#nadalind

As a devoted Grimm fan and Nadalind shipper, I am unashamed to say that Adalind Schade is my favorite character on this show, next to Nick himself. Over the years, I’ve read a great deal of opinions on the hexenbiesting of Juliette, Adalind’s ‘redemption’ arc, and Nadalind becoming endgame.  Both sides have their reasons for supporting who they support, and that’s just fine; to each his own. However, many of these arguments for one faction or the other (namely Nadalid versus Silverhardt) describe the character arcs that these women went through in only a very surface level way and often neglect to understand who these women truly are at their core. 

What shaped them into who they became and why they made the decisions they made.  

Understanding them individually also serves to help explain how it was that Nick’s vision of his ideal endgame lover changed so dramatically over the seasons.  

In the beginning, we meet Juliette as Nick’s co-habiting girlfriend of almost two years. Nick has bought a ring and is preparing to ask her to marry him. We know only that she is a vet, and that it’s presumed from her recounting spending summers with her grandmother in Spain and her fluency in Spanish that at least one side of her family is European. Mention is made by Nick of memories she has with her father as a kid watching fireworks together, but that was a fantasy Nick dreamed up about Juliette regaining her memories after she’d lost them, so we as viewers really don’t know how much of that is true or just a manufactured part of Nick’s dreamscape. 

We know that she has friends of her own, mostly people she knew before she met Nick, some from her vet practice, and a few that she went to college with.  

Beyond that, we know precariously little about Juliette, and over the six seasons of the show, very little actual development is given to her character until she becomes a hexenbiest and is transformed into Eve. 

What we do see is a kind, caring woman who obviously loves her boyfriend very much and is hopeful for a future with him – home, marriage, children. However, these hopes reside with the man she fell in love with, the wide-eyed, charismatic, idealistic young beat cop who was still searching for his place in the world after living such a nomadic, peripatetic childhood being raised by his strange, eccentric aunt.  

At that point, their wants and desires coalesced. He wanted to put down roots and have the quiet, normal life he was denied growing up – not just for himself, but for his future children.   

And Juliette very much wanted to give that to him.  

But then Adalind walked into his life, Aunt Marie showed up on his doorstep, and his world was forever changed. 

Throughout season one, Nick was actively working to keep the wesen world away from his personal life, namely Juliette, as it had become increasingly apparent that the danger involved with being a Grimm came with a level of life-threatening violence (Siegbarst, Daemonfeurer, Reapers, Verrat, the Coins of Zakynthos) that he was unwilling to subject her to. Hence, he began pulling away from her, lying about his long, erratic hours at work and the unexplained battering he was taking as time wore on. 

Juliette could sense that something was wrong. He began pulling away from their social circle, though it should be noted that most of his friends weren’t actually his to begin with. From the flashbacks of their early days together, one can infer that they were Juliette’s friends, and Nick simply found a way to fit himself into that group as they absorbed him by virtue of the fact that he was seeing her. He was making excuses for not showing up to dinner, planned events, and date nights. He no longer confided in her about what was going on in his life, things that happened at work, etc. Instead, he suddenly had a brand-new friend, Monroe, seemingly out of nowhere. 

A friend that, to Juliette, did not seem like the type of person that she would’ve known Nick to associate with. At all. Suddenly, he was spending more time with Monroe than her, and more than that, consistently seeking counsel and advice from the weird clock guy over his own girlfriend. 

Juliette was certain that something was going on, and Nick was deliberately keeping things from her. She wanted to believe that he was just having a hard time dealing with Marie’s death, and that keeping those feelings locked away was causing him to seek out destructive coping mechanisms. That was why, when he asked her to marry him (after their entire romantic weekend went tits up because of yet more wesen shenanigans) she couldn’t say yes.  

If he needed help dealing, she absolutely wanted him to get it, but she couldn’t commit herself to forever with someone who was shutting her out. Going into a marriage burdened with secrets and lies is a recipe for disaster. Perhaps he should have told her then. But I don’t think her reaction would have been much different to how it went down a few episodes later when he did tell her, though. Granted, by that point, she had the added stress of Nick (in her eyes) acting like a boorish jerk to Adalind on their double date with her and Hank. Add to that his virulent dislike of Adalind for no real reason (that she knew of) and his suspicions that she was responsible for the cat's scratch without any actual evidence other than ‘she’s a witch’ to prove it. It is reasonable enough to understand why, by this point, Juliette had enough of Nick’s suspicious behavior and attitude.  

If these two had been reasonable and thinking clearly, the signs were more than obvious that this should have been the perfect time for a break-up. If Juliette had not been poisoned, I genuinely think she would have left. Nick, however, was so desperate to cling to the one bit of normalcy he had left in his chaotic life, that he wasn’t about to let go of Juliette for anything, even though his Grimm world had now put her life at grave risk. 

I know he was starting to believe that Marie was right when she told him to let Juliette go, but then his supposed dearly departed mother came back from the ‘dead’ and threw his life into another headlong tailspin. She was the one who said, ‘don’t make the same mistake that I did. Don’t leave the people you love.’ That was the driving force (this and knowing how much his mother regretted leaving him when he was a child and how losing Nick’s father destroyed her) that motivated him to do whatever he could to help Juliette get her memories back and fix what he had broken. 

At this point, I didn’t care either way if Juliette ever got her memories back. I was never that invested in their relationship in the first place (it just never really pulled me in because the chemistry was just not there for me), and she’d already earned some ill will from me for treating Nick like a crazy person when he took her to the trailer to prove to her that what he was saying was true. Yes, I get that he did not handle the reveal in the best way. He completely overwhelmed her with information that, in her mind, seemed fantastical and unreal, and the fact that he was running around like a raving loon really didn’t help his case. However, she didn’t even attempt to sit down and look at the books or ask him to slow down so she could better grasp what he was trying to tell her. She just immediately decided that he was mentally unstable and needed help.  

Babygirl, this is the man you’ve been living with for over two years now. You know him well enough at this point that you can be reasonably certain that he isn’t just going to wake up one day and decide to make up some nonsense about people who can turn into strange, crazy monsters just for shits and giggles. You should have enough trust in him at this point to at least try to understand what he’s telling you. Do you really think he would be freaking out that much it if really was just an innocent cat scratch?  

Still, I was willing to give her leeway in this, because Monroe did emphasize to Nick that some people just can’t handle knowledge of the wesen world and all it entails. That’s why they tend to stay away from Kerseite relationships as a whole. I even gave her a pass during the whole obsession arc with Renard because that genuinely wasn’t her fault.  

What I could not comprehend was the way she treated Nick during this time. She relegated him to sleeping on the couch (did they just forget they had a spare room?) Was she so uncomfortable with him that she wouldn’t even allow him to use the spare bed in his own house?  I get that he was a stranger to her at that point, but in the hospital, he brought her an ipad with pictures of them to help her remember. Even though she didn’t, she could at least see that they were happy together and in a committed relationship. She could be sure, at the very least, that he meant her no harm. Allowing him to sleep in the spare room was not beyond reason. Relegating him to the couch, even though he said he understood her reluctance to have him upstairs, was just painful and uncomfortable to watch. 

Even worse, when she wanted to understand more about their relationship, she talked to everyone in their lives (her friends, Monroe and Rosalee, even Hank) but never made even so much as one attempt to talk to Nick. Who would know the intimate details of their relationship and be able to answer her questions better than the man who loved her? Even after she found the engagement ring in the dresser drawer, she STILL wouldn’t go to him.  

Nick didn’t find out about her feelings for another man until it had already been going on long enough that Monroe had seen the proof of it with his own eyes, and she felt she had no choice but to tell him before Monroe likely did. Even then, Nick had to find out from a taped tv broadcast that it was, in fact, Renard who she was messing with.  

The defenders will be quick to point out that none of this was Juliette’s fault. I don’t disagree. I think Nick’s anger and rage had much less to do with her messing around with another man behind his back and more to do with the fact that she didn’t tell him what was going on earlier so that he could deal with it before it got that bad. There was also Nick’s growing suspicion that the captain knew more than he let on and had his own agenda – which turned out to be true. Ya know, the whole half-royal/half-zauberbiest of it all... 

Not that he wasn’t absolutely crushed when she told him about these feelings. You could see the light just go out of Nick’s eyes at that point and the low, simmering rage settle in as he packed his things, his tone flat and emotionless as he told her that he was tired of sleeping on the couch in his own house and was moving out. Juliette’s reaction was just as cold and uncaring. She didn’t even try to ask him to stay. It didn’t even seem to matter to her whether he stayed or left. She was at a point where she felt it might be better to never remember Nick at all, so they could both move on. 

This was another tipping point. After curing her from the obsession, Nick should have cut ties with Juliette completely, whether she got her memories back or not. It would’ve been for her own good, and she wouldn’t have to keep suffering because of what he was. She would have been kept away from the constant chaos and danger of Nick’s world and been free to find someone who could better fit her vision of a safe, normal life. 

There were definitely other issues on the table that marked their relationship as unhealthy. It was obvious to me from the beginning that Juliette had some deep insecurities about honesty and fidelity in relationships. Unfortunately, seeing as we had little to no backstory about any of her prior relationships, I have little to base this on other than her own actions. In each season, she accused him at least once of infidelity. The first time with the daemonfeurer, I could almost understand Juliette’s incredulity at Nick’s mediocre excuses, even though he genuinely did nothing wrong. It’s just that he didn’t explain himself very well because at the time, he was still trying to keep the truth from her. 

And let’s be real – in the early days, Nick was an absolutely terrible liar.  

He still had trouble back then justifying his own existence and actions, especially when certain violent wesen left him no choice but to go beyond the boundaries of the law and work outside the system he’d always believed in.   

After everything he went through to help her get her memories back (and her own...mistakes...shall we say), any further accusations against him of infidelity would seem borderline ludicrous. And yet, in season three, she does this not once, but twice. 

By this point, Juliette has her memories back and is fully in supportive girlfriend mode, in some instances, to Nick’s annoyance. After what she put him through, it’s understandable Juliette was obviously trying to make up for how she treated Nick by fully diving in and accepting this part of who he was and the new world he’d thrust her into. She did everything she could to learn as quickly as possible, which I know Nick was grateful for, but sometimes she just went a little too overboard. It felt as if she was overcompensating for not being there for him in the beginning. 

While she did provide some pivotal knowledge and insights for some of Nick’s investigations, more often than not, she saw fit to insert herself into his work without asking first. The Grimm stuff was Nick’s purview, and he was used to being surrounded by people who were already a part of that world and had not only the knowledge but the brute strength, skill, and fortitude to handle the level of violence his job often required. Her medical knowledge was one thing, but realistically, Juliette was unskilled as a combatant. Yes, she was a good shot with a pistol, but beyond that, she was vulnerable, and Nick couldn’t do what needed to be done if he was constantly having to worry about her safety. 

That was the entire reason he had wanted to keep her out of it in the first place. 

Then, Nick got an email from his mother signed ‘love you, M,’ and Juliette got all bent out shape wanting to know who the hell he was talking to, as if she thought he was messaging with another woman. Even after he told her it was his mother, Juliette still didn’t believe him and, in the moment, acted like he was making up some ridiculous bullshit to keep her from finding out that he had someone on the side. 

Honestly? After everything this man had been through for her? After the way he reacted when he found out about her feelings for Renard, regardless of the fact that it was a side effect? 

If there is one thing we can be certain of when it comes to the Grimm, it’s that Nicholas Burkhardt doesn’t share. 

With the chasm between them growing ever wider and the wesen allure having well and truly worn off at this point for Juliette, a bombshell then drops after dealing with the Grausen-infected boy. For the first time since finding out the truth about the wesen world and Nick’s grimmness, Juliette is now finding herself having to face questions about her and Nick’s future. What will her life be like if they marry and this becomes her world – permanently? What will happen when they have children? Will they be grimms like Nick? Will they be forced into this violent world and have to put their lives at risk to uphold the family legacy? 

Will they have to die for it like so many before them? 

Worse, how much more can she take? If Nick thought Juliette knowing was easier than her being kept in the dark, he was sorely mistaken. If anything, it only made his life harder. Now he’s forced to walk on eggshells and worry that the next time violence visits them, will it be too much? The next time he has to do some terrible thing because what he’s dealing with is more than human law can handle, will she turn away in horror and disgust? 

That moment when she invited Nick to sit down with her and talk about his day – wesen weirdness included – he seemed a bit...taken aback. Granted, I know this was not something he was used to doing with her, but even knowing that he could share these things with Juliette seemed to fill him with trepidation, and it was easy to see the cogs turning as his mind began to subconsciously water things down for optimal paleteability.  

The constant stress of having to police yourself because your relationship is on a razor’s edge with someone who already has one foot out the door?

No one should have to live like that. 

When Juliette told him that she just couldn’t see bringing a child into that world – his world - the broken look on Nick’s face said it all: any hope of a future with her had just shriveled up and died. 

His mind already knew the truth, but his heart just wouldn’t give up. And so, he tried to propose again...which blew up in his face before he could even get the words out when his mother and Adalind showed up unannounced and in desperate need of help. Now, I absolutely understand Juliette’s incredulity and anger at having to help Adalind – the hexnebiest that put her in a coma and took away her memories – and she was fully within her rights to walk away from the entire situation and let Nick handle it on his own. 

No one in their right mind would have blamed her. Hell, even Adalind herself didn’t argue the point.

She didn’t want to be there either. 

This was another major turning point. Juliette and Nick’s relationship was already teetering on a knife’s edge after the Grausen conversation, and his aborted attempt at a second proposal was an obvious desperate move to make things solid between them again and prove that they could make it work despite the craziness that often barreled into his life.

The fact that Juliette was now having to entertain the idea of helping Adalind, someone she virulently hated, only added to the bitterness and frustration that had been growing within her for some time. This is the first instance where we see her truly appear mentally and emotionally exhausted with the constant upheaval that Nick’s grimness has brought to their life. 

The thing is, she could have walked away and let Nick handle it on his own. No one held a gun to her head and forced her to help protect Adalind and her baby. She made a choice. For the baby’s sake, I’m sure, but a choice, nonetheless.  

By the time we get to the introduction of Trubel a few episodes later, Nick brings her to the house because as a young, untrained Grimm, her life is at risk, and she literally has nowhere else to go. Nick’s just asking for a little empathy and understanding, and in my mind, I could hear Juliette screaming internally. Her flat, almost irritated response is followed by a look of what can only be described as pure resignation. 

Resignation bordering on resentment. 

And it was all downhill from there. 

By the time Adalind pulls off the twinning curse, Juliette’s cup is one bad day from running over. Finding out her boyfriend was literally screwed over by the woman she hated with the fire of a thousand suns on the same day her house became a massive crime scene was enough to have her at the end of her rope. 

Her venomous reaction is no surprise, and again, she has every right to be angry, but when she snarls at Nick that being a Grimm has ‘infected their lives,’ the look of defeat in his eyes is a punch to the gut. When she tells him she doesn’t know how much more she can take, he is devastated and stunned speechless, almost curling inside himself while being weighed down by a mountain of guilt. 

This could have been another break-up moment, and considering everything they’d been through, no one would have blamed either of them for deciding they were better off parting ways. There’s not a doubt in my mind that if Nick hadn’t lost his Grimm that day, Juliette would’ve called it quits.  

Despite her earlier acceptance of his life, the fact that she did so out of a sense of guilt for not believing him only made the resentment and bitterness she was harboring grow that much deeper when her remorse wore off and reality set in. She now understood that as long as Nick was a Grimm, the drama in their lives would never end.  

They would have no peace. 

Again, this could have been a natural endpoint to their relationship, and no one would have faulted either of them for it. From an honest perspective, she flat out accused him of sneaking some unknown woman into their bedroom for an ‘afternoon delight’ supposedly because he knew that she was going to be ‘conveniently’ out of the house (the third time she’s done this, by the way). The fact that he didn’t deny the sexual encounter because he didn’t realize anything nefarious had happened at first made it seem, in her mind, that on top of cheating on her, he was outright bragging about it.   

Obviously, this was before they realized Adalind was responsible for everything, but that’s beside the point. She assumed the immediate worst-case scenario once again, putting her trust issues and insecurities in a glaring spotlight. 

After the seven levels of hell they’ve been through over the years, how is she still this insecure in their relationship? After all she’s put him through – that they’ve put each other through – the fact that he was still there and still wanted to marry her despite the chasm growing between them should’ve been more than enough proof to dispel her fears. 

But as we saw in season four, ‘Nick the Grimm’ wasn’t what she wanted. She loved him, and some part of her still wanted to be with him (maybe even marry him), but not as he was in the present. She wanted ‘Nick the normal guy.’ Nick, the fresh-faced, wide-eyed, idealistic beat cop she fell in love with all those years ago who had no knowledge of what he was or the violent world he was born into. 

Nick clung to her as the last bastion of normalcy in his crazy life and because he felt responsible for everything that had happened. Juliette hung on because Nick lost his abilities, and she hoped that was their chance for a fresh start far away from the wesen world. 

And Nick was so riddled with guilt over the insanity he’d brought to their lives, he was almost willing to walk away with her, forget all that he’d seen and experienced, sacrifice his friends and his family’s legacy, for one last chance to fix a relationship that had been on its last legs since the moment Juliette rejected his first proposal. 

He could move far away with her, but that wouldn’t have solved anything. Wesen don’t only live in Portland, after all. They’re everywhere. He couldn’t unsee all that he’d seen or simply forget that wesen even existed. He couldn’t turn away from his friends and his mother. 

If Nick did leave, he would try to be happy for Juliette’s sake, but he’d always worry about Trubel, Monroe, Rosalee, and his mother. He would have felt as though he’d abandoned them – Trubel especially, since she had nothing and no one but him that she truly felt safe with and trusted -- and that guilt would have built steadily into deep-seated anger and resentment of Juliette for making him feel as if he had no choice but to leave in order to save their relationship. 

Nick was clear with Monroe that he was pissed off that his powers were taken from him, and he desperately wanted them back. He just didn’t know how to explain that to Juliette without risking her walking away for good. Ultimately, the Wesnerein situation made that decision for them. 

This is the hill I will die on regarding Juliette’s decision to perform the ritual so that Nick could get his Grimm back: the only reason she agreed to do this at all had nothing to do with Nick or what he wanted for himself. She did this completely, one hundred percent because Monroe and Rosalee’s lives were in danger, and Nick had to be a Grimm again so he could help him. 

If she could have found another way, she would have. She definitely did not do it for Nick. She did it because it was the right thing to do at the time for his friends.  

Let us not forget though that no one put a gun to her head and forced her to go through with the ritual. Once again, Juliette and Nick made a choice. They had been told by Elizabeth that there could be unknown side effects, and they chose to go through with it anyway. 

The consequences from this decision only served to put the final nail in the coffin of their relationship. 

By this point, Juliette had now become a hexenbiest herself, and because she feared Nick’s reaction, she went to Sean (and Henrietta) for help. Again, she purposely kept this from him until she had no choice but to accept the fact that the change was permanent. That, and she could no longer explain away how she’d managed to overpower several dangerous wesen (a blutbad, a manticore, and a fully powered Adalind, respectively).  

Nick had sensed that she was pulling away, and she seemed to have become a colder and more aloof version of herself. It was plain to see that every time she had to use her powers to take down an enemy, she was enjoying it more and more. The biest inside her was playing on that long-simmering well of bitterness, resentment, and anger inside of her that she’d tamped down for years, allowing it to slowly boil over and give her the permission and the power she needed to act on it. 

When she finally revealed her secret to Nick, he was understandably in a state of absolute shock. She throws this in his face and forces him to accept their new normal on the spot, without giving him even a second to mentally and emotionally process this bombshell. When he’s not immediately accepting and even, quite frankly, horrified, she takes it as a personal slight (I’m assuming because he’s been able to accept and befriend other wesen, so why not her?) before he can even catch his breath. 

To add insult to injury, when Nick comes to her hat in hand to assure her that he still loves her, has no intention of leaving, and will do whatever it takes to make their new normal work just like she did for him, she pretty much spits in his face and forces him into a compromising position that he wasn’t remotely ready to deal with. 

It seemed to me that Juliette felt he was only agreeing to stay with her and make it work out of a sense of profound guilt for being at least partially responsible for what happened to her. She was pissed off that he told Hank about it because he needed to confide in someone, yet she did the exact same thing when she went to Sean. Both sought solace in others over each other. Just like with the lost memories debacle. 

If there’s one thing that these two have a serious problem with, it’s communication. 

If they had ever actually sat down and had a serious conversation with each other about all of their relationship issues, I fully believe they would have broken up long before this. Juliette wanted to have a future with a version of Nick that simply didn’t exist anymore, and Nick was clinging to a dying relationship out of a misplaced need to honor his mother’s wish that he not wind up broken and alone the way she did. 

He wanted the family he lost as a child and a normal that his life could never be.

Guilt was also a huge factor here. He felt responsible for what happened to Juliette and wanted to do whatever he could to make it right. To ‘give her back what she lost,’ as Monroe put it.  

Up to this point, her ire was mostly aimed at Nick. Despite her rapid shift in personality, he had hoped that, with time, he could get her to calm down and see reason, but once she landed herself in jail, it became very apparent to him that Juliette was beyond giving a damn about what he or anyone thought of how she wanted to live her life. 

All the venom she couldn’t or wouldn’t cut him with over the years for his Grimm shenanigans was now freely being launched in his direction without remorse. 

There may have still been a remote chance to talk her down with time and no outside interference, but once Kenneth spilled the beans about Adalind and Nick’s little Grimm baby...well...she clearly lost her damn mind. 

Now, I'm not going to go into what happened after Iron Hans. We all saw it. We all know what Juliette did. How she almost forced Nick to shoot Monroe, destroyed the suppressant they made to help her, torched the trailer, slept with Sean and Kenneth (the last in her and Nick’s bed purely out of spite) ...and betrayed Nick’s mother’s trust while orchestrating her literal murder (as well as the slaughter of her neighbors) with the Royals (while also kidnapping an innocent child). 

She may not have physically wielded the weapons that killed Kelly, but she might as well have. 

Juliette didn’t just burn her bridges. She turned them into smoking piles of ash.  

Even after getting her soul ‘cleaned,’ there was no going back for her and Nick. This is not to say that they both didn’t have their own crosses to bear in the destruction of their relationship. Juliette was not solely to blame. The choices she made were on her, yes, but Nick made choices, too.  

As I detailed above, there were more than enough ‘breaking points’ in their relationship over those four years since Nick became a Grimm where they could have – and should have – broken up. Or at least laid all their cards on the table to finally decide whether or not they could truly continue to be together amidst the chaos of his life.  

Instead, they both clung to each other for far too long, and they both wound up paying the price. 

One of my favorite Grimm fanfiction authors, Midnight Jen, had Nick lay out the reason for his and Juliette’s failure perfectly in her story, Necessary Sins: 

''I'm done pretending I'm ever going to be something I'm not just because I don't want to lose you. I deserve to have that future Juliette, and I deserve to be with someone who wants to give it to me, who wants it too.” 

“Nick,” Juliette tried to interrupt him, but he wasn't finished. 

“And you deserve the same thing. I like being a Grimm. It's not just what I am, it's who I am. I'm not going to let that stop me from living my life. There's no reason it should. But you can't give me that, and I'm never going to be able to give you that quiet life you want. I'm done pretending we'll work it out.” 

“I love you, Juliette. I do, but I have to stop pretending that one day you're going to love the Grimm and stop wishing I was the old Nick.'”