Defying Gravity 3/?, by ainsleyaisling

[ainsleyaisling]

Title: Defying Gravity, 3/?
Author: ainsleyaisling
Rating: PG-13
'Verse: Musical AU; some details from bookverse
Summary: Glinda and Elphaba - and Fiyero - working hand-in-hand, the way it was supposed to be . . . maybe . . .
This chapter: Elphaba finds exactly what she was afraid she would.
Disclaimer: Wicked belongs mostly to Gregory Maguire, and musicalverse belongs to Stephen Schwartz, Winnie Holzman, and possibly Universal.
Notes: Sequel to "The Effects of Gravity," a link to all chapters of which can be found here. The previous chapter of this story can be found here.


~~Elphaba~~

The words on the papers in front of her had been swimming before her eyes for some time now, including the ones in her own handwriting, and not just the muddled runic letters of the spell. She'd copied it out both ways, in the characters she couldn't entirely understand as well as in ordinary letters, mostly for effect. Looking at the words of the spell in a more easily recognizable form didn't make taking it apart any easier.

She rubbed her aching forehead and took a very deep breath, trying to gather the last remnants of her energy and focus. In order to have something to compare, she first pulled toward herself the original scroll, the spell copied out in Morrible's slanted handwriting, and recited it carefully. Just as had happened every other time she had tried the spell, within moments a glowing sphere materialized in the air in front of her, showing a picture of the object she'd had in mind - the Governor's mansion, back in Munchkinland. It seemed to be, as was proper, a current picture - servants were hurrying about their tasks in the yard, and afternoon daylight shone on the house's windows. She gently brought her hands together to end the spell and banish the picture, and then she turned to the sheaf of papers printed in her own neatest writing, the spell she had created.

For this first attempt she chose her target carefully - the worst possible choice, the most tragic potential outcome. She spoke slowly and softly, hands moving of their own accord, a breeze seeming to rustle her papers.

The glowing sphere that appeared in front of her was larger, and its edges were mostly greenish rather than blue, as they had been with the original spell. The picture it showed was initially a bit clouded, but it soon cleared and allowed her to see exactly what she had both hoped for and been afraid to see: an enormous camp, almost the size of a small town, made up of tents and shacks and burrows of all kinds, and teeming with Animals of every species, every age, running in between the dwellings and talking to one another, children playing around the adults' feet. For a moment Elphaba watched captivated as a small family of Rabbit children played a strange version of hopscotch in the shade created underneath an enormous female Tiger who appeared to be talking to their mother. The grownup Rabbit perched on a tree trunk, grooming her ears while she talked and seemingly unconcerned about her children frolicking below. Then a bit of concentration allowed Elphaba to pull back again, and pull back further, until she could see the entire camp, until she could see its immediate surroundings, until she could see enough of the landscape that she could identify its location.

A giant refugee camp of Animals. From the looks of it, somewhere in the Vinkus, west of the first line of mountains that cut off the view of the kingdom from the rest of Oz. She took one last look and closed her hands, banishing the image. It was all the inspiration she needed to get the next part of it right.

Glinda would be back in an hour or so - she'd been taken off to attend some kind of special event with the Wizard - and by then Elphaba would be ready to teach her the spell, but she also wanted to be ready to sabotage it, and to tell Glinda which part of the spell she must never speak out loud. Then they could practice, and then she could go to the Wizard.

She rubbed her eyes and turned to the one sheaf of papers that would definitely have to be burned when she was finished. She had each bit of the spell carefully marked as to its function in crafting the overall effect, whether it be the words that focused the spell on the correct object, the words that bound the spell together, the words that created the image, or the words that allowed the image to expand or contract. She'd already decided that the easiest part to extract, and the most devastating to the overall purpose, would be the part that ensured the spell would locate one specific group of things rather than every individual one of that type of thing in all of Oz. The problem was, she wasn't entirely sure that she had correctly identified those portions of the spell. It was at least slightly likely that she had them confused with the elements that were meant to stabilize the spell and focus the magic, so that it didn't release magical energy or cause accidental damage. That would not be a good part of the spell to tinker with.

She bit lightly on the end of her pencil for a moment before making a decision, and drawing a firm line underneath two of the words in her carefully crafted spell. Then, holding her hands up as much in precautionary self-defense as in spellwork, she slowly chanted the spell again, leaving out the underlined words.

The power that flowed through her fingers tingled and throbbed with a somewhat foreign heat, and the sphere that began to take shape in the air was fuzzy and unfocused but brighter than before. She was already ducking, knowing something had gone wrong, by the time it exploded itself with a bang worthy of the Palace cannons and shot hot green sparks in every direction. The sparks that soared past her head were pure magic of a weak sort and didn't cause any real damage, but she could feel the slight burn as they touched her skin. Her ears were ringing so much that for a moment she thought the knock on the door was part of the original explosion.

She brushed her hands together, more to rid them mentally of stray magic than for any other reason, and went to open the door, feeling a rather sheepish expression on her face. Sure enough, the first words out of Fiyero's mouth were, "What did you just do?"

"I'm glad you're so concerned for my safety," she said, pulling the door open further and letting him in.

"I was, until I saw you were all in one piece." He looked around him as he stepped into the room. "Unless you've exploded Glinda. You haven't, have you?"

"No, she's not here. A spell went wrong, that's all." She shrugged.

"Badly wrong?"

"No, just a little accident. A little extra magic."

He frowned. "Does that happen often?"

"Not really. You have to have made a mistake." To cover the guilty look she felt certain she was wearing, she asked, "Did you want something in particular?"

"Yes," he said, apparently deciding to ignore her magical mishaps for the moment. "Glinda told me you were working too hard."

"And?"

"And, I thought I'd come and say hello."

"Oh." She paused. "Hello."

He grinned. "Hello. What are you working on?"

"A spell."

"No."

Feeling the smile creep over her face, she relented. "That spell I was talking about the other day, the one I want only us to be able to perform correctly? Want to see?"

"Can I really?" He hesitated. "Is it safe?"

"Yes. The mistake was . . . unrelated." She dropped to the floor beside her stack of papers and gave him a crooked smile. "Watch."

The spell was easier the second time, and the glowing green-edged ball of light was actually larger, the image a little clearer. It centered on the same place - she supposed the spell must naturally seek the very center of whatever she had asked it to find - and the Tiger was gone, but a pair of young twin Deer seemed to be playing with the little Rabbits. "Can you see that?" she asked as one Deer tossed a Rabbit lightly into the air with its nose.

Fiyero leaned over her shoulder. "Um, some deer using a baby rabbit as a ball?"

"Yes. Well, Deer, and Rabbits." She whispered into her hands, and the Animals grew smaller within the sphere as more of their camp became visible.

"They're cute. Are they real?" he asked as the image shifted.

"Yes. Look." The camp grew even smaller, until the surrounding mountains were visible. "Can you tell where they are?"

"Oh. Is that -" He leaned closer and pointed, careful not to actually touch the image. "It's the edge of the Vinkus, isn't it? My family's castle isn't more than ten miles away, right over . . . there. On the other side of that peak that looks like antlers."

"I think so. I mean about the Vinkus."

"I don't remember an Animal village."

"It's not a village." She made the image grow again, gently, until they could see more details of the camp. "It's a refugee camp. Like Rikk told us. These are Animals who've fled the rest of Oz as the restrictions came in."

"Oh." Over her shoulder she could hear his intake of breath. "The Wizard wants to be able to find them, doesn't he?"

"I think so. That's why I want to be able to control its use." She focused the spell in again, until they could watch the little Rabbits and the Deer again. The Deer appeared to have joined in the hopscotch game, using the gleeful Rabbits as stones. "Can you imagine if he were able to find them, and all the others like them? What would happen?" she asked. Her hands shook, and she carefully ended the spell. Both she and Fiyero continued to stare at the place where it had been.

"I see your point," he said. "Though I appreciate that you chose to prove it using the smallest and most adorable Animals possible."

She laughed. "They were just the ones at the center. If you like, I could probably find some Bears gambling in a dice game with Warthogs, or something."

"No thank you." Fiyero gestured at the empty air where her spell had been hovering. "That really is - amazing. You don't let me see it very often lately, your magic."

"I rarely 'let' you see it on purpose before," she pointed out.

"No, that's true." They were quiet for a moment, and she looked down at the floor between them, studying the carpet, until his hand stretched out and brushed her wrist. "You really are working too hard," he said. "You're pale."

"It's important," she said softly.

"I'm not arguing with that. But even people who work on important things need to rest sometime. Nothing bad is happening to those Animals in the meantime."

"Not to those Animals, no." She drew away from him slightly and turned toward the window. "But to other ones, in other places, maybe. And if I take too long, maybe the Wizard will find his own means of looking for them."

"Still, I don't think it's urgent."

Elphaba bit her lip. "I suppose you'd know," she said doubtfully.

"Being one of them?"

"You know what I meant."

He nodded. "And you're right, I am one of them. Sort of. I know I haven't had any orders to go off into the mountains looking for camps of emigrant Animals."

"And it is you they'd send, I guess," Elphaba acknowledged. "Being from the Vinkus."

"So you see? Rest, let Glinda fuss over you, and stop worrying her and yourself."

She held out her hands in surrender. "Maybe. A little."

"That's the best I get?"

"Did Glinda make you swear to come up here and bother me?"

"Maybe. Though it wasn't 'bother' so much as 'talk some sense into her.'"

Elphaba shook her head, but had no need to reply because they were interrupted by a low rumbling followed by the flash of lightning splitting the sky. She frowned and looked again out the window, where the immaculate blue sky gave no indication that anything out of the ordinary had just happened. "Did you see that?" she asked.

"I didn't see anything," Fiyero replied. "I heard . . . thunder. Maybe. But far away."

"It wasn't far away, it was -" She stopped abruptly. If she could hear it closer than Fiyero could, and if she had seen something he hadn't . . .

"What's the matter?"

"Magic," she whispered low.

"What?"

"It's not a real storm," she said, only a bit louder. "It's a spell, and it's close by." She waited tensely, his nervous face mirroring her own, but nothing else happened. Finally she said, "I suppose they only tried it once?"

"They who?"

"I'm not sure," she said, "but I only know one sorceress in the City who claims weather magic as her specialty."

Even he knew the answer to this. "Madame Morrible?"

"Madame Morrible. But what could she be trying to do?"

"Maybe she's making a storm somewhere else?" he suggested. "And you just felt the actual spell, here?"

"Maybe." It was actually an interesting thought; she couldn't quite keep the surprise out of her voice. "Or she's practicing."

"For what?"

"I don't know. But I suspect it's nothing I'd be happy to hear about."

~~Glinda~~

As soon as she entered the suite, Elphaba beamed at her. That told her everything she needed to know. "You figured it out?"

"I figured it out. Come look." Elphaba was sitting on the sofa with her glasses perched low on her nose and a neat stack of papers on the table in front of her, replacing the haphazard mess that had covered the floor in the morning. Glinda kicked off her shoes and padded across the room to sit beside her.

"Did Fiyero come?" she asked as she settled herself.

"He did." Elphaba gave her a bit of a piercing look, although the smile didn't falter. "He seemed to have very specific instructions."

"Did he succeed?"

"Not really, but he tried. Now watch." Elphaba bent low over her papers and began to chant quietly. After a moment, Glinda had to lean back as a glowing sphere, green at the edges and humming with energy, appeared in the air where her nose had been. In the center of it was a three-dimensional image of what looked like a large camp, or a very shabby town, that seemed to be filled entirely with animals.

"What is it?" Glinda asked.

"An Animal refugee camp."

"So Rikk was right." She frowned at the picture that hovered in front of Elphaba's hands. "And we have something to protect after all."

"Yes." Elphaba slowly brought her two hands together, and the sphere disappeared as if she had snuffed out a candle flame. "Now watch." Glinda couldn't discern anything different about her chanting as she ran through it again, except perhaps for a slight pause in the middle. This time, however, the sphere that appeared blinked erratically, and instead of showing the Animal camp, it showed first some cows - or, more likely, Cows - in a field, then a family of Lions, then a pondful of Ducks.

"What's happening?" Glinda asked.

"It's showing random Animals, instead of the group it should have found." Elphaba closed her hands and cut off the spell. "That's what's going to happen when Morrible tries it."

"Oh. Can I try?"

Elphaba handed her a sheet of paper. "Here. Memorize it, especially the underlined part. That's the part that's going to be missing when I give it to the Wizard."

Glinda bit her lip as her eyes scanned the lines of Elphaba's tight script. "Can I look for something else instead? Just to try?"

"Of course. I think that would be best, actually."

Glinda frowned for another moment before she began to chant, hesitantly, one finger tracing the words on the page while the other hand tried to guide the magic, without her wand, as she'd been taught. She had a moment to hold her breath and prepare for the worst, but then her own little sphere appeared, showing a line of men trooping up a small hill with sacks on their backs and what looked like icepicks in their hands. Glinda grinned. "I think it worked!" she said.

Elphaba leaned closer to her and removed her glasses. "What am I looking at?" she asked.

"If I did it right," Glinda replied, "the team of coal-miners in the northern Glikkus that found the most coal today."

"Creative," Elphaba said. "And very specific."

"So it worked!" She wrapped one arm around Elphaba's shoulders as they continued to watch the men trudge up the hill in Glinda's sphere. "We're lucky you're so much cleverer than Morrible."

"End the spell," Elphaba reminded her gently. "Just bring your hands together, and think about it disappearing."

Glinda followed instructions, and the little sphere winked neatly out of existence. "Easy."

"Yes. Now you just have to learn how to cast it while thinking those underlined words silently, so Morrible can't hear that anything's missing."

"I did hear you pause," Glinda said. "We'll have to practice saying that part faster. Or the whole thing slower, with more pauses."

"I have practiced," Elphaba said slyly. "That pause was in a different place."

"You tricky, devious thing," Glinda said with a broader smile. "All right, I'll study hard."

"Good." Elphaba idly tidied the papers into a neater pile. "How was . . . whatever it was?"

"Today? It was the dedication of a new market square in Emerald Heights. It was all right." Glinda smoothed her dress over her knees and waited for Elphaba to put two and two together, as she was certain to do.

"Surely Emerald Heights already had a market square?"

"Yes. It was in the center of town, near the Feline district where the banks were."

Elphaba paused. "They moved it, didn't they?"

"Yes. The original bankers are all gone, of course - a woman told me the Tigers went first, then the Leopards as soon as the banks began to close and there was no more work for the moneychangers. The Lions waited until the restrictions got too bad, but apparently some of them didn't even leave in time and were relocated."

"Relocated to where?" The note of alarm in Elphaba's voice set Glinda's heart racing as it had when she had been talking to the little old woman.

"No one knows," Glinda said. "Prison, maybe, even. But they let the old square go abandoned, surrounded by all the empty storefronts, and they built a new market a few blocks away and brought in bankers and moneylenders and all from other towns in Gillikin, to open up there."

"They?"

"The mayor, nominally," Glinda explained. "For real? I don't know."

"It's worse than I thought," Elphaba said.

"I know. I was surprised; it was hard not to let the Wizard see."

"Fiyero didn't -" Elphaba stopped herself midsentence, and Glinda waited a few moments before asking for clarification.

"Fiyero didn't what?"

"He didn't . . . seem to know anything about this. About this kind of thing."

"Well, he wouldn't," Glinda said. "It happened almost a year ago, he was still in school."

Elphaba nodded. "It must still be going on somewhere, though. I wonder if he'd ever be sent - you know, to 'relocate' someone. I wonder what he would do."

Glinda thought about that for a moment, though the image was deeply uncomfortable. "What we'd do, I guess," she said finally. "The best he could, to make sure no one got hurt."

"I guess," Elphaba said.

Glinda's feeling of discomfort increased as she realized that not only did she not know exactly what Fiyero would do in such a situation, or even what she herself would do, but there was no telling how Elphaba might react to the immediacy of innocent Animals, especially on a large scale, being endangered right in front of her eyes. Her guilt about the Wizard's monkeys, even three years later, was still so severe, and her grief for the missing Doctor Dillamond so painful, and her identification with the persecuted and ostracized Animals sometimes so complete - there was no telling whether she would be able to keep calm, or whether she would simply shatter, as she had almost done on their very first journey to the Emerald City. And if Glinda wasn't there to hold on to her . . .

She threaded her fingers through Elphaba's and squeezed tightly. "Promise me something?" she asked.

Elphaba looked confused. "What?"

"That if anything happens, you won't - change the plan, without telling me?"

"Change the plan?" Elphaba frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Our plan. That you won't - run away, or get yourself killed, or attack the Palace."

"Why would I do that?"

"Just promise, please?" She pressed Elphaba's hand tighter, and finally her friend's face softened.

"All right. I promise."

"Good." She smiled a little shakily and patted Elphaba's knee. "Now let's practice this spell."