A second draft, edited and cleaned up almost ten years after the original publication.
This is the mothership, where my fanfic verse started and where Dante's perilous relationship with a certain small, ginger witch began. It's been cleaned up, edited properly (I hope) and primped up for a new sweep of readers. It's a completed story and I will attempt to post it all within the week.
Devil May Cry: Frail Equilibrium
Prologue
Roy hated winter. Every year, when the cold weather descended upon the city, he had to battle with the oppressive sensation that came with it and that particular year, it felt worse than ever.
As far as his memory served him, the city hadn't seen an October this cold in many years. And it was a bitter kind of cold, with wind that bit into flesh with needle teeth and a gray sky that seemed to swallow the sun whole every day behind clouds with no promise of improvement.
He shuddered under his thick, shabby coat and looked up from sweeping the steps leading up to the front door, examining the empty street with a frown as the few street-lights were finally coming to a weak-willed life. With the longer nights and less daylight creeping into the time-zone, the middle-aged man felt oddly nostalgic. He cast a glance up to the building he took care of: The aged boarding house of small apartments stood quiet and unassuming under the late evening sky.
It was like looking up at an old friend, really; both the building and he had endured many past years of cold winter-times together. It was a sturdy old thing, three stories high, dating back to the late sixties when Roy had first arrived here, while the entire neighborhood was still under development and expanding. He sighed a little, reminiscent of those times. Faded wall-art and the optimistic slogans of that long-gone era were nearly erased from walls around the neighborhood, gnawed away like a dog's bone from the weather, graffiti and the occasional bullet-hole. Times changed. People changed. The city changed.
Just as a smile from the memories of those times threatened to spread on his face, Roy grimaced briefly and resumed sweeping, the broom ushering the last bits of dirt off the steps and into the street. Then he climbed back the short flight of stairs to the door. Thinking of the past made him feel miserable. He thought to himself that he had lived long enough to see this once hopeful place descend into a seedy corner of an already bad city, where the worst traits of humanity were rapidly snuffing out any hope one might have had. He saw it reflected on the building's aged, graying sand color wash, blotched with darker spots where humidity had corroded the original paint.
Perhaps it was long due a refresh… if the times got better.
He wiped that depressing thought off his mind. He had other things to attend to in the present, like the leaky pipe in the basement or the cracked window sill on the second floor that let a hell of a draft in. He pushed the front door shut behind him and pawed at his pockets to make sure the keys were there. He glanced around the lobby and sighed. Empty as always. It had been some time since they last had a tenant, most of the one-room apartments languishing in disuse. He eyed the front desk, sheltered besides the stairway with its comfortable chair and huffed with irritable longing.
"Roy."
He turned around slowly at the bidding. The old woman stood column-straight and rigid at the door to her private quarters, off the side of the lobby.
"Magda," he acknowledged.
"I need you to fetch me some things," she said flatly.
The man narrowed his eyes. "You're worried."
She eyed him distastefully. "Of course I'm worried," she snapped back.
"And yet you don't know what's happening."
"I suppose you do?" she replied sharply.
His nostrils flared. "I don't. Yet," he confessed.
"Then do not tax me with your disapproval, Roy," she said. "And do not think I don't know what you and she get up to behind my back." She drew herself up straighter. "I'm old, not senile."
Roy scowled at her. "I don't owe you anything," he grunted. "I've warned you before, Magda. I understand trying to protect her but you've been flirting with cruelty lately and I'm starting to lose my patience."
"She understands nothing," Magda snapped. "She understands nothing of this and her… her difficulties. What she does isn't natural, even for us."
"Natural is overrated," Roy scoffed, a sardonic smile playing on his face. "This place is standing on a knife-edge, Magda, and one of these days you'll not be able to hold things just so. I've warned you before."
"Stop," she ordered. "Go about your business. I have to think."
And yet, she looked troubled when he turned away.