(Part 4)

"I can't believe that you're not planning to do anything. You're pathetic." I answered finally in disgust, stopping in the middle of the street. We had quickly migrated from Freddi's after I realized that the man had been planning to simply sponge off all the money I had on strawberry sundaes. I had no idea how he could polish so many so quickly without getting a brain freeze, but his half-demon-ness was getting more and more apparent to me through his appetite.

Stopping when he realized that I wasn't following behind him anymore, he turned around with a face of disinterest. From what he'd said, he was probably the same age as me. And still, with that long hair and long beard, he looked as if age had been pressed upon a handsome face. Paired with his strong and solid physique, it was a strange combination. But it was something that I quickly got over now that I knew about his pitiful situation.

How someone could be so hopeless; I still couldn't truly understand.

"Well, that's new. I'm pathetic?" He asked, more surprised than insulted.

"Yes." I answered, struggling to keep my anger inside. What was wrong with this idiot? I wasn't sure why I really cared so much about his family and his situation, but I was the type of person who couldn't stand by and do nothing when someone was down in the dumps. Granted this guy wasn't exactly 'down in the dumps' (in fact, he almost seemed to be enjoying his penniless, derelict and unhygienic situation), but I wasn't about to leave this sore thumb alone. "Yes, you are utterly pathetic. You are the worst specimen of a man I've ever seen. No wonder your brother doesn't want to come back. I'm pretty sure that even if he did, your sister would be repelled by the state of your living, and he would follow her walking away."

"I figure Vergil loves me enough to coming knocking at my door at least." Dante shrugged in reply, not even bothered that I had thrown insults in his face.

"He'll come knocking, but you would be dead asleep. He would assume that you had left, and you would wake up years later, wondering if he ever dropped by." I answered heartlessly –not that I needed much of a heart for him at all. This guy was utterly useless and hopeless.

Dante shrugged. "Devil May Cry is the only place he can find me. He'll come back again and again."

"And again and again, he will meet no results. One day, he'll give up and assume that you have just moved on." I argued, not sure why I was so sure of what I was saying even though I had never physically met his twin at all. The story of Dante, Vergil and Lily/Leah had initially been hard to follow and understand, but it definitely explained how the large crater had appeared in the field outside Limbo City.

It had been a 'supernatural' cause, and my demon hunter friends had placed bets that the cause was demonic. We all knew that if it was a demon's work, then it had to be a damned big and powerful one. And, going by Dante's story, we weren't wrong. It had been the Demon King himself.

The Demon King –who had been controlling the government in Limbo City without our knowing –had perished in that large crater. And Dante, Vergil and Lily/Leah had sent him back to where he belonged.

I would be hard pressed to agree with him if not for the solid evidence displayed before me. Coincident to the day that the crater appeared, the government had immediately decreed the scrapping of the many administrations strapping down on demon hunters. Fines for destruction of property, as well as carrying unlicensed weapons had gone down quickly, and demon hunters had immediately been set free from their dumps. It had been Dante's, Vergil's and Lily/Leah's work.

"Give me a break; he's my twin and we're all half-demons. We'll meet someday." Dante groaned, and I spared a single precious moment to wonder why he even bothered to continue talking to me. It was obvious that his interests revolved around strawberry sundaes, pizzas, alcohol and sleep. Of course, he had displayed much interest in the female anatomy as well, but both of us knew that no bras or underwear would be removed if he still carried that ugly beard.

"Assuming someone hasn't murdered you in your sleep yet." I muttered sourly, trying my best to think of a convincing enough argument to motivate him. I didn't know it then, but it turned out that I had been attempting to do the impossible. 'Motivate' and 'Dante' did not happen in the same sentence naturally. "Someone needs to do something about you."

"Yeah, someone needs to do something about this stupid beard. Do you have some spare change for the barber?" Dante agreed, definitely thinking on an entirely different wavelength as he seemed to measure the length of hair growing haphazardly on his cheek. Thanks to the meal, he now had strawberry sundae stains on them, and managed to look even more homeless and penniless than he did before.

"When do I owe you anything?" I demanded, wondering why he was taking it so easy in his stride to be sponging off someone he had literally just met.

"You don't." Dante replied easily. "But you woke me up in my sleep."

"People wake people up in their sleeps every other day." My vindication probably wasn't strong, but strong vindication wasn't needed for someone like Dante anyway.

"Not a half-demon sleeping for the past one year and three month." Dante reminded, turning back around and continuing walking. I wasn't sure where he was going, but I was simply following him, waiting to see where he would turn up. He wasn't walking back to Devil May Cry, at the very least.

"You're one in probably a few billion." I reminded. "It's forgivable. Taking my hard-earned money for yours isn't."

"How nice to know that I'm special." The sarcasm was easy to hear in his voice when he replied. "Besides, I bet you're poor like me. Demon hunter don't earn too much anyway. Fine, if you can't afford a barber, the least you could do is to lend me a pair of scissors, shaver and some cream."

"'Lend'? You're kidding if you think I'm going to share my shaver with you. Besides, what makes you think I'm going to let you into my bathroom?" I asked, incredulous. He hadn't been exactly wrong in claiming that demon hunters didn't earn too much, but asking a woman to share her shaver with him? It was unthinkable.

"Then I'll roll on the floor and say you abused a homeless man."

Even his threat was as ineffective as he was as a person. I still failed to see how he could have been part of the force that had repelled Mundus back to Hell, considering he couldn't even talk his way into getting a proper haircut.

"Go on." I urged, crossing my arms to show that I wasn't the littlest bit threatened. "The road is empty, just in case you didn't notice."

"You're a bitch." Dante scowled, but only managed to pull off the 'angry old man' look instead. I stifled my laughter, still following behind him.

"That's a mild insult. I've heard worse." I answered easily, but he simply continued walking off.

"Fine. Just a pair of scissors then. I'll shave the rest when I get the money." He grumbled, obviously unwilling to give way, but finding no better alternative.

That was when I decided to let the cat out of the bag, because walking was slowly becoming tiring. The night wasn't getting younger, and I had been awake for almost two days straight packing my parents' things up.

"If you're planning to use my scissors and my spare shaver, you're walking in the wrong direction. My home's this way." I turned around and walked down the way we came, hearing a loud curse coming from behind me. I wasn't wrong in assuming that he was could cuss a good vocabulary, but footsteps chased after me eventually.

"You know, I didn't ask you before: what's your name?"

"I never thought you'd ask." I rolled my eyes.

"I wasn't really interested." He answered honestly with a shrug, and I decided that he was extremely bad with people-skills. Did he even have friends?

"No wonder your brother and sister left you. You're bad with people."

"I'm good with people I want to have sex with." His honesty was blatant, and through it was appreciated, it was still rather insulting.

"Well, I'm sorry I'm not attractive enough to cultivate dirty thoughts."

"I didn't say you weren't attractive." He gave a stretch and a loud yawn, scratching his dirty beard. I wondered if he carried any fleas or diseases that I didn't know of. "But I've just woken up from a year and three months' worth of sleep. It takes time to get Little Dante running again."

I sighed.

"My name is Max. Max Cartwright."

"What kind of a name is that? 'Max' is a name for a guy." His reply was filled with disgust, and once more I wondered why I was allowing a stranger to shave at my place. My parents would be so worried for me in heaven. I prayed silently that I wasn't doing stupid things right after their deaths. But I assume I could pin it down as a grief-addled mistake. It was an excuse, albeit a lousy one.

"Well, I don't have little Max hiding in my pants, so nope: not a guy." I answered with a sharp glare made at his disgust. What was wrong with having this name? "Besides, I gave myself this name. When I was younger, the boys laughed at my name and said it was too girly and 'innocent' for a tomboy. So I up and called myself Max to prove them wrong."

"Then what was your real name?" He seemed a little interested now, which I later found out to be a rather rare occurrence. Still, I didn't get to appreciate that fact at the moment as I shrugged the way he did before and kept my eyes front. I willed my face to not betray any emotion, and hope that the darkness of the night hid my blush.

"I'm not going to tell you that." I balked. "It'll ruin my reputation."

"Like you had any to begin with." His reply was insulting as always, but I found that I had grown up to be rather immune to insults like his. Working as a demon hunter had definitely maximised my capacity to insults, cusses and dirty comments made my way. "Come on; what is it?"

"I'm not telling." I replied firmly, hoping he understood that there was no way he was cajoling anything out of me. Besides, no one knew my real name anymore –now that my parents had passed on.

"Mary? Betty? Daisy?" He was definitely trying his luck by the way he was hitting at all the utterly girly names. I forced myself to show no emotions, telling myself to not even blink when he somehow randomly guessed at my real name. "Mandy? Helen? Annie?"

"Stop trying, Dante. You'll never get it."

"Kelly? Flora? Nina?"

"Stop it –wait, Nina is a girly name to you?"

"Polly –yeah, I've met a 'Nina' before, and she was a prude." Dante continued. "How about Daphne? Katherine? Diana?"

I plugged my fingers in my ears and ran, yelling as I did so. This guy was hell-bent, wasn't he?

He wasn't going to irritate me like that.

Well, at least he wasn't going to irritate me more than he had already than.

Dante was going to find out that Angel 'Max' Cartwright wasn't a bitch who could be easily dealt with.

____________________________________________________________________________________

He was still in the middle of name-guessing even as I set aside the last box of my parent's things. It was his pure dumb luck that I had just been packing my father's clothes, because it turned out that some of my dad's smaller shirts and pants fit him well, thus affording him an outfit change. There was little persuasion needed to have him throwing his clothes, but he adamantly held on to his trench coat no matter what I said.

Eventually, he relented to say that the trench coat held memories for him, and I gave up on making him throw that away. Instead, it went into the washing machine, which went on while I began to jot down the things I knew about him and his story. I was always a systematic person who thought while penning things down. I couldn't make connections quickly if they weren't written down properly, and so I sat quietly down at my couch, making notes on my notepad.

And still, he went on name-guessing. Dante was definitely hell-bent on getting a reaction out of me, which I simply refused to do. Through his shaving and hair-cut process, he had left the door open, stood in my bathroom topless and did his own grooming. And, while the door had been left open, he had guessed up to a hundred female names –none of it being mine.

Still, I wondered how he could so easily come up with a hundred names –and be ready for probably a few hundred more.

"Jane? Jenny? Joanne? Jocelyn? Josephine? Joy?" He seemed to be taking an alphabetical approach, even as he walked from the bathroom to the kitchen, presumably to get rid of his hair-infested shaver. I hoped that after one year and three months of inactivity, he still knew that women did not like to see hair sticking to shavers.

"Stop trying, Dante." I repeated, not even sure why I was even attempting to stop him anymore. It was obvious that he was having a whale of time annoying me. I suspected that his intention was no longer to find my name, but rather to see how long of this guessing game I could put up with before I gave up.

"Just tell me when I reach it. Jude? Judith? Julia? Juliet? June? Justine?" His voice came closer, and I looked up to find a totally different man coming into my living area.

He finally looked my age, and I finally understood how he knew so many female names. He probably slept with every one of those girls that he named, because I immediately felt myself getting a little bothered. Homelessness and penniless situation aside, this man was handsome. From every angle, he did not look like a hobo the littlest bit. In fact, if he was willing to degrade himself and sell his body for service, he would make loads.

"What?" He asked, a little self-conscious now that I had entirely stopped my work and remained staring at him with dropped jaws. "Your name is Justine?"

"No." I barely remembered to reply. "It's just... you're a totally different man now that you've shaved."

"Interested in me now?" He grinned.

It was totally different when it was hidden beneath the length of his beard, for it was ten times brighter and a hundred times more charming. In an instant, I understood one thing that I'd failed to understand since the moment I met him.

"You're angel-man's son! You have the same eyes and smile." I accused, jumping to my feet and pointing at him rudely between the eyes. I couldn't believe it, but after taking away a horrible amount of facial hair, I saw the angel-man again. Well, not exactly the man per se, but definitely a relative.

No one except his son could mimic his handsome and charming grin.

"Angel-man?" He asked, understandably confused. "You don't have to change the topic so drastically to hide the fact that your name's Justine."

"My name is not Justine." I protested absently, still feasting my eyes on him while I wagged my accusing fingertip in front of his blue-green eyes. It was definitely him. The same set of eyes. I hadn't been wrong! I had gone to Devil May Cry looking for the angel-man or someone related to him –and had found his son! Thank gods I'd adopted this crazy homeless man. Just moments ago, I had been worried about my father being disappointed in me in the heavens for forgetting my mission so quickly. "But your father is the angel-man. There's no mistaking it. You have the same white hair!"

"And what do you know of my father?" He scoffed, dropping down to lie on the couch and leaving only a small space for me. "My Pops is in Hell right now."

"Your father is him!" I insisted stupidly, my mind running out of the appropriate words. In my excitement, it seemed as if the name had entirely slipped out of my mind. I knew it... I just could not remember it at the moment in the shock and surprise. "You're his son!"

"Yeah, I'm 'his' son. You're 'his' daughter too, unless your father isn't a guy." He answered mildly. "So... not Justine? What about July? Joelle?"

I ignored his name-guessing, jumping forwards and pulling him up by the front of his shirt. I was, after all, a demon hunter, so pulling him up with my strength required just a little effort. Pulling him and taking him by surprise, I stared into those round eyes alight with surprise. There was no mistaking it. It was him.

"You're definitely his son, Dante. The angel-man. What's his name again... damn it!" I declared, dropping him back roughly on the couch again, then flying to the short table where I left my keys by the door. My father's will was still lying there, and the small note was wedged underneath a small paperweight. I scanned through the words quickly again.

"Your father's name... it's here..." I muttered as I scanned them quickly, then looked up in a eureka moment. "Sparda!"

He clapped lamely, not looking impressed at all. "What is surprising is the fact that you came to Devil May Cry, not knowing that you found Dante Sparda. What the hell do you want with me now?"

"There, read this!" I threw my father's note into his hand, allowing him a short buffer time to read it quickly. He scanned them with bored eyes, then looked up.

"So, your father's dead?"

I wondered how he could miss something so obvious. I, after all, had been packing away my father's things, hadn't I? Furthermore, I had given him my father's clothes and told him that my father didn't need it anymore. Wasn't it clue that Dad wasn't coming back?

"Read about the Sparda part, you idiot." I hit him in the back of his head, and he just rubbed it off lazily, letting his eyes roam slowly.

"So what?" He finally concluded, handing the note back. "Pops saved your family. Big deal."

"I'm supposed to thank him! And you said he's in Hell, so I can't..."

"I'll pass the message the next time I see him." Dante waved it away, patting my cushion and propping it nicely against the arm of my couch as if he planned to use it as a pillow. "But meanwhile, you can treat his son nicely and let me stay for the night."

"You're planning to sleep again?" I demanded, pulling him up again by his shirt when he tried to settle down with his head on the cosy cushion. How could someone wake up from a year and three months' worth of sleep, eat some ice cream, shave, and then fall back asleep again?

"Think of what I did before as hibernation. This is my actual health-recovering sleep." He tried to reason, but there was no getting past me –especially if he was planning to sleep on my couch.

"No way. I'm going to give my utmost thanks to him personally. I'm not going to tell someone as lazy as you to pass a message. What's up with you anyway? Your father was so upright and just. You're just like leech who's too lazy to even sit upright." It wasn't the best analogy, but it was the best that I could make do with at the moment, seeing how his body seemed to be strangely magnetised to the couch.

He gave a dry laugh. "Then you can go to Hell, literally."

"How do I do that?"

The seriousness of my question made him blink his sleepiness away as he stared at me, wondering if I had a screw loose in my head or something.

"Petty humans like you don't just go to Hell, Justine."

"My name isn't Justine." I answered reflexively. "Besides, no one else probably had a real reason to go to Hell. I'm going there to thank someone I owe my life to."

"I told you, I'll pass the message on. He'll be totally fine with it." Dante waved my vindication away, but I crossed my arms in a show of seriousness.

"No, I'm doing it personally, and that's that. Now, you're the half-demon here. How do I go to Hell?"

"Don't be stupid, Justine." He replied. "Besides, I'm not the person to go to if you want to go to Hell. Even if I wanted to visit my Pops, I can't right now."

"Why not?" I sat on the low coffee table in front of the couch, ignoring the fact that my notepad and pen on the table was digging into my butt. It kept me on eye level with Dante, who finally seemed interested enough to not go back to sleep.

"Because conjugal visits aren't exactly allowed in Hell and I don't have my brother's dimension-travelling sword. Vergil has Yamato. It's the only sword that can enable travelling between Hell and Limbo. Dad had it done when he sealed the gate to Hell with that sword. He passed it to Vergil, coz Vergil was older and smarter."

I definitely could not deny that. "But Vergil is not here in Limbo."

"You got that right." Dante agreed with a yawn and stretch. "See why we don't just go to Hell?"

"But Leah –she was human from her world, right? She could go to Hell. Why?"

"Because she had Lily?" It was easy to see that Dante was guessing at the answers. "Don't ask me these questions about Heaven, Hell, Lily and Sparda. I'm not part of it. I just happened to follow Vergil's commands, and we happened to lock Mundus to Hell. I forgot most of it already."

"Then who has the answers?" I demanded, flicking him on the forehead to keep him awake. His eyes were already drooping shut.

"Verge. But Verge's having his twosome, non-demonic time with his sex-partner Leah. He's too busy penetrating her to remember my existence."

I suppressed a cringe at that overly graphic description and purposefully ignored his sexual tendencies. "So all I have to do is to look for Vergil. Then I can go to Hell and find your father."

"Good luck with that, Justine." Dante finally connected his head to my cushion, his eyes closing. "If I'm in a good mood, I'll try my best to remember to order a headstone for your grave."

"And when I meet your father, I'll try my best to not tell him how much of a disappointment and a failure of a son you are." I replied sweetly, standing up and gathering my notes. I was in actual fact as tired as Dante was, but some things needed to be settled first.

I went to my room and spent the next few hours penning things down.

And by the time I fell asleep, sprawled on my own table, I had my priorities set straight.

Number 1 on the list was to kick Dante's ass out of my house as soon as possible.

Number 2 was to send my parent's things down to the charity shelter.

Then, I would move on to number 3: Finding Vergil and Leah.