Same Old Burnt Sugar (Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters)
Title: Same Old Burnt Sugar
Fandom: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
Disclaimer: Not mine, just playing
Characters: Hansel, Gretel, miscellaneous villagers, children and a couple of witches
Warnings: self-hatred, eating disorder, implied violence (and violent imagery), sensory descriptions of illness
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~1800
Spoilers: I have stolen all the backstory from the movie, but the story DOESN’T spoil the plot of the movie itself (the author's notes might).
Summary: The one where Hansel can’t stand the smell (taste, thought) of sugar and Gretel holds him up (or maybe they support each other)
Beta Credit: lavinialavender and whereupon are the most fantastic always *hugs them tight* even when they are suddenly reading a fic without either one seeing the movie :) As always, mistakes that remain are mine.
Author notes: More (somewhat movie-spoilery) notes at the end.
The village of Schwinburg had a witch and a sweetshop.
Hansel and Gretel had heard of the witch just as they were finishing a job in the village of Oberpatch, half a day away. That hunt had yielded a pittance of their usual price, but the witch had been a great mostly-spider thing a bit too fast and poisonous for someone without their particular talents to take down. Neither of them could truly walk away. The villagers had paid upfront and in-full, at least, even if none of the children taken had been alive by the time the brother and sister had tracked the monster to her lair.
The Schwinburg sweetshop, on the other hand, was just within the city gates. The smell hit Hansel hard, the thick richness of butter, the sharp tang of ginger, the burnt sweetness of sugar wafting in the air and making his stomach clench. Between that and the way Schwinburg’s gates towered above their heads like a cage, the jagged spikes on the top carved to mimic (or mock) the monsters from a half-dozen bestiaries, he could feel the old screaming, the shadow edge of dizziness and fear rising up along his spine.
Only Gretel’s grip on his shoulder, a pressure he could feel even through the jacket and armor and into the bruising their last hunt had left, held him in place, held him to this job and this time.
Still, he dropped his eyes as they passed, and if he kept maybe a too-tight grip on his gun, only the strain in his hands gave any sign.
Schwinburg was full of the usual assholes, men who thought that a batch of poor children disappearing into the woods was cause for distributing poison meat for the wolves-or, in their own words, “save a sovereign, dip the brats in flea-poison before they wander off”-and a woman dressed in leathers like a man was mockery at best, a whore a worst, and not worth respecting.
“Say that in front of us again, and I’ll shoot out your manhood, Your Honor,” Gretel said, steel and fire and the only sweet that Hansel could taste without gagging. She rolled the blunderbuss from her shoulder and aimed it easily with one hand at the guards who had advanced to defend their employer. “Come closer and I’ll drop you like a rotten oak.”
Her voice was strong and clear and echoed through the town square like a bell. Frauen in windows gasped, and children hid behind their elders, and probably even the monsters in their dens knew now that there was a new force in Schwinburg: one that had never met a monster (petty human or viciously supernatural, there was no difference) of which she was afraid.
Hansel could speak just fine, could make himself heard and strut and bluster with the best of them, but he preferred not to be seen, to let his three-hours-older sister stand in the twilight and be heard to the ends of the earth.
She had the words and the will and the way, and still the fools of Schwinburg strutting forward with no idea of what they faced only stopped when Hansel pointed his blunderbuss at their heads. “You heard her. Back down.”
The men held up their hands, mock-startled and stupid, and Gretel did the talking. She told them why the Kuhns, Hansel and Gretel, were there and what it would cost them. She told them how much gold she and he expected in advance, and what they wanted if they could bring the children back alive. Hansel nodded at all the right times, kept his gun trained on the fools and wished he could get the stink of sweet buns out of his nose.
It was more than habit to agree with his sister. It was ritual. It was protection. When eyes were on them, they never disagreed. They rarely argued anyway-the mare she’d bought in Berlin with the majority of his archery winnings, and the whore he’d spent the week with in Krakow were two notable exceptions-but never when Gretel was in the delicate business of convincing another set of morons that when she and Hansel went to a fight, it would be she and Hansel.
Maybe it was because she was his sister, but Hansel couldn’t understand why the village idiots that held the purse strings insisted on looking at Gretel and seeing a whore in leathers pretending she could use a blade. For one, Hansel had seen (met, known, in all senses of the word) plenty of whores and not one had the balls to dress like his sister (even that one that had, indeed, had balls).
For another, she had a vicious right hook, and of the two of them, she had the stronger stomach. And he didn’t just mean his stomach.
She looked good in blood, his sister. She would bite and kick and fight and go toe to toe with any witch, bastard, or monster they faced without a second’s hesitation. She didn’t worry for her clothes, face, skin, hands, hide, bones, or the blades and clubs that could break them. She had never once been trapped in what was expected of her.
And Hansel, at least in his own heart, had never once lived up to what was expected of him.
The bargaining done, the arguments finished, the night close to falling, they retreated to the local cheap inn, accosted by the usual wide-eyed townies, come to praise or poke at the famous siblings with a mixture of awe and fear that made Hansel almost as sick as sugar.
The beer was sweet on his tongue, every drought threatening to have his stomach revolt, but he downed them grimly and let Gretel carry the conversation (as she carried him), let her give the spiel: bring down, behead, and burn.
He waved away the stew when it came, and accepted the next tankard shoved into his hand, accepted Gretel’s knowing look as she ate his helping as well as hers-she’d long ago stopped forcing him to eat, stopped pinning him down and snarling at him to keep himself alive, knowing now that he would, for her-and held it together until he’d filled his stomach with enough bitter beer to have a good excuse.
The late summer night was crisp around the edges, with stars that burned like a witch’s eye on a pyre, and he bent over the midden pile, knees digging into the dirt of a hundred un-finished meals and emptied his stomach until he could imagine he tasted blood and ginger in the bile sliding down his throat.
When he finished, panting from the pain, lightning in his head and his watch buzzing like a bee’s nest, he leaned against the filthy wall and forced himself to breathe. After better than a decade, he didn’t have to think about getting out the syringe, shoving the needle into his thigh. The world spun in a way that was not completely related to alcohol, and he barely felt the needle’s tiny, sharp pain.
Gretel found him like that later, her hair slightly mussed, a rip in her shirt, new scrapes on her knuckles.
Hansel blinked up at her. “Trouble?”
She shook her head. “Guy got drunk, got handsy.”
“So you got handsy?” He grabbed her by the hand and ran a thumb over her bruised knuckles. The world was still spinning. He could imagine sugar on his tongue, bruises yellowing on her skin like butter browning over the fire.
Gretel’s mouth quirked and she dropped down next to him. “Handsy, Hansel. You could say that. Or maybe say he’s sleeping it off after I introduced his jaw to my fist. How about you, Hans? Trouble?”
He looked away. “Same old, same old, sis.”
She gently disentangled her hand and laid it over his thigh where the cloth of his pants was worn thin from the needle riding through. “Same old?”
He put his hand over hers, held onto her warmth and her steady fierce strength. “Can’t burn this one, can we?”
She moved her head, though through the darkness he couldn’t tell whether the short motion was a nod, a shake, or something indefinable. “Let’s get you to bed, shall we?”
He didn’t fight her as she pulled him back to his feet and back into motion.
The next day they rode into the forests near Schwinburg and killed themselves a witch.
This one wasn’t very smart, or fast, and didn’t last too long, even if she fought hard before dying. Hansel ended up pulling one of her jagged spines out of his hand-sharp like a hedgehog’s, but something that once they got stuck wouldn’t come easily from his flesh, and burned-and Gretel ended with blood a solid stain from her waist to her calves, with one streak over her forehead where she had wiped sweat from her brow during the work.
The witch had been luring the children into her snares with birdsong, and then keeping them in cages. Only two of the eight that had been taken were still alive.
They were poor little mites, sharp bones and big terrified eyes as Hansel smashed their cage doors and Gretel told them in her clean and no-nonsense voice that they were okay, that they would be okay. Hansel had to turn away from the sight of the blank eyes, of bony arms wrapped around his sister’s neck, and wrap his hand that bled sluggishly. This witch hadn’t fed her prey, apparently preferring them mostly bone.
When Gretel had broken them out, when they had burned their first witch down to ashes and filth, he had been a fat little boy, slow and empty-eyed from the sugar and the fear. He still woke thrashing from nightmares about those cookies and shards of sugar shoved through the bars of his cage, his hands shaking while he brought it to his lips, unable to do anything less while the witch held a knife to his sister’s throat. He had known even then, that he would be eaten when he had eaten enough to please her, but he could do nothing less for his sister’s life. To this day, the act of eating reminded him of having so much sugar in his stomach that he had to vomit it out, and then watching helplessly while the witch beat his sister bloody for his sins.
They burned the witch’s lair to the ground, and carried away their reward, the little girl clinging to Gretel’s shoulders, the undernourished boy with empty eyes Hansel recognized well carried in his arms.
It seemed a long, slow road back to Schwinburg, a smell almost like burnt sugar lingering in his nose, as always, following his sister wherever she would go.
~*~
{Author's commentary/notes}
*I’m playing fast and loose with German geography here (and with many other things). There is actually a town named Schweinberg (though I’d picked out Schwinburg before I knew that for sure; Google translate tells me that Schweinberg means “pig mountain” though I would have guessed “pig town” before) and it is near Oberpirach, which became Oberpatch for the sake of embracing inaccuracy (aka, not actually learning everything I would need to about German geography and culture to write this fic in a REAL place).
*Frauen-plural of “frau”, lady, woman, Mrs., I don’t speak German, so if my usage sucks, please let me know!
*Kuhn-this is…Hansel and Gretel’s last name? Seriously, guys, I didn’t know this until I started reading fanfic for the movie. So it may not be true *itches to see movie again but refuses to pay full price for it *
*Diabetes doesn’t work this way. I had to check, because I have friend with diabetes, and while watching the movie I was like “Wait, is that a high blood sugar when he gets those headaches? Is that a low bloodsugar? WHAT IS GOING ON?” So, after researching a bit turns out, the movie doesn’t know, and Hansel takes magic insulin, and has equally magic diabetes where he only gets dramatic sideeffects and doesn’t worry about his extremities
*Do any of you know which of the siblings is actually older? The internet didn’t seem to know, and the movie itself may have left it to the imagination.
*I wrote this fic on two premises.
One, that Hansel should have an eating disorder (in my continued canon, he eats crackers and beef jerky, and not much of that, just enough to keep up his strength, and in the past Gretel was practically screaming at him/holding him how to eat because she was so scared that even after they got away from the witch she was going to lose her little brother to sugar sickness and his own fear.
Two: That Hansel always seemed to back up Gretel in the movie, but she’s the one who does the talking when they are in public, she’s the one that fights, and doesn’t flinch from the sight of blood (okay, so Hansel doesn’t exactly run screaming, but he…dodges. Or pulls other people in front of him. If you’ve seen the movie you know what I mean), and Hansel just agrees with her. Both because he agrees with her and because he doesn’t seem to have the energy to butt in when she has it handled.
For all that Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters was a busty action flick, I thought that it’s portrayal of women was…strong? I mean, with the witches all being women, and Gretel being The Most Badass, both the savior of the day and the evil of the day were women and Hansel was…along for the ride? Important, but it wasn’t really about him so much.
And also Gretel’s outfit looked both like she could fight in it, and that it was very supportive. *grin *
Fandom: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
Disclaimer: Not mine, just playing
Characters: Hansel, Gretel, miscellaneous villagers, children and a couple of witches
Warnings: self-hatred, eating disorder, implied violence (and violent imagery), sensory descriptions of illness
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~1800
Spoilers: I have stolen all the backstory from the movie, but the story DOESN’T spoil the plot of the movie itself (the author's notes might).
Summary: The one where Hansel can’t stand the smell (taste, thought) of sugar and Gretel holds him up (or maybe they support each other)
Beta Credit: lavinialavender and whereupon are the most fantastic always *hugs them tight* even when they are suddenly reading a fic without either one seeing the movie :) As always, mistakes that remain are mine.
Author notes: More (somewhat movie-spoilery) notes at the end.
The village of Schwinburg had a witch and a sweetshop.
Hansel and Gretel had heard of the witch just as they were finishing a job in the village of Oberpatch, half a day away. That hunt had yielded a pittance of their usual price, but the witch had been a great mostly-spider thing a bit too fast and poisonous for someone without their particular talents to take down. Neither of them could truly walk away. The villagers had paid upfront and in-full, at least, even if none of the children taken had been alive by the time the brother and sister had tracked the monster to her lair.
The Schwinburg sweetshop, on the other hand, was just within the city gates. The smell hit Hansel hard, the thick richness of butter, the sharp tang of ginger, the burnt sweetness of sugar wafting in the air and making his stomach clench. Between that and the way Schwinburg’s gates towered above their heads like a cage, the jagged spikes on the top carved to mimic (or mock) the monsters from a half-dozen bestiaries, he could feel the old screaming, the shadow edge of dizziness and fear rising up along his spine.
Only Gretel’s grip on his shoulder, a pressure he could feel even through the jacket and armor and into the bruising their last hunt had left, held him in place, held him to this job and this time.
Still, he dropped his eyes as they passed, and if he kept maybe a too-tight grip on his gun, only the strain in his hands gave any sign.
Schwinburg was full of the usual assholes, men who thought that a batch of poor children disappearing into the woods was cause for distributing poison meat for the wolves-or, in their own words, “save a sovereign, dip the brats in flea-poison before they wander off”-and a woman dressed in leathers like a man was mockery at best, a whore a worst, and not worth respecting.
“Say that in front of us again, and I’ll shoot out your manhood, Your Honor,” Gretel said, steel and fire and the only sweet that Hansel could taste without gagging. She rolled the blunderbuss from her shoulder and aimed it easily with one hand at the guards who had advanced to defend their employer. “Come closer and I’ll drop you like a rotten oak.”
Her voice was strong and clear and echoed through the town square like a bell. Frauen in windows gasped, and children hid behind their elders, and probably even the monsters in their dens knew now that there was a new force in Schwinburg: one that had never met a monster (petty human or viciously supernatural, there was no difference) of which she was afraid.
Hansel could speak just fine, could make himself heard and strut and bluster with the best of them, but he preferred not to be seen, to let his three-hours-older sister stand in the twilight and be heard to the ends of the earth.
She had the words and the will and the way, and still the fools of Schwinburg strutting forward with no idea of what they faced only stopped when Hansel pointed his blunderbuss at their heads. “You heard her. Back down.”
The men held up their hands, mock-startled and stupid, and Gretel did the talking. She told them why the Kuhns, Hansel and Gretel, were there and what it would cost them. She told them how much gold she and he expected in advance, and what they wanted if they could bring the children back alive. Hansel nodded at all the right times, kept his gun trained on the fools and wished he could get the stink of sweet buns out of his nose.
It was more than habit to agree with his sister. It was ritual. It was protection. When eyes were on them, they never disagreed. They rarely argued anyway-the mare she’d bought in Berlin with the majority of his archery winnings, and the whore he’d spent the week with in Krakow were two notable exceptions-but never when Gretel was in the delicate business of convincing another set of morons that when she and Hansel went to a fight, it would be she and Hansel.
Maybe it was because she was his sister, but Hansel couldn’t understand why the village idiots that held the purse strings insisted on looking at Gretel and seeing a whore in leathers pretending she could use a blade. For one, Hansel had seen (met, known, in all senses of the word) plenty of whores and not one had the balls to dress like his sister (even that one that had, indeed, had balls).
For another, she had a vicious right hook, and of the two of them, she had the stronger stomach. And he didn’t just mean his stomach.
She looked good in blood, his sister. She would bite and kick and fight and go toe to toe with any witch, bastard, or monster they faced without a second’s hesitation. She didn’t worry for her clothes, face, skin, hands, hide, bones, or the blades and clubs that could break them. She had never once been trapped in what was expected of her.
And Hansel, at least in his own heart, had never once lived up to what was expected of him.
The bargaining done, the arguments finished, the night close to falling, they retreated to the local cheap inn, accosted by the usual wide-eyed townies, come to praise or poke at the famous siblings with a mixture of awe and fear that made Hansel almost as sick as sugar.
The beer was sweet on his tongue, every drought threatening to have his stomach revolt, but he downed them grimly and let Gretel carry the conversation (as she carried him), let her give the spiel: bring down, behead, and burn.
He waved away the stew when it came, and accepted the next tankard shoved into his hand, accepted Gretel’s knowing look as she ate his helping as well as hers-she’d long ago stopped forcing him to eat, stopped pinning him down and snarling at him to keep himself alive, knowing now that he would, for her-and held it together until he’d filled his stomach with enough bitter beer to have a good excuse.
The late summer night was crisp around the edges, with stars that burned like a witch’s eye on a pyre, and he bent over the midden pile, knees digging into the dirt of a hundred un-finished meals and emptied his stomach until he could imagine he tasted blood and ginger in the bile sliding down his throat.
When he finished, panting from the pain, lightning in his head and his watch buzzing like a bee’s nest, he leaned against the filthy wall and forced himself to breathe. After better than a decade, he didn’t have to think about getting out the syringe, shoving the needle into his thigh. The world spun in a way that was not completely related to alcohol, and he barely felt the needle’s tiny, sharp pain.
Gretel found him like that later, her hair slightly mussed, a rip in her shirt, new scrapes on her knuckles.
Hansel blinked up at her. “Trouble?”
She shook her head. “Guy got drunk, got handsy.”
“So you got handsy?” He grabbed her by the hand and ran a thumb over her bruised knuckles. The world was still spinning. He could imagine sugar on his tongue, bruises yellowing on her skin like butter browning over the fire.
Gretel’s mouth quirked and she dropped down next to him. “Handsy, Hansel. You could say that. Or maybe say he’s sleeping it off after I introduced his jaw to my fist. How about you, Hans? Trouble?”
He looked away. “Same old, same old, sis.”
She gently disentangled her hand and laid it over his thigh where the cloth of his pants was worn thin from the needle riding through. “Same old?”
He put his hand over hers, held onto her warmth and her steady fierce strength. “Can’t burn this one, can we?”
She moved her head, though through the darkness he couldn’t tell whether the short motion was a nod, a shake, or something indefinable. “Let’s get you to bed, shall we?”
He didn’t fight her as she pulled him back to his feet and back into motion.
The next day they rode into the forests near Schwinburg and killed themselves a witch.
This one wasn’t very smart, or fast, and didn’t last too long, even if she fought hard before dying. Hansel ended up pulling one of her jagged spines out of his hand-sharp like a hedgehog’s, but something that once they got stuck wouldn’t come easily from his flesh, and burned-and Gretel ended with blood a solid stain from her waist to her calves, with one streak over her forehead where she had wiped sweat from her brow during the work.
The witch had been luring the children into her snares with birdsong, and then keeping them in cages. Only two of the eight that had been taken were still alive.
They were poor little mites, sharp bones and big terrified eyes as Hansel smashed their cage doors and Gretel told them in her clean and no-nonsense voice that they were okay, that they would be okay. Hansel had to turn away from the sight of the blank eyes, of bony arms wrapped around his sister’s neck, and wrap his hand that bled sluggishly. This witch hadn’t fed her prey, apparently preferring them mostly bone.
When Gretel had broken them out, when they had burned their first witch down to ashes and filth, he had been a fat little boy, slow and empty-eyed from the sugar and the fear. He still woke thrashing from nightmares about those cookies and shards of sugar shoved through the bars of his cage, his hands shaking while he brought it to his lips, unable to do anything less while the witch held a knife to his sister’s throat. He had known even then, that he would be eaten when he had eaten enough to please her, but he could do nothing less for his sister’s life. To this day, the act of eating reminded him of having so much sugar in his stomach that he had to vomit it out, and then watching helplessly while the witch beat his sister bloody for his sins.
They burned the witch’s lair to the ground, and carried away their reward, the little girl clinging to Gretel’s shoulders, the undernourished boy with empty eyes Hansel recognized well carried in his arms.
It seemed a long, slow road back to Schwinburg, a smell almost like burnt sugar lingering in his nose, as always, following his sister wherever she would go.
~*~
{Author's commentary/notes}
*I’m playing fast and loose with German geography here (and with many other things). There is actually a town named Schweinberg (though I’d picked out Schwinburg before I knew that for sure; Google translate tells me that Schweinberg means “pig mountain” though I would have guessed “pig town” before) and it is near Oberpirach, which became Oberpatch for the sake of embracing inaccuracy (aka, not actually learning everything I would need to about German geography and culture to write this fic in a REAL place).
*Frauen-plural of “frau”, lady, woman, Mrs., I don’t speak German, so if my usage sucks, please let me know!
*Kuhn-this is…Hansel and Gretel’s last name? Seriously, guys, I didn’t know this until I started reading fanfic for the movie. So it may not be true *itches to see movie again but refuses to pay full price for it *
*Diabetes doesn’t work this way. I had to check, because I have friend with diabetes, and while watching the movie I was like “Wait, is that a high blood sugar when he gets those headaches? Is that a low bloodsugar? WHAT IS GOING ON?” So, after researching a bit turns out, the movie doesn’t know, and Hansel takes magic insulin, and has equally magic diabetes where he only gets dramatic sideeffects and doesn’t worry about his extremities
*Do any of you know which of the siblings is actually older? The internet didn’t seem to know, and the movie itself may have left it to the imagination.
*I wrote this fic on two premises.
One, that Hansel should have an eating disorder (in my continued canon, he eats crackers and beef jerky, and not much of that, just enough to keep up his strength, and in the past Gretel was practically screaming at him/holding him how to eat because she was so scared that even after they got away from the witch she was going to lose her little brother to sugar sickness and his own fear.
Two: That Hansel always seemed to back up Gretel in the movie, but she’s the one who does the talking when they are in public, she’s the one that fights, and doesn’t flinch from the sight of blood (okay, so Hansel doesn’t exactly run screaming, but he…dodges. Or pulls other people in front of him. If you’ve seen the movie you know what I mean), and Hansel just agrees with her. Both because he agrees with her and because he doesn’t seem to have the energy to butt in when she has it handled.
For all that Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters was a busty action flick, I thought that it’s portrayal of women was…strong? I mean, with the witches all being women, and Gretel being The Most Badass, both the savior of the day and the evil of the day were women and Hansel was…along for the ride? Important, but it wasn’t really about him so much.
And also Gretel’s outfit looked both like she could fight in it, and that it was very supportive. *grin *