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Enrico Pucci kneels before the son of god, and thinks that he looks like his father.
The room is lavish, floor tiled with marble, wooden joinery engraved with intricate carvings of flower vines heavy with roses. However, the decor also expresses an efficiency that borders on the utilitarian, the furniture both beautiful and simple, never cluttering the eye. To one side of the room is an aquarium, clear blue water teeming with exotic fish. The entire back wall is composed of massive plates of glass, allowing the rising sun to fill the room with soft, golden light.
The only thing he’s looking at, though, is the boy seated in the gold and red chair that is the centerpiece of the room. Sixteen, he’s been told, and already the most powerful man in Naples, perhaps in all of Italy. The sun is rising directly behind him, illuminating him with holy light. His dark blue eyes are the precise chromatic opposite of his father’s amber orange.
“Rise,” Giorno Giovanna says, and that is familiar as well, that detachment masking cool, unworried interest. Enrico would say his face and voice are carefully neutral, but that would be wrong. There is nothing careful about this boy, who is all razor intelligence and utterly assured righteousness.
He rises to his feet, slowly. “Don Giovanna,” he greets, keeping his tone respectful. He wants to be awed, enraptured, at finding such a perfect heir of Dio still living, but he does not think his worship will be welcome. Not now, not yet, when they are still strangers to each other.
“You contacted my organization saying you had information on my father.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.” It’s an order. Utterly straightforward.
“How much do you know?” Enrico asks, because it is better than saying, where do I even begin?
“Very little,” Giorno says. Enrico can’t tell if it’s the truth or not. “I never met him. I know he was called Dio. He met my mother when she was vacationing in Egypt. I inherited certain things from him.”
For half a second, Enrico sees something behind the chair, standing at Giorno’s back, its hands resting on his shoulders, sunlight flaring off a metallic carapace, and then it’s gone. It’s there for barely an instant, a film-reel stutter, and for a moment he feels as though he‘s seen something he wasn’t meant to see, but- no. Giorno Giovanna is a person who reveals nothing but exactly what he wants.
It’s comforting, though. To see that shape, gold and ivory and familiar and brilliant, only reaffirms his certainty that he is exactly where he is meant to be, where his lord would wish him to be. Giorno Giovanna is his father’s son, and he will help bring about Heaven on Earth.
“Do you know,” he asks, his voice gentle and reverent, the same tones he would use when taking confessions and granting forgiveness, “what your father’s dream was?”
For the first time since meeting him, Enrico has the sense that Giorno is intrigued. He leans forward in his gilded chair, just slightly, hands gently crossed in his lap. “No.”
So he tells him. He tells him about Heaven, about gravity, because it was gravity that brought him here to Naples, he is certain of it now. Tells him about ascension and destiny and fate. He speaks for more than half an hour, unpausing. Giorno Giovanna listens without interruption, unblinking and intent, something burning in his deep blue eyes.
“Dio’s dream is not yet dead,” Enrico says, pulling out the fragment of bone, his greatest treasure, holy relic of his lord, holding it aloft in a hand that does not tremble. For the first time in years, his goal seems truly within reach. “I can still bring about the extermination of his enemies. I can still accomplish Heaven. If you will join me, you can fulfill the destiny of your blood.”
Giorno’s eyes are unreadable. “His enemies?”
“Those who have been responsible for his downfall twice now,” Enrico answers, the hatred he has been unable to purge creeping into his voice. “The Joestar bloodline. They will be wiped from existence, and Dio’s Heaven will be complete and everlasting.”
Forever and ever, amen.
Giorno stands, backlit by the rising sun, and steps forward until they’re face to face. His lips quirk up just slightly, a bemused smile that whispers I know something you don’t, and he begins to circle around Enrico, his pace relaxed, unhurried.
Unlike his father, Giorno is not a physically intimidating man, slimmer than Enrico and at least a full inch shorter, and yet it feels like a tiger is circling around him. He catches another glimpse of gold and ivory, a shimmering shadow in the boy’s wake, now close enough to touch, and has to fight to keep himself from shying away. This is a test, he is now certain, and he will play the role of Daniel in the lions’ den if he must.
He will do anything, for Heaven.
Giorno begins to list off the names.
“Joseph Joestar, eighty-one. Holy Joestar, sixty. Kujo Jotaro, thirty-two. Higashikata Josuke, nineteen. Jolyne Cujoh. Ten.”
He lets the last name hang in the air like an accusation, drawing to a halt in front of Enrico once more and fixing him with a piercing stare. It makes him feel utterly insignificant, an ant under a magnifying glass, a sinner before the eyes of god.
“Am I correct?”
Enrico wants to answer yes, wants to ask just how much this boy truly knows, but his throat has closed up. His collar feels chokingly tight, but to reach up and loosen now it would be to show weakness before a predator with its fangs bared. He nods, once, in lieu of the words he can’t manage.
Giorno’s stare holds for a moment longer before he turns away, and as he turns the silky neck of his shirt slips down, revealing the edges of a fuchsia star birthmark emblazoned on his left shoulder.
“You forgot one,” Giorno says. “Giorno Giovanna. Sixteen.”
Enrico can’t breathe. With those blazing eyes off of him, he reaches up to tug at his collar, wondering how the situation slipped from his control so quickly. Instead of stiff fabric, his fingers meet dry scales. There’s a soft hiss in his ear.
So Moses and Aaron came to Pharaoh, and thus they did just as the Lord had commanded; and Aaron threw his staff down before Pharaoh and his servants, and it became a serpent, he thinks dizzily, the verse floating back from some half-remembered memory as his vision begins to blur and darken.
Twin points of pain pierce the soft underside of his chin, and the poison burns as it enters his system. He collapses to his knees, the bone tumbling from his hand and clattering across the mirror-polished floor.
Giorno pauses when it skitters to a halt beside his feet, nearly begging him to pick it up. Enrico prays that he will, that he’ll keep it, a memento of the father he never knew, that Dio’s bone and Dio’s dream might yet survive. Even death would be worth it, if it means that Dio’s son takes up the mantle he has carried for decades now.
Giorno brings a heel down on the bone, brutally swift, and it shatters into so much dust.
The last thing Enrico sees, as the white-hot punctures beneath his chin swallow all other sensation, is Giorno seating himself back in his chair to watch him die. His eyes aren’t cold like his father’s, not at all. They’re furious, protective, passionate.
Giorno Giovanna is so thoroughly his father’s son.