It is Eternal Winter There

by Eirian Erisdar

Two months after a horrifying incident involving four days fighting for his life alongside Vergil against endless hordes of demons, Nero does the smart thing and goes to therapy. In which Nero desperately wishes for his father, and Vergil finally figures out how to be one.

1. It Is Eternal Winter There

A/N: Hey, everyone. This fic can be read standalone or as a sequel to Sweet Dreams Form a Shade which deals with the four-day odyssey of blood that was Nero and Vergil fighting for their lives, and the ensuing emotional fallout and brotherly and father-son fluff.

This fic deals with Nero's resulting trauma and explores he and Vergil's evolving father-son relationship. There are descriptions of panic attacks, and much briefer mentions of alcoholism and self harm, though none of the latter two are expressly shown in this fic and Nero does not participate in either of those two things.

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It is Eternal Winter There

Eirian Erisdar

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Music for this chapter: The Ghost on the Shore, Lord Huron

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"So, how would you describe your relationship with your father?"

Face fixed in the same politely open expression he had been wearing during the session's opening pleasantries, Nero opens his mouth–

–and closes it again.

"Uh," he says, eloquently.

A pause, where the therapist looks at him with a calm, unassuming expression on her face and Nero forgets how to string together a coherent sentence.

The therapist makes a note in her journal before speaking again. "That's okay," she says. "I can sense that's probably too big a question to cover all at once. Why don't we start small? You mentioned your chief reason for seeking out therapy was a poor relationship with your father, and you grew up in an orphanage. Could you tell me more about that?"

Nero realises abruptly that he is kneading his hands together, fingers clenched so tight that his knuckles have blanched white. He forces his sweaty hands apart, rubs them against the rough fabric of his trousers. The cushioned chair is almost too comfortable, as though it is attempting to swallow him whole. The low, warm lighting of the room blurs its corners, makes the walls close in.

"Right," he says, feeling naked and exposed without the reassuring weight of Red Queen on his back. "I didn't know my father growing up. He…uh…didn't know I existed. We only reconnected fairly recently, a few months ago."

The therapist nods. "I see," she says. "So you only met him earlier this year. How was that first meeting? How did it make you feel?"

Nero inhales sharply, and presses a hand to his right elbow. Phantom pain, of the flesh there tearing apart in one sharp twist, bones snapping, the pause where his body had almost seized up in shock before blood began to gush from the torn vessels–

"Nero?"

The world turns cold, the wood-paneled walls fading to grey. There is a vase of blue roses on the low table before him, Nero realises, and the bar of pure white light from the window at street-level near the ceiling of the room grows brighter, lancing diagonally down over his shaking right fist to line each perfect, cyan blossom with gold, moisture tumbling down the glass vase like a crystalline tears.

And Nero just–

He can't–

His mouth is moving without him commanding it to. "I'm sorry," he says, his own voice coming from somewhere distant, beyond the ringing in his ears. "I- I need to reschedule, if that's okay."

"Of course. Feel free to call the office at any–"

Nero stumbles past the therapist and out the door, through the tiny, airless reception, up the flight of narrow steps, at the top of which daylight pours glaringly bright from the glass-fronted door–

Nero bursts out into the street, the shock of cold wintry air seizing his lungs and knocking what little breath he has left from his chest. He takes four staggering steps around the corner of the building and slides down in the recessed shade of an alleyway, fighting the gasping breaths that tear from his throat as he blinks the darkness from the edges of his vision.

He is grasping his right elbow so hard that there are purpling bruises forming around the joint, blood seeping from under his fingernails where they have grown long and cyan with crackling demon energy and speared through his winter coat.

Nero buries his face into his knees and jams his right fist into his mouth to stop whatever is fighting to come out of him. It could be a scream. It could be his breakfast. It could be his guts, the whole bloody mess of it, like his cooling blood on his garage floor, or his father's shredded, torn arm in Nero's hands, the give of bone under his hands as he pulls the jagged bones straight, Vergil's agonized howl spearing hot and horrible by his ear–

Nero gasps in a breath that shudders through him, tears prickling at the corners of his vision–

He comes back to himself fully an indeterminate time later, shivering in cold sweat, the filthy alley wall pressed to his back, tear tracks drying on his aching face.

Nero pushes up his right sleeve with a still-trembling left hand and finds his elbow quite whole, skin unbroken, any bruises long healed over by his demon powers. He flexes the fingers of his right hand. They feel – not quite his, but not entirely not a part of him, either.

Nero scrubs his face with a shaking hand, pushes himself upright.

A moment, where he attempts to understand what has just occurred, and finds himself so terrified that it did occur that he decides to push it to the back of his mind instead.

Except that he can't, and he can't go home in his current state either, or Kyrie would immediately notice something is off and he'd have to–

–He'd have to explain, and go through that all again.

"Okay," Nero whispers into the cold, late morning December air. "Okay."

Across the street, beside a shop so covered in Christmas decorations it looks like someone has vomited green and red tinsel all over it, is a phone booth.

Warms wrapped around himself, Nero stumbles across the street, ignoring the strange looks passersby give him, and locks himself into the blessedly private, small space of the phone booth.

He fumbles for change. The coins clatter and scrape against the coin slot, shuddering with his bloodless fingers, and Nero grits his teeth as the coins slide in one by one, achingly slow.

Nero has keyed in half the number to Devil May Cry shop before he realises what he has done and slams the handset so hard back into the receiver he is surprised it does not break.

He almost called his father.

The father who had ripped his arm from its joint – but also, eight weeks ago, had stood in front of him in the face of endless tides of demons; had taken a blade in the chest and one in the the stomach to save Nero's life, had held Nero close when Nero had fallen, exhausted, and who had smiled up at him with pride in his darkening eyes as blood seeped out of Vergil's mouth, Red Queen in his gut–

Nero leans against the grimy fiberglass wall as the clatter of coins falling into the change box fills the tiny booth.

"Shit," he mutters, a bizzare urge to laugh welling up inside him, drawing a single fresh tear to run down his left cheek.

He scrapes the coins from the change box, enters another number.

"Devil Maaaaay Cry." Nico's drawl filters through the phone, tinny and compressed by distance, and Nero nearly collapses with relief at hearing a voice that is not his own.

"Nico," he whispers.

"Oh hey, skidmark!"

"Hey," he says, feeling a savage twist of victory as he manages to keep his voice even. "Do you have anything for me?"

"Whaaat, demon huntin'? Hold up, lemme see."

Nero curls the phone closer to himself in the crook of his neck and screws his eyes shut, fighting to control his breathing.

"You okay there, Nero? You're breathing kinda hard."

"Went– running," Nero says, stumbling over the word. "Wanted to blow off some steam."

Nico's laugh bites into his ear. "Nothin' like kickin' demon ass to blow off that steam! Yeah, there's small reports of demon activity not too far from where I am. Want me to pick you up at your place?"

"Nah, I'm out," Nero says, the humour in his voice feeling foreign and strained even to his own ears. "Could you swing by my place and pick up my gear? Tell Kyrie I'll be back for dinner."

"Sure!" Nico says brightly, and Nero sags a little with relief.

He rattles off the address of his current location, and Nico signs off with laughing challenge that almost makes the world feel normal again.

Nero steps out of the phone booth. He stares across at the opposite building and the alleyway beside it, shivers once, and turns to head towards a nearby park to wait for Nico.

(:~:)

Nero has managed to get his hands to stop shaking by the time Nico's van screeches across three lanes of traffic and skids to a stop double-parked at the edge of the pavement.

Nero jogs through the scattered groups of people enjoying the midday sun at the park edge, eyes glued to the neon blue Devil May Cry letters on the side of the van. Nico leans through the passenger window and waves at him, and Nero manages a ghost of his usual smile in return until a voice rings out beside him and stops him in his tracks.

"Hey, aren't you that guy?"

Nero swivels to find two young men roughly his age staring excitedly at him.

"Yeah, you're that demon hunter!" One of them says, taking another step closer than puts him within arm's reach, oblivious to the way Nero pointedly steps back.

Nero narrows his eyes. He has a bad feeling he knows where this is going.

"The one who fought demons four days straight in that dome thing two months ago!" the first speaker's friend is saying now, nearly shoving his friend aside in his haste to get closer to Nero. "Watched the whole thing live online. Gotta say, I was really moved when your dad took that second sword for you. He must love you so much."

Nero's mouth is suddenly incredibly dry; he tastes the iron of dried blood, remembers the gleam of Red Queen in the starlight as the goliath plucked it out of the air and plunged it into his father's unresisting stomach.

A hand lands on his shoulder, and Nero blinks, breath hitching in his chest.

The stranger squeezes the hand he has on Nero's shoulder. "Good to see you're doing fine. No lasting damage, like a straight up boss. You do autographs?"

Nero feels that urge to laugh boil up within him again, and his hands curl into fists at his sides.

"Hey, you two," a comfortingly familiar voice drawls over Nero's shoulder, "Get lost."

"Whoo-whee, pretty lady– argh!"

The latter is courtesy of Nico's steel-toed cowboy boots slamming into the speaker's nether regions.

Nero feels a tug on his left elbow, and follows Nico into the van automatically. The van door shuts behind them both, and, faced with the familiar questionably-clean surfaces and cigarette-scented upholstery of the van, Nero allows himself to slowly, carefully uncurl, slumped on the long padded seat and running a hand over his face.

Nico is looking at him curiously. "You uh, okay there?"

Nero freezes.

"Yeah," he says, heart hammering in his throat. "I'm fine."

Nico stares at him for a moment, then fishes in her pocket. "Okay," she says, unwrapping a piece of gum and sticking it in her mouth, chewing noisily. "So, you were out for a run, huh?" She looks pointedly at his feet.

Nero nods. "Yeah, I was–" he stares down at his feet, in their ratty combat boots.

Nico snaps her gum loudly. "Mm-hm."

Nero suddenly feels very warm in his full winter coat, covered collar to knee and entirely not suited for running. "I'm an adult," he snaps. "I can do what I want."

"Yup," Nico says, popping the p as she slides into the driver's seat and pushes the van into gear. "Keep 'em on, I ain't pryin' or anythin'. Your gear's in the back."

"Thank you," Nero says testily, getting to his feet as the van begins to move, loose mechanical parts clattering across the workstation, cups sliding across the table.

The feel of the familiar hooded coat and single half-finger glove grounds him as he pulls them on, takes him a little further away from the alleyway and the phantom pain in his elbow. It gets even better, a little closer to normal, when he allows his right arm to dissolve to pure demon energy and slots a Gerbera into his elbow.

Some small part of him wonders if it is wrong that he should occasionally feel so disconnected to his actual, human limb and so comfortable with these artificial weaponised arms.

But then his eye falls on Red Queen, gleaming where it rests against the table, and he does the same thing he has done every time he has seen it since he returned to demon hunting two weeks ago: wrap gloved fingers around the familiar grip, and sling it on his back before his mind can process the memory of the same blade embedded in his father's stomach, Vergil's blood seeping into the dirt at Nero's knees.

"You ate lunch yet, shorty?" Nico calls from the front of the van.

"Nah, I'm–" Nero pauses, considers the nauseous emptiness of his stomach. "I'm not hungry," he says, and feels his stomach settle with the knowledge he will not have to force it to accept food, not when the mere thought of eating reminds him of the rancid taste of stomach acid in his throat as he retched in the alley.

"Suit yourself," Nico says easily.

Then Nico is filling the van's small space with her usual easy banter and Nero falls into their usual patterns with relief, collapsing into the passenger seat and kicking his boots up on the dashboard.

It is enough, for the moment, to take his mind off the dome, therapy, and the damned mess that is his relationship with his father.

(:~:)

It is pushing eight in the evening by the time Nero spears Red Queen through one last Empusa's head and revs the grip once, blasting the Empusa's skull apart to the sound of Nico's very vocal whoop.

"Yeah! That's what we're talkin' about!" Nico yells, sticking an arm out of the driver's side window to wave at him. The window and the entirety of the front of the van is stained filthy red and black from demon parts where Nico had enthusiastically assisted Nero's hunt by using the van as a battering ram.

Nero barks a laugh as he clears Red Queen of gore with a flourish and returns it to his back, a familiar weight. "And this was afew small reports? Seriously?"

"Nothin' we couldn't handle," Nico says, waving a hand impatiently. "C'mon, get in. I'm hungry."

Nero feels his stomach clench. It is only now that he recognises the murmur of hunger there where it had been hidden by the exhilaration of battle. Demon hunting had been easy, grounding; allowed him utter control. It had been enough to almost make him forget his hunger – the fact he has not eaten since a rushed breakfast that morning.

"I'll drop you off," Nico says, as she guns the accelerator to send the van bouncing over the multitude of demon parts littering the street.

"Stay for dinner. Kyrie wouldn't mind," Nero offers, sliding into the passenger seat with contented exhaustion, popping out the strain in his shoulders. He is tired enough now that he is hopeful for a dreamless night's sleep – a sleep so deep that even the blue-black light of the dome cannot enter his dreams.

Nico laughs bright and loud. "You know me. I'd never turn down free food," she says, and Nero grins as he leans on his open window and sets his chin down on his crossed arms, watching the dark shore of Fortuna fly past in the sharp winter air.

(:~:)

Dinner with Kyrie and Nico holds a warm familiarity that is comfortingly normal; Nico's boisterous yelling and Kyrie's crystalline laughter surround him, allows him to pick through perhaps half of what is on his plate before his stomach tightens below his ribs and he puts down his fork.

"Nero?" Kyrie says, a question in her soft brown gaze.

"No, no, it's not the food," Nero says hurriedly, running a hand through his shower-damp hair. "I'm just…too tired to eat."

Kyrie's smile at him is all understanding and unpresuming love, and the gnawing in Nero's stomach turns to heavy guilt. "That's okay," Kyrie says, placing a hand on his right arm, which suddenly turns the arm his once more, real and warm and flesh and bone. "You should get some rest."

"Yeah," Nico chips in, downing the rest of her whisky sour in one go. "It's only been, what, two weeks since you've been out huntin' again? Get your beauty sleep." She turns to Kyrie. "Thanks for lettin' me stay the night. You make some damn good whisky sours."

Nero allows the conversation and laughter to wash over him, sipping at his own drink – stronger than Nico and Kyrie's, to account for his demon biology. The buzz of the alcohol spreads artificial warmth down to his stomach, settles it, calms the telltale shake of his right hand.

By the time he has drained his drink, he feels normal enough to bat away Kyrie's protestations that he should go to bed, and instead settles beside her at the kitchen sink, taking comfort in the rush of running water and dish soap and Kyrie's steady presence at his side.

Nero feels Kyrie's head drop to his shoulder as he hands her a plate to dry, and he presses a kiss in return to the top of her head and leans his cheek into her orange-red hair. The radio on the counter is playing something soft, and Nico has long since disappeared upstairs, so it is just the two of them swaying gently to the music and the clinking of the dishes and quiet hiss of the water in the sink.

"How did it go this morning?" Kyrie murmurs into Nero's shoulder.

The buzz of the whisky still tingles under Nero's skin, allows him to reach for the next plate without shattering it.

"It was– difficult," he manages. "I didn't complete the session." The words slip over his lips, a mere shadow of the true events of that morning, but he cannot bring himself to tell her the full truth, for fear of the memories overwhelming him.

Kyrie's hand clasps his, just for a moment, as he hands her another plate. "That's okay," she says. "I'm proud of you for trying."

Nero is glad her head is on his shoulder, then, so she cannot see his face, and he has to blink away the sudden moisture gathering at the corners of his eyes.

"I'm going to go back," he forces the words out of his throat, past the lump of guilt stuck there. "I'm going to keep trying. You were right, I– I need it. The therapy."

Kyrie's lips press softly against his cheek. "Thank you."

The kindness nearly undoes Nero right there and then, and he is grateful that the remaining dishes take only a few moments, then it is a simple matter of getting ready for bed and closing his eyes, Kyrie's soft breathing a calm rhythm to his left.

(:~:)

Red.

A pool of crimson blood, congealing around his hands and knees where they curl into the ground. His right hand, claw-tipped and lined with veins of glowing blue.

His Devil Bringer.

Nero looks up from his hands, breath stuttering in his chest, and feels his heart rocket up into a thrumming scream in his chest.

"Nero," Vergil gasps, more blood pouring out over his lips with each choking breath, joining the scarlet river that drips ever-so-slowly from the around Red Queen's blade, buried to the hilt in his stomach.

Nero's breathing quickens to a desperate, sawing wheeze that joins the thundering of his pulse in his ears, a deafening crescendo that threatens to crest over him like a wave and smash him into nothingness.

"Ne…ro," Vergil whispers, blue eyes somehow leeching colour, turning more lifeless and pale with every passing second. His half-gloved hand twitches where it lays drenched in blood, seeking out Nero plaintively. There is an expression of such mingled sorrow and love on his features that Nero feels himself shake.

Nero stifles a sob, crawls closer to his father on hands and knees, reaching out for his father with his right hand, the blue-black claws of the Devil Bringer slipping over Vergil's cold fingers–

Vergil's fingers reverse blindingly fast to clench ice-cold around Nero's wrist, Vergil's other hand flying up to wrap vice-like around Nero's elbow.

Nero's eyes widen, and his lips open to scream–

–That same look of sorrow and love fixed on his face, Vergil's hands twist–

–And Nero shudders awake, a silent scream frozen on his lips.

He lays there for a moment in the silvery moonlight pouring in through the window, shivering in cold sweat, eyes wide, listening for the threat he knows must be there.

Nothing.

Kyrie's breathing is slow and even behind him, and Nero calms minutely. He has gotten better at this – waking from his nightmares without disturbing her. It is enough that she has grown obviously happier recently, commenting that he is sleeping better with one of her most beautiful smiles.

Nero has not the heart to correct her.

A needling, aching pain makes itself known in his right elbow, and Nero fights to exhale slow and quiet as he unclenches his left hand from around the joint. A glance down at his right elbow reveals five crescent-shaped furrows in the exact shape of his left fingernails, already healing over with a flicker of blue demon energy.

Nero flexes the aching joints of his left hand, and notes with a jolt of fear that there are small, dotted bloodstains where his elbow had pressed into the sheets before it had healed completely.

He grits his teeth and pulls his pillow lower, covering the drying blood. He would have to fake a small accident with their coffee in the morning, and then get the sheets off the mattress and into the machine without Kyrie noticing the blood.

Nero sits up carefully, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, and curls into himself, pressing both hands to his face.

Kyrie's breathing is calm, measured, at peace.

Nero cannot afford to break that peace.

Shoulders still twitching from the occasional shudder, Nero pads barefoot out into the hall, down the hall and stairway, and into the kitchen. He sits at the counter, listens to the ticking of the kitchen clock, the humming of the refrigerator in the silence.

His father's face still flashes before him every time he closes his eyes, Vergil's face holding that desperate mix of pride and love and sorrow that he had pushed into Nero's name during those last moments in the dome, when they both had thought death had come for them at last. And then they had sat together in the garden a few days later, a slow calm between them, and his father had said that he would have done it all again for Nero, if Vergil had to.

In a way, he misses that version of his father the most – raw, messy-haired, wrapped in flannel pyjamas and a woolen throw and barefoot in the garden, close enough to touch – who had let him sleep with his head on his father's shoulder, and had offered to train him with such earnestness.

But this is the same Vergil that had torn his arm from its joint in the dark confines of his garage, that had staggered away into a portal while Nero's screams echoed after him.

Nero knows, with a disjointed sense of logic, that Vergil had not known that Nero was his son at that point in time.

But it does not make it better.

The kitchen clock strikes four, and Nero jolts so hard at the sudden sound that he nearly tips over a glass.

Then his gaze falls on the liquor cabinet, where Nico had helped put back the whisky after dinner – and he remembers the calming buzz of the alcohol in his stomach, how it had steadied his hands enough that they did not shake when Kyrie grasped his fingers as they washed the dishes.

Nero pushes himself off the counter with hands that are not his, moves over to the cabinet with legs that are quite steady but seem to step without him ordering them to, and slides open the cabinet.

He and Kyrie's meagre collection of bottles stare back at him – mostly gifts from Kyrie's friends or the opera house, and mostly unopened.

Nero's nerveless fingers wrap around the same bottle of whisky that Kyrie had used to mix their drinks at dinner, pulls it out. It is heavier than he thought it would be.

He carefully pours himself the same amount that Kyrie had used to make his drink. No more, no less.

He takes one tentative sip first, and when the burn of it over his tongue and down his lips warms his icy limbs at last, downs the rest of the serving in one go.

Then he very deliberately puts the whisky bottle back in the cabinet, rinses out the glass, and heads back upstairs. The alcohol suffuses him with warmth, stops the tremor in his icy hands, makes them almost his own again as he slides back into bed, watching Kyrie smile in her sleep with the same wonder he first felt in his chest when he first realised she loved him, years ago.

He sleeps in disjointed, broken fits and starts for the rest of the night, but the heaviness of the alcohol in his empty stomach holds the dreams at bay, ephemeral whispers beyond the borders of his mind, where a part of him bleeds forevermore at his father's side, the blue-lit dome enclosing them both.

(:~:)

Nero books a session with the therapist that very afternoon.

He had eaten breakfast under Kyrie's gentle cajoling, but then she had gone to a practice session at the opera house and Nero had found himself so jittery with the thought of stepping into the therapist's office again that he had no stomach for lunch.

Nero descends the stairs to the therapist's office with his stomach as empty as a pit, mouth drying as the daylight fades behind him and he enters the stifling heat of the reception. Some part of him registers that the assistant at the counter is wearing a turtleneck and the room must not quite be as hot as he thought, but even with his coat and scarf off Nero feels his palms beginning to sweat.

The door opens.

"Nero? Come on in," the therapist says, offering him a bright, unjudgmental smile.

Nero moves in automatically, sits in the too-soft armchair, resists the urge to start kneading his hands together.

The therapist sits down opposite, opens her mouth to speak–

Nero cuts her off with words of his own. "I'm sorry about yesterday," he says, the words tripping out of him in one great rush. "I was– I didn't feel well."

To his surprise, the therapist favours him with a brilliant smile. "There is no need to apologise," she says. "You would not be the first person sitting in that chair who had to leave a session early when it became too overwhelming. You should be proud of yourself for coming back."

Nero blinks at her then, and notes suddenly that the vase of blue roses is gone from the low table between them. Instead, a cup of tea rests on a woven coaster by his knees, silvery steam curling into the air.

"Now, you don't have to talk about what happened yesterday," the therapist says calmly. "Unless you wish to, of course."

"I–," Nero hesitates. "I think I have to," he says, eventually. "I think there are some– some things I have to tell you. So that you don't– don't end up saying things that might. Uh. Make me do that. Again."

The therapist regards him with an even gaze. "Okay," she says. "But please don't force yourself. Stop if you're feeling uncomfortable."

"Okay," Nero breathes.

Silence for a long moment, afternoon sunlight filtering through the high window above, Nero picking at the woven green cover of the armchair.

Where even to begin?

"–I think you know who I am?" he starts awkwardly. "My family, I mean."

"Yes," the therapist says, with a rueful smile. "But only as much as anyone born and bred on Fortuna would know."

The Order of the Sword, and their worship of Sparda.

Nero nods jerkily. "Yeah so – so Sparda's my grandfather. He had twin sons, Vergil and Dante, but something happened when they were children that separated them and killed their mother. I'm not sure what. Dante refuses to tell me."

The therapist makes a note in her journal, and Nero tamps down on the urge to peer over in an attempt to see what it is.

"Anyway, from what I know, my father came to Fortuna when he was – I don't know, it must have been somewhere around eighteen or nineteen – met my mother, and left," Nero says, the words coming smoother now, a repetition of what he had been told since his childhood days at the orphanage. "My mother died after I was born. I don't know how. I ended up at the orphanage."

The therapist listens attentively as Nero covers his childhood, Kyrie and Credo, how he first met Dante and the events that had led up the destruction of the Hell Gate in Fortuna.

"And I ended up thinking Dante was my father for a while, you know?" Nero says, hands curled around his cooling cup of tea. "Nearly every sentient demon I met kept going on about the blood of Sparda in me. And I sort of hated him for a while after. How he never admitted it but let me keep the Yamato, because I was family."

"The Yamato," the therapist says. "That's your father's–"

"My father's sword, yeah," Nero says, and clenches his hands tighter around the ceramic of the cup, because they have finally covered enough of the messed-up history of the Sparda family that he finally has to face one of his worst memories."

"My father was trapped in Hell for a long time," he says, and places the cup back on the low table, because part of him is afraid his right hand will grow cyan claws and shatter it. "I think it was against his will. He and Dante don't like talking about it. But when he came back he…he was close to death. And the only way he had to survive was...was–"

He stops, then, because he has to put that into words, and his right elbow is aching again, and his right hand numb and not his–

"Nero," the therapist is saying calmly, "Let go of your elbow."

Nero sucks in a breath that clears the spots from his vision, and looks down at his right elbow. His left hand has dug into the skin again, red welts already beginning to form, but the skin is yet unbroken.

"Sorry," Nero says, forcing his stiff left fingers to open.

"Does that happen often?" the therapist is saying, while Nero stares at his elbow, the reddened skin fading his usual pale instantaneously.

"Occasionally," Nero finds himself saying.

"Okay," the therapist nods.

Nero finds himself absurdly gratified that she does not choose this moment to drill into this.

"So, uh," he continues, feeling his pulse begin to race again. "My father needed a way to survive. I won't go into the semantics but he needed the Yamato, which by that point had formed my right arm. My Devil Bringer."

To the therapist's credit, she only blinks once at this and then waits for him to continue.

Nero feels the electricity start up within his core, flare along his limbs, until he cannot stand it anymore and rises to his feet, pacing the length of the room.

"It…it was sunset," he says, steps quickening as though he could outrun the memory of the garage that day, with the golden light filtering over the growing pool of his own blood. "I was in our garage helping Nico, our friend, with her van. Then Kyrie called us in for dinner, and Nico went first and I stayed behind to finish up–" Nero halts in place, left hand drifting towards his right elbow before he catches himself and holds his left wrist with his other hand.

"I remember– I remember the silhouette of him," he says, and runs his hands through his hair just to give them something to do. "Hooded cloak against the setting sun, ragged breathing. I thought he wanted food," he gasps in a breathy laugh, wheezing against the panicked beat of his heart in his throat. "I invited him in for dinner. But when I turned around again he was staring at my arm."

"And then?" the therapist says, something like an inkling of understanding dawning on her face.

"And then he grabbed by arm and twisted–" Nero breaks off, because he feels his gorge rising, like it did in the alleyway when he could not stop shaking–

He comes back to himself a short while later, crouched on his knees by the low table, a throw around his shouldler, a fresh cup of hot tea in his hand.

Nero blinks up at the therapist, who sits quite composedly beside him, hand on his left wrist to prevent him from grabbing his elbow.

"Are you back with us?" she says, gently.

"Yeah," Nero croaks, feeling watery and shaky and not at all fully present, but not about to fall apart, at least.

"Do you want to continue?"

Nero nods.

"Okay," she says, returning to her seat and tapping her pen against her journal, "That was your first memory of your father?"

Nero nods, and feels the urge to laugh bubble up inside him again. When you put it like that, they really are messed up, his father and him.

"Okay," the therapist says. "Then what changed?"

"What do you mean?" Nero says, slowly straightening out his aching joints and collapsing into the armchair again.

The therapist shrugs an easy shoulder. "Something had to have happened. If my father did that to me I'd have had nothing to do with him for the rest of my life. You're here, as you said, because you want to better your relationship with your father. So what changed?"

Feeling raw and scraped out from within, Nero leans back in the armchair, stares at the ceiling, and tells her about V.

He tells her about his father's humanity, his cutting wit, the glorious exhilaration of fighting together; the way V pressed on even as his body crumbled around him, and how in a way, the two of them could have been friends.

Then Urizen, and Vergil thanking him before disappearing again, then the top of the Qliphoth and he and his father doing their level best to come as close as possible to killing each other without actually doing so.

By the end of this particular part of the tale the therapist is looking at him with intense scrutiny over hands curled under her chin.

"You stabbed each other," the therapist says, impassively.

"I– yeah," Nero says. "I mean, I was yelling at him for being an asshole, and he was doing that whole power shtick he had going on then, and we stabbed each other. But we were both in full demon form so we healed over pretty quickly. It wasn't the–" It wasn't the worst part of the fight.

"I see."

"He and Dante came back from Hell after like, a month?" Nero says, "And I don't know if he they had a little heart-to-heart in Hell or something, but my father's been…decent, after that. Like he wanted to know me."

"But he didn't apologise," the therapist says.

"What? Oh," Nero says, almost surprised at the question. "Uh. He did seem to regret what happened. But he didn't apologise, no."

"Hm," the therapist murmurs, pen flying cross her journal. "Go on."

"So, uh, we'd been figuring things out for a little while, until two months back. When– when the dome happened."

"Ah," the therapist says.

"Do I– do I need to explain the dome?" Nero hazards. Sudden fear rises up within him – the whole four-day ordeal had been livestreamed almost in its entirety on every news network on Fortuna and the mainland, and it terrifies him that someone should have seen the most vulnerable part of him like this, when he and his father had fought so desperately to survive alongside each other.

"No," the therapist says. "I know the general background. It was on the news for several days, though I made a point of not watching the details. I thought it disrespectful."

A pause.

"Thank you," Nero says, leaning back and closing his eyes. "It's just…there was a moment. In the dome. My father took a greatsword to the chest for me, and I lost control, and when I came back to myself I called him dad for the first time. I don't even know why. It just slipped out."

"And how did he respond?"

"He said something. A quote, I think. Sweet dreams, form a shade. Then he stood up and moved between me and the demon. And, and I think," Nero blinks away moisture at the corners of his eyes, blurring the ceiling, "I think he was trying to tell me he loved me."

"Sweet dreams, form a shade," the therapist recites, "O'er my lovely infant's head."

Nero raises his head from the back of the armchair abruptly. "What did you say?"

"William Blake," the therapist says plainly. "A Cradle Song."

Sweet dreams, form a shade, o'er my lovely infant's head.

Nero runs the words over his mind twice, thrice. Sits up, hands curling in the throw around his shoulders. "Was he…was he trying to say he would protect me?" he mumbles, feeling a slow heat building behind his sternum, like he has swallowed a rising sun.

"I don't know," the therapist says. "You will need to ask him yourself."

Nero jumps to his feet again, throw abandoned, feeling too warm even in his long-sleeved shirt. "There was something else," he says, and feels the words rush up out of him again, unstoppable, fueled by fire. "Near the end, when the goliath was towering over us, and we were both too exhausted to stand, my father said If thought is life and strength and breath, and then took my sword and stood over me, even when he was swaying. I thought – I thought he was speaking about power then. I was too tired to think–"

"One moment," the therapist murmurs, tapping on a tablet. "Ah, here. If thought is life, and strength and breath, and the wantof thought is death." She looks up at him, and Nero stares at her, chest heaving. "The Fly," she supplies. "William Blake."

"Was he saying–" Nero whispers, fists clenched at his sides, feeling as though the roof has split open and the galaxy is rushing in. "–Was he saying he would die for me?"

"Perhaps," the therapist says, and tilts her head at him. "How would that make you feel?"

"I–" Nero looks away, with a strangled feeling in his throat that he slowly realises is mingled joy and terror. Joy, because if Vergil had really meant those things, then Vergil must care for him far more than Nero had previously assumed – and terror, because he cannot bear to lose his father again, not even this jackass who had taken his arm from him.

The memory of Red Queen piercing his father's gut shakes him to his core.

Vergil had not dodged the blade. Nero had thought then that it was because Vergil was too exhausted to do so, but now…

A long, long silence, where Nero collapses back into his chair, shock at this new discovery thundering through him, and no matter how he tries to speak further, cannot get the words out past the sheer enormity of the revelation.

The therapist snaps her book shut. "Well," she says, "I think you've made excellent progress today, Nero. You should call your father. I think you deserve to ask him what he meant in person."

"What?" Nero jolts. "But I–" He stops, then, and blinks up at the window above, through which golden-orange sunset light is filtering.

Has he been speaking that long?

"We will call you with a new appointment for next week," the therapist says. "You should be proud of yourself, Nero. Get some rest."

Nero nods. He stands, and feels suddenly exhausted, scraped raw, as though he has been battling demons all afternoon instead of speaking.

The therapist gives him a small, understanding smile. "Rest," she says, and Nero forgets to thank her as he takes his coat and scarf from the waiting assistant and tumbles out into the golden dusk light before he registers what has happened.

He watches the Christmas lights on the shop opposite flicker to life in as the sun slips towards the horizon across the park, and looks up to the darkening sky just as the first snowflake begins to fall.

Standing in the fading orange light, Nero breathes in the snowfall, feeling the cold air wash in and out of him.

He realises, with a somewhat chagrined smile, that he is feeling properly hungry for the first time in a long while.

(:~:)

Nero goes to sleep that night exhausted, with a good meal in him – his first full, proper meal in two days – and falls almost instantly asleep.

He had hoped that the food and the revelations of the day would give him a dreamless sleep.

He had been wrong.

Nero snaps awake as though he has been struck, acid bubbling up from his full stomach to hammer against his lips.

He can somehow still smell the iron tinge of blood from his dream, gushing out from the stump of his right elbow, his father glassy-eyed beside him in the same pool of blood, an open wound in Vergil's chest where his heart should be.

Nero looks down at his right elbow, and the hand he has clutched around it.

At least he seems to have avoided breaking skin, this time.

His hands are shaking. He needs to sleep.

Head floating, arms nerveless, Nero pads softly from the room, wanders like a wraith down into the kitchen, and has a hand on the liquor cabinet door and another on the bottle of whisky before he realises what he is doing.

Nero's hand spasms on the bottle, sending the amber liquid sloshing within.

He lets go of the bottle like it has burned him and slams the cabinet shut, backpedaling until his hip hits the kitchen counter. Nero looks down at himself, and then at the liquor cabinet.

What had he been doing?

"Shit," he whispers.

He had heard stories, back when he was a member of the Order of the Sword. Stories of Knights who had seen such horrors in battle that they could not sleep at night without a bottle in hand, could not fire a weapon steadily without a glass of liquor in their stomachs.

Nero feels a new terror rise up within him now, and he moves into the hallway, away from the lure of the liquor cabinet and its siren call of easy sleep.

In the hall, in the soft grey darkness, he leans against the wall, head in his hands. He wishes he were anywhere but here, alone in this empty hallway with a scream building in his throat, Kyrie sleeping peacefully above. He wishes he were in the garden, with the setting sun warming him, and his father by his side, with none of the weight of their history between them.

He wants– he needs–

Nero fumbles for the hall phone, dials a number with shaky fingers. He regrets the decision almost the moment he presses the last number.

"Don't pick up, don't pick up, don't pick up," he whispers–

"Devil May Cry," a singsong voice says, and Nero's chest seizes from the mixture of relief and disappointment – relief that it is not his father, and disappointment because of the same. He almost feels faint.

"Dante," Nero whispers.

"Hey, it's my favourite nephew!" Dante says, the delight evident in his voice. "What's up? Isn't it sort of late over there?"

And there is another thing that Nero struggles with at times – how Dante shows his love with such free abandon, and while Vergil furls himself under so many layers that sometimes Nero wishes he could take a sledgehammer to that core just to hear Vergil speak without weighing the words.

"It's nothing," Nero says, leaning his head into the coolness of the wall to stop the hot ache growing between his eyes. "I just– I was wondering if there was anything we could take to sleep better. Demon biology and all."

Dante barks a laugh. "Tough luck, kid. Nothing for it. I used to train until I felt like my face was going to fall off or drink until I blacked out– Wait." Dante cuts himself off abruptly, dawning concern in his voice. "Nero? Are you having problems sleeping? Don't do what I just said. Do NOT do the stupid things that your Uncle Dante used to do."

"No, no," Nero says hurriedly. "I'm just. I mean. Maybe? Occasionally. I'm doing much better than I was two months ago."

A bald faced lie, but Nero feels something shriveling up within him at the thought of admitting such a weakness, when his father has been doing so well, having gone through the same thing Nero has.

"Hey, you need a snuggle buddy?" Dante is saying now. "Didn't ask since you have Kyrie, but your old man and I had trouble sleeping for the first few days until we slept in the same bed."

Nero almost chokes on his surprise. "My dad needed you there when he was sleeping?" The very idea of his father being vulnerable enough to admit he needed something like that is staggering. Then, close on the heels of shock comes a creeping jealousy. Nero wishes so much in this moment to rest safe in his father's arms that he feels an ache in his chest at the very thought of it.

"Yeah!" Dante says, with a clatter that suggests he has swung booted feet up onto the desk. "We had a good ol' hugging-it-out moment then I snuggle-attacked him. Best sleep I've had in years. We still sometimes sleep in the same room when your dad's had a bad day– Oh hey, Verge."

"DANTE!"

The sound of his father's angry tones echoing in the background nearly makes Nero drop the phone, and cold sweat forms on his forehead at the thought of what his father might have overheard–

"Hey, Nero, want to chat with your dad? Vergil, put down the Yamato, you can kill me later. Your kid's on the phone."

Nero hears a muffled scrabbling, Dante's low chuckle, then the sound of fist meeting cloth and a small oof of pain. The longing has grown in Nero's chest now, burning like a ball of compressed fire under his sternum.

"Don't be a hardass, Vergil!" Dante's singsong voice echoes, edged with static, and then the background noise clears up until there is a rustle of cloth and Nero hears the familiar breaths of his father.

Nero opens his mouth. Closes it. Screws his eyes shut and leans his forehead against the wall, pressing the phone so hard to his ear he feels the ache in his skull.

"Nero?" his father says, with such an awkward, gentle eagerness and furled pride that Nero almost releases the breath he had been holding in a sob.

"Nero," his father is saying again, with a note of growing concern, his voice so much closer to Nero's ear than Dante's ever was. "Are you well?"

No.

"Yeah," Nero says, nodding against the wall as, to his humiliation, the first of many silent tears well over his eyelids to run down his cheeks. "Yeah, I'm fine," he says, with determination, and is proud of how his voice does not shake. "Just, you know. Insomnia."

A pause, where Nero knows he has not quite succeeded in hiding everything from his father.

"Very well," Vergil says, and Nero presses a hand against his twisting mouth against the despairing sob that threatens to burst out of it. "I will remind you that we have training scheduled for the day after tomorrow," Vergil continues. "I…look forward to seeing you then."

"Okay," Nero says, and, because he cannot trust his voice to remain steady for much longer, and because his fingers are beginning to shake where he holds the phone to his ear, he mumbles "Goodnight," and fumbles the phone back into its receiver on the wall without waiting for his father's reply.

Nero takes four stumbling steps back into the kitchen and collapses into a seat at the counter, head in his hands.

His hitching breaths are turning to sobs.

He wants out– out of this mess of jealousy and anger and bitterness and longing, out of– everything.

Through his blurred vision, the liquor cabinet stares right back at him.

Nero gulps in one more breath, forces it down, and folds his hands together under his chin, dropping his gaze to the cabinet opposite him. He wants sleep without nightmares so badly it he feels the call of the liquor there like a physical pull.

He sits there, drained, tears slowly drying on his face and hands, staring at the liquor cabinet, unmoving through the lonely watches of the night, until the cold, pale sun rises again on another winter morning.

(:~:)

Nero moves through the demon hunt in a fevered reverie.

Nico is whooping, and the van is roaring somewhere to Nero's right, and Red Queen flays demon skin from flesh and cleaves flesh from bone with the devastating control that Nero is so familiar with – and yet Nero feels none of it.

Not the shockwave exploding from the palm of his Gerbera, or the roar of Blue Rose when he uses it to blast a Pyrobat out of the air. Flaming bits of demon rain down on his face, and the burns are dull flares of distant pain that seal over immediately with demon energy.

The last demon vaporizes in a blaze of brilliant white light as Gerebera's energy beam flares from his hand, and Nero numbly shakes off the twisted husk of metal that was the devil breaker as Nico shouts in victory somewhere behind him.

He turns on the spot and moves towards the van, meeting Nico's exhilarated smile with an exhausted twitch of the lips.

"I think we should call it a day," Nero says as he climbs in, going for the light banter he always had with Nico, and props his bloodstained boots up on the dashboard and closes his eyes before he can judge if he was successful.

A long, uncharacteristic silence from Nico, before the clatter of the gearshift and the low thrum of the engine rising into a thunder.

Nero runs his left thumb over his right elbow, and pretends to be asleep all the way back.

(:~:)

He gets Kyrie to eat dinner with him that night in the living room, away from the lure of the liquor cabinet, with the excuse of a movie to make up for it. He manages half his portion in slow, careful bites. Kyrie falls asleep on his shoulder halfway through The Empire Strikes Back, and Nero feels his dinner turn to glue in his stomach when Luke loses his right arm to his father.

It is a movie he was watched a dozen times before this, and yet–

He had forgotten.

Nero mashes the remote with a thumb, shutting off Luke's screaming.

He sits there for a long moment with Kyrie's warm weight against his side, trying to ground himself.

Kyrie leans her head into his neck as he slides an arm around her shoulder and another under her knees, and he watches her peaceful, delicate face with an ache in his heart as he carries her upstairs and tucks her in. She curls into her pillow as he presses a kiss to her forehead, something breaking within him as she sleeps on undisturbed.

Nero gets ready for bed, brushing his teeth until his gums ache, then climbing in next to Kyrie and staring at the ceiling.

Exhaustion catches up with him, though, and he closes his eyes–

–and wrenches them open to the feeling of his heart hammering in his mouth, his father's strangled cry still echoing in his ears.

Nero lays there, eyes wide open, staring at the shadows on the ceiling, until his breathing and his heartbeat slow from their frantic pace to just a little above normal. A glance at his bedside clock shows he has barely slept for half an hour.

He knows, logically, that he should just stay in bed.

But the longer he lays there, unmoving, the more jittery he becomes, the itch to move crawling under his skin, grasping invisible hands around his throat.

Nero chokes on a breath and slides out of bed. Spending another night staring at the liquor cabinet – feeling the pull of the whisky like a living thing around his heart – sounds like about the worst thing possible, so Nero grabs Red Queen and steps out barefoot into the garden, avoiding Kyrie's neat tulip beds.

The air is bitingly cold on his short-sleeved shirt, and his long flannel pyjama trousers snag on the grass, but the cold wakes him up, an icy, outward burn that distracts him from the burn within, and Red Queen flourishes in his hand and the air turns to steel.

Again, and again, and again, until at last the sun peeks over the horizon and Nero is down on one knee in the soft grass of the garden, Red Queen plunged tip-first into the ground, gasping for breath and feeling as though he is about to pass out from exhaustion and hunger.

He stumbles back into the kitchen, hating how his head automatically turns to the liquor cabinet as he passes it, and goes upstairs.

Nero cleans himself up quietly, slips into bed as the early morning sun begins to filter through the curtains, and dies to the world.

In the haze of his exhausted, dreamless slumber, there is a moment where he registers Kyrie getting out of bed; a hand on his shoulder and a word that might be his name, but he is so, so tired and his muscles so sore and hopelessly pliant that he cannot hope to wake, and Kyrie's hand disappears and Nero flees into the pitch darkness again, down, down until he cannot even recognize himself.

He sleeps until the worst of the exhaustion passes, and jerks awake at the culmination of another nightmare.

Nero groans as the sunlight hits his face. Each eyelid is weighed down with an impossibly heavy load. A glance at his beside clock shows he has had roughly two and a half hours of sleep.

Better than the night before, at least.

In his ratty flannel pyjamas and sweat-stained shirt, Nero staggers down the stairs. Kyrie is nowhere to be seen, long since left for the opera house.

The morning light makes it easier to ignore the liquor cabinet. Nero grabs the first box of cereal he sees and shakes it roughly into a bowl. The milk sloshes over onto the countertop when he pours it, but he cannot bring himself to care.

He rummages around for a spoon and carries the bowl out to the garden, where he sits on the bench facing Kyrie's tulips, in the exact spot where he had fallen asleep against his father's shoulder two months ago, when the desperation of survival was still fresh and they were both vulnerable enough to share the moment of quiet.

The first spoonful of cereal tastes like wet cardboard, and Nero chokes it down with a cough, already struggling to find the will to bring the next spoonful up to his lips. His stomach rebels as the first mouthful reaches it, and the spoon slips into the milk as Nero closes his eyes against the exhausted nausea.

The whoosh of reality splitting open forces his eyelids apart.

He looks up.

His father looks back at him, the shimmering blue portal sewing closed behind him as he slides the Yamato back into its sheath.

Nero's mind blanks.

Vergil is staring at him, quick blue eyes running from his exhausted face down his rumpled pyjamas up to his face again.

"Uh," Nero says, eventually. "What time is it?"

"Ten hours antemeridian," Vergil replies. "As we agreed."

"Oh," Nero says. "Shit."

He stands up, and some of the milk sloshes out of the bowl to rain on Kyrie's tulips. Vergil follows the motion with increasingly darkening eyes.

"Right," Nero mumbles. "Sorry. Come in, make yourself comfortable. I…uh. I'll be a moment."

He dumps the bowl in the sink, the whole thing, scattering cornflakes all over the bottom of the sink itself, and tries to stop his head from spinning as he clambers upstairs. It takes longer than it should to find suitable training clothes, and when he glances at himself in the bathroom mirror he winces at what he sees – too-pale skin, drawn cheeks, bags under his eyes.

He stumbles back down to the kitchen and finds his father standing there, the Yamato loose in his left hand, staring at the sink with its upturned cereal bowl.

Vergil snaps his gaze towards Nero as he enters, and Nero feels momentarily like he understands the fear some lesser demons show when Vergil stares at them with the same intensity he does now.

"There's a spot not too far from here that's good for training," Nero rambles as they step out of the house. He curls over the keyhole as he locks the door, attempting to hide the shaking of his hand as he inserts the key in the keyway.

Vergil does not speak. Nero can feel his father's burning gaze on him the entirety of the short walk as Nero leads the way out of the neighbourhood, to patch of open wilderness at the edge of the forest proper, a wide clearing of windswept snow.

"Okay, we're here," Nero pants as they reach the edge of the clearing, trying to hide his shiver as the cold seems to leach right through his coat and through his skin, seeping into his bones. He had never minded the cold much, his demon blood giving him more resistance to extreme temperatures, but now the ice seems to claw frozen hands through every gap in his clothing, turning his breaths into rattling wheezes.

Vergil has not moved. He looks at Nero with a gaze that is far too perceptive, something like alarm rising in his features.

Nero feels himself growing steadily more impatient. "What," he says, testily.

Vergil blinks once, and his expression smoothes over like stone. "Ah. I thought we might start with the basics. This is our first opportunity to train together since both of us have recovered fully. I would like to see your sword forms."

Nero nods, unhooks Red Queen from his back, and settles into a stance. Taking a breath, he begins to move through the basic forms of the Order of the Sword, forms that he had trained with as a child.

He is about five steps in when he realises his mistake.

He had moved through these forms again and again last night, without care for breath or pain or rest, from when the moon reached its zenith to when it finally disappeared beneath the horizon. Three hours of proper sleep in as many days, the rest fraught with nightmares or shallow and fitful with alcohol on his tongue.

Nero's feet have turned to lead, his spine aching like the winter branches of the trees above; his wrists burn with every movement, his stomach is a howling, empty hold within him, and every sudden spin and burst of movement makes dark spots dance in front of his eyes–

"Enough."

His father's hand seizes hold of his wrist, halting Red Queen mid-strike, and Nero takes a sharp breath until he realises it is his left wrist – his sword hand.

"Enough," Vergil repeats, and there is the same faint, gentle earnestness that had pierced Nero's to the core, two nights before when he had leant against the wall fighting the shuttered sobs in his throat as he spoke to his father.

"Nero," Vergil murmurs, stepping closer, and Nero's whole body aches with the urge to throw down Red Queen and stumble into his father's arms and be held.

And yet–

His father steps closer, silhouetted against the morning sun, and the part of Nero that still screams silently at every nightmare throws him back to his garage, the silhouette of Vergil's hood against the setting sun–

Nero's left wrist spasms under his father's hand, twists away.

Vergil's intake of breath is sharp. Pained.

Nero fights to control his own breathing, the self-hatred rising up inside of him as he turns away, turning his words hard, glittering, like the ice encasing the tree branches above.

"I'm fine. I don't need your help."

"Nero," his father's voice is saying, and Nero feels the ghost of a touch on his shoulder. "Nero, please." There is a strangled note in Vergil's voice.

"Just–" Nero closes his eyes. Opens them again. "Just let me continue. Please." An echo of his father's plea.

A pause.

"No," Vergil says with finality, and Nero curls in on himself, shame rising up from the pit of his empty stomach. "You are unwell," Vergil says, matter-of-fact. "To continue would be meaningless in your current condition."

Despair claws its way up Nero's throat, sends words hissing from between his teeth.

He turns on his father, eyes flashing dry and red in the freezing wind.

"Look, jackass, I understand," Nero hisses, and he feels as he did in those last hours in the dome, dredging up what little strength he had left to press on. "I know you think I'm weak. Look at you. The dome barely affected you at all." He gasps in a breath, feels tears begin to clog in his throat, choking him. "I may have beaten you once on the Qliphoth, but I'm weaker than you in every way that matters and you know that. I know I'm never going to be good enough for you."

His father starts forward, as if to speak, and Nero rambles on, the words spitting from his lips now like unstoppable blades.

"I don't want this," Nero barks a laugh that tears at his lungs. "I don't need your pity."

Vergil is staring at him now, frozen, one hand still reaching out.

Nero chances a glimpse at his father's face and nearly folds in half right there an then at the sheer agony that flashes across Vergil's face before it flattens in a granite mask.

"I see," Vergil says, in a voice so tightly controlled that Nero almost flinches.

Nero glances up at his father's again, and his heart leaps into his throat, hammering in fear.

Vergil's face might be an impassive mask, but his eyes are terrifying – shards of emotionless blue ice that skewer Nero in place.

Nero knows with complete certainty that his father is furious, and that Nero has crossed over some irreparable line. His left hand drifts to his right elbow, digs into his coat until pain spikes up his fingers. He feels his breathing grow ragged, misting into the frozen air.

"I can see I am not wanted here," Vergil says, face hardening further as his eyes follow the movement of Nero's hands, lingering on Nero's elbow. "I will leave you."

Vergil turns on the spot, left hand white-knuckled on the Yamato's sheath, and slices a portal into the winter air.

Unbidden, a plea rises to Nero's lips as his father steps through the portal, back straight, dark blue coat fluttering in the wind.

The portal closes.

"Don't go," Nero whispers, and curls in on himself, fingers white on his aching elbow, as the tears come at last.

(:~:)

Dante whistles merrily as he ducks through the last flickering streetlight and unlocks the door to the Devil May Cry shop, balancing the enormous pizza box in one hand as he edges into the shadowed shop.

"Pi-zza, pi-zza," he hums to himself, dumping the box on the desk, flicking on the desk light as he collapses into the squeaky chair, and reaching in for the first slice with a hand covered in dried demon guts. Good demon hunt, good cash up front, and delicious, greasy pizza. Heaven.

Dante is midway through his first slice when his eyes slide to his left and alights on the curled shape on the sofa beside the fridge.

The slice of pizza goes flying, and Ivory is halfway out of its holster before he recognises the distinctive silhouette of slicked-back hair.

"What the hell, Vergil," Dante grouses, pulling both feet off the desk to slam against the floor. "I nearly shot you."

Vergil does not move. The pool of dirty light from the desk lamp seeps across the tiles, just reaches the tips of Vergil's boots.

Dante watches his brother for a moment.

"Okay, okay," Dante says, heaving himself out of the desk chair and towards the light switches by the door. A casual flick of his finger, and the lights blaze to full brightness. He turns in place. "Now will you tell me what's– Shit."

Vergil sits curled over his knees, coat discarded beside him on the couch, the Yamato set on the low table in front of him. His face is in his hands, his shirt folded up to his elbows, and a half-bottle of Dante's cheap vodka sits beside the Yamato, already half-empty.

Dante approaches cautiously.

Vergil does not move as Dante carefully removes the bottle, taking a small swig himself to fortify against the mess this following conversation will definitely be.

Dante pushes the bunched up coat aside and settles on the couch beside his brother.

A moment, where Dante simply listens to Vergil breathing.

"Verge?" Dante ventures.

Vergil inhales. It almost sounds like a sob. "I am incapable of doing anything," he says, voice thick with unshed tears, "that does not hurt my son."

Oh, damn. Training must not have gone well.

"Something happen?" Dante says.

"I have failed him," Vergil says, lifting his face from his hands, and Dante jerks back, because his brother's eyes are rimmed red, filled with such depths of pain that Dante forgets to breathe. "I have always failed him," Vergil laughs, a broken, raw sound of absolute despair. "He is in pain, and yet I could do nothing but pain him further."

"Vergil," Dante says, reaching out and clasping a hand around his brother's wrist, feeling the fluttering pulse there. "You didn't mean to hurt him."

"But I did, once," Vergil says, the self-hatred burning in his voice, each word a blade ripping up out of him. "I tore his arm from its joint, left him bleeding in his own home."

Dante looks away.

He hears a stifled sob, and realises with a jolt of horror that there are tears dripping down Vergil's chin.

Vergil has buried his face in his sleeve, breath hitching. "I don't deserve Nero. He's afraid of me. He's always been afraid of me, and nothing I can do will ever change that."

"Vergil," Dante says, sliding closer, "You're not a horrible father."

Vergil makes a horrible noise, halfway between a keen and a laugh. "Don't joke with me, Dante," he whispers through shuddering gasps. "You would make a far better father than I ever would."

Dante's hand tightens on Vergil's wrist at that – he remembers weeks on end laying on this same couch, dead to the world, only rousing to eat, sleeping curled in the scent of his own unwashed body, the air grey and colourless.

"I should have died," Vergil says suddenly, turning to face Dante with a terrifyingly blank expression. "I should have let the Yamato be, and died, and Nero might have been happy–"

"Shut up," Dante says, and pulls his brother in close. Vergil shakes under his hold, but Dante's hand curls on the back of his brother's neck as he tucks Vergil's face into his shoulder, and Vergil melts into Dante's embrace, as if he has finally given up the fight to maintain his control.

"We're gonna find a way to help Nero," Dante says, low and fierce. "We're gonna find a way to help him, and then you and him are gonna talk this out, and we're going to be a happy family again–"

Vergil wheezes a laugh into Dante's shoulder – the mad sound of hysteria.

"Listen to me!" Dante wrenches his brother to face him, presses his forehead to his brother's brow. "Listen to me," Dante almost begs, the emotion cracking in his voice. "We're going to get through this. We got through everything else before this. We'll get through this too."

Vergil's only response is another crackling wheeze, a terrifying reminder of his days nerveless and struggling to breathe after the dome, and Dante pulls him in close again, steadying him, until the sound of his brother's quiet sorrow runs its course.

(:~:)

Nero stares at the liquor cabinet.

Kyrie is asleep upstairs. Nero sits at the kitchen counter, his left hand white-knuckled on his right elbow.

Exhaustion is too simple a word to describe his state, now, and the grief of the morning has settled firm claws into his heart and claimed it for grief forever.

Nero stares at the liquor cabinet.

He stares, and stares, and continues to stare, fingers digging into the skin of his elbow, and counts the minutes and hours until morning."So, how would you describe your relationship with your father?"

Face fixed in the same politely open expression he had been wearing during the session's opening pleasantries, Nero opens his mouth–

–and closes it again.

"Uh," he says, eloquently.

A pause, where the therapist looks at him with a calm, unassuming expression on her face and Nero forgets how to string together a coherent sentence.

The therapist makes a note in her journal before speaking again. "That's okay," she says. "I can sense that's probably too big a question to cover all at once. Why don't we start small? You mentioned your chief reason for seeking out therapy was a poor relationship with your father, and you grew up in an orphanage. Could you tell me more about that?"

Nero realises abruptly that he is kneading his hands together, fingers clenched so tight that his knuckles have blanched white. He forces his sweaty hands apart, rubs them against the rough fabric of his trousers. The cushioned chair is almost too comfortable, as though it is attempting to swallow him whole. The low, warm lighting of the room blurs its corners, makes the walls close in.

"Right," he says, feeling naked and exposed without the reassuring weight of Red Queen on his back. "I didn't know my father growing up. He…uh…didn't know I existed. We only reconnected fairly recently, a few months ago."

The therapist nods. "I see," she says. "So you only met him earlier this year. How was that first meeting? How did it make you feel?"

Nero inhales sharply, and presses a hand to his right elbow. Phantom pain, of the flesh there tearing apart in one sharp twist, bones snapping, the pause where his body had almost seized up in shock before blood began to gush from the torn vessels–

"Nero?"

The world turns cold, the wood-paneled walls fading to grey. There is a vase of blue roses on the low table before him, Nero realises, and the bar of pure white light from the window at street-level near the ceiling of the room grows brighter, lancing diagonally down over his shaking right fist to line each perfect, cyan blossom with gold, moisture tumbling down the glass vase like a crystalline tears.

And Nero just–

He can't–

His mouth is moving without him commanding it to. "I'm sorry," he says, his own voice coming from somewhere distant, beyond the ringing in his ears. "I- I need to reschedule, if that's okay."

"Of course. Feel free to call the office at any–"

Nero stumbles past the therapist and out the door, through the tiny, airless reception, up the flight of narrow steps, at the top of which daylight pours glaringly bright from the glass-fronted door–

Nero bursts out into the street, the shock of cold wintry air seizing his lungs and knocking what little breath he has left from his chest. He takes four staggering steps around the corner of the building and slides down in the recessed shade of an alleyway, fighting the gasping breaths that tear from his throat as he blinks the darkness from the edges of his vision.

He is grasping his right elbow so hard that there are purpling bruises forming around the joint, blood seeping from under his fingernails where they have grown long and cyan with crackling demon energy and speared through his winter coat.

Nero buries his face into his knees and jams his right fist into his mouth to stop whatever is fighting to come out of him. It could be a scream. It could be his breakfast. It could be his guts, the whole bloody mess of it, like his cooling blood on his garage floor, or his father's shredded, torn arm in Nero's hands, the give of bone under his hands as he pulls the jagged bones straight, Vergil's agonized howl spearing hot and horrible by his ear–

Nero gasps in a breath that shudders through him, tears prickling at the corners of his vision–

He comes back to himself fully an indeterminate time later, shivering in cold sweat, the filthy alley wall pressed to his back, tear tracks drying on his aching face.

Nero pushes up his right sleeve with a still-trembling left hand and finds his elbow quite whole, skin unbroken, any bruises long healed over by his demon powers. He flexes the fingers of his right hand. They feel – not quite his, but not entirely not a part of him, either.

Nero scrubs his face with a shaking hand, pushes himself upright.

A moment, where he attempts to understand what has just occurred, and finds himself so terrified that it did occur that he decides to push it to the back of his mind instead.

Except that he can't, and he can't go home in his current state either, or Kyrie would immediately notice something is off and he'd have to–

–He'd have to explain, and go through that all again.

"Okay," Nero whispers into the cold, late morning December air. "Okay."

Across the street, beside a shop so covered in Christmas decorations it looks like someone has vomited green and red tinsel all over it, is a phone booth.

Warms wrapped around himself, Nero stumbles across the street, ignoring the strange looks passersby give him, and locks himself into the blessedly private, small space of the phone booth.

He fumbles for change. The coins clatter and scrape against the coin slot, shuddering with his bloodless fingers, and Nero grits his teeth as the coins slide in one by one, achingly slow.

Nero has keyed in half the number to Devil May Cry shop before he realises what he has done and slams the handset so hard back into the receiver he is surprised it does not break.

He almost called his father.

The father who had ripped his arm from its joint – but also, eight weeks ago, had stood in front of him in the face of endless tides of demons; had taken a blade in the chest and one in the the stomach to save Nero's life, had held Nero close when Nero had fallen, exhausted, and who had smiled up at him with pride in his darkening eyes as blood seeped out of Vergil's mouth, Red Queen in his gut–

Nero leans against the grimy fiberglass wall as the clatter of coins falling into the change box fills the tiny booth.

"Shit," he mutters, a bizzare urge to laugh welling up inside him, drawing a single fresh tear to run down his left cheek.

He scrapes the coins from the change box, enters another number.

"Devil Maaaaay Cry." Nico's drawl filters through the phone, tinny and compressed by distance, and Nero nearly collapses with relief at hearing a voice that is not his own.

"Nico," he whispers.

"Oh hey, skidmark!"

"Hey," he says, feeling a savage twist of victory as he manages to keep his voice even. "Do you have anything for me?"

"Whaaat, demon huntin'? Hold up, lemme see."

Nero curls the phone closer to himself in the crook of his neck and screws his eyes shut, fighting to control his breathing.

"You okay there, Nero? You're breathing kinda hard."

"Went– running," Nero says, stumbling over the word. "Wanted to blow off some steam."

Nico's laugh bites into his ear. "Nothin' like kickin' demon ass to blow off that steam! Yeah, there's small reports of demon activity not too far from where I am. Want me to pick you up at your place?"

"Nah, I'm out," Nero says, the humour in his voice feeling foreign and strained even to his own ears. "Could you swing by my place and pick up my gear? Tell Kyrie I'll be back for dinner."

"Sure!" Nico says brightly, and Nero sags a little with relief.

He rattles off the address of his current location, and Nico signs off with laughing challenge that almost makes the world feel normal again.

Nero steps out of the phone booth. He stares across at the opposite building and the alleyway beside it, shivers once, and turns to head towards a nearby park to wait for Nico.

(:~:)

Nero has managed to get his hands to stop shaking by the time Nico's van screeches across three lanes of traffic and skids to a stop double-parked at the edge of the pavement.

Nero jogs through the scattered groups of people enjoying the midday sun at the park edge, eyes glued to the neon blue Devil May Cry letters on the side of the van. Nico leans through the passenger window and waves at him, and Nero manages a ghost of his usual smile in return until a voice rings out beside him and stops him in his tracks.

"Hey, aren't you that guy?"

Nero swivels to find two young men roughly his age staring excitedly at him.

"Yeah, you're that demon hunter!" One of them says, taking another step closer than puts him within arm's reach, oblivious to the way Nero pointedly steps back.

Nero narrows his eyes. He has a bad feeling he knows where this is going.

"The one who fought demons four days straight in that dome thing two months ago!" the first speaker's friend is saying now, nearly shoving his friend aside in his haste to get closer to Nero. "Watched the whole thing live online. Gotta say, I was really moved when your dad took that second sword for you. He must love you so much."

Nero's mouth is suddenly incredibly dry; he tastes the iron of dried blood, remembers the gleam of Red Queen in the starlight as the goliath plucked it out of the air and plunged it into his father's unresisting stomach.

A hand lands on his shoulder, and Nero blinks, breath hitching in his chest.

The stranger squeezes the hand he has on Nero's shoulder. "Good to see you're doing fine. No lasting damage, like a straight up boss. You do autographs?"

Nero feels that urge to laugh boil up within him again, and his hands curl into fists at his sides.

"Hey, you two," a comfortingly familiar voice drawls over Nero's shoulder, "Get lost."

"Whoo-whee, pretty lady– argh!"

The latter is courtesy of Nico's steel-toed cowboy boots slamming into the speaker's nether regions.

Nero feels a tug on his left elbow, and follows Nico into the van automatically. The van door shuts behind them both, and, faced with the familiar questionably-clean surfaces and cigarette-scented upholstery of the van, Nero allows himself to slowly, carefully uncurl, slumped on the long padded seat and running a hand over his face.

Nico is looking at him curiously. "You uh, okay there?"

Nero freezes.

"Yeah," he says, heart hammering in his throat. "I'm fine."

Nico stares at him for a moment, then fishes in her pocket. "Okay," she says, unwrapping a piece of gum and sticking it in her mouth, chewing noisily. "So, you were out for a run, huh?" She looks pointedly at his feet.

Nero nods. "Yeah, I was–" he stares down at his feet, in their ratty combat boots.

Nico snaps her gum loudly. "Mm-hm."

Nero suddenly feels very warm in his full winter coat, covered collar to knee and entirely not suited for running. "I'm an adult," he snaps. "I can do what I want."

"Yup," Nico says, popping the p as she slides into the driver's seat and pushes the van into gear. "Keep 'em on, I ain't pryin' or anythin'. Your gear's in the back."

"Thank you," Nero says testily, getting to his feet as the van begins to move, loose mechanical parts clattering across the workstation, cups sliding across the table.

The feel of the familiar hooded coat and single half-finger glove grounds him as he pulls them on, takes him a little further away from the alleyway and the phantom pain in his elbow. It gets even better, a little closer to normal, when he allows his right arm to dissolve to pure demon energy and slots a Gerbera into his elbow.

Some small part of him wonders if it is wrong that he should occasionally feel so disconnected to his actual, human limb and so comfortable with these artificial weaponised arms.

But then his eye falls on Red Queen, gleaming where it rests against the table, and he does the same thing he has done every time he has seen it since he returned to demon hunting two weeks ago: wrap gloved fingers around the familiar grip, and sling it on his back before his mind can process the memory of the same blade embedded in his father's stomach, Vergil's blood seeping into the dirt at Nero's knees.

"You ate lunch yet, shorty?" Nico calls from the front of the van.

"Nah, I'm–" Nero pauses, considers the nauseous emptiness of his stomach. "I'm not hungry," he says, and feels his stomach settle with the knowledge he will not have to force it to accept food, not when the mere thought of eating reminds him of the rancid taste of stomach acid in his throat as he retched in the alley.

"Suit yourself," Nico says easily.

Then Nico is filling the van's small space with her usual easy banter and Nero falls into their usual patterns with relief, collapsing into the passenger seat and kicking his boots up on the dashboard.

It is enough, for the moment, to take his mind off the dome, therapy, and the damned mess that is his relationship with his father.

(:~:)

It is pushing eight in the evening by the time Nero spears Red Queen through one last Empusa's head and revs the grip once, blasting the Empusa's skull apart to the sound of Nico's very vocal whoop.

"Yeah! That's what we're talkin' about!" Nico yells, sticking an arm out of the driver's side window to wave at him. The window and the entirety of the front of the van is stained filthy red and black from demon parts where Nico had enthusiastically assisted Nero's hunt by using the van as a battering ram.

Nero barks a laugh as he clears Red Queen of gore with a flourish and returns it to his back, a familiar weight. "And this was afew small reports? Seriously?"

"Nothin' we couldn't handle," Nico says, waving a hand impatiently. "C'mon, get in. I'm hungry."

Nero feels his stomach clench. It is only now that he recognises the murmur of hunger there where it had been hidden by the exhilaration of battle. Demon hunting had been easy, grounding; allowed him utter control. It had been enough to almost make him forget his hunger – the fact he has not eaten since a rushed breakfast that morning.

"I'll drop you off," Nico says, as she guns the accelerator to send the van bouncing over the multitude of demon parts littering the street.

"Stay for dinner. Kyrie wouldn't mind," Nero offers, sliding into the passenger seat with contented exhaustion, popping out the strain in his shoulders. He is tired enough now that he is hopeful for a dreamless night's sleep – a sleep so deep that even the blue-black light of the dome cannot enter his dreams.

Nico laughs bright and loud. "You know me. I'd never turn down free food," she says, and Nero grins as he leans on his open window and sets his chin down on his crossed arms, watching the dark shore of Fortuna fly past in the sharp winter air.

(:~:)

Dinner with Kyrie and Nico holds a warm familiarity that is comfortingly normal; Nico's boisterous yelling and Kyrie's crystalline laughter surround him, allows him to pick through perhaps half of what is on his plate before his stomach tightens below his ribs and he puts down his fork.

"Nero?" Kyrie says, a question in her soft brown gaze.

"No, no, it's not the food," Nero says hurriedly, running a hand through his shower-damp hair. "I'm just…too tired to eat."

Kyrie's smile at him is all understanding and unpresuming love, and the gnawing in Nero's stomach turns to heavy guilt. "That's okay," Kyrie says, placing a hand on his right arm, which suddenly turns the arm his once more, real and warm and flesh and bone. "You should get some rest."

"Yeah," Nico chips in, downing the rest of her whisky sour in one go. "It's only been, what, two weeks since you've been out huntin' again? Get your beauty sleep." She turns to Kyrie. "Thanks for lettin' me stay the night. You make some damn good whisky sours."

Nero allows the conversation and laughter to wash over him, sipping at his own drink – stronger than Nico and Kyrie's, to account for his demon biology. The buzz of the alcohol spreads artificial warmth down to his stomach, settles it, calms the telltale shake of his right hand.

By the time he has drained his drink, he feels normal enough to bat away Kyrie's protestations that he should go to bed, and instead settles beside her at the kitchen sink, taking comfort in the rush of running water and dish soap and Kyrie's steady presence at his side.

Nero feels Kyrie's head drop to his shoulder as he hands her a plate to dry, and he presses a kiss in return to the top of her head and leans his cheek into her orange-red hair. The radio on the counter is playing something soft, and Nico has long since disappeared upstairs, so it is just the two of them swaying gently to the music and the clinking of the dishes and quiet hiss of the water in the sink.

"How did it go this morning?" Kyrie murmurs into Nero's shoulder.

The buzz of the whisky still tingles under Nero's skin, allows him to reach for the next plate without shattering it.

"It was– difficult," he manages. "I didn't complete the session." The words slip over his lips, a mere shadow of the true events of that morning, but he cannot bring himself to tell her the full truth, for fear of the memories overwhelming him.

Kyrie's hand clasps his, just for a moment, as he hands her another plate. "That's okay," she says. "I'm proud of you for trying."

Nero is glad her head is on his shoulder, then, so she cannot see his face, and he has to blink away the sudden moisture gathering at the corners of his eyes.

"I'm going to go back," he forces the words out of his throat, past the lump of guilt stuck there. "I'm going to keep trying. You were right, I– I need it. The therapy."

Kyrie's lips press softly against his cheek. "Thank you."

The kindness nearly undoes Nero right there and then, and he is grateful that the remaining dishes take only a few moments, then it is a simple matter of getting ready for bed and closing his eyes, Kyrie's soft breathing a calm rhythm to his left.

(:~:)

Red.

A pool of crimson blood, congealing around his hands and knees where they curl into the ground. His right hand, claw-tipped and lined with veins of glowing blue.

His Devil Bringer.

Nero looks up from his hands, breath stuttering in his chest, and feels his heart rocket up into a thrumming scream in his chest.

"Nero," Vergil gasps, more blood pouring out over his lips with each choking breath, joining the scarlet river that drips ever-so-slowly from the around Red Queen's blade, buried to the hilt in his stomach.

Nero's breathing quickens to a desperate, sawing wheeze that joins the thundering of his pulse in his ears, a deafening crescendo that threatens to crest over him like a wave and smash him into nothingness.

"Ne…ro," Vergil whispers, blue eyes somehow leeching colour, turning more lifeless and pale with every passing second. His half-gloved hand twitches where it lays drenched in blood, seeking out Nero plaintively. There is an expression of such mingled sorrow and love on his features that Nero feels himself shake.

Nero stifles a sob, crawls closer to his father on hands and knees, reaching out for his father with his right hand, the blue-black claws of the Devil Bringer slipping over Vergil's cold fingers–

Vergil's fingers reverse blindingly fast to clench ice-cold around Nero's wrist, Vergil's other hand flying up to wrap vice-like around Nero's elbow.

Nero's eyes widen, and his lips open to scream–

–That same look of sorrow and love fixed on his face, Vergil's hands twist–

–And Nero shudders awake, a silent scream frozen on his lips.

He lays there for a moment in the silvery moonlight pouring in through the window, shivering in cold sweat, eyes wide, listening for the threat he knows must be there.

Nothing.

Kyrie's breathing is slow and even behind him, and Nero calms minutely. He has gotten better at this – waking from his nightmares without disturbing her. It is enough that she has grown obviously happier recently, commenting that he is sleeping better with one of her most beautiful smiles.

Nero has not the heart to correct her.

A needling, aching pain makes itself known in his right elbow, and Nero fights to exhale slow and quiet as he unclenches his left hand from around the joint. A glance down at his right elbow reveals five crescent-shaped furrows in the exact shape of his left fingernails, already healing over with a flicker of blue demon energy.

Nero flexes the aching joints of his left hand, and notes with a jolt of fear that there are small, dotted bloodstains where his elbow had pressed into the sheets before it had healed completely.

He grits his teeth and pulls his pillow lower, covering the drying blood. He would have to fake a small accident with their coffee in the morning, and then get the sheets off the mattress and into the machine without Kyrie noticing the blood.

Nero sits up carefully, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, and curls into himself, pressing both hands to his face.

Kyrie's breathing is calm, measured, at peace.

Nero cannot afford to break that peace.

Shoulders still twitching from the occasional shudder, Nero pads barefoot out into the hall, down the hall and stairway, and into the kitchen. He sits at the counter, listens to the ticking of the kitchen clock, the humming of the refrigerator in the silence.

His father's face still flashes before him every time he closes his eyes, Vergil's face holding that desperate mix of pride and love and sorrow that he had pushed into Nero's name during those last moments in the dome, when they both had thought death had come for them at last. And then they had sat together in the garden a few days later, a slow calm between them, and his father had said that he would have done it all again for Nero, if Vergil had to.

In a way, he misses that version of his father the most – raw, messy-haired, wrapped in flannel pyjamas and a woolen throw and barefoot in the garden, close enough to touch – who had let him sleep with his head on his father's shoulder, and had offered to train him with such earnestness.

But this is the same Vergil that had torn his arm from its joint in the dark confines of his garage, that had staggered away into a portal while Nero's screams echoed after him.

Nero knows, with a disjointed sense of logic, that Vergil had not known that Nero was his son at that point in time.

But it does not make it better.

The kitchen clock strikes four, and Nero jolts so hard at the sudden sound that he nearly tips over a glass.

Then his gaze falls on the liquor cabinet, where Nico had helped put back the whisky after dinner – and he remembers the calming buzz of the alcohol in his stomach, how it had steadied his hands enough that they did not shake when Kyrie grasped his fingers as they washed the dishes.

Nero pushes himself off the counter with hands that are not his, moves over to the cabinet with legs that are quite steady but seem to step without him ordering them to, and slides open the cabinet.

He and Kyrie's meagre collection of bottles stare back at him – mostly gifts from Kyrie's friends or the opera house, and mostly unopened.

Nero's nerveless fingers wrap around the same bottle of whisky that Kyrie had used to mix their drinks at dinner, pulls it out. It is heavier than he thought it would be.

He carefully pours himself the same amount that Kyrie had used to make his drink. No more, no less.

He takes one tentative sip first, and when the burn of it over his tongue and down his lips warms his icy limbs at last, downs the rest of the serving in one go.

Then he very deliberately puts the whisky bottle back in the cabinet, rinses out the glass, and heads back upstairs. The alcohol suffuses him with warmth, stops the tremor in his icy hands, makes them almost his own again as he slides back into bed, watching Kyrie smile in her sleep with the same wonder he first felt in his chest when he first realised she loved him, years ago.

He sleeps in disjointed, broken fits and starts for the rest of the night, but the heaviness of the alcohol in his empty stomach holds the dreams at bay, ephemeral whispers beyond the borders of his mind, where a part of him bleeds forevermore at his father's side, the blue-lit dome enclosing them both.

(:~:)

Nero books a session with the therapist that very afternoon.

He had eaten breakfast under Kyrie's gentle cajoling, but then she had gone to a practice session at the opera house and Nero had found himself so jittery with the thought of stepping into the therapist's office again that he had no stomach for lunch.

Nero descends the stairs to the therapist's office with his stomach as empty as a pit, mouth drying as the daylight fades behind him and he enters the stifling heat of the reception. Some part of him registers that the assistant at the counter is wearing a turtleneck and the room must not quite be as hot as he thought, but even with his coat and scarf off Nero feels his palms beginning to sweat.

The door opens.

"Nero? Come on in," the therapist says, offering him a bright, unjudgmental smile.

Nero moves in automatically, sits in the too-soft armchair, resists the urge to start kneading his hands together.

The therapist sits down opposite, opens her mouth to speak–

Nero cuts her off with words of his own. "I'm sorry about yesterday," he says, the words tripping out of him in one great rush. "I was– I didn't feel well."

To his surprise, the therapist favours him with a brilliant smile. "There is no need to apologise," she says. "You would not be the first person sitting in that chair who had to leave a session early when it became too overwhelming. You should be proud of yourself for coming back."

Nero blinks at her then, and notes suddenly that the vase of blue roses is gone from the low table between them. Instead, a cup of tea rests on a woven coaster by his knees, silvery steam curling into the air.

"Now, you don't have to talk about what happened yesterday," the therapist says calmly. "Unless you wish to, of course."

"I–," Nero hesitates. "I think I have to," he says, eventually. "I think there are some– some things I have to tell you. So that you don't– don't end up saying things that might. Uh. Make me do that. Again."

The therapist regards him with an even gaze. "Okay," she says. "But please don't force yourself. Stop if you're feeling uncomfortable."

"Okay," Nero breathes.

Silence for a long moment, afternoon sunlight filtering through the high window above, Nero picking at the woven green cover of the armchair.

Where even to begin?

"–I think you know who I am?" he starts awkwardly. "My family, I mean."

"Yes," the therapist says, with a rueful smile. "But only as much as anyone born and bred on Fortuna would know."

The Order of the Sword, and their worship of Sparda.

Nero nods jerkily. "Yeah so – so Sparda's my grandfather. He had twin sons, Vergil and Dante, but something happened when they were children that separated them and killed their mother. I'm not sure what. Dante refuses to tell me."

The therapist makes a note in her journal, and Nero tamps down on the urge to peer over in an attempt to see what it is.

"Anyway, from what I know, my father came to Fortuna when he was – I don't know, it must have been somewhere around eighteen or nineteen – met my mother, and left," Nero says, the words coming smoother now, a repetition of what he had been told since his childhood days at the orphanage. "My mother died after I was born. I don't know how. I ended up at the orphanage."

The therapist listens attentively as Nero covers his childhood, Kyrie and Credo, how he first met Dante and the events that had led up the destruction of the Hell Gate in Fortuna.

"And I ended up thinking Dante was my father for a while, you know?" Nero says, hands curled around his cooling cup of tea. "Nearly every sentient demon I met kept going on about the blood of Sparda in me. And I sort of hated him for a while after. How he never admitted it but let me keep the Yamato, because I was family."

"The Yamato," the therapist says. "That's your father's–"

"My father's sword, yeah," Nero says, and clenches his hands tighter around the ceramic of the cup, because they have finally covered enough of the messed-up history of the Sparda family that he finally has to face one of his worst memories."

"My father was trapped in Hell for a long time," he says, and places the cup back on the low table, because part of him is afraid his right hand will grow cyan claws and shatter it. "I think it was against his will. He and Dante don't like talking about it. But when he came back he…he was close to death. And the only way he had to survive was...was–"

He stops, then, because he has to put that into words, and his right elbow is aching again, and his right hand numb and not his–

"Nero," the therapist is saying calmly, "Let go of your elbow."

Nero sucks in a breath that clears the spots from his vision, and looks down at his right elbow. His left hand has dug into the skin again, red welts already beginning to form, but the skin is yet unbroken.

"Sorry," Nero says, forcing his stiff left fingers to open.

"Does that happen often?" the therapist is saying, while Nero stares at his elbow, the reddened skin fading his usual pale instantaneously.

"Occasionally," Nero finds himself saying.

"Okay," the therapist nods.

Nero finds himself absurdly gratified that she does not choose this moment to drill into this.

"So, uh," he continues, feeling his pulse begin to race again. "My father needed a way to survive. I won't go into the semantics but he needed the Yamato, which by that point had formed my right arm. My Devil Bringer."

To the therapist's credit, she only blinks once at this and then waits for him to continue.

Nero feels the electricity start up within his core, flare along his limbs, until he cannot stand it anymore and rises to his feet, pacing the length of the room.

"It…it was sunset," he says, steps quickening as though he could outrun the memory of the garage that day, with the golden light filtering over the growing pool of his own blood. "I was in our garage helping Nico, our friend, with her van. Then Kyrie called us in for dinner, and Nico went first and I stayed behind to finish up–" Nero halts in place, left hand drifting towards his right elbow before he catches himself and holds his left wrist with his other hand.

"I remember– I remember the silhouette of him," he says, and runs his hands through his hair just to give them something to do. "Hooded cloak against the setting sun, ragged breathing. I thought he wanted food," he gasps in a breathy laugh, wheezing against the panicked beat of his heart in his throat. "I invited him in for dinner. But when I turned around again he was staring at my arm."

"And then?" the therapist says, something like an inkling of understanding dawning on her face.

"And then he grabbed by arm and twisted–" Nero breaks off, because he feels his gorge rising, like it did in the alleyway when he could not stop shaking–

He comes back to himself a short while later, crouched on his knees by the low table, a throw around his shouldler, a fresh cup of hot tea in his hand.

Nero blinks up at the therapist, who sits quite composedly beside him, hand on his left wrist to prevent him from grabbing his elbow.

"Are you back with us?" she says, gently.

"Yeah," Nero croaks, feeling watery and shaky and not at all fully present, but not about to fall apart, at least.

"Do you want to continue?"

Nero nods.

"Okay," she says, returning to her seat and tapping her pen against her journal, "That was your first memory of your father?"

Nero nods, and feels the urge to laugh bubble up inside him again. When you put it like that, they really are messed up, his father and him.

"Okay," the therapist says. "Then what changed?"

"What do you mean?" Nero says, slowly straightening out his aching joints and collapsing into the armchair again.

The therapist shrugs an easy shoulder. "Something had to have happened. If my father did that to me I'd have had nothing to do with him for the rest of my life. You're here, as you said, because you want to better your relationship with your father. So what changed?"

Feeling raw and scraped out from within, Nero leans back in the armchair, stares at the ceiling, and tells her about V.

He tells her about his father's humanity, his cutting wit, the glorious exhilaration of fighting together; the way V pressed on even as his body crumbled around him, and how in a way, the two of them could have been friends.

Then Urizen, and Vergil thanking him before disappearing again, then the top of the Qliphoth and he and his father doing their level best to come as close as possible to killing each other without actually doing so.

By the end of this particular part of the tale the therapist is looking at him with intense scrutiny over hands curled under her chin.

"You stabbed each other," the therapist says, impassively.

"I– yeah," Nero says. "I mean, I was yelling at him for being an asshole, and he was doing that whole power shtick he had going on then, and we stabbed each other. But we were both in full demon form so we healed over pretty quickly. It wasn't the–" It wasn't the worst part of the fight.

"I see."

"He and Dante came back from Hell after like, a month?" Nero says, "And I don't know if he they had a little heart-to-heart in Hell or something, but my father's been…decent, after that. Like he wanted to know me."

"But he didn't apologise," the therapist says.

"What? Oh," Nero says, almost surprised at the question. "Uh. He did seem to regret what happened. But he didn't apologise, no."

"Hm," the therapist murmurs, pen flying cross her journal. "Go on."

"So, uh, we'd been figuring things out for a little while, until two months back. When– when the dome happened."

"Ah," the therapist says.

"Do I– do I need to explain the dome?" Nero hazards. Sudden fear rises up within him – the whole four-day ordeal had been livestreamed almost in its entirety on every news network on Fortuna and the mainland, and it terrifies him that someone should have seen the most vulnerable part of him like this, when he and his father had fought so desperately to survive alongside each other.

"No," the therapist says. "I know the general background. It was on the news for several days, though I made a point of not watching the details. I thought it disrespectful."

A pause.

"Thank you," Nero says, leaning back and closing his eyes. "It's just…there was a moment. In the dome. My father took a greatsword to the chest for me, and I lost control, and when I came back to myself I called him dad for the first time. I don't even know why. It just slipped out."

"And how did he respond?"

"He said something. A quote, I think. Sweet dreams, form a shade. Then he stood up and moved between me and the demon. And, and I think," Nero blinks away moisture at the corners of his eyes, blurring the ceiling, "I think he was trying to tell me he loved me."

"Sweet dreams, form a shade," the therapist recites, "O'er my lovely infant's head."

Nero raises his head from the back of the armchair abruptly. "What did you say?"

"William Blake," the therapist says plainly. "A Cradle Song."

Sweet dreams, form a shade, o'er my lovely infant's head.

Nero runs the words over his mind twice, thrice. Sits up, hands curling in the throw around his shoulders. "Was he…was he trying to say he would protect me?" he mumbles, feeling a slow heat building behind his sternum, like he has swallowed a rising sun.

"I don't know," the therapist says. "You will need to ask him yourself."

Nero jumps to his feet again, throw abandoned, feeling too warm even in his long-sleeved shirt. "There was something else," he says, and feels the words rush up out of him again, unstoppable, fueled by fire. "Near the end, when the goliath was towering over us, and we were both too exhausted to stand, my father said If thought is life and strength and breath, and then took my sword and stood over me, even when he was swaying. I thought – I thought he was speaking about power then. I was too tired to think–"

"One moment," the therapist murmurs, tapping on a tablet. "Ah, here. If thought is life, and strength and breath, and the wantof thought is death." She looks up at him, and Nero stares at her, chest heaving. "The Echoing Green," she supplies. "William Blake."

"Was he saying–" Nero whispers, fists clenched at his sides, feeling as though the roof has split open and the galaxy is rushing in. "–Was he saying he would die for me?"

"Perhaps," the therapist says, and tilts her head at him. "How would that make you feel?"

"I–" Nero looks away, with a strangled feeling in his throat that he slowly realises is mingled joy and terror. Joy, because if Vergil had really meant those things, then Vergil must care for him far more than Nero had previously assumed – and terror, because he cannot bear to lose his father again, not even this jackass who had taken his arm from him.

The memory of Red Queen piercing his father's gut shakes him to his core.

Vergil had not dodged the blade. Nero had thought then that it was because Vergil was too exhausted to do so, but now…

A long, long silence, where Nero collapses back into his chair, shock at this new discovery thundering through him, and no matter how he tries to speak further, cannot get the words out past the sheer enormity of the revelation.

The therapist snaps her book shut. "Well," she says, "I think you've made excellent progress today, Nero. You should call your father. I think you deserve to ask him what he meant in person."

"What?" Nero jolts. "But I–" He stops, then, and blinks up at the window above, through which golden-orange sunset light is filtering.

Has he been speaking that long?

"We will call you with a new appointment for next week," the therapist says. "You should be proud of yourself, Nero. Get some rest."

Nero nods. He stands, and feels suddenly exhausted, scraped raw, as though he has been battling demons all afternoon instead of speaking.

The therapist gives him a small, understanding smile. "Rest," she says, and Nero forgets to thank her as he takes his coat and scarf from the waiting assistant and tumbles out into the golden dusk light before he registers what has happened.

He watches the Christmas lights on the shop opposite flicker to life in as the sun slips towards the horizon across the park, and looks up to the darkening sky just as the first snowflake begins to fall.

Standing in the fading orange light, Nero breathes in the snowfall, feeling the cold air wash in and out of him.

He realises, with a somewhat chagrined smile, that he is feeling properly hungry for the first time in a long while.

(:~:)

Nero goes to sleep that night exhausted, with a good meal in him – his first full, proper meal in two days – and falls almost instantly asleep.

He had hoped that the food and the revelations of the day would give him a dreamless sleep.

He had been wrong.

Nero snaps awake as though he has been struck, acid bubbling up from his full stomach to hammer against his lips.

He can somehow still smell the iron tinge of blood from his dream, gushing out from the stump of his right elbow, his father glassy-eyed beside him in the same pool of blood, an open wound in Vergil's chest where his heart should be.

Nero looks down at his right elbow, and the hand he has clutched around it.

At least he seems to have avoided breaking skin, this time.

His hands are shaking. He needs to sleep.

Head floating, arms nerveless, Nero pads softly from the room, wanders like a wraith down into the kitchen, and has a hand on the liquor cabinet door and another on the bottle of whisky before he realises what he is doing.

Nero's hand spasms on the bottle, sending the amber liquid sloshing within.

He lets go of the bottle like it has burned him and slams the cabinet shut, backpedaling until his hip hits the kitchen counter. Nero looks down at himself, and then at the liquor cabinet.

What had he been doing?

"Shit," he whispers.

He had heard stories, back when he was a member of the Order of the Sword. Stories of Knights who had seen such horrors in battle that they could not sleep at night without a bottle in hand, could not fire a weapon steadily without a glass of liquor in their stomachs.

Nero feels a new terror rise up within him now, and he moves into the hallway, away from the lure of the liquor cabinet and its siren call of easy sleep.

In the hall, in the soft grey darkness, he leans against the wall, head in his hands. He wishes he were anywhere but here, alone in this empty hallway with a scream building in his throat, Kyrie sleeping peacefully above. He wishes he were in the garden, with the setting sun warming him, and his father by his side, with none of the weight of their history between them.

He wants– he needs–

Nero fumbles for the hall phone, dials a number with shaky fingers. He regrets the decision almost the moment he presses the last number.

"Don't pick up, don't pick up, don't pick up," he whispers–

"Devil May Cry," a singsong voice says, and Nero's chest seizes from the mixture of relief and disappointment – relief that it is not his father, and disappointment because of the same. He almost feels faint.

"Dante," Nero whispers.

"Hey, it's my favourite nephew!" Dante says, the delight evident in his voice. "What's up? Isn't it sort of late over there?"

And there is another thing that Nero struggles with at times – how Dante shows his love with such free abandon, and while Vergil furls himself under so many layers that sometimes Nero wishes he could take a sledgehammer to that core just to hear Vergil speak without weighing the words.

"It's nothing," Nero says, leaning his head into the coolness of the wall to stop the hot ache growing between his eyes. "I just– I was wondering if there was anything we could take to sleep better. Demon biology and all."

Dante barks a laugh. "Tough luck, kid. Nothing for it. I used to train until I felt like my face was going to fall off or drink until I blacked out– Wait." Dante cuts himself off abruptly, dawning concern in his voice. "Nero? Are you having problems sleeping? Don't do what I just said. Do NOT do the stupid things that your Uncle Dante used to do."

"No, no," Nero says hurriedly. "I'm just. I mean. Maybe? Occasionally. I'm doing much better than I was two months ago."

A bald faced lie, but Nero feels something shriveling up within him at the thought of admitting such a weakness, when his father has been doing so well, having gone through the same thing Nero has.

"Hey, you need a snuggle buddy?" Dante is saying now. "Didn't ask since you have Kyrie, but your old man and I had trouble sleeping for the first few days until we slept in the same bed."

Nero almost chokes on his surprise. "My dad needed you there when he was sleeping?" The very idea of his father being vulnerable enough to admit he needed something like that is staggering. Then, close on the heels of shock comes a creeping jealousy. Nero wishes so much in this moment to rest safe in his father's arms that he feels an ache in his chest at the very thought of it.

"Yeah!" Dante says, with a clatter that suggests he has swung booted feet up onto the desk. "We had a good ol' hugging-it-out moment then I snuggle-attacked him. Best sleep I've had in years. We still sometimes sleep in the same room when your dad's had a bad day– Oh hey, Verge."

"DANTE!"

The sound of his father's angry tones echoing in the background nearly makes Nero drop the phone, and cold sweat forms on his forehead at the thought of what his father might have overheard–

"Hey, Nero, want to chat with your dad? Vergil, put down the Yamato, you can kill me later. Your kid's on the phone."

Nero hears a muffled scrabbling, Dante's low chuckle, then the sound of fist meeting cloth and a small oof of pain. The longing has grown in Nero's chest now, burning like a ball of compressed fire under his sternum.

"Don't be a hardass, Vergil!" Dante's singsong voice echoes, edged with static, and then the background noise clears up until there is a rustle of cloth and Nero hears the familiar breaths of his father.

Nero opens his mouth. Closes it. Screws his eyes shut and leans his forehead against the wall, pressing the phone so hard to his ear he feels the ache in his skull.

"Nero?" his father says, with such an awkward, gentle eagerness and furled pride that Nero almost releases the breath he had been holding in a sob.

"Nero," his father is saying again, with a note of growing concern, his voice so much closer to Nero's ear than Dante's ever was. "Are you well?"

No.

"Yeah," Nero says, nodding against the wall as, to his humiliation, the first of many silent tears well over his eyelids to run down his cheeks. "Yeah, I'm fine," he says, with determination, and is proud of how his voice does not shake. "Just, you know. Insomnia."

A pause, where Nero knows he has not quite succeeded in hiding everything from his father.

"Very well," Vergil says, and Nero presses a hand against his twisting mouth against the despairing sob that threatens to burst out of it. "I will remind you that we have training scheduled for the day after tomorrow," Vergil continues. "I…look forward to seeing you then."

"Okay," Nero says, and, because he cannot trust his voice to remain steady for much longer, and because his fingers are beginning to shake where he holds the phone to his ear, he mumbles "Goodnight," and fumbles the phone back into its receiver on the wall without waiting for his father's reply.

Nero takes four stumbling steps back into the kitchen and collapses into a seat at the counter, head in his hands.

His hitching breaths are turning to sobs.

He wants out– out of this mess of jealousy and anger and bitterness and longing, out of– everything.

Through his blurred vision, the liquor cabinet stares right back at him.

Nero gulps in one more breath, forces it down, and folds his hands together under his chin, dropping his gaze to the cabinet opposite him. He wants sleep without nightmares so badly it he feels the call of the liquor there like a physical pull.

He sits there, drained, tears slowly drying on his face and hands, staring at the liquor cabinet, unmoving through the lonely watches of the night, until the cold, pale sun rises again on another winter morning.

(:~:)

Nero moves through the demon hunt in a fevered reverie.

Nico is whooping, and the van is roaring somewhere to Nero's right, and Red Queen flays demon skin from flesh and cleaves flesh from bone with the devastating control that Nero is so familiar with – and yet Nero feels none of it.

Not the shockwave exploding from the palm of his Gerbera, or the roar of Blue Rose when he uses it to blast a Pyrobat out of the air. Flaming bits of demon rain down on his face, and the burns are dull flares of distant pain that seal over immediately with demon energy.

The last demon vaporizes in a blaze of brilliant white light as Gerebera's energy beam flares from his hand, and Nero numbly shakes off the twisted husk of metal that was the devil breaker as Nico shouts in victory somewhere behind him.

He turns on the spot and moves towards the van, meeting Nico's exhilarated smile with an exhausted twitch of the lips.

"I think we should call it a day," Nero says as he climbs in, going for the light banter he always had with Nico, and props his bloodstained boots up on the dashboard and closes his eyes before he can judge if he was successful.

A long, uncharacteristic silence from Nico, before the clatter of the gearshift and the low thrum of the engine rising into a thunder.

Nero runs his left thumb over his right elbow, and pretends to be asleep all the way back.

(:~:)

He gets Kyrie to eat dinner with him that night in the living room, away from the lure of the liquor cabinet, with the excuse of a movie to make up for it. He manages half his portion in slow, careful bites. Kyrie falls asleep on his shoulder halfway through The Empire Strikes Back, and Nero feels his dinner turn to glue in his stomach when Luke loses his right arm to his father.

It is a movie he was watched a dozen times before this, and yet–

He had forgotten.

Nero mashes the remote with a thumb, shutting off Luke's screaming.

He sits there for a long moment with Kyrie's warm weight against his side, trying to ground himself.

Kyrie leans her head into his neck as he slides an arm around her shoulder and another under her knees, and he watches her peaceful, delicate face with an ache in his heart as he carries her upstairs and tucks her in. She curls into her pillow as he presses a kiss to her forehead, something breaking within him as she sleeps on undisturbed.

Nero gets ready for bed, brushing his teeth until his gums ache, then climbing in next to Kyrie and staring at the ceiling.

Exhaustion catches up with him, though, and he closes his eyes–

–and wrenches them open to the feeling of his heart hammering in his mouth, his father's strangled cry still echoing in his ears.

Nero lays there, eyes wide open, staring at the shadows on the ceiling, until his breathing and his heartbeat slow from their frantic pace to just a little above normal. A glance at his bedside clock shows he has barely slept for half an hour.

He knows, logically, that he should just stay in bed.

But the longer he lays there, unmoving, the more jittery he becomes, the itch to move crawling under his skin, grasping invisible hands around his throat.

Nero chokes on a breath and slides out of bed. Spending another night staring at the liquor cabinet – feeling the pull of the whisky like a living thing around his heart – sounds like about the worst thing possible, so Nero grabs Red Queen and steps out barefoot into the garden, avoiding Kyrie's neat tulip beds.

The air is bitingly cold on his short-sleeved shirt, and his long flannel pyjama trousers snag on the grass, but the cold wakes him up, an icy, outward burn that distracts him from the burn within, and Red Queen flourishes in his hand and the air turns to steel.

Again, and again, and again, until at last the sun peeks over the horizon and Nero is down on one knee in the soft grass of the garden, Red Queen plunged tip-first into the ground, gasping for breath and feeling as though he is about to pass out from exhaustion and hunger.

He stumbles back into the kitchen, hating how his head automatically turns to the liquor cabinet as he passes it, and goes upstairs.

Nero cleans himself up quietly, slips into bed as the early morning sun begins to filter through the curtains, and dies to the world.

In the haze of his exhausted, dreamless slumber, there is a moment where he registers Kyrie getting out of bed; a hand on his shoulder and a word that might be his name, but he is so, so tired and his muscles so sore and hopelessly pliant that he cannot hope to wake, and Kyrie's hand disappears and Nero flees into the pitch darkness again, down, down until he cannot even recognize himself.

He sleeps until the worst of the exhaustion passes, and jerks awake at the culmination of another nightmare.

Nero groans as the sunlight hits his face. Each eyelid is weighed down with an impossibly heavy load. A glance at his beside clock shows he has had roughly two and a half hours of sleep.

Better than the night before, at least.

In his ratty flannel pyjamas and sweat-stained shirt, Nero staggers down the stairs. Kyrie is nowhere to be seen, long since left for the opera house.

The morning light makes it easier to ignore the liquor cabinet. Nero grabs the first box of cereal he sees and shakes it roughly into a bowl. The milk sloshes over onto the countertop when he pours it, but he cannot bring himself to care.

He rummages around for a spoon and carries the bowl out to the garden, where he sits on the bench facing Kyrie's tulips, in the exact spot where he had fallen asleep against his father's shoulder two months ago, when the desperation of survival was still fresh and they were both vulnerable enough to share the moment of quiet.

The first spoonful of cereal tastes like wet cardboard, and Nero chokes it down with a cough, already struggling to find the will to bring the next spoonful up to his lips. His stomach rebels as the first mouthful reaches it, and the spoon slips into the milk as Nero closes his eyes against the exhausted nausea.

The whoosh of reality splitting open forces his eyelids apart.

He looks up.

His father looks back at him, the shimmering blue portal sewing closed behind him as he slides the Yamato back into its sheath.

Nero's mind blanks.

Vergil is staring at him, quick blue eyes running from his exhausted face down his rumpled pyjamas up to his face again.

"Uh," Nero says, eventually. "What time is it?"

"Ten hours antemeridian," Vergil replies. "As we agreed."

"Oh," Nero says. "Shit."

He stands up, and some of the milk sloshes out of the bowl to rain on Kyrie's tulips. Vergil follows the motion with increasingly darkening eyes.

"Right," Nero mumbles. "Sorry. Come in, make yourself comfortable. I…uh. I'll be a moment."

He dumps the bowl in the sink, the whole thing, scattering cornflakes all over the bottom of the sink itself, and tries to stop his head from spinning as he clambers upstairs. It takes longer than it should to find suitable training clothes, and when he glances at himself in the bathroom mirror he winces at what he sees – too-pale skin, drawn cheeks, bags under his eyes.

He stumbles back down to the kitchen and finds his father standing there, the Yamato loose in his left hand, staring at the sink with its upturned cereal bowl.

Vergil snaps his gaze towards Nero as he enters, and Nero feels momentarily like he understands the fear some lesser demons show when Vergil stares at them with the same intensity he does now.

"There's a spot not too far from here that's good for training," Nero rambles as they step out of the house. He curls over the keyhole as he locks the door, attempting to hide the shaking of his hand as he inserts the key in the keyway.

Vergil does not speak. Nero can feel his father's burning gaze on him the entirety of the short walk as Nero leads the way out of the neighbourhood, to patch of open wilderness at the edge of the forest proper, a wide clearing of windswept snow.

"Okay, we're here," Nero pants as they reach the edge of the clearing, trying to hide his shiver as the cold seems to leach right through his coat and through his skin, seeping into his bones. He had never minded the cold much, his demon blood giving him more resistance to extreme temperatures, but now the ice seems to claw frozen hands through every gap in his clothing, turning his breaths into rattling wheezes.

Vergil has not moved. He looks at Nero with a gaze that is far too perceptive, something like alarm rising in his features.

Nero feels himself growing steadily more impatient. "What," he says, testily.

Vergil blinks once, and his expression smoothes over like stone. "Ah. I thought we might start with the basics. This is our first opportunity to train together since both of us have recovered fully. I would like to see your sword forms."

Nero nods, unhooks Red Queen from his back, and settles into a stance. Taking a breath, he begins to move through the basic forms of the Order of the Sword, forms that he had trained with as a child.

He is about five steps in when he realises his mistake.

He had moved through these forms again and again last night, without care for breath or pain or rest, from when the moon reached its zenith to when it finally disappeared beneath the horizon. Three hours of proper sleep in as many days, the rest fraught with nightmares or shallow and fitful with alcohol on his tongue.

Nero's feet have turned to lead, his spine aching like the winter branches of the trees above; his wrists burn with every movement, his stomach is a howling, empty hold within him, and every sudden spin and burst of movement makes dark spots dance in front of his eyes–

"Enough."

His father's hand seizes hold of his wrist, halting Red Queen mid-strike, and Nero takes a sharp breath until he realises it is his left wrist – his sword hand.

"Enough," Vergil repeats, and there is the same faint, gentle earnestness that had pierced Nero's to the core, two nights before when he had leant against the wall fighting the shuttered sobs in his throat as he spoke to his father.

"Nero," Vergil murmurs, stepping closer, and Nero's whole body aches with the urge to throw down Red Queen and stumble into his father's arms and be held.

And yet–

His father steps closer, silhouetted against the morning sun, and the part of Nero that still screams silently at every nightmare throws him back to his garage, the silhouette of Vergil's hood against the setting sun–

Nero's left wrist spasms under his father's hand, twists away.

Vergil's intake of breath is sharp. Pained.

Nero fights to control his own breathing, the self-hatred rising up inside of him as he turns away, turning his words hard, glittering, like the ice encasing the tree branches above.

"I'm fine. I don't need your help."

"Nero," his father's voice is saying, and Nero feels the ghost of a touch on his shoulder. "Nero, please." There is a strangled note in Vergil's voice.

"Just–" Nero closes his eyes. Opens them again. "Just let me continue. Please." An echo of his father's plea.

A pause.

"No," Vergil says with finality, and Nero curls in on himself, shame rising up from the pit of his empty stomach. "You are unwell," Vergil says, matter-of-fact. "To continue would be meaningless in your current condition."

Despair claws its way up Nero's throat, sends words hissing from between his teeth.

He turns on his father, eyes flashing dry and red in the freezing wind.

"Look, jackass, I understand," Nero hisses, and he feels as he did in those last hours in the dome, dredging up what little strength he had left to press on. "I know you think I'm weak. Look at you. The dome barely affected you at all." He gasps in a breath, feels tears begin to clog in his throat, choking him. "I may have beaten you once on the Qliphoth, but I'm weaker than you in every way that matters and you know that. I know I'm never going to be good enough for you."

His father starts forward, as if to speak, and Nero rambles on, the words spitting from his lips now like unstoppable blades.

"I don't want this," Nero barks a laugh that tears at his lungs. "I don't need your pity."

Vergil is staring at him now, frozen, one hand still reaching out.

Nero chances a glimpse at his father's face and nearly folds in half right there an then at the sheer agony that flashes across Vergil's face before it flattens in a granite mask.

"I see," Vergil says, in a voice so tightly controlled that Nero almost flinches.

Nero glances up at his father's again, and his heart leaps into his throat, hammering in fear.

Vergil's face might be an impassive mask, but his eyes are terrifying – shards of emotionless blue ice that skewer Nero in place.

Nero knows with complete certainty that his father is furious, and that Nero has crossed over some irreparable line. His left hand drifts to his right elbow, digs into his coat until pain spikes up his fingers. He feels his breathing grow ragged, misting into the frozen air.

"I can see I am not wanted here," Vergil says, face hardening further as his eyes follow the movement of Nero's hands, lingering on Nero's elbow. "I will leave you."

Vergil turns on the spot, left hand white-knuckled on the Yamato's sheath, and slices a portal into the winter air.

Unbidden, a plea rises to Nero's lips as his father steps through the portal, back straight, dark blue coat fluttering in the wind.

The portal closes.

"Don't go," Nero whispers, and curls in on himself, fingers white on his aching elbow, as the tears come at last.

(:~:)

Dante whistles merrily as he ducks through the last flickering streetlight and unlocks the door to the Devil May Cry shop, balancing the enormous pizza box in one hand as he edges into the shadowed shop.

"Pi-zza, pi-zza," he hums to himself, dumping the box on the desk, flicking on the desk light as he collapses into the squeaky chair, and reaching in for the first slice with a hand covered in dried demon guts. Good demon hunt, good cash up front, and delicious, greasy pizza. Heaven.

Dante is midway through his first slice when his eyes slide to his left and alights on the curled shape on the sofa beside the fridge.

The slice of pizza goes flying, and Ivory is halfway out of its holster before he recognises the distinctive silhouette of slicked-back hair.

"What the hell, Vergil," Dante grouses, pulling both feet off the desk to slam against the floor. "I nearly shot you."

Vergil does not move. The pool of dirty light from the desk lamp seeps across the tiles, just reaches the tips of Vergil's boots.

Dante watches his brother for a moment.

"Okay, okay," Dante says, heaving himself out of the desk chair and towards the light switches by the door. A casual flick of his finger, and the lights blaze to full brightness. He turns in place. "Now will you tell me what's– Shit."

Vergil sits curled over his knees, coat discarded beside him on the couch, the Yamato set on the low table in front of him. His face is in his hands, his shirt folded up to his elbows, and a half-bottle of Dante's cheap vodka sits beside the Yamato, already half-empty.

Dante approaches cautiously.

Vergil does not move as Dante carefully removes the bottle, taking a small swig himself to fortify against the mess this following conversation will definitely be.

Dante pushes the bunched up coat aside and settles on the couch beside his brother.

A moment, where Dante simply listens to Vergil breathing.

"Verge?" Dante ventures.

Vergil inhales. It almost sounds like a sob. "I am incapable of doing anything," he says, voice thick with unshed tears, "that does not hurt my son."

Oh, damn. Training must not have gone well.

"Something happen?" Dante says.

"I have failed him," Vergil says, lifting his face from his hands, and Dante jerks back, because his brother's eyes are rimmed red, filled with such depths of pain that Dante forgets to breathe. "I have always failed him," Vergil laughs, a broken, raw sound of absolute despair. "He is in pain, and yet I could do nothing but pain him further."

"Vergil," Dante says, reaching out and clasping a hand around his brother's wrist, feeling the fluttering pulse there. "You didn't mean to hurt him."

"But I did, once," Vergil says, the self-hatred burning in his voice, each word a blade ripping up out of him. "I tore his arm from its joint, left him bleeding in his own home."

Dante looks away.

He hears a stifled sob, and realises with a jolt of horror that there are tears dripping down Vergil's chin.

Vergil has buried his face in his sleeve, breath hitching. "I don't deserve Nero. He's afraid of me. He's always been afraid of me, and nothing I can do will ever change that."

"Vergil," Dante says, sliding closer, "You're not a horrible father."

Vergil makes a horrible noise, halfway between a keen and a laugh. "Don't joke with me, Dante," he whispers through shuddering gasps. "You would make a far better father than I ever would."

Dante's hand tightens on Vergil's wrist at that – he remembers weeks on end laying on this same couch, dead to the world, only rousing to eat, sleeping curled in the scent of his own unwashed body, the air grey and colourless.

"I should have died," Vergil says suddenly, turning to face Dante with a terrifyingly blank expression. "I should have let the Yamato be, and died, and Nero might have been happy–"

"Shut up," Dante says, and pulls his brother in close. Vergil shakes under his hold, but Dante's hand curls on the back of his brother's neck as he tucks Vergil's face into his shoulder, and Vergil melts into Dante's embrace, as if he has finally given up the fight to maintain his control.

"We're gonna find a way to help Nero," Dante says, low and fierce. "We're gonna find a way to help him, and then you and him are gonna talk this out, and we're going to be a happy family again–"

Vergil wheezes a laugh into Dante's shoulder – the mad sound of hysteria.

"Listen to me!" Dante wrenches his brother to face him, presses his forehead to his brother's brow. "Listen to me," Dante almost begs, the emotion cracking in his voice. "We're going to get through this. We got through everything else before this. We'll get through this too."

Vergil's only response is another crackling wheeze, a terrifying reminder of his days nerveless and struggling to breathe after the dome, and Dante pulls him in close again, steadying him, until the sound of his brother's quiet sorrow runs its course.

(:~:)

Nero stares at the liquor cabinet.

Kyrie is asleep upstairs. Nero sits at the kitchen counter, his left hand white-knuckled on his right elbow.

Exhaustion is too simple a word to describe his state, now, and the grief of the morning has settled firm claws into his heart and claimed it for grief forever.

Nero stares at the liquor cabinet.

He stares, and stares, and continues to stare, fingers digging into the skin of his elbow, and counts the minutes and hours until morning.

---

Next up: Good things finally start happening.

I wrote this entire emotionally draining 11000 word chapter in 26 hours. lol.

Don't worry, we'll get to the healing soon. Feel free to comment or leave me a message if you have any questions about the fic. I'm on a 24 hour shift at the hospital tomorrow, but I'll be chugging away at the next chapter after I get off work Sunday morning.

You can find me on tumblr at eirianerisdar.