Chapter Text
show you what all that howl is for
“If you’re gonna take a swing at me, take a swing,” the Wolf growls, his yellow eyes fixed on Snow. “Otherwise, put the sword down. I’m not gonna hurt you.”
Snow tightens her grip on Winter. “You know,” she says, “I really, really want to believe you.”
The Wolf barks a short laugh. “So what’s stopping you?” he rumbles. “Is it the teeth?” He flashes his fangs, each one as long as a knife, and shakes himself. “Put the sword down, Snow.”
Maybe it’s the way he says her name—Snow, not Snow White, not Miss White or Princess or any of the other names that don’t fit—or maybe it’s just sleep deprivation. Snow puts Winter down.
The Wolf’s eyes gleam. “Thank you,” he says, and pads closer, until all Snow can see is black fur, until all she can smell is the wild. The Wolf smells like old forest, like winter. Pine needles and cold snow, wood smoke and blood, warm fur, old magic, strange and savage places.
The smell of him takes Snow right back three hundred fucking years into the past. She can feel the cold wind. She can see the trees. She can hear the Adversary’s army advancing in the distance.
The Wolf leans in and, very, very gently, rubs his jaw against Snow’s cheek. His fur is soft. The bizarre, unreasonable urge to dig her fingers into the Wolf’s ruff rises up in Snow’s chest. She manages to fight it back. This is not the Homelands. This is not another night in the Black Forest, hiding from the Adversary.
And then the Wolf pulls away. The moment is broken. The Wolf circles Snow once, twice, chuffing and snuffling, and then paces a few steps away and sits down, tame as any dog.
Not tame, Snow tells herself, catching glimpses of those wicked fangs. Not tame, not tame, not tame.
“So,” the Wolf says, “I hear you’ve been looking for me.”
“That’s all you have to say?” Snow almost shouts, shock giving way to anger. The Wolf blinks, languid. “Where the hell have you been? We—I—thought you were dead!”
The Wolf shrugged his massive shoulders, a strangely human motion. “It’s not my fault if you made the wrong call, Sheriff. I’ve been around for fuckin’ forever.”
“So I’ve heard,” Snow says, darkly. “Where have you been? What—what’s going on? Who murdered those women? How are you involved?”
The Wolf laughs again, short, scraping barks that show off all of his teeth. “You got a lot of questions,” he says. “I remember that about you. I’m not here to do your job for you, Sheriff. You’re a detective, aren’t you? Detect.”
He remembers me. “Answer me,” Snow says flatly. “Where have you been? The Mirror only sees a forest.”
“I’ve been here,” says the Wolf. “Same as you. Same as everyone else. The mundane world ain’t that big, Snow. There’s nowhere else to go.”
“You’ve been here the whole time?”
“More or less,” the Wolf says.
“Where?”
The Wolf looks at Snow, solemn and fierce. “Everywhere,” he growls. “Holly’s bar, the Open Arms, the Puddin’ and Pie. Toad’s place. I crashed with Faith and Lawrence for three fuckin’ decades back at the turn of the century. I was everywhere you never looked.”
There’s violence in his voice, a terrible anger. Teeth. It should make Snow afraid, but it just pisses her off.
“Hey,” she growls right back, “I’m trying, okay? I’m trying. I’ve been trying! For three hundred years, all on my own! Yeah, I let—I let a lot of Fables down. I didn’t pay enough attention. But I’m trying to fix it now.”
“Who?” snarls the Wolf, lips curling back over his fangs.
“I—what?”
“Who?” The Wolf insists, and rises to his feet again, towering over Snow. She’s stuck in the past, still—she’s been here before, standing in front of the Wolf, level with his teeth, waiting for him to swallow her whole.
Snow doesn’t know what he wants. Is there a pattern, with the Big Bad Wolf? Is his mercy conditional, whimsical, as wild and unpredictable as the wind?
“I failed Lily,” Snow says, grasping at straws. The words rip through her like knives. “I failed Faith. I failed Holly and Gren, and everyone who’s come to the Business Office looking for help. I—”
The Wolf huffs a sigh, and absurdly, gently, rubs his nose against Snow’s cheek again. “I failed them too,” he rumbles, and like that the violence is broken. Snow knows, very suddenly, that if she were to climb up on the Wolf’s back he would take her wherever she asked him to go.
“I don’t understand,” Snow says, and leans forward, pressing her face into the Wolf’s neck. His fur tickles her cheeks, but he doesn’t pull away. She can hear his heart beating. It’s faster than her own, louder, deeper. Snow feels it in her teeth.
“No,” says the Wolf, “you wouldn’t. Ask me again.”
“Ask you what?”
“Anything you want,” the Wolf says. “I’ll answer. I’m done with games.”
“Where have you been?” Snow asks. “We—I looked for you, at the beginning. I tried to find you, and bring you here.”
“I’ve been… hidden,” the Wolf says, after a pause. “From the Mirror. From you too, I guess. From anyone at the Woodlands who might care to look for me.”
“Why?”
The Wolf’s face isn’t really made to show expression, but Snow gets the distinct impression that he’s frustrated. “These lips,” he growls, “are sealed.”
Snow stares at him. Something itches in her brain, lost to grey swirling days of fear and confusion and stress. “I thought you said you were done with games.”
“Ask me again,” says the Wolf.
“Why were you hidden?”
“These lips,” the Wolf says significantly, and pauses, “are sealed.”
The realization hits Snow all at once. These lips are sealed. Faith, touching the ribbon around her neck. These lips are sealed. Beauty at the ball. These lips are sealed. The girls at the Puddin’ and Pie. The Wolf, here, now, looking at Snow like he’s waiting for her to understand.
Something very dark has crept into the Business Office, and it sits perched on the tip of Snow’s tongue.
“Someone in Fabletown,” Snow says softly, “doesn’t want you to talk.”
The Wolf blinks, slow.
“Someone… with money. Power. Someone who can bankroll Georgie Porgie and keep the Tweedles on retainer. Someone who can pay for spells to—to keep you hidden. To bind you to his will. To scare everyone into silence.”
The Wolf blinks again. He flashes a bit of tooth.
“How much can you say?”
“Good question,” the Wolf growls approvingly. “It’s hard to tell. I was, uh. Not really awake, when the spell was cast. I never really know until I can’t answer.”
"You’ve tried to tell people before?”
The Wolf shrugs. “Who would I tell? Comes up now and again, usually with Gren and Holly.”
Snow thinks for a moment, pacing back and forth in short steps. The Wolf—the Wolf wants to help. Clearly, otherwise he wouldn’t be here. Something is preventing him. If there’s a spell on him to keep him from talking, a spell on him to keep him hidden, Snow’d bet all of the dwarves in the Homelands that there’s a spell keeping him… complacent, too. There’s a reason why he’s come here, instead of taking matters between his own teeth.
“Want to play Twenty Questions?” Snow asks.
The Wolf barks another laugh. “Sure,” he says. “Shoot.”
---
Between the two of them, Snow is able to piece something like a story together. It’s frustrating, at first. Any time she asks the Wolf a straightforward question—who do you work for, who murdered Faith and Lily, where can Snow find information—the Wolf says, “These lips are sealed.”
(Saying it over and over again seems to really, really piss him off. Snow can understand, because she’s damn tired of hearing it.)
After a bit, though, a rhythm evolves. “Is Beauty involved in all of this?”
“These lips are sealed.” The Wolf’s yellow eyes gleam.
“Where was the last place you saw Beauty?”
“The Open Arms,” the Wolf says promptly.
Snow’s heard of it. It’s a seedy motel a few blocks from Porgie’s strip club. “What was she doing there?”
“Working.”
“Same as you?”
“Same as me,” the Wolf agrees.
“What would I find there, if I went?”
“Nothing,” the Wolf says. “We cleaned it up, after. Try somewhere closer to home.”
Snow frowns, thinking. She sifts through every conversation she’s had with Beauty lately. She thinks about how tired Beauty’s been, how wan, how often she and Beast are screaming at each other, their voices slicing through the Woodlands’ thin walls.
“Debts,” Snow says slowly. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Debts.”
“Everyone owes somebody,” the Wolf growls.
Beauty’s been having money troubles. She and Beast came through the Homelands alright—Beast’s lands were close enough to the portal that he dropped Beauty off and went back, before the worst of the Adversary’s forces arrived. But three hundred years is a long time, and Beast was never the richest of the princes in the Homelands. Money runs out.
So, Beauty owes this shadowy person money. To pay them back, she picks up a job at the Open Arms, where Snow will bet Winter that Porgie’s girls use to make a bit of extra money on the side of their stripping.
Faith and Lily had debts. They had debts so deep they turned to mundie drugs and prostitution to climb out of it. The Wolf had debts too. That’s what Holly had said. And the same person owned all of this debt. He was using it to control Fables, to hurt them. To kill them, or make them kill for him.
Snow’s blood boils.
The Wolf, to her surprise, growls approvingly. “I can smell how angry you are,” he says. “That’s good.”
“Don’t be condescending,” Snow snaps. “I don’t need your approval. I need—I need to fix this. I need to stop it.” She needs to find who’s hurting her people, who’s trapping them and terrorizing them and killing them, and put Winter through his fucking throat.
The need is wolfish.
The Wolf flicks an ear, yellow eyes thoughtful. “That’s why I’m here,” he says. “To help.”
Snow huffs. “I don’t suppose you can just come and say who’s behind all this outright, can you?”
The Wolf gives her a withering glare. “I wouldn’t need your help then, would I? I could just deal with him myself.”
Him. We’re looking for a male. Snow’s going to bet that whoever this he is, he’s human-shaped, too. Not that trolls and monsters and wolves aren’t capable of rising to the top of whatever gang is terrorizing Fabletown, but being human-shaped has… privileges. It offers Fables a leg up. She’s honestly surprised that whoever the Wolf works for lets him roam around in his fur. Snow still has the knife that’s stained with lycanthropy somewhere in the depths of the Business Office, but there are spells that can change someone’s shape, and glamours.
“Okay,” Snow says slowly, trying to come up with a plan. She’s fucking exhausted. Ideally, she’d find somewhere, hole up, and take a nap. Nothing clears up an issue like a good night’s sleep—Snow should know.
But she can’t bear the thought of this person, this monster, prowling around Fabletown while she sleeps, hurting more people, dragging more Fables under his control.
“You can’t tell me where to find your… employer, obviously,” she says.
“Obviously,” the Wolf agrees, bone dry.
“If I were to pay the Tweedle brothers a visit, would that be profitable?” Snow asks, carefully choosing her words. She hates this. She was never very good at politics, at subtlety. But the Wolf nods.
“Could be,” he rumbles. “Lily’s funeral is in an hour, though. It would be… a show of good faith, if you went, Sheriff.”
There’s something significant about the way the Wolf says that, but Snow’s too tired to parse it out. He wants her to go to Lily’s funeral. Snow can do that.
“Fine,” she says. “But I don’t know where it is.”
“That’s okay,” says the Wolf, and his great outline begins to blur. “I can take you.” The change is over in less than a second, and Snow realizes that the Wolf’s employer hasn’t let him wander around in his fur all these years after all.
The Big Bad Wolf is a shapeshifter.
A man stands before Snow, shaking the last of his wolfishness out of his hands and his face with practiced ease. He’s not especially tall, but he is broad-shouldered and deep-chested, all rippling muscle and shifting tendons. He has reddish hair and thick stubble, and his eyes, once the fierce yellow bleeds out of them, are a rich, cunning brown.
Snow blinks. “I danced with you,” she says. “At Bluebeard’s ball. You wore a wolf mask.”
“I’m not really known for my subtlety,” says the Wolf. His voice is not so deep and terrible in human shape. He’s completely naked, and Snow very determinedly keeps her eyes trained on his face and not his broad shoulders, his deep chest, or anything farther south.
“Why did you dance with me? Why were you at the ball in the first place?”
For a moment, she thinks he’s going to say, “These lips are sealed.” But instead he winces, drops his eyes, and scratches the back of his neck.
The fact that the Big Bad Wolf gets nervous is maybe the most surreal thing Snow has learned in her entire life.
“Boredom?” the Wolf hazards, still not meeting Snow’s eyes. “It felt like hunting, going to the ball, and… I wanted to dance with you.”
Now it’s Snow’s turn to look away, fighting down a blush. “Why?” she asks.
The Wolf shrugs. “You were the only one there I wanted to dance with.” His voice is soft and absurdly gentle.
They really should not be having this conversation while the Wolf is buck ass naked, so Snow mentally shakes herself and says, “Let’s find you some clothes. We have a funeral to get to.”
Snow knows that both Crane and Cole keep spare clothes down here, in case they need to change suddenly for a formal function. Nothing of Crane’s is going to fit someone like the Wolf, so Snow goes right to King Cole’s desk and riffles around.
She comes up with bits and pieces of formalwear. The Wolf accepts a pair of slacks and a crisp white dress shirt. He rejects a black suit jacket, a red tie, and—Snow tries very hard not to think about this one—boxers.
When he’s satisfied with his appearance, the Wolf holds his arms out for Snow’s inspection. “Do I blend in?” he asks.
Snow looks him up and down. “Not a funeral,” she mutters, but she’s not going to change either. “So. Where’s this funeral, Mr. Wolf?”
The Wolf pulls a face. “Bigby,” he says. “And I’ll show you. Come on.”
For a heartbeat, Snow considers just how fucking stupid this is. She’s about to follow the Big Bad Wolf into the dark. She doesn’t know where he’s taking her. She doesn’t know if anything he’s told her is true.
But she thinks of the light in his eyes when he’d said, You were the only one there I wanted to dance with, and decides to take a leap of faith.
Snow White buckles Winter to her hip, and follows Bigby into Fabletown.
---
Troll funerals, Snow discovers, are not that different from human ones. Do wolves hold funerals for each other? She knows that the Big Bad Wolf—Bigby—had littermates, but she doesn’t know if wolves stayed close with their siblings as they grew up. His littermates have clearly never grown to Bigby’s size and renown. There’s only one Big Bad Wolf, after all.
Did his brothers and sisters die in the Homelands? Snow got Rose through the portal by the skin of her teeth. She and Rose have their problems, but she can’t imagine living three hundred years with the knowledge that her sister was dead.
Do wolves mourn?
There are only a few Fables at Lily’s funeral. Holly and Gren are there, of course, Holly leaning heavily on Gren like her grief is going to lay her out flat. A few of the girls from the Puddin’ and Pie are there two, the little redheaded one and another blonde girl Snow vaguely recognizes. There are a pair of trolls out of glamour, and the Woodsman too.
When Snow comes up with Bigby at her side, everyone goes very still.
“What are you lookin’ at?” Bigby growls. “She’s with me.”
The unglamoured trolls don’t look convinced and Gren is glaring at Snow fiercely, but Holly nods, and that’s that. The little redheaded girl even comes up to them, looking up at Bigby.
“We thought you’d come,” she says, and she sounds too tired for how young she looks. “I know you and Lily never got along really well, but we thought you’d come anyway.”
“Of course I came, Nerissa,” Bigby murmurs, and he’s as gentle with this girl as he is with Snow.
He looks out for those girls, Snow remembers Holly saying.
She hasn’t figured out yet why the Big Bad Wolf is apparently the patron saint of prostitutes, but at least Nerissa and Faith and Lily had someone looking after them, even though the Wolf didn’t do much good for Faith and Lily in the end.
It must burn at him like it burns at Snow herself. That’s why he came to find Snow now, after hiding for three hundred years. He’s fucking pissed off.
Snow lets Bigby guide her to a spot out of the way, and the funeral begins.
Holly speaks for a minute, then Gren, then Nerissa, all of them talking about how much Lily meant to them. Snow mostly tunes them out. She’s not proud of it, but she’s heard so many of these speeches since the Adversary drove them all out of the Homelands, and after a while, they all start to run together.
She hates how much pain there is in Fabletown. Sometimes it feels like the whole city is built out of it, out of grief and anger and fear and the bones of every Fable who just couldn’t survive in the mundane world.
Knock it off, Snow tells herself sternly. Exhaustion’s making her maudlin and melodramatic, and that doesn’t help anyone. Bigby, so casually Snow almost thinks it’s an accident, leans a little closer, and the warmth of him helps ground her a little.
(The warmth of him also sparks an answering warmth somewhere deep inside Snow, and she resolves to stamp it out before it can become anything untoward. He’s the Big Bad fucking Wolf for god’s sake, and Snow is too old to have a crush on the first handsome man she can tolerate for longer than five minutes.)
Snow is so busy trying to crush anything other than professional interest in Bigby that she doesn’t see the Tweedles come up at the back of the funeral. She does, however, see Gren roar, inarticulate with fury, and shed his glamour so he can go after the Tweedles unencumbered by a human disguise.
Snow half-rises, a hand on Winter to intervene, but Bigby catches her by the elbow and shakes his head.
“Gren can take care of himself,” he says. “The Tweedles ain’t got a chance against him, not when he’s this pissed.”
"They’re brawling in the middle of New York City,” Snow snaps back, shrugging out of Bigby’s grip. “I should stop them, before someone gets hurt. Before someone sees.”
“Nobody’s gonna see, Snow,” says the Wolf. “No one ever looks.”
“I don’t care,” Snow says. “I can’t just—”
Then one of the Tweedles pulls out a shotgun, and everything goes to shit. A mundie sees a shotgun and, in most cases, runs the other way. Fables—especially big Fables—see a shotgun and see a challenge.
Gren roars and lunges. A single swipe of his claws is enough to put one of the Tweedles on the ground, but the other pumps the shotgun and Gren falls back with a wounded howl. Blood sprays.
Snow draws Winter in one fluid motion and shouts, “Hey! Over here, asshole.” She doesn’t feel the need to identify herself. Everybody’s known who she was since the minute she walked into Holly’s funeral.
The Tweedle—this one’s Dee, she thinks—swings around, bringing the shotgun to bear, and Snow sees the moment he decides to shoot her flash through his eyes.
She sees the barrel flash, and then Snow is flat on her back looking up at the sky while a deep and terrible snarl makes the earth shake.
Bigby stands in front of Snow, and the veneer of humanity he’d put on for her is gone. He’s not fully in his fur, but there is a wolfish slope to his shoulders and streetlight shines off his claws. He snarls again, and the familiarity of it has Snow standing back up, as ready to fight and die beside the Wolf as she was three hundred years ago. Blood is dripping down his right arm. He's been shot.
“What the fuck d’you think you’re doin’?” the Tweedle—Dee, it’s definitely Dee—demands. “What are you doin’ with her?”
“This is a fuckin’ funeral,” Bigby growls. “What are you doing here, huh? Fuck off.”
“I got business here,” Tweedledee disagrees, and reloads his shotgun. “I’ll shoot you, Wolf, don’t think I won’t. I don’t care if you’re here with your girls. The Crooked Man’s got loose ends. You know how much he hates those.”
The Crooked Man. Snow has never heard that name before, but she understands, instinctively, that it’s an important one. Bigby doesn’t back down. Snow can’t see his face, but she can hear his fangs in his mouth. She climbs to her feet, ready to fight.
“Get out of here,” Bigby snarls, and shifts so that Snow is fully behind him. She tries to step out from his shadow, Winter drawn and gleaming, but he shifts again, standing between her and the shotgun.
Dee notices, and guffaws. “Oh,” he says, mocking, “you’re not here for your whores at all, are ya? You’re here for her. Really, Wolf? It’s been what, three hundred fuckin’ years, and you’re still pinin’? That’s just fuckin’—”
Whatever Dee is going to say is lost to Bigby’s furious snarl, and Bigby surges forward, all fangs and dark fur, and the Tweedle’s laugh turns into a scream.
Blood flies. Snow leaps to intervene, Winter flashing, but the other Tweedle pulls out a second shotgun and brings it to bear at Bigby’s back.
“Don’t!” Snow shouts, and gets between the Wolf and the gun.
Later, she won’t remember hearing the shotgun go off or seeing the muzzle flash for the second time that night. One second she’s standing up, Winter bared, and the next she’s on the ground, looking up at a hazy night sky while fire rips through her shoulder and her blood pools around her.
“NO!” roars Bigby, and Snow sees black fur, white teeth, yellow eyes, and there’s screaming—
The next thing Snow knows, she’s lying on top of the altar while Holly curses above her. Holly’s hands are on Snow’s shoulder, pressing down, and all Snow can hear is the growling.
She turns her head, reaching for Winter, and sees Bigby in his full wolf shape, being physically dragged off—oh God, off one of the Tweedles’ mangled body, blood on his fangs. Gren, also in his true shape, has the Wolf in a stranglehold, but even Snow can see that Gren’s not going to be able to hold him for long.
"She’s awake!” Holly shouts, seeing that Snow’s eyes are open. “Thank the Homelands, she’s awake, Gren, get that crazy fuckin’ fur ball over here before he goes completely feral.”
“Easy for you to say,” Gren huffs, and hauls the Wolf farther away from the Tweedle. He’s dead, Snow thinks. Not even a Fable can survive what’s been done to him. “Bigby, you asshole, she’s alive, your mate’s alive, you can chill the fuck out—”
Snow, with immense effort, sits up. The world spins. They’re still under the overpass, the heat oppressive, blood on the concrete, and Snow says, as Gren brings the Wolf around and he meets Snow’s eyes, “What the fuck did you just say?”