I don't think there's any major trigger warning for this chapter other than some mentions of injuries
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"What was I doing?" Sunny thought as she lifted herself off the ground. She looked down to see white lilies covering the earth.
"What is-" Sunny grunted in pain when she tried to place her hand down.
She tried to focus but couldn't take her mind off the stabbing pain coming, what felt like everywhere. Her throat, her head, her hand. She was eventually able to flip herself over. Hoping it would ease the discomfort.
She looked up at the star-filled sky and again tried recounting her thoughts.
"I was... I was at the pudding n pie," Sunny tried to recall. "Crane, Tweddles, that fucking bitch."
"Language, Yen Yen."
Sunny's eyes snap open. Suddenly seeing her parents looking down at her. "Oh... this is a dream."
"It's almost as if she's not happy to see us, Angel," Sunny's father joked to her mother.
"I didn't say that," Sunny frowned at the illusion. She pulled herself up to get into a sitting position.
"You took quite the beating tonight, mi luz." Her father told her with a hint of concern.
Sunny looked down at her hand. For some reason, she couldn't focus on it. The pain was there. She could tell something was wrong. She just couldn't visualise it. "I wish I could say I had it worse."
"Well, don't look at me," A third voice jeered. "If I had control, we'd be in a very different situation."
Sunny looked in between her parents to see... herself?
At least, a Sunny that looked like she had her shit together. She didn't look like she just got headbutted. She was dressed in a dark red evening dress. Lacking the tired lines that we're currently under the real Sunny's eyes.
The other Sunny stared at her with a smug smile.
"No one asked you," Sunny frowned at the reflection.
"What are you? 12?" Other Sunny rolled her eyes.
"You're too hard on yourself," Sunny's father said. Sunny couldn't tell if the dream parents could see the copy too.
"He's always been too soft on you," Other Sunny nodded to her father. "Can you imagine if he were alive? If he saw you working for Ichabod Crane. What a disappointment you've turned out to be."
"I'm not-"
"And you even let him escape. Let Miss High and Mighty hand him over, and for what?"
"That woman would have killed Bigby!"
"Don't even get me started on the Wolf!" Other Sunny laughed. "That really makes me wish I was in control. Then I would have devoured him by now."
Sunny's mother suddenly spoke up. "I don't trust the Wolf."
"You've never trusted anyone I've shown interest in, Mom," Sunny sighed. "I'm surprised you let me get married to..."
The other Sunny frowned for a moment. "My god! You can't even say his name! It's a miracle you got married at all!"
Sunny felt her face go red. "Well, it doesn't matter now! Any hope for that relationship is long gone."
"It went on too long anyway," Other Sunny held her head in her hand. "The way you let that family treat Li-"
"Shut up-"
"You don't wanna talk about Liena? Let's talk about mother dearest here." Other Sunny placed a hand on her mother's shoulder. "When were you planning on visiting her? Telling her about this whole deputy arrangement?"
"Once we got settled," Sunny answered.
"You'll never be settled! You'll never feel safe! Didn't you ever listen to Dad? Fabletown is filled to the brim with some of the worst scumbags this world has ever seen. You've experienced it first hand, thanks to Crane."
"I don't wanna talk about him," Sunny covered her ears.
"You don't wanna talk about anything," Other Sunny huffed. "But honestly, talk about pathetic."
Sunny didn't say anything. She was trying not to imagine the sicko's face as the other Sunny mocked him.
"But, but, I, I didn't kill those women!"
"I, I thought it could be different with you!"
"It was so pitiable. Who cares if he didn't kill Faith and Lily? What was the wonderful thing the Wolf said? 'Have his head swinging from the Washington Bridge.' Now that sounds like a perfect punishment for him."
"Killing him wouldn't have helped find out what happened to Faith and Lily!" Sunny stood up to shout in the mirror's face.
"No, but it would have been really satisfying," Other Sunny smirked.
"Get out! Get out of my head!" Sunny screamed. "Just leave my parents and I alone!"
"Didn't you notice?" Other Sunny gestured around. "They're gone."
Sunny looked around. Her parents were indeed gone. Along with the Lily field they had been standing in. Sunny now found herself standing in a motel room... the one from the picture.
"Not here!" Sunny shouted. Determined to keep her eyes closed.
Sunny fell to her knees. She couldn't breathe. It felt like her head was about to explode.
"Mom?" Sunny's eyes snapped open. She looked up to see Liena standing in the doorway. Staring down at her in concern. "What's going on?"
"No, no, you shouldn't be here, Li Li!" Sunny cried. Grabbing at her daughter's arms.
"Mom, where are you?" Liena asked.
"I, I don't-" Sunny tried to think back. She remembered phasing in and out of consciousness as Snow tried to get them somewhere. "Bigby... Bigby Wolf's apartment."
Liena nodded in understanding. Gently taking her mother's hands. "You need to wake up, Mom."
Everything went dark for a moment. Sunny opened her eyes with hazy vision. She let out a quiet groan as she leaned up from the bed she found herself in. She didn't remember being in what she assumed to be Bigby's bedroom.
The last thing Sunny remembered was making it through the front door. She frowned as she looked at her surroundings. Flowers covered the bed, much to her annoyance.
It had happened a few times when she was a teenager. Waking up from a particularly bad nightmare and found her magic had gone a bit out of control during the troubled sleep. It had been so long since she started suppressing her magic that she hardly remembered.
Thankfully this time, the magic seemed to be contained on the bed. She folded up the sheet into her arms. Taking it to the window and shaking all the petals down into the ally.
"Anyways... 'Guard against', as they say," A voice Sunny recognised as Swineheart's said.
"What about Fei?"
Sunny made her way over to the door. Her body still felt heavy.
"Her magic should have her up and going in a few hours. Just give-"
Swineheart paused as Sunny opened the door. He had a calm smile on his face, while everyone else looked a little shocked.
"Hi," Sunny said awkwardly as everyone kept staring at her.
"Looking a little green there, kid," A pig said to her. There was a brief moment where Sunny wondered if he was really there or if it was something her brain cooked up because of the blood loss.
Sunny looked away from the talking pig and up to Bigby. "You're alive; that's good."
Bigby looked a bit bewildered at her comment for a moment. "I could say the same about you."
"So we're just gonna skip over the hand thing?" The pig rolled his eyes.
"Colin," Snow frowned at him.
"Yeah, no, but the kid came in here an hour with a couple of missing fingers, and now she's walking around like she's got a hangover."
Snow scolded Colin as Sunny looked down at her hand. To her surprise, she didn't see any missing digits but instead a mass of leaves covering her whole arm. She shifted and realise it was the same for her neck. All the places Bloody Mary had gotten her claws on the night before.
She should have been a bit panicked but instead felt a sad ping in her chest when she saw her watch. The glass of the aged clock was smashed beyond repair. Just another thing of her father's taken from Sunny.
The woman shook it off. She didn't want these strangers to see her grief over a seemingly average watch. She looked at her fingers again. Sunny had used her magic to heal minor things like cuts and whatnot before, but nothing to that scale.
Sunny took a deep breath. She took a step towards Bigby. "Are you... I dunno. Feeling alright? You ended up a lot worse than me last night."
Bigby shrugged off her question. Turning around made making his way into the kitchen.
"That bad, eh?" Sunny tried to joke. The tired bags under her eyes and her uncomfortable posture betrayed her. She was scared.
"It's Bigby, kid. He'll be okay," Colin told her. "Hell, I've seen him take worse."
"Not much worse," Snow muttered.
"Don't worry about me, alright? I'll be fine." Bigby told her as he took a beer out of the fringe.
"See? Strong as an oak, this guy," Colin smiled.
"I'm just... glad you're alive," Sunny said in a sincere tone. "I just... you took like five gunshots to the chest. I get that Fables are different, but I wouldn't think anyone could take that and still be breathing... I just froze."
"I'm pretty hard to kill," Bigby said. Sunny wanted to call him out. He seemed to be downplaying what happened to him, and it made her worry for the Sheriff.
Without thinking, Sunny reached to take his hand but stopped when she remembered it was covered in shrubbery.
Bigby gave her an undeciphered look. She shook her head and frowned."Sorry."
"You were really fucked up, man," Colin interrupted. "You looked like when you take an action figure and bend its limbs the wrong way."
"Colin," Snow repeated.
It was fair to say that Colin didn't seem to care about Snow's attempts to get him to stop talking. "I'm just sayin', I was worried about him, is all. The guy hasn't had a night's rest in days."
"We'll all get some rest when this whole thing is done," Snow stated.
"Do you have an idea where to start?" Sunny asked hopefully.
"What's even happenin' out there?" Colin asked. "I mean, do you guys have like a plan or somethin'?"
Bigby took a moment to make his way back into the bedroom. Coming out in a clean shirt. "The Crooked Man, Bloody Mary, the Tweedles... This is bigger than I thought it was."
"The Crooked Man came out of the shadows for a reason," Snow thought out loud. "For him to attack us so blatantly like that...he either feels invincible or desperate."
"Well, if those are my two options... I don't think I'd pick desperate." Colin put in his two cents.
"What do you mean?" Sunny looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
"White traded Crane. To save Bigby. I'm just sayin'...that's not exactly somethin' you do when you're playin' with house money."
"So he called my bluff," Snow shouted in defiance. "It's not like I'm gonna let Bloody Mary just murder-it was a split-second decision, and I don't care how it looked. I'd make it again and twice on a Sunday."
"Alright, I'm not faultin' ya," Colin probably would have shrugged if he was capable.
Though this Sunny had been silently considering everything that had happened in the last... she had forgotten how long it had been for a moment. Three days? That didn't feel right.
"I just wanna say...Thank you, Snow. For all that back there," Sunny peaked out from the kitchen. "I think we both might be dead if it wasn't for you."
Snow seemed grateful for Sunny's words. Giving her a soft, I'll be it tired, smile. "No problem."
"Thanks? You're not pissed that Crane's flown the coop? Or that the Crooked Man thinks he's got Snow under his thumb?"
"Of course I am, but-" Sunny tried to put it in a way that made sense. She was just so tired. "She did what she had to."
"You weren't there, Colin, so just drop it," Bigby told the pig.
"Okay, okay," Colin rolled his eyes again.
"All I care about right now is...just what does the Crooked Man want out of this? I thought he was just a...loan shark. But clearly, he's operating in other circles. It can't just be about Crane, right? Getting him out of town? Is this all about the murders?"
"It has something to do with the woman working at the club," Sunny pondered with a frown. "It all keeps coming back to them. But why? How do they connect?"
"I don't know how it all works out yet, but I know it does...somehow," Bigby answered as he sat down.
"The Crooked Man...declared war against us last night. At least, that's what I thought when it happened. But now I see this war has been going on for years. We just haven't noticed it because our way of doing things is broken. We need to do things the right way."
"What does that mean? The 'right way'?" Colin asked suspiciously.
"What do you think I mean?" Snow glared at him.
"I don't know, but it suspiciously sounds like 'your way'. Bigby and the kid are the ones on the front lines. You can't give someone like Bigby a leash. Nothing's gonna get done."
Sunny was starting to wonder if Colin even knew her name.
"A little restraint and thought behind things will never hurt anyone, Colin," Snow huffed.
"Yeah, wait, what do you mean? What is this 'right way'?" Bigby asked.
"We haven't been doing a good job. All of us."
"Is this about the tree?" Sunny asked her.
"It's not just the tree," Snow explained. "From now on, we do everything cut and dried, by the book, straight as an arrow."
"Pure as driven snow," Colin muttered.
"I'm not saying I'm the arbiter of-"
"Sure you're not," Colin smiled contemptuously.
Snow clearly had enough of Colin and turned to Bigby. "This town has enough monsters. What happened last night...what you turned into...it can't happen again."
"Maybe we just need to gather our bearings and sort this out later-"
"You can't keep avoiding this," Snow told her. "It's never gonna be the right time. We need to sort this out now."
Sunny felt a guilty shiver go down her spine. Things were more than messed up in Fabletown, but a part of her realised that Snow and Sunny had different ideas of what needed to be done.
"We need monsters to fight monsters," Colin told her.
"Colin, if I really believed that we needed him to lose his flippin' mind at a moment's notice," She turned to Bigby again. "Then that would mean I'd lost all faith in our ability to help this town. Just let that side of you be done, okay? Be done and buried, and we can all move on."
"We were under attack, Snow. What did you expect me to do?" Bigby defended.
"There are degrees."
"Degrees?" Bigby gave her a look. "I only ever do what's necessary."
"Really?" Snow doubted and turned to Sunny. "Do you believe him?"
Sunny's eyes widened in surprise. Did she? She knew Snow didn't just mean last night. Sunny looked at Bigby for a moment. She barely knew the guy, but a part of her wanted to believe he really was trying.
"... yes."
Snow seemed a little annoyed by her answer. It probably wasn't the one she expected. "Look, I care about how this is done just as much as I care about it getting done."
"So for that, you wanna give Bigby a handicap? Like the bad guys will worry if shit gets sloppy? Everybody wants Bigby to smile and shave and take a shower now and then... Hell, I'm practically the president of the 'Bigby, Don't Be Such A Dick' Club... But this is the wrong fucking time to put shackles on him."
"We can do this, Snow," Sunny stood up. It hurt to have nothing to lean on, but she was determined. "We can work out what the hell is going on, but we can't get hung on bureaucracy right now."
"I'm going to--I'm going to let you 'do it', okay? It's just that...now that I'm deputy mayor, I need your respect," Snow told her and then looked at Colin. "And this situation...has to end.
"What situation?" Colin shouted.
"All unglamoured Fables, starting today, have to go and stay at the Farm," Snow declared.
"Oh, give me a fuckin' break!" Colin snapped around to Bigby. "Are you gonna let her talk to me like that?"
"It's been the rule for a reason, Colin... And Bigby knows it's for the best of the town. It keeps everybody out of trouble."
"And what if a Mundy does see me, huh?" Colin argued. "I'm a pig, not a mouse with a hat and a cane! They know what a pig is! It's not the end of the world!"
"Look, everyone, just calm down, alright?" Bigby told them.
"I'm perfectly calm," Snow said with a twitch in her eye.
"I'm not! Tell me right now: what's it gonna be, Bigby?" Colin insisted.
Conveniently for Bigby, the phone started ringing along with a loud knock at the door.
"Uh... I'll get the door," Sunny told Bigby as she walked over. Meanwhile, Snow answered the phone.
Just as Sunny reached for the handle, a voice shouted from outside. "Open up, Wolf!"
Sunny cringed at the anger in her aunt's voice. She opened the door to see the woman along with her dear daughter.
"What the hell happened?!" Catriona screamed at the state her niece was in.
"What are you doing here?!" Bigby asked in confusion.
"I'm trying to talk here," Snow frowned at them all as she lifted the phone back up to her ear.
Sunny was quick to huster her family out into the hall. "I'm sorry, but this really isn't the time."
"You didn't answer me!" Catriona worried. "How did this happen? What did they do to you?"
"We... there was a fight, but I'm fine. Really."
Catriona stepped forward and grabbed Sunny's hand. "This is not fine. You're scarring me, Yenay."
Sunny opened her mouth to answer but stopped as she felt a pair of arms wrap around her waist in a vice grip.
"I'm okay, Li Li," Sunny comforted her daughter. Smoothing out her child's hair.
"You were scared," Ace mumbled into her mother's bloody jacket. "You were having a pretty bad nightmare."
"Well, it's over," Sunny smiled sadly at her. "Wide awake now."
"We need to get out of town," Catriona frowned in concern.
"Take Li Li out to the cabin for a few days. Warn Dia and mom about everything that's been going on," Sunny instructed. "I'll let you know when all this shit is done and dusted."
"No, I mean all three of us," Catriona clarified. "You can't possibly wanna stick around?"
As they talked, Snow made her way out of the apartment. Walking down the hall without another word.
"Look, I know I'm insane for wanting to stay," Sunny sighed. "But if I don't... people will get hurt. More people like Lily."
"What about you?" Catriona shook. "Your hand. It's... your powers might not be able to handle the strain after all this time."
Sunny realised how much the whole situation was affecting her aunt. This woman always kept her cool. No matter what. For as long as Sunny could remember, Catriona was able to brush anything off. She always found a way to work through something while keeping her laid-back demeanour.
"I can do this," Sunny said. "I'm sorry, Cat, but you promised me you would take care of Liena. She's the priority."
Catriona bit the inside of her cheek nervously. "I'm... I'll go, but don't you dare keep me in the dark. The moment you sort this out, call me."
Before Sunny could answer, the door to Bigby's apartment opened. Bigby stepped out and looked around awkwardly.
"Nerissa is waiting for us in her office," Bigby told Sunny.
Sunny gave him a surprised look. "Oh, okay," She turned back to her family. "I'll see you in a few days?"
They both gave her uncomfortable nods. She gave them each a hug and turned around. The two of them watched sadly as Sunny and the Sheriff disappeared around the corner of the hall.
Confession: this is one of the chapters I've been the most nervous to post. I wasn't sure what people would think of the dream sequence, my characterization of Snow (which I'm still trying to work out tbh), and the implied powers of Sunny's daughter.
But here is it! Soooo hope you enjoyed it <3