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“So how does it feel to be reunited with your dear old brother, huh?” Dante leaned in to bump Vergil with his shoulder as they walked along a particularly red and barren-looking stretch of hell.
Closing the portal to the other side had been a hectic rush with not much time for chit-chat. But now that the immediate apocalypse was out of the way, they could take their time.
There had been a few tense moments then—Dante hadn't asked what they were going to do next, he'd just cut in with, “Now we look for a way back, yeah?” and after a long, uncomfortable moment of hesitation, Vergil had offered him a slow nod, and Dante had allowed himself to relax just a tad.
Vergil said using the Yamato again too near where the Qliphoth had been was a bad idea—so they were headed to a far distant point where he said he'd escaped from the last time. Maybe they could use that again, maybe not, but it was as good a plan as any, for now.
In the meantime, now that they didn't have any demons to fight, things were a little...silent.
“It feels fine,” Vergil replied. That didn't give Dante much to work with.
“Come on, how many years has it been?” Not a question Dante expected or needed an answer for, but he asked it anyway.
“I'm not sure,” his brother replied, taking his question entirely seriously. “Time doesn't always flow the same on either side...and there have been...other complications.” He turned his head to Dante. “How many years has it been for you?”
“Eh, not that long. 'Bout enough time to nip off to the corner store for some milk. And have a son grow to adulthood.”
Dante wasn't sure what sort of answer he was expecting to that, but Vergil didn't even sigh in response, just continuing to walk on in silence.
“You must've gotten lonely, all that time without me,” Dante bumped him with his shoulder again, adding in a needlessly forceful elbow jab while he was at it. “Did you cry lots?” Not waiting for Vergil's answer, he spread his arms wide. “Don't worry, I'm here to hug it all away, bro!”
Vergil's answer was a casual swing at his face with the scabbard of his sword, which Dante nimbly avoided.
The swing didn't at all deter Dante, though, as the grin that had been repeatedly infecting his face since they'd come down here to hell just spread wider. “Aww, he's shy! It's okay to admit you have some soft and squishy feelings in there, deep down.”
Unsurprisingly, that led to the first of many fights—which Dante won, though Vergil claimed otherwise.
After that fight, and then the swarms of enemies that followed it, the both of them wound up lying on the arid ground panting for a while amidst the stunning landscape of demon guts that surrounded them as they contemplated their next move.
Despite being rather tired at this point, Dante still couldn't leave well enough alone. “Since you never answered my question, I'm gonna take that as meaning you missed me lots,” he said, heaving himself off the ground as his brother did the same.
“Believe whatever you like,” Vergil muttered as he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the nameless demon muck off his face. Dante settled for using the back of his hand.
“Then I choose to believe you were absolutely devastated by my absence,” Dante said, strolling up to his brother to continue on their way, “Spending day and night struggling to get back to me, only ever thinking of the deep brotherly affection you'd lost, and constantly thinking about how you'd make everything up to me.” He cluched his heart dramatically.
Turning toward him, Vergil gave him a dull look as he tucked his dirtied handkerchief away. “You think I have something to make up to you?”
Dante clapped him on the shoulder, and Vergil's eyes immediately slid over to where Dante's hand lay, a nameless expression on his face. Dante dropped his hand. “Vergil, m'boy, making a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself is the first step! ...No wait, that was admitting your powerlessness... Whoa, and here I thought the twelve steps were totally useless, but now that I think of it, this stuff is pretty relevant to you, huh! All that stuff about admitting wrongs and making amends...”
Vergil's eyelids twitched, and he clicked his tongue at Dante. “I have no idea what you're talking about, but I see no meaning in dredging up the past, now. What's done is done.” And without another look at Dante, he continued on down the path.
Shaking his head, Dante followed after him. “Come on, you're not gonna offer one teeny-tiny apology for kinda almost destroying the world? Again?”
There was a slight hitch in Vergil's stride, but he didn't stop walking. “Do you honestly care about that?” Vergil said, tone dismissive.
“Why the hell else would I have stopped you?” Dante shot back, his joking manner now thoughtlessly evaporated, and he winced when he heard his own voice. He didn't want to say it like that. Fake fights, he could handle—he couldn't handle another real fight. He'd been bracing for one every single minute since the two of them had come down here, and he couldn't handle it.
“Because nothing gives you more pleasure than keeping me from what I want,” Vergil replied, tone somewhere between dry and bitter.
“Whoa whoa, you're making me out to be the asshole, here?”
“Would you describe yourself as a pleasant person?”
“...Yeah, okay, so I'm an asshole, but you're definitely the bigger asshole, so feel free to be smug about that victory.” Vergil didn't answer, so Dante continued. “I just wanna know if I'm gonna have to kick your ass again in the near future when you suddenly get megalomaniacal again.”
Ahh, now he'd gone and said it. He'd ruined this temporary, fake alliance between them and brought them back to reality. Vergil was still Vergil, and Dante was still Dante. Dante had known he would ruin things soon enough, but he'd wanted to hold out for at least another week—another week to see Vergil's face, fight with him, joke with him, memorize the sound of his voice and the way he moved and everything else to last Dante for another twenty-five years of booze-addled reminiscence, once Vergil was inevitably gone again and Dante was left alone.
Vergil stopped where he was and turned fully toward Dante, his expression harder than usual. “If that's what you're anticipating, then I apologize for letting you down,” he said icily, then stalked on ahead.
Dante stood there for a moment, feeling a little gutpunched, before he jogged after his brother. “Hey, one apology, that's a start!” he called after him, and when he came up at Vergil's side, slung a casual arm around his shoulders. Even through his coat, he could feel Vergil's body heat, warming him in the chill of hell. “Now if you could just say you're sorry for never shooting me a text for the past couple decades...”
“A what?” Vergil's head turned to him, his expression withering.
“Whoa, you don't even know what a cell phone is, do ya? Okay boomer, it's time for an education,” Dante said, making a conscious effort to not squeeze the arm around his brother's shoulders to make sure he was still there.
x x x
Their tentative alliance continued, held together by what felt like the thinnest threads of circumstance.
It was a funny thing. Dante had spent two and a half decades mourning Vergil, but now that he had him back, he had no fucking clue what to do with him. He was by turns giddy to have him around and terrified that he would go. The last time they'd been on anything resembling friendly terms, they'd been eight years old. At this point, about all Dante remembered was conflict and grief, and those were the parts that clawed into him deepest and refused to let go.
Of course, Dante was a big boy. He knew what Trish or Lady would tell him about this—he'd heard their lectures about a million times—often enough that they'd both basically given up trying. Why can't you just have a real conversation, Dante?
As far as Dante was concerned, he was having real conversations with Vergil. What was more real than a conversation with swords and fists? That was a lot more real than empty words.
Maybe that was why he kept goading Vergil into more fights. It was a test, to make sure they could do it without everything breaking. Or maybe Dante just wanted to be eight years old again, who the fuck knew.
But somewhere around the point when they'd both lost track of their ongoing score, and they were arguing about where to wipe the slate clean to start their new scoring system, when Vergil had really lost his patience and stabbed Dante straight through his gut with Rebellion, just like old times, but then Dante had gotten stubborn and kept a hold on his collar, throwing him down on the ground too, and then they'd wound up ditching their swords for a good ol' fashioned punch-out in the mud, and Dante had wound up straddling Vergil, laughing as he gave him a well-deserved punch in the face—at around that point, Dante had to admit to himself that they weren't eight years old anymore.
Because when they'd been eight, he hadn't gotten hard from every single fight.
x x x
The last time Dante had had normal sex was when he was a teenager.
Well, what he assumed was normal sex. He didn't really have a damn clue what normal people did, but back then had probably been about as close to normal as he could get. More than a few times during his misspent youth, back when he'd gone out to bars to get wasted instead of drinking at home alone like an adult, he'd drunkenly stumbled into various flavors of hookup, generally crawling out of some stranger's bed in the wee hours of the morning with vague or little memories of the night before, desperate to escape for reasons that seemed petty in retrospect.
It had never really felt that great—maybe because he always went into it drunk, maybe because he was always half-terrified that he could never reciprocate whatever it was people hoped from or expected of him—he was just looking for a distraction, and sex was a piss-poor one, compared to fighting. The one good thing he could say for himself was that he'd always had a healthy paranoia about getting anyone pregnant, so when he was with a girl, it was ass or mouth or hands only. He didn't even trust condoms. There were few things that scared Dante more than spreading his fucked genes around.
But even that had become out of the question, once his demon had awakened.
There had always been a part of him that enjoyed fighting a little too much—or a lot too much. He'd been aware of that since he was a kid, when he and his brother had beaten each other bloody for fun, causing their mother to shriek in horror at the sight of it. It was her reaction that had woken him up—after that, Dante had stopped giving his all when he fought with Vergil. It was better just to let Vergil win, rather than to let it escalate to the point where it would make their mother cry.
Some part of him had probably instinctively known what would happen, if he let that part of him go, and he'd been holding himself back. He'd had a damn good set of reasons to hold himself back.
But his awakening atop Temen-ni-gru had put an end to all that good ol' healthy repression, and now, a normal fuck never did it for him. No—that was understating it. He couldn't even hold himself back to the point of a normal fuck. Whenever he was in a fight and it got good, he'd start getting hard, and whenever he was trying to fuck and it got good, his demon wanted to turn it into a fight. Those two wires were irreversibly crossed, and he couldn't untangle them, no matter how many normal, healthy skin mags full of attractive women he tried to beat off too. Not that he wasn't into women. His life would have been a hell of a lot easier if he'd just been gay or something. No, he just wasn't into humans.
It hadn't really sunk in until well after Temen-ni-gru. A lot of things had started sinking in around that time. He'd gotten real falling-down drunk one night and gone out looking for a fight—not even on a job, just blindly running out into town looking for something to stab, and luckily there'd still been some demonic stragglers at the time, or he might really have done something worth regretting.
It was a testament to how fucking unkillable he was that even when he could hardly walk in a straight line, the demons he found couldn't even fuck him up as bad as he'd wanted them to. Nothing could give him a good fight anymore, there was nothing worth fighting, what was even the point?
Drinking held back the demon, but not very well. Once he'd shed enough blood of his own and blood of the enemy and his heart was pounding hard enough, it all came roaring back, and he wound up playing with his food, swatting around a couple of demons in a back alley without really trying to kill them, laughing drunkenly as he smacked them with the flat of his sword and watched their blood hit the alley walls. It wasn't enough, it was never enough—he wasn't sure what happened in between, he didn't even remember, but by the end of it, his fangs were buried in the neck of a vaguely human-shaped demon and his pants had fallen to his knees as he fucked the wet gash his blade had opened up in the demon's back—he remembered grabbing it by the back of its head and slamming its face into the wall over and over and getting off on the crunch of bone, cumming to the sound of its dying shriek as he shifted into full devil trigger with an gutteral howl.
And then when he was done and he was human again, with a bloody, dead demon filled with his cum at his feet, he'd stumbled away, pants down around his ankles, tripped, and puked up a stomach full of whisky and pizza on the pavement.
At the time, he'd really felt that was rock bottom, like he was teetering on the verge of just letting go completely and becoming one of the things he was supposed to be hunting. He'd really had no fucking clue, back then.
These days, Dante managed his needs with a few swigs of booze and his own red clawed hand, gnawing at his own arm when he needed to taste blood. It was better just to chew himself and feel his mind go blank, better to think about that disgusting fuck in the alley or the handful of other times he'd slipped than the other things his mind would come up with. He was so sick of that one memory, dredged up over and over until he was sure his own fantasy of it had overwritten the reality. He knew in that memory, his brother had never reached out to touch Dante's cock with his hand, Dante had never cum, he'd never clung to Vergil and tasted him back—that was all in his own head. Mentally attempting to re-write his personal history and fix every stupid, juvenile mistake was an entertaining pastime that went very well with a drink or five.
When Dante jerked it to that memory, he couldn't help but trigger—every single time. Even in his grave, Vergil still brought out the demon in him.
x x x
These were some of the thoughts that passed through Dante's mind as he stared at the large pink blossom before him.
“Surprisingly pretty, for a hell flower,” Dante commented, as if said hell flower was not the cause of his current...distress.
“Hmm,” Vergil grunted, eyeing the same flower. “There are plenty of beautiful things in hell.” And from his tone, he seemed to mean that quite sincerely.
“Never took you for a flower guy,” Dante said as he grabbed the flower's thick stem with his Balrog gauntlet to burn it to a crisp. “Sorry to ruin your aesthetic pleasure.” Burning the flower, however, seemed to be a mistake, as he inhaled a full lungful of the blossom's scent in the smoke and staggered, momentarily dizzy.
“You can't seriously be so affected by these flowers,” Vergil said, sounding deeply exasperated. His expression was cool as always, despite the sweltering heat around them.
“Nah, I'm fine, I'm fine,” Dante waved away the smoke, shaking his head. “I just need a minute.” And he walked a little ways away from Vergil, sitting himself down on a rock.
They'd been down in hell for a few weeks, now, and this particular stretch of the journey was through a jungle-like area with lots of thick, twining plants—an unsurprising number of which were very carnivorous. It was hot as hell, too. Dante's coat was tied around his waist as he scrubbed at his sweat-streaked face with the back of his glove and took a few deep breaths, determinedly not looking over toward his brother.
As much as he'd been enjoying this hell jaunt, this one particular leg of the hike was...straining, to put it mildly.
This forest was absolutely chock-full of those pink flowers. Vergil described them with some vaguely lewd-sounding Latin term that Dante had immediately forgotten, opting instead to call them “hell flowers” and leave it at that.
Despite Dante's attempts to get away from him, though, Vergil was oblivious—or uncaring—at Dante's attempt to distance himself, as he approached him, casually whacking his way through the undergrowth with his Mirage Blade. “After the river of blood and cavern of needles, this is Dante's downfall? Some piddling flowers?”
Normally, Dante would have risen to the bait, but he really didn't want to look at Vergil right now. Leaning his forehead on his fist, he kept his eyes clenched shut and tried to imagine the toilet at Devil May Cry at its worst. “...How long until we're out of this forest?”
“I doubt it will take us more than three or four weeks to get through.”
“Three or four weeks?!” Dante yelped, head whipping around to Vergil, which was a mistake.
The bastard refused to even loosen his collar, in this obscene heat, and he was still barely sweating. He looked like he hardly felt the heat at all. His silvery hair was swept back in stiff lines, glossy, his full lips pressed together slightly in annoyance. He was still wearing his damn coat, which was probably for the best, but it didn't matter how covered he was—Dante was having absolutely no trouble mentally undressing him, over and over.
Dante's head whipped forward again, holding it in his hands as he focused on the undergrowth at his feet. “No way am I taking this for three weeks. There's got to be another way.”
“What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. How about I weave you a flower crown?” Dante could hear the smirk in his voice.
“Don't you know pink and red together are a fashion crime?” Dante shot back. He had to make a few jokes, or he was really going to lose it. “I can't believe these flowers aren't bothering you.”
“There are plenty of far more potent drugs in the underworld. You get resistance through exposure.” Vergil didn't elaborate on his experiences with these drugs, though, and Dante didn't prod.
“How long does it take to gain resistance?”
“Around ten years.”
Dante heaved a long sigh, shifting in his seat—which was a mistake. With every movement he made, his erection rubbed the inside of his pants, and he had to resist the urge to lean into it, to reach down and rub himself off. He'd already tried that enough times that he was sore and oversensitive.
“I am way too fucking old for this,” Dante groaned into his sweaty hand. He was over forty. Didn't guys get erectile dysfunction and stuff, around this time? God, if he could get some of that, wouldn't that solve a whole lot of problems. But if anything, he was feeling more...vigorous than he'd even been at eighteen.
“You do realize our father lived for at least two thousand years?” Vergil said dryly. “And you're still juvenile enough that I have faith you have many years ahead of you.”
“Takes one to know one,” Dante shot back, fully aware he was proving Vergil's point with that remark.
“But more to the point,” Vergil smoothly ignored him, “being surrounded by the demonic energy of hell will have rejuvenating effects. It's not surprising if you're feeling more...youthful.” Dante heard him sigh before hesitantly adding, “The truth is, these flowers are all connected through an underground root system, and there is a main, central plant that I believe is not too far away. So if we can find the main plant and kill it, all the flowers in the forest should shrivel up and die.”
While this sounded like great news, something about the way Vergil said that made Dante wary. “is there a catch here? There's gotta be a catch.”
“The main plant will be far more potent than its satellites. I'm not sure you would like to go seek it out. If you would prefer it, I could go alone to kill it—”
“No!” Dante immediately cut him off, his mouth reacting faster than his own brain as he was struck with terror at the idea of Vergil going off by himself. “No,” he repeated, a little more calmly this time. “If we get split up in a jungle like this, we'll have a hell of a time finding each other again. Better the both of us go. How do we find this thing?”
“It will be where the flowers are thickest. Just follow your nose, Dante.”
x x x
Vergil took the lead to sniff out the plant. Watching his ass as Vergil whacked his way through jungle undergrowth was a special kind of torture, but there was another reason Dante had to stay in the back.
Dante could feel his skin rolling under his clothes, hardening to demonic plates before melting back into soft skin again. The teeth in his mouth kept shifting from sharp to dull, and he felt the hard nubs of wings aching to burst out of his back.
Sin Devil Trigger had already been a move in desperation, a line he'd never wanted to cross. And ever since Dante had come to the underworld, with all the demonic energy swirling around, it had been easier to shift, easier to stay longer, and with each change, he felt himself going deeper. He'd suspected this might happen—the last time he'd come to hell, he'd felt it bring out his demonic side, and he'd been half-resigned that this time, hell would finally take him, stripping away the last scraps of humanity he'd been clinging to all these years.
And now, with these fucking flowers, it was finally happening. As they approached the main plant, it was slowly tearing Dante's demon out of him. Over the past few weeks, Dante had resigned himself to consuming demon flesh, but this was one appetite he was not going to sate. If he did that, then he really would lose himself.
Dante had spent years resisting his demonic lust for Trish, and then for Nero—sometimes he wasn't sure if this was just a demon thing, or if this was just a next-level Freudian incest complex or something, but whatever the hell it was, he was not gonna let it happen. Even if Trish had ever been interested—which she wasn't, she could barely put up with him as a partner, let alone deal with his shit on a more intimate level—Dante's psyche could not handle acting out the violent fantasies he had on a woman with his mother's face, and neither was Dante going to fuck up Nero's sweet relationship with his girl because he couldn't keep it in his pants with his own fucking nephew.
And Vergil—
Dante swallowed as he thought back on that one time, back before Temen-ni-gru, when they'd both been teenagers—when Vergil had gnawed at his flesh, drank his blood and ground against him.
And then Dante had rejected him. Not because he didn't want Vergil. But because he'd been scared of himself.
But that had been twenty-five years ago. Though being with Vergil felt like old times, Vergil had literally become a different person, since then, broken and put back together. Vergil didn't speak of it, but Dante could sense something different in him. He lacked the blind arrogance of his youth, which was probably a good thing, and he seemed...both less and more human. He hardly slept, and when he did, it wasn't for long.
Vergil always needed space around him, now. If Dante came to close to him when Vergil was sleeping and Dante was on watch, Vergil would immediately wake up, and more than once, Dante had found himself with the Yamato pressed against his throat as Vergil looked at him with blank eyes, still caught in nightmares he never spoke of.
It wasn't that Vergil was fragile, now. Exactly the opposite. He was like broken glass. Beautiful, sparkling under the light, and ready to cut into you.
He was scared he didn't know who Vergil was, now. Dante was scared to find out that he was the only one who was dragging around the past like a ball and chain, and that Vergil really had emptied himself of everything that day he'd impaled himself with Yamato in their childhood home.
It wasn't fair. How did Vergil get to wipe the slate clean for himself and leave Dante drowning in everything, all alone?
Dante wanted to drag Vergil down with him, which was the sickest impulse of all.
x x x
“Y'know,” Dante said, sword slung over his shoulder in a forced casual manner as he stepped into the clearing where the main plant awaited, “I've noticed a pattern with demonic babes. They always look sexy, but then they transform into something extra nasty.”
“How rude,” the pink flower demon replied to them. She was a collection of blossoms hanging from a stem in the shape of a girl with a slight, youthful figure, surrounded by a vase of leaves. “Do you treat every flower like this?” She lay reclined on a green leaf that extended from the stem she grew on, and didn't rise at Dante and Vergil's presence.
“Flowers are for pluckin', after all,” Dante stood before her, pointing the Devil Sword Dante at her.
The demoness, however, did not seem intimidated. “Why are you bothering me? I have no interest in fighting.”
“A demon with no interest in fighting? Tell me a new one.” Despite all the sweat pouring out every pore in his body and the fangs he was clenching at the back of his mouth, Dante was doing a pretty good job putting on a tough act, so that was something to be proud of, at least.
Leaning her chin on her hand, the demoness pouted her pink, floral lips. “Uh, hello, I'm a sex demon.” She made a beckoning gesture toward Dante with her other hand. “I'm much more interested in seeing you strip. ...And him, too,” she cocked her head at Vergil with a sweet grin. “The three of us could have so much fun,” she purred, and when she saw the death glare Dante gave her in return, she added, “Or you two could fuck while I watch.”
“Yeah, see, I'm not really into that,” Dante said, the biggest lie of his life. “So either you turn off the horny juices in this forest, or I'm gonna have to do a little garden pruning in here.”
The flower demoness laughed. “I've heard all about you, Son of Sparda. But I thought you had a bit more respect for daddy's legacy. Don't you know he was the one to plant me and my sisters, over two thousand years ago?”
Dante's sword arm lowered slightly. “...What.”
“The Dark Knight Sparda was a real honey,” the demoness cooed. “A lot of people 'round here still hate his guts, but well, he was always a perfect gentleman with me,” she giggled. “And he had a massive—”
“Don't need to know!” Dante swiftly cut her off. The very last thing he wanted to hear about was his demon dad's sex life. “Just turn off your damn flowers already!”
The demoness frowned at him. “What? No. You come into my forest make demands of me? I'm just trying to have a nice sexy time, here. If you don't want to fuck, then get out.” Then she rolled over on her leaf, and the green fronds around her began to close in, her stem retreating into the ground.
“Oh no you don't—” Dante ran up to her, sword raised, but her blossom was closing, and as he approached the flower, she rolled, turning toward him, and blew a hot pink cloud in his face.
Dante breathed in a big lungful of the cloud before he realized what was happening, and his vision momentarily went white. His legs wobbled as he fell to his knees, and the blossom, now fully closed, was pulled into the ground by the stem, burying itself away.
“Dante!” he heard his brother call, but he wasn't paying attention. All he could hear was the sound of his own gasping breath, loud in his ears, as his blood pounded. He felt hot all over, and he was shaking.
“Dante,” the voice was closer, and Dante looked up to see Vergil's face over him, looking down on him with concern.
Clutching his stomach, Dante cringed in one himself. “Get away from me,” he said, and his voice coming out of his mouth was guttural and two-toned.
“Dante, are you—”
Vergil didn't get to finish that remark.
The demon burst from Dante's flesh all at once, and he leaped on Vergil, throwing him to the ground. His claws tore through leather and flesh, stripping Vergil's coat one one side from his shoulder to his hip, his head immediately lowering to lap up the blood with his long tongue as his other claw reached down to Vergil's thigh, yanking it up, shredding his pants with a casual swipe.
“Get away from me,” Dante repeated at a strained growl as his fangs bit into the firm muscles of Vergil's chest, drawing a gush of blood. “Please.”
But Vergil remained still beneath him. He wasn't struggling or fighting back at all. “You can use me,” he said, his tone shockingly calm. “It's fine.”
Dante groaned, pulling his bloodied fangs away from Vergil's chest with an extreme force of will. He could feel his cock sliding out from underneath the plates that usually kept it hidden, slick with plasm. “I can't,” he pulled his claw away from Vergil's thigh, digging it into the earth at his side instead. “No, no no no,” he shook his head, closing his eyes to the reality before him.
“It's all right,” Vergil's hand rose up to touch the jagged angles of his demonic face. “You can't hurt me in any way that matters.”
That was a lie and they both knew it. “I'm gonna lose it. I'm gonna go all the way and never come back, I can feel it. Just leave me here. Just—” Dante clawed his way backwards in the earth, away from his brother. “Just go. Go!” He brought his sharp, spiked arms up to cross in front of his face, hiding from everything he didn't want to see.
“Dante,” he felt a touch on his shin, a touch that traveled up the spiked ridges to the hard plates of his thigh. And then he felt a weight over his thighs, seated right behind his cock, and opened his eyes.
Vergil was sitting on his lap—his jacket and vest were shredded and hanging off one arm, his chest striped with bloody but rapidly-healing cuts. His pants had been slashed open at the crotch, showing his reddened cock rising thick between his legs, which he was now pressing forward into Dante's own much larger one. His dark eyes bored into Dante's. “I might call you any number of names, but I never took you for a coward.”
Dante's claws dug deep into the earth at his sides as his chest heaved with the effort of restraint. Vergil raised up one hand to dip his fingers in his own mouth a moment before lowering his hand behind his balls, pressing into himself, as the other grasped the base of Dante's massive demon cock. His hand wouldn't even go all the way around as he stroked its ridged length, base to tip.
“What are you—”
“If you won't handle your problem, then I'm forced to deal with it,” Vergil said in a clipped tone, and then before Dante could bring himself to protest, he raised himself up to align his asshole with the tip of Dante's girth and slowly bore down on it.
Dante's hips immediately bucked, and Vergil gasped as Dante's cock shoved halfway inside. There was a faint tremor in his muscled thighs and a bob of his throat before he continued sliding down all the way, until he was sitting flush on the plates of Dante's abdomen, Dante's full length filling him. The reddened stretch of his asshole was absolutely obscene, and there was a visible bulge in his stomach from the line of his cock. The tight squeeze whited out Dante's mind for a moment. Every fiber in his body was telling him to fuck, claw, rend, devour, ruin. A low growl escaped from his throat, and Dante hardly recognized the sound.
Vergil leaned forward, panting over Dante's cock, a line of precum dripping from his own erection. He looked at Dante with half-lidded eyes and a flushed expression—out of anger or arousal, Dante couldn't say. “Are you so disgusted by this? Pathetic.”
Dante was enraged, and he didn't even know why.
Bowling Vergil over, he grabbed him by the ankles and spread his thighs wide, drawing back until just his cockhead was barely penetrating Vergil's hole to slam inside again, all at once. Vergil's head threw back, mouth open, but made no noise as Dante began to pound him. His entire body jolted with each powerful thrust, slack underneath the hulking demon that arched over him, wings flapping in counterpoint with the movements of his hips. Vergil's ass made wet, slick sounds with each plunge of Dante's cock, but with the redness of his own demonic skin, Dante didn't even realize he was making Vergil bleed until he saw the drip on the forest floor—and that just stoked his hunger. He turned his head to the ankle in his grip, ran his cheek along Vergil's calf, and bit into the flesh.
Vergil spasmed in his grip, his insides clenching around Dante over and over as he spilled white seed over his own stomach, but still, he never made a sound, and suddenly, that was the most infuriating thing in the world to Dante, and his claw razed down Vergil's side, digging in at his hip. He wanted to see Vergil bleed, scream, struggle, break—whatever it took to get him to submit, to bend to Dante's will forever and never leave him again.
His other hand went to Vergil's neck, closing around it like a threat. Vergil arched up into it, eyes closed, and Dante's claws tightened around it as he continued fucking into Vergil mercilessly.
“Scream,” Dante growled, shaking Vergil by the neck like a rag doll. “Scream!” He wanted Vergil screaming his name and nothing else, he shouldn't even be able to think any other words. He would rip out Vergil's tongue if he dared to say anything else.
Vergil's lips just turned upward in a smug sneer as he rasped out under Dante's grip, “When you do something worth screaming over.”
Dante was the one to scream instead, a grating shriek as he finished inside Vergil, pumping searing-hot load into him with thrust after violent thrust, claws buried deep in the flesh of Vergil's hip as the other squeezed around his neck tight enough to hear bones pop.
After the shudders of orgasm left his body, Dante's devil trigger unravelled and he collapsed, immediately rolling away from Vergil to kneel on the ground where he stayed on all fours, gasping and dry heaving.
After a minute or so, he heard the sound of Vergil pushing off the ground, and Dante felt him looking, but didn't look back. After a minute, he heard Vergil walk away, and Dante dropped down on the ground with a groan, covering his face with his arms.
x x x
Eventually, Vergil returned looking impeccable. He always had been good at that clothing regeneration thing, but it sure contributed to his mystique of perfection. When Dante did it, he still felt dirty afterward, but Vergil actually looked clean.
Then, in a manner that was absolutely nostalgic in its predictability, they dealt with the whole situation by determinedly not talking about it.
Maybe Dante wondered why through that whole ordeal, Vergil had never gone into devil trigger himself, but he sure as hell wasn't going to say a word about it.
After getting that out of his system, Dante was able to make his way through the forest with minimal disturbance. Or perhaps they'd satisfied the flower demon with their little spectacle, and her horny pollen had become subdued now that she'd rubbed one out on her own. Dante didn't really want to think about it.
Fortunately, there were enough fights coming at them that Dante didn't have to think about it, and he could clear his head with some sorely-needed bloodshed.
With time, he and Vergil slid back into their old banter, with the odd fight here and there—a careful holding pattern, deliberate on both sides, to maintain a fixed distance between the two of them. With a mission in front of them and demons to fight, it was easy to focus on those things instead of each other. It was a relief to focus on those things.
The hardest parts were when they were taking turns sleeping, and Dante would watch Vergil sleep from a distance, taking care not to come to close to wake him up.
How utterly Vergil, that Dante couldn't approach him, even when he was asleep. He was always somewhere else, on his own, forbidding entry.
One night, though, leaning against a jagged rocky structure as he watched Vergil sleep in a sitting position against a dead tree, Dante found himself wondering what it would feel like to have Vergil leaning against his side in sleep, or if it was even possible.
As much as Vergil was unapproachable, Dante was just as guilty of all the wrong approaches. He'd only ever known how to come at Vergil with a sword, and nothing had changed since they were teenagers. If Nero hadn't stopped them, one of them would certainly have died, and Dante couldn't even say for sure which.
“We're so fucking broken,” Dante muttered softly into the night wind, words meant for no one.
x x x
Occasionally, though, their meaningless banter would unfortunately turn into real conversation, despite Dante's efforts to the contrary.
“I think being a stubborn ass has got to be genetic,” Dante commented as he got to his feet after one particularly stupid spat about which fork to take in the road that had eventually lead to an exchange of blows. “Your kid is just as bad as you.” Bringing up Nero always seemed to irk Vergil, so Dante went out of his way to do it as much as possible.
“If you're looking to insult me, genetics is the wrong angle,” Vergil shot back, dusting off his coat with a scowl.
“True, it'd be better to start with your fashion sense, your taste in music, your life choices...”
“I don't need to be lectured on fashion by a man with a history of parading around without a shirt. And if we're discussing life choices—”
“Hey, no matter how much pizza I eat, at least I didn't get anyone knocked up, teen dad.”
Vergil's pace increased slightly, a sure sign of irritation.
“You never did tell me that story,” Dante went on. “So how'd you meet? Did you woo her with chocolates and poetry?”
Vergil's scowl deepened. “I never wooed anyone.”
“But you clearly did sow the oats.”
“How do you know he's not yours?” Vergil snapped back.
“V, when I was seventeen, I would have rather slit my own throat than get a girl pregnant. I've never fucked a girl in the pussy in my life.”
Vergil flicked him a look out the corner of his eye. “You hate your blood that deeply?”
Dante ignored the question, instead asking, “So who's the mommy? I'm dying to know.”
“...I'm being perfectly honest when I say I can't recall. I've hired...women of the night once or twice. I suppose it could have been one of them.”
Dante couldn't help but snicker at the term woman of the night. “Oh V, but you're handsome enough, you didn't need to pay for it! Or were you just too shy? Don't know how to talk to the ladies?”
Vergil's scowl deepened. “I have no use for that sort of superficial nonsense. I occasionally have physical needs, as do you.”
Dante probably should have shut his mouth at that point, but quite foolishly, he opened it again. “Aww, c'mon, you don't have to put on that tough act with me. You just wanted a cuddle, huh? Well, my arms are wide open!”
Vergil was walking a couple steps ahead, and when he spun around, he forced Dante to stop, or crash into him. He just gave Dante a long, hard look, his lips pressed in a tight line, without saying anything.
Dante realized he shouldn't have said that. He broke eye contact first, and Vergil turned ahead again to continue onward.
They didn't talk much for the rest of that day.
x x x
Weeks bled into months. It was hard to tell the passage of time, since it wasn't like the underworld had a consistent day/night cycle. Some places were bright and others were dark, and they just slept when they couldn't go on any further.
No place made Dante feel more like a demon than the underworld. He'd experienced it before, the last time he'd been here, and he felt it even more strongly now—there was a part of him that felt at home here, that settled into it like it was natural. There was less pretending here, less trying to fit into a society that was never going to welcome him anyway. Demons spoke the law of the fist and the sword, which Dante was more fluent in than anything using his tongue. It was...a relief. And that sense of relief was terrifying.
Even more terrifying was how used to it he could see Vergil was. Dante realized, far too late, that Vergil had spent more of his life in the underworld among demons than he had above, among humans. Vergil took the brutality for granted, like he'd been born in it. But Dante knew he hadn't been. He hadn't always been like this—and this was just another kind of front.
Dante had so many questions lingering at the back of his throat, but the more time passed and the closer they got to their goal point, the less he felt he could ask them.
What did it feel like to carve out your humanity? Why did you do it? Did you want to kill me that badly? Or was I anything to you, by that point?
...Am I anything to you, now?
He felt this impending sense of pressure, like he had to ask before this was over, like he would never get another chance, but that just made it more impossible to say any of these things. And more than anything, he couldn't bring himself to believe talking would change anything. Vergil had only ever believed in force.
And then it was too late, and they had suddenly reached the rift they'd been seeking all this time, with the human world flickering on the other side.
“Dante,” Vergil said when they reached the gate. It was a jagged opening in the air at the top of a barren, icy peak. After a long hike up to the summit, the both of them stood there with the cold wind whipping around them, neither feeling the need to shiver.
Vergil turned to face his brother, eyes serious. “I'm—”
“Don't,” Dante cut him off, head turning away from Vergil's piercing gaze. He had the sick, sinking feeling that he knew what Vergil was going to say. It was the bomb Dante had been waiting to drop all this time, and he didn't want to hear it. He wanted to put it off for another few weeks, a few months, and fill up the time with pointless banter and avoiding real conversations. He wished the journey could have gone on like this for years.
But Vergil had never cared about what Dante wanted. “I'm staying here,” he said, his voice heavy with finality. “This is where I belong.”
“No you don't,” Dante stepped forward, voice low. “You belong in the human world. With the rest of your family.”
“Dante—”
“Nero's girl Kyrie is pregnant, you know. I wasn't joking about grandkids.” Dante saw Vergil's hand twitch, then tighten around the hilt of the Yamato. A constant habit of his, the way he reacted to everything.
“You'll be a good grandfather,” Vergil said, eyes lowering to the rocky ground at their feet.
“No, I won't!” Dante snapped at him, and it came out harsher than he'd expected. “I'll disappoint them, I won't be there for them, and I'll bail on every single important event in their lives to get drunk alone and feel sorry for myself! And I'm not their grandfather—you are!” His voice felt so tightly controlled, it was just about ready to snap.
Vergil's eyes rose from the ground a moment, penetrating Dante with his gaze. “I have nothing to offer that world, and it has nothing to offer me. There's no place there for a demon. You know that better than anyone.”
Dante's fist was swinging out before he even knew what he was doing, and he must have surprised Vergil, too, because it connected square in his jaw, nearly knocking him over.
As Vergil was staggering, bringing a hand to his jaw, Dante said to him, voice shaking, “You're just as human as I am, you stupid fuck. Haven't you learned anything from trying to cut it out of yourself once already?”
“Yes,” Vergil spat, bringing his hand down from the blooming red on his cheek. “I learned that I shouldn't have been so careless, and I should have made sure 'V' was dead.”
Dante took another swing at him, but Vergil blocked this one with a raised forearm, turning his arm outward to grab Dante tightly by the wrist. Undeterred, Dante took another swing at his face, which Vergil caught in his palm.
“You'd be killing yourself!” Dante strained against Vergil's palm, shoving it down to grab his wrist in turn.
“Yes, that's the idea, Dante,” Vergil shot back with utter venom, his right arm straining against Dante's grip as his left squeezed Dante's wrist ever tighter. “Congratulations for figuring that out.” His eyes bored into Dante's, red and hot, his lips pulled back in tense snarl.
Dante's arm trembled slightly in Vergil's grip. “Don't you dare.”
“As if you've ever—”
“Don't you dare go without me.” Dante's voice broke. And then, before he could think, his head jerked forward to press his mouth against Vergil's.
Vergil jerked underneath him, lips initially still, but when Dante's moved desperately against his, they slowly opened, allowing Dante's needy seeking, his intrusion. Vergil's grip on his wrist tightened, if anything, making Dante's bones creak painfully with the strain.
“Vergil,” he murmured against his brother's lips, and he felt Vergil's hot exhale in reply. When Dante finally pulled back, Vergil still had his wrist firmly in his grasp. Dante wasn't letting go of the wrist in his hold, either.
Vergil's face seemed like it might be on the verge of breaking into something. His lips pressed together, then relaxed, and he swallowed, closing his eyes for a long moment before opening them again.
I need you. Come home with me, Dante did not say.
“This doesn't change anything,” Vergil said, his voice harsh and quiet. “...We're too broken.” Then he let go of Dante's wrist. “...I'm sorry, Dante.” Then he shook off Dante's slackening grip and turned away.
Seeing him walk off to the edge of the icy peak, towards the sheer cliff that lead below, something snapped inside Dante. He triggered with a howl, jetting toward his brother with lightning speed to grab him by the back of his jacket, then spun around just as fast to fling him as hard as he could through the portal gate behind them, following after him only a split second later.
The world seemed to upend, then right itself, and Dante landed on top of Vergil in a grassy green field, claws grasping for the sword at Vergil's waist. Vergil's hand shot out, shifting into blue claws on instinct, but he was too slow, and Dante yanked the sword away from him, spinning around to cut at the portal with wild, sloppy swings, making it absolutely unusable ever again, before his claws closed around the Yamato blade itself, straining against the demonic metal.
Sensing what he was about to do, Vergil leaped on him, fully in devil trigger as one clawed hand went for the hilt of the Yamato, and the other stabbed at Dante's wrists with lightning precision, gouging through plate to send blood spurting up from both, but Dante wouldn't let go.
“I'm breaking this sword forever, and you're never going back,” Dante growled in his two-toned voice as he whipped side to side, trying to get out of Vergil's grasp.
But Vergil struck his wrists again, and with a final yank, ripped his sword from Dante's grasp, and the blade swiftly merged with his arms, drawing out of reach. “You're an absolute fool, Dante,” he said. His tone of voice was hard to read when he was in devil trigger, and Dante couldn't tell what he meant by that at all.
But it didn't matter, because a heartbeat later, and Vergil was leaping on him with teeth bared and white-hot blades in his arms, tearing through Dante's hard, plated skin to make him bleed, biting into the soft junction between arm and shoulder to make Dante howl and hiss as Vergil's tail came to wrap around Dante's neck and squeeze.
When Dante's cock slid out from his plated sheath, he felt Vergil's there too, hot and pressed up against it, as Vergil rutted against him with furious abandon. Dante's claws scraped along his back, and though devils couldn't cry, they sure could scream, and Dante opened his mouth and roared in an endless, nonsensical stream, pulling Vergil close and tearing at him in turn, and this time, Vergil did reciprocate with a string of punctuated growls that came with each grind of his jagged hips against Dante's, until he was roaring too, shooting ropes of cum over the both of them, white mixing with the red that he'd bled from Dante's body. Dante came only a few moments later, arching up into him, wings beating uselessly against the ground as he pressed himself against his brother like he was trying to make them one again, just like they'd been in the womb.
When they finally shifted back to human form again, spent, Dante's grip on Vergil was iron and white-knuckled, both arms wrapped around him like a vise.
Vergil was still in his grip, just breathing against Dante's neck as they lay there in the long grass.
After a long, terrifying silence, Dante said, “I'd say that's my win. That puts me up by one.” There was a wobble in his voice, but at least he'd managed to say it fairly lightly. That was an accomplishment.
“You idiot,” Vergil's lips ghosted over his neck as he spoke, his body relaxing against Dante's. “We're even.”
“Yeah,” Dante agreed with a long exhale. “Maybe we are.”