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For a moment, Elphaba just stands still, trying to breathe through the ache in her chest.
Half of her wants to collapse to the ground and never rise again. The other half wants to fling herself into doing something, anything so that she’ll stop seeing the nightmarish visions still haunting her mind, that reappear every time she closes her eyes for more than a clock tick.
What do I even have left now, she wonders, half hysterically. All her good deeds turned to ash in her hands and then some, what is there that’s worth doing anymore?
Nessa’s silver shoes. The only thing that Elphaba could perhaps still claim belonged to her. The shoes that were stolen by that stupid farmgirl who must be skipping merrily down the Yellow Brick Road at this very moment, utterly oblivious to anything outside her own ignorant self.
It’s almost a relief to have something to focus on. Yes, the shoes are rightfully hers and Elphaba is going to get them back. That girl had no right to them. How dare she just take them? How dare Glinda just give them away?
Don’t think about Glinda. Rage and hurt and despair still swirl within Elphaba, threatening to choke her with their bitterness at any thought of Glinda. Better to not even touch that right now.
Another thought brings her up short, then. Fiyero…Fiyero was dead, but what of his body? In her visions, she’d seen him left hanging on that pole. Had his murderers not even afforded him the dignity of burying him?
Perhaps there is one last thing she can still do for him. She won’t leave his body to the crows and the elements, to rot in the sun.
The brief glimpses she’d caught in her mind’s eye while desperately trying (and failing, Oz damn her) to save him told her enough for her to know that she doesn’t want to see this, to see him like that. But she owes it to him, to give him the respectful burial he deserves.
A rustle of wings, and Chistery comes to hover beside her. Sorrow and compassion shine in his expressive eyes as he softly touches her shoulder. She turns away, unable to bear the weight of sympathy she does not deserve.
Instead, she sends him and the other Monkeys off to find that farm brat. Chistery hesitates, clearly reluctant to leave her alone, but she stands firm against his concern and he eventually goes. It’ll be safer, for her and for them, if they don’t all fly around Oz together as one large group. And she wants nothing more than to be alone right now, as she mounts her broom and flies back toward Munchkinland.
The sun is beginning to set when Elphaba at last reaches the spot where she’d last seen Fiyero (where she’d left him). She hovers above the nearby field, straining her eyes for any sign of a crumpled body hanging from the pole she’d seen in her visions, even as her heart seizes at the prospect of seeing the evidence of what he suffered before he died. She scans the rows of soft yellow wheat for the green and gold of his uniform, for the brown curl of his hair.
She doesn’t see him.
Her chest tightens, and she turns her broom around to slowly circle the field.
Finally, her eyes catch on a very familiar wooden pole, one she realizes with a sinking stomach matches the one from her horrible visions.
She dives down, jumping off her broom in front of it.
He’s not here.
For a brief, gloriously irrational moment, she wonders, did the spell work after all? Had she actually managed not to destroy yet another person she loved?
Then she sees the reddish-brown stains all along the pole, the same color staining the ropes dangling from the crossbeam near the top.
She barely registers when her knees give out. Something crusty breaks underneath her hands and she recoils, scrambling back and shuddering at the sight of the darker reddish-brown patches drying on the ground. Blood. Fiyero’s blood.
She’s too late.
He’s dead and his body is gone.
“Fiyero, where are you?” she whispers.
Surely, they wouldn’t have taken his body, to…to display it as some gruesome warning against defying the Wizard?
No, she reasons, pushing away the treacherous little voice in her head that hisses, what if? There are many ways to conceal and spin the true nature of Fiyero’s death, and so obviously martyring him would be a bridge too far even for the Wizard. He surely wouldn’t risk pushing the Vinkus to open rebellion over such a stunt. He’s too smart to make that kind of mistake.
Maybe she’d been wrong. They must’ve taken Fiyero’s body down and buried him after all. Maybe the Gale Force had had enough lingering respect for their former commander to give him this last kindness. If being buried in an unmarked grave counted as a kindness.
Either way, he’s still dead. Either way, she’ll never know where he’d been buried, will never be able to bring flowers to his grave.
Perhaps that was for the best. No apology would ever be enough to make up for what she’d done to him. As if she even deserved to beg for his forgiveness.
He was so bright, so beautiful, until she dragged him into the darkness. Into the dirt where he died alone, in agony, for trying to save the wretched, wicked thing that she is.
No good deed goes unpunished. Certainly not any of hers. And as it turns out, not even when you’re someone as good as he is- was.
She knows that now. Oh does she know.
She should never have allowed him to follow her from the Wizard’s palace. She should’ve pretended that she’d truly bespelled him, that he was suffering the effects of temporary madness, anything but what she’d done: allowing herself to selfishly, greedily give into the disbelieving elation that he loved her back. It was her love that destroyed him. If she’d just been able to rein in her heart, been strong enough, smart enough to dissuade him from throwing everything away for her, maybe he’d still be alive.
Tears blur her vision, but she furiously swipes them away. Her regrets mean nothing. She’d failed him, just as she’d failed everyone and everything else.
She forces herself to her feet, forces herself to turn away from the pole so she can mount her broom. There’s nothing more for her here and she’s lingered long enough that she wouldn’t even be surprised if the guards were to come and find her.
She can’t seem to bring herself to care though, even as a voice deep down cries that Fiyero would be devastated to see her like this, that it would be a poor way of honoring his sacrifice. Does it even matter anymore? Let them come. Even as she rises in the air and deliberately returns her focus to retrieving the shoes that are all she has left, a corner of her mind whispers, would it be so terrible for all this to be over?
Maybe once she has the shoes, she’ll go repay Fiyero’s murderers in kind. And maybe one of them will be lucky enough to best her and end her miserable existence.
And then, though she doesn’t deserve it, maybe she’ll finally see Fiyero again.