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“Lady said that the first time she met you, you killed Vergil,” Nero says from behind Dante. He sounds somewhere between casual and hesitant. Trying to pretend he isn’t asking if it’s okay to ask.
From the corner of his eye, Vergil watches Dante’s eyes squeeze shut and lips part for a quick, short breath. He doesn’t reply.
He’s not dead to the feeling himself.
They’re hard to approach, Vergil knows. That’s not an accident; they’ve both spent most of their lives trying to be. But he remembers being V, not as if he was a different person but as if he’d held up a magnifying glass to reality and it all suddenly looked different. A human’s perspective, almost drowning in love and guilt and fear and regret, all driven by an innate human instinct for emotional connection. Since he learned to see that way, it’s impossible to go back entirely, and he doesn’t want to, but it also didn’t all stay. Unified in himself, he isn’t entirely human, and he knows better than ever now that it would be folly to try to pretend otherwise.
Still, it taught him to turn his mind to an angle and see a little more clearly through human eyes.
Vergil eyes Dante sidelong for a couple of steps, knowing exactly what he’s thinking. Dante’s mind, for one, has always been perfectly accessible to him. He’s fighting his own silence, for Nero’s sake, but he’ll lose. He can’t talk about it. It leads him too quickly down paths that cost him too much to walk.
But Nero can’t read that silence. He’s human. He wants family; to connect with them and know them. And his family wants him, even though neither of them is any good at letting themselves be known. So Vergil grabs his humanity with both hands and finds his way to an answer he can bear to give. “It wasn't then. I leapt into Hell.”
Nero makes a surprised noise. Vergil follows another human instinct and glances back at him. ‘Glancing’ as an emotional connection doesn’t come naturally to demons. They either stare down or don’t meet eyes at all. Like Dante, right now, his head canting in Vergil’s direction but keeping his eyes forward.
Not like Nero, who looks back at him, expression open as always in a way that makes Vergil’s skin crawl a little. He looks...horrified. And curious. Hungry, in fact; almost desperate to ask the next question in his mouth. But maybe he understood more about their silence than Vergil had credited him for, because he’s holding himself back.
“We are devils,” Vergil points out. “Hell isn’t antithetical to us.” This connecting thing could be habit-forming, he reflects as Nero’s expressive face changes again in response. “I...wanted to follow in our father’s footsteps. Understand the world he walked in.” This time Dante does look at him. They both know it’s a half truth, but still it’s some truth. He gives Dante a smug look.
They go around a corner and Nero uses the extra pavement to duck around them, tired of being the one walking behind. He burns off the extra speed with a few pirouetting steps, spinning to face them just long enough to rake over them both with his eyes and then back around to face forward again. Childishly playful antics, which of course earn a smile and a snort from Dante—quick as ever to put things he doesn’t want to deal with behind him. But it’s also a graceful move by a man with mastery of his footwork. Vergil wonders who taught his son to fight. They did a good job.
“So,” Nero says then, and this time there’s a hush in his voice, “that means you did kill him?”
The scents. The sounds. The textures. Rotting splendor and a hollow frozen loyalty that hadn’t really been him. Mallet Island. He takes a few steps in silence. There’s nothing he can say.
Beside him, Dante empties out. The air around him almost physically chills as the ever-present banked heat of his charm abruptly cuts off.
Only a breath after the silence crashes down, Nero twists at the waist to look back at them again, responsive in a way that says he understands he just threw a grenade. The gravity in his eyes says he knows too, and that he’s not proud of himself but it got him an answer he needed. He reads the expressions on their faces and then stops in his tracks. “Holy shit, you two really are identical.”
Dante lengthens his stride and passes Nero, starting to leave them behind. “We aren’t talking about this.”
Nero grimaces and nods. Vergil wonders if he realizes Dante means that in the continuous tense.
“A ruthless gambit,” Vergil comments, tone carefully neutral, after Dante’s left them behind. He’d appreciate it more if he weren’t the object of it, but at least the boy has some bite to him, under all that earnestness and desire to help.
Nero grimaces again. “Yeah, don’t I feel like a big man right now.”
Even if Vergil could think of something approving to say, it wouldn’t be the kind of compliment Nero would take well. So he just stays and lets his continued presence be a reassurance that he hasn’t alienated them. Dante will get over it. But they won’t see him back at the van.
***
It’s on the fading end of sunset when Nico turns the lights on inside the van, and Vergil jumps down off the roof where he’s been reading for the past few hours. He may have left behind the nightmares, but remembering isn’t exactly conducive to a social mood.
Nero is sitting in the van’s open doorway, cleaning and honing Red Queen. He looks up, and then out at the darkness. “Oh, right. Hey.”
Vergil turns to look at him.
“Tell him I said sorry, will you?”
Vergil twirls Yamato in its sheath. “Tell him yourself. I’ve never said those words to him in my life.”
Nero rolls his eyes, but when he goes back to work on his blade, he’s smiling.
It’s hard for either of them to lose track of each other. He finds Dante sitting at the edge of the lake not far from the parking area, exactly where he knew he’d be. It’s a rocky little inlet, where waves whisper and lap up against the stones. Dante’s amusing himself by skipping stones out across the water, landing them in teetering stacks on the far side. He doesn't acknowledge Vergil’s arrival, but then he hardly needs to.
Vergil stops just behind his shoulder and sets a hand on his back. Their power pops and crackles between them at the touch, like to like. “Dante.” It’d be clear to anyone right now that he’s in a mood. There’s a sense of churning imminence around him, like a thunderstorm about to break. To Vergil’s keener senses, he’s still in turmoil, the usually clean-burning power of him guttering in the wind of his unsettled will, and through the physical contact he can all but taste the flavor of the reason—but none of that is anything he didn’t already know. “You're still thinking about Nero's question.”
Dante’s hair tickles Vergil’s fingertips when he shakes his head. “I'm not thinking about the question.”
No, he's remembering.
Dante rolls a flat stone over his knuckles like a coin, and then tosses it with a snap of his wrist. “Do you remember?” he asks, voice oddly normal in the quiet of twilight. “The last thing Griffon told me was that they were memories you'd purged. They let me kill them to set you free.”
The human in Vergil’s head rears up suddenly, and he’s abruptly glad to feel his brother under his hand for whole new reasons. He presses his fingertips down, feels the hardness and give of Dante’s muscles underneath. The slow rise and fall of his breathing. The living presence of someone who understands. “I remember,” he says slowly after a moment. “But it doesn't haunt me anymore.”
Dante takes a deep, shaky breath in and out. “Good.”
Vergil frowns. “You were worried about that?”
Dante cocks his head. “Worried is a big word.”
What’s this feeling? Is he gratified? Uncomfortable at the thought of his brother being emotional over him? He’s been half-human his whole life and yet new things still keep turning up. “What word would you use then?”
Dante shrugs under his hand like he’s jostling the question away. That’s exactly what he’s doing. “Can't think of one.”
Another stone goes: skip skip skip. The soft sounds of its bounces are almost meditative. Vergil can begin to see why Dante’s been occupying himself with this while he brooded.
What strange, lovely things he’s missed out on in this ruin of a life he’s lived so far. Diving repeatedly into Hell and blood and torment, when at any time he could’ve sat by a lake with his eyes closed, feeling the way the moon tugs at the water.
It’s almost fully dark out now, with only a fading band of violet marking the horizon behind the tree tops. It doesn’t interfere with their vision, but the darkness provides a certain closeness. An intimacy veiling them from the sight of most sentient things in this world. He could’ve had this, too: quiet moments with his brother in between the endless fights. Moments to more slowly savor the things that spark and flame between them when they battle. The things they fight over, and the things they fight for.
He lets the sweetness of this moment linger a little longer before he tests its strength. “Does it still haunt you?”
Dante sinks into a memory like a dark pit. Vergil watches it swallow him.
The next rock is whipped with demonic strength, a glowing red projectile that blows up the cairn on the other side when it connects. The detonation comes rattling back across the water like the thunder of a breaking storm as Dante hops to his feet. “I wanna kill something.”
And oh, he does. His bloodlust hits Vergil so hard that his own mouth starts to water with it. One part of his mind snarls back in answer to the challenge. But the human part, more assertive than it used to be, stands fast against the surge of violence and notes that this is really eating at his brother.
He could leave it. He would have, once. Instincts recently cranked up to a volume that can make him listen say not to.
Dante conjures his sword. “Fight me.” He stares Vergil down through the scattering flames of its summoning. “Beat me and I'll tell you.”
Focus sharpens Vergil’s mind like a blade. Dante wants him to take his answer? “As you wish.”
They’re both a mess within a matter of moments. Dante fights feverishly, like he did when he was young, when they stood atop Temen Ni Gru and believed they were anything but foolish children. It’s not a winning strategy against Vergil now, but then winning isn’t Dante’s victory scenario here. He presses close, ignores everything he knows about fighting Vergil in favor of putting himself in harm’s way for a shot at drawing blood. In return, Vergil uses Yamato’s speed to lay Dante open again and again, superficial and perfunctory cuts that won’t even slow him, and avoids every opening for a finishing blow as the trap it is. In this mood Dante will gladly take a killing wound in order to return one, because right now he’s after pain—enough to pay off the old ghosts and curses that bind this secret in his throat.
It’s different from their other fights, and timelessly familiar, and the thrill of it is electric under Vergil’s skin. Fighting his brother is ecstatic. He can feel Dante’s body in his own sinews when they collide. Their minds press together with every move, following each other’s thoughts and calculations, knowing each other from the inside out. Their power is a red and blue heat haze filling the clearing, ringing in their souls on the same crystal-clear note that they can both feel, as if they’ve only ever had one soul to share between them.
Something they’ve both wondered.
Sparks from their clashing swords flicker on the water. Their feet skid and tear at the loam, kicking the scents of damp earth and crushed greenery into the air around them. The right kind of opening arrives. Vergil flips over a swing of the broad blade and directs Yamato’s tip toward Dante’s throat on the come-around. Dante leans back to avoid it, but Vergil is inside his guard now. They’re moving in sync, against Dante’s will, but once it begins neither of them has the power to end it so easily. Vergil dances with him, turns with him as Dante brings his sword back around to his left. They’re shoulder to shoulder and then back to back, spinning together like two sides of a coin, Yamato held vertically grip-high and point-down at Vergil’s left side. Dante sees the move, changes direction again to meet him as he comes around his right side, twisting fast as a snake, but Yamato is there to catch the black blade before it can bisect Vergil. They’re shoulder to shoulder again, eye to eye. And then Yamato rises and tilts, its edge screeching against Dante’s, and Vergil drives it back under Dante’s ribcage.
With a slip of his feet, Dante’s resistance cracks. Vergil turns into him, setting his other hand to Yamato’s hilt to drive it fully through him and take him down to the ground.
Dante lies still where he’s pinned for a moment, gasping through his punctured lung. It sounds ghastly. Vergil kneels astride him, knees to either side of his chest and hands holding Yamato steady, and waits.
When he manages to speak, his voice is a breathless whisper. Pink foam flecks his lips. “I didn't recognize you till it was over.” He sets bloody hands on Vergil’s thighs. “I killed you, and I didn’t even know.”
This is a fact they both already knew. It’s his hands that tell the secret he can’t speak. There’s a desperation in his grip that Vergil has never felt before.
Mallet Island. Mundus tortured them both there, in lieu of their father. He corrupted Vergil into a shadow of himself, and he forced Dante to be the final destroyer of his own family.
There’s a certain appeal to the thought of letting the bastard out of his prison, so they could finally kill him for good.
Vergil looks down at his brother. Dante looks back. He’s a wreck, even more bloodsoaked than Vergil is. Typical. Sometimes he thinks Dante wears red just so he doesn’t have to do as much laundry. Neither of them do or think a goddamned thing—just sit there, throbbing to the same pulse while the night deepens around them and the stars of Earth shine over their heads.
Eventually Dante’s fires bank, and the panic goes out of his grip. Vergil pulls Yamato out of his brother’s chest and wipes the flecks of bloody froth off his mouth.
One more of the many things between them there aren’t words for. Mother often accused them of being telepathic, when they weren’t trying to kill each other. It wasn’t that, though, so much as they had a language of their own—one not grounded in speech, because speech is a human thing, and humans have no words for so much of what they are.
Dante pushes up to his elbows and then begins coughing till blood bubbles up to his lips. He glares accusingly up at Vergil, one hand pressed to his stab wound. “You didn’t have to puncture my lung.” He sounds better, but still wheezy.
“It was for your own good.” Vergil offers a hand.
Dante accepts it, and lets himself be pulled to his feet, hacking up blood again at the movement. “Was it though?”
Vergil shrugs and turns toward camp. “Maybe just a little bit for fun.”
When they reach the van, its lights are off but Nero is still sitting in the doorway, failing to look like he isn’t waiting up for them. He double-takes when they get close enough for him to see them clearly in the dark. “You were fighting again?”
He sounds so disappointed in them that for a second Vergil flashes all the way back to childhood.
“We were working through some shit,” Dante replies. He leans up against the side of the van next to Nero.
“You smell like shit,” Nero retorts, and slaps him in the chest with the cloth he’d been using on Red Queen earlier. “Also you look like you died and then got back up again.”
Dante runs the cloth over his face and arms. “Yeah, well, it beats therapy.” He drops the rag, now red-streaked and useless, back in Nero’s lap. The boy looks at it in disgust. He’s never had their taste for blood. It’s surprisingly charming. “Go hit the hay, kiddo. You look bushed, and if we bring you back to your girlfriend in worse shape than we found you, she really will kill us.”
“You’d deserve it,” Nero snorts, but he climbs to his feet and turns to head into the van. Then he pauses and turns back. There’s apology written all over his face, transparent as ever. “Dante…?”
“We’re still not talking about it.” But Dante smiles a little as he says it. Nero relaxes, recognizing it for the absolution it is. It’s not his fault they are what they are. “Go on. We’ll keep watch.”