Vanessa X Gregory Novels & Stories

I swear the Gregory/Vanessa ship has the most niche, patient writers on AO3, which is where you want to be. Trying to find it on general fanfiction sites is a nightmare because tagging can be all over the place—sometimes it's just buried under 'Five Nights at Freddy's' or 'FNAF Security Breach' tags with no proper relationship tag. On AO3, use the 'Gregory & Vanessa' tag, but then you have to sort by Kudos or Comments and really read the summaries. Look for ones mentioning 'recovery', 'found family', or 'slow healing'—those tend to be the slow-burn ones where the trust builds over chapters.

I found one called 'Circuitry and Second Chances' that's about Vanessa grappling with what happened while Gregory keeps checking in on her, and it's all through these little moments over a year. It's not romance, obviously, but the bond is so carefully built. Filtering out the 'Vanessa & Gregory' platonic tag might actually help, ironically, because a lot of the fast-paced or action-focused fics use the romantic slash, while the deeper character studies often use the ampersand.

Man, you’re asking the deep cuts. I stumbled into the Vanessa and Gregory tag a while back, mostly because the post-canon material for 'The Secret Saturdays' is so thin on the ground. There’s this one writer, pseudonym DocScary, who has a longfic called 'Cryptid Comforts'. It takes the premise that Vanessa is studying cryptozoology formally after the series ends, and Gregory is reluctantly assigned as her field mentor because, let’s be real, who else knows more? The slow burn is glacial, in the best way. They bicker over methodology, she gets impatient with his old-school bravado, and the moments of vulnerability are tucked into quiet scenes like sharing a thermos of coffee in a rainy dig site. It’s not tagged as romance for the first 20 chapters, just ‘adventure & friendship’, which makes the shift feel earned. I lost sleep over the chapter where he gets injured protecting her from a rogue yeti (OC, but it works) and she has to patch him up in a cave—the tension was so thick you could carve it. The writing is more character-study than plot-heavy, which suits them. It updates sporadically, but the existing 30-ish chapters are a masterclass in building something from shared professional respect.

Another one, 'Saturdays in Waiting', takes a different angle: Vanessa as an adult, taking over more responsibility from her parents, and Gregory as a semi-retired agent who keeps showing up ‘just to check on the perimeter security’. Their history gives them this shorthand, but also this huge wall of ‘we never addressed that almost-kiss in the Andes’. The author plays with time jumps, showing how their lives run parallel for years before finally intersecting. It’s a quieter, more melancholy burn, with a lot of focus on Gregory’s past and Vanessa’s struggle to be seen as an equal. The dialogue is sharp, and the payoff, when it comes, is a quiet confession over a chessboard, not some grand gesture. It just feels right for them. I’ve re-read that final scene maybe a dozen times.

Gregory x Vanessa isn't the pairing I'd usually go for—she's such a complex, morally grey character, and he's a kid trying to survive—but that's exactly why it works for some people. The tropes that fit best are ones that really lean into that inherent imbalance and the horror elements. 'Ghost in the Machine' or 'Digital Ghost' stuff where Vanessa's consciousness is trapped in the Pizzaplex systems after the fire, and Gregory, maybe years later as a teen hacker, finds traces of her. It lets you explore guilt and a strange, asynchronous connection without the ick factor of a direct age-gap romance.

Body-sharing fics, where Vanessa is fighting for control with Vanny and Gregory gets caught in the middle, can also be intense. You get that protective dynamic, but it's born from desperation. Found Family, but of the deeply broken and unsettling variety, feels more honest than forcing a fluffy romance. The best stories I've seen use the setting's inherent creepiness to build a bond that's more about two damaged people finding an anchor in each other, however twisted that might look from the outside.