Collecting You
By gypsylemon
Author's Note: Yes, I know there's also a book, which I read, but this fic takes place at the end of the Broadway play. Even so, it adopts many aspects from the book, so in a way it's a crossover/AU.
Disclaimer: None of this belongs to me except the ideas.
Chapter 4: Fear and Loving
When Elphaba first woke, disoriented as always after a long sleep, she feared the pillow beneath her head had turned to stone until she opened her eyes and saw that she was lying on the floor. Glinda lay a few inches away from her, sprawled out like a rag doll on the smooth marble. She looked completely still, like she had been shot down and lay just where she had fallen. She looked dead.
Elphaba's heart sped up as she pulled herself into a sitting position and crawled across the floor to Glinda's still form. Her breathing grew more labored, she took the other woman's hand in hers and tried hard not to notice such a great contrast in their skin tones; green skin the color of mold next to a small white hand, delicate and beautiful as porcelain.
"Glinda." She tried to whisper, feeling her throat close and a painful feeling rise in her stomach. "Glinda?"
Instead of feeling warm like human flesh, they felt like ashes, the ashes of Fiyero. They were still hot from the inferno, the walls turned to flames, and smoke clouded the air. Elphaba could only watch in terror as the world around her was rapidly becoming her past. She felt the scars on her body bursting open with new burns as fire danced around her, and all she could do was whisper her very first word over and over again, "Horrors…"
No, Glinda wasn't dead, she couldn't. How? She was not like Fiyero, Elphaba had not yet tried to save her, for everyone whom she had tried to save ended up dead. All her attempts ended in failure; but she didn't kill Glinda. Glinda had been helping her, not the other way around. Someone had followed her, then. Someone must know she's there. She had to go, but she couldn't just…leave. She was being pulled in too many different directions, and how was it that Glinda was dead? It was a trick, she thought, someone trying to trick her into leaving the apartment and walking right into a trap. They would kill her, but Glinda…they had killed her too. The horror of it all sank in, and her mind reeled and her vision went black.
She fell forward in a faint, but the shock of hitting the floor brought her back to consciousness. Her heart threatened to burst from inside of her, it was beating so fast. Her throat and lungs sabotaged her quest for life and she couldn't breathe, couldn't think. She pulled herself closer to Glinda, took the small woman's shoulders and shook her corpse in one last, feeble attempt to prove that she hadn't gone completely mad.
But the corpse tensed beneath her hands and moved at its own will. Glinda sat up and immediately saw something was wrong. "Elphaba, what is it?" But Elphaba was beyond answering. She looked shocked, as if she had seen far worse then just any ghost; the ghost of her only friend. Green hands came to Glinda's cheeks ever so gently, then arms wrapped themselves around the blonde's small frame and held her close. It felt like she would never let go.
Glinda returned the hug, still very confused. Again she asked Elphaba and this time she got an answer. "You were dead." She whispered, almost afraid if she spoke the words they would come true. "You were dead like him but you came back."
"I'm alright, it's ok." The words left the petite woman's mouth without thinking, because although she did not know whether things were ok, she knew they soon will be. Since Elphie's return, there had to be hope for the future to get through a day; even if it was just false hope, it was still hope all the same.
Elphaba pulled away then, and drew in a shaky breath, letting her arms drop to her sides. She pursed her lips and shuddered and her words came as a surprise in context and the emotions they initiated; "I love you like I love him, Glinda." The two of them were sitting near each other, so there was not much space to close between their mouths.
It was Elphaba's green lips that found Glinda's, and the instant they connected sparked a strange feeling, an exhilaration the blonde had yet to experience before.
As though she were trying to extract Glinda's soul with her lips so that she could possibly have some of it for her own soulless self, her kiss was sudden and full of need. They sat on the floor, lips together, until time seemed to come to a standstill, and though no exchange of souls came out of it, there was an exchange all the same.
For half a second, Glinda felt like she was kissing Fiyero again, but she banished the thought just as quickly as it had come. It was Elphaba, the beautiful soliloquy of a woman that Glinda always wanted to be close to. It was only now that she truly recognized the feeling, as well as the other woman's true needs. They needed each other. Like two halves of a whole, they needed each other.
Her pale hand rose on it's own will, slowly, reluctant at first, and came down on Elphaba's head, brushing black tangled hair away from their faces. The woman's green cheek was its next location, fingers reaching for her neck. Elphaba wrapped one arm around Glinda's back and held her closer then comfort would allow - for then, at least - but Glinda didn't resist. She couldn't resist even if she tried. It was too soon to realize just what she was doing, but it was far too late to care. Or Stop.
"Elphie, I don't know how," Glinda spoke between kisses, "how you loved him, but I can only guess, it was so much. I, too, love you, like you love him."
This spawned their longest, fiercest, most passionate kiss.
But stop they did, for their lungs had grown aggravated with the lack of breathing and rebelled on both women. They stopped for then, but had no intentions of ever stopping for good.
Later that day they sat on a spacious couch, curled up so close that they didn't take up even half the space of one cushion. Elphaba held Glinda in her arms and remembered what it felt like to hold, while Glinda told Elphaba stories of old friends, reminding her what it felt like to gossip.
"Shenshen went off to marry into money, I'm certain." Glinda said, reaching to the farthest corners of her mind for information on this particularly superficial acquaintance.
A smirk pulled at the left corner of Elphaba's mouth and she said, "It would be very unlike her to marry into anything but that."
"Now don't be that way. She can't help it; she was born into money and will most likely die in money as well."
"I was born into money. You can't say you haven't ever seen the Colwen Grounds in their full glory. I resisted," Elphaba's smirk faded as she came to a more serious subject, but she spoke almost dismissively of the memory, "but my parents never acted as though I was their child anyways, so there was a reason behind my poverty."
The thought of having an unloving family struck a chord deep inside Glinda and somehow wished, for an instant, to be the mother Elphaba never had. "I'm sure they loved you." She said, trying to raise the green woman's spirits.
"I'm sure you're only saying that to comfort me," and although it was indeed true, Elphaba's spirits were never low - nor were they ever high, but for once she felt good; she acted as if her family was a part of another life of hers, a life that she had long since moved on from. "But do tell me more, my absence has been impeccable in losing track of all life but my own. Maybe even my own, some of it." She added.
Glinda smiled as her friend mocked herself and snuggled closer to the warmth of her body. "Well, Master Boq has married Miss Milla, as you may know."
"Yes, I've had the opportunity of meeting them."
"And all their children." Glinda triumphed in finding she had brought a smile to those green lips. "What else is there to tell?"
She lay in Elphaba's arms for so long, she had almost forgotten who she was, for it felt like her arms were permanently connected to her skin. It was as if the green had glued itself to her body to form one creature, two souls - one definite, one questionable - coming together to create a single bit of life.
In the crowded mess of yesterday's festivities, no two hearts beat stronger for each other.
