A/N: Welcome back ladies and gentlemen! Quick thanks to reviewers, followers and favouriters before we get with things - I'm glad you like the story so far, Fae'sFlower, and I hope it continues to meet and exceed expectations... though I'm afraid that worrying for the characters might just be the most sensible option at this point. It's going to be a rough journey from hereon.
Anyhow, without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review and above all, enjoy!
Disclaimer: Wicked is one of the many things I will never own, a fact that I have long since accepted.
The two of them spent the night huddled around a table in Nessa's bedroom, dining on piping-hot bowls of soup as they planned out the tuition, sketching out timetables, resource lists, rules, and all manner of other necessary documents – everything that Nessarose would need to become a proper witch.
Along the way, they also began tentative plans to scale back the restrictions that had further soured Nessa's reputation among the Munchkins, hoping that a more benevolent form of government might at least be able to repair Nessa's reputation. It wasn't much, but at least it might encourage her citizens to look upon her more favourably.
Because leaving spellbooks behind would only draw attention from the few remaining servants when they finally returned to the manor, Elphaba instead offered to commit as much of her knowledge to paper as she could, providing Nessa with a handful of duplicated pages at a time – much more concealable than the paving-stone-sized tomes they'd originally been written in. Nessa herself set the schedule of deliveries: at the end of every week, Elphaba would fly past the house under cover of darkness, hidden under as many obfuscating enchantments as she could muster, and slide an envelope of transcribed spells under Nessa's bedroom window; if Nessa and Boq were alone in the house and none of the servants were due to make another appearance that day, she'd even be allowed in for the evening and given a chance to eat and sleep in comfort.
As nervous as she was about the whole situation, Elphaba had to admit that the chance of getting a hot dinner and a warm bed once a week sounded pretty good. All the same, the idea of leaving so much transcribed magical knowledge hanging around where anyone could read it – or use it – still gave her the shivers. In the end, she had to trust that Nessa could handle the situation intelligently enough to not just leave her spells lying on her desk… and more importantly, she had to trust that Nessa could use that newfound magical power responsibly.
After all, she mused to nobody in particular, if you can't trust family, who can you trust?
Yourself, perhaps? Your friends, maybe?
Evidently, my inner monologue has difficulty with rhetorical questions.
In one of the brief lulls in conversation, Elphaba found herself glancing over Nessa's shoulder at the blanket-shrouded figure lying on the bed, almost lost among pillows and plush toys. Judging from those muffled snores, Boq was definitely on the mend, though she couldn't imagine how he'd feel once he awoke: even if he wasn't suffering the usual aches and pains that people in his condition usually experienced, he'd be effectively trapped in the manor with Nessarose for as long as the people of Munchkinland hated him. Not much of a life, but at least he'd be safe.
Maybe it was better this way. If nothing else, it might force the two to be honest with each other – and themselves. Boq might never love Nessa, but with a little time, maybe he could learn to live with her until it was safe for him to leave… assuming, of course, it would ever be safe. But she had to hope that she could at least deflect the blame from Nessa over the following months; she mightn't be able to win a true victory against the Wizard, but she could at least ensure that her sister suffered no further blame.
She had to hope… because under the circumstances, there honestly wasn't much else she could do.
She was still hanging onto that miniscule sliver of hope the next morning, when Elphaba finally bid farewell to Nessa and left via her bedroom window, soaring off into the cold grey sky.
Months rolled by.
Elphaba's rebellion went on, bloody and thankless and all-too-often futile: for every Animal she released from captivity, two more were silenced, never to speak or think again; for every supporter she gained among the Animals, two more were killed – usually while covering her escape; for every re-education camp she destroyed, two more sprung up within a matter of days.
Her attempts to spread the word of the Wizard's fraudulence to the people all ended in failure: no matter how diplomatic her approach, no matter how reasonable her argument, they simply refused to listen. Some threw stones, some shot at her, but the overwhelming majority of them just ran away, fleeing the Wicked Witch of the West in droves. Sadly, it wasn't so surprising in hindsight: after all, Elphaba was just one voice, easily drowned out by the Wizard's thunderous bellowing, easily dismissed by the jeers of the crowds. And as for the Animals who supported her… well, the popular slogan still proclaimed that Animals should be seen and not heard, and few Ozian citizens paid much attention to their attempts at championing Elphaba's cause.
Time and again, she tried to break into the Wizard's palace, mostly in desperate gambits intended to release the Flying Monkeys from captivity, sometimes in deranged attempts at kidnapping the Wizard. And time and again, she failed: guards stood in readiness at almost every single window and balcony from the ground floor to the uppermost towers, and the few entry points that weren't guarded had been covered with layer after layer of magical wards, courtesy of Madam Morrible. From the looks of things, the palace guard had been on high alert ever since the disaster in Munchkinland – not that they'd been idle before then. In fact, from what little Elphaba could tell, the only point where they'd been lax enough for someone to infiltrate the palace had been during Glinda's great day of celebration, and judging from the current political climate, days like that weren't likely to appear on the calendar again.
So, with the rebellion in shambles and no sign of improvement in sight, Elphaba found herself looking for solace wherever she could find it; and because Glinda and Fiyero were still out of reach, her only consolation lay in her occasional meetings with Nessa.
Once a week, Elphaba would return to Munchkinland in as swift a manner as possible, even teleporting herself across hundreds of miles if need be, and slip an envelope containing that week's lessons under Nessa's window. And on every single visit, she found herself hoping – praying – that Nessa would be there to let her in, not only because it would mean a hot meal and a bed for the evening, but because her sister was one of the few remaining loved ones still within reach.
Nessarose wasn't always waiting for her, but when she was… well, it was the nearest thing Elphaba got to contentedness in those dark days. True, her guilt started gnawing at her for entirely different reasons while she was sequestered at the manor, but for once, the brief moments of happiness she enjoyed there outweighed the depression of her days in the field. There, alone except for Nessa and Boq, she enjoyed a sense of security she hadn't felt in years; she got to spend her evenings in the company of friends that weren't in danger of being murdered or kidnapped… and best of all, Elphaba could pretend that she wasn't leading a failed rebellion and alone in the world except for the few Animals she'd been able to rescue from the camps; for a while, she could pretend she was normal.
By her second visit, Boq was in good health again and appeared to have come to terms with his newfound prison sentence, enough to speak on a civil-verging-on-friendly basis with Nessa. Though he didn't seem especially comfortable around Elphaba, he was never anything other than gentlemanly around her – if nothing else, he was courteous enough to tolerate their infrequent chess games on the duller afternoons.
In sharp contrast to the Munchkin's tentative interactions, Nessarose spent their meetings virtually erupting with exuberance: freed from the constraints of her wheelchair, she practically ricocheted around the manor, launching herself up flights of stairs in fits of delirious abandon and sprinting down the corridors at blinding speed, the ruby slippers leaving a glowing trail of scarlet-coloured stardust in her wake. On every single visit, she was bustling around the house, busying herself with five different tasks at once, even taking time off her official duties to help out with the housework that the vastly reduced staff couldn't perform themselves; she was even learning how to dance, as Boq exhaustedly confessed one evening – after having been run ragged across the length of the ballroom.
And most importantly, she was learning magic: given that Elphaba could only transcribe and post a few spells at a time, Nessa's studies proceeded at an understandably languid pace, but she was making progress nonetheless. By their third meeting, she'd gotten the hang of actually casting spells by incantation and gesture, and was already capable of conjuring mystical light; by their fifth meeting (perhaps a month later), she'd progressed to basic telekinetic motion, and though she couldn't lift anything heavier than the marble paperweight on her desk, she was definitely growing stronger with every lesson.
With Boq's protection still on her mind, it wasn't long before she requested special lessons in healing magic, and Elphaba found herself watching with something akin to pride as her little sister swiftly graduated from banishing bruises to sealing cuts and puncture wounds. On one especially joyous meeting, she even greeted Elphaba by healing a gash on her hand left by one of the Wizard's more insistent hunters, even performing effortless diagnostic spells on the fly as she arranged cushions and icepacks for Elphaba's burned shoulder.
Of course, the lessons weren't always so productive. More than once, Elphaba had to extinguish the drapes after Nessa accidentally ignited them, and attempts at trying to ward the house against intrusion only resulted in the drawing room windows being permanently sealed shut. Advanced incantations proved to be something of a weak spot in her early days, for though she could easily command magic with gestures of the hands and fingers, spoken spells often ended in embarrassing miscasts: after one particularly memorable failure, Boq had to spend a rather problematic afternoon hastily burying the multilegged corpse of his bedside table in the garden, prompting Nessa to put any further lessons in transfiguration on hold for the time being.
Just as well, Elphaba mused, as Boq pummelled the struggling piece of furniture to death with a shovel for the second time in a row. I'd hate to think of what'd happen if she'd had a chance to make a start on the Grimmerie's incantations…
Sadly, the turmoil wasn't restricted to their lessons. By the fourth month of the lessons, the relationship between Nessa and Boq began to fray as cabin fever set in: the friendly conversations slowly dwindled away, along with the dancing, the candlelit dinners, and even the chess games. Often, Boq would vanish into some isolated corner of the house and return ashen-faced, his eyes wet with fresh tears; as the weeks went by and communication broke down further, Nessa often did the same. Though neither of them ever acknowledged the fact that they'd been crying, it wasn't hard to see why: one wanted freedom, the other wanted company, and neither could get it. In the end, it wasn't as if there was anything to be done about the situation, not with Munchkinland still politically tense at present; the most Elphaba could do was encourage them to reconcile and force them to discuss matters in person – before her schedule forced her out of the house all over again.
In the end, things only got worse: by the sixth month, the two of them could swing from amiable to downright venomous over the course of a single evening. They were careful not to let Elphaba see them fighting on the occasions when frustrations boiled over, but she could tell that there was an explosion in the making from the simple fact that they refused to speak to one another until she left the room. Of course, it wasn't as if she couldn't hear the two of them shouting at each other or discern what was being said; besides, even if Nessa had found a way of smothering the sound before it could reach her, the arguments were easy to predict, almost always beginning the same way: Boq, voice ragged with emotion, crying out, "I'm a prisoner in this house!" and Nessa, on the verge of tears, wailing, "I'm not keeping you prisoner, Boq, I'm keeping you safe!"
And there were times when even arguments couldn't suffice, days when the tension in the air between the two of them solidified into something palpable enough to smother any attempt at conversation: mealtimes spent in agonizing silence, magic lessons abruptly faltering whenever Boq entered the room, and an all-too-visible series of attempts by both parties to exile themselves to opposite ends of the house. For a time, Elphaba attempted to mediate – in her own remarkably awkward way – and tried to encourage the two of them to actually talk about their problems rather than bottling them up until they finally exploded, but neither showed any overwhelming interest in listening. Eventually, Nessa took her aside one night and pleaded with her to stop negotiating, insisting that they were "just having a bad month."
She'd almost believed her.
It wasn't until Elphaba succumbed to curiosity and paid a discreet visit to the manor a couple of days ahead of schedule that she realized just how dysfunctional the relationship had gotten. Hovering just above the manor's roof, hidden from sight by layer after layer of obfuscating enchantments, she heard the sounds of a colossal argument raging across the house: Nessa, screaming in rage, demanding explanations from Boq; Boq futilely trying to answer back, quickly lapsing into panicked mumbling and desperate, whimpered apologies; the sound of a china plate shattering against the wall, accompanied by a startled yelp from Boq; Nessa's voice, louder and angrier than Elphaba had ever heard, screaming that Glinda would never love him and would never care about Boq the way she did; another musical explosion of crockery and glass, and another, and another.
No less shocking was the apparent resolution: after the argument had run its course and Boq had fled the room in terror, Nessa hurried after him, frantically pleading with him not to leave, insisting that she hadn't meant what she'd just said, that she'd just gotten carried away. After about five nerve-wracking minutes of pleading and cajoling and promising the Munchkin that things would be better from now on, she eventually managed to convince him that it wasn't safe "out there," slowly luring him away from the front door and into her arms.
They were still cleaning up the mess when Elphaba arrived to confront her. Nessa had nothing but apologies and excuses to offer, claiming that she'd had a few too many drinks that evening and had gotten a little upset with Boq's habit of "pining for Glinda." Admittedly, there were quite a few bottles missing from the wine cellar, but any attempts to dig deeper than that were met with terrified silence: Boq was too scared to disagree with Nessa's explanations, and immediately blamed himself when Elphaba started asking questions about how the trouble had started.
Worst of all was the simple fact that, after all the investigations, all the stern warnings and reparations and fence-mending and amateur counselling, there was precious little Elphaba could do about the events of the evening. Talking things out over the course of a few hours wasn't going to change a thing; but as Nessa herself pointed out, letting Boq leave the building would be nothing short of a death sentence with public opinion of Nessarose and her "favourite" as low as it was; and it wasn't as if Elphaba could stay there indefinitely to try and work things out in the long term – as much as she'd have liked to. Time and again, she had to weigh her commitments to friends and family over her duty to defend the Animals of Oz, and with the latter in more immediate danger, she had to hope that Nessa would be sane enough to listen to the advice she'd been given that evening.
Yes, said a bilious voice in the back of her mind, you have to hope. Because you've failed as a revolutionary and you've failed as a sister; soon, you'll fail as a witch, and you'll fail as a human being. Soon, hope will be all you have left… and hope fades so very, very, very easily.
In the end, Elphaba could only do her best to ignore the voice of her own self-loathing and carry on with the schedule – six days a week spent on bloodshed and desperation and so many failed attempts to save lives, with the remaining twenty-four hours spent on family, magical tuition, and trying to patch the holes in an increasingly tenuous relationship.
Months fell from the calendar. Hundreds of Animals all over Oz suffered and lapsed into silence; thousands more simply died in captivity. Elphaba endured everything that the Wizard could throw at her, from demoralizing speeches to massed gunfire; once in an azure-blue moon, some misguided outcast would take her in out of sympathy to her cause, and would have to suffer terribly for it. Back in Munchkinland, Nessarose slowly made her way through the improvised magic lessons, progressing from the junior textbooks to the intermediary studies, occasionally demonstrating her skills when Elphaba returned to the manor with broken bones; Boq fluctuated wildly between near-mechanical efficiency and sobbing fits of neuroses, often freezing in terror whenever Nessa tried to hug him by way of apology for her latest outburst; and Elphaba herself ended each visit lying on a bed in the guest room, wondering how it was possible to fix something that might very well be beyond repair.
So it was that one long and torturous year went by…