Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first thing Glinda notices is the smell.

Not the sharp sting of the potion or the bitter tang of boiled wool that clung to the tower while the water steamed off the floor. That’s already fading.

It’s smoke.

Smoke and sweat and torch oil on iron brackets. The air outside the chamber is thick with it, seeping under the door in faint grey threads. It smells like every storybook riot she’s ever had read to her as a child: the part where the villagers come with pitchforks and flames and righteous certainty.

They’re chanting.

It takes her a second to realise that’s what the noise is—her ears are still full of other sounds: the clatter of buckets, the shrill gasp of the guard who yanked the curtain back, the terrible, heavy splash of water hitting stone. The way Elphaba had—

Glinda’s throat closes. She grips the edge of the overturned bucket so hard her knuckles go white. The wood digs into her palms.

Don’t think it, she orders herself. Don’t.

There’s a guard talking at her. Someone in a ridiculous hat—the captain of the palace guard, she thinks, though he looks younger than she remembers, or maybe she’s just older now in the way that matters.

“… they’re getting restless, Your— Your Goodness. We need you. They—”

“Of course,” she cuts in, because he is talking too slowly and the chanting outside is getting louder.

WICKED. WICKED. WICKED.

She hears it through stone. Hears the way their feet stamp in time. Hears the scattershot, gleeful edge that wasn’t there the first time she heard that word sung in this city.

“No one mourns the Wicked,” they cried, on a bright, shiny morning when the Wizard rode into town.

Now it’s a sport. The word is a weapon they throw at the tower walls.

Glinda realises the guard is still staring at her, waiting. She realises she’s been staring at the wet patch on the floor where—

No.

She drags her gaze up, smoothing out her face. The muscle above her right eye is twitching. She presses her thumb there until it stills.

“Of course,” she says again, lighter this time, her voice settling into that familiar bright register, the one she’s used so often it feels automatic. “Oz needs to hear from its… from its leaders.”

The word catches. She bites down on the rest of the sentence, because if she says “from us” she thinks she might scream.

There is no us anymore.

The guard doesn’t notice. They never do. He bows, lets her past. She has to step around the scattered buckets, the splinter of a broken handle, a dark patch of water that is just water, it is just water.

Her skirt swishes through it anyway. The hem darkens, clings.

She does not look back at the place where her best friend, her worst mistake, her something had been only moments ago. She narrows her focus like she’s about to go onstage: one foot, then the other, shoulders back, chin lifted.

She can feel their eyes on her already, even through stone.

The corridor is full of people.

Guards in mismatched armour, citizens in borrowed courage, courtiers in nightshirts thrown hastily under coats. They crowd the stairwell and press against the walls, all of them peering, whispering, straining for a glimpse of the Witch’s last known location.

When they see her, the murmurs swell.

“Glinda—!”

“Glinda the Good!”

“Is she— Is it done? Is she dead?”

Their faces are flushed with excitement, with fear, with something she doesn’t want to name. Someone reaches out and grabs her sleeve, blue eyes wide and hopeful.

“Is it true?” the woman gasps. “Is the Wicked Witch gone? For good?”

Glinda’s mouth moves before the thought catches up. Years of practice, of charm work, of answering questions she doesn’t fully understand with confidence, carry her forward.

“Yes,” she hears herself say. Her voice sounds steadier than her knees feel. “The Witch—” Her throat tightens around the word; she forces it out. “Elphaba is gone.”

There is a ripple of relief. A trembling, nervous laugh from somewhere upstairs. Someone actually claps.

The sound hits her like a slap.

She told them she was wicked. She sat in drawing rooms and auditoriums and floated above the city on bubbles, helping to paint Elphaba green in their minds long before the Wizard ever declared her an enemy. She helped.

She swallows it down.

Now is not the time. If she starts unravelling here, in this stairwell, with the door to the tower room still ajar behind her and the smell of water and burnt… something… clinging to her clothes, she will never stop.

Later, she promises herself. Later you can fall apart.

Right now, there is work to do.

She moves through them, smiling, offering reassuring nods, the occasional squeeze of a hand. Some of them are crying with relief, pressing themselves against the stone to give her room, reaching out but never quite touching. The halo effect of goodness keeps a small, clear circle around her at all times.

No one touches her and yet she feels smothered.

At the bottom of the stairs, the door to the balcony is half-open. Light spills through the crack: the flicker of firelight, the uneven glow of torches held aloft below. The roar of the crowd grows louder. WICKED, they chant. WICKED WITCH. WICKED WITCH.

The captain of the guard pushes the door the rest of the way.

“Lady Glinda,” he says, voice low but urgent, “if you could… calm them. Give them something to—”

He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t have to.

Glinda looks past him, out over the balcony.

The courtyard below is full to bursting. People are jammed shoulder to shoulder, faces turned up like flowers straining for sun. Torches sway, casting wild shadows over stone. There are banners stolen from earlier festivities, hastily altered: the Wizard’s face scribbled over with crude green skin and hooked noses, the word WICKED painted in clumsy, thrilling strokes.

She can’t see the end of them. The crowd spills out into the streets, a living sea.

For a moment, she feels very small.

“Are you well enough?” the captain asks quietly. “You’ve been through a lot tonight, my lady.”

Glinda’s laugh is a brittle little thing that feels like it might crack if she puts any more weight on it.

“I’m always well enough,” she says. Then, lighter: “When has Oz ever known me not to be?”

He smiles back, relieved. People love an answer that fits their expectations.

She steps out onto the balcony.

The roar hits her like a physical force.

“GLINDA! GLINDA THE GOOD!”

It shudders up through the soles of her shoes, into her knees, fills her chest until she’s not sure she’s breathing air anymore or just sound. The torches blur for a second; she blinks rapidly, eyelashes damp.

She’s done this before.

Years of parades and public appearances. She knows how to hold herself, how to tilt her head so the tiara—oh— she lifts a hand to her hair, realises with a vague, dazed surprise that she isn’t wearing one. Her hair is falling out of its careful curls. There’s a damp patch on her sleeve she doesn’t examine too closely.

It doesn’t matter. The crowd doesn’t see details. They see the outline: the bright dress, the golden hair, the smile.

Smile, she tells herself. It takes effort. Her face feels like stone.

The cheer swells as she steps fully into view. People chant her name, clap, stamp. The word GOOD rises up like incense.

“Friends,” she calls out, and thank Oz, her voice carries. The balcony acoustics do half the work for her. “Fellow Ozians.”

The crowd quiets, the noise folding in on itself. She can hear individual words now, snatches of conversation.

“—did you see the smoke?”

“—my sister swears she melted, just melted—”

“—knew she’d protect us—”

Glinda takes a breath, the cold night air burning her lungs.

What do I say?

We killed her. We hunted my… we hunted Elphaba from university to forest to sky because it was easier than admitting our Wizard was a fraud. I smiled through it because I was too afraid to stop the parade once it started. I let you call her wicked because it was easier and safer and I was a coward.

She can’t say that.

So she says something else.

“Tonight,” she begins, “a great evil has been defeated.”

There is a cheer. It hits her like a wave; she nearly stumbles.

She tastes bile.

She sees, superimposed over the roaring crowd, Elphaba’s face in the tower. The shock, the betrayal, the impossible, stupid hope. The way her eyes met Glinda’s right before the water hit, as if asking one last time: are you with me?

And Glinda had— what had she done? She’d stood there and let that stupid girl kill her. Let the bucket tip. Let the curtain fall.

She hears the splash again. Smells the potion, the steam.

“Glinda?” A voice hisses from behind her, one of the advisers. “Your Goodness, the people—”

Right. She’s paused too long.

She swallows and forces herself to continue.

“The Wicked Witch of the West threatened all that Oz holds dear,” she says, and it’s a small mercy that her voice doesn’t tremble, because inside every word shakes apart. “She endangered our beloved Wizard, attacked our citizens, oppressed our Animals. But…” She forces herself to lift her chin, to look at the crowd rather than the dark place in her memory. “But goodness will always triumph. Compassion, courage, unity—these are the true powers of Oz.”

The crowd eats it up.

They cheer for those words like they’re hearing something noble, not the hollow, rattling echo she hears inside her skull. They chant wicked at a woman who is already gone, and good at a girl who no longer recognises herself.

You told them she was wicked, Glinda.

You floated down into their streets in your bubble and your best dresses and you let them think green meant evil and different meant dangerous. You let them boo and hiss at the stories, laughed with them.

You made it easy for them to pick up torches.

“And now,” she says, because the speech has to go on, it has to, if it stops she will start screaming and she doesn’t know if she’ll ever stop, “now we must move forward. We must rebuild what has been broken. We must honour the loss of life—”

Elphaba’s, whispers something in her chest.

“—and continue the Wizard’s great work of peace and prosperity.”

She hears herself say it. Hears the way the crowd murmurs in approval.

The Wizard. The conman. The fraud who begged Elphaba to clean up his mess, then let the guards turn on her.

She smiles and lifts her hands, and feels the weight of the lie settle on her shoulders like a cloak.

Somewhere behind her, there is movement. She doesn’t turn, but a tiara is placed lightly on her hair, fingers gentle, as if this is a moment out of a storybook: the coronation of Glinda the Good.

She remembers being a little girl and imagining this exact moment. Standing on a balcony, people chanting her name, a crown catching the light.

In all her imaginings, she was happy.

“Glinda the Good!” someone cries, voice cracking with excitement. It catches. The chant swells through the crowd: GLIN-DA THE GOOD, GLIN-DA THE GOOD.

The tiara sits heavy on her skull. It might as well be iron.

She lifts her arms higher, because they want that gesture, because it steadies them, because that’s what she’s for: a shape to project hope onto.

Inside, something small and precious curls in on itself and goes very, very quiet.

Later—she doesn’t know how much later; time has gone strange, stretchy—she dismisses the last of the advisers from her chambers with a smile so automatic it barely feels like it belongs to her.

“Yes, of course. We’ll discuss the succession in more detail tomorrow. Yes, I’m quite all right, just tired, what a night, goodness me. Sleep well.”

The door closes behind them with a soft click.

Silence drops over the room like a curtain.

She stands where she is for a long moment, hand still raised halfway from waving, fingers frozen in a polite little flutter. The smile is still on her face. Her cheeks ache. Everything aches.

She watches the doorknob like it might turn again, like someone might burst back in and tell her it was all a horrible joke, that Elphaba is fine, that they’ve caught the real Wicked Witch somewhere else entirely.

Nothing happens.

The room is empty but for her and the faint, fading impression of the crowd in her ears, like echoing song in a theatre long after the orchestra has stopped.

Slowly, as if it weighs a thousand stone, she lowers her hand.

Her reflection catches her eye in the mirror over the dressing table.

She hardly recognises the girl looking back.

Her hair is wilted around the tiara, curls fallen, a few strands sticking damply to her forehead. There’s a smudge of something dark along her jaw—soot from the tower, maybe. Her dress is creased, the hem stained darker where it brushed through water. Her eyes are ringed in smeared kohl and something rawer, redder.

The tiara glitters like it’s delighted to be here.

Glinda takes one step toward the mirror, then another. Each one feels like walking through molasses.

Up close, she can see the tiny tremor in her own hand as she reaches up. She touches the tiara lightly, then grips it, knuckles whitening, and lifts.

For a second she thinks it might be stuck. The idea almost makes her laugh.

It comes free with a quiet scrape of metal on hairpins. She sets it down on the table very, very gently, like it might explode.

Without the weight of it, her head feels strangely light. Untethered.

She stares at her bare head in the mirror.

Someone whispers her name.

She jolts, every muscle going tight, heart slamming against her ribs.

But the room is empty. The whisper was in her memory, not her ears: Elphaba’s voice in the tower, just before—

No. She can’t—

She sees it anyway. The moment the water hit. The way Elphaba’s body jolted, the way the steam rose up, screaming hot. The way Glinda’s own feet rooted to the floor.

She sees the curtain fall.

She hears the guards shouting and the captain calling for more water and the citizens below screaming with joy as smoke billowed out of the tower windows. She hears herself gasp. She hears—

She hears herself.

Saying nothing.

Doing nothing.

Her stomach twists. She braces her hands on the dressing table, bowing her head.

“I told them you were wicked,” she says aloud. The words sound thin in the quiet room. “Oh, Elphie. I told them you were wicked and they believed me and then… then he told them again and it stuck and I…” Her voice cracks. “I let them. I let them believe it.”

She squeezes her eyes shut. Behind her lids, green.

“Goodness,” she whispers, the word tasting wrong. “Goodness gracious, Glinda, what have you done.”

Something gives.

It’s small, at first—a hitch in her breath, a tremble—but then it’s like the thing that’s been holding her ribs in place all evening just… snaps.

The first sob rips out of her without warning. It’s loud, wild, not at all the dainty little sniff she’s practiced for public sympathy. It bends her double. Her hands scrabble for the edge of the table; she barely manages to stay upright.

Once that one is out, the others follow in a rush.

She cries like her lungs are full of smoke. Harsh, hiccupping sobs that hurt her throat and make black spots dance at the edge of her vision. Tears spill hot and fast down her cheeks, drip off her chin onto the already-ruined bodice of her dress.

She hears the mob again in her head: the pounding on the tower door, the chant of WICKED WITCH, the giddy hysteria of people who think they’ve watched justice done. She hears, under that, the Wizard’s silken voice, the advisers’ murmurs, her own bright little quips about wickedness, about goodness, about right and wrong as if any of it were that simple.

She hears nothing from Elphaba, because Elphaba is gone.

“I’m sorry,” she gasps, though there is no one here to hear it. “I’m so sorry, I’m so—”

She claps a hand over her mouth, as if she can shove the words back in.

Sorry isn’t enough. Sorry is laughable. Sorry is something you say when you scuff someone’s shoes, not when you—

What have you done? What have you done?

She staggers away from the dressing table, away from the mirror, away from her own ruined face. Her vision blurs, the room swimming. She nearly trips over the edge of the rug and falls down heavily onto the end of the bed, the mattress dipping under her weight.

The crown of Glinda the Good sits on the table across the room, neat and glittering. It might as well be on another continent.

She curls in on herself, arms wrapped around her middle like she’s trying to hold herself together physically because if she doesn’t, she’ll fly apart.

“I told them,” she whispers, rocking without meaning to. “I told them you were wicked. I told them and they listened and now you’re—”

Dead. The word sits just behind her teeth. She can’t push it out. Saying it would make it solid.

Her chest tightens, breath coming in sharp, shallow pulls. For a moment she thinks she might actually be sick. She swallows hard, presses her palms against her eyes until she sees stars.

Outside, somewhere in the city, someone starts singing.

It’s faint through the closed windows, but she recognises the melody: the same one from that first day, dressed up for a new occasion. No one mourns the Wicked, they sang then. Now the words are meaner, more triumphant. No one mourns the Wicked, no one cries when they are gone.

Glinda’s fingers dig into the bedspread.

No one mourns the Wicked.

She is mourning so hard she thinks she might split in two.

She doesn’t know how long she stays like that, shaking and gasping, curled around the empty space where Elphaba should be. Her throat grows raw, her eyes puff up, the sobs eventually thinning to the occasional, involuntary little gulp of air.

When the tears finally run out, she is left hollow.

Her head throbs. Her dress is wrinkled and damp. She feels like a marionette that’s had all its strings cut.

She uncurls slowly, limbs heavy. She wipes at her face with clumsy hands and stares up at the ceiling.

On the dressing table, the tiara glints again, catching the lamplight.

Glinda lets out a long, shuddering breath.

“If this is what good means,” she whispers to the empty room, “I don’t know how to be it.”

The mob’s chant still echoes faintly in her skull, even though the city outside has started to quiet. Wicked, wicked, wicked.

She closes her eyes.

In the dark behind her lids, Elphaba is still there, still standing, still looking back at her in that last, stunned second. The look in her eyes says everything Glinda never did: you were supposed to be on my side.

“I’m sorry,” Glinda says again, as quietly as a prayer, as useless as one. “I’m so sorry.”

No one answers.

Tomorrow, they will call her Glinda the Good and hand her more words to say and decisions to make. Tomorrow, she will smooth her hair and fix her smile and step out onto that balcony again because Oz needs someone and apparently she is what it has.

Tonight, there is only this: the echo of a scream cut short, the ghost of a girl she helped turn into a monster, and the crushing, inescapable knowledge that she told them Elphaba was wicked.

And they believed her.

Chapter Text

The world doesn’t end when the girl pours the water on her.

It just feels like it for a minute.

The liquid hits her skin and every nerve goes white-hot. It’s not like normal water—cool, clean, mischievous when it splashes too hard. This is thick and wrong, sharp as glass. It bites everywhere it touches: face, arms, chest. Her dress clings, heavy with it. Her lungs seize.

She hears herself scream and barely recognises the sound.

Then the floor vanishes.

There’s a split-second vertigo—stone gone, air rushing past her ears—before her shoulder slams into something hard and wooden. The impact knocks the breath out of her. The world goes sideways. Her head snaps against a beam.

For a few infinite, jagged moments she can’t tell which way is up, whether she’s falling or lying still or somehow both. Everything is noise: the roar of the mob outside, the ring of the bucket clanging to the floor above, the sizzle of potion on stone, her own hoarse gasps.

Then fingers, not human-warm but firm and insistent, latch under her arms.

“Elphaba. Elphaba.”

The voice is wrong. Hollow. It echoes in a way her brain can’t parse. But her name is right, and the urgency is right, and the way those hands are hauling her further into the dark is very, very familiar.

“Yero,” she croaks. Or tries to. It comes out half air, half pain.

“Stay with me,” Fiyero says. His voice rattles, straw against wood. “You have to move.”

She would like to explain that she is in fact already doing quite a lot—namely, not dying immediately—and perhaps they could all agree that’s enough activity for the moment. Instead, she makes a low, useless noise as another wave of burning rips across her chest where the potion soaked in deepest.

The space under the floor is a crawlspace at best. Someone, years ago, bricked up the old foundation and forgot about it. The boards above are close enough that when Elphaba turns her head, her brow brushes splintered wood.

Her skin feels like it’s been grated.

The boards vibrate with footsteps. Men shouting. Metal scraping. The pound, pound, pound of fists on the door.

“GET HER! OPEN UP!”

“THE WITCH! THE WITCH!”

Their voices rain down through the floor, muffled but unmistakable. The word wicked rides the air like smoke.

Elphaba’s hand spasms. She tries to reach for her broom, for anything, but her fingers won’t cooperate. They jerk, tremble. Pain flashes up her arm.

The spell. The potion. Overuse. It all hits at once, a brutal, electric exhaustion.

“Yero,” she manages again, because the panic surging in her chest needs somewhere to go. “Glinda—”

“I know.” Fiyero sounds like he’s breathing hard, which is absurd because technically he doesn’t. The straw in his chest rustles anyway, a ghost of effort. “She’s still up there. You can’t go back.”

Elphaba tries.

She doesn’t think about it. Her body just moves, or tries to, like a compass twitching towards north. She scrabbles for purchase, nails clawing at the packed earth as she tries to drag herself back toward the rectangle of pale light where she fell through.

Pain explodes in her shoulder. Her arm gives out. She bites down on a cry, jaw clenched so hard something pops.

Above, the room she just left erupts into chaos.

She hears the door slam open, crashing against stone. Boots thunder across the floor. Someone shouts, “There she is!” Then another voice, high and appalled: “Sweet Oz! She’s— she’s melted!”

Laughter, disbelieving and giddy. A shriek of fear. Something else—something heavy—thuds down. Maybe the bucket. Maybe Elphaba’s hat. Maybe a piece of the life she just lost.

“Stay down,” Fiyero hisses. He presses closer, his straw-swathed body forming a protective curve around hers. “If they see you—”

He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t have to.

She closes her eyes, breathing shallowly through her teeth.

So this is it. This is what dying looks like to them: a splash of water and a scream and then nothing but a damp stain on the stone. Neat. Clean. No messy body to bury, no inconvenient corpse with a face they might recognise.

“Elphie!”

The voice slices through everything.

Glinda.

Elphaba’s eyes fly open. Her heart lurches so violently she almost chokes.

She tries to move again, but Fiyero’s arms are iron around her now. He’s stronger like this, all leverage and angles.

“Elphaba, no.”

“She’s up there,” Elphaba snaps, or tries to; the words crack. “She’s— They’ll—”

“They won’t hurt her,” Fiyero says, and for once there’s no lazy drawl, no flippant humour. Just flat conviction. “She’s their Good. You’re the monster. That’s the whole point.”

The whole point.

Yes. Of course.

She told them he was a fraud, and the Wizard spun it into a story where she was the threat and Glinda was the shining counterpoint. Wicked and Good. Black and white. It’s always easier to rally behind a pretty picture than a complicated truth.

Up above, the mob’s chant changes, names rearranging themselves into new patterns.

“GLINDA! GLINDA THE GOOD!”

“She doesn’t know,” Elphaba whispers. The floorboards are so close she could reach up and press her palm to them. “She… she thinks I’m gone.”

“She has to,” Fiyero says. “It’s the only way this works.”

Works.

As if this is a plan and not a last-minute scramble to survive a murder attempt.

Elphaba’s chest tightens. The potion burns under her skin, a slow, vicious heat that seems to sink bone-deep. Every breath drags over raw places. Her hands won’t stop shaking. The magic she dragged out of herself to try and save Fiyero—whatever he is now—buzzes at the edges of her awareness like a swarm of bees, angry and disjointed.

Above, briefing voices blur together. She catches fragments. Dead. Melted. Wicked Witch. Green stain.

“I… can’t…” She swallows. Her throat feels scraped raw. “I can’t just leave her.”

“She’ll be safer if they believe you’re dead,” he says. “You know that.”

He’s not wrong.

That’s the worst part.

If she goes back up there, if she bursts from under the floor dripping with potion and fury, if she stands beside Glinda and screams the truth into the mob’s faces, they will drag them both down. They won’t listen. They’ve already chosen their story.

They’ll string Elphaba up. They’ll twist Glinda’s goodness into complicity and when they realise their shining symbol loved the monster all along—

No.

No, she can’t let them do that to her. To Glinda. To the girl who once put a silly little hat on her head and told the world they’d be surprised how much they’d changed.

“Elphaba.” Fiyero’s straw hand lands on her shoulder—carefully, gently, as if he’s aware of every burn hiding under the fabric. “Listen to me. We have to go. Now. There’s a tunnel at the far end of this crawlspace. It’ll take us out under the walls. Once we’re clear—”

“Where does it go?” The question spills out, automatic. The practical part of her brain hasn’t quite got the memo that her whole life is currently on fire.

“Away,” he says. “Guiding Forest, if we’re lucky. Somewhere we can figure this out without—”

He breaks off.

Through the boards above them, in the brief lull between shouts, a sound threads down like a hairline crack.

Glinda.

Elphaba goes utterly still.

It isn’t Glinda’s public voice—the one that sparkles and trills and fills a room with sunshine. It isn’t even her irritated one, when she’s hissing about lateness or bad manners.

It’s something rawer. A broken, scraping sob that sounds like it’s been torn out of her chest.

Elphaba’s breath catches.

For a heartbeat, she forgets the burns, the mob, the tunnel. All she knows is that sound: the person she loves sobbing somewhere above her, just beyond reach, and the knowledge that she is the reason.

Another sob. A muffled, choking sound, as if Glinda’s hand has flown to her mouth too late to catch it.

Elphaba’s nails dig into the dirt. Her shaking hands aren’t strong enough to claw through stone, through wood, through lies, but something in her tries anyway.

She should go to her.

She should. She should push the trapdoor open and haul herself back into that awful room and stand there, dripping and shaking, and tell Glinda she’s here, she’s alive, she’s sorry.

The picture flashes in her mind: Glinda’s face when she sees her, hope flaring, then fear as the guards turn, as the mob realises their monster has cheated them of a tidy ending.

They would tear Elphaba apart. And Glinda, who has already chosen her side in their ridiculous story whether she meant to or not, would be dragged down with her.

The sob above sharpens into a thin, keening sound. It cuts straight through her ribs.

Fiyero hears it too. She feels him tense.

“Don’t,” he says. It’s almost a plea now. “Elphaba, please. You know what they’ll do if they see you. And if they see you with her—”

She knows.

She knows.

She grits her teeth so hard her jaw aches.

Another sob. This one sounds like a word—like Elphaba’s name, strangled on the way out. It might be imagination. It doesn’t matter. It sinks into her like a brand.

She presses her forehead against the underside of the floorboards. The wood is rough and damp, smelling of dust and old water and something else now—potion, maybe. Screams. Regret.

“I’m here,” she whispers, though there’s no way Glinda can hear her. Her voice barely carries past her own lips. “I’m here. I’m sorry.”

A tear leaks sideways from the corner of her eye, vanishing into her hairline.

Pathetic. After everything, after all the anger and defiance and righteous fury, this is what she’s reduced to: crying quietly into the underside of a floor while the girl she loves sobs for her in the room above.

The mob’s chant rises again, muffling Glinda’s grief. WICKED WITCH. WICKED WITCH. NO ONE MOURNS THE WICKED.

Except she is, Elphaba thinks numbly. Except she is.

She wants to stay under this floor forever, pressed to the ghost of that sound, until it wears her down to nothing. Until the memory of Glinda’s sobs is all that’s left of her.

But the world, annoyingly, refuses to stop turning.

“Elphaba.” Fiyero’s voice is quiet now, the urgency folded into something steadier. “If you stay, you die. If you go back up there, you both die. You know that. You are allowed to live.”

Allowed.

The word tastes alien.

She’s never really thought of her existence that way. Her being alive has always felt like something the world tolerated at best. An inconvenience. A mistake. A joke.

Now, for the first time, staying alive feels like a choice. A choice that will hurt someone else.

A crack of laughter erupts above—a harsh, brittle thing that doesn’t sound like Glinda at all. Then a door slams. Footsteps retreat. The boards vibrate in diminishing shudders.

The next time she hears Glinda’s voice, it will be on a balcony, bright and polished, saying something triumphant and terrible to a crowd that will lap it up. Elphaba doesn’t know that yet. All she has is the sound of those sobs and the knowledge that Glinda believes she is gone.

She could go back and shatter that belief.

She could also get them both killed.

The burns on her skin pulse in time with her heartbeat. Each throb is a reminder: you are not invincible. You are flesh and bone and magic in a world that has just proven it is more than willing to throw water on you and watch you die.

Green girl meets bucket. Simple arithmetic.

She drags in a shaky breath. Her lungs protest. The potion’s fumes have left a bitter taste clinging to the back of her throat.

“Take me to the tunnel,” she says, very quietly.

Fiyero exhales, straw rustling. Relief, if stuffed sacks of hay can feel such a thing.

He starts to manoeuvre them around, his awkward new body somehow finding leverage in the cramped space. His hands slide under her shoulders again, mindful of her burns, and he half-lifts, half-drags her forward.

Every movement hurts.

The crawlspace is narrower here; boards loom inches above her face, dust thick enough to choke on. Cobwebs tickle her cheeks. Once, something small and skittering dashes across her fingers and she flinches so violently pain flares white-hot down her arm.

Her hands won’t stop shaking. It’s not just the physical shock anymore. Magic hums angrily in her veins, frayed and overtaxed. She can feel the empty spaces where she hauled power out of herself to slam into Fiyero, to twist the curse that should’ve killed him into something else.

She doesn’t know what that something else is yet. She doesn’t know if he’ll stay this way. She doesn’t know if she can fix any of the fixes she’s tried to make.

She only knows that her capacity feels scorched. Every thought of casting—of flying, of blasting, of anything—lands on a field of ash.

“Are you all right?” Fiyero asks at one point, because he is an idiot.

She lets out a sound that might be a laugh if you were being very generous and had never heard laughter before.

“I’ve been boiled alive,” she says. Talking takes effort. Each word feels like it weighs a pound. “I’m crawling through dirt. Everyone above us is convinced I’m dead and celebrating it. And I just—” Her voice falters as Glinda’s sobs echo in her memory. “Yes. Perfectly fine, thank you. Never better.”

“Okay,” he says mildly. “So ‘no’.”

She would roll her eyes, but it would require muscles her body has temporarily put on strike.

They inch forward. The crawlspace slopes down, the stone of the tower’s foundation giving way to older, rougher brick. It smells of damp and old secrets.

Above them, the noise of the mob fades by degrees as they get further from the tower room and the balcony. It doesn’t disappear. It just becomes part of the background, like the sea: always there, always loud, always hungry.

Elphaba listens to it and to the echo of Glinda’s cries layered underneath and presses them together in her mind until they fuse into one unbearable chord.

She is not good at letting things go.

It would probably be healthier, in the long term, to try and forget that sound. To tuck it away under shock and exhaustion until it blurs.

Instead, she does the opposite.

She grabs onto it with teeth and nails and stubborn, exhausted will. She drags it to the front of her memory and burns it there, tracing over it again and again like writing lines on a chalkboard.

You did this, it says. She is crying because of you.

Good, she thinks viciously. Let it hurt. Let it keep hurting. If she ever starts to convince herself that going back, sending a message, slipping a hint to Glinda is a good idea, she wants this pain to be there, ready to jab her in the ribs.

She has always, frankly, been dangerously weak where Glinda is concerned.

She cannot afford that weakness now.

If Glinda believes she’s dead, Glinda will… what? Grieve. Rage. Slip into whatever role Oz needs from her and try to make something vaguely decent out of the wreckage. She’ll be safe in the way that matters: alive.

If Glinda knows she’s alive, Glinda will try to help her. Glinda will choose her, openly or in whatever half-measure the situation allows, because Glinda is a fool in the exact same direction Elphaba is.

And they will kill them for it.

She will not give them that target.

She will not give them that angle of attack.

So she presses Glinda’s sobs into her memory until they carve out a groove.

This is the sound of why you have to stay away.

The tunnel mouth finally appears ahead: a dark, jagged gap in the foundation where old stone has crumbled. Cool air whispers through it, smelling faintly of wet earth and freedom.

Fiyero shifts, bracing himself to wriggle them both through.

“Almost there,” he says. “Once we’re clear of the city, we can—”

“We can never tell her,” Elphaba says abruptly.

He pauses. “Tell who what?”

“Glinda.” The name catches in her throat. She forces it out anyway. “If you… if you see her again. If you go back, if you—” She swallows. “Don’t tell her I survived.”

Fiyero goes very, very still.

In the dim light slanting through the tunnel mouth, Elphaba can see his painted eyes fix on her. They’re wrong up close, glassy and bright, but somewhere underneath she can still feel him.

“Elphaba—”

“She’s already lost so much,” Elphaba says. She is very aware that she is talking about Glinda losing herself. Her. It feels both absurd and too big to look at directly. “Her friend, her… whatever I was to her. Her good opinion of the Wizard. Her sense of the world making any kind of sense. If she thinks I’m dead, she can grieve and then… reassemble. Without having to worry that one more wrong move might get us both killed.”

“You don’t get to decide what she can handle,” he says quietly.

“Don’t I?” It comes out sharper than she intends. Heat flares in her chest, this time not from the potion. “I’ve been deciding what everyone shouldn’t have to handle since Shiz. Since before Shiz. You think that stops now because a bucket fell over?”

“You’re not the only one who cares about her,” he says. “You’re not the only one capable of making choices.”

That hits harder than she expects.

She flinches. It sends a new ache skittering across her ribs.

“I know,” she says, voice rough. “Believe me, I know. But you asked me to listen to you. Now you listen to me. If you love her—”

“I do.”

“—then you know what they will do to her if they catch her conspiring with the Wicked Witch of the West. The dead Wicked Witch. The one they just spent an entire day working themselves up to kill. She is—” Elphaba’s voice goes quieter. “She is everything they think they want. Let her keep that. Let her do… whatever good she can from inside that lie, without my shadow making it harder.”

He is silent for a long, heavy moment.

Above them, faint now, they can just make out the rumble of the crowd. Elphaba imagines Glinda stepping out onto the balcony, light catching in her hair, the word good attaching itself to her like a crown even before they’ve physically put one on her head.

She imagines those same people turning on her if they knew.

“Please,” she says. She hates the way the word tastes. “If you ever cared about me at all, you won’t tell her. Not until… not unless it’s safe. And it won’t be, Yero. Not for a very long time.”

He exhales, straw rustling softly. It sounds like wind in dry fields.

“You know she’s going to hate you for this,” he says. “If she ever finds out.”

“Yes.” Elphaba stares at the tunnel ahead. Her hands are still shaking. “That seems… fair.”

She will add it to the list.

The burns throb. Her head swims. Her magic feels like a muscle torn clean through.

She doesn’t have the energy to do the selfish thing and run back.

“Okay,” Fiyero says finally. “Your secret. For now.” His tone carries a weight she doesn’t examine.

He adjusts his grip on her and together they inch through the tunnel’s mouth. The stone scrapes her shoulders, sending knives of pain through already-tender flesh. She bites down on a whimper.

On the other side, the earth slopes downward. The air grows fresher with every painful shuffle. There are roots above them now, dangling like fingers, and beyond that, faintly, the whisper of wind in leaves.

The city’s roar fades behind them.

Elphaba concentrates on the mechanics of not passing out. In. Out. Ignore the tremor in your hands. Ignore the way your skin feels two sizes too small. Ignore the echo of Glinda’s voice in your skull.

She fails, of course. The echo is persistent.

ELPHIE!

The way Glinda used to say her name at Shiz, half surprise, half delight, like she’d thought of something ridiculous and wonderful and of course Elphaba had to be the first to hear it.

The way it had sounded in the tower, raw and breaking.

She tucks the two together in her chest, sharp edges touching.

They hurt.

Good, she thinks again. Let it hurt. Let it never not hurt.

If she ever stands too close to a city again, if she ever allows herself to even think about drifting up in a bubble or walking into a courtroom or letting Glinda know she’s alive, she wants this memory to rise up like a wall.

You did this. You chose this. Don’t make her pay twice.

The tunnel spits them out at last into a drainage ditch half-a-mile outside the city walls. Night air hits her face like a slap, shocking in its clarity. Stars scatter overhead, indifferent.

Fiyero hauls her the last few feet until they’re both sprawled under a tangle of scrub. He’s breathing hard again, out of habit.

Elphaba rolls onto her back, every movement a small apocalypse, and stares up at the sky.

The stars don’t look any different now that half of Oz thinks she’s dead.

Her hands, held up against the starlight, are a map of tremors. Burns bloom angry and red along her wrists where the potion soaked the sleeves. When she flexes her fingers, pain sparks in each joint.

Magic flickers at her fingertips instinctively. She crushes it down. It feels brittle, like forcing power through cracked glass.

“Rest,” Fiyero says. “We’ll move again before dawn.”

She doesn’t argue.

Her whole body hums with exhaustion, but sleep does not come quickly. Every time she closes her eyes, she hears water. Screaming. The thunk of the bucket hitting stone. Glinda’s sobs.

She lies there under the open sky, under the weight of her own choices, and memorises the sound of the girl on the floor above her breaking.

Later, when the nightmares come, they’ll replay this moment again and again, stylised and distorted. Sometimes Glinda will pound on the floorboards, screaming for her; sometimes the boards will be made of glass and Elphaba will see her crying and still not be able to move. Sometimes there will be water seeping through the cracks, filling the crawlspace, smothering them both.

For now, it’s just the memory of a voice, and the decision she made in that crawlspace to let that voice believe she is gone.

She clings to it like a talisman.

Proof. Not that Glinda loved her—though that is there too, sharp and dizzying—but that staying away is the only way she can love her back without destroying her.

It’s a flimsy excuse, maybe. A story she tells herself to make loss feel like choice.

It will have to be enough.

She turns her face away from the city. Her burns ache. Her hands tremble helplessly in the grass.

She lives. Glinda cries for a dead girl.

This is the shape of mercy, tonight.

Chapter Text

Morning comes far too soon.

It slides in under the curtains with indecent enthusiasm, a bright gold that has no business touching anything connected to last night. The light spills across the carpet, reaches for the bed, and finds Glinda curled on top of the covers in the same blue dress she wore to watch her world end.

Her eyes are open.

She’s not sure she ever really closed them. If she did, it was in brief, stuttering snatches. Each time she drifted near sleep, something yanked her back—an echo of the crowd, a phantom splash of water, the ghost of her own voice saying evil has been defeated.

She lies there, flat on her back, staring at the ceiling, feeling the way each breath scrapes in and out. Her throat is tender. Her head is pounding behind her eyes, a steady, punishing ache.

For a few blessed seconds, she has that strange, floating sense of unreality—the one where the night feels like a dream she’s half-forgotten. She could pretend she’s back at Shiz, that the chanting is just students practising for some ridiculous ceremony outside her window, that the heaviness in her chest is exam nerves.

Then she turns her head.

The tiara on the dressing table catches the light and slices the moment in two.

Right. That.

Last night’s sobs sit like bruises inside her ribs. She can almost feel them, hanging heavy and purple. The memory of the balcony is sharper: the roar of the crowd, the way her own voice sounded like it was coming from someone else’s mouth.

“Lady Glinda?”

The knock on the door is soft, polite, and exquisitely badly timed.

She doesn’t answer. Her tongue feels swollen.

“Your Goodness?” a second voice adds, a little more anxious.

The new title lands in the room like a stone through glass. It still feels like they’re saying it wrong, like there should be a question mark at the end. Glinda the good… what, exactly?

She swallows down the flicker of bitterness. It scorches on the way down.

“Come in,” she says, because if she sends them away, they’ll only come back in greater numbers. And because the world has not ended, apparently, and expects her to participate in this fact.

The door opens with a soft click. Her maid, Tansy, slips in first, eyes wide and carefully schooled into concern that doesn’t dare to be too familiar.

Behind her, two advisers hover in the doorway like anxious pigeons—Assistant Minister Braggett, whose moustache is always a little too full of self-importance, and Madam Korr, the Chief Press Liaison, whose smile is sharp enough to cut.

Glinda pushes herself up on her elbows, wincing as muscles protest. Everything feels sore, as if she’s been trampled by the same crowd she stood above last night.

“Good morning,” she manages. Her voice comes out rough. She clears her throat and tries again, forcing a little more brightness into it. “Goodness, look at you all. You’d think we’d had some big event.”

Braggett lets out a relieved chuckle. “Ah, Lady Glinda—ever the jester. Ha! Yes. Well. There is, er, the small matter of your address today.”

“Address.” The word feels like it belongs to someone older, someone with less glitter and more gravitas. She swings her legs off the bed, feet hitting the rug with a soft thump. Her dress rustles. A faint whiff of last night’s smoke clings to it. “Address to whom?”

Korr’s eyebrows flick upward in the way that says she’s recalculating how much she needs to explain.

“To Oz, of course,” she says smoothly. “The city. The nation. The world, ideally, once the news spreads.”

“Oh.” Glinda lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “Of course. Silly me.”

She knows this routine. There is a crisis—someone tripped at a ribbon-cutting, the wrong colour bunting was hung for Lurlinemas, a visiting dignitary made a comment about the Wizard’s hat size—and the solution is always the same: send Glinda out with a pretty dress and some carefully chosen words and let her make the problem seem smaller.

Except this is not a bunting issue.

Her stomach flips.

“We’ve had dozens of requests already,” Braggett blusters, stepping further into the room while Tansy begins quietly assembling basins of water and cloths, the mundane choreography of morning routine. “Radio wants a statement. The Emerald City Times is doing a special edition. The Quadling Post has sent a correspondent. You must speak to the people about the… about last night’s triumph.”

Triumph.

The word lands like cold water.

Madam Korr clicks open her leather folio and produces a sheaf of paper, neatly stacked, dotted with ink corrections.

“We’ve prepared some remarks,” she says, smooth and efficient. “Nothing too heavy—simple, heartfelt, with strong messaging about unity and the Wizard’s enduring vision.”

“Enduring?” Glinda repeats faintly.

Korr gives her a look that is almost kind, in the way of someone being kind to a highly-strung horse.

“The Wizard may have departed physically,” she says, “but his ideals, his reforms—”

His lies.

“—must endure,” she finishes. “Oz is unsettled. People need reassurance, a sense of continuity. They need to see that their new leader supports the foundations he laid. For now.” A minuscule pause before the last two words. “Once things are more stable, we can… recalibrate the narrative.”

Narrative. Recalibrate. Words like stage directions, like script changes at Shiz when they realised one of the leads couldn’t hit the high notes.

Glinda takes the papers when Korr offers them. Her fingers feel clumsy, as if someone has swapped her hands for unfamiliar ones overnight. The pages whisper against each other as she flips through.

They are full of the usual polite fictions.

“The tragic necessity of confronting evil.”

“The bravery of our beloved Wizard, placing himself at risk to protect us all.”

“The selfless act of Glinda the Good, standing firm in the face of terror.”

Each phrase lands like a pebble in her throat. She can’t swallow them. They stack up there, smooth and choking.

There is one line, halfway down the second page, that makes her breath catch.

“Though it pains us to speak ill of any soul,” it reads in Madam Korr’s neat hand, “the Wicked Witch of the West brought this fate upon herself through repeated acts of violence and treachery.”

A neat little sentence. Sympathetic in its framing, firm in its judgement.

Glinda stares at it until the letters blur.

Treacherous. Violent.

Elphaba standing in the Emerald City’s square, eyes wide behind her spectacles, clutching a tiny, terrified lion cub to her chest. Elphaba in the Wizard’s chamber, horrified as he laughed off the caged monkeys’ suffering. Elphaba on the dormitory balcony, looking up at the stars like they might finally, finally have an answer that wasn’t stamped and approved by anyone in a hat.

Everything she did that mattered arose from the same stubborn refusal to go along with sanitised stories.

“Lady Glinda?”

Tansy’s voice is small, hovering near her shoulder. “Shall I draw your bath?”

“Hmm?” Glinda drags her gaze up. Papers rustle in her grip. “Yes. Yes, please. Hot as you can make it. No—lukewarm. Not… too hot. Or cold.”

She doesn’t know why the thought of hot water makes her chest tighten. She only knows that something in her rebels at the idea of steam right now.

Tansy bobs a curtsy, scurries toward the adjoining washroom.

Madam Korr takes a careful step closer. “We can, of course, adjust any phrasing that doesn’t feel quite right,” she says. “Within reason. The key points, however—”

“You want me to say she was wicked,” Glinda says, more bluntly than she intended.

Both advisers freeze for a fraction of a second.

“We want you to say,” Korr replies slowly, “that the Wicked Witch of the West has been defeated. That Oz is safer. That our faith in the Wizard’s system remains unshaken.”

Glinda tries to imagine saying her name and attaching that word to it in front of thousands.

Elphaba. Wicked.

She’s done it before. The Wizard’s PR machine had scripts; she was good at reading them, at improvising glittering extensions. She’d told funny little stories about the strange green girl from Shiz, all rolled eyes and shrugging indulgence, and watched people’s faces go hard and closed when they saw Elphaba in person.

They needed so very little encouragement.

“I… I don’t know what she was,” Glinda says honestly. The confession feels like peeling off a bandage. “I thought I did, but then… everything’s different up close, isn’t it? What I do know is that she’s gone because we—because I—”

Her voice stutters. The memory of the tower rears up, stark as a photograph.

Korr’s expression pinches almost imperceptibly. “With respect, Lady Glinda, Oz does not need nuance right now,” she says. “It needs stability. Stories are how people make sense of chaos. If we give them competing versions—”

“They might ask questions?”

Korr doesn’t flinch. “They might panic. They might turn on each other. On you.”

Braggett hurries to pile comfort on top of that. “You saw them last night, my lady. So unsettled! So frightened! Why, some of them were ready to tear down the palace gates if we hadn’t announced the Witch’s… er… demise. But once they saw you—glowing, composed, reassuring!—why, they nearly wept with relief. You are what keeps them from turning into that mob again.”

Glinda tastes iron. She realises she’s bitten the inside of her cheek.

The idea of “that mob” turning on her is… honestly, not as terrifying as it probably ought to be. There is a hollow place in her, carved out where shock and grief scraped through, that looks at the crowd and thinks: if you loved me for this, perhaps I deserve whatever you do next.

But that part of her doesn’t get to steer right now.

Her job, apparently, is to stand between Oz and its own worst impulses and smile so brightly they forget they were ever ready to throw stones.

She looks down at the pages again. At the tidy, tyrannical little sentences.

A great evil has been defeated.

The Wicked Witch brought this upon

We must honour the Wizard’s courage.

“You want me to lie,” she says.

Braggett sputters. “No! No, never—well, that is, a touch of… creative framing…”

“Framing is everything,” Korr murmurs.

Glinda lets out a breath that is almost a laugh, except there’s no humour in it.

“I stood on a balcony last night,” she says slowly, “and told the entire city that goodness will always triumph. I did it with a tiara digging into my scalp and water drying on my shoes that might’ve—” Her throat closes around the rest.

The advisers exchange a glance.

Madam Korr’s voice softens a fraction. “Lady Glinda. You have been through a great deal. No one expects you to be completely composed. But Oz needs you. You are the face of hope now. Later, in the privacy of council chambers, in policy, we can talk about what kind of hope that is. Today, they just need to see you smiling and hear that everything will be all right.”

It’s always the same argument. Whether it’s poor Quadling farmers or discontented Gillikinese intellectuals or terrified citizens in the Emerald City: they just need to see you smiling.

She looks down at the papers one more time.

She hates every word.

“Very well,” she says. Her voice sounds distant to her own ears. “We can… rehearse it while I get ready.”

Braggett exhales hugely, as if she’s just pulled Oz back from the brink of ruin with that sentence alone.

“Wonderful! Splendid! The very thing. Glinda the Good indeed.”

The title hits her like a pebble hitting a mirror. Tiny cracks spider through her reflection, invisible to everyone but her.

Korr’s attention flicks to Glinda’s dress. “We’ll want something bright and familiar,” she says briskly. “They need the Glinda they know. The sparkly one.”

“The sparkly one,” Glinda repeats, because if she doesn’t, she might start screaming.

Tansy peeks her head out of the washroom. “Bath’s ready, my lady,” she calls, then hesitates. “Shall I… prepare the pink gown? The one with the flounces? People do so love that one.”

People. The amorphous, hungry beast outside her windows.

She thinks of the blue dress hanging limp around her, stained and crumpled. Of the way Elphaba once scoffed at that pink gown, then secretly looked twice when she thought Glinda wasn’t watching.

“Yes,” Glinda says. “The pink one. If we’re going to put on a show, we might as well go all out.”

The transformation is an old ritual.

Slip out of yesterday’s skin; slip into another.

Tansy helps her peel the blue dress away. The fabric clings for a second where water dried in stiff patches. Glinda’s body twinges with dull protest as she lifts her arms. When she catches sight of herself in the mirror—petticoat, chemise, hair half-fallen—she almost doesn’t recognise the girl there, shoulders drooping under invisible weight.

There are faint red marks along her collarbone where droplets of potion splashed. They look like the ghost of a necklace someone pressed too hard into her skin.

“Oh, my lady,” Tansy murmurs, eyes catching the marks. “Does it hurt?”

Glinda forces her shoulders back. “It’s nothing,” she lies. “A little water. Nothing I can’t handle.”

She pointedly doesn’t think about Elphaba under that same deluge.

Soap, cloth, water. She steps into the tub. The water laps at her calves, her waist, her ribs. It’s lukewarm, just as she requested—no steam, no heat to bring last night’s sensations roaring back to life.

Still, when she sinks down, her skin prickles. A phantom memory overlays the mundane—cool bathwater becomes potion, gentle laps become a splash. For a second, she’s back in the tower, watching liquid arc through the air toward someone she—

She inhales sharply, fingers digging into the rim of the tub hard enough to hurt.

“Are you all right?” Tansy asks, instantly alert.

“Yes,” Glinda says. Then, because that sounds unconvincing even to her own ears: “Just a little cold.”

It’s a lie; the water is fine. But Tansy nods and fusses with more hot water at the far end, as if temperature is the problem.

Glinda keeps her eyes on the wall tiles and recites Madam Korr’s script under her breath while Tansy washes her hair.

“Great evil… defeated. Wicked witch… brought this upon herself…”

The phrases taste like soap. They slide across her tongue, leaving a slick, artificial cleanliness that doesn’t reach the corners.

She wonders, briefly, what Elphaba would say if she could hear her rehearsing this. She imagines a snort, a cutting remark about propaganda, about how words are just another kind of spell and she should be more careful what she casts.

Her hands tighten on the tub’s rim until her knuckles whiten.

Elphaba will never hear it.

The thought knocks the breath out of her more effectively than the cold.

By the time she steps out of the bath and lets Tansy swaddle her in towels, she has repeated the key phrases enough times that they sit in her mouth without wobbling. If she doesn’t think about them too hard, they almost sound like hers.

Dress. Corset. Layers of crinoline and organza. The weight of pink settles around her like a memory. Tansy laces her in, fingers deft and practised.

Madam Korr stands in the corner, one eye on Glinda’s reflection, the other on the marked-up speech. Occasionally she calls out a line and waits for Glinda to repeat it with the correct inflection.

“We must… what, now?”

“‘We must remain united in the face of fear,’” Korr reminds her. “Emphasis on united. The unions will like that.”

Glinda tries again. “‘We must remain united in the face of fear.’”

“Good.” Korr nods. “And then—‘We will honour the Wizard’s courage by continuing his great work of peace and prosperity.’”

Peace and prosperity, built on cages and lies.

Glinda’s stomach twists, but her voice does what it’s told.

By the time Tansy pins the last curl into place and settles the tiara back on her head, the speech flows out of Glinda like water over stone. It is astonishing, really, how quickly the body can learn to perform even the things the heart recoils from.

She stares at herself in the mirror.

The girl looking back is Glinda the Good, just as Madam Korr wanted: glossy ringlets, perfect make-up, shoulders back, smile hovering at the corners of her mouth like a promise.

If she looks closely, she can see the tiny vulnerabilities—the faint shadow under her eyes, the almost imperceptible tremor in her hands. But she knows the crowd won’t be looking closely. They will see pink and gold and a familiar silhouette.

People love a silhouette. It lets them fill in the rest with whatever they need.

“Ready?” Braggett asks from the doorway, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a man convinced he is living through history.

No, she thinks.

“Yes,” she says.

The balcony is different in daylight.

Yesterday, it caught torchlight and anger, the night wrapping around Glinda like a cloak. Today, the sun lays everything bare. The green-and-gold banners, hastily retouched to remove the Wizard’s profile. The gilt on the balustrade, chipped in places. The sheer size of the crowd.

There are more people than last night.

Word has spread; the city has emptied itself into the palace square. Every balcony, every rooftop, every window is crowded.

Vendors weave through the masses selling commemorative ribbons and cheap little flags, some already bearing Glinda’s face rendered in hasty caricature

At the sight of her, a murmur ripples through the throng, swelling quickly to a roar.

“Glinda! Glinda the Good!”

The sound claws at something primal inside her. Her first instinct is to duck back, as if the noise itself could knock her off her feet.

She stands her ground.

“Well,” she murmurs, mostly to herself. “Here we are again.”

Korr gives her an approving little nod. Braggett beams as if he personally invented her.

“Remember,” Korr says softly, “they are frightened. You are their comfort.”

Right.

She steps out into the full glare of the day.

The cheer slams into her like a physical blow. It reverberates up through the stone, through the soles of her shoes, up her spine. For a split second, the sound fractures—half adoring crowd, half torches and pitchforks.

Her vision trembles at the edges. The colours of the square smear.

She clings to the railing with one hand, fingers curling around cool stone.

Smile, she reminds herself. This is what you do. They need you to be solid even if you feel liquid inside.

Her lips curve. The crowd howls in approval, as if she’s handed them something precious.

“Fellow Ozians!” she calls, and her voice rings out clear and bright. She can’t hear the wobble only because the crowd fills the gaps. “My friends!”

The speech sits just behind her teeth, waiting.

She glances down at the pages Madam Korr insisted she bring, more for show than necessity. The words blur briefly, black ink swimming on white. She blinks until they settle.

“We stand today,” she begins, “at the dawn of a new chapter in Ozian history.”

The crowd roars. Dawn, new chapter—people love a metaphor they can feel clever for recognising.

“Last night, many of you stood right here in this square. You watched as the Wicked Witch of the West attempted, once again, to bring fear and chaos to our beloved city.”

Her tongue trips on Wicked. She feels it catch, snag on something between her heart and her mouth. No one else notices. Or if they do, they simply fill the half-second with louder applause.

“In her obsession with power,” Glinda goes on, “she attacked our dear Wizard, threatened our safety, and sought to tear apart the peace we have all worked so hard to build.”

Elphaba in the Wizard’s chamber says: I trusted you. You lied to me.

Elphaba in the forest says: I’m not the one you should be afraid of.

Glinda keeps talking.

She speaks of darkness and light, of fear and courage, of a singular wicked force defeated by the united will of Oz. She phrases it so that it sounds inevitable, like a story children will tell each other in bed with their covers pulled up to their chins.

“Heinous as her deeds were,” she hears herself say, “we must remember that goodness will always triumph. Not through cruelty, not through vengeance, but through our shared compassion and our unwavering belief in each other.”

The hypocrisy scrapes her throat raw.

We melted her. We poured water on her until she screamed and fell and I stood there and did nothing.

She looks down at her own hands on the railing, the nails perfectly manicured, the fingers that once reached for Elphaba on a broomstick now spread in an open, reassuring gesture.

The crowd eats it up. They cling to the story. It gives them somewhere to put their fear, their guilt, their unease.

As she speaks, Glinda catches glimpses of individuals: a young man with a fresh tear in his coat sleeve, as if from last night’s scuffle; a woman clutching a child to her hip, both of them craning to see; a pair of Animals near the back, ears flat, eyes wary.

She wonders what they see when they look at her.

A saviour? A puppet? A girl in a pretty dress parroting the words of the comfortable?

She can feel Madam Korr’s presence behind her like the touch of an invisible hand at her back, guiding her forward every time she falters.

“…and though it pains us to speak ill of any soul,” she continues, “the Wicked Witch of the West brought this fate upon herself through repeated acts of violence and treachery.”

There it is. The line.

She hits each syllable cleanly, the way she practised. No stumble. No outward sign that internally, something is tearing.

Images flicker behind her eyes, unbidden.

Elphaba reaching for her hand in the Ozdust ballroom, awkward and unsure.

Elphaba rescuing the lion cub, eyes blazing, voice shaking with outrage.

Elphaba standing on the parapet, hair whipping around her face, refusing to bow.

Violent, yes—but in the way that storms are violent when they break a drought.

Treacherous—to whom?

Glinda leans into the next part, because if she doesn’t, the lie will show.

“We must learn from her mistakes,” she calls. “We must learn that when we turn our backs on each other, when we choose selfishness over solidarity, we all suffer. But when we stand together—” She lifts her arms, letting the skirts swish just so, letting the tiara catch the sun. “When we stand together, there is no darkness that can overcome our light.”

The crowd roars.

The volume spikes, pressing against her eardrums. She hears cheering, whistling, stamping—the raw, animal joy of people who believe they’ve cheated death for one more day.

Under it, for just a heartbeat, she hears something else.

A splash. A scream cut short. The sound of someone she loved not being allowed to finish a sentence.

The world tilts.

For a terrifying half-second, Glinda’s vision narrows to a tunnel. The edges go black. The sea of faces blurs into a mosaic of colour and movement with no edges. Her breath goes shallow.

She has been in crowds her whole life. She has basked in their adoration, played them like an orchestra, ridden that energy like a wave.

Today it feels like being buried alive.

You can’t fall apart here she tells herself, words pounding in time with her heartbeat. Not on the balcony. Not where they can see.

She digs her nails into her palms, hidden by the fall of her skirts.

Smile. Breathing in. Smile. Breathing out.

The moment passes. The edges of her vision ooze back into place. The colours separate into individual banners and hats and flags instead of a single pulsing threat.

“…and so,” she says, picking up the next line almost seamlessly, “let us honour the Wizard’s courage by continuing his great work of peace and prosperity! Let us show the world that there is no force so wicked that Ozian goodness cannot overcome it!”

They chant her name.

GLIN-DA! GLIN-DA THE GOOD!

The title wraps around her like barbed wire disguised as silk.

She holds her arms out a little longer than necessary, letting them project their hope onto her. It is safer for them to do it; it gives their fear somewhere to go.

Inside, she stands in that tower room again and watches herself stand still.

When the speech ends, when the cheers begin to crest and ebb, she retreats with the same bright little wave she’s been practising since Shiz. The doors close behind her. The noise dampens, becomes a distant roar instead of an all-encompassing storm.

Madam Korr is immediately at her elbow.

“Perfect,” she says, voice humming with satisfaction. “Absolutely perfect. The phrasing, the gestures—the bit about learning from her mistakes was particularly effective. The press will love it. We’ve already had requests for transcripts—”

Glinda smiles at her, because that is what is expected.

“Thank goodness,” she says lightly. “I’d hate to think all this glitter went to waste.”

Braggett beams. “My dear, you were marvellous. A true beacon. Oz is lucky to have you.”

Lucky.

She thinks of Elphaba under the floorboards, under the flames, under their story. She thinks of how very few people have ever been lucky to have her, in any way that mattered.

“Yes,” she says. “We’re all just… so very lucky.”

Her cheeks are starting to hurt from smiling. She doesn’t quite remember when she started.

They shepherd her back to meetings immediately. There are council discussions, security briefings, arguments about who will take over which parts of the Wizard’s administration. A blur of faces and voices and demands.

Throughout, she hears the echoes of her own words from the balcony repeating back at her with minor variations, like children trying out a new song they’ve just learned. Wicked. Evil. Defeated. Good.

At some point, someone brings her tea. At another, a plate of tiny sandwiches appears and disappears, apparently eaten by some alternate-universe version of herself who is not currently watching her own hands do anything.

She moves through it all like she’s underwater.

Her body does the things it’s supposed to do—nod, smile, inquire, suggest—but inside, she’s in two places at once: the present and the tower.

Evening comes and goes.

By the time they release her from duties, the sky outside her windows is a deep, bruised blue. The city lights glitter like scattered coins.

Tansy unlaces her dress with gentle fingers. Glinda steps out of the layers and into the soft familiarity of a nightgown in a fog. Her muscles feel like they’ve been holding a single position all day and are only now realising they’re allowed to move.

“Shall I leave a lamp, my lady?” Tansy asks.

Glinda considers it.

The shadows at the edges of the room feel thicker than usual, full of watching.

“No,” she says. Then, quickly: “Yes. Just one. Turn it low.”

Tansy obeys, then slips out with the same soft click of the door as this morning.

Glinda is alone again.

She sits on the edge of the bed for a long time, hands loose in her lap, staring at the tiara on the dressing table.

It looks smaller from this distance. Almost harmless.

She wonders if it will ever feel like anything but a weight.

Eventually, because there is nothing else left to do and her body is beginning to insist on some kind of reprieve, she lies down.

She does not expect sleep to come. She is wired and exhausted, like a bird that has flown headfirst into a window and is now stunned on the ground, heart racing, wings refusing to move.

But the body has its own priorities.

Within minutes, despite the buzzing in her veins, her eyelids droop. Her muscles loosen against the mattress. The lamp’s glow blurs.

She slips under.

In the dream, she is back in the tower.

Of course she is. Where else would her mind drag her, given the day?

The stone floor is cold under her heels. The air smells of wet wool and metal and something acrid that curls in her nostrils. The door to the stairwell shudders under the impact of fists on the other side—pound, pound, pound. The chant of the crowd bleeds through the walls.

“WICKED! WICKED! WICKED!”

She knows, in that deep dream-logic way, that she has been here before, that this is a rerun. She also knows that the script is about to go horribly, irrevocably wrong and there is nothing she can do to stop it.

“Elphie,” she says, turning toward where Elphaba should be, already saying the line she remembers from last night. “We can run away. We can—”

But the room is empty.

For a moment, confusion ripples through her.

Where is she? Where is the green girl with her hair half-falling out of its tie, eyes blazing, hands crackling with barely-restrained magic?

Glinda takes a step into the centre of the room.

Her shoe lands in something wet.

She looks down.

A pool of water spreads across the stone, dark and glassy. It is still at first, then trembles, then begins to move of its own accord, creeping outward in unnatural little pulses.

Her reflection wobbles in it—her face pale, hair a mess, crown crooked. Behind her, the empty room yawns.

She tries to step back. Her foot won’t move.

Panic flares.

“Elphaba?” she calls, voice bouncing off the walls. “Elphaba, where are you? This isn’t funny—”

The water shudders.

Something breaks the surface—green fingers, splayed wide, then a hand, then an arm up to the elbow, all of it slick with potion. It looks like someone is reaching up from beneath the floor, trying to claw their way out of drowning.

Glinda’s heart jams against her ribs.

She wants to move toward it. She wants to grab that hand, to haul with all her might. But her legs feel rooted, fused to the stone. She strains against invisible bonds and gets nothing.

“Elphaba!” she screams. “Take my hand!”

The green hand flails in her direction, fingers stretching, reaching. The water drags at it, thick and clinging, pulling it back a little each time it almost breaches the surface.

Another arm emerges, then a shoulder, a hint of Elphaba’s face beneath the rippling surface—eyes wide, mouth open in a scream the water swallows.

Glinda reaches out with her own hand, arm trembling, fingertips straining.

They do not meet.

The distance between them is inches and infinity.

The more she reaches, the more the water seems to thicken, turning to tar. Elphaba’s hand breaks the surface again, closer, closer, drops flinging off her skin. Glinda can feel the cold of them on her own fingers, like ghost-touches.

“Hold on!” she sobs. “Please, just hold on!”

“I can’t,” Elphaba’s voice gurgles from somewhere below, distorted, full of bubbles. “You tell them I’m wicked—what did you expect?”

“That’s not— that was before—” She can’t breathe. Her chest is a vice. “I didn’t mean—I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

The hand slips.

For a horrible, slow-motion second, their fingers almost brush. Glinda feels the ghost of contact, the barest skid of skin on skin. Then the water surges, yanking Elphaba back down.

The surface snaps shut over her like a lid.

“No!” Glinda screams. Her voice shreds. “No, wait, please—!”

The pool convulses.

The hat bobs up, spinning lazily.

The water boils.

Steam explodes upward, scalding. It hits Glinda’s face, her hands, her chest, except it doesn’t burn, it just feels heavy, like guilt made vapour. It clings to her, seeping into her clothes, her skin, her lungs.

She can’t see.

“Elphaba!” she coughs into the whiteout. “Elphie, I’m here, I’m trying, just tell me what to—”

The chant of the mob swells, suddenly deafening.

“NO ONE MOURNS THE WICKED! NO ONE CRIES WHEN THEY ARE—”

The last word distorts.

“—YOU.”

The voices all turn into one, and it is her own, bouncing back at her from every wall, dripping from the ceiling, echoing through the steam. Wicked. Wicked. Wicked.

She stumbles backward, blinking furiously.

The steam parts like a curtain.

On the far side of the room, Elphaba stands by the window, very calm.

She is dry. No potion clings to her. Her dress is whole, her hat tilted at a familiar angle. Her skin glows that deep, indefinable shade of green that used to unsettle Glinda and then, somehow, became another colour in her sky.

She looks exactly as she did the first time Glinda saw her at Shiz, when she stomped into the quad and shattered every neat, pink expectation in her world.

Relief floods Glinda so fast she sways.

“Elphie,” she breathes. “Oh, thank goodness. I thought you’d—I couldn’t reach you—”

Elphaba tilts her head, considering her.

“You didn’t try,” she says.

The words land like ice.

“Yes, I did, I—” Glinda gestures at the pool, at her outstretched arm. “I tried to take your hand, I wanted to, I just—”

“You didn’t try,” Elphaba repeats, and now her voice is echoing too, bouncing in that unnatural way. “Not when it mattered. Not when they asked you who the monster was. Not when you stood on that balcony and told them I was wicked.”

Glinda’s mouth opens. No sound comes out.

Elphaba’s eyes are very dark.

“They poured water on me because you told them to be afraid,” she says. “You handed them the bucket every time you smiled and nodded while they turned me into a story.”

“That’s not fair,” Glinda whispers, but the protest is thin, even to her own ears.

Elphaba’s mouth twists. Not quite a smile.

“Oh, Glinda,” she says. “Since when has any of this been fair?”

She lifts one hand.

Water gathers in the air between them, coalescing into a suspended wave. It hangs there for a heartbeat, shimmering, then begins to tip.

“Maybe now you’ll understand,” Elphaba says.

The water crashes down.

Glinda raises her arms instinctively to shield herself. It hits like a wall. Except it isn’t cold this time; it’s boiling. It scalds her skin, presses into her eyes and nose and mouth, fills her lungs.

She can’t breathe.

Her last glimpse of Elphaba through the deluge is—strangely—not angry. Not triumphant.

Just sad.

Glinda wakes up choking.

For a disoriented, terrifying moment, the darkness of her bedroom feels like the inside of that wave. The sheets twist around her legs like currents. Her chest is on fire. Her throat convulses.

She sits bolt upright, clawing at her own neck, gasping.

No water comes up. No potion. Just air, ragged and tearing its way in.

The lamp is still on, turned low. The soft pool of light wraps her bed in a thin aura. The curtains are drawn. The tiara glitters faintly on the dressing table. The city hums beyond the windows.

She presses a hand to her sternum, feeling her heart slam against her palm.

A sound escapes her—half sob, half laugh.

“Wonderful,” she croaks to the empty room. “Haunted by water now. How… thematic.”

Her nightgown clings to her, damp with sweat. Strands of hair stick to her temples. Every breath feels like inhaling through cloth.

She swings her legs over the side of the bed and pads unsteadily to the washstand, pouring herself a glass of water with shaking hands.

She stares at it before she drinks.

It’s perfectly ordinary water. Clear. Still. Caught moonlight in a glass.

Her mind supplies the image of the pool in the tower instead, surface breaking as a green hand reaches up.

Her stomach heaves.

She forces herself to raise the glass and take a sip anyway.

The coolness soothes her throat. It catches somewhere in her chest but settles eventually.

She sets the glass down with exaggerated care.

On the other side of the room, the tiara watches her.

She thinks of Elphaba’s accusation in the dream—You didn’t try—and the awful part is that her own mind supplied that line. Elphaba hasn’t said anything; Elphaba can’t say anything anymore.

This is just Glinda, cross-examining herself in the only courtroom left available.

She leans on the edge of the washstand and stares at her reflection in the small mirror.

Her eyes are wide and wild. There’s a crease between her brows she doesn’t remember earning. Her lips tremble.

“I did try,” she whispers to the girl in the glass. “I just… didn’t try hard enough. And now it’s too late.”

The girl does not argue.

She rubs a hand over her face, trying to ground herself in the physical sensation of skin against skin. Her palm comes away damp.

She should go back to bed.

She should sleep. Tomorrow—and the day after, and the day after that—will require more versions of herself. More speeches, more meetings, more decisions about the shape of “good” in a city that has very different ideas about it than she does.

Instead, she pads to the window and draws the curtain back a fraction.

The square below is mostly empty now. A few stragglers weave home, their voices faint. A patrol of guards clanks by, armour catching light. Somewhere, a dog barks. Somewhere else, a late radio plays a tinny music hall tune.

She rests her forehead against the cool glass.

Far beyond the city walls, the land fades into darkness. The forest is a black smudge on the horizon. She squints, as if she might, by some miracle, see a flash of green against the night.

Of course she sees nothing.

“Where are you?” she whispers, to the sky, to the dark, to the memory of Elphaba under those floorboards, crying apologies that no one will ever hear.

The night does not answer.

She lets the curtain fall back into place with a soft sigh.

When she returns to bed, she leaves the lamp on.

Sleep comes again eventually, in fits and starts. The nightmares are less dramatic this time, more a series of impressions—green skin, water, the word wicked looping like a song you can’t shake.

She wakes before dawn, eyes gritty, body heavy.

The first rays of pale light are just beginning to pry at the edges of the curtains.

Somewhere, the city will be beginning to stir. Papers being printed with her face on the front, headlines shouting her name, editorials waxing poetic about Glinda the Good and her victory over evil.

Glinda lies there, staring at the ceiling, the memory of Elphaba’s hand reaching for hers burned into the backs of her eyelids.

Her first day as Glinda the Good is done.

It already feels like something she wants to wriggle out of, like a costume that pinches under the arms.

Outside, in the streets she cannot yet face, people will tell each other the story of the Wicked Witch and the Good who defeated her. They will pass it down like a charm against the dark.

Inside, in the quiet between breaths, Glinda knows another story. One she cannot yet bring herself to speak aloud.

For now, her job is to stay on script.

Later—if there ever is a later that feels safe enough—she might try to improvise.

Chapter Text

Six months after the tower, Elphaba lives in the walls.

Not metaphorically. Not just in the stories whispered over cheap drinks and stolen meals.

Literally.

The Emerald City is a honeycomb if you know where to look. Old service corridors behind grand parlours, forgotten maintenance shafts between tenements, disused air vents above theatres. The Wizard built his illusion on layers of tricks; every trick needs somewhere to hide the mechanism.

Elphaba has made those mechanisms hers.

Tonight, she’s wedged in a space barely wider than her shoulders, plaster dust in her hair, one cheek pressed against cold brick. On the other side of the wall, an Ozian noblewoman is complaining that her bathwater isn’t hot enough.

Elphaba’s skin prickles at the word.

She shifts, ignoring the way her burned ribs protest, and peers through a missing brick into the room that actually matters: the warehouse next door.

Three Animals are chained to a central post.

A Lion, grown but underfed; his mane hangs in lank, dull clumps. A Goose, wings bound, a rag tied over her beak. And—this one hurts the most—a Goat of late middle years with spectacles askew and fur going grey at the muzzle.

Doctor Dillamond’s age, her brain supplies helpfully. As if it’s ever really stopped thinking of him.

Around them, a half-circle of men in cheap uniforms and cheaper bravado are taking turns taunting them. A logo is stencilled on their armbands—a crude, angry eye with a line through it.

“No more Animals in our schools!” one of them jeers, poking the Goat in the shoulder with the butt of his spear. “No more Animals in our council, no more Animals taking jobs that belong to honest, decent citizens—”

The Goat says nothing. His eyes flicker, not with fear so much as a deep, familiar weariness.

The Lion growls low in his throat, then clamps his jaw shut. He’s already bleeding along one flank; he’s learning, fast, what gets him punished.

“Charming,” Elphaba mutters under her breath.

Beside her, in the dark, straw shifts. Fiyero’s painted eyes regard her from his place braced awkwardly against the opposite wall. Crawling through the city’s innards is not a particularly graceful activity when your limbs are jointed out of broom handles.

“You say that every time,” he says. The hollow echo in his voice has softened over months, less jarring now. Familiar. “You could try ‘revolting’ or ‘pathetic,’ just for variety.”

“Oh, very well. Revolting, pathetic, and utterly predictable.”

“That’s better.” He tilts his head. “You ready?”

Her hands flutter, betraying her with a tremor.

She clenches them into fists until the shaking turns into a steady ache instead.

“I was ready three hours ago when they dragged them in here,” she says. “You’re the one who insisted we wait until dark.”

“And we were right,” says another voice from behind Fiyero—low, gravelly, with the rolling R of rural Munchkinland.

Sessa the badger squeezes forward as far as the tunnel will allow. Her fur is shot through with silver, one ear torn at the tip. She has the air of someone who has seen every kind of cruelty and is entirely unimpressed by it.

“City guards are fewer at night,” she reminds Elphaba. “Less chance of reinforcements. You still want these three alive at the end?”

Elphaba presses her forehead briefly against the brick.

“Yes,” she says. “Preferably.”

“All right then.” Sessa eyes her. “You sure your magic’s up for this, Wic. You’re shaking.”

“It’s just the crawlspace.” Elphaba lifts a hand and watches her fingers betray her with another tremor. “Terrible ergonomics.”

Sessa’s look says she is not fooled. None of them are. They’ve seen her come back from raids grey-faced and hollow-eyed, hands twitching like she’s still channeling power.

The burns have faded from angry red to mottled greenish scars along her arms and ribs. The real damage is deeper, where the potion soaked into her system and twisted in ways she can’t quite map. Her magic, once a clean, fierce river she could tap when she needed, now feels like a reservoir full of fractured glass.

She can still use it. She has tested that. It just costs more. Every spell drags her through molasses and leaves splinters.

It’s a good thing she’s always been fond of pain.

“If my magic gives out,” she says lightly, “we’ll improvise. You lot aren’t exactly helpless.”

Fiyero snorts. Sessa bares her teeth—badger for a grin.

Below them, in the warehouse, one of the men hefts a branding iron from the coals of a brazier. The metal glows dull orange.

“Last chance, Beast,” he says to the Goat. “You sign over that school, or you get stamped. Then we let the little ones know what happens to Animals who think they’re people. Might make them behave better when we ship them off to the—”

Elphaba doesn’t hear the rest. The word school has detonated something behind her ribs.

“All right, that’s enough waiting,” she says.

She digs her fingers into the cracks of the brickwork and breathes slow.

In. Out.

The magic hums warily at her fingertips, like a cat deciding whether to scratch.

“We go on three,” she says. “One, two—”

She doesn’t bother with three.

Her hand snaps out.

The boards beneath the brazier’s legs crack with a sharp, satisfying sound. One moment the brand is in the man’s hand; the next, the floor gives way and the coals drop, spilling into a hastily-dug trench the rebels carved under the warehouse days ago.

The man yelps, stumbling.

At the same time, Fiyero kicks the hidden panel they prised loose earlier.

The entire section of wall between them and the warehouse swings inward with a groan of abused hinges.

Sessa drops through first, a streak of black and silver fur, teeth bared.

Elphaba follows.

The men have just enough time to look astonished before things start to go very badly for them.

Later, the story will sound different.

Later, after they’ve slipped away into the maze of alleys and tunnels, after the Lions and badgers and half-starved couriers have embellished and edited, it will become something else.

They’ll say the Green Ghost exploded out of the wall in a shower of bricks, eyes blazing, cape billowing in a wind that came from nowhere.

They’ll say she raised a hand and the brand flew from the man’s fingers, spinning in mid-air like a tiny sun before extinguishing itself in a bucket of water.

They’ll say she moved so fast she blurred, dodging bullets and spells and spears, untouchable.

Some of that is almost true.

From Elphaba’s perspective, it is considerably messier.

She lands hard, knees jolting. The first man to rush her gets a face full of conjured gust and goes sprawling, but the effort sends a spike of pain down her spine that makes her vision stutter at the edges.

She grits her teeth and pushes through it.

Sessa barrels into the man with the brand, claws flashing. He squeals, dropping the iron. Fiyero, moving with the jerky inevitability of a marionette possessed by vengeance, swings a broom-handle arm and cracks another thug in the jaw. Teeth fly. The man drops.

“Witch!” someone shouts, voice high with terror. “It’s the Witch!”

“No,” someone else yelps, scrambling backward. “She melted—”

“Ghost,” another pants. “It’s a ghost—”

The word sticks.

Elphaba doesn’t have time to savour it.

She lashes out with another spell, the motion economical. The shackles on the Goat snap open with a clang. Metal shrieks, bending. She feels the effort like a pulled muscle all through her arms.

The Goose struggles, wings flapping weakly as the ropes fall away. The Lion lurches forward, fur brushing her skirt as he finds his feet, a low snarl vibrating his whole body.

“Door,” Elphaba says curtly to him, already turning toward the brazier. “Left-hand side, up the stairs. Sessa’s people are waiting outside. Go.”

He hesitates, eyes flicking to her. There’s blood in his mane. Something in his gaze says he’s weighing fleeing against fighting.

“Now,” she snaps.

He goes.

The Goose flutters after him, half-running, half-flying.

The Goat lingers half a heartbeat longer.

“Dr Dillamond would be proud of you,” he says quietly. “If he were here.”

Elphaba’s hand stutters in its next gesture.

A spear whistles past where her head had been a second ago. She ducks on reflex, the shaft burying itself in the wall with a thunk.

“Less talking, more running,” she says, the words coming out far less crisp than she intended.

The Goat nods once—stiff, dignified—even in his ragged state, then hurries after the others.

Fiyero catches a man by the collar and flings him bodily into a crate marked IMPORTED WINKIE TEA. The wood splinters. Leaves and paper explode.

“Are we ghostly enough yet?” he calls, a little breathless.

“It’ll do,” Elphaba says.

She raises both hands.

The floorboards nearest the remaining thugs heave like something alive. The men scramble, yelping as planks buckle and pop, tangling around their ankles like grasping fingers.

The magic bites back. Her vision swims.

A familiar, unpleasant buzzing starts in her fingertips, travelling up her arms.

Not now.

She clenches her jaw and forces the power back into its channels, smoothing the wild edges. The spell settles enough to topple the men and keep them pinned.

Sessa’s people spill through the other entrance—half a dozen Animals and humans, faces masked by scarves, weapons improvised from whatever the city tossed aside. They secure the men quickly, tying hands, gagging mouths, stripping armbands.

Elphaba sways, just once.

Fiyero’s straw hand closes around her elbow, steadying.

“Easy there, Green Ghost,” he murmurs. “Save the dramatic fainting for the encore.”

She grunts something unladylike.

“You’re welcome,” she says to the room at large.

One of the younger rebels, a girl barely out of adolescence with a scrap of green cloth tied around her wrist, stares at Elphaba with round, awe-struck eyes.

“I knew it,” she breathes. “I told them you’d come. My cousin said the Green Ghost rescued their neighbour’s boy in the South Docks last week, but I thought— That is, I hoped—”

Elphaba cuts her off with a sharp gesture.

“Less gushing, more looting,” she says. “Take anything that looks like a record. Names, routes, payment ledgers. If these charming gentlemen are part of something larger, I want proof.”

The girl flushes but nods vigorously, darting toward a desk in the corner.

Sessa pads over, fur bristling.

“One of them shouted ‘Chapter’ when they dragged those three in,” she says. “Like this is part of a bigger… something. We’ll dig.”

“We always do,” Elphaba says.

The humming in her fingertips now feels like angry bees trapped under her skin. She flexes her hands once, twice, trying to shake it off.

She catches the Goat’s eye as he reaches the stairs.

He hesitates, just for a second, then inclines his head in a formal little bow.

“Thank you,” he says.

The words land more heavily than she expects.

She nods back, unable to trust her voice.

The rebels move fast, practised. Within minutes, the warehouse is a tangle of unconscious or bound men, empty chains, scattered papers. The coals in the overturned brazier have been stamped out. The only light comes from flickering oil lamps.

Sessa nudges a fallen armband with one paw. The painted eye sneers up at them.

“Emerald City Citizens for Human Prosperity,” she reads. “Catchy.”

“CCHP,” Fiyero says. “Bit of a mouthful. Couldn’t they have gone with something snappier? ‘People Against Pets’?”

Sessa snorts.

“They’ll be ‘People Against Breathing’ when we’re done,” she says. “We’ll track their meeting places. Find out who funds them. Usual pattern.”

Elphaba nods.

Above them, raised voices in the street. A distant bark of a dog. The city’s constant, restless shuffle.

They have minutes at most before someone wanders past, notices the wrong light behind the warehouse’s shutters, gets curious.

“Time to vanish,” she says. “No names, no lingering, no trophies except papers.”

“You heard the Witch,” Sessa says crisply. “Move your tails.”

“Ghost,” one of the younger rebels corrects shyly. A scruffy boy with a patch over one eye. “Green Ghost.”

Elphaba pretends not to hear. The name makes something strange twist in her chest.

In the beginning, she tried to correct them. I’m not a ghost; I’m very much still alive; this is the problem. But the more she insisted, the more the story hardened the other way. There’s power in myths. And safety, sometimes.

The Witch died in the tower, the story goes. The mob melted her. Glinda the Good said so.

This thing in the walls—this green flare that appears when children are dragged from their homes, that breaks chains and tangles spears, that knocks the wind out of men with too much hatred and not enough sense—is something else.

The Green Ghost.

Not quite real. Not quite killable.

It serves their purposes.

It serves hers.

Fiyero nudges her again. “You okay?” he asks quietly, straw fingertips light.

“Fine,” she says automatically. “Just… tired of crawling.”

He gives her a look that says he does not believe that is the entire story. He knows better than to press when she’s still buzzing with adrenaline.

He’ll wait until they’re back in whatever bolt-hole they’re using this week and she is wrapped in a blanket arguing with her own hands that no, really, they can stop shaking now.

He’s annoyingly patient like that.

“Go,” she says instead. “I’ll be right behind you.”

He hesitates, then obeys, folding his lanky limbs awkwardly as he clambers back into the hidden passage.

Elphaba takes one last glance around the warehouse.

Three Animals who would’ve been branded, shipped, broken, are gone. That is something.

The men on the floor groan, groggy. That is something too. They will wake up with sore heads and fewer illusions about how safe they are in their righteous little clubs.

It isn’t enough. It will never be enough.

But it’s what she can do from under the floorboards of the world.

She slips into the wall and pulls the panel closed behind her.

Darkness swallows the warehouse.

The safehouse smells like old books, soup, and too many people trying to breathe quietly in one place.

They’ve changed locations three times in as many months. The first was compromised when a careless boy brought home a girl he fancied and she recognised Elphaba from a half-burned wanted poster. The second was raided by guards “searching for contraband literature” and would have ended in blood if not for the fact that the Green Ghost had some well-timed business elsewhere that night.

This one is an abandoned plumber’s shop under the east-side viaduct. The front room is full of rusted pipes and cracked porcelain sinks. The back, through a cleverly-disguised trapdoor, opens into a cellar large enough to house a rotating cast of fugitives, informants and very tired revolutionaries.

Tonight, it also holds a pot of watery stew on a brazier and a radio someone “liberated” from a particularly obnoxious bureaucrat.

Elphaba ducks her head as she comes down the narrow steps. The place is high enough for Fiyero to stand in, barely, but low enough that she has to stoop. The ceiling is a patchwork of old pipes and haphazard reinforcement beams.

The rebels look up as she enters.

There’s a murmur that isn’t quite a cheer—too wary of drawing attention, even down here. But eyes brighten. Shoulders loosen.

“Wic,” Someone calls from their place by the stew. “You didn’t fry yourself. Always a relief.”

“I try to keep my combustions to a minimum,” Elphaba says dryly.

She crosses to the table where tonight’s spoils are laid out: a stack of ledgers, a half-burned pamphlet, a list of names.

Sessa joins her, sliding a chipped bowl of stew within reach. The smell makes Elphaba’s stomach rumble. She realises she hasn’t eaten since a dry heel of bread at dawn.

She picks up the pamphlet with her free hand.

“‘Emerald City Humans First’,” she reads. “Catchier than your version, Fiyero.”

From his perch on an upturned crate, Fiyero offers her a salute with his mug.

“Still terrible branding,” he says. “All the best slogans have alliteration. Where’s the poetry? ‘Humans First’ sounds like an uninspired queue.”

“‘Animals Last’ would be more accurate,” Sessa mutters. “Same old story, dressed in new colours.”

Elphaba flips the pamphlet over. The back is a crude woodcut of a snarling Wolf with blood dripping from its teeth and a child’s shadow in the background.

She feels, for a second, very tired.

“You’d think they’d at least update the imagery,” she says. “The Wizard had better illustrators.”

“Not as many,” Sessa says. “Lots of his old storytellers jumped ship when… well. When the tide turned.”

“The tide turned,” Elphaba repeats. “Did it?”

Sessa gives her a look.

“Some of us aren’t being dragged out of classrooms by soldiers anymore,” she says. “That’s something. There’s a new law about Animal housing. ‘Anti-harassment provisions,’ they’re calling it. And the Good Lady does her little speeches about tolerance. It’s not nothing.”

There it is.

Glinda, drifting into the conversation like perfume no one will admit they’re wearing.

Elphaba keeps her eyes on the pamphlet.

“I’m sure the speeches are very moving,” she says.

“Not as moving as the hem of her dress,” Fiyero puts in. “Apparently she wore the pink one again last week. The papers practically swooned.”

Several of the younger rebels snigger.

Sessa flicks her ear.

“I’m talking about the amnesty order,” she says. “Animals imprisoned for ‘seditious behaviour’ in the early purges? Some of them have been released. New trials. Reduced sentences. A few of ours on the outside got pardoned.”

Elphaba’s hand tightens around the pamphlet.

The edges crinkle under her fingers.

“Small gestures,” Sessa goes on. “Symbolic, yes. But tell that to the Fox who got out of that hellhole of a factory because of a signature on a bit of paper. He’s not spitting on her name.”

Elphaba’s first instinct is to bite.

To say something cutting about pretty pink signatures and how convenient it must be to ease one’s conscience with carefully rationed mercy. About how Glinda could have done more, sooner. About how no amount of amnesties now will wash out the stains of those first, crucial missteps.

She can feel the words crowding the back of her throat like a rush of sparrows.

She swallows them.

“I’m glad,” she says instead, after a moment. The words taste like grit. “For the Fox. I’m glad he’s out.”

Sessa’s eyes narrow a fraction.

“You don’t have to pretend you don’t care, you know,” she says quietly, pitched low enough that the others, engaged in their own arguments, won’t hear. “Not with me.”

Elphaba lifts a shoulder.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she says. “I’m simply thrilled to hear that the benevolent Glinda the Good is sprinkling crumbs of justice from on high. Truly, my hardened little heart is warmed.”

“Uh-huh.” Sessa’s whiskers twitch. “And that’s why you’re not listening to her radio addresses at ridiculous hours of the night.”

Elphaba stiffens.

“I listen to the Wizard’s old broadcasts,” she says. “For reference. It’s useful to know what kind of lies people are used to hearing.”

“And if the voice rewriting those lies just happens to belong to a certain blonde who cries over dead green girls—”

“Sessa.”

The word comes out sharper than she intends.

A few heads turn. Fiyero glances up, sensing tension.

Sessa holds up her paws in mock surrender.

“All right,” she says. “All right. You live in the walls, I live in the sewers, we all have terrible coping strategies.”

Elphaba lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.

Sessa is not wrong.

She does listen.

Not every time—she has raids to plan and spells to rehearse and burns to manage—but often enough that she knows the pattern of Glinda’s broadcasts.

The radio crackles. There’s a little fanfare—brass and drums, a remnant of the Wizard’s showmanship. Then Glinda’s voice, bright but carefully modulated, pours into the room.

Citizens of Oz. My friends.

She talks about unity. About moving forward. About new provisions for Animal safety, about tax relief for Munchkinland farmers, about investment in education.

Sometimes, when she thinks no one is listening closely, she sneaks in something stranger—a plea for people to question what they’re told, a suggestion that kindness is not the same as obedience.

Elphaba lies on whatever cot or patch of floor is currently hers, back pressed against cracked plaster, hands folded on her stomach to hide the tremors, and listens.

She tells herself it’s reconnaissance.

She tells herself she’s cataloguing which narratives Glinda leans on now, how she positions herself, what levers she pulls.

She tells herself she only flinches when Glinda says wicked because the word has always fit like sandpaper in her ears.

Fiyero, who has the audacity of someone who’s already technically died once, calls her on it every three days.

“You could just admit you miss her,” he said once, when she snapped the radio off in the middle of a speech about rebuilding Shiz’s library.

“I am perfectly capable of holding two thoughts at once,” she’d shot back. “I can be grateful someone is trying to mitigate the worst of this mess and also be furious she’s propping up the system that created it.”

“And also also, you could be hopelessly in love with her and pretending you’re not,” he’d added.

She had thrown a cushion at his straw head. Hard.

Now, in the safehouse cellar, she tears the pamphlet neatly in half.

Paper rips with a small, satisfying sound.

“We use their rhetoric against them,” she says, louder, including the room. “If they say Humans First, we show the humans in charge are the ones making them poorer, hungrier, more afraid. We put faces to the Animals they hurt. We make sure every Fox and Goat and Lion they’d brand has a name and a story circulating faster than their lies.”

One of the younger rebels—Cree, a lanky Quadling boy with ink-stained fingers—nods eagerly.

“I can do that,” he says. “I’ve got cousins at the presses. We can slip notices in with the adverts. Little stories. People read those without thinking.”

“Good,” Elphaba says. “Do it.”

Sessa taps the ledgers.

“And these?” she asks. “Names. Donors. Some of them very respectable.”

“We leak the right ones to the right ears,” Elphaba says. “Let Glinda’s shiny little administration handle its own rot for once. Quietly. She likes quiet, from what I can tell.”

A few chuckles.

Sessa’s gaze sharpens.

“You’re making a lot of assumptions about what she likes,” she says. “For someone who pretends not to care.”

Elphaba’s jaw tightens.

“We have a delicate equilibrium,” she says. “She keeps the crowds busy with her sparkle, I keep the worst elements of those crowds from murdering whoever they feel threatened by this week. It works.”

“For now,” Sessa says.

“For now,” Elphaba agrees.

She doesn’t say what else she knows.

She doesn’t say that she can tell, in the fine tremor that enters Glinda’s voice when she talks about the Wicked Witch, that the story costs her. That sometimes, when she pauses after a phrase like evil has been defeated, Elphaba can hear the echo of a sob through floorboards.

She doesn’t say that every new reform, every carefully-negotiated concession, feels like a tiny apology sent through the airwaves.

She doesn’t say that none of it is enough, and all of it is more than she expected.

The radio on the shelf crackles suddenly, as if summoned.

Cree fiddles with the dial. Static, whistle, then a familiar fanfare bursts through the cellar—lighter now than in the Wizard’s days, but recognisable.

“Speaking of the sparkly one,” Fiyero murmurs.

A few rebels roll their eyes, but no one leaves. Even the most cynical of them listen when Glinda talks. Information is information, whether it’s wrapped in glitter or not.

“Hush,” Sessa says.

The fanfare dies.

“Citizens of Oz,” Glinda says. “My friends.”

Elphaba goes very still.

Her voice comes down here thinned and tinny. The cellar eats some of the warmth. Even so, there’s something in it that hits Elphaba’s bones like the memory of sunlight at Shiz.

“Today,” Glinda continues, “I want to talk to you about kindness.”

Elphaba nearly snorts.

Of course.

“The events of the past months have left many of us frightened,” Glinda says. “Change can do that. When we are frightened, we look for someone to blame. Someone different. Someone we can point to and say, ‘It’s their fault; if we remove them, we will be safe again.’”

Around the cellar, shoulders shift. A Wolf with a scar across his muzzle snorts softly. A human woman with ink under her nails crosses her arms.

“But fear,” Glinda says, “is a terrible architect. It builds ugly houses for us to live in. It makes us smaller. We lash out at our neighbours instead of asking who built the world that frightened us in the first place.”

Fiyero’s straw eyebrows climb.

“She’s getting bolder,” he murmurs.

Elphaba doesn’t answer.

She is listening too closely.

“I have signed an order today,” Glinda goes on, “to review every case in which an Animal was imprisoned for so-called ‘seditious behaviour’. Many of those cases were rushed. Many were unjust. We will do better. We must.”

A murmur in the cellar.

“Tell that to the ones they killed last year,” someone mutters. An Elephant, her trunk coiled tight against her chest.

Glinda’s voice softens, as if she’s heard.

“I know this does not erase what has been done,” she says. “Nothing can. But we can stop doing it. We can start listening. We can choose to see our Animal neighbours not as threats to be contained, but as citizens, scholars, artists, friends.”

Doctor Dillamond’s chalk squeaks across a blackboard in Elphaba’s memory.

She stares at the radio as if she could conjure Glinda through it.

“We can choose,” Glinda says, “to be better than the stories we were given.”

Elphaba closes her eyes.

The cellar breathes.

Someone sniffs. Someone else scoffs. Most are silent.

“That’s all for tonight, my friends,” Glinda says. “Remember: goodness is not what we are told to be. It’s what we do, every day, when no one is watching.”

The broadcast clicks off.

For a long moment, no one speaks.

Then the Wolf says gruffly, “Symbolic gestures.”

The Elephant huffs. “Symbolic’s better than nothing. Symbols got us killed; maybe symbols can keep us alive.”

“Words,” mutters the scarred Quadling boy with the cousins at the presses. “Always words.”

Elphaba opens her eyes.

“They’re not nothing,” she says, before she can stop herself. “The order she mentioned—that’s real. People will walk out of cells because a pen moved.”

Several heads turn toward her.

Sessa’s gaze is particularly sharp.

“But?” she prompts.

Elphaba shrugs, shoulders tight.

“But,” she says, “you can’t unhang the ones they already killed. You can’t unburn a book or unbrand a Lion. You can’t pour water back in a bucket.”

The last sentence slips out before she can catch it.

Silence drops.

Fiyero’s straw fingers drum once on his knee, then go still.

Sessa’s expression softens, just for a second.

“No,” she says. “You can’t.”

Elphaba realises her hands are trembling again. The stew in her bowl sloshes.

She sets the bowl down, flexes her fingers under the table, willing them to still.

“What we can do,” she says, forcing her voice into the steady, lecturing cadence she uses when she needs everyone to stop staring at her, “is make sure the next time some bright wizard with a shiny balloon or a catchy slogan rolls into town, there are enough people remembering this to not fall for it so easily.”

Cree nods, seizing the shift.

“Stories,” he says. “That’s what you always say. We need better stories.”

“Exactly.” Elphaba snatches at the thread. “The Green Ghost, for example, is an excellent story. Very educational. Teaches children that if they join hateful little clubs, a terrifying apparition will emerge from their pantry and rearrange their limbs.”

A ripple of laughter breaks the tension.

Fiyero grins. Sessa rolls her eyes but doesn’t protest.

“And what does the Green Ghost teach the children who are dragged out of their homes?” the Elephant asks quietly.

Elphaba meets her gaze.

“That someone is watching,” she says. “Even when it feels like no one is. That someone will come.”

“Will she?” the Elephant presses. “Every time?”

Elphaba thinks of the nights she hasn’t made it in time. The ones they were too late to save. The blood. The bruises. The empty beds.

“No,” she says. The word tastes like rust. “Not every time. But more than never.”

The Elephant nods slowly.

“That’s already more than we had,” she says.

Elphaba swallows.

The buzzing in her fingers has finally begun to fade. In its place, a bone-deep ache settles—part physical, part something else.

She pushes back from the table.

“I’m going to go… exist in a narrow, dust-filled space for a while,” she says. “If anyone needs me, please reconsider.”

A few chuckles.

She climbs the stairs without looking at the radio again.

In the cramped storage room above, surrounded by rusting pipes and cracked basins, she finds her usual patch of wall and leans her back against it, sliding down until she’s sitting on the floor.

The bricks at her shoulder are cool.

Through them, faintly, she can feel the city’s heartbeat: carriage wheels, footsteps, the occasional distant cheer.

She closes her eyes.

Glinda’s voice lingers in her ears.

We can choose to be better than the stories we were given.

“You first,” Elphaba mutters, to no one.

Her hand finds the old scar along her forearm where the potion bit deepest.

Her fingers shake against it.

She presses her head back against the bricks and tries very hard to pretend that she does not care which stories Glinda is telling these days.

In the walls, the Green Ghost waits for the next crack in Oz’s conscience wide enough to squeeze through.

Chapter Text

The first time Glinda hears it, it’s in the wrong room.

Ghost stories, in her experience, belong in dormitories and dressing rooms, passed around between girls with hair in curlers and faces smeared in cold cream, not in the corridor outside the Council Chamber where people argue about taxation brackets.

She’s halfway down that corridor now, a folder of briefing papers hugged to her chest, brain already bracing for yet another discussion about grain imports, when voices drift out from the alcove by the servants’ stair.

“I’m telling you, Tansy, she came right out of the wall.”

It’s a young man’s voice, pitched low and urgent. Glinda recognises it distantly as Jori—one of the laundry runners. A red panda, part of her attempts to reintegrate animals into palace staff. A good kid. Terrible at starching cuffs.

Tansy—her maid—snorts softly.

“Don’t be daft,” she says. “Nobody comes out of walls. You’ve been talking to your cousin again; he always did have an imagination.”

“She’s not the imaginative one,” Jori insists. “She was the one being dragged away.”

Glinda slows, without meaning to.

She tells herself it’s because her slippers are new and the marble is treacherous. Certainly not because her heart has just done a peculiar little leap.

Tansy clucks her tongue.

“Dragged where?” she asks.

“Some warehouse by the river,” Jori says. “Those awful Human Prosperity lads—you’ve seen ’em, with their stupid armbands?—they grabbed her after work. Said she was ‘inciting’ something ‘cause she’d been to one of them Animal literacy circles. Said they were taking her for… for ‘re-education’.” His voice wobbles around the word.

Glinda’s fingers tighten around her folder.

She’s seen the reports. Neat little memos about “unregulated detention centres,” always with enough distance in the phrasing to make it sound like a logistical problem rather than a horror.

“And then,” Jori goes on, “just when they got her inside, there was this noise. Like the building was… angry. And the floor just—” He claps his hands, the sound echoing off the stone. “Cracked. Right under their feet. Caz said one of ’em nearly fell in a hole.”

Tansy snorts again, but it’s softer this time. Less dismissive.

“Buildings don’t get angry,” she says. “People do.”

“Yeah, well, something did,” Jori says stubbornly. “There was wind, inside. Blew their torches out. She said she heard someone shouting in this low, witchy voice, and then—” He drops his own to an ominous whisper. “—a green hand came out of the wall and snapped her chains clean in half.”

Glinda’s heart stops, then lurches forward on a different beat.

Green.

“Green hand,” Tansy repeats, unimpressed. “Next you’ll be telling me it was the Wicked Witch herself, come back from the dead.”

Jori hesitates. “Caz said… they’re calling it the Green Ghost,” he says. “Says it’s been happening all over. Every time those Human First idiots try to cart off Animals, something stops ’em. Walls cracking. Doors slamming. Ropes going limp. Always a flicker of green light. Always someone saying they saw a hand, or a shape, or a—”

“Oh, for Lurline’s sake.” Tansy makes a noise halfway between a laugh and a sigh. “People will make a myth out of anything. Your cousin was scared, that’s all. Probably some loose floorboards and a draft.”

“What about the chains?” Jori presses. “You can’t draft chains open.”

“Maybe someone with sense cut them.” Tansy’s voice has an edge now. “One of ours. Someone real, not a… spooky story. And if that’s the case, I hope they were far away by the time those men got their wits back. You lot start putting ghosts in everything and the only thing that’ll happen is more crackdowns for ‘witchcraft’ and ‘vigilantism.’”

There’s a pause.

Glinda realises she’s holding her breath.

“…Suppose,” Jori mutters. “Just… she sounded so sure. Said the hand was cold when it grabbed her. Said she heard it laugh. Not nasty. Just… like it was glad to be there.”

Something twists under Glinda’s ribs.

The image rises unbidden: Elphaba gripping a railing at Shiz, knuckles white, laughing at some awful pun Glinda made despite herself. That laugh had been all sharp edges and reluctant delight, as if joy were an indulgence she wasn’t entirely convinced she was allowed.

It isn’t real, she tells herself. He’s talking about someone else. Something else.

“Green Ghost,” Tansy sniffs. “Next it’ll be the Yellow Yodeler and the Purple—”

Glinda chooses that moment to step around the corner.

Both of them jump like they’ve been shot.

“Lady Glinda!” Tansy gasps, cheeks going pink. “Oh! I was just coming to see if you needed your—”

“—tea,” Jori blurts at the same time, because panic has replaced his brain with nonsense.

“Yes,” Glinda says.

She has no idea what question she’s answering.

For a heartbeat they stand there, Tansy clutching a feather duster like a weapon, Jori perched on the windowsill halfway through a bow, Glinda clutching her folder like she’s afraid the papers inside might try to escape.

Then training kicks in.

She smooths her expression into something gentle. Something Glinda the Good would wear when she stumbles upon staff gossip and chooses to be indulgent rather than stern.

“No need to panic,” she says lightly. “I’m not the inspection committee. Although if I were, I’d have to give this alcove a fairly harsh mark for dust.”

Tansy flushes deeper and swats ineffectually at the cobweb above her head.

“Sorry, my lady,” she mutters. “We’ll see to it.”

Jori is staring at the floor in the careful way of someone who is absolutely not thinking about the words he just said.

Glinda’s pulse thrums in her ears.

She could let it go.

She should let it go.

Instead, she tilts her head, as if only now registering the scraps of conversation she walked in on.

“Ghosts?” she says, keeping her tone amused. “Are we telling spooky stories before breakfast now? You’ll have everyone jumping at shadows.”

Jori makes a small, strangled sound. Tansy elbows him.

“Just nonsense, my lady,” Tansy says quickly. “You know how city folk are. Turn a drafty window into a haunting and a squeaky floorboard into a curse.”

“Mm.” Glinda lets her gaze rest on Jori for a second. “Something about a… green spirit?”

Tansy shoots him a look that could curdle cream.

Jori swallows.

“My cousin, Caz,” he says, words tumbling out. “She works down at the river, loading crates. Said she was almost taken by some bad sorts and—well—” He trails off, clearly realising belatedly that telling the woman responsible for public order about vigilante interventions is perhaps unwise.

“Bad sorts,” Glinda repeats. “You mean members of those… civilian groups?” She can’t quite keep the distaste out of her voice. “Human Prosperity, Humans First, that lot?”

“Yes, my lady.” Jori’s paws twist in his apron. “But she’s okay. Because of the—er—”

“Drafty floorboard,” Tansy cuts in. “Probably just one of your men doing their job, my lady. Nothing for you to worry that pretty head over.”

Glinda smiles.

It feels like stretching skin over a crack.

“I worry about a great many things that are supposedly nothing,” she says lightly. “It’s become something of a hobby. But I’m glad your cousin is safe, Jori. That’s the important part.”

He looks up, startled that she’s remembered his name. Everyone always is, despite the fact that remembering names is one of the few skills she has that doesn’t feel like a performance.

“Yes, Lady Glinda,” he says fervently. “She… she said to say thank you. For the pardon order. Her brother got out because of it. She said…” His voice goes shy. “She said you sounded… different. On the wireless. Like you meant it.”

Something in her chest eases and tightens simultaneously.

“I did mean it,” she says simply.

Tansy’s face softens.

“We all know you did,” she says. Then, brisk again: “But we also know you haven’t had breakfast yet, and you’ll faint in the council if I don’t get something into you. Come along.”

Glinda allows herself to be shepherded toward the council doors.

At the threshold, she glances back.

“…For the record,” she says, casual as she can manage, “if you did see anything truly… unusual. Men in armbands operating outside the law. Strange disturbances in the walls. Drafty ghosts. Do mention it to the Captain of the Guard. Or to my office. We can’t do much about rumours, but patterns are… useful.”

Jori nods quickly.

“Of course, my lady,” he says. “If the Green… if anything like that happens again, I’ll tell someone.”

“Good,” Glinda says.

Out loud, her tone is brisk. Efficient. The sort of uncomplicated approval that tucks a story neatly back into place.

Inside, the word green is still ringing.

The council meeting is about sugar tariffs.

Of course it is.

They argue for an hour about whether dropping import duties will help Quadling farmers or ruin Winkie merchants. Charts are waved. Numbers are flung about with the abandon of confetti. Someone accuses someone else of being in the pocket of the syrup lobby.

Glinda nods in the right places. She asks a few questions about how this will affect rural workers, because someone has to, and makes a mental note to ask her secretary to send a discreet enquiry to a certain Quadling union leader she trusts more than half the people in this room.

In the gaps, Jori’s story keeps replaying.

Warehouse. Armbands. Chains.

A crack in the floor.

A green hand.

She should not be thinking about it.

Even if she believed in ghosts (which she doesn’t, because believing in stories is how they got here), the idea that Elphaba would come back as some kind of benevolent chain-snapping spirit is… ridiculous.

If anything, she thinks with a grim little twist of humour, Elphaba would come back to haunt her. Specifically. Personally. Door-slamming, book-throwing, caustic commentary on every speech.

You didn’t try, her dream-Elphaba said.

Councilman Haar is saying something about “restoring confidence in the markets.” His moustache wobbles. Someone else says “post-Wizard era” as if naming it makes them sound clever instead of terrified.

Glinda clears her throat.

“And what about the… other markets?” she asks. “The unofficial ones?” She can feel Madam Korr prick up behind her like a very stylish cat. “I’ve seen reports of Animals being… traded. Between farmers. Between factories. That’s not technically… legal.”

“The law on that is ambiguous, Lady Glinda,” someone says. “It was never clearly codified under the Wizard—”

“Then we should codify it,” she says. “Clearly. Now.”

They blink at her.

“We’re having enough trouble with the citizenry adjusting to the idea of Animal rights as it is,” another councilor says carefully. “Perhaps it would be unwise to—”

“People adjust faster than you think when you make their options clear,” she says. “We tell them Animals are citizens, not property, and we back that with law. Simple.”

“Simple,” Haar repeats faintly, as if she has suggested they paint the entire city purple.

She smiles at him.

It is not a friendly smile, exactly.

“We will return to this,” she says. “Form a subcommittee. Draft proposals. You know the drill.” She waves a hand, as if summoning bureaucracy is as easy as conjuring bubbles. “In the meantime, I’d like the Captain of the Guard to provide a report on the activities of these… Human Prosperity groups. I keep hearing their name. I’d like data, not gossip.”

Korr leans in.

“We have some preliminary information already,” she murmurs. “There have been… incidents.”

“Bring them to my office,” Glinda says. “Later. All of them.”

Haar looks vaguely offended.

“Surely you don’t intend to dignify these hooligans with—”

“I intend,” she says sweetly, “to know exactly who is harassing my citizens and where they’re doing it, so I can stop them. Does anyone object to me doing my job?”

Silence.

“Wonderful,” she says. “Do carry on about sugar.”

Her attention, ostensibly, returns to tariffs.

Her mind is already in a warehouse by the river, following the sound of cracking boards.

The reports arrive in her office that afternoon.

They come in a stack almost as tall as her tea tray, bound with a plain twine that looks offended to be touching her polished desk.

Glinda shoos everyone out.

“My lady, you have your weekly briefing with—”

“Reschedule it,” she says.

“The Winkie ambassador has been waiting—”

“Reschedule him too.”

“But—”

“Tell him I’m terribly sorry, I’ve been held hostage by paperwork,” she says. “It won’t even be a lie.”

Eventually, they relent. The door clicks shut behind the last reluctant advisor.

She exhales, the sound too loud in the sudden quiet.

The reports stare up at her.

She starts at the top.

It’s dry stuff, mostly. Arrests logged. Complaints filed and discarded. Notes from local watch captains about “disruptive elements” and “mutual altercations.”

In between the bureaucratic hedging, patterns emerge.

—Animal attacked leaving a factory in the South Docks. Intervention by unknown third party. Perpetrators claim “witchcraft.” No corroborating evidence beyond “a strong gust of wind” and “voices in the walls.”

—Attempted raid on Animal literacy meeting in West Market. Doors reportedly “jammed” from the inside for several minutes. Witnesses report “green sparks” from the keyhole. No damage upon later inspection.

—Unlicensed “Human First” patrol ambushed in Old Town. Weapons broken “without visible cause.” One member claims he was “bitten by the building.”

Glinda rubs her temples.

If she crosses out the embellishments, what remains is simple enough: someone is interfering with these groups.

Someone, or several someones, with enough organisation and nerve to keep hitting them where it hurts. Enough talent or sheer luck to do it without getting caught.

There are no names.

No arrests.

The phrase “Green Ghost” appears in exactly none of the official reports.

It appears in all the witness statements.

She gets through twenty accounts before the first mention.

—Mrs Etta Kiln, laundress, says: “It were the Green Ghost, I’m telling you. Me nephew saw her last week. Thin thing, like a streak of moss. Came out the fireplace and cracked Benny’s whip before he could use it. You watch, she’ll have their guts if they keep this up.”

Half an hour later:

—Javek Thorn, butcher’s boy, says: “I don’t know what I saw. Just a flash. Green, like bottle-glass. And a voice said, ‘Not tonight, you don’t,’ and then the rope snapped. Might’ve been a trick of the light. Might’ve been the Witch, back for blood.”

And further down, in a cramped, careful hand:

—Anonymous (refuses to give name), says: “It wasn’t a ghost. Ghosts don’t feel solid when they haul you upright. She had a hand like mine, only… cold. Like she’d been standing outside in the rain. And she sounded… tired. Not angry. Just tired.”

Glinda’s throat tightens around nothing.

She sits back in her chair, the papers swimming in her vision.

Green. Hand. Voice.

It’s nonsense.

People see what they want to see when they’re frightened. They turn drafts into spirits, coincidences into fate. They wrap their hope in a colour and call it a ghost because the alternative—believing no one is watching—is unbearable.

She knows this.

She has stood on too many balconies, tailored too many stories, not to know how desperate people are to believe someone is out there making it better.

And yet.

And yet.

Her fingers drift to the edge of her desk, tracing the grain in the wood.

In her nightmares, Elphaba’s hand is always reaching for her. Slick with water, fingers splayed, grasping for purchase. She wakes with her own fingers curled, as if they’d been reaching back.

If Elphaba were a ghost—and she isn’t; ghosts aren’t real; Elphaba is dead; you watched her die—would she waste her time on laundresses and literacy circles? Would she crack whips and snap chains and terrify petty bigots in warehouses?

“Of course she would,” Glinda says aloud, before she can stop herself.

Her voice startles her in the quiet room.

She slaps a hand over her mouth, as if someone might have heard.

No one has.

She’s alone.

She lets her hand drop slowly.

It is a ridiculous fantasy, she tells herself. A self-serving one. She wants Elphaba to be out there somewhere, doing what Glinda can’t or won’t, so she can feel less monstrous by proxy.

If the Green Ghost is anyone, it’s a group. A network of dissidents. Maybe even some of the Animals she signed orders for. Real people. Real danger.

That should be her focus.

Not colour.

Not cold hands.

Not the way her heart has been beating oddly ever since Jori said green.

She reaches for a pen.

On a blank sheet of paper, she draws a rough map of the Emerald City.

Not accurate. Not for public consumption. Just a circle for the palace, spokes for major roads, hatches for districts. She dots the raids she’s read as she remembers them: South Docks. Old Town. West Market. The viaduct.

There’s a pattern, of sorts.

Whoever they are, they’re moving along the poorer districts, where Human First groups feel safest. Near the river, near the old industrial quarter, near the crowded tenements.

Nowhere near the palace.

Of course not, she thinks.

If she were hiding from the story she herself helped write, she’d avoid the centre too.

Her pen hovers over the page.

She realises, belatedly, what she’s doing.

She is mapping ghost sightings in her spare time.

Glinda the Good, Leader of Oz, Chancellor of a thousand tedious subcommittees, is sitting in her office drawing little dots on a page because a laundry boy mentioned a green hand.

“Get a grip,” she mutters.

She caps the pen and sets it down so firmly it rolls off the desk and clatters to the floor.

Her shoulders sag.

A clock ticks softly on the mantel. Outside, somewhere in the palace, someone laughs. The sound echoes down the corridor and fades.

She is tired.

She is so very tired.

Her hand drifts, of its own accord, to the radio knob.

It hisses to life. Static, then the end of a newsreader’s report about rainfall in Winkie Country. Some cheerful music starts—plinky-piano, a jaunty little tune that makes her teeth itch.

She turns it down to a murmur rather than off.

She has the strange, irrational feeling that if she turns all the sound off, she’ll be left alone with nothing but the memory of the tower and the weight of these reports.

Her eye catches on a line halfway down the last page.

—Unofficial nickname circulating among lower districts: “Green Ghost,” “Witch’s Shadow,” “Wicked Protector.”

Wicked Protector.

The words hit her harder than expected.

In public, she has to flinch when anyone says wicked, has to maintain the story, has to let it sit in the mouths of children as a bedtime warning.

In private, the word has become… something else. Something messy. Something like a bruise she keeps pressing.

Wicked protector.

She imagines Elphaba hearing that. The startled snort. The way her ears—if they’d not been hidden in her hair—would’ve gone a little darker.

“Better than Wicked Witch,” Glinda says to the empty room. “Slightly.”

If she were here.

Which she’s not.

Which she never will be again.

Her chest aches.

She gathers the reports back into a stack, aligning the edges carefully, as if neatness will make their contents more manageable.

When she rises, she takes one sheet with her—the map she drew. She folds it once, then again, until it’s small enough to tuck into the inner pocket of her bodice.

Just paper, she tells herself. Just… data.

Just in case she hears more.

She does.

The city is full of new rumours now, layered over the old ones like palimpsests.

At a ribbon-cutting for a new hospital wing, she overhears two nurses whispering about a Wolf who turned invisible long enough to slip his chains when a gust of wind knocked out the guards’ lanterns.

At a visit to a school, a student tugs her sleeve and asks, very seriously, if the Green Ghost works for her.

At a tedious gala for trade delegates, a lady of some minor house holds court over champagne glasses, telling everyone how her cousin’s neighbour’s brother saw a streak of green light twist a spear out of a man’s hand.

Glinda laughs in all the right places.

“Oh, my,” she says. “How dramatic. People will say anything, won’t they?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the lady says, fanning herself. “One has to believe in something these days. And if I were a cruel man with a whip, I’d be very nervous right now.”

Glinda clinks her glass against hers.

“Then I suppose the Green Ghost is doing some good,” she says lightly. “Even if she’s just in their heads.”

Even if she isn’t.

Even if she is.

Later, in her rooms, she takes the map out and adds new dots.

The pattern thickens.

Someone is building a network of fear and relief, carefully placed, carefully targeted. Enough to make the bigots jump at shadows; enough to make the frightened feel slightly less alone.

She finds herself listening differently to briefings now.

When the Captain talks about “vigilante activity,” she leans forward.

“Vigilantes?” she says. “Plural?”

He shrugs, uncomfortable. “Hard to say, Lady Glinda. Some reports talk about a group. Some say it’s one… figure. Tall. Thin. Hooded. They call it a ghost, but I don’t—”

He catches himself.

She raises an eyebrow.

“You don’t… believe in ghosts?” she prompts.

“I don’t believe in anything I can’t arrest,” he says bluntly. “But if someone’s out there breaking chains, they’re breaking the law. We can’t have people taking justice into their own hands.”

Glinda hums.

“And yet,” she says, “from what I’ve read, the chains they’re breaking belong to people who shouldn’t be chained in the first place.”

His jaw tightens.

“With respect, my lady, that isn’t for vigilantes to decide. That’s for us. For you.”

“Yes,” she says softly. “I know.”

He shifts. “Would you like us to crack down?” he asks. “We could put extra patrols in those districts. Make an example of—”

“No,” she says, too quickly.

He blinks.

She pulls herself together.

“I mean,” she says, more measured, “no unnecessary crackdowns. I don’t want innocent people caught up in a hunt for… rumours. If you catch anyone in the act of harming someone, Human or Animal, then by all means arrest them. But if you catch someone… intervening… non-violently…” She chooses her words carefully. “Perhaps we focus on why intervention was needed in the first place.”

The Captain looks at her for a long, assessing moment.

“You want me to look the other way,” he says.

“I want you,” she says, “to prioritise. Resources are limited. Use them on the people swinging whips, not on… ghosts.”

He snorts, despite himself.

“Yes, Lady Glinda,” he says. “Ghosts duly deprioritised.”

After he leaves, she sits a long time at her desk, staring at nothing.

You are not helping, whispers the guilty part of her. You are encouraging lawlessness. You are indulging a story because it makes you feel less alone.

Or, says another voice—quieter, but no less insistent—you are choosing to allow someone else to do what you cannot. What you will not be allowed to do and stay in this office.

She presses her palms over her eyes until colours bloom.

In the darkness behind her hands, it’s easy to imagine that the patterns on her lids are green.

That night, sleep comes in reluctant, jagged pieces.

When she dreams, she’s on the balcony again.

Below, the crowd chants something new.

“GREEN GHOST! GREEN GHOST!”

She leans over the rail, searching for a flash of colour that isn’t pink or gold.

Somewhere in the throng, she sees a hand—green, reaching up.

She wakes with her heart in her throat and the map in her pocket crinkling where she’s pressed a fist against it.

She lies there in the dark, pulse racing.

“If you’re there,” she whispers to the ceiling, to the city, to the impossible idea, “if you’re… anything… be careful. Please.”

The room says nothing back.

Far away, in some alley or attic or crawlspace she will never see, something may or may not hear her. Something may or may not laugh, low and tired and glad to be there.

Glinda closes her eyes.

In the morning, she will put on her tiara and talk about unity and kindness and the importance of going through proper channels.

Tonight, alone, she lets herself imagine a green ghost slipping through the cracks in her city’s conscience, doing with wind and brick what she’s trying to do with pens and speeches.

She will never say it aloud.

But from this night on, she starts counting the rumours.

Chapter Text

The night starts with rain and ends with fire under her skin.

It’s a slow, mean rain—the kind that works its way into stone and bone. The kind that makes the Emerald City’s alleys shine treacherously. Elphaba is already damp when she reaches the edge of the Old Tannery District, hood pulled low, boots slipping on the slick cobbles.

She nearly misses the turn.

If not for the smell—sharp, metallic, wrong—she might have.

Smoke, she thinks first, heart kicking. Then no, not quite. Something acrid and too clean. Chemical.

Her pace quickens.

Ahead, beyond the humped shapes of abandoned vats and mouldering crates, a low, ragged sound threads through the patter of rain.

Crying.

She rounds the corner.

Three Animals are pressed against the far wall of the alley, pinned there by four men with torches and masks.

The masks are cheap—bits of cloth tied over noses, eyes cut out. The torches sputter in the rain, the flames struggling, but the men’s armbands are bright enough: that damned stylised eye, painted badly in red.

Humans First. Or Prosperity. Or whatever variant of “we’re scared and stupid” they’ve settled on tonight.

One of them has a bottle in his hand, rag stuffed in the neck, flame licking at the end.

“Last chance,” he says to the Animals. “You lot clear out of this district by dawn, or we clear you out. Fire’s a great motivator.”

The Animals are already scorched.

A Rabbit, whiskers singed, ears plastered flat with rain and fear. A Bear, bigger than the others, but with his left shoulder bandaged and held stiff against his body; he’s in no shape to charge. Between them, half-hidden, a young Cat’s fur sticks up in wild, damp spikes, eyes too wide.

Elphaba swears under her breath.

This wasn’t the plan.

Tonight was supposed to be a meeting. A quiet check-in with an Animal healer in this district who’s been keeping tabs on who’s been taken, who’s gone missing, who’s quietly not returning from late shifts.

In. Out. No theatrics. No ghosts.

The bottle flares as the man angles it, preparing to throw.

“All right,” Elphaba mutters. “So much for that.”

She steps out from behind the crate.

“Excuse me,” she says.

Her voice is not loud, but the word carries strangely in the narrow space, skating on the wet walls.

Four heads snap toward her.

Rain hisses on their torches. One of the men—young, chin patchy with the beginnings of a beard—actually flinches at the sight of her. Green skin, black coat, eyes that have forgotten how to do anything but assess threats.

“Who the hell are you?” he demands.

She tips her head.

“Interior decoration,” she says. “Apparently this alley needed something more… terrifying.”

The Cat makes a strangled noise. Halfway between a laugh and a sob.

“Witch,” one of the others breathes. His mask slips as his mouth drops open.

She sees the moment recognition hits. Not because he knows her—he doesn’t; she’s a bedtime story to him—but because the shape of her matches the silhouette someone painted on a wall once with the words GREEN GHOST underneath.

He goes pale.

“Thought she was dead,” mutters the one with the bottle.

A familiar script tries to roll over the scene.

You thought wrong. I’m un-meltable. Or: rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. Elphaba can hear the lines in her head, sharp and light, fashioned out of the same defiance she’s worn like armour for months.

She doesn’t say any of them.

She is too tired for theatrics.

“Put the bottle down,” she says. “Walk away. I won’t even tell your mothers what you’ve been doing with your evenings.”

“You don’t tell us what to do,” the young one snaps. “This is our city. Human city. Time the Animals learned their place.”

The Bear’s lips peel back in a bare-toothed snarl.

“Funny,” Elphaba says. “Every time I hear that, the people saying it always seem to be standing on land Animals were on first.”

She lifts her hand.

The magic comes slower than she’d like.

Where it used to surge—eager, hungry—it now drags. It’s like drawing water from a well that someone poured rocks into. She has to reach past the grit, past the splinters left by that cursed potion, past the exhaustion she’s been pretending is just “a long day.”

Wind, she thinks.

Simple. Directed.

Air swirls around her fingers, cautious at first, then building. She feels the familiar pressure behind her sternum as she pulls. Her burned ribs ache in sympathy.

The man with the bottle smirks and cocks his arm, clearly having decided she’s bluffing.

He throws.

She snaps her wrist.

The air hits the bottle mid-arc.

It jerks sideways, then shoots straight up, the rag-tail flame flaring. It explodes harmlessly against the rain-black sky, a brief bloom of fire that’s snuffed out before it can fall.

The men shout, ducking instinctively.

The Rabbit gasps.

Elphaba’s vision wobbles around the edges.

Too much, too fast.

She swallows the wave of dizziness and pushes forward.

“Last chance,” she says, and this time she doesn’t bother to make it sound flippant.

Something in her tone gets through.

The patchy-bearded one takes a step back.

The leader—middle-aged, thick-set, with the self-satisfaction of someone who’s never had to question his place in any room—raises his chin.

“We don’t scare off so easy, Witch,” he sneers. “We’ve got the law on our side. Got the Wizard—”

“The Wizard,” she says, very calmly, “is gone. And if you had the law on your side, you wouldn’t be doing this in an alley in the rain.”

He opens his mouth to retort.

She doesn’t give him time.

She slams the wind sideways.

It hits them like a sweeping hand. Torches go flying. Cloaks snap. The rain, caught up in the gust, becomes a biting curtain of droplets that sting exposed skin like hail.

The men stagger.

One loses his footing on the slick cobbles and goes down hard. Another is flung into the wall, breath pummelled out of him. The leader, to his credit, stays upright—but only just.

Elphaba feels something tear inside.

Not literally; there is no gruesome internal rip. But the magic catches on a sore spot and the pain flares. Her hands spasm. For a second, she can’t feel her fingers.

She bites down on a sound.

Not now. Not when they’re still standing.

She yanks again.

The air swirls tighter, focusing around the men’s legs. The water on the ground answers. There’s a sick satisfaction in watching mud and slick stone betray them—boots slide out from under, knees buckle.

They go down.

“Run,” she says to the Animals, words squeezed through gritted teeth. “Now.”

The Rabbit doesn’t need telling twice. She darts past the floundering men, paws slapping wet stone. The Cat is close behind, eyes white, ears flat.

The Bear hesitates, looking torn between fleeing and using his one good arm to rearrange someone’s face.

“Go,” Elphaba snarls. “Don’t flatter them by dying here.”

He goes.

The men curse and scrabble. One reaches for a fallen torch. Another fumbles at his belt for something that might be a knife.

Elphaba raises her hand again.

This is where she should stop.

She’s done enough. They’re down, they’re disarmed, the Animals are moving. She could vanish now—slip back into the shadows, let the legend fill in the gaps.

Instead, something mean and tired in her says: no. They don’t get to walk away thinking they were just unlucky with the weather.

She pulls deeper.

Her fingertips buzz. The air howls.

The torches, rolling on the wet ground, extinguish themselves, flames smothered by rain whipped into frenzied spirals. The alley plunges into a deeper dark, lit only by the faint glow of street lamps at either end.

For a moment, the men are silhouettes in a storm.

She tightens her grip on the spell.

The stones under their hands tremble. A hairline crack splits one, then another, then the gap widens into something they can feel—a juddering under palm and knee that makes them shout.

One tries to scramble to his feet.

She lets the crack yawn just enough that his foot sinks to the ankle.

He yelps.

“Do you know,” she says conversationally over the roar of wind and water, “what they say about ghosts?”

“W-what?” The word squeaks.

“They say they’re the parts of the past that refuse to stay buried.” She steps closer, coat whipping around her legs. “You probably think you’re very new. Very bold. Very different from whatever thugs the Wizard used to hire to do his dirty work.”

She can see their eyes now, wide in the dark.

“You’re not,” she says. “You’re just the same rot in a new uniform. And if you keep sniffing around my people…”

She flicks her fingers.

The wall beside the leader groans and a chunk of plaster drops, missing his head by inches.

He flinches violently.

“…I will make this alley your grave,” she finishes softly.

The threat hangs there, almost physical.

Some part of her knows she’s leaning too hard into the myth. That every time she does this, every time she adds a new, more theatrical detail to the story, it gets harder to stop.

Some other part of her is satisfied to see them shaking.

“Go,” she says.

They don’t need telling twice.

They scramble, tripping over one another in their hurry to get away from her, from the cracking stones, from the wind that seems to have taken personal offence at their existence.

She lets the spell go in stages.

First the stones still. The cracks hold where they are—enough to be a reminder, not enough to be a hazard. Then the wind slackens from a howl to a gust, then to a breeze, then to nothing.

The rain falls straight again.

The alley is suddenly, shockingly quiet.

Elphaba sways.

The world tilts. The wet bricks blur.

She puts a hand out to steady herself against the wall and misses.

Her knees hit the ground faster than she expects.

Pain flares white-hot from her chest, radiating down her arms. Her fingers twitch uselessly, as if they’re trying to keep casting even now. The buzzing in her hands has escalated into a full-on swarm, every nerve ending singing with too much use.

“Shit,” she says weakly.

Her voice sounds like it’s coming from underwater.

She tries to brace herself to push back up.

Her arms don’t cooperate.

They shake and then simply… give.

For a bizarre moment, she is offended at her own body.

Get up, she thinks. We have places to be. We have damage to catalogue. We have—

The alley flickers in and out.

Her vision narrows to a tunnel. The rain on her face feels like static.

Is this what burnout feels like for people who fly too close to the sun? she thinks, somewhere sideways. Do they hit the ground and get lectures too?

“Elphaba!”

The voice reaches her through the static—muffled but urgent.

She can’t tell from which direction it’s coming. The word ricochets off the walls.

“Elphaba, you idiot.”

Ah. That narrows it.

She blinks.

The world tilts again and resolves into Fiyero’s painted face hovering above hers, straw hair plastered to his head with rain. His hat is gone, probably claimed by the storm. His glass eyes look more alive than most living men’s.

“Hello,” she says, because apparently her brain has decided to cope with imminent collapse by embracing social niceties. “Did you enjoy the show?”

“Loved the first act,” he says briskly, looping his broom-handle arms under her shoulders. “Hated the part where you passed out in the second.”

“I didn’t pass out,” she protests. “I… knelt.”

She tries to demonstrate being upright and fails spectacularly.

Her legs might as well be carved from jelly.

He hauls her against his chest anyway, straw creaking, joints protesting.

“Come on, Green Ghost,” he mutters. “Time to go haunt a couch.”

She wants to tell him couches are not typically considered sites of spectral terror. What comes out is a noise that could be agreement or a dying goose.

Her hands spasm again.

He feels it.

“Easy,” he says, his voice dropping. “Don’t try to cast. It’s over.”

She grits her teeth.

“Not… casting,” she pants. “Just… existing. Difficult. Would not recommend.”

“Noted,” he says. “I’ll file a complaint with management.”

The alley sways around them as he half-carries, half-drags her toward the mouth.

Her head lolls against his shoulder. She can smell damp straw and a faint lingering whiff of the cologne he used to wear, trapped in the fabric somewhere.

If she closes her eyes, just for a second, she can pretend they’re back at Shiz and he’s walking her home from the library after she stayed too late and forgot how to be a person.

She doesn’t close them.

She’s not sure she’d be able to peel them open again.

By the time they reach the discreet side door that leads to one of their bolt-holes—a door cunningly disguised as an outrageously ugly mural of a dancing Winkie farmer—her breathing is ragged.

He kicks it in the agreed pattern.

A hatch slides open.

“Password,” someone grunts from inside.

“Elphaba is an idiot,” Fiyero says promptly.

The hatch slams shut.

There’s a muttered curse, some scuffling, then the door opens properly.

Sessa squints up at them, one ear twitching. Her nose wrinkles as she takes in Elphaba’s colour—or lack thereof.

“Again?” she says. “Really?”

Elphaba considers a retort and decides all her retorts have been replaced with static.

Fiyero shouldered past Sessa with a muttered “excuse me, cranky badger, emergency collapse coming through.”

They descend into the cellar.

The safehouse tonight is one of the smaller ones—a butcher’s old cold room, oddly cosy now it’s filled with blankets, lanterns, and a kettle that never quite comes to a boil. A couple of young rebels look up as they enter, eyes widening.

“Oh, stars,” one of them breathes. “Is she—”

“Fine,” Elphaba says automatically.

It would be more convincing if she weren’t currently doing her best impression of a dead marionette.

Fiyero lowers her onto the battered couch in the corner.

It’s more springs than cushioning at this point, but it’s better than the floor. The room tilts alarmingly and then settles as her head hits the armrest.

Her hands are still twitching.

She stares at them, furious.

“Stop that,” she tells them.

They do not oblige.

Sessa’s paws appear in her line of sight, followed by the rest of her. She hops up onto a crate beside the couch and peers at Elphaba’s face.

“On a scale from ‘I overdid it’ to ‘I’m about to explode like an overfilled kettle,’ where are we?” she asks.

“Tea metaphor,” Elphaba mutters. “Appropriate. Let’s say I’m… whistling.”

Sessa snorts.

“I’ll fetch Rian,” she says.

“Rian?” Elphaba frowns. “We don’t need—”

“You need Rian,” Sessa says firmly. “Shut up.”

The healer arrives within minutes.

Rian is a Fox in late middle age, russet fur streaked with silver, eyes sharp as needles. He sheds calm the way other people shed hair.

“Burnout again?” he says, taking in the scene.

“Define ‘again,’” Elphaba says faintly.

He sighs.

“That would be a yes,” he says.

He sets his satchel down and begins unpacking small jars and bundles of herbs.

“Everyone else, out,” he says. “Give the Witch some air.”

There’s a murmur of protest.

“She doesn’t need an audience,” he snaps. “She needs to stop trying to impress you all.”

They shuffle out, some more reluctantly than others.

Fiyero lingers.

Rian arches an eyebrow at him.

“I can go stand with my nose in the corner,” Fiyero offers. “But if she passes out, you’ll need someone to hold her down.”

Rian considers this.

“Fine,” he says. “You can stay. Try not to get straw in the poultices.”

He turns his attention back to Elphaba.

“Tell me what you cast,” he says.

“Wind,” she says. “Some… stone manipulation. Intimidation theatrics. Nothing major.”

“Mm.” His hands are gentle but firm as he takes one of her wrists and presses his pads to the inside, feeling for the pulse of magic the way a human healer might feel for a heartbeat. His whiskers twitch. “Nothing major. For someone with a raw, chemically-damaged system and a chronic history of overextension.”

“You sound like a pamphlet,” she mutters.

He ignores that.

“Any loss of sensation?” he asks. “Pins and needles? Numbness?”

She considers.

“Just the usual… buzzing,” she says. “And everything hurts. And my hands don’t belong to me. Otherwise, delightful evening.”

He clicks his tongue.

“How many times in the past fortnight have you used that level of power?” he asks.

She glares at the ceiling.

“I don’t… count.”

“Start,” he says.

She makes a small, non-committal noise.

“Rough estimate,” he presses.

She sighs.

“…Six?” she offers. “Seven, maybe.”

“Six,” Fiyero says promptly. “Tonight makes seven. She did the thing with the collapsing beams on Tuesday, the floodgate spell on the warehouse last week, that ridiculous stunt with the hanging sign—”

“Traitor,” she mutters.

Rian’s mouth tightens.

“And how long did you rest after each?” he asks.

She searches her memory.

“An hour?” she says. “Two? Sometimes I even sat down.”

“Mm-hmm,” he says. “And by ‘rest’ you mean ‘sat up listening to Glinda’s speeches and re-grouting your trauma.’”

Her head jerks.

Fiyero winces.

“I told him about the radio,” he says. “In my defence, you talk back to it like it’s a person.”

Elphaba glares weakly at him.

Rian sniffs.

“Her coping mechanisms are her own,” he says. “My concern is that her coping mechanisms apparently do not include ‘resting.’”

He releases her wrist and moves his fingers to her ribs, skimming just above where the potion burns left their deepest marks.

She flinches.

“Pain?” he asks.

“Only when I breathe,” she says.

His whiskers twitch again.

“Funny,” he says. “You know what else is funny? The way you still think you can pour magic out of a body like this without consequences.”

He taps lightly along the scar tissue, muttering under his breath. Elphaba feels a faint, cool tingle spread outward. Some of the sharpest edges of the pain recede, dulled to a more manageable throb.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Convincing your nervous system not to riot quite so enthusiastically,” he says. “It’s a temporary patch. What you need is real rest.”

“Rest,” she repeats blankly.

“Yes.” He fixes her with a look. “A week with no high-level casting. No dramatic rescues. No theatrical windstorms. Light spells only. Maybe a levitation of a teacup, if you’re feeling indulgent.”

She laughs.

It’s not a happy sound.

“A week,” she says. “You realise what can happen in a week? What they can do in a week?”

“Yes,” he says. “I have scars too. But here is what else can happen in a week if you keep this up: you fry yourself. You collapse mid-rescue. You lose control of a spell and bring an entire building down on your head and everyone else’s.”

She opens her mouth.

“Or,” he goes on, “maybe it’s not that dramatic. Maybe it’s smaller. Your hands stop obeying you altogether. Your vision goes fuzzy every time you channel. You twitch when you’re not casting. You lose the fine motor control you need to aim properly.”

Her hands twitch now, as if trying to demonstrate.

She looks away.

“I can handle it,” she says.

“Can you?” he says quietly. “Because I’ve been watching you for months, Elphaba. Every time you pull this stunt, it takes longer for you to stop shaking. Your nose bleeds now when you push too hard; it didn’t before. You think I don’t notice when you sit there with a rag pressed to your face after everyone else has gone to bed?”

She had hoped he hadn’t.

She had hoped her private little humiliations were, at least, private.

“Even if I believed you didn’t care what happens to you,” he says, “which I don’t—”

“Why not?” she snaps, more sharply than intended.

He blinks.

“You think we haven’t all heard you, muttering in the walls?” he says. “You think we don’t know that half the time you climb back into your bolt-holes, you spend the night reciting every mistake you’ve made instead of sleeping?”

Her cheeks burn hotter than the potion scars.

“I—”

“You are not doing us a favour,” he cuts in. “You’re not being noble. You are gambling with our one real weapon because you’re trying to atone for every sin you’ve convinced yourself you committed.”

The words land like slaps.

Fiyero shifts uncomfortably.

“Rian,” he says softly.

“No,” Rian says, eyes still on Elphaba. “She needs to hear this.”

He takes a breath, fur ruffling.

“Look at me,” he says.

She doesn’t want to.

She does anyway.

His gaze is steady.

“When you push yourself until you collapse, you are not thinking of us,” he says. “You are not thinking of the Animals you’re trying to save. You are thinking of the girl on the balcony.”

Her stomach drops.

“I—”

“You are thinking, ‘if I suffer enough, if I burn myself down to ash, maybe it will balance the scales.’ You are thinking, ‘if I die saving someone, maybe it will make up for the fact that I didn’t die that night.’”

There is a roaring in her ears.

She wants to tell him to stop.

She wants to tell him he’s wrong.

She wants to tell him he’s too right.

“You are not immortal,” he says. “You are not infinite. You are a green girl with a damaged system and a finite amount of magic to pull from. If you burn out entirely, we lose you. The Animals you haven’t saved yet lose you. The ones who whisper your name like a prayer lose you.”

He leans in.

“And she loses you,” he adds, very softly.

Something twists so hard in her chest she almost gasps.

“She is safer without me,” Elphaba snaps, the words leaping to her tongue like they’ve been waiting.

There it is.

The mantra.

Rian’s eyes soften—not with pity, but with a kind of exhausted understanding.

“I didn’t say she isn’t,” he says. “I said she loses you. There’s a difference.”

“She already lost me,” Elphaba bites out. “I made sure of that.”

“And yet,” he says, “you’re here. Breathing. Even if you seem determined to make that as difficult as possible.”

Fiyero clears his throat.

“Rian,” he says carefully, “if the goal is to lower her stress, maybe—”

“I am not interested in lowering her stress,” Rian says. “I am interested in keeping her alive.”

He turns back to Elphaba.

“You repeat it like a charm,” he says. “She’s safer without me. Safer without me. As if saying it enough will turn self-neglect into selflessness.”

She flinches.

“Is she safer without you?” he asks. “Yes, in some ways. Of course. You are a target. Your name is still on wanted posters in half the city. You bring danger with you. That’s true.”

He doesn’t soften the words. Doesn’t cushion them.

“And,” he continues, “would she be safer if you died in an alley because you couldn’t bear to live with yourself? Would the world be safer without you taking these men’s toys away?”

She doesn’t answer.

He sits back slightly.

“Rest,” he says quietly. “We can argue philosophy later. Right now, your nervous system is screaming. If you keep pushing like this, one night it will stop screaming because it will have nothing left.”

The buzzing in her hands has dulled to a low, angry hum.

Her bones ache.

The cloak of exhaustion settles heavier over her shoulders, now that the adrenaline has burned off.

He presses a small jar into Fiyero’s hand.

“Rub that on the scars twice a day,” he instructs. “It will help with the sensitivity. Not a cure. But something.”

He digs another jar out of his bag and sets it on the crate beside the couch.

“And drink that,” he adds. “Not all at once, unless you enjoy the taste of swamp. It will bolster what magic you have left and clear some of the potion residue. Slowly.”

Elphaba eyes the jar.

Its contents are a disturbing shade of brownish green.

“It looks like something that crawled out of my worst memories,” she says.

“Good,” Rian says. “Maybe you’ll respect it.”

He pauses.

“Take the week,” he says.

“I can’t—”

“You can,” he says. “You just don’t want to. There’s a difference. Let Sessa’s people handle things. Let others take some of the risk. You are not the only one in this fight.”

She stares at the cracked ceiling.

A week.

How many warehouses can be filled in a week? How many trains can be loaded, how many classrooms emptied, how many “prosperity” meetings held?

How many Green Ghost stories will end with And then she didn’t come?

“You don’t have to disappear,” Rian says, softer. “You can still plan. Strategise. Teach. We need that as much as we need theatrics. You’re good at making people angry in useful ways.”

She huffs a breath.

“I am very good at making people angry,” she says.

He allows himself the flicker of a smile.

“Then do it from a chair,” he says. “For seven days. If nothing else, consider it an opportunity to annoy the right people for longer.”

He gathers his things.

“If you feel pins and needles all the way up your arms again,” he says, “or your vision goes, or you can’t unclench your hands in the morning, send for me. Do not wait ‘to see if it goes away.’ It rarely does.”

She grumbles something that might be agreement.

He hops down.

“Try not to die,” he says dryly, as a parting shot.

She glares.

“I’ll… pencil it into my schedule,” she mutters.

When he’s gone, the cellar feels strangely muffled. As if someone has thrown a blanket over the sounds of the world.

Fiyero shifts onto the edge of the crate and leans back against the wall beside her, his joints creaking.

“You know he’s right,” he says.

“I hate that he’s right,” she says.

He nods sympathetically.

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s terrible when other people are right about us. Very offensive.”

She stares at the ceiling.

“She is safer without me,” she says again, quietly this time.

He glances at her.

“Maybe,” he says. “In some ways.”

He picks at a loose thread on his sleeve.

“And maybe,” he adds, “you staying alive is the thing that actually keeps her safest in the long run. I haven’t done the maths, but I’m pretty sure dead you can’t rearrange any thugs’ limbs.”

She closes her eyes.

Images flicker behind her lids: Glinda on a balcony, Glinda in the council chamber, Glinda in the tower, hands over her mouth as the bucket tipped.

“I can’t go back,” she whispers.

“I know,” he says. “I’m not saying go back. I’m saying… don’t use ‘keeping her safe’ as an excuse to punish yourself.”

It lands.

Of course it does.

She’s not stupid.

She knows, somewhere under all the layers of anger and duty and grief, that there is a part of her that likes the hurt. That thinks it’s deserved.

Hurt enough, that part whispers, and maybe it will balance. Burn enough, and maybe the burned bits in your memory will stop screaming.

She curls her hands into fists.

They shake, then slowly still.

Her whole body feels heavy. The couch might as well be made of lead.

Rian’s spell soothes the worst of the rawness, but fatigue isn’t something he can magic away.

“You cannot pour from an empty cauldron,” she mutters, echoing some self-help slogan she once saw on a poster in the Shiz counsellor’s office.

Fiyero snorts.

“See?” he says. “You even sound like you know better.”

She wants to argue.

Instead, she yawns.

The room wobbles.

Fiyero reaches down and tugs a blanket over her legs, surprisingly gentle for someone with straw for fingers.

“Sleep,” he says. “I’ll wake you if the ceiling collapses or the world ends.”

“The world already ended,” she mumbles. “This is just… the bits after.”

He pats her arm.

“Then you might as well nap in the rubble,” he says.

Her eyes close.

Somewhere above, rain drums on stone.

In the distance—if she strains, if she lets her mind slip sideways—she can almost hear the faint, tinny echo of a familiar voice drifting from some radio in some other room.

Citizens of Oz. My friends.

She imagines Glinda at a desk, eyes shadowed, pen in hand. She imagines her making decisions, signing orders, trying to tilt the world a fraction less cruel without tipping herself out of her precarious place.

“Safer without me,” Elphaba whispers into the dark, the words more habit than conviction.

They taste like penance. Like an old, worn-out spell that never quite did what it promised.

As she drifts, another thought brushes the edge of her mind, unwelcome and persistent.

You’re safer for her if you’re still here.

She doesn’t let herself touch it for long.

She falls asleep before she can argue with it properly, fingers curled, scars throbbing in a slow, reluctant lullaby.

For the next few days—no matter how hard she tries to tell herself otherwise—when someone suggests another big raid, the memory of this collapse, of Rian’s voice, of her own traitorous trembling hands, rises up like a wall.

Glinda is safer without me, she tells herself again, because it’s easier than saying:

I need to live.

She pulls the blanket higher and, for once, lets the city fend for itself for a night.

Chapter Text

They pin her into the dress like they’re girding a battleship.

It’s the pale blue one this time—soft, respectable, less “Ozdust” and more “stateswoman.” The bodice is structured enough to hold her upright even if her spine forgets how. The skirt falls just so. The sleeves are translucent at the shoulders, a pretty illusion of fragility that fools exactly no one who has sat through her committee meetings.

Tansy fusses with the hem, then with the sleeves, then with the invisible specks of lint only maids can see.

“You look beautiful, my lady,” she says.

Glinda learns forward and lets Tansy zip and button her in, one fastener at a time. The fabric is cool on her skin. Her ribs protest when she inhales.

“‘Beautiful’ isn’t exactly the brief,” Glinda says, trying for lightness. “I think the word they used in the memorandum was ‘reassuring.’”

Tansy straightens.

“You look reassuring,” she says at once, fiercely loyal. “Beautifully reassuring.”

Glinda’s mouth curls.

“That’s me,” she says. “Oz’s favourite ornamental sedative.”

Tansy’s face crumples for half a second, like she’s about to argue with that, then smooths. There’s only so much contradiction you can offer your employer when she’s paying your wages and staring past your shoulder.

Because Glinda is staring. Not at Tansy.

At the mirror.

The one over the dressing table has seen a lot of versions of her—Shiz coquette, Emerald City darling, Wizard’s favourite, public penitent. Glinda the Good. Glinda the Liar. Glinda in a nightgown with mascara streaks.

Today’s version looks… tired.

Not in the cute way you complain about with friends. In the honest way that leaves smudges under her eyes even after Tansy taps concealer over them. Her hair is perfect—Tansy has seen to that, coaxed it into soft, weightless curls that brush her shoulders like a halo—but it’s the kind of perfection that feels artificial from the inside, like a wig glued onto a stranger.

Tansy moves behind her to fasten the necklace they decided on—a simple pendant, nothing too ostentatious. Glinda meets her own gaze in the glass.

“Smile,” she tells her reflection.

The woman in the mirror bares her teeth.

It’s not right.

She read somewhere—some terrible deportment manual her parents made her study when she was 5—that a smile shouldn’t show too much gum or too many lower teeth. That people can tell when it doesn’t reach your eyes.

She tweaks it. Softens the corners. Lifts her eyebrows just enough to look interested, not frightened. Tilts her head.

The Glinda Smile slides into place like a mask onto a hook.

Her stomach lurches.

It’s physical, that reaction. Not a poetic metaphor. Nausea curls low and insistent. For a second she thinks she might actually be sick all over Tansy’s hard work.

She grips the edge of the table.

“How long have I been doing this?” she asks the mirror, keeping her voice airy so Tansy won’t hear anything under it.

The mirror gives her a rueful almost-smile.

Since you were old enough to know people liked you better that way, it doesn’t say.

“Are you ill, my lady?” Tansy’s face appears over her shoulder, reflected.

Glinda forces a breath in through her nose.

“No,” she says. “Just… pre-speech wriggles.”

Tansy snorts. “You don’t get nervous,” she says. “Not in public, anyway.”

“I get very nervous in private,” Glinda says. “I just do it on a delay.”

There’s a knock at the door.

Madam Korr’s crisp voice filters through the wood. “Lady Glinda? It’s time.”

Time.

It always is.

Tansy adjusts the tiara—today’s is smaller, more understated, the official line being that Oz does not require pomp to feel confident, it requires continuity—and kisses Glinda’s shoulder through the fabric, quick and sneaky, like she did when Glinda was too tired to get up after the first meltdown.

“You’ve got this,” she murmurs.

“Of course I do,” Glinda says.

She waits until Tansy has stepped back before she lets herself meet her own gaze again.

“You’ve got this,” she tells the mirror version.

The mirror version looks like she would rather crawl under the bed.

She smiles anyway.

The speech is another unity one.

They always are, lately.

The Wizard is gone. His apparatus lingers. His absence left a vacuum that opportunists have been only too eager to fill. Meanwhile Glinda has been stuck doing the worst group project in history with an entire city-state.

“Citizens of Oz,” Madam Korr recites as they walk toward the balcony antechamber, notes in hand. “Remember: open with gratitude. Acknowledge their fears. Then pivot to shared values—”

“—courage, compassion, cooperation,” Glinda recites along with her. “Yes, I know. I wrote it.”

With some editing.

Korr’s mouth twitches.

“And try not to ad-lib too much,” she says. “The last time you went off-script we had three days of letters from Winkie landowners.”

“They were being ridiculous,” Glinda mutters.

“They were also very loud.”

They reach the heavy double doors that lead to the balcony. Beyond, Glinda can hear the murmur of the crowd—a different tone from the last time she stood here and felt their roar like a physical slap. Today’s sound is lower. Less feverish. More… uncertain.

The word on everyone’s lips is “referendum.” Or “restructuring.” Or “succession.” Or, in certain closed-door meetings, “abdication.”

There’s a draft proposal on her desk—somehow both exhilarating and terrifying—about a council structure that doesn’t centre her so firmly. About distributing power instead of letting it congeal around one girl with good hair.

She’s read it three times. Marked questions in the margins. Stared at it until the words blurred.

Today’s speech is supposed to be a soft lead-in. Preparing people for the possibility that Glinda the Good may not always be Glinda the One In Charge.

She looks down at her notes.

Unity. Shared responsibility. Trusting each other.

She wonders, not for the first time, how people would react if she said: “I don’t trust myself.”

“Ready, my lady?” Korr asks.

Glinda looks at the door.

The last time she stood on that balcony with a green girl in the back of her mind, she branded someone wicked in front of the whole city. The time after that, she sold them a story. The time after that… and after that…

How many layers of story-telling can one balcony hold before it collapses?

“Yes,” she says.

The guards push the doors open.

Sound pours in.

Not a roar this time. A wave.

The crowd is large but not frenzied. Banners flutter—some Emerald City green and gold, some bearing slogans she endorsed (“Kindness is Strength,” “All Hearts Together”), some… less expected.

Glinda steps into the light.

The reaction washes over her.

“GLINDA! GLINDA THE GOOD!”

Her throat tightens despite herself.

She moves to the front of the balcony, the familiar choreography guiding her steps. The sunlight hits her hair just right. She raises a hand. The murmuring hushes.

“Citizens of Oz,” she calls, and her voice is clear. It always is. “My friends.”

The speech sits in her mouth like a foreign object.

“Today,” she begins, “we gather—not in fear, as we have too often in these past months—but in hope.”

It’s not a lie, exactly. There have been genuine victories. The amnesties. The new laws. The quiet dismantling of the Wizard’s worst inventions. The fact that the city feel less like a tinderbox than it did a year ago.

But even as she talks about hope, her stomach is still doing slow, nauseated somersaults from the Glinda Smile in the mirror.

She keeps her gaze sweeping over the crowd, never lingering too long on any one face. It’s a trick she picked up early: it makes every individual feel seen, even if she couldn’t identify them again in a line-up.

“Change is frightening,” she says. “I know. Believe me, I know. We have all had to relearn the stories we thought we could rely on. We have had to look at old heroes and see their cracks. We have had to look at ourselves and ask: what did we accept? What did we ignore?”

She pauses, just long enough.

The crowd shifts.

“And yet,” she goes on, “we have not fallen apart. We have not turned on one another. We have—”

Her eyes snag on something.

A banner.

It’s high up, halfway back in the square—hand-painted, letters uneven, the white sheet beneath it rippling in the breeze.

For a second, she can’t quite make it out.

Then the gust hits just right, the fabric stretches taut, and the words jump up at her like a slap.

THE WICKED PROTECTOR IS WATCHING.

Beneath, a crude but unmistakable silhouette: pointed hat, long coat, broom like a spear.

Green streaks radiate out from it in clumsy brushstrokes.

Her breath catches.

The crowd waits.

Her script waits.

Her tongue has forgotten what comes next.

“…we have…” she flounders.

The square swims.

She hears the words, but they’re not the ones she’s meant to be saying.

Wicked protector.

The phrase outs itself from the back of her brain where she’d tucked it after reading it in an unofficial report. It has been living there, restless, ever since.

Down on the balcony, the banner’s maker is almost certainly just some earnest teenager with a paint-stained apron and a vendetta against bigots. Up here, the sign feels like a message addressed directly to her.

WICKED PROTECTOR IS WATCHING.

To the crowd, it’s a threat to anyone harassing Animals.

To Glinda, it’s…

You.

Her heart is pounding.

She forces her gaze to move, to keep sweeping, to act as if nothing has yanked the rug out from under her.

Her mouth remembers its job before her brain catches up.

“…we have stepped up,” she says, the words arriving a beat late. “We have chosen, again and again, to meet fear with courage. To meet division with unity.”

The sentence lands. The crowd cheers, seemingly unaware that she just fell into a chasm and climbed back out by habit alone.

Behind her, she can feel Korr’s attention sharpen.

She keeps going.

She talks about shared governance, about listening to one another, about building structures that don’t depend on one person, one story, one smile.

The words return to their rehearsed rhythm, but the banner is burned into her peripheral vision now.

Every time she glances over that patch of crowd, it’s there.

WICKED PROTECTOR IS WATCHING.

She shouldn’t dwell.

It’s just one sign among many.

There’s another one closer that says GLINDA FOR PRESIDENT? with a badly drawn heart. Someone else has written KINDNESS > FEAR in neat, blocky letters. A group of Animals near the front hold up simple boards that say WE ARE WATCHING TOO.

It shouldn’t matter more than those.

But she can’t stop thinking about the hand that painted that silhouette, the brush that dipped into green.

She imagines, unwelcome, Elphaba seeing it.

Snorting.

Saying, with that particular curl to her lip: “Typical. They only like me when I’m dead and intangible.”

Glinda’s voice falters again.

“…and so,” she says, pulling herself back, “we will, together, shape the future of Oz not through fear-mongering or scapegoating, but through shared responsibility. Through talking to each other. Through… through…” Her eyes flick, unwillingly, back to the banner. “…through protecting one another. Wickedly, if we must.”

There is a ripple of surprise.

The word wicked hangs there, not in the way they’re used to hearing it from her.

Her advisors collectively tense behind her.

Glinda leans into it.

“Because goodness,” she says, “is not polite. It is not always tidy. Sometimes doing what is right looks wrong to those who profit from things staying the same. Sometimes protecting those who need us most means standing up to… forces we were taught to admire.”

She can feel Madam Korr’s blood pressure from here.

Too late.

She is ad-libbing now.

Somewhere, Elphaba’s ghost (real or imagined) is raising an eyebrow.

“Some of you,” she says, “have taken it upon yourselves to… remind those who would hurt their neighbours that Oz is watching. That we are not the same people we were a year ago. That we will not stand by while fear is used as an excuse for cruelty.”

A murmur ripples through the crowd. Several heads turn toward the Wicked Protector banner.

Glinda’s heart is beating so hard she feels it in her throat.

“This is not,” she adds quickly, “an endorsement of lawlessness.”

Several councilors behind her visibly relax.

“But it is,” she continues, with a flintiness she didn’t know she had, “an acknowledgment that when institutions fail—and they have—the conscience of Oz steps in. In alleys. In classrooms. In homes. We see you. Those acts of courage. Those whispers of… protection.”

Green ghost, she doesn’t say.

Wicked protector.

She can’t say it.

Not up here.

“I promise you this,” she says instead, forcing the script back on track. “We will build structures worthy of your courage. Laws that reflect your instincts toward justice, not punish them. We will ensure that those who have been harmed by the old stories are at the centre of the new ones we write.”

She wraps it up.

Ends with a familiar refrain about unity. About trust. About walking forward together. Her voice never fully steadies—the crack from that moment at the banner threads through the rest of the speech like a hairline fracture—but she doesn’t drop the mask again.

The crowd cheers at the right places.

When she finishes, they chant her name.

She steps back.

The doors close.

The roar dims.

In the muffled quiet of the antechamber, the first thing she does is put a hand on the wall to steady herself.

Madam Korr is on her almost instantly.

“What,” she says in a tone of strained politeness, “was that?”

Glinda blinks.

“The speech?” she says. “It was very moving. I’m rather proud of the bit about structures worthy of courage, actually, that came to me right on the spot—”

“The part,” Korr cuts in, “where you appeared to endorse vigilante activity and used the word wicked as a compliment.”

“Oh, that,” Glinda says.

She tries to play it off. Tries to summon the breezy, slightly ditzy tone that has disarmed so many political opponents.

It lands short.

Her stomach is still churning.

“It was… a slip,” she says. “You saw the sign.”

Korr’s mouth compresses.

“I did,” she says. “Along with half the journalists in the city.”

Glinda’s cheeks warm.

“I didn’t exactly shout ‘Long live the Green Ghost,’” she protests.

The words are out before she can call them back.

Korr’s eyes narrow.

“So you are aware of these rumours,” she says. “I had hoped it was just your staff bringing you gossip.”

“Of course I’m aware,” Glinda says. “It’s my job to be aware. People are frightened. They make stories. They cling to them. It’s… how they cope.”

“And how you cope?” Korr asks, not unkindly, but not gently either. “Do you… cling, Lady Glinda?”

The question hits too close to the bone.

She looks away.

“I cling to the fact that a great many Animals are being saved from awful situations,” she says. “Whoever is responsible.”

“You slipped,” Korr says. “That was not your usual phrasing. That wasn’t nearly as… deniable. You know what they’ll say.”

“That I’m in league with witches?” Glinda says tiredly. “They already say that.”

Korr hesitates.

“I am on your side,” she says. “You know that?”

Some days Glinda does. Some days she suspects Korr is on the side of stability more than any individual, and Glinda happens to be the current best option.

“I know you like your job,” Glinda says.

That earns her the faintest ghost of a smile.

“Yes,” Korr says. “And I know you like keeping Animals alive. And that you like keeping your friend’s legacy from being entirely papered over by the Wizard’s propaganda.”

The word friend stings.

“It’s getting away from us,” Korr says more quietly. “The Ghost. The banner. The whispers. People are starting to ask questions. Who is she? What does she want? Does Glinda know? Is Glinda… coordinating?”

Glinda’s breath hitches.

She realises with a little jolt that that idea—that she might be coordinating with this force haunting the alleys—isn’t entirely untrue from the public’s point of view. She did tell the Captain to deprioritise draughts. She did decide what to ignore.

“I’m not,” she says.

Korr studies her.

“I almost believe you,” she says.

Glinda laughs weakly.

“Is that supposed to be reassuring?”

“It’s supposed to be a reminder,” Korr says. “That every ad-lib is a signal. Every crack in your script tells people where you’re leaning. If you lean toward the Ghost too obviously, the people who hate her will start to hate you more. And you still need those people for half your policies.”

Glinda feels suddenly, acutely tired.

“Understood,” she says.

Korr nods.

“Good,” she says. “Now go and look convincingly radiant at the reception. I will go and convince the press you meant ‘wicked’ in the… you know… slang sense. ‘Oh, that’s wicked cool,’ as the children say.”

Glinda snorts despite herself.

“You’re very hip, Madam Korr,” she says.

“I am painfully aware,” Korr says dryly, and sweeps off toward the press room.

The reception is a blur of hands and faces and champagne.

People congratulate her on the speech.

No one mentions the Wicked Protector banner to her face.

They will, in editorials, later. They will dissect her choice of words, the tightness around her eyes, the way she paused when she saw that sign.

Here, in the bright, echoing hall with its chandeliers and its carefully-arranged trays of canapés, everyone is too busy being seen with her to risk anything that might cause awkwardness.

She smiles.

She laughs.

She makes a joke about tariffs with a Winkie merchant, deflects a Gillikinese envoy’s attempt to corner her about trade routes, takes a delicately frosted pastry from a tray and forgets to eat it.

Her head throbs behind her eyes.

The banner sits in her peripheral vision like an afterimage. Every time she closes her eyes for a second to stave off a wave of dizziness, she sees green paint.

At some point, someone presses a glass of champagne into her hand.

She drinks it faster than she means to.

The bubbles do nothing to soften the sharp edges inside her.

After an hour of this, she catches Korr’s eye and deploys a weapon she rarely uses: the “I am about to faint” look.

Korr’s mouth tightens, but she’s too clever to call Glinda on it in public.

“I’m afraid the Lady is needed for urgent state business,” she tells the nearest cluster of courtiers. “If you’ll excuse her.”

Glinda nods, offers apologies, and slips away.

The urgent state business turns out to be breathing.

She doesn’t go back to her office.

She goes to her private balcony.

Not the big public one. Not the one where she stands in front of banners and microphones and the expectations of a city. The little one off her sitting room, just wide enough for a chair and a small table.

It’s dark now.

The city is a river of light.

She can see the crowd dispersing from the square, the churn and flow of bodies making their way home or to taverns or to whatever secret meetings they’re not supposed to be having.

The night is cool. The earlier nausea has settled into a dull ache in her stomach. Her head feels oddly cottony, champagne and adrenaline mixing in unpleasant ways.

She pours herself another drink anyway.

Not champagne this time. Something harder. Whiskey, maybe, or Quadling rye. She doesn’t look at the label. She just sloshes some into a glass and leans on the balcony rail.

From here, the city looks almost peaceful.

No banners, no faces, no individual pains. Just light. Just movement.

She takes a sip.

It burns all the way down.

She holds the glass up, watching the way the city’s glow refracts in the liquid.

“If you’re haunting me,” she says to the night, to the city, to the ghost she isn’t supposed to believe in, “this would be a great time to throw something dramatic.”

Nothing moves except the smoke from a chimney two rooftops over.

No green sparks crackle. No witty retort floats up from the cobbles.

She sighs.

“Did you see that?” she asks anyway. “The sign?”

Her voice sounds small out here.

She imagines, for a second, that Elphaba is leaning on the railing beside her, shoulder to shoulder. That they’re both looking down at the crowd.

“What do you think?” she imagines Elphaba saying, dry as old parchment. “Flattering? Tacky? ‘Wicked Protector’ sounds like a brand of boots.”

Glinda huffs a laugh.

“I thought you’d say it was an oxymoron,” she says to the phantom. “Wicked and protector in the same breath. Makes people’s heads hurt.”

She takes another sip.

The alcohol warms her cheeks. Her fingers feel a little less like they’re made of carved wood.

“If you were here,” she says, words slurring only slightly around the edges, “what would you say?”

About the sign. About my speech. About what I’m doing. About who I’m becoming while you’re… not here.

She waits.

Her mind supplies an answer from memory.

Elphaba, leaning back against a towerside parapet, hair whipping in the wind, saying: “You always did like a good crowd. Careful they don’t swallow you.”

Elphaba, in the Wizard’s chamber: “Look at what he’s doing, Glinda. Really look.”

Elphaba, in the Ozdust ballroom, vulnerable under the jokes: “For once, I’d like to stand there and know I’m there because I deserve to be.”

“What do I do with them?” Glinda whispers. “With these people. With their fear. With this… Ghost.”

The city hums.

Somewhere far below, someone laughs. Somewhere else, a street musician hits a sour note.

“You’d say, ‘Stop caring what they think,’” she goes on. “You’d say, ‘Do what’s right and let them catch up or not.’ You’d say, ‘Burn it all down and start again.’”

She smiles crookedly.

“I can’t burn it down,” she says. “I barely got them to agree to one tiny, ridiculous tax reform. If I suggested burning anything, they’d bring their own torches.”

She tips her head back, looking up.

The sky is the same as it was at Shiz. The same huge, indifferent expanse. The stars don’t care about coronations or referendums or wicked girls and their wicked ghosts.

“I saw someone call you ‘Wicked Protector’ today,” she says. “Out loud. On fabric. In front of everyone. It felt like… like they were saying your name without saying it.”

She swallows.

“I used your word as a compliment,” she admits, a little shyly, like she’s confessing to cheating on an exam. “It slipped out. Korr will murder me later. But it felt… right. It felt like taking back something.”

Wicked had been a cudgel once. A tool the Wizard used to keep people afraid and compliant. She’d helped him wield it. She will never stop hating that.

Today, for half a second, it felt like a badge. Like a crooked little crown worn by someone who doesn’t care if it’s crooked.

“I don’t know what you’d say,” she whispers—and there it is, the sharp truth under all the hypothetical banter. “Because I don’t know who you’d be if you were here. If you’d forgive me. If you’d spit at my feet.”

Her throat tightens.

The drink swirls in her glass.

“You’d probably tell me I’m not doing enough,” she says. “That these little reforms are crumbs. That people are still hurting and I’m standing on a balcony talking about unity like it’s a spell.”

She laughs, hiccup-small.

“And you’d be right,” she says. “Again. Infuriatingly.”

The ache in her chest pulses in time with the city’s lights.

She sets the glass down on the rail.

Her fingers curl around the cold stone.

“If you were here,” she says, each word deliberate now, as if she’s afraid of breaking them, “I think I’d… ask you to stay.”

The admission hangs between her and the empty air.

She hasn’t said it before. Not like that. Not without caveats or qualifiers. It feels indecent. Selfish.

“I know it’s safer for you to be… wherever you are,” she says quickly. “If you were out there, people would go mad. They’d try to kill you again. They’d use you to hurt me. To hurt everyone who cares about you. I know that. I do.”

It’s the line she never quite says out loud in council: that some of the compromises she’s making are as much about protecting the Ghost as they are about protecting the city.

“If you were here,” she goes on, “I’d have to decide whether to stand next to you and let them call me wicked too. I like to think I’d get it right this time. But I don’t… know. Not really. And I hate not knowing. I hate that the one test I needed to pass, I failed.”

Her shoulders shake once.

She doesn’t notice the tear until it drops onto the back of her hand.

She wipes it away, annoyed.

“I’m talking to stone,” she says aloud, because if she doesn’t throw in some sarcasm she might actually start sobbing again. “That’s very well-adjusted. Very sane.”

The city doesn’t answer.

A breeze lifts a curl at her temple. For half a second, she imagines it smells of something familiar—old books and potion ingredients and rain on dust.

“If you were here,” she whispers, so quietly she doesn’t quite hear herself, “maybe I’d remember how to talk like Glinda and not like Glinda the Good.”

Her little balcony is high enough that the sounds of the city blur into a steady murmur. Not the mob’s roar from that first terrible night. Not the carefully choreographed cheer of today’s crowd.

Just… life.

She leans her elbows on the rail and lets herself listen.

“You’d hate most of what I’m doing,” she says. “And you’d love some of it. And you’d tell me exactly which is which in excruciating detail.” She smiles, weak but real. “I miss that.”

The wind sighs.

Far below, unnoticed, a slim, hooded figure slips along a rooftop edge, walls at her back, eyes on the same city.

Glinda can’t see her.

She talks anyway.

“I’m trying,” she says, to the Wicked Protector banner in her memory, to the ghost in the walls, to the green girl who may or may not be out there. “I don’t know if it’s enough. I don’t know if ‘enough’ exists. But I’m trying.”

She drains the last of her drink.

It burns less this time.

The Glinda Smile she practised earlier feels far away now. What’s left on her face is smaller, more fragile, closer to the girl who cried into a blue dress while the city sang about wickedness.

“If you were here,” she says again, and this time there’s no hypothetical response in her mind, “maybe… I’d be braver.”

She lets the sentence hang there.

Then she laughs at herself, softly, and pushes off the rail.

“Get a grip, Glinda,” she mutters. “Talking to ghosts won’t write policy.”

She scoops up her glass, steps back into the sitting room, and closes the balcony door with a quiet click.

Behind her, the city keeps humming.

Somewhere out there, in alleys and crawlspaces, a story about a green ghost shifts into a story about a wicked protector. Somewhere in here, a woman who helped write the wrong story spends another night trying to write a better one.

Alone on the little balcony, for a few minutes more, the stone remembers the warmth of her elbows and the shape of the words she left behind.

“If you were here… what would you say?”

Chapter Text

Crowds still make her skin crawl.

They always did, even before they learned her name like a curse. Now, pressed into the tide of bodies in the palace square, she feels like an exposed nerve in a sea of cotton.

At least the hood helps.

The coat she stole three months ago—a dull, city-worker grey—doesn’t look like hers. The brim of the hat is pulled low enough to shadow her face. The rain earlier has left everything damp, including the fabric, which clings in unflattering ways. Good. No one looks too closely at sodden strangers.

She keeps to the edge of the square, near a statue of the Wizard they still haven’t taken down. They’ve just draped it in a banner that reads WE ARE OZ now, like that solves anything.

From here, she has a clear view of the balcony.

She tells herself that’s why she chose this spot: tactics. Good vantage, easy escape route into the side street, three different ways to climb if she needs height.

She does not admit—even in the privacy of her own head—that it also gives her the best possible angle on Glinda.

It’s been months since she last saw her in person.

The wireless doesn’t count. Voices get flattened going through wires and air. Besides, listening to someone doesn’t prepare you for the impact of seeing what the city has done to them.

The balcony doors open.

The crowd’s murmur swells.

Glinda steps out into the light.

Even from here, Elphaba can see the little hitch in her shoulders, the micro-straightening as she moves from human to symbol. There’s a half-second where she is just a small blonde woman in a blue dress that doesn’t quite sit right on her frame, then her posture shifts and Glinda the Good takes over.

She raises her hand. The crowd erupts on cue.

“GLINDA! GLINDA THE GOOD!”

Elphaba’s fingers curl at her sides.

The roar of it vibrates up through the stone, rattling her bones. For a split second, the sound warps into a different chant—WICKED WITCH, WICKED WITCH—and the phantom of heat licks at her skin.

She breathes through it.

In. Out. You’re in the crowd, not above it. You’re a draught in their ribs, not a target.

“Citizens of Oz,” Glinda calls, voice clear and carrying. “My friends.”

The wireless doesn’t do her justice.

There’s a warmth in her live voice that the radio strips away, a roundness to the vowels that makes even hollow words sound like invitations. It used to annoy Elphaba at Shiz. Everyone leaned in when Glinda spoke; no one leaned in for lectures on Animal rights.

Now, against her will, she leans in too.

“Today,” Glinda says, “we gather—not in fear, as we have too often in these past months—but in hope.”

There’s the script. Elphaba’s read enough leaked drafts in safehouses to recognise the rhythm. Acknowledge fear. Reframe. Offer something pretty to hold.

She studies Glinda’s face.

To most of the crowd, she probably looks exactly as she’s supposed to: composed, kind, luminous. The tiara catches the sunlight. The hair, as always, is offensively perfect.

But Elphaba sees the cracks.

The tightness at the corners of her mouth. The faint sheen on her upper lip. The way her eyes skim over certain parts of the crowd—the Animals clustered near the front, the cluster of Human Prosperity armbands to the left—and linger a fraction too long on others, like she’s counting them against some invisible ledger.

She flinches, very slightly, when the cheering spikes.

No one else seems to notice.

Elphaba does.

She tells herself it doesn’t matter.

Her being aware of every little twitch in Glinda’s shoulders is a side effect, that’s all. Occupational hazard of having loved someone so long she could read their posture in the dark.

She’s not here for that.

She’s here because Sessa’s people intercepted a flyer from one of the more… excitable factions.

BIG SPEECH TODAY, it said in angry block letters. OPPORTUNITY. TIME TO SHOW HER SHE’S NOT UNTOUCHABLE.

Sessa had tossed it on the table, whiskers twitching.

“I can’t spare more than two bodies,” she’d said. “We’ve got raids to prep. You going to watch the Good Lady’s back, Wic?”

Elphaba had shrugged, as if it were nothing.

“She’s not my back to watch,” she’d said.

She’d been in this square three hours later.

Glinda talks about cracks in old stories. About learning to see those cracks. About not clinging to heroes just because we’ve always had them.

Elphaba almost laughs.

There you are, she thinks. Chipping away at your own pedestal one metaphor at a time.

The crowd listens.

Some faces are rapt. Some guarded. Some openly sceptical. It’s not the fever-sweaty mass it was the night the Wizard fled. People are tired of being whipped into frenzy. They want something steadier.

She can feel it in the way they breathe.

Near her, a group of men shift.

They’re dressed like dock-workers: heavy coats, caps pulled low. Nothing remarkable. But their energy is off. Too coiled. Not the exhausted looseness of people who came to listen and will go home grumbling about taxes.

One of them—the shortest, with a crooked nose—keeps patting his side, where his coat bulges oddly.

“—and we have had to look at ourselves and ask: what did we accept?” Glinda’s saying. “What did we ignore?”

“About time someone asked you that, sweetheart,” the crooked-nose mutters under his breath.

Elphaba’s ears prick.

She edges a fraction closer, letting the swell and sway of the crowd carry her.

Another man leans in.

“Wait till she hits the part about ‘trusting your leaders,’” he says. “That’s when we do it. People’ll be looking right at her.”

Do what?

Elphaba’s pulse steps up a notch.

She glances sideways, keeping her face angled down.

The bulge under Crooked Nose’s coat isn’t the right shape for a weapon she recognises. Too round. Too… sloshy?

A bottle, she realises. Bigger than a flask. The kind you’d store lamp oil in.

Her scars twinge.

Of course.

“Boss says just a scare,” another man says. He sounds like he half-believes it. “Flash and bang. Nothing lethal.”

“Flash and bang on a balcony made of wood,” Crooked Nose scoffs. “Accidents happen. Besides, even if she ducks, the message lands. They take her out, the whole rotten structure goes with her.”

“They” is nebulous. The Them that every angry man thinks he’s bravely opposing.

She shifts closer, using a taller man’s shoulder as cover.

“If she’s gone,” the third one says—young, with a scar down his cheek—“it’s chaos. Chaos is good. Chaos is… opportunity.”

Opportunity, Elphaba thinks sourly, is always code for someone else will die and I might feel powerful for five minutes.

Glinda’s voice floats down, oblivious.

“We have had to look at old heroes and see their cracks,” she repeats. “We have had to look at ourselves and ask: what did we accept? What did we ignore?”

Elphaba could tell her.

She won’t.

On the balcony, something shifts.

A banner somewhere in the middle of the square catches the wind and unfurls fully for the first time.

Elphaba follows the crowd’s glance.

The words jump out at her, stark black on white.

THE WICKED PROTECTOR IS WATCHING.

Underneath, a silhouette of a witch even a child could recognise. Oversized hat. Overlong coat. The angle of the broom is wrong, but that’s almost charming.

Her first instinct is outrage.

Who authorised that?

Her second is… something else.

A strange, unwillingly fond exasperation.

Honestly, she thinks. ‘Wicked Protector’? Sounds like a brand of soap. Or a terrible novel.

On the balcony, Glinda sees it.

Elphaba can tell by the way her voice stumbles. Just a fraction. A hitch small enough that most people probably write it off as a swallow.

“…we have… stepped up,” Glinda says, catching herself.

Even from this distance, Elphaba sees the way her shoulders stiffen, the way her eyes linger on the sign a beat longer than is natural.

The crowd murmurs.

She can practically feel Madam Korr having a cardiac event somewhere behind the curtains.

Elphaba’s chest feels very tight.

“She saw it,” she hears one of Sessa’s younger recruits whisper near her elbow. She hadn’t noticed him there—Cree, ink-stained hands and too-thin wrists. “She actually saw it.”

“Of course she saw it,” Elphaba mutters. “It’s enormous.”

Her sarcasm comes out strained.

On the balcony, Glinda keeps going. But something in the flow of her speech has shifted. The word wicked is now lodged in the air between them, like a spark looking for dry tinder.

“And yet,” Glinda says, “we have not fallen apart. We have not turned on one another. We have… stepped up. We have chosen, again and again, to meet fear with courage. To meet division with unity.”

She scans the crowd.

Elphaba feels, absurdly, like a child caught somewhere she shouldn’t be, even though there’s no way Glinda could see her in this sea of faces.

“Some of you,” Glinda says, “have taken it upon yourselves to… remind those who would hurt their neighbours that Oz is watching. That we are not the same people we were a year ago.”

The men beside Elphaba exchange a glance.

“That’s us, lads,” Crooked Nose says, smug. “The conscience of Oz.”

Elphaba wants to turn and ask him if his conscience always smells like lamp oil.

“This is not,” Glinda adds, “an endorsement of lawlessness…”

There’s the Korr edit.

“…but it is an acknowledgment that when institutions fail—and they have—the conscience of Oz steps in. In alleys. In classrooms. In homes. We see you. Those acts of courage. Those whispers of… protection.”

Whispers of protection.

Elphaba’s throat goes dry.

On the wireless, Glinda’s speeches are abstract. She can almost pretend they’re about someone else.

Here, watching the lines of tension around her mouth as she says protection, seeing the way her hand tightens around the railing when she says institutions have failed, it’s painfully obvious who she’s thinking about.

Not just Elphaba.

The Animals. The rebels. The kids in literacy circles. The laundresses who lean out of their windows to hiss at Human First patrols.

But also.

“Wicked,” Elphaba says under her breath, testing the word in this new configuration. “Protector.”

She wants to scoff.

Instead, something inside her unwinds half a millimetre.

She tells herself it doesn’t matter.

What Glinda says on balconies hasn’t mattered for a long time. Not to her.

Liar, something in her replies.

The men beside her start shifting again.

“That’s the cue,” Scar Cheek says, fingers brushing the outline of the bottle under Crooked Nose’s coat.

“Wait till she wraps up that bit,” Crooked Nose murmurs. “When she hits the ‘trust your leaders’ line. Then we give Oz something to really talk about.”

“You’re sure we’re not going to hit anyone else?” the youngest asks. His voice trembles. “My cousin’s up there. Near the front.”

“We’re just sending a message,” Crooked Nose says impatiently. “She ducks, she’s fine. People stampede a bit, maybe. Wake up call.”

Stampede.

Elphaba looks at the packed bodies between them and the palace.

There is no such thing as “just a stampede.” Not in a crowd this dense. One flash, one bang, one wave of panic, and the most vulnerable always go down first.

“Don’t,” she says.

It comes out before she’s decided to speak.

Three heads whip toward her.

Crooked Nose squints, trying to peer under her hood.

“Mind your own business,” he says.

“This is my business,” she says flatly.

She shifts her weight, letting the light hit her face just enough.

His eyes widen when he sees the green.

“Oh, for—” she mutters, and tugs the hood further down. “Not today. You think I keep this complexion for attention?”

Cree makes a strangled noise beside her. She can’t tell if it’s awe or panic.

“You’re—” Scar Cheek starts.

“No, I’m the other green woman,” she snaps. “Yes, of course I am. Lower your voice.”

They stare.

For a moment, time trembles.

She can feel the crowd’s movement around them, oblivious. Glinda’s voice floats overhead, talking about shared responsibility, about rewriting stories.

Down here, in the press of bodies, another story balances on the edge of a bottle.

“Congratulations,” Crooked Nose breathes. “We were just talking about you.”

“Funny,” she says. “I was just thinking how I’d rather be anywhere else.”

He recovers faster than she expects.

“So you’re the Ghost,” he says, eyes gleaming. “Perfect. You, more than anyone, should understand. She’s part of the same system that branded you Wicked. That hunted Animals. That—”

“She’s also the one signing the amnesties,” Elphaba cuts in. “And the orders that kept your cousin out of a factory last month, if the accent I’m hearing is South Docks. Tell me I’m wrong.”

He blinks.

“She’s playing you,” he says, but there’s less certainty in it now. “Little crumbs. Little gestures.”

“I’m not naive,” Elphaba says, and has to bite back a hysterical laugh at the idea that anyone could still think that of her. “I know crumbs when I see them. But let me explain this very slowly: the man who comes after her will not be better.”

Scar Cheek shifts uneasily.

“Look around you,” Elphaba says, quieter, letting the anger thread through her voice. “Half these people only tolerate Animals because Glinda told them to consider trying it. You blow her off that balcony, and the people waiting to step into the gap will use that as proof that kindness gets you killed. They will come for you. They will come for yours. And they will say you started it.”

“She started it,” Crooked Nose hisses. “She stood up there and called you Wicked. She sold us the Wizard’s lies with a smile on her face.”

“Yes,” Elphaba says. “She did.”

For a second, her voice cracks.

They don’t know why.

“She also got him out of that damn tower,” she goes on, forcing steadiness back. “She’s dismantling pieces of his machinery from the inside. I’m dismantling others from the outside. You blow her up and all you’ve done is slit both wrists of the only thing holding this place together.”

Scar Cheek frowns.

“You sound like you care,” he says slowly.

“She’s not the problem,” Elphaba snaps.

There it is.

It hangs there between them, naked and ugly and true.

“You want a list of problems?” she says. “I can name names. The men funding those little Human Prosperity clubs. The judges who still sentence Animals to ‘relocation’ and call it mercy. The merchants who’ve quietly cornered the grain market and are letting Quadlings starve. Go throw your message at their houses. See how they like a bit of chaos.”

“She signed their laws,” Crooked Nose insists stubbornly. “She stood there and made them sound pretty. If she’s gone, they lose their darling. They lose their story.”

Elphaba is suddenly, viscerally tired.

“Do you know what happens when you take away a story without giving people another one?” she says. “They cling to the last bit of it they remember. The Wizard goes, they cling to the Wicked Witch. Glinda goes, they cling to the next idiot who promises them safety. You’re not blowing up a hero. You’re burning a scaffolding with people still standing on it.”

The bottle is still hidden under his coat. His hand has drifted away from it, but not far.

She could grab it.

She could wrestle it away physically. Risky. Messy. Attention-drawing.

Or she could break it.

Her fingers twitch.

Rian’s voice whispers in the back of her head: no more theatrics. Light spells only. Rest.

She ignores him.

She lifts her hand slowly, as if she’s just pushing her hood back a little.

The magic sits sulking just out of reach. She coaxes it, careful. A thread, not a flood.

Glass, she thinks. Not wind. Not stone. Just… glass.

She imagines the bottle’s neck. The flaw where the glass is thinnest. The stress line where Crooked Nose’s grip is too tight.

A hair-thin crack snakes around the bottle’s rim.

“Whatever she is,” Elphaba says softly, “she’s not your target today.”

Across the square, Glinda’s voice rings out.

“…we will build structures worthy of your courage. Laws that reflect your instincts toward justice, not punish them…”

The crowd cheers.

Crooked Nose hesitates.

His jaw works.

“We could change everything,” he says, but it’s quieter now. “One bright flash, and they’d know no one is safe.”

“They already know,” Elphaba says. “You think the Wizard’s guards felt safe when the mob turned on them? You think I felt safe when the bucket tipped? Safety is a fairy tale they sold you along with mine.”

She curls her fingers.

The crack widens.

Inside his coat, the bottle gives a soft, treacherous pop.

Crooked Nose yelps, jerking away. Oil leaks, warm and slick, down his side. He scrabbles, hauling the bottle out before it soaks him completely.

“What did you—” he starts.

The neck snaps clean off in his hand.

Oil splashes onto the cobbles.

Rain diluted it earlier; the stuff doesn’t catch easily. A blessing. She filed away that bit of chemistry after the third factory fire.

The rag stuffed in the top sags, wet.

Scar Cheek swears.

“You idiot,” he hisses. “You said you wrapped it tight. We can’t light that now; we’ll burn ourselves first.”

Crooked Nose stares at the broken bottle.

“It’s a sign,” the youngest says, sounding half-relieved, half-freaked-out. “The Ghost says no. We back off.”

Elphaba raises an eyebrow.

“I did not say—” she begins, then stops.

Actually, she did.

In every way that matters.

She lowers her hand.

“You want signs?” she says. “Fine. Here’s one. You light that thing, I put you six feet under this square before it goes off. And I won’t need a bottle to do it.”

“Threatening us now?” Crooked Nose sneers, trying to recover some swagger. “You talk about justice and then—”

“I talk about triage,” she says. “You want Glinda gone because you think she’s the thing stopping you from having the world you deserve. She’s not. The thing stopping you is the fact that you’d be terrible at running it.”

The younger two bristle.

“Try again,” she says. “Pick a better target. Pick a better tactic. If you want to scare the people who actually hold power, you don’t lob a firework at the face on the poster. You go after the hands on the purse strings.”

She steps closer.

Up on the balcony, Glinda is wrapping up.

“…together, we will shape the future of Oz not through fear-mongering or scapegoating,” she says, “but through shared responsibility.”

Her voice rises.

“Through protecting one another.”

The Words fits the moment like a lock.

Elphaba looks Crooked Nose dead in the eye.

“She’s not the problem,” she says again, more softly this time. “Don’t make her your excuse.”

Something in him wavers.

Scar Cheek blows out a breath.

“Boss won’t like it,” he mutters.

“Boss can come argue with me himself,” Elphaba says. “I’m very easy to find if you’re stupid enough.”

The youngest cracks a nervous grin.

“He’s really not,” he stage-whispers. “You’re not.”

She almost smiles.

Almost.

“She’s not the problem,” she repeats, mostly to herself now.

She can feel the familiar twist inside—the part that wants to tell them, actually, no, she is a problem. For Elphaba’s sleep. For her ability to stay away. For any illusion she might have had of moving on.

She keeps that bit to herself.

Crooked Nose looks down at the ruined bottle, at his oil-slicked coat, at the Ghost’s very un-ghostly, very solid green hand hovering inches from his chest.

He swears under his breath.

“Fine,” he says. “We stand down. Today.”

“Good boy,” she says coldly.

He flinches like she slapped him.

They melt back into the crowd.

It’s not over. She knows that. Men like that don’t have one bad night and decide to take up knitting. Someone else will try something, somewhere else, on some other day.

But Glinda will finish this speech alive.

That will have to do.

On the balcony, Glinda is closing.

“…we will, together, shape the future of Oz,” she says, “through shared responsibility. Through talking to each other. Through—through protecting one another. Wickedly, if we must.”

The word wicked lands like a small explosion.

Elphaba feels it all the way down here, under her damp hat.

The crowd reacts.

Some laugh, delighted with her daring. Some shift uncomfortably. Some cheer louder, because they’ve always loved a bit of scandal in their saints.

Glinda’s face is tilted up, catching the light.

Elphaba can’t see her expression clearly, but she can imagine it: that tight, defiant little tilt of the chin she gets when she’s just done something she knows her advisors will scold her for later.

Heat prickles at the back of Elphaba’s eyes.

She tells herself the burning is from the oil vapours, wafting up from the broken bottle.

Liar, says that same damned voice.

The speech ends.

The crowd roars.

“GLINDA! GLINDA THE GOOD!”

Elphaba stays until Glinda gives her little half-wave and retreats through the doors.

She watches the balcony empty.

The square begins to break apart, the mass of bodies dissolving into streams down side streets and alleys. Voices rise and fall. Arguments about what she meant. Excitement. Cynicism.

Near her, Cree practically vibrates.

“She said wicked like a compliment,” he says under his breath. “She saw the banner and she didn’t flinch away from it.”

“She did flinch,” Elphaba says quietly.

Cree blinks.

“She recovered,” Elphaba adds, because fairness is apparently a habit she can’t shake. “That’s more than most of them manage.”

Cree looks at her, eyes bright.

“You saved her,” he says. “From those idiots.”

Elphaba shrugs.

“I saved the square from a stampede,” she says. “She’s collateral.”

“You could have let them try,” Cree says. “Gotten rid of her. Made chaos.”

“Yes,” Elphaba says. “And then I’d spend the rest of my extremely short life dodging the kind of men who think ‘Green Ghost’ sounds like ‘open season.’”

He grins crookedly.

“You know that’s not why,” he says.

She gives him a flat look.

He holds up his hands.

“Fine,” he says. “Fine. I won’t say it.”

“Good,” she says. “We have enough people shouting my motives at me these days.”

They slip into a side alley.

The press of the crowd thins. The sounds of the square fade behind the mutter of everyday city life.

Her hands are steady now.

Rian’s warnings ring in her ears anyway.

Light spells only.

She considers telling him she only cracked a bottle, no windstorms, no stone upheavals, just a whisper of pressure in glass.

He’d probably still call it idiotic.

He’d probably be right.

She pauses in the shadow of the palace wall and looks up.

From here, she can see the stone underside of a balcony. Not so different from the one she pressed her forehead against all those months ago, listening to Glinda sob above.

Now, Glinda is somewhere on the other side of that stone. In some gilded room, surrounded by people telling her how brilliantly she spoke while quietly drafting memos about “concerning rhetoric.”

Elphaba presses her palm to the cold surface.

“Wicked protector,” she murmurs, tasting the phrase properly this time.

It still sounds ridiculous.

It still does something strange to her insides.

“She said it like a good thing,” Cree says softly.

Elphaba snorts.

“Of course she did,” she says. “Leave it to Glinda to make even my epithets sound like applause.”

She pulls her hand away.

In the lingering chill on her skin, the mantra rises, familiar as breath.

Glinda is safer without me.

She leans her head back against the wall, closes her eyes, and lets the words run through her like a well-worn spell.

Glinda is safer without me.

Safer if she doesn’t know I’m in her crowd. Safer if she thinks the Green Ghost is just a story that happens to agree with her sometimes. Safer if she never has to decide whether to choose me again.

Rian’s voice, annoyingly, intrudes.

Self-neglect, he says in memory. Not selflessness.

She grinds her teeth.

“She’s not the problem,” she says one more time, to the stone, to the city, to herself.

Maybe it’s not altruism.

Maybe it’s cowardice.

Maybe it’s both.

She pushes off the wall.

The alley yawns ahead, leading back into the maze of streets and pipes and crawlspaces where she knows how to move, how to vanish, how to strike.

Behind her, the balcony stands empty.

Above it, somewhere she cannot see, Glinda might be leaning on a different railing, looking down at the same city, asking questions Elphaba refuses to hear.

From below, from the shelter of shadow, Elphaba watches the light glancing off the palace windows one last time.

Then she turns and slips back into the walls.

Chapter Text

The dream always starts with the wrong door.

Glinda knows, even inside it, that the corridor is wrong. The palace halls are too long, the sconces too far apart, the shadows too dark. Stone stretches and stretches, more tunnel than hallway, smelling of damp and dust instead of polish and beeswax.

Her slippers make no sound.

She walks.

The air feels thick, like wading through velvet. Somewhere ahead there’s a noise—faint, urgent. A voice leaking under a door.

Her name.

“Glinda!”

She knows that voice.

She knows every syllable of it, down to the little crack that appears when Elphaba is trying very hard not to sound scared.

She moves faster.

The corridor goes on.

Door after door flickers by: library, council chamber, Ozdust, classroom she hasn’t seen since she was eighteen. Each one is wrong, slapped into the palace walls like badly-fitted teeth.

“Elphaba?” she calls. Her voice comes out too small. The hallway swallows it whole.

She can still hear the other voice.

Closer now.

“Glinda!”

The sound is muffled, like someone shouting against a pillow. The hair rises on the back of her neck.

She breaks into a run.

Her skirt doesn’t trip her. Her shoes don’t slip. For once, the dream makes that part easy. What it doesn’t make easy is distance. No matter how fast she runs, the door she’s heading for never seems to get any nearer.

It’s there, though. It’s always there.

An ordinary door. Peeling paint. Iron latch.

The screaming is right behind it now.

She reaches out.

Her hand closes on the handle—

/

Elphaba wakes with her fingers dug so hard into the mattress she’s sure she’s left bruises in the straw.

Her room is all sharp corners and shadow. The old plumbing shop’s back office has one tiny window, high up, that shows a stubborn scrap of streetlamp through grime. The rest is a mixture of stacked crates, discarded pipes, and the narrow bed Sessa bullied her into using more than twice a week.

Her heart’s pounding.

For a few seconds, she can’t remember where she is.

All she knows is that the pounding isn’t just in her chest.

It’s in the walls.

In the door.

“OPEN UP! OPEN UP IN THE NAME OF—”

The impact shudders through the wood, through the stone, rattling bottles on a shelf. She can feel it in every bone.

She’s back there.

Tower walls, not cellar. Cold stone under her feet, not floorboards. Bucket in the guard’s hands. Mob outside, baying.

Except she isn’t.

She’s here.

The pounding cuts off mid-blow.

Elphaba sucks in a breath sharp enough to hurt.

The silence that follows is almost worse. It’s the kind of silence that suggests something is waiting, just out of sight, ready to finish what it started.

She forces her fingers to uncurl.

Her palms throb.

Empty. No broom, no spell burning between them. Just sweat, cooling quickly in the night air.

“Just a dream,” she mutters.

Her voice sounds like it’s been dragged over gravel.

She hates how small it sounds in the room.

From the shadowy corner near the door, something stirs.

“You all right?” Fiyero’s voice, straw-rough, floats out of the gloom. He’s perched on a crate, long legs folded, hat tipped forward. He insists he doesn’t sleep, technically, but he spends a suspicious amount of time doing a very convincing impression.

“I’m fine,” she says automatically.

He grunts.

“Good,” he says. “Because whoever you were about to hex just now doesn’t exist, and it’s very disappointing for them.”

She exhales. It’s almost a laugh.

“Thought we were raided,” she admits.

She doesn’t say: I thought it was the tower again. I thought they’d come to finish what they started. I thought… I thought she was above me, crying.

The echo of that particular sound is still lodged somewhere behind her ribs, forever on loop.

“You really think Sessa’s lot would let anyone get this far without tripping over three different warning bells?” Fiyero says. “You’ve been sleeping in pipe-mazes for months. The walls are on your side.”

She flops back onto her thin pillow.

The pounding in her chest slowly, stubbornly, starts to ease.

“I know that,” she says. “My hindbrain is less convinced.”

He leans back, joints creaking.

“You were talking in your sleep,” he says.

She stiffens.

“Wonderful,” she says. “Let me guess. Arcane secrets? The date of the Wizard’s true birth? The location of my hidden stash of biscuits?”

“Nothing that useful,” Fiyero says. “Just the usual.”

“Usual.”

“Lots of ‘no’,” he says. “Some ‘wait.’ One name. Over and Over.”

She stares at the ceiling.

Rainwater has seeped a stain into it that looks unnervingly like the outline of a hat.

“Doesn’t narrow it down much,” she says.

“No,” he agrees quietly. “It really doesn’t.”

/

In the dream, the handle won’t turn.

Glinda knows this part too.

Her fingers close around the iron. She twists. It doesn’t budge. The metal is slick, but not with water—this time it’s with something thicker, like guilt given weight and texture.

“Elphaba!” she calls. “I’m here!”

On the other side of the door, the screaming intensifies.

It’s not the high, theatrical wailing of someone in a melodrama. It’s raw. Hoarse. Cracking on the vowels.

“GLINDA!”

The door shudders in its frame.

She yanks. Bashes her shoulder against it. Kicks it like she’s seen guards do.

It doesn’t move.

“Hold on!” she sobs. “I’m coming, just hold on—”

She can’t see anything, but she can hear it: the splash. The bucket tipping. The slow, horrible sound of liquid hitting skin.

Elphaba’s voice sharpens into a pitch Glinda has never heard in waking life and never, ever wants to.

“No, wait—Glinda—”

The rest drowns.

The sound of water is deafening.

She’s crying now. The tears are hot and frustrating, blurring the splintered wood in front of her.

“Open,” she begs the door. “Please, please, please—”

Her hand slips. The handle jerks out of her grip.

Something heavy slams into the other side of the door. Elphaba. The impact travels through the wood into Glinda’s bones.

Her knees buckle.

She slides down the door, palms pressed flat, as if she can absorb some part of her through the grain.

“Elphaba,” she whispers.

The water keeps coming.

The mob outside has turned into a dull roar—not chanting, not words, just a horrible, hungry sound.

The door handle creaks.

It’s moving.

Someone—something—is turning it from the other side.

She scrambles back to her feet, hope punching a hole in the terror.

“Elphaba?”

The door swings inward.

There’s no one there.

Just an empty tower room, puddles spreading, hat on the floor.

“See?” says a voice behind her. “You’re too late again.”

Glinda turns.

The door slams in her face.

She wakes up with a scream lodged halfway up her throat.

It comes out as a strangled gasp instead.

Her bed canopy, not a tower ceiling, looms above her. Her fingers are twisted so tightly in the sheets her knuckles are white. Her nightgown is plastered to her skin.

It takes her a few seconds to realise the pounding isn’t the mob.

It’s her heart.

She forces herself to breathe.

In. Out.

The room is dark but familiar—soft shapes of furniture, the outline of the wardrobe, the faint glint of the tiara she forgot to put away properly.

Her throat aches like she’s been shouting.

She pushes herself up on shaking arms.

The clock on the mantel insists it’s somewhere between three and four in the morning. The time where even the city seems to take a breath, the usual night-noises dulled.

She hates this time.

It’s when everything she’s spent the day outrunning catches up.

She swings her legs off the bed. The floor is cold under her bare feet.

The urge to check the door is overwhelming.

It’s ridiculous. No one is out there. Her guards are posted down the hall. The palace isn’t under siege. There’s no mob battering down anything.

Still, she stumbles over and presses her palm to the wood.

Cool. Solid.

No water seeping underneath. No hands pounding from the other side.

She leans her forehead against it anyway, breathing in the faint scent of polish.

“I’m here,” she whispers, to no one. To no thing. To the empty corridor. To the part of herself still locked in that tower room.

Her pulse gradually slows.

She peels herself away from the door and gropes for the lamp switch.

Light spills across the room, harsher than it should be at this hour.

She squints.

In the mirror over the dressing table, a pale, wild-eyed woman stares back at her.

Her hair is damp at the temples. Her cheeks are blotchy. There’s a crease on one side of her face from the pillow.

Glinda flops into the chair in front of the mirror.

“Well,” she tells her reflection. “That was delightful.”

The woman in the mirror doesn’t laugh.

She presses her fingertips to her temples, trying to massage the dream away. It clings.

Elphaba screaming. Elphaba slamming into that door. Elphaba gone when it finally opens.

She sees her in everything these days. In guilt-dreams like this. In half-heard rumours. In crude street art. In the way crowds flinch when she says wicked a certain way.

It’s getting worse, not better.

Some nights she doesn’t dream at all. Those are the good nights. She wakes heavy but blank, like she’s had a respite from herself.

Most nights, there’s something.

The tower.

The balcony.

The door.

The worst is when the dream doesn’t even give her a door. Just silence where the voice should be.

She reaches for the pitcher on the dressing table, pours herself water with unsteady hands.

The glass clinks against the ceramic.

She stares at the surface for a long time before she can make herself drink.

When she finally does, the water feels like lead in her throat.

“Brilliant,” she mutters. “Haunted by hydration.”

She pushes the glass away.

Sleep is a lost cause.

She knows the pattern now. If she tries to lie back down, she’ll just drift to the edge of sleep and then jolt awake again, over and over, each time a little more frayed.

She might as well surrender.

She wraps a shawl around her shoulders and pads out onto the small private balcony, bare feet soundless on the polished floor.

The night air hits her, cool and damp, like a hand cupped over her fever.

The city spreads out below, a quilt of yellow-white squares under the dark.

She grips the balcony rail, hard enough to ground herself.

“Just bricks,” she tells herself. “Just lights. Just people sleeping. Just people awake.”

Somewhere out there, someone else is doing this exact thing—staring out a window, trying to breathe around the memory of a bad night.

The thought is both comforting and unbearably sad.

“If you’re out there,” she whispers, before she can stop herself, “I’m sorry. Again.”

The city doesn’t answer.

It never does.

/

Elphaba sits up because she has a choice: either she does it now, voluntarily, or she waits for the dream to drag her upright later, heart pounding, throat raw.

The walls in this place remember pounding.

The old cold room’s door is thick. Sessa added a second bar across it “for peace of mind.” Unfortunately, peace doesn’t rely on wood.

Elphaba’s nightmares have range.

Sometimes it’s the tower door that’s under assault, sometimes the palace gates, sometimes the flimsy door of some hovel the Human Prosperity boys are kicking in. Her body doesn’t care about specifics. It hears the impact and floods with cold.

Tonight it was both.

Tower first. Mob after.

In the dream, she lay under the trapdoor again.

The boards above her were damp where the potion had seeped, her back pressed to rough wood, every nerve screaming. She could hear them pounding on the door to the tower room—fists, boots, something heavy used as a battering ram.

Over it all: Glinda’s voice, muffled by distance and floor.

“Please,” she was saying. “Please, she’s—she’s gone, you got what you wanted, just stop—”

Elphaba had pressed her hand to the underside of the boards, fingers searching for gaps. For any sign that she wasn’t leaving the person she loved in a room with a mob.

Her fingers found only splinters.

She woke up with her hand pressed flat to the underside of the shelf above her bed, palm burning.

Now she stares at it.

The skin is intact. No splinters. Just a faint tremor in her fingers.

“Perfectly fine,” she tells them.

Rian would say otherwise.

She swings her legs off the bed, hisses when her bare feet hit the cold floor.

The shop is quiet.

Down in the cellar, she can hear the soft murmur of sleeping bodies—Sessa’s snore, someone’s restless rustle. Upstairs, beyond the boarded windows, the distant clank of a night watch patrol drifts in.

No one is pounding on anything.

She drags her shawl around her shoulders and gropes for the kettle.

The old stove complains as she coaxs it into life. The hiss of gas, the click-click-clack of the flint, the eventual bloom of flame. Small, manageable fire.

She pours water into the dented kettle and sets it over the flame.

Tea is Rian’s idea.

He insisted, after one particularly bad week of collapses and nosebleeds, that if she wouldn’t sleep, she could at least replace some of the caffeine with something gentler.

“Chamomile,” he’d said, with a straight face. “Or mint. Or literally anything that isn’t half-ground coffee and spite.”

She’d told him spite was an excellent stimulant.

He hadn’t disagreed.

The kettle vibrates softly, annoyed at being woken.

Elphaba leans her hip against the counter and presses her hand flat to the cool wall.

Above, she can picture the palace.

Glinda somewhere in it, in her ridiculous bed, in her blue dress from earlier, in her nightgown now. Dreaming, maybe, of doors that won’t open.

She doesn’t let herself think of Glinda awake, breathing hard, leaning against a door the way Elphaba did.

That would make the nights feel too much like a shared sentence.

She glares at the opposite wall instead.

“Stop it,” she tells herself. “She’s sleep. Or not. Either way, it’s none of your concern.”

Her hand stays where it is.

The kettle starts to whine.

She takes it off the flame before it boils.

“Light spells only,” she mutters, echoing Rian, as she pours.

No magic in this.

Just leaves. Water. Patience.

She curls up on the crate that serves as a chair and wraps both hands around the mug, letting the heat seep into her fingers.

She should go back to bed.

She doesn’t want to.

Bed leads to sleep and sleep leads to…

“Glinda!”

The echo of her own shout makes her flinch.

She hadn’t realised she said it out loud.

Fiyero shifts again.

“Talking to yourself is one thing,” he says. “Talking to ghosts is a whole other level.”

She rolls her eyes.

“She’s not a ghost,” she says.

He tilts his head.

“Good,” he says. “Then maybe try addressing her when you’re not three nightmares deep?”

A muscle jumps in her jaw.

She sips the tea.

It tastes faintly of dust and desperation.

“I can’t,” she says.

The words come out small, and it annoys her.

“Can’t,” Fiyero repeats. “Or won’t?”

She stares into the steaming mug.

Outside, something bangs. A door. A cart against a curb. Her shoulders tense before reason catches up.

“Same thing,” she says.

He is mercifully quiet for a minute.

“You know,” he says at last, “I have nightmares too.”

She looks up, startled.

“You’re made of straw,” she says. “You don’t have a nervous system to torment you.”

“Rude,” he says. “I have whatever the magical equivalent is of a nervous system. And it’s very offended. I also have memory, and that’s enough.”

He stares at his own hands.

“I dream,” he says slowly, “that I’m still tied up. In the cornfield. Can’t move, can’t shout loud enough, can’t do anything but watch everyone tramp past, oblivious. Wizard’s men. Human First idiots. Sometimes even… you.”

Her throat tightens.

“I’ve never—”

“In the dream,” he says. “Not here. Here, you untied me. Eventually.”

He smiles crookedly.

“But dreams aren’t interested in that,” he says. “They like to pick at the things that almost were. The moments you almost died, or almost said something, or almost didn’t. They live in the almost.”

She stares at him.

“Helpful,” she says dryly. “Thank you. I feel much better.”

“Shut up and drink your tea,” he says, but his voice is gentle.

She does.

It doesn’t fix anything.

Her hands still tremble. The pounding in her head comes back in little aftershocks. The imaginary door still slams shut every time she blinks.

But the ritual—that tiny sequence of kettle, flame, cup—is something to hold onto.

Something solid.

Something that isn’t water pouring over someone else’s skin.

/

The next night, Glinda tries to outsmart her brain.

She works later than usual.

Papers, meetings, memos. She signs so many things her hand goes numb. She dictates letters until her voice starts to fray. She insists on seeing the draft of a new education bill before it goes to committee and spends an hour scribbling questions in the margins.

By the time she lets herself stop, it’s well past midnight.

Her eyes burn.

Her head feels like it’s full of wet wool.

Perfect, she thinks. Exhaustion might finally bludgeon the dreams into silence.

Tansy tuts when she sees her.

“You should have gone to bed hours ago, my lady,” she says, unpinning Glinda’s hair with brisk fingers.

“Yes,” Glinda says, letting her head tip back. “But if I don’t stay late sometimes, how will Oz know I’m Very Serious?”

“You’re serious all the time,” Tansy says. “People just can’t see inside your head.”

“Let’s keep it that way,” Glinda mutters.

Tansy helps her out of the dress and into a nightgown. She rubs scented oil into Glinda’s temples the way Elphaba used to before exams at Shiz.

“Try and get some real sleep,” she murmurs. “Not that shallow kind where your eyes twitch and you wake up more tired than you were.”

“I’ll do my best,” Glinda says.

It’s the most honest she can be.

Once Tansy has gone and the lamp is turned low, she crawls into bed and lies very still.

She doesn’t pray.

She doesn’t bargain.

She just stares at the canopy and waits.

Sleep takes her quickly, like a tide finally claiming someone who’s been dodging waves all day.

For a few minutes—seconds?—there’s nothing.

Just dark.

Just the soft sense of falling.

Then the door appears.

Of course it does.

It’s worse, somehow, for having been delayed.

The corridor is narrower tonight. The pounding louder. There’s no build-up, no stroll; she finds herself standing in front of the door without having walked there at all.

She knows how it goes.

She knows she’ll grab the handle and it won’t turn and Elphaba will scream and she’ll—

She doesn’t reach for it.

She steps back.

It’s a dream, she tells herself inside it. You know this now. You’ve had this one.

She can feel the unseen weight of Elphaba on the other side of the wood. The trapped, desperate energy.

“Glinda!”

It wrenches something in her.

She closes her eyes.

“I can’t open it,” she whispers.

The confession feels like peeling skin.

“I couldn’t then and I can’t now. I can’t get back there. I can’t drag you out. I can’t—”

The wood shudders under another impact.

“Please,” the voice sobs. “Please, Glinda, I’m—”

She can’t listen.

She clamps her hands over her ears.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry, but I can’t open it. I’ve tried. I’ve tried a thousand times. I broke my shoulder on it. I broke my heart on it. I—I can’t.”

The pounding reaches a fever pitch.

Her name turns into a wordless scream.

She wakes with tears on her face and her hands still pressed over her ears.

Her heart is trying to beat its way out of her chest.

She bursts into laughter.

It’s not funny.

It’s awful, thin laughter, the kind that comes when your body doesn’t know what else to do.

“Brilliant,” she gasps. “New coping strategy: refuse to participate in my own nightmares. That went very well.”

Her ears ring.

She drops her hands and sits there in the dark, shoulders shaking, not sure if she’s crying or laughing or both.

Eventually the sounds from the dream fade.

She lies back down, but she doesn’t close her eyes.

She stares at the ceiling until dawn creeps around the edges of the curtains.

When Tansy comes in, she says nothing about the dark circles under Glinda’s eyes.

She just says, “Tea?” softly.

Glinda nods.

Later, in a meeting, someone compliments her on her “tireless dedication.”

She almost snorts.

If only tireless were a thing.

/

Elphaba experiments too.

Her tactic is different.

Sleep in shorter snatches, Rian suggested once, when she complained about the way the nightmares seemed to wait until she was deepest under before pouncing. Nap like a cat. Never long enough for your mind to dig a full hole.

She hates that he might be right.

She hates naps.

Naps feel like surrender.

But her body is starting to insist.

So she tries.

During the day, after long nights, she lets herself doze in armchairs, chin on her chest, instead of only lying down in the vulnerable sprawl of bed. She leans against warm pipes and allows her eyes to close for ten minutes. She curls up in corners with a book and lets pages turn without reading.

The dreams still find her.

Shorter, jerky versions.

The pounding compresses into single blows. The screaming cuts in like a skipped recording: “GLIN—” and then silence as she jolts awake.

It’s exhausting in a different way.

One afternoon, she falls asleep in the worst possible place: wedged between two support beams halfway up a maintenance shaft, spying on a Human First organiser’s meeting.

She’s been crouched there for an hour, listening to the same recycled rhetoric. No new information, no fresh leads, just the same “take back our streets” with more spittle.

Her legs go numb.

Her mind, bored out of its skull, wanders.

She slips.

In the half-second between awake and dreaming, there’s the sick lurch of falling.

Then she’s under the trapdoor again.

The boards are heavier this time.

They press down, not just rest above. The weight is immense, like the whole city’s sitting on that wood. She can’t breathe.

Above, she hears Glinda.

Not crying this time.

Singing.

“No one mourns the wicked,” the song goes, jaunty and cruel. “No one cries when they are—”

“Stop,” Elphaba croaks. “Please don’t—”

She wakes with her forehead hitting the beam in front of her.

“OW.”

Her shout echoes up and down the shaft.

Voices below stop.

“What was that?” someone says.

She swears silently and scrambles sideways, pressing herself into the narrow space between pipe and brick.

A guard sticks his head up into the shaft’s lower opening, squinting.

“Hello?” he calls. “Anyone up there?”

Elphaba holds her breath.

The muscles in her calves, pins-and-needles from being crouched too long, choose that moment to start twitching.

She grits her teeth.

The guard waits another moment.

“Damned rats,” he mutters eventually, withdrawing. “Told him this place was crawling.”

She waits until the meeting breaks up and the humans clatter out.

Only then does she allow herself to breathe properly.

“New rule,” she mutters to herself. “No naps in enemy architecture.”

Her head throbs where she hit it.

Her palm, pressed against the wall to steady herself, tingles faintly.

For a second, she could swear she feels more than stone under her hand.

Something like a pulse. Like another hand, far away, pressed against other stone.

She snatches her hand back as if burned.

“Too much tea,” she tells herself. “Too much sleep. Not enough… reality.”

She climbs down.

She doesn’t admit—not even internally—that the phantom sensation of another palm against the far side of the wall stays with her all the way back to the safehouse.

/

If someone drew their insomnia on a map, it would look like matching constellations.

In one small circle of the palace, Glinda lies awake, night after night, listening to the city breathe and her own guilt talk too loudly.

In a cracked room under a viaduct, Elphaba sits awake, mug cooling in her hands, listening to pipes hum and her own ghosts rattle.

They both press their palms to walls.

They both whisper apologies to people who aren’t there.

They both tell themselves that this is safer, this distance, this ache.

They both, in their own ways, are wrong and right.

One night, in that thin, uncanny hour where late and early blur, Glinda dreams a different dream.

She’s in a room she doesn’t quite recognise. No windows. No doors. Just four walls and a ceiling too low.

She is not alone.

On the other side of the room, half in shadow, Elphaba sits with her back against the wall, knees drawn up, arms draped over them. Her hat is off. Her hair hangs loose around her face.

She looks tired.

“How did you get in here?” Glinda asks.

Elphaba lifts her head.

“I live in the walls, remember?” she says. Her voice is wry, but there’s a crack in it. “Your walls, my walls. Everyone’s. Terrible real estate, excellent acoustics.”

Glinda frowns.

“I’ve been trying to get to you for months,” she says. “I keep finding doors that won’t open.”

“Or don’t exist,” Elphaba says. “Dreams are notorious for poor architecture.”

Glinda steps closer.

She doesn’t feel her legs move, but the distance shrinks anyway.

“You’re not a ghost,” she says. “I keep telling people that. You’re not a ghost.”

Elphaba’s mouth twists.

“And you’re not a goddess,” she says. “I keep telling people that. They don’t listen either.”

They’re closer now.

Not quite touching.

Glinda reaches out.

Her fingers are inches from Elphaba’s.

She expects the dream to throw a door between them. Or a flood. Or a mob.

Instead, the walls themselves tremble.

The sound is like distant pounding.

“Wake up,” Elphaba says softly.

Glinda blinks.

“I don’t want to,” she says.

“Too bad,” Elphaba says. “You’ve got speeches to write.”

The walls shudder again.

The pounding gets louder.

She jolts.

Sits up in her bed, heart hammering, hand outstretched toward empty air.

Her room is quiet.

No walls falling.

No witches in the corners.

Just the faint echo of her own voice saying: you’re not a ghost.

She presses her palm to the mattress where she thinks Elphaba’s hand would have been.

The imprint is imaginary.

The ache is not.

Across the city, Elphaba jerks awake at almost the same moment.

She has dreamt of Glinda before.

The balcony. The tower. The look on her face when Elphaba stepped onto the broom.

Never like this.

Never sitting together, almost-companionable, as if nightmares can be negotiated with.

The memory lingers as she sits up, as she reaches instinctively for the wall, as her palm presses flat against the rough plaster.

“Stay away,” she whispers, to the woman in her dreams. “Stay safe.”

There’s no answer.

Of course there isn’t.

There’s just the echo of Glinda’s voice from a dream room with no doors, saying: you’re not a ghost.

She huffs a breath.

“Tell that to your streets,” she mutters, dragging her shawl tighter. “They’ve already made up their mind.”

Sleep does not come back for either of them.

The city slowly brightens, indifferent.

People get up, stretch, curse the hour, make tea, make coffee, make trouble, make do.

In a palace and under a bridge, two women who once shared a dormitory ceiling move through their mornings like sleepwalkers, the same sounds in their heads.

Pounding.

Water.

Sobs.

Each other’s names, half-bitten off.

Nightmares have very good aim.

They keep throwing them at both of them, from opposite sides of the same story, until something breaks, or something opens.

For now, the doors stay shut.

The walls, however, are listening.

Chapter Text

The night was supposed to be safe.

Not in any absolute sense—there was no such thing anymore—but in the carefully-managed, over-rehearsed way the palace liked. Limited guest list. Thorough security sweep. Enough guards in the corners to make any troublemaker think twice.

“Soft crowd,” Madam Korr had called it. “Academics, diplomats, philanthropists. No pitchforks.”

Glinda clung to that phrase now as she stood at the top of the marble staircase, looking down at the sea of bodies in the ballroom.

Soft crowd.

Sure.

They looked soft enough. Silk and satin, grey suits and embroidered shawls. The Animal delegation from the University had come in their best: polished hooves, brushed fur, spectacles gleaming under the chandeliers. A band played something light in the corner. Waiters drifted.

It was the launch of the “Reconciliation Fund”—a pot of money wrestled out of a reluctant council to repair some of what the Wizard’s regime had done. Scholarships for Animal students. Grants for communities that had been ravaged by “relocations.” Support for families who had lost someone to “questioning.”

It was also, whether they said it aloud or not, a test.

How many people would show up to applaud when she announced that some of the Wizard’s personal assets were being sold off and redirected? How many would smile to her face and snarl into their drinks later, muttering about ingratitude and legacy?

Wizard loyalists, Korr had said in her office that morning, lips pursed around the phrase like it tasted sour. There’s been chatter. Talk of “restoring the proper order.” Nothing concrete yet. We’re beefing up security, but—

But.

There was always a but.

“I’ll be fine,” Glinda had said. “You’ve tripled the guards. What are they going to do, throw a canapé at me?”

Now, watching the crowd swirl below, she wasn’t so sure.

The music ended in a scatter of polite applause. Heads tipped back toward her.

Korr touched her elbow.

“Ready?” she murmured.

Glinda pasted on the Smile.

Always.

She stepped down the staircase.

The room arranged itself around her.

People turned.

Voices lowered.

There it was again—that subtle shift in air pressure, as if her entrance were weather. Once she would have preened under it. Tonight it sat on her shoulders like a weight.

She reached the dais at the far end of the ballroom, the one with the tasteful banner: RECONCILIATION & REPAIR – TOGETHER FORWARD. The podium had been polished. The glass of water beside it had been poured precisely half-full, the way she liked it.

“Citizens of Oz,” she began, after the obligatory fanfare. “My friends.”

Ever since the Wicked Protector banner, “my friends” tasted different in her mouth. Less automatic. More like a claim she was trying to live up to.

She talked.

About reparations without using the word, because it scared people. About responsibility without saying guilt, because that made them defensive. About the Wizard’s hoarded wealth, how it would now go toward scholarships and clinics instead of showmanship and balloons.

She saw the flickers.

Some faces lit with real relief. Others tightened. A few pairs of lips thinned at the mention of selling off his “memorabilia.”

“He was a visionary,” someone had told a reporter recently. “We shouldn’t erase that, just because of a few… errors.”

Errors.

Glinda kept her voice level.

If anyone else heard the slight edge when she said “we were all complicit,” they didn’t show it.

Above, the balconies were lined with additional guards. Korr had insisted. Sturdy women and men with crossbelts and no-nonsense expressions. A few of the palace staff had been stationed up there too—trusted servants, she’d been told, to keep an eye out from a different vantage.

It should have reassured her.

It didn’t.

There was a prickling at the back of her neck that had nothing to do with the weight of the tiara.

She pushed through it.

“…and so,” she said, fingers resting lightly on the edge of the podium, “this fund is not a favour. It is not charity. It is the beginning of a debt we owe. A small attempt at repair, after so many years of—”

Something moved on the balcony to her left.

She shouldn’t have noticed.

The lighting up there was dimmer, designed that way so the attention would stay on her. But a shadow detached itself from a pillar for a heartbeat. A flicker. A shape turned where no one should have been turning.

Glinda’s mouth went dry mid-sentence.

Her eyes skated toward it before she could stop herself.

Nothing.

Just a guard, shifting her weight.

Get a grip, she told herself. Not every shadow is—

A sound cut through the music of her own voice.

Not loud.

Not the shout of a heckler or the crack of something crashing to the floor.

A twang.

Like a string being plucked, sharp and taut.

Her body recognised it before her brain did.

Every story she’d ever heard about hunting. Every ballad with a crossbow in the second verse. Every self-defence seminar where someone had talked about “projectiles” in the vaguest, most sanitised terms.

She froze.

No, she thought, absurdly. Not here.

The next second stretched into something long and horrible.

She saw it.

A sliver of metal, glinting in the chandelier light. Dart? Bolt? Not an arrow—too short, too vicious-looking—but flying with the same, sickening intent.

Headed straight for her.

There was no time to duck.

The podium was too narrow to hide behind. The dais was too exposed. Her guards were too far away, their faces just beginning to contort from polite neutrality into panic.

All she could think, with a stupid clarity, was: of course. Of course it’s like this again. Of course it’s something falling toward me and I am rooted to the spot.

She flinched.

The bolt juddered mid-air.

For a half-second it seemed to hit something invisible—an unseen wall between her and the rest of the room. It shivered, trajectory warping, then snapped sideways in an unnatural curve.

It still came close.

Close enough that she felt the wind of it against her cheek like a slap.

Close enough that she saw the faint, oily sheen on its tip.

Poison, some cold, clinical part of her supplied.

It tore through a lock of her hair.

Smashed into the column behind her with a thunk.

Gasps.

Screams.

Someone shouted, “GET DOWN!” too late.

Glinda stood there, heart thundering, the sound in her ears louder than the rising panic in the room.

The bolt quivered where it had embedded itself at eye level in the carved stone.

One breath.

Two.

There was a beat of stunned silence.

Then everything exploded.

Guards surged.

People shrieked.

The band dropped their instruments in a cacophony of clattering wood and brass. Somewhere a glass smashed.

“Lady Glinda!” Korr’s voice, shrill with something like real fear, cut across the chaos. “MOVE!”

Hands grabbed her arms, tugging her toward the back of the dais, away from the line of fire.

She let them.

Her knees weren’t entirely working.

She stumbled, heel catching on the edge of the carpet, and went down hard on one hand. The jolt travelled up her arm.

For a moment, her view of the room tilted.

She saw it from floor-level: hems and boots and panicked hooves, guards’ legs a blur as they tried to push the guests toward the exits.

She also saw, very clearly, where the bolt had come from.

Up, on the balcony directly opposite the one she’d been watching earlier, a man was struggling.

He was dressed like palace staff—dark waistcoat, neat trousers. Nothing that would have pinged as suspicious at a glance. But the weapon in his hands was unmistakable.

Not a full-sized crossbow; something smaller, more easily concealed, designed to fold into itself. He fought with it now, frantically trying to reload. His movements were jerky, off.

Because something was grabbing at him.

Glinda squinted through the bodies.

A shape had him by the wrist.

Slim.

Clad in black and grey, not guard blue.

His arm jerked again.

The weapon clattered to the balcony floor.

Hands—two? three?—hauled him backwards, away from the railing.

She saw a flash then, just before someone stepped in front of her and blocked her view.

Not a clear face.

Just a strip of exposed skin where a sleeve had ridden up.

Green.

Her breath stopped.

“Glinda.”

Her name, whispered.

Not from the balcony.

From somewhere much closer.

From behind the curtain to her right, where the shadows clung thicker, the heavy brocade hiding a service alcove.

She knew that voice.

Even distorted—hoarse, gritted with effort—it sounded like the only thing in the room that made sense.

It cut through the fog of panic like a bell.

Her head whipped toward it.

The curtain shifted.

For a heartbeat she saw her.

It couldn’t be anyone else.

She was half-hidden, pressed against the column, hand still outstretched from the spell she’d just cast. The torchlight caught her at an odd angle, slicing her face into planes of shadow and gold.

Hat low. Hood up. Coat wrong.

Skin unmistakable.

Green.

Elphaba.

Every part of Glinda’s mind that had been arguing with itself for months shut up all at once.

There.

She was there.

Her mouth moved.

Glinda couldn’t hear the words over the roar of the crowd, but she could read them.

Stay down.

Then Elphaba jerked as if hit.

Her body folded sideways out of Glinda’s line of sight.

“NO—”

The word ripped out of Glinda before she could stop it.

Hands clamped on her shoulders.

“Lady Glinda, we have to move—”

She twisted.

For someone who trained as a courtesan of the crowd, she could be surprisingly strong when she wanted.

She shoved Korr off, stumbled toward the curtain.

“Elphaba!” she choked.

People were still trying to clamber up onto the dais to get at her—to protect, to flee, to just be near the centre of the action—she couldn’t tell. Guards fought to hold them back.

The curtain billowed as someone slipped behind it.

Glinda reached it and flung it aside.

The service alcove was a narrow slice of space between columns and wall, barely big enough for two people to stand shoulder to shoulder. It led to a discreet back door, used by staff to bring refreshments in without being seen.

It was empty.

No witch.

No assassin.

Just a faint, fading smear of something dark on the stone where a body might have brushed in passing.

Glinda stared at it.

Someone grabbed her arm again.

“Lady Glinda, please,” a guard said desperately. “We don’t know if there are more—”

“I saw her,” Glinda said.

The guard blinked.

“Who?” she asked. “The shooter? We’ve got him.”

“Her,” Glinda insisted, dizzy. “She—she was here. She—”

Her own words tangled in her throat.

Saying the name out loud, here, in this room, in front of these people, felt like stepping off a ledge.

She swallowed it.

“It doesn’t matter,” Madam Korr said tightly, appearing at her elbow. Her hair had come slightly loose, a testament to how hard she’d been shoving through the crowd. “We have to get you somewhere secure. Now.”

Glinda’s gaze snapped back to the balcony.

The man who’d fired was pinned to the floor by three guards, his face mashed against the polished wood, arms twisted behind his back. He was shouting something about betrayal, about “the true Wizard’s will,” words blurring into spit.

No sign of whoever had grabbed him.

No flash of green.

Her heart pounded against her ribs like it wanted out.

“You saw someone take him down,” Korr said, following her gaze. Her voice had shifted into that careful, coaxing tone she reserved for angry donors and frightened witnesses. “Good. The guards did their job. We’ll commend them. Later. Right now—”

“It wasn’t a guard,” Glinda said.

She wasn’t sure why she was insisting. She’d had, what, half a second? A scrap of colour? A voice that could have been memory?

Except it hadn’t sounded like memory. Memory-Elphaba was always more articulate. This voice had been ragged around the edges, like it had been dragged across too many nights with not enough sleep.

“Lady Glinda.”

Korr’s grip tightened.

“This room is not safe,” she said. “The guards are sweeping the balconies, but until we know there are no more weapons, I need you out of here. If they got one loyalist in, there may be more. Please.”

The please cost her.

Glinda heard it.

She let herself be steered toward the side door that led to a safer corridor, the curtain falling back into place behind them.

As they moved, she glanced down.

There, on the pale marble of the dais, close to where she’d gone to her knees, a few drops of something dark stood out starkly.

Not red enough to be wine.

Too thick to be ink.

Blood.

Her stomach swooped.

It wasn’t hers; she knew that much. Her cheek stung where the bolt had grazed, but when she touched it later with tentative fingers, they came away with only the faintest smear of blood. Surface damage. A whisper.

This was more. A little arc, like the spray from a shallow cut.

Right in front of the curtain.

“Wait,” she said, digging her heels in. “Stop.”

“Glinda—”

“Look,” she hissed, nodding down.

Korr followed her gaze.

A muscle in her jaw jumped.

“It could be from anything,” she said. “Someone knocked over a glass, someone cut themselves on a chair—”

“The glasses are over there,” Glinda snapped. “And that’s not wine.”

Korr pressed her lips together.

“We’ll have it analysed,” she said. “Later. After you are somewhere they cannot aim at your head.”

She was right.

Of course she was right.

Glinda let herself be moved.

Still, as they hustled her out, she craned her neck, trying to catch one last glimpse of the balcony, of the alcove, of anything that might prove she hadn’t just imagined that green.

All she saw were uniforms.

Blue.

Gold.

No black.

No grey.

No hat brim.

The door to the corridor closed behind her with a solid, final thunk.

The sudden quiet felt obscene.

Out here, the panic was muffled. Guards stationed along the hall snapped to attention as she passed; some looked shaken, some furious. None of them looked confused in the way she felt.

In the secure room—one of those bland little spaces with no windows and too many chairs—they sat her down. Someone handed her a cloth for her cheek. Someone else poured water. The Captain of the Guard barked orders into the air, receiving updates through messengers who’d been running so hard they were breathless.

“Shooter in custody,” one panted. “Calls himself a ‘proud servant of the Great and Powerful.’ Claims there are others. Boasting. No sign of them yet.”

“Motives?” the Captain snapped.

“Wanted to ‘strike at the false Good Witch,’ sir. ‘Show Oz she’s not invulnerable.’”

Korr’s eyes flicked to Glinda’s face at that.

She was pale, hands folded tightly in her lap, knuckles white.

“Congratulations,” Korr said softly, in that brittle way she had when she was trying not to show emotion. “You’ve reached the part of the job description they don’t put in the brochures.”

Glinda let out a weak laugh.

Her cheek stung under the cloth.

She lowered it.

“Is it bad?” she asked.

Korr squinted.

“Not particularly,” she said. “Superficial. A line. You’ll have a very dramatic scar if you’re lucky. Heroes are meant to have one.”

Glinda snorted.

“I’m tired of being a hero,” she said.

“Unfortunately, the people aiming poison at you still believe you are one,” Korr said. “Which means you are still their favourite target.”

Glinda swallowed.

Her mind was back in the ballroom, replaying the moment.

The twang.

The bolt.

The way it bent.

“If… if that thing had hit,” she said slowly, “would I be…?”

“Dead?” the Captain supplied cheerfully, because tact had never been his strong suit. “Almost certainly. Or in a coma I wouldn’t bet against. We’re analysing the residue, but it smelled wrong.”

“Right,” Glinda said faintly.

“Someone saved you,” Korr said.

She said it practically. Matter-of-fact. No romance in the words.

Glinda’s skin prickled.

“Yes,” she said.

“From the balcony?” Korr went on. “One of the guards, perhaps? They reported a struggle with the shooter just after the first shot. We’ll know who to commend when we sort the accounts.”

“Not from the balcony,” Glinda said.

Korr’s gaze sharpened.

“From where, then?” she asked.

Glinda’s hand drifted, almost unconsciously, to the side of her neck, to the place where she’d felt it first: that shift in the air that wasn’t the bolt. The sense of something stepping between.

“The… air,” she said. “The bolt… twisted. It hit something that wasn’t there.”

“Magic?” the Captain said.

Korr shot him a quick look.

“Could be the weapon misfired,” she said smoothly. “We can’t jump to conclusions. Lady Glinda, in the panic, you might have—”

“I saw her,” Glinda blurted.

Silence dropped into the room like a stone.

Korr’s shoulders went very still.

“Her,” she repeated carefully. “You mean the guard on the balcony?”

Glinda swallowed.

Say it, she thought. Say it and watch this room change.

She remembered green skin.

A voice shaped around her name like it had been waiting.

Glinda.

She remembered the way Elphaba’s hand had been raised, fingers splayed, as if feeling the trajectory of the bolt in the air.

She remembered the jerk of impact in Elphaba’s body a moment later, the way she’d been dragged sideways out of sight.

The blood on the marble.

Her stomach lurched.

“Someone,” she said, retreating. “I saw… someone. Take him down. I couldn’t see clearly. It was… chaos.”

Korr relaxed by a hair.

“Understandable,” she said. “Shock distorts things.”

Glinda wanted to laugh.

Shock had never made anything more vivid for her. It sharpened everything. Her mind was a cruel archivist; it stored every awful detail.

“What if it was her?” she heard herself say anyway.

Korr sighed.

“Lady Glinda—”

“What if,” Glinda barreled on, ignoring her, “what if those rumours aren’t just… stories? What if she’s out there in the walls and the alleys and now apparently the palace, doing exactly the thing everyone says she is? Protecting people we failed?”

Korr pinched the bridge of her nose.

“You are in shock,” she said. “You just survived an assassination attempt. This is not the moment to indulge in—”

“Indulge?” Glinda snapped. The word hit a raw nerve. “You think I want this?”

Korr’s expression softened, just a fraction.

“No,” she said. “I think you want to believe you didn’t lose her that night. I think that’s reasonable. I also think weaponised nostalgia is the last thing we need layered on top of political instability.”

Glinda flinched.

“Those are my choices?” she asked. “Bury her or destabilise Oz?”

“Those are your narratives,” Korr said, gentle now. “There may be others. But we will not find them tonight.”

She squeezed Glinda’s shoulder.

“Rest,” she said. “We’ll talk in the morning. After I’ve had the shooter interrogated and the balconies double-checked for mysterious green stain patterns.”

She left on a huff of bureaucratic purpose.

The Captain followed a moment later, barking more orders.

The room emptied, slow as a receding tide, until it was just Glinda and the guard by the door.

He stared studiously at the opposite wall.

Glinda stared at her hands.

They were still shaking.

She flexed them.

Twice.

Then she stood.

“Lady Glinda?” the guard asked.

“I need a moment,” Glinda said.

“Protocol—”

“Protocol can have one minute,” she said. “I’m not leaving the secure floor. I just… need air.”

The guard hesitated.

“Ten steps,” Glinda said. “You can count them.”

He relented with a reluctant nod.

She stepped out into the corridor, walked exactly ten steps to the end where there was a small, plain window looking out over a rear courtyard.

Night had fully fallen now.

The stars seemed closer somehow.

She leaned her forehead against the cool glass.

“Glinda.”

The voice was only in her memory now, but it still made something inside her jolt.

She closed her eyes.

“Was that you?” she whispered. “Or am I finally losing it?”

The glass gave her nothing.

She lifted her hand and pressed it flat to the pane.

The old habit.

Press your palm to stone and imagine someone on the other side.

Tonight, for the first time, she let herself imagine a very particular someone.

“If you’re out there,” she said, breath ghosting the glass, “and you keep doing this—saving people and vanishing and bleeding on my floors—at least let me see you properly once before you blow yourself apart.”

The words fogged, then cleared.

Far below, in the tangle of rooftops and alleys and hidden ledges, something moved.

Glinda didn’t see it.

She was facing the wrong way.

But if she’d been looking, she might have caught, just for a heartbeat, a dark figure slipping along the palace’s outer wall, one hand pressed to a fresh wound at her side, the other skimming stone for balance.

She might have seen the way the figure paused, just under the line of her window.

Might have seen the slight tilt of a head, as if listening.

Might have seen a green hand lift, almost in answer, almost in farewell, before the shadows swallowed it again.

As it was, all she felt was a faint echo in her palm.

Like another hand, far away, pressed against the same invisible door.

She opened her eyes.

The courtyard was empty.

Her reflection looked back at her in the glass: pale, shaken, cheek bandaged, eyes too wide.

She looked at herself for a long moment.

Then she whispered, to the girl in the window and the ghost in the walls and the city between them:

“I saw you.”

She didn’t know if it was true enough to stand up in court.

She knew it was true enough to haunt her.

Behind her, the guard cleared his throat.

“Time’s up, my lady,” he said gently.

She nodded.

“Right,” she said. “Let’s go face Korr’s paperwork.”

She walked back down the corridor, heart still beating a fraction faster than normal, one hand resting, without her realising, over the spot where the bolt had almost struck and where, tonight, something else had.

Not a shield.

Not a door.

A presence.

She clung to that.

Soft crowd, she thought, a little hysterically. Right.

The Wizard’s loyalists had come with poison and a plan.

Someone else had met them with a spell in the air and skin in the way.

Glinda didn’t know which terrified her more: the fact that people still wanted her dead for doing too little, or the fact that the one person who had always accused her of not doing enough was still, apparently, willing to save her life.

From the shadows, from below, from behind curtains no one was supposed to look behind.

Wicked protector, the banner had called her.

Glinda wasn’t sure who, anymore, that description was meant for.

Chapter Text

The official story is ready before her cheek has even finished scabbing.

By morning, there are draft statements on her desk. By lunch, there are editorials on her breakfast tray. By evening, she is sitting in yet another briefing room, listening to people tell her what happened to her.

“—so, the consensus,” the Captain of the Guard is saying, “is that the shooter acted alone inside the palace. No evidence of further infiltration. However—”

He flicks through his notes, moustache bristling.

“—there was interference from an unauthorised magical actor. Witnesses report a… cloaked figure on the balcony above. Spellcasting. Swift. Targeted.”

Glinda sits straighter.

“Unauthorised magical actor,” she repeats. “That’s your… phrase.”

The Captain shrugs.

“‘Anonymous witch’ sounded too tabloid,” he says. “And we’re trying not to panic the council with the idea that spellcasters can wander in and rearrange physics at will.”

“Right,” Glinda says.

She feels oddly cold, despite the fire crackling in the grate.

They’re in the smaller council chamber, the one they use for crisis meetings and things they don’t want to dignify with the formality of the big hall. The walls are lined with books about law and precedent, as if legitimacy can be absorbed by proximity.

Madam Korr sits to Glinda’s right, glasses perched on the end of her nose, expression sharp. The Captain’s deputy leans against the wall, arms folded; to her left, the palace physician hovers, looking faintly annoyed that his report has been bumped down the agenda.

“So,” Glinda says carefully, “this… unauthorised magical actor. What do your witnesses say?”

The Captain consults his papers with exaggerated diligence, as if buying time will somehow change the words on the page.

“At least three guests report seeing a flash of light from the left balcony,” he says. “One—the historian from Shiz, Doctor Beadle—claims he saw a silhouette move in time with the bolt. His account is… colourful.”

“Colourful how?” Glinda asks.

“He described it as ‘a spectral witch, doubtless summoned by the restless spirit of the late Wizard to punish us for our impudence,’” the Captain says dryly. “We’re… discounting that bit.”

“Spectral,” Glinda mutters. “Lovely.”

“Two staff members on the upper level corroborate a struggle,” Korr puts in. “They saw one of our people—Guard Lenfar—wrestle the weapon from the shooter.”

“That’s not what I’m asking about,” Glinda says. “I saw someone else up there.”

Korr’s gaze flicks to her face, then away.

“Yes,” she says. “You mentioned that last night. In the immediate aftermath.”

“As if I’ve since come to my senses,” Glinda says lightly.

Korr doesn’t rise to the bait.

“The guard’s account is as follows,” the Captain says, ploughing on. “He engaged the shooter, struggled, and someone grabbed the shooter’s arm from behind. Cloaked. Hooded. He assumes—his words—a rebel witch.”

“‘Rebel witch,’” Glinda echoes. “Singular?”

“Yes,” the Captain says. “We’ve had reports of minor spellcasters aiding dissidents before. Hedge-witches, mostly. Nothing on this scale, but—”

“It was her,” Glinda says.

The room goes very quiet.

Korr takes off her glasses and polishes them with a handkerchief she pulls from nowhere.

“Lady Glinda,” she says, after a pause. “We have been over this.”

“Have we?” Glinda says. “Because I remember mentioning it once, and then being escorted to a very nice room where no one let me finish a sentence.”

The Captain clears his throat.

“With respect,” he says, “I saw the scene myself. The figure was hooded. We have no facial description. It could have been any number of—”

“Any number of witches, yes,” Glinda snaps. “There are so many green ones running around these days.”

The physician makes a small, disapproving noise.

“Skin colour is not a reliable indicator of identity,” he says. “Not under those lighting conditions, not at that speed, not under stress.”

Glinda laughs, short and sharp.

“You sound like a tutorial at Shiz,” she says. “Thank you, I did actually pass basic perception theory.”

“Then you know,” he says mildly, “that memory, especially under duress, is an… interpretive engine. It fills in gaps.”

“And what, exactly,” she asks, voice dangerously even, “do you think I’m filling them with?”

Korr sighs.

“With grief,” she says. “With guilt. With stories you’ve heard all your life and ones you’ve been telling yourself for months.”

Glinda feels something twist under her ribs.

“The bolt bent,” she says, deliberately. “It didn’t miss. It changed course. In mid-air. I felt it. I’ve… felt that before.”

She remembers the tingle of displaced air on the broom, the way raindrops had seemed to curve around them. The push of invisible forces when Elphaba got irritated with weather.

Elphaba’s magic always did have a… particular texture. A stubbornness. It pushed through the world like it had something to prove.

“That could be any skilled caster,” the physician says. “You have a template in your mind. Your brain will match anything close enough to it. It’s what minds do. They pattern-match.”

“So now it’s my fault,” Glinda says. “For having a brain.”

“Glinda.” Korr’s tone softens. “No one is saying it’s your fault. We are saying it is… understandable that you would see her everywhere right now. You’re exhausted. You were nearly killed in public. Your body is still catching up. It’s not surprising that your mind is… reaching for the most familiar witch-shaped explanation.”

“Most familiar witch-shaped explanation,” Glinda repeats, dazed. “Do you hear yourself?”

She presses her fingertips to her forehead.

The skin there is warm.

Her cheek throbs under the dressing.

It had been such a small graze, physically. They’d cleaned it, dabbed something that stung on it, bandaged it with a strip of white linen that keeps catching the edge of her vision. It will scar, the physician had said. A faint line. Nothing disfiguring.

It feels deeper.

“Let’s,” Korr says gently, “separate what you know from what you saw.”

Glinda drops her hand.

“Fine,” she says. “What I know: someone used magic to deflect a poisoned bolt aimed at my head. They then assisted in subduing the shooter. They bled, near the curtain where I saw them stagger. They vanished.”

“Correct,” Korr says.

“What I saw,” Glinda says. “A cloaked figure. Hood up. Hand out. Skin visible between glove and sleeve. Green. Voice saying my name.”

Her name hadn’t been shouted.

It had been breathed, like a warning, like a prayer, like a reflex.

Glinda.

Korr nods slowly.

“And what you interpreted,” she says, “is that this must be Elphaba.”

“It wasn’t an interpretation,” Glinda snaps. “It was recognition.”

“Under extraordinary circumstances,” the physician says softly.

She turns on him.

“You weren’t there,” she says.

“No,” he agrees. “I was not. I am not trying to negate your experience, Lady Glinda. I am trying to understand what it is, so I can advise you on how best to… support yourself.”

“Support myself,” she repeats.

The phrase feels like sticking plaster on a knife wound.

“Look,” the Captain interjects, clearly desperate to move things along. “We’ve had rebel witches operating in the city for months. There are entire cells dedicated to… whatever it is they think they’re doing. Busting up patrols, sabotaging trains. It makes more sense that one of them slipped in than that the Wicked Witch herself rose from the dead, attended a formal event and left a calling card.”

Glinda stiffens.

“You think I’m offended she didn’t send an RSVP?” she says. “I—”

“It is not about offence,” Korr cuts in. “It’s about probability. About impact. If it were her—if Elphaba were alive and present enough to save you at a public function—do you grasp what that would do to the city? To your work? To your position?”

Glinda swallows.

Images flash: the front page of every paper in Oz screaming WICKED WITCH RETURNS. Wizard loyalists frothing. Human First radicals calling for crackdowns. Animal activists painting her as a coward if she doesn’t immediately stand beside Elphaba and denounce everything she’s ever done in fancy dress.

“Yes,” she says quietly. “I grasp it.”

“Then you also grasp,” Korr continues, more gently now, “why we cannot build policy on a half-second glimpse and a wish.”

Wish.

Glinda flinches.

Is that what this is?

Is she wishing so hard for proof that she’s not the only one trying that she’s conjuring witches out of shadows?

“It’s not a wish,” she says.

Korr’s face softens.

“I know,” she says. “It’s a hope. And a fear. Mixed together until they’re indistinguishable.”

The physician clears his throat.

“If I may,” he says, “I’d like to make a suggestion.”

Glinda laughs.

“By all means,” she says. “There’s been a distinct lack of those in my life.”

He smiles faintly, as one might at a particularly prickly plant.

“You have been under sustained stress, Lady Glinda,” he says. “We’ve all seen it. The workload, the… emotional demands. The guilt you insist on carrying in that very specific way of yours. Now an assassination attempt. Nightmares. Hypervigilance.”

She stiffens.

“Tansy has been very discreet,” he adds quickly. “She only told me you haven’t been sleeping when I pressed. She’s worried you’ll fall down a staircase.”

Traitor, Glinda thinks, but without heat.

Of course Tansy told him.

Of course someone did.

“You’re describing an entire city,” Glinda says. “Everyone’s tired and jumpy.”

“Yes,” he says. “But not everyone is… Glinda the Good while being tired and jumpy.”

She looks away.

“So?” she says. “What’s your prescription? Less guilt, more walks?”

He actually smiles.

“Tempting,” he says. “But walks won’t do it. You need rest. Real rest. Not two hours of twitching followed by five cups of coffee and a speech. You need time away from balcony edges. Away from crowds. Away from… doors.”

Her stomach drops.

“I didn’t tell you about the doors,” she says quietly.

He shrugs.

“You didn’t have to,” he says. “Your hands tell their own story.”

She realises, with an unpleasant jolt, that she’s been unconsciously rubbing the heel of one hand against the doorjamb this whole time.

She snatches it back.

“What are you suggesting?” she asks.

“A reduced schedule,” he says. “A week, at least, of only critical duties. No public appearances. No late-night drafting sessions. You delegate to your council more. You… rest.”

Korr looks pained, but not surprised.

“I’ve been pushing for that,” she says. “For months. She won’t listen.”

“I’m right here,” Glinda says.

“We know,” Korr says. “We appreciate your presence.”

“And,” the physician continues, “I would also recommend speaking to someone. A neutral party. Not a political advisor, not a servant who loves you. A professional. Someone trained to help… hold this.”

He gestures vaguely around the room.

The air.

The tension.

The weight of it all.

“You think I’m hallucinating,” Glinda says.

“No,” he says. “I think you experienced something extraordinary. I think your mind is trying to make sense of it with the tools it has. That’s what minds do. But if you start doubting your own perceptions, if you start wondering whether every flash of green is a ghost or a breakdown, that will make your work much, much harder.”

He meets her eyes.

“And if it was her,” he says softly, “you will need support for that, too.”

The admission takes the air out of her.

“If it was her,” she repeats.

“It may never have been,” he says. “It may have been a rebel witch with unfortunate fashion sense. It may have been a trick of the light. It may have been your brain grabbing a shard of hope in the middle of real danger. Or it may have been her. You are not losing your mind for considering any of those options.”

The Captain looks awkward.

“I prefer the ‘rebel witch’ explanation,” he mutters. “Easier paperwork.”

Glinda almost smiles.

“Of course you do,” she says.

Korr leans forward.

“Here is what we’ll say publicly,” she says. “A dissident spellcaster intervened. Anonymous. You were saved by the courage of an unknown citizen. We frame it as proof that Oz is not willing to let Wizard loyalists have their way. We do not speculate about identity. We do not mention green.”

Glinda bristles.

“That’s lying,” she says.

“It’s… choosing a version of the truth that doesn’t set the city on fire,” Korr says. “We don’t have enough facts to justify the risk of naming her. Not yet. Not on this flimsy basis.”

She hates that Korr is good at this.

She hates that, in some awful way, she agrees.

If she steps out onto a balcony tomorrow and says, “The Wicked Witch saved my life,” the world doesn’t tilt nicely toward justice. It convulses.

Wizard loyalists double down. Human First gets new slogans. The people clinging to the story where Glinda the Good is the exception that proves the rule about wickedness have to choose, and most of them aren’t ready.

“She’s not wicked,” Glinda says quietly.

Korr closes her eyes briefly, like she’s heard this argument a hundred times (she has).

“To you,” she says. “To me. To those who know better. But the word is still a live spark for others. If you throw it into kindling now, we’ll spend the next year putting out fires instead of building anything.”

Glinda rubs her temples.

A small, treacherous part of her thinks: maybe I am losing it.

Maybe the crossbow bolt rewrote something in my brain as it passed.

She remembers the dreams. The doors. The way she hears Elphaba in every crack.

If grief really is an interpretive engine, hers has been revving at full tilt for months.

Maybe her mind did what it’s been wanting to for so long: put Elphaba back in the one place she can’t leave again.

Right at the edge of death, in the moment just before impact: there she is.

Safe and doomed all at once.

“I’ll… consider the rest,” she says.

It’s the closest she can come to agreeing.

Korr nods, clearly recognising the small victory.

“Good,” she says. “In the meantime, say as little as possible about… her. Whoever she was. Focus on the fund. Let the papers gossip themselves hoarse over the ‘mystery witch’ without your input.”

Mystery witch.

Glinda wants to laugh until she cries.

Of course that’s what they’ll call her.

The press loves a woman they can fill in blanks on.

The papers do exactly as predicted.

GLINDA THE GOOD SAVED BY “GHOST WITCH,” screams one headline, over a lurid illustration of a green spectre deflecting a cartoonish arrow.

WIZARD FANATIC FOILED BY REBEL MAGICIAN, says another, more sober.

WHO IS THE PALACE PHANTOM? asks a third, with a deeply unflattering drawing of a hooded figure that looks less like any witch Glinda’s ever known and more like an overcooked asparagus.

They keep it vague.

Rebel witch. Ghost witch. Palace phantom. Conscience of Oz.

They don’t say her name.

Some of that is caution. Some of it is deliberate narrative choice. Some, Glinda suspects, is superstition—they have told their readers for so long that you shouldn’t say it aloud that they’ve convinced themselves.

She reads it all.

Of course she does.

She’s not supposed to.

Korr has suggested, gently, that she limit her “media intake.”

“I can’t fix what they get wrong if I don’t know what they’re saying,” Glinda had retorted.

“You also can’t sleep if your brain is full of opinion pieces,” Korr had countered.

Now Glinda sits in her office, legs tucked up underneath her on the armchair by the window, three different newspapers on her lap, and feels her brain buzzing in unpleasant ways.

Tansy, bless her, has refused to curate.

“If I start cutting bits out,” she’d said, “that’s just… censorship. I’ll bring you the lot and you can chuck what you want at the wall.”

Glinda hasn’t thrown anything.

Yet.

She folds the latest paper and sets it aside.

It doesn’t matter what they call her.

It matters that she knows.

It was her.

It had to be her.

The thought has become its own sort of mantra.

An equal and opposite spell to the one she can feel coiling around her everywhere else: it wasn’t, it couldn’t be, you’re tired, you’re seeing what you want to see.

She presses her fingers to her cheek, feeling the rough edge of the bandage.

“Was that you?” she whispers.

The room, as usual, says nothing.

She tips her head back against the chair, closes her eyes.

If she tries very hard, she can replay the moment in slow motion.

The bolt’s trajectory.

The angle at which it twisted.

The timbre of the word Glinda as it cut through the noise.

She has heard other witches speak her name before. Shiz classmates. Hedge-healers. Angry mothers accusing her of interfering in their children’s schooling.

None of them arranges the syllables quite like Elphaba. There is always that little bite on the d, that slight reluctance on the second syllable, like saying the name admits something she’d rather keep behind her teeth.

It was her.

She could go to the palace mages, ask them to examine the ripple in the air that the spell left.

She doesn’t.

She already knows what they’ll say.

We found residue. We found a disturbance. We found evidence of a powerful caster. We found… possibilities.

They will not find her.

She presses the heel of her hand into her eyes until points of light dance.

“Maybe I am losing my mind,” she mutters.

It’s almost a relief to say it aloud.

Losing your mind is at least a narrative. It’s cleaner than the alternative, where your perception is right but you’re not allowed to act on it.

Rest, everyone says.

You need rest.

It becomes the new refrain, replacing unity in the mouths of the people closest to her.

Korr slides shorter agendas across the table. “The rest can be delegated.”

The physician drops off a vial of something that smells like flowers and sternness. “Only if you need help dropping off,” he says. “Not a long-term solution. A nudge, not a crutch.”

Tansy swats her hand when she reaches for a sixth cup of coffee. “That’s enough beans to wake the dead, my lady. You’re very much still alive.”

Even the Captain gets in on it.

“You can’t stand between every bolt and the crowd,” he tells her. “That’s our job. Yours is to be here in ten years to give more speeches people complain about.”

They all mean well.

It grates.

She lets Korr trim her schedule, reluctantly.

Public events are cancelled “out of an abundance of caution.” Committee meetings are chaired by deputies. Briefings are summarised instead of delivered in excruciating detail.

On paper, it looks like a reprieve.

In practice, it means she has more unstructured time.

More room for her mind to fill.

She tries the sleeping draught once.

Pours out the prescribed half-dose into a mug of hot milk, wrinkles her nose, drinks it down.

It tastes of chamomile and defeat.

She crawls into bed expecting nothing.

Sleep hits like a hammer.

No doors.

No mobs.

No witches.

Just darkness, long and strange.

She wakes eight hours later feeling both heavier and oddly brittle, like someone has rearranged her insides and forgotten to tell her.

She doesn’t take it again.

She would rather have her nightmares than the blank.

Blank feels closer to really losing her mind.

Nightmares, at least, have a narrative.

“Are you hallucinating?” Tansy asks one night, in the small, honest space of the dressing room.

Glinda nearly drops her brush.

“I beg your pardon?” she says.

Tansy is kneeling to unlace her boots.

She looks up, face open and stubborn.

“You’ve been… distracted,” she says. “More than usual. Jumpier. You keep looking at corners like they’re going to answer back. And you talk in your sleep.”

Glinda goes cold.

“What do I say?” she asks, before she can stop herself.

Tansy hesitates.

“Her name,” she says. “And ‘no’ a lot. And… ‘don’t go.’”

Glinda swallows.

“And…?” she prompts, because apparently she is a masochist.

“‘It was you,’” Tansy says quietly.

Glinda exhales slowly.

“Right,” she says, staring at the floor.

“Is it?” Tansy asks.

Glinda forces herself to look at her.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“Was it her?” Tansy asks. “At the ball. Behind the curtain. Saving you. Was it her, or was it… someone else?”

There’s no judgement in the question. No politics. Just… curiosity. Concern.

Glinda clings to that tone like a lifeline.

“I think so,” she says. “I felt… it felt like her. It sounded like—”

She cuts herself off, because she’s met herself, she knows how she sounds when she gets going about this.

Tansy nods slowly.

“I believe you,” she says.

Glinda blinks.

“You do?” she says.

Tansy shrugs.

“I’ve never seen anyone else make a broom fly,” she says. “Or turn an entire ballroom’s worth of glitter into a political statement. Or give monkeys wings. Why not this, too?”

It shouldn’t mean as much as it does.

One maid’s belief.

One person saying, I don’t think you’re crazy.

Glinda feels something loosen in her chest anyway.

“Everyone else thinks I’m seeing things,” she says.

“They think you’re tired,” Tansy corrects gently. “Which you are. They think you’re carrying too much, which you are. They think you might be latching onto the one familiar thing in a world that keeps changing under your feet.”

She sits back on her heels.

“That doesn’t mean you’re wrong,” she says. “It just means you’re… human. Even when they keep trying to make you something else.”

Glinda stares at her.

“When did you get so clever?” she asks.

Tansy smiles, small and fierce.

“I’ve always been clever,” she says. “You’ve just been too busy saving Oz with your hair to notice.”

Glinda laughs.

It comes out unexpectedly wet.

She swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand.

“I am losing my mind,” she says. “Just… maybe not in the way they think.”

Tansy stands and smooths her hair back, fingers gentle.

“Maybe,” she says, “you’re not losing it. Maybe you’re… rearranging it. Making space.”

“For what?” Glinda asks.

Tansy shrugs.

“For the possibility that you were wrong about the ending,” she says.

The words land like a stone in a still pond.

Wrong about the ending.

Glinda has been living in the ending for so long she hasn’t considered that the story might be… ongoing.

If it is, she thinks, miserably, I’ve skipped several chapters.

“Rest,” Tansy says, because apparently everyone is contractually obliged to say it at least once a day. “If she’s out there, she’ll still be out there after you’ve had a nap. If she’s not… you’ll need the strength to live without her anyway.”

Glinda sighs.

“Fine,” she says. “One nap.”

It ends up being two hours of staring at the ceiling, counting cracks.

Still, she tries.

That has to count for something.

In the quieter moments—between meetings, between nightmares, between the thousand small demands of leadership—she finds herself tracing the phrase It was her. It had to be her like a worry stone.

She catches herself doodling a pointed hat in the margins of her notes.

She realises she’s started listening for that particular bend in the wind whenever something unusual happens in the city.

She half expects to look up from a briefing one day and see Elphaba leaning in the doorway, arms folded, eyebrow raised, ready with a scathing comment about her latest policy.

It doesn’t happen.

Of course it doesn’t.

Instead, she gets reports.

Anonymous witches interfering with arrests. Doors that won’t open for Human First thugs. Floorboards that collapse only under certain boots.

Each one is another datapoint.

Each one is another chance for her mind to say: See? See?

Each one is another chance for Korr to say: Or. Or it’s someone else. Or it’s a network. Or it’s the story you helped write, coming back to bite you.

Alone, in her rooms at night, she lets herself believe the first.

In public, she nods along with the second.

“I’m losing my mind,” she jokes, when someone catches her staring out the window too long.

They laugh.

They reassure.

They tell her she’s doing wonderfully, that Oz is lucky to have her, that she must take care of herself.

None of them says: Yes, you’re losing it. Of course you are. Anyone in your position would be. The question is what you build out of the pieces.

On the worst nights, when the door dreams come back and the pounding is too loud and the water is too cold, she remembers the moment on the dais when everything changed.

The bolt.

The twist.

The voice.

Glinda.

It felt like someone reached through her nightmare and grabbed her shoulder, yanking her sideways into a different ending.

Maybe that someone was her mind, desperate to rewrite the scene.

Maybe it was a witch in the rafters, anonymous.

Maybe it was Elphaba.

She holds all three possibilities at once like burning coals.

“I’m losing my mind,” she whispers into her pillow.

Her mind, stubborn as ever, whispers back:

Or you’re finding a way to live with what you did. With what she did. With what’s still happening.

The city sleeps and wakes and eats and works and tells ghost stories about a Green Ghost and a Wicked Protector.

In the palace, Glinda stands on yet another balcony, practising yet another speech, the bandage on her cheek a faint, maddening reminder.

When she smiles, she sees in the window’s reflection not just Glinda the Good, but a woman who has started to suspect that sanity might not mean what it used to.

That maybe, in a place where witches melt and don’t die, where doors stay shut in dreams but open in alleys, the most rational thing she can do is cling to the one truth that keeps her upright.

It was her.

It had to be her.

Whether that conviction saves her or breaks her remains, for now, unwritten.

Chapter Text

She doesn’t realise she’s been hit until the adrenaline lets go.

One second she’s pressed flat to cold stone behind the curtain, lungs burning, spell still crackling along her nerves. The next, the edges of the ballroom are blurring and there’s a hot, animal ache in her side that wasn’t there before.

Of course, she thinks, as her fingers come away sticky. Of course I get stabbed while saving Glinda at a philanthropy gala. That’s on brand.

No time to check the damage.

Korr’s voice is barking orders, the crowd is tipping toward panic, and the guards on the balcony are finally doing what she needed them to do thirty seconds ago.

“Stay down,” she hisses, half out of reflex, not entirely sure who she’s saying it to.

Glinda’s head whips toward her.

For a heartbeat, their eyes meet.

Elphaba feels it like a punch.

Recognition. Shock. Something too big to name.

Then she’s yanked backward—some overzealous guard’s flailing arm catching her in the ribs where the knife grazed—and the pain goes white-hot.

She bites down on a sound and lets the momentum spin her into the narrow service alcove. From there it’s three steps to the door, one muttered word to convince the lock it’s stuck, and she’s in the servants’ corridor, swallowed by a stream of frantic staff.

“Did you see—”

“—Lady Glinda’s hurt—”

“—they say there was a witch—”

She keeps her head down and her cloak pulled tight.

Her side throbs in time with the word witch.

By the time she reaches the outer wall, the wound is a steady, grinding pain.

Not deep enough to kill her outright. Deep enough to make every movement a series of negotiation: if leg moves, ribs protest; if ribs protest, spell focus scatters; if spell focus scatters, she falls.

She chooses not to fall.

“Idiot,” she mutters at herself, as she crawls along the ledge of an ornamental cornice. “Absolute… unmitigated… idiot.”

She hadn’t meant to break cover.

Shadow work. That was the deal.

Dart in, trip a guard, break a chain, spook a bigot. Be the gust of wind that made a whip slip. Be the draught that made a door slam. Be a story, not a person.

Then the bolt flew.

Too fast. Too clean. Too familiar.

Something in her reacted before the rest of her could vote.

The spell leapt.

It’s muscle memory, she thinks, as she grits her teeth and drags herself up onto the low rooftop beyond the palace wall. That’s all. Years of yanking Glinda out of the way of falling scenery at Shiz. Of flicking glitter out of her face. Of catching her by the waist when she misjudged a step.

You don’t unteach your reflexes in a year.

Her boot slips on the tiled roof.

She catches herself on a chimney, breath hissing.

The city sprawls under her—rooftops, alleys, the faint glow of lanterns like embers scattered in ash. Behind her, the palace looms, all white stone and good intentions.

Glinda is somewhere inside it.

Alive.

Possibly with a very dramatic scratch on her face, because of Elphaba.

The thought makes something twist sharply under her breastbone.

“You’re welcome,” she mutters at the palace, then immediately wants to hit her own head against the chimney for the sheer pettiness of it.

The pain in her side spikes.

Right.

Priorities.

She drops down into the gap between buildings, letting herself half-slide, half-fall into the familiar maze of service alleys.

By the time she reaches the old plumbing shop, the taste of copper is in the back of her throat and her hands are shaking hard enough that her fingers barely work the knock sequence.

The door flies open on the second tap.

Sessa fills the frame, fur bristling, small but somehow still managing to look like she could murder her.

“About time,” she snaps. “We were deciding whether to assume you were dead or just spectacularly stupid. Then we agreed it was probably both.”

“Nice to be… predictable,” Elphaba manages.

Her knees choose that moment to give up.

Sessa swears and ducks, shouldering under Elphaba’s arm with a strength that always surprises people until she reminds them badgers were not designed with subtlety in mind.

“Fiyero!” she barks. “Rian! Your favourite idiot’s here and bleeding on my floor again!”

Fiyero appears first, all long limbs and straw-rasp.

“Wow,” he says cheerfully, taking Elphaba’s other side and half-lifting her. “You really took ‘crash the party’ literally.”

“If you make one more joke,” she grits out, “I will set your hat on fire.”

“See?” he tells Sessa. “Fiery, even while exsanguinating. Very impressive.”

They haul her into the back room and lower her onto the rickety table that serves as a triage bench.

The world tilts.

The ceiling swims.

She clamps her jaw shut until the urge to pass out recedes a notch.

Sessa peels back the edge of her coat.

Blood has soaked through the layers, dark and tacky.

“Shit,” Sessa says succinctly. “Rian!”

He’s already there, slipping past her with his satchel, whiskers flaring as he takes in the mess.

“How many times,” he says, calm but tight, “do we have to have the ‘light spells only’ conversation before it takes?”

“Technically,” Elphaba says, teeth chattering as he presses around the wound, “this was more of a… light… deflection.”

Rian gives her a look that could cauterise on its own.

“Did you or did you not just redirect a poisoned bolt and wrestle a man with a weapon inside the most heavily-guarded building in Oz?” he asks.

“…semantics,” she mutters.

He snorts.

The sound is unamused.

“Hold still,” he says. “If you faint, I’ll have to tell you I saved your life later and you’ll make it dramatic.”

He works quickly.

The knife—or whatever it was—went in at an angle, slicing along the ribs rather than straight through. Luck, or the world’s cruel sense of humour.

“This will hurt,” he warns, and then pours something cool and caustic into the wound.

She jerks.

The pain is a flare of white, sharp and clean, almost a relief compared to the dull grind from before.

“Great,” she gasps. “Love… whatever that is.”

“Quadling antiseptic,” he says. “You’re lucky it missed the lung. Another inch and we’d be seeing if your magic could keep you breathing without air.”

“Would… have saved you some lectures,” she wheezes.

He ignores that.

Fiyero, hovering uselessly, finally finds something meaningful to do and starts cutting away the blood-soaked fabric with the careful hands of someone who’s had practice dealing with stupid injuries.

“Any more poison?” he asks. “Like the bolt? Should we be worried you’ve got slow-acting Wizard goo in there?”

“No residue,” Rian says, nose twitching. “This cut is clean. Probably from a panicked guard’s knife or the shooter’s second weapon.”

“Elphaba,” Fiyero says. “Did you… get stabbed by the people you were saving?”

She’s not sure whether to laugh or snarl.

“Occupational hazard,” she says.

“Of being a martyr?” Sessa mutters.

The words hit harder than the antiseptic.

Elphaba grimaces as Rian starts stitching.

“Let’s hold the sermon until he’s not actively sewing my ribs together,” she says.

Sessa folds her arms.

“Fine,” she says. “Five minutes. Then I’m yelling.”

She doesn’t have to wait that long.

“Do you have any idea,” Sessa says, as soon as Rian steps back, “how many people saw something up there?”

Elphaba groans and slumps back against the table, breath coming in sharp little pants.

“I tried not to be seen,” she says.

“You tried badly,” Sessa snaps. “Guards saw a cloak. Staff saw a witchy silhouette. Half the guests saw light flashing from the balcony. Word’s already spreading: ‘Glinda the Good saved by mystery witch.’ Guess who people are assuming that is?”

“The Green Ghost?” Fiyero offers. “The Wicked Protector? The Palace Phantom? That kid yesterday was calling you ‘the Angry Draught’—”

“Shut up,” Sessa and Elphaba say in unison.

Sessa jabs a clawed finger at Elphaba’s shoulder.

“You risk everything,” she says, “for the girl who stood on a balcony and crowned herself Good while you were ‘melting’ under her feet.”

The room goes very still.

Rian’s hands pause, mid-wrap.

Elphaba’s jaw tightens.

“She didn’t crown herself,” she says.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Sessa says, eyebrows climbing. “Did the tiara levitate onto her head by popular will? Did the Wizard’s press team drag her out there at wandpoint? She chose that title. Glinda the Good. Nice and simple. No nuance. No mention of who the bad one was supposed to be.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Elphaba snaps. “You think I haven’t replayed that scene in my head so many times I can count the syllables in her breathing?”

“Then why,” Sessa demands, “are you throwing yourself in front of bolts for her?”

“Because—” The word rips out of her, too loud. Pain spikes in her ribs. “Because she’s not the problem.”

“That’s not an answer,” Sessa says.

“It’s the only one that matters,” Elphaba bites back.

“Funny,” Sessa says. “To me, the girl who told the whole city you were wicked and then sat in your enemy’s office while they hunted Animals looks a lot like a problem.”

Elphaba’s vision whitens at the edges.

“Careful,” she says softly.

Sessa’s eyes flash.

“No,” she says. “I’m done being careful about your feelings for your ex-roommate when those feelings are getting you killed.”

Elphaba flinches.

Fiyero makes a small, strangled noise.

Rian sighs through his nose.

“Sessa,” he says mildly. “Perhaps we can interrogate the psychology after she’s had a chance to breathe without wincing.”

“No,” Sessa says again. “Because next time she might not come back to breathe at all.”

She steps closer, close enough that Elphaba can see the flecks of lighter fur around her eyes, the way they’re damp at the corners.

“We need you,” she says. “Out here. In alleys. In warehouses. Breaking chains. Spooking thugs. Not playing personal bodyguard to the woman in the prettiest room in the building.”

Elphaba’s laugh comes out raw.

“Personal bodyguard,” she says. “I’ve intervened exactly twice. Once when a bunch of bigots were about to cook a Rabbit and her friends, and once when someone aimed a poisoned piece of metal at Glinda’s face.”

Saying her name aloud costs her.

It always does.

“Twice,” she repeats. “The rest of the time I’m doing exactly what you say: alleys, warehouses, very glamorous sewer work. I did not set out tonight with ‘crash Glinda’s party’ on the agenda.”

“You could have walked away,” Sessa says.

“No,” Elphaba says.

The word is out before she can dress it up, blunt and bare.

Sessa stares.

Fiyero shifts, straw fingers worrying at the edge of the table.

“Look,” Elphaba says, forcing the words out through gritted teeth. “I’m not defending what she did back then. I’m not rewriting it. She stood up there and called me wicked and let them hunt me. I know. I was there.”

She was also under there.

Under the floorboards.

Under the story.

Memory rises, unbidden.

/

The boards above her were never meant to be listened through.

Cracks let light in. Not sound. The tower room had been built to keep noise in and out equally.

But grief doesn’t care about architecture.

The first thing she’d heard after Fiyero dragged her under and the trapdoor slammed shut was the mob.

The pounding.

The pitch of it had changed once the bucket tipped. Less anger, more… celebration. The ugly, rolling sound of relief when a story lands exactly where people were promised it would.

Wicked witch, wicked witch, wicked—

Then, over it, a different sound.

Muffled sobbing.

Not the melodramatic wail she’d always expected from the decorative blonde in her tower.

Sharp, ugly, gasping sobs. The kind you make when you’re trying not to.

Her name, dropped like a stone into the cracks between.

“Elphaba… oh, Lurline… Elphaba, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—”

A fist hitting wood.

Not the mob’s. Smaller. More frantic.

“Why did you go, why did you go, why did you—”

Her hand had been pressed flat to the underside of the boards.

Just wood between them.

Impossible and impenetrable all at once.

She could picture Glinda on the other side, forehead to the splintered planks, tears streaking ruin through her makeup.

She knew how Glinda cried.

She cried like she laughed: with her whole face.

Elphaba had bitten her fist, hard enough to draw blood, to stop herself from pounding back.

If she knocked, Glinda would hear.

If Glinda heard, she’d know.

If she knew, she’d come.

If she came, the mob would see.

If the mob saw—

The mob would tear her apart.

Everything in Elphaba had been screaming: knock anyway.

She hadn’t.

She’d stayed very, very still and listened to Glinda sob and promised herself, viciously, that this was better. That Glinda was safer without her. That her tears were a price worth paying for her life.

That if Elphaba ever broke that silence, it would mean she’d failed both of them.

/

“I heard her,” Elphaba says now, through the memory, through the pain. “After. After the… performance. She didn’t know I was listening. She thought I was dead. She cried like she was dying too.”

Sessa’s mouth tightens.

“And that’s enough?” she says. “A few private tears behind closed doors and you’ll literally bleed to keep a crown on her head?”

Elphaba bristles.

“It’s not the crown,” she snaps. “It’s what she’s doing with it.”

“What, committee meetings and politely worded reforms?” Sessa scoffs. “She signs papers. You break chains. You really telling me that makes you equal partners in this?”

Elphaba’s temper flares.

“She signed amnesties,” she bites out. “She got people out of ‘re-education’ camps you and I couldn’t reach. She strangled three of the Wizard’s worst laws in committee before they ever hit the streets. I know; I’ve read the drafts she buried. She’s dismantling his machinery piece by tedious piece while pretending she still believes in the wrapping. You think that’s easy?”

“She believes in it a bit too much for my taste,” Sessa mutters.

“Of course she does,” Elphaba says. “She was built for it. They honed her into a symbol since she was fifteen. ‘Good’ is the only language half this city speaks. If she suddenly started calling herself Glinda the Complicated, they’d riot.”

Fiyero snorts.

“Would pay good money to see that letterhead,” he says under his breath.

Elphaba ignores him.

“She is the only person in that building whose conscience keeps her up at night,” she goes on. “The rest of them sleep just fine on their piles of Wizard souvenirs. If she goes down, the ones ready to take her place aren’t kinder. They’re just better liars.”

Sessa’s eyes search her face.

“And you’re sure,” she says slowly, “this isn’t just about the fact that you… love her.”

Elphaba’s breath stutters.

The word lands like a physical blow, knocking the air out of her.

She opens her mouth.

Closes it.

The room holds its breath.

“I—” she starts, then cuts herself off so sharply it hurts.

Heat climbs her neck, prickling under the green.

Rian raises one eyebrow, very delicately.

Fiyero looks away, suddenly intensely interested in the ceiling.

Sessa’s expression softens, but she doesn’t back off.

“You’re allowed,” she says quietly. “You know. To love someone who hurt you. Who hurt all of us. Who’s trying to fix it and making a mess as she goes. You’re allowed to have that tangle. We all do, in our own ways. But we need you to know when that tangle is pulling you by the throat.”

“I know,” Elphaba says.

She does.

She hates that she does.

She also hates that the word love is now hanging in the air between them like smoke, impossible to unsay.

“I didn’t mean to be seen,” she says, voice smaller than she likes. “I didn’t plan to… announce myself. I heard the twang, I saw the line, and my body… moved. That’s all.”

“That’s not all,” Rian says gently. “That’s years of reflexes and guilt and care and stubbornness. Your body isn’t separate from your choices.”

“Thank you, philosopher,” she mutters.

He smiles faintly.

“Stitches are done,” he says. “You’re lucky. No infection yet. Keep it that way. No dramatic rooftop runs for at least three days. If you have to topple anything, use a whisper, not a shout.”

She snorts.

“As if I’m not already whispering myself hoarse,” she says.

“Then try shutting up, for once,” Sessa says, but there’s a thread of affection in it now.

She steps back, folding her arms again, as if physically restraining herself from hugging Elphaba and biting her in the same motion.

“We’re scared,” she says, more quietly. “That we’re going to lose you to them. Not just to a bolt, but to… them. To that girl on the balcony and that building and your hope that she’s different now.”

“I don’t hope,” Elphaba says.

Three sets of eyes give her identical looks of disbelief.

She sighs.

“Fine,” she says. “I hope a little.”

Sessa’s mouth twitches.

“A lot,” Fiyero says.

“An amount,” Rian compromises.

Elphaba closes her eyes for a second.

Behind her lids: Glinda on the dais, hair catching the light, eyes flinching when she saw the banner. Glinda’s face when the bolt came. Glinda’s face when she turned toward the curtain, toward Elphaba, like a moth to a candle.

Her chest aches.

“Whatever my… personal idiocies,” she says, when she can trust her voice again, “strategically, she’s still more useful breathing. To us, not them. Every time she signs a paper that keeps an Animal out of a cage, that matters. I’m not going to sit on a roof and watch someone blow that option out of the sky if I can stop it.”

Rian nods once.

“That,” he says, “I can get behind. Just try to do it without perforating yourself next time.”

She grunts.

“No promises.”

Sessa huffs.

“Just… be more careful,” she mutters. “If you die, I’ll kill you.”

“That’s not how that works,” Fiyero says.

“Badgers are creative,” Sessa says. “We’ll find a way.”

Later, when the others have drifted back to their tasks and Rian has left her with a pot of something that supposedly promotes healing (it smells like boiled socks), Elphaba lies on the narrow cot in the corner of the workshop and stares at the cracked ceiling.

She should sleep.

Instead, she replays everything.

The bolt.

The twist.

The look on Glinda’s face when she realised where it had been aimed.

She hadn’t meant Glinda to see her.

She’d meant to be air. Invisible. A force, not a figure.

But Glinda’s eyes had snapped to the gap in the curtain like a compass finding north.

Of course they had.

Glinda has always been infuriatingly attuned to the things Elphaba least wants her to notice.

The memory of her sobbing in the tower bleeds into the image of her standing on the dais with blood on her cheek. Past and present overlay, a double exposure that makes Elphaba’s head swim.

She presses her hand to her side, over the bandage.

“I didn’t mean to be seen,” she tells the ceiling.

It sounds weak, even to her own ears.

Because part of her, deep down where she refuses to look directly, did.

Not in that moment—there had been no time for vanity—but in the long ache of the months before. Part of her had wanted proof.

Proof that Glinda would still react. That she would still flinch at green in the corner of her eye. That she would recognise her, not as a cautionary tale or a footnote, but as a person in the room.

Glinda had said her name.

Elphaba heard it, even over the chaos.

She tells herself she imagined it.

She doesn’t entirely believe herself.

“You’re safer without me,” she mutters, because Rian isn’t here to scold her for the mantra and someone ought to.

The words feel thinner than they used to.

Less like conviction, more like habit.

She remembers Glinda pounding on the tower floor.

Remembers herself not pounding back.

She presses her palm flat against the wall beside her cot, fingers spread, as if there might be a pulse on the other side.

There isn’t.

Of course there isn’t.

There is only brick, and beyond that more rooms, more walls, more people trying to sleep or argue or forget.

Across the city, she can almost imagine a different hand on different stone, pressing back.

If she lets herself, she can almost hear Glinda’s voice, the one from that night and the one from the ballroom, overlapping.

“Please, please, I’m so sorry—”

“Elphaba—”

She pulls her hand back.

“No,” she tells herself. “We’re not doing this.”

She closes her eyes.

In the dark, the scene replays again: Glinda, bolt, twist, curtain, eyes.

She’s angry at herself.

She’s angry at the men who aimed the weapon.

She’s angry at Sessa for being right about too many things.

She’s angry at Glinda for making it this hard to keep her distance.

Mostly, she’s tired.

“Next time,” she mutters, to the empty room. “Next time I’m staying on the roof.”

It’s a lie.

She knows it.

The city knows it.

If the air twangs like that again and Glinda is in the line, her body will move before the rest of her gets a say.

She didn’t mean to be seen.

She didn’t mean to bleed on the dais.

She didn’t mean to let love—there, she thinks it, winces, doesn’t take it back—drag her out of the walls and into the open.

Too late.

The story has a new crack now.

Glinda has a new line on her cheek.

Elphaba has a new scar along her ribs.

The distance between them is exactly the same as it was yesterday, and also not.

Under the floorboards of their separate lives, something is shifting.

She feels it.

She hates it.

She doesn’t know what to do with it except lie very still, let Rian’s herbs do their work, and hope that, for a little while at least, the only pounding she hears is the echo of her own stubborn heart and not another mob at another door.

Chapter Text

On paper, she drops it.

Officially, she lets the story settle into the version everyone finds least disruptive:

GLINDA THE GOOD SAVED BY ANONYMOUS REBEL WITCH; CITY UNITED AGAINST WIZARD FANATICISM.

It’s neat. It’s tidy. It doesn’t require anyone to rewrite any dangerous stories.

On paper.

In her head, it will not sit still.

She wakes with the echo of her name in her ear.

She goes to sleep with the ghost of green at the edge of her vision.

She spends a week trying to be reasonable about it.

She lasts four days.

The first step is easy.

“Off the record,” she says to the Captain, the next time they’re alone. “I want everything you have on the… unauthorised magical actor.”

He looks nervous immediately.

“We’ve already shared all relevant security details, Lady Glinda,” he says. “Threat assessments, tactical recommendations—”

“I read them,” she says. “They were very boring. I want the interesting bits.”

His moustache twitches.

“The… interesting bits are mostly gossip,” he says. “Half these reports are hearsay from drunk dock workers. The other half are scribbles from kids who think the sewers are haunted. It’s not… actionable intelligence.”

“I’m not asking you to action it,” she says. “I’m asking you to put it in a folder and send it up to my office so I can read it.”

He hesitates.

“Madam Korr—” he begins.

“Madam Korr,” Glinda cuts in, “does not need to know everything. If there’s anything truly dangerous, she’ll find out at the same time as I do. Until then, this is… personal curiosity.”

It comes out more bluntly than she intended.

The Captain studies her for a moment, eyes crinkling.

“Well,” he says at last, with the air of someone making a decision that’s going to cause him work later, “there is one file that didn’t make it into the… official summary.”

Glinda raises an eyebrow.

“And you didn’t think to mention it before because…?”

“Because it’s embarrassing,” he says. “For my profession. For the guards. For… everyone. And because Korr would have my head if she knew I’d been indulging the rank-and-file’s ghost stories.”

“Indulge me,” Glinda says.

He sighs, resigned.

“I’ll send it,” he says.

The file arrives two hours later in a plain folder with no markings.

Of course it does.

Everything important in this place looks boring from the outside.

Glinda takes it into the small sitting room off her chambers—the one with the ugly armchair she’s fond of because it’s the only piece of furniture in the palace that doesn’t feel like it’s watching her—and curls up with her knees under her, skirt be damned.

Inside the folder: reports.

So many reports.

Short, breathless notes from street patrols. Longer, irritated memos from mid-level officers. Scribbled statements from civilians.

She skims.

…Green figure seen on viaduct, 2am. Disappeared when approached. No footprints on wet stone. Possible illusion.

…Anonymous tip: “She’s back.” Caller hung up before elaborating.

…Human First confrontation in Old Tannery District broken up by “invisible force.” Torches extinguished, assailants thrown to ground by sudden gust. No casualties. Animals fled into side alleys and refused to answer questions.

…Children in South Docks chanting “Wicked Protector is watching” in sing-song when guards passed.

Her chest tightens.

The stories are inconsistent.

Sometimes she’s a vengeful ghost. Sometimes a fury. Sometimes a blessing. Sometimes a thing you invoke to scare bullies.

But there’s a pattern.

Animals who were cornered saying, “Someone was there.”

Human First boys nursing bruises they can’t explain.

Doors that opened for the right people and stuck stubbornly for the wrong ones.

And always, always the colour.

“She was green,” says a shaking witness in one statement. “I swear she was.”

“She had to be,” says another. “My cousin saw her at Shiz once. Same eyes. Same… everything.”

Glinda presses her fingertips to her lips.

The rational part of her notes that people remember colours wrong all the time. That if you tell a city long enough that witches are green, they’ll start tinting their own memories.

The rest of her doesn’t care.

She reads until the words blur.

At some point, the sun finishes setting outside. Tansy brings in a tray with tea and toast and retreats without comment when she sees Glinda’s face.

By the time she closes the file, the decision has already been made somewhere behind her ribs.

The official channels will only get her so far.

The rest, she’ll have to see herself.

“Absolutely not,” Korr says.

Glinda smiles at her, all teeth.

“I haven’t told you what I’m about to suggest yet,” she says. “You can’t ‘absolutely not’ things in advance, that’s just rude.”

Korr pinches the bridge of her nose.

“You are going to say ‘I want to personally tour the poorer districts to show I care,’” she says. “You are going to say ‘it’ll be good optics.’ You will be lying. And then you will be shot at again, and I will have to explain to the council why I didn’t chain you to your desk.”

Glinda leans back in her chair.

“Chains would be very bad optics,” she says. “Imagine the headlines. GLINDA THE GOOD OR GLINDA THE GAOLED? You don’t want that.”

“Glinda,” Korr says, voice softening in that way that makes Glinda feel simultaneously cared for and five years old. “You just survived an assassination attempt. We’ve barely contained the political fallout. The last thing we need is you gallivanting through alleys looking for stories.”

“I’m not gallivanting,” Glinda says. “I’m… walking. Quietly.”

“In disguise,” Korr says flatly.

“Possibly,” Glinda concedes.

“No,” Korr says.

Glinda sighs.

She knew this would be the reaction.

That’s why she didn’t start with Tansy.

Tansy doesn’t say no.

She just stares at Glinda’s reflection in the mirror for a very long time, lips pursed, brush in hand.

“You want me,” she says slowly, “to undo fifteen years of training.”

“Yes,” Glinda says.

“Your entire brand is ‘immediately recognisable from half a mile away in fog,’” Tansy says. “That’s not easy to disguise.”

“Thank you?” Glinda says.

Tansy sighs and sets the brush down.

“Take off the tiara,” she says. “Step one.”

Glinda obeys.

It feels almost indecent, like undressing in public.

Tansy puts the tiara in its velvet box with exaggerated care.

“Right,” she says. “Now: hair down.”

Glinda pulls the pins out one by one.

Curls spill around her shoulders, chaotic without their usual scaffolding. She fingers a strand, suddenly shy.

Tansy circles her, considering.

“What if we lean into the chaos,” she muses. “Let it frizz. No one expects Glinda the Good to have bad hair. It’ll throw them.”

Glinda laughs.

“I always knew my hair was a weapon,” she says. “I just didn’t expect it to be wielded like this.”

They work.

They tone down the curl, twist it into a rough bun at the nape of her neck instead of the halo of blonde she’s known for. They smudge her eyeliner. They step back.

The face in the mirror is still hers, but less… luminous. Less stage-lit. More tired woman than icon.

“Colour,” Tansy mutters, rummaging in a drawer. “We need to drown you in something forgettable.”

She pulls out a dark, hooded cloak.

Glinda swallows.

“Is that—”

“It was hers,” Tansy says. “From Shiz. You told me you used to sneak out with it over your party dresses when you didn’t want the chaperones to see you.”

Memories flash.

Cold evenings. Sneaking back to the dorm, giggling, cloak smelling of smoke and cheap wine.

A green girl sitting on her bed, raising an eyebrow, saying, “Enjoy the empty-headed revelry?”

Glinda reaches for the cloak.

The wool is a little rougher than she’s used to now. Familiar.

“I’m going to get mud on this,” she warns.

“I’ll wash it,” Tansy says. “I’d rather scrub out dirt than blood.”

Glinda looks at her.

“You don’t think this is a terrible idea,” she says.

“Oh, I do,” Tansy says. “It’s an appalling idea. But I also know you. If I say no, you’ll go by yourself with your hair in full halo mode and get mugged before you reach the end of the street. At least this way you might come back with all your teeth.”

“That’s very romantic,” Glinda says.

Tansy smiles, small and fierce.

“For what it’s worth,” she says, fastening the cloak at Glinda’s throat, “if I were a witch hiding in the walls, I’d want you to come find me like this and not from behind a podium.”

Glinda’s throat tightens.

“Thank you,” she says.

“For helping you with your completely inadvisable plan?” Tansy says. “Any time.”

The city smells different down here.

Glinda has always known that, in theory. The view from her balcony shows smoke and roofs and distant river, but it doesn’t carry the scents up with it.

In the South Docks, the air is salt and tar and fish and coal. In the Tannery District, it’s leather and rot and the sharp tang of Chemicals Nobody Has Licensed Properly. In the shadow of the viaduct, it’s damp stone and garbage and wet fur.

She keeps her hood up and her head down.

She is not naïve enough to think the cloak makes her invisible, but it helps. People glance at her and look away, pegging her as just another moderately well-dressed woman who took a wrong turn.

Tansy walks half a pace behind, basket over her arm, the very image of a maid who’s used to dragging her employer out of stupid situations.

They don’t go with guards.

Too obvious.

Too many uniforms and everyone shuts up.

They bring one guard in plain clothes, posted at the end of the street, under strict instructions to only intervene if Glinda is physically attacked.

The Captain had almost choked agreeing to that.

“It’s reconnaissance,” she’d told him. “Threat assessment. You keep telling me to stay off the front lines; this is me reconciling the two halves of my job.”

He’d muttered something about “reckless nobles” and signed off.

Now, walking through the narrow lanes of Old Tannery, Glinda wonders if maybe the real recklessness was spending so long up there and not down here.

Kids dart between crates, shrieking, blackened feet slapping on stone. A Cat in a threadbare jacket haggles with a Human woman over a sack of flour. A Goat in scholar’s robes sits on an upturned barrel, reading to a half-circle of grimy children from a book with missing pages.

“—and then the Witch said, ‘No, I will not let you take him,’” the Goat intones, voice soft but intense. “Because she knew that once they had him, they’d never let him be free again. And she was very tired of seeing cages where there should have been windows.”

Glinda slows.

“It’s her,” a little boy whispers, eyes wide. “It’s the Wicked Protector. This part’s my favourite.”

“Mine too,” says a girl, hugging her knees. “My uncle says she saved him by knocking a guard down with a barrel.”

“That was me,” the boy says hotly. “I saw her first.”

Glinda wants to slide into the circle and listen, like she used to in story hour at school.

She doesn’t.

She moves on.

There will be time to unpack how it feels to hear Elphaba turned into bedtime stories later.

For now, she’s following a trail.

Whispers.

Snatches.

Graffiti.

It’s everywhere, once she starts looking.

A crude green smudge on a brick wall, broom like a diagonal scratch, captioned SHE’S WATCHING.

A chalk outline of a witch’s hat on a stoop, with the words ANIMALS SAFE HERE underneath.

On a bridge support, someone has painted, in tiny but very neat letters:

IF YOU ARE HURTING AN ANIMAL, ASK YOURSELF IF YOU WANT THE WICKED PROTECTOR TO KNOW.

The phrase coils in her chest.

Her phrase.

She used the word wicked in that speech like she was testing a tooth she wasn’t sure had healed.

They ran with it.

Of course they did.

“Look,” Tansy murmurs, nodding toward a corner.

Under a cracked archway, half-hidden by a stack of crates, there’s a wall.

At first, Glinda thinks it’s just another layering of posters and old Wizard propaganda, faded slogans flaking under newer notices.

Then she sees it.

It takes up almost the entire side of the building.

Not as polished as the palace banner, but more… alive.

A witch, painted in bold strokes of green and black. Hat tilted. Coat swirling. One hand raised, palm out, like she’s physically holding back the grey shapes on one side—faceless figures in uniforms and Human First armbands, clubs raised.

On the other side, huddled close to her, are Animals.

A Fox with a bandaged tail. A Bear with a limp. A flock of Birds, wings half-spread as if they’re not sure if they’re allowed to fly. A Dog with a pup tucked under her.

The witch’s body is the only thing between them and the grey.

Her face is turned slightly away, hat brim casting her eyes in shadow.

It doesn’t matter.

Glinda recognises her anyway.

The artist hasn’t got the nose quite right, but they’ve nailed the posture. The set of the jaw. The way she leans forward like a stormfront.

Above the mural, in letters as tall as Glinda’s head, someone has written:

OUR WICKED PROTECTOR.

The words hit her like a physical blow.

Her knees go weak.

She grips Tansy’s arm.

“Steady,” Tansy murmurs, stepping subtly in front of her, as if shielding her from view as well as holding her up.

Glinda can’t look away.

Her brain is doing that awful split-screen thing again: overlaying old images on new.

Elphaba, drenched, surrounded by guards, crowned Wicked by a mob. Elphaba, shoved into the role of villain so neatly the city barely noticed the seams.

Elphaba, here, painted by someone who never knew her, as a shield.

She remembers saying the word wicked into a microphone, twisting it, daring it to mean something else.

She didn’t do this.

They did.

Kids, probably.

Animals.

People who never went to Shiz. People who don’t know what her laugh sounds like when she’s caught off-guard.

They’ve taken the word that almost killed Elphaba and stuck it on her like armour.

“Our,” the paint insists. “Ours. Not yours, Wizard. Not yours, council. Ours.”

Her throat closes up.

“Who did this?” she forces out.

A bear in a shawl, passing with a basket on her hip, glances over.

“Local kids,” she says. “Mostly. My niece did the Bear. First time she’s picked up a brush for something that isn’t homework.”

She squints at Glinda’s half-hidden face.

“You like it?” she asks.

Glinda swallows.

“It’s…” She can’t find the word.

Blasphemous, says the part of her that remembers the Wizard’s posters. Dangerous, says the part trained by Korr. Perfect, says the part that still sees Elphaba on a broom in her dreams.

“Beautiful,” she settles on.

The bear smiles.

“Yeah,” she says. “They did good. Makes the kids feel… safer, you know? Like if someone comes knocking, there’s someone else knocking back.”

Glinda’s chest aches.

“Does she… really…?” she asks, before she can stop herself. “Come?”

The bear shrugs.

“She’s come for some,” she says. “Not for all. She’s not a fairy story. She can’t be everywhere. But the stories help. They make the little ones stand a bit taller when the Human First boys swagger through.”

She adjusts her basket.

“Anyway,” she says. “Got to get these scraps home before they rot. You be careful out here, miss.”

She moves on.

Glinda stands there, rooted, looking up at the wall.

Tansy shifts beside her, hands tight on the handle of her basket.

“You all right?” she asks quietly.

“No,” Glinda says.