Thank you xFroggyFernyCabbagex, So Anyway and Phases of Obsession for your orders! I have a Dream Fiyero coming your way right now!

If you're interested in playing a game, keep a look out for a couple of lines I took from the book. One of my favorite lines that Elphaba deadpans in MaGuire's masterpiece is in this, as a matter of fact. :)

Elphaba found, as she tended to her fresh injury, that the only thing that could compete with the discomfort of the bleeding mess of her leg would have been her damn broomstick trapped against her back. It was the primary symbol for her alternate identity and therefore very important that no one discovered it, but she didn't have the heart to give it up after so long toting it around. As soon as she took a look underneath her torn skirt, however, the stiffness from hiding the long, knotted stick behind her back under her cape was quickly forgotten.

The lion's sharp claws mangled the skin and muscle of her leg enough that the sight of it made her sick to her stomach. Elphaba's head turned away, her wet, messy waves falling in her face, blocking the stomach-turning wound from her sight. Taking a deep breath and releasing it as a shuddering sigh, she found herself appreciating Levin even more for her healing ability and her magical potion, not to mention her generosity in giving her some of the brew.

The potion wouldn't do any good if she bled to death, however. She was attempting to stop the blood by pulling up the bottom of her skirt and bunching the material over the lesions. It was somewhat boring waiting for the flow to stop, but she decided to take advantage of the peace and quiet of where she was sitting to rest.

Out of the corner of her eye, however, she saw a bright blue and white figure nearing her. So much for peace and quiet.

Dorothy plopped down on the damp earth at Elphaba's side, watching her silently as the witch moved a new section of the ripped material over her injury. Finally, Elphaba became peeved enough with her new audience that she ceased ignoring the child and looked up at her with disdain.

"Can I help you?"

"I, uh…" Dorothy started, her brown eyes darting down uncomfortably. Elphaba knew she probably shouldn't have sounded so unkind to the young girl, but when she was this girl's age, at least she had enough of a backbone not to be ultra sensitive to something as minor as a tone of voice…

She was ready to shoo the sad thing away, but Elphaba then felt the compassion she never truly received in her life as she watched their breaths rise in a faint mist in front of them. Her arms were cold without the sleeves she had torn off to make bandages, but she still had her thick, wool cloak over herself. Little Dorothy was only wearing her little blue dress and thin socks under the sparkling shoes, so she must have been freezing. Elphaba was the kind of person that she would have given up the cloak from her own back, but not only was her own cape soaked with blood and rain, it was doing more than covering her bare arms– it was also hiding the ever important Grimmerie and her distinctive magical broom.

She did have her old wrap that Glinda found in the attic of the Emerald Palace, however. It was worn out and good for hardly anything anymore but a small pillow when rolled up, but it had to be better than nothing. She reached in and pulled out the thin material from under the large book in her bag and threw it lightly to the girl.

"Put that around you."

"Oh! Thank you," Dorothy said, her voice timid but her eyes glittering with appreciation as she pulled the cloth over her shoulders. "I…I actually came over here to say that: thank you. You saved my life before."

"Oh. Yeah, well, I'm sure you would have done the same for me." She didn't mean it; it just sounded like the right thing to say. Dorothy nodded slightly and looked down at the nasty wound underneath Elphaba's shredded skirt.

"It looks like it hurts. I mean–" Dorothy continued, probably after seeing the cynical expression that not even the normally straight-faced Elphaba was totally able to hide, "–of course it hurts, but just the way it looks. It's so…red. It just seems like all the colors here are so much brighter, bolder. Oz is just so beautiful and extraordinary; I wouldn't even have thought that people would bleed here, or that there would be evil, or that they could die…"

Nessarose, Fiyero… They could bleed, they could die. And in the case of two of Oz's most powerful, the Wizard and his press secretary, there was evil.

While she would have probably preferred to have been left alone to tend to herself and her self-pity, her heart reached out to this small girl, who was still shivering despite the wrap she had enveloped around her.

"I used to be like you."

Dorothy seemed surprised at the older woman's remark. The poor child, she was so uncomfortable in this world; maybe where she came from, there wasn't anything like terrifying or glittering witches or wizards or talking Animals… Maybe all she knew was a world of dull hues.

"I used to believe that Oz was good and beautiful. For years I believed this."

"What changed? Was it because of the Wicked Witch of the West coming about?"

Sweet mother of Ozma! This girl hadn't been there for three days yet she was already well rehearsed and sure about the Wicked Witch of the West. But Elphaba considered her question anyway. What changed? That was easy. She met the Wizard and saw him and the head of her old school for what they really were. And in turn they made her Wicked.

"It was pretty close to the same time, yes," Elphaba replied, holding back from adding how only minutes divided the events. Other than the small details, maybe this was her one opportunity to set the record straight with someone who couldn't so easily immediately pigeonhole her simply by looking at her. What did she have to lose? "But I won't say that she was wicked. She might have scared people, but she never hurt anyone. Intentionally, at least…"

"How does wickedness happen?" Dorothy asked, her eyes wide and curious with naïveté.

That was a good question, Elphaba thought, one that she had considered many times in months past as she tried to sleep on spoiling newspapers that all declared her evilness. Of course, the questions were framed much differently in her mind: Why did all of this have to happen? Why me? What is so wrong with me?

"Dorothy, do you think people born that way? Or are they made to be by others?" she asked pensively, and the girl frowned in thought. "You see, my theory is that it doesn't matter how much generosity we have nor how much we care about things, because in the end it makes no difference. What does is what other people think of you. I'm not saying that's right or reasonable, but that's the way the world works. If someone looked at the Witch and decided, 'I don't like her. She's green. She must be evil. I don't like what she's saying either, so she must be lying,' and everyone agreed, it wouldn't matter what she was like as a person: if she wanted all her life to be looked at differently at a first glance, or if she remembered being held in her mother's warm arms, or if she longed feel a lover's gentle touch… No, she would be forever viewed as wicked. And that's that."

"So you're saying the Wicked Witch, that she had a mother?"

"Of course she did," Elphaba answered, her tone emphasizing the silliness of the question. "And a sister, too, as I'm sure you're well aware of with your entrance here. Nice shoes, by the way," she couldn't help but add, her voice dripping with bitter sarcasm. With more important things to focus on, she had managed to distance her heart from those beautiful slippers, but that didn't stop her from being outraged at it all. What kind of person takes a dead woman's shoes, anyway?

"Oh, they're terribly uncomfortable. We've been walking for nearly two days straight, barely resting for a couple hours here and there, and my feet are killing me! And my socks are so sweaty, it's not to be believed."

"Then take them off."

"I've tried, but they're stuck! There's something the matter with them; they're too tight. Maybe I'm growing."

Elphaba's forehead furrowed as she turned her gaze back down to the beautiful shoes. She doubted the girl simply outgrew the shoes since taking them from her sister. They obviously were able to come off from Nessa, so why wouldn't they now? Her sister didn't place a curse on them posthumously, of course, not that she had the knowledge or power to do so anyway. So who did Dorothy encounter that did?

Glinda did, of course. But that didn't make sense. It was one thing to give the girl the shoes out of spite for Elphaba stealing her boyfriend, but to make it so the girl couldn't rest her aching feet at all? All because Glinda didn't want Elphaba to take them? The two women didn't even discuss the shoes until after Dorothy began making her way to the Emerald City, so after these years of separation did Glinda really know her well enough to anticipate such an uncharacteristic reaction from the so-called terrorist? Surely not.

"They won't come off?"

"Yes!"

"That's odd."

"No more odd than animated apple trees or men made of tin, I suppose." Dorothy opened the top to her basket to reveal her little dog and she scratched its head. "So, you're acquainted with that bear?"

Elphaba attempted a deep, calming breath as she looked down at the simple girl. Here she was, possibly bleeding to death, and little Dorothy was asking about her social relations? This was the same girl that managed to make every front page in a day of arriving in Oz for dropping a house on her one and only sibling. Just because she gave her something so she wouldn't get sick from the cold didn't mean that she wanted to be friends and continue to chit chat. So what was she supposed to say? And why in Oz's name did she always want to express her thoughts so badly?

She looked over the girl, trying to decide what about the child made her want to open up. Maybe it was simply because she was the first person that had actually listened to what she had to say.

"He's a Bear," Elphaba corrected, enunciating the capital pointedly. "And yes, we've met."

"He didn't seem to know you at first..."

"It's been a while."

It was true. Hell, Elphaba hated lying if she didn't have to; in her experience, brutal honesty got so much more accomplished.

"I've spent most of my adulthood fighting to get these Animals back their rights," Elphaba started. "Years ago, Oz experienced a great drought, and soon politicians, powerless to do anything to improve the situation, looked to find someone to blame for it. Since then, Animals have slowly but surely been stripped of their rights as Ozian citizens, of their pride, and even in some cases their ability to speak. It's been a vicious downward cycle for all of them and it has lead to even the best and brightest of Animals bleating and crawling on all fours or cowering in forests, waiting for the day when politicians decide to finish them off, once and for all."

"That's terrible."

"That's politics for you. That's the kind of stuff that's worth living to fight for…to die for."

Elphaba looked away, covering her mouth with a hand as she thought about the sacrifices that had been made. Oh, Fiyero....

"Would you really have burned down this forest if they didn't do as you asked?"

"No," the witch said truthfully. "The wood is too wet anyway; it would have taken forever to catch alight."

Dorothy smiled at that and said, "You were quite convincing."

"Yes, well, I've always broken boundaries and expectations. I see no need to stop now."

Speaking of stopping, she peeked under the dark material she was holding firmly against her thigh, and indeed in the time she spent talking with the young girl the blood flow had slowed. It wasn't perfect but she didn't have the patience to continue to wait, so she pulled out the tiny vile she had tucked into a small pocket at her waist and looked at the healing potion carefully.

It was transparent yet milky looking; thicker than water but thinner than oil. Any other day she would have completely distrusted the liquid and simply toughed out the injury, but other than her comatose state a couple days prior, she hadn't properly slept for the better part of a week. She was far too exhausted to care the consequences, just as she most likely wouldn't have cared what would have happened if the wood hadn't been wet earlier when she was holding the flaming log in her hand…

Her hands were slick with ruby-red blood, so it took a couple tries to pull off the cork from the little bottle. Dorothy, looking on with interest, clearly wanted to ask the woman a million questions but held back and instead watched silently as Elphaba exposed the nasty wound on her leg and dripped the strange liquid over it. She very carefully tipped one, two, three, four drops over the wounds, making sure not to miss and waste any of the precious concoction, and they stared at the mangled flesh for a moment, waiting for a reaction.

She was expecting something soothing, maybe cool, but it was anything but; it took only half a second for the most intense, torturous pain to explode from throughout the abrasions. Her cry got caught in her throat, and the heel of her boot and her long fingers all dug deep into the dirt as she writhed about. She opened her watering eyes enough to see Dorothy's innocent face filled with concern before she blacked out.

When she awoke, she felt no pain. She was not lying in the same position, either, nor was she clothed like she had been before, and thankfully Dorothy was no longer staring at her. But she was not alone.

Elphaba found she was in a clearing in a forest, completely enclosed by trees. She was warm, dry and comfortable, despite the odd location, for she was wrapped in her thick cloak and strong arms around her nude body. She smiled and turned, and sure enough it was Fiyero, his handsome features lit by the glowing moon.

She remembered this place. She and Fiyero found the spot after their first day together after leaving the Emerald City. It was the most memorable and incredible night of her life, and she knew that from then on she wanted to wake up like that every day in his embrace. The next few nights on their adventure were just as wonderful, but of course all good things must end, and in Elphaba's experience, all good things came to cruel, morbid, and life-altering conclusions. But here she was, despite it all, gazing into Fiyero's eyes once again.

"Hello," she whispered.

"Hi," he said just as softly, brushing her hair out of her face with the most gentle of a caress.

"This is a dream."

"If so, I like this dream," he replied contentedly, and she had to agree with him. She watched him as he stroked her hair, captivated with the way the blue of his eyes intensified in the dim light and how his messy hair looked so un-princely yet absolutely gorgeous at once.

"It seems every time my eyes close, you're there, haunting me."

"Haunting you?" he laughed, and her heart leapt giddily upon hearing it. "I'll make sure to haunt you more often then, because I have never felt so good nor have you ever been so breathtaking."

She was ready to retort with something sarcastic about how ridiculous that statement was or about how they had managed to turn into such silly romantics, but she stopped herself. This was nothing but another fanciful vision, an interpretation of the strongest of her heart's desires. She knew that as soon as she would wake, she would be forced to face the strong likelihood of finding his murdered corpse, and that made saying anything at all tremendously difficult.

As soon as he lowered his lips to hers, however, none of that mattered. Even if this was all part of some vivid fantasy, at least here in her mind he was alive and his body was living, breathing, and impassioned at her touch. She responded to him with fervor, deepening the kiss, trying to memorize everything about him: the softness of his skin over his well-built chest and shoulders, the way his hands slid down her body, how his thick golden hair curled around her fingers, and the feel of his mouth against hers, kissing her so passionately…

Suddenly, he was no longer warm under her touch. He collapsed heavily onto her shoulder, his eyes rolling back behind his eyelids, which became as pale and blue as the rest of his body, and his skin was cold as ice. She rolled over swiftly but carefully so she could look down at him and she called out his name but he would not wake.

"No, Fiyero, please…I can't watch you die again…" she pleaded softly, running her hands through his hair and across his cheeks, which became ever more soaked in his blood the longer she looked at him. "I can't do this…"

She kissed his forehead, not caring that she tasted the metallic bitterness of blood on her lips, and closed her eyes as she held him tightly to her. She refused to let go this time.

It took her a few minutes until she stirred awake again. She had returned to her resting spot against the tree in the Pine Barren, and she was once again soaked to the bone from the constant rain and perspiration. Her chin was resting against her chest, so she lifted her head and blinked away the drowsy fog from her vision to see Rainier, Dorothy, Boq, and the Lion all sitting nearby, talking amongst themselves.

She buried her face into her hands, remembering her vision so clear that her eyes prickled with potential tears. Elphaba did not cry, however. She simply wrapped her arms around herself to try and gain some comfort.

As she sat huddled there, drained and weary, she considered resting her eyes. She knew the moment her lids shut she would be dreaming again. Would she dream of Fiyero? Would he be holding her, caressing her, loving her? Or would she be gripping him again, dead in her arms, or watching as his body was forced behind mysterious doors?

She shook herself awake. She shouldn't be concerned with her dreams with him, but rather the reality for them both. She needed to get to the Emerald City – Glinda was waiting for her to arrive – and figure out what ever happened with their prince. After that, she didn't know what she would do, except probably leave Oz for good. She also considered traveling to Kiamo Ko and living out the rest of her days there. Even if she was alone when she did so, it would be what Fiyero would have wanted for her as she would be safe in his family's home.

She was so lost in her own thoughts that she didn't even notice that little Toto, Dorothy's dog, came trotting over until he hopped into her arms. Instead of setting the dog aside, for she was too worn down to continue acting so grumpy, she stroked the surprisingly soft fur and took solace in the mutt's persistence at nearness to her. Maybe the ugly thing wasn't so bad after all.

Dorothy followed her dog over and knelt at Elphaba's side. "Are you all right?" she asked uncertainly.

"I've been better."

Her eyes turned over to her friend the Bear, who neared and stood over her.

"The child and her friend have agreed to accompany you the rest of the way to the Emerald City if you find you are ready to travel," Rainier explained, and Elphaba found herself grateful for his straightforwardness. "If not, you are always welcome here, young Miss Fae, until you are rested and well."

"I truly hope you can come with us," Dorothy said, taking Toto out of Elphaba's hands. "Do you think you can walk?"

It took Elphaba a moment to remember that she was injured, and that injury was the reason she fell unconscious and into her dream-state in the first place. She looked down at her leg and pushed aside the material of her skirt to look at her wound: it was still red but it already appeared as if new skin was forming, attempting to pull itself together, however roughly. She pulled over the ripped sleeves she had set aside and tied it around her limb, forcing the cuts closed. She gritted her teeth until she managed to get the knots tied and sat back, breathing heavy. At least it no longer stung and burned like the fresh injury had but rather just throbbed and ached. That sort of pain was easier to deal with, and with that in mind she forced herself to her feet. Well, that was a start.

"Yes, I think so."

"I have convinced the Lion here to escort you all the rest of the way for protection, to make up for the earlier…misunderstanding," Rainier explained, nodding his head at the large Animal of whom he was referring. "Maybe he could get some courage from the experience."

Elphaba looked over to see the Lion gripping his long tail obsessively and overanxiously in his huge paws and heaved a heavy sigh. "You have got to be kidding me," she muttered darkly.

But with that, Elphaba set off unwillingly with the motley crew with the firmly established identity of Fae amongst them. The next couple hours of her life seemed longer and more unbearable than her entire frozen flight over the Madeleines, with the girl adamant that they sing songs to pass the time. Elphaba refused to join in with the merriment, and it took everything she had to discourage them from trying to link arms with her and skip the rest of the way to the Emerald City.

When they didn't sing, Dorothy would whine about how much she missed Kansas and Aunty Em and her uncle What's-His-Name; Boq would begin to rant about how much he hated the Wicked Witches and how miserable of a being he was, not having a heart; and the Lion would tell anyone who would listen how he would be king of the forest one day.

"Release me," mumbled the witch. "Whatever my faults, I don't deserve this."

Review? Please? With Fiyero on top? (Ooh, that sounds like a better deal than I had originally meant. ;) )