𝐘𝐈𝐊𝐄𝐒 ❖ KIMETSU NO YAIBA

1. TEACH ME THAT

It had been about a year or so since Mieko had been on her own.

It wasn't as easy as she thought it would be either. She had been evicted from the house within the first month since there was no one paying for it, but since it was such a bad house and on the dirtier and ickier side of town, no one had wanted it. So Mieko was now bunking out in her father's old room since it was the biggest and least damaged part of the small home and didn't smell like garbage.

She had grown out of many of her clothes, so taking clothing from the waste bins of the town and then washing them in the creek a little ways out of the village was something else she had to do. Food was different story. There was no way in hell she was going to search the bins of the streets for something to eat. Instead, she taught herself to fish and was growing something of a (really bad) garden in the back yard.

But now, she wasn't in her garden, or down the creek or looking for new pieces of clothes. Instead she was in the forest, battling out lone skilled swordsmen who dared to call her weak. Being 10, she obviously didn't have the brightest mind, but she was creative enough for a story. Already she had 'lost' vision in one of her eyes and she had one hand behind her hand since the swordsman 'cut off' her hand.
Her hands weren't the prettiest in the village, but growing up where she did, she didn't have the money for expensive hand cream or anything like that, so they were already rough enough. Now, they were about rough and dry enough to start a fire or something.

And still did Mieko remember each move that the colourful haired boy performed day after day back where Crazy Old Jiheko lived. Each twist and each turn she could remember -true, it probably didn't look like how that boy did it, but it wasn't that far off. Most of the time it was just wild slashes, but sometimes she found herself doing the certain slash techniques without meaning.

"Ah!" Mieko yelled out, grabbing her stomach and pretending she had just been cut through it. "Oh no!"

She flopped on the ground and did a rather graceful hand to her forehead. "I am wounded! Oh, the blood! EUH!"
Grabbing a bunch of fallen leaves to her left, Mieko threw them over her stomach, pretending they were blood or something silly like that.

"Is that the light I see before me-...uh...."
Mieko was about to feign her death, the first death in her little game of make believe, but even in her dream-land, death was not a concept to here in the slightest.

Because, sitting above her, in the stake of the thick branches of the trees -branches too thick to pretend to use as swords- there was an oddly coloured...person? This person was grey and had strange tattoo's over his skin and clothes Mieko had never seen before. They might be western...maybe.

Mieko watched them with a focused look, and all memory of her game of play pretend left the window. There was considerable distance from the ground to where this person had perched themselves over the dark haired girl.

"Hey! It's rude to spy on someone!" Mieko says, like she's never spied on a person before. This however, was taking it to the next level. And the eerie smile on this man's face was less than necessary.

A gurgle of a laugh sounded from this man, and he sounded way too excited to be here right now. "I've never eaten such an imaginative person like you before! Maybe I ought to feast on children more, Ehehee!"

Mieko blinked for a moment. "...'eaten'?..."

Mieko looked at the grey coloured skin, the strange clothes and the tattoos of various colours. And now, she was noticing the horns and the disfigured veins on this person. And now, it was in this moment that Mieko knew she was a goner.

"Oh." Mieko was momentarily calm when she clocked it that this guy was a demon.

She never really believed in demon's before. She's never seen one, and the stories seemed too insane to ever be true. Not that Mieko didn't like a good stories now and then, but people who tell stories about demons are always trying to get people to believe them with a furious passion. There was also the old folk trying to scare children to do chores or the odd jobs around the house by telling the young folk about demons. And then there was Crazy Old Jiheko, who always tried to convince people about how he slayed thousands of demons back in his youngers -and that was just beserk, there was no younger days for Jiheko, he's been old for his entire life.