It was the wrong side of midnight when they finished the job, and strolled their blood-soaked bodies home over the moonlit cobblestone, swaggering aimlessly through the lifeless streets of Red Grave City.
All in all, Dante was pleased. It had been ugly in a way he craved—messy and complicated, requiring liberal broad-brush applications of concentrated brutality. Even now the slashes on his abdomen itched as they mended, and the omnipresent ache inside him was slaked, if not sated.
His office was locked up tight, after hours, waiting patiently for him on its dark side street; an unlikely oasis between the ornate old-world facades and periodic contemporary intrusions, dance clubs and poster ads and graffiti, coexisting in an unholy but alluring union of classicalism and modernity.
Underneath the scrolling ciphers of the storefront, the joint was dark and dormant, neon strobing erratically over the drawn blinds.
"Sign's on the fritz again," muttered Dante.
His first impulse was still to hit it, but his better nature prevailed. It had taken him some time to admit that troubleshooting didn't always have to be literal. In his solitude, in the bitter wake of Temen-ni-gru, he had begun to realize that blunt-force solutions were counterproductive to the integrity of certain fragile, unstable amalgamations—like hydrogen-filled glass, or his relationship with his mercurial, mercenary brother. Hindsight was a bitch. And more often a heartbreak.
Behind him, arms threaded over Red Queen, Nero struck a stance and cocked his head. "I don't know. It looks kinda cool like that. Adds something. Grit. Patina. Ambience."
"Sure," said Dante. "Authenticity, right?"
Nero shrugged, shedding one of his cynical smiles. "People pay a lot of money for that."
"So long as it's my name on the check." Dante unlocked the door and pushed inside. He flipped on the lights and the overhead fan, tossed his keys on the desk and breathed a sigh. Nero trailed after at a saunter, closing the door behind them.
"That was a hell of a fight," said Dante. He unshouldered his sword and dropped the brace of pistols. "You did good." The rush still lit along his limbs and coursed through his core, along with the residual, hectic aftermath of the Devil Trigger, which always felt sensual and decadent in a weird, animalistic way. He threw off his coat, rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck, then flopped down and spread his arms, kicking back in the center of the chesterfield.
"You said it." Nero's eyes were exhilarated. The kid liked carnage. Maybe a little too much, but whatever. It wasn't like he had any room to talk.
"You can use the shower first," said Dante. It was one of those niceties that wasn't. Showering second would give him a little more time to steep in the sanguine and adrenaline; languish in the post-hunting glow. It was one of the few kicks he had left that still did the trick.
Nero wiped a sleeve over his brow and shucked his blood-spattered duffel coat and sweater, leaving him in a tank top and jeans. The kid was well-built—a bit beyond his calendar years for someone who was supposedly fully human—and he seemed to know it. He eyed Dante for a moment, then smiled slowly in that impious way that reminded him of someone else, with a nod toward the bathroom. "You wanna come with me?"
Dante laughed. "Do you need supervision?"
"Not exactly."
"Can't reach your back? No worries, kid; Lady left a long-stemmed loofah in there."
"I'm asking if you want to fuck."
Dante stared, fingers stilling at his ribs, arrested in mid-scratch, his mind gone completely white. "Say what?"
"You heard me," said Nero, blasé in a way that bespoke experience. "Don't look so scandalized. If you're not into guys, that's fine. Personally, I can go either way. But you look good, especially right now, and I figured it couldn't hurt to ask. You're here, I'm here, and you know how the Devil Trigger is. Makes you feel kinda…yeah, you know. Frisky."
Yeah, he knew all about that, all right.
"I'm not scandalized, kid." He was, in truth; but not by that. He was unsettled by the execution and its implications, not the nature of the overture. The sly insinuating look the kid leveled was pure Vergil, but the clarifying offer and its blunt-force phrasing were all his.
"So what's the problem? Is it the age difference? It's not that big." Nero grinned. Blood spattered his face like infernal freckles."I'll tell you what is, though."
"Holy shit." Dante scrubbed a hand over his face. "Listen, kid, I have no proof of this, but there's a pretty good chance we're related."
Nero shrugged. "That's a little warped, I guess."
"I'll say."
"But I could probably get into it."
"What is wrong with you?"
Nero snorted. "Nothing that isn't wrong with you."
The kid had a point there. More than he even knew.
"Can I grab a beer?" Nero asked, hooking a thumb at the fridge.
"Yeah, knock yourself out."
"Thanks."
"I feel bad I don't have more to offer you," Dante called ironically, after a moment.
"Ha," said Nero.
"It's nothing personal, kid. Or rather, I guess it's everything personal."
"You think we're related." Nero glanced at him as he opened the fridge and plucked out a bottle, apparently content to chug if he couldn't shag. "Why don't you think you're my father?"
"I know I'm not," Dante said.
"Sounds like something a deadbeat dad would say."
The kid was funny. Dry funny. It panged Dante sometimes, because of who was speaking through him in those moments.
He allowed that he might be wrong about Nero's paternity; that years of wishful thinking had colored his every sub-thought in shades of a very particular blue—what one might call Vergillion—but there was no denying the uncanny way the kid favored his brother sometimes, in certain lights and moments and angles. The starkest and most staggering ones popped out at the oddest moments, startling Dante each time, like a malicious carnival game of genetic whack-a-mole.
"You'd have been pretty young," said Nero. "But it's possible, Teen Dad."
"I'm not your dad."
"How do you know?"
"I know I'm not your dad because I don't bang women," Dante said, abruptly, the admission sounding more blunt than he'd intended. He cringed, sighed, paused. Regrouped. "More often than not, I don't bang anyone."
"Why not?" Nero looked interested. "You're a handsome devil. You always have chicks all over you. Pretty sure you could have dudes all over you, too, if that's what you're into."
"What I'm into." Dante gave an awkward, halting laugh, as he ran a hand back through his hair. Eventually, he sighed. "Well, kid, that's the other part of the problem. And I don't think there's any good way to explain it, so you're gonna have to trust me."
"I get it," said Nero knowingly, as he took a long pull. "You're into something weird."
"No," said Dante, quickly, then thought better of it. "Yeah, sort of."
"That's cool. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone, right?"
"Right." So far it's only hurt me, kid.
"You want one?" Nero asked, grabbing another beer from the vintage Frigidaire.
"Sure," said Dante, and caught it in both hands when it came winging his way. Beer was a joke and he drank it like water; Kool-Aid to his half-breed constitution. He would have preferred to wind himself tight around a magnum of whiskey, but there was time for that later, when he was alone. Then he could hold his thoughts down under a tumbler until they drowned and sank back into the black depths of his mind.
"So you don't like girls." Nero wasn't letting up yet.
"What? The ladies? Sure, I like 'em. Fuck, I love 'em. In case you haven't noticed, all my best friends are babes. I just don't want to give anybody the idea—" Dante broke off, unsure how to phrase it, now that he was actually saying it aloud, instead of merely knowing it internally.
"What idea?" prompted Nero, leaning against the wall, taking another pull of beer.
"That I'm available in any way."
Nero eyed him. "You look pretty available to me. Bachelor, eats pizza every night." He considered it, dryly amending the words with a shrug. "And every day, for that matter. Freelance job, no apartment. No family."
That last part sliced Dante as surely and surgically as Yamato ever had, especially coupled with that insolent, narrow-eyed smile—the one that, near as he could figure, was a genetic party favor dead middle between Vergil's cool, sardonic amusement and his own showy sarcasm.
Dante heard his own laugh, bloodless as the unseen wound from the kid's casual vivisection, wondering if his heart was going to fall apart into hemispheres a beat later. He remembered Vergil's favorite parlor trick: gruesome death as a delayed consequence, timed to the finite click of Yamato's hilt meeting her sheath, and his unsmiling delight.
There were those rare, white nights when the ache and actuality of his brother's absence became too great, too yawning and raw—a chasm in his chest he couldn't hold closed. The nights when no amount of killing could assuage the enormity, or his awareness of the magnitude of his loss, and he could only stare at the wall, beset by the kind of demons no weapon could slay.
He couldn't tell the kid about the occasional men who passed muster, the ones who caught his eye for rarified reasons—that something about them bespoke Vergil in passing or particular. Maybe it was their coloring, their build, or the proportions of their features. The look in their eyes—narrow, insinuating, intense—from across a dark dive. Sometimes it was in their expressions, their voice, or the way they moved.
Whatever he let them do, he never let them stay.
Nero was sauntering around the edges of the room, taking it all in. The stacked wall of speakers, the elaborate wet bar, the demon skulls and weapons mounted near his desk. "A jukebox," he said with a cryptic smile. "Thought only bored millionaires bought those." He paused at the majesty palm and tested its frond between his fingers. "This is real," he said.
"You were expecting plastic?" said Dante. "Come on, kid. This is a classy establishment."
"I'm surprised these plants aren't dead. You don't get a lot of light in here."
"They're extremely hardy cultivars. Come from out of town, if you get my drift." Dante slugged back a solid hit of beer. "They not only like darkness, they thrive on it."
"Cultivars," echoed Nero, imbuing the word with ironic emphasis and a self-aware lilt. "That's quite a word coming from a dude who's wearing cowboy boot legwarmers."
Dante sighed. "I used to know a guy. Talked like a book. Living with him was like having one of those word-a-day calendars. You can't help but pick shit up. Guess he rubbed off on me." In more ways than one, he didn't add.
He was pretty sure Vergil had used the word, probably sardonically, when talking about them. He made a lot of dry horticultural metaphors about the business of being hybrid. He'd compared them to destructive weeds in a formal garden, to tares in wheat, to invasive exotic plants, to wild oats in a field. The only thing Vergil loved torturing more than Dante was a metaphor.
Nero laughed. "I know a guy who talks like a book too. That is, when his nose isn't buried in one. Strange dude, but he's all right. You should meet him. You guys have some common interests. I'll bring him around some time."
"Sounds like a party," said Dante, with a shit-eating grin.
Nero turned his attention to the massive Victorian staircase, gleaming in dark garnet shellac, worn and slightly alligatored, but still grand. He ran his hand over the newel post, glancing upward as he rounded it. His eye fell on the built-in bookcase tucked beneath the flight, and he studied the haphazard stacks. "You have actual books. Figured this'd be full of some old fake-leather encyclopedia set no one ever opens. You know, that library look, with none of the reading."
"I read a lot."
"That's kind of a surprise."
"How so?" Dante wondered if he ought to be insulted, but found himself only faintly amused.
"I mean, I get the pulp novels. You just don't seem like the type to read this other stuff. Great lit-tra-chure. The classics." Nero made a scrunched, bemused face at his copy of The Aeneid.
"I didn't used to be," Dante said, quietly. "But people change."
"The Sound and the Fury," said Nero, picking up the book and leafing through it.
"Faulkner," said Dante, ignoring the distant pang in his chest.
"East of Eden." Nero shrugged. "I've heard of it. Any good?"
Dante grimaced. "Not my favorite." That had been a hard read. Not because of the prose, but because its themes hit a little too close to home. "Really oughta shit-can that one." All that fraternal enmity, so futile and unnecessary, leading to the inevitable tragic end. He didn't need his art to imitate life quite so mercilessly. "See the movie instead."
Nero continued to study his untidy library, looking over the spines like an antiquarian.
"So what's with the inspection, kid? You've been here before."
"Just trying to get to know you," Nero answered, vaguely.
"You can count on me to save your hide when the world's going to hell. What more do you need to know?"
Nero smirked. "There's a little more to life than that, isn't there?"
"Is there?" Midway, Dante realized he wasn't being flip; he was really asking.
"There oughta be," said Nero, turning away from the bookshelf. "What's the point, otherwise?"
Dante was silent for a long moment. "I don't know."
Nero turned around and headed back toward the couch, drinking his beer as he went. He'd recently cut his hair into sort of a jagged crop, and seeing it worn back off his face was another thing Dante found disquieting. It wasn't hard to see the ghost of Vergil there, the Vergil who'd fallen into the demon world—Vergil from when they were both around Nero's age.
All Dante could figure was that his brother had managed to get laid, somewhere, somehow, in the days before his soul was crushed, warped, reformed and pressed into service by Mundus. In some ways it didn't sound like Vergil at all, but in other ways it did; he could picture a calculated decision by his brother to vouchsafe his genetics in a willing host, before going off to fight the World.
Dante couldn't even let himself humor the other possibility—that Vergil was actually doing anything as human as seeking physical comfort in the wake of their devastating estrangement.
There was a bleaker thought, one that surfaced briefly like the cryptic silver flash of a fish in a still, dark pond; one he didn't allow himself to dwell on for long—that maybe Mundus had demanded such a duty of Vergil, or perhaps Nelo Angelo. That his brother had essentially been bred, put out to stud.
The irony was that Vergil's oft-propounded theory had always been that they, as hybrids, were probably shooting blanks. Guess you were wrong, bro. Or maybe he was right, and Nero came from some other twisted, far-spreading branch or root of the demon tree. A second-cousin once removed, or something. Something shirttail, something peripheral. Enough to resonate with the Yamato, anyway.
Or maybe he wasn't their blood at all, but from some entirely different demon seed that happened to take root in a human womb—though looking at him, Dante found that unlikely.
Nero smiled at Dante as he dropped into his desk chair and rolled it over to sit across from him, eyes fixed on his face. The intensity in them was almost incandescent, like Vergil's had been. Pain passed through Dante's heart like a pulse of poison.
"I wish you'd change your mind," said Nero, tilting his head. "You don't know what you're missing."
"Speaking of missing, isn't there a sweet, naïve girl missing you right now? Waiting at home with a casserole and singing a song while birds fold your laundry?"
The kid and Vergil apparently seemed to have some genes in common on that score; a versatility he didn't find in himself. All of his sporadic carnal collisions were men; men had fewer expectations. Men didn't mind as much when you grabbed their hair and called them by another name.
"Kyrie is pure. Good. She doesn't understand everything, but she knows I have needs she can't fill. I tried to bring it up once. She told me she doesn't want to know. And she's right. She shouldn't have to." Nero nodded as if agreeing with himself, as if to affirm the rightness of it.
"Kid, I'm gonna level with you. That is a recipe for disaster in the long-term. Purity, pedestals—all bad news. You need someone who gets you, who accepts you—even the messed-up, bent-up, fucked-up, dented parts—because life leaves marks. Someone who looks across at you, not up, or down. An equal. You need to love someone as complicated as yourself." Dante paused, brow creasing, eyes finding the middle distance. "Maybe a lot more complicated."
"But true love is pure." Nero said this as if it were self-evident. Dante had to groan at the lasting power of cliché.
"Love isn't pure, kid. It's raw and filthy and glorious and perfect and sometimes it's a hot fuck on silk sheets in the moonlight, and sometimes it's a fight on jagged fucking rocks or a knockdown drag-out in the dirt. But you make up, and you make out, because you know that whatever happens between you, your true feelings will never change. And yeah, you know what, I'll walk it back— I guess there's a purity in that. But it doesn't always look like what you think it does." His heart had started beating faster as he said it. Remembering.
Nero sat back in the chair, studying him. "That's some monologue."
Dante threw up his hands. "Yeah, well."
"You talk like a guy who knows."
"I do know." Dante averted his eyes. "And that's how I know nothing else will ever compare."
"What happened?" asked Nero, raising his gaze after a moment. "I mean, only if you want to. You don't have to tell me."
Dante laughed, but there was no humor in it. "We lived in two different worlds. Or thought we did. We were stupid kids. We loved testing our powers, but we didn't understand them. Or the consequences. We were too young." He killed his beer, wishing it was whiskey. Wishing a lot of things. "There's a lot I'd do differently, now, if I could do it all over. If I had another chance."
"Maybe you'll get one."
"Not likely." He hated saying the words. He'd spent five years in literal hell, trying to prove himself wrong.
"I'm sorry," said Nero, looking at him. His face did contrition well.
"Me too, kid." No one can ever know how much. Dante shifted focus; angled to hide the cracks in his cocksure veneer. "But my point is, don't settle. And when you find the right one, don't let them" –fall— "get away."
Nero smiled, after a moment. Insolent but gentle. "Gee, thanks for the pep talk. Are you sure you're not my dad?"
"For crying out loud." You should thank me for not swallowing you.
"All right, all right, I'm kidding. I just…" Nero shook his head, smiling faintly. "I almost wish you were."
"I think we both know I'd be a terrible dad, kid. But thanks for the compliment."
Nero hesitated. "If you really think we're related, though, maybe you know him. He'd be part of your family, right?"
Dante felt a sudden bloom of emotions in his chest that he couldn't untangle, like dark wildflowers of all different kinds—all beautiful, but heavy with thorns. Treacherous and agonizing to touch. "Sorry, kid—I don't have any family, and I wouldn't know how to find them if I did."
Nero looked disappointed, an expression he quickly subsumed to insouciance. Dante knew that drill, and he ached for the kid. "Guess we're a couple of orphans."
"Hey, it's not so bad. I turned out fine." After a beat, Dante sobered. "I can tell you one thing, though. You're a damn good kid. I may not be your dad, but if I were, I'd be proud of you. And that's how I know your father would be proud of you, too." He felt his throat seize for a beat. "Wherever he is."
Nero stared at him for several seconds, then broke into a broad grin. His pugnacious face beamed artlessly and Dante was reminded of how truly un-shitty the kid was, in spite of his checkered heritage and impudent looks.
Dante glanced at the clock. "It's late, kid. You need to call that nice, sweet, respectable girlfriend of yours, and either tell her that you're coming home, or that you're crashing here, but no funny stuff."
"With you?"
"On the couch."
"Come on. No funny stuff, I swear. I just…" Nero broke off, casting about for a beat. "If you're the closest thing I'll ever have to family, I just want to…"
Dante felt something pierce him in the chest. "Yeah, I get it."
"Be near."
"I get it."
"So I can sleep with you? I mean, not sleep with you. Just—you know, in the same bed."
Dante shrugged, sighed. "Yeah, sure. Why the hell not."
"Okay." Nero nodded, slightly awkwardly, as if the idea of platonically sharing a bed with a guy was suddenly somehow more loaded and vulnerable than falling asleep in one after screwing him first.
"I'll warn you, though. I have a lot of dreams. And they're not all good ones." That was an understatement, though depending on how much whiskey he drank before he turned in, the incidences could be blunted and minimized. He could shotgun a bottle while Nero scrubbed up. "Hey, go shower already. You smell like an abattoir."
"Abattoir?" Nero's face scrunched. "The fuck is an abattoir?"
"A slaughterhouse," said Dante, flatly. "Everything sounds better in French. Now go on. You look like a Jackson Pollock."
He could tell that Nero didn't know that reference, either, but that he didn't want to ask again. Dante grinned as the kid went off to the bathroom. Something occurred to him and he called, "Fresh towel's on the right."
"K," called Nero, laconic. "Thanks."
He heard the knobs squeak and the water turn on, as the overhead pipes kicked up a racket. He knew it ran ice cold at first, and smiled absently when he heard Nero yelp. After a beat he sat up, hunched forward, staring at Nero's discarded coat, carelessly thrown on the floor. That was unlike his brother in every way, and he wondered if maybe he was mistaken.
It is like you, though, he told himself. And if he's your nephew, you're in there too.
He had been hesitant to confirm his suspicions until now, afraid to be right. Afraid, even more than that—more than anything—to be proven wrong.
He waited a minute more, until he was sure Nero's shower was well underway. It would take the kid a hot minute to scrub off all the blood and gore and ichor. Water splashed down; he heard it shift and spatter as Nero moved around, redirecting its path. A beat later, the kid began to sing.
Dante snorted, amused, but the laugh dried up a moment later, as he remembered something about Vergil with an icepick pang of memory. His brother never sang in the shower that Dante could remember, but he did sing, absently, periodically humming—alone in the carriage house while honing and polishing Yamato. He was unselfconscious in that activity, probably because he had a great voice—a surprisingly sonorous baritone. That was also why Dante never gave him shit about it. Talent was talent, and Vergil had always had that going for him.
He pushed up from the couch and went toward the crumpled, blood-soaked coat. His heart felt like it was beating in dark honey, heavy with dread and memory, the entire weight of the past a merciless drag on his slowly thudding pulse. Somewhere under it all was a strange, bright, slender hope he had no reason to hold. He knelt and grasped it—coat and hope both. His gloved hands shook a little, in a way they never did; not before a battle, not before anything.
It was crusted with layers of gore; dried and congealing. Slowly, he turned it inside out, exposing the unstained interior, the lining that had lain against Nero's body during the fight. Then he took a deep breath and held it lightly against his face.
A sound caught in his throat—a gasp, a dry sob. It was a bolt to the senses, a stab to the gut.
He sank down, disbelieving, pressing his face deep into the fabric, breathing, breathing; only breathing. There was no question. His demon was certain.
This was Vergil's. This was of Vergil.
The other part of the kid's scent was bland, meaningless, and he ignored it, just as he ignored the copper-and-brimstone smell of demon blood and viscera. He focused only on the half that made his brother exist again, if only on an olfactory plane. It was bittersweet to confirm that some part of Vergil did indeed live on. He knew that going forward, being around the kid would always be equal parts comfort and anguish, now that there was no more ambiguity.
He was on his knees, stroking the coat in his arms, face buried in its folds, when he heard Nero click open the shower door. "Where's your conditioner?" he yelled.
"New bottle's on the sink," Dante managed to choke out, hoping his voice sounded halfway normal.
Nero fell silent, and the shower door clicked again. Dante shuddered, rising to his feet. He held the coat in his arms a moment longer before reluctantly hanging it on the coat rack in the corner, impulsively smoothing the gore-stained fabric with a parting stroke of displaced tenderness.
He felt surreal, unmoored. He staggered to the bar and grabbed a magnum of whiskey, about five fingers down, not bothering with a glass. He sank back down on the chesterfield and stared into the middle distance, taking a good swig every now and then, letting it burn. Hoping it would cauterize this fresh agony, or at least take the edge off.
"Shower's all yours." Nero was coming out, in his tank top and boxer shorts, tousling his silvery crop with a towel. He looked fresh and well-scrubbed, ready to raise hell. No worse for wear.
"Thanks," Dante uttered, automatically. "Kid," he added, politely. He took one last drink and set the bottle on the floor. I'll come back to you.
Normally he would have just hauled the bottle into the shower with him, but a small, seemly part of him still heard Vergil's phantom ground-glass drawl in his head: Not very classy when you have company.
In the shower, Dante braced both palms against the tile and let the water beat down. His shoulders heaved, his chest clenched, but no tears came.
He wet his hair under the spray, then pulled back, letting the drops trickle down his face to simulate the sensation. It was one of the worst feelings; having every emotion and impulse associated with crying—the hitching breath, the shuddering sadness, the heat behind the eyes—but not being able to physically seal the deal. Like emotional blue balls.
Be honest. You always knew. The way the kid rattled your blood.
But suspecting—even being almost certain—wasn't the same as knowing. His devil blood stirred for demonic things and objects other than his brother, though never as strongly, and never with the same animal magnetism. Carnal, yes, but not erotic. Never with the same loving, hedonic, all-consuming, bone-deep resonance.
He'd never been close enough to smell the kid before. Even now, he'd only smelled him secondhand. He wished Nero would leave the coat, so he could keep it hanging there forever, blood-soaked and crusted, like the slashed glove on the corner of his desk—a deceptively light object with all the gravity and permanence of a lead paperweight.
Artifacts of his suffering, burnt offerings to his failures; icons of all he'd lost.
Eventually he turned off the tap and gathered himself, squeezing out his hair. He grabbed a towel and dried off in front of the mirror. After a moment's study, he did what he always did, what he couldn't help doing: carded his hair back from his brow. It was a sight that never failed to make him catch his breath, but the rush quickly faded when he failed to see Vergil in his own eyes. It was his own soul looking back at him; his battle-worn, lonely, incomplete soul.
He saw more of his brother looking back at him from Nero's eyes. It occurred to him that the coat and the glove were loaded but ultimately inert; pressed flowers between book pages, dead souvenirs of a past, like Polaroids under glass. The kid was a piece of living history.
Nero is the last part of Vergil he has—and it's more than he's ever had before.
"Hey kid," he began as he walked down the hall, but Nero wasn't in the office.
In his bedroom he found Nero already sound asleep, crashed out diagonally, taking more of the bed than his tacitly allotted half. Vergil would never do that. Vergil slept beautifully, as he did all things; artful and elegant in his slumber, infernal peace on his veiled white lids like a neoclassical statue; claiming his own space but never more than he required, which was odd given his ruthless insistence on taking more than he was entitled to in every other area of life.
Dante, on the other hand, had been known to kick out, to stretch, to cling, to huddle close and smother, to shift into multiple improbable postures during the night.
In some way, I guess you're my kid too.
Nero slept like a dead thing. He didn't so much as stir a lash when Dante flicked back the covers, or when the mattress dipped as he got into bed. He didn't even wake up when Dante rolled him over and onto his own side of the bed, reclaiming his legroom. The kid's face was sullen in slumber, like a cupid with a toothache. There was something of Vergil there, too, a certain cultivated and smirking peevishness. Resting bastard face, by any other name. He had to admit it was pretty endearing.
Dante hit the bedside light and lay on his back in the darkness, hands behind his head, staring at the hairline cracks in the plaster ceiling, letting himself steep in the strangeness of the evening. He wasn't used to sleeping in clothes. He wasn't used to sharing his bed. He listened to Nero's low, slow, intermittent breathing. It had the demonic cadence of a tranquilized animal.
After a moment Nero shifted abruptly, flinging an arm out and muttering. The words were nonsense, and Dante found himself chuckling. A beat later Nero turned over, fists clenched, without waking, and curled violently into Dante's side.
It hit him with the impact of a blow.
At first he did nothing but close his eyes. As he'd suspected, secondhand had nothing on firsthand. This close, the kid's scent was almost unbearably present, undeniably Vergil. Dante's associations with his brother's scent were tangled and legion, particularly where beds were concerned. It was loaded as hell to lie there, steeping in his genes, and all those memories returned in visceral force.
But there was also a solace he didn't expect—that just being near his brother's blood was almost like being in his presence again, blunting the constant underlying ache. If he closed his eyes, and blurred his mind, he could almost imagine it was Vergil who slept beside him. It was methadone, but he'd take it.
He turned his head on the pillow, letting his face press into and against Nero's laurel crown of wayward silver, hoping he wouldn't wake up and get the wrong idea. It would be both awkward, and hard to explain. But the kid was out cold; dead to the world. He mumbled something and twitched like a dog running in its sleep; he was a vivid dreamer.
Dante breathed deep, and felt Vergil in the world again.
I'll watch him for you, Verge. I'll make sure he doesn't do anything stupid, like me.
Or you.
He couldn't save his brother, but he could protect his brother's son.
There was nothing left to do but let it be what it was: a heavy and complicated gift—wonderful and horrible; bittersweet and heartbreaking and phenomenal and rare.