A/N: Hellllo~ ! I'm so terribly sorry for not updating in the last months or so, and I am ashamed that I have no excuse. :'(

And thank you all for the reviews! I'm sorry I don't have time to reply to each one individually, but I really appreciate your praise!

Disclaimer: (Forgot to do it earlier, sorry) Blue Exorcist, unfortunately, does not belong to me. That should hopefully be obvious.

~ Silly Humans ~

There is darkness, and more darkness, so thick and deep that he could hold it in his hands. The surface under the boy's feet, although invisible in the lack of light, is cold and feels distinctively like stone. There's the sound of dripping coming from somewhere, eerily loud and echoing. Funny, it didn't seem like he was in a room.

Small hands clutch small shoulders, hoping to rub warmth into the chilled flesh. There's a scream.

The boy spins on his heels, knocking his foot painfully into something tall and solid and smooth- a wall?- and he falls, hands flailing back to catch himself. But the fingers touch nothing, and the boy's stomach lurches up painfully as he begins to plunge downwards.

Who's screaming?

It's dark. Too dark. And there's someone else there. Falling with him. He can feel hands, surprisingly warm, wrap around his neck, pulling him close. So close that he feels the rough fabric of the other's shirt. The boy's mind is blank, all he can think about is his descent. Is he going to die?

He's the one screaming.

~ † ~

With a jolt, Yukio snapped up, panting hard as the feeling of vertigo slowly left him. He was soaked with sweat, but still shivering from the lingering cold. Shakily, he licked his lips and pulled the covers close around him.

What was that dream just now?

He couldn't really remember. It was slowly fading from his mind. At this point, all he could remember was blackness and a lot of... falling? Yukio wasn't sure. But he did know that he'd had this dream before. Many, many, times, but a long time ago. This was the first time he'd dreamed of the dark room in years. In fact, he was surprised that he hadn't already forgotten that nightmare from his childhood. Maybe it was how real it felt- the coldness on his skin and the feeling of plummeting into the abyss.

The digital clock aside his bed read 4:24, a time too early in the unholy hours of the morning for the page to really want to relinquish of the comforting warmth of his bed. Yukio got up anyway, deciding that he didn't really care, since his shirt was sticking to his chest from the sweat and he was feeling pretty uncomfortable. He stood up, legs still shaking from the nightmare. Pulling open the wardrobe drawer, he groped blindly for a few minutes, trying to find one of the many sets of school uniforms he owned and a decent set of underclothes.

After finding his garments, Yukio all but stumbled out of his room into the shadowy hallway, and started to make his way to the bathroom, which was, unfortunately, located on the ground floor. Upon reaching the said location, Yukio immediately proceeded to splash water on his face, trying to dissipate the spine-tingling feeling of being watched that had been following all the way down the stairs. He waved it away as an aftereffect of his nightmare, and shook his head, dipping down to better drown himself in the stream of liquid.

"Why're you up so early?"

Yukio whipped around, nearly smacking his nose on the sink faucet. "R-Rin!" He'd forgotten about the demon's presence in his dorm. Rin watched Yukio expectantly, hand on hip. "I... woke up and couldn't go to sleep." It was a half truth. Rin glared at him a bit suspiciously, and Yukio let out a mental sigh when he turned away.

"That aside, why are you awake?" Yukio couldn't keep the resenting tone out of his voice.

"... None of your business."

An awkward silence later, Yukio was taking a shower and Rin had retreated to the confines of his own room.

~ † ~

Yukio was tired. That was all there was to say about it. Really. He'd been saying that all morning, which is testimony to the fact that this was probably his worst school day on record.

It started with Rin. Even after the bathroom incident.

"Exorcist, get your damned ass over here!"

Yukio was really not sure why he was needed to pry the decidedly angry Ukobach off the equally angry demon prince, but he did it anyway, as he was sure that Ukobach was the only experienced chef in the entire dorm (which, of course, only consisted of a three-man populace,) and didn't want to go to school hungry. He was, however, justifiably surprised when Rin explained that Ukobach wasn't letting him near the kitchens.

"Why would you need to be able to get into the kitchens?"

"To cook breakfast, of course!"

Yukio's eyebrows arched, giving the demon a 'oh really now' stare, and promptly left the two be- as soon as he got his morning meal and packed bento lunch, of course. The day didn't get much better from there, starting from Yukio missing questions in math and ending with cram school, which would have been just fine had it not been for one of Mephisto's very specific orders, given to him that morning. That Rin, the demon prince, was going to be joining their cram class. A demon. In an exorcist class.

Sometimes Yukio wondered how insane you could get. He always arrived at the same conclusion- that it couldn't be much worse than the Chairman.

"So, continuing with the discussion we left off on last week, who here has gone through the temptaint ritual?" the anti-demon pharmacology teacher, a stocky old man, asked the class. Five students raised their hands- Bon, Shima, Konekomaru, Izumo, and Yukio himself. "Alright then. Anyone who hasn't already experienced temptaint please line up here..."

The teacher pulled out from his bag a small vial of dark liquid and a carton of milk. "This classroom is actually a nesting area for hobgoblins, haha. They are attracted to rotten flesh, so we'll be using this-" He held up the glass tube "- to lure them out. Blended with milk, of course, so that it does not make them too aggressive." With slow, practiced motions, the professor began preparing the ingredients. However, the moment he popped the cork off the blood vial, there was a sharp snapping sound.

And then another.

A short-haired girl named Paku clapped her hand over her mouth the stifle the shriek she'd let out, cutting it short. "W-What was that?"

SNAP. SNAP-CRACK.

Yukio knew something was not right when Rin's head snapped up, eyes flaring crimson. He opened his mouth to ask what was wrong, when suddenly the demon jumped and pushed Yukio to the ground, hissing a hurried 'Get DOWN' before practically jumping over Yukio's bent-over shape and into the nearest empty desk, slamming it against the wall- where it shattered into shards of wood and metal and demons.

A hobgoblin, marked red and green, growled at Rin, disturbed from its sleep and seemingly oblivious to the other pages in the room, most of which had hastily got out of the way and were watching the scene with wide eyes. Rin just glared at the creature, as if daring it to make a move.

And then it wailed, scurrying into a hole in the wall. The following silence was so bloated that the room's occupants practically felt it pressing upon them.

"R-Rin?" Yukio began to get up from his sprawled position on the floor. When the demon didn't respond, he asked, "What was that all about?"

For a few seconds, Rin just stared blankly at Yukio's face. Then his eyes focused and he said stoically, "I can feel a demon's presence that's much stronger than any hobgoblin I've ever encountered."

Yukio didn't have a chance to reply, because at that moment, there was a yelp. As the cram students turned around, they saw a hobgoblin, obviously the king of its colony (there was a crown balanced haphazardly on its smooth head,) clamping its clawed hand over the teacher's mouth while the smaller goblins clung onto the man's feet.

"Sensei!" It was Shima. There was a bit of chaos as the teenagers flailed around, some of them being ambushed by hobgoblins and some of them trying to figure out how to help the teacher. As it would be, none of them had weapons on them at the moment, save for the holy water grenades that- That's it! Yukio thought, reaching for one of the projectiles. His hand was only able to graze the object before he felt a tug on his pants' leg, and his stomach filled with dread at sudden stench in the air.

He twisted his body to get a better look and was met with the gruesomely deformed head of a demon. He faintly registered Rin yelling something at him- probably something important, like the name of the demon- but he was too focused on the creature practically drooling on him to focus on the garbled commands that the demon prince was trying to hand out. There was a putrid smell emanating from the demon, and it was making Yukio feel nauseous and his eyes were watering and even for all the intense studying on facing demons and defeating them, all the page could think was 'ew.'

Looking back on it, Yukio felt pretty pathetic.

He tried to grab the demon but his hands kept slipping on the decayed skin and it was disgusting and it was hard to see now with all the haze in his brain and tears in his eyes. The stupid thing was right on top of him, pressing its weight down as it leaned closer to Yukio, misshapen teeth bared. Yukio closed his eyes and tried to push the thing off him, to no avail. This is how I'm going to die, I'm going to be eaten in a freak classroom accident, oh god this is not how I wanted to die. Yukio forced down the panicked thoughts and tried to focus more on moving the mass above him out of the way. There was a shout somewhere, and some conscious and rapidly-shrinking part of Yukio's mind hoped that everyone else was okay.

Suddenly, the pressure was relieved, and Yukio took a deep breath through his lungs, and sat up, a 'thank you' ready on his lips for his savior, when he opened his eyes and had to doube-take because what was going on?

The demon who'd attacked Yukio was still there, but standing off to the side as if it wasn't sure what to do. The majority of the class members were to one half of the room, some of them hiding under desks and chairs while others were helping the teacher stand up and some two or three aria-trained pages had their hands together, mouths open, and looked like they'd stopped mid-prayer. The hobgoblins were cowering in the corner of the room, under the teacher's desk, and Yukio wasn't sure why until he saw Rin, standing in the center of the room with cyan fire blazing and eyes a burning crimson. He was glaring at the hobgoblins.

"Who sent you?!" He growled at the goblins. They responded only with shakes of their head and a garble of incomprehensible speech. At least Yukio couldn't understand it. Rin seemed to know exactly what they meant, and turned to the other demon instead. "And you! What in the blazing hells are you doing here?"

The demon, now that Yukio got a better look at it, was in fact very humanoid, although it resembled a revived corpse more than an actual person. Sort of like a zombie, Yukio thought. It was slumped on four limbs, looking bash, akin to a dog who'd just been chastised by its master. It made a shrill whooshing sound, like air blowing out of a kettle, and then turned away, running directly through the way and disappearing in haze of blackish mist. Yukio stared, still trying to comprehend what had happened.

Rin cursed, running his hand through his hair and relaxing from his tense posture. Yukio dimly realized that his tail was no longer on fire. The rest of the students were stirring, slowly moving as if worried that the slightest sound would make the demon's anger turn on them.

The silence was interrupted by the teacher lunging forward and grabbing Rin's shirt from behind.

A/N: aaaaaaaaaaaand... I'm an evil idiot who doesn't feel like writing anymore tonight! ;) have fun with the cliffhanger!