Work Text:
A long time ago, in a now-ancient Italian city, a young man met a young woman named Beatrice. He found her so beautiful, so striking, that with only a brief meeting, he was struck with love. He worshiped the image of her he constructed in his mind, the fair goddess he made out of scraps of memory and called her name. He wrote a love story for her, to forever memorialize their love that was not, pure and eternal and passed down over the ages. And this man’s name was Dante, and his story was nothing more than that: a story.
No matter how much lipservice he paid to his love, his story was one of his religious convictions and political beliefs. The ‘Beatrice’ he so loved was just a stand-in for his fervent love of God. His obsession with her was ridiculous, given that he was a married man with children - four of them. It was nothing more than a twisted delusion of ‘love’.
It was not as though Kinzo cared for his four children or for his wife when he knelt at Beatrice's feet and offered up his heart and soul to the witch. It was not as though Kinzo cared for anything but himself when he declared that the witch had been reincarnated. And it was not as though Kinzo cared about his child when he gave it over to Ushiromiya Natsuhi to raise (to kill).
Dante went nine years between the first and the last time he met Beatrice: so too was it with Kinzo, meeting a six year old servant with hair a soft blonde, not yet faded to brown by age and time. Kinzo looked at that small body, eyes wide and looking around, altogether far too much of a child to be brought into his bloodstained and haunted home. He looked at them, thought ‘too young', and yet, holding onto unvoiced hope, giving an uncharacteristically-asked-for favor to an old friend, he allowed them in. How terrible was that?
How terrible was it, Beatrice mused, to cling to such a hope and yet to never voice it, to never dare to reach out to that child as a father? How terrible was it, that Genji had expected Kinzo to do so, and that Kinzo had not? Kinzo had only ever wanted the witch: the Beatrice atop the mountain, awaiting his ascent.
Now, Beatrice was the one with unvoiced hopes as she awaited Dante atop that mountain. She awaited Battler, the man she had placed her hopes upon, who might come to understand her. If he could reach the divine revelations, with the power of human reason and love, then he might take her hand… or he might push her from the peak down to Hell.
For her sins, she would let Battler drag her to the furthest depths, to be encased in ice and shackles for her betrayal. There she would wait, with the devil as her company, until her being rotted to nothing, all her power and wit and beauty lost. She was not the sinless Beatrice of Dante's dreamings, a pretty being perhaps entirely conjured, never to be made real. She was flesh and blood and wickedness, for all her piety at the feet of miracles and certainty.
Battler was her Dante, and yet the smirking man before her, sipping tea while Gretel stood apart from him, arms crossed, was an exile returned. Dante had never returned to his beloved hometown of Florence, for fear of his murder. Battler - loyal and stupid - had come back, rose-tinted nostalgia blinding him to the blood dripping from the floorboards, and he had died for her. He had died for Beatrice, now trapped forever in Purgatorio as he worked to purge himself of sin, to be worthy of judging her and deciding her proper end.
She had given him Virgilia to guide him, as he had faltered and as she had grown impatient, and instead he had fallen into a sweet illusion of her innocence. He had been tied up in red, her heart practically before him with how many hints Eva-BEATRICE had given him. He had only needed to see her and she would have been his eternally, to do with as he pleased. Instead, Battler had faltered, his wits dashed on the rocks of his trial, and Beatrice had torn her chest open for him, red slicing her existence to ribbons. Beatrice needed Dante to reach her, after all, or the story could not continue. She would remain forever in place, transfixed by the horror of her own existence, unable to acknowledge herself.
She had given him Virgilia, her own mentor, and had then made her betray him just to force him to look at Beatrice as the witch, the monster, the sinner. She had not wanted him to think her a noble lady, a pretty victim: she had not wanted to be Dante's Beatrice, pretty and dead and existing only in ink. She could never settle for that, to be the tragic dead woman, the long lost mourned child. She was a witch who haunted, a child who survived. She was not the first love Battler was barely even wistful over, but the current passion that demanded his whole being to fight, to deny, to attempt to kill.
Battler's new guide was his sister, disguised as a new character. His gaze had become cold and sharp, and where before he would have played along with Beatrice’s antics, now he looked at her as though he saw only evil, only illusions, where there was only her genuine happiness to be with him. He had been reforged in the flames of the phoenix, reborn as the hero who would put the witch to death rather than the effusive Dante who would fall to Beatrice's feet to beg mercy and love from her. King of himself, he would force the witch to kneel and beg for mercy for her crimes.
Beatrice smirked at him, her heart quivering, her resolve settled. She was ready for Dante to pass his judgment.