[Father's Visit]

One day, it happened out of nowhere. It was a clearly normal day when Vergil opened his eyes slowly to the sunlight peeking through half-closed curtains. It had felt completely routine when Vergil showered and got ready for the new day, throwing on a fitting black tee and equally black pants.

When he got out of his bedroom, Dante was already out in the common space by then, barely awake. Even as he approached his twin brother in the kitchen, Vergil could easily see Dante still nodding off while waiting for the coffee machine. He didn't bother trying to greet his half-asleep brother, knowing that he would gain no reply until Dante had his first sip of the beverage. Checking in the fridge, Vergil settled for some toast for breakfast, sitting down to start on his meal just as Dante took his seat across Vergil as well, nursing the coffee carefully between his hands.

"Morning, Verge." Dante greeted lazily after becoming a little more awake with the dose of coffee.

"Good morning." Vergil answered. "Any news from Lady today?"

"Other than her usual morning calls about how I'm supposed to be paying off the debt?" Dante asked, though there was really no need. Vergil wasn't interested to know how Dante still have a massive debt with the woman despite having worked for her so many years ago. He had once tried to ask Lady what the actual amount of debt his twin brother had left with her, and the number that he received was almost akin to a national debt.

It was that day that Vergil realized that the only reason why Lady was not a billionaire was because she constantly paid for Dante's lawsuits and police fines. A sense of grudging respect had thus been created within Vergil in regards to the tight-fisted, crude mouth and very-frank freelance demon huntress Lady.

"Yes, other than that." Vergil answered.

"Nothing much. No jobs suited for us. But she said that she heard something funny on the streets. Some white-haired guy named Sparda was apparently asking around for us. Said he was looking for his sons, and asked for our description and address." Dante updated, getting up for his second cup of coffee quickly. Two doses were the usual wake-up call for Dante, but it appeared that Vergil's twin might be needing three this morning, considering how Dante had been half-drunk when he returned home.

"Probably a mad man." Vergil commented. "Or someone who has been reading too many fairy-tales."

"I don't know about that, Verge." Dante started on his second cup now as Vergil brushed the crumbs of his toast away from his fingers, then brought the dish to the sink for a wash. He considered leaving it there for a future wash, but that habit was something he definitely could not encourage in his twin brother. Vergil might come back to wash the dish later, but if Dante ever started trying to do the same, Vergil was sure that his twin brother would leave months' worth of dishes in the sink.

No, he guessed he would just have to wash it immediately.

"What don't you know about?" Vergil picked up the conversation again as the water started running.

"If it's a fan, then he probably has done a lot of his homework. Stories of Dad are kind of hard to come by, and if he'd worked it out enough to go around asking for us, then he might not be that mad."

"Or maybe he is just too far into his madness to distinct between his fairy tales and our truth." Vergil offered as a counter-point. "We'll deal with him if he comes and causes us trouble."

"Alright." Dante answered, still cradling his cup as he approached the front door at the sound of doorbell ringing. "You have a delivery, Verge?"

"No, nothing that I know of." Vergil answered as he left the dish out to dry, wiped his hands on the hand towel nearby. With his back to the rest of their apartment, Vergil could easily hear Dante opening the door to greet the visitor.

Not a second later, the sound of ceramic cup crashing down on the floor echoed in the apartment.

"Dante? Vergil?" A male voice was clear in his enunciation as he spoke –clearly not Dante's voice. Vergil had spun around to see what had gone wrong with Dante enough to make his twin brother drop his favourite cup on the floor, but his view on the visitor was blocked by Dante's body, though he saw a peek of white hair as well. "You're Dante. They said that your hair is short and unruly, and you've got a good chest. The ladies had lots to say about your broad shoulders."

Vergil couldn't really put a finger on why he found that voice strangely and distantly familiar.

"It's so good to be able to see you again, Dante. You've grown so big now! That's my boy." A hand from the visitor ruffled the top of Dante's hair, and from where Vergil stood in the kitchen, he could see that his twin brother was not reacting at all –just having become a complete stone.

"Dante?" Vergil could not help his curiosity as he began to make out of the kitchen towards the living area where the entrance was connected to. "What's wrong? Who is this?"

Approaching his brother and trying to speak was a wrong thing to do, because Vergil finally realized what had caused his twin brother to freeze up so badly.

Sparda stood at the door, looking at him now since his voice had clearly been heard. A wide smile drew across the man's face, and Vergil couldn't believe his eyes. Whoever this guy was; he looked a hell lot like his father. And apparently sounded like him as well.

"Vergil! You've grown so much as well! I can't even tell that you guys are twins anymore." The man that looked and sounded like Sparda exclaimed with surprise and joy.

"Who are you?" Vergil was quicker to shake his shock –Dante was still frozen and speechless in his shock –as he asked suspiciously.

"You don't remember me?" The man reeled back in obvious surprise. The hurt that briefly ran through blue eyes was surprisingly genuine, though it was something that Vergil could not wrap his head around.

"No, I don't." Vergil answered, because he clearly would remember anyone who looked and sounded so much like their dead father. "Who are you?"

"I am your father, Vergil! Have you really forgotten about your Pops?" The man exclaimed in shock. "Dante, you remember me, right?"

Vergil watched as his twin brother stiffly shake his head from side to side as well.

"You ungrateful little things!" The shock and hurt disappeared in almost a second, and instead was replaced with a short-fused anger that sparked to life. Vergil watched in soft shock as the man whacked Dante on the head in a disciplinary movement –and was sure that he would have gotten the same assault if he wasn't standing so far away from the door. "How can the two of your forget your father just like that? I thought Eva and I taught the two of you devils better than this?"

"You're mistaken." Vergil began to frown now, realizing that this guy was most probably the exact same guy that Dante had been talking about just minutes ago. Clearly this man had gotten wrapped up in fantasies of Sparda so much that he had gone for plastic surgery. Vergil wasn't sure what this person had done to his vocal cords, but he clearly had changed his voice in such a way that he sounded exactly like their father. "Our father Sparda is dead."

"Dead?" The man who looked like Sparda repeated. "Excuse me, which part of me looks dead to you?"

"Please leave, sir. Dante and I have better things to do than entertain you." Vergil simply answered as politely as he could afford himself to. He really didn't have the interest to deal with crazed fans like these. He wasn't sure why so many humans idolized his father in the first place. Yes, Sparda had done Humankind a very big favour by turning his back on his demon brethren and closed the gates to Hell with his power. Something like that, though, had now transformed into fodder for more 'science fiction' stories, so Vergil had not expected anyone to take the Legend of Sparda so seriously.

Apparently his expectations was being ruined by this man.

"Who told you I was dead?" The man didn't seem ready to give up the conversation at all, turning to glare at Vergil in a disciplinary move that gave him a distant flashback of the younger days in which Vergil was actually intimidated and scared of his father's disciplinary glare. But the years had passed and Vergil was in his early thirties. A glare like that was nothing to him at all right now and had little effect when Vergil could glare so much scarier.

"No one told us..." Dante finally seemed to find some words. "But our father died to seal Mundus away from the Human World when we were four. He never came back home, and didn't even come to save our mother when demons attacked us."

Vergil watched as the man winced, an expression of pain and regret flitting across his face momentarily.

"About that... I've met your mother while I was roaming around. She gave me the confidence to go finding you boys again. I have already apologised for abandoning her, and she forgives me for not being there to save her."

"I don't know what you're talking about, but our mother has been dead for as long as our father has been." Vergil didn't let up on his frown, because he no longer understood exactly what this crazy fan wanted from them. Coming here and making up funny stories about what had happened to his parents even though the both of them clearly knew that their parents were dead was something that Vergil couldn't find it in himself to entertain for long.

"Your mother... she's an angel now. Don't you the two of you know? She has been watching over the both of you for as long as she can remember." The man answered with a look of what looked like concern and pity in his eyes, and even Vergil could not deny the likeness of this crazed fan to his father. In all honesty, neither Dante nor Vergil remembered much about the parents that left them early on their lives anymore. Sparda and Eva were a distant memory that spanned more than twenty years ago, and if anyone expected half-devils to have better memory, Vergil would easily call bullshit on that. It was true that Vergil had better wits, but when it came to brains, Dante as a half-devil was doing as badly as –sometimes even worse than  -humans.

"Look, your joke has gone too far. I have no comments about you being obsessed enough about Sparda to do plastic surgery and change your voice, but Dante and I have no interest in entertaining you. We have a business to run." Vergil finally put his foot down, stepping forth and dragging his brother back to his side by the back of his collar. Dante stumbled, but otherwise did not protest, since the younger twin was still having troubles wrapping his head around things.

Really; when it came to anything other than killing and hunting demons, Dante had nothing useful in his head that proved his worth as a son of Sparda at all.

"Me? Obsessed about myself?" The man repeated in surprise, as if that was his first time entertaining a thought like that. "There are fans like that out there?"

"Apparently you're one of them." Vergil made sure that Dante was out of range standing beside him, then reached for the open door that swung inwards. "It was not a pleasure meeting you, and please do not come back."

With those words, Vergil slammed the door closed.

________________________________________________________________________________

Neither of the Sparda brothers had talked about what happened in the early morning, and it was already well into the late afternoon. After slamming the door close on their strange visitor, Vergil had gotten a call from another contact on the street who had given him a small job to earn small change. Since he needed some form of an exercise to work off the hangover, Dante had tagged along and gotten the both of them rather messy upon return.

Having taking a bath first, Vergil sat on the living room couch, his white hair still dripping water droplets and scrolling through his phone for any news of the supernatural. Things covered in the local newspaper known simply as the 'supernatural' were usually the result of demonic beings and those big news tended to reap big rewards when Vergil or Dante killed those demons –particularly if that propelled them into the news again.

Vergil was tempted to think that the 'Sparda Brothers' had their own file in the local newsprint, ready to be taken out whenever either he or his brother(or both of them) killed yet another big-scale, attention-grabbing demon.

He was still in the middle of looking for any signs of demonic activity that could possibly bring him good money when Dante joined him in the living room as well, still rubbing the water out of his hair. When Vergil didn't bother to look up or acknowledge Dante's arrival into the room, the younger twin only crept up to his older brother, then used his own towel to dry Vergil's hair, purposefully messing it up as best as he could.

Too used to his brother's childish antics by now, Vergil didn't even bother to protest when Dante laughed at the chaos that he left.

There was a short moment of silence as Dante mellowed his laughter back to nothing, and then a loud crash came through the window close to them. Jumping to their feet immediately, owing to trained instincts of demon hunters, both Sparda brothers stood ready for a sneak attack upon them. Vergil even had his summoned swords ready at hand, though Dante still stood weapon- less since their swords and Dante's guns were at the other side of the room.

It didn't take long for a face to appear on the other side of the broken window.

"Hello, boys." Sparda said, and Vergil was extremely tempted to send a summoned sword straight at this man, regardless of how human this man felt. Still, it would be bad press if he killed someone now. The Sparda half-demons that were famed for saving the humans like how their father did from demonic invasion would probably find themselves discriminated against if Vergil killed a human now –no matter how tempted he was to do it, and no matter how justified it was going to be considering this said human was breaking into their house in broad daylight, when their apartment was five floors up.

"Um... Hello?" Dante answered in the most uncertain greeting ever as both brothers straightened from their defensive stances, looking flummoxed.

"Mind if I get a hand? Climbing up the drainpipe isn't as easy as television shows make it seem. It's a lot harder now that I'm human, and I'm getting old." The man answered, speaking conversationally as if there was nothing wrong with visiting a pair of brothers by climbing up a drainpipe, breaking their window and then requesting for help to come in.

Vergil had no idea when his day had suddenly gotten so mad and out of hand.

"What are you doing here?" Vergil could not help but ask in hostility as soon as Dante had helped the man up through the window easily, skirting past the shards of broken glasses on the floor. "Couldn't you knock on the door instead of breaking our window?"

"I tried that in the morning, and you weren't exactly very receptive of that, were you, Vergil?" The man answered in an 'I-know-what-you-are-thinking' tone, which only served to irritate Vergil much further. "I'm here to visit my sons."

"We are not your sons."

"Yeah, and my name isn't Sparda." The man answered, brushed the imaginary dust down from his clothes, and then took a look around with surprise, as if only then remembering that he had invited himself into the apartment. "Wow, this place is pretty big. It looked a lot smaller from the door. I expected it to be a little messier, though. Dante was always a pig when he was younger, right?"

As if he had been completely welcomed into the house at all, the man continued to look around the house, making sounds of amusement and off-handed comments that sounded almost like he was the real Sparda. Vergil watched in disbelief as the man took a stroll around the house, appreciating their decorum. Even Dante was stunned in silence this time as the brothers watched the stranger help himself to the couch in the living room, then patted the empty space beside him in invitation to join him –on their couch.

"Come, boys. I'm sure you guys want to talk to your Pops."

"About that; give us a moment." Dante surprised Vergil by breaking his silence spell, and the younger twin grabbed onto his brother's upper arm, dragging him into the nearest room –which happened to be Vergil's –and slammed the door shut behind them.

"What are we going to do with him?" Dante was acting disbelieving like a little kid who was suddenly dealing with a strange adult in his apartment.

"We're going to kick him out." Vergil answered firmly. "That; or we're asking around if any asylum has lost their patient. That's the furthest form of kindness that I am willing to give him."

"I don't know about that, Verge..." Dante's reply was surprisingly weak.

"What don't you know about?"

"I know you've been pretty irritated at him all this while, but if you ignore the fact that he is a human and is a lot younger than what Dad's age should be right now, he looks, thinks and acts a hell lot like Dad."

Vergil blinked once, then twice at the uncertainty written on his twin's face.

"You're kidding me. You think that guy is really Sparda?" Vergil almost spluttered. He knew Dante was an idiot, but he had never thought that Dante could be an idiot enough to believe something as ridiculous as this. "Do you need to go back to elementary school to be taught not to trust strangers?"

"I know this sounds stupid!" Dante protested. "But if you really listened carefully to all that he was saying while he was... um, appreciating our place; he really sounded like he knew that old you and me. Like how my room was a pig sty-"

"That is not a secret that only Sparda knows." Vergil interrupted.

"-and how you always climbed stairs by putting your hands on the next step before climbing up, even when you were tall enough to stop doing that." Dante finished, ignoring the interruption.

"I might not have been the only baby doing something like that at that time. I'm sure it was a common occurrence among toddlers." Vergil dismissed.

"Then how about how I always chewed the corners of tables and cupboards when I could crawl?"

"Common."

"And how you got locked in the shoe cabinet once because Dad accidentally put his sword in front of the doors and you couldn't push it open?"

"A fantasy he made in his head." Vergil dismissed.

"How I climbed into Dad's study and puked over his documents?"

"It happens often."

"How you and I always bit each other on the foreheads until we were bleeding when we first grew our teeth? How you and I were slobbering all over each other while we slept so much that Dad and Mum couldn't stand it and made us sleep apart until we stopped showing tendencies of biting or licking things while we were sleeping?"

"It's a twin thing. I'm sure it's-" Vergil paused, thinking back on his brother's words. "Wait, we were not old enough to remember something like that."

"Exactly." Dante answered, as if satisfied that his elder twin was finally seeing some form of confusion. "That man knows these kinds of things about us. Even if he imagined half of it, he's been pretty accurate thus far. There hasn't been a single wrong comment he made about the both of us during our younger years that I remember while Dad was around."

"I still refuse to believe that he's our father. Sparda is dead, Dante. No matter how we dream about him, he isn't coming back. I learnt the hard lesson in Temen-Ni-Gru."

"I know, Verge." Dante answered, apparently not appreciating the nag. "I'm not saying that he is our father, but I'm saying that he might not be as crazy as you see him to be. He knows things about us, and he has to get them from somewhere. We need to get to that 'somewhere' and destroy all those information about us."

"Because the things he's been saying are all embarrassing things about us when we were young?" Vergil asked, clearly seeing the truth in Dante's eyes. "You're afraid of ruining your reputation."

"Our reputation." Dante corrected, knowing that there was no way that he could hide the truth from his elder brother. "He's got loads of embarrassing stories about you as well."

"We were toddlers, Dante." Vergil sighed as he put his hand on the doorknob, clearly ready to get back outside once again. "But I get your point. We'll talk to him and try to get something out of him."

________________________________________________________________________________

"Say I accept that you are our real father for a short moment." Vergil started, making sure that his words made clear that this was a strict assumption. "What do you want by coming to visit us? Our father has left us alone more than twenty years ago, and it's not exactly high time to be coming back and looking to change our diapers."

"Diapers are not the only thing I can change, my boy." The man answered with a delighted smile, as if Vergil had already acknowledged him for a father. Now that Dante had mentioned it, Vergil was a little bit struck at how the man spoke exactly like their father. Vergil and Dante might not remember much about their parents, but Vergil clearly remembered his father's fondness of referring to them as 'my boys' -though that could easily be a habit of all fathers. "And I'm not here to change anything; just add on to your lives until one of us dies and joins your mother in the clouds."

"You mean you want to live here?" Dante interrupted in surprise. "You want to live with us?"

"Can't I? Can't a father want to live with his sons? I asked around. Neither of you are married or even have girlfriends. While I am disappointed that the both of you haven't inherited your father and mother's capacity for love, I can't exactly blame the two of you, since I was the one who cursed you with half-demon blood. It probably scares away the women."

"You say it as if you know what it feels like to be a half-demon." Vergil commented sharply, hoping to trip the man out of his well-crafted act.

"Of course. I was a full-fledged demon, wasn't I?" The man answered easily.

"Then why do you feel human to us now?"

"I lost it over the years." The answer came so quickly that Vergil took a long second of silence to process the ridiculous lie that was coming out from the man's lips.

"You lost your demon side over the years?" Vergil repeated with a tone that could almost sound like he was spitting the words out. "Don't be ridiculous."

"Don't take that tone with me, Vergil." The man snapped back quickly, a fatherly disciplinary tone that was dead set to take Vergil to hand –except Vergil had grown up in the past twenty-plus years without a father figure and no longer feared the authority of a fatherly figure.

"Don't treat us like a pair of four year old kids." Vergil spat back in reply, the pure curiosity to know where this man got his information about them from keeping Vergil from kicking this man out of the front door immediately.

What Vergil expected from the man in reply had been some form of verbal retaliation to his hard tone, or perhaps a fatherly explosion of emotions that spoke for his 'disappointment' of having a rude son. None of that came, however, when the man that looked like Sparda looked taken-aback at Vergil's words, then seemed to internalize them.

"I... I supposed that I have been trying to treat the two of you like four year olds." The man suddenly confessed in a small tone, as if feeling guilty. "But what's a father to do when the last time he'd ever saw his sons were when they were four and still soiling and wetting the bed?"

"Explain." Vergil was perfectly comfortable being unemotional and relentless as he stared straight at the man who claimed to be their father.

"I suppose I have to..." The man who looked like Sparda sighed as he sank heavier into their couch, seemingly suddenly defeated. "You boys only heard that I had disappeared and assumed that I was dead when in fact, I was never. I was trapped in the Demon World when I went out to seal the gate that night. It took most of my power to seal the gate, and while it was closing, it sucked up all traces of anything fully demonic. I was still demon enough to be sucked in, and I didn't have enough power to break out. So I ran around the Demon World looking for a way out. Eventually I did, but something went wrong in the process, because I turned up back here as a human. A powerless, penniless human with nothing but the clothes on his back and the looks on his face. I was halfway around the globe, and I couldn't understand their language. I knew I had to get back to the two of you, but I could only to do it through human means. I wasn't sure as well how many years had passed in the Human World while I was trapped in the Demon World. All I know is that I used my human strength and my face to earn money as quickly as I could, then went around asking for the two of you. The other side of the Earth hasn't heard of the two of you, and I had to travel around half of the globe before someone finally heard the name Sparda before. By the time I reached here... well, you guys are already thirty."

"But Pops," Dante piped up in curiosity, "if you're human now, then how come you haven't aged a single day since when you left?"

"Another question that I have no answer to." The man that called himself Sparda shrugged his shoulders. "But I know Vergil won't be satisfied with an answer like that, so I brought a page of a spell book that follows the spell that I took to come back from the Demon World the closest. I couldn't find the exact spell anymore, but this one said clearly that immortality is to be expected for the being that is pulled through the realm for at least a century."

"So... you're saying that you're immortal?"

"Immortally human." The man nodded with something that looked like a sad frown. "If you don't believe me, then this ought to prove something."

Both Vergil and Dante watched in silent surprise as the man removed a small sheathed knife from his jacket pocket, then drew the sharp end over his palm in a casual movement. Once done with his self-harm, the man simply turned his hand towards the Sparda brothers and allowed them to watch the wound heal quickly, the blood being the only evidence that something had happened at all.

"I'm still weak and incapable as a human, but I can't be killed. I've tried. I tried to kill myself to join your mother in the clouds. I have stabbed myself in the heart, set myself on fire and tried to behead myself. None of it worked. If Vergil has any bright ideas on how to kill me, please feel free to help your Pops out."

"I'm not sure whether I can believe you at all." Vergil answered honestly. "Anyone can come here saying that they are our father. It is really not pleasant to be suddenly attacked with the idea that our father –who we believed dead for more than twenty years –was actually simply just on the other side of the Earth working like a human to earn money just to come see us. A father –I correct –who is not only human now, but also immortal."

"My boy..." The man who identified himself as Sparda began to say in a pleading tone, but Vergil had had enough.

"Don't. Don't 'my boy' me, because only my father can do that, and I don't believe you."

"What about you, Dante?" The man turned to the younger twin, as if hoping to get through at least one of them.

"I'm with Vergil." Dante answered sheepishly. "I'd like to get my father back, but it's probably not so easy. He's not going to just knock on my door one day and say hi."

"Fine." The man stood up, clearly pissed off that he had been wasting his time. "Your mother did warn me that something like this would happen. She did say that it was stupid of me to rush immediately to come find you two once I got your address, that I was reckless for not having planned it more carefully. But I don't care. The two of you are my sons, and I'm going to make you acknowledge me whether you two like it or not, you idiots."

Vergil's readiness to ask the man to leave their house once and for all was taken completely from his lips when the man suddenly lunged at him. Taken completely by surprise at the sudden action, Vergil fell with the man's sudden weight on him, but the weight wasn't pressed on him for long at all. With Vergil having fallen back on the couch, he stared up at the man who looked like Sparda in horror when the man held his amulet in his hand.

"Give that back before you regret it." Vergil growled in threat, but it was like the man couldn't hear him. In the same sudden motion, Vergil watched as his brother was taken by equal surprise, completely caught off-guard at the reasonless attack.

Both Sparda brothers watched in muted horror as the man who called himself Sparda jumped up on the low table in front of the couches, holding both of their amulets.

"Eva said this would work, so it had better." The man announced. "The two amulets of my love, and my blood."

Slamming the two amulets together –jewel-to-jewel –the man who had not yet wiped off the blood off his hand from the previous demonstration now wiped his blood all over the two amulets.

The reaction was instantaneous. There was a bright flash of light that blinded Vergil and Dante for a few seconds, and then there was suddenly a very strong demonic presence in front of them. Blinking furiously against the visual assault, Vergil finally managed to blink the black dots out of his eyes... and met the figure of his father's demonic form standing in front of them.

"Well?" A distorted voice spoke. "If this doesn't convince you that I am your father, I don't know what will."

"D-Dad?!?" Dante exclaimed, eyes wide with shock.

"Yes, you idiot son. Still, I guess I have to thank Eva. She's the only person who can change me back from a human to a demon even after she has become an Angel." The distorted voice seemed to comment off-hand before the devil-triggered figure turned to the silent Vergil. "Well?"

"We're going to go downstairs." Vergil said after clearing his throat, forcing himself to blink. "And then you're going to pay for drinks because I need one badly now to forget this ever happened."

"Make it ten." Dante agreed with a nod as both Sparda brothers stood up in unison, held each other's eye contact for the shortest moment, and then went tearing for the front door as if the Devil himself had been chasing their tail.

Thus remained Sparda in his devil-triggered form, still standing on the low table in the middle of the living-room, staring at the front door that had slammed behind his two sons that had gone tearing out of the apartment. It was clearly not the type of reunion that he had imagined -it didn't include his sons running away from him immediately. His sons' words only sank in shortly after he de-triggered, and Sparda was tearing out behind his sons in another second.

"It took all of my fortune to come find you boys!" Sparda yelled as he chased after his sons down the stairs. "I'm not paying for drinks! And the two of you shouldn't be drinking!"

"We're not four anymore, Dad!" Dante shouted back up the stairwell. "Besides, we need the drink. I can't deal with a father's visit without at least ten pints of beer right now. Vergil and I both."