A/N: Happy New Year! Please bear with these update times, I know my updates are about as often as the blue moon, but I'll try to do better this next year! In the meantime, a sort-of longer chapter! :)

Fiyero woke up slowly, eyes hesitantly adjusting to the concept of light, brain gradually assembling a picture in his mind. Once he was finally able to open his eyes, or rather, eye, because one was too swollen to let any light in, he looked around.

Oz, how bad did they torture me? Fiyero thought, groggily, though he didn't want to know. Where was he anyway? Where was Elphaba?

He gasped quietly, immediately regretting it as pain shot through his ribs. Where was Fae? What did they do to her? Was she okay? Did she get his letter? What-

Oh, shut up, idiot, what does it matter where she is if you don't know where you are? He looked around, moving his head as much as he could as his neck didn't seem to be so damaged. So they threw him in the dungeons.

At least I'm not dead, like last time he thought, grimly. Why hadn't they killed him?

"But for now we need him alive and here."

"Why?"

"Bait." The last word of the memory echoed through his head. Bait. Elphaba.

"Elphaba!" He yelled, instinctively, shooting up, then groaning with pain, dropping down again, and holding himself as still as possible until it passed.

"Who's there?" He heard someone's voice. It was very familiar.

"Huh?" he grunted, surprised. Then there were two voices.

"Fiyero?"

Elphaba raced up to the bars of her cell. "Fiyero? Where are you?"

"Um… in the dungeons?" she heard his voice from somewhere to her left.

"I figured out that much, idiot, I mean, where are you in relation to where I am!"

"Um… am I supposed to know the answer to that without knowing where you are?"

Elphaba slapped her forehead with her unhurt hand. "Okay, can you see me?" She stuck her hand through the bars of the cell and waved. She heard some shuffling around.

"Wait, should I Iook left or right?" Elphaba groaned.

"Right!"

"Got it!" he said, then a few moments later, "Which way is right?"

"Sweet Oz," Elphaba mumbled, before turning to Glinda. "Can you see him?" Glinda looked.

"Fiyero, stick your hand out!"

"Why?"

"Just do it!"

"Okay, okay…" There was silence for a few moments. Glinda looked back at Elphaba and shook her head.

"Fiyero, how long have you been in here?" Elphaba called out. There was another pause.

"Um, a few days? I don't really know. There aren't really any windows here." he said, then after another, shorter pause, "How long have you been in here?"

"Not even a day," Galinda answered for Elphaba. There was a long period where they just sat there. None of them knew what to do now. They were out of ideas, and basically all herded to the one place where they couldn't do anything. They were helpless, and completely in the hands of Madame Morrible.

"Did they do anything to you, Yero?" Elphaba asked, finally.

"Just chased after me a bit. Nothing serious. I got away," Fiyero said almost immediately.

"Then how did you get here in the first place?"

"Well, I mean, they got me at some point," he stuttered. Elphaba sighed.

"Tell me the truth."

"What do you mean? I am telling the truth!"

"No you aren't. You cannot keep it away forever."

"Fae-"

"Fiyero!" Elphaba scolded, sternly.

"Okay, they hit me a little. I passed out. Still nothing too serious. Don't worry," he finally said. Elphaba closed her eyes for a second, let out a breath, and then reopened them.

"How bad is it?"

"Not too bad. A couple bruises." she heard. She still didn't fully believe him, but she decided to let it slide. She backed away from the bars and leaned against the wall, crossing her arms and pulling her legs up to her chest. She had no more say in his response.

"Fae?"

"Hmm?"

"Please don't worry about me," he said, more gently.

"How can you expect me not to? I can't help it after what happened to you!" she responded, more sharply than she had wanted.

"Just, please try and… I don't know…" Fiyero's sentence tapered off there and the dismissal dungeon was left in quietude for what seemed like an hour, though no one could be sure. Elphaba tried to keep her concerns at bay, eventually resigning to staring at the rusted metal words nailed to the end of the hallway to her right:

South-Stairs: Severe Protection Unit Floor C

Ever since she sent that letter to Glinda, - what was it, three weeks ago? - there was that gnawing feeling of guilt at the back of her consciousness. She couldn't shake the feeling that she had caused all of them this pain because she just had to pay attention to that stupid, childish desire to live the happy ending that had longed for as a little girl.

Stupid, childish desires. That's all that happy endings were. Her father had told her that when she was little. She never fully believed him. Oz would have been much better off if she had just listened. Now she had them all in jail. Glinda could have been in such a good place if she still believed that Elphaba was dead. Or if she actually was dead. Or if she never had existed.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Elphaba mentally shook herself. She was becoming the bitter Wicked Witch again. All the thoughts from that dreaded night were flowing back in again. She could make good. She just wasn't trying the right way. She couldn't do it on her own. Glinda and Fiyero would help.

And then suffer more because of her.

"Elphie?"

"Yeah?" Elphaba tore her eyes away from the "S" in "Stairs" to look at the blonde.

"Am I going insane, or is someone looking at us?"

I never knew how big my wings were until now, Salean thought, crashing through the small, metal pipes as fast as he could manage. Wincing and cursing more than a few times, he did his best to navigate which pipes would lead him to the back of the palace, where he hoped that he could find the gauges to turn off the different systems in the castle. There must be one way out from there.

He knew that the plan was very unstable (looking over the whole thing made him feel very stupid), and relying on many things that should not be relied on, such as his sense of direction and knowledge of human living structures, but he had no other choice. Rather, he had much better choices, but he was too short on time to think of them.

Reaching an intersection, Salean staggered to a stop, wracking his brain on which way he had started, what ways he had turned, and which way he needed to go now. He heard the sound of breaking metal behind him. A long crack in the pipe extended from somewhere behind him to beneath his feet. In horror, he watched as a long sword crashed through the pipe two meters behind him, then again, closer.

You would think that they would be a little more subtle, he thought, clumsily fleeing down the pathway to his left in a quick, random decision. He could have been going the complete opposite direction that he wanted to be going, but it didn't really matter as long as he wasn't skewered on that blade anytime soon. Or ever.

Muffled shouts of, "He went that way!" and "To the left!" followed him down the ever narrowing pipe until he was surprised that he still fit in the pipe at all. However, the sound of the guards seemed to be fading. He couldn't hear anything. In the whopping third major mistake that day, he stopped, listening hard.

And then the floor caved beneath him. Startled out of his mind, he jumped up and yelped, narrowly managing to grab onto the remaining metal in front of him and scramble back into the pipe, somehow able to roll out of the way of the long sword extruding from the floor, missing it by a fraction of an inch and severely crumpling his right wing in the process.

And he was rolling down… down… down the pipe, going who-knows-where at an increasing speed until he finally seemed to have reached the bottom, colliding with a hard grate at the end. He shook himself lightly, regaining his bearings as he heard distant shouts of, "We lost him!" and "He went down there!".

Then, before he had even realized where he was, a surprisingly close voice almost whispered, "Am I insane, or is someone looking at us?"

A/N #2: To be quite frank, this year wasn't the best, but let's be happy and make the next year awesome! I'm terrible at these sentimental let's-look-over-this-year-and-everything-that-made-it-great sorts of things, but thanks to the people on this site for welcoming me and my stories. Your support is very much appreciated.

Reviews bring in the new year well! :P