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The first time Vergil saw her, she was newly born.
She didn't look like much to him. A wet, pinkish raisin of a creature absolutely rank with the scent of birthing fluid and fresh mucous. Nothing was more human than an infant, and he wanted little to do with her. He barely wanted to be in the room. Neither he nor Dante belonged anywhere near a maternity ward.
Yet his eyes never left her as she exchanged hands.
Nero held her with so much care it looped back around to being awkward, and he struggled to keep an unaffected countenance. A valiant effort, if not for the way his feet kept shifting weight and position, and the unintended manifestation of his wings. Their faint blue shape curled around them, cloistering them off from everyone else until it was time for him to let her go. Even then, they curled under the little bundle to guard the contents. As if there was any way in the world that he would ever drop her.
Nicoletta held her with such unimpressed ease that she could have been the eldest of a dozen siblings, and passed her on without fanfare.
Lady held her in a rather technical manner--with great attention to the cradling of the head and proper support of the body. Once she got it down she strode around the room like there was never any question she knew what she was doing. She held her almost as long as Nero had before realizing she'd gotten too comfortable. Enough so to reveal how much she clearly liked infants. Her eyes darted for the next person to hand her off to.
Which would be Dante.
Vergil tensed in spite of himself, but he needn't have. Lady was in even less of a rush to hand the baby to Dante than Dante was to accept that particular parcel. Even better, she didn't even look Vergil's way. It spared him from having to be the only one to verbally decline in front of Nero.
It wasn't until Kyrie finally had enough strength to take her back and the other occupants of the room picked up on some unspoken cue to leave that Vergil realized how keenly he had been watching the child change hands.
As he left, his eye fell to the clear bassinet beside the bed where her name was boldly printed:
Madeleine Eva Sparda
The second time Vergil saw her, it was... complicated.
"So you're just going to blow it off then?" Nero unfolded his arms and threw them up, whirling to leave. "Fine, forget it."
He grabbed Nero's shoulder, a touch more forcefully than intended. "Do you really think I belong anywhere near a child? An infant?"
Nero looked back at him. It really was amazing, in spite of having more of Dante's temperament and vocabulary, how Nero could call you a fool--'a fucking idiot', to borrow his crass tongue--with just a single incredulous squint.
"Father," he said carefully. And that rare word was always careful, always just tender enough that Vergil's attentions were held in captivity every time. "Madeleine is your granddaughter."
"And a human."
"So... what?" The tired lines around Nero's eyes vanished as old, familiar fire rose to replace them. "Not worthy to see her grand dad? She gonna have to beat the shit out of you before you bother to care about her, too?"
Vergil's lips thinned. He dropped his eyes closed and let Nero go to focus on controlling his own swelling temper. The foyer of Devil May Cry saw its fair share of their disagreements, but it had been a long time since they tore that wound open.
In the dark, he could hear Nero's boot steps trot an irritable circle. "What is it? What are you so damn scared of?"
'I have nothing to fear'. For once he bit that instinctual mantra back. In this instance, there would have been no truth in those words. Even though Nero was his son and they could occasionally not butt heads long enough to act like it, there were oceans of unexplored territory between them. Nero knew of Mundus, in much the same way Vergil knew of Credo, but there was no retreading those places. There was no explaining just how deeply accustomed he was to being hunted.
"Where I go, calamity follows." He opened his eyes, heading the obvious jab at his power-grabbing antics off with a stern look. "It follows the Sparda name."
"Yeah tell me about it..." Nero crossed his arms and dropped his head back. "Look, I get that. I do. But she's a Sparda too, and right now she's just a baby. And as much as you pretend Sparda's blood is all that matters, even you and Dante were just kids once. Annnd last I checked demons don't spend nearly as much time on cooking and poetry as you do, old man."
Vergil couldn't help a wry twitch of his mouth. "If I wish for a diet that isn't all pizza and bar food, cooking is a necessary skill."
Nero mirrored the expression as the smirk it would have been if Vergil let it get that far. "If you wish'for Mads to be safe, getting close to her is just as necessary." He trotted down the steps and took off with a tired, but amiable wave. "Invitation's open."
Vergil went. What choice did he have when Nero put it like that?
Madeleine wasn't yet a year old; only nine months, in fact. What he had mistaken for some sort of milestone-related party or shower for her was actually more of a gift for Kyrie. The same tiredness that permeated Nero had found its home in her. Though they ran an orphanage full of children with minimal exhaustion, it was a very different matter to take care of a baby.
Nero was taking Kyrie out somewhere quiet for the weekend. Just the two of them, to regain their strength.
"They're gonna end up spending most of it sleeping," Dante mused when they had gone.
Vergil nodded silently. Mostly so he wouldn't ask just how Dante intended to take care of a baby when he could scarcely take care of himself. Aprons answered him; one that Dante allowed to hit him square in the face, and another that Vergil snatched out of the air.
Nico marched between them with an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips. "Maddy's sleepin', ya got about two hours before she's up if you're lucky. Best get workin'."
"On what?" asked Vergil.
The cigarette tipped up, and she gave him a nonplussed stare. "Don't really get the principle of this business, do ya? Y'ain't just baby-sittin', you're pickin' up around here."
Dante groaned, and Nico shushed him with a harsh hiss. "Givin' mom and dad a break means shit should be clean when they get back. And y'all ain't no good on the baby so I'm in charge. Now git on, and don't go making a bunch of racket. You don't want that li'l booger off schedule."
Vergil had already removed his coat and was busily tying his apron. He was the only one who kept Devil May Cry in any kind of order anyway. Cleaning was a form of meditation for him at this point.
All told, there wasn't truly much to clean. The orphans who typically clogged the house were absent, no doubt set up in a church somewhere for the weekend. What faced Vergil was not a den of squalor and iniquity, but merely a house that was struggling to hold the line against entropy. Piles of books stacked atop a dozen surfaces, left there in pseudo-neatness by people who simply had no time to re-shelve them. Cups that appeared perfectly clean had found their way away from the kitchen. Trash bags were tied and lined up but hadn't been taken out. Everything was just one vital step (and perhaps some vigorous dusting) removed from order.
Vergil had it under control well before Madeleine's soft babbling alerted him that she had awakened early. He had been heading down to deliver the next load of laundry to Dante--a task that even he couldn't botch--but seeing her stopped him in his tracks.
She was standing in her crib, her tiny fists gripping the wooden bars with surprising strength. She regarded him with more curiosity than wariness, seemingly unbothered that she had awakened alone and was now faced with a stranger.
She was a stranger to Vergil as well. He had done some reading before she was born and knew how fast she would develop, but words from a textbook did not describe how different she looked. Her eyes were open and blue, as he'd assumed they would be. Her hair had grown out from near-baldness into a series of thick golden cowlicks. She looked more like a fat-cheeked beanbag than a raisin.
Her brows furrowed, and she yelled out an unintelligible garble at him and yanked at the bars of her crib.
The laundry had barely hit the floor before he was right at her side. What if her grip failed and she fell? What if she hurt herself yanking on the crib like that? Books on child development had not prepared him with answers to anything concerning the resistance of baby joints to dislocation. Not knowing if his concerns were well-founded or utterly ridiculous, he had no choice but to pick her up.
She was warm. Almost hot, with a strange, radiating aura of humidity. Was that normal? He tried to hold her like he recalled, but she had already grown too big to be contained comfortably in such a position. Lucky for him, she righted herself on her own and pressed herself back by bracing on his chest. For one hotly embarrassed moment he thought she was trying to get away from him, but she was only propping herself up so she could look at him.
Vergil remained completely still as she reached her fingers up with a deep scowl to prod his features with what little muscle coordination she had. She mumbled with the grave intensity of a surgeon concentrating on a difficult operation as she poked at his eyebrows and caught hold of a lock of his hair.
"Da?"
Ah. So she thought he was Nero. "No, child. I am--"
She yanked. The strength in those tiny fists astonished him, leaving him biting hard into his lip to keep from either shouting or tensing his arms in a way that might have squeezed her too hard.
"Madeleine," he said with all the patience he could muster. "Release me."
From behind, he heard heavy footsteps. Mercifully, not heavy enough to be Dante's.
"Well lookit you," Nico drawled, circling around him. "Found out the hard way she's a yanker, huh?"
"If you could extract her instead of gawking, Nicoletta?"
"Yeah yeah, keep yer demon panties on." She tucked her cigarette up behind her ear, and though it was subtle, the pitch of her voice rose. "Hey, lil booger! Come here'n give aunt Nico a hug."
Madeleine released him and reached out for Nico with an excited screech. In the moment it took for Vergil to smooth his hair back into place, Nico had her snugly straddled between the crook of her arm and the angle of her hip.
"You're quite deft at handling infants."
Nico shrugged. "Ain't nothin' to em. Jelly beans with legs, really." She pinched playfully at Madeleine's cheeks. "You know who that is, Maddy?"
Madeleine looked between Nico and Vergil. He knew she could not possibly know who he was, but there was a strange tension in his chest. She pointed one tiny, pale finger at him and looked back to Nico. "Da?"
"Naw, booger. That's your daddy's daddy. Say 'Grandpa Vergil'."
Madeleine kicked her feet animatedly, and squealed, but the words were nonsense. Nico tried a few more times to get her to repeat the words, but she grew shyer every time. Though she was grinning, she refused to so much as look at him.
"Worth a shot," Nico said with another shrug. "Say bye bye, Mads."
She peeked up at him, her eyes full of mischief as though it was all a game they were playing. She gave him less of a wave and more of a repeated clench of her fingers, and then her face scrunched up and she dissolved into a fit of giggles.
Nico walked out of the room cooing praise, unaware that Vergil had been pinned where he stood. A deluge of warmth he had only tasted the faintest sips of since he and Dante returned rolled over him.
He thought about that moment nearly every day for the next month.
The third time Vergil met her was, regrettably, not her first birthday. The event had grown in importance to him as it approached until it was nearly all he thought about, but neither he nor Dante had made it.
Demons lacked consideration that way.
Along with the gifts he had compiled, he chose to send flowers as a means of expressing his regret. To his further regret, it had become something of a family joke that he was the only man alive who would send apology flowers to a baby.
It was some months after when things died down. He made the decision to see her on a whim one morning, after the epiphany finally reached him that he did not actually need to wait for Dante, or for any special occasion.
He was her grandfather. He could just go.
The orphan with the cheeky mouth answered the door. Vergil didn't recall his name, only that he was nearly of the age to leave and start his own life, and he had been there the longest. His aura had a certain eldest sibling hostility that Vergil appreciated. It went undimmed as he took in Vergil's resemblance to Nero.
"Can I help you?"
"I'm here for the man of the house."
"That's me today." He raised his chin. "What do you want?"
Vergil glared. "Where's Nero?"
"Working," the boy answered tartly.
"And Kyrie?"
From within, her clear voice answered. "Yes, who is it?"
The boy shot Vergil a scowl, and stood aside as Kyrie emerged. Her color was much better than their last brief meeting. She still looked tired, but in the way that anyone who looked after orphans probably did. Either to keep it out of her way or to make her life easier in light of Madeleine's absolutely demonic grip, she had cut her hair. It curled delicately just below her chin, held back by a simple and efficient hairband. Her eyes widened, and unconsciously Vergil stood a bit straighter.
"You look well."
"You too," she said, without a trace of awkwardness. "Please, come in."
No wariness. No questions asked. Even though it was unlike him to just...show up. She had always been that way, and he understood it as the thing that Nero liked about her.
But it was that kind of trust that had allowed him to wander in and snap Nero's arm off.
His dour thoughts only lasted for as long as it took to get cozily seated at the dining room table. Madeleine was seated snugly in a disastrously messy high-chair. The fallout of spaghetti and peas littered her bib and coated her face like shaving cream.
"Should you not feed her yourself?"
Kyrie laughed and settled down opposite him, over a still-steaming cup of tea. "She's at the age where she likes to do certain things herself. It's a lot to clean, but it's important to let her do things she's actually capable of doing."
As if remembering something, she slid her chair back. "Oh, I didn't offer you anything--"
"I don't need anything from you." He winced at his unintended harshness and raised a placating hand. If there was any human on earth who deserved what little graciousness his humanity could produce, it was Kyrie. "Please. I did not come to increase your work."
Kyrie sank back into her seat. She didn't say anything, but he saw her whole body settle and fully relax. "So... Why have you come, father?"
His mind reeled. Hearing her call him that was even rarer than hearing it from Nero; mostly because he avoided speaking to her. There was something too vulnerable about being in her presence. He always got the feeling she knew him better than he liked.
She followed his eyes to the goblin merrily attempting to snare a particularly elusive noodle.
"Maddie," she said softly. "Do you know who this is?"
"Dada," the child said matter-of-factually.
Vergil laughed faintly through his nose. "She said the same before. Perhaps to her, the resemblance is that strong."
Kyrie shook her head. "She doesn't really think you're Nero, she'd be be inconsolable if you were."
"Inconsolable?"
Kyrie gave an almost apologetic smile. "She cries when he leaves and drops whatever she's doing no matter what it is to demand his attention when he comes home."
"I see," he said slowly. "And that's..."
"Perfectly normal, yes. She does it when I have to leave her too." She turned her attention back to her child. "Maddie, this is your grandfather. Grandpa Vergil."
She burbled something, and Vergil casually awaited the same chain of events as before. Kyrie, however, did not merely repeat the word's but slowed them down. Perhaps as Madeleine's mother, she could hear something that neither he nor Nicoletta could in the nonsense.
"Grandpa---Vergil."
Madeleine looked his way and held out a spaghetti sauce soaked hand to him. "Gamba Berble!"
At first, Vergil mistook the heat flaring in his body for a flush of either pride or embarrassment. Then he felt the distinctive surge of demonic energy across his skin. Scales forming where there shouldn't have been any. He vanished from the table, there and suddenly gone to Kyrie and Madeleine--who he heard 'oooooh'ing as he stumbled down the hall and locked himself in the bathroom.
The warmth that had been a mere deluge before was a catastrophic flood this time. He had never felt so powerful in his entire life, but never such a tenuous grip on his control of himself either. Energy poured out of him without end, bottomless as the rivers of blood that flowed in hell. As he gripped the sink and splashed water desperately against his burning face, he heard a slither behind him. He would have cut their shower in half had he not had the presence of mind to glance in the mirror first.
It was just a tail. His tail. That he hadn't summoned. Because he hadn't focused on his devil form, it had just happened without his say so like he was a kid again and had stumbled onto the ability to teleport for the first time--nearly smacking into a wall in the process. There was no intent, no focus, no careful amassing of power.
There was just Madeleine.
A gentle knock at the door interrupted his thoughts. "Is everything alright?"
He straightened his clothes quickly, and coaxed himself back to a calm enough state to do away with his tail. It was foolish of him to be reduced to such a state by a mere child's words in the first place, and he opened the door as if nothing had happened.
"I'm alright," he said coolly. "No need for concern. Please, be seated. I did not come for idle chat or to have you running after me."
"You came to see Maddie."
He looked away as though he hadn't been caught red-handed, gazing around the room until he came to the pegs where the aprons hung and grabbed one. "I came to ensure she wasn't wearing you and Nero thin, yes."
As he hung his coat and tied a tight, efficient knot against his back, his eyes again wandered to Madeleine. Though they both came and went as they wished, living with Dante did give Vergil a certain amount of insight into what he did with his free time. He never missed a chance to gloat about a party or a demon hunt that Vergil declined to attend.
"Has Dante ever come by without me?" he asked.
Kyrie absently scooped the more inedible bits of Madeleine's food away. "Hmm... No I can't say that he has."
Vergil smiled, and gave a quiet, self-satisfied laugh. She'd spoken his name first and he would never let his younger brother forget it.
Cleaning the house was both simpler and far more difficult than it had been previously. On the one hand, it was already fairly clean. On the other, the orphans were underfoot and every time he passed Madeleine she shouted his name, nearly costing him his control every time. Nevermind the one quite precocious young girl that appeared out of nowhere without fail every single time to insist that he had to answer or else she wouldn't remember his name.
There was no greater relief to him when Kyrie took Madeleine away from the dining room for a bath.
As he ironed the laundry, he couldn't help but laugh. The King of Hell.. Undone by an infant.
When Kyrie returned, she had Eva in the same grip Nico had held her in, snugly straddled against one hip. Her sleeves were rolled up, and he could see well how much muscle had come into her arms. She had never been a fighter, but she looked strong. Not enough to kill a demon, but certainly enough to care for a baby, and Vergil was beginning to appreciate the kind of power that took. Nestled down against her bosom, Madeleine rubbed at her eyes and gave a soft whine.
"Is she alright?"
"Sleepy," Kyrie answered softly, easing down onto the sofa.
His lips parted. It took him a few tries to swallow his pride enough to ask: "And you?" She looked up at him, and he felt his face flush. "I'm asking if you could use rest. I wasn't able to assist you with the child."
She smiled again in that too-understanding way, and he knew before she'd answered that she saw right through him. "Do you want to hold her?"
He couldn't have trusted himself with words even if he knew which ones to say. He followed Kyrie's gesture to the empty loveseat, and sat patiently while Kyrie lowered Madeleine to the floor.
"Go to Grandpa Vergil."
Madeleine looked uncertainly back at her mother, and toddled off in a completely different direction, meandering to several different spots in the living room with seemingly no regard for him.
Over a dry tongue, he whispered her name. "Maddie?"
She looked his way, and he held out his hands. Again her eyes went to her mother, but she waddled toward him on her chubby legs. She didn't really come to a stop so much as she allowed herself to collapse into his hands. Somehow she weighed more than he thought, yet nothing at all. He lifted her against his chest, purposefully allowing himself to slouch for her comfort, and for a brief, magical moment he thought he had charmed her right to sleep in an instant.
Both the fantasy and his ears were pierced by her wail, and he shot a bewildered, pleading look to Kyrie.
"She's not fighting you, she's fighting sleep." She held up her hands and mimicked a rubbing motion. "You have to coax her into it."
Working around the fact that Maddie was squirming in a very familiar mimic of one who just could not get comfortable, Vergil rubbed in gentle circles across her back. The ten minutes he spent on the effort were easily more suspense than most demons encounters he had these days. Maddie alternated several times between going still and silent as a stone to squirming and whimpering. He even coaxed a burp out of her, earning a silent but sincere pantomime of applause from Kyrie. The whimpers grew quieter, and her still periods longer, until finally she seemed to have drifted off.
With a careful sigh, his body relaxed.
Atop his chest, Madeleine mimicked him, snuggling down more comfortably now that he wasn't quite so tense. Without the urgent need to soothe her, his hand rested across her back, his thumb gently stroking through her hair. He was given to understand that babies, like young animals, often began their lives with light hair colors than darkened in maturity.
Madeleine's hair was growing lighter. Gold gave way to silver-white near her scalp, and her thin brows and lashes were coming in like slivers of platinum.
Kyrie sat a cup of tea on the end table beside him, and he found he had no strength to chide her for her persistent hospitality. "Sugar?"
He shook his head, and gingerly looked up. He had never been able to ask Nero. It felt like too much would happen--too much would come to the surface. But he felt comfortable enough to ask Kyrie. "Why did Nero give this child...that middle name?"
She sat on the arm of the chair that he wasn't using. "He didn't. It was my suggestion." A shy half-smile tilted her lips. "I hope it wasn't too bold of me."
"That depends on your reasoning."
"Hmm...I suppose the same reason we might have given a son my brother's name in the same place." She shrugged amicably. "It's really as simple as kind remembrance."
A dim memory flickered through him. It was years after their return from Hell, but the visits never changed. The wrenching feelings that welled up before the grave told him in no uncertain terms that his path would have gone no differently if he had known. In many ways, the revelation that Eva had died in search of him was more damning than anything he'd assumed. Even with Dante so purposefully near him, the phantom scent of cold ash always made Vergil's head spin and churned everything inside of him until he was wound tight. But one year--the one before Maddy was born--Vergil realized, Nero had come. Taken a sudden interest in the rest of the family, gone though they were. At the time, Vergil had been preoccupied by how jarring it was to hear Dante recall her warmth so easily. To him, Eva was a shimmering, idealized haze on the other side of a barren and unforgiving desert of his own making. Too many years spent strangling his humanity. Too many as the plaything of a demon with ideas above his station. He remembered more of his and Dante's fleeting childhood than he did of her.
"I see," he murmured, his eyes drooping closed.
Kyrie might or might not have still been there. He didn't know. His whole being was absorbed in the rapid rhythm of the little heart beating against his. At once he was filled with a stinging regret that he had missed this phase of Nero's life, and and even stronger resolve to see Madeleine grow up. If she never awakened, fine. If she did, he would be there to teach her. There was no meaning in the burst of power he got from only hearing her call out to him if he didn't use it to protect her.
He pressed his lips to the delicate crown of her head in a silent oath. As her delicate curling hairs tickled his cheeks, he thought that no silk thread in the world had ever been half so fine.
Hell itself would not stop him seeing her more often from then on.