The Twilight Man: Blood Obligation (JJBA)

[Leila Hann]

Prologue: Friends In Low Places
​

Three men stood under an awning, sheltered from the snow, as they watched the wooden dock. Across the nighttime port, a steamship sat in the ice-flecked river, a sluggish flow of travelers trickling down its gangplank. Most of the arrivals were well dressed. Those that stood out from the rest did so by their actions, rather than their appearance. A talkative old man gesticulating at the uniformed port security officer who stood by the gangplank. A wide eyed young woman pulling frantically at her husband's arm.

Well, there was one whose appearance alone was remarkable. A silent, brooding foreigner adorned in jewelry who pushed the others out of his way without a word or a glance as he crossed the dock toward the snow-capped roofs and gloomy streets.

One of the three watchers, a wiry man with dark hair and a pair of pigeon feathers tucked behind his ears, pointed toward the foreigner. The hulking, silent traveler was alone, now. Moving into a narrow, slushy street, probably empty of witnesses. The other two watchers nodded agreement. Quiet as bats, they glided down the alley, and then up another one. Their mark rounded an intersection, and came back into view. Now that he was closer, the size of him took them aback. The foreigner was taller than any of them, and broader of build beneath his cowled cloak. But then he tilted his head back, and a distant lightpost revealed the golden ring in his lower lip again. The three exchanged reassuring glances, and reached their silent consensus. Risky, yes. Very risky, even. But the winter of 1888 had been bitter cold, and even more bitter for business, and a man walking alone covered in golden piercings wasn't something to pass up. Even if he was massive. The big, hooded man stopped as the three emerged from their cranny and flitted across the snow, surrounding him.

"Well hello there, sirrah." Robert E.O. Speedwagon bowed irreverently, pulling the bowler hat off his long, greasy mop of pale blonde hair and flourishing it. More to make himself feel confident than for any intended drama. "You wouldn't happen to have any more of what you've got on your lip, would you?"

The foreigner was silent. Still. His arms at his sides. Sharp blue eyes flicked from the long-haired man in front of him to the knife-wielding pair on either flank, and then back again.

"Tattoo," Speedwagon said, more sure of himself now that their mark was surrounded as he gestured toward one of his companions with his bowler, "would you like to do the honors this time?"

"This time? It's always BEEN me, aside from last time." Tattoo growled and rolled his eyes as he stepped forward, shaking his bearded and heavily tattooed face and raising his knife toward the foreigner's throat. "Alright, you hold good and still now while my mates do their work, and nobody has to get hur-"

There was a rushing sound, and a blur of motion. One second, Tattoo was raising the blade into place. The next, he was grasping his right hand in his left and gasping in pain and surprise, and the foreigner was holding his knife. A moment later, the foreigner dropped the weapon to the snow and pinned it there underfoot.

With a roar, the black-haired and sharp-eyed Kempo closed the distance, brandishing his own knife for a slash, but then suddenly twisting his torso around and raising his right leg to lash out in a blindingly fast kick. However, the foreigner brought his own arm down just as fast, the forearm slamming into the attacker's ankle. The snap of breaking bone echoed across the alley, followed by a howl of pain as Kempo dropped to the snow, clutching his leg.

Speedwagon gasped, nearly shrieking out loud when he heard the snap of bone and the agonized howl. A broken leg! He recognized the sound and the unnatural bend of the limb as soon as his companion fell to the snow. Snapped right through, it is! Not now! We can't afford this now!

And it was only he, himself, who remained armed and able-bodied. Only he could salvage this. If they were lucky, the foreigner's gold would at least be enough for a doctor, even if it provided nothing else. He had no choice; he would have to get his hands bloody tonight, rather than merely sticky.

"Oh that's how it's going to be, is it?" He said, his voice rising a little. Truth be told, he wasn't sure this would go any better for him than it had for Kempo, but he would play as dirty as he could. "I didn't want to have to do this, but somebody's got to rob you and I'd much rather it be us, 'specially if we've got doctor's bills to pay now." As he spoke, he held his hat up on one finger and poked its side with his other hand. A circle of gleaming, razor-sharp blades snapped out from just above the brim, forming a deadly ring a few inches wider than it. With a jerk of his arm, he aimed for the mark's hulking chest and sent the hat gliding through the air, buzzing toward the foreigner as its whirling blades flashed in the gaslight.

The foreigner turned his head toward the approaching bowler. Something lashed out from beneath his cowl, and a sharp breeze suddenly blew across the alley and swept over Speedwagon's face and hair. The hat, still spinning, floated back the way it came before slowing to a complete stop atop the head of its openmouthed owner.

The foreigner looked down at the Asian man with the broken ankle, still writhing and gasping in the snow. He then raised his head toward the others and finally spoke, in a deep, faintly accented voice. "You were right, Tattoo. Nobody had to get hurt."

Speedwagon's jaw dropped, his mouth perfectly O-shaped. Tattoo was giving him a terrified look, and all he could do was return it with one of his own. He started raising his hand to grab his hat again, but stopped halfway as he realized it might not be safe for him to touch anymore. After a moment of silence, the hooded foreigner looked back at him. He expected to see rage in his eyes, or bloodlust, or the smug, self-satisfied cruelty of someone that thought he was above them that boiled his blood like nothing else. However, he saw none of those things. The hulking foreigner's face was like a calm, dispassionate statue from some blue blooded ponce's collection.

"Come. Take your friend away; I did not mean to hurt him that badly. I will not stop you." He then continued walking down the alleyway, kicking Tattoo's knife back across the snow toward its owner and then pushing past the still gaping Speedwagon.

"Speedwagon," Tattoo said weakly, unwilling to take his eyes off their would-be victim even long enough to retrieve his knife, "let's get the hell out of here."

Speedwagon started to nod agreement, but then changed his mind. Slowly, he craned his head toward the foreigner's retreating back. The blades of his hat were still extended, making him feel like he was balancing an umbrella on his head, but he still wasn't about to put his hands near it when this man could control its movements as if by magic. "You could have sliced my head off in an instant if you'd wanted to. You'd have been in your rights. Why didn't you?"

The big man stopped again, looking back at Speedwagon over his massive shoulder. Under the hood, Speedwagon caught a glimpse of short, dark blonde hair and golden earrings to match the lip ring. It was a tantalizing sight, but Speedwagon knew that that ship had sailed, sank, and splintered against the ocean floor at this point. "Human lives are short enough as it is."

Speedwagon blinked. Slowly, he raised a hand to the side of his bowler, pressing its crown and withdrawing the blades with another sharp click. "I'd have killed you there. You know I'd have done it."

The stranger shrugged. "But you failed. Let us keep it that way."

"Speedwagon," Tattoo repeated, his voice taking on a greater urgency as he tried to help their injured companion up, "can we leave?"

Speedwagon looked down at the moaning, trembling Kempo, and then back at the foreigner. Watching for movement, but there was none. "Aye. We can, and ought to. Here, help me with Kempo." He stepped forward, Tattoo following suit after a moment. He winced in sympathetic pain when he saw the state of the limb Kempo was clutching up close. Bent and hanging loose at the point of the impact, the trouser leg filling up with dark blood and staining the snow around it. Carrying him all the way back home like this, in this cold, in this state...Speedwagon clenched his teeth, worry starting to give way to panic. He nearly jumped off the snowy pavement when the foreigner suddenly spoke again.

"I will help you take care of your friend, if you agree to guide me in this city."

Tattoo had started to raise Kempo's shoulders, and nearly dropped him back into the snow as he looked up at their would-be victim and barked "Are you out of your bloody head?" A moment after he'd shouted it, he looked remorseful, and shrank back a little. Speedwagon couldn't bring himself to blame him for it.

"No," the foreigner said, his expression and tone of voice unchanged. "Your friend needs help. I need information about London, from someone who knows the streets. And who will not attract attention."

Another long, chilly silence as the tiny snowdrops fluttered weakly down all around them. Speedwagon looked up from Kempo again, and kept his eyes off the foreigner's. "You're an odd fellow, you know that? But I can't say I've ever met one as was odd in your particular way."

"Most people have not," the big man said. It didn't sound like a boast, or even a complaint. Just a dispassionate statement of fact, delivered with a neutrality that made Speedwagon inclined to believe it.

He finally looked down at Kempo again, and made the calculations. This man really could have killed them all, if he'd wanted to. And he really, at least arguably, should have.

"What's your name?" Speedwagon asked the man as he knelt down by Kempo again and motioned for the stranger to assist.

"Gabriel," said the hulking foreigner. He then walked up to them and raised the bleeding, gasping Kempo up in his massive arms, supporting the broken leg so that Kempo only cried out in pain a tiny bit. Speedwagon was gaping again, and beside him Tattoo did likewise. The man who'd called himself Gabriel was carrying a grown man as if he weighed as much as paper. "Show me the way."

…​

"Where did you sail from, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Honduras."

It was nearly midnight as they walked along a street covered in a particularly black and grimy carpet of snow. There were few lightposts here, and fewer still that worked. The faint light was just barely enough to show the profile of the immense, ogre-like face carved into the dead end at the street's terminus. They'd deposited Kempo on the threadbare mattress of the apartment he and Na Ying shared with another immigrant family. She'd been understandably hysterical when she saw the state of him, and babbled at Speedwagon in Chinese until he managed to placate her via gestures and soothing mouth noises. Gabriel, walking alongside him from the tenement to the apothecary, showed no sign of tiredness from carrying the man all the way from the docks.

"And what brings you to England, exactly?"

"I am hunting some unusual relics. I heard they were brought here."

Speedwagon looked quizzically up at Gabriel's hooded face, pushing a stray lock of hair out of his own. "You're looking to pick up museum pieces, but you haven't got any money?"

"I will have to get some. Or take the relics without paying."

Speedwagon smiled brightly and clapped a hand on Gabriel's mountainous shoulder. "Well that there's a sentiment that I can appreciate. Making money is Robert E. O. Speedwagon's specialty, and taking things without paying? Well, I never learned any other way!"

Gabriel's face showed amusement, but only slightly. "That hat must have been one of your better catches."

Speedwagon put a loving hand on his bowler and looked down at the filthy snow with mock-embarrassment, "Actually, I might have exaggerated a touch; this was one of my rare honest purchases. I borrowed the money from my sister, and it's paid me back over four times and counting now. Speaking of which, oi Clara!" He stopped for a moment and hollered at the window of a brick building that looked slightly less ramshackle than most of the others. A tall, lanky woman in a frilly black dress, with long blonde hair and bushy eyebrows much like his own, leaned out.

"Robbie! Will you ever learn to stop shouting like that, you shitheaded little scamp!? I'm trying to run an honest business here, unlike some people I might name!"

Behind her, several other women looked out, either glowering at him or directing coy little painted smiles at Gabriel.

"I love you, sis!" He tipped his hat at her.

"I love you too, Robbie." Clara smiled warmly back at him. "Shout at us at this hour one more time, and I'll make you fill in for Eliza again."

The siblings waved cheerfully at each other before Clara left the window and he went back to walking Gabriel down Ogre Street. There were only a few other pedestrians about at this time of night, mostly huddled in furtive groups in the shadows beneath the crumbling buildings. Only a few windows were lit, and most of the ones that were had women behind them.

"The other Chinaman who runs the apothecary here on Ogre Street, Mister Chan," Speedwagon continued, "keeps his shop open much later than he has any good reason to. But bad reasons are just as well for the likes of us, and Kempo needs medicine."

"I will need some reagents as well," Gabriel said, still walking along beside him.

Speedwagon looked at him from under the brim of his bowler. "Come again?"

"I brought a rare herbal concoction from my homeland," the giant explained, "and lost it in an accident at sea. The ingredients needed to brew more may be hard to find on this island. Cheaply, at least."

"Well, good luck you're with me, then! Chan's got every foreign herb and oil I can't pronounce, and you won't find someone willing to part with 'em for cheaper in all of London."

…​

The man who'd identified himself as Gabriel was bemused. "Fortunate," he said. He wasn't ready to call it destiny just yet, but losing the flask in that freak storm, and then stumbling into a shop like this one so soon after arrival? He would be alert for more signs.

"Just up this next little bit now, and yes! Looks like the old crook hasn't closed for the night just yet." Speedwagon pointed at the dim, candle-lit window of a particularly small and unassuming thatched-roof structure with a sign covered in Chinese characters over the door. "Come along, maybe he'll give you my special your-store-hasn't-been-robbed-in-six-months discount if we go in together."

Gabriel hid his irritation, and followed along in silence. After they'd approached further across the blackened snow, he craned his head upward, sniffing at the fumes that wafted from the shop. A mixture of pungent odors, ranging from spice to musk to sharply chemical. Eclectic scents, and some familiar. Perhaps he would be making up for his loss sooner and less painfully than expected after all, then. He quickened his pace a bit, pulling slightly ahead of Speedwagon, when suddenly his guide put out a hand and stopped him.

"Wait just a second there," Speedwagon whispered, "I smell something."

Gabriel looked down at him, trying to parse his meaning. "Are you saying we should try a different shop?"

"No no, not the medicines. I smell something…." Speedwagon sniffed the air, holding his head back and nervously clutching his hat "…evil."

"Hmm?" Gabriel had familiarized himself with as many English idioms as he could before boarding the ship for London, but this was one he was at a loss to understand.

Speedwagon ducked back against a brick wall, crouching in the darkness below an overhanging roof. Gabriel, eyebrows raised quizzically, followed him with some reluctance.

The long-haired, hatted man narrowed his eyes, looking out at the handful of shrouded figures that stalked along the nighttime slum. "This nose can smell evil, it can," he explained, tapping the appendage in question demonstratively, "and there's always that common stink in London, but right now I smell something sharper."

Gabriel cocked his head at Speedwagon, his sharp eyes narrowing. Several possibilities ran through his mind. Not the last of which was that Speedwagon was simply making things up, but upon further study of the man's face and tone he didn't think that was it. "You can smell evil? Interesting." He would have to put this claim to the test later.

"Oi! It's him!" Speedwagon hissed excitedly as he pointed a finger at a slim, jacketed figure crossing the street a ways ahead of them. Gabriel looked. The subject of his guide's attention was a very young man, perhaps still in his teens, with light, curly hair and an angular face with an almost feminine beauty to it. Speedwagon turned excitedly back toward Gabriel. "It's the Brando brat! I'd heard he's been creeping back into his old neighborhood, but my associates and I never managed to catch him alone."

Gabriel looked back away from the young Brando man, and let his impatience show in his voice. "Let me guess. He owes you money."

"Well, not him personally, but his old man's dead and left us eight years overdue. But more importantly, young master Brando got lucky. Somehow got himself taken in by rich bastards over in Hampshire. Very rich bastards. I never thought anyone in this neighborhood would see the little shit again, but my sources have it that he's been creeping back onto Ogre Street every couple of months for the last year and a half."

Gabriel watched the youth as he reached the sidewalk and disappeared into the drugstore entrance. "If he is wealthy now, why would he be shopping here?" He asked.

"You can ask him that yourself once I've helped him lose some of those extra pounds." Speedwagon tapped the brim of his hat with a fierce smirk. "If you object to waiting just a minute to buy your own medicines, I don't think Kempo'll mind terribly if we can wait out here just a bit. Not if it means we'll make back what it'll cost both of us and then some."

Gabriel folded his arms and let out an exasperated sigh. "I will wait." He paused for a moment, before thinking to add "Do not kill him."

"Well, alright," Speedwagon made a show of rolling his eyes and shaking his head disappointedly as he found a cranny closer to the door, "I suppose he's so used to being waited on hand and foot he won't even think of trying to fight back anyway."

They waited, the last few, tiny snowflakes fluttering down through the darkness, until the door opened again and the youth exited, hands in his pockets. Brando's eyes swept across the street as he emerged, and alighted suspiciously on Gabriel where he stood a few arms' lengths away. With Brando's back turned to him, Speedwagon darted out from his nook behind the shop's crumbling brick corner, but his target proved to have not lost all his Ogre Street instincts. Brando's body ducked downward, Speedwagon's grasping hands clutching empty air just above the youth's golden curls, and then rolled across the snow before leaping back to his feet a few paces away. Gabriel approved. If what Speedwagon had told him about this youth were true, he was to be commended for not allowing himself to soften when it would have been so easy to.

"Oh no you don't!" Speedwagon, pursuing, grabbed his hat off his head, snapped the blades out, and threw it past the fleeing Brando boy. The spinning blades flashed in the dying streetlight as the hat swerved around in the air and began sailing back toward the escaping mark. Brando skidded to a halt, turning around to flee in another direction while lowering a hand into one of his coat pockets. That gave Speedwagon just enough time to catch up and throw himself into the younger man's side, knocking him to the snow. Dio gasped and dropped the knife he'd been drawing as Speedwagon put his own razor to Dio's throat.

"Alright now," Speedwagon said to the furious looking young man as the hat landed in the snow beside them, close enough for him to pick up with his free hand, "welcome home, Dio. I'll bet you thought-"

"Stop!"

Dio Brando shuddered at Gabriel's raised voice. The door of the drugstore opened, and an elderly Chinese man peeked out nervously. Even Speedwagon was afraid.

"No weapons," Gabriel said, arms still folded as he watched, unmoving, from the sidewalk, keeping his voice neutral and his growing irritation suppressed. "Fight him fairly, or let him go."

Speedwagon looked back from Gabriel to Dio, his knife still at his throat. Dio said nothing; he just lay in the snow and gave Speedwagon a look that would make most people flee the city. It was as if his handsome, delicate features were just a thin mask over a burning well of hatred that blazed out through his eyes. Gabriel saw Speedwagon's nostrils twitch. Perhaps, he mused, Speedwagon and his nose had been right about Dio Brando after all. Nonetheless, he would see to it that honor was abided by. Experience had taught him that this was probably the best he could do for these creatures.

"Now," Gabriel repeated.

Speedwagon drew his knife back and stood up over the glaring Dio, resheathing the weapon and wiping some dirty slush off of his pants before kicking Dio's own dagger further away from him. Slowly, blazing eyes fixed unblinkingly on Speedwagon, Dio stood up as well.

"Alright then," Speedwagon said, facing Dio and bending his knees into a combat stance, "what say you? Just our fists. If you win, you'll make sure to thank the nice gentleman over there for giving you the opportun-"

Dio punched Speedwagon in the face.

The older man roared in pain, raising one hand to his eye, but he still managed to sweep out with his foot and knock Dio prone while he was off balance from throwing the punch.

"YOU LITTLE SHIT!" Speedwagon threw himself down at Dio, bringing his own fist into his blonde head, "YOU GOUGED MY EYE!" Indeed, when Speedwagon took his other hand off his face to block Dio's own next attack, his left eye was red and swollen half-shut, and bleeding from the corner.

Gabriel remained silent as he watched. Bad form. Even given the circumstances Brando had been thrust into, that was bad form. He admired the audacity of the early strike, but targeting Speedwagon's eye when it would serve no tactical purpose and only cause more pain? Very bad form.

A moment later, Dio's legs swooped up behind Speedwagon's back, and he locked his feet around his head. With an audible growl, he then flipped Speedwagon off of his body and slammed him onto his back in the snow.

Unfortunately for Dio, before he could get back up himself, Speedwagon pulled back his own leg and drove it out into his opponent's crotch. It was now Dio's turn to roar in pain as he crumpled once again, and this time Speedwagon didn't give him a chance to recover. He stumbled to his feet while Dio was still gasping and began kicking him mercilessly, knocking his arms out from under him when he tried to use them to get up and drawing blood in half a dozen places. Gabriel considered intervening again, but didn't just yet.

"I don't like to go below the belt, but after what you just pulled?" He delivered a final kick into the side of Dio's chest, leaving the youth gasping and trembling in the slush. Faces peered down at them from a handful of second story windows, but then turned away again with jaded disinterest. Seeing that Dio had no more fight in him, Speedwagon turned back to Gabriel, his hand returning to his bloodied left eye. "Good enough for you, Gabriel?"

Gabriel chuckled. Speedwagon looked around, his face alarmed, as it took him a moment to realize that the low, rumbling sound was coming from his companion's throat.

"That was an honorable victory." Gabriel said, still morbidly amused at the vicious antics. "You have the right to the contents of his cave now."

Speedwagon raised his bushy eyebrows in confusion, but then gasped in pain as the movement aggravated his gouged eyeball. After giving Gabriel a perplexed and somewhat resentful nod, he crouched down next to Dio again and flipped him over onto his back. Dio, recovering slightly, gritted his teeth and stared up at the lightless winter sky, letting the robber do his work. Speedwagon pulled a pair of tiny, unmarked glass bottles out of Dio's pockets, and then a leather wallet. When he opened the wallet, however, his face fell.

"That's…all?"

Sitting up with a stifled groan and wiping some snow-wetted golden bangs out of his bruised and bleeding face, Dio gave Speedwagon a contemptuous smirk. "Did you really think I'd be stupid enough to bring money to this worthless slum?" Brando's voice was cold and clear despite his injuries, and surprisingly deep. "I brought only what I needed. Congratulations on your victory."

Speedwagon started to say something else, but then his good eye fell on Gabriel, and his expression changed. "I've earned the rights to the contents," he said slowly, "so, where's the cave?"

Dio snorted. "You don't honestly think I'm going to get your filth all over my house?"

"Say Gabriel," Speedwagon said, ignoring Dio's words but keeping a watchful eye on his movements, "you told me you were looking to get ahold of some expensive relics, but weren't sure you'd have the money to buy them. What sounds like less trouble to you; robbing a museum, or having this fine fellow make a generous donation so you can buy them like an honest, hard working citizen?"

Gabriel took a few steps forward, planting a massive foot beside Dio's bedraggled legs. He thought for a moment. Engaging in crime already, the very night he arrived? He thought about the benefits, and the drawbacks, and how he'd already adjusted his list of options when he appointed Speedwagon as his guide. "I cannot refuse that offer. And I would rather not rob more people than I have to. If you are willing to share your spoils, I will come along and make sure he yields them honorably."

Dio tilted his head up at Gabriel. "You people can't possibly be serious." Gabriel met his gaze, and made sure Dio could tell from his expression that he really was. Dio closed his eyes and clenched his fists, letting out a slow, measured hiss.

"I will buy my reagents," Gabriel said, "and then you will bring us to your home."



TO BE CONTINUED ->

 

[QTesseract]

Huh. This is going places. What places, I have no idea, but definitely places.

 

[Anonfox123]

Been waiting for this since it was announced in the JJBA lets-watch thread, and wow, this is a strong start!

 

[MAGNUS1337]

Dio is the goodguy in this timeline?

 

[Leila Hann]

Dio is the goodguy in this timeline?

Click to shrink...

He's the victim in this situation.

 

[SorcieredeFleur]

I'll crosspost my comment from Nyanarchy

Even when he's the victim Dio manages to be the worst.

You and your co-writer have done a really good job showing what is admirible about Speedwagon without white washing that fact that he is a murderer and a thug.

Click to shrink...

On a reread I also like the worldbuilding and set up being done with Speedwagon's gang and family and Orge Street in general.

 

[AmbarGriss]

Okay, you grabed my attention. Watched.

 

[Leila Hann]

1. Starman​

Dio made sure to stumble and gasp out a pained groan as he stepped out of the very cramped carriage cab, and leaned down to grasp and rub his leg. The trick would be to make just enough noise to wake someone up without letting these halfwitted thugs realize what he was doing, and starting now rather than after they entered the house would appear less suspicious. Ahead of him, the long haired Londoner held the door. Behind him, the reason that the carriage had been so cramped waited for Dio to get clear before following, much more silently than one would expect given his bulk.

"Now that there," the mangy-haired cutthroat said in a soft voice, as if afraid he might be overheard even alone out here in the forecourt, "is what I call plain disgusting."

He gestured to the house before them. The hilltop manor rose like a cathedral behind the ten foot tall fountain that formed the centerpiece of the parking lot. Two rows of balconied glass windows reflected the feeble moonlight that made it through the clouds, continuing from the columned doorway to each of the extensive side wings. Another row of dormered windows emerged from the shale tiles of the high, slanted roof, which also sprouted an array of flat and dome-capped towers that cast their shadows across the chimneys.

"I agree," Dio said coldly, fondling his knee with a pained hiss, "the architecture is all mismatched. It's quite grotesque."

Speedwagon wheeled on him with a glare. "You know damned well that's not what I meant!" He flung his hand disdainfully at the mansion. "How many people live in this monstrosity anyway?"

Dio couldn't help but let the corners of his mouth creep upward. "Three. Unless you count the help."

"How much help do three people need!?"

Dio turned away from Speedwagon, rolling his eyes in detestation. "You wouldn't believe my brother."

Speedwagon looked confused. "Your foster brother, you mean?"

Dio blinked. Had he actually just said that? For a moment, he almost forgot to exaggerate the strain in his breathing as he took his first steps toward the manor. "Yes. Why do you care?"

A massive hand fell on his shoulder. "You're raising your voice," Gabriel whispered. "Stop."

Dio looked up at the grim-faced and olive-skinned giant, eyes narrowed. What was the story behind this one? Speedwagon was nothing out of the ordinary, if louder than average; Dio had spent his early years surrounded by his like. But the hulking foreigner who he seemed to be answerable to? There was something going on here.

But those mysteries could be solved later. For now, Dio needed to focus on the task at hand. If he played this very, very carefully, he might just be able to turn tonight's misfortune into some major progress. He began leading them, suppressing a fake hiss with every other step, toward the front entrance, until Speedwagon put an arm in his path.

"Through the front door? How stupid do you think we are, Brando?"

Dio closed his eyes and affected a defeated expression. "I may have overestimated slightly." He cherished Speedwagon's stupid grin as he adjusted their path toward the north wing, only for Speedwagon to pull him toward the south one instead. Perfect.

"I imagine," Dio whispered as he grunted and stumbled his way up the little staircase toward the southern side door, "that small, valuable items will be the fastest way for me to be rid of you."

Gabriel nodded.

"Thought so." Dio scowled hideously to hide his inner glee as he pointed down the velvet curtained hallways with its arched ceilings and many framed paintings and photographs. "Up this staircase."

As he led the pair up the winding stairs, grimacing and clutching his knee again every few steps, he stole a glance out a passing window to make sure of something. Yes, there was the faint lamp-light coming from around the outside corner from a window in the floor above. Jonathan was awake in his room, just like the last few nights.

Dio allowed himself a hidden smile when he was sure neither of the thugs could see his face. Whoever lost this little dust-up, Dio would win.

…​

Three hours ago, Jonathan Joestar's notes had made perfect sense. Now, as the late night gave way to predawn, it was all becoming a blur. He pulled himself upright, away from his desk, and leaned back into the chair, rubbing some overdue sleep out of his eyes. He'd always been a bit of a night person, but since classes had stopped for the Christmas holiday he'd let it go much too far. Open side by side in front of him were his reading lamp, two stacks of ink-lined papers, and an ancient stone mask.

Standing up and stretching his broad shoulders, Jonathan picked the water bottle off of his nightstand and took another drink. On the wall beside him hung a photograph of himself, his father, and Dio, taken the year before last when the boys had just started at Hugh Hudson Academy. Across from it was another, of the mother he had never met. After his eyes wandered to her picture, they returned once again – as they usually did – to the stone mask that had survived her.

Deciding that he wasn't going to make any more sense of the new notes until he'd gotten some sleep, he picked up the mask – deceptively light and smooth to the touch – and held it up again beside the sketches that had just come back from Guatemala, where they'd been copied from the wall carvings of a pre-Mayan ruin. There, again, was a mask just like the one in his hand; serene and flawless in expression, save the pair of ghoulish fangs poking down over its lower lip and the snakelike mass of hair carved in a winding curl across its brow. In the sketch, the mask had its hidden blades extended, and was being held by a manlike figure, stylized in the typical Mesoamerican form, with a trio of horns rising above his wild-haired head and a pair of fangs to match those on the mask.

He shook his head. This deity or spirit or whatever he was supposed to be looked so much like the variation of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec sun god, that he'd seen associated with the mask before. But so far south? So many centuries prior? While the thrill of discovery had Jonathan high in his spirits, he also couldn't help but dread having to rewrite so much of his thesis.

He was just getting ready to put out the lamp and force himself to get some sleep before morning caught him off guard, when he heard a loud thud from just outside his bedroom door, followed by a pained gasp.

Jonathan turned around with a start. From behind the door, he heard softer sounds. Furtive scuttling, and tiny whispers. Including a voice he recognized.

"Dio?" He called, stepping up to the door.

When the noises only fell silent in response, Jonathan, raising the lamp in his free hand, swung the door open. Standing behind it were a pair of complete strangers, holding his wet and disheveled looking foster brother up by the shoulders. Dio raised his head and started opening his mouth, but before either he or the stunned Jonathan could say anything the man on Dio's left – a wiry, long-haired fellow with a bowler hat and a long scar running across his face – gave Jonathan a disarming smile.

"Ah, excuse me gentlesir." He raised Dio up and held him a few inches closer to Jonathan. "Is this Dio yours? We found 'im in terrible shape in the worst part of London, and thought we'd do the right thing and return him."

Jonathan blinked.

The man on Dio's right, cloaked and hooded, was one of the few Jonathan had ever seen who was both taller and wider than his rugby champion self. The hatted one with the cockney accent wasn't, but he nonetheless didn't look like someone who could be taken lightly. Dio struggled a little against both, and gave Jonathan a wild, desperate look as he hissed "JoJo!"

"He's not making much sense, I'm afraid," said the hatted one, his smile getting wider and phonier, "I think someone must've clonked him on the head."

Now fully awake, Jonathan blinked again before glaring into the speaker's eyes, one of which he now noticed was swollen and bloodshot, as if it had been gouged in a very recent fight. Confusion gave way to cold rage. "Put my brother down."

It was the hatted man's turn to blink. Jonathan's eyes remained open, his free hand balling into a fist. Slowly, the man removed his hand from Dio's shoulder and brought it politely to his waist pocket. Jonathan clenched his lips together and raised his eyebrows. The hatted man moved his hand away from his pocket again and kept it well away from either his or Dio's bodies. After giving him one last warning glare, Jonathan moved his eyes to the large one.

"What are you doing here?"

"What do you THINK they're doing, JoJo you idiot!" Dio suddenly twisted himself to get free of the big man, but failed with a pained gasp. "Hurry up and-"

Suddenly, the big man let go of Dio, making him thump to the floor with an outraged shout. His eyes were not on Jonathan, however, but over his shoulder, suddenly fixed on something in the bedroom behind him. Following the intruder's gaze out of the corner of his eye, Jonathan saw that he was staring at his desk by the window, upon which his notes, pen, and mask lay.

"This isn't important anymore," the big one spoke for the first time.

"What?" The hatted man looked confusedly back and forth between Dio picking himself up off the floor, his suddenly distracted partner in crime, and the room behind Jonathan's shoulders. "Gabriel, what have-"

"I came to this island looking for masks like this one," Gabriel said, his voice getting lower, "it must be fate that led me to this house." He looked back at Jonathan. "Where did you get that?"

"That's no business of yours," Jonathan said sternly as Dio, looking as confused as the hatted man, returned to his feet behind Gabriel. "Now, leave. Take whatever you want from the house, but you will NOT touch that mask, and you will NOT lay another finger on my brother."

Dio gave Jonathan a look of outraged disbelief at the first part of his sentence. The hatted man's eyes lit up. "Anything? Even those silver candlesticks along the hall-"

"Not now, Speedwagon," Gabriel said without taking his eyes off Jonathan. The hatted man closed his mouth and shrank back. Gabriel paused a moment, as if carefully choosing his words, before continuing. "These masks came from my people. I have been searching for them."

It wasn't in Jonathan's nature to mock, but even he couldn't help but scoff. "Do you really expect me to believe-"

"Have you seen its blades?"

Jonathan stopped, mouth hanging open.

The faintest hint of a smile appeared on Gabriel's dark-skinned face. "Looks like you have. You know I am telling the truth now."

"Blades?" The man who was apparently named Speedwagon stood on his tiptoes to look over Jonathan's shoulder at the mask. One of his pale blond eyebrows rose in confusion as he beheld the smooth, white stone.

"JoJo," Dio growled, pulling his injured leg away from the strangers, "are you really not going to give these creatures the beating they're clearly after?"

Jonathan looked at Dio, and then back at Gabriel, before addressing his foster brother. "I think it would be best if we tried to avoid that." He then looked at Speedwagon, who was giving Dio a frankly murderous expression, before continuing. "And I think you'd best go to your room. You've had a terrible night, and if this does get any uglier I don't want you to be here in the state you're in."

For a moment, Dio was silent. There was a look on his face, one that Jonathan had only ever seen there less than a dozen times. He was never sure what to call it; something that bounced between shame and agitation without actually being either. He also was never sure, in the times he had seen it, what had brought that expression about. Save once.

He banished the unpleasant thoughts and kept his face concerned. "Can you walk?"

After a moment, Dio backed up and, after giving Speedwagon one final, acid-filled glare, limped away down the hall without another word. Jonathan started after him, but Gabriel's hulking presence in the doorway reminded him that he had best not let these two out of sight. He'd make sure Dio was alright afterward.

"The mask," Jonathan said, feeling slightly guilty but unsure what to do about it, "what else do you know about it?"

Gabriel's expression was hard to read. "I know where it is from, and I know its use."

Slowly, not sure if he was making the worst mistake of his life, Jonathan took a step back and allowed Gabriel to stride into his room, cloak swishing behind him. Jonathan then gave Speedwagon a menacing glare, and he followed with an innocent smile. Soon, all three were standing before the desk. The mask stared blankly up at them, fangs glistening in the light as Jonathan replaced the lamp beside it.

"Go on then," Jonathan said, "where is it from, and what was it used for?"

Gabriel stared at it silently a moment longer before answering. "It was crafted in what is now called central Mexico. It is a tool of death, and corruption."

Jonathan started feeling a little frustrated. "I've already deduced that much, seeing as its blades are designed to impale a man's brain from half a dozen sides. I'd assumed it was meant for some manner of blood sacrifice, or perhaps execution, though for the Aztecs at least those were often one and the same…though the latest findings seem to imply it's older than-"

"It is not Aztec."

Jonathan folded his arms. "Well, yes, that's exactly where I was getting before you interrupted me, sir."

Gabriel laid a tan-skinned finger on the edge of the table, looking down at Jonathan's notes. His eyes settled on the horned god-figure holding the mask in the archaeologist's sketch, and narrowed before returning to the stone object itself. "I do not know how old this particular mask is, but ones like it have been made for thousands of years before the Mexica came from the north, or the Toltecs before them. Hundreds of years before the Maya built their cities in the south. They are not for ritual, or criminals."

Jonathan's eyes widened. He wasn't entirely convinced that this man wasn't just telling him what he wanted to hear, but with the recent findings he actually wasn't sure what else the truth could be. "Why else would one go to such elaborate lengths to kill a man, then? And how is it that it reacts to blood, but not any other fluid of similar temperature and iron content?"

"It is not designed to kill directly, and the blades are not triggered by anything you can brew in your laboratories." He was silent another moment, seeming deep in thought. "I think I should show you something." Gabriel backed away from the table. Jonathan stepped back beside Speedwagon, pulling his silver-backed mirror out of Speedwagon's hands and hanging it back on the wall as he kept his eyes on Gabriel.

"This will make a mess," Gabriel said, "but the other option would be worse." He reached up with both hands and pulled back his cowl. His hair was dark blond, seeming mismatched with his swarthy complexion, and cut short from the scalp. Almost military fashioned. With the hood pulled away, Jonathan could now see that in addition to the golden hoops in his lip and ears, he was adorned with a sort of bronze circlet or tiara. A curtain of sky blue cloth hung from behind it across his neck, reminding Jonathan a bit of an Arabian headdress. There was an ivory horn set in its front, and from either of its sides hung three fine chains that reached almost to his chin, each tipped with a tiny mass of open bronze leaves. Now that his face was fully illuminated, Jonathan also noticed what could have been a birthmark, but was so geometrically perfect that it had to be some kind of faint tattoo or subtle painting that ran across the foreigner's nose and then up across his eye socket before turning another ninety degrees to extend over his brow. It was just barely a different color than his skin, but unmissable in the light.

What made Jonathan's mouth fall open, however, was when the chains hanging from his circlet began to move. Like tiny metal snakes, they raised their heads away from Gabriel's and began swishing back and forth in the air, some cutting up and down, some side to side, and others in wild circles, all while Gabriel stood in place without moving a muscle. Before Jonathan could even compute what his eyes were telling him, the chains reached a blur of speed, and a gust of wind circled around the room, sending several pages of Jonathan's notes fluttering off of his desk and making Speedwagon reach up through his flying mullet to keep his hat on his head. Then the chains fell limp again, and the wind stopped. Jonathan gasped. Speedwagon shrieked.

"The mask," Gabriel explained once they had settled down, still unmoving, "is activated the same way as my headdress, but is much more dangerous. Where did you get this one?"

"It…It belonged to my mother." Jonathan managed to choke out. Gabriel somehow seemed even taller and more imposing than before. "She purchased it from a sailor when I was just an infant. Before she died."

Gabriel looked pensive. "Then this is not from the set I came looking for. Such a coincidence, fate really must be on my side." He stepped back toward the desk. "But you will understand now that I have to take it." He reached for the mask.

Jonathan rushed to interpose himself, knocking the hulking sorcerer's arm away with his own. "I told you before, you are NOT taking my mother's mask! No matter who you are!"

Gabriel was silent. His eyes went wide.

"You blocked me," he said after a moment. He seemed to disbelieve the words as they came from his gold-adorned mouth. His eyes were still wide.

"I'll do much more than that if you continue to force my hand."

Gabriel's eyes went from wide, to suspiciously narrowed. A look came over him then that Jonathan didn't like at all. Across the bedroom, Speedwagon stopped eyeing the gold buttons on Jonathan's ball jacket and closed the closet door again, ready for action.

"Good acting," Gabriel said, arms rising to chest level and knees bending, "you actually fooled me until now."

Jonathan was ready for his pounce, when it came. However, it wasn't directed at Jonathan at all. Instead, Gabriel sprung toward the window that extended across the wall from behind the desk. Jonathan turned and prepared to block an attack from the side, but rather than striking him Gabriel grabbed the silken window curtain and pulled it back, standing to the side and holding the fabric up in front of him. The first, pale light of dawn, just barely creeping above the distant hills and through the winter cloud cover, fell through the window and across Jonathan's face and shoulders.

Jonathan blinked in confusion.

A moment later, so did Gabriel.

"What?" Gabriel asked, his voice falling almost to a whisper as his eyes widened, as if struggling to take the whole of Jonathan in. Jonathan, looking back and forth in confusion between the rising sun and the large, bejeweled man holding the curtain open, was losing what he thought was his understanding of this situation more and more by the second.

"What indeed?" Jonathan asked, keeping his body tense and ready in case this possibly mad individual decided to attack him after all, with his fists or with his strange powers.

"You have not used the mask," Gabriel continued, his voice still just above a whisper, "but you had the strength to block my arm. How…?"

"I've played quite a lot of rugby." Jonathan risked taking his eyes off of Gabriel for a moment to glance at the artifact. "And, what do you mean use the mask?" He paused, feeling almost stupid. "And how did you do that thing with your headgear?"

Gabriel was silent. He stood so still, curtains still in hand, that for a moment Jonathon wondered wildly if he had turned into stone.

"Terribly sorry, I was busy a moment and I think I must have missed something important," Speedwagon took a small step closer, removing his hand from his pocket, "but what's all this about masks and curtains and bloody magic?"

Gabriel looked back at his companion. "you can leave this house if you wish now. You have been helpful to me, and I would rather not involve you in this."

"Neither of you are going ANYWHERE," Jonathan said, his confusion and dazedness overcome by his growing frustration, "until I've been told the entire story of why you're in my house, why you want the mask, and what…" he pointed to the window and kind of swiveled his finger around as he struggled for words "…that…business…was all about."

Speedwagon gave Gabriel a look that suggested that he agreed with Jonathan on this subject. Gabriel was still again, eyes thoughtful and unblinking.

"The masks," Gabriel said, "were designed to transform their wearers. Men whose brains are pierced by their spikes stop being men, and become demons."

Jonathon felt his eyes going back one of the pieces of paper that had been knocked to the floor by Gabriel's conjured winds. The god or devil figure, fanged and triple-horned, holding up the mask with its skull-piercing spikes extended and covered in blood.

"And you're a demon yourself, then," Jonathan said, looking back at Gabriel, and at the chains hanging innocuously from his circlet in particular. In response, Gabriel shook his head, and his mouth drifted into another near-smile.

"Demons are a crude mockery of what I am. I have made it my life's work to rid the world of them.."

Jonathan wanted to contest this assertion, but after seeing what he had with the chains and the wind, and seeing the implacable sincerity in Gabriel's bright blue eyes, he found himself unable to question it. Whatever Gabriel was, he was certainly not a man. Or at least, not merely a man.

"I will offer a deal." Gabriel spoke again, stepping back into the middle of the room while keeping his eyes on Jonathan's. "I will leave this mask with you, for now. In two or three nights, I will return, and you will accompany me until the following dawn. You will learn everything about the stone masks, and the people who made them. After that, I think you will agree that this one must be destroyed like all the others."

Jonathan clenched his jaw. He was too sleepy to make a decision like this. An increasingly large part of him was sure that he already was asleep, and that this had all been an extraordinarily bizarre dream. He redoubled his probing of Gabriel's eyes, but couldn't penetrate beyond the stony blue stare.

"Alright," he said, reluctantly, "with the direction my studies have taken me, I don't think I can refuse that offer."

Gabriel smiled for real this time. Jonathan blinked. Something had changed in this entity's manner in the last few minutes, and Jonathan couldn't for the life of him figure out what or why.

"It is settled. I suppose 'JoJo' is short for something."

It took Jonathan a moment to realize that was a question. "Jonathan," he said, raising his hand, "Jonathan Joestar."

"What kind of ridiculous name is Joestar?" asked the man named Speedwagon with a derisive snort. Ignoring him, Gabriel raised his own becloaked arm in return.

"Gabriel Wamuu."

They shook. Gabriel had the firmest shake that Jonathan had ever felt (something that other people usually said about him, funnily enough), and he thought for a moment that his skin felt one or two degrees cooler than it should. He then let go, and picked Jonathan's notes off the floor and put them back on the desk before raising his cowl again.

"I will see you soon, Jonathan Joestar. I will find my own way out. Farewell." And with that, Gabriel turned around and left the room.

"Ah, I should probably get back home myself at this hour," Speedwagon smiled and waved his hat with a little bow, glancing nervously after Gabriel, "don't want to worry the family. Do take good care of your Dio brother, Mr. Joestar." He turned around and started toward the door, but Jonathan reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder, freezing him in place.

"Your family, Mr. Speedwagon. How many are there?"

Speedwagon was still for a moment. "Well, there's my sister, her wee son, Tattoo definitely counts as family, and Kempo never quite married Na Ying but she's pregnant as a-"

"And you'd be from Ogre Street, wouldn't you?"

"What? That filthy place? I'm a Whitechapel man born and-"

"I'll take that as a yes."

Speedwagon turned around, and gave Jonathan an expression that was starting to turn combative. His free hand rose toward the brim of his hat.

"Put back the little candlestick. That's father's, he'll miss it. Keep the cufflinks, and he won't notice if you take just one of the bigger ones in the hall."

Speedwagon's mouth fell open, and his eyes widened in disbelief.

"Don't waste your opportunity, sir," Jonathan said, letting out a little sigh, "I see the state of your eye. You wouldn't have fought Dio past that point if you were anything less than desperate."

Speedwagon started to say something, but couldn't seem to find the words. The look on his face went from disbelief to something like awe.

"But if you ever harm us again, no matter why or where…" He let Speedwagon imagine the rest of the sentence himself.

"Of course. Thank you, Mr. Joestar."

Jonathan took his hand off his shoulder. "Let me walk you to the door."

"Aye, of course." Speedwagon looked at his shoulder where Jonathan's hand had just been, and something in his posture shifted. "Also, I'm…sorry."

They left after Gabriel, neither of them spotting Dio as he emerged from behind the hallway curtain he'd been listening from.



TO BE CONTINUED ->

 

[SorcieredeFleur]

So it feels like Wam perhaps had somekind of break with Cars and AC/DC over the use of Stone Masks and Vampires in the past? I wander which side Santana took?

 

[Leila Hann]

So, after this it's going to be one chapter per week. Updates saturdays.

 

[SalsaDeGranada]

Been waiting for this for ages, really happy it's finally here!

 

[Leila Hann]

Been waiting for this for ages, really happy it's finally here!

Click to shrink...

Thanks. Only hope it doesn't disappoint.

 

[ShyPerson]

Thanks. Only hope it doesn't disappoint.

Click to shrink...

Definitely not. Eager to see where this goes and anticipating gratuitous copyright infringing musical references to cause localizers nightmares for years.

 

[Leila Hann]

Definitely not. Eager to see where this goes and anticipating gratuitous copyright infringing musical references to cause localizers nightmares for years.

Click to shrink...

This is one area in which the non-commercial nature of fan fiction is a blessing.

(don't worry, there's going to be plenty of gratuitous musical references. And not just the canon ones)

 

[random_npc]

"Ah, excuse me gentlesir." He raised Dio up and held him a few inches closer to Jonathan. "Is this Dio yours? We found 'im in terrible shape in the worst part of London, and thought we'd do the right thing and return him."

Jonathan blinked.

The man on Dio's right, cloaked and hooded, was one of the few Jonathan had ever seen who was both taller and wider than his rugby champion self. The hatted one with the cockney accent wasn't, but he nonetheless didn't look like someone who could be taken lightly. Dio struggled a little against both, and gave Jonathan a wild, desperate look as he hissed "JoJo!"

"He's not making much sense, I'm afraid," said the hatted one, his smile getting wider and phonier, "I think someone must've clonked him on the head."

Now fully awake, Jonathan blinked again before glaring into the speaker's eyes, one of which he now noticed was swollen and bloodshot, as if it had been gouged in a very recent fight. Confusion gave way to cold rage. "Put my brother down."

It was the hatted man's turn to blink. Jonathan's eyes remained open, his free hand balling into a fist. Slowly, the man removed his hand from Dio's shoulder and brought it politely to his waist pocket. Jonathan clenched his lips together and raised his eyebrows. The hatted man moved his hand away from his pocket again and kept it well away from either his or Dio's bodies. After giving him one last warning glare, Jonathan moved his eyes to the large one.

"What are you doing here?"

"What do you THINK they're doing, JoJo you idiot!" Dio suddenly twisted himself to get free of the big man, but failed with a pained gasp. "Hurry up and-"

Suddenly, the big man let go of Dio, making him thump to the floor with an outraged shout. His eyes were not on Jonathan, however, but over his shoulder, suddenly fixed on something in the bedroom behind him. Following the intruder's gaze out of the corner of his eye, Jonathan saw that he was staring at his desk by the window, upon which his notes, pen, and mask lay.

"This isn't important anymore," the big one spoke for the first time.

Click to shrink...

this bit is great, you can see everyone involved trying a gambit at once, unitl Wamuu decides trying to get money is of no importance compared to his purpose.


this looks great so far, I wonder if Dio is going to use the mask? or if he's going to stick around as an untrustworthy asshole vaguely on the protagonist's side? Dio's the worst, but if he comes to understand those who use the mask go insane, he might decide that's to high a price.


Edit:
wait, what

"What?" Gabriel asked, his voice falling almost to a whisper as his eyes widened, as if struggling to take the whole of Jonathan in. Jonathan, looking back and forth in confusion between the rising sun and the large, bejeweled man holding the curtain open, was losing what he thought was his understanding of this situation more and more by the second.

Click to shrink...

he's in the sun here, and not catching fire. How did I not initially notice that? what the hell is going on here? how did he gain immunity to the sun?

 

[Anonfox123]

Edit:
wait, what
he's in the sun here, and not catching fire. How did I not initially notice that? what the hell is going on here? how did he gain immunity to the sun?

Click to shrink...

I think Gabe/Whammu is behind the curtain or off to the side, not in the direct sun. Raises question on how he's going to leave though, if thats the case.

 

[Leila Hann]

he's in the sun here, and not catching fire. How did I not initially notice that? what the hell is going on here? how did he gain immunity to the sun?

Click to shrink...

A couple lines above that:

Instead, Gabriel sprung toward the window that extended across the wall from behind the desk. Jonathan turned and prepared to block an attack from the side, but rather than striking him Gabriel grabbed the silken window curtain and pulled it back, standing to the side and holding the fabric up in front of him.

Click to shrink...

He's keeping himself out of the sunlight.

I think Gabe/Whammu is behind the curtain or off to the side, not in the direct sun. Raises question on how he's going to leave though, if thats the case.

Click to shrink...

Now that's a question.

 

[spiritualatheist]

I think Gabe/Whammu is behind the curtain or off to the side, not in the direct sun. Raises question on how he's going to leave though, if thats the case.

Click to shrink...

He does have that weird lightbending supers peed thing in canon, doesn't he? Or is that Kars?

 

[Leila Hann]

2. Family Portrait​

Fifteen minutes later, Jonathan rapped his knuckles against Dio's bedroom door. He was somewhat relieved when, after a few seconds, he heard footsteps behind it, and the door slid open a crack.

"You got off easy," Dio said as he looked up at Jonathan's unblemished face. His own still bore a bruise, and a pair of small cuts that looked like they had just been washed.

"I was just lucky, I think." Jonathan shrugged and shook his head defeatedly, letting out an exhausted breath. "If that Gabriel fellow hadn't been in the mood to talk, I doubt I'd have come out on top. Even without the other one there to help him."

Dio nodded, giving Jonathan a meaningful look.

"Is anything broken?" Jonathan continued.

Dio managed to smile, lighting up his face with an almost glowing warmth as his smiles always did despite his injuries. "You've seen me walk off much worse."

Realizing that he was patronizing Dio, Jonathan looked downward and then returned a more bashful smile of his own. "Of course. Everyone knows you're a cat with nine lives, Dio." Dio nodded with a pained little chuckle. Jonathan held up the bottle in his other hand. "I brought wine. I know you don't often partake, but after tonight I think we both need it."

His foster brother shook his head, looking away with a flick of his much messier than usual golden curls, but not before Jonathan caught his smile give a tiny, involuntary return. "Have as much as you want, I'll just sit with you."

"Oh come on now Dio, if I have to drink alone I'll feel enough of a ruffian that I should be going off to London with those two rather than living here."

Dio smiled again, and looked back up at Jonathan. "Well," he said with a melodramatic roll of his eyes, "if that's what it takes to save your dignity."

"It's also a really good wine."

The two laughed, and Dio ushered him into the room.

Dio's bedroom was the same size and shape as Jonathan's, but arranged differently. The bed and desk were each situated in one of the back corners, away from the window, which was usually hidden behind a pair of thick, carmine drapes. The walls and floor were fastidiously clean, and the dressing table bore a carefully sorted array of small, locked boxes that contained Dio's jewelry and school trophies, as well as a chessboard with the pieces stacked alongside it. Dio pulled out the desk chair and sat down in it next to the dressing table, motioning Jonathan to sit on the bed. Jonathan placed the bottle and pair of cups on the table and poured. Dio took his, and held it out rather grimly in something like a toast before they each took a sip. For a long while, they stared down at their cups, waiting for each other to speak. Finally, Jonathan managed to open his mouth.

"How did it happen?"

Dio looked at him quizzically. Either not understanding the question, or pretending. Probably the latter, unless he was even more distracted than he looked.

"Where did those men attack you, I meant."

Dio raised his glass to his lips and took a much larger sip then the previous, before putting it back on the table and letting out a long, quiet sigh. "I stayed in London too late after my interview. Perhaps I allowed nostalgia to get the better of me." He stared at his nearly empty cup now, a look of distaste and perhaps shame coming over him for a moment before he sighed again and picked it up to drain the last bit. "I think I've learned my lesson now."

Jonathan nodded, understanding. Dio's bruised cheek was more swollen than Jonathan had realized before, and the cut on his ear more ragged. A rush of shame came back to Jonathan himself now, as he banished that little sense of satisfaction from his mind. This was no time to be taking pleasure in his foster brother's misfortune. Really, he thought he had banished that spiteful little part of him long ago. But when he saw Dio being dropped to the floor earlier, and moreso when he'd limped off to his room in defeat, that part of him had made itself heard again with a tiny suppressed urge to cheer.

Jonathan clenched his teeth. He didn't want to feel like he had rewarded Speedwagon for anything when he gave him those cufflinks, but.

"It looked like you gave them what for, at least. The smaller one might not have the best depth perception for a day or two."

Dio relaxed a bit more at that, but then looked confused when Jonathan mentioned Speedwagon. "What do you mean…oh, yes. I'm not sure if that was actually me. I don't remember quite how it went, but he looked like he'd been in another fight before they attacked me."

Jonathan's teeth clenched a little harder. A vague, uncertain memory came back to him, and he hastily reminded himself that that probably hadn't actually happened the way he sometimes remembered it. But when he had seen Speedwagon's eye, something had flashed back up in his own mind.

"Well, however it happened, he was surely asking for it." Jonathan shook his head before pouring himself another cup of wine. Dio half-reluctantly did the same. This time they clinked their glasses together with a shared smile before taking their first sips, though Jonathan's expression was a little forced. The silence came back as they sipped for another minute, the early morning light oozing feebly through the dark red drapes. This time it was Dio who broke the silence.

"How much did you have to give them?"

Jonathan smiled more genuinely this time. "Just a few knick-knacks were enough to keep them happy. Do me a favor and please don't mention this to father, speaking of which."

Dio chuckled. "You did bribe me with drink." Jonathan laughed along with him, at ease again, and they each raised their cups.

…​

Dio stopped himself as he saw the last gulp's worth of wine flowing toward his mouth, and pressed his lips shut before putting the cup down. Two glasses, and the day hasn't even started? A sickly, gelatinous flow of disgust washed through him. Last night really got to me. No more today, and none at all until Christmas Eve.

"You wouldn't mind if I finished it, if you don't want it?" Jonathan asked, gesturing toward Dio's cup with his own. Dio opened his mouth for a biting repartee, but changed his mind and instead said "I was hoping you'd offer, JoJo. You know I hate wasting things."

He watched as his hulking, black haired foster brother poured Dio's cup into his own and took a hearty gulp. Jonathan probably wasn't even tipsy yet. Even beyond his six-foot-five frame and sixteen stone of nearly solid muscle, Jonathan's constitution had always astounded Dio. He'd seen him down an entire bottle and only slur his words very slightly for the rest of the dorm party, and while Dio did pretty well on the rugby team by virtue of his speed and reflexes he'd seen Jonathan just shrug off three tackles simultaneously. And yet, for all that, Jonathan's musculature wasn't bulging or grotesque like that of some overachieving athletes, but instead seemed to fit his broad-shouldered skeleton like a suit of well polished armor. He got nearly as many looks and giggles from the girls at the social events as Dio did.

What got to Dio more than that, however, was just how nonchalantly Jonathan smiled as he removed the cup from his lips and put it back down on the dressing table. To him, the spicy red sherry wasn't even something to savor, though he enjoyed drinking it more than Dio did. It wasn't the taste of wealth and security and comfort, for Jonathan. For him, it was just a drink.

"I'm going to fall asleep soon," Dio said, "so I hope you don't mind if I kick you out in a few minutes."

He nodded and returned Dio's half-sarcastic smile. "Of course. You're not the only one. I may not have been battling my way through London's criminal element all night, but I haven't slept either."

Dio waited for Jonathan to say something about the conversation he'd had with Gabriel. About whatever nonsense the foreigner had fed him about his mother's Mesoamerican knick-knack, and the promise to meet again. It was probably the most bizarre thing he'd heard in his life, and he wished he had heard it from the beginning if only to marvel at the full brazen complexity of the utter bollocks. Unfortunately, he'd only crept back from his room when he'd heard Speedwagon's shriek; the brainless gutter oaf had probably been frightened when Jonathan showed off the mask's spikes. So many of his like really were that superstitious. That kind of worldview was a trap Dio himself might have fallen into in his youth, were his senses any less sharp or his wits any slower.

Finally, he got tired of waiting. "They stayed in your room an awfully long time."

Jonathan shrugged, and his expression more bemused than anything else. "The bigger one had the strangest reaction when he saw the mask. I had to bargain with him to stop him from taking it instead of just my cufflinks. I'm not sure how much I'm ready to believe, but what he already knew about it…" he seemed to think carefully about what he said next, before changing his mind "…well, I probably need some sleep before I can weigh the evidence objectively."

Dio nodded agreement, with an incredulous, narrow-eyed look. Perhaps Jonathan had just been shining Gabriel on after all, when he agreed to meet with him. Although Dio certainly wouldn't have described what happened to the cuff links as "bargaining," it was entirely possible that Jonathan actually considered those details to be unimportant. Jeweled cuff links, and aged sherry.

He closed his eyes for a moment, the crash after the night's adrenaline-filled adventures hitting him harder, and the pain in his cuts and bruises becoming a sharper ache. He really had lost it, hadn't he? He'd been so desperate to salve his wounded pride after Speedwagon beat him that he'd lost all perspective, frantically tried to spin the event into something he could call a victory. But, loathe though Dio was to swallow a failure, he was glad that the robbers hadn't done what he'd planned when he brought them to his foster brother's room. He didn't want anyone else to kill Jonathan.

…​

Jonathan picked up the half-empty bottle and cups and tilted back his head, stretching his neck with a sigh. Dio was right; sleep was long overdue. Jonathan would really need to make sure he got his cycles realigned with the sun again before classes resumed after New Year's. He resisted the temptation, once again, to tell Dio about what he'd seen Gabriel do with his headdress. He felt the need to tell someone, but it would be hard to get anyone to believe it at the best of times, and Dio had enough to deal with on his own right now.

"I suppose we'll need to visit father on Sunday, then. I don't think either of us will be awake before hospital visiting hours have ended today."

Dio shook his head. "Oh, yes. I'd nearly forgotten. Perhaps I should send him a letter before I sleep."

Jonathan shook his head as he started to get up from the bed. "Don't worry yourself, I'll do it. He has been feeling better, at least. I hope he can be home in time for Christmas."

Dio stood as well, pushing some blonde curls out of his face, his own tiredness clearly visible. "I guess the doctors did him some good after all. I still wonder if he might have gotten over this episode faster if he'd stayed home like he wanted, but I can't argue with success."

Jonathan finished standing up, stretching his extensive arms, the bottle in one hand and the cups held between the fingers of the other. The talk of father made him think of something.

"Dio," he said, softly and consolingly, "you were visiting their graves, weren't you?"

Dio blinked, his face uncomprehending.

"Your parents' graves, in the East End. That's how you ran afoul of those two, isn't it?"

Dio was still. His face blank. He blinked, once and then twice.

"Sorry." He never knew what was and wasn't okay to talk about with regards to Dio's childhood, even after all these years. Dio almost never permitted the topic to come up. And he really was sorry, though not for what he was asking but rather the reason he was asking it. "You don't have to talk about it. I shouldn't have asked."

"Yes."

It was Jonathan's turn to blink. Dio was sitting still, making a very particular expression.

"I was visiting their graves. Stupid, I know. I've been taught my lesson." He got to his feet, a little more shakily than before. "Goodnight, then. Don't forget the letter."

Jonathan clenched his teeth, trying to ignore the sick, disappointed feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Goodnight, Dio. I'm glad you're okay."

He left the room and closed the door behind him. That face Dio made when he answered that question. Bouncing between shame and agitation. When he knows he's been caught in a lie.

Jonathan gave the door a forlorn look, shaking his head and biting his lip. Dio, what in God's name are you getting mixed up in?

…​

The nurse opened the bedroom door, and Jonathan stepped inside after giving her a grateful smile. On the crisp white bed under the windows, a tall, slim man with some early wrinkles on his face and hair the same color as Jonathan's was sitting against a mound of pillows. He looked up as the door opened, and a wide smile bloomed under his heavy moustache.

"You're back again already, JoJo? Wasn't it just yesterday you and Dio last visited?"

Jonathan smiled back. "Four days ago, father."

"Oh?" Baron George Joestar looked grave for a moment. "Am I losing my memory now, too?"

Jonathan shook his head and stepped forward, leaning over the bed reassuringly. "Nonsense, father. The nurse said you've been getting sharper since you came in this time, and you already look better than you did on Wednesday. It must be the monotony of the place that's confusing you. You remember how that happened to me when I was fourteen?"

George's expression mellowed again. "Ah, yes, I'm sure that must be it then. It is terribly boring here, day in and day out, and they do seem to fade into one another." He leaned back into his pillows. "And I presume Dio was too busy to come a second time?"

"He wanted to," Jonathan said, "but he had some things come up. He's been dreadfully busy lately courting that law firm he's hoping to apprentice for. You know how he is, when there's something he really wants."

George chuckled a little, shaking his sweat-gleaming head. "I hope he's at least willing to be home for Christmas Eve this time. I've made it my business to be recovered enough to go home myself before then." Here he gave Jonathan a slightly irritated look. "I still think perhaps I should have stayed there to begin with. Dio was right. There's nothing they can do here that the doctors couldn't provide me with there, and I'd get to see my boys all holiday long. And my studio, for that matter."

Jonathan sighed and shook his head. He'd offered more times than he could be bothered to count to bring his father his paints and papers during the hospital stays, since they'd started last year, but George always insisted he couldn't paint anything outside of his studio. "Father, last time you stayed home it took you months to recover. You've healed as much in a week since the worst of it this time. Truth be told, I'm beginning to fear the house may be contaminated with something."

George scoffed. "Nonsense, boy. Rory is older and frailer than I, and he's been butlering as well as ever since my problems started. If I'd let you bring me here last time, why, I wouldn't be surprised if my recovery took twice that long."

"I can only point to past events as evidence for my case." Jonathan shook his head, and chuckled grimly. "Now I'm talking like a lawyer. It's bad enough you should have one in the family. I'm sure you'll be out in time for Christmas, though. You really are looking much stronger."

They shared another little chuckle at this, though George's face still carried a hint of resentment. Jonathan decided it was time to raise the subject he'd been wanting to.

"Speaking of our respective studies though, I've made some of the strangest discoveries about the mask since obtaining those new notes from the Americas. It's much older than I realized, and far more mysterious. Were I just a bit more impulsive, I'd almost be tempted to postpone my graduation and sail to Mexico myself at this point."

George's eyebrows rose a little. "Really?"

Jonathan nodded earnestly. "I've never wished as strongly as now for the name of that sea captain who mother bought it from. If I could just ask for more details about where it came from, this could all be so much easier." He paused for a moment, hesitating. "I know you've told me all about it already, but maybe there's some detail you didn't think important. Can you think of anything?"

For a moment, George stared intently at the white plaster walls, his face deep in thought. "Like I said," he began, speaking slowly, "the sailor used the most ridiculous sales pitch I think I've ever heard in my life. Talking about how cheap he would sell it because he feared it's curse, while carefully avoiding the subject of why he didn't simply throw it overboard if it was that terrifying. I'd have grudged Mary for her purchase if it had been that that convinced her to buy it, but…" He paused again, as if unsure of exactly what he was remembering here.

Jonathan nodded encouragingly. "You said mother was drawn to it as soon as she laid eyes on the thing, before the man even noticed her."

"Yes, I did tell you that." George continued, still looking distant and slightly unsure. "But there was one other thing. She had been talking to me about the lunch we'd just had in town, when she saw that mask and dragged me over to it. You must have gotten your love of history from Mary, JoJo. She always loved old and curious things. But I remember, just for a very brief moment, I could have sworn she looked frightened rather than intrigued."

Jonathan blinked. An uncomfortable sensation was coming over him.

"I'm sure it was just a trick of the light. I didn't marry a superstitious woman. But I just remember the way I felt for that moment, when I thought she'd seen something that disturbed her, and felt concerned myself until I realized I must have been mistaken." He shook his head a little, slowly. "Beyond that, I just remember her being excited to take it to a professor who could tell her more about it."

He stopped there, and closed his lips tightly. Jonathan had no plans to question his father any further along that path of investigation. It was a path that led to the carriage ride back home the following day, the muddied road that gave way above a ravine, and the death of Mary Roxana Joestar.

"She said it reminded her of a folktale she'd heard. But I'm sure I told you that bit." Jonathan nodded. He'd investigated that avenue of research quite thoroughly when he'd begun his thesis, and exhausted it without finding any such tale that matched the details of this specific mask.

George looked back at his son, eyes sad, but mouth smiling a little again. "You really do have her keen mind, JoJo. And the shape of her head. But, that is all I can remember about our purchase of the mask."

Doing as good a job as possible of hiding the growing sense of dread, Jonathan placed a hand on his father's shoulder. "Well, thank you anyway. I'm sure I can piece this puzzle together in time for graduation."

"I'll be more surprised than anyone if you don't." George leaned back, letting out a longer, higher breath. "I…I'm sorry, but I think I need a bit more sleep. Thank you for coming again; it makes it far more bearable for me here, even if it's your damned fault I'm not recovering at home where I should be."

Jonathan sighed. "No one is forcing you to stay, if you actually think that." He took his hand off of George's shoulder and stood back upright. "Farewell, father. I'm holding you to that Christmas deadline."

George chuckled weakly. "Well now that you're pressuring me, I'm not so sure. Farewell."

Jonathan wore a smile as he left the room, but let it wither as soon as he was out in the hospital corridor. Nothing to reassure him that Gabriel was mistaken, and barely anything to lend him credence. Nothing to make sense of either the new notes or the…thing…that had happened with Dio's questionable London acquaintances. Nothing to help convince him that he wasn't about to make a mistake this evening, or that he was and should just go straight back to the manor instead.

"Excuse me," a sharp, female voice said as a finger tapped him on the arm, "you're blocking the hallway."

"Oh! I'm sorry. Please excuse me, miss." Jonathan turned around and stepped to the side to shift his considerable bulk out of the way. Behind him, a young looking nurse with lightly tanned skin and flaxen hair beneath her cap was holding onto an instrument-laden cart and raising her eyebrows impatiently.

"Much obliged, sir." She nodded curtly and pushed her cart onward. As she passed by and Jonathan saw her rounded cheeks, pointed chin, and heavy eyelids up close, his mouth fell open and he let out a sharp breath, almost forgetting everything else entirely. No, no it couldn't be. After all these years? Here? Now?

"Erina?" Jonathan asked.

The nurse spun back around. "Where did you get my na-" her bright turquoise eyes fell upon Jonathan's face, and suddenly went as wide as his own.

"JoJo?"

Jonathan started to walk toward her, but stopped, muscular arms half raised. Erina raised one hand off of the cart and held it aloft between them.

"You've, um. You've grown." Erina's eyes moved down to Jonathan's knees and then up to his massive shoulders and bulwark-like chest again. "A lot."

"Erm." Jonathan smiled bashfully, head spinning and mind racing. "You've changed a lot. I mean…" Erina was blushing herself as he hastily rephrased that "…it was…you were thirteen years old when last…"

He raised a hand to his head, then back down again. Erina opened her lips once more, but couldn't seem to think of anything to say. The pause was only a few seconds, but it felt like hours.

"I thought you were still in India," Jonathan finally broke the silence.

"We just moved back last month." Erina shifted in place, and fixed her cap as it started to tilt off. "I…am sorry, I thought about writing you again, but it had been years since we last corresponded and I was afraid I'd be…" she trailed off, shifting in place again.

"I'm sorry I didn't write again, since then." Jonathan said. Sincerely.

"I'm sorry too. It was…" she looked up and down the hall, and then back at the cart. "I'm sorry, I can't talk right now. You, well," she smiled again, and this time it was much more like the wry, mischievous smile he remembered from seven years ago, "I assume you're at the same address?" She paused, as the possible implications of what she'd just said seemed to hit her. "That is. I meant that, with you being your father's heir, I assumed you'd still be by Blackwater. Unless you've married, of course, or have some project elsewhere…"

"I'm at Hugh Hudson most of the time," Jonathan said, "at least until summer. But I am back at home for the season."

With everything else going on in his head, Jonathan could still barely process this. Erina Pendleton, if that was still her last name, hadn't just grown taller and shapelier. Her eyes were sharper than he remembered, and her posture stiffer, in a manner he could almost call soldierly. Her skin was at least two shades darker from its years under the oriental sun, but it had a subtle lustrous quality to it, almost a kind of glow that was more felt than seen.

"I do need to get moving now," she said, with obvious reluctance, "but I'll write you tonight! I'd like to catch up with my childhood friend." Her businesslike expression started to come back, but she still looked a little frazzled.

"I'd like that as well, Miss Pendleton." She didn't correct him, which for some reason made him feel more at ease.

"Goodbye." She smiled again. Faster, softer this time, but still the same smile.

"Goodbye." He watched her march on down the hallway, pushing the cart ahead of her heavy white skirt.

Jonathan turned around and stared at the door to his father's chamber again. Now. How could this be happening now of all times? As if he didn't have enough thinking to do already, between his research, whatever madness Mr. Wamuu intended to drag him into, and Dio's latest drama-

Suddenly, he went cold all over. His heart froze. He almost forgot where he was.

Dio.

His lips fell a little bit open again. The image of Erina Pendleton flickering across his vision, and with it other pictures. Things he was sure he had just dreamed about, or misremembered.

He swallowed, rubbed his temples, and took in a deep breath before letting it slowly out. He was on edge, he told himself. All the stress and excitement must be getting to him. He'd live up to his agreement this evening, and sort out his traitorous memories afterward.

And visit Erina once or twice before classes resumed, if he could. She was an old friend, after all.

…​

Dusk brought with it another sprinkle of fine, ghostly snowflakes. Londoners pulled up their hoods and hurried on their way as the sky darkened and the muddied pavement of the courtyard whitened. Jonathan Joestar adjusted his coat as he stepped out of the underground and up onto the snowy bricks. He adjusted his nostrils to the heavy smell of coal smoke drifting over from across the River Fleet, upon which a trio of grimy barges could be seen. Breathing through his mouth a bit more than usual, he wondered what he was hoping for more; that Mister Wamuu would appear and tell him everything about his mother's mask as the letter he'd received that morning suggested, or that he wouldn't and Jonathan could go right home and forget he had ever met the towering magician.

A quarter hour after the last bit of natural light had faded out from above the gables and church towers to the west and the tans and whites gave way to dusky blue, two men separated themselves from the thinning crowd and made their way up to the leafless tree Jonathan was standing under. Gabriel was wearing the same heavy, cowled cloak as he had last week, his ear and lip rings clashing almost disconcertingly with the drab wool. Speedwagon was in a thicker, but more tattered, jacket than before, but still had that bowler hat nestled atop his pale mullet.

"What's he doing here?" Jonathan asked, narrowing his eyes at Speedwagon. The latter gave him an indignant little look in return.

"Mister Speedwagon has made himself useful," Gabriel said patiently, his face neutral, "he will help us find our target."

Speedwagon nodded his head, looking back at Gabriel. "If I can, that is. We're not the only ones as been after this one." He looked agitated, Jonathan thought. Even grim.

"Are you alright with this?" Gabriel asked.

Jonathan looked at Speedwagon uncertainly. He remembered how the man had looked down and whispered ashamedly when he'd apologized, that night. However, he'd also beaten up his brother in the first place.

"I believe I am, Mr. Wamuu," Jonathan said, overcoming his reluctance.

"Good," Gabriel replied. He turned to face the open street leading east. "We are going to kill Jack the Ripper."



TO BE CONTINUED ->

 

[toxinvictory]

Well damn, I will most certainly be following this fascinating narrative closely.

 

[SorcieredeFleur]

To try and kickstart conversation a bit:

I find how "innocently" insenitive Jojo is due to his privalige is a very humanising element to him. He wants to do whats best for people but he doesn't realise that his family being so rich requires the existance, exploitation and oppresion of the poor.

 

[radioxaxa]

Wonder if they'll leave anything of Jack this time around.

 

[SorcieredeFleur]

Well they don't have a trained Hamon user so if Jack isn't a vampire yet then there should be a body left after they kill him unless Wammu is feeling hungry.

 

[Leila Hann]

3. Jack the Ripper​

"Now wait, Mr. Wamuu, let me be sure that I completely understand." Jonathan was still holding one hand to his forehead as he sloshed through the mix of old and fresh snow behind the other two. "You're trying to tell me that the Whitechapel Murderer was turned into a blood-drinking demon by a mask like my mother's, and that we're going to track him down by holding up a cup of brew and wishing really hard?"

"My investigation these last few days has convinced me that he was," Gabriel answered without turning around, "And no, not wishing. More a matter of being sensitive to the right vibrations. I will handle that part."

"I thought you said you'd be handling the killing him part," Speedwagon gave him a suspicious look.

"I can do two things at once," Gabriel said, almost curtly, "your only purpose is to help me navigate these streets, Speedwagon. Jonathan's is to watch and learn."

"Speaking of which," Speedwagon replied, holding up a finger instructively, "it's this way."

He waved them around a different crumbling, colorless brick corner than the one Gabriel had been about to take. The first thing Jonathan saw when they'd cleared it was a filthy, graffiti-covered street end, carved into the crude likeness of an enormous, ugly face. He looked across from there at the assortment of run-down tenements and low-ceilinged storefronts illuminated by just a few struggling lamps and the meager moonlight that fought through the snow clouds above. Jonathan felt his eyes go wide. Of course, Ogre Street. That was where Dio had probably run into them, after all. He had never quite picked up the nerve to visit this particular neighborhood before, despite his curiosity. He'd also gotten the impression that his father and foster brother both preferred it that way.

"Home sweet home, Mr. Joestar," Speedwagon spun around with an illustrative wave of both arms, "I suppose I just owe you the favor of entertaining, don't I? It's not as pretty as yours, but." He took a step closer to Jonathan and placed a hand on his bicep, looking at him with a surprisingly genuine smile. "You're a big boy, aren't ya? I'd wager you'll come out of here alive."

Jonathan held his tongue as he looked over the street and then back at the smiling, long-haired man who was patting him on the arm. "Well, thank you," he said after an uncertain moment. "On the subject of favors, I'll refrain from beating up your sister when we're introduced."

Speedwagon threw back his head and laughed, slapping Jonathan on the arm once again before turning around and leading them down Ogre Street. Jonathan let out a frustrated, nervous breath. Not quite the reaction he'd been hoping for, but then, he supposed Speedwagon was still agitated himself beneath the bravado. He'd been unusually quiet and subdued for most of the walk from King's Cross.

"Here we are now," the behatted man spoke again after leading them a ways through the gloom and slush, addressing Gabriel this time, "my dear sister's respectable establishment. I expect you'll want to hear what she told me straight from the source, aye?" Gabriel's hooded head bobbed affirmation, and Speedwagon led them toward a door with a cleaner coat of paint and flanked by windows with slightly better curtains than most of the neighbors'.

"What type of shop is this, by the by?" Jonathan asked as he followed them inside, taking one last look behind him to make sure no one was sneaking up with a knife, "I imagine your sister must be quite the businesswoman to keep this-"

He stepped in after the other two, glad for the indoor warmth, but then stopped speaking mid sentence. Four women, each wearing a floor-length, frilly dress of a different color with collars cut obscenely low and matching ribbons in their overmade hair, looked up from the threadbare couches lining three of the walls. Standing just to the side of the door, glowering suspiciously at himself and Gabriel, was a burly man with a short brown beard, a face covered in wild tattoos, and his hand on the knife hilt at this belt. Aside from a pair of shaded lamps and a pair of curtained doors leading away into the building, there wasn't much else.

"Don't look at him like that, Tattoo," Speedwagon admonished the man by the door, "that's the Jonathan I told you about."

"Oh." The tattooed man raised his eyebrows and took his hand immediately off his hilt. He stepped up to Jonathan, who was still struggling to get his bearings, and dipped his head respectfully. "Thank you ever so kindly, sir. God bless ya."

Jonathan stared at Tattoo in confusion, before noticing the thick, new-looking coat he was wearing. He then looked back at Speedwagon, whose own jacket was old and threadbare.

"Ah." Jonathan blinked once or twice, looking at his guide with a newfound respect before returning his attention to Tattoo. "Well, I…suppose you're welcome?" He didn't mean that as a question, but it somehow came out as one. Before Tattoo could reply, Jonathan was distracted by something warm and soft pushing itself firmly into his forearm. He looked down at it, and found himself staring down the cleavage of a freckled thirty-something year old woman in a yellow dress and ribbons.

"You've good taste in friends, Robert," the woman said, painted eyes slowly working their way up Jonathan's chest and toward his eyes. "That nose of yours at work again? I can just see he's a real gentleman."

"Handsome too," said a younger, thinner woman in red as she crept up behind her coworker, "but still so young…"

Jonathan took a step back toward the door, looking around for help. Gabriel was standing, impassively, in its center, completely ignoring the attention of the green and blue clad girls as they pawed at him. Fortunately, when he desperately met Speedwagon's eye, the latter came over and laid a hand on each of the women's shoulders.

"We'll all have time to make each other's acquaintance right and proper," Speedwagon said, "but just for now this one is in my company."

The two women backed away and returned to their couches, smiles immediately replaced with bored expressions. "You actually are handsome, though," the younger one said with a shrug. Out of the corner of his eye, Jonathan thought he saw Tattoo giving him a dirty look, but it passed quickly. Before Jonathan could puzzle out what he had just seen, or even be sure if he'd seen it at all, one of the back door curtains swished open and a fifth woman marched in. Her dress was plainer and less frilly, and her face – though painted like the others' – lacked even the affectation of coquettishness. Beyond that, Jonathan would have best described her appearance as "Speedwagon, but a woman."

"Keep it down," Clara said, her voice sharp but quiet, eyes flicking across the room sternly, "my boy is sleeping." As everyone fell silent, she addressed her brother. "These are the two?"

"That's right."

Clara nodded. She seemed to be appraising Jonathan and Gabriel, but not in the way the others had been. Taking note of their heights and bulk, and Gabriel's eerily rigid and still posture. "Come in back, then. I made a nice pot of tea. If you can really help us, it'll be the least I can do."

Jonathan followed her, more than a little gratefully, out of the front room. Gabriel and Speedwagon went after. The kitchen was dirtier than the foyer, but not in the unattended way. Rather, the dirt and dust had all been driven down between the counters by furious scrubbing of the exposed surfaces, as if the passion for cleanliness existed, but time or strength were in short supply. The hearth was hot, at least, making it a bit cozier than the previous room. Clara took a large teapot off of it as she motioned everyone to sit.

"We should just get to it, I suppose," Speedwagon said as his sister handed him a steaming cup, leaning back in his chair and setting his bowler down on the table beside his saucer, "fill these blokes in."

Clara sat down herself after handing out the cups, putting her elbows on the table and pushing her own pale bangs out of her narrow face. She let out a long, heavy breath, the professionalism slipping. She seemed to be having trouble getting started.

"Still no word from Eliza, then?" Speedwagon asked.

Clara shook her head. "Neither glimpse nor letter. And while she's the only one of ours that hasn't come back, the other girls talk to other people's employees. It isn't only in Whitechapel anymore, since we all started avoiding it after dark; two more have disappeared around East End, and one other's body was found just this morning."

"Erm," Jonathan shifted uncomfortably in his chair, which creaked dangerously beneath his mass, "if you don't begrudge my asking, aren't your employees the…erm…" he felt his face go hotter than the hearth could account for, and had trouble continuing "…indoor sort?"

The Speedwagon siblings both looked at him. Clara crossly. Robert sympathetically.

"Sorry. I, um. I'm not so familiar with how your industry works. Carry on."

Clara gave him a skeptical glare before moving on. It hurt him, a little. While it was considered a rite of passage of sorts by most of his classmates to partake, Jonathan had never quite been able to bring himself to, despite his occasional curiosity.

"Bled dry," Gabriel spoke for the first time.

Clara nodded. "It's…so bizarre. The Ripper's first few victims weren't like that, but ever since Miss Kelly they have. Same wounds as the first bunch. Bodies dumped the same way, them as could be found at all. But also all...bled out...now, but with hardly any red on the snow."

Gabriel nodded, looking incredibly nonchalant at this. Clara was visibly disturbed, and Jonathan noticed her eyes avoiding Gabriel in favor of his own and Robert's now. She took a comforting sip of tea before continuing.

"The last two vanished south of Whitechapel. Closer to here. If he keeps…hunting…so close to our neighborhood, I don't even know where we can work. Or who will even come looking for us, besides that devil himself."

"Devil?" Another female voice half-whispered from behind the door.

Clara's face hardened. She whispered something under her breath that sounded like "oh, not this again." Before she could say anything more loudly though, Gabriel turned his hooded, gold-hung face to the door. "Come in," he said. The door opened, and the young girl in red poked her ribboned head in, looking nervous.

"We're talking about Jack, Cecily," Clara said sternly, "not some man you saw through the window here a month ago."

Gabriel tilted his head, a bronze chain shifting along the lower edge of his hood. "A suspicious man, I assume?"

Clara sighed, shaking her head. "She has a bit of an overactive imagination."

"Well, yes, maybe I do," the girl at the door retorted, huffily, "but I didn't imagine that man. Eliza saw him too."

"Come inside," Gabriel ordered the girl. Clara put her face in her hand and shook her head, but Cecily swished her long red skirt inside and closed the door behind her.

"What makes you think that the man you saw outside was Jack the Ripper?"

"No normal person would ever look at someone the way he did at Eliza," Cecily said, "and it was right before Jack started getting so much worse. He was just...stalking...outside the window, looking at Eliza with a smile that showed so many teeth, so sharp. Like a devil!"

Clara rolled her eyes. "Did he have horns too?"

"Yes! I saw them poking right out of his hair! Eliza told me I was crazy, but he was looking at her, and now she is gone."

Speedwagon raised his own bushy eyebrows at that detail. "So, maybe you did imagine that one part, if she didn't see it?"

Jonathan tried to repress a derisive smile as he looked over at Gabriel, but stopped when he saw the latter's expression. He had looked serious before, but now his face was downright grim.

"A month ago?" Gabriel asked. Everyone looked at him.

"Erm…yes, give or take," Cecily repeated, shrinking away a little from Gabriel's size and voice. Then, as if his intimidating presence had given her an idea, she said "Wait...you're hunting that monster, aren't you! You think you can get rid of him, really?" She looked at Gabriel more carefully, eyes seeming to linger on his exotic jewelry and on the geometric blue marking that curled around his eyes. "Well...I did see him before, so if you need someone to lure him in for you I could-"

"No," both Speedwagon siblings said, almost in a single voice. Cecily nodded meekly, looking both disappointed and relieved.

Gabriel was silent for a moment, as if pondering something. Then, he said "thank you," and turned back to the other three at the table. Cecily looked around uncertainly, before slipping awkwardly away again and closing the door behind her.

"Sorry about that," Clara said, but she sounded less certain herself now. Her eyes were reluctantly studying Gabriel again.

What proceeded then was a discussion of streets and intersections – all ones that Jonathan had been told to avoid for as long as he could remember, and that he'd barely ever thought of as actual places where people lived as opposed to some kind of morbid fairyland – and speculation as to what time of night most of the murders would have most likely taken place at. Every few sentences, Clara and Speedwagon stopped to sip their tea. Jonathan and Gabriel barely touched theirs. Jonathan felt like he should be taking notes when Clara started lecturing them on the probable routes the victims had been walking when they were taken and her brother supplemented it with his musings on which alleyways a bloody-handed criminal would take to go unseen to those places. However, Gabriel seemed to remember it all without need for note-taking. And then, almost abruptly, Gabriel stood up (nearly knocking his chair over in the process) and thanked Clara for her information before instructing the other two to follow him.

"Bye for now, sis," Speedwagon tipped his hat at her before putting it back on his head as he got to his feet himself.

"You'd better not get killed too, Robbie. You'd better not." The two briefly embraced. Jonathan watched this, curiously. His first reaction was that this was slightly off for a sibling relationship, but a moment later it occurred to him that he'd felt the same way when his flatmate's younger brother had visited last semester. And when he'd been invited over to the rugby captain's house the year before and seen him with his sisters.

Gabriel opened the door, and Speedwagon followed. Putting some distracting, and disquieting, thoughts out of his head, Jonathan brought up the rear, and gave Clara a nervous "thank you" of his own that she only returned with a nod. He avoided looking at the red-garbed Cecily back on her couch as they passed back through the foyer.

"Later, Tattoo," Speedwagon smiled at the guard by the door.

Tattoo gave Speedwagon a silent, pleading look, and crossed himself.

Then, they went back out into the darkness and the snow.

…​

Hours later, they were still roaming the streets. The snow was falling much more heavily, burying the cobblestones and pavers in undulating mounds of ghostly white and shading out much of the streetlight. Speedwagon had liberated an extra scarf from a poorly shuttered storefront they'd passed, and they had taken a break to warm up in a dimly lit and malodorous pub, but he was beginning to shiver again even despite that. Jonathan was doing better, but his fingers and ears were still starting to go a bit numb. Leading them around yet another lifeless cul-de-sac, Gabriel leaned over the open wooden cup he'd been holding in front of him. He sheltered it with his hand from the snow, and Jonathan watched as he blew gently on the surface of the acrid-smelling liquid within and studied the movements of the ripples.

"He's getting closer to our position," Gabriel declared.

"Do you mean we're getting closer to him?" Jonathan asked, looking at the chemical brew with very narrow eyes.

Gabriel shook his head, letting a couple of gold-tipped tassels poke out of his hood for a moment. "No. He's approaching from the northwest. He must be cutting across the buildings. Unless he changes course, we can meet him back at the main intersection." He turned around, and dramatically picked up speed, making the other two run to keep up.

"I've still got trouble believing you can brew up a vampire-detecting ripple potion from stuff old Chan sells," Speedwagon put a hand on his hat to keep it in place as his hair trailed behind him, "but after all else I've seen since meeting you, Gabriel, well." As they returned to the intersection, he suddenly stopped for a moment and wrinkled his nose. "Well dammit all, you're right!" he whispered, "there's a stench in the air alright. One as puts the usual London depravity right to shame."

Jonathan gave him a baffled look.

"This nose can smell evil, it can," Speedwagon said by way of explanation, gesturing to it while keeping it painfully wrinkled, "and the last time it sniffed anything anywhere near this bad, it was when…ah, never mind."

Jonathan cocked his head to the side. "You can smell evil?"

"It's not many who believe me when I first tell them about it, but there's many fewer who don't after knowing me a good while-"

"Hush!" Gabriel whispered harshly.

The other two closed their mouths, and looked across the snowy dunes and whirling flakes at where Gabriel was looking. A lone, furtive shadow, just barely darker than the space around it, was crossing the street. Like themselves, he was wearing a winter coat and scarf, and though it was hard to tell in the snow and darkness, Jonathan thought he had his hands in his pockets.

Gabriel put his hand over his cup and blew on it again. This time, Jonathan was actually at a loss to explain what happened with the ripples; they were sent outward toward the edges of the cup, but bounced back toward the center exclusively from the direction of the street ahead of them, where the man was crossing. Another chill came up from within Jonathan's chest, icier than the one in his fingers, ears, and face.

"What do we do?" he whispered at Gabriel.

"Confront him," Gabriel whispered back, closing the lid back onto the cup and screwing it tightly shut before replacing it in his cloak pocket. "If that's Jack, he'll think he has no reason to run from us." He straightened up, and cracked his knuckles on both fists. "I hope he has his mask on him, so we don't have to go looking for it afterward."

"Alright then," Speedwagon nodded, before flashing a sardonic half-smile. "I've got me some experience at creating the kind of situation you describe. You two big fellas take left and right, I'll head him off, and if he tries to suck my blood please kill him before he can get to me."

Before either of the others could stop him, Speedwagon took his first couple steps out into the street. Jonathan gave Gabriel a pleading look, but saw to his surprise that the hulking sorcerer had already turned his back and was flitting down the sidewalk much faster and more silently than anything with his bulk ever should have. Grimacing, Jonathan edged a bit further up the sidewalk in the other direction, moving halfheartedly into the street to close off the man's right. A moment later, the man stopped in the middle of the street, a few meters away from Speedwagon. Now that he was closer, Jonathan could see that their mark was a short, slightly portly man, with dark brown hair and a short, trim beard and moustache below his woolen hat.

"Do you need something?" the stranger asked. Through the snow, Jonathan saw Gabriel closing silently in on the man's far side. He nervously came a few steps closer himself, wondering if he really was just being hoodwinked into taking part in common banditry.

"Well, I might need something, depending," Speedwagon returned, taking off his hat and holding it in front of him. "Would you by any chance happen to be Jack the Ripper?"

The man gave Speedwagon a shocked, almost outraged glare.

"That's not very polite," he replied, voice low and controlled.

"Well, I'm just asking."

As Jonathan risked another, careful footstep forward, the bearded man suddenly looked to the side, locking his eyes on him. The eyes in question went wide, and Jonathan swore for a moment they were luminous, almost like a cat's. The man then looked the other way, where he saw Gabriel.

He turned back toward Speedwagon, who had taken a few steps backward. A long, low, hissing breath. Then he opened his mouth again, and Jonathan's heart froze through. He was parting his lips wider now, and Jonathan could see teeth more like a dog's than a man's. No, not a dog either; they were sharp and needle-shaped all the way into the sides of his mouth. More like a predatory fish, or a bat.

"Since you insist," Jack the Ripper replied through his mouthful of fangs. Speedwagon's eyes widened, and a tiny whimper escaped his throat as he saw the light glinting off of those two rows of jagged needles. "Yes, I am. And since you just had to raise that topic; while you three might not be my usual type, the streets have been awfully empty."

He took a step toward Speedwagon, and then pirouetted around with almost unbelievable speed and lunged toward Jonathan. Jonathan heard a warning cry from Speedwagon, but could barely register anything besides the oncoming cavern lined with gleaming stalagmites, and the two blazing, volcanic pits above it. Jonathan raised his fist, but it didn't connect. Instead, a sharp, whipping wind lashed through the air between his flesh and the glistening fangs, and the monster was repelled, nearly losing its footing as the snow was whipped into a frenzy and rose in a blinding vortex around it. Behind the snowy whirlwind, Jonathan could just barely make out the outline of Gabriel, approaching with his knees bent and arms held out to both sides, chains lashing wildly like octopus tentacles all around his head.

The thing that had a moment ago passed for human seemed to be regaining its footing despite the wind, and faster than Gabriel's approach. Jonathan did the only thing he could think to do, and punched it in the side of the head. The loud crack was followed by a discordantly high-pitched scream, almost more a whistle than a shriek. Jack the Ripper stumbled backward, and the wind vortex knocked him off his feet. After a moment, the blinding whirlwind of snow and sharply biting wind was gone, the snowflakes collapsing down onto the prone demon. An instant later, Gabriel was upon it. Jonathan was still blinking the snow out of his eyes, so all he could see was Gabriel's hands descending, then an explosion of hot liquid, a louder whistling scream, and then an almost earsplitting crunch.

And then, all was still.

Jonathan blinked the last of the melted snow out of his eyes, and raised his hands to the flecks of warm liquid that had landed on his face and the front of his coat. It was thicker than he expected, and not as hot as he felt it should have been. In front of him, Gabriel rose back to his feet. His cloak hung down wetly around his arms and legs. Some semi-liquid bits fell from his hands. On the snow beneath him, there was only a splatter and a mass of indistinguishable blackness above Jack's neck, as well as some flecks of what looked oddly like sharp metal.

Jonathan choked when he saw it. He gagged when the wind brought a whiff of the corpse's scent to his nostrils, worse than any rot or decay he'd ever smelled. When he saw that the body was still twitching and clawing at the air with its twisted fingers, however, was when he had to look away to avoid losing his dinner. He was even gladder to have done so when, a moment later, he heard two more of those crunches as Gabriel jammed his foot twice through the torso, after which its writhing died down to a limp wriggle. When he withdrew his foot, there were a couple of metal shards stuck in his boot. He looked down at them, his expression more bemused than anything else.

"That was…that...?" Speedwagon's eyes were wider than Jonathan had yet seen them, when he looked back at his fellow mortal. He was holding his hat up wardingly, and it looked like there was a ring of blades surrounding the brim. An insignificant detail, after what Jonathan had just witnessed.

"That was too easy," Gabriel's voice took over. His voice was too normal-sounding, after what he'd done. Jonathan and Speedwagon looked back at him. He was standing over the remains, looking distrustfully down at them as he wiped his hands against the sides of his cloak.

Speedwagon slowly craned his head back toward Gabriel. "If you'll pardon my asking," he said, "how difficult is it normally supposed to be?"

Gabriel kept his eyes on the remains. "It varies. Each vampire is different. But they have become stronger on average with every few sets of masks, and this one was weaker than I have fought in a long time."

Speedwagon finally blinked. "Well, that's a good sign then, isn't it?"

Gabriel shook his head slowly. "I do not think so. Some vampires are strong enough to turn their victims into weaker demons. More powerful vampires can animate more servants at a time. I am afraid this might not have been our real target."

"You're saying there's ANOTHER Jack the Ripper out here? An even WORSE one?"

"Maybe."

Jonathan looked warily out at the streetlamps and snow-covered rooftops. Where was he? It was as if the London he had visited throughout his life had split open, and he had fallen into another version of the city that had been hiding in some invisible netherworld beneath. No, actually that wasn't it at all. If his mother's mask, the antique that had hung from the wall in the Joestar foyer since before he could remember, was at the root of this, then what he thought of as the "normal" world had never actually existed at all.

"If that wasn't him. Jack. The real Jack," Jonathan said, hoping that putting words around this would help him process it, "then what should we be doing next?"

"Looking for the real mask wearer." Gabriel rolled up his gore-soaked sleeve and reached into his pouch to produce the flask again. As he pried off the cap and began swishing the liquid around and sheltering it with his free hand, Speedwagon padded through the snow toward Jonathan.

"You alright, Mr. Joestar? That creature got awfully close to you."

"I'm quite alright. Thank you." Jonathan held up his hand and looked at his own knuckles where he had punched Jack. There was a dull ache in them, and they looked slightly bruised. As if he had punched a wall rather than a man. Speedwagon looked like he was about to say something else, when a fresh voice cut through the snowy air.

"Who are you three…wait…Robbie?"

"That voice!" Speedwagon spun around so fast he almost fell down into the snow. "Eliza? Eliza Day!?" He raised his free hand and waved it energetically over his head.

Jonathan followed Speedwagon's eyes. A young woman was standing a little ways up the street, casting a long shadow from the streetlight behind her. She was just close enough that Jonathan could distinguish fair skin, long dark hair, and wide, bright eyes through the snowflakes and the gloom.

"Robbie!" The woman repeated. She took a few steps closer, and her look of surprise turned into a joyful smile. Speedwagon started to approach her himself, still waving and grinning. "Where the bloody hell have you been, girl? We were sure we'd seen the last of you!"

"Wait." Jonathan stepped up behind Speedwagon and placed a hand on his shoulder. As Speedwagon looked at him in confusion, Jonathan raised his voice. "Miss Day, was it? Perhaps I could lend you my coat. You must be dreadfully cold."

Eliza stopped her own approach, standing perhaps twenty feet in front of them. The freezing wind picked up, blowing her ebony hair up and around her smooth, swanlike shoulder. Aside from the purse hanging from her arm, she wore only a dress of thin, pale green cotton, and the wind blew its skirt halfway up her bare ankles. And yet, she wasn't shivering. Her hands hung at her sides, arms uncrossed.

"Oh." She bit her lip, looking over at him coyly. "Well, yes. I've learned to handle it over the years, but a coat would be lovely, good sir. Robert, I'm glad you've finally found yourself a companion with a bit of class."

She came closer, the nearer streetlamp illuminating her deep brown eyes and the fading red of the wild roses sewn to the low-cut neck of her dress. As she drew near, Speedwagon's nose wrinkled up, and he coughed, making her stop again, looking at him in doe-eyed confusion. Jonathan's eyes shifted over to Gabriel, who was holding out his flask. He looked back at Jonathan, and nodded grimly.

"Eliza," Speedwagon said, his expression changing as he took a step back and tensed up his arms again, "what have you been up to these last few weeks?"

Eliza blinked, cocking her head to the side as her hair fluttered back down around the pale luster of her neck. She looked like she was starting to speak, but then something else caught her eyes, and they narrowed. She clenched her jaw, and looked up from the splattered remains of Jack the Ripper at Gabriel, and then back at Jonathan and Speedwagon.

"Did you just kill Aaron?"

Her voice had gone as cold and biting as the wind that played around her hair and skirt. Her lips had fallen from their earlier smile into a thin, straight line.

"That was his name, then?" Jonathan asked. His own muscles were tight, and his heart pounding against his ribs as he stared the woman down.

"'Twas." She put her hands on her hips, and then locked her suddenly luminous and catlike eyes on Speedwagon. "You just take EVERYTHING from me, don't you Robert? You and your bitch sister."

"What?" Speedwagon blinked, his mouth hanging open. "Eliza, what…Clara housed and fed you even when you kept getting sick. I stole the medicine for your fever last year!"

"Yes." She almost sneered the word. "So you could put me back out on the streets again and keep this all going." Her smile returned, but it was a completely different expression than her previous, girlish one. It was wide, thin, and joyless, and seemed to harden her entire face around it into icy stone. "Not anymore. I'm putting all the working girls out of their misery now. To tell the truth, I'd been meaning to pay you and Clara a visit soon enough, and draw it out a little more in your cases." She looked back at the corpse. "That one was already doing God's work when I met him, though the dumb brute didn't realize it of course. That's why I took him on and made him better at it, after he mistook me for an easy mark."

Speedwagon's face had gone waxen. He looked nearly ready to faint. "Eliza, this isn't you."

"It's the new me, is what it is." She reached into the purse, and pulled out a flat, oval shaped object that gleamed stonily in the gaslight. "I was as stupid as every other five-pence bitch in this city. Couldn't even see your like for what it is." She raised the mask and held it before her face, its blank, marble eyes covering her own and its serene, fanged mouth overlaying hers. "And to think," she chuckled humorlessly, "I was actually disappointed once when you turned me down."

Jonathan felt like his heart had stopped beating at all. It was dark, but not too dark for him to recognize the artifact she was holding. Almost exactly like the one tucked inside the desk drawer in his study. Differing only in some of the minor detailing of the bangs and the carven rim.

She pressed the mask to her face, and a droplet of dark red appeared from each of her nails. As soon as blood touched stone, the five hidden blades – jointed and spike-tipped like the legs of a spider – swished out of the sides and top of the mask and punched into her skull from all sides, sending a chorus of muted crunching sounds over the street. She didn't fall when it pierced her head. She didn't even flinch. As her hands returned to her sides, the eyes and mouth of the mask lit up in a dull, glowing red, as did the fine geometric lines that ran along its edges. Jonathan felt like he was screaming, even with his teeth pressed together and his lips tight. My God. When I first saw the spikes, I was just glad I hadn't hurt myself with them. If I had had a shaving cut when I first touched my face to it, I wouldn't just have died. I'd have… He felt an almost manic urge to be back home. To get the skulking, deceptively handsome-faced invader as far from his house and family as possible.

"I'll decide what I'm doing with this city once there's no more like you and I left in it," Eliza's voice continued, muffled but decipherable, from behind the unmoving mask, "but first, I'm going to need me a new Jack the Ripper to help out. You broke it Robbie. Now you have to buy it."

Gabriel stepped forward, advancing over Aaron's remains, and pulled back his hood so that his chains hung free. "You see now, Jonathan." His voice was calm, but held a tension that Jonathan hadn't heard since he had flung the curtains open on him in his bedroom. "This is a stone mask at work. I am sorry about your friend, Speedwagon. There is only one thing we can do for her now."

Eliza raised her hand, and Aaron's corpse exploded. Gabriel, who had been standing right in front of the corpse, spun his body in place, leaning over the body and spreading out his arms and legs to shield Jonathan and Speedwagon. Jonathan heard Speedwagon's shriek of alarm, and a series of wet stabbing noises from Wamuu, before gasping in pain himself as his shoulder, forearm, and waist seized up around a trio of deep stabs. Two broken razor blades and an old darning needle, all covered in dripping black gore, had half-buried themselves in his flesh. Gabriel's body was stuck with at least ten. Speedwagon had been sheltered by both of the larger men and struck by no shards, but he was sprayed with Aaron's black blood nonetheless. Before Jonathan had finished blinking this new shower of gore out of his eyes or assessing the damage to his own forearm, waist, and shoulder, Eliza charged, streaking across the snow with her body bent forward almost double, hair trailing behind her and hands outstretched. From beneath each fingernail, another bit of metal gleamed.

A gust of air blew the snow around her up in a great wave, lifting her off her feet mid-leap and slamming her against the brick wall beside the sidewalk. Her blank, masked face turned in Gabriel's direction, as a muffled "What?" echoed out. While Jonathan was still struggling to decide what to do, Speedwagon jumped backward and threw his bowler hat like a discus. It cut through the falling snow and sliced across Eliza's chest, but she barely even seemed to notice. Jumping back to her feet, she crouched down like a wild animal and raised her hands at the advancing Gabriel. Her fingertips erupted in blood and shredded skin, and a volley of gore-covered carpenter's nails shot at Gabriel like bullets. Jonathan saw Gabriel fall down on his back, just in time to avoid the projectiles, and continue skidding toward his mark through the snow. Eliza leaped into the air just before the advancing bulk could connect, soaring over Jonathan's head in a wild arc of pale skin and green cotton before crunching the snow beneath her as she landed in the middle of the street. Gabriel was already standing back up, but Eliza had regained her bearings first. And now, Jonathan was the closest to her.

As the masked head came flying toward him, followed immediately by a whirlwind of flailing arms and clawed, bloody fingertips, Jonathan pulled back his uninjured right arm and punched her in the shoulder. Once again, that heavy impact as his knuckles crashed into something much harder than human flesh should be. It was not enough to knock her down, and an instant later Jonathan felt a new kind of agony as more nails came stabbing out through the skin of her shoulder, impaling two of his clenched fingers into the bone. Pain came roaring up his arm, making him cry out, as the woman retracted the nails and then wrapped her hands around Jonathan's shoulders and slammed him down onto his back with a strength many times too great for her slender frame.

"Idiot," she hissed from behind the mask as it filled Jonathan's vision, eyes, mouth, and engravings glowing like red hot iron, "didn't think this rose would have grown herself some thorns, did'ya?" Her ruined fingertips pressed themselves into his shoulders, and yet another kind of pain burned through him as they punched through his coat and into his skin. There was a tight, liquid sound, like water being sucked through a straw, and Jonathan felt his flesh go unnaturally tight around her fingers. Before he could even fully acknowledge the fact that his blood was being sucked out through her claws, Gabriel's shadow loomed up behind her, and Jonathan felt a higher jolt of pain followed by an immense relief as he kicked the monster off of him.

Gasping, Jonathan forced himself to sit up and look around him. The street was filled with white vortexes of whirling snow. Gabriel stood beside him, the chains of his headdress spinning and flailing like high-powered machinery as the sharp, loping shadow of Eliza leapt and tumbled around to avoid the blasts of wind. Jonathan saw the bestial outline, running on all fours now, with the red glare of the mask blazing toward him as she ducked under another air blast and moved back toward him. Willing himself to ignore the burning and numbness in his punctured fingers, Jonathan reached around his own body and pulled out the razor blade protruding from his left shoulder. Compared to the pain in his fingers, he barely even noticed the sting as it came out, or the wetness as blood flowed from the opened wound. With nearly the same motion, he threw the shard with as much strength as he could muster. It didn't seem to hurt her, when it buried itself in the crook of her neck just below one of the impaling legs of the mask, but it didn't need to. Her head reflexively flinched downward toward the impact, and she stumbled on her arms as it distracted her for the fraction of a second that Gabriel needed.

The mask muffled another roar of rage as an updraft lifted Eliza into the air, tossing her straight upward in a flurry of snow, blood, and flapping hair and cloth. Before she could descend, Gabriel streaked over to her, grabbed the mask in both hands, and kicked her in the chest. Another sickening crack as her collarbone gave way, and then an even worse cracking as the spokes of the mask were torn free of Eliza's skull. Jonathan flinched away from the sight, shutting his eyes and trying to banish that glimpse of ripped bone and exposed brain, but he knew it would be back to vex his dreams. When he opened his eyes again, she had landed on her side and was raising her hands to her exposed face, legs thrashing wildly and kicking up more snow than Gabriel's winds. She threw back her ventilated head and screamed, louder and shriller than even Aaron had. Pain shot through Jonathan's head, and he was forced to put his hands to his ears and grit his teeth against the scream.

Through the stars dancing before his vision, Jonathan saw Speedwagon running toward the thrashing demoness, raising his hat and putting the force of his charge into the throw. Jonathan and Gabriel both shouted for him to stay back, but it was too late. The hat left his hand, and embedded itself in Eliza's head, jerking it back. The hat remained stuck in place, protruding from her like a grisly growth, but it didn't seem to impede her in the least. Rather, it snapped her out of her pained flailing, and brought her attention back to Speedwagon, who was now dangerously close. Gabriel's chains began moving again, but Eliza opened her mouthful of batlike fangs and spat another volley of crimson-trailed nails and sewing needles at him, forcing him to duck out of the way and let his chains go limp. She continued toward Speedwagon.

Moving faster than he ever had, forcing the cold and pain and numbness out of his world entirely, Jonathan rolled up onto his feet and ran toward them. A gust of wind pushed him from behind, as Gabriel realized what Jonathan was doing and helped him along. Jonathan was almost flying as much as running as he passed the street sign, using all eight of his working fingers to grab and pull it out of the pavement with a groaning crack, and then brought the broken point of the metal shaft down over his head into Eliza's ankle as she leaped for Speedwagon. Just as her fingers closed around his coat and slammed him into the ground, she too fell as the signpost pierced through flesh, bone, snow, and pavers, pinning her leg to the ground. Jonathan collapsed himself, stumbling over his own feet as he came to a stop. Eliza was stuck in place, but she had both hands on Speedwagon now, and was clutching the struggling man against her body.

"Stop!" She barked, twitching her gory, broken head back and forth between Jonathan and Gabriel, Speedwagon's hat still sprouting from just below her eye. "I can crack his neck in a heartbeat, I can!" She grabbed Speedwagon's throat and squeezed it, causing him to choke and gasp desperately for air just as he had been about to speak himself. "You can have him back, but you'll have to let meaahhh…."

She stopped, and almost choked herself, as a stony crack sounded. Jonathan pulled his head out of the snow, and looked at Gabriel. He was holding half of the stone mask. The rest was in fragments in the snow at his feet, and the brick wall beside him was freshly gouged. Eliza shook. Her mouth opened and closed, cutting its own lips on her extended fangs.

"There's no letting you go now," Gabriel said, advancing slowly back across the street. He reached up and pulled a sewing needle out of his cheek, almost nonchalantly. "You won't live longer than another night. Maybe two, if you don't exert yourself." He dropped the remaining half of the mask and stepped on it, crunching it to pieces as well.

She bared her teeth at him, keeping the struggling, choking Speedwagon's neck wrapped in her hands. "How do you claim to know that?"

Gabriel shook his head. "I know much more about the masks than you do. I have fought your kind more times than I could be bothered to count. I know you can feel your strength abandoning you. It is over. Let him go."

She choked out a hoarse, spiteful laugh, spitting out a little more blood. Her hair was heavy and clotted with blood now, sticking to her torn dress and ragged skin. The wounds on her head and neck looked smaller than they had a minute ago, as if they'd already begun to heal, and the pieces of her collarbone had moved halfway back into position. "I'll just have to drink ALL of Robbie's blood, then, won't I?" Her fingers closed tighter around his neck. His face began to turn purple, and his writhing became involuntary. "That ought to keep me going longer."

"You will still die."

"But at least I'll take this son of a bitch with me!"

Jonathan barely had the searing agony of his fingers under control, but he was just lucid enough to follow the conversation. Not knowing if he was being misguided, or even just outright foolish, he nonetheless took in a sharp breath and spoke. "Miss Day?"

Her head shot around to glare at Jonathan. The hat finally fell out of her face, leaving a bone-deep gash in its wake. She didn't seem to be healing anymore.

"I can't pretend to understand how you feel," Jonathan said, breathing heavily against the pain in his fingers and arm as he lay in the snow, head just barely raised above it, "and I won't try to. But this I can assure you; killing Speedwagon will only make things worse."

Eliza gave him a look that burned with contempt. But, Jonathan continued.

"You said you're trying to help the others. Your…colleagues. To end their suffering. But, what do you think will happen to the ladies you worked with, if Mr. Speedwagon were to perish?"

She rolled her glimmering eyes. "They'll be free of Mr. Speedwagon. That's what."

"Yes, ma'am. But they'll still be alive, won't they?" Jonathan groaned, and forced himself up onto his hands, so he could look Eliza straight in the eyes. "They'll be in the same situation, but with less money, and less protection. Who's going to steal the medicine the next time one gets sick? That won't be a merciful death, if it comes to that. It'll be a very long, slow one." He paused for a moment. Struggling with himself as much as the pain of his wounds. "I've…my father's been in and out of the hospital for almost two years. I hope he's getting better, but I don't know for how long. He's in pain, every day. Sometimes he can't eat, or sleep, or speak, when his episodes are at their worst. There'll be…probably more of that, for Cecily and the others. Someone new might be taking over Ogre Street, and do you think they'll be better than Robert and Clara, or worse?"

Eliza was motionless. Unblinking. In her hands, Speedwagon was starting to go limp. Behind her, Gabriel was quietly watching.

"I'll…I'll make you a promise, Miss Day. Let him go, and the others will hear you died fighting. And you really will have. They…they don't need to know the details. Everyone will think you died a saint."

Eliza's arms were beginning to tremble. Her jaw clenched tighter and tighter.

"If you kill him, then that will mean you weren't actually doing any of this to free anyone. You were just doing it because the mask made you do it. You can decide whether or not that's actually the truth. You…you always wanted to be free, didn't you? Try to think and decide…what YOU actually want. What you think is actually right. The things you told myself and Mr. Speedwagon before."

Her lips trembled. Her fingers twitched. Her many wounds were bleeding more profusely now, and her skin beginning to discolor. She looked down at Speedwagon, head lolling down into the snow, unconscious. A quiet, high-pitched whine emerged from her throat.

"Please, Miss Day. You spoke of mercy. Let your final act be one of mercy."

Her hands relaxed and fell off of Speedwagon's throat. Her face sank down into the snow, surrounded by tangled and blood-soaked black hair. Speedwagon's throat was redder than his face, but his chest began rising and falling again as soon as she let go, and a moment later his eyelids started to twitch. Gabriel stepped over to him and pulled him gently out of Eliza's reach.

"It…it's almost dawn, isn't it?" Eliza asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.

Jonathan looked eastward. The sky was beginning to lighten over the rooftops. "Yes, Miss Day."

Speedwagon began opening his eyes. Gabriel helped him turn over, so he could retch. As he began moving his limbs again, Gabriel stepped over beside the buildings, placing himself in the shadows. Jonathan narrowed his eyes, but kept most of his attention on Eliza.

"I died fighting." Her voice was weaker, starting to sound as ragged as she looked. "That's…well…"

"You killed Jack the Ripper," Jonathan forced himself to smile.

She laughed. It was a normal laugh, this time. One with humor in it rather than malice. Jonathan found himself smiling along with her, though he was in too much pain to laugh as well.

"By god, I did!" She continued giggling, shaking her head back and forth. "I mean, you killed him too, but I did it first!"

He nodded, still smiling.

The first real sunrays came down over the rooftops. There was a flash of heat, as if Jonathan was suddenly facing a bonfire, and he felt the snow soften and melt beneath his body. Crackling yellow flames engulfed Eliza, and then there was only a handful of needles, a tattered green dress and a pile of charred bones and ashes.



TO BE CONTINUED ->

 

[radioxaxa]

Damn, that death was surprisingly sad. Though the fact their is more than one type of Mask just means more trouble is right around the corner. Hopefully Gabriel can teach JoJo and Speedwagon another technique, aside from Hamon, too deal with Vampires.