Chapter Text
The moonlight shone gently on the forest floor as Fiyero and Feldspur raced through the forest. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a lantern move and a dark shape fall over. Feldspur stopped abruptly and exclaimed,
“I didn’t see her!”
“Neither did I.” He hopped off of Feldspur, nearly slipping on a few small rocks as he walked over to the girl.
“Sorry, miss, I didn’t see you there, you must have…” She moved the lantern upwards, and their faces were illuminated.
“...blended with the foliage,” he found himself ending with.
She glared at him. She was wearing two hearing aids, the earmolds emerald, like her. As if she was trying to hide them, which was pretty useless with the cords streaming down to the box strapped to her chest. Just like his, except he only had one hearing aid. He had changed his earmold to emerald green the day before to stand out. She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it, thinking.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Sorry, I just…never mind. I’m fine.”
“Okay. Are you heading back to Shiz?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too. My sixth school. Hopefully this one works out,” he replied. The reasons he had been kicked out of his previous schools ranged from ridiculous to probably sensible enough.
“And you’re coming six weeks late?” She raised her eyebrows.
“Yeah. It’s a long story. Want a ride?” he asked her.
She looked like she was thinking about it for a while, and then said,
“I’m only doing this because I don’t feel like walking back in the dark.”
“If you say so.”
He got onto Feldspur and offered her a hand, which she refused, and she climbed on behind him.
“Those lanterns aren't always the best for walking through a forest. Part of the reason Feldspur’s here.”
She didn’t say anything. He kept talking anyways.
“Of course the main reason he's here is because he’s my best friend,” he continued as Feldspur whinnied in agreement, “The fact that he can hear, smell, and balance better than I can are just added benefits.”
There were a few occasions here and there where Felds would let him know of something he didn't hear, or help him in areas that were hard for him to walk in(or he just rode on him for the fun of it, or if it was easier anyway), but it wasn't all he did(and thank goodness for that, he thought, or he'd be even lonelier).
“Plus I didn't want to be lonely in the Vinkus,” Feldspur added.
“That, too. But they almost didn't let us come this year. It’s ridiculous.”
“So what were you doing in the forest at this hour?” Feldspur asked the girl.
“Just, uh…not important. But I’d be careful here if I were you, Feldspur. Someone put the most horrendible words on my Goat teacher’s chalkboard earlier.”
“Noted.”
After a while, they got off of Feldspur near the main office(so he could ask the headmistress about something), and he said to him,
“I’ll come visit you tomorrow or something. I hope there’s some other Horses you can talk to.”
“I hope you find your people as well,” he replied.
“Thanks.”
He walked into the office and up to the lady sitting at the desk, who gawked at him slightly.
“What? You didn’t expect the prince of the Vinkus to be disabled?” he signed in case she happened to know any, or at the very least so she knew that was what he preferred at school.
“I don't sign,” she said.
He repeated it aloud.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized genuinely, “What can I do for you?”
“Uh, I had some things that were supposed to be dropped off here, do you know where they were left?”
“They were brought up to your room earlier. I’ll get you your room key,” she said, getting up.
He sucked air through his teeth slightly. He knew they were probably just trying to be nice, doing their new royal student a favor, but he was nervous they hadn’t been careful enough with his CPAP and some of his other stuff.
The girl mumbled something.
“What?”
“Uh, I’m Elphaba Thropp,” she repeated. She didn't pronounce the th, though he could understand her fine nonetheless. He did the same thing with his deaf accent, it was just too quiet for him to hear, so he couldn't quite say it either even with practice.
“Oh, you're Governor Thropp’s daughter?”
“Yeah, unfortunately. You can understand me?”
“Of course. I’m Fiyero Tigelaar.”
She nodded. The woman came back from the other room and handed him his key.
“Thanks,” he said. He asked her a couple other questions to make sure his other accommodations were set up, and turned to leave. There were three boys behind him. Two of them walked up to Miss Ponzi, giving him a sideways glance, and the third grinned at him. He smiled back.
“Hi, Elphie,” he waved to her, “Fiyero Tigelaar, right?” he asked as they were leaving.
“Yeah.” Fiyero turned to face him. He had curly red hair and was about the same height as him.
“I’m Boq. Boq Woodsman. I can show you to our dorm if you want.”
“Uh, sure.” They walked out the door, Fiyero switching to Boq’s other side so he could hear him better.
They went to the boys’ dorms, making some small talk. The campus was oddly not well lit, he had to walk slowly to be sure he wouldn’t lose his balance. They got to their dorms, which ended up being right across from each other(Fiyero’s was a private suite).
“You should come study with me and Elphaba sometime,” Boq said as he walked into his dorm.
“Yeah, I’ll think about it…” he replied.
He walked into his own dorm, his stuff set next to his bed and all in good shape. He put on his glasses, dug out his sketchbook from one of his bags, sat on his bed, and opened to a new page. He began to sketch Elphaba from memory, and when he finished, titled it Fae.
The next morning, he decided to look around the campus for Elphaba. As he walked through the quad, people were glancing at him, whispering to each other. He never spent much time wondering if people like that were doing it because he was a prince or because he was visibly disabled. It didn't matter that much anyway. He walked up to a map of the school, where a boy was standing, obstructing it. The boy grinned sheepishly as he approached, and sidestepped when he realized what he was doing. As he studied the map, someone walked up next to him and said something he couldn’t quite make out.
“What?” he asked, turning to her. She was a blonde girl wearing all pink.
“Are you looking for something? Or someone?” she asked, not looking at him directly.
“No. Well, yes, actually, I was, uh, looking for Elphaba.”
“Why would you be looking for her?” she asked, scrunching up her face.
“Why wouldn’t I? She seems nice enough.” He rubbed the skin next to the red, bumpy scar on his neck from a surgery when he was thirteen, which had begun to itch. Galinda’s eyes flicked to it for a few seconds.
“Oh…wait, are you deaf, too? Figures that----with her. But you can----better than her!” she replied, talking loudly and slowly the way people sometimes did when they found out he was Deaf.
“You really don't need to speak like that, I can understand you better if you don't.” He went back to studying the map for a moment, confusing her.
“You know, I promised to give a guided tour to any recently arrived students,” she said, moving to his other side(the side he could hear better on, thankfully).
“Uh…okay?” he replied. He considered taking a tour from her, but he wanted to focus on finding Elphaba.
“Are you a recently arrived student?”
“I mean…yeah. I doubt I’ll last any longer at this school than I did at the others though.”
Especially if they don’t give me an interpreter soon, he thought.
“Well, I wasn’t at any of your other schools,” she said, grinning. Oh, she was flirting with him. Of course she was.
“You know what, maybe I will take you up on that tour,” he said. He was used to this charade; meet a girl who liked him, end up dating once or twice, and one of them would end up breaking up with the other for a myriad of reasons. This girl seemed nice enough.
“Great. I’m Galinda, by the way. I know who you are, of course.”
He nodded, not sure how to respond to that. The two of them walked towards a building he guessed was the library. When they entered, Galinda said something he didn’t hear well, and he saw Elphaba sitting at a table, doing work. He walked closer to her, but before he could get there, Galinda said,
“Oh, Fiyero! You----my friends!” She grabbed his arm gently.
Elphaba looked up, and he waved to her. She rolled her eyes and looked back down, asking Boq something. Fiyero turned and went along with Galinda, who walked him over to the boy with dark hair and glasses he had seen earlier and another blonde girl. The boy grinned sheepishly, and the girl looked down fast.
“I’m Pfannee. Uh…Pfannee, yeah,” the boy said, flustered.
“Shenshen,” the girl said, not looking at him.
He would have done the same show off opportunity in the library that he did at his last school, but he didn’t quite have the energy to be running around at the moment. The four of them ended up walking around campus as a group, but he kept thinking about Elphaba. He noticed Galinda and Shenshen glancing at him and whispering, but Pfannee struck up a conversation with him, and he decided it was nothing. He ended up avoiding them for the rest of the day.
***
“You sure you don't want to come?” Boq asked her as they left Dr. Dillamond’s class the day after Fiyero had arrived. He had invited her to join him, Fiyero, and a few others to hang out in town that evening.
“What’s the point, anyway? I’m sure Fiyero will just bring Galinda along.”
“He won’t. Fiyero has mostly been hanging out with some second years. I’ve asked him to come hang out with us, but he thinks he made you angry or something, so he’s been avoiding us.”
“Well, he’d be right about that. But I never really liked him in the first place,” she replied as they walked outside.
“You accepted a ride from the guy!”
“Because I made the horrible decision to walk through a forest at dusk.” Granted, it was already kind of dark when she had left to follow Dr. Dillamond, but the way she had originally gone was blocked off when she got back.
“Are you just mad because he was hanging out with Galinda?”
She shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Well, I think it would be nice for us to hang out outside of mostly only studying for the past six weeks, but if you really don’t want to come, I understand.”
She considered it for a moment. Over the past few weeks, she had realized how much she had missed Boq after not seeing him except in passing for nine years. They had been friends for a few years when she was younger, but after Dulcibear was fired by her dad, she had run away to Boq’s house, which ended up resulting in his parents forbidding them from seeing each other. They also ended up at different secondary schools, so the chances of seeing each other were slim. Maybe it would be worth it. Plus, before Fiyero, she hadn’t talked much to anyone who had similar disabilities to her. Even though she wasn’t sure she liked him very much, maybe it was worth it to talk to him.
“Okay, I’ll come.”
“Well, now I feel like I wore you down-”
“No, I want to come. Really,” she assured him. He laughed.
Later in the day, they met up at a cafe downtown. It was thankfully not busy, so she hopefully wouldn’t have as much trouble understanding them. Fiyero had gotten there before the rest of them, and was sipping tea through a straw at a table with two saved seats and an empty spot for Nessa.
“It’s a little early for tea, don’t you think?” Boq said as he walked over to him.
He shrugged.
“It’s pretty much all I can have here. It’s good, anyways”
“All right, then.”
“Think I’ll have some tea, too, I’m not hungry,” Elphaba said.
“You should,” said Fiyero, “Try the lemon tea. That’s what I got.”
“That does sound good.” She was usually more of a spiced tea person, but she liked herbal tea if it was flavorful.
“Are Crope and Tibbett coming, too?” Boq asked.
Fiyero shook his head.
“Crope had theater practice and Tibbett had a track meet.”
Elphaba sat down next to Fiyero, and Boq and Nessa went to the remaining spots.
“So Galinda didn’t follow you here?” she asked Fiyero.
“She hasn’t been following me everywhere. Just around the classes we have together,” he replied.
“Why don’t you just tell her you’re not interested?” Boq asked.
“I did.”
“Oh, so she’s one of those obsessive girls?” Nessa asked.
“I think she just thinks I should ‘take what I can get’,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“Of course she thinks that,” Elphaba groaned.
“You’re her roommate, right, Elphaba?” he asked. The way he said her name nearly made her blush.
“Unfortunately. She hasn’t bothered me as much recently, though.”
“That’s good.” He smiled, his lips only going up on the left side, “Guess she decided to divert the attention to me.”
Boq and Nessa were engrossed in a conversation of their own that Elphaba couldn’t hear. Fiyero leaned in near her and whispered,
“Did I give----”
“What?”
He was sitting on her left side, the side that didn’t hear as well.
“Did I give you the wrong idea by hanging out with Galinda for a while?” he repeated.
“Oh. No, it’s not a big deal. Really. It just annoyed me a bit at first.”
“Yeah, okay. I just wanted to make sure…I do hope we can be friends.”
Feeling a bit caught off guard by that, she just nodded. Nobody except Boq had ever just casually decided they liked her like that. Besides Riva. They had met in the hospital when she was getting her tonsils out, and Riva was having some huge surgery she forgot the details of, both seven years old. She had stayed overnight in the hospital for monitoring due to her heart defect, and her father had forgotten to pick her up for a few days after. So, the two of them wrote back and forth to each other in the game room since Riva was mostly Deaf and preferred to sign, and she knew basically no sign language. Eventually, a waiter brought her, Boq, and Nessa their orders.
“Fiyero!” someone called. She looked up. It was Galinda. What was she doing here?
“Hello, Galinda,” he said.
“Do you want to come shopping with me and Pfannee and Shenshen? You don’t have to hang out with them.”
“I’d much rather be here, thanks.”
“Why do you keep trying to get him to join your little cult?” Elphaba asked. She ignored her, but Fiyero chuckled.
“Well, if you’re sure.” She walked off after patting his shoulder.
“She just wants a prince in her group. That’s all it is,” Fiyero said once she was out of earshot.
“Of course she does,” said Nessa.
“She could have one if she stopped being mean to Elphaba,” Boq said.
“What, so you would let her into our group?” Elphaba asked.
“Only if you approve.”
“No way.”
She took another long sip of her tea.
“You were right about the lemon tea, Fiyero.” It tasted like the barley tea Dulcibear used to make. She missed her tea. And everything else about her.
“See? I told you it’s good. Very toasty,” he said.
“Well, uh…I should probably go now,” Elphaba said a few minutes later. She had been meaning to write a letter to Dulcibear.
“Me too,” said Nessa. Boq decided to join them, and the three of them walked back to campus together.