Title: The Memento
Characters: Dante, Patty
Word Count: 1.796
Summary: Patty discovers that Dante has some secrets that make him look oddly human.
Warnings: Treads into anime-verse. Set before Crossfire. Mild language.
Disclaimer: Devil May Cry and all related characters belong to Capcom.

Dante was still apprehensive of Patty hanging around his office so much and going on cleaning campaigns, but he had given up trying to talk her into stopping. Any such attempts had been futile, at best. So, whenever she came in and started stomping around with a bucket and a mop, he just accepted the inevitable, kept to himself, and lay on the couch to get a quick nap. It didn't take a lot for him to tune out the noises and sleep through the whole thing.

That evening Patty was attacking his desk, clearing away beer bottles and cans, empty pizza cartons and bits of useless paper. The girl seemed almost furious in her fussing.

"The whole place turns into a real pigsty in just a week!" she huffed, scrubbing a cheese stain off the desk.

Dante was lying on the sofa as usual, with a magazine left open over his face, arms crossed behind his head. He ignored her. Patty glared at him for a moment and then put down her scrubbing rag to pick up a logbook left on the desk. She raised an eyebrow at it. Dante rarely did any accounting or any form of paperwork, but earlier she had seen him scribble some things in this logbook after he came back from a job. Perhaps he was keeping some track of his earnings after all. She pulled one of the drawers of the desk open to stow it in there, but before she placed it in, she paused and stared at the contents of the drawer.

Patty gave a quick glance to Dante. He seemed to be snoozing for good. Quietly she put the logbook on the desk's surface again and reached in the drawer, pulling out a folded piece of dark cloth. She picked it up from its edge, so as she lifted it, the weight inside it moved and fell out of the folds of the cloth as it opened, landing in the drawer with a small clatter.

"Where'd this come from?" she wondered aloud, picking the object up.

Though she knew better than touching anything unusual in Dante's office by now, she was fairly certain this particular trinket was harmless. First of all, it was a crucifix and she was sure that if anything would be demonic, it probably wouldn't be shaped like a cross. And after all, it was so painfully plain-looking that it couldn't have been anything other than a simple trinket. She held it in her hand with a curious look. It was a small cross, an inch or two long. It looked like it was made of silver and had a black, smooth and reflective stone set in the very middle where the arms met. It was a little clumsy-looking, as if it had been made by hand and not within a mold. It looked old, but the silver had not surrendered its glisten. She raised an eyebrow at the cord it hung from, though. While the ornament itself looked like it was of some value, it was attached to a rough, black cord that felt like aged leather, but by the texture she could tell it was some kind of thin rope. She couldn't see how something so cheap and vulgar could be attached to what seemed to be a precious antique of some kind.

More importantly though, that necklace was obviously made for a woman; so why did Dante have it?

If this is his idea of a proper present for a girl, he really is stupid, she thought with a frown. And this thing looks expensive. So he can afford silver jewelry, but not a chain to go with it-or clothes for me?

"Patty, what are you doing?"

Patty nearly jumped when he spoke. "Hey, I thought you were sleeping," she said. Looking over at the sofa, she saw him pull the magazine off his face and sit up, putting his feet on the floor.

"I was, but when you stop making a racket, that's bad news," he sighed. He rested his elbows on his knees briefly, looking over at her.

He saw her standing over his desk and immediately noticed the dark piece of cloth lying open on it. His eyebrows bowed up slightly and he stood up.

"What've you got there?" he said, going over to her and trying to look nonchalant.

"I found this in your desk!" Patty said confidently. She held the necklace out to the side, away from him while putting out a hand and stopping him in his trail. "What is this?" she demanded. "Look, if you're going to buy jewelry for a girl, you need a better taste, no woman would wear a cross this old with a piece of rope and-"

"Patty, give me that," he said, a little sharply.

She stared back, stunned. He hardly ever talked like that, at least not around her. It wasn't like his tone when demons were involved either, she could tell that much.

"Don't make me repeat myself," he went on, a little bit forcefully, holding out his hand.

This tone of his made her feel that the issue was oddly...personal. Without a word, she put the necklace in his hand. Silently, with a manner of suppressed indignation, he swept the cloth up from the desk and moved away, but didn't fold it up. He seemed to hesitate, staring at the cross in his hand with the cloth idly held in the other while his arm hung on his side.

"So what is that?" she asked. "Whose is it?"

Her questions seemed to snap him out his absent-minded state and he put the cross necklace in the cloth again and folded it up. He didn't answer though.

"Hey, don't go quiet on me! Tell me!" she insisted, almost stamping her foot on the floor. "Don't make me bet it on a poker game-you know you'll lose!"

"Belongs to this girl I used to know. A long time ago," he said dryly, making her hush immediately. He put the folded up object in his pocket, his hand resting there idly as he stared out the window, keeping his back to her.

"A girl? How long ago?" Patty insisted, now that she got him talking.

He sighed, turning around and leaning his back on the wall, crossing his ankle over the other, hand still his pocket. "Ten years or something."

"That's a long time!" she exclaimed. "Where is she now?"

He didn't answer.

She gulped. "Is she...dead?"

He snorted "I don't know. I don't know where she is. But that's part of the fun. She always liked surprises."

She couldn't understand how that could make sense. He didn't know if that girl was alive or dead and yet he spoke of it as if it was some kind of game. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"That I don't know where she is or what she's doing. I haven't seen her all this time," he pointed out the obvious.

"But why?"

"She asked me not to."

Patty huffed. "Ugh, you must've treated her really badly if she asked you that!" she said, folding her arms.

Dante didn't respond to that jibe and Patty frowned. Normally, Dante ignored her when she asked him things like these. But he seemed amused to nearly make a joke out of the memory of this mysterious girl. Still, he was answering and she was going to milk that for it was worth.

"What's her name?"

He smirked in a lopsided manner. "Tess. Come to think of it, I always called her Twig, though..."

Patty grimaced. "Ugh, what kind of name is that?"

He shrugged. "Wasn't my fault she was so skinny. Thin as a twig."

"What, thinner than me?"

"Way thinner."

"Why, was she sick or something?"

Dante scoffed. "No, she was just puny. You'd think most girls start looking feminine at that age, but she was just skinny."

"Doesn't sound like you liked her much," she huffed. "You never talk about people like that."

He shrugged. "Heh, you should have heard her talk about me. Real shrew, that girl. Makes you and Lady both look tame."

Patty raised an eyebrow at that comment, but she was curious about this girl. "How did you meet her?"

Dante huffed, moving back to his desk at leisure. He sat in his chair and raised his legs on the desk, letting them thud on the wood as he crossed them. "Had to live in a boarding house, before I got this joint. Her granny and...uncle ran the place. You could say we were neighbors."

"You were a kid then?" she suggested. She tried to picture how Dante might've looked as a teenager or a kid. "What about her, was she older-"

"Same age," he interrupted.

"So were you friends or something?"

"Something like that. We fought a lot, but we got along."

"What happened to her?"

That question was not answered. Dante just exhaled quietly and linked his fingers together, resting his hands on his chest. He didn't seem like he wanted to answer that. Patty huffed, thinking that this was all she was going to get out of him and seized the rag from the desk, turning around to go back to her cleaning.

"She had to leave. No idea where to. She gave me this thing to hold on to for her," he said, sounding almost angry about that, eyes shut and looking like he was going to doze off. But he opened his eyes again and actually glared at her. "This is between you and me, got it?" he said.

Patty stopped, looking over. He seemed really affronted by the issue after all. She nodded sheepishly, but she still asked: "Why?"

"Because you rubbing salt on old wounds is bad enough," he said, and had a rather grim tone.

She stared at him a little; this definitely was a personal issue. He never talked about himself. What Patty knew about him came from Lady mostly, sometimes Morrison too. Neither had mentioned this or any part of his life before they met him. He just never spoke of that. She asked him another thing that crossed her mind.

"So, was she your girlfriend?"

Dante looked at her with the corner of his eyes for a moment, like the question had offended him somehow, then he just picked up one of the magazines on the desk and opened it, fixing his gaze in the open pages. She raised an eyebrow. There he went again, with the puzzling silence. And yet this time she got the feeling that he had reacted a little differently than when she had asked him the same thing about Trish or Lady.

Like the question had embarrassed him.

NOTE: I really was experimenting here, to see how the anime-verse of DMC worked with my stories. Not too well to be honest, and I've never been certain about just how canon the anime is in relation to the games. I mean, yeah, Capcom claims it is, but I'm not a 100% sure it works right. But this snippet was pretty good and I decided to include it in the anthology.

It spawned from me trying to bridge those two moments in Frail Equilibrium and Crossfire, concerning Tess' necklace. I don't think seeing it is painful for Dante; he just prefers to keep it in the back of his mind rather than constantly facing with that long moment of loneliness that I described in the end of Frail Equilibrium. Which some people found somewhat emotionally overbearing or over-charged in terms of DMC's overall atmosphere. Some of you even got angry over it.