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It is an unspoken agreement between them that they are not, nor will they ever be, in love.
Their touches never linger. Their kisses never last. They are a secret confined within the tacit hours of the night, meticulously hidden between dusk and dawn and the drawn curtains of her bedroom.
It is the faint scent of gunpowder and spring blossoms that never fails to catch his attention, perpetually clinging to her clothes, her skin, her hair. His gloves.
They don’t desire one another. They don’t crave one another. He doesn’t miss her when his fingers grow cold with solitude in the bleak light of morning.
He never seeks her out, always waiting for her to make the first move in this elaborate game of catch and release that they are playing. A glance. A sigh. A smile. A gun at his temple and a knife at his throat. She is hardly any better at expressing her desires than he is but she has always been twice as brutal.
She is a bad habit. A vice. An indulgence. Nothing more, nothing less.
He does not care for her. He does not live and breathe for these stolen moments entangled in her bedsheets and at the mercy of her fingertips.
He does not fall asleep to the sound of her breathless whispers in his ear.
They are not lovers.
They cannot afford to be.
Because love isn’t soft, like those poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.
Maybe that’s why she is the one wounded but he is the one bleeding.
“She’s hurt.” The words are bitter on his lips. They taste of shock and wonder in the worst kind of way. It is a statement and not a question in the same way her injury is real and not an unlikely possibility anymore.
He remembers their careful rhythm of dodge and parry and shoot and slash, always one step ahead, forever untouchable and invincible and as dread spreads through his veins, slow and steady like a numbing poison, he can’t help but feel betrayed. She never needed him to fight her battles before.
“She’s recovering,” Trish corrects him, her fingers idly twirling a lock of golden hair as piercing eyes glance at him from atop his brother’s heavy desk. “She was hurt but she is getting better now. She was discharged from the hospital yesterday. Did nobody tell you?”
He knows better than to think she doesn’t see right through him, beyond the yellowing pages of the well-loved book in his lap, dog-eared and stained in several places because its owner is a barbarian who reads in the bathtub, during breakfast, on a mission, after a fight, after a fuck, in his arms and curled up against his back without ever bothering to use a proper bookmark even after he so graciously went out of his way and made her several because he couldn’t bear to witness her indiscriminate cruelty towards printed prose anymore.
The faint traces of gunpowder and spring blossoms still clinging onto every printed word are suffocating, even after he closes the book and stares at its faded and worn cover in contemplative silence, trying not to choke on what remains left unsaid and on the tip of his tongue. Nobody told me , he wants to say. Why would anyone bother , he wants to ask. It’s not like I even care.
“You are allowed to be upset when a friend gets hurt, you know?” Her voice is nonchalant, almost dismissive but even without looking up he can tell she is being anything but insincere.
He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t want her concern, her approval, her anything. He wants her to be gone. He wants to be alone. He wants to be livid and mad with rage and murderous with hurt and above all he wants to leave these stifling thoughts behind and kill .
Killing is always easier than feeling. Killing is tangible and absolute.
He should have been there to kill, twisting and turning in a danse macabre, never missing a single beat of her gunshot melody.
She shouldn’t have been hurt.
And he shouldn’t be left useless and feeling .
“She is not my friend,” he says instead.
It is rarely silent in the Devil May Cry and the silence is always at its worst when his brother is gone.
Trish remains, seemingly unperturbed by his claim, patient like the woman she was crafted to be but isn’t. For all her flaws and imperfections that denote her a poor doppelgänger, she is still a force to be reckoned with. Worse, as she continues to twirl her hair atop his brother’s desk and stares at him with all the poise and pomp of a woman who is nowhere near naive enough to believe a single word tumbling from his lips, it dawns on him, grudgingly, that she has no incentive to be here, no purpose in telling him about any of this, no reason to remain calm other than knowing him too well.
“I know.” Her words are clear, deliberate. “I know that she is not your friend.”
“She is not my anything.”
The words are out before he has time enough to process them. He has never been one to lie. It is not like him to start now.
It’s not a lie , he tells himself, she doesn’t mean anything to me .
She can’t. Because things that mean something get lost and broken and hurt all the time. Just like when he was a trembling boy kneeling in the dirt before the burning ruins of his childhood. Just like when he was eighteen and in love and thought he could make it work if only he tried hard enough.
He is not good at making things work.
He is even worse at keeping people alive.
“Whenever you are done being sorry for yourself,” her voice interrupts his spiraling thoughts, “I came here with an actual job that needs to be taken care of and seeing as Dante is not back yet and I have a pressing appointment with another client, I told Morrison I’d pass it on to you.”
He is in no state of mind to think about work and yet the prospect of a hunt calms his uneasy nerves, albeit minutely. He meets her eyes, waiting, expectant.
“It’s still out there, you know. The demon that got her.”
He doesn’t need her to say another word. So she doesn’t.
Redgrave sleeps at night. The city knows better than to think its nightmares are trapped within dreams.
Monsters roam these streets and he is but one of them.
It is well past midnight by the time the blood on his sleeves has dried and restless feet carry him across cobbled pavements and desolate streets.
His doubts are always loudest in the dark. Pitch black and hungry, they leer at him from secluded alleyways and desolate corners, hiding and nesting inside his thoughts with razor teeth, slowly nibbling away at his resolve to keep his hand hidden, his cards close to his chest and unseen by her clever eyes.
It is a fool’s errand. She sees right through him the moment he appears on her doorstep, careful and controlled, bloodsoaked and blasé and knocking with the urgency of a man who is but one step away from crossing a line so fine and delicate neither quite dares to acknowledge it for fear of overstepping within a single glance, a single breath, a single word.
She does not smell of gunpowder tonight. She smells of exhaustion and disinfectant and fabric softeners. She looks tired, fragile. Above all, she looks miserable the second she reaches for his wrists, fingertips gently dancing along the crimson droplets both real and imagined as his heart bleeds out with every beat, every truth they never uttered written clearly on his sleeves for her to see.
Her hands are small in his, gentle and steady as warm water pours over his skin, washing away the dirt and grime and tacit shame from his fingertips.
She does not complain when he leaves his clothes in her bathtub, too wound up and anxious to care about how much of a bother it will be to get rid of the stains come morning. There is no angry banter. No heated kisses. As he sinks into bed next to her, she allows him to pull her close. This is not like them. Too quiet. Too gentle. Too sincere. No whispers. Just heartbeats. Just the rough texture of countless stitches against his fingertips. Just the warmth of her skin to remind him she is alive. Just the sharp intake of breath that she tries to hide whenever she moves too fast or breathes a little too deep.
“I’ll be fine,” she assures him, lips pressed against his temple where the barrel of a gun should have belonged.
“I know,” he says, this time , he thinks.
“No, you don’t.” Her voice is calm, her touch gentle even though her words aren’t. “You’ve seen me fight and you’ve seen me kill. You’ve never seen me suffer and heal. So you don’t know, Vergil.”
His words get stuck, then, lost somewhere between regret and blame and the realization that he hates this, he hates seeing her like this, he hates her for the restlessness that courses through his veins, for his inability to simply mend her wounds for her inability to shrug it off, for the fact that she is mortal and he is not, for leaving him behind, one day, to come back to an empty apartment and an empty bed and the fading scent of gunpowder and spring blossoms and a pile of dog-eared books and -
And for making him trip and fall and for maybe - possibly - stumbling alongside him.
“You’re not supposed to care,” he reminds her as gentle fingers card through his hair.
“Neither are you.” An admission as much as an admonition.
“I don’t,” he says.
“I do,” she replies.
His breath catches. He dares not look at her.
“You shouldn’t.” He thinks that maybe there is an almost plea hidden somewhere beyond the slight tremor of his fingers as he traces the faint outline of bandages across her skin. She remains deaf to it.
“But I do.”
There are no knives at his throat. No gunshots in his ears. Eventually, he feels soft lips press against his temple once more and his heart soars. And his fingers curl into the loose fabric of her shirt because he is not afraid, because he is not pleading, because the fine line, their unspoken agreement, has not been broken, has not been made into a lie. Pretense has not been pried from his hands, one gentle finger playing with a strand of his hair at a time.
“You are insane, woman.”
She laughs, quietly.
“I’ve been told I am a bit of a fool.”
He looks at her, then - raises his head and really looks at her, sees the faint crinkles around her smiling eyes, the fading scar across the bridge of her nose, the mirth barely hidden in the corners of her lips, and takes her in for what she is: hurt and human and vibrant and alive and a fool and mesmerizingly his.
“You are infuriating,” he says, “stubborn and bull-headed and absolutely mad.”
“And human,” she adds.
“And mortal ,” he concedes.
“And that is a problem.”
“Yes. It is. It is a very stupid, very persistent problem.”
“Probably because you’re a bit of an idiot.”
It’s because of her teasing smile, he thinks, because of the warmth clinging to her words and the laughter silently hiding in her voice and the stitches holding her skin together. It’s because she is here, he thinks, and because he doesn’t know how much longer she will be.
And then, he doesn’t think anymore.
“I have to be,” he says, “for falling in love with a fool.”
He is eerily familiar with the prickle of exhilaration that comes with a killing strike, that heady feeling of anxiety leaving his limbs as triumph courses through his veins, the rush of adrenaline that clings to his every breath when he is in battle. He has not expected this same feeling to numb his senses now, as he rests his head against her pillow smelling of disinfectant and fabric softener and watches copper and steel eyes staring back at him from beneath raven bangs.
“You’re an idiot for many reasons, Vergil. But not for that.”
It occurs to him for the briefest of moments that maybe he should be offended. He is not, though. He might be tomorrow. But not now.
Not while there is a small pile of dog-eared books on her nightstand right next to a picture frame proudly displaying the bookmarks he gifted her months ago, still crisp and clear and in pristine condition because she’d rather keep them than see them grow worn with use.
Not when he knows fully well that her kitchen will smell of Earl Grey in the morning when he stumbles through her apartment still half asleep, burying his head in her neck and circling his arms around her waist as she finishes her morning coffee and pours him a cup of tea.
Not when she inclines her head and her breath whispers against his lips and he thinks he’d rather slay a hundred more demons blindfolded and with both arms tied behind his back than let go of this femme so fatale, the only thing she defied more reliably than death was common sense.
Maybe, just for once, this can be love, and love can be soft, like those poets say.