#dmcweek2020

“I wanted sword fight with Vergil but he only force on that stupid puzzle cube that dad brought back another day!” Dante yelled.

(Y/N) flicked her eyes to the floor to see a Rubik’s cube in front of the couch, looking a bit beat up. She then flicked her eyes to Vergil, who looked confused briefly before shooting back his own defence.

“It’s not my fault that you’re too stupid to figure out how to solve it,” He snarky remarked.

The (E/H) hair girl raised an eyebrow at the pause between Dante’s accusation and Vergil’s defences. Dante was lying about what started the fight and Vergil was going along with it? The boys had never lied to her before so why were they now?

‘I’ll just have to separate them and get one of to confess,’ (Y/N) thought.

“Dante, what have you been told about annoying your brother when he’s doing something,” She told him.

“But I’m bor-!” Dante began to whine.

“You have plenty of toys and activities that you can do by yourself,” (Y/N) reminded him. “As for your punishment…” She began before Dante interrupted.

“Vergil was the one, who hit me first!” He yelled.

“That’s because you slap the Rubik’s Cube out of my hand!” Vergil yelled back.

“Boys!” (Y/N) shouted over them.

Both boys immediately stopped their arguing and just scowled to themselves.

“I don’t care how started, I’m finishing it,” She started. “As I was saying, your punishment will be Dante to stand on the naughty step for fifteen minutes,” She instructed.

Dante started to whine soon as he heard his punishment but a pointed look shut up him up. (Y/N) walked Dante over to the stairs to watch him get onto the naughty step. She then returned to the couch where she left Vergil. He had picked up his broken Rubik’s Cube. A large part of the cube had broken off.

(Y/N) walked up to the boy and crouch down in front of him.

“I have superglue in my room,” She softly told him.

The blue-eyed boy looked at her with hopefully look in his eyes. (Y/N) smiled at him before getting up. She offered a hand to the boy, which he took happily.

The two of them walked to (Y/N)’s bedroom to fix the broken toy.

Vergil placed the toys and it’s broken pieces onto (Y/N)’s table whilst she looked for the superglue in the table’s draw. Once she found the item she glued the Rubik’s Cube back together, she put a rubber band around the cube to make sure that the pieces stay in place whilst there glue dried. The whole time she was fixing it Vergil watched intently.

“All done!” She announced, putting the toy back onto the table. “All we have to do is wait for the glue to dry, so while we’re waiting for it dry could tell me what you and Dante were really fighting about?” She asked.

(Y/N) could see the eldest son of Sparda freeze up knowing that he had been caught red-handed. Vergil lowered his head in shame and embarrassment.

(Y/N) got up from her chair and kneeled in front of the young boy.

“Vergil,” She softly called to him. He didn’t look up when (Y/N) called to him. “I’ve known you and your brother since you were born. I’ve watched the two of you grow up I know your personalities,” She told. “So, tell me please tell me why you and Dante were fighting,” She politely asked.

The young woman waited as the boy slowly worked up the courage to confessed to what happened. He played with the edge of his shirt.

“Dante said ways going…” He started with a loud but quickly got quiet as he approached the truth.

“Sorry Vergil, I didn’t get that,” She told him.

There was another moment of silences before Vergil let out the truth.

“Dante said he was going to marry you!” He shouted. “But I am the eldest son so it should be my job!” He exclaimed.

What? Marry? Where was this coming from?

“What are you talking about?” She asked totally confused.

“Your father’s student so it makes sense for one us to marry you,” He explained.

“Vergil…” (Y/N) sighed. “You don’t have to do that anymore, people haven’t done that in a hundred years,” She told. “Also theirs so many other people in the world you could marry,” She told him.

“But I want to marry!” He shouted. “You’re strong and you’re nice,” He said.

“Vergil… I see you and Dante as little brothers,” She told him.

“I’ll find someone,” She told him as she cupped his cheeks then rubbing her thumb against it. (Y/N) looked at her watch. “Dante’s punishment should be done by now so let’s go and get him,” She told Vergil. “Then it’s your turn on the naughty step about ten minutes,” She told him.

To say that getting used to the whole ‘family dynamic’ thing was strange for you, Vergil, and Nero would be the same as saying that everyone around the shop was ‘slightly’ eccentric. Now, you didn’t try to force affection upon the boy or anything, but there were times (cough, cough, now) that you couldn’t help but watch him as he did something as simple as work on Red Queen. You were just so in awe of the fact that your baby boy had grown up to be this handsome young man with a genuinely good heart.

“What?” he asked, pulling your attention back to reality.

“‘What’ what?” you teased, pretending you didn’t know what he was asking about.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Is it wrong for a person to look at their son?”

“Well no, but . . .” He trailed off, clearly unable to come up with a response through his embarrassment. A tinge of red was rising up his neck.

“Would you like to know what I was thinking about?” you offered in a show of mercy.

Now, Nero’s eyes lit up. “Sure.” Clearly, he was excited by the prospect of some bonding conversation with his mother, but he was trying to seem apathetic.

“You get a little wrinkle between your eyebrows and bite your lip when you’re concentrating really hard on something. You might look like a clone of Vergil, but it’s nice to see that you took after me a little.”

He seemed to be a little speechless at that. “Uh . . . thanks . . .” There was a pause where it felt like there was more he wanted to say, so you simply waited. “Kyrie loves when she catches me doing that. I, uh, always wondered where I got it from since no one at the orphanage did that.”

“Vergil loves it too,” you confided. “Never understood why.”

A little smile graced his features, one almost identical to your own. “Thanks, Mom.”

Eva shakes her head. She knows what he is, of course, has known since he first stumbled into her garden with a dazed look and a wound in his side that oozed a thick, purple fluid more like tar than blood, but he’s never told her of his life before they met. Sometimes, when she can’t sleep, she lies awake and stares at him in the dark, the handsome face he wears now so unlike the monstrous one that belongs to his true nature that she can almost convince herself she dreamt it. But that otherness is there: in their love-making, in the quick and easy way he heals, in the inhuman strength and speed he possesses. Now, he looks only weary, tired, and she marks her place and goes to him, kneeling next to his chair and reaching up to touch his face.

Sparda leans into her, nuzzling her palm and looking at her with those sad, grave eyes. “They kill, of course. It’s in their nature, or what little of it there might be. Mortals are food and hunted for sport, their torture a delight. And they will turn on their own for little more than petty amusement, alliances turned to slaughters at the simplest change of whim.”

“Are you worried that Dante and Vergil will be that way?” she asks, keeping her voice low and soothing.

He considers her for a moment, her not-quite husband. Then he shakes his head. “I could not say. I had a brother once, who I loved more than anything in the world. Yet when the time came for me to make a choice, I attempted to kill him, and sealed him away when that failed. You want to ask if I regret it,” he chuckles wryly, “and I do not. It was a necessary thing. Ugly, yes, but necessary.”

“Sparda,” she begins, only for her voice to die in her throat when the change occurs.

It’s slower than it was years ago, before the twins were born, and starts in his face. The skin shifts, melting and reforming like wax as the eyes take on a glassy shine and the healthy, olive tone of his complexion fades to an ashen gray. Horns grow from the hair, which hardens and curls into a helmet, and the armor flows from there to coat the rest of him, until the knee she’s balancing herself on is rough and cold to the touch. “What legacy,” he asks with a tongue not suited for human speech, “am I leaving for them?”

To that, she has no answer. So she takes his hand and pulls him from his seat and up the stairs, knowing that the boys will be out all afternoon, and in their bedroom she comforts him as best as she knows how, whispering words of love and devotion into his ear until both of them are spent and the sky outside has gone the pale umber of evening. And when the twins return, covered in mud and scrapes and bruises, she cleans them up and makes a dinner fit to feed a small army, and she helps them get ready for bed, and all the while that question nags at her. What legacy? she thinks, soaking in the bath. One of a good father, if a little absent and strange. But the image of that strange smile and the sword on his lap will not leave her, and the chill of it remains long after she has fallen asleep.

She finds Vergil in Sparda’s study the next morning. Eva pauses in the doorway, a dusting rag held uncertainly to her chest as she takes him in, a boy who is small and precocious for his age, so unlike his rambunctious younger brother. His head is tilted back so that he can look up at the sword on the mantle; this one is much more Oriental in design, made to be wielded with grace and poise, and it will belong to him one day. Which means that it’s only natural that he’d show interest, isn’t it? Why, then, does it fill her with the same discomfort from yesterday? Why does it bring back the nightmares she thought she had shaken off? 

Trying to bring some of the normalcy back to her day, Eva forces a smile to her face and knocks on the open door. “You know you aren’t meant to be in here when your father is gone.”

Without turning around, Vergil replies, “He said it was fine.”

“Did he?” She steps inside, moving to stand next to her son. “Well, I suppose it’s alright, then. Where’s Dante?”

“Out,” he answers vaguely.

That could mean anything from the yard to the playground to the woods to accompanying Sparda on whatever errand he’s running, and she kneels and places her hands on Vergil’s shoulders, looking up at the sword with him. “Do you like it?”

He hums. “It’s pretty.”

“Yes,” she agrees, “it is.” And that isn’t a lie. The hilt is wrapped in a lovely blue fabric that complements the intricately crafted golden hilt wonderfully. What she does not say is that she hopes he never has to use it. “Your father used it once to do a great thing. Did you know that?”

Finally, Vergil looks at her, his eyes wide with a wonder he so rarely shows. “He did?”

“Mm-hm. You see, there were once demons who wanted to hurt people, just because they thought that they should be able to. Your father used this sword to seal them away.” She glances up at it. “He calls it Yamato.”

Curious now, Vergil allows her to lead him to the armchair in the corner, and he climbs into her lap, something he has not done in over a year. “What about the other one?”

“Hm.” She smooths his hair back. “He said its name is Rebellion, and serves a much different purpose. It’s meant to protect the weak and avenge the injustices they’ve suffered.”

He wrinkles his nose. “Sounds stupid.”

“Do you really think so?”

“No,” he admits, “but it’s for Dante, and Dante is stupid.”

“Vergil, you know that’s not true,” she admonishes.

He frowns at her, looking uncharastically like his father. “It is. He hides my stuff and always wants to do what I do. He won’t leave me alone unless I play with him, and then he gets me in trouble because he plays rough and you don’t like it.”

She bundles him into her arms with a sigh. It’s easy to fall back into the role of matriarch in the daylight, particularly with the familiar friction between her sons to occupy herself with. “You must be patient with him. He only wants to spend time with you.”

“I wish he wouldn’t,” he mutters. 

“That’s enough of that,” she says. Downstairs, she hears the door open, followed by voices—one chattering excitedly, the other answering in the short gaps allowed by the first—and Eva nudges Vergil down, dusting specks of dirt from his shirt. “Go down and see if your father needs any help, and then you can finish your chores.”

“Yes, mother.”

She kisses the top of his head and sends him on his way. There’s a hint of guilt for it; out of the twins, Vergil is far easier to handle than Dante, preferring books and tidiness over the haphazard, yet harmless mess that seems to follow Dante wherever he goes. That makes it rare for her to display any sort of shortness with him, but—

I had a brother once . . . I tried to kill him. 

—she doesn’t want him to push Dante away.