Crown of Straw

[Fae]

I wrote this mostly for my own personal amusment, but when I realized I haden't posted in so long my account had been deactivated I figured I should put something up. So let me know what you think.
(oh, and there's probably spoilers in there somewhere so watch out)



1.

Trust.

She thinks trust is a funny thing, she’s not sure, she can’t trust her own thoughts anymore. She lost her trust now everything is jumbled.

She used to trust in books. Careful words, neat and clean, never stepping past the bounds she could place on them, never accusatory. Thought about and thought provoking, they kept her anonymous and safe.

But now words consume. They eat away at her shrieking curses and blame. It’s all her fault and the damage is unlimited.

Guilt was a paralyzing flood. It was true, everything they said was true.

She could see her flaws and follies revealed in all their hideous vanity and the cost in lives and pain that had resulted. Her heart laid bare and scourged on a rack of her own terrible, terrible mistakes. Names and faces skimming past her minds eye accusing her incessantly.

Animals she couldn’t save being lead away to slave in the Ruby mines of Quadling country or the Pipeline project that would never be completed because it had never been started, just a front to keep the populace happy, an easy way for those who spoke out to ‘disappear’. Boq, whom she had hardly even known, but never once wished ill, heartless and irrevocably damaged through her carelessness. Nessa, the sister she had refused to help, dead to bring her out of hiding. Fiyero, who had given up everything over and over for her, dead or not he was gone forever. How many times had she wronged him? Inadvertently driving him to disaster and tragedy.

She has known pain. She’s used to it. It is a constant that she can depend on.

She is the disgrace and plague of her father. The cause of her mother’s death and her sister’s disability. She is deformed and wicked. But this steady cataloging of her guilt- this weighing of the soul that she has sought never to believe in and yet been unable to escape from - this is pain beyond measure or endurance. She thinks her mind may snap. She wants it to, to end this torment.

She used to think, she still thinks in patches, about the river not so far below her. Considering it around the choking wrenching black fear that rises up to swallow her like the water that is its cause. She’s dead by water once already. It frightens her but at least it would be easy.

But nothing is ever easy. And anything too easy she has always rejected. No compromises. Trust shattered with the lift of a curtain.

The best way to bring people together is to give them a really good enemy. She had never thought it would be her. He had said that he would save her; she wanted so much to let him save her. She had wanted to believe again. So she had agreed and it had been just one more trick.

She had been foolish to believe so blindly.

Now she believed in nothing.

She was nothing, here in the darkness, nothing but blackness emptiness, soulless just like her. The walls pushed in, trying to crush her with the unimaginable weight of thousands of stones behind them. Cold sweat beaded on her forehead as she panted for air. It was stagnating and foul, saturating her with a smell of rot, which caused her stomach to heave endlessly, though it had long since expelled anything she had to bring up. It was icy in the dark. The kind of cold that would bleed a person of all their heat given time enough. A slow sucking death. She was stuck. This hole would be her grave and no one would ever find her bones.

Or was she dead already? She couldn’t quite recall. She couldn’t trust that light she loved to save her. She missed the light and longed for it. It had been beside her once. Holding her hand and calling forth an echoing glow from somewhere deep within herself. From a place she had never know existed.

White and blue and sequins and lace and pink roses.
Secrets told by midnight candles. Hopes and dreams expressed. Gossip recounted and laughed over. She had, for once, been more than enough. Good enough to be a best friend and a worst enemy. Enemies and friends and something between and then something stronger, but it had been them together. Together they had embarked a journey full of hope and trust and dreams.

They had gone hand in hand to the city of jewels.
It had changed her for the better, being needed and wanted, being part of the brightness. But she couldn’t hold it; she couldn’t find her own light. Not without him, not without her. They had known that they could change things. They had been wrong in the end. Hope faded, trust shattered, dreams twisted into darkness.

Everything had gone according to her enemy’s plan.

But for Fiyero.

Dearest, darlingest Fiyero. She wishes he would save her. Swing in on a rope and brave a hundred guards. But that is foolish. She seems to be good at foolish. She was a fool that day that they took Dillamond away, but he had helped her then and it had changed them both as well. She wonders sometimes if he would still be hers had that not happened. She likes to think he would.

She knows it is not so.

But she is and will always be his.

So He had said trust, and she had trusted, he had said go and she had left, he had said he was coming and she waited, he had said die and now she was dead.
She must be dead, for there could be nothing now but darkness and the echoing sound of the steady drip of water from her soaked clothes. How could she trust him when he was dead to? How could she help but trust him when he was all she had left?

She was wet and cold, shivering with the heat of shame at her endless failure.

***

Little teaser chapter, hope you liked!

[Twisted]

I liked it very much. There were a few grammatical errors here and there, but I just woke up, so I can't find them now for the life of me -_-. But there weren't that many. 'Tis interesting too. I'd love to read more.

[emeraldroad]

Wow...well, keep it up!

[DancingElphie]

Great job! However, make sure there's a line in between paragraphs, it makes it MUCH easier to read. I love her thoughts though. Great work, and hope to see more soon!
DE

[Fae]

Thank you for reminding me about the spacing, everything looks different on a word document.
Here is slightly less dark/bitter part two.

****

2.

He wiped the sweat beading on her brow away with a cloth hand. Feeling the dampness on and in the weave of the fabric.

When the girl had cried into his chest, saying how sad she was to leave them all, he could feel the water soaking into his body. The wet feeling remained for almost a day as it slowly dried inside. Like wearing a set of wet clothing that you couldn’t take off, only under the skin and not over it.

It was a decidedly unnerving and annoying sensation.

But now he could only feel the sweat on the surface of his skin. Was he loosing sensation or was there just not enough water?

Strange things had been happening to him since he had become a Scarecrow.

The thought made him laugh aloud. A strange sound in this dark and empty place. He had not thought to find it so desolate and completely devoid of the signs of human habitation. Not after she had lived there for three months.

It had always been clear that she was far from concerned with the frills and furbelows and trappings of luxury but she had always had little things to make a space her own. Mostly books, he recalled fondly remembering the room that she and Galinda had shared. One half so bright you could hardly bear to look at it. A forest of lace- edged throw pillows and draped spangled fabric. The other side dark and modest. Its only ornamentation an oval of green glass, too dark to be used as a proper mirror, which hung from the wall. Surrounding it were clippings from different newspapers concerning the bans on animal activity and notes or diagrams covered with her own spidery elegant handwriting that no one but her could ever read. Books stacked all around her bed created a wall in piles like battlements. She had never bothered to ask if a shelf might be put in.

But there was nothing of Elphaba in this castle; it was as though she’d never lived here. From the look of her, whatever she had been doing to exist many would not count it as living at all.

Another violent shiver from his patient brought his attention back to her. He smiled fondly tucking the blankets he’d found tighter around her. She had always been smarter then he, but she had never been terribly practical. She should have known better than to hide in the dark in wet clothing. But she would be fine; the fever was mild and already breaking.

He had been terrified when she hadn’t answered his knock. He had clawed open the trapdoor desperately, fearing the worst. And, for a few moments it had seemed that his fears were correct. She had been curled in a fetal position, barely breathing and running a fever. The walls of the tiny space were damp and covered with lichen, a terrible stench of waste and bile and death rose from it and though he could not vomit he felt a very strong urge to. When her reached down to pull her out She cowered away from the light as though it burned her. It frightened him to see her so defeated and despairing.

That’s not Elphaba.

When he thinks of her he sees her standing in defiance, alone against an entire nation. He sees her caring for those that no one else will stand up for. He sees her reaching for the cut on his face that sun-showered rainy afternoon among the flowers. He sees expanses of exposed emerald, daring and delicious in the moonlight.

She is so strong, stronger than anyone he has ever known. They have all been strong to get to this point. They have all lost something. But she has never seemed to feel it, she is indomitable.

But something has changed. Something is wrong. This is more than a simple fever. And he doesn’t know what it is. All he can do is wait.

Suddenly he knows how she must have felt as she waited for him in the dark.

*******

He awakes to the feeling of eyes on him.

He hadn’t even noticed he’d fallen asleep beside her.
It was wonderful to wake with her in his arms again, warming each other’s bodies. He would give up anything for this. He has given up everything for this.

Even with her sick, even though they’ve not yet spoken and hardly touched, he knows that there was never any other road than this one.

There were still dark circles beneath her eyes, a sign that she’d hardly slept in days, but they were clear, undimmed by fever. She sat up and stared at him, incomprehension written on her features. “Elphaba,” In a rush of movement fueled by relief he caught her up in a tight embrace, bringing one hand to cup her cheek. “Elphaba I’m so glad you’re all right.”

“Fiyero?” her voice is shaking.

“I’m here, I’m here.” He holds her, murmuring reassuring words of no meaning or importance into her dark, tangled hair. She is crying. He can hardly feel the salt water as it soaks into his burlap skin, but her face is wet and gasping sobs wrack her chest. She suddenly stiffens, and the crying is stopped abruptly. Elphaba looks up at him her face flushed a rich shade of forest green, her eyes red and haunted. There is none of the pity he fears visible on her face, only another look of defeat.

“Look at you, I’ve failed again.”

There is a tiny part of him that wants to scream that she has failed and look at what she’s done to him. But he’s made his peace with this…new form, and he knows that she saved his life. Through the tiny inner demons who prod him towards anger he knows for certain he loves her more than anything, and his heart aches at the pain in her voice. Would that he could make it go away.

He is trapped between so many fierce feelings he doesn’t know which way to turn. The hunters of the Vinkus worship gods of blood and fire to seek strength. Even as their Prince, Fiyero has never understood that. It is love that is stronger. Love is hard, harder than steel and thrice as cruel. It is inexorable as the tides, life and death both follow in its wake.

He wonders when he became so contemplative.

“You did everything you could. You saved my life, that’s no failure.”

“You’re still so beautiful, Yero my Hero,” She places an experimental kiss on his painted lips. He’s horrified to find he can hardly feel it. He wants to cry. “So bright.” She smiles faintly, a look of almost hysterical relief on her face. “you were right all along. I should have trusted you.”

He wouldn’t cry, even if he could. She needs him to be strong for her now, and he won’t let her down, not for anything.

[imperfectly_green]

Wow. It's very good. DE was right--a line between the paragraphs makes it much easier to read. Can't wait for the next installment!

[DancingElphie]

I love how you write in present tense: it's a very effective tool for setting mood and such. I"m not spotting any grammer mistakes, and I love how you write Elphie and Yero. Great job, and I VERY MUCH appriciate the lines!
DE

[Twisted]

No grammar mistakes that I can see in the new installment. But, you know, I'm a sucker for yero and fae. Hehe. Very nice, and you lighten the tone without loosing your original groove and feel; I like that.