Sorry this update is late again, I've been (and still am) really busy with a lot of things at once. I'm not sure if I'll be able to update tomorrow night, either; otherwise the next update will come Monday morning (my time).

This is a nice, fluffy chapter for you, though!

26. Fun

"Okay," a voice said from the doorway to the dining room and Fiyero looked up from his scrambled eggs and bacon to find Elphaba standing in the doorway, still in the flannel pyjama trousers and tank top she'd slept in and with her glasses perched on her nose, but looking wide awake. She came into the room and let herself fall down on the chair opposite his, pulling the elastic band from her long hair and starting to undo her braid. "Spill. What did you find out yesterday?"

Fiyero sighed wearily and stabbed at his eggs again. "Not much," he admitted grudgingly. "Duran isn't talking. Or, well, he's talking," he corrected himself, "but the only thing he keeps saying is that it wasn't him, that he didn't stalk you or attack anyone, and that he would never do such a thing to you."

He could see the spark of hope in Elphaba's eyes at that and his heart went out to her. He himself had lost contact with all his friends after he'd left the Vinkus, but he did remember what it was like to have them. He understood how badly she wanted her friend to be just that – her friend – and not the man who had been scaring her for the past couple of months.

"Listen, Fae," he said, reaching for her hand across the table and squeezing it. "I know you want to believe that he's not our guy, but you have to agree with me that it's very suspicious. I left him alone for a while after pointing him to the bathroom, so he had the opportunity. He's in love with you, he told you that himself, so he also has the motive. Besides, how else would you explain the cufflink with the military insigne?"

"Coincidence?" she suggested, but Fiyero just gave her a look.

"Your stalker is coincidentally in the military, just like Duran, and he struck on the same night Duran confessed to you that he's in love with you?"

She bit her lip and he rubbed her knuckles with his thumb. "I'm sorry, hon," he said, "but honestly? I think Duran is lying. It's the most logical explanation."

"For you, maybe!" she burst out, pulling her hand out of his and running both her hands through her now-loose hair. "You don't really know him, but I do, Fiyero! I don't believe he could do something like this!"

He didn't say anything. He understood it had to be hard to accept for her, but he really did believe it had indeed been Duran.

"Besides," she added, her dark eyes piercing when she looked at him, "how would he have sneaked that knife inside the Palace to stick in my pillow? He passed every security check you put in place while I was in Munchkinland, including a metal detector. How did he do that, then, huh?"

Fiyero blinked. He hadn't even though of that yet. "Wait. He sneaked the knife in?"

Elphaba looked at him as if he were crazy. "Well, it's not like I leave knives lying around my bedroom, Yero," she said sarcastically.

"I thought…" He shook his head. "I somehow just assumed that the knife was yours – that he got it from your kitchen or from the dining room."

She tilted her head a little to the side. "There's only one way to find out," she said. "All the big knives we have are kept in the kitchen in a large knife block. If one is missing, Duran must have taken it. If not, do you agree with me that it might not have been him?"

Fiyero pushed his chair back and rose to his feet, waiting for her to do the same. "I suppose. Although then the question remains who it really was – not to mention how he got the knife in."

"One step at a time," she told him as she moved past him and led the way into the kitchen.

The cook, a bald man who was busy preparing something on the stove, looked up when they entered and smiled warmly at Elphaba. "Good morning, Elphaba," he greeted her. "Come to try out another recipe?"

At the questioning look Fiyero gave the young witch, she shrugged. "I like to cook," she said. "Whenever I have some free time, I usually go to the library to read, but I also often spend a few hours in the kitchen, trying out new recipes."

Fiyero was impressed. Wryly, he realised there was still so much about Elphaba that he didn't know. He was hoping he'd find out, though. When the stalker business was dealt with, that was.

The cook winked at Fiyero. "Of course, now that she's got you, I'd imagine she'll have other uses for her free time," he said jovially, at which Elphaba flushed and Fiyero rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. He'd almost forgotten that the entire Palace staff was aware of the fact that they'd slept together, thanks to those three guards and their big mouths. Awkward.

"Harron," Elphaba said, clearing her throat and getting down to business. "Are you by any chance missing a knife from the knife block?"

The cook's eyebrows rose and he nodded at the knife block on the counter. "They're all there – see for yourself. Why are you asking?"

Elphaba gave him a look and Harron pressed his lips together. "Oh. The stalker thing? What happened?"

"Let's not get into that," she said tiredly, rubbing one of her temples. "No knives are missing?"

He shook his head. Just to be sure, she and Fiyero moved over to check the knife block; but as Harron had said, all the knives were there.

Elphaba looked at Fiyero. "So he didn't get it from here," she said, a hint of relief in her voice. "That means it can't have been him, right?"

"It could," said Fiyero, but when he saw her face fall, he added, "but it's becoming less and less likely."

Elphaba turned around. "Thanks, Harron," she said to the cook before leaving the kitchen. Fiyero followed her, not back to the dining room, but down the hall to his own rooms instead.

Once she was standing in his foyer, she let out a breath she'd been holding and turned to face him. "Now what?"

"Now I go back to the police station to inform the others of what we found out," he said, "and then we'll see if Duran has maybe seen something else when he was here. Anything at all that could point us in the right direction."

Elphaba nodded. "Okay. Can I come?"

He gave her a look. "No, Fae."

She crossed her arms, obviously sulking. "I'm tired of sitting here waiting for news all the time, Fiyero. It's driving me crazy. I'm not good at waiting. I prefer taking action."

He wrapped his arms around her and pressed a kiss to her lips. "I know," he said. "I'm sorry, hon, but there's not much you can do right now."

"Where did that come from, anyway?" she muttered as she put her chin on his shoulder. "The 'hon', I mean?"

She felt his grin and heard it in his voice, rather than saw it. "I don't know. I just thought it'd be nice to have a nickname for you, other than 'Fae', and for some reason you don't strike me as the type of woman who would tolerate her boyfriend calling her 'dear', 'love', or even 'honey'. I thought 'hon' would be relatively safe."

She smirked. "It's a little… I don't know. Perky. It just sounds like something that would be used by teenagers, not adults."

"Are you calling me childish?" he asked, pretending to be wounded, and she chuckled.

"Never mind. It's fine. I kind of like it," she admitted. "You know, since I skipped the whole teenage romance stage, anyway. Because of my skin, and because of Avaric… I've never had a boyfriend before to call me nicknames or to go on dates with, you know? So it's kind of nice to have that now, immature as it may be."

He grinned at her again. "Well, I'm about as immature as they come and I wasn't planning on ever growing up, so you're lucky," he teased her, kissing her nose. "Look, I know it's hard for you to have to stay here, but with a bit of luck it won't be necessary for much longer. Let me handle this for you. It's Sunday, so leave your work be for the rest of the day and do something fun. Find the twins and go play tag with them in the garden, curl up in the library with a book, or go try out one of those recipes you mentioned earlier…" He shook his head. "You never really struck me as the cooking type, to be honest, so I was a little surprised to hear about that just now."

"I used to cook for my father and Nessa when I was young," she said with a tiny smile. "It was one of the chores Frex made me do that I actually liked. You've tasted my cooking before, too," she reminded him. "Remember all that food at the picnic in Munchkinland? The fresh bread, the cakes, the dinner leftovers we heated up?"

"That was all your cooking?" he asked in amazement. "Wow. I'd love to learn how to cook," he said. "I suck at it. Seriously. I can't even make toast or fry an egg without burning it."

She laughed. "Well, you can't be good at everything." She kissed him again and then pulled away with a sigh. "All right, you should go. I'll try not to break anything out of sheer frustration while you're gone."

"That's my girl." He grinned at her, but she could see the pride in his eyes. "You're holding up very well, you know. Anyone else would have cracked by now, but you're handling everything as if these things happen to you every day. I'm impressed."

She made a face at him. "Yes, well, you don't become the Emerald City's deputy mayor by letting every setback get you down."

"Good point." He grew serious. "I mean it, though, Fae. I admire you," he confessed. "Not just for everything you've achieved, but also for the things you've been through and the way you've handled them. I know I told you that you were cold and prickly at first, but I didn't realise how much you have to do on a daily basis or how hard you always work. That takes a lot of motivation, determination, and discipline – three things I've never really had, which is why it impresses me all the more that you have them in spades. You've got balls," he stressed, which made her chortle. "You can be intimidating and quite scary, true, but there are so many more sides to you that I didn't see at first."

She smiled ruefully. "There were a lot of qualities I didn't see in you at first, either, you know. Besides, you're not the only one. I've hardly ever met anyone who looked past my skin and my 'scary' attitude right at first. I've always been like that, even before I became the deputy mayor. It was a defence mechanism, I guess."

He kissed the top of her head. "Honestly, sometimes I wonder what in Oz you're doing with me. A woman like you shouldn't be with a silly playboy who's never achieved anything in his life."

She rolled her eyes at him. "You're an idiot. Now go," she urged him. "The sooner you figure this out, the better."

"True." He pulled away from her with obvious reluctance and childishly blew her a kiss at the door. "I hope to be back sooner this time – maybe even in time for dinner. Maybe we could spend some time together tonight?"

She smiled. "That'd be nice."

He left and she went to the library and spent the next few hours reading, trying her hardest to keep her mind off things. When she went to have lunch with Oscar and the twins, the latter two were complaining.

"Auntie Galinda and Uncle Cohvu said yesterday that they wouldn't be coming over today because they wanted to spend some time together," Xalo said grumpily, his arms crossed to show his discontent. "And we just asked Grandpa if he could tell us another story, but he says he's busy."

"Oh no," said Elphaba, looking at her father. "None of that. If I'm forced to take a day off, Dad, then so are you. Work can wait until tomorrow. Have you finished eating?" she asked the twins, who nodded, and Elphaba pushed back her chair. "Come on, then, let's go to the garden. We're going to play some games. You, too," she instructed her father, who sighed, but complied; and when Fiyero returned to the Palace a few hours later, it was to find the mayor in the garden, glancing around suspiciously.

Fiyero cleared his throat. "Oscar?"

"Shh," the older man shushed him. "I'm trying to listen. Look out, children," he called. "The Big, Bad Bully is coming for you!"

There was a giggle and Oscar whirled around and ran, with surprising agility for a man his age, over to a cluster of bushes and plucked Xalo out from behind them. "Got'cha!"

"Grandpa!" Xalo whined. "That's not fair! You made me laugh!"

Oscar laughed and tickled his grandson. "Come on, help me find your mother and sister."

Fiyero's eyebrows had risen a bit and Oscar told him in passing, "Hide and seek. Do you want to help me look?"

"Elphaba is playing hide and seek?" the bodyguard asked incredulously. Despite his suggestion to her about playing in the garden with her kids, he hadn't really expected her to actually do it.

"She's good at it, too," Xalo said, huffing. "She and Fawn both. It's not really fair, anyway. They're green. They blend in with the bushes much better than I do."

Fiyero grinned.

"And they don't giggle," Oscar added, which made his grandson sigh.

"That, too," he conceded sulkily.

Fiyero laughed. "What else have you done today?"

Xalo brightened. "Well, this morning Fawn and I played videogames and we read for a bit," he said, "but at lunch, Mum said we'd all go outside together, so then we first played tag for a while, and then we did hide and seek inside the Palace, only that was a bit too big for one person to search, so we moved outside after a while to continue there. We all thought at first that Mum was really good at finding people," he recalled, scowling, "but then we found out that she cheated. She used that spell she also used to find me on our party – a locating spell – so she knew where we were hiding."

Fiyero had to suppress more laughter. Xalo looked genuinely indignant about the whole thing, but the mental image of Elphaba, smirking as she located everyone with her magic and then pretended to be a star at the game, was fairly hilarious. He could see her do it, too.

"Come on," Xalo said. "Let's go help Grandpa find them."

The three of them spread out across the garden to find the girls. Having been trained as a hunter during his childhood in the Vinkus – an old tradition that had seemed pointless at the time, but came very much in handy once he became a bodyguard – Fiyero managed to track Fawn down easily. Instead of calling out to Oscar, however, he ducked into her hiding place with her.

She scrutinised him with large, dark green eyes. "You're not going to betray me?"

He shrugged. "Hiding along with you is much more fun." He nudged her playfully. "You found yourself a good spot."

"I know," she said, beaming at him, but then she sobered. "Do you know who is after Mum yet?"

Fiyero shook his head. "Sorry, kiddo," he said. "I'm trying, I swear, but I don't know. Whoever it is, he's very good at hiding and not leaving any tracks."

Fawn sighed and Fiyero reached out to squeeze her shoulder. "Hey, no worries, okay? We'll find him."

She nodded. "Okay. And if you do, are you and Mum going to be married?"

He stared at her.

"You and Mum said that you'd go dating first," she reminded him. "Now you've been dating for a while, right? So are you going to get married?"

"Um…" Fiyero floundered. "Well… not yet. I mean, not for a while. I mean… we haven't really talked about it. We haven't been dating for long, you know," he tried to explain. "People usually date for at least a year or so before getting married."

"Oh." Fawn looked disappointed, but then she brightened again. "But you'll stay here with us until you do? Get married, I mean?"

Fiyero chuckled a little awkwardly. "Sure. If your mum will have me."

Fawn nodded confidently. "She will. She likes you a lot, I can tell."

Their little heart-to-heart was interrupted by Oscar going, "Found you!" and picking Fawn up from her hiding place, spinning her around before putting her down on her feet. "Ha. Two down, one to go. Now where is your mother?"

The twins and their grandfather continued their search, leaving Fiyero to ponder Fawn's words. Did Elphaba really like him? She'd laughed at him that morning, but he'd been serious when he'd asked her what she saw in him. He truly didn't understand. He'd gotten to know her as a strong-willed and independent young woman, powerful not just with regard to her magic, but also in personality. She was smart and assertive, but also had a softer side. She was a wonderful mother, a good friend, and a pretty impressive witch. She'd achieved so much in her life and he… well, hadn't.

He was willing to admit now that perhaps part of his initial dislike for her had been the fact that he was jealous. He'd had so many opportunities to do something with his life, but he'd thrown them all away; while she had hardly had any opportunities at all – she'd made her own. All right, she hadn't exactly treated him very graciously in the beginning and he hadn't made a great first impression, either, but even back then he'd admired her, in a way. He just wondered if this could last. How long would it take for her to realise that he was only dragging her down? The magical, single-mum deputy mayor and the bodyguard who never even graduated university. It seemed like a joke.

"What're you dreaming about?" someone suddenly asked from behind him, making him jump. He turned to find Elphaba smirking at him from behind a tree. "I'm sorry. Did I scare you? I seem to have that effect on people."

He rolled his eyes at her. "You startled me, that's all." He quirked an eyebrow. "Shouldn't you find a better hiding place than that?"

"Now that you mention it, yes." She appeared from behind the tree trunk, took his hand, and tugged him over to the tree. She quickly clambered up the branches and motioned for him to follow her, which he did. Together, they perched on a thick branch near the trunk, high enough so that they wouldn't instantly be seen from the ground.

"Am I glad I decided to wear jeans today, rather than a skirt," Elphaba said with a little snigger. She glanced over at Fiyero. "If I get caught, it'll be your fault for not blending in with the leaves well enough."

He laughed. "We can't all be green, Fae. Sorry."

She stuck out her tongue at him.

He looked at her a little curiously. "You haven't asked me about today yet."

"No," she said. "I don't want to think about that right now. We can talk later." At the slightly amazed look he gave her, she shrugged. "You told me to spend the day having fun," she reminded him. "I am. Don't spoil my fun by talking about my stalker. We have plenty of time to worry about that later."

He had to smile at her logic. "Okay."

"Now shh." She pressed her finger to his lips. "Or they'll hear us."

Grinning impishly, he scooted a little closer to her. "I suppose you'll have to find a way to shut me up, then, don't you?"

"Mmh." She kissed him. "How's that?"

"I'm not sure," he said. "I'm still talking, aren't I?"

She kissed him again, more thoroughly this time, and Fiyero buried his fingers in her hair. Unfortunately, their moment was broken all too soon by two little voices singing, "Mama and Fiyero, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!"

Elphaba broke away, grimacing, and Fiyero buried his face in his hands. "Guys, please!"

"How did you even find us?" Elphaba demanded, her cheeks flushed.

Xalo smirked up at her. "Grandpa spotted Fiyero's sweater."

"It's red," Fawn stressed. "It's kind of hard to miss between all those leaves."

Oscar laughed and ruffled both their hair. "Caught, Elphaba," he said to his daughter, his eyes twinkling. "And kissing in a tree, no less. I've always regretted missing your childhood, but things like this make me feel like I'm the father of a teenage girl after all."

Elphaba groaned. "You're never going to let me live this down, are you?"

"Never," Oscar assured her cheerfully.

Elphaba grumbled and gave Fiyero a glare. "I told you you didn't blend in well enough."

He just gave her his best innocent, puppy-eyed expression in reply and then kissed her again. She didn't have many more complaints after that.