A Brother's Deflowering

by idslog

Summary:

Dante finds out his older brother Vergil is still a virgin at the age of forty-three and takes it upon himself to fix that. (5V/3D)

Chapter 1

Notes:

This is the third time now i’ve written about vd losing their virginity to each other

Dante’s graduation was a celebration of total freedom. While everyone around him had their own plans lined up, all he cared about was the summer that he would have and the winter and spring before the next summer after that. When he had told his parents that he wanted to spend the next year carefree and living the height of adolescence, they all but gave him an encouraging pat on the back to chase stillborn dreams.

Perhaps the existence of his older brother Vergil had cushioned their hardness towards their second child. Vergil was everything that Dante wasn’t, cold, sullen, buried in his work. Vergil’s status as the firstborn son was a blessing. All Mom and Dad cared for after an eternity of Vergil’s stony attitude and his hard-working character was for their next son to be happy. Vergil might argue that their parents veered too much in this other direction, if his prissy upturned nose was anything to go by whenever he came around to visit and saw how Dante was doing at school, skipping out on his classes while he pursued whatever fleeting passion came his way.

It was never a real issue that Vergil was so stern about Dante’s education and his behavior, even though he made clear his distaste. All that mattered was that Mom and Dad were okay with him, and Dante was far from the worst a kid could be. He was begrudgingly kind, helpful, to the dismay of his cool and nonchalant pretense at school.

Dante didn’t always remember his brother as cold. He was mostly off-putting, civil to some, but honest and filial to their parents. A momma’s boy, Mom described, just like you, Dante. When he was younger, Vergil was kind to him too. He didn’t live at home, but he was almost always in Red Grave, choosing not to fly too far from the nest. Dante wondered if he ever wanted something more for his life, go somewhere else. But Vergil did travel, apparently, at least when Dante was still quite young and before that. He had lived in Fortuna for a while apparently, and Dante wondered why he came back at all.

Not that he wasn’t glad Vergil was around. If he hadn’t, he’d have no one to spar with when Dad wasn’t home, no one to teach him how to cook when Mom wasn’t. He filled up those roles whenever their parents had to leave for work or for leisure, and it was like he was made to be an older brother. When Dante grew up, he realized how much of this might have been duty to family. Duty of not, he still loved Vergil. Even when he grew up, and Vergil decided Dante was to be more self-reliant, he wanted his older brother to stay.

 

 

 

That same summer, Mom and Dad decided to go on a vacation. Now that Dante had finally finished high school, Mom wanted to take some time off. Dante didn’t realize how much of her time was devoted to childrearing until then.

Dante wanted to join, but from the looks on his parents’ faces, this was more of an “adult” vacation for them than anything. Not in the way that Dante might insist on being an adult, even though he only just turned eighteen. Vergil had wished him a happy birthday, like he always did, and Dante replied as soon as he received the text, as if he wasn’t waiting for Vergil to congratulate him first. He spent his birthday with his friends, like he had been, from middle school up to now. When he was younger, he spent it with Vergil, who shared the same birthday as him. But somewhere along the way that tradition ended. When Dante asked his mom why his older brother had stopped celebrating their birthdays together, she put Dante back in his place when she reminded him that he was the one who refused to share his birthday cake anymore.

Dante had the keys to the manor since he was fourteen, and while he was trusted enough not to bust up the place while his parents were gone (who’s going to mess up the house? You and your two girlfriends? Mom had laughed,) she still encouraged him to visit his older brother.

“You haven’t seen him in a while,” she said, twirling a lock of her hair with a finger. She was already dressed for a tropical summer; Red Grave summers were never hot enough to warrant a spaghetti strap top and swim shorts borrowed from Dad.

“Yeah, cause he probably doesn’t wanna bother,” Dante says, and instantly regrets how whiny he sounds.

“He’s busy, you know that,” she chastises. “It’s not that he doesn’t want to see you.”

Dante didn’t bother to correct her. Actions spoke louder than words, and he hadn’t seen Vergil since a few months ago. It didn’t seem like a long time, but he missed out on quite a few milestones in just those few months, Dante’s birthday and his graduation, though he had sent a pretty lavish bouquet to the house when Dante came home with Lady and Trish in tow, expecting to drink and party the night away at the manor. A fat collection of flowers so heavy that it was placed on a stand by the front door, filled with red and white flowers. The absence of roses was the only thing that managed to convince his friends that it wasn’t some insane declaration of love. The perfectly platonic congratulatory letter nestled between tulips certainly didn’t alleviate the ribbing Lady gave him after snatching it out from between his fingers. It wasn’t Dante’s fault. Vergil always managed to write so elegantly that he could make even a recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich sound charming.

Dante hides his face behind his hands when he remembers. Stupid Vergil. Always extravagant when it suited him, and that was always at the most inopportune of times, when Dante had to pick up the pieces in front of his friends.

“I can ask him to come check up on you when he comes back from his trip.”

“Mom! No! I’m not a child,” Dante protests.

She leans forward, gently lifting Dante’s hand off his face and patting it with her hand over his. “Dante… you are a child.” When Dante frowns, she elaborates. “You’ll always be my child. But I won’t make Vergil come if you don’t want him to. I’ve already talked it over with him. When he’s returned, you can visit him any time.”

Dante sighs. He can’t do anything when the adults have been talking and already made up their minds. He leans back in the lawn chair. “Yeah, sure. Why not. I’ll go visit my dear brother.”

 

 

 

A week into his parents’ vacation, and Dante feels like he’s going to burst. He’s already stayed over at Trish’s for a sleepover the night that his parents flew, but even she had to kick him out at some point. She had her job, and Lady had picked up an internship because of course she had to. She couldn’t be content with wasting her last high school summer away like Dante. Sucks to suck.

When Mom kindly and pointedly lets Dante know Vergil’s back, Dante’s at his wits’ end, going stir-crazy with boredom. At this point he’ll hang out with anyone. Don’t get it twisted. Vergil’s his last choice of company. It just so happens that Dante’s circle of friends and family is very small.

Vergil’s apartment is further from downtown than Dante expected it to be for how most career-oriented people tend to congregate inwards like ants in a death spiral. He lives within a historical area, where there are semblances of the same architectural notes of their family manor here. Another home away from home.

For how rich their family was, Vergil’s flat was considerably more humble than Dante gave it credit for, squished between two other residences. Not cheap, not by any means, but not befitting of a son of Sparda. Dante would live in the manor his entire life if he could. And he was probably allowed to. Dad and Mom hadn’t begun to shoo him out even though he was an adult now. Though he’s not sure who the title of the manor would go to in the event of their parents’ passing. Dante wonders if Vergil would let him mooch off him if he was to inherit the house.

Dante almost slaps himself when he hesitates to knock on the door. There’s no world-destroying demon behind that door, only his brother. Why is this so difficult? But before he can prove himself worthy, the door swings open.

“Come in, Dante,” Vergil says. No hug or kiss on the cheek. Not even to show him around the apartment, which looks admittedly well-designed. He lets Dante in without much fanfare.

“Hey,” Dante mutters, when Vergil’s back is already turned.

“Take off your shoes,” Vergil orders. Dante groans, but he obeys. He trips over his feet trying to get his left shoe off without unlacing it.

“How are you?” Vergil asks. He strides off while Dante’s still thinking of how to respond. I’m good, yeah, except not really because I’m here and you don’t seem to care that I’m here.

“I’m fine,” Dante says, when Vergil’s already disappeared to the kitchen.

“That’s good to hear,” Vergil says, echoey in the distance between them. “Tea or water?”

“No coffee?” Dante asks. Not that he likes coffee. Or tea. Or even water. He wants sugar injected directly into his veins.

“No. There’s too much caffeine in it,” Vergil replies. Dante rolls his eyes. Of course.

He looks around the flat while he can. Vergil sure takes his time anyway, enough for him to wander, and it’s fairly big for a bachelor. For a second Dante thinks of looking for clues of a second tenant, a roommate or a partner, but just about every inch of Vergil’s place is straight out of an interior design magazine. All the clothes on the clothes-rack are in his style, blues and blacks and greys and whites. A bit drab, but Dante lets out a constipated breath when there’s nothing feminine or colorful on it. Red might look good on Vergil. Dante would try and wrestle one of his coats on his brother if he knew it would fit (and if Vergil wasn’t impossibly stronger.)

The only things that give this place life are the few flower arrangements, propped up corpses that have yet to decompose. They’re quite unlike the flower arrangements that Dante has seen before, so much empty space between each stem, and hardly any flowers at all on one. What peculiar styles Vergil enjoys.

“I prepared some snacks for you,” Vergil says, returning from the kitchen. He presents Dante a glass of water and a bowl of strawberries sliced in half. Okay, could be worse. Dante pops one in his mouth. It’s almost sickeningly sweet, which means it’s perfect for Dante’s palette.

“Why did you come over?” Vergil asks, sitting down on his lounge chair. He looks frighteningly like a therapist. Dante doesn’t want him digging in his head.

“Mom said I could?” Dante says through a mouthful of strawberries. Why? Do you not want me here? “Can’t I just come and see my big brother when I want to?”

“Of course you can. Just wondering if you were here for a particularly pressing reason,” Vergil answers smoothly. “You’re welcome here any time. I haven’t seen you in a while, so it’s good to see you healthy and in such good spirits.”

Not good enough to come around for graduation or my birthday, Dante wants to retort.

“I might not be engaging company right now, though. I have a manuscript to read through, and this client is particularly stubborn,” Vergil says.

It was partially Dante’s fault for not texting ahead of time, not until he was already on the tube and summoned all the guts in his usually impulsive and careless body to shoot Vergil a quick heads-up just before he arrived. But Dante refuses to admit fault.

“I can go,” Dante sighs, slapping his knees before he gets up to go. Welp, he can’t say he didn’t try. At least he’ll have something to report back to Mom.

“You can stay here,” Vergil says. “I am still capable of chatting with you.”

“Oh. Sure thing,” Dante says, sitting straight back down. He props his feet up on the coffee table, and it earns him a dagger of loathing that sobers him up. “Okay! Geez.” He puts them back down.

There’s a bit of an awkward silence once Vergil picks up his work. Dante considers fishing out his phone to play with, but for some unholy reason, he kind of wants to impress Vergil by not succumbing to the pleasures of short-form entertainment on his phone. Vergil doesn’t leave the air completely empty, though, when he asks:

“Why are you taking a gap year off? Did you miss the deadlines for sending in your applications?”

Dante flushes. You miss a deadline once or twice or a dozen times and Vergil never lets you forget.

“Hey, I didn’t miss anything. Just wanted to take a year off after going through high school.”

Vergil tilts his head backwards with that expression that says I didn’t know high school was so dreadful for you.

“Then what are your plans after this year? Even if you don’t want to attend university this year, you should be thinking about it now.”

Dante laughs, but it’s more like a scoff. “Geez, Vergil. Ever thought about the idea that some people might not want to go to school like you?”

“I have. That’s why I’ve asked you what your plans are.”

Okay, he’s got Dante there. Dante huffs and looks out the window. Compared to the view out of their family manor, Vergil’s apartment looms over a few shorter brick residential buildings and a sliver of a park between two of said buildings. There’s enough greenery to make it feel less brutal and cold, but Dante thinks Vergil’s crazy to give up the view of the yard and the forest on the outskirts of town where the manor lies.

“Dunno,” Dante eventually says, kicking an imaginary rock with his sock.

“Do you need help with figuring out what you want to do?” Vergil asks. Dante scrunches up his face. Ew. If this conversation is anything to go by, Dante doesn’t want Vergil’s “help” that’ll just unfold into unwarranted jabs at his lifestyle and habits.

“Nah, I’m good. I’ll figure it out soon,” Dante replies, shrugging. Vergil doesn’t seem content with his answer, but he can kick rocks.

Unfortunately, the only thing he wants to kick is Dante’s already fragile ego. “It’s wise to think about these things ahead of time. You’d benefit from an early start. Well, considering your little sabbatical, I wouldn’t say early. But the second best time to plant a tree is now.”

Dante sneers. “Oh, like you’re perfect.”

Vergil makes a sound like he doesn’t disagree. How did Dante ever miss this? His eye twitches.

“So you’re telling me you stayed on the straight and narrow your whole life?”

Vergil eyes him. Dante hates it. Apparently he doesn’t even deserve the dignity of Vergil’s full-frontal expression. “Of course.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dante says exasperatedly, running his long fringe between his fingers. He can’t be related to this guy. He just can’t. Vergil is so uncool it hurts. “What, like… no parties?”

Vergil shakes his head, as economic as he nods.

“No girls?”

Vergil shakes his head again.

Something unclogs the gear in Dante’s head, making it turn again. A gummy smirk stretches across his cheeks, but even that’s not enough to subdue his explosion of laughter.

That explains so much. Why Vergil’s got Yamato permanently stuck in his ass (the thought of his older brother unsheathing his blade from its scabbard in his ass makes Dante laugh even harder.) It’s so simple.

He’s just never gotten laid.

Vergil turns a bit more. A little more, then Dante will have all of his undivided attention.

“Have you finally gone insane?”

Dante wipes a tear from his eye. More spill out anyway.

“Geez, I’m sorry–it’s just–so you’re never had sex?”

Dante feels like he’s pretty good at reading his older brother’s body language. It’s not as hard a feat as his friends made it out to be. He’s just a wild animal, underneath it all. Vergil’s slick-backed hair looks like it bristles like a porcupine when he stiffens.

“Dante,” he scolds. Dante pouts. That’s no fun.

“What? If you’ve never fooled around with anyone, am I wrong to jump to the most logical conclusion?”

“Do you really think this line of questioning is appropriate?”

“We’re brothers, it’s fine. I wanna know,” Dante says. “I need a role model.” He leans forward, close enough to Vergil until he turns his head. Aha! Dante won this game of gay chicken. That’ll show him. “I need someone to look up to.”

Vergil doesn’t respond at first. It’s hard to tell if his pause is attributed to a careful consideration of his next words. Then Dante relishes in the fact that Vergil needs to try at all.

“No, I haven’t,” Vergil says, a stony facade to his voice.

“No fff–” Vergil glares at him, “-freaking way! Are you serious? You’re forty-three!” Dante stops to gasp, then bursts out laughing again. “Holy crap. You’re a wizard.”

“A wizard?”

“Like, you know, when you reach thirty and you still haven’t had sex yet, you’re a–you know,” Dante chokes. “A wizard.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Do you have any powers? Can you read minds? Can you read mine?” Dante asks.

A mirage blade whizzes past Dante’s ear and disappears before it can pierce the wall. Dante swallows, but his smile is still impenetrable, undefeated.

“Does that answer your question?” Vergil asks snidely.

Dante grins. It feels awesome to give Vergil a taste of his own medicine, make Vergil as uncomfortable as he did him. He wouldn’t admit it, and it wasn’t like he had to impress Vergil or anything, but Dante wasn’t that successful with women either. His best friends were two jaw-dropping girls that would laugh him out of his carefully manufactured bravado if he ever had the bright idea to ask them out. But at least he had the excuse of being a teenager. An eighteen-year old virgin wasn’t unheard of. A forty-three year old virgin was. And Dante was going to lose his virginity soon, he swears!

Though Dante put an end to his brother’s interrogation, Vergil, through all his incessant demands for Dante to make something of his easy life, gave him something invaluable. The dimly burning coals of an idea, and Dante knew how to stoke the fire.

So much for having nothing to do this summer. Dante knows exactly how to pass the time.

 

 

 

To be fair, Dante doesn’t know how he hasn’t seen it sooner. Maybe it was naïveté at first, and self-centeredness, that he never gave Vergil’s love life a second thought. Being single suited Vergil, stylish for him to be a bachelor. But that doesn’t mean he had to be a virgin. There had to be something wrong underneath those fitted coats and Mandarin collars if he never even got around to having sex once. What would compel someone to go through adolescence high and dry? Dante needs to know. He wants to pry Vergil apart like a science project, fiddle through his organs and see where his drive for sex turned off or went missing. Maybe it wasn’t a matter of mind, but body. Maybe his whole dick was missing and that’s why he never had sex, though Dante remembers walking in on Vergil once in the shower, and while he doesn’t remember the specifications (nor does he want to), he’s sure that Vergil was still functioning down there unless it had gotten sliced off by a demon or something.

A dick was wasted on Vergil, Dante laments. If Dante had a dick, he would practically be unstoppable.

The beginning of Dante’s plan is barebones. His hyperactive brain shoots to the easiest possible scenario, which would entail trapping Vergil in a room with a room full of women and locking the door until he had to give. The hard part would be getting Vergil in a room with a woman. The harder part would be finding any room that could hold them in. And the hardest part would be breaking Vergil’s spirit.

When Vergil’s imprisonment is reframed in Dante’s mind as speed dating, the gears start to churn in his mind, slow but sure. It's a fair idea, but honestly, kind of antiquated. They’re for old people. Dante could ask his parents; they’re bound to know a lot of eligible bachelors and bachelorettes Vergil’s age. Probably all divorcees and widows at that point, though. Dante doesn’t want his brother crawling through the second-hand options.

But then he realizes one constant between all ages. Something everyone’s on now. Virtually the online edition of speed dating, revamped for quicker, easier connections. Romance on steroids.

Online dating.

Dante’s no stranger to dating apps, while he was still underage a couple years ago at the age of sixteen. But he got found out pretty quickly and was banned. Dante couldn’t see his brother willingly on social media unless it was for business, but good thing Dante couldn’t care less if Vergil was willing.

Trish is the one who knows how to navigate the online dating sphere. A couple years older than Dante, she’s had her fair share of experience and the benefit of foresight enough not to use dating apps while she was still a minor. Her photos are all polished, not that they even need to be. She’s gorgeous. The pictures are not the only thing that embellish her account, even though Dante’s sure it’s 99% of it.

Dante all but hunts her down for help, his angel in glossy latex fetishwear.

“Oh?” Trish says, once Dante pitches his proposal to her. “Is Vergil finally entering the dating market?” She’s always had a weird thing for Vergil, or maybe she was just marginally kinder about him than Lady was. Dante was starting to regret asking her for help.

“Well,” Dante starts, and Trish’s expression is already incredulous. “He didn’t say exactly that, but–”

“Better to ask for forgiveness than permission, right? I don’t blame you. Just don’t expect me not to say ‘I told you so’ when he shuts your project down.”

“Look, I’m genuinely concerned about him. He might die a virgin,” Dante moans.

“Wait, he’s actually never…?” Trish asks. Dante blushes. Crap. He really shouldn’t have let that slip. Vergil didn’t seem to care when he told Dante, but he might kill him if he found out Trish knew.

Mercifully, she ignores how tight-lipped Dante is. “Just give me the go-ahead, Dante. I’ll solve his little problem myself,” she says, winking.

“You’re too young for him,” Dante scoffs. He hasn’t asked Vergil, truthfully, about what he likes. But Dante’s sure he wouldn’t like Trish.

Not that Trish wasn’t great. She is great. Hot. Smart.

But Vergil wouldn’t like her, that’s all.

“Killjoy. Let me see what you’re working with,” she says. Dante hands over his phone, filled with an album of Vergil’s pictures, or pictures of pictures taken from the family albums that Dante scoured in order to fill up his own.

“Doesn’t he have any pictures in this decade?” she asks. She scrolls up further and makes a face. “This is just a picture of him as a teenager,” she says. She shows Dante the photo. It’s a rather grainy image of Vergil in his graduation robes and cap, posed with their mom and dad. Then she opens up a picture of Vergil and Dante on their birthday, the last one that they ever celebrated together. “And you’re in this one. We can’t have that. I’m pretty sure all of his potential matches would bail at the sight of his snotty little kid brother.” She cackles when Dante punches her shoulder.

“Jerk.”

“But in all seriousness, Dante, there’s nothing that great you could use here.” Trish sighs.

“Uh… he has a couple pictures from work. Like headshots. In a suit. Suits are fancy.”

She shakes her head. She hands his phone back. “I can’t work with this.”

“What? Seriously?” Dante huffs. “I didn’t expect you to give up so quickly.”

“It’s not that. Don’t even joke about that,” she says, glaring at him. “Take some pictures of him in his element. Maybe when he’s reading or working. At a spin cycling class. Give me anything better than what you have right now. Otherwise, you’re shit out of luck.”

“Fine,” Dante says. Taking pictures of Vergil should be no herculean task. The only problem would be explaining to Vergil why he had taken up such a sudden interest in photography, and while chasing his fleeting whims was not particularly groundbreaking, his sudden interest in Vergil as his subject matter would definitely be suspicious, not just to his brother, but anyone else.

 

 

 

There’s plenty of opportunities to take candids of Vergil when he practically ignores Dante one entire afternoon, even though Dante had given him at least a one-day heads up this time. But at this point Dante’s a pro at entertaining himself, and his new mission has given him an entirely new sense of purpose. Vergil would not willingly bequeath him any photos if he knew it was for a dating app, and candids were more sincere than a selfie, anyway. Dante laughs at the idea of Vergil holding up a smartphone to the mirror to take a picture of himself. No, that’s unbecoming, he can imagine Vergil saying, and Dante agrees. Vergil would never debase himself with bathroom mirror thirst traps.

Dante had no faith in his selfie-taking skills anyway. In all aspects except physical, Vergil’s an old fart, a geriatric, even less hip than their dad, who one might think would be even more serious than Vergil considering he was the Legendary Demon Swordsman and all that. But he was considerably more relaxed and even a bit silly and off the wall, worn down by his love for all things human. Vergil was high-strung, even though he had lived in the lap of luxury.

It’s not hard work to take good pictures of Vergil. He looks impossibly photogenic. He can make even his arduous work look interesting, when he sits by his window and flips through a manuscript from one of his clients. Dante takes a few pictures from afar, then decides to sneak a bit closer. His presence must be familiar enough for Vergil not to care when Dante flits around his older brother like a fly.

“What are you doing?”

Or not.

“Taking pictures of you,” Dante says. No point in being dishonest now, not yet, at least.

“What for?”

“... I’m making you a dating profile.” Okay, he caved.

Vergil puts his documents down. “Do not use my likeness online.”

“Why not?”

“I do not wish to be recognized for something other than my work.”

“They’ll recognize you for something even better.” When Vergil raises an eyebrow, Dante grins. “Your good looks!”

“Forget it. Online courtship is a pointless endeavor.”

“If you don’t believe in the success of online dating, then what’s the harm in having an account?”

Vergil pauses for a moment, and Dante silently cheers in managing to upstage his brother in the verbal battlefield. It’s a very difficult feat to pull off.

“Fine,” Vergil sneers. “Enjoy your little game. You’re still young enough to waste your time. Just don’t waste mine as well.”

He turns back to the window, and Dante snaps a picture of Vergil while he’s still grumpy. Even his grumpy expression looks stern more than anything, the foul odor washed away by his strikingly sharp features. Not. Fair.

Dante gets up to about a good couple hundred new photos in his phone, exactly as Trish had requested. It’s a matter of curation, she said. Whittle it down to five survivors from hundreds. Dante scrolls through the tiny icons, blending into one fine mush of color. They all look the same to him. He wonders how Trish’ll pick out which deserve to take top spot in Vergil’s dating profile.

The only thing he gleans is that Vergil’s handsome. Dante won’t deny it. Hey, their whole family is bangin’, on an objective level. Their dad’s got that silver fox thing working out for him for maybe a good thousand years now, and their mom hasn’t aged a day even though she’s the one human in their family. It rocks that Dante took after them, but that means Vergil did too. He almost looks too similar to Dante when he was his age. Dante shudders at the thought of ending up like his brother. After setting Vergil up, he’s gotta work on losing his own virginity. And maybe get a new phone number so he can stop getting shadowbanned from dating apps.

Vergil’s got his own vibe going on. Not quite a DILF, even though technically he’d be closer in age to being his father seeing that their actual dad happens to be a demon thousands of years old. Dante’s not impervious to how his brother is perceived. Unfortunately, Trish has made some of her own comments that have made it obvious, and even Lady, despite her distaste for Vergil’s off-putting attitude, can admit that Vergil is handsome.

Yep. His brother is a desirable, sought-after man.

He’s certainly not without the attention of women. Which is why it’s so frustrating that he hasn’t gotten laid yet. For Dante, who’s gotten laughed off the stage by Lady and Trish when he’s shot his pathetic attempts at flirting their way, Vergil seems to attract attention without even asking for it.

Maybe it’s age that’s given him the upper hand, and all Dante has to do is wait to fill out a little more. He’s tall already, nearly as tall as Vergil, and their mom says Dante’s still not at the end of his growth spurt even if he did come out a runt. It’s just maddening to twiddle his thumbs until people start to see something in him, something in the shape of desire and trustworthiness, and seeing Vergil in his old age makes Dante all the more impatient for life’s big milestones to come his way. If Vergil can finally get laid, maybe he’d be able to too.

In the end, Trish picks out four pictures, just short of the maximum five that could go on a profile. One that Dante had managed to snag without alerting Vergil when he tagged along Vergil’s 5pm walk in the park to stretch his legs, basking in a surprisingly warm Red Grave afternoon. Another one when they had gone out for lunch, at Dante’s request, to a diner that their parents usually took Dante to whenever he asked. Vergil had noticed then, his picture being taken, and ignored it. Trish thought his best shot there to be the one where Vergil had just finished his eggs benedict and wiped his mouth with the napkin before berating Dante’s choice of restaurant.

But the highlight of Vergil’s profile was the picture that Dante took of Vergil reading a book in his leisure, after taking a break from the manuscripts, by the window of his nicely arranged apartment. Dante’ll admit that it’s his best work yet. Maybe if Vergil really insisted on Dante staking himself to a vision of the future, he could say photography for his skills alone.

 

 

 

Vergil, 43
Still a devoted believer in chance encounters, deep conversations until midnight, and rose petals in bed.

Though Trish was a great help with photos, when it came to Vergil’s bio, she and Dante battled it out to a gruesome end. “This is disgusting,” she said with an ugly, exaggerated frown, when she eventually saw what Dante had put. Dante thought it was funny.

We’re the same kind of weird if…
Proper grammar and punctuation gets you hot and heavy.

Dante had to applaud himself for that one. Still had to slip in a stinger. He wasn’t completely forgiving every time Vergil corrected him about his speech.

Unusual skills
Swordsmanship, polishing my blade

Soon, Vergil would have someone else polishing his blade for him.

Now that Vergil’s profile had been set up, Dante arranges his dating preferences, inputting the same demographic range that he used to put it when he was a teenager: ages 18-65+. At least this time it was more age appropriate for Vergil to be handling the GILFs that crawled into Dante’s messages.

Would Vergil go for someone younger? Not Trish, definitely not, and not Lady, but someone in the low twenties, or even under… Vergil was middle-aged for human standards, and Dante didn’t know if he would be hit with the same mid-life crisis that seemed to consume most human men around his age. Searching for something new and young, and a lot of the time, that came in the form of new cars, new guns, young girls. Even if Vergil seemed to pinch his nose whenever Dante came by his house, irritated at his childishness, some guys really liked how juvenile the girls they managed to snag with their wealth and age were. It gave them a sense of fatherhood, Trish said, after a time with one such man, and even if she vowed never to dip in that pool again, Dante thought it would be nice to rely on someone older like that. Probably why he turned his preferences all the way up to 65+.

Maybe Vergil would go for someone that old. Try to recreate the nostalgia of being doted on. Or perhaps he simply desired maturity, from how he scorned Dante's behavior.

Dante shudders at the idea of his brother being a grave robber. Vergil might be his brother, but even some secrets are beyond family, and he doesn’t want to be privy to something so sinister.

Once he gets the profile up and running, the scene is a lot less sparse than he remembers it. Even when Trish had told him about the disparities that men and women had on the online dating field, Vergil’s profile defied all expectations. In the first hour, he’s matched with twelve women, half of which decide to start the conversation on their own, and this app wasn’t even one of those that had the gimmick of women initiating the conversation first. It’s almost overwhelming, too overwhelming for Dante to reply to them all at once, and he almost forgets to put on his Vergil voice when speaking to them. Dante had to be in character, if he really wanted to pull off Mission Deflowering. Part of Vergil’s charm was his looks, but another equally important part was his shrewd, smart wit, his sarcastic humor. He was snarky and rude, but that didn’t deter a good portion of people and those people happened to be the ones right in his dating market.

At first Dante pretty much swipes right on everyone. Then, remembering Trish’s advice about how the algorithm worked, and the fact that he should probably be a bit less lenient with Vergil’s virginity at stake, he started really reading their profiles. Still, there’s not a large loss to the curation of women that Dante has rallied under the image of his brother. They’ve just become of a higher quality.

He can’t resist himself. The day after, when he visits Vergil, Dante thrusts the phone under his nose.

“Don’t you see? Despite all odds, women are interested in you,” Dante says. His screen is open to one particularly scantily-clad woman by the beach, enjoying a drink over the water.

“I am not interested in them,” Vergil replies. He pushes Dante’s phone aside.

“Wuh–you didn’t even look!” Dante protests. “For all you know, she could be the hottest chick in Red Grave City!” He looks at his phone, just to check. Maybe not the hottest, but still smokin’.

Vergil frowns, and jots down a note on the manuscript he’s looking over.

“Do you want to go out with guys? Is that it?” Dante asks. Only a half-serious question, but if Vergil’s going to come out to him now, Dante can adjust his preferences. Then he can adjust his perception of his brother after that.

“I’m not interested in them either. Whatever dredges of society you’ve managed to fish up with my likeness as bait, I’m not interested in getting to know any of them.”

Dante scoffs. “They’re perfectly reputable women. Look,” he says, thrusting the phone again into Vergil’s face, this time, on the bio of a particularly verbose woman. “Just read her profile.”

Vergil stares at Dante as he flicks the woman’s profile to the left. Dante gasps.

“No.”

Vergil turns back to whatever he’s doing. He’s always doing that. Turning away from Dante like he’s got something better to do. He’s been toiling away at his career for over two decades now. What will it take for him to slip away just for a moment?

When Dante leaves in a huff, he realizes far too late, too late to run back to Vergil’s flat and into his office and point at him and yell “aha!”

Vergil knew to swipe left.

So he does know how dating apps work.

 

 

 

Vergil was so resistant about not seeing any of his matches, evading Dante’s phone with impossible precision and foresight. Dante was a son of Sparda, and he rarely felt like he couldn’t take on anything. But Vergil was the same as him, only with twenty or so more years on his shoulders, the only one besides Dad who could best him. So Dante, the seasoned war strategist that he was, shifted his methods from physical dominance to mental warfare.

The only way Vergil couldn’t turn him down is if Dante found someone absolutely perfect. Too perfect to turn down. And in order to do that, Dante had to find out everything about Vergil.

Yes, he’s bringing out the big guns. Mom.

When she calls, every Friday at seven on the dot, Dante interrupts a only mildly interesting tangent about Dad floating out into the middle of the sea to conduct some research for the next stage of his sinister plot.

“Has Vergil ever brought a girl back home?” Dante asks.

Mom pauses for a bit, leaving the call silent enough for Dante to hear the waves hitting the sand. “I don’t… no, I don’t think so. Why are you asking?”

Dante wonders if he should spill. Ah hell, why not.

“I want to set Vergil up,” he declares with his full chest.

“Oh, honey,” Mom says, and that alone is enough to pierce out all the air from his lungs. “I don’t normally like telling you what to do or not to do, but leave Vergil alone on this, please?”

“Wait, what? How come?” That wasn’t the answer he was expecting.

Mom hushes up again.

“I’m at home, Mom. He isn’t here,” Dante says.

Still, another beat, before she speaks. “He’s always been a bit sensitive about that. I’ve tried to set him up myself. But he doesn’t take to charity. He’s not that kind of person.”

Dante scoffs. It was hardly charity. How messed up was Vergil to misinterpret any sort of kindness as charity? Especially from his own family, no less.

“Well let’s just say I’m asking about Vergil so I can get to know him a bit better,” Dante says.

She sighs, resigned. “There was someone when he was around your age. A girl from Fortuna, I think.”

Dante perks up. His age… could the reason why Vergil had never seen the light from between a woman’s legs be because he never got over someone he met more than two decades ago?

“Did he introduce her to you?”

“No, they weren’t that serious. Vergil would definitely bring a girl home if he thought she was special,” Mom says. “But he did talk about her, and that’s more I can say for anyone else.”

“What was she like? Do you remember?”

“I mean… Fortuna girls? Probably very modest,” she replies. Dante grimaces. Ugh. Even Vergil’s tastes were virginal. He couldn’t possibly imagine going big and bold. But hopefully his tastes had changed since then.

“But was she?”

“Dante, I really don’t remember. I’d ask your dad, but I don’t know if Vergil would talk to him about something like that. There are things only boys tell their moms,” she says, and Dante blushes. “Speaking of, I have your dad with me. You should chat with him a bit!”

“Mom!” When the line goes silent and a lower, fuller voice asks “How are you, Dante?” Dante resigns to his fate.

“Hey, Dad. Yeah, I’m good–”

 

 

 

It’s almost offensive how easy it is to get a date with someone with Vergil’s profile. Before he knows it, he’s got three women asking him out on a date. Dante supposes half of the credit should go to his immaculate flirting skills, even if they are in the silhouette of Vergil’s character. Proper grammar and spelling goes a long way, Dante finds. He will keep this in mind for the future.

It’s a hard pick between the women. Dante’s a respectful man, and he refuses to put down three bad bitches. But one of them has to be perfect for Vergil. Who deserves the honor of deflowering his older brother?

None of them seem particularly close to how Mom described his one romance, but all Dante has to do is get close enough. He eyes this one blonde chick, in her mid-thirties, older than the two other choices that are waiting and eager for just one affirmative text. She’s smart and firm, and she apparently went to the university that rivalled Vergil’s. Not from Fortuna, a Red Grave local, so there’s the element of cultural familiarity there. But maybe she’s too safe a choice, too obvious a match. Opposites attract. Dante checks out another profile in his DMs. Short, perky brown hair, petite and looks like a bird. In a good way. From what he’s gleaned from their texts, she’s a complete 180° from Blondie.

Dante thinks to ask Trish and Lady, but decides against it. No, this is too severe a task for them to be burdened with. It must be Dante that makes the killing shot, him that puts his own life at risk for his brother.

In the end, he goes with the blonde. Can’t go wrong with an adequate match, even when Dante’s stomach churns at the idea of his brother having to settle for ordinary.

There’s no need to wrestle the woman that Dante’s picked out into a date at one of the most sought-after restaurants downtown, somewhere his parents used to take him and Vergil whenever he found time in his schedule. It’s notoriously difficult to get a reservation there, but Dante’s smooth-talking (and let’s be real, family name) gets him a seat for two.

Vergil is the last piece of the puzzle, but Dante’s looked through his very accessible and detailed schedule to find when he has time off. So much of his work is on a flexible timeline, so it’s hard to pin the tail on the proverbial donkey. But the next Friday is free, and Dante, knowing how much foresight and preparation means to Vergil, asks him a week ahead of time. Vergil’s text is brief but affirmative.

I’ll be there.

All Vergil needs to do is to show up looking as good as he normally does, and Dante can guarantee Vergil coming to dinner looking even better than usual. He always dresses up and more for the occasion, and he’ll definitely go for “more”.

He doesn’t even need a makeover. There’s nothing that needs changing, no hair that needs to be slicked back to reveal a hidden beauty, no glasses that impede his striking blue eyes. Dante’s made everything so easy. Vergil would be an idiot not to follow through.

The night of the date, Dante arrives at the restaurant ten minutes ahead of time, which is very unlike him, and it should speak volumes of his sincerity towards his mission. The date’s already inside, seated close enough to the window that overlooks the street as per Dante’s specific request. Dante lets out a sigh of relief when he realizes she wasn’t a catfish. It’s a good thing that she came early, but perhaps she could glean that Vergil seemed like a hard to please man. And he was. He barely tolerated Dante’s tardiness as is.

Of course, Vergil had to upstage him. Dante should have known to come at least twenty minutes earlier.

“Evening,” Vergil says. He hasn’t gone inside yet, still chatting with the concierge. He gives Dante a once-over. He’s very decidedly not looking restaurant-ready, in a loose henley and jeans that gives him enough air for his skin to breathe. “You’re not dressed appropriately for dinner.”

Even though Dante’s not actually there for dinner, it still annoys him how Vergil chooses to pick him apart at any chance. “So about that…”

Vergil raises his eyebrow. “You can wear my coat if you want. It’s not fitted for you, but it’ll do.”

He starts taking off his jacket, and Dante furiously shakes his hands.

“No, no–” he hisses, trying to pull Vergil’s collar up. “I’m not having dinner with you.”

When Vergil stares at him, more annoyed than confused, Dante beckons through the glass. “Your date’s in there.”

“What date?” Vergil asks. His face is properly dark, and he looks a little less sexy and a lot more scary to be meeting his future wifey right now.

“She’s just inside! The smokin’ hot chick over there, blonde, in a black dress!”

Vergil doesn’t even give it a second thought. “I’m leaving,” he says. He nods briefly to the concierge, who nods back. “I’ll see you another day.”

Dante snatches his brother’s shoulder, trying to make the unstoppable force of his older brother stop. “You didn’t even meet her–”

“I already told you I wasn’t going to entertain your silly project,” Vergil snarls. Even though they’re almost the same height, Vergil’s stride takes Dante a few seconds to catch up to.

“Are you serious? She’s already there! Why not just go in and chat her up a bit? You might find out you have more in common than you think!”

“You are welcome to go in there and take my spot with that poor woman,” Vergil says.

“But… it’s for you,” Dante wheedles.

Vergil looks at him, always from the side. He doesn't deign Dante with a response.

Instead, he goes home the way he came, without Yamato, so through the subway. Dante stops at the top of the stairs, watching Vergil scuttle off down and away when he turns out of view.

In the end, Dante trudges back to the restaurant. He leaves the establishment with a red handprint on his face.

 

 

 

For as much Dante originally agonized over not seeing his friends over the summer, he’s completely forgotten to meet up with them at all as a group. Their group chat had gone mostly silent since Lady had been so occupied, and Trish and Dante’s messages had also petered out with no fight from Dante. He didn’t expect to be whisked away by Vergil, of all people. To be fair, he hadn’t been entertaining until recently.

It’s shameful. Dante should be the glue that held his friends together. It’s how Lady and Trish met, after all. Now he had gone his own separate way, filling up his summer with a venture stranger than any job or internship. He made it right, in the end, after calling Lady fifteen times throughout the day until she finally picked up after work and then rallying in Trish too, a much easier feat with her less inflexible schedule.

“I miss us,” Dante whines. “I feel like I haven’t seen you guys in ages.”

“I saw you last week,” Trish says, deadpan. She neglects to mention how it was only to borrow one of Dante’s jackets for an event. They had talked for a total of two minutes.

“Look, I’m sorry I haven’t been keeping you guys updated. There’s just so much on my plate right now,” Lady says, squinting at her screen. She brought her laptop to the diner, effectively making their lunch date a study date.

You should quit your internship and hang out with me, Dante thinks, but he knew Lady would shoot a bullet in his head if he so much as implied it.

“How’s work?”

Lady just shakes her head. Trish says “same old.”

“How’s Mission Deflowering?” Trish asks.

Dante opens his mouth, before he realizes Lady has been left out of the plot this entire time. “Oh right, Lady doesn’t know yet. So–”

“Trish already clued me in. Thanks, Dante,” Lady says. Hey! It’s not his fault she didn’t know. He didn’t want to bother her while she was so busy. And from what Dante had gleaned, Lady was far more sour on his brother than Trish was, ever since he had always treated Dante’s friends so coldly whenever they visited the manor for sleepovers. Lady had a much lower tolerance threshold for dickheads.

“Any progress?” Trish asks.

Dante slumps in his seat, leaning against her shoulder. He sniffles. “I set him up on a date. He didn’t even want to see her. And then his date slapped me when I tried to apologize.”

Trish howls and Lady laughs too. Clearly she wasn’t focused on work enough to be dismissed from their conversation altogether. “You should focus on losing your own virginity before you start caring about what Vergil does with his.”

Dante gasps, affronted. “Et tu, Lady?”

She shrugged as she typed away. “You were always going on about it when we were younger.” She says it like the latest instance of that happening wasn’t just a month ago. Just one month, and she was already acting like a grown-up even though she was younger than both Dante and Trish.

“Yeah, but Vergil’s a lot older than me. It’s kind of like I can’t lose mine when he still has his, you know?”

Lady scrunches her face up. “You’re not normally this nice. Why the change of heart?”

“I just told you!” Dante says. “It’s just–it’s pathetic if I lose it first. Like I’m an adult,” he ignores how they raise their eyebrows at him simultaneously, “but Vergil’s an adult-adult.”

Lady exchanges a look with Trish. Some kind of female telepathic communication thing that Dante doesn’t understand. “Then I think you’re going to die a virgin too.”

Dante wails and buries his face in his milkshake. These wenches of little faith. So far no one had expressed confidence in his endeavor. Not Lady, Not Trish (even though she helped Dante immeasurably), not even Mom.

He was going to prove them wrong.

 

 

 

 

Like all of Dante’s ideas, this one is wild, hardly thought out, and absurd. But Dante thinks all of his ideas deserve a seat at the table, especially the funny ones. And this one is a real knee-slapper.

The package comes quicker than Dante imagines, but at this point he was already visiting Vergil every day, so when Dante gets to his apartment he takes the discreet cardboard box in with him. Vergil never had anything more than letters delivered to his apartment, so Dante knew it was what he had gotten for him.

“Mail for you!” he yells. Vergil didn’t answer, but he was home. He never responded to Dante raising his voice. Shrugging, Dante goes upstairs to Vergil’s office.

Vergil heard him, obviously, and swivels around in his chair with a hand extended like he was about to review Dante’s report card. Nope, it’s something better. Vergil raises an eyebrow when he looks at the address and checks its validity.

“What’s this?” he asks, and even though his assumption is correct in that Dante had a hand in it, it’s still frustrating to be pinned as the suspect. Though Dante can’t find the heart in him to be so annoyed now.

“A gift,” Dante replies.

The packaging is discreet and plentiful enough that Vergil has to wade through a matryoshka of boxes and bubble wrap until he pulls off the final wrap to reveal the fleshlight. The cap’s still on.

Vergil shoots Dante a look before he uncaps the pocket pussy. Dante can detect the exact Vergil makes the revelation on what it is. He’s surprised Vergil didn’t recognize it sooner, but turbo virgin that he is, Dante really should dial back his expectations. To Vergil’s credit, he doesn’t drop it or throw it or anything, even though his pinched nose like he’s caught a rotting smell is a sight to behold.

“And why was this sent to me?” Vergil asks. Oh boy. He shouldn’t have asked. He really shouldn’t.

“Since you’re so unwilling to have sex with a real human woman, you might as well practice on an object,” Dante says, impish grin threatening to rip his cheeks apart.

Vergil doesn’t say anything, as he rotates the fleshlight in his hand, daintily pinching it between the middle and avoiding the bright pink pussy that occasionally grazes by his vision. What more is there to look at?! It’s just 80% black plastic and 20% silicone, and Vergil only needs to focus on that small minority.

“Hm,” Vergil says. He peers at the lips closer. Okay, that’s a bit scary. He looks like he’s actually considering it. Dante might have gotten it for him, but part of him expected it to serve as a gag gift more than anything, a humiliating kick in the ass to get his geriatric butt in gear. Obviously Vergil wouldn’t debase himself to pleasure himself with an obscene mimicry of a pussy.

But Vergil’s contemplative expression is nothing to laugh at. He stops rotating the fleshlight, and he stares straight down the eye of the beast.

Dante swallows. “How… how do you like it?”

“I haven’t tried it yet,” Vergil says, and Dante’s heart sinks. Vergil deigns to grace the lips with his other hand, giving it his full attention. More than he’s given Dante anyway. He pokes at it like a peckish bird at a new kind of feed, seeing if it’ll taste good or make him explode like rice.

“So I put my… in here?” Vergil asks, almost with an innocent vulnerability. He angles the fleshlight so that Dante too can see how he’s touching it. He opens up the cunt cavity for Dante to see the insides of, and the way they part between his fingers is so effortless.

“Y-Yeah,” Dante mumbles.

His older brother’s fondling is strange at first, alien or animalistic but just not human, but soon he touches the clit with the pad of his slim index finger. It’s protruding, has always been protruding. It needs no coaxing out with expertise, always hard and at the ready. A lewd permanent display of arousal. Dante blushes, when Vergil presses it in a slow circle. He shifts awkwardly, and his thighs rub together.

“Hm,” Vergil says again. How was it so interesting? It was just a pussy. Dante had one too. No big deal. Vergil was such a virgin. Dante watched, mouth feeling like it was filled with cotton, when Vergil inserted his middle finger up to the webs between fingers.

“Ah,” Dante whispers. It was just one, smooth glide in. He wonders if it’d go as easily in him.

“What did you say?” Vergil asks, but Dante can’t answer. He pulls his finger out, and slides it right back in like another rep of a set, and another, slow but unrelenting. “This is a bit loose.”

His index finger joins in on the fun, plunging along in the same tantric rhythm. He strokes along the floor of the pussy, widening the hole enough for Dante to see right through it. When he inserts his ring finger, the hole gapes wider, and Dante can see how Vergil ploughs through it like a rake through a field, rubbing it warm to boiling hot. He’s hot down there himself, on the verge of whistling out steam.

“I can see how this would feel pleasurable,” Vergil comments, and Dante sucks in his lips and kisses his teeth when his pussy squeezes around a regrettable nothing. Fuck, it looks good, what Vergil’s doing. Is he even a virgin? He must be lying. The whole time, this month has been an empty quest to a pirate’s chest filled with lint and spiderwebs. For the first time, Dante regrets going on his noble mission to cure Vergil of his virginity.

When Dante looks at Vergil’s face, searching for clarity, he groans. There’s an unsubtle perk of his brother’s thin lips, in something closer to a smile than what Dante’s seen in the past few weeks.

Vergil unceremoniously caps the fleshlight, slipping it back into the box without the bubble wrap.

“Return it, Dante. I have no use for it, like all of the women you’ve sent my way.”

“Why? You seemed to like it,” Dante retorts. Vergil’s lips twitch again, before they flatline again to his deadpan expression. Amusement still graces his eyes.

“I don’t need it,” Vergil says, and that’s the only explanation he offers. What, like he’s too good for it? Like the ladies, who are awesome and cool and sexy Dante might add, who’ve been falling over their feet for his older brother? Were his hands just that dexterous to please himself all on his own?

…Actually, considering the show that Vergil put on, that wasn’t too impossible of an assumption. Just the sight of Vergil opening up that pocket pussy made Dante lightheaded with promise. Guaranteed pleasure.

Vergil was so frustratingly egotistical. Too egotistical to realize that Dante was just trying to help him out.

“I’m not going to return it,” Dante announces. He steps forward, almost stumbling over his feet like a newborn fawn to grab the fleshlight box off the table. “I’ll put it–” he looks around urgently, “-here!” He opens up Vergil’s closet and tucks it into an empty space beside his shoeboxes. When he leans down, Vergil’s residual scent floats up his nose and Dante has to snap back up for fresh air.

Vergil doesn’t go to pluck out the invader in his closet. All he does is stare at Dante with the same amused expression. Somehow, this irritates Dante more than if he threw it out.

“Hey, you’ll never know when it might come in handy. Heh heh,” Dante laughs at his own inadvertent joke, though his heart’s not really in it.

Vergil all but shrugs. Indulgence is worn strange on him. For once, Dante wishes he was uncompromising like he usually was.

True to his word, Vergil never uses the fleshlight. And Dante checks, he really does. It never moves from its spot in the closet, not even to throw out. In some wicked, twisted way, Vergil probably kept it because it could be seen as an admission of guilt if he didn't. Dante checks inside too, whenever he can, and the cap is always firmly sealed. The pussy inside is as spotless as Vergil had left it the first time. Dante sniffs it too, for good measure, really honing into his detective skills. Nope, no smell of jizz, just medical-grade silicone. It definitely wasn’t well-loved, or loved at all. It was a neglected and pathetic thing, and it saw even less use than Vergil’s least favorite clothes and shoes. Even those saw the light of day once a year.

 

 

 

[
Vergil
Do you want to join me for flower arranging today?
]

“This seems girly,” Dante grumbles, thrusting his hands in his pockets. “Wish you asked me out to spar instead.”

It certainly was a perfect day for it, and those were hard to come by. Red Grave was a metropolitan hotspot, but it was not known for its good weather.

A warped smile appears on the side of Vergil’s mouth. Man, it’s like he’s really not used to feeling happiness at all. His smiles are so rare that when they do pass by like a shooting star, it’s never how Dante sees normal people smile at all.

“We can cross blades whenever you want. You don’t have to join me.”

“No, I’m coming,” Dante says, heart thumping at the thought of Vergil rescinding his invitation. He steps up quicker, to match Vergil in his indomitable stride. He links arms with his brother, like when he was young, and Vergil doesn’t seem to mind. Vergil never extended out physical touch like charity or kindness, but he wasn’t opposed, and Dante was certainly craving it when Mom and Dad would indulge him in cuddles all throughout the evening on the couch, much into his teenagehood.

Vergil guides him where they need to be, which isn’t too far from his flat. Walking distance. Some part of Dante wonders if comfortability really suited Vergil. His hackles always seem raised like he was prepared for war, and while Dad decided he wasn’t suited for a demon life, Dante could see Vergil following in their father’s footsteps before he gave up all his power.

Certainly, flower arranging didn’t suit him. It comes to Dante too late, but only when he sees the same red and white flowers nestled into the display along the wall does he consider the idea that Vergil might have arranged his graduation bouquet himself.

“How many people are coming?” Dante asks. “Seems kinda empty.”

Vergil shakes his head. “No one. It’s not a class. Not today, at least. I only booked the studio for a couple hours. You wouldn’t be able to keep up with me at the current level of my class.”

“Hey, I’m not that dumb! I can keep up with you and your nerdy florist buddies,” Dante says, blushing.

Vergil smiles briefly. “But this way you’ll have more freedom to make something you like, won’t you?”

Fair enough. Dante eyes the vases on the shelf. He picks out a particularly gaudy one, a vase with two male faces on each side with Roman features and curly beards. Vergil looks at his choice before picking his own, a stumpy vessel that looks more like a bowl for dogs to drink out of than something that can hold a flower. Good luck with that one, Vergil.

Vergil slides on a pair of gloves and insists Dante does too, stopping him before he grabs on a handful of flowers by the stem. Dante spends absolutely no time on his decision once he’s allowed to bound free amongst the dead field, taking out a good three-quarters of the red roses for his own usage. If this is all on Vergil’s dime, Dante will put his money to good use.

Vergil takes longer to pick out his selection, but Dante gets started on his first. It’s not that hard a feat. When he’s virtually finished and bouncing on his heels, Vergil’s just gotten around to placing his flowers on a towel beside the bowl in a mysterious order that Dante can’t comprehend. Vergil encourages him to experiment with a few other arrangements. The key word in his encouragement is “variety”, and that lack of subtlety is not lost on Dante.

Although Dante will begrudgingly admit some entertainment in putting flowers together in a pot, akin to some kind of adult finger-painting or collage, Dante finds it more fun to watch Vergil in his element with his arrangement. It’s no different from when he flips through and corrects his clients’ writing, but as much as Vergil enjoys the art of reading, he takes to flowers like a bee.

And like work, he takes it all too seriously.

“Hey, look, Vergil!”

Vergil turns to look, and frowns when he sees the stem of the rose between Dante’s lips.

“Get that out of your mouth, you fool,” he hisses. Dante splutters around the rose, and Vergil takes it upon himself to pry it out from Dante’s lips himself like chocolate from a dog. Vergil’s fingers are warm on Dante’s skin, leaving an invisible burn there that Dante tries to bite away and override with pain. Vergil carefully wipes the stem dry with a paper towel.

“Hey, there’s plenty more where that came from,” Dante says pathetically. Vergil tends to the rose for far too long. Dante didn’t know his saliva was so offensive to this already dead flower.

“There weren’t any thorns, were there?” Vergil asks. His hand darts out, never giving Dante any warning when he’s so fast, pinching his chin and angling his face from side to side to catch the light on Dante’s glossy lip. He pries Dante’s lower lip down again, another hot, sudden burn over the one Dante just tried to nurse back to health.

“N-no,” Dante says. He licks his lips. “Nothing, see.”

“Alright,” Vergil says, before he lets go.

Both his mouth and ego metaphorically bruised, Dante seeks to interrupt the silence with noise. Any noise.

“What are you making?” He asks. He can’t make heads or tails of Vergil’s arrangement, no colorful flowerbuds, 90% thin stems that veer to the left. “Why does yours have so few flowers?”

“It’s not typical of the ikebana style to crowd an arrangement with flowers.” Vergil shoots a look at Dante’s horrific mass of red. Dante doesn’t appreciate that.

“I like roses,” Dante says defensively.

“Duly noted. I’ll consider that the next time I decide to arrange you a little something.”

“Oh, uh, okay.”

Vergil stares at his bouquet for too long. Before Dante can ask why he’s looking so strangely at it, Vergil shuffles closer.

“If you are insistent about having an entire rose bush as an arrangement, at least give them enough space to breathe,” Vergil says, leaning over into Dante’s space. Like he can’t help himself to fix Dante’s wrongs. Dante instinctively turns his head when Vergil’s easy, calm breath graces the length of his throat. Vergil reaches out and pulls out a few roses at the top, the petals of the roses blooming wider a little more.

“Yeah, breathing room. Got it,” Dante mutters. Vergil could give him some too.

Instead, Vergil’s hand comes to rest at Dante’s shoulder, for balance for the way he’s kneeling on the tatami mat. Not too much weight on him. Dante could take more. What he can’t take is Vergil’s hand slipping down to hold his waist, and Dante sucks in his teeth forbidding himself to gasp.

“Perhaps you should place your best roses in the center of the arrangement,” Vergil says, as close to a suggestion as he can get with his firm voice. It sounds dusky, and Dante usually might find himself rejecting any offer of improvement flung his way. Right now, he obeys Vergil’s recommendation.

“This pathological one could go here. Draws the eye,” Vergil states, plucking out a particularly droopy rose from the center and slipping it back into the side of the vase, where it ducks its head from its weak neck, diverging from the mass. It’s a bit cute like that, a pathetic little loner.

“How’s that?” Vergil asks.

Dante blinks, cementing himself back in the present. “Yeah, it’s nice.”

Vergil hums approvingly.

Normally it was so aggravating for Vergil to take control like that, give the impression that he saw everyone else as no more than a child or another inferior subject. But to Dante, the light that he painted his older brother in seemed to change and refract with time and perspective. It was almost motherly, the way he fretted over Dante’s every move, stricter than their actual mother had been. Or maybe it was the absence of a firm guidance that made Vergil yank Dante’s leash a bit tighter, to compensate for his supposedly unserious upbringing.

Vergil’s tendency to fill in the role as a mentor for Dante only really became unwelcome when Dante grew older and into his self-consciousness as a teenager. But he wasn’t always adverse to an authority figure. Besides their father, Vergil also taught him how to fight, how to cross swords. At some point in Dante’s adolescence, he started denying Vergil that role in his life as a teacher. Not just Vergil. He had even lashed out at Dad, but Dad had quelled Dante’s outbursts with the skill learnt from handling Vergil when he was Dante’s age. Vergil, on the other hand, simply relented, deigning to fade away into obscurity.

Dante had almost forgotten how weirdly sensual it was, being told how to conduct himself with that strict guidance with Vergil’s hand over his. When they were in high school, Dante never understood why Trish and Lady developed crushes on their teachers. They were never the most attractive, so painfully ordinary that Dante found it hard to reconcile the thought that his girls could possibly be so head-over-heels for them. With Vergil back in his life, Dante could finally see what his friends had seen in those men.

Vergil was a stick in the mud. He was controlling, picky, maddening. He loved telling people what to do. He was attentive, caring, romantic. Dante wasn’t sure how Vergil had been single this entire time.

 

 

 

Dante had to know if that afternoon was just a fluke. There was no way Vergil remained single if that was what he was capable of this entire time. Though he was unpolished and rough, that moment seemed to erode away that gritty facade to something shiny and gleaming, and it had caught Dante’s eye like a possessive spirit.

And there was no better way for Vergil to prove himself but with a repeat performance, a recreation of a date. This time, Dante takes the initiative to invite Vergil out again, though he chooses a different restaurant than where he got slapped. He probably won’t come back for a good while. Vergil almost demands to accompany Dante to the restaurant, probably afraid he’ll pair him up with another unsuspecting victim if he doesn’t. It’s fine by Dante’s books. The longer the date, the more he’ll see what his older brother is made of.

For all accounts and purposes, Vergil is a thing of chivalry. He looks great, wearing a formal button-down and a navy waistcoat in lieu of the stuffy overcoat he usually wore, and Dante can’t say he doesn’t look banging either, in his black corset and red coat. They look a proper pair in blue and red. The brotherly version of a power couple. Vergil extends his arm out, and Dante eagerly takes it, almost skipping down the street on their way to dinner.

The foreplay to dinner is awesome. Vergil doesn’t even need prompting to be a gentleman. He watches out for potholes, opens doors for Dante. Doesn’t pull out his chair for him, but unravels his napkin for him.

Dante, for what it’s worth, doesn’t mention Vergil’s progress on his online dating profile in case it stinks up the mood. Vergil looks as joyous as he can be when his expression is completely neutral, read through his languid movements, permitted to be lazy.

Vergil is the one who actually brings up said topic, though this time, it’s regarding Dante.

“You’re awfully knowledgeable about dating apps for someone who’s just leapt over the precipice of adulthood,” Vergil comments.

Dante scoffs, but a smile slips through his lips. “I’ve had a few years of practice,” he brags. He neglects to mention Trish’s input.

Vergil frowns. “So while you were underage? That’s unsafe.”

Crap. “Ha, right. Hindsight is 20/20,” Dante says nervously. “I got banned on most of those apps for being underage, so I’m off until I get a new number or phone. Not that I’m so eager to return to online dating.”

Vergil sighs and he pinches the bridge of his nose, but neither of them can really do anything about it now. Dante’s still here. He didn’t get whisked away by some nonce.

“Right,” Vergil grits out. “Were those fleeting glimpses of your online presence enlightening?”

“Not really,” Dante says. “Don’t worry. Nothing happened. I didn’t meet up with anyone. Trish and Lady certainly stopped anything from happening, even if I missed out on snagging a hot babe or two.”

“That’s a relief. Perhaps I shouldn’t have judged them so prematurely. They’re better influences for you than you are for them.”

Dante’s nostrils flare. At last Vergil recognizes the qualities of his friends, even at the expense of him.

“You’re telling me. Hot babes were few and far between. Most of the people who hit me up were gross old dudes.”

Vergil stiffens, looking like an angry porcupine again. “Are matches not reciprocal?”

“No–no! That was… somewhere else,” Dante mumbles, eyes suddenly shifty. He doesn’t want to say how he gave up on matching with women halfway through and downloaded a gay dating app not realizing it was solely for hookups. “Different format. I gave up on that a few days in.”

Vergil hums, but he’s still frowning. It’s foreign to the anger and irritation that Dante is used to. It looks like worry.

Dante coughs. “Anyway, they couldn’t charm the pants off me if they tried. They definitely couldn’t pull anything like this off.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. They could take some pointers from you,” Dante teases. “You have the formula down pat. Wining and dining me like a classy lady.”

For the first time in, well, ever, Dante catches Vergil blush. It’s such a faint thing, it disappears like it was never there. “You’re my little brother. Of course I would treat you with the dignity you deserve.”

Dante’s throat feels all too dry. He brings the glass of wine that Vergil had picked out up to his lips, trying hard to sip it delicately instead of trying to flood the desert in his throat with alcohol. Vergil exceeded expectations. If only he knew where to apply himself, pull out the moves on a babe that matched his style and energy. Then he’d be limitless.

 

 

 

The date had been so pleasant that it was hardly a chore at all. The night had become a lot colder when the sun set, but Vergil had brought Yamato with and teleported them back as quickly as possible. Instead of taking Dante back to the manor, Dante asked to crash at Vergil’s. And though there was no real reason to think Dante in danger of anything, no perils that their demonic strength wouldn't conquer, Vergil still allowed him to stay.

“Thanks for dinner, Verg,” Dante says, propped up on Vergil’s shoulder and smiling like an idiot. He had drank seven glasses of wine because that accursed blood in him kept digesting it too quickly. Vergil had drank three, and was now completely sober, which Dante was trying to avoid.

“Thank you for being good company, even though I now have too many concerns I didn’t know I should have had about you,” Vergil replies. He tries to place Dante down on his bed, but Dante’s too clingy to let go. Vergil’s hands slide down the shape of his body to his waist, an attempt to peel him off foiled when they rest there and hibernate just slightly under Dante’s hem, Vergil’s cold fingertips making him shiver.

“It was perfect,” Dante says, butting his forehead against his brother’s. Drunkenness does wonders for his confidence. Like this, he can face Vergil eye-to-eye without buckling under his austere gaze. “You’re so ready to date. Go forth, big brother, fly high.”

Vergil huffs. “Are you still spouting nonsense?”

“Yeees,” Dante slurs. Vergil rubs his thumbs into his skin and Dante almost moans. “You aced it. Scored ten out of ten. I have no notes. Maybe pull out the chair for me next time. Uh, I mean, for your date.”

“You were keeping score?” Vergil asks. Dante nods.

“Had to see–had to see what you were made of,” he whispers, voice fading away, “if you were ready for a date with a real woman.”

Dante sways against his older brother’s tight, unyielding body for a moment. Then Vergil unceremoniously drops him on the bed. Dante’s head bounces on the firm mattress and he winces.

“Ow, what the–what gives?!”

When Vergil looms over Dante on the bed, bracing him between two pillars that Dante knows won’t budge until his brother does, Dante feels like a sparrow in a cage. In Dante’s entire life, he’s never known Vergil to be dangerous. In theory he was a dangerous creature, but he never dealt Dante wounds that he knew wouldn’t heal.

“Vergil?” Dante laughs nervously. He pats Vergil’s arm. “You good?”

“When will you stop pushing at my every nerve,” Vergil whispers, sounding like he’s talking to himself more than he’s asking Dante. His eyes are glossy even in the shadow, wide while his irises are pinched into points. Oh great, he’s completely lost it.

Dante’s always known his flight and fight wires have been crossed. Long ago rewired, and he’s never gotten around to fixing it. Instead of apologizing, he pushes at Vergil’s immovable chest. It’s harder than he expected it to be, despite how much Vergil seems to sit on his ass. Dante swallows.

“Come on,” he urges. “Get up, weirdo. Don’t be like this.”

Vergil leans down, almost too slowly, and Dante pushes at him like he’s being slowly crushed by a trap wall. It’s almost like an embrace, but Vergil’s hands stay like pillars around Dante’s frame, never taking that step into becoming something loving, relieving.

“You need to learn the consequences of your actions.”

Finally, Dante’s instincts kick in, far too late, as he scrambles on his side and tries to wriggle out of the claustrophobic tightness between him and his brother. That wall closes on him entirely, and Dante squeals, something that will ring in his mind when he inevitably recalls this event over and over. But what comes next will take precedence in his memory.

“No running, little brat,” Vergil hisses; when did he get so close to his ear?! Dante wants to clap a hand over his cheek, disinfect the residue of Vergil’s steaming breath against his skin. It’s going to leave a stain.

Dante manages to slip further up the bed. He elbows Vergil’s head, but it doesn’t move. If Vergil is that strong, or Dante just doesn’t want to hurt his brother, he doesn’t know. Vergil’s hands, firm and callused on his palms, finally come and grab his waist, where he’s despairing bare because of his stupid fashion style, holding him still. It’s like Dante’s scruff has been pinched by a momma cat, and he goes completely limp.

Dante’s mind stutters when Vergil’s fingers dip below the waistband of his boxers. His loose trousers don’t even offer any resistance, slipping down easily to his calves when Vergil tugs away at his clothes. 

“Hey, are you really serious…? When I said–ah!” Dante moans when Vergil nips him under his jaw, and his pussy really, actually clenches up on itself like a hitched breath, “-when I said you should lose your virginity, I didn’t–didn’t mean with me!”

Vergil stops. Maybe to step back and be the proper adult for once, though Dante’s sure his brother’s got a few screws loose enough for him to be a 43-year old virgin. For one horrifying second, Dante thinks Vergil might back off. Then he’d really have to contend with the consequences of his actions.

“Don’t worry, Dante. I’m not going to have sex with you.”

Even though he says that, he peels Dante’s boxers off, almost kindly, undressing him with the due care of another lover. Or a baby getting its diaper changed. Dante hopes it’s not the second one.

Vergil runs his slim middle finger down Dante’s cunt. It feels open, ready, and still, Dante reckons one finger covers the entirety of his pussy. His face burns, and instead of burying his head in the bed, he noses at Vergil, eager to get revenge at him for his little bite. Vergil dodges out of the way when Dante’s teeth snap at him like a dog.

“Behave, and maybe I’ll repay you with kindness,” Vergil says. Shit. Dante’s so used to Vergil’s snarky remarks, just the possibility of positive reinforcement makes him pliant and panting. He lets Vergil rub him there, as much as he wants, even though his pussy gets wetter and louder, more flammable to orgasm.

It’s like Vergil is toying with him, trying him out like the fleshlight Dante gifted him. It feels so good to be on the receiving end, when Vergil’s fingers start to prod and pry at him like a new discovery, and Dante’s head feels hot when he realizes he’s giving his older brother his first glimpse at pussy. So kind of Vergil to lead Dante to his sexual awakening, but Dante’s forgotten his own part in it and his charity. All in the name of helping his brother lose his virginity and stop being so uptight about everything.

How is it? Dante wants to ask. How’s pussy feel? You like it? But Vergil goes on and parts his pussy lips, and all Dante can do is whimper. The callused pad of his thumb pushes at Dante’s clit and Dante humps it like a dog. Vergil’s nice enough to not move away when he does.

It’s embarrassing that Dante’s wet enough that Vergil doesn’t have to look very deep to draw out the slick from his cunt. Just a swirl of his fingertip at the shallow base makes Dante wet, a vicious cycle of providing enough for Vergil to take out and rub all over his mound, like a child playing in a puddle.

Thankfully it’s not enough for Vergil’s curiosity to be satisfied at the surface of Dante’s pussy. He digs his finger into it, and Dante moans when he’s subjected more to the invasive prowling of Vergil’s fingers. When another finger joins, and another, Dante feels dazed when he realizes Vergil’s applying the practice from his pocket pussy onto him. To Vergil, Dante’s just another toy, this time, a life-sized little brother for him to mount and breed and dispose.

Vergil peels his fingers out. Before Dante can demand them back, Vergil slaps his cunt. The first time he’s laid a hand of Dante in disciplining him, and it’s on his cunt.

“You–!”

But the pain of Vergil’s slap is in its absence, not the impact. Really, his slap was nothing short of playful, testy. He pats it like a pet animal, and Dante feels himself domesticated through his cunt.

When Vergil’s had enough fun exploring by himself, he takes his hand away. Dante can hear the unzipping of Vergil’s slacks, and he doesn’t even sound like himself when he begs “in, inside!”

Vergil doesn’t respond with words. He rubs the shaft of his cock against Dante’s cunt, as if he’s putting it there just to line himself up. Then he plunges, hard, one long dip against Dante. It presses his clit on its path. There’s no part of Dante’s cunt that doesn’t feel hot.

Dante’s blood goes cold when he realizes Vergil’s actually going to follow through with his promise.

There’s just no way. He would let Dante–himself go hungry?!

Dante pushes his ass back, his one free leg outstretched, in an obvious mating display. Still, Vergil abides by his rigid routine of thrusts. Now that Dante’s legs are apart, it’s even harder to feel the weight of Vergil’s cock against him, but Dante hopes it’s a worthy risk.

“Put your legs together if you want to feel good. I already told you, I don’t intend on fucking you,” Vergil rasps.

Why not?!

Dante keeps his legs petulantly wide, not even thinking about the ramifications if Vergil really were to accidentally snag on his pussy and slide in in one devastating stroke. What it’d do to them, as brothers, to their mom and dad, to everyone in their radioactive vicinity. Vergil fucks against his cunt, trying and successfully lighting up a fire there with his unbelievable cock, it’s unfair, it’s not fair–!

But Vergil doesn’t make mistakes. Dante has to concede, and his legs snap together. Vergil doesn’t have to push him, mold him to his own preferences–Dante moves on his own, pinching his muscled legs together so roughly that his knees grind up against each other. Vergil finds the only open space between his thighs and his cunt, and with the pressure keeping him insulated in that small fuckhole, Vergil’s cock makes sparks burst in Dante’s vision whenever he moves. In or out, it doesn’t matter. Anything that scrapes by his rarely touched clit and his sensitive labia makes him gasp.

Dante grabs at Vergil’s arm. Vergil only grunts, doesn’t throw Dante off like a bull. It’s not like him to not speak his retorts. Maybe he’s lost his mind enough for Dante to plead again.

“Just the tip! Just the tip, it won’t count!” Dante squeals. He doesn’t want to think about how he’s being reduced to bargaining to get his way. If his friends could see him now–he doesn’t want to think about Trish and Lady seeing him now. A messy, sobbing wreck. He just wants Vergil to fuck him. Just the tip will do, really, Dante convinces himself. And hey, maybe the promise in his pussy will convince Vergil enough to give him a little more, just a lot of “little bit more”s that’ll find his older brother rooted in his virgin cunt.

Vergil draws out, and when he comes back, the fat, protruding root of his cock dips slightly into Dante’s pussy.

Before he knows it, Dante’s cumming around Vergil’s tip, kissing close-mouthed around the head and shivering in Vergil’s tight hold. His abs pulse, hurting more than any plank or crunch he’s ever done, as they heave with the most mind-numbing orgasm he’s ever had. Even if Vergil wanted to fuck him through it, he can’t, not when Dante’s pussy has squeezed on air so tightly that nothing will go in or come out.

“Did you just…?” Vergil mutters. His grip goes still, harder, firmer, bruising, and Dante wonders if he’s about to snap.

“Please–” he moans, before Vergil draws his hips back and thrusts up against him again, never into–

“Who gave you the right to cum?” Vergil hisses. “Don’t you understand you’re just a hole for me to fuck? You don’t have the privilege of orgasm.”

Dante howls when Vergil drives his dick back between his legs. Against his pussy, it feels like a burning sensation, right after he’s come, but Dante still wants Vergil to put it in.

Vergil’s a liar. Dante’s not a hole for him to fuck, not at all, just a crass facsimile of one made out of gangly legs and a sloppy pussy mound. It’s louder than Dante imagined, similar to what Dante might make with his own fingers in the privacy of his bedroom, and maybe close to what Vergil might sound like when he jerks himself off, a marriage of those two sounds. Vergil’s dick resurfaces over and over between that makeshift pussy, and again and again Dante is greeted with a vision of if he had a cock, all to himself, when Vergil fucks up to the hilt and it pokes out like a sore thumb between his legs. One particularly deep thrust, and Vergil’s ejaculating, and it’s almost as if Dante’s coming with him again even though he’s still being worked up from the heat between his legs.

“Ah,” Dante cries. It spurts all over his crotch. He doesn’t suppose Vergil lets himself go so messily over himself, though the image of Vergil cumming all over his own abs and chest makes his pussy heated. But when Dante’s borrowing his cock for the first time, Vergil is generous enough to let Dante make a splatter.

Vergil’s burdened breath weighs down on Dante’s neck, heavy enough that Dante can almost feel words unspoken on his skin. He doesn’t want to break the silence either, in this magical moment, for once, not intending to put his own foot in his mouth like he always does.

After an eternity of silence, Vergil slips out from between him as quietly as he can, and Dante flops on his back. Vergil gets up from the bed, with the posture of someone unaffected if Dante couldn’t see his mussed hair and sweaty skin. With his hair down, he looks shockingly like Dante, and Dante feels more convinced he’ll look like that when he’s Vergil’s age. Vergil peels his vest and shirt off, revealing more of his glistening skin trapped and condensing under all that stuffy fabric, the muscles that Dante was deprived from touching. He wants to get up and smell Vergil, between his pecs, down his abs, around his armpits. But he can’t even lift an arm.

“I’m going to wash up,” Vergil mutters. He disappears into his bathroom, coming right out to pass a hand-towel to Dante. Dante can barely move. Vergil puts it beside him on the bedside table, before he goes into the bathroom again, shutting the door with a firm thud. The sound of the shower begins almost immediately, and Dante lets out a sigh that he didn’t know he was holding.

He looks down at himself. When he’s unfolded and splayed out like a pinned butterfly, he can see how messed up he really is. Vergil’s grip on him, while firm, was enough to bruise on his hips like handprints on a child’s finger-painting project. Cum splatters between Dante’s legs, and he shudders when he remembers the way Vergil came all over his crotch, his own cock peeking through the gap, as if Dante was ejaculating over himself in an uncontained, cummy mess.

Dante musters up the energy to swipe a bit of the cum off, dipping into it where there’s a huge glob laying there above his clit that has yet to moisturize his skin. He brings it up to his nose and sniffs it. It smells pleasant. He licks it off. It tastes pleasant too. Tastier than what Dante imagined cum to taste like. But that might just be Vergil’s diet.

His hand flops back to his side again. When his head finally floats down from the heavens and Dante regains his sense of touch, the sticky sensation eggs him to touch it. Dante dips his finger into another glob of cum like a child dancing in puddles. He shivers when he remembers how Vergil felt rubbing up on him. Not enough, always too far from enough. Dante was excessively greedy, but now, he really felt like he was owed this one pleasure.

If he can’t get Vergil’s dick, he might as well get the next best thing.

Before he can decide on putting his fingers inside, the door opens and Dante stops in his tracks like a deer in headlights. His older brother casts a long, daunting shadow down the bedroom. Vergil scowls.

“You messy child. Do you need me to wipe you down too?” he asks, but Dante can tell he doesn’t want an answer. He sits by the side of the bed and grabs the hand-towel. He wipes down Dante’s face and chest, wicking away his sweat first, before he rubs down his crotch and legs. Dante whimpers. Then Vergil twists him to the side, careful not to push down on the bruise he left there.

“Lift your leg up.”

Dante obeys, and Vergil swabs his pussy. Dante moans. It’s still throbbing and sensitive down there, but Vergil takes the towel away before he can get close to another orgasm again.

“I ran a bath,” Vergil says, after a pause. He looks away and folds the wet side of the towel in on itself. “You should wash up while it’s still hot.”

Again, Dante’s caught between feeling like a baby and a lover.

He tugs Vergil’s arm.

“Hm?” Vergil says, but he doesn’t turn to look at Dante. Not even from the side. It’s like he’s embarrassed. Or ashamed. Like a dog who’s just been found wrecking a scene around the house. Dante doesn’t even feel like laughing at how miserable Vergil looks.

“Vergil,” Dante mumbles.

“What do you want, Dante?” Vergil asks pointedly. “Use your words.”

“I want you to…” Dante blushes, but no one could say he wasn’t brave. Headstrong. “I really want you to fuck me.”

Vergil doesn’t even chide him for his language, which is a sign of end times. His shoulders slump, and Dante feels his own heart tearing apart just from that small, resigned movement.

“I won’t,” Vergil says quietly. This time, it does feel definitive. For as much as Dante presses Vergil’s buttons, he’s not dumb enough to try for the big red button in the glass cage. Especially when that button belongs to his older brother.

Vergil peels Dante’s hand off his arm and squeezes it, almost imperceptibly, before he drops it and leaves Dante in his bedroom, alone.

Chapter 2

“Dante. Earth to Dante.”

Dante blinks.

“Dante!”

“Yeah–yeah, what?!” he asks, a bit too snappy than usual. Trish blinks and backs off a bit. Even Lady looks alarmed.

“What crawled into your ass and died?” Trish asks, but there’s no discernible malice to her voice. 

“Nothing,” Dante scowls, though he directs his mean-spirited gaze through the window instead of at his friends. They don’t deserve that.

“You can’t just haul us out of our busy schedules and clam up,” Trish says. “Did something happen with Vergil?”

Without missing a beat, Lady sighs. “I told you, Dante. You should focus on yourself before you try to get your brother laid. Which I feel I should let you know again, is an impossible feat.”

Dante, as gracefully as he can, hides his blush with a bow of his head and the curtain of his bangs. He doesn’t say how close he got to killing two birds with one stone.

But Trish’s response is more unwelcome, in the form of prying. “What did he do?” she asks, leaning in, keen. Dante should have never let her into the loop.

What did Vergil do, exactly? Nothing, really, nothing unwarranted. All he did was pin Dante down and fuck his thighs like he was trying to lose his virginity to them. “He was just mad at me for trying to set him up again.”

Lady tuts. “See? You’re too nice for him.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve learnt my lesson, ladies,” Dante grumbles. “Don’t mess with big bad Vergil.”

“You’re finally catching on to what everyone else sees in him. Don’t even bother with someone like that.”

Lady was wrong, but Dante didn’t want to correct her. It’s not like Vergil made known his own charms to anyone else. Only their parents and Dante were witness to his doting, brooding nature, hidden between thorns that pricked anyone that didn’t know how to handle him with the right care. Dante had already been pricked so much that his skin was spotted with those scars, but he was unrelenting to a fault.

Which placed him right in his current predicament.

It had been difficult for Dante to fall asleep that night, but the glasses of wine he enjoyed so late at night had coaxed him into a brief nap in the hot bath that Vergil prepared for him. Only when the water started to cool, and it took a while since it was hot enough to scald any normal human, did Dante wake up still in the dim light from the bathroom counter. When he had slinked out of the water to see if Vergil was still in bed, wanting to crawl in next to him like he used to whenever his brother stayed over at the manor, Vergil was gone from the apartment completely. His office was empty, even though he tended to turn to work as a form of stress-relief, even when work was the source of his stress. Yamato was gone from its mount, and Vergil never let it lounge carelessly elsewhere, so he must have taken it to leave. Dante didn’t know where to even look for Vergil, and he didn’t have a key to come back with. Vergil would kill him if Dante left the door unlocked.

So he stayed put at Vergil’s home, like a pathetic little puppy, sleeping on the couch with his feet dangling off the side because it was far too short to fit his good height. But the front door was right by the living room, and Dante couldn’t risk not seeing Vergil when he came back.

When Vergil did, it was in the morning when the sun broke, before six, when he usually woke up to start the day. Dante caught him, coming back through the front door, as silently and humbly as he usually did, propping his coat on the hanger and slipping his boots off. Vergil all but gave him a brief look that made Dante feel like he wasn’t even there, just another part to his already minimalist furniture, like a flower arrangement that was on the verge of wilting and needed replacing, before he retreated upstairs to his own room. Dante refused to leave, just on principle, and when Vergil came back out to make breakfast they shared their food in cicada-dotted silence. Even with all that unsaid between them, Vergil still took out a blender to a cup of nonfat milk and an equal ratio of strawberries for Dante’s breakfast.

Geez. Vergil couldn’t possibly use his words, for how intimate his letters were. Not when his words really mattered, when he had to speak to Dante face-to-face. But as much as Dante blamed his brother, it’s not like his own throat didn’t close up when he thought about asking what happens next. And just like that, when Dante saw himself leave Vergil’s apartment like he usually did, this time he did not feel the same promise of return that he would any other day that summer.

That morning was the last time he had seen Vergil in a week. Vergil didn’t text him, but he rarely did, and Dante was content never to come back. For once in his life, he feared Vergil, but not because of what he did–no, they were equal participants in that crime.

Dante couldn’t stand rejection. So he did something better. Pre-emptive. Maybe nuclear. Vergil wouldn’t have the opportunity to turn him down if they never had to see each other again (though Dante still bitterly checked his phone every waking moment of every day to see if he’d texted.)

He was witty, street-smart (at least that’s what Mom had told him,) a perpetual motion machine of fun. He’d find a way to make use of the rest of his gap year and the rest of his life, with or without Vergil.

 

 

 

There was nothing to do. Dante’s boredom was heightened by the sudden soberness of his brother, his parents, and his friends from his life. Summer was awful, Dante decided. It wasn’t fun at all, especially when there was no one to spend it with. And the only person who indulged him, Dante had so expertly repulsed with his annoying behavior.

In his bed, Dante lays sprawled out, one foot dangling off the end as it bounces to the beat of his ear-blasting music. It probably blares through his headphones. If Vergil was here, he’d tell him to turn it down before it exploded Dante’s eardrums.

Ugh. Even with a thick, delicious bassline between his ears, his mind always wanders back to Vergil. Not that Dante could help it; his brother had already burned the silhouette of his cock against Dante’s crotch. It felt impossible to scrub away.

Who taught Vergil how to do all of that, anyway? It was totally unnecessary. Not just how expertly it felt against Dante (though he supposes he doesn’t have other experiences to compare it to in the first place,) but the foreplay, the dirty talk, the courting–and it was definitely courting, now that Dante really thought about it. It was only hidden under the pretense of brotherhood, but Dante didn’t think older brothers took their little brothers out for flower-arranging classes and candlelit dinners where they served miniscule portions of foreign foods. Not that Dante had a frame of reference for that either.

Maybe that’s why he let it happen for so long. Those boundaries didn’t exist for them both, in part due to their mixed ancestry that muddied the waters of what a normal family should look like. Dante and Vergil were both spoiled, not just with riches but with attention and tutelage that Dante later found out seemed to be a rare phenomenon, when he bore witness to Trish and Lady’s dysfunctional parents.

It wasn’t fair. Vergil told him he was a virgin. There’s no way a virgin could have done…could have said all of that. The desperation in Vergil’s hands, the shaking, powerful grip on Dante’s hips like a child with a toy was the only proof of Vergil’s intact virginity.

Dante cups his crotch over his pants. His hand is warm, but far from the same heat that Vergil’s dick had rubbed his cunt into a frenzy over. Like many times before in the past week, Dante starts to stroke at his cunt, warming himself up. It was no real substitute, once he tasted real meat.

Vergil fucked his thighs so powerfully, with so much vigor. Dante knew Vergil kept a physique for his own benefit, but only when he had felt the sculpture of his torso and thighs against his own back did Dante realize the years of effort put to his body with not a step of the way missed. Figures, that like everything Vergil did, he put all his focus into like it demanded his attention.

Dante’s hand isn’t enough. He feels feverish, like he has to take off all his clothes and douse himself in a pool of cold, refreshing water. He gets his pants and boxers shucked off entirely, and just about pulls his shirt up to his neck before he gives up, not wanting to lift his back off the bed to take it off. He rubs the side of his palm into his slit roughly, grunting when the friction tugs at his clit. He goes straight for the good spot inside him, dipping two fingers in and fucking them in and out. Before, Dante had fingered himself with almost a juvenile curiosity, opening himself up like a new discovery on his body made every day. After Vergil, it seems like he was always waiting to be fucked, and his pussy was prepared for it too, wet and sticky and drooling like a sweaty puppy.

His nape feels hot, suffocatingly so with the shirt bunched around his shoulders and neck. Dante can almost make it out like Vergil’s breathing on him like he was that night, leaving the phantom of his arousal on Dante’s skin. Maybe he can hear Vergil speak, finally, through the unspoken words in his panting and heavy breathing. Maybe he’ll hear Vergil calling for him, Dante, little brother–

“Little brat,” Dante manages to hear from the howling and frantic drumline in his ears, just a faint whisper. He gasps, and fucks his cunt harder. Fuck. So much for wanting Vergil to see him like a man. All that ambition’s thrown out of the window. Dante wants Vergil to put his knee on his back, or a foot on his head, pinning him down as he thrusts into him like a toy. Holding Dante with as much strength as he needs to subdue him, which Dante knows won’t be a lot with how much power thrums in his blood. Dante wouldn’t even resist. He’d let himself be thrown over Vergil’s cock like the fleshlight that he bequeathed his brother, floppy and defeated.

“Vergil,” Dante cries, biting his lip roughly right after. It’s too loud in his room, now that he’s tossed his headphones off. There’s still the faint sound of rock music from those blaring speakers, and he has half a mind to throw them at the wall with his pussy-slicked hands. It feels too much like an admission of something, uttered when it should be left secret six-feet under.

Dante lets his pussy do the talking and his mind wanders. Vergil showed himself to be that uncontrollable in bed, rutting like a dog. But he was still in his right (well, that’s to be debated) mind not to fuck Dante, forbidding either of them to bridge that gap between brothers. Even though Dante can still feel the head of Vergil’s penis pop in him, it really didn’t count. It didn’t count unless Vergil was fucking the deepest part of him, trying to get past his cervix like biology and logic didn’t matter, not until Vergil came inside and gave both of them the life-changing possibility of a baby, something that Dante didn’t and never wanted, but at least there would be something tangible to fuck up the status quo of a brother-brother relationship that they had maintained for so long. Then, Vergil wouldn’t be able to ignore how he had twisted Dante into a knot, wrinkled him so much that once unfolded, he would never be returned to the same boy he used to be.

Dante grunts as his other hand comes around to touching himself, first his clit, to get both hands on base as he works himself towards an inevitable orgasm. But at some point it’s too much for his cunt to handle, and his hand comes up to rub at his abs and his chest, over a slightly sensitive nipple, then around his mouth, tracing his lips with the pads of his fingertips.

How would Vergil fuck if he wasn’t angry? He was so pleasant that evening, wine slipping through the cracks of his grumpy veneer. The perfect gentleman. Dante could certainly take some pointers, he could hear Trish say in his mind, but now he wanted to keep even that a secret despite the fact that he hardly kept secrets from his girlfriends. He wanted to keep to himself the way that Vergil had walked him to the restaurant, keeping Dante to his side with just a few fingers on the small of his back.

Dante’s fingers come to a slow crawl on his lips, touching where Vergil hadn’t. If Vergil were given the responsibility of his first kiss, he would take it with the utmost sincerity. Treating it like an arduous task, like a weight on his back he would drag up the mountain. If it weren’t for Dante and the foot that was constantly finding itself stuffed in his mouth, they really might have fucked, for real, instead of the mimicry of sex that Dante got, a slow, tender lovemaking that had to come after a hearty meal and wine that both served as aphrodisiacs to their unspoken attraction. Vergil didn’t seem the type to ravage anyone, nor did he see the need to at all, so he would take Dante apart like he was trying to deconstruct him to his most primal and base elements, the parts of him that only knew how to feel pleasure.

Regret isn’t enough to douse Dante’s reality in cold water. He comes around his fingers, not unlike the past several nights he’s spent, alone at the manor.

“Shit,” Dante mumbles to the void. He really needs to get laid.

 

 

 

Fifteen days was enough. Dante might as well just bite the bullet. He was going to see Vergil sooner or later, definitely whenever their parents were coming home. It was the perfect excuse for his weakening resolve.

“Vergil!”

Dante catches Vergil briefly stiffen, before he resumes walking down the same path that he was taking. Counter-clockwise around the park, as always, and he never went clockwise until Dante urged him to, claiming boredom. So it was easy to figure out where he might find Vergil, but catching up to his broad stride was a different story.

“Hey, don’t walk on by without me,” Dante says, panting, clutching Vergil’s sleeve around the elbow. “Man, you move fast.”

“What is it, Dante?” Vergil says. “You didn’t tell me you were coming over today.”

Dante had been by so often until that night, he had stopped seeing the need to even inform Vergil. Vergil had hardly turned him down at his door. The assurance that he’d always welcome Dante at his home drops like an anchor in the pit of Dante’s stomach.

“You said I could come any time I wanted,” Dante replies weakly. Vergil looks at him from the side.

“That I did,” he eventually concedes, though he continues to walk down the path around the park, before turning in the direction of his home. Dante keeps up a light jog by his side, refusing to give up now that Vergil’s invitation technically hasn’t been rescinded.

The way back is silent and awkward. None of Vergil’s prying questions about Dante’s lack of doing, and none of Dante’s own prying about Vergil’s love life. Now both of their hands are free of their respective burdens, washed clean by…

Dante gnaws on his cheek when he thinks about Vergil up against him and breathing in his ear. He slaps his face red before catching up to Vergil’s resolute figure.

Part of him wishes Vergil would go back to the way he used to be, fretful and nagging. He clearly wanted to put what happened behind them both, but he wasn’t doing a very good job of stepping past it. Instead he just clammed up and was more off-putting than Dante thought was even possible, barely a person at this point, but a workaholic automaton. When they arrived at his apartment, Vergil didn’t even ask Dante to take his shoes off, heading straight for the bathroom for a light rinse before he came out with his hair down. With his bare face that Dante wasn’t sure was due to being naturally hairless or being meticulously clean-shaven, Vergil looked too much like Dante in that moment. His hair was still wet, but dried enough with a towel for it to not splatter on his work when he picked up a book from atop a few stray documents–the most he’d let pile up on his table until it went into a very organized set of drawers.

“Whas’dat? Work?” Dante asks.

“Not at all,” Vergil replies, flipping the cover to face Dante so he can read the title. The Stranger. Nothing Dante’s ever heard of before, not even when he scoured through the bookshelves of Vergil’s childhood bedroom. “I have nothing to do for the rest of the evening, so I’m picking up where I left off.”

Dante’s lip wobbles. Vergil’s a terrible host. Even with Dante right there as his patient guest, he always ends up holed into his own hobbies. Hell, he’ll even go for flower arranging right now, if only to have Vergil tell him off again. Though this only really had been a recent development since…

Dante frowns. He was trying to rectify his mistake, and he had to bear the hard times to come out clean again. He couldn’t give up so easily on Vergil. His dating life, he could, but not Vergil himself.

“Why did you become an editor?” Dante asks.

Vergil, even though his expression remains poised as always, tells Dante everything he needs to know from the silence as he draws up a correct answer.

“Did I need a reason to become one?” Vergil answers, coming off more defensive than Dante expects.

Dante shrugs. Not really. That’s like asking Dante why he does anything or doesn’t do anything. Why he found it so compelling to try to set Vergil up.

But Vergil is different. He has a rhyme and reason, never-rarely ruled by impulse or irrationality.

“No. I just wanted to know. So I can figure out what I wanna do in the future.”

He can see Vergil sit up a little straighter if he could from his perfect posture, clearly interested in the topic even though his eyes dart back instinctively to his book.

“It was something I took to during my second year in boarding school. It was enjoyable enough that it became a serious enough prospect as a career.”

“Why not writing?” Dante asks. “You could’ve been a famous writer. I mean, you already have the lifestyle of one. Eccentric, lonely,” Dante teases, and Vergil shoots him a blistering glare. “Or are you more into correcting people’s mistakes?”

“It’s an antiquated stereotype that every editor is a failed attempt at an author,” Vergil sneers. “And many of us happen to be writers. I write in my free time.”

“You do? Can I see?”

Vergil cocks his head. “I’ve written you so many letters throughout your childhood and adolescence. You’ve already seen my writing.”

Dante blushes when he thinks about Vergil’s letters to him. “Letters don’t count! That’s not–that’s obviously not what I meant,” he says, even when Vergil looks like he might laugh at his fumble. “Haven’t you written a novel?”

“Nothing that you might find interesting or sordid enough to match your tastes, Dante, supposing you read at all,” Vergil answers. Dante guesses that insult isn’t undeserved. At last Vergil is fighting back. He takes out a thin book from the small collection of paperbacks on his desk in the very corner. “But I mainly write poetry. Here, if you’re so curious.”

There’s no cover to judge from besides the title Vacant Hall and Vergil’s name underneath it, but Dante still finds a way to (though he keeps his thoughts to himself.) When Dante opens it up, the words immediately start to glaze over and turn to mush.

His eyes dart back up at Vergil, who looks… a bit expectant. Dante closes the book, and now there’s something in the shape of disappointment.

“I’ll read it later,” Dante says. He promises.

“Of course,” Vergil replies, and Dante’s sure there’s not one inch of faith in his voice.

 

 

 

Monotony is hell. Vergil might be content to stay indoors like a house cat, but Dante isn’t. If he was a cat, he’d be scratching at the door for escape in minutes. But seeing as though Vergil’s not going to take him out any time in the foreseeable future, Dante’s hand is forced.

He’ll take Vergil fighting. That’s decidedly unromantic, isn’t it? Just two men who long for the heat of battle over the heat of fucking, in a public space so that the threat of witness will deter either of them (mostly Vergil) from making a move. Their blades seeking to cross rather than rut, determined to climatically end each other–

Okay, he’s not proving his point.

He half expects Vergil to turn him down, seeing the downward trend that their relationship is spiraling towards. But to his surprise, Vergil says yes.

“Pick the place,” Vergil says, a hand already trained on Yamato’s handle.

Neither of them (and especially their parents) would have appreciated the amount of collateral damage Dante would definitely inflict to anything within a twenty-foot radius. Even Vergil, who was so conservative with everything else that he did, fell into the seductive dance of battle so easily that he could lose himself as much as Dante did. Dante remembers, from all the times he had to sit out to let the big boys play and watch his big brother and father spar, swords clashing like an asteroid against a planet.

Dante takes Vergil to a skatepark that he knows is abandoned, on the outskirts of town when he used to go with Lady until a demon busted the smooth concrete to bits and the city’s lousy government never got around fixing the infrastructure. Not worth it just to please a few kids skipping school, Dante thinks bitterly. But where the skate park had fractured, a landscape for brawling and dueling was born for Dante and his friends to prowl, the only people who’d want to step foot there still. And now Vergil was privy to this private spot that Dante had with his girls. He wonders if they’d consider this an act of ultimate betrayal.

Vergil raises an eyebrow when he takes in their surroundings. It’s certainly a far cry from what he would take Dante out to. He brings Dante out to flower arranging classes and expensive restaurants (regardless of who invited whom, it was always on Vergil’s dime.) Dante takes Vergil out to abandoned concrete jungles infested with weeds and mosquitos.

“Ready for me?” Dante goads.

“I should be asking you that, brother,” Vergil retorts, but even at a distance Dante can see his smile. “You have far overblown your confidence against my capabilities.”

“Hey, we haven’t fought in…” Dante makes a big show of counting on his fingers, “...like seven years? You’re not taking on a kid anymore.”

The look on Vergil’s face expresses his disbelief and amusement. Dante’s hand itches for Rebellion, and knowing that Vergil always lets him make the first move, shoots across the jagged concrete for his brother, who blocks the attack with barely a flick of the wrist, his posture casual and lazy.

The fight is a slaughter. For Dante. Almost immediately he’s defeated, when he tried to draw out Luce and Ombra against Vergil as a distraction. He’s learnt his lesson; he’ll stick to his sword. Vergil all but slapped him with Yamato’s blade against his hip, sending Dante sprawling on his side.

“First one’s always a warm-up,” Dante protests, even though Vergil hasn’t said a thing.

“Of course.”

“Best two out of three?” Dante suggests meekly. Vergil says nothing but extends a hand for Dante to lift himself off his feet.

“If you insist.”

So much for Vergil pretending that fighting is a chore, when his movements only seem to become quicker and more graceful with time, barely a human or a demon, but a shooting star. He barely breaks a sweat, even in Red Grave’s humid summer, when Dante feels like he’s about to drip through his clothes even though he’s in his more casual wear.

Two fights turn to three, then four, then two hours later, the score is sixteen to zero. But Dante’s not a giver-upper. In his gut, he feels on the precipice of something great. And Vergil is the one drawing out that sensation in him, the more Vergil sheds the dust of his combat skills. It drags Dante out of the water, forcing him to come onto land to evolve.

Vergil’s attacks seem to be going slower, but Dante knows that to be untrue. Only in his vision is Vergil’s movement slowing, as Dante’s keen eye catches up to each trained parry, each dodge, that’s followed up by a strike meant to send Dante flying. Despite what he and many others thought, Vergil did make mistakes. They just happened to be so imperceptible due to his stoic demeanor.

A twitch of his strong brow, an inhale, a pursed lip, all of those things have come to mean something to Dante to understand a man whose demeanor seems to relay no weaknesses or feeling. And when Dante takes advantage of one of those little Vergil clues, he soon finds himself straddled across Vergil’s slim waist, taking both of them by surprise, Yamato against Rebellion where Rebellion’s blade nears dangerously to Vergil’s neck.

“Holy crap!” I can’t believe I won, Dante almost says, but for once in his life he shuts up before he embarrasses himself. “I beat your ass!”

What should Dante reap for his rewards? Vergil appears disgruntled, his lips downturned, and Dante wants to kiss him. It would be Vergil’s first kiss too, wouldn’t it? Unless he was macking on chicks without going the full home-run.

“It was one win against sixteen,” Vergil says, interrupting the fantasy, and that alone is a grave admission of how butthurt he is.

“One win against thousands,” Dante emphasizes. “I’m counting every time we fought ever.”

Vergil scoffs. “Dante, you couldn’t have beaten me as a child. But you were able to best me today, and for that, you performed better than I hoped.”

Dante takes Rebellion off Vergil’s chest, and he realizes his hands are still shaking. He drops his sword by Vergil’s side, bracing himself around Vergil’s body. Dante has his brother right where he wants him.

He laughs, high-pitched, giddy. “What happened, Vergil? Age finally get to you?”

Vergil eyes him coolly from the ground, even with a chunk of destroyed ground propping up his head uncomfortably.

“Despite my seniority, I am still physically capable of taking you down a peg or two.”

“Hey! I just bested you in a sport you had twenty years ahead on me! I think you’re gonna need to start using Yamato more for fighting than using her to take you around like a more efficient subway.”

“You are mistaken. I use Yamato quite frequently in combat.”

Dante scoffs. “With who?” No one else in the world could match Vergil’s strength, and fighting demonspawn could not sharpen his skills like a water stone. There was no fitting opponent for his older brother.

“I still spar with Father,” Vergil says. “We go further north, into the woods where it’s still his land until it reaches Red Grave National Park. There’s a large field there where we meet every fortnight.”

“Oh,” Dante says. “I didn’t know that.” He feels embarrassed, all of a sudden. So was he the only one that Vergil was avoiding? Mom and Dad didn’t talk about him too much than what he was used to, but hearing this all from Vergil, not as a confession, but as a matter of fact, is so much more devastating. “What… um, why’d you stop coming over?”

Vergil sighs. “You were–you are a growing boy, Dante. I understand that at this pivotal moment in your life, you wouldn’t want to be around your family as much. Certainly not me. I know our lifestyles are distinctly unlike each others’.”

“I-I guess,” Dante mumbles. “But it’s not like I asked you to stop coming around the house and playing with me.”

Vergil stays silent for a moment. Even Dante knows what he says isn’t entirely true. Though he doesn’t remember telling Vergil outright, Dante’s actions certainly haven’t made it seem like he was welcoming Vergil’s too-strict hand. He was so eager to break out of that mold, and since their parents never encouraged him to be anything other than himself, Dante at one point in his life might have thought to stray as far from Vergil as he could.

“I see.”

“Yeah…”

“I suppose I misunderstood your intention, then,” Vergil says, but there’s no suggestion that Vergil wants to rectify the time that they’ve lost together.

What can Dante even say? He’ll beg for another match, another game, but begging Vergil to come back home is an entirely different thing, and it’s not like he could fix the hole in Dante’s childhood–that was all done. Vergil could come back like Dante was thirteen again and it still wouldn’t fill up that abyss that had grown and hungered for years.

Forget it–even Vergil knew that the time for fighting was over, and without any pretense, they head back in silence.

 

 

 

Unknown Contact
Is this vergil?

Dante sits up, attention fully committed. This is the most interesting development of his day. Though if he was his brother, he’d be annoyed by the lack of care given to the proper capitalization of his name.

Dante
whos this?

Unknown Contact
Sorry for the late reply! I just got back from a trip, are you still interested in meeting up any time soon?

Dante curses under his breath. It had been weeks since he’d last gone online to match or message new people, but it wasn’t enough to catch the stragglers that he had sent his number so liberally to before he had stopped for good.

“Nope,” he says firmly. It’s enough time for Dante to be sitting on Vergil’s account for him to have made a decision. His finger moves over the block button, but he stops himself before he can deal the finishing blow.

He doesn’t ghost women. He has manners.

Dante
Hey my bad lady I was trying to set my virgin brother up and he kept turning down every woman I sent his way so he’ll probably reject you too sorry for leading you on. bye

Then he blocks her number. Honestly, Dante should have been a bit more conscientious of handing his phone number out like candy.

He goes to delete Vergil’s account, ignoring all the piled-up notifications in the messaging channel of the app. Dante doesn’t even want to give it the pomp and circumstance that he feels like his and Trish’s efforts have culminated towards. He still has the pictures in his photo album, the memories in his mind, the sensations on his body.

When all is said and done, Dante looks at his screen, turning it off and on again. He’s bored once more. Vergil’s actually busy today, with the clear warning that he won’t be home until tomorrow evening. Trish won’t be free until tonight, either, her schedule more reliable and ingrained into Dante’s usually inconsiderate memory. And Lady, for the duration of the summer, is always out of the question.

Dante sniffles and buries his face in his pillow. Being the fun one was a curse. But when he goes to delete the app itself, a revelation comes to him like an angel in his crocodile tears.

You should focus on yourself, Lady’s voice echoes.

Now that there wasn’t an account associated with his phone, Dante tries to make one for himself. He winces when an error pops up that says he’s barred from making an account right after deleting his last one.

No matter. Plenty of fish in the sea, and that’s not just a saying that applies to chicks. Another dating app will do, even if it might not be on par to the previous platform. But Vergil isn’t here, his parents aren’t here, and Dante is eighteen and an adult and he can do what he wants.

He takes a lazy picture of himself in bed, his messy hair fanning over his cheek and pulling his shirt down low to show off his collarbone and the top of a pec. Casual, lowkey, chill, unlike Vergil’s pictures. If Trish saw Dante now, she would for sure be insulted at the state of his profile. But all Dante needs is a quick chat, maybe a quick fuck. He was never one to make fanfare out of losing his virginity, and being so close to losing it once made its bitter loss all the more sour.

He loses no time in swiping right, going through girl after boy after girl until his finger and his screen is a blur. He’ll vet them later. He just needs someone to talk to now.

Five minutes later, he gets a ding on his phone.

He shoots up on his bed. In the tiny icon in his messages, he can already see long, bright red hair and tan skin. A great start. Dante opens up her text.

Lucia
What are you looking for here xx

Dante
Something casual? But not casual like that haha I mean chill. Someone to hang out with, mostly
And if that becomes something more I don’t mind either

hbu?

Lucia
Truth or dare xx

Dante blinks. Weird change in tone, but he’ll go with a little playful fun.

Dante
dare, I guess. Im a bit of a daredevil myself haha

Lucia
Do you want to share nudes? I’ll send you pictures of my brests and pussy. Message me at redgravehotties.net/sexxylucia and we can swap pics there xx

Dante groans. Forget it. He’ll just sleep today away.

 

 

 

Though Red Grave does see its fair share of low-level demonic activity, it actually rarely comes to their doorstep. Dad had done a remarkable job in disguising himself amongst humans, and while Vergil nor Dante surrendered their own heritage like he did, no one came around sniffing in that unprecedented era of peace. The most that the city saw were stragglers. On the more harmless end, on par with a teenage shoplifter, and on the other end of the spectrum, equivalent to a crazed gunman–but nothing world-destroying. Though their father was the main reason for this order, Vergil had his fair share cleaning up with him in a secretive family effort. This was all before Dante was even born, and by the time he could talk or walk, Vergil had already cemented himself as this platinum-gilded statue that was impossible to walk past or ignore.

While Vergil showed his claws when he trained Dante, in actuality, Dante rarely saw his brother attack or kill. It had only occurred a couple times, when Dante was still a child. Even though the more inconsequential of his childhood memories went and gone, Dante could never forget the way that Vergil carved through the trespassers that went past the manor’s main gate. That day, it was only him and Dante as he babysat in their parents’ absence. He did not even allow them to come up to the doorstep, and all that was left of the attempted intruders was an artistic splatter of multi-colored blood that rained on the freshly mowed lawn that Vergil washed away with the garden hose.

That was probably the coolest thing that Dante ever saw up until he went on the Internet and saw boobs for the first time.

In all seriousness, growing up served him a harsh reality of Vergil’s life. He had all this power, and he thought best to employ his skills in the art of words? Dante was scared shitless enough to retract his desire to be an adult. If that’s what being a grown-up entailed, he wanted no part in it. He didn’t want his edges to be whittled down, his love for violence paved over into something clean and tidy. That’s probably why he deigned not to have a plan for his life. Look how well that went for Vergil.

At least their relationship is smoothed out now, as much as Vergil’s rocky demeanor will allow. They’re back to being attached at the hip, or, in other words, Dante is allowed freedom to orbit Vergil like a moon. But sometimes Vergil is nice enough to take Dante where he wants to go instead of himself. As they exit a diner with their drinks to go, a piercing shriek makes Dante jump and throw his milkshake into the air.

“The hell?!”

Behind them, a couple quivers under the shadow of a massive pest, its bulbous head swaying around like it can’t even keep balance with the weight of its crown. It’s not even a particularly shocking sight, but Dante knows they tend to breed and multiply this time of the year.

Without even thinking, he launches across the block and pummels the bug with his bare fists where it looks the most fun to hit: on its pulpy, glowing head. The gratification is instant when blood explodes from every vulnerable spot on its body, and it doesn’t taper off until Dante is more than fifty blows in.

When everything around him becomes clear again, he looks up at the people he’s just saved. They are completely unrecognizable as humans. Black sludge coats them from head to toe.

“Heh,” Dante says. “You’re welcome.” The couple stare at him, agape. The woman throws her iced frappuccino in his face, ice cubes and paper straw included, and they run away.

“Blegh. So much for being a good Samaritan,” he mutters, wiping the gunk out of his eyes.

“Well, thank you for defending my honor and hygiene,” Vergil says as he catches up to Dante in his lazy stride. “Such a beast, if left alone, would have put us in grave danger.”

“Shut up,” Dante grumbles. “It’s not my fault you and Dad got rid of all the ones that could fight back.”

“We ran you out of a potential career, didn’t we?”

“Pretty much,” Dante says. Once he flicks off the grime on his face, Vergil hands his milkshake back to him. Dante didn’t even know he had caught it in the first place.

“They didn’t even say thank you! Did you see how they looked at me?” Dante complains, wiping his hair off with a towel. Vergil had shoved him into the portal that led right into his shower, not even letting Dante step one dirty foot onto his apartment floor. Vergil hums noncommittally.

“It’s a thankless job,” he agrees, but he doesn’t sound as frustrated as Dante would have hoped.

“Should’ve let the bug eat them whole,” Dante says. “They’d be begging for my help through its guts.”

“I didn’t know your reason for fighting was to please others,” Vergil says.

“It’s not! …But it wouldn’t hurt to feel appreciated once in a while.”

Vergil turns to him on his swirly chair, and his staredown through his reading glasses is magnified by the lens. Dante feels the urge to scurry into a dark corner.

“Does it matter? You like to brawl and you’re good at it. That’s more than what most could ask for.”

Somehow, the admission of Dante’s skill makes him feel more exposed, naked to his eye. It’s not the first time that Vergil’s administered his scarce praise. Even drowned and doused in sarcasm, there’s a belligerent truth to his own words, like he’s too afraid to make it known without a veneer protecting it.

Thank you for defending my honor and hygiene. Honor, Dante wasn’t sure. Vergil could take care of that himself. But no one could deny that Dante didn’t protect his brother’s fair skin and glossy hair and trim coat from the horrors of battle.

 

 

 

Around two months since Dante finished high school and started fucking around full-time, his parents returned from their vacation. Dante had just gotten home that day, after being at Vergil’s, and once he saw his parents’ car drive up to the front yard he gave a holler and ran downstairs as fast as he could.

They had come back with souvenirs and suntans in tow. For Dad, it was more like a burning than a tan, covered in a rash of red skin. It was sure to be gone tomorrow, but he still looked funny. Vergil would have looked about the same, considering he took after their dad’s complexion more than their mom’s, ghostly pale, haunting since he didn’t inherit Dad’s goofy, infectious smile. Dad winced when Dante hugged him, as if Dante or anyone could really do him any physical harm. Mom looked as lovely as always, and she had surprisingly gotten her hair cut short for the first time since, well, ever. It came up to her shoulders, and it fitted her very nicely, the kind of haircut that women tended to get when they approached a certain age. Foregoing that youthful length, her short bob suited her more.

“I hope you weren’t too bored with us gone, sweetie,” Mom says, tiptoeing to kiss his cheek.

“I can entertain myself just fine without you guys, thanks,” he says, picking up Mom’s two suitcases in each hand. Though really, he only substituted his parents’ absence with another relative.

She smiles mysteriously. “I’m sure you did,” she says. “Vergil says you’ve been around his a bunch.”

Dante blushes. “Yeah, well, that’s what you told me to do, didn’t you?” he says a bit too defensively. He wants to quickly hurry inside, but Mom’s pace is too languid from retirement and vacation. “Gonna sleep the jetlag off?”

Mom laughs. “We’ve done enough sleeping. Want to get rid of us that quickly?”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“I know, I know. Sorry for riling you up,” she giggles. “We can order some pizza tonight. How does that sound?”

Immediately distracted by the promise of food, Dante perks up. “Can Vergil come?”

Mom raises an eyebrow. “Of course, I’ll just let him know,” she says, fishing for her phone in her purse.

Dante’s already texting away. “Don’t worry, I got it.”

When he looks back up at her, she’s wearing a gentle smile. Dante can already tell what she’s thinking. Mom is so obvious. But it doesn’t stop him from being bashful enough to scrunch his face up and hide his own toothy grin.

His phone vibrates in his hand.

When do you want me over?

“Vergil’s asking when he can come over.”

Mom tilts her head to the side. “Why, he can visit his home any time he wants.”

“Oh, right, okay,” Dante says, blushing. He texts back.

Whenever you want

He almost expects Vergil to appear behind him in a heartbeat, give him a good shock. But Vergil comes an hour later, when the sun is prolonged in the summer sky and when Dante’s leg is already getting antsy with anticipation.

“Vergil!” Dante hears his mom’s distant shout, and a laugh before it’s cut off by a deep embrace. The masculine, steadied steps of his father, too, that briskly end with an exaggerated, sticky kiss on the cheek with Vergil’s scowl that follows, and Dante’s already beaming before he turns the corner and spots his brother from the balustrade.

“Dante,” Vergil says, nodding to him curtly, as if they haven’t seen each other in less than a day. Dante still grins, like he should the first time he saw Vergil in months. With a big, unyielding smile.

He runs down the stairs, having to veer to a halt before his family and almost teetering into them in the process. “That’s what took you so long, huh?” he says, clapping Vergil on the back, appraising him with a once-over. Trust Vergil not to come underdressed even to his childhood home. Dante pries the wine bottle from Vergil’s hands, holding it up to the afternoon sunlight that drips through the windows. “Fancy stuff,” Dante says, as if he knows anything about wine. But Vergil’s in on the joke, smiling as he shakes his head.

Mom pries the wine off Dante’s grubby little hands, and the men congregate to the back yard, where the only visible perimeter to where the yard ends is when trees take over into an ocean of forest. Even though their father wanted to live a normal, human life, he didn’t go so far as to give up being in the upper echelon of society. And Dante could hardly complain.

Dante tails them, not unhappily. Dad and Vergil are talking about something beyond his own interest, but he still follows them out into the yolky sun, basking in the heat that washes over his face, squinting at the sun.

Vergil has Yamato with him, which isn’t a surprise since that’s what he probably took to get here. But Dante’s ears perk up when the word “spar” is uttered, even though he’s not sure who said it first, and a huge smile blooms on his face.

“Who’s fighting? I want in!”

Dad shoots him a grin. “Are you so eager to take your old man on? I might be out of the game, but I think I still have a good thousand years of experience before you.”

“I beat Vergil a few weeks ago!” Dante says. The look Vergil gives him is scathing.

“Is that so?” Dad muses, turning to Vergil.

“One fight out of sixteen,” Vergil emphasizes.

“One fight out of thousands,” Dad corrects, and Dante mentally cheers. Exactly! “If you’re losing your touch, Vergil, maybe you should come over more often to sharpen your skills.”

“Perhaps,” Vergil says softly, looking at Dante. Like it all depends on him.

Mom comes out with a few glasses of the wine that Vergil brought, and for once, all four of the glasses are filled equally. No more little sips for Dante.

“I’ll get one of my swords, then,” Dad grunts, and while on his way back to the house, snatches a glass of wine and downs it in an instant. Mom slaps him on the shoulder but giggles like a schoolgirl.

Dad and Vergil fight first, to Dante’s dismay, even when he volunteers a three-way fight that only leaves their dad befuddled and Vergil irate. He’s antsy and leaning forward with his elbows against his knees when their fight goes on for too long, as they tend to be when they’re so evenly matched. Vergil proves Dad wrong. He’s not losing his touch. Not at all. Mom pats Dante’s back as she leans down in her own lawn chair, sipping on her wine.

To tell the truth, Dante’s irritation is not only due to his exclusion. Vergil had shrugged off his coat, leaving him only in his annoyingly impractical vest (why was it sleeveless and a turtleneck??) Every strike that Vergil made towards their father drew out the muscularity in his arm as he straightened it, and every parry caused it to flex and pop from his pale skin. And whenever he raised his arm, Dante could see Vergil’s armpit, where it was hairy despite his usually smooth and clean-shaven body and easy to gloss over as it blended with his pale complexion, one of the only places other than the top of his head that sprouted any hair.

The only other place being his groin, when Dante remembers how it rubbed up against his ass, his cunt. He bounces his leg more furiously when his pussy reacts fondly to the memory, trying to subtly bruise away the arousal there.

Half an hour later, and the only reason that Dad and Vergil stop fighting is in a dull moment where Mom yells “let Dante have his turn!” to which Dante flushes and shakes his hands in an attempt to get them to resume. Dad straightens up and makes his way towards them, Vergil only following behind looking mildly discontent with ending it there. But fights are of barely any importance to their father, so he must concede.

“Your turn. Who do you want to take on?” Dad asks. Dante sheepishly points at him, avoiding Vergil’s gaze. Hey, he hasn’t seen Dad in months. Vergil can sit out for a bit.

“You beat Vergil, huh? Show me what you’re made of, kiddo,” Dad says, pulling Dante to his feet. “I won’t go easy on you,” he teases, but Dante knows it to be false. Even if Dante doesn’t win, Dad always goes easy. He has no competitive spirit in him.

“Go Dante!” Mom cheers. “You can beat him!”

Dad turns to her, affronted. “Are you on his side? I’m your husband!”

“And he’s my baby!”

“I’ll be rooting for you, Father,” Vergil says with some mirth on his pale lips, and now it’s Dante’s turn to be affronted.

Dad strikes first, and Dante follows his movements like a dance. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Vergil watching him intently, as if to study and appraise his movements. He’s talking with Mom, but while she looks relaxed and content to aerate the wine in her hand, Vergil’s the opposite. Dante strains his ear to see if they’re talking about him, but it’s hard to do so when Dad’s sword is constantly invading his space.

“Boring you already?” Dad asks, and his sword cuts through Dante’s bangs, a few stray hairs floating into the wind. “Or would you much rather be duelling your brother?”

“No.” Dante stabs lamely at his father’s chest, which he easily parries.

“You have improved though, I’ll give you that. Perhaps we should have left you with Vergil more,” Dad says.

The idea of growing up under Vergil’s watchful eye makes Dante boil with want. He blocks a keen jab and returns a blow too close to Dad’s head.

Dad raises his eyebrow but he smiles, impressed.

He, of course, is unconquerable, but instead of beating Dante on his ass, wears him down through attrition. For a geriatric, he’s lost none of his edge, even if his relaxed and summery demeanor indicates otherwise. Dante is a sweaty mess when the sun drops below the horizon, and everyone can already tell that he’s lost before he drops Rebellion to the ground. And by that point, Mom and Vergil already went inside to cook and set the table. There was no one to impress.

Dinner as a family feels so right. Dante doesn’t remember the last time they’ve had dinner all together. It’s only when Dante has to catch their parents up on what they’ve been missing out on that he has to remember to keep his mouth shut when it came to that evening. Vergil, of course, smartly glosses over the details.

It’s strange to hear his account of their summer on his end. Dante was pleasant company. Dante has matured quite a bit from only a year ago. Dante has potential to be great, even if he hasn’t put his mind to anything yet. All these affirmations are said to their parents, and entirely new to Dante himself. Honestly, he’s surprised Vergil had anything nice to say about him at all, and maybe if he knew Vergil a little less he might have assumed that he was just sharing niceties with their parents for them not to worry about Dante when they had taken their much-needed vacation. But Vergil was never the one to mince words when he could, especially when it came to Dante.

It’s a bit too much, the faith in Vergil’s words, the praise wrapped within it. Dante chases it away with small sips of wine that he nurses in his mouth. He has to ration out the glass over the long stretch of dinner. Not enough to make him drunk. Not enough for a repeat of what happened last time.

Dinner is a leisurely event, and Dante scarfs down all his food before any of his family are halfway finished. No matter, he can do all the talking while his parents and brother catch up to him, and he has enough to say even when their plates have been cleaned. They flit to the lounge and their parents take to more wine to cure their jetlag. Dante notices that Vergil hasn’t drank much either. He had cleared his one glass before they had even started eating.

Mom and Dad don’t notice, but Dante is aware the moment that Vergil steps away. He gives him a head start, before he excuses himself a minute after, heading upstairs.

The room to Vergil’s door is ajar and the light shines through the dark hallway like a beacon. Dante sneaks up to it, even though it’s a meaningless feat. Vergil can sense his presence as much as Dante can him.

“I was wondering where you snuck off to,” Dante says. Vergil only acknowledges him with a small hum. “Miss being a kid?”

Vergil looks up, still away, but silent as he contemplates his answer. “I suppose most people do.”

His room looks just like something Dante might see at his apartment, except for the deep, reddish hue to the walls and the antiquated architecture. But it’s still organized with that same palate for interior design, even though Vergil had moved out when he was 21. Despite how his room has drawn him here, he doesn’t act like it’s his own, keeping a vigilant distance like a visitor in a museum. His things are all tidy, exactly how he left it, and there’s not much taken away for his own home besides a few empty chunks in the bookshelf where he moved his books out. Still, about half of his collection remain, and since Vergil hardly has any novels of a juvenile nature, Dante can’t make any sense of the collection Vergil chose to leave behind.

Vergil peers at the bookshelf.

“Did someone touch my books? This one’s out of place,” Vergil says, slipping out a paperback from between two others.

“Oops?” Dante says sheepishly. He must have put it back wrong.

Vergil looks at him from his periphery. “It’s organized alphabetically by author, not by title.”

Dante laughs nervously. “Gotcha. I’ll, uh, keep that in mind.”

“Did you find that book particularly interesting?” Vergil asks. If he’s unbothered that Dante went prying, he doesn’t make it obvious just yet. Dante dislikes that about him.

“Not really? I mean, I understood the words but I didn’t really get the themes and all that. I just wanted to know what you liked to read.”

“Oh.” The paperback lies in Vergil’s pinched grip for a moment before he slides it back, not in its rightful spot, but where he found it. Instead of looking around more, Vergil stares at Dante with newfound interest, forgetting the childhood he had come here to rediscover. Dante wants to wilt under his gaze, but he refuses to, not even when Vergil gets dangerously close.

“I think you grew taller these few months, Dante,” he murmurs.

“Hm?” Dante didn’t know Vergil was so acutely aware of something like that. Vergil’s never half-assed anything, not even the act of looking, which feels so burdensome like the weight of the sun.

Vergil steps closer, and pulls his hand up to measure the flat top of Dante’s head to his own. Dante suppresses a shiver when Vergil’s hand grazes his hair, drawing an invisible line towards his own forehead. It reaches just past Vergil’s hairline.

“Oh yeah. I guess I did,” Dante mutters.

Vergil smiles. “Not content at your height?”

They were both already plenty tall, past six feet in height. Far surpassing the physical expectations for what most ladies wanted in a man. For what it’s worth, Dante didn’t want to grow much taller. It was nice to share something more with Vergil besides their good looks and their birthdays.

“Maybe… I heard chicks like tall guys,” Dante says, and instantly regrets putting his foot in his mouth.

“Is that so,” Vergil replies. Dante cringes.

“Yeah, well, I mean… objectively?” he defends, sticking his foot further down his throat, almost gagging on it at this point. “Tall guys mean… better genetics, or whatever. Also apparently girls like to feel small and protected and stuff.”

Vergil doesn’t even nod or look to contemplate the words that Dante has said. He smooths down Dante’s hair. It tickles when he pulls on the roots just very slightly. Dante leans into his hand.

“You have exceptional genetics,” Vergil says.

Dante scoffs. “You’re only saying that because we got the same genes and I basically look like you when you were a teenager.”

“Is that so bad?” Vergil asks. “Do you want to look like someone else? More like Mother or more like Father, or another person entirely?”

Dante pauses. “No,” he admits.

Vergil’s lip purses, like he’s tasting Dante’s answer on the bed of his tongue. His expressions are so slight. The only moment he let them slip out from his lips was when he had Dante in the palm of his hand. He has Dante, now, only if he’d dare touch anything beyond the hair on his head.

In a moment of clarity, Dante realizes that everything he’s done, the pretense of setting Vergil up, annoying him at every corner of the way, was just so Vergil might give him a reaction.

Dante grabs Vergil’s shoulders and smothers him with a kiss. His first kiss.

At first, he thinks Vergil might just stand there like a statue, since he goes so still that not even it seems like he might toss him away, whether it be out of disgust or fear that their parents might catch them in the act. But after an insecure second, he clutches Dante and his arms snake under and around his back to take him in an inescapable embrace. Vergil leans too much into it and Dante has to strain backwards to meet his brother’s furious kiss, and Dante can’t laugh at how eager and virgin it is. Vergil’s fervor is overwhelming, physically and emotionally. It excites Dante too much. The reaction he gets is everything he wants.

He wrings his head to the side so he can breathe, and Vergil only nips down on his slender neck where it’s horribly ticklish. “Ver-Vergil,” Dante whimpers, hoarse.

“What? What is it?” Vergil croaks, before he nibbles down on Dante’s throat again. Knowing Vergil, he’ll bite down as hard as he can without leaving a mark that’ll last for ten seconds. Always so keenly aware of Dante’s body like it’s his own, knowing its limits, like when he sparred with Dante when he was a child. Knowing how to knock him on his ass but not cruelly, enough to instill a lesson in him for another day.

“What do you want from me?”

Too much, it’s so much, Dante wants to say, but he doesn’t even want to risk the possibility of Vergil backing off. He grabs onto Vergil’s back, scrabbling for a good hold on him, one that’ll never let go. Vergil leans into him so hard that Dante has to step back, one, two steps, before the edge of Vergil’s bed kicks into the pits of his knees and both of them go tumbling, onto that bed that Dante’s buried his face in more times than he can count.

A hand cups the back of Dante’s head in their fall, and Vergil slots his mouth with Dante again. Knees on either side, Dante feels small under Vergil again, like the first time. Small and protected. Dante feels dizzy when he connects the dots.

All thoughts that aren’t of Vergil are thrown to the air, but thankfully, thank fuck Vergil hasn’t lost all his senses either when he sweeps Dante back on his feet and pats him down like a cop, smoothing out his unbuttoned shirt. His own tousled hair goes uncared for, and Dante catches Mom round the corner to peek into Vergil’s bedroom.

“There you are, boys,” Mom says. Her eyes run down the gap between brothers, but it snags on no particular detail, not the hand around Dante’s waist, their kiss-swollen lips. “Taking a stroll down memory lane?”

“Something like that,” Vergil replies.

She mumbles incoherently to herself, peeking behind them to take a good look at Vergil’s room. Vergil’s hand stays firm, unforgiving against Dante’s back. “Your father and I are going to turn in a bit early, but you can always stay here if you want. Your room is always prepared for you,” Mom says.

Dante, wide-eyed, darts a glance at his brother. Vergil hides his expression behind a stern brow and a thin, flat lip, but Dante can read his brother like the back of his hand now.

“Thank you, but there’s no need to accommodate me. I’ll take Yamato home.”

“Actually, Mom, can I crash at Vergil’s for a sleepover?” Dante blurts out. Even Vergil reacts at that, turning his head to Dante. The hand around his waist starts to stroke him.

“Vergil?” Mom asks. “It’s up to you.”

“I don’t mind,” Vergil says, still looking at Dante. “But if you get homesick, Dante, I’m not taking you home.”

“I won't!” Dante protests.

Mom giggles. He’s already forgotten she’s there, the only things in this room himself and every part of Vergil that screams to touch him. Dante hears him unsheath Yamato.

“I’m serious. I’m not letting you go,” Vergil whispers against the shell of Dante’s ear, before he says “I’ll see you soon, Mother. I’ll write you.”

“Night, Mom,” Dante says weakly, before Vergil draws a blinding portal across the middle of the room. The hand on his back briefly leaves, and Dante takes that first, faithful step through, trusting that Vergil will follow.

In an instant, he’s back in Vergil’s apartment, directly into his bedroom, faintly illuminated by streetlights and other apartments through the blinds. Vergil joins him only a second later, his presence only made known by the gentle touch on Dante’s neck.

“Dante,” he says. Dante shivers. Vergil’s fingers pull at the ends of his hair, like a schoolboy yanking at his crush’s pigtails. Dante turns around, and Vergil slots his lips back in with his.

Notes:

ever since i started writing 10k+ chapters half of the process has gone into editing. my eyes are glazed over at 2am right now.
i write my chapters one after the other, and i usually have a brief outline for the next chapter, but this one kind of veered out of the direction i intentionally planned for it so i wasnt expecting that
no smut for this chapter unfortunately... but i won't say that's the case for the next one

Chapter 3

Dante moans into Vergil’s mouth. Their surroundings are lost to them both now, in the privacy of his home, caution thrown into the wind where neither their parents nor the rest of the world may find them. They rock together like a dance in the ballroom of his bedroom. Vergil does seem like the type to enjoy those grand shows of courting, fanfare, if it were not for his secretive nature and general introversion. Perfect, that they have just this little spot all to themselves, and when Vergil draws Dante into another one of those dips to crush his thin lips against his, no one can jeer or interrupt or ask them to politely leave the premises lest they start fucking on the dance floor.

One of Vergil’s hands chooses to roam, the other one steadfast in its grip around Dante’s waist as an object that he’s in fear of losing to his rampant passion. The more active participant treads over Dante’s clothes. Thankfully, in the summer, he’s without his leather jacket, but he dresses to impress the eye, not the hand, so on top of the canvas of his vest and atop his skintight mesh turtleneck is a sensation that still feels too distant, too many degrees of distance between their skin. As much as Dante thought that lust might turn them both into pornstars, Vergil’s not going to rip his clothes off and ravage him like a smutty, muscle-riddled paperback casanova on an equally sinewy horse.

“Are we just going to kiss all night?” Dante goads. He pulls at Vergil’s cravat, but despite his own extravagant fashion tastes, he doesn’t actually know how to undo it. He hopes his pulling works enough as a hint.

“Do you really think that’s the only thing we’ll do?” Vergil asks, his tone raw and murky into Dante’s ear. Dante shivers and shuts up. Vergil kisses him against the shell of his ear, then under, rapidly birthing goosebumps on Dante’s neck deep under his collar.

“Then–-do something,” Dante urges, embarrassed by himself and the state of things. He pulls at Vergil’s vest, down each button until he’s down to his pants which happen to be the easiest garment to tear off. He can feel Vergil’s cock, erect beneath those stifling layers, and Dante wonders how he hasn’t burst through his boxers already.

Dante’s hand sees it before he does, when he pulls it out from Vergil’s underwear. He just has to look, give it the due appraisal it deserves, especially when it evaded him so last time.

His breath leaves him. It’s an alien in the palm of his hand. The head is rubbery, hidden halfway by foreskin, and Dante strokes over its glossy tip, feeling it out. A much different feeling than what he had felt inside him, his pussy unable to make out anything but the shape and the weight and the heat of it, not the fine details of its coloration from how the head throbs an angry pink-purple, likely from his pale complexion, and the faint line where that the blood-flushed head stops at an immiscible line where the rest of his shaft turns a fainter, less violent saturation.

It doesn’t suit Vergil, his aristocratic, so-masculine-it’s-feminine features, that he has a penis befitting of a bull, but Dante can’t be arsed to care. It makes his pussy feel feverish.

When Dante regains the spit in his mouth and the ability to speak, he clears his throat. Better make a good first second impression.

“Nice to meet you, Yamato Junior.” He shakes Vergil’s penis curtly, even giving it a little nod. “I’m Dante, Vergil’s little brother. We’ve met before. I think we’re going to be best of friends very soon.”

Vergil has a strange, displeased look on his face that’s not unwarranted but still, when Dante’s holding his cock with the same tenderness as he would a newborn kitten, he’d hope that Vergil wouldn’t look so dismayed. But he hasn’t taken it away yet, so that has to account for something.

“Sorry, sorry,” Dante mumbles. His face goes hot.

Dante kneels on the floor (the only time he will ever kneel, let that be known) and he looks up at Vergil, only wanting to witness the carved lines on his brother’s face when he’s on the precipice of finally losing his virginity. If Vergil hadn’t pushed him into bed all those eons ago, Dante might not have even realized that even he, the most stoic of men, was still a man. A man who, despite all those decades of abstinence, wanted to love, wanted to fuck and to cum. Wanted to tease as much as his prey would allow, before he drew out his teeth and the true extent of his strength in order to bite down and succumb to his hunger.

Vergil’s face is so human. His displeasure has subsided into something more immature, maybe even insecurity that Dante has seen in his own pallor in the mirror dozens of times, and that epiphany rocks his world. Despite the turbulence in his eyes, Vergil’s dick twitches and bobs when Dante stares at him, not it, for far too long.

“Don’t play with your food, Dante,” but his cheeks are pink on those intimidating cheekbones. “Weren’t you eager to do something other than kiss?”

Fine. If Vergil’s going to be so obstinate, Dante might as well give his spoiled big brother what he wants. The bulb of his cock is more threatening when Dante’s down on his knees in worship, the slit playing a staring contest with him. Vergil’s penis has an advantage on it too–it won’t blink or shy away until Dante does something clever, quickly. He darts forward and licks it, equal parts eager and shy. At the end of the day, it’s still Dante’s first time, so it’s a little special that it’s his first dick and honestly? Probably his last.

In the distance, Dante hears a long, shuddering exhale, ancient like it’s just been exhumed. He leans back, to appraise it now that the seal of Vergil’s blowjob virginity has been broken, and there’s a little bead of fluid that has to be from his cock, Dante’s lips not wetted enough to garner that effect. It’s cute, and not unlike his girlfriends, Dante isn’t impervious to the appeal of cute things. He smooches it right on the kisser, the damp fluid slipping through his lips by accident. Dante swears it tastes better when it comes from the source, straight from the tap, when he doesn’t have to scrape it off his own body like leftovers.

“Mm,” he hums, making a big show out of licking his lips, tongue overestimating their range of motion, slobbering all over his cupid’s bow and chin in the process. “Not too bad. Has a robust, masculine scent.” He smacks his lips. “Notes of pineapple pizza for dinner.”

“You wretch,” Vergil hisses. Close to greatness, but it’s no brat. He runs his fingers through Dante’s messy hair, drawing it tight like a bow from his scalp, but there’s no real violence in it, even though if Vergil opted to fuck his throat like a fleshlight Dante wouldn’t be at all opposed. Well, Dante refuses to let another second go by without his brother on his tongue, so he kisses the tip again, Frenching it this time as per the natural progression of making out. His lips push Vergil’s foreskin back and Vergil almost winces when it’s pulled back completely. Dante doesn’t draw back, not when he’s come so far already, and his tongue explores the underbelly of Vergil’s cock in order to familiarize himself with all planes of it.

As his mouth gradually sheathes itself on Vergil’s cock, the smell sinks into his nostrils and makes its home there. As much as Vergil kept himself to a standard cleanliness, he had been out since the afternoon and had exercised with Dad, had dinner with the family. When Dante’s throat finally calls it just an inch shy of Vergil’s trimmed crotch, he almost drowns with the heady flavor on his tongue and the musk vibrating in his nose, all of that accumulated sweat from sparring outdoors in the hot sun insulated in those tight trousers. Dante needs a moment to catch his breath, and his nose to the blades of Vergil’s trim pubes, each inhale he intakes poisons his head with a dizzying migraine.

Only a tiny admission, a light “ngh” from Vergil reminds Dante to keep his senses afloat, and he suckles down on Vergil’s dick as a self-soothing behavior, invigorating the cavern of his mouth with purpose and motivation. It batters the jagged ceiling of his mouth when Dante tightens his lips around the base of Vergil’s cock, yearning to suck him balls-deep but not experienced enough to know how to do that without his teeth grazing along the sensitive shaft. Vergil might be able to withstand any blunt force to his body, and a few teeth hurt no one, but Dante intended to make a good first impression, full of starry-eyed promise and potential.

“Dante,” Vergil grunts, and Dante agrees with a hum around his dick. Yes, me. I’m great, aren’t I? My first time, but I’m trying my best to suck the soul out of you. It’s not until Vergil’s grip in his hair tightens that Dante realizes that Vergil’s about to cum–his name was a warning. But it’s pointless. Dante intends to swallow, and when his brother’s fingernails dig into his scalp, Dante only lets his shaft loose enough for his lips to enclose around the thick head of Vergil’s cock, clogged by that fat tip that Vergil tries to pull out. A burst of flavor explodes on Dante’s tongue, so much cum in his mouth that it must look like a slaughterhouse in there, and he almost chokes on it when he realizes why Vergil’s load is so virile–probably due to the lack of masturbation and frequent cleansing of his balls into anything that’s kept them painful and heavy, unloaded all in one eruption that’s both explosive and effusive. Dante has to do all in his power not to swallow it too early, even when Vergil’s jizz starts to tickle the back of his throat and his tonsils.

Slowly, steadily, he peels himself off Vergil’s cock.

Look what I caught, Dante tries to say.

“‘Ook what I cot,” he says instead. He opens his mouth wider than he’s ever had at the dentist and sticks out his tongue, where all of Vergil’s healthy, abundant jizz has pooled onto. Prideful enough to keep all that precious cargo exposed where it could fall and splatter onto the floor wastefully, but it’s worth it to see Vergil’s constantly aggrieved expression, worked into a state of putty where he can’t even tell him off with one of those classic scathing, witty remarks.

All Vergil ends up muttering is “Dante,” shaking his head, that aggrievement blotching his brow like an artistically placed splatter of paint. He backs out, and luckily he’s still hard. Go demon genes.

Vergil shuffles off his own clothes and Dante helps unhelpfully, tugging at his vest until he’s shaking Vergil back and forth and Vergil has to swat him away to undo them himself. He still goes the mile to place them on his bedside table, but Dante knows his brother’s out of his sane mind when he doesn’t fold his clothes.

Dante takes his top and undershirt in one swift motion, throwing it atop Vergil’s clothes. Vergil hooks his fingers into Dante’s pants, testing the give before he goes to undo his first functional belt and the second ornamental one with the gracefulness that Dante so sorely lacked. He holds an impatient breath when his trousers slip down on their own, bare skinny legs in his boxer briefs that cup over the heat where his cunt has been stewing in its own arousal, turned on by kissing his brother and swallowing his dick into his gullet. From the moment they relocated to Vergil’s bedroom, Dante already knew how sticky he was down there, and the honesty of his body terrifies Dante.

He braces for Vergil’s reaction when he peels it away. Even without looking, Dante can feel the way in which his sopping pussy clings to the crotch of his underwear before distance finally tears it away.

“I’m ready for it, gimme.” He tugs on Vergil’s arm impatiently.

Vergil shakes his head meaningfully, tilting Dante’s chin to face him. “You’re just a boy. You need a man’s touch,” he says. And that alone shouldn’t make Dante tremble with some wicked, unbridled glee, just from words alone. He needs to get on Vergil’s level. Read more books, maybe, Vergil’s or the literature he devours, even though Dante’s brain is rotted by screens and he’s never gotten through a page of a book without diving for his phone.

Learning how to disarm Vergil by flowery language seems to be a less feasible option than with Rebellion, and Dante chooses to employ his own strengths where he can–with his body, which he grinds against Vergil’s touch and makes his own lust obvious. Vergil, with some unexpected apprehension, nears Dante’s cunt slowly like it might bite, caressing the flat of his stomach where his womb lies hidden beneath so many layers of skin and flesh and organs, in the back of his pelvis like a pearl. The thought of Vergil looking for his womb there, through those degrees of separation instead of through his pussy, makes Dante horribly horny. Vergil presses down, and Dante shifts his legs to each other. The weight of his touch bears on his bladder too, and he’s not about to piss all over himself as an adult.

“Please,” Dante begs, and Vergil presses down meanly. But he gets the point, thank fuck, and dips under to cup Dante’s pussy, stroking and petting it with the entire length of his fingers. One slips into Dante’s cunt, and he clutches Vergil’s shoulders as he expertly dips him, and Dante’s back meets the bed with an almost too tender kindness.

The return of Vergil’s fingers to Dante’s pussy is a welcome guest. For a moment Dante wonders what Vergil thinks of his body, and a sinking insecurity rubs into his skin. Does he like it? The bed of his cunt’s all made ready for him, cozy like home, Dante swears, as he’s starting to believe in some fate where Vergil’s meant to fit inside. Vergil touches it like he’s still figuring it out, seeing what he likes and doesn’t like now that he has the time to learn his little brother’s cunt. His fingers drive in, flexing wide as if to see how much he’d fit when he does eventually fuck him, and Dante shudders.

Far be it to discourage Vergil’s intrepid curiosity, but Dante needs him in his pussy, stat.

“It’s enough,” he whines. His cunt suckles at Vergil’s fingers, but that seems to make Vergil all the loath to take it out, too comfortable at where he’s nested at his new home.

“We need a condom,” Vergil grunts.

“No–no! Don’t,” Dante pleads. “What’re you gonna do, teleport to the drugstore with your dick out? Vergil,” he pauses meaningfully.

And without anything creative to say, he flushes as he mumbles, “just fuck me raw.”

He can’t see Vergil, not through the arms that block his own face like blinders, but the touches on his body are stunned-still. Then, the touch of something low against his cunt, too low, but that’s quickly rectified when Vergil shifts and slides home, easy. For as much as girls his age talked about how painful it was to lose their (bleh) maidenhood, all Dante feels is a fullness like the bloated aftermath of an indulgent meal. There’s a sort of stinging warmth within him, and Dante sinks into the heat that consumes his lower body. Bliss.

Wait. Hey…

He just–he just lost his virginity.

And so did Vergil.

“Vergil,” Dante gasps, shaking the forearms that bracket him on the bed, before he stares up at his brother. “You just–we–”

Vergil’s eyes are ablaze. But even he is too distracted with his cock in cunt, unmoving and soaking in it like a hot bath. It takes a few shakes for him to blink and look up at Dante with that same ardor.

“You make me lose all my sensibilities,” Vergil utters, words gutted out of him and which bleed into a thick, sinister sludge that slithers into Dante’s ears too deep where it’ll fester in his memory forever. Vergil draws his hips back, though seemingly reluctant to be spared from that sweet sensation for more than one second. One thrust back, and they both groan something quiet and embarrassed and shy. Dante nods furiously, and Vergil fucks another time into him again, and each of their following noises become less and less hindered by insecurity and self-consciousness, louder, thinner, coming from the gut rather than the throat.

“Fffugh,” Dante cries, scrabbling against Vergil’s forearms. “What the fuck, what the fuck–” There’s an igniting in his pussy, like Vergil’s striking a piece of flint in him to burst sparks there. It feels crazy. Is it supposed to feel this crazy in him?

“Dante,” Vergil croaks, voice broken up by his moans and almost incoherent utterances that just sound like a chanting of his name.

Well, at least that answers the question of if Vergil likes it. He’s liking it very much, from how quickly his pace gallops, not too quick like when he needs to efficiently end a stray, low-level demon. It’s far from economical, savage like a punishment and a lesson that he needs Dante to relish. It hurts enough for Dante to feel every bruising attack to his innards, his cervix, which must be sufficiently plundered already, and Dante eagerly wants to feel it in the morning, limp out of bed as part of his deflowering rite of passage. Knowing Vergil, he’s the only person in the world who would do that to Dante.

Vergil hair comes undone from its perfectly quaffed shape, sweeping over his face. It’s a style that fits a young adult rather than a middle-aged man, but it takes years from Vergil’s face–not that it needed to, for how few wrinkles have cut into his forehead and under his eyes so far.

He’s really hot. Dante can’t help but stare up at his brother in awe, no quippy remark in his arsenal. It’s so stupid. Balls-deep, trimmed crotch pressed against his just-virgin cunt, and right now he chooses to be fawning over Vergil like a lovestruck teenage girl.

The grind of Vergil’s stubbly crotch works Dante’s clit into a frenzy, but it hardly matches up to a concentrated, pointed effort, when Vergil goes to thumb at it with determination. It’s too much for Dante to take all at once. He’s never gone for both his clit and his cunt before, too sensitive to press at two of his buttons at the same time.

“Vergiuuuh–” Dante gasps, slapping Vergil’s arm. “I’m gonna–”

The warning doesn’t deter Vergil, even if it might end their fucking prematurely. He presses down at Dante stubbornly. For his first time, Dante’s cumming like a shotgun blast, squeaking and arching and twitching as his stomach churns and boils over.

Vergil, for as much as a romantic as he is, doesn’t cum with Dante in the flowery haze of a mutual orgasm, as he’s already been wracked with one. But he’s not completely infallible, hips and dick stuttering as Dante’s flesh tries to coax him into ejaculating. It’s sore in Dante now, but Dante’s ego is sorer when Vergil comes to a stop.

“Cum in me,” Dante moans. His ankles lock around the small of Vergil’s back, his thighs gripping at his waist. By all means Vergil should still be able to break out with ease.

His pause, which in Dante’s overactive, instant-gratification mind, feels like infinity as he’s suddenly forced sober from his cock-drunkeness. Vergil’s cock pulses like it’s about to make Dante’s wishes come true, and he bites back a whimper. He doesn’t even have to thrust for Dante to inch closer to orgasm.

“You have your whole life ahead of you, Dante. You’re not ready for a child,” Vergil groans, and to Dante it sounds like pleading. His tone sounds heartbroken. Heartbroken because…?

“But you are.”

The look that Vergil shoots him is despairing, frantic–

“You’re ready for a baby,” Dante gasps. “Come on, your sperm’s gonna turn into dust if we don’t try for one soon. Don’t you wanna be a daddy?”

He doesn’t know where all this is coming from. He doesn’t want to be a dad. Certainly doesn’t wanna get knocked up, ruin his sculpted, heavenly abs. He’s never even heard Vergil talk about parenthood. He treated Dante at an arm’s distance and with the cold professionalism of a teacher. In all likelihood, he probably wouldn’t be a good father at all.

But Dante’ll cast his net anywhere if he can catch just one tiny win.

“If you don’t wanna, at least give Mom a grandchild–you know she wants one,” he bargains. His argument is reasonable, but more importantly, shrewd. The Mom card works on Dante, and he knows if nothing it’ll work on Vergil too.

Vergil shakes his head, but he trembles as he takes his cock out to the brim and thrusts back in. Dante moans. Despite how rubbed-raw his guts feel, it’s starting to amp up again.

And because Dante can’t stop running his mouth, even after he gets what he wants, he carries on. Babbling, at this point.

“Give her a little rugrat, a little demon-human baby that looks like us–oh, shit,” Dante almost wails when Vergil claws at his thin waist, bouncing him off his cock, “another one to the Sparda bloodline, white hair and blue eyes–”

“Dante-”

“You like that?” Dante laughs breathlessly, keening when Vergil almost collapses on him to fuck him like an animal, just to lay on top Dante like a pillow and hump until he busts. “Think you’re gonna need to turn your office into a nursery. Ah!”

He shudders when Vergil bites down on his neck with a grunt, and then fluid flows inside of him, emptying out into his womb since the head of Vergil’s cock is butted against his cervix, and Dante knows just how precise his brother’s aim is. With any luck, Vergil’s jizz is as potent as a strapping twenty-year old, probably more so ‘cause he’d be enhanced by their dad’s genes. Dante blushes when he thinks of his cunt being warmed with Vergil’s aftermath, the consequences of their actions far from his mind, just like anything else he does and barrels into headfirst. But the difference between those times and this Thing with Vergil is that he has given this a lot of thought. More thought than anything he’s given to in his entire life.

 

 

 

This time, when Dante wakes up to an empty bedroom, he’s only briefly discombobulated before his senses reassure him of Vergil’s presence, through the muted sounds from the kitchen, the ajar bathroom door which still has steam leaking out of it, and most telling of all, Yamato propped up against the bedside stand, even though Vergil must have had plenty of time to remount it on the wall.

True to his fantasy, Dante’s sore all over, and of course his cunt bears the most damage. He gingerly touches it, and his pussy throbs to let out a bit more of Vergil’s cum even though the sheets are already irreparably stained. He has half a mind to go out buck-naked, but he’s pretty sure Vergil wouldn’t like him dripping his cum like a snail-trail around his apartment. Ruining the sheets and mattress was already a generous permission. Dante’s not eager to pull on his form-fitting clothes either, but lucky for him (and Vergil)–his ingenuity strikes.

When he comes face to face with Vergil, his brother’s reaction is all that he wants and more. His sharp eyes rake over his navy sweater that hangs on Dante’s shoulders slightly oversized, the hem coming down just barely over Dante’s crotch. He wiped himself in the bathroom, only a surface-level cleaning. The rest of Vergil’s jizz is still salvageable to crawl into his womb.

“Hm.” Vergil takes a leave from the breakfast he’s cooked up, pushing the pan off the induction stove. The smell of eggs and sausage and sheer protein invades Dante’s lungs, and he drools for it. But it’s incomparable with the attention from his older brother. Vergil leans against the counter as he looks down at Dante from an arm’s distance, and Dante petulantly steps up closer to meet him where he is, even though it grinds his gears.

Vergil lifts the hem of his sweater to look at Dante’s cunt. Dante blushes and looks down at himself too, putting himself in his brother’s shoes and tries to see what he sees. Vergil says nothing, but Dante swears his brother’s trousers are beginning to strain.

Dante clears his throat.

“How was it?” he asks. He juts his hips forward. “Losing your virginity. Was it life-changing? Earth-shattering?”

Vergil looks up at him, and a slyness twists his mouth and his eyes. “Give me a moment to think.”

“You better be thinking about how you’re going to sing my praises.”

“It was enjoyable,” Vergil replies. His hand gives up the hem and slips between Dante’s thighs, rubbing where Dante scrubbed himself clean.

Just enjoyable? Dante’s about to protest, but Vergil rubs the meat of his hand between Dante’s cunt, and now he can’t think, much less speak.

“Very enjoyable,” Vergil says. “So much so I can’t wait for another chance to lose myself in this weakness again.”

“Ah–” Dante wriggles, but he doesn’t want to grab Vergil’s wrist to hump his clit selfishly. Like a cat, Vergil’s affections are on his terms, his ground.

“Is that better?” Vergil asks. “Unable to consistently beat me in combat, but this,” he stops to fondle Dante’s cunt kindly, fingers tracing along those warm folds, “you have something that disarms me without fail.”

Fuck. This is what he asked for. This is what he gets. Dante’s heart burns with his cunt as Vergil dips his middle finger inside, swirling it like a coffee stirrer. It’s sloppy in his ears, and Dante can feel his own thighs getting damp and undoing the clean-up he had so successfully made progress on earlier.

Dante’s stomach grumbles, and Vergil pulls his finger away.

“Whuh?”

“Go eat,” Vergil says. He rinses his hand under the tap. Dante wants to fight for the right for Vergil’s cock, but the glint in his older brother’s eyes tells him it’s not over yet.

For an economical bachelor like Vergil, he has naught but two elegant high chairs up against the kitchen peninsula, which he eagerly takes his place to eat his tray of meticulously prepared breakfast. Rather than one whole plate of ingredients piled up on one another, Vergil has several little dishes of salad, miso soup, an unknown cut of fish, and a singular pickled plum in a bowl the size of a thimble. Dante’s food is distinctly mismatched, all the eggs and sausages and of course, a healthy smattering of roasted tomatoes and greens in one dish. Despite Dante’s grumpiness, he finds himself wolfing it down in an instant, finishing when Vergil’s still making his way through the fish in lazy chews. For as efficient as Vergil had parts of his life nailed down, he seemed to take these tiny moments with an air of luxury.

Dante impatiently waited for him to finish up. Curse these high chairs. He’d had the fantasy of grinding down on Vergil’s lap while he tried to finish his food, seducing him from making progress. Maybe later, if Vergil still intended to work on the day that he had taken his little brother’s virginity, Dante would definitely crawl into his lap and make a scene.

“When do you suppose our parents will expect you back?” Vergil asks.

“I didn’t know you wanted me gone so quickly. Wined and dined me and now you’re shooing me out the door, huh?” A hand on Dante’s thigh quickly turns him into a subdued puppy, down to his wagging tail. “Uh. I didn’t make any plans with them, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Vergil hums.

“They’ll find a way to entertain themselves,” Dante says. He shudders when he thinks about their mom last night, sprawled over Dad’s lap like he and Vergil weren’t right there, giggling as she smothered kisses into the roots of his thinning hair. Then he imagines what they’d look like if they saw Vergil burying his teeth into Dante’s neck.

For Dante, who has foresight only a few inches away from his face, even he starts to worry about their parents. Vergil seems entirely unconcerned, and that man has foresight all the way to the summit of Red Grave’s tallest alps. They should probably have a talk about it, but for once Vergil's stoicism comforts Dante.

When Vergil finally finishes, Dante shoots up to his feet. Vergil takes their plates to the sink. Then he starts washing. By hand. Dante stares at him, agape.

“Come on!” he exclaims, as Vergil juts a thumb down the thimble-sized dish.

Vergil almost laughs. Dante knew he was trying to take the piss.

After that, Vergil finally seats himself on the lounge, appropriately low and wide enough for Dante to belly-flop onto his lap. He makes himself comfortable on Vergil’s thighs like a cat, and Vergil scratches him low under his skull like one.

“You should have been disciplined more as a child,” Vergil says, rubbing down Dante’s spine.

Dante laughs. “Mom and Dad weren’t gonna do it. If you stuck around, you could’ve put me in my place.”

The sound that Vergil makes is not one of total disagreement.

“You could’ve done more than that, discipline. I could have been on your dick for years if you got around to it earlier.”

The fingers on Dante’s waist become bruisingly stiff, rigor mortis. Is Vergil really opposed to the idea? Dante cranes his head around to look, just in case. He still hasn't weaned off the need to seek Vergil’s reactions, and he doubts he ever will, sick from the overwhelming sweetness that makes his tummy churn whenever Vergil hands him a generous nod of approval or demonstrates the half-lidded trust of a cat.

“You know I was terrible at school. Did you ever think about spanking me? After every question I got wrong?”

“I would assume you got them wrong on purpose, then,” Vergil responds thinly. Dante grins.

“Not more than I already did–ah!” His eyes go blown-out wide.

Vergil actually spanked him.

It wasn’t painful. Honestly, it’s fairly tame for him.

But he still spanked him.

“Enjoy that, you sicko?”

Vergil slaps his ass again. Dante yelps.

“Go on, Dante, finish your line of thought. How would I wrangle you into submission?”

“Hrn,” Dante mumbles, face buried into the crook of his elbow. Vergil’s hand rubs at his ass smoothly, from where he slaps deeper into the crack. Dante’s pussy clenches, and his face burns when Vergil exhales a laugh. “You could’ve been my teacher. I’d probably learn more from you than at school.”

“And I suppose I’d get through to you through here,” Vergil sighs, and when he rubs his thumb into Dante’s pussy Dante’s entirely unprepared for it. He gasps for air, arching back.

“You…you said it, not me–!” Dante squirms when Vergil kneads the pad of his thumb down. The rest of his fingers so conveniently cup around his clit, too much attention just for his suddenly bashful little dick.

“Your cunt would lead you astray,” Vergil says. He slaps it, lightly, but its reduced force is a thousand times more impactful than a strike to Dante’s ass. Dante almost swallows his tongue.

“Haven’t–unh–haven’t you heard of positive reinforcement?” He chokes out. “Don’t just beat me into shape, oh, fffuh–”

Vergil shifts from under his legs, but his hands continue to comfort Dante in the absence of the rest of his body, smacking closer to his hole. It’s where he’s wettest, and the impact echoes in the surprisingly clear acoustics of Vergil’s apartment.

“You may be right,” Vergil says, distant in Dante’s hollow ears, and he leans to dip his tongue into Dante’s cunt.

“Vergil!”

Dante’s eyes roll into his skull. Vergil’s tongue is as curious as his fingers, his dick, and it doesn’t swim too long under the surface, coming out to breathe and lap all over Dante’s cunt, up and down in a weirdly juvenile motion. Dante has never imagined Vergil capable of such an act, never seen his brother do so much as lap around a spoon, much less lick a plate clean.

Vergil keeps his face to skin, breathing in whatever demented concoction their bits have fucked together last evening. His cum is still there, and he must taste it on his own lips when his tongue reaches in, surprisingly long and intrusive and worming into Dante like it has a mind of its own. His lips suck on Dante’s pussy, clit resting on his inner lip, which looks thin on the outside, but feels plush and comforting on the inside. Dante gasps when he feels himself getting wet, only to realize it’s Vergil whose saliva is trailing down his cunt lips from how ravenously he’s slurping on Dante.

“Holy shit, holy shit,” Dante cries, rocking his ass back in his brother’s face. He doesn’t care if it makes him look like a slut, or worse, if it makes him look like a girl. All he wants is to ride Vergil’s mouth like a motorcycle. Vergil’s slender hands hold onto his cheeks tight, parting them with that gentle but firm touch, much like the decisive hand of a mentor.

They could have had years of this. Hiding from their parents in the dark corners of the manor like mice, just to have their hands all over each other, Vergil’s inexperienced but still much older adult penis using Dante’s virgin pussy to fill the gaps in his sexual resume. The thought of what could have been might have upset Dante before, but now he feels reborn into a new era where all he knows is Vergil’s flesh against him and in him.

“Ah,” he whines, and Vergil hums into him in response. All that does is vibrate through Dante, waves going so long and so far as to reach Dante’s ears, that sour, nasally voice made deep through sex and desire. As if Vergil knows its effect on Dante, he speaks that low thrum into his cunt, verbose even with his face stuffed full. As always, he finds a way to get his penetrating words through to Dante.

Dante swears he hears the word “cum” on his lips there, and so he obeys, grunting and fisting the tight leather of Vergil’s lounge as Vergil stabs his tongue into the shallow bed of his pussy and lays it down there as Dante soaks it. He shivers, from how much fluid has been washed out of him in a cleansing flood and leaves him cold, warm only where Vergil encouragingly drinks from his embarrassingly noisy cunt. It certainly doesn’t help that Vergil’s making a big show out of it, swigging it like a beer at the pub. Dante hadn’t cared too much about it last night, but now in the day where sunlight shines through the uselessly flimsy blinds, he feels entirely too self-conscious, forced to reckon with his own body.

His face burns when he thinks he hears the sound of Vergil laughing into his flesh. He squeezes Vergil’s head tight with his thighs, and all it does is squish Vergil’s face tighter against his pussy, perfect for Dante to ride out the rest of his orgasm. Vergil hardly needs room to breathe, the only air he seems to need in the depths of Dante’s cunt where fluid and gas has been recycled over and over again.

Eventually, Dante’s grip loosens, and his hips fall flat against the couch, defeated. “Guh…”

Vergil peels away, and when Dante turns to peek at him, he’s wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes convey a smirk where his lips are unavailable.

“I think I agree with you, Dante. Perhaps you’d be a less rowdy child if I had supplied to you a healthy demand of ‘positive reinforcement.”

“Maybe. But you like that I’m like this, don’t you?” Dante pants. “Untamable.”

Vergil’s astute gaze eyes him. Bingo. Dante’s grin grows into something obnoxiously wide.

That was the first time they had christened that day with another go at sex (though Dante’s idea of yesterday was any time before they went to bed, even if they probably passed out at around four in the morning.) But neither of them were content to end it there. They fell into each other again, Dante on top of Vergil, Vergil on top of Dante, wrestling for their own wants and needs that aligned parallel to one another. The veneer of Vergil’s reserved attitude slipped away each time he nipped at Dante’s chest, his nipples, watching how each bite and bruise faded in seconds and tried to make them last minutes. He rejected Dante’s pussy in favor of his nonexistent breasts that he tried to mold from the nonexistent fat there. Dante had no idea how Vergil could resist his awesome, virgin-destroying pussy, and constantly attempted to snag him with less than subtle means. But Vergil was hypervigilant, and whenever Dante edged his sopping-wet cunt close to the tip of his cock, he always turned the tables on his head. It’s not until Dante begged and crawled for it that Vergil mounted him from behind like a dog.

Despite their demonhood, there were only so many of their bodily functions that they could fend off. When Dante goes for the toilet, he grabs his phone to occupy the hyperactive loneliness in his mind. Vergil refused to go with him, even when Dante offered to open up his legs for his brother to aim through. Spoilsport.

He probably had been away from his phone for half a day, the longest he’s been without it since he bought it. Before he can even turn it on, a notification turns on his screen for him. A few notifications. But he’s always been Mr. Popular, so it can’t be helped–

Wait. The most recent texts are from Trish.

Trish [12:21]
Heyy we’re here

Open up

 

Are you home?

Trish [12:38]
Did you forget we were coming? 🙄

“Trish!” Dante yelps, wiping his crotch in an embarrassingly sparse way. In Trish’s absence, Vergil responds.

“What?”

Dante [12:39]
ILL BE THERE DONT LEAVE YET

“My friends are supposed to be over today!” Dante runs out of the bathroom and sweeps his clothes up, folded over on the bed in one of the brief moments he and Vergil were split apart. He starts pulling his clothes on. To his despair, Vergil’s already taken his boxers to wash.

“I’ll take you back,” Vergil says, already putting on his coat.

“Hey, wait, wait,” Dante stammers. “I’ll just take the subway.”

Vergil raises an eyebrow. “Want me gone so quickly?” he asks, and Dante blushes. “Dante, it’ll be quicker if we take Yamato.”

“Fine,” Dante concedes.

Mom and Dad had left home to do god-knows-what, so Trish and Lady were waiting out in the front lawn. The sky was downcast over the manor, so when Dante and Vergil came back (as much as Vergil disliked to teleport indoors) a few droplets were already starting to fall.

Dante hurries to the door as quickly as he can. Hopefully his girls can’t smell the cum on him or see the weird gait that he’s acquired. Vergil does what he tends to do when Dante’s friends come over, which is make himself scarce.

“Hey, sorry,” he says breathlessly. Trish darts inside like a sopping cat, even though she looks dry to the bone. Lady follows behind.

“What took you so long?” Lady asks.

“Uh.” Uhh. Uhhh. “I just woke up.”

She checks the time on her phone. Dante knows it’s already past noon.

Trish gives him a once-over, and he squirms in his barely-laced boots. But she just rolls her eyes. “Seems about right.”

Dante sighs. Crisis averted.

Not for long. When they round the foyer, the phantom of his dreams makes himself known to his friends.

“Hey,” Trish says casually, while Lady looks distinctly more disgruntled as if she had just stepped into a pile of steaming hot dog poop. Vergil nods at them, following his same script as he always had. Good to know he was as normal as he usually was in the face of a possible incest scandal.

“I didn’t know he would be here,” Lady whispers loudly, so that both Dante and Trish can hear, and knowing Lady, she probably meant it for Vergil’s ears too.

“Yeah,” Dante laughs nervously, looking at his brother. If he heard anything, he displays no such indication. “He’s just been around, ‘cause our folks came back yesterday.”

The explanation seems to do it for them. Trish dives into the couch, making her home there as she had when they were all kids. “I missed this place,” she moans. “I wish I grew up in the lap of luxury.”

Lady sits by Trish’s feet on the couch as Dante sifts through his collection of movies and games.

“What are you in the mood for, ladies?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lady says. How strange. She’s usually pretty decisive about her tastes, and there had been a bullet hell multiplayer she and Dante were trucking through before they graduated.

He turns to Trish. “What about you?”

She shrugs. “You pick something. I don’t want to choose. Work put me through the ringer.”

This was all a bit unusual. Dante was always at the whims of his friends’ demands, especially whenever they came around to his manor and made it their own home for the day. It was the least he could do, they said, since his family was so wealthy. He should throw them a few breadcrumbs when he has the chance.

Dante puts something on. Perhaps a horror movie would shock their senses awake. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. They were placating him, like a child given a plethora of gifts and treats before their parents told them they were going to have a divorce.

He really hoped that wasn’t what it was, a friend-break up. But he didn’t want to be the first one to say something. All three of them sat in an uncomfortable silence that even the movie’s shrill screaming and gore splattering and corny dialogue didn’t loosen their tongues.

When the movie ends, Dante quickly inserts the game he and Lady left off on into the console. Lady takes her place in it with him, but it’s too automatic. Trish leaves and comes back after raiding Dante’s corner of the pantry, and Dante doesn’t even feel the urge to fight back.

They hadn’t said when they wanted to leave. Dante wishes they could stay over. They used to. Once Lady puts down the controller on the console, it’s a decisive end to their day together, and Dante doesn’t know how else to occupy their time next. He’ll dance and perform like a circus clown if he has to.

Instead of leaving, they linger around aimlessly like ghosts. None of them initiate the classic pull-out-your-phone-and-doomscroll that the rest of them would eventually follow and lose their precious hours to.

“Uh, right,” Dante says. “So that’s it, then?”

Lady exchanges a look with Trish.

“We need to tell him.”

“You tell him. It was your decision.”

“What was her decision?”

“Dante,” Trish starts, with the same severity she might have had if she was a) dying or b) pregnant, which is insane, because neither option is possible. “I’m moving in with Lady.”

“What?” His brain short-circuits for a moment. “Uh, okay?” Lady lives with her very unlikeable dad, so he assumes Trish doesn’t mean she’s going to tag along as a third wheel. “You guys getting your own place?”

Trish shakes her head. “I’m moving in with her when she leaves for uni.”

Oh. His mouth dries out. “Wait. All the way in Fortuna?”

Trish nods.

“In… in October?”

Dante doesn’t fail to catch the way Lady bites her lip–he can almost feel the nervous crunch of her teeth over skin.

“Honestly? Maybe late September?” Trish says. The maybe sounds like a definitely.

“So in a few weeks? When did you–why didn’t I hear anything about it?” Dante asks. Even he can tell he sounds a little hysterical.

Lady bows her head, and Trish runs her long hair through her fingers. She uncrosses her long legs, then crosses them back with the other leg on top. The pause lasts so long, and before Dante can burst, Lady tugs Trish’s hand out of her hair and holds it for too long. Pointedly.

“Oh,” Dante says.

“It’s pretty new,” Lady says defensively. “That’s why we didn’t say anything.”

So new that they were already moving in with each other, Dante wanted to retort. But that wasn’t fair to say–-they had been best friends for so long.

Dante got that. He got that just fine. He was familiar with new. But it just sounded like an excuse.

“Okay,” he says. "Good for you. Good for you guys."

“Dante.”

“What?”

“I know you’re upset. I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head. “No, I don’t want this to be about me.” He barks an unconvincing laugh. “Hell, I think I just wanted to clock you babes before you told me.”

Trish scoffs. “You’re just oblivious, Dante. You’re such a guy.”

“I am not!” When both his girls raise their eyebrows at him, he shrinks. “I’m not oblivious.”

“Suuure.” Lady smiles.

At least they seem more at ease. Their conscience cleared, it was much easier to leave him now.

“If you’re ever in Fortuna, stay with us,” Lady says. And the sad part is that Dante believes her. That if he really did go, they’d let him stay for as long as he’d want to, begrudgingly forgive him every time he’d forget to do the dishes or take his clothes out of the wash.

He bids them goodbye, and the door closing is a sober clap to his senses.

Vergil was still in the house, Dante could tell. He follows the faint trail of his aura all the way up to his bedroom, where Vergil sits at his desk with one of his books in his hand. Maybe he senses Dante’s urgency, for he closes his novel promptly when Dante pops in.

“Hey.”

Vergil nods at him, observing him with his hawkish eyes. “Finished with your friends?”

“Yeah. Can we go back to yours?” Dante asks meekly.

“Of course,” Vergil responds.

 

 

 

When Dante started staying at Vergil’s more frequently, their parents might have chalked up Dante’s sudden introversion to seeing his friends leave the nest. Mom was emotionally intelligent enough to coax Dante into seeing his friends off, which he did. But after that, it was Vergil’s apartment, over and over.

Distance was of no issue for their family, not really. If it was not because of their wealth, it was because of their power. Fortuna was only a couple hours away by car, less than an hour by plane. If Dante worked on his flying more, he might be able to make the trip alone without any stops.

It was hardly a disconnect to find out Trish and Lady were macking behind his back (well, maybe it was, just a little.) But Dante thought he was the glue between them. It’s how the both of them met, after all. In just one summer, all of that had changed.

They just got together, and they were already carving out a life for themselves. A moat between them and everyone else, Dante included.

But they weren’t the only ones. Dante had his own moat and his own sandcastle, one that housed himself and his brother. He had his own thing going on too, in the name of Vergil. And he had spared those details from his friends. It wasn’t meant to be a secret, not really–though of course incest was still a taboo in Red Grave, not so much in Fortuna. Dante’s friends would forgive him of anything, and if Dante asked, they’d forgive Vergil of any imaginary sin he had too.

Funneling all his time with Vergil was the only thing that made him happy. It had been since the beginning of summer. Vergil hardly protested, except for when he had to work, and even then Dante celebrated to himself whenever he successfully seduced his brother away from manuscripts to entertain his own whims.

Despite Dante’s original intent to lead Vergil to water, he was the one learning something new every day about his own body. Vergil was very creative. He wanted to play with parts of Dante’s body that Dante didn’t even know could be desired so fervently. Once Vergil even got to sample his toes, to Dante’s chagrin, laving between each of them like a starving beast. When Dante tried to kick him away, it only encouraged Vergil more. It was no real fight, and in that regard Dante was able to surrender his pride and let Vergil win and take.

Though they were allowed their honeymoon phase, Vergil did have responsibilities, and over days those responsibilities cut into their hedonism more and more until they were more or less equally balanced for Vergil–Dante had a life-life balance between Vergil and his other indulgences.

Vergil wasn’t intent on keeping Dante sequestered to the shadows. Though he was an introvert, he took Dante out almost every day, and some days he really had to peel Dante out of bed and out of the house. Dante liked it, even if he said he didn’t. He liked what Vergil had to show him. He could see himself living like this, for the rest of his life.

 

 

 

After Vergil’s afternoon walk, Dante slips into the shower behind him, steam escaping into the rest of the bathroom until Dante slides the glass door shut behind him. He wants to be trapped in the oppressive heat, partly from the hot water, mostly from Vergil’s boiling blood that radiates through his skin.

Dante rests his cheek on Vergil’s nape. His hands reach around to grope Vergil’s chest playfully, but they quickly drop to hug Vergil around his midsection. All Dante wants is to hear that reliable pulse underneath his brother’s skin. He presses up against Vergil, not purposefully, but it can’t be helped that Dante’s pecs and his puffy crotch rub up and spark shivers between the two of them. Water pours over both of their heads, trickling around them like they’ve become one body.

“Dante…” Vergil sighs. He pries Dante’s hands off, and turns around to look at him. Dante stares at his brother’s serious, calm expression. Then another thing calls his attention, and he looks down. Vergil’s cock is erect and it points at Dante’s cunt like it’s asking for permission.

“Oh,” Dante says dumbly. Neither he nor Vergil say a thing, nor make a movement. The shower continues to cascade down Vergil’s back and over his head that flattens his thick hair to his scalp, Dante catching stray droplets in the crossfire.

Vergil passes his body wash to Dante. Dante’s doused himself in it many times already. Pouring it out onto himself is like coating himself in Vergil concentrate, a citrus-yuzu smell along with something cedar and woody. He squirts some into his hands, and starts to soap up his own shoulders.

Vergil’s hands join his, and they continue their path down Dante’s broad chest, then slim waist. Dante squirts more soap onto his hands, and he returns the favor, rubbing it over Vergil’s muscular frame. Together they clean and worship each other’s bodies. When Vergil takes it a step further, stroking Dante’s hips, Dante follows in kind, and once in a stalemate, Dante takes it further again in a game of gay chicken.

Who knows who moves first, but the head of Vergil’s cock kisses Dante’s clit modestly, and they both groan.

“Again,” Dante pleads, humping forward this time, taking more of Vergil’s cock between his legs. Vergil buckles against his demands, and his head falls besides Dante for his steamed breath to ghost along his ear and neck.

“Of course, little brother,” he replies, and hugs Dante’s waist. It feels so terribly cliche. Vergil’s so big and strong and big. It makes Dante feel small even at their mutual height and lean muscle mass. None of that matters when Vergil puts his hands on him. Even though Vergil calls him undomesticated, Dante feels the exact opposite.

Vergil’s cock thrusts against Dante’s cunt, and Dante lets himself be taken. They sway and rock togher, the thick, sticky slapping of their thighs echoing over their gasps and moans. Dante tries to tip-toe in the slippery tub, and Vergil’s forearms choke his waist in its crushing grip to allow him the illusion that he’s contributing to balance when his cock slips in and hooks Dante like a fish.

They had been having sex so frequently now, but their libido never matured with them in those weeks. Sometimes it took them just a couple minutes to cum, and in the suffocating heat, Dante did just that, squeeze around Vergil’s cockhead and bite his chest in childish frustration. Vergil never strayed so far behind, and he ejaculates shallowly into Dante’s cunt, dripping out before he could even finish cumming.

Both of them are loath to let go of one another, not even when they’re wrinkled all over and Vergil’s water bill is sufficiently racked up. Not even when Vergil turns the shower off and the heat starts to dissipate.

“Would you move to Fortuna with me?” Dante blurts out.

“No.”

Dante deflates. “Oh, okay.”

“My home is here, in Red Grave, close to our parents and close to you.”

“But if I went to Fortuna, we’d be far apart.”

“With Yamato?” The rest of Vergil’s question seems redundant.

“Fine. Can I live with you then?”

The look that Vergil gives him is insulting. “What?! Don’t you want me to stick around? Pick up after you and tend to your every need?” Dante wiggles his eyebrows sexily. There’s one need that he definitely wouldn’t mind tending to.

“I am hardly a traditionalist. I don’t have fantasies of you doing my chores or cooking me dinners. Though perhaps the reason why no such image comes to mind is because I know how terrible you would be at it.”

Dante glares at him. “Okay, man.”

Vergil contemplates. “I’ve been spoiled by your presence. I grew up with the same silver spoon in my mouth as you did, Dante–luxuries are hard for me to surrender, too.”

“So…?”

“One day. Although I know I will never be or want to be sober of you.”

“But not now?”

“Are you in such a rush to grow up?” Vergil asks. Dante frowns. Hadn’t it been Vergil who egged him to do so?

“I don’t get it. You told me to figure my shit out, like find a job or go to college. I wanna move out, and that’s no good?”

Vergil stares at him. “So you would be content to atrophy in my bed instead of the one you have at home.”

“That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” Dante scowls. “I don’t atrophy.”

Vergil doesn’t respond, which is Dante’s least favorite way of saying the unsaid.

“Then just tell me what to do,” he says.

“You haven’t been receptive to my advice before. I didn’t think you’d want it still.”

“I don’t care. Just this once. I’ll do whatever you tell me.”

“Go to Fortuna. Join your friends.”

Dante opens his mouth to speak. For the first time, he’s the one with excuses not to barrel headfirst into something. Questions already feel like rolling and spilling off his tongue. What if Trish and Lady don’t want me there? What will I do? What will I do without you?

“Okay,” he says.

Vergil raises an eyebrow, waiting for a protest that never comes.

“You going to be okay on your own?” Dante asks, but it feels like he’s asking himself more than he is Vergil. Vergil scoffs.

“There’s no need to ask me that,” he replies, tucking the long strands of Dante’s fringe behind his ear. “I’ve lived my entire childhood without a little brother. But I cannot see a version of my future that doesn’t look like you and you alone.”

 

 

 

Dante,

I do not often find myself at a loss for words, but I find myself having the opposite problem–there’s not enough that I could say about you that could be quaintly encapsulated within letters upon letters. I know your attention span has also been adapted for a technological age, so I won’t take too much of your time–I know what you would like to hear from me, which is my complete, unadulterated, life-long affection for you, and I know you like to be reminded of it quite constantly, which is an easy task for me.

Even though I had not seen much of you during your late adolescent years, I am still impressed by what you’ve made with the likeness that I’ve lent you. It’s a strange thing to watch yourself reborn as a boy again and watch him make such different choices that you would have when you were younger. You are too rambunctious, quick to anger and tears, inflammatory, and it’s a shock to me that you’ve managed to survive secondary education without my input. None of these choices and paths are any I would make, except if I had an older brother like you, I might be so similarly entranced. But I don’t just watch you with some kind of queer fascination and indulge in the spectacle of your decisions’ consequences. I watch you because I cannot stop myself from doing so.

The one decision that confuses me most is your decision to be mine. You seem content to make your grave with me for reasons I cannot understand. Do not take this as me being ungrateful, for now that I’ve had a taste of you, I do not want to let you go. I intend to hold you for as long as you want me, and capture your attention within reason. You have always been flighty, a free creature, so I know how meaningful it is for you to make your nest in my heart where you may always return.

Your brother,
Vergil

 

“Couldn’t have sent this in a text, could you,” Dante mutters, staring down at the letter. His hand covers his face, even though his blush must surpass the mask of his fingers all the way to his forehead which feels like a kettle whistling its lid away.

“How else would I kindle your affection?” a voice behind him asks. Dante doesn’t need the glow of Yamato’s portal, not the loom of Vergil’s body behind his, not even his voice to tell him this one truth of life: Vergil is there.

“Vergil!”

Notes:

umm. so.
i have mixed feelings about this chapter ending. mostly positive! but i am shocked at where my brain ended up taking this. i never expected it to be so romantic, yet at times i felt like i was also falling in love with them. this certainly fell into a lot of the same trappings as your regular coming of age, but i'm not particularly concerned with originality, especially not in fanfiction... i'm just kind of speechless about the whole experience making this. weird, but rewarding. i really hope you liked it, or at the very least, had a strong opinion about it.

vergil in this story is so pacified, he's basically identifiable through his snark xD though most of his bite is gone since he grew up in a loving family. i tried my best to reimagine what the twins would look like if they 1. weren't twins and 2. had a loving, healthy life, which is a far cry from the trauma-riddled boys we got in canon. best thing to write a modern AU is definitely making one or both of the characters zoomers btw

Notes:

hello i am back. i always have so much to say in my mind for the A/N but i always forget when i actually have to write it xD anyway it seemed right to have a 5v3d fic to pair with my 3v5d one. i had some internal battle since i wondered if it was too similar but in the end i was just like fuck it. two cakes