A/N: Sorry to leave you all on a cliffhanger, but I did the same to myself, just to tell you. I get to practice my monologue tomorrow and get commentary, and next week I get to perform it, and it's from Wicked, and I'm hoping the instructor will let me wear green makeup. Which I have. Same as they used on Broadway. It's from a regular make-up store. So yeah.
Disclaimer: I don't own Wicked, but I do own its makeup! Bwahaha.
The room was still as a portrait. No one moved. No one spoke. No one did anything but gape.
This could be construed as very, very bad, thought Elphaba, frozen in the glares of hundreds of people.
"Damn it, Elphaba," Fiyero muttered from the crowd. What to do, what do I do? He wondered for a moment, and then it hit him. Glinda. Fiyero shoved his way through the crowd like the prow of a boat parting a still lake on a hot summer's day, making his way to the back of the room.
Glinda stood there, against the wall, as stunned as everyone else. Fiyero suddenly emerged from the crowd at her side.
"Glinda," he began.
"What?" she asked from an almost somnambulatory state.
"Glinda," he said more urgently, "we have to do something?"
"What?" she asked again, but she seemed more alert now, as though the sound of a voice had drawn her out of whatever trance the rest of the room seemed to be in.
"I don't know. Get her out of there. Make a speech, or something, distract everyone, and I'll take her back upstairs and we'll get ready to…something. I don't know. But Elphaba will be out of here and away from…this," he said, the words bubbling rapidly from his lips. Glinda nodded, strangely grim.
"Let's go," she said fiercely.
The wrangler had broken out of his trance and begun to move menacingly toward her. Elphaba resisted the urge to laugh in his face. After all, he still had the whip, and though she'd endured much worse, she'd rather escape this encounter unscathed, which she was pretty confident she could accomplish.
The Bear growled, a dog-like sound low in his throat, distracting the man and making him turn away from Elphaba for a moment. In that moment, Fiyero appeared at the back of the cage, on the other side of the bars.
"Slip through," he hissed insistently at Elphaba.
Thank you, she mouthed silently to the Bear. He nodded in response and growled again, keeping the wrangler focused on him as Elphaba slipped once again through the bars of the cage. Glinda, at the podium from which the wrangler had made his announcements, cleared her throat, snapping the crowd out of their collective hypnosis and bringing there attention to her. No one noticed Elphaba and Fiyero sneak silently from behind the cage to the doors of the ballroom, and up the stairs. No one noticed the adolescent boy who followed them out from the other side of the room. And no one noticed the slight redhaired girl who followed him out of the ballroom and then tucked herself near the front doors but out of sight.
Up in their room, Fiyero and Elphaba collapsed on the floor as soon as they pulled open the door. Sinking in just after them, Liir slammed it shut.
"No one better have heard that," Elphaba muttered into the carpet. She hit the floor with her fist. "Damn, damn, damn! I could have saved that Bear, I could have done it, and now he'll probably get beaten or killed because of me!" She rolled over onto her back. "I hate infamy."
Fiyero laughed. "Most people probably do," he said.
"Yes, but not in the same way. They hate infamy and the infamous. They don't hate infamy because they are infamous," Elphaba elaborated.
"You're not infamous," said Liir.
"Yes, I am," answered Elphaba. "Just because you're not afraid of me doesn't mean the rest of Oz isn't. Irrationally so, I might add, while you, on the other hand, ought to be afraid."
"No, I oughtn't," said Liir. "You oughtn't to be afraid of anything, except being afraid."
Elphaba rolled over again and raised herself up on her elbows.
"Maybe I haven't raised a complete idiot after all," she said. Liir hid his smile. It was as close to a compliment as she got. But she soon moved on to the next thing. Pulling herself up to a sitting position, knees to her chest, she rested her chin upon her kneecaps and hugged herself.
"We need a plan," she said. "And we need to leave here. I don't think we can stay any longer. The Gale Force, if it's still called that, or whatever its new incarnation is, shall probably come looking for me here."
"I don't understand why, if the Wizard is gone and was going to be deposed anyway, people still hate you," said Liir.
"That's because people are absolute morons," Elphaba enlightened him. "Anyway, let's think. Where can we go and how can we get there without being noticed?" she wondered.
"I have an idea," said Fiyero. "They'll be looking for a man and a woman, and if they're really quite smart, or have talked to your brother, a man, a woman, and a boy."
"And?" said Elphaba impatiently.
"What if you dressed as a man?" he asked.
Elphaba laughed outright for a moment, then abruptly stopped. "That could work," she said.