Chapter 5
Elphaba looked down at the child she held in her arms and smiled, a small tear falling down her face, which burned her cheek. She ignored it and stared in wonder at her child.
"She's so beautiful," Elphaba whispered as the baby closed its eyes and began to sleep
"You did it" Fiyero said, his hay rustling as he came and sat on the side of the bed. He gently kissed Elphaba's forehead, and then kissed the baby.
"Fiyero..I can't be a mother" Elphaba sighed looking down
"Yes, you can, and you are" Fiyero said taking Elphaba's chin and turned her head towards him "That baby is lucky to have a mother like you" He said and smiled
"We could be great parents huh?" Elphaba said getting up slowly, trying to ignore the after birth pain. She walked over to the small makeshift cradle that Fiyero had built, and put the baby inside it and covered it with a small blanket "How can this child be lucky to have parents like us Fiyero? Think about it, you did get a diploma for crying out loud!"
Fiyero smiled slightly and walked over to Elphaba and tried to comfort her frustration. But Elphaba shook him off, turned around and stared him in the eye.
"Fiyero, her mother is a witch, a fugitive! And her father..is.." Elphaba then stopped and looked at Fiyero and spoke lowly "you're a scarecrow. How are we supposed explain why her father is a scarecrow!"
"you could tell her the truth when the time came.." Fiyero tried to convince Elphaba, when he couldn't even convince himself of that
"no, no I couldn't. And you know why, who knows what she'll end up like! She could be magical like me, or a regular person like you" Elphaba then took a deep breath "I couldn't tell her about what happened, about Oz, about my past" Elphaba then broke down and started to sob on Fiyero's shoulder, every tear stung her face like a cut.
"stop crying, you're just going to cause yourself more pain" Fiyero said comforting her "It's true, you couldn't tell her, but we have a responsibility. A young life is in our hands, it's fate rests with our actions. We can't just refuse something that is made to be ours. We can't get rid of it"
Elphaba then looked up at Fiyero and repeated "We can't get rid of it" she then quickly turned and ran down the staircase, leaving Fiyero completely dumbfounded.
Elphaba went down the staircase until she reached the very bottom of the castle. She raced past the dining room and through the kitchen into the storage room. She grabbed the key hanging from the wall and opened the door. She then grabbed a lighted torch and began to race down the stairs to the storage room. She then threw the torch into a larger one, which lit the whole room. Her crystal ball glimmered in the light, a few papers were scattered around the floor with spells she had tried to conjure. She made her way over to the ball, picking up some of the papers on her way. She then put the papers on a dusty table beside the ball, and then looked into the ball.
After she had "died", and after Dorothy had left, her own guards had destroyed her crystal ball for no reason. When she returned, she had found it crushed into pieces. Since Fiyero and her were in a hurry, her loyal monkeys had brought her all the pieces of her precious ball over the years, and had helped her rebuild it in her new castle. She looked inside the green glowing of the ball and sighed
"This is the only way, she'll be better off without me as a mother..She'll have a real family, a real life. But where can I send her..it has to be somewhere where she will never learn of me or Fiyero.."
The ball then started shimmering. It then showed the Emerald city, beautiful as ever. It then grew black and then an image of Glinda popped up
"Glinda..Glinda would know who.." Elphaba said out loud to herself "But she can't know it's my child..then she would know that I was still alive and I would be put to death by the citizens of Oz, with Glinda's approval or not"
Elphaba then turned around, even more frustrated then before. She sat down in her dusty chair and tried to think. Fiyero then came down and sighed
"I figured you'd be down here" He said and started to look around. Elphaba then explained what she had seen in the crystal ball, and that Glinda would know what to do with their child
"It would never work Elphie..there's no way we can send a newborn child all the way to Oz" Fiyero said shaking his head "and even if we did, Glinda may have her blonde moments, but she's not a complete idiot, she would get suspicious of where the child came from, who it's parents really are and such"
Elphaba then stood up, clearly getting pissed off
"well since you're Oz's greatest thinker, I'd like you to come up with something better, cause quite honestly, I'm out of ideas!"
"You shouldn't be out and about an hour after you've had a child you know" Fiyero said quietly
"I don't care about what I should or shouldn't be doing! I'm trying to figure out how we're going to take care of our child. We barely have enough food for ourselves Fiyero..well, for me anyway. For the past 3 years, I've been living on stale bread and bananas that Chistery finds occasionally. For the past 3 years, I've been trying to figure out how to turn you back into a human. For the past 3 years, I've been running away from everyone, including myself. For the past 3 years, I've been pretending I'm someone I'm not!"
An awkward silence then filled the air. Chistery broke the silence by coming down holding his banana and stared at Fiyero and Elphaba, who weren't even looking at each other
"Miss?" Chistery asked and tugged at Elphaba's dress "Miss?"
"what Chistery!" Elphaba said sharply, which made the monkey cringe
"Little miss cry" Chistery said, surprised that she had yelled at him.
Elphaba sighed and then looked at Chistery
"I'm sorry Chistery, Miss is just a little..mad right now" She said bending down and smiled slightly
"your spell worked" Fiyero then said quietly
"It wore off, it was a failure, like everything else in my life" Elphaba said getting back up
"But it worked for a reason..some higher power made that one spell work for that amount of time. Elphie, it was the night that never ended, and you remember it. When you turned me into a human again, we stayed together, we acted like the young lovers we once were. And when the spell wore off, you found out you were pregnant. That's not a coincidence. Someone or something made sure I was human long enough to be able to get you pregnant in the first place. It was our destiny to be this child's parents...even you know that. And the one thing that wasn't a failure in your life is that child. You should be proud of what our love did."
Elphaba then walked over to Fiyero and hugged him tightly
"I am proud of my child, and I love her more then anything I can
think of. That's why I have to get her away from here, far away.
She would be better off not knowing who we were. I don't want her
to end up like me. I want her to have a normal life, not one that is
confusing and hard to go through."
Fiyero then looked at
Chistery still standing there
"You have access to see Glinda right?"
Chistery nodded "Miss Glinda"
"Give Nanessa to Chistery, then he could.."
Elphaba then looked up at Fiyero and finished his sentence
"He could give her to Glinda, without telling her where he got her and who her parents are! Fiyero, that's perfect!" Elphaba said and smiled sadly
Elphaba then started up the stairs, back to where she had laid Nanessa. Fiyero and Chistery followed silently. The cries of the baby grew louder as they approached the room. As soon as Elphaba opened the door, the baby stopped crying
"well..that was weird" Fiyero said from behind her after Elphaba stopped in her place in front of the doorway.
"It was like..she knew it was me" Elphaba said to herself as she approached the cradle. She picked up her child and cradled it in her arms.
"Tonight...tonight when she's asleep, Chistery will fly her to Glinda" Elphaba then looked at the little life in her arms "Can you two leave me alone for awhile?"
Fiyero nodded and started to walk out. But Chistery stood there completely unaware that Elphaba wanted time to herself. Fiyero tugged at Chistery's tail, which made Chistery yelp out in pain
"that was for pulling me apart in the woods" Fiyero snickered
Chistery followed after Fiyero, mad enough to pull him apart again. As soon as the door closed, Elphaba sat down on the side of her bed, and cradled Nanessa a little longer.
"I'm sorry" She whispered to the baby, and brought it up to her chest and cuddled it with all the love she could muster for something that wouldn't be hers much longer.