Chapter Text
Brian Yu does not remember how he died. He doesn’t remember most things about his life before this one, actually. He does remember the night he came back, though, quite vividly in fact. Mostly, he remembers being awoken VERY rudely by persistent, if muffled, scraping. At first he tried to ignore it and return to sleep, but it’s rhythm wasn’t steady enough to be tuned out as whitenoise.
He looked from side to side, and determined either he was blind or it was too dark to see a damn thing. He reached out slowly, finding his limbs stiff and sluggish to respond, and encountered soft velour under his fingertips, only a few inches above his face. The material was upholstering something hard that did'nt yield to casual attempts to push at it. Metal, or wood maybe he thought.
Shk! ...Thpp.
Shk! ...Thpp.
Shk! ...Thpp.
That damnable scraping was getting louder, and unless he found it’s source and put a stop to it, he wouldn’t be able to fall back into blissful slumber. He turned onto his side and found it an uncomfortably tight fit for his shoulders. To his left he found the same soft fabric over a hard, solid surface. He rolled again, in the opposite direction and found the same to his right. If he had remembered being human at that point, he might have begun to panic. As it was, he just heaved an annoyed grunt.
The scraping was right above him, seemingly unaware of his stirring. If he couldn’t leave this apparent box to stop it, maybe he could startle it enough to drive it away. He pulled back a fist in the little space he had and rapped against the ceiling above him. At first nothing changed, so he tried again, with more force.
“Hey...” His voice came out a dry rasp. He coughed, cleared his throat, and tried once more. “Hey! Cut... that out.”
The scraping faltered. Brian had a brief moment of smug satisfaction. All was silent again, and as he let his head plop back onto the small pillow under it, he could feel his eyes slipping closed (not that it mattered in the perfect dark).
This was interrupted by a blinding flash of blue that resolved itself into the glowing, grinning face of a girl. From the fact that he could see through her to the suddenly illuminated wall above him, Brian surmised she wasn’t exactly interacting well with the laws of physics.
“Hey, Boo! Oh my gosh, Scott was right, there IS a person in here!”
“Bwah!” Brian shouted, and shoved the floating face. It popped back through the ceiling and plunged him into darkness again. Overhead there was a commotion, a brief explosion of muffled voices, too distant to be intelligible, but the volume and rushed pace held excitement. He didn’t want excitement, he wanted a nap.
An almost thunderous THUD rattled his box. Loud, frantic scratching replaced all the previous noises. Brian did not have enough time to wonder if he should be more worried than aggravated, because it changed in quality within the minute. No longer muffled, something clawed against the ceiling, leaving the sound of wood cracking into splinters ringing in his ears. It paused then, but he wasn’t foolish enough to think that meant he would be left in peace.
Sure enough, the wood around him shuddered. The thing above him grunted, and heaved, and with an ear-splitting CRACK Brian was blined for a final time that night, not from darkness, but from the brilliant, silver glow of a waning gibbous moon. It silhouetted the hulking form that loomed over him; from the backlighting Brian could only discern wild hair, impossibly broad shoulders and pointed ears. It grinned, letting all of his very sharp teeth glint, and tossed the wooden coffin lid aside.
“Hey there new friend,” it- he- barked. Literally barked, there was something unmistakably lupine to his voice. “Woah, guys, he’s a beefy boy!” And then he was reaching down and grabbing Brian around his bicep. He wasn’t rough about it, but there was absolutely no resisting being hauled up by that grip. He lifted Brian up, up and up- six feet to be exact- and placed him onto perfectly manicured sod. Well. Perfectly manicured except for the dots of irregular shaped stones, and one gaping hole in the ground that he’d just been evicted from.
Brian gawked. An extremely unlikely cadre of... people- yes, people is what he was going to go with- gawked right back. There was the blue girl from before, sort of floating in mid air a few inches above the ground. Her whole body had that translucent quality, but her clothes were strangely solid. Leaning against a shovel stuck point first into the ground was a bored looking, dark-skinned girl with fiery hair. Literally fiery, as in it was made of actual fire. Beside her was a third girl, almost disconcertingly normal looking compared with the other two on first glance, but her skin was alarmingly pale, and laced with even stitches over deep lines. Her hair was dark but shot through with a streak of white.
Brian blinked, slowly. The fiery girl sighed. “Damn. Strike out. I should have known Vera would sell us a bogus map to the grave of Jared the Beheader.”
“At least the animation spell was real,” the stitched girl offered. “Honestly, I was surprised that was the part that worked.”
The big guy that had pulled Brian out of what he was now very aware was his grave landed beside him on all fours with another teeth rattling thud, then shook violently, throwing grave dirt everywhere, and sat back on his haunches. From this angle Brian could see the great big bushy tail wagging behind him so hard it was almost spinning like a propeller. He seemed unaware it was continuing to fling dirt. “You look like you’d be great at throwing a ball! Hey! Maybe you should try out for our team?”
Stitches grimaced. “Wooooah, woah, slow down there, Scott. Easy. Down boy. Let him get his bearings first.”
“Yeah,” Hothead chimed in, “We don’t even know if his lights are all on upstairs.”
Brian flexed his fingers into a fist then raised it and flipped her off. “Oop.” She grinned. “He sure understood that .”
“Yeah, there isn’t even football tryouts, or school right now, IT’S ALMOST SPRING BREAK! We came out here to wake up JTB for his legendary party planning skillz!” Floating girl punched the air. “We can’t let a little set back like grave mix-ups get in the way of planning the best spring break bash of literally FOREVER!”
“I think we’re going to have to put that on hold, Polly. We don’t have any more scrolls of Animate Dead, and we can’t leave this big guy here to hang.” It was clear Stitches was the only one acting as the voice of reason at this point, and she was also clearly frazzled.
The ghost- Polly- pouted. “Maybe tall, dark, and green is a legendary party animal too? Whadaya say, big guy, let's get cranked!”
Brian took a long moment. He tipped his head from one shoulder to the other, still feeling stiffness in his movements. His eyes wanted to close, and there was some kind of lingering cold deep under his skin that he couldn’t rightly attribute to the night air. “I would like... to go back to bed.”
Polly resumed pouting. The big, furry guy- Scott, she’d called him- craned his head to look around. “You can’t sleep in a graveyard. What if it rains?”
“Tell that to Sleeping Nasty over there,” Hothead said and nodded at something behind them. Brian turned and looked over his shoulder. What she had alluded to was impossible to miss. Only a row away there was what had once probably been a very grand and expensive headstone. It rose as a short Corinthian pillar over the others, and seated on it’s pinnacle was an angel, wings mantled, sheltering the dead beneath and hands turned upward, beseeching on their behalf. It was covered bottom to top in freshly sharpied blasphemies and profanities, and it no longer had a head. Sprawled cat-like, almost liquid, and sound asleep in its granite lap was unmistakably a demon. Red skin, pointy horns, spade tail and all.
Brian felt a brief flash of jealousy for this creature being completely oblivious to the ruckus that had dislodged him from his not-so-eternal slumber. Stitches coughed, and his attention snapped back to her. “Ah. Well. Seeing as we’re kind of responsible for the whole raising the dead and all, and also the whole digging up your grave thing- sorry about that- I guess, you could come stay with us? If you’d like too.”
He considered it. Really, what choice did he have? It was clear that even if he crawled back into his coffin and asked them just to bury him again, he was still and would from this point on forever be a member of the living dead. And while sleep sounded very nice, he didn’t fancy he could keep snoozing through an eternity of nothing. He rolled his shoulders in a shrug.
“Sure.”
Stitches beamed. “Cool! I’m Vicky, by the way. This is Amira, that’s Polly, to your right is Scott, and behind you is Damien. Speaking of, could someone go wake him up and tell him we’re gonna bail?”
“Oh! Me! I will!” Scott was off with a bounding leap. Brian almost envied his seemingly bottomless enthusiasm. The girl who had now introduced herself as Vicky stepped up to him and reached for his hand. She barely came up to his chest, but she still moved like she wanted to be extra gentle, just to be sure, and her smile was reassuring. It was kind of touching. All things considered, Brian couldn’t really find it in himself to have any hard feelings. It was an accident, after all, and maybe he could get used to being alive again.
“That doesn’t look like the ultimate party animal, Jared the Beheader, who’s parties were so legendary people would literally lose their heads to attend. Who is this noob?”
Brian found in that moment that even his startle reflex was slow. Mostly, he froze, which didn’t look like anything outwardly happening. He turned slowly and sure enough the new voice that had spoken right behind his shoulder belonged to the roused demon boy. He leaned in, headless of personal space. It might have been a more effective intimidation tactic if he were taller. Brian amended his first mental inventory from horns, plural, to horn, singular; the right-side one looked as if it had been snapped off.
“This here,” Amira said as she slipped between the two, chin up and chest out, “is the newest, coolest, chillest dude on the block. And his name issssuuuuuuh...” She looked up.
“Brian,” he supplied the word like it had never been lost. He could remember nothing before this night, but the name was right, and he knew that with a certainty of conviction that surprised him.
The demon scoffed. “What kind of lame ass name is Brian ?”
“No more lame... than Damien... I’d imagine.”
He watched as the demon bristled, pupils narrowing to slits, and lip curling back over a fang. He had a suspicion that naming Damien before he’d actually given it had put him off, but it seemed he was smart enough to figure out one of the others had told Brian before he rejoined the group. Brian held steady, not breaking eye contact with the attempted stare down. A handful of silent seconds passed, before Damien broke it first with a “Tssh. Whatever. Don’t fuck around with a prince of hell, or I’ll give you a matching hole on the other side of your face, rotbreath.” Hole? Huh...
And with that Damien shoved past them, bumping Amira into Brian along the way. He caught and steadied her back onto her feet.
“Well, he seems... charming.”
“Oh don’t mind Damian, he’s just gotta go through the territorial threat displays first. There’s a sweet core under all the prickles, threats of violence, and gasoline. Very, very deep under.” Vicky patted his chest. “Let’s go! Amira and I share a dorm on campus. You can crash there while we get everything sorted out.”
“Sounds good... to me.” And he allowed his new monster acquaintances to lead him out of the graveyard and into the city of Monsteropolis.
“HOOOO SHIT guys, I just got the best idea ever!! COMBINATION WELCOME AND SPRING BREAK PARTIES! Two parties at once! That’s like... at least quadruple the party!”