| Muse Cafe - September Special |
[Sep. 30th, 2007|11:56 pm] |
The light was all wrong, but that didn't stop it from being morning, no matter that this pale tasteless effort from a lonely sun wasn't any motivation at all to crawl out of bed. At least it wasn't a hardship to leave Fiyero; neither of them were quite sure why it was he needed sleep, or even if it was sleep he was having when he went so still, but even when he shared her bed at night there wasn't any warmth to share between them. Not like when she and Glinda had. . .
And there she went, the most important rule, the don't even think about Glinda rule, broken already, and her not even actually out of the bed. Elphaba snorted, and rolled over, bare feet hitting bare floorboards. She stared down at them, and wriggled her toes. Still green. After two months in this place of people who would ask her where she bought her colouring before they would hiss and cross the way not to meet her, she was able to note that really, her verdant skin against the gleaming wood made an attractive picture.
"As a still life with feet, you're a success. Congratulations. As you're not installed in an art gallery, perhaps there should be less stillness. I suppose you'd best keep the feet." Once she'd stood up, mechanical habit took care of washing and dressing, still in blacks, although her hat was left behind with only a gentle touch to shape the rim to a more pleasing curve. It hadn't been long enough to master the strange mechanical contraption in the kitchen, however, and after fifteen minutes of effort left her with nothing but a puddle of hot water on the counter and the echoes of language it was just as well her straw man hadn't heard echoing from the walls she took herself outside.
It might be an extravagance on the piecemeal income they were scraping together from odd and odder jobs, but she simply was not going to face the day without some of this strange elixir the locals called coffee. Since the magic of producing it was beyond her, that left the cafe. This early it would be deserted, but open, and the bells over the door sang as she entered, stopping to breathe in deep. When her eyes opened again, a single patron curled around a mug in a corner booth proved her partially incorrect, but Elphaba figured the world was allowed to mock her with the details as long as the important things fell into place. Once her own brew was safely in her hands, a draw was declared and she retreated to a table with a window view.
Potent, heady stuff, this coffee; somehow with the scent in her nose the sunlight felt warmer on her skin, the very air richer. Even as she properly woke, brain rousing to some semblance of functioning, a smile touched her lips. Even the ebb and flow of the people outside seemed a dance she could step into, finding a place in the pattern as neatly as Glinda might. And there she went again, breaking the most important rule for the second time that day. Smile faltering, Elphaba turned away, her shifting mood bringing a new perspective, and with it the realization that she shared the cafe this morning with someone burdened with more misery and heartache than she'd seen since leaving Oz.
More in sympathy with this place and these people than she'd perhaps felt in years, her heart reached out, yearning to shift the burden to something more bearable. Then, with something almost like a click, something shifted in her mind, a wave of vertigo crashing down on her. She struggled to breathe, ceramic whining protest as her hands tightened, and swayed as pressure stabbed through her brain, thought impossible through waves of pain.
"Eleka nahmen nahmen atum atum eleka nahmen." The chant slipped through her lips, carried on the barest whisper of breath to wind through the air, an almost visible gleam twisting around the weeping girl. A gasping, hiccupping sob and it was swallowed down. The witch could only watch, helpless inside a body she could not even feel as the power was pulled from her, twisting the threads of fate to some new pattern. Vision left, then, leaving something like blackness, something like blinding light pressed against her eyes. A bare moment to wonder, if this was what Fiyero saw, when he went dormant, and then the bells over the door jarred her free.
At some point a party of three had come in, clustered around the counter, still staring out the door after the girl who had just fled. A shocked silence hung in the air, pressure building as horrified realization grew. By some miracle none of them turned to the woman seated by the window, not realizing that if any explanation were to be given it would start with her. Elphaba wasn't in any shape to deflect questions, world spinning around her as she tried to think about what had just happened.
And there she went again, the rule more important than the most important rule of all, much more important than not thinking about Glinda, the rule about not somehow working the magic of the Grimmere to turn another life into a disaster, broken before she'd even finished her coffee. Elphaba sat frozen, mug cooling in her clenched hands, oblivious to the puzzled hum off conversation behind her. She hadn't even known about that rule. Wasn't that just. . . typical? |
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