The Emerald And The Ruby

by Straight_jacketed

Summary:

Seeking a friend and fellow misfit, a chaos-loving shapeshifter joins forces with a green-skinned witch out to bring down a dictator, and before either of them know it, they've become Oz's least-favourite team...

Chapter 1: The Haunting

Notes:

And here we have a brand-new story, one conjured up largely on a whim and presented to you for the first time.

Well, it was inevitable that these two loveable rebellious misfits met, really. As for how it'll go... you'll just have to wait and see.

Please note that I'm incorporating elements from the musical and the movie here, along with a few of my own bizarre little headcanons about the state of Oz's technological development.

Without further ado, my latest story: read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Elphaba wasn’t sure when she first realized that she was being haunted.

However, to hear the servants around Colwen Grounds tell of it, it had begun mere days after she was born.

Around that time, everyone in Munchkinland had been up in arms over the arrival of the governor’s monstrous firstborn baby, and the gossips among the staff had all done their part in sharing everything they’d seen: the unnatural green skin, the hail of moving objects, the disgrace, the shame, all of it.

But less than a week later, one of the maids had caught the gardener having a quick nip of a flask behind the potting shed, and the only reason why he hadn’t been reported and fired on the spot was because the maid had been looking for a quiet place for a smoke; so, instead of reporting him, the maid sat and listened to the gardener’s reasons for drinking, and eventually bundled them up into another tall tale for the rumourmill.

The story went that the gardener had been trimming the hedges that afternoon, in a grumpy mood over the latest round of questions from the thrillseekers eager for news about the monster baby, when something on the very edge of the property had caught his attention: a vivid red-and-pink haze making its way across the wall, shifting from a haze of light to human to bird to cat to wolf and back again as it moved.

He’d only seen it for half a minute at the most, but it had been enough to terrifying him beyond the limits of composure, hence why he’d needed a belt from his flask. He didn’t know the haunting presence he’d glimpsed was a ghost, a demon, or something even worse, but he knew for a fact that it was another sign of how unnatural Governor Thropp’s daughter was if such things were drawn to her – for why else would such a thing be here?

And of course, the maid told the story to the cook, who told the story to the bootboy, who told the story to the butler, who told the story to another maid, and so the rumours spread. And every servant who heard the story and spread it further agreed that, regardless of whatever this strange shapeless red figure really was, the haunting presence could only portend doom for the Thropp family.

Years later, with her mother’s grave growing cold and her father raging over his new daughter being born a cripple, Elphaba knew that they were right.

---

The first time Elphaba herself saw the haunting was in her childhood years.

It had happened in the wake of yet another one of Elphaba’s magical rages, and once again, it had left the neighbourhood kids running in terror, Nessa screaming in fear, and her father yelling himself hoarse at Elphaba for disgracing the family yet again.

Elphaba didn’t know how to explain herself to him. She couldn’t understand how it had been her fault that objects had just started rising into the air and flinging themselves around willy-nilly, but it was all the same. It was just one of the many unnatural things about herself that she had to get used to.

But once father had stormed off in a rage and all other witnesses had slipped out of sight, Elphaba had glanced out into the lush greenery beyond their little playground – and in that moment, she saw it: a red shape, vague and ethereal at this distance, but definitely changing shape as it flitted across the grounds: motes of light, birds, cats, wolves, armadillos, insects, even little girls her age.

For a moment, Elphaba was tempted to follow, to see where it was going and maybe learn a little more about it… but then she remembered that father was already angry with her. She’d been enough of a burden to him for one day without chasing after ghosts, especially ones that were drawn to her for being unnatural and ugly.

So, before the shape could get any closer, she’d turned and ran indoors without a second glance.

---

Elphaba had caught other glimpses of it over the years, but only out of the corner of her eye and never long enough for her to be sure that it was even there.

Every time she’d seen it, she’d done her best to ignore it, knowing that her father would be all the angrier if he ever learned that it was real, and that she’d be in for even harsher treatment as soon as people realized that the haunting was her fault.

For the longest time, Elphaba thought it was just something the weird quirk inside her had conjured up to make her life even harder, or, as one or two of the less-stable servants had suggested, a sign that Oz himself had cursed her with a portent of doom as punishment for her ugliness. Of course, both possibilities had only encouraged her to ignore it even more: after all, why pay attention to a haunting you conjured up without knowing it? It was like going mad – the more you thought about it, the worse it got.

But then came her first day at Shiz: she’d lost her temper in public and accidentally revealed what she really was before all the world, and right then and there, she should have been punished. The quirk should have ruined her already-ruined life, probably sent her back home in disgrace or even to prison for the damage she caused that day… but instead, Madame Morrible had given her an opportunity that Elphaba had never imagined for herself – or even believed that she deserved: a chance to climb out of the governor’s shadow and into the light as Grand Vizier of Oz, the magical right hand of the Wizard himself.

Bewildered and euphoric, Elphaba wandered the university grounds in a daze, enraptured by visions of the future and feeling genuinely optimistic for the first time in her entire life. But as she’d made her way back across the grounds towards the dormitories, she’d caught a glimpse of something red flickering through the air out of the corner of her eye… and this time, she didn’t ignore it.

Several hundred yards away, Elphaba recognized the familiar haunting, the same scarlet shape making its way across the horizon, shifting from animal to human and back again with dozens of new shapes she hadn’t seen before.

And for the first time in her entire life, Elphaba realized that it was watching her. Whatever it was, it was still too far away to get an idea of what it looked like while it was in human form, but there was no mistaking the fact that it was turning to look directly at her.

Maybe it wasn’t just something her powers had conjured. Maybe this thing really was drawn to her. After all, Madame Morrible had finally helped her realise just special she really was; maybe this was just another facet of it, another sign of greatness.

And for the first time, Elphaba smiled at the sight of that strange red phantom blurring its way along the horizon.

“Bring me luck,” she whispered.

Then she ran back indoors, practically skipping all the way.

And the strangest thing of all about that day was that, even though she had no proof to speak of, she had the impression that the haunting had heard her.

---

Elphaba saw the haunting again many times throughout her days at Shiz, a glimpse here, a visitation there, never enough to see up close, but more than enough to give her confidence.

It was there on those teeth-grinding nights when she feared that Glinda would drive her mad with her endless patter, a faint red glow visible through the window, grounding her in the moment.

It was there on her lonely walks across the campus after dark, a ruby glow leading her through the dark, almost like the ignis fatuus of legend, except this wisp was guiding her to safety instead of doom.

It was there when Fiyero nearly ran her over, guiding her away when she’d finally had enough of the handsome prince’s chit-chat.

It was there after Elphaba freed the lion cub from the cage with Fiyero’s help, hovering on the very edge of the grounds as Elphaba had grappled with her feelings, bracing herself for disappointment and telling herself that Fiyero would never love her back.

And as she and Glinda took the train south to the Emerald City, she could see that same red blur following them through the countryside, a scarlet ghost somehow keeping pace with the train in a dozen different shapes.

And maybe it had been her imagination, but as Elphaba took flight for the time on the day of her great rebellion against the Wizard, she could have sworn she saw a tiny glimmer of red on the horizon far below...

---

Days later, Elphaba settled into her first hideout, a simple cave deep in a forest well away from the prying eyes of patrols and Flying Monkeys.

It was cold and more than a little bit on the damp side, but at least there was plenty of room: she’d already stashed her bedroll, the Grimmerie, some maps, and enough provisions to keep her going for the next few weeks without having to go foraging for more. She’d even conjured up a campfire of smokeless flame so that she could have light and warmth without alerting any passers-by to her hideout. From here, Elphaba could begin planning the next stage of her rebellion, and with any luck, it would remain too obscure for anyone to pay any attention to.

Little by little, she began laying out her maps and notes in order, all of them gathered from the various outposts she’d raided along the way, ready to plot out the first of her targets in the liberation of Animals across Oz.

With local police forces, the Gale Force “secret” police, the armies of each of Oz’s four territories all uniting to help crush both Elphaba and any Animals who refused to be Silenced, the Wizard’s dominion was buzzing with activity just waiting to be disrupted, from the ever-advancing propaganda broadcasting centres for the ever-advancing radio service to sentry posts for the Gale Force. There were even libraries of magical tomes that Morrible had been calling to be brought to the Emerald City, the better to prevent anyone from learning magic and realizing that the Wizard’s performances were nothing but flim-flam and lies. But most important of all were the internment camps being built to house Animal captives, for they seemed to be springing up all over Oz, if the papers she’d stolen were accurate.

But just as Elphaba was mulling over which camp she should target first, there was a muffled crunch from outside – the distinctive sound of boots across dry twigs.

Elphaba spun around, hand raised to strike with every gesture, spell, and technique she’d ever learned. She didn’t know if this was a soldier, an officer of the Gale Force, or a Flying Monkey, but she knew for a fact that she didn’t even need the Grimmerie for this: one gesture would be enough to disarm the intruder on the spot and leave them trussed up while she fled in search of a fresh safehouse…

…assuming it was an intruder, of course. Maybe this wasn’t one of the Wizard’s troops. For all she knew, this was just a lost woodsman blundering through the wrong stretch of forest at the wrong time. But still, better to be safe than sorry.

She crept to the mouth of the cave, hand still raised and poised to strike, ducked into the stalagmite-studded shadows of the entrance where nobody could see her from outside, and peered into the gloom.

Nothing.

Puzzled, she turned around to make her way back into the cave-

-only to find herself face to face with a stranger.

“Hi, Boss.”

“Aaaaargh!”

Once Elphaba had recovered from the shock and realized that the intruder didn’t appear to be attacking, she frantically assessed the situation, tried vainly to figure out how the hell someone had managed to sneak past her in a cave with only one entrance or exit, before hastily punting the notion to one side and focussing on the specifics of her strange new guest.

The intruder was perhaps a head shorter than her, dressed in a faded maroon tunic stitched together with a hodgepodge of old rags, and looked to be anywhere from twelve to fifteen years old. More specific details on this apparition’s appearance briefly beggared Elphaba’s ability to describe for once: the androgynous figure sported a build that was somehow both stocky and lean at the same time, a mass of childish freckles across her face, red hair grown into two throat-length locks on either side of her head, and unusually large eyes with pink irises.

Also, for some reason, she appeared to be wearing Elphaba’s hat.

“Who the hell are you and what are you doing here?!” Elphaba demanded, snatching the hat back and donning it again before the intruder could do any more damage.

The apparition ran a hand through her close-cropped mop of red hair and winked. “The name’s Nimona.”

“…that really doesn’t tell me much.”

“It should,” said Nimona, grinning and exposing oddly fang-like teeth. “Because I’m your new sidekick.”

Notes:

Updates will be arriving once to twice weekly, so tune in to see what happens next :)

As always, feel free to comment generously: regardless of your opinion, it gives me the strength to continue!

Chapter 2: A Most Unusual Duo

Summary:

Early days and teething troubles...

Notes:

Welcome back!

I hope you're enjoying the story so far. Good news is that I have more than enough chapters backlogged and ready to launch, so there shouldn't be too many delays in writing more before I run out... unless of course, there's another week like this one. However, I'll do my best to keep a schedule of at least one or two chapters every week.

Without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Elphaba sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose.

She’d been talking to Nimona for almost ten minutes, and she was no nearer to learning anything concrete about the mystery girl: quite apart from the fact that the kid had somehow outdone both Glinda and Fiyero in sheer flamboyance within seconds of meeting her, quite apart from the fact that she kept vanishing behind rocks and suddenly appearing right behind Elphaba without warning, questions seemed to ricochet off her without leaving so much as a dent.

“How did you find me?”

“I just did. I’m good at that: I’ve got the nose for it when I want to.”

“But how did you get past me without me noticing you?”

“I’m good at that, too.”

“And why wouldn’t you be working for the Wizard or Morrible or someone else with that kind of skillset, hm? They’re very good at sniffing out promising young talent in my experience.”

“Easy: they don’t know about me. Besides, why would I wanna work for them when I can work for you?

“So, you’re just here to be my sidekick?”

“That’s about the long and short of it, Boss. I’m here to help you terrorize Oz, free the Animals, destroy the Wizard’s regime, cause mayhem, raise hell, knock over applecarts, and generally break stuff.”

“Kid, where are your parents?”

“Don’t have any.”

“So… you’re a foundling, then? You’ve escaped from an orphanage, is that it?”

“Nope. I just don’t have any parents. Besides, I’m too old for orphanages.”

“Wha- look, where are you from?”

“Nowhere near here.”

At this, Elphaba had started to wonder why her collection of supplies hadn’t included alcohol. But still, she’d persevered, if only for the sake of her own peace of mind: this rebellion wouldn’t last long if she wasn’t willing to ask questions, after all.

“Nimona,” she said wearily, “are you seriously telling me you’ve got no loyalty to the Wizard?”

“Why would I? I’ve never met him.”

“And you don’t believe in anything that Morrible’s been saying about me? You don’t believe any of the broadcast proclamations about me being a wicked witch, or about what happened to the Flying Monkeys or anything else like that? Or have you just not seen any of the wanted posters and propaganda they’ve been putting on display?”

“Oh, I’ve seen them,” said Nimona, brightly. “I just don’t care about them.”

“Well why not? Everyone else in Oz seems to believe it: half the people I flew over on the way here shot at me with everything from crossbows to muskets. And before the Wizard declared me a public enemy, people were calling me ugly and awful from the day I was born. Why are you any different, Nimona?”

Nimona smiled and shrugged. “I’m not people,” she replied, as if it was the most obvious answer in the world.

Elphaba closed her eyes, took a deep breath, steeled herself, and counted to the highest number she could reach before finally exhaling.

“You’re seriously telling me you don’t think there’s anything weird and unnatural about me?” She waved a hand over her face, across her skin, which couldn’t be mistaken for any other colour but green, even in the dim light of the cave. “About… this?”

“Nope,” said Nimona. “You’re just green. Simple as that. So, what’s it to be? You in or out?”

Elphaba stared at her, trying to work out if Nimona was lying to her, but after several seconds of scrutinizing that wide-eyed, guileless face, she couldn’t detect any of the commonly accepted tells for lying: no hesitation, no anxious repetition, no facial tics, no loss of eye contact, no excessive blinking, no blinking at all in fact. Nimona had been meeting her gaze for nearly a full minute and hadn’t blinked once in all that time, her oddly pink-tinted eyes remaining fixed on her.

It almost seemed as if Nimona was being genuinely honest, but how could that be? What made Nimona so different and why was she so determined to be vague about it? Could she actually trust her? And more baffling, why was Elphaba seriously considering the offer?

Well, it’s not like you can just send her home, she told herself. You don’t even know where her home is, and for all you know, she could get arrested by a squad of guards on her way back just for having a weird haircut. Besides, if she was sent by the Wizard or Morrible or whoever, she’d have stuck a knife if your back before you even knew she was there. Might as well accept her help as long as it’s being freely given… and hopefully, you can make sure she doesn’t get herself killed doing something insanely reckless.

“Alright,” she sighed. “I can give you a trial period: if everything works out, you can become my official sidekick. In the meantime, you help out with… scouting. And sabotage. And general disruption.”

Nimona grinned, and for the briefest of moments, Elphaba could have sworn the girl sported needle-sharp fangs in place of teeth.

“And breaking stuff,” she giggled. “Lots and lots of breaking stuff.”

---

And so, the partnership began in earnest.

At first, Elphaba put Nimona to work sneaking into the camps where Animals from all over Oz were being led for re-education, scouting out the defences while the guards were fast asleep and helping her free the Animals from their cages before fleeing off into the night. After all, given her impossible gift for breaking and entering, it seemed the most logical choice… but somehow, Nimona always ended up going a bit above and beyond the call of duty.

For one thing, far from leaving the moment she was finished her sabotage, Nimona would linger, sometimes even offering to help her fight the guards no matter how many times Elphaba tried to keep her safe.

For another, when Elphaba told her to stick to sabotage instead of joining the battle, she got into the habit of locking the doors to the barracks and leaving the guards trapped inside, even when none of them were at risk of waking up after she and Elphaba had drugged their food. She didn’t seem inclined to hurt or even kill them in their sleep, so Elphaba didn’t need to worry about her setting fire to the barracks, thankfully; the merest notion that they’d be left struggling to force the door open once they woke up was enough to make it worthwhile for Nimona.

Of course, that wasn’t the only cheeky thing she did when she wasn’t releasing Animals from their cages: she took inordinate joy in waiting for one of the guards to use a latrine, locking the door, and then flooding the pit below with water, sending the contents gushing up into the cubicle, leaving Nimona clapping her hands in delight at the guard wailing over his ruined boots.

Then there was the fact that she somehow found the time to graffiti the buildings in lurid green paint, gleefully proclaiming ELPHABA WAS HERE in jagged letters – but never her own name, oddly enough.

And then there were the really inexplicable things that beggared even Elphaba’s imagination, from the fact that Nimona was somehow able to steal the keys even if they were still attached to the garrison commander’s belt, from the fact that she could somehow sneak through tiny windows and under doorways.

Elphaba asked her how any of this had been possible time and again, devoting hours after every successful raid to trying to decipher her young friend’s methods, but all Nimona would say in reply was “I’m Nimona,” and that was that.

For a time, things went relatively well: two or three camps fell, the few Animals they’d captured were released and sent to a secluded glade in the forests where nobody would think to look for them, and Elphaba usually ended up getting a lead on the location of the next camp to raid. And of course, they spent their days slumbering in the cave, waiting for the chance to launch the next raid.  

Then one night, a rescue operation went horribly wrong.

A carriage of new recruits happened to arrive at the camp at exactly the wrong time and caught the two of them snooping around a camp, and in short order, they sounded the alarm.

Even with Elphaba’s magic and the techniques she’d been working on, there was only so much she could do against a garrison of thirty guards plus the twenty visiting reinforcements. She’d been meaning to simply grab Nimona by the collar and fly away, but then one of the guards had knocked her broom out of her hands with a halberd and sent it tumbling away across the camp, and there’d been no choice but to stand and fight.

For the next minute, Elphaba battled the guards, swatting dozens of them aside with concussive thunderclaps that scattered them like ninepins, binding them up with vines and creepers, even deconstructing buildings to block them off from her, but once the garrison had the time to reach the armoury and arm themselves with proper rifles, she knew it would all be over in a matter of seconds.

And just when it looked like Elphaba’s grand crusade for Animal rights and the freedom of Oz was going to end before it even began, there was a muffling rumbling from somewhere just outside Elphaba’s peripheral vision.

A moment later, a large pink-and-scarlet rhinoceros ploughed through the ranks of the gunman taking aim at her, sending them tumbling aside like a line of dominos.

Before Elphaba’s stunned eyes, the rhino became a scarlet-furred gorilla that leapt and vaulted across the battlefield, bowling guards left and right with colossal fisticuffs. The gorilla became a giant pink octopus that had snatched up eight guards in its tentacles and rolled away, flinging them aside as it tumbled gleefully across the camp. Whatever it was, nothing could harm it: blades shattered against its skin, bullets pinged harmlessly off it, and even the fire from the few torches the guards could light barely singed the impossible creature’s hide.

Elphaba couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but she knew when to make the most of a tide turning in her favour, and quickly took to the battlefield again, hammering the remaining troops with enough firepower to send them fleeing into the wilderness, with anyone too slow off the mark ending up knocked unconscious or just trussed up with sprouting ropes of ivy.

Before long, the camp lay in ruins, the guards were either incapacitated or running their lives, and the Animals had been released from their cages to flee into the night.

Only then did the strange pastel scarlet creature shrink back down into human form – or more accurately, into Nimona.

---

“How is this possible?” Elphaba demanded, once they were back at the cave. “Don’t get me wrong, I know all about transformation magic; I’ve heard of magicians who can disguise themselves as other people and even animals, but that usually takes spells or talismans or at least some kind of will-working. Even the Yookoohoos are said to need some kind of chemical focus for their powers! I’ve never heard of it being this effortless. How is it that you can shapeshift? What even are you?”

Nimona shrugged, which was quite a feat considering she’d conjured up a pair of human-sized hummingbird wings from her shoulders and was now fluttering several feet off the ground.

“I’m Nimona,” she replied.

“Oh gods, not this again…”

“It’s the only answer I’ve got, Boss: I’m not a witch, I don’t work magic, I didn’t use rituals, spells, or talismans. It’s just how I am.”

“But how did you gain this power?” Elphaba insisted, trying to maintain eye contact with Nimona as she shot out of the air and rolled across the ground as an armadillo.

“Who says I did?” Nimona shot back, as she zipped back into human form. “I know I didn’t get it from anywhere.”

“Well, it had to have come from somewhere. There had to be some kind of accident you were involved in, or maybe someone experimented on you, or maybe there was some kind of higher supernatural influence involved, or something! I mean, extraordinary things don’t just appear out of nothing! There has to be a reason for all this.”

Nimona rolled her eyes as she flitted from human to gorilla to ostrich and back.

“Alright then,” she remarked, snidely. “You’re clearly the expert. If it’s that simple, then how did you learn to use magic right out of the womb and read the Grimmerie without even trying? How did you enchant everyone in your class except for Fiyero without even meaning to? How did you give the Flying Monkeys wings without meaning to? How did you make a broom fly on your second look at the Grimmerie? How did you get the power to do any of the things you’ve done in your life, Boss?”

This threw Elphaba for a loop: she hadn’t expected the argument to be turned in her direction, not with her usual approach of constantly going on the offensive whenever a debate cropped up. Truth be told, she’d never met anyone who’d tried to steer the topic this way; whenever she got aggressive or interrogatory, the response was usually raw snark, vapid insults, or just angry shouting, except of course with Glinda and Fiyero (both of whom usually tended to deflect unwanted topics of conversations with charm). She’d never met anyone who’d tried to compare the two of them.

“I… I don’t know,” she admitted. “I was just born this way.”

“Exactly!” exclaimed Nimona, practically leaping out of her chair in the form of a large pink frog. “You didn’t get your powers from anywhere: they aren’t outside of you, they can’t be separated from you; they’re part of who you are. You have these powers because you’re Elphaba.”

Elphaba blinked, honestly not sure how to respond to this. Then, something that Nimona had said finally reached her after tunnelling through several dozen layers of confusing back-and-forth, and her eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“How do you know I was doing magic from the day I was born?” she asked.

Nimona just smiled mysteriously.

“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” demanded Elphaba. “You were the ghost haunting the outskirts of the manor when I was little! And later, you were following me all over Oz! Munchkinland, Shiz, the Emerald City, here… you’ve been following me around my entire life! And…”

Elphaba’s brow wrinkled as she struggled to process several different things at once. “You’re obviously not a kid,” she said at last.

“I am right now.”

“Well, yeah, I get that, but… you’re a lot older than you look.”

“Always have been, Boss.”

And for the briefest of moments, as she flitted from deer to human, Nimona’s smile seemed so very tired.

“But why have you been following me all my life?”

“What can I say? I’m a fan of outcasts and underdogs. Besides,” she added cheekily, “when they smell of magic as much as you do, I just had to see how you’d turn out.”

“Magic has a smell?”

“Oh, you’d better believe it, Boss, and your kind of power even more than most: you smell of lightning even when you’re not working magic!”

“So, you were curious about my rare talent? Fair enough, that seems to be the way for just about everyone in Oz. Is that because you were looking for someone like you – another rare talent?”

Nimona shrugged.

“Okay, don’t answer that, then. But answer me this much: now that you’ve seen how I’ve ‘turned out,’ what do you want now? Why do you want to be my sidekick at all?”

For the first time since they’d met, Nimona hesitated.

“Same reason you wanted to rebel against the Wizard,” she said at last. “Because I’ve been here long enough to hate the Wizard and the way Oz ended up thanks to him: the end of the old royal family, the vanishing people, the loss of the old history, the silencing of Animals, even that sugary-sweet respectability crap that everyone seems to be chasing these days. I can barely stand to even be anywhere near the cities these days. For a while, I thought I couldn’t stand any more of it, that was just gonna to leave and go right back… home.”

She paused, as if worried she said too much. “But then you made your big exit from Emerald City with the Grimmerie and everyone in Oz calling you a wicked witch, and I knew there was something worth sticking around for: you might just be able to change things.”

“Why didn’t you try it yourself?”

“Easy: because I’m the best at breaking stuff, not so much making new governments or forcing reforms. Besides, I kinda get bored easily.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” deadpanned Elphaba.

“Good one, Boss. So, you having second thoughts, or are we ready to go back to breaking stuff?”

Elphaba thought for a moment, silently mulling over everything she knew about the crazy little shapeshifter.

As far as she could tell, she could trust her to be helpful, and she definitely wasn’t working for the Wizard or she’d be dead by now… and yet, Nimona clearly wasn’t being completely honest with her, lying either by omission or fabricating huge chunks of her story. Even so, Elphaba didn’t get the impression that she was lying about anything dangerous, and she hadn’t gotten any prophetic visions involving Nimona, so perhaps the obfuscation wasn’t that concerning after all.

“Alright,” she said at last. “Let’s try Munchkinland next.”

Chapter 3: Friends And Comrades

Summary:

The partnership continues, and a sore spot is discovered...

Weeks went by, and little by little, Animal internment camps throughout Oz began to fall.

Elphaba and Nimona had worked out several winning strategies, though it took a lot of planning, because Nimona was very easy to bore and looked for any opportunity to break stuff. Just entrusting her with pure stealth wouldn't have been enough to keep her stimulated.

Of course, Elphaba wasn't ready to consider lethal measures just yet: even though the Wizard's forces sure as hell wouldn't hesitate to kill her, becoming every inch the wicked witch that they claimed she was didn't appeal to Elphaba. Besides, she needed the camp guards alive to make sure the Wizard was getting the message, and the fact that they usually ended up crawling back to the Emerald City demoralized to hell and back only made a nonlethal takedown all the better.

Still, it required a lot of diversions and luring, but Nimona didn't seem to mind.

Whenever distractions were brought up in the planning sessions, she'd usually just grin and say "who has seven heads and is great at distractions?" and then let half a dozen new heads sprout from her shoulders and holler "me!" in competition with each other until Elphaba could calm Nimona down.

The first and most obvious strategy was to have Nimona playing the distraction, tearing through the perimeter fence as a rhino and knocking over the guard towers as a gorilla and generally getting the guards riled up enough to chase after her. While they were preoccupied, Elphaba would sneak in, free the Animals and lead them deep into the wilderness: there, in hidden glades and caverns and all manner of other hidden regions unknown even to the Wizard's men, the Animals could be safe from any further persecution.

Then, there were raids when it was better to have Elphaba play the distraction, appearing above the targeted camp and immediately luring the guards out in a frenzied attempt to claim the bounty on her head, allowing her to lead them on a merry chase across the countryside. Meanwhile, Nimona would sneak in, KO any guards who'd been left behind, release the Animals from captivity, and trample the camp to matchsticks.

On occasion, Nimona would be sneakier than usual and impersonate a human just for the sake of a raid: regardless of whether she took the form of a man, woman, or even child, she'd appear out of nowhere and deliver some vital aid to Elphaba at the last minute, leaving the camp too distracted by the fact that Elphaba had somehow corrupted another Ozian citizen to their cause to focus.

Sometimes, an all-out assault was called for, with Elphaba blasting the camp from the western skies with magics that simply disassembled the camp brick by brick, while Nimona charged in from the east, shredding the defences and sending the guards into a panic, and often driving them into a full retreat – allowing Elphaba to free the Animals at leisure.

And above every camp they liberated, they left the same message, magically emblazoned across the sky in searing green letters and carved into the wall of every building left standing:

DON'T BELIEVE THE WIZARD'S LIES.

---

Of course, that was only the beginning.

Raids on the internment camps did their part in curtailing any further efforts to silence the Animals and freed any that had already been arrested, but for every camp they destroyed, two more seemed to spring up elsewhere – and why not? They were cheap to build, easy to police, and apart from the specialists in "Silencing", they didn't require anyone with serious training to staff. And though Nimona had the time in her life destroying one camp after another, Elphaba knew they couldn't spend the rest of their lives playing whack-a-mole.

After all, even with the broomstick and the speed of a cheetah on their side, the two of them couldn't be everywhere at once.

And once the Flying Monkeys were sent out to scour the countryside for any sign of a green girl on a broomstick, usually with a litany of threats spurring them on to greater feats of desperation, Elphaba had to tread a lot more carefully. She used everything from magical illusions to makeshift fireworks to draw the Wizard's "scouts" as far away from her as possible before attacking her next target, and though Nimona insisted they could easily tackle the entire flock together, Elphaba honestly didn't want to risk hurting any of them, not after everything they'd already suffered because of her.

Besides, even with her magic, she wasn't invincible by a long shot: if she couldn't prepare herself, a bullet could kill her as easily as anyone else in Oz. And as useful as Nimona's apparent invincibility was, she didn't want to see if there were any limits to her power just yet.

So, after a lot of agonizing and soul-searching, Elphaba began a tour of the safehouses she'd set up across Oz, recruiting from the liberated Animals living there.

She didn't accept the sick and wounded, and she refused point blank to recruit anyone who had families to care for, but other than that, she gathered anyone willing to risk their lives for the cause. Some of them ran the safehouses, some of them stole food and equipment from Ozian convoys, some helped sabotage the Wizard's machines, and a few took up arms and fought alongside her.

Most surprising of all had been the gaggle of orangutans from Gillikin country, the staff of a well-respected publishing firm that had been dissolved by personal decree of the Wizard himself: together, they'd managed to steal a printing press of all things and begun churning out leaflets denouncing the Wizard, calling upon the country to rally to Elphaba's side.

These leaflets were to be scattered across Oz in colossal aerial bombardments, either by Elphaba, Nimona, or any of the several dozen birds that had joined the cause. It wasn't much, but for every day the leafless blizzarded down on the cities of Oz, it made their message a little harder for the people to ignore.

Over the weeks that followed, their little Animal army met with rousing success: quite apart from the fact that they could be set up all over Oz and carry out missions in countries that Elphaba couldn't hope to reach in time, they had the advantage of being disregarded at every turn. By pretending to be Silenced and unintelligent, the Animal saboteurs could casually wander around in broad daylight without being opposed by anyone, even around the camps. So long as nobody caught them sabotaging machines or releasing other Animals from captivity, the disguise was impenetrable.

For added fun, Elphaba soon had an entire flock of pigeons ferrying messages back and forth between safehouses, and so long as nobody thought to coax a word out of the carrier pigeons, none of the Wizard's lackeys noticed anything amiss.

"Guess that's how it went before the Internet," Nimona mused on hearing of how their messengers were working.

"What the hell is the Internet?"

"Never mind."

---

And then one day, they decided to be a bit more ambitious than usual.

By now, the Wizard and Morrible were working overtime to ensure that everyone in Oz kept dancing to the tune of official propaganda even in the face of Elphaba's efforts to discredit them. True, nobody had declared that the Wizard was a fraud and nobody outside the Animal population was on Elphaba's side, but it had people worried, and that was almost enough: if the all-powerful Wizard couldn't stop one lone witch and a few rogue Animals, then was he really all-powerful at all?

So, every hour, the airwaves echoed with the voices of Morrible and the Wizard, and even the little country towns without radio service were more than happy to accept weekly deliveries of the Wizard's speeches on gramophone record, just to make sure that everyone knew that the Wizard of Oz himself was guarding them from the horrors the Witch threatened to unleash. There were uplifting speeches proclaiming how much good the Wizard was doing, official statistic showing how little the rebellion was accomplishing, diatribe after diatribe upon the evils of the Wicked Witch's "reign of terror," and ever more grandiose promises. And of course, Morrible had the art department working in overdrive to produce new and terrifying posters, each one making Elphaba look more monstrous, until she barely even looked human anymore – and as much as it stung Elphaba to seem them lining the streets, she couldn't help but laugh at how ridiculously overdone they'd gotten.

The propaganda became even funnier when Nimona was added to the mix, because in the confusion of the attacks on the camps, none of the witnesses had seen enough to learn that she was actually a shapeshifter.

Indeed, it was more common for people to assume that Nimona was an entire team of Animals loyal to "The Wicked Witch of the West," and that the unusual pink-and-scarlet skin colour was just the result of some weird experiment that Elphaba had performed on them to turn them against "their rightful benefactors." So, Morrible denounced the Wicked Witch as a hypocrite and a torturer of Animals, the Wizard thunderously called for an end to the torment that had been inflicted on the "innocent beasts" in grandiose appeals to the Wicked Witch's better nature, the people of Oz could tell themselves that they were in the right again, and Nimona laughed herself to tears.

But then, a few months into the rebellion, one of Elphaba's spies reported that Morrible was sending a trainload of the Emerald City's most charming spokespeople on a tour of Oz to enforce the public outlook. After all, it was one thing to hear Morrible's stentorian voice croaking away about fighting evil and the Wizard's thunderously amplified calls for justice and goodness echoing from on high like the voice of god; getting to hear the Wizard's truths up close and personal from one of the prettiest faces in all of Oz was a new high on the propaganda front.

So, as soon as Elphaba and Nimona worked out where the train was headed next, they made their way there ahead of it, ending up in a tiny village somewhere in the Vinkus, ready to crash the party as spectacularly as possible.

Arriving a good two hours in advance, they hid themselves away in the tower of a long-neglected fort, looking down on the plaza below as the villagers finished setting the stage they'd built there and putting finishing touches on the hand-painted mural they'd decorated the town hall with.

Nimona was bored as hell of course: even after two long games of poker, she spent most of the next ninety minutes graffitiing the inside of the tower with spray paint or listening to rabid-sounding percussion-heavy music on a device that (had Elphaba not learned to expect the impossible when it came to Nimona) should have been too small for any gramophone record.

In the end, all the two of them could do was grit their teeth and wait for the tell-tale sound of a train pulling up at the station…

Two hours later, the cry went up, and a horde of richly dressed celebrities and their assistants descended on the town. Within minutes, Elphaba could already see them flocking through the streets towards the plazas, blowing kisses and signing autographs for every step of the way. For some reason, there was a figure at the end of the crowd that the locals seemed the most excited to see, but Elphaba couldn't get a good look at her from her current position: even with a bird's eye view of the place, the VIP always seemed to be hidden behind another mob of adoring fans or the retinue of one of the other celebrities.

Eventually, the cortege reached the stage, allowing the first of the visitors to take the microphone and begin giving the usual speech about how the Wizard had done so much for Oz and how the Witch could not be trusted when she'd never done anything for anyone, and all the other things that usually made Elphaba's eyes glaze over whenever she heard them on the radio.

Then, at the very moment the current speaker was at their most strident, thundering about how the Wizard could save them all, Elphaba took to the air.

Illusion magic dyed the clouds pitch black and tinted the sky a hellish crimson, bolts of non-existent lightning bombarded the streets, harmless explosions rippled across the edge of the plaza, disembodied voices howled in agony throughout the town, fiery comets split the sky, gigantic figures shaped from living shadows loomed down from the ruins of the old fort, and the beautifully-painted mural that had been commissioned in honour of the visit melted and oozed off the town hall. And while Elphaba's illusions did their work, Nimona swept through the air as a winged serpent the length of a train carriage and began circling the plaza, knocking over carts, tearing up the manicured lawns, spitting fire at the flower beds, and roaring so intimidatingly that hopefully no-one would notice that she wasn't actually attacking the people.

Within seconds, both the crowd and the visiting celebrities were screaming, cowering in terror at every new sight, some of them already fleeing for the apparent safety of their homes even as the speaker tried to calm them…

…and then Elphaba appeared in the skies above, soaring towards the plaza.

The entire crowd took off in unison, followed closely by the very celebrities who were supposed to be providing morale – some of whom were so eager to escape the plaza they literally shoved slower performers backstage just to make sure they got a headstart down the road.

Of course, the celebrity troupe hadn't been stupid enough to travel without an armed escort, and a platoon of soldiers immediately charged in to combat her with guns and halberds at the ready. They'd learned this time as well: the gunmen held back, leaving the halberdiers to take the brunt of every wave of concussive force and every paralyzing blast that Elphaba could dish out, while they took aim. Unfortunately for the gunmen, they hadn't been counting on Nimona to leap into view in the form of a bear and charge headlong into their ranks, sending them fleeing in all directions. And they certainly weren't prepared when a rhino apparently joined the fray, either, nor for the ostrich, the armadillo, or the whale.

All of a sudden, the heroic charge of the Wizard's soldiers was reduced to an embarrassing rout as the soldiers fled, either forced to retreat by a kaleidoscopic display of combat magic or by a bewildering series of Animals that insisted on laughing at them as they ran. The last to leave was the current celebrity speaker and apparent master of ceremonies, who was left hightailing it down the road with Nimona hot on his tail in the form of a beaver and gleefully gnawing at his undefended backside.

In the wake of all this, Elphaba was left standing in the middle of a now-vacant plaza: the townsfolk had taken cover in their homes, the various VIPs were running back to the train station as fast as their fancy shoes, and the soldiers were trying to keep up with them.

Now that there was nobody to stop her, she quickly went about scrawling her usual graffiti in the sky, as always leaving the buildings for Nimona to vandalize; after all, as crazy as she was, Elphaba couldn't deny that that the shapeshifter was an artist, and she worked best with a canvas all to herself.

But as she finished the last s in DON'T BELIEVE THE WIZARD'S LIES, she caught a hint of movement out of the corner of her eye, and on instinct, she spun around with her hands raised to strike.

At once, she saw that the source of the movement was on the stage about five or six feet away from her, just behind the little curtain where the rest of the celebrities had been waiting in readiness for their turn in the spotlight. A moment ago, Elphaba had seen some of the VIPs shoving their slower comrades behind that very curtain just so they could have a running start to the train; perhaps this was the last of the stragglers.

Lowering her hand, Elphaba waited for the lone VIP to dive out from behind the curtain and run for it like the others.

Instead, the celebrity guest very calmly pushed the curtain aside and stepped into the view.

There was a deathly pause, as the two of them locked eyes.

"Um… hi, Elphie."

"…Hello, Glinda."

---

Why hadn't she realized it sooner?

In hindsight, it was so obvious who that much-adored figure at the back of the cortege had been: much like Elphaba herself, Glinda had always had the gift of making herself the centre of attention wherever she went, though it her case it was exclusively of the positive kind.

In that moment, Elphaba couldn't help but feel uncannily self-conscious, finding herself overwhelmed by a hurricane of concerns over how she looked, none of which had bothered her in the slightest before today: was her hair okay after the flight? Had she gotten dust on her cloak? Did she at least look presentable? Was she blinking away tears?

By contrast, Glinda couldn't have looked better if she tried: even after being shoved backstage by a horde of panicking celebrities, she looked nothing short of glorious. In her pink and silver gown, her gleaming diamond tiara, and her almost comically bejewelled wand, she looked less like one of the Wizard's propaganda professionals and more like she was gearing up for a royal wedding. Her hair was still shining like woven gold, perfectly sculpted into a haircut that would have made the finest ladies of Munchkinland look tawdry and cheap; even from this distance, her dazzling blue eyes sparkled with Glinda's ever-present joie de vivre; and her skin was still flawless, still perfect, still-

Elphaba blinked furiously, hastily forcing herself out of her reverie. She couldn't afford to get distracted now, not when the soldiers could rally at any minute or the local police could take up the fight. She needed to make this quick but profound, to say everything she needed to say, and then-

"You look a lot better in person than you do the posters, you know," said Glinda.

At this, Elphaba briefly found herself unable to reply, if only because she'd been effectively sandwiched between two wildly different feelings: anger at Glinda for being close enough to the propaganda department to see the posters up close but not do anything about them, and joy at Glinda complimenting her. In the end, all she could do was awkwardly croak out "thank you."

Another awkward silence followed.

"So… the Wizard sent you here on the propaganda offensive?" Elphaba asked at last.

"I'm here to reassurify people," said Glinda.

Was it Elphaba's imagination, or did she sound just a tiny bit on the haughty side? She'd never known her to sound that lofty: she'd been snobbish and vain at Shiz, sure, but Elphaba hadn't heard her sound quite so aggressively dignified as she did today.

"I'm sure you are."

"The last few months have been pretty frightening, Elphaba: terrorism, violence, Animal uprisings, the rumours, the paranoity... The Ozian public need to know they can rely on someone in these trying times."

At this, a tiny spark of rage flared in the back of Elphaba's mind. She didn't want to get angry with Glinda, or to spoil the amicable note they'd left each other on all those months ago, but after seeing everything the Wizard's specialists had been doing, it was just about impossible to keep the anger suppressed.

"Except for Animals, of course," she said, coldly.

A tiny hint of shame briefly cracked Glinda's serene mask. "I… that's not my department, Elphie."

"Yeah, I noticed. What is your department called, by the way? Are you in charge of it, or is Madame Morrible still treating you like a serf?"

"I'm just a spokesperson right now, but I'm still a valued part of the Wizard's information disseminatification system."

The scepticism must have been visible on Elphaba's face, because Glinda immediately snapped, "It's not all about telling lies, you know! I help people: I give them motivation to get out of bed in the mornings, I give them the courage to go on living even in the face of everything that's happening out there. I mean, if you think about it, I'm just fixing the damage that Morrible's thugs are doing!"

"Cute, Glinda, very cute. Again, the people you're helping don't happen to include Animals, so that means less than nothing."

"Elphie-"

"Oh, and by the way, the 'terrorism' you're reassuring people about consisted mainly of me breaking captured Animals out of internment camps! And what about the 'Animal uprisings'? Do actually know how many of those Animals I had to rescue from the camps before there were enough of them to become an army?"

"I told you, I don't know anything about that!" shrilled Glinda, eyes suddenly full of tears. "I'm not in charge of anything that's happening to the Animals and I definitely wouldn't let it happen if I saw it happening!"

"If," echoed Elphaba. "If you saw it happening. But you don't, do you? You're being paid too well to look in the right direction."

"This isn't about the money, Elphie-"

"Not that kind of payment, you ditz! You're getting everything you could possibly want out of your current job – attention, prestige, luxury, a place next to the throne, a chance to show the world how good you are – and while you're dancing your way across every magazine cover from here to the Emerald City, you're letting all the real injustices waltz right past you, and you're helping to cover them up!"

"I'm just trying to keep things from getting out of control! Can't you understand that? Someone has to do it, Elphie: if it wasn't me, it'd be someone else, someone who'd be more involved in what's happening to the Animals. Besides, I'm not doing anything wrong, not like some of the people the Wizard has working for him! At least I'm not bribing or threatening people, not like…"

Glinda hesitated, and for a moment, the mixture of shame and anger was joined by a new emotion that Elphaba had almost never seen on Glinda's face before: dread. And she didn't need to make too many guesses to imagine what she was afraid of, not after the way she'd quailed at the sight of Morrible's imperious glare during their last meeting at the Wizard's palace. So, Morrible was every bit the slavedriver she'd been to Glinda back in their days at dear old Shiz, except now she'd gone from merely criticizing her to the point of depression to making her fear for her life.

"It's still happening, though, Glinda. And if you need this much justification just to live with the job, if you're really this scared and upset-"

"I'm not," said Glinda plaintively, but without conviction.

"-then why stay in the job at all?"

This threw Glinda for a moment; obviously, the idea had never occurred to her in the last few months.

"You can just leave, you know," said Elphaba, gently. "You can come with me instead, just like we talked about before: it's not too late..."

For ten nerve-rending seconds, there was silence in the plaza as Glinda mulled over the decision, anxiously chewing her lower lip as she agonized over the second chance she'd been given.

And then Nimona zoomed in from the side, shifting from horse to ostrich to human as she skidded to a halt. "Boss! I just finished tagging all the houses on the southern end of town! Is there time to do the plaza or…"

She trailed off, belatedly noticing Glinda.

"Oh, hi there!" she said cheerily. "Do you know each other?"

Glinda blinked in confusion, clearly not knowing what to make of Nimona.

Then, she took a step back.

"Elphaba," she said quietly, "who the hell is this?"

At this, Elphaba very gently massaged her temples, already feeling the beginnings of a headache. "This is Nimona, my partner in crime and self-appointed sidekick, and before you ask, no, she's not a witch. Nimona, this is Glinda Upland, my best and only friend from my college days and a current member of the Wizard's propaganda department."

"Ooh! Drama."

Glinda looked from Elphaba to the grinning shapeshifter and back again, noticeable escalating from bewilderment to outright suspicion. "But if she's not a witch, then what is she?"

"I'm Nimona."

"I wasn't asking you! What is she?"

Nimona's teeth remained firmly locked in an amicable grin, albeit now sporting more fangs than teeth; the rest of her mouth slid downwards into a scowl. "Boss, I'm starting to see why you haven't been speaking to her lately," she grumbled.

But Glinda would not be deterred. "What is she, Elphaba?"

"Does it matter?"

"Of course it does! I mean, where did you meet her? How did you meet her? How can you trust her when you don't even know what she is?"

Elphaba felt the spark of rage in the back of her mind again. "Compared to who, exactly?" she said icily. "A woman who decided she'd be better off supporting a dictator instead of her best friend? At least Nimona's helping."

If nothing else, Glinda had the decency to look ashamed, but even through the expression of pain and self-reproach, Morrible's media training was already taking over. "Elphie, I've been hearing all kinds of stories about the magic you've been working with in the last couple of months, about the effect it might be having on your mind; a few even said you might be drawing spirits or other things that could corrupt you or make you worse. What if the stories are right for a change?"

"Worse?" echoed Elphaba.

"You know what I mean! You don't know the first thing about her, do you? I'm betting she hasn't told you anything about herself, so how can you put your trust in her?"

Elphaba wanted to fire off another smartass remark about the trust she'd had in Glinda before they'd parted ways, but unfortunately, Glinda had decided to experience one of her rare moments of insightfulness.

It was true that Nimona hadn't been entirely honest with her and had likely omitted more than a few details about herself, especially the fact that she'd been haunting Elphaba almost since the day she'd been born… but at the same time, Nimona didn't have any power to corrupt her opinions in any way – at least, none that she'd ever demonstrated. Nor had Nimona disrupted her plans or even done anything that Elphaba wouldn't approve of, apart from petty vandalism and some very immature pranks. Indeed, she'd been almost childishly loyal to her.

"I'm serious, Elphaba: you know Oz has enemies and any of them could be plotifying against the Wizard at any time. The Nomes, the Royal Family of Ev, the Wheelers… what if she's one of them? What if she's some kind of monster or-"

"Do NOT call me that!" Nimona snarled, eyes flashing blood-red, and even Elphaba had to take a step back at the sight of the rage etched across the shapeshifter's face.

In all their months together, Nimona had never lost her temper so badly, or at all it seemed; even with her noted dislike for Ozian society, nothing had ever gotten her angry, perhaps because she'd taken so little of it seriously. Now though, she was literally twisting herself out of shape in anger: her mouth had erupted into a jagged maw full of fangs, her fingers were distending into claws, her skin was starting to layer itself in bony plates, but worst of all was the look on her face, a gut-wrenching mixture of rage, indignation, frustration, and… hurt?

To Glinda's credit, she at least had the decency to look abashed. "It was just the first word that sprang to mind," she said meekly.

"Yeah, pretty telling choice. Boss, if she really is your friend, then there's no accounting for taste. You wanna hit the road or what?"

"In a minute." Elphaba cleared her throat. "Glinda, is this really you talking, or is it Morrible using you as a ventriloquist dummy again? Because I think she's always had more interest in what's going on outside Oz's borders and she's always had an eye on the next big enemy she can help the Wizard serve up to the public. So, be honest: do you care about who and what Nimona is, or does Morrible?"

Glinda couldn't make eye contact, much less speak.

"Thought as much. So, if you're not really concerned about what Nimona is, then why bring it up at all? What prompted this big display of Ozian patriotism? Is it just friendly concern, or-"

She stopped: even from here, there was no ignoring the fact that Glinda was blushing.

"You're jealous," Elphaba realized aloud. "You're jealous that I've got someone else as a partner in crime and you're trying to bring me back into the fold so we can be friends again, only in the Wizard's employ. Actually, let's take this one step further: you're undermining my attempt to fight for Animal rights just because your feelings are hurt. Does that sound about right?"

Glinda's eyes remained determinedly fixed on her shoes.

"Oh, for crying out loud. Come on, Nimona, let's get out of here."

"Elphie, wait, just let me explain-"

But Elphaba was already readying her broom to take flight, even as Nimona shifted into the form of an albatross. "I think I've heard enough from you and Morrible, thanks!" she snapped. "Goodbye, Glinda. If you want to meet me on friendly terms, try being a decent person again. Who knows, you might just like it!"

And with that, Elphaba practically flung herself into the sky, followed closely by Nimona, Glinda's screamed appeals vanishing into the distance behind them.

In their wake, they left a town awash in graffiti and still shrouded in illusions that wouldn't fade for another hour or so, a propaganda tour in shambles, and another humiliating defeat for the Wizard's forces.

If only we could feel like it was worth the effort.

Notes:

Enjoying the story so far? Got any predictions of the future? Theories of what's going on? Criticism to provide?

Feel free to comment! Your contributions give me strength!

Chapter 4: Monsters

Summary:

Old wounds are revealed.

By the time Elphaba and Nimona arrived back at their latest safehouse, the news of the attack was spreading across Oz through telegram and radio, and to nobody’s great surprise, Glinda was already being lionized as a hero.

Since she was the only member of the propaganda team that had “stood her ground”, she’d been cast as a heroic defender of innocents and innocence alike, and though she hadn’t been able to prevent the “monstrous defilement of the town,” the fact that she’d been seen verballing sparring with Elphaba from a distance meant that most of the population were convinced that she’d either driven the Wicked Witch away with magic or simply refused to succumb to the Witch’s “blasphemous entreaties”, a sure sign that nobody in town had been close enough to hear what had actually been said.

Of course, this was only the preliminary spin on events, beginning with gabled witness reports delivered by awestruck villagers, soon to be refined into deliberate misinformation by Glinda’s co-workers on route to the radio. Once Morrible herself took control of the situation a few hours later, the radio propaganda went on the offensive, amplifying damage done to the village itself, exaggerating the risk posed to its people, and doing everything to make Elphaba look as cruel and cowardly as possible.

The weirdest parts of the entire program were the efforts to portray her as terrifyingly powerful but paradoxically weak, as if Elphaba could somehow ruin all of Oz with a single spell but could somehow die from tripping over a doorstep: she was now “frail,” “limping,” “afraid of sunlight,” “foul-smelling,” “craven in the face of brave resistance”, and “sickened by water.”

And somewhere in the midst of all this, Morrible must have found the time to interrogate Glinda about her meeting with Elphaba and compile evidence of every Animal and “human follower” that participated in the last few raids, because the “truth” about Nimona hit the airwaves soon afterwards.

The stories about Elphaba hypocritically experimenting on Animals were now conveniently forgotten about, replaced with the story of “an unnatural abomination summoned by the Witch’s evil magic, a sure sign of her meddling with powers that only the Wizard can safely harness.”

Gone was the feigned sympathy for the Witch’s “victims”, the moral appeals, the cries of “these poor Animals!” Instead, what followed was about thirty-five minutes of Nimona being denounced with every kind of sanctimonious insult possible: “barbarian,” “savage,” “creature”, “disgusting half-Animal,” “twisted in mind and body,” and even “anarchism made flesh”, though admittedly Nimona liked that last one.

But the most common of all the insults was Morrible’s chosen pronoun for Nimona, picked as if in defiance of Nimona happily picking whatever pronoun happened to pick her current for: “it.” To the Wizard’s propaganda department, Nimona wasn’t even worthy of the language used to describe Animals anymore: she was just an “it.”

There were claims that Nimona’s shapeshifting was a betrayal of the sanctity of the human form, that she insulted human beings just by existing, that her nature appealed to the Witch’s lust for destruction for carnage, that the Witch kept her chained up on a spiked collar between non-existent massacres, and even that Nimona ate people alive. Quite a fabrication, considering the nearest thing to human flesh that Nimona had eaten was the seat of the regional communication director’s pants as she’d chased him screaming down the road, snapping playfully at his rear to speed him along.

And then of course there were the “perversion” accusations. Now that Morrible knew for a fact that there weren’t any humans among Elphaba’s supporters and certainly no men, the propaganda was now bristling with claims that Nimona gladly “profaned rational human norms” by regularly switching from female to male and back again, that she was “sexless thing” who would corrupt children to her perverted way of life if ever given the chance to mingle with proper Ozian society.

There were even rumours that Nimona regularly deflowered and impregnated “impressionable young maidens from around Oz” and left them to die giving birth to nightmarish shapeshifting infants – and that Nimona would happily seduce young men and impregnate them as well.

“I’m starting to think Ozians have hangups, Boss,” mused Nimona, as the radio continued spitting out insults in the background.

Elphaba, who had been accused of even worse things in the after-hours propaganda broadcasts, just nodded bemusedly.

To her surprise, though, Nimona didn’t lose her temper at any of the insults catapulted at her over the course of the broadcast: true, the smile was gone from her face for most of the diatribe, but rather than losing her composure as expected, she simply sat and soaked up every single epithet with a mixture of mild annoyance and weary resignation. Occasionally, she’d shift into Morrible’s form and mockingly flap her jaws in time with the speech, deliberately contorting her features to make the most ludicrous expressions possible.

It wasn’t until the end of the broadcast that Morrible’s screed finally delivered an armour-piercer in the conclusion: “The Witch has already proven herself a traitor to the Wizard and a destroyer of all that is good; today, she proved herself a traitor to her own species! What else can we call one who associatifies with a beast so low and perverse? I ask you, what else can we call an apostate who cast aside the friendship of the Wizard and accepted the company of a monster-”

Without saying a word, Nimona jumped to her feet, picked up the radio and threw it at the wall so hard it practically disintegrated on impact.

Then, she transformed into a rhinoceros and began furiously trampling the pieces into the ground.

After this, there was silence in the cave, broken only by the sound of Nimona getting her breath back, shifting from form to form as she slowly calmed. Even so, it was clear that she wasn’t feeling any better for giving vent to her spleen: her face was still furrowed with anger, bitterness, and that same expression that Elphaba had seen when Glinda had called her a monster, but even worse now. Now it was beyond mere hurt feelings: it had strayed into raw pain, all the more shocking considering that Nimona seemed incapable of feeling it more often than not.

Elphaba had seen her shrug off fists, blades, bullets, runaway carts, collapsing buildings, artillery barrages, and even poison gas, not only without being harmed but without suffering so much as a wince of pain. And yet, it seemed the word “monster” had been enough to cut right through her defences.

Eventually, though, Elphaba found herself speaking up, partly out of curiosity but mostly out of concern. After all, she’d spent most of her life being the angriest person in the room, constantly snapping back at insults, shouting whenever people stared at her, losing her temper, lashing out with magic and being grateful for the results if only because she could be left alone at last. Now, it seemed she’d finally found someone who could outdo her bad moods.

“Nimona,” she whispered. “Do you want to t-”

“No.”

“I’m just asking-”

“And you don’t need to, okay? I’m not in the mood and it’s none of your business!”

“Nimona, come on: we’re working together, aren’t we? You’re my sidekick. Do we really have to keep secrets from each other?”

“We’re not keeping secrets! I just don’t want to talk about it!”

“Then have you ever considered that talking about it might make you feel better? I mean, you’re obviously dying to say something.”

For a split-second, Nimona looked as if she was genuinely considering it. But then the moment passed, and the pain was back on her face so suddenly it was as she’d just let a mask slip over it.

“It doesn’t matter,” she sighed. “Talking doesn’t help anything: people don’t listen, and if they do listen, they don’t understand, and if they do understand, they rewrite it in their heads so you said something completely different. You know it, I know it, and Morrible sure as hell knows it, so let’s just get back to breaking stuff. Okay, Boss?”

Now it was Elphaba’s turn to sigh. How had she ended up being the Glinda in this relationship?

“Alright,” she said at last. “Alright. Just one other question first, though.”

“You get exactly one.”

“Have you actually gotten anyone pregnant?”

Nimona was halfway through opening her mouth to reply when the joke finally made contact; letting out a snort of laughter, she doubled over, roaring and hooting in mirth for a good twenty seconds before she finally regained the power of speech.

“No,” she said at last, still giggling as she shifted from man to woman to child and back again. “Maybe you’ve guessed already, but my relationships have never gotten that far. I mean, you’ve seen me being both guys and girls, but I’ve never really tried doing… that.”

Elphaba’s eyebrows rose ever so slightly.

“Guys and girls?” she echoed. “As in ‘not just guys’? Nimona, I know you don’t like it when I ask stupid questions, but are you actually… female?”

“I am right now.”

“Well, your default form is female, but… well, most of the books of magic I’ve read insist that anyone using magic to shapeshift has a base form to return to, but you’re not using magic and I’ve never seen you need to return to your human form. Does that mean you don’t have a default form at all, and this is just a shape you’ve chosen for yourself?”

“They’re all shapes I’ve chosen for myself,” said Nimona, grinning cheekily. “Why’s this one any different?”

“Alright, but does that mean that you don’t have a gender as we’d understand it? But if that’s the case, then what do I call you?” Elphaba paused, and then realizing she might have just been terribly rude, added, “I mean, what do you want to be called?”

“Nimona.”

Elphaba sighed like a deflating ballon. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I?”

“Hey, Boss, I’m whatever I am in the moment. He/she, they/them, zir… does it matter when you can be any of them? It’s nice to be asked for change, but most people tend to settle for ‘it’ sooner or later.”

“Well, I’m not most people, and I’m not even sure if Morrible isn’t going to be calling me ‘it’ by the end of the week, so…”

Nimona chuckled. “Call me what you like, Boss. Besides, running around playing Lothario isn’t really what I want to do with my life: maybe some other shapeshifters might be happy to screw their way around the world, but not me. If there are any shapeshifters,” she added sadly.

For a moment, Elphaba wondered a bit about this, but decided not to pry any further for once: after all, it didn’t take a genius to guess that Nimona was harbouring more wounds that her carefree attitude suggested… and Elphaba knew only too well that even the simplest of wounds could run a lot deeper than anyone could possibly imagine.

“Why are we still standing around talking?!” Nimona demanded, suddenly smiling again. “We’ve got stuff to break! Come on, Boss, let’s get to work!

---

Months went by, and the two of them went on with their attacks across Oz.

Regardless of what Morrible claimed, they always reserved their real destructive power for the camps and prisons, the more deserving of their targets.

Everyone else, from tiny villages in the middle of nowhere to the greatest cities of Oz, was merely bombarded with illusions, leaflets, and anything else Elphaba could conjure up to undermine faith in the Wizard’s rule.

And as always, it was an uphill fight: quite apart from trying to encourage disbelief in an enemy who had a qualified witch on the payroll and decades of experience with special effects fraud, the simple act of keeping Animals safe was a nightmare. Every so often, Elphaba’s Animal supporters would end up getting killed or captured in battle, gradually eroding their numbers from a dedicated army to barely a handful of volunteers… and for every one of her allies that Elphaba was able to rescue, there were always ten more that died while being interrogated for Elphaba’s whereabouts. About the only consolation that Elphaba could find it that was the simple fact that her friends had told her long ago that they’d rather die than be Silenced.

But if seeing her fellow revolutionaries among the Animals being slowly whittled away was painful, seeing the Wizard’s soldiers doing the same to Animal civilians that she’d already freed was even worse.

It didn’t matter that Elphaba was rapidly taking their place as the chosen enemy of Oz; the fact that they had helped to provide her with food and shelter was reason enough to make them targets. More than once, Elphaba arrived at one of the secret glades to find it on fire and strewn with the bodies of slaughtered Animals, or worse still, a mindless herd left Silenced after days of indoctrination by the Wizard’s experts and left behind as bait for a trap.

(Sometimes, the Wizard’s troops would leave prey Animals in the same pen as predator Animals, just so they could place bets on which of the Silenced victims would end up getting eaten first.)

By the fifth month of this, the surviving Animals began giving up on Oz altogether. As they tearfully explained to Elphaba, they couldn’t trust their former friends and neighbours anymore, and though they thanked Elphaba for saving them and for her best efforts to spread the truth, none believed that there was anything that could inspire the people of Oz to listen to it.

Elphaba tried to reason with them, offering them better safehouses with better defences, and though she managed to get the huddled Animal families to remain with her for a little while with that promise, it lasted only for a couple of weeks: once the Flying Monkeys found the clifftop sanctuary Elphaba had set up in the mountains of the Vinkus, an artillery strike was enough to send the Animal residents fleeing for their lives, and only the timely arrival of Elphaba and Nimona had kept them from being captured en masse by the Wizard’s troops during their escape.

After that, nobody was interested in sticking around.

Their faith in the cause had been broken, as had their hopes of being granted rights in Oz again. The only thing left to do was to flee the country altogether and make the incredibly dangerous journey across the deserts surrounding Oz, and hope that the prejudices of the Wizard’s regime wouldn’t follow them into whatever land they ended up in. And though they pleaded for Elphaba to join them, telling her that it would only be a matter of time before she “and your crazy young friend” ended up dead, Elphaba couldn’t bring herself to follow: even after all the misfortunes she’d already suffered, she still had some hope left that she could make a difference.

So, she used the Grimmerie to send the Animals to the safest known region beyond the Deadly Desert, opening a portal to a lush green realm that showed no sign of human habitation.

Gathering up the few possessions they still had, the Animals said goodbye to Elphaba, wishing her and Nimona the best of luck, and then hurried through the portal to the only safety they could find. Once they were through, Elphaba allowed the portal to close behind them, leaving no trace for Morrible or the Wizard’s army to follow.

And that was the end of Animal involvement in Elphaba’s rebellion.

From then on, it was just Elphaba and Nimona.

---

Things didn’t improve after that.

The two of them did their best to keep up the pressure, to get people to question how the Wizard could be all-powerful yet not be able to stop them, but there was only so much they could do by themselves, and once again, they couldn’t be everywhere at once.

Though Nimona suggested building a new army from the few Animals they rescued, Elphaba wouldn’t hear of it: any Animals with military experience were long gone by now, and all that remained were civilians… and worse still, the internment camps were getting into the habit of culling potentially dangerous prisoners well in advance, so most of the Animals she rescued these days were extremely young – and recruiting child soldiers was not on Elphaba’s agenda.

Instead, the freed Animals were simply sent the same place where she’d sent the rest of the Animals; Elphaba kept the portal open just long enough to confirm that there were free Animals on the other side who were alive and aware enough to adopt the orphaned refugees, before shutting it behind them.

With Elphaba hobbled by the lack of support, the Wizard went on the offensive: the army doubled recruitment rates, new forts sprung up all over Oz to bolster the internment camps, and a massive civil armament campaign began. Suddenly, towns all over Oz were granted a good-sized garrison of troops equipped with the best weapons available, including cannons, mortars, and even handheld artillery pieces. Now, as if having to avoid getting shot wasn’t bad enough, Elphaba had to worry about getting blasted out of the sky by a modified firework launcher.

None of it mattered to Nimona, who remained impervious as ever, and technically, Elphaba only had to worry about the artillery if she got distracted and couldn’t shield herself with magic in time… but even so, she needed to be more cautious than ever now. And eventually, it turned out that Elphaba wasn’t the only one who needed to be careful.

One summer evening, an attempt to drop leaflets on a country town in Munchkinland went nightmarishly wrong when the Wizard’s troops brough out the newest weapons to tackle Elphaba, and not because they came close to killing her (though they did).

The real horror began when two things became painfully apparent: first, the troops had only just been trained in how to use the launchers and mortars and didn’t have any experience in using them on anything that wasn’t standing completely still.

Secondly, the hot weather had turned the once-green fields on the outskirts of town into a rustling, hissing expanse of dead grass, all of it dry as a bone, the whole thing nothing more than a massive tinderbox just waiting for a spark.

One badly aimed rocket from one of the Ozian grunts, and before anyone had the slightest clue what was happening, a huge swathe of the field was on fire.

And as the fire spread, so the confusion: either because they hadn’t noticed the fire or because they wanted the glory of bringing down Elphaba, the soldiers continued attacking, and kept missing, spreading the fire further. A civilian fire brigade hastily formed and formed a bucket chain while they waited for the real firefighters to get out the hoses, but Morrible’s propaganda campaign meant that the people were too scared to get close to Elphaba, so they instead tried to handle the firefighting stealthily when it would have been more sensible to run like hell, so by the time they’d finished tip-toeing through the field, the fire had spread even further. 

The same went for the professional firefighters, only worse: they not only had to contend with being scared shitless of Elphaba but also with glory-starved soldiers who thought the firefighters might be trying to bring down the Witch themselves, and few of them ended up being arrested before they could even aim a hose at the fire. And then the rest of the population noticed the fire, and in the ensuing panic, the townsfolk were caught between hiding from the Witch in their homes or running for their life through a road that led directly through the burning fields.

It was, in short, a clusterfuck.

About the only upside to the entire disaster was the fact that the soldiers eventually realized their mistake and went fleeing off into the night, but that just left Elphaba struggling to put out their fire by herself, and by then, so much of the field was ablaze that extinguishing it almost beggared her magical stamina. With every stretch of flaming grass that she smothered or doused with her powers, there was almost more, and the embers of the fires travelled far.

Fortunately, the local firefighters weren’t stupid: while she struggled to manage the advancing inferno, they tackled the fires that had already spread to the village itself, but between arrests and assaults by overzealous guardsmen, they were dangerously outmanned.

So, Nimona stepped in: while Elphaba was flying around the town, quenching the fires and trying to stop any more of the fields from bursting into flame and trying to keep the fleeing refugees from being barbecued in their escape, she literally galloped off to the burning houses and began forcing the terrified residents out. They were scared of Elphaba, to be sure, but they were much more frightened of Nimona, and that was usually enough to get them moving.

Eventually, Elphaba gave up on fighting individual fires and summoned up the best rainstorm she could possibly manage.

She wasn’t an expert on weather magic by any means (after all, that was Morrible’s speciality), but she managed to conjure enough rainclouds to encircle the village. Moments later, the heavens opened, disgorging a deluge of water on the blazing fields below, drenching the fields and swiftly drowning several miles of flame at once, kicking up massive clouds of smoke as the flames guttered and died.

Elphaba kept her distance until the smoke had dissipated and the rain had stopped: after everything she’d done to get this far, passing out from smoke inhalation and falling to her death would have been a pretty embarrassing way to die.

She eventually found Nimona outside a burning house that the firefighters hadn’t gotten to just yet, trying to force the people hiding inside to flee before the flames consumed the entire building, but it seemed she'd ended up dealing with the stubbornest of the townsfolk. She’d already kicked in the door as a horse and had succeeded in dragging out the resident family of five in gorilla form, but the homeowners were so terrified of Elphaba and Nimona that they kept fleeing back into the burning house, forcing her to chase after them and drag them back outside again.

As Elphaba approached, Nimona had gotten so impatient that she’d resorted to uncharacteristically trying to explain herself to the family even as they tried to run back indoors for a third time, but it wasn’t doing much good, because she couldn’t be heard over the roar of the flames.

After being dragged to safety by Nimona’s octopus form, the parents resorted to grabbing improvised weaponry and attacking Nimona in a hopelessly misguided effort to save themselves. All they got for their troubles was a broken pitchfork and a bent knife, and Nimona still wouldn’t release them, and for a moment, it seemed they were at impasse, along with the rest of the family.

Then the youngest child snatched up a sabre left behind by one of the fleeing soldiers, clumsily pointed it at Nimona with trembling hands, and shouted something at her. Again, the roar of the flames and the sound of nearby screaming meant that most of the little boy’s speech was inaudible, but both Elphaba and Nimona caught the last word: “monster.”

The effect on Nimona was nothing short of immediate: instead of reacting with the explosive rage Elphaba had come to expect whenever the word was used in her presence, Nimona froze on the spot, eyes widening in a mixture of horror and grief. Then, without saying a word, she dropped both the boy’s parents and his older siblings, then sat there in total silence, blankly staring at the little boy for a full minute while everyone else tried to figure out what to do next.

At that point, Elphaba stepped in.

With a wave of her hand, she sent another wave of water cascading down on the house, extinguishing the flames instantly. Then she wrestled the sword out of the kid’s hand and shooed the family away as loudly possible, not caring if they ran back indoors or into the street. All that mattered was making sure five idiots didn’t get themselves killed before she and Nimona made their getaway.

With Nimona still too shellshocked to change out of her octopus form, it took a lot of effort to magically gather her up and haul her onto the broomstick, but eventually she managed to fly off with Nimona in tow, soaring off into the night.

---

By some miracle, they made it back to the cavern safehouse without being noticed, and Nimona managed to recover enough presence of mind to shift to human form, so it wasn’t too difficult to carry her inside.

Unfortunately, other than that, the shapeshifter was virtually catatonic.

In desperation, Elphaba carried her to one of the cots she’d set up inside the cave and put her to bed, practically cocooning her in blankets, if only so she’d be comfortable while she recovered from the shock.

It was stupid of her, really: Nimona had already made it clear she was older than she looked, so it wasn’t as if putting her to bed like a kid who’d had a bad day at school was going to do any good. And yet, Elphaba couldn’t help herself; she didn’t have any other way of helping her, so the best thing to do was to just make her feel safe until she’d recovered.

Meanwhile, the new radio she’d picked up to replace the one that Nimona had destroyed was already blaring out another hurricane of propaganda. Unsurprisingly, the fire was blamed entirely on Elphaba and Nimona; the soldiers were completely absolved of both accidental arson and cowardice, having been driven away by Elphaba’s “dark magic” and returned to “heroically save the village” once the spell had worn off; the firefighters had been forgotten about, their efforts to put out the fire having been attributed to the soldiers who’d started it; the few broadcasts that even mentioned the rainstorm credited the Wizard… and of course, Nimona’s attempts to rescue the people who’d been endangered by Morrible’s propaganda were simply not recorded. Most likely, the family she’d saved had been paid off to prevent the story from spreading.

And of course, all descriptions of Nimona now included the word “monster.”

Credit where credit was due, Morrible was nothing if not a brilliant opportunist: she’d clearly been very thorough when squeezing information out of Glinda, who would have no doubt mentioned how Nimona had lost her temper when she’d been offhandedly called a monster. Now, she was doing her best to jab at Nimona over the airways, trying to get her angry and demoralized, prodding her into lashing out.

(How the hell had Elphaba ended up being the better adjusted of the two of them? How had she wound up as the Glinda in this relationship?)

Eventually, Elphaba just turned off the radio and went back to her vigil by Nimona’s bedside. By then, though, Nimona was awake… and by the looks of things, she’d spent the last few minutes crying. Not only were her eyes still wet with tears and her face still red from weeping, but she was even hiccupping ever-so-slightly.

That in itself was shocking enough, but the fact that she’d been crying without Elphaba noticing was another nasty surprise: Nimona rarely did anything subtly even when she was being stealthy; if she’d gotten this quiet, it must have meant that the insult had cut deeper than Elphaba could have imagined.

Elphaba put a calming hand on her shoulder, though she wasn’t sure if she wanted to reassure Nimona or herself. “Do you want to talk?” she asked quietly.

Nimona hiccupped one last time, and muttered, “I still can’t tell you everything about me… but maybe I can tell you a little.”

“I think I can manage a few guesses: this isn’t the first time you’ve tried to help someone and had the word ‘monster’ screamed at you, is it?”

“And it won’t be the last time, either.”

“But why did this one hurt more than all the other times you’ve heard it? Was it just because it was from someone you were trying to hope, or-”

“No.”

“What, then?”

Nimona closed her eyes. “Because it’s always the kids who say it.”

“What do you mean?”

For a moment, Nimona was silent. “Do you remember the time when you asked me why I’d been following you for so many years?”

“Yes, and I got the feeling you weren’t being completely honest when you explained why. So, why were you really haunting me?”

Nimona sighed and hung her head. “Because I wanted to know if there was anyone in Oz who knew what it was like,” she said at last.

“What what was like?”

“I’m not from Oz, Elphaba. The kingdom where I was… well, where I guess I was born… it’s beyond the Deadly Desert, beyond Ev and Ix and even the Nome Kingdom. Out there, past the ocean, it’s very different from Oz.”

“Don’t leave me in suspense, Nimona. Elaborate.”

“Lemme put it like this: if you’d been born there, they wouldn’t have called you names and shut you out of everything. They’d have killed you the moment you were born. They’d have called you a monster and worse just for being green, long before they ever got a good look at your powers.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

“No, I told you before I don’t have parents.”

“How, then?”

“I got to see how it started. The people of my homeland wanted to defend themselves from monsters, so they hid their city behind a wall, layered everything with security measures you’ve never even heard of, wrote laws that keep the poor in their place, and make sure nobody leaves. Whenever I visit, the leaders – the kings, the queens, the directors, or whoever – they’re always telling the same old story, but no matter how they say it and how cute they make it sound, it always adds up to the Same. Damn. Thing. The nobles ‘defend the kingdom by becoming symbols that don’t really mean anything, the poor don’t need rights or opportunities as long as they’re protected, the city’s surrounded by monsters, and the only way to survive is to toe the line or else.

"It doesn’t matter that they’ve never seen a monster; it doesn’t matter that the only thing out there in the forests are wild animals; it doesn’t even matter that all the ‘monsters’ they’ve met in the past were just protesters and rebels and… well, me. They’re taught to believe in monsters as soon as they’re old enough to fight, so they keep on believing in monsters and that everyone they’re pitted against is a monster – even if it’s a kid just like them. They grow up believing they can be heroes if they drive a sword into the heart of anything different, and… and… sometimes… I…”

Nimona trailed off, her face a mask of pain and grief. Elphaba knew that look only too well, having seen it in the mirror far too many times for her own good, and she’d heard that agonized silence from herself more than enough to know what it mean: Nimona hadn’t lost her train of thought in the heat of the moment, but had deliberately cut the sentence short because whatever she’d meant to say next hurt too much to say.

“They’ll always be frightened of monsters,” Nimona plunged on, visibly forcing her grief away, “because their leaders want them to be afraid, because they know that-”

“The best way to bring folks together is to give them a really good enemy,” finished Elphaba. “That’s how it goes, isn’t it?”

“Right enough, Boss, but what happens when the leaders start believing the lie? Well, then there’s no hope: nobody knows the truth then. So, I gave up and came here instead. Not my best move, really, because it’s not that much different from home. So, I went looking for someone who’d know what it was like, someone who’d keep me from drifting off into the wilderness and off to another land altogether. And then, I found you.”

Elphaba took a moment to digest this before finally replying. “Why didn’t you say anything, Nimona?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you just introduce yourself?”

“I didn’t know how you’d react.”

“What, a lonely weird kid with magical powers meeting another weird kid who can shapeshift? I’d have thought you were the ultimate imaginary friend.”

For a moment, Nimona actually smiled, before another not-too-subtle note of pain swept it away.

“It’s never been as simple for me as that,” she said quietly. “Whenever I’ve tried to make friends, even if they’re outsiders or outcasts, they’ve always left me – or turned on me sooner or later. So, whenever I approached you, I always chickened out sooner or later.”

“Then what changed?”

“When I saw you heading to the Emerald City, I thought that would be the end of it: the Wizard would reel you in, you’d forget all the good things you could’ve done, you’d give up on helping the little people, and you’d become just like everyone else in Oz.”

Elphaba blinked. “What gave you the impression I’d cave in that easily?” she asked, unable to hide the not-too-subtle note of indignation in her voice.

“I’ve been in Oz for a long time, Boss: I’ve seen a lot of people go into the Emerald City, talking the talk about reforming the place or even starting a revolution. Some of them were even a little bit like you – talented, smart, with big ideas about changing the world for the better, maybe even a little bit on the outcast-y side. And the moment they got a taste of power, they got bored with the revolution, started shopping for job perks, and before they even knew what was happening, they were part of the problem. Morrible was one of them, back when she was young; flashforward a few decades, and she gave up all her principles just so she could ride the Wizard’s coattails to power.”

Nimona paused for breath, and Elphaba once again wondered just how old the little shapeshifter really was.

“But you didn’t,” Nimona continued. “I saw you fly away, I heard Morrible and the Wizard declaring you a public enemy. And as soon as I realized you were going to rebel-”

“You finally realized we were the same after all,” said Elphaba, softly.

Was it Elphaba’s imagination, or was there a glimmer of hope in Nimona’s eyes? On a face so used to conveying nothing but impish humour and bitter cynicism, it looked almost obscene, but there it was, clear as day.

“And that’s when I realized you needed a sidekick,” Nimona continued. “I mean, cool as it is to lead a one-woman revolution, you can’t do it all your own. I mean, yeah, everyone’s against you and the Animals have all had to leave, but still… there’s always me, right?”

“I don’t think you were looking to be my sidekick at all,” said Elphaba, quietly. “I think you wanted a friend.”

For a few seconds, Nimona looked as if she didn’t know how to respond to this. “I didn’t want to say it when we first admitted,” she admitted. “I didn’t want to-”

“Be disappointed? I understand. You’re not the only person in the room who’s lost a friend when you thought you could depend on them the most.”

Again, there was a look of dawning hope on Nimona’s face.

 “But what do you actually get out of our alliance apart from friendship, Nimona? If you can make it across the Deadly Desert – across entire continents without being noticed and if you can stand up to everything from knives to bullets without shedding blood, I’m pretty sure you don’t have that many needs in life. So, what did you really want when you joined the rebellion?”

Another moment of hesitation.

“Proof, I guess,” said Nimona at last. “If you can change Oz for the better, then maybe my country can change as well, and it’s not hopeless after all. Isn’t that worth hoping for?”

She wasn’t asking Elphaba a serious question, not really: she was asking for validation, openly fishing for a reason to carry on despite the depression. Nimona had always seemed buoyant and unquenchably exuberant, seemingly able to bounce back from anything including weapons-grade explosives, and now a little feedback from a friend was helping her bounce back from this moment of despair as well. All she’d need was a little push to get her fit and fighting again.

And unbelievably enough, Elphaba wanted to say no.

After all, in all the decades she’d been alive after all the months and even years they’d been leading a rebellion against the Wizard, she’d never gotten the slightest hint that anything she’d ever done had ever changed peoples’ minds, or that any of her successes could have led to anything worthwhile. Even after her greatest victories when the Wizard’s soldiers had been left fleeing in terror and it seemed like nothing in the world could stop her, Elphaba couldn’t help but feel those familiar ripples of pre-emptive despair creeping over her, as they always did whenever things seemed to be going too well for her. She needed to brace herself for the worst, to prepare for when things blew up in her face all over again, and when she wasn’t being overcome with the sheer joy of letting her powers blaze a trail across Oz, she needed to think realistically if she wanted to do any real good for the few Animals left.

Don’t wish, she’d told herself, time and again. Wishing only wounds the heart.

And she’d been proven right, time and again.

And though she wanted more than anything else to spare herself the pain of setting herself up for another failure and to spare Nimona the pain of having her hopes dashed, she couldn’t bring herself to say no.

“Whaddaya say, Boss?” said Nimona, extending a hand. “Let’s get all the proof we’ve ever needed: let’s show ‘em the world can change.”

She was almost pleading, Elphaba realized. She might have been older than she looked, but Nimona still had a child’s need for friendship; perhaps that, more than anything else, was what finally spurred her reach out and take Nimona’s hand.

“Let’s break stuff,” she said, smiling in spite of herself.

Notes:

Care to guess what happens next? Let me know. Feel free to furnish me with your theories, opinions, and comments!

Chapter 5: Fraying And Tearing

Summary:

A deadly opponent takes centre stage...

Notes:

Sorry for the delay, everyone: I had to do some rewriting and rethinking over the last week. Hopefully it pays off, but as always, you'll have to be the judge.

Anyway, read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Elphaba knew the hope couldn’t last long.

That was why she started enchanting the medallions in the first place, though admittedly, acquiring them had been something of an accident: she and Nimona had raided a supply cart delivering a treasure trove of luxuries to mayors and other officials valued by the Wizard, and amongst the sealed packages of Vinkus tobacco and Corn Basket coffee, they’d found a small chest of necklaces.

Monetarily, they were just shy of total worthlessness: the gold was fake, the emeralds and rubies in the medallions themselves, were made of glass, and the entire batch wasn’t worth the price of a cup of tea, but they looked convincing enough, which was probably why they’d been requested in the first place. Either someone had a lot of romantic partners they wanted to fob off with cheap gifts, or some corrupt old tightass needed to bribe a lot of extremely credulous nitwits.

Whatever the case, Nimona brought the lot back to the cave, and on a whim one day, Elphaba brought out the Grimmerie and begun enchanting them.

There’d been so many times when she’d needed to get Animals out of danger quickly but there’d been no time to cast any of the complicated spells that could them to safety before the troops had arrived on the scene. So, why not prepare a spell in advance?

The medallions were all enchanted with the same spell of teleportation: all the user needed was to touch the medallion and say where they wanted to go, and there they’d be. And if the user didn’t know the destination and couldn’t pinpoint it on a map (as was often the case with the Animal children she was rescuing), Elphaba had found very quickly that it could still teleport an Animal to safety if she held the medallion and spoke the destination instead; as long as the refugee Animal was wearing the necklace, the enchantment still worked for them.

For good measure, after stocking up on several hundred of these enchanted medallions, Elphaba made sure to hide caches of them all over Oz just in case she needed more than she could carry.

The only wrinkle in the whole operation was the one question that the rescued Animals kept asking her just before she sent them to safety: “when will you use one for yourself? When will you join us?”

And Elphaba never knew how to answer them. She couldn’t even tell them that she would to remain in Oz until every Animal left in the country was safe and the Wizard was deposed, because she kept getting hamstrung by the logical problems of this solemn vow: with so many culls, executions, and Silencings, Oz’s Animal population would soon run dry, leaving behind only the few thousand refugees she’d been sending out of the country to rebuild their respective species. And after that, the only problem Elphaba had left to face was the Wizard… and if he couldn’t be forced to leave office, could Elphaba go through with what would have to happen next?

She’d gone out of her way to avoid killing wherever she could, even if it meant leaving witnesses and threats alive, and though she was sure that there had to have been collateral damage from all the explosives being catapulted in her general direction, she’d never been able to find evidence of any deaths from the bombardment (though given Morrible’s efforts to make the armed forces of Oz look as heroic as possible, that probably wasn’t so reassuring).

Could she kill the Wizard? Did she have what it took to murder him in cold blood when she knew for a fact that he was powerless and incapable of defending himself? Would it change anything? Or would it give Morrible or one of her like-minded cronies a chance to slot a puppet ruler onto the throne?

And even if she could psyche herself up enough to do the deed and live with the consequences… well, she’d need to get to the Wizard first. For all its beauty and refinement, the Emerald City was virtually impregnable: even if the Wizard hadn’t retreated to the lower levels of his fortress-like palace, the metropolis was still guarded by the best and brightest of the Wizard’s forces, with the army manning the walls in their hundreds, every street greedily scrutinized by the officers of the Gale Force, and the Flying Monkeys ready to serve as eyes in the skies the moment the order was given. And then there were the city’s mechanical defences, with every bejewelled rooftop bristling with gun turrets, cannons, snipers, and all manner of anti-air weaponry… and worst of all, there was at least one real witch in residence.

Attacking the Emerald City, even stealthily, would have to be the absolute last resort, especially while Morrible was still alive.

And if it just wasn’t possible… would Elphaba finally admit defeat?

Would she leave Oz forever?

---

And it was on one cold and gloomy afternoon in the depths of the cavern safehouse that Elphaba found herself reflecting on this very fact, musing over her collection of teleportation medallions as she did so.

Then, just as she was wondering if they would be enough to get past the web of protective enchantments that Morrible had shielded the palace with over the last few years, when Nimona practically exploded into the cave in the form of a mammoth, bouncing off the walls as an armadillo and wildly flittering around Elphaba’s head in the form of a hummingbird.

“Look who just brought home the bacoooooooon!” she cackled.

“Nimona, what the hell are you talking about? I thought you said you were heading out to scout out the training camp for the new army recruits.”

“And I found something better than that to attack, Boss,” said Nimona with a wink. “Take a look at what I picked up in the comms building…”

Sure enough, she was clutching a telegram in her tiny claws.

ATTENTION COMMANDER PERKEL STOP, it read, YOU ARE TO CEASE ALL TRAINING EXERCISES AND IMMEDIATELY REPORT TO STRATOKUS VILLAGE GILLIKIN COUNTRY WITH ALL SEVENTY OF YOUR INFANTRYMEN STOP WE WILL BE PERFORMING A TEST OF THE WIZARD’S NEW KINEMATOGRAPHIZATION MAGIC IN ORDER TO SPREAD HIS RIGHTEOUS MESSAGE FURTHER AND WE WILL NEED YOUR MEN TO ENSURE ITS SAFETY STOP INCIDENTALLY I WILL BE PERSONALLY SUPERVISING THE TEST STOP THE WIZARD DOES NOT LOOK KINDLY ON FAILURES AND I EVEN LESS SO STOP I TRUST YOU WILL BE SUITABLY INCENTIVATED QUERY I EXPECT YOU HERE IN THE NEXT FORTY-TWO HOURS STOP NOW KINDLY START MARCHING AND DO NOT STOP FOR ANYTHING STOP.

“Holy hell,” whispered Elphaba.

“I know, it’s so clunky. At least email lets you use punctuation.”

“This is the first time in the entire rebellion that Morrible’s ever shown her face outside the Emerald City,” Elphaba plunged on, barely noticing Nimona’s quip. “If she’s headed to somewhere as remote as Stratokus, then maybe she won’t have had time to layer the village with the same kind of enchantments she’s set up around the Emerald City – and if she’s really attending to supervise the test and this isn’t actually a trap, then maybe we can get her out of the picture for good!”

Without missing a beat, Nimona shifted from hummingbird to tiger. “So how do we get her out of the picture, Boss?” she asked, gleefully baring her fangs. “Do we lock her in a cell and force her to listen to the Banana Splits theme until her brains pour out of her ears, or do we just hit her until she stops moving?”

Elphaba winced. Obviously, the stress was weighing heavily on Nimona as well, for she usually resorted to comically bloodthirsty remarks when she was at her most anxious and doing her best to hide it. It was like her usual impish humour, but not quite, and every time Elphaba heard it in action, she couldn’t help but worry about the level of fear, hurt, and anger in play behind every lurid description.

“Well,” she replied, “I doubt Morrible will just surrender, but… I think we should wait until we get a better look at what’s going on before we start making plans. Besides, we’ve got to figure out if this whole thing is just another one of Morrible’s traps, so we’ll have to arrive ahead of them. We’ll have to start packing up soon, so we can-”

“Already done, Boss,” said Nimona with a wink. “Bags are packed and ready when you are.”

“Nicely done. In which case, I have only one question: what the hell are the Banana Splits and what does their theme sound like?”

---

Forty hours later, the clouds parted, and the two of them slowly descended from the moonlit sky into the rocky mountain town of Stratokus.

It wasn’t the most impressive sight in Oz, and probably wouldn’t have been even in the daylight: once upon a time it had been a successful trading hub, had even gotten fabulously rich after the Wizard had put an end to mining ventures outside his borders, triggering a major boom in the Glikkus gemstone market. Stratokus had been a major stop along the route to the Glikkus emerald mines, and they profited off every traveller that needed transport and every pound of cargo that needed to be ferried, including the emeralds. Unfortunately, Stratokus’ hadn’t reckoned with just how cheap their new ruler was: rather than accept the cost of having his emeralds shipped through Stratokus, the Wizard had simply built a new rail line bypassing it entirely. Overnight, the entire town’s profit margin had simply evaporated, and with the Wizard now in complete control of Oz, they’d had no choice but to lie back and take it.

By now, Stratokus was a ghost town, a tumbledown collection of weatherbeaten buildings half lost amidst the mountains, lost among the pinnacles dotting the town like trees, almost abandoned save for the few residents who’d been too stubborn to leave with the rest of the locals once the exodus had begun. Judging by the stockade populated entirely by senior citizens, the Gale Force had decided even those hardy survivors were too many for their tastes.

Frankly, Morrible couldn’t have picked a better spot for an experiment… or an ambush. Unfortunately, there was no sign of her: either she was hidden away in one of the several dozen ramshackle houses encircling the town hall, she was at work in the town hall itself where the stage for the experiment was being built, or Elphaba had been wrong, and the press secretary hadn’t arrived yet.

Nimona all but begged to be allowed to run rampant, pointing out the lack of civilians and the numerous collapsing buildings that cried out to be trampled into the snow, and though Elphaba was tempted, she vetoed the idea on the spot. Again, she couldn’t help but feel that the whole thing was a trap just waiting to happen.

Instead, the two of them hid atop one of the rocky pinnacles overlooking Statokus, a fifty-foot column of rock just behind the town hall, and there they settled in to wait for Morrible to show herself. Two long hours went by as the Gale Force and their lumbering workforce went about hammering together the stage on which the experiment was to be conducted, and still there was no sign of Morrible or the troops she’d requested.

Another two went by, and Elphaba began to wonder if the troops had been called for at all and the telegram had just been the bait for a trap.

It wasn’t until the fifth hour went by that a train finally rattled to a stop at the long-neglected station and a platoon of exhausted-looking soldiers lurched out. Immediately, an officer of the Gale Force stormed up and read them the riot act over being late, demanding to know what had kept them up, then roaring a torrent of insults whenever the platoon commander tried to explain himself, and taking the trouble to mention what Madame Morrible would do to them if they delayed a moment longer.

Once the officer had finished yelling at them, the little army went to work on Stratokus: armed with a bizarre collection of wires, oil drums, and bizarre-looking flasks of liquid, they went from door to door, arranging the drums and flasks in the centre of each home and garlanding them with wire. But to Elphaba’s frustration, she didn’t realize what she was looking at until the distinctive t-shaped detonator was brought out.

“Guess that answers that question,” mused Elphaba. “They want to blow up the town as soon as I set foot in it.”

Nimona just laughed. “That’s not gonna stop me if I go first.”

“Maybe, but where’s Morrible? Come to think of it, why would she risk her life just to handle such a dangerous trap? Maybe the telegram was just the bait to get us up here.”

“It wasn’t.”

“How can you tell?”

Without saying a word, Nimona pointed at the town hall. It took a few seconds and a temporary vision-enhancing spell for Elphaba to work out what she was pointing at, but eventually, she just about recognized Morrible’s smirking face peering out through a tiny window just above the stage.

“Again, why the hell is she here and taking this much of a risk?”

“Who knows? More importantly, who cares? If they didn’t want us to open this present, they shouldn’t’ve put a bow on it.” Nimona giggled at her own joke.

By now, the army was almost finished planting bombs and were now making their way to the far end of town, behind the hall. Here, they took up defensive positions around the few houses that had been wired for detonation, setting up sandbags, cannons, mortars, and even a few weapons that Elphaba hadn’t seen before. However, the ones that really worried Elphaba were the few taking up position on the “safe” rooftops, because they were armed with the newest and most precise rifles from the Wizard’s armouries, and Elphaba had two bullet holes through her cloak to prove just how accurate at they could be even at extreme long range. And judging by the peculiar glow to the scopes on these rifles, Morrible had enchanted them to allow the snipers to see in the dark.

Again, why was Morrible so determined to handle this trap herself when the troops, the artillery, the snipers, and the bombs could have done the job for her?

Minutes later, there was a rumble from below as a small group of overalled technicians began wheeling a strange array of equipment towards the stage. To Elphaba’s eyes, it looked nothing more than a box and a collection of senses all set on wheels, but Nimona seemed to recognize it immediately.

“It’s a projector,” she explained. “Well, part of it is.”

“Well, it doesn’t like any kind of projector I’ve seen, but I’ll take your word for it. But what about the other part?”

“It’s a film camera. Looks like our Wizard learned a lot about the history of film before he came out here to Oz.”

“It’s a bit big as far as cameras go, isn’t it?”

“Not that kind of camera, Boss. It’s for… nevermind, I think we’re going to see what it does right now.”

As Elphaba watched, the technicians positioned the camera and projector directly across from the stage and then set up a large portable screen across the back wall for the projector. Then, just as Elphaba was about to comment on the “magic lantern shows” she’d sometimes seen at Shiz, the projector rumbled to life and began beaming images across the screen, but not slides, as Elphaba had been expecting: what was being projected weren’t still images, but animated scenes.

Before her eyes, she saw the Great Ozian Railroad, the Emerald City’s skyline, the palace, and finally, the Wizard’s giant mechanical face, accompanied by a muffled but still audible recording of his voice.

“This really was a test,” Elphaba realized. “They just wanted to use it as bait, too. Crazy as it is, I can see why they’d make such a big deal out of it: with this, the Wizard’s propaganda isn’t limited to sound anymore; now he can actually show his face to the masses without running the risk of anyone seeing the man behind the curtain.”

“Just wait until he discovers social media,” said Nimona.

“Still don’t know what that is, by the way.”

“Believe me, you don’t want to.”

“Hush for a second; it looks like the programme’s changed…”

Far below them, the projected show ground to a halt, and now the camera was brought to the front of the array. Then, for seemingly no apparent reason, one of the technicians brought out a large trophy on a marble stand, the kind of award granted only to veteran educators under the Wizard’s regime.

There was a grumbling of voices from the town hall, and with a little temporary hearing spells, Elphaba dimly recognized Morrible’s voice snarling, “Be careful with that, it has great sentimentious value!”

“We just need a subject to focus on for the duration of the screen test, Madame Morrible.”

“Then take good care of your ‘subject,’ damn you! When I said you could use one of my personal possessiations to test lighting and range, I didn’t expect you to treat it like a brass spittoon!”

There was a pause, as the technicians finished apologizing and went to work with their array of machinery, hauling in portable lights, boom microphones, and even a strange wooden board that seemed to be there just to produce a loud clapping sound.

Then, the technicians swivelled the camera in the direction of the trophy and began filming, as Nimona put it.

Elphaba peered closer, trying to work out if there was anything more to this, but as far as she could see, there didn’t seem to be anything other than a trophy being filmed down there. For a moment, there was a flurry of activity from below and Elphaba almost fell off the pinnacle trying to get a closer look, only to realize that it was just one of the technicians slowly rotating the trophy on its pedestal while the rest of the crew began playing around with various backdrops for it.

What could possibly be the point of all this? There had to be a reason why they were testing the film equipment alongside the trap, otherwise why would there be a test in the first place? Why not just make it a straightforward trap and have someone blast her out of the sky the moment she arrived? Why would Morrible waste so much precious resources, risk her own life, complicate the whole thing by having the whole thing take place at night, just to add a superfluous test of equipment that could have been tested anywhere in Oz?

Muttering a few choice expletives, Elphaba leaned further out, trying to survey the area one final time, only for Nimona to let out a hiss of “get down!” And before Elphaba could react, the little shapeshifter had already grabbed her by the arm and pressed her flat against the edge of the pinnacle.

A nanosecond later, Elphaba heard the gunshot ripple across Stratokus, a bullet whistling right through the space where she’d been sitting a moment ago.

And suddenly, every single light that had previously been focussed on the stage was now pointed squarely at Elphaba and Nimona, Morrible was shouting orders, the snipers on the rooftops were volleying rounds of suppressing fire at the edge of Elphaba’s cover, and the artillerymen on the far side of town were already swivelling their cannons and mortars towards the pinnacle.

Elphaba had barely enough time to make a grab for her broomstick before an explosive shell slammed into the pinnacle, snapping it in half with an almighty roar of erupting gunpowder and shattering rock, and sending Elphaba tumbling off her perch, out into empty air.

She fell for about thirty feet before she just barely managed to get the broomstick into gear again and arrest her downward plunge before she hit the ground, stopping about five feet from impact.

By then, there was no time to take off again: every single gun in town was being trained on her again, and if she tried flying now, she’d be shot down before she could rise any higher than ten feet. She didn’t know where Nimona had fallen, if she was back on her feet and looking for her already, but she couldn’t afford to wait for help now.

With seconds to react, Elphaba threw everything she had into shielding herself: with a wave of her hand, she summoned up a wall of solid rock from the ground ahead of her, blocking the incoming hail of gunshots from the troops on the ground and the air-splitting bolts from the snipers, even soaking up a couple of cannonballs before the wall began to crack. A hissing storm of grenades cascaded down on her from the nearest soldiers, but Elphaba just smothered their fuses before they could detonate and swatted them back across town, immediately sending the troops fleeing in all directions before they could realize that the fuses were dead.

And as the troops struggled to regroup, Elphaba darted out from behind cover: she reached out with will and magic alone and sent a wave of a force racing across the rooftops, sending the snipers toppling off their posts and sliding down their roofs.

Behind her, there was an even louder rattle of gunfire and several more explosives, followed by a roar of annoyance from Nimona.

Good, Elphaba thought, as she frantically scanned the area for the next threat on the agenda. She’s still in reach. Just got to hold out until she can get here, then we can both fight our way out. Just got to hope that they don’t-

“IMMEDIATE FIRE ON THE WITCH, NOW!”

Ah crap…

In the distance, there was a muffled roar of artillery, and by sheer luck, she spun around on instinct and reached out with all the magic she could muster-

-just in time to see the cannonball hurtling towards her, see it slowing down at an agonizing pace until finally it shuddered to a halt in mid-air, less than three feet from her skull. For a moment, all she could do was stare at the white-hot cannonball hovering before her, unable to believe her luck.

Then, she heard Morrible scream “Don’t just stare at her, you idiots, KEEP SHOOTING!”

Cursing a purple streak, Elphaba lashed out and flung the cannonball right back at the artillerymen with meteoric speed, immediately being rewarded with a deafening boom, a chorus of screams, and a trifecta of secondary explosions. She must have hit a magazine or something because the entire artillery battery was suddenly lost in a colossal smoke-cloud as the explosions rippled out across the “safe” end of town, and suddenly the sappers and engineers who’d been happily manning the cannons were now struggling to put out a fire in the middle of their own battery.

Judging by the swearing and cussing in the distance, the other artillery battery still had their hands full with Nimona.

Meanwhile, the ground troops rallied and went charging in, guns at the ready. With seconds to react, she swept a hand through the dust at her feet and with a complicated gesture, flung it into the sky; with one flex of magic, the dust was instantly transmuted into a thick grey fog, cutting visibility down almost to zero.

Unable to see their opponent, the soldiers were forced to drop their guns, draw their spears and sabres, and go charging headlong into the cloud… where they still couldn’t see her, but Elphaba could most assuredly see them.

A wave of her hand flipped two oncoming halberdiers flat on their backs, a crook of her finger sent three of them cartwheeling helplessly away, a casual swing of her fist smashed an oncoming squad to the ground with the force of a wrecking ball and left them winded and groaning in the ashes. Anyone who got close enough to actually see her found their weapons going limp and floppy in their hands as a spell turned their blades to rubber, and any troops dumb enough to charge onwards after that found their boots turning to stone, leaving them rooted to the ground.

It was around the time that one unlucky corporal was left fleeing across the battlefield with a broken nose and his own animated spear hopping after him that the troops belatedly realized that Elphaba wasn’t quite as frail and craven as the propaganda had made her sound. Slowly but surely, the soldiers about-faced and resumed charging, only this time in the opposite direction, back to the safety of cover. Elphaba briefly rejoiced as she hastily readied her broom to take flight; all she’d have to do was get some altitude, find Nimona, and they could get out of here before the trap got any worse.

Then, a gust of wind suddenly swept through the cloud, blasting away the ash and smoke, leaving the battlefield suddenly clear, and Elphaba didn’t have to look far to find the source of the gale.

Standing on the stage, hands outstretched and steering the winds through magical gesture, was Madame Morrible. By now, her face was chalk-white with rage, her eyes flickering with what almost looked like miniature lightning flashes, her smugly serene face torn in half by a furious snarl. In that moment, she didn’t look like the Wizard’s press secretary or a teach or any kind of witch at all; now, boiling with frustration and grinding the molars off her teeth in rage, she looked more monstrous than Nimona herself.

Beside her, the technicians were still filming, only now the camera was focussed on Elphaba. And now with a jolt of horror, she finally realized what the test had been for in the first place: it wasn’t just as bait, but a chance to film Elphaba’s death in battle.

Elphaba was already taking flight, kicking off the ground and catapulting herself into the air, trying to get a better angle to either continue the fight or flee. Less than three feet off the ground, though, a hurricane-force wind slammed into her and sent her spinning helplessly away. She tried to fight through the squall, to force herself through Morrible’s conjured gale with every last ounce of horsepower the broom had in it but even pushing it to its very limit was only enough to keep her still in spite of the barrage. Then Morrible hit her with another gust, this one almost enough to knock the broom out of Elphaba’s hand, and more than enough to budge her free of the stalemate.

For a hundred yards, she tumbled backwards across the town hall courtyard, barely shielding herself with her arms and her magic as Morrible bowled her away. Elphaba finally rolled to a stop on the other side of the square, dazed, bruised, but otherwise unharmed…

…and with a thrill of horror, as she got to her feet, she realized she was now standing right in the middle of the bomb-laced half of the town.

Across the square, she heard Morrible shouting orders and caught a brief glimpse of the technician lunging for the detonator.

Once again, there was no time to take off. All she could do was summon up all the power she could and shroud herself in it, pouring out raw magical power in great waves of sculpted emerald light, crafting a solid sphere around herself in the few seconds she had left. And then, no sooner had she managed two-thirds of the shield, one of the houses to her right erupted in a white-hot fireball, the impact knocking her on her side and splitting the air with a razor-sharp storm of shrapnel that her magic only just managed to repel.

Elphaba staggered to her feet, patching up the few spots where the shield hadn’t had time to form.

And then another house exploded to her left, knocking her back across the square, deeper into the thicket of booby-trapped houses, and suddenly, all the houses seemed to be exploding at once, the full force of the Ozian demolition team doing its level best to crush and sear her out of existence.

Explosions flung her back and forth across town, hammering her into buildings, burning wreckage, pinnacles, trees, and only the strength of her shield kept her bones unbroken; fire washed over her in an unending stream, searing plantlife around her to ashes but merely leaving her sweltering beneath the shield; a storm of burning timbers, flying bricks, and spears of shrapnel rained down on her, but it only bounced off her magical defences. Even so, it hurt: even through the shield, the impacts still left bruises, and the sheer effort of keeping the shield around her left her body silently howling in exhaustion.

After twenty seconds of uninterrupted detonations, Elphaba found herself catapulted forwards, back across the square, to land in a smouldering, bruised heap right at the foot of the town hall stage, almost at Morrible’s feet.

Behind her, perhaps a half dozen soldiers stood in readiness, guns at the ready despite their trembling hands.

And behind them, Morrible’s prized trophy was still standing forgotten on its pedestal against the screen, a sight that could have made Elphaba laugh if her ribs didn’t hurt so much.

Elphaba struggled to haul herself upright, but between the strain of maintaining the shield and the battering she’d just withstood, she could barely force herself to her knees, and after that, she was already beginning to tip backwards in sheer exhaustion.

By now, the shield was gone, her stamina was drained, and her lungs felt like they’d been squeezed empty; she couldn’t even grip the broomstick. Until she could get her beath back, she was as good as helpless.

“You’ve learned much since last we met,” said Morrible.

She was chuckling now, the bloodthirsty snarl replaced with an almost catlike smirk, and like a cat, she was obviously going to have fun playing with Elphaba before trying to finish her off.

“How much of the skill you demonstratified today was acquirified through spellbooks your shapeshifting friend stole for you, I wonder?”

Elphaba, who’d been an equal partner in those thefts, refused to answer; she wasn’t going to give Morrible the satisfaction.

“Speaking of which,” Morrible continued, “where is Nimona? I’m very eager to make its acquaintancy.”

“Her, Morrible, not it,” Elphaba wheezed.

 “I wasn’t aware that it mattered, Ms Elphaba: your friend is alien to this land and has no right to live here unless it serves our purposes. Either way, the only thing to call a tool, cooperational or otherwise, is it. Speaking of which, we might make some progress on that front today, yes? Perhaps we’ll have more luck harnessiating its powers than yours.”

At this, Elphaba laughed hoarsely. “You really are an idiot, you know that? She can’t be hurt, much less captured, and she hates authority figures. I’m not giving her orders; she’s helping me of her own free will. What makes you think you’re going to get anywhere trying to control Nimona?”

“Your failures are, as always, your own. Perhaps I made a mistake when I stood up for you on your first day at Shiz… but then, who really can predict the future, hmm?”

Morrible theatrically checked her pocket watch. “It really is taking its time, isn’t it? Very well then; corporal, could you please shoot the witch? Perhaps that will draw the shapeshifter out of hiding.”

Silence.

“Corporal?”

Morrible turned, only to find Nimona stacking up a large pile of unconscious soldiers less than ten feet away from her.

 “They were like this when I got here,” she growled.

If Morrible was in any way surprised by this development, she showed no sign of it. If anything, she looked mildly amused.

“I take it that you are the creature that my one-time star pupil befriended?” She tut-tutted disapprovingly in Elphaba’s direction. “And here I was, hoping that my lessons might have been a civilizing influence on you in spite of your rebelliatious tendencies, but no, you associate with something as vulgar as this.”

“Awww, thanks!” sneered Nimona.

Morrible shook her head in disgust. “I should never have let you share a room with Glinda Uppland, Ms Elphaba; you’ve mingled with nothing but aberrants and misfits ever since. Anyway, creature, are we going to stand around all evening trading wittifications, or are we going to fight?”

“Thought you’d never ask. Now, let’s break stuff.”

And with that, Nimona erupted into the form of a rhinoceros, put her head down, and with one eardrum-rupturing bellow, lunged towards at Morrible.

But before Nimona had even started moving, Morrible had been tracing magical gestures in the air in front of her, and glaring dark clouds had already been forming overhead, flickering with embryonic lightning. Elphaba had just enough time to open her mouth in a frantic attempt to warn Nimona, before Morrible swept a hand through the air and called down a searing white bolt of lightning.

It struck Nimona square in the flank, instantly cutting off all forward momentum, tossing her bear form aside like a rag doll and leaving her slumped in a smouldering heap at the foot of the stage right next to Elphaba. And from here, there was no mistaking the fact that there was now a massive, electrical burn in her side, still smoking and already leaking a trickle of blood.

Morrible hadn’t just caught Nimona off-guard: she’d wounded her.

In all the months Elphaba had known the crazy shapeshifter, nothing had ever been able to hurt her, not even briefly. Blades, guns, bombs, collapsing buildings, derailing supply trains, even a spy balloon blowing up in her face, all just bounced off her without so much as a flicker of pain; at the most, they knocked her back and left her a little bit on the dazed side, but that was it. Now, though…

Magic could hurt her… and judging by the blood, maybe even kill her.

Elphaba tried to force herself upright, to stop Morrible somehow, but the press secretary just spun around and knocked her flat with another magical gale, then rounded on Nimona again.

By now, the shapeshifter was slowly clawing her way to her feet, now in the form of a gorilla, and though she was clearly in a lot of pain, she wasn’t down for the count just yet. With a grunt of effort, she vaulted onto the stage, latched onto the roof of the town hall and flung herself at Morrible, only for another wild gust of wind to sweep her out of the air and bowl her back across the courtyard.

On the upside, she collided with the film-equipment along the way, reducing the camera to a sparking heap of wreckage, but that was about the only thing either of them could be thankful for.

A moment later, Nimona struggled to her feet just in time for another bolt of lightning to lance down on her from above, slamming her to the ground with a flash of voltage so bright that Elphaba could see it through her closed eyelids, and leaving another smouldering, gore-haloed wound in Nimona’s side.

Groaning, Nimona clawed her away upright, only for a miniature hurricane to tear a chunk of burning timbers from one of the ruined houses behind her and catapult it at her like an artillery shell, hammering her back into the ground.

Another chunk of timbers cartwheeled through the sky towards her, but this time, Nimona was ready: hardening her leathery pachyderm skin into a shell, Nimona hunkered down into a huge, crag-faced, spike-tailed creature that seemed half horned lizard half tortoise, and this time the shrapnel just bounced off her shell.

A wave of Morrible’s hands conjured an advancing rime of frost and sent it creeping inexorably across the ground towards Nimona, freezing her limbs and pincushioning her from below in a dozen places with a rising field of needle-sharp icicles. But even as she hissed in pain, Nimona changed yet again, sprouting dense fur and layering on body mass as she transformed into a huge bear, shrugging off both the cold and the puncture wounds.

Morrible muttered a few unladylike remarks and went to work on the flames on the other side of town, spinning and weaving the inferno into vortices that she swept at Nimona as a squadron of fire devils, each of them menacingly swirling towards her like a pack of wolves closing in on a stranded horse. But at the last moment before the fire whirls touched her, Nimona changed into a colossal monitor lizard the size of a carriage and glittering black scales like diamonds, and the flames simply washed over her hide, as fluid as water and every bit as harmless.

For a moment, Elphaba thought Nimona might actually be able to overcome the magic long enough to properly counterattack.

She was still thinking that when Morrible waved a hand and hit her with another thunderbolt, and another, and another, until the sky coursed with twisted, forked lightning pouring down on Nimona from all angles. There was no more finesse now, no artistry or technique, just raw, destructive weather magic hammering the target into submission.

At the heart of the blinding storm, Elphaba could just about see Nimona herself, writhing in pain beneath the onslaught and trying to find a shape that could withstand the voltage, shifting from giant tortoise to elephant to whale to dragon to something beyond description, pushing her talents to the very limit in a wild attempt to resist the pain. But for every shape she took, Morrible only piled on more lightning, until Elphaba had to shade her eyes with what magic she could manage or risk being blinded.

Finally, Nimona’s wildly shifting silhouette twitched one last time and then slumped forward, caught between rhino and horse. Finally, Morrible quenched the lightning with another wave of her hand, and Elphaba could see the wreckage she’d left: Nimona was still alive and breathing, but a huge swathe of her hybrid shape was layered with third degree burns, seared down the muscle in an ugly four-foot stretch of blood and sizzling flesh…  and here and there, Elphaba caught glimpses of scorched bone protruding from the smouldering mess: ribs, limbs, even sections of her skull.

Maybe it was Elphaba’s imagination, but Nimona looked to be healing already: tiny strings of muscle and sinew were already creeping across the wounds, but it was slow-going, and she probably wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry until she was done healing.

Morrible was already striding closer to her, waving her hands in another magical gesture... and taking her eyes off Elphaba for a few critical seconds.

As she did so, Elphaba just barely managed to force herself onto her knees, grab the edge of the stage, and force herself upright again, muscles screaming every inch of the way. She was too exhausted to cast anything more than the simplest of spells, but she was on her feet and moving now.

Meanwhile, Morrible had moved away from calling down the weather to sculpting something out of surrounding energy, awkwardly shaping motes of light and shadow into a huge collar and chain large enough to fit over Nimona’s rhinoceros/horse neck. True, she was working outside her speciality, so it wasn’t as quick as her usual spellwork, but it hardly mattered while Nimona was out cold: already, the collar was almost a solid object, lowering slowly and inexorably towards Nimona’s neck.

“Yes,” Morrible purred, “I think you’ll be much happier once we’ve properly domesticatified you, my dear. You’ll have a special padded cage, a bowl with your name on it, a blanket, and we’ll even take you for walks in the park on sunny days… and all you have to do is help us hunt down any further dissidents.”

The collar yawned open like a pair of fanged jaws ready to slam shut on Nimona’s jugular.

“Who knows? After a few years in a cage, you won’t even be thinking these angry, anarchistic thoughts anymore; you won’t even transform unless we want you to: you’ll just be the Wizard’s shapeshifting mastiff, living for pats on the head and juicy bones. Ah, it’ll be much easier to tame you than Ms Elphaba. On that note, what do you think I should do with her once we're finished here? Perhaps-”

Without saying a word, Elphaba snatched the trophy off its pedestal and brought it crashing down on Morrible’s skull with an immensely rewarding metallic clang, like a bell being hit with a brick. The press secretary swayed on the spot for a moment, and then pitched forward, facefirst into the dirt; Elphaba didn’t know if Morrible was unconscious or dead, and for once, she honestly didn’t care.

All that mattered for now was that the magical collar was fading away, Morrible was down for the count, and the soldiers looked to be down as well… for the moment: some of them were starting to groan a bit wakefully for Elphaba’s liking.

Elphaba hobbled over to Nimona and shook her as hard as she could. Immediately, she was rewarded with a loud shriek of pain and yanked her hands away as if Nimona was on fire, cursing herself for being so thoughtless. Of course touching her would hurt her: the poor shapeshifter was roughly fifty percent electrical burns right now.

“Nimona?” she whispered, gently patting her on the one patch of unburnt skin she could find. “I’m gonna need you to transform again, quick as you can.”

Nimona let out a low, keening whimper. “It hurts. I need to, but it hurts so much...”

“I know, kid, I know, but i can’t get you out of here like this: you need to become something small, okay? A monkey, a mouse, something just small enough for me to carry so I can get you out of here.”

There was a muffled thud from behind her: one of the unconscious soldiers had clawed his way free of the pile Nimona had left him with and was now crawling across the stage for a rifle, and judging by the swear-words from the rest of the stack, the other guards weren’t far behind.

“Uh… quickly, please, Nimona? We might be in serious danger right now.”

For a nerve-rending five seconds, Nimona groaned and grunted with the effort of forcing her still-healing body to change again. Finally, with a muffled crunch that sounded uncannily like breaking bones, Nimona just managed to begin shrinking down to size with a series of shuddering, spasmodic convulsions, getting smaller with every single pain-ridden twitch: first, horse sized, then human-sized, then cat-sized, until finally she had become a red-furred sloth that awkwardly curled its arms around Elphaba’s neck and passed out.

By then, though, the guards were on their feet and loading their guns, and even Morrible was beginning to stir.

Elphaba had just enough time to clamber onto her broomstick and kick off into the sky as the first gunshots rang out, hurtling skywards with bullets whizzing past her like engaged hornets. Somehow, they just managed to reach escape velocity before any of the serious snipers could get to the rifles, and together, she and Nimona soared off into the night.

They left behind a town and a mission both in shambles. Half of Stratokus was in pieces and on fire thanks to Morrible’s bombs, the remaining villagers were still in the stockades and unlikely to see daylight ever again, and worst of all, Morrible was still alive.

What had they gotten out of this?

Morrible had been humiliated, her film footage had been ruined, her trophy was now sporting a massive dent in the shape of her skull, and her troops had gotten a front-row seat to her getting an entire chicken farm’s worth of egg on her face, but those were about the only things Elphaba and Nimona could be thankful for.

Right now, Elphaba was wrung dry and wouldn’t be up to fighting or using magic for days, Nimona was horribly wounded and might not be healed for weeks, they’d both fallen into Morrible’s trap, and worst of all, the illusion of invincibility they’d been nurturing had been shattered. Now they knew for a fact that magic could cut through Nimona’s invincibility.

For now, that wouldn’t be a problem until Morrible got out of intensive care, but if she went out of her way to recruit more witches and magicians, or Lurline forbid, kickstart an accelerated magical tuition program at Shiz, then nowhere would be safe.

All things considered, about the only worthwhile things that Elphaba and Nimona had walked away with tonight were their lives.

And given how badly things had gone tonight, those might not last for much longer...

Chapter 6: Moments Of Tenderness

Summary:

Three lonely, wounded souls find each other in the dark...

Notes:

As always, I can only apologize for tormenting Elphaba and Nimona in the previous chapter, but in all fairness, I needed to give them a real challenge to make this struggle more complicated than the fight to bring down the Institute.

As such, this is going to be a bit of a breather, a moment where they can recover and find a bit of happiness. Feel free to let me know if it makes up for the wounded characters - or not.

Anyway, read, review, and above all, enjoy!

As it turned out, being badly wounded and exhausted to the point of collapse was only the start of the evening’s annoyances.

Elphaba got back to the cavern safehouse to find it had been reduced to a smouldering crater, courtesy of an aerial bombardment. Judging by the winged silhouettes just barely visible in the pale sky, the Flying Monkeys had been sent to destroy any of her boltholes that they could find while Elphaba self was out taking the bait for Morrible’s trap, just so she wouldn’t have anywhere to retreat to.

No doubt the Flying Monkeys had been given an extra crack of the whip to find her and been equipped with bombs to make sure they could destroy her base once they’d found it, for most of the surrounding forest was still smoking in the wake of the barrage.

A quick inspection of the wreckage confirmed that nothing of Elphaba’s possessions had survived.

Just as well that she never went anywhere without the Grimmerie and the little green bottle.

She had other safe houses, thankfully… but given how aggressive the hunt had become, it was only a matter of time before they went the same way as the cavern.

And after that, where would she go next?

Sighing, Elphaba began hobbling through the forest as quietly as possible: there were other caves nearby, and though not all of them were as spacious as the one lost to the bombardment, they were at least well-concealed beneath fallen trees and boulders. She and Nimona could rest there for a time, at least until they’d recovered enough to go looking for the next viable safehouse.

After a few minutes of searching, she found a handful of nooks burrowing into the rock, each of them large enough for a mattress and its occupant(s). Drawing her bedrolls from the enchanted pockets of her cloak, she laid them out across the cave floors, hoping that Nimona would be comfortable on one of them (and wouldn't shapeshift into anything large while she was still unconscious).

Elphaba shook her head, eyeing the tiny huddle of scorched red fur still clinging to her; every so often, the Nimona would twitch and change into a mildly different breed of sloth, wincing and shivering as she did so. Evidently, she hadn’t quite recovered enough for more drastic transformations.

Right now, Elphaba would just be happy if Nimona could be more comfortable than she was right now: even now that the worst of her wounds had healed during the flight, the little shapeshifter was still in a lot of pain, if those shivers were any evidence, and being dangled from Elphaba’s neck like a novelty medallion for the last five hours of high-speed flight probably hadn’t helped.

Then, just as she was about to untangle Nimona the sloth from her collar, she heard a crunch of dry twigs somewhere in the distance.

And less than fifteen feet away, a hushed but familiar voice called out “Elphie?”

Elphaba froze.

Was this the final trap, the last attempt on her life that Morrible had prepared for her today? Was Glinda meant to be the bait that lured her in front of a firing squad? Or was Glinda to be the assassin, somehow?

“Elphie? Are you there?”

The voice was closer now. Even with the sun not yet over the yardarm and the dawn still pale and feeble, Elphaba could clearly see Glinda stumbling clumsily through the forest towards her, obviously not dressed for the weather or for the terrain, still in her Emerald City fineries and getting her magnificent dress caught on every branch within reach. Frankly, it was a wonder she hadn’t tripped and broken something.

Also, she still had terrible night vision.

Back in Shiz, it had meant that a slightly tipsy Glinda had once mistook her for Fiyero one dark evening and had gotten as far as kissing her quite forcefully on the lips before she’d realized her mistake.

Here, it meant that in the pre-dawn gloom and the shadows of the trees, Glinda couldn’t see that Elphaba was exactly five feet away from her and closing.

No, this clearly wasn’t an assassination attempt. If Morrible had somehow trained Glinda to be cold and ruthless enough to kill on command, she wouldn’t be stumbling around squeaking Elphaba’s name, not even to lure her out. She wouldn’t have played dumb: she’d have just swept the forest for any sign of Elphaba, as silently as a shadow, and then stuck a knife in her sleeping back. End of story.

Come to think of it, Morrible would have probably forced her to start eating more carrots, too.

“Elphie, please! Say something! Please, tell me you’re okay! I’m not being followed, I promise: I just want to know you’re alive!”

“Look left, Glinda.”

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!”

“Keep your voice down, dammit, it’s only me.”

Glinda sagged with relief. “You’re alive,” she gasped. “When I heard the Flying Monkeys had bombed a cavern out here, I thought you’d have been caught in the blast and I was so worried and I thought that even if you’d survived you’d be abducticated or worse and I was just-”

Elphaba very gently put a hand over Glinda’s mouth and waited for her to run out steam. “They missed me by about five hours, Glin,” she said, once things had quietened down enough for her to take her hand away. “I was busy getting used as a human pinball by Morrible before then, anyway.”

“It that why she’s in hospital? They say she’s been concussed-”

“With a trophy, I know.”

“But where’s Nimona?”

Elphaba pointed to the tiny sloth still clinging to her neck.

“Speaking of which,” she said wearily, “if you’re genuinely serious about caring and you’re not here to spy on us for the Wizard or capture Nimona or whatever-”

“Of course I’m not!”

“Then would you mind holding her for a minute? My neck is killing me.”

With some difficulty, she gently prised Nimona’s little claws away from her neck and held her out to Glinda as if she were a sleeping baby, and to her surprise, Glinda reached out and took her almost on instinct. Obviously, Glinda’s work as the Emerald City’s newest darling had given her a lot of experience with kissing babies, because she took Nimona in her arms with surprising ease, to the point that Elphaba almost wondered if this really was an attempt to capture Nimona and very nearly prepared a spell before common sense caught up with her.

But as Nimona the sloth settled into Glinda’s arms, the shapeshifter opened one eye, stared for a moment at Glinda’s shining gold locks, and then transformed.

Suddenly, Glinda was no longer holding a three toed sloth, but a little girl with a tattered red dress, an incredible mane of red hair, and a face that could have passed for her default form’s baby sister. Then, before Elphaba’s eyes, Nimona snuggled in against Glinda’s shoulder, muttered something inaudible, smiled drowsily, and then drifted back to sleep, still cradled in Glinda’s arms.

For a moment, Elphaba could only boggle at the sight. Nimona wouldn’t have been caught dead in this pose: she never looked vulnerable if she could help it, never looked genuinely helpless, and certainly never looked childlike unless it was a ploy to lure in a clueless member of the Gale Force with her “demon baby” routine. Seeing her like this was completely outside of Elphaba’s experience; she could only assume Nimona was even sicker than she first appeared if she’d let anyone (much less someone who’d once called a monster) hold her like this.

As if that wasn’t bewildering enough, as Glinda looked down at the little shapeshifter in her arms, the expression on her face shifted from surprise to bemusement, to acceptance, to something almost like affection, to another emotion that Elphaba couldn’t identify. After a while, she even started gently petting the back of Nimona’s head.

“What did she say to you?” Elphaba whispered.

“It sounded like ‘Gloreth’ or something like that. Do you know what that means?”

“No. Like you said, she doesn’t tell me everything: some things are still too painful for her to talk about.”

There was a long pause as Nimona drifted even deeper into sleep. Eventually, Elphaba and Glinda had to sit down, partly because Elphaba had been all over Oz in the last few hours but mostly because Glinda was in stilettos that weren’t meant for cross-country walking in rough terrain.

And it was then that, as Nimona was sleepily hugging her, that Glinda blurted out, “Elphie, do you think I’d be a good mother?”

Elphaba blinked. “Er, what.”

Glinda blushed a rich shade of garnet. When next she spoke, she was noticeably trying to keep her voice slow and even, but once again, she couldn’t help speaking faster and faster until she was practically firing off a word every nanosecond.

“It’s just… I’ve finally been properly engaged to Fiyero and we’re going to be married in the summer and he hasn’t had much time to talk with me because he’s been really busy looking for you on the Wizard’s orders but I really want to spend the rest of my life with him and I’ve never thought about it until now but I’m wondering if I’d be a good mother and I really want to be a good mother to Fiyero’s children and I know I used to worry that having a baby would ruin my figure but now I can’t stop thinking about it and and and and…”

She took a deep breath.

“So, do you think I’d be a good mom?”

Elphaba slowly processed this. “You’re getting married?” she demanded.

“Yes.”

“To Fiyero?”

“Yes.”

At this, Elphaba couldn’t help but feel a tiny stab of something that felt almost like jealousy – and yet, she couldn’t work out if she was jealous of Glinda or Fiyero… or both.

“And… you’ve been courting since Shiz. How long has it been since then?”

“Two and a half years. Why?”

Elphaba sighed so heavily she swore she could feel herself literally deflating.

Two and half years since either of them had been anywhere near Shiz, and eighteen months since Elphaba had started her mad rebellion against the Wizard: it felt as if she’d been fighting for centuries and yet at the same time it felt as if she’d only started last week. How was it possible to feel ancient and also like a complete novice in a conflict that was only a couple of years old? And now Glinda and Fiyero were getting married?

 “No reason,” she lied. “I’m very happy for you.”

Why was Elphaba imagining Fiyero kissing her?

And why couldn’t she get the memory of Glinda accidentally kissing her out of her head?

Why did she want them both so badly?

Was it just because she’d spent the last few years separated from the friends that she’d known the longest? Was it the stress and the misery of everything she’d tried and failed to do? Or was it just the fact that she wished more than anything in the world that all her friends could be together and happy? Yes, that had to be it: Glinda would have loved Nimona if they’d met on a friendly basis, would have tried to teach her fashion just as Nimona would have tried to mould her into a tomboy. And Fiyero would have thought Nimona the most exciting thing since rodeo, would have gleefully egged her on to grander and grander feats of daredevilry and probably talked her into a dance-off for good measure.

And why the hell did Elphaba had to keep thinking about these things when she knew that it only hurt her more in the long run?

“We’re both very much in love,” said Glinda, a little more insistently than necessary. “It’s just that… well, he’s very busy out looking for you.”

“Me?”

“Well, he made captain not long ago, so he’s got an entire platoon of men, and he’s really devoted to finding you. Not because he wants to hurt you or anything,” Glinda added hastily. “He’s just… really devoted to the job. Really, really devoted to the job.”

“Ah.”

“We’re really happy together.”

“I see.”

“I’m really happy.”

“Yes, I got that.”

“Couldn’t be happier, in fact.”

Elphaba quietly reflected that people who were genuinely happy didn’t smile as if their teeth were about to snap in half.

“And that’s why you’re here against the Wizard’s orders, having a secret meeting and consulting public enemy number 1 for advice on whether you’d be a good mother,” concluded Elphaba. “Glinda, be honest with me: are you honestly and truly happy with how things have turned out?”

Without saying a word, Glinda walked over to the nearest of the bedrolls in the cavern alcoves, laid Nimona gently down on the pillow and tucked her in.

It wasn’t until she finally returned and sat back down on the boulder next to Elphaba that she spoke.

She barely managed to utter the words “I mean, Fiyero gets a little distant sometimes” before she once again started verbally cascading over Elphaba in a mad fit of sheer anxiety. This time, Elphaba couldn’t work out a single word that was being said apart from “I have an important job and people need me,” and that was only because Glinda kept repeating it between sentences, like a mantra.

Elphaba let her go on talking for a bit, trusting that she wouldn’t get loud enough to wake up Nimona, but eventually, as expected, Glinda ran out of breath and fell silent for a while.

“I miss you,” she said quietly.

For once, Elphaba couldn’t bring herself to bring out any of her usual replies: she couldn’t tell Glinda to join her, to denounce the Wizard, to stand up for Animal rights, to find a way of exposing the lies and hypocrisies to Oz, to at least try to be as good a friend as she was at Shiz. For once, they weren’t meeting over the course of a raid and they weren’t meeting where the Wizard’s officials or Ozian citizens could see them; the tension that had defined the previous meetings didn’t infect the conversation, nor did the anger or the bitterness.

Here, they could be themselves for the first time in almost two years.

And besides, even if that hadn’t been the case, Elphaba had been awake since six o’clock the previous morning, and since then, she’d flown from one end of Oz to another, she’d nearly fallen to her death, she’d done battle with the army and the Gale Force, she’d been blown up, batted around like a tennis ball, and had nearly brained an old woman to save a badly-wounded shapeshifter.

By now, she was too tired to be angry.

Instead, all she could say was, “I miss you too.”

For a moment, there was silence in the forest, broken only by the distant birdsong.

Glinda bit her lip. “Elphie,” she whispered, “Can I stay here? Just for a little while? Please? This is the first time I’ve been out of the Emerald City on non-officialized business and once Morrible’s out of the hospital I’ll have to go right back before she gets mad and… well, not that mad, because she’s honestly not that bad a boss but… you know…”

Had it been anyone else, Elphaba would have suspected that they were trying to delay her long enough for the Gale Force to find her, or else just waiting for her to let her guard down so she could slit her throat. But this was Glinda: no matter how ambitious she was, no matter how desperate she was to cling to what little she’d gained in her time with the Wizard, she wasn’t a traitor or a killer, not even a knowing accomplice to one. She’d never stoop that low.

“Of course, Glinda. You stay for as long as you need.”

Glinda’s eyes flitted to the vacant bedroll lying in the alcove nearby. “Do you mind if I lie down? I’m kind of tired.”

In spite of herself, Elphaba smirked. “You got up early to go looking for me, didn’t you?”

“Worse: I haven’t been sleeping that much at all these last couple of days. I keep waiting for Fiyero to come back from the hunts, but sometimes his unit doesn’t return to the city for days, so I usually just end up waiting until I fall asleep, whether I want to or not. And then after being totally insomniated, I went looking for you this morning and… I’m kind of crashing.” 

“Well, I’m just as tired, so we might as well both turn in for the morning.”

“You’re okay with that? You’re not worried about the Gale Force or the army or someone finding us while we’re asleep?”

“Glinda, I’m just about burnt out: I’m tired, I’m bruised, my magic’s been pushed to its limits, my adrenaline has just about dried up, and if I tried to fly away right now I’d probably fall off the broom. Plus, Nimona’s still recovering from everything Morrible did to her – she probably won’t be able to well enough shapeshift into anything combat-ready for at least a day. We’re not remotely fit for travel. All we can do is hide here until we’re recovered, maybe cover the caves with some branches, and hope for the best. If the Gale Force find us, well, they find us. Simple as that.”

She allowed this to sink in a little.

“Now, bedtime.”

---

There was just enough room on both the bedroll and the alcove for the two of them, as luck would have it, so once they’d hastily covered the cave with a few branches, the two of them simply lay down next to each other.

Glinda insisted on lying in front of Elphaba so she could be used as human camouflage if the Gale Force really did stop by, but other than that, there wasn’t much in the way of strategy: once they lay down, they were already half-asleep, barely conscious enough to draw the covers over them before the two began dozing off.

But even with the branches over the entrance keeping most of the sunlight out, they couldn’t help but drift back into wakefulness. At one point, Elphaba woke up, her eyes briefly focussing on the leaves and dirt caking the hem of Glinda’s skirt.

“You’ve ruined your clothes,” she mumbled.

“’s okay,” Glinda mumbled back. “I hate this damn thing.”

Had Elphaba been a bit less tired, she might have been shocked enough to sit bolt upright.

“It’s not mine,” Glinda explained sleepily. “Haven't been able to wear anything of my own since I got the job. Morrible made me wear this dress, but it’s not me. It’s… everything I hate…”

Sleep descended on them again soon after.

When Elphaba drifted out of sleep again, she found herself in Glinda’s arms. She was kissing her, she realized, sleepily planting kiss after kiss on Elphaba’s cheeks, moving steadily towards her lips.

“Please,” Glinda was whispering between kisses, sounding on the verge of tears. “Stay with me, just for a little while. I love you.”

Elphaba awkwardly patted Glinda on the back. “I’m not Fiyero,” she said gently. “I’m Elphaba, remember?”

“I know, and I don’t care. I love you both, I always have, but every day that goes by, both of you just keep getting further away from me. Please, Elphie, I don’t want to be alone. I want to be with you forever…”

She swooned again and slumped forward, leaving her awkwardly draped over Elphaba’s bosom like a quilt, and between chronic fatigue and strained muscles, Elphaba didn’t stand a chance of moving her.

“A couple of days of insomnia, my ass,” Elphaba sighed sleepily. “Why can’t you ever just admit what’s really wrong, Glin…?”

Then it was her turn to tumble back into unconsciousness.

When next she woke, Glinda was once again lying next to her, leaving them face to face.

Nimona, still in her little girl shape, was stumbling into the alcove, dead-eyed and rubber-legged. Murmuring to herself, she crawled into the narrow space between Glinda and Elphaba, snuggled into Elphaba’s arms, and promptly fell asleep, unconsciously hugging Glinda as she did so. Even her hair seemed to reach out to hug her, reshaping itself into octopus-like tentacles to cuddle her in her sleep.

Elphaba absently drew the cover over Nimona, then fell asleep.

---

When she was finally awake enough to open her eyes without dozing off again, it was roughly five-thirty the next morning: Elphaba had been asleep for nearly twenty-four hours, give or take a few interruptions.

And the same went for…

Elphaba belatedly noticed the absence next to them and realized with a jolt of shock that Glinda was gone. In the space she’d occupied, she’d left only a note:

Elphie, it read, I’m sorry I left, but people will be asking questions if I stay out any later. I need to be there for Fiyero when he gets back from the search and I need to catch up with my work, because it really is essentialating. I promise I won’t tell anyone about where you were – but I think you should probably find a new safehouse sooner or later.

Good news is that Morrible’s been organizing a big Oz-wide celebration, all set to begin in a couple of weeks from now: she was sending notes from the hospital before I left, and from the sounds of things, it’s going to be a big festival of defiancy against you – a day that’s “totally Wicked Witch-free.” Bad news, the army and the Gale Force will be fortifiating the Emerald City and all the other big cities. Good news, they won’t be hunting for you around the country, so you’ll be free to go looking for new safehouses.

Don’t worry about me: I’ll be absolutely fine putting on a show for my fellow Ozians.

Just promise me you’ll be safe.

Glinda

Elphaba silently folded up the note and pocketed it, trying not to feel the same sting of abandonment she’d felt when Glinda had refused to join her that day in the palace attic.

Meanwhile, Nimona was awake and stretching, her body exchanging limbs from a dozen different creatures as she did so.

“Morning, Boss,” she yawned. “Was someone hugging me last night?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” said Elphaba, instantly burying her frown and doing her best to look amused. “I think you awakened Glinda’s maternal side, too.”

Nimona stared. “Glinda?” she echoed. “She was here?”

“Apparently, the thought of me turning up dead was too much: she spent the day with us, right up until the last couple of hours, I think.”

“And she was hugging me?”

“Well, you hugged her first. I think you mistook her for someone.”

Nimona raised an eyebrow. “What makes you say that?” she asked, suspiciously.

“Well, you mentioned a name when you were snuggling up to her: Gloreth.”

Once again, Elphaba saw the pain in Nimona’s eyes, but now even stronger than usual: after spending so many months doing her best to help Animals traumatized by the loss of their families or betrayal by people that they’d considered neighbours and friends, she knew how to recognize that kind of deep, tearing sense of loss and grief. Whatever the name meant to her, Nimona was in agony at the mention of it.

“Come on,” said Nimona, quietly. “Let’s get out of here. We’ve stayed long enough.”

“But-”

“Come on, Boss. We’ve got work to do.”

She got to her feet, a little shakily at first but regaining strength with every step, visibly forcing a grin back on her face, and Elphaba could only shamble after her, feeling all the lonelier now that Glinda was gone and Nimona’s walls were back up and higher than ever.

About the only advantage they had was a single day when nobody in Oz would be watching the skies. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had.

But maybe it wouldn’t just be a day when they could find safety. Maybe there were other things Elphaba could do that day.

Maybe it was time she went home…

Notes:

I know, I know, I just had to add that bit about Nimona confusing Glinda with Gloreth, didn't I? I just had to inflict a tiny dose of emotional harm at the end of the recovery chapter, didn't I?

Sorry.

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