Work Text:
The smooth upper edge of his wing talons scratched absently at what constituted his bare neck in this dimension. Eons in this form (prior to his questionable decision to remain on Earth with the Bourbon brothers) made the move instinctual, but he couldn’t ignore how different it felt now, with that dirty tan collar gone.
For the entire two weeks he’d been in this limbo dimension, there’d been a nagging sensation that he was missing something. Being forced to stay squished into a tiny human form for fifteen years had been bad enough, but that ridiculous collar Dick had always liked to see him wearing had been the topper on what he now recognized was a giant sentimentality cake iced with about twenty pounds of whipped stupid.
He’d initially accepted wearing that rune-laden atrocity to gain the trust of his human mark, but he’d hated every second of it. Then at some point—he didn’t really even know when—the damned thing had started to mean something to him. Something big. Something important. Something that, when it was all said and done, he’d been willing to give everything for. Even his life.
Now, floating in the dim, silent, extremely boring dimension he’d gotten himself thrown into trying to save Dick’s ass for the hundredth time...he realized he missed the damned thing. He felt naked without it. Which was also stupid, because he no longer had a body. Except he sort of did? With a shrug, he dropped that train of thought. Defining the attributes of his various forms in the multitude of dimensions he could occupy was not something he was willing to do anymore. It seemed no one understood differential equations these days, and he’d be damned if he was gonna draw that shit out on paper. He was a daemon, after all, not some two-bit scribe.
Gaz stretched, fully opening his wings and giving them both a long inspection with all but one of the eyes in his multi-faced head. Inky black skin stretched like silk across the implied framework of bone. He flexed the talons at the tips and watched them extend and retract, and briefly wondered, for the thousandth time, if a certain human would like the way they’d feel on his tender skin.
Movement caught the one eye not focused on his wings. He trained it on the odd, monochromatic display of Earth in front of him, which rippled like a giant movie screen floating just below the surface of a lake.
He watched as the tailgate of a very familiar truck dropped down, and two men began sorting through a huge collection of weaponry.
Only three of his other eyes joined the first in watching this scene. The rest remained focused on his battle-scarred wings. He’d been watching over the daily activities of the man he loved and his little brother for two weeks now, so this slice of their lives wasn’t exactly fascinating. The drinking, the crying, the episodes of rage followed by depression...those had been hard to watch and hard to turn away from, but this was clearly an extermination job, and a pretty basic one, from the looks of it.
His eyes watched as Dick picked up a missile launcher and brandished it with a huge, child-like grin. His brother, Sal, stared blankly back at him and then shook his head. The missile launcher was tossed back into the truck bed, and Dick’s smile vanished. He made his displeasure known with the same adolescent level of drama, and then followed Sal toward a building a short distance away.
A small smile crept across all of Gaz’s faces, before the three additional eyes returned to their job of helping to inspect his wings.
Moments later, a flurry of activity in what looked like the inside of an old barn drew every eye to the display. Gaz’s wings snapped down to his sides, the talons reaching forward to catch on non-existent ground as his faces moved closer to the image. A low growl rattled his...torso? Yeah, let's go with torso.
The brothers were being attacked. Multiple assailants. They’d apparently chosen to employ a zero-stealth plan to attack what was obviously a werewolf den, and had been immediately overwhelmed. Both men were now on the ground being hog-tied.
The growl intensified and a snarl raised the corners of his mouths. Twenty-foot fangs glinted in the reflected light.
The woman who appeared to be the lead werewolf—some trifling hussy in skin-tight jeans who Gaz vowed to eviscerate the instant he was released from this shitty dimension—stood over Dick and appeared to be yelling at him.
“Call for me,” Gaz demanded through his loud growl, willing the beautiful man at her feet to hear and obey. The man did neither. Gaz’s fangs got longer.
There seemed to be a lot of arguing taking place, and Gaz’s anxiety grew exponentially.
“CALL for me!” he repeated. “ONE TIME! That’s all you have to do, just—” Gaz let several of his eyes close and two of his jaws snap shut as he tried to keep hold of his composure. With his remaining eyes, he watched as the man he loved continued to piss off the leader and escalate the situation with his smart mouth. Gaz opened his closed eyes one by one and he slowly shook his head.
Anger spread across the faces of the werewolves, and the leader started gesturing wildly, repeatedly flashing a curious, ‘X’-shaped tattoo at Dick and Sal.
A very attractive, muscle-bound werewolf, who immediately became number two on Gaz’s “to murder” list, got entirely too close to Dick, and Gaz began screaming at the image.
“CALL FOR ME! You don’t even have to say my name, you just— Just WANT me! I ALWAYS come when you want me there! There’s a REASON for that, you DULL son of a—”
The leader grabbed a gun off of the floor and aimed it directly at Dick’s face. It was clear she was about to fire.
The entire dimension shivered with the force of Gaz’s roar. His wings flared up and back and he lashed out at the image with all six of his forelimbs. They passed through the image with barely a hint of distortion, but Gaz continued to strike anyway.
Sal broke free of his bonds and leapt at the leader. The gun fired wild and missed Dick, who had managed to free his feet and was now trying to cut the ropes around his hands. He was eventually successful, but not before another muscle-bound werewolf began man-handling Dick in a way that ensured Gaz would add him to his kill list, with a side note to do it very slowly.
Dangerous, bizarrely ill-placed objects seemed to jut out from literally everywhere in this barn, and the anxiety Gaz felt watching his Beloved being thrown around like a sack of flour was starting to unravel the fabric of his surroundings. Vortices began to open nearby, but he ignored everything that didn’t involve the scene before him.
It all ended abruptly when Sal dispatched his opponents and then beheaded the one attacking Dick, but not before the beefy werewolf shoved Dick one last time against one of the strangely hazard-bedazzled beams. The headless werewolf crumpled into a pile of ash, but Dick was still hanging there on a bright red plastic-coated hook that kept him suspended off of the floor.
Gaz let out a massive sigh of relief when he saw Dick was stuck, but not hurt.
With the threat of the impending death of his beloved no longer stealing his entire focus, he was able to process the details of the barn a bit better. Sure, lots of the objects protruding from the surfaces inside that barn were placed there by someone who’d clearly just signed up for Accidental Death and Dismemberment insurance and was looking to cash out quick, but a lot of the objects looked blunted—like maybe they weren’t meant to maim or kill. But they still looked threatening in a way that was hard to explain.
Gaz squinted all of his eyes. Each face tilted to the right.
Sal was talking with Dick now. They were arguing about something, and Gaz noticed Dick was trying to keep Sal from looking between his legs. There was an object of some sort there that seemed to be causing him some distress.
Sal made a move like he was going to try to lift Dick, but Dick became even more distressed and shoved Sal away.
“Let him lift you off of the hook. What are you doing?” He continued to watch as they argued. Then, looking frustrated, Sal turned and walked out of the barn.
Dick looked extremely upset. He was squirming in the strangest way, and reaching up to try to pull himself off the hook. Which made no sense, because Sal had just offered to do that and he’d refused.
Gaz was starting to panic again. Dick was definitely suffering, though he couldn’t tell why. But he knew it had something to do with whatever Dick was trying to avoid coming in contact with below him.
“Call. Me.” Gaz ground out through locked jaws. Then, with an extremely frustrated sigh, he dropped his head down and groaned. “Dick Bourbon, it’s a good thing you’re pretty, because sometimes you are The Dumbest bitch.”
Dick moved, and the object beneath him became much more visible. Gaz leaned close. Then closer still. Until finally, the shape of the object became apparent.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me.” Incredulity at Dick’s ability to get himself into such an absurdly improbable predicament lowered Gaz’s remaining terror by half. His wings drooped and splayed out to either side and he frowned with every mouth. Half his eyes rolled dramatically.
“...sorry…”
Dick’s voice broke through the utter silence of Gaz’s prison like a shotgun blast. “...sorry I haven’t looked for you, I’m sorry I never gave you the answer you deserve, I was—”
“Thank FUCK!” Gaz shouted with a dramatic head-roll, and immediately melted through the display, his human form coalescing on the other side.