You can thank Ultimate Queen of Cliffies in particular for motivating me to post this a couple days sooner than I originally planned. Thank you to everyone else who also reviewed; each message you send is very special for me and brightens my days! I look forward to your thoughts on this one.
Fiyero had taken a liking to spending his time outside. It was reminiscent of his youth in the Vinkus and of rebellion of his future and a welcomed change from his miserable years spent indoors. While he spent his far too many sleepless evenings watching the stars from the roof of Briscoe Hall, he also enjoyed the shade of a specific pearlfruit tree by the Suicide Canal.
On one particular day, he worked his way through a nonfiction analysis of the Pleasure Faith, an extremist progressive religion. He wasn't a religious guy, but he had chosen the book because it held information on the Time Dragon, a mystical oracle and a tangible prophet in the form of a clockwork propaganda machine that, other than in occasional colloquial references, was a forgotten relic. While the Time Dragon was said to see "before and beyond and within the truth of time," the book didn't reveal anything about travelling through it.
A shadow fell across the page he was staring at and Fiyero looked up at the silhouetted figure above him. He didn't need to wait for her to speak to realize it was Elphaba.
"He reads."
Her hair was down today and fluttering in the wind. She removed one of the hands that was gripped on the strap of her book bag and brushed some of the unruly locks away from her eyes as she stared down at him.
"Does that surprise you?" Fiyero asked, leaning back in the grass on his elbows so he could see her face better.
"No, but Galinda would be disappointed. She's convinced you're above such behavior."
"If you don't tell her I won't," he joked. He had become so mellow, but it was true Galinda hadn't noticed. He felt the need to explain himself. "We wear different faces for different people, I guess."
"I'm afraid that is something I don't know much about. I am always a little too much for others."
She sat next to him in the grass and pulled out her lunch, and he turned to his side to look at her. Fiyero reached out to pluck one of the tart grapes she had in her hands for himself and, to his gladness, she didn't stop him.
"What do you mean?" he asked, popping the fruit into his mouth and offering her the leftovers of his cheese sandwich in payment. "Look at the way you are with Nessa in comparison to how you are with Horrible Morrible or the show you put on for others."
And her fugitive version had been different with him, somehow both gentle and powerful at the same time; vulnerable yet utterly secure. No one else in Oz had seen such a side of her, and all of that still existed in the girl at his side, whether she realized it or not.
She acted as though she didn't. "I don't put on a show."
"Oh come on," he said. "I've seen how you try frightening people who gawk at you too long. It's an amusing defense mechanism."
Between bites of grape, he kept seeing how she would glance at his sandwich until she finally seemed to cave and reach out for a piece. He gathered that not many people shared with her.
"It doesn't take much," she said, nibbling at the food. "All I have to do is look at someone too long and they go scurrying away." Just to prove her point, she stared down at him, clearly holding back a smile so she could still seem intimidating.
"I don't think you're scary at all."
She pretended to be insulted. "Not at all? I'll have to work on that."
He laughed and felt his heart swell with love. For a moment, they sat in companionable silence, watching as an eager bird skimmed the smooth, glossy surface of the canal for its lunch, all the while still picking at their own shared meal.
"So what is Prince Fiyero, the man of many faces, reading?" He showed her the cover, watching her disbelief as she clapped the last of the breadcrumbs from her beautiful hands and took the dense tome from him. Her green fingers began flipping through the text, her eyes darting all around the old paper, scanning the words at impressive speed. "I didn't think you were a pfaither."
"I'm not. Don't get me wrong, I see the values of hedonism, but religiously I'm agnostic. I've spent too long watching as too many stupid and intelligent people alike blindly follow charismatic leaders in droves out of fear and blind trust. Churches are built on that foundation. I don't want to be a part of it."
"And spiritually? How do you identify?"
"Spiritually, I'm apathetic. I'm not going to be the one to decide what's really out there. I'll leave that to much smarter people than me." On the topic of smarter people, he considered her more closely. Despite his intimate connection with Elphaba, there was little he truly knew about her and his curiosity was piqued. "You don't share your sister's reverence for the divine or what-have-you," he remarked. "So what, Miss Elphaba, do you believe in?"
"I don't comprehend religion," she admitted. "I grew up being taught that theology was the fundament on which all other thought and belief was based. It was as if the early theologians were explorers of Oz, seeking out what they believed to be good and evil, except the maps were made of invisible stuff."
"Do you think good and evil exist?"
"I don't expect to know."
"So what do you believe in, then? Only what you can see?"
"After living my life the way that I have, I would hope that I would live my life judging things by more than their outward appearances. Though, I'll admit, I find myself hypocritical at times." She looked sheepish then, and their eyes locked. The smile he gave her was forgiving.
"You still haven't answered me."
"I still haven't found an answer," she said, and at his questioning look she continued, "Although if I am to be categorized, I'm certainly an atheist and an aspiritualist. Even as I child I doubted the Unionism with which my father tried raising me, and would read countless books trying to find an ounce of satisfying logic in the various religious theories available to me.
"Since arriving at Shiz, I've spent time aiding Dr. Dillamond in his research. Much of it involves manipulating lenses to view bits of tissue backlit on transparent glass, and the enhanced glimpses of organic life it reveals are nothing short of amazing. Naturally, seeing the structures of life like that puts all of the past assumptions into question and raises new ones. As I suggested before, all previous literature is phrased in Unionist terms and pagan terms before that, and they don't hold up to scientific scrutiny."
"It's interesting how the deity becomes passé but the attributes and implications of the deity linger."
"He thinks too," she quipped, her clever eyes shining over the frames of her glasses at him.
"That is still up for debate," he said easily.
She chuckled. "If that's so, explain your choice of reading."
"Researching a possible dissertation subject," he lied. "I'm interested in the subject of time and its dimensions."
She seemed intrigued. "What of it?"
"Well," he started, trying to piece together his own weedy theories, "is it merely linear, or does it take on a more complex shape? It seems to be a constant experience among people, regardless of nationality or gender or shape or size or breed, so is accurate to describe it as absolute and equable? We all seem to perceive time in the present, but can it be possible to comprehend other dimensions simultaneously, like present or future? Is time impervious to alteration? Is it possible to move through it?"
"Those are incredibly complex ideas," Elphaba said, her face calculating as she inspected his. "What inspired them?"
He shrugged off the question, unwilling to come up with a satisfactory fib. "The pfaithers venerate the Time Dragon. I was studying that, trying to figure things out. It seems that this Clock of theirs can peep through time, suggesting that it is possible to distinguish multiple dimensions of time at once, but I don't understand how. You study magic and science—what do you think?"
"I won't pretend as though I understand magic," she said slowly.
"Do you only desire to better control yours, then?" he asked. "How maddening it must be to have such singular access to something you don't understand."
This seemed to frustrate her. "Never mind me. What, specifically, do you wish to know?"
"If one can move through time, what happens when he arrives somewhere he's already been?"
"Do you wonder if he will watch his younger self frolic stupidly," she started, her cavalier comment hitting Fiyero far too close to home for his liking, "in his older form or sort of metaphysical entity?"
"I had been considering the possibility that he could inhabit his younger body," he suggested, nervously waiting for her reaction. She remained impassive but still thoughtful.
"I wonder what happens to his original consciousness if the new one replaces it?" she mused, which was something Fiyero really hadn't thought much about. "Is it pushed away, extinguished, or simply repressed? What an interesting prompt."
"Is it feasible for him to change the future? To make it different from the one he already experienced? And what would happen to the world he had come from and the people in it?"
"I suppose with every choice he would make different from that which he already made, he'd be creating an alternate reality."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that time would most likely take on a new path, but whether the old one would even exist anymore is hard to say. But then again, this is all from the perspective of one individual, so it seems quite illogical for the lives and consciousness and developments of millions of others to simply disappear because one man moved through time. So perhaps the two dimensions would exist parallel to each other."
He groaned. "This is making my head hurt."
Her laugh was melodic. "Then perhaps you'd be best picking a different dissertation topic."
"It seemed like such a good one too," he chaffed.
"If it really interests you, I'd consider asking Madame Morrible." He pulled a face at the suggestion and she snickered. "You don't like her. She's…not that bad."
"She is," Fiyero insisted, more serious now. "She's power-hungry and manipulative and yes, I don't like her."
"Those are strong opinions for a recent transfer. Despite my personal reservations, it seems as though you have formulated opinions on good and evil and found a place for our headmistress among them."
She may have been joking, but she hit the nail spot on. If there was someone to convince him of evil's existence, it would be Horrible Morrible. How could one become so crooked otherwise?
"Greed and evil are similar creatures, if not one and the same," he justified. Fiyero remembered something the Wizard told him once when the Captain of the Guard had approached him and inquired on a subject very similar to this— Why did people so easily differentiate between wonderfulness and wickedness since they were attributes everyone possessed? The Wizard's answer had been frighteningly astute for someone so corrupt, which Fiyero carried with him, and he relayed, "I have no interest in disregarding moral ambiguities as others do. I don't see the world in black and white. I'll judge people on their choices and why they were made."
"And from where do your judgments on Madame Morrible stem?"
"I knew her before I arrived here. She doesn't remember me or else she probably would not have allowed me in."
Elphaba seemed amused. "Yes, I've heard of your reputation. Are the stories true?"
"A gentleman doesn't say," he said, grinning.
"There are gentlemen at Shiz?" she jested. "I hadn't noticed."
His face settled into a look of contentment as he continued to gaze at her. He could spend every day like this, talking about philosophy or nothing at all with her, and he'd be happy. Once upon a time, his life was still and calm until she came into it – a huge commotion – but now the opposite was true: in every moment without her there was chaos within him, and as long as she was near he was at ease.