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Jonathan cautiously peered over the castle's parapet, keeping his guard up in case Dio tried shooting pressurized fluid from his eyes again. But in the distance, he could barely see the light of Dio's smouldering body as it continued falling.
As he looked down at the falling vampire, Jonathan felt tears come to his eyes and spill over. His body was starting to finally feel the pain from his wounds, both physical and mental, as the adrenaline from the battle wore off.
"Dio..."
Jonathan's voice could only manage that much as he forced himself back onto his feet. But the events of the night had clearly taken their toll on him. Fighting the knights Bruford and Tarkus, losing Baron Zeppeli, moving all night, and finally confronting Dio - Jonathan had been surprised that he had stayed on his feet for that long.
But as his energy ran out, Jonathan could no longer fight the exhaustion pulling at him. Collapsing onto the ground and closing his eyes, he heard Poco calling out for him and felt Speedwagon carefully turning him over before he lost consciousness.
For as long as he could remember, if Jonathan had a really bad day, his brain would try to ease its sting with happy memories. With the events that happened during the night, tonight was no exception.
Jonathan opened his eyes to a harsh slap on his arm, and he winced as he drew away from it. He was sitting at the desk placed inside his room, and a piece of paper and an open book were illuminated by candlelight.
The one sitting beside him was none other than his adoptive brother - it still felt weird for him to call Dio that - who was none too happy to be there. Jonathan didn't want to be there either, but it wasn't like either of them had much of a choice. If it weren't for their father telling them to work together, Jonathan would be in bed already.
"Jojo! Can't you focus already?!" Dio snapped at him, tapping his fountain pen lightly against the desk.
"Sorry, sorry..." Jonathan muttered, sitting up straight again and looking down at the paper. "The answer for the practice question here...it's 1587, right? For Mary Stuart's execution?"
To his relief, he received a small nod in reply. "Good, you've been paying attention after all," Dio commented. "It happened on February 8th, but I don't think the teachers will care about the exact day. They've only been drilling us for the years in our practice sheets."
Of course, Dio had to show off his knowledge at a time like this. Jonathan put his head into his hands and groaned. "Why do we have to memorize things from almost four hundred years ago anyway? My brain hurts..."
"Lord Joestar's holding another charity ball in a week, and people are going to be asking about us. If you mess up this test, word will probably get around. Having an adopted son look more competent than his biological son isn't a good public image." Dio tapped a page on the workbook between them. "Let's move on to the next question."
As Jonathan raised his head from his hands, he couldn't get his mind off what Dio said. His father's public image...why would Dio care about that? He only cared about "being number one," and he never made any effort to hide the fact that he outclassed Jonathan. His treatment of his adoptive brother while refusing to refer to their father as his didn't make it seem like he cared for family at all.
"Get your head out of the clouds, Jojo."
For a moment, Jonathan thought that maybe something was changing, that Dio was slowly but surely coming around to being a part of his family. But the memories of what happened when he arrived at the mansion snuffed that hope out. A pang of guilt ran through him, he was still suspicious despite Dio not doing as much harm in the last few months.
"Jojo?"
(But in hindsight, some part of him not in the dream knew that he was right, Dio probably hadn't cared. He couldn't understand his brother in the end, which parts of him were real or fake, but Dio likely chose the method of poisoning to avoid the Joestar name being cast under scrutiny. A nobleman's death disguised as a mere illness...what was the scope of what Dio wanted in the end?)
"JOJO!"
Dio's voice brought him back to reality, and he looked back at the page. The question right below the last one: "Mary Stuart's knights- Oh! Those were Tarkus and Bruford! Father told us about them the other day, they were executed with her," Jonathan quickly answered.
He knew that he had answered the question correctly, but his heart sank when he noticed Dio rubbing his forehead in irritation. "As soon as this blasted history page is done, I'm getting the maid to make us coffee," he grumbled half to himself.
Jonathan sighed and looked down at the remaining questions. "Dio... I'm far too dense for studying..." he whined as he wondered just how he'd be able to pass the next test.
"Sit up, Jojo. The page isn't done yet," Dio chided. Jonathan looked over at his brother, noticing that he looked halfway to falling asleep as well. Forcing himself to sit back up again, he looked at the next question on the page.
Suddenly, a loud rumble echoed through the room. Both boys jumped and looked around before they realized what it was. "That's odd, Father didn't think there would be a storm tonight," Jonathan remarked.
A harsh nudge to his ribs elicited a small yelp from him. "Does it matter what Lord Joestar thought? That doesn't change a thing right now." Dio tapped his pen over the question in the book. "When was the reign of Lady Jane Grey, and how long did it last?"
"Nine days. It was from...um...it was sometime in June?"
The look Dio gave him in place of a response made him wonder if he was just going to give up on him. Or get him that coffee early. Or both. But as another rumble of thunder echoed through the room, Jonathan saw a brief flash of panic in his eyes before his expression steeled itself again.
Jonathan couldn't help the feeling of worry that washed over him. He hadn’t seen the prideful boy look scared of anything before, but then again, Dio hadn’t been living with them for long. Everyone in the mansion knew that Dio came from a poor background, and from what Jonathan had learned from his (former) friends, people who had lived in the slums were more likely to be jumpy if something unexpected happened.
Jonathan had found this out for himself by nearly running into him around a corner once, accidentally spooking the other boy. The bruise he got from Dio decking him didn’t fade for a week, and he still didn’t know if it was done on reflex or not.
But thunder couldn’t be lashed out at, and the small changes in his expression weren’t unnoticed by Jonathan. Even if he couldn’t understand why his brother acted the way he did, he was still his brother and part of his family. He wanted to do something to help, even if he didn’t quite know how…
“Hey, Dio? I don’t think Father will be pleased if he finds that we were up at this hour. If we ask the maids for coffee, then they’ll surely tell him!” Jonathan rubbed his eyes as he kept forcing them open.
His brother said nothing for a moment as he stared at the page, but then let out a sigh. “Then what do you suggest, genius? You’re not allowed near the stove after the Turtle Soup Incident,” Dio grimaced at the memory, “and I don’t know how to use the stove here. It wouldn’t be safe for me to do it right now anyway.”
“Well, um… You get up early, right? We can ask the maid for coffee in the morning and try to study then…” Jonathan began. His words trailed off upon the realization that studying meant that he might miss some of his breakfast, even if having his meals taken wasn’t anything new to him anymore.
“...I suppose you’re right, for once.”
Dio put down his pen and stood up from his chair. Jonathan watched as he covered his mouth to stifle a yawn and began to head towards the door.
“Hey, you can stay here for the night!” Jonathan quickly suggested. “Wouldn’t it be easier to get back to studying if we were both here?”
Looking back towards him, Dio wore a look of incredulity. “That’s got to be the stupidest thing-”
Another bang of thunder resounded outside, louder than the last few. Dio nearly jumped at the sound and began looking around, but Jonathan was more concerned about the wind outside the window. Even the trees looked like they were whipping around in the storm.
“Woah…” Jonathan muttered, and Dio looked past Jonathan to see it too.
He seemed to go pale for a moment and muttered, “This storm could blow off the top floor of a house…”
“No it couldn’t, this house is the safest place there is,” Jonathan argued. He was ignored
“...I guess staying here wouldn’t be so bad, even if it’s stupid,” Dio sighed, and he blew out the candle that had been lighting the desk. “But this isn’t happening again, got it?!”
Jonathan was more than eager to leave his desk and finally get into bed, and Dio laid on top of the covers as he stayed on the far side of the bed. But after a few minutes of hearing nothing but the storm outside, Dio eventually went under the covers as well. Jonathan had fallen asleep quickly after that, but he woke up the next morning to his brother trying to untangle himself from his arms.
He looked less than thrilled at being used as a human teddy bear, and made good on his word to make sure Jonathan studied hard in the morning.
A few days later, Jonathan found that he had passed that test with a high mark for once. He tackled Dio in a hug at the time, thanking him over and over, but nearly knocked over a small table in the process. But even the scolding he got from his father didn’t dampen his good mood, and Dio was a bit less hostile too. All in all, it had been one of his better childhood days.
Jonathan’s eyes slowly opened again, though he squinted slightly against the light from the torches. He noticed that something warm was beneath his head, and suspecting what it was, he looked upwards.
“Speed…wagon…?” he muttered, correctly guessing that his head was on the other man’s lap.
The hoodlum in question looked down at him with a mixture of excitement and relief. “Mr. Joestar! You’re awake!” he exclaimed, his volume doing nothing for poor Jonathan’s ears at the moment. He turned away from Jonathan and called towards the castle, “Oi, mates! He woke up!”
Speedwagon helped him to his feet as Tonpetty and Straizo quickly made their appearance at the castle balcony. From them, he learned that he had been asleep for at least four hours, Poco and his sister had been safely sent back to Windknight’s Lot, Speedwagon had been guarding him, and the duo from Tibet had been wiping out all the zombies in the castle. They planned on getting rid of any stragglers before they left England with Dire’s remains.
It only took a few minutes to decide what to do next. The quartet exited the castle, with Speedwagon taking the stone mask as they left, and they went down to the bottom of the cliff where Dio had fallen. As they expected, all that was there were the clothes he had been wearing. The rest of his body had been destroyed by the Ripple.
“Let’s just burn this devil’s clothes and be done with it,” Speedwagon suggested, reaching into his coat for some matches. “The officials already have him listed as dead from the mansion fire, I’ll bet.”
Jonathan somberly nodded. “Yes, that may be for the best,” he sighed. He remembered having to burn Baron Zeppeli’s body earlier that night, and combined with having to set his home ablaze, he was starting to gain a distaste for fire.
Nonetheless, he knelt down to gather up Dio’s clothing. He froze when he noticed something shiny fall out of one of Dio’s pockets, and he carefully reached out to pick up the object. He turned it over in the light of the moon, and quietly gasped when he realized what it was.
It was a pocketwatch. His pocketwatch, the one Dio had stolen from his desk all those years ago. It had a few scorch marks on it, but the quiet ticking from the watch made him realize that it still worked.
Dio kept it all these years…but why did he retrieve it from the ruins of the mansion?
“Something on your mind, mate?” Speedwagon asked, snapping Jonathan out of his thoughts.
“Ah, no need to worry. I was just thinking of keeping this,” he explained, showing his friend the pocketwatch.
Speedwagon glared at the watch. “It is a pretty little thing, but it still belonged to Dio. Do you really want to keep something like that, Mr. Joestar?”
Jonathan felt numb as he put the watch into his pocket. “My youth with Dio ended back at our home, and I have to accept that our days together are over now. But even so…” He put the gathered clothing into a small pile. “...I don’t know how much of it was real or fake, but the seven years we spent together weren’t all that bad. I want to at least keep something to remember those days.”
Even if he couldn’t fully understand his reasoning, Speedwagon nodded his head and struck a match. As he tossed it onto the pile of clothing, all the words that Jonathan wouldn’t say died on his tongue. He tried to force down all his conflicting emotions, reminding himself that Dio was a monster and already dead. Burning his clothes wouldn’t matter, and he already had a memento in the form of his - their pocketwatch.
Tonpetty and Straizo came to the fire as Speedwagon left its light. “At last, it’s all over,” the Ripple master sighed.
“Will and Dire are avenged,” Straizo agreed. He looked like he wanted to say more, but instead quietly sighed.
The sudden sound of something breaking quickly grabbed their attention, and they turned in the direction of the sound. By the rocks of the cliff, Speedwagon had brought his sledgehammer down upon something hard like a vengeance. Glancing at the shards on the ground, Jonathan realized that it was the stone mask.
“And that’s the end of that,” Speedwagon declared. “And good riddance!”