Defying Gravity, 21/?, by ainsleyaisling
Title: Defying Gravity, 21/?
Author: ainsleyaisling
Rating: PG
'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: Some of the pieces come together and a plot is afoot.
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, plus the posted chapters of this story, can be found here. The previous chapter of this story can be found here.
~~Elphaba~~
She lined up the two identical green glass bottles on the bureau in her bedroom; but Glinda's rebuke hovered in her mind and Glinda had been right - there were more important, more practical things to worry about. She sent a message.
In the meantime, there was work to do. The first few ants and spiders she'd tried to send to another room had arrived perfectly intact, but dead. At first she'd wondered if maybe she was throwing too much power into the spell - it did still leave her somewhat dizzy and reeling for the first few seconds after she'd cast it - but when she concentrated all her will on reducing the power she used, on not overdoing it, the bugs ended up falling short of where she had tried to send them, but still extremely dead. The walls didn't appear to be the problem, either - a spider sent two feet across the room with nothing in the way ended up just as dead as one sent out to the parlor.
"I think," she told Glinda over lunch, while trying to rub a crick out of her neck, "the problem is that the spell takes the thing apart, molecule by molecule or however it is, and then reassembles it in the new place. The things look exactly right, but a living thing can't stand being taken apart; it dies in the instant everything is separated."
Glinda frowned over a piece of cold chicken. "But," she said haltingly, "people - things - generally don't die that fast, do they? I mean if you step on a spider and completely crush it to mush, yes. But if a person is, I don't know, shot in the head or something - they're still alive for a few seconds, aren't they? Surely long enough that if magic suddenly healed the shot wound, they'd live?"
"But the reason they're alive is that a heart is still beating, or a brain still working," Elphaba said. "With this spell, in that instant, there is no heart or brain or anything else. I think that's it - you can't blast a living thing into nothingness and then just put all the pieces back together and expect it to live again."
"You'd have to be able to give it life again," Glinda mused. A slice of apple paused halfway to her mouth, her elbow propped on the table. "Interesting."
Her dreamy tone suggested that the comment did not refer to the first part of her remark. "What's interesting?" Elphaba asked.
Glinda looked over as if she'd momentarily forgotten Elphaba was there. "That the soul isn't part of the body. If it were, it'd just snap back into place with everything else and you'd be fine. But at that moment when the body comes apart, the soul must be released, in that instant. I think that's interesting."
"It is interesting." Elphaba stared at her plate for a moment. "I wonder."
"What?"
"I had been thinking there must be a way to move things without them coming all apart like that, but . . . what if the solution is really to bind the soul to the body and not let it leave?"
Glinda made a face. "Bind a soul to a body that's being taken apart? That sounds painful."
"Only for a moment. But what if it failed?" Elphaba bit her lip, continuing to stare at the plate so as not to break her concentration. "What if binding the soul to the body isn't enough, and you just end up with a soul animating a dead body."
"I'm not sure how that's different from being . . . alive," Glinda said. "I mean, without a soul the body is dead. Right? If the heart is still pumping at all, the soul is still in there, isn't it?"
"No, it wouldn't be like being alive," Elphaba said, her brow tightening as her mind filled with horrible images. "A soul in a regular living body is part of the body - well, more or less, as you said. But a soul just bound to an animated dead body would just be a soul trapped in a thing - the body wouldn't feel pain, it could even fall apart, because it's already dead. But the soul - ugh, the soul could stay bound to the body even as it falls apart, even if it were buried, even -"
"Stop." Glinda was looking pale. "You're right, that's horrid."
"I don't want to try that," Elphaba said unnecessarily. "Especially since unless I did it to something that could talk, we'd never know whether the body was alive, or whether a suffering soul was just trapped in it."
"No, definitely not." Glinda swallowed and pushed her plate a few inches away from herself. "You know, there are all those fairy stories about evil witches or angry gods who trapped a person in the form of a rock or a tree or something - did you read those?"
Elphaba nodded. "I never wanted to think very much about them, it sounded too terrible."
"That's what this sounds like to me. Like a person's soul being bound to no better than a tree that can move." Glinda shuddered. "All right, so do we have any other thoughts?"
Elphaba sighed. When she'd first read the book, it hadn't sounded this hopeless. "Back to moving things through walls and air without taking them all apart, I suppose."
"Where do the things go?" Glinda asked. "They can't just be taken apart to small pieces and then sent through the air, or through the wall - that wouldn't be any more instantaneous than sending the whole object zipping across the room without taking it apart, right? And the spell is supposed to work through metal walls and all manner of things that you probably can't send molecules through. So how do the things get there?"
"Through Time," Elphaba said mostly to herself, now looking out the window. "Through another dimension? To the fairy world, for all we know . . . But I see your point. The problem isn't how to bind the soul to the body; the problem is how to send the living things into . . . wherever, whole, in one piece."
"If they're just blinking into fairy land for a moment, or whatever it is," Glinda said, "there's no reason they have to come apart. That I can think of."
"No, it's just a lazy spell." Elphaba pushed her teacup away after nearly putting her elbow in it. "And a lazy caster, I suppose. I wonder how we find out -"
"I have an idea, actually." Glinda was neatly flipping down the cuffs of her sleeves, which she had turned up to eat. "Remember, my subject was pretty fairy magic," she added wryly.
"Pretty fairy magic isn't so pretty," Elphaba said, knowing that Glinda was already thinking about the less savory aspects of what she had studied. What she really meant, of course, was magic so ancient it was treated mostly as legend - and often dressed up for children with crowns of flowers and wands and little flying sprites. As Oz became a practical farming and manufacturing land, and fewer and fewer students took up sorcery at all, that magic had begun to fall into the category of too complicated for a people who were mostly interested in fortune-telling and rainmaking.
Glinda gave her a nod. "Let me look for some books. I never looked into anything this complex, but I doubt I could have even if I wanted - the books just weren't there. But if they're anywhere I bet they're here. We already know the Wizard must have the entire contents of the Ozmas' libraries."
"You know what to look for," Elphaba agreed. "If you can find it - with what you found yesterday, I think we'd have our answer about how to get the Animals out of that laboratory and take them out of the Palace."
Glinda's head lifted and her eyes flashed with interest. "How?"
"I'd only have to magic them out as far as that lower cellar. Then we could take them down the hall to the underground river -"
"And send them out in boats." Glinda paused. "Assuming the river comes out somewhere safe and doesn't just flow into a pipe or a dam or something."
"I thought of that," Elphaba said. "But think - they bring the wine stores down the underground river to the dock you found. They unload the wine. Do you really think they then carry the boats down the hall and up the stairs and have the boatmen carry them back outside?"
Glinda laughed. "All right, of course not. The boats, and the boatmen, must go on down the river and come out somewhere else. Can we find out where that is, and make sure it isn't in the middle of the Wizard's garden or something?"
"That's why I asked for Fiyero."
"Clever."
By the time Fiyero knocked on their door, Glinda had been down to the Wizard's libraries and was back with a huge, dusty, but beautifully illuminated book that she refused to explain to Elphaba, saying, "This is only the first stage." Her energy still feeling rather drained from a day of sending spiders all around the suite, Elphaba finally gave up and sat rolling a yarn ball for the cat to chase while Glinda sat in front of the fire poring over her enormous book.
When Fiyero arrived they took turns telling him everything, their words spilling over one another. They left out the part about what they were planning, for now, but Glinda explained everything she'd found down in the wine cellar. Fiyero nodded and sat down on an end of the sofa.
"It comes out through a cave a mile downriver," he said. "You know the Palace is on a hill; the main river flows down alongside the base of the hill. The underground segment meets up with the aboveground river when it gets to the point where they're on the same level, understand? It sort of flows out of the hill."
"So it comes out from underground right at the point where it meets the big river?" Elphaba asked.
"No. It takes a mile for the underground river to surface; then it's another quarter mile or so before it joins up with the big river. It's about the same place where the water from the lake flows in - there's a big marina there. The suppliers who sail in under the Palace usually catch a steamer going back upriver to wherever they came from." Fiyero's eyes narrowed slightly. "We've been sent on patrol there; every unit has a rotation guarding the marina against dissident groups. Why do you want to know?"
"We don't care about the marina," Elphaba said honestly. "The place where the underground river first surfaces, is it guarded?"
"Of course it is, it's technically a way into the Palace." Now he looked even more suspicious. "Elphaba?"
Elphaba drummed her fingers in her lap for a moment. "Is it well guarded? At night for instance, would they pay much attention to a boat coming out of the Palace?"
Fiyero hesitated, but finally he said, "I doubt they'd pay much attention to a herd of Dolphins coming out of the Palace. They care about things going in."
"It's a pod," Glinda said absently. She'd been paying as much attention to Fiyero as was polite, but the dull end of a pencil was still tracing across the lines of the book in her lap. "A pod of Dolphins."
"Could you take me there, some night?" Elphaba asked urgently. "To the place where the river comes out. Without us being seen?"
"I think so," Fiyero said slowly. "But - what are you two planning? What are you taking out through the downstairs wine cellar?"
Elphaba hesitated, meeting his eyes, and in that instant his face cleared and his chin lifted.
"Oh, no," he said. "They'd know you were in there -"
"I won't be going in," Elphaba said. "There'll be nothing for them to find."
"Then who -"
"No one will be going in," she clarified, realizing she'd said the wrong thing. "I have it taken care of."
He looked at her, and then in a brief, quick gesture, waved his hands in the air as if performing a parlor magic trick. Elphaba nodded.
Fiyero let out a breath, slowly. "And you can't just -"
"No, the spell is too weak to move them very far."
"So you're going to move them into the cellar, and then float them out." He sighed. "And then what?"
"That's where Glinda comes in."
Hearing her name, Glinda looked up and nodded. "I'm going to get the Resistance to pick them up on the shore and take them to safety." She sounded absurdly cheerful about it.
"Well, that sounds - easy," Fiyero said, eyebrows lifted. "You've already agreed with them?"
"Not yet," Glinda said, "but Elphaba needs time to work on her spell and scout out the riverbank and all. I'm working on it."
"You're both insane," he said. "And I suppose you know that, after they get over being really, really mad, they'll just go and round up some more Animals to test on?"
Elphaba looked at Glinda, who was looking back at her with eyes glittering in the firelight. Elphaba nodded to her slowly; after all, it was Glinda's idea.
"There won't be any Animals left in the City," Glinda said softly, turning back to Fiyero.
"That's the public rumor," Fiyero said. "But we know there are cells, still in hiding - it's only a matter of time -"
"No." Though very soft, Glinda's tone was so firm that she stopped him cold. "We're going to get them all out."
For a long while no one spoke, and Fiyero just stared back at her. Eventually he said, "You can do that?"
"We think so," Elphaba said.
"We can do it." Glinda laid her pencil in the spine of her book and pressed her palms against the open pages. "We're going to get them all to the refugee camps. Then we'll worry about what's next."
Fiyero looked from one of them to the other, slowly. "Well," he said. "Now I'm pretty worried about 'what's next.'"
"But you'll help," Elphaba said.
"Yeah, I'll help." He shrugged. "I know you need as much information as possible to be safe. Safer, anyway."
"Can you get me to Rikk?" Glinda asked suddenly. "Or, well, get Rikk to me?"
Fiyero hesitated, then said, "I'll send some kind of veiled message. I'll try." He turned his attention to Elphaba. "Tomorrow night?"
A shiver of fear went through her, but she nodded calmly. "You'll come here?"
"Yeah." He flashed a sudden smile. "Wear black."
Elphaba had to fight against a smile, but Glinda laughed.
Author: ainsleyaisling
Rating: PG
'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: Some of the pieces come together and a plot is afoot.
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, plus the posted chapters of this story, can be found here. The previous chapter of this story can be found here.
~~Elphaba~~
She lined up the two identical green glass bottles on the bureau in her bedroom; but Glinda's rebuke hovered in her mind and Glinda had been right - there were more important, more practical things to worry about. She sent a message.
In the meantime, there was work to do. The first few ants and spiders she'd tried to send to another room had arrived perfectly intact, but dead. At first she'd wondered if maybe she was throwing too much power into the spell - it did still leave her somewhat dizzy and reeling for the first few seconds after she'd cast it - but when she concentrated all her will on reducing the power she used, on not overdoing it, the bugs ended up falling short of where she had tried to send them, but still extremely dead. The walls didn't appear to be the problem, either - a spider sent two feet across the room with nothing in the way ended up just as dead as one sent out to the parlor.
"I think," she told Glinda over lunch, while trying to rub a crick out of her neck, "the problem is that the spell takes the thing apart, molecule by molecule or however it is, and then reassembles it in the new place. The things look exactly right, but a living thing can't stand being taken apart; it dies in the instant everything is separated."
Glinda frowned over a piece of cold chicken. "But," she said haltingly, "people - things - generally don't die that fast, do they? I mean if you step on a spider and completely crush it to mush, yes. But if a person is, I don't know, shot in the head or something - they're still alive for a few seconds, aren't they? Surely long enough that if magic suddenly healed the shot wound, they'd live?"
"But the reason they're alive is that a heart is still beating, or a brain still working," Elphaba said. "With this spell, in that instant, there is no heart or brain or anything else. I think that's it - you can't blast a living thing into nothingness and then just put all the pieces back together and expect it to live again."
"You'd have to be able to give it life again," Glinda mused. A slice of apple paused halfway to her mouth, her elbow propped on the table. "Interesting."
Her dreamy tone suggested that the comment did not refer to the first part of her remark. "What's interesting?" Elphaba asked.
Glinda looked over as if she'd momentarily forgotten Elphaba was there. "That the soul isn't part of the body. If it were, it'd just snap back into place with everything else and you'd be fine. But at that moment when the body comes apart, the soul must be released, in that instant. I think that's interesting."
"It is interesting." Elphaba stared at her plate for a moment. "I wonder."
"What?"
"I had been thinking there must be a way to move things without them coming all apart like that, but . . . what if the solution is really to bind the soul to the body and not let it leave?"
Glinda made a face. "Bind a soul to a body that's being taken apart? That sounds painful."
"Only for a moment. But what if it failed?" Elphaba bit her lip, continuing to stare at the plate so as not to break her concentration. "What if binding the soul to the body isn't enough, and you just end up with a soul animating a dead body."
"I'm not sure how that's different from being . . . alive," Glinda said. "I mean, without a soul the body is dead. Right? If the heart is still pumping at all, the soul is still in there, isn't it?"
"No, it wouldn't be like being alive," Elphaba said, her brow tightening as her mind filled with horrible images. "A soul in a regular living body is part of the body - well, more or less, as you said. But a soul just bound to an animated dead body would just be a soul trapped in a thing - the body wouldn't feel pain, it could even fall apart, because it's already dead. But the soul - ugh, the soul could stay bound to the body even as it falls apart, even if it were buried, even -"
"Stop." Glinda was looking pale. "You're right, that's horrid."
"I don't want to try that," Elphaba said unnecessarily. "Especially since unless I did it to something that could talk, we'd never know whether the body was alive, or whether a suffering soul was just trapped in it."
"No, definitely not." Glinda swallowed and pushed her plate a few inches away from herself. "You know, there are all those fairy stories about evil witches or angry gods who trapped a person in the form of a rock or a tree or something - did you read those?"
Elphaba nodded. "I never wanted to think very much about them, it sounded too terrible."
"That's what this sounds like to me. Like a person's soul being bound to no better than a tree that can move." Glinda shuddered. "All right, so do we have any other thoughts?"
Elphaba sighed. When she'd first read the book, it hadn't sounded this hopeless. "Back to moving things through walls and air without taking them all apart, I suppose."
"Where do the things go?" Glinda asked. "They can't just be taken apart to small pieces and then sent through the air, or through the wall - that wouldn't be any more instantaneous than sending the whole object zipping across the room without taking it apart, right? And the spell is supposed to work through metal walls and all manner of things that you probably can't send molecules through. So how do the things get there?"
"Through Time," Elphaba said mostly to herself, now looking out the window. "Through another dimension? To the fairy world, for all we know . . . But I see your point. The problem isn't how to bind the soul to the body; the problem is how to send the living things into . . . wherever, whole, in one piece."
"If they're just blinking into fairy land for a moment, or whatever it is," Glinda said, "there's no reason they have to come apart. That I can think of."
"No, it's just a lazy spell." Elphaba pushed her teacup away after nearly putting her elbow in it. "And a lazy caster, I suppose. I wonder how we find out -"
"I have an idea, actually." Glinda was neatly flipping down the cuffs of her sleeves, which she had turned up to eat. "Remember, my subject was pretty fairy magic," she added wryly.
"Pretty fairy magic isn't so pretty," Elphaba said, knowing that Glinda was already thinking about the less savory aspects of what she had studied. What she really meant, of course, was magic so ancient it was treated mostly as legend - and often dressed up for children with crowns of flowers and wands and little flying sprites. As Oz became a practical farming and manufacturing land, and fewer and fewer students took up sorcery at all, that magic had begun to fall into the category of too complicated for a people who were mostly interested in fortune-telling and rainmaking.
Glinda gave her a nod. "Let me look for some books. I never looked into anything this complex, but I doubt I could have even if I wanted - the books just weren't there. But if they're anywhere I bet they're here. We already know the Wizard must have the entire contents of the Ozmas' libraries."
"You know what to look for," Elphaba agreed. "If you can find it - with what you found yesterday, I think we'd have our answer about how to get the Animals out of that laboratory and take them out of the Palace."
Glinda's head lifted and her eyes flashed with interest. "How?"
"I'd only have to magic them out as far as that lower cellar. Then we could take them down the hall to the underground river -"
"And send them out in boats." Glinda paused. "Assuming the river comes out somewhere safe and doesn't just flow into a pipe or a dam or something."
"I thought of that," Elphaba said. "But think - they bring the wine stores down the underground river to the dock you found. They unload the wine. Do you really think they then carry the boats down the hall and up the stairs and have the boatmen carry them back outside?"
Glinda laughed. "All right, of course not. The boats, and the boatmen, must go on down the river and come out somewhere else. Can we find out where that is, and make sure it isn't in the middle of the Wizard's garden or something?"
"That's why I asked for Fiyero."
"Clever."
By the time Fiyero knocked on their door, Glinda had been down to the Wizard's libraries and was back with a huge, dusty, but beautifully illuminated book that she refused to explain to Elphaba, saying, "This is only the first stage." Her energy still feeling rather drained from a day of sending spiders all around the suite, Elphaba finally gave up and sat rolling a yarn ball for the cat to chase while Glinda sat in front of the fire poring over her enormous book.
When Fiyero arrived they took turns telling him everything, their words spilling over one another. They left out the part about what they were planning, for now, but Glinda explained everything she'd found down in the wine cellar. Fiyero nodded and sat down on an end of the sofa.
"It comes out through a cave a mile downriver," he said. "You know the Palace is on a hill; the main river flows down alongside the base of the hill. The underground segment meets up with the aboveground river when it gets to the point where they're on the same level, understand? It sort of flows out of the hill."
"So it comes out from underground right at the point where it meets the big river?" Elphaba asked.
"No. It takes a mile for the underground river to surface; then it's another quarter mile or so before it joins up with the big river. It's about the same place where the water from the lake flows in - there's a big marina there. The suppliers who sail in under the Palace usually catch a steamer going back upriver to wherever they came from." Fiyero's eyes narrowed slightly. "We've been sent on patrol there; every unit has a rotation guarding the marina against dissident groups. Why do you want to know?"
"We don't care about the marina," Elphaba said honestly. "The place where the underground river first surfaces, is it guarded?"
"Of course it is, it's technically a way into the Palace." Now he looked even more suspicious. "Elphaba?"
Elphaba drummed her fingers in her lap for a moment. "Is it well guarded? At night for instance, would they pay much attention to a boat coming out of the Palace?"
Fiyero hesitated, but finally he said, "I doubt they'd pay much attention to a herd of Dolphins coming out of the Palace. They care about things going in."
"It's a pod," Glinda said absently. She'd been paying as much attention to Fiyero as was polite, but the dull end of a pencil was still tracing across the lines of the book in her lap. "A pod of Dolphins."
"Could you take me there, some night?" Elphaba asked urgently. "To the place where the river comes out. Without us being seen?"
"I think so," Fiyero said slowly. "But - what are you two planning? What are you taking out through the downstairs wine cellar?"
Elphaba hesitated, meeting his eyes, and in that instant his face cleared and his chin lifted.
"Oh, no," he said. "They'd know you were in there -"
"I won't be going in," Elphaba said. "There'll be nothing for them to find."
"Then who -"
"No one will be going in," she clarified, realizing she'd said the wrong thing. "I have it taken care of."
He looked at her, and then in a brief, quick gesture, waved his hands in the air as if performing a parlor magic trick. Elphaba nodded.
Fiyero let out a breath, slowly. "And you can't just -"
"No, the spell is too weak to move them very far."
"So you're going to move them into the cellar, and then float them out." He sighed. "And then what?"
"That's where Glinda comes in."
Hearing her name, Glinda looked up and nodded. "I'm going to get the Resistance to pick them up on the shore and take them to safety." She sounded absurdly cheerful about it.
"Well, that sounds - easy," Fiyero said, eyebrows lifted. "You've already agreed with them?"
"Not yet," Glinda said, "but Elphaba needs time to work on her spell and scout out the riverbank and all. I'm working on it."
"You're both insane," he said. "And I suppose you know that, after they get over being really, really mad, they'll just go and round up some more Animals to test on?"
Elphaba looked at Glinda, who was looking back at her with eyes glittering in the firelight. Elphaba nodded to her slowly; after all, it was Glinda's idea.
"There won't be any Animals left in the City," Glinda said softly, turning back to Fiyero.
"That's the public rumor," Fiyero said. "But we know there are cells, still in hiding - it's only a matter of time -"
"No." Though very soft, Glinda's tone was so firm that she stopped him cold. "We're going to get them all out."
For a long while no one spoke, and Fiyero just stared back at her. Eventually he said, "You can do that?"
"We think so," Elphaba said.
"We can do it." Glinda laid her pencil in the spine of her book and pressed her palms against the open pages. "We're going to get them all to the refugee camps. Then we'll worry about what's next."
Fiyero looked from one of them to the other, slowly. "Well," he said. "Now I'm pretty worried about 'what's next.'"
"But you'll help," Elphaba said.
"Yeah, I'll help." He shrugged. "I know you need as much information as possible to be safe. Safer, anyway."
"Can you get me to Rikk?" Glinda asked suddenly. "Or, well, get Rikk to me?"
Fiyero hesitated, then said, "I'll send some kind of veiled message. I'll try." He turned his attention to Elphaba. "Tomorrow night?"
A shiver of fear went through her, but she nodded calmly. "You'll come here?"
"Yeah." He flashed a sudden smile. "Wear black."
Elphaba had to fight against a smile, but Glinda laughed.