(no subject)
Title: The Effects of Gravity 25/?
Author: ainsleyaisling
Rating: PG
'Verse: Musical AU; some details from bookverse
Pairings for Story Overall: Glinda/Fiyero, Elphaba/Fiyero, Glinda/Elphaba
Summary: End of term.
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~~
She had read the letter from her parents at least ten times by the time Elphaba came back from checking on Nessa. Her fingers fidgeted with the fine parchment as she watched Elphaba elbow her way through the door with a pile of books in her arms, which she deposited on her desk with a loud thump.
"Nessa's?" Glinda asked, as Elphaba straightened the stack.
Elphaba nodded. "They wouldn't fit in her trunks. I've got tons of room."
"How, I don't know, your books seem to have been breeding." Elphaba laughed, and Glinda felt insanely pleased with herself. "You realize no one's going to be able to lift that last trunk of yours?"
"My father's sending two servants," Elphaba explained, turning and sitting down in the desk chair. "To help Nessie."
"Is she almost packed?"
"Just about. Madame's been helping her. We'll finish tomorrow."
"My parents wrote again."
Elphaba looked politely interested. "Oh?"
"I've just been . . ." Glinda looked down at the letter again and shook her head. "It's strange, it's as if I can't tell who they're writing to."
"What do you mean?"
"Well - look." She stretched over the end of her bed to hand the letter to Elphaba. "Read it."
Elphaba read it silently, but Glinda already had it memorized. Our darling Galinda, it began, we are thrilled that Miss Elphaba will be coming to visit and of course we shall write to Governor Thropp and issue a formal invitation. It will be so lovely to have the house filled with girlish laughter again.
Glinda was fairly certain she could tell when Elphaba had got to that part, because she started coughing uncontrollably.
"Keep reading," Glinda said, rolling her eyes heavenward.
Elphaba switched then, for some reason, to reading aloud. "'We will send your chaperone' - really?"
"Really."
"Do you have one all the time?"
"Only when I'm alone." Glinda gestured for her to go on.
"Then you're never really alone, are you? Well - 'your chaperone, to meet you at Shiz station. We're so looking forward to seeing our princess again and hearing all about the things you've been learning at school, and your splendid stories about the Wizard and the Emerald City . . ." To Elphaba's credit she managed not to fall into sarcasm, but rather read the entire letter as if it troubled her a bit.
"See what I mean?" Glinda asked, holding her hand out for the letter.
Elphaba folded it over before handing it back. "They don't know anything that happened this year, do they?"
"Not really," Glinda admitted. "I didn't tell them much. It would have upset them."
A different kind of person, perhaps, would have reminded Glinda that it was her parents' job to look after her and not her job to spare them from the ugliness of life. It didn't surprise her to hear no such thing from Elphaba, whose parents had probably not spared her from much. Elphaba only said, "They don't read newspapers?"
"Most of what happened here would never have made it into papers in Gillikin," Glinda pointed out. "And they only read the society page and the business pages anyway."
Elphaba made a soft, thoughtful noise under her breath. "Well," she said, "they'll have to notice you've rather grown up."
"I'm not sure they will. And I don't think it's growing up really, anyway, or that's not how they'd see it." Glinda paused in concentration, biting her lip while she considered how to explain. "My cousin had a baby last month . . ."
"That's - nice?" Elphaba looked somewhat at a loss. "If she wanted one."
"She did. I think." Glinda smoothed her skirt over her outstretched legs. "The thing is she got married last year - when she was eighteen, you know, she didn't want to go to university - and now she's had a baby, and I haven't seen her since I left home of course, but I've had letters from her, and she doesn't seem any different from before. And she must be grown up, I mean, if you're not grown up when you're someone's mother, then when are you? But - well, I've just been wondering . . ." She sighed fretfully enough that Elphaba came to sit on the bed with her.
"Something wrong?" Elphaba asked.
"I just don't think I was expected to grow up, the way you mean it. Maybe not ever." Glinda frowned at her lap. "I think what you mean by growing up, where I come from just means - I don't know, becoming less - womanly, or . . . something."
Elphaba nodded, clearly trying very hard to sympathize. Obviously she had never worried, and no one had ever worried on her behalf, that education and studiousness would make her less girlish - Glinda was one of the very few people who'd ever expected Elphaba to be girlish at all anyway. And Elphaba's sister - pretty as she was, Nessa was still in another class altogether because of her handicap, and because she would need to rule a province one day. Elphaba leaned back on her hands and shifted herself closer to Glinda. "Are you worried they won't notice you've . . . changed, or that they won't understand, or - are you worried they'll think it's a bad thing, if they do notice?"
"I'm not sure," Glinda replied honestly. "I think they expected me to go off and learn sorcery and study pleasant things and come home with a lot of fancy tricks and still be pretty and - well, you know."
"I wouldn't worry about that last part," Elphaba said, both fondly and with a touch of irony. "But - you're afraid they'll find you too serious?"
"I'm afraid," Glinda said, realizing it was true as she was speaking, "that if they do, they won't let me come back. Mostly they'd let me do anything I wanted, but if they thought it was for my own good . . ."
"What would they have you do instead?"
"Stay in Gillikin and go to society parties and find a suitable husband." Glinda leaned her head against Elphaba's shoulder for comfort. "Thank goodness Fiyero has such a reputation - they never said a word against him, but when I wrote that it had ended they didn't seem terribly upset." She strongly suspected that Elphaba had almost laughed, but she could forgive her for that. Especially when Elphaba was always so willing to sit and listen and hold her hand and never tell her she was being silly, even when they both knew she was.
"I think," Elphaba said, shifting her weight so that she could take Glinda's hand, "you could make them think everything was just fine if you wanted to. You're good at that."
"But I don't want to. Or I don't want to have to. I want . . ." Glinda laughed as if to indicate that she knew she was being childish. "I want to be able to run to my parents and tell them all my troubles and have them fix everything. And I know they can't fix any of it, and even if they tried they'd fix it by taking me away from everything - from school, from you - and seeing that I have a perfect husband and a baby within a year and never leave Gillikin again."
"I think that sounds - comfortable," Elphaba said gently, cautiously. "Are you sure you don't want to have that as a choice? To know that if it gets to be too much, they would pull you out of all of it?"
"I can't think that way," Glinda replied. "If I do, I might choose it, and it wouldn't take long for me to hate myself for it. I wouldn't really be any happier. Besides," she added, twining her fingers with Elphaba's, "I wouldn't really want to leave you. And - I want to do something better. Or more important. Or something."
"Still, it's a choice."
"No, it's not," Glinda said, realizing that this also was true. "It's a not-choice. It's telling my parents I'm in over my head and then letting them choose for me."
Elphaba paused. "We are in over our heads," she said.
"I know." They were quiet together for a long while, and then Glinda said, "So my parents are just going to have to think everything's fine, I suppose. I imagine they'll think you're taking care of me, once they meet you."
"Have you - warned them about me, at all?"
"I haven't warned them about anything," Glinda said, knowing exactly what Elphaba meant. "I've told them all about you, of course. Well - mostly."
"So they're expecting . . ." Elphaba couldn't, apparently, suppress a glance down at her green hand entwined with Glinda's " . . . me?"
"They're expecting my best friend," said Glinda very firmly, and refused to answer any more questions. Of course she had told her parents that her roommate was green - to her considerable shame, she had told them so on her very first night at school, when to have such an indescribable roommate had seemed like the worst thing that could happen to her. And she had the whole first half of the summer to make sure they knew what to expect when Elphaba arrived - and to make sure they weren't somehow under the impression that she had been speaking metaphorically.
"Anyway," Elphaba said, "you'll see them tomorrow."
"Yes." Glinda tightened her grip on Elphaba's hand. "I will miss you."
"You'll forget all about me once you get home and see your family again."
"I will not." Her hand tightened even further, although Elphaba didn't complain. "Will you miss me tomorrow, when you're here alone?"
"Yes," Elphaba said plainly. "It will seem strange to have the room to myself."
"You ought to go down and sleep in Nessa's room."
"Maybe I will. The way I used to when she was frightened."
"Did you?" Glinda asked, charmed by the idea.
"Well, she could hardly come and crawl into my bed on her own. So I went to her."
"During thunderstorms?"
"Oh, no." Elphaba smiled a little, remembering. "Her nanny would stay with her whenever there were thunderstorms, to make sure she wouldn't cry and wake Father."
"Then what was she frightened of, when you stayed with her?"
Elphaba's smile widened. "The nanny. She was very cross sometimes."
"Did you have a nanny as well?"
"Not exactly," Elphaba said. "One of the maids looked after me I think, until Nessa was born and our mother died. Then Nessa's nanny looked after me as well, but she was mostly there because of Nessa. Because she couldn't do much for herself, you know."
Elphaba didn't speak often about her childhood, not that Glinda couldn't guess why. But still, these little gems of information fascinated Glinda. Each one revealed to her made Glinda feel as though she didn't really know Elphaba at all. Her roommate might think she didn't keep secrets, but she didn't give much away, either.
Glinda looked absently out the window, still holding tight to Elphaba's hand. It was nearly entirely dark, and the noises of the dormitory had gone quiet around them. "Will you stay here with me, tonight?" she asked softly. She didn't think she could entirely bear to let go of Elphaba sooner than she had to, knowing that she would be facing more than a month all on her own.
Elphaba smiled. "Are you frightened of something?"
"Yes," Glinda said, hoping to lighten the atmosphere. "Nessa's nanny."
~~Elphaba~~
For as much as she'd managed to say in all the previous days, when Glinda was finally leaving for her train she didn't seem able to say anything. She finally just hugged Elphaba so tightly it almost hurt, tears beginning to glisten in her eyes, and Elphaba was afraid that anything she could possibly say would only make matters worse. She did promise, finally, to write as soon as she got home and to make sure right away that her father would let her go to visit Glinda - and then and only then Glinda managed to follow the porter to the train station to meet her chaperone. She had asked Elphaba not to come with her; Elphaba secretly thought it was because Glinda was afraid of crying in front of the crowds of other departing students.
Their room that night was not just quiet; it was cold and echoing and almost frightening in its emptiness. Every sound Elphaba made seemed to be magnified a hundred times. The quiet unnerved her, especially knowing that most of the other students, including Fiyero and the precious few others that Elphaba really knew, had left the campus already. The empty, completely bare bed on the other side of the room unnerved her even more - somehow the absolute clean emptiness made it seem as though Glinda had never been there at all. Elphaba curled herself into a ball in the center of her bed and tried opening a book, but it was no use. It was too quiet, and the nervous discomfort was making her stomach hurt. Finally, barefoot and with her quilt thrown over her nightgown, she crept downstairs and knocked on Nessa's door.
Nessa's room couldn't have provided a greater contrast to Elphaba's, but then, Nessa never had a roommate and Madame Greyling lived in the suite year-round. For the first time Elphaba wondered whether that was frightening, to live all summer in one suite in an otherwise completely empty dormitory. But for now the fire was lit, and quiet music drifted from Madame's closed door, and Nessa hadn't even gotten ready for bed yet. She was carefully curling her hair at the mirror when Elphaba slipped in.
"Lonely?" Nessa asked, barely glancing at her sister's reflection behind her in the mirror.
"A little," Elphaba said, seating herself on the end of Nessa's bed and wrapping the quilt tighter around her shoulders. "It's quiet upstairs."
"Well, almost everyone is gone," Nessa said pragmatically, ignoring (willfully, Elphaba thought) the fact that really it mostly mattered that Glinda was gone. "If Father hadn't had to go to Center Munch we could have gone home today too."
"I'm sure he tried to change his trip," Elphaba murmured. For Nessa's comfort he would have at least tried almost anything.
"He did," Nessa said, "but the Assembly insisted and you know how angry they were with him last month."
Elphaba didn't know, but she honestly didn't care enough to ask, either.
"Can I ask you something?" Nessa set down her hairbrush and turned herself carefully away from the mirror.
"Of course."
"Do you think Father would disapprove if I saw Kiren while we're home?"
Elphaba's eyebrows lifted in some surprise; she hadn't realized Nessa had even been talking to the boy. Then again, perhaps she should have guessed when his friend stopped bothering her on his behalf. "I don't know," she said. It was a difficult question - ordinarily their father wouldn't have denied Nessa anything that she thought was proper to do, but on the other hand, he was unlikely to think almost any boy was good enough for her, either.
Nessa frowned prettily. "I don't know either. I suppose I'd better say he's just a friend from school and see how Father reacts."
"If you like," Elphaba said, "you could say he's a friend of mine. I'm not sure Father will believe it, but it certainly wouldn't surprise him to have someone come to visit me and spend all his time talking to you instead."
"Elphie," Nessa scolded gently, but Elphaba could see that she was considering the wisdom of the suggestion. "Would you do that, really?"
"Of course." Elphaba paused. "I could use a favor in return."
"What?"
"Suggest to Father that he send me to stay with Glinda for the second half of the summer?" Now that the worst was out, Elphaba started talking fast. "You could ask him to take you to the City, or to the summer house in Nest Hardings. Tell him if I went to visit Glinda then he wouldn't have to bring me along."
"Has Glinda invited you?" Nessa asked curiously.
"Yes. Her parents were going to write to Father. But I'm afraid he won't let me."
Nessa nodded thoughtfully. "All right. Though I'll be sorry to be without you that whole month."
"I know. I'll miss you, too," Elphaba said.
"You won't, you'll be with Glinda."
"Glinda's not my sister."
"No, she's not." Nessa sighed. "Want to sleep here tonight?"
"Yes, please. It's too quiet upstairs."
"All right." Another sigh. "You don't think - I mean, he's even smaller than Boq."
"Kiren? He seems very . . . dignified."
"I suppose." Nessa shrugged. "It's not as if I know how tall I am, anyway." She rolled herself toward the bureau. "Help me dress? Then I won't have to bother Madame. We have an early start tomorrow - but at least we'll be home by lunchtime."
"Yes," Elphaba said. "We will."
Author: ainsleyaisling
Rating: PG
'Verse: Musical AU; some details from bookverse
Pairings for Story Overall: Glinda/Fiyero, Elphaba/Fiyero, Glinda/Elphaba
Summary: End of term.
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~~
She had read the letter from her parents at least ten times by the time Elphaba came back from checking on Nessa. Her fingers fidgeted with the fine parchment as she watched Elphaba elbow her way through the door with a pile of books in her arms, which she deposited on her desk with a loud thump.
"Nessa's?" Glinda asked, as Elphaba straightened the stack.
Elphaba nodded. "They wouldn't fit in her trunks. I've got tons of room."
"How, I don't know, your books seem to have been breeding." Elphaba laughed, and Glinda felt insanely pleased with herself. "You realize no one's going to be able to lift that last trunk of yours?"
"My father's sending two servants," Elphaba explained, turning and sitting down in the desk chair. "To help Nessie."
"Is she almost packed?"
"Just about. Madame's been helping her. We'll finish tomorrow."
"My parents wrote again."
Elphaba looked politely interested. "Oh?"
"I've just been . . ." Glinda looked down at the letter again and shook her head. "It's strange, it's as if I can't tell who they're writing to."
"What do you mean?"
"Well - look." She stretched over the end of her bed to hand the letter to Elphaba. "Read it."
Elphaba read it silently, but Glinda already had it memorized. Our darling Galinda, it began, we are thrilled that Miss Elphaba will be coming to visit and of course we shall write to Governor Thropp and issue a formal invitation. It will be so lovely to have the house filled with girlish laughter again.
Glinda was fairly certain she could tell when Elphaba had got to that part, because she started coughing uncontrollably.
"Keep reading," Glinda said, rolling her eyes heavenward.
Elphaba switched then, for some reason, to reading aloud. "'We will send your chaperone' - really?"
"Really."
"Do you have one all the time?"
"Only when I'm alone." Glinda gestured for her to go on.
"Then you're never really alone, are you? Well - 'your chaperone, to meet you at Shiz station. We're so looking forward to seeing our princess again and hearing all about the things you've been learning at school, and your splendid stories about the Wizard and the Emerald City . . ." To Elphaba's credit she managed not to fall into sarcasm, but rather read the entire letter as if it troubled her a bit.
"See what I mean?" Glinda asked, holding her hand out for the letter.
Elphaba folded it over before handing it back. "They don't know anything that happened this year, do they?"
"Not really," Glinda admitted. "I didn't tell them much. It would have upset them."
A different kind of person, perhaps, would have reminded Glinda that it was her parents' job to look after her and not her job to spare them from the ugliness of life. It didn't surprise her to hear no such thing from Elphaba, whose parents had probably not spared her from much. Elphaba only said, "They don't read newspapers?"
"Most of what happened here would never have made it into papers in Gillikin," Glinda pointed out. "And they only read the society page and the business pages anyway."
Elphaba made a soft, thoughtful noise under her breath. "Well," she said, "they'll have to notice you've rather grown up."
"I'm not sure they will. And I don't think it's growing up really, anyway, or that's not how they'd see it." Glinda paused in concentration, biting her lip while she considered how to explain. "My cousin had a baby last month . . ."
"That's - nice?" Elphaba looked somewhat at a loss. "If she wanted one."
"She did. I think." Glinda smoothed her skirt over her outstretched legs. "The thing is she got married last year - when she was eighteen, you know, she didn't want to go to university - and now she's had a baby, and I haven't seen her since I left home of course, but I've had letters from her, and she doesn't seem any different from before. And she must be grown up, I mean, if you're not grown up when you're someone's mother, then when are you? But - well, I've just been wondering . . ." She sighed fretfully enough that Elphaba came to sit on the bed with her.
"Something wrong?" Elphaba asked.
"I just don't think I was expected to grow up, the way you mean it. Maybe not ever." Glinda frowned at her lap. "I think what you mean by growing up, where I come from just means - I don't know, becoming less - womanly, or . . . something."
Elphaba nodded, clearly trying very hard to sympathize. Obviously she had never worried, and no one had ever worried on her behalf, that education and studiousness would make her less girlish - Glinda was one of the very few people who'd ever expected Elphaba to be girlish at all anyway. And Elphaba's sister - pretty as she was, Nessa was still in another class altogether because of her handicap, and because she would need to rule a province one day. Elphaba leaned back on her hands and shifted herself closer to Glinda. "Are you worried they won't notice you've . . . changed, or that they won't understand, or - are you worried they'll think it's a bad thing, if they do notice?"
"I'm not sure," Glinda replied honestly. "I think they expected me to go off and learn sorcery and study pleasant things and come home with a lot of fancy tricks and still be pretty and - well, you know."
"I wouldn't worry about that last part," Elphaba said, both fondly and with a touch of irony. "But - you're afraid they'll find you too serious?"
"I'm afraid," Glinda said, realizing it was true as she was speaking, "that if they do, they won't let me come back. Mostly they'd let me do anything I wanted, but if they thought it was for my own good . . ."
"What would they have you do instead?"
"Stay in Gillikin and go to society parties and find a suitable husband." Glinda leaned her head against Elphaba's shoulder for comfort. "Thank goodness Fiyero has such a reputation - they never said a word against him, but when I wrote that it had ended they didn't seem terribly upset." She strongly suspected that Elphaba had almost laughed, but she could forgive her for that. Especially when Elphaba was always so willing to sit and listen and hold her hand and never tell her she was being silly, even when they both knew she was.
"I think," Elphaba said, shifting her weight so that she could take Glinda's hand, "you could make them think everything was just fine if you wanted to. You're good at that."
"But I don't want to. Or I don't want to have to. I want . . ." Glinda laughed as if to indicate that she knew she was being childish. "I want to be able to run to my parents and tell them all my troubles and have them fix everything. And I know they can't fix any of it, and even if they tried they'd fix it by taking me away from everything - from school, from you - and seeing that I have a perfect husband and a baby within a year and never leave Gillikin again."
"I think that sounds - comfortable," Elphaba said gently, cautiously. "Are you sure you don't want to have that as a choice? To know that if it gets to be too much, they would pull you out of all of it?"
"I can't think that way," Glinda replied. "If I do, I might choose it, and it wouldn't take long for me to hate myself for it. I wouldn't really be any happier. Besides," she added, twining her fingers with Elphaba's, "I wouldn't really want to leave you. And - I want to do something better. Or more important. Or something."
"Still, it's a choice."
"No, it's not," Glinda said, realizing that this also was true. "It's a not-choice. It's telling my parents I'm in over my head and then letting them choose for me."
Elphaba paused. "We are in over our heads," she said.
"I know." They were quiet together for a long while, and then Glinda said, "So my parents are just going to have to think everything's fine, I suppose. I imagine they'll think you're taking care of me, once they meet you."
"Have you - warned them about me, at all?"
"I haven't warned them about anything," Glinda said, knowing exactly what Elphaba meant. "I've told them all about you, of course. Well - mostly."
"So they're expecting . . ." Elphaba couldn't, apparently, suppress a glance down at her green hand entwined with Glinda's " . . . me?"
"They're expecting my best friend," said Glinda very firmly, and refused to answer any more questions. Of course she had told her parents that her roommate was green - to her considerable shame, she had told them so on her very first night at school, when to have such an indescribable roommate had seemed like the worst thing that could happen to her. And she had the whole first half of the summer to make sure they knew what to expect when Elphaba arrived - and to make sure they weren't somehow under the impression that she had been speaking metaphorically.
"Anyway," Elphaba said, "you'll see them tomorrow."
"Yes." Glinda tightened her grip on Elphaba's hand. "I will miss you."
"You'll forget all about me once you get home and see your family again."
"I will not." Her hand tightened even further, although Elphaba didn't complain. "Will you miss me tomorrow, when you're here alone?"
"Yes," Elphaba said plainly. "It will seem strange to have the room to myself."
"You ought to go down and sleep in Nessa's room."
"Maybe I will. The way I used to when she was frightened."
"Did you?" Glinda asked, charmed by the idea.
"Well, she could hardly come and crawl into my bed on her own. So I went to her."
"During thunderstorms?"
"Oh, no." Elphaba smiled a little, remembering. "Her nanny would stay with her whenever there were thunderstorms, to make sure she wouldn't cry and wake Father."
"Then what was she frightened of, when you stayed with her?"
Elphaba's smile widened. "The nanny. She was very cross sometimes."
"Did you have a nanny as well?"
"Not exactly," Elphaba said. "One of the maids looked after me I think, until Nessa was born and our mother died. Then Nessa's nanny looked after me as well, but she was mostly there because of Nessa. Because she couldn't do much for herself, you know."
Elphaba didn't speak often about her childhood, not that Glinda couldn't guess why. But still, these little gems of information fascinated Glinda. Each one revealed to her made Glinda feel as though she didn't really know Elphaba at all. Her roommate might think she didn't keep secrets, but she didn't give much away, either.
Glinda looked absently out the window, still holding tight to Elphaba's hand. It was nearly entirely dark, and the noises of the dormitory had gone quiet around them. "Will you stay here with me, tonight?" she asked softly. She didn't think she could entirely bear to let go of Elphaba sooner than she had to, knowing that she would be facing more than a month all on her own.
Elphaba smiled. "Are you frightened of something?"
"Yes," Glinda said, hoping to lighten the atmosphere. "Nessa's nanny."
~~Elphaba~~
For as much as she'd managed to say in all the previous days, when Glinda was finally leaving for her train she didn't seem able to say anything. She finally just hugged Elphaba so tightly it almost hurt, tears beginning to glisten in her eyes, and Elphaba was afraid that anything she could possibly say would only make matters worse. She did promise, finally, to write as soon as she got home and to make sure right away that her father would let her go to visit Glinda - and then and only then Glinda managed to follow the porter to the train station to meet her chaperone. She had asked Elphaba not to come with her; Elphaba secretly thought it was because Glinda was afraid of crying in front of the crowds of other departing students.
Their room that night was not just quiet; it was cold and echoing and almost frightening in its emptiness. Every sound Elphaba made seemed to be magnified a hundred times. The quiet unnerved her, especially knowing that most of the other students, including Fiyero and the precious few others that Elphaba really knew, had left the campus already. The empty, completely bare bed on the other side of the room unnerved her even more - somehow the absolute clean emptiness made it seem as though Glinda had never been there at all. Elphaba curled herself into a ball in the center of her bed and tried opening a book, but it was no use. It was too quiet, and the nervous discomfort was making her stomach hurt. Finally, barefoot and with her quilt thrown over her nightgown, she crept downstairs and knocked on Nessa's door.
Nessa's room couldn't have provided a greater contrast to Elphaba's, but then, Nessa never had a roommate and Madame Greyling lived in the suite year-round. For the first time Elphaba wondered whether that was frightening, to live all summer in one suite in an otherwise completely empty dormitory. But for now the fire was lit, and quiet music drifted from Madame's closed door, and Nessa hadn't even gotten ready for bed yet. She was carefully curling her hair at the mirror when Elphaba slipped in.
"Lonely?" Nessa asked, barely glancing at her sister's reflection behind her in the mirror.
"A little," Elphaba said, seating herself on the end of Nessa's bed and wrapping the quilt tighter around her shoulders. "It's quiet upstairs."
"Well, almost everyone is gone," Nessa said pragmatically, ignoring (willfully, Elphaba thought) the fact that really it mostly mattered that Glinda was gone. "If Father hadn't had to go to Center Munch we could have gone home today too."
"I'm sure he tried to change his trip," Elphaba murmured. For Nessa's comfort he would have at least tried almost anything.
"He did," Nessa said, "but the Assembly insisted and you know how angry they were with him last month."
Elphaba didn't know, but she honestly didn't care enough to ask, either.
"Can I ask you something?" Nessa set down her hairbrush and turned herself carefully away from the mirror.
"Of course."
"Do you think Father would disapprove if I saw Kiren while we're home?"
Elphaba's eyebrows lifted in some surprise; she hadn't realized Nessa had even been talking to the boy. Then again, perhaps she should have guessed when his friend stopped bothering her on his behalf. "I don't know," she said. It was a difficult question - ordinarily their father wouldn't have denied Nessa anything that she thought was proper to do, but on the other hand, he was unlikely to think almost any boy was good enough for her, either.
Nessa frowned prettily. "I don't know either. I suppose I'd better say he's just a friend from school and see how Father reacts."
"If you like," Elphaba said, "you could say he's a friend of mine. I'm not sure Father will believe it, but it certainly wouldn't surprise him to have someone come to visit me and spend all his time talking to you instead."
"Elphie," Nessa scolded gently, but Elphaba could see that she was considering the wisdom of the suggestion. "Would you do that, really?"
"Of course." Elphaba paused. "I could use a favor in return."
"What?"
"Suggest to Father that he send me to stay with Glinda for the second half of the summer?" Now that the worst was out, Elphaba started talking fast. "You could ask him to take you to the City, or to the summer house in Nest Hardings. Tell him if I went to visit Glinda then he wouldn't have to bring me along."
"Has Glinda invited you?" Nessa asked curiously.
"Yes. Her parents were going to write to Father. But I'm afraid he won't let me."
Nessa nodded thoughtfully. "All right. Though I'll be sorry to be without you that whole month."
"I know. I'll miss you, too," Elphaba said.
"You won't, you'll be with Glinda."
"Glinda's not my sister."
"No, she's not." Nessa sighed. "Want to sleep here tonight?"
"Yes, please. It's too quiet upstairs."
"All right." Another sigh. "You don't think - I mean, he's even smaller than Boq."
"Kiren? He seems very . . . dignified."
"I suppose." Nessa shrugged. "It's not as if I know how tall I am, anyway." She rolled herself toward the bureau. "Help me dress? Then I won't have to bother Madame. We have an early start tomorrow - but at least we'll be home by lunchtime."
"Yes," Elphaba said. "We will."