Who: Gretel and Negan What: Serious feels. Where: Negan's room When: Thursday, early morning Rating: Medium for feels, high for Negan's mouth Status: Complete
One second, the only things Gretel was consciously aware of was the weakness a recently broken fever had left in her- body and soul- and the now-familiar sounds of Negan’s voice in low, dark chocolate song; the next, the hot ache in her shoulder was once gone- again. Her hair was longer, draped like a thick blanket over her shoulder and both hers and the arm wrapped around her bare stomach from behind, beneath the covers. A second ago she was wrapped in a man’s shirt, blankets, sweating from infection and fighting for her life. Now she was naked, still under covers, but without the infection, and the memories of her life as a witch hunter, and at the hotel, rightly in place among those of a completely separate life, left behind in the continuing dream.
It had been going on for days, her and Negan’s reality being split between this world and another one completely. The barriers between what was real and what wasn’t had long ago started to thin- now they were crumbling. Everything on either side felt as real as everything she had ever known, both in her life before this place and now; a thin spike of nerves tightened in her chest at the strain of fighting to figure out who she was for the first few seconds of every day. Gretel the Witchhunter slowly sat up in Negan’s bed, leaving his heavy arm around her middle as she covered her face with both palms, then pushed them up through her hair with her eyes closed and concentrated on breathing.
During the first minutes after waking, it wasn’t unusual for Negan to think he was still dreaming. Unlike the first time, when they’d been pulled from a moment out of the blue before they woke up, every time since then had been after they’d gone to sleep. Waking up in the hotel was always warmer, and never held the same anxiety that he had in his dreams, but he still couldn’t figure it out. It didn’t help that he and Gretel had been sleeping together all week, either, but that wouldn’t make things any different. They could never stay away from each other for long.
He didn’t stir until Gretel did, his arm shifting and his hand curling around where it had shifted to rest by her hip. Like other times before, he felt like they were still dreaming, and when he realized Gretel’s skin was warm instead of burning hot, he felt an immediate sense of relief. A low noise rumbled in the back of his throat, and his hand tightened around her hip, rubbing slowly with his thumb.
It clicked when he blinked his eyes open and saw she was naked, and her hair fell to her waist. The realization was like a switch was flipped, but he didn’t move just yet. He sighed through his nose, half debating if he should just fall back asleep again. It seemed easier than dealing with whatever reality they were facing.
If she were honest with herself, she would’ve considered the same thing, even knowing she would’ve gone back to straddling a bad fever with an injury that wouldn’t heal properly for weeks- if at all. The problem was the fact that Gretel felt like she didn’t know anything anymore- no decision felt more right or wrong, her emotions were impossible to pin down, and she had no idea what to do about any of it.
She felt him stir, and ironically it brought her a small thread of relief she didn’t fully understand. Well- she did understand it, but actually rationalizing it never got her anywhere. Gretel sighed too, letting her hands drop from her hair- one laid on Negan’s wrist on her abdomen, the other draped behind him, nestled between his back and the blanket. She didn’t look at him, though- her eyes slowly familiarized themselves with the hotel bedroom. She didn’t speak for several more moments, but when she did, it was quiet, and breathy.
“What’s happening to us…”
Gretel’s hands on his skin were comforting and familiar in a way he was starting to get used to. His resolve had all but crumbled at the beginning of the week, and it just continued every night they were brought back to their dream world away from the hotel. Part of him had thought that maybe the dreams would stop, and maybe they could go back to normal, but they only continued on and made every day more confusing than the one before.
The only constant Negan had throughout everything was Gretel. She was always there. He relaxed into her touch, and gave her hip a squeeze. He didn’t want to move, yet, like if he laid on his side and just stared at her hip, maybe everything else would go away. It was all just too much to deal with.
“I don’t fucking know,” he muttered, rubbing his thumb over her hip bone. Finally, he looked up at her, mostly to assure himself that she no longer had her gunshot wound- again. “This fucking hotel.”
He was right, and the second the words left his mouth, Gretel realized she’d already known it anyway. What else could it possibly be? -then again, asking that question to herself produced just as many certain answers as any other desperate question she’d agonized over while being awake for the last few days.
One side-effect of their split lives was the feeling of never quite being rested, and that had gotten worse since time in the winter wasteland seemed to be normalizing along with time here at the hotel, which was a strong factor into why they were taking so long to figure out which was reality every morning. Gretel finally looked back down at his face when she sensed his eyes on her; she felt the same warmth that swelled in her chest when she was the woman in the dream- the connection she’d formed with him that was as tangible as a thousand threads pulling them together. But that wasn’t new, it was only stronger now- and much more complicated.
Without really thinking about it, the hand that was behind his shoulder blades slid upward and gently ran through his black, bed-mussed hair; she laid her head back against the headboard and exhaled slowly through her nose.
“It’s given me dreams before,” she started, still quiet. “Some of them lasted a long time… a lifetime. But never something that kept going like this.” She’d told him when he first arrived at the hotel about that one, after he asked what the best thing she’d ever experienced from the hotel had been. A normal life, from beginning to end, with varying degrees of joy and loss and love and pain, but overall there had been peace. What they were experiencing now was not the same; it wasn’t peaceful. It felt too real.
Negan angled his head into her touch out of reflex. At this point, there was no denying that what happened in their dreams was real, or else being in each other’s company wouldn’t feel so normal, and her touch wouldn’t feel so soothing and familiar.
But that was the problem- the dreams were starting to make it harder to hold onto what he thought was reality. Up until they’d started, he’d been sure it was reality, no matter how twisted it was. Now, he was starting to have his doubts, and he found himself feeling slightly more disappointed every time he woke back up in the hotel. It was a small, nagging feeling, but it was still there at the back of his mind.
“You think it’s happening to anyone else?”
She shook her head faintly; her fingertips lazily threading through his hair to the scalp in thoughtless, affectionate touches.
“Hard to say. I haven’t spoken to anyone besides Hansel- and it’s definitely not happening to him.” Saying that was it’s own little pain centered in the back of her jaw; Hansel- this Hansel- hadn’t been through the hotel’s games nearly as long as she had. He was still acclimating, and it was just as slow and painful as it had been the first time, but now there was an impossible distance between the two of them created by the memories she had of this place that he didn’t. The detachment was hard for her brother to deal with, and this new thing was simply more to that.
He didn’t exactly have the best opinion of Negan to begin with, either.
“It doesn’t seem like it on the network either,” she added with another sigh, and drew one leg up under the blanket, bent at the knee.
Negan nodded as he shifted onto his back, staying close so her fingers could stay in his hair, and he could keep one hand on her leg. When she bent it, he wrapped his arm loosely around her upper leg, his hand resting lightly on the back of her thigh. The closeness was so habitual, he moved without a second thought.
He didn’t know what to think. The fact that it wasn’t happening to everyone was probably a good thing. It was good that it wasn’t happening to Judith, at least- everyone else was secondary. But the fact that it kept happening to him and Gretel felt significant in a way he couldn’t really describe, but he was starting to admit to himself. It was unavoidable. They’d been awake for more than half a week straight because of it.
“You think it’ll stop?” he asked, rubbing his thumb absent-mindedly over her skin.
Gretel didn’t answer right away; she didn’t have an answer, not anymore than she did for the question of why this was happening to them, why it was his world they kept going back to. His touch on her leg was also distracting, but not in any conscious way; it felt good, warm, and familiar.
“If I had to guess… everything here stops eventually,” she finally said, though her voice carried a hint of gravity, like news she didn’t know was good or bad. She was quiet for another moment, letting her thoughts flow from that realization, from the back and forth of his thumb, and the contrast between the skin of his palm and her thigh. She looked down at him, letting her head loll on the headboard, causing a few lengths of her hair to fall from her shoulder in the process.
His face was the same face in the dream, same grey-to-black markings in his beard, which she remembered once thinking, drunk, reminded her of a handsome cat. It was easy to picture his smile and laugh from both worlds. The same tired look in his eyes she remembered from the times she’d nearly drank herself to death, and from a dusty, blood covered bench in a dilapidated gas station.
“In all my life- before this place, and all the time here- I’ve never known anyone like you-” Half way through saying it, she felt her stomach tighten with something like pain; maybe part of it was, but she pushed through it. She’d learned a lot of things in her captivity here; one lesson that had been ground into her repeatedly was that silence rarely ended well.
Negan watched her eyes as they searched his, and he was thinking the same thing; he didn’t know if he really wanted the dreaming to stop, or not. The dream world was dangerous and unforgiving, but it was one he was used to, and whether he wanted to admit it or not, he felt happy there. What they had in the dream, aside from having been attacked, was good for that world. And that was enough. He wanted that.
It made what Gretel had to say simultaneously easier and harder to swallow. He was quiet, practically holding his breath because he half expected whatever came out of his mouth to be heinous. He chewed on the inside of his lower lip, and squeezed her leg. This, right here, was the sort of shit he’d been avoiding, hard, for years. Even in his and Judith’s world, it hadn’t changed before he died. But here, in the hotel, he couldn’t avoid it anymore.
“That’s because there fucking isn’t anyone like me,” he said, and though it was casual enough, his voice was tight enough that he cleared his throat, and sighed. He had to say something, but he didn’t know where to start. “I’ve done a really fucking good job of being a fucking prick about it.
Though she watched his face and his eyes with gentle acceptance, there were complicated things in her gaze. They were sharp, jagged things like the broken windows and burned out cars of his world, in their shared dream- and just as real- but she didn’t give them a specific voice. It wasn’t necessary. He knew where they came from.
After a few heartbeats that felt thicker than usual, her shoulders fell with another silent breath, like she was steeling herself for something.
“I know you-” she began, looking down briefly. “-from there-” Meaning the dream. “-and since I found you eating ice cream and marking everything like a dog.” Her eyes met his then, a small smirk pulled into her cheek before moving on. “Even before the dreaming, you’ve meant something to me… Now, something deep. I can’t just… cut it out.” Her lips rolled together, trying to combat the feel of her mouth going dry. “We don’t know how long this… going back and forth between worlds will last, or what will happen to you- or me… but that’s the way it is.” Looking at him again, her shoulder twitched under her hair, and her voice tightened. “It just is. So what I need to know that you can tell me is… what do you want from me.”
Negan was quiet, his hand still curled around Gretel’s leg, and his eyes on her face while she spoke. Realistically, he knew this sort of talk was coming, he’d just been hoping to keep putting it off until… well, he didn’t know when. Maybe never. Not talking about it just felt easier- but it had gotten them to where they were now.
He sighed, giving her leg a gentle squeeze and bringing his other hand to rub across his face, stopping to rub his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose. He couldn’t just not say anything.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I know that’s not fucking helpful.” He dropped his hand from his face so he could look up at her again, and then pushed himself up to sit against the headboard, his knees bent and his feet planted on the bed, parted slightly. “I don’t want anything from you, Gretel. Not like- fuck, there’s a fucking reason I don’t talk about this shit.” He ran a hand through his hair, stopping to rub the back of his neck, his eyes on the space between his knees.
“You mean something to me, too,” he admitted, his voice tight with how difficult it was for him to say. “Which is why I’ve been such a fucking prick. How fucked is that?” He let his head fall back against the headboard, shaking it slightly, before he looked at her again. “I already told you I don’t want to hurt you anymore, so…” He paused, and cleared his throat. “I think the more important question is- what do you want from me?”
Part of knowing him was already understanding how much he didn’t want to bring whatever all this was to voice. It’d been that way with them throughout the months at the hotel, for better and worse, before the dreams started. It’d even been that way in the dream-world, to an extent, though the circumstances were obviously so different. She watched him as he dragged his own words out, the fidgeting and squirming that came with it familiar to her as well- not just from him.
For her part, and as usual, she remained very still as she listened, another ongoing example of how different they really were; even so, she’d seen things in him that were more than just redeeming. He did his best to hide those things from everyone- like he said- for a reason.
She sighed through her nose and carefully ran his question through her thoughts, which felt raw and exposed as she knew he did. The answer wasn’t simple for them, not here- still, only one thing kept returning to the front of her mind.
“...so don’t,” she said, meeting his eyes in a vulnerable, but cautious way. “Don’t hurt me,” she went on in the same voice. “Just… treat me the way you want me to treat you.”
It sounded simple when she put it like that. Really, it was simple. It didn’t have to be complicated. The hotel made things complicated on its own, but Negan only furthered that every step along the way, because it was what he was used to. He couldn’t survive with emotional attachment- at least, it made surviving easier. He was better without it, and stronger.
Or he thought he was. It hardened him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t just as easy to crack.
He reached over, smoothing his hand over her hair, resting at the back of her head as he leaned over to press a kiss to the top of it, thinking about her fever-hot skin in the dream, and how she shook in his arms. She felt just as vulnerable now as she did then.
“I promise,” he murmured against her hair. What he promised exactly, he didn’t specify, but there was a lot between them that could be left unspoken. He didn’t want to hurt her. He wanted to treat her right. He wanted to make it through whatever the hell the hotel was doing to them, and it would be a hell of a lot easier together than apart. “I’m no fucking angel, but I promise. I’ll try.”
This kiss on her hair didn't just feel natural and familiar, Gretel knew it was genuine. It made her smile, despite all the complicated things that still weren't being said- things both of them were more than aware of- things she was still gunshy about, but right then made the tentative decision to accept anyway.
“It's not like I have any idea what I'm doing, either,” she finally muttered a little flatly, but said while gently catching his hand to lace her fingers within. “My life before this place was nothing but…”. Well- he knew. She'd told him enough. It was all horror, surviving with Hansel in a life they had no choice over. Then the hotel had thrust her into a new breed of chaos that still didn't give her much insight into how a partnership like this was supposed to work. Except… She picked up in a different place in a statement she hadn't finished making. “The only things I do know weren't… real.”
Negan wrapped his arm around Gretel’s shoulders, pulling her in to settle against his chest, looking down at her hand in his. Their worlds were different, but similar enough in their horror that he knew what she meant without having to explain. But he’d at least had something, at some point, some time that felt so long ago now, he wasn’t sure it had even really happened.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said, rubbing his thumb over the back of Gretel’s hand. “I did have something real. Didn’t make me any fucking better at it.” He kissed the top of her head again, letting his lips rest there and sighing. “I lost it.” At that, his grip seemed to tighten on her, just enough to be noticed. “I thought it was easier not to have anything than lose it again.”
She let herself be pulled into him, wrapping her arm around his torso and folding her legs beneath his, and felt the distinct sensation of being able to breathe easier for it. She listened to his voice as it resonated in his chest beneath her ear, and understood everything with perfect clarity, so much so that she felt nothing else really needed to be said.
Her thumb brushed back and forth over the back of his ribs, and planted an encouraging, commiserative kiss on his chest. She squeezed him back when his arms tightened, and tilted her head up to give him a slow, meaningful kiss.
Negan kissed her back, bring his hand to her jaw and making a quiet, content noise against her lips. He thought back to the first time they’d kissed, when the hotel had forced them into it, laughing in their faces because it was the only way to get the hotel to let her go. Then, she kissed him because she had to, and that was fine. He hadn’t expected more.
Now, with their history, it felt significant. They didn’t share moments like these. The closest they got was during their week spent as werewolves, and there were so many other feelings and emotions that had gone into that week. This week, aside from their dreaming, it was just them.
He stroked his fingers over her cheek, resting his forehead against hers.
“You know I’m a real fucking piece of shit,” he warned in a mutter against her lips. Not that she needed it, but he felt like it needed to be said again.
A soft, slow sigh escaped Gretel’s nose, brushing his as they kept so close. Her eyes were closed, and not just because the proximity wouldn’t allow her to see him properly anyway. Something about the way he said it tugged at already taut strings in her chest; the sensation was bittersweet.
Eventually she did nod, faintly and still connected to him at the brow. There wasn’t a lot she knew for certain- not about their dreams, what would come at them in the hotel, how others might react, or how to define what she and Negan had- but she knew she cared for him, deeply, and that would probably come with more pain. But she also knew the taste of the real connection she had with him she hadn’t experienced anywhere else; it was layered and complicated, but ignoring it was impossible at this point.
“You said you’ll try-” she started, the words brushing his lips the way her hand grazed his jaw, then the side of his throat. “So will I.”
Negan nodded, and tilted his head to kiss her again, just as slow as before. It still scared the shit out of him, but trying to deny it wasn’t going to help anything anymore. It had never helped in the first place. Before he didn’t care, because he wouldn’t let himself, but he didn’t think he had the choice anymore, not without Gretel being deeply hurt in the process.
He ran his fingers through her hair, and turned to face her more so he could wrap an arm around her middle and pull her in closer. Before he could lay her down again, though, there was a distinctly insistent, low woof from the side of the bed that pulled his attention away. Vlad stood by the side of the bed, watching them with his head tilted at first, before he came to put his chin on the mattress and stare at him.
“What? Did Timmy fall in the fucking well?” Negan asked, which earned him a louder bark in response. He sighed, and rolled his eyes. “Fine. But you’re a fucking cockblock, Vlad.”