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The rains start three days after Madame Morrible dies.
Glinda doesn’t know where they come from, and she doesn’t know what to do with them. She’s never really seen rain before, not like this—not thundering down from the sky in great torrents, turning the sky violent and grey with no sun in sight.
They had rain, of course, but only pleasant sunshowers, the sort that children play in, that leaves delicate puddles to splash in when wearing their special Puddle Splashing Boots.
This is something more. This is something catastrophic, something so beyond the range of her imagination that she has to huddle up in a room with no windows and stand very still and not look at anyone or anything lest they see her fear.
Water fills the streets in great rivers, and buildings flood, and people scream.
Glinda does not know what to do to help, so she does what she does best: nothing.
–
They kill Madame Morrible in secret.
There aren’t jails made for as ones such as she, and Glinda doesn’t have any idea how to hold her, and they can’t risk her escaping. So they kill her, Glinda and the new head of the guard and an executioner, because they have an executioner, a tall woman with strong muscles who does not smile and does not laugh and does not seem interested in Glinda at all.
Madame Morrible dies, and nobody notices, because Glinda does not tell them to notice, and they have spent their entire lives being told who and what to look at and think about by a great and powerful wizard, and that has not changed tremendously now that there is a great and powerful witch instead.
They kill Madame Morrible, and the rains come, and they do not stop, not for days and days and days.
–
Before the rains have even finished, the rumors begin. The rains were a last revenge from the cowardly Wizard, who was not so great after all, who fled in fear from the terrible Wicked Witch and left behind this attack on them, because he was wicked too.
By the time the rains stop and people can step outside to see Glinda the Good helping to pick through rubble, spotless and clean and the brightest thing that they have ever seen as she lifts a child to safety, the rumors are cemented in the Emerald City.
Within days, they have spread to the rest of Oz, and soon the Wizard is beside the Wicked Witch in posters to spit on as they walk past.
Glinda the Good is good, and those other Witches and Wizards were wicked.
But they are gone now, and Glinda remains, heroically rescuing children from rubble without ever breaking a nail.
She’s perfect.
She’ll always be perfect.
–
It turns out that running a kingdom is more complicated than the Wizard made it seem, probably mainly because he wasn’t very good at it.
There are questions constantly, and people even more constantly, and Glinda would be thrilled with the people if they didn’t come with so many questions, or if the questions were things like what shade of pink goes best with my complexion or how many hair clips are required for this updo .
Instead their questions are things like where should I get food from now that my farm has flooded and who is going to pay the teachers and please help me my child is lost and I don’t know how to find them .
That last one isn’t a question, but it’s worse than a question, because it’s a plea for help, and Glinda wants to answer every plea for help, but there are too many pleas and not enough Glinda, and also their child is probably dead and she can’t fix that.
At night, when she curls up alone on her bed and lies very still and doesn’t cry, she wishes for the Wizard back. The Wizard always knew what to do, and even if it wasn’t the right thing to do, it was something, which is better than the nothing that she feels like she is doing all the time now.
The Wizard was Great and Powerful, and he was a liar and wicked and mean, but he was Great and he was Powerful and Glinda is just Glinda.
She’s not even Galinda, anymore.
She lies like that, curled up and very still, until the wishing for the Wizard goes away for the night, and then she closes her eyes and sleeps. In the morning, she wakes up and gets up and gets dressed and makes herself pretty and flips her hair and doesn’t think at all about the Wizard.
–
A year after she gets rid of the Wizard, somebody tries to kill her.
It’s a surprise, because she’s The Good and she thought people only tried to kill The Wicked. They’re not very good at it, and the guards stop them, and they go into a prison cell somewhere, and she tries not to think about it.
They do ruin her dress, though, so she changes.
She throws that damaged dress in the trash, though it doesn’t actually fit in the trash, so it ends up sticking out in all directions like a great big plant.
It’s gone when she comes back that night.
She doesn’t ever see it again.
She doesn’t ever see the person who tried to kill her again, either.
–
Rumors spread that they were a plant of the Wizard, who was Wicked, because he was jealous of Glinda, who was truly Good.
Everybody knows that the Wicked cannot stand the Good.
–
It turns out that, once she’s been doing it for a while, the ruling part of ruling Oz isn’t actually that difficult.
It’s hard, sure, and exhausting, and there is always more work than there is Glinda to do the work, but it is all people and questions and helping, and Glinda can do those things. Glinda knows people and she figures out how to answer questions and she likes to help.
But the problem is that there is nobody else to do the job, which means that it needs to be her to do the job, always, forever, just like the Wizard, except the Wizard wasn’t really doing the job, so it’s not like the Wizard at all.
She is the only one who can do the job, which means that she must do the job.
Once, like it’s a joke, she says that maybe there might be a time when she doesn’t do the job, when someone else rules Oz, someone who actually studied ruling instead of sorcery, and all around her people weep and cry, Who could ever be as good as you, Glinda the Good? Who could ever rule as good as you rule?
And so she laughs and tells them that it was a joke and never says it again.
–
Every morning, the first thing Glinda does when she wakes is do herself up.
She has three outfits for each day: a sleeping gown, which is acceptable to be seen in but suitably scandalous so people know that they shouldn’t be seeing her in it; a day gown, which projects stability yet whimsy and goodness; and an evening gown, which is elegant and designed for public viewing while appearing as though it is designed for the intimacy inherent in dining with one or two, one of whom is Glinda the Good.
She dines with someone every night, and rarely the same person more than one night a week.
Her makeup is soft, girlish, with heavy lashes to accentuate her eyes. It is heavier in the evening, but done so that a casual onlooker could not tell that she redid it, but rather that it blended seamlessly from one to the next.
There is nary a blemish in sight, nor a pore, nor—Oz forbid—a pimple. Each is covered with a specially-designed patch, one made with edges so thin they are undetectable where they meet her skin. When she has pimples, she must be careful not to touch her face so as not to dislodge the covers.
It takes between an hour and two each morning, careful hands meticulously working through intricate work.
She has not let anybody see her without a full face of makeup in years.
–
Rumors spread that the Wizard, the Wicked Wizard of Oz, was the true enemy of Oz, and that the Wicked Witch supported Glinda the Good in her gloriocious fight against him. The rumors say that she was a martyr, a Brave and Strong friend to Good.
–
It takes almost a year and a half to bring Animals full Personhood. There is nothing stopping Glinda from doing it immediately, from a pure technical standpoint, but in reality she has to work her way up, starting with undoing the harm that the Wizard did and then building out to give them more and more rights until Personhood is the only sensible next step.
She does it.
There are so many wrongs that she can never right—but that one, she does.
–
Being Good is a box, and a pedestal, and a coffin. It is the open air and the crushing weight of the atmosphere. It is a monochromatic palette of pink.
Glinda is Good. She wakes up every morning and she is Good and then she goes to bed, and then the next morning she wakes up again to be Good.
She laughs, in the soft cheery laugh of the Good, and she dances the dance of the Good, and she sings—oh, she sings.
They sing at funerals, where she’s from. They sing for life, for love, for joy and pain—but they sing, too, always, at funerals.
Every day, she sings.
–
Rumors spread that Glinda—
–
Glinda tours the corners of Oz, speaking to humans and Animals alike, hearing their fears, their pleas, their wishes. Under the brush of her fingers they beam; under her song they glow.
The news follows her every move—every touch to a man who they think might grace her bed, every look of her eye towards an Animal who they think she might elevate to a new Council role, every flicker of her smile, every hint that she might be faltering.
Her rule feels so tenuous, even now. They are looking for cracks. They are looking for hints that she might be the next Wizard, capricious and cowardly.
And she would let them, if it didn’t mean chaos would follow. There is no replacement; she has no heir. They look for her to fail but refuse to consider the option that she might, see her consideration of any sort of redundancy as a sign of weakness in itself.
So she does not touch any men, looks at every Animal, and does not ever, ever let her smile flicker.
She refuses to let Oz devolve into chaos or cruelty.
–
Rumors spread that Glinda the Good mourns the Witch of the West, the way the Good mourn their brave and glorious soldiers. Or perhaps, some rumors say, the way the Good mourn their friends.
–
Glinda writes a letter, a kindly letter, a kingly letter, to a man who was once a prince, and in it she writes, I do not ask for your love, or even for your affection, but if you were ever my friend, I am asking for your help .
–
All efforts to turn major decision-making power to the Council fail almost before they can start. Humans do not trust the Animals on it; Animals do not trust the humans. Inexplicably, bafflingly, frustratingly , she is the only one that everyone trusts.
She is Good.
At night she goes to sleep with policy proposals spread out over her bed, and in the morning she wakes and does herself up while rereading them, just to make sure she understands.
She learns from talking, from seeing, from doing . She was never the one who was readerly.
When she’s alone, she holds two-sided conversations with herself, affecting a lower register for the second voice—smug, studious, angry. Clever. So Oz-damned clever.
Look at what being clever got all of them.
Glinda never used to be this uncertain, before this all. She knew her place, and everyone else’s. She knew what was good, what was Good. She knew what she needed to know, and she knew how to get it, and then she was placed in a room with a woman who defied all of that, and did it while being green.
–
The rains come sometimes now, not just rain but days and days, lashing the windows and filling the streets.
The ground can take the water now, though, and so the floods aren’t nearly as bad.
Still, when the rains are at their worst, Glinda has to find an empty room and stand very still so nobody can see her fear.
Still, when the rains finish, she goes out to her people and helps.
Now, though, when she helps, people help with her.
–
Four months after she sends the letter, she gets one back.
It reads, I was your friend.
–
He becomes her confidant, her advisor—the only person who is willing to tell her when he thinks she’s wrong. He was raised to be a king one day, for all that he eschewed it, and he knows all those things that she has had to piece together.
She bounces policy ideas off of him, and he gives suggestions, ways to enact change to benefit those who need it the most while minimizing the risk of accidental harm to others.
They make a difference, together.
Sometimes, reading his letters, her heart aches at the thought of what could have been. What might have been, if things had been different.
His words are a balm to her heart, most days. And a curse, the other days, like a hangnail or a torn cuticle, something to worry at constantly, a reminder of just how alone she truly is.
–
One day, Glinda thinks, I know those words.
–
Of Elphaba, Glinda has a hat that was once hers and a Grimmerie that was once the Wizard’s and memories that were never owned by anyone else.
Memories of loathing, of confusion, of fear, of disdain—but also of things that make her heart clench in her chest, of things that feel like happiness even though they never felt like happiness when they happened, of wonder and awe and the sort of envy that might not be envy at all.
Without fear, without self-consciousness, Elphaba would argue against injustices—would argue that, when others suffered, it was because of them , because of their actions and systems that they benefited from. She would argue that humans shouldn’t gain at the expense of Animals, that if it required taking from another that which they wouldn’t give on their own then you had no right to do so, and Glinda would watch her green lips move and think, why are you talking about this? Why are you thinking about this? Let us live as we live, and if you want to be sad about it, then be sad about it without bothering us.
–
Glinda thinks, I know those words .
–
Glinda has always, at the core of her, wanted to be Good.
But Good, for so long, was the uncomplicated sort, the sort that only goes until it would start to bother her. But if she were Good until that, then she would have been Good, and that would have been enough.
After all, if Good were about making people happy, then something that made her unhappy wouldn’t be Good. And so she wouldn’t need to worry about things if worrying about things made her unhappy, because then it wouldn’t be Good.
–
Glinda thinks, I know those fucking words .
–
Glinda doesn’t write a letter back, because every time she picks up a pen to start writing it her hand starts shaking so much she doesn’t think she would be able to write anything legible. She tries to compose the letter in her head, but every time she starts her brain fills up with something shivery and cold, and she has to stop.
One of her people asks her if she is alright.
She does not let her smile flicker again.
–
When she gets back to her room, Elphie’s hat is gone, and Glinda thinks she might cry, or maybe scream, or maybe do nothing at all.
She does not look at where it is gone from. She sits down at her vanity and begins the long process of removing her makeup. She sings, just as she has sung every day.
In the mirror, she sees black and green and black again step into view. It stops there.
Glinda finishes taking off of her makeup.
And then she stands up, turns around, pushes Elphie down on the bed, and bites her.
–
The whole event is less graceful glorious lovemaking with diaphanous curtains and soft lighting and more furious writhing interspersed with hysterical tears, but by the end of it Glinda is sprawled against Elphie’s chest, out of breath and as unpretty as she’s been in years.
It’s like it all burst out of her, like Elphie was a knife that punctured her shell, breaking every piece of control that Glinda has clawed together.
She bites Elphie again, just because Elphie is here to bite, and Elphie yelps and tries to push her away, angry and irritated and so the same all over again. Glinda is magnanimonious, so she offers to let Elphie bite her too.
Elphie doesn’t bite her, but she does play with Glinda’s hair, which is almost as good.
Glinda sleeps.
–
Rumors spread that the Witch of the West lives.
Rumors spread that Glinda the Good loves her.
Everybody knows that the Wicked cannot stand the Good, but everybody knows that the Witch of the West was never really Wicked at all.