Work Text:
Scorpia knows the ins and outs of the Horde's headquarters like the back of her hand. The subject was covered in its entirety during Force Captain Orientation, after all: because of it, she knows the underground tunnels, the hidden nooks and crannies, the shortest way to get to the mess hall from the training simulation chambers when it usually takes a full five minutes of walking through endless corridors. (A full fifteen, though, if the person doing the walking is the friendly type and can't help but stop on the way to say hi and talk to people, an experience Scorpia is intimately acquainted with. It's as if whoever designed the headquarters specifically made it in order to keep the aforementioned mess hall as far away from the training area as possible, so that walking from one point to the other would constitute an extra workout in and of itself.)
Catra didn't attend orientation, but Scorpia has come to learn that even without it, Hordak's recently appointed second-in-command knows her way around. It's what makes it so hard to find her, when she disappears for hours on end to "be alone", or something else equally terrifying. Scorpia doesn't want Catra to ever feel alone; she wants her best friend to feel loved, to feel cherished, to know that she's always got someone that she can count on. It's pretty obvious that Catra hasn't often felt that way ever since Adora left the Horde, so it's become Scorpia's self-assigned job to be at Catra's side every step of the way and cheer her up any time she thinks it might be necessary.
Right now, she thinks it might be necessary.
Catra isn't in any of her new rooms, which used to belong to Shadow Weaver only a few hours ago. She isn't in the mess hall, or the training area, or the dorms where she and the others sleep -- or, well, slept, if Scorpia thinks about it, as Catra presumably won't be sleeping there anymore. There's a half-shredded picture of Adora pinned to one of the bedposts, though, which is an interesting find, but not one that helps her in her search. She checks the hollow walls, Entrapta's room-slash-laboratory ("I have not seen her in the past three hours, forty-seven minutes, twelve seconds and counting") and even her own humble chamber, which, to be fair, probably isn't the most likely place a person trying to be alone would go, but she does want to be thorough. In the name of said thoroughness, Scorpia even checks the courtyard and the area surrounding the building, and finds various broken metallic bits and pieces, and even what looks like it may be a dead rat, but no Catra.
The only place that's left on her list is the rooftop.
It has never been officially stated, but everyone somehow knows that the roof is off-limits. Cadets and Force Captains alike do not go near it; even Scorpia doesn't know what it looks like up there aside from in blueprint form. Perhaps Catra now has the ability and the permission to go there (is there a second-in-command orientation that taught her new leader these things?); perhaps she doesn't and is there anyway. Scorpia wouldn't put it past her. What she has to decide now, though, is whether to go up after her and possibly break an unspoken rule.
It doesn't take her very long to reach her decision. Catra is worth it.
Scorpia quickly takes the narrow set of steps up to the door that leads outside, and emerges onto a large platform lit only by the gentle rays of the setting sun. Catra's right there, sitting at the very edge of the platform with her knees curled up to her chest and her back to the entrance.
"Catra!" Scorpia exclaims, glad to finally find her. "I've been looking everywhere for you!"
Catra's head turns slightly, just enough to see who's standing behind her. "Oh, it's you," she says, without any inflection whatsoever, and turns back.
Scorpia walks over to Catra's side and settles down herself, carefully crossing her legs beneath her and stopping herself at the last second from throwing an arm around Catra's shoulders, who wouldn't appreciate the friendly gesture. "Why are you here?" she asks, a question which means many things: why are you hiding, why are you unhappy, why are you sitting on what is objectively the dustiest part of the building.
"No reason," comes Catra's murmured reply, which Scorpia knows only means one thing: it's none of your business.
Catra isn't the kind of person to reply to direct questions with direct answers, but Scorpia isn't the kind of person to give in easily, so she opts to go about getting Catra to talk about her feelings another way. "Wow, I've never seen this view before in my life," she begins. "I've been missing out! The sunset looks so beautiful from here, and you never told me about it?"
Scorpia chatters on, jumping from topic to topic, knowing that Catra isn't listening but not really minding. She leaves small pauses in her speech for Catra to reply if she ever wants to, and although the other girl doesn't take her up on it -- or even utter a word throughout the whole thing -- Scorpia goes on doing so.
She's rewarded for her patience when, in the middle of a sentence about the one time Scorpia as a cadet almost accidentally lopped the head off of one of her superior officers, Catra speaks up. "If you were in my place," she begins, completely ignoring everything Scorpia's been talking about, "what would you do?"
Scorpia's elated, she really is, that Catra's starting to talk about whatever's been bothering her this whole time, but she can't for the life of her get what Catra actually means by her question. "What... do you mean?" she asks hesitantly, mildly concerned that Catra will drop the subject entirely if Scorpia doesn't immediately understand her. Catra's skittish that way.
Luckily for her, Catra doesn't drop it at all, instead turning to face Scorpia properly. "If I wasn't in the picture, and you became second-in-command instead," she elaborates. "What would you do?"
"Oh, I couldn't possibly," Scorpia says, aghast. "How could I imagine a world without you in it, now that I've met you? We're --"
Catra fixes her with a look, and Scorpia falters. "Er... let's see," she says, changing tracks. "If I got promoted, and you were still around and still best friends with me, just out on a mission, or something, I would..."
"Yes?" Catra prompts, clearly eager to know what Scorpia has to say.
"I would... I would hand out cupcakes to everyone, to motivate them to work harder so that the Horde can finally win its inevitable victory over the Rebellion!" It's a reasonable answer to Catra's question, she hopes. "You know those tiny little cupcakes the waiters were handing out at Queen Frosta's castle during Princess Prom? I'm pretty sure Entrapta loved them too, as much as I did."
Surprisingly, Catra seems to like her answer. "That's just about what I thought you'd say," she replies, and the corner of her mouth twists upward slightly in a smile. Only too late does Scorpia realize that it is a bitter smile, one without any humour. "And where, exactly," she continues, "would you get those many cupcakes?"
Scorpia opens her mouth to answer and realizes she has no answer to give. Catra, however, does not seem to need one: she moves her body away again, staring into the distance, and says, "We have a whole army to feed, and cupcakes like that don't come cheap. Besides, one cupcake wouldn't improve a thing. Motivation isn't that easy." Through gritted teeth, Catra adds, "Change isn't that easy."
And just like that, Scorpia understands what Catra's been bothered about this whole time. "This is about Lonnie, isn't it?" she asks, and Catra's eyes flash in anger. "You've been worrying about what she said earlier, and I didn't know it!"
The two of them had, earlier in the day, returned from Hordak's chamber, vibrating with excitement over the news of Catra's promotion (well, Scorpia had been vibrating; Catra just looked extremely pleased). They passed a group of cadets, and Catra called out to a couple of them. "Hey, Kyle, Lonnie," she'd said. "Call everyone to the courtyard. I have an announcement to make."
"Ooh, is that how you're going to tell everyone?" Scorpia said, bouncing on the balls of her feet. She'd refrained from telling everyone they met herself, albeit with a lot of difficulty, simply because she knew that Catra, the absolute genius, would already have a plan regarding letting the Horde soldiers and cadets know about her new leadership in an effective manner. Just as Catra was about to say something else, the broadcasting screens that were usually hidden behind panels in the walls unless needed, flipped over to reveal Lord Hordak's face.
Without any pleasantries, he got straight to business. "There has been a change in leadership, and though significant, it should not affect the smooth running of the Horde in any way," he said. "Force Captain Catra is now my second-in-command, and you will report directly to her instead of to Shadow Weaver." Without any pleasantries, he ended his message, and the broadcasting screens folded back into the walls and disappeared.
"Oh, well," Catra said, not looking too dejected at the announcement being taken out of her hands. "Looks like you won't need to call everyone to the courtyard after all."
Scorpia was ready to hug her best friend in happiness, when they both heard a loud, affronted, "You?"
It was Lonnie. She looked directly at Catra, a mixture of shock and indignation on her face. Scorpia knew what her one word had meant. Catra knew what it meant. All the people that had been standing in that hallway, frozen in their tracks and waiting to see what happened next, knew what it meant.
Lonnie didn't think that Catra, beautiful Catra, with all her smarts and graces and wily ways, with all the effort she had put into proving herself worthy, deserved her new position.
Scorpia had needed only to see her best friend's hand clench into a fist, and she was stepping forward, ready to defend Catra's honour; she was stopped, though, by a fluid motion from the person she was defending herself.
"Me," Catra practically purred at Lonnie, and when Scorpia looked over at her in surprise, there was not a trace of wrath or resentment in her expression. "Problem?"
The two girls stared each other down, a battle that, for once, Scorpia couldn't help her companion with. The staredown went on so long that it started to get awkward, everyone wondering who would give in first and Scorpia not wondering anything at all, having full faith in the person beside her, when the short blond kid, Kyle, spoke up. "C-congratulations on your --" he began stuttering out, only to have Lonnie shift her glare to him and pointedly elbow him in the stomach. After a groan of agony, he subsided and said nothing else.
Even though Kyle had picked a terrible time, he had somehow defused a little bit of the tension in the room. The staredown was over, Lonnie and Catra didn't look ready to tear each other's throats out, and people were moving again, going to whichever places they had originally been on their way to before the drama started. Catra, too, seemed relaxed: Lonnie had looked away first. "Training session in ten," she'd said to that group of cadets. "Don't be late."
Scorpia had thought that was the end of that, and not thought about it any further. Apparently she was wrong, because here she is, on the rooftop with a Catra that doesn't seem to have forgotten the encounter for one second.
"Why didn't you just tell me?" Scorpia insists, horrified that she hadn't put it together earlier. "I would have supported you, you know! Lonnie was wrong, anyway --"
"You dimwit, this isn't about Lonnie," Catra spits out, and with those six words she completely shatters all of Scorpia's illusions of understanding what she believes goes on in Catra's head. "Although she is another problem I'll have to deal with eventually. No, this isn't about her."
Tentative, afraid of being snubbed again, Scorpia asks, "Then what is this about?"
Catra doesn't answer at first, and in fact takes so long that it seems like she won't answer at all. She does speak eventually, though, but it is in a low voice, devoid of her earlier emotions. "I thought that I could change things," she says, making a pattern in the dust on the platform with a sharp nail. "If I could get high up enough in the hierarchy of the Horde, that is. And now here I am, standing exactly where I've always wanted to be, and I don't know how to change anything at all."
The way she says it, the look on her face, wrenches Scorpia's heart and makes her think she would do anything to wipe Catra's insecurities off the face of Etheria. "You'll change things," she tried to assure her, not entirely knowing how to go about doing so but hoping her confidence in Catra give Catra confidence in herself. "You're clever, and quick-witted, and you haven't just accidentally made it this far, you know!"
Catra doesn't appear to register the compliments. "What comes next, though?" she asks, mostly rhetorical. "What do I do now? How do I change things, with the limited resources I have, that the Horde has? You heard Hordak when he said my being in charge shouldn't and wouldn't change a thing about how the Horde is run. How do I prove to anyone that I'm not just repeating the same actions as the people before me, that I'm more than just a dumb stand-in for Shadow Weaver?"
Scorpia hears the unsaid words, How do I prove to myself that I'm more than just a stand-in for Shadow Weaver?
There is only one thing Scorpia can do in response, and that is show her own unwavering belief that no matter what, Catra will always pull through. "Maybe things aren't looking so good right now," she says. "But this is only the beginning! You have plenty of time ahead of you for you to prove yourself over and over, even if you've technically done that already by proving yourself worthy in Lord Hordak's eyes!" And my eyes! "And Lord Hordak only said that the smooth running of the Horde wouldn't change in any way, and since I'm taking that to mean that even with all the changes you'll introduce sooner or later -- and you will, and they will all be perfect -- there won't be any problems that arise due to them! We may not have all the resources we need right now to make the alterations you might be thinking of, but with every victory against the Rebellion, we'll gain more and more, and then we can do more and more. You'll be able to change the Horde -- no, the entirety of Etheria -- soon enough!"
Scorpia ends her speech on her feet, her convictions giving her extra energy. She glances over at Catra to see her reaction, and finds the girl staring up at her contemplatively.
"Huh," she says, with some surprise in her voice. "You're actually right." The words warm Scorpia and she grins, overjoyed to see the cloud that had been hanging over Catra's face go slowly away. "All I have to do is win some battles against the princesses, huh?" she continues, and stands up herself. "That should be easy enough to do." She stretches, arms high above her head, her tail twitching in the cold evening air. "I think I'm gonna go check in on the cadets, give them a few pointers on how to deal with an angry She-Ra in the ranks of their enemies, seeing as I'm the leading expert on such things. See you downstairs."
As she starts to walk away, she murmurs something to herself, something Scorpia doesn't think is intended for her ears but accidentally ends up hearing anyway. "I will change this place for the better," is what she says, and as Scorpia hurries to follow her downstairs, the same way she hurries to follow her in everything, she feels within herself a fierce, unfaltering faith that what Catra says will, eventually, come true.