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Saint Aelphaba’s name stared down at Glinda from all sides. She raised one pink gloved hand to block the A from her vision, then lowered it with a sigh. Distant semblances of Elphaba were all she could have these days, yet it was close enough to sting. Glinda imagined she had given the A she dropped from her own name to Elphaba. Something to remember me by, she pictured herself saying. She frowned, bowing her head. Her A, her heart, her whole world, what did it matter? Elphaba remembering her was not the problem. Elphaba leaving her was.
Glinda’s world for the first seventeen years of her life had been the social scene, and how to stay on top of it. She had trained herself to be absolutely perfect, popular and perky, Galinda the golden girl. After Elphaba, she had given all that up. Because of Elphaba. For Elphaba, maybe. As such, Glinda could not reconcile herself with where Elphaba’s loyalties lay. She could not comprehend her friend’s devotion to The Cause, not when Elphaba had been the cause of Glinda tearing down her own personal causes and replacing them with people.
People were realer than causes. Then again, they were more likely to leave.
Glinda blinked back tears, and took a deep breath. This was not the day for bitterness. The last year had been filled with bitterness, as well as what Glinda could only describe as grief. She had come to know grief for the first time when Ama Clutch died, but—and she felt terribly guilty about this sometimes—it was nothing compared to how she mourned for the still-living Elphaba.
Alive as far as I know, she couldn’t help thinking. Who would throw the funeral if she wasn’t? Who would think to tell me?
Glinda closed her eyes. Elphaba had to be alive. She’d have teased Glinda something terrible for it, but she was certain somehow that if Elphaba was dead, she would have felt it.
Elphaba had woken pieces of Glinda that she hadn’t known she contained, had seen her through the painful becoming from Galinda to the person she was now. They had changed each other in their time together, Glinda was sure. They were connected by fate, or God, or evil, or whatever else neither of them really believed in. Glinda was a woman possessed of a quiet conviction, shaky but immovable, and there was no doubt in her mind that if something had happened to Elphaba, she would know.
Glinda opened her eyes and looked up at the stained glass depiction of a woman emerging from a waterfall. The long, dark hair, the slim figure. If not for her pale skin and the water touching it, she easily could have been Elphaba.
It was as close as Glinda was able to get these days, this day. One year since Elphaba had kissed her and left. One year since Glinda had been left with a small pile of food, an ache in her chest, and a riddle (hold out? Hold out for what, you clever, conniving girl?). One year since Glinda had tasted everything she never knew she wanted, realized how much she wanted it, and then watched it walk away.
Glinda couldn’t be who Elphaba would have wanted her to be. In the absence of her battering ram personality, Glinda’s walls had sprung back up as if enchanted. Her persona went from porcelain and glass to solid stone, and during the day she was every bit as beautiful as everyone expected her to be. She was good, and she barricaded herself against greatness for fear of being burned.
Today, though, she had slipped out of her painfully quiet room and caught the first train away from Shiz. Elphaba would be pleased to know that in her absence, Glinda had been spending more time in the library. She had also been spending more time with Nessa, whose religious rantings had increased and taken on a sharp edge. Glinda had heard Elphaba’s name echoed in Nessa’s insistence on an absent but loving presence, and it was the first time she’d understood religion as more than a distant concept that people used for power. She began reading the books on Unionist theory Elphaba had left behind and found that the Unnamed God tended to take on any name the believer needed him to.
So she went to the library, and she read about faith. Between Nessa, her empty room, and the smell of books that had started to cling to her clothes, it was inevitable that Elphaba would become either a ghost or a god to her. Glinda read about faith, and decided she would just have to have it. Not in the Unnamed God, Lurline, or Ozma, nor in the phantasmic phantoms of sorcery or the Time Dragon Clock, but faith in Elphaba. Faith that she would not be left behind forever. Faith that something big would change, and their paths would cross again.
When she came across the story of Saint Aelphaba, the woman who vanished for centuries but returned in the end, Glinda vowed to wait. She could hold out as long as she had to.
A book on the parishes of the Emerald City had mentioned the small church in passing, and Glinda had been seized by the idea. So here she was, on the one year anniversary of Elphaba’s departure, praying. It had such wonderful symmetry, she thought. Symmetry enough for the period of faith to be rewarded, for the wait to be over. She listened to the water running from a small tap set into the wall, and she could almost hear Elphie laughing. One year was long enough, wasn’t it? One year was unfathomably long. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to do this again.
~
Glinda returned to the chapel on the same day the next year, and the next, and the next. She had graduated by then, walking the stage with her near-perfect grades, feeling Elphaba’s absent smile at that. She wasn’t built for faith. Still, she did her best.
It became a pilgrimage, the journey to the city to pray. She had crawled back into the social scene, now the young, ambitious Arduenna, the good lady Glinda. Her piety was her secret, something belonging to the Glinda of the past, to Elphie’s Glinda. Nessa knew of it some, for Glinda had borrowed her books on saints over the years and even accompanied her to Munchkinland’s maunteries when she visited over the summer. She saw the patience on the faces of the devotees of Saint Aelphaba, and it strengthened her resolve.
The Unnamed God meant little to her other than a convenient place to direct prayers, but when asked by suitors or dignitaries she described herself as a Unionist. Elphaba would have hated it, which, on the 364 days of the year she allowed herself to be bitter, made Glinda smile.
This day, four years exactly since she had last seen Elphaba, something else was on her mind. She suspected that this would be her last visit to the chapel as an unmarried woman. If Sir Chuffrey was not stupid–which he was not, Glinda had noticed disappointedly–he would propose to her before the year was out. And if nothing changed, if Elphaba stayed gone, Glinda would accept.
Hear that? She thought at the stained glass above her. Last chance. She’d held out. She would continue to, in every other way she could think of, but her faith was not strong enough (or it did not lend her strength enough) to throw away her best chance at the only life she could conceive of without Elphaba. She would use her position for Good, if she was able. She had plans already, quiet subversions that the Gale Force would not be able to stop, performing obedience at the most believable level. She would not become an Adept, a pawn of Morrible or the Wizard. She would not be the Galinda she would have been as a wife had Chuffrey gotten to her just a few years earlier and one wonderful girl less.
She would leave him if she had anything to leave him for, and she would continue her annual crusade, but the foolish future path she’d only let herself think of when times were at their hardest–one where Elphaba returned and things were simple –would be lost to her forever.
~
She was married that autumn. She went to the City with her husband more often, but they usually stayed towards the north end where business and arts flourished, and religion took a backseat. Glinda did not go to the church on those visits.
As such, when she explained to Chuffrey a week before the five year anniversary of Elphaba’s flight from her life that she would be journeying to the city on religious reasons, he was rather confused. Glinda told him that it was an annual trip she had started in her school years, that she was very particular about following it, and that she would be making it alone.
He agreed without much questioning, and it occurred to her that he probably suspected her of an affair, and that he wasn’t particularly bothered. It was an affair, of sorts, Glinda admitted to herself as she stared at the depictions of her personal saint.
She sat looking at Aelphaba and thinking of Elphaba for a couple hours, then got abruptly tired of it. On every other visit she had stayed in the chapel until the sun went down, but a strange kind of restlessness now propelled her from her seat. As she turned back towards the train station, something compelled her to take a different route than usual. Meandering through the streets of the Emerald City, she watched the sun make its lazy route across the sky with a sadness she tried to ignore.
She dipped into little side streets, heading westward in a way that no longer made sense if she was actually trying to get back to her platform. She followed her feet anyway. It felt as though something was calling to her.
After an hour of wandering, she came to a chapel she had never seen before. Her praying done for the day, she couldn’t explain what drew her to it. It wasn’t as though only lighting the right candle when she begged the Unnamed God for Elphaba’s return would actually bring it any closer to reality.
As she got closer, she was able to make out the letters over the simple doors. They read “The Cloister of Saint Glinda.”
Glinda stopped. That was just too on the nose. She would not be the vainglorious, vapid, Glinda The Good that everyone expected her to be. Not on the one day a year she allowed the persona to slip. It would feel like narcissism for her to visit a cloister of her own name, perhaps only because of the slow blending of Elphaba and Aelphaba in her mind.
She had thought maybe this feeling was a vocation of some sort, a call, the call, but Elphaba wouldn’t be caught dead in such a place, and Glinda didn’t feel like being caught alive in it, thrashing like a fish in that net of lies and heartache that she was sure would trap her eventually.
Whatever was pulling her to the church must be wrong, and she had half a mind to determine if there was some unregulated location spell being cast in the area. She pursed her lips and tested for magic in the air with a twist of her hand. To her surprise, the square erupted in colour. Under-the-counter spells had been woven through the entire city with such consistency and quantity she was amazed anyone could walk around of their own free will.
The strength of the magic radiating from the chapel was unique, and upon closer examination Glinda realized there must be some poor maunt in there casting it unconsciously. She wondered if it was meant as a call to Saint Glinda and had somehow caught her instead. It was powerful, but it could not be for her. Glinda touched the greenish glow gently, hoping to soothe it. Then she took a breath and walked away, ignoring the tugging in her heart.
~
Inside the chapel, a woman who’d had her head bowed in deep contemplation all day suddenly lifted it. There was something- some feeling in the air. Despite her religious surroundings she did not believe in divinity, which left only magic. It felt familiar, too. Too familiar.
She got up and rushed to the door. The devotees of Saint Glinda looked up as she passed. In the dim lantern light of the sacred space, any one of them would have sworn her skin looked oddly green.
Elphaba dashed onto the street, whipping her head around like a predator, hunting for something. With a certainty she could not explain, her eyes snapped to the back of a blonde head bobbing away through the crowded streets.
Elphaba felt wildness rise into her throat and paralyze her limbs. She wanted to run, towards and away simultaneously, and the strength of the opposing desires froze her in place. The woman stopped suddenly, and Elphaba ducked back, ensuring she was hidden in the shadows.
Glinda’s eyes swept over the cracks between buildings. She looked like she was searching for something. She looked desperate. Elphaba didn’t dare breathe.
After a minute, Glinda turned away, and within a few seconds she had vanished into the crowd.
Elphaba stared at the spot she had been for a good long while. Then she went back inside, and collapsed in a pew.
Saint Glinda, she thought somewhat hysterically, staring up at the portrait of the woman who looked uncannily like the girl whose name she shared. You’re real after all.
~
Usually, Elphaba went to the oratory on days she could pretend. She had communicated to her shadow colleagues that it was her preferred drop-off point, so whenever she had to take or deliver something she would spend a few hours there. She also went there when there was a gap in her schedule too big to fill with the usual distractions, when her little apartment felt suffocating in its silence. The community of silence she found in the chapel was quiet too, but it was a quiet she chose. She also went on Nessa’s birthday each year, and on her father’s, pretending to some religious leaning in honour of her family.
She did not go on Glinda’s birthday, the day they met, or the day they ended. It would deny her the deniability that kept her sane, and she could not have that. She had to stay focused, had to ignore the loneliness that gripped her, had to have faith in a movement greater than herself, had to forget. She could not forget.
She tried to think of Glinda in the distant way she sometimes thought about Boq, Crope, Tibbett, and Fiyero, but she could not dull the sharpness of her memory. “Hold out” had been cruel last words, she knew that now. She could never go back, could never subject her loved ones to the danger that being loved by her placed them in. She prayed, on those days she went to the chapel, that Glinda hadn’t listened.
Elphaba happened to receive instructions for a hand-off on the five year anniversary of the day she’d left, the day Elphaba had ceased to exist and Fae was born. She’d considered changing the meeting point, but decided that would not be in line with her internal lies. On that day, she was annually extra worried that something might pull her back, that Glinda might pull her back. She determined it was her own weakness of will, but made an effort to be out of the city and far away from Shiz each year nonetheless.
This year, she had realized that wouldn’t be possible. She’d taken her seat in the pews with a mounting restlessness, and did her best to settle herself. Whatever call she felt, she could not follow. She had a job to do.
Now she lay in those same pews, heart beating unevenly. Glinda had been in the city today of all days, and had walked nearly up to her door. Elphaba thought of the way her eyes had searched the darkened street, the way she had just known somehow that Glinda was nearby, the way she felt on this day each year, and wondered what better proof of a soul there was than being able to sense someone else’s.
What horror. What joy.
She sat there until everyone else had gone, and long after. She sat there until someone called “Elphaba!”
The voice was deep, masculine, familiar. Distinctly not Glinda. Despair, relief, and fear flowed through her all at once. She tried to lose Fiyero, but he followed her, and she slipped, still rattled from the events of the day. She knew in that half second when she couldn’t stop herself from turning at the sound of her childhood nickname that it was over.
She asked about Glinda because it seemed too providential to be coincidence for Glinda and Fiyero to be so close on the same day, and because she could not help herself. She heard of Glinda’s marriage with a heart at once relieved and broken. She shook Fiyero’s hand and felt her mask fall to the side. It was over.
She did not stop Fiyero returning. She told him she was married, just not to a man, and even as she said it couldn’t decide if she meant the cause or the past. She didn’t stop their affair, and though she told him she didn’t exist and so he wasn’t being unfaithful, she knew that they both were. Her decreased time in the oratory was proof of that, her free evenings now spent on the opposite of faith.
She hadn’t expected to love him, but she did, in her way. Still, they loved each other out of loneliness. Elphaba was a fantasy Fiyero escaped his life through and for, he was a stand-in for her countless could-have-beens.
When she failed, she felt her whole life come crashing down around her, and saw how little rubble there really was. She had built nothing, accomplished nothing, lost everything. She felt something in her mind snap cleanly in two like a broken bone. She would have sworn she heard the crack.
She stumbled back to her apartment out of instinct more than any desire to be there. The amount of blood shocked her, and she touched it without thinking. She stared down at her hands, now red as she deserved, red as they should’ve been had she succeeded. The wrong person had died, the wrong person had lived, and both were her fault. The break in her brain widened, threatening to swallow her whole.
Out of her mind with grief and guilt, she left. She went to the only place that her destroyed and disjointed thoughts ascribed a measure of safety to. She went to church.
The maunts took her in, took care of her. She was barely a person by this point, having worked so hard to make herself nothing but a cog in the machine she had let down and left. She couldn’t pull her thoughts together, couldn’t pull a thought out of the viscera she had been left with in her head, on her hands. She avoided the other maunts and wished she could avoid herself.
The only place she found any measure of peace was in the depictions of Saint Glinda tucked into every corner of the cloister. Something in that blonde, benevolent face reminded her she had once felt more than this, had once been more than this.
Incredibly slowly, she began to heal. She couldn’t do it properly or quickly on her own, but she let it happen anyway. She wondered, distantly, when she was capable of wondering again, if she would die here. She wondered if that would be for the best.
~
Glinda came down with a horrible sickness on Lurlinemas Eve, feeling as though aftershocks of death were passing through her. She recovered after a month, but something about it stuck with her. She began reading up on curses, on feeling others’ pain. She thought of her last visit to the Emerald City, the magic that had pulled her around as if made for her. It restored her faith, and this illness restored her fear.
She decided when she went to the city this time, she would not be coming back.
She packed her bags and said goodbye to Chuffrey as if it was a normal trip. Theirs was a business relationship more than anything, and they both knew it. She would not miss him much. She paid for her ticket–a one-way trip–and settled into the train seat with her classic kind of calm conviction.
When she got there, she rooted around inside herself. Under the bluster of Lady Chuffrey, the heartbreak of little Glinda Arduenna, and the resolve of Glinda the Good was the connection she had felt on her last visit. She let the magic of the city reveal itself to her, and used the pull inside herself to find the matching thread of green cutting through it. It was different this time, distant and sickly, but it was there. Reminded of her own disease, she resolved to follow it.
Glinda allowed herself to be pulled through the city, dragged as if by an invisible hand. She arrived at the same square as the year before. Certain now that however strange it was, this feeling must be right, she knocked on the door.
A withered old woman came to it, and smiled. “You must be her Glinda then,” she said.
Glinda’s heart soared, knowing there was only one person who “her” could be, knowing there was only one person whose Glinda she was. She nodded.
“She never really cared for ours, but I suppose I see the resemblance,” the woman said. “Yackle will take you to her. Come along dearie.” Then she turned and walked deeper into the halls of the building, beckoning for Glinda to follow. She did. She felt sick with hope, and overwhelmed by the awful undertones of the pull that had increased tenfold as soon as she stepped inside.
Her heart ached with it, and she felt as though the magic was going to be yanked right out of her, flying to what must be Elphaba faster than she could.
She turned a corner with a feeling like a cresting wave, and a figure running down the hallway towards her skidded to a stop.
The years had not been kind to Elphaba, lining her face with grief and worry, leaving her gaunt and thinner than she’d ever been at Shiz, but she was as beautiful as when she’d put that hat on all those years ago and Glinda had realized how beautiful she’d always been. Glinda felt foolish, suddenly. No faith could match this. Elphaba wasn’t some phantom patron saint of waiting, she was a person. She was gloriously, wonderfully real. The green magic that washed out of her in waves wrapped itself around Glinda with a greediness she understood entirely.
Glinda heard her let out a strangled cry, and it broke the last of the spell she felt she was under.
She dropped her bags, ran the last few steps forward, and threw her arms around her friend. Elphaba collapsed like a rag doll, and Glinda followed her down to the floor. She realized Elphaba was sobbing, silent heaves that shook her whole body, and brought her hands up to her face anxiously.
“Elphie don’t cry,” Glinda said, wiping the tears away as quickly as they fell, “you’ll hurt yourself. Don’t cry. It’s all alright now.”
This only made Elphaba cry harder, inconsolable and unreachable with it. Mother Yackle looked on, mildly surprised. Sister Saint Aelphaba’s most extreme emotional reaction up until this point had been the occasional derisive snort at some of the teachings of the Unnamed God.
She touched Glinda’s arm and beckoned. Glinda looked down at Elphaba, then scooped her up in a bridal carry. Elphaba wrapped her arms around her neck, burying her face in the expensive fabric covering Glinda’s shoulder. Glinda rubbed her back soothingly as she followed Yackle to a small, bare room with nothing but a bed, a few books, and jars of oils. Glinda thanked the old maunt as she left, and deposited Elphaba onto the bed.
Elphie had stopped crying, and was now just shaking, staring up at Glinda like she might vanish if she blinked. Glinda pulled away to grab some of the oils for Elphaba’s burned cheeks, and Elphie grabbed her arm in a flash, digging her nails in.
“Elphie, ow,” Glinda protested. “I’m not leaving, alright? I promise.” Elphaba made no move to let go, and Glinda raised an eyebrow. "I’m not the one who leaves.”
Elphaba let go, and Glinda smiled as she fetched the oil, pleased that she remembered how to gently manipulate her friend.
As she swiped the oil across Elphaba’s face, she studied her more closely. There was something distant about her eyes, something that had always been sharp enough to cut when they were at school. Elphaba wasn’t just different, she was broken.
“I’m sorry,” Glinda whispered. “I’ve come too late haven’t I? I should have listened last year, when I felt you, only I wasn’t sure.” She lowered her eyes, respect and devotion. “I’ve missed you.”
Elphaba reached out and took Glinda’s free hand. She opened her mouth, closed it, then simply squeezed Glinda’s hand. Glinda thought of the Elphaba she’d known, always too quick with a retort, tongue never bitten and words never held back. She blinked back tears.
“I wish you hadn’t done this on your own,” she said quietly, her grief and anger remembering themselves.
Elphaba shook her head. “I had to,” she rasped, her voice hoarse from disuse. Glinda could have wept with relief. Immediately defending her decisions, not apologizing unless cajoled into it. Her Elphie was not entirely gone.
“You did not have to,” Glinda snapped, hands on her hips. “Whatever you’ve told yourself about protecting me hardly matters when you didn’t ask me. I would rather have been in danger with you than safe without you.”
Elphaba narrowed her eyes, some of the old fire back in them, and Glinda turned to put the oils away, hiding her smile. If she had to debate Elphaba back into herself, so be it.
“You were safe,” Elphaba insisted.
“So I was right, that is why you did it,” Glinda said. “Lurline, Elphie. How can someone as brilliant as you be so moronic?”
Elphaba glared up at her, and Glinda pursed her lips to keep from laughing. “You get to put yourself in constant danger for what you care about, why don’t I?”
“You matter more,” Elphaba said far too quickly, then blushed. Glinda stared at her, awed and honoured.
“Elphie,” she said gently. “I’ve had six years to think about this. Six years of living safely without you. It’s not what I want. It never has been.”
Elphaba scoffed. “I had to,” she said again. She was quiet for a moment, clearly thinking, pulling together scattered pieces of her mind. ”Fiyero… is dead. Because of me.”
Glinda raised her eyebrows, startled. “Fiyero? I saw him once, months back.” She remembered her strange certainty, and snapped her fingers. “I knew he had seen you,” she said to herself. She looked down at Elphaba, who looked shocked.
“He didn’t tell you?” She asked. Elphaba shook her head. Glinda considered this. “I’d asked him to give you a message,” she said. She remembered it clearly, sitting across from Fiyero and feeling closer to her school days and closer to Elphaba than she had in months. “If you should see her,” she said quietly, echoing her words from what felt like a lifetime ago, “tell her I miss her still.”
Elphaba looked up at her, sadness and guilt warring on her face. “The Gale Force?” Glinda asked. Elphaba nodded. “That’s a shame,” she said softly, “he was a good man.” Elphaba looked away, and something occurred to Glinda. “You and him,” she said. It was not a question, but Elphaba nodded anyway.
“I’m sorry,” Elphaba whispered, and Glinda could feel that she meant it for a great many things. She saw the shame and self-loathing in Elphaba’s eyes, saw the life of penance Elphaba had constructed for herself, and at once knew what she had to do. She could feel the sun streaming through the window at her back, could see the hair at the sides of her face glowing with it. She was a performer at heart, and she had never cared about a role more. She took Elphaba’s face in her hands and met her eyes.
Judge and jury, Saint and salvation, Glinda looked down at Elphaba. With the emphasis each word deserved, she said, “I forgive you.”
~
Elphaba stared up at Glinda, her head haloed by sunlight, her voice full of faith, and felt something inside her heal. “I forgive you,” she repeated, and Elphaba shuddered.
“You shouldn’t,” she said, “I don’t.”
“Who matters more?” Glinda asked.
Elphaba made a noise that was almost close to a laugh. “You,” she said, without hesitation.
“Well there you go then,” Glinda said. “You’re forgiven.”
Elphaba smiled for the first time in months and shook her head ruefully. “Manipulative little thing, aren’t you?”
“There’s my Elphie,” Glinda said, beaming back at her, and sat down on the bed next to her. Elphaba watched the moment she went from saint to person, and as she had always done, loved her both ways. “I came to the city every year, you know. On-”
“The day I left,” Elphaba finished, and Glinda nodded.
“I went to Saint Aelphaba’s chapel,” she said.
Elphaba looked up at her, startled. Glinda was smiling down at her lap, hands folded and fidgeting. “It seems we had… similar ideas.”
Elphaba started to laugh, and she could hear Glinda laughing too, and it wasn’t funny, all the loneliness and replacements, all the settling for semblances, but they both had the real thing now and that was all that mattered.
“Glinda,” she said, unsure of what to say, unsure of how to say it. She hadn’t talked to someone properly since Fiyero, hadn’t had the strength or the sanity to. “I’m damaged goods. I always have been, but especially now.”
“You’re healing,” Glinda said quietly. “You need help to do it. I’m here now. I won’t let you leave me again.”
Elphaba took a breath, then another. She thought about the loneliness of the past months, even deeper than that of the five years before. “I’m not strong enough to,” she said, realizing the truth of it as she did. “And I don’t want to.”
Glinda smiled, looking at her with faith she hadn’t earned. “Good,” she said.
“There are risks,” Elphaba said, unable to face that just yet. “I don’t exactly blend in, and I can’t stay hidden here forever. My mind isn’t as strong as it was, neither is my body. I don’t know how to take care of someone anymore.”
“I accept the risks,” Glinda said, “and I can take care of us both.” She reached out and slid her hand into Elphaba’s. “I love you,” she said, “I don’t want to live without you anymore.”
Elphaba reached up with her other hand, turned Glinda’s face to hers, and kissed her. Elphaba felt long dormant parts of herself–some that Fiyero had touched and many that he had never managed to–come alive.
The road to recovery would be long and winding, the road to fixing Oz dangerous and uncertain, but Elphaba knew she would not be walking them alone, and she was suddenly sure that both destinations were not only possible, but inevitable.
It would not be easy, but it would be. Elphaba had faith.