Chapter 4 : Week 1
A/N Thank you to hollyBush (I love SkinDeep!), musicGal3, SailorSea, Lady Osipria,FabalaTiggular & robber'sdaughter for the reviews. :) SailorSea, I like that last part about Nessa too. Typical her! :P
A/N 2 : updated on 2nd Nov 2014 to correct grammar , punctuation and spelling mistakes.
Fiyero had instructed Elphaba to go to his room after her breakfast with his breakfast, and so it was, on that first weekend of 'servant month (as Fiyero had coined it)', that she found herself walking to the boys dorm for her first housecleaning job with nothing but a book.
Galinda had wished her well, and said that she will be with her 'spiritually'. Elphaba had laughed at that.
Despite being on rather friendly terms with a few boys (namely Boq, Fiyero, Tibbett and Croup), Elphaba had never been into the dorm of any of the boys. She was never invited, and was never interested too. As a matter of fact, she had never been to anyone's room, except for hers and Nessarose's.
She knocked on the door of Fiyero's dorm, slightly nervous. What would he get her to do? Clean cobwebs? Wash the toilet? Paint the walls?
Before her imagination could go any further, the door opened, with Fiyero, dressed casually for the weekend, behind it.
"You're on time!" He said with delight.
"I am never late for anything," she informed him.
"It's good to see such enthusiasm coming from one who loses a bet," he told her teasingly. "Come on in."
Elphaba went into his room. As a prince, he did not need to share his room with anyone. With the second bed removed, his room seemed larger than the one Elphaba shared with Galinda, even though she knew that all the dorm rooms were roughly the same size.
In the place of the removed bed, Fiyero had put a small table at the corner, with some personal belongings on top, a jug of drinking water and a gramophone.
There were two mountains of notes stacked up on the study table, leaving little room for a person to sit down and do any studying. There were also a few clothes lying around, and Elphaba suspected that the rest were in the wardrobe, neatly pressed, since Fiyero always turned up neatly and fashionably dressed (the latter according to Galinda, since Elphaba was not remotely interested in fashion).
"So what am I supposed to do?" She asked him.
"Filing." He told her. "These," he waved to the two mountains, "are everything from this term – projects, tests, whatever little notes that I have taken. I am just not good in filing them."
Elphaba signed. She had helped Galinda kick start a filing system soon after the term started, and was not expecting to do the same for another friend so soon.
"Alright," she told him.
At her request, Fiyero found a few boxes, one for each subject. They then took down the first pile of papers onto the floor.
Using coloured paper, she divided each box into sections, writing down their contents in her neat handwriting. "For projects, notes, tests, miscellaneous items," she told him.
As Fiyero ate his breakfast while seated next to her, Elphaba went through the paper. There were some that she could identify easily, since they took some subjects together, but there were others that were filled with his scribbles, so unreadable that she had to pass to him to identify which subject it was for. There was quite a few pieces in which there was nothing but lines of zigzags, or some other random drawings (including a drawing of one of the professors with fangs and breathing fire, which drew a chuckle from Elphaba), and Elphaba threw them away.
Fiyero went to the washroom after he had finished his breakfast and tried to tease Elphaba.
"I'm going to wash my hands, Elphaba. " He said in a singsong tone. "Are you coming?"
"The 'following' excludes washroom," she told him as she frowned at the piece of paper she was holding.
"You're really not coming? I'm just going to wash my hands, nothing rated."
Elphaba quickly rolled up the piece of paper into a ball and aimed at him. The ball hit the closing washroom door and bounced off and she could hear the prince laughing inside. "You didn't get me!"
After he came out from the washroom, they continued to sit there, Elphaba doing work, Fiyero watching, for quite some time, until the prince announced. "This is boring. It is such a good day, too good to be spent indoors."
"What?" Elphaba, who was, at that moment, trying to identify the subject of the piece of badly scribbled paper in her hand, replied absentmindedly.
"Let's go out! There is some place that I want to go." He jumped up with excitement.
"What? Where?" She asked, still half engrossed in the sorting work.
Fiyero quickly grabbed a backpack, and started stuffing some stuff inside – some clothes, some big towels, and a big water bottle which he filled with water from the jug on his table.
"Come on," he said, getting all hyped up. "You are supposed to follow me wherever I go right?"
"But where are we going?" She asked.
"You will find out soon enough. Just rest assured that it is nowhere sleazy." He looked at what she was wearing – her usual black dress and boots. "This will do," he told her.
They went to the cafeteria where Fiyero grabbed some sandwiches and fruits for lunch. She then followed him as they walked out of the Shiz campus.
"Where are we going?" Elphaba asked.
"You'll find out soon," he told her again.
There was a hilly forest quite a distance behind Shiz, and Elphaba found the two of them going towards that direction. She had never been there before.
"We're going to the hills?" She asked. He had never struck her as the nature kind of people.
"Bingo," he told her.
They walked onwards, and Elphaba thanked goodness that she was wearing her boots. She imagined Galinda doing the same trek, in her fashion heels, and had to smile at that image.
As they went near to the edge of the forest, Elphaba began to notice that there were some places where the growth was less sparse, forming what seemed like a path into the depths of the forest.
"Do you come here often?" She asked.
"Me. And other people. This place is not exactly a secret." He told her.
They walked into the forest, and Elphaba immediately felt a coolness as the sunlight was blocked by the tall looming trees. Fiyero gestured towards a half-seen path up the hill, and two made their way up.
Elphaba had been carrying the backpack all the while, and Fiyero took over. "You will need all your energy to climb up," he told her.
As they made their way up the hill, the terrain became steeper. At certain places, Fiyero would turned back and stretch out his hand for Elphaba. She refused his hand the first time, but after a near slip, she swallowed her pride and took his hand whenever it was offered.
The path disappeared sometimes, but Fiyero seemed to know the way well, going up, or turning left or right, before they picked up the trail again. While they did not see any animals, Elphaba could hear the sounds of some birds singing, and the sounds of crickets and other insects.
"Am I hearing things?" She asked, after they had climbed for what seemed like a long time.
"What did you hear?" Fiyero asked.
"I heard the sound of running water," she told him.
Fiyero smiled. "You have very good hearing. We're almost there."
Another few turns, and they reached a plateau.
There was a clearing, and in front of them, was a waterfall falling from a great height. Behind the waterfall was a tall rock formation, with vines all around (and two bright yellow birds fluttering their wings around the vines). The waterfall fell into a stream, which wind around and disappear to the forest at the side. Near to the base of the waterfall, erosion had created a natural pool of clear water. On the right side, the clearing ended on a cliff.
Elphaba was speechless for some time.
"It's beautiful," she finally said, her tiredness forgotten.
"And look here," Fiyero said, pulling her to the edge of the cliff. She looked down, and saw below them, trees, miniature houses and buildings, and roads. Shiz, with its distinctive architecture, was easily recognizable among the buildings.
"There," Fiyero pointed out, "is my room. I was looking out of my window one day with my binoculars, and thought I saw this clearing in the middle of the hill. So one day, I just came over and explore. Few people know about this, and whoever that do, came, but tried to leave the place as undisturbed as possible. " He explained.
Fiyero took out a large towel from his backpack and laid it on the grassy ground. He then proceeded to take off his boots and put each shoe on two of the corners of the towel. Elphaba did the same, thus effectively stopping any wind from pulling the towel away.
"What are you doing?" She asked, startled, when he started taking off his clothes.
"Swimming, of course. The water is cool, and clean," he told her. "Are you joining?"
Elphaba shook her head. She did not know how to swim, but she was not going to tell him.
Fiyero continued to strip off his clothes, until only a pair of shorts was left. Elphaba, by then, had turned her back to him, not wanting to see, but she could already felt her cheeks flushing, the image of his bare chest and its vividly blue diamond tattoos imprinted in her mind.
She heard the sound of him getting into the water before she turned back again. He was swimming the length of the stream gracefully. She sat down on the towel and looked at him for a while, admiring (without admitting to herself) the way his muscles moved easily as they carried him in the water as if swimming was second nature to him.
After a while, Elphaba looked into the backpack. To her delight, she found her book among the clothes and food. She took it out and started reading, while enjoying the gentle breeze and the sound of the water lapping against the shore.