Chapter Text
A woman clad in black slinks into his shop at Morrison’s call. Dante barely gives her a once-over, a bob of black hair tucked around her ears and a vest tied to her figure like a corset under a long coat. He catches tattoos dotting the expanse of her arms, a cane held up in her arms as she stares down into a book.
Dante turns his attention back to Morrison as he says, “Listen, I’m gonna find Lady and Trish. Bring them in on this.”
He spreads his arms, whines out, “What? C’mon, you don’t think I can handle this gig on my own?”
All Morrison says as he exits is, “It’s a big job…Big job, Dante. You’re gonna need the help.”
Dante briefly huffs out his frustration, but he puts that to one side as he leans forward at his desk. “So, what’s your name?” he throws out to the stranger.
He watches her pace forward. There is something familiar about her, in the wisps of demonic energy barely clinging to her wiry frame. Her face is recognisable, in that way that strangers catch your eyes in the street. If he was given more time, maybe he could piece something together, but instead, she interrupts his thoughts. She replies, “I have no name. I am but two days old.” Her eyes skirt over text in the book she holds as she walks forward towards him, but her delivery holds a lilting mirth, as if this is only a joke she's told too many times before that she can't keep the dryness fully out of her voice. She snaps the book shut and looks up, dark green eyes staring straight into Dante’s. She manages a breathy laugh and says, “Just kidding. You can call me V.”
V, a pseudonym probably, but he has no room to judge. Dante gets a clearer view of the book now as it moves into her coat pocket. He catches a large letter V on the cover as it slides out of view, probably to lay claim to it. Doesn’t seem to be anything important, if the slam poetry was anything to go by. But something about it, the book, the name, lies latent at the back of Dante’s mind.
He tables this too, along with the bare familiarity of V’s face. He’s more interested in the devil stench that clings to her, as she’s fully human otherwise. He’s had his fair share of experience with humans playing demon, but he wouldn’t expect a warlock to show up at his shop, even less that Morrison would vouch for her. Finally, he asks, “Ok, V, why don't you tell me everything about this job?”
V doesn’t lift her face very high, Dante’s noticed. It stays up in a half-tilt, just enough to make eye contact but not enough to sustain it. She must be nervous, Dante thinks, though he wouldn’t have thought that from her voice. She sounds assured and proud, a conversation rehearsed in her head enough times to make an impact. She simply says, “A powerful demon is about to resurrect, and we need your help, Dante.”
He can’t help the laugh that bubbles out of him as he stands up. “Now that’s a familiar tune. Do you have any idea how many times I’ve heard that exact same line?” He moves over to the couch, just for a change of scenery, maybe to catch a better glimpse of V’s face.
She doesn’t hesitate to reply, “This is…special.” V's cane taps the ground with a soft thud.
Dante's eyes furrow. “Special. Okay, so what’s so special about this one?”
V walks forward towards him, lifting her cane back in the air. “This demon is your reason.” V says it like a joke again, though it clearly isn’t one anymore. “Your reason for fighting.” Dante can’t parse any of the humor or bitterness or guardedness in her face.
Dante humours her. “This demon got a name?” He leans forward in anticipation despite himself. There have been many demons behind his reason for fighting, all of them long-dead. But…something about V makes it impossible to distrust her. She holds too much weight with too much poise, and her voice is sure despite its humour. Maybe her humour makes V more believable too. She knows enough, maybe even too much, that she is worth hearing out.
V doesn’t hesitate in her reply. And Dante can only see red.
-
Nero wakes up suddenly. It takes him a moment to recognise he's still lying in bed next to Kyrie, and when he turns over, the alarm clock glows a soft 2am. He isn't used to the sensation, normally he sleeps like a baby through the night. It takes an especially sharp shriek from either Julio or Nico to wake him up anytime before 10. And that’s early for him.
He slowly extracts himself out of bed, doing his best to not wake up his girlfriend. This is a new feeling. Nero was used to the blaring of his buster arm when a demon got in his proximity. Now, that sensation spreads all through his body, no longer confined to just his right arm, though it groups up in his shoulder blades at times, as his spectral wings get ready to manifest for a fight. The change is still fairly new to him, but it isn't that feeling either.
It's like there's a sonar in his head, a blip on the horizon aiming straight for his front door. His senses have never been entirely accurate or even location-sensitive. Usually, the demon’s already heading straight for him anyway. It’s more like an adrenaline boost instead, his body lighting up for a fight. But now the approaching presence doesn't feel malicious in that way demons tend to. Instead, as the mark in his head splits into two, and as Nero speeds down to the ground floor, clearing the steps in one jump, he gets more than an inkling of what it could be.
He tosses open the front door just in time for two grimy, dishevelled men to materialise in front of him, just powering down from a Trigger. They must've flown over, Nero thinks, as he immediately slams the door in their faces.
Holy shit. It's been a year. He had been starting to think he'd never seen them again. His…uncle. And his dad.
After a moment of perturbed silence, there's a series of loud knocks on this door.
Fucking hell. All he can think about is how this is gonna wake up the damn kids. And after all that struggle getting them to sleep.
Begrudgingly, Nero opens the door and lets them back in.
-
Vergil has always thought of Arkham as a pest, a persistent irritation that approached him with open arms, and only shackled him with the knowledge he purposely kept hidden. Ever since he was lured in, with questions about Sparda’s real legacy and a curious proposition, Vergil has dreamed of impaling him with Yamato and ending his foolish life.
He can’t do it, not yet at least. There are still some small things Arkham keeps close to his chest. All Vergil needs is an upper hand, one second where Arkham is pushed off-balance, and he can finally take back what is rightfully his.
Technically, it would be what is rightfully both Dante’s and his, and it requires both of their blood, both of their amulets to achieve. Dante probably wouldn’t waste a breath on a scumbag like Arkham, even if Vergil needs him alive just a little longer, before everything is in its place and he can take the pawn off the chessboard himself.
One of those small things makes itself abundantly clear, speeding for the tower. In a rare moment of honesty, Arkham mentions that he knows the man heading for them, before clamming up again. Vergil, meanwhile, has done his homework — Arkham has a son, angry and vengeful, and completely oblivious to the machinations of his father’s master plan. Just the description makes him think of Dante too, a rebellious fool who just can’t fathom his own heritage, the power that only he is right to hold.
But when the intruder finally appears, swinging a bazooka and guns around with a passable amount of skill, Vergil cannot help but notice that the stranger is clearly a girl, a young woman of their age. That is how she introduces herself, and if Vergil could still think of anything but his unending quest for power, something in him might’ve snapped at the sight.
But it doesn’t, and he barely lets it phase him, and the last thing he sees is the slash of blood from his brother’s palm as he falls backwards into an inky abyss. That is all that he is worth after his tremendous failure.
-
“Hey princess,” the infernal bird squawks at her. V doesn’t dignify the thing with an answer, only softly grunting as she keeps making her way through the city alleyways.
The tattoos on her skin sting lightly, a constant reminder of what she’s done and who she’s become printed onto her body itself. They only cover the expanse of her arms and upper body, but from the memories they’ve reapplied to her, it feels as if they cover the underside of her eyelids too. It is difficult to sleep, or even to dream lightly, after taking them in. All that effort in ejecting the nightmares from her body, just to accept them back. She hadn’t even had any time to savour the lack of their oppressive weight once she was cut out, before Griffon attached itself to her.
V is not entirely sure why she is so deadset on stopping her demon half from rampaging across two worlds. She has never once cared about the lives of people she doesn't know. Even now, she barely finds it in herself to care.
What makes it so different now? This has been something V has tried to contemplate in those rare moments of silence, where Griffon sinks back into her skin for a demonic boost and she can fully dedicate her mind to what's at hand without its infernal squawking.
Maybe it is her now fully-human instincts. She is so intensely frightened on a primal level of the sheer power that the fully-demonic threat puts out, that she simply must put a stop to it. Even if she has no power to do so, and she can only rely on Dante.
It feels just as weak to do what she has never done before—speak to Dante, and ask earnestly for his help.
She can barely remember if that’s ever happened before, her memories of everything still patchwork, excised out and refitted where he saw fit.
“Yeesh, princess, you asleep over there or something? You really are a sleeping beauty, aren'tcha?” The bird squawks again.
“Speak,” V replies. She can't stand its smart drawl, she's sure no one can. Even Dante in his infinite wellspring of humour cannot find it amusing.
There's no pain in Griffon's voice when it answers back, “Yeah, you're a real smartass too. But there's been something I've been meaning to ask.”
At this, V simply grunts. She doesn't like to tolerate this mind-numbing timewasting.
“Well, to, uh, put it simply,” Griffon actually sounds nervous. It goes silent for a moment before saying, “Why're you a lady?”
V doesn't reply. In the silence, Griffon keeps talking, “You're just Vergil with all those demon bits taken out, ya? Last I checked, you're a dude.”
“Hmph. Not anymore,” V answers.
She isn't sure why. She hates not knowing why. All she knows is that, just as she felt that fear upon seeing her demon coagulate into a true monster, a monster she could never be, she had felt a stirring of…satisfaction. When she'd seen the body she's now relegated to.
It does not feel foreign, the way the nightmares do and the claw of tattoos down her body does and the lack of Yamato by her side. It's the only part of her current situation that actually feels…
Right.
-
Nero is out of his depth, he knows, he knew that, even before Dante had run that spear of a line through his brain. He's down an arm, a sword, down his teammates, down Kyrie. Just as he's gotten Dante back, it seems like he's about to lose V.
He literally feels her flaking away, calcified skin sticking to him like the plague. Her tattoos seem to be getting fainter too, less obvious against the pale sheen of her skin. Whatever it means, V is getting weaker, barely able to walk on her own anymore.
Her story stings at Nero too. Dante has always been an outsider, but he has always felt familiar. Even when he's in his Devil Trigger, even when he shrugs off a bullet to the head, he has always felt human. Nothing weirder than Nero himself, even if he is technically more demon. He knew Dante had lost some family, a mother and a sibling. The thing that orchestrated this, corrupted Lady and Trish, erected the tree, sucked the entire city dry of blood, that thing did not feel the same way.
V had said, the brothers would not stop fighting. There would be no end to their violence. Nero cannot accept that, but neither can he accept that that thing was once human. There must be a piece missing, something V isn't telling him, something Dante is too battle-crazed to have noticed. But V is still dying, and he can’t ignore her final wish.
As they keep walking, stumbling forward, the scene changes. The rotting walls of flesh and decay warp into a bright summer day and a house now sits silently on the edge of his sight. It feels almost like a technicolor screen. At his side, V softly chuckles, though it sounds like a hacking breath at first, and it takes Nero to realise what she's looking at.
Dante stands at the foot of that monster, Urizen was the name V had given it. Nero can’t help but to call out to him, hard edge tinging his voice. Dante turns around slowly as they approach, sword slung cockily over his shoulder. He only replies, “You’re late…Just finishing up.”
Nero doesn’t bother with what he says. V lifts her arm from his neck, and Nero lets her shift forward slightly onto her cane. Once he’s sure V won’t immediately keel over, Nero asks Dante, “That thing's your brother?”
“Afraid so.” Nero can't get a very good look from his angle, but it looks like all the strength has sapped out of Urizen. It looks less like the looming presence that had effortlessly taken everyone he knows, even himself, even Dante, out of commission. It instead looks more like that shambling corpse that found his house and stole his arm. V said that they were one and the same person. Now, Nero believes her.
He always believes V unquestionably about this demon. She’s made it abundantly clear that she has some ulterior connection to it, just as, if not deeper, than it and Dante's connection. That should only make her more suspicious, but Nero can’t take her for the lying type. She wants to destroy Urizen too, and he doesn’t need to know her reason as long as they're on the same page.
But Urizen is a false name. Vergil. That’s the demon’s true name. Dante’s brother. V starts shuffling forward at his side, but Nero can’t bring himself away from his mind to pay much attention to her. They barely look the same, Vergil now so far removed from even Dante's own demon trigger. He looks to Dante and says out loud, “So he was behind all this. Your own flesh and blood.” Maybe if he says it out loud, it’ll suddenly make some sense, click in his mind. When Dante replies, “Right again,” with a locked jaw and narrowed eyes, it doesn’t help.
Nero struggles to ignore this, even as V tosses barbed words towards Vergil’s pathetic almost-corpse, and Vergil answers with a gargle in its voice. Her pace doesn’t slow, as uncertain and shaky as it is, and even the flaking of her very skin isn’t enough to phase her. V had said that the brothers, Dante and Vergil, were the ones who could never stop their fighting. Dante even calls out to V, warns her to get back as he spins his broadsword and stalks towards his brother.
But V stops him. There are decades of history intertwining Dante and his twin, but V has something even more important at stake. He doesn’t know what it is, just that she’s the only one who actually told him everything. Even if she had still kept her own secrets, her own agenda, Nero trusts V.
Her plea is not excessive, but enough to pull even Dante’s attention away from Vergil. She says, “I want to end this battle with my own hands,” and Nero knows that neither he nor Dante will get involved. It’s the weakest V has ever sounded, but the most honest as well. Dante takes a step back just as V steps forward.
He doesn't react as V holds her cane up over Vergil’s eye, as she starts to speak and Dante starts to run, noticing something Nero would never be able to.
V's strike is magnified, the squelch of viscera replaced with a sharp, distinct crack of glass as the setting completely shatters. Nero is blown back, Dante completely tossed off balance, and everything is cut off by the blinding light that covers both V and Vergil. As it fades and the countryside falls aside in unnerving silence, he finally notices that in front of him is another man, in a dark blue coat and a familiar katana hanging by his side, with sharp white hair that Nero knows all too well.
And V is gone.
-
Dante has taken one of their showers, the one on the ground floor. The twins are loud, and he doesn’t trust either of them upstairs near the kids or Kyrie. Nico has the same sleeping habits as him, so she won’t wake up unless someone boldly stumbles into the garage, neither does she have the demonic homing beacon that’s interrupted his own sleep. So now with Dante taking dibs, Nero is stuck babysitting…Vergil.
It’s hard to say his name. Nero had known V for maybe 2 days, maximum. She had been particularly mean when she'd first sourced him out, dismissive and cold. A month later, she felt different. Griffon once cackled that V had actually tried to save innocent lives for the first time in her miserable life and V had thwacked it with her cane so hard Nero thought the bird had finally died.
But she hadn't denied the charge. She'd actually changed a little in that city, Nero was sure. And now he isn't, because V is gone and he only has Vergil in her place.
He's learnt a few snippets from Lady and Trish whenever either deigns to visit Fortuna. Or more accurately, he hears things through the grapevine from Nico, so he isn't sure what's true and what isn't. What's just her colorful imagination and what's genuine fact.
Vergil seems content to sit in silence, eyes closed as he waits his turn for a shower. But Nero hates sitting in silence.
“So,” Nero rubs his nose slightly. “How was hell?”
Vergil turns to Nero slow enough that Nero can hear the creaks of a hinged statue in his mind's eye. With an eyebrow raised, he replies, “If you have nothing important to say, it might be better to stay silent. Have you considered that?”
It's a fire lit under him. Holy shit. “I'm being serious here. You spent a year down there. What was it like?”
Nero wants to hear Vergil's answer. He'd grown to trust V, but he'd barely known her. If what he's heard is correct, then they're the same person. V held Vergil’s memories and emotions, while the demon had only contained raw power and instincts. So they’re the same, even if the body is separate. And he and V had managed to get along fairly well by the end, even if neither were aware of the connection between them.
So Vergil isn’t just some stranger who happened to also be his dad. He has to keep telling himself that until he starts to believe it.
Vergil takes a second to consider, before finally replying, “It was…not as bad as I feared.”
An admission. Nero has to keep his eyebrows from flying off. From the impression everyone’s given him, he had assumed Vergil was the type to never reveal anything. But again, he reminds himself, V changed. So Vergil has too.
Nero decides to test his luck. “Because of Dante?”
And his…father’s face relaxes slightly, his mouth dipping into a small smile. His voice is quiet but sure when he answers, “Yes. But not entirely.”
-
V has never spoken to Trish, as she was named. By the time Mundus created her, he had already enacted the brunt of his horrible torture on Vergil. Her rough patches of memory and her fading consciousness, were only poked through further by Trish's presence.
A woman with his mother's face, but carrying the stench of a demon. Hellfire and brimstone and…home.
Her role was to lure Dante, but V believes she was meant to pacify herself as well. After all, Mundus only bought her complete silence with the amulet. There's no reason to think Trish was not designed with something similar in mind.
She knows that, logically, Trish is not Eva. She remembers her in the bowels of hell, on Mallet Island, and had gotten brief glimpses on that first excursion to defeat her demon half. Trish is nothing like her mother. She is aloof where her mother used to be open and caring. She obviously doesn’t see Dante as a son, something closer to a friend or a confidant. The similarities end with their faces.
But V has never had to look any deeper. A touch of blonde hair is enough to give her flashbacks to a past she barely remembers. Why had a mother so kind, so genuine in her love, left? Abandoned him, her, just like that? And why did she have to leave her—?
It takes all of V's power to put that aside for once. Despite her failing strength and the newfound scrapes on her palms that don’t even bother trying to heal anymore, she manages to comb through wrecked shops until she finds a blanket that is still usable. As she waits for Trish to wake, she does her best to anchor herself back to Blake.
It feels ridiculous how close the answer has been, and yet how far she wandered. She always knew that poetry—words and humanity—were a source of comfort and consolation to her. And despite that she has never managed to make the connection. She was too wilfully arrogant, blind to the obvious truth.
Trish rouses slightly, shaking her from her thoughts. And again, even though she consciously knows that this is not her mother, V cannot stop the words from leaking past her lips at the slightest push. She gives up her whole story of escaping hell, finding the Yamato, splitting herself in two.
She poses Trish a question then, as she unsteadily rises to her feet. “Was this fool before you right?”
V isn’t sure what she expects Trish to say. She doesn’t remember how Trish acted under Mundus’ control, nor does she really know what she’s like now. She wants…something. Consolation maybe. Reassurance, from a familiar face, that she made the right choice. For the face she’s been looking back at her whole life to give her something, when she’s so close to death’s door.
Trish leaves her behind. And V’s lips curl. Yes, she definitely isn’t her mother.