o-o-o-o-o
What greeted them back at Dante's office was a scene of complete disaster.
The door that had been smashed in was still hanging precariously off its hinges. Dante's desk was a heap of splinters by the back wall, and the back of his chair was sticking out from under it. There was a notable amount of dried blood on several surfaces, bullet holes riddled the ceiling, and several of the skulls on the walls had come off and clattered to the floor. And, of course, there was the shot-to-hell motorbike. But that wasn't all of it.
Apparently, after Dante and Trish's hasty departure, some of the punk kids of the surrounding neighbourhood had thought the broken door to be the equivalent of an open invitation. They had left behind a few souvenirs of their own, including cigarette butts and mostly-empty beer bottles that littered the entire floor. Sloppy graffitis in green, silver and bright pink graced the walls, and someone had thought it funny to play colour-me-beautiful with one of the big, horned skulls. To cap it all, the kids had used the remaining furniture to build a campfire in the middle of the room. The scene was complete with a large smoke stain on the ceiling, and a smell of something burnt lingered in the air.
Despite the destruction of his property, Dante seemed oddly cheerful. He'd set his weapons against the wall, rolled up his sleeves and started to shift through the rubble. The picture frame with its broken glass had been gently picked up and pocketed, and then he had gone about collecting the other items that had escaped the massacre.
Trish couldn't quite share his enthusiasm. The place was a total mess, and had she been the one to call the shots, she would have turned on the spot, walked out and found pleasant quarters to be in. But this was Dante's home. She realised that despite the unfamiliarity, she understood the concept. It came in a flash and left a painful, hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. She'd never had a home.
And she was largely responsible for his home being in the shape it was. That brought an unpleasant twinge of guilt to join the hollow feeling. Neither was something she was particularly happy to be experiencing, and the combination...
It sucked.
Right. For future reference, avoid smashing up people's homes. In fact, just... avoid smashing things up in general.
She eyed the bottles with distaste. She figured that it would be only proper to help him clean up, but she sure as hell didn't want to touch those.
But she should help, because, hey, wasn't she the reason that the place was in such condition in the first place?
Did he think of it that way?
"Hey... Dante?" she called to him.
"Hm?" he said distractedly. He was considering the large, sprayed-on skull with something suspiciously akin to appraisal.
"About this mess..." She wasn't sure what she was going to say. That she was sorry? In the light of, well, everything, that seemed rather lame. "I..."
"It's just stuff," he replied, and there was a note of finality in his voice. "Stuff that can be replaced."
Unlike some things.
She could hear the afterthought as clearly as if he had spoken it aloud. She saw his free hand sneak into his pocket and remembered the amulets she'd given back to him. Two? Yes... although she'd only ever seen him carry one.
"Dante?"
"Yeah?"
"Where did you get the other amulet?"
Dante put the skull down. His back was towards her, but she could see his shoulders tense. When he answered her, his voice was quiet, strained.
"From my brother."
Right, Nelo Angelo. The other son of Sparda. Mundus's plaything. Even during those rare and fleeting moments when her Master – former master, she corrected herself – had allowed him any kind of respite, he had roamed the castle like an unsettled ghost. Never pausing, never resting. Always searching for something that could never be found.
Trish thought she now had an idea of what he had been looking for. And discovered that that was worse than the guilt and the hollow feeling combined.
"Well, what's past is past," Dante said rather harshly, interrupting her thoughts. "And 'this mess', like you put it," he continued in a lighter tone, "isn't going to clean up itself. So we'd better get cracking if we're going to make this place fit to live in. And there's still the bedrooms upstairs to do – who knows what they've done to them."
The implication of the plural form didn't escape Trish. "You mean that you'd have me stay, then?" she asked.
Dante chuckled. "Hey, do I look like the kind of a guy who'd kick a lady into the street?"
No, he didn't. He looked like some sort of a knight... a knight red spandex, meticulously picking up the pieces of his life and putting them back together. And taking her in with open arms, even though she had been the one to break everything apart.
Trish looked at the floor. It seemed blurry. Then she blinked a couple of times, rather viciously, bent down and reached for the beer bottles.
They worked in companionable silence. Dante disappeared for a while through a door at the back and returned with a handful of large black plastic bags, into which they stuffed the bottles, the remains of burnt furniture, and, surprisingly, the demon skulls. When Trish gave Dante a querying look, however, he only shrugged. "Doesn't seem so important anymore," he said.
After a couple of hours, the room had turned from 'disaster' to 'damaged'. They stood in the middle of it – Dante with arms crossed, Trish with her hands on her hips – eyeing their handiwork appreciatively. The blood was still there, of course, as were the graffiti and the scorch marks. The walls and the ceiling would have to be repainted and the floor done, but that could wait for another day. All in all, though, it looked much better.
Cleaning had been surprisingly hard work, so when Dante suggested that they left the upstairs for tomorrow and hit a hostel a few blocks down, Trish gratefully agreed. While she examined the door, he produced a pizza box, tore it up and found a marker to scribble something on it with. Then he hung it on the door, and she suppressed a snort when she read what it said.
Reopened for business in a couple of days. In the meantime, trespassers will be hunted down and slayed. Thank you and come again,
The Proprietor
The closed the door as best as they could. Dante pointed out the direction and she started walking, not immediately realising that she was the only one doing so. She did, however, when she was startled by a heartfelt, savage curse.
"Son of a bitch!"
She turned around.
Dante was standing up from a crouch, holding up something that he had apparently picked from the ground. That something, on the second look, appeared to be a vandalised girly poster. The same poster, she recalled, on which his sword – the Force Edge – had been hanging. It was torn nearly in two from the middle, and on the lower half of it, someone had doodled a split oval shape with rays around it. The upper half sported a gigantic moustache. The look on his face was halfway between outrage and pure agony.
"I've had this since I was sixteen," he said in a voice that sounded like someone had punched him in the gut.
Trish couldn't help it. She doubled over and laughed. At the sight of Dante's affronted face she laughed even harder, until the tears she'd been biting back earlier welled up in her eyes and spilled over.
o-o-o-o-o
AN: I'm actually getting into this story. Expect more in the near future.