Disclaimer: I don't own Devil May Cry.

I think this might be the last one for a while… not sure. I really should come up with a plot. I need to do more stories with plots. One-shots are just easy.

There actually is a bank in Germany called Sparda.

- - - - - -

"Good morning." Sparda rose from his desk to kiss her briefly.

Eva's hand took his arm, squeezed and kept hold. "Pinch me."

He complied.

She shrugged, mouth twisted wryly. "Still feels like a dream. I never really believed in heaven. Immortal souls and all that nonsense."

"It's basic physics for us. Humans die, their souls come to the Underworld, we drain them and they return to be reborn."

"The Underworld equivalent of the water cycle. Or mana from heaven. This is the realm of light." She nodded.

He tugged at her lightly and she let herself be pulled into his arms. "You did not think I would let you be lost to me forever."

"I agreed to put my soul in your keeping, didn't I? I trusted you." She smiled and nuzzled the soft fabric.

"I failed you once. Never again. You will not die again." And all the will that had first defeated Mundus behind that promise.

"I know." She had known what that would mean. She'd never agreed to become a demon, a god, whatever. But she'd let her soul be bound to the amulet, knowing but not admitting to herself that he would not be able to let her simply rest there forever.

And it hadn't been enough to merely watch over her children. She'd missed movement.

More than anything she'd missed him. Anything was worth staying with him forever.

"I trust you. Speaking of trust," and now she put her hands on her hips, "Where are my girls?"

"Pardon?"

"Don't tell me you've forgotten. We were going to have a boy and a girl, then the boy turned out twins. So you owe me two girls, buster."

"Don't you think we should wait until we have caught up with the world? It has changed much?"

"No, because the world thinks we're in our sixties. Much more and we'll be old enough it would be too weird to adopt."

"Adopt?"

"No one's going to believe I can still have a kid," she pointed to herself. She needed a spell to make her look older when she went out. She looked good with silver hair, like Sparda. "So we'll pretend to adopt."

"That is true, we will need to provide for our future identities. Dante or Vergil will have to pretend to have children at some point."

"They had better have children. I want grandkids. I also want my kids. I miss motherhood. Reading and watching movies all day is too boring. I miss the constant hair-pulling of two too crazy kids to look after." She smiled nostalgically.

"I missed their childhood." He sighed. "I envy you."

"We both weren't there for them for so long… but we'll be there for these two." She squeezed him.

He nuzzled her hair, silently agreeing.

She relaxed against him, sighing contentedly. "Put those books away and come back to bed. I want to get started now." Death and imprisonment had taught her the value of time.

-

Minerva didn't consider it goofing off in class, although she sat in the back row so people didn't get distracted looking over her shoulder, unlike the people who were watching videos.

After all, this was a business class, and this was business. She listened with half an ear to the professor as she finalized the sale of a few of her stocks on her tablet.

So far she wasn't really impressed. All her friends in high school had been gushing about going to college, about how the classes would be far more challenging and they would get to choose to study interesting stuff.

Hopefully things would change when she got the intro courses and breadth requirements out of the way. The upper lever courses here were taught by the actual graduate business school's professors.

The big improvement about college, as far as she could tell, was that there was less of it. Only a few hours a day instead of most of them. Sure, most people in the pre-business major were struggling and spending enough time studying it worked out about even since there was a competitive curve (which she was breaking) that it worked out about even, but it came easily to her.

Half of that was the fact that her father ran a bank and she'd sometimes crept into his office and sat in his lap while he pointed out things to her. She'd loved spending time with him. So she'd learned this at her father's knee, literally.

He'd given them their own stock portfolios and bank accounts when they were five.

It wasn't quite as fun as sparring, but it was a competition, after all. Humans were no match for a daughter of Sparda.

So now she owned six companies, although she'd taken over and resold others. One of them had been bought out jointly by her and Alexandra when they were six. They created custom dolls, and the two of them had filled their rooms with them.

It was all practice, though. Someone was going to have to inherit the Sparda bank when Father 'died' and brother Dante, who had been the titular head while Father was 'dead' had no interest whatsoever in business and brother Vergil, who was the eldest and should technically inherit it was occupied with his kendo school.

So it was going to be her. And she was going to make her father proud.

So she waited for class to end. She wanted to get back to her room and get set up for the videoconference with the founder and manager of a successful community bank in Kenya that gave out loans to people who were starting small businesses.

Doing well by doing good. It was a family tradition going back over two thousand years.

She wanted to found her own bank like it in another developing country so she could get some practice in before she took over. Of course, her father would still be around to advise her. It was a matter of pride. Spardas, as brother Dante had told her, did everything with style.

-

Alexandra started the wheel and expertly centered the porcelain, movements precise and sure. She'd done this hundreds of times by now. Her parents had proudly replaced the china they used in the house with her stuff, and she'd given it as presents to her brothers and big sister back when she was learning.

She was strong enough the rotating clay didn't push her hands out of alignment. An unfair advantage, really, but then she had all sorts of advantages.

Stupid intro ceramics course that was a requirement to get to the interesting ones even though she'd submitted her portfolio.

She could go to LA, buy herself a studio and start selling to art galleries as herself right now, but no, her parents wanted her to go to college and Minnie pinned her to a wall until she vowed she would. A Sparda kept her vows.

So she kept making this stupid mug for the few more seconds it took until she stopped the wheel, took it off and headed for a table to attach the handle. They were letting them use porcelain, one of the more expensive clays (although this was the cheap stuff) and one of the harder to work with to make mugs? Half the people in here were total beginners.

Okay, well, she had to make two more (only the best one would be graded), and that was the assignment for this studio session. She would stay around, though, until the end.

She loved playing with clay. Marble was better though.

"Alexandra, you're supposed to be working on mugs, not statues." Without turning around, Alexandra lifted the dampened paper towel she had laid over the mugs.

"Oh. Then why haven't you left?"

"I'm sculpting."

"Can I see your bust?"

A bust? That was going to be the next project? She stopped bending over her work and pushed her chair back from the table a little.

A moment of silence. "That's very detailed, Alexandra, but you're supposed to be making a bust of a person, not a full figure of some D&D creature."

Alexandra snorted. Her sister-in-law Nevan wasn't in D&D. She'd done a good job on her bat dress, though, for only fifteen minutes. "It's just for fun. I might submit it for extra credit."

"Oh." The TA wandered off when a student called for help.

Alex hummed to herself as she worked on the eyes with a fine tool. Distraction gone. This was what she lived for.

She should make this a matching set, it could be his next birthday present, it was coming up in a few months. Do Vergil and Lady to and she'd be set.

She always got a song for him. An exclusive one. When she finally got a gallery, she would use them as the background music in it.

-

"So how was your day?"

Mini cast her whip three times to open the fridge door, pull out the pitcher of water, and close it again before dismissing the whip and pouring herself a glass. "The conference went well. I think I impressed him, which means he's the third person who'll be putting in a good word for me with the project sponsors. I hate that I need to play politics and get people to see how great I am, otherwise they think it's nepotism." Back went the pitcher.

Alex shrugged. "That's cool and all, but I was talking about school."

"What about it?"

"Same as usual?" Alex already had orange juice.

"Same as usual. Is the Barber person still talking about all the 20th century theory stuff?"

"It's a class on the Renaissance. It's supposed to focus on the idealogies of the time, it says so in the syllabus, not a…" she drank her orange juice. "I swear, Mini, if you hadn't made me promise I would be arranging another gallery show now. Hell."

"It's only four years. We have eternity."

"Which means we'll probably be doing this again. And again. We're going to have to pretend to be… what? Our own great-grandchildren? Adoptees again? Being immortal is going to be a pain in the neck. People are going to call my style derivative of my famous ancestors'." She groaned. "And I'm not going to be able to kill them unless dueling becomes legal again. I was born too late."

"Technically, we should have been born over thirty years earlier." She reached for the paper. "If you hate the idealogues so much, why not major in something else? Like business. You've got the skills, you should use them."

"It's about art, Mini, not money."

"It's about you taking after Mother."

"You say that like it's a bad thing."

"It's not, Dante does very well, even if he should reinvest in something instead of just buying rainforest to run around in. Although that is a good idea. The world is growing smaller. One of us needs to learn about technology, or we could be in trouble some day."

"Don't look at me, computers are too easy."

"Someone has to be responsible. We're going to be on this planet for a long time so we should keep taking care of it."

"Someone should be allowed to test out of business ethics courses."

"Someone bankrupted a company because the owner's daughter spread rumors about her." Mini shook her head. "I can't believe I was that immature." If Father ever found out she would never be able to face him again.

"I can't believe you were that immature either, even though she had it coming." Alex shrugged. "What was wrong was you running me through. You killed me and damned me to torture."

"It's only four years. Deal." Mini wasn't impressed.

"You're the businesswoman, deals are your thing."

"It's not like you're a starving artist. You sell stuff all the time, 'Protector of Man.'"

"What can I say? I'm trying to beat Dad in the contest for all time worst pseudonym." Alex laughed.

"Vergil's right, at some point somebody's going to find out." Mini groaned. "We're all exceptional people and we're not staying hidden like we should."

"Hey, Vergil's not exactly hiding his light under a bushel basket either. People are fighting to get into his swordfighting school." Alex shrugged. "I'm an artist, I know what people see, and they won't see us. They already think they know what we are."

"We're going to be around for millennia. Someday, someone is going to blow our cover." Humans might irritate her, but she didn't want to move to the Underworld. They might go there on occasion to visit Father's family, but it wasn't her home.

Humans might be annoying, but she didn't want to abandon them to their own stupidity. She didn't want them to suffer.

Poor people starving, despots, no human rights… she didn't want to take over the world, but money was power.

She had centuries to make a difference.

In her most hubris-filled moments, she wanted to be thought of alongside Father as one who had helped humanity.