A/N: How many years has it been? Too many, but I'm glad to be trying to get back into writing again - even if more post-Shiz cohabitational fluff is all I can come up with at the moment.
This one's for ribbit. I can't think how to respond adequately to your words, except to thank you for them. Please, please keep reconsidering.
Elphaba's key stuck in the lock and she had to kick the door of the garret to get it to open. The first thing she saw was Glinda at the stove with an apron round her waist, looking red in the face.
"What the devil's burning?"
"The dinner," said Glinda, in a dangerous voice.
It wasn't like Glinda to attempt advanced culinary enterprises, or even intermediate ones. Elphaba saw, too, that there were distinct signs of effort having been made around the place. There was a jar with a bunch of daisies in it on the desk, and a bottle with a real cork. Besides the apron, Glinda was wearing a blue dress she never wore to school.
It was the dress that did it. Elphaba remembered Glinda wearing it the day they moved into the garret. It had not at all been a suitable dress for unpacking in.
"Ah," she said, stopping at the door.
"Do you want to go back out and try again?"
"Happy anniversary," said Elphaba, the full realisation of her fault pushing out the thoughts of the conference paper she had been finishing in her head on the long walk home.
"That would have sounded better if you'd actually remembered."
"I had every intention. I just – "
"Didn't," said Glinda, with the tight, bright smile she used when she was really angry.
Elphaba been looking forward to shoving down some sort of leftover stodge, washing her hair and going to bed. She hadn't been expecting to walk into a domestic Situation. The combination of unexpectedness and guilt made her go on talking, which of course only made things worse. "You shouldn't have gone to all this trouble. Coming in from Lady Brickbat's and doing all this."
"Well, isn't it lucky that one of us did?"
"We could have gone out, if you'd wanted. You didn't have to cook."
"Why not? Because I'm so bad at it?" said Glinda. "And gone out where, I ask you? The penny buffet at the Spud and Shovel?"
"No. I meant somewhere you like. Somewhere nice."
"We've got no money for anywhere nice. We only just paid off the new windowpane. Or did you forget that too?"
The old window had cracked right across in a gale. Elphaba had proposed they put sticking tape over the crack and make do, but Glinda had disagreed on the basis that it made the room look like even more of a dump, and sticking tape was only prolonging the inevitable.
"Of course not," said Elphaba. "We spent half the holiday money on it."
"I do hope you're not still sulking about that."
"Me? You're the one who kept reading those brochures about package trips to the Grasslands."
"We both agreed we'll just have to settle for half a holiday this year," said Glinda. "Which is pretty appropriate, considering I only see half of you most of the time these days."
It was true that Elphaba had been much occupied with her studies. She tried not to go on about her research to Glinda in case she gave away how much she enjoyed it. Sometimes she loathed it, and that was all right; they could talk about that. But there were times in the laboratory, her eye to the microscope, when she felt the sheer exhilaration of science. To be alive completely to the gleam of the new, the incontrovertible! Glinda found no such compensation in the classroom. It was an unfairness between them, one of several for which Elphaba felt the pinch of responsibility.
"That's ridiculous," she said. "We live together. We sleep together. You see me repeatedly."
Glinda pushed a stray curl out of her face with the back of her hand. "In passing. And if you want to talk about sleeping together – " She stopped short.
"Pardon?" Though she tried not to show it, Elphaba was shocked. They rarely spoke about such matters, but then they had never really needed to. It wasn't an area in which they had ever had difficulties – at least, not after the first few times, which had been improvisational and somewhat mortifying.
"Nothing," said Glinda, redder in the face than ever, sticking her nose in the air in a way that always reminded Elphaba of Caprice-in-the-Pines. "It's nothing."
"It's obviously something, or you wouldn't have felt the need to bring it up."
At first it seemed as if Glinda wouldn't be drawn, but then she sighed. "Oh, don't let's kid ourselves, Elphie." The same wilting curl fell back into her face again and she tucked it distractedly behind her ear. Portrait of the hostess, fed up. "You must have noticed that things haven't exactly been…as they used to be."
Elphaba's first instinct was to deny it. But if she were being completely honest – "Not quite," she said, feeling a little winded.
Glinda actually looked relieved. "Honestly, I've been worrying that maybe you hadn't noticed, and it was just me. I think that would have been worse."
"But it's normal, sometimes." Wasn't it? "It happens to everyone." It did, didn't it? You couldn't expect the earth to go on figuratively moving all the time.
"I know that, I suppose. It's no-one's fault – I'm tired or you're busy, or I'm busy and you're tired, we've both got all these other things to think about, and these floorboards – I'm sorry, but I still can't look the Trundles downstairs in the eye after that time Mr Trundle asked us if we'd been moving furniture, and we should ask him next time if we needed a hand."
"It's not so bad as having Nanny and Nessarose on the other side of the wall."
"That's true," said Glinda, with a smile that was there and then gone. She looked at the ceiling and then at the new windowpane. "I just don't want it to go on being normal for us. I don't want to be desultory with you."
The little timer on the stove top went off loudly. She bent to open the oven door, screwing her face up at the blast of heat, along with an overpowering redolence of charred oranges. "Pass me the oven gloves, would you?"
Elphaba handed them to her and watched as Glinda lifted out a blackened cake tin. "I've never seen you bake before."
"You'll never see me do it again."
"What's it supposed to be?"
"Marmalade pudding."
"It looks very nice. I'm sure it'll taste fine if you scrape the top off."
"With what – a hacksaw?"
She did make Elphaba laugh, like no-one else. Elphaba went to stand beside her, hip to hip, and poked at the cake tin. "The way things are between us – you don't really worry, do you?"
"I worry about all sorts of things that I don't think ever enter your head." Glinda took off the oven gloves and tossed them aside, turning so that they were facing each other. "I have nightmares that we'll turn into one of those couples who sleep in twin beds and take up bicycling."
"I seem to recall that when we did sleep in twin beds it was quite a lot of fun, despite the restrictions imposed by proximity to walls."
Glinda gave her a distinct Look. "It wasn't all fun. I remember it more like a terrifying swerve, at the start. Having all those strange feelings in that little space." Her look changed to something softer. "I do miss it sometimes, though."
"Having strange feelings?"
"No, idiot. I still have those on a regular basis. Fortunately for you. Don't you know what I mean, though, about the beginning? It was all so intense and – oh, adventurous." Glinda's look changed again. Elphaba couldn't read it. "Not that this isn't part of the adventure. This next bit. It's simply – "
"Different?"
"Yes, but I expected that. Only the longer we've been living together – I never really anticipated how it would be different. I feel as if, in the beginning, it was an adventure without us having to do anything. It just was.Whereas now we have to try. We can't just take it for granted that everything's going to tick along like it did when we were deviant college girls."
"Crope and Tibbett seem to tick along in clover, and they were deviant college boys."
"They have their problems too," said Glinda.
"Do they? I didn't know that. What sort of problems?"
"Get your own gossip, you pilferer. If you were more diligent in keeping up with your correspondences, you too would be possessed of the details of our friends' private lives."
An image flashed into Elphaba's mind of Glinda walking across the lawns at Shiz in the same blue dress, twirling a parasol. "Do you remember that parasol you had?" she said, surprising herself.
"Which one? When?"
"It had a pattern on it. You used to carry it with that dress."
"Heavens, I had tens of the things. They all had patterns. It could have been any of them. How is it that you can remember a parasol, but you can't remember crucial dates?"
"I do try. Not hard enough, I know, but I just don't think of calendars when I think of you. The thought of you – it's not a constant thing, or an obvious thing. It never has been. It's like something that hits me over the head during the day when I'm thinking about something else. It's like – if I buy a packet of penny sherbet, and then I think I've lost it, and it turns up at the bottom of my bag." Glinda moved her; that was what she was trying to say, more than looking through any microscope. "How many buttons are there on that dress?"
"Ten," said Glinda. "No, hang on – Nine."
They looked at each other and Elphaba knew they were both thinking of their first day in the garret. Unopened boxes everywhere, the floorboards giving up their faults. "Did you never find the one that got lost?"
"I didn't, as you ought to be aware." Glinda smoothed her hands over her apron primly. "The whole day was a frightful drag. All that furniture we had to move."
"And all by ourselves."
"Such a chore! Are you actually going to apologise, or just give the impression of having done so?"
Elphaba took her hand. "This is me apologising. I'm doing it now."
"Then you could at least do it properly."
It was a sticky embrace, and Glinda smelled of burnt marmalade, but Elphaba found it exotic.
"What's in the bottle?" she said.
"Oh, it's just bargain-bucket plonk. Let's shake it up and see if it's any good. If it's not you can run down and borrow a pint of gin from Mrs Clinker."
The wine in the bottle was vile. They drank it anyway, and chucked the pudding out of the new window.