Also, they've met.]

Fighting some enemy with him— assuming that that's true, it's a good sign. [Although they are both guilty of tripping face-first into DIO charisma, but he'd like to think they've learned. He's picking and choosing details to think about here, and it's obvious; give him a moment.] If you believe him, then I'll do the same.

[Perplexing is a good word for it. But not evil, not the way DIO had been. Radiating it, a terrible aura even as he'd drawn people in with that charisma.]

Okay.

[There's a lot of trust packed into that one sentence, he realizes. He wouldn't blame Kakyoin for ignoring Polnareff's advice; he wouldn't blame him in the least for hating Giorno. But if Polnareff believes him, Kakyoin does as well, and that almost trips him up, because it means so much.

But he won't say anything. That would ruin it.

Instead, carefully:]

You okay?