Lady joined them in the living room when she'd finished the dishes, and what Nero had thought was unbearable awkwardness between two people ramped up exponentially when a third was added. In the face of the uncomfortable not-conversation, Nero muttered something about needing to clean his gun and hurried upstairs to retrieve his case from the locker in his closet. Part of him wanted to hide out up here, in the safety of his own bedroom, but Blue Rose really did need cleaning and he knew Kyrie hated the smell of the solvent.

When Nero returned to the living room, Lady had taken over his armchair and was paging through one of the books from the Order's library that still lurked in stacks around the room. No matter how many boxes they stacked in the garage, it seemed that there were always more books spawning in a corner somewhere. Perhaps Zaffiro had been sneaking them into the house when they weren't looking, or perhaps the Order's demonology books really did multiply when left unattended. Spontaneously reproducing books would not have been the strangest of Agnus's innovations.

Nero spread a heavily-soiled square of canvas on the coffee table and laid out his cleaning supplies before gently placing Blue Rose on the material. Lady glanced over, curious. "You're using a brush?"

"Always have." Nero opened the cylinder and peered inside. Rose was filthy, poor thing. As he opened the bottle of solvent, he noticed Lady still watching. "Shouldn't I be?"

She shrugged. "Personal preference. You can try my snake if you like. It's a little quicker, for light cleaning. Easier on the bore, too." She reached behind her chair and slid open one of the windows to vent the chemical smell.

"Maybe later. It's been a while since I've given her a full cleaning, and she's pretty caked up." He twisted the bristles over a stubborn patch of residue, then switched out his bronze brush for a steel one and poked at the spot again. "Normally I do this in the van on the way back from jobs, but things have been a little hectic lately, so I've been using that time to grab a nap whenever I can. Besides, with Nico's driving, it's hard to keep things on the table." He capped the solvent and reached for the oil. "You want anything cleaned, while I've got the stuff out?"

Lady shook her head. "I only put a few rounds through my nine-mil, and it was clean to start. And I don't think Kalina Ann will fit on your coffee table. I'll save that for the garage."

"Yeah, that's probably for the best. Kyrie would have kittens if she saw that thing in here." Nero finished with the oil and gave Blue Rose a final rub-down with a soft cloth. The pistol didn't polish up as well as she should have; there were splotches of grime wedged in the fine engraving. Nero sighed and dug a much-abused toothbrush out of his kit to scrub at the flowers cut into the side plate. He loved the look of the Rose, and he was damn proud of her, but he was never again engraving this much surface detail into any weapon he made.

Nero glanced up from his work, curious if Vergil had noticed the workmanship of his gun, or if he was even aware that Nero had engineered it specifically for devil hunting and tooled the entire mechanism by hand. He'd never seen Vergil handle any firearm—it wasn't as though he needed one, considering those blue-flame swords he could pull from thin air—and for all Nero knew, he was completely indifferent to them, but somewhere deep within Nero resided a child who had never had a crayon drawing magneted to a refrigerator door, and he was due some paternal approbation. Was it too much to hope for his father to notice and praise his creative endeavors?

Apparently so, for Vergil was deeply engrossed in something he was reading, and hadn't looked up. Nero flicked his gaze to Lady, who also had a gilt-edged volume spread across her knees. "So what's that you're reading? Anything good?"

"Research." Lady tipped the book upright to show him the cover. The title was Something Something Daemonium, he thought, though the leather was badly damaged and he could barely make out any of the letters. "It never hurts to know more about what we're fighting."

Vergil, predictably, surfaced the moment the conversation turned to books. He glanced at Lady's book, then bent forward to scan the stack beside her chair and selected a smaller volume from near the floor. "You'd probably be most interested in this one, then. It contains details on the physiological makeup of various demons, including their vulnerabilities."

Lady opened the book he offered and raised her eyebrows. "Now that is interesting. How did you know?"

"I've read it."

She turned the ancient volume over in her hands. "And here I thought we kept most of the books on demonology out of the reach of children."

"You did. I read it during my last visit to Fortuna."

"Oh? When was that? Dante told me he hadn't been here in a few years."

Vergil turned to Nero. "How old are you, Nero?"

Nero blinked at the question. "Twenty-five."

Vergil made a gesture that expressed that Nero's answer stood for his own, then returned to the book he'd been reading.

The casual reference to his own origins stunned him for a moment, but when it had sunk in, Nero held up a hand. "Hold on. These books are from the Order's internal research library. They weren't even available to most members of the Order, much less to outsiders. How the hell did you get access to them?"

"It was not… authorized, strictly speaking." Vergil's gaze slid away from Nero. After a few seconds of continued scrutiny, he added, "I was given access to the library by one of the archivists."

He was being more than usually evasive, and Lady pounced. "How did you manage that? Bribery? Subterfuge? Threatening to cut him to ribbons?"

"Her. And it was nothing of the sort. It was an… arrangement of mutual convenience."

Lady smelled blood, and she showed her teeth. "The details of which were…?"

Vergil's lips thinned, and he said nothing. If Nero hadn't been watching closely, he might have missed the pink tinge creeping up his father's neck.

Lady didn't miss that detail, either. Her eyes went wide as she took in his reaction. "You—you seduced a librarian?"

Vergil scowled. "I wouldn't say seduced. As I recall, it was mostly her idea."

"But you actually slept with a librarian to get access to the restricted section?" Lady threw her head back and laughed. "I've heard of bibliophiles, but that definitely wins the prize!"

Vergil was not amused by her amusement. "If I hadn't, it's very likely none of us would be here right now. So perhaps we can look beyond the follies of my youth and be content with the result."

Lady wiped her eyes. "What result?" A few seconds passed before she looked over at Nero, eyes widening. "Wait… you mean the archivist was…?"

Vergil nodded, and Nero's stomach clenched. This was more knowledge of his mother than he'd ever had, and while a part of him longed to learn everything he could, the words of every question lodged in his throat. "Um," he managed after a few false starts. "Was she… Do you… happen to remember her name?"

The crease between Vergil's brows deepened for an instant before his face smoothed. "You don't know?"

Nero shook his head. "I was just… found on a doorstep." He tried to grin, but the effort hurt. "I don't know my real birthday, or name, or anything."

There was a flash of tension across Vergil's face—was that guilt? Surely not—and then he closed his eyes, concentrating. "Bianca," he said after a moment. "Her name was Bianca."

"Bianca," Nero repeated. He laughed softly. "I guess that fits. Bianca e Nero." White and black. He tried not to think about any deeper symbolism associated with those colors. "Do you remember anything else about her?"

"I believe she had worked for the Order for a few years as a researcher before being promoted to the archive. And… she must have enjoyed art. Sculpture. She had a reproduction of The Kiss in her apartment." Vergil shook his head. "I'm afraid I didn't know her well. I was only here for a few weeks."

"It's more than I knew before. Thanks." Nero silently repeated Bianca in his head, trying to imagine a face to put with the name.

Lady was frowning. "She'd worked for the Order for a few years? How old was she?"

Vergil's head canted in an approximation of a shrug. "Mid-twenties, at a guess."

Lady's eyebrows arched. "So she was a cradle-robber, too."

Vergil, more ruffled by this than Nero had ever seen him, actually rolled his eyes. "I was nineteen. Hardly a child."

"Hardly more than one. That's about the time we met, remember? You were a cocky little shit."

"Don't confuse me with Dante," Vergil scoffed. "I'd been living on my own for eleven years by that point. Life experience accelerates maturity."

Lady's eyes narrowed. "But not necessarily good judgment."

Vergil's mouth hardened. "I was not the only one who fell prey to Arkham's manipulation."

Lady's body went rigid, and Nero flailed to say anything that might temper the sparks flaring between them. "Well, everybody does occasional dumb shit when they're young. Part of growing up, right?"

"True." Lady turned away and settled back in her chair, clearly making an effort to relax for Nero's sake. "All right, Truthfully Assured Destruction. Nero's up first."

Nero groaned. "I have not consumed nearly enough alcohol to play that game."

"Game?" Vergil glanced between them, his brow furrowed.

"It's a game where you have to answer a question truthfully, or escalate to progressively more taboo topics," Lady explained. "Like Truth or Dare, but without the embarrassing stunts."

Vergil's expression remained blank, which was to be expected. Nero doubted that party games rated high on his list of life experiences. Still, considering the tension that lingered in the atmosphere, a silly game might be just the thing to break the ice. Nero turned to face Lady. "All right. Just keep it family-friendly, okay?"

"The first round always is," Lady smirked. "We'll keep it on-topic, though: Bad teenage choices. What's the worst idea you ever had?"

"Had? Plenty. I'm full of bad ideas," Nero grinned.

"The worst one you acted on, then."

"Let's see…" Nero's fingers tapped idly against Blue Rose's grip as he thought. "Back when I was first getting into modding guns, I wanted to make ammunition that exploded on impact, so I had the brilliant idea to hollow out some bullets and fill them with the thermal-ignition fuel gel we used in our swords."

Lady's jaw dropped. "Oh, no."

"Oh, yes. I mean, they did explode. Just… not outside of the gun. Nearly blew my thumb off when I test-fired one. Fortunately I'd decided to try off-hand first." He waggled the fingers of his right hand thoughtfully. "It's funny—for some reason, it's always this arm that gets screwed. First the gun, then that demon in the woods, then…" He trailed off when he realized Vergil had gone very still, and recalled that he'd been trying to lighten the mood. He forced a laugh. "Good thing I figured out how to regrow limbs. Probably my body's way of telling me it knows most of my big ideas are shit." He turned back to Lady. "Okay, turnabout. What's the worst idea you ever had?"

There was an instant's flicker of something like panic in her eyes, but it quickly vanished behind a wink. "Oh, I've never had a bad idea in my life. I'm perfect."

Nero snorted. "Okay, Little Miss Perfect, I'll modify the question: What thing have you done in your perfect life that you most regretted doing later? Be honest, now. This game was your idea."

Her smile turned brittle, and it took her a moment to answer. "Killing my father," she said quietly. "Not that he shouldn't have died, or that it shouldn't have been me. I wanted to end it myself. I just… Dante offered to do it for me, and now I kind of wish I'd let him." She sighed. "Though if I had, maybe I'd resent him for it, and I wouldn't want that, either."

"To be fair," Vergil said into the heavy silence that descended after Lady's confession, "we all killed Arkham at one point or another. I thought I'd finished him off myself on two separate occasions. The man had an irritating habit of not staying dead."

Lady hummed thoughtfully, and her eyes shifted to Vergil. "Kind of like someone else I know. Come to think of it, how many times have you died?"

"That depends on your definition of death."

"Ballpark estimate?"

He paused to consider. "Somewhere between two and six."

Lady gave a low whistle. Nero felt himself gaping, and closed his mouth by an act of will. "And on that note, I think it's your turn. Worst decision of your life?"

Vergil's fingers traced the edge of the book in his lap. "There have been several I regret in hindsight. But I always had good reason at the time for making the choices I did."

"Always?" Nero's eyebrows shot up. "From what I heard, you once threw yourself into hell just to spite Dante."

"That wasn't the reason." Vergil scowled. "Well. Not the only reason. And in my defense, it had been a bit of a day."

"It certainly had," Lady agreed.

Nero kept his eyes fixed on Vergil. "The Qliphoth wasn't a bad idea?"

"In retrospect, the complications it presented exceeded the benefits. But at the time, it served my purpose."

"Served Urizen's purpose, maybe," Lady put in.

"What about splitting yourself in two with the Yamato?"

"I would have died otherwise."

"Precedent indicates it wouldn't have stuck," Lady stage whispered. She was enjoying this.

Nero snapped his fingers. "I've got one. Sandals with leather clubwear."

Vergil grimaced. "I would never. More to the point, that wasn't my decision. I—my… human incarnation was constrained by his circumstances. He had no choice but to take what Griffon provided."

"The demon chicken made those fashion choices?" Lady cackled. "That explains a lot, actually."

"Not exactly, but he selected the target who did. And that man was no better judge of style."

"Urizen wasn't exactly a snappy dresser, either," Nero pointed out. "The whole slimy tentacle thing is kinda B-grade horror."

"Nor did Urizen seek my opinion regarding his appearance. Form is less vital to most demons than function."

"Now that I can believe," Lady said. "Trish is the only one I've ever seen with any kind of fashion sense."

Vergil huffed through his nose. "You clearly never saw my father."

Nero stared at him. He'd never once heard Dante speak of his father, and while Zaffiro had shared a single memory under duress, he certainly hadn't expected it from Vergil. "Sparda?"

Vergil nodded. "He was very traditional. Dressed for every possible occasion, and always for peak dramatic effect."

"Huh. I would never have guessed."

Vergil cocked an eyebrow at him. "I hope that's not a commentary on my appearance." He reconsidered. "Well. Maybe Dante's."

Nero laughed. "No, I just meant that I hadn't seen him depicted that way. I mean, when I was growing up, nearly every public building here had a statue or painting of Sparda somewhere, but he was always dressed in some kind of flowing robes, doing that angry-god pose." Nero held out his hands as though balanced on a sword and mimicked the stern expression. "You know?"

Vergil nodded. "He did use that pose, but only when one of us had done something worthy of punishment."

Some primal part of Nero coiled in apprehension at the thought of being punished by the Legendary Dark Knight Sparda. "Such as?"

There was a definite smugness in the set of Vergil's lips. "Dante once tried to swing from one side of the gallery to the other on the chandelier. He slipped off and flew head-first through a four hundred-year-old stained-glass window."

The memory of pulling the twins off his roof a few weeks earlier made the scenario all too easy for Nero to picture. "That seems like a very Dante thing to do."

Vergil's smirk deepened. "It was not entirely his own idea."

Lady cocked an eyebrow. "And yet, why do I have this feeling that he's the only one who got in trouble for it?"

"I couldn't possibly have been involved. After all, I was studying in another room when it happened. I couldn't be expected to keep watch on my younger brother all the time."

Nero could almost hear the words, spoken in Zaffiro's voice. "Wow. And your parents actually bought that line?"

Vergil gave a mild shrug. "It happened to be true. I went in the other room the moment Dante climbed up on the banister."

"You devious bastard." Lady shook her head. "I don't know whether to be outraged on Dante's behalf, or impressed that you actually managed to pull off a setup like that."

"I'm sure Dante got his revenge sooner or later." Nero turned back to Vergil. "I seem to recall something about your mother threatening to lock you both in a vault…?"

"An idle threat, perhaps, but one we frequently earned." Vergil's gaze went a bit distant, and then he looked thoughtful.

"I'll bet." Nero noted the sudden change in expression and wondered just what had triggered it. "I guess I'll file that story with all the other juicy family secrets I've uncovered lately."

Vergil seemed to return to the present and opened the book in his lap again. "I'm sure that's a slender file."

"It's bigger than you might think." Nero had learned of his father's childhood trauma, his nightmares, his years of torture and slavery. He'd learned how close the twin brothers had once been, before fate and Mundus had conspired to separate them. But none of that seemed appropriate to bring up now. "For one thing, I now know that you play violin."

Vergil shook his head. "Played. That was a long time ago."

"Nah, I bet you could pick it up again in a heartbeat if you wanted, since you're basically a prodigy at everything."

Vergil looked up from the book to stare at him. "I'm a what?"

Nero felt heat rushing to his ears. He hadn't meant for the compliment to slip out, but there was no downplaying it now. "Come on. You speak at least four languages, and you can remember details about books you read a quarter century ago. Pretty sure that qualifies you as a genius."

"Merely the result of intensive study," Vergil said mildly.

"You were reading Latin at age five."

"Because I'd been taught from age three." He folded his hands over the book. "Where did you learn your swordsmanship?"

The change in topic caught Nero off-guard. "With the Order's Holy Knights. Credo—Kyrie's brother—was the Supreme General. He strong-armed me into joining up when I turned sixteen."

"And how often did you train?"

"Every single day, at the ass-crack of dawn," Nero groaned. "And extra training most afternoons, since I was usually late to morning practice. Thank you, Lieutenant Lauda," he added under his breath.

Vergil ignored the addition. "And through that repetition, you acquired fluency in those skills, cultivated your reflexes, and strengthened your body. Anyone observing you now would assume you had a natural talent for combat, because your execution appears effortless." He picked up the book again. "Ability is never attained without effort."

"I guess." Nero stored away Vergil's rare praise to unpack later, and let his gaze fall to at the book in his father's hands. "I'm pretty sure the foreign language bus skipped my stop, though. If Kyrie hadn't tutored me, I never would have made it through second-year Italian. I'd never manage something like Latin."

"You could, if you were properly motivated." One of Vergil's eyebrows twitched as he swept the room with his gaze. "Though having seen how you live, I don't know when you'd find the time."

"Yeah, that's definitely a thing." Nero looked around the shabby, cluttered living room and reluctantly got to his feet. "And I should probably be using this time while the kids are away to clean up the house, because I can never get enough done when they're here."

Lady started to rise. "Do you want us to help?"

Nero waved her back down as he went behind the sofa to collect a box. "Nah, it's fine. I'm just gonna start moving some of these boxes out to the garage. Or just straight to the trash. We probably don't need to keep these old personnel files…" He trailed off as he stared into the box in his arms. It was packed with manila file folders. The one Nico had pulled free weeks before read Laboratory on the tab. "Holy shit."

Nero dropped the box over the back of the sofa and reached for the next one. The heavy parcel bounced on the cushion, and Vergil righted it before it could topple. "What is it?"

Nero heaved two more file boxes onto the seat before leaping over the couch himself. "These files Nico found! They're the old department staff records from the castle. Every department housed in that building, I'll bet." He tugged files out of the first box at random, checking the department listed on the folder. "Labs, Acquisitions, Medical… It's got to be here somewhere!"

Lady moved to peer over his shoulder. "I'll help, if you tell me what you're looking for."

"Anything to do with the research library. Archives, Library, Books, look for anything like that."

With nods of understanding, Vergil and Lady each claimed a box. After a minute of searching, Lady held up a file. "Here's one marked Biblio. Could that be it?"

"Yes! Pull anything from that department." Nero took the folder from her hand and checked the label, which read Sarafino, T. Inside was a work history with a small black-and-white ID photo pasted to it. Sarafino, T. turned out to be a pudgy man in his fifties. Nero picked up the next folder, which belonged to Belarosa, C., a dark-skinned woman of about thirty. "Dammit! There's no first names on any of these. How am I gonna find her if—"

"Give them here." Vergil gently prised the file from Nero's trembling fingers, then collected a thick stack of folders from Lady. Nero clenched his fists, scarcely daring to breathe as his father opened each file and examined the photograph inside.

It shouldn't matter this much, he told himself as the wait dragged on. Whoever she is, she's long gone. It hasn't made any difference to your last twenty-five years, and it won't change anything for the future. But even as he tried to convince himself of his own indifference, the anxiety built until his heart was hammering as fast as it had been in the seconds after Dante had told him Vergil was his father.

There were only a few files left in Vergil's stack when he wordlessly offered one to Nero. Nero looked at the folder, then at Vergil, and back to the file before slowly closing his fingers on it. The name on the tab read Lucentio, B. With the truth lying in his hands, Nero almost couldn't summon the courage to open the folder, but at last he swallowed the stone in his throat and turned back the cover.

Staring back at him from a monochrome snapshot was a fair-haired woman with a bright smile. She looked to be a couple of years younger than Kyrie, which was jarring; somehow Nero hadn't realized that his mother must have been younger than he was now when he was born.

"She's pretty." Lady was craning her neck to see the photo. "You have the same nose."

Nero merely nodded, not trusting his voice. He wasn't sure what he should be feeling in this situation, but the swirling sensations in his chest were a bewildering vortex of grief and joy and anger and relief. He stared at the photo for what must have been minutes; he ceased being aware of anything happening around him until he heard the garage door and realized Vergil and Lady had packed up the rest of the file boxes and carried them out.

"Thanks," he murmured when they had returned. "Sorry. I was going to do that."

"It's fine. You were busy." Lady flashed him a smile and returned to her chair, while Vergil wordlessly picked up his discarded book.

Nero shook himself out of his stupor. He needed to get his racing thoughts in order and vent them. Somewhere else. "I'm, uh, going to put this upstairs. I want to show it to Kyrie when she gets back."

Secure in his own bedroom, Nero propped the file reverently against the mirror over their dresser and bent low to gaze at it once more. He drew a long breath. "Um. Hello… mother," he whispered. "Mom? I don't even know what to call you, but it's nice to finally meet you. I'm Nero. I… I don't know if you ever gave me a different name. There's a lot I don't know about you, and I probably never will. But… I guess I'm glad to finally learn where I came from."

It may have been a silly exercise, but he felt lighter having expressed himself. He took a few seconds more to compare his mother's photograph with his own reflection—Lady's right, we really do have the same nose—before returning to the living room.

Lady was still curled up in the armchair, paging through the book Vergil had recommended. Vergil was seated at one end of the couch, his long legs extended before him and only his eyes moving as he devoured the text in his hand. The console clock carried on ticking in the background, the only sound in the room except when one of them flicked over a page.

Nero knelt by the table to finish putting away his cleaning gear, and the conflicted emotions fluttering in his midsection began to settle at last. This scene was mundane, but peaceful. Like this, he could almost envision them as a normal family, enjoying a quiet day at home—if you ignored the custom revolver on the table, the books on demonology, and the fact that Lady was in no way related to either of them.

Still, it felt good to be a part of such a calm, grounded moment. It reminded him of those precious evenings he'd spent here in his early childhood, when Kyrie's parents had allowed her to rescue her favorite playmate from the orphanage for a home-cooked meal. After supper, he and Kyrie would sprawl on the floor to color, while Kyrie's parents sat in the places Vergil and Lady now occupied, reading or sewing or writing letters in the soft orange glow of the lamp. Credo would settle at the end of the sofa with his schoolwork, pages rustling, the clock ticking in the background…

"Challenging Mundus," Vergil said suddenly.

The domestic vision faded abruptly. Nero blinked, and it was the middle of the afternoon, and harsh sunlight glinted off the barrel of his revolver, and the sharp odor of solvent emanated from the bore brush in his hand. He turned to stare at Vergil, who was wearing a pensive frown. "What?"

"Challenging Mundus," Vergil repeated, "when I was badly injured, and already fatigued from battling Arkham and Dante in succession. That was the worst idea I ever had."

Lady laughed at the non sequitur, and Nero just shook his head as he hefted the reassuring weight of Blue Rose. The idyllic scene in his memory was a beautiful dream, but he wouldn't trade this crazy family of his for anything.


NOTE:

Bianca Lucentio translates very roughly to "White Light," which I chose because it seemed a perfect counterpart for Nero Angelo (and their son). But for those playing along at home, it is also yet another Shakespeare reference (the names of the secondary lovers from The Taming of the Shrew). Like many other writers in DMC fandom, I've used Shakespearean names for all the cities, because… well, after Capulet City, it seems a rather obvious naming convention. Anyway, I was pleased that I managed to get both the symbolism and the lit nerd jokes in here!