Remains (The Fall)
Title: Remains (The Fall)
Author:
incaseineedyou
Rating: PG
Verse: bookverse, but requires a willingness to believe that book!Glinda would visit Kiamo Ko after the melting. And I made a mistake and included the hat from the musical. I'm in the process of taking it out :(
Disclaimer: Do you really think I'm making any money off of this? I own nothing.
Summary: Focuses on different moments in Glinda's life centered around death or loss.
Notes: It starts off rocky, I'm the first to admit that, but it gets a bit better towards the middle, if given a chance.
cross-posted at
gelphie_lovers
Feedback: anything, please. I wrote this months ago and tried to fix it so many times that I can't read it anymore. Any suggestions or comments are so beyond welcome or appreciated that I won't attempt to tell you how much I need them.
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Galinda used to blow bubbles and watch them rise, higher and higher, glinting in the sun until they popped into nothingness. She would run after them, holding out her hands, trying to catch the drop of liquid she was sure must be falling back to the ground. But her bubbles were magic; nothing fell back from them like the rules said they should. Galinda didn’t know what gravity was, but she knew that she couldn’t escape the ground like they could. She was told that there were cycles and that nothing could simply cease to be, but she loved her bubbles. They were beautiful and left behind no messy remains, no marks or stains, just her wide eyes, searching for the exact point at which they’d vanished.
Maybe she simply lost them; if they were free from rules and weight, maybe they didn’t really die at all.
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Galinda’s parents took her to a funeral when she was seven. She still doesn’t know who the funeral was for, because she wasn’t told anything about the man whose stiff form her family seemed to have gathered to gawk at (“Be cute and charming,” her mother said “but be sure not to smile while we’re inside; image is always important.” “Behave, dear.” Her father said, not looking at either of them).
The body was hard and waxy and the room made Galinda sneeze. The group around the coffin seemed to be imitating the dead man, faces slack and expressionless and voices hushed. They seemed almost overly respectful- until she heard the words they were saying. All of the abuse was directed towards the dead man himself and the trembling woman in the fourth row. Galinda was confused, as neither of these people seemed to be doing anything worth talking about, or really anything at all.
When Glinda sat next to the woman, the scraping sound her chair made was startlingly loud, rude and grating. The woman’s eyes flew open and she was pulled back into the room, but from where Glinda couldn’t say. The stark light reflected in eyes that were wide, staring, gazing blankly at the coffin as everything became, for a second, overly still. Then she broke. Focus crashed into her eyes like reality into something light and fragile, or maybe like pressure out into a space too empty. The woman fell forward and the eyes squeezed shut, gone, leaving two tears to trickle down and splash small stains on her dress.
When she started to sob, Galinda fled. The wet, wracked sounds were too bare and guttural to be stood, and people were staring. The woman took ages to grope her way to the coffin, and no one helped her. Galinda thought the kneeling, violent sobbing over the silent body was grotesque. She wished there was a way out. She wished that the woman could disappear, that she could just not be here. Reaching for her mother’s hand, she was swatted away before she could become a nuisance to the conversation.
“She’d like to pretend she loved him that much; please.”
“God knows he’d need not have visited his friend Sir Sarai so often, if she did.”
“When a man prefers the company of other men to his own wife, you know she isn’t trying hard enough.”
“Not that she had much to work with- look at her.”
“That’s what she wants, is to be looked at.”
“Yes… Trying too hard now, isn’t she? As if everyone didn’t already know.”
The last voice was her mother’s. Glinda did not attend her funeral. Every time she tried to speak of her mother’s death, her voice started lecturing on proper ways and times to smile. She was as scared of giving a speech as she was of seeing the body, and of hearing what people would have to say about her mother in their soft, rich tones and fake accents.
“Just look at me now.” Years after, her expression is perfect in the mirror as she shakes her head in amusement, ruffling the curls perfectly arranged for whatever celebration she will be appearing at that night. “I imagine I’d be able to sell a speech about even that cold hag.” She chuckles scandalously, her eyes flashing, before she turns abruptly away from the mirror and starts to sob.
In her mind, her mother tells her that so disrespectful a joke could have been aided by a saucy half-smile, and that the sounds and mess she is making now are disgusting.
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Dillamond’s body was messy, splattered, torn. When Glinda thought of the Goat, she imagined his throat cut open, the twisted angles of his body. She struggled to recall the deep gravely tenor to his voice, the sweeping hoof-gestures that overtook him when discussion in class became passionate. She couldn’t recollect a single meaningful thing he’d ever said.
Glinda hasn’t attended a funeral since she was seven, and she doesn’t want one. She doesn’t enjoy dragging out the mockery death makes of people’s lives.
Dillamond’s eyes are bulging and glazed over in the heat, with flies swarming around them in her mind. She doubts that is how he would want to be remembered.
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“Of course I am, the Wind is here, can’t you hear it?”
Glinda felt, afterwards, that she couldn’t hear anything else. She stumbled from class to class with red eyes and dry skin and her curls blown out, frayed by the force of something much greater than she was. She was being taken away, but away from what she wasn’t sure. She felt sick and light, like something easily tossed aside, and while Elphaba’s loose grip did little to dispel that feeling, it kept her from floating away.
She couldn’t tell when she was dreaming; there was sand in her eyes, there was sleep in her eyes, she tried to remember what was real and the world spun until she fell. She had a dream that she sighed and her breath blew a contract with Ama Clutch’s name on it off of a table, and the woman fell babbling from a height that had previously failed to matter to her. She couldn’t sleep at night from fear of the force of her snores. Elphaba sighed against her neck and she shivered.
She was eroding; pieces of her were carried away or lost or discarded- she couldn’t tell which, but they were gone all the same. Glinda wore long-sleeved dresses, and when Nanny walked Nessarose down to breakfast, Glinda forgot and almost called her the wrong name, while Elphaba merely stared down at Nessa’s feet. Glinda felt sick enough she couldn’t finish her cereal, and when Elphaba excused herself minutes later Glinda rushed to follow her, and to steady herself on a green arm.
“Stay out of the wind until the time is right or you’ll be blown in the wrong direction.”
The wind surrounded them. There was no right time, there was no right way. In Glinda’s dreams there were silver threads connecting all of them. She reached out for Elphaba until they were tangled together. Behind her back damp, fish-like hands took Glinda’s, the contact making her both swoon with nausea and press closer to the body in front of her. Elphaba tried to pull away but the knots were already tied, tiny threads connecting a sail to her back, breaking the powerful stride and ripping the dark gown as the force of wind caught her, revealing more and more green skin that glowed in the dim light. Elphaba’s hair was blown wildly about her face as she turned around, rising up, Glinda clinging to her, a pale hand on her shoulder, wrenching the torn fabric further off of it, exposing her. They were caught in a hurricane.
Elphaba pushed her away quickly, soon enough that Glinda only fell a short distance back to the ground. Maybe to save her? But Elphaba rose much faster after Glinda was back on the ground, and her face was turned towards the setting sun, the ground forgotten as she became a silhouette, the dark and light harshly defined. The threads binding her shone silver, pulsed red, led back to Glinda’s wrists. She followed blindly until she woke, Elphaba’s head on her chest, her arms circling around the green back. The sickness overwhelmed her and she rushed dizzily to the toilet, passing the open door to the adjoining room on the way. Nessarose slept barefoot.
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Elphie backed off of the train platform, already obscuring herself beneath her dark cloak. All Glinda thought was how much it was like a fairytale, but she was crying over the villain, and that Elphie would remember her crying and being dense, taking so long to realize she was leaving. Of course she was leaving. Had Glinda actually assumed Elphaba would come back to Shiz with her? She couldn’t remember. She barely remembered to watch the crowd fading behind her.
Elphaba circled lazily, hawk-like even without the benefit of her infamous sharp profile, features blurred by distance and the sun. Glinda didn’t know if Elphaba knew she was watching, or if she’d have cared. She was mad, after all, about shoes and power and connections Glinda didn’t understand. The huge, pink thing draped about Glinda was surely visible as she emerged from her shaded corner, walking onto the lawn that Elphaba had just taken off from. Surely Elphie could see her. But she only rose farther away.
“Elphie, no. No!”
“Oh, Elphie!”
Elphaba had never turned back for her.
The image has vanished, the feeling has dried up. Elphie spiraled up into the sky and Glinda is afraid she’s burned up in the sun. She reached out her hand to touch a beautiful dream, to find it was only a reflection and fractured open at her touch. The bubble popped and there was a tiny hint of moisture on her lip, a quick dry kiss that is already evaporating in the heat. Now nothing, though her hands are cupped shaking in her lap, waiting to catch whatever falls down when she breaks.
Elphaba refused to be weighed down. But Glinda wonders if she is in control of the causes that have swept her away, or if she is being blown in circles, adrift in the city now, clutching to the broom handle just to keep from falling.
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Elphie was gone. She hadn’t simply died; she’d vanished, every trace of her lost. Glinda held her hands out in front of her, frantically sliding across the cold stone in a search for some remain, some sign that something real had died here. The stones were dry, the water that had taken her dried up, without even a mark on the floor.
Glinda squeezed her eyes shut in a new kind of disbelief and began to tremble. Her own tears fell, like they were supposed to, and splashed tiny, dark stains onto a floor where there should already be a puddle, a lake, a flood from the magnitude of what had happened, what had been destroyed. But there was nothing, except her useless, insignificant tears, and this pressing, contracting or expanding feeling in her chest that had not given Elphaba anything real, hadn’t protected her, and hadn’t ever stopped her from disappearing. Glinda’s hand was a fist around the thin fabric of her dress and that didn’t matter, either. She was too heavy, there was too much in her, and yet nothing, a strange light numbness at the same time.
She felt like she should sink into the floor or dissolve into the air. She wanted to melt out of this faltering, slowly rocking body and hide herself from the pale, shaking hands that tensed, grasped until they ached. She couldn’t. She was curled tightly on the stone ground, her body painfully solid where her knees dug into her chest, her fingers into her shins. She bit her lip until it bled. She was too real.
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Glinda had a bubble that would never pop. She floated in it above the whole world, higher than the rules should have allowed anything to be. Their eyes were wide as they watched; they loved her for it. But the sun glinted and the glare hid dark smudges on her face and stains on her dress. Their eyes were careless, skimming the edges at best, and usually missing her completely.
Her tears hit the bottom of the bubble and were gone, absorbed into the glassy wall with nothing more than a ripple. She was choking on thick liquid and her eyes stung with soap. Below her people cheered in celebration of their destruction. She vowed to never touch the ground again.
Glinda smiled until her jaw clenched and waved until she couldn’t feel her arm. She felt something close in her as a gust of cold wind brought sounds of distant voices and blew her even higher. Who, or what, were they cheering for?
Maybe, she thought, she could disappear after all, without ever being noticed.
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not to be needy, but any feedback at all would be so amazing. Thanks for reading!
Author:
incaseineedyou
Rating: PG
Verse: bookverse, but requires a willingness to believe that book!Glinda would visit Kiamo Ko after the melting. And I made a mistake and included the hat from the musical. I'm in the process of taking it out :(
Disclaimer: Do you really think I'm making any money off of this? I own nothing.
Summary: Focuses on different moments in Glinda's life centered around death or loss.
Notes: It starts off rocky, I'm the first to admit that, but it gets a bit better towards the middle, if given a chance.
cross-posted at
gelphie_lovers
Feedback: anything, please. I wrote this months ago and tried to fix it so many times that I can't read it anymore. Any suggestions or comments are so beyond welcome or appreciated that I won't attempt to tell you how much I need them.
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Galinda used to blow bubbles and watch them rise, higher and higher, glinting in the sun until they popped into nothingness. She would run after them, holding out her hands, trying to catch the drop of liquid she was sure must be falling back to the ground. But her bubbles were magic; nothing fell back from them like the rules said they should. Galinda didn’t know what gravity was, but she knew that she couldn’t escape the ground like they could. She was told that there were cycles and that nothing could simply cease to be, but she loved her bubbles. They were beautiful and left behind no messy remains, no marks or stains, just her wide eyes, searching for the exact point at which they’d vanished.
Maybe she simply lost them; if they were free from rules and weight, maybe they didn’t really die at all.
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Galinda’s parents took her to a funeral when she was seven. She still doesn’t know who the funeral was for, because she wasn’t told anything about the man whose stiff form her family seemed to have gathered to gawk at (“Be cute and charming,” her mother said “but be sure not to smile while we’re inside; image is always important.” “Behave, dear.” Her father said, not looking at either of them).
The body was hard and waxy and the room made Galinda sneeze. The group around the coffin seemed to be imitating the dead man, faces slack and expressionless and voices hushed. They seemed almost overly respectful- until she heard the words they were saying. All of the abuse was directed towards the dead man himself and the trembling woman in the fourth row. Galinda was confused, as neither of these people seemed to be doing anything worth talking about, or really anything at all.
When Glinda sat next to the woman, the scraping sound her chair made was startlingly loud, rude and grating. The woman’s eyes flew open and she was pulled back into the room, but from where Glinda couldn’t say. The stark light reflected in eyes that were wide, staring, gazing blankly at the coffin as everything became, for a second, overly still. Then she broke. Focus crashed into her eyes like reality into something light and fragile, or maybe like pressure out into a space too empty. The woman fell forward and the eyes squeezed shut, gone, leaving two tears to trickle down and splash small stains on her dress.
When she started to sob, Galinda fled. The wet, wracked sounds were too bare and guttural to be stood, and people were staring. The woman took ages to grope her way to the coffin, and no one helped her. Galinda thought the kneeling, violent sobbing over the silent body was grotesque. She wished there was a way out. She wished that the woman could disappear, that she could just not be here. Reaching for her mother’s hand, she was swatted away before she could become a nuisance to the conversation.
“She’d like to pretend she loved him that much; please.”
“God knows he’d need not have visited his friend Sir Sarai so often, if she did.”
“When a man prefers the company of other men to his own wife, you know she isn’t trying hard enough.”
“Not that she had much to work with- look at her.”
“That’s what she wants, is to be looked at.”
“Yes… Trying too hard now, isn’t she? As if everyone didn’t already know.”
The last voice was her mother’s. Glinda did not attend her funeral. Every time she tried to speak of her mother’s death, her voice started lecturing on proper ways and times to smile. She was as scared of giving a speech as she was of seeing the body, and of hearing what people would have to say about her mother in their soft, rich tones and fake accents.
“Just look at me now.” Years after, her expression is perfect in the mirror as she shakes her head in amusement, ruffling the curls perfectly arranged for whatever celebration she will be appearing at that night. “I imagine I’d be able to sell a speech about even that cold hag.” She chuckles scandalously, her eyes flashing, before she turns abruptly away from the mirror and starts to sob.
In her mind, her mother tells her that so disrespectful a joke could have been aided by a saucy half-smile, and that the sounds and mess she is making now are disgusting.
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Dillamond’s body was messy, splattered, torn. When Glinda thought of the Goat, she imagined his throat cut open, the twisted angles of his body. She struggled to recall the deep gravely tenor to his voice, the sweeping hoof-gestures that overtook him when discussion in class became passionate. She couldn’t recollect a single meaningful thing he’d ever said.
Glinda hasn’t attended a funeral since she was seven, and she doesn’t want one. She doesn’t enjoy dragging out the mockery death makes of people’s lives.
Dillamond’s eyes are bulging and glazed over in the heat, with flies swarming around them in her mind. She doubts that is how he would want to be remembered.
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“Of course I am, the Wind is here, can’t you hear it?”
Glinda felt, afterwards, that she couldn’t hear anything else. She stumbled from class to class with red eyes and dry skin and her curls blown out, frayed by the force of something much greater than she was. She was being taken away, but away from what she wasn’t sure. She felt sick and light, like something easily tossed aside, and while Elphaba’s loose grip did little to dispel that feeling, it kept her from floating away.
She couldn’t tell when she was dreaming; there was sand in her eyes, there was sleep in her eyes, she tried to remember what was real and the world spun until she fell. She had a dream that she sighed and her breath blew a contract with Ama Clutch’s name on it off of a table, and the woman fell babbling from a height that had previously failed to matter to her. She couldn’t sleep at night from fear of the force of her snores. Elphaba sighed against her neck and she shivered.
She was eroding; pieces of her were carried away or lost or discarded- she couldn’t tell which, but they were gone all the same. Glinda wore long-sleeved dresses, and when Nanny walked Nessarose down to breakfast, Glinda forgot and almost called her the wrong name, while Elphaba merely stared down at Nessa’s feet. Glinda felt sick enough she couldn’t finish her cereal, and when Elphaba excused herself minutes later Glinda rushed to follow her, and to steady herself on a green arm.
“Stay out of the wind until the time is right or you’ll be blown in the wrong direction.”
The wind surrounded them. There was no right time, there was no right way. In Glinda’s dreams there were silver threads connecting all of them. She reached out for Elphaba until they were tangled together. Behind her back damp, fish-like hands took Glinda’s, the contact making her both swoon with nausea and press closer to the body in front of her. Elphaba tried to pull away but the knots were already tied, tiny threads connecting a sail to her back, breaking the powerful stride and ripping the dark gown as the force of wind caught her, revealing more and more green skin that glowed in the dim light. Elphaba’s hair was blown wildly about her face as she turned around, rising up, Glinda clinging to her, a pale hand on her shoulder, wrenching the torn fabric further off of it, exposing her. They were caught in a hurricane.
Elphaba pushed her away quickly, soon enough that Glinda only fell a short distance back to the ground. Maybe to save her? But Elphaba rose much faster after Glinda was back on the ground, and her face was turned towards the setting sun, the ground forgotten as she became a silhouette, the dark and light harshly defined. The threads binding her shone silver, pulsed red, led back to Glinda’s wrists. She followed blindly until she woke, Elphaba’s head on her chest, her arms circling around the green back. The sickness overwhelmed her and she rushed dizzily to the toilet, passing the open door to the adjoining room on the way. Nessarose slept barefoot.
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Elphie backed off of the train platform, already obscuring herself beneath her dark cloak. All Glinda thought was how much it was like a fairytale, but she was crying over the villain, and that Elphie would remember her crying and being dense, taking so long to realize she was leaving. Of course she was leaving. Had Glinda actually assumed Elphaba would come back to Shiz with her? She couldn’t remember. She barely remembered to watch the crowd fading behind her.
Elphaba circled lazily, hawk-like even without the benefit of her infamous sharp profile, features blurred by distance and the sun. Glinda didn’t know if Elphaba knew she was watching, or if she’d have cared. She was mad, after all, about shoes and power and connections Glinda didn’t understand. The huge, pink thing draped about Glinda was surely visible as she emerged from her shaded corner, walking onto the lawn that Elphaba had just taken off from. Surely Elphie could see her. But she only rose farther away.
“Elphie, no. No!”
“Oh, Elphie!”
Elphaba had never turned back for her.
The image has vanished, the feeling has dried up. Elphie spiraled up into the sky and Glinda is afraid she’s burned up in the sun. She reached out her hand to touch a beautiful dream, to find it was only a reflection and fractured open at her touch. The bubble popped and there was a tiny hint of moisture on her lip, a quick dry kiss that is already evaporating in the heat. Now nothing, though her hands are cupped shaking in her lap, waiting to catch whatever falls down when she breaks.
Elphaba refused to be weighed down. But Glinda wonders if she is in control of the causes that have swept her away, or if she is being blown in circles, adrift in the city now, clutching to the broom handle just to keep from falling.
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Elphie was gone. She hadn’t simply died; she’d vanished, every trace of her lost. Glinda held her hands out in front of her, frantically sliding across the cold stone in a search for some remain, some sign that something real had died here. The stones were dry, the water that had taken her dried up, without even a mark on the floor.
Glinda squeezed her eyes shut in a new kind of disbelief and began to tremble. Her own tears fell, like they were supposed to, and splashed tiny, dark stains onto a floor where there should already be a puddle, a lake, a flood from the magnitude of what had happened, what had been destroyed. But there was nothing, except her useless, insignificant tears, and this pressing, contracting or expanding feeling in her chest that had not given Elphaba anything real, hadn’t protected her, and hadn’t ever stopped her from disappearing. Glinda’s hand was a fist around the thin fabric of her dress and that didn’t matter, either. She was too heavy, there was too much in her, and yet nothing, a strange light numbness at the same time.
She felt like she should sink into the floor or dissolve into the air. She wanted to melt out of this faltering, slowly rocking body and hide herself from the pale, shaking hands that tensed, grasped until they ached. She couldn’t. She was curled tightly on the stone ground, her body painfully solid where her knees dug into her chest, her fingers into her shins. She bit her lip until it bled. She was too real.
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Glinda had a bubble that would never pop. She floated in it above the whole world, higher than the rules should have allowed anything to be. Their eyes were wide as they watched; they loved her for it. But the sun glinted and the glare hid dark smudges on her face and stains on her dress. Their eyes were careless, skimming the edges at best, and usually missing her completely.
Her tears hit the bottom of the bubble and were gone, absorbed into the glassy wall with nothing more than a ripple. She was choking on thick liquid and her eyes stung with soap. Below her people cheered in celebration of their destruction. She vowed to never touch the ground again.
Glinda smiled until her jaw clenched and waved until she couldn’t feel her arm. She felt something close in her as a gust of cold wind brought sounds of distant voices and blew her even higher. Who, or what, were they cheering for?
Maybe, she thought, she could disappear after all, without ever being noticed.
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not to be needy, but any feedback at all would be so amazing. Thanks for reading!