A/N: This may be the longest chapter I've ever written. It has also been heavily influenced by Isabel Allende and X-Men (perhaps the oddest combination ever) in that it has a long retelling of some of Elphaba's childhood, in particular the development of her powers (light bulbs go off in everyone's heads. Aah, NOW it makes sense!)
Disclaimer: Although I work and seldom cease
At reading it and owning this,
Alas I cannot seem to get
Past reading this to owning it
And I don't even own the structure of that poem! Dorothy Parker does.
Under my sister's gaze, I grew flustered and couldn't lie.
"I…I…I," I stuttered, trying to think of something.
"What is it, Elphaba?" asked Nessarose with a glint of hard steel in her voice that I'd never heard before. "What do you know?"
"Boq- he- he's not going to ask you to-to be his girlfriend," I stammered. "He's going to break up with you." Her eyes went wide, her face turned white.
"You're lying!" she screamed. "You're just jealous because no one will ever love you because you're- you're just a hideous, awful, freak!"
I slapped her across the face. I had never done anything like that before in my life.
"You're wrong," I said calmly, not allowing myself to be angry. "Someone does love me. Father may not, but I've learned that's not my fault. It's his. He's not a strong enough person to bear grief without a scapegoat." Her round eyes grew even wider and her mouth dropped open. I had violated the sacred family precept of blaming me. "Someone who- someone who does love me told me that."
"Get out," she said quietly. "Get out of my room, Elphaba. I can't- I have to- I can't talk to you right now."
Satisfied that irreparable damage had not been done to our relationship, I went outside to find Fiyero.
"How did it go?" he asked.
"It'll be better…later," I said. I felt strangely hot, as though my cheeks were flushing. "Once she's talked to Boq and she knows I was telling the truth."
"Oh, no," he murmured, "she found out?"
"I slipped up," I said. "She didn't want to go, she wanted to talk to Boq, and…"
"Elphaba?" asked Fiyero, looking at me strangely, "are you all right?" It was then that I realized through the hot muggy fog of my own head that I was swaying, having trouble standing. I wiped my forehead, it felt nearly damp with the feverish threat of impending sweat.
"Elphaba?" Fiyero's voice was coming at me from very far away. His arm was holding me, touching me through just a thin layer of cloth, but it felt…removed, as though it and my physical body were in some otherworld… "Elphaba!"
I felt the blackness closing in on me from all corners of my muddled mind, and, fevered and ill, I let go and clung to it.
…
I drifted in and out of consciousness for three days up in my dorm room, with Morrible, Glinda, Fiyero, Nessarose, and a coterie of nurses hovering over me. I drifted through scenes of past and future and what I was not quite aware was the present (that consisted, mostly, of vaguely familiar faces hovering over me) I drifted through the dark corners of my childhood and the shadows of what was to come.
I dreamt, and later when I woke completely, all that remained were scattered impressions:
A living Scarecrow, a shiny, silver man, the shrill annoying bark of a small dog, the stonework of an unfamiliar castle, desperation, the yellowed old pages of a book, the brink of insanity. Also good things- the warm weight of a familiar hand on my back, the scratch of straw against my cheek and the feeling of safety, a moonlit forest, a brief feeling of relief in a dance to music that was somehow familiar though I'd never heard its like before.
Also, also, this:
It began a few days before my mother's death. I only know this from patched together memories, snatches of dreams, and whispers around corners from my fearsome nanny. A woman unversed in the art of coddling, her sarcasm and unbridled bitchiness and personality greatly influenced me, as everyone at Shiz knows quite well.
But for three days before Nessarose's birth, I awoke screaming, pummeling invisible, intangible demons I lacked the words to name.
The next time, I was five and I got a premonition that Nessarose, just three, would get sick, and like an idiot I told my father. At first, he didn't believe me, but two days later when Nessa contracted pneumonia and nearly died, my father, predictably, blamed me.
When I was eight, a neighbor was teasing me and I was giving it right back, until I got a sudden, horrific, gory vision of his death, getting caught in the grain thresher he was playing near, his father's, carelessly left running. Ten years later, the graphic vision still haunted my nightmares. I shouted it out and he just laughed at me, but his father found out about it and three days later, when he died, I was nearly killed by a mob of our neighbors who stormed up to our house bearing torches and pitchforks, weapons that were no match for the rage of my Nanny, a veritable force of nature, that confronted them at our front door. They left nearly instantly.
The first outward manifestation of my powers came when I was thirteen. I was gangly as a long-legged colt, with pointy knees, elbows and nose and long, dark hair I kept so severely braided that it, always straight as sticks, came wavy when I loosed it at night. I had owlish glasses and always carried a thick book with me. Not only was it interesting with the added benefit of encouraging people to leave me alone, but it also made a good weapon. I didn't have much need of it, though. Although I was never included, my classmates, having known me since early childhood, no longer felt the need to constantly mock me. They knew that I would thwack them with an 800 page Vinkusian discourse on politics and suspected inwardly that I'd kill them or turn them into toads. We had all been raised between our superstitious nannies and grandparents and our pragmatic parents, creating in us a peculiar blend of mythology and skepticism. The idea of Lurline and Preenella visiting at Lurlinemas we scoffed at, and we could all see straight through those stories whose only value was to frighten children into obedience, but the other dark stories of witches and malevolent fairies and changelings, lingered at the shadowy edges of our young minds, deeply influencing us all.
But one day when I was thirteen, at lunchtime I came upon a group of children teasing Nessa, whom they were spinning around in her wheelchair.
"How come you can't walk, Princess, huh? Did your freaky sister break your legs so that she could-"
"SHUT UP!" I screamed, storming towards them, eyes and figurative guns blazing. The air around me began to crackle palpably with electricity. Sparks danced along the edges of my fingers; I fisted my hands and they grew there into glowing balls radiating comforting heat.
Slowly, I opened my hands and released the collected energy into an explosion of heat and light that knocked all of us down and sent the other children flying backwards. But they didn't get up, they lay, not dead but paused, on the ground. Yet the air around Nessarose and I was anything but paused; it spun and crackled and buzzed.
"Elphaba!" screamed Nessarose in terror. "Stop it!"
"I can't, I can't, it's not me, no, no!" I screamed, just as terrified. I had been pushed back to my feet and the air around Nessarose and I became a swirling vortex, filled with electricity, spinning outwards from me uncontrollably as I sobbed until I passed out.
After that, my father hired a woman to teach us at home and we didn't attend regular school again until Shiz.
My bursts of power became more frequent and when I grew angry I would run to my room and be found, later, passed out on the bed. By the time I was fifteen, though, I had learnt how not to pass out and how to stop the vortex from forming, but none of the rest of it.
My next vision came when I was fourteen. As a motherless girl in an old-fashioned home who had no ill-advised friends to whisper about the mysterious secrets of sex with, I had basically no idea about any of it, so when I dreamt about getting my period I thought it meant I was going to die. I, with the fatalism I had recently adopted (and just as quickly rejected), cleaned my room, made a will leaving everything but the diaries detailing my hatred for my father to Nessa (the diaries I left to Daddy Dearest), and reread my favorite book. Despite all my preparations, when I did find blood in my panties I screamed like a banshee and went running to find Nanny, who gave me a saucy, lurid explanation of sex that was at least clear, though horrifying to my inexperienced, serious, sensibilities, and sent me away with linens and the assurance that I wasn't dying, although I would be if I didn't get the hell out of the kitchen this second, Miss Elphaba.
A few months after that, I had my worst 'episode' ever. I guess maybe PMS had something to do with its intensity, for I nearly blew up the house in a huge fight with my father, and, when he threatened to have me locked up in an insane asylum as a menace to society, I lost control and nearly zapped him.
All this came surging up at me, drowning out the actual premonition that I, eighteen year old, unconscious, Elphaba, was having; of train rides and secrets and spells and monkeys with wings and attics and brooms that flew.
And, when I did wake fully, all that was solidly forgotten with one look into Fiyero's worried blue eyes, bringing me firmly back to this world.
