Retaliation
~ A 'Wicked' Fanfiction ~
~ By Heatqueen ~
Chapter 1
I didn't understand the power of words back then. How a single spoken word could dictate a situation. How words had hidden meanings and contexts. How a single word could change everything, or how more words spoken meant less words listened to.
Some people are writers, and some people are talkers. Elphaba was a writer, and I was – and still am – a talker. It's just that now I've learned only to speak when the words are meaningful. Back then, some might have said I valued form over content. Long strings of acutely decorated phrases spilled effortlessly from my lips, but in truth, there was nothing of worth to be found in them.
Words had their uses. They could dictate or command a situation, change opinions and create perceptions. They spun tales favourably or otherwise for the sake of advantageous gain. And advantageous gain was a thing I sought constantly from the moment I arrived at Shiz University. Insecure and naïve, I was desperate to be popular.
Let's consider my arrival at Shiz as the start of the story. It was pre-empted by a series of forewords carefully placed by my elders in the form of disclosures to only the most important and wealthy Gillikinese families that I was to attend the university. They were exaggerated to give the appearance of wealth and good breeding. In fact, I was a country girl who excelled in the art of illusion. Anyone with good fashion sense knows that a well-placed accessory can turn an ordinary outfit expensive.
Thus I arrived in a carefully selected outfit of whites and beiges, designed to present an air of sophistication, and thoroughly practiced speech to match. It was easy to drown the mild country accent in a wide vocabulary and deeply knowledgeable conversation. In reality, what I believed to be deep knowledge could easily be spotted by anyone with the vaguest sense of academia as being nothing more than pretentiousness. As it turns out, there was one person with their head so screwed on that their cleverness almost passed with an air of righteousness; and it came in the form of the most unexpected sort of being imaginable.
Picture this – I was standing among a crowd of fresh faced students making polite conversation and ensuring that people only looked at me from my preferred angle, and all of a sudden my vision was marred with an image so completely bizarre that I thought I was seeing things. Among the renowned faces I'd long recognised the famous Nessarose of the Thropp bloodline, but it isn't she who'd taken my attention. Standing by her wheelchair there was another girl who looked not nearly as pretty and more severe. She stood astutely with a glower on her face and one hand firmly gripping the handle of the chair. I thought it was merely a bad trick of the sunlight that painted her face and hands the most garish shade of green I'd ever seen, but even blinking a few times did not dispel the illusion.
If I am the main character of the story, then let's call Elphaba Thropp the antagonist. I was soon to learn that she was too quick-witted for words. She was the one girl who would out-do me in any verbal battle (And I have won a lot of those). In hindsight, it was my fault for making her the enemy, but at the time, she was the perfect target. So different from everyone else, with a vicious temper and freakish bursts of magic, she was the perfect person on whom I could turn the focus. See, I wanted the best of both worlds: I was desperate to hog the limelight, but keeping everyone's eyes elsewhere meant that they would be too distracted to figure out my secret.
It was the perfect plan – and it fell through completely.
If there is any one way to bring people together, it is to unite them against a cause. The cause was to despise Elphaba, and as Elphaba's roommate, I became the leader. When I look back, I did many cruel things, but she did not make it easy for herself. So quick to buy into every piece of bait I laid out for her, she talked herself into a deep hole in which she became seen as little more than a bad-tempered witchy sort of girl. Her status, which should have been a great asset, did her no favours, not when she had a beautiful and elegant sister snatching at scraps of sympathy for being related to her.
Nessarose was considerably milder than her sister. She went from moments of curt sensibility to genuine sweetness, and even mild defence of Elphaba's behaviour. Torn between her reputation and Elphaba, she played a careful juggling act, reprimanding Elphaba just enough to remain favourable but not really retaliating. In her free time, she prayed to the Unnamed God, a trait that most found weird but never said anything about.
She picked up a boyfriend, Boq, who's name I could never pronounce at the time. I was too airheaded to bother with the names of those who were unimportant. He was a lowly Munchkin boy with such little height that Nessarose dominated him from her wheelchair. He was plain, but Nessarose adored him above anyone else in the university. It's just unfortunate for her that he did not feel the same. Everyone except Nessarose knew that the girl he really wanted was me.
Nessarose could be opinionated when it struck her. She frequently disagreed with Elphaba's attitude towards religion, a matter that occasionally became public knowledge. She often prayed for the Unnamed God to forgive Elphaba's sins. Elphaba insisted that she couldn't be rescued because she didn't have a soul, not that it mattered because there was no way she would let anyone else, let alone a fictional being, dictate her actions.
Elphaba's stubborn disposition was the early cause of our frequent arguments. To my immense frustration, she was the sole person who would not buy into my beautifully constructed good-girl performance. My efforts were met with cutthroat retorts that dug at the holes in my deception, exposing them in plain sight. There was no winning when my cold statements about her appearance were met with wicked reality checks about how Animals were murdered for the sake of my Fox fur coat, or that the labourers who sewed my dresses were underpaid. To her, I was little more than a rich, ignorant brat, and no amount of 'goodness' was going to change that.
Unable to bear it, I slid into an offensive stance, using attack as a form of my defence, ensuring that I did everything I could to influence the other students as much as possible. Hundreds versus one, there was no way she could win. If she was a monster, the student body were swarms of enemies out to get her. Not one corridor wasn't filled with a potential hazard, whether it was as little as a cold stare, or as much as physical violence. Somewhere within it all, a rumour started up. Hit the green girl with water, and she'll burn. A ridiculous idea, but one that took. It only takes a small seed to give birth to an entire concept. And indeed, Elphaba did seem to dislike water. Perhaps it's only that I was looking for something to be different, but she always flinched whenever there was water nearby.
I could make neither head nor tail of it. Elphaba had to shower, right? When I thought about it, I didn't think I'd ever seen her shower, but it's not as if I could just walk into the bathroom and demand to watch her bathe. Whatever the case, the presence of the rumour meant that all the whispers were about her, and my secret continued to remain a secret.
But all it takes is one slip of the tongue – one misspoken sentence; one rash statement during a moment of loss of temper. For all the careful construction I had done, my young and foolish self then went and ripped a gigantic, gaping hole in her own glorified persona. Actions lead to consequences, and my fear of the consequences led to further rash actions; and thus the cycle continued until I was entangled in a web of consequences from which I could not escape. It was this that led to the revelation of my secret, and the events that surrounded it. In fact, if I'd been truthful from the start, the whole mess could have been avoided – but one only ever realises these things in hindsight.
The only way in which I can describe my initial feelings towards Elphaba is Unadulterated Loathing. From her looks to her clothes to her wicked tongue, there was nothing to like about her. Living in the same room as her was an easy shortcut to sympathy and kindness as people wondered how in Lurline's name I managed to put up with her. I lapped it all up, letting it play up to my 'good girl' image. 'You're so good, putting up with the green bean!' they'd all gush, whenever something terrible happened.
And loathing was a word I frequently threw at Elphaba, whenever I was lost for a response to one of her quick-witted derisions. 'I loathe you!' I declared on multiple occasions, only to be responded to with a loud and ugly cackle. The girl just didn't care. On the other hand, I cared very badly (though I denied it vehemently at the time).
The day that everything fell to pieces, we were in the middle of a heated argument. Oz only knows how it started, but by this point it had, as usual, degenerated into careless, insensitive throwaway statements designed to do little more than pick at each other. So determined she was to shriek me into submission, that my ears would surely sustain damage if this continued much longer. Thoroughly irate with the situation, I let slip a string of words that I instantly came to regret.
'I will write to my parents and tell them how horrendible you are!'
Ordinary as those words seem, I instantly had to choke back regret. Now that I'd spoken them, I'd have no choice to follow through, else Elphaba would win. For most, this wouldn't have been a problem. Just write a letter and be done with it. But most people didn't get a horrendous headache from reading. Most people didn't see letters spinning around uncontrollably on a page. Most people didn't continuously get their b's and d's backwards.
There was no way I could let Elphaba see me write.
Worse, Elphaba had gone into full put-down mode. 'Tattling to Momsie and Popsicle because you can't fight your own battles?' she quipped. 'You are all hot air and no action, my pretty.'
'Just you wait and see!'
The trouble with Elphaba is that her comments frequently left me on the verge of tears, a fact that I hated and couldn't seem to control. Exhausted from our heated spar, I shut myself into the bathroom and squinted my eyes shut so that there was nothing to be seen or heard except darkness. Stupid Elphaba Thropp had probably gone straight back to her reading and forgotten all about it, but I never could let it go as easily. Spoiled as I was at the time, I'd never been criticised much before meeting Elphaba, and was having a hard time handling it.
Of course, she was the one person who would know if I was faking it. With a razor-sharp mind and the ability to analyse a situation, she would easily figure it out, which would only serve for her to mock me further. There was no choice in the matter. It would have to be done. But how could I write a letter without actually writing one?
It's at this point that I should have admitted defeat. If I'd been a better person, I'd have apologised to Elphaba for all the tasteless, cruel things I ever said to her. Maybe I'd even tell her my secret. But alas – I was neither mature nor selfless; I saw nothing more than an unrelenting desire to triumph over Elphaba. Winning would be the ultimate success in terms of my reputation. Take down Elphaba, and be the best, most wonderful girl in the entire university. Bask in the glory and worship of the rest of the student body. Never mind the feelings of the green girl; she was hateful, so they were irrelevant.
Instead of admitting defeat, I created another deception. I should have known that creating another lie within an already dishonest life would be tricky to uphold. The more you manipulate, the less control you have over each lie that you tell. One wrong move and it's all over.
I made the wrong move.
