A/N: …hiiii…um… college ate my life? Sorry!!! I can't even express how sorry I am to have abandoned you all so entirely…if any of you are even still there, reading this?

Disclaimer: Not mine.

The funeral was simple. Six men from the Resistance, masked as much as possible, carried the coffin from the Church of St. Glinda to the small urban cemetery along the route least likely to attract official notice. Elphaba was veiled in black, and Fiyero's hat was pulled low. Moya's face was the only one fully exposed, raw and rugged as wind over cliffs. Galwan sat in her arms, pulling at her hair, demanding to know where his mama was. The third time his voice rose, plaintive above the minister's chanting, Elphaba's gloved hand whirled through the air like a pinwheel, settling finally in a death grip on her own jaw, and fled the cemetery.

She ran through the drizzle, back to the church, where she collapsed against an alley wall. Images of her own mother's funeral slipped frantically through her head. Little feet in black stockings in her little button boots, clicking on the rain-wet pavement. The gleam of the coffin at the head of the church. Her green hand on it, in a patch of blue light from the stained glass window, looking almost normal. The pallid sickness of her mother's face beneath her dark hair, the contrast garish. She didn't remember what she had done—tugged at her mother, probably, asked her to wake up in a small reedy voice like Galwan's—but her father had pulled her by the arm out of the church and left her in the vestibule while Nessa cried inside in her nanny's arms.

She heard footsteps slicking past the alley. Fiyero, skulking after me in side streets again?

He stilled, as if he had heard her thought, and she curled in tighter, indifferent. If he finds me, he finds me.

"Elphaba?"

She wasn't sure whether to be irritated or relieved when she heard him come toward her and felt his heat in front of her. She raised her eyes.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," he answered. "Are you all right?"

"Yes…no…of course not, not really, Lysia's dead."

"It's not your fault."

"That doesn't matter. "

"No, it doesn't." He sat beside her and she let him drape his arm over her.

"She's just…gone, from the world, from everything, forever…she was here, and she's not, and I don't…why does it happen this way?"

"Maybe she's not gone forever, Fae, maybe she's just not here."

Elphaba snorted and grabbed at her bootlaces, fidgeting. "Of course. The Great Land of Eternal Happiness in the Sky, I forgot. Forgive me, but as I haven't believed it since I was thirteen , my recollections were a bit far from the forefront."

"You're disapproving."

"Of closeminded adults participating in a great conspiracy to delude themselves and everyone else into believing assorted fairy tales that end up getting people killed? Whyever would I disapprove of that?"

"Have you ever thought maybe you're a little closeminded about certain things?"

"I believe what my reason leads me to, Fiyero."

"Your reason isn't infallible."

"It's better than letting my desires lead me. You think I don't wish I had the capacity to believe my mother and Lysia and everyone else are happily singing in some paradise full of sunlight? Of course I do, sometimes more than anything. I wish I could believe in some benevolent figure looking out for us all, but I can't. I'm not configured that way. I see the world and the world tells me if there is an Unnamed God he's a sadistic, petty little bastard."

"Elphaba--"

"Don't try to tell me otherwise, Fiyero. It'll only make me cross at you."

"All right." He let her lean her head against his shoulder. Somewhere in the distant bowels of the city, sirens wailed. The bells above them began to clang.

"Cacophony," she said. "Pandemonium."

"Are you just throwing out words or did that mean something?"

"If you'd paid attention in Old Ozian Literature, it would."

"What a good thing that I have you here to educate me then,hmm?"

"I suppose. Well, it was in a verse poem, from well before the Wizard, during the interregnum of Osgard the Terrible, before Ozma the Universal was able to retake control, and…"

But he could only distract her for so long.

Eventually, he had to bring her back to the house, and as they approached, she got quiet.

"I think I should move out," she said.

It spoke to how deeply he felt about her that the first thing that hit him about that sentence was I.

"I?" he said.

"I'm dangerous," she said.

"I'm a fugitive, too," he said. "Don't be a martyr, Elphaba."

"Fine," she said. "Do what you like; experience has shown I can't hide from you. But I'm leaving this house. I can't live here with Moya and Galwan and be a danger to them every moment I'm alive. I won't have them dragged into this. They've lost enough."

"Moya won't let you," Fiyero said.

"Good job no one's going to tell her, then, isn't it," Elphaba responded in the quick Gillikin slang she'd picked up from Glinda. It always sounded so much more authoritative when she used it. On Glinda, like so many things, it was silly.

Elphaba shot Fiyero a glare, as though she knew he was being cruel to her friend in his head. He grinned back at her.

"How are we going to get out without her knowing?"

"Magic," Elphaba said, "and effort," and she hiked up her skirts and began climbing for the low overhang of the roof outside their bedroom.

Shrugging, he reached for an outcrop of brick and began, like always, to follow her.