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It suddenly came back to me.
I don’t remember what day of my hospital stay it was. I think it was the day Rikiel left the hospital. I’d started being able to move around a little in a wheelchair, and after being bedridden for so long, the hair I’d kept down was getting in my way more than I could stand. So I asked him—something like—if he could buy me a hair tie.
He said he still had a spare, so I waited to take it from him. But, unusually, he hesitated.
“…I want to tie your hair.”
He still didn’t hand it over. When I finally said it out loud—I want to tie my hair—he apologized. “Sorry,” he said, and then added,
“If it’s all right… would you let me tie it for you?”
After all that silence, the answer was strangely light—so light it threw me off.
“I thought you were going to tell me to pay you,” I shot back.
“Is that a no?” he asked.
I wanted to say, At least joke back, but I just sighed and said, “Go ahead.” He stepped behind me.
I don’t know where he pulled it from—probably his—but a high-quality wooden comb slid through my dry, rough hair.
It had been a long time since I’d let anyone touch my hair.
When I was little—before my mother remarried that bastard of a stepfather, before my younger sisters were born—my hair had been long, like it is now. Back then, maybe because I was her only blood family, my mother still had some affection left for me. Every morning she would part my hair neatly and tie it into two sections. The same hairstyle she wore.
So I wouldn’t feel lonely on my own.
“Dona, your hair looks just like his,” she used to say as she smoothed it with her hand.
I remembered that.
The priest’s touch was strangely gentle—strangely practiced. Maybe because he tied his own hair back. Even so, he took his time, dividing it cleanly into two equal parts. It wasn’t the same as my mother’s, but I liked it far more than I expected.
“About my father’s hair…”
The words I should have kept inside spilled out, and it was too late to swallow them back. They kept coming.
“Did you tie DIO’s hair too?”
The priest looked slightly startled. He blinked, then answered, almost apologetically,
“DIO—he didn’t tie his hair.
But the length was nearly identical to yours.”
Then he smiled. He was smiling.
I’d never seen him smile like that before. And the man he worshipped—my father—had never had his hair tied by anyone.
So I thought, It’s only me. Only me.
I thought it. I wanted to think it.
But there was no way that could be true. There was no way I could be the only one. That kind of convenient dream didn’t exist.
Weather’s disc was inserted. Right before my consciousness went dark, what flashed in my mind was the delighted face of that bastard’s little sister—blond, angelic, smiling like she’d been blessed, because her brother had tied her hair for her.
—
Why did I say such a thing?
Even now, I don’t know. Maybe I felt a fleeting pity for his messy head. Maybe the way his hair caught the light reminded me too much of hers.
My hand brushed through his hair. Dry, rough—hair that had probably never been cared for in his entire life. It’s completely different, I almost let myself say aloud, and swallowed it.
As I combed it, separated it into two, tied it neatly… I thought of Perla.
Of course, it didn’t resemble hers in the slightest. And yet, for those few minutes—maybe the calmest minutes I’d had in days, in months… perhaps in years—I felt something close to peace.
Like tending to a chick. Like I was looking after something small and helpless.
No matter how I tried to stretch it, it ended in less than five minutes.
The boy seemed satisfied, peeking into the mirror over and over. Then he looked up at me with eyes that were too young for distrust, too young for suspicion—and asked if I’d done the same for DIO.
I denied it.
I sat back down to read. Versus closed his eyes again and slipped back into dreams.
That was all.
Only that.
Nothing more than a trivial, meaningless thing that lasted less than five minutes.
And yet—right in front of me—was DIO’s son. The key to raising myself to Heaven. The gift DIO left behind for me—truly, a gift from God.
Smug. Insolent. Flimsy—like a house of straw.
It was nothing more than a momentary flashback. A single flicker.
I have no regrets. I was never made to carry something like that.
And with that thought as the last thing in my mind, I brought my hand down on Donatello’s neck.