Chapter Text
1.
The first thing you see: the bright of sunrise.
It looks like the entire sky has been set alight. The sun is burning the horizon down and starting the universe over again; the blue of the sky is a fresh slate and the red-pink-orange is its masterpiece.
You blink.
It feels strange, like your eyes had been sewn shut overnight and the sunrise pulled out the sutures and just now you’re learning how to move them again. Slowly, things come into focus. The sky at the line of the horizon sharpens from watercolor drips to oil paints. The place you’re in fills out with detail: miles upon miles of corn and grass vaguely whispering in the breeze.
You’re pretty sure that you died in this field. You’re pretty sure that you’re supposed to be dead right now.
The last thing you remember—you close your eyes—is pain. A gunshot straight through your stomach. Did someone yell your name? Ropes binding your wrists to a cross beam; where had the ropes come from? Who strung you up? Nails driven through the pole behind you, into the muscles of your back. Why did you deserve that? Your ankles bound together and then tied again to the pole. You couldn’t fight back, could you? Who could?
You’re hanging by the ropes at your wrists and the nails at your back, you realize, but the pain is gone. You don’t feel much of anything. A kind of pressure where you think the ropes are; a kind of itching at the back of your head like a thought without words.
There’s no sensation of the breeze, though you can see the sway in the stalks of corn. There’s no warmth from the sunrise lingering on your face, no burn to your eyes when you open them to stare directly at the distant fiery sun. There’s no pain, despite the nail driven straight into the low of your spine. Multiple nails, maybe?
You can move your eyes, looking around you a little, but your neck is stiff and pinned to place. Another nail, you’re pretty sure, but you can’t feel any pressure from this one.
You’re a little lightheaded, though. You turn your gaze downwards: ragged green shirt, holes at the knees of your pants that have been patched up with a different shade of fabric. Out of your peripheral vision, you see gloves covering your hands. And at your wrists, straw sticks out at strange, bundled angles.
You don’t know what you are. You don’t know who you are. You remember pain, and then you remember closing your eyes, and then there’s nothing. Like falling into a dreamless unconsciousness.
You close your eyes again. Maybe when you wake, something that makes sense will have come to you in sleep.
2.
You can’t fall asleep. You open your eyes again. You’re still strung up on the cross beam and you’re still nailed to the wooden post. A crow lands on your wrist and you anticipate the pain of agitating any soreness from the ropes, but nothing comes. Just a strange weight on your arm; not quite feeling like touch but also not not touch. More like a change in the air pressure, or a shift in bone deep heaviness.
The crow caws and you wonder if it’s calling its friends. You wonder if a whole gang of crows is going to land on you. You’ve never really cared for birds that flock like murders of crows do.
Murder. Is that what happened to you? There was shouting. Rifles. A bullet, maybe multiple. Someone screamed your name. What was your name? That’s important, you’re pretty sure. To have a name. And the fact that if someone was screaming your name, someone was fighting for you.
Another crow lands, this time below your feet. You’re hanging a couple feet off the ground, just enough that your head reigns high over the corn. The crow beats its wings and caws. It looks up and its beak opens up like a gaping maw ready to swallow the sun, or swallow you. It looks like it’s going to say something, something important.
But it doesn’t. It has no human voice in it, only the base instincts of a bird.
You shiver at the thought of a world where every animal is an animal rather than a sentient Animal. That’s important too—you think you care about Animals and animals alike.
You blink a few times, trying to clear your mind. You still feel lightheaded and out of place, like some dream lingering after you wake and haunting your thoughts through the day. Like an out of body experience that you will carry the ramifications of forever.
You blink a couple more times. You try to wiggle your fingers and they move at your command. You can’t reach the ropes to untie yourself, you don’t think. There’s no way to get down without help.
But no one is looking for you. You’re dead. You must be.
The men who strung you up are becoming a sharper memory now. Green uniform. Yellow armband with some kind of a symbol on the left arm of the man who shot into your stomach. A wicked, awful laugh when your head lolled forward. The ropes binding your wrists too tightly.
You groan a little, almost surprised to find that you’re capable of any noise at all. Something has happened to you. Something has changed you. Something has taken from you.
You take a deep breath next, but you fill no lungs with air. Your shoulders heave, and there’s a strange crinkling sound, but there’s no real breath. You try to exhale and nothing comes out. The lack of breath is strange, making you feel a little weightless and a little suffocated at the same time.
You’re pretty sure you’re dead. At least, you’re supposed to be. Everything about this is unnatural.
The sun has fully risen over the line of the distant horizon. Oz’s corn fields stretch out around you endlessly. You can see the Yellow Brick Road winding to either side of you, well enough that you’d be able to catch any travelers’ eye, but you have no way of getting to it on your own. You’re trapped here until someone else can pull out those nails for you.
So you just hang there. Limp. Powerless. You can’t remember who you are, and you wish you had just died.
3.
Time passes strangely. It could have been minutes, hours, or it could have been months before you see the girl coming down the road. She’s humming to herself a little, looking like any other wanderer, until she gets to the crossroads where you stand.
Things have been coming back to you slowly. They come back as if old dreams, as if deja vu.
You remember not putting up much of a fight. Your life, you thought, was not the important thing so much as the sacrifice you were making was important. You were more a distraction than anything while someone else could get away. You were a casualty more than a hero of any kind, you’re pretty sure. You’re also certain that you would do it again.
You remember refusing to cry. You remember failing not to scream when they drove the nail into the back of your neck to hold your head up. You remember your eyes watering with the pain and you remember refusing to blink any tears away. You didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. You wanted to be brave until the end.
You also wanted it to end, oh, you wanted it to end so badly. You wanted the pain over and you wanted the men to give up on their torture—that was what it was, wasn’t it? Torture and execution. Except you’re not sure if it worked.
You begin to remember loving someone. You remember desperately trying to protect someone. You know they were worth it, you have no doubt or regret about that, but you can’t conjure up a name or a face. Sharp chin, maybe. Strong jawline. Distantly dark eyes. But you can’t quite put it all together.
You remember someone else when you see the girl coming down the road. Her silver shoes glint in the mid-morning light, and you know that you’ve seen those shoes before. They’re familiar to you, though you aren’t sure how. You’ve definitely never seen the girl before.
Your head drops forward and you hope it looks more like a nod than like the lack of control that it is. She flinches a little, then stares at you for a long moment before coming closer.
She inspects you, frowning. You greet her, and your voice is rougher than you think it might have been, once upon a time. There’s more of a husk or a scratch to it. You aren’t sure if you like it or not.
“Did you speak?” she asks.
“Certainly,” you say, unsure if you really did. “How do you do?”
She stares, eyes wide. She opens her mouth as if to say something polite in return. Instead what she says is, “You’re a talking scarecrow.”
You blink at her. Your eyes move to either side of you to glance at your wrists. The straw itches, but you think maybe that’s a phantom pain more than a real one. A scarecrow.
“I suppose I am,” you say, because there’s not really anything else to say.
She licks her lips. Glances down at her dog. Then nods decisively, just once. “Would you like help getting down?”
And that’s that. That’s all there is. She helps you down and you stumble a little and she catches you. Then, somehow, you convince her to take you with her to the Wizard. If he’s as wonderful as she says, maybe he can tell you who you are. Maybe he can give you a brain that remembers something. Maybe he can fix this.
4.
She’s strange, this girl. Dorothy. She claims to be from somewhere very far away. She claims to have killed a wicked witch, even if accidentally. She’s going to the Wizard on advice from Glinda the Good—both names that ring a bell but that you can’t quite place—for help. She’s alone, and she’s desperate.
So she lets you go with her. She could use the company and you could use a purpose. The sharper your memories become, the more you need a direction and a plan.
There’s someone you have to get to, but you aren’t sure where they are. There’s someone you died to protect, and you should find them. This person isn’t going to find you, not if they think you’re dead. Which you’re pretty sure by now isn’t true, even if you feel a little adrift and unconscious still.
At the same time, alive isn’t really something you feel at the moment either. You don’t breathe, don’t tire, and you’re pretty sure you don’t get hungry or need to eat. You have and need none of the things that you associate with living.
It’s more like…like being animated than being alive. You can move and think—however much you’re jokingly pretending otherwise at the moment—and you feel by all means like you have some degree of personhood and autonomy. But you aren’t quite sure you’re alive. Or, you aren’t quite sure you’re human.
Dorothy doesn’t seem to mind though. She accepted you as a walking and talking scarecrow without much trouble. You suppose she’s had a strange, magical day already.
You don’t tell her that, while Oz has its eccentricities compared to where she says she’s from, you’re still an unnatural thing. You don’t tell her that you’re pretty sure this is a transformative spell you’re under and not something that just happens to scarecrows here.
There’s a lot that you don’t tell her as it comes back to you. Instead, you continue to feign ignorance and brainlessness. It’s easier than you thought it would be. Maybe you have practice.
Really, you don’t want to upset her with what you’re pretty sure had been done to you right before you transformed, and you don’t want to ruin her bright-eyed perception of this world. You want her to get home unscarred, unlost, unchanged. So brainlessness it is.
5.
You and Dorothy are resting a little ways away from the apple trees you had stolen from. The adrenaline of taking the apples—or, getting them thrown at you and picking them up from the ground—is still running through you like a constantly pulsing wave of energy. You itch to get up and keep moving, but Dorothy needs to rest, and so you stop in the shadow of an old, towering tree.
Dorothy seems to have no shortage of things to talk about, things to ask you about. You answer her questions dutifully: things about Oz, about Munchkinland, about talking Trees and talking Animals. There are, after all, at least some helpful things you remember. The blanks in your memory don’t seem to apply to the world so much as they apply to yourself.
She asks about Glinda only once. The name is familiar to you; you say it and it rests on your tongue as easily as sugar melts there. Though you aren’t quite sure if you have a tongue anymore. You just know that Glinda’s name feels like another memory that’s missing: one that has a home so deep in your heart that you can’t find it anymore.
There’s nothing that you can tell Dorothy about Glinda, in the end. All you can say is that the name is familiar. That you wish you could share more. None of it is a lie.
What is a lie: you say you can’t quite picture her face; but it’s coming back to you the more that Dorothy describes her own interaction with Glinda the Good. In your memory, she’s beautiful. Curls of blonde hair. Bright, soft eyes. The softness of a silk dress under your fingertips. Her hand cupping your cheek, guiding you closer. Gentle, unworn, unworked palms.
And another lie: you say you have never heard of a Wicked Witch in Oz. But you glance at Dorothy’s shoes, and you think you remember at least one name. Nessarose; Nessa, once. Before the spiral and before the fall and before the wickedness. Once upon a time, you recall in an old, old memory, there were two sisters—
There’s another witch—and you remember sharp teeth and wit even sharper and you remember a forest with a mossy floor and you remember you remember you remember something—but the name escapes your memory before you can begin to guess it. Like sand through an hourglass. You think maybe you’re running out of time to remember.
6.
“You don’t seem to know much,” Dorothy says, a light giggle in her voice. You’re back on the Yellow Brick Road, and she’s asking you about why it was built so gold. Beautiful, she says, but it does feel a little impractical.
You smile wryly. “I suppose that’s what not having a brain will do to you.”
“I suppose so,” she agrees. She runs a hand over Toto in her arms, tangling her fingers in the fur. It’s a little strange to have a pet, you think, but everything about this situation is strange and so you can’t really fault her for it. “Mr. Scarecrow, I—”
—and there’s a cackle, a scream, and rush of wind; a kind of dusty tornado or cyclone of dirt-smoke clouds up in front of the two of you, and you both stumble back away from it. You feel a piece of straw come loose from your neck but you can’t be bothered to look for it.
You stare at the cloud of smoke and Dorothy steps further back, and she’s shaking, so you step in front of her to guard her. You aren’t sure what you could do against any kind of danger—you’re a scarecrow now, you remember, and this means that you are so easy to tear apart, though at least you would feel no pain—but you try to protect her anyway. You ready yourself to be ripped apart at the stitches.
7.
The last thing you saw, as your eyes drooped shut for the final time: the Emerald City Guard coming for you. They were green, thundering shadows driving pain through all of your body. Laughing, kicking, hissing their interrogation; ropes, knives, guns, fingernails. All the dozen methods of torture that you learn in training.
You did not cry. You refused to. You would not give them the satisfaction. You would not cry for them.
There were much worse things that they could do, after all. They could torture you, they could kill you, they could smear your name in the dirt, they could bury you in an unmarked grave in a cornfield that would flourish off your decaying remains, but none of that is what scared you most.
So you would not cry, and you would not tell them where your lover was. You would rather die than give that up. You would rather die than let her experience this.
You thought, when you woke, that the last thing you felt was pain. But you don’t think that’s quite true anymore.
Before the weightlessness that exists in you now, you felt magic. You felt yourself breathe. You felt yourself become calm. You felt it all washing over you like water melting away your pain to reveal something stronger underneath.
You heard rather than saw the Emerald City Guard scramble away from you, shouting something awful.
It’s the Wicked Witch, she’s done something, she’s come for him, she’s come for us, go go go go—
Then silence. Silence, and then the sunrise.
8.
You know instantly that this is the Wicked Witch that Dorothy spoke of. There’s something intimately, terribly, beautifully familiar about her as she steps out of the cyclone of smoke and dust. Like hearing your own heartbeat. And you understand as fact more than you recall as memory her being the one to turn you into a scarecrow.
Dorothy puts a hand to the fabric of your shirt, tugging slightly as if to try to get you to back away. You feel her tugging pressure like a voice of reason in the back of your head, but you can’t listen to reason because the gravitational pull of the Witch is so much stronger. So you don’t move. You just stare at the Witch, frozen.
And the thing you have desperately been trying to remember, the final puzzle piece which makes all of this suddenly make some amount of sense, the thing that wakes you up, finally: she throws a fireball at you, lighting the tree just to your left, and you remember you love her.
9.
Her name is Elphaba.
10.
Yours is Fiyero.