Chapter Text
The smell of bacon brings him back from the edge of restful sleep. He wakes up, momentarily thinking he’s back home. His immediate thought is to remind Kyrie that he’d promised her he’d cook her breakfast. His eyes adjust to the morning light and he focuses on the figure of Vergil sitting on the corner stool, Blue Rose in his hands.
Nero jerks up into a seated position, “hey, that’s not yours,” he says with a frown.
“It’s an effective piece of craftsmanship. If crudely made,” Vergil says, twisting the barrel around in his hands. “Where did you acquire this?”
“I made it,” Nero says, holding his hand out like a child who refuses to share. “I put it together myself. Etchings, too.”
Vergil stands and walks over to hand Nero his gun. “There are much more elegant ways of going about violence.”
Nero huffs a laugh, “I can wield a sword, too, you know.”
“Can you?” Vergil asks, curiosity in his tone.
“Yes. Better than you, I’d bet,” Nero says, a bit of the residual anger bubbling up in his words.
The faintest smile appears on Vergil’s lips before he says, “we’ll have to see about that.”
“Hey!” Natasha’s voice cuts through their conversation as her head peers around the entrance to the kitchen. “Breakfast.”
Having them both seated in front of him in broad daylight and listening to the small talk between them confirms Nero’s initial and only working theory. The shock from the fact that he’d been sent back in time is immediately displaced by the shock of being sent back in time and meeting his teenage parents.
Vergil excuses himself and promises to return later in the day. Nero pushes down the awkward emotion that settles in with the anxiety in his chest when he watches what is evidently his father kissing his mother goodbye. The sound of the door shutting rings loudly in Nero’s ears as his vision blanks for a moment.
This leaves him alone with Natasha. Alone with—
“Thank you,” Nero says, pushing his plate back. Nero will never admit that he thinks Kyrie is a better cook than his mother.
“Not a problem,” she says with a smile. “We can go through the texts I own and see if we can find anything relating to messing with time.”
“Yeah,” Nero stands to take their plates and put them in the sink. His mother or not, Kyrie has him trained to help out when he is a guest. “That sounds good.”
The rest of their morning is spent going through the books on the shelf. Natasha finds a vague description of a spell that can affect a person’s place in time, but it seems like they’ll have to break into the castle again. Nero finds an entry on a demon that uses time travel as a way of getting around. He also remembers a certain half-demon that can teleport through space. He wonders if any of it is related.
Nero also has a thought sitting in his head. He wonders if it’s selfish. He wrestles with the thought as he tries to read an entry on a demon that is made up of blades.
After a few frustrating moments where he can’t shake it, it wins. He looks up at his mother and says, “ I— I know it’s probably not my place to say, but I think you should give up on the search for the tower.”
She glances up from the book in her hands, “and why is that? What do you know?”
Nero shakes his head. He doesn’t know anything, actually. He just knows what becomes of whatever is happening. The concern is apparent in his voice, “it’s not going to end well. I can’t exactly tell you how.”
She watches him curiously for several moments. Long enough that Nero becomes uncomfortable with the gaze. He looks down when she decides to respond.
“What are you to him?”
“To who?” he asks, knowing exactly whom she was referring to.
“You look like him,” she says. The curiosity in the way she looks at him makes sense now. She’d been having a similar internal debate to the one that Nero had.
“I don’t think I can tell you,” Nero says, staring down at the words in the book in his lap.
“Are you… Dante?” she asks.
“No,” Nero says with a laugh. “I can promise you that your boyfriend would have reacted very differently if I was Dante.”
“He said he could sense your presence when you arrived. He’s looking for him. For Dante,” she says softly, “he thought his brother had been dead. He wants to make things right between them.”
Something sinks into Nero’s stomach. It makes his chest ache and he can’t look up. Of the series of questions he’s trying to answer, it brings forward the question of what the hell happened between now and Nero’s time that resulted in the horrors Vergil would commit.
Nero struggles with himself. He’s unsure what he can say. “It’s just not a good idea.”
“To find Dante?”
“No,” Nero shakes his head, “to find the tower. Is that where he’s going?”
She nods, “he is seeking out someone by the name of… Arkham.”
She watches him, expecting a reaction to the name. Nero’s never heard of it. Regardless, he tells his mother exactly what he thinks. “ Arkham? That sounds like the name of a very good person who doesn’t want to unleash hell on Earth.”
She sighs and shuts the book she’d been looking in. She asks again, “ who are you , Nero?”
Nero doesn’t think of the consequences of what he’s about to say, “I’m—”
The door to the apartment gets kicked open, causing them both to look up. Vergil storms through, the aura coming from him is dangerous. He disappears wordlessly behind the same door as the previous night, only this time he emerges with a different sword in hand. He tosses it in Nero’s direction.
“Your assistance is required,” he says as he exits the apartment as quickly as he had come in.
“Go,” his mother gestures for him to follow. Nero picks up Blue Rose and follows him out. The thing Nero hasn’t been able to place about Vergil makes him ever so slightly more approachable than his middle-aged counterpart.
“Where are we going?!” Nero yells as he catches up with him.
“I believe I’ve made contact with someone important,” he says. They head down the street of their apartment building. A few blocks down, Nero sees what assistance Vergil needs. There are several demons coming from an opened portal, many are already taking shots at the nearby buildings.
“He believes he holds more power than he does,” Vergil says as he unsheathes the Yamato. He turns to look at Nero. “I intend to set boundaries.”
Whatever the hell that means, Nero’s delighted to be presented with some kind of normalcy. He laments that he doesn’t have Red Queen with him, but the backup blade Vergil gave to him will do just as well. It’s masterfully made, the weight makes it easy to wield and it slashes through thick skin with ease.
Nero glides through the devils with a practised ease as Vergil dashes around them from the outskirts. With both Nero and Vergil here, it's not a fair fight by any means. It makes Nero wonder how skilled Vergil is at this age.
“Hey!” Nero calls out as he dodges one of many claws coming at him and kicks off of another to slice through an incoming demon with ease.
“What?!” Vergil calls back, absolutely annoyed as he lunges forward at a creature much larger than he is with murderous intent.
“How old are you?!” Nero yells. He charges a shot with Blue Rose and aims down at another demon as Vergil yells back at him.
“How is that pertinent?!” Vergil yells back from across a newly crossed horde of demons.
Nero laughs, the adrenaline of being back in the most normal scenario he’s been in in months makes the blood pump in his ears. It’s his favourite song.
“I dunno! I figure even a child would be able to handle this horde by himself!” Nero knows that Vergil is not a child, but if Dante’s words are anything to go by, Vergil has many buttons. Nero just needs to press them. He slashes through another demon as the fight slows down.
Nero holsters Blue Rose and takes a look at the blade Vergil had tossed at him. It really is very well made. He wonders if the manufacturer is still around in his time. He could definitely use something like this to train—
The blade distracts him enough that he misses sight of a demon crawling up from a pile of rubble that they had created. It leaps off and tackles Nero to the ground. Nero grunts and pushes at the demon’s clawing jaws with his hands, only just keeping his own face from being eaten.
With a final, skillful trick, Vergil leaps off of a decaying demon in front of him, flips backward, and lands directly on top of the demon that is trying to bite at Nero, Yamato first. The sword pierces through the demonic flesh and is held still through the demon fading away, revealing the tip to be held, yet again, at Nero’s throat. Vergil lands softly on his feet as the demon fully dissipates, one leg on either side of Nero. Vergil’s coattails sway in the wind as the sun sets behind him.
“I am eighteen years old and if this has proven anything , it’s that I already possess a mastery that you can only dream of in your middle age,” Vergil’s words are loaded with arrogance and his expression is beyond condescending.
And Nero laughs. He’s on his back on a street in the middle of Fortuna as it was however many years ago, his eighteen-year-old father is standing above him pointing a weapon at his throat, and he just called Nero old.
He could not make this up.
“ Why are you laughing?” Vergil asks, narrowing his eyes. The Yamato doesn’t move from its position at Nero’s throat.
“Nothing,” Nero says through the laughter. “I just— Nothing. I’m twenty five. ”
Vergil glares at Nero a little longer, but he sheathes the Yamato again. He holds his hand out for Nero, the arrogance still plain on his face. Nero doesn’t take his help, but he does hand the blade back to Vergil as they begin to head back.
Dusting himself off, Nero asks, “where did you meet her?”
It’s a casual enough conversational piece that in no way shape or form implies Nero is trying to get any information out of this version of his father that he wouldn’t get from the other one. None whatsoever.
“The library,” Vergil responds plainly. He runs his hands through his hair, it sticks completely up now with the sweat that trickles down the side of his face.
“I want to give you shit for that, but I technically met the love of my life in church,” Nero says with a small laugh. He’s still riding the wave of confidence the adrenaline has given him.
Vergil turns to him, the faintest look of amusement on his face. “It’s hard to believe a woman would look at you and have wholesome intentions.”
“ Hey,” Nero starts, although he wouldn’t exactly disagree. Kyrie was special, but her determination to stick with Nero through the good and the bad, her strength and heart, it all put her in a league of her own. It’s a miracle Nero ended up where he was with her.
Vergil takes a few steps ahead of Nero as Nero finds his words, “I could say the same about you.”
Vergil turns back to look at him for a moment before continuing forward, “you could.”
The rest of the walk is in silence. Nero’s adrenaline high comes to an end as he realizes he’s had his second proper conversation with his father. About girls.
He makes a face for only himself as he follows Vergil up the stairs leading into Natasha’s apartment. As they enter, she’s sitting at the small dinner table with an open book on the desk.
Her expression is unreadable as she takes in the sight of the two of them entering.
“Are you alright?” Vergil asks.
“Yes,” she says, forcing her face into a smile. It fools no one, Nero’s sure, but nobody says anything of it. She continues, “I had dinner without you. There are leftovers in the fridge.”
“Anything interesting?” Nero asks, gesturing to the book as he takes a seat across from her at the small table.
She shrugs, “I’ve figured out an easier way to get into the castle.”
“Oh, yeah?” Nero asks, genuinely impressed if that was the case. It was a fortress.
Without breaking eye contact with Nero, Natasha vanishes. He’s positive he didn’t blink.
“What the fuck?” Nero says, blinking hard and looking around for Vergil. He’s by the counter, scooping cold pasta onto two plates.
Natasha reappears in front of him with an arrogant smile that’s only just less intense than Vergil’s.
“Magicks of all kinds exist, Nero,” she says, her smile warming, “not just demonic. You would do best to remember that.”
She holds out a charm on a necklace she wears. It’s a little rune, Nero realizes. His mother was a sorceress of some kind. That’s pretty badass. He’s a little proud.
A plate gets served in front of him and Nero nearly chokes on his own spit again. If the Vergil he knew met this one, they’d kill each other. This Vergil, completely unbothered, takes a seat next to her and starts shoveling cold pasta into his mouth. His sweaty hair falls over his face and for a split second, he could have easily been mistaken for Dante.
“Let me warm that for you,” Natasha says, reaching over for their plates. Vergil pulls his away.
“I like it cold,” he says, like a child. Eighteen, indeed.
Nero stifles his laugh and gives her a grateful smile, “I’m fine with this, too.”
The unreadable expression on her face comes back and she shakes her head, picking the book up from the table and she heads into the other room. Vergil and Nero eat in silence. The sounds of running water come in the distance and Nero realizes that he’s alone with his father again. This time outside of a familiar combat zone.
“What are you to her? Vergil asks, the empty plate in front of him pushed aside. Right to business, as always.
“What?” Nero asks, genuinely confused.
“You share her expressions, her eyes,” he says flatly.
They’re yours, idiot. Nero squints at him, the confirmation that she is his mother sinks the anxiety into his stomach again. “Sorry for having eyes?”
Vergil doesn’t respond to Nero’s sarcasm. He continues his series of questions and not-questions. “You are not Dante. Why do I sense a demonic presence in you?” he asks.
There’s a moment where Nero wonders if he should come clean about his relation to them. He’s concerned he’s going to faze out of reality if he messes up the timeline somehow. Thus far he’s kicked many rocks and it doesn’t look like the dinosaurs have come back, but this is something major. Still, clearly, his parents have had some kind of discussion and neither seems prepared to let the subject go.
Maybe if he doesn’t outright admit to it.
Nero stares at Vergil, doing his best to keep his face as unreadable as he can. It’s a long shot to assume that Nero’s his own son, Nero can admit that, but if Vergil knows that Nero’s different, that Nero makes his skin itch in a way similar to Dante. On top of all of that Nero looks like them.
What other conclusion could he come to?
“You know who I am,” Nero challenges, pushing the feelings that sink in his stomach as far down as he can.
Vergil’s expression is unreadable, his eyes bore into Nero’s. He asks, “are you father’s illegitimate child?”
“What?!” Nero chokes on his pasta this time. Vergil watches him choke with the same unchanging expression. Nero manages to clear his throat and yell back, “what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“My father was on this mortal plane for a very long time, perhaps, before he met mother—”
“ No,” Nero says flatly, “definitely not.”
“Dante…” Vergil muses, “no, that is unlikely…”
Nero keeps staring at him, the challenge to recognize him as a son remaining. He watches Vergil’s face go through the most subtle train of thoughts. The man’s eyes stare down at the table for a moment as he goes through all possible relations he could have to Nero before he settles on one. Vergil looks up again.
If not for the fact that Nero was aware that Vergil didn’t like to expand on his thoughts, nor would Vergil ever admit to the insane claim that he was staring at his child from the future, Nero would have missed the subtlest of nods that Vergil gave him. It was an understanding. He knew.
Vergil keeps staring at him, face unchanged. His voice is steady, controlled when he asks, “how are you here?”
Nero pushes the half-eaten plate away from him and sets his hands in his lap to hide how they shake. He’s expecting to fizz out like the demons or implode on himself. A layer of sweat develops in his hands as he goes into the explanation of having been on a walk, seeing a strange woman in a shop, and going through a wall that brought him into the past. He pointedly leaves out the reason he’d been on the streets in the first place. He does note the situation that had been at hand. Demons afoot, plagues, locusts, the whole shebang.
“And I don’t think I was supposed to tell you that,” Nero ends with a frown. He could have doomed the entire world with that. He’s expecting to implode in 3… 2…
“You haven’t phased out of existence,” Vergil says, as if reading into Nero’s worry, “if you had changed anything, you likely wouldn’t be able to sit here as you are.”
There was some logic to that, Nero thinks. He’d indirectly told Vergil what their relation to each other was and lived to tell the tale. He could test the waters this way and see what he could get away with saying.
“This woman,” Vergil asks, “what was she like in appearance?”
Nero shrugs, “I don’t know. She looked like she was made of porcelain. Her eyes could move in her eye sockets on their own. She wasn’t a demon, though. She looked like a puppet almost? Not like a demon puppet, I’ve seen plenty of those.”
“How are you so sure?” Vergil asks.
Nero shrugs, “just a feeling. The feeling. You know what I mean.”
Vergil hums in acknowledgment. He doesn’t say anything else as he gets up and pours a glass of water. Nero expects him to head out of the kitchen, but is once again surprised by the act of the glass being set in front of him.
“You should eat,” Vergil says. Then he walks out of the kitchen.
Nero grips the edge of the table, grounding himself as best as he can. He’s only somewhat confident that he still wont fade away. He waits there for a moment before he reaches for the glass on the table. He hasn’t disappeared, he hasn’t exploded. It seems like everything remains in place. He takes a slow sip and Nero breathes as deeply as he can.
He wonders if he should just tell Natasha. He wonders if Vergil will.
He also can’t believe his father served him dinner.
Nero decidedly takes a walk after yet another stressful conversation with his father. This time around, he wanders the streets of Fortuna as he remembers them mostly. Some of the shops are different, but he recognizes the majority of the ones that have their closed signs up for the night. He catches his reflection in the window of a dress shop. The two mannequins in the front window will one day model a dress that a fifteen-year-old Nero will save up to get Kyrie for her birthday.
The block he and Vergil had rid of demons has been sectioned off and crews are already beginning to work on the “electrical short” that had caused the damage. Nero takes a look around the outskirts of the area and he finds the source of the summonings. It was professional work.
And he thinks back to what Vergil had said, it had been Arkham, most likely. What was that guy’s deal? It takes Nero about an hour to disrupt the seal enough that it can’t be used without redoing the entire thing before he’s content with leaving it be.
“I hope you guys are okay,” he murmurs to the sky above him. He’s sure the gang is dealing with their issue as best they can. Kyrie can handle the kids. But, still, Nero feels useless in the grand scheme of things. There’s a major event and he’s stuck in the past.
For a moment, he wishes he could reach for one of Nico’s cigarettes. He sure as hell deserved one now.
As he walks down the main street that connects everything, leading him down a longer more scenic route to his mother’s apartment, Nero thinks on just that.
His mother is here. He’s met her, he’s talked to her. He likes her. Nero had been sure that she had been a random one-night stand, somehow. That a woman who’d been drunk or inebriated in some way shape or form, had looked at Vergil and only in that state would have wanted anything to do with him.
But, no. There was a whole woman here who cared for him.
There’s the faint acknowledgment of something that sits in the back of his head as he walks down the streets illuminated only by streetlights. The stars above him shine as bright as they did when Nero looked up at them with a matching brightness in his own eyes.
He laughs at himself at the thought, he’s not in the right headspace to admit it to himself just yet.
Instead, he thinks of the other side of that relationship.
Vergil was still the same stuck-up, arrogant bastard that Nero knew, but there was a softness to his edges. It was a lack of something, Nero notes. Something that the man he met on the Qliphoth carried heavy on his back. Because of this, Vergil was infinitely more approachable and he seemed like he could be reasoned with at this age.
It drives the question further into Nero’s head and his heart. What the hell happened? What separated them and led Vergil down the path he ended on and Nero abandoned?
He turns around suddenly, feeling a set of eyes on him as he finds their owner in a large black crow.
“Even in the past, you’re around, huh?” Nero asks with a faint smile. He stands alone at a bench in a small park near a makeshift pond. The streetlights give the area a glow as the crow regards him curiously.
“In a few years, some of your offspring are gonna make a hell of a mess out here. Don’t tell anyone I told you that, okay?” Nero says with a short laugh. “It’s great though, this lady swings her bag at you and two days later like ten of you come down on her. It makes the papers.”
The crow caws at him as if responding to his words. Nero nods at it. “Yeah, just like that.”
He stares down at the path for a moment before looking back up at the crow. “You know anything about deadbeat dads and meeting them when they’re six years younger than you?”
The crow caws again.
“Yeah, didn’t think so,” he says as he walks down closer to the pond. It’s the site of another set of memories. Many dates, many awkward attempts to put his arm around her, and the site of his first kiss.
Its water glimmers underneath the moonlight. He manages to see the larger of the fish swim by the edge. Nero wonders if his parents have ever been here.
The selfishness of telling his mother not to look for the tower rushes back as he sits there again, this time without Kyrie. He could stay here. He could get to know his family in a way that his present would never allow. He’s already got a better relationship with Vergil than he ever had in his own time.
Would that be okay? Has Nero not earned a family?
And he’d be doing a good thing, he realizes. He could keep his parents together.
He considers the thought of that meaning that Nero as he is would disappear at some point. He’s uneasy at that thought.
He looks to his right, fully expecting the most gorgeous woman to come out of Fortuna to be at his side. And she’s not, and his heart sinks. He couldn’t leave her. He couldn’t think of a future where she was not in his life.
And yet.
The thought lingers in his head as he heads back to the apartment. The moon is high in the sky as he reaches above the door frame to find the spare key she keeps. He unlocks the door and
gets to witness more of the domestic life Vergil had lived in his youth. Nero has begun to process some of it, realizing that there was a softness to his father that Nero never knew, but it still makes him no better than an awkward child.
They sit against the couch, doing their own research. Vergil sits with his legs spread apart enough that Natasha can sit comfortably between them with her back against his chest. She holds the book that they’re both looking at open.
They’re a couple. It’s still as off-putting as it ever was.
“Are you alright, Nero?” she asks.
“Yeah,” Nero says, unable to look in their general direction. “Sorry I took so long. I haven’t seen the city like this in years.”
Vergil hums in response and she says, “you don’t need to apologize. We saved you a stack.”
Nero looks over beside them and sure enough, there are five books that need eyes on them. He takes his jacket off and sits on the ground. The ones she’d set out for him are all demonic in nature. He starts skimming the first one, looking for any sign of a porcelain woman or glowing crystals of any kind.
When he’s able to sneak glances at the two, he wonders if this is how Dante and Vergil felt in their youth when they’d see their parents. It was awkward at best, horrifying at worst.
A couple of hours pass and Nero finds no leads in his own search. Eventually, the words frustrate him and he tosses another book aside into the pile he’s already looked through.
“Have you considered there is no demonic influence in what’s happened to you?” Natasha asks, looking over at Nero.
He can’t fully look at her when she’s still wrapped up in half-demon.
“What does that mean?” Nero asks. Out of the corner of his eye he watches her look up at Vergil.
“Do you know what angels look like?” she asks.
“No,” Nero hears Vergil respond. “Definitely not.”
“I can speak to the coven,” she says after. Nero’s staring at his pile of books.
“Coven?” Nero asks.
“Some of us have to work for our connections to power,” she says, playful in her tone.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Vergil says immediately. There is no anger in his tone. “I certainly have put in work.”
“Uh-huh,” she responds. Nero watches her stand up out of the corner of his eye. He watches her put her hands on her hips and bend over slightly to move her face closer to Vergil’s. “Of course, first-born of the legendary dark knight Sparda.”
Nero’s chest aches. The look she’s giving Vergil reminds him of the way Kyrie looks at him sometimes.
“I’d appreciate it if you did,” Nero chimes in, sounding more awkward than he feels. Everyone back home would laugh at him for third-wheeling his own parents like this. Hell, once this was all over he’d laugh at himself for it.
“Of course, Nero,” she says, straightening out and turning to look at him with some concern on her face.
She opens her mouth to say something else, hesitates for a moment, and then looks back at Vergil.
Nero watches Vergil look up at her and decide to stand. Vergil leaves the room without a word.
Natasha stands there, looking the most awkward he’s seen her. Her usual confidence is entirely absent.
Nero meets her eyes and decides he can’t take the two of them teeming with awkwardness over their entire situation. He grabs the bull by the horns. He pushes the books near him aside and shifts his position so he’s sitting criss-cross.
“He told you,” he says after a few moments of silence. It’s not a question. He knows that she knows.
Her face softens when she realizes they’re on the same wavelength. She drops to her knees beside him. “I—”
She looks at him with wide eyes and Nero is tempted to run away. He’s dealt with a lot in his life and suddenly finding out he had a family via violence atop of a demonic tree is a million times better than this. He meets her eyes, seeing the concern and wonder in them. Nero’s eyes shift elsewhere, or else he’d drown in his mother’s gaze.
She reaches out to him hesitantly. Her hand held up in midair. “May I?”
He’s unsure of what she means to do. He thinks it’s a hug when he responds, “uh, sure.”
She doesn’t hug him. She takes his face in her hands, cradling the side of his face gently and Nero fights the emotion that wells up in his eyes. She doesn’t fight the emotion in hers. Tears stream down her face as her thumbs rub against his cheeks. She whispers softly, “ nene.”
And Nero awkwardly jerks away from her grip. That’s way too much to handle right now. It makes him want to stay . He can’t look at her because the emotion he’s trying so hard to beat down wins in the moment. He does his best to nonchalantly rub at his eyes before he tries to glance back at her.
She gives him a concerned look, “you said— an orphanage.”
“Yeah,” Nero says, his tone colder than it means to be.
“I— what becomes of us?” she asks. “Of you and me?”
“I don’t know,” Nero says. He wishes he had an answer for her. He doesn’t trust himself to say any more than that without his voice breaking.
They stay like that. Nero stares at the ground, letting the anger he feels toward the father he left back home rise back up into his throat. It's his fault Nero doesn’t have an answer to any of the questions that plagued him his entire life . It distracts him from the tugging at his heart, the way he wishes the ground would swallow him whole. He feels her watch him.
“I’m sorry,” she says finally.
Nero doesn’t think it’s an apology she has to give, but it breaks him all the same. He breathes heavily, unable to stop the shaking that overcomes him in the moment. He fights the tears harder than he ever did Urizen. Some break through his defenses, but he’s determined not to cry.
“We’ll get you home,” she says after what’s been a minute of Nero’s silence. “Or…”
“Or?” Nero asks, turning to look at her. He’s embarrassed by what he thinks he looks like in front of her.
“Stay,” she says. There’s a plea in her eyes. “Help me fix this…”
She shakes her head at Nero’s look of confusion, rubbing the tears out of them, and composes herself the best she can. “I know he is not meant for greatness. I know he will find Dante and many will pay for it.”
“Then why are you helping him?!” Nero yells, the emotion he’d been holding in pouring out at once in a pained question. If she’s part of the reason he finds the tower, she’s no better than him.
She looks down at the ground. “Two years ago, I dreamt of a boy with a sword among the ruins of the castle. I had thought it was the wishful thinking of my subconscious. I belonged to the Order then, in body and soul. They had taught me the practise of magick. I was alone in the library one night and I thought the boy had found me. You are aware of what happened next.”
Church girl running away with the guy with the sword. Nero’s heard that one before. Sort of.
Nero doesn’t comment, so she continues, “once I’d escaped from the order, I had many more dreams. I saw him atop of a tower, but it was accompanied by grief, by a world that I had never seen before. I have been living with the misguided hope that he would lead to the Order’s fall. And then you fell into our lives. I no longer believe he was the boy I dreamt of.”
She looks up at him, her eyes as big as they had been when she cradled his face, “and I cannot do that to my own child.”
She inches closer to him, the same plea from before in her eyes, “he wants to find a power his father left behind. The life it brings you is not worth any power in this world. His path has been walked, but we can save you.”
A hell of a woman his mother turned out to be. Kyrie would be head over heels.
Nero shuts his eyes and takes a slow deep breath. The thought rings in his head louder than it has all night. He hates to admit it, but he wants to stay. He’s met his parents and his mother is determined to save him from the fate at the orphanage. He shouldn’t want to give that up, he should be proud of the man it’s made him. He’s saved lives, he has the girl of his dreams at his side.
And yet. His mother makes a hell of an argument, even if she doesn’t have the full details. Nero’s earned this, hasn’t he? A small reprieve from the world that’s taken so much from him. He thinks of the lives that would be saved if Vergil never unleashes the Qliphoth on Redgrave City. Thousands of families that would get to live. Nero’s own included.
He’d trade his own life for the city’s, he thinks. And he’s earned the right to have a family. Even if it’s in the most fucked up circumstance he can think of.
Just for a little while.
A little bit.
He can always change his mind.
“I can’t help you find the tower,” he says finally, resigned to his own selfish desires. He opens his eyes, they’re tired. He gives her his own pained expression.
“We don’t need to,” she says. A small smile on her face, “you leave him to me. It’s done. It’s over. We can live here without a problem.”
“I don’t know,” Nero says. “That doesn’t sound right. Time is fucked up, isn’t it? I feel like I’ve just doomed my timeline to fighting dinosaurs in space or something.” He laughs awkwardly, trying to lighten the moment for himself.
“Find Dante with him,” she says in response. Her eyes are pleading. “You can change things for the better. Reunite them for good .”
Nero blinks. He hadn’t considered Dante in all of this.
He hadn’t considered that he could give Dante the relationship he always wanted with Vergil. Nero could have his father. He could save everyone who died from the Qliphoth. He could save everyone who’s ever suffered at the hands of his father’s pursuit of power. This could be bigger than all of them.
All at the cost of life as Nero knows it. He’d grow up as someone else. Someone who didn’t watch Dante murder Sanctus only to later learn that was his uncle.
“I wouldn’t get to meet you,” Nero says weakly after a moment. “You’re cool and badass and I’d be in diapers."
She laughs humorlessly.
“ Nene ,” she says again. She reaches forward and takes his face in her hands again. This time he lets her. “Your eyes tell of the suffering they’ve known since birth. Let me heal you. Let me raise you.”
Nero shuts his eyes. He can’t face her. He thinks of Dante’s attempts to reconcile with his brother, of whatever unknown befalls Vergil that turns him into the monster Nero could only just bear to look at. He thinks of the countless decayed bodies he passed on the streets of Red Grave, innocent souls that never stood a chance. Between the disaster in Fortuna and the Qliphoth, the deaths as a result of Sparda were well in the thousands.
He thinks of the Order, of the Saviour. If events were to happen at all similar to how they did, they’d have Vergil with them. The order would be no match for the three of them. Credo would be alive . Nero’s eyes shoot open as the thought enters his head. He stares forward, looking past his mother.
All this time Nero had been thinking of Kyrie in relation to him. The more he thinks of it, the selfish move would be to keep Kyrie’s family away from her.
Could he be that selfish? Could he live with the fact that he could have prevented all that loss of life, all that pain, all for his own love?
He lets go of a shaky breath, the decision was made. This was bigger than them all.
“Okay,” Nero says, turning his glance back at her. He can live with the fact that he will likely disappear if it means saving so many people from suffering at the hands of his family. If it means Kyrie won’t lose her brother. And if Nero gets a family as a result? It could be worse, he thinks.
He gives her a real smile and raises his hands to cover hers. “Where do we start?”
She laughs nervously, still clearly reeling from their conversation. She drops her hands from his face. “I must convince him to stop looking for the Temen-ni-gru.”
Nero sighs. It was all fun and games when it was all hypothetical. Still, the Vergil that was present now seemed to be just slightly more reasonable.
“I’ll beat it into him,” Nero says with a smile that reaches his eyes.
She gives him a strained smile, “please don’t.”
Nero laughs.
When he lies on the couch later that night, his parents asleep not so far away, Nero feels as light as he ever has. It’s not anything he ever expected, but in the deepest parts of his soul, it really was everything he’d ever wanted.
He had Kyrie and in the life he’d led, that was more than enough, despite everything. And now he was presented with an opportunity to fix everything. He’d be selfish not to fix it.
It hurts, the pang in his heart brings the emotion to his eyes as he thinks of the last time he spoke with Kyrie. It hadn’t even been in person, it’d been over the phone. She’d asked him about the situation at hand, about how the search for the cause of the demonic outbreaks was going. She was terrified something would hit Fortuna and Nero had assured her everything would be fine.
And now Nero was in a position to really make good on that promise. Kyrie had always deserved better than Nero and giving her Credo back is the best thing Nero can do for her. Nobody loses in this scenario.
Nero wipes at his eyes and flips around so he isn’t looking into his mother’s empty living room.
He stares at the white couch until he succumbs to his tired eyes. His mind is racing, but above it all he thinks back to the thing he couldn’t admit to himself before. The realization he’d had upon seeing that his parents were more than just a random night together. In a proper state of mind, Nero wouldn’t admit it to himself. And he won’t ever.
But, now, as sleep comes over him in slow rocking waves and the walls he’s constructed around himself are down, Nero finds the most comfort in knowing that he was conceived of love.