Once upon a time, there was an old woman. No, this gives the wrong impression. The old woman is still there, like many of her kind, keepers of knowledge—and therefore power—far beyond men. The old woman was—is—a witch.
In a time—a darker time, perhaps—a meaner time, certainly, and a time when magic existed openly in the world, before cold iron, hot powder, and clean penstrokes banished it to shadowed corners and liminal spaces—there was a woodcutter. Woodcutters and their children seemed to be rather prone to strange happenstances at that time, as it were, and so, he loved, and married, and his wife bore him two children.
You know this story, don't you? The two children were named Hansel and Gretel. The first a boy, the second a girl. Their mother died, and their stepmother, in the manner of stepmothers of this sort, found them expendable when famine struck. They were left in the woods and the hands of fate. Of course, in the manner of all children left in the woods, they did not die. The first time, they found their way back home; the second time, lost deep in the dark forest, they found their way to a house. A wonderous house! One of gingerbread and icing, spun sugar and tempered chocolate. Driven by hunger, these two children ate, and for their crimes, the brother was imprisoned, to pay back with flesh what he had unlawfully taken (for witches have their own laws, see, alien to us though they may seem); the sister indentured, to work off her debt by feeding her penned brother and keeping the witch's house.
You know what happened. The brother endured—the passive sort of endurance, bearing captivity and confinement and the knowledge of his impending death, forced to watch his sister suffer. The sister endured—the active sort of endurance, biting down on rebellion and too-telling inquisitiveness and the fear of the fate in store for her brother, forced to comport herself despite her hands being forced to bring their doom. In the end, the sister's ingenuity, coupled with courage, defeated the witch and won the siblings their freedom.
This is when the story starts being wrong. Witches are feared by men, and men react to their fears with fire. No witch worth her spells can be harmed by it, not if she has any love of life. But Gretel had won the house and its contents by right of conquest, so the witch could not—would not either—oppose the girl further. The children left. The witch left also, to build another house of cakes and cookies.
The children grew up, and had children of their own, who had children in turn, allowing memory to fade to mere myth, as they lived their mundane lives. Yet their ancestors had supped at a table of a Hexe, and that marked their blood as changed. Touched by witchcraft—a very attractive quality, for certain other creatures.
Uncounted generations passed. The witch checked on the descendants of the siblings who bested her, sometimes. Call it curiosity, call it concern, call it a combination of the two. It was only natural for her to hear the news of one of them being taken by the Courts. Seelie. They had a fascination for the simple innocence of children, as great as the Unseelie love of adults' complexity of emotion. The witch watched as the mother went to treat with the Court, as such things went—and if the way to the Good Neighbors was so easily found, what of it? If the woman found two iron knitting needles in her pack, what of it? If a red riding hood could be found beneath a tree, if a wolf would startle the woman from her enchanted stupor, if a hoary crone gave her a flask of some vital substance for no more than a story, what of it?
These too-fair folk had changed since the days when Janet could save her knight by waiting at a crossroads and not letting go. Though the woman saved her child, she lost her life.
The old woman had cradled the infant in its swaddling, and laughed away all the fair lords and ladies who cooed endearments and dripped sympathy with honeyed voices, then tramped back to her new gingerbread house.
The baby had been fed with goat's milk and bread sops, watched over by skulls glowing with fire within. He grew up stirring mysterious concoctions and knitting cotton candy to sweaters for gingerbread children (there was an episode during which he thought himself one of them, and was deathly afraid of water and foxes both). There had been no one to return the boy to, and so he was raised by three riders, of the sun, night, and day, two witches, one tall and thin, the other plump and stout, and a single great wolf, taller than he.
He learned strange things, in his childhood years: guard your name carefully, give it to no one. True love is potent beyond measure, though it need not be born from Cupid's arrow-prick. Evil stepparents get their comeuppance.
The last, Turmeric mused, was the one he least expected to be relevant. And yet here he was, teaching Bianchi about tinctures of arsenic and cyanide, and shape of Flame that coaxed ergot to lethal potency. Hemlock was too noble a death, given who had also perished by it. Aconite, that old faithful, but one which on account of the Wolf, he did not use. Foxglove, with its brilliant blooms and medical properties.
"Slow poisoning still remains ineffective." He tried again, "Your parents know that you have Poison Cooking, so they will react the moment symptoms of poisoning show up."
"That," Bianchi replied darkly, "Is why I am going to use multiple, non-Flame poisons."
He drew in a breath, but Bianchi continued through gritted teeth, "Basil has explained the precedent of open challenges to me already, but I don't care! I don't fucking care about legitimizing my inheritance, I don't care for my Famiglia. I just want my brother, and my parents can go fuck themselves!"
Revenge. Poetic justice usually turned out well, though one should not escalate. "Then use a single-dose poison." He pointed out the array of death-dealing substances laid out upon the laboratory counter.
Hiss. The foxglove rose menacingly, pink and red trumpets swelling once more with life, "They made me poison my brother!" Bianchi snarled, unearthly fragrance coming from where her hands clenched the foxglove stalks, and the layers of blossoms darkened to deathly hues, shedding white pollen and dripping too-viscous nectar. "They want me to keep poisoning my brother! They deserve to suffer what they wanted us to suffer—not just—not just die a quick death!"
Gretel never regretted pushing Oma into the oven, and yet she did return to that place where a candy-house moldered, and stand there, in the snow, and try to silence the screams in her memory. Gretel never regretted any of it, least of all saving her brother, and there had been no question that the witch had been deserving. Yet she had needed to silence those screams.
"It will be unpleasant to look at." Warned the grandson of that witch, who was also the manifold-great-grandson of her victim, "No matter how terrible your target, they are still human—you will still care. That is not wrong. A swift death would be easier on both sides—it'll be better by far than looking at lingering suffering."
"They deserve it!"
"They will not know what their penance is for." He countered evenly, "There is no point in it—the satisfaction won't last, but the memory of their last moments will."
The monkshoods of aconite were flourishing as well now, purple as bruises and yellow as brimstone, his student's Storm expressing what her words could not, pain tangible in the toxins now hanging in the air, forcing him to stoke his own Flames to survive them.
"I hate them!" Bianchi hissed again, the stems of foxglove pulping in her fingers to ooze up her arms, coating her hands in a cross of lady's gloves and knight's gauntlets, all in lurid shades of plum and pink.
"It is reasonable to." He agreed, "But any victim of slow poisoning dies in a pitiable state, and I do not think you truly seek such cruelty."
Bianchi grimaced, and paced, and kicked at a wall. Finally, she threw down the stalks in exhaustion, "You're right. I don't." She slumped, "But I still want them to suffer."
"Humiliation is suffering." Turmeric suggested, "Knowing that they have lost their children's love is also suffering. Being forced to face you on the dueling grounds would be suffering also. And they do not call for pity."
"It is easier to be angry for a short while than to hold it for years." Bianchi scrubbed her face with a sleeve, "I know that. I think that I need to think."
"That would be for the best, I believe."
"Sorry for the mess."
"Don't worry about that. I'll clean up, you head upstairs."
"Thanks."
Turmeric pulsed disintegrating Storm Flames through the space, careful to avoid damaging the appliances. The man was not fond of vindictiveness, and the irony of Bianchi's intended methods did seem to be far to close to that of a Court of sharp-toothed creatures. There were people who did not balk at such excess cruelty, his colleagues among them, but Bianchi was not so—there was a great difference between the imagination of an act, shaped by stories, and the execution—the girl could do the former, but not the latter.
Rinsing a washcloth, he scrubbed the surfaces down. After Bianchi succeeded, she would still need a guardian, for Hayato if nothing else. And he had an inkling of who to seek. Debt. Care. Love. Such things combined made for a potent combination.
Turmeric wrinkled his nose. Even if that man required a miraculous revelation on proper conduct when faced with women—encounters with Oregano and Lal having failed to impress his failings onto him—Trident Shamal was honorable, as far as Mafia men went. Powerful too, which was no less essential, given the situation.
He went upstairs. Oregano raised an eyebrow at his frown. "What's the matter?"
"Shamal."
"Daemon's taken quite a shine to Bianchi."
"That is…"
"His comeuppance." Oregano smirked, "I may not have planned it, but it's coming together wonderfully—woe onto others via the 666, possibly. Don't worry, Shamal will still be functional afterwards."
"This one needs to learn Primo's techniques." I announced to sir as he trudged through his workload while I kept him there by the power of my gaze—he would run away otherwise.
"What?!" Sir tried to overturn his coffee with his flailing. I held it hostage. "But Basil, those are Sky techniques!"
"This one researched the Young Master's condition." I revealed placidly, "All the theory involved has been committed to memory. Yet this one has no experience with the practical. This one suspects that it would be easier to replicate Giotto's techniques with Sky Flames, followed by altering the known base to find Rain variants."
Sir reached across his desk to ruffle my hair, overturning the stack of files in his inbox, "Shishou is very happy that you want to learn lots of fun things, Basil-kun! But Tuna-fishy's problem is very big!"
I waited for him to continue. "Intuition is very loud, Basil-kun! And that's a problem too! It's going to be very hard to figure out how to help Tuna-fishy without making the problem worse!"
23. The number clicked into my thoughts. I set my face, "This one has committed."
"Are you sure?" Sir leaned forward, pushing the mug he was using as a pen-holder off the desk, sending the writing implements rolling into the inaccessible crevices created by the furniture.
22. "Yes." I confirmed seriously, though the effect was quite ruined by me trying to reach into the dusty crevice between the sofa and the bookshelf. So the number was a countdown… of the 666 perhaps?
He grinned and rolled his chair back (it was a spinning chair), making sure not to cap his pen, "Come on then! To the training rooms!"
I sneezed from the dust, then followed him with a skip.
Full disclosure, I didn't see the Hansel and Gretel/Hayato and Bianchi parallels until they started writing themselves. There's also the line in Wikipedia of how some versions have the stepmother and the witch being symbolically the same person. Bianchi's mother is therefore the witch and stepmother in the sense of wanting to kill her stepson. Her father is the witch in the sense of forcing Bianchi to feed her brother to fatten him/hurt him. Oh, and Turmeric's aro/pansexual. Oma's true love is perfectly effective for any evil curses, thank you very much.
Basil's Chigiri problems include not realizing people get traumatized when they kill people in a brutally drawn-out fashion, or that you don't kill your parents without getting issues (she didn't).
And then Iemitsu. Ah, Iemitsu. Who knows whether he's speaking from personal experience or trying to convince himself that what Ninth did was for the best? He doesn't know, he's a mess of contradicting instincts.
