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“I, too, have been losing my gentleness / since the first young wound.” - Hari Alluri, from “Ancestral Memory”
“What fragments of her history live in my body? What rooms does my blood remember?” - Heather Christie, from The Crying Book
The realization that she’s never seen somebody die before now strikes Catra.
She’s never been so close to death. She’s caused a handful of them, maybe, but has never actually looked one in the eye.
Some dread sits heavy in her once she sees Hordak dead and splayed on the floor. Maybe dead isn’t the right word. Reprogrammed? Turned off?
Glimmer protests as if Horde Prime will listen that her friends would be looking for her, that the Rebellion’s tech master—or worse, She-Ra—would find a way to break her out.
“You’ll regret keeping me here,” Glimmer protests through gritted teeth. “My people will be waiting for me.”
Catra watches Horde Prime sneer at the mention of She-Ra. Figures that even an overlord from galaxies away would want something to do with Adora.
“And what,” Horde Prime says, turning his gaze to Catra, “of you?”
Catra swallows, then manages a smirk. “You killed my boss,” she answers. “I don’t have anyone. I’m all yours.”
Glimmer stiffens. Catra turns, gives Glimmer a stern glance, a glance that she hopes says “ don’t fuck this up, stay with me .”
Glimmer relaxes. Horde Prime smiles down at Catra.
“Good,” he hisses. “You will care for the prisoner.”
-
Etheria may as well never have been her home.
Catra feels nothing as she watches it from far away out the window, its surface marred and cratered by blasts from Horde Prime’s ship. From below, Etheria must be screaming, fighting, crying—and if Etheria had ever bothered to scream or fight or cry for her, maybe she would feel differently. But that’s an excuse. It always has been. She should feel differently.
She stares numbly out the window until her eyelids droop, her head lolls against the window frame.
There’s no way for Catra to track the time, which is a strange departure from life in the Horde. Time hardly exists. Glimmer, the prisoner, wakes up when she chooses and rings a bell on the ship once she wants one of her three meals per day. Catra has hardly any need to wake up at the Horde’s regimented 6AM and even less need to stay in her chambers.
Sleep so hardly comes to her these days anyway. Usually she’ll only wear herself out until she’s tired, but that comes too infrequently to predict.
She sighs, tearing herself away from the window. She turns the corner.
Her eyes catch the bob of a ponytail, its owner walking down the corridor and away from her. Catra’s eyes are wide. Her ears and tail stand up on high-alert.
“Adora?”
Catra blinks, and the vision is gone.
-
“You’re not giving me a lot of reasons to trust you.” Glimmer sits in the center of her bed with her arms folded across her chest. She lifts the fork on her tray, poking at the food Catra’s brought her. “What even is this?”
Catra shrugs. “Better than a ration bar. Be grateful.”
“Let’s see...I’m trapped on a ship with the girl who killed my mom,” Glimmer says, “with no way out. So I don’t think I will, thanks.”
Catra sighs. She sits at the chair along the wall of Glimmer’s cell. “I don’t need you to like me. I know you don’t.” Then she adds, in little more than a whisper: “But we both want to get out of here, and we both want Horde Prime gone. So can you just lay low until I figure out what his deal is?”
“Isn’t it obvious what his deal is?”
“What,” Catra snorts. “World domination and shitty little brothers?”
“Catra, if Hordak was a defective version of him, what’s an entire army—stop laughing at me!”
Catra’s almost doubled over, the first good laugh she’s had in who knows how long. “Are you kidding? That guy was a moron. I did what he’d tried to do for years in months.”
Glimmer winces.
“Sorry. Not a good thing,” Catra says. She pauses, considers her words carefully. An apology begins to form, but as quickly as it blooms in her mind, it dies. She falters. “I didn’t mean to kill the Queen.”
Glimmer tenses. “But you did.”
“And you can hate me for it later,” Catra says. “but right now, we’re in survival mode. Got it, Sparkles?”
Catra doesn’t wait to see if Glimmer nods. She gets up, leaving Glimmer to her meal as she palms the doorknob. She opens the door, but right in the crack is the same flash of blonde hair.
Catra swallows a gasp.
“Hey, Glimmer?”
“What?”
“Have you been...seeing things?” Catra asks timidly.
Glimmer groans. “No, Catra, I haven’t seen anything except this cell, and this bed, and this weird space food—“
Catra rolls her eyes. “Got it, got it, I’ll leave you to wallow.”
She practically bolts out of the door, throwing herself down the hallway after what is but isn’t Adora—it’s not her, the vision doesn’t make any noise as it trails through the corridor, she discovers once she catches up to it. It doesn’t smell like Adora, or even feel like her. There’s something artificially stiff about her.
But still, Catra puts a hand on its shoulder. Her hand meets static.
Adora disappears.
-
“Our subject seems...disappointed.” Horde Prime’s lips curl upward. “Is she not grateful for my hospitality?”
“You heard her,” Catra answers, “she’s a queen. She’s not used to roughing it. I mean, I would hardly call a double bed and fine food ‘roughing it.’”
They sit at Horde Prime’s dining table, Horde Prime at one head of the table and Catra at the other. She does her best to control the snarl in her lip as she speaks. She pushes down the vitriol she has for him, for Hordak, for everything the Horde has touched while she pushes down her ire toward Glimmer.
It’s fucked up that Glimmer’s accomodations in captivity are nicer than anywhere Catra has ever slept until now. Besides her stint in the Crimson Waste, the food in front of Catra at Horde Prime’s table is her first taste of something other than a ration bar. But it’s not in her best interest to show any contempt for the hand she’d been dealt in Horde Prime’s company.
“Etherians,” Horde Prime scoffs. “Your people are unappreciative.”
“Oh, she’s not my people.”
“No? Were you not born on the same planet?”
“How would I know?” Catra says, voice level. “You know everything about the entire universe. Why don’t you take your best guess?”
Catra can’t get used to Horde Prime’s eyes—green, always shifting, always more of them than Catra expects. They inspect her now, narrowing as they attempt to read her purposefully blank expression.
“What do you know of Eternia, hm?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“I doubt that’s true, Catra,” Horde Prime answers. Catra opens her mouth to speak. Horde Prime waves a hand in her direction before she can squeak out a syllable. “No, you weren’t born there. I wouldn’t do you that favor—you are being kept alive for your intel on the Heart of Etheria after all, not out of sympathy.”
Catra crosses her arms across her chest. “I wasn’t asking.”
Horde Prime eyes her once again. “What do you know of She-Ra? Much more than I do, surely. She was your friend, was she not?”
Her spine straightens. In another world, several revelations and explosions ago, she would have laid Adora bare in front of Horde Prime. She’d spent three years dissecting Adora’s every fault, every crack in her armor to be exploited. Now, she hesitates.
She thinks to the flash of Adora’s ponytail she saw bouncing through the hall that morning. To touching the illusion of Adora’s shoulder. To the apparition vanishing as quickly it had arrived.
“I know as much as you do,” she says coolly. “May I be excused?”
-
The sound of Catra’s own tears fills her chambers.
She isn’t crying when she notices it. She is lying on her bed, staring at the wall, wide awake. Her neck snaps to the corner of the room.
She sees herself, somehow. Several years younger, the tufts behind her ears fully intact and wearing her old training uniform. She is at most fourteen.
A younger Adora sits with her, wrapping Catra’s wrist with bandages as Catra tries her hardest to stifle her sobs.
“Don’t let Shadow Weaver see you hurt like this,” Adora says. “She’ll tank your training score.”
“Fuck Shadow Weaver,” younger Catra mutters.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” Adora asks gently.
“No.”
Catra watches her younger self wince as Adora rubs alcohol on a wound on Catra’s knuckles. Adora murmurs a quick sorry as Catra’s breath hitches. Catra sees blood collect on the bandage.
“No one would notice if I just ran away, you know?”
Adora lifts her head to look at Catra. She reaches with one hand to wipe away the tears leaving thin tracks down her cheeks. “I would.”
Catra now looks on and remembers swallowing her next thought, the intense urge she had at fourteen to ask Adora if she would run with her if Catra asked. She knows the answer now—the irony would be funny if it hadn’t led to her being held prisoner on a spaceship in the middle of nowhere.
Adora pulls her into a hug and Catra sighs into it, reluctantly resting her head on Adora’s shoulder. Her injured arm hangs limply between them.
“Hey,” Adora says softly, rubbing her back. “Fuck Shadow Weaver, right?”
Younger Catra laughs at her, her head vibrating against Adora’s shoulder. And younger Catra’s laugh makes Adora laugh.
Catra doesn’t get up, doesn’t try and touch the shoulder of this Adora sitting in the corner. She stares at the ceiling until the images dissipate into the air.
-
Delivering Glimmer’s meals proves to be a low point in Catra’s day, which is saying quite a lot. Glimmer is short with her half the time and launches into impassioned tyrades about her many faults the other half.
“You know, Sparkles,” Catra says during one breakfast, “pretending to conspire with an evil overlord is somehow less taxing than this.”
Glimmer only glowers at her as she sticks a spoon through her breakfast. “How do I know you’re really pretending?”
“It’s not much to go on, I get it.” Catra rolls her eyes. “But tough. It’s all you’ve got.”
“What’s your plan here?”
Catra pauses. She’s considered her options, the best way to sleight of hand her way past Horde Prime and back to Etheria, but every plan leaves a hole somewhere.
She sighs, plopping down on Glimmer’s cot. “Honestly? I don’t know.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Everything I can think of just gets us off the ship,” Catra says. “It doesn’t…” she lowers her voice to a muttered whisper: “It doesn’t get rid of him .”
“Well, we don’t need to get rid of him,” Glimmer furrows her brow. She’s looking at Catra like some wounded animal, a quiver that’s not quite a smile on her lips. “We can figure out how to get him later. We have a whole army back on Etheria. We have the Rebellion, and the princesses, and—“
“She-Ra?”
Catra’s hands ball into fists. It’s almost a reflex at this point.
“You can’t just wait for Adora to come and make everything alright,” Catra scoffs. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“I’m not.” Glimmer looks down at her hands. “I don’t know how I can even face her right now.”
“We’ve got that in common,” Catra says quietly.
Glimmer looks at her again, the same soft expression Catra can’t make sense of in her eyes. “I just mean that you don’t have to do everything alone.”
“Huh,” Catra barks out a laugh. “Who else do I have?”
Glimmer doesn’t answer.
-
Catra traces a fork through her breakfast—some sludge-y thing one of Horde Prime’s clone servants calls “porridge.” She looks up and Scorpia, Scorpia but not Scorpia, is sitting across from her.
She nearly leaps out of her seat, stifling a shriek as Scorpia’s eyes lock onto her face, her gaze hot and pointed.
“You’re a bad friend.”
“I—“ Catra stammers. “I didn’t mean it,” she says numbly, though she knows it’s futile as Scorpia’s figure glitches in and out of existence.
Catra’s breath stops as she watches Scorpia flicker out one last time. She closes her eyes, runs a hand down her scalp to smooth the hair that threatens to fall out of place. An old habit, one she supposes doesn’t matter anymore. Who does she have here to look superior to? To aim to intimidate, to show no weakness toward? Glimmer doesn’t care, Horde Prime has nothing but power over her.
Horde Prime usually spends his mornings scouring over files and reports in the ship atrium, she learns over days of observation. His atrium is far from his lab, though Catra isn’t sure which would give her more potential leverage against him. Stealing an intel report from Etheria? Botching some experiment meant for mass destruction.
With Hordak it was easy—though he was once the looming figure hung over her head as a child, he grew predictable. The game got easy. Once she could separate him from his one crutch and Entrapta was far away—
She tries not to dwell on Entrapta.
Horde Prime is nothing like that. He oversees everything, with eyes and ears and clones in every crevice of his ship. If she is to outsmart him, she’ll have to be clever like she’s never been before. But, she thinks, she’s made it this far. Like hell is she about to go down now without a fight.
She abandons her breakfast and runs for the lab.
Horde Prime’s lab is cold and dark and pristine. Not like Horde Prime’s sanctum at all, what with both Hordak’s incompetence and Entrapta’s scattered mind running havoc over it. Toward the entrance are what she guesses are cloning pods, glowing green tubes with a grey shapeless something in their centers.
Catra tiptoes through the lab, careful not to wake any guard clones patrolling the hallway. She scours the room for something, anything —and then, blinking bright red in the center of the laboratory and spanning three monitors, she sees a map with a bright “X” in its center. The “X” matches a button on the keyboard below the screens.
-
“A distress signal?” Glimmer asks.
Catra shakes her head. Glimmer stands in her cell, Catra outside. The door is latched open and they speak through a green barrier. Horde Prime’s security is thorough—it tracks prisoners entering or leaving cells through the barrier. If Catra or Glimmer pass through it outside Glimmer’s allotted mealtimes, sirens would alert the entire ship. Horde Prime had told her her first night on the ship the mechanics of the cell.
Catra found it suspicious then how readily he’d tell a stranger about the intricacies of his ship’s security. Was it a showing of trust? An intimidation tactic, to imply that every inch of the ship is covered in tech, and not to try and outsmart him? She can’t help wonder what other measures he’s set up.
“Not really,” Catra says. “Are you kidding? He’s the top of the Horde food chain. He’d never let any of his underlings rescue him.”
“You sound pretty sure of that.”
“I know his type.”
“So it’s a beacon,” Glimmer suggests. “Like the one in the Crystal Castle.”
The Crystal Castle. The memories that lined its halls, the scenes of a life that has passed her by that haunted her.
Catra hisses. She hugs her arms tight to her chest.
“What do you know about the Crystal Castle?” Glimmer asks.
-
Catra hears the skittering of footsteps in the hall, the giggling of two teenagers. She catches the flash of blonde again.
“Come on,” Adora whines, “what are you showing me?”
This time she doesn’t chase Adora down the hall, but follows quietly behind. Adora is being dragged through the corridor by Catra’s gentle pull on her wrist.
Catra’s laugh echoes through the hall. “I reprogrammed one of the door locks—look.”
The image of Catra and Adora blinks and flickers from view. When they reappear, Catra is closing in on Adora, hands reaching gingerly for the sides of her face. The younger Catra leans in, closing the distance, brushing their lips together as Catra watches Adora’s fumbling hands scramble for something, anything to do.
“Was that okay?” Catra watches herself pull away, but not much. “I won’t do it again if it’s—“
Adora catches her words, chasing them away with her lips and closing the distance between them again. Her hands find purpose at Catra’s waist, her fingers digging into soft skin and hard muscle. Catra swears she can still feel it, the ghost of a touch on her sides.
-
Once Horde Prime gives her a formal tour of the laboratory.
Catra stands with her back straight, eyes glued to whatever Horde Prime describes as he describes it. She tries her best to feign ignorance, to not give him any reason to think she knows more about the lab than she lets on.
In truth, she’s been making trips in and out of the laboratory whenever she finds herself without supervision—which isn’t often, but a life in the Horde has trained her well in secrecy.
Horde Prime gestures toward a wall of inactive bots. The bots are flat and unassuming, stacked one against the other leaning against the lab’s back wall. They have a green diamond in their center.
“Impressive, no?” Horde Prime’s eyes light up.
Catra shrugs. “Entrapta’s bots were bigger. Probably more powerful, too.”
“And you have her intel?”
“Of course,” Catra says. “It’s dangerous to have underlings who know more than you.”
Horde Prime only smirks.
He presses a button on the console. A bot stirs to life, its body inflating to a giant sphere. The green diamond in the center screeches as it blinks red.
Catra ducks just in time as the bot fires at her. It sears a hole into the wall of the lab.
“Hey!” Catra shrieks as she scurries to the corner of the lab. “What was that about?”
Horde Prime clicks the button again, and the bot deflates.
“Consider it a warning, Force Captain ,” he snarls. “It’s like you said. Underlings with knowledge are dangerous.”
Catra swallows. She nods.
“Dismissed.”
-
“Our plan isn’t working.”
Catra paces the floor of Glimmer’s cell. She smooths her hair back with hands that threaten to shake.
“He knows something,” Catra says. “I know he knows something.”
“About us?”
“About me, I don’t know, sneaking into his lab. Gathering intel.”
Glimmer pouts. She purses her lips. “Do you think the bots have security cameras installed in them? The Horde’s did, right?”
“What—do I—do I think the inactive bots have security footage?” Catra sputters. “No? We’re his first guests in ages. No,” she says again. She repeats it like she’s trying to convince herself. “No.” She sighs. “Maybe. Fuck.”
“Hey,” Glimmer stands to put a hand on Catra’s shoulder. Catra doesn’t shove it away; instead she winces. “So there’s a roadblock. We’ll find a way around it.”
“How? Though the power of friendship, or sparkles?” Catra scoffs. “Look how well that turned out for you.”
Glimmer folds her arms across her chest. “What, and doing it all alone has worked out any better for you?” Glimmer sighs. “If I had listened to my friends, none of this would have even happened.”
“So what do we do?” Catra asks. “We have to act first. He’s onto us, and he’s been torturing me like in that stupid Crystal Castle ever since I got here—“
Glimmer’s eyes widen. “The Crystal Castle?”
“I followed Adora in once.” Catra sits down on Glimmer’s cot. “It—I think it tried to break me. Get to me somehow. I don’t know.”
“How?” Glimmer prods.
“It...” Here Catra hesitates. She starts again. “It showed me stuff I didn’t want to see.”
“Like what?”
“Like—forget it.”
“Catra—“
“Fine!” Catra hugs her knees to her chest. “It showed me how things used to be, okay? With Adora, and Shadow Weaver.”
“Oh.”
“I didn’t want to be weak. But I just saw how much I needed her then and—“ Catra sighs. “I didn’t want to need anyone ever again.”
Glimmer chuckles. “Bit of an overcorrection, huh?”
“A little.”
To Catra’s surprise, Glimmer sits down next to her. She pulls her in for a hug and for once, Catra doesn’t pull away. She can’t remember the last time someone’s hugged her, and she had no idea how much she had ached for it.
“Everyone needs people, Catra,” Glimmer says. “I know we don’t see eye to eye, but I think I can help prove that to you.”
“How?”
Glimmer pulls away. She smirks.
“Easy,” Glimmer says. “You tell me when, and we set off the beacon back to Etheria. And if you get us there in one piece, you become the Rebellion’s battle strategist. Queen’s orders.”
“Deal.”
-
A dream:
Adora’s shout. Her own laughter—maniacal, ugly. The green expanse of the Whispering Woods, violet cracks perforating the forest floor.
“You always have to go and ruin it, don’t you?”
“Catra, look what’s happening!” Adora shouts. “You’re going to destroy everything!”
The ground cracks beneath them. The earth gives in underneath her and she’s tumbling down, down into a sea of light. Her hands grasp for purchase at the edge of the cliff.
Adora leans down to offer her hand.
“Catra!”
See, Catra knows how this ends. It ends with a fall, with some dark being taking control of her, with a fight and a punch. She knows.
But now Catra reaches out. She reaches her hand toward Adora, trembling as Adora remains steady.
Catra wakes up in a cold sweat. Next to her is the image of Adora sleeping soundly with her back facing her.
Catra shakes her head. She can’t stay here—can’t feel boxed in, trapped in her room anymore. She wanders the chamber hallway aimlessly, taking one lap, two laps, however many will calm her still-racing heart.
She rounds the end of the corridor, and Horde Prime smiles back at her.
Catra’s hands ball into fists.
“What about that disappointed you, Catra?” Horde Prime says. “Was it that She-Ra saved you once again?”
Catra stammers. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Horde Prime chuckles. He circles her slowly, deliberately, then says: “Or is it that you wanted to be saved?”
Catra’s brows furrow. “What?”
Horde Prime only smiles in response, toothy and ominous. “Follow me.”
He leads her into the atrium. It is pristine and white with monitors that span the entire room. With a snap of Horde Prime’s fingers, the monitors are flooded by some dark, patch of land Catra doesn’t recognize.
“I have suspected for some time,” Horde Prime says, his back to her as he faces the monitors. “That you and the Etherian queen have been plotting against me.”
Catra’s blood runs cold.
“And what would give you that idea?” She clears her throat. “You aren’t that special.”
“Enough!” Horde Prime turns on his heels to face her, his many eyes narrowed and piercing. “I did not bring you here for you to try and defend yourself. However,” he turns his head back to the monitors. “I can offer you a gift.”
“A gift?”
“If you cease your plotting with the queen and help me destroy Etheria,” Horde Prime says. “And She-Ra.”
“What’s in it for me?” Catra asks.
“Watch.”
A woman with a tail and tall, triangular ears comes onto the monitor. Catra can make out a cave as her eyes adjust to the screen, with pointy fixtures lining its walls.
The woman looks at her—almost looks Catra right in the eye. But she can’t be looking at her, Catra wagers with herself. She’s a recording.
The screen flickers, and the woman is transformed into a beast. She growls, swipes at an intruder with giant claws, her glowing mane shaking in the wind.
Her adversary wears a Horde uniform. They puncture her side, and Catra’s heart lurches as she hears the beast give a mighty groan.
Something in Catra goes cold.
Horde Prime stops the stream.
“What the hell was that?” Catra cries.
“You wondered,” Horde Prime answers, “days ago, where you were from.” He nods again toward the screen. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Of course she would like to know—she’s wondered since she was a child, since Adora pinched the tip of her nose and hissed when her too-sharp claws made contact with her arm by accident, when she looked so undeniably different than any of her squadmates. Maybe she never had the drive to capture that part of herself like Adora, but it burned in her, bubbling under the surface always.
But she thinks of Glimmer instead.
The Horde in any iteration isn’t a home to her. She receives nothing, she gives everything. And she had promised someone something, and it felt good to promise, and even better to have someone trust her word.
Catra swallows that burning down. Instead, she laughs.
“I told you before, old man,” Catra says. “I don’t have anyone. I don’t need to start now, do I?”
She doesn’t wait for Horde Prime to respond. She bolts down the hall as fast as she can, before Horde Prime has a chance to flood the halls with a memory of a life passing her by, before Catra can even think too hard about what to do next.
“Glimmer!” She stops on her heels outside of the cell. “It’s time.”
“To pull the beacon?” Glimmer rushes to to the door. “You sure?”
“I’m sure,” Catra says. “Come with me.”