Work Text:
So, the scenario:
Part 3. You are Enyaba's daughter. You read tarot and your stand has the ability to see the future of others in a certain time frame. You could be really useful, so your mother orders you to take a visit to Dio Brando, not warning you to the possibility of exploitation considering your offered services.
But the meeting is not very productive from the start. You laugh at his ideologies, and offer a debate with yours. You do not accept him as a God.
So Dio chooses a different route and seduces you for the first time, then the second, then the third time in a row.
You disappear into one of the service rooms for the whole day afterwards, drown in your shame and the betrayal of yourself.
Your body starts to show symptoms of an illness and you feel very cold.
You know there is no escape. No way to leave.
You are utterly, entirely doomed.
You have no idea what to do. It was your decision to come here, leaving it all behind, and when it came down to the choice itself, it was your own fault.
Even if it was your mother's order to take a visit, your very own spirit warned you, that even if your body does, your soul will never leave this place once you enter.
The minute you laid eyes on the mansion you knew you were claimed.
It was not the act of the seduction itself that trapped you here.
Not the scenery, or the man himself, or the way he towered over you in a sensual way, mirroring your own selflessness to take what was left of it.
It was the choice of words - yet not the psychological warfare, the way he tried to leave an impact.
Not his charm, or the arrogant way he tried to smoothly get under the folds of your brain.
A part of his backstory rang alarm bells all over your head, that he mentioned like it meant nothing.
One of the only things he mentioned about his past.
In order to numb the burning sensation in your lower stomach, and ill feeling since the encounter, of knowing your decisions might have cost your life, your mind became obsessive about it - the possibilities it hinted.
The first time you decide to walk out of the secluded service room you hid into, his statement is weighning heavily on your brain.
You try to ignore the pain in your lower stomach that have been building up since he took you, the shivers your body gets, the feverish and tired feeling.
You decide that it's understandable in the situation your put yourself in, trying to not bother with illness, with pain. Things cannot always get worse, can they?
Fear holds you as you walk through the aisle, trying to find something, anything that's less dark and still slightly secluded.
Piles of gold, jewellery, diamonds are laying by the side as you walk through.
Thankfully, noone is there to witness you touching a ring once before putting right back.
As you reach the back, a big door towers over you. Hesitantly deciding to enter, a huge library opens up to you.
There are latters left around to climb up by the bookshelves, everything is piled up and thick coat of dust covers every object it can reach - it almost feels like death to enter. Your spine shivers in an uncomfortable, uncomprehensable way.
The book of the Quran lies on a desk by the side and you carefully decide to flip a page, sitting down not-so elegantly.
You do not notice a shadow disappearing from the latters where your eyes laid for a while and circling closer as you silently attempt to pray.
The pain is getting worse, you hope for God help you, if he is truly, really there, palm opening upwards.
But you do not feel God's hand leading you out from here, you do not feel the spirit taking ahold of that stubborn stupidity of yours, no matter how tight you shut your eyes.
You only feel the touch cold and long fingers brushing through your neck, slightly tugging your hair to the side.
You don't turn back instantly, as Dio himself leans slightly toward your ear.
"Have you found anything exciting?"
You draw back, but your aching stomach disturbs you. The uncomfortable, pushy feeling between your legs. It’s arousal, you tell yourself. Must be.
"No." you reply reflexively, then put yourself together, your spine uncomfortably being pushed to the desk.
"Do you finally understand your situation?" he asks in a deep voice, almost threatening.
"No. Not really." you feign ignorance.
"You could now pretend to at least admire me. Try to earn a significant position in my life, attempt to climb a sort of hierarchy my subjects fight over in order to stay alive. You are out of choices to make."
"You said it." you try, try so hard, but the pain is not letting you think. "It's all my fault."
You can't help but notice his eyes focusing on where you hurt the most.
"So. Why not try?" Dio tilts his head, dressed up, looking as majestic as he always is.
Looking as dead, as how the corpses look digged up late night in an abandoned cemetery.
You can't help but ignore his charm.
Also, attempt to cope with intellectualization.
"What did you mean, when you said you spent hundred years in a coffin and still came out intact?"
"Weren't you taught manners?"
"I am serious." you stand your ground.
He decides to ignore all that.
"I don't remember. It was dark."
"No, you must have something to share."
"No. I don't."
You burst out laughing. He looks at you, expressionless.
"It's ironic that you swear to be the next God, yet you are not even capable of opening up about your past experiences."
"Maybe I just do not want to share it with specifically you." he rejects your attempt, you chew on your lips.
He stands still, yet you feel him way too close.
"You've already lost this war."
"Then why am I still alive?" you swallow, the silence is heavy and eerie.
He leans close. You lean back.
"Why you wouldn't be?"
You shake your head.
"Let me guess. You will seduce me again. Make me fall in love with you, so none of my ideologies make sense. You recognized that I am not easy to break spiritually, and I do not submit. If you break my soul, you will break anything associated with my weak beliefs about destiny. So that makes me a prey you can play with to ease your own fears, while fulfilling mine."
"I do not fear!" Dio snaps for only a second, then turns away, his demeanour is back.
But you saw this Dio before. You saw this Dio the moment you stepped in here for the very first time.
You hold your lower stomach; you really need to relieve yourself somewhere, you need to get out, but there is no way out of this right now.
You sense strategy change, the switch his brain does.
He is a predator, just like the rest.
You knew men like him before, and all of them hurt you. Men like these cannot heal wounds.
"Have the sense of immortality blinded you from your own inner world? Are you drowning in constant, never-ending delusion?" you ask, as you can't help but get involved. Your previous introduction (ending the way it did) has drawn you into a specific hook.
He stays quiet, wrist in grasp.
The fear in your eyes dissolves his death stare.
The need to urinate stops as he gently runs his finger up your wrist. But only for a moment.
"Don't make me regret that I kept you, now." He says gently, softly, getting closer and closer. "Don't forget how fragile you are."
Every inch of you tells you to run.
"What happened in that coffin? Have you gone mad?"
"I am not mad." he says in a tone that instantly silences you.
For a second.
Unfortunately, you are not right in the head either.
"Did the thought of reaching Heaven occured in there for you?"
"How did it find you?" he draws back as you step ahead.
You point up at the ceiling.
He sighs, appearing behind you silently, grabbing your head, murmuring in your ear.
"But you talked yourself down of it, right? Because you knew that you are too weak. You were born a fragile, sweet, pathetic woman." he grabs your chest, it's humiliating and in the moment, uncomfortable. "You made a sorry attempt of an excuse to stay away and fight for greatness, and you built it to become the center of your oblique belief system and identity. Even if your God abandoned you. Even if it molded you into a weak being."
The cold air of the library becomes freezing as his laugh echoes, and it keeps ringing in your head.
"My God is not a sorry excuse." you argue.
"Pucci said the same thing. Fortunately, I made him come back to his senses. He found better judgment."
He kisses your neck, his fingers wandering down to your legs.
"Stop initiating sex." you say, suddenly angered, reflexively as you can't even imagine getting touched in your state. "Enough."
You know it's no use. He is the worst kind of rapist, a good one at that.
The type that won't stop until you believe that he has the right to take you.
"Here, again. You could convince me otherwise. Convince me of dedication, so I might take pity. Save your foolish ego."
You try to stand up against all this evil warfare, but there is no use. The illness is taking over.
"Don't think I did not see through your facade. You act all sweet, blinded by the delusion that you are capable of saving people. Of feeling whole."
He leans closer, grabbing your hip, pushing himself toward you. He feel him all over, your spine has the same coldness coursing through it.
"But you have a void inside you, a void you cannot fill. The void I have, had. Yet, I can choose to fill it, because I have the physical, mental capacity, I have it all."
He pulls you close by the head, looking all over your lips.
"But you...you have no chance to reach those heights, no choice but to oblige to your mortal, physical qualities. You are simply not cut for it. You feel empty and helpless, because you are not like me, not as strong as I ever was even at my lowest and never could be."
He warningly puts his finger by your pulse.
"Yet, you still believe you get to refuse me, and walk out on me intact."
You should be afraid. Hurt. Empty.
But your body is burning up.
Something is very wrong, your entire body is in a fragile state, and you don't want to believe which infection you got.
But you need to relieve your needs.
You have to leave.
"I need-"
He pulls you in, points at your lower stomach.
You understand now that he senses more about you - due to his supernatural qualities - you have might expected.
"That is the drawn line between us. You do not get to understand me."
"Understood." you say, your body winning over you. This is misery itself. The urges, the pain, the physical illness, and the pure hell you experience talking to him means really, really nothing.
You know that what might come might be the most traumatic death and experience you could ever imagine for yourself.
You settle into that discomfort, looking into his eyes. He is a cruel monster, no humanity is left in him.
Karma will take care of him, once it has to.
"Fair enough. You don't know anything about me.” you say eventually.
But that is not what sets Dio off.
It's the dedication that stands still in your eyes, the fact that you still not broken.
"And I don't know you either. I am perceiving you from past experiences, and I apologize for judging you so harshly. I understand your fury. I attacked you first intellectually, when we met. I had no right to do that. If your brain works differently then mine, your choice in my punishment is not bound by my morality. I accept that."
You chew on your bottom lip.
He freezes completely, let's go of your body.
Not because of the apology itself. Anyone begging not to be raped and killed would say anything to save their life.
No, the difference is that your apology is second-hand. Like your life is not dependent on it.
It's genuinely sincere.
You do not break.
"I was born in survival." is all he says.
"Me too." you answer lightly, your thighs crossing eachother as you try to squeeze back your genuine discomfort.
Then he gets it. Your behaviour. Your twitches. Your pale face.
His aura suddenly changes as he reaches to your forehead.
"You have a fever..."
"I really should have apologized, sooner." you admit, closing your eyes as his cold hand feels soothing. "I am sorry."
You swear it is the fever that makes you repeat and genuinely feel your own apology. At least you wish it did. With what's left of your existence, at least you could take a little bit of yourself into the grave.
Not like you had anything ever to cling to.
Your nature was always doomed.
But he does not do what you already played out in your head or imagined.
Not even the best scenario you thought of.
"Even though the hell your body and I put you through is pure torture, you are still sincere." he lets go. "Did your mother drop you on the head as an infant?"
"It would have been done by no accident." you say, and you can't help but catch the slight twitch on his upper lip.
If you wouldn't feel extremely unwell, you would probably laugh at his reaction.
But illness always takes a special toll.
"I informed D'Arby that you are still alive and breathing." He walks past you. "Ask him for anything you need."
You nods, and he quietly leaves.
Existence hurts. Your entire urinary tract is burning up, the pain is unbearable.
You are fragile and human, and you do know what these symptoms mean.
If no medicine is given, you are not sure you will make it.
It's over once it reaches your kidney.
Your God abandoned you, coldly, ultimately.
There is no turning back from here.
Pray does not leave your lips. You know that you are damned anyway.
If God is driven by any morality or judgement, he won't hesitate to erase what's not succeeding in conveying His Will.
If God is the soul, he will definitely choose for you to be reborn from this pitiful, weak mask you have been comfortably performing in.
You pass out sleeping, hugging yourself into any amount of comfort you can get.
The room you hide in, feels small and empty, like none your own humanity was the only thing left to fill it.
Even your heartbeat echoes.
You have lucid dreams constantly. Cannot get rid of them.
It's the effect of the mansion, of the free space, of the energy.
You are sweating in your sleep, twitching and unlike when you are healthy, you are speaking too.
Whenever you wake up, you fall right back asleep again.
The door creaks slowly, but there is a lack of footsteps.
Dio looks down at you intently, standing by the bed, watching your muscles twitching in your sleep.
You do not snap awake, until his hand grasps yours.
You immediately turn to face him, breathing fast, heart beating, sitting up.
Your dreamstate already left your eyes when his bores into yours.
"I woke up sometimes, just like that." he eventually says, not moving, his expression tough and cold, holding your hand up to his lips "In the coffin."
He kisses your hand, then places his other hand on your lower stomach for only a moment.
It creeps you out as he slowly reaches, but fear leaves you as he smoothly caresses through the fabric of your clothes and looks at you with his all-knowing eyes.
It's his effect, the effect of his performance of being alive, the effect of everything he probably ever stood for.
Or he is just knowingly taking advantage of the fact that his existence is a proof to mortals that immortality can indeed be the cure to all of their cries — even if Dio himself is no actually cure for the problem at all.
Even if he just exploits on the weakness and gets caught up in his own lies, in the performance of it all.
Even if his interpretation of his own state is destructive, repetitive and blind.
He let's go of your body, then quietly stands up by your side.
You look up at him, and he reaches for your chin, caressing through it's edge with his thumb once before stopping himself to touch.
"Asleep, it was an endless dream state I could not supervise. Nothing happened in it to me, nothing that is significant. I was not meant to be there."
For the first time, he hesitates to speak, turning away.
"I had no control over what was happening to me." he walks to the door. "So I did what I always had to. I learned how to control it. I deceived it. As simple as that."
His hand twitches by his side as he turns back one last time.
"Your brain made you forgot." you eventually translate him, not looking away. "You reached your very own boundary."
He shakes his head.
Maybe he decidedly came to conclude that this was an argument for tomorrow.
If there is one.
"Rest." he ends the conversation, and the door quietly closes by itself as he disappears.
You shut your eyes, attempting to find some closure in what he means.
And by that, you realize.
Your symptoms are gone.
You are no longer ill.