Work Text:
I
You had always had this ability to somewhat blend into the background.
To disappear amongst other background things, like the noise of a forgotten radio, or the outline of a familiar couch. It wasn’t something that bothered you. To be completely honest, it was something you took pride in.
You were not overtly shy. You weren’t overtly extroverted either. It wasn’t that you were afraid to push yourself out of the background, you simply believed that, at times, when there was nothing for you to add to a conversation, it was smarter to just stay silent.
To choose your words wisely.
The background of the Devil May Cry was something you were familiar with.
It was awfully close to home.
Sometimes, when the downstairs area was bustling with motion and noise, when Dante was arguing with a potential costumer on the phone, while Morrison was trying to gesture something towards the red devil, while Lady and Trish were bickering about this or that, the background was a comfort.
A safe space.
You were friends with all of them, very good friends with some of them, actually. It wasn’t that you didn’t want to talk to them. Most of the time, there was just nothing for you to say.
You were not a hunter. Concerning this line of business, you weren’t much of anything really.
But after the first time you had entered the shop, years ago, when no one was there for once, this had become a sort of strange habit.
You had stood somewhat lost around the room, feeling like you were intruding into Dante’s private space if he wasn’t there, and already contemplating to simply leave, when the phone had rung.
And you had picked up. That had been the start of this sort of strange partnership between yourself and the devil hunters. Because you had picked up the phone, no idea what the password was, or what kind of missions were even worth considering for Dante.
You had picked up and wrote everything down. Then you had accidentally knocked an old pizza carton from the desk and picked it up, straightening some of Dante’s bills in the process. And then you had organized them. And the phone had rung again.
Dante had been surprised to see you when he had come home in the evening. Surprised, but grateful.
It never became a spoken agreement. It was never an obligation for you to come and go, to stay. Dante never demanded anything of you. Which was why you never expected him to pay you and he never offered either.
It was something that you did when you had the time. Mostly after your ‘day-time-job’, as you liked to joke. Sometimes Dante was home and talked to you, filled you in on stuff that you needed to know and stuff you didn’t. Sometimes the others were there and talked to you, joked with you, were your friends. Sometimes they talked about work and you kept to your background.
Sometimes no one was there and you picked up the phone and wrote everything down. Talked to walk-ins. Straightened up a little bit. Stuck sticky notes to bills that Dante couldn’t avoid any longer.
Which was how the Devil May Cry had become this strange kind of familiar place to you. Somehow a space for work. A space for friends. A space to hide in the background. A space that was somehow home and somehow not.
If someone asked you, you wouldn’t have been able to explain why you felt this need to do it, to stick around. Maybe it was out of a sense of obligation, after all. Not towards Dante, but towards the world. Towards yourself.
Despite the fact that you weren’t a hunter, you couldn’t just do nothing, right? Because you knew. Knew about the monsters that hid in the dark. Knew about the dangers they carried with them. Knew everything that Dante and his friends did, despite the fact that they were catastrophically underpaid considering the dangers that were connected to their job.
No, you couldn’t know about it all and just do nothing.
You also knew which drawer Dante hid his favourite cookies in, not because he was afraid you or anyone else might steal them, but more out of an old habit. The old habit of a boy who had once had a brother of the same age and felt the need to be competitive about everything. Even if it was just cookies.
You knew where you had to punch the coffee machine to make it stop making that bubbling noise and start filtering your coffee. Knew where to pull against the fridge, to make the crooked and stubborn door move.
You knew which space to clear on the desk, because Dante would put his feet up there. Knew how Dante liked to order his pizza.
Knew the way he’d roll his eyes in your direction when Trish and Lady were nagging him about something. And he knew the way you would shoot a small smile back at him at his antics.
Dante knew that you were there. Even when you disappeared into your background, he always knew when you were there. He never forced you out of the background, somehow knowing when you preferred to be a shadow in the room instead of an active participant in another discussion or session of joking.
In retrospect, you were sadder than probably either of you would have imagined when he disappeared into the underworld after the Qliphoth incident. There was no background for you to disappear into without him there. Not this strange sense of home.
Maybe Dante had emitted that strange sense of home and not the place itself.
As the stag of notes you kept taking for him grew larger, as you started to pay the most necessary bills with what little money trickled in, you grew worried for the first time. Truly worried.
Because, sure, Dante could survive almost everything. But what if one day he didn’t?
Or what, if he survived, he never found a way home.
But Dante did. Of course, he did.
The Devil May Cry, however, did not revert itself back to the way it had been. Did not revert itself back to this home away from home.
Maybe it was that you were more aware now of the fact that Dante was not as immortal as you had always thought.
Maybe it was the fact that Dante didn’t return alone.
It took you a while to figure out why Vergil’s presence at the shop sort of bothered you. Not like a person you didn’t like or didn’t want to be around. Not like someone you hated. More like an annoying twinge in your side. A small, but still present stone in your shoe. Like an itch on your back, right between your shoulder blades where you couldn’t reach.
It took you a while, but once you noticed you couldn’t stop noticing.
Couldn’t stop noticing that, despite all the ways in which you were different, you were also the same.
Because Vergil had, similar to you, this ability to let himself blend into the background. To retract himself from the group crowding the shop and just somewhat disappear between the radio noise and the old, familiar couch.
The only problem was that he never disappeared from you. Because you were already there, in the background.
And it took you some time to be okay with sharing the background of the Devil May Cry.
II
It wasn’t that you didn’t notice Vergil.
You noticed him immediately. All the ways in which he was similar to Dante.
The seemingly unnatural body height, the broadness of his shoulders, this sense of strength that did not just sit in their muscles but in their very being. In their blood.
The white hair. The eyes that at times seemed grey, at times blue.
And some of the ways in which they were different. How age had affected their faces differently, making it easier to tell the twins apart.
Where Dante was loud, Vergil was quiet. Where Dante was laid-back, Vergil was rigid.
Both didn’t seem to fit into their age: Dante, because he had never matured at all, really. Vergil, because there were so many years lost in between. So much lost, beyond the years.
You noticed him as a person that was intruding in your calm little background right away.
You noticed him in another way one afternoon when Dante was teasing him. When you found out that he was Nero’s father.
“I’m just saying, there’s a certain… what do you call that negative kind of stereotype that is attached to something?”, Dante had teased from his place behind his desk.
“Stigma”, you had whispered to yourself from your spot on the couch.
Dante heard you, due to supernatural half-demon senses. “Yeah, right, there is a certain stigma attached to teenage-parentage”, Dante continued, unperturbed by your presence.
You were only in the background after all, still wondering what the hell Dante was getting at.
Vergil was leaning against the other wall with a book in his hand, trying to do his very best to ignore his brother.
“I so can’t imagine it”, Dante laughed. “You as a teenage dad. You know these reality shows about teen moms? Sometimes, when I need a laugh, I am trying to picture you in it. Seems so ridiculous.”
Your eyes landed on Vergil, who obviously, desperately would have liked to disappear into the background as well, if his brother would only let him.
“Come on, Verge, I’m curious”, Dante kept going, not at all bothered by the tense atmosphere in the room. “Did it only take once to make Nero? Or were you as horny as any teen?”
Your eyes nearly fell out of your head then. You had met the Fortuna people a few times, and of course you had assumed that there had to be some kind of blood relation between Dante and the white-haired kid with demon powers that wasn’t really a kid anymore.
You just had never thought about Dante’s long-lost twin and that he might be that connection.
“As I already told you, brother”, Vergil replied in a tone that seemed both exasperated and emotionless at the same time. “It was a long time ago.”
Dante huffed a laugh. “Yeah, you were young once too, I remember.”
You flushed a deep shade of red. Why though?
Maybe it was because both Sparda twins, even Dante, had always seemed sort of otherworldly to you. The extremely good looks, the strong built of their bodies.
But Vergil was so much stranger than his brother. His quiet nature, the way he would manage to disappear into the background despite his powerful presence in the room granted him a sense of mystery. As if normal human rules did not apply to him.
As if normal human urges did not apply to him.
But now you had the picture in your head, of a younger version of the blue devil at the far end of the room, lost in youthful recklessness and a need for pleasure that so did not seem to reconcile with the version of him he was now.
With the version of him you had gotten to know in the past month.
You shouldn’t be thinking about this. Shouldn’t imagine a young half-devil losing his virginity to a face-less woman, creating that kid that wasn’t a kid anymore.
Shouldn’t feel this strange kind of warmth deep in your gut, that feeling of excitement that came with fantasizing about a man that was almost twenty years your senior.
That came with fantasizing about a man who you knew nothing about except for the fact that he was quiet and dangerous.
He had almost destroyed the world twice in his quest for power, after all.
You pushed the tingly feeling in your stomach as far away from your thoughts as possible and remained in the background.
____________________________
One thing that fascinated you about Vergil’s ability to disappear into the background, just like you, was the fact that you were so fundamentally different.
Not only did he stand almost two head’s above you, or was twice as broad as you (probably thrice as heavy too), but he was so imposing in a way where you were just unassuming.
How could he disappear just like you did?
He was the kind of man that every person in a room noticed when he entered. The kind of person someone would always keep an eye on because he made you feel uneasy. As you had said, otherworldly.
And yet he somehow managed. Somehow managed to retract himself from a conversation that did not interest him. Managed to disappear with a well-timed movement out of anyone’s focus. Managed to choose his words wisely enough that no one really cared if he voiced his opinion or not.
They always knew that he was there, just like they did with you, but they did not see him.
Not the way you did.
III
It took Vergil a little longer to see you as well.
Not much, but a little.
___________________________________
He read poetry and that somehow irritated you.
Because poetry was art and Vergil seemed like a person with a far too one-tracked mind to have the time or the will to appreciate art.
But he had also seemed like a person with a far too one-tracked mind to be a teenage dad, so what did you know?
Still, there was a certain kind of dreaminess associated with poetry, at least for you. A sense of romance and wonder that did not seem to fit with Vergil. And yet it fit perfectly.
It was something that Dante liked to tease about as well.
Dante liked to tease Vergil about anything that gave him the chance, you realised eventually. Maybe it was because he had missed him. Maybe he wanted desperately to relive a part of the childhood that had been stolen from both of them.
“You really shouldn’t be the one to say anything against someone reading”, Trish chastised the red devil as the leaned over the pool table to take her next shot.
Dante fiddled with the billiard cue in his hands, his eyes flitting over his brother’s reading form on the old leather couch. “I’m not saying anything about reading in general”, he defended his earlier statement. “I just don’t get the whole rhyming stick.”
You bit your tongue from your place behind Dante’s desk, sorting through documents. You bit your tongue to stop yourself from mentioning that poetry was much more than just rhyme patterns. It was about meters and stress and a certain kind of subject matter.
It was about art and passion.
Your eyes moved over to Vergil who was still ignoring his brother in favour for his reading. With all your might, you tried to push down your blush.
“Besides, I do read”, Dante continued.
“Magazines don’t count, pizza demon”, Trish replied bitingly as she managed to sink two of her balls with one move.
You smiled to yourself as you remembered stuffing Dante’s dirty magazines into one of the desk drawers in order to have the space to work earlier.
“I just don’t get what kind of fun it is to read this stuff”, Dante grinned as he looked at his brother. “What do you see in your poems, huh, bro?”
Vergil consequently ignored his brother.
“Maybe he sees a world in a grain of sand”, you whispered to yourself, so quietly that it did not force you out of the background.
Dante and Trish didn’t notice, despite their super hearing, because they were now fighting over whether or not Dante had adjusted the placement of the white ball. Both of them were used to the fact that you would speak to yourself sometimes while working, so they didn’t pay you any mind. They knew that you would make yourself known, if you wanted to step out of the background.
Still, something hot seemed to burn at the back of your neck and you raised your eyes to meet greyish blue ones over the spine of a book.
You swallowed painfully. You weren’t sure whether Vergil and you had ever looked at each other. Sure, you had stolen glances towards him (he was devilishly handsome, after all) and he had probably assessed you as well one or two times, but you had never actually looked at each other.
Fiddling with the pen in your hand, you tried to hold his gaze. It was a strange feeling, to be seen by another background person. As if there was nowhere you could retreat to. No where to hide.
Vergil was in the background with you.
His brows furrowed slightly as you held his cold gaze. As if he was curious about what he saw that first time he was actually seeing you. As if he didn’t mind that you saw that he was curious. Finally, you tore your eyes away from his, staring at the paper in front of you without really remembering what you had been working on.
Trish won the game.
Vergil kept looking at you from time to time and your face burned hotly.
____________________________________
Two days later you found the note.
It had been scribbled onto the top note on your pad of colourful post its. The pad of post its only you ever used. Dante knew that your notes were meant for him when you put them some place he would actually see.
Like, on top of a pizza carton or on the coffee machine. Once, when he had ignored your insistence on paying the bill for utilities for so long that you had stuck one over the framed picture of his mother on his desk. Dante had been at a bad mood over that, but the next day the bill was paid and the toilet flushed again.
But the pad of post its was yours. No one ever touched it.
Or, rather, no one had ever touched it.
The handwriting on the grotesquely pink sticky note was neat and yet elegant, with artistic swirls around some of the letters. You did not have to wonder who wrote it, because something about it was just so Vergil.
What is poetry?
“To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.”
Beneath it he had written a name.
William Blake.
Your brows furrowed in confusion, not quite sure what to make of this. Clearly, he had wanted you to know that he understood your reference. Wanted to make sure that you knew that he knew.
Which wasn’t that surprising. You had noticed Vergil’s affection towards Blake’s writing. Still, the thought that the blue devil might feel the need to prove something to you was strange.
It was a strange feeling. It was a weirdly powerful feeling.
Dante was talking about something.
“Hm?”, you made, still lost in thought.
“I said that I need my spot”, he repeated with an easy smile.
“Oh, yeah, sure”, you mumbled as you stepped away from the desk so that Dante could sit down behind it.
“So, what do we have here?”, Dante started as he leafed through the bills you had stacked on top of the pile for him, letting him know that they were the most urgent ones.
You pulled the pink sticky note from the pad and pocketed it. You didn’t know why.
Why you felt the need to keep the written form of a poem you knew by hard.
Why you felt the need to look at his handwriting again as soon as you were home.
Why it made you blush when you noticed Vergil leaning against the doorframe to the kitchen with a steaming mug of tea in his hands, his eyes following the motion of your fingers as they stuffed the note into the back pocket of your jeans.
Why you looked away so fast as if you had been caught doing something illicit.
From Vergil, you could never hide in the background and it made you uneasy. This coercion to share your safe space.
__________________________
You replied a few days later.
For once, Dante had chosen to make jokes on your expense, something that did not bother you. Not really.
You should not laugh about the times he teased others without expecting to be teased at times as well.
“I’m just saying, your tidiness is sometimes a little concerning”, he expressed as he messed up his neatly organized desk a little, just to mess with you. “It’s almost neurotic.”
You shrugged with a fond smile on your face as you pulled the most important documents from beneath his fingers, just to keep him from messing up too much of your work. “If I don’t keep your affairs at least a little bit organized, you’d be going into the backyard with a shovel instead of the bathroom”, you teased.
“Hey, it’s been some time since those toilets didn’t get some flushing!”
You bit your tongue not to mention the fact that it had been since the Morrison brought the job to defeat the Qliphoth.
That the shop seemed to be running a little smoother since Vergil was there.
“Just be grateful someone is willing to organize your shit, Dante”, Lady called over her shoulder as she waltzed into the kitchen as if she owned the place.
(Considering Dante’s debt to her, she most likely did own at least half of the place.)
“I am grateful”, Dante defended himself and winked at you. “Sometimes I am just worried that you might one day go crazy and end up in a mental institution from OCD.”
“I am far from OCD”, you argued, but had already lost focus on the conversation.
You had felt that hot tingling at the back of your neck again and turned to the side just in time to see Vergil’s eyes on your face before they snapped back to the book in his hands. His lips twitched at Dante’s comment, as if he was tempted to smile.
Strangely enough, that irritated you.
If anyone within this shop was endangered to develop OCD, it was the devil that never had a hair out of place, never bend his back in bad posture, never even took of his bloody gloves around his own home.
Before leaving for your flat for the night, you went to the kitchen and climbed onto the counter in order to reach the tea in one of the highest drawers.
The tea that only one of the twins ever drank. The tea that was hidden in a childish manner similar to the way Dante hid his cookies in his desk. The sticky note was yellow and read:
“I do not suffer from insanity.
I enjoy every minute of it.”
- Edgar Allen Poe
__________________________________________
Work was really busy after that and it took you almost a week to make it to the shop again. No one was home, so you took up your place behind the desk and got to work. After about half an hour you pulled the last sticky note from your pad and sighed in annoyance. You would have to go to the store and get new ones some time in the next few days.
Dante crashed through the double doors, obviously in a good mood. “Whaddup, stranger?”, he asked as he flopped down onto the couch.
Vergil followed behind him quietly.
“How was the job?”, you asked as you scribbled your message onto the last sticky note.
Don’t forget to pay for electricity. It’s hard to read dirty magazines in the dark. Which was probably not even true for half-devils with super senses, but it would make Dante smile.
“It was okay. Not much of a challenge, now that there is two of us, but the competition keeps me entertained.”
You rolled your eyes and threw the trash of the used notepad into the bin underneath the desk. “Remind me to go out for office supplies in the next couple of days”, you said as you straightened out the chaos on the desk, throwing away old notes that had already been taken care of. “I’m out of sticky notes.”
“No, you’re not”, Dante claimed and yawned. “You stocked up already, don’t you remember? They’re in your drawer.”
You opened the first desk drawer on the right and looked at the fresh note pad with white sticky notes inside. You never bought the white ones.
You always bought the colourful ones, because you worried that Dante (cursed with the attention span of a fruit fly concerning anything that he didn’t consider to be fun) would not notice anything unless it was in bright, attention seeking colours.
Taking the pad from the drawer, you turned the white, pristinely thick paper in your hands. You had not bought these.
Vergil came from the kitchen with a steaming cup of his tea in his hands.
The way he cocked his head when he noticed you looking at him seemed like a challenge.
IV
You bought new, colourful sticky notes for anything that you wrote down for Dante.
The expensive, white ones were only used whenever you received a note from Vergil. Or whenever you would write him one.
It was a strange sort of back and forth between the two of you. Someone would say something around the shop and he would leave a note on the pad where only you would find it. Someone would say something else and you would leave a note somewhere only he could find it.
It was almost like a game, a strange sort of tennis match.
A game none of you could really win at, but it made you accomplices. A way to let each other know that, despite the fact that you both remained hidden in the background (you more often than him), you noticed almost everything that went on in the shop. That you listened and learned and were just… more aware than any other member of the Devil May Cry.
You didn’t know whether he kept it up to keep proving a point. To prove to you that he was more sophisticated than his brother, more well-read.
Maybe even to prove that he was more well-read than you.
You only knew that you did it because it made you feel strangely warm and jittery. To have this sort of secret from Dante and the others.
To have a secret with Vergil of all people.
It was as if you had a secret language. And it gave you the strange feeling that Vergil was talking to you more than to anyone else without actually ever saying anything directly to you.
___________________________________
“Are you never worried that one day you might get a job that you can’t handle?”, you asked Dante one day after he came home from a job injured.
You had never told him how worried you had been when he disappeared into the underworld for months with his brother, but guessed that he somehow knew.
“What do you mean, a job that I can’t handle?”
“Well”, you fidgeted uncomfortably as he pulled his shirt over his head, revealing his extremely muscular torso and the already closing, red gash in his side.
(You never looked at Dante in that way. He was a friend and nothing more. But seeing him then made you wonder just how similar the twins were built and you had to avert your eyes.)
“There is always a risk of dying, when you go out to fight demons.”
Dante shot you one of his rakish smiles as he wiped the blood away with some paper towels. “Don’t worry about us, honey, we’re pretty indestructible.”
You chewed on your bottom lip then, wondering why he had chosen to say ‘don’t worry about us’, instead of ‘don’t worry about me’.
“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow
and I am in them and that is eternity.”
- Edvard Munch
Vergil wrote on your pad the next day and you felt slightly better. somehow.
_________________________
Dante and Vergil were fighting pretty badly one week.
Dishes were broken, people were thrown into walls and at one point one of the two kicked the desk over, causing all of your neatly stagged papers to fly to the floor. You were so angry that, after coming in and seeing the mess, you simply turned on your heel and left the shop again.
The next day, the mess had been cleaned up, but you still had to re-organize the desk.
And the twins kept fighting. You did not know what had started it. You did not know what they kept fighting about.
You did know that Dante was glad to have Vergil at the shop. That he was happy that he had his brother back. That he hoped to regain some of the sense of family they had once had and lost.
And sometimes, when you managed to peek at Vergil without him immediately looking back at you, you wondered whether Vergil might feel the same.
Wondered about the way his lips would twitch when Dante made a well-timed joke. About the way his eyes would linger on the photograph of their mother when he passed behind the desk. Wondered about the way he would look at his brother with something that looked almost like affection in unnoticed moments from the background.
After ten days of yelling and sword fighting and carnage in the shop, you couldn’t take it anymore.
“Between what is said and not meant,
And what is meant and not said,
Most of love is lost.”
- Kahlil Gibran
You put the note on his favourite mug.
The next day Dante and Vergil spoke to each other quietly in the kitchen and the worst of the fighting was over.
__________________________________
You forgot your phone at the shop one night and only noticed when you were already home.
After putting some clothes back on, making your way back to the shop and searching in the dark for the spare key that was hidden somewhere on the ground next to step to the front door, you managed to unlock the double doors and enter the shop.
Everything was quiet and you guessed that the twins were already asleep. Sneaking across the squeaking floorboards towards the desk, you tried your best to be quiet.
Your phone was lying on top of the desk in an almost unassuming way, as if it wasn’t its fault that you were still out and about at 1 a.m.
You grabbed the offending piece of technology and turned around, wanting to leave as soon as possible.
You hadn’t heard him, but Vergil was standing right behind you and your high-pitched expression of shock pierced the air as you jumped back, your phone slipping from your rigid fingers. You never saw Vergil move, but, somehow, he managed to catch your phone mid-air.
“What the –“, Dante called as he thundered down the stairs in nothing but his boxer shorts.
His shoulders relaxed as soon as he turned on the lights and saw that it was just the two of you downstairs.
“I… I forgot my phone”, you mumbled weakly, literally able to feel how pale your face had gotten due to the surprise. “Sorry, I didn’t want to wake you two.”
You pointedly avoided Vergil’s gaze as he handed you back your phone without a word.
Dante simply huffed a laugh and waved your apology away as if it was nothing. “Let that be a lesson, babe”, he simply said and yawned. “Sneak around here at night, and you might be scared shitless by wandering devils.”
You could see Vergil’s brows furrowing at that from the corner of your eyes and some sort of bitter expression crossed his face, as if he didn’t like the thought of you being scared of him.
“I have licked the fire and danced in the ashes of every bridge I ever burned.
I fear no hell from you.”
- Nicole Lyons
You wrote him to let him know that you were not scared of him.
“One day I will find the right words,
And they will be simple.”
- Jack Kerouac
He replied and for the first time in this strange sort of game, you had no idea what he meant.
V
It was a day like any other when Dante almost ruined everything.
You were sitting behind the desk and scribbling some stuff down, Lady and Trish were playing pool and Vergil was reading on the couch.
Dante had been irritated about something all day and suddenly, whatever it was that caused it, he seemed to snap. “Do you know what day it is?”, he asked his brother.
Vergil looked at the red devil over the edge of his book, his expression making it obvious that he had no idea what Dante was getting at.
“It’s mom’s birthday. Or would have been.”
And with that, it was as if all air had been sucked out of the room. Lady and Trish stopped playing and looked at the twins with wide eyes.
Vergil simply stared at his brother for a long moment before snapping his book shut with a loud sound that made you flinch. Dante did not say anything and he did not stop his brother when Vergil left the shop and didn’t return for days.
Something inside your chest ached as you thought about the ghost of the beautiful woman who you only knew from one photograph that was looking at you every single day.
Something about the fact that the twins were now remembering this woman, this first woman they had ever loved, for so much longer than they had known her, teared at your heart.
Something about the fact that Vergil had believed for so long that she had abandoned him in favour of saving his younger brother, whom he had always been jealous of.
Despite the fact that you weren’t sure whether Vergil was ever coming back, you put the note between the pages of his abandoned book.
“I won’t ever forget you and maybe that is the only forever the two of us together were ever meant to have.”
- S. L. Gray
Maybe it would help to soothe some of the pain from losing his mother.
____________________________
You were the first after Dante to know that Vergil was back, almost a month later.
“We are each our own devil,
And we make this world our hell.”
- Oscar Wilde
Strangely enough, there were no words to express the relief you felt at knowing that he had come home.
VI
Vergil was living at the Devil May Cry for six months.
Six months, and the two of you had never had a direct conversation, never even exchanged any kind of words vocally with each other.
And yet you had the feeling that you knew him better than any other member of the Devil May Cry. That thought scared and excited you more than you could possibly express.
____________________________
Lady tried to set you up with a friend of hers.
“You’ve been single for such a long time”, she explained, “and I think the two of you might really hit it off.”
And you would have taken her up on that offer, some time ago (six months ago), before you knew what it was like to feel the hot tingling at the back of your neck from greyish blue eyes watching you closely.
Before you knew what it was like to feel jittery with excitement just in the hope to find a note that was just meant for you somewhere around the shop.
Before you knew what it was like to wish for a conversation with a person to whom you had already bared so much of yourself to without really giving anything away.
“No, thanks”, was all you mumbled. “I’m not really into blind dates.”
“Think about it”, Lady demanded with a shrug of her slim shoulders as she scribbled the number of the guy down on one of your (colourful) sticky notes. “I think he might really be your type. And he would like you.”
Once she was gone, you threw the sticky note carelessly into your desk drawer.
The next day it was gone without at trace. Somehow, you knew that, even if you were hell-bend on searching for it, you would never find it.
Instead, you found the note that forced your heartbeat to pick up and blood to rush to your face.
“Is that all you want to be? Liked?
Wouldn’t you rather be passionately and voraciously desired?”
- Margaret Atwood
You snapped the drawer shut as if its insides could hurt you and stepped from one foot to the other, not really sure how to act. In the end, you left without telling anyone goodbye.
____________________________
You did not reply anything to that note.
You could not reply to that note. What could you possibly say? What could possibly encompass what you felt?
Because you didn’t know Vergil, not really. You might know the way in which his brows twitched if he was irritated, the way the muscle in his jaw would tick when Dante was teasing him.
The way a smile pulled on the corners of his lips, even though he never let it break free. The way his fingers moved so gracefully to turn a page.
You might have memorized every swirl and stroke and line of his handwriting, but you didn’t know him.
Did you?
You did not reply, and you could tell that it irritated him.
That you would just abandon this little game of yours like that.
Could tell from the intensity with which his gaze burned on your face or your neck, far more openly now than ever before.
(Not that any of the others noticed. You were both hidden in the background, after all).
Could tell from the way his brows furrowed and his jaw twitched when he looked at you, not his brother.
The tension between the two of you was so thick, so palpable as if you could cut it with a knife, and yet no one noticed. It did have an effect on the two of you and only on the two of you.
You were jumpy and more fidgety than usual, afraid at any time that Vergil might…
… might do what, really? It wasn’t as if he had ever spoken to you, let alone done anything else to you.
And Vergil was… well, more irritated than usual, to put it lightly. Mostly, he was taking it out on his brother, who enjoyed the increased amount of sparring his older twin suggested. It was the only kind of bonding the two of them had ever known, after all.
_________________________
Their swords were clashing together repeatedly. The sound was coming from the street outside, being carried through the slightly opened double doors into the shop.
It wasn’t that loud, but it was distracting you. Annoyed, you left the desk with a deep sigh to get yourself a glass of water from the kitchen. You were just about to sit down behind the desk again, glass of water still in hand, when Vergil kicked Dante through the double doors, the younger twin landing on the floor right in front of the desk with a loud crash and a low groan.
You could only blink dumbly at the scene.
The twins were on each other again in the next second. In a somewhat desperate move, Dante threw his devil sword at Vergil, who ducked away but still followed the projectile with a stunned expression. Dante used the lapse of attention to wrench the Yamato from his brother’s grasp, turned the sword with an expert flick of his wrist and shoved the blade right into his brother’s stomach.
Vergil went onto one knee with a pained grunt…
… and you gave a sound somewhere between a gasp and a scream and the glass slipped from your cold fingers, shattering to pieces on the floor.
Two sets of greyish blue eyes stared at you as if they just now noticed that you were there.
“Hey, it’s okay”, Dante said soothingly and raised his palms in a defensive motion. “He’s fine, you see?”
Your eyes were trained on the blood that was being soaked up by Vergil’s vest as he grabbed the hilt of his Katana and pulled it out of his body with skilled motions.
Practiced motions.
A huff left him as the tip finally came free and he twirled the sword in his hand to push it back into its sheath.
You couldn’t say anything, your entire body feeling cold.
You had known that the twins were almost indestructible, long before Dante had told you, but seeing it…
Seeing Vergil being impaled on his own sword, it did something strange to you. Something that you couldn’t explain.
Something you had never felt when Dante had come home wounded.
“You okay?”, Dante asked. “You’re as white as a ghost.”
“Yeah, I’m fine”, you mumbled, feeling cold all over. “’m sorry about the glass.” And with that you went into the kitchen on wobbly knees.
When you returned with a dish towel, Dante had already removed the broken glass from the floor, picking it up and putting it into the trash bin beneath the desk with his bare hands (obviously not worried about being cut) and you soaked up the liquid.
Somehow, there had been no blood spilled on the floor, only water.
“I’m good”, you lied as you felt Dante’s stare and saw him shrug from the corners of your eyes.
Back in the kitchen, you wrung out the towel over the sink, long after it was already too dry to drip. You couldn’t stop, because if you stopped, you would see how badly your hands were shaking.
Eventually, you had to let go of the towel and looked at your white, trembling hands.
Until a hand closed around one of your cold wrists from behind you, stopping the movement. You jumped slightly in surprise, but all sound was trapped inside your throat.
Vergil’s hand was warm, unnaturally so, and you could only guess that it was a half-devil thing. It looked impossibly big, wrapped around your slim wrist. His thump swept over the back of your hand, gracing your pinky, and your other hand stopped shaking as well with the soothing motion.
Turning slightly, you realized that he was standing far too closely behind you for comfort. Not daring to look at his face, your eyes were trained on the bloody gash in his vest and the small sliver of skin you could see through it. Creamy pale skin, with not even a scratch on it.
Indestructible.
Still, you couldn’t help but say it.
“Are…”, you swallowed painfully around the tightness in your throat. “Are you okay?”
Those were the first words you had ever directly spoken to Vergil.
He nodded slowly. “Yes.”
You nodded back, and your breathing calmed slowly. Hearing him say it was somehow more reassuring than Dante’s words.
His hand remained curled around your wrist, his fingers pressing against your pulse point, until he could feel your erratic heartbeat returning to normal.
Once he removed his hand from your skin, you felt your body shivering. The space where his skin had touched yours felt too cold immediately, as if it was missing his warmth.
You turned slowly, fighting the claustrophobic shiver that wanted to crawl down your spine at being sandwiched between his body and the kitchen counter. He was so much taller than you that you had to tilt your head back in order to chance a glance at his face from beneath your lashes.
There was something in his gaze that you couldn’t bear. A curiosity, a strange sense of wonder, as if he truly couldn’t believe that you would care. It felt painful on your skin, the way his gaze burned.
You lowered your eyes and couldn’t help but continue to stare at the blood that was slowly drying on his clothes. Without thinking about it, you reached out until your fingertips brushed that oh so slim patch of skin that was bared through the cut.
Vergil tensed immediately and you wanted to pull your arm back with a gasp, but his hand curled around your wrist again, your fingertips hovering centimetres from his skin.
You didn’t know what his intentions were, whether he wanted to keep you touching him or to stop you from doing something even more stupid. Still stubbornly staring at his torso instead of his face, all you could see was that his abdominal muscles didn’t seem to relax, even moments later.
From your peripheral vision, you could see him ducking his head down, coming closer to you. It felt strangely intimate, being squeezed between the sink and his body, his face coming closer while he was holding your hand trapped between your bodies.
And this was the first conversation you have ever head. Consisting of only two sentences.
Until…
“When are you going to answer me?”, he whispered into your ear and his cold breath fanned over the side of your face, drawing across your cheekbone like a caress.
You stiffened and flushed a deep red, somehow worried that Dante might hear.
As if the thing you had been doing was something illicit and dirty, something that had to be kept a secret.
When all you had done was exchange notes.
Exchange poetry.
And what had you thought about poetry? That it was connected to a sense of romance and wonder.
You pulled your hand away as if he had burned you and pushed past him, out of the kitchen and out of the shop without saying another word to Dante.
Vergil’s disappointment was so obvious, so palpable that you could taste it on your tongue.
VII
The dynamic between the both of you changed again.
It would have been subtle to anyone but the two of you.
You returned to the shop without mentioning the incident and Dante took it as a sign that everything was okay. For him, nothing had changed. He did not know what was going on in the background, didn’t notice
You, however, couldn’t stop thinking about the heat of Vergil’s skin, couldn’t forget the way his breath had felt on your face.
The way his gaze burned your skin seemed to change, the fire seeming to grow hotter, an itch that you could barely ignore anymore.
It was extremely distracting, causing you to work slower than before. Forcing you to stay longer to get the stuff done that you wanted to before returning home and going to your actual job the next morning.
Similar to the way that you could not reconcile the knowing about demons with doing nothing, you could not reconcile the thought of knowing Vergil (in whatever strange way it was that you believed to know him) and do nothing.
You met his gaze over the desk and wanted.
You didn’t know exactly what you wanted, but you wanted something.
________________________________
You stayed longer than usual.
You stayed way too long, considering that you still had to make it home and to bed, that you had to get up in the morning to work the job that was actually providing a roof over your head and putting foot in your stomach.
And you were awfully tired.
Just this last thing, you promised yourself as you punched holes in the last contract Dante had worked to put it away in the ring folder that was stashed beneath the desk, even though Dante insisted that he didn’t need to keep track of his jobs.
The space around you blurred without you noticing until your head was suddenly falling forward, almost smashing into the wood of the table due to this quick bout of sleep that suddenly took over.
A large, warm hand was on your shoulder, drawing you back before anything could happen. You had to shake your head to clear your thoughts, being very confused for a moment.
Then you looked up at Vergil, who stood right next to you.
Accidentally, you met his gaze and were again consumed by this feeling of want.
Vergil’s hand left your shoulder and grazed your chin, his thump sweeping over your jaw. You flinched away, glancing at his brother in panic, but Dante was simply lying on the couch, leafing through a magazine.
You jumped up and announced your leave, all the while feeling Vergil’s gaze burning a hole into the back of your head.
____________________________
Vergil kept looking at you and you kept wanting until you couldn’t take it anymore.
You weren’t bold enough for this, but you could also no longer stand this strange tension. That feeling of want that made you feel empty and too full at the same time.
Into the cover of the book Vergil was reading at that time, you wrote:
“I hope that someday when I am gone, someone somewhere,
Picks up my soul off these pages and thinks,
‘I would have loved her’.”
- Nicole Lyons
VIII
You were almost asleep in your bed when you heard a strange noise and your eyes whipped open.
Frozen in panic, you didn’t know what to do. Had it just been the wind outside your window? Or was it an intruder? Your body tensed, still contemplating what to do.
For a moment, you felt the strange urge to cover yourself beneath your blanket, just like when you had been a child. As if any part of you that was under the blanket could not be touched by the monsters you knew lurked in the dark.
But you remained as you were, your body only half covered by the blanket that was twisted between your legs. Allowing the monsters to reach out, to touch and…
A warm hand curled around your calf, keeping you from jumping off the bed.
“It’s me”, Vergil said, as if you should have known.
As if him coming to your bedroom that night, after you wrote those words into his book, was the natural consequence of all of your actions.
As if this had always been where that game of the two of you would lead.
Rules as simple as elementary math.
Two and two makes four.
Vergil’s hand was still on your calf and it was a strange kind of comfort, the warmth that seemed to radiate from his skin into yours.
He was not wearing his gloves.
You shifted slightly, halfway sitting up to look at him, but all you could make out in the darkness were the outlines of his form. The ends of his hair, the breadth of his shoulders. But his face was in the shadows. Still, his gaze managed to burn over your skin.
What are you doing here, you wanted to asked, but it would have been a stupid question. He had picked up your soul from those pages.
“Do you still fear no hell from me?”, he asked as if he had heard your question regardless of you never voicing it.
“No”, you replied immediately, no thought required. Your voice was surprisingly steady.
He let go of your calf and shrugged out of his coat. Your hands shook as you pulled your sleep shirt over your head, baring yourself to his gaze from the waist up.
The coat of darkness only made you brave for a moment before you remembered that Vergil had the sharpened senses of a devil.
“How much can you see?”, you asked into the darkness as you pulled your blanket higher, covering your chest. You couldn’t even see how far he was with undressing.
“Enough”, was his simple reply as he curled a hand into the blanket and pulled it away from your desperate grasp.
His hand landed back on your calf and moved upward, leaving goosebumps in its wake. You felt the mattress dip under his weight as his hand reach your thigh, his fingertips grazing your sleep shorts.
Swallowing thickly, you took whatever pride you had left in you and sat up straighter, pulling the shorts down your legs. There was no sense in turning back now anyway.
His warm hands on your waist pulled you back down, causing you to lie on your back. You let out a shuddering breath as his hands trailed up your sides, thumbs brushing over your ribs.
His hands were calloused. Years of training, years of wielding the Yamato, winning and losing battles, had left their marks. It was hard for you, to reconcile the picture of the warrior with the picture of the poet inside your head.
His knees were between your legs now and you resisted the urge to clench your thighs together in anticipation. He would have been in your way anyway.
He was leaning over you, his thumbs brushing from the undersides of your breasts to their sides in a feather light touch. His breath fanned over your face and you had to close your eyes.
“I have not done this in a very long time”, Vergil whispered above you and something inside your chest warmed at that admission.
Here, in the darkness of your bedroom, naked between your legs, Vergil did not have to hide between false pride and that air of arrogance that always seemed to surround him. He could not hide from you in the background here, because there was no background to retreat to.
“I know”, you replied just as quietly, remembering that conversation he had had with his brother what felt so long ago now.
That first time you had looked at Vergil as a man instead of an otherworldly being.
That was a long time ago.
I guess you were young once too.
His nose brushed your cheek bone as his body moulded itself to yours and you shivered pleasantly at being enveloped in his warmth.
“Do you passionately and voraciously desire me?”, you asked boldly.
Vergil flexed his hips against yours, causing you to feel the way his length prodded against your thigh.
“What do you think?”, he asked back and you answered him by kissing his lips.
It was a satisfying feeling, like the last puzzle piece being snapped into place.
And you had to agree.
This was always where your actions would lead you.
Two and two makes four.
____________________________________
In the end, it was a little clumsy, a little fast and a little strange, as all first time are.
At first, Vergil kissed the way he wrote. Neatly and strangely elegantly. Carefully.
But once his fingertips brushed your centre and you couldn’t help but moan into his mouth, his lips moved against yours like the things he said in his poetry.
Passionately, with a sense of longing and danger behind every word.
He did prepare you, but he was incredibly big and you were so strangely excited by the things that were happening that you couldn’t possibly relax.
The intrusion was slightly painful as he pushed into you, but you didn’t think that it could have been any other way. His entire body was almost twice the size of yours, after all.
Vergil liked to kiss the moans straight from your mouth. He liked it when your nails scratched down his back and when your thighs clenched around his waist.
He finished before you did and you could sense that it bothered him slightly.
His lips were on your throat when he pulled out and immediately put his hand back on you. You blushed fiercely when you felt that the slide of his fingertips was aided by his release slowly dripping out of you.
It made you blush and clench at the same time. His movements were a little jerky, a little unexperienced, but somehow you liked that too.
Liked that sense of power that came at being more experienced at something than he was. Because, for so long, it had seemed as if the twins were good at everything.
He twisted his hand then, finally finding the spot he had been looking for, and was rewarded by a deep moan and your back arching off of the bed. Your climax was quick work after that.
Vergil’s breath was heavy against your neck when your walls stopped clenching around the fingers he had buried deep inside you. Your breath was just as ragged, partly from your body climbing down from its high, partly from his weight on top of your breast cage.
You had not touched him much during the entire thing, keeping your hands mostly to his back and shoulders, somehow afraid that the dream might break if you got too handsy.
Now, you regretted that. What if this was the only time? What if once had been all he wanted?
You lifted a slightly shaking hand and carded your fingers through his white hair, the only thing that seemed to slightly glow in the otherwise dark room. A pleasured hum left his throat as your nails scratched his skull and he pressed a lingering kiss to your naked shoulder.
____________________________
You fell asleep too quickly and regretted that as well.
You could not remember how long he had stayed, how long he had held you. You just knew that, when you woke up in the morning, you were alone.
But on a sticky note on your bedroom door, it said:
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
- Oscar Wilde
And you knew that it wasn’t the last time.
IX
You could barely look at Vergil that next day in the shop.
You were somehow worried that Dante might read what had happened between the two of you right off of your face.
Which he didn’t. Vergil’s and your secret was tugged safely into some corner in the background, which was entirely yours.
Vergil’s gaze continued to burn your skin, but in a pleasant way. In a way that caused shivers to run down your spine, in a way that whispered promises of things to come into your ear.
___________________________________
Vergil was a very passionate man. He was also a greedy man.
He was easily influenced by the things that surrounded him, by his current mood. You learned that the hard way.
Pun intended.
Because Vergil was also a possessive man.
“I know why I keep you around”, Dante had said after realising that you had gotten him a very big, very lucrative job, simply by answering the phone when no one else was in the shop.
You had grinned and rolled your eyes at that until he slapped your ass lightly. With your smile slightly more strained, you went home.
You slept naked now, always prepared. Always wanting.
Vergil never came before it was dark.
You yelped in surprise as he yanked the blanket off of your naked body without any preamble. His clothes were already lost somewhere in the darkness, which you figured out when he covered your body with his possessively, pressing a bruising kiss to your lips.
“Sometimes, I could just kill him”, he breathed into your neck.
“You would never”, you whispered back and moaned when he bit your neck. “He’s your brother.”
“Unfortunately.”
His finger left bruises on your skin that night and you were surprised by how much you liked it. Were Surprised how much you liked the sound of skin slapping against skin each time his hips snapped forward. Surprised at the way you came around him at his rough pace
Were surprised at how pliantly you let him handle you when he pulled out to sit up on his knees. He pulled your waist up with his hands and turned you around quickly, pushing your face into the mattress while keeping your hips in the air. Like this, from behind, he felt even bigger inside of you and you felt absolutely wrecked.
His hand smoothed its way around your body and his fingers plucked another orgasm from your clit while he drove into you. You moaned into the pillow and the headboard of your bed continued to crash against the wall.
Once Vergil finished inside you, he collapsed, as if his entire strength had left him. Maybe it had.
Maybe you finished him as completely as he finished you.
He had the state of mind to roll sideways before completely squishing you between his body and the mattress. Lying next to you, he curled his body around yours, his sweaty chest pressed to your back.
“I’m on birth control, by the way”, you didn’t know why you felt the need to say it then.
Maybe it was the way you could feel his release running down your thigh.
“I know”, Vergil replied quietly. “I could smell it on you.”
Huh. Well, that was good to know.
“Dante and I are just friends”, you mumbled into the crook of your arm, as if you were afraid to say it.
“I know”, Vergil repeated. Maybe he could smell that on you too. “But he is my brother”, he said then, as if that would explain everything.
And somehow, it did.
__________________________________
So much changed and yet no one noticed.
Noticed the way you could not tear your eyes away when Vergil’s gaze met yours. The way his fingers touched your body almost coincidentally whenever you walked past each other.
Trailing over your shoulder blades when you sat behind the desk and he passed behind you. Brushing your wrist when you squeezed past each other in the small doorframe to the kitchen.
You brought a book for the times it was too loud or too stuffed with people in the shop to get actual work done. You would flop down on the couch beside Vergil. You did not sitting as rigidly as him, with his back against the backrest and his feet firmly on the ground.
You sat with your legs crossed in front of you, your back against the armrest, facing Vergil. The others didn’t notice that you were the only one who did not avoid his personal space. Sometimes, your foot would brush his thigh when you shifted. Sometimes, when he was particularly bold, Vergil’s free hand, the one that wasn’t holding the book in front of him, curled around your ankle.
There were few things that you had ever experienced in your life that were as peaceful as reading beside Vergil in the background while the rest of the Devil May Cry bustled around without seeing you.
“Whatever our souls are made of,
His and mine are the same.”
- Emily Brontë
You wrote into his newest book and hoped that he understood the things you did not dare to say to him out loud yet.
That night, Vergil held on to you so tightly as if he was afraid you might disappear if he loosened his hold.
X
It all changed again on an unassuming day. And uneventful one, when you were really honest.
Well, uneventful for everyone except you and Vergil.
Because, despite all the things you did in secret in your bedroom, in the cover of darkness, not that much had changed inside the shop. Yes, you touched each other occasionally, sent each other longing glances and shared a small smile or two, but you did not speak to each other.
Never in the presence of others. Never in the light of day.
You had no idea what Vergil looked like naked, despite having felt him a hundred times against you. Had no idea how his face twisted in passion, or how his lips would sometimes twitch when you tried to say something funny when he held you at night.
He always waited with you curled up in his arms until you fell asleep. You had no idea whether he stayed for longer, whether he allowed himself to fall asleep next to you and simply rose before dawn. All you knew was that he was gone before the sun rose and you never saw him in the light of day. At least not in your bedroom.
Not in private.
Not until that day he entered the shop and no one was there except for you.
It was so strangely different that you almost laughed.
For once, there was no need for the both of you to hide in the background, because there was no one else there. No reason not to speak.
No reason not to touch.
But you could see him and it was all so very strange.
Beneath the desk, you rubbed your naked thighs together, only covered by the sundress you were wearing. The spring was surprisingly hot for Red Grave.
Vergil’s hand that wasn’t holding the Yamato flexed as if he was nervous.
“Um”, you made and swallowed thickly, immediately feeling a blush rising to your cheeks. “You’re…early?” You had no idea where he had been, no idea when he had planned to come home.
Which Vergil knew, of course, and his brows twitched slightly at your words. You just shrugged, obviously not knowing what you were saying.
“There’s no one else here”, you stated the obvious then.
“I know.”
You didn’t know why you flushed even deeper at that.
Vergil came closer, rounding the desk until he was standing directly next to you. His fingers brushed your naked shoulder, fiddling with the thin strap of your dress for a moment. Then his hand travelled down your arm, curling around your wrist so that he could pull you from the chair.
You had never been upstairs inside the shop and your heart beat in your throat when he pulled you up the stairs and into his bedroom.
The room was tidy, almost coldly so. Nothing seemed very personal except for the books on the bedside table and the Yamato Vergil leaned against the wall next to the door.
“I don’t know when the others will be home”, you whispered, as if there was anyone else to hear you, when Vergil shrugged out of his coat, folding it neatly on the end of the bed.
“Neither do I”, he replied and took a step closer.
As if on instinct you took a step back. He raised a brow at you in a playful manner and you simply shrugged again. You had never seen him during any of the things you did at night. Just the sight of his bare arms, of the way his muscles flexed when he moved them, made you light-headed.
Accepting the challenge, Vergil advanced on you until your calves hit the edge of the mattress. He shoved against your shoulder with one hand, not hard enough to be brutal, but enough to make you stumble backwards, your back hitting the bed.
He seemed even more imposing, standing over you like that. The way he removed his gloved made you shiver.
His naked hands on your naked knees pushed your naked thighs apart. He went to his knees between your opened legs and you could barely suppress the shiver that was violently crawling down your spine.
Vergil had never put his mouth on your before. His hands pushed your skirt higher until it was pooled around your waist. With deft fingers, he pulled your soaked underwear down your legs.
Goosebumps erupted on your skin when his lips kissed their way from your knees to the insides of your thighs on both legs. Only once you were a shivering and writhing mess on top of his bed did Vergil kiss you where you wanted him to.
His movements were slow at first, experimental licks against your slit that drove you almost mad. It reminded you of that first night, of the first time his fingers had touched you. Of his inexperience with such things, and the same wave of affection as back then washed over you.
Vergil, however, had always been an in general talented person and a quick learner. It did not take him long to figure you out, to take you apart on his tongue and fingers so skilfully that you were bucking against his face, one of your hands curled into his hair and the other into the sheets above your head.
Two of his fingers where steadily thrusting in and out of you, crooked in a way that made you see stars, and his tongue laving over your clit again and again when the front door fell shut.
“Anyone home?”, Dante called loudly through the entire shop.
Vergil hesitated and your body immediately started to shake.
No, I’m so close, you wanted to say, please, don’t stop now.
And Vergil knew how to read your body like an open book and buried his head back between your thighs with renewed vigour, his movements far sloppier than before.
You had to bite the skin of your wrist when you came, somehow managing to trap all sounds of pleasure inside your throat. Vergil was on you once you stopped clenching around his fingers, pushing his tongue between your lips and forcing you to taste yourself. You bucked against the hard length trapped in his trousers on instinct, but Vergil shook his head quietly.
His lips twitched at the way you pouted and you had never seen anything as beautiful as Vergil almost smiling.
Somehow, Vergil managed to distract Dante long enough for you to come down the stairs unnoticed, pretending that you had been in the shop the entire time and had simply not heard the red devil come in.
Dante never asked what Vergil and you had done in the shop on your own, but wondered briefly if you might have a heat-stroke from the unusually hot spring as he saw your flaming red face.
You did not explain to him that you had seen Vergil pocket your ruined underwear earlier and did not really know what to do with that.
“’I don’t believe in magic’, the young boy said.
The old man smiled. ‘You will, when you see her.’
- Atticus
Vergil wrote onto your notepad when Dante was in the kitchen and you had to hide your face so that he did not see the overwhelmed tears that were standing in your eyes.
XI
Seeing Vergil and Nero together changed everything for you.
Because it forced you to recognize the fact that Vergil had lived a life long before he had ever met you. You had to face the fact that once upon a time, Vergil had made all the wrong choices and become a terrible person because of it. That he was just slowly walking back into a life where he wasn’t a monster.
That he was just slowly learning to be human.
Nero was so much like his father and at the same time not at all like him. It was a consolation and an anguish all at once.
Vergil was a father, you realized with a strange, painful tug in your heart. He was almost twice your age. He had killed more people than you had probably ever met.
You felt a strange kind of desperation at the thought.
Adding to that, you wondered what exactly it was the two of you were doing. Where exactly were you going? Did you have a goal in mind?
Did Vergil?
_________________________________
You all were gathered in Fortuna, laughing at Nero’s, Nico’s and Dante’s antics while sharing experience and information, hoping that this kind of discourse would allow for the devil hunters’ work to be easier.
Keeping to the background in Fortuna was even harder, because you had to share that space not only with Vergil, but Kyrie as well.
Still, it was made easier every time Nero pulled her out of the background with gentle touches, bright smiles and soft kisses.
Hiding in the background was easier then, especially when you simply stuck to another room. Your heart beat faster once Vergil slipped into the same room at the boldness of it all. What would you say if any of the others found you here, alone?
What would you say if Nero found you there, alone?
“You are different”, Vergil whispered at you while his brother laughed boomingly in the next room.
“How so?”, you asked just as quietly.
“Look at everyone else”, Vergil answered. “They are merely words, while you are poetry.”
Your heart beat faster in your chest. “And who wrote that?”, you wanted to know.
“Timothy Joshua”, Vergil replied and you smiled at him.
Somehow, his words made you feel better. They always did.
You wondered if Vergil could always read when your soul was troubled.
He always seemed to know what was the right thing to say.
___________________________
Wondering about the future, wondering about Vergil, caused this feeling of want to return to you and it was far more painful this time than it had ever been before.
“What is on your mind?”, Vergil asked one night as you were chewing on your lower lip and his fingers were playing with your hair in the darkness.
“Nothing”, you replied sullenly and Vergil simply sighed as he took your tighter into his arms.
“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
-Jane Austen
You wrote onto a sticky note, but crumbled it in your hand before Vergil could ever see it and stuffed it into your back pocket, all the while cursing your own cowardice.
XII
“You still owe me an answer”, Vergil breathed against your neck, alluding to the last note he had left you.
You shut your eyes in the darkness of your bedroom, not trusting your voice to say anything without giving too much away.
Instead, you pressed your lips to his, still owing him an answer.
_______________________________
You knew that the Devil May Cry had been attacked by demons before, once or twice or more times, but that had been long before your time.
Still, in your mind, the shop had always been a safe space.
Until it wasn’t.
It was dumb luck, really, that you were not alone that evening. You had been, for a few hours.
But then Dante had come home and ordered a pizza for the both of you, cursing for two straight hours when it was delivered with olives.
Vergil came next in the early evening, wrinkling his nose in distaste at the greasy pizza carton staining the old floors. He greeted his brother with a curt nod and you with a brush of his fingers against the back of your neck without Dante seeing.
Lady popped in, just wanting to pester Dante about money or something else. She had not realised that something had followed her from her last job.
No demon senses and all.
Suddenly, Dante said up straighter on the couch, his serious expression so similar to his brother’s that you had to look away.
“I feel it to”, Vergil confirmed and unsheathed the Yamato.
And then all hell broke loose.
The front doors burst open as demons filtered into the shop.
Dante cursed loudly as he called for his devil sword. In two flashes of blue and red, Dante and Vergil were on the demons, their movements faster than your human eyes could see. Lady followed suit, grabbing the Kalina Ann from where it was strapped across her back. A frown crossed her slender features at realizing that she could not use the rockets inside the shop, so she had to keep to the blade strapped to the nozzle.
You were pretty useless at it all. Scrambling for some sort of cover, you practically fell from Dante’s desk chair and tried to hide beneath the massive wooden desk. Which worked out fine until a claw-like hand wrapped around your ankle, tearing your jeans, and pulled your from beneath your hiding spot.
A scream tore from your throat as your back was dragged across the wooden floors, small scrapes and scratches being left behind on your arms and back, your free leg kicking blindly at the small demon that had managed to slip past the defence line of the three hunters.
In a flash of blue light and smoke, Vergil was there, shielding your body from the demon, cutting it down with one skilled slash of the Yamato. He turned, sword raised over his shoulder to assume the next fighting stance.
There was some kind of explosion, glass and wood splintering all around you and dirt hit your face like a shock wave. It was hard to breathe through the dust that flew around the room and for a moment, all you could hear was a shrill ringing sound in your ears.
The dust settled and finally, everything went quiet.
_______________________
“Dammit, Lady”, Dante’s voice was carried dully to your ears.
“What, I fired it outside!”, the huntress defended herself.
The dust settled and you could see Lady with the smoking Kalina Ann standing outside, pieces of demon corpses paving the street.
The shockwave of her rocket had caused one of the windows to burst from its frame, leaving an oddly shaped hole in the wall behind.
Vergil large hands were beneath your arms suddenly, seemingly from out of nowhere, and lifted you back onto your feet. You stumbled slightly due to your weak knees and he had to hold you upright.
“What?”, you asked dumbly as you saw his lips moving without any sound coming out.
His voice was too quiet for your damaged hearing.
Leaning down, his lips almost brushed the shell of your ear as he whispered: “Are you alright?”
You nodded dumbly, far too shocked to really take stock of your numb body.
His gaze swept over your form from head to toe, as if he himself did not trust your assessment of the situation.
Then, he let go of you slowly, just in time for Dante and Lady to step back into the shop.
____________________________
The damage was…
…manageable.
Vergil put the desk which had been knocked over by the explosion back to an upright position and you started to sort its contents back into the drawers before sorting everything that had been lying on top of the desk.
The picture frame of their mother had not been damaged and you wiped the dust off of the glass with the sleeve of your shirt. Meanwhile, his gaze burned hotly on your skin.
The twins collected the largest pieces of the broken window frame and glass while Lady swept up the smaller pieces of dirt and dust. Covering the space that had once been a window with some sort of tarp, Dante clapped his hands together in satisfaction.
“Well, could have been worse”, he announced.
“I’ll send someone to replace the window first thing tomorrow”, Lady promised and for once there was no talk of money and debt.
“Nice”, Dante beamed at her and ruffed her hair up with one hand.
Lady punched him in the solarplexus and he dropped his arm with a pained oomph.
“You good, honey?”, Dante asked you then, for once seeing you despite the fact that you tried to hide in the background.
“Yeah”, you replied hollowly. “Occupational hazard, I guess.”
“That it is.”
Vergil remained quiet, even when you excused yourself for the night and went home.
________________________________
A high-pitched squeak left you as something pushed the front door to your flat shut before you had even turned on the light in the hallway.
Vergil muffled the sound before it could turn into a scream with a hand over your mouth. Your shaking fingers still managed to find the light switch and your hallway was drenched in the warm light of your overhead lamp.
God, the both of you looked filthy.
Vergil’s white hair was stained grey with dust and his clothes were covered in demon guts and blood (maybe some of the blood was even his).
You could feel the remains of dust burning in your eyes as well and saw it staining your clothes. On the way home, you had finally been able to feel your body again, noticing how the joints in your shoulders ached from being dragged across the hardwood floors and there were three long cuts running from your calf to your ankle, not deep enough to be alarming, but still burning on the skin in a way that was annoying.
Vergil waited until your eyes met his to remove his hand from your mouth.
And immediately replaced his fingers with his lips.
There was a sort of desperation inside the kiss that scared you because of the way how the feeling echoed inside your own body.
You could have died today.
Or gotten seriously, seriously hurt.
The same could have happened to anyone of the others.
Maybe that realization was just now kicking in. Maybe Vergil was pushing the numbness out of your body with the insistent press of his lips against yours.
Anyway, adrenalin found its way into your veins and your heartbeat sped up as you yanked on the lapels of Vergil’s coat far more roughly than usually.
Your back was pushed against the front door and you winced slightly at the strain in your tormented muscles. But before Vergil could pull away to look at you with this gaze that burned so hotly on your skin, you pulled him down again, your lips demanding against his, kissing the dirt off of each other’s mouths.
In a frantic and desperate scramble of hands, you managed to open his vest without bothering to push his coat off of his shoulders, simply smoothing your hands over the hard planes of his pecs.
Vergil hands burned on the skin over your ribs when he pushed your jumper up over your waist. You felt so small in the grasp of his big hands, the way he could almost encompass your entire ribcage just by spanning his fingers over your body.
You only had the time to toe off one shoe when Vergil was already yanking your pants down over your butt. A small smile graced his features as you hopped awkwardly on one foot so that he could pull your leg free of the confines of your jeans. His hand lingered on the red lines marring your calf for a moment, but you pulled him back up with a hand in his hair. You gasped in surprise when your panties were simply torn from your body, the elastic biting into your skin for a second before it snapped under his strength.
You were still fiddling with his belt buckle when Vergil already lifted you off your feet, and you almost didn’t manage to open his pants and ease his hard length out before your back was rammed back into the wood of the door behind you.
Despite knowing how strong the Sparda twins were, you were still impressed by the way Vergil managed to seemingly effortlessly keep up your weight as you wound your legs around his waist and lined him up with your entrance.
It was desperate and rough and fast.
And in the back of your mind you were awfully aware of the dirt itching on your skin, of the smell of blood clinging to Vergil’s clothes. There were a million things you should have done before jumping each other’s bones, but somehow, this felt so right.
Your tail bone hurt from the way Vergil was repeatedly pushing your hips against the door with every sharp snap of his thrusts and his lips felt chapped and dry against yours.
But every moan that left his throat left your head dizzy and every clench of your walls around him caused a tremor to run down his arms that made you feel way too powerful.
Vergil held you up against the door for several long minutes even after you were done, your breathing slowly evening out.
He twitched inside you and you could feel the warmth of his release somewhere deep inside yourself. The thought made you squirm and Vergil gave a satisfied grunt at the friction.
“What did you tell Dante where you were going?”, you asked once he let your feet back to the floor, his semen running down your naked thigh.
You were wondering, because it was not the middle of the night, for once. Vergil had not stolen out of the shop under the cover of darkness and Dante had surely noticed him leaving. Had surely wondered where his brother went so shortly after a demon attack on their own home.
“Nothing”, Vergil replied as he smoothed your dirty hair away from your face with his hands. “It is none of his business.”
_____________________________________
“I need a shower”, you finally muttered when neither his hands nor his eyes left your face.
Vergil simply hummed in affirmation and let go of you, hands moving to his leather pants to close them again and close the clasp on his belt buckle.
Your slender fingers on his wrists stopped his movements.
“Would you…”, you swallowed thickly. “Would you care to join me?”
Vergil hesitated for a moment as you glimpsed at him from beneath your lashes. He didn’t say anything, but did not stop you either when you pulled him into your way too small bathroom.
Your eyes followed hungrily every inch of pale, perfect skin he revealed. You had touched almost every part of his body in the past few months, but you had never seen it.
A knowing smile tugged at Vergil’s lips.
He knew that he was illegally beautiful and somehow that amused and bothered you at the same time.
Your shower was almost too small for the both of you.
Almost.
With your back pressed tightly against his wet chest, the water running down your bodies caused a delicious slide between your skins. Vergil bent down and pressed small kisses against the your scratched shoulders as if he wanted to whisper apologies across your skin.
_____________________________
You did not know why he laid down next to you on your bed, but enjoyed the effortless silence that settled over the room.
The need not to talk could be something beautiful too.
But the events of the day caught up to you eventually and Vergil’s far away expression being directed towards the ceiling didn’t really help with the anxiety that was clawing up your throat.
Shifting, you swung one of your legs across his hips and settled down in his lap, perched on top of him. A small smile broke out on your face when you saw the way his abdominal muscles twitched when your fingertips danced across his stomach.
“What will you tell your next woman about me when I’m gone?”, you asked, not elaborating on whether you were gone due to death by demons or just because this strange thing between the two of you might burn out one day.
“I will tell her that you were a foolish girl who asked foolish questions”, Vergil replied as he pulled you down to silence you with a kiss.
______________________________
“When I die and my atoms become free,
I hope they wander the universe
I never got to see.”
You finally gave him an answer.
XIII
As with so many changes that had happened between the both of you, Dante gave the final push.
________________________________
“Everything has changed and yet I am more me than I’ve ever been”
- Iain Thomas
Vergil had written to you and filled you with a strange sense of hope.
______________________________
“You are just a sad bunch of damaged, traumatised boys”, Nico had said jokingly to the descendants of Sparda. And even though everyone laughed that day in the garage in Fortuna that was way too clattered with a van, Nico’s work bench and every member of the Devil May Cry, that sentence left a stale taste inside your mouth.
And something about it must have stuck with them too, or at least with the twins, because both of them were unable (or unwilling) to let it go.
Dante showed it through words, causing arguments every day, being more annoying and unbearable with every passing word.
Vergil was quieter in his irritation. Simply not answering when spoken too, staring at the pages of his book without actually reading them.
He was even quiet and cold when he was with you. Distant, even when he was inside you. Not speaking as much as he used to in those dark hours of the night.
Seeming less affectionate.
And then Dante said it.
“I don’t even know why she’d throw all of us in one pot like that”, he muttered petulantly. “I mean, look at Verge. He’s more broken than I could ever be.”
He regretted saying it instantly, as well as everyone else who was present in the room did.
Because at the moment the words left Dante’s mouth, Vergil’s eyes snapped up from behind his book, and there was a strange kind of hurt on his face. As if, after everything that had happened and been done to him, there was nothing as painful as the thought that his own brother, his twin, the person who had brought him back into this world, might consider him to be a broken thing.
The air felt as if it had been sucked out of the room. Vergil did not move, his biting gaze on his brother did not waver.
“Verge, I –“, Dante started, but Vergil simply snapped his book shut and went upstairs without a word.
You flinched when the door to his bedroom fell shut with a definitive bang.
_________________________
Vergil sat rarely with any of you in the shop anymore, choosing to read in his room instead.
He did not come to visit you anymore either, and at first, that had made you angry.
What the hell had you done wrong? It had been Dante’s words, not yours.
Eventually, Dante got his older brother to listen to his apology, but the atmosphere remained frosty.
And that soft sense of hope you had felt vanished.
__________________________________
Eventually, you managed to corner him without the others noticing.
Basically, by sticking around like a very stubborn spider perched on the wall. And he had to leave his room eventually.
Lady and Trish were bickering about something for once and Dante was caught in the middle, obviously wishing to be anywhere else but there.
Vergil had just come down to get himself a cup of tea, skilfully hiding in the background so his brother and his companions wouldn’t notice.
But you did. He could not hide from you, just like you could not hide from him.
“Vergil”, you whispered when you snuck into the kitchen behind him.
He hummed lowly in affirmation, letting you know that he had noticed you.
“What’s going on?”
He cast a distant look at you from the corner of his eye, his head only tilted enough to stare at you over the collar of his coat, his back still turned to you.
You would obviously have to be more specific.
“You don’t come around anymore”, you whispered, even quieter than before. If he wasn’t half devil, you might have wondered whether he actually heard you.
“And?”, he asked just loud enough so you could hear with your dull human senses. That air of aloof arrogance that had surrounded him the first time you had met seemed to be back in place.
“And I’m wondering why.”
Vergil simply shrugged it off. “I decided against it.”
Curling your hands to fists at your sides in frustration, you fought the urge to stump your foot like an angry child. “Why?”, you bit out.
“Why do you think?”, he asked as he pushed past you and you realised that you wouldn’t get any more precise answers from him.
He was already back on the stairs when Dante caused him to stop in his tracks.
“Hey, everything okay with you?”, the red devil asked you.
He had noticed the way you were standing in the kitchen doorway, hands curled to tight fists and arms tense, eyes trained on his brother.
Your lips were pressed into a thin line and tears pricked hotly at the corners of your eyes.
You didn’t know why you felt the urge to cry. Was it out of frustration, or anger?
Was it heartbreak?
Whatever it was, for once, you did not feel the need to hide it in the background.
The others went quiet and Vergil turned, noticing the tears in your eyes.
“Babe?”, Dante nudged.
You simply kept glaring daggers at his brother and then turned on your heel, leaving the shop behind before your hot tears could fall.
____________________________________
“How was I to know that this tiny spark
Would spread like wildfires.”
- N.R. Hart
Vergil wrote onto your notepad, but removed the piece of paper and threw it away before you could ever see.
________________________________
“What did you say to her?”, you heard Dante ask, but Vergil never answered.
You still came around, of course. After all this time, you could still not know and do nothing. And as long as Vergil kept to his room, his presence didn’t bother you that much. Or you told yourself that, at least.
Until the day he walked past you behind the desk like he had come accustomed to do before pushing you away and hesitated.
Your body immediately tensed as soon as you realised that Dante was upstairs in his room and no one else was in the shop. You were alone again (at least somewhat) for the first time since…
Vergil’s fingertips brushed the top of your spine before gently curling around your slender neck as you attempted to flinch away.
“You could do so much better than a broken creature”, he stated quietly and left as quickly as if he was a ghost.
The phantom of his hot touch left a coldness behind that seemed to crawl into your bones.
____________________________
Dante’s words had hurt Vergil because, if Dante, his ever-hopeful brother, could not believe in him, then who would.
The words continued to hurt him, even after his brother’s heartfelt apology, because he feared that his brokenness might taint you somehow.
In the end, you had to take a deep breath and muster up all your courage. And you wrote:
“And in the end, we were all just humans,
Drunk on the idea that love,
Only love,
Could heal our brokenness.”
- Christopher Pointdexter
_____________________________________________
Your alarm was ringing and you rolled over with a groan to reach for your phone on the other side of the mattress.
Instead, your hand collided with something solid, warm and smooth.
Your eyes flew open as you pulled your arm away from Vergil’s naked chest. Quickly, he deactivated your alarm and stopped your hand with a swift motion, his fingers curling around your wrist.
Staring at him with wide eyes, you had no idea how to voice the questions that were swarming through your head.
How long have you been here? What are you doing here?
Have you ever heard of such a thing as privacy?
Calling first?
Knocking?
And he looked so beautiful in your bedroom under the light of a starting day, when everything was drenched in this orangey red light of a sun that hadn’t really risen yet, but was already warming the horizon.
All your thoughts came to a screeching halt when he pulled the hand he was still holding in a tight grip forward, until he could place it squarely over his chest, right above his heart.
His heartbeat was thundering beneath your palm.
“I am not human”, he said then into the tense quiet. “Or, I am not only human.”
“I know”, you croaked.
“And, still, you think you could heal my brokenness?”, he asked and there was this pain inside his eyes again, which made your heart clench painfully and forced tears into your eyes.
“I think I want to try”, you promised, pressing your hand more firmly over his heart.
It was the closest thing you dared to say to confess your love. At least for now.
“Well”, he mumbled quietly. “If anyone can, it is you.”
And that was most likely the closest thing he dared to say to confess that he loved you for now as well.
XIV
Dante found out quickly after that.
Which was to be expected, really.
The two of you had gotten so bold in your fleeting touches and shared smiles that the lines between the background and the rest of the room started to blur.
________________________
You were reading on the couch again, leaning away from Vergil with your crossed feet pointing at him.
Biting your lip, you tried desperately to hide your smile as his fingers inched higher from your ankle, brushing over your jeans-covered calf.
With subtle shifts and flexes of your legs, you tried to shake his wandering hands off.
His fingertips reached the back of your knee and you jumped with a light squeak. He knew exactly how ticklish you were at that particular spot.
“Uh”, Dante made, his eyes focusing on Vergil’s hand, the one that wasn’t holding his book up in an oh-so-innocent manner, and the way in which it was wrapped around your knee.
Blood rushed to your face as you sent a panicked look at Vergil, who still pretended to be reading.
Then another well-timed poke of his fingers into the soft spot on the back of your knee caused your leg to jerk so hard that you accidently kicked the book from his grasp.
You laughed so much that you almost fell from the couch while Dante demanded answers.
___________________________
Dante watched you more closely after that, but only for a little while.
He was not the kind of person who had the will or the energy to keep peeking into the background for too long. He belonged into the room, loud, boisterous and charming as he was.
And soon enough, you were alone in the background with Vergil again, no longer keeping a secret, but still hidden from view.
You realised that you didn’t mind sharing your safe space anymore.