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The fields beyond the map did not belong to Oz anymore.
They lay in a shallow bowl of land where the wind moved gently, bending grain and grass as if smoothing a blanket. The little farmhouse crouched there with stubborn patience, its paint sun-bleached, its porch listing just enough to suggest age rather than neglect. It was quiet in the way Elphaba had learned to trust. Quiet without watchers.
Fiyero stood near the fence line when she returned that afternoon, one arm hooked easily over the post. A farmer was speaking to him, gesturing animatedly about crows and crops. The man laughed, clapped Fiyero on the shoulder in a friendly, careless way, then went on his way down the dirt road without a second glance.
Fiyero lifted a hand in farewell.
When he turned, Elphaba was already watching him.
“How was it?” she asked, setting down her basket.
He shrugged, straw whispering softly beneath his shirt. “Same as always. He talks. I listen. He forgets I’m strange after a while.”
“And when he touched you?”
Fiyero didn’t hesitate. He never did with her. “It felt like being leaned on. Nothing more.”
She nodded, jaw tight in that familiar way that meant the thought still hurt, even after all this time.
He crossed the space between them easily, steps sure despite the way his body had changed. When he reached her, he didn’t touch her right away. He waited, as if asking without words.
Elphaba lifted her hand and laid it over his forearm.
The magic responded instantly.
Not with light or spectacle, but with warmth. A low, humming recognition that moved through him like a remembered breath. The burlap beneath her palm softened, the pressure of her touch no longer external but internal, as if it were meeting him somewhere deeper than straw.
Fiyero closed his eyes.
There it was. That familiar, devastating sense of having weight again. Of being more than assembled. Her magic wove through the spell that sustained him, not correcting it, not challenging it, but reminding it of what it had been built to preserve.
“You feel it,” she murmured, not quite a question.
“I always do,” he said. “With you.”
Her fingers curled slightly, careful, reverent. With anyone else, touch was information. With her, it was meaning.
He leaned down until his forehead rested against hers. The wind moved around them, carrying the dry, clean scent of straw and earth.
“You know,” he said quietly, “sometimes I think my body remembers that night better than I do.”
Her breath caught. She didn’t pull away.
The night lived in both of them whether they summoned it or not.
Running through the dark. The forest lit like a secret behind them. Laughter that bordered on disbelief because stopping meant being it might not be real. Hands everywhere. Everywhere. As if they could anchor themselves to each other against what was coming.
He remembered pressing her against the trees, her magic sparking wild and soft because she was new to this and in love as he was. He remembered the way she’d said his name like it was a promise and an apology all at once.
And later, the choice. The torture. The spell spoke through tears because it was the only one she had that could save his life, he gathered from her months into their journey Beyond Oz when she would wake up scared and crying, magic flailing.
Now, years later, her hand rested on his arm, steady as stone.
“When you touch me,” he said, voice rough but calm, “I don’t feel like something you saved. I feel like someone you chose.”
Her eyes shone, sharp and bright and unhidden. “I never stopped choosing you.”
She reached up then, palms bracketing his face. Straw and wheat gave way beneath her magic, warmth blooming where her thumbs brushed his cheekbones. He could have sworn he felt skin there. Could have sworn he felt her exactly as he had that night, her touch reverent and urgent and devastatingly familiar.
He kissed her.
Not with desperation. With certainty.
It was enough.
He stands very still when she touches him later, because stillness is respect.
Because her hands deserve reverence.
The farmer’s grip had been easy to forget. Weight. Pressure. Fact. He had smiled, nodded, played the part expected of him. A friendly thing in patched clothes who mostly looked like he belonged to the fields now.
But Elphaba’s touch is never just a fact.
It is warmth where there should be none. It is memory answering instinct. Her magic does not force sensation into him. It invites it back, gently, like calling something shy from the trees.
He loves her.
That knowledge sits in him solid and immovable, heavier than straw, stronger than enchantment. He loved her before they ran. When she shook with terror and still chose to save him. When Oz decided they were monsters and sang songs over their supposed graves.
He has never once regretted it.
If he had to choose again, he would choose her every time.
And yet there is a small, aching want he never voices.
He wishes he could still give her what she deserved. The graceful prince. The easy charm. The weight of him. The visible future Oz understands.
Instead, he is this. Straw and wheat and a body learning itself again while his homeland celebrates his death with fireworks and relief.
All he has left to offer her are the remnants. Old family jewels buried in enchanted bags. Clothes altered for a body he no longer has and for female relatives he doesn’t even know that suit her, the Vinkus blues. A listening ear. A steady presence. Love that does not falter even when his footing does.
Then she presses her forehead to his chest.
And stays.
Not as an obligation. Not as a pity.
As a choice.
“Here,” she says later, with a kiss.
The lamplight is low and warm. The bed creaks softly beneath them. For a moment, he thinks this is all there is. Her breath. The quiet. The fact that they are still here.
“I know we’re not in Oz anymore,” Elphaba says, a little fond, a little shy, a little forlorn. “But we grew up there. Used their calendars our entire lives. And based on my frustratingly lax calculation, they should be going into Lurlinemas about now. I know you never practiced and my father made sure I never-“ she cuts herself off at the memory of her father.
“Anyway, here.”
She holds out a small box.
“I wanted you to have this.”
“You’ve already given me so much, Fiyero,” she adds softly, as though afraid he’ll leave if he doesn’t like her gift. “I thought maybe I should give you something back for once.”
He takes it carefully.
The idea that anything inside could make him love her less is laughable.
He opens the box.
His breath stutters.
“The poppy,” he whispers. “You kept the poppy.”
“I was always going to,” she says. “It’s the first gift anyone ever gave me without strings. Without laughter behind my back.” Her fingers curl at the edge of the box. “I kept it in stasis. I’d look at it sometimes. And Doctor Dillamond’s glasses. And think about how you became your own. How the poppy reminded me of your heart whenever I read another story about how you were hunting me.
That they don’t know you at all or maybe I don’t? But I know now where your heart was, Yero.”
He stares at the flower, red and impossibly alive, waiting patiently for his hands.
“I adore it, Fae,” he says. “Maybe we can plant it. Have a garden. Something just for beauty.”
He smiles at her then, bright and unbroken.
“Not that you aren’t already the most beautiful thing ever created.”
She laughs, breathless, and he kisses her face softly, reverently with burlap lips. Each kiss is a promise he will never break. A life they’ll get to live.
A world away, Oz tells itself stories of wicked witches defeated by goodness and hushes voices that point out good deeds done by said wicked witch.
Here, Beyond Oz, love keeps blooming anyway. Ever changing. Every twining. Ever growing.