Chapter Text
Boq was still small enough that shadows from passing wagons seemed to fall over him like entire storms when he first understood that the world wasn’t built for Munchkins. He stood beside his mother on the dirt road that led to their farm, the spring sun bright overhead, yet he was swallowed in the shade of a Gillikinese merchant’s enormous cart. The merchant’s boots thudded on the ground as if each step were a reminder: someone else’s feet ruled this land.
His mother nudged him forward with a basket of early-season squash. “Offer it nicely, Boq. Visitors appreciate proper manners.”
Boq lifted the basket with both hands, his thin arms trembling slightly under the weight. He stepped forward and spoke clearly—he always tried to speak clearly—but the merchant didn’t look down. He didn’t even glance. Instead, he addressed everything he had to say to Boq’s mother, as though Boq were simply a post in the ground holding up the basket.
His mother accepted the coins for the squash. The merchant thanked her, nodded toward her, and climbed back onto his wagon without a single acknowledgment that Boq had spoken at all.
As the wheels rolled away, Boq lowered the now-empty basket. A strange tightness gathered in his stomach. Not anger, exactly. More the distinct, sharp sense that something deeply unfair had just happened, and that everyone around him seemed to think it was perfectly normal.
Boq watched the wagon disappear down the road and wondered why “normal” always seemed to mean “someone taller gets everything.”
He didn’t yet have the language for it.
He didn’t know the word politics.
But he understood the shape of the problem.
Life in Munchkinland was a patchwork of bright fields, orderly farmhouses, and people who tried very hard to be pleased with their lot. Munchkins were proud of their farmland, of their communal spirit, of their industriousness. Yet Boq saw—far earlier than most children—that the pride they held tightly never extended beyond the border.
To outsiders, Munchkins were quaint.
Small.
Mild.
Obedient.
And their rulers—always from elsewhere—seemed to prefer it that way.
Boq’s father told him not to worry about it. “We’ve always been governed by others,” he said. “It’s just the way Oz works.”
But Boq didn’t like that answer. Just the way Oz works sounded like a lullaby for those who didn’t want to think too hard.
Boq wanted to think.
He wanted to watch.
He wanted to understand why decisions about their land were made in Emerald City halls where no Munchkin voice was ever heard.
He became an observer long before he became anything else.
He watched the mayor’s meetings from afar, lingering near the edges of crowded gatherings, listening to the way officials spoke about harvest quotas as if the farmers weren’t standing right there.
He watched how traveling soldiers of the Wizard’s administration looked down the moment they entered Munchkinland—as if the very air shrank to match the people.
He watched how quickly Munchkins apologized. For stepping aside. For speaking up. For existing in the way of someone taller.
Observation became instinctive. Boq learned to read expressions and tones of voice the way others read storybooks. He sensed tension before it appeared. He understood which adults were quietly resentful and which had resigned themselves long ago.
When other children played games in the fields, Boq found himself drifting toward adults’ conversations. Not eager to join—simply eager to know.
He asked questions constantly.
Not “why is the sky blue?” but “who decides what we pay in taxes?”
Not “where do storms come from?” but “who decides where the roads go?”
Not “why can’t I stay up later?” but “why do officials from other provinces govern us instead of someone from here?”
His teachers called him inquisitive.
His father called him nosy.
His mother just smiled quietly and said, “He sees things.”
And Boq did.
He saw how often Munchkins were dismissed as unserious.
How often decisions about their future were made by people who had never lived among the blue-painted houses or walked the small stone bridges.
He saw that the Wizard’s government preferred a quiet province to a powerful one.
And somewhere between watching and wondering and worrying, Boq’s curiosity hardened into resolve.
If no one else would speak for Munchkinland, he would.
He didn’t tell anyone at first—not even his parents. It felt too big, too strange, too daring to say aloud. A Munchkin boy studying politics? Leaving home? Going to a university like Shiz?
It sounded like a joke.
But it wasn’t a joke to Boq.
At night, lying on his small bed under the sloped rafters of the farmhouse, he made silent promises to himself:
I’ll learn how the Emerald City works.
I’ll learn how to make people listen.
I’ll bring a Munchkin voice to the places where decisions are made.
I’ll change the way the world sees us.
He didn’t imagine glory. He imagined balance. He imagined fairness. He imagined Munchkins standing straight, not bowed.
He imagined, most of all, being seen.
By adolescence, he studied every book he could find—history of Ozian governance, speeches by past ministers, maps of provincial borders. The village librarian, a kindly older otter named Thessa, began slipping him advanced texts under the counter.
“You read like someone who’s preparing for something,” she said once.
Boq only shrugged, cheeks warming. “Maybe I am.”
Thessa leaned closer, eyes gleaming. “Then prepare well. People underestimate the small. But underestimated people often change the world, because no one sees them coming.”
Boq remembered those words for years.
His determination set him apart from other Munchkin boys his age. They teased him for carrying books instead of tools and mocked the way he observed everything before speaking. But ridicule only sharpened his focus. If anything, it taught him something useful: people who laugh at ambition are usually the ones who have none.
He practiced speaking aloud in private—slowly, clearly, with the confidence he didn’t yet feel. He learned to steady his nerves before addressing authority. He learned that watching people was the first step to understanding them.
And understanding people was the first step to influencing them.
By the time Shiz University sent its acceptance letter, Boq didn’t celebrate with loud joy. He felt something deeper, steadier, like finally stepping onto the path he’d always known he’d walk.
Munchkins rarely attended Shiz. Even fewer studied government. But Boq had not let the world’s expectations shape his own.
He would go.
He would learn.
He would become someone the Wizard’s government could no longer ignore.
Boq stood on the hill above his family’s farm the night before leaving, hands in his pockets, wind brushing his face. The fields glowed under the fading sun—small, orderly, familiar.
And he whispered into the breeze, not expecting answers:
“I’ll come back. And when I do, things will be different.”
It wasn’t just hope.
It was a vow.
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The day the carriages from Shiz pulled into the wide courtyard, Boq felt a thin, precise kind of triumph settle through his chest—the sort of satisfaction that comes when a plan, long nursed in private, finally crosses the line between imagination and fact. He had been accepted. He had come. He had left the small, painted fences of Munchkinland for the slate roofs and soaring turrets of a school that taught power in the language of law and rhetoric. For a Munchkin boy who had learned early that his people were most often ruled, not rulers, it felt like arriving in a city that might at last let him speak.
The courtyard was full of laughing students and nervous parents and trunks of trunks—bright banners snapped overhead, professors gave curt, cheerful orders into the bustle, and an enormous notice board declared the semester’s lectures in bold copper type. To Boq, everything was sharp and electric. The air itself seemed to hum with the promise of lessons that would explain how decisions were made—who made them, and why.
He wandered with his acceptance letter tucked into his inner pocket like a charm. That letter had been the answer to years of small, stubborn work: thrifted coins saved from chores, extra shifts at harvest, a dozen long nights with borrowed books. He thought of his parents—his mother’s quiet confidence, his father’s pragmatic caution—and felt the particular sweetness of having actually done it. People in Shiz would not be able to ignore him because of his size. They would have to reckon with whatever he learned here.
Then she appeared.
Galinda walked into the receiving hall like she owned the light. Boq had known of her name—who didn’t?—but the name had always been just a clear bell in the rumor-soup of Oz.
Seeing her in flesh collapsed that distance into something urgent and unmanageable. She was taller than most girls, carriage proud, hair arranged into a halo of practiced perfection. She laughed as if she had already won a game, and the laughter stuck to the room like a bright, gilded ribbon.
There was an ease about her that made everything around her seem softer. People turned toward her without being told. Luggage caring was offered, paths opened. Her confidence carried an effect like wind around a lamp: it made other shapes visible only because she was so luminous. Galinda’s popularity was not a thing of whispers; it was visible as a physical force, and for the first time Boq felt himself slightly off-balance in its wake.
He watched her as he watched other important things—first to note, then to learn. She greeted acquaintances like sovereigns greet ambassadors, with attention precise and warm enough to be sincere, but measured. She made everyone she spoke to feel like the most interesting person in the world for three minutes. It was almost cruelly enchanting.
When she approached the little cluster of new students where Boq stood, someone nudged him forward with an encouraging elbow. He straightened, heart noise soft but present.
“Hi!” Galinda’s voice was bright enough to cut a corner of the courtyard’s shadow. “I’m Galinda Upland. What’s your name?”
Boq nearly choked on it—the simplicity of being asked. For a moment his reply came out too formal, the habit of practiced sentences in front of authority: “Boq, from Munchkinland. Studying political administration—”
Galinda’s eyes—not unkind, only quick—glanced down at his hands clasped around the strap of his satchel. “Boq. That’s a cute name.” She said cute the way one might touch something fragile and precious. “Political administration? Oh, my! You’ll have to tell me all about how to fix things.” She smiled, and Boq felt the warmth of being seen in public for the first time in a place that mattered.
They exchanged a few more words—Galinda ripe with easy charm, Boq careful with his tone—enough to leave him buoyed. Her attention was like early applause. He liked her. He liked her a great deal. Something unfamiliar in his chest shifted when he imagined her attention lasting beyond the courtyard.
Nearby, another girl stood apart from the cluster of newcomers, hands folded over a satchel the way a person might fold their hands to hold themselves upright. She wore sensible clothes—no halo of hair, no practiced smile. Nessa, Boq heard someone murmur, and with that single syllable an image layered over the memory of her posture: small, slightly slumped, eyes that did not ask for the world’s attention. Boq’s regard slid toward her with a tenderness that surprised him. There was the outline of a story on her face—maybe homesickness, maybe caution. He felt pity, the soft, immediate kind that rises for people who have too much weight in their chests. She was struggling to move her wheelchair and luggage at the same time.
He stepped closer, offering an awkward, well-meaning smile and a hand towards her luggage. “Hi—Nessa, is it?”
She gave him a small, surprised look and returned the politeness with practical reserve. “Yes. Thank you.” There was nothing performative about her gratitude. It sat like a coin placed on a table and left there. Boq thought of Thessa, the librarian back home, and how she had slipped him books as if to say, We keep things in the quiet places. It felt natural to protect Nessa in the way one protects small plants around a stubborn fence.
Then the student body’s murmurs changed pitch—an unusual sound, like a sudden, confused intake of breath—and Boq’s eyes were dragged to the entrance.
Elphaba stood there.
He could not have said why his first sensation of her was not the natural ignoring he had been conditioned to expect. Everyone else had said things about oddities: that she was unlike the standard beauty of Shiz, that she moved with an angular energy. But nothing had prepared him for the color. Green. It was not the pale, theatrical tint of a painted performer; it was a clear, living tone that pooled across her features as if she had grown from it. The green made her neither monstrous nor pretty in any ordinary sense. It made her unforgettable.
Boq felt something like a wind in his chest—part curiosity, part alarm. People’s conversation snagged; a few students laughed too loudly, and others looked away with polite stiffness. Some pointed with thin politeness. Galinda’s smile sharpened for an instant—interest adding a tilting charm to her gaze—but Elphaba’s face remained unreadable, an expression that withheld anything like invitation.
Then it happened. A clumsy spat between two new boys by the stair—one shoved the other over a trunk, and the trunk’s corner struck a stack of wooden slats. Voices rose. An unfair, old habit of campus quickness—lining up sides, testing muscles of insult—began to unspool.
Elphaba moved.
She did not shout. She did not rush in the way a friend would. She placed her hand out in a small, decisive gesture, and the air around the fallen trunk seemed to tighten. A breeze that had nowhere to come from curled and rose like a thread of living thought. The slats shivered and lifted as if something intangible had tugged them up into the air, arranging them into a neat, uncomfortable barrier between the quarrelsome boys.
Gasps threaded through the hall. Boq’s fingers went cold. He had watched displays—parlour tricks, old enchantments at festivals—but this was different. There was force in Elphaba’s movement that felt like a will at work—clear, unmediated, not decorative.
When the boys backed away, their bravado complicated by the sudden intervention, Elphaba lowered her hand. The slats fell to the floor with a soft thud, ordinary as thunder after lightning. For a moment no one moved. Then murmurs formed and spread like color through a stain.
Boq felt his heart beat faster—not in fear alone, but with a genuine, private astonishment. There was something about that power: terrifying, yes, because it could reorder bodies and space at a thought; but also—he found himself admitting, to no one—beautiful in its truth. It announced a person who could not be easily arranged by the expectations of Shiz.
When she turned, their eyes met for a fraction of a breath. Boq, who had spent years perfecting unreadable composure, felt a small, ridiculous flush. For an instant, he thought she might scowl at him for watching. She did not. Her gaze skimmed past him, distant and unreadable.
He watched her walk away, green against the polished stone like a brushstroke that did not belong yet would not leave. The sound around him resumed with a different air—tension and wonder braided into the regular noise of arrivals.
After the commotion, a professor whose robes fluttered with a gentility older than the building herself came through to give a short, clipped welcome and assign rooms. Boq had pictured the moment many ways in his head—sitting in a hall, hearing his name called, being assigned to a roommate who would share insights and study habits, who would become an inevitable part of the social training he thought university life required.
When the list was read, he found his name and saw the room number beside it. He followed the others along the long corridor—students laughing, reunited friends plotting evening gatherings—until they reached the doors of their floor.
He opened his room and felt the hollow of disappointment before it had a chance to shape fully. The bed on the opposite side was made, but no trunk sat there, no coat hung from the peg. The other bed was empty. The quiet room smelled faintly of dust and possibility. For the first time since he had stepped out of Munchkinland, Boq felt alone in the specific way of being without a compatriot.
Roommates, he had always believed, were social tools as much as companions—practice partners for speech and argument, people who rubbed off habits, who introduced you to small rituals of belonging. He imagined late-night debates humming under shared quilts, someone to trade notes with, someone to watch reputations be made and broken together. He had wanted that friction; he had sought the polishing heat of peers.
Instead, he sat on his single bed, fingers to the fabric, and felt the absence as an ache.
He tried to reason it away—perhaps his roommate had been delayed; perhaps they would return with apologies and snacks and an easy way to talk. He told himself he could make do. He took out his acceptance letter and read the neat cursive printed with the university seal, and the printed words carried the small triumph again: Admitted to the Department of Political Administration.
But triumph and elation mingled awkwardly with the slow, private loneliness. He had wanted companionship to learn the subtleties of life at Shiz—how jokes landed in dining halls, what tone commanded attention in tutorials, which professors were kind and which were indifferent. He had wanted someone to share the early, embarrassing missteps of a boy too used to being overlooked. The room was too still to teach him that.
He dressed his satchel with notebooks, maps, and the small, worn copy of Ozian governance he had carried since childhood. He placed it on the desk by the window as if making small deposits into the guarantee of the day. Then he lay back and tried to catalog the impressions from the hall.
Galinda’s light had brushed him like a favor. Nessa’s face had pulled at something protective in him. Elphaba—Elphaba’s green had stuck like paint across his memory, and her power had unsettled him in a way that made his chest both cold and oddly bright.
He thought of how easy it was for people to be taken by surface charms—the laughter, the halo of hair—and how something different could be overlooked until it could not be. He thought of the Munchkin habit of quiet endurance; of how sometimes those who endured accumulated a steady insistence of their own.
The loneliness nudged him into a decision. He would not waste precious days pining for a roommate he had not met. He would use the solitude as a laboratory. He would observe. He would attend every lecture that promised insight into ceremony and policy, every tutorial that offered case studies, every debate that turned on tone and the manner of asking questions.
There would be friends, perhaps. There would be alliances. There would be rivalries. But for now—and perhaps for a long while—he would be an attentive student of people, a careful watcher of how influence moved in halls and how attention could be captured or deflected.
He closed his eyes and made the soft, private vow he had made once before on the hill at home: to learn enough to bring a voice back to those who were not heard. The vow felt steadier here among stone and torchlight, among students who wished to step into adulthood by argument and oration.
Outside, the campus kept living—luggage slammed, decisive footsteps, laughter like a banner snapping in wind. Inside, his small room held a single bed, a desk, and a quiet man who had come from a place where people were often governed by others. He had achieved much just by arriving. But the first lesson of Shiz, he realized as sleep tugged at his eyes, might not be found in a lecture hall at all. It might be the patient, hard business of watching people do what they always do when they think they are unseen.
And Boq had always been especially good at that.