They said that life could end up changing in the most unexpected ways possible and almost everyone who heard this phrase agreed with it, but none were quite so aware of how much it could change other than Elphaba Thropp and Glinda Upland. Neither of them were very old women, and yet they had lived the lives of legends and had been around to see change after change after change overtake their country. It was almost as if they were centuries old, though they were not quite that ancient yet. But sweet Oz did it feel like it!
"Who'd have ever thought?" Glinda asked with a weak smile as she and Elphaba were reunited again after decades of separation and suffering.
"Certainly not I," Elphaba replied with a similar tone, looking borderline crazy because of how much life had put all of them through. And yet, against all odds and expectations (literally) the two somehow managed to find one another again. Now they stood on the very edge of Oz, alone, with nothing but the future to look to.
"Are you ready?" the green witch asked her oldest and closest companion.
"Do we have a choice?" came the dry and snarky reply. Elphaba did not answer verbally. Instead, she only gave a low laugh before she kickstarted their ride, a broomstick, and sent them flying somewhere over the rainbow, out of Oz altogether.
After an immeasurable amount of time, the two of them touched down in a farm, in the heart of a very new and very strange land.
"I feel like we're back to where we started!" Elphaba chuckled dryly, thinking about her own rural roots.
"I have a feeling we aren't in Oz anymore," Glinda replied, and then without further ado, the two old friends walked towards the farm's house, hand in hand. They had no idea where they were, or what they were getting themselves into, but here went nothing!
A few years later, the pair had managed to settle down comfortably a few houses down from the place where they first touched down. Whether it was fate, magic, dumb luck, a bit of all of the above, or something even more than that, the pair had managed to touch down right on the doorstep of Ms. Dorothy Gale, one of Oz's most (in)famous figures.
"Well! I do say! I never thought I might meet you again!" she exclaimed as she opened up her house's front door to see Glinda and Elphaba on the other side of it. Elphaba's skin had changed from green into a more "normal" color, now matching Dorothy's. Because of that, Dorothy did not recognize her at first, but she did recognize Lady Glinda.
"Nor I you," came the tired and disbelieving reply from Glinda. Sweet Oz, was life playing some kind of trick on them now? Sure, they knew that life could be strange and could change on a dime, but this was astronomical!
"Well, your landing here was far better than any of mine into Oz," Dorothy gave her old friend a dry smile.
"No kidding," Elphaba finally spoke up, shooting Dorothy an unreadable look. Even though it had been decades since last they met, Elphaba still had no idea how to feel about this strange, meddling little girl. Perhaps she was not so little now, a young woman who looked about the right age to start going to Shiz University, Elphaba could still see the ignorant, innocent little girl that she used to be, and it made her feel uncertain. She did not know if she still held a grudge against Dorothy for what she had done to Nessarose. She did not know if she still held a respect for Dorothy for coming all the way to her secluded castle in the west to beg for forgiveness for what she had done. She did not know at all how to feel about this strange little girl who had been an enigma to all of Oz twice over now.
"Oh! And who are you? Are you a friend of Lady Glinda's?" Dorothy really could not recognize Elphaba without the green skin and for a moment, Elphaba considered giving her quite the rude awakening, but at the last second, she changed her mind and lied.
"Yes I am," she said. "You and I have never met before, but Lady Glinda and I go way back..." and that was where Elphaba left it and Glinda had the good sense not to say anything else either.
From that point onward, Elphaba and Glinda essentially became two new farmhands for the Gales. When Glinda made it clear that they could not return to Oz and had no place else to go, Dorothy had graciously opened up her home to them.
"It'll be nice to have some Ozians to talk to again," she mused. "No one else back here believes a word of what I've said about Oz..." and that was when the three women, two old and one young, became a very strange trio of friends indeed.
Dorothy clung to Elphaba and Glinda simply because she wished to have some Ozian friends to speak to. Elphaba and Glinda, meanwhile, clung to Dorothy for they had no one else to help them to adapt to this strange new world of Kansas. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry had also graciously invited the two strange women into their service, but because they did not believe Dorothy's stories about Oz, they were unable to completely relate to Elphaba and Glinda. It was then that Elphaba, for the first time ever, expressed relief in having found Dorothy again.
"I may not be a fan of that little farm brat," the ex-green witch muttered. "But I do thank Oz that she was the one we landed with."
"Do you think that was why we landed here then?" Glinda asked. "We were all in Oz, do you think we were somehow drawn together again by that same power?" but Elphaba only shrugged in reply. She was done with magic and higher powers and controlled destinies. All she cared about now was making a peaceful life for herself and Glinda. Maybe now at last, she could get a fraction of the life she had always wanted...
But even though Elphaba and Glinda had gotten off to a somewhat rocky and awkward start with Dorothy, their only connection being their longing to go back to Oz, as the time passed, their friendship grew more genuine. It was still very strange, but it was no longer so tense and it was not only built upon one pillar of desperation. They had more connection points now outside of their experience and eventual expulsion from Oz. What they first began to bond over was the fact that they were all, in some way, at heart, farm girls.
"I was born and raised in an area sort of like this," Elphaba once told Dorothy as the two of them overlooked the endless flat land that surrounded the Gale family farm and house. "It was a bit nicer than this," she said. "But I grew up on a farm too."
"Really?" Dorothy sounded genuinely interested. "Were you ever lonely?"
"All the time," Elphaba confessed, unsure of why she was being vulnerable with a girl she still wasn't exactly on friendly terms with. But Dorothy didn't know this, so she gave Elphaba another deeply interested look. There was no real pity in it, which Elphaba was glad of, but there was a deepness to it that made her almost uncomfortable. Dorothy might've still been very ignorant and naive, but there was a very strange and powerful wisdom about her that made it impossible for Elphaba to dismiss her entirely.
"I was never exactly the most popular girl in my town," Elphaba continued, despite her reserves about being so open, let alone to someone like Dorothy. But she couldn't help but feel compelled to spill the truth to this strange little farm girl, who was more like her than she liked to think.
"Nor was I," Dorothy agreed solemnly. "They called me weird, and absentminded. They said I was a dizzy dreamer, whose head was always in the clouds. They didn't like me very much. They avoided me because I was... weird. And different."
"Me too," Elphaba replied, feeling as if she was hearing her own story being told back to her by this child.
"You were a dreamer as well?" Dorothy asked, and Elphaba felt very uncomfortable with that question, but she didn't deny it.
"My head was always in the clouds too," she confessed. "I didn't really much like it on the ground, or with other people."
"Nor I," Dorothy nodded. "I was always-"
"Somewhere over the rainbow," the two spoke these last few words in unison and in their surprise, they both locked eyes. Elphaba was left feeling haunted while Dorothy looked as if she had finally found a friend.
But Dorothy didn't just bond with Elphaba, she also bonded with Glinda. She came to realize that the mysterious and beautiful Good Fairy of the North was more than just that. She was also something of a tactician, very cunning, ambitious and resourceful. And from the stories she was telling, she had helped free Oz from the tyrannical clutches of the Emperor Apostle of Oz. Glinda had mustered up brains, heart and courage and managed to help stall and outwit some of the Emperor's most powerful allies. She may have never engaged in direct combat, but she had more than proven her worth when it came to helping save the country.
But that was one story Glinda had yet to share with Elphaba, that the Emperor Apostle was none other than her little brother, Shell Thropp. Glinda had kept this secret only because she did not wish to trouble Elphaba further. How could she tell the ex-green girl that yet another one of her family members had become a religious nut, this time almost subduing an entire nation into a totalitarian theocracy? Frex had barely even managed to hold a congregation and Nessa only managed to capture Munchkinland before her untimely death (at Dorothy's unwitting hands... or house... which had since been returned to its proper place on her family farm) but Shell managed to take over the entire country, using the threat of dragons and military brutality to subdue even the smallest acts of "treachery".
Even though Shell had stepped down very fast when the true Ozma of Oz made herself known, in all the years he did manage to claw his way up to power, he had been nothing but ruthless, even worse than the Wizard. There was just something not right about mixing the Thropp lines with Unionist doctrine, it never ended well. And Shell was the worst example of that to ever exist. But Glinda knew that Elphaba still only had fond memories of her troublesome but playful, youthful little brother. She did not want to corrupt those memories by revealing to her what Shell has truly become, so she kept that secret to herself. In his youth, Shell had only been a good liar, but in his adulthood, he had been a monster. How could Glinda tell that to Elphaba? The answer: she couldn't. So she didn't.
But even though Glinda refused to speak too much about Elphaba's family, she told Dorothy a great deal about her own.
"We came from the northern lands of Oz, obviously," she told the girl as they sat on several hay bales, watching the cattle in the distant pasture grazing. "I was from Pertha Hills in the Upper Uplands, and my parents were named Highmuster and Larena. They were both very rich and powerful, although they were not technically official nobles..." and although Dorothy could not relate to being born of a rich or powerful family, she could relate to Glinda's isolation in the same way she had related to Elphaba's.
Even though Glinda had been raised slap in the lap of luxury, she hadn't always been happy. If anything, she had been melancholic, forever longing for something else. Even if she didn't know what it was, there was always another life beyond the farm that she desired. Elphaba had given her that life, and even though she had lost Elphaba for a time, the impact Elphaba left on her ever faded away.
"I remember getting my hands dirty in all sorts of political schemes," she admitted with a dark smile.
"I can relate," Dorothy gave a similarly jaded snort, thinking about her most recent trip to Oz. That time had been a bit more... chaotic. First of all, her status as the hero of Munchkinland had been redacted and she had been named a traitor, and an assassin of the glorious Nessarose Thropp, rightful Eminence of Munchkinland. Things had not improved from there...
But when the trio of farm girls weren't talking about their less-than-stellar histories, they were hard at work on the farm.
"Wow, you're strong," Glinda had remarked with a fond and gentle smile as the bony Elphaba easily threw a haybale up on the bed of the cart that Henry was about to drive towards the lower end of the large field in which they were all working.
"I was born and raised on a farm," came the sarcastic reply.
"But you hadn't worked on one in years!" Glinda replied as she struggled to lift a bale only half the size of the one Elphaba had so easily picked up.
"No, but working for the Ozian resistance and then being stuck in Kiamo Ko with the Gale Force on the outside and a family of nutjobs on the inside mixed with all sorts of shady doings and deeds will definitely keep a witch in shape," Elphaba said as she tossed another haybale up. In the distance, Dorothy and her little dog, Toto, were busy dragging more bales over for Elphaba and Glinda to load up.
But even though manual labor was still not Glinda's forte, she still had a very commanding aura and was still useful on the farm.
"I never realized you were so good with animals," Elphaba remarked with an almost envious look.
"Just my natural beauty, I guess," Glinda joked, tossing her faded curls as she easily rallied several sheep back into their pens. She was swift to move onto the chicken coop. Even though that area was dirty and disgusting beyond words, Glinda seemed to have a way with the chickens as well, easily catching them all and returning them to the coop. The Gales were all impressed. Glinda looked quite proud of herself. Maybe ordering around chickens wasn't quite like ordering around Ozian servants, but her aura of command still remained and that was all that mattered to her.
"I still got it!" she smirked as the placed the last of the chickens inside the coop. Em and Henry thanked her heartily for that.
Next, Glinda got the family's horse under control. She even took the old mare for a ride around the property, surprising the Gales.
"You know how to ride horses?" Dorothy had asked with wide eyes as Glinda mounted their family horse.
"I may have come and gone by bubble most of the time, but as any good and aristocratic lady should have, of course I knew how to ride a horse!" came Glinda's scornful reply, then she clicked the reigns and sent the horse trotting away at a rather brisk pace.
"Show off," Elphaba muttered under her breath, but she was smiling as Glinda rode away. Dorothy, herself, also knew how to ride, but she wasn't anywhere near as skilled or graceful as Glinda, almost falling off four times in 10 minutes.
"In the name of goodness!" Glinda cried in frustration and worry as Dorothy nearly fell off the saddle again. Elphaba only watched with a smirk.
"Yeah, I don't cause disasters," Dorothy joked once she finally brought the horse back. "I am one," and while Elphaba paled, Glinda elbowed her.
"Where have we heard that one before?" she whispered.
"Shut up," Elphaba replied.
But Elphaba and Glinda proved their worth even beyond the farm. Glinda showed just how much of a brilliant strategist and "marketer" she was by helping the Gale family farm stay afloat, making enough money at the local market to survive another year. Glinda filled out their paperwork and budgets with a very keen and critical eye, hand almost a blur as she made note after note, tutting all the while.
"Confound it all!" Henry murmured in awe as Glinda worked the facts and figures like they were nothing.
"She's had years of practice," Elphaba muttered, sounding amused and proud at the same time. Glinda said nothing, but she nodded her head in agreement. How many trade forms had she filled out while in power? And even before that, how many nights had she spent with her parents, helping them run Pertha Hills and help them take stock and inventory of all the products the farm had turned out on any given year?
And Elphaba was able to give all sorts of good advice on how to care for crops and plants. This came from her experience not only as a farm girl in Munchkinland, but also as an herbalist and a traditional witch. She had used all sorts of herbs and plants in her potions and spells so of course she knew how to tend a garden.
"She has quite the green thumb," Glinda said once and Elphaba had elbowed her in reply, much to the confusion of the Gales. But they weren't going to complain! They thought these new and mysterious strangers that Dorothy had found were wonderful! Maybe a bit odd, eccentric and mysterious, but very helpful nonetheless. And Dorothy herself quite enjoyed their time and company. She looked up to them and enjoyed nothing more than spending long days in the farm or barn with them.
"We're just three farm girls, bonding together just like we should," she remarked one day as the three of them reclined in the barn, resting in the upper loft and eating some fresh apples from one of their neighbors who lived at the very end of the lane.
"Agreed!" Glinda raised her apple in a mock toast and Elphaba did the same.
Theirs was a very strange life to be sure, and not at all one that any of them had ever expected to have, but life really did have a way of changing up on itself and this life, the farm girls decided, was quite alright. It might not have been the classiest or easiest of existences, but it was peaceful, simple and happy, and for the three of them, who had survived some of Oz's worst days, that was more than enough. Elphaba had finally found her happy ending and her peaceful life, Glinda was finally free, and Dorothy finally had some real friends to call her family. What more could any of them want? Life on the farm really could be a paradise, and perhaps it was biased for three farm girl to be saying that, but as far as they were concerned, it was even better here than it had ever been somewhere over the rainbow.
There's no place like home.
AN: NGL, I wanted this to be a cute, funny fic like the previous chapter, but man did it get heavy, angsty and pensive. But at the same time, I still like how it turned out, so this is what we're going with. (I mostly just wanted to see our three farm girls interact. I think the three would make a very interesting family, if given the chance).