Bune silently walked out of the room, leaving Zac alone with his thoughts, his appetite, and a very ripped pigeon drawing.
"Hey, wait up, Bune!" Zac shouted, jumping up so fast his chair tipped backward with a clatter.
He scrambled out of the library, his leopard-print footies sliding slightly on the polished floor, and looked up and down the corridor. It was completely, utterly empty. The flickering torches cast long, lonely shadows against the gothic arches.
"That's odd," Zac thought, scratching one of his fleece ears. "Where'd he go?"
He took a few steps down the hall, peering into the gloom. "Hey, Bune? Did you have to go poop or something? I can just wait for you here if you've got the runs!"
No answer. Just the distant, ambient groaning of the demonic keep settling on its foundations.
Zac crossed his arms and leaned against the cold stone wall to wait. And wait. As the minutes ticked by, the hallway seemed to play tricks on his eyes, the perspective warping like a camera trick so that the corridor looked like it was actively stretching longer and longer the more he stared down it.
After thirty minutes of standing alone in the spooky, stretching hallway, Zac started to feel a bit dumb.
"He ditched me," Zac muttered, blinking in realization. "He actually just straight-up left me alone."
His eyes widened. The implication finally set in. "Oh. Am I free to do whatever I want now? Fuck yeah. I'm gonna do some bad dog shit and finally have some fun."
He pushed off the wall, a wicked grin spreading across his face as he marched down the hall, ready to unleash chaos upon the Broken Antler's pristine headquarters.
Ten minutes later, Zac was not having very much fun.
He wandered aimlessly, the harsh reality of Marchosias's monastic lifestyle crashing down on him. There was absolutely nothing to do in this giant, obsidian halfway house.
He mentally ran through his options. He could go to the dining hall, but Halphas was definitely avoiding him… or worse, plotting revenge for the pigeon-shaming incident. If Zac asked for food now, he'd probably just get served a raw Bicorn head or a bowl of gravel.
He could take a bath or a shower, but both of those options currently resulted in him losing several layers of his epidermis. His skin was still tender from Private Ami's barnacle-brushing and the near-fatal boiling in the caldarium.
He could try to find the other demons to hang out with, but they were all currently avoiding him or nursing their wounded egos. Skarg was probably still frozen in a block of his own shame after getting muzzled by a camel. Andras was off brooding in the shadows because his dog liked Zac better. The only one who didn't seem actively upset with him was Nock. But Zac had a sneaking suspicion that Timon and Pumbaa would be a bit salty about being cast as disposable extras and brutally minced into pork sausage just so the lion could impress a human in a dream.
Zac sighed heavily, the sound echoing down the never-ending corridor. His leopard tail drooped, dragging limply on the stone.
"I guess I was a bit of an asshole to Bune yesterday," he mumbled to the empty air. "I really shouldn't have made light of his hoarding addiction."
A sharp pang of genuine guilt stabbed through his chest, entirely bypassing his magically suppressed fear reflex to poke directly at his conscience. Bune had literally broken down crying in front of him. The dragon had admitted how hard he was struggling, and Zac had just brushed it off because he was too focused on his own blue balls.
And the others... Bune had said Marchosias was trying to help all of them.
Zac leaned against a suit of armor, his mind drifting to the Captain. Marchosias was so tired all the time, so grouchy and burdened. Even though that perpetually exhausted, stern energy made him top-tier in the butch dad rankings, Zac knew the wolf was hurting. March didn't seem to know how to smile. The only time Zac had seen him even slightly honest, slightly unguarded, was when he was just waking up from a nap, blearily kneading Zac's sides like a big, sleepy puppy. Zac still didn't know why the wolf was voluntarily celibate, why he pushed everyone away, but he was actively trying to help prevent Bune from relapsing. That was honestly really beautiful. It was the kind of deep, tragic nobility that kept March at the absolute top of the hottest-in-the-house list, even ignoring the fact that salt-and-pepper wolfmen were already Zac's most cherished trope.
Then there was Bune. The dragon man was a fussy neat-freak to be sure, but maybe all that cleaning, all that obsessive organization, helped distract him from the literal hunger for gold that threatened to consume him. Bune had saved Zac from getting maimed countless times already. Zac honestly didn't think he would even be sane right now without Bune's constant caretaking. The butler was usually the first face (or faces) Zac saw in the morning and the last he saw at night. He even took time out of his own day to try and teach Zac things. Even though Zac hated school, he knew Bune probably didn't put 'teaching a non-receptive, hypersexual human' at the top of his list of fun things to do.
Zac groaned, rubbing his face as he thought of Halphas. The buff, nerdy eagle who seemed so cocky and confident. The guy who had conjured Zac coffee and waffles on demand, who had actually managed to convince Zac to work out a bit. Halphas was so insecure with himself that he was literally projecting a magical illusion 24/7. He had some sort of severe avian imposter syndrome; he hated being a pigeon.
Zac felt another deep, sharp pang of guilt. "And I said I wanted eagle dick every single day," he whispered, horrified at his own past behavior. "Of course he wouldn't be honest that he was a pigeon. He probably thought I'd call him a gutter bird like the others did. How the fuck did I not get all the hints? It's like everyone was explicitly telling me he wasn't actually an eagle."
Zac's mind drifted to Andras. The owl wasn't hiding his appearance; he was hiding his emotions. The corsair was so obviously suffering from severe avoidant attachment style that Zac didn't even know how to begin to break through the bird's walls. The only thing in Hell that Andras seemed to actually care about was Goremaw, and the doggo wasn't talking. From the moment Zac saw the owl practically piss himself and dissolve into shadows just because Zac said 'I love you,' he knew the owl wasn't the heartless bad boy he claimed to be. He was just terrified of getting close.
And then there was Nock. Zac sighed heavily. The lion was hiding himself too, but he wasn't ashamed of his species; he was ashamed of his body. Feline body dysmorphia. How a literal demon could hate looking demonic was beyond Zac, but he felt a profound ache for the lion. He had an incurable, magical STD and was so deeply ashamed when Zac saw him "without his face on" in the pool that he had actually crawled away and called himself worthless.
Zac started to walk again, his leopard-print slippers making no sound. The endless stone halls of the keep seemed darker now, the silence heavier and more oppressive than it had been.
Finally, there was Skarg.
There was no way, absolutely no way, that Amdusias had been telling the truth. The nude, barbarian wendigo could not be the Demon of Love. He was all testosterone, all machismo, all blunt, primal lust. He was a force of freezing nature.
But... Zac thought, chewing on his lower lip. That little baby otter demon...
It was so much different than Bune's spectral maids or Nock's bug-infested living armor. Even Halphas's homing-pigeon recruit, Cher Ami, made sense for the Earl of Violence (messenger pigeons were vital in historical warfare). But the cherub? The cute, squeaky little flying otter that had run right to the caribou to report about the battlefront? That wasn't the kind of creature that would serve a demon of ice or cavemen. It was the kind of creature that would serve a Disney princess. Or a god of springtime mating.
Zac shook his head, a blush creeping up his neck. Shit. Skarg made me orgasm so fast when he dream-fucked me. I didn't even touch myself. Maybe he actually IS a professional lover.
He thought back to the scene in the war room, how Skarg had completely lost his mind, yelling and running through a solid wall just to escape when Zac and the others had heard his true nature sung aloud.
He is ashamed of being the Demon of Love, Zac realized. Does he think it isn't manly? I guess it does seem like an odd power for a high-ranking demon of Hell to have. If his whole identity is built around being the biggest, baddest, coldest brute in the Pit... being outed as the 'smashing chauffeur of passion' would ruin his entire tough-guy image.
Zac stopped walking, feeling a sudden, physical wave of nausea wash over him.
He didn't know anything about his new roommates. All he had done since he arrived was sexually harass every single one of them. Sure, they had played along, mostly, they were demons, after all, and lust was their native tongue. But looking back at the past few days, the picture shifted.
The Broken Antler warband wasn't filled with terrifying, unstoppable monsters. It was filled with sad, broken men who were all deeply, profoundly emotionally compromised.
Am I the asshole? Zac thought. No, it's the ancient demons who are wrong.
That total dick, Ose. He had brought me here under completely false pretenses, promising me a glorious afterlife filled with hot anthros who would totally gape me. I've been holding up his end of the bargain! Ose never said I would have to remain a pristine, untouched virgin to do this job!