This is a thank-you giftfic for Eosrose, who made a podfic of one of the short D/V fics I originally did for the lj group Springkink. You can find a link to her podfic on my profile.

She requested family/fluff/a fairytale twist: I hope you can guess the fairy tale here.

Reference to Ifrit from DMC1, and Vergil's... sudden loss of IQ compared to the novel in DMC3.

"What did I say about…" Eva suddenly realized that she never had told them about strangers with candy. Not specifically. She'd told them to stay by her side in public like they were chained unless they wanted to be put on the kiddie leashes (actual chains from a devil arm that was able to disguise itself: better to be considered a crazy lady than have her children killed) again, and she'd mentioned that demons wanted to kill them and they shouldn't be stupid repeatedly, but not candy.

And it wasn't even candy: the sorcerer that must have been after the bounty on Sparda's children had taken them into a specialized smithy (swords, guns, enchanted metalwork) and tried to trap them in the blast furnace. The two of them had been lured by sharp things.

Vergil hadn't even noticed that he'd been locked in a room with reinforced walls, too busy looking at the swords, and Dante, "Did you really have to just walk into the roaring blast furnace?"

"But he dared me!" Dante said again. At least Vergil making fun of him for it was getting it through to him that this had been a Bad Idea, although with her luck, he'd insist that it hadn't been and do the next thing someone dared him to just to prove that he wasn't embarrassed at all.

Face, meet palms. Eva had been sneaking around until that happened, trying to figure out what she was dealing with before it came to a pitched battle – she didn't want to risk him grabbing Dante to use as a hostage – when Dante had started to just walk right in. So she'd had to run forward and kick the bastard into the oven.

Her hair was going to be as white as Sparda's had been before much longer if they kept this up. "No tomato juice for a month. And lots of fish." He needed more brain. "As for you, Vergil… No, you may not take those back with us."

"But they're loot!" Vergil said, from behind the mass of swords he was holding by the rope he'd wrapped around them. "You take stuff from the sorcerers you kill all the time."

"First off, you didn't kill him, you got yourself captured. I killed him while you were too busy looking at shiny things. Do you really think I'm going to reward behavior like that by letting you take all those home?" Eva asked him. "Alright, you two: What have we learned today?"

"Don't get myself barbequed just because I'm dared?"

"Don't go off with weirdos just because they promise swords?"

Inwardly, she groaned, because the real answer was obviously: Absolutely nothing.