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“Mermista hates me,” Catra insists.
“She does not!” Adora puts a lot of intensity behind her words, possibly to make up for the fact that she doesn’t quite sound like she believes them.
“Listen—the other princesses had, you know, time. To get used to me being on your side. To like, hang out with me when we weren’t trying to kill each other.” Catra rubs her jaw ruefully. "Or knock me into next week with a right hook. Whatever. But Mermista was chipped, and then she was in the infirmary, and then she went home to Salineas to help with the reconstruction there—reconstructing after I helped Hordak blow it all up.
“I’m not—this isn’t a guilt thing, okay? I do feel guilty, but—look, Adora, I promise this isn’t me beating myself up. I mean, maybe she’ll get over it one day! I… I hope she does. I’m just saying—I gave her a lot to get over.”
Adora sighs. “So you don’t want to join Bow and Glimmer’s double date with her and Sea Hawk tonight.”
“No. And Mermista doesn’t want me to either. Nobody does, trust me. I—no, let me finish—I’m sure we could be totally civil with each other, but our vibes would wreck the mood of the whole night. Everyone else has been really… eager, for the most part, to forgive me, and that’s—I’m grateful for that. But Mermista needs more time. And that’s… I mean… that’s fair, you know? That has to be fair.”
Adora hums neutrally. “Your ‘vibes,’ huh? Okay, Perfuma.” She gives Catra a gentle, teasing poke in the shoulder. “I still think you’re being too hard on yourself, but I also think you’re being really thoughtful about Mermista’s feelings. I’ll tell Glimmer we’re staying in tonight. Guess you’ll just have to watch me obliterate Sea Hawk at arm wrestling some other time.”
For a moment Catra looks tempted to change her mind, but she shakes her head, a bittersweet smile on her face. “Some other time.”
Mermista plops her chin in her hand and stares across the bar to where Sea Hawk and Bow are arm-in-arm, trying to enlist other patrons to sing along with the shanty they’re improvising. The responses run the entire gamut from mild disinterest to complete disinterest, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping them from trying.
As Sea Hawk tugs Bow’s face right up against the side of his neck and Bow, even from across the room, gets visibly starry-eyed by the proximity, Mermista leans over to Glimmer. “You know what else rhymes with ‘nautical’? Homoerotical.”
Glimmer laughs like she’s just been hit in the stomach, nearly aspirating half her cocktail. “I guess I should be grateful,” Mermista smirks at her. “At least if he’s flirting with your boyfriend he’s not setting anything on fire.”
Fortunately Glimmer’s mouth isn’t full of liquid this time. “Mer-mista! Oh my gods. I mean, you’re not wrong…” She catches her breath and smiles fondly. “I happen to think it’s kind of adorable.”
“Uh-huh. That sounds like you.” A stranger listening in might not hear the affection in Mermista’s voice, but Glimmer can. “So speaking of Adora-ble…” All of her attention suddenly snaps to Glimmer, the “seven seas of friendship and the rolling waves of love” or whatever the boys are singing about instantly forgotten. Glimmer cringes a little, partly at the pun, partly at the suggestive tilt to Mermista’s eyebrows. “Feel free to tell me to mind my own business, but also? Feel free to tell me absolutely everything.”
Glimmer laughs again, maybe just a tiny bit nervously. “I mean… it sounds like you sort of already know.”
“All I know is enough to make me want to know more. Perfuma told me you all played Spin the Bottle after we left the party the other weekend, which—okay, wow. And then by the end of it, Perfuma and Scorpia hooked up, and like a week later, you’re with Adora? And Catra?”
Mermista shakes her head as she continues. “You just… you gotta help me connect the dots. Adora and Catra have history together, like history-history, so that’s one’s obvious. You and Bow, also obvious—and finally a thing, thank gods, by the way. And you and Adora have always been, y’know…” Mermista shrugs, “you’re real soft together. It’s cute. You and Catra, though? That’s where I’m like, lost in the fucking wilderness.”
Glimmer sighs and smiles. “If it helps, it was a surprise to me too. When we—when Catra and I were being held on Horde Prime’s ship, we… we went through a lot, together. And then she saved me, and then we all went back to save her, and when we got her back, she—she wasn’t the same Catra anymore. She is, but she isn’t. She’s not hurting anyone, or h-herself, or pushing people away. She’s making connections, she’s trying to make things right. She knows it’s going to take a long time, we all do, but—I’ve seen her working on it every day. And, I don’t know. We just… connected. And then all three of us really… connected.”
“Huh.” Mermista frowns thoughtfully and takes a long sip of her drink as she processes what Glimmer’s said. She rolls the glass between her hands for a while, takes another brief sip from it, then nods, apparently reaching the end of her train of thought. She tilts her drink a little in Glimmer’s direction.
“The sex must be un-real,” she drawls, and in an instant Glimmer’s face turns bright pink. Mermista chuckles and gives her a self-satisfied wink. “Thought so.”
“Really loving this ‘double’ date we’re on,” Mermista sighs sarcastically as the server brings her and Glimmer—and just her and Glimmer—another round.
“I mostly feel sorry for the band,” Glimmer says, clinking her drink against Mermista’s. “They took one request from these knuckleheads and now they’re stuck with ’em.” Indeed, Bow and Sea Hawk are attempting quite a performance on the dance floor, now with a reluctantly bespoke soundtrack. A couple of other patrons seem to have elevated their response from mild disinterest to mild curiosity. Mermista isn’t one of them.
“You know what? This is actually fine,” Mermista says in a gentler tone of voice. Glimmer raises an eyebrow. “I’m not even being a bitch, I mean it. Okay, first of all, you and I never hang out, so this is… you know, it’s nice or whatever. Second, this is my favourite bar, and I’ll tell you my two favourite things about my favourite bar: none of my exes ever come here, and none of his exes ever come here.”
Glimmer cocks her head. She doesn’t have any exes herself, but that doesn’t sound… “Is that—do you guys go a lot of places where that’s a problem?” Mermista just groans and waves the question away.
“Don’t get me sidetracked. So no awkward exes here, but also, no mind-controlled zombies trying to chip us, no huge First Ones creature to battle, no advancing army of murderbots, no—well, you know—no surprisingly sexy Horde spies setting off bombs in the middle of a party…” She sighs, sounding so tired, and closes her eyes for a moment, and it’s an unusually vulnerable display for her.
“We can just chill,” Mermista finishes with a little shrug, opening her beautiful brown eyes again. “Rebuild, and heal, and get on with our lives.”
Glimmer nods, a lump of emotion in her throat. She’s more than familiar with the feeling.
“Plus,” Mermista adds, finally sparing a glance across the bar to the big number their boyfriends are apparently now trying to choreograph, “I’ve got a great view of his ass from here.”
Glimmer realizes she can’t be allowed to drink anything at all when Mermista is talking. What had once been a mouthful of ice water is now everywhere.
“Sorry, sorry,” Mermista says as she helps Glimmer wipe everything up with napkins, not sounding terribly sorry at all. “We just need to hang out more. I’m really not that funny once you get used to me.”
Glimmer’s not so sure about that. Mermista’s wit is even drier than Catra’s, and something about her flawless deadpan zeroes in on the heart of Glimmer’s sense of humour. She definitely wants to hang out more with Mermista, so she’ll take the excuse, but she’s going to time her beverage intake carefully when she does.
They manage to restore their table to more or less its pre–Water Incident condition. A question Glimmer wants to ask Mermista pops up again in her mind, and this time she doesn’t ignore it. She hopes it’s okay to ask. She remembers that Mermista had been vulnerable, a little, with her.
“Hey, uh, Mermista? Do you… do you really hate Catra?”
Mermista’s eyebrows go up just a little and she leans slightly back in her chair, as shocked as Glimmer’s ever seen her. “Uhhhh,” she begins, “did I… say I hated her? Did I do something? I don’t—”
“No! No, no, no. I just… I know you haven’t had a chance to spend much time in Bright Moon since… everything, and I just wondered—I know after everything that happened—ugh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”
“Hey, chill, it’s fine,” Mermista interrupts. “She’s your—you’re saying ‘girlfriend,’ right? Okay, so you think I might hate your girlfriend. You and I are friends. It’s a totally legit thing to bring up.”
Glimmer smiles a little when Mermista calls them friends, but it falls away when she realizes Mermista validated her question without technically answering it.
“Okay, so… do you?”
Mermista sighs. It’s not her typical sarcastic sigh, and it’s not her weary optimism from before, either. “The short answer is no. I don’t hate her.”
It hangs in the air for a few moments. Glimmer frowns. “So what’s the long answer?”
“It… depends on what you mean by ‘hate.’”
Glimmer chirps a little “oh!” of dismay and Mermista lifts her hand. “It’s a longer answer than that. I don’t…” She sighs again. "It’s not that I want bad things to happen to her. Or, like… that I think she doesn’t deserve happiness with you and Adora.
“Adora’s told me stuff and, you know, alluded to stuff, about growing up in the Horde. Her and Catra. And some of what happened with them, like, out in space. And…” Mermista shrugs, conceding an unspoken point, "I talk to Perfuma. She doesn’t say much about it, but we’ve known each other a long time. I know she’s… helping Catra. With stuff.
"And that’s good. Great, even. Again, like, I don’t think she doesn’t deserve a chance to start over, if she’s really gonna take it. And I don’t not believe you and Perfuma about the work she’s doing…
“But I’m still angry.” She doesn’t sound angry. She just sounds tired. “Maybe when I’m a little further removed from 12-hour shifts clearing rubble from what used to be Salineans’ homes… Look, I don’t want to be angry at her anymore. And honestly, there are people I’m a lot angrier at. I’ll…” She rubs the back of her neck and closes her eyes for another moment. It looks like she’s trying to imagine something.
“I’ll get over it. It’s not, like, a forever thing. But it’s a thing I’m still in the middle of right now.”
Glimmer nods, then wraps an arm around Mermista’s shoulders and gives her a little squeeze. Over by the stage, Bow and Sea Hawk are similarly entwined, though they’re expressing themselves at a much higher volume.
“You’re right,” says Glimmer.
“I know,” Mermista replies automatically. “What part, though?”
“We should definitely hang out more.”