Chapter Text
Elphaba has become all too familiar with exclamations of surprise and horror being thrown her way in lieu of a greeting when she encounters someone new.
Always, without fail, the first remark is about the color of her skin. Something along the lines of Dear Oz, why are you green?, with only slight variations. The second comment, because it is never so much a question as it is an expression of disgust no one even bothers to try to mask, is And what in the name of Oz is that?
Which, frankly, Elphaba finds quite stupid. Grym may be peculiar looking, though in her opinion not so much as to warrant such an overreaction, but he is, very clearly, a bat.
He’s not even the blood-drinking kind, no matter what the Munchkin children say. He doesn’t bite anyone. Elphaba sometimes wishes he would. At least maybe it would earn them some respect. But Grym is too gentle for that: he only clings to her back, leathery wings tucked around him, and peers at the world from behind her shoulder with big, dewy eyes.
He only dares to fly at night, when everyone has gone to bed. Elphaba will crack her bedroom window open to let him out, and she will watch him circle over the house, nothing more than a small dark shape in the night sky, unnoticeable unless you know what you’re looking for. She will close her eyes and let the cool breeze waft over her cheeks.
She imagines herself with wings in moments like these; fantasizes about joining Grym up there, weightless. It’s the only time her daemon seems happy. Maybe, by extension, it’s the only time she is happy. When no one is looking, no one is judging. When there is nothing but the stars in the sky and the smell of lilac in the summer air and the quiet flutter of Grym’s wings as he returns to the window.
Grym had settled in this shape when Elphaba was fifteen. A late bloomer, daemons of children her age having long found their forms. Before that, he tended to make himself small. A mouse curled up in her pocket, a sparrow on her shoulder. Where Elphaba was loud, never shying away from a confrontation, a necessity in a world that seemed determined to hate her, her daemon rarely spoke. They were one, yet different. Grym was the soft underbelly of the being they made up together. Too delicate, she thought sometimes, for the reality they had been born into.
When he turned into a bat, the thing that surprised Elphaba most had been his size. Far too large to fit into her pocket, or indeed to hide at all. His wingspan was formidable, his body as long as Elphaba’s torso. But he tried, still, lurking behind her shoulder whenever they ventured outside, like he was desperately trying to become invisible.
At school, there had been a poster plastered to one of the walls of Elphaba’s classroom. The great spires of the Emerald City against a perfectly blue sky, and below, in curling yellow letters, the slogan Elphaba would read every day, like a prayer.
Emerald City, where dreams come true.
Emerald City, where the Wizard could give her her heart’s desire.
Sometimes, in her daydreams, it would be the green seeping out of her skin. Sometimes, it would be the ability to fly, to finally experience what Grym could so easily. How unfair, after all, that she should be forever stuck on the ground while her soul was free to soar anytime he wanted.
Sometimes, and those were thoughts she was not proud of, it would be Grym switching shapes one last time. To something less strange, maybe. Something that could thrive in the light of day instead of hiding in the night.
But daemons cannot change shapes once settled; not even magic can do that, or so the stories say. Once your soul finds its shape, you simply have to accept it. You can’t run away from the truth of yourself.
And Elphaba loves Grym; truly, she does. She loves the weight of him on her back, and how graceful he is in flight, and how soft his fur is to the touch in spite of the angular sharpness of his wings.
She just cannot shake the feeling that they are both supposed to be more.
***
Elphaba’s father doesn’t much like Grym, which is not surprising. He doesn’t much like any part of Elphaba.
His own daemon, Fruma, is a goat. With her horns long and straight, she stands almost at height with her owner. They’re black and shiny, those horns, so sharp they could spear someone clean through. Fruma stands proud, always does. A creature of high mountain slopes, out of place in the plains and gently rolling hills of Munchkinland. Her father does enjoy the vantage point his station affords him, and he doesn’t bother to hide it.
Grym keeps out of her way. Fruma pays him no attention, anyway. She’s too busy fussing over Nessa and her daemon, or trotting alongside Elphaba’s father as they attend to their many duties.
When Elphaba first sees Doctor Dillamond, it strikes her how dissimilar the two are. Doctor Dillamond doesn’t look down on her. He doesn’t try to make her feel small. There is no accusatory glare in his eyes, like he is always blaming Elphaba for something, most of all for the fact that she dared to exist.
No, Doctor Dillamond likes her, he does, and Elphaba likes him back. She tries not to think too much about how his approval feels like a substitute for something she could never dream of getting from her father.
***
Nessa’s daemon is Foxglove, a flower to match Nessarose. He settles as a polecat, with shiny brown fur and clever eyes. He can usually be found in Nessa’s lap or on the back of her chair, looking pleasant and soft as a toy. He’s perfect, of course, in their father’s eyes, just like the rest of Nessa is. He does not have strange leathery wings or sleep upside down, hanging from the ceiling.
What their father doesn’t notice is that Foxglove has sharp teeth hiding behind that innocent little snout. He bites other kids’ daemons, though no one ever dares to report it or point a finger at the governor’s beloved daughter. Once or twice, Elphaba catches him dragging a mouse he’d caught in the grass, jaws clamped hard enough to draw blood. He never kills them, but he’s never far from it, either.
Elphaba learns to pretend she doesn’t see it. Nessa doesn’t have a bad bone in her body; it’s just temper tantrums, nothing else. Their father would never believe Nessa could do any wrong, and it might be one of the few things he and Elphaba agree on.
After all, most of the time Foxglove is perfectly sweet, curled up in Nessa’s lap or fetching her cookies from the kitchen. He even gets along with Grym, the two of them sitting together in front of the fire during cold winter evenings while Elphaba reads stories to Nessa. He loves the fairytales and the colorful illustrations just as much as Nessa does.
It isn’t until much later that Elphaba manages to acknowledge Foxglove’s small cruelties as such. It was Nessa lashing out - trying, in some way, to gain a sense of control in an environment that had afforded her so little of it. An ill-conceived attempt to show their father she wasn’t the helpless little thing he made her out to be.
But it had also been a sign of something else, a kind of darkness simmering beneath, and Elphaba wonders how she could have missed it, this long-festering resentment. As hard it has been to accept the truth of herself (and has she, really, accomplished that?), it has been even harder to come to terms with everything her sister has turned out to be.
Elphaba blames herself for it, but just like with most of her regrets, her guilt fails to actually change anything.
In her solitude, she clings to the memory of Nessa on her first day at Shiz: bright-eyed and beaming, Foxglove on her shoulder, his gaze darting around to take in every little detail. How hopeful they both had been.
She had been hopeful that day too. So filled to the brim with it that even Grym had dared to take flight in the bright light of day, circling over the water and the old cobblestone of the courtyard.
That day, for the first time, Elphaba had actually believed that her dreams might come true after all.
***
Madame Morrible’s Mallix wraps around his owner’s neck like a beautiful bejeweled accessory. Coils and coils of him resting on her shoulders, scales purple and silver and deep ashy green, ever-changing depending on the light. He looks heavy, but Madame Morrible never lets the weight of him show as she moves around the university, regal and graceful in every step.
He is silent but alert, tongue darting out periodically to taste his surroundings. His eyes don’t give anything away, and his serpentine body twists lazily on itself in moments of quiet in Madame Morrible’s study. Round and round, like a gem-studded cyclone.
She doesn’t find out until she’s in the Emerald City that there is poison in his fangs; that he can strike fast as lightning when he wants to, in contradiction to his usual languid disposition. He’s beautiful, but deadly. And those unblinking eyes, which all this time had seemed to her serene, finally strike her for what they are: soulless.
Madame Morrible brands her the Wicked Witch, and the words, delivered so cruelly for all of Oz to hear, burn as painfully as her daemon’s venom would in Elphaba’s veins.
***
During her first weeks at Shiz, Elphaba comes to the realization that as different as she and her roommate are, they may just have one thing in common.
That secret, deep-buried wish that their daemons had settled as something else.
Galinda Upland of the Upper Uplands takes Shiz by storm from the moment she sets foot on the premises. Everyone loves her, just as everyone hates Elphaba, and so Elphaba tries very hard to loathe Galinda, just to spite her.
Within days, Galinda struts around like she owns the place, usually with a gaggle of disciples on her heels, tossing her golden hair and striking perfectly practised poses. Everything about Galinda is, simply, flawless: the outfits chosen with utmost care each morning, jewelry catching the light just so, the slightest hint of a smile sending people swooning.
It’s unbearable, and yet Elphaba cannot look away.
The only thing that doesn’t quite seem to fit into the picture Galinda is painting for everyone around them is Glimmer.
(Because of course his name is Glimmer, as if Galinda Upland’s parents could have named him anything else.)
Now, it’s not to say that Glimmer is ugly. Far from it. He’s as striking as the rest of Galinda, so vibrantly pink that Elphaba has to wonder if his plumage or Galinda’s wardrobe came first. He’s beautiful to look at, and swooping in flight, his wings shining in the sun as if they have been polished. He grooms and preens himself relentlessly.
It takes Elphaba a while to notice that something isn’t quite right with the two of them. At first glance, nothing is amiss: he has a gilded perch next to Galinda’s bed, and he’s always hovering somewhere nearby wherever she goes. Other students ooh and aah over his pink and orange and yellow feathers, shimmering to befit his name.
But the core of the issue, Elphaba finally decides, is that despite all his beauty, Glimmer isn’t delicate. He’s no butterfly or even a hummingbird, nothing tiny or fragile or subtle. He’s a parrot, with a mighty beak and large clawed feet, and there is a distinct gracelessness to him when he’s not flying. He waddles awkwardly across Galinda’s desk in class or her vanity in their dorm room, making a mess of Galinda’s carefully organized collection of makeup products. He doesn’t sing; instead, he screeches in moments of excitement, and every time he does so, Galinda flinches ever so slightly, her eyes darting to him sharply. He goes quiet afterwards, though no words are exchanged between them.
Galinda’s soul, despite its, well, glimmer, is a clumsy, inelegant thing. And clever too, far too clever for the ditziness Galinda seems so eager to perform. His dark eyes are always scanning the room, searching for people’s reactions. He’s restless, anxious, in constant contradiction to his owner’s poise that she puts on every morning like a uniform.
They’re ill at ease with each other, or rather, Galinda is ill at ease with him. He never gets too close to her, and that, at least, is something completely foreign to Elphaba. The weight of Grym on her back is as familiar to her as the beating of her own heart. But Galinda and Glimmer are always apart, even though they are always together. The gap between them, once noticed, cannot be unseen.
Perhaps this is why Galinda puts on such a show whenever she steps out into the world. So no one pays too much attention to the distance she puts between her and her own soul.
But Elphaba notices. She notices everything about Galinda, and especially the things she doesn’t want anyone to see.
***
In the aquatic lights of the Ozdust Ballroom, Glimmer’s feathers turn cerulean.
He and Grym approach each other over Elphaba’s and Galinda’s heads, circling like two overgrown moths. Cautious, testing. They come to a halt inches away from each other, suspended mid-air. This close, it’s impossible to miss how similar their wingspans are.
Elphaba’s heart stammers in her chest as her and Galinda’s hands touch. It’s a shock to her system, this simple contact, a buzz that settles under her skin and will not subside. Galinda’s open palms are warm; her eyes, dark and wide, catch Elphaba’s reflection.
For the first time, she is beheld by someone who is not her sister or her nanny, and she does not feel her hackles rise. There is no alarm or horror or disgust in Galinda’s gaze, and no pity either. There is sorrow, and not the self-serving sort. An openness that’s in equal measure startling and inviting.
With their daemons overhead, they dance.
It is the closest Elphaba had ever been to flying then.
***
“He is rather funny looking, isn’t he?” Galinda says once they’ve returned to their room.
It’s an off-hand remark, uttered much later into the night, when they’re sitting together on Galinda’s bed, drowsy yet unable to sleep. For the first time, Elphaba gets to luxuriate in the impossible softness of Galinda’s mattress.
Galinda’s eyes are turned upwards as she lies down, staring at Grym who’s hanging upside down from a ceiling beam, wings tucked around him like a blanket. He looks down at her, his large, dark eyes catching the light of Galinda’s bedside lamp.
Elphaba has grown used to comments about Grym’s appearance, but Galinda’s words hold no malice. Her voice is hushed, softened with tiredness and laced with a sort of curiosity or perhaps wonder.
“I’ve never seen anything like him,” she adds after a beat, one corner of her mouth curling into a smile.
“Well,” Elphaba mutters, allowing herself to slowly lie down beside Galinda, her own eyelids heavy but her heart racing in her chest, “you’ve never seen anything like me either.”
She’s not sure if she’s attempting a joke, but Galinda seems to take it as one. She laughs, a delighted sound, and Elphaba’s chest expands with a feeling that could be pride.
Galinda’s hand finds hers and squeezes. Elphaba has no idea what to do with it, with this sudden and new affection, except return it and hope at some point she figures out how not to let it steal her breath. “Elphie?”
“Yes?”
“Do you want to skip class today?”
Elphaba blinks, the question swimming somewhere on the edges of her sleepy mind. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” she says, though she’s not sure she actually cares, and a yawn escapes her with the final word. Galinda’s thumb swipes across her knuckles, leaving a trail of sparks in its wake.
“Come on,” Galinda says, and there’s mischief in her eyes, warm and excited and directed right at Elphaba. The force of it kind of makes her want to run, except her muscles are too loose and heavy to move, and Galinda’s hand anchors her in place. “There’s this café in town, it’s so lovely… And their pastries are so much better than the breakfast they serve here.”
She turns onto her side, gaze pleading. “Please?”
And Elphaba knows, just then, that she’s not going to say no. That she will go with Galinda wherever she wants to go, be it a café in town or the far end of the Impassable Desert.
Much, much later, she doesn’t begrudge Glinda for not being able to do the same for her. All that stays with her from that moment is the dreamlike softness of an early morning after a long night, and the bone-deep contentment of lying beside someone babbling about pastries that they’ll get to eat together.
Deep in the forest, hidden from the world, Elphaba remembers the powdered sugar on Galinda’s nose and the first bite of a freshly baked fruit tart; the swelling of juice and custard in her mouth, overpowering in its sweetness.
She remembers sitting across a little round table from Galinda and falling, one bite at a time, in love.
***
For a while there, which seems both a blink of an eye and a lifetime, things are bliss.
Life at Shiz follows its own rhythm, removed from the rest of the world. Days bleed into weeks in a steady routine of studying, classes, exams, and good old-fashioned fun squeezed in whenever possible. It’s a novelty to Elphaba, just how much of it suddenly fills her schedule. Galinda is very good at this part of student life: the parties and outings and spontaneous excursions out into the fields when the weather is pleasant. The first few times, she has to drag Elphaba away from her books; after that, Elphaba starts looking forward to Galinda’s next idea more than she would care to admit.
Those hikes and picnics out and about become her favorite. It’s not just the two of them most of the time, though Elphaba certainly doesn’t mind when she gets Galinda all to herself. But more often than not, Nessa is there too, and the boy she’s taken the shine to, Boq, whose cricket daemon usually hides in the pocket of his shirt.
And Fiyero, whose brief fling with Galinda doesn’t seem to have gotten in the way of him still tagging along once any romance had fizzled out. Galinda doesn’t seem particularly broken up about the failed courtship, remarking casually to Elphaba that there’s plenty of princes to go around. Elphaba does not actually believe that’s the case, but she does not see the point in arguing the matter.
Besides, the end of that relationship brings with it a sense of relief she doesn’t want to dwell on. Fiyero is fun to be around, relentlessly so, annoyingly so, and that pep of his becomes somewhat more appealing once he does not have Galinda hanging on his every word. Once it becomes a habit for Galinda to drift over to Elphaba to link arms with her instead of clutching his hand.
Fiyero’s daemon, Karaya, is, unsuitably for a prince, a pony. A miniature horse, he likes to insist, one small enough that only the youngest of Munchkins could attempt to ride on her back. She’s a prancing, mischievous thing, his soul, and golden like wheat in the sun right before the harvest.
Just like Galinda, Fiyero likes to pretend to be one thing and one thing only. They’re similar, those two, with all their surface-level luster and all the depths it hides. Depths that they themselves seem unkeen to look at, but that Elphaba senses the same way one might a step on the staircase in one’s childhood home when creeping out of bed in the dead of night. The details may be hidden, but she knows it’s there.
In another world, they would have made a good couple.
There’s a quiet resolve to Fiyero’s daemon, a surprising steadfastness yearning for a purpose. He’s always running from something, or maybe in search of something, and Elphaba wonders what will happen when he finds it.
But for now, Karaya seems content galloping across the fields that their little group ventures out into, and it makes something in Elphaba want to run too, just because. Just because it’s a beautiful day, and Galinda’s hand is in hers, and she feels boundless, ready to face whatever the future may bring.
***
As weeks become months, they begin to forget themselves.
Touching another person’s daemon simply is not a done thing; it’s one of the social taboos that only a mother with her child or a married couple may be exempt from. You do not simply go and touch someone else’s soul.
Elphaba knows this. Every child in Oz old enough to walk knows this.
But she sort of starts to forget, sometimes.
If she were one to point fingers, she would say Glimmer does not make it easier to remember. He flocks to Elphaba the way he never does to his actual owner, waddling awkwardly towards her when she and Galinda are studying at one of the large desks in the library - well, Elphaba is studying, while Galinda always finds a way to do anything but - and he peers at the books she’s reading, tilting his head and craning his neck until he’s mere inches away. He even sometimes speaks directly to her, in his croaky parrot voice, asking questions. Leaning closer. Soaking up whatever it is she tells him in response.
It should unsettle her, but it never does. Unlike Galinda, she doesn’t mind the bird’s lack of elegance; she finds the reflection of it in the stiffness of Galinda’s own limbs, the rigidity of her posture. She doesn’t mind his proximity, unconventional as it may be. There’s something in him that reminds Elphaba of herself: a longing for companionship and tenderness that has long been denied to him.
Galinda has the most friends Elphaba has ever seen a person have, yet her soul might just be the loneliest thing in the world. At least Elphaba always has Grym by her side; Glimmer seems perpetually forlorn despite his owner never being more than a few feet away.
Sometimes, Elphaba wants to bring it up, but she doesn’t have the words to start. Whatever conflict is going on inside of Galinda, this war she seems to be waging against herself that she might not even be conscious of, it’s something only she can resolve.
So instead, Elphaba gives Glimmer the attention he needs so much. After all, she loves Galinda, though that is another thing she does not have the words to put into. Loving her daemon is simply an extension of it.
And he is beautiful in his ungainliness, in his cleverness, in the sunset hues of his feathers. Elphaba’s fingers begin to reach for him without the input of her brain. Only at the last moment does she stop herself. She always stops herself.
But she knows one day she might not, and she has no idea what that would mean for them.
***
If touching Glimmer becomes a risk, a possible disaster she’s courting, touching Galinda, at the very least, becomes second nature.
Almost every night, they stay up late to talk. It’s ridiculous, she thinks sometimes, just how endless the talking is, and yet the well of topics never runs dry, always offering up another silly musing, or another joke, or a piece of gossip, or something deeper, a story from Elphaba’s childhood, an anecdote from Galinda’s early life in the Gillikin high society. A conversation about the day’s events may turn into a heated discussion of their future plans in the blink of an eye; under the roof of their bedroom, Elphaba finds herself turning out every pocket of her mind for Galinda. Every dream, every fear, every memory.
Sometimes, they talk for so long they both fall asleep on the soft expanse of Galinda’s bed. Once it happens for the first time, it seems to keep happening, accidentally and then not. It starts to feel like a game they’re both playing: who can stay awake the longest, who will be the last to give in to the unavoidable embrace of sleep.
The morning Elphaba wakes up with Galinda wrapped all around her is not the first, or second, or even the tenth time she’s fallen asleep in her roommate’s bed. Galinda’s bed is so wide that they can usually sleep without touching, but just like with every other aspect of their relationship, this too seems to be an evolving thing.
The current stage of said evolution is Galinda’s arms wrapped around Elphaba, their fronts pressed together, and the soft puffing of her steady breath in the crook of Elphaba’s neck.
Elphaba herself forgets to breathe at first, faced with all this Galinda in her space not two seconds after waking up. Before Shiz, she had never shared a bed with anyone. Her father seemed convinced she would somehow infect Nessa with her greenness were they allowed to sleep in the same bed, or even the same room. Galinda, at present, doesn’t seem too worried about that possibility.
Before Elphaba can decide what to do, frozen in place, Galinda stirs under the blankets, her knee bumping into Elphaba’s. Early morning sunlight casts beams across the foot of the bed, the air hushed with the sleepy stillness of a world not yet ready to begin the day in earnest. Elphaba’s nose is full of only Galinda: her sugary perfume lingering on her skin, the warm scent of a living breathing human, her soap and shampoo, just a hint of sweat after a night under piled-up blankets.
Galinda’s hair tickles her cheek. Her eyes fall to Glimmer’s golden perch, where he’s still fast asleep with his head tucked under his wing, and where Grym had also taken up residence, hanging from it upside down every night that Elphaba has forgotten to go back to her own bed.
As minutes tick by, she begins to relax into the peacefulness of it. Galinda’s arms are tight around her, even in her sleep, but not suffocatingly so. There is a safety in the embrace that reminds Elphaba of a different time, when she was very little, when she wasn’t yet aware of how the world perceived her. When her nanny would lull her to sleep, and she would feel loved.
Perhaps half an hour later, when Galinda wakes, her sleep-dazed eyes blink up at Elphaba. And when her vision clears, she does not recoil; her nose, practically brushing Elphaba’s, scrunches up in a funny little greeting.
“Good morning,” she says, voice thickened with a good night’s rest. Her fingers move up from Elphaba’s back to the nape of her neck, mindlessly playing with the hair there, and Elphaba stutters in her own response.
When Galinda sits up, Elphaba’s eyes are glued to the line of her back in her thin nightgown, the way it drapes around her hips. This early in the morning, Galinda is unguarded, disheveled. Before long, she’ll have scrubbed herself clean and perfumed every inch of her skin; she’ll have done a dozen intricate things to style her hair and examined her outfit in the mirror at least four times. She’ll be the Galinda everyone else knows and adores.
But right now, she’s the Galinda only Elphaba gets to love, and she does not sit up behind her or lean in to press a kiss to Galinda’s shoulder, but she imagines it so much it may as well be a memory.
***
They love each other, she and Galinda. They don’t say it, but it’s there, as sure as the shape of their own daemons.
They love each other in the quiet mornings in their bedroom. They love each other in the fields of poppies around Shiz, Glimmer and Grym circling overhead in a joyous dance of their own. They love each other, hand in hand, in the dazzling opulence of the Emerald City.
They love each other up in a dusty forgotten attic, and that’s where they lose each other.
Glinda, the name still strange on Elphaba’s tongue, like a word that’s almost correct but not exactly, eyes the broom in Elphaba’s hands. Elphaba knows she won’t get on it as soon as Glinda herself does.
And she should be used to this, perhaps, to the idea of being alone once more, with just her and Grym. But in her time at Shiz, this brief, wonderful time, she’d allowed herself to expand the frames of her reality to fit Glinda into it, and that future they were supposed to have together, only hours before taking shape right before their eyes, now hangs between them like a half-formed ghost.
And it is right then, with a shriek Elphaba has never heard before, that Grym hurls himself into Glinda’s embrace, his claws clutching at the fabric of her dress, and it feels like someone had opened up Elphaba’s chest and put a hand around her bare heart.
No one touches another person’s daemon, but it doesn’t matter. Not when Glinda holds Grym against her chest and sobs into his fur, and his leathery wings get caught in the strands of her hair, and Elphaba feels like she’s dissolving into a puddle.
Many things hurt in that moment, the betrayal and the truth and the rejection, but Glinda holding her soul does not.
When Elphaba takes off into the sky at last, those childhood dreams now mocking her from the distance of years long passed, Glimmer chases after her for what feels like miles. Pink feathers stay in the periphery of her vision even as the towers of the Wizard’s palace begin to shrink behind her.
Daemons are not supposed to be this far from their owners. It must be agony for Glinda to be separated from him like this, and for him too, yet he doesn’t falter. He flies and flies and flies, always on Elphaba’s tail. She doesn’t stop at first, hoping to discourage him, but Glinda’s soul is as stubborn as Elphaba herself, and, it appears, just as reckless.
So she stops, because she must; because she does not want to cause Glinda any more pain than necessary, and she reaches for him. His feathers are soft, though his beak nipping desperately at her cloak and her neck and her ear could draw blood.
She can still feel Glinda’s hands on Grym, a phantom sensation. She wonders if her hands on Glimmer will feel the same to Glinda across the distance.
She has never kissed Glinda, never mustered up the courage to do so. It feels silly now, that fear that had stopped her all these months as she traced the shape of Glinda’s lips with her eyes and imagined what they would feel like against her own. What precious little fantasies they were.
It’s too late to turn back now, so she kisses Glimmer instead, that clever little head of his, and she hopes Glinda will be able to feel it too. It’s all she can give her now.
And Glimmer must understand that there’s no point in further pursuit, no pulling Elphaba away from this new path she’s found herself on, for when she releases him from her hold, trying to commit the exact shades of his feathers to memory, he hovers in the air for a long moment before returning east.
Elphaba watches him go until he disappears from sight, and then, with the familiar flapping of Grym’s wings just above her, she takes off into the unknown.