Chapter Text
The mottled sky of Hell stretched above them, grey and dreary like always. In the far distance dark blobs whirled between toxic plumes of gas, chasing and meeting and falling in wild bouts of violence. A shriek echoed over the jagged plains. The ground itself seemed to rumble in return.
Vergil closed his eyes. His fingers tightened around Yamato as Dante shifted by his side.
The sons of Sparda had sought rest in a small recess in a cliff. It had been formed by a fallen root of the Qliphoth, the plant carving through stone as easily as claws carved through flesh. Fresher scars marred the ground outside – great gouges and small bullet-sized craters still simmering with faint traces of magic and demonic energy. A spectral blue sword fizzled out of existence. The chunk of root it had pinned to the cliff fell with a sad thump.
“I’m up one,” Vergil said when his panting had finally faded to more normal paced breaths.
Dante huffed. “It was a lucky shot.”
“It was skill,” the elder replied, directing a self-satisfied glance at his sheathed sword. “Something which you clearly lack.”
“Hey! My skill has beaten your ass plenty of times.”
Vergil smirked, ignoring the odd twist of feelings the words stirred. “Perhaps it is not a lack of skill but rather a lack of intelligence. What fool grasps a sword by the blade?”
“Stopped you from skewering me,” Dante muttered as he flexed his right hand. The deep cuts Yamato had left when Vergil ripped it free had long since healed. The wound to his brother’s pride clearly had not.
“At the cost of victory,” Vergil pointed out. “You are lucky I did not severe any fingers.”
“They’d grow back,” Dante dismissed. “I think. The kid’s arm did.” He scratched his head and flexed his hand again. “That said, maybe save the dismemberment for non-related hell spawn next time.”
Vergil bit his tongue. The words burned in that odd mix of indignation and shame that had become more prominent since he had merged back into himself.
His time as V had made many things more prominent.
Another piercing shriek rang in the distance. Vergil inhaled, steady and controlled.
The cambion extended his presence around him, his back pressed firmly against the rocky wall. His energy brushed against the warm flame of his brother’s, gliding over and around the bright bursts and whirlpools that marked Dante’s power. Vergil lingered for a moment as that flame dimmed just a little before flaring back to its usual size. Dante’s presence brushed clumsily against his own, almost certainly unconscious in thought.
Vergil bit back the chirr that welled in his throat.
Instead, he extended his presence further still, beyond the temporary sanctuary they had found to the plains beyond. Nothing living met his reach. No wholly demonic power, tangible or not, crept through the fabric of space with its mind-piercing tendrils.
The tense line of Vergil’s shoulders eased. Tentatively, like a fern slowly unfurling its leaves after frost, he turned his thoughts to his newfound son left up in the human world.
Nero. The cambion dipped his head and silently mouthed the syllables. It was a strong name, if unfortunate for those who dabbled in history. Irritation flickered through him briefly. Then again, he thought, it could be nothing more than a harmless dialect. Fortuna was close to Italy. He remembered that. Just as he remembered a hushed voice and kind, dark eyes lingering among the towering shelves of the chapel-adjacent library.
Yet, there was more he could not remember. A name. A careless promise whispered in a tangle of sheets – both lost to a place where Mundus’ torturers could not find them.
Vergil scarcely remembered the warmth of his son’s arm in his hand, scaled and dripping blood. He had been too far gone then, the corruption in him slowly devouring what it could. Yamato had sung and he had followed on base instinct alone.
The sword sung now, resonating with the knot of regret that twisted in him. Fingers reached to the inner pocket of his coat for a book that was not there. Vergil did not delude himself that Nero would read a battered old thing from a stranger who nearly killed him. Still, a tiny part of him hoped.
(He had a son, a nestling. Even after however many weeks they had spent in Hell, the thought sent him reeling.)
Next to him, Dante had fallen silent, awkward and unsure. Vergil could sense another, darker undercurrent lingering beneath his twin’s disquiet. Dante flexed his right hand, then his left, his gaze fixed on a spot beyond his feet.
Vergil curled his fingers tighter still around Yamato. Words failed him, leaving both twins unmoored in their absence. Silence clung with its stifling hands, almost as daunting as the space that sat between their reclined forms.
‘Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.’
Vergil’s lips twitched in a wry smile as the familiar lines drifted through his head. It was apt that such a fitting description of the relationship he had with his brother should come from the work after which they both were named.
It was fitting too, perhaps, that they began things anew in Hell.
Vergil glanced at Dante out of the corner of his eye. His brother’s arms had wrapped around leather clad sides, the press of them tight like the line of Dante’s shoulders. The younger cambion had closed his eyes. His chin was tilted down against his chest, sleeping or at least pretending to.
‘Let us descend now into the blind world’, the poet Virgil had told the man he was to guide as they stepped into the First Circle of Alighiere’s imagined hell. ‘Let us go on, for the long way impels us.’
They had time, after all. It was more than anything Vergil had before.
~ ~ ~
True rest was a rare luxury when all the realm’s inhabitants sought their blood. Not that most fodder here poises a real threat, Vergil sneered in his head.
The power of the Qliphoth fruit thrummed in his veins, heady and violent all at once. The faint energy of the root they were tracking hummed beneath the ground. His stride was sure as dirt and rock crunched beneath his feet, a far cry from the last time he had traversed the same land. Yamato sung in his hand. A lust for blood sung in his heart. A growl rumbled from Vergil’s throat, long and low. Beckoning any fools to take up the challenge.
Dante stumbled behind him. “You seem eager for a fight,” he said. The exhaustion was evident in his voice. “That Behemoth from this morning- night- whatever damn time it is here not enough of a challenge for you?”
“Or perhaps it proved too great a challenge for you,” the elder cambion returned. “Losing your touch, brother?”
He had just enough presence of mind not to chitter, aware of Dante’s eyes on the back of his neck. The lesser demon’s blood had disappeared from Vergil’s person a while ago, but the smell of it still stung his nose. It plucked at that primal instinct in him, just as he had seen it pluck Dante’s before his too human-minded twin had shoved the bloodlust down.
Vergil’s head snapped to the side as a wind blew by, sending loose stones clattering along the ground. His power swelled and banked against his iron fisted control. Blinking, Vergil forced his attention back to Dante whose response had devolved to mere complaints.
“All I’m saying is it didn’t have to rip the ground out right from underneath us,” the younger was saying. “Uncool. Very uncool. No stars at all for being a terrible host.”
“Hell does not care about your stars,” Vergil said absently, wondering what celestial bodies had to do with anything. A memory drifted forward from his time as V, some garbled jingle about ratings, but it was discarded for the more curious flicker that suddenly afflicted Dante’s presence.
It was gone as quickly as it came. Vergil turned anyway.
The elder twin reached his own energy out towards his brother’s red spark as a low chitter fell from his lips. He assessed the haggard look on Dante’s face, tracing the lines and shadows that lingered there. Dante glanced away almost immediately, but it was enough.
Vergil pursed his lips, a prick of worry creasing his brow.
The Bememoth had ambushed them seconds after Dante had settled down to sleep. It had been nearly a week since either had attempted true rest, but Vergil had insisted. He had even agreed to sleep himself after Dante woke, despite how his power hummed within him as it fed off the latent energy in the atmosphere and from the Qliphoth fruit.
“Well, we aren’t going to find any better digs hanging around here.”
Cloth ruffled as Dante strode past and Vergil abruptly realised he himself had stopped in place. Shaking his head, the elder cambion followed after the younger, Yamato in hand.
The tip of the reforged Rebellion hung low over Dante’s shoulder. It had been there for a while, as though gravity were pulling against his brother’s hold. Gravity seemed to pull against his brother too. In a few quick steps Vergil had outpaced him, finding himself at the front once more. It did not feel like a victory.
He growled at the world at large. It had sense enough not to growl back. Behind him came the sound of Dante’s gait. A stumbled step. A recovery several seconds too slow. Vergil kept walking, adjusting the pace of his own gait to match. His fingers tightened around Yamato.
That flicker came again, brief but clear. Tired.
“Do not think I have forgotten our agreement,” Vergil said in a clipped tone. “That poor attempt from before hardly counts as sleep.”
“It’s not my fault I was interrupted,” Dante threw back, though the bite was lacking.
“We will find better…digs as you say.” Vergil turned his attention to the scene around them, scanning for an appropriate place to rest. Another human colloquialism drifted to mind as he spoke, the kind of inane thing that would tumble from Dante’s mouth. “Then you can hit the sack.”
His twin huffed. “Slang doesn’t suit you,” Dante said after a moment.
Vergil’s eyes narrowed. His power pooled at a point near Dante’s head, taking the shape of a spectral blue sword that barely missed his brother’s flesh.
“Hey! No need to get offended.”
“The only offence is to have sullied my tongue with your mutilated attempts at communication,” Vergil retorted. His cheeks burned.
Dante dodged the next summoned sword and the third, but blood bloomed on the fourth.
Too slow, Vergil thought, his ire morphing to fear. His brother was too slow, just as he had been too slow in shaking off his slumber when the Behemoth attacked. Vergil ducked as Dante’s sword swung at him, his eyes finding the new cut on Dante’s cheek. The skin was already stitching itself back together. The red it left behind, however, sat in stark contrast to the pale skin and dark shadows beneath Dante’s eyes.
Yamato’s sheath blocked another blow from its sister. Vergil stepped back. Dante followed, though his feet seemed less sure. Devil Sword Dante cut through the air, too uncharacteristically aimless to be much of a threat.
“Retreating already? I thought you wanted a fight,” his brother grunted, his brow creased. He seemed to waver where he stood.
Vergil stared at his twin for a moment. It was true he had thrown first blows in their squabble. Yet, continuing it felt wrong.
The flicker, when it came a third time, cut like a chasm through a roaring flame.
“Very well,” Vergil said, decision made.
He lunged forward, the sheathed Yamato flicking out and around to knock Dante off-balance from behind. The crack of whips and chains was drowned out by the rush of him triggering as, with a powerful beat of his wings, Vergil swept his brother off his feet.
“Wha-”
Dante’s protest cut off in an abrupt and somewhat shrill cry as he was tossed higher into the air. Then, in a flash of red, the younger cambion dashed away, his coat flapping behind him. Vergil, with his wings and tail, was quicker.
Dante swore as Vergil hefted him up yet again, arms locked around his little brother’s chest. Devil Sword Dante swung futilely in the air, at the wrong angle to hit anything, before it was dismissed and replaced by Dante’s own fists.
“This isn’t funny, Vergil!” the younger twin yelled.
Vergil could not help his smirk, nor the chitter that left his lips.
“I disagree,” he said. He was tempted to toss Dante again, but the childish rush from before had dissipated enough for sense to trickle back in.
Vergil clutched Dante to him more firmly, Yamato gripped in front of his brother’s chest. His wings carried them higher into the air as the cambion looked around. The sky was otherwise empty. The plains beneath were void of life. In the distance though, little specks of movement encroached upon the horizon.
Vergil cut a swooping arc as he shot towards a patch of jagged rock and what passed as trees in Hell. His tail lashed behind him. Wind rushed against the armoured scales on his face, whistling along the length of his horns.
There was a tug of power, then Dante’s form expanded in a rapid explosion of limbs.
The sudden shift of weight dragged Vergil down for a moment. His wings strained against gravity. His arms strained against the bulkier form of his brother’s Devil Trigger. They parted as Dante’s wings opened, pushing Vergil up and back with a powerful beat of their own.
Vergil’s teeth ground together. He blocked a blow from Dante’s sword and returned the favour with a volley of spectral blades. Dante dived left to avoid them. Vergil gave chase.
The elder cambion could admit his twin’s strength was impressive. A mere beat of Dante’s vast wings carried him more than several yards. Pebbles shuddered on the ground when Dante drew near, only to leave a cloud of dust behind him as he pushed back up. Strength rippled through his armoured limbs, the cracks between the plates burning orange-red.
Yet, in the form inherited from their father, Vergil was the faster of the two.
Swinging his tail around as a counterpoint, the elder twin made a sharp pivot right. The move brought him down and under his brother, metal singing where their swords met. A push of Yamato sent Dante spinning through the air. Vergil smirked. Teleporting to where the other was righting himself, Vergil knocked him forward again.
The specks on the horizon lingered.
A hand grabbed Vergil’s tail and this time it was him who found himself tossed through the air. Dante’s burning eyes appeared in his vision. Clicking melded with the repeated swoosh of both their wings.
“Not so fun, is it?” the younger jeered.
“If you leave yourself open, I would be a fool not to take advantage,” Vergil retorted. He made a series of clicks himself, short and sharp. A challenge. An invitation.
Dante grunted, more human than demon, and Vergil felt his shoulders tense. He clicked again, tail swinging behind him as he brought Yamato down.
It was a powerful blow. The force pushed its energy through the larger sword raise in a block and to the body of the one who held it. Dante hurtled to the ground. His wings crumpled beneath him as he landed back first in the dirt.
Dante tapped the ground, a clear sign of his submission. He was already partway through shifting back to his usual form, the armoured plates and spikes bleeding away in wave of fading red sparks. Brimming power hidden once more.
Vergil landed next to his brother, discontent but unable to grasp why.
“I guess we’re even,” the younger wheezed.
Vergil pursed his lips. “You still don’t know how to count.”
Dante just waved his words away. The younger cambion let his arm drop to his stomach, soft and human. His right hand remained loosely curled around his sword. Vulnerable.
Vergil growled as his own grip tightened around Yamato. Dante flexed his free hand, scratching at his chest, and diverted his gaze.
The elder cambion let his own form shift into the guise more familiar to his brother. The hurt – for that was what he felt, Vergil realised – drained as the silence grew. He turned away, eyeing the pillars of rock they had landed amidst. The columns appeared to be carved with a rough precision, as angular as they were jagged. Some sat close together. Others were spaced wide enough for Nightmare, V’s old and largest familiar, to pass through. The ground beneath their feet was formed from the same hard stuff as the needles that sprung from it. A harder rock than the ground the Behemoth had broken through before.
“We can rest here,” Vergil said. The distant specks, when last he saw them, had still been far away.
Dante rose to his feet, his eyes fixed on the sky above them. It was too open, though the pillars offered much closer quarters deeper amidst their ranks. The younger twin turned towards the relative safety wordlessly. His shoulders dragged as though they bore a weight greater than the combined will of their father’s sword and the Rebellion.
Vergil inhaled. A different kind of discontent trickled through him.
It appeared too often, the tension between them. Less a suppression of violent intent, than a hollowed foundation neither quite knew how to fill. It felt foolish to be forced to grasp blindly at every turn.
And yet, Vergil thought in the face of the years that stood between them, what else is there to do?
Sparda’s sons moved through the rock formations with quick and steady tread. The imprint of their footsteps in the dust disappeared with a beat of Vergil’s wings. The burning urge before to challenge any and all to fight was gone. Instead, the cambion was careful to keep his power restrained, allowing it to lick at his veins but no further. Dante did the same. His demonic presence all but vanished in what seemed like a well-practiced move.
Vergil did not ask.
Instead, he followed his little brother’s weaving pathway that set pillar after pillar between the wind and themselves. They darted quickly from cover to cover until they came to a place where the breeze had died entirely. The pillars were numerous and thick, barely enough room between them to lay down. Several leaned towards each other, cutting off easy access from the sky. The ground was still hard. Something in Vergil relaxed.
“This will do,” he said.
Dante merely grunted. His brother had already sagged against one of the pillars, his left hand clutched to his chest and his right holding Ivory aloft. Vergil frowned, not having noticed when the Devil Sword Dante had been banished for the cruder weapon. Yet, he could commend his brother’s sense. The broadsword would have proved difficult to manage in the close quarters.
Vergil sat against a column of rock opposite Dante. He watched as the eyes of his twin slid closed. Sleep followed, quick and deep. It was very much reminiscent of the same lethargy that had forced Vergil’s instance on sleep before.
He pressed Yamato’s sheath further into his shoulder. His feet pressed into the unyielding ground. The shadows beneath Dante’s eyes lingered like they had for days.
Vergil closed his own eyes, though his senses remained alert to the world around them. For a while he thought of nothing. Wind whistled through the needles around them. Stones tumbled as rock shifted in the distance. Time trickled by and the odd word started to trickle in, remembered passages from a book he had given away. The edge of its absence felt keener in the silence.
Nero, Vergil thought then refused to think as a shadow passed overhead. The cambion’s eyes traced its path long after it flew out of sight.
The ominous presence of Hell pressed in. Damp and dirt filled his nose. Something dripped a little way off. Slowly. Rhythmically. There was water nearby, Vergil thought. Just as there had been in his cell. Within hearing but ever out of reach.
Lips smacked at the memory of being dry, cracked and bleeding and raw. Vergil swallowed. The shadows moved and three red eyes flashed in their depths. There and gone in an instant. A serpentine tail slithered through the darkness. Vergil wrapped his own around himself in a faint flicker of blue sparks. Laughter rang out, mocking and loud. Dante did not stir.
Vergil threw his presence out around him, seeking, searching for the cause. Light glinted off the sliver of Yamato’s blade that had risen above its sheath. Vergil’s shoulders were tight enough to hurt. His heart pounded. Power buzzed in his veins. It tangled with his brother’s own energy dulled by sleep. Nothing else save the faint thrum of the Qliphoth root from before met its reach.
The laughter came again, but it was only in his own mind.
It was only his own mind.
Vergil breathed. A quick glance showed Dante still sleeping soundly across from him.
Some are born to sweet delight, Vergil thought, and some are born to endless night. The familiar words seemed hollow, the fire that had so often lingered behind his repetition of them snuffed out.
‘She tried to save you too.’
Vergil stood and began to pace the small perimeter around their resting spot. His tail swayed behind him in agitation. Urizen had remembered those words. Urizen had been a fool.
The cambion ran a hand down his face, ignoring the tremor he felt there. The memories from his time as Urizen were too hazy to fully trust. And yet-
Hope was a foul and insidious thing.
What did Dante say? No stars, Vergil thought with a wry twist of his lips. Or some nonsense like that.
He tipped his gaze upwards towards the grey sky. The blanket of clouds and gas remained strong, though if he stared hard enough the faint imprint of a maybe sun pressed against them. There were no stars there either.
The cambion sunk slowly back down to the ground, Yamato returned to its place against his shoulder. The sky remained dull and blank. Suddenly Vergil wished it would split open to reveal the heavens above.
It had been too long since he had truly seen the stars. Years lost spent trapped by Mundus, then trapped in a haze of weakness and corruption. Trapped by the fog of Urizen’s anger and V’s own imperfect memory of the glittering bits of sky that marked Red Grave’s night.
Closing his eyes, Vergil traced those in his head instead. The image he conjured was shaky and old, more reminiscent of a painting than nature itself. Pinpricks of silver twinkled. He imagined them dazzling and splendid like the poets always said.
A low voice pierced the vision. Its sound was fuzzy, barely remembered save for the instinctual sense of ease it brought.
“That one is called Orion,” the voice said, its timbre deep, to a boy scarcely five years old.
Vergil’s eyebrow’s creased as he imagined following a finger across the night sky of the human world. The stars positioned themselves in its wake. There were a few gaps, several crooked lines – spaces where Vergil’s memory struggled to connect the dots. Still, the fabled hunter appeared. Sparda’s voice rose and fell as he told the story of the man.
Vergil inhaled, ignoring the sting in his eyes as he folded the memory carefully away.
~ ~ ~
When Dante finally woke, blinking sleep from his eyes too slowly for comfort, they moved on. Vergil did not raise his previous promise to rest himself and his twin did not push. Neither broached the silence between them for a long while.
They were tracking one of the lateral roots that had spanned from the Qliphoth’s base. Vergil had sliced it from its mother source. Yet, when Dante had ripped the newly severed end from the ground, they had found the root had spawned its own numerous growths that dug straight down through the ground. New roots, Dante had pointed out. Each its own risk of sprouting another demonic tree. Sap had pumped from the plant’s wound, fresh and unceasing. Evidence that while the tree was dead, the root was still gaining nourishment enough to thrive. Even now its presence pulsed through the ground beneath their feet.
Vergil pursed his lips in thought. The Qliphoth had sought out human blood when it rose. It had drained all it came across. Fed, wanton and ravenous, on the inhabitants of Red Grave city. The cambion frowned, cutting through a distant swell of guilt to the objective facts beneath.
Demons desired human blood more than most things. They desired hybrid blood more. Yet, if the energy of Hell alone were not enough to sustain most demon kind than it would be far emptier a place. Certainly, pockets of pure energy were scattered across the realm.
Perhaps the root found such a seam, he thought. It was a solid conclusion.
Vergil opened his mouth to test his hypothesis with Dante when something grabbed the collar of his coat.
Yamato was out and swinging before he had a chance to blink, only to stop short of tearing through his brother’s throat.
“Sorry,” Dante said, not looking sorry at all. “I should have let you walk into the wall.”
Vergil turned, still bristling a little, and came face to face with a cliff. His frowned deepened. Distraction was a deadly thing in Hell.
The elder twin settled for straightening his coat in an attempt to brush the incident off. He could hear Dante’s quiet breaths next to him. They both pretended that Dante could not hear the rapid pace of Vergil’s heart.
“That is not a wall,” Vergil said finally. His tone was deliberate, derisive. Not a tremor of strain within it.
Dante rolled his eyes. “Whatever. What’s got you so lost in thought anyway? Thinking up another poem? How about a bawdy one this time? Be a change of pace at least.”
“No.” Vergil looked away, banishing the glint of concern he had seen from his mind. “And there is far more to the art than base desire and violence,” he added, knowing where his juvenile brother’s mind would wander next.
“Even Shakespeare wrote about sex and fighting.”
Vergil refused to respond to the crass observation. Instead, he stood back and examined the cliff face. It was not overly tall. Nor did it bear the deceptively smooth but sharp walls of the obsidian mountains in more volcanic areas.
A pebble hit the back of his head.
Vergil threw a glare over his shoulder. Dante was looking the other way as he whistled nonchalantly. The imprint of shadows was still evident under the younger’s eyes and Vergil’s ire ebbed just a little.
“The Qliphoth root,” he said, choosing to change the subject in place of hurling a larger rock back at his brother. “I imagine it has found a source ripe with energy and that is what is fueling it.”
“Huh.” Dante scratched his head in the corner of Vergil’s vision. “Well, its creepy ass aura or whatever you want to call it seems to head up that way.” He jerked his head to the top of the cliff.
“Ever observant,” Vergil drawled. He could feel the aura of the Qliphoth root beneath them, trailing up the sheer rockface instead of continuing beneath it.
Dante scowled before turning back to examine the cliff. “This thing shouldn’t be too hard to scale. Here goes nothing.”
With a running start, the younger cambion leapt up half the cliff face and grabbed onto a protruding rock. Dante glanced back down, a challenging grin on his face. Vergil smirked, swallowing a sardonic comment about wings as he made his own running jump.
It was with satisfaction that Vergil noted his attempt had carried him higher than his brother, if only slightly.
His lead was short lived, however, as Dante immediately began to climb. The younger twin pushed himself up the cliff in a burst of enhanced speed. Vergil deftly followed, the rock groaning beneath his grip.
Whatever lethargy had seemed to plague his brother before was gone. Every time Vergil caught up to Dante’s heels, the latter pushed forward with another flash of red sparks. Teleporting would ensure victory, but it would defeat the purpose of the pursuit. Vergil ground his teeth, drawing on his own energy to increase his speed only for Dante to dart away once more as though he had been waiting for Vergil to try exactly that.
The younger cambion swiftly disappeared over the top of the cliff. A loud whoop rang out. Vergil rolled his eyes even as he pressed his face into the rock before him to stave away a smile. Dante’s head reappeared back over the cliff a moment later.
“Getting slow in your old age?” he jeered.
Vergil raised an eyebrow. “I recall I am ahead in our sparring matches.”
“We’re even,” Dante laughed as he offered a hand to pull Vergil the rest of the way up. Then he abruptly froze.
Vergil frowned.
Still clinging to the cliff face, Vergil tilted his head. His senses picked up nothing odd or malevolent save the faint thrum of the root in the rock beneath them. Glancing back up, Vergil studied Dante’s pale face. The fringe hid his eyes, though his jaw was tense under the stubble there. A tremor ran through the hand stretched out towards him-
Oh.
Yamato hummed in the pocket of space where Vergil had stored the sword to free his hands. A tower replaced the cliff Dane was kneeling on. Vertigo made Vergil’s stomach churn.
Only this time he was not falling. A faint spray of blood did not emanate from his little brother’s naïve hand. Mundus and his cursed armour did not await a thrice damned fool.
Vergil breathed. Dante had already started to retract his hand, his fingers curling into a fist.
In a rush, Vergil hefted himself up and over the remaining few feet of the cliff with a powerful beat of temporarily conjured wings. His feet alighted next to Dante. Bit by bit his heartbeat calmed. The spike of panic that had pricked it morphed into something lighter and on a sudden, unbidden whim, the Vergil gave one last sweep of his wings. The wind they made buffeted his twin, tussling hair and coat.
“Hey-”
The reaction was immediate and loud. Dante spluttered, flattening his hair and flitting a good few feet out of range. Vergil smirked when their eyes met. Dante pouted with an exaggerated tilt of his lips. Faust appeared in his twin’s hand and was promptly deposited on mussed hair, a defence that, while logical, defied good sense in fashion. Or weaponry for that matter.
Dante traced the brim with a finger before tipping it up. “After you,” he said in a poor attempt at a cowboy’s drawl.
Vergil sighed.
Walking, when they resumed it, did not have the same oppressive silence as it had before. Still, even as Dante chattered beside him, Vergil could not help but feel he had chosen wrong.
~ ~ ~
Time passed in the same muffled, disorientating way it always did in Hell. The brothers’ trek seemed endless, but their friendly competition on the cliff seemed to have had a lasting effect on lifting Dante’s energy and mood. Conversation flowed, mostly one-sided, like it had when they were children. Bickering followed, light hearted and easy, touching on nothing important at all.
The longer the lightness around them lasted, the less Vergil felt that sense of wrongness linger. Dante flashed a smile, all teeth and closed eyes, at something and Vergil hesitantly returned it.
“Well?” Dante asked, seeking an answer to a question Vergil had missed.
The latter opened his mouth to respond when something tripped along his senses. Whipping around, Vergil’s eyes honed in on a growing shadow in the sky.
It was a pack of lesser demons. They were larger than Hellbats but smaller than most other demon kind. Claws glinted on the tips of their wings. Their forms were twisted like someone had tried to wind them up in opposite ways on opposite ends. One at the edge of the pack turned and, when it saw them, let out an ear-splitting scream. At the sound the others turned and screeched as well, well over two dozen hurtling towards the brothers.
Vergil’s lips rose in his own beckoning snarl as Yamato sliced through the sinew and bone of the first to reach them. Black sludge oozed from the severed form as much as demon blood, unnatural, even in Hell. Dante grinned beside him.
“Time to party,” he said and then he was gone.
Like a spring, the younger twin crouched then leapt through the air. The air around him flashed and a motorbike appeared beneath him as he landed in the midst of the pack. Vergil’s heart leapt into his throat, but none of the slowness with the Behemoth before was apparent in his moves.
A roar born from neither demon nor half-demon filled the air as Dante revved his strange Devil Arm. The wheels were spinning before they hit the ground, grinding whatever hapless demons that were too slow to dodge beneath them. A mixture of blood and sludge sprayed over everything around him. Without pause, Dante flipped over the handlebars, his still gripping them tightly, and brought the bike down in an overhead arch that knocked half the demons still in flight to the ground.
Vergil felt his jaw drop. He quickly closed his mouth as Yamato cut down another foe. A series of quick slashes sent a rush of lethal force at the demons gathered behind his brother’s back. They all fell with strangled cries.
Dante laughed, short and sharp. The motorcycle split in two in his hands, its wheels turning like saws, and Vergil barely resisted rolling his eyes at the ridiculous weapon his brother had found. Yet, despite himself, the corners of his lips tweaked upwards.
The twins matched each other blow for blow, kill for kill, one clean and precise and the other a whirlwind of destruction. Soon enough it was over. The last of their winged foes shrieked as Yamato struck it down midair.
A wave of disappointment washed through Vergil as he watched the corpse land with a thud. Dante gave a faint whoop beside him, seeming more out of habit than true delight. The sudden quiet in the wake of their battle mixed with the foul stench of the demons’ unnatural remains.
Vergil’s upper lip curled as his boot landed in a small pool of not-quite blood. He shook his foot to get the worst of it off. To the side Dante shook himself like a dog rather ineffectively. The buzzing of the ridiculous motorcycle-saw Devil Arm he held finally ceased as it was dismissed. Vergil’s lip curled further, vexation warring with resignation. The elder twin brushed a hand over the new stains on his well-worn coat. Blue sparks leapt over the fabric and wiped it clean. The viscera in his hair vanished too.
Vergil’s shoulders dropped a fraction. It feels good, he thought, to be clean.
Dante groaned as his leather coat hit the ground with a sad plop. Vergil grimaced. His brother, meanwhile, tried futilely to scrap the sludge off his forearms. The acrid scent it gave off would be cause for concern if it was not already clear that the sludge did little more than stain the skin it landed on.
“What the hell were they?” Dante groused. “They’re worse than an exploding Empusa Queen.”
Vergil frowned at the dismembered demons once more. He nudged one with Yamato’s sheath. Where the corpse had not been ground into mincemeat by Dante’s questionable taste in weaponry, it had several insect-like legs and a pair of wings reminiscent of Hellbats. Circular marks followed its gnarly spine, too uniform to have occurred naturally. Vergil’s frown deepened.
“An experiment,” he guessed.
The cambion had glimpsed a room full of tubes and floating bodies in capsules several times when he had been dragged between cells. Eerie light, dim as it had been, had blinded him each time. Vergil exhaled, nostrils flaring. His next breath he sucked in through his teeth. It was still not enough to avoid the foul scent coating his tongue.
“It’d be fun to watch you squirm on those tables,” a coarse voice sniggered. “But the Emperor has plans for you.”
“Whatever they were,” came Dante’s voice like a beacon in the night. “They could have kept their insides inside them. Or at least not sprayed it all over me.”
“If you did not insist on charging carelessly into their midst, then you would not be in the position you are in now,” Vergil pointed out, his voice tight.
Dante rolled his eyes. “Where’s the fun in that?”
Vergil stifled the urge to growl. “You are a fool.”
“Haven’t found something that can kill me yet,” Dante retorted.
Vergil clenched his hand to keep from scrabbling at his sternum. The phantom press of armour stilted his breath. The memory of lingering corruption deadened his limbs.
The cambion pressed his lips together as his mind flashed a hazy vision of his little brother being thrown from the Qliphoth, near dead. Dying.
“It is mere luck that you have not,” he ground out.
“I’d argue it’s the opposite.”
Vergil shot Dante a confused look but the other ignored it. Instead, the younger twin stretched his arms, then rolled his shoulders. Something clicked as Dante moved his head from side to side. A mixture of sludge and blood dripped down his jaw. Vergil’s fingers itched to wipe it away.
“Experiments you said?” Dante asked with a casual curiosity. He toed at the pool of sludge around him with his boot. “The lab grown demons I know don’t bleed this stuff.”
Vergil frowned. “You have encountered such before?”
“Yeah. A whole bunch of man-made demons on Fortuna I had to help the kid clean up.” Dante tilted his head. “Pretty sure Lucia and Trish don’t bleed black either,” he muttered.
Lucia was an unknown name, but Trish-
Vergil inhaled, slow and controlled. His memory, fractured though it was, knew well enough the image of that face-stealer. Such offense was hard to forget. Even harder when the few precious, untainted memories of his mother blurred into an impassive and cold shell.
A face loomed over him, peering through the gaps in his visor and helmet. The armour hurt where its edges dug into his flesh. The familiarity of the uncaring guise he could barely piece together hurt more.
“That demon was fashioned for a different purpose than these,” he said, sneering at the mention of her on his tongue, at the old ache in his heart.
Dante frowned. “Trish is a friend.”
Vergil’s sneer grew. “She’s a pawn of Mundus. Or did you forget, brother, what lengths our father’s enemy has gone to ensure our demise?”
Dante clenched his fists. The power inside Vergil simmered in his veins. It was the younger who looked away first. Vergil huffed as he turned away too.
“Was.”
“What?”
“Was,” Dante repeated. “Maybe Trish was a pawn at the start but she helped defeat Mundus. I don’t need to be a savant at chess to know pawns don’t do that.”
Vergil’s jaw twitched where he had clenched it. That vision flickered in his head once more, a face leaning into his obscured gaze. A voice, smooth and feminine, that spoke words garbled by his ears. Plotting. Planning…
‘I’m not your mummy, V.’
Through the holes in Nelo Angelo’s memory a more recent one bled through. It was hazy, like most from the time Vergil had spent rent in twain. His lips curled back on instinct, but the cambion had learned to view human weakness in all its forms from a different light. The sharp dichotomy of kin and foe softened beneath it.
“We can discuss your poor choice of friends later,” he said at last, the whole of him not yet softened enough to truly let the threat of Trish go. Perhaps it would never be.
“Hey, don’t knock ‘em until you know them.”
“I have no wish to know them,” Vergil replied.
Dante huffed behind him. Too human, like always. “You’ve got to make friends someday, Verge. What happens when I’m not around to skewer? You can’t fulfil your repressed need to bond by beating up Nero. The kid doesn’t understand violence is your way of saying hello.”
“Unlike you, I don’t have an incessant need to cling to people to survive,” Vergil bit back.
The elder cambion could feel Dante reel back behind him, that damn flicker appearing once again. Vergil hunched his shoulders, unwilling to parse the reason for it. Hurt and guilt plugged his throat. Something hot and familiar nipped at its heels. His hand slipped to Yamato’s hilt. That too Vergil did not parse.
“We have lingered here long enough,” he said into the silence that had crept over them. “Clean yourself and let us be off.”
Movement came behind him. Then Dante’s voice, professional and emotionless. “These things aren’t going to come back and haunt us later?”
“No,” Vergil answered, his tone certain. “Whatever their use was to…Mundus, they have outlived it.”
He did not look down again at the demonic remains around them. He did not think further on his own short-lived use to their old foe.
Hell’s jagged wasteland greeted Vergil as he gazed out at the horizon. Alighieri’s own imaginings paled in comparison. So too did all those poets before and after who dared to dream of hell. Yet, it was human words Vergil’s mind idly recounted as his fingers reached for a book no longer there.
‘Rage, fury, intense indignation
In cataracts of fire blood and gall
In whirlwinds of sulphureous smoke:
And enormous forms of energy…’
A wet, suction-like sound turned his head.
Dante had picked up his discarded coat from the pool of muck where he had carelessly dropped it. The Devil Hunter held it aloft, pinching the coat’s shoulders while he wrinkled his nose. What little red there was left visible seemed dull. Black sludge had begun to seep through to the inside of the coat, stained darkest around the inseams.
“Dammit.”
“Regretting your recklessness?” Vergil could not help but ask. The question came out snider than he had intended.
Dante shot the elder twin a foul look. Vergil opted for a neutral expression.
His brother gave the soiled garment several futile shakes. A curse slipped from Dante’s lips. He shook the coat again for good measure, only resulting in sending flecks of blood and sludge everywhere around him. Vergil deftly stepped back to avoid the spray.
Another jab lurked on the tip of the elder twin’s tongue but he refrained from giving it life. That hot thing inside him had cooled and without that heat, the need to cut his brother to wound – literally or figuratively – had faded. It left him in that same uncertain place he had found himself in too often of late.
“Fucking, fuck, fuck.” Dante tilted his face back towards the sky. His eyes were closed in a long-suffering expression. “A pack of Empusa would have been better than this.”
Finally, finally Vergil felt a swell of power where he brushed the edges of his brother’s presence. Dante pointed a finger at his stained coat, his expression resolute.
“Out, damned spot,” he said. The familiar red sparks of his brother’s magic flickered over the leather, wiping away the evidence of their fight. “Worse than Empusa,” he muttered again.
The corner of Vergil’s lips twitched. “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”
Dante inhaled as he ran his fingers through his ever-lengthening hair. Bits of viscera fell onto his shoulders.
Vergil’s grin faded as the silence grew.
The elder cambion turned away once more, his shoulders set in a rigid line. His hold on Yamato tightened, the lines of the sheath digging into his palm.
“Your coat is not the only part of you that should be scoured,” he said. It was a clumsy attempt at neutrality and no answer came.
Vergil exhaled. It seemed he had mis-stepped once again.
There was another surge of power centred on Dante. When the younger cambion strode forward, pushing past his brother as he did, his form was blessedly free of their most recent slaughter.
Something inside Vergil eased. The rest of him remained coiled and tense, discontent humming beneath his skin. A whine died in his throat. He had left such weakness behind years ago, along with the chains and pain and mockery. The knowledge did nothing to force his feet to move.
Vergil felt his chest constrict as he watched Dante draw further away. His hand itched to reach out. His feet remained frozen beneath him. His thoughts swirled, his mind clinging, as it always did, to words he had once read. Words he had once been read.
‘I stand in pause where I shall first begin…’
“You know, I never had a head for Shakespeare,” Dante called back suddenly, his tone light. “Only remember the parts that everyone knows.”
Vergil breathed, taking the olive branch for what he hoped it was. One foot lifted and he began to follow his brother. “I should have guessed you paid no attention in school.”
“Didn’t have any school to pay attention to,” Dante shrugged. “Besides, I learnt all the important things on my own easy enough. Taxes. Hunting. How to pick the lock on a pair of cuffs.”
“The quintessential knowledge needed for survival,” Vergil said dryly, tucking the little glimpse into his brother’s life safely amidst his fractured memories.
“You never know until you find yourself needing to escape a cop car or handsy prison warden.” Dante waved a hand, a nonchalant gesture with little thought behind it.
Vergil frowned. “Prison warden?”
“It was for a job,” Dante replied. His back was to Vergil but the line of his shoulders rose a fraction. “Turned out to be a demon and we both know how they just love to get a taste of the great Sparda’s blood.”
Vergil’s frown deepened. Concern threaded through him. A slowly dawning thought followed, burning like ice where it touched. Yamato’s sheath creaked beneath his claws. Vergil’s eyes pierced the back of his little brother’s head as though it would reveal a terrible truth therein. Handsy-
“Don’t worry,” Dante’s voice cut in through Vergil’s budding rage. “Kicked that demon’s ass seconds after meeting him. Lady would have never let me hear the end of it if I became a low-level thug’s chew toy.”
Relief flooded through Vergil. Confusion swelled too at Dante’s flippant tone. The elder cambion let the intangible part of him brush against his brother, searching for a tell. Yet, it was like running into an impassive wall. Dante’s presence too uniform to be anything but deliberate.
Dante flashed him a grin over his shoulder. His eyes were just a touch feral, his teeth showing a fraction too much. A rumbling sound leaked from Vergil’s chest. Dante looked away.
“What about you? Where did you pick up all those long ass words and fashion sense that’s stuffier than dad’s?”
“You are in no place to cast judgement on others for their taste in fashion,” Vergil remarked, remembering well the shirtless fool he had encountered on the Temen-ni-gru. “And I made the most use of the libraries available to me, as everyone should.” They had been safe for a child. More importantly, they had been filled with knowledge. The right knowledge if one asked the right questions, much like dealing with his elusive brother.
Vergil opened his mouth.
“Let me guess,” Dante drawled. “You had a dozen old, granny librarians eating out of your hands when you recited the 100 greatest hits of poetry to them.”
Vergil shifted. He knew himself well enough to know his interactions with others as a child fleeing his family’s destruction had been limited, even if he did not fully recall that time. The boy he was had learned well the foolishness of trust, after all.
‘She tried to save you too.’
“Poetry does not have ‘hits’,” Vergil responded in the present, his tone automatic.
(A voice murmured with him beneath bedsheets, her face almost as young as his had been. Her features blurred beneath his gaze.)
“What then? The greatest slams? Slam poetry is a thing, right? Kind of like rap or so I hear.”
“It is nothing like-” Vergil inhaled. Slowly regrasped the pertinent point of the conversation. “Dante-”
“What about Arkham?” The question came out of nowhere, sharp and pointed. “The crazy, old professor give you lessons too?”
Vergil reeled back, his mind drawing a blank. Dante pressed the advantage, ruthless.
“The secrets to dad’s power wouldn’t have been written in any old textbook. Did the jester whisper sweet nothings about giant ass towers in your ear or was it in Fortuna-”
“Enough!” Vergil rapidly closed the gap between them, shoving at his twin’s shoulder until the latter turned to face him.
Dante avoided his gaze, shame flitting across his face. Vergil growled. The wall that was Dante’s presence remained intact, doing little to temper the elder’s irate mood. Concern still lingered, but fatigue had weaved its tendrils through it. Whatever his brother sought to mask, Vergil could not fully glean it. He could not summon the strength to press further, could barely control the burst of rage at each speculative thought of what his brother had meant.
Chains and whips were not the only evils in the world.
The feeling of failure stung Vergil as it always had. Worse now, than before.
“If you do not wish to talk,” he told his twin. “Then simply say so.”
Dante’s posture slumped further. “Sorry.”
Vergil scrutinised his brother for a moment longer before turning to face the direction the Qliphoth root had spread. “Let us go,” was all he said.
~ ~ ~
The constant silence had started to grate on Vergil. The endless circles their every interaction seemed to go in grated worse. Habit was indeed a hard thing to break.
Sparda’s eldest son focused on the task at hand, or rather the one that snaked beneath the ground they walked upon. The Qliphoth root seemed endless and Vergil wondered how it had grown so far in such a short span of time. More than a week spent traversing its length and still the twins had not found the source of whatever was sustaining it.
Vergil risked a glance over his shoulder. Dante ambled along behind him, figure slouched, his right hand buried in a pocket. The other hand he flexed every so often, seeming lost in thought. The younger cambion’s shoulders were hunched. Tense. Withdrawn. It looked wrong on the loud and boisterous brother Vergil remembered, albeit in pieces, from their youth.
Discomfort prickled along the edges of his mind. Dante’s weapons were absent. Banished to the small pocket of space his brother could access, out of the way but slower to draw from. Vergil’s thumb stroked Yamato’s sheath as he inhaled, his ears straining.
Wind whistled through the wasteland. The cambion glanced around, his jaw tight. Naught but dust stung his nose. Black rocks glistened untouched in what little light there was. The place was empty. Indeed, since the abandoned experiments – for that is what they must have been – nothing else had crossed their path.
The tension in Vergil unwound a little. His senses, previously thrown into stark overdrive, returned to a more manageable level as his attention returned to his foolishly reckless little brother.
A harsh barb sat on the tip of Vergil’s tongue. Yet, he withheld it as his gaze alighted on the slow drag of Dante’s steps. Scarcely noticeable but there all the same. Unsettling, just like it had been before.
Dante’s hand opened and closed.
Vergil floundered. After their last argument, he was uncertain that asking after his brother’s state would be welcomed. Even then, their conversations nearly always devolved into bickering or awkward silence.
Vergil did not wish for either. He wanted more. Like sunlight breaking through the clouds in winter, the urge broke through parts of Vergil he had long since locked away. He wanted a connection that ran deeper than pointed words. He wanted to talk with his brother like they had in their youth, amenable and easy. He wanted the charade he had watch as a youth of people laughing together, eating and playing together, peers leaning on each other as they fell asleep atop their notes, lovers holding hands in quiet nooks-
He wanted the child that he had been stolen from.
(The child he had abandoned.)
Vergil’s fingers brushed the empty pocket in his coat as inspiration struck him. It was a thought within a thought, selfish perhaps, but Vergil had always been selfish. This he knew.
Still, he expanded his presence over the area around them, methodical and cautious. Only his brother and the Qliphoth root below them pinged his senses. The wind stirred dirt and rock. In the mid-distance to the side a skeleton from a long-deceased demon crumbled a little more.
Vergil inhaled, his hand wrapped in a steadying grip around Yamato.
“Tell me about Nero,” he said.
“What?” Dante raised his head, blinking at Vergil as though he had come out of a daze.
A pause. There was no sound but their own breaths and footsteps.
“My son,” Vergil repeated, his voice a few decibels above a whisper. “Tell me about him.”
Dante looked around. Something inside Vergil recognised the paranoia. When the younger twin came to the same conclusion the elder had, he turned back to face his brother, quickening his steps until they were walking side by side.
“The kid is a hell of a hunter,” Dante began, breezing past any of the caustic remarks he could have made. There was something fond in his voice, even if it was flatter than usual. “He’s got good instincts, mostly, and one hell of a punch.”
Dante huffed something that almost seemed like a laugh. Vergil latched onto the sound like it was water in a desert, pushing back the memories of Dante’s tired rage atop the Qliphoth and his son standing between them both.
“No wonder you lost,” Dante added as he rubbed his jaw. Blue eyes peered out from behind silvery hair. Cautious. Hesitant.
Vergil allowed the corner of his mouth to rise in a half smirk. “It is only natural my son should be powerful.”
Dante huff-laughed again and Vergil felt a small sliver of accomplishment. His pace had slowed imperceptibly. Just enough to match Dante’s muted gait.
“At least he’s smart too.” The sting of Dante’s jibe faded as he continued, Vergil’s curiosity overriding all else. “Kid made his sword all by himself. Red Queen he calls it.” Dante paused. His head tilted, his eyes hidden by his hair. “I guess he takes after the old family patriarch in that. Remember how dad used to take apart clocks and shit in his study?”
Vergil did not. He nodded anyway.
“I sure as hell didn’t inherit the handyman skill, though I can patch a wall decently enough if I don’t say so myself.” Dante flexed his hand absentmindedly. Vergil’s eyes honed in on it.
“Nero is a swordsmith?” the elder asked.
Dante pursed his lips in thought. “More like a mechanic, or maybe an engineer. Damned if I know the difference between the two.”
Vergil pondered this information. He could recall his son’s sword easily enough, the revving of its engine unique among all the weaponry Vergil had encountered. It was the same sword V had watched Nero tinker with in the back of the young gunsmith’s van, a memory that had miraculously survived being erased by the trauma of that chaotic ride. Perhaps, Vergil thought wryly, it is why I remember that moment so well.
Indeed, the cambion could nearly perfectly recall the crease on Nero’s brow as he had steadied himself with his legs pressed against the workbench, a screwdriver in his lone hand. V’s memories – where they were not focused on clinging for life to the seat – had focused on the boy’s face, had spent the time looking for familiar lines to draw the wrong conclusions. It had been easier than lingering on the lack of an arm. Even now the memories of that garage were patchy at best, narrowed to only the incessant need to survive.
Vergil could not recall if she had ever dabbled with mechanical things. He could scarcely recall the feel of her fingers on his face, the frown she wore when disappointed-
“What else?” he asked, grasping for a distraction.
“Nero’s got a mouth on him,” Dante answered. “But you already knew that.”
Vergil did. “Is that your doing?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at his brother.
“No!” Dante cried, reeling back almost comically. “Kid had a dirty mouth before I met him. You can blame the cult for that.”
“Cult?”
“Fortuna’s best and brightest,” Dante said with false cheer. “A bunch of humans who worshipped dad and thought turning themselves into demons could make them his equal. Another legacy of Sparda’s power.” The last few words were spat with venom before Dante caught himself. The younger cambion exhaled, seeming to deflate.
A fleeting glimpse of earlier times flashed through Vergil’s mind. Coastal shopfronts. White stone and a mockery of their father’s visage. A sprawling library. Her.
The city had seemed dull and archaic with its drab garb and misguided religion. Yet, even then there had been an underlying thread of something…obsessive. Vergil’s memories from then may not have been entirely intact, but he new well enough the lengths some had gone for their father’s power. The lengths he himself had gone.
A furl of horror moved his lips. “Did they-”
“I don’t think they knew,” Dante answered quickly. “The kid seemed to be just another one of the guards. No special treatment. Hell, most people seemed to avoid him except Kyrie and her brother.”
“Kyrie?”
“Nero’s little sidepiece,” Dante said with a suggestive waggle of his eyebrows. A pause, then an even more suggestive drawl. “Like father, like son.”
Vergil balked. “You mean to say Nero has sired a child.”
“No!” Dante spluttered. “The kid’s smarter than that. His girl is too I’d bet.”
A strange mix between relief and disappointment washed through Vergil, too perplexing to unpick. His fingers twitched towards the empty pocket in his coat. With Nero’s crude way of speaking, he could no more imagine his son reading Blake’s compositions on love to a young woman than he could Dante wilfully opening the book.
Nevertheless, the thought bloomed a sort of warmth inside him, it too unfamiliar. Vergil’s thumb stroked Yamato. It was good his nestling was not alone. That he would not face the same lonely fate as Vergil had for decades. Yet, Vergil’s certainty of that wilted as the rest of Dante’s words sunk in.
“What happened to the cult?” he asked, his tone dark.
Dante whistled, long and low. “I dealt with it with the kid’s help. It’s how we met.” A grin flashed across Dante’s face. “Took out the head guy – not that he had the decency to stay dead – and Nero threw a sword through me and tried to beat my face in. Like father, like son,” he repeated. “Though to cut the kid some slack, he hadn’t quite grasped he was on the side with the bad guys just yet.”
Vergil blinked as he tried to comprehend the spew of words his brother had thrown at him. Dante, for his part, steamed on ahead.
“Once Nero knew what they were doing to people, he was all for tearing down the place. Especially when they shoved his girlfriend inside a giant statue of dad.” The younger twin side-eyed Vergil. “You know, it’s hard to imagine the hot-tempered kid came from you. He’s so…heartfelt, and you’re just-” Dante made a hand gesture that meant nothing to Vergil but seemed vaguely like an insult. “Must have gotten it from his mother.”
Vergil inhaled sharply. “I would not know,” he said stiffly.
Dante looked away. The younger twin’s jaw worked, chewing on something that he refused to say aloud. Quiet descended, uncomfortable and unwelcomed. Vergil frowned, failure pricking at him once more. It blended well with the ache in his heart.
Their boots crunched against the ground for a yard, then two, then-
“He’s good.” Dante’s voice was quiet, barely audible to even Vergil beside him. “Better than either of us.”
The elder cambion focused on the horizon before them, his lips twitching and falling. Pride and shame welled inside him. A sense of loss did too. His arm tightened around where Yamato laid against it, almost cradling the sword. Vergil stared at his most faithful companion and wondered what it would have been like to hold the weight of an infant in his arms. If the instrument of violence had been replaced by a small head and arms, small waving hands and fluttering wings, his nestling. Would it have changed his foolish, foolish plans if he had simply known?
Vergil breathed.
“What did my son do after this cult was…dealt with?” he asked.
Red clad shoulders shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Vergil stopped. “You don’t know?” he repeated, his voice flat.
Dante turned to face him, drawing to a halt himself. “I didn’t hang around long after the mess was dealt with. Figured that people seeing me around would only make things worse given I killed their leader, even if he was a crap-filled douchebag. Besides, Nero had things in hand.”
Vergil growled faintly. The explanation was understandable, and yet- “Surely you kept in contact.”
Dante had never been great at masking his guilt, not from their parents and not from him.
The claws of old hurt cleaved into Vergil’s heart, bloody and raw. A gasp punched out of him, like it had back home. Back at the mansion when a blade had pierced his small frame from behind, had left him drowning in his own blood as he reached a hand for Dante, for his mother…
That his son had- That Dante-
That he-
“You abandoned him?” Vergil’s roar shook the air around them, his tone slipping into something more demonic than human.
“He had other people around him,” Dante protested. “A whole ass life he sure as hell didn’t need a stranger interjecting in.”
Vergil could not understand the apparent callousness behind his brother’s words. His brother who had clung to him at every opportunity, who he recalled clinging to their mother and father in his blurred memories of childhood.
(His brother who had charged at him, sword drawn and with no hesitation, atop the Qliphoth. Who had been ready in that moment to kill.)
“Does that justify turning your back on him?” Vergil ground out.
“Hey! It’s not like I cut him off completely.” Dante’s gaze darted everywhere but Vergil’s face. His body was half turned, hiding. “I gave him some tips here and there about hunting, sent a few jobs his way and agreed to let him branch off the business when he wanted to continue. It’s far easier to leverage off something with an existing reputation than start a business from scratch.”
“But you did not return.”
“He didn’t need me.”
Vergil snarled. “And the fact you were family changed nothing?” Disbelief coloured his tone. Vergil might not have known his son well or for long, but their dance atop the Qliphoth had confirmed at least one thing.
‘This ends, right here.’
Nero, the boy who had forced his way between two full grown half-devils, would not have let family slip so easily through his fingers. Like Dante, Vergil had thought. Wrongly it seemed.
Silence had lingered for too long.
“Dante,” Vergil said in warning, his face like stone.
“Like you’re one to talk about family,” his brother shot back, defensive and biting.
Anger shook Vergil’s hands. It coiled unpleasantly in his gut. The less human part of him wanted to tear into his brother, wanted to spill Dante’s blood like Urizen had. Like Vergil had on the Temen-ni-gru.
It was unfair to place the entire blame on Dante. Perhaps it was unreasonable for him to be so angry when he himself had not been there for his son (had ripped off Nero’s arm before he knew). Yet, the pain from the boy Vergil had been refused to fade.
A dust cloud bloomed around their feet as Vergil grabbed Dante’s collar and dragged the other close. The tip of the sheathed Yamato pressed against his brother’s chest, right above his heart. A heart that pounded furiously hard.
Dante wrapped a loose hand around Vergil’s wrist. The younger twin made no attempt to grab or parry Yamato, not even an aborted flinch. He swallowed, the line of his throat glaringly open. His submissiveness only fanned Vergil’s ire more.
“Dante,” the elder cambion said again, his voice now dual toned. “Do not tell me you said nothing.”
“He had Yamato.”
“He did not have-” Vergil cut himself off, having veered too close to his own painful truths. “Coward,” he hissed as he shoved Dante away.
The younger twin stumbled back a few steps. The ends of his coat flapped around his legs.
“Coward,” Vergil hissed again.
The claws inside him twisted. The boy writhed in their grasp. Power thrummed beneath his skin like it had decades ago, spilling over in swaths of silvery scales. Vergil held back from Triggering by the skin of his teeth.
The cambion turned away from Dante, unable to bear looking at his brother’s face. Boots shifted on the ground behind him, but no hand or blade touched him. A new fear wormed its way through Vergil’s rage, leaving an icy chill in its wake.
“Vergil,” Dante called.
The elder twin ignored him. Ignored the insipid things inside him that whispered Dante would leave him too. A scuffed shoe stepped forward, the movement cascading in the swing of blue coat.
“Vergil, listen to me.”
The paths of Hell spanned out before them, harrowing and unchanged. Vergil had walked them before. He had walked them alone. Perhaps he would again, he thought, as that whisper grew and Vergil’s other foot stepped forward. His heartbeat was steady. His mind suddenly filled with clarity. The part of Vergil that had dragged himself from the fire, that had split himself from weakness, the part that had refused to reach out all those years ago urged him to keep going before he was left again.
Yet, the remnants of V gave him pause. In the brief gap it had pierced in Vergil’s long-forged walls, something else slipped through. A deep voice reading lines from a book as its two young nestlings drifted to sleep.
‘Here all suspicion needs must be abandoned,
Cowardice must needs be here extinct.’
Vergil pursed his lips at his namesake’s words, so easily spoken upon a page to a man who stood before the fictional gates of a human hell. It was harder to enact in reality where pain so often left its brutal scars.
“Vergil, please,” Dante begged, desperate.
Still no touch, violent or otherwise, came.
“What was I supposed to say?” Dante cried when Vergil refused once more to speak. “Hi, I’m your uncle. By the way, I’m the reason-” His words choked off, hands twisting in the white strands of his hair. “Fuck you.”
Vergil blinked away the hazy shadows of Mundus’ dungeons. His pursed and his hand clenched tighter around Yamato. His steely gaze pierced the horizon.
What would their father think of the wounds his sons had dealt each other? Of their failures in living up to the Legendary Dark Knight who had stood dauntless in the face of all of Hell?
“We need to focus on the task at hand,” Vergil said, his voice clipped and cold.
Dante did not argue or quip. A noisy breath fell from his lips. Leather creaked where arms had no doubt folded around themselves as Dante stepped behind the elder twin in brooding silence.
Vergil inhaled. A tremor still wracked his hands. Wherever the Qliphoth root led, they could not find it soon enough.