Chapter Text
“It’s always something with that girl,” Glinda said to the sunset, leaning on the rail of her balcony. Dorothy Gale was sitting inside, on the recessed couch in the tastefully mauve conversation area, sobbing stickily. Glinda hadn’t invited her, she’d just shown up in that little gingham monstrosity. There was the dog, too, but he was alright. He reminded her of- no. Best not to think about him just now.
Stepping back inside through the double doors, Glinda surveyed the scene. One of her aides, a Secretarybird named Nabo, stepped up delicately beside her, her crest shrinking back in dismay. The dog - Glinda couldn’t remember his name, or whether she’d ever been told - took one look at Nabo and decided to hide on the other side of Dorothy’s legs.
“Ms. Glinda,” Nabo croaked quietly. “There’s someone from the Animal Repatriation Group House to see you, she has some questions about the timeline for the next few months. And the interim Governor of Munchkinland has sent another telegram asking for the appointment of a replacement, really I don’t think she’s cut out for the job for much longer. Oh, and the Shiz University board of trustees has some rather strongly worded feedback about the Animal reparations mandate - don’t worry, I put it out before leaving it on your desk.” She took an awkward, leggy step back as Glinda turned and stared at her.
“I’m sorry, did you say - put it out?”
Nabo bobbed her head. “Yes. It was on fire. Quite dramatically on fire, actually. And I have a glazier coming up to look at the window.”
Glinda blinked. “The window?”
Nabo bobbed her head again, her crest shrinking even further. “The window it was thrown through, yes.”
Glinda sighed, throwing a hand across her forehead before catching sight of herself in the mirror and stubbornly crossing her arms instead. The board of trustees was going to be something of a problem, especially if they’d decided that firebombing her office was a good idea. The interim Governor’s position was understandably difficult, considering that, up until a month ago, she’d been Nessarose Thropp’s housekeeper, the poor thing. There was not a large corps of dedicated civil servants in Munchkinland, which made it difficult to consider any better appointment than the woman who had, thus far, managed to keep the lights on and the trains running for the last month. The ARGH would make sense to deal with first, as they were trying to do something helpful and didn’t seem to actively want Glinda dead. At least, not yet. Probably best to-
Dorothy made a very wet and unhappy sound.
First things first. Real people first, before all else. It had been the first decision she had made after- Best not to think about that just now. The first decision she had made before encouraging the Wizard to take a very long vacation. People first, politics, magic, power, and propaganda came second. “Thank you so much, Nabo, you’re a real hero,” she said, putting an encouraging hand under Nabo’s beak. The crest opened with a little optimism. “ARGH first, Governor second, Shiz- well. Shiz when I feel like it, I suppose. I promise, I promise I’ll have answers for the other two before the end of the night. I just have to deal with a little,” she twiddled the fingers of her free hand in the direction of the conversation pit, “unexpectified hiccup first.”
Nabo relaxed, her crest flaring out. “Thank you, Ms. Glinda,” she croaked, sounding deeply relieved. “I’ll show the ARGH rep out and tell her to wait for a courier later, and the Governor will just have to wait for a telegram. Shiz can, pardon my Winkie, get stuffed in the meantime.” Nabo cocked her head conspiratorially, the closest Avian equivalent of a wink, missing Glinda’s small wince. She leaned in, extending her dramatically long neck to bring her beak up next to Glinda’s ear. “Good luck with the fledgeling, Ms. Glinda.” With that, Nabo took her leave, strutting out of the room with her usual high-stepping, precise gait.
Glinda put her hands on her hips and made a small, fortifying sound. She strode with purpose across the room, stepping down into the conversation pit and coming up in front of Dorothy, looking down at the wretched crying girl. Dorothy looked back up at her with a blotchy, red face, wet with tears and who knew what other unpleasant bodily fluids.
It was at this point that Glinda realized she had no idea what to say. This was, to say the least, an extremely discomposing experience. She had never actually considered having children much beyond the obvious fact that she would eventually have some number of them, and as such she had never given much thought to what interacting personally with a distressed child might entail.
“Well,” she began, and faltered immediately. Dorothy’s brow furrowed.
“Well?” The girl repeated, looking somewhere between frightened and confused.
“Well,” Glinda started again, “what seems to be the problem?” Now Dorothy looked decidedly confused, and something else - perhaps disgusted, though that couldn’t be right.
“What seems to be the problem?” Dorothy repeated, sounding incredulous. Glinda began to worry that the girl was even dimmer than she’d initially suspected. “I’m stuck in an insane upside down world full of talking animals and people who seem to think that’s totally normal, I was kidnapped, thrown in a pit, and had to kill the Wicked Witch to escape, my only possible chance of getting home flew away in a hot air balloon, I’ve spent weeks wandering from one hostel to another just trying to figure out what to do next, and just when someone finally thought to bring me to the person in charge of all this mess, she turns out to be a stupid pink hag who’s looking at me like I’m the crazy one in this situation.” Dorothy paused to catch her breath, then narrowed her eyes in evident confusion at Glinda. “Why are you crying?”
“I’m not,” Glinda replied, wiping her eyes delicately. “And I really will not have that kind of language used in my house - they’re not animals, they’re Animals.” She sighed, staring at Dorothy who looked, if anything, more confused, not less. She supposed the girl had had a rather difficult few weeks. Her and the rest of Oz. ‘Stupid pink hag’ should probably have stung, but she had been called so many things recently that none of it stuck any longer. She was simply Glinda, now, to herself if not to anyone else.
The fact remained that Dorothy had murdered- no, not murdered, slain the Wicked Witch. Glinda’s feelings on that fact, as if she had any, were immaterial. They had to be, if that act was going to be what Oz needed it to be. An inflection point, a rallying cry, a place to begin fixing everything that had been so terribly broken for so terribly long. And the girl was clearly not as stupid as she’d thought.
Glinda stepped over the dog - she really needed to find a polite way to discover his name - and settled herself on the couch next to Dorothy, who scooted a few inches away. Glinda tried not to take it too personally.
“You’ve had a difficult time since coming to Oz, haven’t you?” She said with as much sympathy as she could muster. It really wasn’t the girl’s fault, the way things had gone. Certainly no more than it had been Glinda’s.
Dorothy made a choked noise in her throat and nodded. “You could say that,” she said warily.
“Well I think I will,” Glinda replied, feeling that she was getting nowhere. She thought fast, something she was becoming quite good at lately. The girl was a national hero, and she was relying on the generosity of the Emerald City’s hostelries? That was an absolute propaganda nightmare. “You said you’ve been trying to find a place to stay, didn’t you?”
Dorothy nodded slowly. “Just until I can get out of here. Until someone can send me home.” She looked pointedly at Glinda, who ignored her just as pointedly. If Dorothy Gale could be sent home, it would have to be Glinda who figured out how to do it, and the only hope for that lay in the Grimmerie, which was its own problem at the moment.
Glinda smiled as hard as she could. “Well, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, my apartments are quite sizable. There are a few staff rooms that no one’s ever used. You’re practically an Ozian icon, by now, we really can’t leave you running around from one insalubricious hostel to another, can we?”
Dorothy’s face went from blotchy red to pale, then back to a hot pink. “Me, live here?” She gestured around at - well, pretty much everything. “You really don’t have to do that,” she said with a slightly panicked look.
Glinda’s vision blurred. She couldn’t think why, but her face was suddenly running with hot tears, her throat closing like someone had wrapped their hand around her neck. She tried to fight it, to hold it down as she’d been doing for Oz knew how long, but her wretched body betrayed her yet again and she had no choice but to let it happen, heaving great ugly gasping breaths between convulsive sobs. Her nose ran, and the stupid dress didn’t have pockets, so she didn’t have a handkerchief, and she absolutely refused to dribble on her blouse.
A hand, rough and small and shaking slightly, touched her forearm. She blinked the tears away as best she could, the world coming back into her field of vision in splintered fragments seen through a broken mirror. Dorothy’s face, closer than before and looking more concerned than frightened. A swimming vision of horrid gingham near at hand.
“I washed it this morning,” Dorothy said. “And I haven’t used it. Honestly, I’ve just been crying on my sleeve mostly. Auntie Em says I shouldn’t, but I say why dirty a handkerchief if you don’t really need to?”
Glinda wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands, trying to make sense of the words. She blinked a few more times, and resolved the scene in front of her. Dorothy, next to her on the couch, having moved a bit closer, proffering a worn but evidently clean white handkerchief. Glinda took it and blew her nose with as much poise as she could muster. It wasn’t much.
Dorothy was saying something again, and Glinda tried to listen with ears that were still rushing a little. “I didn’t mean any offense, ma’am,” she was saying, voice slightly hushed. “It would be awfully nice to have a place to myself for a while, only I don’t like the idea of taking a favor I haven’t earned. Gales aren’t like that.”
Glinda stared at her. Pinched, worried face. Hair a complete mess. Dress that only a mother could love, and not a very good mother at that. She was a national hero, whatever Glinda thought of how she’d become one, and she didn’t think she’d earned the hospitality of Oz.
“Dorothy,” Glinda said damply. “Do you know what an ‘intern’ is?”