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Vergil stared at the grotesque corpse, a familiar body twisted by spikes and acid, an heretic smirk still somehow plastered to bloodied lips. The body blurred, acid-eaten flesh becoming gory tears through pale and delicate skin. Past bled into his present, filling his ears and mind with echoes he couldn’t fight.
“Dante.” A word through cracked lips.
“Mom!” he screams, throat raw from the smoke.
His knees hit the ground besides her. They hurt now, too. White bloodstained hair lengthened, turned blonde. The scraggly red ground of hell was a wooden floor gouged by claws.
“Dante, don’t go, you can’t—leave me mom.”
How could he go on alone? He is small and terrified, doesn’t under what the Yamato wants with him, why it screams in his ears. He wants her warmth and smile but Dante’s smile was gone forever.
“I need you,” child him echoed in his voice, but this time, Vergil did not say it. Already, his mind was closing those doors and blocked out the growing void threatening to devour him, leaving a functional shell.
Vergil had never learned to stop surviving, and he would not do so today.
###
“He’s dead.”
Impossible. Nero stared at the body in front of him, ears ringing, his mind refusing to register the words. Dante, dead? Nothing could kill the old prick! He couldn’t be dead, he couldn’t—he could be in Hell for years or lost in Redgrave for a month, but he couldn’t be dead. That was too permanent, too unreal.
But Dante’s wide chest remained utterly still, his shirt slashed and turned and eaten through by a revulsive dark green substance, like acid had eaten not only clothes, but huge chunks of the body under. No orange glow shimmered around the wound. Nothing.
No life.
Only Vergil had returned from Hell.
Vergil, who had killed hundreds of thousands of residents in Redgrave in his quest for power, his bid to defeat Dante. Vergil who had sought nothing but his twin’s death from the start, who’d gone alone with him to Hell, presumably to exterminate the Qliphoth’s roots. Vergil, who seemed in perfect health now, not a scratch on him, the same cold mask as always, the same arrogant voice.
“What did you do?”
His blue wings snapped behind him and he stepped forward, out of his house. Vergil slid back but provided no answer. The only flicker of emotion in his goddamn face—the only sign he had any, really!—was the displeased flattening of his lips. Nero’s blood pounded against his temples, fingers curling into fists.
“You fuck! You—” He’d killed him. He’d had to. Who else could do that? “I can’t believe you—and you just show up here with his body like he’s a fucking trophy?”
When Vergil recoiled, Nero’s arms flew to him, ripping Dante out of his grip, cradling him closer. Fuck, Dante had been the most infuriating bastard, but this didn’t feel right. Nero couldn’t fathom never hearing his shitty jokes or having his anger stoked by an all-too-easy smirk. He held on tighter for a moment, Dante's too-cold body against him, the egregious hole in his chest palpable.
Dead. Undeniably dead.
Nero snapped. He set Dante down, trembling as the broad shoulders and back settled against burning asphalt, the edge of his vision darkening. Anger and grief tore through him, a searing blade, the pain too raw and strange to fathom.
Nero hadn't understood how deeply he valued Dante until he was gone.
And now… now he would get revenge.
He pounced over Dante's body and on Vergil, slamming him on the ground with a deep, hateful "You fuck!" His fist connected—once, then twice, then in a flurry of human and demon punches, and he marked each of them mentally. For every taunt lost, every smile gone, every stylish finish wasted. For his mentor, his uncle, his friend.
With that last thought, Nero grabbed Vergil’s face and slammed his whole skull down in the street. The ground had already caved from multiple impact, cracks spreading out from under them. Blue light flared to life repeatedly around Vergil’s head—his healing repairing any damage done—and his hands had turned into claws digging through broken asphalt. Nero remembered doing this to Dante, too, punching him over and over. But Vergil wasn’t fighting back, wasn’t even struggling under him. He just lay there and accepted punishment, and that only stoked Nero’s anger.
“Fight me you asshole!”
He slammed both human fists into his face, breaking the nose only for it to heal instantly. Vergil squeezed his eyes and grunted but otherwise didn’t react. Nero switched to his demon arm, shoving his face down.
“Why won’t you fight me? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Nero grabbed the front of Vergil’s vest, pulling him up. He wanted a battle, damnit, wanted to kick his ass fair and square and then shove the Yamato through his chest. He couldn’t do that if Vergil didn’t defend himself! That was fucked up, he wasn’t—but Dante— For a moment, Nero lost track of Vergil, couldn’t see him through the blur of what he belatedly realized were tears. He swore and wiped them away with an angry gesture.
“I did nothing.”
Vergil’s whispered voice froze him. He’d never heard his voice so small, despite obvious efforts to keep it steady. Didn’t take a genius to hear all the cracks under.
“I could not do anything, so I did nothing,” he repeated. “I watched, held down and powerless, as a great spike pierced him. Watched acid eat through his stomach, get healed, eat through again—a long, endless cycle. Watched the light slip out of his eyes, and watched his lips form a single, last word.”
“Wh-what?” Nero’s fingers tightened their grip on the vest as his mind struggled with the words. D-did he mean—they’d been defeated? Together? “B-but you live.”
Vergil’s entire body turned rigid as a rod. He did not reply, but Nero had the distinct impression he’d have vanished through the ground if he could have. And if it was true… Nero did not have to imagine what it was like, to watch a brother die while powerless to help. He had lived it, still carried that pain within him to this day. And here he was, straddling someone who’d endured the same, punching him repeatedly, accusing him of doing it.
Nero scrambled back, a wave of disgust pushing through him—at himself for assaulting Vergil, at this asshole for not explaining sooner, at the whole fucking world for even daring to kill Dante. He slammed his wings into the ground, sending shards of broken asphalt flying, then let them vanished. All of his anger had vanished, voided by the brutal acceptance Vergil had not, in fact, caused this.
The older twin pushed himself up, dusting his coat in slow, fluid movements. Piercing blue eyes nailed Nero to the ground, on his knees, stealing his breath away. Vergil hadn’t uttered a single word, yet his distaste washed over Nero. The corner of his lips turned into a grimace.
“Take care of him. I cannot.”
Sunlight glinted on the Yamato’s blade as it left its sheathe, and it hit Nero this asshole meant to leave.
“W-Wait!”
Vergil ignored him, slashing a first rip in the fabric of the world. Nero scrambled up. He’d dumped Dante on him—Dante’s body, fuck!—and wouldn’t even fucking stay? What the fuck?
“Vergil!”
The second tear followed as Nero sprinted to close the short distance between them. His hand extended, reaching out. Vergil whirled around and slashed through his palm, stunning him to a stop. They stared at each other as blood dripped from Nero’s palms and the Yamato’s tip. It hurt—not the cut, not really, but the message behind, the brutal rejection. Vergil wanted nothing to do with him.
He stepped back, half-stumbling into his portal, the Yamato still out. Dark red vapes enveloped him, and the blue tears sealed back up as he continued to stare, a stone mask Nero would never learn to read.
###
Their ancestral home.
Nero had had good instincts. Where else could they lay Dante to rest but where their lives had begun and been snapped in half? Vergil stared at the few gathered in the gardens—a cluster of friends in a destroyed landscape. How fitting. And fitting, too, that he hovered unseen, his brother’s specter.
He should be down there, shouldn’t he? He should always have been by his brother’s side. And for a brief, impossible instant, that had seemed possible again. They’d been together in hell, sparring against one another, pushing back hordes of demons. Fighting and laughing, Vergil quietly basking in Dante’s energy, his countless anecdotes. His stories about Nero…
We got plenty of time, he’d said, foolishly hopeful.
They did not.
He watched dirt fill the grave, the scrapping of the shovel and thump of earth on his brother’s wrapped body the only sound break the silence. How long would the grave be distinguished from the muddied, almost grassless surroundings? Nero placed a last shovel and spread it out, evening it as he could. A strange light shone in his eyes, catching the greyed sunlight. Vergil refused to acknowledge it; he had not cried and he would not. Ice had wrapped his heart, numbing him.
Vergil’s foot drifted forward. He took a first step, then another, his body moving even as his mind shut back down. Dante’s friends spotted him, and many turned to stare. Only one had cried—a redhead he’d never seen before, not even in the Qliphoth. He ignored them, letting his momentum carry him. The Yamato slid out of its sheath with a whisper, the weight of her familiar, a loose knot when all of him had become wound tight and impossible to release.
Perhaps he should put an end to it now and slide the blade through his chest, as he had but a few meters away, inside the broken house. There would be no V and no Urizen this time, no all-consuming power and no scraping to face himself and live on. How pointless it had all been, to suffer so much only to wind up here. Only to have Dante ripped from him.
But he had not yet learned to stop surviving, and he wouldn’t today.
Vergil stabbed the Yamato downward, through the soft earth and into Dante. A shudder ran through him, like an invisible hand clenching around his stomach and yanking it up. He fought his urge to gag, surprised anything was alive enough inside of him to react like this. Glares burned his scalp and Nero clenched the hand he’d cut. They all wanted him gone, and although words bounced in his mind—I’m up one and You left me and You were the one I wished to protect—none made it past his lips.
Vergil turned heels and strode away, coat flapping in the wind. He knew, already, that he would never come back.
A hand grabbed his shoulder—no, not a hand, but shining blue claws. Vergil froze. He could have run, warping out of Nero’s grasp, but his feet rooted into the ground, his body refusing to obey him.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”
Nero’s voice cracked, raw with emotion; a strange counterpoint to his own empty tone.
“I do not know and it does not matter.”
“Fucking hell. That’s your twin!” Nero forcefully turned him around before gesturing at the grave, now some distance away. Vergil kept his gaze elsewhere, fixating on a random patch of grey sky above Nero’s shoulder. “You just gonna pop up and stab his fucking corpse and say nothing? Why don’t you tea bag him while you’re at it?”
Vergil pressed his lips. He could have asked what tea bagging meant, but it hardly seemed relevant.
“Nero, are you happy?” he asked instead.
“What?”
“You have a partner, do you not?” he forged on. “Dante said so. Does she make you happy?”
He snapped his gaze back to Nero and watched confusion spread across his face. “Y-yeah, of course she does! What does that have to do with anything?”
It had everything to do with this. Everything Vergil touched eventually died and rotted away, and now only Nero was left. Nero, who had extended his compassion to him, dragging his breaking body to Urizen. Nero, who had a loving girlfriend and trusted friends. Nero, whom he had already hurt so deeply. Vergil could not allow himself to falter. Nero was the only family he had left, and neither of them would survive the inevitable result of staying together.
“Keep my book,” he said, “and stay away from me.”
He walked away again, head held high. No blue claws flew after him this time, no whisper of protest. Nothing but the wind whistling in his ears and snapping his coat, and a cold numbness rising through him, freezing over the last of his internal hell.