[Fic: Devil May Cry] "God Child"
Jan. 24th, 2008 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rocknloadTitle: God Child
Author: Brittany![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rocknload
Fandom: Devil May Cry
Rating: PG13
Words: ~3000
Summary: [one shot] Fourteen-year-old Vergil seeks the guidance of a master swordsman; but to earn it, he has to pass a test.
*
Vergil hated the way Yamato felt in his hands, he absolutely hated it, and when the next creature jumped out of the shadows he swung the sword like a club, and he knew he wasn’t supposed to do it like that but it worked anyway. It fell into pieces, guts and bones, the shrieks rattled his teeth, and when he stepped over the body he almost managed to keep the blood off his boots. But not quite.
The next time, he swung Yamato like a meat cleaver. Maybe an ax, a small one. That thing fell apart, too.
Sloppy, said the creaky voice in his head. Ugly. I’ve seen more technique out of a—
“Shut up,” he snapped, and then he cringed as he returned the sword to the sheath. He’d been in these caves for so long that now he was responding to that voice, like a lunatic.
He’d been hearing it for hours, already.
He waited a second, listening carefully—not for the voice, he was listening for more footfalls, more claws scratching on rock. When it seemed like nothing else was coming, not for now, he forced himself to relax. He took a deep breath in, he let it out, and then he kept moving forward.
Vergil wanted to think he was getting the hang of the caverns, but that’d be a lie. The tunnels were twisty, the ceiling was low enough to induce claustrophobia and where a set of human eyes would see nothing but pitch-blackness Vergil was seeing in grainy shades of gray. He wasn’t even sure he’d be able to find his way back to the entrance, and he had half a mind to try, but whenever he thought it for more than a second—
Come back with the head by sunrise, she said, again, in the back of his mind. Or don’t come back at all.
“Shut up,” he muttered. But he kept going.
The tunnels forked off into two separate paths up ahead, and he was certain he’d stood in front of this split before, but he couldn’t remember which side he’d picked before. He toyed the hand guard of his sword for a second, trying to think and remember.
He picked the path on the left.
It because pretty obvious pretty quick that he’d made the right choice. The scenery wasn’t a change, he was getting the same feelings of déjà vu every other twist had provided, but a few meters down the path, something crunched beneath his feet.
A few more steps, and the crunching and grinding was a constant thing. The sound was making his mouth twitch, yanking his lips down into a grimace, but he didn’t want to look down.
Well, aren’t you a simpering little coward, the voice said. Really, she was laughing.
“Shut up,” he said, and he looked down.
He expected bones. What he saw was definitely human remains, mummified maybe, dry and old, he didn’t know, and grayscale made it hard to make out the details on the pieces of people strewn across the ground. The largest one was a jaw, part of it, and that one was fresh enough that he could see the lower lip, shriveled and pulling away from the bone.
There were a lot of fingers. Or maybe not much was bigger than a finger.
He controlled his nausea. He swallowed, hard, and carefully, slowly shook his head. The pieces kept on crunching.
He was getting closer, anyway.
*
“Is this all you have to offer? Smoke and booze?”
Isabella spent every night in a pub that was dark and smelled like ash and piss; she overed a Chivas Regal and smoked through an entire pack of Camel Turkish Jades. The routine had been fifty, or perhaps sixty years in the making—it’d been long enough that she couldn’t remember how it’d started, or why.
But sometimes, once a decade, perhaps, someone showed up in front of her table, just to shake things up.
She lit another cigarette, took a long drag, and studied the boy.
He was stubborn. She could tell, because he stood there for almost a minute in strained silence before he spoke again. “I’d heard you were a swordswoman of some repute,” he said, “ but I begin to suspect I’ve wasted my time coming here.”
She blew smoke up in the air, over both their heads, and tapped the ash from her cigarette onto the floor. “You’re trying too hard,” she said. “Start over.”
He was very young, not older than fifteen, and his right hand was curled around the only thing noteworthy about him—a Japanese sword. Isabella had never been a fan of the style, but it was out of place. It was odd. Beyond that, there was nothing of interest. He was tall, he was skinny, he’d spent too many hours practicing that sneer in the mirror.
“I need more power,” he said. “I need the strength to—”
“I don’t care.”
He squirmed.
Isabella took a few drags to fill the space between his thoughts and his words, and she cast a bored glance around the bar. When she looked back, he was still scowling at her, and he hadn’t come up with an argument, yet. She knew, because if he had, he would be saying it.
She leaned forward, and ground her cigarette out. “Boy,” she said. “More men than I can count have approached me just as you have tonight. What makes you any different?”
She took a sip of her scotch and watched his glare darken.
“Were they human?”
Her glass was halfway down to the table when she paused, but she’d collected herself when she set it down. She gave him another look, a more careful look, but she found nothing different.
“All but one. They were quite like you,” she said, drawing another cigarette from the pack. “They were only just.”
*
He took a closer look at the demons when they attacked next, after he left them in a bloody pile at his feet. He prodded one of them with his boot, and he hated himself for it, but he felt a little relieved to feel its weight.
Think you’re pretending? You must be good at it, the voice in his head told him, and he knew he wasn’t imagining that, either.
The demons had visible skeletons and long, heavy claws—they’d taken away pieces of his coat in the battle. He hadn’t seen anything like them before, and Vergil knew demons, but they weren’t totally unfamiliar. And their blood smelled the same as every other demon he’d ever killed.
Something was still wrong.
Stop stalling, boy.
He glanced down the tunnel.
It got narrower, and the smell was getting overwhelming—and the ground wasn’t crunching under his feet, anymore. The texture had changed. His boots were sinking into gore. The deep breaths were doing more harm than good, now, and when he took them through his nose he choked.
Bring the head back before sunrise, or—
“I know!” He shouted it so loud that the echo made him flinch, but the voice fell silent.
He moved forward. It was all he knew to do.
The biggest, baddest monsters always lurked in the deepest caverns, the darkest rooms; Vergil knew that from reading comics books that hadn’t been his, an age or two or more ago. And that’d be the end game, there’d be no more of this, he’d just… kill whatever it was—he didn’t know what he was doing, not exactly, but he was faster than pretty much anything—he’d take the head, and—
I don’t value a man unless he’s a man of action. Take your plans, and—
“Stop.”
The tunnel widened, up ahead.
He slowed down, slightly, because the rock walls gave the impression that this was a threshold, and not even his heightened vision gave him a clue as to what was coming. His fingers curled around Yamato, but he didn’t stop. This wasn’t the time to hesitate.
Something moved. He tensed, and his eyes followed that faint sign of life, but he’d wait until the last second before he drew his sword.
The head, make sure you bag the—
His mouth started to move automatically, to say whatever words might make her shut her trap, if only for a minute, but before he could, the something moved closer. It was running at him, now, almost silently, he saw a white flash in the shadows.
He almost drew Yamato.
—before sunrise.
He hadn’t moved fast enough, after all.
*
“There’s a cave, not far from here,” Isabella told him. “And a demon in these parts, as I’m sure you knew before you came.”
He looked at her skeptically, but he nodded.
“Many nasty things lurk in the caverns, and one fouler than most.”
“Is it a demon?”
“It’ll bleed like one,” she answered. More than that, she couldn’t say, and not just because he was an arrogant little snot and she didn’t want to. There were rules to be followed, a ritual like her nightly scotch and cigarettes. “The creature in the cave takes a different form for each opponent.”
He snorted. “Then how will I know it?”
“You’ll have no doubt when you see it.” A stupid question received a simple answer, but at least it was an honest one.
His fingers were still wrapped around that sword; she hoped he was well acquainted in its use. The creature took a different form for each opponent, but no form wanted to die. “You want me to challenge this thing,” he said, after consideration. “You want me to kill it.”
“I want you to bring me its head,” she answered. “Do this before sunrise, and I’ll teach you what I know.”
The boy had more questions for her—“Where in the caverns? Why the head?”—but she had no more answers, and finally he left in a huff. He hadn’t said a word about accepting her challenge.
She waited.
*
“Vergil!”
The boy came skidding out of the cavern, his voice high and thin and painfully childlike. Before Vergil had even moved, the boy was standing in front of him, staring up.
“Vergil! You’re—” The boy’s face fell, and he crossed his arms and scowled. “You’re not my brother.”
His shoelaces were untied, his jeans had holes at both knees, and his white hair was hanging in his eyes. He was ten years old, and Vergil didn’t have to guess that because he knew. This was Dante, ripped right out of Vergil’s memories of the day his brother died.
“You shouldn’t trick people like that,” the creature wearing Dante’s face was saying. “You look like him a lot but you’re not. So stop.”
Vergil took another one of those calm breaths, he filled his lungs with putrid air and curled his fingers around Yamato so hard he felt the strain in his knuckles. “S—stop—”
“Tricking me,” the little boy said. “I’m not stupid.”
He blinked hard. Dante didn’t go away.
“What’re you looking at?”
Vergil closed his eyes again, and his left hand went up to rub at his temple. The voice was gone now, it’d been replaced by a low buzzing he was certain was entirely in his head. “The monster,” he said, after he’d taken a second to compose himself. He’d almost managed it. “The monster, where—”
“Monster?”
Vergil looked at the kid, again.
He’d gotten bored with the conversation, by now, his gaze was wandering all over the place, up the plain gray rock walls and across the blank gray rock ceiling. He didn’t seem to notice the body parts, or they didn’t seem to bother him—no, they didn’t bother him. There’s no way he could have missed them.
“How did you get here?” Vergil demanded.
“Dunno.”
“How long have you been—”
“Don’t know.”
He’d put all those bodies here.
This was the creature in the cave.
“You can stop looking at me.”
Vergil looked away.
You’re lucky, the voice said, speaking to him, finally. Not a fierce beast, doesn’t have a single claw. A simple matter to—
“There’s another way,” he interrupted. “You can change it, you can change this.”
The demon—
“You’re the demon, here,” he snapped. He shouted, and the voice didn’t deny it. “You will change this, or—”
The boy had been backing away steadily during Vergil’s conversation with the air, though he didn’t step back into the dark. He wouldn’t go that far. His eyes had gone wide, and they got wider as he spoke. “You’re a freaking weirdo.”
“I’m not,” Vergil disagreed, purely out of habit, because that was what you did when your brother called you a freak. He froze, and the nausea hit again. Shaking his head didn’t clear it, swallowing didn’t either. He grabbed Yamato tightly and took a step forward.
Dante—what looked like him, anyway—took such a hurried step in the opposite direction that he almost tripped, his arms pin wheeling to keep his balance. “What? What?” he was saying. “I didn’t do anything!”
The sun rises in less than an hour, and this deal will not stand another night.
“Shut up!”
The boy froze, and Vergil didn’t know if it was the icy tone that did it, or the threatening way Vergil kept gesturing with the sword. He stared up for half a minute, maybe longer, before he jerked his gaze away. “Definitely not my brother,” he muttered.
Then he turned tail and darted back into the cavern.
*
The mouth of the cave was only a mile away from the door to the pub. It was still three and a half hours before she heard the door to Lockwood’s open, and that boy dragged himself in front of her, again.
She took her cigarette out from between her lips, resting it on the ash tray. “You made your way back,” she said.
He said nothing.
His pretty clothes were mussed, his hair fell across his way in a way that was neither stylish nor intended. But he wasn’t bloody, he wasn’t sweaty, he wasn’t breathing hard. If it wasn’t for his eyes, Isabella might not have known how exhausted he really was.
“You had an easy time of it,” she noted. “Most who enter that cave—”
“I didn’t.”
She waited for his explanation, even something so small as a cocky smirk, which seemed to be in character. But it didn’t come. She looked down at his hands. One was curled around his sword, same as it’d been before.
The other held a lumpy, uneven package. A sack of some sort, tied with a piece of thin rope, about the size of a cantaloupe.
He saw her gaze, and he tossed it onto the table. It hit with a heavy thunk and rolled around, upsetting her ashtray, sending the debris straight to the floor. She swore and jumped to her feet, and for all his hesitation at the beginning of the night, he didn’t even flinch, now.
“So you did it,” she said. She picked her drink up off the table. She glanced down at the package, and she reached out to tug on the cord.
“Don’t.”
His voice was strained, he was stuck somewhere between ordering and pleading, but that told her enough. She let her hand drop. “Your lessons begin tomorrow,” she said. “And you’d better show up on time, or not at—”
“Don’t order me. I meant what I said, before, in the caves.” He spoke without looking at her; he was staring at the wall at her back. “Who was the one?”
Isabella took a seat, moving leisurely, already reaching for another cigarette. She was down to three. “Beg your pardon?”
“You said…” He took a second, maybe a little more, and then he shook his head sharply. “You said everyone who came to you was human. Except for one.”
She paused, and then she laughed. “Boy,” she said, striking a match. “I didn’t have anything to teach him. But … that is why I gave you that chance.”
He seemed frozen to the spot, his mouth moving like he was chewing on his lips from the inside. Finally, he managed, “And why is that.” His voice was as flat as his face.
“You reminded me of him,” she said, waving her hand slightly, smoke rising in small circles up from her fingers. “You know, he had pretty white hair, just like yours.”
*
“You aren’t going to fight?”
Vergil’s eyes had never adjusted to the new, unnatural darkness, but he’d found the boy anyway. He was a faint shadow pressed up against the far wall, small fists curled up and held next to his head. The whimpers had given him away.
“Stand up,” Vergil ordered.
He didn’t.
“Move.”
He didn’t do that, either.
Vergil held Yamato awkwardly at his side, raised like he meant to draw it, not sure if he should, or… not. He didn’t know what to do at all. If the thing would fight, struggle, hell, even speak, he’d know what to do. But this…
Say please, Isabella suggested. Perhaps that will work.
He spoke slowly and deliberately. “I’ll kill you for this,” he said. “One day.”
Save your threats for when you have the strength.
He scowled. Then he swung the sword, and caught the boy on the temple with the sheath.
Dante—not Dante—yelped, but didn’t fall. He didn’t cry, either, but Vergil didn’t have any memories of that, nothing for the creature to draw on. When the boy looked up again, he was shaking. Vergil could see the trembling limbs, even in the dark.
He raised the sword again.
“You’re… really going to kill me, huh,” the boy said, after a long silence. He pulled his fists up in front of his face, rubbing at tears that weren’t there.
“You should’ve fought back,” Vergil said, by way of an answer. His grip on his weapon made his fingers hurt, his wrist ache.
“I thought—” The creature sighed, and his voice shifted, becoming sad and serious—not Dante, not anymore, even if the face was the same. “I thought this would be better. That it’d be harder.”
*
“You’ll be there, then,” Isabella said, making the statement a question. She didn’t care, but she wasn’t sure anymore; the boy had gone from obvious to nearly impossible to read, and she wasn’t going to waste time better spent sleeping if he was turning coward now, of all times.
He looked back at her for the first time in minutes. “I will.”
She chuckled, taking a long, slow drag on her very last cigarette. She wanted to enjoy the flavor. “To learn to kill me?” she asked. “You’ll know that by the end, you realize.”
He stared at her for several seconds, the silence strained as always, and then he kicked out, striking the side of the table. The package—the size of a cantaloupe, or maybe a small, severed skull—rolled wildly.
Isabella was on her feet again, her eyes flashing, waiting for his challenge.
But he just stood there, calmly, sword resting lightly at his side.
“I know,” he said. “I’m counting on it.”
*
Vergil knew he had to be quick. He moved to swing—and he found himself wondering if Dante, the real thing, had accepting dying so easily. The thought sucked all the strength out of his motion, and Yamato dropped harmlessly to his side.
“You keep doing that,” the creature said, his voice the voice of a child, sulking and petty.
Vergil raised the weapon again.
“Don’t you feel bad?”
The voice in his head didn’t have a word to say to that, no helpful comments, no smart remarks. In fact, his mind felt remarkably clear. And maybe he did feel bad—his head hurt, his entire body was sore, he felt like throwing up. That wasn’t what Dante meant.
The creature could’ve taken the form of any monster that had ever dragged itself out of Hell, and Vergil would have preferred it.
But that was the idea, now, wasn’t it?
“Don’t you?”
“No,” Vergil answered, and he swung his sword.
*
Author: Brittany
rocknloadFandom: Devil May Cry
Rating: PG13
Words: ~3000
Summary: [one shot] Fourteen-year-old Vergil seeks the guidance of a master swordsman; but to earn it, he has to pass a test.
*
Vergil hated the way Yamato felt in his hands, he absolutely hated it, and when the next creature jumped out of the shadows he swung the sword like a club, and he knew he wasn’t supposed to do it like that but it worked anyway. It fell into pieces, guts and bones, the shrieks rattled his teeth, and when he stepped over the body he almost managed to keep the blood off his boots. But not quite.
The next time, he swung Yamato like a meat cleaver. Maybe an ax, a small one. That thing fell apart, too.
Sloppy, said the creaky voice in his head. Ugly. I’ve seen more technique out of a—
“Shut up,” he snapped, and then he cringed as he returned the sword to the sheath. He’d been in these caves for so long that now he was responding to that voice, like a lunatic.
He’d been hearing it for hours, already.
He waited a second, listening carefully—not for the voice, he was listening for more footfalls, more claws scratching on rock. When it seemed like nothing else was coming, not for now, he forced himself to relax. He took a deep breath in, he let it out, and then he kept moving forward.
Vergil wanted to think he was getting the hang of the caverns, but that’d be a lie. The tunnels were twisty, the ceiling was low enough to induce claustrophobia and where a set of human eyes would see nothing but pitch-blackness Vergil was seeing in grainy shades of gray. He wasn’t even sure he’d be able to find his way back to the entrance, and he had half a mind to try, but whenever he thought it for more than a second—
Come back with the head by sunrise, she said, again, in the back of his mind. Or don’t come back at all.
“Shut up,” he muttered. But he kept going.
The tunnels forked off into two separate paths up ahead, and he was certain he’d stood in front of this split before, but he couldn’t remember which side he’d picked before. He toyed the hand guard of his sword for a second, trying to think and remember.
He picked the path on the left.
It because pretty obvious pretty quick that he’d made the right choice. The scenery wasn’t a change, he was getting the same feelings of déjà vu every other twist had provided, but a few meters down the path, something crunched beneath his feet.
A few more steps, and the crunching and grinding was a constant thing. The sound was making his mouth twitch, yanking his lips down into a grimace, but he didn’t want to look down.
Well, aren’t you a simpering little coward, the voice said. Really, she was laughing.
“Shut up,” he said, and he looked down.
He expected bones. What he saw was definitely human remains, mummified maybe, dry and old, he didn’t know, and grayscale made it hard to make out the details on the pieces of people strewn across the ground. The largest one was a jaw, part of it, and that one was fresh enough that he could see the lower lip, shriveled and pulling away from the bone.
There were a lot of fingers. Or maybe not much was bigger than a finger.
He controlled his nausea. He swallowed, hard, and carefully, slowly shook his head. The pieces kept on crunching.
He was getting closer, anyway.
*
“Is this all you have to offer? Smoke and booze?”
Isabella spent every night in a pub that was dark and smelled like ash and piss; she overed a Chivas Regal and smoked through an entire pack of Camel Turkish Jades. The routine had been fifty, or perhaps sixty years in the making—it’d been long enough that she couldn’t remember how it’d started, or why.
But sometimes, once a decade, perhaps, someone showed up in front of her table, just to shake things up.
She lit another cigarette, took a long drag, and studied the boy.
He was stubborn. She could tell, because he stood there for almost a minute in strained silence before he spoke again. “I’d heard you were a swordswoman of some repute,” he said, “ but I begin to suspect I’ve wasted my time coming here.”
She blew smoke up in the air, over both their heads, and tapped the ash from her cigarette onto the floor. “You’re trying too hard,” she said. “Start over.”
He was very young, not older than fifteen, and his right hand was curled around the only thing noteworthy about him—a Japanese sword. Isabella had never been a fan of the style, but it was out of place. It was odd. Beyond that, there was nothing of interest. He was tall, he was skinny, he’d spent too many hours practicing that sneer in the mirror.
“I need more power,” he said. “I need the strength to—”
“I don’t care.”
He squirmed.
Isabella took a few drags to fill the space between his thoughts and his words, and she cast a bored glance around the bar. When she looked back, he was still scowling at her, and he hadn’t come up with an argument, yet. She knew, because if he had, he would be saying it.
She leaned forward, and ground her cigarette out. “Boy,” she said. “More men than I can count have approached me just as you have tonight. What makes you any different?”
She took a sip of her scotch and watched his glare darken.
“Were they human?”
Her glass was halfway down to the table when she paused, but she’d collected herself when she set it down. She gave him another look, a more careful look, but she found nothing different.
“All but one. They were quite like you,” she said, drawing another cigarette from the pack. “They were only just.”
*
He took a closer look at the demons when they attacked next, after he left them in a bloody pile at his feet. He prodded one of them with his boot, and he hated himself for it, but he felt a little relieved to feel its weight.
Think you’re pretending? You must be good at it, the voice in his head told him, and he knew he wasn’t imagining that, either.
The demons had visible skeletons and long, heavy claws—they’d taken away pieces of his coat in the battle. He hadn’t seen anything like them before, and Vergil knew demons, but they weren’t totally unfamiliar. And their blood smelled the same as every other demon he’d ever killed.
Something was still wrong.
Stop stalling, boy.
He glanced down the tunnel.
It got narrower, and the smell was getting overwhelming—and the ground wasn’t crunching under his feet, anymore. The texture had changed. His boots were sinking into gore. The deep breaths were doing more harm than good, now, and when he took them through his nose he choked.
Bring the head back before sunrise, or—
“I know!” He shouted it so loud that the echo made him flinch, but the voice fell silent.
He moved forward. It was all he knew to do.
The biggest, baddest monsters always lurked in the deepest caverns, the darkest rooms; Vergil knew that from reading comics books that hadn’t been his, an age or two or more ago. And that’d be the end game, there’d be no more of this, he’d just… kill whatever it was—he didn’t know what he was doing, not exactly, but he was faster than pretty much anything—he’d take the head, and—
I don’t value a man unless he’s a man of action. Take your plans, and—
“Stop.”
The tunnel widened, up ahead.
He slowed down, slightly, because the rock walls gave the impression that this was a threshold, and not even his heightened vision gave him a clue as to what was coming. His fingers curled around Yamato, but he didn’t stop. This wasn’t the time to hesitate.
Something moved. He tensed, and his eyes followed that faint sign of life, but he’d wait until the last second before he drew his sword.
The head, make sure you bag the—
His mouth started to move automatically, to say whatever words might make her shut her trap, if only for a minute, but before he could, the something moved closer. It was running at him, now, almost silently, he saw a white flash in the shadows.
He almost drew Yamato.
—before sunrise.
He hadn’t moved fast enough, after all.
*
“There’s a cave, not far from here,” Isabella told him. “And a demon in these parts, as I’m sure you knew before you came.”
He looked at her skeptically, but he nodded.
“Many nasty things lurk in the caverns, and one fouler than most.”
“Is it a demon?”
“It’ll bleed like one,” she answered. More than that, she couldn’t say, and not just because he was an arrogant little snot and she didn’t want to. There were rules to be followed, a ritual like her nightly scotch and cigarettes. “The creature in the cave takes a different form for each opponent.”
He snorted. “Then how will I know it?”
“You’ll have no doubt when you see it.” A stupid question received a simple answer, but at least it was an honest one.
His fingers were still wrapped around that sword; she hoped he was well acquainted in its use. The creature took a different form for each opponent, but no form wanted to die. “You want me to challenge this thing,” he said, after consideration. “You want me to kill it.”
“I want you to bring me its head,” she answered. “Do this before sunrise, and I’ll teach you what I know.”
The boy had more questions for her—“Where in the caverns? Why the head?”—but she had no more answers, and finally he left in a huff. He hadn’t said a word about accepting her challenge.
She waited.
*
“Vergil!”
The boy came skidding out of the cavern, his voice high and thin and painfully childlike. Before Vergil had even moved, the boy was standing in front of him, staring up.
“Vergil! You’re—” The boy’s face fell, and he crossed his arms and scowled. “You’re not my brother.”
His shoelaces were untied, his jeans had holes at both knees, and his white hair was hanging in his eyes. He was ten years old, and Vergil didn’t have to guess that because he knew. This was Dante, ripped right out of Vergil’s memories of the day his brother died.
“You shouldn’t trick people like that,” the creature wearing Dante’s face was saying. “You look like him a lot but you’re not. So stop.”
Vergil took another one of those calm breaths, he filled his lungs with putrid air and curled his fingers around Yamato so hard he felt the strain in his knuckles. “S—stop—”
“Tricking me,” the little boy said. “I’m not stupid.”
He blinked hard. Dante didn’t go away.
“What’re you looking at?”
Vergil closed his eyes again, and his left hand went up to rub at his temple. The voice was gone now, it’d been replaced by a low buzzing he was certain was entirely in his head. “The monster,” he said, after he’d taken a second to compose himself. He’d almost managed it. “The monster, where—”
“Monster?”
Vergil looked at the kid, again.
He’d gotten bored with the conversation, by now, his gaze was wandering all over the place, up the plain gray rock walls and across the blank gray rock ceiling. He didn’t seem to notice the body parts, or they didn’t seem to bother him—no, they didn’t bother him. There’s no way he could have missed them.
“How did you get here?” Vergil demanded.
“Dunno.”
“How long have you been—”
“Don’t know.”
He’d put all those bodies here.
This was the creature in the cave.
“You can stop looking at me.”
Vergil looked away.
You’re lucky, the voice said, speaking to him, finally. Not a fierce beast, doesn’t have a single claw. A simple matter to—
“There’s another way,” he interrupted. “You can change it, you can change this.”
The demon—
“You’re the demon, here,” he snapped. He shouted, and the voice didn’t deny it. “You will change this, or—”
The boy had been backing away steadily during Vergil’s conversation with the air, though he didn’t step back into the dark. He wouldn’t go that far. His eyes had gone wide, and they got wider as he spoke. “You’re a freaking weirdo.”
“I’m not,” Vergil disagreed, purely out of habit, because that was what you did when your brother called you a freak. He froze, and the nausea hit again. Shaking his head didn’t clear it, swallowing didn’t either. He grabbed Yamato tightly and took a step forward.
Dante—what looked like him, anyway—took such a hurried step in the opposite direction that he almost tripped, his arms pin wheeling to keep his balance. “What? What?” he was saying. “I didn’t do anything!”
The sun rises in less than an hour, and this deal will not stand another night.
“Shut up!”
The boy froze, and Vergil didn’t know if it was the icy tone that did it, or the threatening way Vergil kept gesturing with the sword. He stared up for half a minute, maybe longer, before he jerked his gaze away. “Definitely not my brother,” he muttered.
Then he turned tail and darted back into the cavern.
*
The mouth of the cave was only a mile away from the door to the pub. It was still three and a half hours before she heard the door to Lockwood’s open, and that boy dragged himself in front of her, again.
She took her cigarette out from between her lips, resting it on the ash tray. “You made your way back,” she said.
He said nothing.
His pretty clothes were mussed, his hair fell across his way in a way that was neither stylish nor intended. But he wasn’t bloody, he wasn’t sweaty, he wasn’t breathing hard. If it wasn’t for his eyes, Isabella might not have known how exhausted he really was.
“You had an easy time of it,” she noted. “Most who enter that cave—”
“I didn’t.”
She waited for his explanation, even something so small as a cocky smirk, which seemed to be in character. But it didn’t come. She looked down at his hands. One was curled around his sword, same as it’d been before.
The other held a lumpy, uneven package. A sack of some sort, tied with a piece of thin rope, about the size of a cantaloupe.
He saw her gaze, and he tossed it onto the table. It hit with a heavy thunk and rolled around, upsetting her ashtray, sending the debris straight to the floor. She swore and jumped to her feet, and for all his hesitation at the beginning of the night, he didn’t even flinch, now.
“So you did it,” she said. She picked her drink up off the table. She glanced down at the package, and she reached out to tug on the cord.
“Don’t.”
His voice was strained, he was stuck somewhere between ordering and pleading, but that told her enough. She let her hand drop. “Your lessons begin tomorrow,” she said. “And you’d better show up on time, or not at—”
“Don’t order me. I meant what I said, before, in the caves.” He spoke without looking at her; he was staring at the wall at her back. “Who was the one?”
Isabella took a seat, moving leisurely, already reaching for another cigarette. She was down to three. “Beg your pardon?”
“You said…” He took a second, maybe a little more, and then he shook his head sharply. “You said everyone who came to you was human. Except for one.”
She paused, and then she laughed. “Boy,” she said, striking a match. “I didn’t have anything to teach him. But … that is why I gave you that chance.”
He seemed frozen to the spot, his mouth moving like he was chewing on his lips from the inside. Finally, he managed, “And why is that.” His voice was as flat as his face.
“You reminded me of him,” she said, waving her hand slightly, smoke rising in small circles up from her fingers. “You know, he had pretty white hair, just like yours.”
*
“You aren’t going to fight?”
Vergil’s eyes had never adjusted to the new, unnatural darkness, but he’d found the boy anyway. He was a faint shadow pressed up against the far wall, small fists curled up and held next to his head. The whimpers had given him away.
“Stand up,” Vergil ordered.
He didn’t.
“Move.”
He didn’t do that, either.
Vergil held Yamato awkwardly at his side, raised like he meant to draw it, not sure if he should, or… not. He didn’t know what to do at all. If the thing would fight, struggle, hell, even speak, he’d know what to do. But this…
Say please, Isabella suggested. Perhaps that will work.
He spoke slowly and deliberately. “I’ll kill you for this,” he said. “One day.”
Save your threats for when you have the strength.
He scowled. Then he swung the sword, and caught the boy on the temple with the sheath.
Dante—not Dante—yelped, but didn’t fall. He didn’t cry, either, but Vergil didn’t have any memories of that, nothing for the creature to draw on. When the boy looked up again, he was shaking. Vergil could see the trembling limbs, even in the dark.
He raised the sword again.
“You’re… really going to kill me, huh,” the boy said, after a long silence. He pulled his fists up in front of his face, rubbing at tears that weren’t there.
“You should’ve fought back,” Vergil said, by way of an answer. His grip on his weapon made his fingers hurt, his wrist ache.
“I thought—” The creature sighed, and his voice shifted, becoming sad and serious—not Dante, not anymore, even if the face was the same. “I thought this would be better. That it’d be harder.”
*
“You’ll be there, then,” Isabella said, making the statement a question. She didn’t care, but she wasn’t sure anymore; the boy had gone from obvious to nearly impossible to read, and she wasn’t going to waste time better spent sleeping if he was turning coward now, of all times.
He looked back at her for the first time in minutes. “I will.”
She chuckled, taking a long, slow drag on her very last cigarette. She wanted to enjoy the flavor. “To learn to kill me?” she asked. “You’ll know that by the end, you realize.”
He stared at her for several seconds, the silence strained as always, and then he kicked out, striking the side of the table. The package—the size of a cantaloupe, or maybe a small, severed skull—rolled wildly.
Isabella was on her feet again, her eyes flashing, waiting for his challenge.
But he just stood there, calmly, sword resting lightly at his side.
“I know,” he said. “I’m counting on it.”
*
Vergil knew he had to be quick. He moved to swing—and he found himself wondering if Dante, the real thing, had accepting dying so easily. The thought sucked all the strength out of his motion, and Yamato dropped harmlessly to his side.
“You keep doing that,” the creature said, his voice the voice of a child, sulking and petty.
Vergil raised the weapon again.
“Don’t you feel bad?”
The voice in his head didn’t have a word to say to that, no helpful comments, no smart remarks. In fact, his mind felt remarkably clear. And maybe he did feel bad—his head hurt, his entire body was sore, he felt like throwing up. That wasn’t what Dante meant.
The creature could’ve taken the form of any monster that had ever dragged itself out of Hell, and Vergil would have preferred it.
But that was the idea, now, wasn’t it?
“Don’t you?”
“No,” Vergil answered, and he swung his sword.
*
