A\N: Um...yeah, just enjoy...
Elphaba was losing control.
As she shouted and fought, ranting at the small child caught in her hands who would not, could not, possibly out of spite give Elphaba the shoes, a small part of her mind began to realize that fact. Elphaba was earning her title as the Wicked Witch of the West...
Or perhaps, simply going insane.
Was this what it took? After thirty-eight years of neglect and abuse, was Elphaba's battered and scarred heart finally tearing her mind apart in revenge? Was this pair of shoes the straw that broke the camel's back?
Elphaba knew it was hardly irrational thinking. After all, instead of taking Dorothy and her friends in, calmly letting them help her find the solution to Glinda's spell, Elphaba had kidnapped the girl and was terrifying her in the vain hope that it would do something. Occasionally Elphaba had to stop herself from storming up those stairs and trying to beat the shoes off her.
Or worse.
Elphaba sighed.
She stopped reading, leaving only a finger to mark her place. Her eyes drifted from the black-and-white page to Kiamo Ko's walls around her.
Elphaba was broken.
It was...well, she had been doomed from the beginning. It had been inevitable. And as much as Elphaba found herself ranting and railing inwardly against the fact, she was also oddly resigned. This madness would make her truly evil.
And then what?
Elphaba glanced back at the book.
The Grimmerie. Her spellbook, her one, precious object. Once, alone and starving, begging for food, a Vinkus stallholder had offered to trade the book for food. But Elphaba had gone hungry instead. Just as she so often had.
With that spellbook, Elphaba's power was unlimited. As a good woman, perhaps even a hero to Animals, she didn't do much but at least she changed some things. But what would she do when she was insane?
When no rationality existed to stop her?
Elphaba glanced around her again.
Dorothy's sobs had faded. Was that because the girl had cried herself to sleep, or because her sobs didn't even begin to match the ones in Elphaba's own heart?
It was hardly an easy thing to realize you were turning evil.
Even worse, Elphaba supposed, because she had only ever had one taste of love, of any love-Fiyero. No childhood, hated throughout her adulthood...the same pain that led her to help the Animals led her to fall wholeheartedly for Fiyero. Deep within herself, Elphaba knew that even if Fiyero were a monster, she would still have loved him with the same ferocity and intensity, so long as he fed her scraps of approval. And Fiyero seemed to have truly, deeply loved her, an unconditional love that Elphaba hungered for.
It had been like water to a woman who had never before drunk anything but wine. Oh, certainly, the few snippets of attention her mother and father had graced her with had pretended to heal the bruises and cuts on Elphaba's heart, but to truly slake her thirst, she needed that water.
And how she wanted more.
Elphaba looked up at the stairs. Dorothy was atop them.
Elphaba was suddenly and intensely jealous.
The girl carried herself with the trademark confidence of childhood. That kind of confidence, Elphaba knew painfully well, came only from having at least one person love you unconditionally, from birth. And she never had that. If Elphaba could have found it, in that one instant she would have switched bodies with Dorothy, chopped her feet away, and gone 'home' to an aunt and uncle who wouldn't care one tick that Elphaba was injured and would simply love her anyway.
But Elphaba couldn't. So she didn't.
She knew Fiyero wasn't coming back. While laying with him, in the brief weeks she'd had him, she'd considered what she'd do after she lost him. Suicide had seemed the only option.
It still was.
Elphaba would never know love again. Because Fiyero had loved her, he had weakened her. Elphaba, foolish woman, had been so desperate for even a few weeks if love she had forgotten that her own scars were what kept her safe. Now those scars were torn wide open, and anyone who saw them could twist her mind, warping her into nothing more than a puppet.
Oh, how the Wizard would love that! Elphaba laughed hollowly. The hateful bastard...
So, that left only one thing.
Elphaba looked at the Grimmerie again.
She would take the shoes. Elphaba wanted to feel them on her own feet just once. Those shoes were more than just shoes-they held Fraxspar's love for Nessarose, Elphaba's own love for her sister, and for one instant before she died, Elphaba wanted to feel such powerful loves on her own feet, pretend that the love was meant for her, so she could feel one more time the beautiful feeling Fiyero had begun to heal her with.
And then...
Elphaba looked up the stairs. Well, perhaps she would let Dorothy find out the wicked old witch was dead, or even kill the witch herself if the child needed it. Elphaba owed the girl that.
But first...
First she wanted those shoes.