This is unbetaed, so yeah, sorry for whatever sounds weird or words-that-don't-belong-there. The beta thing...is a thing in progress, I swear, I just need to...kick my bout of human interaction-related anxiety in the face and act.

(...Yeah, I might publish some more unbetaed fics before that happens...)

Anyways, enjoy!

Edit (01/07/2017): fixed the formatting and lightly edited some sentences. Thanks for everyone's support!

Neuro starts acting weird on a Friday. Well, Neuro always acts weird, at least by human standards (as he insists his behavior isn't different from any high-class demon, which is worrying enough), but Yako is used to that kind of weird, the sadistic I-like-to-torture-you-and-verbally-abuse-you weird. This weird, she isn't, and it's potentially scarier for this same reason.

First, Neuro tones down the abuse. Which is good for Yako, of course, except it isn't, because it means there's going to be an increase of torture and/or life or death situations in the future. It's like a cooling off period, and Yako has grown to be wary of them. She is pretty sure Neuro wouldn't, in the end, let any kind of serious harm come her way, but she much prefers to see the knife coming before it sticks into the wall next to her head, and she isn't being completely metaphorical here.

The second weird thing that starts to happen is that Neuro starts to dump over her the puzzles he's finished with. Which, okay, a little strange but maybe a new kind of demeaning act? Making her clean up his mess? Except then he forces her to start solving the puzzles, and after the first day she knows it's best to just do it and not ask if she doesn't want to see Neuro's 'innocent' "No?" face. If it means less torture, so be it. Also, it's kind of fun, even if some are ridiculously hard and bite her (which basically means Neuro tampered with them to make them more difficult, joy).

But then, one day after a long, stomach filling case, Neuro brings her a knife.

A bloodied knife.

In the middle of the night.

Yako dies a little inside, but she's been for way too many years with the creep (and without him, during his three years long absence, the traitorous part of her brain whispers) to jump and scream for her life like the character of a horror movie. She also knows him too well to feel seriously terrified, even if he's wearing one of his blank stares plus creepy smile while hanging from the ceiling.

She's a little worried, though. Worried about the origin of the knife, and why on Earth's sake would Neuro bring it to her (she isn't even going to think about the unholy hours. It wouldn't be the first time the demon woke her up in the middle of the night in an ecstatic and drooling frenzy related to a new and juicy case).

Then, she realizes the knife is familiar, and why it's familiar, and her wariness turns into disbelief as she stares at the principal weapon used in the serial killings they just cracked open.

She asks just what in hell's name is he doing with the principal proof needed to put the killer in prison for a long time, and his answer makes so little sense she just. It's too early for Neuro's recent brand of weirder.

What, do you not like it, woodlouse? It's for you.

She turns away, buries herself back into her blankets and tells him to bring that back to where it belongs, in a police office, for fucks sake, and try not to steal any more crime weapons, because it just isn't good for their advertising.

She isn't sure when he leaves, but the next morning she wakes up to a rat with ten eyes and three mouths biting at her ankles. She can't stop moving for the rest of the day, lest she'll feel her legs start burning and blistering.

Neuro sulks.

He still makes it a new tradition to bring her things from crime scenes, though he doesn't try bringing something directly related and needed for the trials again. Yako gets tired of explaining to Neuro that thievery is a crime on itself, no matter how demonic his ass is, and just ends up going along with Neuro's new brand of insane.

She just hopes he won't start putting people in boxes next.

The third and even weirder thing he starts to do (though for this one he waits two weeks after the 'dumping puzzles and objects from crime scenes' thing) is that he starts to do her hair. It could be passed off as his new weird way of annoying her, what with how much he pulls her strands, uses ungodly stuff to make it stiff as a rock or jelly-like and even makes it change colors at random, but he always seems weirdly proud when he's finished, with an expression on his face that practically screams "See?".

Yako doesn't know what she's supposed to see, just that her hair suddenly grew snakes on its tips and she has to wrestle them into a ponytail to stop them from biting her face.

He takes to do her hair thrice a week, and she can't, for her life, escape him.

(She ends up eating part of her hair once too, when Neuro turns it into something that looks, feels and smells like spaghetti. She gets a stomach ache rivaling her mother's cooking, but the taste is so worth it. Even if she spots a bit of a bald spot on her head for a while afterward.)

All that weirdness seems to get her eventually, as she doesn't just resign herself to it, but starts to imitate him, encourage it. Well, she doesn't dump puzzles over his head, as fun as his reaction would be for the 0,1 second before her bloody demise, but she starts buying him puzzles and leaving them on his desk, and though she isn't going to fucking steal something from a crime scene, she...starts to take photos, which doesn't help much with her reputation either, but. She likes Neuro's expression when he sees the photos on his desk.

And one day, she gets the guts to brush his hair.

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It isn't that busy of a day, her 'demonic makeover' been done the day before, and she's still sporting her hair in two horn-like buns she hadn't been able to undo even after an hour under the shower. The opportunity just appears, when Neuro is dozing off on the sofa, and she's taking advantage of the lull in case hunting to try to brush her hair back to normal. It's a losing battle.

She finally gives up, wondering how in god's sake did Neuro manage to make such bulky horns when her hair is so short, but as the same as with the spaghetti hair (which had gone to her hips), she stops before what little of her remaining sanity is threatened even further (or before the hair somehow absorbs her negative thoughts and tries to kill her. It had happened with the Hell-Cat shaped hair).

It's then when she looks at Neuro, sprawled and relaxed, and a lightbulb goes on in her head (her hair, coincidentally, turns a shade lighter). Not dwelling on how much of a stupid idea it is, she moves until she's in front of Neuro's head, crouches down and brings the brush to the demon's head until the bristles touch his hair-

And Neuro jumps to the window. Literally.

Yako would be laughing if she wasn't completely frozen by the demon's expression.

Surprised, pleasantly surprised? And...was that a blush?

She just stays there, brush in hand and eyebrows almost touching her hairline, until Neuro seems to get his wits back and sends her one of his deep, analytical stares.

He doesn't ask what she's doing, and she doesn't answer with a "brushing your hair". Still, their eyes seem to be having the conversation just fine, and he gets back to the floor, passes Troy and goes to stand in front of the other side of the sofa, facing her. She puts up the brush and asks with the same calmness that five years of insanity and mysteries and disentangling human psychology have taught her.

"Do you want me to brush your hair or not?" and, like that, the air seems to shift, and again when Neuro softly snorts and goes to sit down, looking at her with an unsaid "Well?", hiding more human emotions beneath than Yako could have even dreamt of. And Neuro has been turning human, has been learning since she was sixteen and he'd eaten his first meal in the human world, but the stark realization at seeing it bare in front of her still makes her heart skip a beat.

She gets up from her crouched position and walks until she's in front of Neuro's head, behind the sofa. She starts to brush his hair.