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ohbutwheresyourheart · 28 days

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fragments from the google docs continues with: Nero's mom has a little chat with everyone's favourite goth kid, and she knows her ex well enough to sniff him out even when he's up to his stupidest hijinks yet.

Adaline has stepped out - she needs a breath of air not tainted by fear and guilt, please God just give her that much - and so she is the first to see them.

Her first impulse is to tell Morrison it can wait. Or, if it can’t wait, to send whatever job it is Lady and Trish’s way. Devil May Cry doesn’t need the money and the thought of leaving Nero -- or Dante leaving her -- is, for the moment, incomprehensible. Even for an evening. Even for an hour. She will fall apart. She will shatter like glass.

Then she sees the figure following -- limping -- a step or two behind Morrison, and holds her tongue. It’s rare that a client makes their own way to Devil May Cry; Morrison likes to act as go-between to keep the jobs coming through him. His pockets would empty fast if there was no need for a middle man.

So she keeps her peace, sipping from her glass of wine held in a hand that is only ever so slightly shaking, until Morrison comes close enough to see her in the dim glow of the neon sign. He tips his hat to her, as is his custom, but Adaline is hard-pressed to fetch up a smile as is hers.

“Always a pleasure, Ada,” he begins conversationally. “I realise this isn’t the best of times, but… well, we have a bit of a doozy by the sounds of it. Might even be connected to what happened here.”

Adaline’s toes curl inside her shoes and her grip on her glass tightens; the chardonnay glitters a kaleidoscope of colours as the neon lights refract through it. She says nothing.

The figure behind Morrison -- a young man, maybe only Nero’s age, dark-haired and covered in tattoos -- keeps his head bowed. In one hand he clutches a cane; no affectation, he’s leaning on it quite heavily. In the other, he holds something else, although Adaline can’t properly see what it is.

“May we…?” Morrison nods towards the door.

“Who are you?” Adaline asks the boy. “Why are you here?”

At first, she thinks he isn’t going to answer, but eventually he finds his tongue. His voice is low and slightly husky. Eventually, he does her the courtesy of looking at her. A pretty boy, with pale green eyes; she recognises the shape and colour from somewhere, though she can’t presently think where.

“My name is V. I am here because I have some information about a powerful demon lord poised to wreak havoc on this world. It is something I thought an equally powerful demon hunter ought to be aware of.”

Again, Morrison makes a movement towards the door. “Probably easiest if we don’t have to repeat the story…?”

The last thing - the absolute last thing - Adaline wants to do is let them across the threshold of Devil May Cry. This boy brings trouble, she can feel it. She wants to run inside, batten down the hatches, and keep what is left of her family safe from whatever trouble is building outside.

But Dante never will; she knows him that well by now. Dante never saw trouble in his life without throwing himself into the middle of it. Deep down, Adaline knows she has (just, barely) too much of a conscience to let the world burn for the sake of her boys. Not for the first time she thinks of how much easier life would be, without caring. Without that little bean counter in the back of her mind, totting up life and death. The rippling, unknowable consequence of so much as an afternoon off at the wrong time.

She downs the last of her wine and nods towards the door. “By all means. God knows, he needs some occupation. Why don’t you boys talk about money first? And we’ll talk about… everything else.”

It’s difficult to tell, at first, who is more disconcerted by the proposal. Morrison, however, is a wonderfully uncomplicated man and the rare opportunity of browbeating Dante into promising away his earnings before he’s even earned them without Adaline there to intervene is a powerful incentive. Nodding again to her, Morrison strides into the building.

And so they are two. For once, Adaline doesn’t care to hear the details of payments and cuts and debts, which is all Morrison will be talking about for now. She’s much more interested in V.

He’s gone back to avoiding her eyes as much as he can, fiddling with his cane and what she can now see is a large, though not particularly thick, hardback book. Something about it catches her attention, but it’s too dark to make out the details.

Moving as discreetly and unhurriedly as she can bear to, Adaline lets one hand drop to her side, and then behind her back; out of sight, she casts a series of cantrips. V himself -- his body; his being -- is untouched, but to Adaline’s eyes only his tattoos glow a faint purple. Perhaps the surprise shows on her face, or else he is magically attuned enough to feel the cantrips probing over him; he raises his head, offers a half-smile tinged with an emotion she can’t quite place.

“I assure you,” he says, “I am no demon, nor am I here to launch an ambush.”

No demon, maybe, but something in V is of the Underworld. Adaline’s consolation is that she knows anything she can pick up with a cantrip, Dante will smell on him.

“Forgive me if I seem discourteous,” she says with only a moderate amount of irony. “Someone tried to kill my son two days ago. It’s put me somewhat on edge”

There: V is good, he schools his expression again as quickly as he can, but Adaline sees the flash of panic; the momentarily widened eyes, the white-knuckled grip on his cane; the look of a man caught out.

“I’m… sorry to hear that,” he manages, but it’s too little too late.

Still with one hand behind her back, Adaline prepares to conjure more than a cantrip. “Who are you?”

V holds up his hands -- one still clutching his cane, the other held awkwardly to keep the book under his arm from slipping away -- and the attempted calm is replaced by no small amount of fear. Genuine fear, too, as far as she can tell, unless the boy is an excellent actor. While Adaline can’t smell fear rolling off a body like a demon could, she considers herself a decent interpreter of body language.

It calms her, just a little; anything afraid of her is no match for Dante.

“A friend. Or,” he adds, seeing her disbelief, “If not a friend, at least not an enemy.”

“Someone else walked up to this building once and said the same thing. It ended up causing us a lot of pain.”

They say, the two of them, that they wouldn’t be without Trish now -- but if it was between Trish and Vergil? That bean counter again: life and death, death and life. Pray they’re never given the option.

She’s scaring him: the boy with the demon tattoos looks ready to peel off. Adaline shakes her head, reminds herself he’s only Nero’s age -- if there’s a plot at work here, V is the intermediary rather than the mastermind -- though Nero would be furious to know she still thinks of him as a boy, not a man. Even if it’s a ploy, a trick, they need to know who is after them. Of course they first assumed… But it can’t be… Or is she fooling herself? Maybe the wine was a bad idea.

“Fine. I--” Adaline gropes for the words. “We need to know. Especially if it’s really all that bad.”

V relaxes slightly; lowers his hands, looks at her with something like compassion. He’s just a boy, she reminds herself again; look at him, this boy with his tattoos and his postmodern goth aesthetic, with his cane and his book and something demonic carved into his skin, something he might not even know of or understand. Bound up in a world of trouble beyond his capabilities. Even if that trouble is to do with whatever attacked Adaline’s son, V did not break into Devil May Cry and tear Nero’s arm off.

Those eyes, though. There’s something about him; something she can almost touch, almost taste. Something she feels like a bigger idiot every moment for missing.

“Had I the choice, I would not bring trouble to your door,” he says. His voice is low, genuine; Adaline finds she believes him. Or, at least, believes that he believes it.

She sighs. Exhaustion is settling into every muscle after two days of adrenaline-fuelled anxiety. The wine was definitely a mistake.

“We should probably head inside. They ought to be finished squabbling over money by now.”

V glances at the door; what he sees must confirm her suspicion, because he nods. He shoots her a quick smile and bows: it’s over-exaggerated, a dancer’s flourish; head down as far as his waist, arms outstretched, his cane flicking towards the door.

“Ladies first.”

It’s a charming display, but Adaline isn’t in the mood to be charmed. Especially not when charm so often disguises an intent to hurt. Again, that impulse against all good sense to turn the boy away and batten down the hatches with Dante and Nero. Her brain is running through all of the possibilities, even the most outlandish ones.

Okay, Mundus is dead (or as close as they’re going to get to killing him) and his corpse is slowly rotting in agony, but what if some other demon lord got the same idea? Mundus sent an underling to tempt Dante into danger once before, why fix what isn’t broken?

If that’s the case, whoever has taken Mundus’s place has even learned not to rely on painted doll replicas (and what if that’s why V seems so familiar? Something old, something new, something borrowed, something… green).

V looks up with a smile but his face falls when he sees Adaline still looks decidedly unamused.

“Let’s hear what you have to say,” she says, leading the way into Devil May Cry.

Dante looks expectant, almost excited; Morrison looks satisfied. Those two states don’t normally coincide. Adaline wonders how much money is involved here, and where it’s coming from. V doesn’t exactly give the impression he’s swimming in cash. Then again, this is Dante: he gripes about money from time to time but he’d work for free if the pizza place didn’t demand payment. Adaline happily funds him but he has a few shreds of chest-beating masculine pride about paying his own way that surface now and again.

Adaline circles around the desk to set her glass down on it, briefly makes eye contact with Dante, and leans against the wall behind him. She nods to Morrison as he leaves with a few final words about bringing in Lady and Trish and sets herself to watch. Now that she’s taken her own measure of their newest client, she’s interested to see what Dante makes of him.

Not much at first. Dante leans back in his chair, posturing boredom with the merest glimmer of interest.

“So,” he begins without preamble, “What’s your name?”

V stands in the centre of the office, the book open in his hand and his gaze pointed down at its contents.

“‘I have no name; I am but two days old’,” he says. In the ensuing pause, he snaps the book shut and looks up. “Just kidding. You can call me V.”

Adaline isn’t looking anywhere in particular. It is pure chance when her eyes fall on Eva’s photograph. It’s been on the desk as long as the desk has been in Devil May Cry, and Adaline stopped really seeing it years ago. She knows Eva is there, watching them (watching over them?) but familiarity breeds indifference to the contours of her cheeks and the exact curve of her jawline.

Or the colour of her eyes.

V is watching her when she looks up again; he’s quite still, but his grip on his cane is white-knuckled. His eyes are wide. Helpful: it lets her check the colour again.

Adaline remains impassive to the best of her ability. After a moment, during which she sees V’s Adam's apple bob frantically in his throat, he becomes impassive too; he looks away, deliberately turning his attention back to Dante.

For Dante’s part, if he’s noticed the brief, silent struggle, he gives no indication of it. Humming, he lazily sets aside his magazine and stretches.

“Okay, V... Why don't you tell me everything about this job?”

There’s a slight pause before V answers. He gives a little shrug, his lips pursed, as if to… well, Adaline isn’t quite sure, but his nonchalance strikes her as over-acted. In fact, if he is bringing them information about a job big enough that Morrison is nervous about Dante going it alone, isn’t ‘nonchalance’ the last thing in the world V should be feeling?

“A powerful demon is about to resurrect and…” Again, the briefest of pauses, as if the explanation is so obvious that V can barely bring himself to voice it, “We need your help, Dante.”

Dante lets out a bark of laughter. Either he’s giving an Oscar-worthy performance (and people rarely realise it, but Dante is a good actor when he wants to be; the man practically has a degree in misdirection) or he’s not picking up on any of the inconsistencies and questions Ada is. In stark contrast to her own anxiety, Dante is languid and lackadaisical. He pushes himself out of his chair and strolls over to the couch, still chuckling.

“Now that’s a familiar tune,” he quips. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve heard that exact line before?”

V doesn’t look offended by being blown off so easily. He shifts slightly, grip on his cane visibly tightening. Despite her suspicions, Adaline has an impulse to offer him a chair; he looks genuinely in pain. Before she can, however, he walks towards Dante, intent.

“This is… special.”

“Special,” Dante echoes disbelievingly, a hint of amusement colouring his tone. “Okay, what’s so special about this one?”

It’s about this moment that Adaline realises V has almost completely turned his back on her and she can no longer see his face.

“This demon is your… reason. Your reason for fighting.”

Something shifts in Dante’s expression. He doesn’t enjoy being jerked around and doesn’t suffer fools, but he’s enduring V’s dancing with more patience than Adaline would have expected. Is he finally realising, as she has, that there’s more to this than meets the eye? Or did Morrison just flash more money in his face than usual? Adaline can’t think. His reason for fighting? His reason… your reason--

I have no name; I am but two days old. How -- poetic.

Poetry. Murmured half-under his breath; the one indulgence in an otherwise spartan life; the book she had picked out for him, unearthed in a second-hand store--

“This demon got a name?”

“Vergil.”

#fragments from the google docs #devil may cry #dante #vergil #dmc v #nero's mother #nero's mom #this was the best place to crop this for posting but i do have a little more #that is basically v going '...lmao yeah u got me babe i should have known you'd know'#and yes v DOES immediately assume that ada's son is dante's #not vergil's

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