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The first time Galinda heard Elphaba Thropp sing, she was spying.
Well, not spying spying. She was observing. Investigating. Taking an interest in the academic affairs of her roommate. Galinda tried several of these phrases while following Madame Morrible and Elphaba down the corridor, but none of them held up under scrutiny, so she settled on spying and decided not to make a habit of honesty.
It wasn't her fault. Madame Morrible had stopped Elphaba after class and was speaking to her in the low, intent voice professors used for favorites, the sort that suggested importance. And importance, in Galinda's experience, ought to be carefully distributed among people prepared to wear it correctly. Elphaba wore importance the way she wore everything else: plainly, with no thought for drape. She stood by the professor in her black dress, hands clasped too tightly before her, chin lifted, trying very hard to receive praise without looking hungry for it. This was already an offensive amount of information to possess about her.
Madame Morrible left a few minutes later in a sweep of colorful skirts. Galinda, who had already gathered enough material to sustain an entire afternoon’s resentment, prepared to retreat. Then Elphaba began to sing.
Galinda stopped behind a marble column with one hand flat to the cool stone and the distinct sensation that the day had taken a personal turn against her.
The voice came out of Elphaba with no warning, huge and bright and edged with wanting. Galinda had heard good voices before and knew exactly what was meant to be done with them: placed properly, polished smooth, their vowels sweetened into prettiness. Elphaba did none of that. Her singing did not flatter the air; it claimed it. It rose into the dome, struck every surface, and came back larger, carrying impossible things with it—recognition, and a future with the Wizard?
Galinda disliked the entire experience. She disliked the force of it and the way Elphaba’s hope and ambition had no manners whatsoever. It made her feel she'd witnessed something unclothed, which was absurd, because Elphaba was fully dressed and, if anything, overdressed.
She retreated before Elphaba could turn and find her there.
Later that day, Elphaba was already in their room when Galinda returned. Galinda crossed to her side, opened her diary with a decisive snap, and wrote: Elphaba Thropp sang today. She stared at the sentence until it became far too intimate for a neutral record. After careful revision, she added unfortunately, then locked the diary. She tried her best—and failed—not to steal glances at her roommate while she was preparing for bed. Elphaba, perhaps sensing scrutiny by the ancient and miserable magic available only to older sisters and green sorcerers, glanced up. Galinda looked away so quickly she nearly injured her neck.
The next disaster arrived only a few days later. Galinda had woken that morning with a sense of purpose so clean it nearly required a sash. She would write home. She would describe the trials Oz had seen fit to visit upon her, chief among them green, and she would do it beautifully. She’d gotten as far as her own salutation and no further when, from the other desk, Elphaba began a letter of her own.
My dear father.
They found the melody at the same instant.
Galinda was never able to reconstruct afterward who had pitched toward whom. One moment she was cataloguing her sufferings to the page and the next their two letters had become a single thing—complaint folding into countercomplaint, each line of loathing arriving exactly where the other had left a space for it. It was the most coordinated either of them had ever been about anything, which was deeply offensive.
Galinda gave the next phrase more brightness, expecting to overpower the intrusion through charm and superior diction.
Elphaba met her note for note.
That was the catastrophe. Not that Elphaba sang back, which was rude. Not that she sang well, which was ruder. But that her voice settled against Galinda’s with insulting precision—two declarations of mutual loathing arranging themselves into something balanced.
Galinda could endure being opposed and contradicted. What she couldn't endure was harmony, because harmony implied a fit, and a fit implied that some part of her had been built with a matching part of Elphaba, which was intolerable.
The wretched fit followed them out of the room. They quarreled in counterpoint. Other students began to notice, then to enjoy it, then to gather in doorways and corridors with the eager expressions of people sensing entertainment at no personal cost. Galinda told herself she hated being one half of a spectacle. She didn't examine why she kept supplying her half.
The trouble, after that, was that Elphaba’s voice refused to confine itself to proper occasions. If she'd only ever sung when provoked, Galinda could've filed the whole matter neatly under rivalry and got on with her life. Instead Elphaba sang privately, carelessly, in fragments and under her breath, with no apparent awareness that she was doing it at all.
She hummed while she studied. She sang scraps of things while hunting misplaced books, while lacing her boots, while searching her pockets for notes she'd forgotten she'd tucked there. She murmured melody into the steam off her tea. She sang while doing all the hundred plain, unglamorous tasks that her plain, unglamorous life appeared to consist of.
Galinda noticed all of it. Her mother had always said that the difference between a well-liked girl and an unforgettable one was attention to detail. Elphaba’s singing was a detail. Granted, it was a detail with unreasonable range and a tendency to appear at inconvenient hours, but Galinda refused to be made ridiculous by classification.
The showers were the worst of it. The tile took Elphaba’s voice and gave it a silvery doubling, sent it curling out beneath the door while Galinda sat on the edge of her bed and tied and untied the ribbon of her robe with steadily increasing force. Elphaba must have believed herself alone, because this version of her voice was nothing like the others. It wandered. It lost its own thread and found it again. It sounded like Elphaba thinking out loud with no audience to stand guard against—and Galinda, who had never in her life done a single thing without some audience in mind, even if only an imaginary one, sat outside that door and felt something she had no intention of feeling.
The night of the Ozdust changed everything and nothing quickly enough.
Galinda would spend a long time afterward trying to assign that night a single shape and failing, because it had really been two nights stacked atop one another pretending to be one. There had been the hat, and there had been Elphaba in the middle of the floor wearing it, dancing alone, terrible and grand, while everybody watched and laughed the way Galinda had meant them to watch and laugh.
And then there had been the moment Galinda’s stomach turned over inside her, as if it had finally developed a conscience, and she crossed the floor and joined her. After that came a blur of music and green hands and a sudden, dizzying rush that left her entirely without a script. She walked Elphaba back to their room with her heart beating far too fast. Elphaba hummed the dance tune while changing. Her hair fell over her shoulders, dark and heavy, while the melody slipped from her in a shy little loop, filling the space between their two beds.
"Are you aware of yourself humming?" Galinda asked.
Elphaba stopped at once, which gave the answer away.
Galinda smiled. "Please continue. I like it."
Elphaba’s mouth twitched. "Do you, now?"
"Yes. Actually, Elphie, now that we’re friends"—the word felt so new and delightful in her mouth—"I’ve decided to make you my new project!"
Elphaba feigned protest but played along. The song rose bright between them. Galinda sang, and chattered, and demonstrated. She was giddy with it still—Elphaba beside her, laughing. Elphaba having quietly rearranged the world in Galinda’s favor and then asked for nothing in return. It made Galinda want to do something back, though she had no earthly idea what might be equal to it, so she settled for fussing. After her bit, she sat Elphaba down at the vanity chair. In the glass, Elphaba lifted her eyes and looked at herself.
"Why, Miss Elphaba," Galinda said, her cheek resting on Elphaba's head. "Look at you. You're beautiful."
Galinda was ready for any number of reactions. She wasn't ready for the way Elphaba’s face came open and undefended, caught believing she was beautiful for half a second before she could remember not to. And Galinda knew that openness. She'd been stealing it for weeks through bathroom doors and across this room in scraps and glimpses—the voice with no performance in it, the Elphaba who forgot to stand guard. She had only ever overheard that version of her before. Now she had gone and caused it with her own two hands, and it turned out that causing it was an entirely different order of thing from overhearing it. It arrived under the ribs without knocking.
Elphaba’s eyes filled, and Galinda’s heart gave a painful little tug. She came around the chair and knelt in front of her. Up close, she could see Elphie's constellation of freckles and revel in them.
"Honestly," she whispered, putting both hands to Elphaba’s face, "I was just being silly. You don't need any makeover."
Elphaba looked back at her with shining eyes, her gaze soft and dark. Her lower lip parted, slightly. Something warm and reckless turned over inside Galinda. She leaned forward and brushed her lips to Elphaba's. It was soft and brief and somehow still enough to set every nerve in her body alight. Elphaba made a startled sound against her mouth and then, for one perfect second, kissed her back.
Galinda drew away smiling, a little dazed by the discovery that she had wanted to do exactly that for some considerable time. She looked at Elphaba, and her smile fell apart. Elphaba had one hand lifted slowly to her own mouth. Her eyes were wide—not with delight, but with the flat, dawning horror of someone who had just understood the trick a moment too late.
"Galinda."
It was astonishing how much dread one name could contain.
"What are you doing?" Elphaba asked. "What about Fiyero?"
Galinda blinked multiple times. The words made no sense at all. They belonged to another universe entirely. They certainly had no business in this room. "What?"
"You know, Fiyero, your boyfriend," Elphaba's voice had taken on a dry edge. "The man you said you were going to marry, barely minutes ago."
"Oh." Galinda gave a helpless little wave of one hand. "That. Oh, Elphie. You of all people should know better than to take everything I say seriously." She laughed.
She meant it lightly, but Elphaba seemed to hear something else entirely.
"Right," she said.
The word had no warmth left in it at all. Galinda could feel the situation slipping out of her hands.
"Elphie, I didn’t mean—"
"Of course you didn’t." Elphaba stood up too quickly, nearly knocking the chair. "That was stupid of me."
"No, it wasn’t, I just—"
"Am I a joke to you?" Elphaba asked, and now there was color in her face, anger finally breaking through the shock.
Galinda stared at her. "What? No—Elphaba, where are you going?"
Elphaba turned and was through the door before Galinda could make her feet work.
"Elphaba—"
The door shut behind her. For several bewildered seconds Galinda stood perfectly still, pulse pounding in her throat and one hand still half-raised in the empty air. It took her longer than she would ever admit to remember how to be a person and stand up.
Then she lunged for the first thing her hand found—which happened to be one of Elphaba's cardigans—and ran after her.
It was early morning, the hour when the school belonged to no one. Galinda found Elphaba out past the boathouse where they had first arrived at Shiz, standing by the water, her shoulders bare in the cold and her arms folded tightly across herself.
She slowed before she reached her. Some instinct she didn't know she had informed her that arriving at speed would be one more thing done to Elphaba, and Elphaba had had enough done to her tonight to last a lifetime.
"It’s freezing," Galinda said, stopping a careful distance away. "You forgot this."
She held out the cardigan.
Elphaba took it without looking at her, avoiding Galinda’s fingers entirely.
Galinda swallowed.
"I’m sorry," she said. "I frightened you. I shouldn’t have kissed you without asking—it was sudden, I know it was sudden, and I—"
"You didn't frighten me."
Elphaba pulled the cardigan around herself and looked out over the water. Galinda shut her mouth. The first swing had missed; she understood that she'd apologized for the wrong thing.
Silence stretched. Galinda sat down beside her.
At last Elphaba said, "I thought you were different."
Galinda closed her eyes.
"Elphie—"
"You don’t grow up looking like me without learning very early what you are to people." Elphaba’s voice was low and even. "A curiosity, a problem. A joke."
Galinda turned toward her. "You’re not—"
"I had it settled. It doesn't even hurt anymore, most days." Her mouth tightened. "And then tonight you walked onto that dance floor. No one in Oz could've made you do that. And you did it anyway, and for a little while I let myself—" She stopped. Her jaw worked. "I let myself forget what I was. I thought, maybe she sees something. Maybe I was wrong about her. Maybe this is real."
Galinda’s throat ached. "Elphie, please—"
"And then you kissed me and it was the first time anyone—it was my first kiss," Elphaba went on, relentless and quiet, "did you know that? Of course you did." Elphaba’s hands tightened on the cardigan. She turned and looked at Galinda directly, and her eyes were dry, which was the worst thing of all. "So. I have my answer. You have a Fiyero for the daylight and you have me for whenever the room is empty and it's funny. And tomorrow this becomes a story you tell. I was wrong about all of it. I should've known better."
"Can I speak? Please?"
Elphaba's chin came up, defenses already reassembling, but she didn't object.
"I don't—Elphie, I don't know what I'm doing. I want to be honest with you and I find I'm badly out of practice." Her voice came out entirely her own, stripped of every shine she had ever practiced. "But I know I meant the kiss. I knew it the second I'd done it. I think I've known it longer than that." She wiped angrily at her face. "And I'm sorry, for everything. You're not a story I'm going to tell, and you're not a joke to me." She looked down at her hands. "You might be the only thing I've got that isn't one."
Elphaba looked at her for a long time.
"I don't know if I believe you."
Galinda sat with that.
"That's fair," she said. "If I’ve been dreadful enough that you don’t believe me, I don’t imagine a speech by the lake is going to repair it." She folded her hands in her lap because they were shaking. "So I’ll prove it."
Elphaba’s expression did something small and unreadable. Elphaba looked at her for one more long, agonizing second, and stood up the moment Galinda made a move to lean her head on her shoulder. She began walking back toward the building, her stride fast and unyielding. Galinda hurried to keep up, trailing slightly behind her. They reached the door of the dormitory before Elphaba stopped with her hand on the brass knob. She didn't look back, but she paused.
"I didn’t hate it," she muttered.
"The makeover?"
"The kiss."
She pushed the door open and went inside, leaving Galinda in the doorway with relief crashing through her so violently she had to keep her hand flat against the wall. Eventually, she pushed herself upright and slipped back into the room.
Sleep was entirely out of the question. She lay down anyway, because there was nothing else to do with a body, and spent the remaining hours until their first lecture arriving at three sharp conclusions.
First: she had become the sort of person who chased green women to lakes at dawn and cried at them.
Second: Elphaba was right about every important thing.
Third: Fiyero had to go.
She stayed under the covers long after the morning bells rang, watching through a crack in the blankets as Elphaba dressed in total, icy silence. There was no humming today. When the door finally clicked shut behind her, the air left in the room felt twice as thin. Galinda waited a full three minutes before she dared to breathe normally, her mind already spinning.
She ended things with Fiyero before their first lecture. He was so gracious about it that Galinda spent the walk to class quietly thinking. She'd prepared something kind but terminal, and he'd met her three sentences in with warm agreement and the observation that they made far better friends anyway. The whole business was over before she knew it. It would've been a devastating blow to her ego—especially when he immediately followed it up by casually asking if her "interesting green roommate" was coming to breakfast—but Galinda didn't have the bandwidth to analyze his wandering attention yet.
She immediately found Pfannee and Shenshen and informed them, in strict confidence, that she and Fiyero had mutually decided to pursue separate futures. With any luck, Elphaba would know before ten. And there she was, arriving to lecture with her satchel clutched to her side. She looked suspiciously between Galinda and the chair beside her left conspicuously empty, Galinda herself patting it with what she now recognized as the deranged optimism of a woman who had learned absolutely nothing.
Elphaba looked at the chair. Then at Galinda. Then at the twenty or so people watching.
She sat down at a different table.
Galinda spent the rest of the lecture staring at the blackboard and experiencing growth. The internal expansion lasted well into the evening, leading directly to an idea that, in hindsight, suffered primarily from a failure of packaging.
In fairness to Galinda, it had seemed private, tasteful, and free of audience participation—what she suspected had bothered Elphaba the first time. She wrapped it in pink paper, of course.
The little pink box was back on Galinda’s pillow the next morning, unopened, with a note that said, "I don’t know what this is for."
"Elphie?" Galinda said.
Elphaba looked up from her book. "Mmh?"
"If a person wanted to be—kind. To you. Without being the wrong sort of kind. What would that look like, hypothetically?"
Elphaba studied her over the top of her book. "It would look like not making a spectacle of it."
"Right," Galinda said. "And if spectacle were unavoidable, due to the person's natural—"
"Galinda."
"Yes?"
"I'm sure you'll figure something out."
"Oh, I will."
The opportunity to prove it arrived the following afternoon. Galinda returned from class alone to find Elphaba’s side of the room exactly as Elphaba had left it: books stacked in precarious towers, notes and flying papers tucked into impossible places, stockings drying over the bedframe. Galinda straightened the entire mess. She genuinely, thoroughly meant well this time. By the time she was finished, the desk was neat and beautiful—just like her Elphie.
When Elphaba came back from the library, she stopped dead in the threshold, her satchel slipping an inch down her shoulder as her eyes scanned the pristine landscape of her own desk. The silence stretched for a good thirty seconds. Galinda sat on her own bed, suddenly hyper-aware of the ticking clock, watching Elphaba’s gaze linger on a row of ancient history texts that had been carefully sorted from pale mauve to deep crimson.
"What the—" she stopped, eyeing Galinda. "I had a system."
"Elphie. Your books were utterly disorganized."
"They were alphabetically organized."
"Exactly, when they should've been ordered by color and size, which is now done. No spectacle here, see? This stays between us. I did it from the bottom of my heart. Actually, let's not even mention it again."
"I appreciate the effort, but please don't do that again. Ever." Elphaba looked at her long enough to make sure the boundary had properly set, and then went back to disorganizing her books. Galinda didn't miss the private smile gracing her face. She didn't point it out, of course, for she had learned somewhere in the last few days that pointing things out was the fastest way to make them stop.
She borrowed one of Elphaba's books and tried to read it. She brought her opinions to Elphaba the next morning. They were all wrong. She knew they were wrong approximately two seconds into Elphaba's response, but Elphaba was arguing with her—really arguing, the concentrated kind she usually saved for the books themselves—and Galinda discovered that being wrong at Elphaba was significantly more interesting than being right.
"You're not listening," Elphaba said.
"I am, you're just very fast and I lost the middle part."
"The middle part was the whole point."
"Then say it again."
"I already repeated myself twice."
"Elphie." Galinda set her elbows on the desk. "I'm genuinely trying to understand the middle part. Please say it again."
Elphaba looked at her for a moment longer, then groaned and said it again. And then, because apparently she had no regard for her own peace, she explained the part after that as well. Galinda lost every point she made and enjoyed herself enormously. She found herself asking questions simply to hear what Elphaba would do with them. She wanted, absurdly, to be corrected by her.
Elphaba rose at last and went to stand by the window, one hand braced on the sill. She was humming again—something low and shapeless, not quite a tune yet. Galinda set her pen down.
"It was your voice, you know."
Elphaba glanced back. "Sorry?"
"You have a beautiful voice."
Elphaba blinked and her cheeks turned a darker shade of green. "Thank you."
"Will you sing to me tonight?" Galinda asked, feeling bold. She joined Elphaba near the window and looked out as well.
"I only sing to myself and occasionally Nessa."
"Liar, you sang how much you loathe me to my face."
"Only to get under your skin."
"Do it again," Galinda said. "Please?"
Elphaba looked at her for a long moment.
"I don't know what you want me to sing."
"Anything." Galinda smiled. "I don't think I've ever cared less about the song."
A reluctant sort of amusement moved across Elphaba's face.
"You're a very strange person."
"Maybe."
Elphaba huffed a laugh and looked back out the window, her expression gone distant enough that Galinda thought she might refuse after all. But then her shoulders loosened and she drew in a breath. It started as almost nothing, a wandering line scarcely louder than the night air coming through the cracked window. Then it found a shape and rose. Galinda had heard Elphaba sing to the sky, she had heard her sing to herself when she thought no one was listening.
She had never heard her sing to one person.
This voice stayed close and warm, gentler than it had been behind closed doors, refusing to carry any farther than the two of them and the moon. With her eyes half-shut and her long green fingers curled against the windowsill, Elphaba looked entirely peaceful.
When the notes finally faded, the quiet of the room returned. Elphaba glanced up, caught Galinda staring, and pulled her hands back into her sleeves.
"What?" she asked, her voice dropping into a sudden, quiet shyness.
"You really have no idea, do you?" Galinda said.
"About what?"
"How you look when you do that. It's completely unfair." Galinda stepped closer, her hand rising toward Elphaba's face before her brain could veto the impulse. "You just stand by a window and exist, and I can't look anywhere else."
Elphaba stiffened, her jaw tight against the blush creeping up her cheeks. "I’d rather you bullied me the old-fashioned way than whatever this is."
"I'm not bullying you," Galinda whispered, her fingertips brushing the dark curl against Elphaba’s cheek. "This is probably the part where I admit I’d very much like to kiss you again."
The silence stretched long enough for Galinda to become aware of her own pulse in her throat. Elphaba didn't move at all, her eyes locked on Galinda’s with a fierce, almost painful intensity.
"Galinda," she breathed, a warning and a plea all at once. "Don't say things like that if you don't—"
"I do," Galinda whispered, and closed the remaining inch between them.
She kissed her once, gently, as if any excess might break something fragile between them. Then she drew back just far enough to search Elphaba’s face, waiting for permission to indulge her tenderness further. Elphaba’s eyes stayed shut, her breath hitching, braced for the joke to finally turn mean. But when Galinda didn’t retreat, Elphaba’s hand tightened desperately on her sleeve, a silent, urgent pull forward.
Galinda obeyed. The second kiss deepened all on its own as Elphaba's hand slid behind her neck. She tilted her head, and suddenly that intolerable, oh so welcome harmony returned—they fit perfectly. Galinda's hands found Elphaba's arms, sliding upward until they rested lightly at her collarbone. She kissed Elphaba's upper lip, then her lower, then couldn't for the life of her determine which she liked better and had to try both several more times.
Elphaba laughed softly against her mouth, the sound vibrating straight through Galinda's chest. Her fingers came up to gently catch Galinda’s wrists. When they broke apart, neither of them moved very far.
Elphaba’s forehead rested briefly against hers. She let out a shaky breath that brushed warm over Galinda’s mouth.
"Galinda."
"Yes?"
"We should…" She seemed to lose track of the sentence entirely when Galinda kissed the corner of her mouth.
"Should what?"
Elphaba gave her a look.
"You're not helping."
"Sorry. Terribly sorry. Continue."
Elphaba took a breath.
"I think… I think I'd like to go slowly."
Galinda sobered and stopped everything she was doing at once.
"Oh."
A flicker of uncertainty crossed Elphaba's face.
"I only mean—this is all rather new to me."
"Elphie."
"But I don't want you to think—"
"Elphie."
"This is embarrassing—"
"Elphaba Thropp. Listen to me."
Elphaba stopped.
Galinda brushed a curl away from her forehead. Oz, I'd wait a hundred years if you asked me to, she thought, a sudden, sharp wave of fierce protectiveness rising up in her chest. But Elphaba’s defenses were still hovering nearby, ready to snap back into place if pushed, so Galinda kept her voice light.
"We don't have to do anything tonight," she said. "Anything at all. We can simply... be."
Elphaba's expression softened. "You'd really be all right with that?"
"Of course."
The words seemed to settle something inside Elphaba. A small, shy smile appeared.
"Maybe we could…" She looked suddenly nervous. "Sleep together?"
Galinda blinked.
"You mean in the same bed."
"Yes."
"Right. Yes. Obviously. Of course."
They moved away from the window and settled beneath the blankets of Galinda's bed, facing one another in the dim room. For a long while neither of them spoke, the quiet safety of the room wrapping around them. Then Galinda leaned forward and pressed one last, brief kiss to Elphaba's forehead.
Several seconds passed.
"Are you comfortable?" Galinda asked.
"Yes. Your bed is twice the size of mine."
"Good. Let me know if you need anything. And you can absolutely drink from my water bottle on my bedside table. I know you wake up at night to drink."
Elphaba shifted slightly under the covers, her eyes narrowing in the dark. "How do you know that?"
"Sleep tight, Elphie!"