Work Text:
There’s a famous story that everyone knows, but like most stories not everyone tells it in quite the same way. This version may be a little different than you remember, but it also may be just as wondrous.
Or not. Your mileage may vary.
We begin not at the beginning, but in the midst of our journey just as our hero Jerry, a young man from Kansas, and his odd group of friends made their way through a harrowing forest. You see, poor Jerry and his dog Belle had been taken far from their home and ended up in the magical land of Oz. As beautiful as Oz was, Jerry had taken on the journey to the Emerald City to meet the Wizard of Oz in hopes of being given a way home.
Luckily along the way Jerry met Ralph, the scarecrow who wanted to ask the Wizard for a brain, Daniel, the tin man who wanted to ask the Wizard for a heart, and he had just met Rupert the lion who the whole land of Oz saw simply as a coward. What more could a young man want on such an arduous journey?
And now with the exposition out of the way, our story can begin. The four had decided to take a rest before continuing on any further, and were relaxing in a lovely field of lush green grass.
“But if lions are the kings of the jungle, how can they be cowards?” Daniel asked from his seat against a tree. If the tree was worried about the man with an axe being so close, it didn’t make that known.
Rupert closed his eyes and took a deep breath before opening them again. “First, this is a forest, not a jungle. Second, I’m not a coward. People just think I am because I’m nice to all of the animals and not what they think a lion should be like. I don’t really need courage, I just want people to stop considering me cowardly for not trying to scare everyone.”
Jerry came to sit closer to the pair, and almost as if to prove a point Belle ran over to Rupert and curled up next to him without hesitation. “That sounds reasonable. I’ve actually been wondering about some of these wishes myself to be honest.”
“Which ones?” Ralph asked, sounding almost nervous, though he sounded nervous a lot. It was easy to be nervous when a member of your party was a grumpy metal man with an ax… plus he had a budding crush on Jerry and wasn’t sure how to manage that. As it turned out, meeting a rather large talking lion hadn’t even phased him much.
“Daniel mostly.”
Daniel seemed surprised. “What’s weird about wanting a heart?”
“Well depending on context a lot of things, but the reason I’m curious is, why a heart specifically? You clearly have emotions already, so if that’s the major drive then why not just ask to be human? The Wizard should be able to do that... I think.”
“I am human, thank you very much.”
This earned him a confused look from everyone, and Daniel let out a long sigh.
“It’s really not that interesting of a story. I have a twin brother who was dating this girl who was awful to him, called him names all of the time, acted like he was worthless, all of that. So after a lot of talking, I finally convinced him to leave her. She was… well she was super pissed at me, which I didn’t care about but it turned out she was a witch, and she cursed my ax so that it would cut off one of my body parts every time I used it.”
“And you used it anyway?” Ralph asked.
“Well yeah. I was a woodsman. Cutting wood was my job.”
“But you didn’t stop?”
“Well you kind of get to the point where the whole thing seems too absurd to be real and…”
Jerry was questioning his life choices. “You just kept hacking off pieces of your body?”
“Pretty much.”
“Okay,” Rupert said after a moment. “Then where did the whole tin body thing come from?”
“A tinsmith would replace my body parts as I cut them off. Now that I think about it he asked surprisingly few questions given the circumstances.”
“You never thought to get another axe?” Jerry asked, but Ralph put a hand on his shoulder and shook his head.
“Just let it go.”
It was better that way.
“Anyway,” Daniel continued. “Sure I’m a living tin man and that’s fine I guess, but I don’t have a heart. I’m hoping if I can get one, then I’ll be able to prove to my brother that I’m alive.”
Okay, that was something Jerry could focus on without his brain snapping in two. “So that’s it? You’re afraid if you come back to your brother like you are now he won’t believe you’re alive?”
“Of course not! Why would he?”
“Well,” Rupert said, running his large paw gently over Belle’s fur. “You’re a walking talking tin man for one, even in Oz that’s kind of rare. And didn’t he know that any of this was going on after his ex cursed you?”
For once Daniel actually looked ashamed, averting his gaze and picking at the blades of grass around him. “No,” he said quietly. “After the first time I decided it was best if I just disappeared. I still wasn’t certain that the ax was really enchanted or if I’d just worked myself into believing it was but I left and found myself a place in a nearby town. That’s where I met the tinsmith.”
“Then how do you know your brother thinks you’re dead?” Ralph asked.
“Oh I left my arm behind. It’s the first part of me that got chopped off.”
Jerry’s jaw dropped and he wasn’t even sure how long it took him to speak. “I really don’t mean to be rude, but Oz is fucked up.”
Daniel, Ralph and Rupert looked at each other and responded with a mixture of nods and shrugs.
“That’s fair,” Daniel said.
“I’d thought the munchkins were going to be the weirdest part of this whole thing,” Jerry went on. “They just kept popping out of everywhere! And singing! About me killing someone! I’m a pacifist! The whole thing was an accident, I would never kill anyone on purpose! Yes okay, they were excited because this woman had been oppressing them forever but I really didn’t appreciate them literally singing in my face about me being a murderer and-”
“Whoa!” Ralph put his hand on Jerry’s chest. “It’s okay, the munchkins can’t hurt you.”
“Breathe,” added Rupert, the only other party member with lungs.
Jerry willingly took the advice and took several slow deep breaths until he felt himself calming down. “Sorry, I’ve just been holding that in for a while.”
“I guess Oz can probably be a bit much for someone to experience all at once if they’ve never been anywhere like it before,” Rupert said. The talking lion made good points. “What is it like where you’re from?”
“Uh… boring? There’s corn… animals that have no interest in talking, and it’s very sepia.”
“Sepia?”
“It’s a color,” Ralph said offhandedly. “Sort of a brown.”
Jerry looked at Ralph. “How did you know that, Mr. I want a brain?”
For a second Ralph looked like a deer in the headlights. “The person who made Ralph was an artist, and he talked a lot about art. Ralph doesn’t need a brain to file away useless information about colors.”
He knew that he shouldn’t say it, but Jerry couldn’t help but think that these guys really needed to give up on this whole wish thing and just accept that they already had what they wanted. How on earth would a heart and brain work in a non biological creature anyway, it would just rot?
“Right… Um, Daniel?”
“Hmm?”
“Where does your brother live?” Jerry asked. “Is it far from here?”
“No, not really. It’s not along the yellow brick road, but it’s only a few miles away from where we are now. Why?”
“Well why don’t we just go ahead and talk to him? It makes more sense to do it now than to go all the way to the Emerald City and come back. Besides, when we get to the Wizard, I’m going to go home so I won’t even get to meet your brother.”
Daniel looked thoughtful for a second but shook his head. “I don’t have a heart yet Jerry.”
Jerry stared at Daniel, and it made him feel a little better when he saw out of his peripheral vision that Rupert was doing the same thing. “Daniel. As Rupert pointed out, you’re a walking man made out of tin. Do you expect your brother to surgically open your chest to make sure there’s a heart bouncing around in your torso before he’ll accept that you’re actually alive?”
“Well no… that doesn’t sound like something he would do…”
“Then what does it matter? Let’s just go visit your brother and tell him what happened.”
While Daniel sat and thought on the idea, Ralph put his hand on Jerry’s arm. When Jerry looked over he wasn’t entirely surprised to find a very concerned looking Ralph staring back at him.
“What’s wrong Ralph?”
“If Daniel doesn’t really need a heart, do you think that means Ralph doesn’t need a brain? That’s all he has ever wanted!”
Jerry took Ralph’s hand in his own and gave him a sympathetic smile. “Ralph, if you can put enough thought out there to think you need a brain, then you don’t need a brain. First off, if you didn’t have at least something resembling a brain you wouldn’t be able to function at all, and second you definitely wouldn’t be able to have intelligent conversations and do things like remember facts about colors. Yes, you need some kind of brain for that, no matter what you say.”
Ralph looked thoughtful. “But Ralph doesn’t feel very smart.”
“That just means you need to learn more, that’s all. I can help you with that.”
That was enough to make Ralph happy, and he couldn’t help but give Jerry a rather dopey smile, even for a scarecrow. Jerry wasted no time smiling back.
“Okay loverboy,” Rupert said, snapping both Jerry and Ralph back to attention. Perhaps it meant something that neither knew to whom he was referring. “Daniel doesn’t really need a heart and Ralph doesn’t really need a brain, but what about me? And what about you? Are you just going to go to the Emerald City all by yourself?”
“Well…” Jerry had to stall for a second, giving himself a moment to think about the question. “You want people to stop thinking you’re cowardly just because you don’t attack everyone you see, right? Well what’s the Wizard even going to do about that? Put up a sign? How about you talk to the people you aren’t attacking? If they call you cowardly tell them that you’re not a coward you just aren’t a bully.”
Daniel perked up, looking rather excited. “And if they give you shit for it, then you can scare them by suddenly looking angry, roaring, and chasing them out of the forest. You won’t have to hurt anybody, but you showed you weren’t a coward, and you were only aggressive because they were being rude.”
Rupert’s eyes shifted from Jerry to Daniel as they spoke, and he gave a light shrug when they were done. “That sounds reasonable. But what about you Jerry? We may have had what we wanted all along or whatever but I don’t think that’s going to work the same with you getting home.”
“No… but what if I decide I’m in no rush to get home?”
“Don’t you have a life back in… uh… Kansas?” Ralph asked with some difficulty. Even if he did have something like a brain, memory wasn’t his strong suit, and Kansas was such a strange sounding name.
“The word life is subjective. Also, Kansas will still be there when I decide to go back.” Jerry lowered his voice, hoping the others might not hear. “Anyway, I thought you’d be happy if I stayed.”
“Ralph would be!” So much for being quiet. Ralph didn’t seem to do volume control any better than memory. “He just doesn’t want you to do something you’d regret.”
“I have done… so many things I regret. That munchkin thing will haunt me until the day I die. The angry talking trees were pretty horrifying, I actually think I hate trees now. I never thought that day would come. And I could definitely do without ever hearing about Daniel systematically chopping every piece of his body off, ever again. That will visit me in my nightmares. But I don’t think leaving Kansas behind to stay with you guys will be something I regret.”
“Well I don’t think any of us are really going to argue,” Daniel said as he stood up. “We know Ralph isn’t, he’s probably already planning your cozy little home life back in… wherever you met I guess.”
Ralph looked like he was going to reply, not that he really looked like he knew what he was going to say, but Jerry cut him off. “There weren’t really a lot of houses there actually, just corn. Come to think of it, who even owned the corn?”
He turned to Ralph who shrugged. “Ralph never actually saw anyone come out and collect it. He was just in charge of scaring the crows away… which he didn’t do a very good job of.”
Rupert followed Daniel’s lead and stood, stretching luxuriously for good measure. “Wait, does that mean you wanted a brain because you were bad at scaring crows?”
“Well Ralph is a scarecrow,” he said, putting his hands on his hips. “It’s in the name. If he can’t scare crows then what is he good for?”
“No, I get that, but a brain? What were you going to do, challenge them to a spelling bee? Ask them math problems?”
Ralph narrowed his eyes at the lion. “Ralph would have figured that out when he got a brain, wouldn’t he?”
“This isn’t really important,” Jerry said quickly. “I was just going to suggest we headed to find Daniel’s brother and see if there was a place to stay there. If you want to get up to any scarecrow… things, then that’s up to you Ralph.”
Ralph hadn’t stopped glaring at Rupert yet, but he finally did so almost reluctantly. Clearly straw was very conducive to bitterness. “Ralph would rather not. Crows are assholes.”
Jerry could see Rupert’s fur puff up from the corner of his eye but thankfully nothing more was said. Things were just starting to come together, he really didn’t need Rupert literally tearing Ralph apart over avian opinions.
“So this is it then?” Daniel asked. “We’re seriously abandoning our trip to the Emerald City to see the Wizard, leaving the yellow brick road and heading to my old home?”
“Yep!” Jerry said cheerfully as he stood up. When Ralph seemed to be a bit wobbly, Jerry helped him as well. “I mean, just because a witch in a sparkly dress told me to do something doesn’t mean I have to do it. I’m allowed to decide how my story goes, and so are all of you.”
Ralph seemed to like the idea but also was still a little unsure. “Even if we are your sidekicks?”
“Says the man who has been wanting a brain longer than I’ve even been here,” Jerry said. “Same with Daniel and Rupert. You aren’t the sidekicks, I’m just the human who came and helped you. Really I’m just your…” He paused as a horrifying realization dawned on him.
“You’re what?”
“I’m your manic pixie dream girl. Uh, boy.”
The others looked at each other with confused expressions before Ralph spoke up softly. “We don’t know what that means.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s just find Daniel’s brother.”
And with no more words exchanged, they left the yellow brick road and began their way onto their new adventure.