DISCLAIMER: The characters of Wicked that you recognise here are the property of Stephen Schwartz and the producers and creators of the show. I'm just borrowing them for my leisure.
AN. What's this, an update 2 days in a row? Well, the thing is that I'm currently in Perth visiting a friend. Tomorrow (Friday, our scheduled update day) I fly out at 8.30 am to go visit Kelly in Adelaide and don't land until the afternoon. Because I didn't want to get up super early to update before the airport, I'm posting this now (I'm seeing The Lion King tonight). Which means you still have to wait until my Sunday for ch 22 (sorry).
Chapter 21: Milestones
August 1936
Arora was ten months old at the end of her first summer. She was crawling, pulling herself up when standing next to the coffee table, and had four teeth. She made a lot of noise, but had no discernible words as of yet, although the whole family was prompting her.
Nessa was spending as much time with her niece as possible, she was due to leave for Shiz University in just a few days and was rather dreading it.
"What if when I come home for Lurlinemas, she doesn't remember me?" she asked Elphaba anxiously.
"Of course she'll remember you," Elphaba reassured her. "You're her favourite aunt!"
Nessa smiled slightly despite herself. "Fabala."
"Don't worry about it," Elphaba continued gently. "You just go to Shiz, and have a thrillifying time, ok?"
The two sisters were sitting out in the back garden as Arora crawled around on a blanket happily.
"I'm going to miss her first birthday," Nessa continued, clearly committed to being despondiary in this moment, despite the beautiful weather.
Elphaba sighed. "Nessa, she's going to be one. She has no idea what a birthday is. We can just wait and festivate properly when you're home for Lurlinemas."
"You can't move her birthday to December."
"We're not moving her birthday. We're just festivating at a later date. Nessa, you have to snap out of this. I know you'll miss Arora, and home, but you're about to start college. People would kill for that experience. I would kill for that experience."
Nessa looked to her sister, frowning slightly.
"Do you mean that?"
Elphaba sighed again. "No… yes… look, I love Arora more than anything or than I ever thought was humanly possible," she said, looking affectionately at her daughter.
"But, would I love to go to Shiz? Yes," she admitted. "That's the whole reason I ran away. And that's why, it's killing me that you don't seem to be looking forward to it at all."
Nessa looked downcast. "I am looking forward to it," she admitted as though she should be ashamed of it.
"But I'm also terrified. I've had you with me my whole life… except for those few months when you were away, of course," she acknowledged.
Elphaba supressed a smile. Nessa had taken to calling her running away as "going away" as though she'd been on vacation or something, and it always amused her.
"What if I can't cope alone?" Nessa asked her quietly. "What if I don't make any friends? I mean, I've never had many before, but I've always had you to talk to. My chair-"
She broke off as Elphaba swooped forward to grab Arora, who had crawled off her blanket and was about to insert a blade of grass into her mouth.
"Nessa, I've been telling you for years. If you don't think about your chair, no one else will either."
"Is that what happens with your skin?" Nessa demanded pointedly, surprising Elphaba.
"Ok, three things: A- where did that come from?; B- being in a wheelchair does not even come close to the same thing as being the only green person in Oz; and C- in a way… it kind of did happen that way."
"What do you mean?" Nessa frowned.
Elphaba bounced Arora gently on her lap as she answered. "You don't understand what the Emerald City's like, Nessie. Everything is green. I didn't stand out, I blended it. There was no one giving me odd looks or calling me names, and in a way, I was able to almost forget that I was… different. And I think that helped me feel better about myself, and I think that helped when I met Fiyero… to a point."
Nessa mused over her sister's words thoughtfully.
"Are you ever going to tell us what happened with him?" she asked, making faces at Arora to try and get her to smile.
Elphaba shrugged. "There's not much to say. The Emerald City was a bubble. When we left, the bubble popped and the reality is that I don't belong in his world."
"Do you wish he knew about Arora?"
"Yes," Elphaba murmured, so quietly Nessa almost missed it. "But at the same time, I think it would have killed me to have come back here if I'd told him and he still rejected me… us."
Elphaba gently ran a hand over her daughter's head.
"Despite all that, and despite Shiz… I don't regret her. I can't," she said honestly. "She's the best thing that's ever happened to me."
Nessa smiled. "To our family," she corrected.
Elphaba lifted Arora up and kissed her velvety cheek. "Isn't that right, Miss Rora Rose?" she cooed.
Arora babbled happily at her in return, offering her mother a drooling grin.
"Rora, can you say 'Momma'?" Nessa asked her niece. "Momma," she prodded gently.
Arora returned with a bunch of squeals and babbles, and then a singular clear "Momma."
Elphaba and Nessa both stilled, gaping at the little girl beaming back at them.
"You heard that too, right?" Elphaba asked her sister in a daze. "I wasn't imagining things?"
Nessa beamed at her excitedly. "No, she said it! She said 'Momma'!"
Elphaba held her daughter close, burying her nose in the brown curls that covered her head. She was tempted to burst into tears.
"We should go tell Father," Nessa said excitedly. "Can you help me back into my chair?"
Elphaba nodded wordlessly and handed Arora to her sister to hold.
Frex was just as excited as his daughters and the three of them spent most of the afternoon trying to coax Arora to repeat that and any other word they could think of, to no real success.
But on the morning that Frex and Nessa were setting off for Shiz a week later, while Elphaba stood in the driveway with Arora on her hip, Arora was happily saying 'Momma' on repeat to anyone who would listen.
"Alright, Nessa. Time to go," Frex said gently.
He was going to help Nessa settle into her dorm and to help ease her anxieties.
Nessa nodded nervously and looked to Elphaba.
"Ok, Rora Rose," Elphaba said brightly. "Give Aunt Nessa a big cuddle and kiss."
She handed Arora to Nessa, who hugged her tightly.
"Bye Rora," she said. "I'll see you at Lurlinemas. Be good for your Momma."
"Momma!" Arora repeated and Nessa smiled tearily.
Elphaba gently moved in before Nessa could start crying, handing Arora to Frex and bending down to hug her sister.
"Have fun," she said softly. "Write to us heaps. You're going to be fine, Nessie."
"I wish you were coming with me," Nessa replied in a choked voice.
Elphaba squeezed her tightly. "You'll just have to let me live vicariously through you, ok?"
Nessa nodded.
Frex and the driver helped her into the carriage and then stored her chair away.
"I'll be back as soon as I can," Frex told Elphaba before he climbed into the carriage.
Elphaba nodded, bouncing Arora on her hip. "We'll be fine. Take your time."
Colwen Grounds felt strangely empty without Nessarose there.
Her letters for the first few weeks were soaked with homesickness and nerves. She was sharing a compartment with the Headshizstress, a Madame Morrible; and although Frex was pleased the woman was doing all she could to ensure Nessa's comfort and help her, it made Elphaba furious.
"She's already worried about making friends," she said to Frex. "Sharing a room with the Headshizstress isn't going to help with that."
"She'll be fine, Elphaba," Frex said patiently.
Elphaba wasn't so sure.
By the time of Arora's first birthday at the end of October, Nessa seemed to be settling in. As a surprise, Frex wrote to Madame Morrible and arranged to have Nessa brought home for that weekend.
Between the travelling, it didn't give her much time at home, but they were able to have a small festivation on the Saturday afternoon, although Arora's actual birthday was the Monday. It was simple, but it was what Elphaba wanted.
"She has no idea what's going anyway," she'd reasoned.
That hadn't stopped Frex and Nessa from spoiling Arora rotten, however; but Elphaba didn't have it in her to complain.
When Elphaba had put Arora down for a nap and returned downstairs, she was surprised when Nessa handed her a small box.
"What's this?" she asked in confusion.
Nessa just smiled. "Open it," she urged gently.
Bewildered, Elphaba obeyed. She unwrapped the small box and opened the lid. Inside, there was a dainty silver ring. The band looked like leaves and in the centre was a small rose, with small chips of deep blue opal embedded in the petals.
Elphaba stared at the ring, and then looked to her sister and father in shock.
"Wh- what is this?" she asked them.
"Well," Nessa began to explain. "We thought you deserved something for the occasion."
"Isn't that what Mother's Day is for?" Elphaba asked, still a little unsure about what was going on.
Nessa looked at her sympathetically. "Fabala, you're a single mother and your daughter just turned one. This is just to say…"
She trailed off and looked up at Frex.
"Your sister and I are very proud of you," Frex finished quietly. "That's what this is for."
Elphaba felt a little overwhelmed. It felt as though she'd been waiting her whole life to hear her father say those words; and she'd never expected this would be the context they were delivered in.
"We picked a rose because of the Sleeping Beauty reference- you know, Briar Rose," Nessa explained. "Plus, there's 'Rora Rose' so it seemed to fit. The stones in the petals are chips of opal. It's the birthstone for October."
Elphaba studied the ring again carefully, and then met Nessa's gaze with a smile.
"Thank you," she said sincerely, bending down to hug her sister tightly.
She met her father's gaze as she straightened up and smiled faintly, and he nodded slightly in return.
Frex went to summon the housekeeper to get them all some tea, and Nessa and Elphaba seated themselves in the living room. Elphaba slowly took the ring out of its box and slid it onto the middle finger of her right hand.
She'd never been much of a jewellery person, and she'd only ever worn one other ring before- on a different finger on her other hand. She loved her gift and what it represented, but there was a knot in her stomach as she studied her hand.
"Fabala?" Nessa asked softly. "Are you ok?"
Elphaba looked up and smiled. "Yeah, I'm fine," she replied. "I'm just… thinking."
"This day last year?"
"Something like that," Elphaba murmured.
That night before she got into bed, hoping that Arora would also give her a gift and sleep past five am the next morning, Elphaba pulled a book from her nightstand- Arora's baby book.
She'd been diligent- although Nessa said "fanatical"- about filling in every possible detail over the past year. Every milestone, every word, any memory no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.
Elphaba tried to ignore the voice in her head that told her she was doing this for Fiyero's sake. She couldn't imagine any circumstances under which he'd ever know about his daughter; but she couldn't help herself from documenting every minute detail- anything that happened that made her conscience whisper "Fiyero should know about this."
Now, she jotted down all the details from Arora's first birthday carefully. All the gifts she had been given, the cake they'd had, and the word "ack" with a question mark that Frex had insisted was Arora saying "cake" but Elphaba wasn't entirely convinced.
Setting the book down on the bed, Elphaba studied her right hand again. Tentatively, she slid it off her finger and onto the empty ring finger of her left hand. It didn't really fit on that finger, but Elphaba held out her left hand and studied it nonetheless.
It had been a year and seven months and she still felt as though she was missing a part of herself. Elphaba wanted to know when she'd stop missing her engagement ring… missing Fiyero.
With a sigh, she put the baby book away, switched the rose ring back to her right hand and got into bed, turning off the light.
In a few hours, Arora would be awake and everything would start all over again. Life went on, and Elphaba would continue to record her daughter's life for the father who would never know her.