Verlady Week 2024: Prompt Masterlist
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May the muses be ever in your favour, dearest Verlady enjoyers! I wish all of you lots of fun and success for your preparations. Thank you so much for your support and your interest in this fandom event. I am looking forward to celebrating Verlady Week 2024 with you!
Please click on the ⏫ graphic above for a comprehensive (and readable!) list of ship week prompts for your convenience.
For more detailed and additional information about the chosen prompts, please see the ⏬ individual prompt reveal posts :
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7
Please use the tag #verladyweek for your contributions, wip snippets, previews, discussions or anything else relevant to Verlady Week and feel free to ping @verladyweek if you want to be extra sure that mod notices you and shares your post on this event blog.
DAY SEVEN: All things end, Dante. Even Verlady Week.
Verlady Nation, I am so happy to be a part of you and to have been a small part of this amazing event week. While the day is not quite over yet, it's getting late in my part of the world, and I want to take the opportunity to say a few things before we all give ourselves and each other a well-deserved pat on the back and say farewell to Verlady Week 2024.
First of all: Thank. You. To all of you. To each and everyone who left a like, shared a post, saw a post and forwarded it to their one (1) friend who they thought could maybe get a kick out of it. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time out of their day to hop over to AO3 and leave a kudos or even a comment on one of the (so far) EIGHTEEN! (pardon my excitement, but that number necessitates all-caps) wonderfully intriguing short stories that have been created for this week - and I know that there are still some stories in the works that are not quite done editing yet. To put this number into perspective, there are - as of the moment of me writing this post - 131 stories in the Lady/Vergil tag on AO3. Which means that almost 14% of all VL stories on AO3 were created in the span of this event week.
Like. You guys. Are beasts. And I say that with awe and adoration.
Thank you to everyone who shared a song - I made a Spotify playlist out of the suggestions and will share it in the masterpost I will compile sometime in the next week.
Thank you for sharing your headcanons and your personal thoughts regarding the intricacies of how you view Verlady's dynamic.
Thank you for all the funny memes! For the photo manipulations! For the renders! Thank you for sharing how Verlady has influenced your real life in small ways, like tiny heart/cheeks on your fingernail.
And I know that was already a very long section of "first of all", but I just wanted to add one last thing:
Thank you so much for every single person who has started a project inspired by this event, regardless of whether you actually finished and shared it or not! All I ever hoped for, was that people would find ways to enjoy this ship and maybe even engage with each other, and I am so happy to say that you have literally made my whole week, I am completely blown away by all of your hard work and the love and support you show each other.
You can still share any works you have not finished yet, a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, it doesn't matter, I got you. Just yell at me give me a ping and I'll reblog your post and add you to the masterlist!
If I have - for whatever reason - NOT reblogged a post you made for this event, please reach out to me! I am so sorry. I promise it was a genuine mistake on my part. I check the event tag regularly, but I might have missed a post or two by accident.
Now, second of all: some of you have already expressed that they would like to see this event return, and I absolutely 100% agree. Next Verlady Week will run from September 8th to September 14th 2025 - and if you happen to have the time or energy for a side hustle, there's always VXLENTINE'S DAY 2025 on February 14th.
Before I go into more detail about the latter, I want to talk about the former for just one more second: I will post a link to a Google form sometime next week, allowing you to anonymously suggest prompts that you'd like to explore or see others explore for Verlady Week 2025. I actually have this huge mountain of unused prompts leftover from brainstorming this year's event, but if any of you have any unfinished WIPs and you think that "oh well, maybe participating in next year's event is that final push of Motivation(TM) I need to finally finish this", then please, toss a fitting suggestion my way and I will do my best to include it. Or if there is any concept you've always wanted to explore with Vergil and Lady, just yell at me over on Google Forms, or in my DMs (@verladyweek or @kintsugicore) or just write a frenzied post here on Tumblr one morning, explaining in excruciating detail how you are haunted by visions of Vergil accidentally becoming a stripper and Lady running into him on her friend's bachelorette party and I will probably nod in agreement and mutter "I bet that is all just one of Dante's elaborate ploys to do the And Now Kiss(TM) with them" and add something like Striptease to the prompt sheet.
There will not be any prompt voting because VXLENTINE'S taught me that there are certain limitations to how well I can restructure my RL to allow me pockets of time to organize forms and polls and put together necessary graphics, etc. But as of now, I don't think voting is necessary. Verlady nation is tiny, and if any of you want to suggest any prompts (would love ideas for any misc. prompts, tbh!), I think it will be easy to fit at least one suggested prompt per person into next year's prompt sheet!
Now. VXLENTINE'S! I am so so sorry that I didn't manage to put together a poll or a prompt post yet. To simplify the process of choosing the next prompt, I have decided to show you the suggestions I received and explain which suggestion I chose to use and why.
Now, different first meeting is the one person who left empty-handed, but I have decided to carry that prompt over to Verlady Week 2025 instead (so, there's your first prompt, ha!)
VXLENTINE'S DAY 2025 will have the prompt "Sweet Surprise" because I felt it checked the most boxes for prompts suggested. It can be made to fit for a gift, but also for a blind date or first date or any of the other things person #2 suggested, really. Technically, depending on how you envision that Different First Meeting, it could probably work for that one, too.
I will make a proper announcement post for next year's VXLENTINE'S DAY when the dust has settled for a bit and we've all had time to read through everyone's wonderful contributions to Verlady Week and the stress we may have experienced the past few days no longer feels as draining. (And again, you were all so amazing! You did so well! You've put the D in Dedication.)
To close out this already very long post: Verlady Nation is probably among the tiniest little fringe existences in this fandom. It was so nice to be a little louder than we usually are. Thank you again, so much. I hope to see you again in February, and maybe September 2025!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
It was a stupid thing to do. The kind of dumb move seen only in cheap movies and popular sitcoms. Something that should only ever have been used as a last resort, if at all. Every fibre of her being screamed that this was wrong, and yet for some reason, she didn’t want it to end.
@verladyweek Day Seven!
Prompt - Fake-Out Make-Out
Well, here we are - the last story of the week!
I can't believe how quickly that went! I just want to say well done and thank you to everyone who contributed so far - I've had so much fun looking through all of your wonderful Verlady submissions, and I can't wait to catch up on any that I've missed!
Also a massive thank you to @sonderlativ for putting this together! Your prompts were super fun, and I hope we can do something again like this next year!
Thanks also for all the nice comments and feedback, it's really appreciated. ❤️
Until next time!
(P.S. I have so many random WIPs as a result of this project, so feel free to keep an eye out for those at some point in the future if I ever manage to finish them!)
He had noticed the girl’s bravery first, followed only shortly afterward by her perseverance, and he had grudgingly admired it. Anyone who was so set on vengeance that they would stand up to two feuding half-devils in order to see it through was someone who commanded his respect, even if he had no choice but to stop her from setting his plans alight with her fury. That fury, and the drive behind it, had reminded him a little bitterly of Isla Steinbeck, the pretty researcher in Fortuna who had been so obliging of his plan to gain what power he could lay claim to. He had left Mary Arkham there in the library of the tower from hell—a fitting place, his mind had supplied, considering her father’s legacy—and gone to get his own retribution on the one who was creating a second layer of trouble for him.
After that, he had barely had enough presence of mind to remember, in rare lucid moments, who he was, let alone the bitter, angry girl who had fought her way up an infested tower. Dante, and Mary Arkham, and Isla Steinbeck, had been ghosts of memory.
And when he’d escaped hell and come back to himself, and learned that he had a brother and a son and something that might almost pass for a normal life, he had recognized the angry woman by Dante’s side as she had been all those years ago. She was still brave and furious and driven, but Mary Arkham had no longer existed.
Vergil—or Urizen or V or whoever he was now—could relate.
Vergil was resilient. Lady had to give him that. On the Temen-ni-gru, he’d been bitten by the snake and come back to finish the fight, eyes blazing and Yamato ready to slice down whatever came between him and his goal.
That hadn’t ended so well, but at least there had been an end. For Lady and Dante, life had continued after him, and the only thing they could do was find a way through.
And then he’d come back as something else, as a brainwashed demon who recalled nothing about who he was, and though Lady hadn’t met that version of him, she had seen the aftermath. She had seen what he had cost Dante, what he had turned his brother into, and she had hated him. It wasn’t right, really, to hate him for that, but she had thought at the time: if only he wasn’t such a stubborn snake. If only he wasn’t a glutton for punishment. If only he didn’t have some innate urge to hurt Dante in every way he possibly could.
And even that hadn’t been the end. Because he’d found a way to come back. Of course. That was what Vergil did: he stared down death and laughed in its face, even when he was the one being pressed into the dust. And Lady wanted to hate that about him so much she burned with it, but she could only find it in herself to respect it. It was what she had done every day for years after her mother’s death.
It may be the final (official) day of @verladyweek 2024, but what a week it's been! My heart is so full 😭
At a rough guess it's been about 16 or 17 years since I started shipping these two fools together and a few years ago I would never have imagined I'd ever have been back in this fandom again, let alone involved in a Vergil/Lady shipping week and not in my wildest dreams could I have seen myself taking part! Even though it was so scary I did it! I couldn't have made it without everyone's support 😭
The biggest thankies go to Sonder for founding and hosting this week. Thank you so much 😭
It's been so much fun and I don't want it to end, but there is so much tasty new stuff to drool over now (plus I still have two fics unfinished soooo Verlady week will still stretch out into the future for me oops 🙃)
My final submission for this week then:
Prompt: Dealer's choice/free day
I can't claim credit because they were done by my local beautician, but this time I asked for a tiny, small, white heart on my ring fingers against my usual background of "Vergil-blue" as a sweet little reminder of them, because to me - whether they know it or not - Lady will always be Vergil's heart 💙
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some content to go feral over.
So this isn't based on a @verladyweek prompt or anything, but it still feels relevant because it definitely happened due to all the wonderful Verlady content I've been consuming all week 😆
Basically I just woke up from a crazy DMC related dream, which, amongst other scenes (including Nero accidentally vaporising Vergil with a laser, and 'slicked Vergil hair DLC'), included this gem, which went something a bit like this:
♡
Vergil: *secretly hanging out with Lady in his room*
Dante: *calling from downstairs* Vergil! Are you home? I need to talk to you about something!
Vergil: *groans and slinks downstairs, with many apologies to Lady*
Dante: There you are! OK so listen to this, it's about this demon Nero found...*rambles*
Vergil: *Thinking about Lady and nodding*
*10 mins later*
Dante: So what do you think?
Vergil: *Jolted out of his thoughts* Uh, yes. Sure. Let's go fight it or whatever.
Dante: ...Bro. I just spent the last 10 minutes telling you how awesome Nero looked while killing the thing, were you even listening...?
♡
And yeah, that's basically all I can remember from it lol
Super dumb, but thought it was amusing so now you get forced to enjoy it too 🤣
(P.S. I can't believe it's the end of the week already, this has been so amazing! I'll see if I can post a final story later today!)
This week has been marvelous! Special thanks to Sonder for the creation of this amazing week (I hope we can repeat it). ❤️
Dealer's Choice!
Well well. I don't know where to start. It'll be too improvised as I write.
Let's rock!
Promp Suggestion
I didn't think of it in the moment, but now that I wrote my "divine library" version of DMC3 (my day 5 oneshot that I promise I'll share it soon), I'd love it to be a promp in a future Verlady Week. I'd be awesome to read different versions of that moment.
Wip
Note: this little wip has been almost for a month in my keep notes. It came from the original idea I had for my Vxlentine's oneshot, and that oneshot became a bigger AU idea that I couldn't end in time for the event day. I don't know If it'll se the light someday so... here it is:
Let me tonight forget about the tricks of fate upon us.
Let me lose myself in you like there's no tomorrow.
A tomorrow in which I will lose you in one way or another.
Let's pretend a forever in this ephemeral moment.
That's all I need.
A moment is enough for me.
The touch of your velvety lips.
Attentive caresses.
Melodic sighs.
The pearly, captivating spray of your fragrant skin.
The intoxicating fusion.
The brief journey to Eden.
Old Render
This is an old render I made on Xnalara and I just noticed I didn't share it before.
And there's no better way to finish this amazing week than sharing this meme. I have plenty of silly DMC memes in my gallery, but this one,as far as I know, is the only one that implies Verlady. 🤣
Submission live on AO3 for Day 6 of @verladyweek 2024!
Prompt: Poems and Petals
The link below goes straight to Chapter 2 of These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends (Chapter 1 was released for the Day 2 prompt "What's in a name?")
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Lady is struggling with insomnia and discovers that Vergil's bed is the only place she can sleep peacefully - without him in it, of course. Things take a somewhat melancholic turn, however, when she finally asks him where he's been going at night.
@verladyweek Day Six!
Prompt - Sharing A Bed
This took me far too long to write, and I don't even know why... It ended up being longer than I'd planned, and I've been spending days trying to cut it down and make it more streamlined lol. Despite my best efforts I was still working on it today, even though I started it weeks ago.
But! I still have half an hour(ish) to go until midnight in the UK so technically I made it in time! XD
In the wake of the Qliphoth, there were few truly green areas around Red Grave City, and Lady could tell that the loss hurt Vergil in more ways than the simple guilt of being the one to cause it. When Nico drove them through forests that had flourished beyond the reaches of Urizen’s destruction, Lady had seen something like longing in his eyes as he’d stared out the window, quickly covered by a veneer of disinterest. He’d turned to cleaning the Yamato or reading a poetry book or polishing the buttons on his coat or whatever it was he did to seem uninterested in anything going on around him.
But Lady had noticed, and she’d asked Dante about it. He had only shrugged. “The guy’s been through a lot. When we were kids he wasn’t an outdoor guy or anything, but he always liked walking through the forest around our house.” He’d smiled briefly. “We were maybe five, but he had this book on trees and he’d tell me what every single one was called when we passed them. Every single one. And if he didn’t know it he spent ten minutes flipping through that book trying to decide. I think I slammed him into the ground to get him to stop, not like it worked.” The nostalgia had fled, and Dante had stared at his brother with that deep sorrow that always made Lady just a little afraid. She had seen him in those days after Vergil had fallen. She knew the depths of grief he was liable to fall into, even with his brother sitting across the room. He spoke up again after a second, the easy tone of his voice not reaching his eyes. “It’s probably been a while since he’s seen any trees that weren’t…you know, made of human blood and smothering the world with human-killing roots.”
Lady had to admit that Vergil, with his neat hair and elegant coat and cutting precision, did not strike her as a tree-hugger. Neither had V, for that matter. It wasn’t as though she knew him (either of him) that well. The weight of their past hung heavy between them, and if he was content to ignore her for the time being, Lady was content to ignore him, and even Dante seemed to recognize that was the best-case solution. But she did know that Vergil spent a lot of time shut away in his room upstairs, or, if not, then pretended to be shut away while he tricked around the city with Yamato.
And Lady had seen that room, and the bedroom fit for human life that it pretended to be. It was little more than a box with a bed and a tiny window. It was a sad place to spend all your time, and even if he deserved it, she couldn’t help but feel like it was a cheerless existence.
He can live in a cheerless existence, she told herself firmly. Does Vergil even know what cheer is? Maybe he’s perfectly happy living in a box. It’s better than whatever existence he had as Nero Angelo.
Try as she might to ignore it, it was that thought—that reminder of what Dante had told her so many years ago, that memory that she now shared as a vessel for Artemis—which lodged in her brain for a week straight.
Lady was pragmatic. She liked to think that she did nothing out of sheer sentiment. She had hung around Dante this long because he refused to fully pay off his ever-increasing debt, and she protected him and worried about him because he would rejoice at the fact that being dead meant he’d never have to. She had urged Nero not to kill his own father because she hated to see a kind young man forced to make the decision she had once made. So when she stopped by the greenhouse and surveyed its sparse selection of seasonal flowers, she picked one at random, because if she didn’t think about it, she could pretend she wasn’t doing this out of pity. Or sympathy. Or empathy.
It was a few sprigs of budding larkspur.
She chose it because it rose up above the others and it was blue, like Vergil.
Lady endured the somewhat mortifying ordeal of shoving open the shop door, crossing over to the stairs, ignoring Dante’s startled look, and stomping up the stairs with her hands full of flowerpot. Before her nerve could fail her, she rapped on Vergil’s door. “Vergil, open up, I have something I need to give you.”
The silence dragged on long enough that she wondered if this was one of those times he had used Yamato to go who-knew-where, but eventually there was the sound of footsteps and the door cracked open. “I have no reason to think that I need anything at all that you—“ Vergil began, but the irritation in his voice faded as his eyes fell on the pot in her hands. He stood motionless and silent for a moment, his hand clenching restlessly on the doorframe. “Is that a flowerpot?”
She shoved it at his chest. “Call it a housewarming gift or something, whatever you want.” She began to turn away.
He grabbed the pot before it could fall. “You’re about two months too late for that. Try again.” There was a bit of mocking humor in his voice, but he stared at her intently without a hint of a glare. He seemed genuinely curious, if bewildered.
Lady sighed. The best-case scenario here, she had thought, was that he would throw the pot out the window and laugh at the concept of ever needing anything as feeble as a plant. The worst-case was having to explain herself. Lady wasn’t sure if she could put her thought process into words, since she had done her best not to think about any of it too deeply. She plowed ahead anyway. “Your room’s awful. When I emerged from Artemis, plants helped me. They’re all dead now, I don’t have a green thumb, but Dante said that you liked trees when you were a kid, and I’ve seen the way you stare at the forests whenever we drive through them, and I thought a plant might…might help,” she finished lamely.
Vergil leaned more heavily on the door for a second. He stared down at the larkspur. One finger came up to lightly touch one of the petals. “Larkspur,” he said suddenly. “It’s poisonous.” His eyes gleamed at her, and suddenly something mischievous entered his expression, not unlike his brother’s. “Did you have ulterior motives in giving me this plant?”
She shrugged. “It’s tall and blue. I thought you two would get along well.”
“Ah. I forgot, you don’t have an instinct for ulterior motives, do you? You prefer to shoot first and ask questions later.” He sighed, but there was something exaggerated about it that told her he wasn’t completely being serious. “Quite an inelegant way of handing your problems.”
“Look who’s talking,” she shot back. “You’re not much of a plans guy either. You pretend to be, but if Dante does one single thing better than you, you’ll kill yourself to outrank him.” And maybe a couple thousand people in the process, she thought, but withheld that comment. It wasn’t often that she found herself bantering with him without wanting to fire a bullet through his head just to get him to shut up. She was even enjoying it.
“We’re twins,” Vergil said flatly. “It’s what we must do.” One index finger ran up the stem of the larkspur. Vergil cocked his head and glanced down at Lady. “Thank you,” he said. “The gift is much appreciated. It will certainly liven the place up a little.”
He carried it across to the window, where he set the pot down on the rug. Lady lingered in the doorway and cast a glance around. It was almost exactly as she remembered it: a tiny closet with a tiny bed that barely looked large enough to hold Vergil’s tall frame, and just enough room for a dresser. He had placed a warm lamp on the dresser, shoved a tiny bookcase into the corner, and put a blue rug down. With the plant in a spot of sunlight cast by the tiny window, the effect was almost homey.
The part of Lady inclined to be nosy wanted to look at the books he’d stuffed into the bookshelf, but she pulled back as he turned around. “Very pretty.” Now he actually did glare at her. She raised her hands in an expression of innocence. “You’ve made it look way better than it’s been in the past.”
“Yes, well, Dante wasn’t exactly interested in upkeep. I, however, was not about to live in a dark box with no personality.”
“If you need any more plants for your windowbox, you have my number.” Now that she’d done what she’d come to do, Lady wanted to get out of there as soon as possible, uncertain what she thought of this unfamiliar, bantering duel across the threshold of Vergil’s bedroom door. She backed away and stepped onto the stairs, trying not to consider it a retreat.
The larkspur went unmentioned for weeks, until one day, Lady returned to her apartment to find a pot of blue-and-gold pansies sitting outside her door. She raised her eyebrow at the note attached. One line was scrawled in neat, small, old-fashioned handwriting:
It's a bit filthy (rated explicit)... sorry not sorry, hope you enjoy. It's also extremely cliche, self-indulgent, multi-chaptered and not finished yet so read at your peril :)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
A "Day 5" story conceived on Day 5 itself, but I felt like I had to give it a try.
It's gonna be a multi-chapter story. There is some plot to follow, pinky-promise!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Trapped in a life of cruel office work and wicked stepfathers, poor, sweet Cinderlady dreams of a magical night at the royal ball. When her prayers are finally answered, she ventures into Prince Vergil's world, hoping to win his heart before the clock strikes midnight. Or, something like that.
@verladyweek Day Five!
Prompt - Tale As Old As Time
This might be one of the silliest things I've ever written, but I unironically love it. 😆
It might even be my favourite contribution from me for this week, just because of how fun it was to write.
And yes, I know Tale As Old As Time is from Beauty and The Beast and not Cinderella, but hey, it's all fairytale / Disney stuff right? 😁
Prompt: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
@verladyweek
I see a Wuthering Heights quote, I use it. This turned into a little bit of a character study and a reflection of one of my favorite books, but still heavily focused on Vergil and Lady’s dynamic. It was so fun to write!
Lady had never had much use for reading. She had enjoyed it occasionally in school, but most of her time and focus had been on her gymnastics program. Reading, even for school, had been reserved for car rides shuttling her to and from competitions or when she couldn’t sleep before a big day.
Wuthering Heights had always been a secret favorite, and even now, she kept a battered copy of it on the stand by her bed. It was a secondhand copy bought for a dollar at a thrift store years ago and had an awful pink cover and no margins, but she flipped through it and read her favorite parts every now and then. Reading now was reserved for slow moments in Nico’s van on the way to and from missions, or rare moments of peace and quiet before she went to bed.
One line had struck her on her first read as a 16 year old—only months before her mother would be found dead in their living room, when Lady had been Mary, a student reading Wuthering Heights for her sophomore English class. “Whatever our souls are made of,” Catherine Earnshaw had claimed, “his and mine are the same.” Wuthering Heights had enchanted her then, the story of generations impacted by one man’s lust for vengeance, by one woman’s insane love for someone who didn’t deserve it. And then months later that enchantment was utterly destroyed, when Mary’s mother died at her father’s hands and a tower rose from hell and destroyed thousands of lives and she threw herself into the world of demons and devils and one particular tormented, depressed, charming demon-hunter.
And now his brother had joined that group, and it had been 20 years since Mary Arkham had picked up Wuthering Heights, and she was a very different person than she had been then. Lady—for she would never go by Mary again—did not think of that quote with the childish naivety of a student, but with a jaded edge of derision: toward Catherine Earnshaw and the terrible thing she had called love, toward Heathcliff and his obsession, and toward herself, who had had no idea what was to come.
But something made her think of it now, as she marched beside Vergil up the isolated hiking trail, following the last of their quarry. The escaped demon wasn’t a real threat, more of a nuisance, but it was best not to leave it to make trouble. In the lack of conversation and with no need to make a plan for finding what they were hunting (the broken branches, crater-like prints, and demonic slime were quite enough to tell exactly where it had gone), Lady’s mind wandered. Perhaps it was the landscape around them—the bleak plains stretching out below the edge of the mountain range, the overcast sky heavy with dark clouds, the chill autumn wind whisking across her cheeks—that put her in mind of her old favorite book. “Whatever our souls are made of,” she murmured, partly to savor the taste of the prose on her tongue, partly to fill the silence that had fallen between her and Vergil. They didn’t go on hunts often together without Dante or Nero or Trish as a buffer, though they were perfectly capable of remaining professional on jobs. At least, Lady was.
“His and mine are the same,” spoke up Vergil from beside her.
Lady glanced at him, a little surprised, but on further reflection, she supposed it made sense that he would recognize the line. “Have I found another fan of Wuthering Heights in the wild?” she asked him.
“I read it when I was a child,” he said. “I don’t know that I can say I was a fan. But I liked Bronte’s prose.” He lifted his eyes to their surroundings, and she wondered if he had noticed the similarities that she had. “I’m sure much of it was above my ability to comprehend then, and I haven’t revisited it since.”
“I have a copy of it,” she found herself saying. “If you ever want to borrow it.”
His eyes lighted on her, a little surprised. “Perhaps one day. Thank you.” They walked along in silence until he continued. “What made you think of that line?”
Lady shrugged. “The landscape, probably. I read that book back in high school, and that line stuck out to me then. I think I enjoyed the drama of it. The tragedy.”
Something close to a smile played around the corner of Vergil’s mouth. Lady almost laughed; if she had realized sooner that discussing literature with Vergil was one of the few things that didn’t end in threats of death—not yet, anyway—she would have brought it up sooner. “That’s why I enjoyed William Blake as much as I did,” Vergil mused. “The drama of it. I remember Wuthering Heights primarily for the setting, the Yorkshire moorlands rolling out beneath a dark sky, ghosts haunting old houses.”
“Maybe the ghosts aren’t really there,” Lady suggested, her high school English class coming back to her. “Maybe they’re simply psychological manifestations of trauma.”
Vergil grunted noncommittally, and Lady winced, remembering too late what she had heard about V’s familiars. Perhaps the ghosts of Wuthering Heights should be just that—ghosts, to plead with and die with and be done with, instead of memories of trauma and abuse and other things that were altogether too real, and far too recent in both their minds.
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
It struck her then, as it never had before, how different Vergil was now to who he had been in any of his other versions. This was not the power-hungry teenage Vergil who had raised a tower from hell. Neither was it V, the crumbling shell holding together the dregs of his humanity with sheer willpower. And, most importantly, neither was he Urizen, who had imprisoned her in armor not so very differently than Nero Angelo himself had been. This Vergil fought with his brother and killed demons at his side and sat through awkward dinners with Nero and his fiance and discussed a book he had not read in 30 years with someone he seemed to hate.
Lady was not a foolish girl like Catherine Earnshaw, but neither was Vergil a Heathcliff. He was working—however falteringly—to make amends with his family and to right his old wrongs. And Lady could respect that, because even if it was the bare minimum, it was more than he had done decades ago.
There was a flicker up ahead, and she put thoughts of books and change and decades of simmering resentment out of her mind for now. They had a job to do. But when the job was over, maybe she could give a little more thought to this new Vergil.
