be

"He's waking up," a male's voice calls out.

Kyouya opens his eyes slowly and finds himself on a metal table, the injuries from the earlier fight almost gone, only leaving light bruising and small cuts.

"Hey there, human," a man with blonde hair in a strange swirl says to Kyouya, leaning over the teenager with a lollypop in his mouth. "You had a rough time it seems."

A red head hesitantly moves closer. "We found you outside. You wouldn't happen to be the thing that's causing such a fuss, would you? What happened to you?"

Kyouya sits up and blinks at the green overalls he's been changed into. He's getting rather annoyed at people thinking they can dress him, especially into already oil stained clothes. The lights overhead are almost painfully bright and make it easy to see where stains shaped like fingers have touched the clothes. Hopefully before it was put on Kyouya.

He looks around but can't see his tote bag, not that it would have his tonfas since he broke both on the Vindice attacking him. He quickly loses focus though and searches the cavernous room he's inside, metal beams stretching overhead with wires and hooks dropped down to hold large, half completed machinery suspended in the air. Stretching up along the walls to the ceiling are vents and pipes, and the imagery of vines comes to Kyouya despite the metallic sheen.

This place really is a jungle, the large fans built into the ceiling acting as treetops while the floor is scattered with wires and pipes and bits of metal welded together with a few half formed robots towards the back, mimicking leaf litter and roots of the forest floor. Vague pathways around the room are clean of debris, most of the walkways leading to raised platforms or tables like the one Kyouya is on.

He's rather curious as to what these two people link with in a forest environment. Perhaps the animals slinking along the branches above or maybe the hidden scavengers underfoot. He turns back to the two men but he can't place their species immediately.

"What are you?" Kyouya murmurs cautiously.

The red head looks to the blonde but that man is entirely focused on Kyouya, slowly moving closer to the teenager.

"I'm Shoichi," the red head says, avoiding the real question. "That's Spanner."

Kyouya narrows his eyes and slides off the table. "I did not ask who you are, I asked what."

"Do you really want to know?" Spanner questions calmly. "They say ignorance is bliss."

"I don't know who 'they' are so I'm hardly going to take the advice," Kyouya responds in a drawl. "It's a simple question, herbivores, there's no need to drag it out."

Shoichi huffs out a humourless laugh and shrugs. "We're mannequins."

Kyouya immediately coils in preparation for a fight, eyes locked onto the two even as he backs away towards the closest exit.

When Kyouya was young he saw first-hand the aftermath of what a mannequin could do – not even an Alpha or a Guardian, just a newly born creature who slaughtered an entire town, slowly and clinically pulling them apart and then piecing them back together like twisted and distorted versions, as if you were looking through mirrors in a circus. There were too many fingers or not enough skin or the correct amount of limbs but the wrong type.

It was not a town of humans. It was a town of supernatural, over a dozen races living together, all of them killed so easily.

Mannequins used to be called golems, creatures built for the sole purpose of having just enough cognitive function to better assist their makers. Golems are difficult to make and even harder to kill, so most supernatural simply traded them instead of going to the trouble of having a private one. There were no risks involved of the golems revealing secrets because they just didn't have the brain power to remember the tasks they were given.

Unfortunately, all of that magic and energy over all of those years twists the golem, seeping inside and changing it in ways that it really shouldn't be able to. The first golem to become a mannequin never took on a name, but most know him as Frankenstein's monster. After twenty years in Frankenstein's service, subjected to the experiments and sick energies, he suddenly broke free and orchestrated the death of every single family member of his creator before finally killing Frankenstein.

After that more golems changed, became intelligent and cunning, and since they've been exposed to people who need a golem in the first place, standard morals never quite settle in to the mentality they develop.

Mannequins are soulless creatures, empty husks of corpses pieced together, born for the sole purpose of eventually dying under their master's command. They are the so called monsters supernatural children hide from, the unknown creatures under the bed. They've laughed in the face of mortality and crawled out of the afterlife simply because the dead don't scream like the living, not loud enough, not desperate enough for their tastes.

However, the worst truth by far, is that mannequins have strings.

"Hey, calm down," Spanner coaxes. "You'll be dead before it starts hurting."

Kyouya tries to take another step back but his body won't move. The lights glint off thread like a spider's web, hundreds of them linking the two men's fingers to Kyouya's flesh.

"Sorry about this," Shoichi murmurs. "But we're just so very curious as to how you're built."

The mannequin raises a hand and the strings move with it, pulling Kyouya. He tries to struggle but his muscles are slack from the standard paralysis of the thread and he unwillingly takes slow steps forward. It's even getting harder to breath, the strings need to force his lungs to work for Kyouya to get air, and his eyes hurt from not blinking.

The only reason his heart is still beating is because the strings are tugging on it.

"It'll only take a second," Spanner promises. "We're almost done anyway, and we won't even add anything, although you would look nice with a few extra parts."

"Maybe some new bones though," Shoichi hums. "I want to see what a titanium skeleton does to the supernatural he comes into contact with."

Kyouya walks smoothly to the table and lies down again, staring up at the large, lazily rotating fan above as the two men pull on the strings. He can feel the thread under his skin, dragging against his flesh as the mannequins release their control and wind back the strings, all but the one leading to his heart. It makes Kyouya want to shudder in disgust but even if the tethers are gone the paralysis is still very much working.

It's an ironic ability, everyone agrees, that the mannequins who shouldn't have control over themselves now have the power to order around others. It's almost amusing, if it weren't so terrifying.

"Okay, so general anaesthesia or no?" Spanner asks.

"The problem with that is which subtype do we use," Shoichi protests. "All we could do before he woke up was a simple scan to eliminate out the major races. He's not a werewolf so no wolfsbane additive, and he's not fey so no salt, but there are still thousands of species and subtypes to get through."

"I'm not waiting for that long," Spanner dismisses. "So we just start cutting then?"

"He'd move around too much," Shoichi sighs. "Can't knock him out with head trauma either since a heavy injury could make the results biased. Do we still have those cuffs?"

The two mutter to themselves and Kyouya tries to move, to somehow shake off the paralysis. His mind is still painfully clear and if it was a battle of willpower like simple pain or a physical test like something binding him, he would have broken their necks already but this isn't something that can be overcome with brute force.

His lungs are working now, waking up slowly from the poison, but not nearly well as it should. Kyouya is suffocating here on the cold metal table as two mannequins discuss how to best reach his organs while he's still alive.

The thread from Shoichi's finger to Kyouya's heart is still there, not enough to keep up the paralysis, and the mannequin absent mindedly keeps it at a sluggish rhythm so it's just sufficient to keep Kyouya alive. The beats are clearly incapable of keeping up with the amount of adrenalin inside Kyouya. He's going to die very soon, because his very much human body is just going to give up, if he doesn't fix this.

Thankfully, since that first view of what a mannequin could achieve, Kyouya has been planning for this.

There's a demon method of transferring injuries to someone else. It's a skill made to torture, which is what most demon skills are. A human soul close to becoming demonic will be beaten half to death and then shoved at a loved friend or family member. That close to being a lesser demon, they of course move the injuries to their pervious loved one.

The command for transfer isn't the important part so while there is a chant it doesn't need to be said out loud. The necessary portion is the rune sequence on both participants (willing or otherwise) that would be used as a conduit to transfer the injuries. Fortunately for Kyouya, there is a string connected to his heart, and he knows just enough demonic words to tweak the chant a bit so it caters for thread and not runes.

Shoichi abruptly drops and hits the ground hard, limbs splayed and expression slack.

Spanner's head snaps to Kyouya who calmly sits up from the table.

...

"We're really sorry," the two chime in synchronicity.

Sitting on their calves in front of Kyouya, the two mannequins keep their heads bowed. The human frowns down at them, his hands planted on hips like a disappointed parent.

The two are worse for wear, Shoichi missing his arms and part of his face as well as a leg from the knee down, while Spanner has large holes cut into him like a six year old went to town on some dough with a cookie cutter. They're not in pain, of course, their nerves weren't wired for pain when they were first made.

Their stitches, having been hidden under their clothes before Kyouya started in on them, are now showing against sickly pale skin through tears in the material. The black thread looks like worms weaving under the skin and Kyouya can't look at it for long.

It holds their flesh together in patches and where parts are missing the stitches are frayed, hanging loose but slowly moving to tighten and clamp the makeshift bodies together. The discarded bits of flesh are scattered about the large room, a fan on the ceiling jammed with Shoichi's arm.

"Make me tonfas," Kyouya demands, since the Vindice broke his. "And new clothes with the strongest material you have," he adds on with a glare at the overalls he's still in.

"We don't do clothes," Shoichi begins.

Kyouya takes a step forward and the two back pedal quickly, falling over and wriggling away on the ground with unstable limbs, assuring Kyouya that they could do whatever he wants.

"Yeah, clothes," Spanner laughs nervously, trying to crawl into a hollowed out robot's torso. "I've always wanted to be a seamstress."

"Y-You know we didn't m-mean it, right?" Shoichi stutters as his stomach starts aching, the mannequin pressing up against a few pipes. "We would have put you back together. No hard feelings, okay? We're all Otherside here."

Kyouya just hums. "I'm human."

"You mean you used to be human," Spanner can't help but correct, his voice echoing strangely from inside the robot.

"No, I've always been human," Kyouya says. "I left hunter training before they started using supernatural energies to convert the body."

He was kicked out from hunter training and locked up, but that's just splitting hairs.

"Hunter?" Shoichi squeaks with wide eyes. "Wait, a Hibari or just freelance?"

Kyouya raises and eyebrow and gestures to his face. "Silver eyes, herbivore, obviously I'm a Hibari."

Spanner pokes his head out from the metal shell and blinks. "Oh," he says, dragging out the sound to a seven syllable monstrosity. "Yeah, we don't get out much, just… buy our supplies online."

"Not living supplies," Shoichi says quickly. "We don't do that, we work with metals, it's just your portal ended up outside and we thought it was an act of God."

"Demigod," Spanner corrects. "His name is Fuuta and he visits sometimes, please don't kill him."

As if summoned from the mention of his name like the Gods of old, the door a little further down opens and a man steps through, feet barely touching the ground as he glides forward.

Fuuta de la Stella has neat brown hair, blacked out sunglasses and a white vest over a dark green button up shirt combined with black pants and tie, clutching a book bigger than Kyouya's entire torso. The demigod walks up and places his book on the table nearby before turning his head to the hiding Shoichi and Spanner, the tilt of his head curious.

"Did your experiment blow up again?" Fuuta sighs fondly, space dust escaping from his lips. "I know you two just reattach your parts but I worry."

The demigod turns to face Kyouya and pulls off his sunglasses, locking onto the human. Fuuta's eyes are galaxies, thousands of stars being born and living and dying all at once, and when he stares at you it's dangerous to look back. The specks of light that denote the millions of suns fade and the black emptiness swallows you up.

He's a black hole, an abyss, space itself.

Fuuta blinks and Kyouya can finally look away, the trance broken.

The demigod smiles. "Is this the doll you want me to rank?" he asks the two mannequins as he steps closer to Kyouya.

Shoichi and Spanner frantically shake their heads in the background. Kyouya's glare at them gets steadily more murderous.

"My, it's got the glare of a medusa," Fuuta jokes and runs his hand through Kyouya's hair, petting the teenager. "I'm glad your strings are keeping it docile. This would be a lot harder otherwise."

If Shoichi had arms right now he would face palm.

Fuuta eyes flare brighter, a muted sun, and the gravity lessens in increments. "Come in, Ranking Star," he calls out.

Right before Kyouya's feet leave the ground with the absence of gravity, he pushes off and tackles Fuuta into the ceiling.

...

"I'm sorry," Fuuta mumbles through a broken jaw.

Kyouya huffs.