✉ Chapter Twenty: Out Loud ✉
"Now listen carefully. Teleportation is a demanderating and highly advanced skill. It must be attempted only with the greatest of care," Madame Morrible advised. "The slightest hiccup can result in great tragedy."
Elphaba and Glinda stood on opposite ends of a long, open room designated for sorcery training. Madame Morrible had them both change into plain training attire much to Glinda's chagrin.
"Why did you insist on such hideoteous uniforms, Madame?"
"It's simply a precaution dearie. We wouldn't want all of your pretty things getting singed, now would we?"
"Singed?" Glinda gulped.
"Now please focus on the ring marked in front of you. I want you to close your eyes and visualize your destination clearly."
"She's peeking!" Glinda accused Elphaba.
"That means you're peeking too."
"Ladies! Command your focus!"
They slammed their eyes shut and started to breathe deeply, envisioning the target ahead of them. After some time, a thick swirl of red smoke rose from the floor to engulf Elphaba whole, only to have her reappear moments later within the designated ring.
"How'd she do that!?" Glinda gawked.
Elphaba waved a haughty hand in the air to whisk away the smoke and placed her hands on her hips.
"Your move."
Glinda hopped up and down and waved her hands as she attempted the trick herself.
"You nasty show off!" Glinda stomped her foot.
"Oh yeah?" Elphaba disappeared in another puff and rematerialized behind Glinda. "Say that to my face."
Glinda choked on the red smog and whipped around to confront Elphaba, who had already vanished again.
"You little—"
"What?!" Elphaba mocked as she appeared on the far end of the room. "I can't hear you!"
"Impressive per usual, Miss Elphaba. But I urge you to—" Madame Morrible began.
"Your magic is repulsive!" Glinda coughed.
"At least I have magic," Elphaba antagonized, reappearing right before Glinda again.
"Oh yeah, watch this!"
Glinda pointed a finger towards Elphaba with the intention of shocking her, but a few measly bubbles were the only thing she managed to conjure. Elphaba threw her head back in a harsh cackle and turned her back to walk away.
"Go ahead! Laugh at me!" Glinda called erratically. "You just have to have everything, don't you?!"
Elphaba stilled and turned slowly.
"I have everything?"
"Well—"
"You're standing there telling me that I have everything? What is it that I have, Glinda? Tell me!"
"You know what I mean."
"I want to hear you say it."
"You took Fiyero from me!"
"He was never yours to take!" Elphaba hissed. "You want to talk about having 'everything,' Glinda? Look at your life! Doting parents, perfect looks, friends—Oz, so many friends! People worship the ground you walk on just for existing. As for romance? You could have anyone in Oz!"
"Not anyone."
"There it is. It kills you, doesn't it? It kills you that you can't have the one person in Oz who actually wants me!"
Glinda heatedly launched herself in Elphaba's direction. Elphaba recklessly dematerialized but stumbled a bit. Instead of her controlled cloud, a twister of fire overcame her and spit her out onto the floor a few paces back. She coughed and hurriedly batted a few scattered sparks out of her loose hair. She squinted through the smolder to see that Glinda had also been knocked to the ground. Ashes caked her face and hair but she was otherwise unharmed. The two girls wheezed and rubbed at their irritated eyes as the smoke cleared.
"This is precisely why I urged caution! A turbulent mindset can gravely botch a teleportation! I perish the thought of what may have happened if you'd been attempting a long-range travel!" Morrible shuddered. "Think about that, both of you. Class is dismissed."
As their Head Mistress exited, Elphaba and Glinda shamefully got to their feet.
"Are you okay?" Elphaba offered sheepishly.
"As if you care," Glinda grumbled, brushing some soot off of her shoulder.
"I care."
"You never cared!"
Elphaba groaned, at her wit's end over Glinda's dramatics.
"Glinda. I told you those letters were anonymous," Elphaba gritted her teeth. "How many times do I have to tell you that!?"
"It's not just about the letters, Elphie!" Glinda blurted out. "You spent all that time spilling your guts out to a stranger but never once did you think to open up to me!"
"You're mad that I didn't share my gossip with you, is that it?"
"This isn't about gossip, this is about trust! I mean—come on, Elphaba. You were in love with a secret pen pal and you didn't feel like you could confide in me?! You must have been so scared and confusified, seeing as how inexperienced as you were at romance—"
"Gee, thanks."
"But I could have helped! I could have been there for you. Why didn't you let me be there for you?"
"Glinda, I-I wanted to tell you but…" Elphaba trailed off, unable to deny Glinda's observation. Glinda shook her head and crossed her arms.
"I meant what I said when I said that you were my best friend but sometimes it feels like you never believed me!" Glinda's lower lip trembled slightly. "Sometimes it feels like…like our friendship meant nothing to you."
"Glinda—"
"Excuse me," Glinda sniffed. "I have a headache. I think I'll go lie down!"
She made quick work to snatch her bag and darted out of the training room before Elphaba could get another word in. Muddled and unfulfilled, Elphaba fixed to depart as well.
"Miss Elphaba."
Elphaba gasped as Madame Morrible appeared behind her.
"Excuse me, Madame. I thought you'd gone," Elphaba said. "You spooked me."
"Now dearie, you're much too old to believe in spooks!" Morrible attempted a joke. "I didn't mean to startle you, but I wished to speak with you plainly. Without Miss Glinda."
"I thought you dismissed our session."
"Consider this a private lesson," Morrible said. "Now, you displayed a considerable amount of magical skill in the classroom today. However, Miss Elphaba, you must learn to exercise obedience to my instruction."
"I'm sorry, Madame. It just happened; I didn't even think."
"I have already told you not to apologize for talent, Miss Elphaba. But I feel it my duty to impress upon you that great power like yours requires great control. Between today's pyre and the antler calamity last month in Doctor Nikidik's class…well," Madame Morrible clicked her tongue. "Let's just say that magical outbursts are a sticky business. Somebody may have gotten hurt."
"Yes, Fiyero may have gotten hurt had I not intervened that day in class," Elphaba said with a slight edge to her tone. "What Doctor Nikidik did was irresponsible and dangerous. He ought to be removed—"
"Now Miss Elphaba, we don't go removing staff for every little thing—"
"Unless they're an Animal, of course."
Something flashed in Morrible's eyes, and she pinched her lips at Elphaba's defiant tone. Elphaba quickly closed her mouth.
"I know you have concerns, dearie, but everything will be as it should be when you meet The Wizard," Morrible said evenly.
"When?" Elphaba clarified. "When I meet The Wizard?"
"Why! My dear! Your powers get stronger by the day and I intend to inform The Wizard as such! Once he hears about what you can do, he'll beg to meet you post haste!" Morrible promised. "That is, if you continue to work…as you should."
"I will, Madame. Of course," Elphaba nodded. "Thank you."
"There is also the matter of Miss Glinda," Morrible continued. "I couldn't help but spectate your quarrels. Do not forget that I only admitted her at your request. If you feel having her in class has become a distraction, I shall remove her from the seminar. You need only say the word."
Elphaba sized Madame Morrible up. She'd be lying if she said she wasn't tempted by the offer, but regardless of her current state with Glinda, pulling the rug out from under her seemed unnecessarily cruel.
"That won't be necessary, Madame," Elphaba decided. "She will not sidetrack me again, you have my word."
Elphaba reached down to grab her bag and began making her way towards the exit.
"While we're on the topic of distractions, Miss Elphaba!" Morrible called after her. Elphaba turned slowly. "It pertains to Master Tigelaar."
"Been keeping up with the campus gossip, I see."
"Gossip is a most powerful tool, Miss Elphaba," Madame Morrible said. "I regret that the topic must arise, but I won't hold my tongue when something as pivotal as your future with The Wizard hangs in the balance. I feel I must strongly advise against any further fraternization with this boy."
"Respectfully, Madame…" Elphaba said. "I don't think that's any of your business."
"You are my business, dearie."
Madame Morrible's remarks about Fiyero and Glinda nagged at Elphaba, but she didn't feel prepared to process them yet. She opted not to tell Fiyero of Morrible's advice as it would only serve to hurt him. Still, Elphaba had a hard time concealing a sour mood that night in his dorm. After a tense day, her frustrations needed a scapegoat.
"I am sick and tired of Glinda's attitude in sorcery seminar!"
Elphaba sat cross-legged on Fiyero's bed, glaring into a very foggy crystal ball as part of her sorcery homework.
"Can that thing tell the future?" Fiyero asked from across the room.
"Not yet. Only the present."
"Hell, I can tell the present!"
"Well, I can't even do that right now! I'm too scatterbrained, the fog won't clear," Elphaba complained. The swirling fog began to turn red in color, much like her plume of smoke from earlier. "You know, I can tell she wants to make up but she won't just come out and say it. Instead, we just bicker bicker bicker and get nowhere! She's so stubborn."
"Yeah, unlike you."
Elphaba lifted her eyes to glare at Fiyero and he put up his hands in surrender.
"Just saying. Jeez, you get cranky when you can't focus," he crossed the room and held out his hands for the crystal ball. "Give it here."
"But–"
"Give it here."
Elphaba begrudgingly handed it over and the fog faded as he set it aside.
"I just don't know what it's going to take, you know? I knew that it'd take time for her to get used to us being together but come on. It's been a month! Our relationship is old hat by now."
"What does the old hat have to do with anything?"
"Forget it." Elphaba flopped backwards onto Fiyero's pillow and covered her face with an open composition book. "Anyway. I'm done complaining."
Fiyero counted to three in his head.
"I mean it's just so awkward being the only two people in seminar!" Elphaba bolted upright and flung the composition book aside. "Get this. Madame Morrible even asked me if I wanted Glinda removed from seminar! Hell. Maybe I should have said yes."
"You don't mean that," Fiyero said. He moved to sit behind her and began rubbing her shoulders.
"Glinda begged to be in sorcery seminar but what is she actually working towards?"
"Sweet Oz, you're stiff."
"I'm working to meet The Wizard so I can help make Oz a better place! What does she want to do besides flounce around with her little training wand?!"
"How do you live like this?" Fiyero puffed, putting all of his strength into a tight knot in her shoulder.
"I mean, it's distracting, you know? How am I supposed to prove my worth when Glinda keeps dragging our personal business into training?"
Fiyero fell forward as Elphaba abruptly stood and began to pace.
"I'm used to being iced out by Nessa. She yanks my heart around on a chain with her back and forth. Father's an easy one. He hates me, but at least I know he hates me. But Glinda? It was her idea to befriend me, you know? I was perfectly content with our mutual loathing. Making snide remarks, putting glue in her hairbrush—"
"You did that?"
"Only twice!" Elphaba crossed her arms defensively. "But no, she had to take me under her precious little wing. How tremendously good of her! Maybe that's all I was to her, an act of charity. No wonder she resents me so much."
"Fae, friends have ups and downs."
"Well, I wouldn't know that, would I?!" Elphaba shouted.
She heard her own tone and paused her pacing to take a deep breath.
"You should have heard the way she talked to me today, Yero," Elphaba said defeatedly. "She acted like I didn't care…like our friendship meant nothing to me."
"Well…have you ever told her?" Fiyero asked.
Elphaba raised her eyebrows.
"Come again?"
"How much your friendship means to you. Have you ever told her?"
"Maybe not in those exact words but—I mean…she knows."
"How do you know she knows?"
"She knows! Things don't always have to say things out loud for the other person to understand, you know."
"I mean, it helps."
Elphaba let out a sudden, bitter laugh that caught Fiyero off-guard.
"Okay, I see what this is. You're not talking about Glinda anymore, are you?" she accused.
"Yes I am."
"No, you're not. You're talking about us!"
"Okay, so we're fighting now. Gotcha," Fiyero accepted casually. He stood and gestured for her to continue. "Go on, Elphaba. Tell me what I'm talking about."
"Like I can't see through what you mean by all of this talk about 'saying what you feel'," she scoffed. "This isn't about Glinda. It's about how I haven't said it back!"
"Said what back?" Fiyero asked calmly, slipping his hands in his pockets.
"Don't play dumb."
"Oh, I never play dumb. What is it that you haven't said back again?"
Elphaba shifted agitatedly and crossed her arms, disarmed by his casual air. She wanted to argue but it wasn't as fun when he didn't argue back.
"That thing that you've told me, that you keep telling me…the fact that—"
"I love you?" Fiyero filled in kindly.
Elphaba's face heated at her own awkwardness. Her short-lived frustration was fading due to his refusal to engage, but it left an uncomfortable vulnerability in its stead. She preferred rage any day.
"Precisely."
"Elphaba," Fiyero said. He held out his hands to her and she hesitated before taking them. "I only want you to say it if you really want to."
Elphaba anxiously bit her lower lip.
"I'm sorry, Fiyero."
"Look, when I figured out that I loved you I never wanted to shut up about it."
"Tell me about it," Elphaba muttered. Fiyero gave her a patient look and squeezed her hands.
"I do love you. I love you and I love saying so, but if it makes you uncomfortable, I'll try to cut back."
"No, that's not what I meant! Don't. Don't…stop saying it," Elphaba shook her head, a trace of fear in her eyes. "Every time you say it…it gets a little easier to hear."
Fiyero wrapped both of his arms around her and assured her with a long, loving kiss. Elphaba released a regretful sigh when they parted and rested her forehead against his.
"Things would be so much easier if we could just write…what we can't say out loud."
"Do you ever miss writing to him–me…do you ever miss writing?"
"Sometimes," Elphaba admitted, leaning back to look at his face. "This is better though."
"Oh? Why's that?"
Elphaba considered it. It had been easy to divulge her insecurities through anonymous letters, but displaying that same level of honesty as herself proved a greater challenge. Blending Fae and Yero's fearless fantasy world into Elphaba and Fiyero's flawed existence was quite the undertaking, but as Fiyero said before, it was worth the effort. Their relationship wasn't as easy as before…but it was real in a way that their letters never were. In the end, Elphaba supposed, reality was always better.
"Less hand cramping," she answered.
Fiyero caught her hand and pressed repeated kisses to it and he was rewarded with a lovely laugh from Elphaba.
"You tell me when you feel like it, my Fae. We've got all the time in the world."
"Mmm…such maturity," Elphaba complimented, flirtatiously gripping at his shirt collar.
"Oh, I'm lousy with maturity! But listen, and I hate to tell you this but…" Fiyero placed his hands on Elphaba's shoulders and looked her square in the eye. "Not everyone is as mature as I am. Glinda might need to hear how you feel. Out loud."
Elphaba groaned theatrically and pulled away from him.
"Sweet Oz why!?"
"You know as well as I do that Glinda doesn't respond well to subtlety! She lives for big gestures, big scenes," Fiyero said. "She insisted that I arrange for fireworks on our second date! Fireworks! To get through to her, to really get through to her, you've gotta meet her on her level."
"Well, I don't know where I'm going to get fireworks…"
"Just say the kind of stuff you said about her in your letters to me."
"My letters?" Elphaba frowned.
"Yeah—I mean I'm assuming you were writing about Glinda, right?"
"That's it!" Elphaba clapped. "Fiyero you're a genius!"
"That's a first."
"I may be terrible at saying how I feel, but Fae on the other hand…"
"I don't follow."
"You kept all of my letters, right?"
Fiyero nodded and gestured to his bottom desk drawer.
"Excellent," Elphaba said eagerly, making a quick dash towards his desk. "How did you catalog them? By date? Subject matter?"
She yanked the drawer open and her face dropped to behold her letters in a disorganized heap.
"You shouldn't be surprised."
"I really shouldn't be…" Elphaba sighed. "No matter."
Elphaba rolled up her sleeves and grabbed the pile with both hands before dropping the jumbled stack onto the floor. She sat cross-legged before them and beckoned for Fiyero to join her.
"Alright, Yero, help me look. It's going to be a long night."
It took half the night to search but by the next day, tired eyed and papercutted, Elphaba had found what she was looking for. Her plan running through her mind, she entered the Shiz dining hall midday where she knew Glinda would be lunching. Fiyero tagged along for moral support and an admitted desire to spectate.
Glinda sat at the head of a long table with her cronies at either side of her. Without announcement, Elphaba stepped up onto the table and began striding down its length towards Glinda. The dining students shrieked and gasped as they clamored to grab their plates out of Elphaba's way as she made her trek.
"Ew, get off the table!" Pfannee complained. "You're going to step on my salad!"
Elphaba, not responding to her, deliberately nudged the salad plate off the table with her foot. Fiyero burst out laughing as it toppled upside down into Pfannee's lap. Elphaba, ignoring Pfannee's shrieks, turned her attention back to a dumbfounded Glinda and pulled a letter out of her jacket pocket.
"Elphaba!" Glinda hissed, wide eyed as Elphaba stood over her. "What in Oz's name?"
"Dear Yero," Elphaba cut Glinda off as she began to read aloud. "I made a friend."
This was far from the first time Elphaba had drawn attention to herself at Shiz, but being publicly and voluntarily vulnerable was more than a little intimidating. Elphaba's voice didn't feel as strong and she did not feel as bold as she did when she was on the defensive, but she continued anyway.
"I can't believe I just wrote that, but it's true. I made a friend (one in real life, that is). Nobody has ever wanted to be my friend before. Not until now," Elphaba read. "She isn't the kind of person I expected to befriend. We loathed each other when we first met. I detest most of the things that she enjoys and vice versa. She's perky and vain and never shuts up."
Glinda, despite herself, simpered faintly.
"However," Elphaba continued. "I feel that deep down, perhaps very deep down, she is an uncommonly kind person. An uncommonly good person."
The hall was dead quiet, the students perhaps too curious to intervene yet, and Elphaba felt her resolve slipping. She swallowed and glanced at Glinda whose misty expression provided her the drive she needed.
"I would never tell this to her face," Elphaba chuckled in gloomy irony, "but I can't shake the feeling that she has come into my life for a reason. I've always kind of accepted that no matter where life took me, I'd go it alone. But now I know—" Elphaba paused briefly to clear her throat, "now I know that whatever way my story ends, at the end of my days I'll be able to say that there was at least one person who stood up and declared to the world that I was their friend. That has made every difference. Signed, Fae."
Elphaba lowered the letter with shaking hands and chanced a look towards Glinda. "I couldn't find the megaphone."
"I took it with me," Glinda mumbled.
"I see. Well…here," Elphaba offered the letter down to Glinda. "You can keep it. I wrote plenty more like it."
Glinda accepted the letter in silence and Elphaba took a deep breath.
"You were right, Glinda. I didn't let you in when I could have—when I should have. I'm still learning how to be a friend. I haven't had a lot of practice. But as for our friendship not meaning anything to me? That's not true. You are my very, very best friend."
Glinda looked down at the letter with a heavy-hearted expression, but when she said nothing, Elphaba nodded and cleared her throat.
"Right, then."
Murmurs and shouts started rippling through the dining hall as their confusion began to wane and Fiyero approached to help Elphaba down off the table. Feeling that negative attention from the student body was imminent, Fiyero began to guide Elphaba out of the hall. Elphaba stopped momentarily and turned towards Glinda.
"Glinda?" Elphaba called. Glinda turned to look at her and Elphaba shrugged. "I just thought you deserved to know."
Having said what needed to be said, Elphaba grasped Fiyero's hand and the couple took their leave.
"Well?! Aren't you going to tell them off, Glinda?!" Pfannee whined. "I have dressing all over me!"
"Shut up, Pfannee!" ShenShen shushed. "Can't you see she's crying?"