A/N: I'm sorry for the long delay…there's a terrible thing invading senior year. Actually, there are two: one is called the Justice Project, a 400 pt, 12 page paper, with 100 index cards of preparation required, one is called college applications, and a third, wonderful, but still time-invasive thing is called an editorship of the school literary magazine. I should be working on all of these, but is the first day of winter break, and so I shall not.
Disclaimer: Decidedly not mine.
Morrible called, unannounced, the next day. The corn exchange, which Elphaba could scarcely bear, was "intact;" she had spent the night scrubbing frantically at the blood spot on the floor, her hands heavily oiled and wrapped in a half-dozen towels, but burning slightly from the wet despite these precautions. But she couldn't sleep with the blood staring at her.
She had tended through the night, through her scrubbing, to Fiyero and Liir when they woke, and then she had returned to her pail of water, her towels and his blood.
The blood remained. She had thrown the wet towels over it, oiled her hands again, and slipped at last into bed beside Fiyero on the old mattress (Liir was beside them in a blanket lined drawer, pulled out and resting on the floor), and she fell asleep.
Morrible (horrors) was there when she woke, which Elphaba knew the woman had done purposefully, to seize control of the situation, and it might have worked; Elphaba in a shift with her hair loose and her hands bound up, Morrible elegantly composed, if with a hint of fishiness.
But here, with Fiyero, even if he was too weak and exhausted to have spoken much, Elphaba was Fae, and Fae, here, in a shift with her hair loose was not unkempt or ugly, but an avenging green angel with every advantage on her side, and despite everything she was lovely, and Morrible could, to her disgust, tell this.
"you'd be quite pretty if not for the green," Morrible said, smiling with shark's teeth. "A pity."
Not a lie; Elphaba was by no stretch of the imagination pretty. Beauty, though, was another thing altogether, one that did not require prettiness, and it was that to which Elphaba could lay claim, in her eye and hair color, in the cast of her face, the curve of her nose, the intense gleam of her skin now, as she glared at Morrible.
"you're a bitch," said Elphaba, because this was not Crage Hall and there were no ladies present. "you're a monster."
"you're naïve."
Elphaba laughed, a growl in her throat. "Why are you here?" she asked, pacing. She went over to boil water for tea, to busy her hands.
"I have another demand for you," Morrible said.
"Hah," said Elphaba dryly, "Not part of the deal."
Liir cried, and before Elphaba could fetch him, Morrible, moving with fishlike quickness, a silver snatch, had swooped in and snatched him.
"you're hardly in a position to be arguing," Morrible said.
"Fine," Elphaba said, controlling her itching aching fists, clenching them tight at her side. "Give him to me, I'll do it."
"Good," said Morrible, smiling evilly, and handed her Liir, but Elphaba thought she could detect a hint of relief in the knife-edged grin.
"What do you want?" Elphaba set the boy down with one of her Shiz textbooks, which he began first to hug and thump on the ground, and then, once Elphaba had opened it for him, to flip through it.
"you'll need a day job," Morrible said, "and I have one for you. Do you recall a dwarf who used to hang about at Shiz while you were there."
Elphaba laughed. "There were many 'dwarves' at Shiz, Madame. You may not realize this, but the province just below Gillikin is called Munchkinland, and-"
"I know, you stupid girl," Morrible said tightly. "This is a specific dwarf, not a Munchkin."
"you mean an achondroplasiac?" Elphaba asked. "I don't recall."
"He worked at the Philosophy Club," Morrible gritted out through clenched teeth, annoyed that the girl had forced her to acknowledge the existence, and her own knowledge, of such a disreputable venue.
Elphaba laughed again, maliciously. "I don't know about you, Madame Morrible, but I have never crossed the threshold of such a place," she said, and laughed again. "I wouldn't know what goes on inside." This with a perfectly innocent cast of face, so virginal and sweet that, but for the child at her feet and the man in her bed, as well as a certain glint in her hazel eyes, Morrible would have believed in the girl's pretended sexual naivete.
"Fine," Morrible spat at last. "He'll be in the Royal Mall's rose gardens tomorrow at noon. Be there. He'll recognize you by your skin, you'll recognize him of course by his height."
"Did you inform him of his distinguishing characteristic in that fashion as well?" Elphaba spat. "I'm sure he was as unaware as I of what makes everyone stare at him. I'm sure he, like me, has never seen a mirror."
"I'm glad to see motherhood has not dimmed your talent for sarcasm," Morrible said with equal vitriol.
"That's an old joke, Madame, you've used its inverse before," Elphaba said, but the worn memory of Morrible's public insult to the sheen of her skin years before, when she had been at her most vulnerable, less than a stumbling toddler taking her first awkward steps in the direction of resistance, still brought a dark bruising flush, with undertones of a lovely rose, to her thin cheeks. "Anyway," Elphaba said, willing the heat from her face quite convincingly, "I can't go tomorrow, Fiyero isn't well and I can't leave him alone, let alone with Liir. I'll go in a week."
"Fine," said Morrible, aware of the lengths to which the girl could be pushed, and knowing that the same illness of Fiyero's which allowed the girl to win this minor battle also meant that she could not run. "A week from today. Noon, in the rose gardens. I shall expect your first report from the resistance the day after that meeting, as well." And she swept out of the room, leaving Elphaba smiling for some unknown, unfathomable reason.