A/N: I'd like to thank many people of Pencils to Paper, an amazing writing group, and tin-hearted DOT tumblr DOT COM for betaing this chapter!
According to the Time Dragon Clock, that it was nearly seven in the evening. Galinda should have left around three hours ago, and would therefore be back rather soon. Elphaba smiled as she entered the dorm and found it empty and silent, and decided to use the rare opportunity to read in the unusual tranquility.
As she looked at her reflection, she saw her verdigris, as usual, but the writing on the wall made Elphaba's heart begin to pound with fear. As she slowly walked towards the mirror image, her eyes widened more and more by the second.
You're next.
Elphaba's heart began to quicken as she looked around in an almost blind frenzy for Galinda. Was she... Was she dead? Was her simply wonderful best friend's sticky, crimson blood on the mirror?
Elphaba Thropp sat down on her plain bed in shock, her head in her hands, and looked over her options on what she should do now, while she was still alive. The first idea that entered into her paranoid mind was the one that Elphaba put into action. She stood up, grabbed her schoolbag, and then began to ram all her needed necessities in.
Galinda's beaming smile on her face as she opened the door quickly changed to a frown of confusion as she saw her favourite green girl - well, her only green girl - packing her things into a bag. "Um, Elphie?"
The girl's head flew up in shock, and the girl blinked wildly as if there was a ghost rather than a girl in front of her. "G-Galinda?"
"What in Oz are you doing?" Galinda asked, looking at the schoolbag in wonder, her big blue eyes wide and the corners of her mouth upturned.
Elphaba felt idiotic the minute the girl started to smile. "I... I thought you were kidnapped!"
"I was what?" Galinda tried not to laugh, covering her mouth with a manicured hand.
The green girl merely pointed to the mirror, her hand trembling. Galinda bit her lip to refrain from laughing and decided to play along. "What is that supposed to mean, Elphie? You're next? This isn't a very funny joke. What's next? Are you going to greenify me as well?"
"Oh Gods, shut up!" Elphaba laughed slightly, but her voice was full of paranoia, chockablock with the fear of revealing her true feelings for her roommate, hiding her feelings in a laugh. She threw a pillow and Galinda's eyes widened as it came straight for her face, hitting her square between her eyes like a bullet.
That night, Elphaba didn't sleep in her dorm. She muttered that she was going to the library, and Galinda nodded in polite response.
As Elphaba ran into the library and began to read, she felt herself slipping into sleep. But she couldn't sleep in her room. What if something came for them in the night? Elphaba couldn't bare to even think of losing the only person she really loved, but a small fragment of her mind was thinking of that very popular saying:
Every man for himself.
As soon as her friend left, Galinda giggled. She was enjoying this game of frightening people. She felt like a child all over again, and that had to be one of the greatest feelings in the world.
Galinda took the lipstick and blush out again, and blended it onto the wall, muttering under her breath as she wrote, "Just wait. It'll be soon."
Until I get the next batch of lipstick. Galinda thought, wincing as she realized she wasted most of her favourite Ruby Red lipstick with this prank.
She couldn't put this on her lips once it touched both the mirror and the wall! Talk about germs!
Two hours later, Elphaba found a nice, hidden corner of the library, and fell asleep.
The next morning, as Elphaba ran across the campus, unlocked her dorm room, and got ready to choose what to wear, she stopped breathing for half a second.
"Sweet Oz."