A/N: I apologise for the delay! I do my best to stick to the 2-week uploading schedule, but sometimes it is impossible.

[Family Outing]

"Stop it, Dante." Reina complained as she swatted her uncle's hand away before it could make contact on her head again. That man was a nightmare for anyone with styled hair, with the only exception being her father because he had a great glare that could shut anyone up without a single word.

Like the ten times before that she had repeated the words, the hand came back seconds later, slowly and with absolutely no sense of trying to keep things secret. By now, Reina was more or less convinced that Dante was doing it purely to annoy her, because the man always took sadistic pleasure from her annoyance.

"Daddy." Reina whined, knowing that her father hated it whenever anybody whined, most particularly her. "Make Dante stop, or I'm going to whine to you all night."

"Stop it, Dante." Her father's reply was almost instantaneous, repeating the words that she had been chanting the whole while. The effect, however, was miraculous because Reina found her uncle pouting like a little baby, stuffing his hands into his coat pockets as if he didn't know what else to do with them if he wasn't trying to get on her nerves.

"Good boy." Reina could not help but rub salt onto his wounds. While she loved her uncle the way anyone would love the easy-come-easy-go uncle of the family, Reina shared a teasing relationship with him that could easily be mistaken for malice. They were like two children who got enjoyment from seeing each other's suffering not-so-secretly, making each other trip up in front of the parental figure that was her father.

Unfortunately, that analogy put Dante in the same age range as Reina, and not the middle age range that he was supposed to be in along with her father.

"This is not over yet." Dante warned her, trying to look threatening with a glare, but he could not even come close to his twin brother's intensity when it came to dead-eye stares.

"It is for now." Reina answered with a grin, then increased her walking pace to escape from their conversation, catching up with her no-nonsense father who hadn't been bothered to keep his pace slow for the teasing conversation to continue.

"I'm glad that you have the time today to come out with me and Dante, Daddy." Reina started conversationally, keeping her eyes front.

When they first met a few years ago, Reina had had the habit of watching her father's face carefully in the hopes of catching any emotions that might show on his face at her words. Unfortunately, that had gotten her into a few near-accidents and more than a few head bumps when she walked into all sorts of things on the road. Eventually her father had told her to keep her eyes strictly on the road when walking, and it had been an embarrassing thing for a 20 year old to hear those words from her father spoken as if she were a 3 year old who had just learnt to walk.

"I have been busy." He said.

"I know. You are always busy." Reina answered.

"I am only so busy because your uncle-" The standard excuse was coming up, and Reina gave a large sigh to interrupt her father's upcoming justification about how he was always busy trying to erase all the troubles and problems that his twin brother had given them.

"I know, Daddy. I don't blame you." She said.

They were silent for a short while as they took roughly twenty steps in awkward silence, Dante presumably following behind them, distracted with whatever distracted annoying uncles like him.

"I blame myself." Vergil's words were soft and almost inaudible. Sadly for him, Reina had inherited his inhumane abilities, and better-than-human hearing was one of them.

"There is no need to blame yourself, Daddy. I'm already 24. I'm practically an adult now. Other girls my age are still graduating from college and looking for jobs. I'm already faster than them."

"I could not afford to put you into college." He answered, a sour tone in his words. "Even after I found out that you were alive, I still cannot afford to give you the normal life that you should have led."

"Why do I want the normal life?" Reina asked curiously. "What makes you think I want to be normal?"

"That's what I have been wishing from the start. I never knew I had a daughter, but I knew that if I ever had a child, I would want him or her to be as normal as possible, and as far away from Dante and me as possible. We are dangers for you, Reina."

"I think it's usually the other way around." Reina insisted. "I was a mess when I met you, and you and Dante had to deal with lots of my problems when I first moved in. Remember those people I thought were my friends? Dante had to sit in prison for two weeks because of them."

"You still owe me for that!" In the background, an obviously-eavesdropping Dante protested, but neither Reina nor her father gave the man's words heed.

"I admit," Her father started his answer with a hint of a smile in his tone of voice that Reina knew immediately she wouldn't completely like, "You were not the best kind of daughter a person wants to find out that he has all of a sudden."

"Hey!" Her protest was met with a loud snigger by Dante, but the conversation was safely kept between Reina and her father only. "It's not exactly my fault that I grew up with the wrong crowd! I didn't exactly have a parent figure telling me what I'm supposed and not supposed to do after Mum passed away."

"You were young and stupid; I understand." Her father's reply was uncannily condescending, but it was the undisputable truth and thus Reina bit back any further protests. "Now you are not young anymore."

"But still stupid." Dante interjected as if to complete his brother's sentence, which earned a glare from Reina for the shortest moment before she turned back to her father.

"Why did we bring Dante out again?" She asked in front of the man in topic.

"Because he will turn the house upside down if we leave him alone." The answer was again politically correct, and the truth was spoken so blandly that the man in topic didn't even bother to protest against anything; simply accepting the insinuations of insults that Reina's father always made at him.

"Couldn't you have locked him in Hell first?"

"Mundus will be chasing me to get him out of Hell. There is no place that can contain the man, Reina. The sooner you come to accept this, the less he will bother you. Eventually he becomes an insect that you become accustomed to: a bug that will always be by your side, flitting and making pointless sounds. If you don't pay it attention, it will get bored and look for someone else to bother." Vergil's answer revealed exactly what the man thought about his brother, and the greatest irony was the fact that while the insulting words were said, the man in topic had gotten bored and had his attention diverted to somewhere else (possibly the sexily dressed woman strutting on the other side of the street).

"You're wrong, Dad." Reina answered with a sigh, sidestepping a post box in front of her on the street, and looking back to check that Dante had walked directly into the obstacle because his eyes had been everywhere except in front of him. "There is one place that can contain Dante, and it's by your side."

"If you let him hear that, you will never be able to live it down." Her father warned. "Leave him be. This is just an innocent dinner between the two of us, and an insect."

"An insect that inhales pizza like water." Reina sighed again, still struggling to come to terms with the fact that her uncle would always be the reason why family dinners were held so often at pizzerias where they were now considered regular customers. "And one that also goes through money so fast you'd think he bathed in it."

"We are indeed cursed." Her father answered in rueful agreement, but the unspoken truth was still understood and shared between them. Reina's uncle was annoying, insolent and a general burden to their small family (especially in monetary terms) but if Dante were to disappear suddenly for whatever reason, the two of them would miss him very much and search for him until they got him back no matter what.

They settled into comfortable silence for a short while, and it was broken when they paused at the lights, waiting for the green man despite the fact that the road was devoid of cars. With Dante's frequent run-ins with the law, the Sparda family was especially careful to not make any wrong moves in their daily lives.

"How is Nathaniel?" The question might have sounded innocent to any third party, but Reina knew her father well after living with him since their reunion.

"He's fine." Her reply was uncharacteristically short, and she hoped her father got the point of her trying to cut the conversation topic to a close through her curt reply.

"Is he still-" His question could not make it out completely before Reina cut him off with the same tone of warning.

"Yes. He is still in the singing industry and making music. It's his job. You know, the things you and I and even Dante has."

"Reina..."

"We've been through this a million times, Dad." Reina answered, all defensive now that her father had made himself clear that he wanted to wrench this sore topic of conversation open all over again. "I'm not breaking up with him and I know what he is doing. I don't care that you don't accept him; I love him and he's still giving his best for my sake."

"I respect that, Reina. You understand that I approve of any man who loves you." Her father's evened voice was actually the most irritating thing in their repeated arguments about the same thing. He always sounded condescending and rational, and the thing that Reina hated the most was that sometimes his words actually put seeds of doubt in her heart for her boyfriend.

"No, you don't!" Reina raised her voice a little since she was getting really irritated that her father was bringing up this argument all over again when they had had such a nice family atmosphere going on for the whole day. "You don't think Nathaniel loves me and you think him getting famous is going to go to his head, and that one day he's going to dump me for another famous popstar. He's not like that!"

She didn't notice that the lights had turned green until her father started to move to cross the road. She didn't really want to continue the conversation on the road right now, but a small push from the back reminded her that Dante was still here.

"Nathaniel again?" Dante sighed as he pushed her along softly, forcing her to keep pace with her father. "Verge, when are you ever going to learn that Reina's stuck to that idiot until he dumps her?"

"Nathaniel isn't going to dump me!" Reina's voice was now almost a shout. "Stop putting ideas like that in Dad's mind, Dante! You're responsible for this!"

"Calm down, Reina. I am not asking you to break up with him now." Her father said.

"If you wanted me to calm down, Dad, you shouldn't have brought up Nathaniel in the first place. I thought we were done talking about him the last time."

"The last time was before his album was released." Vergil's evened tone came back again. "Even I know how Nathaniel is gaining increasing success with his newest songs and appearing in more places and shows. He is broadening his horizons, Reina. He is no longer the man who stood beside you when you left the gang. At the very least, not much longer."

"Isn't broadening horizons a good thing? You told me to broaden my horizons when I first got out the gang too! That's the only reason why I got into martial arts and demon hunting, and look where I am now. Nathaniel is just taking a route that's slightly different from us, but I know how hard he has struggled to get there. He knows how much we have been supporting each other; I don't believe he's going to forget the days we wished for a bright future together." Reina argued, back again to the same points that she had used over and over again against her father.

"All men are the same. They get overwhelmed by their passion and temporarily forget the people who stood beside them, who believed in them. Nathaniel has a passion, and that passion is not only for music and you, but also for fame. He is going to have to weigh all three passions eventually, and only two of them can coexist in his near future." Her father's argument was unfaltering.

"Not everybody is like you, Dad! Nathaniel isn't like you when you were young. You were stupid and obsessed, but he isn't."

"Oooooh." Dante put in appropriately from behind, sounding as if he had caught a great piece of gossip. "She is reminding you of your stupid past, Verge. Remember how you stabbed me in the chest and cut my hand back in the days?"

"Shut up, Dante." Vergil's answer was irritable at best before he turned back to his daughter seriously. "All men are the same in the way they chase their passion. If you do not believe it, ask Dante."

"Wait, how am I supposed to shut up and answer Reina?" Dante's question from the back was completely ignored in the conversation when Vergil's daughter replied angrily.

"Nathaniel's different, and asking Dante is going to make things worse because his answers are ridiculous. I can't believe you, Dad. I thought we were coming out for a dinner, and I thought we were going to enjoy tonight without arguing all over again!" Reina threw her hands up. "You've totally ruined the atmosphere and my appetite right now."

"It is an argument only because you are making it so. If you will calm down and listen to me, you will understand where I am coming from."

"I'm done listening to you and your stupid ideas! How many times am I going to tell you that Nathaniel is different and he's not going to dump me!" Reina was fully shouting now, easily attracting the attention of strangers in their near vicinity as she came to a stop, forcing the men to stop with her.

"Fine." Vergil watched his daughter fume coolly. He didn't really remember Reina's mother clearly, but a faint memory of bedding a drunk woman with an easy temper always came to mind whenever he saw Reina's anger. Clearly if Reina's mother was still alive, Vergil knew for sure that he would never be able to live with the woman, because dealing with his daughter's temper took a special type of tolerance that could only be extended to people that he loved. Unfortunately, Reina's dead mother was not exactly one of them.

"Fine, what?" Reina barked back, fists on her hips in a stance as if she were ready to fight to the end.

"Fine." Vergil repeated, then turned to continue their walk towards their destination. "Nathaniel is different. You have me convinced."

The change of heart was so sudden that both Dante and Reina stood exchange confused looks for a second, then Dante shrugged and chased after his brother, falling back in pace easily.

Reina, on the other hand, fumed even more. It was clear to everyone that Vergil was not a person who would change his opinions so easily, but the man had clearly lied through his teeth, shrugging off the conversation that he had forcefully opened just minutes ago.

"I hate you, Dad!" She shouted, still ignorant of the eyes staring at her, wondering why a woman in her twenties was shouting at her father with a tantrum like a teenager in puberty. In a way, Reina was acting childishly, but this was because she had been forced to mature and grow up much earlier than normal when her mother died and she was left without parents. After Vergil found her, and both he and Dante had given her a relatively more loving family, she had not been able to help herself but slide back to taking advantage of the love and care that they showered her.

"No, you do not. You hate the truth." Vergil stopped and turned around to look steadily at his daughter. "Come on. Dante will kill me if we do not get to the restaurant anytime soon."

"Yeah, my stomach's growling like a demon." Dante added. "Can't you just let it go and let us get dinner in peace? I promise I'll stop Verge from talking about you-know-who for the rest of today."

"He was the one who started it first!"

"Yeah, well, he's stopping it now, isn't he?" Dante shifted his weight from side to side, fidgeting. "Can we go now?"

"Dad ruined my appetite." Reina reluctantly let a bit of her anger go, but unwillingly moved her feet to catch up with her elders, making sure that she walked beside Dante this time to make sure that her uncle was sandwiched between her and the man of her current displeasure.

Their walk was awkward for a long while as Reina struggled with herself to either let go of the anger or not.

She was so caught up with deciding between keeping her anger or letting go that she was almost unaware of something flying towards her until rough hands shoved her out of the way to the floor. A droplet of liquid splashed on her leg, and she felt a fiery sting on where it had been.

The sound of sizzling was loud. Reina looked up, startled to see her father's exposed forearm quickly turning very red.

"Die, bitch! You don't deserve to be Nathaniel's girlfriend! He is ours!" Reina heard a girl say, and was aware now that someone was standing in front of her father.

"Dad!" All anger was completely forgotten and replaced by shock when she jumped to her feet, ignoring the painful sting on the tiny part of her leg. If only one droplet was causing so much pain, she could only imagine how much pain her father was going through. His forearm was already smoking and becoming all wrinkled, which wasn't a good sign at all.

"I respect you, Miss, for being a fan of Mr Kayden. But please recognise your boundaries well. Who Mr Kayden loves and devotes himself to is his choice. Who decides to love him back is also none of your business. Leave my daughter alone." Vergil's voice was tightly controlled, but Reina knew that he only sounded so tight and pinched whenever he was trying to hide his pain or suffering. Vergil always sounded like that when he came back from a particularly tough job, all covered in wounds and broken bones.

"Dad, we have to get you to a hospital. Right now." Reina insisted, knowing better than to touch the area that was badly affected. She was sure that if she tried to do anything, the skin would peel off immediately.

"I will be fine." Vergil's answer was soft, but still like a tightly wound up coil.

"No you're not! It's probably acid, and I only got a droplet and it hurts. Your arm must be burning by now." Reina insisted. "Dante, call for an ambulance."

"Ambulance, or police first?" The reply from her uncle came from in front of her, surprising her by easily manhandling her attacker into a cuff. The empty bottle was still clutched in her attacker's hand, in which Dante took a careful smell and nodded. "Yup, acid."

"Ambulance first, of course!" Reina yelled, disbelieving of how calm her uncle was.

"I will be fine, Reina." Vergil answered. "Are you okay? You said you got a droplet."

"Dad, don't be stupid. You got everything for my sake!"

"Not everything. You got a droplet."

"Oh my god, stop arguing with me!" Reina yelled. "I'm going to smack you in the head if you say you're fine one more time!"

The threat of her smacking her father's head was so sudden and unexpected that Vergil was clearly surprised into silence.

"Now look here, Woman." Reina stalked up to her attacker, making sure her father was obediently standing behind her and leaving his wound alone. Dante was still expertly holding the woman in a cuff, one hand on the phone. "I don't care who you are and who you think you are. Kudos to you for finding out about Nathaniel and me. You think you love him more than I do? Go ahead. Nobody is stopping you. I don't even care if you think he loves me more than he loves you. I have nothing against you until you pull a stupid ass stunt like this. So bitch up, and go home crying to your mama, because nobody hurts my Dad like that."

Punctuating her words with a hard slap, Reina made sure that her hand made a hand print. She would have done more, but she didn't want to embarrass her father and uncle further than the attention they had already attracted.

"That is not going to do you well with Nathaniel, Reina." Her father said quietly when she returned to his side worriedly, checking his arm if it had gotten worse. It had, because the blisters were rising everywhere on the almost-bloody red skin.

"Stop. Don't think about Nathaniel." She said seriously. "If Nathaniel wants to break up with me over this stupid bitch, then he's not worth my time."

"You were just arguing with him about how much you loved him moment ago." Vergil answered, allowing himself to be guided to sit down on the sidewalk while Dante –unexpectedly –worked well keeping concerned audiences away from the both of them as they waited for an ambulance.

"You know that your words are right, Dad. Don't coddle me like a baby. Nathaniel hasn't been replying my texts and he says he's busy all the time even though the tabloids catch him at parties and whatnot. I just didn't want to accept it, but you were forcing me." Reina pouted, blowing carefully on the affected skin in the hopes that she could give her father some sort of relieve at the very least.

"For what's worth, I am sure he loved you when I first met him. It might have changed over the years, but the first few times I talked to him, you were really the focus of his life."

"He was mine too." Reina closed her eyes briefly, taking in a deep breath. "But from today onwards, you're going to be my new focus, Dad. I'm sorry we argued about Nathaniel. To hell with him. You're going to love me even over the years, right?"

"I wish I did not and will not." Her father gave one of his rare chuckles, his free hand ruffling the top of her head the same way her uncle had done.

This time, though, she was not irritated as she chuckled back.

Hiding behind her father's attempt to irritate her was a faint blush and a smile tugging at the corner of his lips.