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For so long it had been a fact of life that Dante was absent even when he was present. His mind elsewhere, his attention scattered. Always forgetting, shedding, withdrawing away, throwing himself into the dark, whether it was with a grim sense of duty or with a carefree swagger that was just as false. He could be genuinely warm in the right circumstances. And he had plenty of kindness even if it was the kind that could only rarely be honest about itself. But he was always looking for something. Over his shoulder, or too far beyond his straightforward gaze to see.
The Dante reflected in Lucia's eyes now had found that something.
A cooler packed with rustling ice and sweating bottles of beer swung beneath his arm as he danced under a ring of trees bursting with flowers tinged with the colors of the early evening sky. Familiar, playfully combative insults flew from Lady and Trish. Nico cheered him on, already surrounded by empty cans. Kyrie sat under the next tree over with a small crowd of children chattering and darting around like spring sparrows. Nero ran interference on a few more who seemed determined to play in a fountain just outside the circle.
Dante burned brighter than ever at the center of it all. He seemed light enough to fly away any moment, but every time she saw the flash of his smile and the way it reached his eyes so unguardedly, Lucia knew he wasn’t going anywhere. Everything he must have been wanting for all these years was finally right in front of him.
“Hey, Lucia!” he hollered, raising the cooler over his head and treating her to an especially toothy grin. “Was starting to think you wouldn’t make it!”
She gave a smile and a warm nod even as she tucked the bottle of champagne she’d brought slightly behind one of her thighs. “Glad I could. Fortuna is quite a beautiful place.”
“Duties all taken care of?”
“As much as they can be. Matier insisted that a holiday might be good for me.”
He ambled forward and clapped her easily on the shoulder. “Best not let it go to waste then, chief!”
Scruffy, she thought. White-whiskered, like an old man. Crow’s feet at the edges of his eyes from a lifetime of cocky smiles. This new joy that had become a part of him in her absence took years off his appearance, but not enough to undo the passage of time. Half-demon or not, Dante was aging while Lucia…wasn’t.
“Ça va,” she said, because she felt she had to say something, and took a beer from his crate that she knew she wouldn’t drink.
Wind ruffled through the trees and through his hair. He was so close and there was so much life to him and around him. Laughing children, family, friends—Lucia among them. So why was it, staring breathlessly at that smile and the lines it traced in his face, that she felt paralyzed by loneliness?
How frustrating. It was her first time at a flower viewing; she wanted to enjoy it with Dante, not contemplate his lifespan.
Not that that would make the problem go away. Her holidays were rare. Every time she used one to see him, he would be different, and if she only saw him for a few precious hours, of course it would stick out. Maybe she could ask Trish about this? There was Matier, but if Lucia had to talk to anyone about not aging, she felt paradoxically drawn to talk to someone ‘her age’. She and Trish were both artificial demons, though to her knowledge Trish had never believed she was human, nor did she necessarily bother to behave like one. If not for the way she always curled around Lady like a spoiled cat, Lucia wouldn’t have considered talking to her at all.
Something bumped her thigh with surprising force. Lucia looked down, expecting to find a child had run into her, and instead was greeted by wide red eyes and the throaty chuffing of a familiar panther.
“Speaking of spoiled cats.” She smiled and scratched behind Shadow’s ears and along her chin. “Are you unsupervised today?”
Shadow guided her to a different tree on the other side of the circle. Sure enough, there was the thin, dark shape of V, sitting on an unexpectedly quaint checkered blanket. To her greater surprise, he was not alone. The other son of Sparda was with him. He didn’t resemble Dante despite his hair and eyes, not in demeanor and definitely not in warmth, so she found it difficult to think of them as twins. She also just wasn’t accustomed to seeing him. Much less seeing him sit specifically in V’s company.
As always, things changed in her absence.
“You look well,” V greeted.
Vergil squinted, both at her and aside at V. Lucia took a guess. “Neither of you actually remember me, do you?”
“No,” Vergil said bluntly.
“Not your name,” V said a little more diplomatically. “But I remember you looking as you do now.”
“Oh? How is that?”
“Out of place.” He tipped his cane toward the champagne dangling from her hands and raised a glass filled with rich red wine to her.
She accepted it despite a mild sense of defeat.
Business and duty took precedent for both herself and Dante. Kept them apart, cut their meetings short. Every time she had the chance to leave the island, especially to partake in these parties, she spent hours preparing. Considering what to wear and how best to present herself in these situations where there was no role she had to play and no authority she had to convey. These were supposed to be light-hearted and precious times, but she always found herself getting self-conscious about how sheltered she seemed in their company.
At least this time there was another odd duck who had brought red wine and fancy glasses to a beer-level event. To be ‘out of place’ among Dante’s closest company was probably a compliment in V's book.
Splashing drew their attention, along with Dante’s hooting and an exasperated reprimand from Nero.
“Please go retrieve that fool,” V sighed. “Preferably before the children join him in the fountain and manage to make themselves ill.”
Vergil raised a brow. “Wasn’t the point to spend time in company other than Dante’s?”
“That was hardly an invitation for you to spend the night hanging from my coattails.”
The smile V wore was so smug it bordered on oily, and Vergil stared at him like he was a bug that could be flicked aside at any moment. Lucia unconsciously braced for them to fight, but Vergil got up with only a faint click of his teeth and gravitated directly to Nero’s side to reprimand his brother. Dante, not inclined to be stopped so easily, snatched them both in his arms and dragged them in. White sprays shot from the fountain as it immediately descended into splashing and fighting, while Dante’s chest-deep laugh echoed out over the noise.
Dante in that filthy red coat he favored, Vergil in shades of navy and black, and Nero with his spectral, electric blue wings all together under a sky turning to dusky shades of violet...
“The descendants of Sparda,” Lucia mused. “Grown children playing in a fountain.”
“As it should be,” V murmured, almost inaudibly.
Lucia glanced between them and V. He might be right, but as she understood it, he was some part of Vergil as well. If he believed that was where Vergil should be, what did it mean for him?
She took the spot Vergil had vacated and sat her champagne beside the half-empty bottle of wine. “Perhaps this is best at home with you. As thanks for the wine.”
He turned the bottle with a small smile. “Something you favor? You drank from a champagne glass last occasion we met as well.”
“You can remember that, but not my name?” He shrugged, and she tipped her glass back. This man was one of Sparda’s for certain. “What else do you remember of me?”
“Accent. Hair.” He paused and a coy smirk tilted his lips. “La Vie en Rose.”
“Lucia,” she said sternly, if only to stem the blush creeping to her cheeks. “And it would surprise you how often I am gifted champagne by men in suits looking to capitalize on the vacant infrastructure left behind by Uroboros. Their flattery is pointless, but I have come to appreciate the French 77.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “And here am I without my elderflower syrup.”
She couldn’t tell if he was teasing her, but she seemed to recall he had handled all of his own drinks at the bar last year, so there was a strong possibility he wasn’t joking. “It will be your birthday again soon, won’t it? I doubt I will make it to another party—”
“There won’t be one this year.”
It sounded to her like he was trying to convince himself, but she suspected if Dante got it in his head to have another, it would happen anyway. “In any case, I wish you another healthy year. It seems the last has been good to you.”
“…Perhaps it has.”
A familiar pop! later and he was pouring with an expression that suggested he found the act of putting champagne in a wine glass sacrilegious but was willing to put that aside for a moment. Without looking her way, he let his glass tilt toward her. “Thank you.”
The tone of his voice defied her for a neat emotion to fall under but was painfully familiar to her. Beneath the blooming silverbells, she touched her ill-matched glasses of red wine to his champagne in a toast that was ostensibly to the coming year. Whatever else it was about she didn’t know him well enough to decipher. But she thought she understood the way his eyes dropped away from the fountain as he tipped his glass back.
The image of Dante with Vergil in one arm and Nero in the other, sopping wet and smiling like the summer sun, was nearly too bright for Lucia to look at.