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The Good Witch turned and tossed amongst her bedclothes, having been plagued by a meeting-induced tension headache since half past noon. Sleep evaded her now, bobbing and weaving as it fluttered her eyelashes only to dance away to the furthest corner of her chambers. She flipped her pillow to the cooler side and pressed it against her eyelids, staving off the dull throbbing for only a matter of seconds before it plodded back into her skull, persistent as ever. A frustrated sigh escaped her. The headaches had become more frequent lately; Morrible and the Wizard had saddled her with an unusual amount of diplomacy and responsibility just as fresh springtime had gallivanted into Oz. Blearily, she wondered if a cold drink of water would be out of the question, but in the interest of falling asleep, she decided to stay put. If the last few glasses hadn’t helped, another probably wouldn’t do much. How mundane, she thought. If only Oz could know how boring it is to live here.
And then came the CRASH! An absolute, catastrophic, astounding ruckus arose from her balcony, so unexpected that she forgot about her pain for a moment and instead jolted up, utterly defenseless with her legs tangled like a filly’s in the sheets. Her head whipped around, first to the bedroom door and then to the majestic cylinder glass panes that led outside. There, she caught a terrifying glimpse of something amorphous and black as pitch tumbling over the railing: a great spectre, so dark it seemed to swallow even the moon’s auspicious glow. Too large for even the halest of eagles, the shadow crumpled and pulsed with labored breaths; a stiff, brushy sort of tail lay behind it, sticking awkwardly out of what Glinda presumed to be the back end. She fumbled for her wand and slid out of bed, wincing and rubbing her temples. Still a safe distance away, she called out a simple “Who’s there?” and prepared to stand her ground.
“Speak,” she prompted, too tired to be harsh. The shadow curled in on itself, making noises barely audible through the thick glass of the balcony’s doors. It sounded disturbingly, painfully human.
In spite of any and all common sense, Glinda clutched her wand and began to approach. What had been a headache now gave way to a less painful but still overwhelming sense of disquiet. The floorboards, slightly uneven despite the palace architects’ best efforts, creaked softly as she walked; carefully, cautiously, heel-toe to minimize noise. Her uneven, galloping heartbeat jostled every breath she took, causing her exhalations to stutter. Ringlets tickled the back of her neck and her upper lip began to sweat. She opened her mouth to lick it off, and her tongue clicked with saliva as it unstuck from her teeth. The noise resonated through the room; her entire body stiffened. Could it hear her? Was it even alive? Fear ran its frigid digits all across her back, digging into her gut. But cowardice had cost her once. Never would it again. She set her gaze and prepared to take another step.
A near-skeletal hand burst from the darkness and slammed against the glass, rattling the panes in both doors, and Glinda shrieked. She swung her wand out in front of her, its bejeweled apex shining, ready to fire off whichever spell came to her first. In the new light, a singular something glinted: an eye, already half-shut and fluttering towards complete closure. The hand slipped and squeaked down the glass, trailing something in its wake, until it flopped to the ground. Glinda waited with bated breath. The trail began to drip.
An injury?
Glinda loosened her grip on her wand the slightest bit and tried to steady her heart and hands, all of which shook from a concoction of adrenaline and terror. Several thoughts raced through her mind; mired in confusion, she lowered her arms until the wand’s base thunked gently against the floor. Its light dimmed as she began to focus on action.
“You’re Glinda the Good ,” she muttered. “You help people.” It felt stupid to say aloud, but the longer she spent deliberating, the greater chance she would wake to a corpse the next morning. However, that was a lot of blood. She could see it now: a pool, catching the light and rippling as individual rivulets added to its expanse. Foolishly, superficially, she worried whether it might stain.
She hefted the wand over her shoulder, keeping herself backlit in case the shadow were to act with malicious intent, and proceeded to the balcony. There, she fumbled with handles that never quite latched right before gingerly opening the door.
Up close, the shadow seemed to possess no familiar features: it was a lump of black fabric bisected with a single strap of dull leather, and a bundle of twigs poked from underneath what could have been a leg if she squinted. She concentrated on increasing the potency of her wand’s glow until more angles began to appear. Items of clothing distinguished themselves, and she panned her eyes across the figure until —
Glinda’s gaze fixed itself on the shadow’s hand, now lying right by her foot. Blood-soaked nature notwithstanding, its color still shifted in strange ways; ways that she had not laid eyes on since her university days. Her heart caught in her throat and she nearly choked on her next breath. She found she could barely muster the fortitude to squat and observe the shadow more closely, for fear of entertaining too great of a false hope. Nevertheless, she bent her knees and scrutinized the figure, doing all but touching its trembling limbs. It groaned, an agonized sound, and shifted to expose its face at last.
The Good Witch stared, dumbfounded. Right at her feet, shivering in torment, lay the individual to whom every regret of hers could be ascribed. The green countenance, drenched in cold sweat, exhibited nothing but waves of pain that accompanied every stilted inhalation. The hand not splayed across the balcony stone was pressed against the torso as hard as failing musculature would allow. Glinda could barely take everything in.
“El…” she tried, voice breaking before she could even get two syllables out. Her nose had begun to run and her eyes had begun to sting without notice. “ Elphaba? ” The shadow stirred as Glinda spoke. One eye cracked and seemed to try to focus on her; although, without glasses, she doubted Elphaba could even make out her general form.
Action compelled her. Ignoring a sharp, near-sobbing gasp, she encapsulated her government-ordained mortal enemy in the safest, most secure bubble she could manage and transported the younger woman indoors. She strode directly into her washroom and deposited Elphaba in the claw-foot bathtub, pausing only a moment to shed her outer layers. Blood and expensive nightwear simply did not mix.
“Elphaba?” Glinda called again, as loud as she could without completely shattering the palace’s idyll. “You need to wake up.”
Two brown eyes wrenched themselves open to stare blankly at a point somewhere over her shoulder. They drifted about, rimmed with heavy, dark circles and slightly swollen. A tenacious bruise lent a bit of extra color to Elphaba’s left cheek, and a still-oozing gash decorated the right. The cut was clean; due to its shape and proximity to the eye, Glinda surmised that it had been the result of the green woman’s glasses shattering.
Her hands set to work ridding Elphaba of her clothes. A limp hand attempted to swat her away, but she paid it no mind and undid Elphaba’s button-down as quickly as she could. It peeled away with a sickening wet-cloth noise to expose what Glinda desperately hoped were the worst of Elphaba’s injuries. Two deep lacerations lent worrying concavity to an already-flat chest, running from sternum to the base of her ribcage in deadly precise lines. Several ugly, burn-like things smarted in angry lines just above her navel. Glinda grew light-headed and gagged, turning away quickly. With the coolness of porcelain pressing against her back, Elphaba began to come around just in time to catch the end of the blonde’s unfortunate bout of illness.
Glinda rinsed her mouth and hands and turned back to find Elphaba staring more pointedly at her now, conscious but in no lesser agony than before. The green woman grit her teeth and white-knuckled the edge of the bathtub with every breath. Neither one of them particularly wanted to look at the wounds. With nowhere left to stare, they regarded each other.
“Why…” Glinda sat down once more, grasping for words she could not find. “Why are you here? Of all places?” Her eyes darted between each of Elphaba’s, searching for any sort of logic or sense. “There’s direct orders to kill you on sight .”
Elphaba leant her head back until it thunked gingerly against the tub and screwed her eyes shut. The very act of thinking seemed laborious, if not additionally hurtful and actively deleterious, but by some miracle she conjured up a statement.
“Didn’t know… didn’t know where else to… to-to go– tch! ” She hissed and, despite a rush of humiliation, whimpered. Glinda stared, her heart aching and rending itself asunder at the words.
“How long have you been bleeding?” The question came out horrifically nasal and wet. Elphaba held up a hand and tried to count on her fingers, but kept losing her place. With a growl that read less as frustrated and more as helpless, she pulled her shoulders into a tight shrug. “That’s not encouraging,” Glinda breathed, steeling herself to once again examine the green woman’s shredded torso.
The slashes seemed all the more serious as they pulsed blood in insistent, malicious streamlets down Elphaba’s stomach. In the quiet tension of observation, droplets pattered against the bottom of the bath. Glinda approached the wounds with a gentle hand and a damp rag, wiping at the surrounding skin. She held back her sniffling as Elphaba’s muscles jumped involuntarily, recoiling from her touch accompanied by a barely audible hiss.
Mostly clear of blood, the true gravity of the situation laid itself bare. So deep was the longer cut that Glinda could have sworn a bit of bone was visible underneath scant, split globules of yellow fat. The second cut bled more, but appeared much less visceral; for that, Glinda thanked whatever coincidence had curved the instrument away from Elphaba’s vitality.
She conjured up what was left of her formal magic education and focused on the memories of basic healing: a few incantations for bumps and bruises and scrapes were all that came to mind, so she eschewed the thought for a moment and applied gentle pressure to the lesser slash. With a low groan, Elphaba attempted to pull away, but only rammed her shoulders against the tub. She craned her head to try and watch but blanched, sweating more profusely and suddenly looking quite nauseous. Her lips clamped shut, and she raised a hand to them.
Glinda felt the green woman spasm and heard something else begin to drip; she glanced up to quite the pathetic sight. A slight volume of bile ran from both Elphaba’s nose and between her fingers, pooling on her collarbone and dribbling down her forearm.
“Oh, Elphi-aba,” the blonde murmured, fighting the surge of emotion that came with denying the nickname. “Hold on; hold on.” She drew back that curtain of lank black hair into a hasty, greasy ponytail and took another rag to the fluid. “It’ll be alright. It’ll pass.” Elphaba slumped further into the tub, eyes drooping shut; her face was deathly pale. Glinda assumed this was due to pain, as the bleeding had all but stopped.
Switching on the bath’s faucet, the blonde maneuvered Elphaba’s legs out of the way until the water had warmed. She lathered her hands with soap and cupped them under the stream, ferrying the mixture to where it would trickle into the wounds as gently as possible.
“ Guh– ” Elphaba gasped, twisting to and fro against the porcelain; but she could go nowhere to escape the torturous sting. Glinda bit back a snivel of her own and continued the treatment.
Eventually, the water ran clear — or, clearer than it had for several minutes. Generous amounts of dirt had also washed off in muddy waves, creating a small pool of grit near the drain. Soap bubbles slid by degrees down the green skin. Even the burns — which Elphaba had finally been able to divulge were actually bullet grazes — had been cleansed. The green woman’s arms lay stiff at her sides, hands clutching her pants so tightly as to nearly rip the fabric.
“We have to…” sighed Glinda, dreading her charge’s reaction, “we have to rinse this all off, now.” A terse nod. Nothing more.
She angled Elphaba more toward the faucet, placing her hand under the stream to stop it from all cascading down at once onto raw, exposed flesh. The lack of response troubled her. Was Elphaba just sitting there, taking it? A minute passed. The soap slowly dissipated. Elphaba made no sound or movement; Glinda was barely confident that she was breathing. A dangerous pulse fluttered against her fingertips as she took the green woman’s forearm.
However, as time ticked by and the tap kept flowing, Elphaba began to shake. At first faintly, over the span of no more than two minutes she was soon trembling in earnest, eyes glassy and jaw set. But she would not cry.
“It hurts; oh, I know it hurts,” Glinda whispered. “I know.” Her voice rode the edge of shattering. She offered an arm to lean on and Elphaba pitched forward, sinking into the touch as some sort of strangled noise tore out of her throat. “I know; I know,” repeated Glinda, almost chanting. She took the opportunity to wet Elphaba’s hair, stroking over the tangles. “I know.”
After several more agonizing moments, all the soap had run off. Glinda pressed a clean cloth to Elphaba’s chest as quickly as possible, determined to patch her up with as little additional pain as she could manage. Magic danced into her fingers on instinct this time, sewing the deepest layers of skin back together at the edges of both slash wounds. The middle of the larger one still gaped disturbingly, but the bone was no longer so hauntingly present. She laid a few strips of gauze down as a cover, and wrapped Elphaba’s chest from armpit to diaphragm in clean bandages. Her hands shook as she pinned the final length of cloth in place.
Without a word, she supported Elphaba into a standing position and immediately felt small. The Witch towered over her, the elevated bathtub stacking unnecessary inches onto her already lofty frame. She reached towards the dull button of Elphaba’s blood-water soaked trousers but stopped halfway, glancing up for either confirmation or denial. The green woman lifted her head and dropped it once, heavily.
She worked quickly and professionally, undoing the garment and not even entertaining the implications. The pants slid off to reveal horrendous, mottled bruising on nearly every visible inch of skin, each contusion in a different stage of healing save for two broom-shaped ones that seemed to have carved permanent recesses into Elphaba’s inner thighs. Her knees were scraped to hell and back. Glinda sucked in a breath and wiped off some residual bloodstains. Her patient did not even flinch.
After a few seconds, Elphaba was as clean as she was going to get, because she began to sway on the spot. Glinda dropped the rag in a panic and grabbed her biceps to provide some form of stability. Her head still lolled but her breathing had become far more labored, so the blonde eased her back into sitting. She crumpled inward, head between her knees, trying to inhale as deeply as she could, but ended up gulping in uneven bids for air. The bandages dug into her ribs as she heaved.
The attack passed as quickly as it had come on, and Elphaba felt something of which her typical sensorium had long since been deprived: a hand, light but steady, rubbing small circles across her back. Glinda sat beside her, face frozen in terror and freshly damp with tears, gripping her shoulder and continuing her ministrations. Elphaba tried to raise her head to acknowledge this, or anything at all, but exhaustion had seeped into her very cells and rendered her body glacially sluggish. She couldn’t even muster up the energy to make a sound. Without control, she began to shiver. The tub was cold.
Glinda beheld the broken entity before her. The green woman had all but fallen asleep right there, balled up in a porcelain crib, wearing nothing but a tragic pair of underwear that barely held fast to her emaciated hips. Her hair dripped slowly, half-wet and disgusting, carving sodden trails around her vertebrae. Gooseflesh prickled every inch of her sordid skin.
“Elphaba,” whispered the blonde, swallowing the last of her tears, “we need to get you out of this bath.” A nigh-inaudible sigh leaked out of Elphaba’s weary lungs.
She wrapped the green woman in an old towel, creating a sopping, wretched creature who, after taking a single step, slithered to the floor and huddled on the bathmat. Her legs poked out at an angle that would have been humorous had they not also shaken like leaves in the wind. All Glinda could do was layer on more towels, gingerly sponging her dry. When she finished, she drew Elphaba up and propped her against the side of the tub. A green face protruded from the fabric mound like a battle-worn turtle. She cupped the non-bruised cheek in a gentle palm, instantly supporting the weight of Elphaba’s whole head as she collapsed into the touch. The slit under her eye rubbed against itself, but in a defiance of primeval law she ignored the pain and fixated on the sensation of simply being held. Cared for. The hissing of the bathroom’s lanterns grew prominent in the ensuing silence.
Having run her thumb over a rather tacky patch of skin, Glinda flicked the tap on once more and wet the corner of a towel. She ghosted over every bony ridge of Elphaba’s face; tracing her brow, following the bridge of her nose; outlining her ears that perennially stuck out, lending all the more airs of hapless youth to a face that tried so hard to seem mature.
At last — at long last — Elphaba was clean.
Glinda, although more than capable of lifting her, decided against this lest her wounds begin to bleed again. Instead, she conjured up the bubble once more, transporting Elphaba — towels and all — to the bed. The sheets were white but the duvet was dark; in fact, a rather convenient dusky maroon that would be more than capable of concealing a stain. She rearranged the blankets hastily, smoothing down one side and lowering the green woman until she lay, sprawling, in a shallow well of down. Elphaba must have been feeling slightly better, because a vague groan of protest emanated from somewhere around her mouth. Glinda ignored this.
“Sleep,” she pled, taking a limp hand in her own, “if only for a moment.”
Elphaba wanted to resist, she did; she had recognized how reckless this decision had been since aiming her broom toward the balcony through half-sighted eyes. Every second that passed compounded risk upon risk. But, yet — her body refused to give an inch as she tried to summon the strength to stand. She slipped quickly into unconsciousness; nearly too quickly. Glinda watched, for the first time that she could recall, Elphaba falling asleep.
She still appeared characteristically grumpy, but the hardest edges of her gaze dulled into something more of a “not-smile” than a true, deep, haunted glower. All the tension in her shoulders, jaw, and even legs melted off in a visible instant. Glinda dragged over her desk chair and sat beside her enigma, her conundrum; her Elphaba, who would be gone in the morning. She knew this. The realization ached worse than the migraines. Nevertheless, she slipped back into the bathroom and set up Elphaba’s tattered garments to soak in a concoction of soapy water. They would soon be clean enough.
Glinda tiptoed back to bed and lay down next to Elphaba, as they had in simpler times, and found herself yearning — to the point of imminent tears — for the green woman to curl into her once more. She cradled a pillow underneath her arm, imagined Elphaba in its place, and felt pathetic. Her emotions persisted through unconsciousness: the dream she fell into consisted of nothing but glinting swords and flashing gun barrels, slowly culling a crowd that surrounded her. Every member loomed over her, indistinct but familiar; as they fell, they morphed into anyone she had ever held dear.
The Good Witch awoke with a gasp as a bullet was just about to enter her chest. The duvet beside her was neatly arranged, and slow, limping footfalls were thumping towards the balcony.
“Wait!”
Glinda had cried out before she even realized it. Her head spun from how quickly she had jerked up, twisting towards the sound. But her tongue lay still. She just sat there, blinking, trying to focus her beseeching gaze; trying to delay the inevitable.
“It’ll pass.” A murmur, in a voice so familiar. Her heart dropped. She swiped errant curls out of her eyes and finally, truly, saw Elphaba.
The green woman stared back at her, full of indefatigable stubbornness, and stumbled into the night without another word.
“ El… ” She reached for the retreating shadow. “ …phie– ”