Chapter Text
“Come on, Elphie, let me add the tiniest hint of colour…” Galinda gives her the cutest little pout, and she can’t resist it, if she is honest with herself. And her friend, her accidental friend, who she hadn’t even been expecting to tolerate, let alone care for deeply, is holding up a bright violet peony, holding it up in her vision to line up with just behind Elphaba’s ear, in her hair. She sighs slightly.
“Just the one bit, then.”
Galinda practically squeals as she slides the flower into Elphaba’s hair, just behind her left ear, her fingers lingering for a moment too long against her skin. And then she turns, and looks at herself in the mirror, and just for a second, with the light, with the burst of bright purple overpowering everything else, she can pretend, if just for a moment, that she isn’t… that she isn’t… that she just isn’t.
That there is a boring, normal girl staring back at her, whose biggest worry is whether she goes out tonight or finishes her Life Sciences assignment due on Thursday…
That in the light her skin looks a strange shade of dark, but it is definitely a normal skin tone, that anyone might have…
That if someone else were to glance her way, the first thing they would see would be that burst of purple, would be the sudden assault of colour, and it wouldn’t be from her skin…
She shakes herself, because she has never been that girl, and she’s never been one to get lost down a rabbit hole of her own thoughts.
“Thank you.” she whispers, and for a moment their eyes meet, and it looks like Galinda wants to say something else, but the moment passes. Silence continues, and Elphaba lets a little smile touch her lips. “I cannot believe you are dragging me out tonight.”
Galinda laughs, the moment passing, picking up one of her many bottles of scent and spraying it sparsely on her collarbone, on her wrist. “Elphie, in first year I got to take you out out twice. We are starting as we mean to go on for second year, and we are going to make it at least three times…”
It's infuriating, and there are a thousand places Elphaba would rather be than at the OzDust tonight for ‘revisiting Freshers’ at the start of their second year at Shiz, but Galinda’s giggling, and sounded mischievous, and that has always been adorable.
“The things I do for you.” she mutters, but there was the hint of a smile on her lips, and for a moment they make eye contact. She feels somehow lighter on her feet, like actually she might be slightly looking forward to this, she might not be 100% committed to hating every moment of it.
***
“And I tell you, man, the ladies at Shiz are…” Avaric whistles, slicking a hand back through his newly greased hair, “... look in any direction, you’ll be able to have a fantastic night…”
Fiyero forces a huge, slightly sleazy smile onto his face, laughing dryly at Avaric’s comment, when in reality, it falls on dead ears. He’s been looking forward to staying with his old school friend at his University for a long time, and then as it got delayed even further, he’s been forcing himself to look forward to staying with Avaric for a long time - but the reality of it is, it has been nearly eighteen months since they’d been at high school, nearly eighteen months since they’d both had big mouths, a lot to say and not a care in the world about what anyone thought about it.
And apparently Avaric is still the same, even if he likes to think he's now a proper adult, and the half hearted (and almost forced, by the time he will make it through all the resits available) qualification he’ll gain at Shiz will make him employable too. He seems not to have been changed even slightly by seeing what it was like to live somewhere slightly nearer the real world, where you might not have to cook your own food, still, but you at least have to get yourself to the dining hall at the right times, and you have to deliver your clothes to the laundry or they won’t get washed.
Fiyero’s school is slightly different, and although at first, as his friends were all heading to the likes of Shiz and other ‘fashionable’ and modern universities, he’d dreaded his initiation and acceptance into his Winkie military college, something had changed within him this last year. Suddenly, he hasn’t been not-answerable to anything and everything, and it has appeared a lot easier to fit in to rules, fit in to expectations, to be proud of the simplicity of what he is there - nothing important, no one with status, just a trainee foot soldier.
But things aren’t like that here. And he still has an image that he needs to uphold with Avaric and all Avaric’s new Shiz friends, that reminds him almost painfully of the person he was once. So for one night, he is going to have to revert back to the dreaming, almost brainless Prince without a care in the world that he was, so easily. He is going to have to maintain that image just until he can head home (and he never expected to think of his school in Corabia as more home than the Palace he’d grown up in, but what do you know?) and then he can forget about it again, push it under the rug, even if only for a short time.
Avaric looks himself up and down once more.
“I’m ready. Whoever gets this will be lucky to have me.” Laughing, he turns to his old friend and gives him a glancing once over, as if approving. Fiyero grits his teeth very slightly, his stomach turning at the thought of the boy he once was, the man he could so easily have become.
Force the pretence. Only for one night. You’ve got a reputation in Winkie country to uphold, with your old ‘friends’.
He forces a laugh, forces a smile. “Let’s go.”
***
The OzDust Ballroom is everything Avaric had promised him it would be, dimly lit, full of life, full of laughter, full of loose morals, loose tongues and a little bit too much punch. Avaric has at least three dances with three different women whilst he's still propping up the bar with his first pint of jinnberry cider.
Something catches in him when he first sees them.
The first woman (still a girl, really) to enter the room between songs at about 10.30 that night is arguably the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. She has cascades of blonde curls, a dress twinkling, sparkling almost in the right light, and eyes that could enchant anyone. Heads turn as she walks through the door, across the dance floor, she silences parts of the crowd, she enchants with her presence.
But it's the girl who she's pulling onto the dance floor with her that his eyes focus on, and once he started looking, he can’t seem to tear them away.
The first thing he notices are her eyes. They are dark, almost hidden, but in the passing glance as they passed over him, he sees a raw honesty in them that almost frightens him. She doesn’t want to be there, there are a thousand places she would have be, but there’s a softness in them when looking at the beautiful woman on the dance floor, like she's there for someone else.
For some reason, his breath catches in his throat. Suddenly she's the only thing in the room, the only person on that dancefloor, if only for a moment, and once he can drag his eyes away from her face (probably because she turns to say something to the blonde, and there is a hint of a half smile on her face) he can see all of her, in all her magnificence.
The simple but delicate midnight blue dress she's wearing snakes down over a figure that starts all kinds of thoughts in his mind (he's only human, and she's stunning). It clings in all the right places, it leaves everything to the imagination that it needs to. There is a slight plunge to the neckline that stops his breathing, if only for a second, and a hardly-there slit up the side that gives him the tiniest hint of what's underneath, the tiniest suggestion of smooth skin, the side of her leg.
When he looks back at her face again, and he's convinced for a moment she's looking at him, seeing right through him, with her eyebrow raised, he realises the most enchanting thing of all.
Her skin is the deepest, richest, most enchanting shade of green.
He swallows, and throws back the last dregs of his jinnberry cider. He feels suddenly overwhelmed, suddenly more out of place than he has all evening. Gritting his teeth, he steps on to the dance floor.
***
Galinda is spinning her, and despite starting with complaints and comments about the impractical footwear her roommate had forced her into, she finds herself laughing, almost giggling, as the music increases in pace. As she stumbles out of another twirl, a hand catches her arm - that boy she’d seen across the dancefloor earlier, staring at her (she was more than used to that by now) with a slightly strange and unfamiliar look on his face.
He’s with the awful Avaric, she’d seen him with that group of her classmates, and so she wants nothing to do with him, nothing at all.
She gives him a half glance. “No, I’m not seasick; no, I didn’t eat grass as a child; and yes, I’ve always been green.” She follows the glance with an eyeroll and pulls her arm away from his hands. He seems stunned for a moment, and then smiles slightly. It’s infuriating, that half-smile of his, she thinks immediately. It rises all sorts of feelings inside her, and she’s not completely certain every single one of them is anger, but she’d like to keep it that way for now.
“I did.”
“You what?”
He laughs, “...ate grass as a child. Ate everything I could get my hands on actually, the nannies used to call me the nightmare child…”
She raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t say anything. His smile widens, his confidence apparently growing, and he steps one pace closer.
Her heart inexplicably beats faster. She doesn’t like it at all, it feels completely uncontrollable.
He lifts his hands up as if he’s unsure what to do with them for a moment, and then seems to settle on holding one out for her to shake.
“Fiyero Tigelaar.” he announces, looking so pointedly down at her hand that she shakes his, briskly. “Prince of the Vinkus.”
“Elphaba Thropp.” she manages, although there’s a dryness in her mouth that makes her words sound slightly different, like she’s almost not quite herself. “Munchkinland.”
He grips his hand around hers a little tighter, and there’s a hint of a pull, a hint of suggestion in his direction.
“Dance with me?” he breathes, so softly she isn’t sure she hears it.
Everything’s on fire, if only for a second. No one’s ever asked her to dance, no one has ever even looked her way, either on the few nights Galinda has managed to drag her out, in the corridors, in the classes. Not for the right reasons, anyway, she gets plenty of glances, but none of them because anyone wants to dance with her.
She’s not this girl, and she’s never going to be this girl. She drops his hand, like it’s hot, and she can’t meet his eyes.
“I… I can’t.” she hopes it sounds slightly less frightened than it sounds to her, “I… I’m here with a friend, g… girls night…”
And because it’s easier to turn around than it is to meet his eyes again, she turns away, throws herself back into the little group of dancers her roommate seems to have managed to grow.
She can hear her heartbeat in her ears, and her mouth is still dry as sand paper, which doesn’t make sense, because she’s never even wanted to be asked to dance by a man she’s never met on a stupid club dancefloor somewhere Galinda has dragged her to, and he’d only said a few words to her, and looked at her more than once, she shouldn’t feel this different.
No one’s ever said no to him before, but that doesn’t mean anything, right this moment. There’s an enchanting girl in front of him, one that looks as out of place as he feels, and there’s a feeling somewhere inside him - somehow, intrinsically, he knows he needs to get to know her better.
That she means something.
That he can’t let this slip away.
He stands still whilst the music thrums on, and she dances with her back to him, protected by a wall of various shades of pink.