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The first time that Enrico Pucci visits Egypt and sees Dio again, he finds himself wrapped in an embrace both hot and cool at once, not unlike Egypt’s desert temperatures. It’s a new moon that night, Enrico remembers reading, and the air is chilly.
“Was your trip bearable?” Dio asks like Enrico is an old friend, and in a way, Enrico supposes that he is. The voice so gently wrapped in British origin is something that Enrico remembers too clearly from the river. He still wants to know how Dio spoke to him, and he wants to understand his abilities, but all he does is nod silently and lift his arms to return a hug he wasn’t expecting.
He feels the eyes of a bird, or something more than a bird, on the back of his head, before Dio ushers the creature away with a lazy motion of his hand.
“Come, come,” Dio says, and he turns back inside. A man dressed in white takes Enrico’s bag without a word.
“To the tower,” Dio instructs. “Leave it at the door.” Then, he turns to Enrico. “There is a room beside mine, a large one. You’ll be comfortable there.”
“T-thank you.”
It’s the first time that Enrico has spoken since arriving, and he’s surprised at the way he stutters the words. “The trip was fine,” he adds, lifting a hand to his neck and rubbing at the arrow’s wound.
Dio smiles. “You’ve met your Stand, then.”
“Met?”
Another smile, and a little hum like Dio is vastly looking forward to something. “It may take some time for a full manifestation, then.”
The back of Enrico’s neck twinges, and he rubs at it with one palm. A Stand, he thinks. “Do you have one?”
“Of course.” Dio’s confidence both bothers Enrico and intrigues him at once.
“You did this to me?”
“No, the Arrow did.”
Enrico narrows his eyes, even as Dio slips a hand around Enrico’s waist and ushers him towards a massive stairwell leading up from the foyer. “But you gave it to me,” Enrico insists, because no matter how intimidating this tower of a man may think he is, Enrico is only cautiously impressed. “You knew what would happen, back in the chapel. You healed my foot. Is that your ability?”
Dio actually chuckles, and the sound chills Enrico to the bone in such a way that he wants more.
“No, not quite.”
Enrico needs answers, but it’s clear that he’s only going to get them in Dio’s time, not his. This is the way things are going to be now, he supposes, and he feels like a clueless student of the Lord all over again. He thinks that he’ll be good at this, at dealing with Dio, because Enrico’s entire life and career and core of his soul revolves around faith. If he can believe in God, can he not also believe in this man named Dio?
“Do you drink?”
The same voice that taunted Enrico beneath the deadly precipice of that damned cliff interrupts his musings and brings him back to whatever reality this is.
“Er, no, although I suppose I’m not opposed.”
Dio is already pouring himself a glass of red wine as easily as if it were a reflex, and Enrico sniffs at the smell that seems perhaps more mineral than wine should be. He carries the glass with him as he glides so smoothly over the cobblestone floor that he might as well be floating.
“There is something you’ll like better,” Dio says without any other explanation, and he reaches into a low cabinet nestled between a dusty bookshelf and what Enrico presumes is Dio’s bed. With interest, Enrico takes note of each streak of cleanliness on the shelves, a tell-tale sign of books that Dio has pulled more recently.
Before he can ask of Dio’s literary preferences, a crystalline goblet is pressed into his hand, and Dio clinks the glasses together.
“To gravity,” he says, and Enrico swears that he sees the man wink.
Enrico inclines his head and brings the drink to his lips. Then, before drinking, he says, “I understand now, what you meant back at the chapel that day.”
Dio lifts his legs onto the mattress where he sits, leans against the ornate headboard, and crosses his ankles. Then, he pats the space next to him.
Enrico settles for sitting on the edge of the bed and facing the doorway. He swears he can still feel that bird’s beady eyes on the back of his head, gaze piercing through the wound the arrow left on the back of his neck.
“Tell me, then. What do you understand?”
A dimple of displeasure sits at the tip of Enrico’s grimace. “I won’t explain only for you to criticize my interpretation. Trust me. I get it.” When he glimpses Dio’s bewilderment from the corner of his eye, Enrico realizes that this is a man not accustomed to being told “no.” He had better get used to it now. Just because Enrico has come to him doesn’t mean that he plans to wallow in servitude or cower at Dio’s feet.
“I do trust you. And I’m glad you’ve come to me.”
Dio doesn’t express condolences for Perla’s death, but Enrico thinks he feels an invisible air of compassion that expresses, well, something like sympathy.
“Does it still hurt?” Dio asks.
“What?”
“Your neck. Exit wounds can be quite the ordeal. Mine was.” Dio actually laughs to himself, a noise softer than Enrico has heard from him yet. “For only a moment.”
Enrico’s left foot twitches in his shoe. “It’s all right,” he says. “It aches, I suppose. I only have to change the bandage once in the evening, now.”
“Have you changed it today?”
Enrico realizes that no, he hasn’t. The time zones have confused him, and he suddenly hopes that he doesn’t look as jet-lagged as he feels.
A tiny thud behind him signals Dio leaving his glass on the bedside table, and there’s a rustling of sheets. Just as Dio’s fingers brush against the back of Enrico’s neck, a man with a physique not unlike Dio’s hovers in the doorway before kneeling. “A bandage, please, and a bowl of water. Some tape.”
Enrico has a feeling that the man’s appearance was less than a coincidence. Maybe that is Dio’s ability, then. Maybe he has more than one.
“Is it possible to have more than one, er, Stand?” Asking the question distracts him from the way that fingers cool like marble work gently to peel away the dressing, then the colder breath drifting across his neck the moment the wound is exposed and Dio leans in closer.
“Can a man have more than one soul?”
Enrico blinks and counts his primes. “Literally, no. Figuratively, I suppose the answer would be yes.”
“And so it is with Stands.”
The moment that Enrico’s wound is exposed and he is reminded of the coppery scent of blood, a number of facts come together into a picture more and more clear. Dio’s beverage is full of minerals, but not the kind wine is known for. The thickness of it and the way it clings to the side of Dio’s glass is too unusual, even for a Port.
Enrico would cross himself if he thought it would do him any good—Dio’s fingers push into skin like it’s putty or nothing at all, and there is a hint of ecstasy and feeling drained and loved and hated all at once. While Enrico can’t see what happens behind him, he knows, and it excites him more than scares him.
What strange land has he landed himself within? To think that the world has been occupied with individuals like this. Enrico’s spine goes rigid when Dio’s mouth presses against him and when fang tips graze the surface of Enrico’s skin just enough to make his hair stand on end. For the first time, he wonders if perhaps Dio is a devil sent to tempt him with power, if perhaps this isn’t such a good idea after all—but would Enrico feel such peace if it were a demon ridding him of life force?
This, somehow, is different.
Enrico remains frozen when the man with hair to his hips returns, setting the items that Dio requested on the bedside table and glaring at Enrico with narrowed eyes that seem to lead into a void of envy and hatred and distrust.
Dio murmurs an acknowledgment which Enrico feels buzzing against the back of his neck, then shoos the man away with a wave of his hand not unlike the gesture he used to rid them of the guard bird in the courtyard.
Finally, Dio retracts tendriled fingers and relinquishes his mouth’s grip.
On instinct, Enrico brings his hand to his neck and grazes over tingling skin only to find smoothness, not even a scar. His lips part, and he glances at the bandages on the nightstand.
“For the blister on your foot,” Dio explains. “It was a long walk through Cairo, I suppose. You should have worn more comfortable footwear.”
“You drank from me.”
“Yes,” Dio admits freely. “But I fixed it.”
“But you ate a part of me.”
Dio shrugs and leans back in his bed. “And it was delicious.”
“Is that your servant?”
“Something like that,” Dio answers.
“He hates me.”
“He’s jealous.”
Enrico scoffs. The notion seems ridiculous. “Why?”
Then, Dio pierces him with a gaze sharper than the arrowhead, more forceful than Enrico’s pleas for the police to give him Perla’s body because how dare they—
“He is jealous, my dear Enrico Pucci, because he knows I have chosen you as the one who will help me fix this world. Only you can aid me. You do believe in gravity, now? That there is a reason that we met?”
Enrico reaches past the bandages for a blister Dio shouldn’t know about and grips at the stem of his wine glass with trembling fingers.
Lips wet with wine and eyes ablaze with something unlike anything else Enrico has ever felt, he answers, “Yes. I do.”
The rest of the days at the mansion pass in much the same way, and Enrico is more reluctant to leave than he’d like to admit. With Dio, he thinks that he is finding purpose, and he thinks that things make sense.
There is a second visit, then a third, and each time Enrico returns to the Everglades he leaves a piece of his soul behind in Egypt. He is aware of how he and Dio read each other’s mind more and more often, how they begin to complete one another’s sentences and how, whenever Enrico calls Dio on the phone, Dio says that he’s been thinking about him.
Eventually, there is a day when a phone call doesn’t come. Another day. Another.
And Enrico knows something is wrong. He proceeds with his plans regardless—this is Dio, and perhaps it’s a test or some other attempt at a social experiment. Dio likes those kinds of things. It’s what makes him so interesting.
Pet Shop doesn’t greet him. The young man with the doll collection and an obsession with video games is nowhere to be found. And when Enrico climbs the solemn stairs to Dio’s bedroom in the mansion’s tower, there is nothing.
Enrico knows what’s happened—he knows he has lost again, but he seeks out Dio’s coffin regardless.
When he cries, he tastes the salt of the tears that cling to his upper lip, and he feels like he’s drowning—Lord help me.
He realizes bitterly that he hasn’t shed enough tears since Perla, because he had Dio and Dio was all that mattered. Enrico had hidden in the hulking shadow of him and had let himself forget, evolve, grow, and change, and now he feels stagnant again, the same way that the weight of Perla’s body in his arms and the water in his shoes threatened to pull him to the bottom of the river, too.
He thinks about Heaven, and he wonders if Dio is there.
If Dio is, and if Perla is beside him, he wants to go.
Better yet, he thinks he’ll bring Heaven to Earth—it’s what Dio would have wanted, and Enrico thinks he finally understands the gravity heavy within him.