[fic: ouat]

[trysts]

whose woods these are I think I know
once upon a time. red riding hood. red x wolf. spoilers. oh but these woods are lovely, dark and deep ~4700 | r

Wolves are dangerous. In the woods, that is the first lesson you learn. Be wary the wolf, because once he catches your scent there is little that will halt his stalk. Their yellow eyes burning through the night, focused and tunneled, their slovenly jaws watering with just the smallest hint of your flesh. Their song, their howls, are lonely but even that is a trap-to lure you in, lull you, until they push their teeth through the soft, yielding flesh.

Snow White watches as the girl-and she’s a girl, really, younger than her but older too, if you can understand that-sharpens her axe. It’s not pristine, little white scars and nicks decorate it like battle wounds hard won, and she thinks she sees the dull brown stains of blood.

She wears a red cape and you hear stories about that too-the girl who was eaten by the wolf, spat out, but twisted and wrong afterward. She wears wolf teeth like a necklace.

“It’s dangerous in these parts of the woods,” Red Riding Hood says. “If you don’t know where to walk.”

“And you do?” Snow snaps, because she knows trials too. She knows how to be hungry and how to be scared and how to bend your spine too far to the left to avoid being shot.

A ghost of a smile kisses the edges of her ruby red lips. “I learned,” Red says.

Red finds her grandmother again at Snow White’s wedding.

“I thought I lost you,” she says, arms coming up around her granddaughter who has grown tall in their separation. Tall, but thin. She’s all skin and bones pressed so tightly together you can almost hear her grinding down into fine powder.

Red doesn’t say you almost did because they will never speak of that night. The soft sing-song scrape of claws against wood and the smell of cooked flesh and the hungry yellow eyes inviting her into the bed. They will not speak of it.

Perhaps that is the problem.

“You’ll never lose me,” Red says with a smile, and there beneath the gilded wink of King James’s castle she is knighted and called Huntsman.

Wolves are dangerous. That is the rule. When the divisions come, they side with the queen. They are her forest spies, and Red hunts each one down and presents their skinned pelts to King James as her grandmother looks on with pride.

But Red keeps a secret to herself-wolves are dangerous but these wolves, the ones she hunts for the king, are a pittance. Nothing in comparison.

“They’re animals, and yet they’re acting with a precision and coordination they shouldn’t possess.” King James turns to her. Snow White, just now showing the signs of her pregnancy, watches from her perch upon the windowsill. “Is it possible that the queen is controlling them through some spell?”

Red shrugs. She carries her axe and wears her leathers most days. When Snow White had first brought her to King James’s castle she had been given fine silk gowns to wear and had enjoyed it. But silk has no place in the woods, where trees spire into the skin and moss saturates the air with the thick, sweet scent of earth. Instead, Red pulls out the old red cloak. It’s familiar, like a well worn skin, and where the dresses never seem to fit quite right on her, the cloak always does.

“Nothing controls a wolf but a wolf,” Red tells him. “They recognize one and only one alpha.”

James nods, but doesn’t look settled or at ease-not that he has the last few months, and fear has dug little holes in his face, little lines around his eyes. Red looks over at Snow White as she settles a hand over the subtle swell of her belly.

“Of course,” she allows, “not all wolves must wear their fur all day.”

James’s hand shakes where he rests it upon the hilt of his sword.

The yellow eyes trace the outline of her body painted in the reds and oranges of the firelight. She is not as young as they will say later. She is on the cusp of womanhood, and lust has left little hints of tremors at the junctions of her elbows and knees and thighs.

She takes off her cloak and it bleeds watery red onto the wooden floor. There is a pungent smell in the air, and she thinks it’s like rabbit meat cooked too long. But she undoes the pins of her hair and it spills a dark waterfall down her back, and then she takes off her dress too and all the while the creature in the bed does not move.

Being young does not make her a fool-and she met him in the woods before this. A race, he said, to see who reaches your granny’s house first and she had slowed to let him win and now she stands naked in the light of a banked fire and glows with the oncoming of adulthood.

They slid into preordained roles easily but she is not afraid.

“Grandma,” she says, and her voice is husky and low. Her pale hand moves up her side, over a breast. The mouth of the creature on the bed moves hungrily. Under the bed his wolfish fur hides, and they are both without disguises now. His hand is a man’s hand and it curls over the soft fabric of the counterpane. “What big teeth you have.”

His tongue moves out, sweeps over the purse of his bottom lip. “All the better to eat you with, my dear.”

King James meets her in the garden. Red has taken to spending her days there. If she’s not in the woods, hunting, she’s here. The walls of the castle have come to feel suffocating to her, though no fault of Snow White or King James. But she has been whittled down to an extension of the forest. She feels cloistered and asphyxiated if she cannot see open sky.

“One of Snow’s birds has come with news,” King James says.

She doesn’t like the look on his face, Red thinks. She jabs her axe into the ground, leans over its hilt. She watches him, not unlike the wolves she hunts.

“You were right, the queen isn’t controlling the wolves,” King James says. He swallows. “But someone else is.”

He takes her hand and she jolts. People are always so careful not to touch her, not because they’re afraid of her but because she stands so stiff and poised, like she’s so brittle a solid touch will shatter her. But his hand encircles her wrists and it doesn’t feel encompassing at all. It just feels there.

“Someone is controlling them. An alpha.” He looks at her, his eyes clear and unblinking. “They have an alpha.”

And she knows. Red releases a breath she doesn’t realize she’s holding.

When she leaves the castle this time, it’s different. Her grandmother holds her hand tightly, until the bones of her long-stem fingers pressed and grind into each other.

“He’s wily,” Grandmother says.

Red laughs. “He couldn’t fool me years ago, he has little chance of it now.”

“Just promise me you’ll come back,” Grandmother says.

That’s more chains than anything else. But Red nods and kisses the wiry white hair, inhaling the scent of old woman and childhood security.

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” she says.

She goes alone. Snow White had begged and pleaded she take men with her, this time, but Red has always gone alone. She feels too vulnerable with people looking at her in the woods, the woods were she shed the red cloak and pulled on her true skin. She’s only half tamed anymore, and she knows that that frightens people.

A pendent settles on his sweat-slick chest. A glass little thing that she toys with as she sits astride him. Somewhere in the distance she thinks she hears a muffled cry, a sound of a foot banging against the wood, but how is that more important than the sound of their flesh sliding against one another, his deep laugh and the flash of his white, white teeth in the dim light?

His fingers move down along her stomach, to the sweet ache between her thighs, and she sighs. She shouldn’t, she really shouldn’t, but her cloak hangs beside the fire and with it her armor against him, her knowledge of the unbreakable rules of society.

Never invite a wolf into your bed. But he is no wolf. His fingers are not claws that tear apart her flesh, that break her skin so blood runs down her thighs. She will bleed at the end of this, but not from his hands or his teeth.

“Aren’t you afraid?” he asks of her. “Don’t you know? I’m going to eat you up.”

She laughs because she doesn’t believe it, not for a minute. Her fingers curl into a fist, the glass pendant trapped inside it.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she says.

He pushes his fingers up into her and she gasps and bows over him, quaking.

“Little pig little pig let me in.”

Her breath pants out across his neck. “Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin.” She bites down into the patch of skin where his neck meets his shoulder and is rewarded with the reverberation of his groan up his body and into hers.

Outside the moon drips pale silver light onto the still forest where a hungry wolf crossed paths with a curious girl, and in that forest wolves pace the mossy ground, letting out baleful howls as they wait impatiently for their alpha to return.

It is the ease in which she finds him that makes her suspicious. Years have been brushed through her hair without so much as a whisper of him. But now she picks up his trail easily, follows it to the center of the forest that beats almost like a heart, sometimes it feels like her heart.

No wolves impede her path, though she hears the crunch of branches and leafs underneath their massive paws and feels their hungry eyes upon her. She has her axe out, trailing along the soft, damp earth. The hood of her red cloak obscures her vision, and the hem of it billows around her like freshly spilled blood.

She finds him resting against a tree, biting down into the succulent flesh of an apple. Red hasn’t eaten an apple since Snow White found her again. She thinks about a chunk of it lodged in the back of her throat, cutting off the oxygen until she’s as still and pale as a corpse but still alive.

He wears nothing but breeches, but more importantly his fur hangs shaggy and matted with mud on a branch above his head. Wolves are dangerous, but only a few know how much. Red knows. She knows that some wolves will shed their fur like a heavy winter cloak and walk among people, nearly indistinguishable from them. It was not a wolf she met that day in the forest, but she’d seen the hunger in his eyes and had known. She’d known and she’d let him win the race to Grandmother’s house anyway.

Wolves are dangerous, but they are not the only one to wear guises. Whenever Red pulls off her cloak she feels more animal than human and she wonders which skin is really hers.

The glass pendant catches and refracts the light, splintering it in a million directions. It’s nearly as clear as his eyes as they move down her body, settle on the familiar curve of her axe. Is that stain there, on the wicked edge of the axe, recognizable to him? It should be because it is to her. She remembers it coming down across his middle, the curled face of the huntsman, and the flash of his starved eyes.

But he smiles, all rows of unnaturally pointed, white teeth. Unnatural for a human-perfect for a wolf.

“Hey there, Red,” he says. “Took you long enough.”

The wolf comes closer and Red Riding Hood spreads her cloak out on the mossy ground.

She thinks she’s always been more beast than human. And she thinks it’s unfair, that she must live in a world where she cannot reconcile one part with the other. That the wildness must be covered and hidden, glossed with a sheen of restraint.

But then she stops thinking because the wolf bites gently at the curving slope of her thigh, and then up further, and she presses a fist to her mouth to muffle her scream. She doesn’t have to, she knows. There are no witnesses here except the silent monoliths of trees. But, for them, it’s always been about power and restraint.

The taste of him is sitting heavy on her tongue long before he kisses her, because it’s been wedged between her teeth since the night in her grandmother’s bed. But she arches up into him and he pushes down, and she tastes an odd mingling of flavors in his mouth. Him, like the forest on a moonless night, but her as well and the strange, startling tang of her own lust.

“You know what I was that night,” the wolf says. She rests her head along his arm, their sweat cooling on their skin. Night drops over the forest, a heavy thick blanket, but she isn’t afraid. Once she had been, afraid of the forest at night, but even that she has lost. She sacrificed even that to the fires of her carnal lust. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

“Maybe I was tired of playing by the rules,” Red answers. “Maybe I just wanted something to simply want something.”

“You were never afraid of me,” he says.

“No. Never.”

He lays his hands in her hair, and she knows without looking the skin beneath his nails are caked with dirt and forest grime. She knows they’re overly long, and that even as the night settles he does not grow blind like she does.

“Why didn’t you come looking for me?”

His answer is, “Why did you run?”

Sometimes, Red fancies she was the villain in that story. She had watched, blankets pulled up to chin, her grandmother wriggling like a caught fish on the floor, as the Huntsman swung his axe down. The blood had been as red as her cloak, but a wolf’s blood, and her mouth had opened and closed in horror-and she hadn’t known why.

She sits up. “Are you working for the Queen? Are you telling the wolves to do her bidding? I came here to stop you.”

He stands, gloriously naked. He is sleek and tanned, and power thrums like a second heartbeat just underneath the sinew of his muscles, and she wonders which form she prefers. As a wolf there is nothing to mask his strength, as a man there a lie of weakness, because human flesh is inherently weak, even though he is not human and thus does not carry such a frailty.

His big hand pulls down his fur but he does not put it on. Instead, he comes back to her and clasps her cloak around her neck, putting humanity back around her shoulders. His lips move across her face, his teeth scrape across her chest. He’s left little marks at the spot where her neck curves into her shoulder. He had bit hard enough to draw blood, because he had known she’s strong enough to withstand it and had known that she had selfishly wanted it.

“You’re so quick to forget wolves were man’s enemy long before the Queen started this war.” He must be thinking of the glinting hatred in the Huntsman’s eye, because she is too. “If they want a villain why not play the role?”

Red notices she’s left little marks on him, too. Her nails raking down his chest, and small crescents on his shoulders. And her teeth, too, on his neck.

“Could you kill me?” he asks. “I know you’ve killed many of my kind. But could you kill me?”

There’s an old scar across his middle, a jagged white line that looks perverted on his flesh, looks almost angry. Red wonders if he traces the line of it, remembers. Her eyes track to her axe, leaning harmlessly against the bark of a tree.

“Yes,” she says and they know she’s telling the truth. “Yes. I could.”

He pulls on his fur and then he’s a wolf, a massive, dark thing with yellow eyes that that blaze beneath the shine of the moon. But she still isn’t afraid. She pushes herself to her feet as the wolf darts between the trees. She stands still when she hears its howl, hears the answer of its pack. Then she picks up her axe. She leaves the forest.

“There was no sign of him?” King James asks.

“No,” Red says, the easiest lie she’s ever told.

Snow White looks at her, bottom lip catching between her teeth. There’s understanding there, Red thinks, and more knowledge than she’d like to see. They met when they’d both been shrouding themselves in dirt and moss, hiding from what they were, who they were.

But Snow White’s hand rests above the arch of her stomach, and that is a division line, something Red cannot understand.

She looks away.

Grandmother spills out of the closet, wiry white hair spreading along the floor as she sobs and moans beneath her gag.

It’s reality, come crashing through the window, and Red jerks upward from the bed, the man’s overly sharp nails digging into her thighs as she screams. But she’d always known. Always known her grandmother was there. She’d just chosen not to see.

The door crashes against the wall and there he stands, big and broad and an axe gleaming in his hands. He doesn’t notice Red, not at all. His eyes are only for the wolf and Red scrambles up, pulling the counterpane to her chest, breathing in terror.

He transforms, snarling, and the man is now a wolf but the Huntsman is still not afraid. He swings his axe in an arch and blood spills onto the wooden floor, seeps to the white hair resting there, and there is a soft, angry whimper of pain.

Red screams. She screams and leaps from the bed and grapples at the Huntsman. The air is pregnant with the distilled scent of blood and it fuels her, drives her to near insanity, far past her breaking point.

“Quiet girl,” the Huntsman says, still not seeing her, not really. He is here for the wolf, and the wolf alone. “Quiet.” He gives her a shove.

The wolf roars, and leaps, and his teeth find their mark in the Huntsman’s neck and the blood sprays out in an arch, across Red’s face and she tastes the metallic tang on her tongue as she falls to the floor. The axe clatters at her feet, as the wolf devours his feast, and she can hear her grandmother screaming mutely under her gag.

Her hand closes around the axe.

The soft brush of the wolf’s tail curls against her cheek, and then it’s gone, and it runs out into the streaming morning sunlight, and all that’s left is the wet, gurgling sound of a dying man and the smell of his fear and the soft sound of an old woman weeping.

Red pulls off the gag and cuts the binds, and her grandmother’s flesh is papery thin and cold and she swallows bile knowing she is just as much to blame as the wolf.

Her grandmother slowly, achingly, pushes herself to her elbows. Terror is a repugnant scent and it clings to her and tears have left white, crusting tracks down her gnarled face. A scream roars up Red’s throat, like talons that push up against her skin, but she swallows it. Forces it back into her stomach, where it coagulates like a blood clot.

She can’t face her grandmother’s wide, frightened eyes. Even as the old woman’s mouth opens she’s turning, and then she’s running, out into the fresh, brisk air. Somewhere along the way she scoops up her cloak, resting artlessly against the wooden chair. Later, Red will wonder if she took it with her as a reminder.

The woods seem to embrace her with open arms.

Red is the one who asks to be on the frontlines. King James would have put her outside their door, a red-draped stone-faced sentinel, and it would have been more of a kindness to her grandmother than anything else. But Red asks for the field, when the Queen comes. She only understands in these terms now, in violence and in blood and in the axe in her hand.

The day the Queen’s army comes, her grandmother finds her. She wears no armor, no mail, only the blood-red cloak, hood up, and when Red swallows she tastes the familiar bite of blood. A droplet has welled at the corner of her lip from where she worried it raw.

“I don’t care,” her grandmother said “What you did or why you did it. It doesn’t matter. Just-just come back to me? Please. Come back to me.”

This is a momentous moment, where everything can click back into place. Her grandmother loves her. Red can see it in her eyes. She loves her, and nothing matters. Nothing matters, except everything does. She isn’t the girl who crossed the threshold of her grandmother’s house that night, she isn’t the girl who climbed in bed with a hungry predator, who ignored the thumping of her bound grandmother in the closest. She doesn’t know what she is anymore.

Instead, she ducks her head. The Queen approaches and her presence is like a clammy hand at the back of her neck, fingers pressing down into the flesh there. Her grandmother watches her go, down the hall, and out into the open courtyard where the rest of the army awaits. The bent fingers linger in the empty air, still reaching for her.

In the din of bodies, it’s nigh impossible to tell enemy from friend. Only the stench of wet fur distinguishes them. Red doesn’t bother with the humans, her existence narrows down onto the wild wolves that tear through their lines. Her axe is already damp with crimson blood, curling down the curve, hitting the edges of her cloak as it flaps like wings with her movements.

Someone knocks into her, knocks the air out of her, and she goes sideways.

A hand steadies her.

“Idiot,” she says because there he stands, no wolf but a man. His fur dangles unconcerned at the bend of his arm. There is a hint of drying blood in the scruff across his chin, and his eyes burn a bright, lusting yellow, driven frenzied with the craze of battle.

“It’s over you know,” he says, and she knows that and she doesn’t need him to tell her and why does it even matter to him. It’s over. And he’ll win.

His pendant dangles out from his tunic, and he pulls it over his head. Metal clanks hard against metal, and wolves bay to the sky in a death psalm, and they stand like two great statues. Always across from each other, but never allowed to touch.

“Take this,” the wolf tells her. She has never considered the shape of the glass pendent but now she notices it’s a wolf-curiously canting, its head curled around its shoulder, looking for something. “It’s a good luck charm.”

“Why?” she demands, fingers already curling around the glass; so tightly she feels its edges poking against the flesh of her palm and she is almost afraid she’ll break it, but it’s made of stronger stuff than that and holds fast beneath her pressure.

He barks out a laugh, but it’s superseded by the lonesome howl of a wolf as an arrow buries itself in its chest. The wolf before her winces, almost as if his brother’s passing pulls a piece of his skin from his bones.

“The Huntsman to the King and you don’t know anything about the prey you’re hunting,” the wolf accuses but he sounds nearly amused, his voice sliding like a cool waterfall over her. He’s smiling, rows and rows of white, bleached teeth, pointed in places they should not be-if he were a man. “Wolves mate for life, you know.”

She thinks about the way she had clawed at him that night, how she come to him like a city under siege, unresisting and yielding but inside fortified and barricaded. Theirs had been a guerilla war, and she’s not sure who won. Of if anyone had won. Had she recognized him, that day in the woods. She had sensed the hunger in him, burning through him like a dying star, but had she known him for what he was-beneath the layers of skin and fur and sinew and bone, where his heart pulsed in a staccato that resonated with hers? He had recognized her in an instant, catching her scent through the trees, but had she recognized him?

Red had always thought she was more wolf than human-and wolves mated for life.

He crashes into her, and instinct has her scrambling for a perch, for the upper hand. Her fingers slide through the matted, shaggy fur and she realizes it’s the first time she’s touched the wolf form of him. He shudders above her, but lays himself out on top of her, holding her down.

Her hand is still curled around her axe.

“As long as you have it,” he says by her ear, “I’ll find you. No matter where you are.”

She swallows, and remembers how he asked if she could kill him. She thinks of the collection of wolf pelts she already has. She had made a coat for Snow White with some of them, and had been sewing a blanket for the babe. It lay, unfinished beneath her bed-much like his fur had that night.

“Find me,” she tells him, and it’s not a comfort, the sound of her voice. It’s a challenge. “Find me, then. But I’m not prey. I’ve never been prey. Not even yours.”

He smiles, and she feels the cold, bitter bite of blackness as she swings her axe down. The Huntsman had missed, but she didn’t. She feels the metal crack against bone, his soft hiss of pain and warm, warm blood across her fingers, dripping down over her joints, pooling between her knuckles.

The wolf pants, dying, against her neck and a boot crunches down on her head, not hard enough to shatter bone but black dots swarm in her vision and the wolf’s hand digs into her hip. She drops the axe and pulls at his fur, pulls it over him like a funeral shroud, and then it’s a true wolf that lays on top of her, barely alive.

Darkness comes swiftly, and unnatural, like a maelstrom. It swallows her up. It swallows them both. It eats them alive.

“Do you always have to do that?” Ashley laughs, shaking out her springy coils of blonde hair. “What do you think’s gonna happen if you don’t?”

Ruby shrugs, unapologetic. Outside her car, the night opens like a wide expanse of untapped territory before them. At least for Ruby. She casts a dubious look at Ashley and wonders how long before she bails on her in favor of Sean.

Not long, Ruby figures. The girl has it so bad.

She, of course, prefers to be the unattainable-wild, uncultivated but not unspoiled because she is so very spoiled, but she is unfettered and cannot be tethered to solid ground. She likes that, she thinks. There isn’t a single boy in town to tempt her otherwise.

A bony shoulder lifts and drops in a careless shrug. Ashley grins.

“It’s my good luck charm,” she says. “Why test it?” She taps a blood-red nail against the dangling pendant.

The glass wolf spins, and Ruby thinks for a breathless moment between the engine revving to life, it’ eyes are almost tracking her, following her, looking for her.

But then Ashley laughs and they speed out into the open night.