A/N: Ok, some of this may get a little tedious. Elphaba tells Fiyero the story of what happened since he "died." A condensed version, obviously. She doesn't tell him everything, though, not yet. Also, we get to see Elphaba a bit…tender. I've added some things I thought could have happened…and afterwards, they head for the ball, and she'll be as deriding as ever, so if you get bored, bear with me until the next chapter.

Disclaimer: It isn't mine, but then again, nor was the Wizard of Oz Gregory Maguire's…

She didn't wear the pancake makeup.

She was, however, going to go to the ball, heavily swathed in dark scarves, and, in a throwback to her days at Shiz, carrying a book and an apple in her bag.

Fiyero, hat pulled low over his face, groaned when he saw her customary accessories loaded into the bag, borrowed from Glinda.

"You don't need those, Elphaba, you're not some Crage Hall isolate anymore, not that you really seemed all that isolated to me, what with Nanny, Nessarose, Glinda, Boq, Avaric, Tibbett, Crope, Milla, Shen Shen, and I always hanging around."

"Always around, never away, and giving me quite the migraine half the time too," Elphaba remarked, but somewhat good-naturedly. "I wasn't nearly as much the, well, witch I act now, then."

"Well, Tibbett and Crope could try a saint's patience," said Fiyero. "And I know that for sure, after all, Nessarose got irked often enough at them."

Elphaba paused.

"Do you know, I saw Tibbett again," she said carefully.

"Really? Where?"

"In a mauntery."

Fiyero looked shocked. "That statement is profoundly confounding in innumerable ways. What were you doing in a mauntery? No, even better question. What was Tibbett doing in a mauntery?"

"Dying," said Elphaba simply. Fiyero gaped at her. "It is," she began, "a very long story."

"Sixteen years ago tonight, a foolish young man refused to heed the warning of an equally foolish, idealistic, young girl, and he returned to her secret hiding place that fateful Lurlinemas Eve. But there, hiding in the shadows, the agents of a government by terror lay in wait for her. When the man entered, thinking they had found the girl or one of her fellows, they fell upon the man, beating him until the room lay thick with so much congealed blood that it was impossible to imagine that the one who had lost it could still live."

Entranced by her story, for Elphaba had always been an enchantress of words, Fiyero found himself instinctively clutching his mid-torso, where beneath his shirt an impossibly large scar, still angry and red after sixteen years, lay.

But Elphaba continued, as if in a trance.

"The guards dragged him off to prison, to die later, if not sooner. And that night, the girl returned. Seeing the blood, she screamed and collapsed. When she awoke from her faint, she vomited, and, covered in her lover's blood, decided to somehow make her way to a mauntery. She knew she could sleep safely there.

"She stumbled, bloody and only half-alive, through the busy streets clogged with Lurlinemas pedestrians and holiday cheer. Finally, she made it to the mauntery door. A young maunt led her inside and down to where the elderly maunts spent their final years, and there, the maunt laid the young woman down on a chair.

"The girl never intended to stay more than one night, but as she slept, she fell into a coma, and there she stayed for a year. Some have opined that nine months into the coma, the strange young woman gave birth, but no one ever offered proof.

"Upon waking, the girl remembered her lover's death, and the outside world, even her own inner world, seemed far too-hard- for her. The maunts offered to let her stay and become one of them, and, though she never professed her vows, she accepted.

"Often, among her other duties, the young woman was sent to care for a three-month-old baby in the orphanage, and despite her vow of silence, she would- she would-sing to him."

To Fiyero's ears, that last admission sounded as if Elphaba herself had just recalled it.

"And later, when she was sent to another mauntery, further from the Emerald City, the boy was sent along as well.

"Years passed in silence, then in whisper, in washing floors and dishes, and doing other simple tasks, and focusing on nothing but each single, separate second, and it was easy…just not to be an individual, just to float along in a haze that passed for life…then, she was assigned to the Ward for Incurables, to care for the dying, and she focused on them…and came to find dying beautiful, a pattern, lovely and natural. But still, green as she was and isolated as she had been, she was only one of many, unimportant as an individual, a-"

-she recalled her words from so long ago-

"a muscular twitch in the larger organism. She had no self, until, one day, Tibbett, a boy she had once known in college, was brought to the Ward for Incurables. That stupid, foolish night at the 'Philosophy Club' killed him-"

For a moment she broke out of the trance she had appeared in before, slipping into Elphaba again before Fiyero, but then she was gone into the story again-

"He recognized her, he, even so weak as he was, was better at life than she was, and he forced her to be a real person-"

-again, Fiyero recalled their long ago talk about "real" or "realer" people-

"He made her remember, made her be an individual, gave her back, though she didn't want it, herself, and then-

He died, and she could no longer stay at the mauntery. She, the green maunt without a soul, packed her things, and a seven year old boy was sent along, on a wagon train to the Vinkus." To pay penance and ask forgiveness of her lover's widow¸ she nearly added, but remembered, and did not.

"Is that all?" asked Fiyero, sitting spell-bound on the bed.

"Yes…for now," added Elphie, as certain that Fiyero needed to hear the rest as she was that she needed to tell it.

"That's…not what I had expected you to have been doing these past sixteen years," was all Fiyero would say.

She smiled seductively and said, "But then I never am what you expect me to be. You never look for me in a church, and yet that is where you found me once, and where I ran when I thought you were dead."

"Perhaps, dear Fae…you are less atheist than you like to believe."

She did not protest, as he had expected. But hadn't he yet learned that she never did what was expected?

"Perhaps, Yero my hero," she whispered, almost too quietly for him to hear, "you're right."

And with that, she took his arm, and they went to the ball…