TW: Torture, SA, Violence

Through the barnhouse walls, Elphaba heard an approaching rhythmic whip in the air outside. A soft thud of a landing followed, then a muffled but amicable greeting from Glinda. Though, she did approach the window by the fireplace to make sure that it was who she thought it was.

Now, it was Fiyero's turn to be concerned.

"What in Oz was that?"

"Just Chistery," said Elphaba, pulling the curtains back to confirm it. Sure enough, the Monkey was there. He started signing to Glinda. Charading what appeared to be the act of screaming, he opened his mouth and brought two hands to it, gesturing outward like the movement of sound. Elphaba, with her closeness to the window, managed to decode the muffled version of Glinda's reply.

"You heard that all the way from the chapel?"

Yet again, the unlikely pair with the mysterious and poignant connection had their backs turned from the house for the rest of their conversation, so Elphaba couldn't interpret much, even if she had understood Azuracaque sign. She watched Chistery procure a beige handkerchief from his vest pocket for the blonde. Touched by the chivalrous gesture, Elphaba was able to leave the window and trust that, for now at least, Glinda would be alright.

They sat at the well in quiet stillness, watching the light and shadows change as the sun reached its noontime peak. It was autumn in the west - nearing winter - so the warmth was minimal, but appreciated. If Glinda had been wearing her purple dress or her velvety blue one instead of the woolen shadow blue that she wore now, she would have been chilled. Maybe her ears and hands had gone a bit numb, but it was fine to feel something. It was better than being inside, unable to look more than ten feet in any direction without a wall.

She sat with Chistery on the cold ground now, their backs leaning against the rock barrier of the well. His golden hand sat between them, untouched, but there if she needed it. For the moment though, she just needed the only person who understood what she went through to be beside her, listening, even in the silence.

Glinda wrapped woolen sleeves around herself and drew her knees to her chest, covering her legs with layered skirts. She glanced at Chistery and spoke softly.

"When was the last time you felt safe?"

The blonde watched him think, his simian nose crinkling slightly with the twist in his brow, sending faint brown freckles that most people wouldn't even notice on him every which way. The Monkey ultimately didn't respond. He looked down, unable to find an answer.

Glinda wasn't sure, either. Elphaba always came to mind - their last moments in the Emerald City. Though, she wouldn't exactly describe that as feeling safe, so much as feeling joyful, excited, and not particularly unsafe. When was the last time she could close her eyes and know that nothing and no one would hurt her? There had to have been a time, right?

Childhood. Momsie's voice, calling her name across the house as if in song.

Popsicle's warm embrace. Glinda always had to be the first to let go or he would hold her forever.

The way they had to kiss their daughter together, one Upland on each cheek, and a young Galinda would pretend to be embarrassed.

When was the last time, though? And how early did it even count, when the first twenty years of Glinda's life had never known fear? Beyond the fleeting sigh of Elphaba's arms around her that only worked because it had a way of drowning out the entire world, Glinda wasn't sure if she knew what the feeling was anymore - only that Elphaba was the closest thing to it.

"Do you think we can even feel safe again, after everything?" Glinda asked Chistery in a voice that matched the volume of the breeze around them. The Monkey's eyes stayed down, but he lifted his hands to sign.

I HOPE.

Glinda sighed and signed back, a fist with the thumb and pinky out, and a motion that rocked between Chistery and herself.

ME, TOO.

Chistery fingerspelled the names of his nieces and nephews that now resided at Kiamo Ko.

T-H-I-A-G-O. R-A-I-N. L-A-M. A-Z-U-R-I-A. FEEL SAFE NOW, he signed. BUT BROTHERS… Chistery moved his hand away from his head, like a thought drifting off. I DON'T KNOW.

Protector.

Glinda dropped her head against the rock wall, glancing back at the barnhouse. She wondered if Elphaba was anxiously pacing by the window; if spending over an hour out here would have caused her to walk off her fears, or if Glinda would return to lingering vibrations of Elphaba's worry.

"She knows more than I want her to know. More than I've told her." Glinda's voice didn't meet sound. She signed along as she mouthed the words to Chistery, afraid that she'd otherwise be heard through the thin walls of the barnhouse. She kept Ozian grammar instead of Azuracaque. "Though I guess I haven't told her much of anything. And Fiyero…he puts on a smile, keeps his old humor, but he looks at me like I'm going to shatter. I know he's tearing himself apart imagining all the things that could have happened."

Fae, was she… Do you think she was raped?

The pause. The silence. She didn't hear Elphaba tell him, but she must have, which still made Glinda feel sick.

The cries. She'd never heard Fiyero cry like that.

The ozdamn walls that kept nothing secret.

"They know I was…" Glinda couldn't manage to even mouth the word, but she signed it. Two fists moving past each other once, one closing through the motion and one already closed. "Elphaba put it together. Somehow. Maybe she…when I first got here, I couldn't…she put me in dry clothes, and she might have seen something. Or maybe in my sleep…I don't know."

Yet another thing Glinda couldn't control.

"I guess she told Fiyero. He was pressing her on it. I don't think he's anywhere close to knowing what actually happened, how bad it was, or when it started. Elphaba might have suspicions, I can't say for sure… But Fiyero definitely assumes that the worst of it was all after he left."

Glinda appreciated that Chistery kept any choice words he'd have for Fiyero to himself, even if the temptation twitched in his fingers.

Home. Safe. Loved.

Maybe those ideas just looked different now. In innocence, they're animated and colorful and filled with life. Candy pink bedrooms with rose curtains. But when you come to know the world as it is, safety loses its pulse. Home is buried by nostalgia. Love is so heavy all of a sudden. Didn't it used to make her light?

Ideas like that become fossilized, in a way. Feelings that breathed once. They die, but somehow still remain here, imprinted on the soul like scars on skin, like words that used to mean something and now only remind you of what you've lost.

"They'll call you Glinda the Good..."

Glinda unknowingly started breathing faster, rubbing a hand down her left arm as if she were able to wipe off what lay beneath the sleeve.

Chistery placed his golden hand on top of her trembling one, and she was suddenly swept into a memory that wasn't her own.

Chistery, on the ground of the dungeons, unable to move his jaw without excruciating pain. Glinda could feel the chill of the emerald floor under his cheek as if it was her own. She could taste the blood that slipped down the back of his throat and upset his stomach into vomiting, leaving him with no choice but to lay on his side, his head turned into the tiles so that the bleeding would drool out his lips. She heard her own voice as if through wind, barely discernible, talking to someone outside of the door.

"You're free to take the issue to Madame Morrible and disturb her at Shiz, if you feel so inclined, but I come straight from the Wizard. He's allowed me to do as I wish, and my wish is to speak to Captain Chistery."

"Miss Glinda, they've removed his tongue. He cannot speak."

"They…what?"

As if she was Chistery and not herself, Glinda felt the body that wasn't her own roll towards the slatted window of the door and catch sight of a glimmering crystal crown.

The door opened, and a woman in a sparkling pearl dress entered, looking like an angel. With no care for the expensive fabric, she knelt in the pool of viscera in front of the Monkey and picked up his head. Her touch was warm and kind, but Glinda felt herself and Chistery wince when the movement burned like fire.

"I'm sorry! Sorry…" whispered the woman with Glinda's voice, her eyes wide and glistening. She was younger up close - younger than the posters they made of her - but she held herself with a woman's poise. She had to. In brown eyes, her youth appeared, blinking tears that she instantly caught with a manicured finger. "They wouldn't tell me where you were until just now…this is all my fault…"

Glinda felt Chistery's haze in the moment, fighting for consciousness. He was unable to accompany the sign with a shake to his head, but with his thumb and two fingers, he signed,

NO.

A hand to his chest - and Glinda felt a hand on her own - then a swooping motion from his mouth that was unsteady and slurred.

I SPEAK.

He signed another word that the woman in the dress hadn't learned yet, but the Glinda connected to Chistery had.

FAULT. MY FAULT.

She felt the sentiment he did. It was his choice. He didn't blame her, and the last thing he wanted was for Miss Glinda to blame herself.

Chistery had trouble looking up at the woman's - the girl's - face. She really was a child in a costume, wasn't she? It didn't matter how she carried herself, or how tall her heels were. They'd put this girl into the spotlight and made her the new face of Oz and all of its goodness. Maybe there was a time she'd have wanted it. A time before she understood that there was a kind of a sort of…cost.

Still, young Miss Glinda leaned down towards Chistery. Glinda looked up at her own face, her own dimpled smile, and felt the comfort that it gave the Monkey.

The comfort that it gave her friend.

"I'm going to get you out of here, okay?"

Chistery removed his hand from Glinda's arm. He stood in front of her, putting the two of them more at eye level because of his simian stature. A knuckle circled his cheek at the placement of her dimple.

YOU MADE ME FEEL SAFE, Chistery signed. YOU MADE OZ FEEL SAFE.

In a rare gesture between two former prisoners who would have once been violently separated at such an obvious display of their care for one another, Chistery held out both of his hands for Glinda to take. She joined a soft palm to his golden hand without thought, but took more caution with the other one. The larger hand was more distorted by the Grimmerie, with too many joints in the fingers that weren't supposed to be there, and thick, dark nails that were sturdy enough to lacerate with proper force. Glinda found a way to grasp it, despite its size and awkward new anatomy. She wasn't afraid of his hands, or of him, but even years after their days in the Emerald City, her heart spiked as if they were about to get caught.

In the palace, the eyes hidden in long, paneled walls would have passed word to Morrible if they were spotted having secret conversations. Even the Wizard's preference for keeping his princess unscathed couldn't save Glinda from a lashing. Morrible was particularly generous with torture in those days before Fiyero shared her suite. Chistery would face the same, often simultaneously and within sight of each other, but the guards were harder on him. He'd be kept in the dungeons for days until Glinda got some strength back.

The Wizard would come to her room in the night, hushing her cries as he trailed his rough fingers along the crimson welts that rose from ivory skin. Glinda would whimper through the application of some cold ointment he always brought that never seemed to ease any of the pain. She'd lie there on her stomach, her back exposed in a gown that could open there, feeling his coarse moustache on her neck as he whispered promises that he wouldn't let her scar, reaching his hands around to touch her.

"You just let me know when you're ready again, baby doll…and as long as you can play by the rules, I'll bring our friend Chis back before you can say Oz."

He'd pulled her hair off to one shoulder, stuffing his nose into it before his lips met the shell of her ear.

"Think he'd like to watch?"

When she could lie on her back again without crying, she'd let the Wizard have his way, so she could get hers. Maybe that was why the Wizard allowed all of it to happen in the first place. Maybe it's why they didn't crush Chistery's hands or kill him years before he escaped the palace.

Glinda felt an echo of a similar spark from the Monkey, aligned in her fears of the past, but then the two of them met eyes in a silent reminder to each other that they weren't being watched anymore. Psychic communication connected once again, and Glinda heard the voice Chistery used to have, even though his lips never moved.

"No one can be safe forever," he said. "Maybe that's all it's supposed to be - that fleeting moment where something or someone in your life makes things feel alright again."

"Don't leave me here, Elphie."

"Never."

"I couldn't…I was…"

"I found you. I will always find you."

"Just know this, Miss Glinda," Chistery continued. "What they did to you was not your fault, and it never made you any less than the person you are. You are good. Truly good. Don't let them take that word from you. It's what you always wanted to be."

Glinda grimaced through tears she didn't want to fall, but a few of them escaped.

"Chistery, I tried," she whispered. "You know I tried." Her teeth clenched with the bitter taste of a hope she no longer held onto. "I don't want it."

I can't want it anymore.

Her eyes began to drop, but Chistery neared her face just slightly, bringing them back.

"Don't let someone else define a word that was yours. It was attached to your name. You define it, Miss Glinda. Only you."

With a bow over his golden hand, Chistery kissed the top of the blonde's cold fingers. Glinda choked on a sob. She willed it not to cascade into full weeping. She was compelled to draw his hand briefly to her lips, too, touching it to her cheek before letting the clasp of their connection hang between them again.

Without that connection - without the golden hand - Glinda's next thought wouldn't have reached anyone.

What if I don't deserve it?

Chistery took hold of the thought and she could almost feel words turn from cold to warm in her own head, like her fingers between his hands.

You do.

"You deserve to feel safe, too," Chistery continued telepathically. "I think you feel more safe in that house than you care to admit. You're just afraid of what that means."

Glinda looked back at the barnhouse, smoke billowing up the chimney and a warm glow illuminating the small living area window. She pictured wrapping her arms around Elphaba - her beautifully, infuriatingly intuitive Elphaba. Glinda could almost smell the scent of wood and wind, almost feel the comb of long, green nails in her hair. She imagined Fiyero's gentle way of checking on her, how tenderly he kissed her forehead, and how he was always trying to flash a grin that made her smile back. Though it was barely midday, she suddenly wanted nothing more than to lie between them in the bed they all shared, holding Elphaba while Fiyero held them both. It was almost terrifying how easy it would be to nest herself between the people she loved and forget their reality.

Chistery dropped his hands, but the telepathy lingered for a few moments. Glinda met his eyes as he stepped back and unfolded his wings. He gestured with his chin towards the pale feet atop her skirt that she'd already made some effort to clean, knowing that they surely wouldn't remain that way if Glinda walked back to the house. Chistery ascended in a shallow flight, offering a hand to the blonde.

"Time to go home, Miss Glinda."