#dioxjon

Said Death to the Dead

You destroy the thing you love Even though you know it's wrong -stars-

The room was, that night, all moonlight and candlelight - dim gold and silver, streaming through the gauzy curtains. During the day, things would be different, of course - heavy velvet blocking the sunlight being the first difference. The absence of the current resident being the other.

Dio sits at his favorite chair by the window, a polished wood table at his side, a crystal glass (wine, red and rich) held delicately between the fingers of one hand. In the other, he holds the skull.

A souvenir? A treasure? Who can even tell the difference, sometimes.

“The days are long, JoJo.” He says this, red nails dragging over white bone. He’s careful - always careful - not to leave a mark. “Is that the desert, I wonder? You would have known the answer, I think. Always researching things. Useless things.” Well, they seemed useless at the time. The origins of that mask, for example. He remembers clearly thinking, when he ran across Jonathon’s notes, What good is this? It won’t earn him a penny. He remembers, too, the sick bitterness of knowing that Jonathon wouldn’t worry about that. Didn’t need to worry about that. Had never needed too.

“Well, it didn’t help much in the end, did it?” His voice is dark and low, and a growl, a roll. Dio’s fingers feel along the bone ridges, the empty eyesocket. “After everything, you ended... here.” Blue eyes disappearing. All that dark hair, that aristocratic flesh. And as for the rest of him...

Dio drags his thumb down the front of his own neck - his own, that is, at first. It crosses that divide, the half-healed scars, pink scar tissue, a still aching wound.

You ended here. The mantel, or the table, or the other part of Dio. Still... “Life is strange, JoJo, without you following me around, shouting threats.” He sighs, and the wine tastes like blood in his mouth. “Perhaps I should raise you? Hm? It wouldn’t take much. Then you could... follow me around again.” Him and his self-righteousness. His burning eyes. And those hands - Dio’s hands, now - large and strong. Only his blood and the corpse of... whoever. Anyone would do, in a pinch. In theory.

(Dio thinks of that now - of JoJo’s face looking up at him again, properly restored but pale, of course - anything he raises is never fully alive again, He imagines a variety of bodies - possibilities, each different from the other. Small bones and large, muscles large, muscles compact, short and tall, so many options. So many ways to remake his other half. If he did it, he could do anything. In theory. But no, if he were to do it, he would be careful with it - of course he would. JoJo was him, and he was JoJo, after all - two halves of a single whole. He would never inflict on Jonathon a body he would not accept for himself. )

He could do it. Dio sets his glass down, and holds the skull between his two palms.

He could do it. It’s been one hundred years, of course, but what is one hundred after four hundred? What is raising a single bodyless man when he’s raised corpses so old they’d nearly rejoined the earth? Those two dead knights, they weren’t difficult. This wouldn’t be difficult either.

He could do it. Rebuild that face and -- fight him, fuck him. Both at the same time. Kiss him till his breath stopped again - not that it would matter, this time around. Smother him in hate and love and pain and desire and make him gasp and make him bleed. Again. The way he never could, back then.

His lips brush against the cold bone, leaving glossy smears on the hard bone - green shimmers across that brow and yes, he could do it.

But then what?

(Jonathon would still be Jonathon. And Dio is still Dio.)

In the end, it always comes back to that.