Chapter Text
“Think about this logically. It’s probably someone who was named after her.”
Elphaba shoots Fiyero a look that definitely would have killed him if he was, you know, alive. He gestures for her to take another spoonful of soup, obstinate in his refusal to leave her bedside until the bowl is clean.
“The announcement said Glinda the Good, Good Witch of the South. Some kind of crazy coincidence, then? You sound more insane than me.”
“More insane than the idea that she’s still alive after all these years? I don’t know, I just feel like it’s more plausible that some up-and-coming witch wanted to follow her legacy, or something.” He still does that, switching positions between leaning backward on the chair and with elbows on his knees when he’s nervous. She presses fingers into aching temples.
“Look at us, Fiyero. We’re alive, the same as we’ve been ever since we left Oz. Isn’t it possible Glinda could be too?”
“We’re alive because of your magic. Glinda wasn’t like you.”
No, Elphaba thinks, she was different. Glinda never had natural talent, not at anything, not like she liked to pretend she did. She never raised her hand in class and seemed to act aggressively bored when a topic of conversation switched to academics, flippantly waving off her perfect exam results as innate intelligence. But for all her ridiculous declarations of not knowing what a library was called, she sure as hell spent a long time studying (Elphaba knows, because keeping her light on all night while she worked on homework drove her absolutely up the wall). Glinda only acted like she was God’s gift. She made up for what she didn’t possess with an unrelenting drive that was quite honestly, frightening.
The throbbing in her head is getting louder. Ever since arriving in Oz, Elphaba had put down the suffocating feeling of melancholy, of expectation, down to arriving back in a home that she hadn’t visited in three hundred years, but she wonders now if there was always something waiting for her here. Something she left behind. “I know it’s her, Fiyero. I just… do.”
She can’t look at him, afraid she’ll start to cry again, but eventually he snaps the silence with a sigh. “Well, for the record, I still think you’re crazy. But if you really want to find out—” Fiyero holds up the newspaper from yesterday, a little more crumpled than before—"This does say that the Princess’s birthday party is open to everyone. And whoever she may be, Glinda the Good will be there.”
The idea of that party sounds like an absolute nightmare to Elphaba. (To the Glinda she remembers, surely not.) But she’s desperate, the name in that newspaper branded onto her retinas. She must know, even if the answer kills her. “…Thank you, Fiyero.”
He sighs again, sounding full of the world’s woes, and perhaps he is, having to deal with her all the time. The idea does make her smirk a little. “It’s not like I’m not curious too, you know. It’s just, what if it is her, Elphaba? What would you do? What would I do? Lurline above.” He leans in to put his head on her shoulder, and she breaths in his scent; he’s lighter than feathers. Whenever she’s reminded of who she made him to be, even though it saved his life, even after centuries of self-forgiveness, she’s still hit by the same breathless ache.
And yet he’s right. Would the grief of seeing Glinda in the flesh now be stronger than it would to see her grave. The answer to that question, whatever it may be, sends fresh tears to her eyes – so many tears these days, so many days that make her frail soul want to cry. She is old now, and she no longer has the strength she once possessed in her youth. Elphaba thinks of her hundreds of little sketchbooks and of her thousands of Glindas pressed within them. Then she tries to reacquaint them with a Glinda still-alive, still-breathing, feet still-dancing upon this earth. The image in her mind shines incandescent but is faceless and there is no way for Elphaba to tell if she smiles or weeps.
They tell the villagers they are leaving and the children come out in a seemingly endless procession to make their goodbyes. Even a hundred years here could pass, and Elphaba thinks she will never be used to Ozian children not flinching under her gaze. They offer them precious things – sweet wrappers, lengths of ribbon, heart-shaped buttons, roughened pebbles of sea-glass, things that they insist will be useful on their journey, and Elphaba takes them and places them in a handkerchief with the gentlest care she can muster and promises they won’t leave her side. The older villagers press money and food and clothes into their hands. Nothing is expected in return for such kindness but perhaps, once they are finished waving goodbye to the quiet travellers and return home, they may find all their crops grown, ripe and fat to bursting; flowers wonderfully in bloom, roofs and windows repaired like a faerie has come in the night. Elphaba couldn’t possibly say.
There is no yellow-brick road left to walk on any longer. The Emerald City’s verdant halo is all the guide an Ozian needs.
Sometime after, shouldering their bags in the heat, traipsing through jewelled fields and valleys lined with rivers bubbling like lemonade, Elphaba sighs and says, “I’m not used to these people treating me so kindly.”
Fiyero is jumping lithe over a stone in a stream – he turns back to offer his hand to her, his tenderness still so endless after all these years. “You deserve it,” he replies, expression so amusingly readable in its earnestness, and Elphaba thinks there will never be no man (nor scarecrow) like Fiyero.
“I know.” It is with tentative courage that she allows herself to smile.
Elphaba has wept over this world, try as she always did to steel her heart towards it that hurt her so relentlessly, but in the end her greatest fault was only that she loved too much. She loved so much that it destroyed her, it destroyed Oz, it destroyed the people she loved, and it took her so long to understand that it just wasn’t her fault that Oz wouldn’t love her back.
But this new world is beautiful, and it loves her. Is there any softer ground on which to die?
They walk and walk. They pass farmers tilling fields, a market run exclusively by Sheep (selling the most exquisite woollen couture and desserts), meadows of searing yellow rape and bursting green buckwheat beginning to flower. The day is stupendously beautiful, like it is made of jewels and gold, and Munchkinland hums with quiet birdsong. People greet them as they pass – they are all smiling, they have no reserve, no hostility. Fiyero passes pennies to buy strawberries from a teenager holding them stacked by the bushel, still glittering with the early-morning dew, and flirts with the young women shining shoes on the roadside. He’s still handsome enough to make them blush. When they stop to breathe and to eat, they make pictures with the clouds like they did with the stars.
Step after step, she feels as if she’s wading through memories unbidden, but this time it is less oppressive and more like a graceful touch upon her eyelids. The memories are smiling at her underneath the sunshine, sparkling through centuries to remind Elphaba of the times she was a little girl and a little more soft, a little more hopeful of life to come. She cannot remember these roads, these fields, these houses, but still once upon a time this land used to be her home. She is eight, walking through the maize taller than her, green drowning in yellow, invisible and stifled with pollen. She is ten, pushing Nessa’s wheelchair down a gentle slope and breaking into a run, the sound of her sister’s delighted cries ringing through the air – quick, we have to be quick, or Father will catch us. She is thirteen, floating belly-up in the lake in the middle of summer when it’s too hot to even breathe and suspended here in the waters she is no one, nothing, not green and not girl. The waves undulating in her muffled ears sound like her mother’s lullaby.
When she is feeling most angry, most jaded, Elphaba pulls these memories out to remind herself that not all of her life was so lonely. Now she is really here, they flood back with full force like they’ve had a fresh coat of paint.
And they make her smile, really. For oh, does Elphaba love. She loves and will never stop loving.
Distant somewhere she wonders what it would have been like to lead Glinda through these fields. To lie upside down in that lake and look at her blurry through the water. To say here, this is where the little me was born before she ran into your arms and you into mine. But she doesn’t even have to wonder, not really, because she can picture exactly what she would say, how she would look enshrouded by all these flowers, and her smile amidst the sunlight. In another life, in a life they both deserved, she would have taken her here and everywhere. She would have wanted to see Gillikin Country too, to trace the outline of little Glinda with her footsteps. But life isn’t so kind all the time and they never got their chance and now anything that is left of who they used to be back then no longer exists.
It's okay, it’s not so bad. Because this exists, this sun and warmth and they’re eating strawberries on the edge of a field where great long rows of beans are growing and flicking water at each other because it feels nice on their hot faces and makes them laugh, too. It’s enough, and Elphaba remembers that Word in the newspaper and thinks that maybe nothing is impossible after all.
They beat the sun to the Emerald City, but it peers at them through only narrowed eyes, a thin line remaining over the horizon. Even in the half-light, the city is glorious – the spires might as well stretch to the moon, for how high they reach, resplendent in all shades of green. It is so much bigger, so much shinier than she remembers, or perhaps the final years she spent in Oz made her too world-weary to see its beauty long ago. Maybe this is how she first saw the city on that day, curling in on the train under the morning light, humming with the knowledge that her everything would change from her first footstep. On that day Glinda was with her, because of course she was.
“Are you okay?” Fiyero asks, veiled in the dying sunset and looking golden and beautiful. Sometimes she curses his ability to look right through her, companion of centuries. She shakes the fragments of Glinda, those pale arms encircling her, from her shoulders and nods.
“We need to find somewhere to stay tonight,” Elphaba remarks, trying to be realistic instead of the dewy-eyed girl she finds herself becoming the longer they breathe Ozian air. The city is buzzing, awake with festivities and joy for the upcoming celebration. People and Animals are dancing and drinking on the streets, spilling out of pubs with drinks in hand, skin and eyes glowing with the booze. Children chase weaving down alleyways and steal sips of wine. She opens the little pouch of gold coins the villagers had so generously given them that morning, and for the first time sees the image of the Princess stamped on the front, turned to the side with hair swept over a pointed ear. “I hope this will be enough to find a room, but a lot of these places are probably booked in advance.”
“With enough money, anything is possible,” Fiyero replies, the haughty smugness in his voice apparent. She spins around to find him unbuttoning his jacket, producing a similar pouch abound with gold and copper coins alike. They glitter in the remaining sunlight and he spirits them away, grinning at her before one of the little street-children can spot such a tempting prize.
“You bastard! Where did you even get those?” Elphaba exclaims.
Fiyero winks deliberately, enjoying her apparent shock. “You’d be surprised how far a well-placed compliment can go.”
Elphaba sighs, cheeks colouring slightly as she remembers the way he’d blown kisses at the pretty girls on their journey and the several older women she’d found fussing over his shirt collar when she woke up in a state of hazy collapse the day earlier. “You conniving little swindler, you.”
“Now come on, Fae. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth! Now let’s go and find somewhere to rest our aching bones, shall we?”
“Fiyero, you don’t have bones.”
“Semantics, my dear. Even a man made out of straw can feel weary from time to time.”
She is glad to have him, insufferable as her companion can be. Elphaba will never be a city-dweller, too caught up in the discomfort of noise and unpleasant smells and enjoying the slowness and routine of quiet countryside living she’s been accustomed to for so long. But Fiyero is smart as a whip when it comes to such things, the skills she never learned because she couldn’t see over her nose in a book most of her adolescence. He leads them from hotel to hotel until they find one with an empty room and flirts so shamelessly with the boy at the front counter that even she, as used to his antics as anyone could possibly be, has to excuse herself to sigh in her hands. The discount he secures is stupendously outrageous; Elphaba sits on the bed and counts the rest of their gold coins, secretly ceding defeat but refusing to say so, lest his ego inflate to disproportionate size.
She does quite like seeing the image of Princess Ozma on their sides. In some of the newly minted ones her facial expression hasn’t yet been worn away by passing hand-to-hand a hundred times and she can just about make out the slight curve of a smirk, her golden-pressed eyes glinting back at her in the dark. Elphaba last remembers hundreds of thousands of coins extolled with the Wizard’s smiling image. Perhaps she likes these new ones so much because anything is an improvement from being unable to escape that face.
On the other side is a Goat with an austere look and quietly judgemental sloped eyebrows. She has no idea who he is, or used to be perhaps, but it brings her immense pride to see one of his kind on a coin no less and it reminds her of someone she used to greatly admire. They have plenty money to live in the city for the several days until the celebration thanks to Fiyero’s usefulness, enough to afford food and travel too. Elphaba thinks distantly that things may have to change from now, since they are no longer travellers going from nation to nation and subsisting off the kindness of strangers. If Glinda isn’t who they think she is, and if they wish to linger in the city before seeing the rest of Oz.
Still, she can’t think about that now. Any thought of Glinda burns, regardless of whether it is good or terrible.
The next several days are feverish with excitement in the city and the streets are choked with people, residents and tourists alike, abuzz with life like Elphaba’s never seen in Oz before. It makes her so absently sad to see her homeland like this, the final images worn into her mind like pressed flowers so different, empty and cold with fear. In the Oz she left behind people stopped leaving their houses for fear of her. Blinds shut and windows closed. Breezes free to blow down roads devoid of all life, because they are hiding in their kitchens and living rooms, speaking in hushed tones like she will hear them and come for them in the night. Where she walked they cowered. Like she was something their eyes would burn at even catching her in the light. Like she was something truly unredeemable.
These people spare maybe a glance at her green skin, but it is not the repulsion she is accustomed to from a weathered childhood. They glance, and then they turn away, forgetting her, a stranger. The emotions that well up inside her speak words she can’t decipher, but all in all, she is smiling.
The people are more interested in Fiyero, and for good reason, for he is his usual charming self and perhaps he reminds them of a figure that still graces their history books.
In today’s Oz, no longer a shadow of itself as in her distant past, people are revelling in the peace – as they should, she reasons. In preparation for the celebrations, stalls and road-side sellers fill the air with colour, smell and noise. There are newsboys in their tens weaving amongst the crowds, stands overflowing with flowers bursting from colourful buckets, festival games for the children: apple bobbing, hook-a-duck, hoop tossing. Prizes strung up with twine and pins, too, the hugest dolls and stuffed Animals she’s ever seen, hundreds and hundreds of boiled sweets glittering like jewels.
And Lurline, the food! Not a corner of the city in sight without steaming bowls, red-hot pans slick with grease and oil in the air. One for a penny, miss, come here and try this delicacy, fresh and hot made in front of your eyes, miss. Children clambering up to peer over the ledges while the shopkeeps pour batter and season vegetables and pipe whipped cream into perfectly cone-shaped pastries. So many foods she’s never heard of, especially those made by Animals who are no longer afraid to hide their culture and their tradition.
Elphaba buys a Cat-shaped bun from a family of equally similar Cats, tiny box-sized stall crawling with kittens. They’re all different colours, mewling and scratching for their mother. They haven’t learned to speak yet, but in this Oz, they will.
In the hotel room after Fiyero had fallen asleep Elphaba read the rest of the newspaper from the day before. Its sides were creased but she still doubted Fiyero had read on. On the third page, far past the word that had spiralled her into darkness, was an article on an upcoming commemoration gala to celebrate two-hundred-and-fifty years since complete Animal liberation. It only confirmed what she’d known as soon as she saw her name in print, but she still cried pathetically at that one sentence – one sentence, for all Glinda had done? As the original figure who spearheaded the Animal rights movement since its conception nearly three hundred years ago, and who is responsible for the very first fundamental law put into effect for Animal freedom, Lady Glinda the Good will be once again present as chief speaker at the event. A sentence was all she got, banished to page three of yesterday’s newspaper.
Because it was old news. Because there wasn’t a human or Animal alive who would remember their oppression, their suffering, anymore, bar the ancient sting that generations of subjugation would inevitably scar. Because Glinda had changed everything, fought for it all these years, so that no one needed to live in the shadow of their own history again. The joy and laughter that surrounded them was proof of that, and for all the mountains Elphaba could move and seas she could part, what Glinda had done was proof of true power.
When she feels her mind going back to that moment, as it used to do every moment of every day since she left her best friend on that tower, she wrenches it away. She hasn’t allowed herself in years to think of it, to contemplate the what-ifs. For what was done was done and the magic of Time didn’t exist, at least not for a human like her; no matter how her magic pressed against the limits of breaking the world and no matter how the pages of the Grimmerie spoke to her in whispers and curling, insidious chants.
She shows Fiyero the article. It is the day before Princess Ozma’s birthday. Most of the Emerald City is drinking themselves into the night and camping outside in the square for the chance to be close to the front when the guest of honour arrives in the morning. He reads it again and again, pacing the floorboards until their downstairs neighbour protests with banging. Then he tucks himself into bed next to her, blue human eyes still so luminous in the mid-night, the crackle of crumpling paper between their bodies warm with tension.
“What can we do?” He whispers, sounding for all the world like the final futile thoughts she beat herself with when they planned to leave Kiamo Ko.
Elphaba’s read tens of thousands of books and travelled to the end of the world and back but she still doesn’t know. So she tells him to go to sleep, even when she can’t herself, and spends all night staring up at the ceiling like it will whisper into her ear like a sea-conch the right answer.