Primal

“So where have you been Vergil?” She had to ask.

“Never too far Mary,” he sighed.

“Never too close either.” She ended.

He turned, looking at her. She seemed entirely in her element, the broken girl-scout, surrounded by her cherished, broken city. Newspapers scattered along the ground, the breath of the underground tunnels pushing them erratically along. Cold wind from the upper city scratched along his skin, teeth clenching at the awful sound of screeching; the rusted tracks being rapped by old subway cars.

The place was awful, he decided, the exalted “upper world” of earth paling in comparison to hell, his home. At least things down there weren’t so fucking sugar-coated; white and sparkling while rotting inside. There were no uses for lies or deceit in the other world, merely the occasional tricks of devils to fool the all-too-naïve humans.

But devils never lied. Devils never said that they loved. Devils never fell because of poisonous emotions.

Pathetic really.

Yet he had only to look at her and hate the fact that she was human. It was always the strange curse with Vergil, the fact that she had a heart and the fact that he loved to break it. Sure, it was true. Everyone knew that she had loved him, loved him far too deeply for one her age. And yes, it was exactly as she had said it; he knew precisely what she wanted, what she figured she deserved. And no, he had no intention of ever giving it to her.

Mary, Lady: a game.

At first, it was genuine intrigue, that someone of her age, someone so human and tender could so forcefully defile herself in the confines of a bedroom. He had merely gone inside out of curiosity, wondering if one of Arkham’s horrid experiments had crept into Mary’s bedroom and was the culprit of the strange sounds he heard coming from the other side of the door.

What he’d seen had left its own mark, his eyes gleaming and a smile stretching over his stoic features. He watched her, unapologetically, eyes beaming like slanted, cruel moons in the shadows as she did it. Sweat beaded on her bare stomach, dripping down the sides, smeared by the ministrations of her fingers. She writhed, and how he loved the word now, her tiny heels seeming to claw at the sheets beneath them.

Writhe. His favorite human word.

He even let his imagination get the better of him, watching intently as she would bend forward and then throw herself back, her legs spread so wide as she seemed to plead for it. For him. For the dark bastard to creep from the shadows and plunge inside of her, filling her restless need.

And then she said it. Just fucking said it.

“Vergil.”

He stood absolutely still, shocked that she could have seen him, that his hiding place had betrayed him and instead left him the peeping-tom that he most assuredly was. But she hadn’t seen him.

“Vergil…..” She had breathed, the insides of her body clenching around the word, around her fingers buried so deeply within. “God…. Vergil….”

Sleep had soon come to her, her pretty, petite little body still bare to the blue moonlight that beamed through her window. She was like a perfect doll, naked and tossed over a canopy bed, pretty arms resting lazily alongside her exhausted body. Legs still spread as if she waited for it, for him.

Things had been good from then on.

It had become a strange game, to see how far he could tease her, to embarrass her, without letting on that he’d seen.

At dinner time he would do ridiculous things, her father’s overwhelmed mind too distracted to ever catch on.

“Hm….” He would quirk an eyebrow. “melted butter. Nothing quite like it Mary. How it spreads and melts all over your fingertips. Hmm…” He closed his eyes dreamily. “Creamy isn’t it?”

At first she stared at him like a maniac, every semi-sexual remark seeming totally off-put and inexplicable. And despite common belief, Vergil DID have a sense of humor; albeit blasphemous and most of the time at the expense of other people. He took weird delight in throwing off-the-wall words into every day sentences, often grumbling about her father “fingering” him when experiments went wrong or insisting the man was simply “masturbating” in Vergil’s absence.

So it became the weird, unspoken secret between them and Vergil couldn’t have been happier about it.

He would watch her, in his own devil-may-give-two-shits way, seeing her eyes lock on him across the dinner table. As he would walk nonchalantly through the mansion, he would sometimes feel her eyes upon his back, probably against her own will, wondering what must be going on in the mind of her father’s supposed pupil.

In a way, despite his ties to Dante, if one could say Vergil had essentially “grown-up” with anyone, it would have been Lady. But again, the darker son did nothing without an ulterior motive and what might have at times been perceived to be benevolence was usually just a tool to achieve what he truly wanted.

He smiled in the moments of nostalgia, remembering how her skin had never looked so fresh, her eyes so beaming and her body clad so gorgeously in a golden dress, the eve of one of her father’s fundraiser banquets. Young, wealthy men had come from far and wide, each one money hungry suckers for the daughter of the world renowned scientist.

It still astounded Vergil, looking at her now, that Mary was always the last one to think of herself as anything but ordinary, her face covered in surprise when one after another, men asked her to dance. It almost made her that much prettier, her complete obliviousness to the fact that she was beautiful.

And never had she looked more so than when the golden lightening from the ballroom shown into her eyes, the contrasting colors so vibrant as she swirled in the dance.

Dancing.

An odd human ritual he’d decided.

Yet her eyes always came to him, as he watched, ignoring the countless conversations directed at him. ‘Yes Mary,’ He would think. ‘Believe it. Believe I love you. Believe I want you. Say my name one more time angel.’

And though one would be hard-pressed to believe it, it was actually Vergil who had taught Mary how to ride a motorcycle. He had taken the time to physically catch her unawares, studying the odd little quirks of a human woman. Yet it seemed that as she walked amongst the confines of her little castle, that truly, nothing was hers. Life coursed through her veins when banquets were held and people BESIDE Vergil and her father inhabited their tiny little world. Yet when the last guest’s footsteps trotted through the closing door, it became, once more, her prison.

So he began to rescue her.

He would leave little notes beneath her pillow, telling her to meet him in unused corridors of the house. The first time had really been an experiment, a test to see if courage alone would will her to indeed meet him in the south wing of the mansion. Sure enough, she’d come, fire in her eyes as she demanded to know precisely why he’d been in her bedroom in the first place and secondly, why the hell was she meeting him at such a crude hour of the night.

He’d never even answered her, simply walking away, knowing she would follow. She even came willingly, as he coldly wrapped her in his arms, gracefully falling from a high window and soaring towards the ground. Yet she refused to hold on any tighter than necessary, teeth grinding as they came to a halt, safely on the shore of an ocean he doubted she’d ever even touched.

What she thought of him, he never knew. His freakishly tall figure, porcelain skin, wolfish eyes; the fact that his body had reached full adulthood far too early for one his age. He never knew if it horrified her, when he would let them fall for stories, his feet gracefully colliding with the ground when a normal man’s body would have exploded on impact.

He knew only that she would politely look away when he astonished her, when his eyes would glow through the darkness, the inner light of his demon letting them beam like dull flashlights through the murky night. He knew only that she never asked him why he could perform these incredible feats or why she seemed to be the only one he allowed to witness them.

But they’d stayed on the beach, all night, walking without words as she took in the vastness of something she’d read about, yet had only in slight glimpses ever seen (and still then, probably not for many years). The fog that perpetually concealed the house in shadows was gone and moonlight danced merrily on the tumultuous surface of the sea. Boarded windows had never allowed her eyes to see what he had probably shrugged his shoulders to a thousand times, his mind curious as to what he could show her if afforded the time and will to do so.

If he had known then what he knew now, he might have understood why it was so essential that Mary never venture from the house, never come in contact with men, never lose her virginity. He would have known, while he watched her dance, why her father’s eyes stared even harder than his own, keeping sure that she would never get too close, never get too comfortable.

Ah, but if the filthy bastard had only known.

Arkham had once left for nearly a week’s time, blissfully unaware of Vergil’s cruel interest in his daughter, probably counting on the younger man’s normal, borderline asexual behavior. Vergil hadn’t wasted a moment’s time, waking Mary as the sun began to rise, wrenching her from her bed to see it come over the water for the first time. And she had never complained, sitting in silence as she blinked away the tears he couldn’t for the life of him understand.

Tears were usually when a human was in pain, at least from what he’d witnessed. Yet here she was, witnessing something most people would have considered beautiful, her hands clasped over her mouth as she breathed into them. Another odd occurrence he’d chalked up to absolute human insanity.

Later he had taken her to a local bike shop, still in awe that the simplest of luxuries (like walking into a town?) seemed to stun her into silent contemplation. She’d gazed at each one, tiny fingertips tracing along the smallest bits of dust, admiring the glazed texture of a good paint-job.

“If you were to pick one, which would it be?” He’d asked cryptically, the first bit of conversation they’d had.

And so she’d beamed, grinning wildly when gesturing towards one. But he’d never seen her eyes so wide, her mouth so lax as when he’d tossed an old credit card at the owner, purchasing the bike at asking price then and there.

It had become their secret time together, the hours they’d spend pushing the bike far enough away from the mansion so as not to be heard, his voice calmly explaining which gear to be in at which speeds, how to pull in the clutch at which times and precisely what NOT to do when riding. She’d hung on every word, hiding her frustration when she’d killed the motor by letting out the clutch too fast, hiding her embarrassment when she didn’t ride like an expert the first few times around.

Vergil’s patience surprised even him, enjoying these encounters more than he would have liked to. It was the closest thing to a friendship he’d ever known and what was worse than that, it had crept up on him. He’d even laid to the wayside any form of dignity and reluctantly crawled on back of her bike, riding bitch throughout the neighboring counties.

Now as much as one might suppose at this time that perhaps Vergil loved Lady, that would be entirely up for debate. For as much as Vergil was CAPABLE of love, he reserved such an amount soully for his brother and for Mary. Now Dante was a sort of “love” that Vergil had finally felt obligated to accept, knowing that there must have been some tedious connection if he hadn’t already obliterated the bastard for choosing a side contrary to Vergil’s own.

Yet his affection for Lady was something he’d accepted as truly unavoidable. Vergil wasn’t the type to deny emotions; simply, he just didn’t understand or even have them usually. He caved though, accepting Mary as just the “itch he couldn’t scratch himself”.

Except that changed.

Attribute it to age, attribute it to a sort of naïve perception of humans based on lack of interaction, but Vergil had never known a pedophile. Or more, he’d never suspected anything of the sort from Arkham. The man was a single-tracked mind, bent totally on the opening of the Teminigru; nothing more. Yet on the eve of Vergil’s supposed ‘absence’, on the night that the twin had insisted he would be leaving for a few days (and really, was just buying possible time with Mary) the young prince had witnessed something that with all his might, he could never stave off the memory of.

He had sat, lurking in the dark bedroom, preparing to conceal yet another set of directions in her pillow case, listening to the sounds of the shower running when it happened. Arkham had entered, thankfully never turning on the lights as he crept like a spider towards the closed bathroom door. At first Vergil had hidden in the shadows, watching as he expected Mary’s father to just belt out some request and leave as was usual.

Instead, Vergil felt a twitch in his upper lip, watching as Arkham’s fingertips smoothed down the outside of the door. The man’s breathing hitched at times, eyes closing like he was about to devour some delectable meal.

And then he’d walked in; just opened the door, the mist of the shower spray exiting the bathroom as Arkham walked right in. Vergil sat in mild horror, confused and for the life of him feeling as though his time in hell must have left him naïve of human rituals. He had always imagined that humans shunned incest and the idea of a father seeing his daughter in the shower?

He felt sick, oddly sick in a way he hadn’t felt before. He didn’t become ill, his immune system a fucking machine when it came to healing and attacking viruses. But now, his guts churned, his skin prickling over with goose-bumps as he heard everything.

“Not today dad, please.”

“Mary, you know your mother's gone. You know there are certain responsibilities that come from being the woman of the house.”