etrayalogs | Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

With the arrival of Devil May Cry in Etraya, Vergil is farther away. Halfway across the city may still be closer than they were in Folkmore, given the train, but it's much farther away. As a consequence, when Mizu comes over, she spends a longer time. She stays, sometimes, when Vergil is out to wait rather than leave and come back, as she would in the apartments. The fact a mission is coming only makes her want to spend more time with him and thus more time there.

Vergil isn't there, so Mizu settles into a corner where she won't bother anyone and meditates. She crosses her legs, rests her hands on her knees, and closes her eyes. Her breathing settles, and time passes. It's calming because it's an old habit and waiting is comfortable. Even inside and without incense, she feels the passage of time. A door opens, and Mizu listens to the footsteps. They aren't Vergil's, she can tell immediately. It takes longer to tell whether they belong to Dante or Nero.

Her posture stiffens slightly, but Mizu opens her eyes and brings her hands into her lap. No longer in form for meditation, it's a clear sign—for some people—to talk. Not that Mizu expects Nero to need an invitation. It's been a long time coming, so she expects him to initiate the conversation. She'll be relieved, more than anything, because it will be over.

Nero is wearing a tanktop and sweats, coming in from the back of the shop through the garage door. He's got his headphones on and appeals lightly sweaty; whatever he's working on out there seems to be physically vigorous. His attention seems to be somewhere else as he grabs a towel from a random hamper sitting on the office desk, but then he spots Mizu seated over in the corner.

"Oh, hey Mizu," he says, as he turns around and heads back into the kitchen without another word.

"Hello Nero," Mizu greets Nero. She takes off her tinted glasses, her blue eyes shining without them. It's a serious conversation, and she will meet it accordingly, appropriately.

He— He walks away. Mizu stares after him without moving for a few moments. Is she supposed to follow him? She cannot help the slight frown that comes over her face, but Mizu stays seated. It is probably nothing more than commitment to completing what he came into the office to do before handling something new. That's fine. She can wait. She already was waiting.

Unfortunately for Mizu, Nero does not return from the back. He's in the kitchen digging through the freezer, pulling out four pepperoni pizza Hot Pockets, and trying to figure out how exactly to heat them up in this volume. The oven's gonna take too goddamn long.

He resorts, instead, to putting them through the microwave one at a time. The timer beeps loudly and he pulls out the first, adding in the second behind it, then wrapping the first in a paper towel and tearing off a corner so it will cool.

Her frown deepens when nothing happens. As far as she's aware, Nero isn't much of a cook. Vergil and Kyrie cooked in Folkmore. It seems unlikely he's making a meal more complicated than a sandwich for himself. Nothing that takes long. So that means she ought to follow him. He can get food and chew her out at the same time. Vergil has a tail. He probably has something to help him out with that.

Mizu stands, takes a deep breath, and crosses the room to enter the kitchen. Nero uses the heating box. It's convenient, certainly, but Mizu's always preferred using a source of heat she can see. A stove with small flames is easier to judge the food she makes. The heating box is supposed to be faster, but Nero only puts one pastry in it at a time. The box is large enough to fix many of them, and if it were too small, there's the oven.

She cannot help but ask after it. "Is the heating box damaged?"

With his headphones on and his music blasting, Nero doesn't notice for a moment that Mizu has followed him in. Not until he sees the reflection of his face gleam in the microwave glass. Then he turns around and takes off his headphones, letting them rest around his neck. The loud, thudding rhythm of the music is audible all the way across the room.

"Huh?" He at least catches the tail end of the question. "Oh. Nah, you can't do this many at one time or they won't heat up right. End up burned in some spots and frozen inside, or worse."

The explanation makes sense in so much as it justifies Nero's behavior. However, it gives Mizu a worse impression of the device he's using. To only heat so small an amount of food at a time, it's inefficient, something that hardly seems worthwhile for a full meal. She looks at the hand-sized pastry cooling on the kitchen counter.

"By the time you have cooked them all, the first one might get cold," Mizu says. She shakes her head a little. This is why the box is not like an oven. It does not work the same as the hot space around a fire or in a furnace. It may be an unusual trick but hardly worthwhile. "Perhaps you should give the box a talk."

He shrugs, figuring an explanation about radiant heat and how it's split up between four separate garbage microwave convenience meals isn't going to be all that helpful.

"Well, I mean. You can use the oven too and do 'em all at once. But it takes forever, and I'm not eating fuckin' Hot Pockets because I want to wait forever."

With the steam vented out and no longer in danger of liquefying the roof of his mouth, he takes a bite out of the edge of the first Hot Pocket. Mmm. Grease.

"You hungry? I can make you one."

Such a delightful and strong recommendation for—what?—hot pockets? Mizu looks at the pastry on the table and supposes that the dough is the pocket and the filling what is stored in the pocket. It's the kind of name she suspects only someone extremely drunk would even think of. Remarkable that they chose to keep it while sober. It's about as quick as getting food from a street vendor, except in the privacy of his own home. There's something to that, but Mizu cannot say the food sounds appealing. More like someone wrapped up the unwanted leftovers of meat and dregs of sauce in dough and called that food.

"Ah, thank you, no," Mizu says. She doubts her eating it will affect his opinion of her.

She cannot help but frown slightly at the lack of addressing the issue that's been in the air since before Nero left Folkmore. She'd planned to have another conversation with him, but this one seems important to come first. She's tired of waiting for it, and Nero's words when he introduced her to pizza stick in her mind. Her tongue sticks in her mouth, as well she glued it with home greasy food.

"We can talk about what happened between Vergil and I, when he and I then stopped talking for some weeks," Mizu says. She knows Vergil didn't tell Nero the details, but he didn't have to for Nero to pick up on what happened. It was her fault and a choice within her control. Nero should have left her black and blue, with broken bones, by now.

As Mizu abruptly cranks the conversation off in a totally different direction, Nero chews silently and tries to catch up. His eyebrow slowly rises and the rest of his face follows in a look of confusion.

"Whah?" Wait a minute... when was that again? Oh, right. He recalls Vergil moping around for a while back in the other other world. He hadn't dug into it too deeply because Vergil refused to elaborate all that much. Vergil's also a shit-awful liar, so if Mizu had done something incredibly unforgivable, Nero thinks he would have admitted it.

"Why?" he asks. "You guys are over it, aren't you?"

Vergil and Mizu reconnected and carefully pulled themselves back together before they lost each other. It was tender, tenuous, and soft, a careful one foot set in front of the other. Then Vergil left, and Mizu remained in Folkmore long enough to tie up her affairs, to ensure Kai was looked after, and to set off on her revenge. That was the only course she saw open. Then— well, getting kidnapped by the fae, reuniting with Vergil, and forging together something stronger than before. Family. It's precious and lives in her heart, but Mizu doesn't dare say it here, not to Nero who has every right not to be as forgiving as Vergil, who doesn't have the same reasons to be as forgiving of her.

"You made what happens between Vergil and I your business," Mizu says, "Rather clearly, whatever Vergil and I make of it."

She frowns at him further. Nero's not the type to make empty threats.

The other eyebrow joins the first. Then both carefully lower back down as Nero makes a scrunched expression that looks identical to his father's.

"That's not what I said," he says after a moment. "I said if you broke his heart, I'd make it my business."

He folds his arms, careful not to smush his Hot Pocket against his arm. (That'd be 3rd degree burns, even vented a little bit.)

"If he's happy, then I'm happy. That's what I said."

"That would have been easier to understand," Mizu mutters with a snort. That is not at all what Nero said. Mizu knows because she committed the words, however strange, to memory. She put the whole conversation to memory, so that she would know what Nero did and did not consider his interest.

"You said to treat him right, to take care of him, not to hurt him or you'd make it your business, and that you," here Mizu quotes, and her tone shifts to sound something in imitation of Nero, "know the difference between something you had no control over, and carelessly dicking around with your father's heart."

She crosses her own arms. "You made no allowances for hurting him and making it right."

"Oh my god. It's weird you remember that." The most literal man in the world, dating Nero's father, the most literal man in the world. It would be sweet if it wasn't also annoying.

"Do you need me to explain the difference?" he asks, probably coming off a bit snarky though not really intending to. "What did you do to piss him off?"

It's hardly strange that Mizu remembers the one serious conversation she had with Nero about dating his father. She may not need his permission or approval to do so, but Nero matters to Vergil. Mizu wants a decent, tolerable relationship with him if nothing else. Perhaps she shouldn't have pressed. If he's happy, I'm happy has gone to the wayside in lieu of curiosity about what she actually did. It's fine. The impolite tone is what she expected, what she's expected for months now. Hearing it lets the tension of waiting melt away into the proper potential conflict.

"I know what I have control over and what I don't," Mizu says. That's the only distinction Nero made, and she's kept it in mind ever since. It's why she's waited for him to hate her. Her arms curl a little tighter around herself, as though that does anything for her. It still pains her to think about what she did.

"I didn't realize it until afterward," Mizu speaks quietly, color flushing her cheeks. Her eyes look to the side, not right at Nero. "I tried to push him away, by hurting him, by getting hurt. He didn't let it but told me to think about what I wanted and to change, if I wanted to be together."

She does not say that she did. She doesn't explain how she spent their weeks apart or how she's determined not to do it again. She doesn't say anything in support of herself. Mizu only waits for Nero's temper.

Nero's expression remains stonily set as Mizu talks, in that wrinkle-browed frown that resembles his father's so closely. He's quiet as he explains pushing Vergil away out of... whatever reason and getting him upset by getting hurt. It's vague, but it also doesn't go into all that much detail.

Probably for the better, really, because the best Nero could do at this point is tell Mizu that was a stupid fucking thing to do.

"And did you?" he asks. "He forgave you?"

Mizu suspects the details would get an immediate and deserved violent reaction. However, they feel not only hers to share but belonging to Vergil. He chose not to share them with Nero, and she does not want to share more of what's Vergil's, what he chose not to share, than she must. She doesn't explain the 'reason' she pushed Vergil away, or tried to. The foolhardy idea that it would hurt him less than her disappearance, than the parting they'd be forced to have. It was always a stupid thing to do, but Mizu was an idiot about it.

"I did," Mizu says, "I spent the entire time we were apart working on myself. I could hardly claim to have changed if I didn't understand my own actions and how to recognize the idiocy behind them."

She takes a breath, forced steady. The picnic remains in her mind and the conversation with it. "He forgave me before we parted ways, and we've only come together stronger here."

Family, she doesn't say.

"Okay." He was already fairly certain that Mizu and Vergil had patched things up. What with Mizu's presence in the brand new shop, and all, and the way he and Vergil had been visiting each other back at the apartments. So everything is exactly as he already expected it was: all patched up.

One of Nero's eyebrows rises again, not quite as high this time.

"So?"

Mizu uncrosses her arms and lets them hang loosely at her sides. It's hard when she still expects some reaction from Nero, something stronger than an angry tone. She's not sure where he's landing, what he said before or what he said today.

"Vergil forgave me," Mizu says, "You haven't."

How could Nero forgive her when he knew so little? That's unreasonable to ask of anyone.

Here goes the other eyebrow again.

"I wasn't mad at you?" He left it between the two of them to handle, and they did. "Why would I need to forgive you? I'm not dating you, my dad is."

Mizu squints at Nero. It may be what Vergil said, but it's not the way Nero talked about handling things with Vergil. It's not the way people treat her. Not that Nero is like most people, having forgiven Vergil for ripping his arm off and leaving him to die.

"You made it your business if I hurt Vergil, and I did." As hard as the time away from Vergil was, as harder as those weeks felt in cost when he left Folkmore, everything has felt... extremely forgiving. Hard but not in the ways Mizu expects. "It wasn't my place to decide how you felt about it."

"Thanks. I know. But I 'ppreciate that," he says, to the admission that it wasn't Mizu's place to decide how he felt about it. Then he's quick to offer what he hopes will clear up any lingering confusion on the matter.

"Anyway, you fucked up and you worked it out, so... good for you? I don't know what else you want me to say about it."

Good for her? It's strange to hear, and the uncertainty in Nero's tone isn't one that promises anger under the surface. She too doesn't know what else she wants Nero to say about it. It's good to know he's not angry with her, but it's all anticlimactic.

"I expected more fists," Mizu says, "It seemed a worse offense than insulting your grammar and spelling."

What would she know.

That remark gets her a withering, unimpressed look. Boy, he'd better not start picking on Nero's grammatical skills. Before he can say anything the microwave beeps, signalling Nero's second Hot Pocket is ready. He turns around to swap it out with the third one.

"What, do you want me to kick your ass or something?" He shrugs as he exchanges the plates. "You guys made up. I don't think Dad'd be cool if I whooped you for a fight you had a month ago. Even if I wanted to. Which I don't."

Mizu simply pulls the communications device out of her clothes and points to it. "I can read. You fought a kid about it."

She gives no insult to his grammar and spelling, though Nero certainly couldn't get away with that if he'd been raised by swordfather. Master Eiji is blind but no fool. Mizu has excellent penmanship and language skills because of it. She certainly didn't come to him with them. Her only issue with how Nero speaks is that it's sometimes difficult to understand—as this conversation demonstrates.

"I half-expected you to show up at my door the whole time Vergil and I weren't speaking," Mizu says, but she shrugs, unsure herself what she wants with Nero. "Now... I wanted to be sure where we stood."

"'Cuz it's rude to pick on people for shit they're bad at," he says flatly, and pushes the buttons to fire up the microwave for round three.

His explanation at least makes a bit more sense than the rest of this does. He's been on tenterhooks this whole time waiting for Nero to come bite his head off. Props for confronting the issue, he supposes, though Nero is now certain that this was a much, much bigger deal to Mizu than it was to him.

Nero turns around to lean against the counter with his arms folded. "Dad was moping around and miserable. I asked him what happened. He said you'd had a spat, but that he was taking care of it. So I let him," he says simply. "Now, if I ever ask and he tells me you crushed his heart in your fist and broke his spirit and he never wants to speak to you again, then you can expect me on your doorstep. I dunno if that clears it up for you at all, but hey. There you go."

Noted, though Mizu is never going to use that knowledge to get Nero to spar with her for real. She's spent enough time thinking Nero hates her. There's no need to make it happen for real, not for a single sparring session. Unfortunately.

Mizu's eyebrow raises at the idea Vergil would ever describe something in such terms, no matter if someone did hurt him so badly. She's fairly certain that even under the worst of circumstances between her and Vergil, that will never be the case. At the same time, she cannot help but think of Mikio, however, because as much as the words are not the ones she'd choose, she cannot deny he crushed her heart in his fist, broke her spirit, and she never wanted to speak with him again. Admittedly, even had she anyone in her life who felt toward her the way Nero does Vergil, he wouldn't have had the chance to show up on Mikio's doorstep. Then again, maybe she wouldn't have been so crushed, after her mother's and Mikio's betrayals, if there'd been someone in her life who hadn't. Someone she thought still in her life.

"Vergil is fortunate to have you in his life," Mizu says softly. He may never need such protection, but to be loved in that way... it's never to be taken for granted. Vergil, like her, knows that. Nero probably knows that too.

"I guess I'll stop waiting for you to hate me. I'm not that large an idiot to hurt Vergil that way."

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

For Nero:

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