Chapter Text
When Jonathan Joestar takes his last breath, it is like the earth has split below Dio's feet and he feels a chasm strike across the expanse of his being.
In the immediate present, he takes the sentiment to be disappointment: of course he had underestimated Jojo yet again and of course his plans had gone awry. And then when he was cutting off his nemesis' head and replacing it with his own, he thinks the hole will be closed up. He has a body now, even if the ship is burning, burning still. He doesn't have enough time to flex the fingers on his new body before the smoke and heat force him into the chest.
When he takes Jonathan's head with him it is still bleeding from the neck. He cradles it as Jonathan had held onto him and attributes the action to a flight of fancy. Then he closes the lid, turns the lock, and waits.
Inside the chest, there is darkness and velvet. His original plan had been to have the whole ship arrive at its final destination filled to the brim with his slaves. Like a sickness they would have spread and his control over the late colonies would have been guaranteed. But now, there is no one to retrieve him and he is both blind and deaf to the outside world. The ship bursts into flames and he feels more than hears the casket flying past the debris, into the ocean.
For a long time, he simply sinks, the holding container tilted at that awkward angle to balance out the weight. There is a listless drifting and shifting, of the currents, the creatures, perhaps even the continents themselves.
But in the darkness and even at the bottom of the ocean, the chasm is still there.
Well of course it would still be there, his mind rationalizes. The feeling of diappointment cannot be cured without the realization of his goals.
Time passes, even if he cannot feel it. In the darkness of that chest, he goes a little crazy. Once, or perhaps many times, well certainly after the air had run out and after he had already tried sleeping through the ordeal, he had tried to unlock the chest, only to be halted by the unforgiving water pressure and his own crippling weakness. It was definitely luck -- pure, dumb, luck -- that the treasure hunters stupid enough to search through the debris pulled him up at sundown. What a disappointing ending that would've been, he's thought at least once, to be trapped in a trunk for nearly a century only to have his ambitions foiled by the melting ray of the sun.
He doesn't remember what happened when they pried the lid open and it's only after he's drunk every drop of their blood that a bit of sense returns to him. As a coping mechanism, a good part of his brain had probably been extinguished altogether. In stretching his muscles and working his limbs, something falls into place and the memories start to flow back into him. A lifetime before, an even older stone mask, untold powers, and an army of undead. A foolish archaeologist he knew, once. How he wanted to rule it all. How he still does.
His gaze drifts back to his resting place. Somehow, when even thought and speech had been taken from him, whatever reason remained had thought it necessary to preserve the head. It is subsequently in better condition than the body. Jonathan's eyes are closed and his face is set in a perpetually serene expression. Dio makes an effort of wiping the blood and grime from his hands before picking up the head.
It is true, then, that the body will sometimes remember what the brain has forgotten. Although he has only studied Jojo's techniques to the extent of being able to counter them, Jonathan's body still knows how to manipulate its own life energy to walk on water. Later, when he's researching the topic further, he'll realize how remarkable Jojo's body is: one in ten thousand be damned, to be able to stay alive for a century and then function without sunlight, the odds were easily one in one million! At the moment, he smply concentrates on breathing, marvelling at how the body rejoices with each inhale and exhale.
He is distracted for a couple days at best, but it is a distraction nonetheless. It takes him a good part of the night to reach the shores of what he later discovers to be the Canary Islands. He drains a couple more victims, wipes his hands clean, grabs Jonathan, and steals away on another ship before daybreak. In between feedings, he manages to get a sense of time and place: it is 1983 and he is somewhere along the coast of Morocco on the western edge of the dark continent. A lot has changed in ninety-four years -- the up-to-date political geography which he had prided himself on learning is for all intents and purposes useless -- but the world, and the people within it, are essentially the same. The vast majority are weak and spineless, too happy to listen to someone, anyone, who is better.
He consumes with a thirst he doesn't remember from before the shipwreck. It's only natural that he needs more energy even though Jojo's body isn't quite as damaged as his own was after the collapse of the Joestar mansion. The building he's currently in is strangely similar to that, to the extent that it was empty of life and painted with blood. Jojo would not have approved, would certainly have tried to stop him. Probably would have succeeded too, because Dio could never fully account for him. It is in reminiscing about that fight that causes Dio to look at Jojo's head, wondering. With an uncharacteristic gentleness he picks it up with both hands, placing it in his lap. In stroking the still-soft hair, he remembers the man's last moments: his peaceful expression, his unyielding arms, and that embrace which had somehow incapacitated Dio, albeit momentarily. It was an intimacy Jojo had never shown to Dio back when they were alive.
At the end of all things, he is still the same person he was, before death and before the span of a hundred years. He is selfish and he always wants and what he wants now is to be able to gloat, with Jojo alive and thereby able to suffer, knowing the full extent of Dio's victory. So he cuts himself, wedging a thumb between Jonathan's teeth and forcing his blood to drip in. Then he sets the head back on the dresser and waits.
Minutes bleed into an hour and it soon becomes clear that the head will not wake. The chasm, which he had been distracted from, reintroduces itself with a vengeance. Disappointment and frustration bite away at him and were he any younger, he would have thrown the head clear across the room for refusing reanimation. But time has passed and he is no longer the penniless pauper, a puppet to rage. And so he takes a deep breath, picking the head up again and turning it so the candlelight glinted off its features.
Strangely enough, the head still does not share the same pallour as Dio -- indeed, its cheeks were almost pink. With his thumb, Dio traces the edge of the cheekbone to the start of the jawline. Everything is as he remembers it and yet, nothing is right at all.
At some point, he ceases his observations, taking the head with him into bed.
The temptation to speak to it is as strong as it had been underwater. Nonetheless, he refrains.