Chapter Text
When Galinda wakes up, it's because the room is bathed in sunlight, glowing pink and orange under her eyelids. She's startled for a long moment before she remembers that yes - it's supposed to be that way. The curtains have gone. Maintenance came to strip them off last night, along with the chair covers and bathroom mat, for cleaning. Apparently, they can't wait another day to start clearing out these rooms - no doubt to milk whatever they can out of renting it to summer school students as soon as they vacate.
It's her very last day in Shiz. Finally.
She glances over to the bed next to her, to the long sleeping figure and the elbow poking out of the sheets. Elphie's back is to her. Galinda watches it rise and fall with her steady breathing, darker than usual against the white sheets, and greener in the bright sunlight. Galinda's own slippers lie haphazardly at the foot of her bed. She hadn't bothered to put them back on when climbing into her own bed in the middle of the night.
Galinda snorts to herself. They can't even sit comfortably together on these tiny beds, let alone stay the night together.
Good riddance. She'll be happy to be out into Emerald City tonight. She had scoured the student websites and found a little apartment on the outskirts of Emerald City just last week. As shiny as it was in the pictures, with Daddy's help, she'll be able to move in right away and keep it going for the couple of months before her internship starts.
It didn't take much convincing to make Elphie agree to stay with her this summer.
She rubs the sleep out of her eyes and lets them adjust to the light. All right. Pack, eat, get dressed; that's the whole plan for the day. She takes another glance at Elphie's sleeping body. She looks the same as ever, really. Galinda blinks at the image, strange and giddy for no real reason, like every morning of these last few weeks.
When she comes back to the room, a mug of coffee in hand and a cereal bar tucked in the pocket of her dressing gown, Elphaba is up, sitting cross-legged on her bed with her laptop.
"We've got... five hours to pack up and be out," she says, squinting at the corner of the screen.
Galinda glides over to peek over her shoulder, taking a long sip out of her mug. Elphie's personal statement is up on the screen. It's the last of her postgrad applications - dear old Shiz itself, Emerald City College, plus a couple of others. There are comments and highlights everywhere. Half of them are Galinda's own work - she offered to help look over every single one; her experience with tedious applications far outdoes Elphie's.
"Oh, you're still writing those?" Galinda asks.
"Last one. About to submit," Elphaba says, eyes scanning the screen without distraction.
Galinda watches for a minute or two, before planting a kiss into the skinny shoulder in front of her.
She sighs a long-suffering sigh, taking a second to put her mug down and drag her eyes around the room before falling dramatically into her own bed. "Guess I'll get started on my wardrobe."
Two hours later, she has two suitcases full of neatly folded clothes, and a thousand more items flung across her bed, waiting their turn.
Elphie, at last, is up and emptying the contents of her desk drawers into a rucksack. Before Galinda's very eyes, she fills up a shabby suitcase (much more sensibly sized than Galinda's) and two big black plastic bags, and lines them along the foot of her desk. Her desk completely empty too in a matter of minutes.
Hm. That might have been a simpler approach.
Elphie gives her the quickest, tiniest smile when she catches Galinda watching her, before darting her eyes away with a bashful twist of her mouth. Silly girl.
Five hours is nowhere near enough to tidy everything up properly (she really should have started yesterday), and Galinda should definitely be more indignant about the curtain issue, too, but right now, she can't bring herself to care.
"Elphie," she says, her tone loose and playful. "You forgot to put up your hair this morning."
Elphaba makes a small hum of acknowledgement, then agreement, and reaches for the hair tie around her wrist.
"No, don't!" Galinda interrupts. "I just love it down like this," she sighs. "You're so beautiful."
"Shut up," is the lightning fast, automatic reply she receives.
Galinda smiles wider and tilts her hand in her chin in mock adoration.
Well. Real adoration.
She has to be honest about it now, Elphie's reaction to any kind of romantic situation would have made the top of her list of things to see from day one. Looking back, she doesn't know when the morbid curiosity morphed into the kind that leaves her stomach twisting. The Fiyero fiasco in the middle there surely hadn't helped.
Suffice it to say, it's more than entertaining that Galinda herself gets to be the subject here. She springs off the bed and gets to work on her walls, spurred into action by the same delight.
Her timetable and notices and memos come off easily, little pink push pins placed neatly back into their jar. All that's left is the fairy lights. Her mirror is gone in the van she had organised last week, along with her rug and a few bits of furniture all the way from home. She had managed to get by on the little vanity attached to the wardrobe, taking extreme delight in proving wrong Elphie's doubts about that concept.
Galinda ponders how to get at the lights - they're high up above the bed, too far for her desk chair. In the end, she climbs onto all three of her cushions piled onto each other.
Elphaba looks up dubiously at her precarious position from where she's fixing the old zip of her backpack. "Be careful."
"Uh," Galinda says. Half the wire is coiled in her hand, but the string tying one end to the curtain hook just won't give. "Scissors, please," she says, eyeing the pair on her desk, wobbling on her footing on the squishy mattress.
Her roommate is up and on task in a second, but Galinda turns her head just in time to see a devilish smirk flit across Elphie's face.
Before she knows it, the lights, and her hands tangled in them, come rushing down, as Elphaba breaks her balance with one well-aimed tug at her dressing gown.
"Elphie! WHY - !" She screeches - and then she's giggling, because Elphaba is giggling - laughing hard enough to alert the whole damn hallway. Elphaba reaches for Galinda's arm for balance, or to rub it in. She can barely control herself (rude) as Galinda pulls her down too with a vicious grab of her t-shirt.
And just like that, Elphie's body is warm and flush against her. The smell of her hair is in Galinda's nose (Galinda makes sure it is) and her arm wraps around her slender waist with little thought.
She brings their faces together with only a startled breath from Elphie.
Elphie kisses with… determination. Her hands lie uselessly next to Galinda's head but her mouth is a marvel. Galinda thrills at her forwardness and her awkwardness. It's perfect. Unladylike. It makes her feel weak down to her bones, and she has to try so consciously to even make her wrist move - to come up to brush away the tendrils of Elphie's hair that are tickling her face.
She winds her hands in them, as best as she can with one arm trapped in a tangle of fairy lights. Elphie's eyes are dark and perfectly unfocused under her long, willowy lashes. She does that peculiar little thing again - averts her eyes and looks down and away.
And Galinda wants terribly to hold her gaze for longer.
She wills life into her arms enough to lift them and cups one hand under Elphie's chin to make her look. Elphaba stubbornly wrinkles her nose at the attention, kissing Galinda's lips again.
The distraction definitely works.
"You've only got two hours, Glinda," she says wryly, but her voice is too roughened for the right effect. Galinda shivers a little.
Sure enough, two hours later, they're out. Elphie is already downstairs handing their keys in to the reception (which is a loose term for a place that's unmanned ninety percent of the time.)
Galinda counts her boxes piled outside the door to be sure. She checks each drawer of her dresser for the final time.
Everything is empty, the place dull, just like she had found it.
But. Still. It's true -
She's actually going to miss this stupid room. Who would have ever thought it?
There's a lot of memories here. Some not-great ones; also the best ones.
She shuts the door and gathers two of the rosy storage boxes in her hands. It's getting late. She should make towards the elevator. It's going to be weird to be away from Shiz. She hasn't ever been herself outside of it.
"Are you coming?"
And there's Elphie, poking head over the top of the staircase, her hands emptied of the bags she had taken down with her.
Galinda blinks back to Earth and nods vibrantly, motioning towards the remaining boxes.
Elphaba nods and flies towards the boxes, her now-braided hair swishing in Galinda's vision.
She stands up with them, smiling a tentative smile, like she doesn't know how to. "See you downstairs," she says shortly, disappearing back into the staircase.
Galinda wants to run after her.
It was never about the room itself.