Chapter Text
Five years.
Five years of silence. Five years of a grief more complicated than anyone knew. Not the clean grief of loss, but the tangled, poisonous grief of abandonment. Five years of ruling Oz with a voice that had learned to project confidence while her heart remained fractured along the same fault lines that had formed the night she watched Elphaba disappear.
Because Glinda wasn't stupid.
She had known. From the very moment Elphaba had screamed and crumpled and seemingly dissolved into nothing, that it was a lie.
Water doesn't melt people. Water doesn't melt witches. Glinda had shared a room with Elphaba. She had seen Elphaba wash her hands, seen rain catch her on the path between buildings, seen her drink from a glass like any other person. The allergy to water was just another disgustifying rumor, one of a thousand absurd rumors that had grown around the so-called Wicked Witch and Glinda had always known it was nonsense.
So when the bucket fell and the screaming started, Glinda had watched the performance completely heartbroken.
She's not dead. She planned this. She's escaping.
And there in that tower room, she didn’t mourn the loss of her Elphie, she had felt a devastation so complete it rewrote the architecture of her heart. Abandonment.
Elphaba had planned an escape. Elphaba had devised an elaborate ruse, had enchanted water, had built a trapdoor, had choreographed her own false death down to the last theatrical detail.
And she hadn't told Glinda.
She hadn't whispered it during their last embrace on the tower. She hadn't slipped a note into Glinda's hand. She hadn't found a way, any way, in all her brilliance and resourcefulness, to let the woman she claimed to love know that she wasn't about to watch her die.
Elphaba had looked Glinda in the eye, had held her hands and told her to carry on, had let Glinda believe she was saying goodbye forever and the whole time, she'd had an exit planned. A way out. A future that she had chosen not to share.
That was the wound. Not the death—the silence. The deliberate, calculated exclusion. The choice Elphaba had made to let Glinda suffer rather than trust her with the truth.
And for five years, Glinda had carried that wound in secret, telling no one, because admitting she knew Elphaba was alive would have undone everything. The reforms, the political capital she'd built on the narrative of Elphaba's ideals, the fragile peace she'd mended between the factions of Oz. So she had played the grieving disciple, the faithful keeper of the flame, the woman who privately mourned the Wicked Witch while knowing that the she was out there somewhere, alive, choosing not to come home.
They called her Glinda the Good.
It was printed on the banners that hung from the emerald spires of the city. It was whispered in the Munchkinland villages where her reforms had returned stolen farmland to Animal families.
The people of Oz looked at her and saw salvation. They saw the steady hand that had guided them out of the Wizard's shadow. They saw a woman of grace and composure and unshakeable moral clarity. Blonde and beautiful and kind, the living embodiment of everything Oz aspired to be. They brought her flowers when she walked through the Emerald City markets. They wept with gratitude when she stood on balconies and told them that the dark days were behind us, that justice had been restored, that the Animals were free and the courts were fair and the future was bright.
And Glinda smiled, and waved, and said all the right things, and went back to her chambers and sat in the dark and felt nothing.
Not nothing—that wasn't quite right. She felt everything, but it was trapped behind a wall so thick and so high that it might as well have been nothing. The goodness they worshiped in her was real, in the sense that she genuinely cared about the reforms, about the Animals, about the people of Oz. She had not become cynical. She had not stopped believing in the work. But the goodness had become mechanical, a function she performed rather than an emotion she felt. She did good things because good things needed doing. She was kind because kindness was effective.
She led because someone had to, and she was the only one still standing.
She didn't want this. Well. That wasn't entirely true, was it? Maybe Morrible had been right about one thing. Maybe Glinda had wanted this from the beginning. The praise, power, the adoration. She'd just never imagined it like this.
Never like this.
Maybe this was her penance. Maybe this was exactly what she deserved. To get everything she ever thought she wanted and discover it was hollow, to sit on a throne built on the bones of the person she loved most and smile for the crowd. Maybe she was the wicked one after all. Maybe she had been all along, and Elphaba was just collateral damage.
Maybe she deserved this pain. Glinda had decided, somewhere in the wreckage of herself, that she deserved to pay. Every single day. For as long as it took to settle a debt she knew could never be settled.
She relished in it. She wanted the pain. Sought it out, held still for it, let it do its worst and then asked for more. Because suffering was the closest thing she had left to penance. If she couldn't have Elphaba, she could at least have this. The punishment, the hollow ache, the slow and deliberate act of destroying herself from the inside out and calling it what she deserved.
She could feel herself becoming something sharp and ruined, could feel the masochism of it threading through her like a second skeleton, and she let it. Because letting it hurt was the only honest thing she'd done since Elphaba left.
The court advisors praised her composure. And Glinda would smile and thank them and think: I don't waver because there's nothing left in me that's capable of being shaken. I am steady because I am empty. You mistake the absence of feeling for the presence of strength.
She held audiences every morning in the Throne Room. A vast, glittering chamber of emerald and gold that had once been the Wizard's seat of power and was now, under Glinda's direction, a place where any citizen of Oz could bring a grievance and be heard.
She listened to all of them, and she helped all of them. There was no joy in it. There hadn't been joy in anything for a very long time.
Because that was what Glinda had become, underneath the goodness and the grace: a machine powered by rage.
It was the rage of a woman who had been left behind by the person she loved most in the world and left to clean up the mess, to bear the weight, to do the impossible work of transforming a country while the person whose vision she was implementing sat somewhere beyond the desert, presumably at peace, presumably content, presumably fine.
That was what ate at Glinda most savagely in her darkest hours: the idea that Elphaba might be fine.
That Elphaba might have found some measure of quiet in her exile. That she might wake in the mornings without dread, eat simple meals, tend a garden, watch the sun set without the weight of a nation on her shoulders. That she might have found, in her disappearance, the very peace that she'd stolen from Glinda by leaving.
The thought made Glinda want to burn something.
I am here, fighting your battles, doing your work, carrying your cause, and you are somewhere else, and you left me here, and you didn't even have the courage to tell me you were going.
Staring at the ceiling of her chambers, alone in a bed large enough for two. I hope whatever life you've built was worth what you took from mine.
I hope you think about me.
She pressed her fingertips against the cool glass of her balcony doors and let her forehead follow. Below her, the city hummed with evening activity—merchants closing their stalls, families heading home, the lamplighters beginning their rounds. Her city. Her people. The country she had rebuilt from the wreckage of a corrupt regime, through sheer will and sleepless nights and the particular stubbornness of a woman who refused to let someone else's sacrifice be meaningless.
The love burned just as bright as it had the day Elphaba flew away from her for the last time, and Glinda had come to accept that it would burn until there was nothing left of her to consume.
She had built her entire life around that flame. Every reform she'd championed, every law she'd rewritten, every Animal she'd freed—it was all for Elphaba. Not just in memory, but in continuation. Glinda had taken the unfinished symphony of Elphaba's work and made it her own, note by painstaking note. She had sacrificed the life she might have had and replaced it with purpose. Elphaba's purpose. Partly because she was thrust into this role and had no choice. Partly because she loved Elphaba. And partly because she wanted Elphaba to see. To hear about it, wherever she was. To know what Glinda had become in her absence, and to feel the weight of what she'd walked away from.
"I freed the Lions from the containment camps in the Vinkus today." She said it to the mirror while unpinning her hair, her voice careful and conversational, as though Elphaba were sitting cross-legged on the bed behind her. "All of them, Elphie. Every single one. You should have seen their faces." A pause. A breath that caught. "I thought you'd want to know."
And later: "The Goats have a representative on the council now. Dr. Dillamond would have been proud." She'd said that one standing at the window, watching rain streak the glass, and her voice had been steadier than she expected. Almost professional. As if she were delivering a report to someone who might actually hear it.
And later still, in the smallest hours, when the candles had burned to nothing and the loneliness was a living thing crouching on her chest, the composure would crack open and what came through was rawer, younger, stripped of all the careful poise she'd spent the day wearing like armor.
"I'm so tired, Elphie." Whispered into the silence that never once answered back. "I'm so tired, and I don't know if I'm doing this right. I don't know if any of it matters without you here to tell me it does."
A long, shuddering breath.
"I'm trying. I keep trying. For you. For what we were supposed to be. Even though there is no us anymore, because you decided that without asking me. You just—" Her voice would fracture there, every time.
She never got an answer. She never expected one.
But some nights the silence felt deliberate, the silence of someone who could answer but chose not to, and those were the nights that left marks.
But she kept talking anyway, because the alternative was accepting that Elphaba didn’t care to hear her, and that possibility was the thing that would finally break her.
So she swallowed it. Day after day, year after year. She swallowed the rage and transmuted it into policy, into reform, into the relentless, grinding machinery of governance. She turned her anger at Elphaba into action for Elphaba's causes, and then Glinda had made her peace with madness. It was, at least, productive.
The citizens of Oz saw an adored ruler. They saw Glinda the Good, serene and tireless, a beacon of compassion in a recovering nation.
They did not see the woman who stood on her balcony willing into the night: Come home, you selfish, brilliant, impossible coward. Come home and face what you've done to me.
They did not see the cracks. And Glinda, who had been performing her whole life, was very, very good at making sure they never would.
That first year, the love sustained her. The pain was brutal, but it had a direction. She knew Elphaba was alive. She didn't know where. She couldn't search without exposing the lie that held Oz together. So she poured herself into the work and told herself it was enough—that Elphaba would hear about the reforms, the liberations, the changes, and that she would understand. That she would know what Glinda was doing, and why, and that someday, when it was safe, she would come home.
She'll come back, Glinda told herself in the first year. When the Wizard's loyalists are gone, when it's safe, she'll come back to me.
It was in the second year that the first cracks appeared.
She was standing before the Ozian High Court, arguing for the reinstatement of property rights for Animal families who had been displaced under the Wizard's regime. It was a complex case, requiring weeks of preparation, and she had barely slept. The opposing counsel had argued that the legal precedents were too entangled, that the process would take years, that there were simpler ways.
She had won the case. She had gone back to her chambers and sat on the floor with her back against the door, and she had felt something shift inside her chest.
I've made it safe. I've done everything right. And she's still not here. She could come back now. There's nothing stopping her and she's choosing not to.
She's not coming back.
It was such a simple thought. Such a devastating, clarifying thought. Not she can't come back. Not it's too dangerous. But she's not coming back. She doesn't want to.
And underneath that: She left me. She looked me in the eye, she let me believe I was watching her die, and she had an escape plan the entire time, and she didn't tell me. She didn't trust me enough. She didn't love me enough. She left me, and I have to do this alone, and she is out there somewhere living a life that I am not part of because she decided, without asking me, that I shouldn't be.
The thought didn't go away. It settled in. It made itself comfortable.
By the third year, the cracks had become fissures.
The love was still there. Glinda couldn't have removed it if she'd tried, and she had tried, in her darkest moments, lying awake at three in the morning bargaining with the universe to just let her stop feeling this. But something else had grown up alongside it, tangled around it like a vine strangling the tree it climbed. Something harder. Something with edges.
Resentment.
She would be alone at night—always, always alone at night—and the resentment would sharpen into something precise, something that cut.
That was the thorn Glinda couldn't extract. Not the leaving—the silence. The deliberate exclusion from the most important decision of both their lives. Elphaba had decided that Glinda couldn't be trusted with the truth. That Glinda was too fragile, too unreliable, too something to be included in the plan. And every day that passed without word, without a letter, without a sign. Every day was another confirmation that Elphaba had looked at Glinda and seen someone not worth confiding in.
The doctor prescribed medication. Small green capsules. Glinda had almost laughed at the color, a terrible, airless laugh that sounded wrong even to her own ears. They would help, the doctor said. They would take the edge off the worst of it. They would make the days survivable.
Glinda took them. Every morning, with mechanical obedience, she swallowed a small green capsule and waited for it to build a floor beneath her. And eventually, it did. The medication didn't bring back joy. It wasn't designed to, or if it was, it failed at that particular task. What it did was create a kind of buffer, a thin layer of insulation between Glinda and the abyss she'd been standing at the edge of. The world didn't regain its color, but it stopped actively darkening. She could eat again. She could sleep, mostly. She could function, mostly.
The fourth year was the worst.
It was the year the resentment stopped feeling like a wound and started feeling like something else.
It happened gradually, so gradually that Glinda didn't notice the transformation until it was already complete. The nightly conversations with the empty room grew shorter, then infrequent, then stopped entirely. The tears came less often. The ache dulled from a sharp, bright pain to a low, constant pressure, like a headache she'd had for so long she'd forgotten what its absence felt like.
And in the space where the grief had been, something else moved in.
Hatred. It wasn't the dramatic, blazing hatred of an enemy. It wasn't the kind of hatred that drives wars or revolutions or the sort of grand, theatrical villainy that Elphaba had been accused of. It was quieter than that. Colder. It was the hatred that grows in the space between two people who loved each other too much and hurt each other too deeply. The hatred that is really just love with nowhere left to go.
She hated Elphaba for leaving. She hated her for the way she'd looked at Glinda before closing the door. Eyes full of love and certainty and that insufferable, infuriating calm while saying "Everything will be fine. I love you." while the trapdoor waited. Every tender word was a performance designed to make Glinda believe she was saying goodbye forever when she was really just saying goodbye to her. As
She hated Elphaba for not telling her. For the arrogance of it. The breathtaking, unforgivable arrogance of deciding that Glinda couldn't be trusted with the plan. But Fiyero could. Fiyero got to go with her. And that kept Glinda awake at night, turning it over and over like a stone in her hand until there were no sharp edges left. Only the dull, permanent ache of knowing she hadn't been enough.
She hated her for the way the memory of her refused to fade. For the way her voice still echoed in Glinda's mind with perfect clarity when everything else had gone muffled and distant. For the way she haunted every room of the palace, every clause of every law, every freed Animal who looked at Glinda with gratitude that should have been directed at someone else.
She hated her for turning Glinda into a monument. A caretaker. A widow who had never been a wife, forever doomed to tend the empty grave of her own life.
Most of all, she hated Elphaba for making it impossible to hate her. Because even as the resentment calcified and the anger hardened into something permanent, Glinda couldn't fully commit to it. The hatred kept bumping up against the love, and the love was still there, still burning, still faithful, and the contradiction was driving her slowly, quietly insane. She hated Elphaba, and she loved Elphaba, and the two emotions had fused together into something monstrous and unexplainable, a feeling with no name and no resolution, and Glinda carried it everywhere, every day, in every interaction, behind every smile.
And then, somewhere in the middle of that fourth year, the hatred and the love stopped mattering because Glinda stopped feeling anything at all, just the suffocation of it all.
She had been standing on her balcony. It was late, well past midnight, the kind of hour when the city was quiet and the only sound was the wind moving between the spires. She had gone out for air, she told herself. Just air. But she had stood at the railing and looked down at the distance between herself and the ground, and she had not immediately looked away.
She had stood there for a long time.
Long enough for the thought to form fully. Long enough for it to settle into her mind with a clarity that cut through the fog like a blade. Long enough for her to feel its weight, its shape, the terrible simplicity of it.
And then something, she was never sure what; maybe the wind, maybe the distant sound of a clock chiming in the city below, had pulled her back. She had stepped away from the railing. She had gone inside. She had closed the balcony doors and locked them, and then she had sat on the floor with her back against the glass. Shaken.
She never stood on that balcony after dark again.
She never told anyone about that night on the balcony. The thing she had almost done and almost become in the darkest hour of the darkest year of her life.These were the secrets she carried beneath the other secrets.
And beneath even that, beneath the shame and the fear and the lingering horror of how close she'd come, was the fury. Because it was Elphaba's fault. Everything in Glinda's life traced back to Elphaba eventually. Every joy, every devastation, every choice that had led her to this palace and this throne and this railing in the dark. Elphaba had abandoned her, and Glinda had broken, and Elphaba wasn't here to see it, and if she had been, if she had known what her absence had nearly cost…would she have come back? Would it have mattered?
Glinda hated that she didn't know the answer. She hated that after four years, she still couldn't say with certainty whether Elphaba would have chosen her.
The fifth year found her like this: a woman made of contradictions, running a country on competence and fury, wrapped in a love that had curdled at the edges and a hatred that still tasted, underneath, like devotion.
I miss you. I hate you for making me miss you. And if you walked through that door right now, I don't know if I'd hold you or destroy you.
But Elphaba wasn't coming back. Five years of silence had made that clear. She was out there somewhere, Maybe alive, maybe breathing, choosing every single day not to return and the hatred and the love would remain forever unresolved, tangled together in the dark, and Glinda would carry them both until her body gave out. That was simply the shape of the rest of her life. A woman who knew the love of her life was alive and unreachable. A woman who had been left behind by someone who didn't even have the decency to die.
That was the bargain she'd made with grief, and she intended to honor it.
Even if it killed her.
Which, some days, she thought it might.