~*Match Made in Heaven*~

Or more like Hell. Theirs was a…complex relationship.

~*X*~

Lately, Mao had started to notice that Beryl was spending more time with him than was normal, even for her.

You see, Overlord Mao was used to spending a great deal of his time alone. Granted that wasn't the case so often now thanks to his new fr—slaves, or servants if you preferred a nicer way of putting it, but still. Even during their big stupid misadventure he had had more alone time than this. It was ridiculous, because now, (though he would never admit it), he had reached the point where he was looking at the door expectedly every now and then, waiting for Beryl's familiar knock which meant she was requesting permission to come inside.

Being the silly delinquent she was, she'd never just walk in without his okay. He reminded himself not to let her in next time and make her break her own rules and force her way inside.

Mao was rifling through a manga, having had dismissed any and all servants—be they Prinny or otherwise—from his messy personal chambers, since he was certain Beryl was going to show up right on time, as was her wont, and the last thing he wanted was rumors to circulate that an Honor Student, let alone the Dean of Evil Academy, was hanging out with a valedictorian that had…curse the word…graduated. It was enough to make shivers run down his spine!

Knock-knock-knockknock-knock-knock.

Right on schedule.

Despite himself, Mao got to his feet and stalked through messy piles of teetering "research material" as he called it and opened the door, stepping aside to let his rival in.

"Thanks, Mao." Raspberyl was holding a take-out bag, her head lifted in that familiar somewhat haughty way of hers. She skipped inside and turned to him with an impish smile. "Holding a door open for a lady? And they say chivalry is dead!"

Mao rolled his eyes and slammed the door shut. "What is it now, Beryl? Can't you see I'm busy?"

She turned her head from side to side, skeptical. Her eyes flitted from the TV which was showing a rerun of Prism Rangers VS Effort Ninja Gorillian to the other TV that was still on the pause screen of Last Fantasy XXVII. She flicked her fingers towards the wall and several dragon-head sconces caught fire, bringing some light into the usually dim and shady room. "Right, busy. Maybe you'll forgive my intrusion because…" She grinned and showed him the take-out bag. "I brought your favorite!"

"Like a good little delinquent," he sneered, but took the bag from her anyway. She didn't expect a thank you and he had no intention of delivering one anyway.

He sat down back at the low table, rummaging through the bag. Anything in it he didn't like he rightfully assumed was Raspberyl's, as any reasonably competent scientist could tell you. As he opened the plastic white take-out box, clipping the chopsticks together loudly, he remarked off-handedly, "So, what's the Fake Hero up to?"

Beryl didn't reply until she had put a napkin on her lap, and had straightened out some space on the cluttered table for her food. He was surprised by how gentle she was when handling his research material, considering the fact that she usually scoffed at its being there. "Almaz is with Sapphire, since y'know…" She gestured with her chopsticks, shrugging. "Now that their honeymoon is over, they've got some things to look into."

Mao made a face, chomping down on his noodles. "This'll be the last I see of my slave, isn't it?"

"Don't talk with your mouth full," Beryl chided, even though she knew that her friend was going to do whatever he damn well pleased. "Anyway, you should be happy! Things are finally working out for them, and the girls and I got to witness our first real human-styled wedding!"

Mao pretended to gag as Beryl's eyes shone like pink stars at the memory, and she slapped him lightly on the arm.

"Act indifferent all you want, I know you're really happy for them." Beryl took a bite out of her bread, eyeing him knowingly.

"Lies! Why would I care about my servants' happiness?" Mao furiously shoved some more noodles into his mouth and decided to change the topic. "So, did you hear about Big Star's grand scheme?"

"What about Master Big Star?"

"Apparently he decided it's high time everyone here graduated a grade level, and he asked me for permission to let him set it in motion."

"Oh, really?" Beryl seemed excited at the prospect. "When?"

"Two weeks. What are you so happy about? You graduated and went straight from a freshman to a, well, valedictorian." His face twisted in disgust as he said the word.

Beryl didn't seem to be listening. She had put her food down and was absently stroking her fingers down her curling black horns. "Hmm, I'll have to make some time to help out…I think Asuka has our schedule…Kyoko's big blood drive is in a week but maybe…"

Mao stared at her, aghast. "You're not even enrolled in the Academy anymore and you're still planning on helping?"

"Of course! A delinquent's work is never done!"

Mao smirked and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "This is why you're so short," he said. "Everyone knows good deeds stunt a demon's growth! Muahaha!"

Beryl's eyes flashed blood-red. "I am not short, Mao!"

"Yes you are," cackled the Dean. "Look at you! We're the same exact age but you're only half my height."

She lashed her tail crossly. "Well, you know what they say. Big things come in small packages."

"Next you'll be saying 'I'm not short, I'm fun-sized'," Mao retorted dryly.

Beryl playfully hit his arm again, but she was smiling. She jumped to her feet. "But back to the point, this is big news! I've got to find Master Big Star and the girls." She made as if to collect the food but Mao waved her off impatiently.

"I'll just have the Prinnies clean this up."

She smiled again and put her hands on her hips. "Well, isn't that gentlemanly of you! Thanks, Mao."

Gentlemanly. What an awful word! He was an Honor Student, the Netherworld's number one Honor Student for God's sake, and the Dean on top of that of the whole freakin' Evil Academy. How dare she call him "gentlemanly", as if he was actually…He had a three million E.Q. dammit!

As he sat there quietly fuming, Beryl headed for the door, picking her way through his research material.

"See you tomorrow Beryl," Mao found himself saying, picking up his manga and returning to where he had left off.

He missed her surprised glance back at him, and her grin.

"Later, Mao."

~*X*~

Just like a delinquent, Mao thought irritably as he prowled down the corridors of Evil Academy. Working herself to exhaustion.

Asuka and Kyoko, Beryl's lackeys, had sought him out in the commons with the news that their Lady had gone off into one of the empty classrooms to fill out some newsletters that Master Big Star needed for his graduation plan. Could he, possibly, be troubled to go and find her for them? They had very specific orders from their Lady to continue helping Master Big Star and Salvatore, and they didn't want to go against their Lady's wishes.

"Why don't you just use the damn intercom?" Mao demanded. "Instead of making newsletters?"

Asuka and Kyoko had looked at each other. Kyoko said, "Well, our Lady was wise enough to point out that many demons have bad memories."

"So she thought a printed letter would be smarter," finished Asuka. They both spoke with ridiculous, glittery looks in their eyes whenever they discussed their Lady, as if she was a saint or some such nonsense.

"Why are you asking me? You'd be better off asking one of the transfer students to help out," he spat the word out like it was poison.

The pair had sighed. "I guess so, but our Lady always believes we should ask Sir Mao first when it comes to her," Kyoko reminded him.

The Dean made sure no one was listening to their conversation, then he grumbled, "Sure, whatever. It's not like I've got anything else to do until a new shipment of research material comes in."

"Thank you very much, Sir Mao!" Asuka and her companion smiled broadly.

And so here he was, opening doors and not caring if he interrupted whatever classes happened to be going on as he did so, searching in a sort of disinterested way for his rival. Beryl's Level was one of the highest in the Academy so he definitely wasn't concerned about her absence in that regard. As he walked, he passed a trio of transfer students and he stopped in front of them, hands in his pockets.

"Hey," he butted in on their conversation loudly. "Have any of you seen Beryl?"

The redhead he recognized. His name was Adell. He was standing beside Rozalin and they seemed to be having—somehow—a conversation with the mute girl that Gig, another transfer, had called Revya. "Beryl?" Adell repeated thoughtfully. "I think she went down that hallway." He pointed to the left, down an icy corridor.

"No," Rozalin disagreed impatiently. "She went straight ahead." She gestured to a hallway overgrown with dangerous looking plants.

As the pair started to squabble—they did this a lot—Mao tapped his foot, irritated. "What do you think?" he said to Revya.

The pink-haired girl hesitated before she nodded towards the right, which was much clearer and cleaner. Almost as if someone had cleaned away dirt and debris on their way down it. Deciding to take his chances with Revya's opinion, he nodded at her in a silent form of thanks and tromped off in the direction that had been indicated.

The things I do for Beryl, Mao grumbled to himself.

On a whim, he skipped the first three classrooms he saw and pushed open the door that was second to last on the right-hand side. He nearly laughed with glee. His scientific reasoning—which was far too sophisticated for a human of your caliber to understand—had led him to the right spot. The classroom was perfectly square, the tiles white, the walls pale, and by the teacher's desk there was a violently purple printer. It was steadily chugging away, releasing plumes of faint gray smoke into the atmosphere, copying sheets upon sheets of newsletters dedicated to the upcoming graduation ceremony.

Mao looked at the desk and saw that Beryl was sitting behind it, fast asleep. He rolled his eyes. She had her arms folded and her head was resting on them. It seemed she had been here for a while waiting for themany, many, many copies she would need and had nodded off. Her book was underneath her arms, open to some page filled with her silly flights of fancies about demons and proper etiquette.

He nearly shoved her out of her chair to wake her up, but then he noticed something. Slowly, sneaking a peek over his shoulder at the closed door for anyone looking in, he brushed a strand of her pink hair behind her pointed ears.

Ah hah. Just as he had suspected. She had rings under her eyes.

"I bet you've been overworking yourself all this week haven't you?" Mao muttered. She was going to exhaust herself, if she hadn't already, in her ridiculous drive to help others. It was like an addiction or something to her. An idea popped into his head to study her, find out what weird high she got from helping others, but he quashed the notion.

He didn't experiment on fr—rivals.

At least not like that.

Mao sighed loudly and walked over to one of the vacant desks in the front row. He sat down, propped his feet up, reached into the pockets of his red coat and pulled out his Slaystation Portable. He flicked it on and slid the volume control down.

This wasn't because, he told himself, that he was worried about Beryl and that she needed the sleep. No, no, this was merely because he was the Dean of Evil Academy and if he did a favor, he'd take his sweet time about it.

Something else occurred to him and he draped his coat over her before returning to his seat and losing himself in his favorite virtual fantasy world.

After all, the cold bothered her more than him.

~*X*~

"Well we invited Mr. Champloo to the graduation ceremony," Raspberyl was saying as she sat perched on the edge of his desk. She was scribbling in some more things to do into her schedule of good deeds that she shared with Asuka and Kyoko. "But I don't know if he'll actually come. I mean, where does he go when he's not in the Home Economics classroom?"

"Beats me," Mao replied uncaringly. "He'll show up if he wants to."

Beryl hummed in agreement, repositioning herself. She leaned over and scanned the page that Mao's comic book was currently turned to. It displayed an Evil Overlord being defeated by a Hero of Justice, Love, and sometimes Peace. "Why do you still read these things, Mao?"

Annoyed by her interruption—it was just getting good and he was all into the scene, immersed in it!—Mao lifted his head. "What are you talking about?"

Beryl pointed at the comic book. "Are you just a fan of stuff like this, like Almaz?"

"No, Beryl," Mao snapped in a tone of nearly broken patience. "As I've said a million times before, this is for my research! I still don't understand this power of love that the heroes use all the time." He jabbed his finger against the manuscript. "Love seems to be the hero's greatest weapon. They do anything for it."

"Love is the hero's greatest weapon, you're right about that."

Mao studied her, sitting back in his chair. His glasses caught the light and became opaque. "How would you know?"

She looked at him, and something flickered in her pink gaze. Then she lifted her eyes heavenward as if praying for patience. "Just believe me," she sighed.

"Oh no, that's not good enough." He leaned forward and put one hand on the desk. She shifted her tail away and curled it onto her lap instead. "Come on, tell me."

"Well…you know Adell and Rozalin?" Raspberyl started slowly.

"What about them?"

"Rozalin told me once that she had been overcome by a dark power inside her," she explained. "And just when she thought she would start attacking her friends, Adell told her to 'trust this', and kissed her. She turned back to her normal self."

Mao's mind was racing. He thought about it for a few seconds. "Wait hold on, he turned her back to normal by Frenching her?"

Beryl huffed, and he saw that red flare in her eyes again that was only there when she was angry. "Adell's a real hero back home. And he used love, Mao, to save Rozalin from herself. Don't you see?"

"Hmph." He leaned back in his chair once more and crossed his arms. "You sure that's love? Those two spend most their time arguing." He recalled his earlier encounter with them a few days ago, bickering over which way Raspberyl had gone.

"From what I've read, love works differently for everyone." Beryl went back to writing on her schedule, though from his position, Mao thought it looked more like drawing than writing. She didn't lift her pencil enough.

"I need to test this. Someone's got to make sense of love."

"Not everything can be tested, think of that?" Beryl got off the desk with a flutter of her little wings.

He frowned at her comment. "Hey, where're you going?"

She checked a leering stone gargoyle clock on the wall. "It's pretty late, I should get going."

Mao inexplicably felt something stir inside him. Damn his stupid open heart. "Hey, uh…"

"Hm?"

"Are you stupid, or something? Maybe you haven't noticed 'till now, but it's storming outside!"

Beryl crossed over to one of the windows and rose up on the tips of her toes to see out into the murk. "Oh jeesh, it is isn't it?" She muttered something that sounded like a curse under her breath, fretting about her papers getting wet no doubt.

It didn't rain often in the Netherworld but it wasn't unheard of. Sometimes they got really nasty types of rain too. Acid rain, for example. Or once every red moon, blood rain.

"Stop your worrying. You can sleep here if you want, it's not like I don't have the room."

She rounded on him in shock. "Huh? Really? You've been acting nicer than usual, have you been hanging out with Flonne?" She smiled teasingly. "Or maybe it's your heart, since its open now."

Mao scowled. "Hey, if you want to go out into the rain…"

"No, no, I get the hint." Beryl trotted back over to him. "So, where am I staying?"

Mao pointedly turned a page and went back to reading his comic. "Go find your own place to sleep! What do I look like, your servant?"

She snorted in amusement. "I should've known your nice streak was too good to last."

"It comes once every hundred years."

"Find my own place to sleep, huh…?" Unbeknownst to Mao, Beryl's face had a mischievous smile on it. She moved off to another side of the room, her friend too preoccupied with his reading to notice.

"Okay, I'm sleeping here!" she loudly declared from somewhere behind him.

Mao glanced over his shoulder, and then did a double take. He sprang to his feet. "Oh no you don't! That's my bed!"

Beryl was lying flat on her back, eyes twinkling in amusement. At that moment she looked just as much like a demon as anyone else that wasn't a delinquent. It made him pause for a moment, and during that time she said, "You told me to find my own place to sleep."

He stomped over to her bedside, baring his teeth at her. "That wasn't an invitation to steal my bed! What kind of delinquent does that?"

"Au contraire, Mao! I'm following the orders of my host exactly."

Mao made a sound partway between a growl and a groan. "Well, what if I decide to sleep here anyway? Doesn't that go against some rule of yours, sharing a bed with a guy?"

She sat up and considered this, one ear twitching in thought. "No," she decided. "Because it's not like we're going to do anything."

Mao contemplated yanking the covers and knocking her to the floor, but changed his mind. He was hoping if he made good on his threat, his rival would lose her nerve and move elsewhere. Of course that was the root of the problem, because when it came to being pig-headed, Raspberyl was just as stubborn as he.

He went back to his desk, tugging the silver chain on his Gothic-styled lamp, causing the orange light to go out of the skull's eyes. The room was cast into nearly perfect darkness, but that didn't matter, since both of them had night vision anyway. Demons saw exceptionally well in shadow, like cats or any other nocturnal predator.

Beryl simply moved to one side of the bed. Since the bed was beneath a window, she used this as an opportunity to push the dusty red curtains aside and stare out into the gloom. Mao went to sit beside her, and they watched the storm for a while as it shook the spindly Netherworld trees and caused all sorts of racket outside.

"Hey Beryl."

"Yeah?"

"Why've you been coming over to see me so much lately?"

Beryl didn't tear her eyes away from the windowpane, but he could see her reflection in the glass. Her eyes glowed strawberry pink. "Do I need a reason? I mean we're friends aren't we?"

"We are not friends," protested Mao automatically.

She closed her eyes but said nothing.

He was a bit disturbed by her silence. Usually she would instantly amend her use of the word "friend" and use "rival" instead. Rival was their word. Rival was the much safer, less permanent, less intimidating word they used to refer to each other…

But, now that he thought about it, Mao realized it wasn't their word. It was his word.

Because Raspberyl never once shied away from the use of the word "friend".

It was a fragment of the truth of course. They were indeed rivals. But were they also something else? For some reason, Mao found the word "friend" to be scarier to him than all the Overlords of the worlds combined. Not that he would ever admit that to anyone, not even himself.

"Beryl…"

"I'm going to get some sleep, Mao. I've got a lot of things to do tomorrow." She settled down on her side of the bed and pulled the dark gray blankets up to her shoulders, facing away from him.

Mao took his glasses off and placed them on his bedside dresser. He leaned back, arms folded behind his head, thinking hard. But his thoughts kept jumping everywhere, unsure of where to land, until eventually they came to a memory.

Almaz, visiting the Netherworld for his honeymoon, shyly hugging Princess Sapphire. She had smiled and returned it. It had been after a minor quarrel between the two of them, and right after that, all was well again.

What was that called…A wordless apology.

And for some reason, Mao felt like he had just gotten into an argument with Raspberyl, though they had only traded, what, two sentences? If that? Maybe it was that comment he had said…Dammit. Mao really hated being confused, because normally he was at least a step ahead of stuff like this. Stuff that bothered him. Or so he liked to kid himself.

Mao didn't wait until he could lose his nerve. He put his arm out and hugged Beryl to him, holding her until they were chest to chest, heart to heart, and though he desperately wanted to recoil from contact like this, he told himself that if Almaz of all people could do this in broad daylight, he could do it in the darkness of the night in the shadows of a storm.

She let out a strangled gasp of surprise. "Mao...?"

He didn't answer, just lowered his head so his face was pressed against her hair. He could feel the curve of her horns as they gently prodded his shoulders. If he spoke he had a feeling he was going to lose whatever had given him the desire to do something as un-demonic as this in the first place.

She shifted her hand and pressed it against his chest, over his heart, and he wondered what she was looking for, or doing for that matter. She opened her eyes and looked at him, and Mao swiftly shut his own, though it wasn't fast enough for him to miss the astonishment in her rose-colored gaze. He heard the fabric of the sheets stir as she moved her tail, possibly to make herself more comfortable, because God were they both in for a long night.

To his immense relief—though again he would tell no one this—Raspberyl didn't say anything he would have a hard time answering. She just whispered, "Good night, Mao."

His answer was a long time in coming. Truthfully, he was waiting to see if she would fall asleep before he could reply, it'd be less embarrassing that way. But he had a feeling she was still awake when he said:

"Good night, Beryl."

Author's Note: Goodness, my first Disgaea fanfiction. Apologies for any, well, OOC-ness because like I said, it's my first. I've played all the Disgaea games and lots of other stuff by Nippon Ichi, but I decided to do this pairing first because it seemed like the most challenging. How arrogant of me. Reviews are very much appreciated!