Focus, always Elphaba's forte, was a Herculean effort now. Since he had come.
Fiyero. His name was a poem, whispered through the rustling willow trees of her mind. Fiyero. While she sat, taking down instructions for the new campaign, the most important campaign, her mind drifted to find the thread of his, somewhere, elsewhere.
Love had carried her off as easily as a leaf drifting on a river, but she hid it well. She hid it behind disdain, sarcasm, levity. The defense mechanisms she had readied against hatred, she used against love, like a frightened child hiding beneath her coverlet.
But all the hours of the day, when he was somewhere, elsewhere, were torture no training could alleviate, no simple suicide could end. She was sure love so all-consuming would send its tendrils after her, wrapping whatever wisp of a soul she might have, beyond the grave.
The ache of the lack of him resounded through her body, echoing in her heart a thousand times. It came from deep within the marrow of her bones and pushed relentlessly outward, radiating into a constant dull ache in her abdomen, permeated by intermittent pangs from her heart.
"Fae. Fae?"
The code name, intended to construct an impregnable wall between her two identities, had been knocked down, appropriated, turned from and instrument of mayhem into one of love. Which in truth was much the same, where Elphaba's head was concerned.
She needed him.
It was unacceptable, unthinkable, that cool, icy, aloof and distant, solitary and self-sufficient Elphaba Thropp could need someone as much as she did oxygen. Could love someone so powerfully that it hurt.
She grew to hate the sun; for it marked the hours of their separation with its interminable light.
The night was their domain, night angels, flying each others' skies. Counting the stars.
It was too pure, too private, for day to unsheathe it and use it against them like a sword.
For that was surely what would happen.
But for the first time in her twenty-three years of life, Elphaba Thropp was content not to think. She was content to dart through alleyways, to dash up to her room, to slip beneath her blanket and to wait.
She was euphoric, ecstatic, alive, in his embrace.
And surely, something so strong must be eternal.
Surely, time and life and death would bow to a love that bound them heartbeat to heartbeat, even when they were somewhere, elsewhere.
Surely.