Disclaimer: I own nothing. Standard disclaimers apply.
Setting/Spoilers: Set after No One Mourns the Wicked. No real spoilers for the play.
Notes: For all of my Wicked readers who have stuck by me, and particularly those I have been.. well, not really spamming ... the inboxes of with story alerts from other fandoms for the last while. I can't thank you enough, though this itself is a rather inadequate thank you. This was written ten months after a startled moment of realization when listening to the song. Perhaps my favorite Glinda angst piece that I've ever written, which, looking back over my list, is something. And in answer to the inevitable question: no, I don't really know where the Latin came from. It just did.
Seascapes, here, are rare. Oz is a landlocked country, deserts on all four sides, filled with dunes of unending sands that sometimes drift lethargically past their borders.
As rare as the sea is to Oz, so is the idea of a desert, made visual, but not tangible, in sepia photographs in geography textbooks and whispers of age-old fairy and folk tales. To Glinda, it always spoke of untold stories of devastation as lost as the fairy tales hadn't been. Desolation. Isolation.
But the sea... the sepia could only take away what beauty the unreachable sea held, distant and remote on the scarce edges of foreign borders, vibrant and bountiful as their lakes could never be. Crashes and waves, tides and continuous movement. Viva. Cura. Grains of sand gather and blow together with delicate sea spray, swirl and dance lightly across her face. She closes her eyes, and imagines.
Conscious, subconscious, unconscious. There are such small lines between the three, little lines drawn in the sand: veins and arteries and arterioles, maps of places she'd been and things she'd never seen. Her high-heeled foot smudges someplace in the middle of somewhere, spills blood, sinks into oblivion. The red stain spreads, and unites roads and vessels alike.
Politics, quicksand. Small lines. She sinks.
No one mourns the wicked, had cried the people with a newfound voice. No one.
In the corner, no one cries, hands trembling with the involuntarily forces of things beyond her. Whirlwinds of power rush around her, and dissipate, tearing away her tiara and leaving her hair tangled and limp. No one, she thinks. I am no one.
In the approaching winds of what may or may not come, she thinks it might someday be true. Anarchy, corruption; she never was good at politics, never mind solving decades-long problems of an entire nation. She closes her eyes and sees a hot-air balloon swallowed whole by those same winds. Justice is served to the deserving, and somehow, it is not enough. Sand blows away, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, silent and true. She watches, untouched.
Glinda rests her head on her knees, and knows she cannot escape either the silence or the noise. She's been singled out, and maybe this is her recompense. Conscious, unconscious. She wishes she was.
In an unrealized rebellion, the vox populi rises against her, and she shrinks at their words. The voice she has given them in lieu of having or giving her own is harsh and mocking, and does not quite carry to the place where she huddles in a corner against cold stones. Hers dies in the wake of it. Goodness knows, is all she can make out.
It echoes back to her, soft and dangerous, on wings unknown. You know.
She does. Elphaba cries in her head, screams and sobs all too real and too imagined, too old and too recent; and there is nowhere safe. Elphaba collapses in sleep onto a bed, or stones; in dejection, or death, and no one sees.
Goodness knows we know what goodness is.
Her mind translates unwillingly. Subconscious, unconscious. She wishes she was.
You know we know what you are. Muffled, mutated, the words carry in the empty air. She cannot do this. Oz looms suspended over her head, dangles from her fingers. Ordinary, she reverts into the unknown, blending into the background, withdrawing into her grief. Ordinary, she exists as no one.
I know her life was lonely, she eventually answers, in vague terms, coded and encrypted, and no one understands, no one wanting to. In another room, a green skinned girl crosses an invisible line dividing lives and lifestyles alike. In another room, a pink-clad girl dances, arms making nothing into something; and in that room, power rises.
Potens, potentia: power and potential diffuse into each other, and lines blur, their lives intertwined. Blood flows and hearts beat; wands wave in harmony, lips form unknown words. The lines exist, and are forgotten.
You know she died alone!
No one knows,Glinda's mind whispers, and that's the point. Dust collects, and ashes burn uselessly in the fireplace. Lines in the sand wash away over time as if they were never drawn and never crossed, and everything returns to the way it was before, unnatural and left of center, with a coating of now-dry sand as a lone reminder. She cannot sink further.
Her hands shake, and never stop. I am no one, she says, and leads a country. Sands loosen, and begin to blow in from all sides.