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Vampires can sleep for a long time, but not forever. They wake when their body wants to feed. If they are hungry, slumber is fitful and temporary.
Dio sleeps and wakes, sleeps and wakes. He tests the lid of the coffin each time, pushing, punching, kicking. He’d thought his strength was limitless, but he’s useless against the crushing pressure on the ocean floor. Jonathan’s head watches blankly - tauntingly - from the corner.
He’s trapped.
Maybe he’ll be here until the seas boil away, the only living creature on earth not yet killed by the expanding sun. An ironic way to conquer the world, and a cowardly one - he wants to ruin humanity with his own power, not allow time to simply carry him to a hollow victory.
And it’s so unforgivably boring.
He’d swear vengeance on the sea, if it had a soul. But all he has for nemeses are the Joestars.
The Joestars, not just Jonathan, because Jonathan has descendants. Dio can sense the spark of at least one noxious Joestar soul, tiny and indistinct, somewhere far above and far away. The blood that runs through their veins is meant for him to consume.
“Fucked a baby into Erina already, did you?” he sneers, digging his fingers into Jonathan’s rotting neck. “Thoughtful of you to prepare food for me.”
He waits a day or two. “Not going to answer me, Jojo? Good. I hated the sound of your voice. You were always awful company.”
He can’t see Jonathan decay, but he can feel it when he picks up his head to taunt him. And he can smell it, when he’s bored enough to bother with breathing. Vampires can see in the dark, of course, but this merely means that they can see in very meager light. Sight, by definition, requires some form of light. Dio is blind here.
He falls asleep. He wakes up.
He falls asleep. He wakes up hungry.
He’s ravenous, and he’s going to have to wait, his least favorite activity. He shifts uncomfortably. He can’t lift his arms or stretch his legs - he can barely turn on his side. He flexes, tenses, clenches his hands into useless fists, frustrated to the point of fury. He’s managed to connect his head to Jonathan’s body well enough, but he can sense that some part of it holds itself back from him. It feels like an ill-fitting suit, the seams too tight and awkwardly placed, the fabric too stiff. His neck itches.
He wonders if it’s some intrinsic consequence of stealing - no, conquering - a body that did not begin as his. Just a mismatch. But he eventually decides that it’s Jonathan’s fault, Jonathan’s stubbornness fighting him - fighting him even now, long after his death.
Dio’s throat burns for blood, human blood. Joestar blood.
If he isn’t pulled up within a few centuries’ time, Jonathan’s bloodline will have diffused outward into humanity at large, near-impossible to track. Not ideal, but not insurmountable - he’ll drink every human on the planet dry if he has to, and Jonathan will be to blame for all that glorious, delicious death and destruction.
He wonders idly - if he spawns children with this body, whose child would it be? Maybe he could produce Joestar blood that way. He entertains a fantasy of Jonathan watching from some disgustingly saccharine afterlife - surely it would be golden clouds and cherubs for him, that classic boring, sexless idea of heaven - Jonathan watching Dio kill and eat their sweet innocent young children. Sobbing helplessly. It’s so pathetic, it makes him laugh out loud.
He’d never gotten to hurt Jonathan to that extent. He only ever got to kill his pet and his father, and burn down his family home. And kill him. But that’s all. A shame.
Dio doesn’t actually believe Jonathan’s in heaven, of course - he doesn’t believe he’s anywhere. Heaven is a fool’s hope, a delusion to soothe a mortal’s fear of death. Halos and harps and fluffy white wings - a weak person’s weak vision of eternal fulfillment. Dio hadn’t wanted to die - to lose, to succumb, to an enemy or fate or even time itself - so he had taken matters into his own hands. He had made himself eternal.
He made his own heaven. Him above all of humanity, forever.
It doesn’t feel like heaven here. But it doesn’t matter what it feels like. This is a temporary setback. Unforeseeable, even for him. An unlucky twist of fate.
Of course, in a true heaven, he would be so powerful as to be able to decide his own luck. Anticipate everything. Reality at his whim. True omnipotence, well beyond his current set of powers. But only a god could mold the world in such a way. Thus, being a god would be the ultimate heaven.
He'd thought the apex of power was to ascend beyond humanity. Of course, he had planned on improving his strength ad infinitum, but he sees now that he'd been thinking too small. He had planned to reach the apex of human strength once, too, as if that were all that there was. So why would he make the same mistake in assuming that the apex of vampire strength is all there is? There must be abilities that are not yet within his grasp., There must be higher levels of being to which he can ascend.
He thinks about this. He thinks about it a lot.
He gets sick of thinking.
He sleeps.
He sleeps, and wakes, and thinks about heaven.
He sleeps, and wakes, and thinks about power.
He sleeps, and wakes, this time with a jolt.
When removed from any visual cues, a human being is remarkably terrible at keeping track of time. Dio knows this because he had tested it thoroughly with an entertaining old pastime he used to have: that is, locking Jonathan in closets and chests, and lying to him about how long it had been.
Dio had convinced him shockingly easily that one hour had been ten. The reverse had been much harder, but his feigned concern for Jonathan’s mental state had managed to persuade him that he was just appallingly impatient. Of course, the game was up when he left that windowless room with that lovely lockable wardrobe, and saw that it had in fact gone dark, and he’d lost the whole day. His fifteenth birthday, at that. The look in his eyes had been thunderous. Dio hoped he’d try to fight him, but the anger had turned to a pathetic amount of hurt in the span of mere seconds. After that, Dio had decided locking Jonathan in things had grown boring (and he’d become significantly harder to fool with the I-saw-a-poor-injured-mouse-in-that-closet trick).
So it's very amusing that Jonathan is locked in here with him now.
There is a reason that Dio recalls this memory when he does, a reason that he woke so suddenly. Vampires - superior to humans in every way - have an innate sense of time’s passing. And this innate sense tells him that it has been precisely 21 years, 9 months, and 28 days since the heavy lid shut. Since he’d last seen light. Since he’d breathed in anything other than the less than one cubic meter of stale, fetid air that was imprisoned here with him.
That unremarkable interval had also been his exact age at the time.
He’s now spent more than half of his life down here.
There’s nothing noteworthy about this - no reason for him to even spare it a thought. He’s immortal. His lifespan will stretch so long that the whole of his time here will be incidental in comparison. Even if he’s here a hundred years (no), even if it’s a thousand (NO) - it will be utterly insignificant compared to the rest of it.
He soothes himself by thinking of how he’s outliving every human he’s ever laid eyes on.
It works, for a time. A short time. And then he is hit by a sudden and unwelcome longing, unmistakably human in its desperate, vivid banality. It’s been 21 years, 9 months, and 28 days, and he wants to hear thunder. He wants to drink wine. He wants to stand. The old claustrophobia he felt in the first few months, another useless vestige of humanity, returns. He’d shoved it away from himself to the point of imperceptibility; he shoves harder now, enraged at Jonathan for this disobedient body, this pointless discomfort.
He does not need it. He does not need to move, or breathe, or yearn for anything, because everything will be his, in the end. All he needs to do now is wait. But there is no shame in wanting - he has spent his whole life driven by his own desires and nothing else, as it should be. And there is pride in hunger, when you have the power to sate it. He bends the unwelcome feeling to his will, and makes it worthy of him: He wants to hear screaming, pleas for mercy. He wants to drink blood. He wants to kill.
Hunger, bloodlust, rage. It swirls with a ferocious strength and finally settles within him once more, coalescing into the pit in his chest. A hunger with its own gravity; long ago, it had reached some critical mass and collapsed in on itself, a black hole, a hunger that could never truly be satisfied. No - it had always been that way.
He will not think to note the occasion when the same period of time passes once more.
Or the one after that.
Or the one after that.
In the meantime, he sleeps, and dreams of devouring, of the unfathomable amount of blood and power that might be enough to satiate him at last.
He sleeps, and wakes, and senses a new Joestar soul sparking to life, and fantasizes about killing it.
He sleeps, and wakes -
To movement.
At last!
A thud, and the coffin is nudged by a few inches. Something slides roughly across the rugged ocean floor.
He presses an ear to the coffin - vampire hearing is sensitive, and sound carries well through water. He hears ripples of movement, receding. Some large creature swimming away.
Stillness once more.
Dio wails.
Dio screams insults at Jonathan, at humanity, for weeks on end. He desecrates Jonathan’s desiccated head in every blasphemous way he can think of.
“You’ll never get away with this, Dio!” he impersonates Jonathan cruelly, maneuvering his jaw like a puppet. “Ooooh, I’d kill you if only I wasn’t so bloody useless!”
As much as he hated him, he’d respected Jonathan as an adversary, when he was alive. To a very, very small extent. Miniscule. But still. He might not have done this before.
But what does it matter?
He wonders with idle curiosity if he’s going mad. If vampires, with their heightened cognitive abilities, can go mad. And if they could, it would be different than human madness, so how would he even recognize it as such?
He waves it away as a useless line of thinking. Most people would call him insane for every action he’d ever taken. But he was simply being rational, calculated, correct. More brilliant than they could comprehend. Doesn't his current status, above all humanity, prove it to be so? He decides that sanity is a human concept, for small human minds that are fragile enough to break. Evil is a human concept too, for weak human hearts that fear judgment.
It’s irrelevant to vampires. It’s irrelevant to gods.
He needn't bother himself ranting over the contemptible nature of humanity. He tosses Jonathan carelessly to the side.
He sleeps.
Dio is awoken to a thud on the side of his coffin. Perhaps another bored or disoriented sea creature. A common occurrence, once every few years or so. He’d long since learned to pay it no mind.
Another thud, louder this time. Something slides across the wood. Tentacles? The coffin shifts for only the second time during this damnation, but he won’t get his hopes up. It shifts again.
It shudders.
And tilts.
And rises.
Dio hears the unmistakable creak of rope.
He moves up - and up, and up - and he laughs.
“Do you feel that, Jonathan?” he cries out in delight. “I’m getting out of here!”
The coffin violently jerks upward when it breaks out of the water, and Dio feels reborn. With a final thud, it is deposited onto something solid - wood, from the sound of it. Dio tenses: if it is daylight, he must act quickly. He will not allow himself to die just as he’s been freed. Finally unconstrained from the pressure of miles of ocean, it’s effortless for him to poke a tiny hole in the side with a long, sharp talon.
Blinding light!
He hisses, scrambling for purchase to hold the coffin lid shut, but his eyes adjust quickly. It’s the first light he’s seen in a century, tinged red, the small beam falling across Jonathan’s now bare skull.
Dio pokes a finger into the light and it does not burn. Candlelight? He peers out through the hole, and sees the wooden deck of a ship. The sky (the sky) is a gradient, and it’s darkening by the second. Evidently, the sun has just set.
Footsteps.
Silhouettes come in and out of view, the backlit shapes of men. The blessed, cursed, stupid men who’d freed him. He hears their blood pumping strong through their veins, pulsing rapidly with the exertion of hauling him up. They're oblivious that their efforts have directly caused their own deaths.
He shivers with delight at the sheer perfection of this moment. The ideal timing, and a feast presented to him. This can only be destiny, fate on his side entirely.
Before he unleashes himself upon the world, he turns to sneer at Jonathan's skull in the corner. It stares at him with empty eye sockets, and grins at him like it knows something. No - it grins because it is forced to, stripped of its flesh, one more way that Dio has conquered him. Dio returns the macabre grin with a smile that he knows is even more grotesque.
You lost, Jonathan.
You died thinking that you’d stopped me for good, but you merely delayed my victory.
You died, and now there's nobody who can stop me.