Hi.
My dad died a few months ago. That's why I've been AWOL. I'd been one of his caretakers for years- I blame that for my increasing depression that's drained the creativity out of me- and watched as disease and dementia replaced a man that I admired. A man, now that I think about, that was a lot like my Fiyero- charming, thoughtful, sensitive, masculine, athletic, heroic. (I've always thought there needs to be a therapist that specializes in fan fiction and media- I'm sure there's a lot of psychology that can be gleaned from the products of our imaginations.)
If anyone is still with me after all this time, thank you. I'm working on getting better. Hopefully you'll be seeing more of me- that's a goal of mine. You all certainly deserve that.
At least this short chapter suits the tone of this Author's Note. If you'll remember, the last chapter had Elphaba and Fiyero discussing his time-travelling revelation and in trying to prove himself, Fiyero managed to get them in a heated tangle that really caught Elphaba off-guard and unsettled her. She's not accustomed to the idea of being intimate with anyone, let alone someone like our Winkie prince.
Knock knock.
Fiyero leaned against the door frame to Galinda and Elphaba's dorm room, his head drooping cheerlessly against the wood. Sniffling tiredly, he rubbed his palm against his eyes and his face, but it wouldn't do anything for weariness he was experiencing. He had tried to sleep the previous night, but he laid in bed for hours thinking about Elphaba and everything that had transpired after she had showed up in his bedroom earlier that afternoon.
He pondered the fourteen-hundred facial expressions she wore and every glint from her complicated eyes— that stirring under the surface as he stroked and kissed the intensely susceptible skin of her neck, that hatred that flashed the moment he abused the private knowledge of her body to influence her mind... He worried what affect his secrets had on her already unreliable sensibleness; he replayed his words again and again, cursing every way he hadn't done things differently. The most challenging of all, as he stared at the ceiling of his dark bedroom, he did so with sensation of Elphaba's long, lean form flush against him, igniting his nerves and his imagination against his will until he was hot and pulsing and aching alone in his room.
It took some effort to ease his discomfort but at least it helped the sleep come, though it was one riddled with incubi. He didn't know how the dream started but he remembered how it ended: the sight of complex but horrifyingly blank eyes sunken into a face of green, browned by bruises and blood, her body strung up on a pole in the middle of a corn field surrounded by the silhouettes of soldiers brutalizing her corpse with the butts of their rifles.
He jerked awake, sobbing, and crashed his hands over his ears as if it would muffle the resonance of the snapping bones, rocking back and forth with the sheets tangled up around his sweat-sheened legs until everything became quiet once more.
For a couple of months the nightmares were irregular but now with his mounting fears coursing just under the surface each day, dreading the end of the semester, they were back in full force. He felt foolish, like a little child, when he would wake trembling and sometimes even crying in the middle of the night, afraid to close his eyes again. His instinctive response to himself was to man up and shake it off, and then justified his paranoia by saying he didn't really need to sleep anyway.
But when the sun began its decent in the sky every day his body began to strongly disagree with this earlier hypothesis. His sluggishness didn't stop his heart from aching, however, with every thought of Elphaba in the wake of their drama, but it did allow him to make poorly thought-out decisions like, "Go knock on Elphaba's door" when the most likely outcome would be that she would slap him unconscious.
The door opened after a few long moments. It was Elphaba, looking edgy at the sight of him sagged against her door frame. He had wondered in class earlier if she had worn her black turtleneck on this day knowing that he would be watching her long, graceful neck desirously, for even in his indignity he could not deny the fire inside that flashed bright and hot at the very memory of her skin.
His eyes stung, dry and tired, and fell to the rippling material over her throat. There was no lust now. There was just shame.
"What do you want, Fiyero?"
"I just want to see if you're all right. I thought maybe we could talk."
"I'm busy," she said sharply. And, because it was Elphaba, she felt the need to justify herself: "I have three finals next week."
"Have you eaten? Take a break and get a bite with me."
"I'm not hungry. Go away, Fiyero."
"You'll come find me if you get peckish?" he suggested, without any expectation she would do so.
Her lips pursed together like she felt impatient, unforthcoming with a response. Had the situation been different, he wondered how he would feel about leaving her so wordless. This moment left no room for pride, for the silence between them was dense, suffocating, and tragic.
Her countenance was not unlike the wooden door that hid half of her body from his view: a cold, solid, impenetrable barrier closing her off despite his fragile, eager efforts at reconciliation. His sadness at this was bodily, physically manifesting itself somewhere under his skin and above his ribs.
He rubbed his head dejectedly against the wood. "You know we're going to have to talk at some point, right?" Her continued hard silence was answer enough, and he drummed his knuckles against the door frame nonchalantly as he stepped away. "Glad we had this chat."
He left then, expecting to hear the door aggressively snap shut the moment he turned his back to it. How weird it was he didn't hear it before it was too late to hear anything at all.