A/N: Don't blame me. Blame AP Euro, and my teacher who marked off my essay for my usage of "big words." (Veracity and reprehensibility. Those aren't even THAT BIG! And since when is a good vocabulary a BAD thing? And it's not as if I didn't know what they meant. Just because he didn't doesn't mean I should get in trouble!) And yes, I have borrowed something from Star Wars. Cookies to whoever can tell me what. And what's this about the name of Elphaba from? Hm…who can tell me that? Cake, ice cream, and a broomstick for you if you can.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
His parents walked fast. Liir tried desperately to keep up, not wanting Elphaba to glare at him for slowing them down. Fiyero, actually, was behind Elphaba, too, but at her heels, and trying relentlessly to get her to tell him where they were going, which needless to say was somewhat less than amusing to her, although her own thoughts on the matter did seem to entertain her.
"Fiyero, you have only ever succeeded in getting me to tell you something I didn't want to once, and you can hardly employ the same methods here."
"Watch me," he replied, grinning.
She was caught in very human indecision for a moment- she could laugh at him, or grow angry. She stood there, and then suddenly began to laugh, too hard, heightening into a cackle, hysterical.
"Fae? Elphaba?" asked Fiyero concernedly, pulling her shaking frame towards him. "Are you all right?"
"Yes," she gasped for breath as she managed to get her hysteria under control. "I'm all right. I think I'm finally all right." She turned her face to the sky for a moment, and then kissed Fiyero, hard and deep and full.
Liir watched his parents' deepening kiss and felt some unnameable longing well up in his chest. Unsure of what it meant, he pushed it aside and thought about his parents again.
It was hard, processing this all at once. Elphaba was his mother (Elphaba was a mother!); he had a father, Nor was in effect his sister. Though of course he had often been suspicious that this exact thing was true, knowing it for certain put his childhood into a whole new light.
He could nearly forgive Elphaba her sometimes icy, sometimes merely inept, inattentiveness. He could see his parents' love for each other- more than see; it was a palpable force running constantly between the pair.
What Fiyero's "death" must have done to her…it was unspeakable. Already Kiamo Ko and his whole life seemed like a fading dream in light of the vivacious unrelenting life of Elphaba and Fiyero. Already, he could not imagine one of his parents without the other somewhere near. In his dim-lit memories, Elphaba alone, in all her intensity burning into madness, seemed faded and dull compared to the woman standing here now, kissing the man that seemed to be almost literally her other half.
But now their kiss was over, and Elphaba was looking at him.
"Liir," she said impatiently, "Are you going to stare vacantly at that lamppost all day? Come on."
Liir groaned quietly and obeyed. His mother looked like a bloodhound, nose forward, eyes wide, sniffing and intense as if she were privy to some hidden, underlying answer in the air.
"This way," she said definitively, and turned a corner.
Fiyero knew she was not actually following a scent. She was remembering. She had, somewhere deep and buried, the imprinted memory of each step she had taken that fateful day, including the steps to Yackle's fortune-telling shop.
"Here," she said, leading them down several more winding alleys and finally to an unremarkable door in a derelict building, grey, unkempt, weathered, and tumbledown like all its fellows.
Hesitantly, unsure of what she would find, Elphaba knocked on the door several times. A old crone answered with surprising speed. Elphaba drew back in shock.
"Yackle! No. You're not here. You're at the mauntery. How…what…"
"Not anymore, my poppet. Yackle is where she needs to be, when she needs to be."
Elphaba shivered at the 'endearment.' My poppet. Could it be true? Could Yackle's be the plot she had felt enthralled in?
"Why- who- what are you?" asked Elphaba, stumbling over her words as she never had in her life.
"Come inside, dearies," said Yackle. "All of you."
They obeyed, as if all three of them were in a trance.
The interior was exactly as Elphaba had dream-remembered. The same wall hangings disguised the walls and made the place anathema to claustrophobics, the same awful mingling of smells permeated the air.
Yackle led them back to the same room, behind the tapestry. Elphaba had not noticed before that the tapestry was a depiction of Saint Aelphaba disappearing behind the waterfall. Even if the water itself didn't kill her, all those tons of it pressing down upon her should have, Elphaba thought. She wasn't sure what it meant to her, to think this.
Yackle bade them all to sit down. Regaining herself, Elphaba remained standing, her face set defiantly, so Fiyero and Liir quickly pulled themselves up out of their seats, Liir with some regret. He wasn't used to walking so far, and his legs ached, but he didn't dare complain. He wasn't sure whom he was more afraid of: Elphaba, Yackle, or the volatile combination of the two in the same room.
"Now," said Yackle as if there was nothing between them, "what would you like to know?" She placed her wrinkled hands over the crystal ball and waggled long, decrepit fingers.
"Cut that shit out, right now!" demanded Elphaba hoarsely, in a voice that made Liir unsure as to whether she was going to cry or yell in frustration. "I'm more a witch than you are. What I want to know is what you are and why I am cursed with you!"
"Calm down, dear child. You have come so far. Too far. Mother Yackle is mystified, so Mother Yackle will tell you what she can, in hopes that the poppet can help her decipher what went wrong."
You're no Mother, thought Elphaba, but she said, "Too far? Wrong? I don't understand…" Her voice had calmed, but her stance remained tense and dangerous. Fiyero recognized the mixture of anger, stress, and purpose. She was Fae down to her very eyelashes right now.
"That's what Yackle's going to tell you, poppet," the crone said. "Now sit down." Horrified, Elphaba found herself obeying, as did Fiyero and Liir. She was reminded, strongly, terrifyingly, of the interview in Morrible's office. But this spell or influence or whatever it was was obviously stronger, or her age and lack of rebellious idealism over the last fifteen years had weakened her, for she found herself unable to make even the small movement of her foot that she had been able to in Madame Morrible's interview. She couldn't even change the expression on her face.
All she could do was sit in mute horror as Yackle continued.
"All right, poppet. Now that you're quiet, Yackle will tell you her tale.
"Yackle cannot tell you what she is, only that she watches over you and ascertains that the punishments you were assigned are carried out."
Punishments? Elphaba's mind screamed. But what have I done?
"You, poppet, had not done anything," said Yackle. "It was Melena and Frex."
The tables of guilt are turned, thought Elphaba, not without a guilty satisfaction.
"You were born with your skin and teeth as physical manifestations of your great power, which itself came from your dual nature," Yackle went on. "Saint and sinner, you are, a child of both worlds, worlds never intended to be unified, especially not with all the power of the reaction of their combination held in the form of a single small child.
"Your own nature set you apart from the beginning, and your power- not your mother's words, as Frex thought- did open a window of sorts in you, but after birth, and the window neither admitted sprite nor stole spirit, but for a brief time merely remained quiescently open, ready.
"When your parents gave you the name Elphaba, after Aelphaba, the window's purpose was revealed. You, Elphaba, were destined from before birth to be the one whose name would bring balance to Oz, but neither the forces of good nor the forces of evil want that balance, yet both need it. Good recognizes and accepts this, but evil, on the other hand…does not. We are not accepting, it is not in the nature of evil to be so."
The we sent shivers running down Elphaba's frozen spine.
"Thus, evil tried to punish you, to keep your name from any veneration, ever, and perhaps also to turn you to evil in your desperation as well. Since balance is the centerpoint of both good and evil, what was supposed to be your most extensive punishment and what would bring you down at the end, was the exact counter of your namesake.
"Your allergy to water. Where water protected her, it would harm you. It would deny you the opportunity to reclaim and vindicate your name. That, too, was your curse, Elphaba. You have given up your name for good and for evil, a mixture of both each time. To become Fae, and the Witch.
"But you have not fulfilled your destiny. You were to die. Your lover was to die. Your son was never to know your lineage- the entirety of his name. The child in you now was never to have existed.
"Elphaba Thropp," Yackle shook her head, "Yackle does not know who or what you are anymore. You have escaped destiny, and brought these three souls, and those of the young girls, Nor and Cassia, with you." She pointed at Elphaba, her finger as accusing as her eyes. "And now every breath you take, every insignificant thing you do- is an alteration, a defiance, of the very universe."