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eurydicees · 1 month ago

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someone tell the court jester i love his smile

summary: elphaba and fiyero talk about what's true and real, and what's not. pairings: fiyero tigelaar/elphaba thropp words: 2992 warnings: none notes: not technically a prompt but this was inspired by conversations with @napo-con-fritas and @mollrat101 about fiyero with adhd and how the outsider perception of that might impact his self-perception and thus his relationship with elphaba. this fic kind of got derailed from the original topic lol, but thanks for the inspo n i hope u enjoy!

Fiyero is talking, but he’s not really saying anything. He’s just kind of rambling about something that Elphaba isn’t quite following. It’s something about a stray cat he had seen on the street that day while he was out shopping, and how the cat reminded him of someone he knew in elementary school, which somehow led his ramblings to something about the magical fish in a well at his family’s castle in the Vinkus.

She swears that she does usually listen to what he has to say—contrary to what seems to be the popular belief about their relationship, she does actually care about his thoughts and opinions—but something about this particular one-sided conversation is itching at the back of her mind like the final piece to a puzzle she’s been putting together for awhile now. She’s not quite sure what it is, but there’s something important that she’s missing.

He talks with his hands, she notices. He makes both large, exaggerated gestures as he talks just as often as he fiddles and fusses with whatever he can find around him: a piece of paper that he’s methodically ripping to pieces, a ring he wears that he’s usually twisting around or tossing up and down in his palm, a pen or pencil he spins around his pointer finger. It’s really whatever he can get his hands on.

Just generally speaking, Fiyero is constantly in motion. He’s not good at sitting still, or staying stagnant. He’s constantly bouncing his knee or tapping his fingers in basic rhythms against the table, shifting around in his seat during class, or toying with a strand of his hair that’s long enough to wrap around his finger and tug at. It feels like he’s just always a blur of movement, moving through the world at a velocity that Elphaba fears she sometimes has trouble keeping up with.

She doesn’t always know where he’s going at that pace that he runs with, but his mind is constantly running forward. He’s always halfway to the next thought, the third step ahead, before he’s finished with the first sentence. It makes for strange leaps and connections in their conversations and in his logic sometimes, but there is—again, contrary to popular belief—always a real thread from point A to point B.

Fiyero pauses his talking, looking at her with something unreadable on his face. “You’re not listening, are you?”

She blinks. She didn’t realize that she had gotten so caught up in her own thoughts and her analysis of her boyfriend. She loves him, and she knows him, and she knows better than to zone out like that. His ability to sense other people’s disinterest is sharper than she had thought it to be upon first meeting—but it didn’t take long after that realization to understand that this ability is so well-honed because of how hurt and subdued he gets over that disinterest.

“Sorry,” she mutters. She also knows better than to lie to him. He’s always been able to see right through her, somehow. “Just zoned out for a minute. Keep talking, I’m listening now.”

Fiyero licks his lips, studying her carefully. “What’re you thinking about?”

Elphaba shrugs, looking down at the book she had been reading before he wandered into her and Galinda’s room looking to spend time with her after being exiled by his roommate for the night. She’s curled up in her bed, a small crocheted blanket draped over her lap, while he sits at her desk chair.

He’s doing that thing, she notes to herself. The thing where he tugs at the ring on his finger—he always wears it on a finger that seems just a little too tight for it to fit right—then seems surprised that it comes off. And he’s bouncing his knee again. It’s not anxiety, because the rest of his posture is perfectly relaxed. He just doesn’t seem to get stillness.

She hums, trying to figure out how to put into words the things she thinks she’s maybe uncovering about him. The thing is that she’s not quite sure what it is exactly that she’s uncovered. She just knows that there’s something she’s missing about him, something that she wants to be allowed to understand.

Elphaba loves him, is the thing. She’s not quite sure when that development really took place, but after only a few weeks of dating, she’s pretty sure that he’s her first real love. He sees her, in a way that very few people have ever wanted to try to see her.

Most importantly, he actually wants her as she is. Not the dulled, dimmed version of herself that she sometimes wants to carve herself into for the sake of social acceptance. Not the Galinda-fied version of herself that she tentatively has been experimenting with. Not the fiery, angry, defensive version of herself that she falls back upon as a safety mechanism. No, he just wants her as she is and as she wants to be.

She wants to give the same thing back to him. She likes to think that she understands him well by now at least, but really she wants to give him the same sense of comfort that he’s given her. She wants him to feel at ease with her.

And then it clicks. That’s what it is. He is at ease, he’s by no means on edge when he’s around her, but he’s also still always keeping up what’s an act of sorts. It’s not that he’s being fake or lying in any way, it’s more that he’s still desperately trying to mold himself into something palatable, a pill that’s easy to swallow, the kind of person that’s easy to want.

He’s constantly trying to get her attention, trying to keep it, whether that’s by talking about things that neither of them care about or by telling prodding jokes until she laughs or asking her to rant about the latest book she’s read for hours. He’s constantly trying to keep her entertained, keep her laughing, keep her eyes on him.

Doesn’t he know? she wonders. I’m always looking at him, whether or not he’s being bright and loud.

It doesn’t matter if it’s easy to love him or not—which, at the end of the day, it was so easy to fall in love with him, even if she’s well aware that it’s much harder to keep him—and it doesn’t matter if he’s what she ever expected to want. It doesn’t matter if he’s keeping her entertained, not really.

What matters is that he’s there. What matters is not if he’s easy to understand or easy to want, what matters is that being around him is like being free. Being around him gives her the freedom to be who she wants to, gives her the bravery to try to be who she actually is, at the end of the day. Being around him is like being set alight, like waking up after a long sleep to find that the world is just that much brighter now.

What matters is that he’s trustworthy, and that he’s proved himself to be so again and again. What matters is that she cares about this boy who wormed his way into her heart despite all her defenses, despite all her crude remarks, despite all their differences. What matters is that—palatable, popular, suave, prettyboy or none of the above—she wants to stay at his side.

She’ll do the work of loving him, she’ll put in the commitment and the effort to keep up with him. It’s not about being easy to want or easy to love. For her, love is about the act of trying. And oh, how she’ll try for him.

Finally, she says, honestly, “I’m thinking about you.”

He raises his eyebrows at that. He’s back to tearing tiny pieces of a paper apart, shredding it into small squares that flutter to the surface of the desk and pile up there like paper snowflakes. “What about me? I was talking about the fish of my childhood, it’s not really anything important to my psyche.”

There it is—the way he downplays so much of what he says. Like he’s worried that she’ll think it has no value and so he’s trying to take the value away before she can do it for him. Something about that irks her a little; Elphaba has never wanted anything more than for him to trust her, with all of himself, and part of that is trusting that she cares.

“Do you think we would have been friends if we met as kids?” she blurts out.

It’s not really what she wanted to ask, not really what she had been thinking about, but the thought occurred to her when he asked that and she—she doesn’t really know the answer. She’s not sure if she even wants to know, but now the question is there, lingering in the air between them.

He blinks, clearly not expecting the question. He pauses, thinking as he rips up that piece of paper. It looks like a blank sheet from a notebook, so no important notes are getting destroyed, but she really hopes it isn’t from the nice notebook.

“I don’t know,” he says slowly. “You seem like you were pretty introverted as a kid, weren’t you? I might have been a bit too much for you. Too loud. Bright. Noisy.”

“I suppose,” Elphaba says thoughtfully. “It would have been nice if we could have gotten along.”

He shrugs, staring down at his pile of paper scraps. “I was…a lot. As a kid. Hard to handle.”

“Maybe.” Elphaba watches the deft, easy movements of his hands as he sorts the scraps of paper into piles of large and medium and small sizes. “I was, too. To be fair.”

He snorts. “What a pair we would have made. School jester and livewire introvert.”

Elphaba rolls her eyes at the comparison, but doesn’t deny it. She does kind of walk through the world like a livewire, constantly balancing on the edge of electrifying everything around her. It was even worse as a child and she’s well aware of that. She does think it was—at least partially—justified, given how people treated her, but still.

“School jester?” she asks, instead of arguing the point.

“Something like that,” Fiyero says vaguely, flapping a hand in some random direction as if to dismiss the phrase. “The reputation immediately prior to ‘heartbreaker prince’ was probably ‘court fool.’”

She wants to say that that sounds kind of harsh, kind of cruel to himself, but he says it so neutrally that she doesn’t really know what to do with it. He sounds less like he’s offended by the words and more like he’s long since accepted them as gospel.

She still wants to argue with him, tell him that he’s so much more than either of those things. She wants to tell him all of the things that she sees in him, all of the brilliant, beautiful pieces to his heart that add up to so much more than an archetype. She wants to tell him that heartbreaker and court fool are impossibly small, diminishing words compared to all that she knows to be true of him.

But for some reason, all of those words escape her. Maybe there just aren’t enough words in the language to explain all of that easily and simply.

Instead, Elphaba asks him, “Is that why you do that?”

“Do what?”

She looks down at the book in her lap, running her finger along the spine in a smooth, grounding motion. He’s gone back to tearing the paper in half and the rhythmic sound of ripping paper is another grounding sense.

“That thing you do,” Elphaba says, unhelpfully. He just stares at her, not understanding, and she sighs. He’s been receptive to this conversation so far, she might as well push her luck a little. Her words spill out faster, harsher, than she means them when she says, “That whole act. Like you don’t care about anything or want to try at anything, when I know you do. Is it because of that? Because you think that’s all you are?”

Immediately, something in Fiyero’s expression closes off. “Don’t psychoanalyze me, Elphaba.”

She swallows, looking up at him and standing her ground. She’s not sure it’s the right decision, but when has that really ever stopped her? “It’s just an observation.”

He raises his eyebrows again—the only sign that he isn’t actually upset with her. “And what exacty are you observing right now?”

“You’re never still,” Elphaba says. “Not physically, or mentally, or emotionally. You’re always moving onto the next idea or project, even if the first one doesn’t get finished. And the whole time, you’re trying to get people to keep up with you. Trying to keep them laughing.”

“Is that really so bad of a thing?” he asks, something heavy in his voice. “To want to keep people entertained?”

Elphaba shrugs. “Not necessarily.”

They’re both quiet for a moment, staring at that unsorted pile of ripped up paper. His hands have stilled, but his knee is bouncing again. He hooks his foot around at the leg of the chair to still himself, as if now that she’s pointed it out, he’s too aware of it. She wonders for a moment how much of this he’s actually ever noticed about himself.

Elphaba sighs again. She places the book on the nightstand and then neatly folds the blanket to her side so that she can stand up and cross the room to meet Fiyero at the desk chair. Slowly, she leans down to kiss him. It’s a tender, soft kiss; the kind of kiss that takes its time, because it’s in no rush to find anything more than what it is.

Fiyero’s hands go to her waist, pulling her into his lap without breaking the kiss. When they finally pull apart, she’s sitting on top of him with one of his hands on her waist and the other on her thigh. She has her arms resting on his shoulders, hands stretched out behind his head.

“But you’re more than that, you know.”

Fiyero frowns, clearly having lost track of the conversation. He opens his mouth as if to ask what she means, and then it sinks in. She can see the moment that it does, the moment that it all falls into place. It settles on his expression like the paper shreds settle onto the desk.

“And you don’t have to be the—the entertainment of the court for me to want to be around you.”

Saying all of this is awkward, and strange, and vulnerable in a way that Elphaba is unfamiliar with. She doesn’t really know how to express her feelings like this. Between the two of them, Fiyero is the one always murmuring praise and compliments and truths that she’s still working on believing.

You’re beautiful. So wonderful. So smart. The world in my arms. The moonlight pooling in my hands. Even if our time on this land is limited, at least I get this moment. Even if nothing else, I’m okay if I have this. Have you. So pretty. All mine, all yours.

“You’re enough as you are,” Elphaba says, looking into his eyes, not quite sure how to read his expression at the moment. “However you want to be. I don’t need you to be the court entertainment for me to want to spend time with you. I’m not going anywhere. It’s good enough to just be around you, loud and exciting or quiet and calm.”

She hesitates, waiting for him to say something. When he doesn’t, she chews at her lip for a moment before asking, “You do know that, right? That I’m not going anywhere if you tell a bad joke or a boring story or have a low day in general?”

“I—” he cuts himself off, clearing his throat.

He breaks eye contact, looking towards the desk and the pile of shreds of papers. One hand is tapping something out on her waist, a strange beat and pressure against her skin that she can’t quite place the melody of.

“I know,” Fiyero finishes, in the way you would acknowledge something you didn’t know before that moment. Then, a little more confident, “I know.”

She presses another slow kiss to his lips, bold in her ministrations of love as she moves her kisses to his cheek, to just below his earlobe, to his neck, to his collarbone. “It’s not a bad thing to be hard to handle. There’s very little you could do to scare me off at this point.”

Fiyero lets out a shaky breath, pulling back slightly so that he can look at her, actually study her expression.

Then he says the last thing she expected: “This is real, isn’t it?”

Elphaba blinks. “I would hope so.”

“No, I mean—” he waves a hand vaguely through the air, making some unreadable motion with it— “I mean, this is what it’s actually supposed to be like, isn’t it? I just—I lose track of things, and dates, and times. And I jump around my thoughts. And I don’t really know how to study. All things you value. But you’re here.”

“Yeah,�� Elphaba says slowly. “And I get angry and defensive, and snap at people, and sometimes throw things with my mind accidentally when I’m angry. And you’re here.”

“I am,” Fiyero says, a smile growing over his face. “I am here.”

Elphaba hums, and before she can reply, he’s kissing her again. He murmurs something into her mouth, something that she doesn’t quite catch, something that sounds like I love you but she can’t really be sure. They’ve never said that before.

Still, it’s kind of a shame he didn’t say it louder. She would have said it back. But for the time being, she just returns the kiss, and keeps the thought clenched close to her heart.

#this was banged out in like. an hour lol. so its not the most polished thing i've ever posted #but it entertained me to write so . whatever.#my writing #wicked #fiyeraba #fiyero tigelaar #elphaba thropp #fiyeraba fanfiction #fiyero x elphaba #elphaba x fiyero #wicked musical #wicked 2024 #wicked 2003

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