Disclaimer: I own nothing. The title belongs to the incomparable Vienna Teng; characters, setting, and metaphors (upon which I have worked my pitiful manipulation) belong to the incomparable Gregory Maguire.
Setting/Spoilers: Bookverse; set sometime after the final confrontation between Elphaba and Glinda, and Elphaba's return to Kiamo Ko.
Notes: For swordsrock, because she rocks my world. I have no other words. (Thank you! I hope this lives up to your expectations. And is it too obvious I've been reading Virginia Woolf? I hope its readable in spite of it all.) Title and summary are stolen from Vienna Teng's Recessional (and incidentally, the title of her latest album), quite logically because I'm having a love affair with her music right now.
"Damn you, Glinda," the Witch whispers, heartsick and heartbroken. Heartless. The violently setting sun is terrible in its animation, uncaring as it splashes rough, cutting hues of red illumination over everything it touches with fingers long and harsh, sickening in their exaggerated extenuation. She stares at the sky, empty, full of nothingness, bright with the illusion of somethingness.
An age-old image of a woman shrouded in mystery personified presses itself willfully, impetuously, against her closed eyelids. She gives up, disappearing behind a waterfall, lays down in a cave, sleeps for eras that pass by with the sun and changing light outside as Elphaba watches in the distance, removed. Time, sands slip. It is not enough.
She wants to curl up and sleep, and not wake for a very long time, until the world has righted itself again - or simply, until the world is right. These times cause her to detach from her mind if only for a moment, to observe as she always has from the periphery, to wonder if she's insane, if only because she's never in her life curled up (hadn't Glinda laughed at her for that? something about being all angles), always having been incapable of it.
And oh, the clockworks within turn and spin as easily as they always have even without her to initiate the cause to their effect; gears working mechanically, emotionlessly, as if she is an inanimate thing, a conduit of some higher, obsequious power able to be bent, broken, unknowingly. Far in her memory, she recalls a dragon of steel and iron, a small tiger in Quadling swamps, a glimmer-glass, a low vibration that once begun resonated in her very bones until its fading. It gives her pause, at times.
She simply doesn't have the energy or will for faith in humankind, anymore. Isn't she entitled to a little bit of insanity, doesn't she deserve it, this small justice? To let go of that last tendril of hope, those last threads of emotional bonds, spent, frayed, atrophying over twenty years, rotting unnoticed in what passed for her soul. Contamination, contagion, corruption: all necessitating a new start; tools, products untainted. The Great Human Experiment. The Unnamed God presides in his lofty omnipresence, Lurline glancing in interest over his shoulder. Kumbricia sleeps, removed.
"Damn you…"
Glinda's presence in her life has long been restricted to the Glinda of her memories. In a twist of irony, of absurdity, of reality, that Glinda is now gone, and remains in the since-grown lithe girl's frame in which the Witch had last seen her. The Witch uncharacteristically is overcome by a sudden wave of nostalgia. It isn't the first time it has happened even in the last few months, though she'd never admit it to anyone, let alone herself. Her eyes are as dry as her personality is, and as what passed for her humor and wit in the days when Elphaba and Glinda still thrived and loved and lived.
"Foolish girl, I couldn't help loving you."
She feels dissolute, dissolved, dissipate, as if she's withering away into nothing, as if this moment itself is an ending: the end of an era, the end of her life. She doesn't understand it, but that might be her own senility, perhaps her insanity. (Hasn't she lived long enough to know the difference?) She only knows that she wants to live, and live in a world that had not changed. She has always understood Glinda's terror and subsequent slide when she realized the world before her; had never told her.
She refuses to make peace with the world that would not try to make peace with her. Some last remnant of foolish hope carried over from her youth, perhaps that was it. Perhaps it's the loss of hope that sends us over the edge, she thinks. The last shred of hope, fading away into nothing, nothingness.
The Witch remembers sitting and looking out a window at a time when the sky was full, saturated with a promise of something, specific neither to its beauty or horror, its goodness or depravity, but only its imminent eventuality; something nearly tangible, something out of reach, something both beautiful and strange.
A world of equality; a land of peace.
A lullaby.
A soft voice, beside her when she looks around. Bright eyes, an eager and tender smile.
"Foolish me…" she murmurs softly. A humorless twist of the lips graces her face.
Maybe it is instead the loss of human comfort: friendly touches, loving gestures. She'd had a reason to believe in something, then, even something so simple as a lullaby. Fiyero. Glinda. Nessa. Love, hurt. Loss of hope, loss of trust, loss of love.
She closes her eyes. Pain. Grief. Time running out. Red sands running through an hourglass. Red rays clashing, fading in the sky. Red blood running through empty veins.
She opens her eyes. Nothing matters.
Nothingness.
The Witch turns away from it.