Chapter Text
There is a cold draught in the air when Glinda sees her die. The breeze whispers upon her bare shoulder, and a wind chime gently peals, its melody too lovely for such sombre news as this.
She sits back expectant of the ache to come upon her, but when nothing does she wonders if all this time she had been hoping for it all along, for the final survivor of her buried sin to perish at the hands of a child and for her most devastating secret to draw its final shuddering breath into this world that will no longer remember its name. Glinda is many things – charming, kind, indubitably cheerful, and yet among them also ignorant, selfish, and cowardly – but she is not stupid insofar that she cannot understand this, and distantly she wonders when those negative qualities began to eat cancerous into her bare pink soul.
When she looks down at her pale hands she sees Elphaba’s in them. Palm-to-palm, fingertip-to-fingertip, heartbeats echoing at the same time because in the end they had always been two halves of a whole just too naïve to see it.
The grief comes later. It waits, snakelike, until her back is turned and turns itself into a noose in the night; she is frightened and does not recognise it until it is halfway choking her. It comes with many other things – anger, regret, damning relief, and above all, guilt. These emotions are new to her in their voracity and desperate as she might be to scream they press down and rip the noise from her throat. Instead she rolls out of her bed and buries her face in the hardwood floor, desolate in the knowledge that it will be her alone who will mourn.
It chases her in dreams. It follows her outside of them, too, snapping at her collarbones and ankles and earlobes. Nasty little whispers in her ears when the palace is silent, flashes of green in the corners of her eyes.
Madame Morrible is a harsh teacher. When she took her shoulders dearly on that ruined tower it had been her who wiped Glinda’s tears and stroked her soft cheek, and the words she whispered in her ear were everything she needed to turn guiltily away from truth (oh, oh, how regret tastes so similar to blood). But Glinda learns the hard way that Morrible’s scorn was not misplaced. She had little talent in sorcery, and if she had any at all it is a simmering pitiful against the shining light that used to be her best friend. As Glinda fights to lift a coin off a tabletop she envisions that small back, suspended in the air amidst the clouds, watching from that long-ago moment shrouded in almighty power yet also utmost loneliness. She understands that Madame Morrible intends to use her against Elphaba, but if Glinda is their second-best, they all might as well be laughing into their graves.
Still, she learns. Glinda has always made up for her ignorance with ambition. Perhaps it was this that kept her alive. Perhaps it was this that made her a worthy student. Even as a child she could sense her innate inferiority and struggled against it so desperately, fighting against herself with such a tenacity that people really started to believe her intelligence was natural. She would not let herself be imperfect. A decade passes, and she goes from lifting coins to conjuring white flames with a flick of a wand. Madame Morrible forces magic into her veins with a fervency that makes her scream and surges pain white-hot into her veins. She is grateful, because every spell makes her ignore her loneliness. As Glinda’s power grows, so does her influence. In the eyes of the people, she becomes more beautiful, more benevolent, perfect; the Wizard’s perfect papery figurehead. They clutch at her skirts and fall upon themselves for a smile, a word, even a breath. She shines, o she shines! For all her intelligence and strength, this was the one thing Elphaba never understood. Glinda might have as much power as Elphie does in her pinkie finger but to Oz she is their angel, and belief is the true destroyer of worlds.
Her presence becomes hypnotic to them and somewhere along the way Glinda realises she isn’t even pretending anymore because she doesn’t remember who she used to be.
But then Madame Morrible ascends the stairs on that day and she looks impossibly young, and she tells Glinda there will be no lesson that day and Glinda doesn’t have to hear another word from her lips to know to know they have won at the most terrible cost. And the next day is sunny like the earth and the sea and even the sky of Oz itself is rejoicing but Glinda sees everything in grey. There is happiness to be found in the people’s joy; she repeats it to herself like a mantra, and while it may be true she knows even she is laughing at her own cowardice.
After that first night, choking on her bedroom floor, she has many more like it, the grief and shame her midnight torturer. She wakes over and over unable to shake the tears or the apologies. But just as she feels it might kill her eventually things do get better. She sends off the child wearing Nessarose’s shoes, watching as she takes to the skies in the sparkling heels that should have belonged to her beloved friend. When power comes finally to her hands, she has the people’s eyes turn dark toward the Wizard; how foolish they were, allowing her sway to grow such that the people would choose her over him, believing she would bend her head meek for the rest of her days. The people will die for Glinda, kill for Glinda. The city feels so empty when she is done with her conquest, though it is livelier than ever before, and Glinda holds the green bottle that is all that remains of her best friend up to the sunlight. It sparkles deep emerald and casts green shadows upon her feet. It is so final and it contains the last breath of Elphie’s ghost. Today is the fall of this old world, this wicked old world.
Would Elphaba applaud her for finally achieving the cause she paid so dearly for, or would the sting of Glinda’s terrible betrayal still cause her to scorn?
Glinda does not know. It has been long now and she is too weary to wonder anymore. She only hopes Elphaba would like this new world she has built upon the ashes of the one she set ablaze.
Time passes, as it so often does.
There is no one left in the new world to teach her magic anymore, so she teaches herself. She learns to paint the sky with rainbows; to climb into the night sky in just her slippers; to create meadows of blooming flowers as only an afterthought. She searches for traces of old Ozian ancestry, and finds their footprints deep in Gillikin Country – a dilapidated house, an old crone, and a dirty child, a little boy who is actually a girl, with whom she leaves the crown of Oz.
The fairy child reminds her of an old dream she used to have, of the daughter she longed for cradled against her breast. Once upon a time, she had thought Fiyero was the one to stand at her side. It is not like she lacks for suitors, but Glinda feels as though there is no longer anyone left in the world who could place their hand in hers like Elphie once did. She is full of a melancholy no other soul is capable of understand, and she is exhausted of love. So she remains alone.
As the years go by, Glinda fights for the world Elphaba wished for. It takes many days and sleepless nights, awoken by the pale pink rays of sunrise on her desk, working into the starlight. The Ozians hate her, they fight against her, they fall to her hand. She learns and consumes. She chips off pieces of her heart and plants them deep into the misty soil of Oz. She grows to adore her people, those precious souls she holds with a delicate hand, the ones who she can truly give a better life to. It brings her new joy and gets her through the sleepless nights. For all her cowardice, for all her failures, Glinda still weeps for those who suffer and stands up for the weak. Many days she thinks to herself I could not save you, my best friend, but I will save countless lives in your stead and make Oz the place it should have been for you. In my Oz people will never cry: they will never be ridiculed for their species or the colour of their skin.
It takes her five years from Elphie’s death to realise she has not aged a day. In fact she has become even more radiant, ethereal, her skin and hair taking on a lustre far beyond this world, her smile glowing like the moon. She reaches her forties then her sixties and her eighties, and places the bodies of her friends and family into the ground amidst terrible tears all the while looking just as she did at twenty-two. It is no secret that those who practice sorcery for many years transcend this world in different ways, but to Glinda at least at first it feels like the cruellest punishment for her years of hard work. The time comes soon when everyone she once knew is gone, and she weeps alone on her balcony into the sunset, unaware that even the swanlike curve of her crying back is of otherworldly beauty.
Perhaps, she thinks, when I have created the Oz I promised you, when the weight of the souls I have saved is finally enough to outweigh this everlasting guilt, it will finally be my time.
Perhaps then you will return to your Oz in a new body, ready to accept the new world I made for you.
Perhaps then I will earn my forgiveness.
Many days she thinks of the last time they met. She remembers Elphaba’s tender fingers wiping the tears off her cheeks, the shadows in that dark room where they knew it would be their last rendezvous, the forgiveness that echoed from each other’s lips in desperation and in despairing wish that they could turn back the time and stand by each other’s side once more.
It was never Elphie’s forgiveness that Glinda needed to earn.
You have such ridiculously high standards for yourself, Elphaba once said, face half-lit by Glinda’s pink lamp in the terse air of their dorm room, picking up the crumpled papers scattered across the floor, always so confused because she could never understand Glinda’s crippling desire to be perfect. Elphie never needed to try. She never needed to fight like Glinda did, amongst the jeers and digs at her stupidity. And Glinda had loathed her for it. Of course, Elphaba had her own problems, and no sleepless nights and tears in the library creating blisters on her fingers or exhausted nosebleeds would change the colour of her skin, nor would they cease the vitriol; but Glinda was selfish, Glinda was fickle. How silly they were back then. How she wouldn’t give anything to have those times again.
More years pass. Time continues. Glinda finds times of respite in her grief. The children that grasp at her fingers with their little hands and offer her flowers from their gardens. The refugees whom she lifts from poverty and welcomes into her own home. She feels that she is finally achieving Good and with that realisation comes a sense of peace that she has longed for ever since she watched Elphaba take to the skies. And she is not lonely, for everyone in Oz adores her, and she has company in the little princess Ozma who stays eternally a child and The Good Witch of the North, who has little power but is so old that she has seen Oz rise and fall with the comings of every era. It is her that Glinda turns to in moments of fear and her who holds her when she struggles with the ramifications of her ever-advancing age. She strokes her head like the distant shadow of a mother she once had long ago and stirs rose petals into her tea to brighten her mood with the fragrance.
After the time comes when not a soul in Oz is alive to remember the Wicked Witch of the West – outside of poems and storybooks – Glinda considers clearing Elphie’s name. In the end it is her own weariness that stops her from altering the history books, from making her best friend turn in her grave. The past is dead, and so is everyone long with it. Let it rest, let I be the only one left with this truth. Let it die with me, for witches are not immortals, and when it does it shall disappear like the final ember in a burnt-out hearth.
It has been so long. The precious moments of Glinda’s early life are dwarfed by the years she kneels for Oz. Sometimes she awakes in terror that she will forget everything, lost in the centuries, and when she realises she has forgotten another face of someone she used to love the agony is almost too much to bear.
There are some she will never forget, though, or at least she prays, burns them into her soul, desperate not to leave them behind lest they take with her what is left of Glinda with them. Don’t take away Elphie, she begs Time, unrelenting, you can make me forget everything else but I beg you, don’t take her away from me too.