Disclaimer: I own nothing; for fun, not profit; etc.
Setting/Spoilers: Bookverse; only for Wicked... itself.
Note: So after three months of thinking about doing this, I did... and then let it sit for another month. (For good reason.) I seem to have issues with this piece, likely due to the fact that I haven't written Wicked in awhile (forever), but I missed it. Please, please, tell me if you find things awkward; or can't understand what I'm saying at all. I welcome concrit.
Also, as pertaining to the fic itself: The word belvedere is Italian in origin, and literally means 'beautiful view'. Architecturally, the term refers to any structure (or part of a structure) that commands the view.
oOo
"My dear, what they've done to this grand old place," said Glinda. "Look, those pediments are meant to support graven urns, and those revolutionary slogans are painted all over that exquisite belvedere. I hope you'll have something done, Elphie. There isn't a belvedere to match that outside the capital… Tyrants come and go, belvederes are forever."
"I never had the love of architecture that you did, Glinda," said the Witch.
Wicked, The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, pp. 341
oOo
In her later years, Glinda would attend Nessarose's funeral as Lady Chuffery, and sit with the aristocracy: the outcome an inexact future planned for her before she'd had a say in the matter – if, indeed, she'd ever had any at all. She would arrive two days early in the hopes that Elphaba, for once, would not slip through her fingers (she was not blind or dumb; she knew that for much of her life, Elphaba had likely lived within five miles of her), and she would be successful.
"Bless her soul," Glinda would say of Nessie. "Or do you still not believe in the soul?"
"I can make no comment on the souls of others," would say Elphaba.
oOo
It was often that when she went out, Glinda reflected, that Elphaba's eyes would follow her. Whether or not Elphaba was consciously aware of this, however, was likely something that would remain privy only to the girl in question.
Now, she was just as likely to toss an enigmatic "I'll be back in a moment, Elphie" over her shoulder as she left as she was to flounce out without a word and let Elphaba stew in silence, eyes unremittingly on her book or homework or philosophy of the day. It was terrible of her, Glinda knew, but provoking Elphie had a certain quality of dangerous fun which was altogether too amusing to instigate, and by which she knew she'd never be burned – at least, not over something as trivial as this.
The promised moments became hours on these occasions, when the cover of want of fresh air segued into long walks toward her architectural havens. After all, Shiz had not sprung up out of a void at the word of the Unnamed God or the command of Lurline, and its history was gloriously laid out and reflected in the art of its buildings. They leapt from their obscurity like living things: the liveliness of the Gallantine plaza design at the center of the city, the illusionary movement in the facades of the still-standing feudalistic palaces of the Bluestone Revival. She reveled in the incongruity of it all, even as she wrinkled her nose in simultaneous appreciation and aesthetic disgust.
(Secretly, she'd always thought it a shame such places were to be gotten only by bequest, prohibited by law from selling on the market or by less conventional means. Such patronizing form, such supercilious grace and overelegance! )
Impulsively, she took hold of Elphaba's arm one day on an impromptu venture, saying "What a roofline! I hadn't thought there was any roofline sculpture outside Frottica."
Elphie had looked at her a bit oddly for that comment, but went with it. "I had thought the taste for that was out of style."
"Maybe," Glinda replied, "if you don't give a twit for the art of the building. The sculpturing isn't a removable part of the structure, but an extension of the building itself. It has always grated on my nerves to see anything of the Reformed Gallantine school without the roofline."
Elphaba smiled a little, but did not comment; and this was so odd in and of itself that it left Glinda feeling, much as she often did when with Elphaba, a little perturbed.
"What?" she asked.
"I suppose I have learned what comes of you taking new shortcuts about the city," Elphaba said, nodding to a grand old Methric church converted just a few decades past to government use; and Glinda could not read her.
"You're mocking me," she cried accusingly, making to disengage her arm.
But Elphie kept firm hold, and Glinda relented. "Hardly, my sweet. Hurry, or we shall be late to lunch."
The topic was dropped, and Glinda did her best not to make any more outbursts, keeping exploration of the city to herself once again.
oOo
"Shiz was founded on religion," she remembered Elphaba saying once, early in the first tentative steps of their friendship. Boq and Crope and Tibbett had surrounded her at her first – and one of her last – sojourns with Elphie to their clandestine coffee shop gatherings. Glinda had perked up at that, having paid little attention to the rest of the goings-on (which to hear Elphaba dance around the subject were made to seem much more interesting than they had right to).
"Wasn't it originally just Old Saint Ailineas' Monastery in town? A feudalistic village somewhat ahead of its time where literature and philosophy were concerned?" Crope had asked.
"Old Saint Ailineas' as it originally stood doesn't exist anymore," Glinda spoke up, surprising herself, "nor was it originally named for Saint Ailineas. It's a replica – as far as the next century understood replicas to be constructed – and was commissioned by the first band of Unionists in the area. It had nothing to do with the original."
Elphaba's gaze fell on her, surprised but not displeased; and she felt her face grow warm.
"Yes," Elphie had gone on. "Shiz eventually became the center of Ozian industrialism four centuries after that. The capital was only moved with the acquisition of the Quadling Lands to make the country more centralized, and even then it didn't particularly take as a capital until the instatement of His High and Mightiness, the Wizard."
It was nothing she had not already known, or cared to know, never having been a connoisseur of modern history; and with no other opportunities to contribute to the conversation, Glinda withdrew.
Given the origins of the city, it was unsurprising that the best architecture to be found was borne of religion, and she found herself drawn toward both the city's center and fringes more and more. There were glories for the taking: the Gallantine chapel on the edge of Shiz she'd not yet had a chance to visit; the converted Merthic cathedral and its stained marble relief sculpting, the combination of industrialism and rain having done its damage to fantastic beasts and commemorative battles alike; the smaller, truer replica of the more mainstream Saint-Ailineas in downtown Shiz, thrown into bright shades of cerulean and orpiment and aubergine by day, and shadow play by night.
Nightfall and candlelight brought a sense of the preternatural to such large spaces, much as stained light brought a sense of the otherworldly, whim or fancy beyond that of the one bearing the torch illuminating fluted pillar and fanned vault. Streams of lux nova transformed self and space, tangible until touched and broken without effort. The soul was a personal matter, and whatever religion was, it was not entirely inseparable from these beams, catching shards of angled tesserae in the older churches, at once sharp and soft, untouchable despite its tactility.
If there was such a thing as a higher power, it was such places as these that had the greatest chance of convincing even the strongest willed atheist.
Perhaps this was the greatest pity of these places, grandeur steadfast in the face of crumbling faith: a tragic irony. So Glinda supposed, at least – having no real inclination toward faith in any of the proposed deities outside any of her havens, she supposed she couldn't lend weight to either side of the argument.
And perhaps this is the greatest irony of all, Elphaba might toss back at her if she had been following her thought processes and known more of her intellectual vice. It often seemed she did enough of the former anyway.
Irony coming from the atheistic preacher's daughter, she would tease back, shaking her golden curls without any of her former consciousness of self and ego, ego and self; but no, this solace was her secret.
oOo
"I may not adhere to any belief in what may or may not lay beyond the physical world, but it hardly means I believe the tradition should be entirely uprooted from Oz," Elphaba had said of the topic on another occasion, vehemently pacing at the formal disclusion of a Philosophy of Religion class from the latest course listings.
"Is it?"Glinda had asked, genuinely curious. "The Ozma cult has been dying out these hundred years, yes, but I was under the impression the Unionist faith was still strong."
Elphaba had snorted. "Human belief, at least in the present day, tends toward the here-and-now. Unionism began wilting under the stress of the Wizard." She gestured again to the course list.
"Can you even being to imagine, Glinda, what would be lost in the human understanding with the eradication of the history of all that we are? All our tradition, our identity. It's one thing to disagree, but entirely another to destroy."
Looking back in later years, Glinda thought she should have seen this as the first warning sign. At the time, Glinda pictured her sad, dilapidated glories withering in the heart of Shiz; her protected historical markers along the college's edge.
She'd wondered what the Emerald City was like.
oOo
"By the by, I passed an interesting deviation of the Merthic style, if I'm not mistaken – which I may very well be – that I thought you might appreciate on my way back from Three Queens."
Surprised by the non sequitur, Glinda looked up at her roomie, who was gently disengaging herself from a woolen scarf.
Glinda opted not to comment, though the half-smile on Elphie's face was comment enough. Gracefully she remarked, "I'm sure I've seen everything on and around this campus. Is it the old merchant's house near Meridian Way?"
"It is not," Elphaba said confidently, settling herself comfortably on a chair to warm her hands in the fire's glow, a fond glance for Glinda partly masked in shadow. "Far too flamboyant for that, though I'm sure I don't know what its purpose is, or was. Architecture never was of any strong interest to me."
It turned out to be a carriage house that belonged to the old horse exchange, hidden by foliage and overgrowth, and was indeed after the short-lived Merthic Flamboyant style. Glinda was sorry to see it in poorer condition than many of the other structures in the city. There was a quirk to it she felt instinctively not many would readily accept: its severe ogee arches, its irrelative angles, its defiant air.
She found herself wishing for dusk and candlelight.
oOo
"How juvenile, how devoid of irony!" she had once murmured about the illustrious City of Emeralds, sitting in a worn carriage and full of more fear and confidence than she'd ever have of either at any other point in her life.
Shiz, she'd thought to herself at the time, would have done much better to remain the capital, equidistance and convenience be damned. Gillikin had always been and would likely always be the industrial sector of Oz, and lent itself easily to doubling as a business center. Munchkinlanders tended to keep to themselves; and heavens knew Quadlings and Winkies did so to an even larger degree. What need was there, she questioned, for such a shift?
"It's political," Elphaba returned, taking a bite out of an apple on that hazy afternoon. "And politics, by nature, do not lend themselves to convenience."
Neither, she now reflected, did life itself. A small, ironic smile graced her features as she surveyed her new townhouse.
"The pomp, the pretension!" Glinda unknowingly echoed her younger self,
"What was that, my dear?" Chuffery came up next to her, taking her arm with a smile.
In her mind's eye, Elphaba bared her teeth in a smirk.
oOo
In her later years, Glinda walked arm in arm with Elphaba, unconsciously circling the spot where Nessa had been killed. Sunset only made the damage done to Elphaba's ancestral home grisly in crude shades of gamboge and crimson, and she had been glad enough when Elphie had guided her away.
She was terribly sorry she had not seen Colwen Grounds before now. There was such a prevalence of destruction – and ah! what that belvedere had once been, she could only imagine. Such depravity, such debauchery! How could it be allowed, be condoned?
"There isn't a belvedere to match that outside the capital! Tyrants come and go, belvederes are forever," she sang out, clinging to Elphie's arm and the pretension of it all as if a revival of the past itself.
With an expression she couldn't read, Elphaba patted her arm through her voluminous sleeves, seeming to pierce her very soul with a single glance, and spoke:
"I never had the love of architecture that you did, Glinda."