Chapter Text
The girl relaxes, sitting on the rickety fence. Below her feet, tall, dry, tan grass stirs, and beyond her it rolls like the waves of the fabricated ocean. The yellow road is an anomaly among the dried up farm setting. The girl munches on an apple from her apron pocket, eating it in a circular fashion around the core. Her short black hair shifts with the wind. She continually raises a hand to flatten it, but once she pulls her hand away it just moves again. On her feet are those damned, blood red, glistening and shining heels.
The Thief—the Witch—looks on from a tree branch across the road. Hidden behind the leaves and branches, she waits for a moment to strike. She leans against the trunk with her feet on a sturdy branch and her broom behind her. She is clad in a thick black dress with a plain black cloak thrown over it, held by a clasp at the base of her throat. The Thief misses her ornate, bejeweled orange traveling cape, but it naturally restricted the ability to merge with the shadows, with its bright fabric, sequins, and patterns and all. So she had to trade it in for a black one. The Thief has a hand in one of her pockets, and she bounces her dice with her fingers absentmindedly.
The girl on the fence turns to her left, the Witch’s right, and smiles. One of her friends, the blonde half-machine man, walks up, holding a crude bag fashioned from a thin dirty towel. He sits beside the girl stiffly, wearing a white shirt and the tight orange pants, signaling pure, modern, Emerald City style—the minimal kind, the less-is-more type of fad. The half-robot sets the towel on his lap and unties it, revealing a loaf of bread and cheese, and an apple, with most likely questionable freshness, though the Thief cannot tell from so far away. The girl, in her white shirt and blue skirt, beams. She says something. She takes a chunk of cheese and chews, dropping her finished apple.
The half-Cat and half what—Vinkus, possibly?—the half-Cat, half Vinkus woman and that foolish tan man come soon as well, the other two. All four of them, the ragtag group of pals, sit along the abandoned farm’s fence. They chatter and giggle. The Thief scowls. She needs to get closer, so as to hear them, but how?
And then she spots an opening. The part human, part machine thingy jostles the tan man, making him fall. As the robust adventurer pulls the robot down as revenge the Witch leaps to an adjacent tree. One of her booted feet slips; she grips onto the trunk and spews rapid curses to herself. She had learned all this years ago, though, so it is likely she has lost some of her touch—but why now, of all times? No matter. The friends didn’t notice her. She moves into a more steady position, and stills. She can hear the group now.
“So you will truly do it,” asks the half-Cat, half-whatever woman curiously, voice slurred, running a dark hand through her blonde hair, “you will really kill her?”
“Oh, I hope I mustn’t,” says the girl with the shoes concernedly. She puts her piece of cheese on her lap and looks down modestly, the epitome innocence and sympathy. “I really don’t want to kill her.”
“You have to, love,” says the blonde Cat-Vinkus hybrid gently, “you heard the Wizard—‘Kill the Wicked Witch-Thief of the West.’”
The girl sighs. “I know,” she says miserably.
Below, from the ground, with the robot-man on top of him, the man in green says, “If it helps any, Janey-dear, I’d gladly kill her for you.”
“Oh, thank you Jake,” says the girl, “but I reckon the Wizard would know, and I reckon it’s I who must kill her. He said so himself.”
“Well,” says the robot-man, rolling off his joyful friend, “don’t feel bad about her impending death, for I know I can’t.”
“Yes,” says the adventurer with his accent, pulling the robot-man, who rolls his eyes, towards him again and holding him tenderly, “don’t feel guilty. No one does—in fact, people, me included, have been looking forward to her death for years, with all the chaos she’s made. You’ll be doing a service to us all.”
The Cat-woman snaps to him, “Stop being so insensitive!” But then she softens and adds, turning back to the girl, “What he says is true, though. She does deserve it.”
“I heard she was born a man, castrated at birth, and left to die,” the buccaneer pipes up, “an illegitimate being from the very bloody start.”
The Witch falters on the tree. So detached, she hasn’t kept up with the recent circulating gossip. She listens more closely.
“How awful!” exclaims the young maiden, hands at her face, “What a dreadful childhood she must have suffered through!”
“Oh, please,” says the robot-man, as the adventurer holding him nuzzles the section of his neck that’s flesh, “it’s nature, I say, not nurture, that made her who—or what—she is. She could have been born Ozma royalty, and she still would have turned out as wicked as she did.”
“Really?” the adolescent asks.
The machine-human pushes his slowly growing suggestive friend-lover-thing away. “Certainly.”
“Oh, boo,” says the Cat-woman, her ears and tail twitching, garbed in a pink dress. “This talk of nature-versus-nurture is making me fall asleep. Why don’t we talk of something exciting? Like how she was supposedly the lover of that fashion-designer-turned-saint, what’s-her-face, the one stationed in Emerald City.” At this, from her point in the tree, the Thief glowers.
“You mean ‘her’ as in another woman?” the young girl asks her Cat friend. “She is attracted to the same sex?”
“That’s what they spell, love, that’s what I’m saying,” says the Cat-woman mischievously. She wraps her tail around her own waist.
“Well, we can’t particularly blame her for that, can we?” says the robot-man, smirking.
“Hush you,” the Cat-woman laughs, jabbing her friend with her tail.
The machine sniggers and grabs the Cat-woman, who shrieks, and pulls her down, and the adventurer scrambles away just in time. The robot-man straddles the blonde and pins her down to the ground, and all the friends laugh.
The girl sobers, however, upon looking at the horizon. She points. “Look,” she says, “a storm is coming!”
The other three look towards as well. “But it’s so far off,” says the robot-man nonchalantly, though he looks anything but. “Surely, we are safe?”
“No,” says the girl, vaulting off the fence. “We are not—I know storms, I grew up around them. Dirk, you will be shocked, you will! And those trees over there, they are no good, we may be hurt.”
Her friends scramble up, frantic, now, with the Cat-woman shaking and the robot-man and his boyfriend thingy holding each other worriedly. “Come,” says the girl, “I see a farmhouse over there, up the road! Follow me, now, quickly!”
They run off along the yellow brick road, hurrying, looking like a clutch of fools. And those damn shoes, out of her grasp again! What will it take?
The Thief looks to the horizon and sees that there is, truly, a nasty bulbous storm cloud, surrounded by thunderheads, advancing. The sky is purpling quickly. She glances at the meager group and finds them now unreachable, and the Witch would be an idiot to brace the storm unguarded.
So she jumps to the tree she was at previously, grabs her broom, and scales down. She looks to the sea of grass and spots a small shed the fools overlooked on the horizon. She crosses the road, traverses the grass, broom in hand, and reaches the shed. She undoes the latch and steps inside.
It is dark and reeks of hay and manure, but it is nothing the Thief cannot bear. She situates herself on a pile of hay in the corner, tucking her broomstick beside her.
She will overcome. She will rise again, just as she has before. Her peers and the political climate of Oz had knocked her down, berated her, beat her, but hadn’t they and it also made her able, made her into something powerful and unstoppable?
No matter that the acquaintances had ran away. The Thief, the Witch, can wait. She will see them again.