Fear
Rifiuto: Non Miriena
A/N: One more chapter....
Thanks to Hedwig466, lizziemagic, and ShortieJMW for reviewing the twentieth chapter.
Over the next few weeks and months, it became taboo to mention the girls. No one spoke their names, no one slept in the dorm Nessa and Glinda had shared, and for a while, no one slept in the dorm room Elphaba and Milla had lived in. Both dorms were left intact, after the suicides, as though in a museum. Eventually, the dorm Nessa and Glinda lived in, was was torn down.
Everyone said that the reason the dorm was being torn down was because no one wanted to use it due to its association with death, which was partially true, but it was also being torn down because the floors were literally crumbling under your feet. As for the dorm room where Elphaba and Milla had died, it stayed vacant for weeks, students refusing to live in a room tainted with death. Eventually, students would move in, but they would always move out quickly, claiming to hear voices and sounds, or finding objects missing, or hearing the shower going at midnight, and when they checked, it was off.
Everyone wondered what had caused four bright, beautiful, limitless girls to commit suicide. We've tried for years to put the pieces together. We tried to figure out their lives for two years, and then their deaths, after. The girls intrigued us, mystified us, and we worked for another year to try to understand the girls and who they'd been, before we graduated from Shiz.
It was two days before graduation, that we slipped into the dorm, bringing candles, snacks, pillows, pads and pens, in an attempt to converse with the girls that had eluded us until the end. Nothing happened, until around midnight. About that time, we wandered around the apartment, listening. Around twelve forty-five, Crope heard the shower go on, and when he checked, he discovered it was off. But on closer inspection, he found that the tub was tinted pink, and there were red dots on the floor near the outside of the tub- as though someone had slit their wrists in the bath, and the blood had dropped from the wounds to the floor, beading the floor in rubies.
"It sounded like the shower was running, and reminded me of the night the girls died. I thought for a moment that Elphaba was going to ask us to take the bags down to the car. When I checked, I noticed that the shower was off, but then I noticed that there was some sort of ring around the tub. A light pink ring around the tub- like the ring water leaves when it drains. I didn't think much of it, but when I turned to leave the bathroom, something on the floor caught my eye.
There were four, distinct, small, ruby red beads on the floor near the tub. At first, I thought they were actual beads or drops of paint, but they weren't. They were blood. Without even thinking, I grabbed a towel, got it wet, and rubbed wiped them away- but they came back right before my eyes not five minutes later. Everytime I wiped them away, they came back, stronger and darker than before. It was like Milla was in the bathtub, with her wrist hanging over the side, her blood dripping.
And then I heard the shower start, but it hadn't. It was off. When I wiped the spots off again, I set the cloth on the sink, and turned to go back into the room, when I heard the shower start, and then I heard the sound of someone getting into the tub, followed by the blood appearing not twenty minutes after. It was like she was climbing back into the tub, like she was reliving her death."
The other encounter happened to Fiyero, when he checked the closet. Recieving nothing from being in the room, he slipped into the closet, and caught sight of the outline of a figure hanging from the rod in the closet. A creaking could be heard, it sounded like a body swaying back and forth, and Fiyero saw the outlined figure swaying. It was an outline of a woman. A woman Fiyero knew instantly. Elphaba. Safe to say, it shook him up. Both Fiyero and Crope.
It wasn't until years later, when he was handling cases in the City, that he told us about the voice in the closet.
"I didn't want to stay in the room anymmore, so I decided to try the closet, to see if I could hear anything. It was creepy just being in the closet where she died. At first, I didn't hear anything, I just felt a cold chill all around me, like I'd stepped into a freezer. But after a while, I began to hear something; like something being kicked away- a chair or a stool or a box. I waited, and then.... after a few more minutes, it was like a creaking, like a body swinging back and forth on a rope, and then a tapping, like shoes- kind of like someone had hung themselves in the closet. And then I heard a voice.
"Fiyero.... I had to... I had to..."
And then I felt someone touch my shoulder. Just briefly, but still... soft, gentle, like Elphaba used to. And then I heard her voice. It was soft, pleading almost. Like she was begging me to understand."
We tried, we did, to understand. But in the end, we didn't understand, no matter how hard we tried. They were so majestic, so mysterious, so unattainable, that even in death, they evaded us, as though taunting us, like they had in life.