fake plastic love

by queenofmarigolds

Chapter 2: two.

Summary:

more pretending. the wedding comes. elphaba comes back.

Notes:

finishing up this fic's terribly extended journey in the middle of the workday with an 18k chapter starting with masturbation and ending with gelphie smut, as all things should. i hope you like it please let me know! and thank you to all those who helped <3 could not have saved the first 10k of this fic from a premature burial without you. esp flabbergasties for the bubble bellini 🫧

Glinda’s felt itchy all day. Morrible had talked nonstop on the train ride back to the Palace, voice sharp and scoldifying, but Glinda had looked out the window and stirred peanuts around in a tiny bowl and hadn’t thought too much about what she’d been saying, in truth. And then there had been the Wizard, and Morrible snapping at Fiyero for not parading his men through the Emerald City more often as some sort of statement.

She takes dinner alone. “A headache,” she tells Fiyero, and he tuts sympathetically but does nothing more.

“Go and lie down,” he tells her, and smooths a hand over the shoulder of her dress before offering to send a plate of food up to her apartment. Back at school Glinda had headaches sometimes, they came on with stress or too much sunlight. Elphie, good as she was, would press a soothing hand to her forehead and would tuck her into bed, ceasing her studying early so that the bright fluorescent lamplight wouldn’t bother her eyes.

But there’s something upset in her, something askew and lopsidified. Elphaba had always had that effect, ever since the very beginning, cracking windows and floating benches and ruining everything that had been laid out so delicately without a care in the world. Irritating, bizarre, not at all right!

She makes it back to her apartment and slips off her shoes, barefoot on cold cold stone, and she feels it. She eats her dinner, every last bite and an extra roll of bread, and she feels it. She takes a bath and dunks her head under, bringing a hand up to parse through the softness of her hair underwater the way she used to when she was a little girl, and she feels it.

It’s quite annoying. Glinda is not really the type of person to live this way, all unmoored and vibrating on a razor’s edge. Maybe it isn’t even a headache, she thinks as she pads from the bathroom into her bedroom and leaves the lights firmly off, maybe it’s just that itching spread further. She’d been hungry, tired, thirsty, achy, all sorts of things and nothing quite feels satisfying enough.

Glinda lets a sigh loose from her diaphragm. It’s something Momsie had shown her to do years ago, a way to get all the air in and then back out again. “Get the bad thoughts away, shoo!” she’d said, and Glinda— Galinda then— had giggled and waved her hands frantically, and it had never quite gotten rid of the fears but, oddly enough, pretending for Momsie had made her feel a little braver.

But whatever bad thoughts she has today aren't showing themselves. It’s almost worse that way, she thinks. How is she meant to know what to be afraid of if there’s nothing strictly wrong, nothing but a sickly malaise and a looming sense of discontent? Nothing had gone terribly astray. It wasn’t the best event she’d ever hosted, that was for sure, but it was far from disastrous. Who would even remember it in a few days?

Still, though.

Her book is sprawled out on her bed and she flushes slightly; sometimes she has the creeping sensation that Fiyero is watching her, other times it’s Morrible, even when it’s strictly impossible. Like he’s here right now and watching her watch the book, hearing her think about the scene she’d dog eared to save for later. The one where the man had gone down on his knees for his girl, where he’d murmured worship into her thighs until she’d nearly cried when he’d put his mouth on her. There it is now, looking dusty yellow around the edges, and Glinda feels a sudden rush low in her hips.

Fiyero had offered to do this for her once or twice, a long time ago now. He’d done it before, he’d always gotten good results, he quite liked it, dear. But Glinda had blushed and demurred and reoriented him, a slim hand to the crotch of his pants until he’d been stiff and had forgotten all about it. It’s just that it seems rather unappealing, the thought of something slimy and wet between her thighs; how much good could it bring, anyway?

Glinda slips between two of her blankets, she does not get under the sheets. The one below her is plush and the one above her is silky, so she finds herself stuck between textures, toes brushing up into something so soft she can hardly tell it’s there at all.

It’s been maybe a month since she’s done this, she thinks as she slips a hand down her body to rest on the jut of her hipbone, maybe longer. She and Fiyero don’t… do it often, though she doesn’t tell this to anyone, not even Shenshen and Pfannee. It’s just that they’re both so busy. It’s just that their jobs are rather demanderating, that Fiyero often comes home smelling of sweat and salty earth and Glinda doesn’t want it to ruin her nightclothes. But when they do it’s nice, soft and warm and comforting to have his weight on top of her.

She doesn’t think about this, not now. The book lays beside her so she can picture it better, though she doesn’t open it to the correct page she knows what she’s picturing. A woman, not herself, up against the wall. Maybe a man, not Fiyero, leaning into her in utter admiration. Glinda quite likes to be admired.

There are a lot of levels, she’s found, to pretending about things. No one can see inside her head (although sometimes Morrible looks like she can), no one will ever know what she’s thought about here and now but something tells her to keep it on a certain line, to imagine something classic and good like a book cover, figures canoodling below deck on a ship or anything that would be boring enough for a mind reader, were they to exist, to yawn and skip over her head. Nothing like imagining the Wicked Witch, for instance.

She’s never been exactly good at touching herself, that is another thing. Not that it’s something to be good at! Oh, Glinda doesn’t mean it that way. It’s only that she loses it sometimes, she’s feeling something something something and then it sizzles away like water on a hot griddle— she’d made pancakes for Fiyero the other morning and a whole three of them had come out pancake-shaped! It’s only that it’s hard to keep everything in her mind all at once and she isn’t ever sure what she’s meant to be thinking about. This is just the way that Glinda is, the way she always has been— too much going on in one place.

One hand comes up to graze at her breast through her nightgown, through the sheer fabric. She shivers.

And so the other hand dips lower, lower still until it’s resting just above the space between her legs, until she raises her hips into it.

Elphaba had waved. The reminder of it comes butting in, jostling away all other images and sticking out like a sore thumb, a misplaced piece of some other puzzle. Elphaba, from across the sandy square, had looked right at her and Glinda had known it, had felt it in her neck like she’d slept on it badly. She’d lifted up her hand and she’d waved.

Did Elphaba still do her nails? Did she still wear those little gold rings on her fingers, only ever on her pinkies? Glinda had watched her put them on every morning, the first night at Shiz when she’d been dreaming of all the wonderfulocious extracurriculars she’d join, the weeks of loathing and the months of loving. And then, one morning, she’d woken up and Elphaba would never put the rings on in front of her ever again.

Glinda shifts her hips and, before she notices it, bucks into her hand. She hisses and pries her hips back down but the attraction has shot through her like a spark, desire like a current. She dips her fingers lower.

Lying on her back she can see the whole ceiling. She traces a finger through herself and finds it wet, the slightest bit. In the book the man had whispered something— what had it been? Something about need, about burning for somebody and the feeling of dying from want. Glinda holds these words close, rolls them around in her mouth like bits of candy, and slips her eyes closed.

Someone is saying this to her, in her imagination. Someone is burning for her, someone is calling her baby and it’s their hand and not hers between her legs. She traces up even higher and moves her hips again and it’s Fiyero, it’s the prince from the story, it’s…

Elphaba had looked so much smaller from that angle, across the plain, but there was a sturdiness to her arms and stomach and even the space of her legs that seemed new. Had she gotten stronger? Could she lift Glinda now? Back at school Galinda had bossed her around— go there, Elphie, put this on, good job. Would she still listen?

One time Fiyero had thrust into her from behind. Glinda feels a rush at her core, her stomach, and she flips over. Her arm is sandwiched between her body, the plushness of her stomach, and the book flattened on the bed. It stings at her wrist but there is a flush to her cheeks and she’s wetter now, there’s something that’s pooled in her hips and chest and she wants now, properly.

Elphie listening to her, slipping down the bed to touch Glinda where she wants her. Elphie with her tongue between Glinda’s legs, whispering into her skin. What would she call her, Glinda wonders desperately, and grinds down onto the tip of her own middle finger.

Maybe Elphaba would even boss her around. Would Glinda want that? Of course Elphie would have to listen to her first, would have to go where she said and had Elphaba ever done this before, had anyone ever touched her this way? She could make her feel so good, Glinda thinks with a flush of sureness, and her breath hitches where it’s pressed into the mattress. That plush blanket under her steams up with the heat of it. She is going to come, she is going to come very soon and it’s not Fiyero she’s thinking about, not him or any of the other hims she could choose from, no one from her romance novels and not even the hottest one, the one with the man who threw away his whole reputation for his lover.

She is thinking, instead, about Elphaba.

Oz, Oz. In the last few seconds Glinda jerks her head up, chin resting on the blanket, and she stares at the dark chestnut of her headboard. There is nothing there but a knot in the wood, a chip near the top. Elphie, she thinks to herself once, and then it is over.

Her nose itches and she brings up a hand to scratch it, the clean one. Her nails seem pearly and unreal in the moonlight. She flips over onto her back again and lifts the book once, high up in the air with both hands.

Probably she needs to investify in a new library.

---

It doesn’t change things, it doesn’t have to. Fiyero takes her out a few nights later, an evening dinner at one of the Emerald City’s most exclusive reservations, and she wears a positively gorgeous skin tight dress. They make the covers of all of the tabloids and gozzip columns and they’re in the Gazette too, Glinda’s hand pressed to his chest in one photo, a blurry image of the two of them through a restaurant window in the second.

Glinda the Good and Prince Fiyero— Is The Royal Wedding Off?

On Friday evening, our sparkly paragon of goodliness was spotted out with her princely fiance— or is he? You heard it here first: there may be trouble in paradise!

Glinda the Good and Prince Fiyero got dinner and drinks at the Three Queens Brasserie, a most gourmetified restaurant experience. Glinda was dressed in a stunnifying mint green gown, while Fiyero sported a sleek suit, but fans noticed one thing amiss when the couple posed for photos outside.

That’s right, dear readers! Glinda the Good’s engagement ring, the most copied and famous piece of jewelry this side of the Impassable Desert, was nowhere to be seen!

“Glinda and Fiyero have drifted apart behind the scenes,” an anonymous source at the Palace tells us. “Glinda is most distraughtified, of course, and wants nothing more than the wedding and marriage she’s been promised.”

Is there another woman? Is Prince Fiyero at fault, or is Glinda the Good more scandalocious than she seems? Our story continues on page six.

“Where in Oz are they finding these people,” Glinda scoffs, crumpling the gozzip page in one hand and leaving Pfannee to scramble after it. “I mean, really, ‘an anonymous source at the Palace?’ It sounds more like the falsified fictions of fanatical folks.”

“We can issue a cease and desist,” Pfannee says, hurrying along beside her. “It’s pure speculation, they can’t print any slanderating lies against you.”

“Oh, please,” Glinda huffs. “No, we won’t be doing anything of the sort.”

Pfannee and Shenshen exchange a glance. “It’s only… well, Glinda,” Shenshen says, and scrunches up her face. “Some people seem to be believing it.”

Glinda blinks. “Who would possibly believe such preposterociousness?”

“People would,” Shenshen murmurs.

“It might help if you just took another little outing,” Pfannee says cheerily. “With the ring this time. Not so hard!”

“But we just went on a date!” Glinda pouts, and resists the urge to stomp her foot. “And besides, I’m not entirely certain where it is.”

There is a brief and dreadful pause.

“Sorry,” Shenshen says, face fixed in an incredulous smile, “I must have misunderstood. I thought for a moment that you said you don’t know where your engagement ring is, but that’s utterly—”

“No, that’s right,” Glinda says, fluttering a hand. “Oh, who knows where one keeps one’s things nowadays? I’d misplace my head if it weren’t so insistently attached to my body.”

“But… but it’s your ring,” Pfannee replies, face as white as a sheet.

“So it is! You do have a good memory,” she hums, and reaches out to poke his nose with the tip of her finger. “Oz, fine, if I really have to— book us in for reservations at that wine bar, the one with the chairs that make me look tall. Or on second thought just reserve the place, I can’t bear listening to other people small talk. It gives me a rash.”

And this is how Glinda finds herself out for the evening again, eyes straining in the low candlelight. She does so love going out, of course she does! It’s just that she’s rather exhaustified by the long week— it may only be Monday, but regardless— and nothing on the menu looks the slightest bit appealifying. She sighs.

“Aw, come on,” Fiyero says, “it can’t be that bad to be stuck with me, can it?”

In truth Glinda’s almost forgotten he’s there. “Course it isn’t,” she says, and smiles waveringly. “Would you split the tilapia?”

He wrinkles his nose. “I was going to get steak, myself,” he says.

“Of course,” Glinda says, shaking her head to dispel the memories of meals shared with Elphaba in Shiz Proper, of ordering two plates and eating off of both equally. “So silly of me, of course you were.”

And there’s a little lapse, then. One thing Morrible had neglected to mention, something Glinda is kicking herself for not thinking of sooner, is that it is quite awkward to go on a date with the whole of the Emerald City press circuit lurking outside the windows, cameras stuck against the glass hoping to catch a glimmer of Glinda, a frown off Fiyero.

Glinda’s ordered a juicy thing, something aptly listed on the menu as a Bubble Bellini. And poor Fiyero, scouring the menu for a simple drink, sighs and resigns himself to a Glin and Tonic, which comes dusted in glitter. “I don’t understand the names,” he grumbles, but Glinda’s pretty sure he’s just frustrated there’s no Fiyero Fireball or Winkie Prince Whiskey. Back at Shiz, on the rare occasions she got Elphaba to drink, she turned into even more of a lightweight than Glinda herself. Elphie, bubbly as her cocktail, would get giggly and wide eyed, overeager and forgetting her own strength. Fiyero is also a handsome drinker, composed and royal about it. Two things can be true.

“Now, you aren’t allowed to make me laugh or anything like that,” Glinda announces, sipping from her glass, lips touching ice. “Because when I laugh too hard it makes my face wrinkle and I simply cannot afford another unflattering cover photo. Glinda the Good doesn’t get wrinkles.”

“Doesn’t she?” Fiyero asks slyly, “and what do you think would happen if Glinda the Good didn’t always get what she wanted?”

“She’d die,” Glinda says easily, and in essence it’s true— what greater horror than a stranger in her chambers, someone’s greasy hands on her glass, somebody in her space too loud, too brash, too too? “Besides, I don’t always get what I want. Not always.”

Fiyero chuckles, but Glinda’s not entirely sure she remembers which part was a joke. And the buzziness of the alcohol is making things feel familiar, it reminds her of school and long mindless days in the sun with wine and a headache and—

“Who were you with before?” Glinda says suddenly; blurts, really, she isn’t entirely sure why. “Before me, I mean?”

Fiyero makes that silly face he used to make, the one where his brow wrinkles and is grazed by that single curl of hair. “It’s a little late to get jealous now, don’t you think?”

He’s talking about the engagement, Glinda realizes, and huffs. “I’m not jealous,” she tells him, “I’m asking. I want to know.”

“And why is that?” he teases— he’s still teasing, it’s absurdly annoying! Maybe it wasn’t the right question to ask for what she wants him to say, maybe there’s another angle. Maybe Glinda’s truly terrible, not goodly like everyone says, not loved like Elphie always said. Maybe she wants him to confess something terrible, something scandalocious or a dark past, something that would let her come out unscathed, better, lovelier. A bit of a smudge, just something.

“Just,” she huffs indignantly, “tell me something you’ve never told anyone before.”

He opens his mouth once more and he’s going to joke, so Glinda stares at the clear liquid in his glass and bites out, “please.”

Fiyero is an interesting person. It took Glinda a few days to get it right, back at the start of things. At first he’d been a prince, a date, a boy! It was out on the grounds that she’d first noticed it, silly old Biq trailing along with them and Glinda’s stomach rumbling, dinner just a few feet ahead with Elphie waiting— oh, she had thought then, for a reason she can’t remember now, he’s just like me. And he was.

So now, in a moment like this, she likes to watch the veneer, the way it turns slippery. It’s silly that he wears it with her some of the time and takes it off around her, too; she’d tell him to just be honest all of the time only doesn’t she do just the same thing? It’s funny, on a date like this. Glinda’s wearing her ring again, she’s going to let all the cameras see it glinting on her way out.

“I loved a girl in the Vinkus,” he says slowly. “Before you, of course.”

“Of course,” Glinda tuts. The image of that blasted train platform flutters back, a poppy in Fiyero’s lapel; she shoves it away. The poppy that had been left in her bedroom has dried up by now.

“We grew up together. Family friends, that sort of thing; her father was a diplomat. She was my first kiss, actually,” he adds on, and flushes. Glinda squawks in delight.

“Fiyero Tigelaar! And here I was thinking you were a shameless playboy!”

“Not really,” he says. “Not then. And not much after then, either. You know.”

She does.

“So what happened? Between you and… and…?”

“Sarima,” he supplies, and she files it away somewhere nonspecific, a spot in her brain— Sarima. “I went off to school— the first one, before the Royal Vinkan Academy. And it wouldn’t have been politically advantageous.”

“How so,” Glinda asks, head rushing with the Bubble Bellini; what a delight, she should release a line of these! They’d pair nicely with the set of Glinda’s Goodliest Glasses, which have been such a success.

“The royals don’t marry for love,” Fiyero says, “it’s political.”

And Glinda doesn’t dispute it. She doesn’t ask about herself, none of those silly insecure questions. She loves Fiyero, and Fiyero loves her. It is different, and it always has been different.

“It was all very dramatic. I hated my own father for a bit, there. Decided to keep flunking out of school just to bother him. That first school was his alma mater, you know. Drove him up a wall that I wouldn’t do well.”

Glinda smiles, because he smiles, and he looks so familiar for a moment.

“So is that the worst thing you’ve done?” she asks him, leaning forward. Their knees brush and Glinda remembers kissing him at the Ozdust, the shadow of Elphie over by the staircase, the severity of the whole night, the whole thing. All moments feel very severe when you’re young, she supposes. Still, though— if she ended up back there right now, back at the Ozdust as she is today, she thinks it might be just as big.

But then again, well. Maybe she is still young.

“What, failing on purpose? Probably so,” he decides, and then the veneer comes back and he winks at her. “Good thing, too, or else I wouldn’t have met you.”

It’s all so silly.

“So you don’t regret it?” she asks, and he shakes his head, lip stuck out, smiling.

“Why? What’s your deepest secret, Glinda the Good? What do you regret?”

“Telling Pfannee that yellow ascot looked good on him, he needs to give it a rest once in a while,” Glinda says primly. “And going out with you tonight, that as well.”

The drink has only gotten more peachy the longer it sits, the ice is starting to melt and it all tastes a little saccharine. Glinda swallows a sip and, for good measure, a second one. Fiyero laughs, and she wonders if she really does know him a little better now. Does she? What does Elphaba know?

It is, all things considered, quite a nice night. If something is missing it’s easier to brush over these days; telling herself this makes it true. They leave their glasses on the table, someone will clean them up and Glinda won’t ever see their face, it’s something Elphaba would’ve wondered aloud about, making Glinda feel bad, making her overthink. She never could have gone with her, Glinda knows this. She just isn’t good enough.

And now maybe, Glinda thinks as Fiyero opens the door, as she ducks under his arm and offers the paparazzi a pretty little smile before hiding her face in his chest just like they’d planned, maybe, Fiyero is her best friend.

Is that the rightish thing for a fiance to be? She thinks so.

In the Emerald City, on that one short day before it had all gone wrong, she’d called Elphie her best friend, butterflies so high in her stomach she felt like she could exhale them. And Elphie had nodded, confirmation, and taken her hand. Two things, she reminds herself again, can be true.

“Fiyero! Give her a kiss!” someone shouts, and Glinda tightens her arm around his waist— firm, solid, still there.

---

Glinda walks him to his doorway. He does not invite her in and she doesn’t step any further, doesn’t want to be in his space. It’s a perfectly lovely apartment, very well decorated for a boy, but there’s something oppressive in the air sometimes. Glinda shudders.

“Fiyero?” she asks just before he goes inside, and he pauses. He looks a little less stiff than he does when he’s being his captain self, a little fluid with the space of the night.

“Hm?”

“You’re happy,” she says, and it comes out more of a demand than a question before she stammers, “right?”

Fiyero’s fluidity trickles away ever so slightly and Glinda, trying to grasp it, cannot. “I’ve told you,” he says with a sad smile, “I’m always—”

“We’re not a regular sort of couple, are we,” Glinda blurts before he can finish that horrible sentence again. “Most normal couples, they… well, they…”

Fiyero looks down at her, brow furrowed in earnestness, and Glinda feels far too scrutinized all of a sudden. “Do you want me to?”

No, Glinda almost says, and it might be true. In a storybook, in the scandalocious tales the kitchen staff whisper to each other whenever Glinda’s down there planning a meal with the head chef, these things go differently. A date that might end with her being lifted up and taken to bed, or a steamified exchange of kisses in the bathtub, on the balcony, up against the wall.

But she looks at Fiyero and sees only him. The faint stubble on his cheeks, the lines around his eyes that are rather new, the ones that hadn’t been there that first night at the Ozdust. His eyes are softer, though, and he’s looking at her like he already knows something she hasn't put to words.

And she finds that she can’t, quite suddenly. There’s something sticky in her throat and her bottom lip wavers ever so slightly before she shakes her head.

Blessedly, wonderfully, Fiyero’s face softens even more. “That’s alright,” he tells her, ever so quietly, and reaches out to touch the silvery fabric at her forearm.

“The other night,” Glinda says, voice thick and heady and permeating her throat enough to sting, “I thought of her. Of Elphaba.”

“Hm,” Fiyero hums again, and his face is cast in shadow so far above her but she can anticipate the expression well enough, she knows him well enough. “I know.”

“You think of her too,” Glinda says, and with a twitch at the corner of his eye Fiyero nods.

She hasn’t hugged him in a long time, she hasn’t been hugged. Sure, there are the children who worship Glinda the Good, the girls who grab at her with their sparkly gowns and the boys who give her little offerings, coins and scraps of moss and rock. When Fiyero moves forward it’s something else, a certain shuddering ache in her chest and a sob struggling to escape. Sometimes Glinda cries without tears, just the shaking gaspy breaths.

Here, in the hallway between their apartments, Fiyero takes her into his arms and holds her so close that she is breathing in his shirt rather than air. She can taste it, the same cleaner as is used on her own clothes but with something else woven in. She gulps it down.

“Oz, Fiyero,” she murmurs, lips catching on the fabric, “what are we going to do?”

And to this he has no answer.

---

The wedding comes. That’s how time works— eventually those things that are far off in the future are happening, just in front of you, and you can’t even buckle with the enormity of it. There it was, dancing on the edges of her calendar, until it was looming over her, dark and stiff and unmoving.

Momsie and Popsicle get in the weekend before, collide with Glinda the moment they stop off the train all dressed in buttery yellows and obscenely large hairpieces. Momsie, in truth, bursts straight into tears and Glinda has to hustle her away from prying eyes, dabbing a handkerchief to her appley cheeks.

“Our Galinda,” she murmurs, choking on a sob. “You’re all grown up, sweetling.”

“Glinda,” Glinda corrects as softly as she can manage, mind fluttering through the last time someone had called her by her name. “It’s Glinda now, Momsie.”

“Yes, of course,” Momsie says, and straightens her head. “Our dear, dear girl.”

It’s all a little too much to stomach. Glinda thinks about last night, the way she’d torn one of those hideodious posters of Elphie down from the front gate and where it is now, stuffed into her silverware drawer under the tray of fancy knives that she’s never used. She thinks of the way she’d balanced her ring on the edge of the sink drain, the way it would’ve been so easy to flush it all away. She thinks, blushing only slightly, of the wild fantasy she’d imagined to calm herself down.

With her hand between her legs again Glinda had been back at Shiz, with Elphie just beside her. They’d shared beds sometimes, pressing together as close as they could manage so that her chest would thrum warm for hours after the fact. It’s not a realistic fantasy, even— in this one Elphaba’s pressed to her back, and that isn't how it happened. In this one Elphaba kisses up her neck and bites at her earlobe, and her arm is a satisfying weight across Glinda’s hip.

“Elphie,” she’d murmured, and Elphaba had hummed and pressed her fingers right where Glinda needed them.

Or this is what she thinks of, at least. It wouldn’t happen this way.

“Shall we go?” she asks, chirpy and bright. “I booked us reservations for the most wonderfulocious brunch spot in the entire Emerald City— their griddle cakes are just to die for, I always say you haven't really lived until you’ve tried one.”

Glinda has, in fact, never said this. Popsicle smiles and claps her on the back hard enough that the wind almost goes out of her.

“Lead the way,” he says, and Glinda nods a little bit more eagerly than she means to.

The place is lovely and it comes equipped with a privatified room, specially done up for their little party of four. Momsie fits right in with her yellow getup, the walls are sunny and Glinda feels nearly out of place walking inside, especially when the hostess blushes so firmly it’s a marvel she’s even still standing.

“Hello,” Glinda says with a practiced smile, gliding forward across the hardwood. “We’ve got a reservation for four, I believe it should be under—”

“I… yes, I know,” the girl blurts, and reddens even further. “Right this way, Ms… I mean, your Goodliness.”

Fiyero’s already sitting at the table but he jumps to his feet when Popsicle pulls back the private curtain and lets Momsie pass through first. He is such a perfect gentleman it’s nearly choreographed— but then, Glinda thinks as she pulls the chair next to Fiyero back, isn’t that what being a man is? Isn’t that being a woman too, being her?

“And Mrs. Upland,” he’s saying, pressing a low kiss to Momsie’s hand, “I must say, I can see where Glinda gets her devastatingly good looks from.”

Glinda wants Elphaba so badly that she almost seizes up with it.

And Momsie giggles, loud and sharp. “Oh, what a charmer!” she gasps, and drums her fingers on Glinda’s shoulder. “You picked such a lovely one, dearest.”

Glinda looks up and Fiyero’s watching her already. There’s some tension in his jawline, a little tremor there, but he nods his head at her expectantly.

“Yes I did,” Glinda says, and giggles, and Momsie sits down eagerly. “I do so know how to get them, don’t I?”

“She always did,” Momsie tells Fiyero while Popsicle is sorting through his menu. “I came to pick her up from Twirling Academy one day and I found a line of little boys waiting for a clock tick alone with my Galinda! She was having them pay her, you see, pocket money for a chance at her affections.”

“That certainly sounds like the Glinda I know,” Fiyero says, charming as charming could be. He’s so picture perfect sometimes that it frustrates her, the way it all seems put upon. Did he get his lines from fairy tales? It wasn’t fair, that was where Glinda had gotten hers!

But then Fiyero’s hand finds hers under the table. It is big and it is warm, somehow always warm while hers are always a touch frigid around the corners. It covers up her palm, her fingers, and it squeezes, just the once. So Glinda knows it means he is here, even if they are both elsewhere. Which helps.

“Glinda always wanted this for her future,” Momsie says with a sigh. “I remember when she was just a girl and she’d talk about marrying her prince in a big white wedding! And back at Shiz, just before all the unpleasantness, well— she talked ever so much about moving to the Emerald City one day!”

“It’s what everybody dreams of,” Glinda says, but it comes out small. How silly she sounds! And the dream of the Emerald City, just ridiculous. The thought of her and Elphie sharing an apartment, of Elphie coming home late from some magical internship and Glinda being there with dinner— maybe in her fantasy she can cook— and Elphie would come in and drop her bags and tell all about her day, and before bed they could cuddle on the couch with mugs full of tea and talk, and Glinda could have a friend.

Not like this.

The food comes out and Glinda regrets it. Momsie and Popsicle are eating the griddle cakes, the very ones Glinda had gone out of her way to recommend, and here she is saddled with the most boringish option on the menu, plain old eggs. Pretty eggs, at least, fancy ones; they are poached and garnished and sitting delicately on toast nestled in spinach and arugula, sprinkled with delicate black pepper. But in the presence of powdered sugar, caramelized bananas, overly red strawberries…

“I do find it quite silly,” Momsie says to Glinda across the table, lowering her voice to something of a stage whisper, a sly glance over at Popsicle, “that your popsicle and I so often end up ordering just the same thing! Even when we didn’t plan such a thing!”

“Especially then,” Popsicle answers. “I do seem to remember being the one to order first this morning, my dear. Fiyero, I hope you’re quite ready for a lifetime of accusations. Teasing, and copying, and slighting—”

Fiyero, being the good man that he is, laughs. “I do believe I’m already in the thick of it,” he jokes, and Popsicle extends his hand for a mock handshake, and Glinda rolls her eyes delicately, and it’s all very nicely choreographed, a scene from a play designed for an audience just out of sight. Glinda can’t think of the last time she teased Fiyero in such a way. But she does, she knows; he’s almost fraternal some of the time, someone to bounce off of who wouldn’t ever leave her. Would he ever leave her?

Back when they’d first become friends, at the very very start, Elphaba would try to copy her the way she’d been instructed. Out at the Peach and Kidneys she’d ordered the same mixed salad as Galinda, going over the words with practiced ease— “I’ll have the same,” she’d said, and Galinda had felt it blossom in her chest. It made her feel quite important. And then Elphie had started to order for herself, order first, confident and worldly and Galinda couldn’t be more proud. In the Emerald City on that last day Elphie couldn’t decide between two cakes, raspberry and vanilla, and in the end she had ordered one and Glinda the other and they’d split them, forks reaching across the table and Elphie flicking a bit of cream onto her nose until Glinda had gasped and, giggling, a green hand had come to swipe it off.

What would be the normal way to act right about now? Glinda takes a bite so charged with pepper that she coughs. Fiyero, brow wrinkled, turns to her with his napkin.

“Are you alright?” he asks, gallantly, princely, and with a thread of realness underneath it that Glinda wants to peel out and unravel; he’s asking about so much, too much.

“Yes, darling,” Glinda hums, “just too much pepper. Now Momsie, you simply must tell my dear Fiyero the story of how you and Popsicle first met!”

Because, as sick as it will make her, it is just the most romantical story. And Momsie gasps the way she always does, Popsicle turning to her with the familiarly put-on weariness that doesn’t quite hold up in the face of all the affection he directs her way. “I must!” she exclaims, and Fiyero’s head turns to her obediently. Glinda, legs crossed, presses one ankle into the other until it starts to sting. “Now, it all began one summer at Lake Chorge. Both of our families summered there, you see, and I was looking especially gorgeous that year, wasn’t I?”

“She was,” Popsicle says. “She was glowing.”

Maybe the eggs are poisoned. The best kind of assassification attempt, in Glinda’s opinion; she’d much rather go out chicly, clutching her throat and turning pale, than being shot at or something else ugly and loud. How fast would it take poison to kick in? Or maybe the eggs have just turned, sitting out too long, and that explains the cramping. Truly, how quickly would one know about their own death? Would it be terribly rude to leave brunch early for such a reason? If only because the wedding deposit was, regrettably, nonrefundable, and Glinda couldn’t leave such pretty flowers un-bouqueted!

“But I loathed him on sight,” Momsie whispers conspiratorially. “He was too dreadfully handsome— full of himself, too, or so I thought. And he wouldn’t pay me any more attention than anybody else, not even my quite morbidishly old grandfather! Like I was invisible, how frustrating, and so I swore to find him despicable as long as I knew him.”

And Glinda knows, she knows how it all sounds. Fiyero, nodding along pleasantly, is also trying to catch her eye but she won’t look, she focuses on picking each leaf of spinach free from her plate, one by one, tines of the fork into those greening purpling stems. How inconsiderate of Fiyero to pretend like he understands! And to think of Elphie too— she is Glinda’s, she’s always been Glinda’s. What does he even have, if only things that he thinks Glinda doesn’t know about? A Cub rescue, a glance across Glinda’s very own line of quite well-functioning sight at a train platform— just rude, is what it is, and inconsiderated! The both of them should be ashamed. Fiyero, she thinks smugly, doesn’t even know what Elphaba had promised, after she’d asked about the Lion Cub. “I won’t leave you behind again,” she’d said, and she’d promised nothing had happened with Fiyero, back then things were too convoluted to parse through her own relief. And perhaps Elphie had broken the promise, perhaps! But she’d never promised Fiyero a thing, not as far as Glinda knows!

Maybe there were things Glinda didn’t know. No, no, too horrible a thought altogether! Off it goes, shooed away, and Momsie is still talking about being strandified on a raft in the middle of a treacherous lake with none other than her sworn nemesis for company. Fiyero is laughing in the right places, and Popsicle protests, and then soon enough the two of them are in love, writing treatises to each other from across Gillikin when the weather gets cold again, and then they are married. Everything always works out as it should, this is Momsie’s moral, and of course Glinda knew this wasn't true for everyone everywhere, but maybe and perhaps it is in this moment that she realizes it might not be true for her, either.

“Are you alright, duckie?” Popsicle asks as Fiyero pays the bill, such a gentleman, and he ruffles her hair the way he used to. “You seem far away.”

“Of course,” Glinda says, focusing on the yellow buttons of his silly little vest. “I’m just so happy.”

---

Glinda doesn’t want Momsie and Popsicle staying in the Palace. Of course she doesn’t let them know as much, makes Momsie think it’s her idea with a few well timed anecdotes about the clanging of the Gale Force guards in the hallways at night and how brightified the center plaza stays even into the evenings. “Of course I understand why they need to keep the goodliness advertisements lit up at all hours,” she yawns theatrically, “but it really does keep me up!”

Of course she hadn’t left her dearest parents out to dry! No, she’s arranged the nicest suite possible at the prettiest hotel in all of the Emerald City. It’s even got a spa, she’s booked both Momsie and Popsicle for destressification treatments the night before the wedding and facials the morning of. Let it never be said that Glinda Upland does not think of everything!

And Morrible doesn’t have to know that this was all her idea either. “Oh, of course they’re just desperate to meet you and the Wizard,” she tuts, “but they were just exhaustified after all the traveling. And you know I just begged them to stay in the palace, but they insisted it was too much of an imposition! Silly, silly!”

The Wizard, hearing this, shakes his head regretfully. “Such is the cost of celebrity, my dear,” he clucks, and Glinda makes sure to giggle just so to reassure him. This is their little song and dance, as it were.

Morrible is less interested. “Miss Glinda, it really is imperative that we discuss the logistics of this whole… event. Of course all the relevant press will be present— that includes your skeptics, dearie— and you will hold a miniature, shall we say, sort of press conference after the ceremony. Now, you must emphasize your trust in the Wizard— he planned this whole shindig. He is the most generous of benefactors. When we do one small thing for him, well! He does much more for—”

“My skeptics?” Glinda asks, nose wrinkled.

The Wizard shoots Morrible a look, eyebrows raised. She’s always found it quite annoying, the way they communicate right in front of her like she’s too young and foolish to even notice! “Skeptics is a strong word, don’t you think? It’s the way of the news, dear Glinda! The press, the press— they prod us so they can see how we react. That’s all!”

“So you’ve invited the ones who said Fiyero and me were broken up?” Glinda asks tentatively. “I suppose that makes sense.”

“I knew you’d understand!” the Wizard booms, beaming.

“Fiyero and I,” Morrible says.

“And listen, Glinda, the number of things people have said about my outfits— well! I’d need a book to count all the—”

“Not them!” Glinda shrieks. “Not the traitors!”

“They wrote one critical piece,” Morrible snaps. “And no one would criticize a bride’s dress on her wedding day. The important thing is that we discuss our answers to—”

“Glinda the Good Gone Gauche: This Ghastly Gown Makes Globe Readers Grimace?” Glinda splutters, “Madame Morrible, that is… it’s worse than critical, it’s just… and me, gauche?”

Her laugh sounds a bit hysterical. The Wizard, looking on pityingly, clicks his tongue.

“Well, now, it’s not like you’ll be dressed in that again! If I remember well you had it burned, didn’t you?”

“Enough,” Morrible says, and it’s not loud but it’s icy enough to send Glinda and the Wizard to quick silence. “This does not interest me, not in the slightest. Glinda— what do you have to say to our readers who wonder how you can still celebrate in such a trying time?”

And Glinda straightens up. “As terrifying as terror is,” she recites, but Morrible wrinkles her nose, waves her hand.

“It’s been done.”

“Right,” Glinda nods, cheeks pink. “Well, um… Ozians! It is more important now than ever before to hold space for the joy that goodness and goodliness can bring. And on my wedding day, I am happy to say—”

“Yes, yes,” Morrible cuts her off, already looking back to the Wizard— a tiny and pitiful part of Glinda wants to crane closer, to seek out approval that she knows will not come. “That’s enough of that. I think you and I have some more things we ought to discuss?”

And, just like always, the Wizard meets her eyes with a significant looking gaze of his own. They’re out of the throne room before Glinda even knows it, before they even say goodbye. Glinda huffs and turns on her heel for the door.

“Honestly, like I’m not even there!” she mutters to herself, pouting into the shimmery glass of the window adjoining the spiral staircase. Her lips look good this way, most lucious. “I mean, do you really think I’m overreactilating?”

There is no answer from the wall or the window or the Elphie-shaped space she’s conjured up, climbing the stairs in front of her. Predictably so. Glinda sighs and takes the steps one at a time.

“I am not gauche,” she says, and it sounds right; she nods briskly. “I am getting married and it is going to be beautiful and we are both going to be very happy. So there!”

Still no reply. Glinda stomps her foot just a little, just enough so that the noise of it echoes off the steps around it, off the curved tower. “And what is it that they can’t talk about in front of me, anyway? And why does Fiyero act like he’s the only person who’s allowed to be moodified? Why can’t I be moodified? The tabloids would make it into a whole hullabaloo— Glinda Looks Gauntly Glum, or whatever, but it is just so unfair that he can just sulk about whenever he feels like it. Sulking should be free! And the two of them can talk about me like I’m not even there, and I don’t even think the florists put the poppies into the arrangements!”

If Elphaba were here she’d raise an eyebrow. “Don’t you wonder why they keep things from you? Really wonder, I mean?” she’d say. “What if there’s something we don’t know, and what if it has to do with—”

Glinda tosses her hair back, chin up, and sucks in a breath of air to shake this loose. Elphaba is quite annoying, even in hallucinations. She hadn’t even answered any of the other questions. Go figure.

---

She and Elphie had kissed once. Just the once, and just for so brief a moment Glinda sometimes forgets it is real. The night before her wedding, Glinda finds herself thinking about it again.

It was one of those long nights at school, the ones that started off as long afternoons out in the poppy fields before it got dark, before they’d all tumble their way to Fiyero’s room to pass a bottle around to each other, from the chair to the bed to the floor and back around again. Nessa would gaze at Boq, and Boq would gaze at Glinda, and Glinda would gaze at Elphie. Fiyero would gaze at her too. And Elphie, then, too strongheaded, too level, tapping her nails along the curve of the bottle as she picked off the label and crossing her ankles one way and then the other, not noticing.

But then she and Elphie had gone back home, back to their room. Glinda always felt something like relief when she’d cross the threshold and the low pink and orange lights would envelop them both again. The rest of the world could be precarious sometimes, but here it was just her and Elphie and they’d both been tipsy that night, giggling and tripping over Glinda’s heels strewn across the floor from the avalanche that was her closet. “Elphie Elphie Elphie,” Glinda had trilled, leaping onto her bed and bumping her knee in the process, fighting though the pain as Elphie had raised one of her eyebrows so beautifully. It always made Glinda’s stomach flutter when she did that. “Come here, come here! The night is still young!”

“It’s most definitely not, sweetheart,” Elphie had said patiently, the outline of a smile on her lips. “It’s quite old. And tired, too.”

“But I’m not,” Glinda had huffed, and with a tug Elphie was pressed against the side of the bed and Glinda came closer, eyes wide, because it gave her a thrill like sledding down a mountain, a little jump in her chest. “Elphie, your hair is so pretty.”

“Thank you,” Elphaba blushed, and Glinda blinked up at her. “So is, um, your hair.”

“I know,” Glinda smiled before a squeal took over. “And your freckles! And your glasses! I simply cannot even!”

Elphaba had laughed softly. “Alright.”

“The loveliest of anybody’s faces,” Glinda had announced, and then in a strange bout of choreography she’d plucked the glasses from Elphie’s face and put them on the bridge of her own nose, leaning in on a sway. “Wow, you cannot see at all.”

“Thanks again,” Elphaba grumbled.

But of course she was all dizzy, and Elphaba’s skin was warm where Glinda grabbed at her shoulders, just so that she didn’t fall over. And then she’d turned her head and so had Elphie and their lips had collided, sort of. It was hardly anything, just a brush, and at first Glinda had gone to jerk back— so had Elphie, she’d felt it under her hands— but then, well. It just seemed easier, and Glinda loved to kiss, and she was good at it, too. When the world was buzzy like this everything was so joyful and important, and Elphie was important, and her lips were soft, really very soft.

Just for a moment, though. And so silly. Elphie had blushed something fierce, excused herself to the bathroom and come back once Glinda had switched off the lights. They hadn’t talked about it again.

Fiyero’s in her bed. He’s wearing all his clothes, which is quite against Glinda’s usual rules, but nothing seems to matter at the moment; at this time tomorrow she will be married, they will be married. What an odd thing to consider.

“Fiyero?”

He hums, acknowledging, still looking up at the too-high ceiling. Glinda can only sort of see him from where she is lying, knees up in the air; he hasn’t shaved, probably saving it for tomorrow, and there was a hint of stubble emerging, shadowy, showy. Sometimes, next to him, Glinda feels like another species.

“Do you think other people would do this? What we’re doing?”

“What are we doing,” he asks, smiling; she could hear that in his voice, now.

“This,” she says, waving her hand idly at the space between them. “You know, us. How it’s not really…”

Which sounds dreadfully immature when it’s put that way, but it isn’t like there’s anybody around who could judge.

“Real?” he supplies kindly, and chuckles. “I think it sort of is, though. Sometimes.”

Which doesn’t answer her question.

“She wouldn’t be able to,” Glinda confesses, and knows Fiyero agrees, knows he understands. “It makes her crazy, pretending.”

“Yes, I think it would,” Fiyero answers, and there’s something just slightly not right about it but Glinda agrees anyway, because there isn’t anybody else left that would know how she feels, because this is all she’s got.

“Can I ask you something?” Glinda murmurs, barreling on, “did the two of you ever actually… did you?”

Fiyero shakes his head, she can hear the pillow crinkle.

“I kissed her once, sort of,” she blurts, and the absurdity of it all makes her want to laugh loudly, not stop, call off the whole thing and unsend the invites, get the cake up to her apartment so she and Fiyero can eat it alone, just the two of them. “But it wasn’t really real, either.”

Fiyero doesn’t answer for a long while. Looking up at the ceiling is always something to do, actually. When Glinda was young she’d stand on her head and imagine the world flipped upside down, people who lived on the ceiling with chandeliers as their chairs or something. It’s funny now, like cloudgazing.

“What do you think she’d say right now,” Glinda asks, voice coming out low, “if she was here?”

 

“I think she’d tell us both to stop whining so much,” Fiyero says, and Glinda barks out a laugh. “Shallow, the both of us.”

“And self absorbed!” she adds, and finds that it helps. “I bet she’d ask why we need so much space. Did I tell you how she used to make fun of me for having more than one pillow?”

“Well, you had a lot more than one,” Fiyero points out, and Glinda’s cheeks ache a bit— from smiling, she realizes. “She’d ask us if we’re happy like this. And she’d do that face, you know the one.”

Glinda does know. It feels easier like this, dancing around the bigger things, the questions like how could you and don’t you think you should be doing something, really doing something; it’s easier than thinking about how she’d felt, afraid and alone before Fiyero had made it to the Palace, when it was just her and Morrible and the Wizard, when she’d seen and heard just the same things Elphie had and they were horrible, really they were, but what could she do about it and what was she supposed to do, no one had ever said something like this might happen, and what do you do when you know what is wrong but you don’t know how to make it right, not yet?

“She wouldn’t be mad at us,” she says, and she isn’t sure how true that is but when she says it it becomes true. “Fiyero?”

And when she looks over, over past where her hand has found his on the bedspread, he is looking back at her too. His eyes are just the same as they’ve always been. He really is so handsome, truthfully.

It doesn’t happen often, doing this. Glinda finds it nice enough, pleasant like stepping outside and finding the weather is just the same as it had been indoors. Familiar, no kind of shock value. Fiyero feels nice on her, over her, inside of her, because he is there. They haven’t done this for months and she looks at his chest and thinks about Elphaba; knowing, as she knows, that he is thinking about Elphaba too makes it better. That’s the reason for this, anyway. A sharing of knowledge, a togetherness to cement the point. It can’t be competition, not now, not when the thought of her coming back is so ridiculous to begin with.

Fiyero does stay the night, which is comforting when she falls asleep and uncanny in the middle of the night when she wakes from a dream and feels a detached hand on her hip. It can all be explained away, though. It is past midnight, and so it is her wedding day.

---

Every girl in the world grew up dreaming of their wedding day. At least, this was what Glinda had always thought— when something is true for you, how do you know it isn’t a universalifying experience? Just like every other girl she’d grown up with Glinda had spent hours planning the fantasy most delicately: what flowers, and how would the petals be sprinkled? Who would sit at which table, and could Grampsie be trusted near the wedding cake? Of course it had all been amateur planning, Glinda knows that now. And of course perhaps not every girl dreamt of such things— Elphie, for instance, never had.

“But… but not even your first dance?” Glinda had spluttered once, back when she was still Galinda and they were sprawled across their room, Galinda on the couch and Elphaba curled into the rug so familiarly that Galinda felt she’d chosen wrong sitting down here instead of there, but it was too odd to move now, wasn't it?

“Not even,” Elphaba had said, her voice carrying that teasing little note it sometimes got when it was late or they were alone. Or both, usually both.

“Not even your dress? I always thought I was going to wear the most beautiful wedding dress to ever be made, in all of Oz. So I could be a devastatingly pretty bride.”

“I’m sure you will,” Elphaba smiled, the space around her eyes crinkling. “You’ll be the prettiest bride there ever was.”

This, of course, had been in the midst of the strange muddied waters of their relationship, deep in the weeds of what Galinda had struggled to define back then, what Glinda still couldn’t put an official name to now. That strange sort of feeling between them, that kiss they hadn’t talked about, the way Elphaba doted on her sometimes, handing over her boots out in the poppy field or taking down Galinda’s hair from its updo when she thought she was asleep, the way she smoothed green fingers through the mass of it before laying it safely on the pillow. It was so easy with boys to know where you stood— everything was so elementary with them, specific enough that she’d understood the cause and effect for eons and millenia! If you looked at a boy in that specific way, and did this with your eyelashes, and pretended you didn’t see him notice— a kiss. If you kissed a boy, and you thought it was nice enough, and he was charming enough to meet your momsie and popsicle and not too brash or loud in the downtown of Frottica, so there as to be embarrassing— a boyfriend. And so on, and so forth, all the way up to husbandly duties! It made sense!

Maybe it’s girls altogether, or maybe it’s just Elphie, on account of her tragical past away from courting and romancing rituals. Galinda wasn’t sure, and Glinda still isn’t, but either way there is no such straightforward path with Elphie. Holding her hand could mean a smile one day, or an animated conversation about Quadling bird species another, or a quick slip away on the third. A kiss, of all things, could be perfect and splendiferous and wonderfulocious but then one’s Elphieish roommate might not talk about it again, so much so that one begins to wonder if it had happened at all. Perplexing, complicated, things like that.

But, but! Yes, Glinda had grown up dreaming about her wedding.

“Oz, but… but who will possibly dress you?” Shenshen gasps, heels clacking on the marble as she wobbles along. Glinda knows exactly what her face must look like, but she’s moving too fast to stop and look at it. “Glinda, please be sensible!”

“If not for yourself, think of the goodliness of the kingdom!” Pfannee exclaims. He’s running behind Shenshen, already short of breath— he did always forget about his inhaler, honestly! Glinda just hopes he doesn’t drop over dead, too melancholic for a party. “Think of us!”

“I would quite like to be alooone!” Glinda trills, tossing open the door to her apartments with such voracity that the air ruffles the end of her plush bathrobe. “On a girl’s most important night of her whole and entire life and livelihood it should not be so difficult to get a bit of privacy!”

“But,” Pfannee tries again, trailing off when a stricken Shenshen nudges his arm ever so slightly.

“I think she wants us to leave,” she murmurs, and Pfannee gasps again.

“Glinda, is this true?”

“Oh, quite. Ta ta, now! Oh, don’t look so glum, Pfannee, it’s not becoming for a flower dispenser. Everyone will see that pout when you walk down the aisle, it’s just horrendible. You know, my granny always says— laugh and Oz laughs with you, cry and you cry all desperately and terrifically alone!”

“Fix it,” Shenshen hisses, and Pfannee plasters a smile over his mournful cheeks, eyes hollow.

“Who will help you?” he says sadly, and Glinda smiles brightly, taps her slippered foot until it echoes.

“I do have the goodliest and greatliest hair and makeup team in Oz,” she hums, and gestures to the cluster of them waiting in the foyer.

“Not the bats?” Shenshen whispers, brow wrinkled.

“Bats,” Glinda corrects, leaning forward to tap the end of her nose, “and that’s right! Oh, but I really ought to be going! Goodbye, my dears, goodbye!”

And Oz, they’re finally gone. Glinda exhales just a little, flops into the wall just a smidge.

Thank goodness it’s bad luck for a groom to see his bride before the wedding, Glinda isn’t sure she can look too closely at Fiyero just now. Things have been even odder than normal lately, the both of them hanging on the edge of something. Sometimes she feels sure of something as it happens; Granny called it her Upland gift, said all the women in her family had it too, a sense of wrongliness and rightliness. When Fiyero had slept over, staying all night, Glinda had the most peculiar feeling that it would be the last time. She isn’t quite sure what this all means, exactly, and especially considering the wedding that’s about to commence downstairs. She can hear Morrible’s jaunty little announcements bleeding in through her windows.

“Dress first, I think,” she says aloud, and the Bats chitter and chatter in their high-toned way. Glinda goes to her closet alone.

She has always so enjoyed getting ready. For an event, for a regular old day, for the beach or the Ozdust or a wedding, or her wedding, for anything and everything! She loves painting up her face and curling up her hair, zipping herself into her dress and the little performance that came with it, the attentions of the girls and women and ladies beside her every time. Oh, squeeze in there! Oh, it fit so well last week! Oh, try the hair parted just there— oh, oh, and how pretty, how darling!

However, Glinda decides, if she has to hear a single voice she might just throw up. No momsies or Pfannees or, Lurline forbid it, Fiyeros. The Bats squeak so high she can’t understand a word they’re saying, or what language it might even be a part of— but oh dear, is that rude to say? Glinda isn’t sure, but Elphie might’ve told her, patiently as always, that it was one of those culturally insensitive things, something not quite good. And Glinda always did try so hard to be good!

She says a silent apology to Bats and all of Batkind— bats too, while she’s at it!— but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. When she sheds her robe she’s still the same. When it’s time for her hair to go up, for the Bats to clip it into place and start on the line of her lashes, the pink of her cheeks— well, it’s all the same.

And when the window does finally crack Glinda wonders, just for a second, how it could be that Elphie had heard her asking for her. How could she have known when no one knew, when Glinda wouldn’t tell that to a soul?

“Oh, excuse me just a clock tick!” she says, and the Bats chitter and chatter. “Or— I think I’ll do the last of it myself. It’s tradition, you see, just like the rest. Something askew, and whatnot— thank you, thank you!”

Time does an odd thing just then, pulsing all around her. First it speeds up, such that the Bats leaving and the lights in her closet still golden and the walk across her cold floor to the glass, cracked just as she knows it must be, feels like just an instant. In the reflection is her, Glinda, and outside there are banners and bits of sparkle and confetti and things lingering in the air, big spotlights dancing. She looks pretty in white.

But just before she goes out— a quick press to that side of her hair, a plumping of her lips, a blinking of her eyelashes. Just in case.

And then it all slows down of course, once she’s on the balcony. It’s cold out. Glinda had wanted a wedding out of doors, in truth, in a garden full of flowers she can’t name. Morrible had chosen the Palace— better for optics, more room for the press, more excitifying for a royal wedding. Glinda agrees, of course. It’s probably for the best, since it’s cold out tonight.

And then Elphie’s there.

The way she stands is so familiar it’s almost frustrating. Glinda wishes she’d changed more, that would make it easier. She’d been telling herself that everything had changed, of course, but she knows now it hasn’t— Elphaba raising her hand in greeting at that event in Quadling Country was proof enough, and the poppy she’d pretended about, and now this. She looks very small, unsure in the same way she always had about her, the way that made Galinda scoop her up and keep her so very close. She’s got big eyes. She twists a palm around her broom, the ratty old thing, and Glinda can hardly think straight.

“Elphaba,” she whispers, only it comes out a little louder than she’s meant and cracks into the night air. Elphie’s lips twitch melancholically, eyebrows raising up onto the expanse of her forehead.

“Galinda,” she says back, small and soft, and Glinda wants to bury herself in that name again. Only Momsie still calls her that, only sometimes. And Fiyero, once.

But then something sets back in. The spotlights are still dancing, glancing off windows and filtering strange white light onto the space between them both. One wrong move and everyone would see, Glinda knows this; one flying Monkey gone off route, one poorly timed check in from Pfannee or Shenshen, one spotlight at the wrong angle. It’s almost like a nightmare, one of those ones she’s never had but has heard tales about, the ones where someone is tossed up onstage to perform with no script, a big blocky spotlight catching them and making them bigger, biggest, bright.

“Get in,” she hisses, and the severity of it sets in so fast she can feel her heart speed up, “Go, go!”

And Elphaba, because she is perfect, listens. She ducks her head down and follows, curls along the shadow and slips into the door, the cracked one, the one Glinda will have to replace before it attracts too much attention. She’ll tell Fiyero she threw a hairclip or something, wedding jitters, because nobody can know. Fiyero, especially, cannot know. She’s won. Elphie is here, with her.

Unless— “You haven’t been seen, have you,” she hisses again, closing the door firmly behind them both and locking it, even though the air still is spilling through that crack. “No one else, just me?”

“Of course not,” Elphaba says.

“Not Fiyero, not anyone,” she confirms, and Elphaba blinks.

“Why would I see Fiyero,” she asks blandly, and Glinda’s chest does something funny. It’s all a little too much for her, all of a sudden, and Elphie’s still just standing there, just before her, eyes so round and sweet until Glinda can’t stand it and she finds herself barreling forward to catch herself on the woman there. Elphie smells a little like smoke, and wind, and there’s a hint of pine in there too; earthy, like she’s been in the forest. She has, Glinda realizes as she brings her arms up to loop around Elphaba’s neck, she’s been everywhere but here.

“Oh, Elphie,” she gasps, and inhales something ashy and bitter tasting, something she keeps in her throat until her eyes water, “oh, thank Oz you’re alive.”

It’s a silly thing to say. Of course she is, anyway, but Glinda has to say it out loud to make it true, to be sure. And Elphaba’s touching her back, touching her too— there’s a hand coming up to the small of her back, pressing her in closer before it lightens its grip. Glinda misses it right away.

“Careful,” a voice— Elphie’s voice, Elphie’s— says. “Your dress.”

And she is wearing white, isn’t she. A most delicate and beautiful fabric, one she’d picked out from a whole room full of designers with racks of designs and fabrics and gowns to spare, a room bathed in white. This had been the perfectest of all, meant for her, and she’d not mind much if Elphie got it smudgy but she pulls away nevertheless because this is what Elphaba means, because she is saying that it’s gotten to be too much, all of a sudden. Glinda knows her.

“Oz,” she says instead, voice rather hoarse, “I can’t believe you still get around on that old thing.”

And Elphaba looks down at her broom and grins, the pretty gap in her teeth on full display. “Well,” she says, “we can’t all come and go by bubble.”

When Glinda smiles she feels her eyelashes, heavy with mascara, graze the tops of her cheeks. Elphie is smiling too, she can tell it.

But the thing becomes, then, that Glinda isn’t quite sure why she’s here. Elphaba does have a nasty habit of appearing in the wrong places at the even wronger times but this is odd even for her— is she insane, truthfully, to appear right in the middle of the Palace at a time like this, when everyone’s eyes are trained right here?

Maybe, Glinda thinks with a horrible sinking feeling, there’s something terribly wrong. Maybe Elphie’s been shot or stabbed or poisoned, something horrendible enough that she’d had nowhere else to turn. Or perhaps something terrible has happened, something Glinda’s missed or maybe she’s the poisoned one, or— “Are you alright?” she blurts, before her head can go all spirally like it always likes to, inventing wilder causes and effects until there’s nothing left but panic. “Why are you here, Elphie? If there’s something you need, if I can help… it’s only I worry about—” and she gestures aimlessly toward the gigantic windows along the wall, the looming clock in the city center; she’s getting married, it tells her, in only a handful of hours.

“I’m fine,” Elphaba fidgets as she speaks, and her eyes are bigger than Glinda remembers them being, sweeter. “I just wanted to come and see you.”

Oh dear, dear dear dear! Glinda’s hand twitches because she wants to flutter around, plumping pillows aimlessly and moving so fast no one could get a good look at her face, the way she tugs at the edges of her updo. How terribly sweet, just like her wide open face, just like the airy smell of her; Glinda wants to squish herself into the divot between Elphaba’s nose and lip and stay there, wants to be doted on again.

“That means a lot to me, Elphie,” Glinda tries, and hears her voice warble so horribly, embarrassing! “But if anyone discoverates you—”

She’s come closer without realizing it, is the thing. Elphaba’s face is so dreadfully present, her lips look a little chapped. Glinda could help her. She could draw a bath and use her nicest oils and salts, and Elphaba could dry off with the plushest towels this side of the Gillikin River. Glinda wants to deroughify her, to rub at those sharp edges until the girl she has before her is the same softness as the girl Glinda’s used to. Elphaba smiles then, very sadly.

“I know,” she says, in that same doting voice that she only ever used with Glinda. “You never saw me, alright? I was never here.”

It’s just so familiar, is the thing. She’s pulling back just like she always does, just like when she’d flown away that first time or when she’d left Galinda asleep on that hard wooden desk, just like when she’d disappeared into that Quadling crowd. “No,” Glinda says, because she’s not as young anymore. “No, I can’t bear it anymore, Elphie.”

Elphie’s sad smile stays, stretches across that extra millimeter of green skin. “I visited, you know,” she says quietly. “Once.”

Glinda wants to hit her, a little bit. “I know,” she replies— she tries to snap, wants it to come out harsh but it’s Elphie and so her voice still has that bit of levity to it. “You didn’t stay.”

“You were asleep,” Elphaba explains, head cocked. “And I didn’t have much time. I was only passing through.”

“Yes, well.”

“I left something for you,” Elphie says, and blushes instead of saying what it had been— the poppy, of course, which is just plain rude. Remember, she thinks, how Fiyero had given Elphie a poppy before the train to the Emerald City had left? How odd it had felt, like she was too big for her skin all of a sudden? But then Elphie had picked her to come along, so it had been alright. “I wasn’t sure if you…?”

“Did you,” Glinda says blandly. “Well, I pretended it wasn’t real. It’s a little mental exercise I do, you see.”

“Is it?” Elphaba asks, and she sounds genuinely curious. It’s insufferable. Glinda wants to lean in but instead she walks away, squints toward the front door to make sure it’s locked, deadbolted, sealed shut. It is, quite firmly so. “Pretending?”

Glinda decides she’s had about enough. She is in her wedding dress, for Oz’s sake, and Elphaba’s barely even said anything about it, and how long can she get before Pfannee and Shenshen start knocking on her door, before Momsie has some fit downstairs that she needs to attend to? “You’re here to see the Wizard,” she tells Elphaba, “aren’t you? I know how to talk to him, you know.”

Elphaba has started trailing her, standing near the entrance to Glinda’s closet now. “It’s not yours to deal with,” she says softly, kindly. “This is between us— the Wizard and I.”

Glinda scoffs. “Right,” she mutters. “Are you overdue, then? Do you have to leave again? I won’t keep you, Elphie.”

She wants to, though. Please just stay, she wants to say, even just for a minute? And Elphaba would.

Perhaps it’s a test. Elphaba looks up, up at the ceiling and the marble and the pink flowers, the pink staircase, the pink glow from her closet.

“It’s a nice apartment,” she says finally.

“Yes,” Glinda huffs. “I am very important, you know.”

Elphaba smiles softly. “I know.”

Glinda nods.

“It doesn’t look like you, really,” she says, and Glinda raises an eyebrow. “It’s just very…”

“Polished?” Glinda supplies, and Elphaba flushes, blinks.

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant,” Glinda says. It isn’t like school, is what she means, there aren’t any fluffy blankets on the couches or trinkets on her shelves. Her vanity is cleaner, there’s no stain from where she’d spilled nail polish once, sticky up until she’d moved out. There are overhead lights, bright ones— back at school she’d yelped whenever Elphaba had gone to turn on the lights, rushing to switch on the array of lamps and light her candles; it always made Elphie giggle, Galinda moaning about how much easier on the eyes it was when everything was pink and orange and glowy, not so harsh.

When Glinda turns her head her hair tumbles, the strands left out of the updo glancing at her collarbones and bouncing there. She hopes Elphaba looks. She really should get ready, put the finishing touches in her hair before she goes downstairs, where there will be another crisis to deal with— and then there’s the press. A royal wedding, after all, requires ten to a hundred photo ops! It begs for a press conference, a first look, a behind the scenes. Or that’s what Morrible’s explained to her, at least.

“I have to fix my hair,” Glinda mutters, words tumbling together a little bit. Elphaba looks up, face all pinched— she can always tell, can’t she, when something isn’t right? “I’m going to be… married.”

“Alright,” Elphaba agrees carefully, softly.

“Come with me,” she demands, an order that floats up on the end quite pitifully, and Elphaba does.

Glinda loves her bubble. It’s quiet in there, which is nice because on the ground when it’s popped the shouting can sometimes be a tad much, and she’s always been prone to headaches. It makes the whole of Oz look funny, bloated here and too thin there and wobblingly pink all around. It’s the best view of all.

Also it only fits one. The closet is much the same. Oh, it could fit more than one, don’t get her wrong! It could fit a whole army of dressers, it was designed that way! When she goes downstairs for the interviews she will say this, say that her friends and family helped her get dressed, that there was a hair team and a makeup team and a team for tooth whitening, and foot angling, and contouring of the wrists. All of the essential things! But she likes her closet to be just hers, just private. “I do prefer to be changed alone!” she tells Shenshen before events, before shutting the round door in her face, but this isn’t strictly true. Anyway, Elphaba is here now.

The mirrors are doubled up just enough that there is suddenly a mountain of Elphabas, one after another after another. All that same green, all dressed in the same thick black, looking with those same big eyes, fixing on everything. And so Glinda remembers, then, that she has something to be dreadfully embarrassed about.

“Don’t bother looking around,” she trills, “I have just piles of junk in here, what a bother! Just… this way, Elphie dear; I’ll need you to glitterify my shoulders, that’s an insider secret of course but they don’t actually get this way all on their own—”

“My boots,” Elphie murmurs, voice sounding low and queer. And oh, so Glinda’s been caught out. “Are those my…?”

“Oh, those old things?” Glinda tosses her hairbrush from one side of the vanity to the other and it makes a terrible clanging as it falls, shuddering off the mirror. “Well, you did give them to me, you know.”

“I remember,” Elphaba says, smiling. She’s looking a little too nostalgic, actually, so Glinda raises a cruel eyebrow.

“And besides, you left everything behind. I couldn’t be expected to pack it all up, you know; I took what I wanted.”

Elphaba blinks. “I suppose that’s fair,” she nods finally, eyes trailing around the slim room. There is too much here, too obvious. Her Ozdust dress, up on the wall never to be touched again. The keys to their room, set in a little bell jar— was one meant to return those, after the school year ended? With Morrible gone and Ms. Coddle all histrionic after Elphaba’s unexpected departure the hubbub had been at quite a fever pitch. No one had asked for them back, anyhow!

“But I believe I said not to look over there!” Glinda trills again, fluttering her fingers into Elphie’s face until she reels back. “I mean, you simply must understand the way old things pile up. Boots, keys— who knows what else could be lurking back here!”

But Elphaba’s always known her too well. Her bottom lip juts out ever so slightly, cocking her head in a manner so tender it makes Glinda sick. “I kept things too, you know,” she tells her. “The guidebook you gave me— do you remember, Galinda?”

Wrong name again. Glinda grits her teeth and smiles brightly, tugging out the silver body glitter from her drawer. “Oh, vaguely,” she hums. “Emerald City sights, something or other. It was so long ago.”

And maybe she’s imagining it but Elphaba’s face seems to fall a bit, settle in the vaguest sense of disappointment before she smiles again. “You wrote me a message on the inside. About getting my heart’s desire.”

“Did I,” Glinda says blandly, vaguely. “Uncap this, Elphie, I need some along my shoulder blades.”

Elphie’s always been so diligent. When she comes forward Glinda is reminded of the old Elphe so much, the one who used to listen to everything she said. I still listen to you, the Elphaba of now would argue, I just don’t blindly follow anymore.

But she is now. With a careful finger, delicate as can be, she slides a bit of silver up Glinda’s collarbone, along the juts of her skin. Glinda keeps her composure quite well, if she does say so herself!

“It looks like a big wedding,” Elphaba murmurs. She’s very close now, holding on ever so lightly to the skin available and Glinda holds herself still and tall, ignoring the funnel in her chest and the way desire is pooling low in her stomach with every twist of green fingers. “I could see it from the sky, even— everything’s lit up for you.”

“Oh, it’s for the press, really,” Glinda says carelessly. Or it’s what she hopes she’s conveying, at least; really her voice warbles the slightest bit as Elphaba goes around to her back, smoothing the glitter quite lightly along shoulder blades. Her free hand is on Glinda’s waist, for no reason that’s clear to Glinda, but she stays still and hopes Elphie doesn’t move it, wouldn’t move it for the world.

“I wasn’t invited,” Elphaba murmurs teasingly.

“My granny was hardly invited, I had very little say over the guest list,” Glinda sniffs. “Morrible invited my swornified enemies over at the Globe instead— now I don’t know if you saw this, Elphie dear, but they were quite scathingly unkind about an otherwise lovely outfit of mine.”

“I don’t get much news in hiding,” Elphaba tells her in a flat voice, sounding the way she’d used to when Galinda would insist on testing new glittery eye shadow on her.

“And there’s that too, of course,” Glinda says, just as a row of goosebumps tingle into shape along the back of her neck. “I wasn’t quite and entirely sure where to send your invite. You don’t keep an address these days— now Elphie, what did happen to your care for civic engagement? Where will the census men find you for their registries?”

“If it’s bad for politics I’d be happy to register as an Ozian off the grid,” Elphaba teases again. Sometimes she says things just to make Glinda giggle and it works, now, coupled with the light dance of her skin along Glinda’s. It’s probably more than enough glitter by now but Glinda can’t bear to tell her to stop.

“Oh, I wouldn’t know. Everything I know about politics I learned from you,” Glinda says, and then hesitates. “Well, except for the minor acts of terrorism. Those I try to avoid.”

Elphaba lets go and grins at her and Glinda, beginning to get too comfortable, grins right back.

“Probably for the best. I don’t think you’ve got the temperament for it,” Elphaba says.

Glinda scoffs. “For terrorism?”

“I prefer to think of it as civil disobedience,” Elphaba replies, and wrings her hands just a bit, stepping back further so that Glinda can see the whole of her. “Speaking of…”

“No,” Glinda demands instantly. Elphaba’s on the inside, she’d have to go past Glinda to go anywhere but Glinda knows that she could, now, that she’s stronger and faster and has more magic in her little finger than Glinda will ever be able to manage. “You can’t leave yet, Elphie. I— I’m about to be married.”

Elphaba smiles softly and Glinda can tell that there are a hundred places she’s itching to be. “I know,” she murmurs. “And you know I can’t be there, Glinda, don’t you?”

“You could,” Glinda says stubbornly. “We could—”

“You won’t do anything,” Elphaba tells her, rather firmly for Glinda’s tastes. “I told you— it’s between the Wizard and I.”

“So you just came here to see him, then?” Glinda’s face is flushing, an effect that Elphaba alone seems to have on her. “My wedding is in a few hours, Elphie, and there’s nobody else I’d… but you should go. You have better places to be, don’t you? And I can keep my own self company.”

“Don’t do that,” Elphaba says; she sounds pleading but chastising at the same time, raising an unimpressed eyebrow at Glinda for her attitude, her pout, her frustration. “You know that isn’t what I want.”

“But you’re going anyway,” Glinda finishes for her, and she crosses her arms and watches Elphaba watch. “Aren’t you, Elphaba?”

Elphaba doesn’t answer.

“You could at least tell me that you’ve missed me,” sniffs Glinda, sounding rather pitiful but she’s allowed to, a bride should get any wish on her wedding day! “That I look beautiful. I’m getting married, you know— it’s only polite.”

The most annoying thing about Elphaba, Glinda decides, is that even when she’s being rotten and rude and a downright pain she’s still so unflinchingly lovely. “I’ve missed you,” she murmurs, and her eyes are big again like full moons. “I’ve missed you the most, you know.”

Glinda feels her lip tremble and so she bites down on it hard, hard enough that she’ll probably have to fix the lipstick and the gloss and the intricate corners of it. Elphaba takes a dangerous step closer, reaches her hand out to graze Glinda’s dress where the skirt starts, dancing around her waist like she’s not quite sure she’s allowed to touch, like she’s a ghost or a phantom whose hand would pass right on through the fabric. Glinda allows the touch again, meets Elphie’s eyes— they’re the same height, they always have been, but now those green eyes look like they’re swimming just a bit higher than Glinda’s own. Like she’s grown, or maybe it’s just a trick of the light.

“And you look so beautiful,” Elphaba continues, voice even lower as her thumb traces the white fabric. “But you know that already, you’re the most—”

And then Glinda kisses her. It’s the sort of thing she was bound to do; after all, she’s really never been any good at controlling herself. As a little girl she’d been a chronic foot tapper, a chair tilter, an interrupter. Then she’d met Elphaba and she had seen it in her too— her need to be moving all of the time, even in their room after dinner. Her inability to deny herself anything— a third cupcake at the Buttery, a new dress out in Shiz Proper, a scrap of attention, affection from the world of Oz. A nice write up in the papers. A cheering crowd. A kiss.

She isn’t really expecting Elphie to kiss back. Or, well, that isn’t quite right. She supposes she’d just been expecting it to feel more like that time in college, a slip and sliding of lips for a few moments, warm and invigorating but still ultimately rather chaste. Instead Elphaba’s sort of surging forward into it, mouth opening wide and Glinda catches the edge of a sharp tooth— there had been a rumor once, Glinda can’t remember if it was back at Shiz or in the papers these days, that Elphie had teeth as sharp as a shark. It isn’t true and hadn’t ever been but it almost feels that way now, because she’s biting down on one of Glinda’s glossy lips and tugging and Glinda’s going in just as willingly.

If she can move Elphie out of the middle of the closet, into the tight corridor between dressing rooms, it’ll be better. She walks them back until Elphie’s against a wall, until Glinda is squeezed in only a handful of inches away from a dresser herself. Better, yes; there’s less space around them now, less space for bad things to get in.

She’s won, well and truly this time. Out on the town with Fiyero they’d both lost. When the papers paint him as her flawless trophy he’s won, he’s never criticized as vehemently as her. When they’d slept together the night before, something she is still feeling in her hips and in the space at her shoulders where he’d held onto her, they’d finally been even.

But now Elphaba is back and in Glinda’s apartment, in Glinda’s closet, kissing Glinda. It’s a bona fide victory, a real one. Fiyero doesn’t even know, which makes it better. Glinda has her, right here, she’s got her and she’s tucked her away where no one else can find her, a prize she’s wrestled from Fiyero’s grasp and kept close to her chest.

Elphaba just keeps kissing. Glinda pushes herself forward, forward so that her hip bone forces Elphaba’s hips up against the wall, forward so that she can grab at Elphie’s waist, one hand sliding up to grab at her chest, her neck, her jaw. When Glinda gets to her ear, tugging it with two fingers, Elphaba lets out a moan into her mouth. It’s enough to make her suck in a breath, eyes fuzzy.

“I miss your glasses,” Glinda pants, finger at the space where the rims would have been. They’re something she didn’t get to save for her little shrine— oh, fine, that’s what it is!— not like the boots, the keys, the clothes, the flowers, the notebooks where Elphie had corrected her schoolwork with little smiley faces, little praises in the margins. The Elphaba of now, a mirror image, opens up her wild eyes and stares, pupils black, down at Glinda’s lips.

“I miss your pink,” she says, pawing at Glinda’s white wedding gown a little roughly. They are surrounded by pink, entombed by it, even, but Glinda decides not to point this out. Elphaba’s hand is grabbing at the small of her back and pulling her back in and anyway, she’s not one to split hairs. Elphaba can miss whatever Elphaba wants to miss, especially if it’s going to involve her tugging on the dress like that.

But anyway, Glinda doesn’t bother to respond. She drops her head down to Elphie’s neck to suck, and bite, and squeeze. She can feel the thrumming beat of a pulse under her palm— whose, she isn’t sure— but her kisses start to match up with the rhythm, the up and downness of the heartbeat. Elphaba’s breath hisses. Glinda’s hand finds her backside and squeezes, hard.

“Do you remember when we kissed?” Glinda says into neck, muscle tensing alongside tendon. She moves a hand as she does it, down a thigh and back up again when she’s slipped beneath fabric to cup at Elphaba where she wants to. Elphaba lets out a whining moan at that— good, Glinda thinks, that she is still pliable, that she’ll still do just what Glinda wants her to do.

“You do, don’t you?” Glinda continues. Elphie’s skirts can be easily tucked away and Elphie even helps, holds them up as Glinda’s thumb traces along thin wet fabric, finds the rough outline of hair, skin, the depths of Elphaba, as human as could be. “I remember it. You were so sweet to me that day— you always were.”

“Glinda,” Elphaba whines again, because she’s gotten very good at telling the world what she wants, “need you to—”

“And right afterwards you ran away again,” Glinda muses, slipping and adjusting her hand so that a perfectly manicured finger dips below undergarments, touches heat, makes Elphaba exhale sharp and hold her tighter. “I mean, I suppose I do understand. I didn’t really realize until then that it was an option, you know? That I felt that way about you. Not that I feel any particular sort of way, unless—”

She checks Elphaba’s face for a sign of recognition, a notice of her little slip-up. Elphie’s eyes are screwed shut so Glinda can’t really tell. She slips her middle finger up a bit, a bit further, just until it touches the spot she always likes the best when she does this to herself. It’s a bit muddled up and backwards, touching this way around; Glinda’s never done this with a girl, of course. She hadn’t realized just how much hand positioning went into all of it!

“Was that why you ran off, Elphie? You realized then, too?”

So she’s curious, it isn’t a crime! When one is seeing one’s best friend for the first time in many many moons, and especially when one is somewhat besotted with said best friend and unable to know the next time one might see the friend on account of the friend’s mild brushes with terrorism— no, civil disobedience,— well. One might have to take what one can realistically get.

But Elphie shakes her head.

“It isn’t why?” Glinda asks, and her lower lip juts out. “Huh.”

“I already knew,” Elphaba grits out, and Glinda finds herself looking on in something like awe when she grinds down hard onto Glinda’s hand, lets Glinda slip one and then two fingers inside of her and thumb at her clit delicately, the sure way she moves her hips. “Left because I— Oz, Glinda, do we have to talk about this right now?”

“You knew?” Glinda asks, and licks her lips— they're feeling quite dry, all of a sudden. “You already wanted to? To kiss me, I mean?”

“You were always so pretty,” Elphie says, and Glinda gets mildly distracted by the way she’s holding onto Glinda’s shoulders and directing her, almost. They’ll come back to it.

But Glinda’s always adored Elphaba, it’s the one constant of the last few years. Without all the useless— yet still quite enlightening— chatter, she can focus on what really matters. Elphaba’s pressed up against the pink wall, head tilted up a little bit towards the lights. Glinda can see the skin of her thigh, the way her legs are trembling, the way her neck tenses when she leans forward to bite it again.

It’s a funny thing, to know someone so well that seeing them like this is hardly a surprise. Elphaba gets close the same way she does everything else. She’s so full about it, whole and sure and insistent. She moves like she writes, like she thinks. Glinda, fingers moving as much as she can manage, is just perpetually trying to keep up.

“I’m close,” Elphaba says redundantly, and Glinda nods so fast that a bit of her updo comes undone, trailing down to graze her cheek until she blows it away— it comes back anyway. She’s too distracted to care, really; with the way she’s standing she can see everything, and Elphaba’s squeezing her shoulders so tight that she can feel her pulse collecting there.

Elphaba is close so Glinda, whose hand and wrist and thumb are all beginning to cramp, doesn’t stop. Elphie’s different from her, she seems to like it a little firmer and not in circles but over, tapping; Glinda does it all as best as she can. The tiny breaths that come out of the green mouth in front of her have Glinda moaning too, oddly enough. She hadn’t ever understood this phenomenon but it came up in some of the steamier romances she’d read, someone coming undone at the image of their own lover.

When Elphaba comes Glinda’s kissing her, so their bodies are all pressed up together, so she can feel every little movement like it’s a horde of butterflies, bumblebees, the ugly moths that would lurk on their window at Shiz in the early summers. Glinda whines.

“Oz, that’s… that’s enough, Glinda—”

Glinda pulls her hand out unwillingly. Her finger is a little pruned, like she’s been in the bathtub for too long, and it is slick with Elphie. Once she brings it up to her mouth to suck it will look unremarkable again, there will be no remnant of it all.

But Elphaba’s unfurling herself from her place along the wall, and her face is flushed dark green just like her neck, and she’s blinking her eyes rather fast. This, actually, is proof, and Glinda zeroes in on it happily.

“I really wasn’t expecting that,” Elphaba is saying, voice coarse with a strange little laugh that Glinda wants to bottle up or stretch out longer. She rolls her neck. Glinda, aware of her body only where Elphaba is touching it, notices the wetness she’s accumulated only when a green hand slides off her shoulder aimlessly, grazing her waist on the way down. She shivers.

“But you mean in a good way, right?” Glinda checks, and wrings her hands a little bit. Silly, silly! To be so overly anxious! About such a silly old thing, and on her wedding night!

She realizes, then, that this probably counts as a terrible and unwifely act. Probably— she actually isn’t quite sure, because she and Fiyero have never discussified it. And he isn’t here now, and Glinda can’t bear to think about anything beyond what she has right here, Elphaba’s legs and the faint black hairs at the tops of her thighs.

“I do,” Elphaba says slowly. “Glinda, you know I’ve always adored you.”

“Have you?” Glinda asks, feeling a neglected little place inside of her sprout and bloom again under Elphie’s devoted attentions. “Tell me.”

But Elphaba, cursedly, falters. She’s thinking about the circumstances, the wedding and the Fiyero of it all. Glinda can tell. How dreadfully unfair for her to be thinking about all that, especially now that Glinda isn’t!

“It’s your wedding night,” she says, and Glinda scoffs.

“It didn't seem to be bothering you a moment ago. Elphie, I never would have expected you to be a selfish lover! Such a shame, but oh, I suppose I’ll have to make do…”

Elphaba’s lips twitch. “You know that isn’t what I mean.”

“Oh, good!” Glinda exclaims cheerfully. “I am feeling rather worked up, if you must know. You might be a help.”

“But,” Elphaba starts again, guilt around the corners of her lips— for the situation or for her hesitancy, Glinda can’t tell. She levels Elphie with what she hopes is a composed look, calming.

“You’d be better than him,” she murmurs, and Elphaba draws in a breath so shaky that it turns raspy and porous. “I know it. He can’t know me like you can.”

Elphaba shuts her eyes. Glinda wonders, briefly, if it means she’s being far too much. This is something that happens.

“Elphie,” she tries again, and when Elphaba opens her eyes they are sad looking, like what’s coming is inevitable. Slowly, she fixes her clothes. Carefully, she fixes her hair.

The thing about Elphie is that she’s sweet, delicate. When she hoists Glinda up onto the dresser behind her it’s with too much care, maybe; her hands on Glinda’s waist are very soft and she uses the space like there is a lot more of it. When she dips her head to kiss her it’s even softer.

She’s also got a lot more patience than Glinda does, it seems. Elphie is managing, somehow, to kiss every spare inch of bare skin on Glinda’s body. She’s kissing her lips and cheeks and neck, down to her shoulders and collarbone and even grazing the top of her dress where it’s gone askew. Glinda can feel those kisses erupting into goosebumps, leaving a twisting trail behind on her skin.

Glinda likes it in here, likes it better than any other part of the Palace except maybe those twisty back staircases that nobody seems to know about. No one else has ever been in here, never really; Elphaba, now, bracketing her further back and holding onto her thighs where she’s perched on the dresser, doesn’t realize that. There’s something else going on in her head, which is dipping to kiss along Glinda’s arms, making her hair stand on end, down Glinda’s dress and over her stomach, which flutters. Glinda’s never known how to look inside Elphie’s head when she doesn’t want her to. She’s always been rather impenetrable.

When Glinda brings her hand up to Elphaba’s head and trails it down her hair she gets a little smile in return, Elphie’s face peeking back up from where it’s pressed up to her skirt. The green stands out so stark against white. It’s not a color she’s ever seen Elphaba wear. Has she ever worn it? Glinda’s compelled to ask.

“Don’t worry,” Elphaba says softly, still smiling, misinterpreting the whole thing in a delightfully pretty way, “I’ll be careful of your dress.”

Glinda’s chin wobbles. “I don’t care about that,” she huffs, and one side of Elphaba’s mouth curls up higher than the other.

“That’s not the Glinda I know,” she teases, and Glinda clenches her teeth.

“Would you just,” she grits out, and shifts with the hope that one of Elphaba’s hands pressing on her thighs might slip a few inches to the wayside and touch where she wants, for a change. “You don’t need to get me ready, okay? I’m already there.”

How humilifying to say! Glinda’s face reddens when Elphaba looks up at her, all dark eyes.

“You are?” Elphaba asks, so terribly earnest before it slides back off her face and she smiles more steadily. “I want to kiss you, though.”

Glinda’s head hits the wall with a decisive thud as Elphaba kisses lower, lingering at her hipbones, tugging up the skirt of her dress very delicately and kissing knees, calves, marching back up to thighs. She bites.

“Oh, Oz,” Glinda squeaks out. It’s quite disastrous to have Elphaba down there in such a way— she’d promised to be careful of the dress but with the way Glinda’s fidgeting, with how wet she’s gotten, it seems unlikely they’ll come out unscathed. Elphie’s hands have finally lifted up but they flit back to her thighs, now bare, to rub circles at the innermost part.

Finally, finally, Elphie touches. She comes back up to do so; at her full height, and with Glinda sitting as she is, Elphaba’s just a bit shorter. Level with Glinda’s neck, really, which she nuzzles into when her fingers first make delicate contact. She sucks on her middle finger first, before she touches— unnecessary, really— and Glinda finds herself gulping.

Has Elphaba done this before? Glinda finds she doesn't want to know. As one thin finger slips inside of her she swallows, hard. That same finger comes back out again and glides up to the top of her, pressing down firmly on her clit until she whines, head tipping forward. Horrendible.

“You like that?” Elphaba asks, though it isn’t really much of a question. There’s a hint of wonder in her voice, actually. Glinda determines it rather annoying. She nods all the same.

And Elphaba just keeps going, so insistent. It’s got a very concentrated sort of feeling, the intensity pinpointed to the tiniest of surfaces. Glinda can’t breathe. The walls, so pink and glowing with the obnoxious reminders of what she’s saved, stare down at her. She can feel the shriveled old poppy that Elphaba’d left her, wilting in a drawer not too far below her left ankle.

“Pretty,” Elphaba murmurs, and Glinda whines again.

“Elphie,” she tries, maybe pleading— she isn’t sure. It comes out shrill and unpleasant. She’s moving her hips and it’s making her thigh bones hurt where they’re firm against unyielding wood. Elphaba goes faster. She uses just the one finger for everything, delicate and dancing thinly, fleeting. Glinda almost misses having something inside— quite unusual for her, in fact— but the lack of it is somehow more exciting. Withholding, she can pretend Elphaba would deny her anything even though she knows better. So she can clench around nothing and pretend.

“Tell me when you’re close,” Elphaba murmurs again, and Glinda begins nodding before she’s even finished speaking. Her lips are glossy with spit. Elphaba smiles again before— disaster! Glinda moves her leg and her foot slams, hard, against a drawer handle. She winces.

The real disaster, of course, is how caring Elphaba is! She jerks away immediately, hand still slick with Glinda headed straight for her ankle to cup it, face all tightened up.

“Are you okay?” she asks, brow crinkled, at the same time that Glinda lets loose a warbling moan. It’s very loud. It’s a good thing her apartment is so very large.

“Elphie, Elphie, Elphie, why did you stop,” she gasps, squeezing her thighs together. Elphaba blinks owlishly at her.

“You hurt yourself,” she mumbles in explanation. “Wanted to make sure you—”

And she trails off, eyes fixing on Glinda’s legs all squeezed together, the way she’s wiggling. The same green hand comes back to pry them apart. Glinda whines in protest.

“Glinda,” Elphaba chides, and, against all her instincts and rational thoughts, Glinda moans again.

Elphaba blinks. “Oh,” she says softly, tilting her head forty five degrees, puzzling something out. “You… you like that too, don’t you?”

Glinda’s face is so flushed she worries she might collapse. Teeth clenched, she pushes the green hand higher until the same lone finger is back where it’s meant to be. When it finally, blessedly makes contact she exhales through her nose.

“Okay, okay,” Elphaba nods, blushing dark green just the same. “It’s alright.”

“Elphaba Thropp, don’t you dare stop again,” Glinda bites out. Her foot aches and she remembers hurting it like it’d happened in a dream. Elphaba’s finger moves faster, circles tighter. She blinks those wide eyes and Glinda does miss her glasses, horribly, but without them she can bump their heads together.

“I won’t,” Elphaba swears. Glinda moves her hips in time with those little circles and Elphaba breathes out onto her cheek, her ear. “That’s it, good job.”

So, so humilifying. When Elphaba goes to talk to the Wizard, when she stays right here where she’s meant to be, then they will have to talk about this. That is a bit too embarrassing to imagine, so Glinda doesn't.

Instead, on the cusp of it, she pushes herself back against the wall to hold Elphaba’s head in her hands. She squeezes. Elphie, eyes tracking each breath she takes and tongue coming out to wet her lips, nods.

“Sweetheart,” she says, and Glinda comes. It isn’t as seamless as the times she’s touched herself thinking of Elphie— pretending, it seems, can’t compare to the real thing. Sometimes real life is messy. She decides maybe she likes messiness a bit more if it means Elphie might be involved.

She shudders, and then stills. Elphaba’s hand has slipped away from her before she’s noticed, resting cool on her thigh again. She can feel the trail of slickness and finds she doesn’t mind it, not at all, not like the way she minds feeling her body after she and Fiyero do this.

But then, she muses, they’ve never really done this.

“I still adore you, I think,” Elphaba admits, and Glinda giggles, cheeks hurting, foot hurting, chest hurting.

“You know just what a lady wants to hear,” she says, voice raspy, and kisses Elphaba where her bones meet, where her nose becomes the top of her eyebrow. Elphaba’s lips twist up into a smile.

“You really should be getting ready, shouldn’t you?” Elphaba asks, and holds up her hand when Glinda goes to protest, squeaking in indignation. “I’m not leaving, my sweet. I need to speak with the Wizard, but I’ll… I’ll see you again before you know it.”

Glinda’s own giggle morphs into a breath, and into a stretching smile after that. She’s won. Fiyero doesn’t know it, Oz doesn’t know it, nobody knows yet except for her but she’s done it, she’s finally come out first. Elphaba’s smile is so soft when she pulls back, the careful kind of girl who is patient with Glinda, who calls her sweet.

“You’ll stay, then?”

Elphaba’s jaw shifts, clenches. “If he agrees to prove himself to me,” she mutters darkly. “If he—”

“He will,” Glinda assures her easily, because he will. Elphie has the power for things like that. “He will, and then you’ll stay, Elphie? Truthfully?”

“If,” Elphaba says again, but one side of her face seems to betray the bit of happiness bleeding through.

Downstairs a wedding is about to begin, Glinda needs to go find her momsie and popsicle and Granny will be somewhere getting lost on the way to the bathroom, and Pfannee and Shenshen are vibrating on opposing frequencies, and Fiyero’s probably wondering where she’s gotten off to. There’s a new sort of excitement in her chest, brand new.

“Oh,” she hums, and smiles wide until Elphie smiles back. Finally. “Elphie, I’m so happy.”

Notes:

and then wonderful may or may not have happened and act two may or may not have commenced. it's up to you to decide. the end.

words cannot adequately express how glad i am to finally be done with this one. it took months off my life. thank god. but also, i really hope you enjoyed it! i am fond of it in spite of itself so i'd love to hear what you thought :) so many lines that are little treasures to me but they're yours now!

in an ideal world i'll have some more fic for you in not too long! dealing with mild to moderate writers block but that's not real and it can't hurt me. comments are extremely motivating and you can find me ontwitter or tumblr! see you soon i really do hope

Notes:

twitter and tumblr! chapter two will be here when i finish it. also that roman holiday au i promised will be here soon too, i promise. keep in touch!