Nico was not at all happy about Nero invading her apartment after they'd returned home that evening. "I already spent th' whole damn day in that van, waitin' on y'all," she groused as she dragged several boxes full of binders and bound reports out of a closet. "What's so important that it can't wait until tomorrow to look up?"

"Tomorrow we're probably going to be out looking for Lauda or the Nilepoch again," Nero said. "And I can't let anyone else know about this. Not yet." He shucked his jacket and peeled his shirt off over his head.

"Whoa, wait, hold the phone, stop, pause! The hell you think you're doin'?" Nico backed away. "I ain't never once thought o' you that way! An'… an' there's Kyrie, to think of, too! I can't do that to Kyrie!"

"Seriously?" Nero rolled his eyes and shrugged his jacket back on over his bare torso. "Don't flatter yourself."

Nico heaved a sigh of relief, then scowled. "Hey! What're you sayin'? That I ain't pretty enough, or somethin'?"

"Compared to Kyrie?" Nero shot her a look. "Nico, for the first two months after you moved here, you wouldn't shut up about how gorgeous she was."

Nico blushed so deeply her freckles vanished. "Well… she is."

"Yeah, she is. And she's also sweet, and kind, and smart, and… What I mean is, if you were lucky enough to get to sleep next to someone like that every night, do you think any woman alive could tempt you to throw that all away?"

"You mean if I had Kyrie? Uh, no way! She's worth, like, fifty of any other girl."

"Exactly. Since I do have Kyrie, and since there's only one of you, your virtue is perfectly safe from me."

Nico snorted. "Would be if I had any," she quipped. "Say, if you ever do get tempted to throw that all away, can I call dibs on Kyrie?"

Nero massaged the bridge of his nose. "Can we focus? I want to find this file so I can actually get some sleep tonight."

"Fine." She dropped to the floor, cross-legged. "What're we even lookin' for?"

Nero spread the shirt with its blood-scrawled number on the floor between them. "We know Agnus was conducting some kind of biological experiments with demons."

"All kinds of 'em. What about it?"

"This code number was on one of the containment units in a high-security lab. I need to know what was inside, or at least what that lab was used for."

It took them the better part of two hours, rooting through the disorganized collection, but at last Nico brandished a folder with a shout of triumph. "Found it! I thought this might be it; I remember lookin' over some o' these notes last year."

"Great!" Nero set aside the stack of papers he'd been working through. "So what is it?"

"Okay. So you know how Daddy dearest was developin' new kinds o' guards an' soldiers for th' Order's army? Puttin' souls inside armor, an' such?"

"Yeah, I fought a bunch of them. And today we found the room where they assembled the armor suits."

Nico nodded. "Well, the lab you wanted to know about is where the soul parts o' them Angel things got made."

Nero frowned. "Can't be. That was done in the lab where we fought the Nilepoch. I saw the machinery in action."

"That may've been th' final assembly line, but it ain't where the soul research was done." Nico slapped the open file on the floor between them. The notes on the first page were dated from some fifteen years previous. "Seems like it took him a while to work out his technique. He started by takin' tissue samples from a bunch o' different kinds o' demons an' tryin' to graft 'em to inanimate objects, with varyin' success. He writes about makin' some possessed weapons an' such, but mostly the demon parts just sorta broke down into goo. An' he couldn't get souls to bond to things at all."

"Sounds messy."

"Prob'ly was. But then he got his hands on some weird kinda demon that was already bonded to a suit of armor, somehow. He started harvestin' pieces from that demon an' usin' it like glue to implant souls into his own armor designs, like these buggers." She flipped a page and pointed to a diagram Nero recognized as one of the animated suits of armor he'd faced.

Nero frowned. "But the Order had a lot of armor suits. They deployed them over the whole island. Those machines in the lab were basically a mass-production operation. Wouldn't he have run out of pieces of that demon, eventually?"

"Not if the demon was still alive." Nico shrugged. "Tissue samples could be pretty small, an' some o' those suckers heal pretty damn fast. His notes mention the regeneration rate, so maybe he had the whole critter, or maybe he was just growin' demon parts in a jar. It don't say here."

"Huh. So, what's all this have to do with that lab I was asking about?"

"That's where he kept the demons he was harvestin' from." Nico pushed aside a few sheets in the file and shoved a page toward Nero. On it was an incomplete diagram of some kind of armor, more streamlined in form than the Order models he'd seen. Nico tapped a number stamped in the upper corner—the same as the one written on Nero's shirt. "And that containment unit you wanted to know about? That's the number the Dark Angel is listed under."

Nero blinked. "The what?"

"Dark Angel. It's what they called the special demon with th' armor. Don't know why; it don't look very angelic to me."

Nero stared at the image. That memory nagged at him again—his arm, lighting up beside one of the containment tanks, but when he'd looked inside he'd seen only a jumble of black armor. Had this demon been what his arm was reacting to? Had it still been alive, even then?

There had to be something more, though; why would the presence of a barely-living demon trigger such a powerful, visceral reaction? Nero paged absently through the file as he thought. He recognized the powerful automatons called Alto Angelo; they had offered a formidable challenge. And then there was the more common model, the Bianco Angelo…

Nero froze. Bianco Angelo. White angel. Which would make the Dark Angel…

"Nero Angelo," he whispered.

Nico, who had been shoving stray files back into a box, glanced over at him. "Come again?"

"Shit," Nero breathed. "Holy shit. Holy shit." He stared at the file, deaf to Nico's repeated questions. His arm hadn't reacted to a demon. His arm hadn't been reacting at all; it had been the Yamato housed within it, calling out to the soul it was bonded to.

Nero Angelo. Vergil.

Vergil must have been here on Fortuna, trapped in Agnus's lab and subjected to his experiments, for who-knew-how-many years—at least since Nero was a small child, considering the dates on some of those reports. No wonder he'd been staring at that tank, lost in some traumatic memory until Nero jarred him out of it.

It seemed impossible—but then, the Order's reach had extended farther than anyone had imagined. Clearly the Order had possessed the means to obtain the Yamato from wherever it had been lost after Vergil's downfall, so it followed that they might have had a way to retrieve Vergil himself. From his earliest encounter with the Yamato, Nero had never stopped to wonder how a sword belonging to Dante's brother had come into the Order's possession in the first place, just as he had never questioned why it had responded to his call when it had refused to obey the whims of anyone in the Order.

Had they realized what raw power had fallen into their hands? Had Agnus been aware that his prisoner was a son of Sparda, or had Vergil been unrecognizable to them, as he had once been to Dante?

All at once, a wave of freezing cold cascaded over Nero, and he yelped in surprise. The icy water doused his burning thoughts as effectively as it drenched his hair and jacket. He managed to sputter, "What the hell, Nico?" before water streamed into his mouth and he lapsed into a fit of coughing.

"You keep mutterin' things an' ignorin' me, an' I'm gonna do whatever I have to do to get your attention." Nico slammed the empty pitcher down on her workbench. "What the hell's the matter with you? You're actin' all weird again."

Nero scrubbed water from his eyes, then looked down and swore again as he dove to rescue the file folder from the spreading puddle on the floor. "Dammit, Nico! Did you have to dump water everywhere?" He grabbed his shirt and attempted to blot the pages, but the ink was already bleeding into indecipherable blobs. "I needed this information!"

"What for?" Nico scowled. "It's just a bunch o' notes about some creepy-ass experiments my asshole daddy did more'n a decade ago. Not like we're ever gonna wanna replicate those. I'm cool with buildin' on his research to make stuff like the Devil Breakers, but ain't no way in hell I'm messin' around with souls an' shit."

"That's not the point!" He attempted to peel apart two layers of paper, but the saturated fiber shredded into swollen globs of pulp in his fingers. What had been spidery lines of handwritten notes were now little more than a watercolor wash across the page. Any information he might have gleaned from the reports—the date Nero Angelo had been found, Vergil's physical condition, what exactly he had been subjected to while in the Order's power—was lost in a swirl of fading ink.

Nero sighed. Perhaps it was for the best. While some of the data might have helped to fill in the gaps in Vergil's own memory, the details of what he had suffered were something that Nero imagined Vergil would prefer to keep to himself. Even though he was already privy to many of his father's secrets, and had even witnessed some of the unspeakable torture wrought upon his body, none of that had been willingly disclosed by Vergil himself. At some point, Nero had to start respecting his father's privacy.

And this moment, as he sat shirtless and dripping frigid water, seemed as good a time as any to begin. "I'm going home," Nero announced, pushing to his feet. He squeezed the water out of his shirt and tossed it over one shoulder.

Nico gaped at him. "What, that's it? You're not gonna tell me what was so important about th' lab?"

"No point, now. The reports are gone."

"But what about this mess? Are you just gonna leave things like this? There's water all over my floor!"

"And whose fault is that?" Nero took a devilish satisfaction in the look of dismay on Nico's face. "See you in the morning."

It was nearly midnight when Nero slipped quietly through the front door of his own house, but he found Vergil still awake. Although his bunk in the boys' room was still empty, and doubtless more comfortable than the lumpy sofa, Vergil had elected to continue sleeping in the living room—or sitting up reading, apparently, since with the exception of that one night with Rosso, Nero had never actually seen him lie down. "I was worried I might wake you, coming in so late, but I guess you're still up."

Vergil glanced up from the book in his lap. His eyes lingered for a few seconds on Nero, taking in his soaked clothing and the soggy, blood-stained shirt on his shoulder, but he if he wondered what Nero had been up to, he didn't ask. "I don't require much sleep."

Nero had heard that before—though now he wondered if it had more to do with Vergil's troubled memories than with his physiology. Was it possible he still suffered from nightmares? Maybe some of Vergil's abrasive attitude could simply be chalked up to chronic sleep deprivation.

The Yamato was propped against the chair beside Vergil's knee, and Nero's eyes fixed on it. It was strange, seeing it sitting out in the open in his own living room. Now that he thought about it, he couldn't recall ever seeing Vergil without it, apart from the first few days after he'd been restored to his correct age.

The perpetual sneer Vergil had worn earlier in the day had vanished, and with the exception of the shadows lingering beneath his eyes, he seemed at ease. Nero took the fact that he hadn't immediately returned to his book as an opening. "So, I have a question. Why do you carry the Yamato around all the time?"

One of Vergil's eyebrows flicked higher. "Are you suggesting I part with it?"

Nero snorted. "I know better than that. I just mean if the Yamato's passive state is… within you, or bonded to you, or whatever, wouldn't it be easier to just leave it there, and only bring it out when you actually need it? You know, like Dante does. Apparently he's got the same ability, but he doesn't carry his sword around in his hand all the time."

"If he did, he wouldn't be able to fit through doorways," Vergil said dryly, and Nero couldn't help chuckling. The brothers' bickering over whose weapon was superior was a relatively harmless—and frequently entertaining—element of their rivalry. Vergil's hand moved to rest on the pommel of the sword before he spoke again. "I have found it best to be prepared at all times. And…" A rare softness crept into Vergil's expression. "This sword has been the one constant in my life. I prefer to carry it with me."

Nero leaned on the back of the sofa, ignoring the water that dripped onto the cushion from his jacket. "Not entirely constant, though." He hoped he wasn't pushing too far. "I know for a fact you were missing it for about five years." He hesitated only a second before adding, "Maybe longer, depending on when the Order got their hands on it."

The softness in Vergil's face was supplanted by stone. "It may not have been in my possession, but the bond was still there."

"Even when it was broken?"

"Especially when it was broken." Vergil's voice had gone rough, and his face immediately shuttered, as though he'd revealed too much. "It is both a supplement to and extension of my own power. I am always aware of its presence… or its absence."

"Huh. So you're weaker without it?"

Vergil's mouth twitched. "Let us say I am stronger with it."

Well, that helped to explain how Agnus could have kept someone as powerful as Vergil imprisoned for as long as he had—though who knew what condition Nero Angelo had been in when he'd been captured. Nero knew better than to broach that topic with Vergil. "Does it speak to you?"

Vergil blinked at the question. "Not as such. Why?"

"It's weird, but… the first time I saw the Yamato, it was like I heard a voice inside my head."

"Interesting." Vergil gazed down at the sword. "I've felt it… call to me, but never in words. What did it say?"

"It said…" Nero hesitated. If the Yamato had no voice of its own, and Vergil had been nearby, could that voice crying out for more power have really been…? "You know, I don't really remember the details. It was a long time ago." Nero hitched a hip onto the back of the sofa. "So what's it do while it's passive? I mean, were you aware of it after you got zapped back to being a kid?"

Vergil shook his head. "Not consciously. The soul bond didn't yet exist at that age. Although…" He tapped the hilt thoughtfully. "It may have afforded me some protection from the Nilepoch's abilities. You mentioned that we grew faster than normal children. I wonder if its latent power is responsible for that, or for the gradual return of my memories."

"That's as good an explanation as any. I guess Dante's sword could have done the same thing for him." Nero shrugged. "You two showed some abilities pretty early on, too."

"Did we? Interesting."

"No real skill, no control, but the raw power was there." Nero shook his head. "Man, I never want to see another tantrum that comes with its own pyrotechnics. The first time both of you kicked off in tandem, I thought you were gonna burn down my house."

"I would never," Vergil said smoothly.

"Yeah, just like you would never climb on the roof and then try to argue that you hadn't broken any rules."

There was a definite smug turn to Vergil's lips. "If I'd had the Yamato then, I wouldn't have needed to climb."

Nero groaned. "I don't think I could have dealt with a teleporting toddler." What Vergil had said confirmed Nero's theory, though; the Yamato was responsible for his space-warping abilities. No wonder he hadn't been able to escape Agnus's containment tank without it. Though that begged the question of how he had finally escaped…

Nero flexed the fingers of his right hand. The Yamato had reacted to Nero Angelo just a few weeks before Vergil had appeared in Nero's garage, seeking to reclaim it. Maybe that brief connection had awakened him somehow, even granted him the strength to break free.

Perhaps if Nero hadn't entered that laboratory, Urizen would never have come to exist. Red Grave City would have remained unscathed, and Nero would not have suffered the loss of his arm.

But in that scenario, Nero might never have come to discover his true power. Vergil would be imprisoned in a cage, forever lingering at the brink of death. Dante would still believe he had killed his twin brother, and Nero would never have learned that he had a family of his own.

And now he would be facing Lauda's mad revenge scheme without the support of his family or friends. And that meant he might have gone after Julio alone…

For all the pain and tragedy the past year had brought, that alternative scarcely bore thinking about.

"Hey, speaking of teleporting…" Nero swallowed, fighting the tightness in his throat. "I, uh, never thanked you for saving Julio. It meant a lot to me."

Vergil gave a slight nod. "You're welcome."

An awkward silence descended over the room, and Nero fidgeted with his wet shirt. "I'd better go clean up," he temporized. "See you in the morning."

With the conversation at an end, Vergil wordlessly returned to his book.

CHAPTER NOTES

While it's DMC4 canon that Agnus derived the Bianco Angelo from the "Dark Angel," it's left ambiguous as to exactly how Agnus acquired his samples. It's possible that pieces of Nero Angelo's armor just washed up on Fortuna's shores after Mallet Island sank into the sea… but that doesn't explain how they got the pieces of Yamato, which were still in the underworld. My theory is that the Order somehow got their hands on Vergil himself after the events of DMC, which is why he was already on Fortuna (and in such terrible physical shape) when he came to reclaim the Yamato in DMC5. If you want the long-form rationale for this, I have a Tumblr post that goes into more detail (which I can't link here because FFN strips links, but it's linked from the AO3 copy of this chapter. Or you can message me for the link).

Shameless plug: I have written a companion piece to this chapter that deals with Agnus's Dark Angel experiments from Vergil's perspective, and goes into a little more detail about his memory loss. It will first be published in the Vergil fanzine Awakening (launching April 30! Mark the date! It benefits charity!), and will be posted here whenever the zine-exclusive distribution period expires (probably late 2021).

For more information about the Awakening project, check out AwakeningZine on Twitter and Tumblr.