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Polnareff has never liked taking the easy way out. It’s a problem that he chooses to see as a bonus, because it leads him to places he couldn’t possibly have dreamed of getting to without the utter audacity he seemed to have been born with. He’s bold. He’s daring. He’s adventurous.
He is taking his final steps out of his home, alone, without even alerting his father that he may not be coming back.
Because Polnareff is many things, but a coward is not one of them. Someone, for some reason, had taken his sister away from him, and he’d be disappointed in himself if he didn’t hunt them down to enact some much-deserved revenge. He leaves a note before he locks the door behind him, at least, and he fully intends to write home every once in a while, so… it can’t be that bad. Polnareff just knows he has to leave and has to try to solve this problem himself. His instincts are drawing him north, and so north he will go.
He’s gone out adventuring before, but the way the wind hits his face this time sticks in his memory, for some reason. He enjoys the sweet smell of the blooming flowers and marches onwards, wondering if Sherry would’ve judged him for not giving a proper goodbye.
Polnareff continues to not like taking the easy way out. He keeps an angry journal of all his travels that he, someday, will hopefully get to read out to Sherry. Sometimes it veers into poetry—the silly kind with ridiculous rhymes that would make her nose wrinkle as she stumbled onto all the puns. Sometimes it’s short, bullet-point lists because he’s too drained to write much of anything at all. Sometimes, he borrows a polaroid camera to take pictures of the sights around him. Eventually, he takes the leap and buys one for himself. He visits mountains and freezes, because he’d neglected to bring a good coat with him (it wasn’t his fault he didn’t know that the trail would take him to the Alps when he set off to follow it). He sulks around fountains, looking for anyone who might match the description of his sister’s murderer. Once, desperately, he goes to a psychic for a seance, struck with a brief moment of doubt that Sherry would even want him to be doing all this for her. The letters from his father never come—well, he never writes to him, so it’s not as if he can track where he is. He doesn’t feel much guilt over the fact he’s neglecting his duty as a son, His guilt comes because of just how remorseless he feels about never reaching out to him to say he’s okay.
So, he goes to the seance. It’s him and a withered old woman in the back of a wagon, like something out of a black and white film, and she glares at him so severely that for a second he wonders if she heard him mentally wondering if this was all a scam he fell into. She does the whole nine yards—crystal ball, spicy-smelling smoke, palm readings, and finally, she pulls out a deck of tarot cards. Polnareff watches with some skepticism as she flips the cards. The Chariot lies reversed, and the old woman says it represents lack of control and aggression. He nods along with a scowl, clinging desperately to the hope that this is bullshit and means he’s not on this road for naught. The next card is The Lovers, laying upright. He scoffs as he listens to her explain that one, knowing full well he’s not out in the world to find romance. The final card is flipped slowly, and he finds himself leaning forwards in an attempt to get even the slightest peek at what it holds.
“The Magician,” the old woman wheezes, “represents resourcefulness. It is power, skill, and action. Does this give you the answers you were searching for?”
It doesn’t. Not definitively, like he wants. Polnareff feels haunted by the ghost in the shape of a young girl, mouthing words he can’t make out.
He can’t give up. He’ll make his own destiny if he has to.
“Yes, merci.” He gives a polite nod and exits the wagon. His path stretches out impossibly before him.
Polnareff thinks he won’t be taking the easy way out until the day he takes his last breath. He’s on the ground after starting a fight for a reason he, frankly, cannot remember, staring up at a ragtag group who are all talking to him in various accents and languages, and being held down by what may be the most striking man he’s seen in his life. He is not so much of a sore loser as to be unable to admit defeat, and when he concedes he gets to learn the names of the mismatched party. Their cause is righteous enough, and travelling companions are more than welcome at this point in his long and lonely journey. The striking face of Muhammad Avdol is just another benefit.
It’s the same, wherever he goes. It’s all the same. The group travels through deserts and underwater and through mountains, again, and it feels like deja-vu to Polnareff the whole while. He’s retracing his steps. He’s hunting for a specter and questioning his every step. He’s fuelled by so much unyielding anger that when he finally meets the man with two left hands, he nearly dies in the resulting fight.
And yet, at every step, there is Avdol. Avdol in the desert, offering him water from his own flask. Avdol on the boat as they cross the sea, patting his back as he vomits over the side of the ship. Avdol who, as J. Geil nearly strikes Polnareff down, takes a shot that should’ve killed him and then comes back from the dead like magic and nearly brings Polnareff to his knees from sheer relief. Avdol pulls him to his feet. Avdol helps him take another step forward, and then one more, even when Polnareff is too tired to go on. Avdol is the measured strategy to Polnareff’s hotheaded impulsivity, the counterbalance on the unstable scale of Polnareff’s missteps and achievements.
Avdol, somehow, finds him a baguette one day. They’re in the middle of Cairo, as far away from France as they could possibly be, and Polnareff has not had a taste of home in three years. It is the worst baguette he has ever tasted in his life. It’s stale, it’s not made with the right flour, and it’s misshapen. It can barely be called a baguette at all, if he thinks about it, and Avdol serves it with something that is decidedly not the proper boursin cheese that one should eat with a baguette.
It’s the kindest thing anyone has done for him in years.
Polnareff sits on the step of the hotel they’re staying at and splits his food with Avdol, and Avdol shuffles cards as he divines their fates for the upcoming confrontation against Dio. The cards are folded together and split, turned this way and that, spread out on Avdol’s lap and then picked back up again. At the top of the pile, The Magician sits upright proudly, light shining from behind his head. Polnareff slowly raises his head, looking from the card to Avdol. The sunset shines behind the man, haloing him as he smiles.
Polnareff smiles back and offers another piece of bread. The wind blows past them, and if Polnareff closes his eyes, he can almost smell the flowers of France again.