Liir's Brain: Part 2


Liir's Brain: Part 2 - The Witch

Whatever Liir says, he considered the Witch his mother, just as she considered him her son. Neither of them (yes, neither of them) ever acknowledged the bond for what it was because it made both of them uncomfortable (perhaps because neither of them could be what they should have been in those roles). The sticking point wasn't how either of them thought, but what they were willing to believe, both of themselves and of each other.

Elphaba acted many times in her capacity as mother. The first time was in obtaining Killjoy, the family dog, for Liir to be friends with. While the observation of Liir's friendship was made by Oatsie, it was Elphaba's use of the bees to get rid of the cook which provided the dog for them. She saw that Liir was a rather fat, lonely child who tended towards awkwardness and manipulated things so as to give him the one friend he seemed able to handle.

The example of the fishwell, used previously, is both an example of her failing and succeeding as his mother. No, she didn't notice him gone and she hadn't gotten him a bed, but she was also the one to try and resuscitate him when he'd nearly drowned despite her pain at touching water. The child was soaked, his lungs filled with water, and she still worked on him. This time, with Liir nearly dead, is also the only time where we see Elphaba genuinely lose her head. She gets upset, she goes into rages, seems to almost lose her mind at various points, but when Liir is almost drowned is the only time she goes into a frenzy and appears entirely human. Nanny even compares her in that moment to her own mother, Melena, an interesting echo considering the kind of mother Melena was.

Following the actual event, Elphaba murdered Manek by making an icicle fall on him a day later after she heard that it was Manek who tricked Liir into the fishwell. She killed a child in defense of her own, whatever she said about that fact. And afterwards, when Liir was well, she tried to touch him, to be that mother... but children are too honest by half and when she put her hand on him, he shuddered from how unusual it was from her and she got scared off. She didn't try again.

Ever, really. Mother, she seemed to find, was not the position for her and Elphaba, unfortunately, didn't have much patience for things she wasn't suited for.

Liir, on the other hand, didn't know how to be a son.

Instead of demanding love or attention or anything else, he seemed to think that he could work his way into her good graces. No doubt, Elphaba saw some reflection of her own attempts to that end in Liir; Elphaba's father Frex had always 'loved' Nessarose more because of her religious fervor and her normal skin color, but it was Elphaba he'd trusted to be competent. It just never 'got' her anywhere, never increased his fatherliness towards her. It's an unfortunate tendency of people to react the worst to traits in their children that mirror their own and it would be very very human of her to react with frustration to the behavior that didn't work for her.

His physical traits at the time set him apart from her (he wasn't green, he was rather fat, and somewhat retiring) and so he felt that he couldn't approach her. He didn't feel connected to her and the seeming apathy from him was mirrored in her. Eventually, this distance grew to the point where it became more comfortable than the connection. Some part of Liir was frustrated by this, and another part was angered by it. He used the title of "Auntie" to stress this distance, knowingly to upset her as Elphaba lets us know in later sections of Wicked.

"Don't you Auntie me; you know that makes me sick."

It became a pecking game: she would keep him out of her work and ignore him and he would go to the soldiers and ignore her. Instead of being the mother, she acted like another child, reciprocating his behavior instead of acting the adult and breaking the cycle, no doubt because her own mother had laid down the example of childish avoidance through her drug abuse and numerous affairs. She couldn't break the 'game' to make that connection again, establish them as mother and son; by the time she'd gotten around her avoidance issues, her pride stood in the way. Pride and fear, the same fear that kept Liir from attempting a connection in the first place.

The important thing, though, was that he loved her and she loved him. And they both knew it. And they both acknowledged the bond. The problem was that while the other one refused to acknowledge the bond, neither of them could move forward or backward. The very traits that showed them to be family held them in a stalemate that unfortunately was only broken by Elphaba's death.

Elphaba's death changed everything.

She wasn't there to ignore anymore and that just meant he had to pay attention to her, remember every piece and every moment, savor every memory he had of her. She wasn't there to fight him so there was nothing to fight. He had to acknowledge what she was to him, what he was to her, except unlike Elphaba who had the a sense of certainty about Liir (she named him as Fiyero's son in her thoughts), Liir had no such certainty (and no reason to have such certainty) about Elphaba. The distance between adult and child was suddenly very great because she had had a dozen other things, other people, other places to base her sense of identity on and Liir had none of that. The stalemate that had held him back had also held him up; it was all he'd had. And now she was dead.

You can't win an argument with a ghost, can't win a staring contest with a ghost. And above all, you can't wait someone else 'out' when they're dead. So many questions unanswered, things left untied and undone, and unlike Elphaba who was gone, Liir had them hanging over his head, unknown seemingly forever. Without Elphaba to be obstinately not his mother, he had no reason to think she ever was; the 'game' was very much over and no one won.

Liir's mourning was very businesslike (avoidance, very familiar!) and angry. There was frustration there, the frustration of someone who realizes they'd been stupid and missed an opportunity, and more than likely guilt; the last thing she'd heard him say, after all, had been that she was a hag.

The fact that she'd been such a figure of infamy made everything all the worse. Liir saw the graffiti on the street, heard the Animals speak of her; she was such a grand, great figure for them and he's very very 'aware' that he isn't. What connection he had with her was strained even further as the perception of her became more and more epic in a greater context than he was used to. To him, she'd been Elphaba, Auntie Witch, his guardian and not!mother. Hearing about her in this context almost made him feel as if he hadn't known her at all and all those things she'd kept from him were jammed in his face, pieces of her denied to him.

But it did cement the one connection he did have: she was his Witch. He guards her memory, who and what she really was, very firmly because it is all he has of her, the only thing he's sure of. There's nothing he can do about the questions unanswered, about what they might have been, about the connection they'd denied so strongly it was practically it's own creature... but he can keep what they did and what they had, what was sure and what really happened. That's his, because he doesn't have anything else. He doesn't know how to deal with the business she left him, or the differences between them, or all the history that she had that was there but never introduced to him... but he has the time that they did spend together, the parts of herself she did share with him.

She's his, and he knows that because he's always known that... even if he will never, ever be completely and totally sure that he was hers.

And that is, unfortunately, the best it can be.

End Part 2