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“I hate it. I feel like… like I can’t control myself.”
Nero’s confession came so late at night that it was morning, voice low and cracked. The residential district had fallen quiet hours ago and now, at about five and as the sun threatened to rise, there was peace. They sat together on the sofa, bottles of cheap beer in hand to enjoy a moment to catch their collective breath before crashing out, but it seemed Nero needed to get something off his mind; Dante had all the time in the world for him. It wasn’t a bother. Nothing ever was to him.
“I… I can smell her sometimes. Like… every time her heart beats, her blood. When she’s coming on. You know?” He stumbled over his words, embarrassed, but Dante just nodded. The quiet between them hung heavy, anticipatory, foreign. He’d never known Dante to keep his mouth shut for so long. “You… do too?” Nero asked, so small.
“Yeah. It’s good, isn’t it?” Dante’s voice came out huskier than usual, low and dangerous. He took a swig from his bottle without looking up and scoffed. Nero swallowed; he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to agree or not, but he looked down into his bottle all the same. Dante leant forwards and sighed a little as he tried to find his words, but Nero beat him to the punch.
“She cooks bones for me, y’know,” Nero laughed into his hand, brow creasing. “She… she eats fucking bones for me, Dante. ‘Anything’, she says. Anything to help me. Do I deserve it? Where’s she gonna draw the line, when I want to gnaw them fucking raw? When I just want the fucking pig’s head to myself? What if I want…”
Dante finally turned his eyes to Nero.
“Sometimes… I just want to put my teeth on her and keep going. When I hurt her, it… it doesn’t upset me as much as it should. I just don’t know what to do,” came Nero’s admission. He held his face in his hand and felt tears on the crease of his eye, welling on his thick lashes like guilty dew. “I… had this dream where I…” He couldn’t even finish his thought for choking up and eager to try and comfort him, Dante shifted aside to face him more.
“It’s how we are, kid. We can’t train it out of ourselves, no matter how hard we try,” Dante said, depressingly plain. It was a matter of fact. A way of the world. “It doesn’t go away, we can just try and control it. Sometimes, it’s in ways that they won’t understand or… will find vulgar, distasteful or obscene, ya get me?” He swallowed, turning the bottle over in his hands. “We’re lucky—“
“I don’t feel lucky!”
“No, you don’t. But we’re not just demons, are we? Look. It’s hard, I get it,” Dante tried his best to sound comforting, but he wasn’t sure on how well he was doing. He was tired as Nero was and had agonised over it all years ago, but fuck, it left his heart aching for the lad. “That it’s not all of who you are. Your instincts are just impulses, right? You don’t have to act on them and they don’t make you bad. Humans won’t understand it, they never will, no matter how open-minded they think they are. They will never look at you kindly if you tell them what you told me. Do you understand?”
There was a level of urgency, of seriousness to Dante’s voice that jerked Nero back into the room and commanded his attention. He looked up from where he held his head and met Dante’s eyes for the first time and saw the pain there, the warning he wished he’d had himself.
“Y-Yeah. I understand.”
Dante had seen that very same agony before, what seemed like a lifetime ago.
“When… you have demon blood, kid, it gets harder the less you have,” Dante started, his voice hushed and grave. “It, uh, shouts louder than human blood. Wants its progenitor, if you get me?” He tried to explain, but the knit to his brow showed how little even he understood about it. “Your father… he struggled. A lot,” Dante sighed and picked at the paper of his bottle. “We never knew what it was that made he and I different, but I think… I think he was ill. Physically. We couldn’t eat the same after, ah… we were left alone.”
It was difficult for him to speak. Nero could tell how carefully Dante was choosing his words, how he agonised over them to avoid his voice from breaking. He took steadying breaths and busied himself with the bottle.
“… But he had the same desire. I didn’t feel it as badly. So we tried raw meat, didn’t work, he just got sicker. Cooked it, even worse. He had to let it rot before he’d hold it down,” Dante explained. He could see it just like it had happened yesterday, hear Vergil hacking, coughing, vomiting until they dug out the rotten slabs that made Dante choke. But to see him eat, it was as if he’d been starved a lifetime. “Do you know why we want these things?” He asked, almost suddenly. His head snapped up and Nero was left, stunned, wide-eyed until he shook his head.
“N-No, I don’t.”
“Those things that aren’t meant to be, things that are forbidden, give us our power. Why do you think sin exists, Nero? We’re..we’re not just fucking about when we talk about those things, y’know? Humans see demons as sinful, gave their acts names, gave those acts meaning, gave them power and… feed us in turn. Hell turns on sin. Hell turns on humans. And we exist between those worlds, where nothing should,” Dante managed to keep his voice even, but Nero didn’t know how.
It was all too much; Nero gripped his eyes, face scrunching up as his own tears pissed him off. Everything that Dante said was true, made so much sense, a sick revelation that sunk in slowly, aching as it went.
“What sin is there in Fortuna?” Dante asked, so soft. “You must have starved. You and your thoughts… must have been terrifying.”
“You think?”
“… That’s why she cooks for you, isn’t it? Why you let her look after you like that?”
Nero nodded— he was right. There hadn’t been a day that his body hadn’t ached simply from existing, something wrong with him. But when a person’s love and energy and time went into something, he could tell; Kyrie fed him on a level that he couldn’t have ever imagined, but the thought of her pain, of her very death at his hands excited him so much that it made him sick. His sin made him want to die. His sin did not deserve her. His sin deserved nothing more than the garbage he dug through to find something to stop the pains in his guts. He didn’t deserve anything.
“And my father… was like this?”
“Yeah,” Except he only had me. “He… needed more than I could give him,”
“What do you mean?” Nero asked, red-eyed and runny-nosed; he wiped his face on his sleeve and sniffed deep, while Dante wrung his hands.
“I… I don’t know, kid. I don’t know what he needed, because I gave him everything I could,” My mind. My body. My flesh. “But I couldn’t make him stronger the way he wanted to be. I failed him. And I failed him for long enough that his sin ate him from the inside out, just as his sickness did.”
Dante reached out. A wide, warm, slightly-trembling hand wrapped around Nero’s shoulder.
“So I’m not gonna fail you, alright? I…” He had to take a steadying breath. “I want to help you, any way I can. Just talk to me, Nero, don’t keep it to yourself. That’s what consumed Ver-… your father. You’re not him, I know.”
Looking down at Dante’s hand, Nero chewed at one corner of his mouth as he tried not to cry any more. Something still bothered him, though.
“Are… Nero croaked, his voice so fractured that he could barely hold it together. But he was deathly serious, his eyes narrowed with scrutiny, suspicion. “Are you sick, too?”
That caught Dante off guard. He hadn’t thought about it much— hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t needed to.
“… Yeah. I guess I could be,” he admitted.
“What was my father’s sin?”
“Envy. Gluttony.”
“What’s yours?”
“Lust. Sloth.”
“And what are mine?”
“Can’t tell you that. Gotta look into yourself and know what’s true and… all that,” Dante sighed, though he had his suspicions.
They were quiet for a long while, Nero content with Dante’s hand sitting where it was until Dante hefted himself closer and let his arm slide all the way around Nero’s shoulders. He held him there, sturdy and comforting as Nero snuffled to himself and scrubbed at his eyes, trying to process everything he’d been told. Even knowing that somebody understood him was a deep load off his mind, but knowing how much Dante cared… that made him want to cry even more. Nero gritted his teeth and tried to take a steadying breath, but it came out as a hissing sob and his face went back into his hand, embarrassed. Dante merely laid his head aside and gently, shushed the lad and gave a gentle squeeze to his shoulder.
Maybe it was the beer or maybe it was the warm, radiating sensation of somebody giving a fuck, but Nero could have stayed there forever.