A/N: Yay, an update from me! It'd have been up sooner but I'm on vacation and internet access is spotty at best.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Written under the influence of The Hunchback of Notre Dame music.
Fiyero:
The night after Nessarose's funeral, I awoke to find Elphaba's place beside me empty and neatly made despite my slumbering form. I leaned over the side of the bed and looked at the pocketwatch hanging out of my pants pocket on the floor where the pants had evidently been thrown last night when…well…ahem. All right then. It was two o'clock in the morning. I sat up instantly in bed, disoriented, and looked around trying not to panic until I located Elphaba, sitting drawn up so tightly against the window that she was barely distinguishable from the shadows. Suddenly, a ray of moonlight starkly illuminated her face and the crystalline tear trickling down her face.
"Fae?" I asked groggily, kicking off the blankets and standing beside the bed. "What's wrong?"
Hastily, she brushed the tear away from her face. "N-nothing," she lied too quickly.
"Fae."
She hid her face.
"The nightmares are back," she said finally, bluntly. I gaped at her She hadn't dreamed about what had happened that night she was nineteen in years. But I could remember the dreams vividly. She'd shake and sweat and cry out painfully, and I couldn't bring myself to imagine what she was going through trapped in the prison of her own memories.
"Oh, Elphaba," was all I could think to say. She stood, shaking slightly but her face looking as if she were determined to control it. Silently, I opened my arms. She stepped into them and I enfolded her, and she held onto me as if I were her lifeline, what she had learned to do during her nightmares. She had had to teach herself to rely on anyone other than herself. Before, she had refused adamantly to be touched and cried out that she was not worthy of me and I should go away, making me plead with her, making her shake more violently and turn away. That was before I knew, and even a few times after. But the night she had finally let me hold her after one of her terrors, she had shook and cried and I had cried just as much, with her, at this final bond of trust she had at last brought herself to forge.
Now, she grabbed to me tighter, and I picked her up and carried her into bed, cradling her to me, and holding her against me once we were warm under the covers and her paroxysms had stopped.
"You're safe," I whispered to her, knowing that tomorrow she would go to enormous lengths to be braver and more independent (and more hostile) than usual, and might even avoid me for the better part of the day. "We're all safe. He promised. Nothing will ever hurt us again."
She looked up at me with haunted yet startlingly clear hazel eyes.
"I hope, I pray, you're right," she said, "but I think you're wrong."
…
Elphaba:
He was wrong. Just like before, I was sadly, horribly, right. And I should have known, should have predicted, how it would happen.
Apparently, the Wizard arrived around the time we were talking and demanded to speak to me immediately about my intentions toward the Eminency and Munchkinland's status as a separate state. And it had to be now, no waiting the few hours until morning like a normal person, say one who didn't think he was all but Lurlina herself.
We had just fallen back to sleep after my nightmare began. Gale Forcers stormed into the room and pulled me out of bed.
"What the hell is this?" I demanded. "I have done nothing!"
"His Ozness wants to speak with you about the Eminency," one of them said.
"About the- and this is the way he calls meetings with his fellow rulers!" I demanded incredulously.
"When they're terrorist witches," one of them answered. I slapped him hard across the face.
"How dare you. I rule this state, as of right now. Go back to his motherfucking Ozness-" I cackled briefly at the truthfulness of that epithet when it came from my lips- "and tell him that, and that its your damn fault I've just reinstated the Eminency. Get the hell out of my room and I'll see him, with my husband, the Ruling Prince of the Arjikis, when we are dressed. NOW GET OUT!" I roared.
I was quite satisfyingly obeyed.
That satisfaction, however, dissipated soon after Fiyero and I were led into one of the conference rooms of my own ancestral home. The Wizard and an unfamiliar man, about my own height of five feet eight inches, sat at a table. Like guilty defendants, Fiyero and I had cleverly been made to stand in front of them at their high table, so that they looked down at us. Instantly I compensated, throwing my head back defiantly so that I could glare nonetheless down my nose at them.
"You have called me out of my bed at two o'clock in the morning to have a discussion that could and should have waited for daylight and the hours of ordinary, honest government matters, Father, and furthermore you sent your soldiers stomping into our rooms to arrest us like dissenters in the night, so you'd better have a damn good reason for it," I began. The little man obviously shared in our secret or was a brilliant actor, since he didn't flinch when I called the Wizard my father.
"Elphaba," he said jovially.
"Kindly address me as your Eminence," I replied coldly with as much haughtiness as I could muster.
"That is what we've called you here to discuss, Elphaba," he said, pointedly ignoring my demand.
"Well, since you so asked so rudely, I now fully intend to retain the position of Eminence or at least keep it in my family, and I also fully intend to maintain Munchkinland's current status as a state separate from Oz, due fully to your refusal to refer to me by my rightful title," I inform him. "In short, once again, you've stuck this thorn in your own side."
He turned red but his voice didn't lose its level quality.
"I had expected as much. Well then, Miss Elphaba, may I introduce to you my Minister of Interrogation, Lord Master Devyn." Devyn smiled a leering smile at us and a shudder went down my spine. God, I hate that man. Suddenly, I felt someone grabbing my hands in a vise grip behind my back. I whirled to see a Gale Forcer holding me, and one holding Fiyero as well.
"What the hell are you doing?" I yelled.
"Arresting you for sedition, treason, and terrorism," my blood father replied calmly. Devyn's sneer grew wider.
"You promised, you bastard!" I screamed at him.
"You should have known better-" he began, but I wouldn't let him. Struggling against my apprehender, I continued to scream.
"No! Father to daughter, you promised me. You swore! Damn you! Damn you to hell for this!" I shrieked as we were dragged away.
Fala:
My grandfather roused Liir and I in the middle of the night, shaking us awake hurriedly.
"What is it?" I asked, awake faster than Liir as usual and handling the unusual, ominous circumstances with my mother's aplomb.
"Your parents," my grandfather gasped… "the Wizard…he took them…"
"Again?" groaned my uncle, walking into the doorway from the hall where he'd evidently heard us.
"Yes, Shell, again," my grandfather said irritably, "so no matter your personal feelings toward your sister right now, get ready and go to the Emerald City. Make yourself useful and plead for their release there."
"But, Father-" Grandfather leveled him with a glare more ferocious than any I'd ever seen him wear before- and for Mother's sake!- and Shell sighed. "Yes, Father," he said and disappeared.
"Good!" yelled Frex after him. Almost to himself, he muttered, "by the Unnamed God, I will not lose another daughter!"
Devyn:
The witch is different than I had expected. I had expected a cackling, haglike woman, hideous and high-pitched and altogether rather ridiculous. But the witch- she was graceful and proud, and the moonlight playing in her raven hair nearly drove me to distraction. But no, she is disgusting to me. She is a traitor, not only to her country but to her own father. She must be destroyed. Not killed, shattered internally. Broken. She has a weakness somewhere in that queenly armor, and mark me, I shall find it. No matter how long it takes.