Chapter Text
She had been ready to burn it all down.
That is the thing Elphaba keeps coming back to, afterward, in the narrow hours when she can't sleep and the Emerald City hums green outside her window. She had been ready. Four years of clandestine meetings, small victories, lost friends, the frustrating feeling of taking one step forward and three steps back, had made her desperate enough, careless enough towards her own wellbeing if it meant making the Wizard’s whole screwed system tumbling down. Her whole body had been oriented toward it, toward the fire and the fight and Fiyero's hand and the sky opening up ahead of her like a door.
And then Glinda had looked at her.
One word.
And she had come down.
*******
Two hours earlier
The throne room is the same.
That shouldn't surprise her. It has only been four years, stone doesn't change, but she's built it so large in her memory that the actual room is almost a disappointment. The same vaulted ceilings. The same engineered green light. The same long approach to the dais designed to make whoever is walking it feel the precise weight of their own smallness.
She knows all his tricks now. Still, knowing them doesn't make them stop working, which is the most irritating thing about them.
She stands in the middle of it, posture alert, Fiyero half a step behind her left shoulder, and she keeps her hands loose at her sides looking at the room the way you look at something you are trying not to let look back at you.
"He'll have something prepared," Fiyero. Close enough that she can feel the warmth of him. He's been like that since they landed, that careful half-step proximity, the particular way he takes up space near her that means I'm here without requiring her to acknowledge it. She usually finds it steadying. Right now, she finds it harder to accept than she wants to.
"Obviously." she replies, quietly. Her voice doesn't carry. Good.
"Don't react to whatever it is."
"I know."
"You have a face."
A pause. "I have several faces."
"You know exactly which face I’m talking about. The one you make before you say something that can't be unsaid."
"I won't say anything that can't be unsaid." Another pause, shorter. "Probably."
“Fae-”
She almost says something. Doesn't. The doors at the far end of the room open and she makes herself breathe and look and be ready for whatever is about to come through them.
Similarly to the space, the Wizard looks smaller than she remembers too. Or maybe she's just grown, in four years, into someone less impressed by the size of rooms and the empty words of a showman hiding his incompetence behind smoke mirrors and cheap tricks. He walks to the base of the dais steps with his hands open at his sides and his face arranged into something that want to read as warmth and largely succeeded, and beside him-
Two steps back. One to the side.
Glinda.
Elphaba forces herself to keep looking at the Wizard, ignoring every one of her body’s instincts to glance at the pink silhouette at the edge of her vision.
Not that different from ignoring every one of the Good Witch of the North speeches for the past two years. A voice inside her quips bitterly, what is one more time.
"Elphaba." He says her name like he is pleased to have an occasion to use it. "I'm glad you came back."
As if they were long lost friends, waiting to catch up. As if he didn’t send a troupe of Emerald Guards to destroy one of the safe houses for the Animals she has been building, leaving a note pinned to one of the only doors left standing among ashes ‘Aren’t you also tired of this stand off? Come to the Palace, I have an offer that I think will interest you, and a pink friend which is positively dying for the chance to see you again’.
"I haven't decided to yet," she grunts. "We're talking."
Something moves through his face, not offense, which would be easier.
Amusement.
"Of course. Sit, please."
She sits because the alternative would be a statement, and she isn't ready to make one. Fiyero sits beside her. His knee finds hers under the arm of the chair and she leaves it there.
Glinda sits across from them.
This is the first time they’ve been this close since the tower. Since everything. Elphaba has thought about this moment, in the abstract, the way you think about things you're actively trying not to think about. She has not thought it would feel like this. Like something she doesn't have a word for, pressing against the inside of her chest. Grief and worry and anger making her stomach turn painfully.
Glinda looks- fine. That is the first thing, and it is wrong in the way that fine is always wrong when you know a person. In the way a portrait looks fine: technically correct in every detail, nothing out of place, and wrong in some way you couldn't point to with your finger if you were asked. Her golden hair is perfect. Her sequin dress fits perfectly. Her hands are gracefully folded in her lap with the precision of someone who had thought about where to put them. She is sitting with her back very straight and she is looking at Elphaba with an expression of warmth and relief that is real. That is the other thing. Under all the performance, underneath the careful arrangement of herself, the relief is real. Old and desperate and pressed against the surface of her carefully poised face like something that has been waiting a long time to be let out.
It is there for one unguarded second.
Then Glinda feels Elphaba seeing it and the composure comes back up like a curtain being drawn, smooth and practiced, and she smiles.
How long, Elphaba thinks. How long have you been waiting for this moment?
And then an even harder truth to admit, was it as long as I’ve been wating for it?
********
He talks about Oz. He is good at that.
She listens with the part of herself she keeps for listening to people she doesn't trust. Not closed off, just careful. He talks about stability, about progress, about what her particular gifts might accomplish in the right context. He is more careful than he's been four years ago. More considered. He doesn't promise her the Grimmerie this time. He doesn't promise her anything that specific. He offers her something vaguer and more difficult to argue with: the chance to actually change things.
"Reinstated," the Wizard is saying. "Three districts. With more to follow, pending — well. Pending goodwill on all sides."
Pending her cooperation. She understands the sentence he hasn't finished.
The throne room is full of people who are watching like she might bolt any moment, or make wings burst through their spine, and she inhales deeply, in for four seconds, out for another four. Policy papers on the table in front of her. Real ones: actual language, actual provisions, the kind that took time to draft. He's prepared for her. He's known she might need convincing.
She hates that it is working.
Don't, she tells herself. Don’t lose control. Not while they’re watching. Look at the papers and keep your face still and don't-
Her eyes find Glinda.
Her former friend is performing attentiveness with the precision of someone who has practiced it into reflex. Present, engaged, appropriately grave at the right moments. Her eyes move to the Wizard when he speaks. They also move to Elphaba occasionally. Brief, calibrated glances, nothing that would draw notice. She is waiting. Her whole body is oriented toward some moment she is counting down to and Elphaba can't find it yet, can't identify what she is waiting for, but she knows the quality of that waiting. She's felt it herself often enough.
Fiyero's knee presses harder against hers. She doesn't look at him. She can read him fine without looking, can feel his strained stillness, the effort it is costing him to keep his composure how she's asked him to keep it before they arrived.
"What I'm offering," the Wizard continues, leaning forward with the air of a man arriving at the heart of the matter, "is a real place at the table. Your voice, your abilities, working toward an Oz that functions for everyone. Including the Animals."
"Especially the Animals," Elphaba interrupts him. "Or including is doing a great deal of work in that sentence."
He smiles. "Especially the Animals."
"And Madame Morrible?"
Something in his warmth adjusts. Not disappears, just recalibrates, like a lamp being turned down slightly. "Morrible serves Oz. As do we all."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer available to me today." He holds her gaze steadily. "I'm asking you to trust me enough to take one step. That's all. You don't have to believe me yet. You just have to—"
"Stay," Glinda finishes.
*******
She says it quietly and she says it exactly the way she's always said things that matter- not loudly, not with performance, just present in a way that land in the centre of the room and doesn't move. She is looking at Elphaba. Not at the Wizard, not at Fiyero who, as far as the general public is concerned, is still her fiancé, gone away to look for the Wicked Witch. Directly at her.
And the curtain is fully in place again, the composure, the careful arrangement, but her eyes aren't performing anything. Her big brown eyes are doing what they've always done, what Elphaba has never in her life been able to look away from: seeing her. Fully. The way very few people ever had.
I need you here, those eyes are saying, just like on top of that tower four years ago. Please. Please just—
Elphaba looks at her and feels it, you've been trying to get me back for a long time.
She doesn't know how she knows. She just does. With the particular certainty she's always had about Glinda, the certainty that lives below thought, below evidence, in whatever part of her has been oriented toward Glinda like a compass since they were eighteen years old in a room at Shiz.
"You think I should trust him," Elphaba addresses her for the first time since they’ve entered the room. Carefully. Watching.
A pause. Precisely calibrated.
"I think you should stay," Glinda replies. Again. The same words. And the emphasis is so slight that only Elphaba would have caught it, only someone who has been parsing the specific grammar of Glinda's evasions for years would have noticed that she has not, in fact, answered the question she's been asked.
"Yes. the Wizard jumps in, “I would hope that this might represent a new chapter. For all of us."
His stare doesn’t leave her face. Warm, steady, almost trustworthy. She has read a dozen men like him, and she knows the look for what it is, and she holds his gaze and says nothing, because she has learned, a long time ago, that silence makes men like him uncomfortable in ways that are occasionally useful.
Fiyero's hand finds hers under the arm of the chair. His thumb presses once against her knuckles, don't. We should go. We had a plan.
She looks at Glinda's hands in her lap.
Not quite still. The smallest tremor, there and gone, in the fingers of her left hand before she stills it.
She thinks about the Animals she's found. About what it would mean if there were someone in this building with actual power who could help them. About how tired she is of being a symbol and how much she wants, just once, to actually do something.
She turns her hand over under Fiyero's and squeezes once, I know. I'm sorry and looks at the Wizard.
"I'd want to see the provisions in writing," she states, voice hard. "All of them. And I'd want independent verification that the reinstatements have actually occurred."
"Of course," the Wizard nods. Magnanimous. Unsurprised. He's expected her to negotiate.
He prepared for this, she thinks again. He knew what it would take to get you in this room, and he knew what it would take to keep you here and he has thought about this more than you have.
The thought sits in her chest like cold water.
Then again, she thinks, so has she.
She sneaks a quick glance at Glinda.
The relief that moves through her is so brief and so carefully contained that she almost misses it. A fraction of an exhale. The smallest possible loosening in her shoulders. There and gone in under a second, and then she is composed again, pleasant and perfect.
But Elphaba has seen it.
What did you do, Elphaba swallows, equal part furious and worried. What did you do to make this possible, and what did it cost you, and why do you look like someone who has just finished paying for something they decided they were allowed to spend.
******
Afterward, in the corridor, Fiyero waits until the footsteps fade.
"Okay," he deadpans.
"Don't."
"I'm not. I'm just- we had a plan, Fae."
"I know."
"We had a very specific-"
"I know, Fiyero."
He exhales. Presses his mouth together. Lets it go, because he knows her well enough to know when she's set her mind on something, and this is one of those times. "So, what do we do now?"
She looks down the corridor. Glinda has gone with the Wizard. The younger girl walking beside him toward whatever came next in his schedule, her heels precise on the stone floor, her posture easy. She hasn't looked back.
"We test just how much the Wizard means his promises. And we observe," Elphaba murmurs, careful of the ears possibly listening to their conversation.
"Observe what?"
She thinks about big doe eyes catching emerald ones. The relief that lasted less than a breath.
"I don't know yet," she replies.
She starts walking.
*******
Present
Her room is too clean. Someone has prepared it- has known she might be coming, or has prepared it in hope- and the smoothness of the sheets, the fresh water on the nightstand and the precise arrangement of it all makes her feel, obscurely, like a trap has been set and she has walked right into it with her eyes open and her hands empty.
She stands at the window for a long time. The Emerald City at night, still green, still glittering, still performing itself for anyone who looks.
Fiyero sits perched on the edge of the bed and watches her.
"The provisions are real," he starts finally. Not a question.
"Some of them."
"But not all."
"I don't know yet." She presses her fingertips to the glass. Cold. "That's the problem. Some of them are real and some of them might be real and some of them are probably constructed specifically to make me think they're real and I don't have enough information yet to tell which is which."
"And Glinda?"
Elphaba says nothing.
"Fae."
"I heard you."
"She asked you to stay."
"I know what she asked." She turns from the window. "She's been here four years, Fiyero. Three of those years being Glinda the Good, and she's at his right hand, and she's- she looks well. She looks like she's been doing exactly what she wanted to be doing." The words come out harder than she's intended. She registers the hardness but doesn't retract it. "She made a choice."
"She did." He says it simply. No hesitation. "I'm not arguing that." He leans back on his hands and looks at the ceiling. "You forgot I spent two years by her side here, front row seat to the amazing show of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the Good Witch of the North" Disgust seeps into his tone, although Elphaba can still pick the undertone of hurt he is trying so hard to hide. "She's his, now. She's-" He stops. Presses his mouth together. "I don't know who she is anymore."
Elphaba glances away.
"She looked at you when you weren't looking," he continues after a beat of silence has passed. "I noticed that."
"And?"
He shrugs. One shoulder. "I think she's glad you're here. I think that's real." A pause. "I think she'd like to have both. The side she picked and you back in her life. I'm not sure why you'd expect anything different- that's just who she is."
Elphaba turns back to the window.
Her mind unwillingly going back to the tremor in Glinda's fingers. The relief that lasted less than a breath and then got put away.
“Get some sleep," she says softly. "I want to go through the provisions again in the morning, before the verification comes."
Vinkin’s blue eyes regards her for a moment, the familiar look that means he knows she is thinking something, but luckily decides push. She loves him very much for that. For knowing when to leave her alone with what she is carrying.
She goes back to the window after he leaves the room, shutting the door gently behind him.
She stands there a long time, thinking about a word said quietly, and the face it had come from, and the way the composure had not quite covered whatever was underneath it.
Stay, Glinda had said.
Elphaba presses her palm flat against the cold glass and makes herself stop thinking about it. Tomorrow there will be provisions to verify and policy language to examine and a Wizard to be carefully, carefully useful to in order to use it right back, and she needs to be sharp.
She looked well, she tells herself. She looked fine. Four years is a long time and people settle into things and she looked completely fine.
She can afford to wait.
She tries to believe this.
*********
The gift is wrapped in emerald paper. Of course it is.
She stands at the foot of her bed and looks at it for a long time without touching it, the note still in her hand, the Wizard's handwriting neat and particular across the center of the card.
Hope you liked your gift, kitten.
She has asked him for nothing. She wants to be very clear about that, in her own mind, because it is the one thing she needs to be clear about and she feels it slipping sometimes, in the small hours, in the moments when she is too tired to hold everything in its proper place. She has asked him for nothing. She has simply- managed. The press pieces, the carefully placed words in the right ears, the rehabilitation work she's been doing in pieces and increments for twenty-three months. That is hers. She has done that herself, alone, in the margins of everything else he’s asked of her.
She has not asked him to go and find Elphaba. She has not asked him to make an offer, at least not directly. It had to seem like it was coming from him, he had to think this would be just another thing to bind her to him, another nail in her coffin or he would have never agreed to it.
Wear this tonight, so you can thank me properly.
She sets the note down on the nightstand. Facedown. She has learned by now not to leave his handwriting where she might see it unexpectedly.
She sits on the edge of the bed beside the emerald-wrapped gift and looks at her own hands for a moment, before slowly glancing back at the ceiling, and then she lets herself- briefly, carefully- think about the throne room.
Elphaba. Standing in that room like she always stood, like she was daring it to try something, like she had made a private inventory of all the exits and found them satisfactory and was therefore willing to give the room her full attention. Four years older and no softer and Glinda had nearly said something she wasn't supposed to say yet. She had nearly reached across all of it and taken her by the arm and said please, you were right about him, about everything. Please don’t provoke him, not while you’re still not safe, not until I am still not done-
But not yet. Not until it is ready.
Elphaba is going to stay. She is going to look at the policy provisions and verify the Animal reinstatements and she is going to decide, correctly, that some of it is real, and that having access is better than not having access, and she is going to stay. And while she is busy staying, Glinda is going to finish what she's built.
Two years of documentation. Every policy decision, every order, every Animal advocate quietly threatened or disappeared. She has names. She has dates. She has the Wizard's signature on things that would end him.
She just needs a little more time.
She is almost ready. She is-
The knock is soft. Specific. She recognizes the rhythm of it.
Glinda stands up. Slips in the barely-there green silk she’s found inside the box. Puts her face in the right arrangement, a dimple-less smile on display.
She opens the door.