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In his dreams, He’d smile.
Run around that green, freshly cut grass with his little brother carrying a small wooden sword. They’d play for hours, arguing about who’d be the villain and who’d be the hero. Who was the strongest, and who would lose the fights?
All while his mother watched. A smile on her face, a casual giggle or laugh when she thought her boys did something funny.
At times like these, it makes one think: What is a Core Memory?
Is it a tragedy? Like losing a mother and being abandoned the same day?
Are they memories that feel happy? Like the memory of his mother reading from his favorite poetry book to lure him to sleep.
Are they monumental moments in one's life that change the course of their future? Like spending a night with a lady dressed in red. With little knowledge of what would come from that night or what beautiful thing would come from it.
Whatever a person believes is a Core Memory is subject to that person and their beliefs.
With Vergil, He only believes in actions. Actions that produce corollaries. His memories, as he likes to believe, have a big impact on what he does. Why he looks to get stronger. What he’ll do to get to those lengths. Because of his memories, they provide the motivation he needs for his actions.
At times, these memories haunt him. It made him…Human. And he truly believed that his humanity made him weak. His resolve to get stronger was the strength of what his father had given him. It’s why, when he was at his weakest point, he sought to separate his humanity. In doing so, he lost the one thing that made him human. His memories.
When he came to, when V had fused them back to Vergil's former self, leaving behind Urizen, it came to be a surprise when he found out about a son, his son.
Nero.
A multitude of thoughts filtered through his mind then.
I have a son?
How has life been to him?
What is his motivation?
What memories has Nero made while Vergil was out of the picture?
Does he…hate his father? What he is? What he’s become?
Does he resent what he is?
Vergil doesn’t know what it means to be a father. All he planned for in life was to acquire more power. He didn’t know the first thing about what being a father meant.
On his quest for power, he had forgotten what family had meant to him. His quest for power had only started because he wanted the strength to protect himself.
After all, what had started this was being too weak to protect his mother.
He wanted desperately to be loved and protected. When the world had failed him, he sought to take his future into his own hands. No matter the cost.
And what the cost did to him.
If anything, the journey for more power had made him stronger, but he felt weak. All the things he had done to achieve it felt…worthless.
He had all the power he needed to fight his younger brother, Dante. To protect himself.
So, if he had all that he needed…all he required…why did he feel emptier?
He wasn’t in his son’s life, no need to ruin it further.
Dante seemed…the same.
He was missing something, something he had forgotten despite already regaining his memories from fusing with V.
When Vergil is in a state of peril in the mind, he goes to a place where he finds comfort. Stability.
Poetry.
A book can carry a thousand words. Connotations. Paragraphs. Sentences.
And poetry was such a beautiful, well-thought-out stanza of words to describe human expression. Vergil enjoyed reading into the poems, which helped his mind think of things that wouldn’t send him down a spiral.
Vergil found the most comfort in the Poet, William Blake. Though Vergil had a love for poetry that was similar to William Blake. Blake took the pedestal first.
Vergil had come up with many of his own. Most of them about memories and dreams. A few about family or what he thought it was supposed to be like.
The ones about memories and dreams, well, they went something like this:
I dream,
I dream of a memory.
The memory is yellow and green,
Running through the field of grass
My brother chases me
We fight and play, all while eyes watch
I wish this dream were eternal
Much like how it was lost
Regret and sadness
Washing over me
I wish it were a bath
Wish it would cleanse me
Memories of yellow and green
Turned red and blue
If only I were stronger to fight through
Memories of red and blue
Fighting to have their stand
Losing one battle
And winning the next
When does it ever end?
Fears, pain, and weakness
Filtered through the eyes of red
Is it empty on that side?
I reach,
But my hands are never land.
The warmth I seek slips through my fingers,
As though I were never meant to hold it.
Echoes of laughter,
Fragments of a mother’s voice,
A name I cannot call
The noise is a blur.
The blade divides,
Yet the heart remains split.
How do I forge wholeness from fragments,
When even my soul refuses to mend?
A thousand battles,
A thousand lifetimes —
And still, I remain,
Neither man nor devil,
Only echoes of what had lingered.
If only I could dream forever,
Yellow and green beneath my feet,
Before it washed away.
Before I had let it wither.
In the end, Vergil was the very thing he thought weak.
Human.
And tragically so.