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Their boots kicked up dirt and ash. Spires of light filtered through the roof of the forest, thin beds of melting snow peppered the path’s shoulders. Cloudy wreaths swelled around the twins’ collars and faces as they walked, shivering in the cold. Neither of them tried to think of the dust and fine bones grinding beneath their soles or the ugly gash marks that marred the trees and ground, just nature and the smell of damp moss and pine fighting to overcome hell. Despite their awakened, sharpened perception, they found themselves periodically peering back the way they came or into the woods, anticipating the flashes of darkness or unholy caterwauls of demons. Murmured rumors followed them like the plague, crating the wary, unnerved stares Redgrave City turned on them as soon as they set foot in the streets. For its reputation as stoic and cold and infested with decade-old ghosts, the citizens seemed less inclined to keep up the image in exchange for their burgeoning interest in the twins’ white hair, strange weapons, and murder walk so to speak.
Dante shuddered, whether it was from the weather or anxiety, he didn’t know. Fuck, he hated this. He was cold, paranoid, and pissed off. Too goddamn emotional to be doing this right now. But he had snagged Vergil deep in thought at the worst moments throughout the week and only narrowly managed to piece together where his brother’s fragmented vocalization of said thoughts came from. He would squeeze the sharp edges of his amulet, come to a halt at the mere reminder of their mother. Scarcely so, if Dante strained his ears, he would hear Vergil humming her lullaby--while distracted with the pages of a book, hard-pressed raiding the kitchenette, in the muggy throes of a shower. For a man who dismissed his humanity so casually, he had an awful lot of nervous ticks alluding to how close he was to it. The mounting guilt over the revelation that neither of them had gone to visit her since that day was enough to make Dante answer the nonverbal plea for solstice and trawl them both to the northernmost border of their hometown at dawn.
"You haven't been yet?" Dante had asked, twisting the dial on his jukebox to low.
Vergil peered up from his book, an eyebrow raised. "You have?"
Dante felt an embarrassed flush creep up his neck.
"No, but... that always seemed like something you would do."
How wrong Dante had been.
The rustic wooden bridge creaked menacingly as they crossed over it. Its white paint was peeling off and the flower-print carvings engraved into its railing were chipped and broken in multiple places. Their uneven leaves and petals skimmed at Dante’s fingertips as he passed by, injecting melancholy straight into his veins. He jerked his hand away as if the carvings had branded him and walked a little faster, repressing memories of him and his brother letting paper boats sail on the coursing river. Vergil took his cue and kept pace with him until they’d met solid ground again and stepped into the open clearing.
“Holy shit…” Dante trailed off.
It was still standing. Ivy green crept over black scorch marks, the rosewood doors were sprawled on the grass, dark splatters covered the paved walkway leading past the rusted gates. But the house was still standing. It was almost as Dante remembered, two stories of countless rooms, scarlet shingles, and secrets encompassed in a field of wildflowers. Gloriously so. ‘Undefeated,’ it seemed to say. ‘Still going strong.’ Broken down and dilapidated but not beyond a reasonable stop-off every once and awhile. It hurt less to know its resilient condition.
Vergil was silent as ever as he took the lead, dipping into the filth, leaving clear footprints where he disturbed the soot. His eyes landed on the cracked, olden armoire adjacent to the doorway. He lingered there for a short time, beguiled and repulsed by it. Dante wanted to stay there even less than Vergil did, the armoire was untouched since the time he’d been crammed in there, veiled from the demons. Its current state resembled Dante’s recollection of it so much that when he turned around, he half expected to see his mother’s corpse on the floor and became all the gladder when Vergil moved on.
One thing sent chills down Dante’s spine, however. Someone had moved her body so it no longer reposed still. It had been a given that sometime in the ten years this place had been abandoned, some poor fool would stumble across it and alert the authorities to the dead woman’s presence and clean it up. He just hadn’t prepared for it and wished his mother could have had the virtue of a proper funeral.
Their footsteps were the only sound as they traveled inward, hollow and deafening. The foyer’s arches gave way to ornate walls and ceiling, where a magnificent crystal chandelier hovered over them. A splotched, ruined oil painting surveyed the area with the eyes of a family before tragedy.
Now more than ever the encroaching bite of Winter seized hold through the turtle neck Dante had been forced to wear.
“You are not visiting her shirtless,” Vergil had told him. Dante bitched about it, saying he already looked stupid enough with one of his sleeves torn off, that it would only look worse if he wore something dark underneath it at which point Vergil practically ripped the leather coat off of him and shredded the other sleeve to match. They argued and brawled until long after dark, leaving Dante to sleep angry just to wake up and find that his jacket’s sleeves had been neatly hemmed and paired with a high-collared black sweater. Vergil refused to say a word on it which was perfect for Dante because he wasn’t ready to delve into how or when or why his brother learned to sew.
He opted to follow Vergil as he turned left into another part of the house.
The library. Of course, he’d chosen the library. Vergil had shadowed the one in Capulet City every chance he got. If he wasn’t taking up residence there, buried in knowledge and parchment, then he was precisely the same while in Devil May Cry. Though no doubt all the books he had been reading were taken without permission because he was too damn awkward to just ask for a library card like a human being. But Dante was grateful to an extent, lost reading was when Vergil looked at his most relaxed—the bare minimum. Heaven on Dante’s blood pressure if he didn’t have to restrain him.
“Are you all ready to check out, mister?” Dante suddenly said in his best imitation of a customer service voice. Vergil glared at him and well, Dante thought it was funny. It drew a smile out of him at least.
“No,” Vergil snapped. “Leave me.”
Dante winced through another smile. “Please don’t tell me you talk to the librarians like that.”
“Get your jokes out now, Dante,” Vergil replied. He swept the room, running his hands over a row of spines. “I won’t have the patience for them later.”
That had Dante groaning. He pulled his hands down over his face, only bothering to pay attention when Vergil stopped short of a scriptorium. From a distance, he could barely make out the thin, curvaceous lines constructing a magic circle on its dark, glossy surface and the tools skirting the border—graphite, chalk, paint brushes, a flat edge, a compass, an inkwell, artist tools. Embedded into the shelf it sat against was a cupboard of the same material, a symbol he’d never seen etched into it. The whisper of Yamato grating against her sheath made Dante’s hands fly to Ebony and Ivory as he fixed solely on Vergil’s movements. It was fair, he told himself, that he still didn’t trust his brother not to be a power hoarding freak.
Vergil had never seen this ritual performed before. All he knew was that his mother had claimed the library as her study and that she’d spent innumerable hours at her scriptorium sketching and scribbling immaculately the boundaries for her next masterpiece, only saving her darker magics for midnight hours when she was sure her children were at rest. He’d merely heard of this spell from a source who’d studied the margins of Sparda’s notes. A sidelined scrawling, one he’d have no interest in if not for his source’s long-running accuracy streak. He traced over the heart-akin seal, familiar with it, knowing it for its repeated appearances in Temen-Ni-Gru, its meaning translated for him by an alto.
A lure and a warning.
All the power for maximum gain, all the chances for maximum pain.
Ironic how it cursed his mother’s study.
He slid the Yamato over the palm of his hand. Hot blood sprang from the wound and dripped down over his wrist before dousing the scriptorium. Red light shined through the magic circle, Ebony and Ivory’s safeties clicked off. Magic slithered up the intricate lines, illuminating the desk and its tools until it reached up to the cupboard. Its locking system came loose in an orchestra of clicks and grinding gears. The corroded hinges of the cabinet creaked as the door slowly opened, swinging in a graceful arc to reveal-
“A book?” Dante sighed in relief, holstering his twin pistols without care. “Would have been nice to know that sooner.”
Vergil barely refrained from scoffing. He couldn’t expect Dante to know of the artifact’s true power when he had only discovered its existence just months ago. His fingers wrapped around the grimoire—an olden thing from a time long past, bound in dark leather and protected with gold highlights, the same heart symbol gracing the front among another detailed design. Magic and vigor shot through him, deep-freezing and heating him to the bone as a rich song from a deceased witch sang to him an eternity of the unearthly abyss, confessed to him all its sorrows, joys, and humors.
It felt like steamy cider and a pure smile. It felt like Gemini carved into sable metal and bronze; silk familiars, and Latin. It felt like red roses. It felt like mom.
“This isn’t just any old book, Dante,” Vergil chastised, almost amused. His spirits lifted slightly with this new and different but welcome power. “It’s called Ultimo,” he said further before translating. “Finale. It is our mother’s magnum opus, filled with all of her spells.”
“Wait.” Dante held his hands up. “Mom was a witch?”
“A practitioner of magic.”
“Same thing.”
Vergil gave him that look that advocated for Dante’s foolishness and that was when he decided he’d rather be somewhere else. He gave Vergil a dismissive hand wave, pivoted, and ambled out. “I’m going elsewhere. If you want to stay here in the nerd cave for a bit, be my guest.”
He was gone before Vergil could comment, heading up the squeaking stairs as quickly as possible. He crossed the catwalk, forcing his eyes to stay in front of him and not drift to the blackened entryway. Ghostly flames licked his body, a woman’s scream that had haunted his nightmares hit him in the chest and ricocheted between his ribs like a silver pinball. He stomped into the hallway, pretending to be entranced by the ashy swirls he stirred up and not at all despising his brain for bringing back things from so long ago. He passed by every room and door, knowing them by heart, and hate, hate, hating it.
His parents’ bedroom, his and Vergil’s room, a spare den, the utility room with the door that always seemed to squealingly laugh whenever someone opened it, going until he burst into a familiar one. He stopped abruptly, breath returning to him in the span he’d taken in the formerly pristine room. He stepped tentatively inside, into arms made of Eva’s voice and Vergil’s violin.
The music room.
It was self-made, small, connected to Sparda’s study—the place where he worked tirelessly while his family’s amateur, love-filled music sweetened the background, where occasionally he dared write a song especially for them.
Dante pressed down on a white key on the piano, causing a flat note to ring out. He pressed down on a black key, a sharper followed. Years of weathering reduced its beauty to a neglected skeleton. He pulled away from the piano, absently leaned over a wiry violin missing two strings, and plucked one of the intact ones. The broken plink sound it made shoved a wedge into Dante’s heart, rough, hard, and driven in by the swing of a mallet. Each instrument he interacted with brought the mallet down again, drove the wedge deeper. He ran his fingers over the chalky surface of a pair of bongo drums, then across the strings of the regal harp their father so loved to strum, his and Eva’s hands performing a divine duet that Dante had jerkily danced to as a child. He’d earned a miffed bark from his brother on those rare nights. Once upon a time, he shattered long enough to show Dante how to do a basic waltz.
---
“One… two… three…” Vergil whispered out, leading the stride and sway, unmatched grace guiding his movements. “Four… five… six…” He pulled off, gesturing out to his brother’s pose, significantly more poise there than when he started. “See? Was that so hard?”
“No,” Dante grumbled. He shrunk at once, half humbled, half annoyed. But all of that melted away when their mother and father started on a more energetic song and Dante broke into his jouncy dance once more. Vergil groaned and heaped down onto his back, muttering about why he bothered. His whole family’s laughter fractured the music room, rending the sobriety of the moment into dizzying perfection.
---
A splintering crack split Dante’s heart in half.
On that fateful night, he'd woken to the realization that his twin brother wasn’t asleep in their room. He’d found Eva hovering over a cold mug of herbal tea, expression blank as she dwelled deep in her loneliness. Dante knew better than to bring up his father, just so he didn’t have to see that sad smile she’d use to lie and promise she was alright if only to soothe her children over the persisting darkness that hung above their house in a heavy cloud. Remembering her slow, hesitant actions now, how she told Dante they could go find him together, her deft hands wrapping him in a wool scarf and pausing to rest on his small shoulders, the sudden look of terror on her face that made his heart plummet into his stomach, it wrenched out pieces of his soul with bruising vehemence. Only seconds later, the entryway roared with heat and vengeance, Dante pressed himself up against the armoire doors, peering through the thin slats with quiet despair until the last thing he’d known of his mother was her calling for his brother.
As a kid, he had no idea how long he spent in the cupboard, waiting for the flames to die out and the demons to finally grow bored of their new hunting grounds and leave. Today, he still had no idea.
He wrestled his mind free of the memory and prised himself elsewhere. The less he thought about his mother at the moment, the better. He marched toward his father’s study, pushing the door open.
Vergil glared at the ink script on Ultimo’s last page, unable to make heads nor tails of the nonsensical Latin save for one word—Ultimum. Ultimo’s counterpart belonging to Sparda, Last Resort. He’d known of it for far longer, had tailed his father’s premortem deeds to every possible archive in search of one specific piece in it, only finding copied pages on one jackpot of an island. The help he’d sought out had barely been enough to dig up those meager scraps. Faced with the supposed location of it written in front of him in a language he couldn’t understand, with the only person he knew would willingly translate it for him hundreds of miles away, he nearly crumbled into a scream.
He was pissed off, so to speak.
The thought that he could just warp there using Yamato and demand for her service crossed Vergil’s mind. But Dante would come calling if he thought his brother was anywhere near making a run for it. Not to say what might happen if he got caught. (Dante would guilt him with that angry look that suggested he wanted to cry but refused to.) Vergil didn't want to bother coming up with an explanation either, he was in no way ready for that conversation. This left him with no other choice than to tuck Ultimo into his bag and bide his time until he was ready to come back. But forsaken deity knew she would tease him relentlessly.
“What, you can’t read a single word? You poor thing. Come here, I’ll teach you.”
At the time, he’d primly wondered how appropriate it would have been to throw a half mixed bowl of sweet batter at her for that comment. He’d reconsidered it after remembering she was the only sane mind within his vicinity and he didn’t want to be stuck with Arkham drolling on for the rest of the stretch. He still didn’t know any Latin, not any that would currently be useful anyway. He’d be fine, though. He had his mother’s magic to stave his hunger for more and as long as he could find a way back to his... source? Translator? He didn’t know. Her meaning to him remained largely unknown and it didn’t matter, she could help him as long as he made it to her.
"You're ridiculous, it's not so hard," She snapped at him.
Vergil's lips tightened into a grimace."You read it then."
"Not until you try."
He stalked out of the library, putting the Ultimum from his mind as he searched for something different.
He vaguely recalled another place in the house, on the second floor. Above the kitchen, across from his parents’ bedroom. He hadn’t wandered in there since before his father left; since he’d abandoned them, as Dante said it. The word was like acid on his tongue, bitter and biting. Maybe Sparda wasn’t the most open of souls but he loved them, the family he’d made with Eva, more than anything. Vergil’s mother and brother’s misery had been a byproduct of Sparda’s attempts to protect them and maybe that he couldn’t forgive. But he could understand.
He could also understand that his mother had searched for him. He’d learned of that after he and Dante got into a drunk screaming match about it, the results of which consisted of him lying on the frigid wood floor of the catwalk, nursing the mother of all migraines and later finding his brother passed out in the bathroom, covered in streaks of blood that suggested what he’d done to himself. Dante never struck Vergil as the type to claw his flesh open and maybe he wasn’t, not usually. Maybe alcohol did things to both of them. Horrid things. He should know, he’d lived through three gory, violent nightmares consecutively that same night.
He couldn’t call himself better than his brother.
The floorboards creaked as Vergil trailed down to the door at the end of the hallway. He rattled the doorknob. Locked. As if that mattered. He broke it open with a swift kick that he knew his mother would kill him for if she were still alive and stepped inside. Crystalline glass cases lined the room, organized to a simple yet pleasing museum. On the walls, countless weapons, Devil Arms, and other mythical objects hung securely on their hooks and perches, collecting dust. The only time Vergil had been allowed to wander about and look at everything, his father had been supervising with eagle eyes and his powers ready to go should one of those sharp or blunt edges disobey. He’d befriended the Yamato, his brother the Rebellion, and Sparda had trained them diligently on their respective, life-long companions.
Vergil passed his fingers over one of the weapons, a chain scythe with pale green blades called Hisui. He didn’t even think about taking it, he didn’t fight these devils and therefore did not earn their servitude.
He went around the room instead, peering into each case, and was reminded of the fact that both his mother and father were marksmen. He never had any interest in firearms and preferred to get up close and personal with his prey.
---
“Hey, mom!” Dante shouted, pulling himself up over the table. Eva and Sparda sat across from each other, each enraptured with the cleaning process a gun together—a rare sight, they hardly had guns out, only ever unloaded and dismantled for their children’s sake. Eva paused for a second, a kind smile on her lips as she looked to her son. “What kind of gun should I use when I grow up?”
Eva’s smile faltered, so slightly that only Sparda noticed. Vergil peered into the kitchen from the living room, the pages of his book becoming forgotten. He had just chased Dante away from the notion of sparring again. Sparda reached over, squeezing Eva’s hand reassuringly, a conversation only they could hear floating between them. Strangely, Vergil couldn’t help but feel like it had to do with hunting. Dante had been set on it ever since Sparda let him shoot a Ruger Hawkeye. The ones who knew that Eva would have to eventually let him down were Sparda, who she’d confessed her worries to, and Vergil, who’d overheard all of it when he’d sought them out to soothe a nightmare.
When her sad eyes met him briefly, Vergil kind of wished he’d let Dante goad him into sparring.
---
Vergil strode out of the room with a scoff, seriously wondering about the type of demon that had possessed him to go in there. Had part of him so foolishly hoped to be reconnected to his family’s old ghosts?
He didn’t bother with the stairs this time, he leaped over the railing and hit the floor, his balance thrown off by the unexpectedly uneven surface- no, something not a part of it. He stooped down over the object, gently holding it between his fingers. A thin book with a gilded, golden V on the front, standing out among the dust and debris. He would recognize it anywhere, one half of a birthday gift as soon as he and Dante started learning to read. He flipped open to a random page, the first couple lines of a stanza sending regrets and misery through him hard and fast. Just as he thought to flip the book shut, a raspy laugh chilled him to the bone.
He whirled in time to see a sick, black substance crawling its way out of Sparda’s painted eyes and materialize into a cackling wraith. He only had enough time to slip Yamato out its sheath.
Sparda’s study was much smaller than Dante remembered. As a child, he always thought it to tower above everything else in its elegance but now it was just a gentleman’s study which’s novelty eroded. Deep wood paved the walls, a dark brown and gold floral pattern danced on the carpet, the center of which stood a beautiful, lacquered desk. Paralleling each side of the room, ornamented glass and mahogany display cases took up space from floor to ceiling and protected a myriad of his father’s favored weapons. One side contained a curved naginata, a medieval claymore, and a massive bronze and merlot colored axe that he forgot the name of. On the other, an assortment of guns decorated the interior such as an antique bayonet, the treasured Remington Model 11, an 1881 double-barrel shotgun, and a handful of revolvers
Unfortunately noted, however, that Luce and Ombra were missing.
They must have been destroyed on Sparda’s final mission.
Dante’s fingers collected dust as he swept them over his father’s desk and onto the corner of a portrait of his mother. He gingerly picked it up, almost relieved that it didn’t shake in his hands. Of the things that survived in his family’s home, he was surprised to discover this was of them, and a flower of warmth budded in his stomach. He could see why his father loved this photo so much, Eva looked so happy and relaxed, perfectly at home in this little frame, softly receiving the presence of anyone who wandered in. It must have put Sparda at peace to be reminded of her. Dante wished he could have that same feeling but a piece of him tugged at a corner of his brain, whispering that it was impossible.
His memories of her would only ever be a plague of sadness and ash.
Nevertheless, he put the photo of his mother into his bag along with a book and its torn up spine. He’d damaged that book—a copy of a work by Shakespeare—not long after he’d gotten it. Sparda promised he’d fix it, just another broken action to add to the list of things he never did. Eva could never go inside this study, Dante had watched her linger outside it, contemplating whether or not she wanted to visit the phantom Sparda left behind. So, she could never finish fixing the book herself.
The thought of Vergil sewing threatened to make Dante lose his composure and crack up, so he quickly placed the book in his satchel, right next to the photograph. Sewing and bookbinding were kind of the same, right? Maybe Vergil could fix it.
A horrific, demonic screech pierced the air.
Dante went rigid as the usual heat settled into his muscles.
A gleam of sunlight caught his eye and he was next to it in a flash, smashing the glass gun case on the study’s wall and snatching Sparda’s 1811 from its perch. (The one he’d borrowed from the bar had been destroyed on a job not too long ago and Bullseye’s owner gave him a lot of hell for it.) He bolted from the study like he had the Underworld on his heels, adrenaline throbbing with his pulse. His trigger called to his brother’s, answering the unspoken demand for assistance. He skidded out to the bridge, nearly slamming into the railing.
His brother guarded against a massive, silvery pair of scissors jutting out of a miasmic cloud. Another one emerged from the wall, letting out a creaky noise suspiciously sounding like laughter.
‘Vanguards? No, something else.’
Vergil parried the scissors of the first one and disarmed it, they almost sang as they dispersed. An angry flurry appeared on the demon’s porcelain mask just as Vergil turned to block the other demons attack.
Dante jacked his leg up onto the railing and aimed at the demon’s face-
BLAM!
The shotgun struck his wrist with more force than expected. A horrific screech was all that was left of the demon. Before Dante could think to assist his brother with the other one, Vergil finished and narrowly sidestepped the broken scissor blade that lodged itself into the ground. They shared a thoughtful look as both weapons were slipped into a wary resting position.
It was time to go.
Dante jumped over the stairwell and landed on the ground with a heavy thud. Side by side, they walked to the doorway, the silence heavy like sludge. Neither was satisfied with the visit but staying didn’t feel like much of option. They’d be back, it couldn’t even be phrased as a question. Fresh air wafted into their senses as they traversed the cobblestone path, something electric and hearty zipped about the air freely as dark clouds formed on the horizon. The sun had officially risen and would soon be covered up.
Vergil paused for a moment, tracing the design of the rusted gates. Thunder rumbled in the distance just as he met the entryway, his thoughts turning to each little thing he’d come across.
“She looked for me?”
Dante mirrored his brother, as he’d done their entire lives. Tentatively, he lifted a hand to squeeze Vergil’s shoulder.
“She loved you.”
A year later, on their next visit, when most things had been fixed and the earth stopped quivering like it was going to break apart when they so much as shared an uncertain glance, they found themselves traveling back over the streets and outback roads. The bridge still groaned with the pressure they placed on it, the Sparda sword thrummed, anticipation, euphoria rolling off of it at the prospect of going home. Vergil shifted too many times with it on his back to be comfortable but carried the weight without a cruel word or lament for power coming unhinged from his mouth. His fingers interlocked with a fire-tongued beauty, Dante’s occupied with the comforting weight of a slumbering puffball cradled into the crook of his neck.
They combed through the house with a fineness they didn’t have the last time, a confidence that they would be safe, protected from demons. If for just a little longer than last time. Dante dug up more secrets about his mother than he would have liked, only peeked into the world of magic she lived in, and watched from a distance as his brother’s partner waded into the shallow end and blithely conversed with Vergil in a dead language. All the meanwhile, he rubbed Nero’s back, kept him sleepy and sucking on his thumb as he paced between the rooms, rifled around in quieter places, and let him wake up long enough to press a tiny palm to the flat end of a stylized broadsword when his parents weren’t looking. He traveled back again to the music room, deliberately, leisurely swinging his movements the way he’d seen his brother do to with his son as he hummed a guttural version of a song he knew.
He’d taken two seconds to tap on the bongo drums on the floor and when the little bundle of joy let out the most wonderful gasp he’d ever heard, he plopped the kiddo and the drums down in the doorway of his father’s study. He didn’t leave Nero far, he constantly checked over his shoulder and listened to the excited padding on the drums constantly followed by happy squeals to be sure his nephew was still close. He hadn’t thought much of Sparda’s study on the initial go around, too preoccupied with his sorrow to read into it.
The curiosities he’d found this time more than made up for it. Instead of a couple of measly bags for trinkets, they’d brought cardboard boxes to take home to storage. Dante went through some of the things in the study and put the bongos in last, then hoisted a suddenly exhausted again Nero onto his hip. He tracked down less than he had hoped, some music books, an acoustic guitar the owner of which he had no clue, and other things he figured bounty hunters or the public shouldn’t be allowed to get their hands on. Among them stood out a pair of silk cloaks, one red with a sun clasp and the other blue with a moon clasp. He’d originally thought they’d belonged to Sparda but somehow Eva was more clairvoyant than originally believed. He’d found his and Vergil’s names lovingly stitched into the inside collars.
When the blazing sun turned the sky shades of orange, pink, and purple, the mother took hold of her son and headed back to the inn they had deigned to stay in for the night. She and Vergil seemed content to find so much less than Dante did, and how bittersweet it was, to not get what he desired, just what might have been required.
Eva’s grave was nothing more than a knee height granite stone planted into the soil and grass, a statuette of a lovely maiden situated behind it. They’d missed it, or maybe repressed the memory of it from their minds, no way to tell. Dante stretched on the ground, leaning his weight into one side of the grave. Vergil only spared him a disapproving glance before gently hefting the Sparda off his back and pushing it into the ground behind the maiden statue then joining him, reflecting the position on the other side.
“I can’t believe it's been so long,” Dante said. “To think that this all happened in a night, when we were kids, that we made enemies out of each other over it.” He measured his words. It never got any easier to talk to Vergil. Some days were less awkward than others, the best it ever got so far, and they still danced around sensitive subjects. “And now we’re here.”
Vergil swallowed and settled further against the grave, his head relaxed against his palm. The sunset bathed them both in a golden light.
“Did you ever think we’d be friends again?”
A beat.
“No, I didn’t.”
They didn’t speak to each other for a while, they just reveled in the comfortable stillness and the pleasant droning of their inheritance reunited with his wife and children. It made for an awkward family reunion but at least it was one. But as Dante thought of the boxes stacked by the dirt path and the scratchy beds back at the in, the more he wanted to stay.
Just for a little bit longer.