InsaneJournal

Black Rain [Dante & Maria, Devil May Cry, R]
Title: Black Rain
Author: jlsigman
Rating: R
Warnings: Language
Word count: 1194
Prompt: Maria and Dante: It was a dark and stormy night--
A/N: Maria is an original character for the Devil May Cry universe. Her story is placed about 1,000 years in the future, which lets me add a sci-fi element that I always enjoy playing with. These stories with her are part of a much larger arc, so I'll give the immediate background for each story. For this one: Maria showed up on Dante's doorstep some months prior, looking for answers about her background. She's barely 20, very underweight, but fierce and determined. She has the ability to tap into the 'Net without any hardware, which lets her hack computer systems. The day this story takes place, her hereto now unmentioned twin brother shows up to get her to come back home. This leads to some horrific revelations about her past and why she left. After a screaming argument, Maria runs off, and Dante makes sure that the brother leaves.


Dante's grim face was enough to keep the punks in the shadows as he headed back to the shop. The horrors of Maria's past tangled up his already conflicting emotions about the young woman. It had taken all his self control not to pitch her twin brother into the path of a passing air cruiser. Dante wished for the millionth time that Nero would get his ass on-planet and take this problem he couldn't solve off his hands.

He kicked open the door. “Hey, Maria!” he shouted. There was no answer as he threw himself into his chair. Even at her most pissed off she would at least flash a message across his computer screen, so she must still be out. He sighed, then shrugged. She was a smart, tough girl; she could handle herself for a while.

He hadn't meant to doze off, and was disoriented for a few heartbeats when something flashing in his face woke him up. He read the flashing words on the computer screen and starting cursing again. He needed to get a hold of Maria before she got caught in the Black Rain. He'd never bothered to find out what exactly was in the toxic sludge that collected on the underplate and periodically rained down on the sub-sections of the city below, and didn't care to. All he knew was that when he'd gotten caught in it initially was the first time he had ever gotten so sick that he wished he could have figured out how to kill himself. He could only imagine how much worse it would be for the skinny girl. He started to pick at the virtual keyboard then paused, cursing again. How the fuck did he track down someone who interacted with the Network via demonic powers and not with firmware that had an address that could be traced?

A gleam out of the corner of his eye turned into the ghostly torso of Nevan when he looked at her, rising slightly from her her guitar form. “What's all the noise?” she asked, sounding both languid and annoyed.

“You...” Dante trailed off, struck by an idea.

“I haven't done anything,” she retorted, swirling her red hair about her. “Just because - “ She stopped when he suddenly loomed over her, eyes hard and cold.

“She said she could hear you, that's how she found you in all that crap. Can you do the same with her?”

The guns were in his hands, and as good as it looked on him she knew this was not the time to point out other times she had been on the business end of them. But she still had her part to play... “I could if I wanted to.” she pouted.

Her ghostly image vanished when he grabbed the guitar by the neck. She gave an outraged squawk of feedback at the rough treatment, not expecting his temper to be so short already. “You will help me find her,” he growled, and she had to work hard to keep her strings from humming in dark pleasure, “Or I'll bury you in the deepest garbage pit I can find and leave you there to rot.”

“All right, all right!” she exclaimed. “You could have just asked nicely.”

As he slung her on his back, he turned to look at the warning and let out several more expletives. Unless Maria was practically on his doorstep, they were both going to get caught in the Black Rain. He lost several more minutes finding a couple of ancient but still usable tarps to shield themselves from some of the sludge, but they wouldn't last long. With Nevan's voice whispering in his ear and the Gilgamesh face mask covering his nose and mouth, he ran out into the night.

The sky was always a solid dark color above the hovering street lights, since the real sky had long since vanished to the upper levels' support mechanisms. But when the Black Rain came the dark was different, lower and more suffocating. Instead of the fiction of an endless sky above, there was a miasma that reminded people just how much had been taken in the name of progress. The streets were deserted as Dante followed the demon's directions, going around, over, or through whatever was in the way.

It started to drip too soon, he thought. Nevan apparently thought so as well – or was feeling Maria's new misery – because she urged him to go faster, be quicker. Thankfully the buildings in this section were built to look much like they did when he first opened his shop, despite the fact that now the fire escapes were purely for decoration. When Nevan indicated Maria had collapsed on this roof, he used them to leap a story at a time, quicker than any elevator inside.

She was easy to spot once up there, a retching dark mass of shivering misery. The Black Rain was coming down slow but steady, a bitter soaking that would leave the area a mess for days. It had turned her clothes black, and the face she lifted was streaked with black lines that could not all be explained by her hair. She recoiled at the blurry, unfamiliar face but couldn't put up a fight when he picked her up and cradled her. The window at the last fire escape before the roof had been uncovered and the room beyond empty, so he took a chance, needing to get her to shelter before they went any further. He dropped back down, smashed the window in with his boot, and climbed inside, making sure all the glass cut him and not her.

There were no sounds of alarm sounding as he looked around. It seemed to be someone's hidden safe spot, or perhaps some kind soul had set it up for emergencies like Dante's. There was a pile of blankets in one corner, a small pack of energy bars in a box near the door, and a few unopened cans of energy drinks scattered around. Whatever the case, he was glad for it.

Maria was weakly clutching the collar of his coat, still dry heaving occasionally. He had to get her out of her soaked clothing before she was poisoned beyond what she could recover from. The marks of a harsh life of deprivation, beatings and rapes normally hidden were plain on her ice cold flesh before he wrapped her back in one of the clean blankets. He shed his tarp-like cloak before he held her against his chest again, willing her to be warm again. She turned her head so her cheek was flat against Nevan's strap and whispered, “I hate this place.”

In response Nevan's strings hummed a low song, haunting and demonic. It made Dante's skin crawl after a few minutes, and he was about to tell her to cut it out when Maria relaxed with a faint smile. He sighed, and carefully checked the remote access pod he kept in his pocket. The Rain should stop soon, it said, moving on to the next sector. He settled with his back to the wall and waited it out.