Chapter Text
Jonathan Joestar has died.
It seems like such an impossible thing. Even now, with your ear pressed so close to his chest that you can hear the final shuddering beat of his heart, you don’t realise exactly what it is you’ve heard until some moments after. His smothering embrace goes slack. In your current state, you can barely move of your own volition, but as your restraints grow loose you begin to writhe pathetically in desperation. With some effort you rock your severed head back and forth in his arms, twisting yourself around until you can look up into his face. Just to see. Just to make sure.
He’s looking right at you. His head is slumped forward, limp and lifeless, blood and spit hanging in strings from his slackjawed lips. His glassy eyes are entirely vacant, reflecting nothing therein but your own pitiful visage twisted up in shock.
You let out a sound quite involuntarily, something like a frustrated, anguished sob. Only minutes ago you had given him the opportunity to die painlessly and with dignity that he refused to accept. In his stupid, stubborn, futile struggle against you he had succeeded in nothing more than ensuring his demise was more painful and demeaning than anything you would have chosen to subject him to. You have dreamed of this day for so long and now at the moment of your perfect victory the rug has been pulled out from under you. You feel no fulfilment gazing up into his empty eyes. That he would have the gall to die with such a gentle, beatific countenance humiliates you. It makes you feel as if he’s won.
You’re not finished with him yet.
You grit your teeth. You must make haste. When you laid your plans, you had done so under the assumption that you could take your time with Jojo’s body undisturbed. Circumstances have changed. There are flames lapping at the heel of Jojo’s boot and an ominous rumbling emanating from the ship’s thoroughly brutalised engine. Steam bellows out into the cabin in clouds so dense and heavy they look almost like milk. It’s insufferably hot and humid, the air thick with boiling steam and acrid smoke searing your skin, and it’s only going to get worse until the engine combusts and shreds Jojo’s corpse into uncountable smithereens. You’re not an engineer, but you think you must have only minutes, and you must act as though you have even less.
With Jojo’s body now limp and pliable, you can move about and handle him freely. Your tendrils emerge squirming from the openings in your ragged neck wound that were once your arteries and firm up into a set of pseudo-muscular prehensile limbs, endowing you with the mobility to skitter crab-like across Jojo’s massive torso into a more advantageous position perched upon his thigh. The body slumps forward, arms drooping into his lap with nothing to hold onto. You coil your tendrils tight around Jojo’s thigh, grounding yourself, and then reach out with your forelimbs.
Your makeshift arms slither up and around Jojo’s thick neck. With the faintest effort you can raise his head, tilting his chin upright so you can look into his eyes. You hold it there for a moment, and then sheer force of gravity pulls it back, baring the tender column of his wounded throat. The sight of it makes you sigh. You do not regret the sacrifice of your filthy body, but it’s been many years now that you’ve yearned to feel the flesh of Jojo’s throat under your fingers and give it a good squeeze. Under the skinless touch of your tendrils, though, you can’t really feel much of anything. It’s never made a difference to you before, but you find yourself longing for it now. You tighten your noose around Jojo’s neck and count the ridges of his cervical vertebrae, seeking out just the right spot to commence your morbid task.
You squeeze. Nothing gives. You can see that his neck is indenting beneath the crushing grip of your forelimbs, but all of the strength you can muster isn’t even enough to break the skin. You try again, groaning with exertion through clenched teeth, and this time you manage to snap his spine. His head bobs back just a little farther. This is useless. You’re getting nowhere. You’re wasting time you do not have. A new approach is needed.
There is only so much you can do with your flesh alone, and doubly so when you have nothing to work with but the flesh inside your head. With a wince, you reach your forelimbs up and out farther and farther, stretched as long as you can manage. It’s not really painful, per se, but as you approach your limit you feel an uncanny strain at the base of your skull, like your brains are being sucked out through your throat. The best you can muster is five, maybe six feet of prehensile flesh. It will have to do. You join the tendrils and twist them around each other tightly, as if wringing a dishrag, and draw them tighter and tighter until they’re joined into a single loop of razor-thin reinforced flesh wire.
You drape the loop around Jojo’s throat again. If this doesn’t work you’re not sure what you’ll do. Die, you suppose.
This time when you cinch your noose tight around Jojo’s throat, there is a long moment of resistance that strikes the fear of God into you, and then with relief you see tiny red pinpricks of blood emerge like fresh spring buds where the wire bites into his skin. You pull the left end of the loop back up inside yourself with a jolt. The noose tightens, bites maybe a centimetre into Jojo’s throat. A spurt of blood erupts from his split carotid and dribbles down his neck to stain his open shirt collar and the sight makes you cry out with delight. You are so close to freedom you can taste it.
You tug at the right end of the loop, and then the left again. Each time the wire noose gets a little tighter, cutting deeper into Jojo’s throat and spilling more of his blood down the front of his shirt, but even with all your strength it’s a slow, tedious process. It’s like trying to cut a beefsteak with a cheese wire. The brief glimmer of hope you’d seen with the spilling of his blood is quickly eclipsed by impatience and a grim awareness of the disaster rapidly bearing down upon you. How long will this take? How long do you have?
“It didn’t have to be this way,” you sneer. “Never could just take the easy way out, could you? And now look at the state of you.” You are rapidly exhausting yourself and it’s certainly not worth the effort you’re expending to force your mangled throat to spit the words out, least of all to the audience of a corpse. But somehow you feel you must. If the engine were to combust this very moment you don’t want to depart from the earth with the thoughts still trapped inside your head.
“Don’t think I take any pleasure in this. This dirty work. I wanted to do it the proper way. All that work I put into preparing it for you. You just had to blow it up. This could have been over by now if you only knew what’s good for you.”
Jojo’s body is silent, bobbing flaccidly back and forth with every tug.
“I could have given you everything in the world and you threw it all away. For what? Pride?” You scoff. Your diligence has progressed well into the meat of Jojo’s neck now, his windpipe exposed and open to the foul air. “You’ll see. You think you’re off the hook now, eh? Oh, no, no. I’ve got you, Jojo. You’re stuck with me. You’re stuck down here in the mud with me.” You laugh. “Once we get out of here I’ll bring you back. I won’t let you rest. I’ll pry those fucking eyes of yours open so you can’t sleep. You’ll be my witness, Jojo. You’ll live to behold all the things you made me do.”
In your excitement, you do not notice the tension in your razor wire growing slighter, and slighter, and then all at once it vanishes entirely; the loop cinches shut at the centre of Jojo’s throat and with the next tug the whole length of the wire snaps back up inside of you. Jojo’s body sways, one last time, and his torso collapses at precisely the same moment that his head lolls to the side, over his shoulder, and then tumbles to the floor with an undignified thud.
It takes you a little by surprise. You get over it quickly. You don’t have time. You unwrap yourself from Jojo’s thigh and skitter back up over his chest to examine your work.
You wish you had more time to admire the sight of Jojo’s perfect body, freshly liberated from his imperfect head. The glow of the firelight dancing on the wet red meat of his open neck is a thing to behold. Considering your haphazard methods, the cut is remarkably clean, almost surgical. Certainly more attractive than the ragged fringe of half-cooked flesh you’d made out of your own neck. You can see clearly the openings of the veins and arteries, the windpipe, the pearly white of his spine. It’s all yours for the taking. You sigh reverently.
The thought strikes you. Or rather, it might be better to say that this thought has been simmering at the far reaches of your conscious mind for months, and every time it threatened to emerge you smothered it. To even entertain such second thoughts would have damned you. You are well past the rubicon without a backup plan. You must maintain absolute faith in the destiny you have chosen for yourself or you are surely doomed.
Nevertheless. Now that you’re right here, at the moment of truth, you cannot help but to think about it.
What if it doesn’t take?
You’re reasonably sure such a thing can be done. You’ve done it before. Well… you’ve done something similar. It’s practically the only thing you did to pass the time back in November when you were shacked up in Windknight’s Lot, licking your wounds and waiting for news of Jojo’s demise. In that little hamlet there was so much flesh to be had so freely, not only walking the earth but interred deep inside it, and of course as always you could not help yourself. But the zombies you bore out of the bodies you unearthed there were no better than simple puppets. Bloodthirsty, to be sure, and maybe if your hand had been forced you might have been able to overwhelm Jojo with them by sheer force of numbers alone, but the thought of digging up every grave in the Lot just to assemble mindless drones was so unglamorous and mundane that you couldn’t bear it, especially after the immediacy of the ferocity you’d seen in Jack. You needed a hundred of him, but it goes without saying that such monsters are a rare find in any age, and you didn’t have the luxury of time to go hunting. With the gaping hole in your gut, you could barely leave the confines of your hideaway. Your options were limited.
“Living” zombies—for want of a better word—were easier. The long-dead were worm-eaten and rotten through, and most often bone-dry so there was not even anything you could eat to replenish the resources you were expending just to get them walking around; so much of your time and vampiric essence was drained by restoring Tarkus and Bruford alone to a suitable state for deployment that you resolved not to go through the trouble again. Plunging your claws deep down the jugular of a warm, breathing body was always a safer bet. The results were immediate, their mobility and acuity sharpened more rapidly than it did in those zombies who were shaking off the heavy shroud of death, and you got a hot meal out of it to boot. The only reason you didn’t do it all the time was the difficulty of acquiring a living subject. Of course, as your recovery progressed and your followers grew in number, the challenge of hunting fresh prey diminished. Some of them came to you willingly, which you preferred just because they were easier to deal with; more often they arrived as gifts from your acolytes, dropped at your feet in squirming burlap sacks with their hands and feet broken so they could not escape. It was not a dignified arrangement. But you were hungry.
This went on for several nights. And of course, in time, the ample banquet of flesh in Windknight’s Lot began to dwindle. Obviously you had known this would happen eventually, but when it finally did you were furious. The hamlet was isolated, scarcely populated and saw little incoming traffic—in fact, these were the reasons you had chosen to take up residence there while you healed—and you simply refused to accept that it hadn’t even taken a fortnight for you to eat your way through it. You sent your zombies out farther, deeper into the village, closer and closer to the daylight hours. There had to be more. Sometimes there was. Most of the remaining villagers had realised that something terrible was happening there, spiriting away dozens of their neighbours in the midnight hours, and had fortified themselves inside their homes to wait for it to pass. Generally speaking, your zombies were too stupid and ugly to win the trust of any of the living villagers, and so usually they were left with no choice but to brute force their way inside, another task which they were typically not well suited for.
One of your creatures, a hopeless failure and desperate for your approval, returned from his dispatch one morning moments before the breaking of the dawn with nothing to show for his night of labour but a Mastiff with its neck bent. Your zombie had seen the telltale glow of a candle through the barred windows of a domicile, he reported, and had worked tirelessly for many long hours to break down the door and harvest the fruit within, but had ultimately succeeded in nothing more than subduing the guard dog. He begged your pardon. You flew into a rage. Certainly you would not have been much kinder to him if you had not been as hungry as you were, but the hunger made you especially cruel. You berated him, shouted at him, spat at him, kicked his wretched body lying prostrate before you until you could hear his ribs crunching against the toe of your boot. You grabbed him by the hair and dragged him behind you across the stone floor as he flailed helplessly in your grip and cried out for your mercy. Twisting your wrist with only a little more effort than you’d use to wrest open a difficult jar, you pulled your zombie’s head all the way around and off his shoulders, relishing in the meaty sound of tearing flesh and the wet snap of vertebrae. The head, seemingly unfazed, carried on weeping and begging, while with your other hand you beheaded the Mastiff your penitent zombie slave had slain for you.
“You useless fucking beast,” you bellowed at him, “you’re not fit to be anything more than an attack dog!” And you haphazardly jammed his severed head against the gaping wound at the bent neck of the hound, claws expelling just enough of your essence into the limp flesh of the beast to make it seize and twitch back into life. For a moment the head paused its maundering, the eyes swivelling wildly in their sockets; then you saw the seam of its neck wound glistening in the torchlight, cinching shut as though stitching itself together. The creature began to shriek with pain as the nerves in its twisted spine healed and lit up with life. The legs spasmed, and it writhed on the stone floor for some moments as it struggled to bring itself to its feet. When it finally stood, it was a ghastly spectacle: the body trembling as if it would collapse at any moment, the head hanging limply at an odd angle from the hound’s broken neck, weeping blood and spitting black bile up onto the floor. It attempted to walk, and managed only to limp in ambling circles, the head still babbling in desperate repentance.
You watched the horrible creature in rapt attention, paying no mind to its pleas for your forgiveness but utterly captivated by the fact that it had managed to stand up at all. In your blind fury, you had acted without thinking; for some time you had idly wondered if the seemingly limitless healing potential of your own vampiric essence could make such a chimaera possible, but you’d pushed the thoughts aside as the pursuit seemed like a pointless waste of your resources. But the curiosity ate at you nevertheless and, you suppose, must have finally been drawn to the surface by your tantrum. And once your fit passed, as such mercurial episodes always did, you were left to ponder what you’d done under its influence.
This first of your experiments was, only technically speaking, a success; the Mastiff was no good, owing most likely to the poor character of the zombie you’d started out with, and could do little better than follow simple commands and pace dejectedly at your feet. It was not a total loss; firstly, having nothing better to do with it, you ate the rest of the body, which went a little ways to sate your hunger even though eating a zombie always tasted foul and felt disgraceful, and there was some amusement to be had from throwing the creature your scraps and watching it tear eagerly into what had once been its own flesh. In the long term, you made some use out of it as an outlet for your anger, kicking it savagely every time you were upset, and it was only a few nights after this that your relentless abuse of the creature finally did it in, its skull crushed like an overripe berry under your boot. But before you killed it, mere hours after you brought it into the world, you endeavoured to make a second.
Your zombies performed more satisfactorily in the collection of simple beasts, and before very long you were keeping a veritable menagerie of all manner of wild animals in the dungeons beneath your hideaway. A few of your acolytes went so far as to throw themselves at your feet, volunteering their own flesh to be disassembled and rearranged by your divine hands, and of course it would have only been cruel of you not to oblige them.
Your experiments after this rapidly outpaced both your “living” and “dead” zombies in potential, and you showed your successful chimaeras such visible favouritism that with time even your most hesitant apostles surrendered their bodies to your work. In fact, you ran out of useful animal parts long before you ran out of zombie candidates. At the height of your madness, your “laboratory” (a room in your dungeon with stone walls lined with manacles and a big, flat slab of a table with unaccountable dark stains from centuries past right in its middle, obviously constructed as a site for some barbaric dark-age torture, now repurposed by you for your own enlightened pursuits of science) was host to five or six partially deconstructed zombies hanging from its walls, your increasingly deranged and unsuccessful attempts at fleshcraft pinned to your operating table, half-remade and begging for a merciful death after any one of the dozens of times you stormed out of the room mid-synthesis and abandoned your work in frustration.
Because once the newness and intrigue of fleshcrafting wore off, its shortcomings became apparent—shortcomings which, for the purposes which were already beginning to take shape in the depths of your mind (at this point nothing more than a shameful fantasy that you could scarcely bring yourself to look in the eye, let alone confess), were entirely unacceptable. Of chief concern to you was the rapid decay of the mind your subjects exhibited. Some loss of faculties in the process of zombification was to be expected, almost always during the initial transformation, but your chimaeras suffered a gradual, progressive deterioration of their human intellect over the course of some days (and, in your unsuccessful attempts, sometimes even less). The Mastiff, for instance, had never been particularly intelligent even before you’d torn its head off; but it was not very long after you stitched the head to the dog’s body that it lost command of human speech entirely, and could henceforth communicate only in grunts and howls as any other lesser beast. Your more sophisticated experiments, which you built by mixing parts from various zombie donors into a single body, seemed at first to fare a little better, or at least it took them longer to begin showing symptoms of intellectual deterioration, and in such cases you found that if you were desperate you could delay the onset of the rot by sending them back onto the operating table and sticking new parts inside them as a sort of refresher. But from thence emerged a second obstacle, one perhaps even more damning to your ends: while a chimaera made from zombie and animal parts, or from the combination of various animal parts, recovered easily from the initial fusion and rapidly coalesced into a single confluent body, your anthropoid chimaeras endured prolonged suffering as their sundry parts struggled to integrate. Your creatures had a high tolerance for simple pain, and many of them bravely weathered the agonies with a stiff upper lip, even as their haemorrhaging and vomiting persisted; but even your most tenacious recruits could not bear it when their bodies began to split at the seams and literally fall apart.
Failure after failure naturally enraged you. More than that, it frightened you. You were no closer to solving the problem of the perfect chimaera by the time Jojo came kicking down your door, and of course by that point the notion of what you intended eventually to do with him had grown monstrously inside you from a passing fancy to an all-consuming obsession. This is why, when you were finally forced to sacrifice your body, you did not hesitate, and in fact you did not even bear Jojo any ill will for driving you to it; to you it was nothing more than a reaffirmation that you had not yet strayed from your path to total victory. What fealty did you owe to that useless flesh beneath your neck, marred indelibly by your father’s gutterblood in its veins? In twenty years, what good had that body ever done you? If anything, that misfortunate product of the accident of your birth had never done anything but hinder you. Born a girl, afflicted by your mother’s weak and useless genes, then starved in your infancy so you could never hope to catch up to Jojo’s blue blood and privileged rearing no matter how hard you tried; if not for the shock of your mother’s early death and the terrible desperation it instilled in you to bite and claw your way into a new life by any means necessary, there is no doubt in your mind that you would have followed her into the ground not very long after. Every humiliating loss you suffered against the insurmountable hurdle of Jojo’s superior strength was another reminder that you had simply been set up to fail from the start. In your adolescence, the endless resentment inspired in you a deeply shameful, secret fixation upon Jojo’s physique that you mistook at first for simple infatuation, which further mortified you; now, better understanding the desire, you can only embrace it. Taking Jojo’s family, his home, his life was never, ever going to be enough. You needed his flesh.
And now here you are.
It would be an understatement to say that your prior failures in the synthesis of two humanoid bodies into one has caused some apprehension in you. If you still had a stomach, it would be churning. But hesitation is a luxury you cannot afford. There is no reason for you to further delay apotheosis. You slither your tendrils into the inviting holes of Jojo’s open veins, like slipping into a new suit.
It’s warm. Tight. The senses at the tips of your tendrils are dull, but you can feel pressure on all sides, the body resistant to your probing. It poses little challenge. You reach further. Like the beheading before it, it’s slow going, inching gradually forward as Jojo’s defenceless body opens up under your assault. The gap between Jojo’s open neck and yours grows slimmer and slimmer until your tattered wound just kisses his. The angle is off slightly. You twist yourself around until you feel your severed spine line up to his, the vertebrae neatly aligning with a soft, satisfying click.
You’re inside his chest now. You only have to reach the heart. Straight down the jugular and through the vena cava is the most direct route. You’re not a surgeon (well—... you’re not properly trained, in any case); the stone mask endowed you with a perfect understanding and control of your own anatomy, but your knowledge of Jojo’s is a mere approximation. You push on down through the open tunnel of his veins until you feel the resistance suddenly dissipate. You’ve arrived inside the empty chamber of his lifeless heart. Your fear is nothing against the delirious ecstasy of standing finally at the threshold of your destiny. Your tendrils ensnare Jojo’s unmoving heart tight like a snake and you grit your teeth and ejaculate a surge of your vampiric essence into the muscle, gush after gush, flooding his veins with it.
You feel a transient shudder pass through his defiled chest, and then—nothing. A moment passes. You begin to panic. You squeeze his heart again in an imitation of its living systole, hoping to force your essence into circulation throughout the torpid body. And then again. Stillness. You remember, suddenly, that while Jojo was still breathing his body was able to expel your essence without very much effort at all. You’d assumed such an invulnerability was a product of his Ripple training, and that his thoroughly detoxified corpse would submit without a struggle. Were you wrong? Surely if some trace of that contemptible force still dwelled within his cadaver, it would have rejected you by now.
Then you feel something. The body remains unstirring. But there is a tingling at the back of your neck, in the place that you recognise as the base of your severed spine. And then the sensation grows into something like an itch, and then a dull, faraway ache. You clench your eyes shut and sob with relief. You do not yet know that this is where the most difficult part begins.
You keep on pumping Jojo’s heart as your neck slowly begins to heal. The excess skin left over from your slipshod auto-decapitation, overflowing in a ragged mess from the junction of your neck and Jojo’s, shrivels up and peels away from the wound like a scab. You use your capillaries as a fleshy thread to seal the ugly gaping seam shut in a sort of whipstitch. At the fore of your throat, where your windpipe and Jojo’s are merging into one, you feel a sharp pain, like the inside of your larynx is being scrubbed with sandpaper, from all the ash and polluted air that had made its way into Jojo’s open hole. It makes you cough uncontrollably, hacking up grey ashy spit and blood and fluid from his punctured lungs, a bolt of incredible pain shooting up your tender throat with every spew. You are still numb from the neck down and have no choice but to lie there impotently on the cabin floor, gazing up into the thick clouds of steam rolling around the ceiling, regurgitated blood dribbling down your cheeks and into your hair.
Your spine heals first, and the moment your nervous pathway comes alive it batters your brain with an impossible symphony of agony. You have never felt so much pain. It’s enough to make you scream, but you can’t. Your throat is blistered and raw and your lungs—Jojo’s lungs—are still deflated and useless. The pain, you know, is a sign that the body is healing, and it is certainly preferable to feeling nothing at all, but this certainty does not make it any easier to bear. You wonder if this is what Jojo had felt as he was dying.
After the spine, the arms follow. You feel the prickling at your shoulders, then down to the elbows, and the wrists, and by the time the sensations awaken in the hands the feeling has escalated into an angry, splitting throb, as though recovering from frostbite. You try to move. With all your strength, you can only shrug your shoulders slightly. Maybe, you think, you can roll over. You whip your head back and forth, attempting to move Jojo’s body with the strength of his upper torso alone, and can do little better than writhe in place on the cabin floor like a worm. You search desperately around you for something you can use to prop yourself up. You see Jojo’s severed head, lying on its side in the same spot where it fell, his unseeing eyes boring holes into you as you struggle. The sight fills you with indignation.
“You fucking prick,” you gargle. Your voice is thin. You can barely speak. “You bloody prat. You did this to me. This is all your fault.”
The head says nothing.
Enraged, you renew your efforts, and this time after a few attempts you manage to get up to a position lying on your side, one limp arm tucked beneath you. All of Jojo’s insides, still sensitive in half-death, lurch as the motion unsettles your organs. A wave of incredible nausea washes over you, worse than any hangover you’ve ever suffered in your life. You suddenly gain the terrible awareness of a stomach full of food that your vampire body will not be able to digest. You can feel it coming up. You try to swallow it back, to no avail. You gag and retch and heave up Jojo’s last supper all over the floor, a rancid puddle of half-digested food and wine and blood and bile. The acid stings at the open wounds on the inside of your throat. You rest your head in the pool of vomit and you sob.
You have a little mobility in your arms now, although your hands are still quite useless. You push yourself up halfway, still sobbing miserably, into a reclining position with a large wooden shipping crate at your back. Your thoracic muscles feel like they could split down the middle just from the strain it takes to get you upright. From here you can see, only a few feet away, your coffin—your refuge—open and waiting, not yet consumed by the raging fire.
You’ll have all the time in the world to heal once you’re inside. You only need enough strength to drag yourself across the floor.
Before you can begin to move, something happens. You cannot quite explain it. In one hundred years, you will think of it often, haunted by the question of how it happened, or if it may someday happen again. Sometimes you will think to yourself that you must have hallucinated it. There is simply no other explanation.
There is a tensing of the muscles all over Jojo’s body, as if afflicted by seizure. The arms and legs extend, trembling. At first you think this is a good sign: the final push of your vampiric power breaching the last remaining defences of Jojo’s body, the muscles arousing at long last from their sleep of death and submitting to your control. But they are not under your control. The hands open and clench into fists, grasping at empty air, quivering; the legs kick out and drag their heels across the floor. The heart, which you had up to now been squeezing manually in order to circulate your essence throughout the body, awakens with a jolt. It hammers within the grip of your tendrils as if it’s trying to leap out of your ribcage. By now you realise that something has gone very wrong. The hands reach out before you, fingers gnarled into claws, waving as if searching for something. You try to move and you find that the body—the body… it is quite impossible, you’re sure. But the body resists you. It will not move for you. The hands turn back on you, and you watch with horror as they seize your throat.
You cry out in shock. Jojo’s hands throttle you. The spine arches. The legs thrash and you are knocked off balance, back on your side. You are in no danger of suffocation, but the terror of the body lashing back at you is much worse than even the threat of imminent death. The hands, apparently lacking in dexterity, grapple to keep a grip on your neck, wet and slippery with blood. Instead they begin to claw. The fingers dig into your neck with such ferocity that even Jojo’s dull nails are enough to tear long, shallow scratches into the skin. You twist your head back and forth in an attempt to dodge the assault, but it is fruitless. You cannot escape. Maybe before the synthesis had begun you would have been able to slip back out of Jojo’s neck as easily as changing a shirt, but the time for that is long past. You are locked into a body that is fighting to keep you out.
The fingers, scrabbling across your neck, find the seam—the open wound—where your head is stitched to Jojo’s body. They dig into it. Somehow they manage to rip out a few of your capillary sutures. Frantically, you turn to look at Jojo’s head, halfway expecting to see the damned thing alive and awake and laughing at you for being so foolish as to think you could ever get the better of him.
Of course it isn’t. Of course it’s just as dead as it was when you knocked it off his shoulders. Nevertheless, in your desperation, you plead with it.
“Stop!” you shout; “Jojo! Stop! What do you think you’re doing?! You’ll kill us both!” Your pleas go unheard by the severed head. The body’s assault persists. “I’ll make it up to you,” you implore, jumping from wrath to deference. “I’m sorry. All right? But if you kill me here, there’s no hope. We’ll both burn—Jojo, you useless bloody bullcalf, I’ll shred you to—” But before you can finish enunciating the threat, the fingertips force their way through the wound, digging into the meat of your throat, scratching against your bare windpipe. You gasp and sputter as your mouth fills with blood. You cannot even speak. You have to do something. Anything.
With the body in revolt, you now retain command of only the tendrils buried deep in Jojo’s veins and restraining his heart. You have but one tool remaining at your disposal. You have not yet thoroughly exhausted the reserves of your vampiric essence. You had intended to dispense it with restraint, using only what was absolutely necessary to heal the body and saving the rest for Jojo; it is clear to you now that you had underestimated the strength of will that still remains within the carcass and you must do everything in your power to snuff it. It’s not too great of a sacrifice. Your essence is renewable, easily replenished at your next feeding, and the resurrection won’t be impeded by a little decomposition. You can stand to wait a little longer to gloat your triumph over him. And there will be no triumph at all if you don’t act quickly. (After all, you think, how long will you have to wait, really? The steamship is only four days out, and it should only be a few days more before your buoyant coffin crosses paths with a passing vessel. Yes, perhaps Jojo’s tenacity and refusal to submit—even in death—has thrown a wrench into your plans, but when has that stopped you before? To be frank, you should have seen it coming, and maybe you should have made preparations for such a contingency, but there’s no use dwelling on what’s already done. You’ll bear it in mind in the future, once you’re back on dry land.)
You crush Jojo’s thrashing heart in your tendrils until it hurts and you pump everything you have to give into the twitching, flailing flesh. More. More. Until you are fully spent. With every spurt you feel the pounding of the muscle stutter and wane, growing fainter, fainter, until its unruly jackhammering dwindles to a tremble. The hands go lax, too weak to do much more than paw feebly at your throat. And then it’s done. The heart stops. The arms fall to your sides, limp and shivering.
You flex the hands and wiggle the fingers just to be sure you’ve reclaimed control. Whatever insubordinate phantom had momentarily possessed the body—Jojo’s, or the last vestiges of his Ripple; or something else, unearthly and unknowable to you—has fled. Nothing remains but you alone.
You bark out a raspy, gurgling laugh through your maimed throat and mouth full of blood. “Well fought, Jojo,” you spit. “But futile. As always. The prize is mine.”
If Jojo’s head resents the defeat of his body, it doesn’t say so.
You sit up. You try to get yourself up on your feet, but your legs are still too weak to support your weight. You will have to crawl. Your hands are barely functional, still clumsy and stiff with the residue of death lingering in their joints, but they are sufficient for you to seize Jojo’s severed head by his hair and tuck it securely under your arm. It’s funny. It reminds you of your rugby matches at Hugh Hudson, barrelling towards the goal with the football clutched at your side. Had that only been months ago? It feels to you like lifetimes. In a way, you suppose, it was.
You use your free hand to pull yourself forward. It is exponentially more difficult than you anticipated. You’re now attached to a hundred kilograms of all-but-dead meat and you can count every single one of them weighing you down as you drag yourself across the cabin floor like a slug. Your barely-functional muscles ache under the burden of their own weight. Metres become miles. You groan through your clenched teeth as you struggle inch after inch. Somewhere in the engine room, you hear something metallic, like a coin falling down a pipe. Then there’s a deafening bang that rattles the whole cabin. A blast of boiling air sears your back, enough to burn a hole in Jojo’s shirt and scorch your skin. It knocks you off balance and you tumble forward with a shout, crossing both arms over your chest to shield Jojo’s head without even thinking.
You have not been obliterated yet. The cabin still stands. But you’re running out of time. The coffin is within reach. You stretch your hands out, straining your fingers, and just manage to graze one of the handles. But your fingertips are slick with blood and the handle slips out of your grasp. You swear in frustration. You pull yourself forward just an inch, just enough to hook your fingers around the handle, and pull. The coffin doesn’t move—it’s even heavier than your body—but you can draw yourself up to its side with relative ease. You gasp and split into a grin, cackling, driven into a manic fit by your impending victory. Almost there. Almost. One last hurdle.
You get a good grip on the lip of the coffin and heave. You can only raise yourself up about a foot or so before your strength gives out. You need both hands. You lift Jojo’s head up and drop it into the cushioned interior as delicately as your clumsy fingers can manage, then you grasp with both hands and try again to lift yourself in. This time you can get most of your torso over the edge. You’re halfway there. One more push. You scream with the effort. You fling yourself forward and land face-down in the coffin’s satin lining, one impotent leg hanging off the edge at the ankle. You squirm the rest of your way inside, kicking and wriggling to shift yourself around to an upright position with Jojo’s head held tight to your chest. You’re still shuddering with laughter, though you’re barely aware of it.
You reach for the handle of the lid and pull it up, easing back into a supine position as you bring it shut over you. The blinding light of the fire roaring in the cabin is swallowed up by total, inky blackness. You feel around in the dark for a lever, the mechanism by which the lid of the coffin will seal and render your fortress airtight and invulnerable. You find it at your right side and pull. You hear a hiss of air, and in the same moment the cacophony of the collapsing steam engine softens to a hum.
You lay there in the quiet, eyes roaming blindly, waiting. Your jittering fingers twist anxiously in the locks of Jojo’s hair.
The engine gives. You hear the rumble of the blast for only a moment before your coffin is launched miles into the ocean air, rocking your body with a jolt. You’re battered back and forth, slamming between the narrow walls of your boudoir as the casket soars, and falls, and breaches the surface of the water with a sickening crack. The impact shakes you with such force that you’re smashed up against the lid, your skull crushed into the inner corner and splitting on impact.
You lose consciousness.
And you sink.