Explanation: I had a lovely long fic that I scrapped when I realized that it was a dead end. However, there were some things that I just liked too much to delete. Some of those chunks have become stories of themselves. The premise of this: Elphaba has fled to the Emerald City, but it is Fiyero, her best friend (and, their friends say teasingly, love interest), whom she has taken with her. Glinda goes to the Philosophy Club with her friends.

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Disclaimer: Wicked and all its accompanying everythings are the creation and property of Gregory Maguire.

She knew everything after the haze had cleared: she’d been unlaced from the shell she was lying in and tumbled rudely to the floor. It was at that point that she became aware of being naked. She grasped blindly, humiliated, for her clothes, and pulled them on without caring. Her entire body felt filthy. She’d stumbled from the ring and into the light, and found her friends waiting, horrified, supporting a bloody, almost unconscious Tibbett.

“He’s…he’s bad,” Avaric stammered. She’d never seen him like this, at a loss. “I don’t know what happened, but we have to get him—Glinda! Glinda, what’s wrong? You look terrible.”

She shook her head; she felt nauseous. Lashing out at the Tiger, his head driving between her legs; crying out or moaning as the spectators leaned forward in fascination; an ending speech about true knowledge….

“Glinda, go back,” Avaric decided. “We’ll deal with him.”

Glinda obeyed. She didn’t know what else to do. She plucked her way through the miserable dark streets, feeling alone and frightened and oh so young, too young. Somehow, she’d gotten back to Crage Hall and blundered to her dorm, sobbing hysterically. Elphaba wasn’t there, which was a relief, because all Glinda wanted to do now was be alone.

She stripped off her clothes and found her breasts smeared with some kind of salve. More memories started to return, and she shivered violently. There was something running from between her legs, dark and runny and sickly-sweet smelling that she remembered the dwarf shoving up…and then the Tiger’s head pushing into it…no.

But it wasn’t bloody, she gradually registered. Did that mean she was still a virgin? She certainly didn’t feel that way. Why, why, why had she not listened to Elphaba?

Too dirty, too violated, too terrified, too ashamed to think. And what had happened to Tibbett? She lay curled on the hard floor for many minutes, before finally realizing that Elphaba would probably be coming back at some point from wherever it was that she’d been, and Glinda certainly didn’t want to be there for the I-told-you-so. She put on a robe and staggered down the hall to the showers.

When she came back, feeling no cleaner than before, she was so exhausted that she simply collapsed into bed and fell asleep immediately.

So it was that she didn’t know of Elphaba’s disappearance until the next day, when she woke up in the afternoon.

She blinked stickily in those few moments of disorientation that follow initial awakening, and wondered why the sun was so bright. Then she realized that it was late morning at earliest. She started to get out of bed, saw that she had fallen asleep in her bathrobe, and remembered everything.

Oddly, she needed Elphaba. To talk to, maybe? She didn’t know. Glinda decided that she could wait for Elphaba to come back, and flopped onto her bed to wait, content to let the sun shine into her eyes, hear the footsteps outside the door, watch the closet door swing gently—

Elphaba hated when the closet door was left open. She always closed it. And Glinda certainly hadn’t opened or closed it. Also—she sat up to see—yes, her clothes from last night were still in a filthy heap on the floor. Elphaba would have wondered about that; would have woken her up, even...

Glinda got up, far more agitated now, and began ransacking Elphaba’s side of the room. Empty, all empty! So that was why she hadn’t come with them. She was leaving—where?

As much as she hated to leave the safe cocoon of her room, Glinda washed, dressed, and ran out to find one of her friends. It was Milla who met her near the library, and Glinda breathed a sigh of relief: Milla was the least frivolous of the trio that also incorporated Pfannee and Shenshen.

“Glinda, do you know where your roommate is?” Milla cried as soon as she sighted Glinda.

Glinda shook her head. “I was wondering if you—”

“If I did would I be asking you? Glinda, Fiyero’s gone too. All of his things, too. Everybody—that means students and teachers and Heads—is sure that they’ve run off together. Nobody knows where, or why.”

If it had been another time, Glinda would have joked about elopement. Now she was too afraid. “My goodness…”

“Yes, isn’t it an absolute scandal?”

“Milla…what happened to Tibbett?”

Milla’s face turned solemn. “Oh. Oh…yes, Avaric sent you home. Well…we weren’t really sure what happened, but we just found him after the show. He’d been raped, I think, by that Tiger.” Both girls shuddered. “He wasn’t right in the head, muttering, and he was all bloody, and we were picking him up to take home when you came up, all—” her eyes suddenly widened. “Glinda! You were the Kumbric Witch!”

Glinda nodded. She couldn’t seem to stop shivering.

“What was it like?”

She burst into tears; Milla immediately did her duty of crooning and hugging and rocking, but it was no comfort to Glinda, who wanted only to erase everything that had happened last night. And: Someplace along the line she had come to see Elphaba as somebody who was always there, always with the answer, always the one to whom Glinda could always look to fix things.

So right now, when everything was awful and the world falling apart…She needed her Elphie.

THE END