Defying Gravity, 22/?, by ainsleyaisling

[ainsleyaisling]

Title: Defying Gravity, 22/?
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: The girls begin to put their plot in motion, but something threatens to interfere.
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 would never learn not to blush when she walked past the lines of guards outside her and Glinda's suite with Fiyero, knowing they all thought what they thought. Of course, given the nature of rumor and scandal and the gossiping ways of a soldiers' barracks, she knew that most of the Emerald City probably thought the same. That didn't especially help her to feel less embarrassed around the guards.

For the sake of an alibi they left the Palace through the gate that they would have used had they been going out to the pubs or the late-night shows in the theater district, a neighborhood that, despite nearly six months in the City, Elphaba had never seen. Their path took them past the inner courtyard - hidden from the view of ordinary citizens, and therefore allowed to be turned over to the use of the guards and the other Palace denizens - where most of Fiyero's unit had gathered along with the other off-duty guards. Small bonfires burned in artificial pits, and the men were using them to light cigarettes, cook bits of food, and keep themselves warm while they drank Munchkinland beer and a few other things Elphaba didn't recognize. A few of them looked up and saluted a bit sloppily when they saw Fiyero, but most gave him a mere nod or a wave. They were off-duty, and at any rate she suspected Fiyero wasn't a terribly strict officer when it came to the formalities of rank and honor.

They passed close to one of the fires, and Elphaba felt its warmth on her legs and momentarily envied these men who were able to spend their evening carefree, drinking in each other's company and letting the bright firelight erase the cold of the early winter air for them. Then she remembered their bayonets and rifles and what they seemed to be often obliged to do with them, and her jaw tightened with the importance of her mission.

She pulled the hood of her cloak up further, covering her head from the wind and most of her face from the stares, but she wasn't quick enough to prevent being recognized. Some of the men smirked in a way that she found both horribly embarrassing and also rather audacious, but more of their faces reflected wariness and nervousness, if not outright fear. Fiyero led her along the path at the edge of the courtyard and toward the gate, and as they came near to a pair of young guards standing by themselves near the wall, both men sprang to somewhat lazy attention and saluted.

Fiyero waved a hand and shook his head, and they both relaxed, but the younger, a familiar-looking boy of maybe a year younger than Fiyero and Elphaba, kept his very wide eyes on her and dropped a small bow as she passed. He was in such a hurry to step back out of her way that he nearly tripped over his own feet.

"I've seen that boy before," Elphaba said, once they were out of earshot and following the twisting curves of the Palace's walls toward the outer gate.

Fiyero took her elbow and steered her around a blurry dark spot on the path that was probably a puddle. "At the pub, I think," he said. "When you came with me to try to meet Breqen."

Elphaba frowned for a moment, until the image of the startled, pale face came to mind. "Yes. He was terrified of me then, too. What in Oz are you telling them?"

Fiyero didn't reply. When she finally tilted her head to look up at him, he was grinning.

"What?" she asked.

His grin widened.

"Fiyero, what?"

He laughed outright and reached out to tug her hood back into place as it started to slip back over her hair. "He's not afraid of you," he said. "Well - maybe a little, but only as much as is healthy."

"He looked as if he expected me to bite him."

"He has a crush on you."

That was so wholly unexpected that it took Elphaba a moment to recognize the individual words of his sentence and put them together into sense. "Don't tease," she said, feeling a bit cranky, once she had.

"I'm not teasing," Fiyero said with wide-eyed innocence. "Any time he has duty outside your suite he comes back blushing."

"Have you forgotten that Glinda lives there, too?"

"He never asks me about Glinda," Fiyero replied, sounding rather self-satisfied.

"Well, of course not, no one's going to ask their officer about the girl they have a crush on."

"Then why does he ask so many questions about you?"

She looked up at him again, and immediately looked away when she saw the sly way he was lifting his eyebrows. He was having far too much fun. "Why," she asked, "do you ask your guide a lot of questions about snakes and bears when you're crossing through the mountain passes? So that you know to make a lot of noise and tie your food up in a tree, that's why."

"He doesn't ask how to defend himself from hexes, Elphaba. He asks if you're nice, what you studied in school, whether you have a marriage arranged for you-"

"He does not."

Fiyero shrugged. "Suit yourself."

They had come to the outside gates of the Palace. The guards on duty sharpened their attention when the iron gate squawked, but when they saw it was Fiyero and Elphaba they looked aside again. Elphaba stared at the tips of her boots visible beneath her skirt as they walked. "You couldn't tell him how to defend himself from hexes," she muttered after a while.

Fiyero snorted in the dark beside her, but said, "I don't think that's why he hasn't asked."

Elphaba shook her head, and then had to adjust her hood again. "Silly."

They took a few more steps, their feet crunching now on the gravel paths leading away from the Palace. "His name is Mandel," Fiyero said.

"I didn't need to know that."

"All right."

Away from the windbreak provided by the Palace, the winter night was harsher than Elphaba had expected. She pulled her cloak tighter and drew her hands up into the sleeves as they walked slowly and casually down onto the nearest big street, headed in the direction of the nightlife. As soon as they were out of the sightline of even the sharpest-eyed of the guards at the Palace gate, Fiyero took her arm again and led her toward an alley, into the shadows, and then around the corner of a building and up a darkened street.

"Keep your head down now," he murmured as the quickened their steps. "We'll take this back way to the merchant road and then down past the warehouses to the docks."

"All right," she whispered back, their previous conversation nearly forgotten, her breath coming short now with nervousness and cold. She licked her lips and immediately regretted it as the wind stung them bitterly.

"Smells like snow," Fiyero said softly as they rounded another corner and came out on the street used to carry most of the larger goods that arrived in the City up into the downtown shopping districts and markets. Elphaba nodded, too cold to do anything else.

The warehouses that lined the street were dark except for the occasional lamp left burning to deter thieves and vandals. Not that this was the only precaution the merchants had taken - as they passed the shadowed, hulking buildings, occasionally a dog barked into the ringing cold. Elphaba pressed her lips tightly together until some feeling returned to them, and forced out, "Too cold for a dog to be outside."

"They're supposed to have shelter from the wind and the weather," Fiyero told her quietly. His hand tightened on her arm. "The Wizard has laws for the protection of dumb animals, you know. To see they're treated humanely."

"Oh, lovely."

"Isn't it." After another few steps he added, "I've seen some of those guard dogs in daylight; I wouldn't tangle with them."

"I don't think I'll ever be secure," Elphaba said, trying to ignore the way the numbness of her lips slurred her words, "that they aren't Dogs in hiding."

"These aren't," Fiyero said grimly. "Barking and biting machines."

Elphaba covered her mouth with one sleeve-encased hand until her lips burned with returning blood. "Men made them that way," she mumbled through her sleeve when she felt she could.

"And until men figure out how to un-make them once it's done . . ." His hip bumped hers, his stride urging her off at a diagonal. "Let's cross here where it's dark; not much further until we have to veer off the other way."

They walked mostly in silence the rest of the way, the starry, clear sky opening above them as they left the tangle of Emerald City streets and angled across open, windswept fields toward the river. Here the dead grass crunched with ice under their feet. It had been about fifteen minutes by Elphaba's reckoning when Fiyero touched her arm, stopping her, and whispered, "Here. The other side of that hill, by those trees, is the cave where the underground river comes out."

"Where are the guards?" Elphaba whispered back, self-consciously hiding her face from the light of the moon.

"On the other side. Guarding the cave entrance and the approach from the river."

Elphaba dropped to a sort of squat, tucking her cloak around her ankles and knees to shield herself from the bitter frost. Reluctantly baring one hand to the wind, she reached into the pocket of her cloak and pulled out her glasses, wincing as she slipped them onto her nose. The frames were freezing.

Fiyero dropped beside her. "What are you looking for?" he asked after a while of letting her look around them and stare at the hill in the distance.

"A place to stop the boats," she whispered. "To pull them ashore and get the Animals off before the boats get to the marina, where they'd be searched."

"And then take them where?" he asked curiously. "They'd still be on the Emerald City side of the river."

"South, below the Wizard's road. The Resistance could get them across the river into the Vinkus there, where it's unguarded - couldn't they?"

"Probably. At night."

She looked up at him, a particularly stinging wind blowing across the exposed end of her nose. "Can we get closer?"

~~Glinda~~

What annoyed her was that she knew there was a pattern, knew, as surely as she knew her own name. It was like looking at a puzzle with all the pieces jumbled together in a pile, but with the sure knowledge that there was one right solution. She just couldn't find it.

While the fire dwindled lower and the cat stalked in her peripheral vision after a gnat or a spider or an imaginary bit of dust, she stared and stared and stared at the three books she had open before her, their covers draped over each other and pages stuck between pages. She traced her pencil along the pages, she traced intricate patterns in the air as if with her wand, she squeezed her eyes shut until she saw stars. She had all the pieces; she was certain that everything she should have needed - everything she needed - to solve the problem of the otherworld was there, in front of her. And it wasn't enough.

If Elphaba were home - but no, it would have taken her days even to explain what she did know to Elphaba, who hadn't grown up studying magic, who learned quickly but would need lectures upon lectures to catch her up to Glinda in this niche of hers. Elphaba didn't even have the pieces; Glinda couldn't wait for her to put together the puzzle.

She squeezed her eyes shut again; let her mind drift on waves of memory to the fairy tales of her childhood. Little girls asked the fairies for favors; goblins and elves and trolls appeared from underground and the old people danced around the fairy hills . . . little girls -

Glinda's eyes snapped open. Getting to her feet so hastily that she stepped on the hem of her skirt and nearly fell down again, she steadied herself and ran to Elphaba's room, grabbing the spellbook with Elphaba's pencil stuck in the pages. She brought it back to the fire, sitting cross-legged with the book in her lap, one finger nervously twirling her hair. It was Elphaba who knew how to modify spells, and to write her own, but there was no waiting for Elphaba while this revelation was fresh in Glinda's mind. The thought was as elusive as a dandelion seed in her palm; the smallest breeze and it would be gone. She had to try it while she still understood the idea she'd had.

At least, unlike the Grimmerie, the transportation spell was written in words Glinda knew. She read it over and over, her pencil skimming the words, her mind struggling to parse them, to separate them, to break the spell into its parts. When she was ready, when she felt as though she knew where her piece had to fit and what had to come out, she laid the book carefully aside and looked around her, hands patting irrationally at the floor.

Elphaba had banished every spider and fly and ant that had entered the suite, and had in fact had to start summoning new subjects from outside her window, but it had been more than a day and a few new residents had found their way in. On the sill near their stove Glinda found a little black ant heading resolutely for a dropped biscuit crumb.

She placed her thumb in its path and watched the insect crawl up onto her thumbnail. "If this doesn't work," she said softly to her lifted hand, "I'm very, very sorry. If it does I'll make sure you get some biscuit." Cupping her other hand under the first in order to catch the ant if it fell, she returned to the fireside and the book and her lightly penciled note in the margin. She held out her cupped hands at eye level, and concentrated her mind on the ant, and began to chant.

When it disappeared, she let out a breath. At least she'd managed something, with one of Elphaba's discovered spells. Suspense making her heart pound, she ran for the stove.

A clean teacup from breakfast had been left on the counter, not put away. Glinda had pictured it as a convenient and particular place for her ant to end up. She peered into the cup without picking it up, excited and terrified and dizzy.

The ant was in the cup. Alive.

She lifted the cup slowly, but there was no doubt. There hadn't been an ant in the cup before; she'd looked. And this one was nosing around, antennae twitching, all legs working quite well.

She gently tipped it back onto the sill and placed a large biscuit crumb in its path. "There you are," she murmured, watching it heft the crumb and return toward the window.

The knock at the door made her jump. She wiggled her fingers in farewell at the ant and crossed the room, asking loudly, "Yes?"

"A letter," a man's voice proclaimed from the hall. "For Miss Glinda."

Cautiously Glinda opened the door, where a guard in full uniform stood holding out a letter. "At this hour?" she asked.

The guard bowed. "A servant brought it up. He said it came by express."

"Thank you," Glinda murmured, already distracted and slipping her finger under the seal as she stepped back into the suite and closed the door. The address was written in her mother's thin script, and already her heart, so recently pounding in her triumph, was speeding up again at the question of why her mother would send a letter by express.

The writing of the letter itself was almost careless, and the missive brief and hurried:

My darling Galinda,

Last night your father was taken ill - the physician said he has had a stroke or a seizure of the nervous system. He says that the immediate attack is past, and your father is resting now at the maunts' hospital. However I must tell you that the physician does not know whether another such attack will occur, or whether your father would survive it.

We both miss you terribly, and of course I would be easier with my Galinda to keep me company - but we know that you can't leave the Emerald City now. In any case if anything were to happen, the journey is too long for you to arrive in time . . . I promise to send another message if your father's condition changes, or even if it doesn't. But know, Galinda, if the worst should happen - your Uncle Reltin is here now, and we are all in his hands. I'm sure he will do what is best; your father always trusted his judgment. But we must prepare ourselves for the possibility that if we lose your dear father, on top of his loss there would be many changes for us all

Glinda folded the letter back into thirds without reading any more.