A/N: Aaaaargh! I'm back, and I have brought gifts! I'm not going to leave much of a preamble this time - I'd just like to thank everyone who's viewed, reviewed, favourited and followed. Feel free to supply critiques, especially of those terrible typos that creep up on me at four in the morning.
Without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!
Disclaimer: Wicked is still not mine.
"Dorothy, can you hear me? Dorothy? Goddammit, she's going into shock…"
"What's happening to her?"
Kiln paused, tendril-tipped hands sweeping over Dorothy's convulsing face as he struggled to magically staunch the blood pouring from her nose and ears. "I'm not sure," he muttered. "Best guess is she's suffering Psychic Rejection Syndrome – the symptoms match, but I'll be damned if I know why she's ended up with it."
"Rejection Syndrome?" Vara echoed, horror-struck. "But she hasn't been exposed to the memory haze!"
"I know."
"She hasn't even been anywhere near Unbridled Radiance!"
"I know! Vara, hold her legs before she hurts herself. Glinda, get my kit out of the bag – it's on the other side of the room. Elphaba, if you've any experience in magically staunching bloodflow, now would be an excellent time to make use of it; I've got to keep this girl's organs from failing until I can get some fresh blood into her. Arkady, hold Dorothy's shoulders down, she's starting to spasm. Uh… Fiyero, could you hold that dog? I'd rather not deal with hysterical terriers at a time like this."
"But what are we supposed to do?" Boq asked, indicating Gerhardt, Gaunt and himself.
"Keep an eye on those dolls!" Elphaba advised. "And make sure they don't try anything while we're operating."
Boq sighed in frustration and turned back to the ruins of the Hellion's bedchamber, where several hundred silent dolls were still standing motionless around their mistress's corpse. If any of them had realized that the Hellion was dead, they weren't showing any sign of it, and any of them were planning on taking some kind of revenge on her killers, they certainly didn't seem in the mood for it just yet – and just as well, because between injuries, lost ammo, damaged weapons and Dorothy's medical emergency, none of the rescue team was ready for a fight at the moment.
As Elphaba began the slow, awkward process of sealing as many of the ruptured blood vessels as she could find and Kiln hurriedly augmented Dorothy's failing organs with enchantments, Glinda hurried over with Kiln's emergency kit, helpfully opening it so the mage-surgeon could access the tools he needed.
"Is anyone going to explain what Psychic Rejection Syndrome actually is?" she asked.
"It's a physiological response to the mind receiving information it isn't equipped to deal with," Kiln explained. By now, his voice was at its most monotonous, a sure sign that he was reciting information by rote while the majority of his attention remained focussed on Dorothy. "As the shock radiates outwards along the nervous system, the body reacts as if physically assaulted; the brain experiences concussion-like effects, the veins rupture and haemorrhage at incredible rates, the heartrate swings out of control, the circulatory system goes into shock, the organs fail… in other words, if I can't keep her stable until this passes, Dorothy is going to die."
A deathly silence blossomed across the cavern as the team slowly digested this. Meanwhile, Kiln's face knotted with concentration as he began working some new and dramatic form of magic, and his body began to shift inside his coat: two additional arms slowly oozed out of his chest and began edging out from under his shirt; though translucent and almost foetal in appearance, they were nonetheless strong enough to draw several coppery-scented pouches from the kit and begin connecting them to Dorothy's newly-sealed veins. As they did so, Kiln's main arms traced arcane signs across the unconscious child's face, then dove beneath her skin as if it was water, snakelike fingers sliding under the flesh of her scalp and worming into her skull.
Perhaps ten minutes went by as Kiln went about surveying Dorothy's brain and nervous system, patching up what he could along the way. Eventually, the silence grew too much even for him:
"Funny thing," he remarked, as he moved on to Dorothy's spine. "Normally, this only happens when a child's been under the influence of a latent variant on the memory haze and someone tries to undo it by revealing the truth to them – the Empress's nasty little safeguard, you see… but as far as I can tell, Dorothy hasn't even been touched by it."
"Then what could have done this?" Elphaba demanded.
"My only prognosis is that she's had some kind of immensely complex information forced into her memory and her mind couldn't take the strain. Whatever it was, it must have been vast, contradictory, layered with magical knowledge and possibly even eldritch in nature. Other than that, I'm in the dark. Now, please keep those veins patched and make she doesn't tear anything else; the last thing we need right now is any more internal bleeding."
It took almost an hour for Kiln and Elphaba to repair the ongoing damage to Dorothy's body, and nearly double that before her condition actually stabilized. Only then did the convulsions that had shook the little girl so violently grind to a halt, and allow her to rest – though Kiln was careful to give her a sedative just in case the impact to her nervous system hadn't been completely purged.
"What do we do now?" Elphaba whispered.
"We wait."
"That's it?"
"That's all we can do at present: Dorothy's stable for now, but that doesn't mean she's out of the woods yet, not by a long shot. She's in a recovery phase at present, and any sudden movements could destabilize her condition all over again."
Elphaba groaned. "In other words, we're stuck here for the foreseeable future – in the middle of No-Man's Land, with no way of signalling for help as long as this place is still warded, and a few hundred dolls between us and any reinforcements who might show up."
"Until Dorothy awakens, yes." Kiln's already-glum face turned grave. "If she awakens," he added.
"What do you mean?"
"Individuals who've suffered Psychic Rejection Syndrome rarely walk away unscathed even if they're lucky enough to survive the initial symptoms. Remember, this is the result of the mind absorbing knowledge too powerful to process, and as the psychic damage translates into physiological damage, the brain itself suffers as well: we could be looking at amnesia, radical personality shifts, emotional regression, permanent loss of brain function, coma, clinical brain death… there's no way to predict what might happen." He shook his head. "Dorothy may never wake up at all, Elphaba."
"But she could survive this unharmed," said Glinda, ever the voice of optimism. "You said it's rare, but it's not impossible, right?"
"True," Kiln conceded. "But at the moment, the odds aren't looking good: for all intents and purposes, Dorothy's future is now dependent on a coin toss. If it lands on heads, she suffers permanent coma and dies without life support; if it lands on tails, she remains alive and consciousness, but with her mind irrevocably changed – something even I'd be hard-pressed to repair. Right now, we're praying for the coin to land on its edge."
"And this is the sort of thing that can happen to kids?" Fiyero asked, scarcely able to hide his disbelief.
"Why do you think we've stopped trying to teach the specifics of pre-memory haze history in schools?" said Vara bitterly. "This is what Unbridled Radiance does: massacres and midnight kidnappings on the front lines, dead children and grieving parents on the home front."
Kiln coughed for attention. "As I've said, this isn't due to the memory haze. We'll figure out what it is once the recovery period is over and we've ascertained the extent of the brain damage… assuming those dolls haven't killed us first."
He took a deep breath, and began gently cleaning the few remaining streaks of greasepaint off Dorothy's face. "For the time being, we'd best get comfortable: this is going to be a very long night..."
Dorothy wasn't sure what was happening: perhaps this was a nightmare, or something like it. Or perhaps everything up until now had been a dream, and this was the awful reality – she didn't know: her memories of the past were hazy and inconsistent at best, and growing hazier by the second.
Whatever the case, she'd found herself alone, adrift upon an ocean in a storm.
She was clinging to a raft of crudely-bound planks kept afloat on a sea as infinite as the sky, without a trace of land in sight; there was barely enough room to lie atop the hastily-gathered jetsam, and Dorothy was certain that was oozing from the gaps between the planks, the pressure slowly driving them apart, but the skies were so dark with stormclouds and her body so numb with the cold that it was impossible to tell.
All around her, waters as black and fathomless as ink churned and roiled, sculpted into vast waves by the furious wind, lashing at her face with ice-cold talons. She had no idea how she'd found herself here, or what she could have done to find herself a castaway upon this merciless ocean: all she knew was that she was drowning – slowly but surely, even as she kept her head above water.
Every now and again, a wave would crash down upon her, submerging the raft and leaving her struggling helplessly in the lightless depths, her lungs ablaze as she tried to claw her way back to the surface. And every time she struggled back onto her raft, she'd always find herself a little more drained by the experience, her strength flagging a little further: sooner or later, she'd be plunged into the water one last time, and she wouldn't have the energy to surface. She would sink into the darkness and drown there, lost forever.
For some reason, however, she had the feeling that this had happened before: the raft, the shadowy sky, the wide and unfathomable ocean… it all seemed so familiar, but she couldn't say precisely why. The only certainty was that her raft had been a chicken coop the last time around, though how she knew this was beyond her.
But that wasn't the strangest thing about the situation: no, the strangest thing of all was that every time she went under, her memories became a little more distorted. There was no confusing who she was: she knew her name was Dorothy Gale, she knew that she'd been born in America, she knew that her true home was in Kansas with her Aunt and Uncle, and she knew she'd been cast into another world at some point… but after that, it very suddenly stopped making sense.
She was nine years old, and yet she was fifty.
She had two arms and two legs, yet she had six arms and no need for legs at all.
She'd never cast a single spell, and she'd been a creature of magic for most of her life.
Her family was alive back in Kansas, but they were dead as the rest of the state.
She'd last seen Aunt Em and Uncle Henry perhaps a few months ago, but she hadn't seen them in decades.
She had friends who loved her, and yet she'd been alone for forty years with only her dolls for company.
She wanted to return home, yet she knew that her home was long gone and only another doll would fill that terrible sense of emptiness.
She was only Dorothy Gale… but something told her she was also the Hellion.
And the more she thought about it, the more she realized that she couldn't tell which of the two sets of memories were true. And every time the pitch-black waves crashed down on her, a little more of her certainty trickled away into nothingness: she was losing herself, her grasp of what she was and who she'd been eroding away with every moment she was plunged beneath the ocean.
A colossal swell briefly loosened her grip on the raft, and she would have slid back down into the freezing, lightless depths if she hadn't reached out at the last minute and grabbed the edge of the last plank. But as she hauled herself back aboard, she saw that the skin on her arm had turned transparent, exposing bare muscles to the sky.
Bewildered, she blinked in confusion, hoping that this vision would pass if she could only concentrate on the present, but when she looked again, her newly-skinless arm was still there… and growing longer and broader as she watched. This was the Hellion's arm now manifesting, the features of a Dorothy Gale who'd lost everything and vowed to take everything in return; surely she couldn't be that version of Dorothy, not when she still remembered Oz when it was still whole, not when she remembered Elphaba and Glinda as she'd first met them.
But once again, all certainties were being swept away by the storm.
And then, as her body warped and changed, the raft groaned in protest, and its timbers began to split – until at last it broke apart, sending Dorothy plunging into the oily darkness below.
Kicking furiously with legs that felt more like arms with every passing second, Dorothy struggled to stay afloat, pounded by wave after wave of freezing water. In desperation, she reached out for what little remained of the raft, hoping against hope that part of it could stay afloat… but the waterlogged planks disintegrated at her touch, leaving her threshing the water with four skinless arms.
She cried for help, not even caring that her voice was now warping and shifting beyond recognition. But of course, there was no-one there to help. Bit by bit, her strength was flagging, her arms growing weaker and weaker as the waters clung jealously to her misshapen body – until at last they began dragging her under.
Dorothy opened her mouth to scream, but a torrent of water flowed in, silencing her.
And thus in silence, she plunged into darkness.
Eight long hours went by.
Boq remained on guard duty at the front of the group, watching closely for any signs that the dolls might be stirring from their vigil. Occasionally, Arkady, Gerhardt, Gaunt, and Vara would join him on watch, but Boq was the only one of them who never budged from his post, having no need to eat, sleep or attend to any of the other bodily functions that forced the others to work in shifts.
Kiln maintained a close watch over his patient, occasionally checking her pulse, breath, blood pressure, pupil reactions, and other vital signs. Every now and again, he would draw a mysterious-looking instrument from his equipment bag and sweep it across her face, humming anxiously to himself as he assessed its readings. More often than not, he would mutter worrying little clichés: "uh-oh," "that shouldn't have happened," "that can't be right," and worst of all, "this is impossible."
Toto sat by Dorothy's side, head to the ground and mournfully silent.
As for Elphaba, she was left sitting about two feet away from Dorothy's bedside with Glinda and Fiyero flanking her, both of them doing their best to bolster her spirits – without much success. All she could do was stare down at the motionless body, trying not to think of all the horrible things that might happen to her in the next few hours. Apart from Kiln's muttering, the caverns had been almost complexly silent, but she could already tell that at least half the team was gearing up to give her the "it's not your fault" spiel, and frankly, Elphaba didn't want to hear a word of it.
She was too busy trying to figure out how they'd gotten this far, perhaps for want of anything else to do. Looking back, it was almost impossible to imagine that either of them could have ended up in this predicament: for the longest time, Elphaba had been convinced that they'd never been more than enemies; then they'd been unwilling comrades thrown together and forced to rely on each other – for the sake of Dorothy's safety and the sake of Elphaba's sanity. Eventually, Dorothy had learned to trust her, and Elphaba had learned to tolerate her… but what had been the point where her attitude to her had truly softened? Had it been the point when they'd lived together under the same roof? Had it been when the two of them had been kept in Kiln's apartment on medical leave, when Dorothy – on the brink of nervous collapse – had cried and hugged her? Or had it been the point when Elphaba, high on victory and drunk with festivity, had told her all about her school days with Fiyero, all previous reservations forgotten?
Not enough to truly consider her a friend, though, said a nasty little voice in the back of her mind. A true friend would have flat-out told her she'd been forgiven for everything that had happened in Oz long ago. A true friend would have apologised for hating her for something that wasn't her fault. But you just couldn't bring yourself to bury the hatchet and swallow the hurt until she was already gearing up to hand herself over the Hellion, could you?
But look on the bright side, Elphie: this is a new achievement for you, a new milestone reached in your long history of failures and calamities, isn't it? Yes, this is the first time you've managed to get a child killed as a result of your inadequacies!
Elphaba sighed and cursed herself for not recognizing just how serious Dorothy been when she had asked to be handed over to the Hellion. If only she'd taken her resolve a little more seriously that day, if only she'd understood just how much the girl had been willing to sacrifice to save those she cared about, then maybe she wouldn't have ended up like this. Time and again, Elphaba had made the same mistake, thinking that people simply wouldn't make the same kind of sacrifices she would: even after they'd fallen in love, she hadn't realized Fiyero would throw himself into the line of fire to save her; she hadn't realized that Glinda would secretly join her on the front lines, endangering her own life to protect her; and she hadn't realized that Dorothy would give up everything to save her – and yet, she'd done it.
Twice.
And now, because of Elphaba's failure to understand the little girl, because she'd been too proud and too cynical to imagine anyone else as a hero, Dorothy was gone… perhaps forever.
She was dimly aware of Glinda holding her hand, of Fiyero's comforting arm slung over her shoulders. It didn't help much, but if nothing else, she was grateful for the company: being alone at a time like this, in the gloom and wreckage of the Hellion's lair, would have been every bit as miserable as Kiamo Ko in the wake of Fiyero's "death."
Eventually, though, the silence briefly overwhelmed Glinda's composure; she'd always been an extrovert, and her inability to express comfort or concern in the mournful hush that had descended on the cavern was no doubt driving her up the wall.
"So… in this world, she was the Hellion?" she asked. "I mean, this world's version of her?"
Elphaba nodded.
"How's that even possible? I mean… how could she have ended up looking like… that?" She pointed in the general direction of the Hellion's corpse. "How'd she learn to use magic? And why didn't she remember being Dorothy Gale?"
"You're asking the wrong person," Elphaba sighed. "If anyone knows the truth, it'd be Dorothy… and right now, we still don't know if she's ever going to wake up."
Almost in perfect unison, Glinda and Fiyero opened their mouths, doubtlessly ready with the prepared "it wasn't your fault" reassurance, but Elphaba held up her hands for silence. "Not now, please," she groaned. "I'm tired, I'm sitting on more bruises than I know what to do with, we're stuck in the single most depressing locale we've visited so far, we could die at any minute, and we're currently holding a vigil over a comatose child. I appreciate the effort, but there's a limit on what you can do to make me feel better under the circumstances."
Fiyero closed his mouth and lapsed back into respectful silence. Glinda, however, was still deathly allergic to long-term periods of silence – a fact Elphaba was secretly very thankful for: "There's one other thing that still doesn't make sense to me: how did Dorothy's house get here in this universe? I mean, it couldn't have been Madame Morrible's tornado this time, obviously, but what could it have been?"
Dr Kiln looked up from his inspection, absently muttered something that sounded a bit like "Slamming Door," then retreated back into his work.
And then, just as Elphaba was getting ready to subject the good doctor to another round of searching questions, Dorothy let out a sharp intake of breath, loud enough to be heard on the other side of the chamber. On instinct, Elphaba scooted closer to her side, ready to render whatever help she could long before Kiln gave the order: she was expecting a burgeoning medical disaster in the making; she was expecting blood, pain and horror; at the very least, she was expecting something she could at least try to resolve.
What she wasn't expecting was for Dorothy to suddenly reach out and grab her by the wrist. Elphaba tried to struggle free, but for some reason, the nine-year-old girl now had a grip roughly comparable to a pneumatic vice and could not be budged no matter how Elphaba tried to loosen her fingers.
And then Dorothy's eyes shot open: behind the closed lids, all that could be seen was oily blackness, as if the pupils had dilated to cover both iris and sclera. Not a trace of light or colour visible was visible anywhere – except at the very centre of each eye, where a tiny mote of gold sat, gleaming in the dark.
Struggling wildly to haul herself upright even as Kiln and Vara tried to press her back down, the little girl looked up at the horror-stricken faces above her… and as she did so, the motes of gold swelled into luminous yellow discs, expanding to cover everything from pupils to eyelashes – until at last, Elphaba found herself staring into the sickly lamp-like eyes of the Hellion.
"My dolls," Dorothy croaked, her voice distorted and alien. "Where are my dolls? I have to find my dolls… I don't want to be alone anymore, I… I need to… I want… I…"
Then, she slumped back to the ground, collapsing against her makeshift pillow in exhaustion. "Aunt Em?" she asked nobody in particular. "Are you there? Are you alive or are you dead? I… I can't tell anymore."
The golden motes contracted once more, leaving her eyes almost normal again; then without another word, she lapsed back into unconsciousness.
"…what the hell was that?" Glinda demanded.
"I…" Kiln's mouth flapped helplessly in confusion; for the first time in a long while, the mage-surgeon was left completely at a loss. "I… have no idea," he said at last. "I mean… there's a hypothesis based on what I've seen so far, but… shit, I really have no idea."
"Well, feel free to share."
"I'd rather not until I've had a chance to study this under strict laboratory conditions, and that's on hold until we've all gotten out of here alive. I don't know if this is dimensional synch or telepathic invasion or some combination of the two, but I know for a fact that it can't mean anything good for us. For now…" He took a deep breath. "All we can do is keep a very close eye on Dorothy and hope that the physical transformation we just witnessed was a fluke occurrence."
"What if it isn't?" asked Fiyero.
"Then we may have a secondary threat in the cavern with us, and the previously rudderless dolls might just be under active guidance again. Given the events of the last few hours, both of them will probably be in an extremely bad mood." Kiln paused, and mopped a small lake's worth of sweat from his brow.
"In which case," he concluded, "we're fucked."
There was an awkward silence, as everyone looked from the unconscious Dorothy to the dolls still gathered around the Hellion's corpse. Then, all eyes turned in Elphaba's direction, perhaps hoping for some kind of response from their de-facto leader. This time, though, she had nothing to say. By now, Dorothy's grip on her arm had loosened, but Elphaba remained seated by her bedside, holding her hand.
And as the night rumbled onwards and fatigue set in, that was where she stayed – until at last, with Glinda by her side and Fiyero offering his services as a pillow, she finally drifted off into a troubled, uneasy sleep.
By that point, she hadn't had any dream pills for a while, so no memories disturbed her rest – at least, not in the lucid, easily-decipherable fashion that only the pills and magic could manage. Instead, she dreamed a haze of bewildering metaphors, nonsensical pageantry and half-assimilated details from the memories slowly pouring into her brain from the synch. Perhaps it was no surprise then that, looking back on those hazy dreams when she finally awoke, the most she could remember was the experience of holding a child in her arms – a baby girl with skin as green as hers and eyes that glowed with magic – and a sense of sorrow beyond all imagining.
Then, from somewhere overhead, a familiar voice whispering, "Tell me, Empress, can you bear to look upon your darling girls, knowing that the past you tried so hard to destroy now lives on in them? Can you kill them as casually as you kill the other incurable cases in your care?"
And all the rest was sleep and nothing more.
It was the warmth that roused her from drowning – the sense of a warm hand holding hers, slowly drawing her back towards the surface.
Then, something slammed into Dorothy at high speed, a sharp crag of rock digging painfully into her shoulder. Suddenly fully conscious again, she let out a scream of surprise, but only bubbles emerged; she was still underwater… but now the waves had brought her crashing against a huge mass of rough stone jutting out of the ocean.
Realizing that this might be a chance at finding dry land, Dorothy clawed her way up the length of the rock in a desperate race to outrun the burning in her lungs. It wasn't easy, but now her body no longer rebelled with every move, and after several seconds of scrabbling, her head finally breached the surface, allowing her several deep, wheezing gasps of air as she slowly and painfully hauled herself up onto the rock.
The ascent was slow, often interrupted by her hands slipping across the rain-drenched stone and sending her splashing back down into the water, but eventually she was able to clamber up onto the top of the crag and sit perhaps three feet above the wave. She was dripping wet, almost numb from the cold, covered in bumps, bruises and cuts from her climb, and she still had no idea where she was or even what she was…
…but somehow, she was alive.
A flash of lightning lit up the ocean around her, and Dorothy saw that the world ahead of her wasn't ocean at all, but causeway – a wide mass of rocks stretching across the turbulent ocean, just high enough to stand above the waves. And just beyond the causeway, in the distance, the first inklings of land lay on the horizon: a shadowed beach, and beyond, the lights of a village.
Trembling, Dorothy began clambering across the causeway. All around her, the storm raged, the waves crashed down upon the rocks, lightning split the air and the wind howled with all its might, but none of it seemed to touch her. Thoughts of lost identity no longer disturbed her, nor did her occasionally transparent skin and new limbs. Nothing could slow her course, not even the moment when a flash of lightning lit up the world and gave her an unhindered view of the ice-cold blue eyes staring down at her from the pitch-black sky.
She simply carried onwards.
Above her, a voice from the eyes in the darkness rumbled like thunder.
"That's the Dorothy Gale I remember," it chuckled. "Perhaps my observation of this realm wasn't as futile as I suspected… but I suppose we'll have to wait and see. Give Elphaba my warmest regards when you awaken; perhaps she will be the one to release me…"
Dorothy ignored the voice: she had more important things to focus on – the light in the distance, the path ahead, the knowledge that Kansas was still whole, but most importantly, the warm hand guiding her onwards.
She still didn't know whether she was Dorothy or the Hellion.
But perhaps she didn't have to be one or the other.
Perhaps she could be both.
As she finally slipped free of the dream and crept back into consciousness, Dorothy's eyes opened on a world almost as dark as the ocean she'd just escaped from, and realized she must be still in the Hellion's lair.
Or was that her lair? Or-
Dorothy took a deep breath, steadying herself against the wave of contrasts that threatened to overwhelm her again. All at once, she saw things through the eyes of a nine-year-old and the eyes of the Hellion, she whose gaze stretched beyond worlds; her memory had only a few bookcases of newspaper clippings, fairy tales, cheap textbooks and rumours committed to it, but she also remembered entire libraries of spellbooks; she knew only how to speak through words and sentences, but she also knew that she stood at the hub of a vast and impossibly intricate web of magical connections that could carry her silent whispers for miles on end.
Already, she knew she had inherited a great deal of knowledge from the Hellion, but it was still difficult to sort through it all without being washed away like a half-collapsed sandcastle at high tide. Struggling against it didn't help, as she quickly learned; only by learning to flow with the memories and follow the current was she able to prevent herself from losing composure. She visualized her mind as the waterwheel of a mill, allowing the information to wash gently through her mind without accessing too much of it at once; gradually, the disorientation ebbed, and she could focus on the world around her again as she slowly acclimatized to her new state of mind.
She was dimly aware of a familiar warmth encircling her left hand – the same comforting grip that had saved her from the ocean in her nightmare, from the flood of memories that had nearly consumed her. Blinking in confusion, Dorothy looked to her left and saw that Elphaba was slumped next to her, fast asleep, her head on the Scarecrow's shoulder… but even amidst the tangle, it was impossible to mistake the fact that she was still clutching Dorothy's hand.
Wait, how do I know that? There's no campfire here and all the candles have gone out. How can I see in the dark?
Oh. Stupid question.
In spite of herself, Dorothy smiled. She'd no idea how long she'd been asleep, but it felt like years since she'd last seen the green girl's face… and probably even longer since she'd seen Elphaba's face look so peaceful. She wanted to hug her, to thank her for saving her from death in dreams, for awakening her from the stupor and reminding her of who she really was – but as much as she dearly wanted to, she couldn't bring herself to rouse Elphaba from her sleep, not after all the hardship she'd endured to get this far.
So, gently slipping her hand free of Elphaba's grasp, she got to her feet-
-and very nearly collapsed. She only just stopped herself from pitching backwards by hastily propping herself up against a nearby stone wall, nearly waking up Elphaba in the process. It took several false starts before she was able to stand upright on her own: whatever had happened to her, it had left her legs as rubbery as a newborn foal's and about half as coordinated – and the fact that she was still grappling with thoughts that told her she had no legs at all didn't help.
By the time she was balanced enough to start walking, though, the Scarecrow had noticed she was up and about, and was staring at her with something not unlike astonishment. He opened his mouth to speak, but Dorothy shushed him almost immediately, silently indicating that he shouldn't wake the witch now asleep on his shoulder… or the other one currently dozing on his legs.
As Fiyero silently gibbered in confusion, Dorothy assessed the ruined bedchamber: almost everyone who'd arrived to rescue her was asleep by now, except of course for the Scarecrow and the Tin Man. Even Dr Kiln was slumped over his instruments. And not too far away, the dolls stood in their hundreds, gathered around the tangled pile of limbs that had once been the Hellion.
My body – no, the Hellion's body – no, wait-
Dorothy shuddered, and struggled to reorient herself as a headache briefly erupted behind her eyes. The contrast wasn't quite as merciless as it had been the first time, thankfully, but it was still a struggle to deal with until she could focus on calmly channelling the memories instead of trying to force them to cooperate.
And there was so much of the Hellion's mind that was still beyond her grasp: she knew she had a vast mental library of spells and magical techniques, but she couldn't reach it or use it just yet; the knowledge was still too much for her conscious mind to handle. It didn't help that she was technically trying to study all of the library at once, so perhaps the key was to begin at the beginning with the simplest of spells the Hellion had mastered, but that in itself required her to sort through more of her counterpart's memories than Dorothy could manage. Perhaps Elphaba could help her put the information to use. Dorothy almost laughed at this, imagining herself as Elphaba's apprentice, wearing a hat like hers and soaring across the sky on a broomstick; it was ridiculous to imagine, but strangely compelling all the same.
Nor was the Hellion's sight any easier to deal with: there were many levels to how the Hellion had seen the world, and so far, Dorothy was only able to access the simplest of them. So far, she could see in the dark and catch a few snippets of detail written on the fabric of reality, but she couldn't read the stories or see the hidden meanings, not even in the Hellion's disjointed way. Looking at the Tin Man, she could actually see him as the Munchkin he'd once been, and as Dr Kiln, but trying to see any further than that only made her eyes burn. Perhaps, if she focussed on harnessing the memories, she could perceive more than that in time.
But there was one thing she could immediately sense all around her: the Hellion's cobweb of connections. She could feel the army of dolls around her now, sense them brimming overhead in their hundreds, in their thousands. The Hellion had been collecting for a very long time, and there were dolls that still slumbered in chambers as yet unseen, all waiting for the word to rise and fight for their mother.
But they never would. The Hellion was dead now… and her dolls had been left alone in the world.
Unbidden, the sound of the knife slamming home echoed across Dorothy's mind, followed by the agonized scream as the blade tore through the Hellion's body. Dorothy shuddered, realizing in dawning horror that if she ever did unlock the full range of the Hellion's memories, she would have to recall that awful, awful moment again – only this time from the victim's perspective.
Ahead of her, the dolls still stared down in confusion at the body, waiting patiently for their mother to rise again and give her orders. She could hear them chittering to each other along the cobweb, silently murmuring to each other in voices even younger than her own: they couldn't comprehend that the Hellion was dead – the idea simply couldn't enter their minds. Like small children, the notion that their beloved mother might leave them had never occurred to them, and despite having been terrified of the dolls and all they represented, Dorothy couldn't suppress a surge of pity.
When will she awake? They asked one another. When will she be with us again? Why isn't she moving? Have we done something wrong? Is she angry with us? Doesn't she want us anymore? How can we make things right?
Something in the back of Dorothy's head cried out in grief; in that moment, she wanted nothing more than to cradle the dolls to her and tell them that she could never be angry with any of them – her own sympathy briefly merging with the Hellion's own twisted affection. In the end, though, a more sensible part of her mind spoke above the din of confusion: she didn't know if the dolls might turn hostile if anyone tried to leave the cavern, or if they would remain in their vigil forever; all she knew was that the dolls needed help.
Her knowledge of magic was instinctive at best, but she knew her limited powers would not be enough to reverse the transformations the Hellion had forced on them, nor could she undo the damage to their minds. No, she could not give them their lives back… but if nothing else, she could give their lives a purpose again and ensure that they would not be alone.
Taking a deep breath, she allowed the memories to wash over her once again as she began striding unsteadily towards the crowd of dolls. She vaguely registered the Tin Man muttering a swearword and hurrying over to stop her, but by that point, she was too far away to reach without getting the attention of the doll army, and she heard him skidding to a halt behind her.
She was dimly aware that the others were beginning to awake, that Elphaba was lurching upright and struggling towards her, though Kiln and Glinda were already moving to hold her back. Dorothy wasn't sure how she knew this given that she hadn't turned around yet, but the cobweb seemed to be telling her a lot more than she could process consciously.
Then she stepped up to the heart of the doll army; as one, they turned to focus on her, the cobweb registering a surge of suspicion and distrust; for a moment, Dorothy's fragile confidence briefly wavered.
Could she actually do what she was about to do? Did she have it in her to take this final step? Did she have the strength to do this, after all the times she'd come close to screwing up, breaking down or giving in to the very worst in her? After all the times she'd nearly succumbed to cowardice, to despair, to madness and so much worse than that, perhaps it wasn't possible. Wracking her brain, Dorothy retraced her steps along the journey so far, trying to find some shred of worthiness within herself.
She'd started out as a farm girl, innocent and carefree, unaware of the world beyond Kansas.
Then she'd been the girl who'd fallen from the sky, always confused, always befuddled, and always dependent on the friends she'd made along the way.
She'd been the Wizard's pawn, unwitting poster child for the witch-hunters, obediently following instructions without imagining that someone might be using her for their own ends.
She'd been Elphaba's companion, cast into another world and left in the care of the woman she'd feared for so long – until at last she'd seen what the Wizard hadn't wanted her to see.
She'd been the Hellion's prey, marked for capture and tormented from afar.
She'd been the kid who'd gone slightly mad and attacked a doll with the leg of a training dummy.
She'd been the girl consumed by fear, the spider-bitten child who'd stolen dream-pills and hidden in vents for fear that someone might give her to the Hellion.
She'd been a friend to those she thought she would never understand.
She'd been a willing sacrifice.
She'd been a doll.
And now here she was, something else entirely: not quite a monster, not quite the girl she'd been.
But looking back on her story so far, Dorothy realized that against expectations, despite all the mistakes she'd made and all the opportunities she'd had to cross the line into the unforgiveable, despite the fact that she was now holding an entire lifetime of someone else's memories inside her skull, she was still herself.
She hadn't become cruel or uncaring; she hadn't sacrificed anyone to save her own life; she hadn't been consumed by madness; she hadn't forgotten who she was or where she'd come from. And when she returned to Kansas – when, not if – she knew she could still look Aunt Em in the eye and say that she'd done the right thing.
She still had hope: hope that she could see home again; that Elphaba and her friends would survive the war; that the Deviant Nations would win; that Elphaba would have the chance to make the Oz she knew into something better.
And now she knew that, in time, Dorothy might be able to help make that happen.
She looked up at the dolls that now surround her, and offered them a smile as she reached out to them along the cobweb, touching their minds with trembling, unsteady fingers.
As one, the dolls cocked their heads in confusion. She knew that they hadn't been expecting the familiar sensation to come from her, but they'd been conditioned to respond to the Hellion's psychic signature just as readily as they would to her face and her voice: there was only one living being who could whisper orders to them along the cobweb, only one thing in this world that could speak to them so kindly and so gently.
"Mother?"
Dorothy nodded.
She was dimly aware that there were tears gathering in her eyes, and she couldn't tell if they were hers or the Hellion's, but right then, she couldn't care less. All that mattered were the dolls.
Along the cobweb, the confused mutterings gave way to shrieks and sobs of relief. As one, they crowded around her, hugging her furiously and rubbing their heads against her like kittens, their keening voices almost incomprehensible with emotion.
"We thought you wouldn't wake up," said one.
"We thought you were gone," said another.
"We thought we were lost."
"We thought we'd made you angry."
"We thought we'd done something wrong."
Dorothy shook her head. "Oh my sweet dolls," she sighed, sounding more like the Hellion than anything human. "I could never be angry with you. And you know I'll always be here for you, forever and forever and forever."
"But why are you so small now? Why aren't you as big as you used to be? Why is the old you still lying there?"
"Everything changes sooner or later, sweet little doll, even me. I might look different, but I'll always be with you. I'll tell you what: let's take my old body outside and bury it, see it off as kindly and sweetly as you please, and then seed the earth with crimson petals until all of No-Man's Land is ruby-red!"
The dolls cheered, but a few were still staring at the little knot of figures at the back of the cavern. "What about the intruders?" some whispered.
"They're our friends now," said Dorothy. "The Deviant Nations are our friends. We've got a new war to plan, my dolls: the Empress has played with us for too long, had too much fun baiting us to fight the Deviant Nations, and it's time we let them know it's not nice to play games with someone else's toys. To war, my dolls! To war!'
And as one, the dolls exalted, hundreds upon hundreds of childlike voices raised in joy.
Elphaba was officially lost for words.
She had no idea what was going on, why the dolls were calling Dorothy "mother", or how she'd managed to convince them into calling off any hostilities. The fact that her voice had clearly sounded exactly like the Hellion was either a very good sign, or a possible calamity in the making, and the fact that even Kiln didn't know what to make of any of it only made the situation a thousand times more bewildering.
She could only stare in utter bafflement as Dorothy tottered towards her. Tired, unsteady, dressed in the tattered remnants of the harlequin-like costume the Hellion had made for her, the little girl was hardly the most impressive sight in the room to say the least… and yet there was something about her that actually made Elphaba take a step back as she approached. It wasn't until Dorothy got within arm's reach of her that she realized what it was: once again, a tiny mote of gold could be seen in the pupils of her bright green eyes, glowing in the darkness.
Eventually, Dorothy came to a stop right in front of Elphaba; by that point, the rest of the group was too shell-shocked to intervene, and even the three mercenaries were too afraid to stand in her way. In fact, the only member of the team who didn't seem in any way spooked by this transformation was Toto, who had returned to following the girl around as if nothing had happened.
For a moment, there was silence in the cavern, except for the distant sounds of the dolls preparing themselves for work. Then Elphaba finally saw the tears welling in Dorothy's eyes, and the smile she wore in spite of them.
"You saved me," she said softly.
"We saved each other," Elphaba replied, almost on instinct.
Dorothy laughed, but somewhat weakly: fatigue was clearly setting in again. "I suppose we did. But I never got to thank you the first time."
And with that, she lunged forward and threw her arms around her. Startled, Elphaba returned the hug, almost pathetically relieved that the girl was alive and well, that after all the horrors of the day, nobody had died.
For almost fifteen seconds, the two of them remained locked in their hug. Then, at last, Dorothy spoke:
"Let's go home, Elphie," she whispered. "We've got work to do."
A/N: Care to guess what happens next? Feel free to theorize!