Duchess of Malfi fic: hunt the badger by owl-light
So, I went to see The Duchess of Malfi at the Old Vic at the weekend (superb performance by Eve Best in the title role), and, like one does, I came out fancing a bit of brother and sister pre-canon dirty times. And I couldn't find a scrap! Woe. So I wrote some. Here it is, just in case there's one other person on the planet besides me who wants to read this.
Title: hunt the badger by owl-light
Fandom: The Duchess of Malfi - John Webster
Pairing: Ferdinand/The Duchess
Rating: R
Word count: 2,216
Warnings: The incest, violence, lycanthropy and character deaths are all canon, the underage sex isn't! There's a hint of apparent non-con at one point.
Notes: Thanks to the wonderful innie-darling for betaing this piece of self-indulgence. The Cardinal and the Duchess aren't named in the play, so I gave them the names of the real individuals the story was based on. Going to hell in a handbasket. Also on AO3 here.
Ferdinand. I'll go hunt the badger by owl-light:
'Tis a deed of darkness.
The Duchess of Malfi Act IV Scene II
His brother's dog - a hunting bitch he named Alessandra - avoids him. When his brother has her by the leash and there is no escape for her, she worries the ground, fretful to be away. Once she even howls at Ferdinand. She knows what he is; she smells the wolf inside him.
Her fear always makes Luigi laugh. "I named her Alessandra, defender of man, and instead she turns tail and tries to run at the sight of a mere boy."
His brother's laugh is not a merry sound.
*
His sister's laugh is like the trickling water of a fountain in bright sunshine. It sparkles and shines and makes everyone smile. Every time, he gives her a wolf smile in return, and yet it troubles her not. Giovanna's laughter still falls sweet and high.
*
Ferdinand has nightmares. In them he prowls the olive tree plantations outside Cosenza, hunting wary creatures that only slip out of cover in the secrecy of the night. He hears everything, their pattering paws and their too-fast panting breaths, the little warning whimpers they risk. He smells their fear and it is the most exciting thing in the world. He is silent in his chase, racing after them, a natural hunter. Until, with no warning, no change of scene, he becomes the hunted, the horns and cries of a hunting party violent behind him, a loud frenzy of familiar hounds that bay when they get his scent. He forgets the hares and the rabbits that he chased, forgets everything but the need to survive, to run faster and further and longer than the hounds chasing him. The hounds whose cries he understands. They tell him they want to tear him to shreds, spray his blood over the land, pin him up as a trophy. He has become as Acteon, he knows their names: Lycisca, Oresitrophos running though she's blind in one eye, Ladon, Pterelas, Aura and Dromas, those two little more than pups but still eager for his blood. He knows them, has hunted behind them, but now they don't recognise him. They see only the wolf, a creature to be torn to pieces.
He wakes often in a cold sweat, bad humours upon him, fearful and shaking and unwilling to succumb again to Morpheus' cruel grip. He pads in the dark to his sister's room. At first it is enough just to hear the soft rhythm of her breathing, the sound so gentle and reassuring. But on a bad night, when he still remembers being torn limb from limb, howling in agony as he was shown no mercy, he clambers up onto the high bed, lifts the heavy linens and slips into bed beside her.
Her pillow smells of fresh lavender, her hair of camomile. His feet are cold until he presses them against hers.
It is comforting.
*
The summers in Calabria are always hot, the stones of the palace soaking up the day's sunlight so that even the nights stay warm. Giovanna sleeps with no more than a sheet to cover her modesty, her nightgown shed heedlessly on the floor, though Ferdinand would wager her waiting-woman must scold her every morning for such shamelessness.
His nightmares are worse in the summer. Luigi, who has ambitions to become a man of God when he is full-grown, tells him that hell creeps closer to the surface of the earth during the summer months, and that the Devil must be beckoning Ferdinand. He falls asleep imagining that he can keep the Devil at a distance with his wolf claws and fearsome teeth, but his dream-self believes otherwise. In his dreams, the Devil wins. Sometimes the Devil has the face of their father; sometimes even it is Luigi. Sometimes the Devil howls like Alessandra, and Ferdinand howls back in his wolf-voice.
Giovanna is never in his dreams. He thinks he would have peace if she were. Though as the summer grows hotter, it is something other than peace he finds by curling up at her side. Her curls are sweat-damp and there is a hint of musk in the warm bed, and when he presses his face in the hot curve of her neck, his prick stirs and swells.
There are nights he has woken sticky between his thighs, his little prick spent; other times he wakes and must take himself in hand, his own touch bewildering for the second, sharper heat it causes. But that is always over quickly, something new and secret in the privacy of his own bed-chamber. This is different, an ache that starts when he touches his sister, that grows when he slips a hand under the sheet to rest on her soft belly, that becomes almost unbearable when he reaches that hand down to discover the warm, sticky parts of her.
Last summer she was as flat as any boy, but this summer she grows little breasts. Her court dresses become longer, covering her ankles now that she is becoming a woman. She wears laced-up bodices that both hide and draw the eye to her new womanhood.
He aches to watch her, and longs to touch her by day as well as night.
*
He does not have to long in vain forever. He stumbles into his sister's room one night only to find her awake, kneeling on the bed, clutching a sheet to her body, a narrow procession of moonlight from an ill-drawn curtain illuminating her form. "Who goes there?" she demands, gazing out from behind the moonlight into the dark of the room, and Ferdinand thinks there is as much excitement as fear in her voice.
This is the first time he will steal into her bed when she is awake.
"It is I, Ferdinand," he calls out softly, loud enough for her ears only.
"Ah, my brother," she says, no surprise in her tones. "Did you have a nightmare?" she asks, and Ferdinand does not ask how she knows of his nightmares. Perhaps it is the shadows the colour of crows' feathers that ring his eyes, or perhaps the servants talk. Or perhaps it is that mysterious sense that women have, that has grown within Giovanna along with her breasts.
He nods and then whispers yes when he remembers that she can see little more of him than a black shape in the shadows; she lies back down upon her pillows, the covering sheet lifted up on one side in invitation. He slides beneath it, and lies stiffly beside her, their bodies outlined by the pale sheet.
"I can sing to you if that will help?" she offers, and Ferdinand tells her yes again. She makes it so that the only answer he ever wishes to give is yes. They turn on their sides and move together as one as she sings, an old lullaby that Ferdinand half remembers. He feels the familiar stirring of his prick before he has even allowed one hand to rest lightly on her side.
At first he tries to hide it. He is not entirely sure why. They have seen the hounds' careless copulation without any sense of shame, and last spring they both watched a stallion mounting a brood mare, its swollen member so engorged Ferdinand had wondered that the mare could take it. But this feels different from the easy rutting of animals, something secret, something that mayhap should not be acknowledged even in the dark of the bedchamber.
He eases back, curling up like a startled black beetle, and wills himself to be in control of his own flesh.
He does not have the power, though, or the strength of will. His prick grows fat, and his hands stray further, their journeying hidden from sight beneath the covering sheet. And yet it is Giovanna who brings his hand to her firm little breast, rests his thumb against her flat nipple so that he is powerless to resist the temptation to stroke it. It lifts up under his ministrations, becoming a tight round nub, hard enough to suckle a greedy child, and she does not attempt to disguise her sharp intake of breath or the way her heartbeat gallops like a careening steed.
He reasons: if she stirs at his touch she can not dismiss him from her bed because he in turn stirs at her touch, so he uncurls, lifting his nightshirt so that he can press his fledgling manhood against her skin. She shifts in his arms, and the sensation is like magic, lighting a glow inside him that if it were visible would render the entire room as bright as day. He ruts against her, like a hound, like a wolf, his prick slipping between her warm thighs, and all too soon he's spilling his hot seed on her.
"It is our secret," she whispers to him later, and that's when he knows he'll love her forever, that he will never bear to share her.
*
The summer is marked by storms, cruel lightning that sets trees and houses alight, and rushing floods that tear across the land. They are not allowed to venture outside for days on end, but Ferdinand does not mind. The wolf does not need to roam when it has found all it needs at home.
He and his sister spend days as well as nights tangled in each other, and ever after that summer, whenever Ferdinand hears the roar of thunder, he remembers the way Giovanna would shriek and hide her face in his shoulder, and he would bury his face in her thick dark curls.
*
Luigi comes across him once, stumbling late from Giovanna's bedchamber, dawn already past and morning arisen. Ferdinand would have turned wolf then if he could do such a thing in the day, would have growled at his brother and made him feel the same foreboding fear that Ferdinand feels. There is nothing about Ferdinand to give away his secret, no clumsy untied lace or messy hair to tell his brother what lusts Ferdinand has been indulging, and yet he suspects it is writ plain upon his forehead.
That is the day, Ferdinand later realises, when Luigi begins to hate their sister.
Ferdinand does not begin to hate her until much later, when he can no longer have her, when she takes a humble steward as second husband - an honourable man whom she loves - and pushes Ferdinand away with hands that once tugged him to her eager breast.
*
Giovanna's neck is very beautiful, fair like a swan's. Ferdinand kisses it, and Giovanna laughs and kisses him back. She lifts up her skirts like the wanton she is, and rides him, pressing him down into the bed. He reaches up and grasps the heavy swell of breast that bids fair to burst out of her bodice, so tightly it is laced. "Cariola will be here soon to see to my toilet," she rebukes him. "There is no time for me to be undone."
"And yet I am always undone," he teases her, though in truth it is no joke. He becomes faint around her, his will soft even as his member stands up tall.
He wants to take her breast in his mouth, tongue at her nipples until they become dark. They both must dine at the court soon, but he has no taste for duck or rich pastries or dainty sweetmeats, only for Giovanna.
There is a knife by the bedside, a short dagger. He picks it up and presses it to her bosom, feels it sinks into plump flesh, not deep enough to mar or draw blood, but sufficient for there to be a pinprick mark when he lifts it.
"Brother," she laughs. "What would you?"
"I would have you." Her laces are strong and the dagger blunt, but he cuts through them with little difficulty, and then she is bare to him, a promised land of milk and honey, soft and sweet. She gasps as he laves each nipple, gasps more as he bites the white swell beneath the nipple. Gasps and rides him harder, shivering though the day is hotter even than those summer nights when they were but children. He stops her mouth with his hand when she cries out louder, for fear anyone might hear who should not.
*
When he vows he will never set his eyes upon her again, it is as though a madness has fallen upon him, one that nothing, no tincture or herb, no vast and painful prayers, no confession or absolution, can ever lift. He hunts the badger by owl-light, and by day the sound of her laughter haunts him in every trickle of wine into a glass, every fountain of water, every fall of rain.
He would banish her, and yet, for all that she has left the land, she will not be banished. She is in his heart and will not leave. They are not the oneness of a husband and wife, but something stronger, the Devil's own pairing.
When the last breath leaves her mortal frame, he knows it. He clutches his own throat, a desperate greed for each lungful of air. He breathes for her, though he hates her, but it is not enough to save her. He thinks his own end will come soon.
//
Title: hunt the badger by owl-light
Fandom: The Duchess of Malfi - John Webster
Pairing: Ferdinand/The Duchess
Rating: R
Word count: 2,216
Warnings: The incest, violence, lycanthropy and character deaths are all canon, the underage sex isn't! There's a hint of apparent non-con at one point.
Notes: Thanks to the wonderful innie-darling for betaing this piece of self-indulgence. The Cardinal and the Duchess aren't named in the play, so I gave them the names of the real individuals the story was based on. Going to hell in a handbasket. Also on AO3 here.
Ferdinand. I'll go hunt the badger by owl-light:
'Tis a deed of darkness.
The Duchess of Malfi Act IV Scene II
His brother's dog - a hunting bitch he named Alessandra - avoids him. When his brother has her by the leash and there is no escape for her, she worries the ground, fretful to be away. Once she even howls at Ferdinand. She knows what he is; she smells the wolf inside him.
Her fear always makes Luigi laugh. "I named her Alessandra, defender of man, and instead she turns tail and tries to run at the sight of a mere boy."
His brother's laugh is not a merry sound.
*
His sister's laugh is like the trickling water of a fountain in bright sunshine. It sparkles and shines and makes everyone smile. Every time, he gives her a wolf smile in return, and yet it troubles her not. Giovanna's laughter still falls sweet and high.
*
Ferdinand has nightmares. In them he prowls the olive tree plantations outside Cosenza, hunting wary creatures that only slip out of cover in the secrecy of the night. He hears everything, their pattering paws and their too-fast panting breaths, the little warning whimpers they risk. He smells their fear and it is the most exciting thing in the world. He is silent in his chase, racing after them, a natural hunter. Until, with no warning, no change of scene, he becomes the hunted, the horns and cries of a hunting party violent behind him, a loud frenzy of familiar hounds that bay when they get his scent. He forgets the hares and the rabbits that he chased, forgets everything but the need to survive, to run faster and further and longer than the hounds chasing him. The hounds whose cries he understands. They tell him they want to tear him to shreds, spray his blood over the land, pin him up as a trophy. He has become as Acteon, he knows their names: Lycisca, Oresitrophos running though she's blind in one eye, Ladon, Pterelas, Aura and Dromas, those two little more than pups but still eager for his blood. He knows them, has hunted behind them, but now they don't recognise him. They see only the wolf, a creature to be torn to pieces.
He wakes often in a cold sweat, bad humours upon him, fearful and shaking and unwilling to succumb again to Morpheus' cruel grip. He pads in the dark to his sister's room. At first it is enough just to hear the soft rhythm of her breathing, the sound so gentle and reassuring. But on a bad night, when he still remembers being torn limb from limb, howling in agony as he was shown no mercy, he clambers up onto the high bed, lifts the heavy linens and slips into bed beside her.
Her pillow smells of fresh lavender, her hair of camomile. His feet are cold until he presses them against hers.
It is comforting.
*
The summers in Calabria are always hot, the stones of the palace soaking up the day's sunlight so that even the nights stay warm. Giovanna sleeps with no more than a sheet to cover her modesty, her nightgown shed heedlessly on the floor, though Ferdinand would wager her waiting-woman must scold her every morning for such shamelessness.
His nightmares are worse in the summer. Luigi, who has ambitions to become a man of God when he is full-grown, tells him that hell creeps closer to the surface of the earth during the summer months, and that the Devil must be beckoning Ferdinand. He falls asleep imagining that he can keep the Devil at a distance with his wolf claws and fearsome teeth, but his dream-self believes otherwise. In his dreams, the Devil wins. Sometimes the Devil has the face of their father; sometimes even it is Luigi. Sometimes the Devil howls like Alessandra, and Ferdinand howls back in his wolf-voice.
Giovanna is never in his dreams. He thinks he would have peace if she were. Though as the summer grows hotter, it is something other than peace he finds by curling up at her side. Her curls are sweat-damp and there is a hint of musk in the warm bed, and when he presses his face in the hot curve of her neck, his prick stirs and swells.
There are nights he has woken sticky between his thighs, his little prick spent; other times he wakes and must take himself in hand, his own touch bewildering for the second, sharper heat it causes. But that is always over quickly, something new and secret in the privacy of his own bed-chamber. This is different, an ache that starts when he touches his sister, that grows when he slips a hand under the sheet to rest on her soft belly, that becomes almost unbearable when he reaches that hand down to discover the warm, sticky parts of her.
Last summer she was as flat as any boy, but this summer she grows little breasts. Her court dresses become longer, covering her ankles now that she is becoming a woman. She wears laced-up bodices that both hide and draw the eye to her new womanhood.
He aches to watch her, and longs to touch her by day as well as night.
*
He does not have to long in vain forever. He stumbles into his sister's room one night only to find her awake, kneeling on the bed, clutching a sheet to her body, a narrow procession of moonlight from an ill-drawn curtain illuminating her form. "Who goes there?" she demands, gazing out from behind the moonlight into the dark of the room, and Ferdinand thinks there is as much excitement as fear in her voice.
This is the first time he will steal into her bed when she is awake.
"It is I, Ferdinand," he calls out softly, loud enough for her ears only.
"Ah, my brother," she says, no surprise in her tones. "Did you have a nightmare?" she asks, and Ferdinand does not ask how she knows of his nightmares. Perhaps it is the shadows the colour of crows' feathers that ring his eyes, or perhaps the servants talk. Or perhaps it is that mysterious sense that women have, that has grown within Giovanna along with her breasts.
He nods and then whispers yes when he remembers that she can see little more of him than a black shape in the shadows; she lies back down upon her pillows, the covering sheet lifted up on one side in invitation. He slides beneath it, and lies stiffly beside her, their bodies outlined by the pale sheet.
"I can sing to you if that will help?" she offers, and Ferdinand tells her yes again. She makes it so that the only answer he ever wishes to give is yes. They turn on their sides and move together as one as she sings, an old lullaby that Ferdinand half remembers. He feels the familiar stirring of his prick before he has even allowed one hand to rest lightly on her side.
At first he tries to hide it. He is not entirely sure why. They have seen the hounds' careless copulation without any sense of shame, and last spring they both watched a stallion mounting a brood mare, its swollen member so engorged Ferdinand had wondered that the mare could take it. But this feels different from the easy rutting of animals, something secret, something that mayhap should not be acknowledged even in the dark of the bedchamber.
He eases back, curling up like a startled black beetle, and wills himself to be in control of his own flesh.
He does not have the power, though, or the strength of will. His prick grows fat, and his hands stray further, their journeying hidden from sight beneath the covering sheet. And yet it is Giovanna who brings his hand to her firm little breast, rests his thumb against her flat nipple so that he is powerless to resist the temptation to stroke it. It lifts up under his ministrations, becoming a tight round nub, hard enough to suckle a greedy child, and she does not attempt to disguise her sharp intake of breath or the way her heartbeat gallops like a careening steed.
He reasons: if she stirs at his touch she can not dismiss him from her bed because he in turn stirs at her touch, so he uncurls, lifting his nightshirt so that he can press his fledgling manhood against her skin. She shifts in his arms, and the sensation is like magic, lighting a glow inside him that if it were visible would render the entire room as bright as day. He ruts against her, like a hound, like a wolf, his prick slipping between her warm thighs, and all too soon he's spilling his hot seed on her.
"It is our secret," she whispers to him later, and that's when he knows he'll love her forever, that he will never bear to share her.
*
The summer is marked by storms, cruel lightning that sets trees and houses alight, and rushing floods that tear across the land. They are not allowed to venture outside for days on end, but Ferdinand does not mind. The wolf does not need to roam when it has found all it needs at home.
He and his sister spend days as well as nights tangled in each other, and ever after that summer, whenever Ferdinand hears the roar of thunder, he remembers the way Giovanna would shriek and hide her face in his shoulder, and he would bury his face in her thick dark curls.
*
Luigi comes across him once, stumbling late from Giovanna's bedchamber, dawn already past and morning arisen. Ferdinand would have turned wolf then if he could do such a thing in the day, would have growled at his brother and made him feel the same foreboding fear that Ferdinand feels. There is nothing about Ferdinand to give away his secret, no clumsy untied lace or messy hair to tell his brother what lusts Ferdinand has been indulging, and yet he suspects it is writ plain upon his forehead.
That is the day, Ferdinand later realises, when Luigi begins to hate their sister.
Ferdinand does not begin to hate her until much later, when he can no longer have her, when she takes a humble steward as second husband - an honourable man whom she loves - and pushes Ferdinand away with hands that once tugged him to her eager breast.
*
Giovanna's neck is very beautiful, fair like a swan's. Ferdinand kisses it, and Giovanna laughs and kisses him back. She lifts up her skirts like the wanton she is, and rides him, pressing him down into the bed. He reaches up and grasps the heavy swell of breast that bids fair to burst out of her bodice, so tightly it is laced. "Cariola will be here soon to see to my toilet," she rebukes him. "There is no time for me to be undone."
"And yet I am always undone," he teases her, though in truth it is no joke. He becomes faint around her, his will soft even as his member stands up tall.
He wants to take her breast in his mouth, tongue at her nipples until they become dark. They both must dine at the court soon, but he has no taste for duck or rich pastries or dainty sweetmeats, only for Giovanna.
There is a knife by the bedside, a short dagger. He picks it up and presses it to her bosom, feels it sinks into plump flesh, not deep enough to mar or draw blood, but sufficient for there to be a pinprick mark when he lifts it.
"Brother," she laughs. "What would you?"
"I would have you." Her laces are strong and the dagger blunt, but he cuts through them with little difficulty, and then she is bare to him, a promised land of milk and honey, soft and sweet. She gasps as he laves each nipple, gasps more as he bites the white swell beneath the nipple. Gasps and rides him harder, shivering though the day is hotter even than those summer nights when they were but children. He stops her mouth with his hand when she cries out louder, for fear anyone might hear who should not.
*
When he vows he will never set his eyes upon her again, it is as though a madness has fallen upon him, one that nothing, no tincture or herb, no vast and painful prayers, no confession or absolution, can ever lift. He hunts the badger by owl-light, and by day the sound of her laughter haunts him in every trickle of wine into a glass, every fountain of water, every fall of rain.
He would banish her, and yet, for all that she has left the land, she will not be banished. She is in his heart and will not leave. They are not the oneness of a husband and wife, but something stronger, the Devil's own pairing.
When the last breath leaves her mortal frame, he knows it. He clutches his own throat, a desperate greed for each lungful of air. He breathes for her, though he hates her, but it is not enough to save her. He thinks his own end will come soon.
//