Chapter Text
The plan had seemed more sound when she’d formed it, back in the Fright Zone, days away from Bright Moon and the semi-circle of princesses poking holes in her confidence.
‘So, er, you see,’ Scorpia said once her explanation had run its course. ‘There’s no one else. I need your help.’ She tried to smile. ‘Please?’
There was an open window halfway up the wall of the audience chamber. Scorpia thought she could hear laughter wafting in from the courtyard outside.
‘Shadow Weaver is free.’
It was Angella who broke the silence, which made sense, Scorpia supposed, being the only person there who was a queen and not a princess. The words themselves made less sense. That hadn’t struck Scorpia as the most important part of what she’d told them. ‘Yes?’
‘And Catra helped her escape.’
‘I wouldn’t say helped, necessarily, it’s more that she, uh, caused the escape. Unintentionally.’
‘And then she came here,’ Glimmer added, casting a sideways glance at Adora. ‘Do you have any idea how much trouble she caused?’
‘Oh!’ Scorpia was Bright Moon’s guest. They’d accepted her truce. They owed her nothing. She didn’t say anything, repeating those three facts in her mind, until the urge to yell at them to stop changing the subject passed. ‘I didn’t know that, actually, now that you mention it, but maybe we could focus on how Catra is on Beast Island…’
Scorpia’s eyes were on Adora. She’d explained Beast Island, of course, but only Adora had grown up with the stories, only Adora could really understand what it meant, and that made her Scorpia’s best chance. Were those creases of concern around her eyes, or of scepticism?
‘Shadow Weaver killed my husband,’ Angella said.
Scorpia cleared her throat. Was she supposed to respond to that? What could she possibly say? I’m sorry, but that was a long time ago, maybe we can focus on the present?
‘I don’t buy it,’ Glimmer put in, saving Scorpia the trouble. ‘Catra is cunning. If she let Shadow Weaver go, she must have had a reason. I’m not going to let Catra deceive me again. Not with such an obvious trap.’
‘That’s right! Catra came into my home and took advantage of my hospitality! I’ll never forgive her for that.’
That came from Frosta, and it made Scorpia’s head hurt to consider that a twelve-year-old had a say in Catra’s fate. Were kids her age supposed to know words like “hospitality”?
‘In fact, I say we go further than that! Let’s hold Scorpia hostage and see how Catra likes walking into a trap!’
‘Now, wait a minute,’ Scorpia began, just as Glimmer said ‘Frosta, we’ve talked about this,’ and over both of them Frosta’s ‘That’s not fair, you got to capture Catra—'
‘Enough.’ Angella raised two slender fingers to her temple. ‘We are agreed that we cannot trust Scorpia, but that does not mean we can ignore the terms of a truce. We are not the Horde. I hope you all remember that.’
Frosta made as if to object. Between the combined stares of the Queen and Princess of Bright Moon, even she wilted. ‘Fine.’
‘Now,’ Angella said, turning back to Scorpia, ‘Netossa will escort you to—’
At which point Scorpia snapped. What was the point in being polite when they’d already rejected her request? ‘You’re not the Horde,’ she said, loudly. ‘Really? Because I left the Horde to save someone I care about. I thought you would understand. Isn’t that your thing? Or are you happy to pat yourselves on the back and talk about how much better you are, but when it comes to actually doing something… Maybe you only accept Horde defectors who come with magic swords?’
‘Scorpia—’ It was the first word Adora had spoken the entire meeting.
‘And you! Don’t get me started on you! You of all people should know how important this is! She was your best friend, Adora. She would have done anything for you. Does that really mean so little?’ Anger and embarrassment descended on Scorpia like a blanket: anger because she really had thought they might help, embarrassment that she had lost her temper. A bridge burnt just as well whether the flames were true or not. ‘Sorry,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll show myself out.’
They did not trust her to show herself out. Scorpia walked through the halls and courtyards of Bright Moon with her head held high, but she did not do it alone. The atmosphere grew oppressive. She felt like a condemned woman. The princesses had not lifted a finger against her, true, but she had no delusions about the fate that awaited her if she attempted to rescue Catra and failed.
‘I can take it from here,’ she said once they were out of the castle proper, the ever-present line of the Whispering Woods rising in the distance like a second wall. Netossa looked like she might argue. Instead she sighed, shrugged, and left, all without saying a word.
She was two hours finding her campsite. She chose it carefully. Close enough to reach before dark, not too close to Bright Moon, not so far from the tree-line that she’d risk getting lost in the Whispering Woods. The light began to fade as she pitched her tent, still awkward but far more adept than she’d been at the beginning, leaving the Fright Zone—it was an adjustment, to be sure, but she was learning to make do in the blindspots technology had left her with. At least some of it had been covered in training.
Only one moon was left in the sky by the time she was done. The tent was up, her fire crackled merrily in its small pit, and she’d dragged a downed log close enough to serve as a bench. All that was missing was companionship. That thought made her bitter all over again.
‘Excellent, Scorpia. Great job. What were you expecting? Applause? “Oh, thank you, Scorpia, for showing us the error of our ways!” No. They don’t care about Catra. They were never going to help, and that’s okay! All she needs is you. You can do this.’
‘Do you usually talk to yourself?’
Scorpia was on her feet in an instant. The fire was between her and the other person, and she couldn’t quite make out—‘Oh. It’s you.’
Adora stepped into the ring of firelight. Her sword was strapped to her back, but her hands were half-raised: peace, not surrender. ‘Can we talk?’
‘Now you wanna talk? Not back there with all your friends, when it might have made a difference?’
Adora winced. ‘I don’t think anything I said would have helped.’
‘You could have at least tried—’
‘Look, I get it, okay? I’m sorry.’ She didn’t sound sorry. ‘I’m a coward, or whatever you want me to say. Is that better? Can we talk?’
Scorpia couldn’t claim to know Adora well. Nor had she been able to glean much from Entrapta, who had at least spent some time with her. (Catra could have told her everything she wanted to know about Adora. Scorpia had no doubt about that. Instead she had told her nothing—or nothing genuine, at the very least.) Still: what she did know made her think Adora was the type to make a rousing speech in front of enemies and allies alike.
Not the type to skulk around strangers’ campfires in the night.
‘They don’t know you’re here, do they?’
Apparently past waiting for an invitation, Adora unbuckled her sword, laid it at her feet, and sat down. ‘I left a note. Did you really leave the Horde?’
A note? Scorpia frowned. ‘Yes. Why do you think I’m out here instead of on a skiff, heading back to the Fright Zone?’
‘You’d say that, though, wouldn’t you?’
‘You left,’ Scorpia snapped. ‘Is it that hard to believe someone else would too?’
‘That’s not what I meant! You seem nice enough. I know you care about Catra. I’ve seen it. What I don’t understand is—why wait so long?’
‘I could never leave her,’ Scorpia said. That was a deliberate jab, and it had the intended effect. Adora drew in on herself, almost imperceptibly, but instead of satisfaction Scorpia felt a flash of guilt. She did her best to ignore it. It was nothing but the truth. ‘Why did you wait so long?’
‘Don’t,’ Adora whispered.
To her own surprise, Scorpia didn’t.
There was another long silence. Scorpia fed a log to the fire. It made her uncomfortable, as if the trees around her knew what she was doing; but if the Whispering Woods wished to take their revenge, they were apparently content to bide their time.
‘Where’d you learn to make a fire?’
It sounded like an olive branch. Scorpia looked up. ‘Force captain training.’ She didn’t need to add, not that you’d know.
‘Oh.’
‘Which Catra never attended. She’d be hopeless out in the wild. On her own.’
‘Of course she didn’t,’ Adora said, and for a split second Scorpia thought she was going to smile. Then she blinked, as if coming back to herself, as if remembering on her own wasn’t a hypothetical.
Scorpia fancied herself a decent judge of character, but even a mediocre one would have been able to spot the conflict in Adora. It wasn’t hard to guess what was on her mind. Scorpia had gone through the same process: the rhetoric of friend-or-foe weighed against something deeper, something that didn’t care for dichotomies. They were both of them neither friend nor foe, and that made for difficult conversation.
Still: time was a factor. Scorpia sighed and cut through the knot between them. ‘I’ll save you the trouble of asking. You can come with me if you want.’
‘How did you—’
‘You wouldn’t have left a note if you thought you’d be going back tonight.’
‘I left it just in case. I can still go back and get rid of it.’
‘Will you?’
Adora crossed and uncrossed her legs. ‘Is she really on Beast Island?’
‘Yes.’ At Adora’s continued hesitance, she added, not unkindly, ‘What are you having trouble with? The idea that I’m telling the truth or the fact you want to help her?’
Adora’s voice was barely audible over the crackle of the fire. ‘Does it matter?’
‘It might matter later.’
‘The thing is...’ Adora’s mouth worked. ‘I don’t know.’
Scorpia brought her claws together, the way she would to emphasise a point, but the click of them meeting made Adora jump. That was something to remember: Adora didn’t know her, either. ‘Alrighty then,’ she said. ‘I’ve had a long day. I’m going to bed. Keep an eye on the fire. If you’re still here in the morning, I'll assume you're coming along.’
‘What? But—what am I supposed to do? I thought you’d—’
‘Have your answers for you? Ha! Sleep, don’t sleep. Figure things out or don’t. It’s all the same to me.’ Scorpia reached for her bedroll. ‘Tomorrow I’m setting off to find Catra. That’s what matters.’ She fixed Adora with what she hoped was a firm stare. ‘That’s all that matters.’
*
They were half a dozen in the prison transport to begin with.
Catra wondered whether these were to be her companions in exile. Had she still held the capacity to care, it would have been a grim sign. She was the sole Horde officer; the others were an assortment of humans and satyrs, bedraggled but not so weary as to deny her the poisonous stares that were her legacy. She had craved that fear. It had been a symbol of who she’d made herself. Now it was like to get her killed the moment the guards’ attention was split one too many ways.
Not that it mattered. Beast Island was the end. Whether the people who shared that end loved her or hated her made little difference.
It was not to be. Their numbers dwindled with the days until, some ten days after departing the Fright Zone, the transport ejected its penultimate passenger and Catra was left alone. She did not know it then, but it would be another four days to their destination. Why so slow, she might have asked, when the Horde could whisk their soldiers from one battlefield to another in a matter of hours?
Because prisoners did not matter. Would Hordak even notice if the transport never returned, if it followed identical corrugated roads until there was no freedom left behind, no captivity ahead, nothing but the endless solitude of transition?
Those days were the slowest days. The guards did not speak to her. They fed her through a hatch in the metal bulkhead separating the drivers from their prisoner. Time blurred. Her thoughts supplied poison in plenty to fill the gap left by her co-passengers.
How long had she lasted as Hordak’s right hand? Already the weeks eluded her. Why did it matter how long it was exactly, when any answer was the tiniest fraction of the decades Shadow Weaver had spent in the role? (She had excess of hatred, of anger, but the worst thing she felt towards Shadow Weaver was neither of those. The worst thing was admiration.)
Without warning the transport stopped. Sounds filtered in, the crunch of a guard jumping to the ground followed by the thud of the door being unbolted. Catra’s heart beat faster. Her fur stood up on the back of her neck and she pressed herself into the far corner. Four days had seemed endless. Now that they were gone, now that she had reached the end, they were the shortest span imaginable.
The guards pulled her from her corner, forced her out into bright moonlight. She felt disembodied, as if she were watching events that had already transpired, that she could point to and say, ah, see, that’s where I went wrong, if only I had—what? If only she had what? What exit was there?
The end of the road was a small outpost on the coast, three buildings and a dock where a barge bobbed in the waves. There was no wall. Beast Island was the sort of prison that needed no wall, only a gateway, and this facility was it. (Between the buildings she caught glimpses of the island itself, distant and silent, separated from the mainland by dark, choppy water. It looked like any other island, she told herself. It looked normal.)
In her youth, the person waiting for her in the command building would have inspired nearly as much fear as the island. That, at least, had changed. She had been weak. Now she was—otherwise.
‘You’re no one now,’ Octavia hissed. ‘You won’t last a year on Beast Island.’
‘I rose higher than you ever will.’ Catra’s voice was raspy with disuse. She made herself smile. ‘Better to be someone and fall than to be a glorified prison guard your entire life.’
Octavia hit her. Catra let her head whip around with the force of the blow, but she tasted blood regardless. It didn’t matter. She’d seen Octavia flinch. An empty victory, but empty victories suited her, nowadays. Empty victories were all she had left.
‘Get the shackles on her,’ Octavia spat, ‘and get her out of my sight.’
The shackles were heavy things of smooth metal that sealed around her ankles without so much as a seam. There was no chain and nothing around her wrists, and for a moment she wondered whether the security of Beast Island was really as tight as it was made out to be. Outside again, she understood. She looked at the sea and imagined swimming with the weights around her legs, pulling her down with every stroke, sapping her energy.
Beast Island did not need walls. Beast Island did not need chains.
Her scalp itched as they searched her, brief and more perfunctory than she’d feared. Her legs were already protesting the extra weight as she was led onto the barge. Even so she formed her features into a smile. ‘I thought you wanted me out of your sight. What’s wrong, Octavia? You’re not scared of me, are you? Worried I’ll escape on day one?’
Octavia turned away. Catra made sure her laugh was loud enough for the guards hanging back on the dock.
They made the crossing in silence. It was not so far, with the faint thrum of the ship’s engine beneath her. Catra had no doubt it would be farther with the chill of the ocean around her.
She disembarked willingly on the other end. The beach was sand, and for a moment she grimaced. Sand felt nice enough between her toes, but it was hell on her fur, and—it didn’t matter.
Octavia followed her down. ‘I almost wish you’d tried something,’ she said. ‘Give me an excuse to—’
Catra lunged for her mid-sentence. Her claws got within an inch of Octavia’s throat before her body failed her and she collapsed onto the sand, writhing. For a few confused seconds she couldn’t make sense of what had happened—then she saw the remote in Octavia’s hand, registered the waves of pain setting her nerves alight, tracked them back to their source around her ankles.
Octavia, for her part, looked less satisfied than Catra expected. There was fear on her face, and uncertainty, and if Catra was still in too much pain to put two and two together, the facts were there, ready and waiting.
‘You’re no-one.’
The sound of the ship’s engine was a long time fading. Catra lay in the sand, breathing heavily, the artificial pain of her shackles replaced by simple, old-fashioned muscle cramps. She curled up on herself, and waited, and thought.
Octavia had given her much to think about, after all. You won’t survive a year. Beast Island was a death sentence—everyone in the Horde knew it. A year? A year was far more than Catra had been expecting. Then there were the shackles. Catra wasn’t supposed to know they could incapacitate her like that, she was sure of it. That was why Octavia had looked so uncertain. She’d shown her hand, shown Catra exactly what lay between her and freedom.
And then, of course, there was the discomfort that had followed her all the way from the Fright Zone, like someone pulling incessantly at her hair. Catra ran her hand through her mane, felt what was hidden there, what she’d pinned so close to her scalp it was utterly invisible.
These were the elements of hope, but Catra had been a long time without hope. She wasn’t at all sure she knew what to do with it. She wasn’t sure she knew anything at all anymore, and the sand was soft and warm beneath her, and how much easier to put aside something so duplicitous as hope, and simply lie there and let the wind cover her inch by inch. There would be time for hope in the morning, perhaps, or the day after.
That was not reality. Reality was the creak of the trees, the sound of voices, the footsteps coming down the beach. Reality was the ache deep in her body that surrendered to nothing but sleep.
Catra closed her eyes. The pain went numb. The voices faded. She slept.