"Water"
HI! This is my first Wicked fanfic and I am SO EXCITED! I saw the musical on Broadway last week and am now utterly and completely obsessed.
This is musical-verse, obviously, contingent on the idea that "in the musical, Elphaba's aversion to water is no more than one of several ridiculous rumors started by those who fear her" (via Wikipedia).
Oh, and like most Wicked fans, I'm pretty young (15), so I love critiques but please keep them constructive.
Please read and leave me a review if you loved it, hated it, or found it mediocre.
NOTE: This story swings between fluffy and horribly dark. There is one explicit scene describing suicide and another reference to it, so please read cautiously.
She almost drowned just minutes after she was born.
The shrieking midwife, holding her screeching newborn form with two fingers around her ankle, sprinted out of the back door and plunged her into the river behind the house. The midwife splashed and scrubbed, hoping against all rational hope that the green might come off, and completely disregarded the fact that the baby was a baby and, like all other humans, needed oxygen in her lungs. And so the midwife plunged the girl into the river and scrubbed her fiercely, mindless of the baby's head and mouth and nose. The baby's hazy vision was almost entirely black when the midwife adjusted the writhing form and the little girl's mouth peeked above the torrential river to gasp for needed air.
In the end it was all for naught. The scrubbing didn't work, the green remained, and the midwife carried the hollering newborn back into the house by a one-handed grip on the baby's wrist. The little girl dangled in the air, twisting and screaming her lungs raw, but the midwife only smacked her hard, as if the green made the baby's skin something stronger than mere less-than-an-hour-old flesh.
They couldn't stomach taking the green girl into a church (not that any church would have her, anyway) and so later they agreed that the violent early-morning scrub in the creek counted as the little girl's baptism.
She learned to swim when she was three years old.
She ran away for the first time the day that Baby Sister came, scrambling clumsily out the back door. Her mother was in the bedroom screaming, and her father had gone to fetch a doctor, and the cook was bustling around the kitchen doing nothing but muttering about the new baby. Nobody noticed much when Elphaba padded through the back hall, dragged a chair over to reach the doorknob, and trotted out the back.
She followed the creek in the woods nearly a mile until it emptied into a lake, which she gazed at with wide eyes and an open mouth. She stumbled her way to the edge and gazed in. The water was murky and rippling, distorting her reflection enough that even she couldn't tell that her skin was different. Elphaba reached out a longing hand to stroke her lake-self, and before she knew what was happening, her feet were leaving the bank and she was tumbling head-first into the water.
Being alone underwater overwhelmed her with a nauseating sense of déjà vu, though she couldn't remember ever having been trapped underwater before, and Elphaba opened her mouth to scream. Water poured mercilessly in, flooding carelessly down her throat and soaking her tiny toddler lungs. She thrashed helplessly, clawing her hands at the water. It didn't do any good.
And then, all of a sudden, there was a hand around her collar and there was a strong arm hauling her out of the water. Elphaba began to cough violently, spewing all the dirty lakewater from her lungs. She was almost able to breathe again when there was a horrified screech from whoever was holding her and she felt herself fly through the air and plunge back into the lake.
It was just as scary this time – dark and disorienting and far over the head of a tiny three-year-old – but this time there was no benevolent savior coming to get her. Elphaba pumped her tiny arms with exhausted desperation, and somehow (she was never quite sure how) she managed to get her head to break the surface.
And then she was kicking fiercely, slapping at the water with clumsy arms, and dragging herself as best she could towards the bank.
With a family like hers, the ability to swim came in very handy.
She got lost in a rainstorm when she was seven years old.
By seven she was spending most of her time alone. Her mother was gone, the servants didn't talk to her, and her father had never been able to look past her skin. The rest of the villagers never even tried.
There was an apple orchard a mile or so from the house. Elphaba had taken to hurrying away to it, subsisting on apples. She would climb a different tree every day, always pushing herself to climb higher and higher; she had fallen out of too many trees to count.
She wanted to bring Baby Sister. She could strap the little three-year-old to her back and they could climb together. But Father would never even entertain the notion. He said that Baby Sister was safer in the house. He never seemed to care if Elphaba would be safe, wherever she was.
One day Elphaba had run away to the orchard. She was sitting on a dangerously thin branch, watching two monkeys chirp and chortle a few trees away. As she watched, the monkey dialogue grew darker, until one scrap of brown fur reached down to pitch an apple at the other's head. Elphaba's eyebrows raised in amusement as the food fight continued – and then, without warning, both monkeys sprinted away.
Seconds later there was a clap of thunder. Elphaba jumped, letting out an unwitting cry, and clung to the tree trunk. A great gust of wind swept through the orchard, knocking the little seven-year-old off her perch. She hung in the air, arms around the tree trunk and legs kicking freely in the crashing wind.
She would have been okay if not for the water. The rain started all at once, tearing down in ferocious earnest. The tree trunk became almost instantly drenched and slick, and Elphaba's tiny fingers couldn't hold on to dripping water. They slipped, and she tumbled, screaming, from the very top of the tree. Her back slammed into a heavy branch, knocking the wind completely out of her; Elphaba rolled to the side, off the branch, and thumped to the ground. She lay facedown in the mud, collecting herself, before she managed to roll over and turn her face to the sky.
The rain kept lashing down; dozens of drops stung her cheeks, piercing her skin with pricks as sharp as needles. Elphaba gasped for air, trying to get oxygen to her lungs, and then she struggled to her knees. She was shaking badly.
She used the rainwater to wash the mud from her clothes and face, and her father never knew where she'd been. As far as she knew, her father never even knew she was gone.
She tried to take Nessarose swimming when she was eleven years old.
Nessa was Little Sister now, not Baby Sister: she was already seven. At first Elphaba had been worried about Nessa growing up, because Elphaba hadn't wanted to see Nessa hurt by their father; but it soon became apparent that Nessa could do no wrong in Frexspar's eyes, and so Elphaba didn't worry.
One day when their father was away (or so he claimed), Elphaba wrestled Nessarose's little chair out the back door and down the bumpy steps. She pushed the chair through the unkempt grass down the river; seven-year-old Nessa giggled every time she went flying as the chair rattled over a bump.
"This is the pond," Elphaba told Nessa, when they arrived. "I learned to swim here. Want to try?"
Nessa was bouncing in her chair, clapping her hands with delight and squealing. Elphaba smiled more broadly than she had in months at the sight of her little sister so excited. "Let's go, then."
Gently, Elphaba lifted her little sister out of the chair and carried her, princess-style, to the edge of the pond. "Just sit here," Elphaba said, positioning Nessa on the edge with her feet dangling in the water, "and I'll show you." Elphaba slipped under the surface, stroking a few feet away from Nessa until the water was over her head, and popping up to tread water. "It's easy," she told her sister. "Come on. I'll hold you."
Nessa eagerly slipped into the water by her sister's side. Elphaba could stand near the bank – the water only reached her shoulders – but Nessa couldn't. And so Elphaba kept her gently afloat with two strong arms under the little girl's stomach. "Use your arms," Elphaba told her. "Try paddling. Just try. Don't worry, I won't let you go. I promise."
Nessa splashed forward hesitantly, and Elphaba smiled. "There you go," she cooed. "Now make circles with your arms instead of just hitting the water." Nessa's eyes were locked reverently on her big sister's face, and she nodded, understanding.
"Like this?" she tried, and Elphaba was about to say yes, good job, well done –
But before she could, their father burst from the woods, sprinting over to them. "I knew I couldn't trust you!" he screamed at Elphaba, and the eleven-year-old flinched back in horror. Her shocked arms slipped from beneath Nessa, and the little girl screamed; she couldn't swim, she couldn't even kick –
Their father pulled Nessa from the water, and then he turned on Elphaba. "I knew I couldn't trust you!" he repeated. "You tried to drown her, you wretch!"
"No – no, I didn't – "
But he was in one of his angry moods, and he slammed his hands onto her shoulders and forced her head underwater. Elphaba gasped, completely unprepared. She could swim – she could! – but her father was holding her there, holding her still just under the surface, and she didn't have the air. She could see the surface, but she couldn't reach it, and she could only twist helplessly and choke as her lungs screamed for air, setting her chest on fire with the need to breathe –
And then it was over. She was above the surface. Nessa was wailing. Her father was snarling.
"Get out of there," he growled. "We're going home."
Nessarose never did learn how to swim.
She tried to kill herself in the bathtub when she was seventeen years old.
It had been the worst week of her life. Her father had been furious: he had recently discovered that the young staffer in his office who had been having an affair with him had also been having an affair with two other men. He had been drinking and pacing the house, and Elphaba had somehow found herself always in his way. It all came to a head one night, when she dropped her father's dinner cup and sent shards of glass skating all across the hardwood floor. He had screamed at her and slapped her; she didn't make a sound, but Nessa was crying and pleading, and every time the little girl yelled "Stop!" he would hit harder. It was the first time he'd crossed Nessa, which Elphaba would have found interesting if everything didn't hurt so – goddamn – much.
She was sobbing facedown on her threadbare mattress, wishing for any way out, when she remembered.
"Why don't you just kill yourself?" he'd said last week. "Take the burden off of all of us?"
"I wish you would just die," he'd told her yesterday. "Too bad you never seem to give me what I want."
"You can never do anything right," he'd complained today. "Always a nuisance. Just by existing."
And lying on her bed, with her flesh screaming in pain, with the blood from the glass still trickling down her face, with the image of her only adult family member standing over her and screaming, with the memories of almost drowning when she tried to teach Nessa to swim and of being burned with her father's cigarettes when she was ten and of the broken leg she'd gotten when she tried to run away at thirteen threatening to suffocate her, Elphaba couldn't think of any good reason not to.
She tried to do it in the bathtub, because that's what you're supposed to do, right?, and the last thing she felt before the only thing she could feel was pain was the tepid water against her bare skin.
She didn't succeed in taking her own life, and she never tried again. But every time she thought about it, she would think about the way the water wrapped itself over her and lapped at her skin, and the way that it flowered with red when she pressed the blade into her skin, and she way that she could have slumped below the surface and asphyxiated if she hadn't been sitting with her legs twisted oddly, how she could have died a different way too if only the bathwater had done its job.
She endured her first Shiz University prank when she was twenty years old.
She hadn't really expected college to be better than the school she'd attended through eleventh grade, because how much could people really mature in two years? Besides, she was a year older than most of the incoming students (she'd been held back until her father deemed the unbelievably gifted Nessa ready for university-level courses – and there was little more humiliating than being in the same classes as your little sister).
Apparently she or Nessa or somebody else said something about water, because when she returned to Economics after having been pulled from class by Madame Morrible to discuss scheduling, she threw open the door and knocked a precariously-positioned bucket of water onto her own head. The class erupted like a volcano with roaring laughter that burned her like lava. She'd forgotten how it felt to have so many people laugh at her at once.
The bucket had glanced painfully off her shoulder: she knew there would be a bruise by morning. How sad, she'd almost gone two weeks without any fresh bruises.
Elphaba just stood there, sopping wet, at a complete loss for what to do. Her meticulous hair now lay tangled and dripping down her back; her robes pooled water on the floor. And, god, it was cold. Elphaba stared at the assembled class, all still in hysterics, and at the teacher who was quite obviously trying to conceal giggles, and she spun on her heel and ran away, trying to pretend that she didn't want to cry.
Barely six months into the school year, Galinda invited her to her family's tropical "vacation house" over winter break.
Galinda had described it as "rustic". Elphaba was quick to point out that it was bigger than the governor's mansion where she'd been raised. Galinda tilted her head, as if considering this, and then commented that it was nice that Elphaba knew how to rough it.
The first afternoon, Galinda dragged Elphaba down to the family's private swimming pool, despite Elphaba's wheedling protests: "I don't even have a swimsuit!"
Galinda stared. "I thought you said you swim. A lot."
"Well, yeah, but in my clothes. Father said that—"
"I don't care. You can borrow one of mine. Come on, Elphie, we've already been here for an hour and—"
"I'm coming!" she interrupted, before Galinda could go on another tirade about wasting time.
And so, an hour later, she was wearing a ruffly pink swimsuit, diving and splashing with her best friend. She couldn't help but wonder what her father and Nessa were up to, alone in the house for the winter holidays.
But that didn't matter. Right now she was swimming and frolicking without constantly glancing over her shoulder, and for the first time since her father had tried to drown her she felt completely and utterly at home in the water.
Too bad it couldn't last.
She went to Galinda's house for spring break too.
They were stretched out on the floor of Galinda's sun room – they had a whole room, just for sun, Elphaba marveled, and this house was "rustic" – when the doorbell rang. The girls' brows furrowed in perfect unison, but Elphaba shrugged and pulled the door open.
Whoever she had been expecting, it hadn't been Frexspar Thropp, and Elphaba flinched violently enough that both her father and Galinda could clearly see it.
"Can I talk to you, please," he said evenly, every twitch of his face or voice carefully measured. "Alone."
She stumbled back into the house fifteen minutes later feeling unkempt and ugly. Her face was smeared with tears and snot; she was struggling to breathe. Her shirt had been torn in two with the front intact, and her back was exposed and dripping blood.
Galinda couldn't say a word except stammering out Elphie's name as she gaped at her; Galinda's eyes were brimming, threatening to overflow. Elphaba stood there on shaky legs, trying not to collapse to her knees. The pain from her back was overwhelming – it felt like five layers of skin had been ripped up and like a hot iron was being dragged back and forth along her back all at once – and she couldn't think of anything except that it hurt, and if the cuts got infected that would be worse.
Her vision was blackening and her consciousness was flickering, and she only barely kept track of what was happening. The next thing she knew, she was in Galinda's bathroom (sitting in a bathtub full of blood again, she thought ruefully through a mangled brain) and Galinda was using a sponge to gently rinse the blood away from her skin. Elphaba gasped as the water hit her, but Galinda was there, stroking her gently and murmuring soothing words into her ears.
As the warm bathwater cascaded over her back again and again, wiping away the streaming red that clashed so horribly with green, Elphaba scooped up a handful of water and splashed it on her face, trying to shock her brain back into life. To her eternal surprise, it worked – somewhat.
Elphaba just sat there there with her best friend as the water cleaned away the blood, leaning into the soothing comfort of the warm bath, and as much as the past half-hour had been so incredibly painful, she wouldn't have traded that moment for the world.
She washed just before and just after she met the Wizard.
Beforehand, Glinda was giddy with excitement, and Elphaba had to shower and change clothes and fix her hair and put on makeup for over two hours until Glinda was satisfied. Ironically, the shower that she'd been essentially forced into taking was the most quiet she'd gotten that day. Standing in the bathtub, the water pouring onto her head was hers – this was her quiet space, her moment – and Glinda couldn't interrupt it. (She could try, with a furious pounding on the door, but Elphaba pretended not to hear her.)
The meeting with the Wizard was an absolute disaster.
She couldn't get the feeling of the Wizard's arm draped around her shoulder to stop tingling like a ghost on her skin; she couldn't get the smell of his somehow strange breath to stop dancing in her nostrils; she couldn't get the sight of his face, smiling first kindly and then somehow monstrously, out of her mind. Most of all, she couldn't get the feeling of his hand over hers to stop making her feel sick.
He had touched her. He had done those dreadful things to the monkeys – to all of the animals! – and he had stood there and grasped her hand and squeezed her in a hug like he wasn't the biggest monster in all of Oz.
Now, in a creek in a forest somewhere some distance away from Oz (it was a fifteen-minute broom ride, which really didn't tell her much), Elphaba scrubbed her skin raw, determined to get that monster's DNA off of her flesh. The water was murky and briny, but she didn't care. Anything would be cleaner than what he'd left on her skin – on her mind.
Elphaba was shaking violently. Anger and fear and pain were simmering on the back burner of her mind, threatening to boil and explode, but she was shoving that all to the side, focusing on washing herself methodically. Scoop the water, pour the water on her skin, scrub with her hands pressing until her flesh was raw and tingling. Then repeat.
The rhythm calmed her, as rhythms tended to do, and she didn't stop until she'd been scrubbing her arms for nearly an hour and she was sure that she wouldn't cry.
It was water that almost got her caught when she was twenty-two.
She had tried to visit Glinda. First she'd tried to visit Nessa, but Nessa had sent her away, Elphaba's ears still ringing with the words she would never be able to forget. And so Elphaba tried to see Glinda.
She never laid eyes on so much as a pink ruffle.
She'd crept in through the servants' entrance of Glinda's newly-inherited palace. Everything had been fine at first. She'd skulked up the basement stairs, flitted through the kitchen, tiptoed up to the second floor.
The first door she tried was an empty bathroom. The second was a solarium. The third was a sitting room: it was empty, but a tray of food and water sat in the middle.
Elphaba crept across the hardwood floor. It looked as if someone had been in this room, and recently, so –
She walked past the tray of food and turned to look out the window. When she turned away, the cloak around her shoulders slapped the jug of water, which fell to the floor and shattered.
The guard must have been in the very next room, Elphaba thought; that was the only way he could've arrived so quickly. She whirled to face him, and she could feel the panic lighting up her own face. The guard's eyes widened (with disgust? fear? she was used to that) and he raised his spear.
Elphaba scrambled to get away. She turned to run and she threw herself forward – but her foot slid in the puddle of spilled water and Elphaba fell hard to the ground. She struggled back to her feet, but it was almost too late: the guard was now nearly on top of her and was screaming for reinforcements.
Elphaba struggled to her feet. Her ankles rolled under her as she struggled not to slip in the water; she tottered forward again, unbalanced in the puddle, just as four more guards tore through the parlor door. Elphaba stumbled out of the puddle and brandished her broom in panic as the guards raised their spears – and to her immense surprise they recoiled as if expecting to be struck by the bristles.
Elphaba didn't let her shock stop her: she pushed her way straight through them and sprinted down the stairs. They charged after her, but she had adrenaline and panic on her side, and she burst out the back door just seconds before them. Those seconds were enough for her to get on her broom and kick off of the ground, and she left the palace and Glinda and the guards far, far behind her.
For days after that, she cursed that blasted water.
She died when she was twenty-four. Or, at least, everybody thought she died – and if Elphaba had learned anything in the last twenty-four years, it was that it didn't matter what she actually did; what mattered was what people thought she did.
Elphaba would never have any idea where the "water" rumor came from, but in the end she supposed it worked in her favor: it gave her an easy, unquestioned escape. The girl with Nessa's shoes had gotten out of that cellar somehow – Elphaba truly had no idea quite how – and snuck up behind her. Elphaba watched the girl's shadow flit on the wall with mild interest; then she saw she shadow pounce and she knew what was going to happen.
She could have just stood there, could have laughed at the look on the girl's face when she didn't melt. And she would be alive a day longer.
But what would that mean?
That would mean more hiding, more watching, more being on guard every moment of the day. That would mean more being suspicious of everyone and everything that she saw. That would mean more days of futile plans and meaningless attempts to help the animals.
That meant that someday, probably soon, she would die painfully under the hands of the hunters.
It was an easy choice to make, really.
It felt like she was seventeen again, soaked in water, trying to decide whether she really would be able to take her own life.
Just like before, she decided she could.
Elphaba let out a hideous scream, and she watched the girl back away, shaking. Elphaba shrieked with laughter at the girl's horror, and then she let herself melt into a puddle on the ground, slipping through one of the castle's trapdoors.
Taking her own life – just like before.
But just like when she was seventeen, she wasn't really dead. Elphaba wouldn't let anything really kill her against her will, especially not a bratty teenager from Kansas, of all places.
Elphaba flitted down the castle's tunnels, hurrying away from the trapdoor just in case the farmgirl happened to see it, and plunged into the basement-level kitchen. She clutched onto the counters.
Her hands were shaking; sweat was streaking down her face. Slowly Elphaba brought her hands to her mouth and bit down hard on a finger.
She had just pretended to die.
Everybody thought that she was dead.
Slowly Elphaba sagged to the ground, shaking. Her robes were soaking wet; salty tear-water streamed down her cheeks, making her face red and puffy. She was trembling violently.
Elphaba sat there just a few more minutes, and then she pulled herself to her feet. She would wait until the farmgirl left, and then she would find Fiyero. It would all be okay.
It would be okay; it would. She would find a way out of this, just like she'd always found a way out of everything. She just had to calm down.
Elphaba sat down at the kitchen table and took a long, soothing gulp of water.
So there you go! Hope you enjoyed, or at least found something worth reading. Like I said, I'm just a teenager trying to get better at writing, so please leave constructive feedback if you loved or despised anything about this piece.