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After his twin brother steps backward into Hell, his weight tipping off of a broken ledge and his blade dragging against the skin of Dante’s palm, Dante no longer dreams.
In his sleep, he always sees the same thing. He sees Vergil’s face, his eyes a cold and empty blue, and, in the lower part of his vision, there’s his own hand, outstretched for something he can never quite reach.
It’s not a dream, because dreams can’t be real. It’s a memory, painted on the insides of his mind, and when he blinks, his eyelids heavier than all the prices he’s had to pay, his world shifts in barely noticeable segments.
The outcome never changes—Vergil is always just barely out of his grasp—but sometimes the details do. Sometimes his brother’s eyes will be a different shade of blue, just light enough for Dante to realize. The sleeves on Vergil’s coat occasionally unravel and stitch themselves back together in record time, leaving them shorter or longer or not there at all.
Each time he wakes up, his memory of that moment is just a little different than before, and Dante wonders if one day he’ll open his eyes and find that he doesn’t remember his brother at all.
He flips over his palm, traces the scar etched into his skin, and realizes he doesn’t know if he’d prefer that.
When he is eight years old, he watches, from around a corner, as their father presses the sheathed blade of his sword into Vergil’s trembling hands.
Dante isn’t supposed to be awake right now, really. Their father had only shaken Vergil awake, and had spoken in the hushed sort of tone that implied a certain brand of secrecy. But he and Vergil are twins, have promised never to go anywhere without each other, so when Vergil slips out of the room and down the stairs, Dante is absolutely compelled to follow.
“Are you going somewhere, Father?” Vergil asks, his voice neutral and his expression unreadable.
His brother’s always been better than him at this sort of thing, at locking his emotions away behind a blank mask. Dante’s tried and tried, but he takes too much after their mother, or so he’s been told. He wears his heart on his sleeve and his emotions like a cloak, always eager and willing to wrap someone else up in himself.
“Something like that,” their father answers vaguely. “Only for a bit. I’ll be back as soon as I’m done, but until then…”
He presses Yamato more firmly into Vergil’s grasp and his brother wraps his hands more tightly around it, a steely determination entering his eyes.
Later on, Dante gets Rebellion, along with much less of the responsibility that had been passed onto Vergil.
It doesn’t matter anyway because, some weeks later, his mother pushes him into a closet and tells him she’s going to find his brother, and all he can do is wrap his arms around a sword twice his length in a silent prayer for his father to return.
She doesn’t find Vergil. His father doesn’t come back.
They’re both gone, fading into a blurry memory, just as the people in Dante’s life so often tend to do.
The first time he sees Vergil—not the real one, of course—is on another routine job.
He’s been taking a lot of jobs, lately, mostly because he feels like he can no longer sit still. The longer he remains stationary, the more his thoughts bother him, and the more he remembers his own hand, always reaching and always missing what was most important to him.
Dante is tired of being too slow, too late, too much of not enough.
So when people come to his shop, with hope in their eyes and often with nothing in their hands, Dante takes them on. They need his help, and Dante needs to feel useful—it’s the perfect combination, really.
He’s nineteen years old, rapidly bordering on twenty, and when he brings Rebellion’s blade in a downwards arc, cutting his designated demon of the week cleanly in half, he starts seeing ghosts.
His brother is standing in front of him, his face carefully blank, his arms folded over his chest, Yamato tied at his waist.
“Vergil,” he says, instinctively reaching out with his left hand, and his scar prickles with heat as his fingers swipe through the phantom image of his brother.
He’s finally able to touch him now, but his fingers pass through all the same. They’re so close to each other, but there’s at least eleven years of hatred and abandonment and reasons for existence still separating them.
Vergil’s eyes, as blue as Dante’s should be, flick downwards, giving him a familiar look of disdainful appraisement.
“You always were too slow, Dante,” he tells him, in a voice just shy of being disappointed.
Dante returns his sword to his back and turns away, digging the nails of his fingers into his left palm. He feels Vergil’s gaze on the back of his neck the entire way to the shop, but when he looks behind him, the streets are empty and clear.
“The job’s done,” Dante informs his relieved client, who looks instantly grateful, worrying her hands over and over again, telling him so sorry, so sorry, but she has nothing to pay him with, but if there’s anything she can do for him, all he needs to do is ask.
Dante opens his mouth, starts to say it’s fine, but his skin crawls again and ice cold fingers are trailing up his bare forearms and disappearing underneath the still-torn sleeve of his coat, and they feel a lot like his brother’s.
If he’s not careful, Vergil will grab onto him completely and drag him underneath, maybe into Hell.
Dante thinks that he very much doesn’t want to be alone tonight, or for all the nights to come, in fact.
He looks back at the woman, at her rounded features and shapely eyes and full lips. She’s only a little older than him, and she’s looking him up and down with something like muted interest.
Her eyes are very blue.
He twists his face into a lopsided sort of a smile, one with just enough casual cockiness in it to feel like himself again, and he extends a hand, both of them looking at the clean skin of his right palm.
“There could be something,” he says, and she giggles, flutters her eyelashes, and puts her delicate hand in his own.
His left hand itches with an insatiable scratch, his fingers curling again and again around empty air.
“This is reckless, Dante,” Vergil is looking up at him, with an expression Dante has long learned to read, apprehension flickering in his eyes.
They are eight years old and Dante is climbing up a tree, the rough bark scraping against the skin of his hands, but he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t look back down at his brother, his attention thoroughly fixed on the object that’s captured his interest, a single, red flower quivering in the wind, attached to the highest branches of the tree by a delicate stem.
He wants it, not only because it’s red, but also because their mother likes flowers, and Dante secretly likes the way she smiles down at him, brushing his hair back with her soft fingers and telling him what a son he is.
“It’ll be worth it, Verge,” Dante reassures his twin, because at eight years old, the two of them have already long discovered their physical capabilities, the way they heal faster and stronger and better than anyone else.
It makes them like their father, because they’ve seen the way his bruises and cuts from sparring vanish with practiced ease, and their father is invincible, the strongest man to walk this earth.
“It’s a gift for Mom--she’ll like it, trust me.”
Vergil makes a neutral sort of noise, and Dante imagines he’s hugging his boring book of poems closer to his chest.
“It’s just a flower. You could pick one off of the ground, and the effect would be much the same, I’m certain.”
Dante doesn’t think Vergil understands, but that’s all right. His brother has never been particularly adept with this side of the emotional sphere, and while Dante feels a little victorious at the advantage he holds, he’d never say it to his brother.
“It’s not worth giving if it doesn’t mean something,” Dante explains patiently, wriggling his way to the very top of the tree.
Perched in the crook of the highest branches, Vergil’s form looks so small, the world beneath him looks so small, and Dante tilts his face up to the sky, feeling the warm sun against the skin of his face. His brother shifts, and Dante faintly hears him saying something to him, but he’s too busy slowly inching forward to care.
Predictably, the branch, while sturdy enough to hold a single flower, is not enough to support Dante. He feels the crack underneath him, and he has a second to look down before he’s suddenly weightless, tumbling through air and sharp branches until the ground greets him in an impact that steals the breath from his lungs and the light from his vision.
When he wakes up, his injuries are already healed, and Vergil is standing in front of him, his lips pressed together in a thin line.
He grimaces as he sits up, rubbing at his sore back, waiting for the inevitable reprimand from his brother.
Instead, his brother holds his hand out, the red flower cupped gently in his palm.
“If you had been faster, you would have been able to reach it.”
Dante silently takes the flower from his brother, looking at the way the corners of Vergil’s mouth tilt upwards in a barely-there smile.
“It was caught on the lower branches on its way down.”
He looks at his brother’s palm, catching sight of the angry red scratches on the skin, mirroring the ones on Dante’s own, before their accelerated healing washes away the evidence.
Dante tries to ignore the unreasonable warmth that bubbles up in his stomach, pushing himself upwards and already starting to walk back in the direction of their house, Vergil falling into stride next to him.
“We got you this flower!”
Dante proudly presents it to their mother, but when he looks back, Vergil is shaking his head.
“No. It was entirely Dante’s doing.”
Lady is certainly very concerned for him, if the way she keeps dropping by his shop is anything to go by.
Dante is more than old enough to drink by now, and he does so with great abandon, both because his half-demon body can tolerate anything Dante chooses to put in it, and because it’s nice for his head to feel a bit fuzzy for a night or three.
“You’re a mess,” she tells him, kicking aside a pizza box with no small amount of disgust. “When was the last time you left this hellhole?”
Dante shrugs lazily, tipping the bottle back and letting the last few drops inside slide down his throat.
He’s on what people normally call a “vacation,” except his has lasted for about three years, starting with the moment he popped open the bottle on his twenty-first birthday.
Vergil is standing behind Lady, watching him as intently as always, and he thinks about waving at his brother, but decides against it. It’d probably be impolite to do in company, anyway, since Dante is the only one who can ever see Vergil anymore.
“Well, I’ve got a job for you.”
She makes herself at home on his desk, situating herself right next to the picture of his mother, and opens up the pizza box she’s brought with her as some form of comfort or bribery--probably both.
He waves his hand vaguely to indicate that she should continue, taking a slice from the box, and already starting to pick the olives off of it. She takes the nonverbal cue, rattling off the details at his head as he chews slowly through the food, his motions mechanical and automatic.
Vergil silently glides over to stand behind him--he can’t quite recall when Vergil had evolved into being able to actually move--and he senses his brother glancing at Lady, examining her carefully.
“She seems to have done a fine job of reigning your less desirable tendencies in,” his brother notes, a cold, flat edge to his voice.
Dante licks the taste of pizza off of his fingers and leans forward.
“Seems easy enough,” he tells Lady, while pretending like his own brother isn’t looking over his shoulder. “Go in, kick ass, and get home in time for dinner.”
She rolls his eyes at him, nudging his arm with her booted foot, and he guesses that she’s picked the low difficulty of this mission especially for him, as something to force him to get up and function, rather than an actual challenge.
“Just get going. You owe me for the pizza, by the way.”
Dante does get going--he leaves his office with his weapons and his brother, and moves through the city like he’s in a dream, people and places passing by him without much notice.
“The humans are so needy. Why do you bother to continue to assist them?” Vergil questions, an appropriate amount of disgust in his tone. “Our inheritance is greater than theirs--I thought you had come to accept the nature of your demonic half?”
Dante senses that they’re nearing the destination Lady had described to him, and scans the streets for the sight of the building she’d told him about.
“Sure I did,” he answers absently, because his response doesn’t really matter anyway. Vergil isn’t actually here, won’t ever be able to hear the words from his mouth.
“Doesn’t mean I’m gonna stop helping people, though. It’s just the right thing to do.”
“The right thing,” Vergil repeats, somewhat incredulously. “And you believe you are the one who decides between right and wrong? Such foolishness.”
“If you think I’m such a fool, then you might as well just leave me alone, yeah?”
Dante gives his brother a crooked sort of smile, because that’s their little joke. He doesn’t want his brother to leave, and this Vergil, conjured up by a broken piece of Dante’s imagination, has no choice but to stay.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Vergil plays along, as serene as ever.
“Oh, really? Seems to me like you could be doing whatever you want, Verge.”
Vergil smiles back at him, then, in the faintest twitch of his lips.
“It wouldn’t be the right thing to do.”
Dante laughs humorlessly, drawing his sword and letting Rebellion’s tip drag against the ground as he walks forward. That’s Vergil’s little joke right there--that his brother cares at all about the morals that shackle humans to their consciences.
If only Dante could find it as funny as he did.
When Dante thinks he’s completely alone in the world, the last of his bloodline to roam the world with his mother dead and his father gone, Vergil shows up.
He’s already passed by his brother once before, but he’d thought it’d been a vision, a trick of the light, because when turned around, he saw nothing resembling his own face in the crowd.
He knows it’s not when he feels the strength of Yamato’s blade against his own, his brother bearing down on him with a force that Dante can’t quite match up to. Very suddenly, he finds himself defeated, staring up at his brother, who is holding up Dante’s half of the amulet like a trophy, the chain wrapping around his long fingers.
“I thought you were dead,” Dante says, pushing himself upwards, his eyes narrowed. He doesn’t know what Vergil wants with him or his necklace, or what’s become of his brother since they last saw each other.
Vergil hums neutrally, properly taking the amulet in his hands and turning it over, Yamato sheathed at his side.
“For a time, it came close,” his brother admits, and Dante is surprised that Vergil would choose to show any hint of weakness at all.
“But I’ve grown stronger now, in the time that we’ve been apart.”
Dante feels uneasy at the tone of his brother’s voice--he hasn’t seen Vergil in over a decade, but he still likes to think that he knows his twin brother better than anyone else on earth. Vergil doesn’t sound like himself, or at least not any version of him that Dante knows.
“Sure,” he indulges his brother, slowly getting to his feet. “So, what? You just show up and take my half of Mom’s amulet? You got one of your own, so you mind returning that to me?”
Vergil looks at him carefully, his face blank as he walks forward, appraising Dante for something he doesn’t quite know.
Dante automatically holds out his hand for the amulet, but Vergil keeps it in his grasp, now close enough to him for Dante to see the tired, drawn lines on his brother’s face.
“What happened to you?” Dante dares to ask, lowering his arm slowly.
Vergil tilts his head, a thin smile playing at his lips, one that Dante knows to be not-quite-real.
“Nothing that didn’t already need to happen.”
Vergil still has his half of the amulet, and Dante can’t exactly leave without it. Besides, as unusual and stilted as this meeting is, he’s missed his brother. And he likes the sensation of no longer being alone.
“I’m guessing you want to talk?”
His brother pauses for a second longer, an unusual hesitation stilling his movements. Vergil rarely admits when he wants something, a little too stubborn and far too prideful to concede weakness in any way.
But Dante knows his brother about as well as he can in the eight years they were allowed to grow up together.
He reaches out and pats his brother on the shoulder, his hand firm against the expanse of Vergil’s back.
“Come on. I’m hungry--you ever tried pizza before?”
Vergil doesn’t disappear, even when Dante kills his brother.
He drives his sword through the heart of the demon known as Nelo Angelo, and when it dies, its body decays to an empty husk, dropping a pendant in its remains. When Dante kneels down and wraps his fingers around the intricate chain and brings it up close to his face, he understands and wishes he didn’t, all at once.
The skin of his left palm itches and itches underneath the cool touch of the amulet.
He doesn’t let himself think too hard about what he’s just done, and leaves the amulet behind along with his father’s sword with the immobile body of the demon that resembles his mother. It’s his entire fucked-up past, all wrapped up in one bundle--replicas of the real thing.
Later on, after he and Trish have safely escaped the island and set up shop again, Dante digs a grave for Vergil.
It’s nothing big, and nothing special, because he has absolutely nothing left of his brother to bury. His brother’s body is gone, slain by his own hand and corrupted by another, and Vergil’s half of the amulet has met a similar fate as Dante’s, absorbed into his father’s sword to unlock the power his brother had so desperately spent his life seeking.
Even Yamato is gone--maybe it’d landed in a different place in Hell than Vergil had, or maybe his brother had just lost it somewhere along the way, like he’d lost everything else in his endless pursuit for a singular, stupid goal.
So Dante has nothing, except for the true ghost of his brother, who has followed him so faithfully all this time.
But he digs the grave anyway, because when he pushes through grass and dirt and stone with his bare hands, his fingers go numb and he can’t feel the scar on his palm burning into him anymore.
Vergil watches his efforts, as silent as always, and it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking, of whether his brother approves or not. He probably doesn’t--Vergil’s never been one for foolish sentiment, and a grave for an empty existence is a foolish sentiment if Dante’s ever heard of one.
He washes his hands when he’s done, watching the water erase the evidence of his task, and maybe it’s a trick of the light, but if Dante tilts his hand in just the right way, he thinks he can see his scar fading as well, disappearing into the tint of his skin.
The thought unnerves him more than it should--he wants to keep that scar, because he’s not sure how much more he can handle losing.
When he sleeps, he wanders from his usual memory into a new one, where he stares into the bandaged face of his brother and never recognizes him.
He had a chance to save Vergil, three chances, in fact--he should have realized the truth from the minute the demon had shied away at the sight of Dante’s amulet. Who else would react in such a manner but the last remaining essence of their parents’ bloodline?
Dante quickly grows tired of reviewing his useless memories, and instead sits awake at night, staring at the scar on his palm.
“You always were a little late to catch on, brother,” Vergil’s ghost tells him, sitting at his side as usual, his face washed out and faded in the moonlight.
Dante turns to look at him, and his brother’s face warps, flickering between his appearance at nineteen to a corrupted, cloth-covered demon. Each time he changes back, the colors and details of his brother fade away, little by little.
Vergil says nothing when Dante digs the tip of his blade into the flesh of his palm, reopening the scar on his hand and widening it once more, etching it in deep so that he’ll no longer be able to forget.
Vergil is always silent, after all--he can only be heard in Dante’s head.
Dante loses his first kiss to his own twin brother, shortly after they’ve been reunited. Despite the fact that Vergil is the one who initiated the gesture, he thinks it might be his brother’s first kiss, too, if the inexperience in Vergil’s movements is any indication.
He can’t help the laugh that tumbles out of him when they break apart, still too close to each other to be casual.
“We’re twins--I mean, I knew your head was pretty big, Verge, but this is kind of on a whole new level.”
It’s a bit strange, sure, and Dante’s been around human civilization enough to know that this kind of thing is heavily frowned upon, but he can’t exactly say he didn’t enjoy it. Neither of them quite know what they’re doing in this, and Dante doesn’t mind the opportunity to get closer to his brother, even in this taboo sort of way.
Vergil averts his eyes, his fingers running through his slicked-back hair, careful to keep his face as blank as possible.
“Who better to trust with matters such as these?”
Dante raises a brow, chuckling in amusement at the embarrassment lurking underneath Vergil’s calm-sounding words.
“Didn’t know you trusted me--real heartwarming of you, really.”
“Actually,” Vergil seems to correct himself, properly looking at him again. “Perhaps I just sought out a way to silence your foolishness.”
“Whatever you say, brother,” Dante quips, before reaching out again, curving the palm of his left hand around the back of Vergil’s neck and pressing their lips together again.
They lose themselves quickly, after that, the two of them lost and inexperienced and slowly reveling in the novelty of no longer being alone in the world.
In the night, they lean against each other, and Dante pretends to drift off to sleep, smiling where he thinks Vergil won’t see him, while his brother gently traces the letters of his own name into the bare surface of Dante’s skin.
Vergil becomes crueler after he’s dead.
His eyes, now a nearly transparent shade of blue, always seem to cut into Dante wherever he goes, staring and staring at him until Dante doesn’t think he can stand it for a second longer. He retreats into himself, because it’s the safest place he has anymore, with Vergil glancing at his blood on Dante’s hands with every free moment he has.
Lady and Trish drop by the shop, but he shuts them out, turns them away, because talking them requires resurfacing into reality, and he’s not so sure he can do that.
He needs a new life, can’t afford to stay here any longer with his memories lurking in every corner, so when a new problem, a new person, a new location, a new reason to fight drop into his lap, he latches onto it like a drowning man.
Vergil follows him all the way, of course, but when the portal to Hell opens up, and Dante stares it down, his fingers tracing the edge of his double-headed coin, the image of his brother ripples and dissolves into nothing, perhaps returned to its origins.
“We’ll leave it up to fate,” he tells Lucia, who insists on going in herself, even while he knows what the answer will be.
It has to be him--he wants it to be him, hasn’t been so certain of something in a long time.
The coin flips in the air, revolving end over end.
Dante catches it in his palm, allows his companion a second to witness the conclusion, then tosses it to her.
He won’t need it anymore, not where he’s going.
He wraps his hand around the hilt of his sword, feeling his heart pound painfully against the bones of his ribcage, and goes to meet his brother.
“What’s that?” Dante automatically reaches for the book in Vergil’s arms, but his brother pulls away, smacking at his hand.
“It’s mine,” Vergil responds. After a tense moment, he reluctantly uncurls, holding the book properly in his hands and tracing the V on the cover.
“Someone gave this to me--it’s a book of poems. You wouldn’t like this stuff.”
Ordinarily, Dante really wouldn’t. He likes to read the occasional book or two, sure, but only when he’s really interested in something. Otherwise, sitting down and forcing himself to stare at words is a harrowing experience, one that Dante has little desire to repeat.
But Vergil having something that he doesn’t, and something new, at that, is enough to spark Dante’s curiosity, and he narrows his eyes, determination entering his stance.
“Well, maybe I would! Give it over--I wanna look at it.”
He and Vergil are always fighting over their stuff, over who gets what and who gets more, because if they look exactly alike, the only way they’ll ever be different is through the measure of their possessions.
Vergil makes a disgusted sort of noise, flipping open the cover and turning the book around so that it properly faces Dante, allowing Dante to see Vergil’s own name, scrawled into the bottom corner of first page in Vergil’s elegant print.
“I said it’s mine,” Vergil repeats, a bit unnecessarily. “I wrote my name on it, and that makes it mine.”
Dante knows his brother, knows when Vergil is liable to give in, and this is certainly not one of those times. Whatever that book is, it’s gained an awful lot of importance to his twin.
“Whatever,” Dante rolls his eyes.
He waits until Vergil is asleep to creep over to his brother’s side of the room and crack open the book.
Dante holds the candle close to the pages of the book, and reads about the formation of the earth, of an ancient being who created his own universe, his own laws, who wrote his name on the world and called it his.
In Hell, Dante is always chasing a shadow.
Everywhere he goes, he wonders if his brother was here first, if the tread of his motorcycle is erasing the footprints Vergil left behind. There is no concept of time here, so Dante has all the moments he needs to catch up with his brother, to figure out what he’s missed in the terrible gap between nineteen years old and now.
He still sees Vergil, but it’s not like before. His brother is alive here, in a sense, trapped in the place he willingly chose to call his home, and Dante sometimes catches a glimpse of the defeated, corrupted form of his twin, staggering about in the desolate wastelands of the underworld.
He isn’t sure what he’s looking for, really.
He’d come here both to escape from his brother and to find him, and now that he’s done both, he’s still not so sure that he wants to leave.
“Hell of a place to settle down, Verge,” he laughs at his own joke, his voice echoing out into the silence.
It’s a meaningless quip, at someone who may never hear him, but at least he’s starting to feel like himself again. The scar prickles against his hand, but doesn’t quite burn, and when he looks down at his skin, the surface is clean and smooth and unmarked by the stains of his brother’s blood.
Does he understand his brother more now? Now that he’s made the same choice that Vergil has, following after his elder twin and closing the circle, does he know him any better?
Dante’s not so sure the answer to that actually exists--it would imply that Dante actually had an understanding of Vergil to begin with.
“That’s a shitty plan,” Dante tells his brother bluntly, when Vergil announces, in no uncertain terms, that he plans to resurrect Temen-ni-Gu.
“You had to have known that I wouldn’t agree to this--why bother telling me?”
Vergil is turned away from him, looking down at Yamato in his hands. He unsheathes the sword halfway, tapping his fingers against the flat of the blade as he examines the weapon, testing the sharpness.
“Only men without honor work in the shadows. And I consider you an equal--to face off against you as a worthy opponent, you must be informed of the situation in its entirety.”
“Okay,” Dante says slowly, his fingers curling against the bedsheets, watching as the brother he’d just gotten back changes into someone he doesn’t know all over again. “Well, I’m going to stop you.”
Vergil tilts his head, but doesn’t quite look at him.
“Why?”
Dante grits his teeth. Vergil’s always been fond of asking those obvious questions with obvious answers, just to have something to argue against.
“Our father sealed it away for a reason, you know.”
Vergil does know. Vergil is the one who told him in the first place.
“So it is told. And if I can raise it, then I will be stronger than him. I will have obtained his power.”
“You really need it that badly?” Dante asks incredulously. “That’s what some might call an obsession, Vergil. What do you plan to do with all of it? You wanna take over the world?”
The muscles in Vergil’s back tense before his twin fully turns around, and although they’ve been identical in appearance all this time, Dante is starting to see the places where they diverge, where Vergil’s eyes are colder and the lines of his face sharper.
“Not quite.”
He’s obviously not about to get an answer from Vergil, not like this. It makes sense--the only way they’ve ever really communicated is through fighting.
“Then what the hell was all this?” He prompts, in a final question, motioning to the room around them and the still rumpled bedsheets beneath them, because the next time he sees his brother will be when he’s swinging Rebellion at his head, ready to put his power-hungry rampage to an end.
“Your idea of fun? Some kind of messed-up family reunion?”
His brother's mouth twitches into something that could be a ghost of a smile.
“Call it a moment of indulgence, if you will. A memory I wanted to keep.”
Vergil is gone when Dante returns from Hell, this time for good.
That’s one point in his favor. He made it back, and Vergil never did.
It’s oddly lonely, if Dante is honest with himself, to walk through his empty office and not have his brother nearby, blathering nonsense conjured up from Dante’s own brain into his ear. He supposes it should be a relief--whatever part of his mind that had been screwed up enough to do this to him has maybe fixed itself.
Sometimes, he looks at his own face in the mirror, wondering if he can see Vergil. But as alike as they looked on the surface, Dante can never quite manage to fool himself.
Either way, Dante is certain that he’ll never see his brother again, and he manages to content himself with this, for a while. He’s already followed the rest of his brother’s life, has mapped out his footsteps in Hell and carried himself back to the surface.
There’s nothing left for Dante to do, except remember Vergil in the fleeting snatches of time they had together.
He puts his feet up on the desk and plays with the broken glove that used to cover his left hand, and looks again and again at his scar. He starts taking jobs again, too, reminded by the vaguely rational part of his brain that he likes helping people.
That it’s the right thing to do.
So he does the right thing to do, does it over and over again, and thinks about his brother in the empty spaces in between, wondering if he ever could have done the right thing to do for Vergil.
What was the right thing to do?
Perhaps his brother would have hated him, if Dante had managed to grab onto his hand all those years ago and pull him back upwards, trapping him in the world of humans that he so evidently despised. Maybe Vergil would still be alive now, and he would have spared his brother years of enslavement under Mundus’ control.
It certainly sounds like the right thing to Dante.
But maybe it would have been considered selfish, to want to keep his brother with him so badly that he’d deny Vergil’s wishes, as foolish and irrational as they might have been.
When Dante sleeps now, he takes to changing his memories, asking his brother what he wants, and what is right.
He never gets a response, of course, but that’s alright.
Dante’s thinking about becoming a little more selfish, anyway.
They fight a lot, as children.
Their father is teaching them the ways of the sword, passing down his knowledge on how to protect themselves and their home, showing them two swords, the Yamato and the Rebellion.
“It’ll be a gift to you two, maybe when you’re ready,” he says, and he and his brother take this an encouragement, a reason to get stronger and faster and better.
Besides, they like fighting. They’ve always fought, about everything and anything. Dante doesn’t know about Vergil, but he himself likes the way his blood rushes through his veins and a certain sort of excitement sparks in the pit of his stomach when he fights with his brother.
Their father has given them a way to evolve from combat with words to swords, and they take it happily, sparring against each other with their wooden practice sticks, day after day, trying to see who comes out on top.
Their mother is clearly worried for them, but it’s fine. They heal quickly, after all--they’re not sure why, but they think it has something to do with their father, their indestructible, invincible father.
Whatever it is, it allows them to be as reckless as they want, snarling and snapping at each other with as much energy as they’re capable of. It doesn’t matter what they do to each other or say to each other, because in the end, their wounds heal and their words are forgotten.
In the end, they’re Dante and Vergil, the twin sons of Sparda and Eva, the two halves of a separate whole, and they’re not quite complete without one another.
Of course, just when Dante thinks he’s finally put Vergil out of his life for good, his brother always finds a way to come crashing back in.
He’s more dysfunctional than usual--maybe it comes with age, but now that he’s got Nero running a branch of the business for him, he feels less and less inclined to do the work himself, content with sitting in his office and reminiscing over the days gone by.
Occasionally, he’ll entertain himself with visions of his fabricated, changed past, in which one thing or another happened and led him to a different destiny.
He’s in the middle of one, actually, when the stranger named V staggers into his office and requests for his help.
Dante flicks his eyes upwards, mentally tracing the whorls of ink on the man’s pale skin, and, strangely enough, a smile tugs at his lips as he leans forward, a sudden interest uncoiling in the pit of his stomach.
This is a familiar stranger, a person he hasn’t seen in a long, long time.
To Dante, it feels a lot like coming home, and when “V” leans forward and the name of the presumed dead spills from his lips, Dante is reminded of how, ten, twenty, too many years ago, he found his brother again and realized he was no longer alone.
When he is eight years old, he lays awake in bed, staring at the wall in empty silence, listening as his brother’s muted footsteps come padding up the stairs. His footsteps are unsteady, like he’s carrying something a little too big for his person, and when he pushes open the door, with a quiet creak, Dante hears the faint tapping of Yamato’s sheathed blade against the wood.
There’s a faint shuffling as his brother crouches down and pushes Yamato underneath his bed, the sheet draping downwards and hiding it from view.
“I know you’re awake, Dante,” Vergil says flatly. “You were watching us, weren’t you?”
His brother knows, of course. His brother always knows what he’s up to.
Dante sits up, trying hard not to look at the area underneath the bed, feeling, for the first time, something like jealousy. He’s never wanted what his brother has, not for real, because they always ended up sharing when it came to the important things.
Not this time, he supposes.
“It’s not like that,” Vergil narrows his eyes as he watches Dante’s face, and Dante bites at his lip, unhappy with how little he’s able to hide from his twin.
“Father doesn’t love me any better than he loves you.”
Vergil’s reassurance hangs awkwardly in the air, because his brother has never been one for comfort, is mostly of the belief that spending too much time on any one state of emotion was largely a waste.
“So why’d he give you that? He promised the swords to both of us, as a gift.”
“He might be leaving. He wanted to tell me first because…”
“Because he wasn’t planning to tell me at all?” Dante asks, and tries not to sound as betrayed as he feels.
Vergil says nothing, but slowly comes closer, sitting next to Dante on the edge of his bed.
Sometimes, in the very quiet moments of the night, they can allow themselves a sort of peace, an instant suspended in time where they don’t have to fight in order to understand each other.
Dante leans in, closing the tiny gap between them, and Vergil wraps his arms around him, pressing his face into Dante’s hair.
“Stay with me?” Dante mumbles into his brother’s neck, softly enough that Vergil can ignore it if he wishes.
“We’re twins,” Vergil says, as if that’s explanation enough. “Of course I’ll stay.”
“Get up, Dante.”
Vergil is looking impatiently down at him, Yamato held at his side, not a hair out of place. His coat is immaculate, wrinkle free as always.
Different from how Dante remembers it, but finally real.
Dante blinks up at him, staring up at the empty sky of Hell, then at the shriveled remains of the Qliphoth roots around himself.
“Perhaps our last battle has tired you out?” His brother continues, an amused edge to his voice, and Dante shuts his eyes, allowing his head to fall back as an easy smirk crosses his lips.
“Nah. I’m just relaxing. Think I deserve it after everything you’ve put me through, yeah?”
Vergil sighs out, then steps closer to him, and when Dante opens his eyes again, his brother’s left hand is in front of his face, extended towards him.
“Get up,” Vergil repeats. “We have better things to do than for you to simply lie around.”
Dante reaches up and takes his brother’s hand, and his scar prickles sharply, once, twice, then stops, like the itch has finally been scratched. Vergil pulls him upright, and Dante stretches out his cramped muscles, before picking his sword up from the ground and hefting it over his shoulders.
“Guess so. We’d better find a way out of here--the kid’s waiting for us, after all.”
He starts off in an aimless direction, because there is no direction in Hell, really, and he could spend as long as it takes in here, as long as Vergil is with him.
“You seem pleased,” Vergil notes from behind him, before falling into step with him, matching his pace evenly.
“Looking back on a fond recollection?”
Dante grins, tilting his head to look properly at his brother. Vergil’s eyes are blue--the right shade of it, in fact--and no matter how many times Dante blinks, his brother stays the same.
“Nope,” he denies cheerily, memorizing the sight of Vergil’s confused frown, taking it in for all the moments to come.
“I just had a good dream.”