Work Text:
The new moon represented an uneasy time in the hamlet—even in comparison to the natural unease of living on the doorstep to hell. What few shops there were closed and bolted their doors early, their keepers hurrying to the strategic protection of their second-floor homes. Folks who couldn’t resist a visit to the tavern made plans to stay the night within oaken walls, firelight, and safety in numbers. The horizon had barely begun to smoulder when the lamplighter, a scrawny fellow just shy of fifteen, performed his duties with nervous speed before bolting home to his equally nervous mother. It was as if a thumb pressed down on the hamlet’s lips with the falling darkness, holding its voice, its breath, its life in a stasis while it waited for something to pass over.
It was a strange ritual, to an outsider. Perhaps there was a history of monsters venturing further on those moonless nights. Perhaps it was only superstition.
Bigby didn’t much care, either way. The result was the same: for one night a month, she had the streets to herself.
She slung her bag over her shoulder and slipped out of the barracks one hour after the last footsteps passed by. No one was awakened by her departure; like a belled cat, she’d learned how to mute the clanking of her chains as she moved. A skill she didn’t particularly want the others to know. It gave them comfort, the idea that they would always hear her—or it—coming.
The barracks were close enough to the square for the road to be paved and lit. Her bare feet, too calloused by now to feel the cold of the flagstones, carried her confidently through the circle of flickering orange light from the oil lamp. She didn’t need the light; one paltry boon of her condition was excellent night vision. But she never passed up the chance to walk down the center of the streets with her head held high. Her usual route required skirting the edges of the crowd, hair awkwardly parted over her brand, darting between pockets of darkness to avoid the panicked gazes and reactionary blows. Now, no one was looking out their windows to see her, and if they were, what would they do about it? Spread more rumors? Give more nasty looks? Throw a rock or two? Nothing more than they were already doing. Strict orders from the Heir protected her from truly debilitating violence. They were impotent.
It was the closest thing she’d had to security in a long time.
Still, she wasn’t staying up to have a cocksure little parade around the empty streets. Or rather, only to have a cocksure little parade. Her destination lay beyond the hamlet, down the remains of a path that branched off from the main road. She’d discovered it mostly by accident; a particularly belligerent group had caught sight of her, and her route of escape had unwittingly followed the fragmented trail. At first glance, it merely looked like a few flagstones that had been mislaid haphazardly during the first construction. Following it, however, led far beyond the road, around the bay, until it reached a set of stone stairs, weed-infested and cracked, but still bearing the marks of ornate decoration.
Her hand gripped the eroded bannister as she ascended, the manacle knocking loudly against it. She could afford to abandon stealth for expediency. If there truly were more monsters under the new moon, they had never bothered her. The only threat here was an unfortunate number of mosquitos. She huffed as she felt the prick of one on her jaw, smacking it with the back of her hand. Toxic blood didn’t seem to dissuade the little beasts, unfortunately. Hopefully the ones that escaped dropped dead soon after. She still had to deal with the welts, but at least there was some satisfaction in their victory being pyrrhic.
Another one bit her shoulder as she crested the top of the steps and was crushed with a flick of the chains for its troubles. Here, however, was her true destination. She wasn’t entirely certain what the area once was, but her best guess was that it had been some sort of courtyard. The irregular growth of grass and weeds betrayed the shape of the cobblestones beneath. Scattered about were the shattered remains of statues and decorative columns, wrapped in thick woody vines that seemed to be trying to drag them down into the earth. At the center far end of it, flanked on either side by engraved stone walls, stood a massive wrought iron gate. A series of rusting chains entwined themselves through every bar, bound by several heavy padlocks marked with the seal of the estate.
She didn’t know what resided beyond them, but this side was quiet. She doubted anyone else even knew it existed. It was like her own private square, and she guarded its location with the reverence of a holy vow.
Bigby made her way over to a broken plinth, slipping her bag from her shoulder and rummaging through as she approached. She produced a small oil lamp, which she placed atop the plinth, and a flask of fish oil; since so few of the fish dredged up from the cove were fit for actually eating, the town produced far too much of it, which made it dirt cheap to buy. The former was filled with the latter, then lit with a tinderbox. Its weak flame soon began to sputter and smoke, infusing the area with the deep fishy scent and hopefully dissuading any more self-destructive mosquitoes. She slipped off her cloak, folded it neatly, and laid it down as a cushion before sitting at the base of the plinth. The cool stone was refreshing against her spine as she leaned back against it.
Next to emerge from the bag was a small tobacco tin, its lid embossed with delicate roses and violets—one of Audrey’s spares. She retrieved a plug and tucked it between her lips and teeth. The taste of the leaf, and the myrrh holding it together, permeated her mouth with a pleasant bitter sweetness.
Paracelsus made the plugs herself. The excess bile Bigby produced wreaked havoc on her teeth. Regeneration meant that none of them were actively rotting or falling out, but the constant festering pain eventually drove her to visit the doctor for relief. Speaking with her was always a roll of the dice. On the one hand, he enjoyed her company, and having someone to discuss natural philosophy with was a luxury he hadn’t had in years. Her insight was keen and her innovations remarkable, and she was equally eager to hear out Bigby’s own hypotheses.
On the other hand, oftentimes she brought to embarassing light how far the field had progressed without her. Case in point, when she told Paracelsus about her “tooth worms,” the doctor was utterly baffled, and Bigby narrowly avoided losing a few molars to the dental pelican before the miscommunication came to light.
She gnawed on the leaves, then spat the juice into the grass. She couldn’t be sure how much it actually helped, but she enjoyed the repetitive action, and it enjoyed having something to chew on. And it tasted a far sight better than flowers of sulfur.
Finally, she pulled a book from the bag and settled it in her lap. The aged goat leather was tooled with the familiar hastiness of someone attempting to cover up what lay inside. Another gift from Paracelsus, something she’d taken with her after her “mutual parting of ways” with the university. She opened it to the page marked by a tattered ribbon and settled back to read.
It was almost like a normal visit to a park. A normal academic, stepping out from the dusty cluttered halls into the fresh air, letting the beauty of nature remind them why they began studying in the first place.
Except she was seated in a barren, bug-infested courtyard, the air reeking of burnt fish oil, sneaking out in the middle of the night because she wasn’t an academic anymore, she was nothing more than the brand burned into the side of her head. And though she knew that, on some level, she deserved this, she couldn’t deny that it infuriated her.
She took a deep breath and spat out more juice as she turned the page. That was one downside to these moments of peace; when she wasn’t focused on keeping herself safe, or just keeping everyone alive whenever they were sent out, such festering, petty things were given space to rise to the surface.
But it was a sin she needed to keep to herself. All her anger now belonged to the beast.
Not literally, of course. Though it was easier for it to surface when her emotions ran ragged and hot, it wasn’t the source of them. It simply took advantage of the lapse in control and the sweet taste of quickened blood. Regardless, even when she was successfully keeping it chained, any display of wrath was treated as the hiss before a bomb detonation. When the stresses of the dungeon drew her mind close to madness, and bile dripped from her words along with her lips, she was never chastised for acting out. No, the responses were “Control your beast.” “Put a leash on it.” Or, if they were the more charitable sort, “You’re not yourself, you have to keep fighting it!” As if she wasn’t capable of frustration at the chaos they were immersed in. As if she herself were empty of all vicious emotion, and it was only it who even wanted to thrash and scream through the cacophony. The mark made her a devil, but it also forced her to be a saint.
She turned the page again. It was especially discomfiting, to one who had once used anger as the roaring stream to power her work. With the benefit of age, it wasn’t difficult for her to see that as a youth, she was remarkably petulant. Pride became her constant—and, many times, only—companion. Any threat to that, any hint of failure or scorn, and she would take up arms with wolfish ferocity. A difficult or slow-moving task bedecked her laboratory in broken glassware and defaced chalkboards. Once she’d even demanded a duel, although the target of her ire never bothered to show, leaving her and her poor second playing cards until noon in some vain hope that she’d have a chance to draw blood.
Of course, she soon learned that academic responses could be as cutting as any blade. Too many of her advancements were fueled by spite and a need to prove another contemporary wrong. She remembered a series of sleepless nights spent concocting a scathing refutation to Brother Rodolfo’s The Humoral Qualities of the Foods of the New World, Alongside Their Benefits for Incorporation Into the Traditional Balanced Diet. Much time (and money) was spent carefully disproving every single statement, up to and including consuming a potato raw in front of the audience to prove it was cold, not hot. It was so ridiculous she couldn’t help but laugh at herself, but she couldn’t ignore the folly that fueled it all. Had she not been so eager to tear apart any critique, perhaps she would have had more allies. Perhaps she never would have made her greatest mistake.
She never wanted to be that person again. The futility of such rage was learned in agony over the decades. She was in better control of herself now than she had ever been in her life, ironically enough. But in her weaker moments, in the quiet ones, she missed it. The chance to explode, the motivating force that the wrath gave her, the ability to know the consequences of her actions and ignore them—all seemed like privileges in her chained state. Now, instead of her soul being a mill wheel, it was a dam, and every blow of the current brought some nostalgia for the days where it could flow freely, drowning as it went.
It was unwise, and selfish, and it sickened her, how desirous she found cruelty at times. But by the Light, wasn’t it human?
There was only one time she had ever come close to that dam-shattering rage. Her companions assumed that, when the beast took over, she became insensate in some corner of its mind. In reality, the sensation was actually more of a dissociative state; she felt the actions being performed with her limbs, and saw all of the actions with her own eyes, but they were distant. Even the sight of a companion being eviscerated was viewed with dreamlike detachment, no judgement or emotion provided to the images until she crashed back down into her body again. Thus, when the Heir ordered her to transform and slaughter a hag blighting the nearby weald, she remembered every blow the beast gave and took.
She remembered the sudden snatching pressure of the hag’s claws around its horn, dragging it forwards with unholy strength. She remembered it futilely digging into the dirt, howling as it tried to resist, and the earth that flew into the air as it was ripped free and plunged into the cauldron. She remembered how it burned. The boiling water scalded every inch of skin, forcing its way down its throat with every panicked inhale, cooking the surface of its eyes like an egg as it tried to seek the surface. Every flail was fresh agony, every clanging impact against the metal walls only leading to more pain. And when it finally managed to breach into the fetid air, when it let out a pitiful whistling moan from its seared lungs, she heard the Heir’s cry.
“Leave her! She can take it!”
And she remembered the hag’s ladle forcing it under again.
Those words echoed through her mind for the rest of the battle. They were the only thing she heard as a final, desperate headbutt finally sent the cauldron keeling over and spilled out broth and beast. They remained until the hag was dead, and the beast retreated, and any thought was blasted away in the roar of agony, her skin peeling away like a blanched peach, the scalding cold of the chains on her raw flesh. She was unable to walk, but any helping hands stuck to the tacky, bloody flesh, and it was only Alhazred dragging her behind with summoned tentacles that allowed her to make it back to the hamlet.
When she finally came to her senses after that, wrapped in salve and bandages in a sanitarium bed, the Heir was waiting. They were all wringing hands and apologies then, desperately pleading for her to forgive them for what they’d done, eyes wide and begging.
The same eyes Bigby had looked into when the Heir had promised her that things would be different here. That they wouldn’t treat her as a monster, but a fighter for a just cause. That they wouldn’t let them suffer needlessly anymore.
The same eyes that looked at them in the weald and decided to break those promises, and would do it again.
She can take it.
Bigby felt the pressure of that old anger press against the inside of her skull. But more than anything, she just felt tired. Even though her throat still burned, she forced out an achy croak, just to remind them of what they were apologizing for.
“I forgive you.”
The Heir winced at the words. Bigby hoped it was guilt.
A spluttering of the oil lamp grounded her from her thoughts. Her fingers hovered over the edge of the page, then closed the book as she laughed softly. She’d spent more time brooding than reading. The night had progressed far enough that, if she stayed awake any longer, she would be a walking corpse in the morning. She slid the book delicately into the bag and pulled the tobacco plug from her mouth, tossing it into the grass. Something popped at the base of her spine as she stood with a grunt.
The new moon didn’t last forever. Eventually, she had to descend from her courtyard and return to reality. She picked up the lantern, wrinkling her nose at the proximity to the smell, but taking a moment just to watch the little flame dance.
She left it lit, as she returned to the town. Any who were awake to see it had their own secrets to keep.