Chapter Text
Fingers tracing on the skin of her shoulder wake her in the morning. She has a moment of confusion, horror and elation as she processes and realises what happened last night, in the fraction of a second as she wakes. There’s a man in her bed, that beautiful man she met only last night on a dance floor, that for some unknown reason thinks she’s beautiful (she’s still not convinced he isn’t severely visually impaired, or at least maybe colourblind), and once she brought him home - that invokes a blush just thinking about it - he spent most of the night showing her how beautiful he finds her, and she felt things she had only dreamt of.
He presses his lips to her temple, that wide and enticing smile gracing his face.
“You’re blushing.” he greets her with, “Good morning…”
A smile has never flowed so easily onto her lips, and felt so simple. She rolls onto her back, looking up at him.
“I was just remembering what… what you… what we did last night.” Her smile widens, and almost impossibly, so does his. He leans forward and pushes his lips against hers, gently, softly, and her whole world starts crumbling, all over again. Everything she ever thought she knew, everything she ever thought she was, is turned upside with one action, laced with the memories of countless actions last night. This man, this wonderful, beautiful, hopeless (possibly brainless) man is turning her whole world on its head and making her doubt most things she’s ever thought or believed in.
It’s easier not to think, so she wraps her arms around him and deepens the kiss. She feels the beginnings of his reaction to her next to her thigh, and suddenly becomes aware of all the new aches in her body, the exhaustion where she didn’t even know it was possible to feel. Luckily, he breaks the kiss and collapses to the side of her.
“I think we need a lazy morning, Fae… you exhausted me last night.”
Then he hears the most beautiful sound, a quiet, throaty laugh from her, that somehow feels private and as if it is just between them. She rolls onto her side and rests her head just below his shoulder. As if without thinking, he starts threading his fingers loosely on and through her hair.
“You’re still here.” she muses, as if to herself, and he’s hit with another sudden wave of realisation that despite the strength she shows, despite the looks, the confidence, the seeming untouchability, there’s a deep insecurity somewhere within her - something she exposed to him last night as she made herself both emotionally and physically vulnerable - he suspects the most she has ever been. And unbeknownst to her, if she knew him better, if she’d known him before last night, in fact, the slight incredulous shock at him still being here - that wasn’t unfounded. He doesn’t quite believe it himself.
He just knows it feels right. He knows he’s where he’s supposed to be.
“I’d like to stay.” he breathes, and he doesn’t even know what that means as he says it, because he has to be back at school in Corabia in two days time, and he’s only known her for less than 24 hours - he never believed the ridiculous romance stories a selection of his sisters would always rant on about, but there is maybe something to be said for just knowing when you meet the right person. Just knowing that this is not something to let go of.
She props herself up to look him in the eyes, shock and fear in her face. And maybe, still protected painfully deeply, but just maybe, hope. She doesn’t say anything, and he needs to fill the silence, to reassure her.
“I’d like to get to know you better, I’d like… I’d like this to go somewhere…” he breathes, cupping her cheek with his hand. She looks down, as if ashamed, but when she looks up she looks coy, playful even.
“I think we got to know each other quite well last night.” she whispers, blushing again, almost as if she’s not sure she should dare to joke about it.
That flies too close to home, that face reminds him in too vivid detail what she looked like, hell, what she felt like under his fingers, wrapped around him, with him in her mouth. He bends down and kisses her with even more fire than the last time.
“We did.” he laughs against her mouth, supporting her shoulders just above and to the side of him, lazily caressing her skin with his fingers. “But I… I think… for the first time in my life I’d like more than that. I’d like to get to know you in here-” he presses his fingers between her breasts, roughly where her heart is, and he can already see her starting to form a response about how the heart is just a muscle and it doesn’t do anything thinking or contain any personality at all “-and in here-” he taps her temple lightly, indicating that beautiful brain, “-and… and I…” and somehow this is the most terrifying part “... if you’ll let me, I want you to get to know me too…”
He doesn’t think he’ll ever get enough of that smile, that tiny half-smile that’s hardly a smile at all. She brings her lips to his, gently, not taunting, but with a soft, thinly veiled promise of something more.
“Me too.” she whispers between his lips. “Me too.”
***
Galinda Upland is nursing a very sore head as she drags herself up the stairs onto their dorm room floor. She had started the evening dancing, and she and Elphie had had at least one too many punches, but seeing that boy from somewhere else (some military school she thinks Pfannee said, but she can’t remember, not with her head in this state) and the way he was looking at her, she thought in a bizarre moment of selflessness and not-even-beginning-to-think about her own feelings, maybe she should convince Elphie to take him up on his offer to dance. Because she recognised the way he was looking at her roommate - hell, it’s the way she looks at her roommate when she’s tired and she hasn’t had a chance to keep her emotions in check - and she thought Elphie deserved a chance to dance close to someone who wanted to dance with her, to feel that same feeling.
Honestly, she was surprised how quickly Elphaba had agreed with her suggestion, and they hadn’t even been on the dance floor for long before there’d been a slight pang in her heart, despite the great tracklist and the pre-prepared dance moves with Shenshen, not being able to see her roommate on the dance floor. Having watched her roommate walk out into the courtyard, hand in hand with a boy she’d just met and a smile on her face that Galinda didn’t think she’d ever seen before.
Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?
About an hour later, when Elphie had rushed back into the room and pulled her off the floor in the middle of the Quadling Slide, there’d been something completely alien in her face, in her eyes, and Galinda had felt something she’d never felt before - isolation.
“I’m not coming back with you and Shenshen.” she’d hurriedly whispered, looking away, avoiding Galinda’s eyes.
“What? Are you feeling ok, Elphie, do you want me to come back with you?”
A different smile to any of the smiles Galinda had ever seen before had come onto her face, then. “I… Fiyero’s c…coming back with me. To… to our dorm room.”
The green girl had swallowed, gritted her teeth, and then when she’d looked up at her roommate there had seemed to be a new found confidence in her eyes, again, something that Galinda hadn’t seen before.
“He… he wants me, Galinda. And I… I think I might want him too…”
That’s what it feels like, for a thousand dreams that you never really thought would come to reality to crumble in front of you. That’s what other people feel like when it’s made clear that they aren’t someone’s choice.
But Galinda had smiled, and turned on her biggest smile. “Exciting, Elphie! If… if you’re sure?”
Elphaba had rarely looked so certain about anything in the whole time Galinda had known her. And it’s hard to feel sorry for oneself when there’s something one got to see so rarely emanating out of another person - something that can only be described as happiness.
“I’m sure.” Elphaba had said, and something had flicked behind her eyes then as if she had only been realising it the moment she was saying it. “He won’t hurt me… and anyway, if he did, I’ll hex him…”
Galinda’s laugh had sounded a little deflated, but she had grasped her roommates hand.
“Stay safe. Be sensible, Elphie.” she had narrowed her eyes slightly, “if you go all the way, you know what the risk is…”
“There’s a spell for that. I’ll cast it, don’t worry about me. Wish me luck!”
And she’d bent forward and kissed her roommate on the cheek, before turning and leaving the room.
“I always worry about you.” had fallen on deaf ears.
It’s nearly midday now, so surely the boy must have gone, and surely Galinda has a right to enter her own dorm room unannounced to make herself a hot chocolate and nurse her own hangover, right?
As she walks through the door, her heart sinks even further. Not because she’s walked in on anything, not because Elphaba looks in any trouble. Quite the opposite, in fact. Elphaba’s sat on the slightly threadbare couch at the end of her bed, her glasses on and her nose in a book, as usual.
But rather than alone, she’s leaning into the chest of arguably the most beautiful man Galinda has ever seen (he looks even better than he did last night, now he's in the daylight), with his arm around her, and he’s gently stroking her hair, his other hand resting on the arm of the couch, his fingers twiddling around the stem of a small scarlet poppy.
Elphaba looks up from her book as she steps through the door. And for the first time, Galinda can’t read anything on her face. Sure, her roommate looks happy, she gets that, and tired (she doesn’t even want to think about what that means) and content, but there’s something else there, something she can’t quite read, like they’re suddenly not as in tune with one another, like Elphaba’s somehow flown the nest from their little yin and yang thing where they’re nothing alike but almost know what each other is thinking, without warning.
“Galinda, this is Fiyero. Fiyero, this is Galinda, my roommate.”
My roommate. It doesn’t sound quite like everything they are to each other, certainly everything she’d like to be, how much they mean to each other. But she’s Galinda Upland of the Upper Uplands, so she forces a bright smile, hangover notwithstanding, onto her face, and reaches out her hand to Fiyero.
“Lovely to meet you.” She can hear the syrup dripping from her own voice, and for a moment, she almost hates herself for it. For a moment, she wishes she was more like Elphaba, because maybe then she wouldn’t have gotten into this mess. If she always spoke about how she felt, didn’t put up this facade - maybe she’d have more of a chance of getting things that she actually wanted. Maybe.
But Elphaba smiles at the two of them shaking hands and smiling at each other, and it’s that foreign emotion again, the one she doesn’t quite recognise.
Years later, when she thinks back on this moment, the moment the tides turned completely, she’ll hypothesise that what she could see was probably the very beginning of Elphaba falling in love.