This feels like it could be a fanfic but not quite. But Elphaba trusting that if she follows Fiyero's plan he will get back to her and find her. Waiting beneath the floor, maybe the part of her brain that was so sure he could never have feelings for her in "I'm not that girl" despite the obvious signs telling her she's crazy and he couldn't possibly be alive. Her choosing to believe the impossible anyways. How she must have felt when she finally heard him call for her.
summary: fiyero has a thing about elphaba's hands, and elphaba can't even begin to understand it.
prompt: hands, for @fiyerabapril
pairings: fiyero tigelaar/elphaba thropp
words: 1971
warnings: none
Fiyero seems to have a strange kind of fixation on Elphaba’s hands.
He’s absentmindedly toying with the fingers of her left hand now; tracing the lines of her palm with his pointer finger; running the heel of his palm over the pulse point of her wrist and then up to place their hands in alignment.
His hands are bigger than hers, and her fingers are slimmer; hers are made for magic and his are callused and worn from farm work. There’s an easy, comfortable silence in the room, just the sound of their unified breathing and the wind outside.
They’re sitting in bed together, after everything has ended and they can finally rest, which is a novelty that Elphaba is still borderline uncomfortable with. She just doesn’t know what to do with herself if she’s not running, if she’s not throwing herself headfirst into a cause.
But then again, the ability to just…stop is something she’s reveling in. Allowing herself to be calm, to enjoy a sense of stillness and slowness, is a privilege she had almost given up on having. She has time to do things for herself and for him now: she’s reading again, sleeping more, eating enough.
Most importantly, she managed to get Fiyero human again, though not without a cross stitching of scars in various places and not without chronic aches and pains that he refuses to complain about to her. They’re able to form a life together in Fliaan that she never thought she’d get anywhere, and much less with him. She hadn’t ever dared to dream of a life like this.
But having this life now in her grasp, while it is often comforting in its simplicity, does not always take away the fear.
Which is to say that even as Fiyero traces his own finger over the lines of her ring finger, even as he touches each pad of her finger tip like he’s counting them, even as he presses their palms together, even as he holds her so tenderly—even through all that, Elphaba looks at her own hands and feels a self-hatred of such intensity that it almost scares her.
Or, it’s not self-hatred, not really. It’s not really self-deprecation either. No, it’s more like fear. A passive kind of terror that lingers under the bones of her ribs and that hollows out the cavity of her chest until it consumes her from inside out. She doesn’t know how to explain it, not really. Not in words that make sense.
Her hands are where her magic is channeled through, is the thing. Her entire body is a livewire, a constant current of magic running through the sinew and muscles and veins, but the final breaking point always comes through her hands. The power in her hands disgusts her. It terrifies her. She cannot get rid of it. No matter how much she wants to crawl out of her skin sometimes, there is no escaping it.
Fiyero, sitting next to her with their shoulders brushing against each other, warm and present and here, lifts her hand up and stretches out their arms, as if he just wants to look at her hands from another angle. Then he pulls their arms back close to him, kissing the tip of her middle finger and then placing her hand in his lap so he can continue his strange worshipping of her strange body.
She doesn’t know what comes over her when she blurts out, “Why are you doing that?”
He freezes. Carefully, he pulls his hands away from her and puts them to his side, palms flat against the sheets. “Do you, uh. Want me to stop?”
He’s not looking at her, instead staring straight down at her hand still sitting there in his lap. She follows his gaze, realizing she’s frozen there too. Slowly, she pulls her hand back towards herself, looking down at her open, empty palms.
She wants him to go back to touching her, to holding her, to leaving traces of his fingerprints everywhere he can reach, as if covering over the hideousness of her own fingerprints. She hates that she’s made him pull away like this, but she doesn’t understand why he would want to in the first place.
“No,” she says finally.
“Okay,” he says slowly. “Then what’s the problem?”
Elphaba curls her hands into fists, closing her eyes and trying to limit the tension into her fists rather than letting it break the glass of their bedroom windows. Rather than letting it splinter the wood of their bed frame, or break the sanded down floorboards of the home they built together. Rather than letting it break the man beside her.
Then she feels Fiyero’s hand take hers again and she opens her eyes. He’s uncurling her fists as if he has no fear. But he must, he must have some kind of fear; Oz knows she does. Fear is embedded into every part of her being at this point; it’s woven into every place that the magic rests.
“I’m powerful,” Elphaba says, looking down at where he’s intertwining their fingers. It’s not an egotistical statement, or one of misplaced confidence. It’s just a fact. One that they both know well. “Every terrible thing I’ve ever done—and you’re just…holding my hands. Like they’ve never—”
Never hurt you, goes unsaid when she feels him tense beside her. And the worse, awful thought, the one she can’t begin to unravel in her own head: Like I’ve never hurt you.
Fiyero exhales, deliberately forcing the sigh to take away all the tension in his body. He lifts their clasped hands to his lips and kisses the lowest knuckle of her thumb. Then the joint of her wrist and hand. Then the side of her forearm. Finally, he lowers their hands to his lap and covers her hand with both of his.
“I’m not afraid of you,” he says.
It sounds so simple when he says it. But the magnitude of the statement rests in its simplicity. In how easy it is for him to say it. In how he just lets the words lie between them, how he stares at their hands with a soft smile, how he truly, genuinely isn’t afraid of her or the things she’s capable of doing.
“Not of you,” he continues, “and not of what you can do. Not of what you have done, either.”
Elphaba swallows, feeling something awful well up at the lines of her eyes. She hates crying, hates how weak it makes her feel, hates how vulnerable it leaves her.
But she’s safe here. She’s safe with him.
It’s just—she fears he isn’t safe with her. She loves him so much, she loves him more than she thought she was capable of loving anyone. She doesn’t ever want to be the reason he’s hurt. But wanting desperately not to ever hurt him does not mean she isn’t still capable of causing him pain.
She would do anything to keep him safe—she would, and she has, but the cost of doing that is one he paid a heavy price for. She wants him to be happy and healthy and alive and loved but the problem with this is that she cannot understand how she’s the person he allows to love him. The person he wants to love him.
“I love your body—” he says it like a simple, easy truth, despite his amused smirk; she laughs, a little wet and sad, but so grateful too— “and I love your hands. I love them because I love you, and they’re a part of you.”
She whispers, almost afraid of how tenderly he’s touching her, almost afraid of how badly she wants him to continue these prayers over stained hands no matter how undeserved, “Fiyero…”
He shakes his head and she trails away from a sentence she didn’t know the end of. “I know what these hands are capable of. I know what you’re capable of. And I love them, and I love you.”
“I love you too,” she murmurs. Though those words alone cannot convey the depth of her adoration for him, her devotion to him, her care for him, they’re still a start.
“You do this thing,” he continues, a wider smile all to show that he had heard her, “where you separate all these parts of you and your history like they aren’t all just you. And—don’t look at me like that, Elphaba, you know I’m right—and I’m not trying to tell you to stop doing that, because fuck knows I have no room to talk, but—but you need to know that I love all of these sides of you. Your hands, your body, your past, your right now.”
Elphaba swallows, feeling the tears finally begin to spill over onto her cheeks. She’s not sure what did it, what it was that broke her, but he kisses the back of her hand and a quickly cut off sob is wrenched from her throat.
Without letting go of her hand, Fiyero sits up straighter and then moves in one quick, graceful motion to straddle her thighs and sit over her lap. With his free hand, he swipes a thumb over her cheek to wipe away the tears.
“I love your skin—” he presses a kiss to the side of her neck— “I love your face—” a kiss to her cheek— “your hair—” a kiss to the top of her head— “your eyes—” a kiss to her other cheek— “and I love your hands.”
He takes her other hand in his, lifting both of her hands to his mouth and kissing her knuckles. He looks her in the eye then, and there’s such an open, raw look to his gaze that Elphaba can’t bring herself to break eye contact. She feels almost pliant under his hands; she feels almost like she could believe his words.
Keep looking at me, she wants to beg. Keep seeing me.
“I love your magic, too,” he says softly, kissing the pulse point of her left wrist. “It’s a part of you, Elphaba, and you don’t have to be happy about it, I guess, but you don’t have to hate it either. It’s just a thing that exists in you, something you’ve had to learn to control. And yes, you’ve done things you aren’t proud of. But nothing could ever make me afraid of you. Okay?”
“Okay,” she whispers.
“Good.” Fiyero leans forward and kisses her on the lips, gentle and easy. So unafraid. “I love you.”
He smiles, then, and it’s so bright and honest that for a moment, Elphaba forgets all of the terrible things in the world and in her past and she feels—for the first time—forgiven. And it’s not that she feels forgiven for the things she’s done, because oh, she knows it’s going to take more than a few kisses to move on from everything that happened in Oz.
No, it’s more that—it’s more that she’s spent a lifetime trying to make up for the fact of her being. She’s spent her whole life compensating for the fact that it’s her who’s there in this world. Her, all green skin and lanky limbs and sharp angles and hands with so much terrible, terrible magic. Her, so awfully powerful and so often out of control and angry and scared. Her, Elphaba.
And for the first time, all of that feels true and all of it feels like something she doesn’t have to apologize for anymore. Not to him. She feels like maybe she is loved, wholly and simply and in her entirety. Not despite of all she is and not because she’s finally successfully made up for being this way, but because of all of it.
“I love you too,” she murmurs into his lips. “Thank you.”
Now Fiyerabapril is over, I just wanted to thank everyone who participated and engaged with related content!
We noticed less people participated in Fiyerabapril than in Fiyeraba Feburary and so I created this quick survey to gauge why this trend may have happened. I am not bitter, I just have a background in User Experience Design lol.
I am hoping to plan more fiyeraba or wicked-related fandom events in the future, so it would be great to know what you guys are into and what did or did not work.
There are no questions about personal information, so the results should be anonymous. You are encouraged to fill out the survey whether you participated in Fiyerabapril or not!
A quick survey to gather feedback on the Fiyerabapril fandom month to better organize fandom events in the future!
