Work Text:
When Kyoutani comes back from the dead, Yahaba is sitting on the headstone the next row over and reading a magazine. He looks up at Kyoutani when he manages to pull himself fully out of the ground, nails broken and red from his fight with the ground.
"Took you long enough," Yahaba says in the carefully casual way that means he's been mentally practicing the line for hours and passes Kyoutani a bottle of water. Kyoutani's pretty sure he can't drink anymore, so he suspects it's to wash some of the dirt off his hands.
"Why'd you let them bury me in this suit?" he asks when he can make his vocal cords work again. It's not quite right; he sounds different than before, but it's close enough for his usual growl of irritation to shine through. "These were my only nice fucking clothes and now they're ruined."
"Your mom insisted," Yahaba says with a shrug.
"You could have brought me back before they actually stuck me in the ground, then," Kyoutani says, giving up the jacket as a lost cause and shucking it off.
"It took me awhile to get the spell ingredients," Yahaba says. "Next time you plan to get yourself killed, be sure to give me at least a week's notice so I can start getting the crow's blood together."
"Very funny," Kyoutani says, intent on unbuttoning enough of his shirt that he can confirm the cuts running from each of his shoulders to meet in the center of his chest and continuing down as one. "You let them autopsy me?"
Yahaba's eyes are fixed on the incisions. "I needed the information on what killed you," he says distractedly. "Do those hurt?"
"No," Kyoutani says after conducting the very scientific experiment of poking at them for a few moments. "Are they supposed to?"
Yahaba takes a moment to resettle his bangs, which Kyoutani has learned to mean he's rapidly performing a mental scan on as many of his old magic textbooks as he can remember. "I don't know," he says finally. "The book I got the spell from was pretty old, and it just said that all wounds that occurred pre-mortem would remain forevermore, and all those that happened after resurrection would heal themselves so long as the bond between the undead servant and the master remained, but nothing about anything that occurred between those two points. We're lucky cremation went out of style after the blackmarket trade for fresh ashes got too big, I suppose."
"Uh, 'undead servant and master'?" Kyoutani repeats, though he spares another look for his hands. They do appear to be fixing themselves. "Wanna run that by me again?"
"Oh, shut up, it's an old book, you know they're all like that." Yahaba rolls his eyes at Kyoutani's expression and holds up a hand. "Could I control your mind and make you do my nefarious bidding? Sure. But I could have done that back when you were human, technically, and that never seemed to bother you then."
"Do I even want to know what kind of blood you'd need for that?" Kyoutani asks. Maybe a year ago, he would have been more distressed at the idea that Yahaba now had an all-access pass to his free will, but he's gotten to know Yahaba over the months since the whole thing with the demons. Which reminds him— “The spell you did to bring me back didn't involve any deals with demons, did they, because I swear to—”
"No, would you chill out?" Yahaba says, looking very offended for someone with his track record. "I'm not an idiot.” The skepticism on Kyoutani's face must speak for itself, because he rushes to changes the subject. "Shouldn't we be focusing on catching the people who killed you?"
"Oh, yeah," Kyoutani says, rubbing the back of his head, where they at least have managed to remove the... whatever it was that he'd felt pushing into him the moment before he died. Everything had been a bit blurry, at that point. From the size and shape of the hole, he's guessing both that it was a blade of some kind and that there will be a lot of hat purchases in his future. "Any leads?"
Yahaba grins and pulls a dagger out of his satchel. It's in a evidence baggy that probably lived in a police station at some point and the blade is still encrusted with dried blood and hair, which obviously used to belong to Kyoutani.
"Have you been carrying that around just to pull it out and impress me like the grossest trophy in the world?" Kyoutani asks, horrified and a bit touched. "Did you break into a police station?"
"I didn't break anything," Yahaba says smugly.
"Laws, probably," Kyoutani says.
"The point is that we have it now," Yahaba says. "There's some kind of inscription on the dagger hilt, though I haven't figured out the language yet, and the autopsy showed you were definitely under some sort of general calming and control spell when you died."
"So it was probably ceremonial," Kyoutani says, again thinking back to the the thing with the demons. "Was it completed?"
Yahaba shakes his head. "I got there just a bit after you died with back-up," he says and his lip curls. "They ran as soon as we got there, no time for them to have completed anything."
"Wait, you got there right as they were running and you didn't catch even one of them?" Kyoutani asks. "What the fuck, were you asleep or something?"
It's been a long time since Yahaba had stared at him with quite that amount of shocked outrage on his face. "I was a bit distracted," he says as slowly as if he were talking to a child. An annoying child. "What with your still warm corpse being there and all."
"And the people who killed me getting away right in front of you," Kyoutani points out, not sure what Yahaba's getting all sensitive about now. It's not like they didn't know shoving their noses into the criminal element of the magical world was a dangerous thing to do.
"You had a dagger through your head," Yahaba says, squinting like he can't believe the words he's hearing. It's not a look Kyoutani is particularly fond of receiving, though sometimes it's fun to see it aimed at other people. "A dagger, Kyoutani."
"A dagger with some kind of inscription," Kyoutani says, because he's already fought his way through a coffin and over a meter of earth today and that's enough for him. "Any chance that Watari can figure out what language it is?"
Yahaba smiles. "He's our next stop," he says, and hops down from the the headstone.
—
It's well after midnight by the time they reach Watari's apartment, but he's still up and in the button-up shirt he must have worn to classes that day, the rolled up sleeves the only concession to the late hour. He stares at them for a moment when he answers the door, eyes catching on Kyoutani's dirty clothes, before stepping back to let them in.
"It's good to see you back," he says, voice as mild as ever. "I went to your funeral, you know."
"Oh," Kyoutani says, unsure what the proper response to this is, or why Watari and Yahaba are conducting one of their silent conversations around his head. "Thanks, I guess."
"I suppose it's good to know what you needed all that crow's blood for," Watari says when Yahaba looks away, effectively ending their soundless discussion. "I was getting a bit concerned."
"You didn't tell him what you were doing?" Kyoutani asks, turning to Yahaba, who adeptly avoids both of them by pointlessly nudging bits of paper on the table by the entrance way as if neatening Watari's already tidy piles. "Did you tell any of them?"
"I didn't know if it would work," Yahaba says to the paper, looking very disgruntled in a way he only ever looks when he's trying to cover for some icky emotional problem. "I've only ever reanimated birds before, and even them for just a short time."
Kyoutani doesn't really know how to deal with this, and when his awkward shifting sends a little wave of dirt onto Watari's floors, he comes upon an easy way to change the topic. "Hey, can I borrow some clothes? I don't exactly feel like going hunting in a dirty tuxedo."
"Neither of you thought to stop off at your place and clean up, of course" Watari says on a resigned sigh. "At least tell me you got a medic's okay before coming over here?"
"I feel fine," Kyoutani says, which is only a little bit of a lie. Fine suggests some feeling of normality, a return to homeostasis. Kyoutani isn't quite sure what he's feeling now. His mind is sharp as ever, his personality doesn't feel different, and he's in no pain, but...
"Not you," Watari says. "Though you ought to get one, too. I meant him."
Yahaba widens his eyes, carefully innocent. "I'm fine," he says.
Watari doesn't appear impressed. "You just brought a person back to life," he says. "You should be flat on your back about now."
Kyoutani swivels his head around to examine Yahaba more closely. In the light of Watari's room, his face does look a bit clammy and the circles under his eyes puffier than normal. Then again, Kyoutani has seen him work through looking like this and worse before. Kyoutani usually does end up stepping in when Yahaba overworks himself, ever since the thing with the demons, but he's still in what Kyoutani would consider the green zone.
To wit, the way he rolls his eyes and waves off their concerned looks without a hint of dizziness marring the gracefulness of the motions. "I'm fine,” he repeats. "We all know my talents have always tended toward the darker side. I never felt badly at all from the bird reanimations, I only stopped there because it wasn't useful. And I did the spell this morning, anyway, and took a long nap while waiting for it to take effect. So really, I'm fine."
Watari just sighs. "I'll get you some clothes," he says to Kyoutani. "You can use my bathroom in the mean time."
In addition to solving Kyoutani's dirt problem, this also would give Watari plenty of time to interrogate Yahaba more thoroughly and privately, since he tends to be easier to crack one-on-one. It's a well-made trap that Yahaba neatly sidesteps by following Kyoutani into the bathroom.
Kyoutani considers and discards the idea of pointing out that he can wash his hands perfectly well on his own. "On a scale of one to ten, how much are you bullshitting us about being okay right now?" he asks instead, letting Yahaba fuss over the water temperature.
"No more than a three," Yahaba says, finally deciding the water is warm enough and moving back to let Kyoutani stick his hands under.
"Then why the avoidance act with Watari?" Kyoutani asks. "Did you guys get into a fight at my funeral or something?"
"I didn't go to your funeral," Yahaba says absently and shakes his head. "No, we're not fighting. I just... I have a theory about why I might not be as affected by this spell as much as I might have been otherwise, but it has to do with the dagger. I don't want to bias him."
"So you decided acting sketchy about it would be better," Kyoutani says. That does sound about right for Yahaba, he realizes as he shuts off the water, hands and arms as clean as he's going to get them.
"I'm not acting sketchy," Yahaba says in the offended tones of someone caught acting super sketchy. "How are your hands feeling?"
"As good as new," Kyoutani tries to say, but Yahaba intercepts his hands on their way to the towel and, unrelatedly, Kyoutani loses control of his mouth.
"They're fully healed," Yahaba says after spending what feels like a truly obscene amount of time turning Kyoutani's hands this way and that in his own to examine them. "That was fast. The book said it would be, but I wasn't sure if... I'm glad." He lets one hand drop so he can bring the other up almost to his eye level, directly in the light, frowning in concentration at the pink of Kyoutani's fingers. "Do they still hurt? Be honest."
"No," Kyoutani says and wets his lips. "They didn't even hurt that much when they were cut up, actually."
"Huh," Yahaba says, hold still firm on the sides of Kyoutani's hand. "It could be just with pain, because of your increased fortitude, but it might be a sign of a more general decrease in sensation. Have you noticed feeling sort of numb since you woke up?"
If Yahaba had asked a few minutes ago, Kyoutani might have said yes, agreed that numb perfectly described the strange absence of strong sensation since he'd come back into consciousness and the land of the living inside his coffin. But right now, with Yahaba's skin hot as brands against his own, numb is the furthest thing from what Kyoutani feels.
"I'm not sure," he manages, which is less helpful but also less embarrassing than the more honest answer of yes except when you touch me would be.
Yahaba just purses his lips, as in the dark about the cause of Kyoutani's particular difficulty answering the question as he's thankfully been since this problem showed up (for once, not the time with the demons, but if Kyoutani really thinks about it hard enough, it does have roots there.) Luckily for Kyoutani, Yahaba is fairly intuitive only when dealing with matters firmly unrelated to himself.
Thankfully, Watari arrives then with a change of clothes for Kyoutani, which is ample enough distraction for them all. Kyoutani has been on enough hunts gone weird with these two to have lost any shame he might have once had about stripping down in front of them, even though Watari winces at the autopsy incisions. At least the clothes Watari brought him fit him well enough. He wouldn't be surprised if Watari has taken to keeping extra clothes in various sizes stocked around his apartment, given how many bleeding or messed up hunters come crawling to his doorstep. Watari gives support to a lot of the hunters in their group, though Kyoutani suspects he plays a little bit of favorites toward Yahaba and by extension, Kyoutani. He's probably the most connected person in the city outside of Oikawa, who'd set them in contact to begin with.
"I want you to look at this dagger," Yahaba says while Kyoutani changes, drawing Watari back out into the main room, and if it weren't for lines in Kyoutani's flesh disappearing behind Watari's black t-shirt and the hole in the back of Kyoutani's head, it would almost be like a normal work night.
—
They end up at a church sort of building with a plinth, which is one of those things that no longer comes as a surprise. A few years ago Kyoutani wouldn't have been able to define the word plinth, but now it seems like he stumbles across one every other week. It's a veritable plague of plinths, and Miyagi is patient zero.
This plinth has a whole mess of organs on it, which sadly is also fairly standard. Kyoutani catches sight of a heart, a liver, some intestines and possibly a kidney before he lands hard on the plinth itself, squishing what organs he didn't knock away on his way down.
"Protect the sacrifices!" one of the guys who killed him the first time around is shouting. He's wearing a monk's robe and has some symbols drawn on his head in the same language as the marks on the dagger, which Watari had told them was an old vampire tongue. These guys aren't vampires, though, just fanboys with enough magic to make an adequate attempt at resurrecting one of the First Monsters, which is apparently a big deal and very bad and therefore a top priority to stop. "We need his brain!"
Kyoutani would make some remark about how as the only actual zombie present, he ought to have dibs on going after people's brains, but honestly he's never been the type to be all quippy during a fight. He shoots the guy in the head, instead.
All in all, the fight is kind of anti-climactic. The first time Kyoutani had gone after these guys, investigating the spate of disappearances in the area, he'd fallen pretty instantly under the spells they used to entrap their victims and keep them out of it through the ritual preparation. This time, though, being undead and bound to Yahaba apparently trumps any other magic flung at him and Yahaba himself is powerful enough to repel any of their spells aimed at him, so the monks's usual plan is a complete nonstarter and their only back-up plan seems to be flailing around and hoping their superior numbers results in their victory.
It won't. Much tougher creatures have tried and lost. They'd be better off running again, but Yahaba had set up a nasty spell around the church where they'd set up their ambush, so that option is gone, too.
Kyoutani's impressed by his new form's improved physical abilities. It wasn't like he wasn't tough before — anyone trained by Oikawa and Iwaizumi is able to handle themselves in a fight. But he'd been human before, limited by human strength. Whatever Yahaba had done to bring him back, it’s made him far stronger than before, and faster. Not to mention, when one of the monks gets in a lucky shot, piercing through his side with what seems to be a regular knife, the flair of pain is slight enough to ignore and there's no rush of blood to accompany it. It's easy enough just to pull the knife out of his side and use it on his attacker in a much more deadly blow.
The rest go down easy, one after another until Kyoutani turns around and sees that Yahaba has the last of the monks down on the ground and is stabbing him repeatedly. Or rather, he has the remains of the last of the monk on the ground, because there's no way that guy is still in the land of the living, but Yahaba doesn't seem to have noticed. Usually he prefers to stay clear of the messiness of the fighting, using spells or his crossbow, but he's cast both aside to use the same dagger that he'd gotten out of Kyoutani's head, not so much unfazed by the blood spattering all over him as unconscious of it. It's hard to see his expression in the low light, but the rigidness of his movements doesn't bode well.
"Hey," Kyoutani calls out, pitching his voice deliberately loud and almost casual, as if he hasn't noticed anything's wrong. It's worked in the past when Yahaba's been emotional or otherwise weird, just the reminder that he has an audience enough to pull him back if he's not too upset.
This time, Yahaba doesn't even flinch.
Kyoutani steps forward and puts a hand on Yahaba's shoulder, ready to jump back in case Yahaba mistakes him for another enemy and turns the attack on him before realizing who it is. "Yahaba," he says as he makes contact, gently tugging Yahaba up and away from the body on the floor. "I think you got him."
Yahaba resists for a moment before being dragged back and turns his head to stare at Kyoutani, eyes unusually wide. "He killed you," he says.
"Okay," Kyoutani says. He doesn't bother looking down; he doesn't find he especially cares about the person who was the one to stick the knife in him, in the end. They're all dead now, anyway.
"You died,” Yahaba says, as though Kyoutani might have missed this.
"You brought me back," Kyoutani says. There's a part of him that wishes Yahaba had actually had that talk with Watari, who is probably far more capable of handling an emotional Yahaba than he is, but there's another, larger part of him that's jealously grateful he gets to play emotional support, even under less than ideal circumstances. "You brought me back," he repeats. "I'm better now."
"You died,” Yahaba says again. "I got there and you were, you were..."
"I know," Kyoutani says, and decides an attempt at some comforting arm-rubbing action wouldn't be too inappropriate. He generally tries to refrain from letting himself touch Yahaba too much, but these are relatively outstanding circumstances.
Unfortunately, Yahaba must misread his jerky movement for something far braver, because his face crumples like he was just barely keeping it together and he sags forward into the what might be the most awkward one-and-a-half sided embrace of all time. It can't possibly be very soothing, with Kyoutani partially frozen in the both the movement sense and also not exuding any body heat of his own, but Yahaba doesn't seem to mind.
"It's okay," Kyoutani says weakly, shifting his arms around in an attempt at returning the hug and fighting down the follow it up with something equally intelligent and fitting like there, there.
"It is not okay," Yahaba says, mainly to Kyoutani's shirt. Well, Watari's shirt. "You died.”
"I won't do it again?" Kyoutani tries, and to his surprise Yahaba pulls back to glare at him.
"You won't," he says fiercely, in the way he only does when he's talking about something he feels so strongly about that he's forgotten to try to hide how much he cares. "I won't let you."
Then he turns away and starts picking up the scene like nothing had ever happened, collecting up the dropped weapons and preparing spells to get rid of any evidence they might leave at a bloody crime scene.
Kyoutani's not entirely sure what's going on vis-à-vis his whole organ situation, but it certainly feels like his heart is hammering in his chest.