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It wasn’t unusual to find Dante in strange parts of the office when she visited, so it was a little weird to find him in plain sight on the couch, for once. It was weirder that he didn’t wake up at the sound of the door opening. He had a bad habit of pretending he was asleep even when he wasn’t. She could usually catch him by the twitch of his fingers, trying to scope out where the nearest weapon was in case things went unexpectedly bad. This time, he didn’t even do that much.
Lady plopped down on his legs. Dante flinched awake, pale blue eyes opening so fast that she didn’t even see his lids move. She grinned at him.
“Fortuna really wiped you out, huh?” She said, even though she had been there the whole time and knew he hadn’t been any more tired than he usually was afterwards.
“Something like that,” Dante said with a cheery smile, “don’t suppose you could get off my legs, could you?”
“No can do,” Lady said, but she slid off of him and onto the floor. Dante heaved himself upright, sliding down right after her. He shoved away the coffee table with one booted foot, jostling the collection of empty bottles on top of it.
They sat quietly for a long time. Dante didn’t sprawl all over the floor, long limbs taking up all the space. Instead, he curled his long legs up and wrapped his arms around them. He balanced his chin on his knees.
She recognized the pose. It wasn’t one he took often; if Dante could starfish out over any given surface, he would. It was worse in his office, usually. It was his building, he liked to say, who was gonna stop him from getting comfortable? She’d found him half hanging over the top of the fridge once, drunkenly talking to the spider living in the kitchen corner above it.
But curling up like this? Making himself small and unobtrusive? That was right out of the post-Hell handbook. Too dangerous, Lady figured, to really get comfortable when there were demons around every damned corner. It had taken a long time for him to return to his regular octopus ways with his furniture once he got back.
“Needed something?” Dante asked.
“Just looking in,” Lady said. “You haven’t called me up since the Savior Incident—thought I’d swing by, see what you were trying to hide.”
“Just drinking,” Dante said, even though Lady had kinda figured that was what he was doing. It was the wrong time of year for it, though. All Dante’s worst anniversaries were sort of clumped together.
Lady looked around at the bottles. She nudged one with her finger, watched as it toppled over on the wooden floor. Dante didn’t seem drunk still, which meant that despite the number of bottles surrounding them, they hadn’t had a high enough alcohol content to keep him drunk through his little nap. Usually a good sign.
“I can’t let all these bottles go to waste,” Dante said after another moment.
“Go to waste?” Lady echoed, raising her eyebrows. Dante shrugged.
“Got a nephew, now,” he said, “I gotta get my act together, don’t I?”
He didn’t sound happy. Lady stared at him, examining his familiar face with its growing number of wrinkles and the stubbly beard he’d been unable to grow when they were kids but which oddly suited him now. She knew if she asked about Nero, he wasn’t going to answer. She’d known him for too long, spent too much time with him. This was as personal as he could stand to be.
Nero existed now. He lived out in Fortuna, had been living out in Fortuna while Dante was oblivious here in his office, carrying out little jobs, saving the world every now and then. She bet he hated himself for it—but it didn’t explain the bottles.
“. . . by drinking all the alcohol in the building?”
“Well, there’s still some in a cabinet in the kitchen,” Dante said. He shrugged again. “I got too bored to continue. You want it?”
You got bored of drinking? Lady almost asked, but she knew he’d take it the wrong way. “Yeah, I’ll take it. Have a night on the town.”
“Night on Trish’s bedroom,” Dante corrected with just the barest hint of mischief in his voice.
Lady grinned, elbowing him and wiggling her eyebrows. “No better place to be. I’d invite you, but I’m afraid this party is ladies only.”
Dante snorted and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. When he pulled her close, he didn’t even smell that much like alcohol—had he really gotten bored of it? Just because he knew Nero existed now?
Lady couldn’t say she wasn’t happy about it. She’d been hovering on the edge of Dante’s self-destructive spirals for about as long as she’d known him. A Dante who was too bored to drink was a relief just as much as he was worrying; if he was too bored to drink, what else was he too bored for?
“He has the Yamato,” Dante said.
“I know.”
“He needs it more.”
“I know.”
“You still loved your old man, even after everything.”
Lady’s good mood started to slip away. She stared at him, jaw clenched. Dante stared back with that damn blank expression he got sometimes. She’d seen it less and less as he recovered from Hell. She didn’t like seeing it again now.
She had still loved her old man at the end. After everything that happened, everything that he’d done to her, every single inch of her life that he had ripped apart and ruined just so he could raise the Temen-Ni-Gru, even after all of that she had still cried for him. Dante had never asked her about it. On the Temen-Ni-Gru’s anniversary, Dante showed up, got her a drink or flowers or chocolate or pizza or whatever other inane shit he could afford and he spent the day with her and they didn’t talk about what happened to either of their families.
Lady said, “For most of my life I thought I had a papa who cared about me and my mom. That’s what I loved. Not him. Not the actual man.”
Dante nodded a little and leaned back out of her space. He let himself relax back into the couch, head falling back to rest against the ratty cushion. She thought he was over this—saying weird shit and staring at her until she came up with an answer that made sense somewhere in his head. She thought he was getting better. She didn’t want to see him like he had been after Hell, after Mallet, after the Temen-Ni-Gru. She thought. . .
“Nero was an orphan, right?” She continued. “He never had a father, not like I had my papa. Maybe Nero does love him—but it’s equally likely Nero hates his guts for abandoning him.”
“Either way,” Dante said, quiet and bitter, a tone of voice he only ever used with her, “he needs the Yamato more.”
“You can always take it back.” At Dante’s scoff, Lady nudged him again. “I mean it. He was your brother.”
Dante’s expression crumpled. He twisted his head away, his entire body going rigid as he, presumably, tried not to cry. Or scream. Lady was never quite sure what was going on in her friend’s head. It was hard enough work to hold out against his frequent bad moods; becoming spontaneously psychic was entirely beyond her abilities.
She looked out across the shop, at the cracked windows covered in places by cardboard, at the floor Patty hadn’t been by to sweep in months, the dusty furniture, the missing familiar smell of pizza. Had Dante eaten at all? She couldn’t see the usual pile of boxes anywhere.
“Nah,” Dante managed, voice tight and raw. Lady leaned over, let her weight rest against his arm, her head on his shoulder. He readjusted, slinging his arm around her so she could lean against his chest instead. “He’s gotta have something. . . I told him I don’t drink.”
Told Nero that he didn’t drink? That must be tied up with it all, somehow. He couldn’t have the Yamato, couldn’t drink, and Nero was the brand new nephew he was trying to get his life together for. And Vergil was still dead. And Nero had, if Lady understood the situation correctly, just lost his own brother.
When he saw the Yamato, had Dante regained a little hope that Vergil was alive? Had he seen it and hoped for a moment that his brother had somehow survived Mallet? That the kid with the mostly blue coat and white hair was Vergil, frozen between age nineteen and twenty-eight, depending on when the armor took him? Was that why all this was happening? Had he hoped, swiftly lost that hope, and received Nero as a consolation prize? Was all this because Vergil was dead, but Nero wasn’t, and Nero was the last family Dante had? That made more sense then lying to Nero for no reason and going on a bender.
It always came back to Vergil, with Dante. She didn’t blame him in the least. Dante had said once, after Mallet but before Patty, on the third or fourth day of a bender, that he understood now how she had felt about her father. The scar on his palm was nothing now, he said, because at least then there was a chance then that he had survived. It was different when you did the job yourself.
She never recovered from her father’s death, not really. Dante had never recovered from Vergil’s. If Lady found a long lost half-sister, she would probably quit drinking on the spot too.
“You smell like sweat,” she muttered instead of saying any of that. Dante would tell her when he would tell her. And if he didn’t, then Lady was far too old to be cleaning up messes that she hadn’t been paid to clean.
“Water’s off again,” he said, “can’t exactly shower.” He ran his fingers through her short hair. Lady let her eyes fall shut.
“Get a job, loser.”
“Mhm. Working on it.”