Chapter Text
Enrico had woven his way through a crowded airport, pushed along by sharp fingernails that sat on the back of his delicate neck. It was Dio’s hand that guided him, even then. He removed his hand, roughly turning Enrico around before dusting something off his right shoulder. Probably some dirt or hair Enrico hadn’t seen.
“There we go,” Dio purred before taking Enrico’s chin into his hand. His grip was so tight that it almost hurt, urging Enrico to look up and meet his eyes. “We wouldn’t want you to go back to your parents a mess, now would we?”
“No, I suppose not,” he said, holding up a hand and playing his fingers along Dio’s wrist as it held him there. He told himself he didn’t need permission, but he did watch Dio’s face carefully to ensure he wasn’t overstepping some secret boundary. “You’re too good to me, my dear friend. I only wish I could be here when you-”
“Ah ah.”
Dio didn’t have to raise his voice as he chided him, nor did he need to say anymore. Enrico allowed a crestfallen expression to fall over his face, bowing his head only when Dio released him.
It had been something Enyaba had told him. That witch had been helping him from the start, helping more than Enrico ever could. Her prophecies, her divinations, they were what made Dio so certain that Enrico had to leave right then and there. Something about this year holding the final battle between him and the Joestars.
Though Enrico wished to do more this time, to stay and fight with his friend, he knew he had to go. So Dio ordered, so it must be.
So he gathered his bag from the floor and turned to get in line for boarding. That was when Dio held him one final time. Those dark claws threatened to tear through his shirt, and Enrico would have allowed them if it was what Dio had desired to do.
Instead, he boarded the plane in one piece.
He would have to wait one year to shatter, to barely hold on as late news footage covered the day Cairo was set on fire. His dreams of the future went up in smoke, though he didn’t yet know for certain that Dio had died. Then the cameras focused in on a smoldering lot in a familiar, aged part of the city.
Swallowing the lump in his throat, he didn’t miss the dark look that fixed itself on his mother’s face when she finally looked up from the book she’d been curled over.
“Terrible,” she said. It was as if, when she shook her head, the expression was shaken off entirely, reverting to something more neutral as she turned back to her book. “I’m glad you and that minister weren’t down there when that was going on. Whatever kind of outreach program he was setting up down there was obviously too little too late.” She closed her book with a sigh and then stood, short blonde hair fanning to the side as she turned back to the TV to click it off.
It was the sight of his own reflection that made him sick.
He could feel himself beginning to breathe a little heavier, arms coming around his torso.
“What’s wrong, baby?” his mother asked, a gentle smile forming under her worried eyes as she came to stand at his side, a hand gliding gently down and over his shoulder.
He resisted the urge to lean into the touch. Instead, he threw her a lopsided smile of his own as he managed the word, “Nothing. I’m just....” He looked back at the TV. “That was the area we worked in. I don’t know what Mr. Brando will do now.”
“Oh, don’t you worry about him.” She patted him on the shoulder and began walking to the kitchen. “I’m sure God’s looking out for him just fine.”
Enrico kept up his smile until she was gone. Then it disappeared as he felt something wet slip down his cheek.
Tentatively, he reached up and smeared his finger through the liquid, pulling it away to find his fingertip now a stark white. His eyes again found the TV.
In the obsidian surface, he found the hooded figure that had created the wetness now looming over him, eyes blank and liquid pupils spilling over its cheeks as it stared down at its user.
“What a stupid thing to say,” Whitesnake murmured, voice low as if there were another stand user around to keep its voice from.
He coiled around Enrico’s side, striped fingers digging into his shoulders as he appeared there. Though the sloshing of his pupils made it appear more like he was crying, there was a frighteningly large grin across his face.
“Shouldn’t you go tell her ‘god’ is dead?”
Then his stand was roaring with laughter, falling from Enrico’s side to the floor. There he rolled, his user’s humiliation and anger enough to keep him going. There was comfort in knowing his mother couldn’t hear the stand. That comfort was short-lived when Enrico realized, even from his room on the other side of that suffocatingly large home, he still could.
He allowed it to cover his own misery. For a moment, he really didn’t know what to expect after all but slamming the door behind him and laying back against it.
His body really hadn’t reacted when Perla died. When he’d seen the warpath his brother had made before he was forced to say goodbye to him forever.
Dio had been there- Dio had known how to react. Dio had given him the power to piece his family back together, if not in this world, then the next. He’d done all of this when He hadn’t had to, and He’d done this when Enrico thought there was no hope for people like his family in any life.
They didn’t even have a place in one this cruel.
Now Dio was dead, and all of his plans went up in smoke with him.
That realization was what brought Enrico to his knees, curling in on himself as he shook against the wood of his door and started to sob. Abandonment set in. He wanted to scream that it wasn’t fair, but couldn’t for fear of his mother hearing him. She would never understand. If he told her what those trips had really been for- that they weren’t simply trying to reconnect with some nameless and altogether pointless fellowships overseas, but rather working to build a better world where she could hold her daughter again- maybe she could.
That would involve giving her that information, though. Telling her those things would only imbue her with the sins of her children. Those same sins were Enrico’s to bear now. They clawed from the inside of his throat with every sob, making it harder to suck in those greedy breaths of air that he almost willed himself to stop taking entirely, lest his pathetic sobs have been too loud.
After what felt like hours of sitting and doing nothing, he managed to find the strength to stand only to fall into bed. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to do anything but scream.
So he grabbed his pillow and did just that. He cried and screamed into it until it was wet with his tears, spit, and sweat that clung to his face long after it had been removed. Now too hot but not wanting to leave the room just yet, he wormed his way to the cool wall and sat in the dark with the occasional, lingering sob to shake through his chest.
His hand balled into a fist against the paint.
Not a thought entered his head other than how unfair this all was to him, how unjust. How dare this universe give him hope just to snatch it away now? It wasn’t fair, but things rarely were for Enrico.
The force of his shaking and crying rocked him into a deep sleep.
He didn’t wake up when his father came home. He didn’t wake up when his mother knocked on the door to see if he wanted to eat- he rarely ever did. He didn’t wake up when they fought in the room under him.
When he did wake up, it was to find his forehead sticking to the wall from the adhesive of his tears, one arm still lagging with sleep from where it had gotten wedged between the mattress and the wall. The room was dark, save for the bits of moonlight that pooled in from the window just above his headboard. It was just enough light so that, when he turned onto his back, he could make out the shape of the ceiling fan against the white of his ceiling. When he stared long enough, that is.
Darkness like this was dangerous for him. The shadows would play if he looked too hard or too closely. They’d begin to shift into one another, transforming into familiar figures from an older, hotter time he knew never actually existed. At least, not anymore. Not for him.
He turned onto his other side, rubbing the soreness from his limb.
“Whitesnake,” he said, begrudgingly asking the stand forward. He waited for it to curl over the foot of the bed, standing on one of the posts like one of Enrico’s sleep paralysis demons. “Get the light, will you? Not the main one-” he added just short of Whitesnake immediately diving for the switch. Then, almost pathetically, he whimpered, “please. Just the lamp.”
“I’ll get it.”
“Thanks,” he said, and closed his eyes.
They snapped back open when he realized his stand hadn’t been the one to say that. Now he was able to make out the shape of someone else laying next to him.
“Oh jeez, how do you work this?” the stranger asked, hand fidgeting with the edge of the lampshade. “I never had an actual lamp before, just a desk lamp. Why do they make something you’re using to see so hard to use. Oh!” The light clicked on. “You just push it through the pole. That’s cool.”
He turned over his shoulder, finally revealing himself fully. Honestly, the bright red hair had been enough of a clue.
Still dumbstruck, Enrico took some time to say, “Noriaki?”
“Kakyoin,” he corrected. “I don’t think I ever told me you could call me that. Not when I was ‘myself,’ anyway.” He leaned back against the headboard, stealing both of Enrico’s pillows to prop up behind him as he asked, “So, how did I get into your house?”
Enrico looked past him for a moment, scrambling for an answer of any sort before Whitesnake came to his side.
“He should be asking you that!”
“Yeah!” he finally said, “I should be asking you how you got into my house!”
“Oh wow, when Jotaro took the fleshbud out, I really forgot how dissociated you two are,” he said, laughing behind his hand before waving to the stand. “Hi, Whitesnake.”
Whitesnake waved back politely, stopping only when his user smacked his hand down.
He didn’t know if he was talking to his stand or the boy in his bed when he snapped, “Don’t encourage him.”
Whitesnake seemed to think it was the former, dissipating with an indignant expression and allowing Enrico to slide further toward the foot of the bed. Once there, he said, “I asked you a question, by the way!”
“Yes, the same question I asked you,” Kakyoin said. “How am I supposed to know the answer to something I asked you in the first place? Before you ask that one back to me, don’t worry, it’s just rhetorical.”
Enrico glared. “I know it’s rhetorical.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
Silence claimed the room, throwing around its weight like some authoritative beast. Kakyoin welcomed it, eager to just look around at what was apparently Enrico’s bedroom, though he didn’t know how he’d gotten here, apparently. Enrico himself, well, he was stuck with his hands on either of his knees, his lap pressed tightly to his chest in an attempt to make himself smaller.
Something clicked and his eyes narrowed.
“You said Jotaro took out your fleshbud? A Joestar?”
“That’s right.” Kakyoin said. His smile fell. “Of course, you never had one, huh?”
He held his chin up, eyes closing in his pride. “No, I don’t.” He’d never given Dio reason to doubt in him, not like Kakyoin obviously had.
“Right, right.” the other boy didn’t sound too impressed as his long fingers drummed against the sides of his thighs, and he sat up a bit straighter on the bed. “So this is your room?”
“Yes.”
“In your house?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So we’re in America, right now? Not Egypt?”
“Yes and yes.”
“Alright, that works, I guess. And you still work for Dio?”
Enrico’s shoulders rolled forward and he held tighter to his own legs. Even as he made himself smaller, his glare was unwavering. It served as answer enough, but Kakyoin waited for his verbal response.
“I’ll always be loyal to Dio.”
Kakyoin rolled his arm out, and at the same time, Whitesnake branched out from Enrico’s back and swung at him.
He was knocked off of the bed without a struggle, causing Enrico to gasp and rush to the edge. He never really had been in a stand fight before and had just assumed it was him or Kakyoin, he didn’t want to attack out of the blue.
“I’m sorry- I thought you were going to attack with Hierophant-” The floor was empty. “Green?”
He sat back on the bed and looked around, now terrified that Kakyoin had slipped off to some other part of the house. How had he gotten in? Was Jotaro with him? Obviously they’d found a trace of him in the mansion somewhere before they lit it up.
Before he could think any further, the ring of a metal bowl or pan falling on the ground and rattling against it broke out from the floor below him. Someone was in the kitchen.
He quickly looked around again, an image of his sleeping parents coming to mind. Were they here to kill him? Did they think his parents were also part of Dio’s plan? How far would the Joestars go to make sure they could stay in this imperfect world?
So quickly did he get out of bed and down the hall that he only realized he’d moved at all when he had already cut around the banister of the stairs and through the same living room where he’d made that dark discovery.
Then he was through the kitchen door and flicking on the light just in time to see Kakyoin nervously holding onto a counter. One of his legs was up on the cabinet as if he was scrambling back from something, his head pushing back the pots and pans that hung down from the ceiling on that side more for aesthetic than practicality. He must have knocked one down in an effort to get away from whatever had so thoroughly scared him.
“What did your stand do to me!?” he demanded, no longer putting on his faux politeness. “Why can’t I summon Hierophant?”
“I didn’t- I didn’t take your disc,” Enrico said, reeling back from the accusation. “I barely even touched you- Whitesnake just shoved you off of the bed.”
“I fell through the floor! You expect me to believe that isn’t the work of a stand!?”
That made a bit too much sense. It wasn’t as though Hierophant could have aided in getting Kakyoin down here that fast, and Enrico’s room was just above the kitchen.
His answer was taking too long, and Kakyoin let him know it. “Answer me!”
“Keep your voice down,” Enrico whispered. “Whatever stand made you fall through to here it wasn’t mine.”
“Oh, yeah right. I know you have multiple stands- I don’t know how you do, but you do.”
Enrico squinted, head shooting back in confusion before he walked forward, lingering around the kitchen isle nervously. “You think I have multiple stands? You don’t remember what Whitesnake does?”
“Why would I have to!?”
“Sh! Please be quiet.”
“Why?”
Enrico groaned, leaning forward and muttering. “My parents are trying to sleep.”
“Not anymore,” a new voice said, the kitchen door flapping open behind Enrico to reveal his father, tall and imposing despite the sleepy hunch. “What are you doing up?”
He began stammering for an answer, looking over to the fallen pan and then Kakyoin who had his eyes wild locked onto Mr. Pucci as he remained in front of the pans.
“Oh, you don’t have to make yourself food,” his father said with a sleepy smile, stooping down to pick up the pan. He turned it over with a yawn, walking to the sink by where Kakyoin was standing to set it inside. “Mom made goulash. It’s in the fridge. Have as much as you want.”
“But, Dad,” he trailed off, not really knowing how to finish that.
His dad tilted his head, rubbing at the back of his neck lazily as his curious eyes locked onto his son. As if with realization, his arm dropped.
“Oh yeah, your mom said you were pretty upset after seeing Cairo on the news today. I heard about it while at work. Can’t imagine why a city so large would end up in ashes overnight.”
Those words knocked Kakyoin out of his daze, bringing him forward to ask, “I’m sorry, what does that mean?”
Enrico’s father didn’t answer him, still focused on Enrico himself as he laid a hand over his shoulder.
“Mr. Brando might be able to work something out with the churches down there. If not, I’m sure he’ll find another project for you to work on. It can be hard seeing something you put so much work into get taken away from you like that, but sometimes that’s life. We can only be glad you two weren’t down there when anyone got hurt.”
Kakyoin’s surprised expression melted into one of anger. He stormed around to Mr. Pucci’s side, all but yelling, “He was the one that hurt people in the first place!”
“That’s not true,” Enrico snapped.
“What’s not true?” his father asked, waiting for Enrico to look back at him. After waiting for him to respond for a moment, he sighed and nodded. “Oh, I see. You never mentioned you made friends down there. If you want, and you have their numbers, you can try calling them tomorrow.”
“No no, I-”
“I mean it, Enrico. You’re such a bright boy, and a project like this, it was really something you needed. I hope you can find something just as fulfilling.”
He ran his hand over Enrico’s head, laughing when he ducked out of the way of his father’s palm. Then he was walking away with a final “Good night.”
“Why wasn’t he looking at me?” Kakyoin asked. “He didn’t even answer me.”
Enrico blinked, leaning back against the counter as he shook his head in thought.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I don’t know anything anymore.”
“Hey- no time for you to mope. Quit feeling sorry for yourself and help me figure this out. Why am I in your house when the last thing I remember is fighting Dio?”
Enrico sighed, grabbing his head with his eyes screwed shut in confusion and pain. “Kakyoin please, I don’t know,” he stopped when he opened his eyes again, lips parted to begin whatever word he’d been prepared to form.
“What?” Kakyoin asked. “What don’t you kn-”
“Bleeding,” Enrico said, standing up a bit straighter as he backed away. “You’re bleeding, I’ll, I’ll get the-”
Kakyoin finally looked down, finding the front of his uniform suddenly caked with blood. It fell from a thicker part below his ribs, running down either half of his coat.
How did I..?
He didn’t even finish his thought before memories came flooding back about how he’d received his wound.
“Pucci,” he looked up, crossing through the kitchen doors to find where Enrico was digging through a small closet of cleaners and spare towels.
“I’m looking for the first aid kit, hold on,” he said, pulling out towel and offering it to him. His already forced smile wavered in the light of the hallway, finally seeing that the blood had soaked through the entire front of the once-green fabric. “Jesus…”
“Pucci. I think I’m dead.”