A/N: In which I serve up sickeningly sweet tooth-rotting fluff to make up for the 14000 words of unmitigated angst.

Music for this chapter: Snow, Zion T


The stars, a silken scarf across the velvet sky–

Nero's hands curling in his father's coat–

Blood-slick fingers in broken cloth, screaming, screaming as his father closes his eyes–

Goliath, collapsing into dust–

Dante, a single, solitary flame, the Yamato in hand–

The veil between worlds sewn closed, shocking stillness across the square–

Dante's demon claws fading to human hands, wrapping gently around Nero's chest, pulling him away from Vergil's still form–

Nero screaming, thrashing, sobbing, Dante's raw, low voice murmuring words Nero cannot understand into his ear–

An arm around Nero's shoulders and another under his knees, weightlessness, the scent of fresh embers and old demon blood and rough crimson leather against his cheek–

Blinding lights, familiar voices, warm, soft blanket–

Then nothing.

(:~:)

The sun rises, climbs wearily towards its zenith–

–then falls again, slipping below the horizon, as the stars burn bright above.

(:~:)

Flame.

Vergil feels as though he is surrounded by nothing but fire; he gasps for breath with lungs that burn with each inhale, tongue too swollen to ask for water, and when he chances to open his eyes finds the world too bright with flame, drawing precious drops of moisture from the corners of his eyes.

A familiar, sword-calloused hand at the back of his neck, cool fingers on his burning skin; a glass at his mouth, blessedly cold liquid slipping between his lips to run down his parched throat. But he is so desperate that he gulps down too much, finds himself suddenly drowning, and he folds in on himself – coughing, his half of his mother's amulet sticking to the clammy skin of his collarbone, swollen eyes squeezed shut, as a steady arm supports his shoulders and a sweep of hair not his own brushes his forehead.

Vergil takes a wheezing, rattling breath, curling into the steadiness of this familiar presence at his back, and smells the scent of fresh embers, faint alcohol, black coffee. A scruffy-bearded chin scratches his forehead as the hand tucks his aching head into a cool shoulder.

He has a feeling he should know this constant, supporting presence, but the world is nothing but a blur, and each breath an exhausted struggle, so Vergil gives up on trying to think it through and falls down, down into the comforting darkness.

(:~:)

When Vergil next wakes, he is so incredibly comfortable he cannot bring himself to open his eyes.

Dark, blessed quiet.

He floats there for an indeterminate time, a gentle breeze ruffling through his hair, the mattress soft against his aching body. There is a warm weight at the centre of his chest, rising and falling along with his breathing.

It takes a gargantuan effort to open his eyes – each sliver of light a battle – and finds himself looking at an unfamiliar ceiling painted robin's-egg-blue. He blinks slowly, unhurriedly.

He becomes aware of another's breaths, and dips his chin down towards his chest with a languid movement.

Vergil's eyes widen.

Dante slumbers on, one ear pressed to the blankets directly above Vergil's heart, uncombed white hair spread messily over the covers. Dark shadows smudge his lower eyelids, and his beard has grown a day or two beyond its usual roguishly unshaven look into that of a wandering hobo. He has slid almost entirely off the chair beside the bed, worn cotton shirt a little small for him, faded red against white-painted wood. The Yamato rests sheathed beside the bed, propped up against the bedside table.

The chamber is painted varying shades of blue and white, and sunlight filters through gauzy cream curtains fluttering in a gentle breeze, drifting across the crisp white sheets, stopping at the edge of Dante's fan of untidy hair.

Vergil's limbs are too heavy to shift. He opens his mouth, but finds his throat too dry to speak.

He closes his eyes briefly in frustration. His thoughts have not yet fully ordered themselves – there is something important that has happened, but his head still aches if he casts his memory back further than the last few moments.

Watching Dante drool onto the coverlet, ear pressed to Vergil's chest, Vergil wonders…

He takes a long, slow, breath, exhales carefully, and waits, chest still.

It takes a moment. Black spots begin to dance before Vergil's vision after a mere few seconds, and he wonders if he has made a mistake–

Dante's eyes fly open, and he has one hand clenched around Vergil's wrist at the pulse-point and the other grasping his shoulder with bruising strength before Vergil can do much more than gasp in his long overdue breath.

They stare at each other across the same horizontal plane, Vergil's chest quietly heaving with the exhausted effort of holding his breath, Dante's red-rimmed gaze searching, a little wild – melting into an almost painful relief.

"Shit, Vergil," Dante whispers. "Don't scare me like that."

Vergil screws his eyes shut, his breath coming in quick, short gasps now. Holding his breath had been a terrible idea – one he manifestly regrets.

The sharp scrape of chair against floorboards. The mattress dips by Vergil's side as Dante's arm slides under Vergil's back, guiding him upright. To Vergil's shame, his head lolls against Dante's shoulder, his neck as pliant and weak as the rest of him as he chokes in each breath with hitching effort.

He hates this. He hates all of this.

Forcing himself to draw slower, even breaths, Vergil tilts his head back on Dante's shoulder with enormous struggle and skewers his brother with his most venomous glare.

A wide, brilliant smile spreads on Dante's face. "Ah, there's my grouchy idiot of a brother," he says. "I knew you'd pull through.''

Vergil furrows his brow. There is a clue there, in Dante's words – a clue as to how he ended up here, exhausted in this unfamiliar room, with his demon powers the merest hum at his core where they should be a furnace–

Memory rushes in all at once, like searing starfire into his still-healing bones, and his stomach clenches with the phantom pain of Red Queen slicing through his abdomen in cold, frozen metal.

Nero. His son.

Vergil's hands scrabble uselessly across a few meagre inches of the coverlet towards Dante. He opens his mouth, wheezes two unintelligible syllables from lips too cracked to form coherent sounds.

"Nero's fine!" Dante says hurriedly, fingers closing tightly across Vergil's palm. "He's fine," he repeats, softer, and Vergil stares up at him, the words dissipating ever-so-slowly across his scarred mindscape, like variegated ink seeping into water.

Dante's fingers slip out of his, and Vergil feels a traitorous twinge of denial at the loss of warmth, but then Dante's hand returns at the edge of his vision, bearing a glass of clear water, and Vergil is too grateful for the liquid slipping over his swollen tongue to care for the humiliation.

Dante's wrist is iron under Vergil's fumbling grasp, controlling the tilt of the glass despite his near-desperation, and all too soon the glass is set aside and Vergil finds himself blinking slowly, exhausted.

He feels as though he has a lake in his stomach, pushing agianst the fabric of his sleevless shirt.

"So yeah, Nero's fine. Kyrie's looking after him," Dante is saying now, all easy blather again, but with an odd note in his voice that has Vergil straining to look up at his brother. "He woke up scr– uh, asking after you, too. Wouldn't stop trying to get out of bed until Kyrie told him you were doing okay."

"He has…fully healed?" Vergil whispers, voice rough with disuse.

Dante nods, the movement a brush of his untrimmed beard against Vergil's hairline. "Still weak as a Nidhogg hatchling and about as noisy to boot, but fully healed. Just needs rest, like his old man."

Vergil cannot fully see Dante's expression from this angle, but notes with a frown that Dante has curled in on himself a little, despite the arm he has around Vergil's shoulders. As though he is carrying a hidden weight. Almost…guilt.

Vergil opens his mouth to speak on it, but then Dante is jabbering again, a mile a minute like he always has from the moment they first learnt to speak, and then there is something about food and Dante leaves him carefully sat up in bed and buttressed on all sides by a mountain of pillows, and fairly rushes out of the room before Vergil can do more than weakly protest.

Food comes in the form of a tray in Kyrie's hands, and Vergil feels heat rise on his cheeks when it becomes apparent she is prepared to help him eat where his arms still tremble to bear their own weight. Then he considers that the alternative would be Dante feeding him, and decides that this is the preferable option.

And Kyrie somehow keeps him at ease with her light, laughter-filled conversation, despite the fact they have not met more than half a dozen times, and never without Nero's watchful eyes staring at Vergil as though daring him to make a wrong move.

Nero.

Nero's absence gnaws at Vergil like a missing limb. Though Kyrie's presence is a comfort – knowing she would not leave Nero if he were in any danger.

"Thank you," Vergil murmurs, as she stands, empty tray in hand. He is almost surprised to find he means it.

"You're welcome," she says, smiling radiantly at him. "Is there anything else you need?"

"No, thank you."

She helps him settle back into the cocoon of blankets, and he realises belatedly as she closes the door behind her that this must be a spare room in she and Nero's home, and winces inwardly at another debt owed to his son, on top of all that he needs to repay his son already.

Despite his fatigue, he waits a while, to see if Dante will return.

When the door stays firmly shut, Vergil refuses to admit to himself that he is almost disappointed.

(:~:)

The days pass at a languid, golden pace.

Though at first gratified to find his demon core slowly recovering, like a muscle held taut too long slowly knitting new fibres, Vergil finds himself growing increasingly frustrated with the slow pace at which he regains his physical strength.

He snaps at Dante a few times – usually when Vergil is too humiliated that he has to be half-carried to the bathroom across the room, or angry at the mess he makes when he attempts to eat by himself, or missing Nero terribly but not voicing it, or bitterly disappointed at his own almost plaintive wish that Dante would stay beside him instead of only slipping into the room to aid Vergil in tasks he cannot do himself.

There is a cautiousness to Dante's touch now that had been absent upon Vergil first waking. Dante – who had always so loved to invade Vergil's personal space since they were children, and after their return from Hell had so often braved the threat of the Yamato's blade to throw a casual arm around him or nuzzle a bristly face into his neck when tipsy after drinks with Lady and Trish – Dante now only touches Vergil when absolutely necessary, fingers loose upon his wrist and another hand lightly supporting his back, and Vergil–

Vergil doesn't fully understand why he hates it.

He simply knows he does, and that confusion only makes him snap all the more often at his brother, and when Dante actually flinches at one particularly bad outburst, Vergil nearly opens his mouth to apologise – but then Dante is barking another easy laugh, a smile crinkling the skin around his too-bright eyes, and Vergil is pressed into silence by the sheer emotional weight of Dante's forced cheer.

It doesn't help that Vergil is barely sleeping, either.

Nero comes to him in the night as a wraith in his dreams, a gaping hole in Nero's chest where his heart should be, both arms uselessly mangled, legs twisted and torn. Vergil sprints to him every night, in the same, hopeless dream, only for the light to die in Nero's eyes the moment Vergil falls to his knees by his son's side.

And Vergil would wake, chest heaving, drenched in cold sweat, teeth clenched tight around the scream he would not release.

It is a skill he learnt from his time in captivity under Mundus – to hide his weaknesses even in slumber.

Then Dante comes up to Vergil's room in full battle gear on the fourth day after his waking to tell him that a hunt was on and that Dante would be gone for most of the night – and Dante joints Vergil's dreams that night with Nero, both dead and gone by the time his dream self stumbles to their bodies.

Vergil wakes in the early hours of the morning, shivering hopelessly, with the singular, irrational thought that he has to see his son.

He pushes aside the blankets with numb, fumbling hands, and sits up with difficulty – an effort that leaves him wheezing on the side of his bed, hands pressed to either side of his long cotton trousers, blinking the grey spots out of his vision.

It is here that Vergil notices, with the hazy dissociation of the utterly exhausted, that there is a shadow under the crack of the bedroom door where the moonlight pools from the window to lap against the doorframe itself.

It is a shadow cast by something – or someone – leant directly against his door.

But there is not even the merest whisper of dangerous demonic energy from that direction.

It does not matter. Not when he has to see his son.

Vergil takes a deep breath that wipes some – not all – of the spots from his vision, and stands in one smooth motion.

The floor rushes up to meet his face, and he cannot quite stop the choked cry that escapes him as his forehead smashes into the wood, a long cut opening on his brow from a gap between the floorboards.

His door flies open, and Dante tumbles through headfirst, shower-damp hair flying haphazardly about his face.

Even as Dante scrambles towards him on hands and knees, Vergil stares, because how long has Dante been sitting on the other side of his door?

"Vergil, you dumbass," Dante growls as he peels Vergil halfway off the floor and holds him close, running a thumb over the slowly knitting cut on Vergil's forehead.

Vergil does not reply immediately, because the feeling of his brother's arms around his shuddering, sleep-deprived form is such a sweet relief that he finds himself turning his face into Dante's shoulder despite knowing he would regret the humiliation later.

"Verge?" Dante's voice is vibrating through Vergil's cheek, now, sounding increasingly concerned.

"I needed to see Nero," Vergil whispers, and the admission nearly unmakes him right here and now – the voicing of his first and greatest desire, in the presence of his second, no less great, weakness.

Dante's hold tightens around him. "I know," he says, "I know you miss him, even if he's just down the hall. Nero's safe. Kyrie's got him."

"It…it isn't…so simple," Vergil breathes into Dante's shirt, shivering in the chill night air. "The nights – I've not– I haven't–"

One of Dante's hands vanishes from Vergil's side, and Vergil automatically curls closer, to his shame – but then there is a rustle of sheets and Dante has pulled the thick comforter from the bed and wrapped it around the two of them, trapping their shared body heat under the same warm quilt.

"You should have told me you weren't sleeping, Verge." There is an aching, tired note to Dante's voice that shouldn't be there, and Vergil spares an assessing glance at his brother.

The shadows under Dante's eyes have only grown larger in the past few days, and there is the ghost of pain under Dante's ever-teasing smile.

"You're not sleeping either," Vergil says with slow realisation, and Dante looks away, damp white hair falling over his features.

A pause.

"Have you been keeping guard outside my door?" Vergil hisses, and he cannot help the edge in his voice now, at the insinuation of his weakness. In a way, though, he is absurdly glad for the quilt. It has cocooned them both, now, and Dante cannot push him away no matter what Vergil says.

Dante's lips twist. "Stop being such a pompous jackass. Not everything is about your power–"

"–Then why the hell are you doing it, then?" Vergil half-yells, only to realise at the last moment that he might wake Nero, and settling for glaring at his brother instead as Dante folds in half.

"I CAN'T STOP SEEING YOU DEAD!" Dante fairly screams into the quilt by Vergil's shoulder, voice muffled by a mouthful of cloth.

Vergil stops breathing, heart hammering fit to burst in his chest.

Dante raises his head.

They stare at each other, Vergil shocked to silence, furious tears welling at the corners of Dante's eyes.

"Every time I close my eyes," Dante says – and Vergil realises his brother is folding himself carefully close to him, holding him tightly without resting his weight on him – "Every time I close my eyes, I see you dead. Or Nero dead, but mostly you, because you got stabbed twice, you dumbass, and I wasn't there to stop it, and I will never stop paying for that for as long as I live."

A pause, in which the moonlight reflects across two white-haired heads curled tight about each others' shoulders.

"I haven't been sleeping," Vergil whispers into Dante's thin cotton shirt, "because I've been seeing Nero dead. And then when you told me you were leaving for demon-hunting tonight, your corpse joined his."

Dante's shoulders hitch in a hiccupping sob. "Shit."

Then: "I'm sorry," Dante sniffs.

"It was not any fault of yours that you could not come to our aid," Vergil says, fingers finally warm as they curl into Dante's hair and rest at the back of his neck. "They watch me, those informers to the Fates; Called Fortune, Chance, Necessity, and Death."

Dante snorts, breath warm against Vergil's collar. "C'mon, you've gotta stop it with Blake, Vergil."

"Wilfred Owen," Vergil corrects, and feels Dante laugh for real, ear brushing against Vergil's, arms shaking around his back.

They rest like so for a long while, safe in each other's hold, cocooned in a single quilt much like they used to as children, when they would spend half a day hating each other over some inconsequential quarrel and then throw a tantrum if their mother gave them separate blankets at bedtime.

Vergil would have quite contentedly stayed like so for eternity if his joints do not begin to protest.

He shifts a little, and feels Dante shake himself awake, breaking off halfway through a snore.

"Pig," Vergil says, not quite able to stop the fondness from seeping into his voice.

"Stuck-up fancy-schmancy dumbass," Dante says, helping him up. "C'mon, you need to rest. We can see what we can manage with Nero in the morning."

When Dante helps him settle back in bed, though, Vergil curls his fingers tight about the quilt where they have left Dante's side. He will not ask, if Dante does not offer.

Dante stares at him for a moment, then snorts a laugh.

"Shove over," he says, and gamely pushes Vergil to the other side of the bed, hogging an obscene number of the pillows for himself as he climbs in and pulls the comforter over them both.

Vergil clubs his brother in the face with a pillow with somewhat less strength than he would have liked, and rolls his eyes with mock exasperation as Dante does an excellent impression of his drunk persona and snuggles up to Vergil's neck with his itch-inducing stubble.

They fall asleep proper as the sun begins to rise, turning the silvery moonlight on the room wall to spun gold.

When Kyrie finds them in the morning, her hands go to her mouth to cover her smile – and Nico, having come to visit, gapes, whips out her phone, and promptly takes three dozen photos from different angles.

Vergil and Dante sleep on, dreamless.

(:~:)

When, that afternoon, Dante pronounces Vergil "Maybe kinda sorta okay to sit out a bit" Vergil is so caught up in the opportunity to leave his lonely little room with its unending procession of kindness and gentleness and understanding that he staggers eagerly to the stairs under Dante's hold, and even subjects himself to the humiliation of needing to be carried down the stairs themselves.

Two days ago, he would have balked at the idea and resigned himself to another lonely afternoon, but with a good night of sleep with Dante using him as a hot-water-bottle, Vergil finds Dante's steady hold more of a comfort than anything else.

Not that he'd ever admit that on pain of death, but, well.

Vergil is wheezing a little by the time they make it to the garden, and Dante has a concerned expression hidden there under his teasing smile – but Vergil makes a pointed glare that plainly says if you take this from me when your life is forfeit, and his brother settles him on the tall-backed bench facing Kyrie's neat little rows of tulips without another word.

Dante tucks the heavy woolen throw tighter around Vergil's shoulders, produces his first-edition Wilfred Owen out of nowhere – Dante had most definitely gone back to the Devil May Cry shop to get it with the Yamato, the sneaky little thief – but Vergil is so looking forward to a quiet afternoon in the sunshine with poetry in his hands and his brother at his side that he does not have the heart to yell at Dante about it.

Well. He will just have to thrash his brother soundly when he is well and they can spar again.

But then Dante bounces back into the house with a quick word to wait, and Vergil's feels a dawning sense of betrayal when he hears Kyrie and Nero's voices growing steadily closer, and Dante's joining them.

Vergil is not– he is not ready for this.

As much as he had wanted to see his son, in the desperate, overwhelming moments after his nightmares, facing his son now with all that transpired between them in their four-day journey of blood and sacrificeis not something he is in any way prepared for.

And Dante has the gall to spring this on him–

Vergil narrows his eyes. He is going to make Dante suffer for this.

Nero's chuckle is a low, light-filled thing that strikes directly at Vergil's heart.

And then Nero appears, one arm thrown over Dante's shoulders for support, wrapped in a flannel bathrobe, unshaven so bits of white hair stick haphazardly out of his chin, fluffy blue slippers embroidered with the words I love my girlfriend on his feet–

Vergil stares at his son.

Nero stops laughing quite abruptly when he catches sight of Vergil, and somehow manages to blanch and turn red at the same time, turning his face a patchy, pinched white while his ears flame brilliant, tomato red.

Dante looks between the two of them with a beatific smile and dumps Nero unceremoniously next to his father on the bench.

"Kyrie's making hot chocolate," Dante says happily, and bounces back into the house with a skip in his step when Vergil and Nero skewer him with identical, narrow-eyed glares.

The afternoon sunlight filters over them both, suffuses Vergil's aching limbs with warmth.

Father and son stare at the rows of tulips in silence.

It is terribly quiet here, in the idyllic peace of the garden, with nothing but snatches of occasional birdsong to distract Vergil from the sound of his son's quiet breathing.

Each breath, so utterly, beautifully alive.

Vergil's fingers clench tight around the poetry volume in his hands. In the corner of his vision, Nero opens his mouth and closes it again, twice in rapid succession.

Carefully, Vergil glances to his right, assessing his son in the corner of his vision. Nero appears quite well, if a little thin, faint smudges of shadow under his eyes that suggests poor sleep, though, and a resolute frown at the corner of his lips. Nero is doing the same thing Vergil is – sharp blue eyes taking in the tired tilt of Vegil's shoulders, as though searching for remaining injury. Nero's hands are worrying at the flannel of his opposite sleeves, much as Vergil's thumbs are growing white on the book his own hands.

It is this little detail – Nero's hands, both healthy and whole and clean and unbroken, that allows speech to bubble up through Vergil's lips.

"I am glad to see you well," Vergil murmurs, looking away as he says so, and feels Nero tense beside him.

A heartbeat, where Vergil's old fears of Nero pushing him away rise to the forefront of his thoughts, leaving him almost dizzy with a mixture of self-hatred and anxiety.

Then: "You're looking better," Nero says, in halting starts and stops. "I– I mean, better than the last time I uh. Saw you."

A moment, where they both remember the thundering retort of the goliath falling above, the slow seep of Vergil's blood into the dirt, Nero curled over his father's chest in one last, desperate effort to shield him.

The memory strikes silence into the air between them again. It is yet too fresh, too vivid, the regret too bitter on Vergil's tongue.

An angry buzzing sounds to Vergil's right, and he turns slowly to find Nero making a face at the wasp that circles his head, raising a hand to swat at it but not quite succeeding.

Vergil takes a breath, draws on the shallow, cracked pool of blue-lit energy within him, and conjures a tiny toothpick-like blade of blue light that spears the wasp from the air.

Nero inhales sharply beside Vergil as Vergil closes his eyes against his sudden splitting headache.

"Hey," Nero is saying, and there is a hand on Vergil's wrist, where the too-rapid pulse hammers against his skin.

Vergil forces open his eyes as the headache fades to a dull throb, and meets his son's gaze.

A moment, in which neither of them speak, and Nero's gaze drops, and his hand loosens on Vergil's wrist though Nero is about to turn away again–

Vergil's fingers reverse in an almost frantic motion to clasp the edge of Nero's escaping sleeve, his fingers just brushing the back of Nero's wrist – the same wrist that had hung useless and shattered in those last desperate hours in the dome.

Nero freezes.

Then, because Vergil is quietly terrified that this will be all they are forever – silent, unspeaking, a chasm of blood and pain between them – he steels himself and speaks.

"If I had to do it again," he whispers, "All of it, in order that you might live, I would do so."

Nero does not respond except to turn his head to the side, hiding his face, but a moment later Vergil hears something that might have been a muffled sniff.

"Thanks, Dad," Nero says, so quietly that Vergil almost misses it.

And then, suddenly, they are fine.

The afternoon sunlight seems suddenly twice as clear than before, pollen drifting between the multicoloured tulips swaying to the breeze, slow bumblebees wandering in meaningless patterns over the emerald grass.

The skylark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around
To the bells' cheerful sound–

Vergil allows himself a smile. Blake.

Dante apparently chooses this moment to barge in on this tranquil peace, two steaming cups of hot chocolate in his hands, which he pushes into his brother and nephew's hands without preamble.

"Drink," Dante says, pulling off his thin cotton shirt in the warm afternoon sunlight and collapsing in a tangle of messy limbs in the empty space on Vergil's left, sighing contentedly and allowing his head to drop into the space between Vergil's blanketed shoulder and the back of the bench.

Vergil looks down at the cup in his hands. The thick chocolate within is about a third lower compared to Nero's, and is missing quite a number of marshmallows.

Nero pauses halfway into taking his first sip, looking at Vergil's chocolate, too.

They both twist to stare at Dante as one.

Dante is licking away his own chocolate mustache with a careless grin. "I wanted some. I wasn't about to take my favourite nephew's…but old cranky here is fair game."

Vergil pointedly mashes his heel into the top of Dante's foot, and takes his first sip of chocolate in utter contentment as Dante howls.

The chocolate is blessedly sweet, comfortingly warm.

"Y'know," Dante drawls, "You two are going to be a pain in the ass to spar when you're well enough to start training again. You two are damn near telepathic by now."

"Nero fights well," Vergil murmurs. "He could always have beaten you." He risks a glance to his right to find Nero's cheeks turning beet red, and finds his own face rapidly heating as well.

Dante laughs out loud.

A serene pause.

Vergil's eyes slide to his son, carefully. "I could," he begins, and stops as the words stick in his throat. "If you wished, I could…with your training…I…"

Nero looks momentarily stunned. "Are you…offering to train me?"

Vergil determinedly looks at a tulip by his feet and nods once. Then he sneaks a glance back at his son and finds Nero wearing an expression that makes him look ten years younger – like a small child whose father has offered him the world.

It is too much all at once. Vergil looks anywhere but at his son and brother, and watches the sky instead.

The sun travels overhead in a blessedly slow arc.

Dante digs his bristly face into Vergil's left shoulder and falls asleep. Neither Vergil or Nero speak, an unspoken wish not to break the peace in the little garden resting earnest and heavy between them, and Vergil has almost dozed off himself with his head against the warm wood of the bench when a soft weight drops onto his right shoulder.

It takes every ounce of self-control not to tense, and Vergil dips his chin carefully to find his son's spiky hair tickling his nose where Nero has slid in sleep down to Vergil's shoulder, the empty mug slipping in his lax hands.

Vergil is glad there is nobody else in the garden with them, because he does not quite trust himself not to start smiling like fool right there and then.

Then the garden doors slide quietly open, and the smile slips off Vergil's face as Nicoletta tiptoes out onto the grass, a wide grin on her lips and a camera in her hand.

You would not dare, he mouths at her.

She rolls her eyes and looks pointedly at Nero, and Vergil grinds his teeth because he knows she is right – his brother is fair game, but Vergil would never risk waking his son, even to avoid the humiliation Nicoletta would likely hold over his head for years to come.

Then Nero presses closer to Vergil in sleep, mumbling disjointed syllables, and Vergil could swear hearts begin to pour out of Nico's eyes.

And so Vergil sits still, seething, as the soft click of Nico's camera joins the birdsong of the garden, and Dante and Nero breathe quietly against him.

Then Nico slips back into the house with a thumbs up and a wink, and quiet stillness falls over the garden again.

Vergil has never felt so warm, and so content, since the tranquil afternoons of his childhood with Dante beside him, wooden swords in hand, and the sky an unbroken arc of brightest blue, his family safe within reach.

They rest together, three white-haired heads against the garden bench, until the sun slips at last towards the horizon and they are called in to supper.

END


Notes:

"Give us Dante snuggles," my twin WafflesRisa said. (She has been essential in the planning and execution of this story, by the way, so check out her writing on AO3 if any of you are 1917 fans)

"I WILL GIVE YOU SNUGGLES OR GIVE YOU DEATH," I declared, and proceeded to write...this. The whole blanket gratuitous hugging touch-starved mess this was.

I hope it was a satisfying ending to this two-part story. I will likely continue to dabble this this particular universe, so look out for more stories in this series later on. I'm also on AO3!

If anyone is interested in Star Wars, I'm most known for my fics in that fandom. You can also find me on tumblr at eirianerisdar.

I'll be replying to comments soon!