"Need a lift?"
Boq brought the wagon to a halt and offered a hand. Elphaba swung herself up on the seat next to him. "Thanks." She plunked her bag at her feet. "Nessa forgot her books."
He lifted his eyebrows. "She's studying over break?"
The sharp featured girl drew herself into an even more angular frown. "They're for me. I've read mine."
Of course she had. "Anything else?" She shook her head, and he set the horses in motion. Then he turned with a sudden fear. "I'm not leaving her at the station, am I?"
Elphaba lifted a stern eyebrow. "You think I would leave my disabled sister alone in a public train station to ride to Nest Hardings with you?"
"You needn't be rude."
She turned forward, eyes on the horizon that promised nothing but miles of corn for the next stretch of time. "Father took her back."
"Not you?"
She tipped a meaningful look and then went back to studying the countryside. He felt a twitch of discomfort that she should so readily accept what she framed as laughably negligent for her sister.
"How long will you stay?"
"Until the last moment, no doubt. He'll want to soak up Nessa time, and she does enjoy being doted on." She flicked her eyes to him. "Well, you know."
He grimaced.
"Sorry, too fresh?" Too embarrassing. He sighed.
He'd tried, he had, but Nessa would never be – someone else. He thought he could settle, find a way to be happy, but she left no room for anyone else's choices. Even a patient guy like him could only handle so many demands.
"You were good for her." He tensed, ready to fend off the elder sister's strongarming. "But I was glad you broke it off."
"You…you were?"
She studied the sky. "Sure. Never a good idea to court one girl and love another."
He flushed.
"Don't worry, I won't betray your secrets." Her tone held no weight, as if she'd just told him to buy some eggs instead of acknowledged one of his deepest personal heartbreaks. "But she doesn't feel the same."
He shook the reins. "I know."
"She loves Fiyero."
"I know."
"She wants to marry him."
He frowned. "Why are you telling me this?"
She fell quiet. He cut his eyes toward her, and she was folded in on herself. "Better a broken heart now then a wasted life chasing a broken heart later."
His jaw clenched. "And what of hope?"
"Hope?" Her forehead creased as if she'd never heard the word.
"'Tis the season after all."
She shook her head. "Oh, Boq, that's what I mean. Don't lose sight of who you are."
He flinched.
"We weren't born for the rose and the pearl." Her voice fell so low he could barely hear her over the rattling wheels. "I wish, sometimes, but…hope only punishes folly."
"Well, I disagree."
She quirked an eyebrow.
"She won't marry him, anyhow."
"Boq-"
He snapped the reins with a fraction of his frustration. "He doesn't love her. It's painfully clear."
Elphaba turned her eyes on him at last, too soft for such a sharp girl. "I don't know that it will matter."
"It will." He shot her a sideways glance. "It has to."
Oz, the pitying look from her of all people. He'd reached the stone-cold bottom.
He lashed out. "He doesn't deserve her. He's just a spoiled, pampered prince."
She went still.
The bitterness poured out of him, though, to the only person who he could trust not to have fallen under that careless oaf's spell. "Has he ever done one single thing that wasn't disgraceful or selfish? I don't understand his popularity, I mean, other than his name and his looks, neither of which he did a bit to earn."
"Have you?"
He jerked back. The air sizzled with a sudden energy. "What?"
"What have you done?" she asked mildly, though her shoulders peaked in a rigid line. "To deserve her?"
"I-" He stopped. He couldn't claim dating Nessa as a charity case to Elphaba unless he wanted to face life as a frog. "I've showed her I care. He doesn't care about anything."
"Maybe she doesn't want the show. Maybe it's nice just to be." She wrapped her arms around herself. "Maybe she can be herself because he doesn't care. There's no expectations."
He snorted. "We are talking about Glinda, right?" Her head jerked up, and he laughed. "She's like a walking whirlwind of expectation."
She turned away with a shrug, and he realized he must have upset her. The roommates were close, after all.
"So ridiculous," she murmured after a while.
"What?" She couldn't mean Glinda, especially not to him.
She jumped as if startled he was still there. "Oh." She gripped her braid. "Lurlinemas."
"How so?" Her mind worked in such odd ways. How had they gotten there from here?
"Everyone festivating to a goddess they don't worship with a happiness they don't feel. Why bother?"
He sighed. "Why not? Is it better to wallow in the emptiness?"
"Better honesty."
He snorted. "You would say that." Her 'honesty' often felt like callousness.
"And I do."
He let out a long sigh. "What would you have me do?"
She followed the crow as it flew across the cloudless sky. "Do as you like. Lurlinemas isn't harming anyone."
"I meant the other."
She frowned. "I hardly think I'm in a place for such advice."
He scrubbed a hand over his face. "You denigrate hope, but I tried moving on. You saw the results."
"Ah, the eternal unfairness of life." She tossed flippantly, but it drove a spike of guilt through him. What were his problems compared to hers? "A conundrum, to be sure. What does your hope say: another girl or a fresh set of circumstance?"
The wagon rattled over a bridge that spanned a long-ago dried up creek. "Well?"
"Oh, I was asking you. How would I know?"
He frowned. He'd long accepted that Galinda would likely never see him with any true potential, yet, he couldn't imagine another girl. "Any other girl, what would stop the same situation? Either she will feel poorly matched or I, it seems."
"Unless that's the issue all along, is not you, or Nessa, or Glinda, or Fiyero, or-" She swallowed. "Perhaps it's just the matching."
"And we'd know we match how?"
Her eyes searched again for the answers in that great blue emptiness above them. "You can talk together, about nothing or the weight of the world, and it feels the same. That you are authentically you, accepted as you are and yet challenged to be more."
He let the image soak in, rocked by the poetry of it from Shiz's self-confessed most sharp-tongued harpy.
"I imagine, of course. How would I know?"
She tipped her face away, and the angle caught the sunlight just right to highlight the delicate lift of her cheekbones, the appealing warmth of her intelligent brown eyes, the subtle fullness of her lips. Sharp, yes, but pretty in her own way. Why count herself so out of matters of the heart? Surely someone existed as her match.
He voiced the thought aloud to her raucous laughter. "I am without doubt unmatched. Can you imagine? What a terrifying thought."
But her cheeks darkened in a blush he'd have thought impossible for her.
Wait. Could all this talk be something of a confession? Did Elphaba feel, as Boq did with Galinda, that her affection would forever remain unrequited? All that matching talk, didn't each word soundly apply to the pair of them just now?
Oh, Oz. He shifted uncomfortably. Elphaba had a crush on him. He had to let her down gently.
"Elphaba, you know I value your friendship."
She tilted her head, eyebrows pinched. Oh, the poor girl.
"And I think you are very bright, and even kind, though you'd roundly deny it."
She held up a hand. "If this is an opportunity to help you move on, I'll pass."
"What? No! I was trying to dissuade your interest without hurting your feelings." She burst into cackles of laughter that did serious harm to his ego. "Though now I'm questioning why I bothered."
She recovered from her laughter with a wipe of her eyes. "Sweet Boq. You really are all heart." Another aftershock of mirth left her shoulders shaking.
Luckily the Colwen Grounds' manor lay ahead of them at last, and he sped the horses to deliver her before he said something he'd regret. He pulled up the stately drive, and her mirth evaporated into the world weary expression that draped her permanently here. It drew his contrition and an empathetic forgiveness of her earlier slight.
She hopped down and shouldered the bag. "Thanks for the ride."
"Of course."
"As far as the other…" Her smile fell flat here, but whether topic of the shadow of the manor squashed it so, he couldn't say. "I do have some advice I can stand behind."
"Oh?"
"If you believe in your hope, do something with it."
He pursed his lips. "Such as?"
"Talk to Glinda, honestly. Match or not, she's a remarkable ally, and I do believe she might know every person on the planet. If not her for you, she might know who."
"I'll think about it." He shook the reins and did just that the rest of the way home.
And that was how, seven years later, he came to be celebrating his five-year anniversary to Galinda's friend Milla with a beautiful newborn daughter curling her tiny fist around his pinky. He drove them up the lane, his eyes draw to a crow's flight in the cloudless sky.
Elphaba had been right. She never found her match, dead before the graduation they ought to have shared. But he'd been right, too. They'd never married, Fiyero and Glinda, no matter how close they'd come.
He still thought of them all sometimes, and the collective innocent stupidity of their youth. Beautiful, unattainable Glinda. Selfish, prancing Fiyero. Demanding, lovelorn Nessa. And Elphaba.
She'd left quite a hole, that odd girl that never seemed to fit. Through force of will, she'd bent the world around her, since it made no accommodation for her on its own. And the tragedy of her death, the tragedy of her life, it all changed how he saw his own place. He had to be the hope, not just see it.
Hope was a gift to be given to others, as she had given it back to him.
"Merry Lurlinemas," he whispered to the wind, somehow sure she heard. At least, he hoped.