Chapter Text
“Chumimin!”
Diego Brando (from what might as well be another universe) feels as though he has just made a terrible mistake.
He finds the apartment shared by Johnny and his twin, the other Diego, with no problem. Guessing which potted plant concealed the key is harder, but he successfully picks the most lizard-tail-looking one (scientific name Haworthia attenuata). Once inside, he cannot help but look around. Johnny’s half of the apartment is a complete mess. There are piles of souvenirs from Italy, trophies that look like they have been smashed and then fished out of the trash again, a sad-looking teddy bear, and mounds of clothing discarded all over the place. All the clothes are patterned with stars. Ridiculous. Tastelessly American. Diego groans inwardly at the thought of looking through all this garbage to find whatever the hell that weirdo Valentine wanted.
His brother’s half of the apartment is more interesting. There is the expected (okay, way more than expected) coffee paraphernalia and dinosaur-themed stuff. There is also a prominently displayed family photo with a young Diego Brando—he cannot tell which one—and their mother. Aww, that’s kind of sweet. Except why is there only one of them? Is that a corner of his sweater with the rest of him out of frame? Does his brother go around pretending that he doesn’t exist? Now, why on earth would he deny the existence of such a charming relation?
Diego is grumbling inwardly as he digs through a pile of mail, probably committing no small amount of misdemeanors in the process, when he hears the sound. Just a tiny little noise, the kind made by a squeaky toy or small animal. Did he just imagine it?
“Chumi~min!”
No, there it is again. For no reason Diego feels the hairs on his back stand up. He turns around slowly to see the yellow eyes of something staring at him from a hole in a wall. “Oh fuck!” No, he didn’t just say that aloud. The great Diego Brando is not afraid of a rat in the wall, or whatever this is.
The thing moves closer to him. It’s visibly pink. Small. Fluffy. It might be some kind of rodent—maybe a chinchilla? Under normal circumstances he would even call it cute. But right now, the creature is looking at him with a glare that can only be described as intimidating. Relentless. Soul-devouring. It reaches toward him with one accusatory paw.
“To pursue me is foolish. It’s useless, useless!” Diego shouts at the creature. Wait, why is he trying to intimidate a small animal? What does he think it’s going to do? Yet somehow, in his heart of hearts, he knows the creature is allied with Johnny Joestar. It knows exactly what Diego is doing, and it’s having none of it. Why didn’t his brother warn him? Why didn’t he tell him that Johnny has some kind of possessed chumimin hellbeast in his apartment?
The animal hops another step closer. “Chumimii?” it says, tilting its head cutely. Ominously.
“Stop right there,” Diego Brando says.
The thing launches itself at him, spinning through the air and crashing into Diego with surprising force. He yelps as it tries to nip at his fingers, the two of them rolling over the floor and the pile of mail. It occurs to Diego that he has to stop Johnny’s pet from attacking him without hurting it, or else there will be hell to pay. Finally he manages to hold the snarling creature at arm’s length, away from his face, when the sound of a car pulling up outside makes him freeze.
“Are you in there?” Johnny’s voice sounds from just the other side of the door. “I know it’s you!”
Oh shit.
From his precarious position on the floor, Diego spots—at this of all times—an envelope with the return address of a certain Zeppeli family in Naples, Italy. He nudges it toward himself and manages to pick it up in his teeth. The chumimin creature writhes indignantly and fluffs itself up to twice its usual size.
The key turns in the door. Time passes hideously slowly—why can’t he just pause time for everyone else? and then the door finally opens to reveal an extremely indignant Johnny Joestar. “I knew there was something off about you,” Johnny says. “You’re an even bigger lil’ shit.”
Diego has some kind of retort for that, except he can’t speak without dropping the envelope in his teeth. The small pink animal is still hissing and snarling at him. “Calm down, Tusk,” Johnny says to it. Mentally Diego goes through his options. He has to run for it. Johnny is blocking the doorway, and he’ll have to either tackle him or distract him. Diego is not without a few dirty tricks in a fight; he had grown up in a bad neighborhood and was used to taking care of himself (and his brother) from a young age. His ability to throw knives and burning matches is peerless. But this is not the time to resort to violence.
What would Valentine do in this situation? For some reason, Diego envisions his brother’s boss, the one who got him into this whole mess, intoning with great seriousness, hit him with his own, uh…
Diego throws the creature called Tusk at Johnny, and as both of them make a noise of surprise and try to avoid each other, he rolls off the floor in one motion and makes for the door. Johnny’s car keys have dropped to the floor, and he grabs them and pushes through the doorway, Johnny’s furious shouts behind him.
A few strides takes him to his scooter in the parking lot, and thankfully it doesn’t need an app to unlock this time. As Johnny emerges from the doorway, Diego throws the keys over the nearest hedge and hears them land in a body of water, to his satisfaction. One shoe has nearly come off from the frantic sprint. Diego throws it at Johnny for good measure, like a cornered lizard shedding its tail. He clambers onto the scooter, and finally he is off, Johnny’s stream of colorful American invectives receding in the distance. He is definitely never doing this again.
[20 minutes earlier]
The moment he exits the store into the parking lot, the (original, dino-loving, takes-his-coffee-black) Diego Brando gets a text on his phone. It’s from Johnny Joestar, which cannot possibly be a good sign. Diego groans, puts down his armful of overpriced baby supplies next to Silver Bullet, and reads:
did u find it? dumbass
Diego squints at the message, wondering what the hell Johnny is going off about this time. It almost isn’t worth the effort to text him back. Almost.
find what?
A moment later, his phone starts ringing. Johnny is actually calling him. Okay, what?
“Are you really that stupid?” Johnny’s eye-roll is audible through the phone. “Your keys.”
“My keys are right here, Johnny.”
“Wait, what? Where are you calling from?”
Approximately 90 seconds later, Diego is pulling out of the parking lot with an ungodly screech. Holy shit. He’d actually done it. His colossal bastard of a twin brother had actually done it. “Don’t let him get inside! Don’t let him mess with our stuff! My stuff!” Diego yells, phone cradled between shoulder and ear.
“Way ahead of you!” Johnny replies, and Diego swears he could hear the sound of burning rubber on the other end. The two of them are racing maniacally through the city at the same time. He realizes this with irony. It’s almost a bonding moment. Ugh.
“You go to the apartment! I’ll head to the office. For damage control.”
After a journey that, in spite of breaking the speed limit, still takes far too long, Diego parks illegally on the street and runs breathlessly toward the building that houses SBR. The sidewalk in front of him is taken up by an unusual sight: a flock of pink-and-black electric scooters, with almost no room to walk past, and a cheerfully attired young woman standing watch over them. “Oh, great. Don’t tell me you’re from one of those scooter start-ups.”
“Would you like to hear about the transportation solution of the future? Wait, weren’t you just here?” The girl studies him with a surprisingly severe look. “Why are you driving? Did you lose or damage your Ticket to Ride? You did read the fine print on liability, right?”
“If I broke anything, my boss will pay for it.” The gears in Diego’s head start turning. His twin brother had obvious rented a scooter here before leaving SBR. In spite of his increasing desire to yell at him, Diego is still in no hurry to meet his brother in person—that had always ended in bad luck. Hence sending Johnny to the apartment while coming to the office himself. Now he just has to make 101% sure that his brother hasn’t yet returned, and it will be safe for him to go in.
“When I was here just now, was I coming or leaving?”
“What?”
“I have amnesia, okay? It’s a really sad story. Was I going in or out of the building?”
“You were going out.”
“Okay, great! Thanks!” Diego rushes into the building. Just in time, surely. All is well.
Everything is fine. He has barely made it. Barely avoided the avenging fury of Johnny Joestar and escaped his demonic chumimin creature at the same time. (The other) Diego Brando descends into the SBR office from the rooftop parking lot stairwell, out of an inexplicable need to avoid the Ticket to Ride girl waiting on the sidewalk.
“Which one are you?” Magenta asks as he rushes in. Great, the gig is up. Diego ignores everyone’s stares and makes a beeline for Valentine’s office.
“Mr. Brando! Victory is yours, dare I hope?” Valentine looks up at him with a smirk as he closes the door.
“Johnny is like, two minutes behind me. Where’s your safe?”
“Ah, there appears to be a problem. I can’t unlock it.”
“You what?”
“I think Scarlet messed with it. I could have sworn the combination was my birthday…”
Diego ignores the fact that Valentine appears to be trying to enter 20-09-1890 (???) into the safe. “You’re fucking kidding me. We need to get rid of the evidence.”
“Okay, let me see it first.” Valentine snaps a photo of the envelope, then turns toward Diego with a look of irreproachable sincerity. “Now you have to eat it.”
“I what?”
“I thought you liked putting all kinds of things in your mouth—”
“That’s my brother, not me. I think. Did you have to put it like that?”
There is a sudden burst of banging doors and indignant yelling from the direction of the open workspace. Diego and Valentine turn toward each other with frozen faces, as if neither is willing to admit just how inglorious they look in this situation. “Johnny is here,” Diego says.
“I know,” Valentine says.
“We’re going to have to do something. Aren’t you supposed to have like, a smart trash compactor?”
“It’s not working! You’re going to have to eat it.”
“I am not going to fucking eat it!”
“You won’t die. I promise.”
Diego looks morosely at the envelope clutched in his hands. Well, he is good at setting things on fire.
“You!” Johnny Joestar shouts at him as he enters the office. “Which one are you?”
“How the hell are you that fast?” (The original, one-and-only, and totally not an eater of rocks) Diego Brando says, with no small indignation. How did Johnny manage to go from the office to his apartment, (presumably) try to stop his twin brother from wreaking havoc, and then make it back to the office before him? Could Johnny actually beat him if they were racing to the same destination?
Perish the thought. The store Diego was at was just really, really far.
“Oh,” Johnny says. “You’re the asshole I live with.”
Flattering. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Where’s my brother?”
“I don’t know, I lost him. I bet the boss has something to do with this—”
And then Diego is already throwing open the door to Valentine’s private office. Good thing he got here before his brother did, right? Good thing the girl in front of the building assured him that his twin is definitely not inside. Maybe he can get the truth out of Valentine before he gets here.
The door opens, and Diego freezes in place, staring into the eyes of his mirror image.
The other Diego Brando is standing on the eyesore of a couch, holding what appears to be a burning envelope. Valentine is furiously trying to fan the smoke away from the smoke detector mounted on the ceiling. “Oh dear god,” (the original) Diego says, with a feeling in his stomach like he has just been dropped down three flights of stairs.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” his brother shouts, the frantic look in his eyes betraying the fact that, for all his denial, he believes in the curse too.
“What are you doing here? Get out!”
“No, you get out!”
“Gentlemen—”
“WRYYYYYYYY!”
Right on cue, the fire alarm overhead goes off for the second time in six months. The blaring noise fills the office. Diego claps his hands to his ears, while the other Diego is so startled he drops the burning paper onto the frilly couch. Whatever material the damn thing is made of, it goes up in flames immediately. “Oh shit!” Valentine says cheerily, then pushes past both of them and makes for the exit, his personal unit of D4C in his arms.
Diego looks at his brother. His brother looks at him. Whatever dismay that appears on the identical face must be the same as on his own. Finally he groans, grabs his twin by the hand, and drags him out of the room. The sprinklers have come on all over the building. The balloon dogs are running amok, apparently not used to the high-pitched noise. The fridge is crying in an Italian accent. “Wow, there really are two of you,” Magenta says, looking from one Diego to the other. “At least take a picture together?”
“Come on,” Diego says to his twin, who looks dazed by the havoc he has managed to unleash. “Let’s get out of here.”
“So, what the hell actually happened?”
They are sitting outside the building while the fire department is putting out the last remnants of the flames. The SBR offices have been spared the worst, but the fainting couch is a lost cause, and Valentine’s office will have to be remodeled (which Diego is not entirely sorry about). He is almost impressed with his little shit of a brother for causing this much chaos.
“Do you really want to know?” the other Diego sits back, looking way too pleased with himself. “Long story short, your boss is a madman, your coworkers are obnoxious, I impersonated you all day and almost got away with it, broke into your apartment, stole Johnny’s mail, and as you can see, set the office on fire.”
“Wow. Wait, you what? I’m the one who has to live with him, you know!”
As if on cue Johnny appears in front of them, the blue of his eyes as intense and murderous as Diego has ever seen. “How are you going to explain that one?”
“I, uh…” the other Diego looks away for a moment, and his voice suddenly becomes choked with emotion. What the hell is he planning? “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I’m sorry.”
“You decided to steal my mail on a spur-of-the-moment thing?”
“Look, I just wanted to mess with my brother a little. See how he lives. That kind of thing. But I…we never had a happy family growing up. We never had a proper childhood. So when I saw this really nice Christmas card you’d gotten, signed by all these people, I had this warm fuzzy feeling in some part of my body I’d never felt before.”
“Ew.”
“I meant my heart.” His brother looks as sincere as Diego has ever seen him. It’s honestly impressive. “I’m sorry, Johnny Joestar. I just wanted to feel that kind of happiness, if only for a few moments.”
“Um, okay. Can I have it back?”
“It caught on fire.”
“Wow, I fucking hope you never come visit again.” Johnny still looks displeased, but at least no longer homicidal. Once he is out of earshot, Diego leans over toward his brother, and says, “That was the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever seen anyone pull. Congratulations.”
“Heh.” The other Diego smirks, showing not-at-all lizard-like teeth.
“So what was the real reason?”
“I’ve no idea. It’s better you don’t know. I think your coworker in Marketing has a crush on you, by the way.”
“What? What did you say to her?”
“I didn’t say anything that I wouldn’t normally say. But it was obvious. She refused to look directly at me, and usually people can’t keep their eyes off me, y’know?”
“You’re the absolute worst.” Diego has more to say about the topic, but just then Hot Pants herself appears. She takes one look at the fire trucks, the smoke coming out of the second-story window, and everyone sitting forlornly on the pavement, and her face falls.
“Oh god. I fucked up, didn’t I? I fucked up. I need to get away. I need to become a nun. Again.”
“Again?” Diego is not sure how to process that comment, but he rushes to her side nonetheless. “It’s fine! Nobody was hurt. The fainting couch was the only casualty. None of this is your fault. No one thinks that.”
“Are you sure?” Hot Pants looks hesitant to believe him, but hopeful.
“Of course. And my brother here,” emphatically glaring at the other Diego, the cause of all this, “has agreed to give us full financial support from ZWorld for our project. Isn’t that so, Diego?”
“Absolutely, Diego,” his brother replies dryly.
“Wow,” Hot Pants says, looking from one to the other. “This is really weird.”
“You’re just now noticing? Well, I guess the curse is broken. We can all go get drinks or something.”
“To our new partnership,” the other Diego says, with only a little bit of facetiousness.
“To the demise of the fainting couch.”
“To our new hire.”
“Wait.” Diego turns toward the person who has just spoken up, their HR representative, DI-S-CO. “We have a new hire? Who?”
“You might want to bolt down any sharp objects. And that’s all I’m going to say.”