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Dante didn’t mean to jolt awake. He had wanted Vergil to enjoy his first sleep on an actual bed in decades to the fullest extent. But apparently when he came back to his territory and finally relaxed, his brain decided to play memory association Russian Roulette. Its regular feature presentation starring his twin was drawn this time from when he had just rammed his sword through Urizen’s chest, only to look up instead at Vergil’s visage. A face now nearly identical to his, more finely made as if hewn from elegant stone, unfeeling and forbidding when his sight is not set on some remote goal that never included Dante, who could only watch in horror as the light faded from his brother’s grey eyes.
His gaze focused on the real thing across his pillow as he drew in several calming breaths made carefully soundless. Inches away, the bags beneath Vergil’s eyes looked more prominent in the morning light as he struggled to open them. “Enemy?”
If he weren’t so frustrated from having disturbed them both into waking, he would have reached out and placed a gentle hand over his twin’s bruised eyelids. “Bad dream. Go back to sleep.”
“No, I’m awake,” Vergil insisted though he barely moved except to talk. “We’re to help Nero with the last demon stragglers in Red Grave today, remember?”
Maybe it was the dawn softening and limning his features with gold, and the early hours stealing the harsh rasp in his voice, but Vergil never looked more touchable to Dante before this moment, and the realization wiped away the lingering aftertaste of the nightmare.
“What’s wrong?” Vergil asked in that same obliviously inviting tone.
Dante forced himself to ignore his rapidly beating heart, his mind racing for something glib to digress from this moment. “Your hair looks awful,” he ended up rambling.
Vergil snapped wide awake. He sat up so suddenly, the force of it almost made Dante’s face slide from the pillow to land on Vergil’s lap. “What—” he started to say, hands frantically patting around his head.
It was as if his mouth took on a life of its own and started spouting unimpressive babble. “You look like you haven’t combed it in years. Wait, do you even own a comb?”
“Sh-shut up, Dante!”
Crisis averted, he Trickster-ed to avoid the hand making a grab for his hair and ran for the bathroom.
The sun had set for hours already by the time they returned to the office. Once inside, Dante handed his brother a small paper bag.
The frown lines on Vergil’s face looked less severe. Dante inwardly cheered that each consequent encounter with Nero seemed to have brought this effect on his twin. “Are you sharing your commission with me?”
He schooled his face not to break out into a wide smile. “Uh, sure, but you’re getting paid in kind. I had Nico buy this earlier.”
Dante went to the kitchen to reheat last night’s pizza, just in time to have a pink glow-in-the-dark comb in brightly-colored packaging unerringly hit the back of his head.
“Dante, why was your shirt in the trash can?”
“Didn’t you say you weren’t going to pick up after me?”
“You mean you just throw away your clothes?”
“If I couldn’t get them clean, then it’s no good anymore.”
“The stain will come out as long as you wash it with cold water before it dries.”
“Wow, really?”
“Didn’t you at least learn that when you’ve clearly been living by yourself for long?”
“Huh, was I the only one who didn’t know?”
“Stop wasting money!” Vergil burst out. “What else have you been doing that’s keeping you in debt? Don’t laugh, there’s nothing funny about this!”
Dante kept going even when tears started forming in the corners of his eyes.
From the time when they were separated in childhood, all his encounters with Vergil were marked with blood and clashing blades. Vergil didn’t negotiate, either you’re to follow behind him, or you’re in his way. Even while they fought, Dante understood why Vergil behaved like they weren’t brothers. Demons don’t have family, and they can only be counted on to act in their self-interest.
In his nightmares after Temen-ni-gru, Vergil’s face was ever serene. He never stopped falling. “I’m staying,” he said over and over, reverberating in Dante’s mind like an unending scream. His useless hand stretched slowly through air as thick as molasses, only to receive sharp steel opening the skin on his empty palm, rejection and abandonment shattering his heart night after night.
For all the connections he had made in his life, each person who treated him as human serving as strings holding together what remained of his sanity, the one that meant the world to him was a constant reminder that it was preferable to be seen as someone who frequently lets people down rather than let any of them get too close.
No one expected care from a demon.
Brandishing a soiled shirt fished from the trash in one fist, and getting exercised about an utterly inconsequential matter, it looked like Vergil finally belonged in the human world.
And because he couldn’t help himself, a few days later, Dante gave him a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and other super convenient cleaning materials from the nearby supermarket. Despite his protestations that he bought them on sale, Vergil flung the whole bag back at his head.
Vergil flicked blood from the Yamato and slowly returned it to its scabbard. He turned to face Dante, who was watching him intently with his hands resting on his sword he had run through the demon he was standing on, still twitching from underneath his feet.
This time, Dante was prepared with what to say. “I’d been too busy to notice until now, but your style has gotten sleeker, like your movements are precise as ever yet more fluid. It’s glorious to behold.”
Vergil stared back wordlessly, before abruptly turning to walk away.
“Don’t you have anything to say to me?” Dante called out after him. “Like, I look more cool and collected, or I seem sexier, or—”
“Don’t get so cocky.”
It wasn’t a yes, but he would take what he could get. The grin on Dante’s face didn’t fade for the whole day.
It was a little known fact that when Dante started his business, he considered his future as a wide expanse of nothing before him.
How can he truly gain anything, or even wish for anything, even something as simple as wishing for peace, without his twin beside him?
He could eliminate every last demon until he was the only one left, yet it couldn’t bring his family back.
What he said to Vergil back at the top of the Qliphoth was true. His memories of fighting with Vergil were all he had of them since they were kids. Their fights made him the angriest, and also the happiest. No matter how painful or fragile those memories could be, he considered every single one of them as precious.
Though he was scrupulous at letting on that everything was fine, Vergil didn’t notice that he would sometimes let slip that he had problems with his memory. Nero told him once, revealing his concern while his father was out of earshot, that after staying for the month that Dante had been in a coma in the same place, V only remembered that Red Grave was the city he grew up in until he saw their childhood home. For all Dante knew, Vergil asking him the number of their fights was genuinely coming from lack of information.
Dante half-anticipated and half-dreaded the time when they would have to touch on what happened in Mallet Island. And when the question on what happened to Vergil’s half of the amulet would inevitably come, he didn’t know which reaction he would hate himself more for getting, Vergil’s unforgiving wrath, or his quiet resignation. Like the Yamato, the amulet was the one other possession that Vergil treasured. In absorbing Rebellion and Devil Sword Sparda, Dante gained his new sword and Devil Trigger. But what did Vergil gain after everything? Not only did Vergil not have his amulet anymore, unlike Dante he may not even have all of his memories.
What Vergil considered necessary, he carried with him. He had no personal belongings, nor a place to keep any. Nothing to build a life with, should he desire to do so. Everything he had, Vergil fought for, even his own existence.
No wonder he was surprised that he could just be given things, even compliments, much less ask for them.
“You never asked me for anything,” Dante ventured to say on a crisp, cool day, when they were just passing time in the office, waiting for the phone to ring.
“What are you on about?” Vergil groused without looking up from the novel he picked from Dante’s collection scattered about the office. “I told you to pay the bills this morning, didn’t I?”
“Demanded, sure. Invited, yeah. Conjured up something tall, dark, and demonic to get my attention, definitely. But you’ve never asked.”
This time, Vergil peered up, confusion writ on his face at Dante standing before him with two cups of hot sencha green tea on either hand. “Why should I?”
His heart beating loudly in his chest, Dante made his tone as light as he could as he handed one cup to his brother. “You can, you know. Just ask.”
In lieu of a reply, the furrow in his brow remained as Vergil put the book down beside him on the couch. His eyes unseeingly fixed upon the tea he gingerly received from Dante, careful not to let their fingers touch.
Taking a sip from his own cup, Dante let himself sigh internally, both out of relief and disappointment. “Let me know when you’ve thought of something.”
He was only too happy that Vergil seemed to be giving his invitation some thought, so Dante pretended not to see the considering looks sent his way. That was because he started to feel every gaze like a touch, and with it, the growing sensation of constantly being close to jumping out of his skin.
Never given to introspection, Dante didn’t question the urge to kiss Vergil, its steady deepening making itself known through the tingling on his lips whenever their eyes met. His interest in sex was often impulsive but forgettable, fleeting as the turning of the pages of his magazines, because he might be a hedonist, but he knew better than to inflict his mother’s circumstances on an unsuspecting woman no matter how formidable she may be. And so his directionless desires would come and go faster than a Geryon, all except for one. Even at his most furious or apathetic, he hadn’t stopped wanting his brother.
To wake up each morning, and see the face he had known from before they were born, was undeniable proof that things had never been this good for so long, that it was okay to wish for more, now.
None of it was any guarantee that Vergil wished for the same things he did. Still, should Vergil decide to run Yamato through his chest in response to Dante kissing him, it wasn’t going to change things. They would still be brothers.
What was stopping him from acting on his feelings was the worrying paleness on Vergil’s face from a slew of interrupted rest.
It took some time since their return before the Underworld started to pay Vergil a visit unannounced. Whatever horrors he saw when he slept compelled him to leave the bed without returning, then acting normally as if he meant to be awake hours before Dante dragged himself downstairs.
It was with immense difficulty that Dante managed to be devoutly uninterested in his twin during those nights. That was part of the unspoken rules that Vergil had set. He would act as he wished until Dante would tell him to stop. It was enough to be in each other’s space without letting disagreements and bitterness get in the way of them working together. They were rebuilding their lives for the second time, though Dante could argue that it was the fifth time for himself, and they have yet to learn what this would mean for them both.
Matters came to a head one day, when he caught Vergil silently eyeing him from where he stood, and laying an elbow to his desk as he leaned his chin on his hand, he quipped, “Having a nice time there, staring at my handsome face?”
He could have missed the hesitant expression for how fast it appeared, had he not been in the habit of watching his twin closely. What made it more alarming was how Vergil’s voice sounded strange. “How long do you intend to put up with this?”
That caught him off guard. “What?”
“Haven’t this gone on long enough that you ought to worry about yourself?”
His confusion wasn’t lessened with each question. “If this is about my debts, I wasn’t about to take it out of your share on the commission.”
“It’s not that. My mere presence here could make getting work difficult for you.”
“But you haven’t been doing anything but help since we got back.”
Vergil did not refute that, nor did he agree, and the silence grew with Dante’s apprehension, broken by the rumbling sound of thunder.
“So what’s the problem?”
“You keep giving me things.” Vergil’s eyes were wide, making the dark rings more pronounced. “For all the trouble I’ve caused, shouldn’t you try to mete punishment out of this bargain?”
Dante spoke with amusement he did not feel. “Okay, take your punishment then. You’re going to accept everything I’m going to give you without complaining about the cost.”
The clouds outside were threatening a storm, but it was Vergil’s glare that chilled the air between them. “Do you think so little of my skill that you assume I can’t provide for myself?”
He could reach the state of blissful drunkenness on the rare occasion, and in his wildest imaginings Dante never would have predicted getting in a fight with Vergil over this. “Just so we’re in the same page here, this really isn’t about money?”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, but if you’re using those things to buy your way into getting something from me, then take them back. I don’t want them.”
“They’re gifts!” Dante yelled, uncaring if Vergil got satisfaction from pushing him to his limit. “I gave them because I wanted to, and that’s it. You can throw them in the trash for all I care.”
“Then you expect me to believe you’re wasting your funds over nothing but a whim?”
They were twins with the same killer instinct, but they couldn’t be more different. The same shadow was cast upon their lives, and yet it was as if there was no change from their separation the day their mother died. Even if Dante were to leap from his seat and grab a hold of Vergil in his arms, no amount of power could close the distance between them in this moment.
Dante almost couldn’t speak from the tightness in his chest. “Even if there was something I wanted, it’s not something I can get using skill, or even strength!”
“Then all of it is useless to me,” Vergil said with a sneer as he moved to leave.
He found himself gripping the edge of his desk, caught between gathering his spinning wits and giving in to the madness of the situation by launching himself at Vergil. “Where are you going?”
“Out,” Vergil tossed carelessly over his shoulder, stepping into the twilight downpour and closing the door behind him.
Dante sat alone in the dark, trying to breathe.
The job was to clean out an ancient underground tunnel full of Riot nests, where they worked steadily without speaking. He made a half-hearted attempt to get back into their scoring competition, only for Vergil to barely blink at the flair with which Dante cleared the ground of fifty demons in three hits. Then they went back to grimly ignoring each other.
When they finished, they stood the end of the tunnel, eyes adjusting to the sun once more. Dante yawned and twisted around to stretch while waiting for the decision whether they were to take the train or go home via Yamato, when he was almost blinded again by the sun’s glare coming from Vergil’s hand.
“Ow! What’s going on—”
His outraged demand was forestalled at the sight of his multiple reflections on the broken mirror Vergil was holding. Dante’s first gift to him, the pink plastic comb, came with a similarly colored plastic compact mirror that the comb could be kept in, and it looked like they both shattered upon impact earlier.
Vergil didn’t seem to notice that his hard grip on the edges caused his thumb to bleed. Dante was about to point this out, when Vergil hurled it back in the direction from which they emerged.
“Whoa, isn’t that littering?”
He assumed his inane comment would earn a scowl, but Vergil kept his back to him as he gazed into the darkness of the tunnel.
“In that last fight with Urizen. Why didn’t you kill me?”
Dante could feel all the blood draining from his face.
“Don’t you remember what I had done to your friends? Any wound I had dealt you absolves you of bearing any responsibility to care. You should have no problem finishing the job back then.”
For demons, any sign of softness was not permitted to exist, unless it was to be exploited. Dante lived like a human for so long, he had forgotten that for all of his brother’s disownment of his humanity, there was no way that Vergil didn’t suffer as one all this time.
Just as he wouldn’t allow Dante’s gifts to him to count, Vergil wouldn’t allow the wounds dealt to him acknowledged, because he would rather his great and terrible acts serve as cover for his weaknesses instead.
It took a couple of tries before Dante was able to get his dry mouth to work. “You see, I tried that. Not caring. So I hated you. We’re twins. You weren’t supposed to leave me alone, ever. But you’d rather pick Hell over me. You didn’t even let me have the fun of killing you with me knowing. I hated you even more.”
His hands twitched. Dante wished Vergil left half of that mirror for him, just so he could throw something too.
“When you came back, I tried my best to kill you again, but you didn’t even bother to come after me yourself when I failed to finish the job.” He paused, breathing out the last of his resentment. “Now your son said he won’t let us die.”
He took another deep breath. “I’ve lived for myself all this time. It hasn’t brought me anything but hatred. It took me this long to realize that what I really wanted was...”
‘To care for you,’ was what he wanted to say, but the thought of mockery had the words kept stuck in his throat.
“Whatever it is, it brought you this far.” Vergil turned slowly, as if reluctant to look at him. “I don’t know what it is you want from me, Dante.”
Dante stretched his lips desperately, decades’ worth of unvoiced sentiments clawing at his lungs, making him sound out of breath.
“In Mallet Island, I didn’t know it was you, but you remembered me enough to spare my life. You kept giving me chances to fight you all the time, like you knew that it would make me happy.” Dante kept smiling as he looked away into the distant horizon. “I have never given you anything important. I just thought, if I could work my way towards it, then my life will finally be worthwhile.”
He didn’t notice a tear had slipped down his cheek, until a light touch wiped it away. In his astonishment, Dante let Vergil tug at his chin to face him.
“I don’t need you to give me anything.” He didn’t know Vergil’s eyes and voice were capable of holding gentleness. “I need you to tell me what you want.”
He trusted Vergil with his life, but it seemed he was yet to trust Vergil with his heart. He wanted to, so badly. “I want you to throw away whatever that’s making you think you don’t belong here. That’s making you think Hell is the only place you belong.”
Vergil’s eyelashes dipped a little in acknowledgement. “It might be better if I did. Maybe you’ll have some peace.”
Dante threw caution to the wind. “I don’t care about having peace. I care about you.” He finally let his hands reach out to hold Vergil’s face. “Come back home with me.”
Vergil brought his hands up to place them over Dante’s. “I will. But I want to ask you for something first.”
Dante felt his chest expand with hope. “Name it.”
Vergil smiled, leaned his face closer, and told him.