inthewildwood | fanfiction: new skin may hold you in

Title: new skin may hold you in

Fandom: Hanna
Pairing: Hanna/Sophie

Summary: She will not return to the forest.

Rating: T

After Hanna shoots Marissa Wiegler dead- one bullet, sqare between the eyes because anything else would be both cruel and wasteful- she kneels down, sits back on her heels, and considers what to do.

She is wounded and bleeding. She had not lost enough blood for her life to be in danger, but if the wound goes untreated, there is a 93% chance of infection. That must be taken care of before anything else.

Fact: She has no money for a hospital.

Fact: She is in Germany. Germany provides healthcare only to German citizens.

Fact: She has no identification that will convince hospital employees that she is German. Her father's friend spoke of the importance of identification. They will not treat her because she attends the Klaus Kohle Gymnasium and has a dog called Trudi.

So there it is. She cannot go to the hospital. She must clean and bandage her wounds herself.

There must be supplies in the Grimm house.

There are supplies in the Grimm house- in a dirty white box with a red cross on the front. Hanna removes bandages and alcohol from it, then takes off her sweater and shirt. There is no heat in the Grimm house, a fact she is intellectually aware of but does not feel in a physical sense. She wonders if this is a result of the experiments done on her mother. Surely other people feel the heat and cold normally. Her father occasionally commented on the cold. Sophie complained often of the heat.

Sophie complained of many things.

She was Hanna's friend.

Hanna does not think on this further until she has finished cleaning her wounds with alcohol and binding them with the bandages. Survival must come first. When she is done, she allows the thought to return.

Sophie was- is?- Hanna's friend. Sophie's family was kind to her. Her father is dead. Sophie and her family are the only friends Hanna has left. Hanna is currently stranded in a strange country with no money and no identification. She has no one to help her survive, no one to teach her the workings of this world which she is barely beginning to understand.

Possibly, she could return to the forest. She cannot return to their cabin, clearly- she alerted Marissa Wiegler to its location. Marissa Wiegler is dead, but clearly she did not act alone. Her associates must be aware of the cabin's location. Returning to the forest would require building a new cabin without assistance or supplies, somehow surviving several months- at least- with minimal shelter.

She will not return to the forest.

Aother possibility is approaching the government and requesting their assistance. Doing so would require explaining her existence, her mother and father's deaths, and her murder of Marissa Wiegler. It is possible that Marissa Wiegler worked for the government. It is possible that the government will put Hanna in a cell while they decide what to do with her, if she is a threat to them. It is possible that they will decide never to made a decision.

She will not go to the government.

Possibly she will seek out Sophie and her family. A difficulty with this scenario is, of course, that she does not know where Sophie and her family live. But Hanna knows how to track targets; it is her greatest skill and her best asset. She knows where she saw Sophie's family last. She can begin there and track them to their home. It will not be difficult. And finding Sophie's family would mean finding allies, shelter, and people who would be willing to protect her. Neither of her other options offer that.

Also: finding Sophie's family means finding Sophie.

She will find Sophie's family.

Sophie and her family spend approximately a week in government custody before they're released. "Approximately" is the key word there- after that first night spent in shipping containers, they were transported to some sort of sterile-smelling facility where the lights were kept on at all times, so it was impossible to tell what time it was. Sophie couldn't sleep with the lights on. By the end of the week, she is a shaking, jittery mess. The only time she sees other people was when guards came by and deposited a tray of food in her room, leaving without speaking. They won't let her see her parents or her brother, no matter how many times she screams or kicks or throws her tray at the guards. After awhile, she gives up on the tray-throwing. If she doesn't, they might stop giving her food.

On the seventh day- or what she thinks the seventh day- the door opens again, only instead of a guard being on the other side, it was an English-speaking man in a business suit. Sophie, who'd never really lived business suits- not that she had seen them much, being raised by parents perpetually clad in madras and paisley- could have cried. Or kissed him. Or both.

"You're free to leave," he announces. "Courtesy of the British government." He ushers her out the door, and she doesn't think twice about asking questions. She's had enough of questions. When she's reunited with her family, who are waiting at the end of the hall, they don't ask any questions either. No one says anything until they were on an airplane headed back to Britain.

Miles speaks first. "Did they get Hanna?"

"If they did, it was your stupid fault," Sophie snaps. Ordinarily, snapping at her brother would have been an occasion for one or both of her parents to chide her. Neither do. Sophie finds the silence far more unnerving than any potential scolding, and keeps quiet for the rest of the plane trip.

She's able to brush off her friends for the first few days by claiming jet lag. The truth is, she doesn't quite know what to say to them. Normally returning from a vacation was occasion to show off souvenirs and gossip about how fit the foreign boys had been. There was no protocol, so far as Sophie knows, for "I spent my vacation locked in some kind of freaky Terminator jail." So instead of spending time with her friends, Sophie spends her time alone. At first she stays in her room, surfing her laptop obsessively for any news articles regarding strange blonde girls, or murders in Turkey (which was where they'd been- she thinks- when they'd lost Hanna) or the British government having an outing to somewhere in Central Europe to rescue a family of tourists. But on the third day of their return, her mother- belatedly realizing that her children are behaving somewhat oddly- gently suggests that Sophie might go out and get some fresh air instead. Arguing with her seems like a pointless and futile proposition, so Sophie goes. Still, she avoids her friends, walking along the riverbank instead and thwacking at flower heads with a stick. Watching the bright yellow heads tumble from their stalks and into the river does not make her feel better. It makes her think of a pale blond head, last seen slashing the throats of multiple assassins at once.

It's sort of difficult to feel better, with that in mind.

She keeps on scanning the news sites, after dark with her computer hidden under the bedsheets with her, after her mum and dad think she's asleep. It's a fruitless search. She doesn't know the name of the facility they were kept in, or the name of the people who were keeping them, or- for that matter- the people who got them out. Hanna, likewise, does not appear in any news reports- at least, not any news reports in English, which is the limit of Sophie's ability to Google. Still, a teenage girl killing a bunch of grown men would make the international news, right? And it's not anywhere. At one point, frustrated, Sophie dials up the first phone number she finds on Gov.uk, but as soon as she reaches the point in her story where she and her family were waylaid and kept in a strange storage facility, the woman on the end tells her never to call again and hangs up on her.

It's times like these she admires Hanna's method of getting to the point. Sure she was blunt as hell, and freaky besides, but she got her answers didn't she?

Frustrated and blocked at every turn, Sophie returns to her previous occupation: walking along the river and venting her frustration by whacking the heads off flowers. In the distance, her parents' window is open, and she can hear the radio, tuned in perpetually to the oldies station. Somehow, that only makes her angrier, and she starts kicking at the flowers in addition to beheading them. There's almost no plants left unscathed; the riverside is littered with decapitated dandelions and Queen Anne's lace. She's just thinking about taking it a step further and tossing all the flower heads into the river itself when she looks up and sees Hanna.

The other girl is standing on the other side of the bank, still dressed in the grubby jeans and grey hoodie she wore in Morocco. Her hair is loose and wild, like it hasn't seen a comb in weeks, and maybe it hasn't. Her gaze is exactly the same, though- level and unperturbed, despite everything. She's watching Sophie, waiting for her to look up. When she does, Sophie's breath catches.

"I've arrived," Hanna announces.

"Yeah," Sophie says, her breathing suddenly heavy. "Yeah, you have."

They walk in silence for what feels like miles. Hanna says nothing about what she's done or where she's been, only that she's in no danger because she "took care of it." Sophie wants to ask more, and yet she doesn't; remembering the assassins in Turkey, she thinks she knows what "taking care of it" entails and figures she probably doesn't want to know more. And if Hanna wanted to tell her, she would. It's not like she held back on any of the important stuff, like the Grimm House or being abnormal.

Speaking of: "I went to the house of Wilhelm Grimm," Hanna says. "There were statues there, of fairytale characters." She paused. "They were all rusted. They were not beautiful."

"I guess they wouldn't be," Sophie says. She's never been to Germany, much less the Grimm House. "So . . . what now?"

"Now?" Hanna repeats. "Now I am here."

Sophie thinks Hanna might be teasing her. "No, I mean what are you going to do now? Stay in England? Go back to . . . wherever you were from?" She doesn't know where Hanna is from, she realizes; doesn't know any of the important stuff, like who her parents were or what kind of house she grew up in or what she wants to do when she goes to college. If she goes to college. Do assassins go to college?

"Oh," Hanna says. She pauses. "Now I hoped to stay with you." Watching Sophie's face, she adds "not with you, of course- I wouldn't impose on your hospitality. There is a hostel in town that allows me to stay in exchange for my sweeping the floors. It's quiet there. I like it." She wrinkles her nose. "Though it does smell of cleaning solution."

"You don't have to stay in a smelly hostel," Sophie blurts out. "You can stay with us, if you want. Mum and Dad won't mind." Sophie herself wouldn't mind. She has a flash of Hanna sitting at the breakfast table, Hanna dancing to the radio, Hanna curled up next to her in bed watching while she surfs the internet and points out her favourite websites. She thinks she might introduce Hanna to Facebook. Probably she doesn't have one.

"I would like that," Hanna says. "I would like to stay with you." Her affect is flat as always, but Sophie thinks she detects a slight emphasis on the word you. She hopes she does.

"I'd like that too," Sophie says.

Hanna holds her hand out, and Sophie takes it automatically. It's warm and dry against her skin, and Hanna's fingers curl around Sophie's. They walk the rest of the way home like that, hands swinging, the sunset at their backs illuminating the house in front of them.