Fur and Fang
Just a quick short courtlandgentry au I’ve been cooking up for a while. It free to steal if anyone wants to add onto it in any way
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How you ever wondered about the beginning?
Before brothers and the gun, before the fall and the girl and space. Before all of that, the beginning before the beginning? The start?
Let us, dear viewer, go back to the start of this tale with a proper opening—
Once upon a time. There was a Deer. And she was beautiful.
Her coat was thick and sable, her eyes were dark as amber. She was lithe and quick and had ears sharp enough to hear the first crush on a blade of grass tens of feet away. She was young and beautiful. The stags fought for the honor of her in their harems, and her fellow does listened to the warnings her clever mind and sharp ears gave.
She lived well, ate happily, and ran fast. Everything a deer could wish for. Until one day, when her leg was caught in a thin fence. Her herd jumped over and ran past, and she was left to struggle and bleet as her energy slowly waned and the dark expectations of a mountain cat or other wild beast to finish her off settled. She heard, with her sharp ears, the crush of grass.
It wasn't a mountain cat or wolf, but a human... a Hunter, twice as dangerous, twice as beastly. The doe struggled anew, the wire cinching as she tried to run, but it was no use. As he came close, she could see the pale pink of his skin, the white-blue of his eyes, his grin like a gash as he leaned over and... took a knife from his hip and cut her free.
She ran, only to look back a second and see the man wave, knife still in hand. But she was a deer, and even with the kindness, she fled instead of staying.
Not one week later, she returned to her herd, grazing in the summer heat, when her ears caught the noise of a blade of grass being crushed. She bleets a warning and starts her sprint, but the leg wound from the fence is still healing, and while everyone runs, she is left at the back, stumbling for a moment. Her eyes catch movement off to her right, the blurry outline of a hunting gun ready to shoot, and... it doesn't.
It merely folds up, with a hand waving in her direction as she gets her feet from under her and she runs again.
Three days later, her herd is scattered again. Wolves have killed their matriarch, and their stag was killed by a rival. The herd is in upheaval, her leg still healing and her body tired, on edge from being alone, that she walks into a clearing under moonlight and a trap settles around her form.
It is of nature, of natural magic, something in her bones, her pelt, that strikes her to the very grass she stands in. Something has passed, has been set in motion. Something old and strange, a law of the universe settled on her back. And out comes the hunter, mouth still a thin slash, as he sets down a bowl of burning offerings and pulls out the knife he freed her leg with, t’s a simple thing for him to hold it to her throat look into her wild fear filled eyes and simply lower the blade— then demands her to meet him and treat with him as a human, as the Law of Three demands.
She has no recourse but to discard her sable fur and sharp ears for soft flesh and two legs. She meets him naked and asks what he would demand of her, as the Law of Three would demand of her.
"Three times I have spared your life. Three times I have let you live— by the Law of Three, I am owed three boons."
"What are your boons? If it is in my power to grant, I shall," she asks, because he is correct, because this is true, because she is naked for the first time and wishes for the softness of fur, the simple knowledge of a deer mind, not the chill and terror.
"My boon is that you will return with me human, be my wife, and give me sons to raise."
She can do nothing but comply, as is the rule of three, binding and unmoving. And a young doe dies, and Guinevere Gentry is born. She is brown-eyed and black-haired, young and beautiful, and exactly why Jonathan Gentry sought for her. His mother, a Hag, though she was in more than a literal sense, may have given him nothing he did not take, but she had given him knowledge of magic and its rules. And when he saw that doe that day, caught in that fence, fear and panic and expectancy in its eyes, his mother's teachings came to him.
The second time had been completely accidental, but the third was deliberate. He wanted a wife. He wanted sons. And she would give them to him.
She does. She did.
She is his perfect wife, ideal in every way. She stays pretty and stays beautiful even as her belly swells with their firstborn. He brings her gifts and showers her in affection, loves her as any man should their wife, and when the day of delivery happens, he has settled on an at-home birth. Less money to spend, and she was once a deer; she must know how to give birth naturally.
And once the screaming and pushing, the hard parts, stop, he returns, arms open for his wife and child, and sees not a squalling babe but a black wolf pup mewling at his mother's breast. She had promised to be human. To give him son. She had promised to be his wife. She had not promised those sons would be human.
She'd given him a monster for a monster, a beast for a beast.
She whispered into the womb her revenge and her husband's death. In the world of man, a creature like a deer would be hunted—slaughtered, but a wolf could thrive, could survive. A wolf was not bound to the magic that ties her, so she molded him into something that would be her weapon.
She knows cruelty now, and her son shall be its executioner. Her son is not all wolf. He is human first, fur and fangs second. And when his human form folds back over him like an unfitting coat, his father takes this as the expression of magic and nothing more.
His wife remains a good wife. She is, however, a lacking mother.
She made no promises to love her monsters, only birth them, and while this is detrimental to her son, his father cannot beat sense into his wife, nor care. He throws his hands up and leaves her and her negligence be. Their son continues to live, though it takes some beatings to keep the wolf from peeking through when around others. And life continues on.
One child is expensive, and while John wants more sons, as he said to his wife, he must wait until the first one is more independent. And the idea of having more wolf children scares him, though he'll never admit it. Still, how can a man resist his wife?And soon, once again, she is pregnant.
Their firstborn is older, not quite human but enough that he can be pawned off onto school and be expected to manage himself. He makes his wife, his dutiful good wife, promise no more wolf children, and she does so with a smile. Because her revenge is already sealed in the flesh and blood beyond their bedroom door. She has no need for more wolf-children.
The two— yes, even she is surprised— children she now forms, she does so out of spite. She whispers survival and clever ears, sharp tongues and trickster smiles. Her lures, she has made her wolf child to strong, revenge will need an opening— a trap. And her husband, so does love breaking small things. They will be smart like her firstborn, predators like her firstborn, and they will survive in spite of her husband. And they will be beasts as well, because her husband will have nothing from her but her promises, and she promised for them not to be wolves.
Is it much of a surprise that nine months later she gives birth to one coyote and one fox suckling at her breasts? Their father beats her as her wolf son takes the small babes, faster to be human than he ever tried to be at that age, into his arms, his eyes wide with something she remembers as love.
They stay small, and she does not care for them, the same way she did not care for her wolf son, only so much as he is her revenge and they are her spite. But her wolf son loves them as if they are his. He raises them, responds to them, feeds them, interacts with them in ways he has never interacted with another human being, separated by something he could name but could not say.
But not with his monster siblings. Good, she thinks. For the first time, in a world this cruel and unforgiving, at least they'll have each other.
It takes two years, but after her wounds have healed from her second birth and from their father's fists, she takes herself and her children out to the forest on the edge of their property. Past the wire fence that caught her leg. And into the field where he caught her and made her his.
She sits all of her children down in the high grass and tells them a story. Tells them this story.
Her child, her eldest, her revenge, looks at her with knowing eyes. Her boons are completed. Her milk is dry. She is bound to no one and nothing but herself. So she stands up and peels away her soft flesh into her pelt, into her sable, beautiful pelt, and with deer eyes and deer ears she watches them for a second only.
And with deer eyes and deer mind she flees into the forest.
After all, they are beasts.
And she is a deer.
It’s much the same after that. Except where it isn’t.
Of the three beast children that lived in a house with a monster made from spite and revenge, who loved only each other, who knew only each other, who were not quite human and not quite animal, the tricksters tricked and the wolf watched.
And their father was more monster than they ever were.
And one day he went too far. And one day a deer's revenge was met not with a bullet, but teeth and claw. When the police came, they found a ragged fear of a man holding his torn-open throat, eyes wide, and the blood of a fifteen-year-old child with yellow eyes— No, blue eyes. They must have been mistaken. Holding his brother close. They will hear stories of the vicious, wild Gentrys who bite and claw, who snarl at other children, who aren't quite right in the ways normal children are.
And the wolf is dragged away from his pack, from the lures his mother created to fulfill his purpose. Left to languish alone. And the tricksters will bite and claw and laugh and fight and learn to slide beneath humanity, beneath what they aren't and who they are. If they’re forced to separate they always always come back together, through convenience or circumstance, or something else. Something not quite natural. They sneak to their brother sometimes, wiggle themselves beneath the barbed wire fences, hide themselves away between guard shifts and cameras, then curl up on their brother as he spoons them, a splotch of black fur and covered by orange and tan. He makes them leave before the sun comes up.
They learn to hide. Not quite. Not really. Not around each other. They know. They know when their brother is announced dead that he isn't. They can smell a lie. They can hold it in their hands, twist it form like their own and see the edges peaking through.
So it’s not much of a surprise when later, only a couple of years, when they've peeled the flesh from their bones and they are just fur and teeth, a quick summer break to be themselves, they find a black wolf watching them from the woods. Who joins them. Plays with them, carrying them in its jaws before rolling them over, helps them hunt the wild rabbits and feasts on its carcass with their same vigor. He cleans their messy fur and chuffs, as the two clack their teeth and cackling turns into wrestling.
Watches them settle for sleep. Protects them through the night. And leaves just as quickly as he came.
They are what comes after the fairytale revenge, after the witch dies, and the town is saved, and everyone lives happily ever after.
They are the circumstances of their mother, the evil of their father, the love of each other. They are something that does not exist in nature. A contradiction caught between two states of being, forced to be one, separated from the other, neither full in either form.
They are beasts, pretending to be human. And the only thing they have is each other.
Until they don't.
