She put her face against Glinda's and kissed her. "Hold out, if you can," she murmured, and kissed her again. "Hold out, my sweet."*
Elphaba doubled against the alley wall and heaved. She had never known an outward manifestation of grief and had barely made it into the alley before relinquishing her meager breakfast. It had not been difficult to lose herself in the crowd once the carriage began moving away; she'd simply pulled her hood nearer her sharp nose and hidden herself amongst the other dirty, exhausted travelers. Fraught and unforgiving, the Emerald City swept the inconsolable away like leaves in the rain gutter.
She had left Glinda. Glinda, with whom she had been hastily intimate that very morning. Glinda. She heaved again. Glinda, whom she loved and cherished and… whom she would never love as much as her cause. Glinda, who in her incessant silliness and obdurate narcissism, would never love anyone as much as Glinda herself. Glinda, who had always been all wrong for Elphaba. Glinda, who would surely have noticed her lack of tears and taken it to mean that Elphaba carried no affection for her whatsoever.
Glinda. Due to her great affection for the girl, Elphaba was now getting sick all over a dank, soggy alley. She gasped and coughed, wiped hopelessly at the spittle trailing from her lips, and leaned weakly against the brick. She struggled to regain her composure. To be alone and careless in a place such as this would not do, she supposed.
Glinda. The name rang in her head. They had shared a bed for more than a year now, but had confined their affections to the rare evenings when Nanny and Nessa were out. They did not speak of their shared lust. Elphaba understood that she was a means to an end for Glinda. Oh, to be sure, Glinda loved her in some way. Elphaba encouraged the cultivation of ideas rather than the cultivation of curls, and the Gillikinese had been quite impressed with herself when pearls of wisdom dropped from her perfect pink lips during their conversations. She appreciated Elphaba and, although often bored by the girl's habits, came to understand her strangeness.
It had been Glinda that had first told Elphaba she was beautiful, despite the green girl's insistence otherwise. She was always flitting about Elphaba, touching her hair, stroking her arm. Elphaba saw in this a disincentive to Glinda's desires, as if through accumulated inconsequential touches the blonde might avoid the very real consequences of sleeping together, or at least lessen her guilt about the onset of their affair. It was charming. Useless, but charming.
The girl was hardly worth this ardency, Elphaba told herself. Their disastrous interview with the Wizard had enlightened her to the state of many things: Glinda's cowardice, the Wizard's licentious rule, and her own trammeled sense of righteousness. Glinda had told the Wizard that she was an "independent person" – independent of Elphaba's ravings, she meant. She had shunned Elphaba, and Dr. Dillamond, and every suffering Animal, Quadling, and street rat in Oz. The world had made her a life of convenience, and Glinda wasn't about to throw that away to help Elphaba.
No. No, that wasn't right. Glinda did love her, insomuch as the silly girl could manage. It was Elphaba who did not – could not – love her back. How was she to commit herself to another person when she was so unsure of her own person? Never having been one for introspection, Elphaba comforted herself with a staunch examination of the dealings of the world around her, apart and above it all. Hardly the sort to be caught up in an affair. It was just sex, Elphaba thought. Sex and nothing more.
What was this vomiting business, anyhow? Elphaba steeled herself against the pain welling up inside and took a deep breath. Time to move on. The Resistance would be her lover now.
"Well now, that's not exactly right," came a faint echo down the alley. Startled, Elphaba whirled around to face the darkness. She squinted at a shuffling mass scraping its way towards the mouth of the alley where she stood. A tramp or a vagrant of some sort. Perhaps this was her connection to the Cell?
"Wrong again!" The mass moved clumsily closer. To whom was it speaking? Elphaba glanced quickly towards the passing masses of people and then back at the tramp, assured that if she were to call out in case of danger, she would be helped. The smell hit her as she turned back – urine and rot. It was a crone after all: toothless, thin-skinned, and entirely too close. Her face was riddled with deep creases and folds of papery skin which, if Elphaba wasn't mistaken, shifted and crawled with some sort of tiny organism. She steadied herself and leaned closer.
"You were speaking to me?" Elphaba asked unevenly.
"Well, of course, who else would I be speaking to?" the crone chortled, revealing decayed gums. Putrid breath washed over Elphaba's face. "You were standing there giving up your breakfast – making quite a mess of it – and trying to figure out how you were going to live without Miss Galinda."
Elphaba stared, wide-eyed and shocked, at the enigma in front of her. "How did you-" she began, but was cut off.
"I don't know how any better than you do, Elphaba," the thing spat. "But I know, just the same. You will live without Galinda just fine. She is a self-centered, foolish, bubble-headed lovely that added nothing to your life. You outgrew the little minx, I daresay!"
"Now you wait just one clock-tick-" the green girl hissed before the crone cut her off again with a wave of her free hand. The other was buried deep in the rags that hung from her unwieldy frame. Elphaba watched in mixed horror and fascination as the hand endlessly groped and pawed. After several moments, the hand paused as the crone considered its find, and then resumed digging. What in Oz could it be hunting for? Elphaba wondered as her unease launched into full-blown dread. She glanced briefly over her shoulder a second time, only to find the throngs of people gone and the street dark. The first traces of panic wound around her heart.
The crone continued. "As for the Resistance… It will have to continue without you." I am about to be murdered. My life will have been useless. "Ah! Here we are." And to Elphaba's surprise – and relief – the crone produced from her robes not a murder weapon, but an enormous, ancient book. Its skin was a mottled purple, with gold figures stamped into the spine and cover.
"Without me?" Elphaba repeated. "No. I've come to the Emerald City to aid the Resistance. I need to – "
"Come now, dearie, don't just stand there all a twitchy-twitch. Take this-" she thrust the tome into Elphaba's unwilling arms. Flee. Flee. The girl wilted under the weight and leaned against the wall, desperately wanting to leave but caged by her curiosity.
The crone renewed her excavation with surprising fervor. She mumbled and itched, all the while ignoring Elphaba, who knew that she was not long for this world if she stood there much longer.
Before the thought had time to flutter through Elphaba's mind, the crone apparently recognized it and had it within her clutches. "You aren't long for this world, no." The sudden, disconcerting stillness was worse than the search within her robes. The crone stared.
Time slowed, stretched at the hinges of Elphaba's imagination. Something is terribly wrong. Later, Elphaba would swear that she saw the rise and fall of entire civilizations in that stare. She would describe a rose on fire with the light of all existence. She would recall seeing all that she might become as well as the nothing that might become of her. And after a hundred lifetimes of that stare, Elphaba gasped and turned away, exhilarated and terrified and entirely unable to move.*
"I don't understand," she managed. The words tasted inadequate.
"You're not meant to," the crone replied, digging again but never taking her eyes from Elphaba's paling face. When she finally quit her movements her hand, to Elphaba's continuing surprise, drew forth a broomstick. Its handle was charred and broken, split in jagged edges, its straw barely affixed with a frayed string. All in all, a pitiful specimen of its kind. Like me.
Elphaba did not see how the crone could possibly have hidden the broom, broken though it was, in her robes. The cumbersome book, the broom… something was terribly wrong with this situation. The crone's manner, her uncanny ability to prognosticate Elphaba's own thoughts – all of it unbearably wrong.
"You're needed elsewhere," the crone said, once again sensing Elphaba's misgivings. As if that provided any sort of adequate explanation. "Elsewhere, girl! Elsewhere!" She waved the broom threateningly, then shoved it at Elphaba with an expectant glare.
Move, Elphaba! her mind screeched, but she was glued to the spot. Magicked there. She could not speak, could not protest. She could do nothing but watch anxiously as her hand, spindly and green, moved of its own accord and wrapped with halting uncertainty around the handle of the broom.
And the moment her forefinger touched it, she felt a vertiginous yank backwards, like a hook somewhere behind her navel. She heard the swell of the crone's voice in her mind, ushering her towards her fate: "Go then, there are other worlds than these."**
Elphaba knew then with a form of steadfast certainty that had eluded her for her entire life: she was no longer in Oz.
Thomas Stafford considered himself a rather attractive man. Straight nose. Broad shoulders. He brushed his hair back – thinning at the temples, but thick enough where it counts – and checked his reflection in the booth's glass. How could that woman have denied him? Just a poor gentleman trying to find a bit of respite in these hard times, he thought as he heaved his weight off the stool and, with a touch of annoyance, left the booth. Damned trains, late again.
He was tall. He had a decent job attending the station. Why, any woman would be damned lucky to have him, what with all the younger blokes off playing war. This stupid War. Bleeding-heart England should have just let the Continent fend for itself. He couldn't save the Poles or the French, anyhow: couldn't fault him if he had flat feet and a bit too much around the middle, eh? (But, truth be told, he would have paid that doctor even more than he had to fudge his exam paperwork). He kicked a can onto the tracks and continued his perfunctory check.
Strolling down the platform revealed little more about the late train. The station was empty, as it so often had been for the past three years. What had once been an animated center of activity was now a run-down station waiting to be bombed into oblivion. Tom hated the quiet that accompanied the exodus. Though he'd never admit it to a living soul, he hated it almost as much as he hated the dark. Both reminded him of long nights in the cellar during the first War, where, clinging to his mother, he would stare wide-eyed at the concrete overhead, positive that it would collapse and kill him at any moment. He dared not cry for fear that the Zeppelins would hear him. This War would not force Thomas Stafford into a single shelter, bombs be damned. The drink would be his shelter. Maybe a woman.
Damned McDougin's. Shouldn't have gone to an Irish pub in the first place, but it was the closest to his house. He had seen the woman there before. She usually turned up around eight, always in a nurse's uniform. Woman was a whore, not even recognizing a good man when she saw one. With the doodlebugs falling at all hours and sites in London, what did she have to lose? The War had blasted right on past England's doorstep, after all. It was in England's bloody loo, pissing all over the walls and shitting on the floor. And where did that leave poor Tom? Kicking cans on the A platform, waiting for an overdue train, that's where.
He shuffled over to an empty bench and slumped down. Getting himself into a funk, he was. Maybe he'd buy the next girl a few more drinks before asking. Nasty weather today. It was already half-ten; he'd expected the overcast to burn off by now, but despite the heat, the cloud cover remained. This also annoyed Tom, as most unexpected things did, though he couldn't say why. He stretched his legs and crossed his arms over his chest, settling in for a bit of a nap. No one here to care, anyway.
Tom snorted himself awake after the second warning whistle blew. Wiping spittle from his mouth, he shoved himself off the bench, looking around to ensure no one had wandered in while he was asleep. Still empty. He walked to the edge of the platform and leaned over, noting with a touch of trepidation just how close the train was. He hadn't hauled out the carts to unload. Had he missed the first whistle? Must have. A quick check of the clock told him that the train was a full two hours late, now.
Well, if the train couldn't see fit to be on time, then why should he? Tom could do as he pleased, and if the company didn't like it, well, they could find someone else to watch over this godforsaken place. He turned with a self-satisfied harrumph.
That's when Tom's day took a decided turn for the worse.
He first heard a great thump directly behind him, somewhere near the edge of the platform. Next came a whooshing through the air, and as quick as he could revolve to inspect the noise, there was someone there. Just there. She wasn't there before – he was reasonably sure it was a she, what with all that long, black hair – and then she was. Tom blinked. Still there.
She lay crumpled on the tracks, one arm bent at an impossible angle beneath her, hair everywhere, and the strangest thing: a broom clutched in the visible hand, and the biggest book Tom had ever seen a few feet away. He perched on the edge of the platform and peered down at her. He wasn't going to get down there, lady or no. Was she even breathing? Tom picked at his teeth and thought – slowly – of how he could rouse her without having to go cart out a ladder.
She jerked and sat up suddenly, face swiveling away from Tom.
If she didn't move from the tracks, Tom really would lose his job. "Lady, move. The train's nearly here."
She whirled around, looking for all the world like every nightmare Tom had ever had, eyes wide and vicious – but was that a hint of fear as well?
Was she green?
Tom stumbled back as his brain struggled to assemble the disturbing facts of his morning: the train had been late; he'd taken a nap, and was now most likely dreaming; there was a green woman on the tracks, pushing herself to a standing position; the woman had appeared from the very air as if by magic – not that magic was real; the train was blowing its whistle.
He couldn't think with the damned whistle. Why wouldn't the whistle stop?
Then the woman was standing between the metal rails, shrieking and waving her arms at the train, which howled back with its own increasingly angry whistles. It barreled down on her, hurtling towards a swift and absolute kill, and Tom hoped for a moment that the train did kill her; it would save him having to sort out the green of her skin and the wildness of her eyes.
She spread the fingers of her free hand like some ridiculous crossing guard, shrieked a single word, and with a hideous scream the train pulled free from its tracks and took flight. As Thomas turned to run, he perceived the flying train as a Zeppelin from his childhood nightmares: a large, dark blot in the sky, a harbinger of his doom. Tom tripped over his own feet and went sprawling across the platform, just in time to see the next wonder of Platform A.
The woman shrieked again and gesticulated absurdly with both hands this time – the first spread in the universal symbol for HALT, the second clutching the broom stick, perhaps as a futile shield against the mass of iron and coal tearing its way through the sky towards her. She shrieked a third time – the same word, Thomas was sure of it – and Tom was catapulted into his booth with a blast of something radiating out from the tracks.
He groaned and covered his head, waiting for the inevitable explosion that would end his life. The explosion never came. Instead, a low whine permeated the silence. He was making that noise. He couldn't stop making that noise. It erupted from him in a fit of thankful terror; his world hadn't ended. Thomas Stafford could continue his life. The Zeppelin… the train, that is, hadn't killed him! In a moment of bravery that he couldn't quite believe of himself, Tom peeked between the fingers covering his eyes.
The train had stopped. It had stopped in midair, suspended there as if God had just reached down and plucked it from the earth to play with it as a child might with a toy train. Tom had had one of those as a boy. Mama had made sure of it. Oh, the bright red train was his favorite; he loved crashing it into the wooden town and all the little figures…
Silence had stolen into the station again. Tom giggled nervously – until he heard another of those ominous pops, then another, and the station began flooding with people out of thin air. A tall man with untamed hair and the strangest cloak Tom had ever seen stalked towards him, ripping a stick out of his pocket.
"What the bloody hell is going on?" Tom wailed as his bladder let go, all sense of composure trailing in a darkening stain down the front of his trousers.
As the tall man aimed the stick right in his face, shouting some word that sure as shit wasn't English, Thomas realized something. Suddenly there wasn't a place in the world Thomas Stafford would rather be than an Air Raid shelter beneath London.
Minerva gazed sulkily at the report in front of her. Try as she might, she just couldn't muster a care for the perceived inefficiency of certain interdepartmental delivery owls and how, inevitably, this was absolutely ruining everyone's lives at the Ministry.
She needed tea. Desperately. She considered for a brief moment owling in sick, but the Improper Use of Magic Office was already short-staffed that morning, for reasons unknown to the young McGonagall. Whisperings of an upset in Muggle London had been floating through the Aurors' cubicles, but nothing concrete enough to warrant a panic. She observed a number of empty cubicles across the hallway. Half-empty cups, jittering boxes of confiscated items, and scraps of paper littered most of the desks. Her own desk, set on the edges of the Wizengamot Administration Services area, was pristine, as always. Minerva McGonagall was intent on enforcing fastidious order upon her surroundings.
The decision to join the I.U.M. Office came a fortnight after her leaving Hogwarts. Dumbledore had – casually – acceded that a stint at the Ministry would further any young witch's career in whatever field she eventually chose. As Minerva was as of yet still unsure what that eventual choice might be, she welcomed Dumbledore's meddling. Just this once. He hadn't steered her wrong so far. The judgment proved to be sound and she'd spent the last two months learning the ins and outs of the Statute of Secrecy.
It had bored her to tears.
With a great sigh that did nothing to hide her mounting ennui, Minerva opened her first file for the day. She began outlining a case against an elderly wizard who had unfortunately revealed his "talents" to an unsuspecting group of Muggle teenagers, all female. Upon capture, the wizard claimed that he had been attempting to impress the young women with "a bit of magic." Minerva suspected that he was hoping they would be impressed with certain other talents that the wizard offered. When the proper boxes had been checked and the proper forms filed, Minerva moved to the next case.
This one involved a witch who had cursed the sheep in the nearby Muggle village. According to the suspect, the sheep were "always eating her dirigible plums," and she just couldn't stand to see another of the valuable fruits sucked down their "wicked gullets." The resulting bit of magic threw the village into a paroxysm of rage directed at local herders, for how else but under the tutelage of their herders could their precious sheep have learned to climb every fruit tree imaginable and strip them barren?
Ridiculous, thought Minerva. All of it. Determined to finish the stack before she allowed herself time to make a cup of tea, she grabbed the quill and filled in the next available date and time for a hearing. She was interrupted while dotting her i's and crossing her t's.
"Ms. McGonagall? Could I have a word?"
A fuzzy head popped around the edge of her cubicle, but the man attached to it proceeded no further. Instead, the head hung there, disembodied, as if its owner was willing to risk no more of himself to the creature on the other side of the cubicle. This annoyed Minerva to no end. She could not stand cowardice, and she knew without a doubt that Delan Tursichoir was quite possibly the greatest coward of them all. All manner of loud noises, uncooperative paper shuffles, and even disagreeable teapots disturbed the flighty man.
"Yes, Mr. Tursichoir. How may I help you this morning?"
"We have a bit of a situation down in the Aurors' interrogation room, you see," he began, then faltered. "I… I was hoping you might help me with it. With her."
"Of whom are you speaking?"
"A woman!" he bleated, then disappeared beyond the cubicle wall. He reappeared around the edge a moment later, fully bodied this time. Tursichoir said in a hoarse whisper, "It's the most advanced metamorphmagus work I have ever seen."
He plucked at the tufts of hair at his cheeks, a nervous habit that Minerva deemed the most disgusting twitch she'd ever had the misfortune to witness. She turned back to her paperwork to hide the revulsion overtaking her features.
"And why is it that you need me, Mr. Tursichoir? What have I to offer the Aurors' office?"
"Well, it's just that… You see, I heard that you were studying a bit of uh… advanced transfiguration with Dumbledore? Transfiguration, it never was my strong point, Ms. McGonagall." He was picking and scratching furiously now and Minerva considered casting an impedimenta jinx on his hands. "There are only a few others at the office. The rest are off taking care of the train – "
"What train?"
"I'll explain it on the way. Now if you would please come with me," and with that, he turned and loped down the hallway.
Tursichoir, however, provided little explanation of any spectacular occurrences with trains, or of the situation that Minerva might expect in the cool examination room she strode into five minutes later. In truth, she was grateful that he hadn't attempted an explanation: she would not have wanted his jumbled words and breathy voice to mar the wonder in front of her. His explanation would have been inadequate. Unworthy, even.
The green woman lay in a fitful slumber on the table at the center of the room, her hands resting palm-down against the wood. Sheets of black hair surrounded her head but obscured no part of her face; every angle and severe plane stood in sharp contrast to the soft look of her skin. She looked to be in her late teens and wore a drab frock that revealed only the barest shape of her body. It was clear that she was very thin, frail almost, and of an average height. Every few seconds her body twitched violently, arching her torso off the table and then flopping back down with a light thud.
Two Aurors stood watch, wands at the ready, and they greeted Minerva and Tursichoir with a slight nod before returning their vigilant eyes back to the woman.
"You see?" Tursichoir gestured with a jerk of his hand. "Green! We believe she is… that is, she must be hiding her true identity. She caused quite a stir at Camden Town this morning – apparated in and levitated a train, all while a Muggle was watching!"
He positively shook with the effort of telling the story. Minerva shook with the effort of not cursing him for being so dim-witted and slow.
She allowed her eyes to trace over the woman once more, noting for the first time the purpling of her fingertips – or was that char? Minerva couldn't be sure. Honestly, she'd been at the Ministry for a mere two months. She had no business being in this room with a potential suspect of a magical crime. She belonged at her desk, filing paperwork. Even so, that face was fascinating, infinitely more so than filing, however dangerous the woman might turn out to be.
"Anyway, that was not what set us off at the Auror office. You see… when she levitated that train, she cast off a great deal of magical energy. Loads of it! She set off alarms from here to the Isle of Drear," he said.
Minerva tore her eyes from the woman's hands. "Alarms? Was her magical signature so pronounced?"
"It was, Ms. McGonagall," Tursichoir said with an eager nod. His eyes flickered back to the woman. "Don't worry. We have her secured." She noted with no small amount of consternation that Tursichoir had inched his way behind one of the Aurors as he enumerated the securities set forth in the room.
"I see," Minerva said, circling to stand at the head of the table, nearer the woman's exposed emerald face. "I assume that the convulsions have to do with the expulsion of such a widespread spell. Where is her wand?"
"From what I understand – "
Mr. Tursichoir, you do not understand much of anything, Minerva thought wickedly.
" – the Aurors did not find one at the scene, though she did have a broom and a book. Those have both been taken to be processed in Evidence. Most of them – the Aurors, I mean – are still at the station. They may have found the wand by now."
"You are hoping that I will be able to reveal her identity, or at least ascertain whether or not this is her actual face?"
Another vigorous nod from behind the Auror.
"You realize, of course, that there are no guarantees when transfiguring a metamorphmagus? The process is imprecise, especially with an unconscious participant. The transfiguration of a human body is at a basic cellular level and consists of very advanced magic."
"Do what you need to do, Ms. McGonagall. I'll just be… over here," he replied as he pulled his wand from his pocket and clutched it to his chest. Pitiful.
Minerva pointed her wand at the woman and said, "Specialis revelio."
Nothing. She tried again, with no visible results.
"Finite incantatem."
Nothing.
A number of failed spells later, Minerva moved closer and leaned over until her nose was nearly touching the other woman's. She rested the pads of her fingers on the skin stretched over the woman's sharp cheekbone, absorbing the calm of that heedless face. Even with the involuntary twitching of her body, the woman's face exuded absolute control.
"This is her skin, Mr. Tursichoir. There is no metamorphmagus here," Minerva stated quietly. Then, in a whisper: "Rennervate."
Minerva was greeted suddenly by fierce, frightened, wide brown eyes.
*Modeled after the rose of Stephen King's The Gunslinger.
**Pulled directly from The Gunslinger.