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madimpossibledreamerJojo's Bizarre Adventure/Buffy the Vampire Slayer AU
Chapter Summary: The Boss continues to have a bad day.
Word Count: 668
Rating: Teen (Buffy|Jojo's level violence)
Note: HERE THERE
Death is random. At this point, Diavolo knows that almost better than anyone. If anyone could call themselves an expert on death, it would be the former Boss. He’s had more than enough, though he’s noticed something else in the last hundred or so deaths.
He’s never had a painless death. Not one. Not once will he be able to experience going to sleep and dying of old age. He’s fairly certain he’s not even aging.
It indicates a greater control over his Requiem Stand—or at least, the Stand’s control over its own power—than Gold Experience Requiem had itself indicated. It’s not simply a denial of him ever reaching an end. He can never have the long, agonizing wait for his end with a chronic illness, the slow approach of death, nor can he ever die without pain.
An attempt to give himself a respite with painkillers turns to an overdose and his organs failing him in the ambulance. An attempt to hide at least for a little by barricading himself in a room leads to a gas leak. An attempt to sleep through his own death led to a rude awakening in the middle of an inferno, succumbing to the gas and collapsing in the flames as he feels them lick over his skin.
He’s always lucid, too, far more than he should be for a dying man. No matter what he tries to do to allow himself to miss his death, to experience the result only and not experience the painful lead-up, King Crimson is incapable of performing such acts anymore.
As much as he’d tried to prevent it, too, his mind had begun to anticipate, to guess the manner of his death, the instant he arrives somewhere. It’s a bit of a challenge to adapt to having a head again, but despite the ache in his skull and the way his hands fly to his neck, confirming the connection still exists, he begins looking around.
Torches flicker on the walls, illuminating the cold, damp stone. It looks like a tomb, or perhaps an old monument. Regardless of its true use, it’s going to be his tomb soon.
He misses his Doppio. At least if he wasn’t alone, that would be an improvement. He vaguely recalls that his second-in-command had seen a few tomb traps in programs on the television, though hadn’t bothered to pay too much attention other than reassuring his other self that they would never encounter such things.
How very naïve. And here he’d believed himself to be the practical one.
A rock, tumbling down a slope and flattening him? Bow-traps, pinning him with poison-tipped arrows? Saws coming out of the walls? Pits? Poisonous snakes or spiders? Spikes? Sand or water, held back by a door? Getting trapped in a room and running out of air? Starving wild animals running across him and ripping him apart?
And then, when he turns around fully, he sees what look like a student, just lounging at the entrance to the room, as if waiting. Waiting to be noticed.
He’s so calm, and out of place, and Diavolo rarely meets people who aren’t out to kill him, so it’s natural to immediately yell at him. Though he feels a slight, irrational disappointment—he’s been killed countless times by humans. It’s not like he won’t experience the rest eventually, anyway. It’s just a matter of time. “Kill me already!” he screams, and the man just smiles and waves mockingly. Like he’s not even taking him seriously.
And then he notices writing in blood on the wall. ‘Come play my game I’ll test you’, it reads.
And the next thing he knows he’s walking right past the strange man—maybe the Stand User. It’s been a while since he’s run into any Stand User.
Having his skull caved in as something he can’t see rushes him, the message on the wall taunting him as he stands there, a sheep ready for the slaughter, is slightly less novel.
