Chapter Text
She had braced herself for the odious melody of pure agony. A sound that never would've reached her ears on the highlands her parental chateau resided on, or the salons of quilted walls and mosaic tile warmed most days by her feet alone. She'd prepared, with what little time she had, for the offensive screeching every child from Gillikan to Munchkinland had learnt to fear and parody in equal measure. A cryptid song one must always associate with the nastier of terrors; but never a siren, which it had effectively become to Glinda--always straying from the light despite it's great (and only growing) perimeter.
She heard what the bourgeoize of Emerald City chirped behind laquered, gold-plated doors: Elphaba Throppe a creature of great persuasion, more danger on land than in the sky. Seduced our very own Mr. Good-- what a travestiosity! And in the darker nooks of the room-- might the good witch truly be so dull as to lose her suitor to a troll? a mangled wretch? a monster? And Glinda didn’t know what to make of it-- so much confusification, obfuscation, plain ignorance. And truth, more truth than their vulgarities merrited. She was the wretch-- closer than any of them might've ever imagined-- the troll. Thrice the betrayer and twice the betrayed. And Elphie Throppe, well, she was far more bewitching than any half-baked nursery rhyme could ever hope to give voice to.
So now, as the Wicked's screams of terror and pain intermingled with sobs of pure exhaustion, and plain anguish-- as Glinda was subjected to what must've been a bucketful of stale rain water fall alongside thicker, piping rich blood-- she collapsed. A tear streaming down her clavicle into the stiff boning of her dress, already straining with each rapid lungful of air (insatiable as she was to take more from this world than it took from her). Her throat raw from a scream left unscrumpt. Brittle wood barely muffled sounds of the mewling, dying, animal howling and blubbering on the other side. In a voice almost painfully small, something painfully her.
A whimper fell from Glinda's lips, a pounding in her temples almost overpowering the moment, but such an ignorance would be a mercy she could not stomache.
And then a gasp, a small thing, a gurgle really, from Elphaba-- a silhouette torn in half-- collapsed in on herself. The Good hadnt expected this to be easy, any of it, but its so much uglier than she could've imagined. So much crueler. She felt her muscles lock and burn with it.
And she understands that this very evil has kept her company for seasons now. In her home. Rather, she played house in a palace of devilry. She danced on the very floorboards that concealed the bodies of her Oz kin. Her memory fails her, but, who is to say she hasn't committed the very inhumanities performed before her now? Time and time again.
She spares a glance out the broom closet door to where Elphaba stood just moments ago, sees young dorothy stood stock still, like a manekin in a department store, and shaking like a twig. She slips on something, those heels of her's ruby red not with pigment of a rose moon, but with something else. And Glinda feels outside of herself entirely.
Like a trick of the wind, like the last breath of her bubble carriage before it bursts, like wild summer grass underfoot, an invocation: "...Glinda...".
She seems to phase through the door itself-- her first true feat of magic?-- Glinda cannot imagine that a second of time or breath of air should ever stand between her and Elphaba when, instead, she might be at her side not a clock tick later. She arches into her very warmth, as though magnetically compelled. A pool of tulle and chiffon where cobblestone floor meets still-sizzling flesh. So much red, and a sickly yellow, where tissue is the thinnest.
"Elphie." She strokes the shell of her ear in place of her cheek (where there is no flesh to share warmth in). She is faintly aware of the Grimmerie's state-- soaked; binding to hinge in crimson-- where it lay abandoned betwixt the two. Opened and fluttering. "You will be okay. You have to be okay. No matter what, Elphie", she whispers.
"Don't. Don't lie to me. " Her jaw clicks and seems to unwind as though she were a mechanical automaton; and Glinda had always wanted to understand the inner workings of Elphaba Throppe, but this is too much.
The little girl, with shoes far too big for her feet-- ambitions too large for her heart-- understandings too skewed for what the moment demands-- whimpers. Shaking in her slippers like the lion in her jolly gang, shoes clinking faintly on aging stone-- a twinkling like snow and magic. There is none today, but Glinda posthumously mourns how badly the moment demands it.
A nauseating minute later, Dorothy pulls her eye away from the butcherification in front of them and sneaks an anticipatory glance towards Glinda. Taking in the tear tracks and marooning pillow of her skirts. And slowly, quite brazenly, relocates her scrutiny to the gnarlific, twisting mass of wood and straw resting atop the Wicked's bony hands.
The girl takes a step forward, her intentions quite clear and the horrorition must show on Glinda's face, or voice, because she beckons the girl wait, and the girl ceases breathing altogether.
They share in a charged gaze. Silence swallows them, Glinda's breathing ragged with impending dread, the girl breathless entirely. The Good sniffles, "What is it your heart desires, Ms. Dorothy?" She waits a clock-tick, and another, "answer me please".
She breathes in. Out, as though briefly suffocated, and stutters, "The- The broome, Miss." A dead woman's shoes, a dead woman's broome-- what inane things ordinarily. Made into heirlooms in our hands, and made into grave robers the whole of Oz. The corners of her vision seem to white out, and Glinda stands.
"That broom won't bring you home, nor will those shoes. You were lied to, Dorothy. A lie that we can't reversicate, can't repair. Lies tend to break bodies and spirits, and the one you've been told is no different. Do you understand?"
Her lip quivers, "You're mistaken Ms. Galinda--"
"It's Glinda." She snipes, none too kindly.
"You're mistaken. The wonderful wizard himself reassured me that this alone would secure my return home." She smiles, a shaky thing. "He's wonderful. He knows."
Glinda's eyes burn with unshed tears and straining ducts; gooseflesh numb with the unforgiving chill trapped inside these stone walls. "No. However often you've told yourself so, angling to soothify your nerves, your guilt. You know thats not true. Leave, child." The girl walks backwards from Glinda, confusification and unease warring on her features. Shaky on her birdish legs, ankles nearly twisting with the dead weight that seems to encompass her very being.
Glinda rests her forehead on Elphie's sternum, tired, so tired. Nothing easing the prickling heat in her stomache, head, heart.
A whisper of pale air bites her shoulders, a hollow thunk knocks against ground, reverberates through bone. She lifts her head, splotches of red and pink litter her periphery. The girl is stood, back to the world, dulling heels in hand, splintering broom in the other. Stark exposed to Glinda in that moment, young and so very stupid.
"Leave." And when she ceases to move, eyebrows only arching nearer her hairline. The Good Witch stands, "What dont you understand, Ms. Dorothy? I said LEAVE!" She stands mere breathes away from her now. Glinda reaches out, less an invitation than demand. The girl only clutches her plunder tighter. She steps closer, and Glinda must really be a sight; dressed in nothing but blood and indignity, shame and heartbreak. Dorothy only staggers further, "Not without these." She whispers.
Glinda intercepts her, too wet palm tightening around her straining forearm. "Listen to me. You can stop this now, Dorothy, not everything has to be a fight." The adolescent struggles imperceptibly and ambles closer to her escape, dark corrider forboding. Glinda furrows her own brows, "Please".
She shakes her head, frustration clouding her eyes. A socked heel pushes against loose brick, and it drops so far down the doorway she inches towards, nary an echo follows. Promise of a stairway just beneath her step.
But overeager as a child can be, the stone beneath her bare feet is slick and smooth. A stumble evident in the hitch of her gasp‐- she sacrifices her footing escaping Glinda.
And as often precedes tragedy in this tale, the girl's balance lands entirely within Glinda Upland's hands. Supple, freckled skin pimpling under her glitterish nails. The Kansan youth scrambles against gravity. Whines like a cub.
"Please. Dorothy." She pleades, holding the girl's hand closer to her chest. The girl only stares at her, eyes as wide as platters, and beyond her. Beyond Elphaba, outside a window. And what must she see? A land as frought as her own? How much has the girl overlooked in lieu of attending to her own desires and inventions? Its a terrible thought, one that Glinda tries to disabuse her of by catching her eye. But her eye resists, "Miss Dorothy."
She finally looks at her, and Glinda understands that she must see so much of herself in that moment. That this child, too, realizes whatever good they might try and accomplish is only ever eclipsed by the breadth and reach of their sins. And so she must understand this, too.
Glinda doesn't let go of the girl's delicate wrist, she lets go of something else, too. Something that comes loose in her chest. The entire ordeal is comparatively brief. The girl only shouts for so long before breathe itself is displaced from her lungs.
The slippers clatter step my step like the percussion to a great melody. Metal scratches stone but they land without a crystal out of place, frame entirely solid.
Very unlike the girl unfurling, like a flower, far below.
She brushes invisible debris from her bodice. There is very little dust that settles, if any. Swallows.
Clears her throat. "That's enough of that." She turns, searching for the only solid earthly piece left of Elphaba. But is faced with another enchantment of lumber and hay.
"Fiyero!" She gawps, tears streaming down anew. "How-"
"That girl..." Something like disbelief and rage wars on his features. Or whatever might pass for those things on this face she has yet to map.
"She did this." She implores understanding into his pale, sulfer eyes. "Elphie.." She trails off, and looks over his shoulder. Where she lay, all too shattered. They crawl at a snails space to her side, at either shoulder they partake in her faint, fluttering breathe.
"I can't." He chokes. "I can't believe it. I just. Can't."
The entire world seems to bear down on her. On the both of them. And lighter than they've ever been it feels worse than death.
"You're not going to leave me Elphie, you can't. I wont let you. I wont leave your side again not ever." Glinda combs a hand through her fraying strands, fingers at the ends of her braids. "You will stay with us Elphie, and that is not a lie." Her fingers come away angry and red, her knees blistering and sore, as what little left of Elphaba's undoing sinks it's teeth through her own flesh.
Fiyero's hand cups her's, and her eyes snap up to his face-- of straw and of dead things in folliage-- but his nonetheless. Yet his eyes are glued to something just beyond her shoulder.
It's a pool of blood and perspiration, acid and sentence without trial. But in it lay a book, laden with magic and dreams, and awful misunderstandings. And a single crimson page with runes of an otherworldly white. It's scripture fanning a beating heart of a characteristic verdigris. It calls to her.
Redemption, and justice. A sorcery we are all besotten with. Convinced that witchcraft is a servant (such is life in a fanciful dreamworld). Fairness looks so much different than anything her storybooks could've imagined. The world is at your throat. Words, plain and uncursed as they are, cut sharper than any wand of crystal and diamond. It seems to sing. It's archaic symbols suddenly louder than thunder
This Tome demands retribution, and she feels a kinship, it blooms in her stomache.
"Great Oz. I know what my heart desires."