I went to post this earlier and found that Dante had taken a page from Kairi's notebook. Which page? Why, the one that details exactly the best way to tear through an outline like a tornado in a trailer park while simultaneously cackling and flipping me the bird. Of course. Kairi never does anything by halves, and if he's going to properly take a page from her book, neither will Dante. -eyeroll-

That said, I think I've finally made the insanity coalesce into something a bit more manageable. Now I just need to go fill in the plot holes Tornado-Dante left behind in his wake.

Enjoy. I'll see everyone again on Sunday.

Well, that secret lasted real long. -Dante

"Well, all sources say you never use it, so… Noishe decided it was going to be his brush instead." -Dante

Chapter 1.4 - Second Chance
Part 4

Danté lost track of the time, talking to Noishe, listening to his stories of his travels. He didn't notice that it was dinner time until the smells started to tickle his nose, and he looked over at the small kitchenette in surprise.

There stood Dirk, once again hustling about and preparing food, and there went most of the daylight.

"You two having fun?" Dirk asked.

"Apparently," Danté replied. "I hadn't realized… Heh. I don't think I've lost track of time like this since I was a child."

Dirk glanced back at him, then back at the stove. "Yeh're not from Sylvarant."

Well, that secret lasted real long.

"No, I'm not."

"Yeh said yeh'd have ta learn a new weapon."

Danté grimaced. "Yeah. I mean… Even if I had my guns, without fonons, I wouldn't be able to use them."

Dirk turned around, eyed him, Noishe, and the maps between them, and then went back to cooking. "Yeh sure yeh'll manage it? It ain't easy startin' over, an' as much as ah hate admittin' it, yeh've had a hard life."

Danté shrugged. "Dark managed it. I mean… I'm not really pleased with it, but… I don't have a choice. Like I said. Even if I had my guns, I wouldn't be able to use them. They rely on fonons."

Dirk hummed a bit as he went about cooking dinner, and Danté watched for a bit before sighing. "Anything I can help with?"

"Yeh really don't handle bed rest well, do ya, lad?" Dirk asked, even as he held out a couple tomatoes and a knife.

"Being this wounded usually means I screwed up, and if I screwed up, staying in one place is the last thing I want to do," Danté replied, taking the tomatoes and pulling down a cutting board. It didn't take him long to wash his hands, the tomatoes, and get the remains of the stems off them.

"Ah don't want to know what yeh do for a livin', do ah?"

"Nope. Large part of why I want to leave. Lloyd doesn't need me hanging around."

Silence dropped over them, and Noishe padded over and rubbed his head against Danté's hip. It wasn't really the most effective form of comfort, usually, but…

But… Kallig had always done the same thing. Danté didn't like having his hands full, even if it was just with fur.

Danté growled a soft 'thank you' to Noishe as he cut up the tomatoes.

"…Ugh."

"Lloyd, lad, they're good for yeh, and yeh don't complain that loud when ah feed yeh chili," Dirk grumbled.

Lloyd made a sad almost-moan sound and wandered off, and Danté watched him go amusedly. "Well. He and Kairi wouldn't get along well. If what Zion told me of her eating habits was correct, she loved tomatoes."

"Loved?"

Danté blinked at Dirk, then realized what he was getting at.

Past tense. Implies dead.

Danté sighed. "She wasn't exactly a friend. But… she seemed willing to give me a chance, when all I wanted was her captured and Dark dead. My… brother and I didn't get along well. At all." He stopped and shook his head. "I don't know what happened to her. I was trying to cut her loose, when…" He glanced at Dirk and gestured to his bandages."All I can do is hope it was enough."

The silence started to stretch, even as Danté handed the chopped tomatoes over to Dirk and then started looking around for something else to do. Not that there was much to be done. Dirk seemed to have it all under control.

Lloyd was plodding down the stairs with a book, which got put on the table as the boy clambered up into his chair.

Storybook, from the pictures he could see even from over here.

He walked over and glanced over Lloyd's shoulder, grateful that a large part of why he'd been so riveted to Noishe's map earlier was because of the language written on it.

It looked like, while the two worlds shared a currency, they didn't share an alphabet.

He idly wondered how long the storybook would hold Lloyd's attention. The kid was bad at keeping focused for any amount of time.

"So…"

Danté sighed. Great. Here went Noishe, asking questions he didn't want to answer again.

"When you said 'your kind of trouble'…"

"I kill people for a living. It's… My mentor never intended for me to follow in his footsteps, and I did. My brother did. Lloyd… To be honest, I'm scared that if I stay here, Lloyd's going to try to follow in my footsteps, and on top of the fact that that's not a line of work you, his adoptive father, or his biological father will like him getting involved in..." Danté paused to glance at the boy at the table. "I'm also worried that he will, and that I'm going to have to train him, and I'm not going to do a good enough job, and he's going to get himself killed because I couldn't teach him everything he needed. I'm… not the teaching type."

Noishe laid down and dropped his head into Danté's lap again. "If he chooses that path… Look. I don't want him going that way, no. But if he does… I'd rather you trained him. At least then he's not going blindly."

Danté shook his head. "If I can avoid it, I will."

"Avoid what?"

Danté blinked and stared at the boy who'd abandoned his storybook in favor of joining them in the corner. Then he sighed. How the hell was he supposed to answer this one? It wasn't Lloyd's business? But it was. It was about him, after all.

He didn't want to know? Yeah, he probably didn't actually want to know, but he was still young. He was at that age where being an assassin probably sounded cool.

Danté would tell him when he was older? That implied he'd be around then, and he was still doing his best to deny that would be happening.

He finally just settled for sighing and shaking his head. "Something that needs to be avoided," he answered vaguely. Noishe gave him an unamused look, and Lloyd looked disappointed, but Danté was past the point of caring.

"So, you've got everything figured out, then? Are you sure you'll be able to keep up the assassin thing here, anyway?" Noishe asked.

Danté huffed. "No, I'm not sure," he replied honestly. "But… the thing is… my skillset is pretty much good for whatever weapon I choose. I can do close-quarters, I can do long-range, but I was trained to make sure the target was dead by fatal injury. Poison is too likely to be caught and cured. So… yeah, I'll have to learn an entirely new weapon, but I'll be able to work around it."

Noishe made an almost humming noise, and Danté ran a hand through the fur on his neck. Hm… Still pretty knotted up…

"Hey, Lloyd. Pass me the brush, please?"

Lloyd blinked, glanced over toward where Danté was gesturing, and grabbed the brush, then frowned at it. "Isn't this my brush?"

Danté chuckled. "Well, all sources say you never use it, so… Noishe decided it was going to be his brush instead."

Lloyd made a face that was caught somewhere between amusement and confusion, and Danté couldn't help but smile at the expression.

Dammit.

He was getting attached.

Lloyd handed him the brush, and Noishe stretched a bit, letting Danté go back to brushing on him. He desperately needed it, it seemed.

"When was the last time you got a good brushing?" Danté asked.

"Firheicing, about a month before the cliff."

The cliff.

Noishe had mentioned that multiple times now. Given the grave out back, the distinct lack of Lloyd's biological father, and the fact that there was a 'human ranch' nearby, Danté had a feeling that he knew roughly what had happened.

If the ranches were anything close to what they sounded like, it was very possible that Lloyd's mother had been a Ranch escapee. If they'd been chased, and there was a cliff anywhere near the Iselia Human Ranch, then that would explain everything.

And the geography of the area supported that theory, too.

Danté sighed, pulled another mat of white fur out of the brush, and glanced over Noishe's body. "Here, scoot. Let me see what I can do for your tail," he muttered, patting the protozoan's rump.

Noishe stood, half-curled himself around Lloyd, and laid down again, leaving his tail right in front of Danté. The assassin started brushing out the furry appendage while Lloyd watched.

"Did you ask him what… what Dad's name was?"

Noishe's ears perked up. "Oh, right… Erk, I'm really starting to hate the spelling game…"

Danté chuckled. "No, but we've been playing the spelling game all day, so…" He shrugged. "Noishe really doesn't like it, and I don't blame him. It's a bit annoying."

"Spelling game?" Lloyd asked.

"Some words don't translate nicely from the language I'm used to into Noishe's language. So we play the spelling game to translate it. It's like…" Danté glanced at the ceiling. "Iselia. Town names tend to be horrible, since the name for Iselia in Common is, obviously, Iselia, but then in Noishe's language, the series of growls comes out to something along the lines of Vilora, if I'm not horribly mistaken. So. Anyway."

"Firheicing is Noishe's name for him, right?" Lloyd asked. Danté nodded.

"Yup. Yours is actually pretty close. More Lloyden than Lloyd, but… much closer than your father's." Danté glanced past Lloyd to Noishe, who sighed.

"Alright… Let me think… Hm… Last letter of Dirk, then rock, apple, tree, orange, sun."

"Yeah, those 'k's get pretty difficult too, don't they?" Danté mused.

"Huh?"

Danté chuckled. "Well. How many words do you know that start with 'k'? Or 'z' for that matter? That's another one we had fun with." Lloyd tilted his head to the side, utterly confused, and Danté shrugged. "That language doesn't have an alphabet, Lloyd. Noishe can spell in Common because he's spent so many years around humans. Kallig, Koran, Sorylle, probably Twilight could all do the same, but most monsters can't. They don't have alphabets, because they have no reason to be writing anything down."

"Oh… so the spelling game…"

"Last letter of dark, then the first letters of rock, apple, tree, orange, and sun," Danté said, swapping out Dirk for dark, which was a name in Danté's book, but also something readily apparent in nature, which was where most of Noishe's words tended to come from.

Lloyd frowned for a moment. "K… R… A… T… O… S…" Then it seemed to hit him. "Kratos?"

Danté offered up a smile and nodded.

Watching Lloyd light up was… Amazing. The way his confusion had morphed into hope, and wonder, and then awe…

He found himself with an armful of five-year-old a moment later, and Noishe let out an indignant yip.

Lloyd was gone again in a second, latched onto Noishe's back and hugging the protozoan like he was trying to squeeze the very life out of the beast.

"Ack, don't suffocate me!"

Danté laughed. Actually laughed for the first time in years.

"Kratos, eh?"

He glanced up at Dirk and shrugged. "Apparently."

Noishe managed to shake Lloyd off and looked over at Danté. "Apple… oh crap… uh… Oh. There we go. 'Uh.' Hm… Run, insect, orange, night."

Danté raised an eyebrow and started stringing letters together. A, U, R, I, O, N… Aurion.

That sounded suspiciously like a surname to him.

Which meant that, more than likely, it was a surname.

"Kratos Aurion," he said, voice soft.

Noishe nodded, and Lloyd had that look of awe on his face again.

Heh. At least one of them knew his parents' names…

"You don't know yours?"

Oh shit. He said that out loud?

"Deinora Darigan," he said. "That was my mother's name. Best that Master Ryndor was able to tell, she and my father weren't married. Darigan was her maiden name. We never figured out who my father was."

Lloyd blinked, and looked sad. "Aw… and you don't have a Noishe to tell you…"

…Oh forests, this kid was going to have him wrapped around his little fingers in just a few more days…

"If I hadn't had to leave, Rhunön might have been able to find out eventually. She'd been looking into it for years," he admitted. "She might find out yet. Dark would probably be interested, especially if he's still alive. But… It's of no use to me now. Might as well just move on."

Lloyd blinked, then glanced over at Dirk. Dirk huffed. "Ah don't think so, lad."

"But…"

Danté looked back and forth between the two for a moment, before he realized that Lloyd was silently asking Dirk if they could adopt him.

He sighed. "I had Master Ryndor growing up. He's the closest thing I ever had to a father figure, and…" Danté stopped, considered the meeting near the Monolith of Syal, and let a small, sad smile pull at the corners of his lips. "Honestly… I know most of the gambling and drinking and other stuff he started doing in the last couple years made him a less-than-stellar role model… but Dark and I were already long gone by then. That Dark managed to come back around… I think he did a better job raising us than he gives himself credit for."

Dirk smiled. "Well. Regardless. Dinner's ready. You two need to eat, and yeh both need ta rest if we're headin' inta town later."

Danté nodded and got to his feet, walking over to the table and abandoning the brush with the pile of white and green fur. He could brush Noishe some more tomorrow. He'd been doing it off and on for the last few days, anyway, as it made for a rather useful little pastime.

Lloyd sat next to him at the table, eating his dinner while Danté stared off into space and dug into his.

Weapons. He needed to figure out weapons.

Danté was tempted to try to go Dark's route, but… Well.

Dark had always had a grace to him that Danté lacked. A grace that got translated into a deadly dance. The twirls and spins looked almost girly, especially with that long braid, but Danté wasn't fooled by the pretty white and floral chakrams.

Dark was just as deadly as ever, and the poison on those blades was nothing to scoff at.

Kairi's katana, Dark's chakrams, that swallow-blade he'd last seen Seth with, the gray axe the brown-haired girl had started using after a time, Reighn's new scythe, Sync's daggers.

Danté knew they were deadly. Van. Legretta. Zion. Those were the three he knew for sure. Outside of them?

Hm. Poison…

Poison was dangerous.

It was too risky to be using regularly, but… well…

There was a reason he'd always carried gloves and a dagger on him before.

A little difference in MO did wonders for throwing off a trail...

Fun Fact: Dante's birth father will be revealed in Book 3. Right now... best let him stay happily oblivious of just which psychopath he shares blood with.