Chapter Text
There was a time they could’ve ruled the world.
Back when love tasted like coffee on winter rooftops, and the sky stretched wide enough to believe in forever. Back when songs weren’t just melodies—they were confessions, lullabies, promises passed between trembling hands. Back when laughter curled in the hollow of a throat and secrets lived in the space between two breaths.
But time has a habit of unraveling even the most sacred things. Turning gold into rust. Turning love into legend.
Ten years ago, Glinda—the darling of the pop world, with sugar-laced vocals and a spine made of steel—watched everything she cared about slip through her manicured fingers. And she let it. Told herself it was for safety. For control. For her career. For them. For survival.
She told herself it was the only way.
She lied.
Now she wears her past like ink. Tiny silver stars trace her wrists. A phoenix rises from the curve of her ankle. A vine winds over her ribs like a secret she never learned to name. The world sees a goddess—glossy, glamorous, untouchable. But if they looked closely, they’d see the cracks: the tremble in her hands when the lights go out. The pause in her smile when someone says Berlin. Or green. They’d see the part of her that never stopped looking back.
Elphaba never wanted a spotlight. While Glinda was building an empire, Elphaba was sifting through the wreckage—sculpting heartbreak into lyrics, weaving sorrow into songs that hurt to listen to. She didn’t chase fame. Fame came to her. For her honesty. Her brilliance. Her brutal, beautiful truth.
She lived in the shadows by choice. Said she liked the quiet. No one asked what it cost her.
Glinda never explained why she walked away. Why she left their friends behind, why she handed them to Elphaba like offerings laid at the altar of guilt. She let the world call her selfish. Let them believe she was cruel. Because it was safer. Because she had to choose.
So she chose silence. She chose survival.
She walked away from love. From family. From herself.
Now, a decade later, she stands alone on a stage built for thousands, the first notes of a song trembling in the air like a held breath. Ice blue silk drapes over her frame, heels planted firm beneath her. The lights stay low—she prefers it that way. Dim. Private. Honest. Her fingers trembled around the mic, not from fear, but from memory. From a ghost her body never forgot.
The song isn’t approved by her label. It probably never will be. Too raw. Too vulnerable. Too much like her.
She doesn’t say the name. Doesn’t have to. Every note is a confession. Every lyric a wound she still bleeds through.
She had learned to make her pain palatable. Pretty. Marketable.
A glossy sadness the world could stream on repeat.
Elphaba never would’ve done that. Elphaba had been wildfire—fierce and holy and impossible to hold. She didn’t water down her grief. She let it roar. She didn’t stay.
* * *
Half a world away, in a café tucked between old buildings and older ghosts, Elphaba sits with a cold mug of coffee and a blank page. She hasn’t written in weeks. Not lyrics. Not essays. Not even the anonymous pieces she sells to indie zines under false names about war and memory and women who burn too brightly.
She slept with someone last night. She doesn’t remember their name. Just the red scarf, and the way their eyes looked like spring—hopeful and soft, the kind of eyes she leaves before she can ruin.
Her phone buzzes. Once. Then again.
A headline:
"Glinda the Good Gone Raw: Fans Speculate New Ballad Is About the Mysterious Ex."
She doesn’t read it.
She doesn’t need to.
They both “moved on.” That’s what Glinda’s PR team said when they scrubbed Elphaba from the narrative. That’s what Elphaba tells herself when she slides into another leather jacket and disappears into another stranger’s sheets.
But time has a cruel kind of memory.
It unburies the things you thought you’d drowned.
And somewhere—stitched into Glinda’s tattoos and buried in the silence of Elphaba’s unwritten songs—is a story neither of them finished.
They just haven’t realized yet:
The chorus is still coming.