Damaged

Rifiuto: Non Miriena

Summary: Glinda wasn't happy about moving to the city of Nest Hardings. The other students at her new school snub her, she lives in a huge old, creepy mansion in the heart of the city, and she feels more out of place in Nest Hardings than she ever did in Gillikin. So one moonlit evening, while wandering the cemetery behind her house, Glinda stumbles upon a girl, and ends up making a friend: sweet, independent, mysterious Elphaba. While Glinda is thrilled to finally have a friend in this new city, there's one teeny, tiny little catch. Her new friend is dead. Elphaba's a ghost, and apparently one with vengeance on her mind. Glinda soon finds herself drawn into the city's lies, tangled within the heart of buried family secrets. Will Glinda be able to untangle the web of lies and discover Elphaba's dark family secret, or is everything too damaged to repair?

Prologue

Nest Hardings, Province of Munchkinland, 1906

It's hot, muggy, the only way a summer in Nest Hardings can be.

It's the summer of the Western flu- Influenza, brought from the west, the Vinkun lands to the proper towns and cities of Munchkinland. By day, workers in the mills breath it in the air, injesting it into their lungs, and return home to their tenants, where they spread it like wildfire. By night, the rats carry it in the streets, passing the disease to cats out hunting, who later take the disease home to their owners. In a matter of weeks, thousands will be housebound, too sick to work, and by the first month, thousands upon thousands will be dead.

The church bells toll out the number of deceased, as the grave diggers spear their shovels into the ground, digging out graves big enough to hold full-sized coffins. Eventually, the cemeteries begin to overflow, and the city is forced to burn the countless dead. Wrapped in sheets, they're piled together before being lit aflame. The smell of smoke eventually morphs into the ever present stench of rotting bodies and death.

Those lucky few that are able to escape before the epidemic arrives, escape with their lives. Thousands, do not. While the wealthy hide away in their summer homes in Gillikin, the City, and the Glikkus, those left in Munchkinland suffer a fate only dictators would dare dream up. In the city of Nest Hardings, the mansions sit empty, abandoned, waiting for the returns of their owners; of the wealthy who built their lifestyles on the backs of the tenant workers.

Schools are closed, as children take sick; hospitals overflow with patients; and factories, despite the heat and the death all around, continue to stay open, even though most workers will never return to man their machines. Police become temporary morticians, helping cart the dead to the undertakers', dropping the bodies at the doorstep before returning hours later with more.

In the cemeteries of Nest Hardings, whole families are buried together, one on top of the other. Grave robbers haunt the stones, in search of recently buried wealthy, but they're out of luck. Several come upon fresh graves, unburied bodies, rotting corpses left in the open, due to very little room within the gravesites. Rats come to feast upon the flesh of the dead, spreading the disease even quicker. Eventually, the rats too, become victims of the Western flu.

In one cemetery, grave diggers wander among the stones, passing the names of long dead ancestors. They make their way past stillborn infants and insane grandmothers, past suicidal sons and murdered daughters, to a crypt, a vault holding the dead of the reigning family. The names of the dead, carved into the stone, paint a chilling family portrait. The workers break into the stone, and place two bodies, victims of Influenza, then seal the tomb, returning the marble plate to its previous position.

Four years pass.

In those four years, the city is still in the grips of the Western flu. Again, the men return to the family tomb, four bodies carried between them. They once again break the seal, remove the plate, and place the four bodies within the tomb, alongside their family. Once the tomb is sealed, the names are added. Well, all but one.

The last name is left off the family roll call; only the works know who it is.

And while they can't tell, they will never forget.