Who: Logan Waterhouse and Daniel Webster What: Cranky Beast!Daniel rescues a Bigby!Logan in distress. BECAUSE HE IS A FAIRYTALE PRINCE, Y'ALL. Where: The creepy parts of the Enchanted Forest When: A few hours after this conversation. Warnings/Rating: An F bomb. General crankiness and panicking.
Logan tried to keep her footsteps soft as she moved through the dark forest, but there was little to be done when you couldn't tell where the snappy twigs lay. Her eyesight was better in the darkness than she had expected, thanks to Bigby's wolf-senses, but the trade-off was that she was being assaulted by smells left and right. She could smell the leaves and the trees, and something rotten over her left shoulder. There were warm-blooded animals moving around in the distance on her right, and she knew she was fast enough to catch them if she wanted. And if that wasn't creepy enough, she could feel her mouth salivate just at the thought of those animals.
She needed to get out of here, and stat.
Waking up in Fabletown instead of her own bed had sent Logan into a panic, and the heightened emotions had turned her into a wolf, and she had run blindly into the forest for so long she had no idea where she was. She had emptied her pockets to keep from panicking again, but all she had found was the journal and three packs of cigarettes. Not exactly life-savers for a girl in the woods.
Going through the journal had been a good idea. Bigby's notebook was different from her own, but she'd seen it enough through his eyes to know exactly what she was looking at. And flipping through the pages and seeing everyone else share her panic helped her feel a little better about being stuck in a body that clearly was not hers. This body was taller, older, and it had boobs. Proper ones, not whatever her own excuse for curves were. Logan had no idea what she looked like right now (none of those cigarette packs had any mirrors. Useless.), but she had a feeling she was bigger, older, stronger, and probably hotter than she had any right to be. Must be the whole wolf thing.
Pocketing her journal after her conversation with the angry man named Daniel, Logan turned her attention to the trees around her, took a deep breath, and blew. As expected, several dozen trees in front of her rattled and shook, their leaves offering little resistance to her power. This was how he blew down the houses of those pigs. Cool. She blew again, this time at angle so that the leaves would fly upwards. Then, she waited.
Daniel wasn’t taking this well. He was taking it so badly that by the second hour he had disassociated and convinced himself this was some kind of sadistic but temporary dream, and all he had to do was live through the next few minutes long enough to make it through the door and not exist at all. There wasn’t anything in this situation except the horror of his newly malformed limbs and the crushing weight of his own guilt. It was dark in the Beast’s nest, and there were strange sounds in the heart of the castle that, quite frankly, should scare the hell out of any modern man, and certainly scared Daniel, who admitted to himself that he was weak even for a modern man.
The awfulness of his situation, of hating not only who he was but what he was all at the same time, sent Daniel into a kind of desperate anger. When he stopped being angry he knew he would only find despair, and he just couldn’t face it. He wanted to run away from the nightmare, but before he could, the girl had gone crying at him in the journal. Alright, she hadn’t actually cried, and that had just made it worse. People who didn’t make a fuss got to Daniel quicker because he didn’t pay attention long enough to lock them out. He paid more attention to the journal than any one person did, likely, and he read everything that was there for him to read. He knew Logan and he knew what she’d revealed publicly on the journal. She seemed like a sweet kid and he wasn’t going to leave her in the fucking woods just so he could off himself (metaphorically or physically, whatever).
So, get the girl, stick her in the castle, leave. That was the new plan.
It took him hours just to get out of the castle. Daniel wasn’t especially afraid of heights, but he discovered the only way out of the Beast’s West Wing tower “nest” was to actually haul himself out of a broken rooftop window and then scale the building. He wasn’t going to launch himself into the air and hope the wings worked, because what if they didn’t, it would be goodnight and not in a fun way. He found the Beast’s senses were all excellent except for sight. At first it made him feel blind and helpless, big and clumsy, but he realized the hearing and the sense of smell more than made up for it. He smelled a kind of dog and girl smell mixed together (god only knows how he managed that) on the wind, broken branches and leaves in a certain direction, and he headed that way. A little while into it he broke into a run, and realized he didn’t get tired. He just kept running, and after another hour dodging the trees, he decided that maybe this was why the Beast hadn’t actually gotten around to killing himself. At least he could run--or, more likely, fly.
And with these claws, he probably had a half-decent chance at the witch he was always going on about.
Daniel was making an incredible ruckus coming through the woods at full-tilt. He wasn’t paying much attention to his path or the things in it, and he was going at a lumbering clip, fueled by wolf stamina, horse haunches, and the single-mindedness of a hunting snake or hawk heading for point B. The new Beast, fully the size of a polar bear, but constructed with huge gray wings, fur, claws and snout, broke through the trees in an explosion of breaking branches and scurrying fauna.
Logan had spent the time since sending up her leaf sign testing her new body, just seeing what it could do. She knew she couldn't veer too far, but knew her overwhelmingly strong senses would alert her when a human was nearby. As long as it was just small and medium sized critters in the vicinity, she could try trees to look for sunshine all she wanted.
She didn't know how many hours had passed since Daniel had told her he was coming, but Logan was snapped out of a dose when the ruckus came. She could smell the man - no, not a man, an animal... esque thing - long before she could hear it. The part of her mind that could access Bigby's memories told her that this thing wasn't the Beast from Fabletown. No, this thing was new, it was fast, and it was coming straight at her.
The creature broke through the trees with such force, that Logan tripped over her own feet as she tried to back away from the chaos. Blood pumped through her ears as adrenaline filled her body, and Logan heard her throat make a noise more deep and feral than humanly possible. It was aggressive growl that came from a frightened dog, and Logan could feel her fingers lengthen in that weird way they had earlier that day.
Breathe, kid. It can't hurt you.
Logan closed her eyes and did as instructed, convincing herself that Bigby knew best in this situation. Because as terrifying as the giant animal in front of her was, she could take care of herself if she needed to. Well, at least Bigby could. Another deep breath and she pushed back up to her feet, forcing herself to walk towards the creature instead of running away.
"Daniel?" she ventured, her voice cracking with uncertainty.
The creature should have been mightily intimidating. The wings flared out in instinctive brakes as Daniel set his back feet, which turned out to be slick hooflike things with immobile toes that slid uselessly in the mossy turf, and a shocking, ghost-white wingspan fully longer than twelve feet snapped wide into being. Too abrupt, as it turned out, because the front claws weren’t made for running and stopping the way the big tough shoulders and thick haunches were. The striped and slender forelegs caught twisted up in the vines and the monstrous gray and gold head went down into the ground and the tufted fox tail went high up in the air. Twice. The monstrous Beast tumbled end over end like a football gone astray, glints of scales and tufts of feather down taking turns in the tangle of limbs.
He came to a stop flat on his back. The fur on the length of his belly was soft as kitten down, and the suggestion of stripes that would darken into monochrome on his back was here gentle cream and dove white. The broad chest had the suggestion of a boar’s close ribs, but no thick bristle. Confused blue eyes stared up into the tree canopy.
Daniel groaned. The Beast had a voice like a kelpie at the bottom of a great well. “Ow.”
Logan didn't have the time or brain capacity to do anything but watch. The sound of blood in her ears had managed to die down, only to be replaced by the skidding, sliding, thumping sounds of a massive animal upending on the moss in front of her. She was watching somersaults gone horribly wrong, and it was making her cringe and jump in turns. Logan waited until she was sure the beast was done with its acrobatics before moving forward, taking one hesitant step, then two, towards the massive animal on the ground.
She couldn't tell what it was from this angle. It definitely wasn't a part of her world, and if Bigby had something of its kind before, he wasn't speaking up. The wings, the shoulders, the paws, none of it seemed to go together, yet somehow, she knew she was looking at something with more ferocious power than Frankenstein could have come up with in his lab. This was a world of magic, and both she and the beast were living proof.
The voice was murky and echoing, but the sentiment was clear enough. "Are you... okay?" Logan searched for a way to lend the thing a hand. "Do you need any help?" Sure, her body would probably crumple in its grip, but it was the principle of the thing that mattered.
The monster on the ground growled. It was not an entirely dog-like sound, as it came from quite deep down in that strangely malformed chest, and weird echoes of hisses and guttural exclamations rounded out the noise. “No.” With a massive, heaving effort, Daniel rolled his oversize form onto its side. The four misshapen legs stuck out in odd directions, as the limbs didn’t match or bend the way they should in a whole animal. Smooth muscles and cohesive lines suggested less of a sewn-together form and more of a being melded with magic. It was still incredibly uncomfortable, and some of the joints pained him when they moved the wrong way.
Another groan, and Daniel miserably attempted to find his feet. “You Logan?” he asked, very bluntly. The thick tongue made some of the consonants difficult to hear, worsened by the fact he kept ducking his big maned head to try to avoid her eye. Daniel was ashamed of his appearance in a way that whiskey and decay had never managed, and he could not dull his senses with lies or drink. He shook off some of the wet and the mud, huffing wet air through a dark nose. “Fucking forest.”
Logan shuffled backwards in the direction from which she came, giving the animal plenty of room to get back on its feet. It was less cuddly looking when it was upright, that was for sure. You mean he, not it. The disapproval in Bigby's tone was obvious, and Logan blushed, ashamed at how quickly she had judged this... man to be an animal. Daniel was a person, stuck in this body. That meant whoever shared Daniel's head was normally stuck in there too. Another person, just like her.
It took her a moment to figure out what he was saying, but she tried to guess based on the shapes of the vowels. "Mostly." She didn't look like Logan, or sound like Logan, but she was the droid he was looking for. Even though he wasn't looking. What if looking at her was making him want to run away, or worse, eat here? Logan hoped he wasn't being as overwhelmed by his animal form as she had been earlier, because that could get messy fast. Not that she had any particular desire to look something that large in the eye; no, she'd be okay if he helped her get out of this mess and through the door, back to her home and Jan where she belonged. "I'm sorry I got so lost. I panicked and then I was a wolf and running and..." her voice died, and her eyes were studying her shoes as though they were the most interesting thing in the world.
Unaware of the silent slight, Daniel huffed the air one more time and then turned his great shaggy head in her direction. His eyes were terrible, and though they were vibrantly blue and not at all like the former inhabitant of this skin, they were generally unfocused and he kept dropping the wet black nose in an attempt to peer at her with nearsighted vulnerability. He clucked in the back of his throat, a bird-like, dismissive sound, as if brushing her apologies aside. “I don’t care, kid. I don’t belong here either. It’s hell on earth. Let’s get back to the heap of rubble before we both get gangrene.”
The furry snout wrinkled. She smelled like wet dog to him, like wolf, and it was a distinctly other scent that he effortlessly identified as not his own. He looked over his shoulder, winced at the sight of the ugly wings and striped haunches, and began to back up slowly. He put too much effort into thinking it through, and it was like watching someone especially nearsighted try to back up a semitruck. He moved forward again in the direction he had come. “Are you coming?” he asked, uneasily, trying to identify whether or not she was the sort of thing that could keep up.
Hell on earth was a stretch, but as Logan watched Daniel try to change direction, she knew she had no room to argue. Morphing into the wolf had been strange and terrifying, but at least it had been temporary. Daniel seemed to be stuck in his strange body, and she didn't think even her imagination was up to the task of guessing what that might be like. She was already in a body, a human body taller and stronger than she had any right to be, and that was doing enough on a number on it.
"Yes, I want to go back home." Logan knew from Bigby that Fabletown wasn't a bad place, but she was alone and uncomfortable and somewhere in the back of her mind where she was temporarily storing the things she couldn't feel right now, she knew she was terrified. Jan was waiting for her on the other side, and all she wanted was to be back in her pajamas under the covers, with none of this ever have happened. Getting to the door was the first step. If Daniel knew where it was, someone was going to have to peel her away from his side. "This body is strong. I think it will be fine." Logan made no mention the wolf thing, hoping that it wouldn't need to come to that.
“Home,” Daniel repeated, tipping his head at a back angle so he could rotate one eye in her direction. The eye was very blue; it had to be, because it had to get past a tangle of golden mane, dark fur, and a thick gloam that was settling over the forest. Small stubs of horn were just visible in the nest of hair at the crown of his head on each side, and his ears were wideset and tapered to a fuzzy point. “No home around here. You go back through, your other guy kicks around in our world.” A second’s pause. “Life’s a bitch.”
He started moving, walking slowly at first in what seemed to be a very awkward motion, as he had to adjust for rather wideset hips and a low set of paws that brought his heavy head near to the ground. “You smell like wet dog,” Daniel commented mercilessly, not paying the slightest bit of attention to what the effect of his words might be. Once he eased through the path of broken branches and churned up mud that had been his landing, he broke into a trot that was easier on the strange bones of his hindquarters. He sniffed and chose a direction that followed the path back toward the castle in the hills toward the north. “Castle is this way. Better than being out in the wood.”
Logan's face fell at the mention of not going home. She tried to hide it from those brilliant blue eyes, to be strong in the face of adversity, but the fact of the matter was that she just wasn't used to living this life. Sure, she had earned a lifetime achievement award in staring down accepting death in her hospital room, but this? This was different. This was a life better suited to her favorite heroes in comic books, not shy, awkward girls with zero skills.
She followed him in silence, letting him set the pace for the journey. It was easier to walk the path he cleared than break through the leaves and branches herself. "It's the wolf thing," she said, shrugging at the comment. This new body had a heightened sense of smell, but didn't register its own scent anymore. "Running all the way out here probably made it worse." At first she was surprised at how easily she could match Daniel when he picked up speed, but that soon gave way to exhilaration and relishing the feel of a body that could keep up. This was what the big deal was. Logan had always dreamed about what it might be like to be big and strong, but she had never thought it could feel like this.
Pausing next to Daniel when he stopped to pick their direction, Logan smiled. She wasn't even out of breath yet. "Can we get back from the castle?"
Daniel enjoyed the run too. The rush of adrenaline wasn’t like being angry, and he couldn’t remember the last time his heart rate had done anything but slow down. When he stopped in a clearing dappled by diluted sunlight, he did a better job of putting on the brakes without falling flat, and he gave himself an all-over, distinctly canine shake. The wings flopped out to either side, graceful primaries dragging in the mud, coiled tail spreading out as all four legs widened out to gain purchase. Bits of feather fluff and fur went everywhere.
Pleased with himself, Daniel tossed his mane to either side experimentally and then dug his claws into the turf, where he dug up clods of dirt in a most satisfactory way. He sniffed loudly. “It’s this way. Not far now. The door I came through is there, though you’re going to have to go in the normal, boring way through the kitchen.” Daniel sprung out into a trot at a slight angle from their previous path, not looking back to see if she followed. He didn’t want her sprouting ears and a tail so he kept their speed down. An old field pocked by rodents and rusted weapons from a battle long ago spread out on the other side of the trees. The Beast skirted the long abandoned battlefield by instinct, and the old Castle loomed up out of the mist, set deep into the green hill. “What scared you, why’d you run?” he asked, as they moved along toward the side of the castle walls, avoiding the moat entirely.
Logan jumped back to avoid ending up with a mouthful of feathers, but she was laughing now. For the first time since finding herself in Fabletown, Logan was experiencing emotion not on the same side of the spectrum as fear, and it felt like she could finally breathe again. Surprise runs with unexpected creatures, she should really try it more often. Even if said creatures left you dirty and muddy with all the fun it was having digging up the earth. "What's the fun way in?"
She continued blindly following behind him, with no idea of what to expect from this castle. This whole part of the world was untouched by Bigby, and his memory was frustratingly unhelpful with providing any hints. It was a first for both of them that neither had expected, especially considering just how old Bigby actually was. The castle, when it finally appeared through the trees, was large and old, and it reminded Logan once again that she was in the land of fairy tales. You know, if she somehow forgot that she was being led to safety by a man-animal-beast thing. One that was waiting on her for an answer. "Waking up in a body that wasn't mine." She shrugged, her voice and eyes plummeting. "I just... I don't know, panicked. Things like this don't happen to me. You should have seen me when I first heard Bigby." She opened her mouth as if to say more, paused, closed it, but decided she might as well ask. "Weren't you scared? When you woke up here?"
“Fucking terrified,” he replied, harshly enough to discourage any continuing questions.
The big dark stones loomed up over their heads, piled high and set well by engineers in centuries past. The castle had been abandoned for some time, but moss had grown up and not yet managed to crumble a structure that had housed generations of the Valley’s royal family. Curls of dripping ivy and small skittering things clung to every crevice. The Beast followed a path that wound around the side of the castle, and the incongruous smell of spring and roses in full-blossom spilled over the wall. Rose might not be present, but her garden lingered on.
Daniel huffed the perfume out of his nose and stopped where a gate stood open in the castle wall. He sat back expectantly and waited for her to go in. A hint of warm baking bread from the low entrance to the kitchen entrance joined the cold and the damp. “The ‘fun way’ is scaling the wall to the tower window. But I believe the lower floors have Doors also, that the others use.”
Yowch, Daniel-beast-thing was cranky. Boy was she glad she wasn't looking at him. She had a feeling that the look on his face would probably have scared her enough to wolf account again, and then she'd have come so close to the door only to run away again. No, this was better. The large looming castle with the out-of-sync sweet smell and mystery kitchens would all be worth it if it meant she could get away from this place. Sure, Bigby would be the one in Vegas once she went through, but he could take care of himself a lot better than she could. Taking the backseat for a while longer wouldn't be too bad; at least she wouldn't have to worry about wolfing out every time something startled her. Really, this was for the best.
"Yeah, I don't think I could do the scaling thing in these shoes." Logan looked from Daniel to the door and back again. "Thank you, for coming for me." The man might be stuck in a strange body, and be short with her for no reason, but the fact of the matter was that she would have been stuck out in the forest for ages without him. As far as random kindness from strangers went, this was a pretty big one. Logan didn't know how to begin explaining to the man just how grateful she was, or if there were even words that conveyed them. She hoped Daniel was the kind of guy who didn't need gushing proclamations of gratitude, and would pick up on the things she was having a hard time saying. Or the kind of guy who didn't care about how thankful a young girl was. That would work too.
With a deep breath, Logan nodded at Daniel and walked through the door into the kitchen. She stopped just inside the entrance, turning around to face the beast-man one last time. "I'll see you on the other side, Daniel."