do you have a death wish or something?
the question lands like a gauntlet, all clipped edges and disdain, but glinda answers not with the practiced sparkle the city expects but with something that trembles at the seams. [ there is a smile trained into her face like toothwork, and tonight it rattles when she lets it. ] she inclines her head, slow, as if measuring the angle of a bow to an audience that no longer applauds for the right reasons. the words she offers back are silk and splinters. ❝ perhaps i do, ❞ glinda says, and the syllables fall like pearls into a long, empty theater; each one rings hollow in the vaulted hush where elphaba’s voice once braided with hers. the city thinks her jesting — they do not know the weight beneath the joke: a hunger that is not for ruin but for the exacting ache of being seen. [ to laugh at the world while it eats you from the inside is the politest form of suicide. ]
her hands fold at her waist, fingers too pale, joints rehearsed into grace. the chandeliers overhead scatter their light into a constellation of gossip and expectation; she has learned to walk under it like a savant of illusion. yet whenever she moves, a string tugs at her spine, invisible, manufactured, threaded from the governor’s desk to the chorus line to the very bones of her name. she is a marionette in a gown: the glitter is a trap, the curtsy a trapdoor. she knows every angle of the stage because she is the stage now, and the applause that follows is a metronome marking out her loneliness. [ oh, elphaba — if you could see me now. ] the thought is a flame that she hides in a handkerchief, because to whisper it aloud would be to confess treason against the very court that crowned her. the green is gone from the world’s palette; the city paints its banners pallid and polite, deodorized grief in emerald satin. glinda’s heart remembers green as a bruise and a prayer: thunderclouds and stubborn, bitter laughter that smelled of rain. she misses the way elphaba used to make the air ache with truth, the way the other witch's presence rearranged the light, not to flatter, but to expose.
❝ or maybe, madame, ❞ she continues, voice thinning like a ribbon pulled taut, ❝ i have only forgotten the way to live small when i have been taught to live like a star. ❞ the stars, she means, that used to burn for two. now they are compass points in a sky that no longer contains her constellation. she tilts her face up as if to catch meteors on her tongue, and for a breath the practiced brightness splinters into something raw: wet lashes, a mouth that wants confession instead of coyness. beneath her rosewater breath and crystal tiaras, a fracture runs through her like a map of old battles. she is the marionette who learned her master’s commands and then found, one bitter dawn, that the hands that pulled the strings had traded tenderness for ledger. so she performs. she smiles. she files away each missing laugh and wears it as though it were jewelry. [ i will perform until the last curtain falls — because the alternative is to stand still and listen to the echo of the world that took her elphaba. it's too cruel to bare. ] ❝ if by death you mean the death of pretense, of the scripts sewn into my lips, then perhaps i am dying a little every night. if by it you mean something simpler, something quick and clean, then no. i am a longer sort of ruin. ❞ she lets the last words hang like a challenge and a benediction both, and for a second, just a breath, the puppet’s hands are empty and the woman inside is visible: small, fierce, and unbearably hollow.
