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Happily Right Now
Fandom: Fables (comic)
Written for: dreamiflame in the Yuletide 2005 Challenge
by Truth
Happily Right Now
A Fables Fanfiction for dreamiflame
Spoilers through Vol 4: March of the Wooden Soldiers
**
There's something to be said for patience, although Bigby Wolf wasn't usually the one to say it. His reputation was that of thuggish, unthinking action and reaction.
"...and I'll blow your house down."
Oh, if only they knew.
The problem with the residents of Fabletown, especially the ones up at the Farm, was that they did know. Everyone knew. The Mundy's belief in you and your story was what kept you alive. The part which almost everyone chose to ignore was that the story the Mundy's believed often lacked certain crucial details. The duly appointed Sheriff of Fabletown was a brutal monster and everyone knew it. Sadly, most of them never pursued the thought to its natural conclusion or asked why Mayor Cole would choose such a monster to enforce the law.
The General Amnesty had been given in large part because most of the information to be had that would allow prosecution was anecdotal at best - those same anecdotes that the Mundy's loved to tell. After a few centuries, the lines started to blur and the Fables began to forget that everyone's tale was as fuzzy as their own - Bigby's especially, with no pun intended.
There was a lot more to Bigby than was found in the stories... and new stories had been told since he came to this world. Werewolves and wolfmen in the Carpathian Mountains, to name a more modern example, or The Tale of Ivan Tsarevich, the Firebird, and the Gray Wolf. The Three Little Pigs and Red Riding Hood, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Wolf at the Door, The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing... all of these and more were Bigby Wolf and the telling and re-telling kept him alive and strong.
Perhaps they thought him like Prince Charming, with tale after tale always the same. 'I was raised to be charming, not sincere.' However, despite the number of stories in which he carried off the fair maiden, Prince Charming never truly changed. Fickle, self-indulgent and always with an eye out for the main chance or a pretty girl, there was little more to him than met the eye.
Only Jack had as many varied tales woven around him as Bigby did and only Jack, perhaps, realized just how dangerous Bigby was and why. True, the other Fables, particularly those up at the Farm, feared him. That did not mean they understood him. Bigby kept an eye on Jack because he knew just how flexible the other Fable could be. Flexibility was dangerous, something he knew better than anyone else. Take King, now Mayor, Cole for example.
`Old King Cole was a Merry Old Soul, and a Merry Old Soul was He.' The man had little flexibility in him, despite his fountain of good will - a two dimensional creature defined by his story. Little wonder that Snow White had to actually attend to the day to day affairs, playing the heavy to Cole's bluff, good-natured, glad-handing. Mayor Cole didn't have it in him to be much other than a jovial, smiling figurehead - someone who said all the right things and made all the right gestures and caused everyone around him to feel good.
Snow White had locked herself into rigidity in an effort to make everything `right', in order to be able to do the job that she had taken on herself more efficiently. It wasn't easy to run a community full of rambunctious and cantankerous Fables. She was showing definite signs of flexibility, however, since the disaster and its aftermath up at the Farm. Bigby thought, somewhat approvingly, that it showed the good, sensible peasant stock from which she came. It was more obvious in Rose Red, naturally enough, but Snow still had it in her, beneath the Princess that she was more often remembered as. He approved of rigidity, overall, as it made his nominal superiors easier to manipulate, his opponents more predictable, and his own job that much easier.
Bigby's job was to be the flexible one.
"Any progress?"
Frau Totenkinder looked up from her ever-present knitting, causing Bigby to wonder for a split-second if she hadn't served as the inspiration for Madame Defarge in Dicken's book, wielding her needles in the front row of the audience at the guillotine. It was an oddly appropriate image, especially considering the battered young woman affixed to the wall beside her rocking chair. "That depends on what you consider progress, young man."
Bigby had always appreciated Frau Totenkinder's sense of the macabre, but today he had little patience for it. "Useful information would be progress."
"Then no."
They both ignored the woman hanging beside them. Baba Yaga would be of little use to Bigby until she decided to part with what she knew of the Adversary and the power that Frau Totenkinder drained from her was of use only to the elderly witch herself.
"How long do you think it will take?"
"Patience," Frau Totenkinder cautioned him, still rocking and knitting as if they were having their discussion before a pleasant fireside. "All things come to those who wait."
"Platitudes serve little purpose, save to enforce sloppy thinking," Bigby told her, looking down at the slowly moving needles and knowing that she was paying little attention to her knitting, for all that she never dropped a stitch. "I'm as patient as I have to be, but results of some kind would be helpful."
"Results I can give you aplenty," she said, smiling unpleasantly. "Their helpfulness, however, is highly suspect."
Bigby had reports of every word Baba Yaga spoke. Frau Totenkinder had neat, plain writing and was careful to make an accurate record of the constant flow of invective and hate that poured from their captive's lips when she did speak, which was seldom. It was somewhat unsettling, even for him, to see in black and white the reality of the elderly woman before him; knitting and rocking in her cardigan and pearls.
Small children into ovens was the least of it.
Here in the small, cold cell, the wicked witch of the gingerbread house and other horrors rocked quietly. Her support hose ended in sensible shoes and the delicate chain that ran from her glasses to catch in the soft fabric of her sweater glinted even in the dim, reflected light. It was camoflauge, much as his own unshaven, square-jawed appearance... and did not in any way disguise what she was, if you knew what to look for.
"Can you tell me anything at all?" He asked, finally turning his attention to the deceptively young captive, hanging on the wall. She looked so very frail and lovely, abused and imprisoned by a pair of monsters.... Bigby could appreciate the artistry of the lie, but Baba Yaga and the crone who was her gaoler were contemporaries and he had seen Baba Yaga in her true seeming, once or twice, before the Adversary came; an old woman with cracked teeth and a hideous laugh, perched high in her chicken-legged house with its fence of bone and human skulls.
Every Fable knew not to judge by appearances. That didn't keep most of them from doing it, however, and Bigby had carefully sifted through them all to find those who did not. Bigby thought far too much for a wolf and he liked to surround himself with people who did the same. Mayor Cole had no idea what went on behind his back and Bigby liked it that way.
Snow, however, was starting to catch on. He hadn't yet decided if this was a good thing. His ice queen was thawing, slowly, but hopefully without losing the strength and iron will which had carried her this far.
"... not always what it might be."
Cursing internally, Bigby tried to track back to catch what Frau Totenkinder had just said. He glanced back at the old woman to find her knitting needles stilled, her bright eyes fixed on his over the top of her glasses.
"You spend too much time thinking of her," she told him, her gaze that of a fellow predator, unwavering and somehow hungry. "It makes you careless, causes you to feel instead of think."
He did not question her ability to know what he had been thinking of, shrugging and turning his own gaze back to the silent Baba Yaga. "The villain never gets the girl. You know that as well as I do, if not better."
"You've already had her." Frau Totenkinder wasn't known for misdirection or mincing coyly around plain fact. Bigby thought she enjoyed being coarse occasionally simply for the shock it caused those who forgot to look beneath the surface appearance of doddering octegenarian. "But the old saw about happily ever after not being for the likes of us is as oft repeated as the stories of our sticky ends."
"She's to be the mother of my child," Bigby reminded her, dropping his cigarette butt and grinding it out against the stone floor.
"That does not guarantee a happy ending. Think of poor Rapunzel," her eyes gleamed again, "wherever she might be."
The old witch seemed entirely too certain of her prediction for Bigby's peace of mind. His eyes narrowed and the hint of a feral growl leaked through, coloring his words. "Snow is mine."
"... and wolves mate for life, is that it? But you're only half a wolf, Bigby... and the North Wind is not known for its constancy."
"Some things are a matter of choice." His voice was again even, expression smoothing into one of casual unconcern. He should have known it wouldn't fool the likes of her.
"You can't choose what you are, only what you will do about it." Something in her voice resonated in the cold, stone room, rousing even Baba Yaga to stare at them both with a burning hatred.
Bigby lit another cigarette, ears almost ringing with the force of her words. "I hate it when you do that."
The harmless little old lady smile was back as she peered up at him through her glasses. "Is that right, dear?"
"I don't need `happily ever after'," he told her, tasting the lie against his tongue even as he spoke it. "I have `happily right now' and that's all that anyone can hope for."
Frau Totenkinder didn't say anything more, merely smiling and nodding as she picked up her knitting again, but it was Baba Yaga's attention that he had now. "You're a fool," she rasped, lips twisting painfully into an echo of the formerly beautiful smile that she'd worn as the false Red Riding Hood. "Princesses don't run with wolves."
He left them then, without a word; two horrible old women bound together by a hate that was almost incandescent, warden and prisoner in a cell far beneath the halls of respectability. Another story to add to Frau Totenkinder's gruesome reputation, were it ever to be told. Some stories never see the light of day but that doesn't make them any less real.
"Princesses don't run with wolves, eh?" he repeated, making his way up the long stairs toward Snow's office. "Good thing she's only a princess by marriage." He was grinning by the time he reached the top, leaving the cold malevolence far behind him. "Peasants are far more practical... and it wouldn't be the first time a woman chose the monster."
"Who are you calling a monster?"
Bigby grinned as Beast poked his head around the corner of one of the boilers. "You, in point of fact. You're looking good. I see that you've made up with the wife?"
Beast gave him a glum look, despite the lack of horns or fangs. "Luckily she decided to take the sheer, brute heroism that Snow White reported to her as evidence of how much I love her. By the time I got home I was normal again. Who knows how long it will last this time?"
"Long enough," Bigby assured him, grin becoming sly as he clapped the other man on the back. "Long enough."
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