🍕 DANTE SPARDA | devil in the details
summary: every time dante tears another hole through his red coat, he brings it to the same tailor to be mended. the coat keeps coming back and, eventually, so does he
word count: 5,376
content: dante x gn!reader, fluff, humour, mild hurt/comfort, minor injury and blood, dante should be banned from owning leather
a/n: thank you to the lovely anon who requested this and gave me an excuse to spend 5,000 words thinking about dante, his beautiful coat and his slutty little waist 🖤
The first time Dante brought you his coat, he arrived eleven minutes before closing with one sleeve hanging by a few stubborn threads and three enormous claw marks raked through the back. He laid it across your counter like a body awaiting burial, planted both hands beside the remains and said, “Caught it on a fence.”
You looked from the ruined leather to the stranger leaning comfortably into your workspace. He was tall enough to make the shop feel abruptly smaller, white hair falling around a face arranged into cherubic innocence which might have been more convincing had he not entered carrying a sword nearly as long as you were tall. Dried blood marked his collar and stained one glove, though whether it belonged to him seemed less concerning than the fact he appeared serenely unaware of it.
“Was the fence alive?”
“Not by the time I left.”
That sounded closer to the truth. The coat had once been beautiful and, beneath the abuse, still was—scarlet leather cut to accommodate broad shoulders and a narrow waist, with enough weight in the sweeping tails to turn every movement into theatre. Whoever had made it knew exactly what he wanted from it: to be seen coming. The red entered a room before his sword did and made certain everyone was looking when he followed. Unfortunately, its owner appeared to regard being mauled as a routine laundering method.
You lifted the severed sleeve and turned back the lining. “This needs to be partially dismantled. The back panel has stretched out of shape, the lining will have to come away, and I may be able to save the sleeve if you haven’t lost any pieces.”
He bent to inspect it beside you, bringing with him the faint scents of gunpowder, old leather and something recently singed. “You’re the expert.”
“I am, which is why I’m telling you it will take at least four days.”
He tried two days, then three, and when neither moved you, deployed a charming please with all the confidence of a man unaccustomed to finding doors closed after he smiled at them. You assured him that such a polite customer could collect his coat in four days.
The grin came easily then, quick and bright and entirely too pleased by your refusal. “I like you.”
“I charge extra for flirting.”
“Put it on my bill.”
You reached for the order book and asked for his name. Dante offered no surname—“Just Dante,” he said, as though one should have been enough for you and generally was for everyone else—then watched your pen move down the page until you paused over the blood saturating the torn lining. Curiosity had its limits, yes, but professional safety required several answers.
“Is there anything on this coat likely to dissolve my hands?”
“Not anymore.”
“Venom?”
“Nope.”
“Curses?”
“Not in the traditional sense.”
Your pen stopped. “In the traditional sense.”
Dante leant closer, lowering his voice as though confiding an ancient superstition. “You know how people say red attracts trouble?”
“No.”
“Well, they should. You’d be amazed.”
You wrote the estimated cost on a separate slip. Dante whistled at the alleged abundance of zeroes, all two of them, and excavated his pockets in the desperate belief that money might have bred in one of them. Across your counter appeared two loose cartridges, a pizza voucher, several keys, a silver lighter, four coins, a demon tooth and a handful of crystallised organs.
You picked up the tooth between two fingers. “Should I ask?”
“Souvenir.”
“Take it away.”
“You don’t think it adds character?”
“I think it has saliva on it.”
He returned it to his pocket and contemplated his four coins. His attempts to negotiate instalments and barter met with escalating hostility, but the offer to handle any demons troubling you deserved an answer. “The only demon giving me trouble,” you told him, “is standing in my shop without enough money to pay the deposit.”
Dante pressed a hand to his chest. “You wound me.”
“I think you’ll recover.”
His attention sharpened, amusement gaining a flicker of curiosity. You had the peculiar impression of answering a question he had not asked, then levity swept back over it and he reached for the enormous sword strapped across his body, apparently intending to leave it as collateral.
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s worth more than the coat.”
“I’m not keeping a sword in my workroom.”
“Rebellion’s perfectly behaved.”
“It has a name?”
“Don’t be rude.”
“You came here carrying a named weapon, several unidentified organs and no money.”
“Well, when you put it like that, I sound interesting.”
“When I put it like that, you sound like a police report.”
He eventually discovered several crumpled notes in an inside pocket, enough to cover most of the deposit. You accepted the shortfall on the condition that the coat remained with you until he paid the balance, and Dante offered his hand across the counter as though you had concluded some vital piece of diplomacy rather than negotiated with a delinquent peacock. His palm was warm, rough with old calluses and large enough to swallow yours.
“Four days,” you reminded him.
“I’ll miss you.”
“You’ve known me for twelve minutes.”
“Longest twelve minutes of my life.”
The bell chimed as you escorted him outside. Stripped of that red flare, he seemed oddly diminished, although the dark clothes beneath revealed how much of his apparent size belonged not to the garment but to the man himself. He caught you looking, flexed one shoulder with shameless deliberation, and laughed when you shut the door in his face.
The sound followed you back to the counter, where the coat lay waiting like the first bad decision in a story you had not yet agreed to tell.
The coat proved more complicated than you had initially expected. The claws had dragged the leather out of shape, stretching the edges until the panels could no longer meet, and the damage spread each time you opened another seam. You removed the lining and built a fine support beneath the worst of it, strengthening without making the leather rigid; then you placed each stitch so the repaired sections would flex with Dante’s body rather than split during his next quarrel with something possessing talons.
The deeper you went, the more old repairs emerged. Some were competent, others appalling. One sleeve had been reattached with what looked suspiciously like fishing line, and the left side had been scorched, conditioned and scorched again. Beneath the lapel, your fingertips found the mouths of bullet holes, a dark stain near the ribs and a narrow cut through the collar which had missed the wearer’s throat by perhaps an inch if you were being generous. The garment had become an accidental biography, each scar evidence of some disaster its owner had survived and reduced to a joke. You suspected Dante would be much the same beneath it.
He returned on the fourth day carrying the remainder of your money and a pizza he introduced as a peace offering. When you pointed out that he owed you fifteen and the restaurant offered free delivery, Dante maintained that a large pizza held at least twenty in emotional value, then surrendered the money when it became clear charm would not alter arithmetic. You accepted a slice while he stepped onto the fitting platform and slipped into the restored coat.
It settled across his shoulders as though relieved to have found him again. The reconstructed leather bent cleanly when he rolled his arms, the long tails sweeping around his legs as he turned before the mirror. Yet for all his earlier noise, Dante fell quiet when his fingers reached the seam crossing his back.
“You saved it.”
For once, Dante let the sincerity survive without smothering it beneath a wink. You busied yourself with the collar and told him that was generally what people paid you to do, but his thumb continued slowly over the repair. “Most would’ve replaced the whole panel.”
“Most would have told you to buy another coat. The original leather was still workable, it just needed a little patience.”
In the mirror, mischief had fallen away from a face seemingly built to contain it. Without the grin, older things became visible. The weariness feathered around his eyes, a habitual distance in the set of his mouth, sorrow worn for so long it no longer troubled to announce itself. You looked away before observation became intrusion and smoothed the scarlet leather over his shoulders.
“Lucky me,” Dante said.
You pretended not to hear the answer beneath the answer.
The second catastrophe arrived several weeks later as a neat, smouldering hole through the coat. Dante invited you to see the other guy, who turned out to have been a flaming skull mounted on a demonic centipede. Because it fired projectiles, he insisted, it was cannon-adjacent. You asserted it made him an idiot.
This time he had remembered money, or at least enough that you accepted the garment without conducting another financial inquest. He had also brought coffee prepared exactly as you liked it, a coincidence requiring him to pass over several nearer cafés in order to visit the one you frequented each morning. You did not mention that just as he did not mention how carefully he watched you take the first sip.
The damaged panel required new measurements, so Dante climbed onto the fitting platform and spread his arms while you circled him with the tape. He asked you to buy him dinner before wrapping it around his chest, expanded his ribcage by three blatant inches and claimed nervousness when confronted. You pulled the tape snug enough to expel the breath in a betrayed rush.
“Cruel,” he accused.
“Occupational necessity.”
He remained unrepentant while you measured the breadth of his shoulders, the length of his back and the fall from waist to hem, offering opinions throughout, most of which concerned additional pockets. He wanted one large enough for a slice of pizza that was insulated, removable, and perhaps came with a waterproof flap. You were threatening to pin the measurements directly to him when his reflection asked whether that was a promise.
The tape slipped between your fingers.
His delight was immediate, warm and intolerable. You recovered by tightening it around his waist, but Dante merely laughed until you stepped nearer to check the fit beneath his collar. Then, with the abruptness of a curtain falling at the end of an act, he became quiet beneath your hands.
You would come to recognise that stillness. Dante filled any silence left near him, whether with a joke or the extravagant sprawl of his body. Under your hands, he let the quiet remain. His eyes followed you in the mirror while you adjusted the line of the coat and marked the damaged panel with chalk, but he made no attempt to disturb your concentration.
Few customers recognised how intimate a fitting could become. You learnt the angle of their shoulders, where tension gathered through the spine, which parts of themselves they concealed and which they exaggerated. Dante wore confidence with the same dramatic ease as scarlet leather, but his body held truths the costume could not completely disguise. There was an old stiffness beneath one shoulder blade, a faint flinch when your fingers passed his left side, pale scars rising wherever the shirt pulled taut; there were too many to count, and more beneath the surface than any mirror could offer you.
“You always stare this intensely at your customers?” he asked.
“Only the ones assembled incorrectly.”
“That hurts, sweetheart.”
“Hold still.”
He did.
After that, one repair threaded itself into the next. Dante returned with a singed hem, a missing cuff and, on one memorable occasion, a sleeve stiff with something he insisted was not technically blood. You banished him until it had been cleaned and he reappeared the following morning with the coat dripping wet and the righteous expression of a schoolboy who believed literal compliance should exempt him from consequences.
Soon the damage barely justified professional attention. A loose button required an hour on your fitting platform and most of the sweets beside the till. A pulled thread became an excuse to occupy the little sofa while you worked on commissions, his long legs hanging over one arm as he supplied increasingly improbable accounts of his latest hunt. You learnt that he ran a business called Devil May Cry, although ‘ran’ seemed generous. Most days, he appeared to survive through bad planning and a body too stubborn to die. Whatever god protected fools had clearly made Dante a personal project. In return, Dante learnt which afternoons were quietest, where you hid the good coffee and how to distinguish the expression that meant you were listening from the one that meant you were considering stabbing him with your shears.
His pockets developed their own ecosystem. Shell casings bred beside lollipops and overdue bills while the demon teeth multiplied until you suspected the first had begun a dental archive. You made him empty everything before surrendering the coat, and during one such excavation found a scrap of scarlet thread looped carefully around a card.
It was the thread you used for his repairs.
“You’ve been carrying this?”
Dante glanced over from the mirror. “Emergency.”
“You can’t perform emergency leather restoration with six inches of thread and no needle.”
“Good luck charm, then.”
Lightly said, but he took the card from you with surprising care and returned it to the safest inside pocket. After that, you began signing your work with a tiny line of embroidery concealed beneath the lining, where nobody would find it unless they went searching. Dante said nothing when he discovered the first, but he arrived the following week with pizza from the expensive restaurant across town and the entire cost of his repair in cash.
You might have carried on pretending his visits meant nothing if you had not caught him manufacturing one. Late on a rain-swept afternoon, Dante placed the coat across your counter and pointed gravely to a separation in the lining. The stitches had been snipped one by one. The leather was neither strained nor frayed; even the loose thread remained caught beneath the lining, damning him.
“Must’ve been a very small demon,” he said.
“A demon carrying a seam ripper?”
“They’re evolving.”
“You picked this open.”
He received the accusation with magnificent offence. You informed him that your trust had died the moment he disembowelled his own lining. Dante called that dramatic, and you reminded him he had come to the right shop.
Rain threaded silver down the windows behind him. Without the usual catastrophe demanding your attention, the absurdity of the arrangement stood plainly between you—he had sabotaged a perfectly sound repair because he wanted an excuse to visit. Apparently, a man who could face a flaming centipede without hesitation could not ask whether you wanted to see him outside the shop.
You pushed the coat back across the counter. “This doesn’t need a tailor. It needs ten minutes and someone capable of threading a needle.”
“Know anyone?”
“I’m busy.”
His grin faltered—not enough to disappear, but enough to reveal the uncertainty underneath it—and he reached for the coat. You let his fingers find the leather before adding that you finished at seven and intended to eat at the restaurant around the corner. They served pizza, since that appeared to constitute the entirety of his diet.
Dante’s hand remained where it was. “Are you asking me to dinner?”
“I’m telling you where I’m eating tonight. Your interpretation is your own problem.”
“At seven?”
“If you’re late, I’m leaving without you.”
He arrived at half past six.
Dinner became another kind of routine. Dante remained an inconsistent correspondent and a terrible planner, but he appeared at odd hours with coffee, takeaway or news of some minor disaster he insisted you would find entertaining. Sometimes he vanished for several days, never warning you before he went; you refused to ask when he would return, as though silence could make the waiting less revealing.
The coat always came back eventually, until the night Dante arrived wearing it over an injury he thought you would not notice.
The damage he presented was almost insulting. There was a narrow tear beside the lower seam, simple enough to mend within the hour. He launched into a story about an overgrown lizard with attachment issues while you examined it, but the familiar animation had thinned into effort. He kept his left side angled away, one hand braced upon the counter and carrying far more weight than his careless posture would admit. When your fingertips touched the torn leather, it was wet with blood.
“How long ago?”
“Couple of hours.”
You told him to take off the coat. Dante attempted a remark about finally winning you over, but whatever he found in your expression discouraged the rest. He drew the garment gingerly from his shoulders, and beneath it his shirt clung dark and wet to his side.
The tear was forgotten. You caught his wrist when he tried to wave you away and found a steady pulse beneath skin colder than it should have been. “Sit down.”
“I heal fast.”
“You’re bleeding on my floor.”
“I’ll pay for cleaning.”
“With what money?”
“Good point.”
The joke had no shine left in it by the time Dante lowered himself onto the fitting platform, the same narrow stage from which he had posed, preened and stolen enough pins to establish a private armoury. Now he folded instinctively around an injury he insisted did not deserve attention, and the sight of him there felt wrong enough to hollow out the room. You fetched the medical box from beneath the counter, cut through the darkened side of his shirt, and listened as he pointed out, with dwindling conviction, that the shop was already closing.
“Then you can stop bleeding whenever it becomes convenient.”
“You should see the other guy.”
You looked up. “If you say that again, I will make this hurt.”
“There’s my favourite bedside manner.”
The wound curved across his ribs, vicious but already surrendering to his unnatural healing. Once the blood was cleaned away, new skin showed beneath the torn edges; it would not kill him, but relief did not arrive softly. It entered your hands as anger, sharpened by the sudden knowledge of how much the coat had hidden. How many times had it reached your worktable like this while Dante laughed until you attended to the leather and overlooked the body that had bled into it?
You pressed clean gauze against his side, drawing a hiss through his teeth. Dante assured you the wound would be gone by morning, but you secured the dressing anyway. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt tonight.”
The answer seemed to hit harder than you intended. Without the sword, the coat or the swagger broadening his shoulders, Dante seemed less like the impossible figure who had once occupied your doorway than a man who had never learnt what to do when someone noticed his pain and refused to be distracted by his survival.
“The jacket can wait,” you said.
“I knew it. You only love me for my wardrobe.”
“I’d prefer if the man inside it stayed in one piece as well.”
Outside, the rain had thinned to a whisper beneath the awning. Your hands remained at his waist, one resting over the bandage and the other warm against his back. In the hush following your admission, the intimacy of your position asserted itself all at once. You stood between Dante’s knees, close enough to feel heat returning gradually to his skin and each careful expansion of his ribs beneath your palm.
His hand closed loosely around your wrist. “You worried about me, Stitches?”
Usually the nickname earned an eye-roll. Tonight it had lost its teasing edge. You accused him of arriving half-disembowelled; he accused you of melodrama, reminding you that his rapid healing had already begun. The coat, he pointed out, had once survived being set on fire beneath your care.
“The coat, yes. You are considerably more difficult.”
His thumb moved once across your pulse. “You keep trying anyway.”
The glib answer waiting behind your teeth refused to come. You knew what to do with Dante when he was flirting. You knew considerably less about what to do when he meant something, and now he watched you without offering either of you a place to hide.
“I come here ‘cause you don’t ask,” he said at last, his gaze drifting towards the scarlet leather darkened by his blood. “Most people see the sword and the whole half-demon thing, and decide what I’m supposed to be. Monster, hero, tragedy—depends who’s asking.” A faint smile touched his mouth. “You just think I’m bad for leather.”
“You are calamitous for leather.”
“Exactly.”
There was no self-pity in him, only an old fatigue spoken plainly for once. You smoothed the edge of the bandage and told him that catastrophic nuisances still deserved medical attention, a sentiment he warned might give a man ideas. Yet when he lifted his chin and drew you a fraction closer, the confidence with which Dante faced every violence deserted him before compassion. His gaze fell to your mouth; your breath caught, the shop contracting around the narrow distance between you.
Then his stomach growled loudly enough to qualify as a demonic incident in its own right.
Dante closed his eyes. “You didn’t hear that.”
You had undressed him, lost a considerable quantity of his blood upon your floor and were now ordering him dinner, he observed once you insisted upon food. As far as he was concerned, the evening was going exceptionally well. Your laughter loosened the moment without quite breaking it, warmth returning to his face at the sound.
He fell asleep on the shop sofa before the pizza arrived, one arm folded beneath his head and his long legs trailing over the edge. When the leather was clean enough to move, you laid the coat across him and watched scarlet rise and fall with the deep rhythm of his breathing.
By the time you woke at your worktable, Dante was gone. He had taken the remaining pizza and left enough money to pay for it beneath your empty coffee cup.
For nearly two weeks afterwards, you saw nothing of him. His work took him beyond the city without warning, and Dante treated plans as polite suggestions rather than obligations, so the silence should not have troubled you. You told yourself it felt different only because you had seen him injured before he left. Even so, every ring of the bell lifted your attention from the needle in your hand, and every customer who entered left a little more disappointment hanging in the doorway behind them.
On the twelfth evening, the door struck the wall hard enough to rattle the glass. A young man with short white hair stood on the threshold, breathing heavily, one mechanical hand clutching a bundle of ruined scarlet leather.
Your body understood before your mind did. “Where is he?”
The stranger assured you Dante was alive, which was not an answer and did nothing to slow the cold travelling through your veins. He laid down what remained of the coat. For one dislocated instant, you could not recognise it. The back had split almost from collar to hem, one side eaten brittle by acid, the lining in ribbons and blood drying to rust across the surviving panels.
You braced your fingers against the counter because touching it felt impossible. “How alive?”
“He was standing when I left. Complaining, showing off, being a pain in the ass. Normal Dante.”
“Then why isn’t he wearing this?”
“Demon grabbed it. He slipped out before it dragged him into a mouth the size of a van.” The stranger paused, sympathy tempering his impatience. “Would’ve left the coat, but he went back for it.”
Of course he had. Dante had told him to rescue the leather before the acid dissolved it and predicted, with satisfaction, that you would kill him. You informed Nero, once he finally introduced himself, that this stayed under consideration. He received your promise to save the coat with offensive scepticism, then left after swearing he would contact you when the hunt ended.
You worked through the night.
There would be no hiding what had happened to the coat. You could replace every ruined panel, but Dante would return to something cut from the same pattern and stripped of all the same history. Instead, you cut away only what could not be restored, treated the acid damage and built support beneath the torn back. New leather bridged the missing sections, dyed to belong beside the old scarlet without pretending to share its age, while the lining was pieced together from whatever had survived. Each pass of the needle drew the longest rupture closer, not erasing the wound but teaching its edges how to hold.
The coat had always narrated Dante’s survival. Beneath the work lamp, it became an omen.
Every old repair passed through your hands; the claw marks from the first night, the scorched panel, the cuff once torn away during an alleged fall through a church roof. Your hidden embroidery remained safe among the wreckage. He had not replaced a single piece bearing your mark unless the damage made it unavoidable, and when the creature tried to take all of it, he had gone back.
The tenderness of it hurt, though the idiocy, at least, kept your hands steady. You drove the needle through the backing, pulled the thread taut and tried not to wonder whether anyone would remain to wear what you were saving.
Morning slowly unpicked the darkness from the windows. Beyond the glass, the city stirred, oblivious to the terror gathered in your shop. Coffee cooled beside your elbow and cramps stiffened your fingers, but stopping would mean waiting, and waiting offered nothing you could mend.
The bell rang shortly after nine.
Dante stood in the doorway, bruised, filthy and missing part of one boot. Blood had dried through his hair and a fresh cut crossed his forehead, yet he remained upright, breathing and leaning against the frame with exaggerated ease, as though returning from the dead was simply another late arrival.
“Morning, Stitches.”
You crossed the shop before deciding whether you planned to strike or embrace him and managed both in swift succession. Your palm met his chest with enough force to wipe the grin from his face, and when Dante confirmed that he had gone back into a demon’s mouth for the coat—“Would’ve ruined the leather,” he attempted—you caught the front of his shirt and dragged him against you.
For one heartbeat, he was motionless. Then his arms folded around you, one hand spreading over your back while the other cradled your head with a care so immediate it hurt. Beneath your ear, his heart beat hard and steady.
“There,” he murmured into your hair. “Still ticking.”
You called him an idiot, told him you hated him and tightened your arms until his answering laugh dissolved into something without humour. Dante rested his cheek against your temple and, for once, made no attempt to rescue either of you with a joke. He simply held you while the fear drained slowly from your body.
When you stepped back, his hands lingered at your waist and his attention travelled to the worktable where morning light found every alteration. The new leather among old, fine stitches crossing the back, the pale scar left where the acid had bitten too deeply to erase.
“I couldn’t make it look untouched,” you said. “Not without replacing almost everything.”
Dante ran his fingers along the reconstructed seam. “Wouldn’t want that.”
“The marks will still be there.”
“So will I.”
The answer was quiet. He turned while you lifted the coat and settled it over his shoulders, easing the repaired side around his arm and drawing the collar into place. Despite all your measurements, it fitted differently now, a garment assembled from several versions of itself, altered by every survival and strengthened where it had once given way. Dante rolled his shoulders once and the seams held.
You reached around him to fasten an interior closure, your arms almost encircling his waist, and he covered your hand before you could retreat. When Dante turned within the loose circle of your embrace, the tails swept around your legs and enclosed you both in scarlet.
“You’re shaking.”
“I’ve been awake all night.”
“Because of the coat?”
“Don’t insult me.”
He lifted your hand to his chest, pressing your palm over the heartbeat waiting beneath the leather. “Still here.”
You warned him that he had better remain there, because you refused to perform another restoration before next month. Dante considered that a vote of confidence, and when you threatened to sew him into the coat, his smile tilted and he accused you of promising him a good time again.
“For the record,” he said, thumb following the pulse inside your wrist, “I didn’t go back because it’s a nice coat.”
“No?”
“Lots of nice coats in the world.”
“None you can afford.”
“Low blow.” His forehead lowered towards yours, mischief softening into something unguarded as the distance disappeared. “I went back ‘cause you made this one mine.”
The words drew tight every thread stretched between you—the two sleepless weeks, one unbearable night, months of small returns and the hidden marks of your hands carried faithfully against his body. Rather than trust yourself to answer, you closed the remaining distance and kissed him.
After months of shameless provocation, Dante kissed you with startling care. One hand slid into your hair while the other settled at your waist, close without presuming; it was only when you caught his lapels and pulled him nearer that the familiar confidence came rushing back. Even then, beneath all that instinct and flair, he listened to every change in your breath.
When you parted, his smile was softer and slightly dazed. “So, does kissing the tailor get me a discount?”
“Actually, romantic partners incur a nuisance fee.”
His laughter filled the shop, bright enough to scatter the shadows the night had left behind. There were conditions, of course. Dante would pay his invoices, stop opening perfectly sound seams and attempt to avoid being swallowed by anything larger than a delivery van. He considered the last restriction unreasonable, but stole another kiss and promised to try.
It was a worthless promise. You both knew it.
Later, while Dante sat on the fitting platform eating the breakfast he had persuaded you to order, you discovered one final weakness beneath his right arm. He lifted it obediently while you threaded the needle and leant close, your arm curved partially around his waist as his free hand settled at the small of your back with the ease of something finding its intended place.
“Could add that pizza pocket while you’re in there.”
“I have a needle beside your ribs.”
“Just brainstorming.”
“You’re already storing food in my shop. Your coat doesn't need provisions.”
“Our shop.”
Your needle paused, but Dante continued eating with an expression of calculated innocence while the hand at your back drew you slightly closer. You should have corrected him. The shop was yours, as were the bills, the workrooms and the demon teeth hidden in an empty button tin. He had just wandered through the door one evening carrying trouble, blood and four coins. Instead, you tied off the final stitch.
It sat hidden beneath his arm; a small scarlet promise holding old leather to new. Dante could not see it, but he tested the seam with a roll of his shoulder and smiled when it held.
He would tear it again. He would return scorched, bloodied and carrying some outrageous explanation, and you would curse him, mend what you could and remind him that survival did not render pain inconsequential. The coat would never be pristine again. Neither would Dante, but you had never asked them to be. The difference was that now, when Dante came home carrying the damage, he would find someone waiting to let him in.
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