Chapter Text
The thing about emeralds, Elphaba had learned, was that they made poor witnesses. They transformed the dull administrative tedium of governance into something that appeared - to those who squinted from the correct angle - almost magical. The throne room's walls, inlaid with stones that had cost more than feeding the Quadling Country for a year, currently reflected forty-seven ministers in various states of obsequious attention, one empty chair upholstered in pink silk, and Elphaba's own face, green as ever.
"The Gillikinese tariff proposal requires both signatures," the Minister of Commerce was saying. He had the voice of a man who gargled with gravel and ambition in equal measure. "As per the Dual Sovereignty Act of-"
"I'm aware of the Act," Elphaba said. "I wrote it."
She had, in fact, done so at three in the morning on their wedding night, while Glinda slept in the chamber across the hall.
The Minister coughed. The sound echoed off emerald walls and everyone's carefully maintained neutrality. "Yes, well. The Eminence Glinda has been... detained."
"Detained," Elphaba repeated. The word tasted medical. Clinical. It was the sort of word one used for prisoners, not for one's wife..
"Her ladies-in-waiting indicated she was indisposed." The Minister shuffled his papers. They made a sound like insect wings. "Perhaps we might reconvene when both Eminences are available to-"
"Sign it."
Forty-seven heads swiveled. The empty pink chair said nothing, which was what it did best lately.
"I beg your pardon, Eminence?"
Elphaba stood. The movement sent her black robes cascading around her like an oil spill. "I said sign it. Bring me the document. I'll forge her signature."
The council achieved a quality of silence that was almost impossible in a room like this.
"That would be..." The Minister of Commerce had gone pale. "Technically, Eminence, that would constitute fraud."
"Technically," Elphaba agreed, "it would constitute getting something done before we all die of old age waiting for my wife to emerge from whatever constitutional crisis is currently occupying her attention in the East Wing."
She regretted it immediately - not the sentiment, which was honest, but the honesty itself. One of the many exhausting aspects of ruling was that feelings had to be wrapped in seven layers of diplomatic phrasing before they could be aired in public, like corpses too rotten for open caskets.
"Perhaps," ventured the Minister of Agriculture, who was either very brave or very stupid, "we might send an inquiry to the Eminence Glinda? To ascertain her position on the tariffs?"
"Her position," Elphaba said, "is that Gillikinese grain merchants are robbing the southern provinces blind and she'll agree to anything that makes them cry. My position is identical. Sign the damned thing and bring it to me."
She forged Glinda's signature with the ease of long practice. The loops were too tight - Glinda's handwriting had a breathless quality, all air and aspiration, while Elphaba's forgeries always came out slightly strangled - but no one would look closely. No one ever did.
The ministers filed out with the relieved expressions. Elphaba remained in the throne room, standing between two chairs: one black as a burned forest, one pink as a wound that wouldn't heal.
This was the third time this week Glinda had missed a state function.
No - Elphaba's mind immediately corrected the thought. This was the third time this week Glinda had been absent from a state function. "Missing" implied accident, implied she'd somehow misplaced the meeting in the same way one misplaced spectacles or moral conviction. Glinda's absences were never accidental..
The pattern had started… when? Elphaba tried to trace it backward through the accumulated sediment of their marriage. Six months ago, certainly it had been noticeable by then. The morning meetings Glinda sent her regrets for, the state dinners where she appeared for exactly the minimum required duration before pleading headache, fatigue, feminine complaint (that last always worked; mention menstruation and powerful men would agree to anything to end the conversation).
A year ago? At the beginning of everything? Possibly. Elphaba remembered a night when she'd gone to Glinda's chambers - they still occasionally did that then, maintained the fiction of attempting intimacy - and found the door locked with Glinda's head lady-in-waiting, a granite-faced woman named Oatsie, stationed outside like a particularly well-dressed guard.
"The Eminence is resting," Oatsie had said.
"I'm her wife."
"The Eminence is resting," Oatsie had repeated.
Elphaba had returned to her own wing. She'd told herself it was respect for boundaries. Respect for privacy. Respect for the fact that marriage - particularly political marriage - didn't automatically grant unlimited access to another person's interior life.
She'd told herself many things. The thing about being intelligent was that one could construct remarkably sophisticated lies and call them logic.
The afternoon sun, filtered through emerald walls, made Elphaba's shadow on the floor look like something drowned. She stared at Glinda's empty chair and thought: When had they become the kind of people who ignored each other?
But she knew when. It had been gradual as greening, as inevitable as the way her own skin had darkened from spring grass to winter pine over the course of her life. They had married for Oz - because someone had to unite the Gillikin and Munchkinland factions, because the Wizard's departure had left a vacuum that would fill with either cooperation or civil war, because Glinda had looked at her with those strategically wide brown eyes and said, "We could do it together. We could actually fix things."
And they had. Fixed the currency, fixed the trade routes, fixed the broken machine of state that the Wizard had left rusting in his wake. They'd fixed everything except whatever was breaking between them, because that would have required acknowledging it was broken, and acknowledgment required conversation, and conversation required proximity, and proximity was the one thing they'd systematically engineered out of their lives.
Elphaba walked to Glinda's throne. Up close, the pink upholstery showed signs of wear. She touched the fabric. It felt like touching a ghost - a memory.
Her fingers came away smelling of Glinda's perfume. That godawful floral concoction that smelled like what would happen if a garden died and went to heaven. Elphaba had always hated it. She lifted her fingers to her nose and breathed deeply.
The door to the throne room opened. Elphaba turned, expecting a minister with another crisis, another document requiring two signatures and receiving one.
It was Dr. Nikidik. Or rather, it was Dr. Nikidik the Younger, son of her old professor, a man who'd inherited his father's medical license and his habit of looking at Elphaba as if she were a biological curiosity rather than a person.
He stopped when he saw her. For a moment, they simply stared at each other across the expanse of emerald floor.
"Eminence," he said finally. "I didn't expect- I was just-"
"You were just leaving the East Wing," Elphaba said. "At four in the afternoon. Which is an unusual time for a social call."
"I'm the court physician. I make rounds."
"You make rounds at nine in the morning. I've seen the schedule." Elphaba moved toward him with the deliberate quality of a chess piece advancing. "So either you've changed your routine, or someone in the East Wing required medical attention at an unusual hour. Again."
Dr. Nikidik's face achieved the expression of a man caught between professional ethics and self-preservation. "I'm not at liberty to discuss my patients' conditions, Eminence. Surely you understand-"
"I understand," Elphaba said quietly, "that my wife has apparently required a physician's attention three times this week, and I'm learning about it by accident. I understand that something is happening in the East Wing that everyone knows about except me. I understand that I'm being managed like a child."
"Eminence Glinda values her privacy."
"Eminence Glinda is my wife."
"Yes," Dr. Nikidik said. "She is."
Elphaba felt something shift in her chest, some tectonic plate of patience finally grinding past its breaking point. She'd spent months - months - respecting boundaries, maintaining distance, telling herself that love meant allowing people their secrets. But there was a difference between privacy and exile, between respect and abandonment.
"I'm going to the East Wing," she said.
Dr. Nikidik's expression flickered. "I wouldn't advise-"
"I wasn't asking for advice."
She walked past him, through the doors, into the corridor that led from green to pink. Behind her, she heard Dr. Nikidik say something, but the words soon dissolved into nothing.
The East Wing smelled different. Elphaba had forgotten that, or perhaps she'd never let herself notice. While the West Wing smelled of paper and ink and the accumulated mustiness of political documents, the East Wing smelled of flowers - the cloying sweetness of flowers kept past their prime, dying slowly in expensive vases.
Glinda's ladies-in-waiting clustered near the entrance to her chambers. Oatsie stood at the center, arms crossed.
"She's resting," Oatsie said.
Elphaba was so tired of that phrase. "Move."
"The Eminence gave specific instructions-"
"The Eminence," Elphaba said, "can give me those instructions herself."
She pushed past Oatsie, past the carefully constructed barrier. Someone grabbed her arm - one of the younger attendants, a girl with more loyalty than sense - and Elphaba shook her off with enough force that she stumbled backward.
The chamber looked as if a small, localized hurricane had passed through it. The vanity's contents were scattered across the floor: bottles, brushes, cosmetics forming a constellation of Glinda's daily reconstruction of herself. The curtains had been torn down from one window. Papers covered every surface, and on the walls-
On the walls, Glinda had been writing.
With something that looked like it might have been charcoal. Words covered the pink wallpaper in loops and spirals, Glinda's perfect penmanship deteriorating into something primal:
THE SKY IS FALLING
THE SKY IS FALLING
THE SKY IS WATCHING
THE SKY KNOWS
THE SKY WILL TELL
THE SKY IS FALLING
It repeated, over and over, climbing the walls like ivy, spreading across the ceiling in letters that grew larger and more desperate until they were barely legible.
And Glinda herself, in the center of this catastrophe, still pacing. Still talking.
"-can't let it see, it sees everything, Venus sees and Mars sees and all the wandering stars see, they report back, they tell the Unnamed God where I am-" She turned, and for a moment her eyes passed over Elphaba without recognition, without even acknowledgment. "The sky keeps records. Every thought, every sin, recorded in the movements of celestial bodies. We think we're private but we're not, we're never private, the sky is a vast bureaucracy of judgment and it's watching, always watching-"
"Glinda," Elphaba said.
Nothing. Glinda continued pacing, continued her recitation of astronomical paranoia. Her feet were bare, with black stains on her toes.
"Glinda," Elphaba said again, louder.
Glinda's head snapped toward her. For a moment, there was a flicker of something in her eyes. Then it vanished, replaced by a kind of frantic urgency.
"You," Glinda said. She moved toward Elphaba with unsteady steps, grabbed her arm with bony fingers. "You have to help me cover the windows. All of them. Do you have black cloth? It has to be black, colors are transparent to celestial observation, only true darkness provides-"
"Eminence," Oatsie said quietly. "Perhaps you should-"
"Get out," Elphaba said. She didn't look at Oatsie, couldn't look away from Glinda's face. "All of you. Get out."
"Dr. Nikidik said-"
"I don't care what Dr. Nikidik said. Get. Out."
The ladies-in-waiting retreated like a tide going out. The door closed, leaving Elphaba with a stranger who wore Glinda's face and spoke in Glinda's voice but had the eyes of someone drowning.
Glinda had already forgotten about the windows. She was back to pacing, back to her litany. "The conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter indicates catastrophic revelation, the moon…" Her pupils were dilated, her breathing rapid and shallow. Her skin had a grayish cast beneath its habitual pink glow. The pacing followed a specific pattern - seven steps to the wall, touch the writing, seven steps back, repeat. Obsessive-compulsive, possibly manic, definitely detached from consensus reality.
"When did this start?" Elphaba asked, though she didn't expect an answer.
"Tuesday," Glinda said. "That’s when I understood the pattern. The stars have been trying to tell me for years but I wasn't listening-"
"Not the stars.” Elphaba could hear the strain in her own voice. “Glinda?”
But Glinda was gone again, lost in whatever internal astronomical nightmare was consuming her. She'd moved to the wall, her fingers leaving dark smears on it.
"Glinda. Can you hear me?"
"Of course I can hear you," Glinda said in a hushed tone, without turning around. "The problem is the sky can too. Do you understand?”
“No.” A strange urge crept up from somewhere deep inside her - to cry, perhaps. Or maybe to run. “I don’t.”
“That is alright, dear. I’ll protect us.” The pacing returned. Seven steps. Touch the wall. Seven steps back. Her lips moved continuously, sometimes audible, sometimes silent.
Elphaba looked around the room, trying to find something that made sense, some handhold of rationality in this mess. The papers scattered across the floor caught her attention. She picked one up.
It was a chart. Astrological, by the look of it, though far more complex than any horoscope Elphaba had seen. Glinda had drawn the positions of planets, calculated angles, annotated everything with notes in her deteriorating handwriting:
Mars square Neptune indicates deception of self and others. Moon in eighth house: death of identity. Saturn return: karmic reckoning cannot be avoided.
There were dozens of these charts. Hundreds, maybe. All dated, all analyzed, all pointing toward some catastrophic conclusion that only Glinda could see.
"You've been doing this for a while," Elphaba concluded quietly, feeling something in her chest give way. She had not known.
How?
The door rattled. Oatsie's voice came through, carefully neutral: "Eminence, Dr. Nikidik is here. He has medication that might help her rest."
Rest. That word again.
Elphaba looked at Glinda - still pacing, still praying or cursing or whatever one called this desperate negotiation with an astronomical deity. She looked at the walls covered in frantic writing. She looked at the overturned furniture, the scattered cosmetics, the evidence of hours or days spent alone with nothing but fear and stars for company.
"No," Elphaba said.
"Eminence-"
"No medication. Not yet. I need-" What did she need? Information. Context. The truth that everyone else apparently knew. "I need to speak with Dr. Nikidik. Out here. Now."
She moved to the door, where both of them stood by the corridor.
"How long has this been happening?" Elphaba asked.
He glanced past her at Glinda, still visible through the open door. "How long has what been happening, Eminence?"
"Don't," Elphaba said quietly, "insult my intelligence. How long has my wife been having episodes like this?"
A pause. Then: "Since before you married her."
The words were difficult to hear - more difficult still to accept. Had she truly been so selfish? So blind to the suffering of her own wife?
"And you've been treating her."
"Managing her. There's no treatment, not really. There are tinctures that help her sleep, medicines that dull the worst of it, but..." He gestured helplessly at the room "As you can see."
"Does she know? I mean, when she's- when she's herself, does she know this happens?"
"She's always herself, Eminence," Dr. Nikidik said, and there was something almost gentle in his voice.
Behind Elphaba, Glinda's voice rose slightly: "The judgment approaches, the heavens will fall-"
"How long does it last?" Elphaba asked.
"Hours. Days, sometimes. There's no pattern to it, or if there is, I haven't found it. Stress makes it worse. Lack of sleep. Change."
Elphaba turned back to the room. Glinda was sitting now. On the floor. With her head in her hands. She rocked slightly.
"Leave us," Elphaba said.
"Eminence, I really think-"
"Please, leave." Elphaba looked at Dr. Nikidik, at Oatsie, at the small crowd of ladies-in-waiting who'd gathered to witness this unraveling. "All of you. And lock the door from the outside. I'll knock when-” When what? “I'll knock."
The lock clicked.
She crossed the room slowly. Sat down on the floor beside Glinda, careful not to touch, leaving a space between them that felt both necessary and unbearable.
"Glinda," Elphaba said. "Glinda, look at me."
Glinda didn't look. She continued rocking.
"Glinda." Elphaba's voice sharpened. "Stop this. Stop- whatever this is. We need to talk about-"
"Seven times seven is forty-nine," Glinda said suddenly. "Four and nine is thirteen. One and three is four. Four is the number of corners in a room, four walls to keep the sky out, but it's not working, the sky sees through them-"
"That's not-" Elphaba stopped herself. Started again, forcing calm into her voice. "The sky can't see through walls. That's not how vision works. That's not how anything works."
"You don't understand the nature of celestial observation," Glinda said. She was still rocking, still not looking at Elphaba. "Physical barriers are meaningless to astronomical entities. They see through time and space and stone. They see through everything."
"No," Elphaba said, and she could hear her own voice rising despite her efforts to control it. "No, they don't. The sky doesn't see anything because the sky isn't sentient. Stars are balls of burning gas. Planets are rocks. They don't observe, they don't judge, they don't-"
"The Unnamed God uses them as instruments," Glinda interrupted. Her voice had the patient quality of someone explaining something obvious to someone slow. "The stars are its eyes. The planets are its record-keepers. Every movement is notation in a vast accounting of sin and righteousness and I am so far in debt, Elphaba. The calculations don't lie. Mars in the seventh house, Saturn retrograde, Venus in opposition to-"
"Stop it!" Elphaba's hands clenched into fists. She hadn't meant to shout, hadn't meant to let the fear and confusion curdle into anger, but it came anyway, hot and acidic. "Just stop. This isn't- you're not making sense. You're saying things that aren't real."
For the first time since Elphaba had entered the room, Glinda looked directly at her. Her brown eyes were wide and absolutely certain, with the terrible clarity of someone who has seen a truth others cannot perceive.
"They are, Elphie." she said simply.
Elphaba stood abruptly. Went to the window - the one window Glinda hadn't covered - and stared out at the actual sky, the real one, full of ordinary stars doing nothing more sinister than existing. She pressed her forehead against the glass and felt something hot behind her eyes that might have been tears.
A whole year. They'd been married for a whole year. And in all that time, had she ever really looked at Glinda? Or had she only seen what Glinda wanted her to see?
"You've been lying to me," It was not fair. She knew that. But she felt her reason slipping away all the same."You've been… what? Hiding this? Purposely keeping me away? Pretending to be someone you're not?"
"That’s the only thing that keeps the sky from seeing the truth of me,” Glinda said. She had risen now and was once more making her way toward the wall. "If I can pretend for long enough, maybe the final accounting will overlook the fundamental wrongness. Maybe the stars will record only the surface and not- not this."
"There is no accounting!" Elphaba spun around, and the anger was fully present now, sharp and bright and utterly useless. "There are no stars keeping records. There is no Unnamed God with celestial bureaucracy. There's just you, alone in this room, writing nonsense on the walls and talking to planets that don't care whether you exist."
Glinda flinched. It was a small movement, barely perceptible, but Elphaba saw it. Saw the way her wife - her actual wife, the person beneath the delusion - registered the words.
But when Glinda spoke, her voice was still lost. "You can't see them because you're not the one being observed. The sky's attention is selective. It watches those who are already condemned, tracks them through their movements and their choices and their secret thoughts. You've been spared because you're righteous. I'm the one who-"
"I'm not righteous," Elphaba said, and the anger drained out of her all at once, leaving something worse: helplessness. She was arguably the smartest person in Oz, had studied philosophy and sorcery and political theory, could argue circles around any scholar in the Emerald City. And none of it mattered. None of that could reach the woman standing three feet away. "I'm not righteous, Glinda. I'm just- I'm just me. And you're just you. And there's no sky watching, no judgment coming, no-"
She stopped. Glinda wasn't listening. Had probably never been. She was too deep in whatever reality her mind had constructed. She sank back to the floor.
Glinda was at the wall again, adding more writing, though this time it was nearly indecipherable.
And Elphaba just watched.
“Alright,” She said softly. She did not know how long she had been sitting there, only that it was long enough for the tears she had fought so hard to restrain to slip quietly down her cheeks. “Alright.”
She moved carefully toward her wife. Glinda's shoulders were rigid with tension, her entire body vibrating with the effort of whatever internal catastrophe was consuming her.
"What do you need?" Elphaba asked.
The blonde did not turn to face her, but Elphaba could see her eyes straining not to be caught trying. “The windows,” she said quietly. “They must be covered. The mirrors as well.”
“Okay.”
Glinda blinked. Some of the frantic energy seemed to drain from her posture, replaced by confusion. "You believe me?"
No, Elphaba thought. I don't believe you. But saying that wouldn't help.
“Yes, my sweet. We need to keep you safe."
It was like watching someone surface from deep water. Glinda's breathing slowed slightly. Her hands stopped their trembling, or at least trembled less. She looked at Elphaba with something that might have been gratitude or might have been relief or might have been the simple, desperate hope that she was no longer alone in her terror.
"The curtains," she said. "We can use the curtains from the bed. They're thick enough, I think. If we layer them. And there are blankets in the cupboard. Dark ones."
"Show me."
They worked together in silence. Elphaba followed whatever instructions were thrown her way, pulling down curtains, draping blankets over windows, covering the mirrors with whatever fabric they could find. It was absurd.
It was heartbreaking.
"The vanity mirror," Glinda said, pointing. "It's the worst one. It's positioned to reflect the eastern sky at sunrise, which means it captures the morning star's observation. Venus. Venus is the worst.”
Elphaba wanted to scream. Wanted to shake Glinda, to force reality back into her, to make her see how insane this all was. Instead, she picked up a blanket and carefully draped it over the vanity mirror, tucking it in so no reflective surface showed.
"Better?" she asked.
Glinda stared at the covered mirror. "Better," she whispered. "That's- yes. Better."
The room grew darker. The frantic quality of Glinda’s movements diminished, replaced by a heavy exhaustion.
“Bed.” It sounded more like a command than Elphaba would have wished, but she was too tired to soften it.
And Glinda didn’t really seem to mind, because she merely nodded in agreement, climbing in obediently. She pulled the covers up to her chin and stared at the darkened ceiling.
"It's still watching," she said quietly.
"Then I'll watch it back," Elphaba said, sitting on the edge of the bed she had never shared with her wife - not even in those tentative beginnings, when she still tried, when she believed they might become something more. Hoped for it, at least. “I will keep watch. If the sky attempts anything, I shall… I shall see to it.”
Glinda's hand crept out from under the covers, reached for Elphaba's. Her fingers were cold and stained.
"Don't let it take me," she whispered. "When the judgment comes. Don't let it take me."
"I won't," Elphaba held Glinda's hand and lied with her whole heart. "I promise."