Work Text:
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Bow snarled under his breath, tracker pad grasped in his hands. Nothing new had shown up on the map, no matter how hard he stared and shook the device in frustration.
“She’s out there somewhere, I just need to find her!” His fingers were pressed so tightly into the tablet’s screen that he could hear his knuckles popping, the glass beneath his thumbs straining.
“Bow?”
Bow threw the tracker pad to the ground, letting it scatter through dust and pebbles to the edge of the plateau he was sitting on. He felt caught. Stupid.
“Hey,” Adora called out to him gently as she climbed up to reach his perch, an oversized, puffy gray blanket wedged in the crook of her elbow. Once settled, she laid one edge of the blanket over Bow’s shoulder and the other half over her own. Tentatively, she scooted closer, wondering if her friend even wanted to be touched at this point in time.
Bow wrapped one arm around Adora’s torso and tugged her into his chest, which was beating frantically at first—but slowed slightly below Adora’s ear. At least some things are the same, Adora sighed in relief. All hope is truly lost the day Bow stops giving hugs.
With eyes closed and lips in a firm line, Bow started to silently count the things within his control. One, he was safe. Two, Adora was safe—though shaken from losing She-Ra, the details of which he didn’t quite understand yet. Three, Entrapta…
“Is Entrapta still on the ship?”
Adora nodded below Bow’s chin, tucking the blanket in tighter to herself as the wind picked up around them. She had never felt so cold, even in the Northern Reach. The Kingdom of Snows hadn’t particularly bothered her either, but right now, she couldn’t keep from shivering violently into Bow’s side.
Maybe it’s not cold I feel, she fretted, teeth chattering and the first hot pinpricks of tears gathering between her eyelashes and the whites of her eyes, but emptiness.
Bow’s mind kept repeating the same useless question. Asking it felt akin to placing his hand over a flame, but he just couldn’t help it. He would keep futilely reaching for the fire until he could find an answer within the ashes.
“How do we do this?”
No matter how many times Bow had asked over the course of the night, Adora still didn’t have a good response. A plan they could both count on. Something to distract them from the aches in their bodies and the weight on their minds. She released a puff of air between her teeth, letting out a high-pitched whistle that echoed over the desolate landscape. It was one thing to say they would get Glimmer back and save the universe—and it was an entirely different thing to actually figure out how they could do any of that.
Adora tried anyway, hoping whatever exhausted and ultimately inadequate reply she could think up would at least bring Bow some comfort. Sniffling slightly, trying to keep the tears at bay, she began, “We know the other princesses will do anything to help Glimmer—even Scorpia! Which is… cool.” She scratched her head, figuring that she could consider Scorpia’s situation later. “And we have Micah! And he’s a super powerful sorcerer who has been fighting monsters for, what, like a decade?” Adora refrained from mentioning that Micah seemed to be struggling with the emotional toll of surviving Beast Island—and of returning to real life. She flinched just from recalling the look of pure anguish on the king’s face when she thoughtlessly mentioned that Glimmer was queen. That Angella was gone.
I promised her I would take care of you, Glimmer. Now look what I’ve done.
Bow felt Adora’s entire body tense beside him. He couldn’t see her face, but it wasn’t hard to guess at her expression; her forehead was almost certainly creased, eyes squinted or closed, and her cheeks hollowed from her biting on the inside of her mouth. The classic, determined look of “this is all my fault.”
“Adora,” he nudged her with his shoulder to interrupt her thought spiral.
“Right, right, sorry,” she shook her head out, banishing the image of Angella flying into the center of the portal to save them—to save her—to the back recesses of her mind, reminding herself of her current task at hand. Bow was here. Bow needed hope.
“I guess we also have… Shadow Weaver,” she mumbled begrudgingly, balling her hands into fists around the blanket.
“Ugh, of course!” Bow yelled up into the sky. “We’ve got the scary witch lady, whose name is literally Shadow Weaver, who loves dark magic and manipulation!” He groaned for a solid ten seconds while pulling at the flesh of his cheeks. “I can’t believe Glimmer trusted her. Glimmer trusted her over her best friends.”
Adora let out a brief laugh, laying further back onto Bow. “Yeah, not Glimmer’s finest moment.” She spun her pinky finger over the surface of the blanket, pushing rings through its fibers as she bit her lip and held her breath. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. But she couldn’t keep herself from prodding at the wound, from adding, “I probably wasn’t being a great best friend.”
Her vision blurred. Despite her best effort, the tears came forth—as did the thoughts of blame.
“M-maybe I should’ve… I don’t know, explained things better? Or… or maybe I should’ve tried more to talk—no, to listen to her better. I should’ve been there for her—”
“But she wasn’t there for us!” Bow shot back. The anger and dejection in his voice startled Adora, causing her to look up into his face. He was crying, too. “She wasn’t being a great best friend to you—to either of us… and now she’s gone.”
For a while, the only disturbances to the quiet were their sniffles and occasional gusts of wind. Bow held onto Adora tightly, which she appreciated—she couldn’t be alone right now. She couldn’t face the darkness that had surrounded her in the Crystal Castle. Without Bow and Entrapta, she wasn’t quite sure what she had left. The sword was broken, and with it her connection to She-Ra. No more magic. No more destiny. Just her—and she didn’t feel like much of anything.
She hid her face in the blanket, wanting to apologize but knowing Bow would rebuff her self-pitying babble. So she decided to offer gratitude instead: “Thanks… for trusting me.”
Bow brushed his thumb over her shoulder, back and forth, as he brought his brow to the crown of her head. “Of course.” He bunched up his side of the blanket and pulled it around to cover more of Adora’s shuddering form. He knew they were almost the same height—but she had never seemed so small to him before. He idly wondered if anyone had ever tucked her in at night, or if anyone had offered her their jacket while she stood outside. “Mara was trying to save Etheria, and you trust her—so I do, too.”
Adora nodded, pressing the back of her wrist to her mouth so that she could swallow down a sob. Thinking of Mara—her strength, her bravery, her sacrifice—made Adora’s chest clench, almost as if a cold metal fist were in her rib cage. She had naively hoped before that Mara wasn’t really dead and that she could find her predecessor one day. Even as she was struggling to figure out her powers, Adora had always imagined that She-Ra was invincible. Maybe even immortal. But now that she herself had felt the concentrated energy at Etheria’s core tear through every cell in her body, scorch through her veins, Adora knew that She-Ra’s material vessel could be destroyed. Mara was gone. Adora was lucky to still be around… but maybe she shouldn’t be.
“More than that,” Adora mumbled, taking Bow’s hand from her shoulder and gripping it with her own, “thanks for trusting me when I was just a Horde soldier in the woods.”
Bow cracked up, shaking Adora with his heaving laughter. “You turned into a giant warrior from a legend my dads were obsessed with, I had to trust you!”
Adora grimaced. “Maybe everybody would be better off if that giant warrior had stayed in the legends…”
“Adora, no,” he asserted, “We are all better for having you here. You can’t keep blaming things on yourself.” He laughed again, messing up Adora’s already untidy hair with his knuckles. “It’s almost selfish. What if I want some blame, y’know?”
Adora finally broke into a smile. She stared out at the horizon, hoping for a sign. She felt like she was searching the texture of the land for permission to feel some flicker of happiness in her agony. The image before her stayed the same.
“I feel like crap.”
Bow stretched out his arms behind him and stifled a yawn. “Yeah, you look like it, too.”
Adora shoved her shoulder blade into Bow’s chest, earning another round of laughter. “No worries, some buff lady will still find you cute.”
Adora shook her head at the idea and turned back to smirk at Bow. “Does Glimmer have a thing for guys covered in dirt who look dead tired?”
Bow let his eyelids fall closed, leaning forward onto Adora. “Lay off.”
“Hm,” Adora snorted and paused in fake contemplation, “I won’t.” She adjusted how she was seated so Bow could rest more comfortably. “Once we get her back, you have to ask her out.”
Placing the full weight of his head onto Adora’s shoulder, Bow hummed through his nostrils and let his exhaustion overtake him. “Deal. You stop thinking everything is your fault, and I ask Glimmer out.”
Adora wiped the last straggling tears from her face and listened to her friend’s breath as he drifted asleep. “Deal.”