InsaneJournal

Elphaba-Fabala-Elphie-Fae. Yero my hero. You have no soul. I didn't think it showed. Little girl to play with broken things. Horrors. Maybe the Scarecrow was not a Scarecrow at all. A familiar face hidden behind a canvas one. "I shall save you!" cried the girl, the girl with the pigtails and the little yapping dog, and she reached for the bucket of water. It was her soul. The girl was her soul come looking for her. Dorothy Gale.

All the Witch knew next, in the split-second between her final moment and the death that awaited in the splash of water, the inadvertent baptismal splash like Crope or Tibbett had said, was that she was no longer where she had been. There was no Kiamo Ko, no small tower room, no little girl in front of her. And no fire. Blissfully, there was no fire, not on herself, and not on the broom, which was charred but still had a few twigs to its name still. Her broom, her magic broom, the one that had guided her across the skies, like when she left and came back and Sarima and the children were gone. Maybe it had saved her again.

The Witch swayed on her feet for several moments, like she was drunk, but she wasn't. Maybe she was. Drunk with the fact that she was alive. She shut her eyes briefly and then opened them, told herself, Think, think, come on, you're better than this, like she'd told Glinda, Galinda, before the Philosophy Club, before the Emerald City. She had the strangest feeling like she'd fallen out of time. It would be her luck, she probably had. Elphaba squeezed her eyes shut again and held them closed for almost a minute, and forced herself into awareness. She made a point of registering each finger and toe, moving it, knowing it was there; she felt her scalp prickle when she paid it attention, and let the feeling roll down her body, down her chest, her stomach, and then into her legs--where it met with some painful resistance.

That was when Elphaba, who had stopped thinking of herself by that name a long time ago, realized that although her skirt was no longer on fire, it had burned a large chunk of the fabric away and she now had some fairly interesting burns running up one skinny green grasshopper leg. She would have covered it, she hated it when people saw any part of her body, but the unpleasant weals on her calf and thigh were red and pink and not quite green. So she did have natural flesh under her skin, how interesting. She would probably have to see to healing them--if she had her Grimmerie, she could have consulted it, she supposed, but she didn't. She'd left it behind when she came to... Wherever she was.

It was only then that Elphaba the Witch (she was the Witch now, who else could she be?) tried to take stock of her surroundings. She was in some kind of city, but it wasn't like any of the ones she knew, not the hideously beautiful Emerald City or the floating villages of Quadling Country or the ramshackle farm communities of Munchkinland. It wasn't like the tent cities of the Vinkus, the Thousand Year Grasslands. And it didn't seem like anything she knew to be in Gillikin, although she hadn't been there. She had a feeling, though, that it wasn't anything like this place.

The Witch, in a bad position, was forced to realize that she might have to ask for help. She didn't like it, didn't want to be seen as powerless or weak, but even through her muddled state, the jumbled organization of her mind, she knew that with the burns and her disorientation, she was in a bad way, and didn't even know where she was. So, although she didn't think she'd have much success, she began to cast about, looking for someone she could talk to, who might notice her. Feeling oddly at sea (if you believed in seas), she wondered if maybe it would have been better to remain at Kiamo Ko, somehow, and face her fate.

She grabbed at a sleeve--someone, anyone, had to help her--and said in a hoarse voice, she'd been shouting at the Gale girl, that was why: "I need--" she forced the word out of her mouth, it almost hurt her to do it--"help. I'm injured."