He wanted to tell Elphie what he had seen, but he held back for reasons he couldn't name. In some way, in the balance of their affections, he sensed she needed an identity separate from his. Were he to become a convert to her cause, she might drift away. He did not dare risk it. But the vision of the battered Bear cub haunted him.

(Wicked)

We start out in identical perfection, bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief, our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know, the price of living is corruption. There isn't as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness.

(A Lion Amongst Men, page 8)

Fiyero

Fiyero woke, sometime along the terrible journey towards his death. He was in a cart, with hay bales piled on top of him and sawdust beneath. Blood dripped steadily in his eyes as he lay immobile. The steady clip of a pair of jogging horses, and the hacking cough of whomever it was driving them, was the soundtrack of his last moments.

He opened one eye, blinking rapidly to keep the blood out of it.

Above, the sky was blue. It was the same blue as his diamond tattoos, an evening shade. The air around him was warm, and filled with the scents of a farming country. Foreign as it was to his desert trained senses, and to the newer city acclimatization, it was pleasant.

Something in the blows, that first initial strike by the Gale Force, had robbed Fiyero of his strength. It seemed incredible, when only hours ago he had been young and vital, strong. He tried, once, to shift the bales on top of him, but his legs hung lifelessly and the blood leaked out of him remorselessly. It was easier, so easy it was comfortable, to lay back and rest and simply let life go.

So this is how it ends? Fabala will be so cross at me…all my boasting about my tracking skills and I don't notice a squadron of soldiers following me home.

My children…Irji, my heir. The spare, Manok, and my daughter…my daughter…

But her name will not come to mind, and Fiyero only remembers a shy smile and a little girl peeking out from behind her mother's skirts. Then this picture becomes confused with a Lion cub, mewling in a cage the same grey as the walls of Kiamo Ko. Grey like the curtains in the Philosophy Club. Why did I go there? To prove that a virgin husband was a man nonetheless?

Far more real, more vital, is the face of Elphaba. Angular, sometimes hard, sometimes soft. Open, rarely. Closed, mostly.

He coughed- a racking spasm that coated the sawdust with more blood.

Her skin was so soft, in between small scars that decorated her hands. He'd taken her hands in his own, larger ones, and kissed them, asking about the scars. She laughed darkly and distracted him with her body, and he, stupidly male, let it go.

Let her go. Let her strike back against oppression on her own. Was it all part of some grander plot? Kill Madame Morrible, save the Bear cub clubbed on the head. Save the parents from their grief.

Stupid, too, to let Lady Glinda go. Some decaying instinct told him now, as he had not comprehended then, that she could have been useful. Saved or condemned Elphaba. They could have lived in Southstairs together, a fairy tale in a pit of vipers. They could have lived with the Lady Glinda, a tame witch and a wild man on a leash, wheeled out for parties and kept in a much fancier cage. Crope would have fed them peanuts through the gilded bars.

Fiyero groaned, loud enough to be heard by the driver of the cart in which he lay- the man began to whistle a jaunty tune to drown out the sound of another man dying.

The blood in the baby Bear's eyes, it looked as red and probably felt as warm as the blood in his own eyes. In his mouth, in his hair, in his clothes and even his shoes.

No Mother Bear here amongst the hay to grieve. No mother father sister elphaba fae Fabala lalala boq glinda crope tibbet nessa avaric sarima irji lion tyger bear red red red horse hay night blue blue blue blue grey grey grey BLACK.

Fiyero is warm when he dies, cocooned inside a hay bale, dreaming of Lions, Tygers and (a family of) Bears.

He never reaches the swamps where his body will be dumped, never feels the flames as they pile the blood soaked hay onto his carcass, and light it.

Two men stand near the fire, smoking and talking quietly.

"Apparently this one is a barbarian princeling. Explains why we had to cover him.

"If not why we had to waste so much hay."

"Poor bastard."

"Smells like a pork dinner to me."

(In the Emerald City, Elphaba sank her hands into the liquid which pooled in front of the fireplace.)

(She gazed at the walls, sprinkled with blood like a spray of cherry blossoms)

(Her heart froze inside of her)