#and they reconciled

[cocosnows]

A Lone Sword

Chapter 3

After getting thoroughly cleaned, the two boys got dressed with the clothes the woman gave them. Dante wore a yellow t-shit and blue denim overalls that fit a little two big. Vergil chose some shorts and a blue button shirt.

“… Interesting decision…” Vergil said to Dante.

“It’s cool isn’t it?!”, Dante replied excitedly.

“Heh, if you say so”.

The two children went downstairs. Hank and Linda were waiting for them.

“Heya boys! Wow, I couldn’t even recognize you two! Was the bath ok?”

“Y-yes… it was nice… thanks”, Vergil replied to the woman.

“We made some breakfast for y’all, I thought you might be hungry”, said Linda.

Two plates of sunny side up eggs and bread were sitting on the kitchen’s table.

“Don’t be shy boys, make yourselves comfy, ‘kay?”, Linda told them.

“We need to tend to the farm so we’ll be out. You can go wherever, just don’t cause a ruckus, ya heard?”, the man warned them.

“Yes… thank you”, Vergil responded with a serious tone.

The couple went out of the house and left the two boys alone.

Dante eagerly sat down on the table and started wolfing down his meal. Vergil was just silent. He sat down quietly and barely ate his food. When Dante finished his meal, he looked at Vergil and saw his plate almost untouched. He got concerned and asked:

“Verge… what’s wrong? Not hungry? Lemme tell ya, this is reall-“

“Dante”, Vergil interrupted him.

“What happened to mom?”

Dante froze, and his expression drastically changed. After collecting his thoughts for a moment, he started telling everything.

“Some time after you ran away… mom and I went into the house… we started hearing weird sounds around the house. Suddenly, the kitchen was on fire, and somehow all upstairs was on fire too. Mom shoved me into the living room drawer and told me to hide… to escape, and to learn to be on my own… then….”

Vergil was looking at Dante expectantly, and extremely nervous. He didn’t want to hear it, as it pained him to even think about it. But he knew he had to know the truth.

“After she closed the door, she ran to the door… while screaming your name.”

Vergil gasped loudly.

“She couldn’t go out because… b-because… those… demons…”

Dante lowered his head, put his hands on his face and started crying.

Vergil was left speechless. He stood up instinctively because of the shock. Even though Dante didn’t really mentioned what the demons did to Eva, Vergil saw her body with his two eyes. He saw how ruthlessly they murdered her.

“So mother… she really… she… actually…”

He had always thought Dante was the favorite, the preferred one… the one she loved more, but by hearing this he realized… his mother… she was willing to lose her life just to save him.

This realization devastated him. Tears started streaming down his face while his mind was busy assimilating this information.

After a moment, Vergil looked at his crying twin.

“It’s… it’s all… your fault”

Dante lifted his head to look at his brother. With a tearful face and a shaky voice, he just replied a broken “Huh?”.

He raised his voice and shouted at his brother:

“THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT”

He threw his chair away and grabbed Dante by the collar, almost lifting him off the ground.

“If you had NEVER been such a spoiled little brat… if you had NEVER made me angry and bothered me in the first place… the demons would’ve never attacked me… AND IF— IF YOU HAD NEVER EXISTED… THEN MOM… SHE WOULD STILL BE ALIVE”

“Vergil… I… I didn’t… I couldn’t—“

“SHUT UP”

Vergil tightened his grip on his brother’s neck and spoke to him in a threatening voice while looking directly at his eyes.

“You’re weak, Dante… you couldn’t protect her… you couldn’t protect yourself… you’re NOTHING”

He threw Dante, making him stumble and fall on his back.

“Those are some pretty hash accusations there, son”

The voice of a man could be heard from the entrance of the kitchen.

Vergil got startled by the presence of the man and turned to look at him. “Did he hear everything we talked about?”, Vergil thought.

“I knew you boys were pretty suspicious… and sorry for bein’ nosy, but I heard everything”

“It’s none of your business”, Vergil said with a serious tone.

“No, probably not… but I couldn’t turn a blind eye to what you said to Tony… or should I say Dante?”

The man walked over to where Dante was lying, and kneeled down to help him stand up.

“C’mon boys… what happened to you… no one coulda seen that comin’. You two… must be 12 at most. I’m not sure what happened to y’all, but those demons… we have seen ‘em. This place… it’s far from town, and those things sometimes roam around the fields. We can’t be out at night… after all… they took our little Charlie from us… in fact, those are his clothes…”

The man looked at the two children fondly, and with a hint of nostalgia and sadness.

Vergil looked at the man with a frown. “This old man’s sob story doesn’t matter to me… we are different from them… from normal humans…”

The man was still kneeling down, and Dante stood up, teary eyed.

“Whatcha looking so cocky for, boy?”, he said while pointing at Vergil. “Tell me, do you think something would’ve changed if you were in your brother’s place? Do you think you could be able to change your fates?”

Vergil was about to refute that accusation, but the more he thought about the possibilities… the more he realized the truth. Without the Yamato, what could he possibly do against those monsters? This made him frown profusely and clench his fists.

“Heh, thought so.”

The man let out a soft chuckle and Vergil turned to look at him with intense eyes.

“Look, what I’m trying to tell you is that you boys shouldn’t blame yourselves for what happened. The fact that you survived was a miracle.”

“You couldn’t have seen it coming, you couldn’t do anything about it… and that is not a sin. You two… are too young to blame yourselves for somethin’ like this.”

Surprisingly, the two boys were attentively listening to him. The fact that their demonic lineage made them survive stopped them from considering the biggest truth about their position:

What could they POSSIBLY do?

Being so young… could they even do anything about it? Prepare beforehand? Every possibility was simply out of the question.

“I’ve tried to blame myself too… to blame Linda, God and the heavens for what happened to Charlie… but I finally realized that some things are just out of our control. Accidents happen, and they hit you when you least think about it.”

“So don’t blame anyone, not even yourselves, for things that you couldn’t control”

“The only thing you can do… is learn, be stronger, be braver… and cherish your loved ones every single day… that’s the most important possession you have.”

The two boys were speechless.

They were no normal humans, yes, but the powerlessness, sorrow, fear, pain… it all made them just as human as everyone else. And what made them human kept them safe. Kept them together.

Vergil realized what he said to his brother, and how wrong he was, and with a broken voice, he said:

“Dante… I’m… I’m sorry… I was wrong…it was not your fault… it was not…”

Vergil started sobbing and was unable to speak further.

Dante started crying and threw himself into Vergil to hug him. This time, Vergil reciprocated the hug.

“I’m sorry Dante… I’m sorry for everything”

“I’m sorry too Vergil… I won’t bother you anymore… I will give you your space *hic* I p-promise”

“Dante…”

Vergil tightened his hug. The two boys cried their eyes out on each other’s shoulders for some time, while the man just looked at them tenderly, shedding some tears himself.

The words of the man reached a deep fiber inside the twins’ hearts. Those simple words were what they needed to finally lift the clouds on their judgment… to get a new perspective on what happened, and pave a new way for what lies in their futures.

———————

This is the end of the mini AU… if you read this, thank you for sticking with me, I really appreciate it TT. I’m planning on writing an epilogue on this series and maybe a continuation of the AU, but with a time skip straight to the DMC 3 events. Maybe it’s not gonna be a full story with diff chapters like this, I’m thinking on short stories with events of the game adapted to the AU, so… Stay tuned! And thanks again for the support 🫶🏼

[seagiri]

very sleep deprived doodles of whatever’s going on inside my brain

[glorious-spoon]

i'm very picky about tv shows, but my pickiness has only an incidental relationship to whether or not a show is "good". it needs to scratch a particular itch in my brain at the right moment. do i know what the right moment is? no. do i know what the itch is? also no. i can be relied upon to get instantly bored of 85% of tv shows and then turn the remaining 15% into a central facet of my personality for 3-5 business months and even i am incapable of predicting which one it'll be ahead of time.

[clarisse-doodles]

inspired by this post, in which Damian does not know what Vine is

[flawlessflesh]

the day when delgal disappeared.

[ciderjacks]

Ended up feeling sorta bad for them

[wasabi-gumdrop]

(slips this under ur door) pls read dunmesh

[dangans-ur-ronpas]

happy pride month

[tinytorchlight]

oh well thanks for clearing that up

[verc0pa]

barrissoka truthers (me) rising from the grave rn

[cometrose]

zhongli is so fucking funny when hes avoiding people like venti last year and neuvillette this year he can’t catch a break he moves like they’re his ex husbands 😭

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Daddy, don't go.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[effemar]

red, and terrible, and red.

[sincerely-sofie]

Lamb: Hurry and get dressed, I scheduled a talk therapy session for you and the other Bishops and it’s starting in ten minutes.

Narinder: IT IS THREE IN THE MORNING—

[sunderwight]

Demon Shen Jiu is such a fun idea though.

Especially if he himself doesn't know. Like imagine, Yue Qi finds this abandoned baby and the baby is REALLY OBVIOUSLY not human. But this also enables Shen Jiu to survive being abandoned at such a young age -- a human baby would die without adequate nutrition or care, but demons are a little more resilient. Baby Demon SJ has a way more forgiving digestive system and can move under his own power from a much earlier age. By the time he's a year old he's hunting his own rodents and small birds, and has to be stopped from biting and mauling anyone he doesn't like. Which is most people. Qi-ge develops amazing reflexes.

Why do the slavers tolerate a demon baby hanging around? Maybe it's really not all that uncommon. Demons come across the borderlands from time to time, and are as liable to abandon their kids or die or etc as anyone else. It's maybe an open secret among slavers that demon-blooded kids are a better investment, even, because they can survive for longer on less. The only downside is if they don't ever look human enough to pass as human, because that limits potential buyers, but that's only relevant when the slavers are trying to sell them. For the purposes of having a network of street kids stealing and grifting and spying and etc, it's fine. A lot of the slavers themselves started out as demon-blooded street kids with no other options.

But in SJ's case, he pretty quickly starts passing as human. Mostly because he's quite strong, and he's convinced that he's the same as his Qi-ge, so he makes himself the same. Makes his hands look the same and his teeth look the same and etc. It's largely subconscious, and once he starts doing it, it becomes automatic. SJ forgets that he's a demon in the way that most people don't retain their earliest childhood memories -- although he remembers that some of the slavers were demons.

Then of course there's the question of why didn't the Cang Qiong cultivators notice?

A few options. One is that whatever kind of demon SJ is, it's really good at mimicking humans. Another is that he's only part demon, and like Luo Binghe, fully capable of handling both kinds of cultivation. So once he starts learning spiritual cultivation, even from a heretic like Wu Yanzi, he doesn't seem different from any other recruit with a patchy education on the subject. Anything else odd about him could be easily attributed to his exposure to Wu Yanzi and his wicked practices.

Although full demon SJ is a fascinating idea. (Also, it could contribute to all those qi deviations -- he's trying to cultivate AND "fake" human cultivation at the same time, I doubt Qing Jing's techniques are totally compatible with everything going on there even without the psychological turmoil.) Like I'd imagine Airplane wrote that SJ was abandoned on the streets as a baby, and the system was like "hmm he probably wouldn't survive that?" and then in some nine billionth wife arc, Airplane also creates a variety of demon that can fully pass as human (for some identity conflict with a prospective wife), even to the point of fooling human cultivators and demon-detecting tools. So the system just ties these two disparate pieces of world-building together in order to patch a critical plothole (Airplane doesn't know anything about babies). Which has the side effect that Shang Qinghua doesn't even know that SJ became a demon!

And SJ himself doesn't know. The only person who knows is Yue Qi.

Obviously this wouldn't come up much in PIDW, but it could be pretty funny in the SVSSS timeline. YQY just sitting there through the whole Luo Binghe being a half-demon reveal, wondering if he should say something. Subsequently being the most absolutely chill about the whole demon reveal thing anyway. Like he's definitely not upset that Luo Binghe is a demon, or part demon, and the multiple people who try to make a point about it just run afoul of his impenetrable smile and get nowhere.

Then eventually Yue Qingyuan decides that he should probably tell Bingqiu that Shen Qingqiu is a demon. For like, safety purposes if nothing else. He's kept the secret so long also for safety purposes (even if someone put Shen Qingqiu under a truth compulsion he wouldn't be able to admit to being a demon, because he himself doesn't know!), and he's done tons of stuff to prevent anyone ever finding out (although Xiao Jiu is so talented that he didn't have to do much), but Luo Binghe is the demon emperor. That changes things. If Shen Qingqiu is going to be visiting the demon kingdoms regularly then there's a chance something could reveal the truth unexpectedly, and that would probably be worse.

So Yue Qingyuan sits down and has a very serious discussion with Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe about how Shen Qingqiu is actually a demon, was just the cutest little demon baby in fact, here he drew a picture from memory of what Xiao Jiu used to look like before he learned to look more human, and also how a lot of slave kids and slavers and people who fall through the cracks in society have demon ancestry, some more recent than others, and Shen Qingqiu always retained a certain discomfort around his own kind because of the adult slavers who sold him off, and etc etc.

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

One of the weird things about 21st century life is that in every majority-christian nation, the system is set up so that people with the most resources receive the most care and support. So, like, if you go to a hospital and you have a lot of money, you get treated first.

But in the Christian sacred texts, God is extremely clear about how social orders should be set up, which is that the last should be first to care and support. So the poor and marginalized should have access to the best care and support, and whatever resources are left after the poor are well-supported should be used in service of those who aren’t poor.

I think it is weird that God is so unambiguous about this, and people are so unambiguously into God and God’s will for us, and yet we don’t do much to amend these systems.

(We ARE better at providing care for the poor than we used to be, which is why there is so much less poverty today than there was 30 or 50 years ago. But it’s utterly obvious that we do NOT have a system that offers preferential care and support for the poor. Instead we offer preferential care to the rich--which feels so natural and inevitable to us that I often can’t see past the confines of this injustice. But it isn’t natural or inevitable. There was a time when monarchy felt inevitable, after all.)