Disclaimer: Still don't own it, still not making money. Go figure.
Spoilers: Musical, post "Wonderful". AU from there. If you haven't seen and you're scrounging for spoilers, don't take what you find here to be real spoilers - the musical, while it ends darkly, has nowhere near as much... well, death.
Notes: This has been sitting on my document manager for a few months, and in light of the fact that I haven't posted Wicked in a while, I decided I might as well. It started out as a simple "What if" fic, and evolved into a much much darker "What if Elphaba had gotten everyone used against her as Morrible and the Wizard should have been smart enough to do in the first place" fic whilst I was writing it. I don't know why I wrote it, and I'm frankly a little disturbed that I did. This is what I get for listening to As Long As You're Mine on repeat - or at least, the first few seconds of it - in the dark.
Thud.
Her heart was beating.
She was alone. She stared with empty, unseeing eyes into the darkness that surrounded her. How could darkness be so thick, so complete as to give such mixed illusions all at once? It was an impossibly empty void, it was a suffocating prison wall conforming and melding to her body, an oppression she was able to breathe. It was within her, and it clenched at her beating heart.
If she concentrated hard enough on her heartbeat, familiar, enduring, she wouldn't have to think. She wouldn't have to sleep. She'd be shielded in a state of unawareness from the thoughts attacking her mind. Awake, she could try to control her mind; asleep, she had no chance, no way to control. Her mind controlled her, instead. She couldn't sleep, she couldn't think.
Her heartbeat, now sinister and mocking, beat loudly against her chest, against her mind; it echoed in her temples, vibrating hollowly in the darkness around her. It was a reminder of how alone she was.
Images lurking in the back of her mind flittered across her staring eyes, unbidden. Sometimes dimmed and dulled, suddenly real and terrifying, they didn't exist. They weren't real, not anymore. They were mere flashes, excruciatingly bright against the darkness she stared into, fleeting whirlwinds of callous color swirling relentlessly in front of her eyes. Sharp and painfully vivid, they haunted her.
They had been real.
An empty house, traces of blood. Anger and despair so blinding she might have shouted or screamed, but she can't remember, can't dredge it up from the back of her mind.
A dead body, hanging perversely on a pole in a field, all the easier to be raped and eaten by the crows and vultures, his right to any words stolen away. A moment she can't recall, doesn't want to recall; six inexplicably dead Gale Force officers, faces shocked and open and frozen in time, bodies clean of wounds. Running blindly through trees, branches scraping and cutting her face and arms.
No blood here… no blood…
She flinched. It was proof of her own terrible existence, proof that she was still alive.
Frantic green fingers combing through painful tangles of dirty and matted blonde curls, clutching white-knuckled hands. Small hands clenching back almost painfully, a lifeline, trying to hold on to a right to words. Warnings.
They want this… they want you. Don't you understand?
She blinked. Dark and darker shades of black, a heartbeat.
Impressions of figures and places, faint memories of words and warnings were heightened by overpowering imprints of emotion. Her senses were overwhelmed, they failed her; it was too much. Not even she could handle it without breaking.
Blood, so much blood, too much blood...
She could break. She was on her way to broken.
This will happen again… don't… promise me…
Steely certainty, unnatural seriousness. A feeling of some sort of sick and twisted unreality. Guilt, irony, everything converged into a blur of barely distinguishable emotion and senses and memory. A long, hard breath; striking nostalgic memories of sleepless nights and familiar, endearing snores. Two girls in a room.
She breathed out. No girls in a room.
Go. Tears on pale cheeks, trembling green fingers brushing away dampness.
Please.
She had gone.
Her heart beat.
She saw a great funnel of wind, heard her sister's cry for help. She kept a promise.
She didn't go.
Thud.
Her heart was beating.