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“This isn’t a game Catra.”
“It was never a game to me! And I intend to win it.”
From her prison tent in Bright Moon, Catra’s mind kept flashing back to the exchange at the All-Princess-Ball.
Maybe it was all the ice from a few hours before that was bringing out the memory.
“People are going to get hurt!”
The image of Entrapta’s body, covered in splotches of blue from cold and lack of oxygen. It wouldn’t leave her. Catra wondered if it ever would.
Catra had always put on a show of not being scared about what the Horde said about the "scary princesses".
And when your first impression of a princess was "Adora the Dork", it was easy for that false bravado to turn true.
The Horde lied about everything else, why wouldn’t they be lying about how dangerous the princesses were?
But then Frosta…
Entrapta hadn’t even been near the rebels, mostly providing occasional long range support and coordinating her robots. Even if Catra thought the princesses’ guilt would keep Entrapta safe, Hordak would be displeased if his “brilliant new asset” was risked unnecessarily. But Entrapta considered some of the new robots more valuable than the ones deployed on the strange forest palace and wanted to be there to observe them firsthand.
But Frosta just charged across the battlefield unheeding.
She wasn’t like the monstrous, almost pitabile princesses of the stories though. She was in full control of her powers and actions.
And that was almost scarier.
“This isn’t a game Catra.”
Catra thought she understood that.
But had she really?
Perhaps she had been treating the war as a game. A game that risked serious injury or death (“those are the best ones,'' a wistful memory of her playing recklessly with Adora seemed to say), but a game nonetheless.
Now though…
She was starting to wonder if Glimmer would have actually tried to seriously injure her if Bow hadn’t been so emotionally weak.
They wouldn’t have killed her; they wanted precious Entrapta back so much… but would Sparkles have had a problem breaking an arm if her anger overcame her oh-so-noble moral code?
The flowery one was spoken of with some of the most fear around the Fright Zone. Did Catra underestimate her too?
The mermaid hung out with a pirate, a supposedly dangerous criminal. Would she hesitate if sufficiently crossed?
All this time she had been expecting these princesses to be weak like Adora. But while she knew Adora, she didn’t know them .
Catra didn’t know what she was going to do, but she vowed to herself after this, she would change her approach..
She wasn’t sure in what way; but she needed to adapt, to survive.
The fear of childhood stories of cackling princesses would not overcome her.
The memory of that proudly beaming ice child would not make her falter.
She would not be broken by this.