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“I knew,” came the voice, sharp to Elphaba’s ears and against the bones of her knees, which ached on the hard stone floor, “I knew he saw you still.”
It was a little voice, shaky in nature and with some emotion Elphaba wasn’t sure she could characterize. It was, of course, rage; for Elphaba Thropp— who these days was known by many names, too many to count— she herself was the only being in Oz capable of such rage, so of course she did not recognize it. Anger was the emotion of intelligence, which was why Fiyero was always happy to see her.
“A bad omen,” Elphaba said to the voice, turning slowly on her knees and rising ever so clumsily until she fell into a pew, boards hard at her back. “Hello, Glinda. You look ridiculous.”
Glinda huffed and Elphaba looked over at her, once and then twice hungry and searching. The dress she wore was ostentatious, puffy floral motifs all along the bodice. It stuck out awkwardly beneath her cloak, lopsided and misshapen. Had she thought that thin blue thing would hide her face or the absurdity of such a dress in this part of town? Elphaba would ask her, she would.
“So do you,” the girl muttered, and fit her hands along her hips in a very reminiscent sort of way. “Praying, Elphie? And such a dingy chapel at that. You’ll dirty your pretty dress.”
Elphaba, in a frock that resembled a sack of potatoes, raised a thinned eyebrow. “Who’s to say why I’m here? Would you know, my dear? Perhaps I’ve taken an interest in the livelihood of ants.”
For there was an anthill in the ground, in a crack between two slabs of limestone. Glinda had seen it and so had she, clusters of bugs trampling each other with eagerness, slivers of leaves on their backs. Glinda, usually so short— or maybe Elphaba had simply imagined her that way; it had been several years, after all— stood towering behind like a queen.
“Perhaps,” Glinda said, then sighed loudly so that her face scrunched up, rather the way Nessa’s had when she was a little girl throwing tantrums out in the dewy grass. “Oh, really! I come all the way here and this is what you have to say to me, some nothingness about my appearance and a bunch of ants and… oh, I should stamp out every one of those bugs with my heel, maybe then you’d pay attention to me!”
Elphaba was not won over by pouting on principle. For a moment, though, she felt a sort of stabbing between her lungs. For a moment she looked north to the smoky painting at the front wall of the oratory, Saint Glinda with blood delicately pooled along her breast, eyes facing upward and unseeing.
“No need to turn towards murder,” she said, and turned over her shoulder to incline her head to the pew behind her. Glinda sat. “I am, in fact, paying attention. As much attention as I pay anyone, just ask Fiyero.”
“I did,” Glinda said moodily. “Or I tried. I knew he saw you, there’s a certain effect you have on people. A superiority. He moved like he was better than us all even though— an affair, Elphaba, really?”
“Are you married?” Elphaba asked suddenly. She was trying for it to be cutting, trying to make Glinda slink back in that pew and get that trembly face on that she used to all the time back at school. It had been easy enough then, Glinda with her wide eyes and her mean streak. But as much as Elphaba tried it wouldn’t come out that way, instead it was soft enough to be almost tender and Glinda blinked at the tone of it, biting the inside of her cheek.
“Hardly,” she said quietly, “and you know that.”
Which, of course, Elphaba did.
“You should get on home, then,” she said, and turned to face forward again. “The city’s not safe for a young lady, particularly of the hardly married sort.”
“And you would know,” Glinda scoffed. “Oh, Elphie, what are you doing here anyway?”
Elphaba could feel her breath along the edge of her ear. She was moving in closer between those two pews, close enough that Elphaba could hear her swallow. She should move, this much she knew, but she did not.
And it was very cold in the oratory, cold in the city altogether. Quite contrary to the vision of herself she’d tried to cultivate, Elphaba’s favorite season was the spring. Back at Shiz there had been a time in particular— she and Glinda, with the boys as well, down by the Suicide Canal in a field of dandelions still yellow before they blew away. Glinda stretched out in the grass, twisting like a cat, with Elphaba beside her. She’d touched her hair, she’d touched her face— Glinda had been beautiful then and Elphaba couldn’t resist it, now that Boq had moved on and the most teasing she ever got was from Avaric.
“Elphie,” Glinda had called her back then, nudging into her hand with her own pale cheek, and Elphaba had flown to her.
“Praying,” she said now, flatly. “For you to leave, that is.”
“Sometimes I think about that day we met the Wizard,” Glinda said airily, as if she couldn't hear Elphaba’s voice, as if it were on too high a frequency. It was annoying, Elphaba decided, it was obnoxious and bratty and so very Glinda of her, Glinda the spoiled. Glinda the cruel, the idiot, the pretty. “Our Wonderful Wizard, Oz the Great and Terrible. You know, it’s quite the topic of conversation when I mention I’ve met him. Chuff likes to break that out at parties.”
“And what do you say,” Elphaba’s voice was dry, stagnant.
Glinda hummed cheerily. “You threatened his life, remember that? I don’t see you as much of an assassin, Elphaba; in honesty I think you’re a bit too picky for that. Who would wash the blood out of your clothes?”
Elphaba tensed. “So you’re a loyalist, are you,” she said, and heard the foolishness of it as she spoke. How like a child she became around Glinda! How annoying she was, and how Elphaba wanted to please her! “I don’t see you as much of a revolutionary, Glinda, in honesty I think you’re too much of a sheep.”
And for a moment Glinda did not answer. Was she hurt by it, Elphaba wondered? Did it matter in the end?
And then she spoke, quieter this time in the desertion of the pitiful oratory. “Not always,” she said, “not when it comes to you.”
Her hand came out, soft and slight under the lace of her glove, and rested itself along Elphaba’s stiff shoulder. It was a cold hand, freezing through the thick felted material of Elphaba’s own frock, and it was bare. No ring in sight, that is, just the butter yellow of Glinda’s painted nails glimmering through the gloves. And useless gloves they were, all style and no substance, see through and rippable tulle. Elphaba could have ripped them, should have ripped them. Instead she stayed quite still.
“Anyway, can you really look down on devotion? I notice you’re in the oratory to a very specific saint. A worshipper of Saint Glinda, now, are you?”
“I am devoted,” Elphaba bit out, “devoted to a cause. There are bigger things in the world, my dear. Go home.”
There was another pause and then Glinda’s hand retracted fast, so fast that Elphaba nearly missed the chill. “Fine,” she sniffed, “I will. I’ll go and never come back and you can think me dead, picture my frozen corpse floating down the canal with an asp in my bosom.”
“Fine,” Elphaba said sharply, insatiably. “Go, then. It’s cold out, I do hope your Chuff can keep you warm.”
Just before the door Glinda stopped, holding it open so that a gust of freezing air crept in without her. “I take it back,” she called, just before slamming the wood shut. “You’re not allowed to picture my bosom.”
Premonitions were rather stupid and so were hunches. Glinda, back at school, would talk often about foreboding; she’d get a prickle up the side of her neck that meant something was coming.
Elphaba had read sermons of the sort, anyway, a special breed of psychosis. Priests and maunts convinced the Unnamed God was talking to them directly, appearing as cloudy visions in their dreams or over their shoulders in oratories, in church pews.
Glinda had thought magically once just the same. The same, save a little less fire and brimstone. Ama Clutch’s demise and there Glinda had been, convinced she’d prophesied it. Convinced that her thoughts, unheard by anyone but the bitter cruelty of her own brain— though Elphaba conceded at times it could be a very sweet one— were leaping off the page, being heard by the world and cast into action. The whole world arranging itself into some monstrous tableau vivant, waiting just for Glinda.
And where Glinda had seen magic Elphaba had seen cynicism, a plot against goodness and civility. Here, she reflected now, was where they differed.
Still, regardless and anyway— here Elphaba was, back at the oratory. Her undergarments were longer this time, layers on layers; she’d woken with a grave chill looking up at the weak light coming through her ceiling.
She’d last seen Fiyero a week ago, or something close to it. She’d been distracted, embarrassingly enough, not quite there in all senses of the word. She’d slept with him, because that was the sort of person Elphaba was. If she was a person, if she was a woman, if she was something with a soul at all. Most people would’ve picked a fight until he’d left, withheld the premise of sex and made him want. Elphaba was, of course, not most people. With Fiyero’s hands on her chest Elphaba had looked upward and looked at a pile of snow visible from the window, sloped like an anthill.
Premonitions were stupid and yet she was having one. This time she didn’t bother to kneel, sitting instead at the steps at the base of the altar facing the door. It was a terribly shabby place— of course Glinda would notice such a thing, Elphaba thought rather fondly, and then pressed that warmth back down.
But it was, in truth. No one had bothered to maintain this place in years, the upper balconies would probably cave in if anyone were to set foot on them. There was a nest above the doorway too, threadbare and weakly built if not abandoned.
And there was the portrait of Saint Glinda too, overwrought and sentimental. Her pale eyes nearly fluttered up at the light bursting from the sky, blood on her gown and Elphaba had always found it most saccharine. Perhaps she would’ve preferred Unionism, saints and gods and storytelling, if it had been grounded in some reality. Grounded somewhere else, not paintings of pretty blonde girls who became minor saints in their times, oratories to them where no one had left offerings in years.
The door creaked open and Glinda was there. It was hard to tell at first, of course, on account of the bright wintry light seeping in behind her hair. Once, back at school, Elphaba had designated it the color of straw and Glinda had refused to speak to her for a day and a half.
But it was her and Elphaba knew it because she knew.
“You never did know how to avoid indulgence,” Elphaba said. Glinda cocked her head.
“You say that like you aren’t here too. If I’m indulging so are you, Miss Elphaba,” she said, stepping in closer, “Miss Elphaba who is endlessly devoted. Miss Elphaba the superior, the crucified, the wicked.”
Elphaba could not argue. Glinda stepped inside fully and shut the door, shedding her traveling cloak as she did it so that it crumpled to the floor, waves of blue eroding the stone. She was dressed in pink this time, blush pink like the walls of a powder room, and Elphaba found it far more befitting.
“Was there no chapel to Saint Aelphaba? You had to settle for me to pray for?” Glinda asked, dress sweeping so low across the floor that Elphaba couldn’t make out her feet. Was she floating, was she even real at all? Maybe this was some ghost Glinda, Glinda who had thrown herself off a spire or impaled herself with a dagger— she was always taken by the romanticism of death, Elphaba thought affectionately. Glinda Arduenna, all aesthetics; she could be the crown jewel for someone like the Wizard in another life or even this one. Bigotry could look quite pretty on her, perhaps.
“Ease of access and nothing else,” Elphaba said sullenly, sliding across the step to allow Glinda a seat. She perched delicately upon the step, a full step above Elphaba, and let her legs stretch down on an angle. So she did have feet, Elphaba noted with a strange wholeness in her chest, delicate pale ankles fastened into rose gold slippers. “And no one bothers to pray to Saint Glinda anyway, she’s become rather obsolete.”
Glinda huffed just the way Elphaba had known she would and oh, she is letting herself get attached again. Slipping into old habits, teasing for the sake of it and tracing the unladylike slump of Glinda’s body along the staircase. Embarrassing, humiliating. With Fiyero she never had to be tender.
“Well,” she huffed again, “well! I always thought her a far more glamorous saint than most. Blinded and stabbed and ascended all at once, it’s almost impressive, don’t you think?”
“Glamorous, that’s what you’d remember,” Elphaba muttered and tried not to smile back when Glinda pursed her lips at her, squinting. “She was pitiful, or wasn’t she?”
“She wasn’t a virgin, if that’s what you’re asking,” Glinda said lowly. She’d changed. Her hair was short, almost boyish and curly around her ears, which were ornamented with a raindrop of a pearl each. She’d changed, talking about sex and even subterfuge without a blush. Elphaba wanted, for a brief and sickening moment, so hard that her stomach wrenched. She wanted to bite, to tug hard on Glinda’s hair and to watch it spring back. Boyish but spritely, foolish. Too soft and too cold. She was hungry perhaps, and remembered the handful of bread in her coat pocket. Was a soul kept in a stomach?
“What a paragon, then,” Elphaba said. “What good has sex ever brought?”
“Some good, I imagine,” Glinda shrugged, and kicked her feet against the step rather childishly. “Children, babies.”
A horrible thought occurred to Elphaba. “And for you? Do you have children? Does your husband… do you?”
Glinda wrinkled her nose and leaned back against the lectern. “Of course I don’t. Babies, Elphaba, honestly! Do I look like a mother to you?”
Elphaba studied her then. Her skirts were kicked up above her knees, her toes pointed and flexing in the chilly air. Her hair, the cherubic pink of her cheeks and her dress and her waistline. “Not a very good one,” she answered.
“I can’t quite stand brats, as it were,” Glinda confessed idly. She picked up a twig from the ground and began to wind it around her fingertips, cutting off her circulation until her skin went whiter than air. “There’s always the chance you have one, you name her after a saint and send her off to marry, and then she finds herself somewhere rotten. Discussing the virginity of a dead woman, maybe, in a chapel that smells like rats.”
“Does it?” Elphaba asked, surprised. “I really hadn’t noticed.”
“And on the topic of saints, did you find Saint Aelphaba more compelling?” Glinda asked, scoffing. “Disappearing for generations, hiding behind a waterfall? Don’t you go getting any ideas. You’re hardly a martyr, Elphaba, stand up.”
And a silence fell.
“Besides,” Glinda started again, softer this time, “I don’t know what to make of you. What are you now, a shadow? An incendiary?”
“There are a lot of words in the world,” Elphaba said idly. “For you, for instance— socialite, wife, sorceress.”
Glinda scoffed. “You don’t know me, you don’t know me at all then.”
“Ingenue, naive, foolish. Complicit, complacent.”
“A little idiot,” Glinda said, more cheerfully now. “That’s what you used to say.”
“So what do you do, Miss Glinda?” Elphaba asked, a vengeful pit opening wide with a yawn in her stomach. “What, you go to parties and tell silly anecdotes about meeting the Wizard once, back when you were kidnapped by a mean green monster, and you swoon into an old man’s arms? A baronet, really?”
“And you, you sneak around by cover of night and make up stories about being a dangerous killer, a woman made of stone?”
“I am not a woman,” Elphaba said, “I am not anything, not anymore.”
“Not even a terrorist?” Glinda said, and smiled slowly when Elphaba turned to look at her, mouth open. “Oh, I’ve heard the stories. A network underground, a resistance of sorts. You must think I’m quite dim, Elphaba, if you don’t think I knew exactly where you’d gone all along.”
“My work is important,” Elphaba said coldly. The step beneath her was beginning to feel stiff, she was getting hungry again. “Not that you would know, of course. You… what else do you do? Drink at soirees, go out for tea with bumbling idiots, you sleep with an old man, you—”
“I don’t sleep with anyone, not anymore,” Glinda said with a smile. “But you would know all about that.”
Elphaba bit her lip on a snarl. She felt sometimes a touch feral, teeth still as sharp as the day she was born. She remembered everything, still.
“And I doubt it’s that important if the Wizard lets it happen,” Glinda added lazily with a little touch of a smirk on her delicate features, crinkling up her button nose. “Maybe, Elphie, you’re not as powerful as you think you are.”
And then it was silent again.
For a moment, just a moment, Elphaba let herself think of something she had tried, in recent years, to avoid. In fact it had been all she thought about that first few months in the Emerald City but she’d been a child then, young enough to be silly in such a way. It had gotten crowded away now with Fiyero, with a handful of other men; anyway it was easy enough to forget certain things if you tried hard enough.
Such that now all she remembered was the outline of it. On the road to the Emerald City, Glinda hovering behind her in the front rooms of seedy inns and Elphaba standing tall as she could, teeth set in grim determination. Watery soups and Glinda nodding off beside her at night, beds that were overstuffed on one side and sloped far on the other side. The hum of her in the morning, the spritz of perfume insistently along her wrists. A little village with a pastry shop, cinnamon bread covered in flies.
She didn’t remember how Glinda had looked that last night when she’d slipped her fingers between pale smooth legs, barely remembered how she sounded. Just the way Glinda had clung to her, shaking and the rumble of her whimpers in Elphaba’s chest and into her stomach, filling her up. The way it had felt, the simplicity of it— but no, Elphaba doesn’t remember it well at all. Just the outline of her bare shoulder in front of the window, blue with early morning light. That is where she’d looked during it all, away from the something in front of her that would not last by her own hand.
Out the window as Glinda came, the bright electric blue of the sun about to rise sharper than all hell.
Now, Glinda left not long after. Elphaba sat there a while, waiting for the sun to set. She could see it through one of the windows, the part where the stained class was clear. It was meant to represent a wheat field, maybe, or clear ice water. Either way it hardly mattered. Above her Saint Glinda’s throat filled with blood again and again. Below her the ants scattered out of their hill again, tugging forward a crumb larger than the four of them for their queen. Outside the window the sky turned a sharp blue again, cutting into the ridges of the buildings even where Elphaba didn’t see it.
Fiyero would be waiting for her one of these days again soon.
She’d forgotten her hunger. As she stood, once the sun had passed under the horizon, Elphaba left the handful of bread from her coat on the altar. Meek, offering, foolishly it sat there. Maybe the ants would eat it, or the birds.
Fiyero had hardly remembered Morrible. She’d asked him, covertly of course, under the guise of reminiscing, which was always sure to lure him in. She never spoke about Shiz, never about their past— yes, she hadn’t even mentioned Glinda to him, which was for the better. Fiyero had gotten in too deep already.
“And do you remember the old cad who used to run Crage Hall?” Elphaba had asked one night, after a lineup of questions posed to him about school, Biological Sciences and Boq. They were in bed but they had not had sex; in fact, Elphaba wasn’t sure either of them wanted to. With Lurlinemas approaching the square had been all lit up and it was making him antsy, she knew him well enough now to read it. But now she looked at him, his chest and the rumple of hair, and felt a flat nothingness.
He furrowed his brow, stretching so that the tendon of his legs flexed. Elphaba looked away delicately, feeling rather prudish. “The one with the big nose, her?”
She was meant to feel glad at this, he wasn’t supposed to know of her, after all, but this ignorance only served to irritate her. “No,” she said.
“Who was she, then? I remember she didn’t like you much after you’d gone, when Glinda got back she would hardly say a word and the head— what was her name, now—”
“I think you should go back west,” Elphaba had cut him off, brash and careless, and his face had turned mopey like a child. The pout of his lip was viciously unappealing and it gave her a flash of satisfaction, cruel delight. Never say that Elphaba couldn’t find a mean streak within her, if she bothered.
Arriving back in the oratory Glinda was bundled up. She looked like one of those porcelain dolls that sat in the windows of toy shops, the ones that came with all the accessories and over red baby doll lips, perfect ringlets and watery eyes. Walking by them in the chilly air Elphaba wanted sometimes to hold them, sometimes to break them. As much she felt now, of course.
“Well hello again,” she said, and Glinda flashed her a lazy grin as she pulled off her hat and let her bouncy hair fall out. “Do your servants think you’ve taken a lover, or just that you’ve begun to dally with religious psychosis? And to choose the very saint you’re named for, Glinda, what an ego on you.”
“Don’t you lecture me,” Glinda laughed, and her cheeks were bright as she tugged her coat off. Elphaba’s heart lurched, but just a little. “I could blow up your head, just as I did your sandwich that time. Do you remember?”
Elphaba found herself possessed by a strange affection and she stood as Glinda came to her, near the wall between the stained glass and the confessional. Glinda, who reached her with still-pink cheeks, beamed as Elphaba tugged on a curl of her short hair.
“Fiyero didn’t remember Morrible,” Elphaba said, and wondered most starkly why being around Glinda so often made her say things against her will. Glinda’s beam dropped off slowly, brows clenching together, bottom lip jutting out. Elphaba looked down and tried to capture all of her in one glance.
“Why should he? Last I heard he wasn’t a Crage Hall girl,” Glinda said primly, just to make Elphaba laugh. “Is that what you talk about when you’re together, Elphie? Horrible Morrible?”
Elphaba flushed. There it was again, that sudden urge to reassure, to expressly state how different that Elphaba was to this one. Fiyero, she thought to herself bitterly, she didn’t let Fiyero call her sweet names.
“You remember her, then,” Elphaba said, and Glinda sighed most dramatically, flopping against the wall. With her hair and the mischievous glint to her smirk she looked like a teenager, a girl misbehaving in chapel— she heaved up her skirts again to stamp snow off of her thin boots and Elphaba watched it melt into the cold ground.
“Well of course I do, don’t you?” Glinda said. “I remember her and her stupid soiree, and her terrible poetry, and… why, Elphie, do you remember what she said to us on the day of Ama Clutch’s funeral? How peculiar that was, and I…”
Here she trailed off with a shiver. Elphaba itched to loop an arm around her, to look out the window and see electric blue again. Instead she knit her fingers together until green turned pale.
“What if someone had taken her out when we were girls,” Elphaba mused. “Before she and her terrible tiktok thing got to Dillamond, I mean, and your ama?”
But here she had said too much. Glinda dropped her skirts and turned to face Elphaba with a set jaw and a scowl on her face. “Is that a confession?”
Here was Glinda, round face and a dress the color of sea foam. She’d gotten as complacent as her, it seemed— back at the start with Fiyero she’d tried desperately to force him away, to get him off her back. And here she was now with Glinda, laughing like schoolgirls, blushing and studying the curve of her boots.
“No,” Elphaba said, so sharply that Glinda jumped. “No, it’s not and don’t you ever think like that again. Do you understand?”
“I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” Glinda whined. “You were the one who brought it up in the first place.”
“I— Glinda,” Elphaba bit out, hissing through her teeth and gripping onto Glinda’s arm tighter and tighter until the girl looked at her. “I am trying, you fool, to keep you safe. Do you understand?”
Glinda opened her mouth right at the moment that Elphaba tugged harder, making Glinda stumble a step or two until they were face to face. Glinda’s nose was at Elphaba’s thin lips, really; she was shorter even if her curls added an inch of height. And so Glinda didn’t say what she’d been about to, instead her lip wavered and her face pinched together, disfiguring. They were quite close.
She sighed out a gust of air and Elphaba could see her breath in the air, almost going cross eyed. She did not let go of Glinda’s arm.
“Lurline,” Glinda murmured, so quiet that Elphaba hardly noticed the feeling of Glinda’s words rumbling in her own chest. “Fine, I understand.”
And so Elphaba dropped her arm but did not back away.
“I do remember her, of course, the rotten thing. She had that dress like a moldy orange, I always hated that one the most.”
Now she stepped back, one large and long step until her back hit the confessional, which rattled. Glinda looked up at it and then back to Elphaba with a smirk.
“Well, Miss Elphie, are you going to confess your wrongdoing?” She said, and then stepped closer. “I shall be the picture of sainthood, a pure perfect angel. Bless me, Saint Glinda, for I have sinned.”
“Now, that must be blasphemy,” Elphaba said, and swallowed as Glinda’s toes bumped her own.
“Oh, I dabble from time to time,” Glinda said cheerily. “Tell me, now. Have you lied? Have you killed? Have you committed adultery?”
“Have you?” Elphaba asked, shaking her head so that her straight hair fell like a waterfall. “That old husband of yours can’t be the only one you see.”
“He isn’t,” Glinda said wickedly, “I see you.”
Elphaba laughed loud and brash. “So no lover yet? No one tall, dark, and handsome to sweep you away?”
“You’re plenty handsome, dear,” Glinda said delicately, soft enough to make Elphaba laugh again. “And not yet, in a certain sense of the word. Though I’m certainly working on it. Elphaba—”
“What marks the line?” Elphaba said all at once, loud and desperate to turn the page. “One day I am a revolutionary, the next I may become a terrorist. There are arms and puppets and eyes all over this blasted city, you cut off one head and a new one sprouts up in its place. It’s almost Lurlinemas.”
Glinda stepped closer, one ungloved hand coming out to dance along Elphaba’s arm. “Elphie,”
she laughed, faint in the wind, “I don’t have a clue what you’re saying. You speak in riddles, my darling.”
“I am not your darling,” Elphaba said stubbornly, though it did not matter.
“You are,” Glinda said. “You cannot tell me who my darlings are. I could well have many of them, Elphaba.”
“You plague me,” Elphaba said, and slammed her head backward into the confessional. “You are a tick in my skin, a leech on my vein.”
“Might I be a prettier parasite? Leeches are too too for me,” Glinda shuddered, and Elphaba straightened up, hands heated and clenched.
“No you may not. Aren’t you angry, Glinda? Aren’t you raging, furious?”
Glinda blinked up at her once, twice. “Of course I am,” she said placidly. “I’m angry all of the time.”
Breathing heavily, Elphaba met her gaze. It stayed like that for a minute, charged in a way she couldn’t put a finger on. Glinda herself seemed to wiggle and waver in and out of sight.
“Well,” she huffed finally, and slumped back, “I want you angrier.”
“We all want things,” Glinda said placidly. “I, for instance, wish you’d put a stop to this cloak and dagger business. Come to Frottica with me for Lurlinemas, Elphie. You said it yourself— if you cut off one head another just sprouts back. Even if that first head is especially ugly, especially… well. Horrible.”
Elphaba’s eyes flashed. She tried to turn, first left and then right, but Glinda leaned forward to box her in, arms unmoving and gaze steady.
“Let me out,” Elphaba huffed, feeling rather like a child, and Glinda raised an eyebrow.
“No, I don’t think I will,” she said. “You’ll be dead at this rate, Elphie, and not with an asp in your bosom. Not floating peacefully downriver either; no, you’ll be dead as a doornail. They’ll be picking up scraps of green as far as Quadling Country.”
“They’ll find your own pretty skin clawed to shreds if you don’t let me—” Elphaba began, and all at once Glinda released her arms and Elphaba went stumbling out, breathless. Glinda was breathing hard too, her chest rising and falling such that Elphaba could imagine the beat of her heart. She remembered, all at once, Glinda’s cries when she’d come— Elphie, she had whimpered, and Elphaba had quieted her and kissed her, kissed her again.
Now Elphaba stood very close to her again. In her life she’d been on the precipice of many things. Monster or girl, or was she a girl at all? Human or animal, or Animal? And now this, here with Glinda— was this Fae, was this Elphie? In a matter of days Morrible would be somewhere and Elphaba was meant to be there too. Once she’d sat in front of Morrible, sandwiched by Glinda and Nessarose, and felt sharp indignance and desire and it could not be quelled, would not.
There were two worlds, living between visions and realities— in one Morrible would crumple, in one Elphaba would turn and walk the other way. Elphaba hadn’t decided yet which one she liked the best.
“Honestly, Elphie,” Glinda said, shaking her shoulders and refastening her earring, which had slipped low on her ear. “This is all rather dramatic. How badly were you yearning before I found you again, to drive you to such lengths?”
There was a mottled sort of flush high on her cheekbones and her neck. It was patchy like a quilt, the one that Elphaba had stretched across her bed right now looked somewhat similar, in fact. And then she was picturing Glinda there, in her bed, and it could never happen that way but Glinda was right about one thing— yearning, what a stupidly horrible thing. Elphaba so hated to be caught out.
“I find you maddening,” she said. “You follow me around, Glinda, like a little fool. There’s nothing for you here, I am not a thrill for you to seek. If your life is boring you have no one but yourself to blame.”
“You can’t get rid of me by being mean,” Glinda said cheerily, now leaning idly against the confessional herself. “It hasn’t worked on me yet, Elphie, and it never will. Do you want to know what I think? I think you’re jealous.”
“Of you? Hardly,” Elphaba scoffed, the last remnants of her dignity compelling her to step close enough that Glinda, now, had to lean back and look up.
“My husband, then?” Glinda remarked, looking up through her long lashes with a smirk. “When you talk about him it’s with such utter contempt. Really, Elphaba, one would think you hate the man!”
“I’ve got no reason to like him otherwise,” Elphaba said sharply. Glinda smiled rather smugly.
“Right— jealous, then. He doesn’t know, by the by.”
“Doesn’t know what,” Elphaba said flatly, breathing steady through her nose. Glinda was toying with her, playing like a cat with her prey. She did have a cruel streak, remember?
“Oh, but don’t say you don’t remember!” Glinda exclaimed, reaching out to press her hand to the center of Elphaba’s chest. She was teasing, Elphaba remembered it well. “That last inn on the way to the Emerald City, the night we… well. I imagine you do remember.”
“Don’t come back here,” Elphaba said, voice breaking across the words. “Leave for Lurlinemas, Glinda, and don’t come back at all.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Glinda said. “You say that every time, and yet you always come back.”
Her hand was still resting on Elphaba’s chest, pressed in and freezing. It was freezing, it was, but it felt as warm as a brand. Elphaba looked down at it, meeting Glinda’s eyes on the way back up, and shuddered.
What a strange sort of friendship they’d had, if it could be called that at all! Elphaba, kissing her as Glinda climbed into the carriage and trying not to think of it when she turned away. Elphaba, traveling in a quite out-of-season frock to Caprice-In-The-Pines because she’d thought Galinda had asked it of her. Elphaba, to whom Glinda had been clinging anxiously, Glinda with her upturned breasts and the deep divot of her cupid’s bow. Now Glinda looked up at her again, sliding in ever so slightly closer, and Elphaba seized her face and kissed her.
Her lips were as they had been before, if a bit more chapped. Glinda fell back along the confessional— blasphemy for certain this time, Elphaba thought, and was sure Glinda would laugh only she couldn’t bear to break apart to tell her. Glinda’s arms, thin beneath her sea foam whisper of a dress, looped over Elphaba’s shoulders and tugged her in closer still.
Elphaba pressed in close enough that the jut of her hip fastened itself between Glinda’s legs, and she whimpered. Glinda began to kiss her harder, tongue slipping in all messy and trailing down her neck toward her ear, the cut of her jaw. Elphaba could hardly feel her face. Her stomach wrenched, growled.
Yes, Lurlinemas was soon. From behind them Saint Glinda lay watching in perpetual death. Elphaba, hands sliding around her Glinda’s waist, sighed into her pretty mouth.
In the morning she made her decision.