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In the hush of their shared room at Shiz University, moments after the Ozdust's glittering spell had faded into memory, Elphaba and Galinda sat cross-legged on the worn rug. The air still thrummed with the night's confessions, the faint scent of champagne and candlewax lingering like a half-remembered dream. Elphaba's black gown pooled around her like spilled ink, her green skin catching the lamplight in subtle, verdant gleams. Galinda, still radiant in pink silk that whispered against the floorboards, leaned forward, her eyes wide and unblinking, locked onto Elphaba's. They had been here before — or so it felt — but tonight the space between them felt thinner, charged with the raw edge of truths too long buried.
Elphaba's voice came low, trembling at first, as if testing the air.
"Frex... my father. He hated me, Galinda. From the moment I drew breath. Green. Wrong. A curse he couldn't wash away."
The words hung heavy, and she watched Galinda's face for the flinch, the recoil that always came. But there was none. Only that steady gaze, pulling her deeper.
Galinda's breath caught softly, her fingers twitching in her lap, but she said nothing. She simply nodded, knees brushing Elphaba's in the intimate circle of their sitting. The contact was electric, grounding. Elphaba swallowed, her throat tight as roots.
"It's worse than hate," she continued, voice cracking like thin ice.
"I... I let her die. My mother. Because of me."
The room seemed to tilt, the world narrowing to the space between their eyes. Galinda's hand moved then, tentative, fingertips grazing the back of Elphaba's. Not pulling away, but holding — a silent vow. Elphaba's breath hitched, and the dam broke. Memory flooded in, pulling her under.
She was small then, no more than five winters carved into her fragile frame, green as the hidden heart of ancient forests, stormclouds yet to unleash their fury. The house in Rush Margins breathed with the damp sigh of earth after rain — stone walls slick with condensation, the air thick with wilted petals and a cloying sweetness that masked something sharper, something ending. Mother's room was a twilight sanctuary, heavy curtains blotting out Oz's merciless sun, where perfection was preached from every polished pulpit. Melena lay propped against pillows that sagged like exhausted confessions, her skin translucent as the milkflowers she clutched in fists gone frail.
Those flowers — pale innocents, veined with promise and peril. Elphaba could still feel their weight in her own child-palm, guided there by Mother's trembling hand one brighter afternoon.
"Not poison, my little thorn," Melena had whispered, voice a silken thread.
"Just fragile. Like dreams. Like us."
But now they betrayed, petals curling inward like dying secrets, bruised echoes of the hollows beneath her eyes. Frex loomed at the threshold, his silhouette a judgment forged in iron, arms crossed like prison bars across his chest.
"Not now, Elphaba," he'd snapped that morning, tone clipped as a governor's edict.
"Your mother rests. You've done enough already."
Enough. The word burrowed into her chest, a thorn drawing first blood, hot and immediate. She had retreated, green hands twisting in her skirts, but Mother's call — weak, lilting, laced with love — drew her back like a siren's song.
"Elphi... come here."
A smile flickered, faint as moonlight fracturing on dark water, cracking her parched lips. They embraced as frailty allowed: Elphaba's cheek pressed to the cool silk of Mother's nightgown, inhaling lavender woven with the metallic bite of fever-sweat, the faint milk-sour tang of those cursed blooms.
"My beautiful girl," Melena murmured, fingers tracing the emerald curve of her daughter's face without a shadow of recoil.
"Green as the forest's deepest wild. You're my secret, my storm-made child."
That was the last warmth. The last unguarded smile. Hours dissolved into a vigil stolen in glimpses — Frex's hand barring the door like a decree from the Wizard himself, servants murmuring of elixirs brewed in vain, of "the child's ill luck" poisoning the air. And then, the silence fell. No final cry, no ragged gasp. Just absence, vast and absolute. Mother gone, milkflowers scattered across the sheets like stars fallen from a careless sky, their stems snapped clean, white sap bleeding into the linen like accusations.
Elphaba surfaced from the memory with a gasp, her eyes refocusing on Galinda's. Tears brimmed there, unashamed, tracing silver paths down cheeks flushed with shared ache. Galinda's fingers had fully claimed hers now, interlacing with a firmness that belied their tremble — cool verdant skin against soft, warm pink. A lifeline in the storm.
"She was alive, Galinda," Elphaba whispered, voice raw as exposed earth.
"One moment, her hand in mine — warm, real, holding me despite everything. The next... gone. Like smoke through fingers."
Galinda squeezed, thumb tracing slow, soothing arcs over Elphaba's knuckles. Gooseflesh rippled up her own arms, mirroring the chill Elphaba confessed, but her gaze never wavered. That profound eye-lock held them — verbal words paling against this meta-language of souls laid bare. Elphaba drew a shuddering breath, the touch anchoring her, but the undertow pulled again, relentless.
The world turned to ash-gray monochrome in the days that clawed after. Elphaba stood frozen at the nursery window, staring into the garden where Mother once knelt in secret rebellion, humming Munchkinland lullabies that danced like fireflies. No more footsteps padding the hall at dawn. No laughter bubbling up like a hidden spring, warm and defiant. The house, once laced with Mother's quiet heresies — stolen picnics on checkered blankets beneath gnarled apple trees, where tales of flying monkeys and emerald cities spilled from her lips like forbidden honey — now echoed with a hollowness that swallowed sound.
She felt dead herself, a specter haunting her own green skin, movements puppeted by shock. Meals arrived on trays and departed untouched, porridge congealing to stone in bowls. Sleep draped over her like a leaden fog, smothering what dreams dared surface. "What were her last words?" she'd whisper to the empty air, pacing the cold floorboards until her feet blistered. "Did she smile just for me? Hold me tight enough to etch it forever?" Questions gnawed like unseen beasts in the dark, birthing guilt's thorny bloom. Because she was green. Marked from birth. The milkflowers had recoiled from her touch in the delivery room, or so the whispers insisted — Frex's whispers, hissed in shadowed evenings when servants' ears were turned.
One such night, he loomed over her huddled form by the hearth, eyes cold as Quadling marble veined with contempt.
"You're the blight, girl — green as pond-scum clinging underfoot, the foul dregs scraped from a boot's sole after trudging through the muck. Unworthy even of the dirt."
No mercy of abandonment; that would grant freedom. He kept her, a living monument to his grudge, doling out bare sustenance like penance for a sin she embodied.
"Your mother withered chasing your curse. The flowers knew. Oz itself recoils."
Guilt took root then, twisting deeper with every labored breath, every heartbeat. Elphaba clawed at the garden gate one thunder-lashed afternoon, mud caking her arms in rivulets of brown against green, screaming into the gale for Mother to return.
"Come back! I'll be good — less green, less me, anything!"
Something stirred beneath her skin, unbidden: a hot flicker, electric and wild. Vines in the conservatory twisted toward her cry, a distant vase shattering like brittle bone — nascent magic, raw and unripe, leaking like ink from a quill snapped in rage. It terrified her, that inner storm, driving her back into silence, into the gray.
Months stretched into exile's tapestry, woven of monochrome threads. Father paraded her at stifled gatherings — "My ward," he'd call her, voice dripping disdain like venom from a fang — and Elphaba complied mechanically, her mind dissolving into fog at his command. Curtsey to aunts with powdered faces. Nod through sermons of salvation she could never claim. Recite graces to a god who seemed to mock her hue. Her spirit fled to alcoves, emerging only in solitude: curled in the attic with pilfered volumes from Mother's hidden shelf. Grimm's shadowed folktales, chronicles of Ozma's vanished line, treatises whispering of animals' secret sentience. She devoured them ravenously, pages blurring through tear-streaked fingers, each word a fragile raft adrift on grief's endless sea. Books didn't flinch at green. They cradled her, whispering of flight, of defiance, of worlds beyond the heel of Frex's scorn — the lowest muck, scraped and discarded.
Galinda's touch pulled her up again, firmer now, their palms slick with the sweat of unearthed pain. Their knees pressed together fully, a subtle communion of bodies echoing the soul's. Galinda's tears flowed unchecked, but her eyes burned with recognition, not pity — seeing the green not as curse, but as essence.
"You... carried that alone? All this time?" she whispered, voice a fragile thread weaving through the heavy air.
Elphaba nodded, throat constricted as if by invisible vines.
"Every day. It's why fire lives in my breath sometimes. Why I push... everything, everyone away."
Vulnerability rent her open, raw as a root torn from unyielding soil. But Galinda held fast, her free hand rising to cup Elphaba's cheek, thumb brushing away a solitary tear that had escaped. The touch was fire and balm, green skin yielding to pink warmth without shame.
"It's not your fault," Galinda breathed, the words echoing their midnight pact yet weighted now with depths plumbed together.
"The milkflowers took her, Elphie. Their poison, not yours. You're not scum under a boot, not dregs in the mud. You're the forest itself — wild, deep-rooted, alive in ways they can't fathom. Irreplaceable."
Elphaba trembled, the words piercing the guilt's carapace like dawn slicing fog. The weight shifted — not vanished, but shared, lightened by this witness. Breathing eased, lungs expanding into space Galinda had carved with sincerity, unflinching and sincerely. Their foreheads met, breaths mingling in warm cadence, eyes still entwined in that wordless dialogue transcending speech. For the first time, the grey receded, just enough to glimpse color's return — verdant green entwined with roseate pink, pulsing with life.
They lingered thus as night deepened over Shiz, hands clasped, silence a healing poultice. Outside, Oz slumbered beneath indifferent stars, but here, in this rug-strewn sanctum, past's shadows yielded to present's tentative light. Elphaba felt seen — wholly, without fracture. The wound, eternal, breathed freer now. In Galinda's quiet strength, she found not erasure, but companionship in the carrying.
For this night, it was enough. Tomorrow's tempests could wait.