Work Text:
Dante pouted grumpily, slouched against the couch. Vergil was being mean again, and even locked the library door! Not fair! It was going to be so boring, more boring than the tutor's homework that he could easily finish later.
Wondering if there would be anything on the television, he flicked through the channels until he saw what looked like a cowboy exhibition. He had never seen anything like it, either from the tutor or from any of Dad's books. Curious, he readjusted his posture to watch as the performers began to do shooting tricks. Coins were tossed into the air, and one of the cowboys fired their pistols as fast as they could.
Five out of six had holes.
The next demonstrator showed off another trick shooting, angling her shots so that it'd hit the target even if it wasn't a bullseye.
Dante suddenly wished he could do those same tricks.
He wondered if Mama knew anyone with guns...
-3-1-2-4-5-
"Tony, really?" Nell groused in her cigarette-roughened voice, glaring at the pile of crushed and warped metal on her workbench.
A sheepish grin, the white-haired teenager shuffling his boots. "Been trying out some new tricks with the guns, but, y'know..."
"I keep telling you, these aren't meant to be fired like machine guns." Nell sighed a cloud through her nose, ignoring Tony wrinkling his nose at the smoke. A check making sure one of the gun's chamber was empty and no magazine, she squinted at the scratch marks on the barrel's opening. "The Hell did you do?"
"Uh, let's just say I didn't had a planned meeting with a brick wall or the floor..."
"Git," she muttered, but not unkindly. The gunsmith had been hearing other mercenaries complain on how Tony had been shooting lately, like some acrobat hopped up on too much caffeine. How he had been jumping off of the walls or cartwheeling about, with just enough awareness on his line of fire when there were other mercenaries present. "What, are you trying to be some sort of cowboy with them fancy trick shooting?"
"Gotta be a damn good gunslinger in this line of work," Tony tossed back around one of the several sandwiches she always left for him in her mini-fridge. "And it won't just be with hand guns either!"
"Great. Next thing I know, you'll be performing stunts with a shotgun or an anti-tank rifle," Nell snarked. She waved at the box at its customary place. "There, your new ones. Now git so I can work, you brat."
A spinning flourish of grabbing his new firearms, twirling them into his shoulder holsters, and a cheeky wink and mock shooting with two finger guns after swallowing his sandwich. "Bang!"