Work Text:
“Sorry about your apartment, kid.”
Nero’s landlord holds out the recovered bag of his possessions out to him, a mildly irritated look on his face, and it’s immediately clear to Nero that this guy really wants nothing more than to get Nero out of his hair for the night.
Nero grimaces as he steps forward to take his stuff back, his feet squishing unpleasantly in his water-soaked shoes. The bag feels a lot lighter than it should be, probably because everything else got lost in the flood or was destroyed by water damage, along with the rest of his apartment.
“Seems like the flood was from natural causes, so you won’t be charged for that. Hope you got insurance on your shit, though.”
Nero does not, in fact, have insurance on his shit, meaning that he’s lost a good chunk of his money and personal property here, but there isn’t much he can do about it. As bad as the loss of his stuff is, worse is the fact that he’s standing in his soggy sneakers, outside of his ruined apartment at two in the morning, and has absolutely no place left to go.
Kyrie and Nico would let him come over in a heartbeat, and Credo would probably run over the entire city with his police car in an attempt to reach him if Nero asked either of those two parties, but Nero’s never been particularly fond of asking people for help. The three of them have definitely done more than enough for Nero, anyway, and the hour is way too late for him to go bothering his friends over something as trivial as not having a safe place to sleep for the night.
“Thanks,” Nero answers distantly, trying to keep the bite out of his tone.
He’d warned his landlord about the various areas of leakage that had sprouted up around his apartment over the past months, but the man had never bothered to do anything about it, and now they were both paying for it.
“So what now?”
His landlord gives him a sideways sort of look, clear annoyance flickering through his tired eyes, and Nero tries his hardest not to rise to the bait, digging his fingers into the flesh of his palm underneath the long sleeves of his hoodie. As susceptible as he is to confrontation, a fight would do him absolutely no good in these circumstances.
“I’ll terminate your lease, I guess. No penalties or fees or anything like that. Just don’t go making trouble for me down the line, yeah?”
Right. Probably bad for business if word got out that his landlord was a negligent, greedy asshole.
The termination of the lease is probably the best outcome that Nero could have hoped for, though, so he bites his tongue and looks down at the floor, slightly averting his gaze as he tries his hardest not to conjure up unhelpful images of punching his landlord in his smug face.
“Let me know your new address in a week or two, and I’ll send the rest of your shit over to you. Or you can come get it later, once everything dries up.”
The guy is clearly waiting for Nero to leave, not even bothering to help Nero find another place to stay, and Nero is more than happy to comply, stalking away from the complex and into the slight chill of the autumn night. Even underneath the layers of his scarf and his hoodie, he’s still prone to getting cold easily, which makes his newfound lack of wearable clothes and shelter an even bigger problem.
He needs to take inventory, so he finds a fast food place to temporarily park his ass in, fishing out a couple thankfully dry dollar bills to buy himself some french fries and an excuse to stay. Luckily, he’d had both his phone and his wallet stuffed into the back pocket of his jeans during the flood, so both those things had escaped relatively unscathed.
As he digs through the contents of his bag, though, it’s easy enough to tell that the rest of his things weren’t so lucky. His landlord had stuffed the driest of his things into the bag, which wasn’t saying much, given how the whole thing was damp all over.
So far, he’s got a single extra change of clothes, a probably unusable laptop, an unfortunately small bundle of particularly soggy cash, his various chargers, and a rapidly approaching headache.
Nero glances at his phone and runs a hand through his bangs, something like doubt twisting his stomach unpleasantly.
Maybe he should shelve his pride and irrational insecurities and call one of his friends after all.
When he opens up his phone, though, he’s greeted with a series of increasingly incoherent texts from Nico, in the style that suggested she was happily drunk, and absolutely nothing from Kyrie and Credo, which tells Nero just about everything he needs to know. Kyrie was probably nestled in the same, alcohol-laden boat as Nico, and for Credo to not spam him with repeated warnings about Nero’s safety and words of caution, the man would either have to be dead or on the night shift.
In short, his friends are busy, and Nero is screwed.
He allows himself to nibble on another french fry of pity, leaning his cheek on his hand as his mind starts to drift off to the unpleasant future. At this point, his already limited options have been narrowed down to a single, bad idea, but Nero doesn’t have much room to be picky.
He can either camp out here for the next five hours, stuffing his face with fries and wallowing in his own misery, or he can swipe himself into the office building he works at at three in the morning and crash on one of his boss’s expensive couches.
On one hand, the latter choice would give him warmth, relative comfort, and actual sleep. On the other, he’d end up revealing exactly how desperate his situation was to his boss, and even though Dante was a surprisingly nice guy underneath his gigantic ego and absurd amounts of laziness, Nero isn’t exactly eager to air his dirty laundry.
By the time he finishes the rest of his fries, he’s come to a decision, more or less. He sweeps the crumbs and wrappings neatly into the paper bag, bundles it up, and throws it away, staring at the ceiling for a long moment in an attempt to do away with the last remaining shreds of his dignity.
Then, with his pride properly at an acceptable minimum, Nero grabs his stuff, shove his wallet and phone back into his pocket, and heads back out into the night.
Nero wakes up significantly more comfortable than when he’d gone to sleep, his cheek pressed against one of the pillows on the couch, soft daylight trickling in through the array of ceiling-height windows lining the office.
Dante’s office is unusually quiet, free of the chaos that the other man usually tended to engender with the very essence of his being, and Dante’s couch feels a whole lot nicer than Nero actually remembers it, smelling faintly of clean linen and cotton. The whole thing is so weirdly pleasant that Nero finds himself turning his face further into the silk-lined pillow beneath him, chasing the dregs of sleep in an attempt to return to it.
“Ah. So you are awake,” a quiet voice that is most decidedly not Dante’s says.
Wait.
Nero pushes himself upright so fast that the blood leaves his head in a dizzying rush and multicolored spots of light dance in front of his eyes. As hazy as his vision is, though, it isn’t quite enough to obscure the sight of Vergil, Dante’s twin brother, sitting at his desk, his face as infamously blank as ever.
Oh fuck.
Crashing on Dante’s disgusting office couch is one thing, because Dante is his boss, and the man himself is so utterly lax about the rules that he’d pretty much take anything in stride. Vergil, on the other hand, has absolutely no relationship with Nero, given how he works in another department entirely and his office is two floors down from Dante’s.
They’ve only seen each other in passing, because Nero is Dante’s personal secretary, and Dante and Vergil’s weird brotherly feud dictates that they visit each other a minimum of ten times per day to exchange various insults and paperwork. Vergil is also one of the sons of the company’s founder, making it impossible for anyone who works here not to know of him and his reputation.
The man was notorious for being the more stoic of the two twins, with his expression rarely changing, and Nero’s heard enough stories about Vergil’s “terrifying and soulless glare” to understand that most employees feared him and avoided making eye contact with the man at all costs. Absolutely nothing was known about Vergil’s private life, other than the fact that he was related to both Dante and Sparda, but many of the theories surrounding him tended to postulate that Vergil was, in fact, a product of binary fission or perhaps spontaneous sporogenesis.
And Nero had just slept on his couch, without permission.
He swallows hard, pressing his palms flat against the cushions to hide the faint tremble in them as his brain scrambles to come up with a passably acceptable way of phrasing the truth to spare him from getting fired on the spot. In his defense, all the lights had been out, and by the time he’d actually gotten to the office last night, he’d been so out of it that he doesn’t even remember what number he’d pushed on the elevator.
But given the dismal state of Dante’s office, mistaking Vergil’s pristine space for Dante’s could easily be construed as another insult altogether.
“I, um...I’m sorry, sir,” he starts, but Vergil suddenly stands up, the movement silencing Nero immediately.
Vergil looks past him and out the large glass windows separating his office from the rest of the building, stepping easily around Nero and wordlessly shutting the blinds, blocking the two of them off from public view. Nero has absolutely no idea where any of this is going, and is starting to very much doubt that he wants to know.
Past experience has taught him that Vergil had absolutely no problem with firing people in broad daylight, and Nero is having an awfully difficult time coming up with reasons as to why Vergil would want their next interactions to be kept private.
“So what compelled you to sleep here?” Vergil inquires casually, his intonation and expression impossible to read, and Nero shifts nervously underneath his stare, wishing that the man would look anywhere else but directly at his face and would maybe even blink once or twice.
“My...apartment got flooded last night. And I didn’t really have anywhere else to go, so...I was sort of trying to spend the night here. Not in your office, I mean. I was trying to get to Dante’s, but...I was really tired. Sorry again.”
Vergil nods along with his explanation, evidently thinking it over, and Nero cannot tell at all how the other man feels about Nero’s reasoning. His confusion is only compounded when Vergil lifts his wrist and pushes back his sleeve, glancing down at his rather expensive-looking watch.
“I see,” he begins, then abruptly changes the topic.
“It is currently twelve in the afternoon, four hours after your work is supposedly scheduled to begin. I arrived here at six, fully prepared to put a premature start to my paperwork, when I encountered you. Do you know why I did not wake you?”
Nero’s throat feels oddly dry, and he’s driven by some sort of instinct to duck his head, glancing tentatively up at Vergil from underneath his bangs, resisting the urge to tug nervously at his scarf. The other man is testing him, maybe, searching for the correct answer to determine Nero’s merit as an employee, and Nero has no idea as to what the right thing to say is supposed to be.
Given his staggeringly high odds of being fired on the spot, Nero mentally starts cataloging a list of prospective new jobs, along with an exit strategy on how to flee Vergil’s presence as quickly as possible.
“I...don’t?” he tries hesitantly, his words accompanied with the unpleasant feeling of not knowing what he’s doing.
Vergil nods again, as if he’d expected such a response.
“Dante had no need for you, since he is an utterly lazy fool who does not begin actually working until a maximum of twenty-four hours before his deadlines, so I determined that I could allow you to remain asleep without consequence. Aside from that, I assumed you had a reason for inhabiting this building instead of your home, which was correct. And your reason, as it stands, proves extremely useful to me.”
Nero’s always been bad with directions, but he’s never felt more lost than he does now.
“I don’t think I quite get what you’re saying, sir,” he offers, some of the tension slowly starting to leave him as the conversation seems to be going in the not-getting-fired direction, which is definitely good for him.
Vergil turns his gaze up to the ceiling for a long moment, a controlled twitch passing over his carefully blank face in what could almost be a display of emotion, before he looks hard at Nero again.
“What I am about to inform you of is not to leave this room, understand?”
Nero hastens to nod in agreement, more than willing to keep Vergil’s secrets in exchange for keeping his job, whatever they might be.
“You are Dante’s personal secretary, so I am sure that you are aware of our occasional...arguments.”
Nero does indeed recall the last time that Vergil had visited their office, victoriously thrusting a piece of paper detailing Dante’s allotted budget for the next month in his brother’s face, with the line “Recreational (Pizza) Expenses, $0,” circled and underlined several times in navy blue ink.
The Vergil of the present looks pleased with himself just at the recollection of the memory, so Nero wisely decides not to inform him of the fact that Dante had chosen to retaliate yesterday by ordering five-hundred dollars worth of pizza in Vergil’s name.
“You see, in our most recent debate, Dante chose to breach upon one of the less...polished aspects of my life. He stated that I would, and I quote, ‘never get laid.”
Well. This is not at all where Nero had thought this conversation was going.
He feels himself flush in secondhand embarrassment, ducking his head slightly into his scarf as he tries not to betray how awkward he feels, discussing Vergil’s sex life--or lack thereof--with the man himself.
“I mean, uh...I’m sure that one of these days--”
“He is quite correct,” Vergil interrupts, putting an abrupt end to Nero’s feeble attempts to reassure him.
“I have no desire to achieve such physical intimacy with a complete stranger, but the effort of investing in a romantic relationship inevitably doomed to fail is not only a waste of time, but also a horrifying prospect altogether.”
Nero doesn’t exactly consider himself to be the most optimistic person out there, but Vergil’s incredibly dismal analysis of human relationships leaves him temporarily lost for words, which Vergil seems to take a sign to continue. He clasps his hands behind his back and begins to pace in front of Nero’s still form, his cold blue eyes turning darker in thought.
“Yet, a more grotesque prospect than even that is the notion of allowing Dante to know that he is right. Therefore, my only option is to prove him wrong. Which I will do.”
Vergil’s gaze abruptly shifts to him again, and Nero suddenly has a bad feeling as to what Vergil is getting at.
“Wait, so...are you trying to--are you saying you want me to sleep with you?”
Nero himself is no virgin, but the idea of trading sexual favors in exchange for keeping his job has a lot of connotations that Nero isn’t so willing to align himself with.
Vergil, though, looks almost alarmed at the proposition, something like panic temporarily crossing his face before his expression shutters again, and he stiffly shakes his head, much to Nero’s relief.
“Of course not. But I am proposing a deal. After I lay out my terms, you are free to refuse them if you wish--I will not hold it against you. You will simply return to your position in working for Dante, and we shall never speak of this again. But given the facts, I believe you will find this agreement mutually beneficial.”
He’s maybe biting off more than he can chew here, but Nero is undeniably curious, so he tilts his head and inches forward on the couch, looking expectantly up at Vergil.
“Okay. Let’s hear it, then.”
“I am willing to offer you a place in my own apartment, since doing so would certainly give off the false impression to others that we are...involved, so to speak. If anyone within the workspace inquires about your new living situation, you are either to lie and say that you moved in simply out of a desire to, or not respond at all. And if Dante should ask...well, follow my lead in that situation, I suppose.”
“So in other words, you want me to pretend like I’m dating you?”
Nero receives a curt nod in response, and he runs his hand carefully through his bangs, thinking things over. All things considered, the agreement definitely works out in his favor—Nero honestly wasn’t too sure what he was going to do about his living situation, and Vergil is essentially dropping the solution right into his lap. Accepting the deal will hardly make him feel as guilty as he would have about crashing at one of his friends’ places too, because Vergil had made it pretty clear that he was also getting something out of the exchange.
“Why specifically me?” He dares to prod a little further, trying to sound more curious than suspicious.
“I mean, you let me stay asleep on your couch for like four hours, before you even knew I was pretty much homeless. Seems like you sort of had this plan in mind in advance.”
Vergil tilts his head, something like a smile actually curling at the edge of his lips.
“Again, you are Dante’s personal secretary. And I can think of no better way to remind him of the shame of his defeat every single day than to have the blatant contradiction of his beliefs sitting right in his office and working with him.”
The man already looks positively delighted at the prospect—at least, more delighted than Nero’s ever seen him, and Nero is starting to suspect that he and the rest of the office employees have grossly misjudged Vergil’s character. This whole brotherly feud seemed pretty...petty, if Nero had to define it, and he’s surprised that Vergil so willingly engages in it.
“Uh, okay. Great,” Nero says evenly, trying not to betray how ridiculous he finds this whole thing.
“So you accept?”
Nero reaches underneath his scarf to rub at the back of his neck, thinking it over for another moment before deciding to relent. From the looks of it, this whole thing wasn’t going to be a permanent arrangement, and if things really weren’t going well, he’d probably be able to back out at any time.
“Well, I do need a place to live. And getting the opportunity to mess with Dante doesn’t seem like such a bad condition, really.”
Vergil looks quite satisfied with his response, moving back to his desk and opening up one of his lower drawers, removing a surprisingly pink notepad from it and tearing off a piece of paper. He plucks one of his expensive pens from his cup holder and begins to scribble something down.
“Let it be known from the beginning that this is purely a business transaction. We are not actually to be in a relationship, and any and all actions made with romantic overtones will be done solely for the sake of destroying Dante’s worldview.”
Nero tries his hardest not to laugh, tugging his scarf up a little higher.
“Yeah, no strings attached, real relationships are all doomed to fail, I got it. We don’t really know each other, so it’ll be pretty easy to fake things without actually making anything happen.”
As far as he can tell, Vergil is a stone whose two emotions consist of tranquil fury and smug, petty vindictiveness. Neither are exactly the best for laying the foundation of an actual relationship, so Nero’s pretty confident in his own statement.
Vergil nods again in response, looking a little relieved that Nero seems to understand the terms of his contract. He comes back around his desk to stand in front of Nero, holding out the piece of paper to him, along with a key.
“In that case, this is my personal phone number and address. It might seem suspect if we leave at the same time today, since we have not yet been witnessed arriving together. Whenever you finish your ‘work’ with Dante, you may allow yourself into my apartment. We can speak more on the rules and further conditions of this agreement there.”
Nero looks down at the paper, which is covered in both Vergil’s surprisingly messy handwriting and the small watermark of a white cartoon cat with devil horns protruding from either side of its head. He decides not to comment on either of these things, tearing his eyes away from cat’s evil smirk and folding up the note, pocketing the key.
“Sounds good. See you at home, then?” Nero can’t help but add, grinning slightly at the other man, who stares down at him for a long, unreadable moment, before a faint, answering smile of his own curves at his lips.
“Indeed.”
Vergil’s apartment takes more than a little getting used to.
It’s the nicest living space that Nero’s ever been in, but everything inside of it is so perfectly pristine and untouched that the whole area looks virtually unlived in. The kitchen area is actually covered in a faint layer of dust, with only the microwave and the sink showing even the vaguest signs of use.
The place is completely undecorated, save for the second guest bedroom which is plastered in various cat-themed adornments and is entirely off-limits to anyone who was not Yamato, Vergil’s pet cat.
Yamato’s definitely got a nicer room than Nero does. He himself is occupying the other guest room, which has absolutely nothing in it except for a bed, and Nero gets the distinct impression that Vergil doesn’t invite people from the outside into his home very often.
He spends his first night in Vergil’s apartment too afraid to actually touch anything, keeping himself entirely on the bed and trying to make his presence as small as possible. Vergil had seemed largely apathetic to his existence inside of his home, but Nero was still pretty wary about treading all over Vergil’s untouched floors and walls and messing things up.
By the time he finally falls into a semblance of sleep, he’s not quite unconscious enough to ignore the noises of Vergil waking up, nor is he able to block out the sounds of the conversation that Vergil is having with his cat. Eventually, Nero gives up on sleep altogether and drags himself outside, trying to tame his messy hair into something appropriate enough to go and meet his office superior with.
Vergil is sitting in front of a single piece of plain, untoasted bread and a cup of tea when Nero walks in. Nero’s never seen the man outside of work, so the sight of Vergil in casual clothes is nearly enough to override Nero’s recognition of him entirely.
“Good morning,” Vergil addresses him, taking a bite out of his raw bread.
Yamato jumps down from her cushioned dining chair, padding over towards Nero to properly investigate the new intruder in her home.
Dante had kept him late at the office last night due to another nearly-missed deadline debacle, so by the time he’d actually gotten to Vergil’s apartment, Yamato had been asleep in her room and was not to be disturbed under any circumstance. Vergil had given him a rather stiff, desolate tour of the rest of his apartment before dumping him in the guest room and leaving him to his own devices, which didn’t exactly set the best of precedents for how the rest of this arrangement was going to go.
“Uh, yeah. Morning...sir,” Nero stumbles across the greeting somewhat awkwardly, dropping into the chair across from Vergil and tugging the collar of his nightshirt slightly upwards.
Yamato immediately follows after him, curling around his ankles and rubbing her face against his leg several times before tensing her muscles and abruptly springing into his lap. Nero tries not to yelp in surprise at the sudden weight against his thighs, keeping his hands close to his chest, unsure of whether or not he’s actually allowed to touch Vergil’s precious cat or not.
Vergil raises a brow from behind his mug of tea, taking a long sip from it and observing Nero in a too-long silence.
“She likes you,” he states, a very faint note of surprise in his tone, and Nero tentatively takes his words as something like an approval, hesitantly dropping his hands into Yamato’s fur.
The cat purrs happily underneath his touch, tilting her head to give his palm a tiny lick, and Nero smiles down at her against his will, petting her gently. He feels a little less out of place with her in his lap, acting as a fluffy sort of barrier between him and Vergil’s intense gaze.
“That’s, um...good?” He looks between the cat and Vergil again, swallowing down his reservations.
He’d have to learn how to talk more naturally with Vergil. Nero already suspects that the burden of acting like a couple would fall mostly on Nero, given the other man’s general disposition and apparent lack of experience, and he imagines that he’d have a pretty difficult time convincing anyone that they were in a relationship if he spent most of his time walking on eggshells around Vergil.
“Didn’t really take you for a cat person, honestly. Although I probably should have guessed from that piece of paper you gave me.”
“There is no such thing as a cat person,” Vergil says immediately, as if he’d had this conversation many times before.
“The term implies that a love of cats is selective, when, in fact, cats are rightfully beloved by all human beings.”
Nero ducks his head to hide his smile, giving Yamato another gentle pet to the head.
“Okay...but I’m pretty sure that some people aren’t cat fans.”
Vergil presses his lips together in a thin line, tearing a chunk out of his bread with renewed aggression.
“Such beings are not people, they are single-celled amoebas with simplistic tastes to match their simplistic existences.”
Vergil was pretty defensive over his cats, then. The idea somehow makes Vergil seem a little more down-to-earth, slightly more relatable than the impossible-to-read person he’d come across as before. Nero sighs out in quiet relief, a little more ready to actually discuss their plans from here on out now that he feels like he’s actually speaking to another human being.
“Do you want breakfast?” Vergil asks, before Nero can actually bring the topic of their deal up, nudging indicatively at his bread-covered plate.
“Oh. Sure, I guess.”
Nero himself really only eats one thing for breakfast--a bowl of fruity, rainbow-colored marshmallow cereal. His favorite brand isn’t exactly the most popular amongst people, though, for some inexplicable reason, and a large part of him sincerely doubts that Vergil owns this kind of thing in his pantry. He’d have to remind himself to go shopping for his own food later, unless Vergil’s diet somehow coincided with his own.
For now, though, he probably doesn’t have very many options, and accepting the offer is the most polite thing to do.
“What do you have?”
Vergil looks up at the ceiling in apparent thought, taking inventory for a minute.
“Bread.”
Nero waits for Vergil to continue, an expectant silence hanging in the air between them, but the other man seems to have finished with his expansive list, taking another bite out of his pasty white slice.
Nero tries his hardest to keep his face blank as he slides his gaze over to Vergil’s pantry, which was probably twice the size of the bathroom in Nero’s old apartment. He gives Yamato another pet before gently putting her back down on the ground and standing up, walking over to investigate the contents of Vergil’s kitchen himself. The other seems unbothered by his movements, his gaze burning into Nero’s turned back, so Nero doesn’t think he’s crossing any lines by opening up Vergil’s pantry himself.
It’s honestly one of the saddest sights that Nero’s ever seen.
There is indeed bread, a single bag of it resting on the lowest shelf. The ground level is covered in several boxes and cans of expensive-looking cat food, and Nero sincerely hopes that he’s just imagining three-hundred dollar price tag still stamped on the side of one of them. Nearly every inch of the rest of the shelves are covered with styrofoam cups and plastic-wrapped packages of instant ramen, in a rainbow of different flavors, some of which Nero’s never even heard of before.
“Ah. Yes. The ramen is generally for lunch and dinner, which is why I did not mention it,” Vergil amends his statement from behind him, and Nero is very glad that he’s currently facing away from the man, because he’s honestly not sure what kind of expression is on his face at the moment.
“So...this is what you eat, sir?”
Nero can only hope that his voice is as neutral as he’s trying to make it.
“Indeed. Kindly retrieve a cup of ‘Lime Chili Shrimp’ flavor for me. Third shelf, fourth stack from the right. Also, Yamato requests a whitefish and spinach casserole this morning.”
Nero obligingly locates and extricates the cup and the can, along with a piece of white bread for himself, and returns to the kitchen table. Vergil examines the ramen packaging in great detail, possibly checking for any sign of damage, before nodding to himself and placing it down next to him.
He finishes off the rest of his bread, getting out of his chair and cracking open the can, kneeling by shallow, expensive-looking plate on the ground and pouring the food into it. There’s an unusually gentle look on Vergil’s face as he watches Yamato lazily stalk towards the plate, giving Vergil a cursory sort of glance before barely bumping her head against his palm and starting to eat.
“She tolerates me,” Vergil says dryly, giving Nero another glance.
“Hence my surprise at her rather...cuddly interactions with you.”
Nero swallows nervously, but Vergil doesn’t look very offended at the fact that his own cat seems more endeared towards Nero than himself, and merely runs a hand through his carefully styled hair, straightening up and plucking the ramen cup off of the table.
“Now, then. Whenever you finish your bread, we should be going.”
He drops his cup noodle lunch into the bag that Nero’s seen him around with in the office on occasion, going through the contents of his things once more before zipping it up. A rather sly grin stretches across his face, the faintest hint of mischief flickering in his cold gaze as he tilts his head to look at Nero.
“There’s work to be done, after all.”
As it turns out, Vergil is a lot more patient than Nero had given him credit for.
For the first few days, Nero’s only interaction with the man in the workplace is when they show up to the building together and when Nero goes over to Vergil’s office to wait for him at the end of the day so that they can go back.
Nero hears a few new rumors popping up around the office, and whenever he walks into a room full of other employees, they sometimes pause mid-conversation, the leftover awkward silence in the air highly indicative of their previous subject. No one chooses to outright approach him, though, and he highly doubts that anyone would dare to ask Vergil about this sort of thing.
Even Dante keeps quiet, so either he hasn’t noticed the new development, or is just choosing not to address it, and given the varying nature of the man’s personality, Nero can’t determine which option it is.
“I am waiting,” Vergil says, over his cup of roast-chicken flavored noodles at dinner, after nearly a week has passed.
“We have only one chance at true surprise, and I will not risk the opportunity to catch Dante truly off-guard by rushing ahead.”
Exactly what Vergil is waiting for, Nero can’t quite say, but as long as he’s still getting a free place to live out of this whole thing, he’s hardly in a place to complain. The less work on his part, the better, and if Vergil wanted to hole himself up in his office and wait things out for all eternity, he certainly could.
A part of Nero suspects that Vergil’s hesitance to immediately act has more to do with the utter lack of inexperience the other man seems to have with human interaction. In the few days that Nero’s been living with him for, Vergil has demonstrated both a remarkable love of cats and a severe deficit of social graces, the latter of which is easy enough to observe, even in the twenty minutes or so that Nero gets to see him for.
Vergil spends most of his time locked up in his or Yamato’s room, and Nero feels entirely too awkward to go anywhere in Vergil’s apartment without the man himself actually in it, so he confines himself into his guest room as well. They really only see each other for meals, which don’t take very long, considering how the only thing they have to eat is instant noodles.
They exchange a couple of words over dinner, mostly whenever Nero actually tries to start a conversation, but more often than not, Vergil looks a little lost for words, apparently preferring to sit in silence over groping about for something to say.
Nero wouldn’t exactly call his current living situation bad --it’s definitely better than being on the streets or camping out with any of his friends. If he’d been living with Kyrie and Nico, he’d have to deal with the exact opposite of silence, with entirely too much noise drifting through the too-thin walls of the apartment from their bedroom. Their relationship and the assorted activities that accompanied it comprised the entire reason why Nero had moved out in the first place, and he isn’t exactly eager to dive back into the fray.
Credo’s place was alright, for the most part, except that Credo lived more than an hour away from where Nero worked, came in and out of the house at odd hours, and had an unfortunate habit of trying to arrest any and all guys that Nero ended up bringing home, which didn’t exactly do wonders for Nero’s personal life.
So, in terms of long-term residence, Vergil and his one-sided cat conversations are really Nero’s best bet. Still, since Vergil’s use for him seems to be fairly limited and their agreement is likely--hopefully--temporary, Nero takes to apartment hunting in his spare time at the office.
He’s in the middle of idly checking out one of the cheaper units in the area while Dante lays back in his chair and pretends to do his paperwork, when a light knock against Dante’s glass door causes the both of them to look up.
Vergil lets himself in, a folder tucked underneath his arm and his face as carefully neutral as usual, giving away absolutely nothing as he walks up to Dante’s desk and drops the file in front of him. Dante flips over the paper he’d been doodling on, likely to hide his insulting caricatures of Vergil, and gives his twin a lazy sort of grin, while Nero tries his hardest to look like he isn’t watching their inevitable conversation.
“Hey, Verge. What brings you to my fine establishment?” Dante drawls, giving a none-too-subtle look in Nero’s general direction, the implication already starting to drip off his words.
Vergil doesn’t rise to the bait, nodding towards the folder on the desk.
“Your dismal organization of your finances, as usual.”
Dante blinks, sneaking another look in Nero’s direction before an almost disappointed expression crosses his face. He reluctantly opens up the folder, scanning its contents for about ten seconds before shoving it to the side in an abrupt motion of his hand.
“Okay, I seriously tried to keep my mouth shut, but if you’re not gonna own up to it, I might as well ask. What’s with you and—“
“Your budget?” Vergil interrupts smoothing, the faintest hints of smugness starting to creep into his tone, and, from the sheer frustration on Dante’s face, Nero is starting to realize why Vergil had wanted to wait.
“Some things are simply not knowledge accessible to the public, Dante. If you wish to know the truth, then perhaps you should complete your work first, for a change. Then there will be time for...idle gossip.”
Vergil reaches across Dante’s desk, sliding the folder and its contained stack of incomplete forms for Dante to fill out back in front of Dante, plucking a pen from his pocket and holding it in front of Dante’s face. The two twins glare at each other for a long moment, in which Nero keeps his head down and stares with renewed interest at his desk, feeling heat creeping up the back of his neck and his cheeks.
Vergil hadn’t addressed him, or even acknowledged his presence, so Nero suspects that the other man intends for Nero to stay silent.
Dante’s self-control is clearly wavering, his gaze flickering rapidly between Nero’s unmoving form and his brother’s blank face, before he reaches up to snatch the pen out of Vergil’s hand with a growl, his curiosity about Vergil and Nero’s potential relationship overriding his natural unwillingness to do his work. Vergil actually smirks at that, taking a moment to relish in his victory as he gently pats Dante’s desk with a hand, nodding at Nero in a neutral sort of gesture.
“No questioning Nero about it, either, although I am certain you have at least enough shame to restrain yourself from that.”
“Yeah, yeah, this is between me and you and all that. Anyone ever tell you that you’re an asshole?”
“Yes. You, constantly. And sometimes Nero, as well.”
Dante’s head jerks back upward so quickly that Nero feels the muscles in his own neck ache just from observing the motion. Vergil seems unwilling to throw out any more hints, though, continuing his self-indulgent stroll outside of the office. As soon as he’s gone, Nero ducks his head into his scarf, fully expecting Dante to turn his attention onto him, but Dante only lets out a strangled sort of groan, dragging his hand down his face before looking warily at Nero.
“Hey, kid. You heard him—got a lot of work to do. You feel like helping me out?”
Nero’s usual response to Dante attempting to freeload off of him is generally along the lines of “go to Hell, old man,” but since he feels more than a little complicit in Dante’s current suffering, he nods obligingly, which earns him a quite suspicious look from Dante. The man gathers up a generous stack of papers and holds them out to Nero, clearly studying his reaction, and Nero tries his hardest to channel Vergil.
Whatever he sees on Nero’s face, though, Dante stays true to his word, changing the subject to the pizza he’d had for dinner the other night, and Nero allows himself an inaudible sigh of relief, letting Dante’s idle chatter fill his brain with white noise. It’s oddly nice to hear Dante ramble on, given the comparative silence he’s been going home to every night, and he doesn’t tune the other man out all the way for once as he begins to read over the forms.
By the time Vergil returns at the end of the day, presumably to pick Nero up, Dante’s got the completed work stuffed back into the folder and neatly laid out on his desk, an expectant look on his face.
Vergil plucks the folder up between his fingers, flipping through the work, clearly recognizing Nero’s slightly messy, compact handwriting in place of Dante’s curvy, flowing script, but he doesn’t choose to point it out. He raises his gaze over the open folder and looks down at his brother for a moment before dropping it into his bag and turning towards Nero, who is still sitting at his desk.
Nero is so busy studying Vergil for nonverbal cues as to what he should do next that Vergil catches him completely off-guard when he leans slightly down, tangles his fingers in Nero’s hair to tilt his head up, and kisses him.
For someone who’s supposedly never had “physical intimacy” with another human being before, Vergil is surprisingly good at this, but beyond the confident motion of actually initiating the kiss, Nero can feel the hesitance of Vergil’s inexperience.
Ignoring Dante’s strangled noise of mingled amusement and astonishment, Nero reaches up for Vergil’s tie and yanks him a little further downwards, parting his lips to properly deepen the kiss, feeling Vergil struggle to hide his surprise as he presses a palm firmly against the desk to stabilize himself. Nero can’t help but smirk, a little satisfied at finally getting the upper hand on both of the twins, managing to shock them both into apparent speechlessness.
Not that Vergil could currently talk, in the situation he was in.
Nero pulls away of his own volition, glancing up at Vergil slyly through his lashes as he licks his lips, unable to miss the way that the man’s cheeks dust over with a pale pink. He gives Vergil a free opening to compose himself, distracting Dante by leaning around to study his reaction.
“Holy shit, Verge,” Dante mutters, which gives Vergil all the fuel he needs to wipe his face completely blank of emotion again, straightening up and readjusting his tie to glance back at Dante with a raised brow.
“Surprised?” Vergil asks loftily, no trace of the embarrassment he’d shown merely seconds ago in his voice.
Dante scratches idly at his jaw, tilting his head like he’s still trying to figure things out.
“I mean, I guess the whole you two coming into work together probably should have tipped me off, but...you got another human being to like you? You got Nero to like you—and make out with you?”
Nero smiles innocently at Dante at the mention of his name, pulling his scarf slightly upwards.
“It was pretty easy, actually. He got so emotional during his confession—I couldn’t turn him down, you know?”
Dante could not look more confused if he tried, and Nero takes great delight in his floored expression, finally starting to understand why Dante and Vergil maybe enjoyed fighting with each other so much.
“Indeed, it was a heartfelt moment for us both. One of the most pleasant days of my life,” Vergil adds, in complete monotone, with absolutely no change in his expression.
Nero’s answering laugh is completely genuine, and he instinctively ducks his head a little more, muffling the sound in the fabric of his scarf.
“At any rate, I recall that it was you who claimed that I would...how did you put it? ‘Never get laid?’ That I would live out the rest of my days with Yamato remaining as the only living being that I have kissed?”
Dante groans, leaning his head back against his chair.
“Yeah, I remember. Don’t know how I was wrong about that —I seriously thought you had no life outside of your stupid cat.”
Vergil must be in an exceptionally good mood, because he completely overlooks Dante’s insult to his cat, reaching into his pocket and extracting another piece of paper.
“I’m sure you realize that this means that you have, in fact, lost our bet.”
Vergil unfolds the paper, which reveals itself to be an impromptu contract drafted by the two twins, both of their signatures present on the pink sheet. Nero, who hadn’t known about this part beforehand, leans forward in semi-interest, trying to catch a glimpse of the text written on it, but Vergil begins to elaborate on the terms, anyway.
“Here it says, in paragraph three, clause fourteen--’I, Dante, vow to pay for Yamato’s food and living expenses for the entirety of the next year, should Vergil ever find a genuine romantic partner.”
Dante looks at the contract with extreme distaste, obviously regretting his decision to stake such a huge price on the bet, and Nero belatedly realizes exactly why Vergil had been so eager to get him on board with this plan. Anything for his cat, after all.
“Huh. And Nero’s just cool with knowing that this whole thing was made to benefit your cat? Dunno about you, kid, but if it were me, I’d be pretty pissed off about finding out that someone only wanted to get with me because he loved his cat.”
Vergil exhales with more dramatic flair than Nero thinks is entirely necessary, folding his arms, the contract still held between his fingers.
“Do you really think so little of me, Dante?” Vergil demands, and Nero is forced to hide his smile again.
“My relationship with Nero is genuine indeed. He and I have grown quite close since the day that contract was drafted, last year. Besides, he appreciates Yamato for the princess that she is--he sees no issue with the situation, right?”
Nero straightens up at the sound of his name, already nodding in agreement.
He hadn’t known about their little bet beforehand, but it hardly changed things for him, from his perspective. Dante’s got plenty of money to burn, if the way he keeps throwing himself pizza and ice cream parties is anything to go by, so Nero doesn’t exactly feel too guilty about having unintentionally exploited Dante’s money for Yamato’s sake. The ethical concerns about Vergil’s actions are pretty legitimate, but since Nero doesn’t actually hold any personal feelings in any of this, he remains largely unaffected.
“I mean, yeah--I believe in Vergil. Didn’t know about your bet until today, but everything he’s done up until this point, I don’t think you can fake stuff like that,” he supplies, throwing his support fully behind Vergil, as per their agreement.
“Besides, the cat’s pretty great. She likes me.”
“Yamato doesn’t like anyone,” Dante interrupts, clearly suspicious.
“Which is why Nero is special. From the moment she willingly jumped into his lap and submitted herself to petting underneath his hand, I simply knew he was...the one.”
Vergil drops a hand gently into his hair as he speaks, his fingers brushing gently through his white locks in an oddly tender motion, one that Nero wouldn’t quite have expected from someone like him. It’s out of place enough that Nero forgets himself for a moment, leaning into the touch unconsciously.
The flatness of Vergil’s voice draws a look of disbelief from his brother, but given Vergil’s general temperament overall, Dante has no choice but to let it go. He grumbles something underneath his breath, opening up his drawer and extracting a crumpled looking checkbook, but Vergil stops him.
“No, Dante. You must give Yamato the respect that she deserves, and pay a visit to her, in person, when you come to deliver her food.
Dante looks none too enthused about this turn of events, but Vergil shakes the contract in front of his face again, forcing him to relent with another sigh. He tosses the checkbook back into the spare drawer and rubs at his temples, glaring up at his twin.
“Okay, fine. Your cat is a menace, but fine. You two better be prepared for some questions, though--there’s still a whole lot of unanswered stuff about this relationship that I think I have to know. It’s my right as your twin brother and everything.”
“Ask and you shall receive,” Vergil states confidently, before gently tapping his hand against Nero’s back, motioning towards the door with a flick of his head.
Nero sends another semi-apologetic glance at Dante before hurrying to gather his stuff, obediently following Vergil out the door, nearly jumping when Vergil reaches downwards and takes his hand. The man’s palm is a lot warmer than Nero had thought it would be, his long fingers tracing gently at the back of Nero’s hand in a motion that tingles gently up his spine.
He sneaks a quick look at Vergil’s face, which maintains its usual rigidity until the moment they actually get into Vergil’s car and he closes the door behind him, an awkward silence hanging between them.
“Um...congratulations?” Nero offers, but Vergil doesn’t seem to hear him, staring straight ahead of him with a contemplative look on his face.
“That was my first kiss,” Vergil announces to the air in front of him, still not looking in Nero’s direction.
Although Vergil had been the one to actually initiate the kiss, something in the other man’s voice makes Nero feel vaguely guilty, like he’d gone up and stolen something from Vergil. It was certainly true that Vergil hadn’t expected Nero to so enthusiastically reciprocate the action, but Nero had thought that putting a little more energy into it was necessary to convince Dante.
That had been his only motive, of course.
“Oh. Right. Sorry about that. I guess we should probably have talked about it first,” Nero begins, but abruptly quiets down when Vergil turns to finally face him, fixing him with an unusually intense stare.
His blue eyes study Nero’s face for a long moment, his eyes traveling down to Nero’s mouth, and Nero tries not to squirm underneath the sudden attention, his fingers reaching down to tug at his scarf as a form of distraction.
“I dislike being... inadequate in what I do. And I suspect we will need to engage in such behavior in the future, especially if Dante is to be making regular visits to the apartment. Therefore, some practice is required.”
Nero blinks, quickly trying to get a better grasp on the situation as a whole. In his opinion, Vergil honestly hadn’t been that bad, but the other man did seem to be a bit of a perfectionist.
“So you want to--”
Vergil apparently interprets Nero’s half-finished sentence as a form of consent--Nero definitely wasn’t saying no, at least--and leans forward again, curving a hand against the back of Nero’s neck and kissing him. Nero can feel the way that Vergil actively tries this time, taking what he’d learned from their earlier experience in the office and putting it to good use, a much faster learner than Nero would have expected.
There isn’t an audience around to watch them anymore, but Nero finds himself pushing back against Vergil anyways. It’s been a long time since Nero’s properly dated anyone, and even though this whole arrangement was entirely artificial, it doesn’t stop Nero from drinking in the human contact he’s been craving for a while now.
He might not know Vergil very well, but unlike the other man, Nero himself is not very opposed to “physical intimacy with complete strangers,” and Vergil is admittedly a very good looking man.
He brushes his fingers against the strong curve of Vergil’s jaw, slightly testing the boundaries of how far Vergil was actually willing to let him take this, and Vergil doesn’t exactly stop him, breaking the kiss but keeping Nero’s face still close to his. Nero takes a small measure of pride in the way that Vergil is still slightly breathless, a barely noticeable flush on his cheeks as he moves the hand against Nero’s neck a little further down, until his fingertips are pressed against the small of Nero’s back.
“Well?” Vergil inquires, obviously struggling to sound uncaring, but Nero gets the distinct impression that Vergil does, in fact, care very much about what Nero thinks about his kissing abilities.
Nero tilts his head and licks his lips, trying his best not to grin.
“I don’t know,” he hums neutrally, meeting Vergil’s gaze, issuing a silent challenge to the other.
“I think you might have to try again.”
Nero considers himself to be a rather tolerant person--he has a pretty short temper when it comes down to it, but the long years that he’s spent putting up with his friends’ antics and herding his monkeys back into the circus have generally extended his patience. For all his experience, though, it takes him just a little over a month to finally grow completely and absolutely sick of eating instant noodles for lunch and dinner every single day.
He flees the apartment for a few hours on a Saturday, returning with several bags of groceries and the absolute determination to create some normal food fit for daily human consumption.
Vergil seems positively baffled at the sight of many of the things that Nero’s bought, coming out of his room and tentatively approaching the bags like some sort of overgrown cat, inspecting each one with a cautious curiosity. Yamato curls herself eagerly around Nero’s feet, rubbing up against his ankle in greeting, tilting her head upwards as she tries to get a closer look at the groceries.
“And you just...eat this?” Vergil asks as he slowly picks up a carrot between his fingers, raising a brow at Nero with a look of clear confusion and disdain on his face.
The man’s gotten more expressive over the days, something that is probably helped by the increased amount of time that he and Nero spend around each other, a good portion of it spent kissing. At this point, Vergil has gotten so good at what he does that Nero doesn’t really think he needs the practice anymore, but he isn’t about to put a stop to an actually enjoyable activity, and Vergil doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to discontinue things, either.
Nero rolls his eyes, snatching the carrot out of Vergil’s grasp and putting it back in the bag, nudging him slightly out of the way so that he can open Vergil’s completely empty fridge, tugging open one of the bottom drawers to stuff his vegetables in.
“You cook it, first, obviously. And not with the microwave, either. I know you’re living in the Dark Ages here and haven’t touched your stove since this building was constructed, but cooking is a pretty common thing.”
“A thing that there is simply no need for, when you have instant noodles.”
“No wonder you and Dante are twins--neither of you can function for shit,” Nero grumbles, and receives an amazingly petulant silence in return.
“Speaking of which, he’s supposed to come over today, right? It’s been a month, so, as per your signed contract, he has to drop off Yamato’s new cat food and whatever the hell else you asked him to buy.”
Nero himself has grown considerably more relaxed around Vergil, now that he’s come to the realization that, despite being his superior at the office, Vergil is actually a dysfunctional, thirty-eight year old loser of a man whose best and only friend is his cat. The noticeable lack of tension between them is probably for the best, especially since Dante was still of the belief that they were together.
“Supposedly, yes. But Dante generally has a preference for being late to everything.”
Vergil follows him around the kitchen as Nero wipes the dust off of the various surfaces in the kitchen, trailing a pace behind him like a stray animal, looking very lost in his own home. The other man hasn’t become much better with casual conversation and interaction, but he has taken to hanging outside of his room more often, which usually leads to instances such as these.
Nero doesn’t mind too much--it is still Vergil’s home, after all, and Vergil’s behavior, while definitely awkward and weird, is somehow endearing. His potential feelings of not-apathy are more than a little alarming to think about, though, so Nero mostly tries to take everything in stride.
He’s become quite good at handling Vergil’s presence, so much that he doesn’t even jump when Vergil suddenly closes the distance between them and stands directly behind him, looking over his shoulder curiously at the vegetables that Nero is cutting. The other man seems largely unconcerned about the fact that he is standing quite far into what most people would call “personal space,” and places one of his hands on the counter next to Nero’s side, effectively caging him in.
“You really don’t have any like, hobbies, or anything, do you?” Nero asks, continuing on with his work as if nothing were particularly odd about the situation, and Vergil shrugs, tilting his head with muted interest as Nero takes his vegetables and scoops them into a bowl, ducking underneath Vergil’s arm to deposit them into a pot.
“There is little shame in seeking out knowledge where it is available.”
In other words, Vergil is bored, lonely, and probably hasn’t seen anyone cook since he moved out of his parent’s house an unknown number of years ago.
Nero prides himself on being able to correctly translate Vergil’s elaborately crafted sentences, pouring another cup of water into the spaghetti sauce that he’s making.
“Well, since you apparently have nothing better to do, here. Try this for me.”
He takes a spoon from one of the drawers and dips it into the sauce, holding it over his hand to catch any stray drops as he twists around to face Vergil, who stares at it in bemusement for a long moment. The silence stretches on long enough for Nero to actually notice their proximity, and he automatically averts his eyes away from the intensity of Vergil’s stare, trying not to flush underneath it.
Vergil wordlessly leans forward and tastes the sauce, equipped with too many years of drinking cup noodle soup straight from the microwave to bother trying to cool it down first, briefly running his tongue over his lips in a motion that Nero can’t quite force himself to look away from.
“What is this...taste?” Vergil muses aloud, and Nero can’t tell whether his reaction is actually positive or not, deciding to probe gently for some elaboration.
He moves to drop the used tasting spoon onto a nearby plate, but Vergil reaches out and grabs his hand before he can actually get there, gently taking the spoon away from his fingers and dipping it back into the sauce. He repeats the motion several times, actually, until Nero heavily suspects that Vergil is not “tasting” the sauce so much as he is eating it.
“Okay, I’ll take that as an ‘it’s good.’ Now stop hogging it all to yourself--I need to eat too, and so does Dante, if he’s actually coming over.”
“Dante does not deserve your spaghetti,” Vergil replies, sounding somewhat put out as he very reluctantly hands the spoon back to Nero, and Nero ducks his head to hide his smile, gently pushing Vergil away.
“Go play with your cat or something--you’ll get a whole plate of this stuff, later. Anything to make you stop poisoning your kidney with five hundred milligrams of sodium and preservatives every day.”
“Yamato is a princess, she does not--”
“She doesn’t ‘play,’ she ‘entertains her subjects,’ yeah, I got it. Can’t you tell I’m kicking the both of you out?”
At Nero’s prompting, Vergil finally steps backwards, and Yamato immediately moves to follow him, loyal to Vergil until the end.
“Let us go, Yamato,” Vergil instructs, motioning towards the open space outside of the kitchen with a flick of his head, and he steps to the side, allowing Yamato to proceed before him, as always.
Nero bites on his own lip with more force than is entirely necessary in order to hide his smile as he turns his attention back to his sauce, trying to tell himself that it was only natural that he’d become a little attached to Vergil, after living in his home and seeing him at work every day for the past month.
A rather obnoxious, heavy knock on the door, followed by Yamato’s resulting screech of alarm pulls Nero from that train of thought before he can allow it to get out of hand,. A second later, Dante lets himself into the apartment, pocketing the key that Nero hadn’t even known he’d had, carrying a gigantic shipping box underneath his other arm.
“I see you are in the habit of invading others’ privacy, as usual,” Vergil comments, his voice drifting from somewhere near the couch.
Dante shrugs good-naturedly, dumping the giant box of cat food onto one of the cushions.
“You say that, but we all know you love me.”
Vergil says absolutely nothing in response, but doesn’t deny the claim either, pulling the box towards him and examining its contents, apparently satisfied with the quality of cat food that he finds within it.
Nero’s never actually seen the two brothers interact outside of the workplace before, and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t curious.
Dante’s never been in the habit of following the office dress code in the first place, so he looks exactly the same here as he usually does. He’s a little more relaxed, though, if such a thing was even possible for Dante, and he immediately perks up when he sees Nero, offering him a cheerful wave, which Nero feels obligated to return with a small amount of reservation.
“Good to see you’re still here, kid. I know Verge can be a real handful, and he isn’t exactly the best at dealing with other non-cat lifeforms. Sort of surprised he hasn’t said or done anything to scare you off yet, honestly.”
“If anything, the one who will be doing the scaring is you, Dante, given your atrocious and unruly behavior outside of the office.”
Nero recalls a brief, yet memorable incident in which Dante had used the company phone to hire no less than twenty-seven strippers to serenade Vergil in his own office, and finds it immensely difficult to imagine what constitutes as “atrocious and unruly” behavior if that apparently didn’t.
“The only thing either of you are scaring are people with common sense,” Nero mutters, turning off the stove and digging through Vergil’s cabinets in search of some plates.
“Which doesn’t include me, apparently.”
Vergil himself owned absolutely no dishware outside of Yamato’s plate, a single cup, a set of cutlery, and a box full of single-use wooden chopsticks, but Nero’s landlord had finally sent over his stuff a couple of weeks ago, so they weren’t too bad off in this department.
“If you’re staying for dinner, I hope you know there’s no pizza.”
Dante looks quite disappointed, but deposits himself into one of the chairs at the kitchen table anyway, folding his hands behind his head in a lazy gesture that Nero seen a hundred times at the office. Luckily, Dante has enough sense to avoid putting his feet up on the table, and Nero decides to reward his incredible display of etiquette by adding an extra meatball onto his spaghetti.
“Thank goodness,” Vergil says as he lowers himself into the chair opposite of Dante, leaving only an awkward space in the middle for Nero.
“We are saved from a greasy, circular death by the slice.”
“Hey, you can go for me all you want, but you’d better leave pizza out of this.”
Their conversation rapidly devolves into a debate about which of their respective junk foods is better, and Nero decides to busy himself with picking out Yamato’s dinner, opening up a can of salmon casserole and putting it on her bowl. Dante nearly twists his head all the way around to catch a glimpse of Nero kneeling next to Yamato, the surprise clear on his face as Yamato happily licks at Nero’s palm, rubbing her head against him affectionately.
“Holy shit. She does like you.”
Vergil is silent, forgoing a perfect opportunity for a snide remark about Dante’s likeableness, and when Nero turns his head to look at him, the man is gazing in his direction with an oddly soft expression, his fingers fiddling absently with the rolled up cuff of his sleeve.
Nero hasn’t quite seen this type of emotion on Vergil’s face before, in the time that they’ve been together, and he feels his heart flutter weirdly in his chest, ducking his head automatically to hide the oncoming blush. He continues to face pointedly away from the two of them as he discards the can and goes to wash his hands, unceremoniously delivering the plates of spaghetti in front of them afterwards.
“Woah. It’s real food and everything,” Dante mutters as he picks up his fork, examining the plate from as many possible angles as he could achieve while remaining seated. Without hesitation, Dante takes up an incredibly large forkful of the stuff, shoving it all into his mouth and chewing thoughtfully.
“Hey, it’s actually pretty great! I don’t feel so bad about giving up my pizza, if it’s for something like this.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, dumbass,” Nero ducks his head to hide his flush at the praise, unable to resist the temptation to peek at Vergil from underneath his lashes for his response, as well.
Vergil takes a forkful of only sauce, evidently more than happy to dine on only that, and eats about half of the sauce by itself before actually trying the noodles. After the first bite of solid food, he stares down at his plate with an expression of unconcealed shock, probably surprised at the taste of real food after eating Spicy Picante Beef preservatives for his entire life.
“Are you able to do this every day?” Vergil inquires, twirling his fork into a noticeably larger bundle of spaghetti.
“Uh, well hopefully, yeah, because the only flavor of ramen you have left is Creamy Chicken, and I don’t even know why you bought that one.”
“It was on sale,” Vergil defends momentarily, cutting a meatball into pieces and chewing on it in a sulky sort of silence as he waits for Nero to pick up on the meaning of what he refuses to say.
Nero lets the pause go on for a moment longer, just to watch Vergil squirm, before he sighs with an exasperated fondness.
“Yeah, I’ll make dinner for the rest of our lives. You don’t have to beg too hard, you know.”
“Cool,” answers Dante, who has apparently invited himself over for dinner every night from now on.
“...thank you,” Vergil says, so quietly that Nero almost doesn’t catch it, staring quite intensely into his spaghetti.
Another one of those long silences hangs in the air between them, in which both Vergil and Nero try to busy themselves with eating, and Dante apparently takes it upon himself to strike up conversation.
“So, is Vergil a good lay?”
Vergil very visibly pales by three shades, and Nero doubts that he’ll ever find someone who has mastered the art of keeping one’s expression completely blank while choking on spaghetti like Vergil has. Nero, having had an entire year of working under Dante to get used to his normal speech patterns, handles the question with a little more composure, managing to at least swallow his food.
He isn’t quite able to hide the embarrassment on his face, though, his free hand automatically running through his bangs in his usual nervous gesture, and he sees Dante’s eyes narrow as he looks between the two of them, piecing together their reactions to come to a rather accurate conclusions.
“Oh, I get it,” he says, but not without an entirely too smug grin.
“Not too surprised, since it’s Vergil. No pressure or anything, you know. You two do what you want—which doesn’t include each other, I guess.”
Dante’s gleeful cackle at his own joke is interrupted by Vergil plucking his glass of water from the table and splashing it onto Dante. The motion makes him stop laughing, but doesn’t wipe the smirk off his face, nor does it manage to reduce the rapidly spreading red flush across Vergil’s no-longer blank expression.
“Silence your foolishness at once, Dante,” Vergil snaps, as Nero stabs his fork into a meatball on his plate and abruptly leans over to shove it into Dante’s mouth, effectively cutting off whatever he was about to say.
Dante seems to get the combined message from both of them, switching the topic to something far more trivial as soon as he swallows the meatball. Nero makes an effort to slightly contribute, trying not to pay too much mind to the way that Vergil keeps staring at him from across the table. He snaps out of his stupor, once or twice, when Dante or Nero actually address him, but spends the majority of the rest of dinner in a thoughtful silence.
Nero likes to think that he’s gotten pretty good at reading Vergil’s silences, and this doesn’t seem like a particularly angry silence to him. He sees the way that Dante shoots Vergil a couple of semi-concerned glances when he thinks no one is looking, but other than that, he doesn’t outright address Vergil or act as if something’s wrong, so Nero thinks he’s interpreted Vergil’s inaction correctly.
Dante takes his leave while Nero washes the dishes, trying to give Yamato a farewell pat and receiving an angry hiss in return. He chuckles lightly, holding his hands up as he backs away, nodding towards Nero at the sink.
“Thanks for the food, kid. It’s good to see you out of the office. And take care of Verge, would you? I think I put him into shock.”
Vergil doesn’t even stir at the comment, sitting completely still at his place at the table, which is a little more worrying, but Nero nods in agreement anyway, rinsing off a plate and shaking it dry as he puts it into the dish rack.
As Dante shuts the door behind him with a graceless noise, Nero makes Vergil a cup of the tea he usually drank after dinner, putting it in front of him and waving his hand lightly in front of his face. Vergil blinks slowly, his gaze refocusing on Nero as he looks him over, his eyes hovering on the slightly exposed crook of Nero’s neck.
Nero resists the temptation to pull the collar of his loose button-up shirt back upwards, sitting back down in front of Vergil.
“What, are you still thinking about what Dante said?” Nero finally decides to question, probing lightly for answers.
Vergil hums neutrally, picking up his cup and staring down into it, pressing his lips together in a thin line. He swirls the liquid around in it thoughtfully, letting a few more seconds of silence pass by.
“Not...entirely. His comment was indeed the instigator of my current thoughts, but…”
Vergil lifts his eyes again, fixing Nero with that same, intense stare, and Nero finds himself instinctively lowering his head, swallowing hard as he avoids making direct eye contact with the man. As he drops his gaze, his eyes automatically land on Vergil’s forearms pressed against the table, his sleeves rolled up to the crook of his elbow.
He’s been seeing Vergil walk around in his casual clothes at home for over a month now, but he still hasn’t quite gotten used to the sight. Despite being notably more relaxed in his dress code at home, Vergil never quite lost that air of proper elegance in his style of dress, something that was massively offset by the truth of his personality.
Nero’s definitely discovered one thing, though--Vergil was awfully fond of rolling up his sleeves outside of work, or simply not having sleeves at all, and the man definitely has the build to pull it off, his body somehow incredibly toned and well-defined despite eating absolutely nothing but instant noodles and plain white bread every day. He’d caught an actual look at Vergil’s entire torso at one point, when the other man had apparently forgotten that he no longer lived alone and had come walking straight out of his bedroom in nothing but a towel around his waist.
There had been an impossibly long moment in which Nero, who had been eating some of his favorite vanilla rainbow marshmallow cereal in front of the TV, had stared at him in both surprise and mild arousal, and Vergil had very stiffly uttered out a sort of apology before practically fleeing back inside.
Nero has admittedly spent entirely too much time thinking about what Vergil had looked like in that moment, and in a whole lot of other moments in the time that they’ve been together.
In other words, he’s been shamelessly and rampantly checking Vergil out, which is something he probably really shouldn’t be doing, especially when they spent so much time fake-cuddling on the couch, having fake-makeouts to fake-practice for their fake-relationship.
He shakes his head in an aborted motion, trying to clear the Vergil-related thoughts that he could not be having, bringing his eyes back up to Vergil’s face. Vergil himself still seems to be equally distracted though, frowning to himself as he stares in Nero’s general direction.
Then, as if he’d come to a sudden sort of realization, Vergil blinks quickly, looking down at his tea again like he’s seeing it for the first time. In a smooth motion, Vergil drains the entire cup dry, placing it back down on the table and abruptly standing up.
“I must retire for the night. There is a...personal matter that I wish to attend to. The dinner was excellent--thank you, Nero.”
Vergil’s never been particularly good at smooth entrances or exits, but this one seems particularly hurried as he rushes to leave Nero behind in the kitchen, closing his bedroom door behind him.
With only Nero and Yamato left in the room, the silence turns a little more heavy, and Nero clears his throat, scooping up the cup and rinsing it out in the sink. Yamato follows him eagerly, sitting by his feet and watching him closely, purring loudly at him when she sees him put away the cup.
“Yeah, I got you,” Nero answers, bending down and letting her jump into his arms, rubbing her head gently.
“You wouldn’t happen to know what’s up with him, would you?”
He motions towards Vergil’s door with a flick of his head, and Yamato bats idly at the loose collar of his shirt with one of her paws, brushing softly against the exposed skin of his collarbone.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”
Vergil’s behavior is definitely a mystery, but not exactly a pressing one. Nero’s got plenty of time to figure things out, still, and the hour is a little too late for him to start willingly down this train of thought.
He sits with Yamato for a little while, idly petting her head and watching TV on the couch for a bit, not even noticing when he starts to fall asleep. Yamato, surprisingly, stays with him for the rest of the night, curled up happily into the crook of his body.
In the morning, there’s a thin, navy-blue blanket draped over the both of them, a leftover tingling warmth in Nero’s chest, and a very small, barely noticeable smile on Vergil’s face as he sips at his breakfast tea.
“Sorry I’m late.”
Nero slides into the booth opposite of Kyrie and Nico, rubbing sleepily at his eyes with a hand. It’s nearly evening, but he’s already had a long day at work, and he’d been woken up early because he’d left his bedroom door open by accident, allowing Yamato to get in and jump underneath the covers with him. Her presence was usually welcome, but Nero is an incredibly light sleeper, is pretty sensitive about being touched, and wears a nightshirt that has a tendency to ride upwards while he sleeps--all of that, combined with Yamato’s preference for rubbing up against the curve of his stomach, had jolted him awake with alarming speed.
“It’s alright, Nero,” Kyrie says warmly, stirring at the cinnamon-colored drink she’d ordered and tapping the spoon gently against the side of the teacup, placing it lightly against the plate.
“It’s just good to see you again.”
He tries to soften his smile purposefully for her, in the way he only does for his sweetest and oldest childhood friend, tugging at his scarf to loosen it up a little.
“I already went ahead and took the liberty of ordering somethin’ for you. Hot chocolate, with extra marshmallows. Don’t have to thank me, Pretty Boy, I know I’m good.”
Nico slides a steaming cup of what Nero assumes is his drink across the table to him, leaning her face against her hand with a confident smirk. As much as Nero wants to deny it, Nico’s got him figured out pretty perfectly--he’s never been a big fan of coffee, mostly because his body often found itself absolutely unable to tolerate caffeine, but also because his natural sweet tooth absolutely rebelled against it.
“Uh huh. You keep telling yourself that,” Nero mutters, stealing Nico’s spoon to fish out one of his marshmallows and eating it whole, refusing to wait for the marshmallows to melt into the drink.
Halfway into his third marshmallow, Kyrie spots something behind him and perks up, waving happily to indicate their location, and Nero barely has the time to turn around before Credo sits down next to him, trapping him in the booth.
Suddenly, Nero has a bad feeling as to what this might be about.
“So...all of you just decided to meet up here, huh?” He tries tentatively, and he sees the three of them exchange looks, probably communicating as to whether to drop the act or not.
Credo, who has never been particularly tactful with matters such as these, is the first to respond.
“You did not inform us of your new boyfriend, Nero,” he says, with no small amount of slightly menacing overprotectiveness creeping into his voice.
Right.
Nero was normally hesitant to introduce his boyfriends to his friends, mostly because he thought that Credo and Kyrie’s protectiveness and Nico’s...Nico might scare them away. But since the relationship with Vergil hadn’t even been real in the first place, the thought of telling his friends about Vergil’s existence hadn’t exactly crossed his mind.
“How’d you even find out about that?” He stalls, directing his focus into extracting another marshmallow from his drink.
“Well, first I found that your apartment was flooded, which you really should have told us about,” Kyrie starts to explain, a layer of steel in the undercurrents of her voice, and the sweet look in her eyes turns slightly dangerous.
Nero ducks his head into his scarf shamefacedly, mumbling out a quick apology for leaving the three of them out of the loop of that particular disaster, but he’d thought he could solve the crisis and get away with it, without too much attention.
“Then, I got really worried about who you were going to stay with--or where you were at all, for that matter. I went to that office of yours to wait for you so I could find out, when that nice man in the red coat told me you were busy ‘going to town on Verge’s chunky noodle, with extra spicy beef,’ as he put it.”
“I’m going to kill Dante,” Nero mutters underneath his breath, taking a sip of his hot chocolate to console himself, his ears turning a miserable pink with embarrassment.
Beside him, Credo makes a scandalized sort of noise, fixing Nero with a very serious look indeed.
“Nero, do you remember what I said about--”
Nero drops his face into his arms with a loud groan, trying to interrupt Credo before he could launch into a tirade about the hypothetical evils of other people, all of whom were apparently on some sort of conquest to rob Nero of all his happiness and his entire livelihood.
“We haven’t even done anything!” He tries to defend, which is nothing but the complete truth.
Aside from some harmless kissing, they really haven’t, although Nero can honestly no longer deny that he probably would prefer if they had.
“But he is certainly thinking of ‘doing something,’ and you know it.”
Credo speaks with such absolute finality in his voice that Nero automatically gives, turning to look imploringly at Nico and Kyrie. The two of them merely shrug, more than familiar with Credo’s steadfast protectiveness of him, and the other man folds his arms in determination.
“We will have to arrange a meeting with this ‘Vergil,’ immediately. Vergil...sounds like a man of ill repute from his name alone.”
Nero has a brief, unfortunate mental image of Credo attempting to stare Vergil’s unfeeling, emotionless person down and receiving nothing but several disdainful remarks for his trouble, eventually resulting in a disagreement that was bound to escalate into Credo making yet another attempt to file a warrant for arrest.
“Yeah, that definitely isn’t a good idea,” Nero starts, reaching out to grab Credo’s wrist to prevent him from interrupting.
“Look, the truth is…”
Before he can actually clarify the fake-dating situation, though, something like doubt forces his words back down. Logically, he knows that these three are more than capable of keeping a secret, and they rarely interacted with Dante enough for word to get out to him, but somehow, talking about their arrangement without Vergil’s knowledge feels wrong, somehow.
“Vergil is...not like that,” he finishes awkwardly, hastily changing his explanation last-minute.
“He’s never been in a relationship before this, and he doesn’t totally know what he’s doing, yeah, but at least he’s trying. He’s got a lot depending on this, so he definitely doesn’t want to screw this up--and he’s a total loser, so I don’t think he could, anyway. Anyways, you can put your worst fears to rest. He’s completely inexperienced in all related areas, so no one is ‘going to town’ on anything.”
A long pause follows his words, and Nero pulls his scarf upwards, staring determinedly into his drink to avoid looking at any of his friends. Considering how absolutely no part of his speech had been founded on truth, Nero thinks that he did a pretty convincing job in delivering it.
“Oh, so you really like him. You even did the thing with your scarf.”
“What thing with my scarf?” Nero demands, feeling himself automatically shrink underneath Kyrie’s gaze.
“When you get embarrassed about your feelings, you hide half of your face in your scarf and look down. So you must feel really strongly about this guy.”
Nero automatically reaches for his scarf again, before visibly restraining himself, trying to ignore the light flush steadily creeping up his face.
“I do not,” he mutters defensively, denying both of those statements.
“I’m just weirded out because of how you guys keep poking around in my personal life! Don’t any of you have, like, hobbies?”
“Yes. My hobby is tracking down the dangerous criminals you often find yourself in relationships with, and putting an immediate end to their transgressions.”
Nero wisely decides not to point out that “being in a relationship with Nero” was not, in fact, a crime, in hopes of steering the conversation away from the topic of Vergil and relationships in general altogether.
“Okay, well have you ever considered getting a better hobby? Like, uh...like Nico--she likes building...shit?”
Nico, always eager for an opportunity to ramble on about her inventions, snaps at the bait immediately, hastening to correct Nero on his vague description of her job, and Nero allows himself to relax and properly enjoy his drink, having successfully diverted the attention away from his fake relationship.
The conversation won’t quite leave his head, though, and he’s still thinking about it by the time he returns to his apartment with Vergil, sometime after the sun has gone down. He’d told Vergil that he’d be staying out with some friends earlier in the morning, so hopefully the man had been able to fend for himself and revert back to his microwave-abusing ways for dinner.
The apartment seems empty, at a first glance--Vergil’s bedroom is door is firmly closed, but there isn’t any light coming out from underneath the crack, so either Vergil has gone to bed about four hours early, is sitting alone in the dark doing nothing, or just isn’t here.
At the sound of his arrival, Yamato eagerly dashes out of her room and runs up to him, rubbing at his ankles, which is even stranger, because she usually determined that it was Vergil’s turn to be followed around after dinner.
Nero kneels down to pet her head gently, tilting his head as he tries to figure out the situation.
“You know where Vergil is?” He asks Yamato, more for the sake of it than anything, but at the sound of Vergil’s name, Yamato ducks out from underneath his hand and pads over to his closed bedroom door, pawing at the surface.
So maybe Vergil really was just sitting in the dark.
He slowly walks over to the door and knocks softly on it, checking if Vergil is actually asleep. There isn’t an actual response, but now that he’s standing so close, he can make out some barely audible noises from the other side of the door.
“Uh, Vergil? You good?”
The lack of a verbal confirmation makes Nero more than a little concerned, and Yamato seems to agree, if the way she continues to sit by his feet and look expectantly up at him is any indication of what she wants him to do. Nero struggles internally with himself for a long moment, biting at his lip uncertainly.
On one hand, it really wasn’t like Vergil to not respond, nor was it like him to leave his beloved cat outside of his room. On the other, Vergil was also a man who most definitely valued his privacy, and Nero assumes that barging into his room without permissions would be a pretty clear invasion of it.
Yamato meows insistently at him, batting at his ankle with a paw, and Nero sighs.
“Fine, fine. I’m blaming you if anything goes wrong.”
After another moment of hesitation, Nero steels his nerves and tries the handle, finding the door unlocked, and pushing it open.
Vergil is indeed sitting alone in the dark, his back turned to Nero, with his laptop open in front of him, and is apparently so thoroughly engrossed with the contents on his screen that he hadn’t heard Nero calling for him. Nero can’t make out the other’s expression with the way that Vergil is angled away from him, but he recognizes the fascination in Vergil’s confused head tilt.
“Oh,” Nero says blankly, without really thinking, because it takes all of three seconds for it to become abundantly obvious that Vergil is, in fact, watching porn.
It isn’t normal, real human people porn either, because Nero is very certain that this “Yuki-chan” and his incredibly deep-voiced male lover did not readily exist outside of illicit Japanese animated media.
Vergil nearly leaps off of the bed at the sound of his voice, slamming his laptop shut with great force, cutting the audio off mid-moan.
“Hello, Nero. Welcome back,” Vergil greets him, with an alarming amount of stoicism for someone who had just been caught in the middle of a rather private activity.
Luckily for both of them, Vergil is still fully dressed, so he hadn’t actually been doing anything with the porn, other than passively watching it. This little aspect does nothing to help the rather spectacular silence that descends upon them, interrupted only by Yamato’s happy cat noises as she plays with something off in the corner.
“I...sorry for interrupting. You didn’t answer when I knocked on your door, so I got a little worried,” Nero manages, still trying to wrap his head around the whole situation.
Vergil did not seem like the type of person who would regularly consume this sort of content, but maybe, like many things about the man, this was one of those unpleasant truths that Nero would simply be forced to live with.
Vergil’s gaze flicks nervously to the open door still behind Nero, the muscles in his throat visibly tensing as he swallows harshly.
“Forgive me. I thought...you were away.”
“I was. I, um...I came back.”
Nero has had many awkward conversations since moving in with Vergil, but this is by the far the worst. He’s probably only been standing in this room with Vergil for less than five minutes, but this entire affair is being dragged out into eternity, and neither of them seem to know how to dismiss this interaction in a natural way.
“Do not tell Dante,” Vergil orders, his voice dripping with desperation.
“I wouldn’t. I mean, I won’t. He doesn’t...he doesn’t have to know about this. Any of this.”
“We have reached a consensus, then."
Nero blinks at the other man for another moment before deliberately turning his head to Yamato, watching with intense interest at the way she was beginning to groom herself. He takes a very slow, stiff step backwards, starting to mumble out a hurried farewell.
“Wait.”
Nero doesn’t really know if he wants to wait, lest this situation become any more painful than it already is, but he stops at the command anyway, tilting his head to peer at Vergil through his bangs, praying that what the other man had to say would be brief.
“I, ah...I feel as if I owe you some sort of explanation.”
Vergill really doesn’t. What he did on his own time, in his own house, was absolutely none of Nero’s business, but he senses that Vergil very much wants to explain things to him, perhaps to clear his own name, so Nero forces himself to nod.
“Normally I am not invested in matters such as these, but Dante’s words the other night at dinner have allowed me to come to a realization. This…” he gestures vaguely to his closed laptop still on the bed, evidently unwilling to actually put a name to it.
“Is an area in which Dante possesses more knowledge than I...which is, of course, unacceptable. So I was attempting to do research in this field of study.”
Now that definitely sounded more like Vergil.
Nero exhales slightly, the humor inherent in the situation finally starting to override the natural awkwardness, but he ducks his head to hide his smile anyway, not wanting Vergil to think that Nero is actually laughing at him.
“Okay...I guess I can understand that,” he says evenly, taking a slight step towards Vergil and pulling his scarf upwards.
“I’m not really an expert in...in what you were watching in particular, but I have definitely had sex before. And speaking from experience, I think you would learn a lot more if you weren’t using animated cartoons as a reference.”
“They are not called cartoons,” Vergil insists, and Nero suspects that he’s accidentally trodden on a sore spot.
He cuts himself off before he can launch into a rant of sorts, though, shaking his head to himself and casting a plaintive glance down at the laptop.
“Etymology aside, I did, in fact, consider that. However, the notion of seeking out videos between... real human beings on the internet seemed far less tasteful.”
“It’s...it’s porn,” Nero says honestly, unable to hold his tongue.
“You might have some trouble if ‘tasteful’ is one of your criteria.”
“True.”
Vergil glances up at the ceiling for a moment, like he’s about to say something more, but evidently thinks better of it, looking away towards the opposite wall. He runs a hand carefully through his styled hair, before his fingers reach down to fiddle with his collar as he slightly lowers his head, and Nero suddenly comes to a realization himself, of sorts.
He takes another step forward, and Vergil’s attention immediately refocuses on him, his eyes rapidly scanning Nero’s body before they actually settle on his face. With more confidence than he actually feels, Nero tugs off his scarf and lets it slip from his fingers and onto the ground, watching the way that Vergil’s gaze jumps to his exposed neck.
“Well, as long as this arrangement goes on for, you still have my help, if you want it.”
He moves forward again until he’s nearly pressed right up against Vergil, looking up at him through his lashes, and one of Vergil’s hands tentatively comes to rest on his hip.
“And you would be so willing to just...give yourself over?”
There’s an undeniable note of interest in Vergil’s voice, the intensity of his stare turning slightly sharper as he drops his gaze a little lower again, his fingers slipping underneath the hem of Nero’s shirt to brush against his bare skin.
Despite being the one to take the lead in this situation, Nero feels himself blush slightly as he very gently moves the two of them backwards, until the backs of his knees touch the edge of the bed.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he admits, because he is most definitely not new to this.
Vergil seems to think this over, before twisting slightly around to look at Yamato.
“Ah, Yamato. I know it is unbecoming of me to order you around, but would you awfully mind vacating the--”
Yamato doesn’t wait for Vergil to finish his sentence, letting out an amused-sounding purr before stalking out the door and out of sight, presumably returning to her own private room.
“Smart cat,” Nero starts to say, before a slight push against his shoulders and some shifting of their positions leaves him laying back on the bed, staring up into Vergil’s slightly flushed, mildly confused face.
Nero waits for Vergil to continue, surprised but more than willing to go along with Vergil’s initiative, when the other man hesitates.
“...I don’t know what I am doing,” Vergil stiffly admits, from where he hovers uncertainly above Nero, and Nero laughs, reaching up to hook his fingers in Vergil’s collar, tugging his upper half downwards until their lips meet.
“Don’t worry,” Nero smiles against Vergil’s mouth, tangling his fingers into the man’s hair.
“You’ll learn.”
After the third month of living with Vergil, Nero realizes that is utterly screwed, because he is beginning to understand that cannot live in Vergil’s apartment any longer.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with his cohabitation with Vergil. The other man keeps his house fairly neat, and any awkwardness between them has dissolved, mostly ever since they’d started sleeping in the same bed together. Vergil isn’t disruptive, never really bothers Nero, and his cat is great.
Out of the many roommates that Nero’s lived with, his stay with Vergil ranks at the very top, in every sense of the word, and a part of Nero knows that he’ll definitely be lonely by the time he gets his own place.
The other man has his flaws, of course, in spite of the perfect image he often attempts to project.
Vergil is an absolute loser who only has the work aspect of his life together, and is an antisocial shut-in whose Japanese-to-English ratio of possessions is vastly outbalanced. Nero’s seen Vergil spend nearly five hours at his computer in one sitting, doing nothing but online shopping for new and horrendously expensive cat-themed merchandise from overseas vendors.
In short, Nero absolutely understands why Vergil’s never had a relationship before, and yet, when he’s awoken in the middle of the night on one particular occasion, by the sounds of Vergil quietly celebrating having acquired a new breed of virtual cat on his mobile game right next to him, Nero comes to the horrific conclusion that he is in love with Vergil.
Thus, he needs to move out.
Vergil had made it all but clear in the beginning that he had no interest in maintaining an actual relationship with Nero, and that he wasn’t too fond of the concept of a relationship in the first place, meaning that Nero really had no hope in this avenue. Living around Vergil was fairly easy when Nero only thought of him as a semi-friend and a mostly weird superior, but having to share the same living space with the object of his romantic affections was really only something that could end badly.
“Ah. I apologize--you may return to sleep, Nero,” Vergil tells him once he notices that Nero is awake, but strangely doesn’t attempt to hide his display of emotion even now that he has an audience, continuing to smile happily down at his screen.
Nero blinks at him sleepily for another moment, frowning at the way that Vergil’s unstyled hair fell messily into his eyes and his mouth was curved up in a crooked sort of half-smile, and he has no choice but turns his face into his pillow with a muffled groan, trying to hide the blush on his face. There’s an absurdly fond warmth fluttering somewhere in the pit of his stomach, and rapidly spreading up to his chest, and he shuts his eyes, hoping that if he pretends that it isn’t there, the feeling will go away.
“Now that I have obtained the elusive Cleocatra, only Santa Claws remains,” Vergil mutters aloud to himself, almost too quietly to catch, evidently charting the collection of his virtual cats and mapping out his progress in his head.
Oh my god, Nero thinks, in part because Vergil has absolutely no life, but also because Nero is seriously disturbed in the head if he finds this deeply attractive.
Which, unfortunately, he does.
He tilts his head in the other direction, cracking open an eye to peer at the clock on the bedside table. It’s around three AM, which means that Nero really has to reexamine his priorities in his dating life, but also means that Nero has another cause for concern.
Shifting carefully around the slight soreness in his lower half, Nero twists to face Vergil, rubbing his eyes sleepily as he looks up at him.
“Have you been doing this all night?” Nero questions steadily, and when Vergil looks up from his phone again, his expression is more than a little guilty, which is enough of an answer for Nero to know the truth.
He squints as he peers more closely at Vergil’s face, noting the depth of the dark circles underneath his eyes, and he pushes himself properly upright with a sigh, very gently reaching out to cover Vergil’s hand with his own, starting to pry the man’s fingers away from his phone. Vergil doesn’t outright resist, although he does cast a mournful glance at the smiling face of the cartoon cat on the screen before Nero shuts it off and drops it gently into his lap.
They sit in comfortable silence for another moment, before Nero decides to put away his own internal crisis in favor of helping Vergil, and lightly touches him on the shoulder, pulling his own knees closer to his chest as he slightly curls up against the man.
“You know, your current work project isn’t even due for like, what, two more weeks? Don’t spend so much time thinking about it.”
Vergil looks momentarily surprised, his blue eyes shifting to study Nero, apparently not having planned to share the current cause of his insomnia with anyone. The man hides it well, after all--Nero never would have known that Vergil typically had problems falling asleep if he didn’t literally share his bed every night.
Nero feels him tense up against him, like Vergil is about to put up his barriers and shut him out, but with another long look down at him, he decides to relent.
“I understand that the deadline is a ways away. The task as a whole is simply a...large responsibility, and my level of competency in the eyes of my father relies heavily upon the outcome of this particular affair.”
Nero’s never met Dante and Vergil’s father in person, but the legendary Sparda had been the original founder of the whole company in the first place, choosing to retire sometime into his later years and entrust the business to his twin sons while he entered his own, quiet retirement with his wife. The two twins don’t really talk about the man often, but when they do, it’s obvious enough to Nero that they both look up to him greatly, Vergil in particular.
“Pretty sure your father is able to separate his opinion of you from his thoughts on what you do. Besides, you’ve already done a lot for the company, and I think he knows it. He hasn’t exactly voiced his disapproval of you or anything.”
“Well, he never was much of a talker to begin with. Perhaps he does disapprove, and he just chooses to remain silent.”
Nero nudges Vergil lightly in the arm with a soft laugh, somehow endeared by Vergil’s incredibly rare display of insecurity.
“Yeah, I don’t think so. From what I’ve seen between you and Dante, keeping silent about shit you’re unhappy with doesn’t exactly run in the family. Neither of you are really in the habit of sugarcoating your words, and I can’t imagine that that shared trait just came out of nowhere."
Vergil doesn’t quite respond, staring down at his hands, and Nero suspects that it’s going to be another one of those long nights, where nothing anyone really says or does helps. He runs his hand down his face before straightening up a little, kicking the blankets off of him.
“Well, if you’re not going to sleep, someone needs to watch you to make sure you don’t dry your eyes out by staring at virtual cats all day. Pretty sad way to go, honestly.”
Vergil immediately shakes his head, grabbing Nero by the wrist before he can get out of bed and looking at him seriously.
“You need your rest, Nero. Just because I find myself unable to fall asleep does not mean you should lose yours as well.”
Nero sighs, already dislodging Vergil’s grip from his wrist before the other man can protest, resisting the temptation to maybe kiss him to shut his stubborn protests up.
“You’re seriously losing it from the lack of sleep. Don’t you know we’re in this thing together? I’m stuck with you, all the way, even when it comes to shit like this.”
Vergil seems appropriately stunned into silence at this proclamation, and Nero internally kicks himself as soon as the words leave his mouth, because this kind of thing was really not something he should be saying while he was struggling with the whole “I-love-Vergil” issue. Either way, it allows him to properly slip out of bed and heads to Yamato’s room.
Either the cat is just amazingly synchronized with Vergil or everyone is just having trouble sleeping at this point, because the second he steps in front of the slightly open door, Yamato comes speeding out of it and leaps directly into his arms. He yelps in surprise, struggling not to actually drop her or accidentally manhandle her as he tries to get a proper grip, stumbling backwards a few paces.
“I’m guessing you want to go see Vergil?” He questions cautiously, to which he receives an enthusiastic meow in response.
Yamato can’t get through the closed bedroom doors on her own, and the force of her eagerness to see Vergil when she usually attempts to maintain a certain amount of aloofness around him, leads Nero to believe that she’s been waiting for an opening to be let in. He rubs her head gently, pressing a quick kiss between her ears.
“So that loser has someone looking out for him after all. Keep it up, okay?”
He’d feel a little better about moving out and leaving Vergil behind if he managed to make himself believe enough that Yamato was going to be taking care of him.
Nero carries the cat into the bedroom, noting Vergil look of faint surprise and quiet relief as he sets eyes on her, and he sets Yamato gently down onto the bed. As soon as her paws touch the mattress, she stalks up to Vergil’s lap with practiced slowness, apparently trying to look as uncaring as possible, and Nero feels a little like laughing, watching this literal feline version of Vergil behave.
“Hello,” Vergil says softly, extending a hand, and she gives a disdainful look at his palm, marching right past it before crawling up into his lap and curling against his abdomen, purring very softly.
Vergil looks a touch happier, the lines of worry and stress on his face fading slightly as he gently pets at his cat, lifting his eyes to briefly shoot a grateful look in Nero’s direction.
“I figured you wanted her here,” Nero explains himself as he gets back into bed, fiddling with one of the loose threads at the end of his nightshirt.
“But I also know that you’re too stupid and prideful to go and get her yourself. Which is especially dumb, because she really wanted to see you. She just couldn’t get in, because you know, doors.”
The fact that her Vergil-esque personality prevented her from showing that she actually cared about Vergil was probably a pretty big factor in all of it, too, but Nero wisely refrains from voicing this particular observation.
“Hm. Thank you. I suppose virtual cats never do quite compare to the actual thing. My apologies for even attempting such a thing, Yamato.”
Yamato considers his apology for a moment, which is so honest and genuine that Nero is forced to look away, biting hard at his lip to hide his smile, before she clearly decides to forgive him, bumping her nose against his palm and actually giving him a tiny lick. Vergil looks more thrilled than Nero’s seen in him in a long time, his eyes soft and relaxed.
“How come you two don’t just sleep in the same room in the first place? Pretty sure a lot of people sleep with their cats, and you’re definitely way happier with her here.”
Vergil tilts his head to look at him, blinking at him like the answer should be obvious.
“Well, Yamato is a princess, as well as a proper lady. She deserves her own room and her own privacy. And besides, my bed is otherwise occupied by you, is it not?”
There’s a barely noticeable hint of smugness at the end of Vergil’s words, the shadow of a smirk on his face, and Nero flounders in place for several seconds, trying and failing to produce something to say in response, before looking away with a flush.
“Yeah. Whatever. I mean, I guess so.”
Vergil actually laughs at that, another oddity in this rather long chain of strange occurrences, and Nero almost jumps when he feels Vergil’s hand rest gently against the top of his head, his long fingers gently running through his hair.
“It’s good to have you here, Nero,” he says softly, the long night and the lack of sleep evidently loosening his tongue.
Nero blinks, feeling his reservations welling up in the back of his throat, but Vergil looks so at ease and finally peaceful that Nero can’t bring himself to actually put them out there, instead ducking his head and leaning into the touch.
If Vergil is bothered by his silence, he doesn’t show it, petting Nero’s head for a moment longer before retracting his hand and relaxing back into the pillows supporting him.
“You’ve brought my cat to me, which was certainly helpful. Now you should sleep. The both of us still have to work tomorrow, and I doubt that Dante can actually function without you there to keep him on track.”
Nero still wants to keep Vergil company, but he’s a little afraid that if he stays up any longer, he’ll end up sleep-talking his thoughts out into the open or suffer the consequences of his actions by falling asleep face-first on his desk at the office. Besides, Vergil’s tone is pretty firm here, his expression quietly insistent, and the man gently presses against Nero’s shoulder until he lays back down on the bed.
“Yeah, I’m sleeping,” Nero mutters, curling up on his side, still facing Vergil and Yamato, his eyes already slipping shut.
“Wake me up if you need anything.”
Vergil doesn’t reply immediately, so Nero is more than half asleep before he hears the man speak again.
“I believe I have everything I need already.”
His voice is whisper-soft, perhaps meant only for Yamato’s ears, but Nero smiles to himself anyway, turning his face into his pillow so that Vergil won’t quite catch it.
Or maybe he will, and, in the morning, if he asks about it, Nero will simply tell him that he had a good dream.
Nero has found a new apartment.
It’s the perfect place, really. Good lighting, built-in laundry, several windows, only about a fifteen-minute walk away from the office, and is somehow within his price range on top of everything.
A part of him is awfully hesitant to actually get started on the whole moving out process, though, if only because every time he comes back to the apartment and sees Vergil and Yamato, he can’t help but feel like he’ll genuinely miss all of this, in a way.
His new apartment won’t have an entire room devoted to cats--it won’t have a cat at all, because Nero isn’t too sure about owning his own pets, yet. His new place will be pretty empty, even more so than Vergil’s furniture-less, decoration-free landscape, and his pantry certainly won’t be stocked to the brim with dried noodle flakes.
None of these are things that Nero actually thought he would miss, but now that he finds himself sitting in front of Vergil at dinner, preparing to actually bring up the topic of moving out, he can’t ditch this vastly irritating and highly irrational train of thought.
“So, I, um...I was wondering. Dante’s agreed to your bet and everything--you two signed a contract that you can’t really go back on, right?”
Vergil looks up from his mashed potatoes, clearly unsure of where Nero is going, but nodding along anyway.
“Okay...so then this whole, uh, ‘arrangement’ between us, so to speak, isn’t really that necessary anymore?”
The man frowns, his spoon still held midway to his mouth, and he lowers the utensil back down to his plate, straightening up to meet Nero’s gaze.
“Well, I suppose so. If you look at it from the business perspective then yes, our deal holds little merit now that Dante has been successfully exploited into funding a year’s worth of cat food.”
Right. Because Vergil still thought of this whole thing as a no-feelings attached deal, and he was more than capable of kissing Nero and sleeping with him, all as part of their no-feelings agreement.
“Oh. Good, I guess. Because I finally found a new apartment. One without a shitty landlord this time. Probably a whole lot less in danger of flooding, too.”
Vergil takes an inordinately large amount of time to process his words, rather slowly consuming several spoonfuls of mashed potatoes before he answers.
“...okay. So you...plan to move out?”
Vergil’s been fairly open with him over the past few months, but his voice and expressions are so completely flat in this moment that Nero honestly can’t read him, even with all the experience he now has on his side. At any rate, he doesn’t exactly seem unhappy about the idea either, which Nero takes to assume that he’s fine with ending their deal, simply because it is just a deal to the man, and nothing more.
“That’s...the general idea, yeah.”
Nero tries to study Vergil’s face further, but Vergil seems very invested in his potatoes, and only looks up to take what seems to be a way-too-long drink of water.
“Actually,” he says, after maybe ten minutes of eating in silence.
“There is something I would ask of you, first.”
Nero tilts his head to indicate that he’s listening, unsure of what Vergil plans to add to their already established agreement.
“Now that you have brought me out of the world of instant noodles, I should think that going back to them would be somewhat...difficult.”
“So you want me to teach you how to cook?” Nero guesses, looking over Vergil dubiously, the closest that he’s ever seen Vergil come to cooking was when he created an extra-special dish of ‘purr-fect pancakes’ in his cat-themed cooking game.
“Indeed. It should be a simple request, I think. And once you have fulfilled it, you are free to move out at your leisure.”
Nero can do that.
He doesn’t really want Vergil to go back to eating junk food every day, mostly because he’s become a little too invested in Vergil’s well-being since moving in with the man. Besides, Vergil is quite intelligent, and has definitely proven to be a fast learner in all of the other things that Nero’s “taught” him.
So he’ll help Vergil out this one last time, and then Vergil will know how to fend for himself so that Nero won’t lose sleep in the bed of his new apartment worrying over what the man would be eating once Nero was gone, and they’d have a clean and simple break.
It is not, in fact, a simple request.
Nero watches, with no small amount of despair, as Vergil stoically cracks an egg into the pan, dropping the shell right along with it a moment later, the ingredients sizzling angrily against the too-high heat of the stove. Vergil doesn’t seem to understand where he’s gone wrong, staring into the pan with a look of bemusement on his face.
“You, um...your eggs might be really crunchy if you leave the shell in,” Nero tries to suggest, hurriedly reaching over to turn the fire down before Vergil can burn his very nice apartment down and force Nero to move out even more prematurely than before.
“Oh, will they?”
Vergil leans down a little closer to look at his extra-crunchy eggs, and Nero frantically extends a hand and presses against his chest in an attempt to push him backwards, nudging Vergil a couple paces away from the stove.
“Uh, yeah. They will. The shell doesn’t really cook like the rest of the eggs do. It stays pretty sharp and pointy, and you definitely don’t want to be eating it.”
Vergil nods, somehow unfazed by the information of his rather large culinary blunder, before looking to Nero for further guidance.
Nero tries to smother his reaction, not wanting to discourage Vergil before he could actually begin, and instead plucks the pan off of the stove, peeling the very crunchy eggs off of the surface and into the nearby trash can.
“Okay, maybe eggs were too hard. Maybe we should start with, uh…water.”
He checks Vergil’s expression again, but the man doesn’t seem very insulted at the fact that he’s essentially being told that he is absolutely useless in the kitchen.
As it turns out, though, Vergil is highly ineffective at cooking anything without the help of a microwave, and at the end of the day, and one very scorched piece of cookware later, Nero eventually pats Vergil comfortingly on the shoulder, unsubtly nudging him all the way out of the kitchen, where he could no longer be such a looming safety hazard.
“Look, it’s, uh...it’s not for everyone, you know. Don’t feel too bad.”
Vergil doesn’t look particularly upset, though, which is highly suspicious, considering the man’s general reaction towards being less than perfect at a task. Nero looks over Vergil again, just to make that this is the same man that chose to search and watch animated porn out of a petty desire to learn more about his sex than his brother did.
The man seems to notice that Nero is eyeing him carefully, and immediately clears his throat, running his hand through his hair in an abnormally nervous gesture as he struggles to twist his expression into a frown.
“Yes, it is a tragedy indeed,” Vergil amends, in a tone that did not sound very tragic at all.
More on the gleeful, excited side, if Nero didn’t know any better.
“It seems that our lessons will have no choice but to continue.”
Nero holds up his hands, feeling his blood freeze unpleasantly in his veins at the thought of being stuck teaching Vergil how to cook for an indefinite amount of time in the future. He’s not entirely sure that he can guarantee the apartment’s continued safety throughout their lessons.
“I know you really like knowing everything, but I think this is just one of those things you’re gonna have to let go. Not everyone can do anything, you know.”
He fully expects Vergil to flare up in defense of his own capabilities and to maybe insist on going straight back into the fray, but Vergil merely gives a lazy sort of nod in agreement, looking down at where Yamato is darting around their feet.
“Yes, that makes sense,” Vergil replies, quite contently and uncharacteristically, and Nero steps a little closer to him, lifting a hand and pressing it against Vergil’s forehead.
“...What are you doing?”
“Are you sick or something?” Nero demands, checking him over again, but Vergil’s skin feels to be its usual, cold-blooded snake temperature, and his pupils are easily focused and aren’t dilated, meaning that he isn’t on any personality-altering drugs or illegal hallucinogens.
“You’re the most perfectionist asshole I’ve ever met! You hate the idea of not knowing something, and you absolutely can’t stand being the best at something. Do you remember the time you were doing the crossword puzzle in the newspaper and couldn’t figure out twenty-two down, so you spent the next ten hours at the public library, searching for the answer?”
“Well,” Vergil muses, averting his gaze to the side.
“That was a long time ago.”
“That was yesterday.”
Vergil falls silent at that, apparently unable to think of a proper response that wouldn’t dig him deeper into his proverbial hole, and Nero folds his arms, refusing to let the topic slip by him.
“You’re being weird, and when you’re weird--weirder than usual, I mean--it almost always means you’re not telling me something.”
Vergil presses his lips together, looking at something somewhere to the far right of Nero’s head, before nodding stiffly to himself.
“Yes, I admit it,” he finally concedes.
“You see...Yamato ripped my coat.”
Nero looks down at the cat at their feet, who is sitting patiently next to Vergil, looking up at Nero with wide, innocent eyes, then back at Vergil, whose face has returned to being as carefully deadpan as usual.
“...what?”
In lieu of a response, Vergil disappears into their shared bedroom, returning with his favorite coat in his hands, one that Nero had actually repaired the torn sleeve of a couple weeks ago. Vergil holds up the back of the coat, exposing the set of claw marks in the navy blue fabric, nodding to himself again.
“Yes, I was surprised too. Usually Yamato is so well-behaved, but perhaps it was merely...an accident. Either way, you worked so hard in repairing it for me earlier, so I was hesitant to tell you that it had become damaged once again.”
Nero automatically takes it from him as Vergil holds it out to him, holding it up and examining the tear. The cuts definitely look similar to Yamato’s claws, but they’re a lot cleaner than Nero thought they’d be, unusually precise and neat.
“And...you want me to fix it again?” Nero tries, and Vergil does an immensely poor job of pretending to look pleasantly surprised.
“Oh, well...now that you have suggested it, indeed, that does seem like the best course of action.”
Nero runs his fingers gently over the ripped fabric, before folding it up in his arms and holding it close to his chest.
“It’ll probably take me a while to fix. I don’t think I have any more of that matching thread color I used earlier. I think Yamato might have eaten it, honestly.”
Yamato bats lightly at his leg with one of her paws, but doesn’t react otherwise, and Vergil doesn’t step in to defend his cat’s honor, the both of them remaining perfectly content with Nero’s judgement.
Suspicious indeed.
Nero doesn’t see anything truly wrong with the situation though, and therefore sees no need to question things, taking the coat and putting it in one of his bedside drawers, reminding himself to go out and buy thread at some point.
It takes Nero a fully repaired coat, several burned pots, and a week later to realize what’s going on, when Vergil expresses a sudden, newfound desire to organize his personal bookshelves in color-coded order, which was apparently an arduous task that could only be completed with Nero’s help.
“Okay, I’m not doing that,” Nero announces, grabbing Vergil’s arm before he can run off and actually hole the two of them up in his study.
“I have a better idea--let’s talk.”
Vergil freezes in place, a very brief spasm of what could possibly be terror flashing across his face as he swallows hard, reaching up a hand to brush his imaginary bangs out of his eyes.
“...certainly. I am not opposed...to talking. How long might this talk last for, actually? If it is of a particularly dense subject matter, then perhaps this talk could be expanded upon over a series of days?”
Nero gives him an exasperated sort of look, feeling impossibly fond of Vergil. His hand automatically goes to his neck, the fingers of his free hand reaching for a scarf that isn’t currently present, his head ducking of its own accord.
With another tug, he pulls Vergil backwards, until the both of them are more or less sitting on the couch.
“All of this stuff--the cooking, the getting Yamato to rip up your own coat so I would fix it, now this--you don’t want me to leave, do you?”
Nero gets straight to the point, finally confident that he’s hit the mark, and Vergil’s complete lack of movement in response is enough to tell him that he’s on the right track. The man looks away, a pink flush dusting his cheeks, visibly embarrassed at having been caught in the middle of his plans.
“Well...I was speaking to Yamato the other day, and she heavily indicated that she would miss you, in the unfortunate and hypothetical event of you vacating my premises. She likes you very much, you see, after having spent so much time interacting with you, and she has come to the conclusion that, despite not being heavily invested in personal relationships before, things have...changed.”
“Yamato” certainly was talkative.
Nero covers his face with his hands for a brief moment as he smiles, before finally leaning forward and reaching out to touch Vergil’s shoulder.
“Okay...and how would Yamato feel if I told her that I think I love her and I’d like to stay?”
Vergil’s gaze widens slightly as he looks hard at Nero’s face, a very badly concealed brand of hope written plainly across his expression.
“Yamato would like that very much,” he answers, in a muted voice, and Nero shakes his head with a soft laugh, moving forward to kiss Vergil.
It’s mostly a chaste gesture, short and affectionate, but Nero feels stupidly happy when he pulls away, keeping his face close to Vergil’s, his thumb lightly tracing the curved edge of Vergil’s half-smile.
“I’ve never done this before either,” Vergil murmurs, glancing down at his face, a hint of uncertainty for the future crossing his futures.
“Relationships, I mean.”
Nero reaches down for his hand, tangling his fingers with the man’s own, thinking of instant noodle towers and dinners with Dante and long nights spent watching this absolute loser play around with his cats, virtual and real.
“Well, don’t worry,” he answers, shutting his eyes and pressing his forehead against Vergil’s, leaning fully against him.
“You got a lot of time to learn.”