Yeah, so, I’m on break and I have like All The Prompts to work on and I’m writing a Hanukkah fic for the Scarlet Witch and I have a chapter of a WIP to work on, but also my aunt outed me to my grandparents and I am so fucking tired of my family. So I’m a little drunk, I’m watching Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, and I do what I want. Crossposted to AO3.
The witches were always so careful to tie Hansel up. Apparently, it was something about the height, and the leather, and possibly the attempting-to-murder them. Hell if Hansel cared what their logic was. It was uncomfortable—his wrists aching in their shackles, every muscle in his shoulders screaming at the constraint, the muscles in his legs spasming as he struggled to rest his weight on his toes—but he had been uncomfortable before. This didn’t even make the list of the most discomfort he’d ever been in. Ben was coming unglued beside him, locked tidily into a cell with his hands shackled as he shook and tried to bargain with the witch as she sharpened a knife. They’d barely been here an hour, for the love of God, and she’d only managed to snag half of them—Gretel and Edward were still out and about.
“You’re not going to get anywhere, kid,” Hansel sighed, and Ben whipped around to look at him.
“I’m not—aren’t you concerned about this?” Ben demanded, voice cracking.
“Nope,” Hansel said, as flat as ever. Disinterest bordering on dysfunction, a town mayor had commented once. Of course, then he had called Gretel a hot piece of bloodthirsty ass and tried to grab himself a piece, and she’d snapped his arm at the elbow. They hadn’t been back. “Been captured before. Not dead yet. Gonna be fine.”
“Do you really think Gre–” Hansel sent Ben a lethal glare and the boy shut up. The witch’s head snapped up from sharpening her knife and glassy black eyes fixed on Ben.
“What wasssss that?” the witch demanded, stalking forward with the half-liquid look of something turned soft with rot. Horns curled back out of her stringy white hair, not quite far enough to pierce the base of her skull, and her flesh was withered around her bones—at close quarters, it looked almost as if the light should shine through her. The thundering in Hansel’s bruised ribs remembered that she wasn’t nearly so fragile as she seemed. She had tossed him into a tree like so much driftwood. She pointed the knife at Ben through the bars, gripped in fingers like knobbed twigs, nails blackened and ragged at their tips.
The boy, to his credit in Hansel’s humble opinion, pressed his lips together and shied back from the bars.
“What did you sssssay?” she half-shrieked.
“Nothing,” Ben insisted, desperate.
“What was that name? Did you have ssssssomeone elsssse with you?!”
“Yeah,” drawled a voice from the door. “Me.”
The witch spun around on her heels and hurled a blast of power at the door, a blind strike meant to destroy the threat on the spot.
Gretel, crossbow braced against her shoulder, didn’t even flinch, arching an eyebrow in elegant disdain. She fired, and the witch struck the arrow out of the air.
“Very scary,” Gretel snarled, and lunged.
The witch’s skull made a sick crunching sound when Gretel slammed the butt of her crossbow across her withered jaw. The witch slashed, knife in one hand and wand in the other, and a ragged red line gaped over Gretel’s collarbone. It didn’t even seem to register, Gretel’s hand whipping out to bury a short blade in the witch’s throat. Black blood gushed over Gretel’s fingers, and she shattered the witch’s nose with another brutal stroke of the crossbow.
Another blast of energy ripped out of the witch’s wand with a screech. It skittered off Gretel’s shoulder and shattered a window. Gretel sneered, another small knife appearing out of nowhere, embedded in the witch’s shoulder.
The two went down in a tangle of fists and blades, black and red blood mingled on the wood floor, and Hansel sighed. Ben gaped at the fight, then looked at him, and Hansel awarded him a small shake of his head.
Sometimes Gretel just had to get it out of her system.
There was a burst of white light, blazing in the dark cottage, and a crack like thunder, and the witch flew into the wall. Her ragged wooden wand spun away, clattering to the ground. Gretel scrambled back to her feet in a blur, one palm still outstretched and magic still crackling almost tangibly over her skin. She was still figuring out magic, wholly self-taught and therefore with even less regard for the rules than usual, but energy blasts had come fast and easy. Blood was spilling down her chest from the knife wound, more staining her chin from a split upper lip, and her red-streaked teeth were bared in a feral grin.
“You took my brother,” Gretel said, quiet, as the witch struggled back to her feet, rickety. The burst of white magic seemed to have taxed her seriously, and Gretel had the strength of youth and rage and power on her side. “He’s mine. And you took him.” She caught the witch under the jaw, hand wrapped tight around her throat without regard for the black blood still spilling freely.
“White—witch,” the witch gasped as Gretel tightened her grip. “Won’t—kill me.”
“Oh darlin’,” Hansel muttered, and he heard Gretel laugh, high and wild with the thrill of the hunt.
“I’m a grand white witch,” Gretel said. “Not a pacifist.” She stomped on the butt of her crossbow and snapped the long knife away from the wooden shaft, bringing it up as she lifted the witch off the ground. The witch’s eyes bulged as Gretel pressed the blade into her chest, and blood sputtered from her lips. “I’d tell you to spread the word, but then again.” She shrugged and gave a brutal wrench with her wrist. The knife twisted with a messy shluck, black blood splattering the front of Gretel’s leathers, and the witch’s heart came free as Gretel released her throat.
The body slumped to the bottom of the wall, and the heart fell with a wet sound to the floor at Gretel’s feet. She bared her teeth down at the dead witch, eyes wild with something dark and lethal, and carefully, precisely, lowered her boot onto the heart seeping black over the wood. Only when it was crushed into a mess of corrupted tissue and thick fluid did Gretel turn, meticulous, back to Hansel behind her.
“Feel better, sis?” Hansel asked, raising his eyebrows at her. She scowled at him and snatched the key from the witch’s belt, then swept over to him and rose up onto her toes to unlock his cuffs.
“Hansel,” she said, lowering his arms over her shoulders and holding him up as he tried to reacquaint his legs with the idea of standing. He entertained a brief moment of hope that she was planning to just unlock Ben, light the cabin on fire, and get on with business, but the deep breath didn’t bode well. “You fucking moron.”
“There it is,” he muttered, gritting his teeth as shocks of pain radiated out from, apparently, every joint in his body.
“I can’t believe you!” Gretel half-shouted, shifting Hansel onto one shoulder and giving him a sharp punch in the ribs. He groaned and curled protectively around his abused chest as best he could. “You could’ve been killed, good Christ!”
“Ben, sis,” Hansel said, a half-hearted attempt at derailing her. He’d have more success trying to hold back the ocean with his bare hands. Gretel was a force of nature—he’d developed his fine balance of temper and boredom as sheer self-preservation in the face of her.
“And Ben!” Gretel continued with a broad gesture that shattered another window, her scowl deepening. “What are you doing taking him off into fuck-all nowhere hunting psychotic witches? He can barely find his dick with both hands and a manual!”
“Hey,” Ben said, offended. “I resent that remark.”
Gretel snorted, never at her nicest when coming down off a high rage of blood and protection, and shot back, “You resemble that remark, kid. Here.” She tossed the key through the bars and it landed perfectly at his feet, a combination of practiced skill and the sort of easy luck Hansel and his sister had always dragged behind him. He thought it might be their mother’s blessing, now, the last breath of a grand white witch for her son and her daughter—the heir to her power, and her guardian, or so Hansel sometimes thought of them when he was drunk enough. Ben fumbled for the key and twisted his hand awkwardly to unlock his shackles, then the door of his cell, and stumbled out to join them. He gave Gretel an alarmed look, tracking the black blood splashed across her leathers and hands and her own blood in her teeth.
“Ben, hold my idiot brother while the feeling comes back into his feet,” Gretel ordered, beckoning Ben over imperiously. “I’m getting Edward, and then we’re going to burn this bitch down.” She shifted Hansel onto Ben’s shoulder without another word—the slender boy almost crumpled in surprise—and stormed out the door.
Hansel sighed, shaking out one foot, then the other, in an attempt to encourage the blood flow back into its proper path. “How’re you doin’, kid?”
“That was…something,” Ben breathed, staring after Gretel with something not unlike terrified lust on his face.
“Oh, no,” Hansel warned. “I know that look. Trust me, kid, she loses her appeal when she breaks all the fingers in your hand. Seen it a hundred times.”
“She’s scary,” Ben said frankly.
“Yeah,” Hansel said, fond. “She’s crazy.”
“Why’s everyone afraid of you again?”
“’Cause Gretel’s a pretty girl, and nobody wants to think a pretty girl’s the loose cannon,” Hansel said, a fresh wave of prickling pain heralding the return of proper circulation. “But trust me, I’m the sane one.” He paused, and added, “You know, comparatively speaking.”
