4Blame it on the alcohol. And chocobito, from Tumblr.
Also, happy birthday to the dorks! (I know I'm a bit early, but this girl needs her sweet sweet validation).
Neuro was a smart demon. He was, after all, the most intelligent demon in Hell; and even if that fact alienated him from his peers, he was proud of it. Not that he cared what the others though - his reasonings were a thousand years too advanced for them anyways.
That's why he didn't care one bit when he got a mark on his left arm. A soulmate mark. He scoffed at it like it was some kind of bad joke, a curse from one of his enemies. He had plenty to choose from. Thousands of years of existence was enough to amass a dignified amount of people that wanted you dead.
The mark was relatively small - a pair of smiling lips with all the teeth pointy. He knew a few kinds of demons that had teeth like those, of course he knew. But it didn't matter.
Demons didn't have a soul. Or a soulmate, that is. That type of courtesy was reserved for the humans and their short lives and their feelings . Demons didn't have those, he didn't have those. It was stupid to even consider that there was such thing as a soulmate for him, a demon among demons, the ruthless killer everyone feared.
A mistake. Yeah, it must have been a mistake for him to get such a mark on his body. No other demon had one and, who knows, maybe it was just another thing about him that was different? Even whether his "soulmate" was another demon or a human it didn't matter - demons never dared get near him and he didn't spend much time among humans.
He was curious, though, to see if this person existed. A mystery he couldn't solve.
Yako was a normal girl, she considered. Ordinary. Common.
She was a normal teenager, with normal friends and living a normal life. She even loved her parents, which it seems it was unusual for people her age.
But there was one thing she hid from the rest of the world. She had a soulmate. How did she know? Easy, since the day she was born she had a mark on her body; a symbol that told her that out there existed someone made for her, only for her, and that once they found each other the world would make sense.
The girls at her school dreamed of the day the would find their soulmate. Everyone had a mark exactly in the place they would be touched for the first time by their soulmates, a tattoo representing their significant other. A rose in the back of the hand, a pair of glasses in one shoulder, wings on the forearm. Normal symbols, normal places.
Yako? She had one mark alright. She had what looked like a bird head with horns. Yeah. Horns on the top of the head. That creature didn't exist on Earth, and she hoped it was just symbolic.
But the worst part wasn't the monster tattooed on her skin. It was the location.
The inner left thigh.
Her soulmate, the one made for her, would touch her for the first time in her left thigh, a few inches over her knee. Sometimes her mind vagued into thoughts about how the hell this would happen. In what situation someone would touch her there without it being creepy? Maybe a doctor? An accident in the train? She hoped it was at least a bit romantic, even if deep down she knew that wasn't the case.
Dead.
Her father was dead.
No… Killed.
Someone had crashed into her peaceful life and killed her father, having the nerve to make it look like suicide. She knew he didn't take his own life, she knew her father, but her mother and the policemen that arrived at her house a few moments ago seemed eager to close this case as a suicide.
Idiots. All of them. Her father wasn't suicidal! Something must be wrong! The closed room, the closed windows, it had to be a trap! Something in her gut told her.
"Morons!" she murmured under her breath as she closed her bedroom's door. The room just over the one where her father was -
Yako shook her head, tears threatening to come out. The man was dead. She couldn't change that.
But if she could demonstrate how it could be still considered homicide; if she could shut the mouth of the obnoxious man that talked to her like she was too young to understand her father's passing…
She wished she knew how. She wished she could solve this riddle.
"I've decided," she looked down at her hands, "I'm going to find my father's murderer."
"This is amusing," a voice said from above her. "You should be smiling."
Yako's head snapped up but there wasn't anything there. Not even a shadow.
"I came here as quickly as I could. Here's where the tastiest riddle is, right?" the same voice called her from behind, making her turn and find a man standing horizontally on the wall, a crazed expression on his face.
She took a step back, her heart going fast with fear. What was this stranger doing in her room? She wondered if she could scream and call for the policemen downstairs, or maybe she would be dead before she could make a sound.
"What… are you?" her voice came weaker than she wanted.
"Me?" the creepy smile showed rows of sharp teeth. A chill went down her spine. "Ah yes. You humans give yourselves names." He cocked his head, the corner of his lips going up even higher. "My name then is Neuro. The Brain-Eater Neuro."
Yako blinked, the idea of screaming for help seducing her more and more. Please don't kill me…
"I am a creature from Hell," he continued talking as his face morphed like it was something normal to be turning into a freaking bird with horns! "I live to eat riddles."
It didn't matter to her anymore. Riddles, demons, bird, sharp teeth that looked like they could shred her into ribbons…
She had to get out. Run, scream, whatever; but get her far away as possible and as fast as she could. Her rage and anger dissolved at the fear those gigantic teeth provoked in her, too close to her face to her liking. She didn't want to die.
So she turned and made a mad dash to the closed door, the shout for help on her lips. But Yako couldn't make more than two steps, as a gloved hand caught her and lifted her into the air like she weighted nothing. Maybe for this monster she didn't, she thought. Maybe she was going to be eaten.
The demon jumped to the ceiling, her legs firmly grasped in his arms, not caring if her underwear was completely visible or not.
"Huh?" she heard his deep voice and in the midst of her panic she looked away from the distant floor to the bird-demon's face. He had turned back to the human façade, his eyes were looking at something else -
Her thighs.
In fact, he was examining the shameful tattoo in her left thigh, a beacon of ink uncovered in her upside down position.
"What's the meaning of this?" Neuro asked without looking at her. "What's is this doing in your skin?"
She tried to act as if his hands weren't squeezing her legs with too much force. "My soulmate mark." Came her strangled response.
"I already knew that, louse," she blinked at the insult. "What I'm asking is why you have my face in your legs."
It was her time to sound confused. With great effort, she craned her neck to check that, in fact, her tattoo resembled the horned monstrosity Neuro had presented himself as.
"I… don't know?" Yako whimpered feeling her face hurt with all the blood accumulating. "Can you let me down, pleas -"
He did let her go before she could finish, dropping the human and letting her deal with the impact on her own. She gasped, feeling her right hip scream in white pain. It was going to bruise next morning, of course.
But Neuro didn't give her enough time to cry for the pain, as he jumped down and prowled in her direction, kneeling between her legs and pushing them apart to see her mark under the light coming from the window. Yako blushed, feeling incredibly uncomfortable with the human looking demon in such an intimate position.
"I can't believe this," he grumbled, shaking his head. The triangular beads in the tips of his hair softly grazed her skin.
"Are you not going to eat me?" she managed to get out, her voice a little bit more firm as she was still alive.
"Apparently not," the demon smiled at her with zero real feeling behind the gesture. His eyes were inhumanly green, swirling with an emotion she couldn't quite identify. "As we are soulmates."
Yako blinked once. Twice.
"You are joking, right?"
"Nup!" he flicked her forehead. It hurt.
"How?"
"It seems that Fate has a very particular sense of humor," the demon spat with distaste, looking down at her thigh once more as he unbuttoned his blue jacket.
"What are you doing?" she asked, but he ignored her and finished unbuttoning, taking off his jacket to show her the white undershirt underneath it, his arms bare for her to see.
"Do you recognize this?" he was smirking.
His voice became background noise as she focused on the very visible tattoo on his otherwise incredibly pale skin. There, on his left forearm, was a defined soulmate mark in the shape of -
She snapped a hand up to her hair clips. No. This could not be happening. This wasn't real.
The human reached for the mark not caring that it was on a very real demon's skin, maybe hoping that if she touched it everything would go away, he would go away, and she'd wake up in her bed. This had to be a nightmare.
But it wasn't. Neuro's skin was soft and really warm, yeah, and the mark was real too. Her hair clip design was on him, mocking her and her suffering.
"Hm," Neuro murmured, making her look up. He was close, too close. "I always wondered why it was on my forearm. How ironic."
Her touch. She was touching him and she was still alive. Her first touch on her soulmate's skin.
Soulmate.
"We...uh…"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I dunno," he shrugged.
She wanted to cry. Her fingers on his skin felt like a stranger's for a moment. She felt like someone else. This wasn't happening. She wouldn't be made to spend the rest of her life with this demon.
Neuro was still smiling, chuckling softly at her obvious panic at the situation. She could feel his warm breath on her cheeks. She had never been this close to a man before. Yako blushed, despite her horror. Her eyes went down to his lips and his scary sharp teeth poking from behind.
Heart beating fast and her breathing unstable, she let herself be touched as the demon grabbed her chin with one gloved hand making her look up at him. Too close. Too warm.
Were they going to kiss? She didn't know. He wasn't human. She had never experienced finding her soulmate and as she never expected to, she never asked those around her that did. What was she supposed to do now? Live happily ever after? How? Neuro wasn't even human!
Human or not, he leaned down and kissed her. Softly but not gently, the awkward way in which he crashed his lips against her told her that he didn't know either how to proceed with their situation. Too stunned to protest, the girl didn't move in time to push him away before he let her go and sat back to watch her, calculating.
It was in that moment that Yako felt like something snapped into place. Something, somewhere into her very soul was finally home and she felt complete in a way she didn't know she wasn't. The bond.
"Interesting," Neuro's voice made her focus on his face, his eyes, the understanding in them. He had presumably felt the same shift in their souls. He smirked again. "Interesting indeed."
Yako had barely a second to gulp down and take a breath before he jumped in for another kiss.