Celery water

i go into this a bit in BNGN but keeping someone alive and hidden in that state for any length of time with no medical equipment or expertise is Difficult. this would not have been a minor project! diavolo would have had to put a lot of work into this so we can assume from that that this was very, very important to him. we see that diavolo didn't object to murder when his back was to the wall, and hiding a dead body would have been much much easier.

there's two angles to approach that one. 1) diavolo did this to cause maximum prolonged suffering. he was very angry with this woman and wanted to punish her at length. we don't get much in the way of reasons why this would be, but i've got a couple of guesses. diavolo might have resented that after her sentence ended she did not take over care of him, but we don't really get any insights into what that relationship was at all. for all we know she visited every weekend until mysteriously disappearing. another possibility could be in diavolo's DIDesque condition; p5 argues that this is likey due to trauma, but we never See or even hear about any actual trauma and araki is not in the habit of cutting that stuff, but we do hear about a pretty weird and probably stressful birth. could diavolo have remembered this, blamed her for it and felt she deserved punishment for it?

i'm not sold tbh. we never get any indication that diavolo sees his condition as anything but a benefit, and from what we see of him he tends to go for the kill rather than the pain and leave the torture up to other people. but he does resent the past and if he saw his very birth itself as a traumatising mark on his soul... personally though i prefer reading 2) diavolo did this because for him this is some kind of show, if not of affection, than of some kind of possessiveness. possibly this is him completing his little nuclear family, all of them under one roof. maybe, as a person with two souls, this is the closest thing he can imagine to loving someone outside of his own body (diavolo and doppio are, in a sense, bound and buried within each other). possibly some desire not just to erase the past but to have it completely under his control, in the form of an entire human only he knows is even there. the lock of hair, i think, is a deliberate thing left there by him to signify some form of connection, because from a narrative standpoint it's completely unecessary as a signifier of guilt; was there ever any chance that anyone else would be suspected of having done this?

i guess it comes down to cruelty, and whether or not you believe that it's intentional cruelty or the actions of someone whose major flaw is an inability to relate to or understand others.