Tweak

InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "You are beautiful."

Gretel (_gretel) wrote in hobbs_end,
@ 2015-06-28 14:37:00

Entry tags:

supernatural: sam winchester, witch hunters: gretel

Who: Sam and Gretel
What: Gretel finds another human.
Where: The Black Dog
Rating: PG-13ish for language probably
Status: Ongoing, new

Gretel had been on high alert the whole time she'd been stuck in this place. The constant feeling of being watched, and not by anything benign, certainly didn't help her already frazzled nerves, but coming back from the last hour of food-foraging in the forest to find the Black Dog's front door ajar had put a metal rod in her spine- a stiffness that extended to her trigger finger. It rested on the metal guard at least, just in case Rocket had come back from whatever he was looking for while she was out, but her crossbow was held steadily at her shoulder, poised and readied as she stalked through the parlor entrance, past the table where she'd worked on a rough fishing line and net the night before- which was still untouched, and into the deeper hallway in search of who- or what- might possibly have wandered in.

At the T-section of the first floor corridor, she stilled at the sound of movement just around the bend. Footsteps. And a shadow she knew wasn't Rocket's by the size of it alone. Her breath held hard at the top of her throat, making her chest tight; running sweeps of unknown places without Hansel felt like fighting with one hand tied behind her back, or one eye closed- exposed, with too many blind spots.

And the footsteps, heavy and wide, were heading straight for her.

"Stop moving," she finally forced the air in her lungs to work. Her finger squeezed the trigger guard, tensed. "Unless you want a bolt through the eye... stay right where you are."

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_gretel
2015-06-28 11:38 pm UTC (link)

Gretel would have been perfectly fine with just assuming the tall man was insane. Perhaps temporarily, given she'd guess he ended up here the same way she and Rocket had. That would have been a hell of a lot easier to process than the disturbingly familiar details he just spewed out like a spell. She felt her heart twist hard and uncomfortable, trying to shive itself to the top of her throat. Her trigger arm tensed again, out of a conditioned response.

Gretel’s lips parted as if to speak, but the first try produced nothing but a stunted breath. She tried clenching her eyes shut for a moment to reset her perspective. When she opened them again, nothing had changed except the curl of blood through his fist.

"I... alright, wait. Who are you, exactly? I've never seen you before in my life-" And he knew about a very specific and crucial part of her existence. "And you're... bleeding.

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sam_interrupted
2015-06-29 12:17 am UTC (link)

Sam wouldn't have blamed her if she had thought he was insane. He probably was, he couldn't tell anymore. He glanced up at her when she spoke, trying to pull himself out of his own thoughts enough to answer her. He closed his eyes and took a breath to try and clear his head. "My name is Sam Winchester." He told her. "I know this sounds crazy...and I know I don't know you, but I.....before I woke up here I saw all of that." Among other things but he figured she really didn't need to know about that on top of everything else.

He glanced down at his hand when she mentioned it, besides the pain he hadn't paid it a lot of thought. He brought his hand up to inspect the cut. "Fuck. Tore three stitches." He muttered to himself, trying to work out if he had anything he could sew it up with again.

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_gretel
2015-06-29 12:44 am UTC (link)

Gretel stared at him as her brain worked through trying to find some explination for what he was saying. Rational processes didn't apply here, just as they didn't when she woke up in the woods in an empty town with hints of technology she had never seen and met a foul mouthed talking racoon. It was twinging the hunger headache she'd been fighting for days.

Making it bad enough to toss the whole thing in the back burner under the banner of 'stranger things have happened'. After a few seconds and a slightly frayed look in her eyes, she sighed in a way that flared her nostrils, and shouldered her heavy weapon.

"Sam Winchester..." she repeated his still unfamiliar name as if it would jog her memory. It didn't. She moved on, gesturing down the hall back to the better lit foyer. "Come on... I can at least sew up up. We can worry about the rest after."

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sam_interrupted
2015-06-29 01:21 am UTC (link)

Although she hadn't actually said one way or another whether the things he'd said had already happened and that they were true, Sam was sure by the way it seemed to have halted the situation and by the look in her eyes that at least some of what he'd said struck a chord with her. He wasn't sure if that made him feel better or worse though, if he was right then it only begged the question 'how did he know?'

Maybe she was right and it was better left alone for now, he had enough to worry about without adding to his fraying nerves and waning sanity. "Thank you." Sam said with a small grateful smile . "I didn't catch your name."

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_gretel
2015-06-29 01:43 am UTC (link)

"I didn't say it," she responded over her shoulder in the sort of flat tone that only came with prolonged hunger and frayed nerves, and no small amount of unsettled discord thanks to what he'd told her. As if just being here, in this place wasn't nad enough without Hansel. Every day that passed without him frayed her a little more around the edges.

She lead him back to the parlor table, where she had been working on rigging up something to catch fiah from the lake. Everything she owned was dated compared to the rest of the town, even him. From the way she dressed to the weapons she carried, to the way her hair was just a little too long to be fashionable unless in some fundamentalist cult.

Of course, from her perspective, she was the normal one. Everything else was put of place, strange and alien, including the paperthin and way too colorful shirt Sam wore. It looked like it'd tear on a small tree branch.

"My name is Gretel," she said as they reached the table, where she set the heavy bow down and to the side, then picked through the small pouch on her belt. "Found myself facedown in the woods a few days ago. You're the second..." she paused, word searching. "Individual... I've seen here. The other is...hard to miss."

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sam_interrupted
2015-06-29 08:57 pm UTC (link)

Whatever was going on in Sam's head right now, whatever synapses weren't firing or however blurred his lines of reality were, it didn't seem to have affected his skills of observation. He picked up on the tone she used and he remained silent as he followed her the rest of the way back to the parlor. The last thing he wanted to do was antagonise her, especially having just had a mild freak out in her general direction.

Sam glanced at the homemade fishing equipment as they approached her table. He doubted very much she was preparing it for use as some sort of hobby, clearly it was being made out of some necessity which suggested that for whatever reason she was hunting her own food.

"Gretel? Like in the story?" He said absently, still looking over her handiwork. Sam hadn't given much thought to her attire, or her weaponry, most likely because he had seen it in his dream so it didn't seem all that strange to him, it was just her.

He turned his attention back to her. "I woke up on a farm outside of town, this kid, Zidane, found me passed out in a cornfield." He watched her rifling through her bag. "So....there's others? Besides us, I mean. And the kid."

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_gretel
2015-06-29 09:11 pm UTC (link)

"What story-?" Sitting down in a large wooden chair at the table, she looked at him with a slightly diluted version of the look she'd given him when he recognized her. Confusion, but with a hint of uneasy familiarity. Certainly she and Hansel's reputation had spread around the right circles, but she figured this place was so far outside those, it wasn't worth pondering. Rocket hadn't recognized her name, after all. Of course, Rocket was a talking forest creature.

As she set the curved needle and boiled thread set down between them, as well as a small piece of clean linen and a flask of particularly potent smelling alcohol, her look of confusion took on a different edge as he went on about others- others she and her furry companion hadn't yet come across. The thought was more than a little unnerving, though she couldn't pick out a particular reason why just yet.

Probably had to do with the town itself. The fact that it felt like they were all milling around in a gigantic fishbowl.

"You're the first I've seen besides Rocket, but he..." She trailed off, making a face as she dabbed the rag with the alcohol. Somehow saying he 'smelled' others around felt like it would need more explanation than they could filter through at once. There was just too much falling on them at once. "He had an idea there might be more. Where's this kid now? And what are you doing here?"

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sam_interrupted
2015-06-29 09:58 pm UTC (link)

"The kids story. Hansel and Gretel? Y'know candy houses, witches?..." Sam trailed off at the look she was giving him. "Uh...never mind." She really didn't seem to find it amusing to be compared to a fictional character.

Sam eyed the needle with a healthy measure of disdain. He hated this part, even for all the times he'd had it done in the past, or worse for that matter."I.....uh....I dunno, probably off exploring." Sam said, still not taking his eyes off the needle. "That's what he was doing when he found me."

Sam sat down on a chair next to the table. "I wasn't about to stay at the farm. Been in and out of motels most of my life so it seemed like one more wasn't gonna make any difference." He shrugged.

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_gretel
2015-06-29 10:10 pm UTC (link)

"Okay, stop." She cut him off right at the end of an explanation about 'motels'- which is apparently what this place called boarding houses and inns- the look in her eyes shaving sharpened considerably from what he'd said before. About candy houses and witches. His bleeding hand and the tools she held in order to fix it suddenly ended up on the back burner.

"You know my brother's name. You know what happened to us as children, and earlier you knew what happened with me and the Blood Moon ritual..." Gretel's gut was twisting hard. She immediately dismissed the possibility that Sam had run into Hansel somewhere in the town because no way in Hell would her twin let anyone he ran into get away without knowing he was looking for her.

That left precisely fuck-all for other explanations, and Gretel was just...lost. With a sudden flare of true desperation for anything in her eyes, she suddenly grabbed Sam's wrist and pushed the booze-soaked rag onto his cut. Not enough to make it worse, but he'd definitely feel it. And she did not let go.

"Who the fuck are you?" she demanded, putting her weight behind holding him still so he didn't jerk away. "How do you know me?"

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sam_interrupted
2015-06-29 10:51 pm UTC (link)

Sam's reflexes were still a little slow thanks to a lot of sleep deprivation recently, on a normal day he might have anticipated something or read her body language more accurately. As it was he was caught off guard by both her words and her actions.

Sam hissed as the alcohol seeped into the open cut on his hand. "Ah fuck!.....I told you! My name is Sam, you don't know me...anything else I could tell you about myself wouldn't change that." He winced and tried to pull his wrist from her grasp. "I don't know how I know you, all I know is....I dreamt all that about you."

This was the first acknowledgement she'd given that the things he'd seen in his dream were true. That made Sam uneasy, which wasn't difficult lately but this was different. He'd dreamt about things that had been true before, he was sort of hoping that wasn't what this was but the fact that he knew things about her without knowing her did not exactly bode well.

"You wanna ease up a little? I've told you everything I know." Sam fixed her with one of those puppy dog expressions that his brother said could get him out of anything.

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_gretel
2015-06-29 11:13 pm UTC (link)

Gretel didn't ease up- at least, not at first. She watched him, hard-focused on his eyes; only when she determined the sheer honesty underneath the wriggling and wincing did she release her hold.

Sitting back down with a hard huff through her nose (she'd stood up in order to leverage her weight into holding him without being tossed across the room), Gretel tossed the ball of linen to the side of the table. Her jaw set like an anvil.

The truth she'd gotten from him was...unsatisfactory. To say the least.

"Sorry." She wasn't guilt-ridden about her extreme measure, but Gretel didn't usually resort to that level with people who didn't blatantly deserve it. She wasn't entirely convinced Sam was completely innocent yet, either, even if he was telling her the truth- but that face was difficult to ignore, even in her stressed state.

She went back to staring at him, a mix of intense dissecting study and frazzled nerves in her warm brown eyes. He'd dreamed about her... Remembering the needle in her hand, her eyes flicked back down to his hand, and narrowed, then snapped back up to his face. How did she not notice that before?

"That's self-inflicted-" she observed, a faint note of accusation in her tone, as well as concrete certainty. "There sure as hell aren't a lot of reasons I know of to intentionally bleed over something that don't involve spells..."

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sam_interrupted
2015-06-29 11:54 pm UTC (link)

Sam exhaled sharply when she let him go, relieved to have the alcohol soaked rag away from the cut. The apology wasn't exactly heartfelt but he wasn't about to press the issue. "Don't worry about it." He said, knowing he'd probably have reacted in a similar, or worse, way if someone he didn't know had started reeling off details about his life like he'd done to her. "Is Hansel really your brother?" He wasn't sure whether that was some cruel joke on her parents part or whether he was expected to believe that she was actually that Gretel.

He frowned slightly at her inference. "I cut it on broken glass..." He said, which was the truth of how he had injured his hand in the first place. He attempted to leave the conversation there but it was virtually impossible to escape her scrutiny. "I....um....alright! The torn stitches are self inflicted. But not for any spell." He eyed her A little suspiciously at that statement but he sensed he wasn't going to get away without an explanation.

"It's kind of a long story but I've....um....been suffering from hallucinations. Sometimes it's hard for me to know when something's real or not....." He indicated his hand. "The pain helps tether me to reality, so when I saw you.....after dreaming about you.....well, admittedly this time I might have gone a little overboard."

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_gretel
2015-06-30 12:12 am UTC (link)

Gretel just watched him, her spine ramrod straight and her lip caught between her teeth- not in an uncertain or 'worried' way, more like if things don't start making sense soon something is going to die sort of way. So she was magically kidnapped to a place out of her time, connected with a well armed and cross-talking rodent, now here was a man dressed in inappropriately flimsy clothing, who knew her and her brother's name, their story, and about the Blood Moon- yet didn't have any apparent connection to their lives. And he had a tendency to hallucinate things.

This was too weird. Even for her life.

"This is beyond fucked up-" Gretel finally broke, shaking her head into her palm with a long, frustrated sigh. It dropped heavily to the table, picking the needle back up, already tied to the string because she liked to be prepared. As she took his hand again- a vague promise in her eyes that she wouldn't torture him with it (as long as he didn't do anything to earn it), she continued to drone on.

"Yes, Hansel really is my brother. We've been hunters since before his voice dropped and I grew tits- the Candy Witch was our first." With the smooth motion of someone who'd done this way too often, she held Sam's fingers gently in one hand and started stitching with the other. "We've been picking the last of them off for weeks since the Blood Moon- there hasn't been a single town from the Spanish coast to Istanbul that doesn't know us. Then suddenly I end up here. Without Hansel. Wandering a town with no people, with food that magically appears once you eat it-" She didn't mention she wasn't eating it. To Gretel, that fact would've been fairly obvious. "The constant feeling like something is right behind your shoulder... and then you."

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sam_interrupted
2015-06-30 12:39 am UTC (link)

He wasn't exactly sure why he was telling her this so readily, maybe he hoped it would help to explain about the dream, at least a little. Though, honestly, he was pretty sure his hallucinations and the dream weren't connected at all.

Sam stifled a smile at her words, purely because that felt like the understatement of the year. "Yeah, you don't have to tell me that." He said. He hesitated for only a moment before holding out his hand for her, maybe it was foolish but he couldn't help but trust her even though he had no reason to. The familiarity between them in his dream was taking hold here with each passing minute he spent with her. At least it was for him, she obviously still had no idea who he was and she still looked as if she'd happily shoot him with her crossbow.

"You're hunters?" Sam said, raising an eyebrow. "Story never said anything about you being hunters. Guess I should have known from the ritual I saw and all the talk about blood and spells." Sam rambled a little and tried to ignore the needle piercing his skin, though it hurt a lot less when she sewed him up than when he or Dean did it.

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_gretel
2015-06-30 12:59 am UTC (link)

From under the thick fan of lashes, she peeked up at him with her own brow raised. The look only lasted a second before turning back to his hand. She had a rhythm going and wanted to get this done, so they could concentrate on more complicated things and hopefully figure something the fuck out. Plus, Rocket was going to be back eventually- she was already expecting that to go badly. Since Sam had been 'trespassing' and all.

"Where the hell did you hear the story from anyway?" she asked, still stitching. She wasn't going into any more detail about the Blood Moon. It was more complex than just she and her twin being the main cause of witch-deaths in the two decades they'd been at it, but they were already buried under a pile of insanity.

The fact that this Sam knew the visual details about it still didn't sit well in her gut.

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sam_interrupted
2015-06-30 01:08 am UTC (link)

Sam watched her needlework as she stitched, it was virtually effortless, like a knife through butter. At least it was in comparison to when he did it but he usually had to do his own stitches though obviously that wasn't possible with this particular injury.

"I dunno, I guess my brother probably told it to me, my dad wasn't exactly the bedtime story type." He told her. "Most people have it read to them when they're kids."

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_gretel
2015-06-30 01:16 am UTC (link)

Though she didn't look up again right away, it was clear that Gretel's brow furrowed, pressing down over her narrow nose, scrunching the band of freckles there together. He'd heard the bedtime story when he was a child? Like most people? If she had to venture an educated guess, she would've pegged Sam for right around her age...

"That doesn't make sense," she said without looking up. She tightened the last stitch, pinching the skin closed before looping a knot to keep it in better. Holding it with her thumb, she dipped low enough to bite the slack off, loose bits of her hair grazing his wrist in the process.

"You can't be much older than me."

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sam_interrupted
2015-06-30 09:59 am UTC (link)

When she'd finished, Sam ran his thumb along the line of stitches, clearly she was well practised. Without paying it much thought he scratched his wrist as the phantom sensation of her hair against it lingered long after she'd sat up again. "That feels better." He made a gesture to the flask on the table and when he got no protest from her he picked it up and sloshed some of its alcoholic contents over the fresh sutures. It stung like a bitch but it would keep it clean. "Thanks." He said once the sting had subsided.

He met her eye and nodded in agreement that they appeared to be the same age. "Yeah, but the story dates back to the Brothers Grimm, in Germany in the eighteen hundreds. So if you're telling me that you and your brother are that Hansel and Gretel, then I'd figure this place has brought you a couple hundred years into the future."

Sam glanced around, taking in the fact that there was a distinct lack of a calendar or any technology that might allude to what year it actually was. "Well, a couple hundred years by my standard, I'm from 2011. I don't actually know what year it is here."

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_gretel
2015-06-30 07:09 pm UTC (link)

Gretel was having some trouble processing pretty much everything he'd just said.

She stared at him, or maybe through him, trying to pretend that all of that didn't make some kind of crazy sense, considering all the things she'd seen in this eerie, empty town. The weird pieces of technology. Rocket's guns...

Rocket...

Regardless of how horrible it sat in her gut, her mind wanted to accept it- that she'd been thrust through time into some pocket-universe being watched by some ultimate Evil. At least then she had something to focus on besides just being...lost. But that also meant a strong possibility that she was separated from her brother by nearly three hundred years...

That thought alone made her eyes burn, badly. They went distant and glossy. A small, useless breath parted her lips.

"I need to get back," she breathed, and not to anybody in particular.

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sam_interrupted
2015-06-30 07:41 pm UTC (link)

Sam could see how upsetting this was for her, he could probably understand better than most people how she must feel to be without her sibling. "I'm sorry." He said genuinely. "I wish I knew a way to get you back to your brother, to get me back to mine. Seems like we don't get much of a say." His eyes echoed the apology he'd given her. He really did wish there was something he could do.

"I haven't really had time to figure anything out yet." He hadn't been lucid enough for long enough to be honest. "But if you have any leads on what might've brought us here I'd be happy to help.....if you want I mean...."

At that point something shifted in Sam's demeanour. He sat up straighter as if noticing something in the room behind her, then he dropped his gaze to his hands in front of him, resolutely refusing to look up. He didn't speak he just stared fixedly at his hands.

Obviously it had been too good to be true to believe that his hallucinations might be gone just because he hadn't had one in a day or so, and even then those had been pretty tame by hell standards. Apparently Sam's subconscious wanted to step things up a little, because Lucifer was sitting on the table just behind Gretel, grinning inanely and waving enthusiastically at Sam.

When he got no reaction he frowned and jumped down from the table, stalking towards Gretel like a cat and circling her chair. "This is what you've been ignoring me for? Oh Sammy!" Lucifer tutted and poked Gretel's braid. "I mean, I guess she's.....interesting, for a bit of skirt. Well, corset. Or is it what's under the corset, huh Sam? Is that what this is? You're angling for a little real life replay of your dirty little fever dream?" As he rambled continuously at Sam he continued to walk his little circle around Gretel, expanding it to pass by Sam just as he started talking about the dream.

All the time Lucifer had been talking Sam had been edging his good thumb towards the newly sown cut on his hand. He started to press it, lightly at first because it was still tender from having the stitches torn and resown, but gradually he started to apply more pressure. When it didn't work to get rid of the devil he gave in. "Shut up!" Sam hissed over his shoulder, knowing full well that was all Lucifer wanted him to do.

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_gretel
2015-06-30 08:02 pm UTC (link)

Gretel's moments of desperation were usually short lived, and very much few and far between; she was the rational thinker, the calm one- but she was still human (mostly). Sometimes she broke down, but Hansel was always there to bring her back up. Now, she'd been missing her other half for days, and having just learned by all rationality, he'd been dead for centuries...

The only thing that stopped the hot moisture building over her eyes from falling down her cheeks was Sam's sudden posture change. It screamed fear, but an old fear... the way she tensed when a beetle got too close. But far more concentrated. It snapped her attention back to the present pretty easily, considering the malevolent atmosphere of this place. Her brow furrowed, watching his eyes shoot down to his hands from some point behind her shoulder, like he was trying not to be noticed. When she looked over that shoulder, there was nothing.

"Sam-?" His nervousness had the potential to be contagious. When he hissed a sharp order at something that obviously wasn't her, that potential doubled. Instinct or habit, she put a hand on her crossbow. But that's where it stopped.

"...what are you seeing?" Hallucinations, he'd said.

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sam_interrupted
2015-06-30 08:45 pm UTC (link)

Sam so yearned for the days when he was also the rational and calm one of him and his brother. He'd give just about anything to be that again instead of this shell of himself, barely clinging to his sanity.

He knew the best way to deal with the things he was seeing was to ignore them, to treat them like they weren't real, because they weren't. But it was sort of hard to ignore Lucifer when he was practically giving Gretel a lap dance and winking at Sam as he did so. He glared at the apparition, barely hearing Gretel when she spoke to him at first.

When she asked him what he was seeing it brought him back to himself a little, giving him something to focus on, but then he wasn't exactly sure how to explain this. He was pretty sure she already thought he was nuts but telling her he could see the devil would pretty much cement that.

"I...uh....it's....pretty much the same thing every time." He started, trying to find the right words. "C'mon Sammy! Just do it! Like ripping off a bandaid! You know communication is key to a healthy relationship." Lucifer's voice taunted in Sam's ears and he closed his eyes tightly and took a deep steadying breath. "It's Lucifer."

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