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Elphaba was smiling down at her, eyes warm and caring and alive. To her right, she felt Fiyero’s warmth, the vibration of his laugh when Elphaba made a joke. He looked just like he had the day she met him, when he first arrived at Shiz—handsome and happy and healthy, not bloody and bruised, not screaming.
Glinda didn’t remember why this was strange. These were her two best friends in the whole world. Why shouldn’t they be here? But it was. It itched somewhere at the base of her skull, a creeping crawling thing that slipped up her throat and into her mouth.
‘Glinda.’ Elphaba said her name—with no disappointment, no anger, no resignation. The sweetest sound imaginable. Glinda didn’t care. She didn’t care about the itching, didn’t care about the cold roiling in her belly that screamed out for her attention. Not if she could stay here, warm and happy and surrounded by the two people she loved best in the world. ‘Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember, Glinda?’
‘Remember what?’ Glinda laughed, throwing her hair back and leaning into Fiyero.
‘Don’t you remember what you did?’ It was Fiyero who spoke this time. His tone was amiable as ever but the words made her turn cold. ‘Don’t you remember what you let them do?’
Glinda swallowed, drawing back. ‘I didn’t…Fiyero, I…’
Fiyero was smiling at her. Blood oozed from between his lips. ‘Why did you let them kill me, Glinda? Did you hate me that much?’
‘I never, I never hated you!’ Glinda gasped. Somehow, both Fiyero and Elphaba were standing over her. She lay alone on the ground, mud oozing through her fingers. ‘I never did, I never, I didn’t…’
‘You didn’t try to save me,’ Elphaba said. Her lovely green skin was melting, revealing tissue and muscle and bone, her eyes staring at Glinda. ‘You didn’t even try.’
‘What sort of a friend are you?’ Fiyero added. His bruising face dripped with blood. Cracking came from his bones as they snapped out of place, protruding from his skin. One cheekbone shattered, leaving a chasm in his face. ‘You didn’t even try, did you? You didn’t care. You didn’t love me at all, did you?’
Glinda choked. ‘I did, I did!’
Maybe it wasn’t the way they both tried to convince themselves she did, but that was true of Fiyero too. Two people—two friends—who couldn’t love each other in the way they were trying to force themselves to. That didn’t mean she hadn’t loved him at all—how could she not? He was kind and good and made the world so much brighter when he was nearby. He was all she had in the Emerald City, the only thing left of her carefree life at Shiz, her single support in a city full of vipers.
‘I did!’ she cried. ‘I loved both of you!’ So much more than she fully comprehended before they died.
Elphaba tilted her dripping head to the side. ‘Then why did you let him die? Why did you let me die? Why didn’t you save us, Glinda?’ The melting muscles around her mouth bent into a twisted attempt at a smile. ‘Was popularity really that important to you? More important than us?’
Elphaba didn’t blame her. Elphaba hadn’t blamed her, in those few stolen moments before the Wizard’s manipulated assassins arrived. She didn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t!
Yet here Elphaba was, stripped bare of green skin, bones beginning to melt, staring at her—hating her, blaming her. And why shouldn’t she? How could Glinda let her die? How could Glinda just walk away and accept that her only living friend was about to be murdered?
‘I…’ What was there for Glinda to say? There was no defence, no argument to offer.
‘You could have saved us, Glinda,’ Fiyero said. By now, he’d lost any vestige of the genial bright young man she’d loved, a broken twisted horror dressed in the fine Gale Force uniform he was murdered in. ‘You should have saved us. Why didn’t you save us?’
Glinda’s mouth was dry. She couldn’t move. The corpses of her dearest friends moved closer, accusing eyes pinning her in place.
She couldn’t move, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t…
Everything shattered. Glinda shot up, tears flooding down her cheeks. All was dark, Elphaba and Fiyero were gone—she couldn’t see them, couldn’t see anything, yet their gazes still burned into her. She wanted to scream; she wanted to call out for them and beg them for forgiveness. Instead, she cried. Drawing her knees up to her chest, she buried her face and sobbed.
She didn’t know how long she cried for, how long it took before her grief and panic subsided enough for her to raise her head and take in the familiar surroundings of her bedroom in the Emerald City Palace. It felt like hours, but it couldn’t’ve been. The room had grown no light, the dawn no noticeably nearer.
A dream. It was a dream. None of it was real. This, Glinda brushed her fingers against the silk of her bedsheets, this was real.
Her friends weren’t staring at her, blaming her, accusing her.
Her friends were dead.
Grief closed its iron talons around her heart. She slumped back, staring around her. This room. She hated this room. Madame Morrible had led her here that day, when Elphaba stole the Grimmerie and escaped, all fake sympathy and patronisation. This was where she’d mourned and built her mask anew, preparing herself. This was her prison, a prison of her own design.
Oh, how she hated it.
Head aching and sobs lurking in the back of her throat, Glinda rubbed at her wet face and forced herself out of bed. She couldn’t go back to sleep—no matter how much a part of her longed to see Elphaba and Fiyero again, even if they hated her. Tomorrow—today, in truth, it was early in the morning now—was a new day and Glinda would have work to do, speeches to give, rebuilding to set in motion. She could not afford to have any of these emotions lurking at the surface. She couldn’t bring either of her friends back, but she wouldn’t mope around and besmirch their memory.
Setting her jaw, Glinda set to work, cleaning her face, covering any signs of her sleeplessness and crying with makeup and a touch of magic, transforming herself into Glinda the Good. As the first rays of dawn crept through the window, Glinda looked at herself in the mirror and swallowed back her grief.
It was time to get to work.