A/N: People, seriously, get reviewing before I-have-to-kick-you! Aaargh!
Disclaimer: It isn't mine gets evil look on face No, just kidding.
Elphaba, being Elphaba, had of course immediately hit upon the anagram of Cass's last name. She stared openmouthed a moment, although you couldn't tell beneath her scarves, as Cass stammered out a vague apology to Fiyero.
Dawzir.
Wizard.
Elphaba seriously doubted that that was the girl's real surname. But who was she? She was too young to be a Gale Forcer, and a girl besides. Was she a spy?
A thought struck Elphaba like a punch to the stomach. Was Cass- was she- a daughter of the Wizard's? Elphaba's half sister? The thought filled Elphie with revulsion and hatred, too, on her mother's behalf, although she clearly recognized the hypocrisy of her own emotions. The Wizard may have had more than one affair, true, but then so had Melena, and she'd been married, too. And Elphaba herself had been the counterpart in an affair. But knowing something in the mind and feeling it in the heart are two separate things altogether. Elphaba groaned. This whole stupid intrigue was too much like the one surrounding Liir. Why couldn't something, for once, be clear instead of murky?
Elphaba might have said something, but before she could the voice of an announcer was heard throughout the house.
"And now, everyone, please gather in the living room for tonight's main entertainment!"
Elphaba looked at Fiyero. Liir looked at them.
"I have a bad feeling about this," he said.
"So do I," murmured Elphaba. "Let's go." She grabbed Fiyero's hand and the pair strode forward, into the ballroom. Liir glanced awkwardly at Cass and they slowly followed, keeping two feet solidly between them.
In the center of the lovely, festive ballroom sat a cage containing a bear gotten up ridiculously in a green and gold collar and anklets adorned with bells. In a smaller cage growled three large, vicious looking dogs. Fiyero chanced a glance at Elphaba, who looked like she'd have a better chance than the dogs of tearing someone to pieces. She looked at the bear. It moved its great, kingly head and fixed Elphaba in its fathomless gaze, and she knew she had been wrong, initially- it was not a bear, but a Bear.
"Damn it, Glinda," Elphaba muttered under her breath, and in a flash of dark skirts she ad disappeared into the crowd. Fiyero groaned. There was no telling what insane stunt she might pull- she was liable even to climb into the cage and try to reason with the dogs, which fell firmly into the animal category. Then again, she might also try to tear Glinda to shreds, which wouldn't be very nice either. Pushing through a forest of chiffon and tulle, Fiyero tried to track her, a task made easier than in years past because of the way Elphaba's plain dark clothes stood out against the odious Emerald City finery.
"Fabala!" he called loudly, duplicating a trick that had worked once before. She swiveled on the heel of her thick boot, and at her moment of indecision he dashed up to her and caught her by the elbow so that she couldn't disappear again.
"Elphaba, what the hell are you doing?" he hissed.
"I'm only going to go have a few words with Glinda and end this charade of savagery, that's all," she replied calmly. "Now let go."
"No, you'll do something insane."
"Like?"
"Like jump into the cage and try to reason with the dogs."
She looked affronted by this. "I assure you, Fiyero, my last vestiges of adolescent radicalism are long past. I'm not that idealistically foolhardy any longer. I'm thirty-eight years old and I have a firm grasp of my mortality. I'm not some moronic Crage Hall girl who foolishly believes herself to be invincible."
He raised one eyebrow at her. She responded by giving him her Look.
"Let go, I tell you," she said.
"No."
"I'll poof you away in a puff of smoke."
"You're no more a witch than I am."
"You're a man, technically the term would be warlock," she pointed out.
"Or Wizard."
"Don't curse, please," she said, bringing it off with a straight face.
"All right then, you're no more a warlock than I am."
"Of course not, Fiyero, I'm a woman."
He groaned. Just then, the announcer began speaking again.
"Before we let loose the dogs, we'll rile the beast with a bit of whipping," he said, smiling sadistically, reaching for a cat o' nine tails leaning against the podium.
"Damn, we're too late to get Glinda," Elphaba said. Suddenly, she wrenched away from Fiyero and dashed off again.
"No! Fae! Shit!" Fiyero yelled. He began running after her. He caught up just in time to see Elphaba slipping into the cage. She was so bony that, with a little effort, she fit between two of the cage's bars. Well, Fiyero reflected, it wasn't as if the Bear could use the same method. The announcer/Bear wrangler stepped into the cage via the door, to cheers and applause. The crowd didn't appear to have noticed anything amiss about Elphaba's presence, perhaps they thought she was the wrangler's assistant.
Ha.
The man drew back his whip, and the Bear cowered. It was young, Fiyero realized, just barely grown. Elphaba flew in the blink of an eye from the corner to between Bear and tormentor, catching the tails of the whip around her arm and wincing.
"What is the meaning of this?" roared the wrangler.
"Yes, that's just what I'd like to know," declared Elphaba. She turned to face the crowd. "This is a Bear, not a savage beast. He-" here she turned to the Bear for affirmation of her guess at its gender. He nodded yes to her. "He is as sentient, as-as- civilized- as we are. More so," she went on, nearly white with passion beneath her scarves. "We are equal, humans and Animals! Has all of Oz forgotten that so quickly? Has the Wizard's systematic denigration and destruction of their rights so quickly destroyed our sense of justice as well?" she cried, half-pleading, half-chastising. "Stop this madness, this, this- aberration of nature!" she screamed.
The wrangler suddenly ripped away her scarf.
Everyone gasped.
"Yes," he said, clearly referring to her, "do."
"Damn," Elphaba summed up.