Work Text:
Always as a child, Straizo had felt intrigued by danger. The tremors of an earthquake, the sharp edge of a blade, the cold killer's intent in the eyes of a snake. Of course, he felt fear for such things just the same as any other child but time after time, the fear would do nothing but compliment his wonder and awe.
Straizo was four years old when he saw his first tornado. The tornado was just air, just violent winds with no will of its own. And yet when the twister touched the earth, little Straizo felt like he had witnessed the descent of a deity.
When it sucked him into it, he hit his head on a vase and blacked out. When he awoke he was in a field thrown in disarray by the storm, and not a single bone in his body was broken. He was well enough to wander back to town. When his family found him, they called it a miracle, called him a miracle child.
He felt even then that that was not true. He was meant to experience that, meant to know the difference between a miracle and a whim of fate. That twister was a being that was neither malevolent nor benevolent, a puppet of fate.
All it sought was its own continued existence, the same as any living creature, but in its existence all it wrought was destruction. And Straizo refused to believe no matter how slight, that destruction was purely a force of evil. Destruction could mean the severance of binding chains or dismantling of threats to one's success as much as it could mean death and wreckage. Destruction was a chaotic force and Straizo, no matter how reserved he seemed, had always connected deeply with chaos.
However evil, malevolence was one thing that ground Straizo's gears. For Straizo, evil was the willful destruction of great amounts of potential, whether the potential was locked within a person, place, or ideology didn't matter. Tornados and great blazes destroyed some potential as well, yes, but they had no intent in doing so.
Their existence simply spawned destruction and destruction spawned death just as much as it spawned renewal. They were at times the test of which streams of potential were worth more than others. Evil was always something so strange to him. It had always made the underside of his flesh itch with a feeling that was different from the feeling of fear. It perplexed him.
A person that hurt innocents for fun, had the disregard for life, and wrought the utter destruction, of a natural disaster, and yet had the petty intent and emotions of a human. One could not be both, and so he could not help but feel repulsed by such people even as he was also attracted. It was an interesting puzzle, his feelings surrounding those kinds of people. He did not care if destruction amused them. He cared when death and destruction became a bid for attention, a perverted dance for the eyes of the masses instead of a casual fact of life or byproduct of their existence.
Straizo was eight years old when he first watched a person die in front of him. It was his great-grandmother. She withered in her bed at the age of 96. At the funeral, the people around him whispered about what a good fulfilling life she had. They'd murmured about how good it was to die old as she had. He by contrast had wanted to cry, both for her and himself. It had seemed like only yesterday that she'd been teaching him meditative poses, cooking him hearty meals, throwing him out of the estate to make friends, and living life just fine.
But then age had started to wear on her bones. She'd stopped cooking first, having lost the majority of her ability to taste anyways. Then she stopped meditating with him, always with a groan about her aching bones. Then she had stopped throwing him out to make friends, seeming to enjoy it more when Straizo would spend more time inside with her instead of outside where she could not follow.
In the weeks leading up to her death, Straizo was nearly glued to her bedside. Intrigued by the process of her death as per his nature and yet horrified at the deterioration in his once lively great-grandmother. It was like watching moss or fungus eating a person alive from the inside out. His great-grandmother softened and then sagged. She stopped eating.
"You have to eat Great-grandmama. You'll never get better otherwise."
"You and I both know the end is near my dear. But never worry my miracle child. We'll never be apart for long."
She had no fear of death, she always said kindly, telling him not to worry. Always asking for such impossible things. Then she stopped talking as often.
"She won’t speak to me. She won’t speak to anyone anymore. She takes such short and shallow breaths like just existing is painful for her."
"She needs to rest and recuperate."
It took too much energy to speak, the doctors had said. And then she had stopped breathing.
"Great-grandmama?"
"..."
Straizo had been there to see it when the final breath escaped her. He had been watching intently, fascinated yet horrified, intrigued yet always burning with the question, was this going to happen to him?
Straizo had always loved danger but he loved the quick kind, the explosive and destructive kind. He liked the way tornados disappeared with a flourish, the way tsunamis ended with a mighty crash, and the way great blazes died with acres of smoke above them, like the souls of the blazes were being sucked into the heavens. He liked the way heroes died with purpose and villains with wild denial. He liked the thrashing, the screaming, the vying for survival.
He didn't like the quiet kind of death though it also intrigued him. He didn't like the creeping of illness into one's bones. He didn't like the dismissal of pain to make another happy. He didn't like the quiet last breath of the old and sick.
All things die as all things must but if they must, could it not be explosive? Could it not be dramatic? Could it not be memorable? In the days after her death, after his great-grandmother’s skeleton had been picked clean by the vultures that circled around his home, the estate had been quiet and gloomy. His parents stuck together like they loved each other, and like they loved him. But afterward, everyone adjusted and it was like nothing had ever happened. They stopped pretending that they were capable of love.
His father went back to filling the void of the love he had never felt from his mother with other women. His mother went back to mindlessly working with her role as the lady of the house in order to avoid the man who never listened to her. They both went back to ignoring him.
Straizo was the only one who stayed quiet and gloomy. He was the only one that really remembered. He realized one day, months later that he held his great-grandmother's life in his hands, in his memory. Once he forgot her or died she would really truly die.
He wondered to himself silently in his, too still home, lying like a corpse in a bed touched by death, if the same would happen to him. Would he wither, and soften, and sag? Would he stop eating, stop talking, stop breathing? Would he slip through the thin membrane separating life from death and be soon forgotten? Would nothing about him ever matter?
The answer was of course yes. As long as he continued to live he would eventually grow old and with age came softening, and sagging, and a death separated only by a breath. An existence perpetuated only by those who deigned to keep him in their mind.
From the time thereafter Straizo had devolved into a frenzy. Looking into the occult, the spiritual, the everything in order to prolong his life. No, incorrect. In order to prolong his youth. His parents would throw him the barest pitting glance whenever they found him devouring the books of the library at unholy times of night.
As he would sit there, sleep deprived, his muscles would soften, his eyes would sag and he would slip through the membrane between sleep and wakefulness in between the course of a breath. Slipping into a dreamless sleep in such a way felt like a prelude to his own looming death, his own cackling mortality.
Straizo did not fear death, he feared dying old and useless. He would do anything that it took to prevent that. And if he could not prevent it then he would at least push back against it. Eventually, the answer he sought came not in the form of a book but in watching a demonstration of a power called Hamon healing someone. He was in the streets alone with a crowd, watching, waiting for what exactly he did not know, but he felt anticipatory.
The feeling proved right when he saw the sparks, like lightning, bursting up the man's hands. The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention. His cold glacier-like blue eyes greedily sucked in the image of the energy. The nerves on his body took the way the air sparked and crackled and burned it into his memory. He was ten years old and for the first time since he'd turned eight and saw his great-grandmother wither away, he felt hope. He had approached the man after the crowd had had their fill of him and asked him where he had learned such a thing and whether it could prolong one's youth. The man had mentioned a specific mountain and warned against trying to learn Hamon for a purpose as selfish as wanting to prolong his youth.
"You're young enough. You don't need to extend your youth. The way of Hamon is for people who wish to rid the world of monsters." The man had leaned in close as if telling a dark secret. "Monsters that feast upon flesh and rip apart families."
Straizo had thanked him for the information and then went back home to pack. The man hadn't understood. That was okay. Straizo never expected him to.
He packed the essentials including all of his expensive jewelry for later reselling. He didn't bother to say goodbye to his parents when he left. They were inconsequential to him and his goals. They had never really mattered to him just like how he had never mattered to them. He did however visit his great-grandmother's final resting place before leaving. He wasn't being sentimental, it was just on the way to the mountain. And he thought his great-grandmother’s spirit would like to see him off as he left all he had ever known to meet his destiny.
When Straizo arrived at the mountain and met Master Tonpetty, he expressed his desire to learn Hamon and when asked about his reasoning said something about his family being devoured by a monster. A half-truth. Who would dare to say that death was not a monster? Master Tonpetty believed him with little more than a slight narrow of his ancient eyes but warned him that he was probably too young to make use of his teachings immediately. Mere months later he had learned the basics.
"Your body and mindset are both completely suited to learning Hamon. I expect great things in your future."
The master said that he had an aptitude that suited learning Hamon. Straizo felt infinitely grateful to his body for granting him at least that mercy. He complimented his talent with sheer determination to do better. The others tried hard as well but they were not as aware of the snapping jaws of death nipping at their heels.
Through the lessons and lectures and commanderie, Straizo grew as an individual. Friendship had always been something he would put on the back burner, something he said he would get around to but knew he never would. But in the temple filled with dozens of people like him, people above the ordinary, people automatically worth his time, he was never alone.
He had not known loneliness in his childhood and had always done well on his own, but even he had to admit that it was better to not be alone at times. When death clacked its skeletal teeth, he could remind himself that it chased not him alone.
He was the closest with a man named Dire. The loudly outspoken man had returned to the temple from a years-long mission when Straizo was 15. He entered Master Tompetty's meditation room with dark eyes and trembling fists. Instantly Straizo knew that they had both given the same story to Master Tompetty, but Dire had not lied by omission. His premonition proved right when he asked the man himself straight after morning meditation.
Dire had joined the Order when a vampire had done away with half of his family. He had killed that vampire after hunting him down for years on end. And had returned to the vampire’s minions having done away with the other half of his family. Dire was in many ways a living tragedy, but Straizo could not relate to this crisis he had used as a cover for his selfishness. He could not even emphasize.
But what he could do was listen. And listen he did, day and night, week after week, month after month he listened, contributing hardly a word in between Dire's long emotion-filled tangents. Replace him with a sunflower and you'd get around the same experience.
But for some reason, Dire seemed to appreciate his listening and before he knew it, people would see them and call them the best of friends. And Straizo could admit that it was true. He never talked as much, worked as well or reacted as strongly to anyone other than Dire. It was like they were brothers. And Straizo found that he did not mind that at all.
He had another friend in Baron William Zeppeli. He was a strange man, and just as focused as Dire. He never talked much about his life at home, preferring to live in the moment. And if anyone mentioned cooking or wine he was there even if he wasn’t wanted. A wild and weird character was what he was. But his presence pleased Straizo because he stood for mankind.
While Straizo was much more invested in nature as a whole, in the monastery, he gained a budding interest in his fellow man. People could be so interesting, he had found. And men like Zeppeli and Dire were the most interesting. Tragedy followed them like a cat after its prey of choice, stalking, pouncing, and then teasing until it was ready to swallow them whole. Tragedy was a beautiful kind of curse, one that Straizo loved to observe in others. One had to have a brilliant fire to not be drowned by it at every waiting second, to keep going for what they believed to be right through the frigid waters of hell. In all his life Straizo had never seen any man have a brighter fire than those two.
That asertion turned into a lie when he met Jonathan Joestar. That man was in his own way like the opposite of a natural disaster. If the natural world was one side of a coin then Straizo guessed that Jonathan who perfectly represented Man in all its rebellious nature was the other. If destruction was the natural state of the world, the tendency of all things to entropy into nothingness, then creation was the most sophisticated spit in the face of the natural world.
Jonathan in all his polite mannerisms and fighting spirit aimed at a personal monster bent on terrorizing the world, was the very spirit of rebellion against nature and the very avatar of humanity. Straizo could not help but feel intrigued by him, this man who so strongly opposed what he found so very beautiful. In Jonathan's fight, Straizo finally found beauty also in humanity.
It all nearly came crashing down the second he met him, Dio, and came so very close to throwing it all away at that very moment. Dio was nearly impossible to describe. He could rave and rave about him for hours, days, and his words would not nearly be enough to describe all of him.
Dio was the embodiment of a natural disaster, the face of the energy he had craved since young. His every movement, his mere existence brought dread into the hearts of onlookers. He killed and maimed like a spoiled child would play with and throw away toys. His power, his allure, and his youth were all deepened and broadened by the stone mask. He was beautiful in the way a great blaze was beautiful, burning its way through everything without a care, its only thought being to consume.
He signified everything that Straizo so dearly wished to gain. Eternal youth being at the front. Vampires Straizo had seen before, but never had he seen a sane vampire, one that wasn't a mindless monster, one that oozed sophistication like Dio did. Dio represented that it was possible. He made the temptation unbearable.
His movements were graceful, winding, and unpredictable like the fastest of twisters. Like the twister that took him, and flung him, but did not kill him. Dio's voice felt like thinly spun spider silk ensnaring within itself, a sparrow. And his eyes, oh his eyes were two drops of fire straight from the sun, burning within glass balls sealed in his skull. They burned and sizzled and growled like they were the gates of hell themselves. Beasts far crueler than demons lurked within that gaze, just barely restrained. Even with the aura of pure destruction that emanated from him, the true extent of his wickedness was still restrained. Still locked up. Still vying for freedom.
He was too much. The force of him, the sight of him, the mere knowledge of him was too much. It attracted something in Straizo that he thought that he had long since buried since he started his new life. He thought that he could be forever content with the morbid beauty of tragedy and of mankind itself. He had never meant for the roots of that lie to be ripped from his flesh.
The only thing that held him back from joining the vampire, that spared his friends the betrayal, was the sheer force of his repulsion for everything else that Dio stood for. It was true that his very existence sparked destruction. It was true that he was as powerful and graceful as a twister and as wild as a great blaze. It was even true that he walked with, spoke with, and breathed dramatics.
However, he killed with malevolent intent thicker than anything that Straizo had seen before. On the matter of intent, even a miserable zombie would be closer to the ideal of a natural disaster than Dio. He was simply too malicious. To be a perfect natural disaster, Dio needed to get to the point where killing was as easy and inconsequential as breathing.
As he was now he took too much delight in it, took too much delight in showing and flaunting his cruelty to others. He perverted the very idea of nature. Was it a factor in all vampires? Did putting on the mask automatically turn one evil? Did it turn one into such a perverted ideal? That was a risk that Straizo was not yet desperate enough to take.
Dio was so close to the ideal but he wasn't quite there yet. Not quite. It was that fact that irritated Straizo, that made a thick hatred brew within him. For a perfectionist like him, that "not quite" might as well have been a personal insult to him and everything he found beautiful. His awe and disgust battled within him, but in the end, he had always been a gloomy creature, unwilling to let himself love, and so his hatred won.
He escaped from Dio's charm, just barely, by the skin of his teeth and nobody was ever the wiser about his inner turmoil. He liked it like that. It was better like that. When Dio died the first time he felt a sinking feeling in his gut. It felt a bit like relief.
Dio was gone and so the status quo could be reinstated. Dio was gone and so there would never be a reason to fight with himself again. Dio was gone so he could look in awe at honorable men like Jonathan instead. Dio was gone and so everything was fine… until Dio came back and all word of him was lost yet again.
Until an honorable man like Jonathan was lost to the sea while he could bet an eye that Dio had survived again. Until he started to write in journals about his life and the vampire called Dio. Until he held within his arms a life caught in the path of a natural disaster and knew that he had to repent and honor the fallen Avatar of Man with her upbringing. And so he raised her with guilt, repentance, and honor as his motivation. Some would say that guilt was a terrible reason to raise a child but Straizo had always had terrible reasons to do good things. He raised little Elizabeth with as much love and care a cold man like him could muster. He watched her grow up and at the same time, watched himself grow old.
It was nothing at first, just a stray wrinkle here or there. It was nothing at first, just some loosened skin. It was nothing at first, just some tired, uncooperative bones. It was nothing at first, just some unruly gray hairs that refused to grow back black. It was nothing. It was nothing. It was nothing. It was nothing until it was something.
Until Straizo looked at himself in the mirror one day and saw a man that he did not recognize. Until he could no longer ignore the way his face wrinkled, or the way his skin slightly sagged, or the way his joints protested, or the way the gray hair always grew back. Until he could no longer ignore the fact that he was a man, one foot already in the grave and the other inching ever closer, day by day. The worst part was that he could feel it happening, day by day as his skin folded, and his bones grew more brittle, and his hair grew wilder, and as he rotted to death from the inside.
And the maddening cackle of his giggling mortality grew louder and louder, demanding more attention as he helplessly drew ever nearer and nearer to the fate that entrapped his great-grandmother. Ever nearer to the fate that awaited all things that bathed in the sunlight. Entropy of the highest order. The disintegration of life. The shameful end of it all. His mortality cackled and cackled as every step drew him nearer to it. It cackled as every meditation session delayed it a bit more so that the torture would stretch on. It cackled as he went on another mission that could end with him dead as a withered old man despite all his efforts. It stopped cackling when he put on the mask.
There was silence, peace. It was ecstasy. He was alone with himself again as he had been before he witnessed his great-grandmother's death. No more memories haunting his every dream. No more frenzied lonesome nights after catching a glance of himself in the mirror. No more wrinkles, or tired bones, or wild gray hair. No more withering, and softening, and sagging. No more quiet death separated only by a breath. No more rotting to death from the inside like some miserable sack of meat.
There was power thrumming through his every vein, fire burning within his skull, and a lightness in his step that belonged to beings, not of the earth. He was strong and quick, and as sturdy as an old old oak. He was was limitless, breathless, like the earth had melted down and flowed into his eyes; like the universe thrummed vibrantly within his veins; like he was the only thing to ever be alive. It was beautiful. He was beautiful. Finally, he was free. He was free . He was free!
Or… he was free until he lost the battle to Joseph. He was selfish, he knew. He was destructive, and uncaring, and chaotic. But he did not believe that he was evil. And so on the precipice of the highway to hell, Straizo told Joseph of the upcoming calamity. A calamity that he was planning on taking care of himself, but would now entrust with a boy born as a curse.
In his last moments, he laughed as he bade farewell. He died vibrant and energetic in endless youth and beauty. He had died explosively just like he had always wanted. He had died without regrets and on his own terms. In the end, he was the one laughing at his silent mortality.