No one is surprised.

"You take as long in the shower as any woman," Dante said as soon as I stepped out. "I'll be lucky if there's any hot water left." He'd draped himself across the couch, feet dangling over one armrest and his head leaned against the other. I saw him through frays of wet hair and the towel still draped over my head. The usual lazy smirk was back on his face.

"We don't really run out of hot water, and you didn't say you wanted a turn." The more I fluffed my hair dry with the towel, the less I had to look at him, and the less he could look at me. I heard the floor shift under his weight as he got to his feet.

"I did more actual moving around than you, and hey, maybe I wanted to warm up a bit too," he said. "Also I might have accidentally fallen asleep before I took a proper shower last night."

Gross.

He must have heard the noise of disgust I made. "Hey, it was a long trip, and there was all the running around, and I was a little worried you would try to murder me. Don't go turning into Black while I'm bathing, alright? Things would get weird, and I don't think you need that level of stress."

"Shut up," I hissed, tugging the towel down to hide my face completely as he stepped close.

He was probably grinning when he leaned in. "You've got quite a blush going for you."

How he saw that with my face covered, I had no idea. "Go take a shower," I said. "You're gross."

When he stepped past and into the hall, a thought hit me, and my anger faltered. A swell of anxiety rushed in to take its place, and each breath seemed to make thorns stab into my lungs. If Black took over while Dante wasn't there to stop him or talk me out of it, I wasn't sure how long I'd be out. I wasn't sure how far Black could go or where I'd end up. Or if I'd ever wake up at all.

"Hey, Dante." The call fell from my mouth in a rush. I couldn't bring myself to look at him.

"Yeah?"

My breaths felt stale and useless like the air was void of oxygen. I had to swallow the words threatening to claw up my throat. "Do you want something to change into again?" I asked just to say anything else.

"Nah, my clothes are still on the 'clean enough' side, and all your clothes make me look like someone's dad. I'm not made for slacks or sweatpants. That's dorky even for me."

The thought occurred to me that he wanted me to react to that. I was wearing sweatpants, and the clothes I'd given him weren't mine. I could have turned and snapped at him. That was how things were supposed to go, but the thought slipped from my grasp.

"Dante."

"Am I going to get to shower, or…?"

I pulled the towel from my head so I could see the living room around me - the old photos, the radio, and the gashes on the wall that hadn't been there before Dante fought with Black. From my weak, pained breaths came that damn question again. "If he takes over completely," I said, "if I'm gone, will you kill me?"

At his pause, I turned to find him staring me down, frustration simmering in his eyes. "Nero, we've been over this."

"Don't write me off again. I'm not saying this can't be fixed." Grasping some strength to level my voice, I held his gaze. "Maybe we can get rid of Black. I sure as hell hope we can. But I don't want to be blind and deaf while my body is being used to hurt others. If you ever think I'm gone for good, or he's putting others in danger, I want for you to take me out."

In silence, he watched me, searching for any hint of uncertainty. I had none, and his gaze broke from mine.

"You understand that's still an unfair request to place on someone," he said. His eyes followed the lines along the floor. "Cruel to ask a friend to finish you off."

Though the idea that we were friends was an odd one, I nodded. Other than Kyrie, he was the only person who bothered with me. Maybe that made us friends.

"I guess it wouldn't matter who did it at that point," I said, "but I don't know that many other people could kill me. Just promise me, Dante."

Bowing his head, he breathed a sigh. "If there's nothing left, I'll do what I have to. But only then, kid. I won't give up on you easy." A smirk flashed back to his face as always. "But this line of thinking doesn't get us anywhere, so cheer up. It's no fun if you're moping all the time." He made it sound so simple, but maybe it was for him. He was always grinning like an idiot.

"Yeah, I can only be so chipper with you around," I said.

"That's the spirit!"

As he showered, I stretched out on the couch like he had before. Exhaustion sank into me so quickly that I was closing my eyes one moment and being woken up the next. Dante kept smacking my cheek even after my eyes were open.

"Why?" I drawled.

"You feel like a furnace," he said. "Your face is all rosy."

"What does this have to do with you hitting me?" Though I didn't feel warm, my head was fuzzy, and my vision seemed to sway like I'd downed half a bottle of wine again.

"I couldn't get you to wake up for a minute there," he said with a half-smile. "You were supposed to take a warm shower, not a hot one. Probably overheated yourself. Sweats weren't the best idea."

"First I'm too cold, then I'm too hot," I grumbled, dragging myself upright to make room for him. "There's no winning with you."

When he dropped to the other end of the couch, his pretense of humor vanished. I found another piercing stare cutting into me. This one, I couldn't match. "It's not about me," he said. "Could you tell at all when you were cold? Can you tell now?"

It was clear he already knew the answer, so I saw no point in lying. "No. I don't feel hot. I couldn't tell how warm the shower was. I can still feel pressure, but..." Looking down at my hand, I curled and uncurled it. My skin was splotched with red. Biting hard on the inside of my cheek, I made sure I could still feel pain. It was no worse than a prick of a needle, but I could feel it. At least I still had that much.

I tried to ignore the blood filling my mouth.

"I do have some help coming," Dante said. "I know I'm pretty useless about this whole thing, but my friends are knowledgeable when it comes to all the fun occult stuff. They also have money, so they should be able to use proper transportation to get here sooner. Uh, we'll owe them for that, though."

I already owed Kyrie and maybe Dante - still wasn't sure about that one. With a huff, I dropped my chin into my palm and leaned against the armrest. "I feel like I'll have no money by the end of this."

"Oh yeah, they'll bleed you dry. Don't ask for any extra favors." As we lapsed into silence, his eyes wandered the living room. I knew that he couldn't let the quiet hold for too long, so I waited for the inevitable. "Hey," he said, "do TVs exist here?"

"No, they're a myth in Fortuna. A legend, like Sparda."

His shoulders bounced with his snickering. "See, you're more fun like this."

He was too stupid to even feel insulted. Rolling my eyes, I waved my hand toward the empty TV stand. "We had a TV, but it broke a little while back." I felt no need to mention that I'd been the one to break it while trying to use my Bringer to grab something from across the room. Kyrie had been quick to add a "No using weird arms in the house" rule after that. "We still have a radio, though," I said.

He cocked a brow. "A radio? What is this, the forties? How many stations could an island even have? Three? Four?"

If I told him that there were five and only two running this time of day, he was going to laugh, and I was not going to give him the satisfaction. "Do you need to be constantly entertained or something?" I snapped.

Like he'd been waiting for the question, his eyes brightened with his grin. "Yes! Come on, kid, there's got to be something we can do besides sit around and mope. I'm your guest. You're supposed to entertain me."

"I didn't invite you, remember?" He would not get away with pulling that card, and if he kept trying, he would be sleeping outside. "If you're that bored, read a book or play some solitaire."

"Cards?" He rubbed his hand across the stubble on his chin. "Yeah, that'll work. Do you know how to play poker?"

"I am not gambling against you." And I had no idea how to play poker.

"No fun," he sighed, his hand dropping to press over his heart like I'd wounded him. "That's most of the good card games. Well, where are the cards? We can find some game for your innocent sensibilities."

He was bound to keep complaining if I didn't tell him. This must have been what babysitting a little kid was like. "I'm not agreeing to play, but they're in the ottoman," I said, nodding toward the long cushion sitting against the wall. If he tried to get me to play go fish, I would shove the cards down his throat.

Hopping to his feet, he strode over to the ottoman and popped the lid up. "Oh, board games," he said. "You were holding out on me. I play a mean game of Sorry."

Despite his usual obnoxious grin, I found myself smirking in return. "The name is fitting because that's exactly how I'd feel if I let myself play a board game with you. Let me guess, you play red."

"Naturally. And yourself? Blue?"

"Green."

Kyrie could never settle between red or yellow, and Credo stuck to blue. The three of us had played every game in the ottoman to death, long past the age we should have stopped, but the boxes must have all been covered in dust by now. Since the Savior incident, Kyrie hadn't wanted to even open the ottoman because- Shit.

I jolted upright, internally begging for Dante to just grab a pack of cards and shut the thing for good. When he spoke again, though, his voice curled with mischief.

"Is this a photo album?" He pulled out the black one - of course it was the damn black one - and turned it over in his hands. A wry smile pulled at his lips.

"Put it back," I hissed.

The bastard flipped it open. "Why? Are there baby pictures of you in here? I bet you were cute."

"No one has baby pictures of me, asshole." The floor seemed to tilt under my feet, but I stalked over and snatched at the book, only to catch Dante's foot against my gut. With a light shove, he pinned me against the wall. "There are fucking boundaries," I snarled as I latched my hand around his ankle and tried to drag his gross foot off of me.

"Wait," he said. He wasn't smiling anymore. "Why are there so many pictures of you in a hospital?"

Leaning back, I knocked my skull against the wall. "Dante, do you really think we need to talk about my childhood? I will play a dumb board game to entertain you."

Though he dropped his foot, he kept flipping through the pages. "I would get sick here or there," he said. "But we always got over it fast."

My brow puzzled at the use of "we" but he continued, not paying any mind to the odd word choice.

"I guess I thought demon blood kept us hardier than that. How long were you in the hospital? You looked like death, kid."

For someone who was so quick to change the topic of conversation when he didn't like it, Dante never knew when to let something go. With a hiss of a sigh, I rubbed my hand across my face. I guessed none of it mattered. The memories weren't traumatizing or anything. I just didn't want Dante giving me that same pitying look I'd faced for so long. Oh, woe is Nero, the tiny weak kid stuck in the hospital. It was fucking annoying. My only consolation was that Dante looked more confused than anything. He may have been too much of a sadist to feel pity.

"I was just really sick," I confessed with a shrug. "My immune system was shit, so every cold turned into a problem. I was in and out of the hospital for a long time. Got so sick at one point that the doctors gave an ETA for my death." I gave an irritable snort. I hadn't learned about that bit 'til years later. Not that they would have told me as a kid that I had a few hours left to live, but I'd been so out of it at the time that I couldn't make sense of a single word anyone said to me. Consciousness came in short bouts of blurred images and garbled sounds.

"I got over it somehow," I continued. "Woke up. People talked about how it was a miracle for weeks, but that was the same time I lost hearing in my right ear. The fever or infection or something took it. I hated going to the hospital, though. Glad I never really had to go back after that, or I would have lost it."

Dante's eyes still burned with curiosity, but they tore from the page in the album to catch hold of mine. "Is that when your eyes changed color too?" he asked.

"What?" I couldn't help but shrink back under his stare. "What are you talking about?"

Flipping the book around, he pointed to one of the pictures of me trying to hide behind Credo to avoid the camera while Kyrie tried to drag me into view. "They're brown," Dante said.

"Probably the lighting," I muttered. But he was right. They did look dark.

He flipped to another photo of me pouting about something - probably the camera. Credo and Kyrie's parents were obsessive about photos when they first took me in, and I'd never known how to deal with the attention.

In the close-up, it was clear that my eyes were brown like wet sand with flecks of green around the outside. "Weird," was all I could think to say.

Dante flipped forward two pages to the pictures of the party they'd thrown for me after I got out of the hospital. I was still on so many drugs at the time that I'd had no idea what was going on and looked half-asleep in every picture.

And in every picture, my eyes were blue.

"Yeah, that was right when I got out of the hospital," I said, rubbing my eyes to hold back a growing headache. "I don't know, Dante. Maybe the albinism didn't reach my eyes until then." That was not how albinism worked at all, but I had no other answer for him. The drugs could have done something weird. I'd been on all sorts.

"And you stopped being sick after that?" Dante pressed.

"Yeah, mostly." I had no idea what he was getting at. All of that had happened so long ago. A gentle but irritating ringing started up in my right ear like a buzzing insect. I dug the heel of my hand against my ear to try stifling it.

"I didn't get my Trigger until I got stabbed like three damn times," I said, "and my arm only changed when Kyrie was about to get hurt, so maybe it was something like that - my demon side kicking in to save me."

Dante seemed hesitant to speak, a war flashing behind his eyes as they darted back and forth through his thoughts. "But you weren't the one in danger when your arm changed."

"Not really, but I was about out of my mind with worry," I sighed. My head was killing me. Every pulse of my heart was like an ice pick to the skull. "I don't remember it too clearly. There were all these demons, and that voice was bitching at me." The words seemed to slip aimlessly from my mouth as I fought to think against the blinding pain in my head. "My arm did get damaged during that, and it changed afterward, so that's…" I couldn't remember what I was going to say, so I just let it go.

"Voice?" Dante echoed. He sounded far away.

The ringing was getting louder. "Power," I murmured, recalling the words I'd heard. "Need more power." Too loud to be thoughts, too soundless to be real. I'd heard it from nowhere yet all around me. Just like with Black.

The ringing was deafening.

I caught a glimpse of Dante reaching for me as the world melted. He looked lost, stricken. If Dante was scared, I should have been too, but I couldn't feel much of anything. I must have been falling.

As before, Black's voice followed me into the abyss.

"You've said too much, boy. I warned you."

I felt less like I'd woken up and more like I'd been snapped back into reality. I'd already been sitting up when I came to. My eyes had been open before I could see. The only light came from my arm and a scattering of moonlight, but I'd come to know the Order library well enough that I didn't need to look around.

Black had put me back in the same seat at the same table. The record book was still open in front of me. Again, though, it was different. In the pale blue glow from my arm, I read the new line of the flowing script. "Ask if you must. This will be your one and only chance."

"Ask what? Who?" I murmured, rubbing my hand across my face to ease the pounding in my head. When that didn't help, I rested my hand over my eyes like Dante had done before. After a few seconds, I sighed and looked back to the book. "Where's Dante?"

The claws of my right hand curled around a pen lying beside it. I still couldn't feel the arm, still couldn't bring myself to move it, yet it drifted as though pulled by a string and dashed out an answer on the page. "I used Yamato to get away from Dante, though I'm sure he's on his way."

I'd lost my mind for sure. "Yamato? How? What!?" I barked.

The Bringer - or Black, I guessed - swatted the end of the pen against the paper a few times. I must have been annoying him. Good.

"It is of little consequence," he wrote, "but you could hardly use a portion of Yamato's potential. Are you going to ask anything of import, or should I end this farce early?" He really didn't have a right to complain about anything I said when he wasted so much time with his haughty words and calligraphy.

"How about you get the fuck out of my body?" I said as I reached over to snatch the pen away. My left hand froze before I could touch the pen. A chill like poison ran from my shoulder to my fingertips, and then I felt nothing. I could only watch as my arm moved back to rest on the table.

"It is as much mine as it is yours," Black wrote while my heart seemed to tear itself to pieces in its frantic beating. "Moreso, in fact."

"Bullshit." My voice came out in a whisper, empty of the anger I was struggling to maintain. Fear was eating me up inside.

"You would have died on several occasions if not for me," Black wrote. "You owe me your life. I allowed you to continue as you wished for some time, but I've come to collect. Pay your dues with dignity, or I will continue to make this hard on you."

"Fuck you." Though my voice cracked, I'd at least found it again. "What have you ever done but almost gotten me killed? I never asked for anything from you."

"You did," he wrote. "Anything to save her, you said. I let you save her. I let you save this cursed island too."

"You're lying," I hissed. "You're fucking lying."

He tapped the pen's tip to the paper a few times before picking up another line. "Had it not been for my aid, you would not have lived past childhood. Your demon blood was diluted, and your body is weak. A fever was enough to break you. I lent you my power for years without interference. Believe what you wish. That is the truth."

"Like hell." I wouldn't believe a word of it. I refused. "Why do you even need my body if it's so weak, you sick bastard?"

"Weak or not, it is my body as much as it is yours," he wrote again. "It would be buried if I hadn't kept you alive as a child and summoned Yamato so that you could partially Trigger. Not to mention the many other times you needed my power to survive." As he reached the end of the page, the way my hands flipped to the next made me think I could have been looking through someone else's eyes, watching their movements instead of my own.

"This is my body," I said. "I was born with it, and I'm pretty sure you had nothing to do with that. I don't owe you anything."

He paused before answering. "It makes no difference what you think. Do you have anything else to ask?"

Of course. I had a thousand questions, but none of them mattered. At this rate, nothing would change. "Is this entertaining to you or something?" I asked. "Why are we talking like this?"

The scribbling of his pen started up again, the sound drilling into my head. "Entertaining? No. Think of it as a final favor." He'd never done me a damn favor. "I would have preferred to talk in a different way, but you do not hear my voice at most times. When you do, it seems to trouble you. I thought it reasonable to give you some answers because you were so confused. Had Dante not interfered, I might have given you more time, but I knew he would be trouble, so I rushed things."

I couldn't see why Dante's presence mattered. "Dante didn't do anything," I said, more matter-of-fact than spiteful. I didn't feel any anger toward him. At least he'd tried.

"No, he did not."

That was all Black wrote, and I stared at the paper in silence until Black began to twirl the pen between his fingers. Over and under in a practiced rhythm. I'd never been able to do that before.

"What are you, exactly?" I asked.

The pen flicked back into his grip. "I am a demon," he wrote. "I am of Sparda's blood, like you, but you hold a fraction of what I possess. I am the source of your power."

"Pretty sure we have the same blood, but okay."

The pen sat in one spot on the page for a tense moment, leaving a small blot when he picked it up again. "I had my own form years ago," he wrote.

I clicked my tongue, my lip twitching toward a snarl. He'd had his own body. He shouldn't have needed mine, the bastard. "Did someone steal it?" I asked with a growl. "That sounds like it would suck, you know."

Another pause. "When Dante arrives, I'll be ending this. If you have any other pressing questions, I suggest you ask them."

"Whatever your goal is, you're not getting away with it," I spat. "This is my body, and I'll fight you with whatever's left of me. Even if I can't, Dante will find a way to get rid of you, or he'll kill us both."

"You would die either way," he wrote.

I took a deep breath just to feel air in my lungs, unsure how many more times I'd be able to. Somewhere behind the fallen walls around me was a crash of footsteps that made dust fall from what was left of the ceiling.

"Then at least we'll go to hell together, Black," I said.

The glow of my arm dimmed as he wrote in broader, sweeping strokes. I had to squint to read.

"Vergil. I would say it's nice to meet you, but I've known you for so long, and it would be more accurate to say goodnight, Nero."

A cloud must have passed over the moon because it was so dark, and with each blink, the light faded further. When I rushed to stand, my arms helped to push me up, but I couldn't feel the table against my palms. The same sickening cold bled into my legs.

A crash rattled the floor under my feet, and I turned to find Dante leaning against a broken door frame, gasping for breath. He could have been a shadow, just a vague outline of features to my worsening eye. "Kid!" he called between gulps of air. "Nero, that you?" He wasn't standing more than a few paces away, but he sounded like he could have been far beyond my sight, a distant echo.

Ringing swelled in both my ears.

"I'm sorry," I tried to say. I couldn't hear my own voice. Black drowned me out again.

"Pay your debt in silence, boy."

Goodnight, Nero.