March 2013
Another one of those hare-brained drabbles I wrote, and for what it is I really like it.
This is me attempting to define Gretel and Ben's relationship for myself.
Why did Hansel have to shoot him like that?
Gretel pinned a knee into his chest to keep him from squirming. "It'll only take a second to get the bullet out if you just hold still," she said, unnecessarily.
"You're kind of taking more than a second to even find it," Ben countered.
Exasperated, Gretel puffed a loose strand of hair from her eyes, looking straight ahead of her so he wouldn't catch the glint of pride. "My brother is a good shot."
"I'll give him that." Ben squirmed around her probing fingers. "I mean, I'm still alive. He has to know what he's doing."
"Hmm." Gretel leaned down to get a better angle. "That he does. Wait, don't move-" And with a shriek from Ben she wrenched the bullet out of the wound, triumphant.
"Damn," Hansel remarked, walking in just at that moment, "Look what your skeleton did to that one, kid." The bullet was crumpled around the tip from where it had lodged itself between the scapula and clavicle – somehow. Hansel could have sworn up down and sideways that the angle of the shot was totally wrong for that. Then again, Ben had been walking around and moving with that bullet in him for a while before Gretel finally beat him into submission for emergency field surgery.
Ben remained silent; one tear trailed from each outer corner of his eye, and there was a little whimper, but that was the end of it. "Want a lolli for being a good sport?" She wasn't serious.
Remembering the gingerbread witch's house, Ben shook his head anyway.
'Don't eat the fucking candy.'
–
Taking the bullet out had caused enough damage that Ben needed to keep his arm in a sling for a few days. He remained adamant, after everything, about becoming a witch hunter. Hansel and Gretel both found themselves faintly impressed. But they each had their reservations. Ben was too young, they both wanted to press; but Ben could counter that Hansel was younger still when the siblings started.
It was more than a matter of age. Ben had a choice. He didn't have to be a witch hunter. He could stay in the background, as a dedicated fan.
Hansel and Gretel... the way everything happened, there was nothing else they could do. They knew what was out there; it had been burned into their minds. How could they have done anything else – Hansel grow up to work a farm like their father, Gretel get married and have children like their mother – when the only thing at the front of their minds was this happened to us and it should never happen to another child again?
But they couldn't kick Ben away. He lived by himself, before his heroes came along. Before Gretel found himself in his home, surrounded by paraphernalia and memorabilia because Ben didn't have anything else in his life. Parents dead. No siblings. Just a house that he tilled a neighbor's field to pay for, just so he had a place for everything he collected.
And Gretel had sensed this.
Ben had a loneliness about him that he hid so well. An aura of isolation, finding solace in his interests. "Creepy" as they were, so said Hansel.
There was a reason she didn't smash his face in when she caught him touching her breast.
A reason that Hansel couldn't understand if she ever told him about any of it.
–
The sling was gone. They hadn't moved yet. They didn't have a new case.
Gretel read old articles – about witches, about distant royalty. Ben stared into the fire. The rest of the inn's tenants had gone to bed hours ago. Hansel... was elsewhere. Gretel hoped that whatever he was doing, he'd brought enough medicine to last until he came back. She worried when she at least wasn't there to administer it if he pushed things out too long. The worry showed in the way she chewed her lip; her forehead was perfectly smooth, like white marble. A mask of ice. It was the only way she could explain why no one dared critique her lack of a dress. Aside from carrying a big fucking gun. She looked too formidable. Too ready to break the face of anyone who tried to force a skirt onto her.
She had to.
Ben coughed and Gretel looked up. Just a cough. But somehow the atmosphere in the room had changed. She tried to ignore it.
But she felt like Ben wanted to say something.
Well, if he wanted to, really, he would. Gretel typically saved interrogation for witches, and sheriffs who stuck their noses in the wrong places and then didn't share with the class.
"Gretel?"
She almost didn't hear him. Almost.
"What is it?"
"I was wondering..."
Silence stretched. The tiniest hint of a frown creased between her brows.
"Never mind." It hung in the air. Dismissing it, finally, Gretel looked back down at the paper in her hands.
"Gretel?"
She breathed a quiet sigh. "Yes, Ben?"
"Have you... Uh."
Tired of the game already, she replied, "Probably, but I don't remember." Ben squeaked from the chair. Like he thought she had read his mind? "Seriously, Ben, what is it?"
Like a snapping vine he rose from the chair and moved in front of her. His hands twitched at his sides. There was no threat about him; he knew Gretel was perfectly capable of bashing him in, hammering him straight again, and repeating the bashing in the opposite direction. So what he was doing now... felt extremely foolhardy.
"I need to know," he forced out in pieces, "Whether...whether..." His eyes traveled so quickly up and down her body, fixing at a point directly below her nose. And she understood.
"Oh, Ben," she said sympathetically, placing the paper aside. She made room on the armchair for him to sit. He took the invitation, but very deliberately kept space between them. Not having this, Gretel curled a hand around his forehead and brought him to rest against her shoulder. "I get it. I do. And I understand. But I think you also know."
And Ben heaved a sigh, and he didn't say anything. A little wiggle, like a nod. Though Gretel couldn't see for sure, he kept his eyes above the gap between her breasts. For a while. "Have I been the only one?" she asked, gently pushing his hair back, a more motherly gesture to get her intentions across. Ben rubbed the bridge of his nose in a sheepish way.
"There was a girl, when I was really little. She had ginger pigtails and freckles." He snorted derisively at himself.
"What happened to that?"
"She got sick."
Gretel halted. And resumed.
"And then I read about you two in the newspaper. There was a picture. Things kind of... escalated from there. As I got older, I mean. I felt like... Somehow I felt like I could know you, if I read every article I found. Both of you, I mean. But then I met you and...and then I took you home after you had that fight with the Grand Witch and..."
Gretel stopped stroking his hair again. "And what?" Not that she was particularly worried about first impressions but-
"I realized I had no idea what I wanted to get myself into. It was... well, I met my heroes, and you were so much more than I could have imagined. I... was scared to fall in love with you, then. The Gretel I'd pictured in my head before... was just words on a page about what you did. There was nothing about who you were. I was scared that you would push me away; I'm just a kid, right? But... you looked at my scrapbook. You looked at a huge piece of my life, and you liked it. And... you don't know how happy that made me. I had always felt like no one else but you could possibly have understood that part about me, and I never tried to bring anyone else in."
Here, Gretel wondered if Hansel might have slipped something into Ben's drink as a joke; the kid was being unusually articulate this evening. He had to be rambling, on the edge of sleep now. It was late, after all. She felt sleep tugging at the edges of her mind, her thoughts running together into a mellow pool.
"You're not the only one following our story, Ben, I promise," Gretel murmured, resuming the hair stroking again. She wasn't sure why she was still doing it; it just felt right.
"I'm the only one here."
"But you're coming with us." She couldn't just leave him here with himself and his belief that no one else would ever share in his world.
From the moment the kid had first approached herself and her brother in the tavern, clutching his scrapbook of their exploits like so ratty a security blanket, a stuffed bear retained from infancy; Gretel had felt like he was something she wanted to protect.
And how could she protect him if he chickened out now and stayed in Augsburg?
"Yeah." He could stay with her, if he went with them. At least for a little while. "Gretel?"
"Hmm?" She had started to fall asleep.
"Am I creepy?"
Instead of laughing, she smiled to herself, and pressed her lips into his hair. "Go to sleep, Ben," she whispered.
Hansel found them like that the following morning. Ben remained mercifully out like a light. And Gretel dared her brother with her eyes to say anything about it.
I see Gretel as being something between Team Mom and Cool Big Sis to Ben, which I find a lot more interesting. :)
Thank you for reading!