A/N: "This is going to be devastating," my twin WafflesRisa said, halfway through planning this chapter.
It was.
Also, this fic is going to be five chapters long instead of four now, because I can't do anything by halves.
Music for this chapter: Brother (feat Gavin DeGraw) NEEDTOBREATHE
The first thing the therapist does is smile when she opens her office door to the sight of Vergil and Nero.
"Nero, Vergil," she says, genuine gladness in her voice as she lets them in.
Vergil follows Nero into the room automatically, trying to hide his tension by settling onto the sofa as calmly as he can.
His son sits quite a bit closer to him than their previous session, close enough to touch should Vergil lean a little to his right, an echo of the comfortable closeness when they had settled much the same way on the couch at Nero's home after they had finally bared their souls to each other.
Vergil attempts to stop himself from flushing at the memory. He knows he has not quite succeeded when the therapist looks perceptively at him.
"I'm glad to see that you two seem to have been talking to each other," the therapist says. "What happened?"
For a moment, Vergil is almost terrified he might have to explain the sheer extent of his undoing after their last shared session, but then Nero shifts closer, the merest whisper of movement that allows him to feel his son's warmth at his side.
"Last session, I…I hurt him," Nero says, and there is residual guilt there in his voice. "I hurt him, and there was a moment where I thought I would lose him, and I just…broke."
Vergil glances at his son, at the way Nero's hand is gradually curling into a tight fist at his side.
For a moment, Vergil dithers, unsure of what to do. Then the answer presents itself to him, and though a part of him rebels at the thought of showing his vulnerabilities before this almost-stranger of a therapist, Vergil moves.
Carefully, not looking at the therapist or Nero fully, Vergil shifts his hand so the last two fingers of his right hand just brush the back of Nero's wrist.
At the touch, Nero's fingers uncurl from their white-knuckled grip.
The therapist smiles. Vergil looks pointedly away.
"Yeah, so I…wasn't doing great," Nero says, still with that same raw quality in his voice, but now with a note of determination, as though he is pushing himself to speak the truth. "And uh. Dad saw that I needed him, and he came. Even when he wasn't doing so well himself after I said all those horrible things."
Vergil tries in vain to stop his heart from simultaneously clenching with heady disbelief and skipping with joy, as he has every time Nero called him Dad since their reconciliation two days ago.
"And how did that make you feel, Nero?" the therapist says gently.
"Uh. Kind of blown away, I guess," Nero mumbles. "That he cared that much for me. That he could forgive me. And we talked, and I understand why I was wrong to explode like that last time."
"I'm glad," therapist says, smiling at Nero before looking towards Vergil, and Vergil lifts his chin, unwilling to back down even in the face of his own mounting anxiety.
"Now, Vergil," the therapist continues, "Why don't you tell us your perspective of what happened?"
"…I think Nero's retelling was accurate enough," Vergil says, fighting to get the words past the tightening of his throat.
"I don't doubt that," the therapist says. "But it's always worthwhile to hear from the perspective of everyone involved. Your perspective matters as well."
Vergil pauses at that, blinking. "I…Nero said something similar." He feels sudden warmth at the back of his hand, looks down to find Nero's hand resting on his, and his heart swells in his chest. "He said it matters if I was hurt. I didn't think so at first."
"Nero's right," the therapist nods. "What you feel matters. Your opinion matters."
Vergil nods numbly, because he does not know what to say to that, and the words are sticking in his throat like they did the previous session. For a terrifying moment he wonders if Nero will take his silence as insult again, but a glance at his son finds Nero looking at him with calm patience in his gaze, and Vergil feels such an overwhelming gratitude for it that he finds the words at last.
"Nero did hurt me," Vergil says, "But he has apologised for it. And I've come to realise that I…I do not excel in expressing myself." He looks away, residual embarrassment lingering at the confession.
"And I tend to assume things when he didn't say them," Nero volunteers, nudging Vergil with a casual shoulder as he barks a laugh. "Pretty volatile combination, huh."
To Vergil's surprise, the therapist breaks into a brilliant smile. He feels his son jolt beside him, a testament to Nero's own astonishment.
"You both should be extraordinarily proud of yourselves," the therapist says. "It always warms my heart whenever I see two clients as determined to understand and reconcile with each other as you do. You have found the root cause of your previous misunderstandings, and with more work you can learn to recognise the patterns before they occur."
"Ah," Vergil murmurs. He had not thought his realisation that momentous, but now the therapist has laid it out plainly in front of his eyes, Vergil begins to understand.
A wild, unbelievable hope rises within him.
He can learn to be with his son without harming him.
"Ah," Vergil finds himself saying again, stupidly, his hand beginning to tremble at his side as the true enormity of what is being offered to him seeps into his core.
Nero's hand shifts to slip his fingers through Vergil's, holding his shuddering hand tight.
Vergil blinks rapidly, trying to clear the sudden mistiness from his vision, and though the therapist smiles at him without censure and does not comment on it, Vergil has to hide his face by turning away to clear his throat.
His son's hand remains in his the rest of the session, sword-callouses to sword-callouses, and Vergil holds on just as tightly.
(:~:)
"Literature?" Nero says dubiously as they duck into the warm golden light of the bookshop.
"Poetry, to be exact," Vergil replies, reaching out without fully looking to fix Nero's snow-spotted scarf where it has slipped partway off Nero's shoulder.
Nero feels heat flare all the way from the tip of his frozen nose to his ears at the casual affection, but Vergil has already turned towards the back of the shop with an uncharacteristic air of excitement.
"Why specifically poetry, and not prose?" Nero says, following his father between the overstuffed bookcases. When the therapist had suggested the two of them learn each others' interests, Nero had expected perhaps a tour of his father's bookshelves at the Devil May Cry shop.
What he hadn't expected was his father dragging him across the city to visit all of Vergil's favoured bookshops. This, the third, is a brightly-lit establishment with oak floors and warm yellow lighting, the scent of coffee and cinnamon in the air.
"Poetry holds completion in a handful of words," Vergil replies, halting by a floor-to-ceiling bookcase in the deepest corner of the shop that reads Antique Volumes.
"Right," Nero replies, not really understanding at all.
"Now, prose has its own value," Vergil says, examining the shelves speculatively. "There are subjects and artistic expressions that prose conveys quite well."
Nero watches his father, at a loss.
"And yet," Vergil says with a note of triumph, pulling a volume from the shelf with one leather-gloved finger, "Poetry is complete in itself even with fewer words."
Nero peers at the etched gold lettering on the leather volume. "John Keats?" he says.
"Yes," Vergil says. "He–" A pause, where Vergil looks sharply at Nero, and Nero attempts to look less clueless.
"You have no idea who that is, do you?" Vergil says, disbelievingly.
"Uh…should I?" Nero says, feeling a little like he did as a child when Credo had drilled him on the history of the Order of the Sword and he had failed spectacularly.
Vergil looks almost comically appalled for a moment, and sighs. "It appears I must do much to further your education," he says.
"Hey," Nero says shortly, irritation spiking at him despite his best attempt to push it down. He wishes he had not spoken the moment he closes his mouth, but Vergil has already looked at him, sudden anxiety in his gaze, and Nero fights a flinch.
Nero opens his mouth to speak–
"No," Vergil says, halting him with a raised hand. "I apologise. The fault is mine. I did not mean to disparage your upbringing."
Nero blinks at his father. "Okay," he says. "I accept." The tension seeps out of him as he watches his father's shoulders drop with relief.
The air still holds a faint awkwardness.
"I, uh," Nero says, looking at the book in his father's hands, "I wouldn't mind learning. I mean. If you wanted to teach me."
Vergil looks at him then, with the same suppressed emotion on his face that Nero has come to associate with joy.
"It would be my pleasure," Vergil says, and Nero flushes and sinks into his scarf in an attempt to hide his burning ears.
His father flips over the book, looks at the pricing label, and raises an eyebrow. "But perhaps not this particular volume," he says. "This is excessive even by antique standards."
Nero catches faint wistfulness in Vergil's expression as he replaces the volume.
"C'mon," Nero says. "I've got something planned I want to show you."
Vergil smiles at him faintly, a genuine smile of gratitude, and Nero feels his heart warm as they step out into the snow together.
(:~:)
The stumble out into the evening snowfall, weaving their way through the thinning crowd.
"Bet you didn't expect that, now did you?" Nero laughs, shaking confetti out of the light grey wool of his scarf as he re-winds it around his neck.
"You liked that?" Vergil breathes through the spiking headache between his eyes, his ears still ringing from the shuddering power chords. "I'm aware I spent much of the past two decades in the underworld, but that…that is what suffices for music for today's youth?"
"Yeah," Nero grins, seemingly unaffected by the lambasting of sound and light the two of them have received in the last three hours. "It makes people feel alive."
"I can see that," Vergil says, wincing at the sound of his own voice as they pass under the glare of a streetlight. "It would be difficult to think otherwise with the headache this induces upon the unwary observer."
Nero barks another laugh into the wind, breath misting into the air, and Vergil reaches out to brush the confetti from his son's hair before he fully processes what he is doing.
Nero's step hitches, and twists in place to stare at Vergil.
Vergil freezes, hand still buried in Nero's hair, a few stray scraps of confetti fluttering to the ground where he had brushed them from his son's hair.
Nero's cheeks are growing steadily red from something other than the cold air.
Vergil snatches back his hand and makes a point of slipping on his gloves as he begins to walk again, the soft ghost of his son's hair still on his fingers as he slides them into leather.
He hears Nero jog a few steps to catch up, and then his son is at his side again.
"So what's music for you then, old man?" Nero says, as they turn into a street of Christmas lights, chaotic swirls of multicoloured fairy lights strung over the streetlights above, bright-lit shops spilling warm scents and laughing children onto the cobbled pavement.
"Paganini," Vergil murmurs, still trying to calm the thudding of his heart. "Or Tchaikovsky, as a start."
"Okay," Nero says. "The violin, then. I know you used to play."
Vergil stops abruptly. "How did you know?" he says, astonished.
Nero looks slightly abashed. "Dante," he says.
Vergil fights the urge to roll his eyes. "Hmm," he says, looking across the street to a park, where gleeful children slide around an ice-rink on wobbling skates. Almost as though by fate, a lone violinist stands at the edge of the rink, under the warmth of a glowing heat-lamp, Christmas tunes drifting into the cold winter air.
"You know, I think you should play again," Nero says, tucking his hands into his pockets as follows Vergil's line of sight to the violinist.
"I would have to relearn nearly everything," Vergil says, a wistful note entering his voice despite his best efforts.
"So?" Nero replies.
Vergil turns from the laughing children and the faint sounds of the violin.
"I suppose you're right," he says, and Nero's smile is a gift greater than all he has received so far that day.
They walk on, until they reach a suitably quiet spot. The Yamato opens a tear in cold winter air, and Nero, to Vergil's surprise, gives him a quick hug before stepping through the portal.
Vergil finds himself so stunned by it that he stands there staring like a fool for long moments after the portal closes, a smile tugging at his lips.
(:~:)
Vergil lets himself into the Devil May Cry shop as the clock strikes ten.
"So, quality father-son time?" Dante says by the desk, sliding on his coat as Vergil takes off his own to shake off the snow clinging to the wool.
"Save the maudlin chatter, Dante," Vergil says, with no real heat.
Dante makes a noise of acknowledgement but does not quite meet Vergil's eyes as he steps towards the door.
"You're going out?" Vergil says, folding his coat over his arm.
"Hunting," Dante says, with his usual breezy ease – but there is an edge that that catches Vergil's attention and makes him scrutinise his brother more closely.
At first, nothing seems amiss in the jaunty line of Dante's shoulders.
Vergil realises abruptly that it has been a few days since he has talked to his brother properly apart from casual comings and goings – on the way to Fortuna for therapy, or going out to explore the city with Nero, returning late at night to find his brother snoozing in a chair, or halfway through a pizza.
And then he looks at the desk, and realises there is nothing there save for a pile of crushed beer cans – no pizza boxes, no takeout bags.
"Did you eat?" Vergil says, as Dante heads towards the door.
Dante pauses with his hand on the door edge, half turning his head to the side so that the streetlight beyond casts the line of his nose sharp aquiline.
"I wasn't hungry," he says with casual ease, and then the door opens with a gust of frozen air and Dante disappears into the snowfall.
Vergil stands there for a long while, watching the door swing in the wind then come to a standstill.
He cleans up the shop before retiring for the night, and counts a dozen empty beer cans before the desk is cleared. Dante's half of the fridge, when Vergil checks it, holds the same two boxes of old pizza as it did that morning when he had left for his outing with Nero.
Vergil falls asleep that night with a faint sense of disquiet buzzing under his skin.
(:~:)
The cold is a good thing, Dante realises approximately four hours in, as King Cerberus carves a line of hissing, melted snow in the frozen ground, flames leaping from Dante's strikes to burn the Hell Antenora to crisp.
The cold numbs his fingers, seeps into his mind. It allows the world to narrow to whichever weapon is in his hands and his next target, allows the hollow pit of his stomach to echo the empty winter air. He has never been afraid of the cold, and it does him this favour now, taking whatever foolish thoughts he had been ruminating over in the warmth of the shop and freezing them behind icebound walls.
He beheads a Fury with a wordless yell, slamming his devil sword into icy stone, and crouches there for a moment, breathing in sharp, icy breaths in the snowstorm, each inhale a faint spike of pain in his lungs that fades to the forge of his demon powers.
He remains smiling jauntily in challenge as the next straggle of lesser demons approaches, mere hazy shapes in the blizzard, skittering forward through the dense trees.
The smile has frozen onto his face by now, and Dante is glad for it.
In the same way he is glad the dome has brought such good business even now, two and a half months from the incident – allows him well-paid, night-long hunts where Vergil has spent the last few days finally spending time with his son.
It is a good thing, Dante knows. He is happy for them.
It is all he has ever wished for, from the moment he returned from Hell with Vergil.
Dante's lips twist painfully, his grin sharper than the bite of the December air, as he loses himself to the hunt.
(:~:)
The sun is peeking over the horizon by the time Dante fumbles the key into the lock at the shop door, numb fingers slipping on the icy metal.
The poisoned gash on his thigh still sheets blood down his leg, soaking into his boot. It isn't anything dangerous – won't even come close to killing him, but it would certainly hurt like hell for a few days.
Dante doesn't care.
He lets himself in, dripping demon guts and congealing blood onto the floor, and collapses onto the sofa without a care, not bothering to flick on the lights. The ceiling fan turns lazily overhead in the shadows, caught in the initial gust of the opening door.
Dante stares up at it, like he has so many times over the decades, and wonders.
He wonders why it still hurts so much, when he had known this would happen.
He had always ended up alone, from the moment he stumbled out of the smoking ruin of his home as a child. Any others had always left in the end – Trish and Lady had wandered in and out of the shop over the years, but never stayed long. Patty had stuck around for a surprisingly long time, like an annoying, much-younger sister that remained the single bright spot in his otherwise grey-filled days after Mallet Island.
Then she had left to finally be with her mother, and Dante had been so very glad for her, even as the days had turned from gold etched with the pink she so often left in little touches around the shop, to shades of black and white again, grey shadows creeping in on the unwashed floor, piles of pizza boxes and beer cans Dante couldn't find the energy to clean up littering the space that Patty had kept so proudly clean.
Morrison had joked that Dante was moping after Patty left, then. Dante hadn't corrected him beyond an easy, sarcastic joke that left Morrison chuckling as Dante knew he would.
His days had blurred to brief bursts of bloodlust during hunts, subsisting on pizza and strawberry sundaes when he felt his body needing food, and then sleeping from a mixture of alcohol or exhaustion or both, where he could forget he existed and float in nothingness.
And then Fortuna had happened, and Nero's existence had hit him with all the weight of a freight train, and Dante had finally felt something similar to true happiness when he entrusted the Yamato to Nero.
But Nero had Kyrie, and Fortuna, and Dante had an empty shop, and his debts, and demon hunting and pizza and sundaes.
And that was that. His existence.
Dante watches the shadow of the ceiling fan slide across the ceiling in the slowly brightening air of morning, and knows he doesn't quite deserve to hurt this much – not when he has suffered less than Vergil has, not when his brother and his nephew have finally gotten their blockheaded brains to communicate and become father and son, like Dante has wished them to for so many months.
A wheezing laugh escapes him, and Dante presses a filthy sleeve to his eyes, blocking off the growing sunlight.
He had gotten used to Vergil being here, like the maudlin fool his brother always accuses him of being.
He had gotten used to coming back to the shop, coming home, to the lights still on and Vergil reading on the sofa, to waking to the smell of coffee, or sleeping curled around his brother when Vergil had one of his bad days.
He had gotten used to Nero's cursing when Dante runs a hand through his nephew's hair, and he had gotten used to Kyrie's hot chocolate, which so reminds him of his mother's.
Dante had forgotten, in the heady warmth of his brother and his nephew's presence in his life, that eventually they would leave him. Because Vergil and Nero were father and son, and they should rightly prioritise each other.
Exhaustion pulls at Dante's limbs, hunger growling in his stomach and thirst at his throat, and he glances at the fridge, thinks of the effort it would take to cross to it and remove the pizza from its box within.
He gives up before he even begins, and pulls a magazine from the side of the sofa to spread over his eyes. The cut on his leg is bleeding only sluggishly now that his demon powers are taking over, fighting the poison that slows his healing – the blood would stop in a few hours, by Dante's reckoning, and he does not have the energy to bind the wound when it would mean having to stagger upstairs to the bathroom.
He falls into blessed oblivion, where he does not need to exist, and he can push away this meaningless pain until it numbs again, and he can function as he always has, before he knew what it was to have family again.
(:~:)
Vergil closes his room door behind him, shrugging on his house robe over his pyjamas against the chill morning air.
The door to Dante's room is still half open like it was when Vergil retired last night, the bed unmade. Vergil stares at it for a moment before registering that the blankets have not moved at all from their configuration the previous night.
Frowning, Vergil makes his way downstairs.
Then he catches the scent of blood halfway down the steps, and his heart seizes within his chest as his gaze alights on his brother's blood-soaked form on the sofa by the door – until he realises Dante's chest is rising and falling, and there is a magazine over Dante's face, strategically placed to block out the light from the window.
Anger comes quickly on the heels of relief.
Growling, Vergil stalks down the last few steps, leather slippers – a gift from Nero – slapping on the wooden floorboards.
"Dante, you'd better clean up after this–"
Vergil halts mid-sentence as he registers the pool of congealed blood under the sofa itself. There is a large gash in Dante's trouser leg directly above the blood, with the raw edges of a wound still visible within – no longer bleeding, but nowhere close to fully healed.
And Dante, usually so responsive to Vergil's taunts, has not moved.
Breath stuttering in his chest, Vergil crosses the last few paces to his brother, presses an urgent hand to Dante's shoulder.
"Dante."
Dante does not respond except to mumble and curl further into the cracked leather of the sofa, and Vergil shakes his brother harder, panic rising in his throat, until Dante groans and lifts a hand to shift the magazine off his face.
"Dante," Vergil says, trying to hide his relief as his brother blinks blearily up at him.
"Whuzzup?" Dante mumbles thickly, bloodshot eyes blinking in the sunlight. "Everythin' ok?"
Vergil looks at his brother, at the gashes in his clothing and the demon blood and the wound in his leg, and growls, "What the hell, Dante."
"So you're okay?" Dante says, half-sitting up with urgency. "You okay, Nero's okay?"
"I–" Vergil stares. "Yes."
"Okay," Dante mumbles, collapsing back and shielding his face with the magazine again. "Then I'm just gonna– I'm just gonna go back to sleep now."
"Dante," Vergil hisses, hand tightening on Dante's shoulder.
"Wha?"
"You're injured," Vergil says, hovering his free hand over the wound in Dante's leg and wincing at the heat that emanates from it.
"It's jus' a bit of poison," Dante slurs into the magazine. "I've dealt with worse. Didn't bleed to death, right?"
Vergil's chest clenches. "Don't even joke about that."
Something in Vergil's voice must have gotten through to Dante, because Dante peeks out from under the magazine, bloodshot eyes blinking up at him.
"Verge?" Dante says. There is a glassy quality to his gaze that terrifies Vergil, reminds him of his own hours limp and nerveless on this same sofa when he thought Nero hated him.
"Get up," Vergil says. "We're cleaning that wound and then you're having breakfast."
"Not hungry," Dante says with an automatic air, and Vergil looks at him, new terror twisting his stomach.
"You an' Nero have plans," Dante is mumbling now, shrugging Vergil's hand off his shoulder. "I got back late. Jus' need some sleep. Go on."
Vergil slides an arm under his brother's shoulders and yanks him upright roughly, uncaring for the blood and the grime, and Dante screams into Vergil's shoulder as his leg shifts.
Vergil nearly drops Dante at the sudden shout, his brother's breath hot against Vergil's shoulder, his ear ringing. He watches the wound reopen in Dante's leg to seep bright scarlet droplets down onto the cracked leather of the sofa.
"Shit," Dante pants into Vergil's shoulder, breathing a trembling laugh that shudders through Vergil's arm.
New moisture seeps through Vergil's robe, and he drops his chin to find his brother's forehead beaded with sweat where it is pressed into Vergil's shoulder, Dante's eyes screwed shut against the pain.
The shock still keeps Vergil frozen there for a long moment before he maneuvers his brother to sit upright against the back of the sofa.
"I'm okay," Dante groans.
"Shut up," Vergil growls at his brother as he quickly climbs the stairs to the bathroom and snatches up the small first-aid kit that someone – presumably Trish or Lady, now he thinks about it – had placed there long ago.
"Sorry," Dante mumbles when Vergil returns. "You're s'posed to go see Nero today."
"Never mind that," Vergil hisses, getting to work cutting away the ruin of Dante's trouser leg.
Dante stays very still as Vergil works, face pressed into the back of the sofa, sweat and grime-stiff hair hanging in his face. A week ago he would have been leaning into Vergil's shoulder, using every opportunity to get into Vergil's personal space, but now his head lolls against cracked leather instead, as though trying to stay as far from Vergil as possible. Every now and then Dante flinches when Vergil pokes a particularly sore spot – the poison must be quite something, for the pain to affect Dante like so – but Dante is quick to laugh after every hiss of pain, making fun at his own expense, even as the smiles do not quite reach his eyes.
The sleeves of Vergil's robe are covered with rusty stains by the time he is finished, but Dante's leg looks much better, covered in white bandaging.
Vergil cleans up, throws his housecoat in the laundry, and comes back with a glass of water for his brother.
Dante has not moved from where Vergil left him, leaning pliantly into the back of the sofa as though he is a rag doll, but he obediently drinks the glass of water that Vergil hands him.
Vergil pretends not to notice how after the first sip, Dante finishes the rest of the glass in almost-desperate gulps.
Something the therapist had said in their latest session comes to Vergil – something about how those closest to each other hide the most secrets out of love.
"Dante," Vergil says as Dante lowers the glass and closes his eyes.
"Hmm?" Dante slurs, glass slipping between his fingers. Vergil catches it.
"I think–" Vergil stops. Was this how Nero felt, when Nero had asked him the same question? "Would you consider coming with Nero and I to our next session?"
"Next session of what?" Dante says, far more clearly than before, but still not looking at his brother, his head turned carefully into the sofa.
"Therapy," Vergil says, and is rewarded with the sight of Dante snapping open his eyes fully to meet Vergil's for the first time that morning.
"What?" Dante says, disbelief in his voice. "Why?"
"I think–" Vergil considers all the possible options, and chooses the one that his brother will find the least offensive. "It would mean a lot to Nero," he says, and gathers his courage. "And to me."
"Okay," Dante says, and Vergil is momentarily stunned by the ease of the reply, until Dante continues, "I'll do whatever I need to do to support you two. You know that, Verge."
"…Yes," Vergil says, swallowing his many questions. "Yes, I do."
Dante smiles at that, a shadow of his usual cocksure smile, the smudges under his eyes suddenly all-too-prominent.
Dante complies as Vergil nudges him to eat a whole bowl of oatmeal, with ample cream and strawberries, cracks his usual jokes as Vergil half-carries him upstairs, and laughs easily as Vergil helps rinse the dried blood from his hair. Vergil stands guard outside the bathroom door as Dante finishes cleaning up, and Dante does not meet his eyes when he emerges, though he allows Vergil to help him step over the mess that is his room and settle him into bed.
Vergil watches as Dante rolls over onto his uninjured side, facing the wall, immediately asleep in the way Vergil had been so envious of as a child.
He looks at Dante's chest rise and fall for a long while, until he is sure Dante is deep asleep, and then rises and goes downstairs.
There, Vergil stares at his brother's blood on the sofa and on the floorboards, and crosses over to the phone to call his son.
Nero picks up on the second ring.
"Hello?"
"Nero," Vergil breathes.
"Dad?" Nero's voice is instantly alert. "Why do you sound like that? Are you okay?"
"No, no," Vergil scrambles to say. "I'm– I'm quite unharmed. But we'll have to postpone our plans today, I'm afraid. It's– well. Dante."
"Dante? What about him? Is he hurt?"
"No, he's–" Vergil sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. "He was slightly injured on a demon hunt. Nothing that won't heal in a day or two, but I think there's something wrong. Something he's not telling me."
"You mean he's hiding something?" Nero says.
"I suspect he is," Vergil says. "He seemed…different. Detached."
"You think it's something to worry about?"
"I don't know," Vergil sighs. "I wonder if I offended him somehow. But I haven't been present here these past few days except to sleep. I don't know how I could have managed to offend him."
"Well, I wouldn't get too caught up on it," Nero says. "Dante always cheers up eventually. You know him. And he apologised to me even when I didn't bring it up after he shut me down last time, remember? He's probably aware you're worried about him. He'll be fine."
"Very well," Vergil says, a measure of relief seeping through him at his son's assurances. "I'll let it be. Though I was concerned enough that I– I should probably have asked you this before doing so, but I invited him to our next therapy session."
"Oh," Nero says, and Vergil feels his heart leap into his throat.
"Of course that's okay," Nero continues, seemingly genuinely happy with the idea, and Vergil lets out a breath he did not realise he was holding.
"Thank you, Nero," Vergil says, and knows he has succeeded in suffusing the phrase with all the words he cannot yet bring himself to say out loud when Nero sputters a little into the line.
"You too, Dad,"Nero says in a quick jumble of syllables, and hangs up before Vergil can do anything except smile.
Promising himself that once his brother recovers, Dante will have a very long date with a mop, a bucket, and the entirety of the shop floor, Vergil collects the required equipment and gets to work cleaning up the mess his brother made of the couch and floor.
(:~:)
Dante is entirely too cheerful the day of the therapy session.
"So, how does it actually go?" he says, plucking at the collar of the red sweater that Vergil made him wear in lieu of his filthy battle gear. "Does she look into the depths of your soul?"
Vergil fights the urge to roll his eyes. In actuality, he is too relieved to have his usual exuberant brother back to be truly annoyed.
"No, Dante," Vergil says as he slices a portal into the wall. "Her words polish you like a stone in water. It pains you for a while, until you realise you have smoothed over into something new."
Dante looks at him, startled into silence, and Vergil hides a smirk as he steps through the portal into the freshly shoveled snow of Nero and Kyrie's garden.
The back door opens as soon as the two of them emerge from the portal, and Nero leans out into the chilled air and beckons them inside, shoulders hunched against the cold.
Stepping into the warmth, Vergil spares a moment to run a hand through Nero's hair where ice crystals have fallen from the doorframe, and Nero flushes to the tips of his ears at the touch.
Vergil glimpses a pained smile flash across Dante's face, but it is gone again so quickly and replaced with Dante's usual easy grin that Vergil wonders if he imagined it.
Dante's grin remains in place as they head out into the street together, and no matter how many times Vergil glances at his brother during their walk to the therapist's office, Dante's shoulders remain languidly loose. Only the slightest hitch in his step belies the still-healing wound in his leg.
The therapist welcomes them in, shaking Dante's hand as he grins charmingly at her, and then all three of them are settling on the sofa – Nero and Dante on either end, and Vergil between them.
"So, Dante," the therapist says. "I usually begin sessions by getting to know my new clients better. Why don't you tell me a little about yourself?"
Vergil looks at his brother, who sits languidly, one arm thrown over the back of the sofa.
"Ah, I'm not that interesting," Dante says. "Son of Sparda, legendary devil hunter, all that stuff. I'm sure Vergil and Nero must've covered most of it by now."
At first, Vergil finds nothing strange in Dante's voice – only casual ease. And yet there is a glint there in his brother's gaze that reminds Vergil of the look in Dante's eyes during battle – where Dante can almost turn laughter into a weapon.
"All the same, it's worthwhile to listen to everyone's point of view," the therapist says.
"Well, up to eight years old the story's much the same as Vergil here," Dante says with a jaunty smile. "Then we got separated, and I grew up mostly alone. Opened the devil-hunting shop at nineteen, saved the world a couple times, found out I had a nephew while saving the world yet again, and then my brother came back from the dead and here we are."
A pause, where Vergil stares at his brother and considers the sheer number of events Dante glossed over in that particular little speech. Even Nero has shifted beside Vergil, peering at Dante with a minute frown.
The therapist makes a note. "Okay," she says. "Why are you here?"
"What do you mean?" Dante says, meeting her perceptive gaze straight on, as though in challenge.
"Nero came here because he wanted to understand his father. Vergil came here to build a relationship with his son," the therapist says. "Why are you here, Dante?"
"Because Vergil asked me to come," Dante says, a serious note entering his voice as he continues, "and I'll do anything to help my brother and my nephew."
Vergil has to look away at that, the heady emotion rising in his throat. Nero nudges Vergil's hand with his in a brief gesture of support, and Vergil spares his son a smile of thanks.
But when Vergil turns back towards his brother, Dante's eyes flicker away, hurt ghosting over them before his ever-present easy grin returns.
By the tilt of the therapist's head, Dante's momentary lapse has not escaped her. "So how do you feel now that Vergil and Nero have begun to work things out?" she says. "How has this impacted you?"
"Impacted me?" Dante's grin curves wider, even as his gaze narrows ever so slightly at her. "I'm pretty much content. I'm happy for them. Took them long enough, but they're actually a family now."
Vergil notes with a slow, twisting feeling in his gut that Dante has not automatically included himself in that phrase – the family that Vergil and Nero are.
"I see," the therapist says. She turns to Vergil. "I can sense you have something you want to say, Vergil. Why don't you share it with us?"
"Ah," Vergil says, blinking in surprise. "I–" He looks at his brother, at the way Dante is carefully avoiding his gaze even now, and wishes desperately that he had the same way with words in expressing himself as Blake does through poetry.
"Our family," he murmurs, eventually. "Our family, Dante."
Dante's gaze slides to meet his for the briefest instant, and he looks almost surprised for a moment.
"Yeah," he says. "That's what I said."
"No, you didn't," Nero interjects from behind Vergil. "You said a family."
For a moment, the smile freezes on Dante's face.
And then he relaxes, and says breezily, "Did I? My mistake."
"Hmm," the therapist says, tapping her pen against her knee, as though considering something. Then she straightens, looks Dante dead in the eye, and says, "Was it a mistake, Dante? How do you feel like you fit in with Nero and Vergil's relationship?"
Dante looks at the therapist, then, and Vergil catches a glimpse of the terrifying devil hunter within – sly intelligence with a sharp, blade-like smile hidden behind a veil of joking laughter.
"I'm not getting you," Dante says lightly, even as his demon powers obviously flare just under his skin – enough that Vergil feels it, a handsbreadth from his side.
"Hey," Nero is saying shortly to the therapist, "What are you implying–"
Heart thudding in his chest, Vergil rests his hand on top of Nero's, and Nero's mouth slams shut with an audible click.
"It's okay to admit that you're finding difficulty adjusting to new dynamics in the family, Dante," the therapist says. "Your feelings are just as valid as Vergil and Nero's."
"I don't know what you're talking about, lady," Dante says, baring his teeth in a grin so sharp that Vergil almost imagines fangs.
"I don't think it was a slip of the tongue when you described Vergil and Nero as a family, and not your family," the therapist says quite calmly, undaunted. "Vergil and Nero have made leaps and bounds in learning to be affectionate with one another, and it is understandable if you would feel some measure of discomfort with how things have changed."
Dante takes his arm off the back off the sofa.
Vergil tenses automatically in response, left hand drifting towards the Yamato at his side as he stares at the line of his brother's shoulders.
Dante props his elbows on his knees and leans forward with predatory, easy grace. The smile is still there, etched onto his face like a gash in marble.
"Now, I don't know who you think you are," Dante begins, quite amiably. "But if you think for one moment you can imply that I am not happy that my brother and my nephew have found each other, and if you think that I would not give up everything I had to let them be happy," – faint scarlet scales flicker around his eyes, as his voice deepens in a faint echo of his demon form – "You would be asking for death." There is shuttered pain there, hidden among determined, bitter fury.
The therapist's gaze skirts over Dante's slit-like pupils, the faint scales rippling just under his skin, and she nods. There is something in her gaze that shows understanding at last.
And Vergil, watching the faint, burning scales slowly fade under his brother's skin, thinks that he too begins to understand.
–Dante, eating alone, halfway through a cold pizza when Vergil lets himself in after a light-filled day with Nero–
–the way Dante leans away from Vergil's every touch now, as though steeling himself for a separation that has yet to come–
–piles of empty beer cans on the table, untouched pizza in the fridge, too-quick smiles and averted gazes, Dante flinching as Vergil cleans the wound in his leg, terrible jokes at his own pain pouring endlessly from between Dante's cracked lips–
Vergil realises with increasing dismay that Dante's hand has clenched into a fist at his side, a mere fingersbreath from Vergil's hand, but Dante still has not reached for him.
There is pain wrought into the easy line of Dante's shoulders.
If you think I would not give up everything I had to let them be happy–
"Dante," Vergil whispers. His heart is breaking.
Perhaps it is something in Vergil's voice, but Dante looks up and meets his gaze for the first time the entire session, a fiery, impenetrable wall in Dante's eyes.
"Dante," Vergil says, feeling a strangled note crawl into his voice despite his best efforts. "I'm so sorry."
Something cracks in Dante's gaze; like glass shattering asunder. His smile slips.
"What the hell are you apologizing for, dumbass?" he says, voice light, but towards the end of the sentence a telltale tremble scatters the syllables, makes the humour fall flat.
Vergil looks at his younger brother, who had supported him through his weakest, most vulnerable days after the dome, who had held him when he had broken again and again, whom Vergil had always thought unbreakable.
He opens his mouth to speak, and Dante looks away.
Vergil falls silent, aching.
"I think we should stop here for today," the therapist is saying, and Dante is off the sofa in a flash of scarlet and through the door almost before the receptionist has it open.
Vergil looks towards the therapist. "How do I…" he falters.
"Show him the same patience and love he has shown you when you were struggling," the therapist says, smiling kindly at him. "And if words fail, actions speak louder."
Vergil nods, and follows his brother.
"Not for the moment, Nero," he murmurs as Nero jogs to catch up with a frown on his face. "I will call you later."
It is a testament to how far they have come together that Nero simply nods in acceptance.
They pause together when the reach the top of the stairs until Vergil spots Dante's distinctive crimson sweater, already halfway down the street. Nero gives Vergil a brief farewell hug that Vergil returns gladly before Nero slips away into the crowd.
Vergil takes a breath of the cold afternoon air, and sets off after his brother.
(:~:)
Vergil finally tracks down Dante at an open-air seaside café on the far side of a park.
Dante looks up briefly at his brother's approach before continuing to demolish the biggest strawberry sundae Vergil has ever seen.
"Ice cream in winter?" Vergil says, lowering himself into the seat opposite his brother.
"Every season is strawberry sundae season," Dante says with the ghost of his usual humour, as he takes another massive spoonful. His gaze is fixed on the sundae before him and nothing else.
Vergil considers how best to approach the subject, but in the end the chatter of the café's patrons is too loud and the sea wind too chilled, so he reaches out and steals a strawberry instead.
Dante's spoon pauses halfway into the ice cream as Vergil plucks the strawberry from under his nose.
–and then Dante brings the spoon to his lips and continues to eat without a care, and Vergil feels the strawberry curdle to terror in his stomach.
"Dante, please," Vergil whispers.
"You don't have to do this, you know," Dante says, almost casually.
"Do what?"
"Pity me," Dante says, around another spoonful of ice cream. "It's going to happen, anyway. I'm just preparing for it."
"Dante," Vergil says quietly, "I've been neglecting you. I apologise. I'm not– I'm not going to leave you."
"Don't," Dante says, voice so sharp it stabs physically into Vergil's chest. "Don't make promises you can't keep. Don't make it worse."
The winter sunlight shines bright on both their silver-haired heads, fractures into fractals through the glass of the nearly empty sundae cup.
Dante weighs down a few bills under the sundae cup and stands. He gets up and begins to walk, hands buried in his pockets.
Vergil follows wordlessly until they reach a quieter area, and opens up a portal with the Yamato.
Dante goes upstairs the moment their boots leave snow for wooden floorboards, and comes down in full battle gear, sliding Ebony and Ivory into their holsters at his back, eyes shadowed.
"Dante," Vergil says, catching his brother by the back of the shoulder as Dante makes for the door.
"I'm going hunting," Dante says, with no inflection at all. He does not turn his head.
"Don't be a fool, Dante," Vergil says, tightening his grasp on his brother's shoulder. "You're not fully recovered."
"Wouldn't be the first time. I'll manage." Dante shrugs off Vergil's hand.
Vergil blinks, stung, but swallows the hurt. "Then I'm coming with you." His left hand drifts to the Yamato on his hip.
Dante's knuckles turn white on the door handle. "Vergil, please stop," he says, voice hard.
"Dante, I sorry if I–"
"It's not you, okay?" Dante says. His head turns minutely, so the edge of his too-bright smile just catches the afternoon light. "I'm really, really happy for you and Nero. You're right in putting him first. It's my fault I can't deal with being alone again."
There, watching his brother's smile twist against the sunlight, Vergil realises with a terrifying surge of dread that Dante truly believes that Vergil will leave him.
No.
Breath stuttering in his chest, Vergil reaches for his brother again, but Dante twists away.
"I'm okay," Dante says, and his smile is like glass, wrought by a master craftsman with decades of practice – a perfect mimicry of contentment, but utterly fragile. "I'm going to be okay, Vergil. You don't have to worry about me. I can deal with it. I always do, in the end."
"Dante," Vergil whispers, pain lancing up from his chest to his throat, choking through the word.
"So just–" Dante takes one long step back from Vergil's reach, stumbling a little on his injured leg. He is looking Vergil dead in the eye now, his own gaze raw. "Just leave me be. I just need to prepare myself a little. You don't need to feel like you have to help me. Nero needs you."
"I'm not leaving you," Vergil says, forcing his voice to remain steady. "Neither Nero or I will leave you."
Vergil catches sight of a hopeless longing in Dante's gaze – as though Dante cannot bring himself to believe what he so desperately wishes for.
"Do you really believe that?" Dante whispers hollowly.
"Yes," Vergil says immediately. "I do."
"I wish I did," Dante says, and disappears through the door in a gust of frozen air.
Vergil stands there alone, in the warm gold of the afternoon light, and feels utterly, completely helpless in the face of his brother's grief.
(:~:)
The afternoon fades to evening, and the gentle snowfall of the sunset hours turns into a howling blizzard.
At first, Vergil sits to wait with a book of poetry in his hands. But when the wind rises to a scream and the very air seems to turn to ice, seeping through the closed windows and hissing through the gaps in the doorframe, he finds even Blake's words blurring in his vision.
He abandons the volume beside the silent phone and paces the length of the shop as the lights flicker overhead, his hand on the Yamato and growing terror in his chest.
Vergil waits, and waits, the clack of his boots against the bloated floorboards echoing in the empty hours, the weight of his long, dark blue coat swinging over the frozen air, until he can wait no more.
His next step takes him past the worn line he has been tracking into the floorboards, his stride lengthening into a run as he reaches for the door–
–only to slide to a halt as the door almost opens in his face.
Vergil flings up a hand to protect his eyes from the torrent of frozen crystals that surges into the room through the open door, gasping in a breath so cold that it knives him from within.
The wind stops abruptly.
Vergil lowers his hand, blinking the stinging ice from his vision, and finds his brother smiling at him.
Or someone that might be Dante, under all that snow and frozen blood. There is a the remnant of a cut on Dante's cheek, healed over but the blood flash-frozen in a scarlet smear against his temple. His hair is lined with ice-crystals, brilliantly white against his silver-white hair, and there are lines of dried blood at Dante's chin where his own hair must have drawn lashes against his exposed skin in the cold.
Every inch of Dante not covered in ice and cracking leather is dripping slowly with congealed blood.
New terror crashes down on Vergil, turning his limbs to lead.
Dante quirks a bright smile at him, and a frozen, utterly dry skin of Dante's lower lip cracks open.
"Dante," Vergil chokes in horror as a new line of fresh blood seeps down through Dante's unshaven beard.
Dante barks a laugh, and lifts a filthy glove to swipe roughly at his lip. "Eh," he comments, looking down at his scarlet-stained fingers. "You didn't have to wait up for me, Vergil," he says cheerfully as he wipes his fingers carelessly on his shirt. Each syllable reopens the wound, sends fresh droplets dripping down on his ruined clothing, and Dante glances down at the scarlet stains for a moment before shrugging and striding towards the fridge.
"Dante," Vergil repeats, and hears the plea in his own voice as he stumbles after his brother. He notes with detached horror that Dante's left leg is dragging a little behind him as he moves, and there is a suspiciously dark stain right over the healing wound on his thigh.
Dante's fingers leave red smears on the white surface of the fridge as he pulls a beer from its depths.
"Seriously, go to sleep," Dante says airily as he cracks open the can with a filthy finger. "Don't wait up on my account."
Vergil watches, terrified, as Dante brings the can to his lips and throws back the beer in one long draw, alcohol seeping through the gaping cut on his lower lip, turning the trail of congealing blood on his chin pale pink.
It has to hurt like hell.
Dante does not even flinch.
Dante lets the empty can drop from his fingers to clatter against the floor, wipes his mouth with the back of a filthy glove, and bends to open the fridge again.
Vergil takes one long step forward into Dante's space and pushes the fridge door shut.
"Dante," he says, reaching for his brother's shoulder, "This isn't like you."
A flash of crimson leather is all Vergil registers before the crack of his spine against the brick wall smashes the breath from his lungs.
The air escapes from between his lips in a shuddering wheeze, and he feels the rough surface of the wall scrape against his shoulder blades as his demon powers take over, smoothing over the hairline fractures in his spine.
Dante's hands are fisted in Vergil's collar, and Vergil's vision is full of his brother's white hair where Dante has bowed his head over his hands, as though he cannot fight any longer.
"Please," Dante whispers into Vergil's shirt, and Vergil hears the cracking edge in his brother's voice, a trembling dam against yet unshed tears. "Please just go."
Then, quick as they came, Dante's hands are gone from Vergil's collar, and Dante is twisting away towards the stairs, stumbling over his injured leg.
Vergil hastens forward when Dante's leg buckles on the first step, but Dante flings up a hand without looking back, and Vergil stops in his tracks.
Dante heaves himself up the stairs, step by bloody step, bright drops of blood splattering against the wood, as Vergil stands there, frozen, listening to the sound of his brother's teeth grinding against the pain.
Then Dante turns the corner into the upstairs corridor, and Vergil hears the snap of Dante's door closing behind him.
Vergil stands in the pocket of silence that remains, and wonders why the world is not howling along with the screaming in his mind.
He does not–
He does not know what to do.
He is not Dante, who knows how to comfort as easily as breathing; who sees through Vergil almost more clearly than Vergil knows himself.
He is Vergil, who only recently learned how to speak without wounding with every word, whose quest for power nearly cost him his son and his brother, both at once.
"Mother," Vergil whispers.
He recalls the red silk sleeves of his mother's favourite housecoat closing around him, warming him, wiping away his tears.
It is a cruel trick of fate that Dante had been the only one to inherit their mother's talent for kindness and comfort, when Vergil so desperately needs to comfort his brother now.
Then he remembers.
When words fail, actions speak louder.
The words carry his nerveless feet up the stairs, past the copper coins of his brother's blood. They lift his hand to wrap around the stained doorknob of his brother's door, and allows him to pick his way across the scattered debris of Dante's room to his brother's side.
Dante is lying on his side on top of the covers, facing the wall, crimson coat and ruined boots discarded on the floor. His blood-soaked hair glows red and silver in the moonlight.
Vergil looks at the sheets, at the bloodstains that mar them, at his brother's grime-soaked shirt.
He comes to a decision.
Vergil takes off his own long, pristine blue coat, folding it neatly. He looks about for a cleaner spot, and sets the coat on a mildly dusty box of records by his feet.
Then he shucks his boots, takes a single step forward, and climbs into bed beside his brother.
Dante's sharp inhale is a palpable thing as Vergil shifts close, pulling the coverlet out from under them and settling the warm blankets over them both.
Vergil wraps his arm around his brother's middle, uncaring for the black and crimson stains that instantly blossom on the sleeve of his white dress shirt, and presses his face into the back of his brother's dirty hair.
Dante's hair smells like dried demon blood. Vergil does not care.
Dante begins to shake in earnest, shoulders shuddering against Vergil's chest. He turns his face further into the pillow as though trying to hide, but Vergil only curls closer.
"I'm here," Vergil whispers, reaching up to tuck one filthy strand of white-silver hair behind his brother's ear before tightening his arm around Dante again. "I have you."
Dante's breath turns to stifled sobs.
Vergil leans his cheek into the back of Dante's neck wordlessly, and holds him steady until Dante's hitching gasps turn to the long, even breaths of sleep at last.
Next chapter: Lots and lots of brotherly and father-son fluff to make up for this, and a Sparda Christmas.
Thanks for the lovely comments!