Chapter Text
The Emerald City had a way of making you forget that anything existed beyond its walls. This was, Glinda had come to understand, entirely deliberate.
Her apartments were at the top of a tower adjoining the Wizard's palace—not in the palace, the Wizard had been careful to clarify, as though the distinction were a mercy rather than a management strategy. Adjacent to, he had said, with his showman's hands spread wide to encompass the gilded ceilings and the emerald-inlaid mirrors and the balcony that looked westward over the city's luminous sprawl. Glinda had smiled her best smile and understood perfectly well that the apartments were not a gift but a post, and that the view to the west was not an accident.
She had only recently arrived. Three years of finishing at Shiz, catching the train to the capital for speeches and appearances and returning to her dormitory with the particular exhaustion of someone maintaining two versions of herself simultaneously, and then graduation, and then the City, and then these rooms with their emerald trim and their impossible view.
The Wizard had been patient about the timing. Morrible had not, but Morrible's impatience was a condition of the world rather than something Glinda felt personally responsible for managing.
It had been Morrible who spelled out the terms, on a gray afternoon in her office at Shiz, not three weeks after the debacle at the palace. She had poured the tea herself, which Glinda recognized as a performance of intimacy calculated to lower her defenses, and had explained what the Wizard required of her in the way one does when one has already decided you are manageable. A face. A voice. Someone the people of Oz would look at and see the future they were being asked to embrace: prosperous and orderly. Someone who embodied the alternative to chaos. A good witch and a wicked one. The people respond so well to clarity.
"You have a gift, my dear," Morrible had said, setting down her cup with the satisfaction of delivering a verdict already written. "For being precisely what people need to see."
Glinda had smiled, and said yes, and understood the full architecture of what was being offered. Morrible got her instrument: a pretty, pliable girl, publicly abandoned by the fugitive witch, too vain and too stung. Glinda got proximity. Influence.
It was the arithmetic of the possible, carried out by someone who had stood in a palace attic and watched her best friend rise into a stormy sky and chosen, in the half-second available for choosing, to stay.
She did not count the years obsessively. That would have been undignified. Long enough, was what she allowed herself. It had been long enough since the day in the palace, Elphaba's sharp green gaze finding her face one last time across the impossible distance of a choice already made. Long enough since Glinda had stood there and understood, with sudden and complete clarity, what it meant to be the person who stayed.
The work helped, when she let it. The speeches, the appearances, the careful performance of a girl who believed entirely in the benevolence of the man behind the curtain.
Fiyero had arrived in the city before her. He had dropped out of Shiz quietly, shortly after Elphaba left and without announcement, and enrolled in the Gale Force. She remembered the first time he visited her, with his jaw set at the angle that meant a decision had been made and the universe was invited to object. Glinda had looked at him for a long moment and stepped aside, because she knew that jaw, and because she recognized in his eyes something she saw every morning in her own mirror, and because there are conversations that can be conducted without words if two people have been paying sufficient attention to a third.
She was usually on the balcony in the evenings. It had become a habit, standing at the railing while the city pulsed below and the sky darkened through indigo into proper dark.
Earlier that evening, she had sat through a briefing with her hands folded and her face arranged in the expression of attentive concern she had calibrated to suggest investment without alarm. One of the Gale Force's depots had been struck, the briefing officer had said, his voice carrying the flat precision of someone reading from a report he had been told not to elaborate on. Tactical storage. Animal census documentation, the paper trail of a persecution the government had been careful to keep out of public record. The resistance had been after those files for months, the officer said. They had moved on the depot at nightfall. What the briefing officer did not say, but what Glinda assembled from the parts of his language that were most deliberate and most controlled, was that the Gale Force had known they were coming. That the explosion had not been an accident of conflict but a decision: the depot rigged, the documentation destroyed rather than surrendered, the whole building sacrificed to keep those names from reaching hands that would know what to do with them. Three officers with minor injuries, all of whom had been accounted for before the charges went off.
The resistance operatives had not been similarly informed.
Glinda had sat with her hands folded and her face correct, and she held it still now, standing on the balcony with the western sky doing its nightly work of being simply the sky and nothing more.
She watched it for a long time, the way she always watched it, with the particular attentiveness of someone who has given up expecting anything and cannot entirely stop expecting it. The mind did things, after long enough of this: produced shapes in cloud, conjured silhouettes against the dark that were always, on closer inspection, nothing at all. She had learned to let them pass without chasing them, the way you learn to leave alone a bruise you have been pressing too long.
She was turning toward the doors when the air moved. Not wind. Something purposeful, a displacement, the specific pressure of something arriving at speed and then stopping. She felt it across her bare arms and in the space below her ribs before she had fully turned, and she turned the rest of the way because there was nothing else to do, because her body had already understood what her mind was still negotiating.
Elphaba was there, on her balcony. She had come in low and fast over the railing in the moment Glinda had turned away, and she was standing now with the preternatural stillness of someone who has chosen exactly where to put their feet and has no immediate plans beyond that.
Glinda noticed the broom before she noticed anything else. Elphaba held it not loosely at her side, but gripped near the top, the shaft braced against the balcony floor. Her weight rested through it. She was not quite leaning, not visibly, but relying on it all the same, in the way of someone for whom standing had become an effort.
The lamplight from the sitting room reached her in pieces. The black brim of the hat, scorched along the left side. The torn sleeves of the coat, the fabric ragged where something had caught it. The angular jaw, the sharp cheekbones. The cut above her left temple, sealed and dark. And her eyes, bright and intent in the low light, doing several things at once that Glinda could not immediately separate.
Three years (she did count them obsessively after all!). The number was accurate and meant nothing, told nothing of the specific weight of the time or what it had taken to carry it. Here was the actual face, and the memory, which Glinda had tended with the obsessive care she gave to things she loved, had been a diminishment all along, as the memory always was. Glinda stood very still for one breath and felt the full weight of it arrive.
She crossed the balcony and put her arms around her.
There was no decision she was aware of making. One moment there was the distance of the balcony between them and the next there was not, and her arms were around Elphaba's shoulders, and her face was pressed against her neck, and she held on with both hands and breathed her in and felt, all of it, all at once, the specific reality of her, the shape and scent of her that Glinda had spent so long not being able to remember precisely enough. She did not say anything, because there was nothing adequate, and she was not willing to offer anything less.
Elphaba went very still.
Then, slowly, one arm came up and found the back of Glinda's head, and Glinda pressed closer and felt the solidity of her and thought: real.
Elphaba spoke, quietly, into her hair: "Glinda."
Glinda pulled back just far enough to look at her, to take the full account of that face, the new lines of it, the freckles across her nose and her beautiful mouth, and Elphaba looked back at her with a smile.
"You have some nerve," Glinda said.
Something shifted in Elphaba's expression. Something close to confusion and shyness.
"I—"
"No." Glinda took one deliberate step back. "You land on my balcony, which is on the highest floor of this building, which you have somehow located without any correspondence whatsoever, after all of this time."
"Glinda—"
"You have not written, not once," Glinda continued, with the patience of someone explaining something to a person she suspects is being obtuse on purpose. "You have given me nothing. Not a sign, not so much as a message left where only I would know to look. You are possibly the most resourceful person alive, and you chose to do nothing for three years! While I had to listen to them speak of you in the language used for criminals and pests, smiling, waiting for you to show up! And now you are here, on my balcony, looking—" She stopped. She had been about to gesture, a short precise movement encompassing all of it, when she was suddenly reminded of the flying monkeys and the Wizard's various reaches, none of which limited themselves to daylight hours.
"Come inside," she said.
She urged Elphaba through the balcony doors and drew both curtains closed behind her, shutting out the city in one smooth motion.
Elphaba remained where she was, in the center of the room, broom still in hand. Too much of her weight had gone into it for Glinda to mistake the gesture.
"You are barely standing," Glinda said. Her voice came out even. Her heart did not.
"I have had—"
"Don't." The word struck harder than she had meant it to. "Do not tell me you have had worse."
Elphaba’s jaw shifted. "There is a laceration across my back. I cannot see it properly. I cleaned what I could reach."
She reached into the inner pocket of her coat and drew out a small dark-glass bottle, unlabeled and plain, the kind that changed hands between people who could not present themselves at apothecaries. She held it out.
"I need it cleaned before I can close it. There is debris in it still. Dirt from the floor." A pause. Then, more flatly: "I cannot manage that alone."
Glinda looked at the bottle. Then at Elphaba.
"No," she said.
Whatever Elphaba had expected, it was not that. "Excuse me?"
"I said no. You want me to tend to your wounds. After all this time," she crossed her arms. "You disappear. You give me nothing. Then you arrive here injured and immediately require something of me, and I am meant to receive this as though the last three years were an inconvenience in the road." She made a neat, dismissive gesture. "No. Find someone else."
"There is no one else."
"You have built yourself an entire cause," Glinda said. "Surely among its devoted ranks there is someone with hands."
Elphaba went still. She was recalibrating. Glinda saw the recalculation in her at once: the rapid, internal adjustment of someone whose plan has encountered unexpected resistance and who is deciding between strategies.
"The center of the wound," Elphaba said, carefully, "is more serious than the edges."
"Yes."
"If it is not treated, it will—"
"I am sure it will."
"It has already been several hours. The flight here did not improve matters."
"No," Glinda said. "I cannot imagine it did."
Silence stretched between them, taut as wire.
For a moment, Elphaba looked defeated. It was such a rare expression on her face that Glinda noticed it with satisfaction.
Then Elphaba exhaled.
"I am sorry, Glinda," she said. "I was trying to keep you safe." Her mouth altered, only slightly, but Glinda knew that look; she had seen it years ago across classroom tables, in the instant before an argument turned cruel. "You know what it would mean, if you were caught in association with me. It would ruin your reputation."
There it was.
The blow landed cleanly because it had been aimed where the armor was thinnest. Glinda felt it in the old, humiliating place: the part of her that feared Elphaba was right, and feared even more that Elphaba believed it.
She let out a small, incredulous laugh.
"Oh, you wicked thing," she said. "Is that what this is? You are angry that I did not climb onto that absurd broom and ruin my life on your schedule?"
Elphaba’s expression darkened. "That is not what I said."
"No," Glinda said. "Of course not. You are always much too disciplined to say the worst thing plainly."
Elphaba shifted, perhaps to turn, perhaps to leave. The movement cost her; Glinda saw that. She made for the balcony doors anyway, stubborn even in pain.
"If you are not going to help me," she said, "I should go."
Glinda crossed the room before the sentence had fully left her mouth and put herself between Elphaba and the curtains.
"Don’t you dare say that to me again."
The force of it stopped them both.
Then, quieter, because the truth was quieter: "I am always going to help you."
Elphaba’s face had gone unreadable in the way it did when feeling became too dangerous to show directly.
Glinda held her gaze until she could trust her own voice again.
"Let me see," she said.
She eased the coat from Elphaba’s shoulders and peeled the shirt away from her back piece by piece, careful not to drag fabric across torn skin, careful above all not to let her face betray anything it had not been expressly permitted to betray.
The lamplight was unsparing.
The laceration ran diagonally from the left shoulder blade downward across the back, deep and uneven, its edges ragged and darkened with grit, the kind of wound made by something heavy and irregular moving at force. It had bled considerably. Around it, smaller cuts and gouges, a burn along the left flank, the skin stripped raw across the backs of both arms from elbow to wrist where she had gone through something at speed and used her arms to take the impact. Three lacerations on the right forearm. A bruise at the outside of the left elbow, already spreading dark.
"You need stitches," Glinda said.
"The spellwork will close it."
"Elphie." The name escaped her before she decided to use it—the old name, the one that had been sitting unused at the back of her throat for three years apparently waiting for exactly this moment. "This needs more than—"
"It needs to be clean." Elphaba’s voice was flat. She had already run through the alternatives. "The magic won't hold over debris. I need it clean and I need someone with a proper angle and steady hands." She looked at her steadily. "I would not be here if there were another option."
Glinda held her gaze a moment longer, as though something might yet be won or refused in the looking.
Then she guided Elphaba to the vanity and turned the chair so she could sit astride it, facing its carved back, with her injured side bared to the room and her face reflected in the glass. Glinda took her place behind her. In the mirror, they could watch one another without the mercy of pretending not to.
"I am going to be careful," Glinda said.
"I know you are," Elphaba said, and leaned forward into the chair, bracing her forearms along the top rail.
Glinda fetched a clean cloth, dipped it in the salve Elphaba had earlier produced from her coat, and began methodically cleaning the wounds.
She talked, because Elphaba needed something to press against and because silence in this particular configuration would have been unbearable.
"I have an engagement next week," she said, working slowly along the upper edge of the burns, "which I am dreading comprehensively. The Wizard is hosting a reception and Morrible has written me a speech—she does that herself now, did you know? The speech uses the phrase Oz united in purpose no fewer than seven times, which I find I cannot say with a straight face after the fourth repetition, and I have to find a way to deliver it convincingly in front of forty people without Morrible noticing that I am paraphrasing her out of embarrassment by the fifth."
She moved inward, toward the center of the injury, where the skin had been most savaged, and went even more gently there. Beneath her hands, Elphaba’s breath altered—a long, slow release, as if the body had at last been given permission to admit what had been done to it.
"I have also," Glinda continued, "been invited to open the new wing of the Academy of Arts, which is ironic given that the Wizard has spent the last two years defunding the provincial arts programs. Morrible has selected my dress for the occasion. It is very glittery. I have made my peace with it."
"You have made your peace," Elphaba said, a flicker of amusement in her eyes, "with a glittery dress."
"I have made my peace with a great many things," Glinda said. "It is a skill I have developed."
At the deepest part of the laceration, Elphaba’s hands tightened on the carved rail until the tendons rose sharp beneath the skin. She did not make a sound. She held herself rigid through it, then let the tension go by degrees, as though even pain must be disciplined before it was permitted to leave her. Glinda did not pause and did not comment. Only once, when the strain in Elphaba’s shoulders became too plain to ignore, she set her free hand briefly against the slope of one shoulder and left it there for a moment before returning to her work.
At last the wound was clean.
Elphaba closed her eyes. When she opened them again there was a faint luminescence along her fingers, steady and green, and she reached back and held one hand near the wound without touching it, and Glinda watched as the laceration's ragged edges drew slowly together. It was not graceful magic. It was labor. Minutes passed that way, with Elphaba’s mouth gone thin from concentration and her shoulders fixed in unnatural stillness.
When it was finished, she let out a breath.
Her hands fell away. The light faded from them at once, and she sat with her eyes closed for a moment.
"Hold still," Glinda said softly.
She bound the wound across Elphaba’s back first, tearing one of her own soft white tops into strips and winding them with deliberate care, firm enough to secure them, gentle enough not to jar what magic had only just managed to mend. Then she dressed the other injuries in turn: the raw skin along both forearms, the smaller cuts, the bruised elbow, all the scattered evidence of impact.
When she had finished, she leaned forward and pressed her mouth, light as breath, to the uninjured curve of Elphaba’s shoulder.
"Come and lie down," Glinda said.
She helped Elphaba to the bed.
Elphaba lowered herself onto her stomach without protest, which told Glinda more about her condition than anything she might have said. Glinda drew the coverlet over her legs, leaving the bandaged breadth of her back uncovered, and stood looking at her for a moment: the black hair loose across the pillow, the line of her profile, the slow and unconflicted work of her breathing.
"Come to bed," Elphaba said. Her voice was rough with exhaustion.
"I don't want to jostle the wound."
"The wound is closed."
"The wound is fresh." Glinda moved the chair close to the bed and sat.
"I am sorry," Elphaba said, after a moment. "For all of it. It was not supposed to go down like this. I am sorry for the years." She drew a breath. "I told myself it was safer for you."
"It was," Glinda said. "I missed you."
"I missed you too."
Glinda looked at her in the low light, and felt the honesty of that land somewhere it was going to stay. After a moment Elphaba shifted, carefully, and let one hand fall over the edge of the mattress, palm turned upward in a gesture so simple it was almost unbearable.
Glinda went to her at once.
She sank to the floor beside the bed and took the offered hand in both of hers, then folded herself against the mattress, her head resting on her arms only a little distance from Elphaba’s face.
Elphaba lifted their joined hands and pressed her mouth to Glinda’s knuckles.
Glinda turned her hand and did the same to hers.
"I kept your books," she murmured after a while. "The ones Nessa did not take. I have read most of them. Which I think you ought to appreciate, because it required a very distinguished effort on my part."
"The political theory?" Elphaba asked, eyes closed.
"Every word." Glinda paused. "It was punishing."
A sound escaped Elphaba then, too tired to be properly called laughter, but near enough to it that Glinda felt her own mouth soften.
"Mm," Elphaba said, already half asleep.
Her fingers loosened gradually around Glinda’s, though they never quite let go.
A little later, her breathing deepened.
———
The pain arrived before consciousness did, as though the body had been awake for some time already and was merely waiting, with a certain stern impatience, for the mind to catch up.
Elphaba lay still and took stock.
The laceration across her back had sealed, though not without complaint; there was a deep, dragging pull from shoulder to flank each time she breathed too fully. Her forearms burned beneath the bandages Glinda had wrapped with far more competence than she would ever admit to possessing. The knee was worse than she had allowed for the night before.
None of it was unmanageable. That was not the same as slight.
She kept her face turned into the pillow a moment longer, listening.
No movement in the apartment. Beside her, the sheets were cool. On the pillow lay a folded note.
Elphie,
I have obligations this morning I cannot set aside without exciting exactly the kind of curiosity neither of us requires. I shall be back before the afternoon is out.
There is food in the kitchen. Kindly do not behave as though eating were a concession to weakness.
The curtains are to remain closed, and you are under no circumstances to step onto the balcony.
Remain alive, indoors, and preferably in bed until I return.
Yours,
G.
Elphaba read it twice.
The ache in her back altered, not lessened, but translated briefly into something more inconvenient. She set the note down with more care than paper warranted.
Getting upright was ugly. She sat on the edge of the bed while the room steadied around her, one hand braced against the mattress, jaw set against the wash of pain that came with motion.
She found bread, cheese, late pears, a pot of honey, and tea already measured out beside the kettle. She ate standing at first, because sitting required too much concession from the knee, then sat anyway when the room informed her that stubbornness was not the same thing as balance.
The depot returned to her in pieces, as these things did.
A low warehouse at the eastern rail line, unmarked and guarded beyond what its exterior merited. Census ledgers, transfer orders, holding inventories: the paper skeleton of the policy everyone in power preferred to speak of as regrettable necessity rather than what it was. Cages entered as temporary housing. Seizures entered as reclassification. Names flattened into transport numbers. The resistance had been after those records for months, because proof mattered, because memory in Oz was always under active assault, because if they could not stop the machinery they could at least wrench open its casing and make the public look at the gears.
They had gone in fast and quiet. Too quiet, perhaps. The night watch had been light in exactly the way traps were light. A door had given too easily. One corridor had stood empty when it should not have been. Then the first shouted order, the answering shot, the abrupt white fracture of sound and fire.
The Gale Force had known.
She could feel the mathematics of the failure assembling themselves behind her eyes with their usual pitiless speed. Who had known the target? Who had known the night? Who had known both? Three names surfaced at once, none of them comfortable. Two structural weaknesses besides: one courier route too often reused, one habit of telling people the piece of the plan they asked for instead of the piece they needed. Carelessness dressed as trust. Trust made vulnerable by desperation.
A mole, then. Or something near enough not to matter by any humane distinction.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and let the problem run its circuit until it struck the obvious barrier: she could do nothing with it from here. She was hidden in the kitchen of the public face of the regime. She had no secure line to anyone she trusted. Her body, having served her through the night by sheer resentment, had plainly declined to offer further heroics before tea.
She stood at the depot again, for one ugly instant more vivid than the kitchen before her. Smoke. Splintered wood. The taste of lime and soot in the back of her throat. Her own blood slick in her back. The world narrowing and pulsing at the edges as she dragged herself clear of a beam and understood, with cold precision, that she had perhaps misjudged how much damage a body could sustain before it became another logistical problem for one’s enemies.
And in that narrowing, half-conscious dark, she had thought only of Glinda.
Not strategy. Not consequence. Not prudence, nor the years she had spent cultivating distance with all the grim devotion of a maunt. Not the palace. Not the watchers. Not the absurdity of arriving half-conscious at the door of the woman the city had dressed in goodness and placed beside its tyrant like a jeweled candle.
Glinda.
She had wanted, with a simplicity almost violent in its force, to lay her head down somewhere Glinda’s hand might find it. To hear her voice sharpen in alarm and then soften against her will. To be known by someone clever enough to see the whole ruin and still say come inside.
For three years Elphaba had made an ethics of deprivation. It had been safer for Glinda. It had been strategically sound. It had been, above all, easier than admitting what absence became when it was prolonged past the point of nobility and into self-punishment.
Last night, flying west over the city with blood soaking cold into her coat, the decision had not felt difficult at all.
She had missed her too much.
There were truths one reached not through wisdom but through pain severe enough to strip away vanity. This appeared to be one of them.
She took one of the books from Glinda’s shelves almost without looking, drawn less by the title than by the sight of her own cramped hand in the margins. She carried it to the sofa in the sitting room and lowered herself onto it with elaborate caution, stretching the injured leg out before her.
The apartment was dim with curtains drawn against the morning, the light filtered into a pink hush. There were signs of Glinda everywhere: a brush left carelessly on a side table; a shawl the color of shell-pink folded over the arm of a chair; a bowl of pale flowers beginning already to turn at the edges; the particular ruthless order of someone whose life was managed publicly and therefore insisted on managing some corner of it back.
In the book, nineteen-year-old Elphaba had annotated a passage on obedience with the words cowardice with better tailoring. Glinda had underlined the line later, in a different ink, and written beneath it: You are insufferable when correct.
Elphaba looked at the note for longer than the joke deserved.
The room softened. The page blurred. Exhaustion came over her like a tide taking possession of ground it had been patient with for some time. She let the book rest open on her chest and drifted.
She woke again to the sound of a cupboard door closing softly, then the small chime of porcelain meeting wood.
For one blurred instant she did not know where she was. Then the room arranged itself around her: the low light of evening caught behind curtains, the sofa beneath her, one of her old books face down on the cushion by her hip, the taste of exhausted sleep still bitter at the back of her mouth.
The better part of the day gone, then.
She pushed herself up too quickly and had to stop halfway, her breath held against the pull in her back. By the time she was upright, Glinda was already in the doorway with a tray balanced on one hand and disapproval prepared in the set of her mouth.
"You look dreadful," Glinda said.
"I was asleep."
"Yes. Improperly. At an angle that would have ruined a lesser woman."
"I am devastated for the lesser women of Oz."
Glinda set the tray down on the low table between them. Tea, already poured. A small glass of water. Two white tablets beside it. The domestic neatness of it was almost offensive.
"You have spent most of the afternoon unconscious," Glinda said. "I am choosing to interpret that as recovery."
Elphaba reached for the tea. "Your optimism remains one of your more irrational qualities."
"My optimism," Glinda said, handing her the tablets, "is the only reason you are being offered medicine rather than bullied into taking it."
Elphaba looked at the pills, then at Glinda.
Glinda’s brows lifted, so she swallowed them.
The tea was hot and strong and very nearly good. Glinda watched until she had taken several proper mouthfuls.
Only when Elphaba had set the cup down did Glinda sit.
Not opposite her, but a little to one side, angled toward the sofa. Less formal. More dangerous. She had changed out of whatever costume the day had demanded, but traces of it remained: her hair was still arranged, there was powder at her throat, the lacquer of carefulness not yet entirely removed.
"I saw Fiyero today," she said.
The name entered the room like a knife slid under a door.
Elphaba did not move at first. Then she reached again for the cup, not because she wanted the tea but because her hands required employment.
"Did you," she said.
Glinda watched her over the rim of her own cup. "He came here this morning, while you were asleep and before I left."
That made Elphaba look up.
Glinda went on without embellishment, which was how Elphaba knew it mattered.
"He was near the depot last night. Not close enough to stop anything. But close enough to see the explosion, and close enough to see you leave."
Elphaba felt something harden and loosen at once inside her. "How convenient."
"It was not convenient," Glinda said quietly. "He was shaken."
Elphaba looked away.
In memory the depot came back all at once—the impossible brightness of the blast, the jolt through bone, the world knocking sideways. She had not seen Fiyero. She had thought only of flight, of surviving long enough to reach the city, to reach Glinda.
"He told me what he saw," Glinda said. "That you took the worst of it. That you were barely conscious by the time the broom lifted you up. That he thought—"
She stopped.
Elphaba’s mouth had gone dry. "Thought what?"
Glinda’s gaze did not leave her face. "That you were going to die before you got clear."
The room was very quiet after that.
Elphaba stared into her tea as though something might be written there that was not already written in the shape of her own body.
"And he came to tell you," she said at last.
"Yes."
"Why?"
Glinda’s fingers tightened once around her cup, then relaxed. "Because he was afraid. Because I would understand."
She paused, recalibrated, and then, with a deliberateness that made the next words feel chosen at cost, said, "Because whatever Oz believes about us, he knows I am not the person he would come to in distress if it were me he was in love with."
Elphaba went still.
Glinda set her cup down with exquisite care.
"Fiyero and I are not together. Not in any real sense. We have not been for a long time."
Elphaba looked at her and said nothing, which was perhaps the only possible answer.
Glinda continued, though her voice had lost some of its polish now.
"It became useful," she said. "That is the ugly truth of it. Convenient for appearances. Convenient for him, moving where he moves. Convenient for me, standing where I stand. A prince and a good witch are legible to people. They calm crowds. They reassure donors. They provide exactly the sort of harmless narrative old men in offices like to place beside uglier machinery." Her mouth curved, but there was nothing soft in it. "We discovered we could be fond of one another in public without making promises in private."
Elphaba’s thoughts refused to order themselves.
Fiyero, worried enough to come here. Fiyero, who had seen her broken and airborne and thought death close behind her. Fiyero, not with Glinda—not really, not in the way the papers had been so eager to describe. The neat edifice she had refused herself the luxury of examining for three years shifted all at once, and what lay beneath it was not clarity but more feeling than she had any discipline for.
She had spent years not thinking of him except in the abstract, because the abstract was survivable. Fiyero as memory. Fiyero as one more thing folded away under the larger, sharper fact of Glinda’s absence.
Now here he was, abruptly human again. Concerned. Looking for her.
Too much.
She became aware that Glinda was watching her with that intolerably precise attention she reserved for moments when performance fell away and the person beneath it became visible against their will.
"You needn’t look as though I’ve struck you," Glinda said, and the line was airy enough to be kind if one did not listen too closely.
Elphaba set the cup down before she dropped it. "And what am I meant to do with this information?"
"Nothing."
Elphaba looked at her, then toward the curtained window. "Does he know I am here?"
"No."
"You are certain?"
"Yes."
That answer came with enough steel to satisfy her for the moment.
Glinda rose then, not because the conversation was over but because sitting still through it had become impossible. She lit and adjusted a lamp that did not need adjusting, then stood with one hand resting against the carved back of the chair opposite the sofa where Elphaba sat.
Elphaba closed her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them, Glinda was looking at her, and the expression on her face was not one she wore in public. It was too bare in its intelligence, too stripped of charm. There was jealousy in it perhaps, but not the petty sort; something sadder and sharper. Not do you love him. Something more humiliating: what part of you goes where I cannot follow.
Elphaba did not know how to answer a question Glinda had not asked.
She said, with more dryness than conviction, "I had not realized my injuries required a full romantic census."
Glinda’s mouth twitched despite herself. "Don’t be vulgar. I am being exquisitely restrained."
After a moment Glinda came back to the sofa and sat. "He asked if I had heard from you."
"And?"
"And I said no." Her eyes lifted to Elphaba’s face.
Glinda glanced down at the loosened wrapping on one of Elphaba’s forearms. "Your bandage has slipped."
"It can wait."
"No."
"Glinda—"
"No," Glinda said again, but softly. "Give me your arm."
Elphaba held it out.
Glinda unwound the linen with slow, competent fingers. The abrasions beneath were angry still, the skin raw along the length of the forearm where splintered wood and stone had flayed it. She gathered fresh bandages she had evidently bought that day, a clean cloth, and the same bottle Elphaba had handed her the night before. She cleaned Elphaba’s forearm in silence, her face bent to the work, her hair falling slightly forward. Elphaba could feel the care in her hands and hated, suddenly and with no logic at all, the thought of Fiyero carrying concern to this room only hours before.
Glinda tied off the fresh bandage and did not let go.
Their eyes met.
"There," she said. "One catastrophe at a time."
Elphaba looked at her hand where it still rested lightly around her wrist.
"You wanted me to know," she said.
"Yes."
"Why?"
Glinda’s expression altered. The answer, when it came, was stripped clean of rhetoric.
"Because you came back to me bleeding," she said. "And I found that I could bear a great many absurdities from the world, but not that one. Not while you were in my bed, and not while I was still being mistaken for a woman in love with someone else."
The room seemed to narrow.
Elphaba did not pull her arm away. She also did not trust herself to speak.
So Glinda released her wrist, gathered the used bandages onto the tray, and turned slightly aside as though she had not just driven a blade between them and named it honesty.
Elphaba sat very still on the sofa, her body a catalog of pain.
Fiyero, out in the world and searching for her. Glinda not his. Glinda telling her so.
And beneath that, worse: the unmistakable knowledge that some part of her had been waiting to hear precisely this, and had nothing prepared against it.
Outside the curtains, the city had gone from gold to blue-black. When Elphaba glanced at Glinda, she saw that some of the rawness had been put away again, but not all of it. She thought, not for the first time, that Glinda’s composure was less like a mask than a series of carefully fitted doors. Tonight too many of them had been left open.
"It does not have to remain like this," Glinda said.
Elphaba leaned back against the sofa and closed her fingers around the cooling teacup, though she did not drink from it. "Like what?"
"Like flight. Like blood and safehouses and half-healed wounds."
Elphaba looked at her.
Glinda held her gaze with a steadiness too deliberate to be casual. "There may be a way back."
The words did not strike as surprise. Only as inevitability. Elphaba had felt them approaching ever since Glinda said Fiyero’s name.
"A way back to what—your charitable openings and smiling ministers?" Elphaba asked.
"To some protection. To rooms where what is done can at least be influenced before it is carried out."
"The Wizard’s rooms."
"Yes."
The single syllable sat between them like a drawn blade. Glinda did not soften it.
"I know what you think of him," she said. "Spare me the recital. I know what he is. I know what he has built. I know precisely how much of it depends on spectacle, and fear, and other people doing his dirtiest work while he keeps his gloves clean."
"And yet."
"And yet," Glinda said, with a small hard tilt of her chin, "he is not immune to management."
Elphaba looked away.
For a moment she saw again the depot roofline under smoke, the blast opening the night like a fist. Management. A charming word. The sort people used when they wished to make proximity to corruption sound administrative rather than intimate.
Glinda read the turn of her silence correctly.
"I am not asking you to trust him," she said. "I am asking you to consider whether there are forms of survival more useful than martyrdom."
Elphaba let out a breath through her nose. "You do know how to make surrender sound almost respectable."
"Do not," Glinda said softly, and because her voice had gone soft Elphaba looked back at her at once. "Do not call it surrender before I have even finished speaking."
There was no anger in it yet. Only strain, and something underneath strain that Elphaba knew too well to mistake: fear forced into careful syntax.
So she said, more quietly, "Then finish."
Glinda’s shoulders eased by the smallest degree. She took that as permission and went on.
"You have something he wants," she said. "Not only the Grimmerie, though that is reason enough for half the machinery of Oz to turn itself inside out. You also have the quality tyrants always covet and cannot manufacture: legitimacy. He made a villain of you because he could not make you an ally. But narratives change. They are made to change."
"Elaborate," Elphaba said, because if she did not make this sound like interrogation it would sound too much like listening.
Glinda’s mouth twitched, without pleasure. She knew exactly what she was being permitted.
"If you came back under terms," she said, "if there were some controlled appearance, some story of… disagreement resolved, misunderstanding corrected, talents returned to the service of Oz—"
Elphaba laughed once. It was a small exhausted sound, but sharp enough to cut.
Glinda pressed on anyway. "—then he could present it as magnanimity. He likes magnanimity. He likes the posture of wounded forgiveness. I could help shape the terms. Morrible could be circumvented if the approach were made through the right channels."
"No."
Glinda stopped.
It was not the word itself that stopped her so much as the tone: not loud, not harsh, but absolute.
"Elphaba."
"No." She set the cup down before the heat of it burned through her skin.
Glinda’s face did not harden, but it narrowed in concentration, every bright social instinct she possessed drawing into a colder point. "You haven’t even heard the whole proposal."
"I have heard enough."
"Because the mere thought offends your sense of purity?"
Elphaba’s head came up at that. "No. Because I know what the bargain is."
"Then tell me."
The words came harder now, not yet a quarrel but close enough that one could see its outline waiting in the wings.
"He wants the Grimmerie," Elphaba said. "He wants my hands on it and my will bent neatly alongside them. He wants to exhibit me as proof that resistance is adolescent, that power was right all along, that the only sensible end to dissent is incorporation." She leaned back, wincing despite herself at the pull along her ribs, and went on with quieter force. "He does not want peace, Glinda. He wants obedience with better staging."
Glinda held very still.
Elphaba saw the words land and hated that she had said them so well. Hated, too, that some part of her had wanted to say them to precisely this woman, in precisely this room, where truth could do the most damage.
But when Glinda spoke, there was no answering cruelty in her.
"I know," she said.
That changed the shape of everything.
Elphaba had been braced for defense, for the bright polished armor Glinda used when she felt judged and meant to survive it. Instead there was only that: I know.
Glinda looked at her hands, then lifted her gaze again. "Do you think I do not understand what he would ask of you? I do. Better than I want to." A pause. "I also know what the world is doing to you while you refuse him."
Elphaba said nothing.
"I am not blind," Glinda went on. "You arrived here with soot in the seams of your skin and your coat half soaked through, and even then you were still calculating whether you had the right to ask me for help. Do not ask me to witness that and then speak as though I am discussing politics. I am discussing you."
Something low and unsteady moved under Elphaba’s breastbone.
Glinda’s voice had gone very even now. "You think I am proposing compromise because I have grown accustomed to compromise. That may be true. But I am proposing it because I love you, and loving you has made a coward of me."
Elphaba closed her eyes.
Glinda had always been capable of saying the worst thing plainly when it no longer served her to pretend otherwise.
When she opened her eyes again, Glinda had not moved. Her expression was not pleading. That was not her style. But there was nothing ornamental in it either.
"I understand why you’re offering it," Elphaba said.
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"Then try not to answer as though I have insulted your principles rather than panicked over your blood loss."
That drew a breath from Elphaba that might, under kinder circumstances, have become a laugh. It died somewhere on the way out.
"I am not refusing because I doubt your motives," she said. "I’m refusing because your motives are the only thing that makes it difficult."
Glinda’s mouth parted slightly. Then closed again.
Elphaba went on before she could stop herself, because stopping had never been her strongest faculty. "If you suggested this out of ambition, or vanity, or because you had become so comfortable among them that you mistook proximity for power, I could dismiss it easily." Her voice dropped. "It is harder to dismiss love when it arrives wearing bad political judgment."
For one suspended moment Glinda only stared at her.
Then, a short incredulous sound escaped her. "Bad political judgment."
"It is not my finest phrasing."
"No," Glinda said faintly. "It is, however, very much yours."
And because the line had cracked something in the tension rather than deepened it, because they were too tired and too frightened of one another to push this all the way into cruelty, the near-argument faltered there, and changed its nature.
Glinda leaned back and rubbed two fingers against her temple, careful not to disturb her hair. "For the record," she said, with the brittle grace of someone restoring a room after a small explosion, "I do not think proximity is power. I think proximity is occasionally access, and access is occasionally leverage, and leverage is sometimes all that stands between a person and a Southstairs cell."
"I know. I have always known you were clever."
"That is not the same as understanding me."
"No," Elphaba said. "It isn’t."
Glinda looked at her a long time. Then she rose, and the conversation—if not ended—was at least set down gently before it shattered.
"You need food," she said.
Elphaba blinked once. "That is an abrupt rhetorical turn."
"It is dinner," Glinda said, moving toward the kitchen with more briskness than the room required. "You may regard it as a metaphysical argument if that helps."
From the sitting room Elphaba could hear cupboards opening, the clink of ceramic, the low hiss as the stove was lit. Familiar domestic sounds, though she had not known them in this apartment until today. The intimacy of them was almost more destabilizing than the discussion they had just had. It was one thing to be offered a compromise by the Good Witch of Oz. Another altogether to hear Glinda muttering at a pot under her breath because the flame was too high.
After a moment Elphaba levered herself up from the sofa and made her slow way to the doorway.
Glinda turned at once. "Why are you standing?"
"Because I dislike being spoken to from another room."
"You also dislike rest, kindness, ointment, authority, and most forms of joy. Sit down."
Elphaba lowered herself into one of the kitchen’s two chairs.
Glinda was slicing late fennel with alarming efficiency. Her sleeves were rolled back from her wrists. The diamonds at her ears had been removed; they lay beside the fruit bowl like abandoned ice.
"What is that?" Elphaba asked.
"Dinner." Glinda did not look up. "A soup. Bread. Cheese. Something green, if only to preserve the illusion that I am not entirely decadent." A beat. "Unless you have developed stronger opinions on celery in the last three years."
"I have not changed that fundamentally."
"Good. I should have disliked meeting a stranger."
Glinda set a pot to simmer and then, without turning, said, "Stay."
Elphaba looked at her back. "For dinner?"
"For a few nights."
The knife stopped. Then resumed, slower.
"I mean it," Glinda said. "You should not be moving through the city like this. Your back needs watching. Your arms will need redressing tomorrow. The knee is worse than you pretend." She transferred the cut fennel to the pot with sharp economical motions. "And if you attempt to fly before your strength is back, I shall take it as a personal insult."
Elphaba folded her hands on the table.
The practical case was unimpeachable, which irritated her. More irritating still was the quieter truth beneath it: she did not want to leave. The fact of Glinda moving a few feet away in her own unguarded shape had already begun to make its claim on her.
A claim she had no intention of naming.
"There are things I need to do," she said.
"Yes," Glinda replied, reaching for the salt. "And you will do them with properly healed arms rather than out of sheer melodrama."
"There may be fallout from the depot."
"There will be fallout from the depot," Glinda said. "There will still be fallout in three days. Possibly more elegantly distributed by then."
Elphaba smiled into the table. "You make delay sound like a form of strategy."
"Delay is a form of strategy. One of the better ones, when employed by people who wish to remain alive."
She brought two bowls to the table, then hesitated, reading something in Elphaba’s face.
This time when she spoke, the wit was gone from her voice. "Stay," she said again. "A little longer. Let me have that much."
Elphaba looked at her and knew she had already folded.
A few nights, then. In these rooms. Within reach of this woman’s voice, and hands, and dangerous practical hope.
It was, by any rigorous standard, a very poor idea.
"All right," Elphaba said.
Something changed in Glinda's face—not quite relief, not quite triumph, nothing so crude as either. Rather the subtle undoing of a tension held so long it had started to resemble character.
"Good," she said, and had to clear her throat before she could make the word properly casual. "That is sensible for once."
"I wouldn’t overstate the rarity."
She sat opposite Elphaba and pushed one of the bowls toward her. The soup smelled of fennel and cream and pepper and something herbal Elphaba could not immediately name. Hunger, which had been skulking at the edges of the evening, advanced all at once.
For a while they ate without speaking much.
The spoon was warm in Elphaba’s hand. The bread tore softly. Glinda made small practical remarks about when the bandages would need changing, where the extra blankets were, which floorboard near the bedroom door creaked and ought to be avoided if one intended secrecy. The ordinariness of it settled over the room like a spell.
Glinda gathered the dishes. Elphaba watched her cross the kitchen, watched the line of her body bend to the sink, watched the private woman reassert herself over the public one with each small unobserved gesture.
A few nights, Elphaba thought.
Long enough to become a problem.
Long enough, perhaps, to remember too much of what comfort felt like in Glinda’s hands.
When Glinda turned back from the counter, drying her fingers on a cloth, she found Elphaba still watching her.
Neither of them looked away.
"Come," Glinda said at last, very gently now. "Before you fall asleep in the chair and force me to prove I can still drag you bodily to bed."
Elphaba rose, slower than dignity preferred.
Glinda moved to her side without making a show of helping, which was somehow more intimate than help would have been. Together they crossed the lamp-warmed room toward the bedroom, the curtains shut tight against the city, the dishes cooling in the kitchen, the night ahead of them not healed, not solved, only briefly and perilously kind.