A/N: Reviews are sweet. (:
Disclaimer: I can only wish for them to be mine.
It's her.
Elphaba's looking out across the room even though she'd almost convinced herself on the journey that she's a little bit mad. But she's not. Now she's sure of it, looking into the sunlight pouring in through the high windows, unable to focus her eyes (lest she squint and make it all too apparent that there is something (or someone) that she wants to see badly enough to stare into the sun).
As it is, all she can make out is the blonde hair, streaked through with sunlight, gleaming against the pale skin and dress. The girl's face is too far to be made out, but the drop in Elphaba's stomach leaves no room for doubt.
She backs into the wall, backs into the whisperings of voices and of ruffled dresses. Hiding, running.
That girl is the reason that Turtle Heart's glass is wrapped in the farthest corner of her closet. (The only place it would never be found.)
She can remember it, ten years old, tucked away from the rotting house and her family's crumbling love, stretched out in the green grass, distorting the trees and sky in the dull blue ice of the orb.
And then the image changed, as if the trees and the miles of sky beyond them had all surrendered themselves to the image of the beautiful, golden-haired girl. The girl sat, pencil between her small, short fingers, tapping the lacquered desktop and staring, unfocused, out a window that Elphaba could not see.
Immediately, Elphaba knew that the girl was her angel. She was unlike anyone, anything that Elphaba could remember having ever seen. Something in her eyes, which were so beautiful, so delicately pastel like the eyes of Nessa's dolls, and yet so sad, as if the blue there had the sky trapped within it, the sky that the girl stared at so longingly through the window's glass.
Every time Shell's crying became too much, or Nessa's weighted pleas for assurance became too much, Elphaba darted off through the trees to lie alone on her back in the middle of the grasses that nearly blanketed her, staring into the glass with such a strong desire to be where the girl was that she was sure that her eyes must have turned blue with the longing.
Not that that made any sense, of course. But she had never known so much longing before those blue eyes. Not in the mother that she was sad to remember. Not in the sister that had no one to forget.
It became an obsession. Escape. She hated herself, running away, always running away to the green grass and the sky and the girl that was so beautifully sad, a distant reminder of the mother that also had run, pinlobble leaves and sunlight on her skin…
She'd taken the glass and hidden it away, taking the image and hiding it away, and returned to Nessa's side amidst Nanny's murmurings of "Told you she'd come around" that she thought that Elphaba couldn't hear.
And yet, when Elphaba finally thought she was escaping from the suffocating close air and trees of the only childhood she could remember, she suddenly was feeling suffocated again like she couldn't breathe, seeing the small silhouette of the girl in white, chairs gleaming about her waist, sunlight falling around her like a quiet wind.
Elphaba's angel.
A distant voice called her name. Something akin to "Miss Elphaba Thropp, Etc." She felt like that's what she'd get her name changed to. Shorter. So much easier to remember than being forced to remember the mother from whom she'd received the Et of the Etc.
"Miss Thropp?"
Elphaba looked up, despite her best judgment, despite her wish for disappearance. Glinda was coming closer, out of the blinding sunlight, making reality real again, less soft at the edges. Elphaba wasn't so sure that she'd been right about angels all along.
There was distaste upon the girl's perfect face, and even that would never break her shell of beauty. Annoyed and beautiful.
Elphaba felt a rush of soft anger in her stomach that killed any disappointment, hurt. Anger at the girl of her past that had wasted so many hours of her life on an unattainable dream and a familiar, beautiful face. This girl was the same as the rest. Prim. More concerned with looking like an angel than being one.
- - - - -
There are plenty of things that Glinda regrets. Tripping on that suitcase sticking partway into the aisle just a few moments before, for instance. But there was nothing, absolutely nothing that she regretted more than allowing her Ama to temporarily abandon her services, hurt foot or no.
Regret was the feeling that drew her eyes from the unfamiliar girl's mesmerizing green face. Regret pulled her down the halls, an invisible rope tied to her chest. Tugged her eyes down the shining rows of brass numbers on hallway doors.
Oh, Oz, how could she have been so stupid? So utterly stupid.
The chattering, the coquettish giggling, the hat boxes brushing past in delicate creamy arms, these things she could handle, could manage, was raised to rule.
She turned the door handle slowly. Not like she had imagined that she would. When you dream of something long enough, you begin to think the dream is real.
This was nothing like her dream. She wasn't laughing and making introductions, flitting through the door wildly, filled with nothing but anticipation and appreciation for the fact that four whole years remained. Four whole years of possibility.
No, she thought, trying with aching might not to glance about the room as she sank down onto the bed nearest the door. Glinda couldn't help but think that no amount of anything, creativity or delusionality or drowsiness, could have led to the dreaming up of Elphaba Thropp.
Let it be, she thought, fighting the urge to throw something, anything, her hat box, the lamp, her shoe, across the room in frustration. Let it be a dream.