A.N.: Here's to hoping this series is contracted for another season, because I thoroughly enjoyed most of it! It was visually stunning, and a lovely unique reimagining of the original Wizard of Oz story, a bit of fresh air after the oversaturation of Wicked and the 1939 film.
Eye of the Storm
02
"We don't have time for this. Dorothy, do you not see the sky?"
Hastening to her truck, she pulled on a jacket and hopped into the cab as thunder rumbled and the wind whipped up. The dog jumped into the truck as soon as she opened the door, and as she cranked the key in the ignition, Lucas managed to fumble with the door handle and climbed into the passenger seat. His eyes widened as the truck roared to life, no horses necessary to blaze away from the house, churning up dust.
Karen Chapman was awake, and aware, she had been told. She ignored everything else.
"Dorothy - stop this carriage. We cannot stray from the vortex for long, West can only maintain it so long. The elements rebel in your absence, even Dr Andrews' vortex cannot sustain itself for long."
"The elements were upset by East's death, I have nothing to do with them."
"You control them, Dorothy, you alone earned the gauntlets."
"Because I tricked East into shooting herself in the head. We both know I can't control the weather, what happened during the Ritual of the Elements proved that."
"No, you were drawn to Karen Chapman's coat because you felt a connection to her; there was more to be learned from your journey… Dorothy, the Ritual didn't work because you had no learning, no magical tutelage. Dorothy…you can control the elements. And you must."
"I must do nothing."
"You still believe me an illusion?" Lucas said softly.
"How did you know Jane Andrews is my mother?"
"She and I work together," he answered gruffly, his eyes on the scenery whipping past. There was no poppy pollen scattered along this road, only dust and muck from the fields, and there was not a crag or mountain or meadow to be seen for miles, only empty fields and flatness.
She did miss the changing scenery.
Lucas glanced at her, elaborating quietly, "With West. We fight the Beast Forever."
"We both know how good you are at killing; why would West send her finest soldier on an errand to collect me?" A muscle ticked in his jaw, the way it always did when he was under pressure; only his short beard concealed his tell, but she was too familiar with his face not to notice.
"Besides Silvie I am the only face from Oz you know, would remotely trust," Lucas said, and Dorothy took her eyes off the road to stare at him, amused by how out-of-touch he was with reality. Had he chosen to forget? Taken another dose of Glinda's medicine to erase what he'd done from his mind, absolve himself of guilt, so he could go back to Glinda without a hint of doubt or regret?
"The witches would send Silvie to war but not to this world," Dorothy sniffed. Whether this was all still just part of the illusion her mind had created, with Em's acceptance of Lucas all part of it, she didn't know, but she just hoped she wasn't having an argument with an empty cab. She glared at the sword Lucas had retrieved, now resting across his knees as the dog panted in the foot-well.
"Only a witch can kill another witch, Dorothy… And Leithe serves Glinda."
"Who is Leithe?"
"It is the name Mother South gave to Silvie," Lucas said quietly, looking out of the window, frowning as they approached Lucas Memorial. With a population fewer than five-hundred, their hospital was small, rather poor, but immaculate and well-staffed. "I was the only choice."
"If you insist on staying with me, leave the sword behind," Dorothy said sharply, hoping she wasn't imagining him - ironically - as she climbed out of her truck, stalking toward the ICU. She had her staff badge and a huge shadow; Lucas didn't show how bewildered he was by his surroundings, the sharp scent of antiseptic and cleaning products, awful cafeteria food and the coppery tang of blood. He had to recognise the latter, but his beautiful eyes took in the neat wards, the nurses in their scrubs, the immaculate white doctors' coats, the sterile decorations. The ICU was limited-access but she was also staff, and headed straight for the small room where Karen Chapman was propped up on pillows, hooked up to machines that beeped softly, assisting her breathing and monitoring her heartrate and blood pressure levels.
Sleepy eyes peeked over at her as she quietly entered the room, and a hazy smile touched Karen Chapman's lips as she raised a shaky hand to remove the oxygen mask over her face. Lucas stopped abruptly at the doorway, all of the technology - the science - too unfamiliar to him. It had to be frightening, to see Karen hooked up to alien boxes that flashed and made strange sounds, pouches dangling from strange silver hooks, tubes embedded into her arms.
"Karen?" she said softly, and the smile grew.
"Dorothy," she whispered, and Dorothy drew closer, concerned that her breathing was so laboured.
"You need to keep that mask on," she said softly, and Karen smiled sleepily, pressing the mask back over her nose and mouth.
Now that she was here, and Karen was conscious, and Lucas stood behind her, a hulking reminder of her imaginary Oz…she had no idea what to say. She had sought Karen for answers and been sucked into a tornado trying to get help to save her life, had fished her lab coat from the snowy dreamscape during the Ritual of the Elements, only to discover that it was her colleague, Jane Andrews, who had given birth to her. But was any of that real?
Lucas standing in the doorway suggested, yes, it was.
Her sanity demanded it was false, that Lucas was a figment of her imagination, her psyche fractured by the trauma of the tornado.
"How are you feeling?" Dorothy asked quietly.
"Tired. Achy…you?"
"I'm okay."
"Your head."
"It's a mess," Dorothy admitted, raising a hand to the cut on her forehead. But she didn't mean the physical harm she had suffered, which was minimal: The lingering doubts over her sanity were what kept her from sleeping. Not just the dreams of Lucas' hands on her body, gentle and fervent and patient as her thighs shook and pleasure swept over her like a tidal-wave: she didn't always wake from nightmares of him trying to kill her. She didn't always wake with nausea churning in her stomach, something close to guilt, for leaving him strung up, crucified. She knew too much had happened, and she didn't know how to work it out. A shrink would lock her up and throw away the key if she told them about being swept up to a magical world through a tornado.
"Dorothy," Lucas said, with all the quiet urgency she remembered, his eyes on the window, to the darkening turbulent sky.
Karen's eyes sharpened, taking in the strange cut of Lucas' coat, his boots, the way he held himself straight and tall, shoulders back. A soldier's stance. And Dorothy glanced from Karen to Lucas, and wondered…
"Karen, this is…Lucas Roan. He's…from Oz."
For a moment, there was no reaction, as Karen stared at Lucas. Then she turned to Dorothy, removing the mask. "You know…about Oz?"
"I've been there," Dorothy admitted, and Karen started fidgeting, her heartrate rising. Dorothy kept an eye on the monitor, trying to gentle her. "When I went to get help, a tornado swept me up…"
Karen's eyes closed for a few moments, long enough for Dorothy to think she had fallen asleep as her heartrate settled. Understandable, in her circumstances. "Not by accident… Nothing is accidental in this world, or any other."
"I landed in the Munja'kins' territory in the Tribal Freelands," Dorothy said quietly, testing further.
"The Munja'kins," Karen sighed, closing her eyes, looking bitterly sad. Her eyes lingered on the cut on Dorothy's forehead. "Did they hurt you?"
"They thought I was a witch," Dorothy said, and Karen's eyes opened, something uneasy in their depths. Her fingers twitched on her oxygen mask. "They voted to banish me from their lands, rather than put me to death."
"They wouldn't recognise you now," Karen sighed, and Dorothy stared at her sad expression. Karen reached for her hand, and looped fingers with hers; her thumb tapped lightly against the five little dots tattooed onto her hand. "Had they seen these, they would have let you be…or perhaps not, if their Elders remembered who you were associated with, even as an infant."
"The Wizard," Dorothy said quietly. All lies bore a hint of truth, and if the Wizard had told her only half-truths and his own shady perspective, with a broken psyche, she guessed he had told the truth about how he, Jane Andrews and Karen Chapman had ended up in Oz.
"Frank," Karen scoffed lightly, shaking her head.
"He said you were always kind to him," Dorothy said softly.
"I was… And he betrayed us. He manipulated an experiment for clean energy, just to prove a point, his own superior intelligence…or his belief in it… He killed our colleague Roberto in the accident that took us to Oz."
"Roberto," Dorothy murmured. "The Wizard told me…he said my father was called Roberto…but he lied about everything."
"Your father wasn't Roberto," Karen smiled sadly. "When we learned you were on the way, we were surprised; Jane…was fascinated by science, it motivated her like nothing else did. But she had always enjoyed creating things. And you were the most extraordinary thing she ever made." Dorothy felt her cheeks flush, her throat constrict with emotion. Karen's sad smile was motherly, reminding her of Em, the woman who had raised her, until she was twelve years old, told Dorothy she was her mother. She wondered whether it would have mattered if Em and Henry had never told her that she was adopted. She was their daughter; she wouldn't have all this doubt. "Jane…did you see her?"
"I saw her. She sent me home…" Karen shook her head.
"She shouldn't have sent you back here. Even as I left you to the care of the Gales, I always knew one day you would return to Oz."
"What do you mean?"
"Dorothy, you were born in Oz. You are of Oz," Karen said. "We were scientists, you know… We were experimenting how to harness manmade wind-tunnels to create clean energy… No-one could ever have imagined that magic truly exists, that the energy of tornados could rip open pockets in the sky into other realms…but they do."
"You're saying that…Oz is real?"
"As real as your friend over there. As real as you and I. As real as Jane… She sent you back the same way she sent us twenty years ago. How is she?" Karen asked.
"She has been taken prisoner," Lucas said, and Dorothy glanced up sharply, glaring at him.
"By the Wizard?"
"The Wizard is dead. Jane killed him, protecting Dorothy. She freed Oz from his tyranny…" Lucas said, and Dorothy clenched her jaw. "Dorothy stopped a war between men and witches before it could begin."
"Witches? They died when the tsunami struck, along with half of the Emerald City," Karen sighed heavily. "The Citadel was high enough…we watched, as Jane powered the vortex to send us back."
"Mother South survived. A new generation of witches has been born," Lucas told her, slowly coming closer, his eyes on the machines and IV drips. "The Beast Forever has risen again." A tiny smile made the corners of Karen's lips twitch.
"The Beast Forever…" She glanced at Dorothy. "In all things natural there is a system…of checks and balances… Oz is no different. The Beast Forever…from what I understood, the stories told to us by the Munja'kins…the Beast Forever is a powerful force that wars eternally with the witches, checking their power, culling the old and fragile, leaving only the strongest and cleverest to pass on their knowledge and skills… You know about the 2004 tsunami, Dorothy?"
"The Indian Ocean tsunami that struck the day after Christmas?" Dorothy frowned, and nodded. "There were nearly two-hundred thousand casualties."
"A ripple in a pond compared to the tsunamis that struck coastal Oz," Karen grimaced, placing a hand over her side as she fidgeted in her bed, sitting up straighter. She clamped the mask over her nose and mouth, breathing deeply. "Jane and I, we were in the great spire in King Pastoria's palace with you, when it struck. Half Emerald City was wiped off the map, dozens of villages and towns across the coast, even miles inland…only the mountains stopped them… Before the tsunami, the Beast Forever was a wildfire that consumed a kingdom, and killed hundreds of witches before it was quenched. A frozen rain and snows that put Oz through an Ice Age the Munja'kins still honour with their culture high up in the mountains…"
"This time, the Beast Forever takes a physical form of his own," Lucas said quietly, his eyes lingering on Dorothy. "As he was prophesied to do so… A winged beast that calls all vile creatures to his service. He ruptures the earth and sets fire to the skies. There is only one who can stop him."
"And he has Jane," Karen said softly, gazing at Lucas, and Dorothy frowned at them both. This had to be a conspiracy, her own mind turning on her. Karen took the mask from her face. "You don't look convinced."
"She believes Oz to be a dream," Lucas said, his voice drenched in sadness, as his eyes lingered on her face with a yearning that made her body respond in spite of herself. Karen smiled softly at her.
"I would have believed the same, had it not been for you," she said warmly. "You were all the proof I needed that Oz was real, when I woke up in the Gales' corn-field, you strapped to my chest. Jane sacrificed herself to send us here, where you'd be safe, until it was time."
"Time for what?" Dorothy asked, dreading the answer.
"Time for you to go home to Oz, and claim your birth-right."
"Lucas is my home," Dorothy said vehemently, her breath catching in her throat as Karen gasped, and started convulsing. A seizure. The machines started blaring, startling Lucas, and her colleagues burst into the room, telling her they needed to leave immediately. She didn't hesitate; she grabbed Lucas by the hand and dragged him out of the room. He didn't ask, didn't need to; his expression told her everything. He wanted to know what the machines were, why they made those noises, what it meant that a half-dozen people in strange clothes and white coats had descended upon Karen.
The coffee vending machine blew his mind, but Dorothy didn't notice it; she fed quarters into the machine and punched a random button, barely saw Lucas' shocked expression as a plastic cup appeared and steaming liquid filled it from an unseen spout. The scent of chocolate filled the air, and she took a scalding sip, disinterested, before passing it to Lucas.
"It's hot chocolate… It's good," she told him distractedly, pacing, watching as her colleagues rushed in and out of Karen's room. They stayed in the waiting area, mercifully empty considering it was twister season.
She eventually sat, her leg jigging, and Lucas' hand on her thigh made her body jolt, but it was so warm that she allowed it, bringing home how cold she was, how anxious, and just his proximity had always, bar one glaring exception, been utterly soothing to her. They waited like that, one of Lucas' huge hands keeping her grounded and calm as she could be, the other curled around a tiny plastic cup of cheap hot-chocolate, Dorothy doing everything in her power to sit in the waiting-room and not barge into the ICU: She knew better than to interfere, no matter how much she might regret not being there. She would only be in the way.
It was Sam who told her. Sam, who'd wanted more from her than she was prepared to give. Sam, whom she had never let close the way she had once dared to let Lucas in. Sam, who looked exhausted but not overly emotional as he told her two words, pulmonary embolism, without knowing that he was telling her the woman she had thought was her mother was now dead.
A blood clot in her lungs.
The Wizard's assassins had killed her, after all.
But the Wizard was dead; and Dorothy could do nothing to avenge her. Nothing to make her feel better.
"Dorothy… Dorothy," Lucas' voice was quiet but getting more urgent as he stalked after her, his long legs eating up the distance between them in no time, as she meandered toward the exit. There was no need to be here anymore; Karen was dead, and she hadn't been signed off to return to work yet.
He caught up to her at the truck, his hand wrapping around her wrist as she reached for the door-handle. "I do not know about these carriages but even I can see you are in no mind to drive," he said quietly, as the dog peered at them from inside the cab. The sky rumbled, and Lucas' pretty eyes lifted, his eyelashes fluttering in the wind.
"Lucas, let go of my arm and get in the truck if you don't want to be left here," Dorothy warned, her voice low and dangerous like he was used to. Real. Confirmed, by Karen…who believed Oz was real because Dorothy had been with her after waking up from her own journey through a vortex.
She climbed into the truck, Lucas quiet beside her, following suit as she buckled herself in, Toto at his feet, and drove in a daze, out of Lucas proper - which seemed like a sprawling metropolis in comparison to the villages and hamlets of Oz - following the dusty roads through empty farmlands, toward home. The place where she was raised, the ever-changing fields and farmlands and Uncle Henry's tireless work-ethic, Aunt Em's painted dinner service and the old radio, and the small, neat room they had given Dorothy when Karen Chapman had appeared out of nowhere with a baby.
The winds picked up, the sky was in turmoil, black and roiling and lit with forks of lightning, glorious cloud formations that might have made her gaze in wonder if she had been watching on television from the comfort and security of her sofa. A full-blown storm punished them, the truck struggling against the winds, visibility reducing to feet in front of them as her high beams tried to push through, and Toto barked, anxious, remembering their first trip in the tornado; he whimpered and Lucas reached out a hand to scratch his ears, comforting him. The dust-clouds lifted, and Dorothy stepped on the gas, the last stretch of road familiar to her as her own reflection, the small blue house eclipsed by farming equipment and an old red barn behind it.
"Dorothy - !" Lucas blurted, his eyes widening, and nausea churned in her stomach, her heart stopping for the second time today, and they watched the eye of the tornado touch down with enough force that they could feel it.
Staring in horror, they watched the tornado obliterate everything it touched, feeding the monster, the sky boiling with lightning and churning clouds, devastating the barn.
Henry was running back to the house, and Dorothy screamed as he disappeared.
The tornado destroyed the farmhouse she had grown up in, and swept up with it the two people most important to her.
"Dorothy!"
"Put your head down, cover your head with your hands!" Dorothy screamed, over the noise of the storm, the tornado, hunching over the steering-wheel, gasping, holding her breath against the impact as the tornado struck, and with a stifled boom and the scream of metal, the truck suddenly jerked as the winds took control, the engine stuttering and groaning as they were lifted, thrown about like ragdolls, saved by their seatbelts and the metal canister they were safe inside.
Henry… The house had been destroyed, nothing more than splinters of wood and furniture and Aunt Em's painted dinner-service and her childhood athletic ribbons sucked up to be spit out wherever the tornado decided.
They were going back.
Oz.
A.N.: If you've stumbled across this story, please leave a review.