An Expropriation by Chudley Cannon

Disclaimer: I don't own them.

Notes: Crope's POV.

"Each time you visit, the evenings seem to come a little later."

It was preposterous of me to find meaning and sentimentality in the ramblings of a madman, but Tibbett had always had a way of saying things that meant one-hundred things at once.

It was loads of money keeping Tibbett in one of those sensibility homes because Tibbett's father didn't seem to care a lick about the whole ordeal, never had. I'd taken him home myself a week later when he was still mumbling about Tigers and whatnot and his father had seemed to feel that a liquefied brain (or spirit, who could tell) was apt punishment for being "unrepentantly perverted". I'd remembered that Tibbett had told me his family was "sort of Unionist" but I suppose you became more and more Unionist as each objectionable situation was placed before you, so although they never went to the chapel or prayed or seemed to care overly on anything, Tibbett served to be a bit of a conversion experience for them.

It was our friends at the time, guilty Avaric and Shenshen and grief-stricken Glinda, who helped me put up the money to get him taken care of. Society dictated—or, rather, it is fairer to say that society implied—that no one would take care of you if you couldn't take care of yourself, so the homes were rather expensive and once we graduated and grew apart, it was just mine and Glinda's (or Chuff's, if we're speaking literally) money going toward support.

So, what I mean is that although it is conceivable to assume that things had changed with Tibbett's descent into idiocy, I assure you it did not. We still had long talks and he was still only coherent about half the time. If he was in a particularly sedate mood, I was allowed to touch him and touch him I did. He had brief moments of clarity—a sparse few in the span of five years, but moments where he was so achingly lucid and normal that I could swear he'd been playing an elaborate joke on me for years. I wouldn't put it past him.

The most awful part, I would say, and the reason why Glinda just couldn't bear to visit him anymore was that he didn't change a bit, not at all, not ever. She was maturing and growing and becoming a woman and I myself was aging and becoming a bit paunchy, but Tibbett retained his youthful features, his perfect blonde hair, his smooth skin and trim figure. He was every bit as just-out-of-reach as the day I met him, only he didn't laugh as much and he never told jokes.

We pretended, when we were students, that life after Shiz would be exactly like life during Shiz only there wouldn't be any classes or exams or studying—an ongoing orgy, if you will, with wine and liquor and yes, saffron cream, and most of all we'd all be there, Tibbett and I and Boq and Avaric and Fiyero and the ladies. They were puddle-like dreams that grew and grew until the sun intervened and soaked it up all at once on a juvenile "who's man enough for such-and-such" mistake.

He'd said afterward, Avaric had, in an isolated moment of reflection: "It was not one of my better ideas."

"No, it wasn't," I'd said. He'd come by to see the Three Queens Theatrical and Terpsichorean Society's seasonal production of which Tibbett's understudy was leading and of which I had done scenic design.

"I miss him," he'd said uncomfortably and then stared hard at me as if expecting forgiveness. It was not mine to give and so I declined to give it.

It was Glinda who I stuck to and we alone spent the night before commencement by the Suicide Canal, never quite saying a word and yet understanding completely, because she'd lost it all, too. She didn't quite have it in her to be sad yet, and I didn't have it in me to be angry so we did the work for one another. When she married Sir Chuffrey, I was there, and I held her veil for her beforehand so that it wouldn't get any tears on it.

"This is the beginning of it, Crope, you see," she'd said, sniffling, "and still the end. Oh!" I had watched her sob openly and had done my best to hover in concern without really hovering. "That doesn't make any sense," she said in soft, queer tone. "None of it."

"Glinda," I had said with a smile, "you're going to be very, very rich."

"Yes," she had agreed, eyes bleary with tears. "And yet—I don't know if that's what I want at all."

She had cried some more and I had felt embarrassed.

"What do you mean the evenings seem to come a little later?" I asked him, despite its uselessness. "The weather is getting colder, so if anything, the evenings are coming earlier, as they tend to do. What could you possibly mean? Oh, Tibbett, will you please look at me?"

But he was entranced with the ceiling now; his eyes were shiftless shapes and colors in the dim room where we kept the shades drawn to ward off the impending passage of time.

I quickly grew frustrated. "Stop looking up there and look at me."

He did not.

"Tibbett. Damn you. Just look at me." He laughed at the vibrant dust as it skirted upon the air. I hated him like this, I did. I preferred when he retreated into himself, when his eyes shut, when he looked frightened. It was a sick, twisting feeling, to prefer that sort of madness to this lighthearted, childish regression—there were no explanations or rationalizations to the latter and it made every bit of me ache.

I grabbed him by the shoulders, the chair scraping against the floor, wood against wood. I shook him until he looked at me. "You fool," I cried. "A year ago, they'd have let you come home with me if you'd only tried to be lucid—and you're capable of it, don't pretend you're not, I've seen you."

His blank stare, however, revealed that he did not see me. I released him, relaxed against the chair. He sunk back into his cot and stretched.

"All right, Tibbett," I said after a moment. "We'll just sit."

And we did.

"It's ridiculous to me," said Glinda as we shopped for perfume, "and seems unequivocally common. Haven't they anywhere else to go?"

I smiled blandly. "What's the use of separating children from adults when the adults act very much like children?" When she only frowned and picked up another perfume bottle, I added, "Unless you contend to make yourself out as an expert on the subject."

Glinda's girlish laugh was so breathy and carefree that it made me wish to have her around always. "I daren't," she said, "although it seems that if they were making attempts to heal these persons, exposing them to that which they've reverted to is hardly the most sensible thing to do."

"Well, I'm inclined to agree. But sometimes I wonder if they care so much about healing."

"For what it costs to keep Tibbett there, they really should," she said dryly, "although I suppose that's for He of Otherworld Goodliness to worry about."

He of Otherworld Goodliness was her current nickname for Chuffrey. It was months into their marriage and she had moved hastily past the bitter, anguished state to happily ensconce herself in a position of self-deprecating amusement.

"Still," I said. "He isn't a child and, most of the time, he doesn't act like one. And recently, he doesn't mostly act like he's frightened or anything, either. Mostly there are just long stretches of silence and he stares as though he's looking at something when he's clearly not."

"That's funny, Elphaba used to do that," Glinda commented. "But this usually meant she was thinking, not crazy."

"You assume."

"I assume, yes."

I grinned. She was allowed to refer to Tibbett as crazy because she had brought up the precarious subject that was Elphaba, and she'd done it without doing that awful thing where her lower lip trembled and her voice got quivery.

Our relationship, mine and Glinda's, was a great deal of give and take. Obviously.

I complained of the fog of perfumes giving me a headache, so we moved out of the shop and went to go have lunch. The Emerald City on a non-working afternoon was a bustle of color and a discordant rush of activity, which was really just the way I liked it.

"I wonder," Glinda said, "how long I could live here before Sir sent me a letter and bade me to return to him. 'Dear, darling, it's been months since I last saw you; when do you plan on returning?'"

"While, in the meantime, you're living an entirely different life in the city?"

"Yes."

I put my hands in the pockets of my trousers and thought. "You'd get bored and restless."

Glinda gestured to our bustling surroundings. "Here?"

"Yes."

"I sincerely doubt—"

"You're a country girl," I insisted. "The city is all right for a visit, but if you lived here, you'd miss riding horses and flitting off into the forest for... forest-type things."

"I don't ride, Crope, and I've never set foot inside the forest because my papa insisted I'd die of spores."

"Oh." I frowned. "Then what do you do all day?"

"Exactly. The Coffee Emporium, then?"

"You could come back to the loft," I suggested. "I've a few paintings to show you."

She looked pleased. "Oh, are you painting again?"

"I always paint more when you're visiting, I think."

"But you never paint me. Tell me, is it a beauty that's too infinite and difficult to capture on canvas?"

"Oh, yes," I said dryly and she pretended to regard me seriously for all of five seconds.

"I mean it," she said, once we'd seated ourselves and had coffee lined up. "When I was younger, the Pertha Hills seemed to have abundant offerings and endless opportunities. But once I'd gone to school and been around here and there, do you know what I've realized?" I indicated that I did not. "It's all trees, Crope. I'm not sure why I was incapable of seeing that before, but it really is just all trees."

I tapped my spoon against my coffee cup meditatively and cleared my throat. "Remember how Elphie used to say that—what was it—that a class system had unceremoniously based itself on a piece of land's ability to grow trees? It was something like that, about the Gillikin having nothing to offer except an abundance of trees and an economy that sprung out of it somehow."

"All right," said Glinda, looking down at her coffee, "then I didn't exactly come up with this revelation all on my own—perhaps she had a hand in it. Frustratingly, she was completely correct. Per usual."

"There must be something up there that you like."

"My retinue," she said without thought. "Yet, as you may have noticed, I easily shed them when I visit here."

"Well, whatever it is, you aren't a city girl," I decided. "Sorry. You just aren't. You lack the, the…"

"Sophistication."

"No, you've got that, however tacked on it is."

"Tsk, Crope."

"Well, you lack something or other. Emerald City denizens are—well, we've seen everything. Even if we haven't, we can still act like we have. You give off the effect that you've seen nothing."

Glinda seemed unwilling to dispute it. "I have seen nothing. I've lived a very sheltered life."

"Well, it shows. It's very charming, Glinda, but it shows."

"This is awful," said Tibbett a few days later. "I'm dying. I've just realized it, I'm dying."

"You are not," I said uncomfortably. "What makes you say that?"

"I'm so pale. I wonder if it would kill them to open the shades once in awhile. Not a window, of course, although a little fresh air would be nice. I understand I seem the type who's liable to jump out a window."

I smiled. "You always seemed that type."

"Well, I always was that type, anything for attention. Tell them to stop knocking." He shifted uneasily in his cot, the sheets bunching at his movements.

"Who?"

"The boys next door, always knocking, don't understand why they need to celebrate every time they return from class."

I hung my head sadly; we had been doing so well. And now it seemed that it was nearly afternoon and I'd wasted all of it talking to dead weight, a vegetable that progressed and regressed at will.

"All right," I mumbled, standing up. I grasped at Tibbett's hand and it was ice cold and perhaps he was right, perhaps he was dying, perhaps he was dead already. I swallowed around the spill of words as they stuck in my throat. "I'll tell them to keep it down," was all I could think to say. "I'm on my way out, besides."

Tibbett looked at the ceiling. "How awful, to be dying. Dying inside on a rainy day."

I was about to argue that it wasn't raining, but then it did seem a bit darker. I looked out the window, tried to peer through the shades, although I didn't need to, I could hear the rain already.

"It is awful," I agreed.

It was hell catching the trolley in the rain; it was crowded and, with no upper level, I found myself stuck between two men who were larger and wetter than I. My boots slipping along the floor and the water dripping from my hair onto my face, I held onto the outer rail and closed my eyes as the trolley pulled away from the square. It was my habit to watch the window that Tibbett lay beyond and I was hoping to break myself of it.

"And how about yours, was he better today?" The woman took the trolley with me two times a week when she visited her son in the home at the same time I visited Tibbett. She was a nice enough lady, I thought, and she always had something nice to say. I felt sorry for her, besides, because she looked exhausted all the time, from taking care of her son when he wasn't even being taken care of.

"Oh," I dithered, "he was much as usual, I'd say. How is your son?"

"I suppose I'll be taking him out of there by Lurlinemas," she remarked gaily. It was the same remark as last year and I smiled. It could've been she was delusional about it, I thought, or it could've been she was just hopeful. I liked to think it was the second one for I had never known too many hopeful people.

The trolley wound its way past the Palace district and I watched the men in suits getting the hems of their trousers wet in the rain. A great gust of wind sent a ripple across the reflecting pool in front of the Palace and I saw it there, the green face peeking out underneath an umbrella. The figure sidestepped puddles and struggled to keep its umbrella steady, swaddled in layers of fabrics to keep out the rain.

Well, I thought, I'd know that green face anywhere.

Elphaba. Elphaba—of course it was Elphaba.

I am not sure what made me do it, but I got off at the next stop, just beyond the Palace. My shoes were soggy as I backtracked toward the Palace, twisting through the rush of workers—I could just make her out in the sea of black umbrellas. She disappeared into a hat shop and I followed her without hesitation, right into the dry stuffiness of the shop, filled with patrons more interested in avoiding the rain than buying anything; my fingers closed around her wrist and I said, "Elphaba!"

She'd been fiddling with her umbrella and she whirled around, a frown settled on her features like it had been there for years. She narrowed her eyes, opened her mouth to say something, but I perhaps cut her off too quickly:

"You can cut the evasion tactics. I haven't seen you in years, but I know it's you."

She changed tracks rather quickly, scoffed and looked away. "I remember you as more of a patsy, I think you've changed."

I smiled, pleased. "I'm still a bit of a patsy. I can just pick my battles now."

"I see."

"This confirms that you aren't dead, at least. I'd have always wondered."

"Good to know your sleepless nights will have more sleep in them," responded Elphaba idly, running her fingers along the brim of one of the display hats. After a moment, she looked at me out of the side of her eyes. "When people attempt to get lost, Crope, it is usually their sincerest wish to stay lost. If you hadn't caught me off guard—"

"Well, you did a fine job of it. Getting lost, I mean." I looked down at my shoes and felt like spitting at her. "I almost respect you for it. Glinda does, I think. I mean, despite her general heartache and anguish, of course—deep down, she's always just respected you."

I had more than caught her off-guard, it seemed; it was the first time to my recollection that I had ever seen her look genuinely puzzled. "Glinda?" she repeated. Trying out the name after years of disuse, I wondered?

"And she respected your decision to leave, too," I went on, "even though she'd never admit to it. She just all over respects you. Me, I think it's a bit cowardly."

"What has Glinda to do with…"

"You left her," I said simply. "And I had to pick up the pieces."

Elphaba was strangely silent. She clenched the display hat in her hands, green knuckles turning white.

"Not that I minded." I shrugged. "I picked up her pieces, she picked up mine."

"What were your pieces, I wonder?" Elphaba murmured.

"You missed that." Tibbett, I decided, was a million things to talk about and I wasn't willing to waste my breath for her. "You'd like to stay anonymous?" I asked her.

"I need to."

"I won't say a thing."

She paused. "Not to Glinda?"

"Especially not to Glinda. She's too—"

"Don't say fragile," she said sharply and then appeared to shrink within herself. I had never thought of Elphaba—harsh and resolute Elphaba—as small. But she was, very suddenly.

She took a moment before she spoke again. "She wasn't fragile. That was everyone's mistake."

"I wasn't going to say fragile," I said quietly. "I was going to say she's too adjusted. And if I told her, she'd—well, she would be back where she started off and that's regressing. I can't clean up for her again, I won't."

"Then don't," offered Elphaba. "You didn't see me."

I shifted from one foot to the other, clearing my throat. "And you won't go see her?"

"The idea of it, Crope," she said with a short, bleak laugh. "I had not planned on it."

Tibbett hadn't eaten anything for days. More than being pale, he was thin and drawn, and time with him was arduous. He had spells of paranoia, of very palpable paranoia and separation anxiety. When I got up to leave, he grabbed my hand and said, "Don't go, please don't go."

"I have to. I hope you eat something. I hope I come back tomorrow and you've eaten something." I tried to pry his hand from mine, but he only held tighter.

"You're the only one to ever love me, Crope."

He said it so quietly and evenly that it hurt. I squeezed his hand. "No, I'm not the only one."

"You're the only one to visit me. That says it. You're the only one to love me; you're the only one to visit me."

His eyes slipped closed. I watched him for a long time and thought about forgetting him, about leaving him alone and pretending I'd never known him. I thought about Glinda, Glinda-who-wasn't-fragile, Glinda-who-was-getting-along-fine.

"I'm the only one who hasn't cottoned on to the fact that you're only going to get worse," I whispered. I pulled my hand free and smoothed his bed sheets down.

I stopped visiting him everyday after that.

"I like it better than your last one," Glinda commented.

"Oh, do you? Why is that?"

She shook her head. "I don't know; I prefer the colors."

We were in my loft on her last day; I'd opened all the shades so that we could look at the cool, glittering brightness of the Emerald City in early afternoon. She sat at the edge of my sofa in a dress that matched it color-for-color and it was like she belonged, like she was a pretty accessory to the ever-cunning vibrancy of my little loft.

"Just color, then?" I showed her the two paintings side-by-side, the old and the new.

"Mmm."

"Well, you and I are in agreement," I said. "You are the dearest of art critics."

"Yes, I know. Is that clock fast or slow?"

"It's just on time. Are you leaving so soon?"

She smiled apologetically. "The train leaves in an hour."

I took her hand and helped her up, knowing the loft would be darker, less sunny, once she had gone. It would be a long stretch of time before she visited me again, I knew, for it always was. I never could prepare myself for it. When she was with me, I forgot what it was like when she wasn't, when the loft was dark and my paintings had less color and there was nothing but a stark room in a building full of crazies and a vegetable that had once been a boy and would never be a man.

I let the air out of my lungs. "I'll see you off, then."

"You don't have to."

"I'd like to."

"Don't look so sour, Crope." Her hand was soft against my cheek. "I'll be back soon enough. I wouldn't leave you to rot all alone in this city."

I chuckled. "All right."

"I wouldn't," she insisted. "We need each other, you and I. Can you imagine anyone else understanding you better than I do?"

"No," I admitted.

"Nor I. We're both devoted to dead ends. It's such a dreary outlook for a life, but somehow it isn't so bad."

"It isn't," I agreed. "When you're around, at least, it isn't so bad."

I was reminded of what Tibbett had said days ago, although it felt like weeks. Perhaps it wasn't so silly, finding truth and meaning in the daft things he said—because he'd had a point about the evenings coming later when I visited. It was the same principle with Glinda, I thought. The days were longer, the evenings came later, and it was just a bit easier to get by.

I suppose we were better off thinking we only had each other.

End