Work Text:
It’s not until she’s alone that the reality of it begins to sink in.
She’s in the Emerald City, in the Wizard’s palace.
She’s not a fugitive anymore. She’s not the Wicked Witch of the West. She’s...with the Wizard.
Elphaba feels like the last few hours have been a dream. Oz, the last few days, even.
Hearing the news of her father’s death and ensorcelling Nessa’s shoes; Boq’s lost heart and the journey to the Emerald City.
And now. Striking a deal with the Wizard. Agreeing to work together. Freeing the monkeys.
“Of course,” the Wizard had said, all warmth and paternal sentimentation, when she’d asked for a moment to herself. “I’m sure this is all very overwhelmifying for you. Take all the time you need and come find me when you’re ready. I’ll see about getting your quarters all settled for you.”
So she’s still here in Oz’s throne room, too full of nervous energy even to sit down. She’s not pacing, exactly, but she can’t quite seem to settle.
The Wizard must truly trust she’s chosen to join him. Or else she’s still being watched, even now. Maybe he’s gone to get guards, or Madame Morrible. Someone to lock her away, or to kill her—to silence the Wicked Witch for good.
No.
He wouldn’t do that. Would he? He’d been so determined to persuade her, to convince her she didn’t have to be his enemy. If he wanted her dead, his guards would be here by now.
She’s safe. They made a deal.
And—it was a good deal.
The monkeys are free, and she can do so much more. Gain so much power. Make so much good.
She made the right choice.
Of course she did.
There’s a noise at the door and adrenaline jolts back up Elphaba’s spine.
Her broom comes up automatically, held in a defensive stance towards the intruder—the intruder who isn’t the Wizard—the intruder who’s wearing an elaborately decorified green guard’s uniform—the intruder who’s pointing a rifle at her.
The intruder who is—Fiyero.
Elphaba’s heart leaps and breaks and burns a thousand times over in a single breath.
Fiyero.
A unending clock-tick stretches in silence, shattered by the broom slipping from her trembling fingers and clattering to the ground.
It’s echoed almost instantly by the rattle of the rifle hitting the floor, unceremoniously discarded by Fiyero, and then he’s crossing the room, reaching her in three impossibly long strides.
“Elphaba,” he says, and she’s never heard his voice like this. “Thank Oz you’re safe!”
And suddenly she’s wrapped in Fiyero’s arms and he’s crushing her to him, so tightly it would hurt if it weren’t so wonderful.
“Fiyero,” Elphaba gasps out, half a sigh, half a prayer. “You frightened me.”
She feels his hand slide against her hair. His face is half buried in her shoulder.
“I could say the same to you,” he says, so quiet she hardly hears him.
Abruptly he pulls away.
“Come on,” he says. “We don’t have a lot of time—we’ve got to get out of here—”
He starts tugging her towards the door, but his hand is wrapped loosely around her wrist, like he’s not expecting her to resist, and she’s able to pull away easily.
“Fiyero, what are you doing?” she asks.
He turns back to her, eyes wild but jaw set. “I’m coming with you,” he says, steady, with deep feeling. The way he says it, it sounds less like an answer and more like a vow.
“What?” Elphaba repeats, barely able to think past the rocketing hammer of her heart and the rush of joy still fizzling her mind at the sight of him, whole and unharmed and here.
“I’ve spent all this time looking for you,” Fiyero says, like it should be obvious. “Everything I’ve done—the Guard, the search—it’s been—I’ve been looking for you. So I could help you. Protect you. Elphaba, I promise you can trust me. So, come on, let’s go.”
Elphaba shakes her head. “But—Fiyero, I’m not leaving.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “We’re going to be okay. I sent the other guards in the wrong direction; there’s a back way we can sneak out—”
He’s not listening to her, a daze still in his eyes.
It reminds her of that day in the forest, so long ago, when she’d let herself dream, just for a moment, that it was her presence that put him so off balance, that it was thoughts of her and his gaze on her face that made her words slide into one of his ears and dart right back out the other side.
“Fiyero,” she says, reaching out tentatively, laying a gentle hand against his chest, making him freeze.
His hand comes up to cover hers, and he’s still staring at her like he can’t believe she’s real.
He’s engaged to Glinda, Elphaba tries to remind herself.
“There’s nothing for me to fear anymore,” she says, instead of saying anything far more foolish. “The Wizard—I agreed—I’m the Wizard’s Magic Grand Vizier.”
His brow furrows, mouth twisting in confusion like she’s speaking nonsense.
Fiyero reaches up to brush hair away from her face with both his hands, and they linger there, not quite cradling her face. His eyes seem to search hers, and she feels overwhelmed under the scrutiny and all the shocks of the day. She can’t parse what he might be looking for in her gaze.
Finally, what comes out of his mouth is, “Since when?”
Elphaba lets out a breathless laugh. “About ten minutes ago?” she guesses, but her ease falters under the force of his frown, his furrowed brow.
The relief and eagerness she’d felt are fading, simmering into twinges of anxiety and the slowing, aching pounding of her heart.
“I—I wasn’t planning for it to happen like this,” she says, not sure why she feels some dire need to explain herself. “I had gone to Munchkinland, to Nessa, but—I had to come here, to free the monkeys. You have to know, Fiyero, I never meant to harm them. I’ve agonized over it. I wish I could take it back.”
Fiyero opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, but Elphaba is on a roll now.
“The Wizard found me before I could get them out. I wanted to kill him, but—it was different this time. He told me about how he came to Oz, the way the people needed him. How he became what he is—The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He offered me a chance to make things better. To work with him, with all of Oz behind us. He freed the monkeys! And—and Fiyero, the things I can do—the things he and I could do together—”
Fiyero is still holding her, but his hands slip from her face down to her shoulders, gripping there half too hard, like he’s not sure if he should pull her closer or push her away.
“Elphaba, what are you talking about?” he demands. “What about the other Animals? The Lion cub? Dr. Dillamond? Glinda told me everything—she told me it was the Wizard, that he’s the one—”
Elphaba shakes her head, wild, frantic. “I can’t—I can’t think about that right now. I have to—If I’m ever going to help the Animals, I have to survive, too, Fiyero. Can’t you of all people understand that?”
Fiyero jerks back. “Can’t I understand?” he demands, scowling. “Me? Because I’m the selfish, brainless Winkie prince who dances through life without a care for anyone else?”
Elphaba scrubs her fists against her eyes, tries to soothe the building pressure behind them.
“Well, aren’t you?”
When she looks up, Fiyero’s face has gone completely still.
“I was,” he finally says, hollow. “Until this girl believed I could be something more. Until she made me believe I deserved to be.”
He swallows, looking away. “But I guess if she’s gone, that better man doesn’t exist either.”
“Fiyero—!” Elphaba begins, but he’s already walking away.
He still walks away.
~
Despite everything she’s seen over the past few years, Elphaba is still astonished at how easy it is to control a crowd.
The throngs of people who, only a few days ago, would have cowered in terror at the sight of her at best—and more likely come after her with torches and buckets of water—they’re cheering at the sight of her, next to the Wizard, exalted instead of reviled.
It's just like the old visions and daydreams she’d had as a child.
She’d thought she’d outgrown them. If not simply as an adult, then as a vigilante, villainized and pursued even by Oz himself. She’d really believed she didn’t care anymore, about being liked. Loved, even.
The most celebrated, the Wizard had told her, are the rehabilitated.
He’s right, Elphaba finds, and remarkably so.
She’d expected residual fear, distrust, harassment. She'd expected screaming grannies and children throwing rotten fruit.
Instead she gets cheers, and adulation, and uproarious, affectionate laughter, the first time she goes to speak in front of a crowd and stutters out a shy, “Um, hello, I’m--uh—Elphaba Thropp. For those who don’t know me.”
The Wizard, beside her, chortles good-naturedly, and on his other side Madame Morrible folds her hands together, a serene smile on her face but a sharp sparkle in her eye that Elphaba doesn’t quite know how to read.
And so the Wicked Witch of the West is transformified into the Wizard’s Magic Grand Vizier.
The title’s a bit clunky, she’ll be the first to admit, probably needs a little workshopping, but what it comes down to is that she’s safe, and accepted, and beloved.
Glinda puts together this whole marketing campaign, spreading the news, and suddenly Elphaba sees women out and about in pointed black hats like hers, sees an uptick in bright green eyeshadow and lipstick even beyond standard Emerald City fashion, sees children running around with broomsticks pretending to fly.
People trip over themselves to talk to her, to compliment her clothes or her talent or—Elphaba can’t fathom it—her green skin.
It's perhaps the most out-of-her-own-body Elphaba has ever felt. Even after flying, even after turning Boq to tin, even after feeling the world come crashing down around her shoulders when she first met—and fled—the Wizard.
A Munchkin boy she knows for a fact once threw rocks at her shakes her hand vigorously and heaps praise on her, like he thinks they’ve never met. A mother presses her practically newborn child into her arms, like she thinks Elphaba will bless her.
In fact, the only person who hasn’t welcomed her with open arms is Fiyero.
In a bitter twist from that first night, when he’d gathered her into his arms as if he’d never let her go, he now avoids her as much as possible.
When they’re obliged to be in the same room, he’s all stiff greetings and forced pleasantries. He never quite meets her eyes.
It’s so unlike him, unlike the way he used to be with her, it makes her sick to her stomach.
Fiyero is supposed to be light, and laughter, and dancing. Careless charm and snide remarks just this side of cutting, because deep down he’s a hair too soft-hearted to ever be really mean.
He’s teasing pigtail-pulls and quiet goading to live a little and constant pestering for Elphaba to skip class just this once please and overdramatic groans when she declined and half-dragged him by his ear to class himself.
And yes, time changes people. She’s changed—Oz knows she’s changed. But even that night in the throne room he’d been warm, and solid, and gentle, and—and Fiyero.
And she’d ruined it.
He’d left his own engagement ball, she found out later, because whispers had started to circulate that the Wicked Witch had been spotted in the palace.
He’d left his own engagement ball and spread disinformation around the Guard, sending his own direct reports on a goose chase through the palace so he could secret Elphaba out himself.
So that he could run away with her.
How had she repaid him, for that kind of friendship? That kind of loyalty?
“Because I’m the selfish, brainless Winkie prince who dances through life without a care for anyone else?”
“Well, aren’t you?”
She knew it was the wrong thing to say even before she said it. She didn’t mean it, not like that.
She’d meant—well, she’d meant that he was Fiyero.
Light, and laughter, and dancing.
Someone who hadn’t known hardship, not really, not the way she had. Someone who saw the value of the easy road in a way she hadn’t appreciated until it was too late.
She was tired. Tired of running. Tired of pain. Tired of losing.
She wanted to rest. To feel peace. To feel loved. To feel powerful.
So, yes. She expected Fiyero to understand that.
She hadn’t expected him to leave.
~
It’s a whirlwind few weeks, settling into the Emerald City, and then Elphaba and Glinda are swept off to travel with the Wizard on his tour around the Yellow Brick Road, finally completed, with a series of ribbon cutting events scheduled across Oz.
Elphaba takes comfort in the foreign familiarity of having Glinda by her side again, holding her hand and fussing with her hair, chatting incessantly about all the things she thinks Elphaba needs to know about the current state of Oz.
From the Wizard’s perspective, anyway.
It sounds rather different than the side Elphaba has seen firsthand, the tragedies and ruins the Animals and other disenfranchised groups endure.
Elphaba puts those thoughts down and tries to listen, to learn. To relax.
But there’s at least one persistent, prickling problem she can’t seem to let go of.
“Is it strange that the Captain of the Guard isn’t traveling with the Wizard?” she asks Glinda, trying to keep her tone casual. “Or is it normal for him to stay at the palace?”
Glinda’s smile fades a bit, and somehow that’s the first moment Elphaba realizes how brittle it’s been, this whole time, since their first tearful reunion at the palace and through every moment they’ve spent together since.
“It...varies,” she says, too light. “He’ll travel often, but there’s much for him to see to at the palace as well.”
It’s been a long time, but Glinda has never been supremely difficult for Elphaba to read.
“So I’m right,” she says. “He is avoiding me.”
“Look, Elphie, it isn’t—” Glinda breaks off before the obvious next word, personal, which all but confirms that it is.
“He’s not...” Glinda seems to be struggling to find the words to describe it. “The same,” is where she finally lands, vague enough to be maddening. “He hasn’t been. Not since you left.”
Elphaba blinks, too much, too fast. “I can’t have impacted him that much,” she protests, automatic.
Glinda shoots her a look. “You impacted all of us, Elphie. From the very first day. Who can say if it’s for the better, but—nothing has ever been the same since we met and you know it. But with Fiyero…I don’t know how to describe it,” she says, looking off out the window. “It went beyond moodification, though that’s where it started. You saw it, before we got on the train.”
Glinda swallowed. “And then—after. It was different. He was so—motivated. So dedicated. It seemed like a good thing, at first. From a certain point of view. He’s the youngest captain in Gale Force history, you know. By a solid decade at least.”
She doesn’t say anything for a long moment, even though it doesn’t seem, to Elphaba, like she’s gotten to whatever point she’s trying to make.
“It’s just—it doesn’t seem like him,” Elphaba finally says, when it becomes clear Glinda isn’t going to continue.
“No,” Glinda agrees, soft. “That’s what I’m saying. He’s changed.”
“But why?” Elphaba doesn’t know how to make it make sense.
Glinda’s expression is somewhere between affection and exasperation. “Because, Elphie,” she says. “He wanted to find you. He...”
She trails off, looking away, her voice softening. “He would have done anything.”
“Glinda,” Elphaba says, her throat too tight, remembering all at once that this is Glinda’s fiancé they’re talking about, not just Elphaba’s old classmate, old friend, old—
But Glinda laughs, a sound without any humor in it. “Hey, Elphie,” she says, with just enough of her old teasing edge to keep Elphaba from choking on it. “Remember when our biggest problem was me worrying about whether a boy—whether that boy—liked me?”
~
They don’t talk about it again, but Elphaba soon learns that Glinda and Fiyero’s engagement has been quietly dissolved.
They’ve been publicly connected for a long time now, but surprise engagement party notwithstanding, the ball they’d staged for the formal announcement was rather disrupted by Elphaba’s arrival, and a twist of phrase here and a rather gossipy populace there made it all too easy for word of the split to spread and then get eclipsed by the next juicy thing.
In the following days, gossip about the romance of the Good Witch and the Captain of the Guard altogether falls to the wayside in the wake of the return of Elphaba the Wonderful Witch.
“Alliteration!” the Wizard enthuses at her. “Very popular with the populace. And it works both ways, fearsome or fanciful!”
So Elphaba pushes down any discomfort the similarity to her old moniker raises in her gut and waves at gaping children and smiling old ladies.
Still, Elphaba doesn’t understand the why of Glinda and Fiyero’s split—they’re still friends, still spend time together, still whisper together in the corner of the room at balls and dinners, casting glances at other guests and even at Elphaba like no one else will ever be able to understand their private secrets.
But Glinda begins to entertain a variety of suitors, none altogether too seriously, but she’s available for attention in a way Elphaba knows she wasn’t, before. And there are plenty of folk who seem perfectly eager to take advantage of that.
To Elphaba’s eye, none of them seem to capture that spark in her Fiyero always has, but even that spark itself has shifted. There's still an obvious affection, a deep connection between them, but she’s only her standard level of flirtatious and his devotion looks steadier, simpler.
From what Elphaba can see at a distance, that is, because he still has a tendency to turn tail and scurry away when he sees her approaching. He doesn’t even deny that’s what he’s doing, because he hardly ever lets her get close enough to accuse him of anything.
Much of her time not spent out delighting the masses, she spends with the Wizard and Madame Morrible, practicing honing her magic and reading from the Grimmerie at their direction.
Sometimes she can see the immediate fruits of her labor—conjured flowers or levitating chairs or the particularly persistent case of hiccups she gives Glinda (which Glinda, for her part, is very gracious about).
But other times there’s no such obvious cause and effect. Sometimes she chants for hours and nothing seems to happen, save for a strange, eager expression that grows on Madame Morrible’s face, until she remembers to hide it.
Elphaba doesn’t ask any questions, on those days. It chafes against her chest, not knowing. But the thought of being cast out again chafes, too, and it battles the shame until she can smile again, and escape to a quiet evening with Glinda.
In either case, these magical endeavors are usually a fully separate endeavor from the audiences the Wizard hosts so citizens of Oz can petition him for assistance, or simply soak up his glorious Ozness.
So it’s notable, when asks her to bring the Grimmerie along to the throne room on what she expects to be an average afternoon of audiences.
It's even more notable when he lingers by her, not retreating behind the curtain to speak through his booming metal head.
And it’s a complete break from Elphaba’s expectations when a pair of Deer are escorted in.
It’s not typical for the Wizard to let Animals into the palace for audiences, for obvious reasons. Actually, aside from the monkeys, before, Elphaba hasn’t seen any Animals in the palace at all.
It’s clear right away that something is very wrong with them.
One of them is shouting, crying, frantically trying to get closer to the one stumbling on what looks like several broken legs, blood gushing from a wound too fast for Elphaba to see what the wound is.
“Please, she’s dying!” the uninjured Deer begs.
Elphaba has hardly a second to wonder how they got in, if the direness of their circumstance made the guards take pity on them in spite of commands from the Wizard, but he himself doesn’t look surprised at their appearance.
“Ah, yes, right on time!” he says, taking the book from Madame Morrible—since Elphaba’s been back, she hasn’t been permitted to keep hold of it herself, unsupervised. She'd decided it wasn’t wise to argue about it.
The Wizard nods enthusiastically as the Grimmerie starts fluttering, pages flipping rapidly toward its instinctive destination.
“Here, Elphaba, flip just to—ah, yes. That's the one we want,” he says, holding it out in her direction. “Have at it.”
Elphaba can’t tear her eyes away from the Deer.
“Please,” the one standing chokes out, voice raspy, agonized. “Please, help her.”
Elphaba is trembling. “What happened to them? Are they—”
“Come now, Elphaba,” the Wizard interrupts, that placating tone sending sparks of tension down her neck. “You trust me, don’t you?”
“I—” Elphaba blinks, trying to clear the blurry way her vision dances in front of her. She doesn’t consciously choose to ignore the question, but she steps forward, toward the Deer, one hand out soothingly. “I’m going to help,” she promises.
And she recites the spell.
She doesn’t know how long she’s reading, or how many times she chants it, like a prayer. She doesn’t know what it changes, only that both Deer fall silent and still. Alive, and no longer screaming. They both look disoriented, their eyes glassy, an odd shimmer around them that Elphaba might be imagining.
At first she thinks she’s done it—healed her, helped her, done something good. But as the guards shepherd them away from the throne, back towards the door, she can still see the blood soaking the female Deer, see the way her bone still protrudes from her back leg.
She thinks she hears the edge of a low moan of pain, but Madame Morrible’s effusive, flimsy praise drowns it out.
She doesn’t know when Fiyero came in the room. Just that he’s suddenly there, supervising the guards who lead the Deer stumbling back out.
He’s looking at her, for once.
But his face is utterly blank.
~
Perhaps the one place Elphaba can find herself truly alone, outside of her rooms, is the library.
She doesn’t mean to disparage the academic inclinations of the other residents of the palace, but she’s not sure she’s ever seen another soul flicker through the stacks or settle in near her at a table to pore through the incredible selection the Wizard boasts—texts on magic, on healing, on cooking, on travel. Novels and poetry and biographies and things Elphaba isn’t even sure how to categorize.
And above all else, silence.
The day after the Deer in the throne room, that’s where she lets herself retreat. Into the quiet, cool air, into the promised peace of a story that might distract her from any lingering—
Fiyero opens the door.
Suprise blooms through her chest, and her heart leaps, giddier than he deserves with the way he’s been avoiding her—until now.
But—no, it’s clear he didn’t expect to find her here, judging by the way he looks like he bit too hard into a lemon.
“Excuse me, Miss Elphaba,” he says, all stiff formality. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your research.”
Elphaba feels her expression melt into a scowl. “Are you kidding me?” she snaps, irritation flashing up her spine and onto her tongue before she can stop it. “There’s no audience, here, Yero, so you can knock off the fake niceties.”
They both flinch, involuntary, at her slip. At the nickname she’d half-forgotten she’d ever used. That she hadn’t ever meant to use again.
It brings back too many memories, in too quick a flood.
Sun-soaked outings with a picnic basket and a blanket in tow, shooting each other amused grins as Galinda scampered around setting everything just so or shrieked with delight at a shooting star.
Kicking each other under study tables in the library—one swift piece of retribution from Elphaba to counteract Fiyero whistling irritating tunes under his breath or sticking pencils in her braids turning to all out scuffles, ended only by Nessarose slamming her book on the table in a huff.
The way he spun her around the one and only time she let herself get talked into dancing with him at a party, instead of skulking at the edges of the room, smiling at the others’ antics or lightly tapping one foot at Galinda’s goading.
He’d bowed as he offered his hand to her, all melodrama as usual.
Galinda had actually acquiesced to dancing with Boq for once and was giggling into his shoulder while Nessa pretended not to pout over by the punch bowl.
“C’mon, Fae,” he’d said, pairing the plea with ridiculous puppy dog eyes. “My girl abandoned me for some other guy! I’m wasting away here! Alone! Discarded! Banished from the dance floor for lack of a partner!”
“Yero, there are literally dozens of girls here who would kill—or at the very least maim—for a chance to dance with you.”
Fiyero shook his head, stretching his fingers out further.
“But I want to dance with you.”
Elphaba’s heart had leapt into her throat. She didn’t quite know how to choke it down.
“Oz, you’re incorrigible,” she’d muttered, and she knew he saw the smile she tried to stifle by the spark of delight in his eyes.
And anyway, she took his hand, and he took her breath when he twirled her, too fast, leaving her dizzy and giggling, warmth sticking to her hand even after he’d let go.
And of course, in the end, he’d let go.
“I don’t have time for this,” Fiyero says here, now, turning on his heel toward the door.
“Oh, that’s right,” Elphaba says. “Run off, then, like you always do. I don’t know why I expected you to have changed that much.”
Fiyero wheels back toward her, eyes flashing. “That’s unfair,” he says.
“No, it’s just true.” Elphaba snaps, scathing. “You’re not brainless, and you’re not selfish, but you can’t deny you’re quick to run from trouble. What are you so afraid of?”
Fiyero huffs out something that might be called a laugh, if it didn’t sound so bitter.
“You want the truth?” he demands. “I’m not afraid, Elphaba. I just don’t want to be around you.”
Elphaba has never been stabbed, but she can’t imagine a knife slicing sharper then those words.
“Fine,” she says. “I see how it is, then. I should have known better, really. All this time I spent believing you were one of the handful of people who actually cared about me, and here I am learning you actually despise me. Maybe more than anyone else. You must hate me a lot, if all of Oz loves me now and you’re more disgustified than ever.”
“That’s not—”
“Everything I’ve ever done, my whole life, has been for others. But that’s not enough for you, is it?”
“I don’t think—”
“Glinda is happy to have me back—the Wizard trusts me—the people of Oz. But to you, I’m still the Wicked Witch of the West.”
“No, I never—”
“And after everything—after all the time—after you and I—”
“Oz, Elphaba, are you still so determined to never let me talk?”
Fiyero’s expression is a storm like she’s never seen, beating at all her boarded-up windows and rushing up like a flood to batter and drown any paltry defenses she tries to hold against him.
“Sorry,” she whispers, her voice nearly giving out.
Fiyero steps toward her, and she flinches away.
He freezes. “Elphaba,” he says, his tone somewhere between chastisement and guilt. He sounds hurt, under the surface, tinged with something a little like pity.
“Of everyone,” Elphaba says, fire surging back up at his infuriating gentleness. “Despite everything...I suppose it was foolish of me, but I really never thought you of all people would hate me.”
And even though she’s well on her way to blazing with fury, it’s a surprise to see anger sprawl across Fiyero’s face, too.
“Hate you?” he demands, astonishment warring with frustration. “You truly think I hate you?”
He doesn’t give her a chance to respond, doesn’t even give her a chance to blink.
Instead, he steps closer. Instead, he cups her face between his hands, so gently despite the roughness of his expression.
Instead, he kisses her.
His lips are soft but he kisses her hard, the force of it sending her stumbling back a few steps, until the wall presses into her back, cold and sturdy.
“Hate you,” he grumbles, bitterly, pressing her flush against the stone wall and kissing her again, hard and biting and about as glorious as anything Elphaba’s ever experienced.
“Fiyero,” she gasps against his mouth, and it’s just as well that he barely seems to hear her, because she doesn’t know at all what she’d say if he gave her a chance.
Instead of words, she kisses him back, trying to infuse the action with all her confusion and agony and passion and—
For his part, Fiyero seems to know exactly what he wants to say to her.
“As if I’m not so in love with you it could kill me,” he says, apparently unaware of the way he’s piercing her. “As if I wouldn’t sacrifice all of Oz to keep you safe. As if you hadn’t transfigurated me into someone worth being just by being yourself.”
There's a long, unbroken few moments with no words at all, just his hands sliding along her body and her fingers dragging through his hair and the mix of their breath and the sudden taste of salt from a tear she isn’t sure came from his eye or hers.
They break away reluctantly, so slowly, and Elphaba half expects him to dissolve away in front of her eyes. A mirage. A phantom. A fantasy.
He is still so solid under her fingertips.
His heavy breaths still brush across her lips, only inches away.
“I don’t hate you, Elphaba,” he finally says. “I could never hate you. But I am so angry at you I can’t see straight. And you don’t even seem to understand why.”
Elphaba shakes her head, hard, like she can rattle loose some comprehension. “I don’t understand why!” she says. “You’re the captain of the Ozdamned Gale Force, Fiyero. The same group that’s been hunting me for years. The people who enforced the Wizard’s most awful edicts, terrorized every Animal I’ve ever met—”
Fiyero is shaking his head, too. “I only did that so I could—”
“I know!” Elphaba snaps. “So you could find me. So you could stay with Glinda. So you could have access to the resources of the Guard. So you could have the Wizard’s ear.”
“But it isn’t—”
“I understand, Fiyero! I trust that everything you’ve done you’ve done for the right reasons, with the best intentions. Do you truly not think as well of me?”
“I do—”
“If it’s okay for you to work within the system to try to make a difference, then why can’t I?”
“Because you aren’t!” he shouts. “All you’re doing is acting as another of the Wizard’s marionettes. Just like Glinda. Just like me. He’s in your head, pulling strings, and you don’t even realize—”
“Don’t tell me what I don’t realize,” she snaps, but he keeps talking.
“You give me too much credit, Elphaba. I’m selfish, and I want to believe I’m doing good, but I see too much of the horror of this world to ever convince myself of it. I see what the Wizard truly is. And I see what you truly are. I always have. And I’ve let that give me comfort where my own action and inaction couldn’t.”
He leaves in a rough breath. “And now I’ve lost even that. As if the years apart from you weren’t bad enough. At least then I knew you were out of the Wizard’s reach. Now I’m—I’m forced to stand there and watch as everything you truly are slowly melts away.”
“Fiyero...” Elphaba says, barely feeling the tear tracking down her cheek.
Fiyero’s voice has gone so quiet she nearly has to lean into him to hear it.
“I don’t recognize myself half the time,” he says. “But I thought the one thing I could rely on was you. I could see you—the real you—behind the horrendible posters they’d hang everywhere. I could hear you in the reports we’d get about seditious Animal activity. I—I felt you, beside me, when I needed you. When I wanted to be strong like you.”
He finally looks up, his gaze burning into her like touch.
“And now you’re here and it’s almost worse.”
She’s trembling, just a little. She thinks maybe so is he.
“Watching you stand by him, smiling and waving and biting your tongue and performing his tricks, it feels like watching a piece of myself die. Don’t you wonder what the point is of all those spells he has you do? I know you don’t know. Glinda might be as willfully ignorant as you’re trying to be, but she still talks to me, still tells me the truth. Or what approximates it, these days.”
He looks at her, the anger in his gaze leeching into exhaustion and pleading sorrow.
“Don’t you see the way he’s using you? Changing you? Even yesterday, with those Deer—you don’t know what he made you do. You don’t know, but you doubted him, and you still did it! You were afraid, and you didn’t know, and you didn’t ask.”
He hauls in a shaky breath. “The Elphaba I know wouldn’t bite her tongue like that. She wouldn’t stand by and let Animals suffer in front of her eyes for some abstract concept of the greater good.”
Elphaba feels like she’s choking every word she has and hasn’t said, her whole life. She feels like she’ll never breathe right again.
Fiyero shrugs, huffing out a bitter half-laugh.
“Maybe I would have,” he says. “Maybe I do. Maybe I’m a coward. But you were good, Elphaba. Just plain good. It’s probably unfair of me, to hold you to that standard. But I’m also—I’m scared for you, Elphaba. Of course I was scared for you when you were out there—I was terrified. But here, with the Wizard constantly over your shoulder...it’s a different kind of danger. A sinister, subversive kind. Under the surface. Behind the scenes.”
He steps back, and she feels him start to turn away, but she won’t be left again. Not by him. So instead she shoves past him, makes her own way to the door.
This time she’s the one who leaves him.
It doesn’t feel any better.
~
Elphaba dreams in swirls of colors and screams.
Her heart races and never settles; her lungs fill with water more than they do air.
Sometimes Dr. Dillamond stares up at her, bleating balefully.
She blinks and he’s replaced by an image of her mother, blurry and aching and never near enough to hear her shouting for help.
Another lurch and she sees the group of Bears who helped hide her, those first days after she’d run away. The Deer from the throne room. A thousand nameless Sheep and Ravens and Jaguars and Cows, all the Animals she’d met in her travels, all the joy and fear and laughter and suffering she’d witnessed.
The Lion cub.
In her dreams she chants words she doesn’t understand, feels the earth underneath her grow too hot and then too cold.
She hears the Wizard laugh. She hears Glinda crying.
Fiyero is never there, but she can feel his resentment.
Nessa scolds her, voice carrying from another room.
Boq is screaming. Always screaming.
Madam Morrible’s smiles are just a bit too sharp.
~
When Fiyero turns up at her rooms the next morning, she’s expecting him to pick another fight, and she’s expecting herself to jump right in and shout at him.
Instead, he brings her a handful of red poppies and a look of chagrin, and her chest floods with warmth and guilt and some complex twist of fear and desire she can’t parse out.
“I wasn’t done shouting at you,” he says, somewhere between baleful and apologetic. “Or being shouted at by you.”
There's something of a war between pride and desire in her chest, but finally she lets herself reach out, take the poppies. She lets one thumb skim gently across the soft petals.
“And flowers speak louder than words?” she quips—a painfully weak attempt at humor, but he allows the ghost of a smile.
“I’m still angry,” he says. “That doesn’t mean I don’t owe you an apology. And maybe a reminder.”
Red poppies. Shiz. The Lion cub. The train to the Emerald City.
Doing the right thing. Making good.
Fiyero’s scratched cheek under her fearful fingers.
The plaintive mewls of a creature who needed them.
The dull swoop in her chest when he left her and Galinda at the train station.
The rush of joy when she saw him again for the first time in the throne room.
“I’ve never wanted to leave you, Fiyero,” she says, and the words sound braver than she feels. “And...I’ve never wanted you to leave, either.”
It’s hardly a confession, but he sucks in a deep breath, his eyes half closing, so it feels like one. Like she can pierce him, too.
He steps closer, almost too far into her space. But she doesn’t back away.
“I know,” he says. “And you’re right. Holding myself apart from you isn’t helping anything. And besides that...I don’t want to. Not if I could be beside you, instead.”
And even though he’s taller than her, he’s somehow looking up at her through his eyelashes, smoldering, melting her in ways she didn’t know were possible.
He takes her hand and holds it against his cheek, softly stroking it with his own thumb.
She can’t help the slight sigh that slips out, her hand relaxing involuntarily, and he turns into it, pressing his open mouth against her palm, sending heat shooting through her.
“Fiyero,” she gasps, her thoughts scrambling into nonsense.
“Elphaba,” he says, his voice a soft sigh.
They stay there like that for a long moment, not speaking, barely daring to look at each other.
He’d said he loved her, before. She’s afraid to even think it, afraid the very idea will crumble under too much scrutiny.
He releases her hand and she lets it drop, but she doesn't have time to feel the cold absence before his lips find hers, gently coaxing them open, his teeth grazing her bottom lip and sending a burst of static through her mind.
There’s one thing that stays very clear, even as he squeezes her hips and she lets her hands tangle into his hair the way she’s always wanted.
“Maybe I’m right, but you’re right, too,” she finally says, breaking a quiet filled with more subtle communication. “Whatever it is he’s really doing. We have to stop him. We have to do something.”
She feels one last flood of tension drain from his body and he pulls her into his arms. “We will,” he promises, pressing his lips against her forehead.
Elphaba nods. “But just for this moment…kiss me again?”
The bright flash of his grin is half-blinding, and for a moment he’s the obnoxious, fatuous, ridiculous young prince she first fell for. Then it settles and he's the infuriating, endearing, mutinous Captain of the Guard she’ll always adore.
“Anything for you,” he says, and she truly believes him.