A/N: My first JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fanfic and it's actually just 2015 words of rambling about Diego headcanons combined with What If He Retained Some Of Dio's Soul/Previous Memories? Some important spoilers for Part 6/Stone Ocean (mostly concerning Pucci) and Part 7/Steel Ball Run (pretty much entirely concerning Diego), but except for at the end I think they're pretty vague. Oh, and a tiny bit of violence in the last paragraph, but once again it's vague.
So yeah, I think this is mostly pretty self-explanatory, except for maybe the Pucci/Silver Bullet connection? I don't know if it was ever confirmed in canon, but after seeing the theory on tumblr no one can convince me that Pucci didn't reincarnate as Dio's horse. (And then I snuck in Enya and Vanilla Ice as the other (made up) horses Diego has/had, because Why Not.)
It kind of veered off from how I originally planned it because somewhere in the first few paragraphs I stepped away for a day and when I came back I lost the mood I was writing in and kind of forgot what exactly I had been thinking of doing, but except for the ending I'm actually fairly happy with this.
(Also, I'm really surprised Diego and Pucci don't have their own categories here. Marking this as Dio because he has enough presence here, I think.)
x.x.x.x
Diego Brando was born to instincts he did not recognize as his own.
He grows up a child of the night dragged into harsh sun, every morning a flinch of fear away from the light and then momentary confusion about why that would bother him before he gets up to face the day. Although long hours of hard work often leave him collapsing exhausted in bed, uncomfortable on the hard surface but still falling asleep immediately for what little time he can get, if he stays up late enough into the night he feels restless like the day had only just begun and cannot fall asleep. While she was still alive his mother would reprimand him for staying up too late, but after her death he takes to burning off his nervous energy by prowling around the farm, at first always stumbling with only the dim light of the stars and sometimes moon to guide him, but eventually knowing the property at night better than anyone else.
The burning resentment has lingered with him ever since he grew old enough to understand his circumstances, but the hatred it eventually metamorphoses into feels like an old friend, and it was almost frighteningly familiar but for slight changes in circumstances that kept everything just the slightest bit off balance. His mother has a strange sense of pride and dignity that he keeps on forgetting to expect from her, and when she dies he is only surprised that it is due to infection ravaging her body, not a sudden collapse from overwork. Her death leaves a wound in his heart that will never quite heal, only be patched over and forgotten about, but he barely sheds a tear at her funeral and his mind quickly focuses on wondering how his life will worsen now that she is no longer around to direct the attention of the man in charge of them. When the abuse worsens no more than could be expected for a boy expected to work harder and harder as he grows more capable of it, Diego is left constantly on edge and he grows irrationally angry as he waits for the man to stop playing games and start the drunken beatings already.
Which isn't to say that life is easy, because while the other farm hands grow a certain fondness for him and he is slowly allowed to work with the horses more and more ever since he managed to calm a supposedly untamable mustang enough to ride, punishments for slacking off are harsh, and he is still at the bottom of the food chain on the farm. Still, Diego has a constant spot to sleep in and a steady source of food of a quantity and (somewhat) quality his body tells him to be grateful for, so while he still considers the entirety of his situation beneath him and his true potential, he feels there are worse ways to be horribly poor. Slowly he even grows used to it. Between his work and learning to properly ride horses for competitions, he gets along with the other workers, learns the art of charisma to get what he wants. They take him out to town, and he's too young and baby-faced to enchant any women like the grown men try to do, but he hones the art of flirting on girls closer to his age and it comes disgustingly naturally to him, to the point that the older men laugh and make jokes he should have been too young to understand. The other boys his age come to admire his charm and listen to him. Those who challenge his leadership teach him to fight.
Fighting makes his blood sing in a way nothing else does, and he is alarmed by how he has to hold himself back from killing them, slowly torturing them to death until they regret ever deciding to pick a fight with him, Diego Brando, before finally wrapping his hands around their throats and finishing it. He is not particularly violent (although he admits to having those thoughts towards the drunk, who sicken him for whatever primal reason), or at least that's what he tells himself, but he can't help but unconsciously lick his canines in some sick form of anticipation at the thought of tasting their blood. Eventually the thought comes even around women, and his teenage fantasies are filled with intrusive thoughts and desires to sink his teeth into their necks and slip his fingers under their skin into veins and arteries that will give him the sweetest of all sustenance. It frightens him.
Before he can be tortured with this animalistic hunger, however, he has to learn to win his fights, a process which his instincts make very difficult. While his slow development and continued small size are excellent for jockeying and winning races, he constantly forgets that he is not taller, more heavily muscled. Punches take him down much quicker than he thinks they should, and his mind moves far more quickly than his reflexes. He picks up on the art of reading his opponents and aiming for weak points almost immediately, but the style of fighting which his body most comfortably defaults to is not the most advantageous for him to use when taking advantage of his opponents' mistakes. Even after years of scuffles and challenges to his still-fragile reputation, he reflexively punches much harder than he should, and his fists are always torn up by the end of every encounter.
Even so, Diego manages to slowly but surely drag himself to the top of the food chain. His face grows more handsome and his body ever fitter, he wins every horse race he enters, and the resulting money and attention from women he gains causes his social status to rise meteorically, to the point where he no longer has to feign friendliness to the other boys, but instead to the reporters and adoring fans who follow his progress. His rival on the track, that Joestar boy, is crippled, so no other jockey can come close to comparing with his fame, and it brings him an unwarranted amount of satisfaction to see the boy left behind in the dust. Yes, this was how the world should be. It's not enough just yet, of course, but he thinks he's getting there, especially after he marries his very wealthy and very elderly wife and watches her health swiftly deteriorate.
The only thing he could possibly want for is quality companionship, and even that he argues is satisfied by his horses. From the old grey mare he grew up sleeping next to and first learned to ride to the pinto mustang who always seems to eagerly anticipate Diego's presence but barely tolerates anyone else, he loves horses and horses love him. It's strange, too, because he hates dogs and their pathetic subservience, but horses never seemed the same to him. They are better, somehow, and they calm him down from his more violent moods. But there was one horse in particular who he values more than any of the others: Silver Bullet.
Sometimes it feels like Silver Bullet is his only friend in the world, even out of all his horses. There is no racer so reliable, so fast, so in tune with Diego. They are the perfect duo who together take the world of horse racing even more by storm. Even though he doubts the horse can understand him, Diego finds himself pouring all his secrets out to his horse, telling him all of his troubles and in his good moods musing about complex philosophical concepts he could not be bothered to discuss with anyone else. It doesn't make any sense to treat his horse like a human, he knows, but somehow he feels that Silver Bullet truly does know what he's talking back, and sometimes he imagines responses to his words that he is certain the Arab thoroughbred would say if he could. Sometimes he even takes the advice his horse gives him.
Around the time that Diego first meets Silver Bullet, he begins having strange dreams of a very familiar man he does not know. A black priest with white hair cut in some strange pattern relaxes with him, at ease despite being so much younger and weaker. (In these dreams, Diego feels he has that true power his instincts assume of him, tempered only by a strange resistance to his every movement below his neck.) They talk while they lounge, sometimes discussing philosophy and Heaven and sometimes speaking of things Diego only understands in dreams. When he later hears the term 'Stand' during the Steel Ball Run, it brings to mind a monstrous humanoid figure, striped purple and white and lettered incomprehensibly with the same four symbols. (He knows them by heart, too: G Triangle C T, on repeat, circling around every other stripe.) And while he has other dreams with strange beings and the feeling of being almost at his full potential, just restricted enough to be frustrated endlessly, and he can associate the people in these dreams with horses and people he knows in reality, none make him feel as good as the dreams which remind him of Silver Bullet.
Conversely, none of his nightmares are so agonizing.
He does not know how he dies, in his dreams, but he knows he is dead when he watches his priest continue on in his name, fighting against a group of people he is unfamiliar with, with the exception of the oldest, a man he both hates and is afraid of. Diego, or really Dio now as he becomes more comfortable with his nickname than his real name, watches as his priest's Stand morphs into a shining white figure, man fused with the front half of a horse, who recreates the universe in Dio's name as best as he can even though he dies in the process, and it isn't perfect but through sheer force of will he is determined that he will meet his God again, and Dio wakes up crying and immediately goes to give Silver Bullet his favorite treats after these nights. The horse never seems to understand why his master is so upset, but he is nonetheless quite happy to be spoiled every so often.
When Dio enters the Steel Ball Run, it is for money and glory and perhaps a bit for the power he knows he can get from it. When Johnny and Gyro prove to be serious competition against him, it is a desire to beat them down into the dust that keeps him going, that and a desire to learn more about Stands after his first few encounters with them in reality. He hates being bound into servitude no matter how much power he gains from it, but when he steals Scary Monsters for himself he relishes the ability. Now he ahs become far superior to humanity with this Stand of his own, and although he's still not quite as strong as muscle memory once told him, he can bask out in the sun without fear, so maybe he has surpassed even his previous self.
When he learns that he is still not the most powerful being there is and gets sent to his death after being stripped of his powers, Diego finds he has many regrets. They don't seem so important to him anymore, though, perhaps because he knows he has no one to carry on his wishes after his death like he knows his previous self did, but more likely because, as the train fails to slow even a little in its journey after tearing him in two, he realizes that he still did pretty good for himself, and while he will not be mourned by anyone who truly knew him and they would not regret his excruciating death even if they heard of it, it does not matter because he feels the same about them. Truly, all that matters is that it was not a Joestar or Zeppeli who killed him. That would have been too humiliating.