Primal

The blunt side of Yamato suddenly struck across Dante's head wickedly, consciousness leaving him for all of thirty seconds, rendering him prone across the concrete, rain pouring over him. The quick shink of metal, and the weight of his two hidden knives leaving the strap of his thigh, tore his eyelids open, shrieking pain causing his entire body to convulse upwards. Vergil pinned the knives into his forearms, the metal crying out as it was pitched into the sheath of cement, buried deep.


Straddling his heaving brother, Vergil's smirk was wrenched across gorgeous features, eyes beaming with malice.


His fingers traced Dante's exposed torso, the younger's eyes darting nervously upwards at the seductive touch of his older twin, slight fear tracing his contours.


"Your soul," Vergil breathed, leaning down to whisper into his brother's ear, lips dangerously near to the curved shell. "it calls to me."


Both palms planted themselves over the panting chest, hot skin soaked by the rapidly falling rain.


"So beautiful Dante," Vergil purred plastering his body against the other, laughing at the sheer tenseness that fell over the younger at this close range. "Your soul, it sparkles you know."


His eyes gleamed, fingers falling over the the younger's chest, feeling the thunderous beating beneath.


"I could hold your heart in the palm of my hand," he whispered, sliding his nose over Dante's cheek. "And still your soul would will it to beat."


Without another word, Dante's cry wretched itself from his body, back thrown from the concrete as he nearly vomited--his twin's fingers breaking through flesh, tissue and bone, reaching beneath his rib cage to cradle the furiously beating organ in his hand.


Dante screamed so hard his voice felt raw, blood bursting from his lips and pooling over his face and eyes; Vergil's fingertips coiling around his heart.


"And I do, don't I my little brother?" Vergil laughed cruelly, watching with delight as his twin writhed and convulsed in agony. "I hold your heart wherever I go, don't I Dante?"


The younger's face was pale with blood loss, the modern, morbid art for his brother to twist into something beautiful. Vergil rested his face against his twin's, tilting their lips closer. He sighed tiredly, relenting his wretched hold on the younger's heart, feeling as though the organ itself gasped in relief, shuddering as it pumped once more, unhindered by cruel fingertips.


"I love you, you know," Vergil whispered like a secret, listening to the cackling as Dante's infuriated blood began to heal his wound. "Like two halves to one incomplete monster, never entirely anything but never truly empty as well."


Dante's brows had furrowed in fury, skin and bone clanking back together as he slowly gripped his sword, brother be damned in the wake of his rage. Still, Vergil continued on, oblivious to the miraculous healing and silent animosity of his other half, sighing once more as though the world rested over them.


"I love you," He'd lied, the weight like a thousand lies. "I just love you."


It brought Dante back for a moment, the thought of love, the thought that excruciatingly reminded him of Lady. How funny that the connotations of love and anything there after always brought him to thoughts of her, the being that probably fought the idea itself more than she'd ever fought so hard against anything in her life.


"Love," She'd told him not long ago, "is a two edged sword, one side graciously stronger than the other."


She had walked with him, amongst the ghettos and economically forgotten sides of town, showing him the worst of the worst as even his devil side had failed to see it. She'd pointed towards an elderly beggar man, crying out chaotically in the fumes of a schizophrenic outbreak, asking change of anyone that would tolerate him enough to provide so.


"You see him?" She had gestured. "You will never be him Dante. You will never grow old, you will never beg and you will never be seen as lingering and worthless. That is your gift, and perhaps, your curse."


She looked at him levelly, her eyes telling so many more years than she had purchased along the way, wisdom peering out from between mutli-colored irises.


"You will look back at your years," she whispered, "and you will miss them from a face that will betray nothing of the ages you've witnessed. But don't mourn them as we do. Don't look back in bitterness in what you've lost but in thankfulness that you experienced it at all. Don't see years of loving someone as though you wasted those moments, latching on to that which was vulnerable in time. Be grateful, rather, that you were given the heart enough, the days enough to love someone as some haven't. We can't all love those given us, even when obligation wills it so."


Her face had become hard, her father no doubt lingering in her ever turning mind.


"Love who and what you can Dante," She'd told him, unable to meet his gaze as she walked on, uncharacteristically giving into her human self. "Love what will be loved, however available it is. It is a gift, though two edged, to be afforded such. Even when heritage asks it so, sometimes the people we give our heart to the most, are the worst ones to surrender it. Love though and don't be angered when time steals them. Remember that you should be grateful that your heart gives you enough to cherish them."


He'd asked her sometime later, what it had been like to be with her father, to kill someone she had obviously felt so close to.


"It's hard," she told him honestly. "It's hard to accept that I loved him, that I lived for him. That for some moments in my life, I lived for just that look, just that moment when he would have loved me back, when he would have said straight out, "Mary my dear, you've made me damn proud". Sometimes, I think I imagined in moments of fanatical insanity that he WAS proud, that for one fucking second, he'd seen me as the man, the woman, the whatever he'd intended during conception with my mother, that I'd been. The worst love of all--- if I know nothing of love itself--- is the one-sided kind. The kind that leaves you constantly begging for more, for seeing something in the eyes of a monster that makes you falsely believe you're more than just an obligation; a thing.


"Maybe I loved my father too much; unnaturally so in that I lost myself to it. He controlled me in so many ways, made me forget myself in the moments I would pathetically pretend I was enthralled with his scientific ideas; in the moments I would pretend to know just what the hell he was talking about, going on and on about his experiments and the outcomes thereof.


"He hit me a lot. I guess I .... I hate saying it. I hate saying I come from an abusive family, the core of some sadistic "daddy's girl" the outcome of a young girl that hates her father and becomes the all too predictable bitch that slays the world of man in her vengeance for not being treated like a Beverly Hills 90210 teenager. I hate being psychologically figured, I hate being the mental experiment based on "nature versus nurture". I don't know what I am. I still don't know how I feel about my father, despite the outcome of the Temin-ni-gru. I know only that I fell in love, perhaps sickly so, and more cliche so, with someone that didn't love me back. And the cruelest nature of such, was that it only made me love him more. But do I regret that... maybe no."


He'd looked at her, mouth tight as he considered it.


"What was it like to kill him Lady?" he'd asked, against the more socially acceptable retorts.


"You mean, did it kill me?" She'd smiled cruelly. "No. Does the family of a comatose victim mourn so harshly when they pull the plug to someone that lives as a vegetable? I don't know. I know only that the day my father hit me, the very first time, I think that day, the man I originally knew died two days before hand. I don't know now what it takes inside a person to hurt a child, what makes them or what's missing inside that allows them to beat a weaker thing until it screams, until it cries. I don't know what makes a pedophile, what makes a man rape a woman he doesn't know, I don't know what makes a serial killer... I just know that when I looked into his eyes, REALLY, looked into his eyes, as much as I wanted to see so much there, as much as I probably IMAGINED so much to be there, I just saw emptiness.


"When I pulled the trigger? I think I cried for the first time in forever, really cried because I wasn't sorry. I think I wanted to be sorry, I wanted to mourn, I wanted to hate myself so surely for doing what I had. But I really think the cruelest part was that I couldn't mourn, I couldn't care. Like putting an animal out of its misery, I laid to waste the shell of my father's body, the monster behind the angelic mask, the charade that had become his life. Sometimes I think, ...." Her teeth grit. "Sometimes I think the greatest kindness we can give, Dante, is the understanding that somedays, we have to set someone free. Even if in all the world, we can't love anyone else more. My father once told me that the most beautiful flower of all, is the one that has never been picked, never been taken from its roots to lay between the fingers of a human; instead, it lives, it blooms, and it dies because someone wills it so. Because someone loved it more, loved it enough to set it free."

When Vergil had slid inside of him, gasps catching inside his body as he was pummeled almost violently, he could remember gazing into the rain, letting it fall painfully into his eyes; the veritible masochist in every way, begging for whatever cruel attention was available: he scoffed, like some sort of attention crazed dog. And he had felt it, even in the moment he was supposedly being "loved" by Vergil, that there was more than this. That there was something missing, something in the way of detachment he saw in his brother's eyes. Was his soul forever searching, lost and pathetic on a trivial pursuit of something that didn't exist? Was he asking too much for that 'something' that existed only in childhood fairy tales, only in the sociological expectancies of human nature? Was he asking too much for the idea of true love?


In Vergil, he lost himself. He always lost himself. He saw beauty, as it was told in Michelangelo paintings, in the faces of Botticelli angels, the imploring eyes that sparked with something his own could never reflect. He lost his humanity, when Vergil planted both hands on either side of his head, fingernails turning cement into paste beneath the clouded stars, wanting to surrender everything his father had treasured. Forsaking the social acceptances of the human race and indulging in what would be considered monstrous, unnaturally loving that which was said to never love.


God, ... God how he lost himself.


When Vergil had impaled his body over Dante, eyes gleaming with a sort of magic, a sort of horror that would make blood run like glacier water, he had only wanted more of it. More of the isolation from everything and everyone that suddenly beamed so petty.


"Love this," Vergil had told him, pumping viciously over his cock, smile so animalistic it couldn't have been conceived as human. "Love me."


But that wasn't love.


Dante's hand had gone upwards before he'd even acknowledge that he wanted it to move, tearing the short blade from the cement and digging into his brother's face in one rapid movement. The knife soared like heated metal through butter, flying through the soft under-skin of Vergil's chin. A choked gasp and a gurgle came, followed by dark blood spraying through the older twin's teeth. Dante could feel that the tip of the blade was buried deep in the roof of Vergil's mouth, dug to the hilt against creamy flesh.


Still a rotten smile crossed the mirror-like features of his brother's face, the older twin bending down, pushing his mouth against Dante's and filling it with blood. Tongues collided painfully, both swallowing crimson as flesh caught and was torn in the still buried knife in Vergil's mouth. Dante's eyes rolled back as the older once more began to move over him, head thrown back and gothic streams of blood tracing the beautiful exposed throat.


Sick as he was, much as he detested the prone position, (the ultimate control the other had over him in damn near everything), Dante's body swam with the feeling of liquid beauty, soaring to extents of sexual arousal he'd never known existed. His fingertips felt as though they sparkled with an inner power, like he could heal the world with this immense strength his twin radiated. His back began to arch upwards, his own throat exposed to Vergil's fangs and claws, the older taking advantage of such by clamping sharp teeth over the jugular vein and tearing sideways.


Fingertips buried deep in white hair, Dante doing the very thing he'd never in a thousand years expected he would: encouraging evil. He yanked Vergil's head up viciously, holding his hair tightly before kissing him, loving the cruelty of the blade as they both went over the edge of a precipice they'd never seen the top of. The fire of the orgasm
poisoned his mind with a thousand scenarios; a thousand insane possibilities.


The sheer magic of it tainted every resolve, every promise he'd ever made, wanting him to be this way with Vergil forever. Wanting him to willingly follow his brother on whatever path the other chose, be it good or evil.


'Take me with you,' his body had sang out to Vergil, arms coiling around the other. 'Anywhere, everywhere.'


But then it had ended. All of it.


Moments after the explosion that sent him into a wave of euphoria, Dante's thoughts awoke him, sickness welling within as he realized all that had nearly been lost. Every promise he'd made to himself, every whispered vow of vengeance at his mother's grave, he'd spit on it for a momentary bit of pleasure.


Vergil had merely stood, dressing himself as though they'd endured nothing more than any other training match, buckling his pants without even a glance to the other that still sat cross-legged on the ground, gazing up. Wrenching the blade from beneath his chin with a sickening grimace, he smirked for but a second, hurling the blood-soaked knife towards his brother, the force pinning through Dante's shoulder and sending him once more on his back.


By the time he'd managed to push himself upwards, Vergil had left, gone as though he'd never really existed. And Dante could only think, that for all his insisting that he would never leave, never be gone, Vergil, in a sense, had never been there at all.


Another memory plagued his thoughts, Dante's tired eyes gazing through the dirt covered window. He'd been sent to jail about a year after the first 'excursion' with Vergil, having gotten so entirely drunk in a local drinking establishment that it had taken less than twenty police officers to subdue him. Awakening, he hadn't even realized where he was, the alcohol simmering as memory returned. Rage, hatred, detachment and the ever constant isolation from everything. The bars had swirled around his vision, cruel fluorescent light pelting through his split eyelids.


"Ahhhh Dante," Came Vergil's voice, the light more thrashing as his eyelids flew apart, his head trying to pry its way from the floor. Vergil towered over him, his intimidating near 7 feet making him seem as tall as a building, cold blue eyes staring in mock-pity. "how foolishly you attempt to be one of them. Drinking in their caverns, sulking away your pathetic existence as though you're nothing more than a man."


He gazed around in disgust, silver iris's taking in the claustrophobic surroundings of the jail cell.


"You even allow them to contain you," He spat in repulsion, face blazing with something akin to controlled rage. "To cage your spirit. To confine that which is unfathomably more powerful than they are. You should be walking this earth as their God, yet here you lie." He sent a cruel kick to his brother's ribs, Dante's head jerking back from the force. "the human's little pet."


Dante's eyes fell to the floor, remembering the harshness of being pressed so suddenly into metal bars, the cold metal colliding over and over against his face while Vergil fucked him mercilessly from behind.


"Yeah," He actually said aloud to the emptiness, to the abandoned hell that had once been his home. "Yeah Vergil. You set me free."


And even as he spoke it, he knew it was a lie. For every human bar that had at one time held his body from the world, for every fingerprint he'd stamped in ink, Vergil's web of enigmatic lies caged him far more than anything the world had ever produced.


And that? That wasn't love.