El Sueno de la Razon
Fandom: Fables (comic)
Written for: Seanan in the New Year Resolutions Challenge 2005
by kangeiko
In taking Snow to bed after the battle, Bigby had not had any intention other than to guard her 'til morning. The Big Bad Wolf is not known for his designs on maidens' virtues; at least, not anymore. He vaguely remembers an earlier time and cautionary tales, but those moments fade like wood smoke when he gropes for them and he can no longer recall the details. In this era of immortality, memory still betrays them all, stripping away past and present until only glass slippers and happy endings remain.
(He remembers a time when the woodcutter never found him and Little Red Riding Hood's slick limbs went wriggling into his belly in smooth gulps like newly hatched tadpoles.
He remembers a struggling pale form beneath his body, and a knife sliding between his ribs, and wonders if he is hallucinating. He would have smelled himself on the girl - which girl? - if he had touched her in that manner before. No; it was a dream, and nothing more.)
It is the New World, and he is a good guy, now. His story is known but hardly ever told as mundy children now seem more frightened of vampires and werewolves than a wolf in a dark wood. (He wonders how Snow had felt when she slid her knife into his belly; if she knew she was saving him.)
No one is afraid of the Big Bad Wolf anymore.
Certainly not Snow White, heavily pregnant, her naked form swaddled in blankets in front of the fire and her pale toes exposed.
(He had been half-asleep with exhaustion when he had carried her up to her office - the only place either of them had a claim to that was not now ash and cinders - and had tucked her into the over-large sofa in the back room. Snow had been a dead weight in his arms, only shifting when he turned to leave. "Stay here until the morning, Bigby," she had said, half-yawning, one hand buried in his fur. Too tired to protest, he had simply curled up at her feet and dozed off, the smell of her - even wet and tired - comforting to his bones.)
Bigby reaches out a hand to touch the coarse wool of the blankets and they fall open immediately, as if charmed to do so.
Snow's naked belly looks like a ripe melon with tiny blue veins and even tinier freckles. Her toes are curled in her sleep, and Bigby can hear a tumult of tiny voices from below her skin when he passes a paw over her belly button.
She wakes instantly at his touch. He expects her to pull away, and is mildly astonished when she does not.
(Her smell is a little different, though he cannot quite recall if he has ever smelled this before.)
He is acutely aware that his paw is still on her naked belly, frozen mid-transgression.
"Why are you just looking?" Snow says, prodding him ungently with one bared foot, pushing her tangled wet hair back from her head; one hand curling around the swelling flesh. Her fingers barely reach around the great mound of her belly and she smiles in defeat, resting her hand over his paw, stroking the wet fur with cold fingers.
thud thud thud thud thud unfolds from within her belly and Bigby shivers.
There are some things that were written into him before this time, he knows, and many things he has forgotten (things the mundies have forgotten, and he bears it as well he can). Some things (worse things) he had not done before, but the link-up loose-reference word-association everything-has-a-meaning modern mundy world had bled him dry of all certainty and suddenly things he had not done before he had done (before) now.
Into his belly, fool!-
No matter. Again he ate the child. He would reign forever -
My father, he ate me -
My. Father. (Who's afraid -)
You should undress, my child, and come to bed with Grandmother.
He. Ate. (afraid of the -)
Me -
(Big. Bad. Wolf.)
He blames his current form, though it is not at fault (werewolves are not fathers, of course, except when they are) and thinks that perhaps he should leave now.
My mother she killed me/My father he ate me/My sister,/My sister,/Here comes the bogey/BigBadWolf/man!
He's not the Big Bad Wolf anymore (not just the Big Bad Wolf, at the very least), and he should leave now (before the now is different).
Snow's breasts are bared and she makes no move to cover them.
Bigby is looking elsewhere, because the Big Bad Wolf has a hand on Snow White's naked belly and some mundy child might conflate yet another score of fables in his feeble little mundane mind (leave before the now is different).
She is stroking her fingers over his fur and they are not safe here.
"Snow?" He is painfully aware of the smell of wet fur and of the drying blood across his limbs and torso. "Do you want me to leave?" (Say yes.)
"Not yet. Come here first." Still scrubbing sleep out of her eyes, she stretches, her naked breasts rising with the motion. "Come up on the sofa, Bigby, and change back. I don't want you getting it all wet with your fur."
Bigby is examining his claws in minute detail and wondering if there are any clothes of his left in the building. "That's not such a good idea for right now, Snow. You're... emotional from the battle."
My father /Undress and come to bed with Grandmother, Little Red/ he ate me.
(It is always a father in human form that does this, not a bogeyman, though that is no guarantee of safety.
And right this minute -
Right this minute, this very instant, some stupid mundy child is frightened of his stupid mundy father and the stupid mundy monsters in his stupid mundy closet and the before is already full to overflowing but they force yet another skeleton in Bigby's closet. It is not his and never had been and was not there in the original before.
He supposes he should be glad for the General Amnesty.)
"We'll only quarrel again in a minute," she says sleepily, "and I want you before then. Come to bed, Bigby." She reaches out and scratches him behind the ears.
(He is not changing no no no he knows how vulnerable he is here.)
He licks the palm of her hand and thinks that (maybe) she tastes familiar.
Above, the storm is gathering and washing the streets clean of blood and crumbling wooden dolls.
And then Snow White was eaten by the Big Bad Wolf -
No, by ALIENS!! Great big aliens with fifteen heads and Galaxy Rangers blasters!
And, just like that, it passes.
(It is only in the last fifty years or so that it really started to become unbearable. The stupid mundy children with their stupid mundy nannies and their stupid mundy schools had comic books and television and something called Godzilla - he wasn't very clear on the details - and their attention spans became shorter and shorter and shorter. The lycanthropy had been a necessary change as tastes developed and needs must and occasionally the two happened at the same time. This new thing -)
Someone somewhere must be dreaming it, though it sounds ridiculous. Whoever heard of the Big Bad Cubs?
(And Snow White had always died childless.)
He buries his snout in the crook of her thigh, nosing among the curly hair and licking her open. There was a time when this was familiar, but his past is forever unravelling and rewriting itself.
(There was a time when the woodcutter wasn't such a nice man.)
She is shivering slightly, a hand on his snout, urging him back to her, and Snow is suddenly, terrifyingly open before him. In this position, he thinks, claws resting carefully on milky wide-spread thighs, she could give birth at any second.
My father, he ate me -
Aliens, great big aliens with blasters and mind-rays!
The past is not certain now, not when you have no name. The Old Witch finds it useful for harvesting power and hiding herself - it is, perhaps, how she bested Baba Yaga - but there is, equally, the other side of the coin. It is the unnamed bogeyman that scares the slumbering mundy children in their bunk-beds with their dreams of Pokemon and Godzilla; it is the father, now, that is the source of nightmares. Not content with the molestation of little girls (don't walk alone in the woods, little girl, or the Big Bad Wolf will open gobble you up), he feels the tide of the mundy world and its psychiatrists and doctors and movie stars pull him to their children.
In the amalgamated mess of the mundy subconscious, forever pushing its nosey mitts into the lives of Fabletown, the Big Bad Wolf will soon become (will always have been) another archetypal figure.
it's a castration anxiety/an Oedipal complex/child-abuse/paedophilia/infanticide/cannibalism /patriarchal prerogative/Bluebeard-proxy/but Bluebeard is now gone; who is to replace him?/Here comes the -
Big -
"Bigby?"
Bad -
He's smiling again, all teeth and appetite and naked flesh. "Let's get some breakfast."
W-
*
fin