A/N: Bookverse, all the time. Same story, the other woman's side. Slightly more depressing than the first, if that were possible.
Laudes
Angels are always painted softly, but the Scriptures call them terrible. Fae's heart grabs her throat. She runs.
The Witch saw her for the last time and she called her name but she kept walking, she kept walking.
She doesn't hear Glinda follow her over the pounding of the blood in her ears. She was trained how to avoid pursuit, she knows the crannies to hide in, the alleys to take, but she's frantic and her blood is screaming over her mind. She slips into her hideaway without even checking for feet behind her, without even pausing to latch the door.
Glinda bursts into the room moments behind her, stops, stares. She grabs Elphaba's shirtfront, and kisses her without even pausing to check the windows. Elphaba scrabbles her hand against the side of the wall, catches herself from falling. "Don't talk," Glinda says, "I can't do this if I'm thinking."
The Witch turned a dead woman's shoe over in her hand, the Witch watched her lover's wife bend over a loom.
Glinda smells the same as she did those few months ago in Shiz, soft and pink and like glitter, if glitter had a scent, glitter and soap, and her lips are iron brands against the back of Elphaba's eyelids, and when the blonde pulls back Elphaba's blood is pounding so hard she can feel it in her teeth, the room is spinning, and Glinda is piercing her with eyes blue like phthalo, blue like children bruising.
Glinda's smirking and something cold and hot lances through the back of Elphaba's abdomen in response, but Glinda doesn't smirk, Glinda never smirked, and then she pulls Elphaba down. She catches Elphaba's lip between her teeth and the green woman crumples onto the pallet shoved in the corner of the room, and Glinda drops after, soft and heavy and deliciously solid.
The Witch never made it up to them, his wives or her son. The Witch was a knot of things that should never have happened, and then she was undone.
Glinda lays a palm flat against the other woman's cheekbone and Elphaba loses the thought to the sensation of Glinda, lips and fingertips and hip pressing against her own. Fae kisses back and reaches a hand up and tangles it in Glinda's hair, (she must have been travelling light, to have forgotten her conditioner). It pools like incense, and when Elphaba tugs it the gods moan and Glinda drags her hips along the green woman's thigh. Glinda leaves a streak of kisses against Elphaba's neck, wet enough to burn, and Elphaba's the one to fumble with the buttons of Glinda's shirtfront. A heavy brocade that borders on the matronly, a piece Elphaba can't remember her ever buying, a brocade that Elphaba will rip to shreds if it doesn't open, and then it does and Lurline take whoever designed chemises, but Glinda's slipping out of her skirts and petticoats and the chemise too.
They lose their heads. The Witch lost her soul, somewhere, if you could lose something without ever really having it. She could only find blades in her where other people found touch, she burned at the stroke of tears. Everyone (Galinda) kept insisting she had a soul, and then they didn't insist, anymore, they agreed with her initial assessment, but the Witch still lived. Her soul was a girl in a plaid dress, with two braids and a stupid dog. It lived away from her and then walked back.
Glinda's face is covered with a sheen of sweat and oil, after. It makes her glow. Elphaba pulls back a curl and presses her lips to the blonde woman's temple. Glinda's skin puckers a little, a trace of acne at the hairline. She had spent hours complaining loudly about it, back at Shiz, the acne.
And Glinda murmurs, so low Elphaba's half-convinced it's just her imagination, "Come to Shiz."
Elphaba can't say no, but she can't say yes, either, so she just stares. Glinda glares, and snorts, says "fine," crushes her lips against Elphaba's own. The Witch had always been incapable of love, it was lost with the blades, but if she had been, if she had been, it would have been Galinda or at least, the life hanging between them, the two narrow beds and the books and nail polish, the smirk and the smile when strangers walked by, the cream and beer on a table and the people chanting around it.
Galinda smiles over her shoulder in the mirror, says "Didn't I tell you? You're so pretty." They are nothing, nothing at all, they are lit by the amber of the decades and the shadow of the Witch's blades, they are standing in firelit ruin, the Witch hid her eyes in her arms on the table and put the needle and thread down.
The Witch waited for them to pass. They did, eventually. The Witch lifted up her head and saw nothing but a corpse's wing, the Witch went back to her stitches.