fanfic100 - 086. Choices / 100songs - 023. Meant To Live
Title: Somewhere We Live Inside
Fandom: Devil May Cry 3
Characters: Dante
Prompt: 086. Choices / 023. Meant To Live
Word Count: 674
Rating: PG
Summary: Why Dante does what he does. Just a short tidbit of introspective on how his fractured little brain works.
Author's Notes: Written in fifteen minutes, as per 15 Minutes Ficlets' guidelines. I can't believe I wrote this much that quick.
He was an adrenaline junkie. There weren't any doubts about that at all. He craved the feeling that, at an second, he could lose it all with one false move; one misstep, and it'd all be over and he would be no more. At least...No more in the world of the living. There were a lot of reasons for this, really: The death of his mother, his brother's dive into Hell, the knowledge that, even with a single good friend who understood what it was like to have everything you ever gave a shit about taken away from you, he was utterly alone.
Sometimes he could stand it. Sometimes. But then the itch for something started again, and he found himself taking unnecessary risks again. Things like letting himself freefall from tall buildings, running red lights at busy intersections...Anything that, should he fuck it up, he'd be dead. He loved that feeling, because it reminded him he was alive. It reminded him that, even though it felt like the days were one big blur, and there didn't seem to be anything left to live for, he was still breathing. His heart was still beating, even if he couldn't feel it most of the time.
He knew he'd done it right when his knees were shaking so hard afterward that he couldn't walk. When he felt like he'd topple over in the slightest breeze of night air, he knew he'd gotten what he wanted: A burst of heightened awareness of everything around him. The world went by, in those moments, as a blaze of color and a blare of sound, and he simply reveled in it.
It was sad, in a way, that it took that to make him feel that way, but when the world had been reduced to the head of a pin; when he'd become so tunnel-visioned on his new-found purpose, he needed that. It was better than trying to kill his liver night after night. It was a healthy sensation, for the most part, when anything short of losing his head, literally, wouldn't kill him. Coupled with an addictive personality to begin with...Well. Some people became alcoholics (and he'd been among them, at one point in time), some people searched for darker ways to get their kicks...Dante just wanted the fight. If he could have that, there wasn't a need for him to focus on the others.
Besides, every demon he came across and killed brought him that much closer to fulfilling his purpose, and that added a satisfied feeling to the end of every fight. True, while it seemed like it was going to be a long, hard road to making sure his mother was avenged and could rest, and his brother's memory honored, it kept bringing him closer and closer to what he'd set out to do, after the tower.
That, and killing things was good for a bad temper, too. And no one but the leagues of Hell would miss those he dispatched to begin with. It was a beautiful system he'd worked out, one he wouldn't trade for the world.
And really, that was why he did it. It gave him the rush he craved, when everything around him creeped by in monochrome. In those few minutes it usually lasted, it brought the entire picture into focus in bright, searing color, and he felt like, should he die, it would have meant something. It wouldn't have been from his self-destructive habits of the past (not that he'd given them up completely...a guy had to have some downtime, after all). It would have been fighting. Like his mother, even, and that knowledge rested easily with him.
Well, the cash helped, too. But in the end, it wasn't about the money. It was about the rush, and the knowledge of a job well-done, and nothing at all could ever feel as good as that.