starmark | IC Inbox | rubycity_rp

What's the difference?

[Ohhh my god she's adorable. Very carefully, Polnareff offers his fingers to her, inviting her to bite or batter or whatever it is she wants to do.]

[OH LORD, YOU'VE DONE IT NOW. Fortunately, there's still Jolie to pay attention to while Jotaro launches off on the world's nerdiest impromptu marine biology lecture; she transitions easily from batting at Jotaro's fingers to trying to grab Polnareff's, still making her eerily humanlike giggling noises.]

Appearance, for one thing. She's longer and sleeker than a sea otter, who's fatter and with a stubbier tail. Sea otters tend to live their whole lives at sea, for another — they're purely aquatic. River otters are land mammals that just spend a lot of time in the water. She doesn't know how to swim yet; I need to take her out and teach her one of these days, the way that one of her parents would if she had them. She's already been in the bathtub a few times, but that's just to get her used to the feeling of water, it's not the same as getting her to learn to swim and dive properly.

[HE LOVES HIS OTTER OH MY GOD.]

What she's doing right now is trying to juggle your fingers. Her favorite toy is around here somewhere, an emerald Kakyoin made for her. She'll lie on her back and toss it around from hand to hand, it's a game that otters play naturally with stones or other objects of that approximate size and shape, and no one really knows how they learn it. It's to help them develop their motor skills, I think.

[This is the nerdiest rant ever, but fortunately, it's full of absolutely adorable things. Polnareff listens with half an ear as Jolie grips and tosses his fingers; with his free hand he tickles at her belly.]

Ahh, and she's a perfect girl, isn't she? How are you going to show her to swim? What does she eat?

Um.

[CHATTERING X5, HELLO NEW BEST OTTER FRIEND, SHE LOVES YOU SO MUCH]

I pretty much have to get her by the scruff of the neck and drag her through the water until she can do it herself. It sounds harsh but that's really how they learn in the wild, the adults just...haul them through the water and they figure it out from that.

And she eats a lot of fish. Small water invertebrates, stuff like that. Sometimes she gets out and finds bird eggs, I think, but I try to keep her better fed than that so she's not pillaging nests.

[HE WAS BORN FOR THIS

And he laughs at that, because he can just imagine Jotaro in the water, pants rolled up to his knees, stupid hat still on, dragging Jolie through the water.]

Can she eat regular eggs? Ahh, that's a girl-- don't bite, now--

[He coos down at her, like she's really going to understand, like she's a baby and not a wild animal.]

I don't see why she wouldn't. Why, are you going to run down to the kitchen and scramble some for her?

[Keep those earrings well out of her grasp, tall-haired man, or you are going to get the same rude surprise that poor Kakyoin's hair noodle once got when it ended up too close to her paws.]

I might! If she's hungry. Are you?

[Like she's going to answer-- and he leans in closer, because he's actually not thinking, and oh, his earrings so so shiny, dangling like that, and--]

FUCK!

...Shit —

[Okay. This is bad. The otter has Polnareff by the ear and given her track record with shiny things, she's not going to let go, which means if he thrashes around too much he's going to rip them right out of his damn lobes and that's a fucking mess nobody needs right now.]

Hold still, don't move! I'll get her, just don't fucking move around —

[Oh, his opinion of Jolie has gone down so much right now. It's very hard not to thrash around, but at least Jotaro is barking orders, and he can always follow orders. But it fucking hurts, because she's tugging and pulling and playing and holy shit his ears were not meant for this, why is this happening, he is a good person--]

[Polnareff will forgive him, he tells himself, as he stops time.

There are probably less...extreme methods that he could use in order to get Jolie to relinquish something she's playing with, but the truth is that as extreme as it may be, it's also in some ways the simplest. Time stops, everything stops, and she has no recourse as he carefully pries her tiny paws off of Polnareff's earring, and shifts it slightly to relieve some of the tension on his lobe, and then picks her up and moves her away and out of reach. He's learned to put something else in her paws in the meantime to make the change less disorienting on her; she won't know what's just happened, but she'll still have something to bat around, and maybe to some degree that's all she'll care about.

Polnareff might care about this a lot more, but — this is a part of him, he reminds himself firmly, to help ward off the initial stirrings of apprehension that are beginning to tighten in his stomach. He uses it on his own terms. He does it for good reasons. This helped, it helped, he's not a monster.

Hopefully it'll stay that way when —

Time resumes.

In quite literally no time at all, the world has changed; Jolie has moved about a foot and a half higher on the bed toward the pillows, and there's nothing pulling on Polnareff's earring anymore, and there's a toy in her paws instead of a half-heart, and Jotaro is looking...well, slightly wearier and more worn out than before.

Magic.]

[He doesn't realize, at first. He can't see, he just knows one moment there was something yanking on his ear and then there wasn't. He sits up, and Jolie is over there, and Jotaro looks weirdly tired, and--

Oh.

It's a stupid trick. It's just like any other ability of Star's; it's no worse than his punching things or his weird ability to draw or whatever. And Polnareff believes that, he really does, but--

At the same time, not two weeks ago, he can remember Dio, appearing and disappearing at will. He can remember the hopelessness he'd felt when watching from above; the thought that how can we possibly fight this, because his ability was beyond anything they'd ever faced. He remembers the utter malicious stupidity of trying to climb those damn stairs-- and oh, how Dio must have laughed as he stopped time and manipulated Polnareff, because for him time meant nothing, it was nothing, and people were just things to be moved around as he deemed fit, and--

And here's Jotaro, and Jolie is moved away, something shiny in her hands, and it's just a little too similar for his comfort.]

Thanks.

[--but then again-- and he looks at Jotaro, at his stupid hat and his mussed up hair and his carefully stern expression-- it's not the same at all. Because all Jotaro had done was help. He could have done so much more, even in the name of fucking around with Polnareff-- but he hadn't. He'd just-- he'd helped. And maybe that's all that really matters.

So he smiles, after a moment, and wrinkles his nose at the otter.]

After gel, next thing I'm gonna have to buy is some new types of earrings. No more dangling shit.

Edited 2016-03-25 20:58 (UTC)

...Sorry.

[It falls out of his mouth, pretty much instantaneously, because he just knows. Of course he knows, and he hates it, but that's what makes it all the more important to say it, right? Because he used to just assume that people would know, and then they didn't, and that's why sometimes you have to say it.]

Normally I say something before. So it's not just...no warning.

[The corollary, though, doesn't quite make it out: She was hurting you, I didn't want her hurting you an instant longer than she already had, not if I could do something to stop it.

He casts Polnareff an unusually vulnerable look, just for a second, and then lets his attention slide to his otter as well.]

Just be more careful. The dangling shit looks good.

[He offers him half a smile-- reassuring, a little nervous, but ultimately fond. It's okay, and it really is. A warning would have been nice, but at the same time, Jotaro had simply reacted, eager not to see Polnareff in pain. So it's fine.]

Yeah, yeah--

[He tugs out his earrings, shoving them into his pocket. He's not about to risk his ears again, thank you, even if Jolie is currently entirely focused on her new toy.]

Oi, pelts aside, what do you trade?

...Work, usually. I'm good at it, so.

[Three guesses what kind of work the 6'5" refrigerator-like teenager gets drafted to do around here. Which is sort of sad if you think about it, but hey, it puts food on the table and gets the job done.]

Food is free, though. Nobody really polices the grocery or anything.

[Well, all right, that's not so hard. He doesn't mind doing some labor work in exchange for shit.]

Why? I mean, that's great, yeah, but it seems like it'd fall apart in like three days.

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