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Chapter Text

Age—53

Glinda puffed at her pipe, the tobacco filling her senses. On her exhale, she sighed and slumped over in her chair. 

She was tired. So very tired, and the pretty view of what was once the Wizard’s Emerald City had never been able to lift her spirits much. Her balcony was one of the few that remained a true emerald green, from times now forgotten—a grim reminder that always dampened her mood. Large scale renovations had started years before, repainting and tearing down buildings too green and too emerald-filled to be properly readapted.

That had been a complicated process to start up—there were very few who cared about the world around them being so green that other colours ceased to exist; it had alway been about profit. Tearing down most of the city only to remake it in prettier colours certainly did nothing to convince investors that they had made the right choice, but it happened nonetheless; whatever she wanted, she got. And when she had been approached to finally give new life to her apartments, she had surprised everyone by keeping it original.

It had been a surprise to herself as well, when she had refused. She hated the circular motifs throughout the building and in the archway which led out onto her balcony; hated the reflective green emerald that would show her a reflection she no longer recognised where carpet had not been placed; hated the little gold accents that shine too brightly at every turn. In the end she told herself it did not matter what her rooms looked like, so long as she did not look out at the city and see the same.

Still, she sat in her chair out on her balcony and smoked and refused to think any longer. The day had gone by as any other weekday would—full of meetings and law revisions and the elderly and rich Gilikinese men complaining at every turn about everything that did not benefit their coffers. It was a routine she hated with grace, smoking away her troubles in the late evening when the men would open more bottles of bushberry wine and drink themselves to an early morning headache.

In the earlier years, after celebrations and birth-days that passed as they worked, they would insist that she join them. Some would raise the glasses and place a hand around her waist and insist that whatever happened to be inside her cup would be: “the best you'll ever have, Miss Glinda! From our best and oldest barrels—surely this time you'll drink with us?” 

She would smile lightly, flash them pretty teeth, decline, and they would leave her alone until the next time. At the end of those days she would slam the doors to her chambers shut, and hole herself up in there and pull out one of the many bottles of Munchkin plum brandy that Crope would bring her to drink herself to sleep. This habit had not changed much, if only that she learned to like Quadling rum a little better. The bottles still lined the inside of her cabinets, fearing the day they would be half-drunk by the next morning, and rolling about on the floor unlidded.

She found herself sighing past her pipe once more, revelling in the peace and quiet of the evening. Spring was turning into summer, and she hummed at the pleasant tingle of a warm breeze on her skin, a soothing weight settling in her chest as her eyes fluttered closed. It was always hard to fall asleep, but never to fall into a dreamless inbetween, which the summer so often brought with it.

“Your Goodness,” a voice called out softly.

She opened her eyes, and stood—smoothing out her dress as she did. She smiled at the Kingrow on the handrail—a little bird with bright blue and green feathers who had become a sort of a friend with time, and greeted him with a bow of her head as she walked over.

“Good evening, Zimi,” she spoke.

“I’m sorry if I have disturbed you, your Goodness,” he said, shuffling awkwardly.

Glinda laughed gently, “You have not, dear. I simply got caught up in the beautiful weather,” she hummed to herself, “Any—Have you found anything?”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Miss.”

She nodded, having already known the answer. “Thank you. I suppose it should have gotten easier—hearing this news over and over, but unfortunately it has not.”

“I’m sorry, Your Goodness.”

“Don’t be silly—you have nothing to apologise for,” she puffed gently at her pipe. “Too little has been done too late, and I fear that I am the one to blame for it. I only appreciate your help. Tell me, Zimi, how have you been?”

He chirped happily, “Very well, Your Goodness! As you’ve said, the weather is perfect. It is wonderful that summer is almost here—Quadling Country is a great place to find oneself in during the winter months, but the big city is where I enjoy spending my time. The wife and I are glad to be back—even if my trips are a long way from home.”

Glinda smiled, “I am also very glad to have you back—you have been so kind as to help me these last couple of years. Truly.”

He bowed his head. “Oh—it should be me thanking you! What an honour it has been to help you, Your Goodness.”

She laughed and shook her head, “Glinda is fine, Zimi—you know this.”

“Of course, Your Goodness.”

And Glinda laughed once more, a harsher sound to anyone that knew her well, “Alright then. Well—I’ll have your payment delivered on the morrow.”

“Thank you.”

She bowed her head once more. “Fly safe.”

Glinda settled back down in her chair, and not for the first time that day, thought about how tired she was.

Age—24

Glinda had come to realize that she hated routines—they were boring boring boring, and monotony was disgusting and she itched to do something more with herself. Her spontaneity had long since fizzled out of her, gone with time and responsibility and the endless discouragement of irrationality from the Council. “You are the face of Oz, Miss Glinda,” they had told her endlessly, back when she had the will to do everything quickly and efficiently, “You must be steady.”

She felt old.

The routines had stuck to her like leeches—sucking whatever life she thought she could have leading Oz into a new and better time. They had grown on her, vines that refused to break off, warping around her with every year that she continued to work with the council.  They were terrible old things, most of them. She was glad that she had managed to convince some of the younger generations to partake—some Animals too, Chistery included, but she felt very alone in the sea of businessmen and doctors and military generals with experiences that dismissed her own. Progress came slowly, and time to herself came even slower.

Over time, she learnt to take longer in the mornings for her coffee, and to turn her sketchbook into her notebook so she could write and doodle on its pages during conferences. She started to find herself in the nearby library more often in her free time— skimming through books and bringing them back to her rooms so she could spend the next month trying to get through one tiny novel. Those, in turn, became part of her routines.

“Good morning everyone!”

There was a chorus of gravelly greetings in return, before one stood out: “Miss Glinda, please, join us.”

She quirked a brow and sat herself down, “Oh? Is something the matter?”

Master Knishot, a representative from Upper Gilikin replied, “We had just received news that there are… complications in Gillikenny.”

Another voice cut through at that, “Ha! Complications. That’s certainly a way to put it.”

Knishot waved a paw, exasperated, “Master Huntorn, please. We have no time for your dramatics today.”

Huntorn was much younger than Knishot, almost younger than she—though with a temperament that matched his fiery hair, and his shorter stature, he certainly felt the youngest. With the room's eyes on him however, he sank back down in his chair and stayed quiet.

A third voice cut in at that, from the other side of the table, “Settle, please.”

There was quiet.

“Thank you. Now, Miss Glinda—you know better than most that Gillikenny is too wealthy to listen to anyone but themselves.”

She scoffed, “Certainly—the way they treated me up there was a shock to the system, truly. I had never—” she paused and realised nobody quite cared, “well anyway…yes. Though, I thought I had convinced them to join our cause, is that not so?”

Perlen only sighed, a depressing sigh that she felt all aging men were capable of doing, “We thought so, but apparently not. We had been expecting some time last week to bring down the money we were promised but nothing. And yesterday we got a letter that was truly a spit in everyone’s faces.”

She winced at that. “What crude wording.”

Glinda did not particularly like Perlen—he was everything she quite hated in a man. He was old and bearded in the style of the old Wizard, and she was certain he never fully washed or combed it for there was always some food in it. He was careless, and perpetually coughing, and she had half a mind to kick him out of the meeting every time he opened his mouth. When he spoke again, it grated her ears, “I am sorry Miss Glinda… surely today we can ignore your feminine sensibilities in favour of real troubles.”

She forced a smile onto her face—blatantly ignored by the man who favoured licking his finger to instead read through files, “Yes. Let us get on with it.”

An awkward pause before Hunthorn cut in, “Good. Well—on the whole, the letter states that Sir Bozwell and Gillikeny will not be pushing to help reform, and instead will be actively going against us.”

She furrowed her brows at this, “What? But we met with him just last month—”

“-and clearly it did nothing.”

Glinda scoffed, “Surely it must have done something if they had promised to be here, no?”

Perlen coughed, “Perhaps he does not agree with the needs that must be met.”

It is here where Master Massel, a great horned Owl, intervened as he eyed Perlen cautiously, “Do you mean to say that we should let them continue on with the cruel ways in which they treat Animals, just so that they cooperate with us on a grander scale, sir?”

The old man’s eyes widened comically at that, “No, no. I only mean to say well—do we not have Miss Glinda? Can she not convince them?” He turned to her and reached with a pale and clammy hand for her own, “Use your magic, girl—do what must be done! Spell them under your control—threaten! Something must happen or we will be stuck again, as we manage to be every time we center our focus on Gillikin.”

She yanked her hand away, “Absolutely not, sir! If you tire of my methods, I implore you to leave—because I will not be forcing my way into every town and home that Gillikin knows for the sake of doing something ‘faster’,” she stood at that, and spoke firmly,“I am here to change Oz for good—not to find a quick solution to a problem that could only devolve from that decision.”

Knishot nodded in understanding, “Miss Glinda is right. We need to speak to them once more, understand what changed, and convince them again.”

“And risk escalating this matter? Do we want them as our enemies?”

“Enemies or not, they are part of Oz and we are its order,” said Chistery—his first interjection since she had arrived.

A laugh. “We are not old enough of a council to have even become the voice of reason.”

Massel sighed and his feathers ruffled. “There must be something—papers or letters we must have forgotten to reply to. Is there no other option?”

Chistery ground his teeth and shook his head. “There is one thing I’m sure we could try but it is risky and I am not sure that Her Goodness would approve.”

Glinda zoned back in at that. “Pardon?”

Chistery asked for a pointer and held it to the center of the table, pointing at Gillikenny, “They have what we need—wealth, influence in Gillikin. Yes? Well— what they do not have is land.”

She nodded, remembering what her parents had once told her, “Yes, most of the valuable Gillikin land was leased out by the Wizard, no?”

Huntorn laughed, “Leased? Do you mean to say that Gillikin land isn’t–-”

“-No, it is. Or—hm. It’s complicated,” she interrupted, “When the Wizard flew in, he made deals with many of the people in Gillikin who had welcomed him with the least hesitation. At the time everyone was suffering through the Drought and so—some of the land became less valuable,” she sipped her coffee, “He offered money in exchange for the land and—after doing his wizarding to bring back the rain, well—he started to lease it back. Most Ozians don’t know about this though, it’s very hush-hush.”

The young munchkinlander shrugged, “Alright? So what does that have to do with anything?”

Some of the others at the table groaned, and she had to bite her own cheeks to keep quiet, “Uhm, well—most of the wealth in Gillikenny is based on the profit they made from the later established Glikkus mines and their dealings with the Wizard and the Emerald City. A mutually beneficial arrangement, I assume. With the Wizard’s disappearance, I believe they have just been keeping his shares of the profit as well. Not to mention the worsening of the Animals’ working conditions.”

Hunthorn blinked for a little bit, as the rest of the table waited in anticipation, but Chistery ignored him and instead spoke to Glinda, “If we can find these papers within the week? We'll be able to negotiate, and we will be making more progress in a month than we have in the last couple of years.”

She breathed, “You think? Oz, I hope so.”

A new routine was formed after that. Most days she found herself at the center of a crowd, flourishing her wand and reciting scripts she had written into the late night. She spent the week-ends going through records with a few others, trying to find what they could have of any official papers the wizard might have stashed away. She spent countless days like that in the end, the papers piling on the floors and desks stacked so high they started falling into each other.

There was a new buzz in her system and she felt a motivation she hadn’t experienced in a long while. Time started to pass more slowly, and she found herself enjoying it by filling her days with note taking and coffee breaks and sketching things on useless discarded pages. Her nights were spent by a pink-shaded lamp, under its warm light, and she scrit-scratched away at the pages upon pages and folders upon folders of text that the Wizard had kept.

Some of it dredged up memories she tried to forget—it was hard to not think about the wizard in the same frame as her . Sometimes her palm would sweat on the hardwood desk and she would lift it to find droplets, suddenly realising that she had been shaking. Her chest would feel heavy, and she would get up dizzily.

Good. You’ll be making good—Glinda the Good. Glinda—good. You’ll help us—Good—

Sleep would not come easy those nights, if it came at all. That was fine, in and of itself—ever since her first day in the Emerald City, sleep had been a luxury that only a few restless nights in a row could afford her. So she incorporated the late hours of the night into her new routine and carried on. The voices in her head—monkeys screeching, screaming, voices and voices and whispering—did not help her work faster, but she tried to pay them no mind. Yet, even with her working diligently into the late night, what had been a hopeful week turned into a hopeful month, and a hopeful month into a not-so-hopeful two.

With every night that passed, there was a little, wicked voice in the back of her head that told her the same thing over and over and over. She ignored it at first—how could she not? It was an insanity she would not—could not bring herself to face. Not after all her progress in forgetting. Then she spoke to Chistery, hoping that perhaps he would guide her into a different direction, but, though he advised her to be cautious, he had only pushed her further.

So it was that she broke her routine and went down to the dungeons of the castle, her wand lighting the way with a pink tinge. It smelt awful—of a mold or two and certainly rotten meat and piss. How was it that they had not touched on the subject of the dungeon’s upkeep? It was damp and dark and though there were lamps, they no longer held light. As she shone her own light on them, it was clear to her that even if the bulbs were to have been replaced, the layer of filth on the glass panels would have blocked out most of it.

At the end of the hall—at least from what she could make out of it—a cough was heard. It was one Glinda recognised, and she prayed to whatever god would listen to keep her sanity in as good a shape as it could be. As she stepped in front of the cell, her shoes slipped into grimier, wetter mud, and she felt herself swallowing down hard, and breathing as shallow as possible.

She let her light shine around the cell, illuminating the figure within it. White hair was matted and browned at the ends, fingers and nails covered in grime. The clothes she had last seen her in had been swapped for rags in tatters, and Glinda had truly never never seen a more hideodious creature in her lifetime. 

And then eyes lifted to meet hers, and a deep and rasped chuckle fought its way out of the prisoner's mouth.

“Galinda Upland, what a surprise.”

A choked sound escaped her, and she felt unsteady on her feet.

“It’s Glinda, thank you. I have questions.” 

Morrible nodded her head, “Straight to the point with you, as always. You don't feel like talking a bit about the weather?” She laughed her own joke, and Glinda felt a pounding in her head. Morrible only pressed on, “How long has it been since we've last seen each other, dear?”

She felt sick, “Three years.”

The older woman ‘tsk'ed’, “You must not be taking care of yourself then. You look like you've aged ten—I wasn't even aware that girls your age could look so sickly. Are you sleeping well? Eating well?”

 Glinda huffed and curled in on herself, “Certainly better than you must be. You look like a corpse. Prison food must not be all that good, hm?” It was true, too. The woman looked small and frail and nothing like the woman Glinda remembered. It helped, in a way, knowing that she was doing better than Morrible. “Where did he keep his papers?” she asked.

Morrible cocked a brow, “Do you mean to tell me that in three years of having taken over the Wizard’s palace, you haven't gone into his office?”

Glinda stepped forward despite herself, “I'm looking for very specific papers that sign Gillikin land into his name. You know where they are.”

The older woman nodded slowly, staring through Glinda, “Mm. Was it not you who put me in here—does my memory deceive me?

There was a steady rage that started to boil under her skin. “You deserved much worse, Madame Morrible.”

A sqwaky laugh, “It is so unfortunate that you still believe that, Miss Upland. In time you will see that what I had been working towards would have been for the greater good of all Oz. And with the witch out of the way—”

“No!” she said, waving her wand, “You know—you know that she always did what was best for Oz. You started something cruel, and I see that now. I should've stopped you from the beginning.”

Morrible stood up, joints rattling as she did. She looked so much older now, pallid and frail and the shadows on her skin outlining bone.

“Stopped me how, girl? I gave you the power—the Wizard and I gave you credibility, do you believe that you would have gotten here were it not for us?”

She stepped back as Morrible stepped forward, “I wouldn’t have stayed. I would have left.”

This was a lie, she knew it was. Morrible knew it too.

“We gave you power Miss Upland—that wand that you hold was ours to give. You wanted this—you took with greed,” Morrible said in a low tone. She gripped the bars now, with a sure and certain look in her eyes that weakened Glinda’s resolve.

She huffed, “I was naive. But I understand now that I was wrong. I've fixed things—changed things for the Animals.” she spoke, directing the points of her wand to Morrible’s face, “So tell me what it is that I must know, and I will be on my way.”

Another laugh from the older woman triggered a twitch in Glinda’s hand and she shot the wand’s tip into the metal bars with a clang, the sharp points just missing Morrible’s face. She watched fear flash in the woman’s eyes, before she smiled again and pushed a glowing tip back with a steady finger, “Now, now, Miss Upland. Where are your manners? You want something, I want something. Let us negotiate.”

“I do not negotiate with my prisoners,” she growled.

Morrible’s face pulled into a sly smile, “ Your prisoners, my my my. How powerful you must be then—do you own the palace too? Did you claim it for yourself?”

Glinda readjusted the grip on her wand, feeling it slip out of her sweating palm, and shook her head, “No, I—” she exhaled sharply, “You will not talk to me about this. I am here for answers.”

“I am willing to give them to you, don’t you see? A trade of goods.”

Glinda bit her lip, “And what do you want, hm? You want me to—to unlock this door and what—let you go?”

A gentle smile crossed Morrible’s lips, “Clever girl.”

A shudder ran through her spine, her lips nearly curling in disgust, and she felt a pulse of anger rush through her again, “Hm. I could—but seeing as you are a known criminal and I am oh-so-beloved, well. I don’t see how you would make it past the city walls.” Morrible was not, in fact, a very well-known criminal, but she didn’t need to know that.

Morrible shook her head, “Believing you have such unfaltering influence is a mistake. You saw how quickly everyone turned against your precious Elphaba.”

She jabbed her wand harder into the metal, as though they would bend to her will, “You will not speak ill of her, and you will give me what I need or so help me Oz-”

“You’re not very good at negotiation, dearie.”

She felt herself shaking in earnest now, “I’m not negotiating with an enemy of Oz.”

Morrible swatted carelessly at her, “Oh—don’t be dramatic, it doesn’t suit you.”

“I’m very serious.”

A scoff, “I’m certain you are—oh, put that thing away, you think it frightens me? You’ve enchanted it to glow! Bravo, what a feat of magic it is.”

Something clicked for Glinda, “I have the Grimmerie, you know.”

In the dim light of the wand she saw a look of greed in Morrible’s gaze, her eyes growing wide and hungry, “Do you now?”

She breathed in, out.

“Yes. And I’ve been learning. Really learning. It responds to me now. And I swear I’ll—I’ll use it if I have to.”

Morrible hummed, “Yes, I’m sure you will—you certainly look well enough prepared to do something with it—what with all your ridiculous shaking. You don’t even have it with you. Go on—get it. Come back and show me what you can do.”

Glinda’s lip quivered when she spoke, “I don’t need it for what I want to do to you. I’ve memorised that damned wing spell—I hear it in my head and in my sleep,” she swallowed before she could choke on her emotions, “How would you like that, hm? To flap around aimlessly in that rotten cell of yours? Perhaps then you would understand that what you did to those poor, caged Animals was cruelty.”

Fear filled the older woman’s eyes once more and she stepped back from the gate, “Surely the spell does not work for you.”

“I’ve never tried it. But I swear that if you do not tell me what I need, Madame, I will not hesitate to find out. I have grown these last years, and I am tired of waiting to get somewhere,” she paced around the cell now, breathing a little heavily.

There was a heavy silence, and she tried to slow her huffing so that Morrible wouldn’t hear how terribly out of sorts she was. It was dizzying, and she felt faint when Morrible spoke again.

“They should be in boxes, up in the attic with the old keepsakes.”

The attic—of course. It was silly that they hadn’t checked that tower already—

I hope you’re happy—hope—-hope you’re happy—twisted—

She groaned, feeling sick.

Twisted nature—wicked witch—twisted—hope—wicked witch—

Please , she thought to herself. Please stop.

“Miss Glinda?”

She had a palm pressed to her chest, having dropped her wand into the mud.

Wicked witch—wicked witch—-wicked witch—wicked—

Her head pounded and she barely registered the mud on her fingers as she bent down to pick up the glowing wand, “Mm. I’ll be on my way now.”

-

They did find those boxes. “They” did not include Glinda, but she cheered excitedly when she saw that they were brought down.

Age—44

She bubbled her way to Shiz City where the festivities were in full bloom—an annual celebration of the fairy queen, Lurline. There was not a lack of celebrations in her honour—for the Gilikinese revered her in ways that the rest of Oz had forgotten to, celebrations of their land and its beauties and strange magics that coursed through its soil.

Glinda had never been a big believer in any god. She had once been told that gods were made to keep people and Animals under control—that they served no purpose but to yield an unending supply of blind faith in those who spoke for the higher beings. She had never quite agreed when it came to Lurlinism, but she thought it perhaps to be because she was raised on it. Maybe believing that, in turn, proved a point.

She had asked Nessa why she was so devoted, once. She replied solemnly that she felt guided by the Unnamed God and felt safe in his embrace. There was security in knowing that the Unnamed God upheld values that stayed or became important to her—and she cherished her relationship with the Church, as did Frexspar. So she tried it—many years later after Nessa’s passing, she devoted herself and believed, and she felt nothing. Not guided, not protected or sheltered.

With time, she realised it did not matter what she believed, for it would not do her any good. Unionism, Lurlinism, anything-ism—what good does a religion do if it does not help you in the ways that matter?

She partook in the celebration because it was loud, and pretty and despite her blonde curls and big eyes, she did not feel very Gilikinese. Though she attended a few festivals each year as a promise to her parents or as a favour to distant friends—or even on her own for curiosity’s sake, she could not remember the steps to common dances or the lyrics to drinking songs. There was a sort of guilt in knowing that she had reached such an age where it was expected of her to teach a new generation of Gilikinese about their culture, and yet, had not taken any interest in keeping it alive herself. Every year she justified it with not having had the time, and every year she half-heartedly attended big events and promised herself she would remember something about it. Yet, every year she would go back to her big, empty rooms knowing no more than the echo of indecipherable melodies, and the ability to stomp her feet in heels a little better than the previous day.

This festival was no different. She huddled inside her dark cloak and sat on a bench with ale in her hand and watched as people and Animals paired off while a stringed instrument she could not remember the name of—took lead of the melody. She stomped her feet in time with the rhythm, and clapped gently along—but the melodies were lost on her. Pfannee had visited once, and held her hands and pulled her into a tuneless dance—in her chambers back in Oz City. He had made her laugh and threw her around until they both felt the effects of their endless stomping and spinning and instead focused on getting drunk. She had enjoyed that feeling—the weightlessness of being spun around knowing that falling to the floor would only serve to lift spirits higher; she had enjoyed knowing that drinking would help forget why she wanted to spin and dance in the first place.

But she and Pfannee had not spoken in years, and she had already drunk too much ale to spin carelessly away from the crowd. Instead, she watched a mother bundle her baby—precise and practiced and joyful—after which she held the little hands and baby-talked to the child as she clapped the little palms together. She thought it a cute sight, and not for the first time, wondered what her life would have been like had Shiz never been in the cards for her.

(There would still have been balls and extravagant parties, she knew that for sure. Her parents would never have let her marry under her station. It would have surely been an older man if it were up to them—perhaps one with an already greying mustache and an unfortunate reliance on a cane to walk. She liked to imagine it would have been a woman with emerald skin.

She knew that she would’ve been happier than she was now, and that perhaps there would have been much more carelessness that would've come with never having gone to that school. Her parents had been overjoyed at her enrollment into the sorcery seminar—it had been the only course that she wanted, really. 

She knew she would’ve most likely had children by now. Perhaps a couple of blonde-headed ones in their teens who would share the same interests all young Gilikinese kids do.

There was much to think about, and much more to imagine.)

The partying lasted well into the late night, and the drinking even later. She had been steadily eating away at twisted bread and downing her drinks by the time most everyone had decided to go home. There were still a few—most huddled by a bonfire into which some plant or other was being continually thrown, creating a nice smell.

Over the years there were a few habits that had formed and some that had been broken, as is the way things go. One of the ones that had steadily formed with time was caused by years of being the last to get up from a meeting—so much so that the hall had emptied, and from waiting until every last citizen she had spoken to had left happy. With time it had become less about needing to impress others, and making sure that her image was kept perfect—and more about control. Over the people or herself, she did not know.

And so she stayed until the sun rose from the east, from beyond the cityscape and the forests of the outskirts of Munchkinland, and watched as what was left of the big bonfire smoked away in the wind. There were still a few people out of their homes—mainly the drunkards with no sense of direction, passed out on benches or under trees. She felt relaxed, then. There was a little tune still being played on a flute somewhere out of vision—something upbeat that warmed her and made her feel like she was five years old again, stepping onto her father’s toes as he spun her around.

She thought about how she would dance to it in the moment, and her emerald friend popped into her mind—grabbing her by the hand and spinning her around, only to pull her back in by the waist. A hop and a couple of steps later, she imagined she would lose her heel on a loose brick in the square and they would both laugh giddily and out of breath about it as they stumbled through made up steps. Perhaps in this world she would know the lyrics to the folk songs, and sing them to her . She imagined she would look up into big green eyes and kiss a green cheek and promise to dance more when they got home, if only they could stop now to rest their feet. In this world, she hoped she would be picked up and twirled again and kissed firmly on the lips with a whisper of: “Of course, my sweet,” before heading off to indulge in the festival’s treats.

She came back to her senses when the song had ended, the quiet pulling her out of her reverie, and still felt the pain in her cheeks from smiling widely. When she looked up, the sky was steadily turning a light blue, and she thought of going back to the city and sleeping the day away.

Age—37

“Elphie, oh Elphie! Darling, won’t you come here and tell me what it is you see?” she shouted excitedly.

A voice called out from the other room, “In a minute, I'm busy.”

Glinda grumbled and ran off the balcony and back into her bedroom, sweeping past the second set of doors and into the hall. She could hear Elphaba tapping away on her desk, and sped over to it, planting a quick kiss on braided hair as she did.

She skimmed over what Elphaba was doing, notes in disarray and a few mugs already lining the window that allowed for light. There was a stack of papers, inked and ready to go, and she followed the sight of them to the page being written on. She watched her wife's hand hold the pen as though it were a fragile thing, curling and swooping and elegantly writing down whatever it was she got caught up in. She eyed the purple-hued veins that outlined and intersected over her knuckles, and the pretty way her golden rings looked over her verdant skin.

Glinda felt like kissing each and every freckle on her pretty hand, wanting to feel every pulse of racing blood to warm fingertips. She felt like intertwining their fingers together and pressing an emerald hand to her lips. Instead, she smiled and plucked the pen out of her hand, laying it gently down instead, and let her wife turn to her with the fake-annoyed expression she knew she would find.

“Yes?”

She smiled, “You're not busy anymore.”

Elphaba laughed and pushed her glasses up her nose, “Apparently not. What was it you wanted to show me, my sweet?”

Glinda raised the hand she was holding to her lips, and kissed it with an exaggerated “mwah!”, “You’ll have to come with me if you want to see!” she said in a sing-songy tone.

Ever the sweetheart, Elphie made a show of getting up, a slow stretch, and a deep groan as she rolled her eyes, but complied nonetheless. Glinda only laughed and dragged her out onto the balcony.

“Alright then, what am I supposed to be looking at?” asked Elphaba, unimpressed.

“Over there, look!” Glinda said, pointing to a tall tree below, with blooming pinkish-white flowers. Elphaba only bowed over the marble and squinted.

“The tree?” she asked, incredulous.

Glinda groaned, “Elphie! Yes, the tree—don’t you see the flowers? It finally bloomed!”

“Huh. So it has,” she said, shrugging.

“Isn't it so pretty, Elphie?” Glinda asked, taking Elphaba by the hands again and shaking her as though it would rid her of any disinterest she may have.

“Not as pretty as you, my sweet.”

For that, she was rewarded with a delighted squeal and kissed soundly, pulled into Glinda's warmth and melted into her wife's hold. Glinda only kissed her more when she was met with no resistance, moving to pepper her face with tiny kisses.

“You mean, green thing—you're distractifying me!”

Elphaba laughed earnestly into her wife’s lips, and Glinda swore that was her favourite sound. Her second favourite was Elphie's voice as she tried to speak while being kissed, “Oh, you think—I'm distractify—ing— you ?”

Glinda pressed one more kiss to green lips and let her go. “Clearly. With your irresistible emerald charm.”

“Uh huh. You mean the charm that has only ever worked on you?”

“Hush, you! Now listen—because what I am about to say is very important!” she said, puffing out her chest.

Elphaba only grinned and nodded along, “I'm listening.”

“Are you?”

Her wife made a mock-serious face. “Yes.”

“Hm. Good!” she said with another press of lips to Elphaba’s face, “Now, my love, it will interest you to know that that tree has never bloomed before this year!”

Elphaba shrugged. “That’s it?”

Glinda sighed, exasperated, “Were you expecting something else?”

She felt arms wrap around her waist and rub circles into the skin there, before a gentle kiss was pressed to her temple, “Maybe something a little more… wow.”

She gasped, high and false, “Excuse me? Did this information not wow you, Elphie?”

“It did not. Are we done here?” Elphaba sighed.

“Ugh, Elphie! Do you not think it's sweet that this tree bloomed for us?” Glinda smiled, watching as the few flowers swayed gently in the wind.

She could feel Elphaba roll her eyes as she spoke, “Oh, of course—how awe-inspiring it is that the great and ancient tree bestows such wondrous gifts upon us mere mortals. We are not worthy.”

At that Glinda pinched the skin at Elphaba’s hip and grinned when she heard a squeak, “I’m being very serious right now Elphie.”

“I’m very serious too, my love.” She was not serious.

“You are a sweet, silly thing, Elphie, but I will not have you ruining my fun,” Glinda said, turning away.

Elphaba chased her back into her hold. “Mm. If the tree bloomed for us this year then why not last year? We moved during the spring, no?”

“Maybe it’s your beautiful, wondrous magic, my dear. Making all the pretty flowers bloom.”

Her wife let out a low chuckle at that, “Could be. I doubt it—you’ve always had the more nature-inclined magic.”

Glinda started pulling her away then, down the stairs and out into the garden, humming thoughtfully, “Yes but remember—I’ve lived here for the better part of my life, darling. I spent my summers out in those very gardens and under that very tree. I would remember if I had ever seen it bloom quite so spectacularly. Of course there were—,” she shrugged, “-one or two times when it tried to bloom but—even when we pruned it and made sure it was being taken care of… nothing!” She ended her little ramble with a little “hmph!” and let herself smile at Elphaba’s laughter.

They sat down under the big tree—petals under their feet, and the sweet scent of its flowers all-encompassing.

“This is nice,” said Elphaba. “We should do nothing like this more often.”

Glinda guffawed, “Outside?”

Elphaba nodded and smiled, stretching an arm over her wife’s shoulder.

“It’s so cold, Elphie! I should have brought a blanket. You want to sit out in the cold doing nothing, instead of our cozy cozy house?”

“Mhm. Come here and I’ll warm you up,” said Elphaba, wrapping her arms fully around Glinda—playfully tugging at her to get closer.

“Elphie! Behave yourself!” Glinda laughed.

Elphaba only held her closer, “We are at home, my sweet. Let me enjoy you,” and with a cold hand gathered golden curls that she gently moved to the side. Glinda felt a shiver at that, the brush of cold fingers against her neck sending heat up to her face, and she let herself moan softly as Elphaba pressed gentle kisses to her neck.

“Why are you so cold?”

“Because spring weather has a mind of its own. You knew that living up here in little old Frottica meant the cold,” Glinda spoke softly.

Elphaba only kissed her again, “We’re nearing the end of spring. You must just have poor circulation.”

Glinda lolled her head onto her wife’s shoulder and groaned, “You’re supposed to say: ‘Yes dear, you’re right. We should go back inside and admire this beautiful tree from our bed.’”

A hum, “I don’t think so. You dragged us out here, and I think we should enjoy it.”

“I cannot enjoy it if I can't feel my toes, Elphaba.”

“Well. I’m enjoying this. Enjoying you.”

Glinda clasped Elphaba’s hands in her own, warming herself, “You could enjoy me elsewhere, you know.”

“Oh? I thought you wanted to enjoy this tree,” said Elphaba.

“Oz, Elphie—stop using my words against me,” she sighed, before bursting into giggles.

There was a lull in their conversation as she warmed herself in Elphaba’s side. She looked out at their house and wondered at Elphie’s sweetness—her willingness to move away from the bustling city and to take care of her home after Momsie and Popsicle had passed. It was a pretty thing, the manor. White and pristine, with beautiful columns that she had always adored. Then there were the gardens and the greenhouse, full of pretty, flowering bushes and tulips that bloomed each summer despite the otherwise cold weather. The tree—a magnolia that had stood tall for more years than she knew what to do with, was on the edge of their property, rising up above the hedges; it was a magnificent thing that was for all to see.

“I love this tree, Elphie. I used to try and climb it when I was young, you know. I don’t remember it being anything but tall, however, and so the only thing I ever managed to do was scrape my hands and knees.”

Elphaba hummed, “I can see you doing that—a little stubborn you just running at it, convinced that it would help.”

She smiled and paused, and breathed in the sweet air.

“I’m so glad it bloomed.”

“Me too.”

Glinda felt herself be kissed again, and she sighed happily, “I love you, Elphie.”

And suddenly, though that wasn’t quite right either, really it was all just a blur now—they found themselves in their bed, Elphaba tracing patterns on to her ribs, covered only by her shift, “I love you too, my sweet.”

The sense of normalcy settled back into her and she pulled her wife closer, kissing the top of her head. She felt something churn in her chest, a blur of overwhelming sadness as she spoke again, “I love you so much it hurts. Stay, please.”

She heard Elphaba speak into her neck, gentle and reassuring, “I’m not going anywhere; I love you.”

“I need you, Elphaba.”

And then a crash of a window opening sent her reeling.

-

When she awoke, she realised that the window had been blown open during what she realised was an ongoing storm. Rain dripped and pooled on the window sill and down the wall.

“Damnit.”

Glinda bit her lips as she stepped to the window, feet bare and stepping into the cold water. She shut and locked the window bar firmly into place, and watched as the rain pattered hard against the glass. It was not often that she forgot to lock the windows, but it seemed her carelessness came back to ruin a night's sleep.

When she tucked herself back into bed, she shivered, feeling the cold of the floor dissipate, the warmth beneath the covers heating her up. In the dim light she looked to the other side of the bed—the one she could never bring herself to sleep on—the one on which the black hat was gently propped onto—and felt a wave of grief burst in her.

It was not often that she dreamt anymore, but when she did it was always about her. Even after countless years, Elphaba haunted her thoughts and her sleep—and though it was long ago that she had promised herself to not fall prey to the dreams and fantasies, she always gave in.

The best scenario was that it was something she had lived through—after so many years, relieving it one more time did not seem like the worst thing. There was always screaming and crying and acute pain that felt like it was ripping her heart in two, but she would wake up and calm down. Turn the light on and read a book, as screams echoed in her head.

On good days she could not bring herself to say her name; on bad days she would do everything in her power to keep from thinking a single thought about her.

But the sweet dreams—the good ones where she got to laugh and kiss her and hold her again—were always the worst. Ripped away from her again and again in ways that tore her apart entirely. This night was no different. Tears welled up in her eyes and her lips quivered and she let herself scream into her pillow. Her sobs were loud and heavy, and when she thought it was over, Elphie would appear in her mind again and another wave would hit. Her crying was guttural, pulled from whatever was left of her. She felt so alone.

Elphaba had once told her that she could not have a soul, and Glinda had scoffed and dismissed such a notion. Now she wondered whether or not she had thought so because it was Glinda’s soul that belonged to her instead— and only more so with each pang of grief and love that was meant for her and only her.

When she was younger, Glinda would cry and mourn the loss of her friend and the life they could have had together. As she aged, there was a new grief that she found alongside frown and smile lines and the little wrinkles around her eyes, mourning the life Elphaba could have had on her own. She was so young , the voice in her head would supply, conjuring the twenty year old that Glinda had known—bright eyed and with her pretty toothy grin. She shouldn’t have had to die to be where I am now.

Age—31

It had come as a shock to her, when the Ozians started asking about the weather. At the time, she had been quite alone in the palace—with Chistery gone to find and free more Animals, and the council not yet formed. When she had first been approached, she hadn’t even realised there was much of a change in the weather—too busy and panicked about keeping things under control to notice the downpours and the storms. The Ozians were suspicious of the rain, unprepared for it—having been kept under relatively dry weather since the Drought—and assumed that the Wizard’s departure had something to do with it.

That was the truth of course, but she spun the story around for a while and left them to their guessing and speculation.

Ten years had passed since the Wizard had left and since Morrible had been imprisoned. As the figurehead of Oz, self-proclaimed only a few days later, it was not his departure that was talked about, but instead her rise to power. The Decennial Celebration of Glinda: the Good Witch of the North’s Reign, the council had called it. Posters were printed and spread throughout Oz to invite everyone to celebrate such a momentous occasion. She felt it was overtop and unneeded for what announcements she felt like making this year, but she let it be.

She could hear the crowd that had gathered outside, cheers and yelling that had her heart beating faster. She looked at the wand propped up on her bedside drawer, next to the black hat that sometimes made its home in her bed, and picked it up—feeling the weight of the enchanted crystal in her hands. She had never truly gotten used to the thrum of the concentrated energy zipping through it and up to the core on its point.

She could see the light, the soft energy of it swirling in there, waiting to be harnessed and to burst out. She didn’t need the wand anymore, of course—manifesting magic out of her hands was just as easy—but it had become a part of her that Oz adored with passion. So she kept it with her.

With the wand in hand, Glinda stepped into the mirror. Her dresses stayed puffy—the one she had on being silky and voluminous, now in deeper blues, and despite herself, she found that the colour had become a comfort to wear. She looked a little different, and she liked it—she had stopped straightening her hair last year, and instead let her curls be pinned to the back of her head. It was pretty, and looked almost regal with the tiara in her hair. There had been other changes too, her face being the most complimented. She looked more mature now, the round shape in her teens and early twenties had sharpened, dissipating into a sharper jawline and more hollowed cheeks. There was a little forming crease where her brows met, that she desperately tried to rid herself of, but Crope and Tibbett had smiled and patted her gently and told her it gave her “character”. She had not found it amusing.

Despite it all, she found that her change in appearance (aging felt too strong of a word and she dared not think about it), helped her somewhat. Though she had perhaps disagreed with the way the council at times had overlooked her, and had taken slightly drastic measures to get back on top, she did it less now. Even Perlen had started taking her more seriously in the past year—which she felt was not attributed to the many threats of dismissing him that she had warned him with over the years—but instead attributed to the way she presented herself.

With style (and age) came credibility, she supposed.

-

“Fellow Ozians!” Glinda greeted, her voice echoing from the front of the Emerald Palace.

The crowd cheered and whooped and called out her name in a frenzy. It always shocked her just how loud they could be.

“Today is a day of grand celebration, and I owe such a special occasion to all of you—I would not be standing here were it not for your unending support.”

She noticed pink banners and little replica wands held by children on their parent’s heads. The people and Animals that had gathered continued to applaud and cheered, and she smiled briefly before speaking once more.

“It has been ten years now that I have been your representative, ten years that I and our splendiferous Ozian Council have been working to rebuild Oz to a glory that it has long since needed to see. It has been hard work, but it has been good work. I want to thank you all again for giving us the opportunity for us to serve you, for giving us the opportunity to hear your voices and help. We would not be here without you.”

Every year she did this, it was another year in which lied to the crowd. They would cheer and scream and mothers with their babies would come to the front and hope that she would bless them. Every year that she thanked them for choosing her, she would spend weeks after the ceremonies wondering if she was really able to lead Oz the way that she was supposed to—or if taking power after the Wizard was all just one giant mistake that would blow up before she could do something truly good.

“This has been such a wonderful journey, and I am so grateful to you all for letting me be a part of it.”

She heard a shout from further away, “We love you!” and she smiled and laughed.

“As we are reaching such an incredible milestone, I have been thinking that we should do something different,” she paused, letting her words settle, “I want to bring to light something—something I believe needs to be heard by all Ozians.”

There was silence, aside from some shuffling of feet, and she continued, “What do we all remember being the biggest change, in the days, weeks and months after the Wizard’s departure? What took Oz by surprise—left us stuck with no true way of helping ourselves for much too long a time?”

She took hold of the microphone, and walked around the podium with it, and down the steps, “Many of you approached me about the weather in those early weeks—wondering, just as I was, about what had happened to the sun. What had happened and would continue to happen to the crops and our flower fields if the rain continued to pour.”

She smiled at the crowd and gently shook her head, a sympathetic look crossing her features, “Fewer came to me about this—but I’m sure it was discussed amongst yourselves too, I know I had wondered the very same thing.” She spoke loudly, “Was the Wizard’s departure somehow responsible for Oz’s newer, rainer weather patterns?”

Murmurs, the return of speculations long forgotten, “I didn’t know—I had no answer for you. But I do now, and if you’re willing, I’d love to share with you what I know.”

Cheers filled the square once more, quieted only when she raised her hand to speak. She looked for Chistery, a little ways behind her, and he gave her a reassuring nod.

“Muriel Morrible, Sorceress, former Headmistress at Shiz University and Press Secretary to the Wizard himself, was responsible for many big, terrible, weather events over the last thirty five years—starting with the Great Drought.”

Cries of shock and outrage had Animals and Ozians, a few of which had lunged forward and into the line of guards—reaching for answers to their questions. Behind her, council members gasped, unaware of what she had planned. She eyed them and prevented them from rushing to take her back inside, gripping her wand and holding it steady—a threat. She brought the butt of the wand down to the ground and slammed it down hard .

BANG!

BANG!

BANG!

She started her speech back up with a smile as the crowd settled, “Over the time I had spent at Shiz—and all those who had been under her tutelage—I ask you to remember how she parted the clouds in the sky. To all those who lived in the Emerald City and watched as the clouds spun out of sight, and right back in—I implore you to understand,” everyone was watching her and she felt small under their gaze. A passing thought of Elphaba on the podium instead zipped through her mind.

“She was responsible for the famines that spanned over all of Oz. She was responsible for the cyclone that devastated Munchkinland. For the destruction of your homes.” For Nessa’s death. “She was responsible for the murder and mutilation of countless Animals.”

An uproar. Ozians shouting—demanding knowledge she certainly did have. There was so much noise. Blood pulsed in her ears as she saw the guards struggling to keep their line.

She banged the staff of her wand again, waiting until silence befell the crowd once more, and let her magic amplify the sound of her voice, “She is a prisoner of Oz. Has been for many years for her crimes against the Animals.”

She moved again to become more visible and pitched her voice a little higher, a little more reassuring, “It was the last time that I had gone down to see her that she told me all of this in a burst of honesty—I was in shock, just as all of you are now. I understand,” she spoke gently, sweetly.

She smiled, “My fellow Ozians. This wickedness is gone—it has been locked away for good. This sorceress has been punished accordingly for her actions, and will continue to be held accountable for every act of terrorism she has put our people through, of this I assure you. Today, I do not want to linger on her acts of violence and cruelty. Today, I want to celebrate with you—all of you—the end of an era of evil-doing, and the true start of better Oz.”

She was met with mixed reactions, but better than what she had planned for. Little bits of “she’s so good” and “we love you” were heard over the crowd and bowed her head and blew kisses as she smiled. Waving her wand she created pretty shimmers and bubbles and let herself bow out, “Thank you, everyone, for being here. Please, enjoy the festivities—I know I will.”

-

“Your Goodness! Your Goodness please, explain yourself—”

“You cannot be doing such things without our approval—have you lost your mind, woman—”

A hand grabbed at her, “That was unplanned—was that planned? What happened up there—”

She brushed off the hand and past the council, heels echoing in the emerald halls, “There is nothing to explain, gentlemen. I gave the speech I prepared.”

They followed after, hounding her like dogs on her trail. A cough announced Perlen’s uninvited commentary, “Perhaps we should take charge and make sure your speech is in line with our politics.”

Glinda turned to face him with a scowl, “You know, Master Perlen—I recall asking for reviews of my speeches and you refused. What reason did you give, hm? Let me think,” she paused and watched him sweat, “Something about my feminine nonsense… hm.”

A newer member of the council from the Vinkus, Master Rombi, tried to speak up but was quickly shut down by other, louder voices. Poor thing, she thought. What a terrible introduction to council life this must be.

Master Likkin shouted from the back, “This is entirely out of our plan! How does this fit with our schedule, how do we move on from this?”

“With grace.”

“This was insanity—you pushed too hard, we’ll be making no progress like this,” interjected Hunthorn over the other shouting men. She should have anticipated this reaction. They were out for blood, these men. They wanted her out of power and she knew it.

“We’ve not been making progress this last year either way, what with all the initiatives you all propose and refuse to do anything about. We are nearing winter again—and we’ve made no progress with transportation or with the working conditions for the ruby mines in Quadling Country—” she said, sitting down at the table, and gesturing for everyone to take their seats.

“-if we could start on those, I would appreciate good news,” spoke Miss Cutten softly. She was Glinda’s only true friend on the council, and the sweetest thing Glinda had ever met. It was clear to her that the Quadling girl was not fit for council life—she was too sweet and too soft spoken with everyone, and much younger than she—much too young, but tried her best despite all that. Glinda felt very protective of her, especially when she was so often dismissed by the older members, just as she had been.

“Yes, darling—we’ll try and sort that out for you, alright?” she smiled gently and took her hand gently, letting it go only when she got a reassured squeeze back.

“Miss Glinda—Your Goodness—you cannot take such risks. We must move surely, in unison,” spoke Hunthorn.

She rolled her eyes and dismissed him, “What good does unison do if we are moving at a snail’s pace? There is no room for slow—winter is almost here and travel will be slowed or stopped until the snow thaws. No, I acted in favour of our council, I have solved a problem that none of you were willing to face,” she bowed her head, “You’re welcome.”

To her right, Perlen scoffed and spoke softly under his breath, “Bitch.”

She felt thankful for the wand that she still had in her hand and that continued to be twirled around, as the tail end of it swept across his cheek with a resounding TWHICK that echoed in the room. She felt a twinge of remorse as the councillors regarded her with wide eyes, but there was a deep anger that alleviated that guilt.

“Now, now Master Perlen. It is not right to be so disagreeable, why don’t you come back when you’ve handled your emotions, hm?

He did not leave. Instead he stood up quickly, his heavy chair sliding back with heavy creaks and yelled as he held his reddening cheek, “Did you all see what she did—hm? She is taking over this council, I swear it to you! She’ll control all of us if you let her—soon you’ll all have no say at all!”

She narrowed her eyes at him, before smiling and letting herself slouch into her chair for the first time all day, “I recall you telling me, Master Perlen, that hysterics were a woman’s trait.”

Chistery intervened before Perlen could shout again, standing just the same, “Please, everyone. Let us settle and be civil. Your Goodness, I firmly support the decisions and the speech you made today, and I agree—as should we all—that we cannot wait for another winter to pass before we accomplish something.”

Others at the table nodded along, and she felt the meeting come to a healthy resolution.

“Thank you, Master Chistery,” she said with a nod.

He bowed in return.

“Alright everyone, Miss Cutten—dear, I will be off to dress for the celebrations and I urge you all to do the same! I hope to see you all there.”

Age—48

Dearest, Darlingest Daughter, you have been making us so very proud.

We hear of the wondrous ways in which you help Oz, you know! Your friend Miss Shen Shen—how sweet she is, and what a lady she has become—has been ever so gracious as to tell us of your ever-so-splendiferous talent for accomplishing so so much. You have become such an accomplished young lady, and we are endlessly proud of you.

We have heard back less and less from you which saddens us (though we understand that you must be very busy, and important, and kiss you for it!), so we thought to gather all our questions for you and leave them in one big letter.

How have you been? Please be sure to get your rest—you remember how upset Ama Clutch would become when she would find you awake in those late nights. What have you been working on, and is it secret? (We won’t tell!) Have you been in touch with Chuffrey? He is a good man, and we wish that you would consider him. Or perhaps that munchkin man—Hunthorn—is more to your taste? Nevertheless, your father asks: “Would you bring me some of the extra white honey from that place we went to the last time your Momsie and I came down to visit?” (he says that it goes very well with the capilla leaves in his tea!).

We would love to have you here for the winter! We were hoping to take a trip up north, and would love to have you stay with us for the ski season! Mount Runcible is, as is always the case at this time of year, absolutely covered in snow, and we are so excited to make use of the manor once more. We thought perhaps you might enjoy a break—we know you so do love your winterly activities! We encouragerize you to let us know as soon as you could by letter, though should you wish to bubble your way to visiting us, it would be even more splendiferous!

We love you and miss you a terribly thing, darling, and wish you to know that you have missed many interesting developments! For example, did you know your Popsicle has taken on baking? He insisted I teach him to make your favourites—the little walnut cookies with plumperberry jam, and those tarts with creme you used to stuff your face with. He started with those (made excellently, by the way), and has developed wondrously in his skill. He has also trimmed his mustache, and it is so strange to look at him this way, you simply must come and see for yourself.

I, on the other hand, have promised to send hugs, kisses and congratulotions from your Aunties Rosli and Lim, and your Uncle Mirk. Please send them hugs and kisses and your thanks in return, as a young lady ought to. The Murrines family also sends their regards, but you needn't thank them (they were disgracious the last time they had been invited for a dinner party—bringing a wine so sour that I'm sure the decision was made only to rid themselves of it).

On a more serious note, sweet Galinda, please do visit, or we shall have to come to visit you ourselves, and the road is crippling in our old age. If we must, we will; we cannot stand having even one more year go by without seeing your sweet face or hearing your lovely voice. The tele-transmitter is a wondrous thing, but nothing compares to your warm tone in person. 

Wishing you nothing but the very best,

your very very proud Momsie and Popsicle

-

Dear Momsie and Popsicle, I miss you.

My deepest regrets for not replying until now. I realise it is entirely rude of me, and I apologise, but I had truly forgotten to in the midst of the chaos around here. If you see Shen Shen again, please tell her that I miss her too.

To answer your questions!

I have been as well as can be when leading a council of bumbling men—you needn’t worry about me. The work hours are long, and the night is never long enough, but I am getting on well with the little routine I’ve made for myself.

Though I know you are both fond of secrets and the supposed mysteriousness of my job, I want to assure you that everything that is addressed in council, is talked about publicly as well. At the moment I am finding a team to lead the renovations and remodeling of the city—it is far too green and outdated. We shall demolish some buildings, and salvage precious metals and stones, but otherwise have no big projects at the moment.

A personal project of mine however—and I’m sure you will be interested to hear this—is finding a way to fully transcribe the Grimmerie into our lovely Ozian and Gilikk. If I can manage this, I will be sure to ask my friends to translate it further. (Though I have been working on learning Qua’ati, I fear I am not nearly proficient enough).

Chuffery requires too much attention that I am not capable of giving him, and so… he has taken up drinking against his better judgement, and my warnings. I am certain you have just gasped, Momsie, and trust that when I had learnt of such unfortunate news, I too, was in great shock. He is a great friend, but he would make a terrible husband, I’m afraid. (Hunthorn is a man-child.)

As for your honey, sweet Popsicle (Momsie, please give him the letter if he is not already reading over your shoulder), I have sent five large jars by post—they should arrive within a few days. (I, too, enjoy it in my tea. Though I drink fruit teas, mainly.)

I will try to make it home for the winter, though I am not sure I can promise it. I had hoped to arrange lodgings for those whom I am hosting for this renovation project and it has been terribly difficult. Though I will certainly find my way home for Lurlinemas—I have many presents for you both!

Popsicle, I am so happy to hear that you are expanding your horizons—see how much fun it can be!!! I hope that next you will try and tend to the greenhouse yourself, it is immensely therapeutic and calms the senses. If you could take care of my Callisia roses, I would be forever grateful. (Also, please bake me cookies when I visit you soon, I must try them myself!)

Momsie! I have sent everyone my appreciation for their kind words (not the Murrines!), and am sending both of you the same—hugs, kisses, thanks—but many many more. (I am sorry about the wine—I could bring you one of my favourites, if you would like?)

Now it is my turn to ask about the both of you! Prepare yourselves!!!

How have the both of you been, aside from missing me? Has everything been alright? The house is in order, I hope? How are Gil and Button? I hope they are taking good care of you both (say hi to them for me!). Have you taken up any hobbies, Momsie? Any interesting dinner stories that I’ve yet to hear? I have some interesting stories from Crope and Tibbs to share with you both. How was Uncle Mirk’s birth-day?

Lots and lots of love and kisses from your darlingest daughter,
Glinda!

(Oh—Popsicle, please tell Lord Up that I would like to arrange a meeting with him at his earliest convenience!)

-

Dearest, Most Splendiferous Galinda, we are elated to hear from you!

It is about time you replied to your dear old parents. We are glad to hear that you are well despite the incompetence of your council. Should you inquire about replacements, we would be more than happy to help. Your work sounds most important, and we are so excited that our darling girl is doing so well, brava! Will you be taking part in designing the buildings? I remember a time when you had an extensive interest in architecture.

It brings tears to our eyes, knowing that you hold such power with the Grimmerie—our very own darling Galinda—the most powerful sorceress Oz has seen in centuries. What wonders!

I am sad to hear about yours and Sir Chuffery’s incompatibility, we had heard he was a smart, and good man. A shame. Perhaps his younger sister would have been more to your liking?

Popsicle thanks you for the honey; he says it tastes even better than he remembers (I sampled it myself, and must admit it tastes divine). However, he hogs it, like the greedy little thing he is, and I am heartbroken that I myself cannot have it on a slice of toast or in my own cup of tea. It is no matter, I shall steal a jar from under his nose.

What great news it is that you will be joining us this Lurlinemas—we are so very happy to hear this wondrous news! I will certainly get your Popsicle to bake treats for you, and we will rope you into playing the piano for our dinner guests, and have a wonderful time together! Speaking of dinner parties, I do have scandalocious gossip for you. Do you remember Sir Chummin? Surely you must. Well—he brought with him a hard liquor to celebrate your uncle Mirk’s birth-day “properly”. It was not, in fact, very proper at all! The man brought it with him, opened it, and poured a good fifth of it into his own glass first! The gall—the disrespect! By the end of the night, the man was so drunk he confessed to having slept with one of his wife’s friends before sinking right under the table! It was an embarrassing evening and I do wish to forget it.

In response to your other questions, I’m afraid we lead a very unstimulating life. Your Popsicle and I are in good health, but low on spirit. We walk about the gardens, go to dinners with friends every other week, and fall asleep an hour or two after the sun sets. A tired routine, but we do it anyway! Gil and Button take as good care of us now as they did before, nothing has changed; the food is delicious, the house is spotless. Your father does not frequent the greenhouse as often as the kitchen, but perhaps I will one day convince him to enjoy potting plants as much as he loves molding cookies. For now, I am taking care of your roses, my darling rose.

(Please bring us your favourite wine, we would be thrilled to try it.)

We cannot wait to see you dear. We miss you from the deepest depths of our hearts and send you all the love we have,
Momsie and Popsicle

(You should have received a letter from Lord Up. If not, let us know and I shall personally give him a stern talking to.)

-

Sweetest and Dearest Momsie and Popsicle, can you believe we will be seeing each other in a few days time!

I will have much to tell you when we will see each other so I will keep my last letter (for now), a little shorter. Thank you for always being so supportive of my work—I am undeserving of your kind words. While I have not officially contributed to the designing of these buildings, a wave of passion has certainly overtaken me! I have been sketching great, big things that I will forever cherish, even if I cannot see them become a reality. They have become some of my best work!

I have met with Lord Up, thank you for helping me arrange this! The man never manages a reply to my letters and I was starting to worry.

Speaking of worry, do not do so about mine and Chuffrey’s impossibility of a match. Finding a husband (or wife, thank you!) has not been at the forefront of my mind since my poor, sweet Fiyero was taken from us. I still miss him ever so much.

I have gossip of my own regarding Sir Chummin. Word travels fast, but a drunkard’s news travels faster. I believe his wife may have kicked him out of their home, and he has found himself staying at an inn somewhere on the outskirts of the city, drinking and frequenting some… questionable establishments.

Lastly, I am glad that you are both in good health, and I hope to liven up your days while I am there with you. Please tell Button and Gil that I miss them dearly.

(Thank you for taking care of my flowers for me. I will repay you with many many kisses!)

Your ever-loving daughter who is so excited to see you both,
Glinda 

Age—47

She slammed the doors to her chamber shut with a jarring scream, pulse racing with adrenaline and fury. Her vision was tunneled as she threw her wand across the room, hitting the dresser with such a speed that a pretty porcelain vase toppled down with a loud crash.

It did not matter.

Her sight was on her buttonwood desk, cluttered with papers that she had been slaving over for months. Piles of books and open bottles of ink and detailed work, good things—very good things that she had been working on, and little delicate knick-knacks that she shouldn’t damage—

—it all came crashing to the floor in a flurry of pages as she swiped her hands hard and fast across the desk. Crashes of glass and porcelain, spillages of water and oils and ink. Pages and carpet that soaked and bled. None of it mattered—none of it mattered, it had all gone to hell—

“Fuck! Oz, fucking damnit!”

Fists slammed hard on the wood, and she barely registered the pain that raced up her arms, or the pulsing tingles where she knew her skin would turn red. The chair was in the way so she let a boiling energy levitate it and let it zip across the room, watching it as it splintered and scratched at the emerald wall.

Emerald. Everything was fucking emerald. She couldn’t get anything done like this—it hurt her viscerally, it made her want to scratch out her own eyes. She wanted the palace demolished, destroyed through and through. Emeralds everywhere. Green glass at every turn. Who could get any fucking job done like this?

No, she reminded herself, there was no job to get done in the first place.

Shut down, over and over and over again—and of course, all they’ve been doing is getting drunker and richer and I let it fucking happen.

She watched her reflection on the wall and seethed. Her hair had come undone, curls in disarray. She looked dishevelled, the dark liner around her eyes running down her face, and she breathed heavily through her clenched teeth (once she would calm down, she would realise her jaw hurt).

Voices screamed in her head, some faulting her own incompetence, others faulting the council’s insufferable idiocy, and one that wondered as it stared at the green-hued reflection.

Would they take her more seriously if she looked as dishevelled and manic as she did now? Would they take her seriously if she thrust her pointed wand at their necks? Would they lower their eyes and finally obey as she showed them what she could really do with the raw, concentrated power she felt coursing through her?

Next she toppled the desk. She used her hands for it, summoning herculean strength through blind rage and letting it crash with a bang that had the floor beneath her shaking. It was a satisfying feeling.

Drawers fell out, letting loose items that had been carefully and neatly packed away see the light of day. She let those hover mid air too, before letting them fly in every direction. Some crashed through the balcony window, letting the fragile thing come tumbling wholly to the ground and shattering, others hitting mirrors and puncturing holes into wood.

It was only as she learned to breathe properly again that she truly scanned the room. In the giant swirl of a mess that had taken hold of the bedroom, she felt her heart drop as she noticed the black tip of the hat on her bed, under a pile of splintered wood and canvas.

“No, no no no—”

She ran over to the bed hearing glass shards crack further under her heels as she went. She tossed herself onto the bed and threw away a painting that had come off of the wall, wooden boards from the desk and chair, splinters from the headboard, carefully letting them drop to the floor.

Glinda cradled the hat, held it with shaking hands and let her thumbs trace over the pleated brim as tears gathered in her eyes. When they started to cloud her vision, she let them fall, so she could continue to inspect it for rips or tears. When she found none, she brought it to her chest and squeezed it gently, burying her face into the top. It was such an old thing, and, while not frail, it certainly felt more fragile than it ought to have.

When she buried her nose deeper and breathed in, she sighed shakily with tears in her eyes, knowing well that it hadn't smelled like Elphie in decades. She no longer remembered what she smelled like in the first place—only knew that she would recognise it if she would ever come across it again.

“I'm so sorry, Elphie.” 

I'm failing you , she could not bring herself to say out loud. 

“I love you so much. I love you so much and I'm trying, Elphaba. I'm trying so hard,” she said weakly, trying to speak past the lump in her throat. When she tried to stop herself from fully crying into the hat, a pitiful, desperate sound of grief pulled itself from her chest. She was falling apart.

“Please forgive me. Please. I'm trying so much and it's so hard, Elphaba, please. I'm so sorry.” 

I’m sorry for not pushing hard enough. I'm sorry for not working as hard as I know you would. 

“I love you and I'm trying to be good. I am.”

The empty, torn up room did not speak back. It only watched as she continued to drown in her sorrow and grief.

A whine tore its way out of her crying, in tandem with another sharp pain in her chest, and she could only mumble her way through it, “I'm just so tired, Elphie. I'm so tired and I love you so much and I don't know what to do anymore.”

Glinda had curled in on herself at some point, lightly rocking herself back and forth with the hand still clutched tightly to her chest. She heaved and grieved and whispered “I love you" over and over as one would a prayer through her sobbing. 

It was the first and only night in which she had fallen asleep on Elphaba’s side of the bed.

Age—29

“Tighter please, Rolee.”

She swallowed hard as the laces on her dress were tightened once more. When she looked at herself in the mirror she smiled, satisfied with the end result, “Thank you for your help.”

Rolee nodded shyly and bowed low, “Of course, your goodness. Is there anything else you may need help with?”

Glinda smiled kindly and squeezed her arm gently, “No, thank you. Please, take off and enjoy the rest of your evening.”

As she left, Glinda swiped at her dress to smooth it or fluff it, wanting it to look perfect. The tiara sat on a shelf behind her, and she felt her jaw tighten at the thought of having to wear it. It was heavier than it looked, it was made of crystals and large, sky blue aquamarines that adorned its crest. As she put it on, she felt the hair that had been so carefully arranged, flatten itself once more, and she sighed, rushing to fix it before heading down to the ballroom.

It had been a long week, and she prayed that the night would be over quickly. The heels that she had decided on (in reality the only ones that truly worked with her dress), were decidedly uncomfortable, and she could feel the blisters that came with endless dancing already. No matter how hard she tried, there would always be a line of men, whether with an interest to discuss politics, or to convince her that she would be a wonderful wife, or that just wanted something from her, that would press a kiss to her hand, and lead her to dance.

The first to greet her was thankfully Crope, who gently kissed her cheek, followed closely by Tibbett, who instead kissed Crope’s cheek and wrapped an arm around his waist.

“At it again, Miss Glinda?”

She furrowed her brows, “At what again?”

Crope flashed her a smiled, “Sulking. You’ll be aging thirty years in a month if you keep making that face.”

“Perhaps it’s been glued on since we last saw her, I don’t believe she’s changed a single bit,” added Tibbett.

She could not get another word in before Crope jumped in again with a dramatic sigh, “Maybe it’s us. We should consider that we are the problem. Do we trouble you, Miss Glinda?”

Glinda scoffed and shoved him lightly, “Don’t be an idiot.”

“Then let us have fun, join us! We can make you look busy so that you need not worry yourself with Bozzlenot and Huntor and whomever else.”

“Sir Bozwell, and Master Hunthorn. Both are very respectable people.”

Tibbett rolled his eyes, “Oh of course, Your Grand Goodness. Please forgive me.”

She sighed, “Fine, fine. Take me away if you must, but know that I need to drink. I’m running on fumes right now and I cannot be approached by a single other soul without being at the very least a little drunk.”

“Dear, it’s you who arranged the event—we’ll be following you to the drinks!”

She glided over to a staff member holding flutes of champagne, said a word or two that made him blush, and took the whole tray, walking out onto the balcony with a bewildered Tibbett and Crope following closely behind.

“Darling, that was magic! Bravo!” applauded Crope as he swiped a glass off of the tray.

“Concerning, if anything,” mumbled Tibbett.

The three of them sat down at a table, and knocked their glasses together.

Crope cheered, “To Glinda!”

“To you, darling, for having taken on the friend-group’s role of ‘grump’,” Tibbett said with a wink.

When Glinda smiled it did not reach her eyes, but she joined in nonetheless, “To the year in which I can finally leave this gala in the past. May it be soon.”

It was quiet then, as Glinda downed her glass and the men exchanged looks. It stayed that way for a while, the calm of the evening with the gentle sway of music from the indoors creating a nice atmosphere. She realised she had missed this—being with friends and spending time in their company. She watched them out of the corner of her eyes; watched as they instinctively held each other’s hands, thumbs moving gently across gloved hands; watched as they leaned into each other and breathed comfortably; watched as they looked happy.

(Crope had been looking down the rim of his first and only flute of champagne when he noticed four emptied glasses on Galinda’s end.)

“So tell me boys, how have you been? Last I heard you bought a place uptown?”

Tibbett put an arm around Crope and grinned proudly at him, “In a sense. Crope bought a studio for his art-making. Off to the galleries soon.”

“Oh, my! Well that's quite wonderful news, brava! You used to be a shy little thing, dear. I’m glad you’re moving past it. It must be such a change of scenery—to go from managing auction houses for such things to making them. What's that like?”

Crope scoffed, flustered, “The art-making is only a hobby for the moment, I'm still managing the auction house which is over on Morrow street. Which you would know if you ever bothered to come by.” He ended with false sadness, shaking his head, wiping at his dry eyes. When she regarded him with an unimpressed, raised brow, he coughed and continued, “Honestly, though, they're very different. Most of what is up for auction are paintings or ceramic sculptures, and I have to say. It is a lot harder to make such intricate pieces than I thought. Much more time consuming.”

Tibbett shook his head sadly, “Yes, instead of consuming my time! I'm now left alone. It's endlessly lonely in our bed…”

Glinda sniffed, “Mm. I don’t wish to hear about your… bed.”

Tibbett laughed and propped his elbows up on the table, “That’s alright—we want to hear from you!”

“Does anything interesting happen in your bed?” interjected Crope, restraining a bout of laughter.

She was unimpressed.

“In all seriousness, Glinda, do you… take time for yourself? Come on, we haven't seen or heard from you in months. We thrive on scandalocious stories and you are killing us.”

“Please, revive us. Tell us something, anything—but make it good.”

She shook her head and felt lightheaded, “I've never been one to have good stories. I harbour many good secrets, but few are secrets of my own.”

Tibbett “ooh’ed”, and pressed on, “So you do have secrets.”

Crope pressed a hand to his chest and feigned a gasp, “Keeping them from us? Your best friends? You are a mean, little thing, Glinda Upland.”

The thing about drinking five or six champagne glasses in very little time, was that the filter that comes with sobriety dissipates very quickly.

“My secrets are terrible, I'm afraid. You don't want to hear them,” she spoke softly, solemnly. The moon was almost above them now and she admired it.

“Ohh, I'm sure we do. You're a closed book, Glin. We've been dying to hear about you,” said Crope as Tibbett nodded along.

There was a small stretch of contemplative silence before she said anything. She thought about the green bottle. She thought about Elphie’s screams before she found the puddle, and her own tears after startling out of a night terror. She smiled wistfully, and looked down at her glass, “I'm very alone, I'm afraid. Eight years to the day now that she has been dead, and sometimes I still wait out on my balcony in hopes that she'll come back.”

When she looked up and saw that they had paused, whether it was in shock or to let her speak, she didn't know. But she continued—letting herself get caught up in her emotions for the first time in far too long.

“You asked about my bed? Well I'm afraid that the only time someone else was in it, it was her. On the train ride to the Emerald City. I suppose it wasn’t truly my bed, but I think it counts. She snores— snored so loudly in her sleep,” she said with a pitiful laugh.

They had been young then, and Galinda remembered only shapes and outlines of those few nights on the train. Elphaba would toss and turn until Glinda would open her arms and let her nestle her face into her neck. She remembered vague motions of hands that held her waist and cupped her face to press kisses to her cheeks and jaw, too afraid pressed instead to her lips. It was a silly thing to reminisce over, she supposed, and so she recovered from her daydream with a smile.

“I have become a pathetic creature, sadly. But I feel that I have found great success in what I do, and how I work, so I can’t complain.”

The men both tried to look at her as though they had been listening to casual gossip, but failed spectacularly. Even in her befuddled state of mind, she could tell that they matched with looks of pity, and she hated it. Were they expecting something different? Surely they must’ve known her better than that.

All of them were silent for a moment before Tibbett tried to speak, “You know, I had always remembered Elphaba to be the one who was always politicking. With the larger care for the Animals’ rights and for fights she… couldn’t win.”

Glinda did not deny it, “Yes, she was.”

Tibbett pushed, “When you became Glinda the Good, and you spoke against her…”

“Yes.”

People of Emerald City, today I share great news with you all. The Wicked Witch is dead at last!

Fellow Ozians, I am here to put to rest the rumours and speculation. It is true! The Wicked Witch of the West is dead!

My people, I am here to share with you a great joy! We are free, now and forever, of the Wicked Witch of the West!

“Everyone else may have been fooled by her ‘Wicked Witch’-ness, but we were her friends before yours. She was never cruel or wicked of any kind.”

Glinda nodded, and took a sip from her glass, “You are right. Oh! Well… I supposed she was a little crazed after that little girl took Nessa’s shoes, but yes.”

That it was she who enchanted them, she didn’t say.

Both Crope and Tibbett had paused to reflect, the conversation not adding up. Crope spoke again with furrowed brows, “What happened when you both met the Wizard? It was after that that it all went to hell, wasn’t it?”

Tibbett sighed, “We had held back on really asking about her because you just seemed… well you still seem upset. And maybe it is silly to ask this, but it doesn't make sense. You fought her for years at every turn of the road, and not a month after, you lifted Animal Bans and took charge of creating an equal and just council, dismantling the Gale Force… For years you’ve had… for lack of a better term, you’ve had Elphaba’s agenda .”

Cropped nodded along, “You are a miracle worker, Glinda, really. You have made such a difference in the few years that you’ve been on the council, and we thank you for it. We just wonder why it all happened this way.”

“I cannot say.”

Tibbett shrugged, “You could try?”

She dropped her head into her palms, “This may not be a secret to the both of you, but it sure as Oz damned hell is one of my biggest. I love Elphaba, that’s my reality. And the last time I saw her… well. I couldn’t save her. So I’m doing the next best thing, which is making sure her wants become reality.”

Crope blinked, “You’ve done all of this out of guilt?”

Yes.

“No, I’m doing this because it is the right thing to do. She was always right—just very stubborn. And I was a selfish girl.”

“Are you alright? Doing… better?”

She shrugged, “Sometimes, sometimes not. We move on as best we can.”

Tibbett eyed her wearily, “You’ve changed laws. Passed them, too. How come the Wizard didn’t do that in his time here?”

“I’m sure you can figure out the answer to that, you’re a clever man.”

“Oh.”

“Mhm.”

“... And Morrible?”

“Why do you think she’s locked up in a cell?”

Crope slumped in his seat, “This is a lot to take in.”

Glinda laughed and downed the rest of her glass, “Was this enough reviving, resurrecting—whatever gossip—for you?”

Tibbett, who had started rubbing his husband’s shoulders, laughed, still in shock himself, “I think you may have taken off ten years of his life.”

“How rude of me—”

“-Miss Glinda! What a nice surprise!” a voice spoke.

She jolted at the voice, and whirled around to see Sir Gebble, an older gentleman who held a pipe up to his mouth.

“Oh! Hello Sir, how are you?” she asked, standing up. A wave of dizziness hit her hard, but she pushed through it and approached him while her friends watched from a distance. She felt his full beard and mustache press against her hand as wet lips kissed it.

“Enjoying a smoke, young lady. The ballroom can sometimes get a little too stuffy for an old man like me,” he said good-naturedly.

She smiled, “Oh I’m sure that can’t be true! You must be the life of such an event. I do remember enjoying myself so much more at that dinner party you hosted.”

‘You are too sweet, Your Goodness, too sweet. And anyhow, my little social gathering cannot be compared to this fine event! What great effort you must have put into this.”

She let herself laugh before shaking her head, “No, no. I host this party every year, it becomes less of a panic and more of a chore, really. I only hope that everyone has a great time.”

He blew smoke, “ We certainly are. You are a generous hostess.”

“Oh, hush.”

“You knew her, isn’t that right?”

She froze, “Pardon?”

He continued on, puffing out smoke, “The witch whose death we celebrate today. Elphaba Thropp.”

She felt the need to hold onto something, anything.

“Oh. I did, yes. We went to Shiz University together.”

He didn’t seem very invested in whatever story would come out of that line of conversation, and he hummed thoughtfully, “They say she interrupted your audience with the wizard in a fit of jealous rage. What a shame. One would have assumed that being of noble lineage would’ve straightened such terrible behaviours out.”

There had always been a story that she stuck to when people asked about her relationship with Elphaba. She interrupted, stormed the building and in a fury—mutilated the monkeys. Then, on her ragged broom, she lifted up to the skies to terrorise the rest of their wonder Oz, hellbent on destroying Glinda and the Wizard. She was usually more sober for those stories.

“She… she did interrupt. Though why she was jealous, I will never understand. Her raw power had always been astonishing.” What twisted words.

The man shrugged, “You met the Wizard, she didn’t. It had always been considered an honour to meet him, and work with him. You understand this, of course.”

Glinda nodded dumbly, a thin sheen of sweat covering her brow, “Yes, I do.”

Gebble hummed, “Was she really as powerful as all that?”

“Oh, yes. It was… breathtaking, what she could do. At school—I mean. Our paths crossed rarely after that, and so I wouldn’t know. I imagine her powers grew darker, as she did,” she said softly. A gentle breeze brought goosebumps to her skin, and she decided that it was finally time to make the rounds inside. “I must away, now. I have been hiding out here for a while and must now make myself known. Good evening, Sir Gebble.”

He smiled gently and brought her hand up to his lips for one more kiss, “Good luck, Miss Glinda.”

The party inside was much louder than what she could hear of it from out on the balcony. As she glided between circles of people, nodding at those she knew or passing by with a quick word of acknowledgement, she searched for Master Knishot, to whom she had given her speech to be reviewed the night before.

“Miss Glinda. Miss Glinda wait—”

Oh, sweet Lurline, help her—

“-Ah, Master Hunthorn. Good evening,” she said with a bow of her head.

He bowed deeply in turn, “Would you care to dance?”

She nearly found herself groaning impatiently, and covered it with a hand to her mouth as she pretended to clear her throat, “Unfortunately, I must find Master Knishot. I gave him my speech.”

He tsk’ed and took her hand, “I think you should dance first, you look rigid. Find your balance.”

She rolled her eyes and sighed, and let herself be dragged to the edge of the dancing, before gracefully stepping in, hands on Hunthorn’s shoulders. She did not enjoy his cologne—it was too strong and too masculine, a strange and unpleasantly citrusy thing that made her nostrils flare, and head hurt. Perhaps button fruits?

When the munchkinlander spoke, she could never truly make the connection between his features and his voice. His voice was something deep and a little rasped, like that of a hulking, bearded sailor, but his features were boyish and his sideburns were the only hair he had on his face—with rosier cheeks, at times, more pink than a babe.

“You aren’t enjoying yourself,” he said. A statement, not a question.

Glinda scoffed and looked down to meet his eyes, “A hostess never enjoys herself.”

“You don’t find joy in good food and alcohol? Not even celebrating the Witch’s death?” he asked with a shrug.

She pursed her lips and thought for a moment before she spoke again, “Alcohol yes, but I have never been inclined to truly celebrate someone’s death. Surely you can understand that.”

He huffed, confused, “It is like celebrating a new year. Not a celebrated death but—”

She furrowed her brows and concentrated on trying not to step on his toes, “A new year is a symbol of new beginnings.”

“The wicked witch’s death symbolises the same, does it not?”

She shrugged and looked away, watching others sway about, with a happy look on their faces, “Maybe the first year, it did. A change in the leading Ozian powers. But now it’s a reminder that people are cruel enough to celebrate the death of a woman that had just entered adulthood.”

“She did terrible things!” he said, shocked.

She raised a brow, unimpressed, “You will find those to be unfounded rumours. Besides, we’ve all done our fair share of wrong.”

Hunthorn scoffed and stepped on her toes, “If you’re so against it, why be the one to arrange the festivities and host the gala?”

Her eyes hurt from how hard they rolled, “Please, as if it isn't the same routine, every year. Would you like my secret? Keep it simple, keep it fresh. Besides, I am not the one who had suggested this—I would never.”

“Ah. Perlen,” he nodded in understanding.

Glinda sighed and swayed, “Who else? That first year, he suggested it to boost trust and interest in the council, and I found I could not disagree with it. Said he would do it himself, but that planning parties was more of a woman’s job, and so I should take charge.”

He swallowed awkwardly at that and she resisted the urge to steal her hand away from where it had fallen to his own palm, “Well—you do a marvelous job at it.”

As they reached the edge of the dancefloor again, she pulled away and back into the crowd of onlookers, “Mm. Kind of you to say. Now, thank you for the dance, but I simply must find Knishot.”

The rest of the evening went over smoothly, thankfully. She got roped into a couple more dances, but her feet were fine by the end of it. Knishot was not too difficult to find as there were only so many Bears in the hall. She reviewed the speech with him, and thanked him for his help. When she glanced at the large clock on the other wall, she sighed and helped herself to a small portion of food. Any more than ‘just a little’ never sat well with her before a speech.

It was only as she stepped onto the stage, holding the wand that had steadily and concerningly been turning blue over the years, with a headache-inducing tiara on her head, and a script between two fingers, that she felt her underlying anxiety about the success of the night finally settle. It was a terrible event, made even worse by the unending chatter of people who had enjoyed the Wizard’s reign, and benefited greatly from it. They were not as easily swayed by her charm and bright smiles, and it had taken years for some of them to even come to this event, but it was a slow success. She watched them closely, and hoped to keep them under her thumb for as long as she could.

Do good, she told herself.

So the short speech came and went, with thanks to the sponsors, and to those who had donated money, and with quick jokes and a gleaming outlook on the future. A future that had many more celebrations like this to come.

Glinda was tired.

Age—41

The pardoning of Elphaba Thropp, better known as the Wicked Witch of the West, was a quiet affair.

There were newspapers printed and dropped off to every corner of Oz, on a sunny day which coincided with her death, and few even bothered to read its entirety before shrugging and leaving it out on the street in favour of more interesting news. Those that did find themselves reading it, either in shock or entirely unsurprised, would have read this:

Elphaba Thropp, The Witch of the West: No Longer Wicked

Fellow Ozians,

Today marks the passing of the twentieth year since the death of who we have all come to know as Elphaba Thropp, The Third Thropp Descending, and her better known alias, The Wicked Witch of the West.

Over the years we have come to shed new light on this character. We have understood and learnt that not everything is green and white, and that perhaps, our fears were at times unfounded. Of course, there has been and always will be speculation surrounding her true nature—she was green, yes, but did that make her the devil? Was she wicked? Was she Fae, fighting in the Animal’s Resistance? Was she kind?

It will come as no surprise that I knew her; it has long since been known that we had gone to school together. It has been a long time since then, but I remember the good things in life, and so, can only recall gentle laughter and awe-inspiring feats of magic, and emerald skin. As I age, I realise how young we both were—how misguided and naive children are.

We are now aware that our Wizard was not the great man we used to believe he was, and perhaps, Elphaba Thropp was not the wicked witch we made her out to be. We now know that she fought for change, and change came along—a new and braver Oz, that lets Animals live in a harmony unheard of during the Wizard’s era. We have learned to better love and respect one another and I think there is a limitless wonder in that.

I pardon the Witch of the West today because it has long since been time to do so. I pardon her because it has been twenty years since her death, and we understand now that she was a young woman who only fought to bring change along. In her memory, there will be a statue of her in the palace courtyard—open to all, and a poppy field to be planted in her honour. They were once feared, these fields, for she was frequently seen in them.

They were her favourite flowers.

Dearest Ozians, I thank you for your understanding,
Glinda, The Good Witch of the North and Leader of the Ozian Council

Age—56

She stepped out of her dress, a sparkling navy-blue thing that Madame Cutten—Adama—had told was “just lovely, dear, just lovely”, and into the warm bath that had been prepared for her. For the longest time she couldn’t even stand the sight of water—rain, rivers, even the snow left her with a hollow feeling that would eat at her chest. With time, and the need to soothe her old, and aching muscles, she had started to get over this aversion—spending more time in the large bathing tubs that would help untense her.

Glinda let herself sink deeply into it, feeling the pressure in her ears and the way her hair floated up to the water’s surface. As she held her breath and let herself be encompassed by the heat, the gentle sweeps of water cradled her and let her forget her day’s troubles (of which there had been many).

There had been fewer and fewer worries about running the council in her older age, all of the older men that had continued to oppose had long since been dead or had retired, and the younger generations had been more easily swayed to take quicker actions on projects. Munchkinland was still without a true governor, not really a problem in and of itself, but it was becoming difficult trying to manage it when there were few people who could report back from there. So she had sent Hunthorn to manage that position for as long as she needed to come up with a more permanent solution, and he had been behind on schedule with his reports.

She let herself breathe bubbles out of her nose as she sat up, pushing her hair back out of her face. It was getting long again, she noticed. She shampooed at her scalp, rubbing softly with her fingers and shivering at the cold of her shoulders being out of the water. She hated that, even though it was early summer, she still felt the cold in every moment of undress. She soaped herself, and conditioned her hair, and bundled herself into a towel. Letting herself drip onto the floor as she walked to the mirror, she took another towel and scrunching her hair so her curls wouldn’t dry awkwardly.

Glinda had always prided herself of her routines, taking time with her hair and skin—gently applying a conditioner and oils that left feeling content with her appearance—no matter the wrinkles that now lined her face and the white strands of hair mixed in with the blond. Freckles from the sun were few and far between, but there were moles that dotted her skin now—more than the few she had when she was a child. She had one from childhood, a small little thing that dotted her left wrist, that was now accompanied by two others that settled beside it.

She applied a balm to her lips, and a gentle shadow to her eyes, and found her evening dress. She had learned a long while ago that even a balcony stay meant dressing up once more, and so she laid in bed with her sketchbook and drew until her hair had dried and she could put it on.

It was a calm night, she noticed. Few people were out, and the sky was clear and she enjoyed the silence with her pipe in her mouth. Her wand lay beside her, thrumming with energy as it always did, and it only amplified as she held her hand up and let a little breeze form—carrying little bubbles up and away and back down in little figure-eights. It had been a while since she had gotten to enjoy silence like this, and she cherished it. It must have been weeks, she thought, since such an opportunity.

At the time, the City had celebrated the tulip festival, which had become, with time, a large, week-long celebration. Munchkinlanders came by with the tulips and sold them to lovers, or young girls and boys who had waited a year to give their grandmothers such presents. There were competitions held and paintings sold, and competitions for paintings—it was a grand affair all over Oz. She had once gone to Munchkinland to celebrate, and was dragged by them to see the acres and acres of endless flowers, and to sit through lovely performances of “tulip dances”. It was all very impressive. But it was at the end of that week, when everyone had left and the carriages had packed up, and everyone was too tired for another round of celebrations, that the city had become entirely quiet.

The quiet had not always been her friend, though. For years she found herself seeking out contact with other people, so as to not be alone with her thoughts that looped in her mind. Visions and glimpses of emerald, of puddles and pretty dark green lips that she wished she had kissed more than once. Screams and shouts haunted her too. In the end, it mattered not. She had long since acknowledged her constant state of a sort of depression. It had not been too obvious in her twenties, but as she drank more steadily and felt the exhaustion to her bones, she had to finally admit that to herself. She ached, and she was tired, and that was that.

Would she have been able to get out of bed if her guilt didn't root into her very soul? If her grief and the haunting obligation to her friend didn't drive her to this life in government?

Out on her balcony though, she tried to take away all thoughts of politics, and let herself breathe and hum and look at the pretty, unclouded stars. She had put down her pipe and settled with her eyes closed, comfortable and hoping to drift away for a while. Perhaps she had been asleep for a while when she heard it, but she wasn't sure.

There was a swish of fabric, and a thump of something above her. Her hand shot out to grab her staff, gripping it tightly as she rose from her seat with a held-back groan.

“Hello, to you—please, it's rude to not speak when we are not facing each other. I assume that is what you want?” she asked sweetly, letting herself play the role of the wise, old witch.

She looked up to find nothing there, eyes narrowing when she heard footsteps go slowly down the roof. Dark black fabric was what she saw first, gliding down with the rest of the body.

“We cannot have a proper conversation if I am the only one speaking.”

The body, still cloaked in black, floated down gently then, and unfurled to reveal a broom with an intricate handle that she saw in her dreams, and verdant skin that she saw in her nightmares. She blinked.

“I don’t know who you are but I do not appreciate this joke,” she tried.

The stranger took a step forward, and into the light that streamed in from her room, and she understood that it could be no stranger at all. Her heart thumped wildly in her chest and she felt faint.

A whisper was spoken between them, “Glinda.”

Glinda turned away and picked up her pipe, turned it upside down and smacked it hard—letting whatever remained of the unsmoked tobacco fall out, “Did somebody drug me?” she muttered.

“Glinda,” the drug-induced Elphaba spoke.

“No, no. Please don’t speak. The last time I indulged you…” she shook her head and shivered, “Not again, sorry.”

She sat herself back down and stared off into the distance, watching the hooded Elphaba out of the corner of her eye, praying that she would soon dissipate into nothingness. She groaned, “Oh, I’m too old to be on drugs…”

The Elphaba did not move, only stared at her curiously, with a sadness that matched her own, and Glinda buried her face in her hands, “Don’t look at me.”

The hallucination stepped forward again and Glinda felt her heart rate spike as the woman spoke again, a small, broken thing. “Glinda, please. You’re not… high.”

Glinda laughed and indulged her, “Well—it’s either that I’m high, or I’m dead. And I’ve been taking well enough care of myself to not die just yet, thank you.” She stood up then and thought perhaps if she went inside, it would all go away. “And if I am dead, do let me know so that I may end you again myself—leaving me here to deal with all this shit .” She trailed off, muttering to herself.

And then a warm hand held her back as she made her attempt to escape inside, and she shrieked. Honest to Oz, shrieked.

“No! Why are you touching me—oh why are you warm?! Get off of me!” She said slapping the offending arm away with mutterings of “fuck, I’m dead”.

“Glinda, please. You’re not dead.”

She was breathing a little heavily when she spoke again, out of sorts, “Well—you’re certainly not alive!”

Except what she saw in front of her was a more real Elphaba that anything her mind had ever conjured. And there was heat between them that did not belong to her, and pulsing magic that was not her own, and eyes that were so green behind that stupid black hood—

-and suddenly she was walking up to this strange Elphaba of hers, blinking in the gentle lines on her dimly lit face, and the hands that had aged as much as her own, and watched as now it was the emerald woman who stepped back—confusion plastered on her face.

“Glinda, what—”

“Touch me again. Touch me again or so help me I will throw you off of this balcony,” she said stiffly, her heart pounding wildly in her ears.

And this Elphaba did. She stepped in and cupped Glinda’s face like it was the most precious thing she had ever held, thumbing at her cheeks with vaguely coarse hands. Glinda nearly melted into her, and hummed lowly—or moaned—she couldn’t tell— at the touch. Her eyes closed and she basked in the warmth that Elphaba had wrapped around her.

“You feel good. Oz, you feel so good,” she babbled, “So good.”

Perhaps delusion was alright.

Before she could wrap herself further around this Elphaba, the woman stepped back, and instead pressed Glinda hand—her hand that immediately tingled and lined her arm with gooseflesh—to her chest. Glinda felt faint when she felt a heartbeat that matched her own in rhythm. It beat steadily—strong and racing and Glinda clenched her jaw when she started feeling unsteady.

“Oh,” was all she could manage before she stepped away.

“I’m alive, Glinda. I’m here—I’m here,” it was only then that Glinda noticed that her voice was not the one she remembered. It was older, richer in tone.

She felt dizzy, “You—you can’t be—”

“-I am, I am. Look at me, Glinda. Feel me,” This Elphaba pleaded as she pressed Glinda’s hand from her chest to her face, letting the hood slip off as she did.

What she did see—in the warm glow of the balcony’s light—was an Elphaba that was older. Bags under her eyes that she did not bother to cover up as Glinda did, little lines around her mouth, and the single crinkle between her eyes as her eyebrows pulled together in concern. Hair that had started to grey between natural curls that had been braided together in cornrows. She was beautiful. Her cheek was so soft, and warm, and her eyes were so much like she remembered—

She shook her head. This could not be happening. “No. No, no no—”

“Glinda, please—”

And Glinda saw white. Fury. Rage that had been swirling under her skin bubbled to the surface and she raised her wand to Elphaba’s chest as she pulled back and screamed for every year that she had passed drowning in guilt and grief, and instead let a deep betrayal take its place—cutting deeper into her, “No! Elphaba is dead! She has been dead for—for fucking decades and you don't get to come here and tell me otherwise. No!”

Elphaba swallowed hard at the wand glowing brightly in her direction, looking pleadingly at Glinda, “I am alive—Glinda, look at me.”

Glinda just shook her head and whimpered, just then feeling tears that had trailed down her cheeks. When she spoke again it was still harsh and rasped, but the denial was unconvincing, “No! She’s dead—Elphaba’s dead! She’s dead.”

Elphaba looked pitifully at her, tears streaking down her own face, though Glinda refused to look. She grabbed a pointed tip of Glinda’s wand and moved the whole thing away from her. Glinda let her.

“Why am I dead, Glinda? Why can't you see that I'm here.”

Shivers wracked the blonde’s body as betrayal and Elphaba’s voice coursed through it—anger and longing and hope and grief swirling in a nonsensical blur that left her weak. When she spoke again, it was a feeble attempt at steadying herself and she waved her hands around in flutters as she continued to cry, “Because I have spent the last thirty five years—thirty five! I have spent them grieving you. I’ve spent the better part of my life—”

She threw the wand out of sight and felt her hands shake, unsteady, as a deep sob clawed its way out of her throat, “-oh Oz. Oh, what am I doing? Why is this happening—”

And gentle, strong arms wrapped themselves around her as her legs gave out and she fell against the cloak-covered chest. She could not stay there, she absolutely would not let herself fall for it—for this entirely cruel trick. She tried to pry herself away, begging to be let go as she pushed with her hands, but nothing. Elphaba held her securely by the waist, arms wrapped around her as if memorising her while she lowered them both to the ground.

In the end, as seemed to always be the case, Glinda gave in, hysterics ebbing away—letting her head fall firmly into the crook of Elphaba’s neck, noticing she did not smell as she used to—and spoke again in a broken voice, “Why are you here? Why can't you just leave me alone?”

“Because I am selfish, and I thought—” whatever she was going to say was cut off, “Do you not want me here?”

What an awful thing to say.

“Oz, please, Elphaba—I beg you. Leave. Leave so that I can cry tonight and go back to my life, in which I continue to grieve you.”

Elphaba only shook her head and Glinda resisted the urge to scoff. When she spoke again, she repeated herself through her own tears, “But I’m—I love you.”

Glinda knew Elphaba had loved her, just as she did her—this was not a revelation. Perhaps it was an apology, maybe a plea, but it felt so childish when she said it. She spoke the words as though she were a young girl, unable to understand why the world was unfair in the way that it was—why she couldn’t have all that she wanted. Glinda knew quite a lot about that—about being unable to have the one thing she needed. The rage simmered.

“You don’t love me. You don’t fucking love me—I love you!” She tried desperately to pull away, a fear of being present for such a conversation leaving her in a terrorised state, and still she rambled on—incoherent to her own ears, “I mourn you every day—I grieved you a hundred times longer than I’ve known you to be alive! You don't love me!” Elphaba only held her tighter, and let herself sob silently. Glinda could feel it and it stung. “But I do—I love you.”

Elphaba just kissed her hair and heaved, and spoke in whimpered apologies, and Glinda thought, just for a moment about the hands that she had been pounding into her chest, “I’m sorry, I love you—I’m so sorry. I knew I should have found a different way—I didn’t know how this would hurt you. I’m so sorry. I love you.”

Glinda had been whispering to herself, the word “no,” unending, as Elphaba apologised.

“You don’t get to say this to me, Elphaba. You don’t get to reappear out of nothing and—and tell me you’re alive, and—Oz why are you here? You need to go—I can’t—” she tried to look at her, and failed, letting her graze drop once more.

Somewhere in the recesses of her mind she knew her legs and back hurt from being cramped into this position on the stone floor, but she couldn’t bring herself to care—not when Elphaba let her lips fall to her temple and whined as though in pain.

“Why?”

Glinda just shook her head, tired, “I can’t—” I can’t bring myself to look at you. If I look at you again… “I just can’t.”

That was the crux of it, wasn’t it? So when Elphaba let her arms drop and whispered a wet, heartbreaking, “okay,” as she stood to leave, why did Glinda’s own heart break all over again?

It was only as Elphaba picked up her broom and let her cloak fall back into place—

I hope you’re happy!

-that Glinda felt her resolve crumble. She stood tall now, with her lips quivering as she watched the scene unfold, and prayed for strength. She closed her eyes and looked away when Elphaba walked over again, and had to bite her lip when her wrist was pulled up to soft lips and kissed gently.

“Don’t do that,” she said, eyes still closed.

“I’m sorry,” Elphaba mumbled into her palm.

She felt cold—so cold—when Elphaba let go. There was a step, two, on the stone, a flutter of fabric, and when she opened her eyes again, Elphaba was gone.

Perhaps she had never been there in the first place.

Chapter Text

She worked herself to the bone in the weeks after that… episode. That’s all she let it be. A moment of weakness, perhaps a moment of intoxication. She could not bear to entertain the thought that it had been real. 

There were moments in which her wrist would tingle where she had been “kissed” as though it were a reminder of a reality—something that she knew to be untrue. She had not held Elphaba that night, had not been kissed by her, and not even seen the damned woman. She struggled to accept that, and the smallest part of her—the one that held out hope every time she was out on that balcony—was elated at this entire situation, knowing she had been right to hold out for as long as she did.

Hold out, my sweet.

The bigger part of her—the one that vividly remembered hearing her screams and watched her melt from behind that awful curtain, refused to even entertain the thought that she could be alive, much less believe that Elphaba would have risked coming to see her, if that were the case. She hated— hated —that it had been on her mind so intensely since that night. The feeling of Elphaba holding her, looking at her with those big beautiful eyes, and her warm and gentle hands, it was all too much. 

She was going insane, that could be the only explanation besides having strange side effects to drugs she was certain she did not ingest that night —courtesy of having woken up the next morning with a perfectly haunting recollection of the night’s events. It did not matter, she was absolutely losing her mind—maybe she already had. The years she had spent stressing over her work must have finally gotten to her. Either that or the guilt that sometimes suffocated her more efficiently than drowning, had finally caught up to her in her older years. She deserved it, if that were the case. 

But Oz and Lurline above she was tired. She could still feel the warmth tingle on her skin at times and it haunted her every waking moment—fearing that second of warmth would leave her drained the rest of the day. Why was loving the dead so, so difficult? And why couldn’t it finally have gotten easier instead? Surely this was a sign—meant to get her unattached once and for all.

She had parsed through every scenario that could ever exist over the last almost-four decades. Scenes in which Elphaba had faked her death—and running away with her; scenes in which Elphaba had been brought back to life by the tears that Glinda had shed over her puddle, diluting it, or even the grimmerie in her hands—responding once more to Elphaba’s melted form, and deciding to reconstruct her; scenes in which Elphaba hadn’t died at all, and instead got her sister’s shoes and kissed Glinda soundly. And then there were longings—long since left in her past—that entertained the thought of her dying in Elphaba’s place.

Some of them, instead, entertained a similar scenario to that night—that Elphaba would’ve come in through the balcony window and would’ve sat on her bed, wide-eyed and waiting, broom put away. She would’ve told Glinda of some far-fetched story of why she couldn’t come back sooner, though she longed to, desperately—or perhaps the typical miscommunication that followed Glinda’s novels of romance—and they would hold each other until the sun would rise and finally kiss again.

None of it mattered—not those fantasies, not the dizziness that had wrapped her in its clutches since that night—it was all one big hope, one giant illusion that manifested out of her endless nightmares and grief. Not for the first time, she wondered if getting into this line of work for Elphaba was the reason that she could not move past it all. It must have been—there was no other explanation for this pathetic display.

There was another problem; she was endlessly tired now. Her composure had finally started to crack, and everything was going to absolute shit. Throwing herself into her work only served to make it all worse—losing focus during meetings and falling asleep while reviewing documents, and losing sight for a clock-tick too long as she dipped her pen into ink—having it spill over her desk. She felt faint walking up the stairs and only then realised that she hadn’t eaten a meal all day. Food became a little tasteless, and her bed looked very cosy, and nothing she would do, aside from giving into a full night’s sleep, would help.

At least, that’s what Doctor Henell told her when she stood up that morning after the end of a meeting with the new Lady Up (who had stepped into power after her father had fallen in), saw black and little sparkles and the floor, before waking up to Adama desperately grasping at her face in fear, and a headache that she felt even her eyes. He had told her to rest well, and she only ground her teeth and agreed with an apology for “the inconvenience”.

That day, she was taken by dearest Cutten, up to her bedroom and laid to rest. She protested this as she was handed a glass of water by her friend, who only shushed her and kissed her head and told her not to worry. It had been a terrible thing, sending the girl, just fourteen, by herself—but she was smart—very smart—and from a prominent family in the Kells, and so it had been done. But Adama Cutten had grown into a mature woman and mother, and Glinda held great fondness for her—having met and befriended her when she herself was only thirty-one. She mentioned this as the younger woman shuffled about in a state of panic, wondering what else she could do to help.

“I’m worried for you, Glinda, terribly worried. You’ve always had that shallow look in your eyes but, spirits and Oz, it’s gotten worse. Are you sick? Is there something wrong, you must tell me if there is, I beg you,” she had asked as she fluffed the pillows Glinda had been laying on, and pressed her hand to her forehead.

“What a darling, gentle woman you’ve become, dear. Come here, let me kiss you,” she said, and gently kissed Adama’s cheek with a smile, “How good you are you are to me.”

She noticed that most Quadlings tended to turn red quite easily, and Adama was no exception, a rosy tint immediately lighting up her face as she smiled in delight. The smile quickly reset back to worry, however, and she sat herself down next to Glinda, who must’ve looked quite terrible by comparison—ashen in the face, and now dressed in her night clothes.

“Oh, if only I could do more for you, Glinda. You are ever so special to me, you know this, and if anything were to happen to you—oh, I’m not sure how I would manage,” she shook her head and decided that was not enough, and shook Glinda by the shoulders too, “You must get better. You cannot leave me to that council without you. I cannot and will not survive it.”

Glinda smiled and took her hand in both of hers and kissed it, a comforting gesture that she indulged them in since Adama’s youth, “Sweet girl. Wonderful girl,” she spoke gently, “I would crawl out of my grave before I left you alone in that hall.”

They both giggled at that, and the younger woman laid her head on Glinda’s shoulder, and hummed when Glinda kissed her head instinctively. They had a strange relationship, that much was known to them. Something maternal, some parts a friendship—a protectiveness that they indulged in. Glinda loved her dearly, and had watched the sweet thing grow, become a mother to sweeter children, and saw as her own eyes had started to wrinkle gently.

She only stopped thinking as she felt something wet on her shoulder, and realised Adama had been shaking quietly, “Oh—sweet girl, what’s wrong?”

“Will you be alright? Is this—is this something that will be getting worse?” Adama spoke softly, curling an arm around Glinda, almost as if trying to keep away whatever she believed to be ailing her.

Glinda kissed her temple, once, twice, three times, before gently combing through the hair at her scalp, “No, my heart. I’ve had trouble sleeping, is all,” she wondered how much she could say, “Just the past—haunting us, and by us, I do mean ‘me’, as it sometimes does.”

There was a stretch of silence before the soft voice spoke into her neck again, “I’m a good listener. Or at least, better since the kids have started to realise they can talk nonstop.”

Glinda laughed, and the pressure in her chest subsided a bit. It was silent for a while, Glinda brushing through Adama’s curls gently.

“There have only ever been three full truths I have spoken about the Witch of the West.”

Adama shifted to look up at her, “Oh?”

She hummed, “Mhm,” and lifted up a finger, “ The first was that she was. So entirely powerful. So much raw magic.” A second finger went up and she smiled, “She was… positively emerald. Her skin.” The third went up and she sighed, “And the last truth is that poppies were her favourite flower. There are other half-truths and half-lies and full lies, but… very few real truths.”

“Why? Why keep all this… to yourself?” Adama spoke softly. Not judging, not frightened. Just curious. Glinda was thankful for that.

Glinda shrugged and scoffed as though the room around her had done her wrong, “I was eighteen when I met the most powerful man in Oz, and I was twenty one when the system my life had been built on just—came crashing to the ground, and I was the only one the Ozian peoples saw fit to fix it. In some terrible, twisted way, I suppose they were right to.”

She looked down to find Adama with her brows furrowed, and shook her head before smoothing out the wrinkle between them with her thumb.

“I’m… I’m sorry.”

Glinda smiled, “It’s alright. I often wonder: if I had the chance to change my decision then, would I have? And I realise the answer would’ve been no.”

“I don’t think it would’ve been a bad thing—to turn away from such a responsibility.”

She let her head drop onto Adama’s, “It would have been wrong of me not to take on the role, knowing what I knew. I was a terrible girl before I had met her, but I changed. She changed me. And to not do the good I had promised to—”

Glinda. Now it’s up to you—for the both of us.

“-well… It would have broken my heart.”

There was an understanding of who “she” must have been, but it was a question that was spoken anyway.

“She?”

Glinda smiled, a silly thing, and for the first time, found that she could not care about the consequences of the truth. “You’re going to make me say it, hm? Elphaba Thropp.”

Adama had been expecting this answer, but even so, blinked in a near-disoriented state, “So—you knew her.”

Glinda understood what that meant. “Knew” as in a friendship; as in “there’s so much more to this than what you’re telling me”; as in “say more”.

There was so much more to say, so much more to immerse oneself in—stories of their youth, and their silly laughter and the joy—the pure, unadulterated joy that they indulged in endlessly. The terrors of their young adulthood that tortured Glinda for years and decades following. That Elphaba on her balcony, haunting and plaguing her for what she knew to be the rest of her life.

(Scars can never heal if the wound is consistently reopened, and hers never stopped bleeding.)

“Yes,” was the only, simple reply she could bring herself to give. 

Thankfully Adama accepted that answer graciously, and hummed as she took Glinda’s hands into her own and let herself warm them.

“You cared for her?”

Again, a gentle, “Yes.”

A sigh as Adama shifted closer to her, “Oh, well. Then I must tell you how sorry I am. Long overdue.”

Glinda furrowed her brows, “Oh? Why sweet girl?”

“For your loss.”

Something in her heart broke, or healed itself at that—she couldn’t tell. The feeling was the same—something visceral and sharp that stung in her eyes and lodged itself deep in her throat, and brought an overwhelming sense of relief at being gently unbound of this secret grief.

“Oh.”

Maybe things would get better.

-

Things did not get better. Her dreams spiraled, twisting and rooting in truths that she could not bring herself to face. She would wake up to tears streaking down her face, wetting her pillow, and a heavy weight on her chest that lingered for hours afterwards. Sometimes she would wake up to see herself still encompassed by darkness of the early morning, and find herself drawn to the balcony once more, waiting for something to happen.

She felt so childish when she did so, sitting on the floor by the glass or outside, hoping something would click into place. It felt weak, sitting curled up with tears still blurring her vision and it did her no good, as she sat and waited for anything —a sign of something . She had aged past the appropriate years for these behaviours, she told herself, but continued nonetheless. She sat, waited, and cried.

There were many things that she had forgotten to ask the fake Elphaba, before she had sent her off on her way. She certainly wouldn’t have gotten the realities of their situation, but maybe false truths that would have eased her anxiety. Maybe the replies would have been a gentle kiss to her eye, or a moment longer in her hold.

Have you missed me as much as I have you?

Could you hold me for just another minute longer, so that I may stay pretending for just a little more?

Do you hate me? Did you not come back because you thought I would hate you?

There was weight in the last question. Glinda had become an angrier person with time—brought on by difficult people, and hard-to-manage affairs, and the ever-present guilt that could not let her be fully satisfied with any work she would complete. It was an unfortunate reality, and one that she hid well. “Glinda the Good Witch” was never angry. She was always thoughtful and kind, and generous in her blessings—aware of the hardships of Oz, and a woman who was dedicated to every citizen’s problems. No, Glinda the Good could not be angry or upset, because she was just too good.

But Glinda Arduenna Upland redirected some of that pain, letting it take the form of anger—and directed it at Elphaba for the most part. Elphaba who was no longer alive and could not hear Glinda’s frustrations, Elphaba who was dead and could not flinch at the torrent of uncontrolled magic that burst out of her in moments of anger, Elphaba who would never come back to watch as Glinda lost herself to a frenzied panic in her rooms. It all worked out very well, until fake Elphaba stood in front of her with her own weighted sadness in those big emerald eyes and held her with arms that apologised as words could not. After that night—that terrible, awful evening—Glinda could no longer bring herself to use Elphaba as an escape for her anger. So meetings became shouting matches, and letters became threats to get jobs done, and talking to friends became tiring, and Glinda the Good became a little less good.

She worked to get back on top of her job, the meetings, the announcements, but the dreams—because nightmares are also dreams—haunted her at every moment. They whispered in her ears as she sat to eat, or as she read, or tried to sleep, and replayed themselves in her head over and over—taunting her. Remnants of warmth, and echoes of her own voice yelling, and water—so much water, took hold of her sleep. She worked slower, and the routines that she had worked so hard to build crumbled. It was miserable, she was miserable, and it was not getting any better.

Eventually she was encouraged by Adama to take a couple weeks off, and was promised that everything would be taken care of in her place. Her friend had followed her around for a week trying to convince her to try it, saying that she never took any time off for herself. Glinda only sped away as she shook her head and remarked that “there’s no rest for the wicked!”. Sadly for her, Adama was very good at convincing (pleading with) her with her big brown eyes, and so she cancelled public appearances, took her breakfast in her rooms, and tried to enjoy her time away from the world in her big comfortable bed.

At some point, as she tossed and turned and tried to ignore the feeling of guilt of not doing work, and she played with a gold band on her hand, twisting and turning it and wondering how it had all come down to this: laying miserably in bed and being haunted by memories of her hallucinated best friend. It was insanity—she must have truly gone insane. She thought of a younger Galinda—who had yet to go to Shiz—and remembered just how differently she foresaw her life turning out. Planning her life to move between Frottica and Gillikenny and the Emerald City, marrying a richer woman than her—nothing happened the way she had planned. Would she have been happier that way—never having befriended, and fallen in love with her Elphie? At some point, she had thought ‘yes’, but she didn’t quite know anymore.

She reached under her bed then, back protesting in her middle age, and pulled out her giant box of sketchbooks, before opening her light. The leather bound books were cold and dust-filled as she held them, and as she made a note to have someone clean under her bed more frequently. They were books from her early twenties—after Elphaba had died, and she felt something swirling in her chest.

Every time she looked through the pages, she admitted to herself that she had forgotten how good she had been at portraiture. All her work was done in ink—she hated pencil—and clean, secure pen strokes lined the papers. It was pages of Elphaba that stared back at her, young and sweet, with her gentle eyes and pretty smile. She remembered making these—furious scratching, worried that she would forget her face. With age she had; she had forgotten her voice, and her laughter, and her face was sometimes a blur. The sketches brough the back the memory of sharp cheekbones, a gap-toothed grin and the long nails, always decorated so prettily. She loved these works, and she deeply loved Elphaba.

“Oh, Elphie,” she whispered into the quiet of her room. How she missed her.

-

The day had started off terribly. She woke up in a sweat, realising she had gone to bed fully blanketed in what was steadily becoming a too-hot-for-such-blankets heat, and had run late for her first meeting of the day, which she felt was ridiculous considering it had started just before noon. Not long after, she tried to grab her tea and it spilled over onto her dress—a new one that she had commissioned from a friend. It wouldn’t be too difficult to clean it off, but she certainly could not wear it for the rest of the day, and had to go and change. (The Wizard must not have taken into consideration old age—his or her own—however, and it was very noticeable in the incline of the steps up to her room. With every groan and ache in her feet and back, she cursed him to Oz damned hell once more.)

To make matters much worse, she had been approached by Alik—a younger, newer member of the council who took her hand in her own cloven hoof and told her how excited she was to celebrate Glinda’s birth-day the very next day.

(Glinda made a strong effort to even avoid thinking about her birth-day, and with much more reason this year. She liked to say that she had been cursed—doomed to forever have something absolutely absurd happen each year. People would laugh and joke in return, but she was very very serious. Cakes would fall, a frustrating argument would take place, a window was once broken—every year disaster after disaster, and many were much worse than others. All her bad luck over the course of the morning started to make sense.

When she was younger, her parents had been there to celebrate with her, or send her birth-day gifts with sweet letters, and insist that she come to visit them up in Gillikin for a proper celebration—just the three of them. Sadly, Momsie had died a couple years back, and Popsicle did as well not long after, and she was left quite alone. Aside from a few condolence letters that year, she had not kept in touch with the rest of her family. She grieved her parents, but knew that they were old and happy when they passed, and that comforted her a little. She had been entrusted with her family’s home that year and had, for every birth-day and big celebration since, gone back to Frottica for a couple of days to indulge herself in the comfort of her home.)

“Oh? Miss Alik, what do you mean by celebrate ?” she asked warily.

Miss Alik only gave her a smile, “I mean that we are celebrating you on the morrow! You worked yourself to the bone this year, Your Goodness and so we wanted to do something to cheer you up! And well—what better way to do that than with a birth-day?”

Glinda smiled back, though it did not reach her eyes, “Oh you are too kinda—all of you. My, how did you know it was my birth-day, dear? I thought I had been doing a good job of keeping my age secret, but I suppose not!” she said, and they laughed.

“Oh, I heard Madame Cutten saying something or other about it, and then she suggested the council plan a little get-together ,” Miss Alik said, nodding.

Damn Adama , she cursed in her head. “I’ll have to thank her then!” she said, before bowing out with a flourish. “Enjoy your day, dear!” She did not truly mind the idea of a celebration, in reality, though she had grown unaccustomed to being celebrated for such personal things, but it left her trip up to Gillikin to be postponed by a day, and unexpected changes to her plans was never something enjoyable.

It was only later that evening when she was able to find Adama, who had just been coming in from the library, and greeted her, “Good evening, dear.”

“Oh! Glinda—good evening! It’s been so nice out hasn’t it?”

“Absolutely—it is so wonderful to get a break from these terrible, cold winds.”

Adama took off her shawl and wrapped it neatly in her hands, “Yes—summer is such a gift,” she said with a smile.

Glinda interlinked her elbow with her friend’s, and asked, “How has your day been? Busy?”

Adama laughed, “No more than usual, but I do worry that work may start to slow down—summer turns everyone into sun-bathing slugs.”

Glinda quirked a brow and smiled. “Oh? I heard it turns you into someone who throws parties behind my back.”

Her friend made a panicked face at that, closely followed by shock and confusion. “Oh but—who told you? Nobody was supposed to…”

Glinda laughed and pressed a quick kiss to her temple. “Oh darling, it’s alright—please don’t worry. I don’t think Miss Alik knew it was secret, or she wouldn’t have said a thing. Besides, if she hadn’t, I would have been long gone to Frottica by the time you woke up.”

Adama groaned and buried her face into Glinda’s shoulder, and apologised, “Oh Oz! I forgot that you take those trips. Oh—please, forgive me.”

Glinda only laughed again, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, I’ll be there, alright? Have a good night! Fresh dreams!”

“Goodnight, Glin!”

That night, she let herself relax. She opened a bottle of wine, and poured herself a glass as she sat in bed with a book that had been recommended to her by Master Rombi. Perhaps it was the wine, or maybe it was her exhaustion, but she felt herself truly relax for the first time in a long while—perfectly comfortable in her bed, and the chilled wine coursing pleasantly through her, as she sighed—eagerly awaiting the party and her trip up to Frottica. She felt herself start to drift off—her lamp light still bright—having put down her glasses on the nightstand, and fell asleep almost immediately after.

Age—57

Glinda loved her morning routine, especially when she woke up feeling rested and comfortable between her pillows. The day felt a little brighter, the colouring of the sunrise only then disappearing, and she found herself taking time to enjoy it as she went about her morning. She always took a little more time than usual on her birth-days, combing her hair a few more times than necessary, and spending a little while longer picking out her perfume and jewellery for the day. There was something so pleasurable in the small, menial tasks that she could do without much thought. Especially when she would spend the rest of the day putting too much thought in everything else.

Part of her routine—the most important part, really—was to take her notebook or sketchbook out onto the balcony and write up a schedule or doodle and sketch while she enjoyed the view of the city. It was especially pretty during the spring, when she would finish her routine right as the sun would rise, which casted a pretty glow over the sky. More often than not however, it was the sunsets that she would spend her time watching, as her rooms faced the west side of the castle. It had been Morrible’s choice to give her these rooms, and it was not lost on her why, but even after it had all been over, she could not quite bring herself to move. Sunsets were pretty, after all.

It was as she sat down and got comfortable in her chair that she put her quill and ink down on the table beside her, that her hand brushed against something. Immediately she drew her hand away, only to find a small bouquet of poppies, tied neatly together with a bow. She swallowed hard, and picked it up—weighing it in her hands as though it would explain everything. Or perhaps it would only explain if she was truly losing her mind.

They were accompanied by a little note, in elegant, swooping writing that she remembered vaguely—it had been so long since she had seen it—and she slumped in her chair as she read it:

Happy birth-day, my sweet. I hope you celebrate well.

She blinked at the card and the flowers and the swirling pink bow around the green stems, and could only come to one conclusion: I must be going insane.

The only thing she really managed to do then, was lose herself to swirling thoughts as she brought the bouquet—heavy and there and real —up to her nose, and inhaled their muted scent as she blushed at the words on the paper. Doctor Henell had once told her that there was a way to ground oneself by enumerating tangible, real things. Things that could be seen, smelled, heard— touched . The stems and petals and the pasteboard note were tangible enough, all smooth in their own way, and the flowers heavy in another. The poppies—vibrantly pink— Ozma pink, Elphaba had once told her, smelled sweetly too.

(Elphaba had a love for all things that she could read about, and Glinda had always jokingly protested knowing about whatever it was that she had gained an interest in. She regretted not remembering more of it now.)

There were many ways to prove to herself that this bouquet was not just a figment of her imagination, but what good would it do for someone who believed to be delirious in her imaginings?

In the end, fate decided for her as she was torn out of her crisis by Adama who had whisked into the room with a giant box in her hands, and greeted her from her bedside with an excited smile. “Glinda—oh, Glinda! Lurline bless your year, and have the happiest of birth-days!”

She shook herself out of her stupor and quickly got up and went inside to give her a hug, melting a little as she was kissed in the way that was proper for Gillikinese birth-days—first on her right cheek, then her nose, and finally her left cheek. It was something familial, and Adama had been sweet and wonderful and had always insisted on doing it. It was a comfort too, now that there was no one else who would or could.

“Thank you, sweet thing. You didn’t have to come all the way up here, you know, I was just about to head downstairs!”

“Nonsense, nonsense! I had to bring you your favourites—Ojin fruit tarts!” she said, holding up the box before putting it down on the nightstand. “Though—I do admire your ability to walk all the way up here every day, how do you manage such a thing?” Adama asked, laughing.

Glinda widened her eyes and let her voice drop into a drawn-out whisper, “Magic.”

The both of them giggled at that, only interrupted when the younger woman made a sound of interest and held up Glinda’s hand, “Oh! Was I not the first to send love on your birthday? I woke up so early t—oh!” All of a sudden she lit up and waggled her brows. “Glinda… is there a secret someone you’re keeping from me?”

Glinda blinked and looked down to see the bouquet still in her hand. “You can see it?”

Her friend nodded, “Of course! What pretty poppies, too! Oh let me get a vase and then you can tell me all about it!”

She watched as Adama sprinted over to one of her pink vases, textured with little uniform bubbles on the outer glass layer, and went to go fill it up with water. When she came back she took the flowers and undid the ribbon—giving it back to Glinda who had sat herself on her bed and fidgeted with it—and arranged them nicely in the vase.

“There! Now you simply must tell me who they’re from, I need to know,” her tone left no room for discussion.

Glinda only smiled and shook her head, “Honestly, they might just be a joke of some sort. I found them on my balcony this morning.”

“That’s strange, but—oh, what does the note say—”

“-Oh no, please don’t—” but it was too late.

Adama squealed, “Ah, ‘my sweet’! Oh, how romantic! Glinda—you simply cannot keep such things from me! Who is this charming character?”

What on earth could she say to that? That she thought she was hallucinating a bouquet of poppies from her long dead best friend with whom she had been in love with for years? She could not. But as she watched Adama touch and feel the note as she had, her head swirled.

“Honestly—it may just be a jest, I mean, there are so few that could reach me here—”

“Nonsense, nonsense, you know who it is—I can see it. You mustn't lie, Miss Glinda, it is unbecoming,” she said, looking at her with watchful eyes.

Her chest ached. “Really—the person—the person I think it is…It just isn’t possible. Really.”

“Nothing is impossible, Glin, don’t be silly! Are you telling me that you just happened to find these here?”

She remembered something then, and ran quickly over to her closet, ignoring her friend’s protesting as she did, and found a box of old things that she had kept from Shiz. She had been allowed by Morrible to return to the school and pack up any things she felt she would need after moving into the castle, and she had taken little things that her parents had given her and little gifts and mementos from friends, alongside some of Elphie’s things as well. Glinda was sentimental, that was the truth of it—and every time she told herself she would start getting rid of things, she never could. Eventually, she found an old notebook engraved extravagantly with the letters ‘E.T.’ into a corner of its cover, and ran back over.

“I just—hold on, I want to see something, give me a moment—” and took the note back after opening the book, skimming through it until she found a solid paragraph of text.

It had changed a little, but the similarity was there, and that scared her. How many things could happen in a row before they stopped becoming dismissable, and instead factual evidence of something that she was trying so hard to disprove. Why was she trying so hard to lie to herself?

Adama had no such fears, however, and instead took the book out of her hands as she sat and stared through the balcony door. She could see the younger woman running her hands over the text and flipping through the dusty pages, and could not bring herself to stop her. Eventually, when no answers would reveal themselves in the mass of pages, she closed the book and saw the cover.

“Hm…” she hummed to herself. She pulled open the cover, then, and flipped it to the end-paper on which there was a little note.

Property of Elphaba Thropp, 1st year, Shiz University

“Oh.”

Glinda hummed in response.

“You think—”

“Mhm.”

She prepared herself for a plethora of reactions, none of which was the one she got. It was a squeal of joy, followed promptly by Adama shaking her shoulders giddily, “Oh, Glinda you know what this means don’t you? It means she’s alive!”

A steady pressure was building in her chest, fear, worry, guilt. “Is she?”

Adama spluttered, “Well—do you think that it isn’t her?”

She didn’t know what to think, that was the truth of it. What could be more unrealistic than hoping for someone long dead to suddenly turn up alive? There was fear in it too, a worry that if she did let herself believe, she might be wrong—and that would start a cycle of grief all over again. She didn’t want that for herself.

She wrung her hands, brows furrowed in a way that she knew would only deepen her wrinkles. What if it is real? That was the better question. All signs—the bouquet, the Elphaba that stood in front of her and held her, the note that was just for the two of them—they all pointed to Ephaba being alive. Her heart thumped hard in her chest, and fear—so much fear—kept her from admitting the truth to herself. (It may have also been guilt—the guilt of maybe having sent Ephie— her Elphie —away again. Left her on her own for a second time. How many times could she do that to her, before they would finally part for good?)

Either way, she found herself thankful for her friend, who seemed not to care too greatly about who it was that was the subject of Glinda’s stress, but more on the fact there was this added panic in the first place.

“Does this not… concern you? My…” she flitted her hands, trying to find a good word, “acquaintanceship with the Witch of the West?”

Adama cocked her head, “Should it?”

Glinda shrugged, “Well, she’s been pardoned for years now, but the reality is that not everyone will accept her. Unfortunately, I don’t know who does and who doesn’t.”

The brunette just patted her hand, unconcerned, “I’ve never been much afraid of her. I’ve understood that it has always been more frightening to the people of this city and the munchkin-landers, no? Perhaps she was before my time, but… I hold no strong feelings towards her. If you were her friend then so be it!”

Glinda considered that, and accepted it, “Oh. Alright then, I’m glad.”

“So, Madame Upland! You’ve yet to answer me—do you think it’s her?

“I—how could I?” she asked, voice small, “How in Oz could I believe that this is someone that I have known to be dead for over thirty years now?”

The younger woman shook her head. “I don’t know. But it makes sense to come back if she were alive, no? She has been pardoned.”

Something bubbled out of Glinda and she laughed in a state of panic, “But it’s—it’s absurd! I pardoned her because if I had to celebrate her death one more year, I don’t know what would have become of me—not because I assumed that she’d be alive.”

Adama rubbed her hands up and down her arms, trying to ground her. “Well—say that she is alive and well. Wouldn’t you want to see her again?”

“I—” Yes. Yes, of course. “I think so.”

“And suppose these flowers are from her…”

She nodded, “Yes.”

“Isn’t it a sign that she wants to see you too?”

Somewhere, in the recesses of her mind she knew to take that into consideration. The voice yelled and shouted and pounded in her head but she could not bring herself to think about it in a way that considered the both of them. Is this Elphaba missing her? Could she let them miss each other?

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

-

Time slowed after that. Her mind became clearer, less clouded with torrents of emotions that refused to let her sleep. The days she spent working were calmer now too—she had managed to get Hunthorn to reply more efficiently, and smiled when he had told her of the growth that Munchkinlanders had seen on trade routes thanks to the MK—a cross-province train that had finally been completed in the last year, allowing for trade with Quadling Country and Gillikin.

There was much less for her to do as she continued to delegate more and work more to others, and she often found herself in the gardens of the palace, sitting with her pipe, and enjoying the summer sunshine. On those days she missed home, and her own flowers. She hoped Button and Gil were still taking good care of her greenhouse, though she never quite knew with those two. They were good for her parents, cleaning their home and cooking wonderful meals and entertaining them, but they didn’t know too much about flower care, and they had gotten quite old, too. Still, she could not bring herself to let them go, they were too precious.

It was something that she thought a lot about—getting old. There was something about it that made her worry at times, thinking that perhaps she had not done the right things with her life, or that she would have been happier in other ways. It was also a sweet thing. Many of her friends had gotten married, and had kids—Crope and Tibbett had a daughter of their own who was absolutely the sweetest thing, and whom she loved dearly. She too, had gotten older.

Glinda, however, did not have such a family, and spent a good deal of time with friends and watched as everyone got older with their sons and daughters and spouses, and realised that she was rather alone in that regard. She decided she was alright with that, and content to consider Adama something of a daughter; she knew Adama enjoyed it when she said so—Adama’s own parents being people she hadn’t seen since they had sent her away. Instead she let herself get older out in her gardens to sit with her roselings, went out to restaurants with friends when she could, and in the moments where she would fall asleep out on the balcony—regretting it only when her back would hurt the rest of the day.

It was on one such evening that she had been going through her old sketchbooks again, and decided that she would try a little experiment. Taking a deep breath, she ripped a page out, and left it on the table outside, corner held down by a small flowerpot. It was a very old portrait of Elphaba in which she had been sketched secretly. She had been leaning on something with a book in her lap, knees propped up, letting her read. Her hair had been braided up, and it was clear that Glinda had done it for her that day. She remembered holding her own book up to her face with her legs crossed, trying to keep herself from being spotted.

She went inside and wondered if she was delusional for leaving it out there, or worrying that perhaps the wind would end up sweeping it away, but she let it be and went to bed.

It was as she lay in bed that she truly considered, once more, that perhaps she had gone insane—that this was all some entirely strange, realistic concoction of manifested insanity, a byproduct of her heavy grief and aging. Or maybe it was someone entirely else, and she was reading far too much into the signs that pointed her to Elphaba.

It could be anyone with access to the balcony , a part of her reasoned.

I felt her heart beating , argued another. In the end, she came to the conclusion that she should sleep before her worry and stress overtook her, and kept her up until sunrise.

When she awoke, she went through her routine as usual, with the added racing of her heart and the swaying on her bare feet as she flitted about her apartments. Energy coursed through her, sparking down to her finger tips, and she had to keep herself from running outside to check.

When Glinda did run outside—shoes forgotten—and looked to the table, she gasped, her heart racing in her ears as she realised that the sketch of Elphaba was indeed gone, and replaced instead with another poppy.

She hadn’t talked to Adama about Elphie since her birth-day, but she had been trying to convince herself to believe that Elphaba was… not as dead as previously assumed. This was surely another sign—it had to be. Something about this new reality made her heart flutter, and she felt a pulse of joy rush through her, that soon turned into tears. She kissed the poppy gently—sure that Elphaba must have held it.

What a wonderful thought. The idea that Elphaba— her Elphie— alive alive alive, had held the same flower that she was. That she had picked it with her verdant hands and thought of Glinda when she did.

The first thing she did was take a week of leave—making up an emergency or other that she simply had to attend to . She had a few ideas of where Elphaba could be, but she knew as well as Elphaba did that brooms and bubbles were very reliable methods of transportation, so, in reality, she could have been anywhere in Oz. A little voice in her head supplied that she could have been further out than that—out past the Impassible Desert and into Quox or Ev. But no, that made the least amount of sense, and so Glinda continued on her way.

She first tried her luck at the long-since abandoned Colwen Grounds. All of the Thropp residences had remained abandoned and untouched since Nessarose’s death, but the Colwen Grounds especially, had been overrun by the unmaintained flora—the orchards of trees now clouding a clear sight of the manor itself. When she did land by the front door, she noted that the entire thing looked to be in a terrible state—plants overrunning the walls and paint peeling off, and holes in the roof. She tested the door to see if it was locked, and it would’ve opened well, if not for the deafening creaking that assaulted her ears as it swung out.

“Hello?” she called out, “Elphaba?”

No reply came.

The inside was in much better shape, though unclean—visibly untouched as she saw the layer of dust coating most things. It was eerie and quiet, and the corners were always dark which left the place feeling a little haunted. It certainly brought no comforting feelings, and it made Glinda wonder about what conditions Elphaba—presuming she was, in fact, alive—would have lived in. Did she have to hide herself? Or would she have decided to live away from everyone else, content in her self-sufficiency?

She finished looking around the house and found no spot cleaned of dust other than where she touched, no doors swabbed of grime, and so she moved on. She checked the house she knew existed in the Rush Margins, instead. She remembered Elphaba describing her childhood home a couple of times, but she hadn’t assumed it would be quite so distinguishable from the other surrounding homes. Rush Margins had become a hotspot with the new railway, so people had started to settle closer to it, creating a different town center, but she could clearly see that they were new houses. The further east she pushed from the railroad, she could see that change in the town—the poverty that Munchkinland had been in—thatched roofs and barn doors unhinged—before being blinded by a singular big manor that encompassed endlessly more land than three other homes combined.

Glinda did not believe Elphaba had come to her childhood home—she never liked the place, but she pushed on, knowing that Munchkinland was only the first stop on her trip around Oz. She hadn’t been out in public very much in the last couple of years, and had rarely gone quite to the outskirts of the lands of Oz, because even by bubble they took quite a lot of time, and she had never been good at sleeping on the road. After she checked the house—with a knock and a yell of “Elphaba! It’s Glinda!”, she continued on her way. She did not waste her time checking inside, she could nearly feel that her Elphie just could not be in there.

Glinda remembered that Elphie had also spent some years in Quadling Country, but had no idea if she had a proper home there—only remembered stories of endless travels through the marshes, and a longer stay in the Ovvels. She contemplated trying her luck there as well, as she wandered into an inn not far from Rush Margin’s railway station.

“Good evening,” she greeted, “I would like to book a room for the night, if there are any available.”

The munchkin at the counter looked up and welcomed her, “Hello—yes, one moment—oh! Oh, Your Goodness—”

She bowed, “Hello.”

The woman adjusted her glasses and shyly stuttered through her sentences, “We do have—rooms. A room for you. Second floor, third w—uh, door to the left.” Her hands shook as Glinda walked up to the counter to take a key.

She smiled, “Thank you.”

“Will you be eating breakfast as well? It is served in the early morning for all those who take the early train…”

She smiled and shook her head, “No, that’s alright. I have a tendency to sleep late into the day.”

The munchkin woman nodded and smiled awkwardly at her, as though she didn’t quite know what to do with that information. Or the blonde woman in front of her. “Of course, Your Goodness.”

Glinda smiled, something genuine and light, and brushed a hand against the woman’s arm, “Thank you again.”

She tucked the key away and found her room, leaving her wand by the door and sitting on the rickety bed for only a few minutes before she decided to head back down. She walked past a door frame and into the bar—noisy and in possession of alcohol, which she desperately needed. After her fainting spell, Adama had been insistent that she not drink anymore, though Glinda insisted the two were unrelated, and had been heartbroken to discover that her collection had been moved elsewhere.

From the moment she walked in though, she understood that she would be drinking less to forget the hauntings of the day and more to ignore that many pairs of eyes that were immediately drawn to her. Her first thought was to look at how she was dressed, thinking that perhaps she came entirely overdressed for a bar—goodness knows she always was wearing something large and puffed and vibrant—but when she looked down, she only found a pair of dark pants and a white, buttoned up shirt and waistcoat, so that shouldn’t have been it. Then a strand of hair fell into view and she realised she was the only Gillikinese there—blonde in a sea of red and brown.

Ah.

This itself wasn’t uncommon—most Glilikinese did not visit outside of the Tulip Festival—and even fewer travelled as far South as Rush Margins—there was practically no reason for it. She felt her shoulders tighten as she walked over to the bar, unwilling to go another night in which she had attention on her. Her knees knocked against the underside of the bar, and she remembered then, that she may have been too tall to sit on the munchkin bar stools.

“Could I have a Scotterip, please?”

“Certainly, Your Goodness,” the man blinked.

A couple of heads turned, and more than a couple whispers started. She winced and raised her shoulders to cover herself. The whispers settled a little, and she relaxed a little, thanking the bartender and eagerly drank when she was handed her glass—holding back on making a face at the burn in her throat that she had grown unaccustomed to.

Elphaba had surprised her once—when they were back at Shiz and sneaking around with contraband drinks, by telling Glinda didn’t quite like the wine that Crope had given them—that she had a fair knowledge of what drinks she did and didn’t like. She had brought it up casually, but Glinda—freshly eighteen, from quaint little Frottica, and entirely new to the stuff, had been entirely taken aback.

Elphaba laughed confusedly, and shocked Glinda further by mentioning that—no, she was not in fact as old as Glinda—(though even if she was, Munchkinlanders were allowed drinks at a younger age) and was, in fact, a couple years older. Glinda had been in disbelief and Elphaba had laughed—her sharp, high cackle—before explaining to Glinda the wonders of white plumberry wine.

She wondered, if she were still alive, would she approve of Glinda’s own preferences?

It did not matter what conclusion she would have come to however as she was pulled out of her thoughts with a poke to her shoulder.

“Oh, yes?”

A rather old munchkin woman—older than her for certain—stared back at her, with an unpleasant expression that she was generally unaccustomed to. Suddenly, her eyes burned and she was wet, some fizz or other bubbling on her skin and she yelped. The substance—covering her hair and face and clothes dripped into her mouth. Sparkling wine.

“I’m sure I do not know why that was necessary Madame,” she spoke as she wiped at her eyes with the driest part of her sleeves.

“You are Glinda the Good Witch, yes?”

She nodded, “I am she, yes.”

The woman huffed, “Then it is well deserved. You think you can fool us—well, some may fall for your tricks and charms, but you certainly haven’t fooled me!”

She was soggy when she replied, “I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean, Madame. Truly. It is not my intention to fool anyone.”

“You try to blind us to the truth! Don’t you deny it, Glinda the Good. You have been putting your spells on us Munckinlanders for far too long. Using your railroad scheme to cover up your lies—well I’ve been waiting years to finally meet you and give you something to really think about!” The words were screamed at her with a pointed finger.

She stood then, trying to calm the woman, “Madame, please. The railroad has been a great benefit to Munchkinland I hear—”

“Oh, yes, yes I certainly know it! Oh, but its efficiency and benefits are not being put into question.”

Glinda did not understand. “What is the question, then?”

A poke at her clavicle, “Why. Why was it built in the first place?”

Now she really could not understand. Why? Why shouldn’t there be a cross-province train?

The woman continued, a dangerous, solid look in her eyes, “You’re hiding a secret, Your Goodness. You’re hiding it from all of Oz, and dismissing us,” she gestured around the room, “Dismissing what us, as muchkindlanders know to be true—in our blood.”

She was getting a little frightened and a little cold, but pushed on—aware of all the eyes on her, “What is it then? What am I doing wrong? Tell me and I will fix it.”

“You’ve been taking the Wicked Witch’s side, you’re her voice! She has sunk her claws into Oz because of you—even dead she has. Oz may not know it, but you’re more wicked than that damned witch ever was. Right from the beginning dismissing truths about her and protecting her. Twisting lies, loving Animals , pardoning her. That’s the reason we got the trains now, it is. You had to do something to keep us quiet. Well, I sure haven’t been—never will be.”

Something frigid settled over her, hairs standing on end as she heard the woman speak. So much hatred. The munchkin-landers could feel it too—humans and Animals alike.

“Is that so?”

“It sure as hell is. I’ve been saying it since the beginning—and don’t you go denying it, Your Goodness, because I know it.”

Glinda breathed in, out, before smiling gently. “It seems to me, Madame, that you’ve been misinformed.”

The woman scoffed, lip curling into a sneer, “You’re brainwashing them, is what you’re doing. I know what I’m talking about, don’t you tell me what I am.”

“I am not denying the honesty with which you speak, but it holds no truth. It has been long since understood that the witch was simply targeted, misunderstood. I have no hand in the propagation of this information. I knew her, yes, but it is because of these… personal implications that I have left myself out of it.”

“Liar!” The woman yelled, “You are evil.”

“I am but a representative of the people. I built the train because it was wanted and time to do so, nothing more, nothing less. The munchkin-landers deserved more,” she turned to the forming crowd, “do you all not agree?”

Nobody around them had moved a muscle until then, but quickly jumped in to nod their heads with a chorus of “yes” and “absolutely!”. 

Glinda turned back and ‘tsk’ed’, “It is quite unfortunate that we do not see eye-to-eye. Especially on the matter of Animal rights and what has been best for the future of Oz. The Witch has long since been dead, and the pardoning long since out of my own mind. I regret it hurts you so, but there is only so much I can say before I know I am beat.”

With that she whisked away to her room once more, tired and not even tipsy enough—thoughts and yells echoing in her mind. There were few times when she would encounter people that were vehemently against her, and most that she had met were in her earlier years of being a leader for Oz, so this was a shock to the system. Hunthorn and Jul had told her of the more frequent munchkin-lander hate that was directed at her, some very firm in their belief that she had stolen power from the wizard, and that his “departure” was just a coverup for his death.

Over the years the anger dwindled into stories, and stories became few and far between after the announcement for a new trade route, but clearly not all. It was something terrifying, to come face to face with someone who was somehow both wrong and right about her relationship with Elphaba—everybody always had their own twisted assumptions, and it left a sour taste in her mouth. It was as she settled in bed, sticky and tired, that she tried to leave these thoughts to rest.

The next morning, she made the decision that her next and final stop would be in the Vinkus.

-

A couple days by bubble, and a stop in the Kells, got her where she wanted to be, at Kiamo Ko castle. She thought that maybe Elphaba would have gone back there, and made the trip. Most of what she saw on the way was forest and hills, but there were some lone cottages here and there as well. It was as she saw the snow on the mountain ranges that she knew she was getting closer.

Vinkan architecture had always astounded her, and Kiamo Ko was no exception. The last time she had been at the castle, she had had no time to stand around and admire it, but now she looked at the citadel in all its glory. It felt old, almost ancient in its grandeur and though she understood the science behind its beauty, she could not help but admire how much it truly felt like it was levitating—carved out of the mountain and splitting at its center, almost as though it were floating up and only kept down by pillars of chains. It felt as though there were magic pulsing in the ground, through everything around it.

It was dark when she went inside, the only sources of light above her being the spaces between pillars that allowed the sun to glow on the blueish stone. She had never seen anything quite like it. In the back of her mind she knew that she was exploring for a reason—something that she remembered clearly with every echoing, reverberating shout of Elphaba’s name in the darkened halls—but in the end it took her a couple of days to look through the whole place, and she wasn't even sure there weren't any additional passages around. It was only at the end of her exploration there that she let herself into the room in which everything fell to pieces.

The dark pool of liquid that she remembered—the one that smelled of something burnt and haunted her memories—had long since dried. There was a thought that she quickly dismissed—to lean down and run her hands on the stone, but the broken window had let in so much grime that she shook her head and continued to look around, sitting down on one of the platforms created by the blue pillars. There was the bucket, unmoved, untouched, and broken glass and blue feathers. Posters and maps and all sorts of things lay around as well. Her palms felt sweaty, and she tried to brush them off on her dress. They were shaking too, accompanied by a pounding in her chest as memories of death dipped her back into a stubborn grief. She stayed like that for a while, before she got up to look out of the broken window.

It was two steps in that she heard a click, and her foot sunk down. She quickly jumped back with fear, and felt her heart drop at the hole in the floor that had opened up—dark and gloomy and there were stairs .

Right where Elphaba’s hat had been.

Oh.

Oh.

The last time she had fallen to her knees in that room had been when her heart had felt so heavy with grief that she could only sink to the floor and cry into the little, black hat that had remained, and let it soak in her tears. Her eyes had been flooded—crying and heaving and only being able to see her shaking fingers that held on tightly to what was left of Elphaba—her giant pink gown soaking up the dark liquid as well, so that when she finally stood it dripped to the floor again, just as Elphaba had. She remembered praying to whatever god existed: please, she can’t be dead, she can’t have died like this. Not here, not now.

The grief had hit her hard and fast—she hadn’t thought that never seeing each other again meant one of their immediate deaths. How wrong she was.

Years later and she fell to her knees again, a sort of strangled laughter making its way out of her, as something akin to relief filled her chest. Suddenly she could breathe—she could breathe and the tears flowed again, this time as her hands dug into her dress. She rocked back and forth and felt joy in the way she could hear her sobs and laughs echo down the hall—a celebration of her new reality. There was a renewed buzzing of magic under her skin, tingling down to her fingertips and back up again in quick bursts, as though it were happy too.

Perhaps she hadn’t found Elphaba, but she was alive .

She was alive, alive, alive—

“Oz, you’re alive!”

It didn’t matter to her that nobody could hear her cheers, it only mattered that she could finally breathe again.

Alive, alive, alive.

Eventually she picked herself back up and grimaced at the dirt on her, and tried her luck down the uncovered passage. It was so dark, and she felt a bit of fear as her shoes continued to echo against the stone, fearing that there may have been someone— something lurking in the dark. She bubbled herself for safety, and magicked an orb of light that she pulsed out into the long hall. It was long and curving, but at least there were no additional, connecting passages. Eventually she made it out, right at the front gate, and it only brought another big smile to her face.

-

“Good afternoon, Your Goodness.”

She smiled, “Ah, Zimi! I’m so glad you could meet me today—so good of you, truly.”

Zimi only flapped a wing in a “no worries” gesture, “How can I help you, your goodness? I assume this is not relevant to our usual meetings in regards to finding princess Ozma?”

She nodded and offered a plate, “It is not. Would you care for something to eat?”

He shook his head and chirped, “No, that's quite alright, I had a late breakfast.”

Glinda twirled her wand around as she gestured to a smaller seat, “Please, make yourself comfortable, I’m not sure how long we’ll be discussing this for.”

He did as she requested. “What is this about then? It sounds serious.”

“I have come across some rumours that the Witch of the West is alive,” she spoke, keeping her voice level.

Zimi was less composed when he spoke, “Alive! After so many years…”

She hummed. “Indeed.”

“Have you seen her? Has anyone in the palace been made aware of this?” he asked anxiously.

Glinda shook her head, “No I have not, and the council will not be made aware of this just yet. Perhaps, if the rumours are true, I will look into a way of bringing this to Oz’s attention without causing a scene.”

Zimi considered this, “I assume, then, that I am not to tell anyone of this conversation?”

She smiled, “Yes, that goes without saying. But you’re good at secrets.”

He bowed. “Thank you, Your Goodness. So what can I do for you then?”

Glinda shifted in her seat, trying to find her words, “I need you to do this yourself or find someone you trust, if this is too much to pile onto your plate. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Your Goodness.”

She bowed her head slightly in thanks, “Good. I need to find the potential hideout of Elphaba Thropp. She must be somewhere nearby, and while I’m sure I could try and find her myself, I have missed some work that I need to get to. This will not be a long term project.”

“Oh? How long, then?”

“I only need the city searched. The outskirts too, perhaps, but nothing outside of Oz City. Check abandoned places, maybe the old Resistance hideouts.”

He quirked his head, questioning, “So it’s true then, that she was part of the Animal Resistance?”

Glinda only shrugged, “I only know what I’ve been told. It may be true, and if it is, I would like to be thorough.”

“Yes, Your Goodness.”

“How long do you believe this might take you?” she asked, taking a bite out of a pastry that had been set out.

He looked to be in thought for a moment before he answered, “A week, at most, probably.”

Glinda was pleasantly surprised, and flashed him a gentle smile. “Oh! I’m glad to hear it.”

He bowed his head and fluttered to the railing once more, “I’ll be taking my leave now. Please expect me back, at the same time next week.”

She got up and waved him goodbye, “Thank you Zimi. You’re a big help, and I greatly appreciate your efforts. Fly safe.”

“Have a wonderful day, Your Goodness,” he said, before disappearing into the distance.

That week she did catch up on her work, and she worked through it all with a small smile on her face, and her feet bouncing endlessly under the table. If Zimi would find nothing then it was alright, and it meant that Elphaba was hiding safely, still. She thought about how it would feel to see her again, and she found that her cheeks hurt from smiling.

At night, she would sit out on her balcony, sketchbook pages fluttering in her hands, and flipping through them before ultimately sticking to her original plan. Not yet , she told herself, not yet. Oh, but she had always been an impatient person, and she needed to do something besides waiting. She would sit outside and look to the sky and lose herself in sweet imaginings and hopeful thoughts, and with her nose in romantic books. It felt so long ago that such a constant state of joy would never be tangible again, but here it was—pulsing through her, bringing a smile and laugh to her face, clearing dark circles from under her eyes.

There hadn’t been hope like this in so long. To Oz she had been a beacon of hope, of change, of something good that could alleviate them of their stress and worries and unhappiness, but there had never been someone like that for her. And suddenly she felt joy from her youth and the giddiness of a schoolgirl and it was an absurdly wonderful feeling. So wonderful.

-

So the week passed like that, and Zimi came and went with a disappointed shake of his head and an apology on his tongue. She told him not to worry and that she appreciated his efforts. That night, she tried what she had done that first night, and put another drawing under the flower pot, and went to sleep.

Just like the first night, a poppy was there in its place.

She did it again the next night, and it happened once more.

She thought the romance of it all, and shook that thought out of her head—instead thinking about how the poppies would be there, without fail, every morning. It could only mean that Elphaba had been watching her. Had been on her balcony or above it, if that encounter had been any indication as to where she may have been hiding.

Her evenings passed like that—trying to see how long they could keep up with the back and forth. It was a start, and it was exciting and new, and every moment she thought about how terribly she wanted to write something more. Would that be alright? Would she hurt the delicate balance that they had achieved in their communication? She didn’t know.

There was a thought that plagued her—that perhaps this was not, in fact, her Elphie—that it was a terrible terrible joke, and she hated it. A bundle of worry lodged itself in her chest, and all the poppies in the world could not have gotten rid of it.

Was any of this real?

She tried something different.

That night she brought out another drawing, a small thing that she ripped out from a corner of her sketchbook, and left it where she usually did, and sat down with a hot cup of tea and a book. Her big plan involved pretending to fall asleep with the book in her hands, but letting herself see who it really was that came up onto her balcony to take her drawings. It felt so silly and childish, and she was sure to make a fool of herself, but she pressed on. Glinda made herself comfortable and waited, the warmth of the summer relaxing as she read her book.

There was a weight in her chest, a comfortable one now, and she felt her eyes droop, and then—she was asleep.

Glinda had long since been a light sleeper. When she was younger it was because nightmares plagued her and soft creaks from around her were sometimes too much noise for her to sleep through. There was always a sort of nagging feeling that she had to get up, to do something , and that generally manifested while she slept. More recently, she would also wake if something or other ached. However, out on her balcony, she found herself awake when there was a sound beside her. 

Her eyes fluttered open and she blinked away the pain in her neck that was quickly making its presence known, before realising two things: she was outside, and Elphaba stood with a poppy in hand.

“Oh.”

She looked startled, like a child caught with their hand in a bowl of cookies, and spoke in the same tone that Glinda had been hearing repeated in her head for months now, “Glinda.”

She could only stare. She blinked in this older Elphaba, and understood that what she had seen had not been a hallucination at all. It was her, braids running across her scalp, older, and caped, and verdant as ever. She inhaled sharply as she took her in, “You’re real.”

It was dark, and the light inside was closed, so she could not make out Elphaba’s features as she had wanted to, but she could see that she was hunched a little, as though she were trying to run away, and her eyes glittered in the gentle moonlight. There was hesitation as she spoke.

“Am I?”

Glinda groaned and pushed herself up out of her seat, and shook her head, “I thought that I had made you up.”

Elphaba looked down to the paper on the table, and it was clear to Glinda that she had been woken up by the pot moving. “You told me to leave.”

There were hundreds of thousands of thoughts coursing through her mind, endless things she could do in the moment, what could happen a minute from now—where would they end up if she kissed her right then and there? She said none of it, did none of it—her mouth spoke for her. She was alive.

“I did.” It was an apology.

The older woman only shuffled around, leaving the flower on the table, and gripped the broom in her hands a little tighter. Her voice was soft, and there was something broken when she said, “I couldn’t go.”

She said it so pitifully, as though it had been the only thing she couldn’t do, and it brought an ache to Glinda’s heart. She found herself smiling at Elphaba with furrowed brows, and spoke gently, understandingly, “I know.”

“Forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

“Yes there is. You know that.”

Glinda sighed, “I’ve barely gotten a chance to look at you, and now—after all this time—suddenly you feel an urge to explain your absence?”

“Maybe.”

There had been relief as she started to tell herself that Elphaba was alive. It was something unsure, and unknowable—even if she hadn’t melted, perhaps she had died in some other way. But there was such a weight that had fallen off of her shoulders when she realised that Elphie had not died at Kiamo Ko, and the rest of it crumbled away as she watched Elphaba then—encapsulated by moonlight, and cape blowing gently in the summer wind. She was beautiful.

They were quiet for a while—observing each other quietly in a gentle understanding, looking at each other in silence that bordered on a conversation. She wanted to—needed to—approach her. To hold her and kiss her palms and beautiful freckles. She didn’t move—she only stood and watched the gentle halo around Elphaba glow softly as she longed to run her fingers over green cheeks.

Elphaba broke the silence first, “How have you been?”

It was, at best, an absurd question. All of the anxious anticipation that had been steadily thudding in Glinda’s chest burst and she blinked, stupefied. “What?”

“I believe that it’s customary to ask about the goings on in someone’s life when one has not been kept up to date…” Elphaba said, a small smile tugging at her lips.

“That—it’s—what a terrible question,” Glinda spluttered.

Elphaba stepped forward, and Glinda felt herself shiver. “It gets to the point, doesn’t it?”

“Trying to get our… reunion over with quickly, is that it? Running off again?” Glinda meant it as something lighthearted, as Elphaba had spoken, but it came out as something harsher.

“You’ll remember that you were the one who told me to go,” said Elphaba. Oh, the nerve.

Glinda laughed, something high and sharp, “Yes! Because I thought I had lost my mind.”

“Are y—Do you still feel that way?” she asked, softly.

The blonde sighed, tired, and started pacing, walking over to her balcony doors and back to her chair again. “No, I don’t think so. I—” she looked over to Elphaba sheepishly. “I went to Kiamo Ko.”

Elphaba blinked, “Oh.”

Her hands curled into fists, and she felt a swirl of anger and embarrassment, “Oz, I felt—I was so relieved. But I feel so stupid. So stupid,” her hands raised as she scoffed to herself. “Thinking that—that a bucket of fucking water killed you. I never even questioned it even though I had seen you in the rain—seen you taking your baths.”

Green hands took one of her own, as she felt herself soothed by the thumbs that rubbed at her skin. She felt her heart race as Elphaba spoke again, so close to her. “That’s how I needed it to be. My chances of actually dying would have been so much higher had I done that unsuccessfully, you must understand that.”

Glinda sighed, not wanting to think of that, “I suppose I must, then,” she looked up then, searching for a sort of resolution in Elphaba's eyes. “But was there no way to reach me? Not in…so many years, Elphie?”

She did not find answers in her eyes, in those bright, beautiful green eyes, but instead regret. And when Elphaba spoke again, she heard it too, “I am… so remote. I did not live in Oz for years and the… news of the pardon had only just reached me, I overheard a discussion about it.” That made sense, Glinda supposed. “But it was Fiyero who convinced me to—”

She froze.

“Fiyero?”

Elphaba pulled away, wide-eyed, before she nearly slapped a hand to her mouth, “Glinda, listen—”

Fiyero’s alive. Fiyero is alive. Fiyero is alive—

Fiyero and Elphaba.

Oh.

Something churned in her gut and she felt nauseous, so entirely nauseated that her head swam, and Fiyero was alive and so was Elphaba, but betrayal stirred again. Everything—was everything just one big lie? Deceived over and over and over. Cruelty is what it was, leaving her alone to deal with their mess—on top of her own mess too—and running off together.

Fiyero, whom she had loved like a brother. Fiyero—who had been there when she had needed him, who held her and worried with her about Elphaba, and ultimately favoured her.

They chose each other; not her. Elphaba did not choose her.

And it stung.

So she pushed. “I was joking, you know, when I asked if you were in a hurry to run away again, but I suppose I shouldn’t have been so quick to come to conclusions. Is Fiyero waiting for you back at home, Elphie, dear?”

Something dark crossed Elphaba’s features—something sharp and unkind, and a snarl was what she spoke through, “Whatever you’re thinking, Glinda, I want you to know that’s not it. You’re so quick to jump to conclusions.”

“Don’t start with that. You and I were both there when he pointed that rifle at my head. Tell me, does he do that for everyone? Or just his precious Elphaba?” she bit back, hard and mean.

Elphaba huffed. “You’re not listening to me.”

“Does it matter? Thirty five years and not a peep! Not a word, not a sign, not even a trusted friend to tell me something on your part. Did Fiyero keep you? Or was it your own doing?”

“Leave him out of this, Glinda.”

“Oh, come on! He loved you—loves you—for Lurline’s sake!” she shouted, waving her hands. “Does it explain why I was not informed of his or your well being?” She paused, realising that was a good question, and tried to think of the answer. “No, but I understand perfectly well what happens when a man and a woman run off together—”

“Oh, for Oz’s sake—” Elphaba muttered as she took hold of the nape of Glinda’s neck with one hand and pressed the other to her mouth. “Stop talking.”

Glinda would have said something—anything—but had instead become very flustered by the warmth on her neck.

“Good,” continued Elphaba. “Fiyero and I are friends. We went our separate ways after a few years, and I couldn’t—”

Glinda licked her palm. Salty.

“Oh!” She pulled her hand away immediately. “That’s disgusting—what—why would you do that?”

That was a good question. “I don’t know.”

(She couldn’t hear another word about Fiyero. She would find him soon enough, and yell at him later.)

Elphaba groaned, and stepped away. “Of course you don’t.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“What it means, Glinda, is that you haven’t changed! You’re so immature and sens—”

The absolute gall of this woman. “I haven’t changed? I haven’t changed?” She tapped her finger against Elphaba’s chest, watching her wince and step away. “I’m so sorry Madame Thropp, but I didn’t spend thirty fucking years as council leader, running myself repeatedly into the ground and being pushed around by people with their own, greedy agendas so you could tell me—

“Did someone tell you to do this, Your Oz-Blessed Goody Goodness? Oh, grand saviour of Oz?” Elphaba asked, sarcasm heavy in her tone.

“Yes!” She screamed, “You did!” she watched as Elphaba’s expression fell, and there was bitterness in her voice when she spoke, “You don’t remember that, do you?”

“No, I—I don’t,” she spoke softly, a sort of awe replacing her anger.

She stepped between Elphaba’s legs, and ran her hand into Elphaba’s chest again as she spoke, imitating the weight of a book, “Unbelievable. No, of course you don’t. Do you remember shoving that Oz-damned Grimmerie at me? Did you forget that too?”

Glinda felt herself start to squirm under Elphaba’s steady gaze as she searched for something in her eyes. She spoke softly, so softly, and Glinda could only look at her lips. “No… I just thought that you would hide it better than I could. Keep it safe.”

A hand curled around her waist after dropping the broom, and, oh, how quickly she melted. How quickly anger was replaced was a hopeful resignation. Her voice was low when she spoke again, a gentle rasp present from her screaming, “It’s as safe as it can be. If you want it back, take it, it’s yours.”

A blush rose to her cheeks as Elphaba continued to study her. She was so close. So close. “No, I…”

Glinda licked her lips. “What were you saying before? You couldn’t… what?”

She could feel Elphaba around her, not just the warm hand around her waist—but her heat and energy that pulsed out of her, wild and untamed and almost reaching for her. Elphaba raised a hand to cup and frame Glinda’s face, and the blonde could only close her eyes and hum. The hand moved then, trailing over her cheek and into her hair, and back to her cheek, and again brushing slowly through some loose curls. Glinda shivered.

Alive, alive, alive.

When she spoke, it was warm and low, vibrating through Glinda. “I couldn’t go back to find you, because I knew that if I saw you— even just once —I would have stayed. If I had told you, I knew you would have found me, and I would’ve come back to you.”

“Oh,” Glinda whispered, eyes sparkling with tears.

“I supposed I did do some of that, in a way. I couldn’t bring myself to leave again,” there was something raw in her voice, “Please, Glinda. Believe me.”

“I don’t want you to leave again,” Glinda found herself saying, lips nearly brushing Elphaba’s.

Their lips did brush when Elphaba spoke again, “Oh. That’s good.”

And then they were pressed solidly against each other—Glinda wrapping herself firmly against Elphaba, finding purchase under the cloak on Elphaba’s back, with Elphaba cupping her face like it was something precious. They kissed, hard—it had been a long time since either of them had—lips were bitten, and teeth clashed, but they couldn’t bring themselves to care. Elphaba let her hands drop lower, pressing softly against Glinda as they settled on her waist and pulled.

Glinda gasped into their kiss as she felt it, and every other sensation that followed—their fronts pressed fully together. She was starved and she needed more—more of her, more of Elphaba’s touch and she didn’t know where, but it all felt so sweet. She melted again when Elphaba moved away from her lips to press firm kisses to the rest of her face—biting at her lip before she kissed her chin and jaw and cheek and revelled in Elphaba’s soft moans.

‘ Oh, Elphie. Elphie, my Elphie ,” she mumbled.

They had only kissed one other time, and it was soft and gentle—an apology and a goodbye before there were shrieks of terror and pain, and it could not compare to the sweetness of this. This was an “I missed you” and a declaration of need and want and so much love. She felt salt on her tongue as she continued to press kisses, and she couldn’t tell whose tears it was from. She could only press tighter, hold more firmly—try to dig into green skin and bury herself into Elphaba. Perhaps, if she made her home in her ribcage, she would never find herself alone again.

“Glinda—I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you so much, I love you—”

How she missed her. Missed her, missed her, missed her. There were not enough words in the world to encapsulate all that she felt for Elphaba, so instead she sank further into her. She moaned softly as she was picked up, heat running up her body as her thighs were gripped hard, and ran her fingers up Elphaba’s neck and cupped her jaw—biting gently before kissing over it, and doing it again and again, revelling in the humming that she could feel from Elphaba’s throat, as she was carried inside and was set down on the bed. She sat herself up, and pressed her face to Elphaba’s chest, breathing heavily.

“Oz, Elphaba—turn on the light. I need to look at you—please.”

Not one to deny Glinda again, she did, and quickly let herself shed the cloak. Glinda bit her lip as she got a proper look at the woman in front of her. She was dressed differently, the understated wealth that shone through her fabrics and jewellery now gone save for the little gold bands on her tiniest fingers, in favour of a too-long skirt, and a button-ed up shirt that did not quite fit properly around her broad arms, both dark in colour. Glinda’s hands twitched—needing to undo the fabrics herself, to look at her and feel her and touch her.

“You're so perfect, Elphie. So perfect.”

It was clear to her though, that Elphaba did not have the same plans as she, instead pulling off her belt with the skirt and shirt in a couple of swift motions, and smiling as Glinda blushed, turning to her and gesturing for her to get up.

“I’ll undo you, come here,” she said, before pulling Glinda up herself and turning her around, planting a gentle kiss on her neck as she did. Then she stalled, hands patting softly at her back, and Glinda suppressed a giggle. 

“Where are the buttons?”

Glinda spun and guided Elphaba gently to sit on the bed instead, moving her legs to find herself between them. “On the front, darling. New style,” she said as she pulled Elphaba’s hands up to undo them. They were well hidden, the same shade of blue as the rest of it, and much more easy to work with. That said, Elphaba chose to take her time with them, content to sit in front of her with her hands on Glinda’s waist, palming at her and pulling her close. Glinda melted when she let Elphie's pretty head fall to her front.

It was so sweet, and Elphaba looked so perfect with her head laying on Glinda's chest, looking up at her with an almost desperate look. She was perfect, and Glinda could only stare in awe, “Oh, Elphie. I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you so much. You’re beautiful. I love you.”

Elphaba gave her a wide smile as her hands started to unbutton, and Glinda felt her heart melt. Her Elphaba was so pretty, so beautiful and freckled and Glinda needed to kiss every new little dot on her skin that she could find. She needed her hands pressed to green skin and her mouth on every path made by her hands. She needed to hear Elphaba want her . The dress slipped down her shoulders and into a pool at her feet as Elphaba pulled down hard on the straps, and that must have triggered something in her, because Glinda was being pulled out of her thoughts and into strong arms again—sighing into the feeling of Elphaba’s mouth on her chest and ribs, nipping and licking at her.

“Oh, please, Elphaba—” she begged, “You’re so good, Elphie, oh—”

Elphaba moaned onto her skin and gentle ripples of vibrations coursed through her, and she arched into the touch. Elphaba only pulled her again, toppling both of them over onto the bed, and readjusted before burying her face in Glinda’s neck and kissing there as well between soft murmurs, “You’re so beautiful, Glinda. So pretty, my sweet. I love you. I need you.”

Like this, she could feel the warmth of Elphaba’s lips on her and watched as Elphaba wrapped herself around her completely—legs entwined. Bliss is what it was. Her chest trembled with the weight of her want, pulsing to her fingertips that curled deeper into green skin. She was soft and warm and the Elphaba with her was real, real, real, and she was here . She pressed kisses to her head and let her fingers slide down her body—down her back, squeezing at her hips, curling around the shape of her thighs, and gliding back up to touch at her jaw. The small curls that fell gently from her braids tickled at her shoulder and collarbone, and she resisted the urge to run her fingers through them. 

“I like your hair like this. It suits you. I never realised your curls were quite so tight.”

Elphaba propped herself up on an elbow and thought for a moment. “Oh, that's right—I had my hair in those braids for a while, didn't I?”

Glinda kissed her again. And again. “Mm, yes you did.”

“Hm. Yes, my hair greatly likes to coil,” she said before focusing on Glinda’s own hair, wrapping a small strand around her finger, smiling as it kept its spiraling shape. “And yours to curl. Though I already knew that.”

At that, Glinda seemed to realise the rest of her hair was put into a small bun, and pulled at the ribbon to let it free. “Ah, yes. Eventually I asked myself why I bothered with straightening it, only to curl it again later, and so I stopped. I like it better like this.”

Elphaba buried herself into her neck again, and hummed, “I like your hair in every way.”

Glinda’s breath hitched—unused to another body pressed so closely to her, and scoffed, “No you don't. Not until I recolour it.”

Elphaba only shook her head and pressed a firm kiss to Glinda's jaw before nipping at it, “I like it just fine like this. The white suits you.”

“It makes me look so old,” she complained.

“You are old,” Elphaba deadpanned.

A gasp of indignation.

“And so am I,” she continued, “Does the grey in my hair bother you?”

Glinda scrunched her face, and splayed her hand on Elphche's cheek. “Of course not.”

“There you go. And I think you look quite regal, you know.” 

Of course, she had meant the gown, and the updo that was accompanied by the sparkling blue tiara, and the gentle blue that was shadowed over the blackened lines of Glinda’s eyes, but the blonde smiled playfully and kissed her again.

“Like this? You mean…” she lowered her voice into a whisper and ran her nails down Elphaba’s sides, “Pressed against you? Ruffled on my pillows with a pretty green lady atop me?”

Elphaba moaned gently before rolling over and laughing, something sharp and sweet, that made Glinda’s heart melt. “Yes, my sweet. Perfect and regal. Perfectly regal.”

She let her hands fall into Glinda's hair and pulled herself up for another kiss. And another. And one more. They laughed and hummed at each other's necks, and Glinda was sure that she must have looked positively crimson.

“Oh—that reminds me—”

Elphaba hummed a question into her temple, having moved up with Glinda now tucked safely into her side.

“Hm?”

“I have been looking for Princess Ozma, you know. I am not royalty and do not pretend to be, and Oz needs someone to continue leading it,” she spoke.

Elphaba sniffed at that. “I don't think Oz needs a ruler. You've established a council, yes? Why want to dismantle such an effective form of government?”

Glinda looked up at her, brows knit together. “That’s the opposite of what I want. Do you think me mad?" She did not wait for an answer. “No, no, no—I mean to put Ozma in charge of the council once she is well-adjusted, assuming I can find her.”

Elphaba blinked. “Why not just leave someone else already on the council in charge then?”

Glinda huffed, tired, “Because I don't trust them, and because they do not have presence.”

“Presence?” Elphaba laughed. “Do you have presence?”

“Yes! Because I was given it. If there was anything good that came from the Wizard it was…” a couple of things , “it was that.” Elphaba narrowed her eyes at her, suspicious. “Oh, don't look at me like that, I—just let me finish. I have presence, power—whatever you want to call it, because the Wizard gave me the people’s trust, and I kept it. If I can pass that trust on to someone I know can do good—”

“How do you know she will?”

Glinda shrugged. “I suppose I don’t. But I don’t trust most of my council with this, either, so I have nothing to lose.”

Elphaba hummed her approval, but was still squinting at her. “Are you keeping something from me?” she asked playfully.

Glinda on the other hand, sobered up and sighed. “There are some things I’ll tell you soon, if you decide to stay—”

“I will.”

“-but tonight I…” she looked up to look at Elphie, who had taken to drawing patterns against the skin of her back. “I just want to enjoy my time with you, if that’s alright. No more shouting, no big revelations.”

“Oh?” Elphaba smiled, concernedly, “Is it that serious?”

Glinda nodded against her. “I’m afraid so. And I’m tired—so much has happened in the last few months.”

“Alright. We can sleep, if you want.”

“No,” she didn’t want that either.

So they kissed each other instead—at times lazily, other times desperately—leaving gentle bites and whispering sweet things through the night. Neither could sleep, and so they eventually settled beside each other, hands and feet and souls intertwined, and felt their racing heartbeats with giddy smiles. It felt surreal, and she worried she would wake up, but the weight of Elphaba pressed against her—the gentle fruit-scent of her hair and the gentle scratching of nails down her shoulders and back—was real this time. She was here and wrapped so gently around Glinda, as though she were afraid of breaking her.

(Alive, alive, alive.)

Eventually Elphaba broke the silence again, sighing gently and pressing soft kisses to Glinda’s  “You’ve changed so much, you know. For the longest time I stayed hidden from… everyone, really. And somehow I always managed to hear about you and your righteous leadership and I thought to myself… does that sound like the Glinda I know? How did you even manage…” she raised a hand and gestured, “all of this? Forgiveness and progress and everything else?”

Glinda scoffed lightheartedly, “Well! Considering you heard about your pardoning ages later, I don’t think I should trust any thought of your half-baked ideas of me. Especially since not even I understood just how different I had become for the longest time,” she paused there, considering for a moment. “As for your question! Memory is a fickle thing, Elphaba, especially when there are secrets. I took my time with Oz and its people. Make no mistake—there was resistance and there were riots and I was perhaps too hasty when I immediately took down the animal bans, but people always forget eventually. I just happened to take advantage of that.”

“Amazing.”

“Mmm, you might need to stay around for a while to really, truly say things like that.”

“What if I tell you that you are entirely perfect?” Elphaba asked, accentuating her question with a long kiss pressed to Glinda’s brow.

“Oh, well that is a given, of course,” she smiled, before it quickly dropped. “But a lot of what I’ve done, Elphaba… it was out of guilt. Guilt of having done nothing right when I should have. I suppose that has changed me.”

Elphaba held her tighter, “I’m sorry. I should have stayed—”

Glinda shook her head, “No, that’s not true. I should’ve gone with you, I should have been there—”

“No,” Elphaba shook her head and cupped her face. “You’ve done so much good here.”

Glinda sighed, “Yes, but at what cost? I don’t know that I could do this again, were I given the choice. Maybe I could have left with you, and we could’ve come up with a better solution! We could have come back and pretended to work with him, perhaps.”

“I don’t think anything would have turned out as well as they have without you. You made the right choice, and I think I made the only choice I knew how to.”

Glinda sighed, “You did something that I was too afraid—too selfish to do. I can admit that now. But Elphaba…”

“Yes?”

“You were young, and so good and sweet. Too good for the world,” she breathed deeply, mind clouded with endless thoughts that she wanted to be rid of, “Innocence, Elphaba, is power without experience. And you were endlessly innocent, equally inexperienced. Perhaps, had you not worked quite so alone… maybe things would have been different.”

“It was foolish, I agree. I wish I had understood that then.”

Another lull in their conversation.

“And after? You couldn’t—couldn’t you have given me a sign? Just to know that you were alive?” A final, whispered plea asked through gentle, swirled patterns on an emerald chest.

Elphaba sighed, forehead touching Glinda’s, “At first I was scared. How was I to know that something I send wouldn’t be intercepted? How was I to know that alarms wouldn’t start ringing if I flew back to you?” She sniffled, something sad and tired, “And then I became less scared—the more I heard about you and the thousands of wonders you brought to life, the less I worried. But then I wondered if you would even… want to see me, or even remember me enough to bother with your past—with me.”

Something inside of Glinda broke when she heard that. Even decades later and Elphaba was still unsure of herself, and Glinda ached to hear it.

Elphaba only continued, “I… I see that I was wrong. I know that now, and I don’t know why I ever thought otherwise.”

“Oh, Elphie…”

“Glinda, that night—” she kissed the blonde’s teary eyes, and her voice strained to speak, “Oh, Glinda, had I known—”

She brought a green hand up to her lips and kissed it, “Oh, Elphie, my sweet, darling Elphie. It is terrifying to me that you have never quite understood just how much I love you.”

Elphaba burrowed back into Glinda’s shoulder and let herself exhale, hot, heavy breaths on Glinda’s collarbone, “I’m so sorry. So sorry that you’ve been so unhappy. I understand that I was wrong—selfish, really—to not try and come back. I thought that maybe a memory of me would be better than what was left of me. I was so tired, then.”

Glinda understood “tired” better than most. She understood stress and work and feeling so dizzy that her legs could barely carry her up the stairs. She had been drained of energy for years, living on fumes, and praying that it would be enough.

“Were you happy? All these years away, were you happy?”

It was the only thing she needed to know.

It was silent for a moment, and she could feel their heartbeats sync, before Elphaba replied. “I think so. In a way, I think I was, though I am happiest with you.”

Glinda curled around her then, and kissed her soundly. “Elphie?”

Elphaba hummed into the kiss, “Mm? Yes, my sweet?”

Glinda looked at her with a gentle smile, the sky in front of her slowly turning purple. “It’s tomorrow.”

Age—63

“Darling.”

“Mm.”

A bite to her shoulder, a kiss to soothe it.

“My sweet.”

A head of blonde curls, rolled tightly to the scalp, rose from under the covers and Elphaba laughed—something infectious that had Glinda smiling with her.

What was said from under the covers was: “Yes, my dear?” rasped, as all early morning things are.

She hummed as Elphaba pressed a gentle kiss to her lips, and she ran her fingers over the green skin of her wife’s stomach. Glinda tried to stretch out of the kiss to wake herself, but Elphaba only followed her and pressed a few more kisses to her jaw. They were soft and reverent, and Glinda was in love.

“Glinda, my sweet.”

It was then that she noted the dark sky outside, and wondered what in Oz was happening.

She pouted and turned away from Elphaba, a feeling of mock betrayal as the driving force for the distance she put between them. “Elphaba… why in Lurline’s name have you woken me up before sunrise?”

Elphaba smiled and chased to kiss her again. “Today is a wonderful day, Glinda, and you will get out of bed so we can bask in its wonders.”

Glinda rolled over and tugged the covers over her head, “Surely the wonders can wait for the sun.”

If she had been looking at all, she would have seen her wife pause, in pretend thought, “They absolutely can, but I cannot and will not. Get up, please.”

“No, oh—I’m so tired. Let me sleep,” she protested.

It was sadly all in vain. Elphaba was strong and Glinda was entirely at her mercy, so she let the covers be thrown off and let herself be dragged out of bed. It was strange to be out of bed before Elphaba. Her wife had a tendency to sleep into the late morning, a habit formed by endless reading that happened in the late night. It was endearing and Glinda was more than happy to indulge this (and indulge herself in a late morning sleep-in with her wife on occasion), watching Elphaba sleep softly beside her.

It was very rare for her to be the one woken up with such force, and she was hit with dizziness as she stood. Suddenly, Elphaba’s early bedtime the night before made sense. Her wife held her steady as she was pulled out of bed—and Glinda could not find it in herself to complain, instead falling into the warm arms wrapped around her. Elphaba was so soft, and she smelled so nice.

“Elphie, dear.”

Emerald eyes, crinkled from a sweet smile, looked into her own, and she was met with a kiss to her cheek. “Yes?”

“What are we doing?”

Elphaba cupped her face, running her thumbs over her cheeks, and raised herself on her tip-toes to kiss her forehead gently. It was soft and sweet and Glinda hummed as a green hand moved to brush a curl out of her face. “The tulip festival starts today, my love.”

Suddenly Glinda felt very awake. “Oh, does it?”

A kiss to her lips. “Yes.”

She didn’t realise how little she knew about Elphaba until she had come back. A year together at Shiz, even as roommates, could not give enough time to share all their secrets and stories and figure out each other's habits, and Glinda realised this quite early into their reunion. They still worked well together despite it all, and Glinda thought that maybe it was because happier versions of themselves were stuck deep in the past, or maybe it was because, as Elphaba so romantically put it: “I am made for you, and you for me.”

But it was soon that Glinda started to learn more about Elphaba, and loved her all the more for it. She read constantly—whatever she could get her hands on: text books, pages upon pages of documents on Glinda’s desk, books from libraries. She had a scar, barely visible even in the light, at her left hip, that was from a strange dismount off of her very intricate, wooden broom. Elphaba had once told her about how she hated root-nuts when they were back at Shiz and they sat together for their meals, and now insisted that they were her favourite. Everything that Glinda learned about her wife was a gift.

One of these revelations—found out nearly a year after reconnecting, was that Elphaba dearly dearly loved the yearly tulip festival. When Glinda had originally brought it up one evening, asking her along to celebrate near the Colwen Grounds in Munchkinland where many of the larger fields were, Elphaba had surprised her by shooting up off of her chest to kiss her and smiled as widely as Glinda had ever seen her. When she registered Glinda’s shock, she shrugged sheepishly and explained that it was her favourite celebration, and that she had longed to go for years.

They were both young when Nessa took over the Eminency, and Glinda had never known much about Munchkin history, but apparently, it was the Governor of Munchkinland that would generally start the celebrations. She did not remember Nessarose talking about the festivities, and she thought it was perhaps that was because of her devotion to Unionism. Elphaba confirmed this when she mentioned that Nessa and Frex had always found the festival to be celebrated too much like ‘those Lurlinist Gillikinese—laughing about the spirits of the green grass and pretty flowers’.

Glinda had asked Elphaba, then, what she herself would have done—if she would have done it the way Nessa had, or not, and smiled when Elphaba explained that she had always wanted to take part in starting them—once she would have become Eminent. She detailed the way that the celebrations always started—with an announcement from the Eminent Thropp before stepping away from the podium to bow and give tulips to the munchkins who had gathered to hear, and explained with a shy smile that it had been a childhood dream of hers to do so herself, and to walk through that crowd as tulips were shaken at her in celebration.

(Glinda remembered having walked through a similar crowd, once before.)

“Elphaba, dear, you simply must help me decide what to wear today,” Glinda said.

The older woman only poked her head out of her own closet quickly, before returning her attention to whatever she was sorting through, “You will look wonderful in whatever you wear.”

Glinda groaned and looked through her drawers, “You are endlessly unhelpful, you mean, green thing.”

“Thank you, I pride myself on it.”

She flopped onto their bed and sighed, a dramatic spirit possessing her, “Oh Elphie, I am wounded. Here I am, hoping that my beautiful, wondrous—”

“Monstrous, perhaps?”

“-darling wife could help me pick out something that she likes, or maybe even something to match her—but no. Instead here I am, dying—”

Elphaba scoffed, “You’ll live.”

“-and entirely devastated at my being neglected. Neglected, Elphie!” She let herself slide to the floor then, with a swish of the blanket, “Surely you will not continue in such a manner? Hurting your poor, unsuspecting wife?”

She smiled and laughed when Elphaba finally hung her head and walked over to her closet, sorting through big ruffled dresses, before entirely disappearing out of view. When she did come back, she dropped a light blue dress, and an accompanying diaphanous, pale blue overlay—not quite a shawl, sleeved and draping nearly as far down as the dress itself.

Glinda felt a sleeve tickle her arm and opened her eyes to see Elphaba standing over her with an exasperated expression, raising her brow as if to say ‘Are you happy now?’ She smiled, and thanked her wife with a gentle kiss to her hand before getting up to change. 

By the time that they had left the palace, the sunrise had come and gone—a sweet, powder blue in its place. The end of spring was near, and the flowers had all started to bloom, and it felt as though they, too, wanted to celebrate the start of summer. 

This year, they had decided to stay in the city for the start of the festival, instead of traveling to the Colwen Grounds as they more often did. Elphaba enjoyed the grandeur and deep-rooted excitement in Munchkinland—there was much more to do and much prettier things to be found throughout their time there, but taking the carriage to the outskirts of the big city was just as rewarding. The celebrations were still big, and there was music for days on end, and Elphaba's smile was brilliant.

She was nudged with a strong shoulder as they both stepped out of the carriage, and looked over to see Elphaba blinking at her with her large, emerald moment, "I was hoping to visit the market first.”

Glinda smiled and linked their arms together, a pleasant buzz of magic, “We'll go to the market then.”

Elphaba had quite a bit more energy than she did at such things, and she was thankful that she had opted for flat-soled shoes when she felt a tug at their entwined elbows and had to adjust her speed to match her wife’s quickened gait. It was also lovely because Elphaba had chosen to wear much taller boots, and had already taken advantage of the height difference to press her lips to Glinda’s temple and forehead.

It was a sunny day—clouds in the distance, but cerulean skies above. They wandered onto dewy grass to look around and found children playing. For the most part, they were munchkin-landers, red hair curling atop their heads.They all played games with balls and sticks, and little hoops that they found especially fascinating when spinning around on their wrists and legs. The children were sweet if a little mindless—bumping into carts and other people and Animals, sprinting on ahead without realising the need to apologise. She could not help but smile when she noticed a little munchkin girl take a flower from a neatly wrapped bouquet, stolen quickly from the open stand, to give to her friend who had started turning red-cheeked.

The market, as it usually did, consisted of colourful propped up canopies stacked with sweets and bouquets of flowers and little stands with jams and little hand drawn signs next to them that read: ‘3 for 5! What a deal—what a steal!’. She'd wanted to buy some once or twice, however, and was told that they could not, in good conscience, take her money. Elphaba tended to take advantage of such things, not caring for her wife’s false protests, leaving at the end of the day with bags of goodies and with Glinda trying to stop Elphaba from consuming anything too sweet in the late night—the core and true cause of a headache that she would complain about as soon as her head would hit the pillow.

“Glinda!”

She whirled around, following the sound of Elphaba’s voice quickly realising their arms were no longer entwined, and that Elphaba had found her way over to a stall, handing over coins. Elphaba smiled and thanked the vendor, before walking back over to where Glinda stood and held out her hand, pink tulip held gently, and waited for Glinda to accept it.

“For you.”

“Oh—”

Her wife was beautiful—so very beautiful when she smiled. Age had been kind to her, and Glinda was all too enamoured with the gentle creasing at her eyes, and the pretty lines that settled sweetly and only deepened on her cheeks with every upward tug from the corners of her mouth. The sun shone brightly on her face, casting her in vibrant spring green, and Glinda wanted to do nothing but kiss her.

“-thank you.”

She twirled the tulip between her fingers and admired it. It was a fringed tulip—pink and not yet fully bloomed, its little serrated petals were gently folded in on each other—timid and pretty—its center a darker pink (from the lighting or the bulb itself, she could not tell). They were pretty pretty things, looking gently frosted in texture, and Glinda loved them the most. Elphaba had made a point to go around showing her all the different kinds and giving her all sorts of colours—only grimacing when Glinda would see a vibrant, unnaturally coloured one, and steer her away from it with mutterings of how “the colours don’t last long when they’re put in water”. Elphaba’s own favourite variant were the Greigii tulips, which she said were endlessly beautiful in their colouring—vibrantly patterned or striped—with their dark, low to the ground leaves—her favourite being the bold red on the outer layer of white petals.

Glinda did not find time to indulge in the smaller things before Elpahaba. She did not partake in many festivals, or show up for her friends when she should have—she was always far too busy. But the more Elphaba spoke about what she knew—what she had seen and learnt on her travels while away—the more she realised she had isolated herself from the joys of living. It was a depressing thought, and one she did not indulge often anymore. Why wallow in your regrets when you can move forward? And Glinda did; she found joy in knowing and in learning and listening when she could, and it was lovely.

The day went by slowly—it always did when she found herself truly enjoying her time. There were fields upon fields of tulips and Elphaba insisted they walk through them; it had become a sort of tradition by that point. There were little wooden pathways that winded around the fields, and they admired as a gentle breeze rustled the flowers indulging in the almost honey-like scent that was around them. In the distance there were screams and there was laughter, and the ringing of bells, and it was perfect.

It was they sat down for a little while—tired and feet aching, that she dropped her head to Elphaba’s shoulder as she closed her eyes and let herself enjoy it, rubbing at her delicate wedding necklet—intricately woven with emerald beads that sat in the dip between her collarbones—as she often did when her thoughts settled. It was a mindless thing, and sometimes a comfort. It was not always her own that she fidgeted with, either—and always found herself checking to see that Elphaba’s own was straightened out. Her wife thought it amusing and always kissed her when she did, expressing how sweet she thought Glinda was—how she enjoyed her doting.

“I’m sure it has not moved in the last five minutes since you last touched it,” said Elphaba with a smile.

“Hush. I’m busy.”

Elphaba scoffed good-naturedly, “Please. You just want to touch me.”

Glinda looked up and sniffed, “Maybe I do, or maybe I am unsatisfied with this necklace! We will never know.”

“Oh! The mystery,” Elphaba deadpanned.

The blonde quirked a brow, pulling the hand from Elphaba’s neck to instead place it over her heart in false shock, “Do you think me a liar, Madame?”

Her wife hummed thoughtfully, “Not in those words, no. Perhaps attention-seeking,” she paused. “Seeking my attention, specifically.”

Glinda laughed, “Oh—you think highly of yourself, don’t you?”

Elphaba shrugged. “Perhaps I am simply aware that I have a wife who simply cannot keep her hands off of me.”

She sighed, shaking her head, brows drawn together. “Oh, it is true! I give in! I simply love you too much to let you go, is that such a crime?”

A bark of laughter, and a kiss to her temple, “Not at all, my sweet. In fact, I encourage it.”

Glinda smiled, “Then here—turn around. I want to properly adjust this.”

“You want to properly touch me, is what you want,” Elphaba mumbled, only flinching and laughing when Glinda flicked her softly.

“When we’re back home.”

“Oh?”

-

The evening progressed into dances and dinner. There were performers—all holding large, heavy wooden batons with coloured fabrics and bundled material—that kicked high, and sang low—traditional munchkin dances that were always accompanied by fascinated children that held their little tulips in the same manner as the dancers held their sticks, and kicked and swung about, trying to sing along. During this time, in the square, food was served, and people ate and laughed and danced along on the sidelines. It was perfect, and a wonderful spectacle, that was only surpassed once the food was consumed, and she was able to drag Elphaba along onto the stone bricks and get her to sing along.

The first year they had attended, neither of them were very comfortable doing much other than sitting in each other’s company, and reveling in the excited atmosphere of the giant crowd. Glinda had felt more awkward than she ever had—if she could not really, truly take part in Gillikinese celebrations, what gave her the right to take part in Munchkin ones? Elphaba on the other hand, had been vibrating the entire time—feet tapping away frantically and she insisted to Glinda that she remembered the music, could recall some bits of the dances. There was a desperation to be believed, and a desperation at culture forgotten with isolation. With time, they both adjusted, and Glinda was desperate to see the entirely perfect smile that Elphie would give her with every spin and hop and step through the folk songs.

Late spring celebrations were always her favourite. It was never too warm, and only sometimes too cold into the late evening. That was perfectly fine however, because drinking was a perfect solution to the cold, and there happened to be a lot of alcohol. When Adama did not let her drink, it was Elphaba who drank with her. And danced with her, and sang with her, and held her—it was all very sweet. It was also something that the Glinda of the last four decades would not have considered possible—save for inside of late night fantasies and incredibly self-indulgent day-dreams.

Yet, not a single dream could compare to the wonder that was Elphaba herself. Even if she and Elphaba had had an entire lifetime together—if they had succeeded against the wizard together—it could never have been enough. She contemplated that as she watched her Elphie a few paces away, clapping at a small child to whom she had given her own tulip, and who was now taking heavy, twirling steps in a clumsy dance. It was a sweet sight—how Elphie had come back from the dead and was suddenly uninteresting to the world around her in her verdigris. Few people, in the years since her return, had seen her and huddled their children closer to them before they quickly walked away, and even fewer spoke directly to her about it.

There was something so magical about her Elphaba when she was this unguarded. Even on her best days she was always more collected, a little more stoic and grounded—very rarely did Glinda find her with unburdened smiles and carefree laughter, and that was alright with her, but it made her all the more beautiful when she truly found peace. They had both led hard lives, Elphie’s endlessly so, and seeing her so happy in these moments was everything. She felt herself stand to meet her, something reflexive and a little desperate still—to reach out and to lose herself in her softness and warmth.

She was a vision—a wonder—a miracle in their small little world, and Glinda adored her. Loved her wholly—completely—her heart was full of her. She tried to convey that with a thumb that trailed across her jaw, a smooth and sure motion that drew her gaze over to Glinda.

“Elphie.”

The small child that Elphaba had been entertaining scampered off—now that she was no longer the center of attention and waddled in the direction of her parents who sat on a bench not far away, beckoning her over with waves of their hands.

“Hello, dear,” said Elphaba with a kiss to her brow, and a hand that instinctively wrapped around her waist to pull her closer. “Have you finished your drink?

“Yes, I did.” Glinda nodded and smiled in the warmth, looking up to see pretty green eyes looking at her reverently. Her own eyes flitted over her wife’s face, hand trailing behind, mindful of her glasses. She was soft, and freckled and perfect. “How are you feeling my love? Are we staying longer?”

They usually did. The sun had set not long before, and soon there would be a starlight show, bursts of colourful fire that had parents raising their kids on their shoulders and couples laying themselves on blankets.

“Would you like to stay?” asked Elphaba.

Glinda laughed. “I have no preferences. My feet are fine, and I am in no rush. Thank god for these soles—I don’t know how you’re still moving around in those monstrosities.”

The older woman looked down to her feet, “They are perfectly comfortable.”

Glinda rolled her eyes with a mutter of ‘oh I’m sure’, running her fingers down the silky fabric of her wife’s shirt to instead play with her hands—taking a calloused palm into her own and rubbing gentle circles into it, before moving to repeat the motion into soft soft fingers. “So, Elphie, my darling Elphie. Will we be staying?”

Elphaba shrugged, and ran a hand over the nape of her neck. “I’d like to stay. At least until the light display.”

Glinda kissed her— oh, how she loved kissing her —and nodded, “We’ll do that then.”

The hand she had been rubbing mindlessly then tighten—interlocking their fingers—and brought the back of her hand to green lips. She felt a shudder of emotion run through her as she was kissed again, and felt heat rush to her cheeks when Elphaba pulled her hand away only slightly—instead breathing hotly onto her skin as she spoke—soft and low, “Thank you for indulging me, my sweet.”

At some point, they brought themselves closer to the music and danced—soft, gentle steps in time with slowed stringed instruments. It was late and they had both had a fair amount to drink, so they giggled by each other’s ears and stepped on each other’s toes—swaying to music that was certainly still too fast for their snail-paced steps. Elphaba smelled of the flowers they had stepped through and bouquets and perfumes and little pastries, and Glinda could do nothing but resist the urge to clamp her teeth into her jaw. The lamps had been lit, giving off a warm, golden glow, and it bathed them in its light and casted animated, dancing shadows on the ground. It had gotten a little colder, and the sky had darkened fully now—it was surely soon time for the starlight show. Glinda did not particularly enjoy the bright, loud lights—they hurt her ears and thudded through her in a way that left her with a chest ache, but the pretty colours that lit up the sky in flowery bursts and the wide, toothy smile that light up Elphaba’s face more than lights ever could, was worth every minute of it.

“What a wonderful dancer you are, Madame Thropp—I insist we do it together more often.”

Elphaba hummed against her head, “Do you, now?”

They were too old to hop and skip and step in circles very proficiently, but Glinda imagined it nonetheless. Elphaba insisted she felt perfectly ‘youthful, Glinda—I’m still in my prime’, but her knees disagreed loudly. Now their swaying was romantic, in a way—holding each other with reverence that came with growing old. Treasured, safe—loved.

The swaying came to a stop then, with the understanding that they both needed to sit. “I do, dearest. And as your wife, you must do as I say.”

“Oh, of course, dear.”

They did not speak much after that, comfortable in the silence. It was another little while later that Elphaba got up from the bench with a slight groan and dug her fingers into her back to support herself, soon letting her head fall to Glinda’s shoulder instead—the excitement of the day well and truly catching up. She carried the majority of their gifts and shopping for the day, too. Glinda’s only item was another ring added to the growing collection on her hands.

It was only once they got back to their apartments as they undressed and readied themselves for bed that the silence dissipated—with Elphaba laughing when Glinda tangled herself in the overlay as the fabric got caught in one of the buttons on her dress. It was only after Glinda huffed and called out to her with a cry of ‘Elphie, help me!’ that she came running to her aid, limping over with only one heavy shoe on. “Alright—wait, don't move, it’s stuck. Let me get it off.”

Her hands brushed aside Glinda’s cascading hair—now more white than blonde—and winced when she saw that the fabric had split. It wasn’t too terrible, and it was easily taken off, but the fabric, even as Glinda tried to stretch and smoothen it out again, kept its slightly awkward shape.

“I should have been more careful,” she moped.

Elphaba shrugged before sitting down to take off her other shoe. “It was bound to happen at some point—it’s so thin.”

Glinda had set it down gently on her chair and instead started working off her dress, sighing deeply at herself, “Oh, don't say that! I knew better than to forget about—” she rubbed it between her fingers, “-this. Oh Elphie, could you put my flower in a vase please?”

She looked around, before setting her eyes on one atop their dresser. “I will in a moment, I’d like to change first.”

Glinda whirled around to face her then, already part way through buttoning up the front of her shift. “Oh—then I can manage that, my love, don’t trouble yourself.” Instead, she slipped into her house shoes—pink and fluffy, and walked over to Elphaba’s pillow, picking up her own nightgown and bringing it over. Her hands slid up her wife’s front, pulling at the hem of the shirt working to undo the buttons, running her fingers of soft fabric and palming at Elphaba’s sides. Without her boots, Elphaba was shorter—matching her in height, and Glinda could not resist pressing her lips to Elpahaba’s own as she finished unbuttoning.

She cupped a green cheek and smiled, “You can do the rest yourself, can’t you?” before walking to fill the pot with water, giggling at the gentle flush on her wife’s face as she took the nightgown off the bed and scrambled into it.

By the time Glinda came out of their bathroom, routine done and ready for bed, Elphaba had already shuffled under the covers and was reading her book quietly. Glinda tucked herself in as well cold feet finding Elphaba’s warm ones with a happy hum.

Elphaba squeaked, “Ah! Don’t do that, Oz you’re so cold…”

Glinda shivered, content in the heat radiating off of Elphaba, and fell into the crook of her neck, breathing in her gentle scent, and molding herself into her wife’s form. Her eyes scanned the pages of the book, recognising it as being one from her own collection—something fantasy with an unfortunate ending—and turned her lips in to prevent herself from giving that away.

Elphaba did not shift as she held her, instead relaxing with each stroke of Glinda’s hands along her arms and collarbones and ribs. She moved only to lick her finger and flip through pages, eyes scanning and not truly reading—instead focusing on Glinda’s sleepy form. As if she could sense her gaze, Glinda looked up at her with a questioning look.

“My love, will you be sleeping soon?”

Elphaba blinked one, two, three times and Glinda resisted the urge to giggle, “Oh—I’m sorry, is the light bothering you? I can try and sleep now, if you’d like.”

Glinda, losing her battle with her drowsiness, yawned, “No, you know I don’t mind, we have a busy day to-morrow is all.”

At that, Elphaba leaned over to put the book away, closed the lamp light, and scratched at Glinda’s shoulder, raking her nails across the bare skin of her arm—something soothing that left her eyelids feeling heavy—a sweet way in which Elphaba told her she loved her.

-

A gentle rake up to Glinda’s shoulder— I love you . A slow rake down to her elbow— I love you .

A turn of her head to press green lips to white hair— you’re perfect.

She continued like this in the darkness of their room, lulling her wife to sleep with slow, rhythmic movements, and spoke in low tones.

“-when we were by the benches—out in the fields, you know? I saw a little girl today—perfectly tiny and sweet—and she was collecting the biggest rocks she could carry. She was strong too. I saw her dump them in a pile by a tree,” she paused, reflective. “It was strange. Do you remember yourself carrying rocks as a child? I certainly didn’t.”

Glinda only mumbled and drooled.

“My sweet?”

A gentle snore; another kiss to white hair.