The Effects of Gravity 18/? by ainsleyaisling
Title: The Effects of Gravity 18/?
Author: ainsleyaisling
Rating: PG
'Verse: Musical AU; some details from bookverse
Pairings for Story Overall: Glinda/Fiyero, Elphaba/Fiyero, Glinda/Elphaba
Summary: Changes, mistrust, and opportunities lost (or delayed).
Disclaimer: Wicked belongs mostly to Gregory Maguire, and musicalverse belongs to Stephen Schwartz, Winnie Holzman, and possibly Universal.
Notes: Previous section can be found here.
~~Glinda~~
Somewhere along the line, she had turned into two people.
The first was groping for the girl she had been when she first arrived at Shiz, and finding it not that difficult, as long as she did all the right things. After all, some things had come full circle. She was unattached again, free to flirt breezily with anyone she liked and to duck awkward encounters with those she didn't. It didn't even matter that she didn't really like any of them - she hadn't before, either, before Fiyero. She was both more and less vulnerable than she had been before: more, because she now knew exactly what could happen if flirting went too far or if she lost control of the situation, and less, because people were a little afraid of her now, or rather they were afraid of the Wizard's power and Elphaba's anger.
Her looks hadn't changed, of course, and no one would notice if she was a little thinner as long as she remembered to alter her clothes accordingly. If it took more powder in the mornings to hide the shadows under her eyes, no one would know but Elphaba and she certainly wasn't telling. She hadn't lost the ability to chatter about gowns and parties, and if other, more disturbing thoughts tended to creep in, they were easy enough to push aside for later. And she knew she would be thinking about them later.
So she spent her daytimes in the company of Pfannee and Shenshen and Milla and the other girls who seemed relieved to cluster around her again, as if their center had been missing while she was preoccupied with Fiyero and Elphaba and the Wizard. They weren't entirely the same girls they had been all those months ago, of course - some of them had matured in certain ways at least; some of them had boyfriends and seemed to feel guilty about it whenever they looked at Glinda; some of them - Pfannee among them - had learned to study a bit more often in the hopes of not being sent home at the end of the term. But in essentials they were the same. Glinda soaked up their rapt attention; she told stories about the Emerald City with the disturbing parts edited out, focusing on the beauty and grandeur; she tossed her hair and made her eyes sparkle and let them think she was destined to be a queen someday, missing prince or no. Odd green companion or no.
But the other girl that she was - that girl slipped away from the crowd sometimes at dinner to eat with Elphaba in an out-of-the-way corner of the dining room, or to pick nervously at her plate when Elphaba didn't show up at all. She walked to and from classes with her roommate, often without talking, but often brushing against Elphaba with her shoulder or her hand to remind herself that the other girl really was there. She stayed up late into the night reading, because something uncomfortable pricked at her mind whenever she thought of Morrible and she felt that somewhere there had to be an explanation, and that if only she could find it she might be able to sleep. She couldn't ask Elphaba for help because Elphaba was working hard enough on her own, and then sometimes she wasn't there at all.
On the nights when they were both in their room, Glinda would pretend to be asleep until she was sure Elphaba was - then she would get up and sit close by the fire to avoid lighting the lamps, paging silently through books she kept under her bed, turning her head every so often to watch Elphaba, who still coughed sometimes in her sleep although she seemed better in the daytime. But there were also nights when Elphaba failed to come home from the library, slipping into the room in the early morning hours with no explanation. The first time Glinda was positive something had happened to her; when Elphaba finally appeared she had yelled and scolded and cried until Elphaba apologized and said she couldn't say where she had been, and Glinda shouldn't worry. As if it were as easy as that. Glinda pretended not to worry on those nights, but she couldn't sleep until Elphaba came back. On those nights she sat studying at her desk with the lamps lit, sometimes poring over books that she would carefully return to Elphaba's side of the room before their absence was noticed, sometimes struggling with the Grimmerie itself, sometimes wrapping herself in one of Elphaba's sweaters.
Elphaba moved almost silently on her return, but Glinda knew the creaking of the stairwell and the soft, even step. The first several nights this happened she hurried to put out the lamps when she heard her roommate returning, and she crawled into bed and feigned sleep. After a while she didn't bother anymore. She only raised her head from her book and nodded in silent, uncommenting greeting, then returned to her reading. They developed an uneasy routine. Elphaba would always hesitate in the doorway, watching her; but as soon as she had removed her cloak she would come up behind Glinda's chair and embrace her, and she would kiss Glinda's hair and tell her to go to bed, and Glinda would. Elphaba's skin was chilled on those nights and she smelled of wind and forest, and sometimes she was smudged with soot. She never gave any hint of where she had been.
Glinda was a little afraid of her, but she was more afraid that she was losing her. In her dreams she heard Morrible's voice, but in the morning she could never remember the words. What she did remember was that Elphaba was never there, in the dreams.
In a way she looked forward to their next return to the Emerald City, which couldn't be far off - maybe Morrible would tip her hand, maybe something would change, maybe things would become clearer, but above all she and Elphaba would be alone again, away from Shiz, away from distractions and prying students and the need to pretend.
And yet, she remembered her resolution to protect them both from those prying students, and every morning she carefully put away the girl who spent sleepless nights worrying over ancient spells, who felt sick sometimes at the sight of her roommate's empty bed, who strained sometimes to catch Elphaba's scent on her own skin. She laughed, and she flirted, and she tried to make herself stop thinking.
~~Fiyero~~
He'd expected, being without Glinda for the first time since his first five minutes at this school, to be on the fringe of things. It surprised him to find that the opposite was true, that Glinda's crowd remained oddly separate from most of the male students. She held court - it was an unfair expression, but honestly he couldn't think of a fairer one that described it - among a cluster of adoring girls and an outer circle of boys who wanted to get their attention but rarely managed it. Fiyero found that he still fit right into his usual crowd of the campus bachelors, the ones who didn't have one particular girl and didn't especially want one, the ones who found sufficient company at the pubs off-campus and weren't much tempted by the prettied-up schoolgirls. They were generally too drunk to notice that Fiyero took little interest in female company once they were out on the town, and that suited him fine. Rikk probably knew and understood most of the truth, but he was tactful enough not to ask questions.
Glinda's apparent return to her former social status didn't alleviate Fiyero's guilt - he noticed, even if those chattering girls didn't, that Glinda was thin, she was pale, she was often distracted, she daydreamed in class, her smile rarely reached her eyes. He thought Elphaba must have noticed as well, not just because she lived with Glinda and saw her day in and day out, but because she was watchful these days, hardly taking her eyes from Glinda, a concerned expression knotting her eyebrows together, her teeth worrying at her lip.
On the surface they appeared to be on the outs, and he sometimes worried about that, too. They weren't seen together nearly as often, at least not outside their room, and when they were together they often weren't talking. The easy, fond, almost too-friendly camaraderie he had found so strange at the beginning was so little in evidence these days, although they sat very close together in class and he often noted Glinda watching Elphaba out of the corner of her eye. They didn't seem to have fought, exactly, but something was off.
Elphaba, too, seemed if possible more separate, more intense, more angular, more awkward. She sometimes jumped when he talked to her, and seemed startled if he happened to take her arm or touch her hand. She let her hair hide her face when she sat in class beside him, and if he teased her she often looked confused, as if uncertain of why he was talking to her at all.
He saw them both, talked to them both, but they had become his go-betweens with each other. With Glinda he talked only about Elphaba, and once she was no longer ill Glinda began subtly to avoid him again. With Elphaba he spoke mostly about Glinda, until she seemed reluctant to do so anymore - not just to talk about Glinda with him, he thought, but reluctant to talk about her at all.
Still, one day after class he got her to confess that she was worried about her roommate, that Glinda seemed strained, but that it didn't seem to have anything to do with him. "She's not all right," Elphaba said, staring down at their feet walking in step across the thawing ground. "I don't know why. It could be about you, I suppose - it could be almost anything."
"She won't talk to you?"
Elphaba's response was soft. "I haven't asked."
"Why not?"
"I'm afraid of what the answer might be." And that was all she would say on the subject.
He took her arm; she stiffened but didn't withdraw it. He was always so afraid to touch her, although he felt no similar constraints around almost anyone else he knew. "I wouldn't do anything to hurt her," he said, knowing that to Elphaba it might feel like a non sequitur.
She looked up at him, her dark eyes smoky, and said, "Neither would I." He wondered if it was meant to be a message for him. Whether it was or not, she was deadly serious. The silence passed between them for a long moment before he realized they had stopped walking.
~~Elphaba~~
She knew she was neglecting Glinda. What she wasn't sure about was whether Glinda's apparent return, in the daylight hours anyway, to her previous Galindafied self was a response to Elphaba's abandonment, or something else. She did know, however, that what she was doing was more important - not more important than Glinda, of course - but more important than coddling Glinda, more important than spending time with her. Saving her, saving them both, had to be more important.
Elphaba couldn't get the foggy uncertain image of the old matron out of her mind, but more troubling was her persisting inability to remember who she had seen the matron speaking with, or anything about that person. She was too afraid of being consistent, of being followed, of developing too easy a routine to watch every night, but on random nights - different days of the week, different hours - she stalked the woods behind the old blown-out Animal housing, watching, waiting to see lamps, to hear voices. On nights when it all seemed too quiet, suspiciously so, she crept into the building itself and felt her way in the darkness through its abandoned rooms and soot-filled halls. There was no way to tell, of course, which rooms had been Doctor Dillamond's, and she had no idea what she was looking for anyway. Twice she fell through unstable parts of the floor, and once she hurt her ankle badly and had to conceal a limp for days.
She slipped home to their room, to Glinda, on those nights cold and sore and often smelling of smoke and soot. It disturbed her when she began to find Glinda awake on her return - after that first night, that is, when Glinda had nearly cried herself sick and had refused to be comforted - but in a secret guilty way it was a relief. She should have been more worried about Glinda than about her own need for company, and she really should have asked what Glinda was studying so hard on those lonely nights while she was gone, but the sight of her in the quiet lamplight night after night was such an antidote to the darkness and the cold and the dirt. Even though Glinda was wrapped up in this conspiracy; even though Elphaba still wasn't satisfied that she understood the role Glinda was to play. Even though she wouldn't trust even Glinda with the knowledge of where she was spending her evenings, on the off-chance that the wrong person might find out.
She knew that Glinda worried. She knew that if Glinda's reading were really urgent enough to keep her up at all hours, she wouldn't have gone to bed every night as soon as Elphaba came home. She knew that Glinda rarely volunteered information anymore, that her usual friendly chatter was silenced and that she also didn't share the serious things, the things that were bothering her. She knew that Glinda touched her now as if she were stealing the contact, that she brushed Elphaba's hand as they walked instead of wrapping an arm around her waist, instead of kissing her on the cheek. She knew all these things, but there were still too many things she didn't know. There were too many things they still had to figure out together, but first, even more things she had to figure out on her own.
Although it was expected, the sight of the emerald green envelope in the pile handed to her by the mail clerk made her blood run cold. Elphaba wasn't certain that she was afraid of the Wizard anymore, as long as he seemed to be getting what he wanted. But she, and more importantly, Glinda, was about to go walking back into Morrible's hands - in a scant two weeks, as spring finally came in earnest to the Shiz campus. They weren't ready. They were too splintered, too separated, too uneasy. But they would go.
Author: ainsleyaisling
Rating: PG
'Verse: Musical AU; some details from bookverse
Pairings for Story Overall: Glinda/Fiyero, Elphaba/Fiyero, Glinda/Elphaba
Summary: Changes, mistrust, and opportunities lost (or delayed).
Disclaimer: Wicked belongs mostly to Gregory Maguire, and musicalverse belongs to Stephen Schwartz, Winnie Holzman, and possibly Universal.
Notes: Previous section can be found here.
~~Glinda~~
Somewhere along the line, she had turned into two people.
The first was groping for the girl she had been when she first arrived at Shiz, and finding it not that difficult, as long as she did all the right things. After all, some things had come full circle. She was unattached again, free to flirt breezily with anyone she liked and to duck awkward encounters with those she didn't. It didn't even matter that she didn't really like any of them - she hadn't before, either, before Fiyero. She was both more and less vulnerable than she had been before: more, because she now knew exactly what could happen if flirting went too far or if she lost control of the situation, and less, because people were a little afraid of her now, or rather they were afraid of the Wizard's power and Elphaba's anger.
Her looks hadn't changed, of course, and no one would notice if she was a little thinner as long as she remembered to alter her clothes accordingly. If it took more powder in the mornings to hide the shadows under her eyes, no one would know but Elphaba and she certainly wasn't telling. She hadn't lost the ability to chatter about gowns and parties, and if other, more disturbing thoughts tended to creep in, they were easy enough to push aside for later. And she knew she would be thinking about them later.
So she spent her daytimes in the company of Pfannee and Shenshen and Milla and the other girls who seemed relieved to cluster around her again, as if their center had been missing while she was preoccupied with Fiyero and Elphaba and the Wizard. They weren't entirely the same girls they had been all those months ago, of course - some of them had matured in certain ways at least; some of them had boyfriends and seemed to feel guilty about it whenever they looked at Glinda; some of them - Pfannee among them - had learned to study a bit more often in the hopes of not being sent home at the end of the term. But in essentials they were the same. Glinda soaked up their rapt attention; she told stories about the Emerald City with the disturbing parts edited out, focusing on the beauty and grandeur; she tossed her hair and made her eyes sparkle and let them think she was destined to be a queen someday, missing prince or no. Odd green companion or no.
But the other girl that she was - that girl slipped away from the crowd sometimes at dinner to eat with Elphaba in an out-of-the-way corner of the dining room, or to pick nervously at her plate when Elphaba didn't show up at all. She walked to and from classes with her roommate, often without talking, but often brushing against Elphaba with her shoulder or her hand to remind herself that the other girl really was there. She stayed up late into the night reading, because something uncomfortable pricked at her mind whenever she thought of Morrible and she felt that somewhere there had to be an explanation, and that if only she could find it she might be able to sleep. She couldn't ask Elphaba for help because Elphaba was working hard enough on her own, and then sometimes she wasn't there at all.
On the nights when they were both in their room, Glinda would pretend to be asleep until she was sure Elphaba was - then she would get up and sit close by the fire to avoid lighting the lamps, paging silently through books she kept under her bed, turning her head every so often to watch Elphaba, who still coughed sometimes in her sleep although she seemed better in the daytime. But there were also nights when Elphaba failed to come home from the library, slipping into the room in the early morning hours with no explanation. The first time Glinda was positive something had happened to her; when Elphaba finally appeared she had yelled and scolded and cried until Elphaba apologized and said she couldn't say where she had been, and Glinda shouldn't worry. As if it were as easy as that. Glinda pretended not to worry on those nights, but she couldn't sleep until Elphaba came back. On those nights she sat studying at her desk with the lamps lit, sometimes poring over books that she would carefully return to Elphaba's side of the room before their absence was noticed, sometimes struggling with the Grimmerie itself, sometimes wrapping herself in one of Elphaba's sweaters.
Elphaba moved almost silently on her return, but Glinda knew the creaking of the stairwell and the soft, even step. The first several nights this happened she hurried to put out the lamps when she heard her roommate returning, and she crawled into bed and feigned sleep. After a while she didn't bother anymore. She only raised her head from her book and nodded in silent, uncommenting greeting, then returned to her reading. They developed an uneasy routine. Elphaba would always hesitate in the doorway, watching her; but as soon as she had removed her cloak she would come up behind Glinda's chair and embrace her, and she would kiss Glinda's hair and tell her to go to bed, and Glinda would. Elphaba's skin was chilled on those nights and she smelled of wind and forest, and sometimes she was smudged with soot. She never gave any hint of where she had been.
Glinda was a little afraid of her, but she was more afraid that she was losing her. In her dreams she heard Morrible's voice, but in the morning she could never remember the words. What she did remember was that Elphaba was never there, in the dreams.
In a way she looked forward to their next return to the Emerald City, which couldn't be far off - maybe Morrible would tip her hand, maybe something would change, maybe things would become clearer, but above all she and Elphaba would be alone again, away from Shiz, away from distractions and prying students and the need to pretend.
And yet, she remembered her resolution to protect them both from those prying students, and every morning she carefully put away the girl who spent sleepless nights worrying over ancient spells, who felt sick sometimes at the sight of her roommate's empty bed, who strained sometimes to catch Elphaba's scent on her own skin. She laughed, and she flirted, and she tried to make herself stop thinking.
~~Fiyero~~
He'd expected, being without Glinda for the first time since his first five minutes at this school, to be on the fringe of things. It surprised him to find that the opposite was true, that Glinda's crowd remained oddly separate from most of the male students. She held court - it was an unfair expression, but honestly he couldn't think of a fairer one that described it - among a cluster of adoring girls and an outer circle of boys who wanted to get their attention but rarely managed it. Fiyero found that he still fit right into his usual crowd of the campus bachelors, the ones who didn't have one particular girl and didn't especially want one, the ones who found sufficient company at the pubs off-campus and weren't much tempted by the prettied-up schoolgirls. They were generally too drunk to notice that Fiyero took little interest in female company once they were out on the town, and that suited him fine. Rikk probably knew and understood most of the truth, but he was tactful enough not to ask questions.
Glinda's apparent return to her former social status didn't alleviate Fiyero's guilt - he noticed, even if those chattering girls didn't, that Glinda was thin, she was pale, she was often distracted, she daydreamed in class, her smile rarely reached her eyes. He thought Elphaba must have noticed as well, not just because she lived with Glinda and saw her day in and day out, but because she was watchful these days, hardly taking her eyes from Glinda, a concerned expression knotting her eyebrows together, her teeth worrying at her lip.
On the surface they appeared to be on the outs, and he sometimes worried about that, too. They weren't seen together nearly as often, at least not outside their room, and when they were together they often weren't talking. The easy, fond, almost too-friendly camaraderie he had found so strange at the beginning was so little in evidence these days, although they sat very close together in class and he often noted Glinda watching Elphaba out of the corner of her eye. They didn't seem to have fought, exactly, but something was off.
Elphaba, too, seemed if possible more separate, more intense, more angular, more awkward. She sometimes jumped when he talked to her, and seemed startled if he happened to take her arm or touch her hand. She let her hair hide her face when she sat in class beside him, and if he teased her she often looked confused, as if uncertain of why he was talking to her at all.
He saw them both, talked to them both, but they had become his go-betweens with each other. With Glinda he talked only about Elphaba, and once she was no longer ill Glinda began subtly to avoid him again. With Elphaba he spoke mostly about Glinda, until she seemed reluctant to do so anymore - not just to talk about Glinda with him, he thought, but reluctant to talk about her at all.
Still, one day after class he got her to confess that she was worried about her roommate, that Glinda seemed strained, but that it didn't seem to have anything to do with him. "She's not all right," Elphaba said, staring down at their feet walking in step across the thawing ground. "I don't know why. It could be about you, I suppose - it could be almost anything."
"She won't talk to you?"
Elphaba's response was soft. "I haven't asked."
"Why not?"
"I'm afraid of what the answer might be." And that was all she would say on the subject.
He took her arm; she stiffened but didn't withdraw it. He was always so afraid to touch her, although he felt no similar constraints around almost anyone else he knew. "I wouldn't do anything to hurt her," he said, knowing that to Elphaba it might feel like a non sequitur.
She looked up at him, her dark eyes smoky, and said, "Neither would I." He wondered if it was meant to be a message for him. Whether it was or not, she was deadly serious. The silence passed between them for a long moment before he realized they had stopped walking.
~~Elphaba~~
She knew she was neglecting Glinda. What she wasn't sure about was whether Glinda's apparent return, in the daylight hours anyway, to her previous Galindafied self was a response to Elphaba's abandonment, or something else. She did know, however, that what she was doing was more important - not more important than Glinda, of course - but more important than coddling Glinda, more important than spending time with her. Saving her, saving them both, had to be more important.
Elphaba couldn't get the foggy uncertain image of the old matron out of her mind, but more troubling was her persisting inability to remember who she had seen the matron speaking with, or anything about that person. She was too afraid of being consistent, of being followed, of developing too easy a routine to watch every night, but on random nights - different days of the week, different hours - she stalked the woods behind the old blown-out Animal housing, watching, waiting to see lamps, to hear voices. On nights when it all seemed too quiet, suspiciously so, she crept into the building itself and felt her way in the darkness through its abandoned rooms and soot-filled halls. There was no way to tell, of course, which rooms had been Doctor Dillamond's, and she had no idea what she was looking for anyway. Twice she fell through unstable parts of the floor, and once she hurt her ankle badly and had to conceal a limp for days.
She slipped home to their room, to Glinda, on those nights cold and sore and often smelling of smoke and soot. It disturbed her when she began to find Glinda awake on her return - after that first night, that is, when Glinda had nearly cried herself sick and had refused to be comforted - but in a secret guilty way it was a relief. She should have been more worried about Glinda than about her own need for company, and she really should have asked what Glinda was studying so hard on those lonely nights while she was gone, but the sight of her in the quiet lamplight night after night was such an antidote to the darkness and the cold and the dirt. Even though Glinda was wrapped up in this conspiracy; even though Elphaba still wasn't satisfied that she understood the role Glinda was to play. Even though she wouldn't trust even Glinda with the knowledge of where she was spending her evenings, on the off-chance that the wrong person might find out.
She knew that Glinda worried. She knew that if Glinda's reading were really urgent enough to keep her up at all hours, she wouldn't have gone to bed every night as soon as Elphaba came home. She knew that Glinda rarely volunteered information anymore, that her usual friendly chatter was silenced and that she also didn't share the serious things, the things that were bothering her. She knew that Glinda touched her now as if she were stealing the contact, that she brushed Elphaba's hand as they walked instead of wrapping an arm around her waist, instead of kissing her on the cheek. She knew all these things, but there were still too many things she didn't know. There were too many things they still had to figure out together, but first, even more things she had to figure out on her own.
Although it was expected, the sight of the emerald green envelope in the pile handed to her by the mail clerk made her blood run cold. Elphaba wasn't certain that she was afraid of the Wizard anymore, as long as he seemed to be getting what he wanted. But she, and more importantly, Glinda, was about to go walking back into Morrible's hands - in a scant two weeks, as spring finally came in earnest to the Shiz campus. They weren't ready. They were too splintered, too separated, too uneasy. But they would go.