Archive of Our Own

The ocean is cold. Cold and wet and dark, heavy and oppressive and lonely, infinite and unyielding and--

Mostly cold. Mostly dark. Mostly solitary. Those shouldn't really bother Dio--he is cold himself as a being beyond the human limitations of the grave; his eyes tear easily through the shadows of night like hands through thin threads; he is above such things as loneliness, it's laughable to even think he might want companionship, much less that he would cow to such disgraceful, pathetic human needs--he surpassed that particular human necessity even before truly transcending humanity.

But regardless, his skin aches from the lack of warmth. All his eyes show him are the claw marks he's ripped through the soft cloth of the inside of the coffin the few times he managed to corral the recalcitrant body beneath him into shape enough to direct it. And the quiet--the way the silence of the ocean deafens him and any sort of mundane, inane, commonplace, comforting sound of life he didn't even realize he was used to even while isolated--the quiet is the worst.

He can't even hear himself breathing; his head will not attach itself to the body left in this box long enough to have lungs to even try imitating steady inhalations--or panicked exhalations, or whatever it is his body would do if he still had one. Whenever he's able to wrangle himself enough into position to refit the body to his head, he is more focused on aligning his spine and its paths and nerves to those below to maintain control, not on securing his esophagus into working order; a sick sort of muffled wheeze coming from his neck through the cracks of old-flesh and new-flesh are all he's managed so far in terms of "breathing."

He can still smell. His nose is still attached to his face, which itself still has a brain to rule it, with all of the advanced functioning he coveted after acquisition. He can perceive the dry, leafy scents of the fibers of the cloth surrounding him that he never knew existed before his senses sharpened so, as well as the smoky, acrid smell of everything in the air of the burning ship that settled into the nooks and crannies of the coffin before closing for good, and beyond that, beyond the coffin, he can even smell the water and the salt and filth within filling it.

He can smell, deeply, intimately, the souring blood and sweat of the body below him. He hadn't time to be clean about it; in his rush to connect himself to the foreign tissue enough to get in the damn box without being noticed--to even firstly sever that useless, outdated, familiar head from its body to make use of it--before the opportunity was gone and he was buried in flames and wood and metal, he needed to be quick and rough. Much blood spilled into the bottom compartment of the coffin as a result, over the sides and bottom of the box and down the deathly pale, scratched-up, motionless corpse below him, pooling for a while just beneath the stump of a neck--both of their stumps of necks. The smell of old blood, congealed and souring and drying is enough to make him feel dizzy; it'd done the same thing when still new, but just because of the increasing hunger--he hadn't fed in a while before sneaking aboard the ship, having no body to do such with--and the smell of fresh, mouthwatering blood so near, so unable to be gathered with fingers that do not obey him, had felt like the worst kind of pleasant denial. After that--soon after--it became stale, became foul, became unpleasant, became dry and sticky at the back of his neck and head that he cannot move, at the nape and shoulders he can only sometimes feel.

Jonathan's blood. The man that is his personal, perpetual nightmare now--but that isn't true, is it, he has men he hates far more than him, equally dead men in equally unsettled graves, due to his own influence, and the third time is the charm, isn't it--is still tormenting him from beyond the veil. From Jojo’s own stupid planning, his own determination on going down with the ship, too. Taking Dio with him, or something. Stupid, selfish, brave, determined Jojo, always getting in his way, either physically or metaphysically. Dio wants nothing more than to drain his body of everything left in it and replace it with Dio’s essence and power, wants to scoop the drying blood up with Jonathan's own fingers to shove in his throat, wants to use his body to survive and prove him wrong, prove how stupid and infantile and useless this declaration of honorable mutually assured death is; Jonathan may be dead, but Dio is not.

Dio grabbed his body originally as a planned act of simultaneous vengeance, convenience and poetry (how ironic and perfect it would be for him to live to his eternity with Jojo’s body), but now, stuck in this empty, quiet, solitary box for the time being, nerves flaring against his will, Dio wants to disrespect him one last time, as if it'll help himself; wants Jonathan's soul in whatever Heaven he believed he'd go to to ache in righteous fury and disgust at what Dio does on earth. But Dio cannot even turn his head.

When the coffin sank, after that stupid, equally useless woman Jojo had fallen in love with made it out safely, Dio wasn't attached to Jonathan's body, and his head, humiliatingly, bounced around the inner confines of it, tossed with the whims of the underwater currents. It was the first stroke of alarm he had at all since committing to this escape plan--he planned to sneak out of the coffin after properly gaining control of Jonathan's body in the night, using it and Jonathan's powerful legs to propel himself back to land until he found a new body and new minions and new things to occupy himself.

If he thinks about it (and he has nothing to do but think, right now) he isn't quite sure what that next step on land is now that Jonathan is dead. He wanted revenge and domination and proof that he controlled the Joestars and bent them to his whims, not the other way around, but that is no longer something to lord over anyone's head when it's complete.

When he is feeling particularly petty, or angry, or pessimistic, as the coffin he is in steadily falls and falls further and further beneath the waves and he is still struggling to control Jonathan’s body, he turns that outward--his plans turn to thoughts of Erina. She was with child, he was pretty sure, when he heard her moving around in the upper sections of the coffin trying to survive without her husband there to save her anymore, hanging onto that wailing babe. When he gets out of here (not if, when), maybe he can track her down, stop in on his widowed sister-in-law, rip her biological and adopted offspring from her arms in the moonlight and embody every hushed cautionary tale of the demons that creep into houses at night and desire to eat misbehaving children. Jonathan would hate that.

After that, however… once again, he doesn't know. But it's not important right now. He hadn't intended for the coffin to sink, but it doesn't make much of a difference anyway, does it? He still has to make it to land from the middle of the ocean anyway, unless he gets lucky and finds a ship sailing past relatively near enough; he still has his work cut out for him when he surfaces regardless. A little swimming under water that can't drown him may be unpleasant, but it's not even close to an impossible task, not with immortality and its associated gifts bestowed upon him now.

His head sits in the corner of the box that is his current lodging, and he tries to rein in his impatience. He will adapt. His first priority is little by little connecting himself to the body that is also with him until he masters it and can escape this boring, empty box of death. He knows he can do it. He'll figure the rest out later.

The coffin falls for a very long time. Dio remembers well from his studies how deep the ocean is, how empty and wide. He thinks he's caught in a current for a while for how long it feels like he's falling, combined with the nausea of the coffin's movements he can apparently still feel from the perfectly intact inner ears he still owns--either that, or perhaps he's fallen into an underwater valley.

He has to grit his teeth at that thought when it hits him. Deep ocean floor or deeper ocean floor doesn't matter. He's above such meaningless distinctions in the pursuit of a single-minded higher goal.

The box doesn't break when it hits something solid finally--a fear he attempted to not contemplate at all, truly unsure what he'd do if his breathless and motionless head were exposed to the elements, carried by itself through the whims of the underwater waves, hoping some creature did not take his still meaty cranium as lunch--or hoping it would, so that he would not be left there for god knows how long staring up into miles and miles of heavy darkness. As it is, the box simply hits rock, he assumes, and rebounds. The whole internal cabin of it trembles and he bounces with it, tipping with the motions as it hits something else again, striking uneven formations over and over on the way down to what must be approaching an end to the fall.

Dio tries not to worry about what he'll do if he ends up near Jonathan's feet by the end of it all--he'll find his way back up again if he must, even if it takes sacrificing dignity to propel himself forward with his tongue across the coffin bottom. He's done worse to survive, though he doesn't think of those years often.

Luckily for him, he lands relatively close again to the jostled corpse's shoulders and neck once the coffin, finally, slams hard into something relatively flat, and shakes, groaning ominously. But it does not give, does not splinter, and it settles, somehow ending up resting properly on its base after all the falling and flipping and slamming.

The constructor of this coffin was truly skilled, Dio thinks somewhat drily now that he, too, is settled enough to begin managing the situation. Pity Dio didn't pay him better for it when he ordered it custom. Pity he isn't alive anymore to accept Dio's gratitude.

Now, then. Time to recollect himself. Painstakingly, perhaps, but Dio waited years to get the drop on Jojo. He can manage a painful week or so of learning to control this once-antagonistic now-miraculous body and its quirks and conduct a slightly tiring but mostly tedious return from sea.

Something he must do quickly, he knows. Otherwise Jojo's body will begin to rot. And then he won't have anything at all.

The ocean is cold, and dark, and quiet, and they are neutral qualities that do nothing in either aiding or hindering the frustrating task ahead of him that he must complete before time runs out.

Managing to acquire enough momentum with what muscles he can still flex to inch his way back over at the right angle to get where he needs to be is an exhausting endeavor, one that makes him grateful he didn't land any further from the neck of Jonathan's body than this.

And the matter of the body itself--Jonathan's body is frustratingly stubborn as ever, even without its owner to direct it into being a nuisance. It will not connect the way he wants it to, the sinew won't sew together as it did on the ship, skin will not merge and bone will not lock into place. It should--it should, it did so on the ship. It was messy then, yes, but definite and sturdy. Were it not for the circumstances of haste, it would've been a perfectly even match to his own neck that could've lasted days or more as he needed it to. When he lurched across the ship's floors unsteadily before, it was for the ship's rocking, for unfamiliarity with the body he was piloting, not because the body would not obey him.

That's different now. He isn't sure why--maybe because he had been forcibly disconnected when stumbling and sneaking into the coffin's lower compartment, taken off guard by the sudden collapse of the burning ship that immediately followed? Could it be that he'd ripped the body's important pathways in its spinal cord and made it unresponsive, like a candle wick that flickered when made poorly? But surely putting effort in would let his own stronger form mend the body for Jonathan, rebraiding that wick, pushing that flesh and those nerves together neatly and reforming the network he needs for his mind to replace Jonathan's. But it isn't doing that.

Maybe it's the lack of blood, a chilling and unpleasant thought that almost sends him into the same desire to start frantically clawing at the coffin's interior as he did on embarrassing, repressed, human instinct when he first began sinking--not that he can do it anyway without consistent control over these limbs, which he has lost.

It makes sense, something he didn't think about before climbing into the coffin, something he never expected to have to worry about when planning to already be out of this damn box while floating on the ocean's surface. But by the time he waited for Erina and her babes, born and unborn, to be rescued and safely spirited away by those that came to collect and manage what was left of the mess of the wreckage’s aftermath, by the time he waited for them to get far away enough for him to not be seen when he exited, as well as for night to fall properly so that his survival attempts were not made useless in the first place--by that time, the rough waves overtook the coffin, dragging that box of death down steadily to become now a symbolic as well as literal watery grave.

A watery grave on the dark ocean floor, far beneath whatever remaining human corpses sank along with their ship, far away from the sparse collections of strange sea creatures that made this their home.

The only blood nearby for Dio to feasibly collect is Jonathan's drying mass of it, soaking and hardening the cloth under them, congealing in his only half-preserved mess of flesh. Something he can't manage to absorb himself. Something the body will not cooperate with him enough to even attempt to replace. Something that will be pointless very, very, soon, anyway, the instant the blood turns so stale and dried that it becomes useless as a source of food and energy.

For the first time, Dio feels shreds of proper panic, threatening to flood him even when in his right mind.

He tries. He tries again and again. He exhausts himself with the focus he spends on trying to manually control and force his remaining physiology to meld with Jonathan's, a funny contradiction since he has no body to exhaust anymore, and yet he feels it just as plain as when he did.

He is not an unskilled man, not an impatient one, not a weak one, but the trial and error of this particular new struggle are enough to have him clenching his teeth in frustrated rage, wanting to shout at the wood inches from his face, wanting to slam fists into it and crush it and tear this whole thing away, but he doesn't have the voice or arms for either, respectively.

The only boon is that Jonathan's body does not start rotting; at the very least, Dio's half-formed connections to it on and off are enough to keep it from submitting to the call of entropy, obeying instead the more powerful call of advanced flesh bending it to its desires. Jonathan may have been a stupid brute in his youth, but clearly his body is smarter than he was, knowing it is better off serving Dio than its previous master. If only he had the blood to fill it, make it strong and powerful, more than even Jonathan was capable of.

That's his main recourse in handling the situation, aside from his physical efforts: directing his enraged malice towards Jonathan when it is too much and his usually reliable anger as a source of drive does nothing but push him further into something too close to despair for his taste. It’s something more like himself from years ago, resenting Jonathan quietly in his head while minding his words, rather than himself from the last weeks, who had seen Jonathan earn his respect through proving himself as an enemy, but Dio can’t help himself--not when the whole reason he is in this situation is because of Jonathan, not when he has nothing else to distract him inbetween trial and error, not when Jonathan did this with nothing but words of affection dripping from his tongue as if that soothed the tragedy of his own demise and what he intended to be Dio’s along with it. He curses Jonathan in his head, spits at him with all of the venom he can manage with only his mental voice, damns him for his stubborn, stupid, useless, pointless sacrifice that had only dragged them both to the deep and dark emptiness here at the end of the ocean. He thought he did something good, thought he did something righteous and noble and just--all he did was get himself killed, make his new wife a widow not even a week after her wedding, and delay Dio's plans.

A decade's worth (or, perhaps closer to two decades' worth) of buried, hidden anger resurfaces in that coffin, building and building without anywhere to direct and unleash it in that small space like a repressed explosion until Dio wants to scream at the sky but there is no sky anymore, is there? Just layers and miles of silk and wood and water between him and anything resembling what a weaker man might begin referring to as haven, safety, freedom.

Jonathan's body denies him as effortlessly as Jonathan in life did, with just as easily-given, small, involuntary concessions to Dio that Jonathan's sentiment always betrayed, too.

Dio hates him. He hates him, hates him, hates him, he hates him more in this moment (in these long, drawn-out moments that become minutes and hours and days, becoming steadily longer--) than he ever hated George Joestar. In his logical mind, he knows nothing Jonathan could do, alive or dead, could ever make him hate him as much as he hated Dario Brando, but it surely feels that way, this hot and helpless rage that Jonathan never elicited in him while on the opposite side of a fight, or the opposite side of a sports match. And that must be it, he thinks (he has nothing to do but think, nothing but stew and rage and plan and think)--Jonathan never held power over him, never made him look weak, never triumphed easily over him and then kept him stupid and helpless at the mercy of his own whims. Not like Dario did, not even close, not until this, not until the only thing standing between Dio and freedom--escape--is his useless, idiotic, haplessly immobile corpse circumventing Dio as if Jonathan had left it with final instructions to carry out his dying wishes written into its cold viscera.

Dio would kill Jonathan another hundred times if he could. Dio tries to fit himself onto that neck for the millionth time in the cold and dark and quiet he is slowly growing used to, and tears his teeth through the flesh of his lips in an instinctive attempt to hold back the noises he's not capable of making anymore.

It won't work. It just doesn't. It must be the lack of blood, because Dio has tried to turn over every other angle in his mind, has painstakingly managed to work every muscle in his head manually to push himself away from and back to the corpse several times to see if perhaps he was just limited by a millimeter's worth of incorrect positioning. He realizes after those failed attempts that it must be something else, must be the one thing Dio doesn't have control over.

Dio, in his desperation, considers opening a hole in the coffin to reach the outside, waiting for something alive to pass by close enough that he can beckon it forth and consume it to rejuvenate himself and the body--it would probably feel foul to digest, but better that than half a year under the walls of water pressing him down.

But the body, when he maintains an ounce of authority of it, is not strong enough to punch through the thick layers of sturdy wood he himself had wanted crafted to make sure of his own safety, hidden away from the world and the sun. But he doesn't know what that pressure above them, unacclimated to, would do when put upon the already wavering, thin string of control over the body, the body that he can't keep enough sway over to safely shield with his own power and near-invincibility. But these waters are already thick with salt and darkness and thin with anything unlucky and insane enough to be alive down here.

For the first time in his life since he was a very young child, Dio struggles to understand what to do, struggles to find a way out. He knows he can do this, if he can just find some angle to grab onto and wind around his fingers slowly and carefully and insistently until he makes life cave to his desires, as he always has with enough time and patience and determination.

(His mother always said so, in kinder words. She called him a "little survivor," her way of romanticizing living through hell and not giving in voluntarily to the despair. In the end, she was not the survivor she lauded him as while even on her deathbed, begging him to hold on hope and never give up that fire of his. In the end, Dio rejected the title; it was not valor to endure as she and he always had, it could only be impressive to thrive and then accomplish and strike back at those who dared look down at him. That was his greatest gift to his mother and his greatest revenge upon Dario: to live better than they had.)

(His father had also always said so, in more familiar words. He called Dio "scrappy," a "persistent little bugger." Praised only when he pushed himself past his miserable, young, human limits to help provide for them, when he did better in his work and chores and games and gambles than Dario did. Sometimes not even praised--sometimes insulted for it, shouted at for his effort and meager successes. If Dio was nothing in his parents' and community's eyes but a survivor, if his mother had been nothing to anyone else but a victim, then Dario was nothing more than a taker, a leech, a wife- and child-beater who would never have anything more than he deserved for being that. And he died just so, died on the same deathbed as his wife, begging Dio take the same advice as given by her: survive.)

There is a way out. There must be. There has to be. He is not trapped down here alone in the emptiest, most abandoned depths of the earth with no escape, not even death if he were cowardly enough to choose it.

He's half-right, in the end. He's not alone. Jonathan is with him.

Dio only realizes in hindsight his shortsightedness in not trying to mark the passage of time somehow. He could manage that--wrestling control of Jonathan’s nerves and tendons enough to scrape a single line with a single finger into the inside of the wood for every day that passed would be easy enough.

Even as he thinks it, he knows it’s useless--he would run out of easily reachable space within a month and though he knows he could do so, he still struggles to lift a single arm; it would be far too exhausting a task for the simple benefit of markings he can’t even see most of the time with his immobilized head. And while all of his senses and higher reasonings have benefited from the gift given to him by the mask, not even he can effortlessly track hour after hour in a way that lets him be completely sure he has observed and marked the time correctly. Especially when his emotions wrest control over his mind from his logical perception, making his observation of the world shaky and unclear, nonlinear. A flaw of his, to be sure--he always went against his better nature. He is his own worst enemy.

It’s a foolish desire, but he is in a foolish state, wishing for something to tell him how long it’s been: wanting a sign that it hasn’t been nearly as long as it’s felt and that there is hope for him yet; wanting proof it has been exactly as long as that and he isn’t weak for how it’s affected him, that his state is justified.

He wants to sleep. He wants to dream. He still can--the two of them aren’t necessary anymore after his change, but they are possible, and still give a kind of indulgent pleasant experience that most other now unnecessary human needs have become to him. But he’s afraid of what will happen if he does. Afraid he’ll miss an opportunity that may not come again for at least as long as he’s already been here. Afraid to give in, and what it means if he does. Afraid to temporarily escape, only to wake again to the same patterned wood above him.

Dio is sick of fear. He is sick of anger, too. But the former never appears to be his own choice, and the latter’s catharsis has been torn away from him, too.

He wants to forget everything--this stale box and Jonathan’s corpse and the ocean around them and the ship itself and Erina and London and his parents and his childhood and everything.

Dio closes his eyes and tells himself as sternly as he can manage that it isn’t giving up.

Dio doesn’t know what to do anymore besides wait. Waiting and sleeping and thinking--they are all he has. All of them painful in their own ways. The sleep brings him some release and relief for a time, but he can’t sleep forever, can’t make himself stay unconscious for much longer than average human sleep, something in his body still obeying the cues of the flesh it grew as, not the one it transformed into, and the longer he sleeps, the longer he must stay awake to be allowed to rest again. The more he tries to struggle back into unconsciousness (weak, the back of his brain spits at himself), the worse it feels and the more sleep denies him. So he stays awake, and waits, and thinks.

There’s a lot to think about, if he just turns his mind to it. Where he failed and how those failures brought him where he is now, where and why his own chosen minions themselves failed against Jonathan. Jonathan’s own strengths that overcame so much, despite the odds, despite being against Dio as an enemy. Jonathan’s own hopes and desires that sank in the ocean with his cold body.

He thinks about the fact that somewhere out there is a child bearing Jojo’s genes, perhaps even his visage and drive; it’s been so long, the child must have been born by now, and must still be a child. It hasn’t been so long as to produce another generation of young adults, he knows--right? No, surely not, not that long yet.

(Yet.)

A stupid and uncharacteristic thought hits him: were Jonathan still alive, were Dio not where he is now, there is another time where that child might have lived to know him as uncle. Surely not to call him that to his face; even in a version of the events of the last year that went smoother, quieter, less deadly for all involved, Jonathan was not stupid enough to not see the changes in Dio even if he tried harder in lying, hiding, scheming, and Dio was not restrained enough to see that smooth, quiet, cautious version through to the end--he can admit that to himself, now. But maybe there could’ve been a time and place out there in another version of events where the three of them, Jonathan and Erina and their nameless child, huddled together in a house Dio had never stepped foot in, and mentioned in hushed tones the adopted brother Jonathan once knew and loved--and he’d mean it, sentimental fool he was. They’d spin a story about it, he imagines, lying as a controlled method of intended kindness, but enough truth would slip out, Jonathan unable to keep himself truly distant and objective about it. Dio wonders if they’d tell the child that it was an accident that took him, or some sort of sickness--what irony, to be known only to someone else as the kind of tragedy his mother often was to him--or perhaps Jonathan would admit some of his part in it out of guilt or strange, misplaced morality, that there’d been a fight that spiralled out of control and Dio had succumbed to his wounds.

Dio wonders how he’d be seen: that aforementioned tragedy, a relative lost before they’d even been born, never known and never allowed to live past his youth to tell them himself who he was--or perhaps a cautionary tale, a story of where anger and arrogance and mere misfortune gets you if you aren’t careful enough. Maybe he’d be nothing at all to the child, simply a story of their parents’ grief and loss that was generally noticed, vaguely uncomfortable, but not enough to be bothered with as they grew up. That’d be nice.

He can’t imagine any other opinions they might ascribe to family; it’s all he’s ever been able to frame his family members through.

His mother: tragedy. Victim. Giver.

His father: cautionary tale. Leech. Taker.

His grandparents, dead before he could miss them: unknown. His aunts and uncles gone in their own childhoods, long before his own: someone else’s family. His single cousin that managed to struggle long enough into the world that Dio had fleeting memories of him before he, too, lost himself to the inevitable: distant knowledge. All of them were nothing to him but emptiness he could never place.

George Joestar: cautionary tale. A leech who thought himself a philanthropist, alleviating his boredom with stolen artifacts and dressed up streetrats, erasing the violence behind him and his circle of rural gentry’s decisions by turning the focus of his whims into trophies to show off, whether they hung on his wall, or were paraded around his house.

(Dio, himself: victim was smudged off his internal assessment years ago, replaced by taker, which itself was replaced by merely vampire--a statement of self-apparent superiority and proof of having moved past any other labels, any other judgements or concerns besides being exactly what he was. He called himself a God to others, and it was true enough to their point of view, him being so much more than they could become, but in his own mind, vampire was enough of a description.)

And then there is Jonathan. Stupid, sweet, brave, foolish, naive, smart, contradictory Jonathan. Dio had mentally rewritten his title in his mind in so many instances now that even he can’t remember the timeline of every new correction through the years. Every time he thought he knew for sure he had Jonathan pinned down, something changed it. A victim to be walked over. A leech in a child’s body. Someone useless that he could simply deceive until the time came and he was tossed aside. An idiot that couldn’t see through him, destined to become the next in his growing trial of bodies. A skilled enemy, the only one that demanded more of his time than simply brushing off an annoying ant. A cautionary tale of a stranger-turned-brother that gave chances and took ground and ended in tragic death that he defied the victimhood of by choosing it first, a family member that Dio loathed and spent years pretending to care about that ultimately meant nothing to him, absolutely nothing, Jonathan was nothing and everything at once and it was infuriating and confusing and thrilling and all Dio knew near the end for certain regarding him was that he should fall, and it should be by Dio’s hand.

Jonathan fell, as Dio knew he surely would. But it was by his own hand. He did so to stop Dio above anything else. He did so while holding onto him and smiling. And Dio hates him for it. And he feels complete emptiness since Jonathan’s death. And--

The only thing Dio can label Jonathan as in his mind, with certainty, is Jojo.

Dio understands very well why humans use silence and isolation as torture techniques, as methods of punishment. He is beyond them, beyond humanity, stronger and smarter and more beautiful and capable, all by nature of his own transcdence of the boundaries of existence that the rest of those he’d left behind in the dirt could not even dream of, could not even begin to set their ambitions on, but--but.

Humanity as a whole is a soft-bellied insect, living and dying in weeks, and Dio is a perfected diamond, cut by his own hand--he is something infathomably sharper and more durable than them, something that can destroy the soft-bellied insect with little more effort than it takes to collide into each other, something the insect can’t even imagine as a kind of enemy it might stumble upon or be the victim of.

But a diamond, even when flawlessly cut and shaped and chosen, still holds within itself invisible lines and fracture points built off the conditions of its creation, unknown to all but itself. A diamond will still sink when dropped into a pool of water.

Dio sinks easily with the coffin, and his sinks within his own mind.

It is so quiet, so unbelievably quiet, he thought that at some point it would cease, that he would hear something, that the ocean would give way to his own expectations as men did, but it does not--it cares nothing for his desires. He is something hardened and strengthened beyond human imagination, but that means it simply takes much, much more pressure than humans have to give to start cracking. The ocean has plenty of that--pressure. It’s older than him, the whole damn planet is, and the stars in the sky and the sun and the moon and everything that is not humans and their petty houses and petty relationships and petty lives is still older yet than him, has weathered more than he has, has done worse than him. It is a fight between the earth and Dio’s mind and Dio has yet to hear a firsthand account of someone embracing the void and winning.

He cracks. Slowly but steadily. He tries to hold on, but with no plans to speak of, no goal to hold onto, no anger to drive him, his sanity begins slipping through his fingers like the water that drips into his coffin once or twice a month--enough that he remembers it, he knows it happened, but he can’t prove it, cannot move to check for the slightest signs of moisture, all he can do is slowly think and sleep and wait and wait and wait and he misses it every time, every time he says he will note the next time the water begins dripping, he won’t forget, but he does. He can’t be sure it’s not some sort of hallucination of stress, since there are no other signs of the coffin breaking down, but surely he’d experience something else other than this?

He wants to laugh about it sometimes, delirious with the quiet and dark and cold; this is what it’s come to, has it? The highlight of his life being having his ears pricked for a leak in a wooden box inbetween driving himself mad, with only the corpse of his brother for company? What the hell, why not? Was it like he had anything better as a child, living off scraps of food and affection and toys, living for the rare moments of good meals and comfort and games when his mother was able to give them and his father was willing? Perhaps this is just life, or maybe just his--he has spent more time struggling and suffering than he ever has in false luxury, so perhaps that was always how it was meant to be.

He thinks he’s spent more time now, listening on and off for that water, for the once-every-.....what was it, six months? Once a year? Hard to tell, when time is nothing more than a word at this point, because time means change of life and change of space and nothing has changed down here, nothing is alive, there is not space but the meager area afforded to him that is just enough to see how little he has. But once a year, perhaps. He’s spent more time now listening for that water once a month, for a once-a-year series of distant, muffled, low sounds that he assumes are far-off whales briefly, blessedly interrupting his self-reflection, than he ever spent alive. Or even alive and dead but still before this, when he knew things other than this box and Jojo’s still, unmoving body, and the water he is vaguely aware of around him in this underwater valley that must be miles and miles below the surface.

Erina’s child must be nearing or just starting adulthood now. He only knows because of the whales; he’d not known what they were the first few times, has probably slept through many other instances, but they seem, to his flawed perception, to come in semi-regular intervals of long time. They are the only passage of time he has anymore besides the droplets.

He wonders if Jonathan hates him in whatever Heaven he has gone to. Dio doesn’t believe in Heaven, and he’s quite certain whatever exists of it doesn’t believe in him, either, but Jonathan did and if anyone deserved a reward for having put up with him, for having foolishly sacrificed himself for a greater good that had only earned him more scorn and death and the grave disrespect of his cold body even after death, then it was Jonathan. He hopes it’s so, he hopes it’s real and Jonathan has gone there, because Dio can’t stand the thought that both of them are trapped down here forever, that Dio’s actions which led himself straight into the maw of the wet earth had also damned Jonathan. That Jonathan’s soul would know nothing else but the life Dio had done his best to ruin for him and the agonized injustice of being dragged down to Hell with Dio for the crime of being his brother.

If there was someone that Dio would accept the hate of, it would be Jonathan. If there is a Hell, then surely this is it, and Dio has deserved it. Everyone who had ever met him would probably say he deserved it. Dio doesn’t really regret his actions, but if he opposed Jonathan, who has surely gone to Heaven, then perhaps those opinions hold more weight than he thought. He doesn’t know what his father would think, but whether it would be approval or scorn, both ideas make him feel sick. Maybe only Jonathan himself and his mother would protest that he deserved this, but Jonathan was, always, a sentimental fool, and if his mother saw what became of her cherished little survivor that she gave everything to--time, energy, protection--in order to keep alive in those very cold London winters under Dario Brando’s roof, then maybe she would have turned him out onto the snowy streets much earlier to let him fend for himself, maybe she would have let him fall under Dario’s fist one night, too sloppy and drunk and enraged to calculate the force behind his blows.

And maybe that’s not so far from the truth, maybe it’s closer to that than to Dio’s delirious self-destructive rambles.

They talked about it once, when they thought Dio was asleep. Dario, in a random fit after Dio wasn’t quick enough to fetch something or other for him, broke his arm on accident, the one and only time he’d broken a bone. They were lucky it was a clean break, lucky the closest doctor down the street saw to Dio for free, probably on pity, and lucky they were not in such a bad place that Dio’s period of healing (and with it, his inability to help keep money coming in) would put them further into debt, force more sadistic choices of survival in their hands. Dio was eavesdropping at night when the medicine he’d been given to numb the pain started wearing off and kept him awake, and he overheard the conversation that resulted from the day’s stress. Heard his mother try to whisper-yell and beg and reason with Dario to stop, or at least watch himself enough to not go this far again. Heard the state of his body’s health rationalized down to the fact they couldn’t afford a doctor next time, they couldn’t afford Dio being unable to do fetch and carry jobs around the hotel, they couldn’t afford Dio’s wounds healing improperly and causing issues when he was old enough to work at the factories, which would surely earn more pay than his share of work amounted to in their failing business.

Heard Dario mumble, mostly to himself, with uncharacteristic soberness and thoughtfulness and guilt, that they couldn’t afford a child.

(Maybe it was worse that he said it while sober and feeling bad about it--Dio was always prepared for him doing whatever he wanted while drunk and tired and stressed, but the less common moments he lashed out when in a good mood were the ones that took Dio offguard the most. If Dario said something cruel in his right mind, then what did that mean? Especially when he didn’t actually intend for it to be so.)

He didn’t understand the implications at the time, taking it at face value--of course his parents couldn’t afford a child, they could barely afford to eat--he only realized what Dario meant years later with a kind of helpless, useless anger with nowhere to redirect it to since the man had been in the ground for years, but his mother understood the implications. It was the only time he knew of her striking Dario instead of the other way around, and he only knew it was that way around because he’d heard Dario’s pained, shocked gasp after the sound of the slap instead of his mother’s familiar one.

She said something to him then, quiet and furious, and Dio never heard it, didn’t know what words she said or what Dario saw in her face at that moment, but whatever it was, it was enough to prevent retaliation. The fits continued, both sober and drunken, but Dario kept his hands off for months while Dio recovered, and never was quite so purposefully forceful with him after that, even when she died.

Now, Dio wonders if maybe Dario had been right for only one time in his miserable life, if maybe everyone involved would have been better off if they’d given up on raising him. His mother would’ve benefitted, surely, no longer having to work herself to pieces for every waking hour of the day and half the night to help keep three people alive. His father would’ve, no longer suffering the stresses and exhaustion and indignities of the day-jobs he burned through once a month to keep the half-rotting roof over their heads, and additionally no longer having to deal with his worst irritant, as he always lamented loudly. Jonathan never would have to deal with his soul’s fury and pain at everything Dio had forced upon him, the worst yet being the widowing of his wife and orphaning of his child. A burden on his family in youth just for existing, and a burden now for the same, for having made it so Jonathan’s body couldn’t even decompose in peace.

Dio, for his part, thinks he would have been better off dying in his sleep as a child than existing like this. If this can be said to be nothing but punishment, Dio thinks he’d rather take that at the hands of Dario Brando than God, even if thinking that makes him weak, mentally crawling back to familiar pains rather than bear new ones. Or maybe there is no god and no Heaven and it’s just Dio and Jojo, alone in this box, and Dio is once again his own worst enemy.

Silence must be the most abundant thing in the universe, Dio thinks, and it feels as though every bit of it has been sieved into a funnel shoved into his ear and forced through him, cracking his head into two a little more with every bit that slips through, forced down and out by gravity. He wants to claw his ears out so that at least he can tell himself the silence is just his own fault, not a lack of anything around him. He wants to tear his eyes out so he never has to look at that goddamned tattered lid above him ever again. He wants to rip into Jonathan’s body and tear it to shreds, not because he wants to hurt Jonathan, but because he wants to be attached to it when he does, he wants to feel it, because at least he’d be feeling something.

He wants to cry, but he cannot breathe, and has no tears.

He keeps cracking, and Jojo keeps staying as silent as the empty world around them that traps them here, and Dio thinks maybe this is not Hell at all because at least in Hell they’d want to hurt him, right? There would be something new? He could see himself being in Hell, understands being judged and found wanting by Heaven, but why would they let Jonathan’s body be here?

Maybe this is Purgatory then. Maybe they’re waiting. Maybe he’s supposed to wait, too. Maybe he’s not allowed to die until something changes, until he changes, until there is room for him out there. Maybe he’s supposed to pray to be allowed out, and Dio never thought he’d stoop to that, but he’s not completely unfamiliar with begging. It’s just been a while. Surely he can still do it right. Maybe if he lets himself be saved, they’ll save Jojo from this, too.

The ocean is cold and dark and quiet and quiet and dark and cold and the coffin leaks almost twice a month now, so it’s probably not just him, it probably is some part of some corner eroding slowly in the still waters, and honestly it’s impressive it’s lasted this long, but that brings with it a new kind of slow, dreadful horror, of the day that the coffin is filled and Dio is left inside a box of brine which fills his ears and nose and mouth and he knows that even his efforts cannot stop Jonathan’s decades old body from rotting when put into water.

He tries not to think about it. But his mind is the only thing he has going for him anymore.

He counted the lines and scratches on the coffin lid and he used previously unheard of muscles to scoot around the box as best as he could just for something to do, and that’s really funny as well because he’s just a head now, and it’s a funny mental image, and also he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t even be able to isolate and utilize the muscles necessary if it weren’t for becoming a vampire to begin with, so that’s one bonus. The rest of the consequences are, well, being immortal in a box under the ocean with no hands.

It’s okay. It’s okay because he’s getting used to it. He’s here, which means it must be important, it must serve a purpose, it must be fate. This is how the universe works, only things that are supposed to happen happen, so he was meant to be here. His mother and father were right, he is a survivor. He is alive and somehow, miraculously, Jonathan is here, too, and this must be a miracle, right?

He was supposed to survive that shipwreck. Jonathan’s body is supposed to be here. Him and Jonathan are in this together. He was right before. There is a way out of here, and it’ll come if they just wait long enough. If it’s not here yet, it’s because they haven’t waited enough.

He’d entertain himself with singing to pass the time but he hasn’t got any breath, after all. And Jonathan doesn’t have the mouth for it. Aha.

Erina’s child might have a child of their own by now, he thinks. It feels like it’s been long enough for that. If they survived, that is--children can be sickly. He wonders if they even appreciate the sacrifice Jonathan gave to keep them alive. Probably not. Ungrateful lot.

He isn’t sure of the time, he lost track of the whale songs some years ago, he got too distracted and things became blurry and the numbers of the whales started merging with the number of lines in the coffin lid and number of times he’s tried, again, uselessly, to combine his head with Jonathan’s body, and the amount of times he used the little bit of control he managed over it to simply start scratching a line below his (Jonathan’s?) hands, just because it’s something and the sound of the scratching of Jonathan’s (his?) fingernail against the cloth and then wood below is soothing. It echoes softly in the hollow box, makes Dio’s ears ring pleasantly.

He mutters to himself without words that it’ll be okay, they’ll make it out of this, he’ll do it for him and Jojo. It’ll be okay because he’s somehow still alive after everything and Jojo is here and if this was meant to be, it must be fate, and if that’s true, either God is real and is punishing him or he was supposed to do everything he did and there’s something better for him on the other end of this, some greater purpose for him to fulfill, and it can’t be Hell because Jojo is here.

He stops worrying about when or how because that doesn’t matter, he’s been here so long now that who knows when the world will be ready for him to resurface. The why and what are more important. He’s made for something important when he gets out of here, and Jonathan will help him with his body because Jonathan always chooses the right side, and he needs to figure out the point of it all so he doesn’t waste his chance.

Dio is going to win. He’s going to beat this--beat everything, everyone, the world, whatever. He’s figured it out. He will win because he was made to, because he wants to. He accomplished so much in his life before the coffin, all by himself, so he knows his own capability. He only lost in the end because Jonathan’s determination won out over his--Dio lost the battle of wills and was judged wanting by the universe for his weakness, and now he is here, awaiting an end when he can try again, continue, start over. Jonathan’s victory taught him so much--Jonathan was so strong and brave and a truly worthy enemy that happily gave his life to try to stop Dio. It’s an honorable end, one Dio must respect by giving it the acknowledgement it deserves. Dio will respect his memory someday by taking the body he gave and using it to continue on, to continue giving Jonathan’s soul that taste of victory Dio will bring forth.

It’s coming. Dio knows time doesn’t mean anything anymore, if it ever did. Time means nothing to the base state of the universe, the push and pull of contrasting wills and energies that make reality what it is--the forces of the universe and the stars bound by the gravity which itself rules the earth and the ocean, and the lifeforms that defy these things in spite of their pull, and the combatting of humans during their lifetimes to achieve their own ambitions, everything. Dio can master that pure state of being, he can will his victory into being just by being given the chance. This is his trial and test. He will come out the other end of it whole and ready.

He’s survived so much and he is still alive, still thinking, still sane, so he will be ready. It doesn’t matter what stands in his way, he can still thrive as he once did, with only his own power and the approval of fate to guide his existence.

There’s nothing more important in the world than mastering one’s own destiny, to understanding fate and the full gravity of forces that drove the universe, and then taming them, making them one’s own. Fate was reality was ambition was choice, and he chose to achieve victory, to find this end to it all that would be his own Heaven. Jonathan went to Heaven because he won, because he was stronger for a time. Dio knows he can do that, too. Dio will be stronger this time. He knows how to endure, he always has and he just forgot temporarily. He’s remembered now. Heaven is victory and he wants to win, he knows now he is not in Hell nor Purgatory, he is just on Earth, biding his time, a forgotten treasure and secret that cannot be buried forever. There will be more than this, and he will seize it all, all for himself, all for Jonathan’s memory.

He’s scratched a long, deep, single line into the wood below his right hand with Jonathan’s nail. Too deep to continue. He had to switch fingers. He doesn’t try to gain or maintain a larger form of control over the body--it’s useless, and the world will present itself to him when it’s ready.

It’s been so long. He’s tried to stop counting the passage of time as best as he can; it won’t help. The universe is what it is and he is Dio and his destiny will come when it’s time. Does Erina have a grandchild? Is she still alive? Are there great-grandchildren? Dio finds that he’s stopped caring, if he ever did care. Jonathan must have moved past such things a long time ago, as well, with the peace he found in the afterlife beyond. The only thing connecting Jonathan to this earth anymore is the bits of himself left with Dio, Dio who knew him better than anyone, Dio of whom Jonathan in turn saw more of than any other. Dio wonders if Jonathan would be proud of him for surviving as he has.

It’s not proud to only survive, but Jonathan was always sentimental like that. Hopefully soon Dio can make them both happier with something greater than this.

The coffin jerks. It’s the first bodily sensation Dio has felt since falling into the ocean, and the meager nerves still alight in Jonathan’s cold body send him unfamiliar notes of alarm--unfamiliar sensations of movement he has not felt in years.

He jolts awake from a dreamless sleep into reality that feels stranger. He’s stopped being able to distinguish the two for some time--he knows he dreams of being in the coffin, usually unable to imagine much more than that after so long, but he can’t parse anymore which times are the dreams and which are the true experience. He’s supposed for a long time now that it doesn’t really matter either way.

This feels like a dream. He has dreamt this, as well. Though his human memories have become blurry and faded and uncertain through time, all of the memories he gained after his transformation remain sharp and clear; he remembers sensations, he remembers smells, he remembers light, he remembers land and buildings and music and blood and other living people that stood by his side, and sometimes his dreams remember, too, though far less these years. Once, he would dream of “escaping” this box every time he closed his eyes, in some desperate, misguided attempt at returning to a life that didn’t exist anymore; he’s moved on from that, now, knows better, knows his role in the world.

This feels like a dream. But the tipping of the box, the way the wood wobbles, the way the delicate connections between him and Jonathan shift with momentum, the way water wooshes softly past the outside of this coffin--they are sharp sensations. Not blurry. He may confuse dreams with reality, may not know a monotonous reality when he sees it, but he does recognize the sharpness of true observation.

He doesn’t know quite how to classify what he feels as the coffin rises for the first time in what must be decades, for unknown reasons. Curiosity? Of course. And something he might have once called relief. There is something buried deep within his chest that feels strangely like anger, though he doesn’t bother with it. No fear--nothing he could fear could happen, really. After all of this, he must be truly invincible, and what else could even happen? He’d fall out of the coffin into the water to wait for his time there, instead? Fate has better hands than that to play if it felt like challenging him.

No, the thing he feels most must be something closer to excitement, though it’s not the same kind of emotion he’d call excitement in life, or even in living death--it’s a sick kind of thrill that sharpens his whole being, pulls him into focus like his consciousness is a thread through a needle, like he is looking straight into the sun and his pupils have not dilated, but widened to accept all of the destructive rays into his cornea. Is it finally time? It must be, mustn’t it?

It gets less cold as the coffin chugs slowly past the reams of water that hold it down, the pressure of the ocean lessening, opening up slowly to release him, gravity letting him go bit by bit as the universe wills. Eventually, Dio begins to be able to hear some sort of noise in the distance through the water and wood, something akin to machinery. A ship, then.

Some time later, the sudden, sharp, eardrum-shattering loudness of bursting out of the waves meets his ears, only slightly muffled through the wood with his hearing, and oh, he had forgotten how attuned his senses really were, hadn’t he? Everything is so… big in his head, as he recalls what sounds and smells are through the confines of his temporary exile.

Voices. People. He is above the ocean. He’s out of the water.

The box slams into something solid beneath him, entire thing shaking with enough force to remind him coldly of the original topple into the sea, and he wonders if the aftershocks are really just basic physics making the box quiver or if it’s not the trembling of the universe in response to his joy, his exhilaration. If he were still alive, maybe Jonathan would shake with excitement, too, for them.

Dio focuses on one and only one limb: his left arm. He stares into the dark, familiar, scratched up lid above him, and waits, hearing the muffled wheezes of incorrect breathing coming through the half-made connections inbetween him and Jonathan.

There are only two things left to wait for as the similarly excited chattering outside continues. It takes longer than he expects. He stares and his neck wheezes. His focus becomes painful with how forced and consistent it is, but he won’t lose it. He only has one chance.

The first sign of the beginning of the end comes--light. Sunlight. Day, it must be. He’d forgotten what day was, hadn’t he?

But he didn’t forget what it does to him.

The coffin lid opens carefully, sunlight glinting off the metal of a crowbar, and before the owner of the hand that holds said crowbar can even glimpse what’s inside, as they lean forward in anticipation, Jonathan’s hand has already surged forward, plunging into the person’s neck, both grabbing and claiming in the same motion, and then the last necessary piece falls into place.

Blood.

Dio drags the half-screaming, half-gurgling man into the coffin before he even knows what’s happened to him, hand ripping straight through his trachea and nails digging around his spine. Blood. Blood. It drips down his arm, covers the dying, thrashing man that Dio pays no attention to in the regained dark, and most importantly, fills his and Jonathan’s old, sluggish, congealed veins. It plunges into his system, scouring new paths, filling him and revitalizing him and making him breathless and he takes his first breath in decades and he reconnects to Jonathan’s neck and he can feel again, he can feel his body and his toes and even his fingertips in the man’s warm, fluttering viscera and Jonathan’s body sings with it as easily as Dio’s ever did after a fresh kill, and Dio knows he was right, he is destined for more, he is on a path to victory, because this feels like the sheer, unnamed joy of taking a first step into the boundaries of Heaven’s gates. This must be how Jonathan’s soul felt after defeating him.

He drains the man dry to the confused shrieks of those still outside the coffin on whatever ship it’s been dragged onto, and for the first time in years, Dio just breathes, feeling the world around him slot back into place, feeling reborn and new in a way he hasn’t felt since the night the Joestar manor burned to the ground.

Dio wonders if he should burn this ship down, too, in celebration. It’s poetic, isn’t it? Bookends for how he first sank and now again as he rises? Holy fire, prophetic fire, portentous fire. It sounds nice.

He doesn’t burn it down in the end, but only because he’s too busy and disoriented to worry about it much. The other men aboard are smart, and leave the man-eating box they have unearthed from the sea alone, but unfortunately--for them--that gives Dio the time to wait them out.

He scratches new lines into the edges of the coffin with both hands now, thrilled with the ability to do so, delighted with the fact he can once again retract and lengthen his nails at will. He does exactly as has benefitted him so far, as he has been rewarded for, and waits. He’s waited what must be years just since his revelations of new purpose, much less the amount of time before that spent flailing around in unnecessary distress--he can bide his time for maybe half a day with barely a thought.

Dio feels when nighttime comes more than he knows it for any amount of counted hours. He slips out of the coffin in the moonlight with untested but solid limbs; he wrung shaking control out of this body before it was even capable of physically obeying him, it is nothing to wrest authority with real vitality in his veins again. It’s not perfect but this body is no longer an injured, recalcitrant street dog that refuses to obey him with either coaxing or cruelty, that skitters away from his mere presence. Now this body is like a badly fit shirt re-sewn into place--he can feel where the seams have been ripped on it, knows others would find it uncomfortable, but alterations of necessity can only be welcomed and adapted to and thrived in.

He wonders vaguely in his buzzing brain what he must look like, a starved thing from the sea covered in blood and scars and sharp points, stalking the dark deck in stumbling, determined steps, following the scent of life, the sound of working hearts. He forgot how loud a heartbeat could be. The men onboard scream when they see him, at least, and then they stop screaming very soon.

Dio has never felt so alive, so full, so bright and clean and new. He stares into the shining lights of the ship’s cabin after clearing the vessel of the crew, looking into the electric glassbulbs like a moth drawn to flame. But it is not flame, and he is not a moth, and he’s not looking at his own destruction dangled ahead of him like a carrot on a stick, but a dangerous and promising future he hasn’t yet materialized in full words.

He stands woozily, blood-drunk, in the empty cabin, and touches careful fingers to the hot glass of the closest bulb, tapping his new nails against it with soft clinks. He’s not unfamiliar with electricity, of course, it’s just that he forgot how beautiful light could be, how warm and soft. He feels mesmerized staring into it, like he’s caught in a dream. And even the night air is so hot against his skin that is used to the temperatures of deep ocean. His mind that is unused to change and sensation is marvelling at the blustery wind coming off the waves, whispering into the cabin and caressing his lifeless skin, lightly chilling the parts of him still wet with fresh blood.

He can smell the metal and chemical and wood of what makes up the ship, what makes up its construction and upkeep--and much stronger than that, the slightly off, metallic scent of blood now permeating most of the space on this small vessel. The wind brings with it the softer, less familiar kind of salt in the air than what he spent so long smelling in the coffin, until he had forgotten he was smelling it at all because it became the norm. It is quiet here, nothing but the water lapping against the ship outside and the whistling breeze and the ship’s distant thrum of engine, but the quiet is merely quiet now, not empty, not lacking in sound at all.

Jonathan’s body does not welcome him now that it is awakened again, but it no longer is unresponsive, and that is infinitely better. He feels their tendons stretch and pull and twist beneath the skin as he moves, slowly and carefully, enjoying the sensation.

And then there’s the moon, hovering above them all, pinned to the edge of the sky right in front of him like a coin laid on black fabric, surrounded by glittering stars. Dio doesn’t know how long he stands there, fingers pressed to the hot lightbulb as he stares up into the cosmos, looking with some sort of horrific, enthralled awe at the sky through the glass of the ship’s viewport. It’s not like he expected the moon to be gone when he surfaced. He just didn’t expect what seeing it again would do to him--what the lack of night sky did to him. The lack of wind and warmth and light and blood. He feels like he’s experiencing them all for the first time again.

He stands there long enough at least that his and Jonathan’s fingertips are singed by the time he pulls them away, and the moon has travelled another milimeter up from the horizon.

Then he looks around the cabin until he finds what he wants, what he needs to discover, helpfully hanging from one of the walls cluttered with other papers. A calendar.

The nine after the initial one in the year listed doesn’t surprise him, but it’s no less a cold glass of water to the face. The eight after that is less expected, and much harsher a reality to swallow. The last number tells him it is only a handful of years until he would’ve been in the coffin for a full century.

Ninety-four years. Ninety-four years in the sea. Ninety-four years in that cursed box. Ninety-four years since the shipwreck and Jonathan’s death.

Ninety-five since he became what he is now, on that eventful night in the Joestar manor that George Joestar died. One hundred three years since he became an orphan and was then readopted.

One hundred sixteen years on the earth and the entirety of his life before was less than a fifth of that.

Dio giggles. He can’t help it. All he can think is that if these seamen had waited another six years, how climactic his return would be. Only half a decade off from perfect poetry, a beautiful number to tell his story. He’s going to have to smooth over the details when he tells someone of this; it’s too close not to enjoy the fruits of his waiting with a wonderfully spun tale of his hundred year sleep under the sea.

The giggle doesn’t naturally fade away--it turns into a chuckle, into a snort, into a guffaw, until he’s laughing in the middle of the empty, blood-soaked cabin which itself rests in the middle of the empty, salt-soaked sea, laughing and laughing at the time and the dates and the newness and the rawness and the fact he can laugh again with his new lungs, this is his first laughter in a century, shouldn’t he enjoy it?

He can’t weaken from something like laughter the way a human can, like he used to when him and Jonathan got a little too drunk together at night and worked themselves into painful fits of joy in one of their bedrooms at the stupid stories and jokes they’d tell each other to pass the hours, like he used to when his mother would tease him with her games and his father, in an unusually good mood, would join in, tickling his sides til they hurt and he shrieked with the fun of it, so he can’t blame unsteady human knees or aching abdomen muscles when he collapses to the floor.

He laughs, ugly and wretched in the warm electric light and cool moonlight until tears start running down his face, mingling with the blood, and the laughter becomes something else, something nasty and full and messy. He doesn’t need to breathe, really, as much as he prefers it to not breathing, so there’s nothing that stops his body from attempting to pour another ocean out through him, as if he soaked it all up in that century in the coffin at the sea floor and needs to wring himself out. Maybe he did and does. This is the first time he’s cried in a century, too.

It just comes and comes until it doesn’t anymore, until he’s looking at the newly-scratched up wooden floor of the cabin under his own hands through bleary eyes, feeling with surreal clarity the fresh gouges on his own arms. Jonathan’s body starts healing this time, still full with energy and vigor from the feeding earlier. He wonders, vaguely, if Jojo can feel it now, too.

He wonders what the universe has in store for him, that he must go through this to earn his second chance, to grow and develop to the person he is now. Wonders why it is this month and this year that is best.

He supposes it doesn’t matter, does it? He’s Dio Brando and he’s survived everything that’s ever been thrown at him and that means something. He is stronger and more powerful and capable than anyone else that could possibly be alive on this planet. The universe has given him a thread to pull and unravel, and this time, when he winds it around his fingers, he will take the whole world with it, because who else but him could?

Once he is over the ordeal of getting back to land, a painful process involving weighing the benefits and consequences of trying to operate machinery he doesn’t understand or attempting to swim across the ocean himself or simply waiting for another ship to show up, it feels like everything starts falling into place. There’s plenty of blood to find, plenty of spots to hide during the day, plenty of humans to bend to his will--the latter done at first mostly to keep himself safe. There’s always a human or two fascinated with the occult that drifts through empty streets, lonely and dauntless and looking for purpose. Easy to make them minions to help him move from place to place.

Dio, for his part, just enjoys being on land again. He gravitates to civilization, because even after a decade in the countryside of the Joestar manor, and decades more of isolation in a small box, some part of him still misses the city, the noise and bustle and alleys of humanity in close proximity. He wonders what London looks like in this new century, if it is even still standing.

This new century is definitely loud, definitely bustling, more so than he’s ever heard civilization. Electricity has given way to the unique sounds of progress he never imagined--engines everywhere, even in people’s homes and on the city roads, music that booms through an establishment and out into the streets from more than just a good band surrounded by thin walls, and there are blaring sounds that he recognizes as sirens even when the tone and pattern of them are unfamiliar--it’s hard to mistake the pitch and warning of them even when they originate in ways he doesn’t understand.

It’s loud and overwhelming and confusing and he loves it.

Dio doesn’t bother being subtle. He doesn’t bother cleaning up his messes. That’s what the humans are for, if they care to stay long enough to find out whether their usefulness or Dio’s desire for easy blood wins out in the long run. So far, they do care, and so far, the latter keeps winning.

He knows he had a flair for the dramatic and hedonistic in his living death before the coffin, years of suppressed intent and desire being expressed through the new eyes of vampiric capability; now it’s not a flair as much as a need, a streak that has become the whole of him, a hungry, all-consuming struggle to feel and possess and consume until he’s full with it, full with the lights and the sounds and the blood and the people. After the century in the sea, he has nothing but want left inside him, and he will never, ever again bear denial, will never again curb the impulse to take and be euphoric with it. And why shouldn’t he? If any of the people he kills chose to rise above the same way he had, spent the last century as he had, they’d do the same, they only lacked the ambition and experience and opportunity to see the world through the same clear gaze as him. Only he understands the universe truly, only he deserves to make the world his, only he walked out of the ocean as something new and twisted and stronger.

Dio barely thinks through the haze of months that pass him by like that, caught only in sensation and indulgence, caught like a moth in the flame of thriving.

That’s how she finds him, eventually, when Dio finally feels that thing again--that another piece has slipped into place, that a gear has started turning for the beginning of some future end goal.

He’s laying in the messy remains of his latest meal, not caring about the blood covering the floor and walls and himself. He doesn’t need all of it right now, anyway, and that’s another kind of thrill, to not need to take it all, to be wasteful, to feast lazily on something and decide later whether he wants to gorge himself or have someone else clean it up--if he even cares to clean it up.

He’s not expecting a visitor, but he’s not entirely surprised, either--some of the minions lead others here for him, either friends of theirs that want in on what they think the other has or more food. Either way, they’re all happy to throw themselves into his claws. He has that effect on people--the transformation of his human charisma and cunning into otherworldly appeal and manipulation was apparent and useful to him as soon as he shed his humanity, and now, now it goes even further, now he is beyond all of that, something beautiful and dangerous and intelligent beyond human conception, something unreal, powerful, desirable. They looked at him before like a beloved monster, and now, they look at him like a bright and terrible god.

He hears whoever it is stop nearly as soon as the door opens--as soon as the smell of blood hits them. He waits to see if they’ll continue, brave enough to enter the lion’s den, or just back away, running back to safety and mundanity.

They continue through the door way, alone, and it’s a point in favor of prospective minion rather than new food.

Once again, the old, weathered face of an elderly woman isn’t what he would’ve guessed from the usual lot, but he can quickly surmise at the reasonings behind it--someone who heard stories of him and wanted him to make her young and strong and beautiful again, perhaps? It wouldn’t be the first request. He hasn’t fulfilled any of those yet, though.

He doesn’t say anything when she enters, letting the scene speak for itself. To her credit, she doesn’t flinch at it. She either expected as much beforehand, or knew what was she was getting into as soon as she crossed that threshold into the small, dim household he currently makes his home.

He waits for her to say something first. She does, after a slightly uncomfortable period of time.

“I want to serve you,” she says plainly.

“Many do,” he replies, leaving it at that. He licks a stripe of blood up off his (Jonathan’s) arm. It’s not necessary to consume it that way, but he’s been enjoying it, a messier, more pleasurable sensation than simply sticking his fingers in a body and absorbing the liquid that floods to his call. And this way often gets a reaction--the humans like when he does things like that, even if they just like the thrill of fear he can give him.

She doesn’t shake the way most of them do, though. “Will you have me?” is all she says in response, and he takes a closer look, curious.

She’s old, as he noted, with a hunched back and a cane to match, but her eyes are still sharp, observant, shrewd. She looks directly at him without flinching or retracting her gaze to the floor. There’s still that starry-eyed expression the ones that come to him of their own free will get becuase they know they’re looking at something more than them, but the look doesn’t consume her face--just influences it. Her shoes are covered in blood from the floor and she either doesn’t seem to notice, or doesn’t care.

She’s different. Oh, then. Oh. He looks at her and sees not food nor heedless sycophant--he sees fate, again. This doesn’t fit the usual scripts, which means there’s more to it. There’s something he can pull from this and use to fulfill his destiny, isn’t there? He’s been mindless these past months, drunk off the bloodlust and the feeling of the world welcoming him with open arms, but that tingle moves up his spine again, that dizzy, giddy feeling that kept him awake for hours, days, weeks in the coffin, kept him sane and alert and prepared.

There’s more here, this is the beginning of the end, this is how you achieve victory, sings in his mind. Jonathan’s body hums as well, skin prickling around his neck as if he, too, can feel the importance of it all.

Dio doesn’t hesitate. He trusts the gut instinct without scrutinization, accepts it wholeheartedly. It’s as if he’s been sleeping, lulled by the pleasant distractions of the earthly since his feet touched shore, and now he’s awake again, jolted by the memory of something else he must work towards, something glittering and cosmic. “Yes,” he says. He doesn’t.care to ask how she found herself here, because it’s not important. All he asks is, “What’s your name?”

“Enya Geil,” she answers easily.

He doesn’t have time to decide whether he wants to respond with flattery to bind her to him more easily, to keep hold of this thread that will surely lead him where he ought to be, because she pauses only for a second.

“What is yours?” she continues, and it sticks a thorn in him, makes his thoughts stop for a moment.

“No one’s asked me that yet,” he says honestly. He gestures dismissively around the room with one of his hands still dripping viscous, red fluid. “They just call me Lord.”

“All gods have names,” she pushes. “They said you were a god--a god or a monster. And you haven’t killed me yet, as a monster would.”

The spark in him lights further, recognizing the same strings of logic, the same drive in her eyes. “And if I was a monster that just wanted to toy with my food?” he asks, smiling foul and messy and neat all at once.

“Then I’d be wasting my time and you’d kill me anyway,” she says simply. “But I’m old, and if my time comes, it comes, and I’d rather take a chance on something more.”

Something more. The room spins around Dio as he contemplates it, as he wonders and remembers what he dreamed about while in the coffin. Things that must be and meetings that were meant and something that was waiting for him, a call he would recognize when the universe saw fit to bring him to the opportunity. He took the opportunity when the ship caught him, and now he sees another one dangling in front of his eyes. He feels that pull from her, sees it in her eyes, like the inexorable pull of the moon on the tides, the pressure of the ocean that kept him down until he was ready, like the draw between the earth and the sun and the moon. Fate, as inevitable as the natural, quantifiable forces that kept all things on earth to the ground.

Who is he? He’s not Dio Brando, not anymore. He knew that for a while now, even if he didn’t think it so bluntly. He knew since before he exited the ocean, he thinks. He is different now--the same person in the sense he kept the same memories as Dio Brando, and came from no one else, but he’s changed. He understands things he couldn’t before, all through the powers of fate, that which guided planets and the oceans and even guided Jonathan to his victory over Dio, because Jonathan possessed that will to conquer fate and achieve his own destiny, which he decided was to defeat Dio. Fate is a guiding force, but also a choice that could be utilized.

He remembers when he couldn’t put his finger on the right label for Jonathan--giver, taker, or otherwise, he’d simply settled on Jojo. Remembers how he’d erased his own labels in his mind, settled just for vampire, beyond humanity, self-explanatory--but he’s more than that, because he’s more than he was before. He called himself a God before to those in his thrall, but now… now he feels that, truly.

Bookends, he thinks. Poetry. A good story to spin for others that might come worshipping him.

Names and title have power, don’t they? It’s why none of them ever fit Jojo, because he was more than the boxes Dio tried to arrange around him. And this is important. Whatever he tells this old woman come looking for purpose will define him, he knows. He should bind his fate to something worthy, self-explanatory, more than the Dio Brando that could slip off his lips easily if he allowed it.

And, well. It’s not as though a last name is anything but a tool to decipher where one came from, and it’s not as though there is a single molecule in Dio’s body that desires to be claimed by Dario Brando, there is not a cell in him that he shares any longer with the skinny, hungry, cold, frightened child that was born with his name one hundred sixteen years ago. And, he thinks with vicious amusement, it’s not as though George Joestar ever deigned to grace his favorite stray with the name that would make him family in more than just empty words and legal terms.

No. Dio knows exactly what to answer Enya Geil, this woman who is the beginning of a new string. Jonathan’s body twinges again, that almost painful and forceful pricking of his senses.

“My name,” he purrs, low and decisive, “is DIO.”

She nods at that, like it’s exactly what she expected, eyes wide and sincere and awestruck. Exactly as it should be.

DIO continues, solemnly, putting to words finally the things that he had been feeling for some time. “Do you believe in gravity, Enya Geil?” He wants to see if she recognizes the importance of his words--whether or not he ever shares with this woman what it means to him is irrelevant.

And, amazingly, she does--she doesn’t furrow her brow in confusion, nor does she try to find a meaning she doesn’t understand. Her face lights up in delight, in question, and he thinks the universe has done enough talking for him, done enough leading him to the point. He’s awake now in every way that matters, ready and willing to grab fate by the reins and build something with it, whether it is a path or a home or a plan--he will know it when he sees it, he’s certain.

He doesn’t give her time to answer. DIO rises from the messy pool of blood around him, and takes Jonathan Joestar’s body with him.

(Jojo, some part of his mind corrects. He doesn’t acknowledge it. It is the part of him that went into the ocean, not what came out. Dio Brando survived--DIO thrives.)

Jonathan’s body, once more, aches--his neck itches in that way it does when he has to focus on maintaining the strings connecting it more than usual. He strokes absently at the inflamed, unhealing circle of skin. Bookends, he thinks again, and things meant to be, and fate guided by choice; he wonders what became of Jonathan and Erina’s child. Wonders if that, too, is something more.

He’ll find out, he supposes. He’ll know it when he sees it.