Insult

11/11/07

Rating: T

Summery: Glinda on the Wicked Witch's demise. Bookverse.

Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, though if I did you can bet things would have been different.

It was guilt that tugged at her heart. Guilt for their last words and all of the times between. Insult added to injury. Though they'd spent mere moments of their lives together, the memory of that green girl she once roomed with, had never faded from her memory. And now with the news of her death, the Wicked Witch of the West, it was a sorrow deeper than she'd imagined that consumed her.

There were moments forever burned into her, branding her and labeling her soul much as Elphie's skin set her apart from the rest of them. Moments where Glinda herself had been perhaps envious of her friend. Of that undeniable charm, she so often tried to suppress. Of that exotic beauty she could not stifle even with ugly hats and dreadful frocks. Of an eagerness, a stubbornness, and a determination she refused to set aside.

If any of them had a soul, surely it was Elphie. Almost insulting to think she hadn't had one. With her causes, her crusades, her constant need for justice had been tiring when they were children, for that's what they were. Grown children thinking they'd known better, thinking they'd owned the world and everything in it.

As they'd grown and the world settled around them with new and altogether different problems, Glinda could look back on those days spent together as their golden days. Before the innocence was snuffed out of eyes and burned out of what souls they had. She wondered how much of the darkness that comes with growing up had touched Elphie. Silly Elphie who claimed to have no soul, who wanted nothing to do with the discussion of good and evil. In the end, what did win her over? Good or Evil? Or was she right, did she really not have a soul and therefore blameless in the end?

So many of them were gone now, those friends she'd thought would always be part of her life, Glinda began to feel her age. Began to question just what it was all for. There was no one left to mourn her. No one left to remember those moments, the little quirks, no one left to share them with. If all death left were memories, how quickly they'd all fade. How long before Elphaba was nothing but a bedtime story used to frighten small children into good behavior? Or was she already?

It felt wrong. Unjustifiable and so... empty. As if her life meant nothing. As if her struggles meant even less.

Glinda knew the rumors, the lies, about her long lost friend. But she could not put them in their rightful place. How could the girl she'd known, be what they all said she was.

Perhaps Glinda was the only one willing to believe Dorothy's story of accidental death. There was something in that girl from some far off land of Kansas, that reminded the good witch of her lost friend, and perhaps that was why she wanted to believe her incapable of murder. Or maybe it was her innocence, and a need to touch that innocence again, believe in it again. To know that not all things were corrupt. That there was still good in this twisted land.

And the mystery boy, who had lived with Nanny and Elphie, who had come back with Dorothy and the others. What of him? Who was this Liir and why did he seem vaguely familiar to her? Why did she find herself watching him, examining him from all angles and hoping for a tinge of green here, or a sheen of that otherworldly black to his hair? Maybe she just wanted to create some kind of happiness for Elphie. Something that brought her friend joy. Glinda knew there had been far to little of that in Elphie's life.

She remembered when Elphie had confronted her about Fiyero, and a night much earlier when she had charmed them all with her voice in their days at Shiz and the look that had rested on Fiyero's face. She wondered now, if what Elphie had been trying to say then was that she was in fact Fiyero's mysterious mistress. If maybe she'd known that Glinda hadn't been that person, but was unable to tell her that she had. Or maybe she was just trying to find answers to so many questions she had about a life that had drifted from hers to the point of extinction.

She supposed these were things she'd never rightly know. So much about her friend had become a mystery, and Glinda hadn't minded it stay that way. That is until now, when there was nothing left of her. Not even her story, just a bastardized, half fiction version twisted by propaganda and popular belief.

It was the guilt that coiled in her stomach, far beneath her glitter and sequins, that brought it all back to her. That haunted her in her quiet moments.

That no one would remember Elphaba. No one would know that quiet girl with her nose in a book, who just wanted things to be fair. That she could do nothing about it, didn't have the power to sway a nation.

That seemed like the biggest insult of all.

AN: I finished reading the book and felt highly offended myself and wished I'd never picked up the damn thing. Consequently, this little bit of nothiness needed to be written to share in my offense. Of course I'll be reading it again, freaking thing is addictive even if right now I hate it. This was just to help with my frustration over the whole thing.