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Most days it was fine.
A dull ache that lingered around the back of his mind. Hanging around like a small fly encircling his head with its piercing buzz - an irksome drone passing through his ears. It pushed against his neck, a miniscule pressure; something hardly noticeable. Something easily forgotten during a conversation with friends, or a good song - a good meal. He found, when the room was filled with hearty laughter or the scratching needle of the record player, it was hard to make out that buzz. Hard to hear when smothered under layers and layers until it became an afterthought.
It was easy to keep it there; weak and small and powerless to do anything to rear its ugly head.
Usually.
When the conversation died down and the jukebox played its last note, only silence was left in its wake. Silence, the absence of all the everyday sounds that grounded him to life. With no other noise to fill it, all that remained was quietude; loneliness.
And in silence, suddenly a sound that was once so quiet and discrete became much louder.
It was not like a wave - crashing into the shore in a looming heap and sending the sand clambering over each other, fueled by sheer self-perseverance. No, you would see a wave of that size from a mile away. It was a quiet killer. Creeping in on soundless footfalls, a small static building upon itself. Each progression adding to the boundless weight pushing on his tormented muscles.
Suddenly, the single buzz of that small fly crescendoed to a swarm of locusts, their awful chorus grating on the ears. It pressed down upon his muscles, making them scream in agony as their fibres pulled on each other antagonistically - while the wailing urge to move fought with the heaviness that pulled him to the ground, refusing to let him stand. It was like trying to fill a bottomless bucket with water, completely useless and more infuriating the longer he tried. He wanted to rip out his hair until he cried with the pain that he deserved… yet he was too scared to be abused, even by his own hand.
His lungs hurt, his chest tightened like he was holding a breath he just couldn’t expel. It was as if roots had cemented deep in his ribcage, constricting his throat and refusing to relent. The backs of his eyes stung with unshed tears he couldn’t rid himself of, however much he wanted them to fall. It felt as though, with the teardrops that ran down his face - the cause of his misery would be washed away with them.
But it never did. He knew it was pointless, he didn’t even have the energy to shed tears over it anymore - it was pointless in the end afterall.
Many nights, when the room was silent and that low hum started to creep in he would lie on his side, staring into the darkness. His eyes would dart around the room, looking for anything to distract him. Anything to occupy his vision so he could avoid the visions of his brother in his peripheral, the fleeting blood seeping down the walls that disappeared at second glance or the guttural scream he could have sworn was real.
Thoughts swirled in the head he clutched in his hands, his white hair heavy between his fingers. It hurt him even just to think, to dwell on these thoughts for too long, but he couldn’t seem to do anything but that. Perhaps it was what he deserved, to be stuck in this never ending self destructive loop until he was torn apart from the inside-out. This was vengeance for the crimes accumulated in his life - his failure to protect his family, his brother - the humans killed by demons he failed to kill.
Strangely, he thought of his father as well. His human form - a finely dressed man looking not too dissimilar from himself (even more like his brother, he pushed the thought away) - and his demon form alike, curling horns adorned with dark scales that spilled upon the rest of his form. The memories he had of him painted him as a looming figure - his tall stature casting a shadow upon a younger, innocent Dante - much like his domineering statues littered around Fortuna. He would not have been the type to curl in his room, rendered immobile by a simple thought - No, he was the Legendary Dark Knight; he had no time for such trivialities.
Within the darkness of the room, flames seemed to grow around him - crackling their hellish song; jeering and laughing in their vituperative dance. Their embers burned at his skin, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care as they landed on his skin. Smoke constricted his throat, causing him to cough and sputter yet he lay there, staring into the luminous swirls of shifting red hues.
It was beautiful - in a way. Something so destructive, something that could take a life; could be the very basis of life itself. Intertwining licks of shimmering flame danced with their partners, crashing into each other in a final smoky display that dissipated not seconds later - no trace they had ever been there at all but an acrid smell left burning his nose. The deceptive heat drew him in, calming that never ending ache within just slightly before it was pulled away.
Boiling heat turned frozen at the click of a switch - suddenly, covers he had just cast off were pulled tight around him as he hid from the terrifying beast of the biting cold. Despite the flames turning cold, the aching burning did not cease. Instead it came in the form of a thousand needles prickling at his freezing fingers - his blood freezing in his muscles and shrieking with excruciation at the first sign of movement.
He groaned in anguish. He wanted these thoughts out of his head, wanted to rip them from his skull to take that incessant noise away! He wanted to reach inside and rip out his heart so it would stop skipping over itself, his lungs so they would stop stuttering those pitiful, weak breaths.
It was humiliating. To be reduced to this! A bumbling idiot - he was fooling nobody. Like this, he was useless to everyone - undeserving of even pity, simply a fool to be laughed at and scorned.
He needed pain. More than just the annoyance from that pressure building up within him that threatened to overflow at any minute, more than the pain in his chest, wrapped around his ribs, tearing him apart at each rise and fall. But he was even useless at that, every battle scar faded to nothing more than a dull ache within mere minutes - it was never enough. All he was good for was lying around wallowing in self-pity like a castigated child.
It was so easy all the time, to hide his true emotions within a light-hearted attitude - clues to the truth of his declining mental state carefully woven between the intention of his words. But no-one cared to look, to try and decipher the layers upon layers of hidden meanings trapped under his demeanor.
People wanted to see ‘Dante’, the one they had chosen to become friends with. The one who could shoulder a situation with a grin and a smile and never bring it up again, as if it just rolled off his back with practised ease. Not this Dante, he who is rendered useless not by a mighty foe but from the ideas within his psyche. His enemy did not need a sword to fight him, and likewise - this was not one to which he could retaliate with his fists.
Every night, behind his eyes, he was met with visions of those he had failed. His mother, her body burning and turning to ash as the house was surrounded by plumes of smoke - her screams echoing through the halls that hadn’t truly felt like home since their father left. Her blonde hair still shimmered in the lights as it hung around her still shoulders, illuminated by the soft orange glows of the burning furnishings. He still remembers how she lay there, perfectly unmoving on her bed of red velvet that pooled across the floor as if reaching out to him one last time.
To his brother Vergil, the other half of their pair, falling to the deathly grip of the underworld as his blade cleaves the palm of his twin’s outstretched hand. To the unscratchable itch buried beneath the healed scar his other hand scratched incessantly to yield no result, even after so many years. How many times had he failed him now? From that day in the house that he drove him away with his selfish actions, to the day he let him fall.
Nell, another mother returned to the flames by his own selfish actions, held in his arms as he wept silently over her still warm body. Ebony and Ivory clutched in his hands as if letting them go even for a second would mean letting her go too. Visions of Grue and Jessica’s faces crying as they drew their final breaths and used them to curse his name, the remaining daughters’ fates now a mystery he always meant to check up on them but kept putting it off.
The Lowell girl, how he had failed her every step of the way. He was unable to look her in the eye lest he have to burden how he had been the worst thing to enter her life, despite her insistence to continue to hang around him.
He thought of Lady and of Trish, how different their lives had been if their paths had not intersected. Could they have been any better? Or was this life simply the lesser of two awful paths.
Guilt wracked him, pulling him further down. When he went down, it seemed like he was destined to take everyone else along with him - it was the natural course of being associated with him; whether that be under the name ‘Tony Redgrave’ or ‘Dante Sparda’. Eventually the shadow that followed him around caught up, and though he ran it - seemed everyone else was left behind to be swallowed by the twilight.
He turned over, pushing his face over into the pillowcase. It hadn’t been washed in a while, he didn’t remember the last time it had been. Actually, he didn’t remember the last time he had left his bed at all. The last few days had felt a bit… fuzzy - as if he was watching his life be played out by someone other than himself.
Lady, he must’ve seen no more than a week ago, Trish a bit longer - yet he didn’t know if he even wanted to see them right now. Ridiculously, he was envious of them and it brought a shameful sense down on top of his already heavy load. It seemed like they had their troubles figured out, that they were handling it so much better than he was (even if he knew they weren’t). It was silly, he knew he was convincing himself of something that wasn’t there - still he left like if he let the playful mask slip to his friends, that they would up and leave him at the first sign of change.
He was scared of that. He wanted to be alone sometimes, yes, but not alone. To be alone was something that ate you, made you bitter inside as you push away everyone and everything until you were left but a hollow shell, with nothing inside, to waste away like carrion.
That wasn’t what he wanted. He spent too many years of his life running, pushing others away, trying to isolate himself but he could never take that last step to completion - it just wasn’t who he was.
His arm hung lazily off the side of the bed, eyes focused on the wall with large eyebags hanging underneath like warning signs. He was so tired, yet no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t get turned over to sleep. He had been run through by many a sword now, he knew pain - it was all he had known for so much of his life. But that pain was incomparable to the pain that hung behind his eyes and tightened around his throat taking his breath away.
He squeezed his eyes shut to block out the light but this attack came from within, from himself. That was the one person he could never seem to hide from.
God, what would it take for it to just stop?
To be done with this, to move on. Be free from this and simply leave? What price would he not pay for relief, like a sick man looking for that one last cure.
His head was fuzzy, vision slightly blurred - not from shedding tears but his refusal to let them fall. Everything seemed to be absorbed by that static noise, it drowned everything under a heavy blanket of lethargy. It seemed all around him was moving in slow-motion.
Perhaps that was why he didn’t hear the heavy door of the shop closing, nor did he hear the gentle footsteps across creaking floorboards he couldn’t seem to get the noise out of. Even right next to his head he didn’t hear the push of the handle and the opening of the door beside him. Too late he noticed the overwhelming demonic presence next to him, a fatal mistake in battle - but this was not his enemy; tonight, that was he alone.
Entering the room, the person’s silent steps were betrayed only by the clash of whiskey bottles from the floor - spinning on glass bases rocked to and fro as they were disturbed. The mattress dipped down with the arrival of a new inhabitant, perched on the side of his bed. It reminded him of when he was younger, when his mother would read him a story on particularly restless nights - how her hand would come up to stroke his hair, intertwining between her fingers.
But there was no-one left to do that now. His mother was dead, he should know - he buried her.
A hand came up to rest on his back, the warmth of skin contact breaking through the pressure surrounding his body. No words were spoken between the two devils, they simply sat in each other's presence. He had no doubt the woman was waiting for him to speak first, he had recognised Trish the moment she entered the room.
He didn’t have the energy to speak though, so they didn’t.
With each stroke of his back, the fuzziness receded back. Things were becoming more clear; Trish’s long blonde hair, her signature black jacket, her demonic presence. A weight was taken off his mind, not fully - but even that small amount made a world of difference.
“Trish?” His voice came out kind of scratchy, subdued - never a word someone would use to describe him before.
She didn’t respond right away, instead turning her head to look over at the man as her hair cascaded down her shoulder at the movement.
“Are you okay, Dante?”
The sentence was hardly posed as a question, rather a statement - of which she already knew the answer. It was obvious he wasn’t doing okay, that’s not what she was asking… yet the statement nearly broke him right then and there.
It was hard when someone asked that phrase. It seems so simple, possibly one of the easiest questions to answer - either a simple “Yes” or “No” in response would suffice. It was deceptive in that regard - the question itself was prompted from the idea that the other person wasn’t okay, hence the need to ask. But then, that also meant that the other person could tell something was wrong, which meant they cared about his feelings - contradicting the ideas in his head that fueled his misery in the first place, so insistent that nobody took notice of his state.
He didn’t respond. If he could’ve pushed himself any deeper into the bed he would have - doing anything to escape the scrutinising gaze of the demoness. He had to hide away, lest she see something amiss and decide to get out before it all goes wrong.
After a while, the pressure let up on the bed - the woman pushing herself up and walking out of the room. Suddenly, fear gripped his chest. Had that really been all it took for her to finally leave? His breathing became shaky again as it felt like things were moving out of his control, yet he still hadn’t the energy to do anything about it. He lay there, wasting away as one of his only friends walked out the door and he couldn’t muster up the strength to even say ‘Goodbye’?
He pulled the covers up closer to him, burying his face in shame. His fingers gripped tightly onto the sheet until the blood drained from his knuckles leaving them white as his hair. Once again, time moved on without him - what little light he could see through his drawn blinds dimming to welcome the break of night. How many nights did he spend here? He hadn’t even noticed the rising and falling of the sun each day, too absorbed in his own troubles to realise that life still went on even if he wasn’t present himself. Just another one of the ways he was selfish to his own ways…
The door opened. Perhaps, Trish had come back to look down upon his scornful self again. Her familiar silhouette entered the room, but this time - she held something in her hands. Not long after she entered, the smell followed her in. The rich smell of tomato and basil warmed the air, his mind flickering back to the pizza shops he had so often slept in the awnings of when he was younger.
She took the other side of the bed, quickly placing the pizza down and throwing off her boots before climbing up. Not a second later than she had sat down, she dug in - pulling the first slice away from the rest with a string of cheese still pulling on it.
Watching her eat, it was only then Dante realised just how hungry he actually felt.
He had thought it was the growing pit of anxiety in his stomach (a hypothesis supported by the screaming sensation everywhere else in his body) but his stomach growled in ravenous hunger as he watched the demoness devour the slices before her.
“You’re going to have to be quicker than that if you want a slice, Dante.” She smirked at him.
For the first time in a while, he found himself returning a genuine smile back to her - albeit small. It felt almost strange on his face, yet… it was welcome.
His hand reached out, grabbing one of the slices from the greasy cardboard. He bit into it, immediately the mixture of tastes swirling in his mouth - the warmth travelling down his spine to the rest of his body. His muscles ached, but now - they felt less heavy as they relaxed and he realised from the pain how tense he had been holding them. His throat was still tight but no longer so much that he found it difficult to breathe.
He reached Trish’s eyes, gently nodding in hopes of returning her gratitude in action for what he could not muster up the energy to say. She seemed to understand, smiling back at him as they sat eating on his bed.
It was strange. A gesture so small, so insignificant - could make him feel better almost instantly. It did not solve any of his problems, it didn’t bring back anyone lost to the years and it certainly didn’t take the weight of the world’s problems away from him.
But… It helped.