Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s all wrong. 

Everything is wrong. 

Dante is trapped in a wardrobe, terrified and barely able to breathe and feeling like he’s gonna be burned alive while his mom is outside trying desperately to find the brother that Dante’s stupid actions drove off, and all he can think is that this must be the end of the world.

There are monsters outside. Demons. Dante didn’t think they were real, always thought his dad was making up stories when he talked about fighting them way back when, but then the demons appeared and set the house on fire and nearly tore off his arm and now he knows they can’t be anything but real. 

He doesn’t want this to be happening. He wants it to be a dream. A nightmare. This can’t be real. Mom can’t be gone. Vergil can’t be gone. This can’t be real. 

He pulls his knees closer to his chest, pressing up against the back of the wardrobe and trying to get away from everything happening outside. It’s all his fault. If he hadn’t made Vergil run away, if Mom hadn’t had to go scrambling to hide him, if she hadn’t had to go find Vergil because Dante couldn’t help but annoy him, then maybe, maybe-

He shakes his head. He doesn’t want this to be real. 

He wants his dad back. He hates his dad for leaving. He doesn’t understand why his dad left in the first place. He knows that his dad is the reason the demons are here, because some of the demons were screaming about Sparda and the Son of Sparda and Mom said she wouldn’t let them have him or Vergil, so that means his dad is the guy they hate and it’s all his fault that the demons came and ruined everything. It’s all Dad’s fault that Mom and Vergil- that they-

Dante bites back a sob. 

He wants his mom.

He wants Vergil.

He wants someone to save him. 

He really, really wants someone to save him right now. 

Because the demons are closing in and he can hear them tearing the house apart looking for him, gurgling and screeching and growling in ways that Dante thought were dumb when he saw them in horror movies but now realizes are absolutely, totally, terrifying real.

Something hits the wardrobe.

Dante, who’d shoved his head between his knees to make the noises go away, looks up. Through the slats, he can see glowing purple eyes looking right at him.

His voice catches in his throat and he can’t even scream.

‘This is the end,’ he thinks. ‘It’s over. I’m going to die. Mom is dead and Vergil’s probably dead and Dad is as good as dead and I’m gonna be next.’

Through the slats, he can see something shining. The skeleton has a scythe, he thinks. Something long and sharp. Dante wishes he had the sword his dad said would be his when he got older, the Rebellion. But it’s locked away upstairs, and Dante doesn’t know any magic- which he also didn’t think was real until today, but if demons are real then magic is real because the demons used magic to get there and to set things on fire and will probably use it to kill him too- so he doesn’t have it and there’s nothing he can do except sit and close his eyes while he waits for his death come.

…Until it doesn’t.

Because with an earsplitting scream, the skeleton explodes and the scythe falls to the ground. 

The purple glow and scythe are gone when Dante opens his eyes. Instead, two glowing pink lights shine down on him, the new glowing eyes seeming to twist and flicker toward red in a way that makes his head spin. Everything is red-orange in the flames, and Dante can’t really tell what anything looks like anymore. His head hurts. Everything hurts, but the crying and the screaming and the smoke and the light of the flames make his head hurt most of all.

“Are you alright?” asks the pink eyed thing. It has a helmet. It looks like a knight.

Dante stares.

“Are you well, child?” it asks again.

Dante keeps staring.

Another demon screeches in the background and the pink eyed knight turns around. Dante can’t see what exactly he does, the wardrobe still closed and the slats blocking his view, but the knight moves, he hears a weird hum that kind of sounds like thunder, and a second later a bunch of explosions go off and the demon doesn’t make any more sound.

The knight turns back to Dante, then kneels down so their faces are closer together, held apart only by the wardrobe’s slats. Its features are hard to make out, a slit over the eyes the only thing that allows Dante to catch a glimpse of the pink glow coming from within, which is strong enough it lights up the helmet’s forehead too. The knight doesn’t have any pupils. It seems wrong.

“It’s not safe to remain here. We must go,” the knight tells him. 

Dante continues to stare.

“I will free you from your prison. We cannot remain in this place any longer. I have defeated the demons which invaded your property, but it is only a matter of time before more arrive. If you wish to live, I must spirit you to a realm where they cannot reach. So listen, child. Come with me.”

The knight reaches forward, a soft ‘clink’ filling the air when his hand reaches the wardrobe. Something cracks between them. For a moment, it’s almost like Dante can hear his mother’s voice. Her scream. Then the door is pushed aside and Dante’s left open and exposed.

He tries to scoot away, but his back is already pressed against the other end of the wardrobe and there’s nowhere to go. He doesn’t know the knight. The knight saved him, yes, but he doesn’t know him. He wants Vergil. He wants Mom. He wants to wake up and for this all to be a dream. A nightmare. One of the ones that sucks to have, but means Vergil or Mom will let him spend the night with them to make sure the bad dreams don’t come back.

The knight reaches out once more. Its armor is an ashy ivory, ornate carvings covering nearly every inch. He looks like he came straight out of a story book. It reminds him of the suits of armor his dad keeps in the study.

“Come, child. You will be safe with me. I will not allow you to come to harm; you are too precious a resource to lose.”

The knight places a hand on Dante. It’s burning hot. Dante doesn’t know why, but something about the knight makes him want to run as fast and far away as he can.

When Dante neither responds nor moves, the knight lets out a growl that raises the hair on the back of Dante’s neck. He sounds irritated when he speaks, voice distant and echoing weirdly in the metal of his helmet. “I’ve already taken your brother to my safehouse. He cried out for you. Do not make me disappoint him by saying I could not retrieve you as well.”

Suddenly, a beacon of hope. “You have Vergil?!” Dante gasps, desperate, voice finally coming back to him. He can’t believe it. Vergil’s alive? Vergil’s okay?

“I do.” 

Dante shifts in the wardrobe, not sure of what to do. He needs to get out of here, to make sure Vergil’s okay. But what if the knight is trying to trick him? How does he know the knight is telling the truth? How does he know the knight isn’t one of them?

The knight’s eyes flash carmine. Somewhere in the house, there’s a large crack. 

Before Dante can figure out what’s happening, the knight suddenly launches forward. Dante chokes down a yell as the knight’s arms wrap around him, shoving Dante against the floor of the wardrobe. The knight’s body cuts him off from the rest of the house, molten armor blocking out all light and sound. He can’t breathe under the pressure. It hurts.

A rush of sparks and hot air tears past them. There’s a loud clang, and Dante can feel the knight’s body hum against him. When the knight finally pulls away, still holding onto one of Dante’s hands, Dante looks up to see a sea of flame. His eyes go wide as he realizes what just happened. 

The top of the wardrobe is gone. Something above them must have collapsed and destroyed it. Behind the knight are pieces of burning wood and chunks of cracked marble. 

If the knight hadn’t covered him, the debris probably would’ve crushed him. That would’ve been it. He would’ve died in the wardrobe his mom had put him in.

The knight’s booming voice stabs down to Dante’s core. “I will not say it again. Come with me. For the sake of yourself and your brother.”

Dante tears his eyes from the ceiling to look at the knight. He’s scared. Terrified. He doesn’t know the knight. He doesn’t know what’s going on. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen.

But the knight fought back the demons. The knight saved Vergil. The knight saved him, and he wants to help more.

So Dante nods. “Okay,” he whispers, trying his best not to cry. He can’t afford to cry. Not now. He needs to be strong. He needs to be a big boy, like his mother told him. Big boys don’t cry. Big boys stand tall in the face of danger, and never give up. Dante will not be broken. 

“Good,” the knight says. Then, he pulls away from Dante and stands, though he continues to hold Dante’s left hand in his right, jerking Dante to his feet. “Follow.” 

Dante nods. The knight saved him. The wardrobe is broken. He can’t stay here; he doesn’t have any more protection from the demons without it. If he stays here, he’ll be killed by the first demon that finds him. If he stays with the knight, then the knight will kill them first. 

“Your father gave you a special sword, did he not?” the knight asks.

Dante nods. “Rebellion,” 

“Can you retrieve it for me?”

“It’s upstairs.”

“Then upstairs we shall go.”

Dante stumbles forward as the knight tugs him towards the staircase, his short legs not nearly as long as the knight’s massive ones and struggling to keep up. As they move, Dante looks back towards the spot he last heard his mother scream.

There’s a huge wood beam on the ground over there. It’s on fire, and parts of it are black and crumbled away. Chunks of stone litter the floor around it, and a burning tapestry is draped across one end.

Beneath it is blood and golden hair. Cloth. Skin. A lump of-

Dante thinks he’s going to be sick.

Before he can even try to go toward it, before he can so much as reach out for his mom where she lies amongst the flames, the knight pulls Dante into his arms and tears him away from any hopes of reunion. The knight leaps into the air, jumping higher than Dante thought any sort of person could do, and shoots through the gap in the ceiling that the beam came from to land in the second floor hallway. Smoke fills the air. Through the haze, Dante can see glowing red crystals everywhere.

The knight drops Dante on his feet.

“Lead me to the sword.”

Dante nods, dumbstruck. He's running on autopilot. He can still see his mother’s body in his mind, even as they walk down the burning hall. 

She's dead.

She has to be dead.

She was crushed. There was so much blood. She’s not tough like he and Vergil are. She couldn't survive that. She’s dead.

It feels like someone else is moving him as he walks to the room where his dad locked away the Yamato and Rebellion. The door explodes off the hinges when they arrive, the knight lifting his chin to stare at it as he drags Dante into the room. It's hard to make out anything in the room, the smoke thick and gray and making everything fuzzy, but Rebellion gleams through the haze, a single bright spot in an otherwise dull and dark room. When he stumbles to the case it's stored in, the knight having finally let go of his hand, Dante notices that the Yamato is missing.

"Vergil has already retrieved the Yamato," the knight says, words stilted, the knight's patience clearly wearing thin.

Dante nods along even though that doesn't make any sense, because there's no way Vergil had taken the Yamato with him before he'd run away and there’s no way he could've made it into the house to retrieve her without Dante noticing. His brain's too full of static and the image of the beam and the hair and the blood and the flesh over the soundtrack of roaring flames to put up a fight. However Vergil ended up with the Yamato doesn't matter right now; he's here for the Rebellion, Rebellion is still there, and when he reaches for the case, Rebellion immediately dissolves before reforming in his hand. He's got what he came for. He needs to get out of the house. The smoke is hurting him. The smell and the sight are hurting him. It's all horrible and wrong.

The knight hums. He sounds pleased.

“Before we go, there is something I would like you to do,” the knight tells Dante, pulling him back into the hall even as Dante chokes over the smoke filling his lungs and squints through tears blurring his vision. Rebellion feels oddly light in his hand. Like it hardly weighs anything at all, even though it’s as tall as he is. The knight points to the red crystals. “Take these.”

Dante stares blankly. Overlaid on top of the crystals are a burnt beam and golden hair and blood.

The knight tugs at him again. “Take them.”

Dante stares. They look like blood. Smell like it too, except they have some sort of after-smell that makes his stomach turn. The scent of his mom’s blood multiplies. Dante thinks he’s going to be sick.

“Take them!” the knight growls, dragging Dante towards the closest pile of red crystals and placing him in the middle. Dante just blinks in response, too drained to respond.

When Dante’s foot touches one, he’s filled with a weird rush of energy and the crystal disappears. It leaves him feeling giddy. Some of the sickness in his stomach settles, even though his heart still says something’s wrong.

The knight presses into his back. He said they'd go if Dante took them, right? Dante shuffles forward and a few more disappear. With another minute of shuffling and being dragged, they’re all gone. Dante still feels sick, but in a different way. He’s dizzy like he has a fever and jumpy like he drank his mom’s coffee when she wasn’t looking and gross-full like he ate the whole jar of cookies when he was only supposed to have two and it’s terrible but also somehow good, even if he can’t identify what about it would feel good because it all feels bad too.

But he doesn’t have to think about it any longer because the knight picks Dante up and brings them outside.

There’s a huge portal there. A red-pink-purple tear in front of the woods.

The knight walks toward it, Dante in his arms. Rebellion lies across Dante’s body, the hilt resting on Dante’s shoulder and the blade against his knees. The knight doesn’t seem like he wants to touch it. Maybe Dante should be concerned, but right now he’s feeling really overwhelmed, and he doesn’t have the brainpower to think about that much more.

When they walk through the portal, Dante feels a rush of- of- something that feels stronger than anything he’s ever felt before.

It’s too much.

The last thing he hears before the world goes black is the knight saying “Welcome to your new home.”

Chapter Text

Dante wakes up to a world of white, throat dry and head pounding. Ivory curtains hang from the top of a poplar-framed four-poster bed, while waves of alabaster bedding threaten to drown Dante’s aching body. The walls are the color of bone- and Dante knows what that looks like from the time he and Vergil hit each other too hard and things got bad, scaring the both of them into a temporary truce while Dante helped pull Vergil home while Vergil hopped on his good leg, trying and failing not to cry- and the pearlescent sheen of the floor reminds him of the necklace his mom used to wear sometimes when they’d go out.

(His stomach does a flip at the thought. 

His mom’s necklace. His dead mom. The one he’s never, ever going to see again. The one who tried to hide him and died keeping him safe. The one who was crushed and bled and will never again wear a string of pearls, her jewelry almost certainly lost with the rest of the house and her neck probably not in any shape to wear anything, even if her body didn’t burn up completely in the flames. 

The discomfort in his throat multiplies as the urge to sob comes back up, even when he’s so exhausted he feels like he should have no tears left to cry.)

He looks back down at the sheets engulfing his body. The mansion fire replaying in the back of his mind, the snow of the comforter turns to ash. Flakes had drifted in through the slats in the wardrobe even as the flames were held back, a reminder that Dante couldn’t escape, that he was going to die too no matter what his mom did, and all he’d been able to do was watch as his world got whiter and greyer and further away. They’d stuck to his skin like plaster, unnecessary and unwanted and uncomfortable from the moment they were there to the moment they were gone. More had come to meet them as the knight had pulled Dante through his crumbing home. There was no helping it when you walked in a world of fire. Every memory Dante had of growing up turned to dust, working to choke him to death as he waded through its corpse.

Dante swallows. He doesn’t want to think about it any more. What he had. What’s gone. What’s not coming back.

His throat is dry; the fire took all the moisture from his body, he thinks. Throat and nose and eyes, all the mucus and all the tears stolen from him in one horrible, extended moment. What happened to the ash? To him? Where is he? Where is the knight? What’s going on?

The world closes in on him, the pressure increasing, and Dante can’t stand it. He rips the sheets off his body, throwing the scratchy, suffocating fabric down toward his feet, and runs his hands all over his body trying to see if there’s any ash or blood or anything left. All he ends up with are a handful of cuts from his own hands, his nails sharp enough to slice him where the demons and the ash hadn’t, and when he gets down to his feet, he realizes he’s not wearing anything he’s seen before and he hates it. Instead of a t-shirt and shorts, he’s in some sort of weird dress that ties around the waist. His socks are gone, and when he tries to look for his shoes around the room, he doesn’t find those either. There are weird grey statues of creatures he’s never seen before (of demons, his brain tells him, and his breaths only grow shorter as his panic deepens) all over, a few giant fancy candlesticks, and what look like a monochrome closet and dresser made of the same wood as the bed frame, but none of it’s Dante’s. None of it’s familiar. When he looks down to his arms, the blood’s already gone.

Something’s not right. Sure, he and Vergil have always healed faster than their mom, but he never healed that fast, did he? 

He tries to slash himself again, looking for that sharp nail and swiping it across the soft part of his arm again and again until it opens. 

It takes thirty or forty seconds to heal. Dante realizes he doesn’t actually know how fast it’s supposed to do that. He’d never tried to cut himself before- Mom hated when he and Vergil got hurt even when it was an accident, and Dante doesn’t like being hurt, he just doesn’t always mind it- and all the other times he’d gotten hurt he’d never bothered counting. He thinks it’s a little faster than usual, but it isn’t as fast as he thought it was. His sense of time is probably all messed up. He has no idea how long he’s been in this room, no idea how long it’s been since the attack, Maybe he just thought of it wrong before. Maybe the weird place is messing with him. He swears there’s something strange about the air.

Noise sounds somewhere nearby and Dante jumps out of bed, the sheets tangling around his feet before he can land. He hits the ground with an “oof”, and before he can completely free himself, the door to the room opens and Dante’s rapid heartbeat crashes to a halt. 

“...”

There, in the doorway, is a gigantic, standing lizard. It looms over him, a giant predator with bright yellow eyes staring down at Dante where he’s stuck on the ground. Where Dante’s feet can’t run, his heart makes up for it, beating a million miles a minute. He needs to escape.

Dante decides he doesn’t care about the sheets and shoves his nails in them, tearing them in two to pull himself free. 

Problem is, even with his feet untangled, there’s nowhere to go. When he takes a step back he runs into the bed. Throwing a quick look over his shoulder, he sees the room doesn’t have any windows. The only exit is the door. The place the demon is.

It takes a step forward.

Dante won’t be killed. Not now. Not when Mom told him to live. 

“Get away from me!” he yells, trying his best to look big and strong. He puffs out his chest and waves his arms, trying to remember what his mom told him to do if any of the bigger wildlife came out of the forest while he and Vergil were alone. He’s not going to sit and do nothing this time. He’s going to be a big boy. He’s going to do something. 

If the demon is intimidated, it doesn’t look it. Then again, the demon doesn’t have any sort of face Dante’s ever seen on a person, eyes tiny, snout huge, and mouth extending up nearly to its ears, so he has no idea what intimidation would even look like on it. It could be that the demon’s terrified and he just doesn't know it. He really hopes the demon is terrified even though Dante doesn’t know it. It’s twice his size. What’s Dante supposed to do if it jumps him?

The demon takes another step forward. Dante’s still sticking out his chest, still being a big boy, but it gets somewhat harder to breathe. Still, he stands his ground. 

“I’ll hurt you, you know! I won’t go down without a fight!”

It cocks its head to the side. 

Memory comes back to Dante. The Rebellion. He rapidly swivels his head from side to side. He’d had the Rebellion when he left the house, if it’s nearby then maybe he can- can-

It’s nowhere to be found. 

The demon closes in on him. It lifts a hand, claws gleaming.

Dante swallows. The odd pressure grows. This is it. This is going to be the end. He’s trapped in someone else’s house and there’s a demon trapped with him and he doesn’t know where his sword is and-

“Dante!”

A weight is lifted as the demon spins around, immediately dropping to a knee. As it does, a new figure skids into the doorway.

Even with the demon partially blocking his view, Dante knows exactly who called out his name. He knows that voice. Would know even if he hadn’t heard it, even if he hadn’t seen the owner. He’s always gotten this little feeling in the center of his chest whenever he’s near. 

“Vergil?”

Vergil walks into the room, stopping to lift his chin at the demon. He pins it with a glare. “You may leave now. Go tell Uncle Dante’s awake.”

For some reason that makes absolutely no sense, the lizard demon bows. Sounds Dante’s never heard rumble out of its barrel-shaped chest as words he shouldn’t understand somehow register in perfect comprehension anyway. “Yes, my lord,” the demon gurgles.

A second later, it’s gone, skittering out of the room like all the normal lizards always had when he and Vergil had chased them back home. It’s both familiar and not. Familiar and wrong. 

But even ignoring the complete and utter wrongness of Vergil telling a demon to do something and the demon actually doing what he said, a whole new set of alarm bells begins to ring in Dante’s mind over what the demon said. 

My lord? Uncle? What were Vergil and the demon talking about? They’re not royalty, and his mom and dad had never mentioned any other family members. It was always just the four of them.

(Was. It was. But now it’s two. Or maybe three. But not four. No, never four, because the walls are closing in and the wardrobe door is shut and the ceiling is crumbling as ash fills his lungs and Mom is dead, dead, dead-)

Vergil’s speaking before Dante’s rapid breaths can choke him to death. “Are you all right?” he asks from a foot away, having closed the distance at some point Dante hadn’t noticed. How did he do that? He wasn’t there a second ago. Why didn’t Dante notice? Is he that out of it?

Vergil looks genuinely concerned for him, and Dante thinks he might be sick. Vergil never looks like that. Vergil’s supposed to be pushing him around or telling him to go away. Or playing with him, or fighting even, sometimes the two are pretty much the same thing, but not staring into Dante’s soul like he’s actually worried for him. Worrying is their mom’s job. Was. Was. It’s getting harder to breath again and Dante spits out the first thing he can think of to stop the room from completely closing in. Maybe if he makes Vergil feel better he’ll end up feeling better too. 

“Um. I think so,” he stammers. Which he doesn’t. Not really. But Vergil isn’t supposed to worry and Vergil’s worrying is kind of freaking him out, so if Vergil’s indifference is the only familiar thing he can get, then he’ll shoot for that. “I mean, I do feel kind of funny-” he adds when Vergil narrows his eyes, suspicious, because his body is aching, a weird pressure in the air closing in on him that he can’t quite name, “-but maybe I just need water. I haven’t had any since-”

Mom. The attack. The flames and smoke and wardrobe and blood and-

Vergil grabs Dante’s hand, once more drawing his attention back to the present. “Uncle said he wanted to talk to you. Come on, I’ll show you where the dining hall is. It’s almost time for dinner and they should have something to drink to go along with our meal.” He tries to pull Dante along, but Dante doesn’t budge.

“Who are you talking about? We don’t have an Uncle. Vergil, what’s going on?” He’s not going to keep ignoring the elephant in the room. Things are confusing enough without Vergil mentioning relatives that don’t exist.

Vergil makes a funny face at that, everything scrunching up as the worry is replaced by that typical Vergil annoyance Dante knows and loves and is for once in his life grateful for because he still doesn’t know where they are and Vergil’s wearing a weird white dress-robe thing too and when he looks so wrong in the clothing way, having his face look slightly right helps set the world back on its axis. “Stop being so impatient. I’ll show you. Just follow me and you’ll see when we get there.” 

Impatient? Dante thinks he has every right to wonder what’s going on, what with them being in a weird place wearing weird clothing around weird creatures with weird air and weird everything after everything they once knew went wrong.

“What’s wrong with you?” Dante snaps back. If Vergil thought he was impatient before, he’ll show him what real impatience is. “Why are you acting like everything’s okay? Vergil, Mom-”

Vergil spins around on his heel, shaking. His voice has a weird echo when he speaks, and Dante can’t tell if Vergil sounds angry or just empty, even though the extra layer makes him seem weirdly full. “Don’t talk about her.”

Dante’s anger spikes even higher. He didn’t think it was possible, doesn’t think he’s ever been so mad in his life, but there’s something bubbling up in him now, something different, and it’s just begging to be let out. How dare Vergil say that? How dare Vergil, who’d always been the Momma’s boy, tell Dante not to talk about her either? “What? But Vergil, she-!”

Boiling anger is met with cold fury. “I know what she did. What happened.” He steps away from Dante, moving down the hall. When he speaks his voice is soft, and it reminds Dante of what Vergil always sounded like when he’d upset their mom and got so upset himself he’d start to cry. “She’s dead. Gone. She’s in the past, Uncle is not. We need to get going.”

He moves to grab Dante’s hand again, but Dante steps back.

“No. I’m not going. You don’t get to talk about Mom like that!”

“Why not? Do you think just because you were the favorite, you get to decide what I say about her? That’s not how it works.”

“Don’t say were!” And Dante was never the favorite either. She always said she’d loved the both of them the same. Even if she’d been lying- and Dante doesn’t think she was lying, their mom was always honest with them, always kind- Dante doesn’t think he’d have been her number one.

Vergil merely huffs. “Why not? She’s dead. That’s how you talk about dead people.” He drops into a mumble. “And people who left you behind.” 

“Stop saying that!” He knows their mom is dead, knows she won’t be coming back, but to hear it repeated over and over-

Vergil snaps back to anger. “Make me!”

Dante decides he’s had enough. He’s not going to listen to Vergil badmouth their mom anymore, especially when she’s not there to protect herself. The job has fallen to Dante, and he’s going to do it until his last breath. He jumps at Vergil, trying to tackle him to the floor. He’ll beat some sense into his brother. If he wins the fight, Vergil will have to admit Dante’s right. 

But his hit doesn’t land; one second Vergil’s there, and the next Dante’s leaping at air, stumbling a step into the hallway with no Vergil to stop him. 

The next thing he knows, Dante’s slumped against a wall and he can barely think. The world spins around him. His vision blurs in and out. His head is pounding, he’s vaguely aware of his bangs sticking weirdly to his forehead. 

He doesn’t know what happened. It hurts. It was so fast.

After some amount of time Dante can’t make out, everything fuzzy and seeming a mile away, his brain kicks into just enough gear to make out a few things in his surroundings. Vergil’s yelling at him. He’s always loved that, hasn’t he? If anything, the familiarity of it is kind of nice.

“-te? Dante!?” Vergil’s shouts sound like he’s underwater when Dante manages to make out what he’s saying, his eyes eventually focusing on Vergil’s body leaning over him, their knees tangled up as Vergil presses his shoulders against the wall. Is Vergil trying to hold him up? Since when did Vergil get there? Is that Dante’s room behind him? How did Dante get so far into the hall? Why does Vergil sound so upset? Why is everything so far away? “I didn’t mean- Dante-!”

“My head hurts,” Dante mumbles. Distantly, he thinks he smells something coppery. When he tries to lick his lips, dry from sleep and lack of water, he tastes blood.

Vergil says something else, but Dante doesn’t catch it. 

After that, things go black.