Chapter Text
The peacefulness of the late morning was broken only by the sound of rock grinding against wood as they sat together in comfortable silence in the garden, continuing to make progress on the little cribs they were crafting for the twins. They were finally coming together. Six out of the eight sides were completed now – she had made him let her help him with them and it had taken half the time it would have taken him to do it alone – and they were working on the final two at long last. They were beautiful, they really were, with the intricate little swirls and symbols carved into them, and she still couldn’t quite believe just how much of an eye for detail he had. He had come up with the idea for them by himself. He’d been the one to design them and make little adjustments to make sure they could actually be built, and all she had done was follow his lead and help him bring his idea to life. He was so dedicated to making sure that their little ones – even though they had limited means, living out here in the middle of nowhere – never needed for anything. They would have the best of everything. The best cribs, the best home, the best place in which to live and grow up.
She loved him for that, she really did.
Glancing up from the piece of wood she was working with, she glanced over at him for what could quite well have been the tenth time in as many minutes, and she couldn’t help but smile at the sight of him working with his own piece. He had that little furrow of concentration between his brows as he used his make-shift knife to carve another little swirl. It wouldn’t have come as a surprise to her if he’d forgotten she was sitting across from him, honestly, he was that focussed on what he was doing. His hair had flopped forward onto his forehead at some point, and she had to resist the urge to reach out and stroke it back into place. The last thing she wanted to do was break his concentration. Truly though, it wouldn’t have mattered much if she had, because after a few seconds he blew on the rid to get rid of the shavings that had built up before turning his attention to her with a gorgeous smirk playing at the corner of his mouth.
“See something you like?” He teased, setting his knife down next to him on the tree stump he was sitting on.
“Plenty,” She shrugged while continuing to sand a corner of her piece of wood down a little more. “You know, you have a cute concentration face.”
He scoffed. “I have a cute face in general.”
“Yeah, I can’t argue with that.”
“I know you can’t.”
He expected her to come back at him with some little retort – scolding him half-heartedly for his cockiness or telling him to shut up and get back to work or something – and so when that didn’t come, he stopped looking over his work and looked her way and his stomach immediately dropped. Her face had paled slightly and she had that faraway look in her eye, the one she always got when she was seeing something. Immediately, he set his piece of wood down next to the stump and moved to kneel in front of her, taking her own piece from her and setting it down carefully before reaching out to steady her when she swayed forward. He knew better than to try to snap her out of it when she was in the middle of one of her visions. It did her no good – it never worked and only added to the stressfulness of the whole situation for her – and so he just knelt there and continued to hold her until she came back to him with a little gasp.
“Hey…” He soothed when he felt her trembling, his hands coming up to frame her face so that he could get her to look at him. “What is it? What did you see?”
Her response didn’t come in the form of words – not at first.
Instead, her shaking hands moved to cradle the slight swell of her stomach through the dark fabric of her dress and her gaze followed before she swallowed thickly and forced herself to look him in the eye again as tears shone in hers. “One, um…” Her voice came out high and choked before she cleared her throat, blinking furiously in an attempt to keep the tears from coming. “I think there’s going to be something…not wrong, but not quite right…with one of them.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“There was a wheelchair,” She sniffled, berating herself inwardly as she reached up to palm away the lone tear that rolled down her cheek. “It was the only thing I could see at first, but then I heard laughing and suddenly there…there was a little girl sat in it. She was playing with another girl, but I couldn’t see her properly. It made me think of Nessa and I when we were growing up, but then...then I realized that they were green. I think it was them. I think it was the twins.”
He was silent for a long moment then, trying to get his head around what she had just told him, and then one hand left her face and settled atop hers on her stomach. “Fae, are you sure you-”
“I know what I saw!” She snapped, her voice trembling with emotion. “One of them isn’t going to be alright, Fiyero, one of them is going to be in a wheelchair and – just like with Nessa – I’m going to be the one to blame for it.”
“No,” He replied a second later, his voice firm and leaving no room for argument. “I don’t know what’s going on right now. I don’t know what’s going to happen when they’re here, but regardless? None of it is going to be your fault.”
She shook her head, the tears falling freely down her face now. “I’m the one carrying them. So much has happened since that night in the woods. I wasn’t always careful, I…what if I did something to cause it?”
“Fae, listen to me,” He took her face in both hands again, his thumbs moving across her cheeks. “I don’t know much about pregnancies. I don’t know much about babies in general, but I don’t think there’s anything you could have done to cause this. Not so early on. If something is going on with one of them? If they end up being born slightly different? Then they were always going to be born that way. You aren’t going to be the one to blame for it, I promise you that. And, if it makes you feel any better, it doesn’t matter to me whether she needs a wheelchair or not. It makes no difference. She’ll be our little girl,” He glanced down at her stomach for a moment before meeting her gaze again, stroking his thumb against the corner of her eye to catch the tear beading there before it fell. “She won’t be treated any differently to her sister. And she won’t have to struggle. She’ll have support from the both of us. We’ll help her if needed.”
“I love you for saying that. I really do. But that’s not the point,” She almost whispered. “I…I thought this was the one thing I was actually going to get right.”
Before he could say another word, she had gotten up from the tree stump and made her way back inside the cottage, leaving him alone and surrounded by the pieces of the crib she’d been working so happily on just a few minutes ago. He could go after her, he knew. He could sit her down and make her listen to him go on and on about how none of this was her fault, but he knew there would be no point. When she was feeling like this, there was no getting through to her. Anything he said to her would go in one ear and out the other, and there would be no changing her mind. The best thing he could do for her right now was give her the time and space she needed to calm down and think about the whole thing logically. In time, what he’d said to her would begin to sink in and make sense. She’d realize that she couldn’t have had a hand in something like this happening to one of their babies. She’d realize that she wasn’t to blame.
For now? He would continue working on the cribs.
She would come back to him when she was ready.
It was more than an hour later – far longer than he’d been anticipating if he was honest – when she came to him at long last.
He was sitting on the couch in the sitting room with a cup of tea when he heard the sound of the bedroom door opening upstairs, and in a matter of seconds she appeared in the doorway to the sitting room with her cardigan around her shoulders. The unkempt state of her hair and the haziness in her eyes told him that, at some point, she had fallen asleep while she’d been up there and it made him glad in a way. He hoped that allowing herself to rest had helped her to clear her mind a little and think more rationally. Silently, he held a hand out to her when he looked her way, and it relieved him when she made her way across the room and took hold of it before climbing onto the couch next to him and curling into his side. She said nothing initially, but it didn’t bother him in the slightest as he put his arm around her and buried a kiss in her hair. He was more than happy to just hold her until she decided she was ready to talk about it.
“Do you want some tea?” He murmured against her temple. “The pot should still be warm.”
“No, thank you,” She shook her head before bringing her hand to his chest as she looked up at him with a sigh. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have walked off from you like that.”
Chuckling gently, he balanced his cup on the arm of the couch before running the back of his hand down her cheek. “You should know by now that you never have to apologize to me.”
“I know, but you were just trying to help,” She leaned into his touch, her eyes drifting closed slightly. “I shouldn’t have ignored you.”
“You weren’t ready to hear it at the time, not properly,” He pointed out with a shrug, tightening his hold of her and stroking his thumb lightly against her arm through her cardigan. “But I meant what I said. You could never be to blame for something like this. I know what your father said about Nessa. I know he blamed you and I know he made you feel like you were at fault, but you weren’t. He was the one who killed your mother by making her eat those milk flowers. He was the one responsible for Nessa being born the way she was. But he wasn’t man enough to take responsibility for either of those things, and so he passed that off onto you because it was easier for him than admitting that he was the one at fault. You did nothing wrong. You aren’t to blame for anything that happened back then, and you’re not to blame for anything that’s happening now either and I know you know that. Deep down, at least. You do, don’t you?”
She was silent for a moment before she gave him a nod. “I just remember how frustrating it was for Nessa when we were growing up, not being able to walk. She would get so upset because I could do things she couldn’t. Because she couldn’t run around and play with the other kids. I don’t want the same for our child, that’s all. I don’t want her feeling different and I don’t want her hating herself purely because she can’t do everything that her sister can, you know?”
“I get that,” He nodded. “But you have to remember that we don’t even know the full story at this point. You only saw a couple of seconds. She might not even need a wheelchair permanently, we don’t know yet, it could be nothing more than an aid for her. But if it is a permanent thing? Then we’ll handle it. She won’t feel any different because we won’t make her feel any different. We won’t love her any more or any less than we do her sister, and we won’t hold her back from things. We won’t tell her that she can’t do them in case she gets hurt. We won’t be the kind of parents who constantly worry about her just because she has her limitations. We’ll let her find her own way, alright? Be her own person.”
Warmth pooled in her chest at his words and she had to admit that – already, thanks to him – she was slightly less worried and more optimistic about what the future was going to hold for them and their little ones once they had arrived. She felt him bring his other hand to her stomach through her dress and run his palm tenderly across the expanse of it, and when he looked her in the eye once again she felt the love she had for him deepen at the look that he gave her.
“Girls,” He said with slight disbelief. “Oz, I can’t believe it.”
“You’re pleased then?” She asked knowingly. “I would have thought you’d be longing for a boy with your – what do you call them – horrendibly good looks?”
“Oh, don’t worry, I plan to get my boy someday,” He dipped his head to press a kiss to her neck, unable to resist nipping lightly at it just to make her squirm. “But the idea of miniature versions of you around here? I couldn’t be happier.”
She chuckled under her breath, letting her hand fall from his chest so that she could drape her arm across his stomach and anchor herself to him. “I love you, you know.”
“I know,” He assured her with the softest kiss to her lips. “I love you too. More than you could even begin to imagine…”
She sighed to herself as she sat on the tree stump near the lake that evening, twirling the stem of a flower she had found between her fingers as she watched the sun begin to set behind the trees in the distance. Fiyero had told her that he would take care of dinner tonight, wanting her to be able to just relax, and so she had come to sit out in the garden while she waited for him to finish cooking. Her mind had begun to wander in the time she had been sat there and – even though she’d heard him when he told her none of this was her fault and she’d believed it – she was unable to switch her brain off. They could tell their daughter, once she was old enough to know what they were talking about, that she was no different to her sister. They could tell her that she could do anything she wanted to and that she was just as capable, but it was still going to be clear to her that there was a difference. She was going to realize that her sister didn’t need to use a wheelchair and she did. She was going to realize that – even if she didn’t need her wheelchair permanently – that she got tired out faster than her sister did. There were going to be moments where her limitations got her down, there were bound to be, and she would have been a fool to try to kid herself about that. It worried her. It worried her already, and she still had months to wait until the girls arrived. Longer than that until they started walking.
She supposed that was all part and parcel of being a parent though, worrying about your children, even though she had no-one she could ask.
It was just so important to her that her children were never made to feel the way she had been made to feel growing up. Of course, she and Fiyero would never make either of them feel as though there was anything unusual about them or make them feel as though they didn’t belong – because they did – but what about the rest of the world? One day, the two of them were more than likely going to become curious as to what was out there. They were going to want to explore and find out for themselves – they were going to want to start their own lives the older they got – and she knew how ignorant and shallow-minded people could be. It was something she didn’t even want to think about, either of her daughters being treated differently or being walked all over because of the colour of their skin or their disability. But, at the same time, she couldn’t keep herself from thinking about it. It was constantly there in the back of her mind.
“Elphaba…?”
She froze.
The voice that pulled her from her thoughts wasn’t Fiyero’s, but it was familiar.
Too familiar.
She tried to make herself belief that she had imagined it – that was the most logical explanation, what with them being all the way out here – but in the end, she turned to look over her shoulder in the direction the sound had come from and her heart stopped. She truly had no idea how she had found her way here – how she had even managed to locate them both, given how well-hidden this place was – but Dulcibear was standing just a few metres away from her. The flower she had been holding slipped from her fingers as she stood from the stump, the expression on her face shifting from one of disbelief to one of confusion before shifting once more into one of unbridled joy. Unable to stop herself, she hurried towards her and the Bear rose onto her hind legs in just enough time for her to run into her and wrap her arms around her. Her fingers curled instinctively into her thick fur as she nuzzled into her chest, breathing her in as her eyes fell closed. “Dulcibear,” She breathed, her voice thick with emotion as she pulled back slightly so she could look at her properly. “What are you doing here? I don’t understand. How did you even get here? How did you find us?”
Dulcibear chuckled softly, bringing one large paw to her face and stroking her hair back with a shortened claw. “I looked for you when I returned to Oz after the Wizard left. I heard Ozians saying that you were dead, but I didn’t believe it for a clock-tick. I could feel you were still alive. I asked around and, eventually – I don’t know how – word must have gotten to…Chistery…I think his name was, and he told me all about your leaving Oz. I came looking for you the second I heard. I know it took me a while, but the second I caught your scent I knew I was on the right track,” She explained. “It makes sense now, why the scent was so strong. Little One, look at you. You look so beautiful. But I sense…stress.”
Her face fell slightly. “Fiyero and I, we…we’re expecting twins, but I had one of my moments and I saw that one of them had a wheelchair.”
“I see,” Dulcibear replied before sitting down and gesturing for her to do the same which she did. “You’re worried she’ll struggle the same way Nessa did?”
“It was hard for Nessa to understand when we were young, you remember,” She reminded her. “She cried all the time. She hated her chair when we were children. I just don’t want that for my own. I want her to have a normal life.”
Dulcibear hummed in understanding. “I know, Little One. But sometimes, things are just out of our control and we can’t change them. We have to work with what we’re given. You know what you’re doing. You were so good with Nessa. You always knew exactly what she needed and you took such good care of her.”
“I know. This just feels different somehow,” She admitted with a shake of her head. “I can’t explain it.”
Reaching out to rest a paw over her hand as it rested on her knee through the skirt of her dress, Dulcibear gave her a smile. “It feels different because the circumstances are different. In this circumstance? You’re their mother.”
There were tears in her eyes when she looked at her again and, for the first time, she admitted: “I’m scared. I don’t want to…I don’t know…mess things up somehow.”
“And how do you think you would mess things up?”
“I don’t know. I just worry that it won’t come as naturally to me as it did to you. I mean, you had no warning before I was forced on you and you were wonderful with me.”
Dulcibear shifted a little closer to her. “I made mistakes. Believe me. You were just too young at the time, thank Oz, to notice or remember them. I learned from those mistakes though, and that’s how you become a good mother. No-one expects you to know what to do the second those little ones are in your arms, Elphaba. But you’ll get there. And you aren’t going to be doing any of it alone. You have support. More support than I had back when you were a newborn.”
As though he had somehow been able to read her mind, Fiyero opened the back door of the cottage no more than a minute later and paused in the doorway at seeing the two of them. “Oh, hello.”
Sharing a knowing glance with the Bear, Elphaba carefully got to her feet and the two of them made their way over to where he was standing so she could introduce them. “Fiyero, this is Dulcibear. Dulcibear, Fiyero.”
“It’s nice to meet you.” Dulcibear told him.
“Likewise,” He assured her. “Fae’s told me a lot about you.”
Dulcibear glanced at her. “All good things, I hope?”
She laughed at that, giving her a nudge. “What else would he hear from me? Will…um…will you stay for a while?”
Dulcibear glanced between the two of them. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” He waved off her concern before Elphaba even had the chance to open her mouth. “You can stay for as long as you like. You know all the embarrassing stories from Fae’s childhood days she refuses to tell me.”
Dulcibear nodded. “That I do.”
“Why do I already feel I’m going to regret this?” Elphaba feigned frustration, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“Something tells me we’re going to get along just fine.” He ignored her, stepping aside with a smirk to let Dulcibear inside the cottage.
Once the two of them were alone together for a moment in the doorway, she reached for his hand and gave it the gentlest squeeze. “You really don’t mind her staying with us for a while?”
“This is the happiest I’ve seen you look in all the time we’ve been out here, and she’s been here for no more than two seconds,” He pointed out. “As far as I’m concerned? She’s a part of this family now.”
“Oz, I love you…” She shook her head, going up onto her tiptoes to brush her lips gently against his.
“I love you too,” He smiled when they parted. “Now get inside before the dinner I just slaved away on for you goes cold.”
And, with a good-natured roll of her eyes, she did just that.