There God is Dwelling Too

by idslog

Summary:

Dante was supposed to abide by three vows. Poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Poverty was a given. Obedience was manageable.

Chastity was Vergil’s most dire worry. For his brother and for himself.

Before Vergil takes on his priestly vocation, he seeks to finally proselytize his sinful brother, Dante.

(4VD, religious AU; otherwise known as Nunte and Priestgil)

Dante was supposed to abide by three vows. Poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Poverty was a given, at least in their lodgings. What Dante could fit into his room contradicted those vows, and Vergil conducted regular visits to skim off excess luxuries into the trash.

Obedience was less black-and-white. Dante was property of their church, but he took commands from no one, not even headquarters. His favors were simply requested, and he only deigned to take them on if he was bored out of his mind and had nothing to do, which was quite frequently and yet he still lazed around like he was out of options. The only service he reliably performed was when the occasional demon made its way onto church grounds and he with his keen nose slayed it before the watchmen could even ring the alarm.

Chastity was Vergil’s most dire worry. For his brother and for himself.

For Vergil, a vow of abstinence was one of the final frontiers for a man with the vocation to enter priesthood as he neared the end of his serving duties.

Now Dante might not have shared the same ambitions, but it worried Vergil to leave his brother by himself when he would soon enter the seminary. As much as the crows were justified to do so, he found it shameful for Dante to be picked apart by them for being unable to reign in his sins.

The subject of Dante’s celibacy was very worthy of his concern. How was it not? Dante had always taken to women easier. It was only the reassurance that no scandal arose (Vergil knew Dante, if he had committed an affair, would not go down silently) that Vergil was tided over by the assumption that Dante kept himself as chaste as he could. Some of that resolve crumbled with the advent of the newest sister that entered the convent. Sister Gloria was queer, likely foreign, no woman that Vergil had ever seen, and Dante was like no other man either, so it bitterly made sense that they might find an innate connection. Even if they never behaved inappropriately to his studious eye, her presence unsettled Vergil.

What else he saw of her was not noteworthy. She was kind enough, he supposed. Could succumb to mild sloth especially in the presence of Dante, but she always held herself with dignity. To Vergil’s surprise, she was in touch with the senior clergymen, and that made him respect her more when he compared Dante’s self-inflicted stasis to her ambitious rank-climbing.

They rarely crossed paths. But one afternoon, when the chilly air was beginning to parch his lips, they happened to, when he was making his way to his room to drop off his books.

“Vergil,” she greeted, but instead of making her way past him she turned with him as their paths intersected, walking with him, cupping his elbow. “Have you seen your brother around?”

“I haven’t, why?”

“He’s needed with the boys today. Swordfighting practice is in a few minutes.”

Which was a very Dante thing of him to do.

She was looking at him with that expression that women make; she wanted him lured to her conclusion.

He sighed. “I’ll see that he comes.”

“Thank you, Vergil.”

As always he tried to make the hunt for Dante less than a game. But his heart was pumping in the same way after a satiating jog when he did find his brother. Inside the church, to his surprise, though he almost skimmed Dante entirely if it were not for the few worshippers that sat so far in the back pews in the shadows that Vergil found it suspicious. At the end of the nave, Dante slept, one of his trashy magazines a tent erected over his face.

Without much ado, Vergil tore the magazine off his brother’s face. What was underneath was a man completely awake, no blinking away sleep. He smiled at Vergil. Vergil scowled.

“You were supposed to lead sparring today.”

“Oh, yeah?” Dante propped himself up on his elbows, finally pretending to arouse his senses from groggy sleep and gauge the complexion of the sky for the time. “ Well, I’m sure the sisters have it handled.”

“They specifically asked for you to teach them. A man. With swordfighting knowledge.”

Dante tutted. Vergil hated whenever his brother thought to use that tone. As if Dante had any higher position above him. “Those are some mighty regressive values, Vergil. Women can be swordmasters too.”

Vergil frowned. “I’ve never said anything to contradict otherwise.”

“Mhm. Keep digging that grave.”

“Obviously none of the sisters are going to be extensively trained swordfighters under their Father Sparda, you do know this. You’re being deliberately obtuse.”

Dante raised both eyebrows.

“You were invited for a reason. You’re the best swordsman at immediate convenience.”

“Thanks. I’m flattered.”

Vergil opened his mouth like a fish, but thankfully his conscience bid him quiet lest he would say something stupider than he would want.

“Get up.”

“It’s too good a day to spend working,” Dante sighed. “Sister Gloria’ll understand.” He pulled Vergil down by the wrist, unbalancing him. Vergil fell prone onto his brother.

“Dante!”

He struggled, but Dante had prepared for that contingency, tree-log forearms braced inclusively around Vergil’s upper arms and back. The movement made Dante’s chest flex against his cheek, and Vergil blushed. Any louder he might protest, and they’d both be found out.

“Relax, shh,” Dante said, as if he was cooing a baby. His hand gripped the back of Vergil’s head and thrust him between his chest. Vergil almost suffocated on it, if not the lack of air, but the thickness of it. He could feel his strength sapping. Dante let him go, and Vergil slid to his knees, gasping, furious, but too furious to move. Dante laughed, his roar ringing in the fair acoustics of the church.

Vergil resisted the song of defeat, but he still heard it whisper: how on Earth would Dante be able to find salvation?

 

 

 

It was rare that the vicar presided over Mass in his deteriorating health, but in a show of strength Solemnis gave a sermon about the value of forgiveness. The vicar was not too interesting, but Vergil thought his sermons quite moving. In the middle of it, he remembered to turn to his brother. Dante’s eyes were closed, and for a second he looked very serene and holy, until his lips parted and a pinprick of drool slipped out.

Vergil tried hard not to feel defeat. Dante’s unwavering laziness just meant it was up to Vergil to deliver him the word of their Father.

If sermons couldn’t break through Dante, Vergil’d simply need to try something else. Dante was just a late bloomer in this regard, that their Father’s will had not opened his heart yet. Vergil was a little bit prideful, a little bit smug. Dante may have been physically mature, but he was still prepubescent in terms of his deference to the church and their ways.

Vergil knew that Dante felt on some level that underlying competitive spirit that all brothers possessed. His judgement here did not steer him wrong. When Vergil with as much subtlety as he could muster announced he was going to confession, on a weekday no less and not on a Saturday, Dante’s attention was immediately aroused.

“Why? Can’t you talk to me instead?”

Always his questions were mocking and undeserving of answers, but he did sound wounded. He tended to, which is why Vergil hardly brought up confession until he had to.

As of now, he’d say that the matter warrants it.

“I’d prefer to talk to someone with a firmer grasp on morals.”

Dante laughed meanly.

“You should try it. It might be enlightening,” Vergil suggested.

“No thanks, Vergil. I’m not keen on sharing my biggest secrets with a creepy geezer I don’t know.”

“And me? Would you be opposed to your brother taking your confession?”

Dante’s incredulous gaze raked shivers over Vergil. Vergil wondered if his brother could see through his guise. He had not made it so secret that he would prefer Dante modest and obedient, so his desire for Dante to be properly God-fearing was not such a far stretch behind.

“Why? Proselytizing me, Vergil?” Vergil’s breath hitched. Dante had got it in one. But the comment slid off like one of the many scathing insults Vergil frequently relayed to him.

Vergil shrugged as casually as one could with his kind of disposition. “I’m no creepy geezer you don’t know,” he said. That seemed to entertain Dante enough.

“Alright. You know what? Sure.”

Of course, there was no priest on duty today, and Vergil had not requested anyone’s dire help, but that seemed to slip Dante’s attention when he was practically dragging Vergil along towards the church. Perhaps his eagerness to confess was also affected by their time apart. It had been a few days since today and the last time they had met, as the Chief Alchemist had taken the time out of his busy schedule, and Vergil was so inclined to study whatever he could when the senior members of the Order visited.

Some part of Vergil was still on high-alert. Dante could change his whims like a weathervane. He could sniff out the distant smell of pie and drag Vergil into his hunt. Vergil might be able to wrestle his way out of Dante’s iron maiden, but he’d also be delayed in his efforts to save his brother’s infernal soul, and who knows when Dante might be so agreeable in the future. He was only so relieved when they arrived at the church without issue, and gestured towards the confessional.

Dante looked at Vergil in a way that gave him enough pause, or something that paralyzed his stomach, along with the rest of his organs.

“Do you want me anonymous?”

“Yes,” Vergil said. “It’d be better if I treat you like any other parishioner.”

A difficult concept to put into practice, when even Vergil was familiar with the sound of Dante shuffling into place, brusque and shoving his weight around. He bit a scathing remark behind, reapplying the reminder that Dante was doing him a favor. A favor to himself, Vergil thinks. His brother had to be in sore need of a confession. He entered on the other side. Luckily, with the curtains drawn, both his and Dante’s face were cast in a shadow that obscured them more than the flimsy grate between them would.

He heard Dante laugh nervously. “Haven’t done one of these in a while,” he muttered to himself. Vergil tried to not make his disappointment obvious.

“Here goes nothing.” Deep breath. “Forgive me, brother–”

“Father,” Vergil reprimanded. “You’re not addressing me, you’re meant to address our Father.”

“Okay, geez, my bad. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“You can tell me when your last confession was,” Vergil offered.

“Well…”

“Yes?”

“I haven’t… really… confessed before.” Vergil squeezed his eyes shut. No wonder. What he attributed to Dante’s forgetfulness was just absolute inexperience.

“That’s fine,” he lied through his teeth. “Carry on. What are your sins?”

“My sins…” are plenty, Vergil thought. “Can’t think of any. Gimme a sec.

I mean, in recent news? I drank some of the communion wine.”

“That’s why the casks have been so empty!”

“I’m sorry,” Dante chuckled. “That’s the first one I could think of.” He fell quiet for a moment, then “I’ve pretty much stolen half of all the communion wine for… the last ten years.”

“We should all be so grateful that you left the church with a considerable portion,” Vergil sneered.

“I thought this was going to be a judgement-free zone, Father. If you’re going to be like that–”

“No, continue,” Vergil demanded. Only a few seconds delayed did he realize he should’ve been less officious, but decided eventually that Dante wasn’t deserving of his patience anyway.

“Hm… I think I’ve been slothful.”

“Yes.”

“Gluttonous, too. I’m going down the list.”

As if the wine didn’t already give that away. “Mhm.”

“Can’t forget lust.”

Vergil went still.

“Yeah, Father, I’ve got to confess. I am a very lustful creature. I know my general modesty might be deceiving, but I am.”

“What?” But Vergil’s voice was hoarse, and he couldn’t even be sure if he had even said it. Dante didn’t flinch. “What do you mean by that?”

“Seems pretty clear to me,” Dante answered.

“There is such a vast spectrum of…lustful behavior. To think sexual thoughts is not… out of the ordinary,” Vergil said, though he despised to admit it.

“Oh,” Dante chirped, like he understood completely, “Obviously it’s not just that. I masturbate frequently.”

“How many times?” Vergil blurted out. “Daily?”

“More than once a day,” Dante replied. Vergil shut his eyes. His body was abuzz. Though he tried to ignore it, he knew his cock was pushed out from between his legs.

“It’s the only staple of my routine. I can go without food, without wine, if I really try. But I can’t not fuck myself,” Dante said, all too matter-of-fact.

“Watch your mouth,” Vergil gasps.

“Whoops.”

“Is that the extent of your prurient behavior?” Vergil prodded. He hated the sound of his own voice in the confessional. He should hardly be the one speaking. But it felt as though he was on the other side of the booth, pulling his skin and flesh exposed for his brother to see all the sins he had buried under the wooden planks.

“Well, besides from the constant need for sex?” Even the word sex triggered something in Vergil’s most sensitive and susceptible instrument. “Don’t worry, my sins are a solo act,” Dante said.

“That’s…good.”

“A solo act with a variety of instruments,” Dante added. “My hands are great, but it’s never enough, and there’s nothing I won’t try at least once. Hey, is it a sin to use household objects for a sexual purpose?”

Vergil’s mind raced through the last iteration of Dante’s room, scanning his memory for any objects that could remotely resemble a phallus. “How even–”

“It’s not as hard as you think.” Dante’s voice took on a low pitch. “You just have to think outside of the box.”

“Enough!”

Dante fell silent. Thankfully he remained as so, as Vergil regained his senses. And it was no short recovery that Vergil needed for him to calm down, or even slake his terrible curiosity.

“That’s… enough,” he said. “You have said enough.”

“There it is. These are my sins, Father,” Dante said, plainly and unapologetically.

No real regret to his voice. No asking for absolution. Not even a promise he wouldn’t continue on his wayward descent. Vergil twitched, inflamed.

“Do you find it so funny to ridicule the sanctity of confession? No wonder you humored me.” he accused bitterly. "Always you take advantage of the opportunity to humiliate me and my vocation."

“Vergil, come on. I was just–”

“Mortify yourself,” he said.

“Mortify–huh?”

“Inflict physical punishment. Flay yourself,” Vergil grit out. “Or…or strike yourself, with your sword, anything you can think of. This is your penance.” All he could do was disdainfully watch his own bulge pulse in his loose white robes, holding onto faith in the material not to bleed through and stain. He was stunned by the sight of it. It was him. It was a part of him, but it just wouldn't obey.

“Come on, kid–”

“Father-”

“That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?”

“Your sinful body has betrayed you. A physical punishment is required to correct such a deep-seated sin. It is so embedded in your flesh, and you must eject it from your temple.”

“Vergil…”

“This is the only way you may absolve yourself to our Lord, Dante.”

Vergil wondered if his brother might protest, or outright leave the confessional. He knew he could be cruel, when he thought Dante to have been lenient on him during swordplay and proved him otherwise by landing flesh wound on top flesh wound into his skin. He was snide with his words. He debased Dante. This was a different thing entirely.

“Alright,” Dante responded, “I’ll flay myself,” with the same intonation as he might say “I’m going out for drinks.” “How often do you suggest I do so?”

“As many as it takes for you to know repentance,” Vergil said. Dante could flog himself to death for all he cared. He didn’t need to hear another word. Forgetting his rites, the act of contrition, he threw open the door of the confessional and stumbled off.

 

 

 

Vergil never strayed too far from the castle grounds. The Mitis Forest was that time-bending gradient between the castle true and the headquarters where the clergy mainly operated their more technological ambitions, and because of its therapeutic nature, Vergil had lost too many hours to it. He knew each homogenous tree like each silver hair on the back of his hand.

In childhood he recalled coming here with Dante, when Dante wore less faded habits and Vergil still allowed himself to wear his favorite color, blue. Back then, Vergil was more easily distracted from his study and training. Dante, however, had always been the same, slothful way.

For a boy with no friends, Vergil bought his one friendship by blood and it was with his brother who had previously enjoyed decades of human degeneracy before he found Vergil in the safety of the Order of the Sword. But Vergil had hardly seen Dante with anyone either. His brother was a lone wolf. Aside from Gloria, he seemed to have earned the ire of everyone else, and the only reason he was never outright kicked from the church was the open secret that he was another son of Sparda, and his first-born, no less. Dante bought his free ride with his blood.

Suffice it to say that Vergil had a low opinion of his brother now, but that was never always the case. Vergil just did as all boys did. He grew up.

If he had to be charitable, he would need to offer sympathy for Dante’s own extenuating circumstances. He was not as lucky to have been born into the church like Vergil had. Vergil told himself this, for every offense that Dante had committed: when he forgot to pray every morning and night and before meals, when he indulged in (self-)destructive vices, when he stoked fear and anger in his fellow men for the sheer fun of it. For the sake of "drama."

Vergil sat in a gazebo in the forest, waiting out his erection and battling his faith. When faith came up victorious again on its never-ending win streak, he returned to the castle and to his own quarters. Dante wasn’t there, which surprised Vergil, as Dante made just as close friends with Vergil’s room and belongings when Vergil was absent.

Anxiety fed his stomach where it was barren. Not wanting to make himself look too desperate, he abstained from visiting Dante’s.

Instead, Vergil sought out his Father in his own sanctuary the church, and there at the altar, Dante sat, not kneeled, cross-legged like how a child might, looking up at the largest icon of their Lord. Dante was no longer in his faded red robes and in his casual attire that Vergil never saw Fortuna churchgoers wear. They were artifacts from Dante’s life in Redgrave City, before Vergil was born and before their parents died.

The pants were called jeans, Dante had told him.

Even the urge to scold Dante for wearing those dark, worldly garments escaped him. Vergil approached quietly.

“Good evening, Dante,” he said stiffly. Dante turned and smiled at him.

“Hey, kiddo.” No word of the lewd barrage he burdened Vergil with.

“Are you praying?” Vergil asked hopefully.

Dante shrugged. “Kinda. Just talking.”

He turned back to the statue, and Vergil’s gaze followed.

The statue was supposed to resemble their Father in the natural form of his demon, though Dante had claimed otherwise. Dante hardly prayed to Him, but Vergil had still seen Dante capable of self-initiated prayer in the privacy of his own room, kneeling by his bed.

There was a pang of jealousy in Vergil’s heart. Of course Dante wouldn’t need to take prayer seriously. He never had to. Before Vergil was even born, all he would need to do would be to dial home. Send a letter. And before that, even, in adulthood, all Dante would need to do was to tug on their father’s coat.

“What about?”

“About you.”

“Not yourself?”

Dante laughed. “What is there to talk about on my end? My life’s a snoozefest.”

“If you engaged in more of the responsibilities expected of you, you might find all of this a little more interesting.”

He just shook his head. “I don’t think it’s my thing, and you know that.”

Vergil stayed quiet for a moment.

“What did you tell Him about me?”

“Just–you. As a person. As an altar boy, too, I know how important that stuff is to you. And that you’ve grown up so much.”

Vergil didn’t really know what to say other than: “thank you, brother.”

Dante smiled reassuringly.

For a man who had just confessed that his life of the last ten years was nothing but a farce, he looked truly happy. Despite knowing him almost like his own parent, Vergil just couldn’t seem to understand Dante at all.

His gaze dropped, and with the low collar of Dante’s shirt, Vergil caught an unnatural blush on Dante’s nape and shoulders. Resisting the urge to lean in and take a deep breath, Vergil exercised patience as he waited for his eyes to adjust in the dim moonlight.

Dante’s skin was darkened. His flesh was exposed. Vergil could smell it from here. Dried blood and rich plasma. Scars that dove under Dante’s collar. As if a demon had ripped into him, but Vergil overheard no sightings of demons today, and to his dismay to admit, there was hardly anything that could nick a papercut on his brother.

“I did it, by the way,” Dante said, breaking Vergil’s stupor, “mortified myself.”

“You have,” Vergil answered, awed. I can’t believe it.

“Do you want to see?” Dante asked. Without waiting for an answer, he pulled his shirt over his back.

Hunched forward, the light caught the wounds better. Now it looked for certain nothing like a demon-attack. It was self-inflicted, and as recent as an hour ago from the rate of healing. For as much as Dante enjoyed fighting, his body had never been so destroyed as it was now. Beyond that sinewy muscle binding his prurient soul in his prurient cage, Vergil saw his brother’s spirit martyred for a cause he still did not understand. The blood outside his body had dried into streams of red tears from their red eyes, all staring back at Vergil with a sort of reverence.

“Pretty good, right? I think it’s my best work yet.”

“Dante–”

“I don’t think I beat the sin out of myself though. There’s still a lot left inside,” Dante said. He ran his fingers along the nearest tail of a scar, marvelling at how deep and long the wounds managed to impart damage.

Vergil nodded, mouth dry. “It’s enough. He appreciates your effort regardless,” he said.

The erection he tried so hard to quell this morning was back again in full force.

 

 

 

Vergil would not deny that even he was a sexual being, though its role in his godly life served no purpose more than a parasitic worm that he tried to starve. For this the solution was abstinence, to nevertheless accept these sins in himself, but to know that power triumphs all.

Vergil practiced this power through his body and spirit of which he devoted to his Father. He prayed for an infallible will and modelled himself so. He sharpened himself into a weapon that he might be used to execute his Father’s will.

But sins of a carnal nature he could not set free on that impressive marble icon. Shame held him back. Too much like talking to Him about girls.

Like all of Vergil’s other problems, his sexual awakening was unintentionally caused by his brother. Their heritage granted them the privilege of privacy; no cleaners entered without express permission. Only for one of them did this privilege actually serve its purpose, as Vergil maintained his ecosystem as miserly as he could. Dante enjoyed too many worldly pleasures, and they snuck their way into his room. On a regular basis, Vergil would begrudgingly clean out Dante’s room, just to represent his brother more favorably as a son of Sparda, before rats and insects started taking residence as Dante’s roommates.

Imagine Vergil’s room, with a bed and a desk, a wardrobe that housed more stale air than fabrics, and a crucifix of their Father. The only things he had in excess was scripture and other holy texts, with the extensive history of their Father’s holy war on demonkind spanning thousands of years back.

Imagine Dante’s room, a bed, no desk, a thin path of floor leading to his bed for his junk clothes and toys piled up like the tall grass hugging the stone paths in the Mitis forest. The walls were covered by posters of painted musicians that Vergil felt grateful to have not been able to listen to with the church’s limited technology.

Once, Dante had somehow acquired a jukebox, the most egregious of his accumulated wealth of clutter. It was the final straw. Vergil threw out nearly everything. And in the bird’s nest he found literature of little words and many women in thin, glossy color books. Half-naked, though for Vergil, their costumes were so form-fitting that they left nothing to the imagination besides what their cunts might look like.

He quickly threw them out, but they were already stored in a drawer of his memory of which he did not remember where it was if he were to throw it out. Though the images yellowed with time, he had irreversibly become aware of his body. It shamed him to admit that he saw the girls at the congregation differently the next Sunday.

None of them caught his attention for more than a fleeting moment. But Vergil’s life had irreversibly been upended. He now knew Dante was a sexual being.

Dante had always marched to the beat of his own drum. Vergil was a pariah out of circumstances, Dante was a pariah out of choice. He never attempted to ascend the ranks of the Order of the Sword, even if the path for any son of Sparda was paved with the labors of the clergy. As a child, even Vergil understood the gravity for the church to have, in no lesser terms, acquired the sons of Sparda. Dante then was the perfect age, but no longer malleable and set in his debauched ways. All he dared to be was Vergil’s guardian, and he positioned himself in the unbefitting monastic class. So the church set their hopes on Vergil, and deigned to wait another eighteen years give or take, not an especially hard ask in the millenniums that they had worshipped Father.

Dante certainly resembled none of the monks, who Vergil secretly assumed only took up this life of chastity after failing to attract a wife; their looks were poor, and they kept their thinning hair like beggars that clutched onto the few pennies they had left. Neither did Dante resemble most of the sisters, as exhausted of their sexual options as the monks. He, despite his inner evils, had inherited the holy beauty that their father had inadvertently left behind.

It was that sexual dimorphism of Dante’s undeniably male body that caused a great deal of offence when he chose to wear the nun’s habit. Because their uniforms were not made to fit a man of Dante’s stature, the robes he wore adhered to his skin and outright rejected the possibility of chastity. Offers to sew him new garments by the other nuns were denied. Vergil had only realized how much Dante caused a stir with his body when he overheard the heartbeat of gossip that circulated the rectory’s hallways. And so he too agreed that this was a transgression. An act of heretical terrorism. When he tried to persuade Dante to practice some modesty, Dante said it was only a fashion statement.

“Come on,” he had wheedled. “Let me have this. There’s not many other ways I can express myself with these, you know.”

Vergil had seen the pictures Dante kept in a photo album of himself in his younger years. Without a doubt, he had dressed more wantonly, and he even had girlfriends (though Dante had never spoken of a woman in his life) who dressed like the whores he kept the company of in his magazines. But Dante’s physique then was also less wanton, dressed in the lean, innocent muscles of a boy. His breasts and ass had come in later in life, the kind of curves that gestated with childbirth.

It was easier to practice abstinence when back then all Vergil had to ward off were his own thoughts and memories. Much harder when it was his brother in the flesh, who never understood personal space.

“No,” Vergil scolded himself for the umpteenth time when the tributaries of his thought kept flowing back into the subject of his brother, “No Dante.” Except his brain was so recently timorous, that even the name escaped from his lips conjured up the image of his brother in horrifyingly realistic visual clarity.

Almost as if summoned, a knock rapped at his door and before Vergil could even allow his brother to enter he did anyway. Vergil hurriedly assumed a very stiff upright sitting position. Dante entered, and Vergil found himself enticed by the casual way he wore his red robes, even though it wasn’t an uncommon sight, that they were constricted enough to hug Dante’s body but free enough to sway more than it should.

Vergil resisted the urge to check the state of his erection. Instead, he tugged his pants around it to weigh it down. Bad idea. The pressure of it mounted that one feeling, so he stopped before something extraordinarily bad happened. It was already a bit dangerous, slightly wet.

“Are you still mad?”

“I’m not,” Vergil hissed. He was just too occupied trying to guard his crotch from prying eyes.

“Well, you sound mad. But you look constipated,” Dante helpfully commented.

“I’m neither of those things.”

“Sure thing.”

“What is your purpose here?” Vergil asked. “I hope it’s not to help me practice confession again, because I’ll have to refuse.”

“Hey! I think I did a good job, especially with my penance and everything,” Dante protested, and Vergil immediately was made to douse the memory in cold water. “But I’m not in the mood to be whipped tonight. I just dropped by to give you something.”

With all of Dante’s gifts, they came cautiously received, and Vergil braced himself when his brother dangled something in front of him. His heart sank.

“I told you not to bring any more outside books onto church grounds,” Vergil admonished. “Destroy it immediately.”

“Nuh uh,” Dante said, swiping the book away. “I’ve made that mistake once, never again. I borrowed it from a library, so you gotta return it in two weeks if you want me to keep a clean record.”

That did give Vergil pause, though now he wondered what libraries in Fortuna would dare keep Blake in its collection. Some of the more fringe, “liberated” sects, perhaps, who still found Blake compatible enough with the church to agree with both his reverence and his complaints.

Dante handed it back to him carefully. It was a beautiful tome, a work entirely singular of one man’s vision. Now bequeathed to him, Vergil felt entirely incapable of destroying it even if it might cost him his entire life’s work.

“Don’t worry, it’s completely safe, real above-the-belt stuff. None of it will offend your delicate disposition. It’s even in the name. Songs of Innocence…”

“And of Experience,” Vergil finished, but Dante whistled loudly and avoided his gaze. “Dante, take it back.”

“I will. When it’s due.”

“I won’t read it.”

“Oh, you don’t know how?” Dante retorted. He leaned forward, pressing his finger into the paper. With Vergil’s grip around the spine, the pinch of the pages rallied together did not give until Dante massaged the pages, and in his pocket of bated breath, Vergil surrendered his hold just a tiny bit for his brother’s finger to take a dip inside.

“That’s how you start it,” Dante grinned. “Just like that.”

Just like that was how Vergil came. It could not have been mistaken for anything else. Even under his own wavering moan he could hear it like the toll of the church bell, splurting out into the acoustic chambers of his undergarments. As Vergil released he could only stare at the overwhelmingly illustrated page Dante opened up to. All manner of natural hues in watercolor pulled him into a land of pleasure. Dante’s hand still lingered there, painfully still and incomprehensible, and for all Vergil knew his brother was content to lewdly spread these pages apart for him. A string of drool exerted its heavy droplet onto his shirt, narrowly avoiding the paper.

“Oh,” Dante said.

Vergil slammed the book shut. He threw it on the bed, which was a much kinder destination it deserved. Covering his groin with a hand, he swatted Dante away.

“Go away.” As he imagined one might be drunk, he stumbled on his first couple footsteps from the bed, head totally annihilated with shock.

“Vergil…” Dante placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Let go of me!”

“Vergil, I’m trying to take care of you.”

“I…!”

Vergil summoned all his strength to push Dante away, but his brother was a monolith when he decided to be, and unfortunately realizing that Dante was serious enough not to be swatted away when he usually would be pretending Vergil was reciprocating his play-wrestling, Vergil felt even more cornered.

“Let me go.”

“No, let me.”

Dante fell to his knees, left after right, shuffling in front of Vergil. He looked how Vergil might imagine him ready for communion, when Vergil was to take Solemnis’ place, and that momentary shock paralyzed Vergil enough for Dante to pull back the waistband of his underwear with slow, dramatic showmanship.

It was what he dreaded.

So thick and heavy that Vergil felt it like a ball and chain around his hips. His cock was still more than halfway erect, though flagging, and it had yet to retract into itself so it simply hung its head low and ashamed. His load was entirely white and almost opaque, the epitome of a healthy sexual vigor and exacerbated by his negligence to his own body. The more Vergil had left it alone, the more it had acted out like an immature child. It now made its biggest mess ever, painting the walls of his boxers in histrionic frustration, and covering itself head to toe in its own chaos.

“Wow, that’s–it’s a lot,” Dante said, staring at it.

Vergil’s cheeks burned.

“It’s okay. Just take the whole thing off,” Dante said softly. Pity under his words.

To hell with it. Vergil remained stiff, corpse-like, as Dante eased his boxers down his legs with an uncharacteristic grace. Meanwhile he tried to ward off any childhood memories he must have stored away in the attic of his mind of Dante changing him as a baby. Even in childhood before the birth of his conscience Vergil must have known how humiliating it was, his dependency on this wretched man. He only allowed himself to step out of his boxers.

“Vergil.”

“What?”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Dante said, but the veil had already fallen. His words were duplicitous.

“There’s plenty to be ashamed of,” Vergil muttered bitterly. This was likely penance for his own arrogance against his peers. There was nothing to grab onto for superiority anymore, and he had doubt in his own blood. It meant nothing to be the son of Sparda.

Dante didn’t respond to that, though it was probably for the best. Nothing he could say would matter.

“Vergil.”

“What now?”

Dante said nothing.

“What are you thinking?”

Dante looked down meaningfully.

“Don’t,” Vergil almost whimpered. There’s nothing–it’s not hard anymore–

Dante enveloped his lips around Vergil’s flaccid cock.

“Dante,” Vergil sobbed. His brother’s tongue coiled around him like one of those demon stragglers that came around the church premises, its tongue long and immorally wicked. Dante’s mouth felt just as demonic, a hot bath that washed away his disgusting cummy mess only intending to replenish it. Human pretenses, with his demon physiology only observable from the inside. Vergil knew Dante’s cunt would be just as boiling, hidden compartments to extract the utmost pleasure from its victims.

Vergil grabbed his brother’s unruly hair in fists. He pulled it away from him, but it only served to make Dante moan around him, still sealed around him. His voice sounded lower than it usually was.

“Get off,” Vergil begged. “It’s clean now, it’s done, it’s gone, you can stop–”

Of course Dante didn’t obey. His hands gripped the back of Vergil’s ass, feeding him into his mouth. He suckled on his cock wetly like a thumb, as if he was trying to wring it longer. In a moment of despair, Vergil realized his brother was trying to erect him again. And it was working.

Even when Vergil had no more strength to push Dante away, he tried again. Dante outright growled, like a savage animal when someone else laid a hand on its food. In defiance, he sucked it down to the root. His lips pursed together to meet that final stretch, his cheeks hollowed, and from how it all looked Vergil witnessed what was probably the lewdest and grossest and most decadent face he had ever seen his brother make.

At a snail’s pace, Dante drew back his head, and like a magic trick, revealed the entirely erect length of Vergil’s cock from that impossibly eternal throat, each flushed and subjugated inch, every throbbing vein. Dante feigned getting stuck at the bulb of his brother’s cock, and his lips trapped a vacuum around the delicate wrinkles until Vergil made some dying noise. It was as though Dante was swallowing him whole into his stomach, not just his mess, but his penis and all.

When he expected it least, Dante let go, gauging his brother’s expression, but in-between fear and pleasure and hatred and adoration Vergil couldn’t decide which power to let himself surrender to. He watched himself dangle in front of his brother’s lips. Now that Dante was actually off him of his own volition, Vergil completely forgot what to do, how to act.

Before he could pull Dante back on his cock, Dante returned willingly.

He kissed Vergil on his protruding head first for far too long, then along his shaft, kisses that would already be considered too scandalous on the lips, nothing Vergil had ever seen the husband and wives of Fortuna share. But Dante wasn’t a man of Fortuna. He kissed Vergil’s cock without these customs ingrained with him, libertine and uncontained.

Dante sank to an even deeper depravity, smooching lip-prints down to Vergil’s sack, over that delicate seam, and then carried one of his balls into his mouth to cradle it lovingly. Vergil could only imagine that Dante might have felt it stir in his mouth beneath the thin skin, amping to release. Dante’s hand slid over his cock and jerked it, overachieving, and still uncontent with this lavish attention he blanketed on Vergil, his tongue slipped out and teased the back of his balls, dangerously close to his anus. Vergil ejaculated in an instant, streaks of cum that blended into Dante’s silver hair.

Dante didn’t blink an eye. Back to the start of it all, this hellish cycle, he pinched off a sticky rope in his hair and licked it clean off his fingers.

He didn’t have to say it. His face said it all.

Yum.

Vergil, unable to command anything but the use of his legs, ran.

 

 

 

Though he knew where he was going, the sprint there was a world away, and enough for Vergil to stew in thoughts that violated his mind. Unbecoming in how he struck the ground with footsteps that promoted the curiosity of the rectory’s tenants, but he could not give them consideration at this very moment. Unbecoming in how he felt himself a prey animal, but he could not give this consideration too.

He arrived at the only place that brought him comfort. His knees bounced on the hard floor, and Vergil mentally tallied this as one of his many needed penances, his first stroke of corporeal punishment.

“Father, listen to my prayers. Dante is…” He stopped. He didn’t want to talk about Dante. Dante was a lost cause.

The doors of the church opened with an obvious lack of decorum. Vergil ignored the footsteps that boldly demanded attention and continued with his prayer.

“Father, I have been weak, of no fault but my own,” he prayed, and told himself to ask forgiveness for this lie later in the absence of his brother. “My mind and body have strayed. All I can ask is for your forgiveness and the strength to move on.”

A couple fingers in the vulnerable pit of his knee attempted to tickle him out of prayer. Vergil kicked them away.

“Father, set me straight on the path back to you,” he said.

“What path? A path towards death?” Dante asked. If it was possible for Vergil to prostrate himself more, he did.

“Father, remind me of my true meaning in life, my priestly vocations,” he continued, a direction of prayer that he has already recited to his memory. “My ambitions are not my own but serve a greater purpose.”

“Oh come on,” Dante said exasperatedly. “Let it up already. There’s no one you need to impress with this act.’

“I’m not talking to you,” Vergil sneered. “Leave me alone. Father, lend me the strength to overcome the obstacles sent my way,” the burden of desire, but he didn’t want Dante to make fun of him more than he already had.

“Am I the obstacle?” Dante asked, suddenly too close to his ear that goosepimples instantly propagated on Vergil’s skin. He could practically hear eyelashes batting.

“Father, I devote my soul to you–”

“That soul?” Dante adjusted all around him. His crotch rubbed Vergil from behind, that flat space. An ashamed heat rushed to his most unreliable appendage.

“Father, I devote my body–”

“Oh, and this sinful body?” Dante whispered mockingly, dipping his hands under Vergil’s robes. They ran over his chest and his abdomen. “What would our dear old Dad need this for?”

Vergil grit his teeth. “Do not take his name in vain. My body is an instrument our Father–”

Dante grabbed his erection. “Even this?” He held it around the head wrapped in Vergil’s robes, thumb running over the head. Vergil shuddered into Dante. Dante’s other hand soothed his thigh, as his other encased a gentle fist and jerked Vergil higher and harder.

No amount of willpower was level to Dante’s hand on his cock. Prayer abandoned. All Vergil needed to do was endure.

Dante’s platonic hand cupped his balls. He worked them like dice, coaxing them in his palm for two rare sixes. He all but blew on them for good luck.

“I don’t think this would be of much use to him,” Dante said, “you aren’t going to use it anyway, are you? On your road to holiness?”

He wrung the head of Vergil’s cock.

“I can think of many ways you can put it to work. Actual, real work.”

Vergil already knew what his brother was going to say next.

“Give it to me, Vergil.”

Vergil lurched into himself when he was about to cum, his balls drawn tight, but then Dante’s touch was gone like he was never there. Vergil whipped around and his brother was nowhere to be seen either.

“Dante!” Vergil shouted. There was a shuffling between the pews, which pews, there were only a few dozen of them and each bit of space between them held its own bated breath. Vergil began to scour between each pair of pews with an embarrassingly sloppy quality. He just needed to find Dante and throw him out by the scruff before someone finally decided that this was the last straw.

On the seventh attempt Vergil saw a splotch of black. It became alive and turned the corner on the far end of the aisle. This animal pushed itself up on its hind legs and transformed into his brother again when the light hit his gleaming hair and pale-pink skin. He stared at Vergil for a moment like a deer in headlights until Vergil made the mistake of stepping forward. Dante darted off again, ducking low.

“Stop running in the church!”

“Make me!”

Vergil suppressed another constipated curse and sprinted in the general direction towards the back of the church. At the furthest pew from the altar, Dante was nowhere to be found, and Vergil turned the corner to the aisle by the windows.

Dante was between pews again. Vergil leashed in his freeroaming gasps for air until he was completely silent, turning himself into a predator animal. There was a sixth sense in Vergil that Dante was also privy to, a demon addition, but from his own less worldly lifestyle Vergil knew his brother had to be more in tune with his perception than he was. Vergil must rely on what his brother had not.

A modicum more patience.

He slowly took his robes off his body, laying them down on the floor. He sniffed out Dante deep into the church, in the first few rows, so he crawled between the pews to reach the nave aisle once more to block off more escape routes. There was no sound, not from the general radius he knew Dante to be, and he inched his way down with a much more measured speed. Dante was getting closer, or Vergil was by proxy of Dante’s stasis. At the fifth pew back Vergil heard shuffling again, Dante exhausted of time, and Vergil pounced forward and saw mostly Dante’s robed rear end, trying to escape via another window aisle.

Dante turned his head.

“Whoops, you caught me.”

Vergil grabbed ahold of Dante’s ankles and yanked him roughly. Dante fell flat and smashed his face onto the tile.

“Ow! I already said you got me–”

Vergil threw himself across Dante’s back, the only way to pin that entire bulk down. His erect cock buried itself between Dante’s robed ass, knowing its desires the moment Vergil had caught his brother. Dante yelped. Vergil’s hands tugged at Dante’s robes, pulling them all sorts of ways until he felt warm, rough skin, generously seasoned with fur.

His hands ran up Dante’s thighs and then his ass. He wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

Vergil pulled down his pants, and his cock became the first thing to know Dante’s cunt by touch. Too eager a greeting, because he thrust forward and it skidded up and against Dante’s asscrack.

Even though he knew he had missed, Vergil humped away at it. His jaw hung slightly open, endlessly gasping. He hid his face, which must have looked the picture of indecency, in that masculine, sweaty stench, two days removed from a shower. Dante’s stubble was also two days old, from the degree of grit that rubbed against Vergil’s skin.

“Vergil,” Dante gasped, and Vergil moaned at the sound of his own name, egotistic glory. He loved how Dante said it like that, victory owed to him. His hips jackrabbited, and somewhere along the line, he slid into it completely.

Dante muffled a cry into his own shoulder. He was unprepared for it too. His cunt clenched in aftershocks, and embarrassingly enough it almost made Vergil orgasm then and there. The strings in his guts were twinging like a violent downbow, the sensation of needing to urinate desperately.

But moderation was an unknown language to a teenage ascetic. Vergil could not help himself when he sank into the feeling. He poured an adolescence worth of repression into Dante, who seemed to invite it despite the warring signs, the crying, the thrusting back of his ass. Vergil bit Dante’s neck as an act of animal submission and it actually worked to his favor, Dante squeezing around him like a vice in more ways than one.

Dante’s hand reached around and grabbed the back of Vergil’s neck.

“Needed this. Your cock feels so good,” he groaned. Vergil shuddered. “So good, your cock, your weight–”

“Stop,” Vergil rasped, but he didn’t want Dante to stop at all.

“Your breath,” Dante whined. “Don’t stop, okay? Go ahead. Have at it.”

Vergil pulled away his hips high, threw himself back into his brother. Dante cried out, and it rang throughout the entire church.

Vergil himself didn’t dare make a noise of his own. The stirring of his cock in Dante was sufficiently head-splitting, and all he prayed for was for no one to hear them. He turned Dante onto his back like a child and flattened him. It only made Dante break out into giggles, until Vergil clamped over his mouth, thrusting his tongue inside.

Dante kissed him back, just as messily but completely sure of himself. It flipped the coals over in Vergil’s gut to imagine his brother as immature as him, as sexually dormant, a waking coma until this moment, relying on a fantasy of his brother that seems to be coming true. Dante received him so ardently, clutching him like how a child holds onto their father with all arms and legs, trying to absorb Vergil into himself, the only part of him allowed to move away to give more traction to the humping into Dante’s cunt.

He was wet and tight around Vergil, like virgins were said to be, from the knowledge that had poisoned Vergil’s tender innocence from the moment he overheard the other boys diverge from their holy duties. He lived vicariously through them, eavesdropping by choice or not, but never tempted further than the faraway concept of their sex, never consumed by the rabid fantasy that bit at his heels and tried to get him diseased. Envy never even entered his mind, he desired not the girls his age that served alongside him or the locals he saw during Mass, not knowing what it could have felt like until now, to be a confused boy tumbling in the dark between the tall grass, pinning down and wrestling his brother and biting and mounting him.

“Fuck, Vergil,” he heard Dante gasp in his ear over and over, “Vergil,” affirmations of his performance, his body. His own body he rejected an overly vain assessment of, as all it had needed to be was Father’s sword, now in service of his brother’s selfish wants, his unruly cunt that squeezed more when Vergil played rougher, exerted his power, peacocked in excess. Only Dante had ever looked at him differently and seen his body in another light. The aesthetic rewards of Vergil’s training were leeched by his eyes. Vergil had become no more than another pin-up in Dante’s magazine, his fantasy.

Dante’s body was the thick mattress that Vergil succumbed to in lieu of masturbation, excusing his improper behavior as the inevitable twitch of his hips to drive his cock into pillowy flesh. It was more comforting than any sleep he had gotten on his terrible straw bed, any meagre bath he’d taken. Dante’s body was luxury and Vergil’s first taste of it.

His own small pecs squared up against Dante’s chest, which dwarfed him in thickness and size. Vergil groped them, and Dante laughed in his face. He promptly stopped, ashamed.

“No, keep touching,” Dante said. That’s all Vergil needed to fondle them experimentally, treating them like a woman’s breasts. His curiosity had only been now rewarded for the first time, and he doubted it would be satiated even when he grew completely out of puberty. The late start in his sexual journey only ensured a late end.

Vergil found those small pebbles of nipples and tweezed them between his fingers without hesitation. Dante threw his chest forward, grunting like an animal. Struck with wonder, Vergil tugged them meanly like a schoolboy with his crush’s pigtails. Dante grabbed Vergil’s body for purchase, unapologetically molesting him in retaliation over his muscular back and his thin waist. He squeezed Vergil’s ass and instead of offence, Vergil sucked in a crooked, proud smile behind his teeth.

Dante played just as rough, when he discovered how hard he could get Vergil’s pace to gallop by digging his heels in and slapping his ass. Despite what he had previously believed, Vergil himself was a wild horse, not a domestic one, and he buried himself into Dante, body stuttering, overcome with a second of a purely white gasp of light, and he came.

“Oh, shit,” Dante choked, “ah–” he shuddered, when the wet sensation bathed them both.

“Dante,” Vergil could only utter. He spurted more into his brother, unable to deny this part of himself any longer. It was already spilling out, all of it, his pride in the same stream expelled from his body. The mechanisms inside Dante seemed to know what to do, milking around Vergil to keep the juices he’d sucked dry for himself, the fountain of youth and life that Dante needed more than he desired.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re good, Vergil, there you go. Just give it to me, give it. I want it,” breathlessly.

Between Vergil’s ears was a blank slate. Those words embedded in his mind.

“I want it too,” he admitted before he could think not to, grinding his entire self over his brother, shifting his crotch around uncomfortably while he exacerbated the mess of his sloppy orgasm. Without the adequate knowledge to do so, he attempted to pleasure Dante with the use of his entire body, no part of the animal spared, and Dante began to shake, the more classic warnings of an orgasm that Vergil had skipped from too quickly spending himself in his brother.

“You’re so good,” Dante moaned.

His head fell to the side, and Vergil cradled his brother’s face in two hands, biting his skin over stubble. They were both so exhausted they both lost the autonomy of their limbs, and Vergil laid crumpled over Dante like a blanket. Vergil’s flaccid penis unhappily retreated from its anchored spot.

Some time later, Vergil detached from his brother, still in the dead of night. Some remnant part of him begged him to return to quarters, though he could hardly hear it scream. He ran a hand through his hair to try to force it back into its usual stature, though he was far too sweaty for it to take shape. It fell back over his eyes, poking him in one.

Dante was all too eager to stretch out on the stone floor, the picture of laziness. He smiled up at Vergil. What wrinkles had begun forming on his face in the past five years had been ironed out by pleasure.

“There you go,” Dante said breathlessly. “That wasn’t so bad, now, was it.”

 

 

 

The following days were an empty, purged record of hedonism.

Dante now slept in the same bed. It did not matter whose. To Vergil’s dismay, he constantly reminded him of a time where Vergil had called his brother into his bed to comfort him through a nightmare. To combat this, Vergil stuck his tongue down Dante’s throat and his cock between Dante’s thighs, to which Dante would lead it into his cunt with kind guidance.

Obviously they slept as naked and bare as the moment they were born, and whose idea it was Vergil was not certain, a mutual understanding that they both agreed upon once they tore each other’s clothes in the ritualistic preparations of sex and Vergil was not keen to explain to the nuns the crime scene that the forensics of their robes would have exposed the ripping of the crotch of Vergil’s pants, the ripping of the crotch of Dante’s form-fitting robes, and the impact spatter between them.

This agreement worked well for them, but it also made it virtually impossible to leave the comfort of Dante’s furnace body at any moment. Vergil soaked in his brother for so long that when spent, his penis would slip out as wrinkled as the skin of his fingers and toes when he used to fall asleep in the baths.

The most innocuous of things turned erotic. Even urinating metamorphosed into something that could arouse Vergil. As everything Vergil knew of in a sexual landscape, the idea was invited by Dante first, and it wasn’t even intentional, conniving. All he did was watch Vergil with the same kind of entertainment a child had with its doll, and this included when Vergil felt the need to empty his bladder after his penis felt something other than the raw sensitivity of being submerged in Dante for too long. So Vergil was inclined to discover the appeal, and discovered the way Dante squatted and pissed out of the garderobe to be enough to get his cock erect.

Once, Vergil woke up with Dante’s breast in his mouth like he might have as a child had he no mother, and he almost perished from shame. Dante woke up at the same time, saw his brother panic, and cupped his pec and eased it back into Vergil’s mouth.

In this twisted way Vergil saw his brother at his most servile. Not at their Father’s altar, nor the clergy of venerated elders that Dante was openly derisive towards. He, seemingly by no fault of his own, had gotten Dante to heel.

Knowing this, Vergil was consumed by a lust so heavy that it manifested itself in physical illness. Vergil had never had the flu, but then he was struck with the same catalog of symptoms that had regularly plagued the rest of the church.

If Vergil’s absence had been noticed, no one had informed him. He didn’t even know how long he was gone for. Time was as immeasurable as the grains of sand in the palm of a hand. Distantly he knew he was shielded by the legacy of his Father.

Whose emblem kept a steadfast watch over them.

Even without eyes, the symbol of the church (and thus their Father) seemed more omniscient than ever. It was never in a hidden spot in Vergil’s room, always hoisted from its spot on the wall opposite his door so the first thing he would need to reckon with entering his private quarters was the presence of his Father. Seeing as neither of he or Dante left his bedroom all that often now, or even when they did, their faces and bodies were glued together like conjoined twins, Vergil felt His watchful gaze only when Dante was asleep, unable to tempt him in those brief surrenders of time.

 

 

 

Dante must have seen his gaze turn to the crucifix one too many times. That had to be why. For when he asked "could you read me a few passages tonight?” Vergil was completely taken off-guard.

“Sure.” He refrained from letting his shock show lest it discouraged Dante from prayer, but if Dante noticed he surely didn’t care, rummaging through his drawers to find his holy book. When he did, he handed it to Vergil.

Dante went to kneel in front of the crucifix. When Vergil opened the book, he nearly let go. The pages were two solid bricks but carved out to make space for a hidden object. It almost resembled the shape of a gun, though there was no space for where the trigger guard might be, and the indents where the grip would have been were far too short and rounded. In the case of Dante’s depravity, Vergil could only make one assumption to what it could be.

Vergil closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. His gaze resisted the urge to seek the symbolic crucifix of his father for guidance, since he knew all he would find was judgement.

He parted the book from his face and was dealt another blow. Dante was bent over the floor, hands together in prayer. His robes were pulled above his waist, and like always, he wore nothing. It was so high up his waist was exposed too, a slim, malleable handle, a waistline worthy of coveting. The muscles of his lower back, too, were unfathomably sensual. In Vergil’s open gawking, he swore Dante’s ass wriggled.

Dante’s knees knocked politely together only made his cunt jut out like a pouty lip, a shade darker than his lips above. They were pressed together around an object not unlike a lollipop, and Vergil wanted to split it open with his tongue.

His brother waited expectantly. Vergil could not disappoint him.

Dizzy, he dropped to his knees and crawled over, conceding to how Dante left him so primitive. He rested his forehead on Dante’s buttcheek just for a second of reprieve. Vergil sighed helplessly. His brother would be the death of him.

He kneaded Dante’s rear, enjoying the texture of his fur that was nearly imperceptible from how it blended into the hue of his skin. Under his gaze, Dante’s holes were impatient, acting out; they twitched under Vergil’s breath, both asshole and cunt. Vergil grazed over one of Dante’s lips, which made both of them shudder. For Vergil, slightly out of fear, like every fear of the unknown, and the fear that he might disappoint his brother.

All he could see of the toy was the base of it, thick enough that the entire thing wouldn’t possibly get lost inside. Dante twitched again, and a couple millimetres of it squeezed out. Seeing an invitation to be rid of what stoked his jealousy, Vergil yanked it out. It was damp and it slipped out of his fingers onto the floor, a density hard enough that it hit the stone with a thump but soft enough that it didn’t break.

It was the thing that belonged in Dante’s book, too articulated to be considered anything else. The testes were even attached even though they served no purpose by an aesthetic one, two idealistically taut eggs at the base. Dante’s contribution to it was an entirely slicked surface. When Vergil touched it, the viscous surface stuck to his finger like a dewdrop. He furtively put it in his mouth.

Meanwhile Dante’s cunt was beginning to close around absence. Vergil watched it in abject fascination. There was Dante’s… his clitoris, too, or his dick. Vergil saw how it might imitate a miniature copy of his own penis. It hid under a thick hood, and Vergil had felt it rub against him before, erect as well, proof that Dante felt it the same way he did. Like his own, he could retract the skin around his brother’s clit, expose the pink fragile underbelly.

It seated a stone of ridiculous proportions in his stomach, of a wicked pride that in only this hidden way, Vergil could dwarf his hulk of a brother. Far too long had Dante’s jokes at the expense of his height and his stature gone unpunished, and Vergil flicked it to watch Dante squirm.

Vergil explored it more with his eyes before his hands ventured out. His pussy, Dante had called it, a word that he used so much recently yet it never sounded less grating when he spoke it and never diminished the erect burden in Vergil’s pants. He felt the words out on his tongue so many more times than he actually put his tongue on it.

Unable to resist, Vergil thumbed it open like a book he’d been eager to read. Dante made a muted noise.

Although his cock had already gotten to know Dante intimately, the sensation of Dante’s cunt was entirely different on his fingers. It was softer than the inside of one’s mouth. Spongier, with more give. When Vergil extracted his thumb for a second, a humid, cloying musk came with it, and the smell made him closer to coming.

He thrusted his other thumb in it, prying Dante’s pages apart, and the drool of his cunt spilled out from that vulnerable gape. Despite how much Vergil had begun living inside his brother, he was still sorely untravelled when it came to Dante’s body. In truth Vergil considered it some kind of mythological unknown, and Dante himself had certainly never expressed outright dissatisfaction from their time together. Far from it. He invited Vergil into the temple of his body without demanding any complex rituals aside from the offering of his cum.

Even for someone as clueless as Vergil, he knew how spoiled he had it. To have someone wait on him hand and foot and pussy–Vergil lived worshipped. And he hardly knew why Dante out of all people deigned to spend his frivolous life in his younger brother’s arms.

Dante was an objective truth of beauty.

In terms of human sexuality as Vergil understood it to his limited abilities, Dante was desired, horribly so. The monks and nuns and clergy shunned him, but Vergil saw how the congregation stalked Dante with their collective gaze.

Dante was big. He was strong. His face was handsome. He was always smiling. His irises were so blue that sometimes, when Dante’s expression was too serious, he seemed as though he was humbled by tears even if he was not crying. His voice kept a boyish, playful quality as if he clung onto youth but not by desperation, deep, but not stern.

He qualified as a man more than any member of the clergy or the monks. Certainly, his lust made him more masculine and it was apparent to anyone who saw him in the same periphery as any of those other sexually castrated sycophants. If that wasn’t enough, he surpassed women in their sensuality. Unwilling to ever shy into himself like a wilting flower, Dante conquered Vergil’s interest more than any girl that had borrowed his gaze for a few seconds.

“Dante,” Vergil groaned. “You are so…”

“Yeah? What am I?” Dante asked.

Vergil pinched the base of his cock and scolded it quietly. Dante was goading him for an answer, and it did not help deflate Dante’s ego for Vergil to answer honestly.

Even if Dante was immutably attractive. Self-assured.

Sexy, the word came to mind, and Vergil burned around the ears.

While he had gotten more comfortable with it in the past week, Vergil felt wholly unjustified in touching his cock. Not when Dante had put his own pleasure on hold, his one continuous act of selflessness and capitulation for his own brother. On his hands and knees, almost prostrating himself like Dante, Vergil leaned forward and kissed his brother’s cunt.

“Oh,” Dante sighed.

On Vergil’s plush mouth did Dante’s little clitoris slide over the soft valley of it, onto his lips that Dante flattered so much after they had come up for air after thousands of kisses melted into one. Dante called them kissable, and he proved it too. Vergil thought the same of him. Dante’s clit was thicker than it looked, and Vergil took more of it into his mouth than he expected to. The aroma was thick, too much, especially when Dante shifted backwards on his face and Vergil’s nose slipped into his brother’s pussy. Instinctively, Vergil caught his breath, staved it off for a second, and realized there was no way forward but to accept it completely. The stench was amplified by its humidity. It was like breathing in the current from the easternmost coast of the Mitis forest.

To this, Vergil’s cock spasmed from the root, only made a degree less improper from his undergarments restricting its animated enthusiasm. It fired off something moist, but Vergil knew if he drew attention to it, Dante would turn around and suck him fully soaked through his layers. So he let it hang, its punishment of negligence, though Dante would certainly hunt down his pleasure eventually. For now, Vergil committed to the worship of Dante’s parts. He slobbered over that cocklet unabashedly–while the privacy he enjoyed with Dante was a boon, Vergil had no doubt he’d be just as needy of his brother in the halls of the cathedral or in the taller, overgrown grass in the forest, too far from the church and the yard for the groundskeepers to mow. Dante only seemed to prostrate himself more, chest pushed to the tiles. He wetted Vergil’s nose and lips and Vergil moaned. His flat wet tongue ate into Dante, the source of his sweet, deep flavor, the wine of extraordinary banquets.

Minutes upon minutes passed, and Vergil continued to lose his youth to it. A real man, was what Dante’s cunt emboldened him to be. Still, he couldn’t help himself to pinch a lip between his teeth, and Dante booted him in the side like a half-hearted pony. Vergil apologetically lapped the emotional wound it left behind, and self-admittedly he was overzealous with how much he licked the ache away on Dante’s pussy.

“I need you inside,” Dante begged, and Vergil almost gave in, only somewhat composed by the fact that his balls had been routinely emptied since their first time. He mounted his brother, dragging his cock and balls over each inch of Dante’s body that he got to enjoy: over a sturdy calf, a thick thigh.

He had learnt from his mistakes. This time, Vergil cupped under his cock and Dante’s mound, so there was no room other than cunt for Vergil to have found himself in. He speared his brother as slowly as he could. Even though Dante was older, his reactions were palpable and instructive.

“It’s good?” Vergil asked awkwardly.

“Mm, yeah. Just fuck it, baby,” and he obliged.

It never felt anything less inside Dante. Never less than the first time, but Vergil handled it better now like acclimating to a new home. Still, it was far too tempting to just let go of the leash on his senses and fuck away at it like a piece of meat.

“Feels so good inside you.”

“Yeah? My pussy?” Dante laughed breathlessly. Vergil throbbed and he hoped Dante couldn’t tell.

“Everywhere. Inside, outside,” Vergil gasped, “but your–here, this,” he thrusted for emphasis.

“Can’t even say it.” But Dante sounded smug. He sighed like he was over it, but he whined when Vergil moved his hilted cock inside, trying to press up against the end of Dante’s cunt and the beginning of his womb.

“What are you doing?” he whispered roughly. Vergil was taken aback.

“I’m only–just–”

“Trying to fuck my babymaker?” Dante asked, and Vergil almost doubled over. “I knew it. You can’t get in there, kid, but nice try.”

“I’m not,” Vergil hissed, face red.

“Hey, hey, I don’t blame you. Getting your first taste of pussy is a milestone your head might not have wrapped around yet, you little bookworm. A library’s worth of knowledge in your head, and you don’t even know how the human body works,” Dante said.

“I do know,” Vergil argued.

“Mhm.”

“I’m smarter than you believe me to be.”

Dante pretended to ponder. “In the way that matters?”

Vergil's hackles rose. So do his goosebumps. “Our religious education matters. Our knowledge of our Father matters.”

“Sure does.” Dante leaned into his arms on the stone floor, stretching out like a cat. Somehow, the effects were exponential, as if his entire body was a sleeve wringing out Vergil’s cock. And Vergil thought it impossible, but Dante appeared even more impossible to refuse. His robes fell further up his back. His waist was pulled taut by that invisible corset. His buttcheeks spread themselves wide, and his asshole flirted with Vergil.

Vergil folded. His head fell between Dante’s shoulderblades, back hunched. In form, he seemed ready for the most fervid of prayer.

“Dante.” You have to stop. We have to stop.

“Easy, tiger,” Dante said slyly. “Dad’s done all his teaching for now. Time to let your big brother take over.”

Vergil grinded into him, warning shot, but aside from a low hum Dante was undeterred.

“You already got your bits in me, that's a good first step,” he encouraged, “don’t quit while you’re ahead.”

I’ll show you ahead. Vergil withdrew as strategically as he might in their swordplay, giving his impatient brother the urge to follow up with an improvised blow, and fucked back in with nary a snag from Dante’s tight cunt. A misbehaving groan left his own throat. On Dante’s end, just the airy sound of an objective force displacing something in his body.

“Good job,” Dante cooed. “You’re a natural. It’s all rinse and repeat from h–”

Vergil struck his brother’s ass. The effects are instantaneous; Dante stopped and squeezed.

“Your effrontery is appalling,” Vergil panted. “Shut up.”

And before Dante could obviously say ‘make me,’ Vergil spanked him again. Right on the meat of his asscheeks, where muscle submitted to fat, it bounced off a loud clap followed by Dante’s even louder moan. So uninhibited by the fear of being found out. Assured by this, Vergil let himself loose, fucking into Dante with more trained blows. Too overwhelmed to do anything but take it, Dante clutched the smooth floor, almost adhered to it by sweat. He stopped speaking entirely, though Vergil could make out his name between moans. Each ‘Vergil’ a slap, and with this positive reinforcement Vergil learnt to be increasingly more effective than he had expected.

Upon Dante’s spread ass, Vergil clumsily dug his thumb against his brother’s anus, and it kissed him back. A bit of rubbing, and it opened up enough for the first knuckle to enter. Then, even Vergil’s name became absent from Dante’s low animalistic groaning.

Dante rocked back and forth. Vergil rode his brother’s rhythm. To his amusement, Dante reminded him of some of the more fanatical worshippers at their church. Up until now, he had never seen Dante so impassioned on his knees and elbows. Ego wrought to climax, Vergil emptied out his load, and for Dante loved his cum so much, Vergil ensured he fuck him a bit more with his oversensitive cock to smear it all over his brother’s insides until he was overdone.

Despite his age, it was Dante who got up from his prostration ready for another go.

“Vergil,” he said, pawing at him. Vergil weakly kissed whatever he could find of his brother’s, smudging spit on Dante’s wrist.

Dante benevolently tucked him into bed.

Days did not end much more blissfully than this.

 

 

 

A knock at his door jolted Vergil to consciousness. He sat up abruptly. Dante’s arm and the corner of his blanket fell from him unhappily, but Vergil was on high-alert. No one ever called for him, and it was so late; it must’ve been past midnight or even just a couple hours before dawn, as the last inch of their candle marched away towards annihilation because neither of them remembered to blow it out.

“Who is it?” Vergil called out. He hoped his steady temperament was conveyed.

“Vergil,” a hoarse voice, male. “His Holiness has passed in his sleep.”

 

 

 

Vergil's first year in Fortuna was marked by a continuous funeral procession for his Father, an appropriately extended ceremony of their savior that had continued to rule over this holy land by name alone even after He saw to finish his feudal responsibilities here. Solemnis’ passing was second place to his Father, but Vergil still saw the devastating impact of the church’s loss on the community. For this was one of the rare moments he left church grounds, only to see that Fortuna’s tiny nation had congregated in one big nave, downtown on Main Street where white bonnets and veils shuffled rigidly behind an open casket. The vicar was a peaceful man, which also meant he left no impact. Thus his death disturbed the peace, and it disturbed Vergil.

Vergil once thought himself above in-church politics, but that certainty only predated Solemnis’ death. Vergil knew each man there had their own ambitions, as men that glimpsed power did. He knew this, for he had his own. Even Dante had his holy grail, as little as Vergil understood his brother. There had to be something more under those sheets of lust, each deeper layer more cloying and thick and disorienting than the last.

Conclave took place just a little under two weeks after Solemnis’ date of death. It took no longer than a day for the council to decide on what the public already assumed. It was announced while Vergil and his brother ate in the cafeteria, and Vergil studied Dante’s face as the messenger spoke over the mild chatter in the hall. To his surprise, Dante did react. For a few seconds, he seemed entirely too serious.

Whatever it was Dante felt, he didn’t say. Vergil didn’t ask. He considered Sanctus’ promotion by himself, and it inevitably turned into a vision of himself as vicar. He tried not to indulge in the fantasy. There were still years ahead of him.

But regardless of his own desires, nothing went his way. During his afternoon prayer, Sanctus sought him out.

“Vergil.”

Vergil suppressed a shiver. After fucking Dante for so long, it was as if every person who looked upon Vergil could see him exposed, and out of everyone, the vicar surely commanded the most scrutiny.

“Vicar Sanctus,” Vergil greeted. “Congratulations on your new position.”

The vicar waved his hand to dismiss the honor, even though Vergil had not been overtly flattering. “It’s not all glory. I’m still just another peon of our Lord.”

The alacritous gleam in his eyes said otherwise. “You must be a much busier man. What brings you out from the headquarters?”

“You, my son,” but the mirth on Sanctus’ face reflected no such fatherly instinct. “I know you’ve set your eyes on the humble vocation of priesthood.”

“Yes,” Vergil said. His hackles rose as he stared down the vicar, wondering if he felt any unease knowing he was positioned in the center of Vergil’s ambitions.

But he hardly seemed surprised. “Good to hear. I have approached you for this very reason. The Order of the Sword would be eager for you to preside over your first Mass.”

“How? I’m not ordained. I haven’t even entered the seminary.”

“It would be borderline offensive to require our Father’s son to go through the due processes, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I’m not even of age yet.”

Likewise, the vicar dismissed the protest. “With all due respect, Vergil–you should not adhere yourself to the same expectations of your peers. We are all our Father’s children,” and he eyed Vergil, “but only you are Sparda’s child. His will should be clear to you more than anyone else at the Order of the Sword.

And Dante? Did Father’s will flow through him too?

“In these times of uncertainty, it would do well for our community to come together, and what better way than to be united by our savior’s own son.”

The threat of fame become too known to him in that moment. The same procession for Solemnis that filled the streets all ripping him apart as witnesses. The reality was that for Vergil to be vicar, fame and power came hand in hand, but this was the first time he was made to contend with that fact.

It seemed as though Sanctus could sniff out his fear. “For us few who do share our little secret, then. To put your fellow men at ease to know that they have you to aspire and do right by."

Like some virgin idol.

"Regardless, if you wish for me to appeal to something other than your bloodline, know that we do keep a keen eye on you. Out of any of the boys here, I can see that only you have not even once strayed from this difficult path.”

Under different circumstances, Vergil might have taken this to his head. Now he just felt ill. If only the vicar knew how he spent his days in the last few weeks, living a more pussy-inebriated existence than any of the other boys his peer.

“Even your brother left a kind word for you,” Sanctus said. This, out of everything, gave Vergil the most balk.

Dante never mentioned that he spoke to the senior members of the Order. In fact, there was always a bitter aftertaste whenever the topic arose. But who was Vergil to know what happened behind closed doors? Putting personal conflicts aside, it was not impossible to conceive that his brother and the church formed a truce when it came to the betterment of Vergil’s development.

“If you’re not ready–"

“Of course I’m ready. I would be honored to celebrate Mass as my Father’s son,” Vergil said.

“Thank you. The other priests and I will discuss when you may preside over Mass. Perhaps soon next month? To ring in the new year.”

 

 

 

Vergil relayed himself the matter over and over on his way to the forest grounds. But like all times Vergil met Dante in recent memory, he forgot what he wanted to say.

“Dante.” Though hardly anyone walked the Mitis forest anymore, Vergil still looked both ways anxiously before kissing Dante’s stubbly cheek. “Did you wait long?”

“Nope,” Dante said, popping the P. He got up from the grass and dusted off his jeans. “Why? Scared I’d die of boredom without you?”

“No–”

“You think I don’t have a life outside of my little bitty baby brother?” Dante asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I–”

His brother’s face burst into a brilliant smile. “‘Cause I don’t. You’re the center of my galaxy, kiddo.”

Vergil blushed furiously. “You’re such a fool–”

He tried to snatch Dante, to do something, but Dante was already out of his reach, faster than his deceitfully huge body appeared, and Vergil was left with itching hands that never knew what to do. All he could do was trail Dante like a hungry puppy. Vergil did not dare claim lovesickness.

Dante kept a step ahead, and Vergil had no choice but to nip at his feet with his own quick footsteps. He had no idea where his brother wanted to go, no footpath, no circulation or predilection to walk clockwise or counterclockwise around the grounds.

“The vicar came to see me today.”

Dante made a noise far from surprised, and with this nothing Vergil ran in frantic circles. Did that mean Dante was already informed? Had he really given Sanctus his blessing for Vergil to fast-track his priesthood? Or was this simply the natural progression of events that he was expecting?

“What for?”

Or perhaps not. “He–the Order of the Sword thinks I should preside over Mass soon.”

“As a priest?” Dante turned around, but his expression was unreadable. “As a son of Sparda?”

“Serving as a priest, yes. Technically, I haven’t been ordained yet.” Though from how Sanctus was speaking, Vergil doubted that would be a problem. “And… not officially. Just to inspire confidence for the clergymen, according to the vicar.”

“Well, shit. Congrats, kid,” his brother said, his tone hardly excited but to his credit, he stopped long enough for Vergil to catch him, patting him solidly on the back. “I know how hard you worked for this.”

“Thank you,” Vergil answered stiffly. Out of everyone, telling Dante might’ve been the most uncomfortable. Only this morning did Dante have his tongue on him, enjoying him like a twelve-course meal, from Vergil’s mouth to his neck to his chest to his armpits to his abdomen to his cock to his sack to his hole to his buttcheeks to his knees to his ankles to his toes. Thankfully, Dante did not bring this up now to humiliate him, though the opportunities were plenty.

They came to a stop in front of a structure, one of the ancient ruins of Fortuna that was yet to be lost to time. It did not sit alone; a nonfunctional fountain kept the church company throughout it all. Dante stared at this structural hazard with a frightening reverence, and for once Vergil wondered if he’d been suddenly possessed with the spirit of their Father.

Reborn a new man. Chaste and from thereon-out untouched.

Vergil finally grabbed hold of Dante’s hand. Dante blinked out of a daze.

“Come on.” He yanked Vergil in with him.

Ungovernable ruins and plant life reclaimed the cathedral. There was no one way that Vergil could see it function as a place of worship any longer, the building broken down to even less than its appendages. The place had been properly looted, by whom Vergil did not know. The hastily excavated remains of the furniture didn’t resemble anything from the Order’s church or castle. It was missing their Father’s crucifix, and Vergil was a bit grateful that He didn’t have to witness one of his holy spaces succumb to negligence. One side of the nave was completely collapsed, the easternmost part, so it allowed the late morning sun inside, as much as a caved-in structure could even have an indoors.

Vergil bristled. Even he had to admit it was an offence of the Order to let this place go to ruin.

“Damn, this place has really gone to shit since I was last here,” Dante said.

He hurdled himself over a large boulder of debris. When Vergil caught up, Dante was taking another surprisingly tender moment to himself, examining the stone walls fruitful with life. Vergil followed where his brother’s gaze went.

In an unsuspecting corner, a drawing of two figures was the most modern contribution to the destruction of the church. Vergil felt all the blood drain from his face.

It couldn’t be.

Looking closer, the more Vergil’s faith in himself diminished. Both figures were indistinguishable from each other except for their size and hairstyle, and Vergil had an inkling that this had less to do with a physical reality and more to do with the limited motor skills of a child.

There was no room for dispute to the culprit’s identity. Under the two figures, the names Vergil and Dante were writ.

Vergil bowed his head and clasped his hands together.

“Father, forgive me for desecrating your holy space,” he muttered, and Dante erupted with howling laughter.

“You should be asking me for forgiveness, kid, what the hell, drawing me like I’ve eternally suffered from male-pattern baldness,” Dante cackled, wiping a tear from his merry eye. “At least you got the family likeness right.”

Both their eyes were dots framed by an upside down U. Vergil really doubted the integrity of the likeliness based off of skill.

“We need to do something about this,” he whispered urgently.

“Do what? No one comes ‘round these parts. I’m not even sure if this church was the Order’s…”

An inconceivable thought. “What else would it be?”

Dante shrugged. “I don’t know. I just ask the questions, I don’t answer them.”

Which Vergil already knew was a flaw upon flaws of his brother’s. Dante kept turning over stones meant to be undisturbed, not even to find the key to his questions or to peek at whatever secrets were hidden under these artifacts, and on his journey to disrupt everything and everyone around him, he never went alone. Made Vergil ask the same questions, and now he had far too much interest in this archaic, run-down church he just disregarded as a failure of the Order of the Sword he could credit to unintentional negligence. Ignorant, but unintentional. It still seemed impossible that Fortuna could have been anything else than the holy land that their Father once lorded over.

It was impossible. So Vergil dropped to his knees, patting at the drawing to catch a smear, only for him to find the dark lines to be dirt caught in the etched grooves of the stone, deep enough to cut through flesh.

Oh holy Father.

“Forgive me,” Vergil repeated.

“I’d say you’re forgiven, V,” Dante said.

“I don’t believe you,” Vergil muttered. A firm hand forced him to reckon his brother. Dante flashed him a reassuring, an electrifying smile.

“Okay, then take it from me, a son of Sparda.” He traced a lazy cross from his shoulders and threw his hand in the air. “You have been absolved of your sins, my boy. Yes, even the ones you committed ten years ago when you were just a kid.”

Vergil frowned, his heart still strung up by his guilt, his shame.

“Hey, coming from a real sinner? You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Something about that entertained Vergil. And he laughed, despite himself.

He too was a real sinner. So, fine. He’d allow his stringent filter of forgiveness for his younger self’s desecration of holy property compared to the debauchery he had willingly dived into every day for the past few months. Not even. His entire adolescence filled with longing.

Dante seemed assuaged by his lighter mood. He fondled Vergil’s tricep, and Vergil let himself be magicked away, wherever Dante wanted to go.

“Care to take a real sinner’s confession, Father?”

Vergil bristled. “You don’t need to posture. As if you’re really apologetic about your hedonistic behavior.”

“I am, I am,” Dante insisted. “I’ve turned over a new leaf, I swear.”

Vergil must not have looked convinced.

“Come on, Vergil. Break in your priesthood with a good ol’ confession. And one from your reformed brother, no less.”

Vergil sighed, but he conceded.

“Fine. If it brings you peace to your soul. Dante, what is your confess–”

“No, get in the booth,” Dante urged, pointing at a… well, a something. Vergil saw no confessional but the other side of a flimsy plank of wood that could be used as a raft, so he assumed his position there. With no shelter cordoning off light, he could see Dante through the grate, though his head was bowed and face hidden.

Despite this, he asked: “what is your confession, my child?”

“Oh, Father,” Dante began putting on an actor's air, and Vergil already felt a headache approaching. “I’ve been sinful.”

Of course. “How so?”

“I have been tempted by a young man in our very church… no, not just of the congregation, but a young priest, an altar boy just a blink ago.”

An oncoming erection with his headache.

“A real man of God.”

He was, wasn’t he? Until recently.

“And you seduced him from his holy duties, didn’t you? Steered him away from our Father,” Vergil said, leaning his temple against the grate. He was so exhausted.

Dante hummed.

“What is your goal here?” Vergil bit. “Are you trying to seek forgiveness?”

“No.”

Vergil paused.

“Okay, maybe I feel a little bad,” Dante said. “I know how long he’s wanted this. But I’m just selfish. My need for him outweighs our Father’s will.”

Vergil’s throat was dry. “Your need?”

“Mine, and mine alone. I want him all to myself. None of the Order’s brown-nosers even deserve the chance to metaphorically kiss his ass.”

Vergil was not even remotely prepared to hear anything like that. In his mind he had already prepared his brother’s script for him. Something about his lustful flesh that failed to temper, as if he even tried, or to gloat victory over Vergil’s body. Not–

“And I’m glad I got to him first. It was only inevitable that I swallow him whole before anyone else swooped in.”

He needed to know.

“Since when did your desire begin?”

“I don’t know. Really. If I had to say… sometime when most boys start to see themselves as men. But I’ve always loved him, obviously. He’s family. He’s my only family left.”

Vergil knew that exact feeling.

“Did you mistake a familial love for lust?”

Dante laughed incredulously. “Is that what you think it is?”

“Dante…”

“If only he knew,” he said, “he’s been the only one occupying my lonely thoughts. Maybe it began when he stopped coming over to my room after nightmares woke him, and I created another version of him that would keep me warm in bed.

I’ve masturbated to the thought of him. I’ve used toys on myself as a substitute, you know that. Not really to pretend they were him, but to fend off the craving. I’m a pretty lecherous guy, Father. It’s hard for a sexual creature like me to be confined to the sterile wasteland of Fortuna. Not that any of them caught my fancy.

When he first wanted to be a priest, I thought that might never last. You see, he’s very hot-headed. Don’t wanna put him down, but never did I think he was priest-material. But the older he got, the more he seemed to need it. Still… I liked that even more.

He’s very handsome. Don’t get me wrong, it’s the family resemblance, he can’t help it. But he carries himself differently. The way he thinks he’s better than everyone. It’s honestly a bit funny, ‘cause I know he’s not. Just as much of a dog as I am.

Probably more so, if I’m really thinking about it, ‘cause he’s still in his teenage years. I remember when I was his age, foaming at the crotch. I know that all boys want is a wet hole. In my old age, I can be just that. A wet hole. He doesn’t even have to do anything else. He doesn’t need to be a priest, or a weapon of the church. Just a kid digging a hole.

But if he does stay here, if he keeps his vocation, I’ll stick around. Hell, I’ll waste away with him. It’s no skin off my back. Sometimes, I even fantasize about him giving me a baby that I’d have to send away–”

“Dante,” Vergil choked.

“Yes, Father?”

“That’s alright,” he said as sternly as he could through a stolen breath and an unrelenting hard-on. “I get your point.”

“My penance, Father?”

“What?”

“Should I mortify myself for my sins?” Dante asked. He leaned on the grate too, his fingers hanging on. Vergil wanted to touch him.

“No, Dante…” There were too many things for Vergil to contend with right now, his erection, his brother, the vision of Dante’s flayed back for him to cum to and cum on. “You need not rush to punish yourself so harshly.”

“Even after what I just confessed to?”

“No.” Vergil took a deep breath. “Be not too hasty with your own self-flaggelation.”

“So there’s nothing? Nothing I can do?”

“You can accept your sins as a part of yourself that is immutable,” Vergil said. “And your sins are not a burden you are carrying alone. The boy you tempted… you could devote yourself to him entirely. After all, you have already stolen his purity,” he mumbled, embarrassed, “so it would be more sinful for you to abandon him after you have taken what is his. I believe.”

Dante’s expression was unreadable. He suddenly stood up to leave, and Vergil did too on instinct, only for Dante to embrace and kiss him once the wall separated them no more. Within ten minutes, the drawing on the wall was by far the lesser evil that Vergil left behind in the halls of this once-sacred place.

 

 

 

What is it men in women do require

The lineaments of gratified desire

What is it women in men do require

“The lineaments of gratified desire,” Vergil whispered. Meanwhile, Dante hummed and stroked his flattened hair, automatic mechanisms that could be performed half-asleep.

The Blake had superseded its position in Vergil’s hands that were once possessed with their holy scripture. Although his first Mass was today, Vergil could hardly feel insecure in the speech he had practiced since he was a child, and certainly not with Dante’s hand taming his fears. The communion wine Dante fed into his slack throat throughout the night helped.

He reluctantly woke up before Dante an hour before Mass, when the cold sun started streaming in. That was how Vergil defined time now, from its proximity to his brother. Minutes and hours didn’t exist. Morning, afternoon, night were no longer adequate indicators.

“Mass today,” he muttered, when Dante pulled on his forearms as he sat up. Dante moaned.

“Nnf. Gimme ten more minutes.”

“Ten more minutes for you means something entirely different for everyone else,” Vergil retorted, though found Dante’s open little lies endearing now. Dante didn’t bother to defend himself with more than a grunt. Vergil poked him on his waist where a little fat had snuck into his brother’s brawny physique until Dante squirmed and flipped over. He opened an eye halfway.

“Get up now, brother.”

Dante to all his credit did obey, bending over to pick up his clothes. Instead of his own, he fished out Vergil’s wrinkled socks.

“It should be a crime for you to be dressed in these glorified curtains,” Dante said. Vergil smirked. “Feet,” and like a trained dog, he lifted a foot. Dante slid on a stone-cold sock. Vergil raised his other foot when Dante was done.

Dante held open the white pant legs for Vergil to step into. Vergil, too, slipped into it with no hesitation, and Dante did not abstain from taking his time pulling them up around Vergil’s hips. When he zipped Vergil up, he was exceptionally careful to work around his budding erection. The zipper and the linen was intimate on Vergil’s most sensitive skin.

Dante looked up at him. He was at the prime position for communion. Vergil lamented the lack of bread and wine in his room, along with any other substitutes. Before he realized it, his finger grazed Dante’s lips. Dante took it into his mouth, just that first knuckle, his tongue pressing the pad. It took Vergil a congregation’s worth of strength to extract himself, and Dante never went out softly, he never did, nibbling Vergil as his finger abandoned Dante.

Dante picked up a dress shirt and stood up. Vergil shivered when the shadow of his brother engulfed him entirely, a sliver of his forehead only spared of darkness from the candlelight.

“It really is a crime,” Dante mused, “hasn’t anyone told you should be flaunting your assets?”

The idea was so appalling that Vergil had to laugh. He hardly considered any of his body an “asset” in that sense. “Like how you did when you were a younger man?”

“Why not? This time of your life should be prime for experimentation,” Dante said. Vergil saw unfit to correct Dante that the last few months had been the most experimentational of his life.

“I could never expose myself so frivolously.”

“I get it. Definitely not in Fortuna with its winters. But it never gets that cold in Redgrave,” Dante replied, as if weather was the only reason he once dressed in leather and latex strapped across his bare skin as everyday wear.

“I would not be your boytoy anywhere in the world, mind you,” Vergil clarified, shaking off a crooked grin.

“I know,” Dante lamented. “What a shame. At least I can still see your handsome face in the cassock,” he said, pinching Vergil’s cheek. It felt hot and Vergil knew it came from an oncoming blush more than the pressure on his flesh.

If that wasn’t enough, Dante laid a mockingly chaste kiss on his lips, knowing fully well that neither of them would ever conceive of anything Dante ever does as chaste.

“Mass,” Vergil chastised.

“A kiss for good luck,” Dante chastised him back. He kissed Vergil again, and rubbed the entirety of his nude form against him.

“Enough…” but he didn’t push Dante away. In the name of impartiality he allowed Dante to commit his favorite sins on his body the instrument. Let Dante use him as a comfort to grind on and hump, especially when Vergil’s body inevitably reacted to his ministrations and his cock jutted from his robes, the perfect wedge for Dante to scratch himself on. These small charitable actions Vergil allowed Dante to revel in, knowing that his attempts to corrupt his “jailbait” brother (Vergil, once he came to know what this term meant, despised it since) had unfortunately succeeded.

Vergil could not really bring himself to complain now that he was in the throes of corruption, upon knowing that the other side of hell was just the padded, narrow enclosure of an incinerating, wet cunt. He almost demanded for it again, but then Dante let him go.

To send Vergil on his way, he slapped his ass.

“Get to church,” Dante said slyly.

And so Vergil regrettably left his room a step before Dante. It had become normal to do so, even though there was no tangible reason that anyone might suspect that two brothers were up to no good, but it brought Vergil a sort of meaningless condolence.

If Sanctus and the few clergymen waiting at the sanctuary were disappointed in Vergil’s tardiness, Vergil ignored it or simply did not realize it. In a few minutes, the church was open for the congregation and they filled in the gaps between pews. In the red sea, Vergil kept an eye out for that one faded maroon habit. Dante was nowhere to be found.

Until Vergil took a chance on the white-robed assembly of clergymen did he see Dante, in a shape he had never seen before. His size still commanded power, but Vergil could tell his brother was trying his best not to draw attention to himself.

How could he not? Especially today, of all days. Especially in his official cassock, out of all his red and black clothes Dante adamantly refused to diverge from that Vergil didn’t know Dante still had, or had in the first place. Vergil could see that Dante tried to practice modesty at the bare minimum. Nothing was altered to reveal more muscle-bound limbs, no sleeves drawn up to his elbows as a fierce display of his strength like how a tiger bore its teeth. Instead, he had just the cassock, his hooded cloak that uselessly attempted reticence, and of course, unable to resist the temptation of his own fashion sense, three leather belts imprisoned his body through his chest and stomach, held together by struggling gold buckles.

Dante dipped his head through strained humility, but despite himself, shot Vergil one supportive smile under his hood.

From there down the nave, there was nothing else that Dante looked like other than a bride.

For Vergil, who had never seriously considered taking a wife for more than a few weak indulgences, this was the only thing he wanted now.

He could have his entire speech informed by his new relationship with his brother, and take him to the altar to take him. No wedding vows needed be said through words, and no priest would ordain their marriage anyway. Under their Father’s gaze, all that was necessitated was his unspoken blessing, and Vergil felt more than certain now more than ever that this was part of His will. Whatever Vergil declared would be the true and only word of Sparda.

Upon this revelation, Vergil decided: his brother belonged to him. For anyone who cared to know, Vergil would lay his brother on the altar and perform his duties as a newly christened husband and baptize his cock in the terribly real body that hardly relied on faith for Vergil to know that it was all around him and forgave him more than a dead father. This fantasy consumed every square footage of Vergil’s mind, blaze over this now barren land. On this razed earth, only Dante was allowed to grow, to propagate his lust and fertilize plentifully.

Sanctus cupped Vergil’s elbow, his hand guiding him out of hell. “Go on ahead,” he said. The music had already faded, leaving only the aftertaste of the organ’s last chord.

Vergil stepped onto the pulpit, into the spotlight of a couple thousand pairs of eyes, and began to speak. He counted on his blinks and gaps between sentences that offered respite, holding his eyes shut in those second-long pockets of sleep, so that he might be magicked away, imagining himself devoured by worldly comforts, reading Blake, caressed by Dante.

 

 

 

Succeeding his first sermon, Vergil found his time occupied. Part of him expected it one-and-done, a watershed moment for his own journey, but he hadn’t expected Sanctus to take to it so well. As such the circumstances disallowed Vergil the same schedule of hedonism that his brother followed.

But Vergil was nothing if not gratified. He knew not much about the work-life balance that laborers spoke of, but he had his closest approximation to it. He had inadvertently found himself successfully balancing his faith and Dante. Which was work and which was life he didn’t bother making that assessment.

Even he managed to get Dante less scandalous. Not by reigning in his sexual appetite, Vergil might clarify, but by supplementing Dante’s routine with prayer and confession. Dante was now completely willing to throw himself on his hands and knees. Vergil only took a little bit of delight that it was usually done only preceding his enjoyment of Vergil, the same kind of prayer one might make hastily, with a growling stomach, before digging into a meal.

He even showed his devotion outside the bedroom, though Vergil suspected his brother had an affinity for making himself a prey to chase and to find, knowing that Vergil would eventually do so and reward Dante for his newfound routine of worship. Vergil arrived at the church to be pleasantly thrilled to see his brother already there, kneeling.

Though Dante still had a long journey ahead of him. “Prostrate yourself,” Vergil reprimanded, kicking his brother lightly on the calf.

Dante leaned forward until his head touched the floor and he thrust his ass back. Vergil groaned.

“I’m not falling for that.” As much as he would like to.

“Damn.”

Vergil knelt next to his brother. “What would He say if He saw you now,” he sighed.

“He’d be proud of me, I hope. I took such great care of you when he was gone.”

“No pride in how you slept through sermons.”

“Definitely not. I slept through so many of his lectures. He’d whack me on the head whenever he caught me drooling into my textbook.”

Vergil smiled when he envisioned it. It was an easy fantasy. The setting was just different. He allowed himself to sidle into the false memory, sit on the next desk from Dante in front of their father’s daunting silhouette.

It was dangerous territory. He rarely asked Dante about their parents, choosing to subsist on the brisk watering of details when Dante chose to ramble. But his morals had loosened and become so flexible. It was easier and easier to let go.

“And our mother?”

“Oh, she spoiled me. She’d give me a piece of candy if she caught me sleeping through something important, just to wake me up.”

“Beyond that. What was she like?”

Dante blinked at him, surprised. “Wow. Where do I even start… well I can’t start from hers, so I’ll start from mine. Her and Dad taught me everything I needed to know, you know that. She was great. Like she knew how to be a mom on the get-go. Kind, loving, caring, supportive, all that jazz. Sometimes she could be meaner than Dad. Can’t say I didn’t deserve it though. Great sense of fashion. Worked red like it was her job,” he winked, “you can see where I got it from.

She was,” he sighed for dramatic effect, “my rock. Mine and Dad’s. She was everything good under the sun.”

Vergil swallowed. Dante glanced at him and pinned him down with such a nonchalant look.

“They really wanted you, Vergil. It wasn’t easy making you. None of us knew exactly why. Mom was totally fine. Dad… uh, well, demons don’t keep medical records. I think we just chalked it up to not knowing how demons and humans could get it on. They didn’t get me on the first try either, but I’d say I was a happy accident. But you, V, from the moment I was born until the day you were conceived, they wanted to have you.”

“I wonder why.”

Dante grinned. “To give me a playmate?” He raised his hands when Vergil glared at him. “Hey, that’s verbatim! Mom said that!”

They sat in silence for a brief moment before Dante continued. “She was a funnier woman than people might expect.” He eyed Vergil coyly. “She could be pretty wicked too. If she was alive, and also not our dear father’s wife, she wouldn’t have been allowed entry into the church.”

Vergil was aghast but intrigued. “She couldn’t have been that terrible.”

“She wasn’t. But by Fortuna’s standards…”

“Tell me.”

Clearly enthralled by his rapt attention, Dante tapped his nose. “They weren’t married when I was born.”

“Impossible.”

“Yep. I was the flower boy at their wedding. We put up papier-mâché ornaments in the garden and held it there on a whim when Dad asked for her hand for the thousandth time. No officiant or priest or anything. No witnesses either.”

“But our Father’s thoughts on the constitution of marriage…”

“He wanted to get married. He was interested in Fortuna’s unique customs, those existed before he came here. But it wasn’t the sort of thing Mom cared for.” Dante studied Vergil’s expression, and left with his findings pleased. “So you see, Vergil, if you ever regretted bedding me before you married me, rest assured that your fears are unfounded.”

Vergil blushed. “I’ve had no such thought.”

“Ooh. So scandalous, just like Mom.”

“Nonsense,” Vergil scoffed, nudging Dante. “That’s you in a word.”

Dante laughed. “Yeah. I certainly hope so. She really had a fire in her.” He grinned bashfully. Furtively, like he was sharing it with the ghost of her.

“I can certainly see how you took after her.”

“You think so?”

“Yes,” Vergil answered stiffly. “I can’t speak to the accuracy of my assessment. But from how you described her, those embers burn in you too.”

He still felt sour. Though Dante had to have been a more reliable source than the Order of the Sword, too acutely aware was Vergil that what he learned was still just folklore, generational knowledge. There would never not be a degree of separation.

A moment of quiet, until Dante said “no one really said that besides Mom herself.”

“I assume so.” Vergil had faced the brunt of it too. No one called them sons of Eva.

“You take after her. More than you realize.” He raised an eyebrow. “Yes, really.” Dante took Vergil’s face between his hands. What once needed to be forceful, Vergil let Dante hold his face up to the light. “I grew out of the family resemblance. But you do. Both Mom and Dad in equal measure.”

“Do you think so?”

Dante nodded, biting his bottom lip loosely. He examined Vergil. “You got the signature white hair, and especially with it slicked back it looks like his ‘cause he used to comb it back too. But your complexion’s more human. Pink. Dad was kinda ghostly. Scared me a few times around dark corners when I was a kid.”

He turned Vergil’s face to the side, and leaned in close enough to where he might gravitate to kiss. “Strong jawline, but thinner. Hell, everything of yours is thinner. Hairless; Dad had a bit of the same fluff on his chin and chest like me,” he commented. Vergil inhaled sharply.

“Perhaps I haven’t grown it in yet.”

Dante looked endeared by his defensiveness like Vergil had just told him he wanted to be a cosmonaut. “Don’t. You’re going to ruin it for me.”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t suit you. I need you cute, don’t grow it out.”

“If this is your way of calling me weak…”

“Only you would be opposed to being called cute, Vergil.”

“Why shouldn’t I? The word doesn’t promote an image of power,” Vergil huffed. He straightened his back, trying to meet Dante at eye level. They were almost the same height, so it was no issue, but Vergil’s resolve crumbled from the sheer breadth of his brother. Dante jut his chin out with a smirk.

“Are you trying to prove me wrong?” he murmured.

Vergil cupped his chin. “I’ll show you. I–”

The doors to the church opened, and a gaggle of sisters flocked in. Quickly Vergil returned his hands to his lap, and Dante followed suit if not slower, letting his eyes fondle for a moment more. Vergil prostrated himself, Dante too, as the women observed a fair distance from them and settled into the pews somewhere behind.

Vergil couldn’t help himself, he peeked. Dante’s eyes were closed, squeezed closed, like how a child might count down the numbers until he would go forth and seek. Vergil nudged him, but he didn’t budge. He crept his hand those few inches between them and grasped his brother’s fist. Dante’s hand bloomed open like a flower, and they intertwined fingers.

 

 

 

The floodgates had opened. Vergil wanted to know everything. Everything he ever thought to ask, catalogued in his mind and contemplated enough times over for the questions to stay fresh.

He asked Dante if their father ever felt shame for being a demon. Dante said no, entirely too serious, as if he was afraid Vergil might grow another head of shame if Dante said yes. But He had still repented for the time he woke up to justice.

“Do you think He ever forgave himself?”

“He spent the rest of his time here making up and protecting others. That’s as much as he could do,” Dante said mildly.

Vergil allowed himself the sacrilegious thought to imagine himself in his Father’s shoes. He must’ve entered too deep into his own mind, because Dante pinched him.

“Hey, even someone like Dad had to enjoy himself once in a while. How do you think he made us?” Dante teased, pointing to the both of them. Vergil blushed, and then Dante proved his own point to enjoy himself the way their father did.

So the next sermon where Vergil spoke, he chose to speak on absolution. A good break from the recent sermons that Sanctus and the other priests had given. He hardly gave the congregation a second look, after he saw Dante in the pews again on the upper floor.

After the congregation filed out for Mass, including Dante, Sanctus approached Vergil.

“Wonderful sermon, Vergil. It was inspired.”

“I was studying our Father’s own teachings in our scripture. His later hymns touched me in particular, in Psalms, before he left Fortuna.” Vergil was only lying by a stretch. He had read through the entire Psalms, after Dante had inspired him with word and body.

“You’re nothing if not in-depth. Eager to join the seminary, aren’t you,” the vicar said. “You’re really your Father’s son.”

“Thank you,” Vergil replied. Even without Sanctus’ assessment, he did feel closer to his Father than ever.

“You are quite the talented orator. I can see you surpassing our late Solemnis in his one talent,” the vicar continued. Vergil could only wonder why. No doubt partially due to Dante’s trafficking of wonderful poetry to his very feet. “So, Vergil, I can’t see why any of our clergy would be opposed to you joining our ranks, though a little early. In fact, your presence in our ranks is long overdue.”

“Oh,” Vergil said. “And what about Dante?”

Sanctus looked at him curiously. “Your brother?”

“Yes…” Vergil answered, his tongue suddenly heavy like lead.

Sanctus laughed. “I don’t think your brother is eager to follow in our footsteps, my son.”

“No, he isn’t,” Vergil said. “But he is still my brother. He has his own merits. He is useful. He is stronger than any of the Holy Knights.”

“I’m not sure, Vergil,” Sanctus eventually responded, and his voice was similarly stern like a tutor reprimanding a student. “The Holy Knights may be soldiers, but they are disciples first.”

An invisible hand squeezed Vergil’s heart. “He’s a son of Sparda!”

“I know. And we do take care of him, don’t we?” Sanctus said. “We give him a place to stay. We let him do whatever he wants, even against our values. And while we are capable of defending our land, his services have always been appreciated. He has a home here for as long as he wants.”

“So the only issue is that Dante isn’t God-fearing?” Vergil asked urgently. “If he was proselytized, you would allow him into your rank?”

“We have already tried, Vergil. But Dante isn’t the type of man to change,” Sanctus said. “When he arrived at Fortuna seeking you, he made it clear that his only reason for being here was to take care of you. For a while, we were afraid he might steal you away.”

“But he never did. He stayed with me at the church,” Vergil said defensively. “There must be some part of him that desires salvation.”

Sanctus looked at him with horrible sympathy.

“I know there is,” Vergil said and each word was hollow and dry. “Give me time. Just a while longer.”

 

 

 

Dante practically ambushed Vergil when he returned, Dante’s hands clutching his robes always with the same threat of him ripping them off.

“Dante!” before Dante bit and released his ear, and Vergil cursed him out for taking advantage of a weakness only he was privy to. He tried to push Dante off, but they had long since cultivated that play of push and pull, so it only made Dante more frenzied. Distantly, Vergil knew pulling Dante on would bear the same result. There was no option that led to them stopping.

Vergil hesitated, and Dante shoved him down on the bed, coming along for the ride. Instead of stripping him, Dante leaned back all of a sudden, heaving and staring him down. Then he quickly unbuckled his own belts, flinging them on the floor, tearing his bodice and robes off.

“You look so hot in your new cassock,” Dante groaned. He slipped his hands under the robes, undoing Vergil’s slacks deftly.

“You look…” Vergil said, trying to return the compliment. When he ogled Dante, his brother’s entirely nude body, his tits and little sliver of stomach drooping from the weight, Vergil groaned and his cock filled the gap under Dante’s hands.

“Ha, Vergil, you don’t need to say anything.”

Still, Vergil wanted to. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he sighed, and wrapped a hand around Dante’s nape to bring him in. He sucked and bit along his brother’s neck with great force, so that to Dante’s pleasure his marks might last a few seconds more than they usually did. For Vergil’s pleasure too, or to relieve all this pent-up frustration on the most unbreakable thing he owned.

His mouth set its sights on one nipple that Vergil gnawed raw with his teeth, as Dante jerked him off. So innocently covered, Vergil felt entirely blameless right now, his sin out of sight, out of mind, whilst Dante subjected himself to the judgement of his nude form.

As much as Dante stroked him, that pleasure was insurmountable, waning and waxing. Frustrated, Vergil flipped his brother onto his back, intending to stifle the hemming-and-hawing of Dante’s sexual proclivities which would see fit to have them run around in circles until someone gave out. Not today, and certainly not right now. Vergil fit himself into the slot between Dante’s legs and settled his cock in position.

“Do you still jerk off?” Dante suddenly asked.

Vergil was entirely unprepared for that question. “I never–”

Dante laughed breathlessly. “Let me rephrase that. Do you still get off by yourself?”

“No,” Vergil said with a blush. “I don’t see a need to anymore.”

“Spoiled,” Dante said, and kissed Vergil. Their mouths met open, and Vergil drooled into his brother. His hips readied between Dante’s open legs, but Dante reached between them and held the base of his cock. Vergil grunted unhappily. Dante peeled off his mouth and licked away the excess.

“Show me, kid.”

“How?” Helplessly Vergil still bucked at Dante, but he was unforgivably strong, an immovable object. Vergil couldn’t even slip out of the ring around his penis.

“Nuh uh. No crutch today,” Dante scolded. He let go, and the heavy tip of Vergil’s cock hammered onto his stubbly mound. It was shaved two days ago. Vergil watched it happen. “Try. I believe in you.”

It was the faith in him that Vergil found most baffling, though he did go with trembling hand to grab his cock with more pressure than he might while aiming his urine or during a brief lapse of conscience where he felt the only solution to curbing his erection was to squeeze it. He gasped and glanced at Dante, who leered at it.

Vergil pumped his fist around it slowly. A heavy drop of pre-ejaculate was milked out of his tip, already loaded up when he and Dante had been kissing. It splattered under Dante’s bellybutton. Dante scoffed at it, but his eyes were lidded and focused at the same time. Vergil knew that look. He continued to stroke himself, making sure to go at a steady pace to draw out his brother’s entertainment.

“Need some motivation?” Dante asked. Need? Not really, Vergil thought, not at all. He was content to fix his gaze on Dante’s eyes made more elusive and alluring by his browbone that cast a shadow over them, his sweaty and messy hair that spoke to a level of unravelling that had already been done. Dante’s smile, which was dimpled on both sides and his lips that took their time to draw back over his sharp teeth. Dante’s neck, which was as muscled as the rest of him that guided any audience of his body down like a low-cut neckline, a throbbing and swallowing Adam’s apple that Vergil had laved over time and time again. And all of this Vergil could sufficiently feast on just by admiring this objective beauty, and would sustain any infinite number of erections.

“Look at me.” Dante pushed Vergil back until he was sitting on his heels. He ran his hands over his chest, propping them as high as he could to his chin until he let them go and they wobbled back into place. They were much less bouncy than a woman’s but no less captivating. Vergil’s hand unwittingly picked up its pace. Dante was performing for him, considering how impatient he was, but that only invigorated Vergil, to think that his brother was doing all this for his benefit. Dante’s fingers slid down his torso, taking the route of the lineaments between his abdomen, and pinched his own mound before he grazed two fingers over his labia.

“Vergil,” he moaned. He stared at Vergil’s cock. It in no way shied under the gaze, jutting out prouder than ever. Dante’s fingers dipped shallowly into his cunt, not even past the second knuckle, as he felt around for a few seconds and took them out for Vergil to see. Wet. Wet to the brim. Vergil had to clench the bottom of his gut so he wouldn't cum.

“I need you, Dante.”

Dante smirked, but he seemed to know better than to retort with something like “I know” or “tell me about it.” He lubed up his clitoris with his dripping fingers, and Vergil paid the utmost focus to his brother’s self-induced pleasure, perhaps to compare it to his pain. He found them both rewarding in their own right.

Dante was thick, his hood thick like Vergil’s, but there was less of him for it to cover so it hung over his pussy. Dante pinched each side and peeled it back, the head of his clit peeping out. “Fuck,” he groaned, “fuck me, Vergil.”

On command, Vergil thrust his hips forward, but Dante’s other hand cupped his cunt shut from behind. The head of Vergil’s cock smeared against the veiny backside of it. Dante paid no mind to it. In fact, he ogled Vergil’s penis openly, biting his lip, tongue pressed into the inside of his cheek, brow furrowed. He jerked himself off like Vergil did, and meanwhile his other hand’s fingers snuck in innocuously, all four of them, and it gave way like nothing.

“That’s it, baby, yeah,” Dante moaned, performative and genuine. “Fuck it for me.” Vergil grabbed his brother’s furry thigh for stability as he masturbated. “Pussy wants you, Vergil, fuck it into a pulp.”

“Yeah,” Vergil gasped, fucking his hand now, throwing his hips forward rather than his fist against himself. “You take me well.”

The words were hot on his tongue, but Dante didn't even laugh. He just stared. “I know.”

“I’m,” Vergil licked his lips, “going, gonna cum, Dante.”

“Yeah? Mess up that pussy, baby. Wreck it,” and it was hard to tell if Dante was just saying it, but he released his fingers and right as Vergil was on the edge of it Dante allowed the tip of his cock inside and that was enough to get Vergil to orgasm, seated in the shallow end. He knew it loved him so dearly, for it bled Vergil for all he was worth.

Vergil had no idea how Dante spoke like that so naturally, right out of the sticky pages of his magazines but without the awkwardness of a woman only incentivized by money. It always left Vergil so inarticulate, stammering, like a boy littler than he was.

“That’s how you relieved yourself?” Vergil managed to ask.

“Yeah,” Dante answered lazily. He grinned. “But I don’t see a need to now. I’ve got all I need right here.”

His words brought Vergil back to reality, the painful reminder pinching him. He had spent so long trying to proselytize his brother, gotten distracted on his way there. The spectre of their Father no longer loomed over him. But now the vicar took His place.

“Dante, I have to tell you something. I’m beginning my vocation. The seminary is at headquarters, they’ll teach me what I need to know to accomplish my vocations.”

“Hold on. What?”

Dante looked at him like he had grown ten heads. Vergil didn’t let him speak beyond his shock. He had to offload his burden all at once right now. “Live with me there. I want you to.”

“I don’t,” Dante said firmly.

Even with what Sanctus said a prominent reminder in his mind, Vergil would have to bend the rules. “It’d be no different from here. We can still…”

“Still what? Still fuck? In headquarters around the likes of Sanctus and Angus, those asswipes? You know I’m up for a lot, but that’s a whole new level of freak I’m not willing to tolerate.”

“They’re men of God,” Vergil hissed. Dante laughed scornfully, but it tapered off very quickly.

“Vergil. You can’t be serious. You can’t go.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not safe. Sanctus doesn’t have your best interests at heart. Hell, I’m not sure even old man Solemnis did, but–you can’t.” Dante studied him. “Don’t you find him at least a bit suspect?”

“Not so much that it warrants a lack of faith in him,” Vergil replied. “Your hands aren’t clean either.”

“There’s a difference between–!” Dante put his hands to his face, scraping the heels of them over his eyes. “Fuck. I don’t want you to want you to live like this, abstaining from everything good. Mom and Dad wouldn’t want you to live like this, brainwashed by sycophants who only want you for your blood!”

“And you want me for entirely noble reasons,” Vergil sneered. “Needing me to satiate your terrible, immoral desires. Of course the Order of the Sword desire me for my heritage. I am the last faithful relic of their savior.”

It did not go unnoticed. Dante glared at Vergil with a transparent anger that even Vergil felt stunned.

“I know you think you’re better, Vergil,” he said, “but this is not about me.” Vergil stared at him. In that moment of shock, after he’d been bisected, pried open, and examined, there wasn’t much he could say.

What if I am?

But he found it too horrendous to reaffirm Dante’s scathing assessment of him.

Dante took a deep breath.

“Do not go with Sanctus.”

“Don’t tell me what to do. You’re not my father.”

Dante’s unknown gaze seemed to goad Vergil. Go on. Keep fighting me.

“If you don’t want to come with me, I won’t make you. It’s not any fault but your own that you refuse to find salvation.” Dante still didn’t respond.

Angrily, Vergil got up. He brushed down his disheveled robes, terrible proof of his crimes that nudity would not solve. Not even another cassock. He didn’t deserve to wear it right now.

And though he had the last word, he said; “you’ve made your bed, Dante. Lie in it.”

 

 

 

When Vergil returned to his quarters late in the evening, he made note to be silent, pressing his ear against the wall to see if Dante was still inside. Dante was rarely quiet, even on his own, subject to talking to himself with only a thread of sanity separating him apart from the average town lunatic. Though, considering the way the church saw him, he might as well have been the town lunatic–even Fortuna’s most mentally disadvantaged were pious to their Father.

Vergil’s room was fortunately absent of his brother. In fact, there seemed to be no proof that Dante was ever there in the past few weeks. Scraped clean of his residue, Dante’s belongings were gone, the ones he had slowly gotten acquainted with Vergil’s room when neither of them could decide which domicile was to be their main and didn’t see the need to make real arrangements. Vergil could scoff. A bitter attitude he could stomach for a few days.

At least his books were still under the bed where Vergil tucked them away. Dante didn’t think to take away the gifts that he bestowed to his brother.

A day passes, and Vergil confined himself to his study. He considered notifying the vicar of his decision, but he never made the request. Sanctus would seek him out eventually, the nature of his invitation urgent. It was only a matter of time.

A few more days was enough time.

Vergil would not seek his brother out. He had no need to. Dante made it excessively clear what he would or wouldn’t do, and for as much as he was open to denigrating himself, the one thing that held him back was piety.

So Vergil read Psalms again. Dante still didn’t appear.

It wasn’t like him not to. He always ignored Vergil when he tried to push him away. Was this really any different? And so Vergil feels embittered again, that Dante couldn’t take just the slightest of pressure.

He was supposed to be his–

His brother? A father, or a mother?

He was supposed to be someone Vergil could always seek out and rely on. Regardless of how much Vergil rejected his advances.

Or his undying support.

After Vergil read through Psalms for what might’ve been the hundredth time, no longer did he hear the fantasy of his father’s voice dictate his hymns. Dante had given Vergil his best description of it anyway, and it had since muddled the vision from his childhood.

He was seized by this chokehold around his heart. From under the bed he desperately grabbed for his treasures that were buried there, any, for they were all baptized by Dante when he picked them out for him as carefully as flowers in a garden. Vergil found the bookend, a candle with its wick burnt too close to the quick, and all those books fell out in his sweeping motion that disentombs Vergil’s hoarded presents.

All would bear the voice of his brother, the one that coerced him to destroy. But when Vergil leapt through books and pages, he only heard himself, his wretched, pathetic whimpering, his tiny, quivering larva unearthed from its foul cocoon.

 

 

 

No doubt about it, we’re out of the world. No more sound, No sense of touch. Ah, my castle, my Saxony, my willow woods. The evenings, the mornings, the nights, the days… I’m tired!

I ought to have my hell for anger and my hell for pride, – and the hell for sex; a symphony of hells!

I’m dying of weariness. This is the grave, I’m going to the worms, horror of horrors! Satan, you clown, you’d like to dissolve me with your charms. Bring it on. Bring it on! A twirl of the pitchfork, a little lick of fire.

Ah! To rise up once again and live! To feast my eyes on our deformities. And that poison, that fatal fuck! My weakness, the world’s cruelty. Dear God, have mercy, hide me, I can’t hold out! –I’m hidden, and I’m not.

The fire leaps up with my soul inside it.

 

 

 

Never had Vergil entered the sisters’ quarters, but it was an imperative. With his role in the church more cemented, any sister would tend to his worries. On the second day, he did such a thing.

The nuns all looked at him with a bit of unease, though Vergil did not care when his fear started to eat his body alive.

“Is Sister Gloria here?”

The sisters had no answer he wanted. Gloria hadn’t been seen in the past few weeks. Vergil couldn’t rule out the possibility that she and Dante might have run away together.

Dante already had a day and more ahead of him. How far could he have feasibly gone?

There was not a second Vergil could lose to self-doubt. He even almost forgot to hide himself on the way out. Stealing a hooded habit from the rectory, he only gave pause to when the city started to make shape between the trees of the forest. Like a feral animal that had been thrust to the outskirts of its habitat from industrialization, Vergil felt a sense of unease approaching the city.

He made his way to the landmark he knew best and could see over the tops of residential buildings. The hellgate stood there as absolute as the sparing occasions Vergil came about the city. It remained sealed, as all those same occasions. On another day it might offer direction, but Vergil barely glanced at it when he passed.

There were more men than women on the street, though even they were not plenty. Stores were mostly closed, observing the curfew that saw that they spend their nights at home. Even restaurants were mostly empty, for the frugalness of material joys extended to food and drink.

He could not find Dante anywhere. Not in the clothes and meagre necessities that were sold along the business district; there was no semblance of Dante’s lifestyle. Nothing like the musical instruments he played on his fleeting whims, or the type of dress he modelled in his own time. Vergil saw no lascivious magazines, no comic books.

Dante could not subsist on a life here. Fortuna’s environment was unsustainable for such a creature.

As Vergil kept searching, the streetlights turned on, offering as little compensation as possible when the night turned dark. More and more the public whittled away, and Vergil thought it might melt away to reveal Dante hiding between the weeds of humans, though deep down he knew Dante never sought to make himself small.

The furthest place Vergil’s legs took brought him to the sea. A port hugged the coast for as far as he could see. And Vergil ran as far as he could see. Only commercial ships tucked in for the evening.

The ocean was silent, no boat a stray wanderer. It was more infinite than he remembered.

How could Vergil possibly sail these waters? Nothing would take him across, and he had no coin to.

By now, Dante could have left to a place that Vergil could not follow.

“Excuse me?”

Vergil turned. His eyes acclimated to the sight. White hair and red robes.

“Are you alright?”

Only after a few seconds, his mind gained unfortunate clarity and refused to maintain the mirage to his brother, and what was left was the sight of a young woman his age. Her white bonnet deceived him; her hair was brown. She looked at him with something not unlike pity. Vergil dipped his head and hoped she did not recognize him.

“Father?”

She sounded compassionate. Vergil lent her his gaze. She looked compassionate. She touched his arm.

“You don’t have to tell me what’s troubling you, but I can’t just let one of our holy men freeze out here,” she said. She smiled in a soft, pillowy way. It unsettled Vergil.

”I’m fine,” he said. He took his attention from her. He looked to the waters again.

She kept touching him.

Vergil twitched. Too disgruntled to tell her to leave him be, he tore himself away. A dog licking his wounds, he had no choice but to retreat.

 

 

 

Too late did he find himself at Dante’s doorstep, hoping that Dante would know he was there to beckon him inside. But Vergil could not spend another moment regretting waiting this long. Three days. The storm donned his same distress, and it bore no immediate future of stopping, but even if it did, Vergil would not give even his panic the dignity of waiting for a sound, any indication, that life existed beyond this door.

“Dante?”

Vergil was greeted to a sight he predicted might make him despair. Empty of his brother. It was less lived in than it used to be, Vergil could tell. Without Dante, all of this just seemed like a relic of another culture and era that Vergil didn’t know.

Vergil rifled through his brother’s things. Nothing left a clue behind. No writing besides his magazines, and even his holy book and toys were missing. Vergil didn’t take Dante as the type for writing his thoughts down, not when he was so easily capable of speaking his own thoughts unhindered by the second opinion of his superego. A much more difficult endeavor it was, then, for Vergil to only be informed of his brother by his actions first, and then his words that Vergil kept resisting to trust.

A foul warmth blossomed behind his eyes. Nearly tears, but Vergil’s entire body was too bottled up to cry. He stared down at the bed where he and Dante had spent many days and nights. Unclean but in a nondescript way, so what could be inferred would only be attributed to Dante’s general lack of hygiene, not proof that they were so lost in each other that neither of them cared to be proper or even intended to mark the sheets with prideful emblems of pleasure.

“You’re here, good.”

Dante stood in the doorway. Vergil barely recognized him from the way he was dressed. All of a sudden Vergil knew what kind of clothes they were. They were clothes for leaving. A wave of feeling hit him, and he could only assume for an emotion to be this strong for it to be rage. Irradiating anger.

“Where were you?” Vergil demanded, posthumous panic raising his voice.

Dante averted his gaze.

Vergil’s thoughts bounced from conspiracy to conspiracy. “Did you say something to the vicar? Negotiated my terms for me?”

Dante didn’t answer.

That’s right. “I can–” smell taste feel “-tell you’ve been to see him.”

“I just went out to retrieve something,” Dante finally said. Vergil leaned in. There was blood on Dante’s collar. It wasn’t red, so it was distinctly mismatched against the red of Dante’s coat.

“What did you do?” Vergil yanked him by the collar, giving him a thorough inspection. It took all he had for him not to forget everything and just kiss Dante.

“My job. Hunting demons,” Dante said.

“The vicar?”

“Now when did I say anything about him? Though he’d sure like to be a demon.”

Vergil’s conscience saw it an imperative to go to headquarters, witness the consequences of Dante’s actions. Now that Dante was actually here, Vergil couldn’t move. All he could do was stand in front of his brother as an empty threat, but Dante held his place between the doors steadfast.

“We’re leaving.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Dante stared at him exasperatedly. “God damn it. God damn it, Vergil.”

Vergil couldn’t even be bothered to correct his brother’s language.

“You’re not even going to try to repent.”

Date shrugged. “I don’t feel much sorry about anything.”

Vergil pinched his eyes dry. “What about your home here?”

“Don’t you get it, Vergil? There is no home for me here.”

What about me?

“What about all your things?” he tried, gesturing at Dante’s room. Vergil hadn’t removed anything from it since they reconciled their relationship into something more, and it was the most lived in it had been. There had to be a home for him here, or at least a doghouse.

Dante headed a thousand-yard stare in the general direction Vergil pointed to. With a decisive, steady hand, he materialized Rebellion, and drove its tip into the jukebox. Vergil watched Dante as he slashed through his room. Every poster he had accrued like pennies, every bit of furniture and knick-knacks the church and Vergil had turned a blind eye to bore the brunt of Dante’s outburst. Dante only hesitated when it came to the bed, where the sheets were undone and the additional pillow seemed to appeal to his conscience, until he carved a clean virgule through the mattress and bedframe.

“There,” Dante said. “Now I don’t have anything worth staying for. Do you have anything we gotta get?”

Vergil shook his head.

“You’re throwing away your life in the name of freedom.”

“For your freedom, Vergil,” Dante said, his voice thin and worn out. “This is no way for you to live.”

“Oh no? Lead by Father’s will?”

“Father’s… you want to talk about his will?”

Dante unlatched something from his hip and held it out. It was a sword; its style of blade was unfamiliar to Vergil. He took it with two hands, as gentle as nests prepared for the eggs of a cardinal.

“What is this?”

“Yamato,” Dante answered. He pressed it into Vergil’s hands, forcing it to give. “Our father wanted to leave it to you. I wanted to wait until there was a better opportunity. When you were out of the Order’s grasp.”

Vergil couldn’t bring himself to return it. It was right in his hands. Intrinsically correct. As much as Vergil knew Dante to be his brother, for better or for worse.

“And what if I’m not?”

Dante hesitated. He gauged Vergil with a studious effort, and Vergil looked at his brother’s demeanor with that same severity. It was terrifying to be faced with Dante’s sincerity.

“It doesn’t matter. It was Dad’s wish that you have it.”

He let go of the sword, and Vergil found his hands capable of holding it steadily.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked.

“Don’t know. What about you?”

“I don’t have anywhere else, Dante.”

Dante ran a hand through his hair, clearly frustrated. “Guess I’m staying with you then.”

“What?” It’s so unbelievable even Vergil was near tears.

Dante looked down at his feet. “You told me to.”

Vergil stared at him.

“I have seduced a man of God,” Dante said. “I have stolen his purity.”

“Dante.”

“My responsibilities are to take care of his wellbeing. I belong to him.”

“You idiot. You’ve,” Vergil laughed broken, “you’ve been on thin ice this entire time. Stealing bread and wine and seducing your own brother is nothing compared to what you’ve done today.”

“Hm.” Dante tapped his chin. “Think they’ll forgive me? Like a ‘three-strikes-and-you’re-out’ type of deal.” Still, his expression was relentlessly mirthless.

He meant it when he said he’d stay.

“You and I both know you’ve exhausted the possible limit of your sins.”

“I know.”

“You gave me no choice. I can no longer be without you.”

Dante nodded. “I know.”

“You’ve ruined my life. You know that.”

“I know. Give me one more chance,” Dante said. “Forgive me, Vergil.”

Vergil took his brother into his arms, suffocating him with his own chest though it had always been the other way around, and he crushed his lips to Dante’s.

Notes:

holy fuck. this was a long one. longest one-shot i've ever written, so i assume it can be very susceptible to mistakes. if you find any, please let me know.

i had so much to say for the authors note, but the span of me writing this fic took since the beginning of 2026 (not even counting the brainstorming i did since last year!) that now that i do have to write an A/N, i find myself at a lack of words... and i do like to be chatty in my A/Ns :c
comment if i should include an epilogue?? ig??

poems referenced in this fic are Blake's The Divine Image (title), The Lineaments of Gratified Desire, and Rimbaud's Night of Hell