Disclaimer: I do not now, nor have I ever owned anything associated with Wicked the musical, Wicked the novel, or The Wizard of Oz in any of its various forms. They belong to Frank Oz, Gregory Maguire, Stephen Schwartz, Winnie Holzman, and anyone else with a legal claim to them.

A/N: Well, here it is, my second attempt at fanfiction, for which I have appropriated aspects from both the book and the musical and shaken them up with bits of my own imagination to produce the work you have before you. Enjoy! (If you don't, please let me know.) I would appreciate any and all feedback, as I'm still new to fanfic writing and could benefit from constructive criticism. I plan to continue this at some point in the future, and if any pairing is included, it will probably be Elphaba/Fiyero, in case anyone wishes to know.

With Every Tick of the Time Dragon Clock

She had heard of it, of course. How could she not? She remembered, as a child, her father seemed to have some sort of personal vendetta against it. She had never heard the full story, but from the bits and pieces she had been able to put together, she discovered that he blamed it for her, for the way she had been born. No, the color that she had been born. And now she stood before it, trying to discern the evil within through its odd, metallic shell. She felt no revulsion, nothing except an odd kinship with this mechanical mystery, with its hands set permanently at the eleventh hour. She knew that sometimes she had the strange sense that she, herself, was merely a performer, living out a pre-scripted version of life, being mechanically pulled about before an unseen audience, who knew her life's ending before she had had the chance to reach it. Perhaps she was evil, wicked. Perhaps that was why this object felt known to her, as if it were part of a world that waited just beyond her grasp, the world that she felt take shape inside that bizarre dream world where she hovered between sleep and wakefulness. She dismissed the thought as quickly as it came. Her life had barely begun. She hadn't yet had time to store up that kind of wickedness. Had she?

But all these thoughts were beside the point. She was here as a dare, an act of rebellion against the subservience she had been pushed into for so much of her young life. She had discussed it with Galinda, whose perfect features had filled with an odd mix of glee and revulsion at the possibility of such mysterious mischief. The thought of sneaking off-campus was enough to send her in a tizzy, and the thought of breaking the rules to see something so closely linked to the unexplained as the Clock of the Time Dragon filled her with a delicious sense of trepidation. Elphaba, of course, had downplayed these feelings. She was going, or so she avowed, merely out of academic curiosity, to find out exactly what the this purported clock was and why it was there and who was behind it. Nessarose's admonitions that she mustn't even contemplate such wickedness had been more than enough to spur her on, and Galinda's disbelief that the studious Miss Elphaba would risk her perfect academic record to sneak off-campus to see some forbidden curiosity had been the final push that she needed to propel her out of her room, through the streets of Shiz, and out to the tiny shack on the outskirts of town, where the Clock of the Time Dragon and its keepers were housed.

A whirring noise stirred her from her reverie. The clockwork dragon poised atop the structure was coming to life, spewing forth smoke and beckoning her forward with one long, bejeweled claw. With a flick of its leathery wing, it revealed a tiny stage, where a perfect little clockwork man and woman stood in front of a replica of her own home, the Governor's Mansion in Munchkinland. The couple parted, with the little man turning to march offstage, while at the opposite end of the stage one of the strangest contraptions Elphaba had ever seen, some sort of inflated piece of cloth, with a basket attached beneath, floated down to rest next to the woman. Out from the basket hopped another little man holding an even tinier green glass bottle that, Elphaba realized with mounting horror, bore a striking resemblance to the bottle currently residing beneath her pillow. She watched, unable to tear her eyes away, as the man and woman seemed to drink from the bottle before turning to each other to settle, intertwined, on a bed that had been brought onstage at some point during the proceedings. The scene changed. The bed was still the same, but the original man was back, joined by an ancient Sheep, and the woman now sported a swollen abdomen that bore testament to her previous actions. Elphaba knew what was coming, but she couldn't make herself turn away as the Sheep reached beneath the woman's skirts and pulled forth a tiny, perfectly-formed, and unmistakably green infant.

Elphaba stepped back finally, horrified at the implications of what she had seen. The scenes continued, with a little green girl now being tormented by a flock of dirty peasant children, but she couldn't watch any longer. She didn't want to know how far the scenes continued, or if they would reveal to her some twisted version of her future. She turned, sickened, and began to run blindly away from the horrible machine.