tags; anime vergil x female reader, nightmares, hurt and comfort, bed sharing, wing hugs, soft vergil.
Shadows softened in the corners of your apartment.
The room was partially dark. Somewhere, something was dripping—surely the bathroom faucet that had yet to be repaired. The sound was accompanied by the distant murmur of the city. At least the walls were thick enough to keep the noise of the traffic at bay. When you opened your eyes, the faint glow of the streetlights filtered through the curtains, casting stripes of light across the bed.
You let out a silent yawn, and the digital clock on the nightstand blinked. The sun was still nowhere near rising.
Then, the sound of steady breathing reminded your sleepy mind of who occupied the other half of the bed. Beside you, Vergil slept. Or rather, he did what he referred to as sleeping. You described it as remaining eerily motionless for hours with his eyes closed.
He claimed there was no difference, but there was.
Ever since Vergil decided to share a space with you—or rather, ever since you sheltered him in your home—you had watched him adjust to being back in the human world. Or among the sapiens, as he sometimes called them. Sleep, among other things, was an abstract concept to him. And it didn't always come easily.
Vergil tended to stay perfectly still, his eyes squeezed shut as if he were listening to something in the far distance. Or as if he were waiting for something to happen. Rare were the occasions when he truly slept, and when it did happen, it was because you were with him.
You tried not to let that affect you. You failed.
Tonight, however, he seemed genuinely submerged in sleep. Without his shoulders tensed and his brow furrowed, he almost looked younger, less defensive. His breathing was slow and constant. Peaceful.
Then, you remembered why your body had decided to wake you. Ah, right, you thought. I need to use the restroom.
You tried to be as quiet as possible. The sheets slipped slightly as you climbed out of bed. Once sitting on the edge, you looked over your shoulder. Vergil hadn't moved. You took a selfish moment to look at him. Even while doing something as banal as sleeping and wearing the most mundane clothes, he exuded something that made it glaringly obvious he wasn't completely human.
The floor was cold beneath your bare feet.
You just needed to use the restroom.
You slipped out of the room cautiously, careful not to interrupt Vergil's sleep, unusual as it was. The door remained ajar behind you.
And the room fell silent once more.
Nightmares were enemies whose ambushes Vergil could never anticipate.
When they caught him, they dragged him into a darkness of no return, deeper than the hell that had torn him to pieces only to rebuild him out of rot. Then, he would see them: grotesque demon faces reaching for him, claws and wings pursuing him, training him.
The heat of the flames scorching stone, consuming wood until it splintered apart, made him feel terribly small, even within himself. He was. Surrounded by fire once more, back in the body of a child. The panic felt so real. Through younger eyes—his own eyes—Vergil desperately tried to find salvation, only to find it on the ground, pooled in blood. Then the fire consumed everything, and he was dragged to a prison where the horrific heat would only intensify, swallowing his tortured screams along with it.
It was never a gentle return.
It was like being ripped from his own mind by claws and fangs.
In an instant, Vergil was sitting up, his hands clenched into fists over whatever fabric he could grasp, his heart hammering violently against his ribs. For a dizzying fraction of a second, he didn't know where he was. The memory of the fire and a cell in the bowels of hell were still too vivid. Blood could be smelled in the air—dense, and undeniably his own. What his senses perceived was the darkness enveloping the space, the silence, and the cold. He tasted smoke and the blistering heat on his skin.
Reality rushed back as quickly as it had vanished. The room, the cracked and faded walls of the apartment, the sheets he remembered falling asleep on beside—
He snapped his gaze sideways, letting go of the fabric and instinctively reaching for the space beside him. Empty.
Any lingering remnant of sleep vanished.
The room was empty. Far too empty.
Vergil stood up without a second thought. Every muscle in his body stiffened with a tension he only ever felt before a fight. His breathing grew shallow; to his ears, it was barely perceptible, yet it felt deafening. His gaze swept the room until it locked onto the door left ajar. The apartment remained silent. No voices. Nothing.
An unpleasant pressure constricted his chest.
She left. The thought surfaced before he could stop it. It was absurd, irrational. And yet, there it was. The ghost of the fire and a childhood shattered to pieces, years of pain and rot. Of being completely adrift.
Before he realized it, Vergil was standing in the hallway. The air felt heavier, but there were no traces of other demons in the vicinity. Then what...? A current of energy traced a path beneath his skin, as if his body were tearing itself apart to fight something that wasn't even visible. What was he going to fight?
Then, he heard footsteps. Light, soft. Unmistakably human.
Before Vergil could take another step, you appeared, walking barefoot with a sleepy expression and tangled hair.
Ah, he thought, all his instincts silenced by a relief so dense it smothered everything else. There you are.
You stopped the moment you noticed him. Your eyes narrowed in confusion, as if you hadn't expected to see him awake, let alone looking like he was about to kill something.
You stepped closer to him. Your gaze, clearer now, immediately caught the tension wrapping around Vergil's tall frame like a rope snapped taut. The tightness in his jaw only showed like that when he was angry or irritated, but you had learned to read his moods. Vergil didn't look angry in the slightest. It took you a long moment to recognize the emotion blanketing his features because you had never seen it before. Not on him. You had never seen fear in Vergil.
The distance between you closed by a couple of steps.
"What's wrong?" you asked.
Nothing, he thought. A superficial, useless answer when he clearly looked as though he were about to lunge forward and trap you. Ridiculous. You were perfectly capable of getting up during the night without a tragedy occurring; he knew that.
But a part of Vergil—a terribly human part—couldn't differentiate between a momentary absence and a permanent loss. Not when there were still times he woke up expecting to find smoke, or waiting to hear his own screams echoing off the walls of a cavern. But now... a vacant bed had been enough for Vergil to imagine the worst, because a door left ajar had been enough to drag him decades back. What kind of weakness was that?
Nothing, he thought again. He didn't grab you only because he remained rooted to the spot, staring at you. Searching for wounds, traces of blood, any sign of danger. There was none. And how sickening it was, the way the pressure in his chest dissipated the moment he realized you were unharmed.
Only then was Vergil able to answer.
There was a moment where the words hung suspended in the air. Just that. You weren't in bed. It wasn't a reproach, nor was it an accusation.
All Vergil could hear was the rhythm of your pulse.
You understood, and your heart took a painful plunge in your chest as it clicked.
You knew his nightmares. He had told you about that night and everything that followed. How could you have forgotten? Vergil's nightmares always began like this. He had undoubtedly feared the worst when he didn't see you.
You had seen it before, on the nights he snapped awake with a start and held you tighter, the times he stayed awake staring at the ceiling. You knew where it all came from.
"I just went to the restroom," you said softly, closing the distance between you. His eyes followed your every step, capturing everything from the movement of your body to the cadence of your breathing. Vergil's eyes were honest in a way he himself could never be. A few strands of white hair fell out of place, disrupting his immaculate appearance, you fought the urge to brush them away. "I'm sorry."
Vergil's jaw clenched before he forced himself to relax it.
"You have nothing to apologize for." His shoulders sank just a fraction as your scent replaced the air around him.
You tilted your chin slightly to look him in the face.
"I should have told you," you murmured. "Or made a bit more noise—"
"You are not responsible for my afflictions," he replied in a hushed voice. If anyone else were to hear the tone Vergil used with you, hell would freeze over.
Your expression softened under the bluish glow of his gaze.
"Maybe not." Your hand slowly sought his out. Vergil followed the movement as if it were mesmerizing, as if he didn't comprehend that it was meant for him. Slowly, your fingers laced with his—soft skin slipping against the hand calloused by swordplay and years of training. "But that doesn't mean you have to deal with them entirely alone."
In moments like this, Vergil was grateful you couldn't hear his heartbeat. It wasn't a frantic pulse born of fear or alertness, but it undoubtedly exceeded established boundaries, and it was ridiculous, and he couldn't stop it.
A human making the heart of a half-demon beat for something other than hunger. Perhaps he truly was banished from hell.
For a suspended moment, Vergil didn't answer; he simply stood there, watching you. If only you could see yourself through his eyes.
Finally, his fingers closed around yours, covering them.
"Go back to bed," he said.
For a split second, he almost sounded on the verge of saying please. You couldn't help but smile a little, even as your heart melted inside your chest.
"That sounded suspiciously like a request."
Vergil shot you an unimpressed look, but the corners of his mouth twitched just enough to give him away.
"Do not flatter yourself."
"Because it felt like a request."
"Your perception is flawed."
You laughed, and the sound did something inside his chest. Something warm and unknown, something that would take him time to accept. Slowly, the nightmares receded. He knew that, at least for tonight, they wouldn't return.
Because you were smiling at him.
Because tonight was simply a mundane, boring night.
Vergil didn't let go of your hand on the way back to the bedroom. Your fingers unraveled from his when you flopped onto the bed—the exact way you knew made him huff—and opened your arms wide.
Vergil watched you the way one observes something entirely nonsensical.
A cricket could have played a concerto in that silence.
You dropped your arms and shrugged, looking more amused than slighted by the rejection. You had long since learned not to take Vergil's defense mechanisms personally, but you pulled the entire blanket over to your side of the bed anyway.
"Your loss," you said, barely hiding your amusement as you cocooned yourself in the fabric.
Vergil sighed. That long, resigned sigh you discovered was reserved exclusively for you. The mattress dipped beside you as he took his place, hogging more than half the space. The bed wasn't built for two people, much less a half-demon.
In the ensuing silence, nothing happened, and you wondered if he was pretending to sleep. You were just about to drift off when a firm arm wrapped around your waist. The heat of his skin bled into yours through your clothes. You smiled against the pillow.
"I am going to let you go."
He didn't. You two knew it.
The pause that followed was so long you almost started to chuckle.
Then, a surge of energy filled the room. A warm blue radiance momentarily coated the walls before dimming into a soft illumination. The bed groaned under the sudden shift in weight. The cold instantly vanished, and all you felt was a wall of heat pressing against your back. The arm around your waist grew broader, lined with claws that tickled your skin. The blanket covering you disappeared, and you found yourself face-to-face with... well, Vergil. In his Devil Trigger.
It wasn't the first time you'd seen it, but your jaw dropped nonetheless. The bed was definitely not made to sustain the weight of a demon.
"You're gonna break the bed."
"Irrelevant," he replied, his voice a octave deeper. The hand—claw—at your waist hauled you backward, making the poor bed wail. Your back collided with the solid armor of his chest. "You are speaking too much."
Massive wings unfurled, swallowing up most of the room, but Vergil used them to drape over both of you, creating a barrier. A sanctuary. The most dangerous creature your world knew was shielding you with his wings in an attempt to protect you from that very world. Or perhaps it was just another way for Vergil to harbor himself.
The outside world fell entirely mute. Inside that barrier, it was only the two of you. The beat of that heart—which was as human as it was demonic—became a drum that, of all its lethal purposes, ended up lulling you to sleep.
Slowly your eyelids began to close.
"Goodnight, Vergil," you whispered.
There was a low rumble, a rough sort of purr that vibrated against your back. Vergil pulled you closer.
He felt the moment you fell asleep. This time, when Vergil closed his eyes, there was no darkness, no home swallowed by flames. Only your breathing, and the human fluttering inside your chest. Only your warmth.
Slowly, he closed his eyes, silently letting himself drift away, anchored by the certainty that when he woke up, you would still be there. Right beside him.
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