Yes, she had always known that what they had was not to be. They stole time, and retribution was owed. But to duck, to swerve, to simply avoid punishment- that is her goal.
She stalks through the streets. Dark huddles around her, a safe cocoon of anonymity. She wears a thick cloak of dark and heavy material, protection from the toxic touch of the City of Sin.
She passes under a streetlamp, and features are thrown into shocking relief. She is not beautiful, but her eyes are wild, untamable. She seems a dark shade of green- but who can tell anymore?
She crosses the Chapel. She thinks of their first meeting there. His persistance. She should have ended it there and then, and she did, but he had followed her home- to their home.
Could she lie, and say she hadn't wanted him to?
Down, down, down through the streets. The ill lie in coffins of cardboard boxes, quiet weeping and groaning telling the story of the wasted Empire. She ignores the beggars, she disarms her attackers, and the whores leap back in disgust when they see her shaded face.
She presses on, her nostrils full of the stench of decay and her mind full of a curious sense of loss. A premonition? She practises her lines, as she knows they must read:
Fiyero, we cannot do this anymore. They will come for you. They come for you now- I feel it! You must leave, retreat to the Vinkus. You will not die because of me.
She imagines his protest. She disregards it and quickens her pace. A voice that seems to reverberate from the very bricks of the buildings around her cries a warning. She knows something has gone wrong. It has been too long. She will be too late.
The dregs of Lurlinemas decorations haunt the city alleyways. Graffiti challenges for revolution- for the end of the tyranny of the Wizard. Missing Peoples posters flutter from the walls of the neglected buildings, and a thousand faces of those lost leer at Elphaba in the pale lamplight.
Too many of them remind her of Fiyero.
She reaches her destination, perspiration searing her skin. She moves through the door, incautious, caring only to see his face for what she knows must be the last time. The scarf she wears, his gift, strangles her in its grip.
The silence is thick. It is a silence of teetering discoveries.
Blood is there. She smells it before she sees. His body, glorious and shameless in death, lies pale and broken upon the floor. Blue diamonds are shaded dark red, and his dark hair is matted and untidy.
She falls to his chest. She is angry, angry, angry. With herself, with him, with those who did this to him. There is no calm, but the screams that escape her seem to come from a different being, one that Elphaba is watching from a distance. She feels herself float above the scene, above time, and above sanity.
She doesn't know how long she wept. At first light she rises from the body of her fallen lover and moves toward the door. She holds her cape, her broom.
She does not look back.