Chapter Text
The thing about fighting Vergil is that it has always felt like coming home.
Dante knows this is messed up.
Has always known it, in the same vague, inarticulate way he knows a lot of things that are too uncomfortable to look at directly for too long.
He keeps those filed somewhere in the back of his mind, behind the stuff that actually needs processing, while he grounds himself in the here and now, in the task at hand.
And the task at hand in this very moment is staying alive.
Because Vergil fights him like he wants to kill him.
This is nothing new. Dante knows he would probably feel personally offended if his brother did not give it his all, yet something about this confrontation feels different, more meaningful somehow.
Vergil moves across the broken, desolate terrain of Makai like he was carved from it, like the dark is something he wears rather than something that happens to him, and Dante finds himself mesmerized.
He has been aware of the specific way he brother's body moves across twelve years of absence and the last several months of proximity and he is not going to think about what that means, either.
He deflects a heavy swing of Yamato. Feels the shock travel through his elbow, his shoulder, his spine.
Vergil pulls back and comes again.
This is how they speak.
It has always been how they speak, in the gaps where words fail or aren't allowed or would crack something open that neither of them wants open. Every hit is a statement, every counter a reply.
Dante has been fluent in this language since before he had words for the other kind.
"You don't have to stay here." Dante says, because he can't stop himself.
"Stop talking."
Yamato comes down in a silver line, whistles through the air and Dante sidesteps it by a margin so small that it is not comfortable.
Not comfortable at all.
"I'm serious, Vergil. We can both-"
"I said stop, Dante." Virgil growls and something about the register of it tingles down Dante's spine, settles heavy and warm at the base of it.
Right. Okay.
Dante rolls under the next sweep and comes up inside Vergil's guard, and for a second, a single, impossibly long second, they are almost chest to chest. He can see the line of his brother's jaw, the controlled fury in his eyes, the absolute iron of a man holding himself together through will alone because he has never learned another way.
Something happens.
Dante doesn't know what to call it. Doesn't have a name for it. It starts in his chest and moves outward like liquid heat, like the moment before a fever breaks, and he feels-
Wrong.
No. Not wrong. Different.
Like something that has been locked inside him is coming unlocked.
It happens so quickly, without any prior announcement.
One moment he's feeling normal and in the next his whole body opens, his senses unfurling in an overwhelming, terrifying awareness.
Colours are brighter. Smells are stronger and somehow more granular, complicated and layered and why is he shivering?
He steps back and his breath comes laboured and shallow and there is fever clawing at his insides, slow shudders running up his thighs and his arms and the back of his neck. He gasps, shakes his head to clear his vision and Vergil stills, Yamato frozen in the air for a swing that never comes.
They look at each other across three feet of corrupted Makai ground, and Vergil's nostrils flare. His eyes widen, pupils expanding so harshly they eat away the colour of his irises.
His face does something that Dante has never seen it do. Something uncontrolled. Almost panicked. For a fraction of a second the mask slips entirely and there is Vergil, looking raw and stunned and staring at Dante like he is seeing him for the very first time.
"What the fuck-" Dante starts and then the laughter comes.
It is coming from everywhere. Loud and booming and all-encompassing.
It comes from the stones. The dark. The space between dimensions that has its own atmosphere, its own weight, its own depraved breed of wrongness that Dante has never gotten used to no matter how many times he crosses over.
Mundus doesn't have a body anymore.
Not exactly. What's left of him is presence and sheer arrogance and a voice that feels like it comes from the inside of your head like a migraine with opinions.
"Well, well, well."
The words settle into the air with the self-satisfaction of something that has been waiting for an audience for a very, very long time.
"This is certainly unexpected."
"Get out of my head." Dante grinds, even though Mundus is not in his head.
Mundus is in the air.
In the stone.
In the dark that presses against the border of Makai like it's considering swallowing Dante whole.
"The Sparda whelps, brawling in my kingdom." There is a pause. Then something like amusement, if amusement had teeth. "I've watched this circus before. But not quite like this."
The temperature drops.
Dante feels it before he understands it, the sudden change in the air, the way the dark presses closer, the way his skin prickles in a way that has nothing to with the cold.
It's a kind of involuntary response, a tightening, a deep, crawling shiver, like his body is suddenly very aware that it is being perceived by something big and scary and ravenously hungry.
"This is truly delightful!"
The voice is closer now, and cold in the specific way that dead things are cold, that powerful things are cold, things that have existed so long they have forgotten the temperature of being alive.
"How exquisitely appropriate. Sparda's second son, the discarded one, the golden boy...And he smells like this!"
"Like what?" Dante pants into the dark. There is cold sweat rolling down his back, his fingers around Rebellion's hilt are clammy, suddenly feeling weak. He has the sudden violent urge to curl up on himself, to seek shelter. To cover his neck.
What the fuck?
"Dante, be quiet." Vergil's voice has gone low and grating. Controlled. Dante knows that voice. That's the voice that means Vergil is not in control at all.
"Sweet." Mundus sneers, and the word is something obscene in his mouth. "He smells so cloyingly sweet, Nelo Angelo. I imagine you've noticed."
The cold thickens.
And then Dante understands, in the vague and incomplete way he tends to understand things that are operating below the level of explanations, that what is happening to him is not normal. Not human. He's aware of his own scent but only in passing because all he can smell is brimstone and burned ash and cold stone. The stench is overwhelming, burning the back of his throat, nearly making his eyes water as he lifts a hand before his face.
That's when he notices his hand is shaking, shaking so hard he has to curl it into a fist to curb the tremors. There is a strange animal awareness within him, new and distressed and painfully aware of being small and exposed and threatened and it is so loud and potent that for a moment Dante can't even formulate proper thoughts.
The animal within him knows he's in danger.
The animal within him also knows, with a inexplicable certainty, that the sulphur assaulting his senses is Mundus. The same way it now knows that Vergil has a distinct scent, too. Something warm, innately safe and familiar despite the fact this is the very first time he's been able to smell it.
It is daunting. Confusing in more ways than one.
It is his body suddenly being able to experience another plane of existence.
Dante knows what he feels like after a hard fight.
He knows how his body works.
He knows the shape of exhaustion and injury and adrenaline and the specific, familiar ache of going up against Vergil and coming out the other side with all his limbs still attached.
This is not that.
This is something else.
"How long have you denied your heritage?" Mundus booms. "How amusing that you chose to hide in your sapien origins. Too weak and scared to read the blood."
"What the fuck is he talking about?"
"Nothing." Vergil doesn't look at him. Vergil is looking at the dark, at the place where Mundus isn't exactly located but where his voice is coming from, and his hand on Yamato is still, as if carved out of stone.
"Your mother was human." Mundus continues, with the relish of something that likes to hear itself speak. "It appears the trait lay dormant. Unpresented. It only needed a catalyst." A rasping chuckle. "The proximity to the right Alpha will do it every time."
The stone cold silence that follows is its own kind of loud.
Dante looks at Vergil, inhales what he now knows is Vergil below the overwhelming, oppressive stench of Mundus.
Vergil does not look back.
"Vergil..." His own voice sounds strange to him. Slightly distant, like it's coming from very far away. "Vergil, what does he mean?"
"I mean..." Sneers Mundus, and the dark moves, actually moves, contracts, presses inward in a way that makes Dante's stomach drop. "That you belong to whoever claims you. And your brother is too much of a coward to do it. He fears what you are to each other. But I have no such compunction-"
"Don't." Vergil's voice is like a blade, glacier cold, jagged with rising anger.
"Oh, did I strike a nerve?" The amusement stretches wider. The dark is very close now. Dante can feel it all around him, at the places where his skin meets air. Something about it makes him want to step backward, step toward Vergil, and that instinct is so strong and so embarrassing that he has to grit his teeth and consciously fight to resist it. "He presented in my kingdom, Nelo Angelo. He's bleeding sweetness into my air. Do you think I'm not going to-"
Vergil moves.
Dante has seen Vergil fight countless times and he has never seen him move like this.
There is no form or strategy behind it. It is something that comes before cultivated precision, before the years of discipline and contempt and carefully constructed self, from whatever lives in the marrow underneath all of that. Instinct. Raw and unbridled and predatory.
Yamato opens the dark in three places at once. If Dante had blinked he would have missed it.
The sound Mundus makes isn't a scream. It is the sound of something vast and old being told no in the only language it understands.
The dark recoils.
Vergil doesn't stop. He drives forward into it, carving light in the blackness, and Dante watches his brother fight the compressed remnant of a god for thirty seconds that feel like thirty years, and at the end of it the dark retreats. Not gone. Not destroyed. But pushed back, wounded, currently forced to reconsider.
The silence returns.
Vergil stands in the middle of it with his back to Dante, breathing.
Just breathing.
Dante has seen Vergil bleed without changing his expression. Has seen him take injuries that would flatten anyone else and absorb them like they were mild inconveniences. He has never seen his brother simply stand somewhere, catching his breath, as though the act of being upright has become a monumental task.
"Vergil."
"Be quiet."
He still won't look at Dante. His knuckles are clenched so hard around the hilt of Yamato his hand is as white as freshly fallen snow.
"What the fuck just happened?"
Vergil turns around.
His face is blank, cold, stripped of everything that might constitute evidence of interiority. But his eyes are doing the thing they did before, the thing Dante has never seen before tonight, drinking him in, all pupil, like Vergil is seeing him for the very first time. Like Dante has suddenly grown a second head.
"You need to go back."
"I'm not-"
"Dante." Spoken quietly, with a conviction that makes it worse than shouting. "You need to go back to Earth. Now."
"And leave you here? In a dimension where Mundus just tried to-"
"I can handle Mundus."
"That's not the point."
"That is exactly the point." Vergil crosses the space between them in four steps and Dante holds his ground on instinct and then... then something shifts. Something in the proximity of it. He can't explain it, can't name it, but his body does something involuntary and deep that starts behind his sternum and radiates outward, shudders through his marrow and Vergil goes very still six inches away from him and something in his expression cracks almost imperceptibly at the seams. His scent is stronger now, it is everything Dante can smell and he fills his lungs with it, lips parting, heart climbing in his throat.
"Go." Vergil grits through clenched teeth.
Like it costs him.
Like it pains him.
"Vergil-"
"Go, Dante."
And then the rip is open. Vergil opens it, Yamato slices it open in one sharp movement, a tear in the dimension that smells like home, like human air, like rain on stone and the particular exhausted life of the city, and Dante's feet move before his brain does because his body is not operating normally tonight, is not consulting him in the usual way, and the last thing he sees before the rip seals is Vergil's face.
Pained and still.
Looking at him the way Dante has been looking at things he can't have his entire life, with a recognition that comes from somewhere so deep it doesn't have a name.
The barrier closes.
And Dante is standing in the rain outside his apartment, alone, not knowing what just happened to him or why his chest feels like something has been ripped away from it.
He doesn't know the word for what he's just become.
He doesn't know why the night air, without Vergil in it, feels wrong, smells wrong on a visceral and fundamental level the newly formed layer of him deeply resents.
He goes inside.
He does not sleep.