Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Spies from imperial china wash in with the tide

Every battle heads toward surrender on both sides

 

And I am coming home to you

With my own blood in my mouth

And I am coming home to you

If its the last thing that I do”

— The mountain goats, Sax Rohmer #1

“You’re not waiting for her resurrection— you’ve made yourself her mausoleum.”

— Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

When the smoke finally clears, Adora— no, She-ra , she corrects herself— is standing tall in the remains of Hordak’s sanctum, brilliant light spilling forth from the machine behind her and casting a shadow that’s at least twice as long as the seven feet tall that she actually stands in this form and washing out the rest of the room to a collection of dark shapes, trying desperately to shield their eyes.  Right.  First things first.

Adora turns on her heel, enjoying the familiar swishing of her cape just a half-step behind, and raises her newly-reclaimed sword.  The motion is practiced, rehearsed over and over again in simulations, in palace courtyards, against bots on the field.  She lets the momentum of the turn and the weight of the blade carry her down and across, cleaving the portal machine in two with one mighty slash.  Her followthrough is maybe a little more dramatic than strictly necessary, striking a pillar and making the whole building rumble as debris begins to fall from the ceiling.  It feels good to fight like this again, the power and adrenaline surging through her veins like a breath of fresh air after so long separated from it in the portal.

Speaking of the portal…   Adora turns again, this time to face the whole room staring up at her in awe.  She looks past them—Bow, Shadow Weaver, Glimmer, Hordak— none of them matter to her.  She sweeps her gaze across the room until it reaches the spot where she knows Catra should be standing, just feet away from the lever (they’ve always had a near-instinctive ability to track each other, a blessing then and a curse now).  Instead she finds it empty, searching the darkness for any hint of eyeshine only to be met with complete, silent blackness in return.

Adora stumbles, just for a moment.  Like a step she expected to be there is gone, leaving her to put her weight on open air, and something in the pit of her stomach sinks.  So Adora does what she does best, what she’s always , done best:  Grab for the handrail.  Pull back.  Compartmentalize it into a nice little box to be addressed later.  Catra is fine, Adora assures herself.  She probably just recovered enough to run off while Adora was destroying the machine.  If there’s anything to be said about Adora’s oldest friend, it’s that she’s a survivor above all else.  She’s fine.  She has to be.  The thought dies before it can reach her face, at least in any way that others can see.

Instead, Adora turns to look at Hordak, the stutter in her movement as she refocuses almost imperceptible, unless you were looking for it specifically.  She pushes everything else out of her mind, including the deepest parts still screaming that something is wrong , and channels it into a singular, wordless glare, the kind that might actually cause someone to shrivel up and die if they hold her eyes too long.

And Hordak?  Hordak, who’s been the bane of Etheria for decades now, who masterminded her entire childhood without ever once showing his face?  Runs from her, his expression presumably what passes for fear on an alien space-bat thing.  Adora can’t help but smirk at least a little bit at that, and really, who can blame her?  Part of her wants to give chase, to see if she can end this once and for all.

But then Glimmer and Bow are on her, and the rest of the princesses too, wrapping her up as she returns to normal size and allows herself to sink into the warmth, to wash everything else away.  There’s so much more to think about, more to do, but surely nothing catastrophic will happen if Adora allows herself just one moment.

“If you’re all quite done, I suggest we go.  Now .”  Shadow weaver sneers as she extends a hand to Glimmer, the building heaving and shuddering around them as more debris falls.  Adora wants desperately to launch herself at the sorceress, to scream about how everything that just happened is her fault and how dare she act like it isn’t .  But even Adora can recognize that such things are unwise when she’s the only ticket out of a collapsing fortress.  

And then they’re back in Brightmoon, and everything after that is a blur.  The next few weeks are filled with trying to keep Glimmer stable and the alliance together without Angella to lead them, and Adora allows the scream of catracatracatra to fade to a low hum in the back of her mind.

“As you can see,  the Horde’s forces remain largely in a holding pattern,” Juliet makes a sweeping gesture over the holo-map on the table.  A planet in miniature,  blue and red pinpoints scattered across it like a projected starfield.  “Although the possibility that they’re massing forces for a larger attack shouldn’t be discounted, our spies haven’t reported anything of the sort.”

One month.  One month of near-complete silence from the Horde, after 20 years of nearly relentless attacks.  One month without even bots being sighted in the woods, or a raid on a minor outlying village like Thaymor or Elberon.  It was too quiet.  Something was almost certainly wrong, the only question was what , and whether or not it was a threat. 

“In my opinion, our best move right now would be to attack the mountain passes out of Dryl, and try to use the choke points to cut off—”

That’s as far as she gets before someone—One of her lieutenants, going by the armband, although the royal guard tends to blur together under those faceless helmets—and cuts a direct line towards Juliet’s side, without even so much as an acknowledgement of the somewhat absurd amount of royalty in the room.  Adora studies the way the woman’s face changes as this new figure leans in to whisper in her ear.  First alarm, then confusion, then… suspicion? Adora thinks.  “If you’ll excuse me, your majesty,” She gives the queen a short bow, pulls her helmet on, and marches out of the room.

Glimmer leans forward over the table in a terribly familiar way as a tense silence settles over the room, chin resting on clasped hands as she looms over the map, and Adora can’t help but wonder whether or not it’s a conscious imitation, or whether she’s simply developed the same nervous habits.  

Adora looks to her side, sharing a nervous look with Bow.  She knows, of course, that if it was anything approaching a real threat, any sort of attack on the castle at scale, they all would have been swept away to one of the palace saferooms by now, accompanied by a full contingent of the royal guard.  Still, she can’t help but notice that his quiver has been swung nearer to his hand than it had been a few minutes ago, a shape that she recognizes as his folded bow concealed under the table with his hand on the switch, despite the fact that he is strictly speaking not supposed to bring it to meetings.  Not that she really has room to talk, with one hand rested on the shining blue runestone embedded in her bracer.

A brief survey of the room reveals that, in fact, everyone has made their own preparations— Spinnerella and Netossa’s hands are noticeably unjoined and raised slightly.  Perfuma’s eyes are closed and the leaves of the tall green plants which flank the door are waving in an ever-so-slightly unnatural fashion.  Mermista and Frosta can’t really do much with what’s in the room, but Adora suspects that anyone trying to come through the door would be subject to an absolutely vicious tag-team attack via the waterfall behind them, and nearly everyone has pushed their chairs back and angled just slightly towards the door.  

  Everyone is unsettled, both by the interruption to the meeting and the events of the last few months at large.  Only Glimmer is unmoved, a perfect image of serenity and queenly grace, but Adora knows that it’s just a power move.  Her powers require the least physical preparation of any of them to use, and Glimmer is still a fighter at heart no matter what front she’s forcing herself to put up.

Finally, after somewhere around 20 minutes of tense silence, Adora hears the march of footsteps down the hall.  It’s a larger group than she expected, but clearly largely composed of guards based on the lockstep clanking of steel-toed boots on marble floors.  She allows herself to relax slightly.  Juliet has clearly deemed whoever this new arrival is to be safe enough for an audience with the queen (albeit with an armed escort).  The air in the room relaxes palpably as all but one set of footsteps halts just to the side of the door.

“Your majesty,” Juliet drops to kneel as she crosses the threshold.  She’s performing , Adora notes.  Not for Glimmer or for anyone else in the room, but for their unexpected guests.  Trying to present a very particular image of the way things are done in brightmoon.  “My guards apprehended two Horde soldiers at the front gates.  They purport to be defectors and requested an immediate audience with you, if you wish to grant it.  As far as we were able to tell, they are unarmed and acting in good faith.  One of them also claims to be a princess, although we weren’t able to confirm the veracity of that claim.”

The silence in the room explodes into whispers at that, before Glimmer motions them all for silence.  There’s no way that it’s her, logically, but who else could it be?  It would be a tremendously stupid gambit to lie about being a princess and then request an audience with the queen.  But why couldn’t they verify it?  Adora is at least mostly sure that Juliet met Entrapta at some point before she was captured.

“Send them in,” Glimmer says.  Her voice is level, mostly, but Adora hasn’t seen her eyes light up like this in weeks .  Adora breathes a sigh of relief at the small glimpse of the Glimmer that she knows , the one she’s friends with, instead of the shell of defense mechanisms and authority that she’s constructed for herself.

Juliet moves to the side of the doorway, and Adora watches as the flank of the guard becomes the front before parting like water to reveal their guests, still being only very slightly held at spearpoint.  Everyone is putting on a show today, it seems.

The first form to round the corner isn’t the one Adora expects, but it is one that she recognizes.   Scorpia, the only one of the Horde’s captains who can match her in pure physical strength.  Entrapta is close behind her, however, being half-herded into the room by one of the Horde’s familiar bots as she prods at one of the guard’s spear points with her hair.

“Princess Scorpia of the Fright Zone and Entrapta of Dryl, your majesty.  I’ll leave you to it, if you have no further need of me.”  Juliet says, slipping out the door to allow the room to devolve into the world’s most awkward staring contest, no one quite sure where to even start with unpacking this.

“Okay, first of all, princess?   You? ”  Glimmer says first, more by virtue of being the one to settle on the words quickest than by any sort of protocol.

“Oh! Yeah, the Fright Zone used to be my family’s kingdom, actually,” Scorpia says, raising a claw to scratch nervously at the back of her head, “They gave it up to Hordak in exchange for me getting a good position in the Horde.  It’s fine, the garnet didn’t really like me anyway, I think”

It’s incredible, Adora thinks, Scorpia’s ability to drop a world-shattering revelation like it’s nothing.  

It’s… hard to imagine admittedly, the idea of the seven-foot-tall teddy bear wielding the same force that had been used to so thoroughly ruin her and Catra’s childhoods.  It’s equally hard to imagine this idea that the Fright Zone had ever been anything else (Although apparently always called that, which somehow makes Scorpia being, well, Scorpia, even funnier than it already was).

“Huh, learn something new every day,” Glimmer concedes, “and the two of you are here, why , exactly?”

“We, uh, wanted to join the rebellion?” Scorpia says, looking nervously at Entrapta for a better answer and getting a shrug of her hair in return.

“Why now?   What do you have to gain?”  Mermista interjects from across the table like she’s been itching to interrogate someone for months now.

“Well I tried to warn them not to turn the portal machine on and they didn’t listen to me.  I would prefer not to be involved in a second near-apocalypse, if possible,” Entrapta gets in first this time, sounding more irritated about the affair than anything else.

“And things have just been… pretty bad around there.  Worse than usual, I mean.  I managed to convince Hordak to turn the transport to Beast Island around, but pretty much as soon as she was back we grabbed Emily and left,” Scorpia adds.

“Anything you can tell us about what’s been going on that we might have missed?  Troop movements, territory they want to capture, anything like that?”

“It’s, uh,” Scorpia pauses for a second, racking her brain for a response, “Not really?  Honestly Hordak has barely left his sanctum since, y’know,”

Then, quieter:

“And… everything is kind of falling apart, with Catra gone.”

Adora feels every muscle in her body go rigid at once.

Catra .

Gone.

“Scorpia.  What do you mean, gone? ”  the words come out more forceful than Adora means them to, and she’s dimly aware of the fact that she’s interrupting Glimmer.  She doesn’t care.  Getting the words out is already a fight against her shaky voice and rapidly-drying mouth.  If she allowed herself to continue to spiral, she might never manage it.

“As in, no one has seen her at all since the portal?  She just kinda never showed up when everyone else came back,”  Scorpia says, glancing around for anyone to bail her out of this, clearly realizing that she hit a nerve.  “I sorta thought you guys would know already, what with all your spies and stuff…”

Adora doesn’t catch the rest of what she’s saying.  She can feel the metal of the war room table start to strain and deform under her grip as she tries to hold herself up, but it feels so far away.  Everything feels so far away.

Catra. Gone.   The words play over and over again in her mind, accompanied by the image of Catra’s crumpled body being swallowed by the portal as Angella swept her away to safety.  Catra’s body, crumpled on the ground where Adora had punched her hard enough to draw blood for the first time in her life.  She can feel the bile rising in her throat now, the acid taste embedding itself so deep into her mouth that she feels like it might never go away.  A fitting punishment, she supposes, to be corrupted in turn.

It’s only then that the second part of Scorpia’s statement falls into place.

They should have known.

The horde had not, by any means, been entirely compromised by the rebellion’s spy network, sure.  Plenty of plans slipped their grasp entirely by virtue of never being spoken outside of Hordak’s sanctum, new weapons often developed in complete secrecy until the moment they hit the field.  But Catra had been missing for months .  And as the second-in-command, she was honestly probably more visible to the average soldier than Hordak was, with her having largely taken over the day-to-day operations of the entire military after Shadow Weaver’s defection drove Hordak further into hiding.  Her unannounced absence for that long would be noticeable to anyone.

And then Adora remembers.  Remembers the way that Glimmer had started taking meetings with her spymasters in her private chambers after her coronation; the way she had completely refused to divulge the contents of these meetings to Adora and Bow.  Everything starts to add up in Adora’s brain, and she really, really hopes she’s wrong.

Still bracing on the table (now with much more noticeable dents under her hands), Adora turns to Glimmer.  Glimmer, almost completely unmoving from the way she had been sitting when Scorpia and Entrapta came into the room.  Almost , except…

“You knew .”  The words are a simple statement of fact.  A declaration, not a question, not even an accusation , really, because an accusation implies that there’s any doubt.  The look on Glimmer’s face has already given Adora all of the answers she could possibly need.  Her eyes are cast down, studying the tiles on the floor instead of looking at Adora’s face.   The worst part is that she doesn’t even look guilty , or like she regrets it at all.  “You fucking knew , and you kept it from me.”

Glimmer lets out a breath, and then drops her hands to her sides, pushing out of her chair to meet Adora’s eyes.

“Yes, Adora, I knew,” Glimmer says, her voice trained and leveled.  Had she practiced how she was going to do this?  “And I didn’t tell you.  I’m sorry.”

(Still not admitting to the full extent of it, notably.  Not telling is an entirely different matter than going out of your way to hide something )

“For what it’s worth, I would have told you if there was a body,” Glimmer offers, “But Scorpia is right, Adora.  She’s just gone .  She dropped off the map completely after the portal happened.  Our first thought was that Hordak locked her up, but one of our people managed to get a full accounting of the prisoners and she wasn’t in the list at all.  Our people in the Crimson Waste haven’t seen her either, and no transports have left for Beast Island since the one that was carrying Entrapta turned around.  And stars know that she couldn’t manage to keep a low profile anywhere else for long, so I think we can rule out a sudden change of heart, not that that was a high probability anyway .”

“You still should have told me, Glimmer”  The three of them told each other everything.  Wasn’t that the point?
“Tell you what, Adora?” Glimmer snaps at her now, chair skidding back from the table as she pushes her way into Adora’s space, “ ‘Hey, just FYI, the enemy soldier who you’re still hung up on and is directly responsible for my mother being subjected to a fate worse than death has vanished into thin air and there’s nothing we can do about it, I’ll let you know when we find out more and you can just go back to what you’re doing’?  I’m sure that would have made you feel so much better.”

“Yes! Sure!  I don’t know, anything would have been preferable to keeping me in the dark, Glimmer, I’m supposed to be able to trust you!”

“Fine, Adora, do you want the truth?”  There’s something darker behind her eyes now, something terribly familiar in a whole different way to earlier.  “The reason I didn’t tell you is because I knew that you would react like this, and I couldn’t afford dealing with that right now.  Not when I was dealing with ascending the throne and taking over the rebellion on no notice because you fucked up.  I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to be distracted .”

Her last word pierces Adora’s heart and cuts her through like a knife.  Adora knows that Glimmer didn’t mean it like that, that she doesn’t know the history behind it.  But that doesn’t stop her from hearing the two other voices layered over it, carrying themselves in the words of her would-be best friend.

A distraction.   That was all Catra had ever been to them, to anyone besides Adora, it seemed.  A nuisance, to be disposed of at the first available opportunity.  It was the one thing she had always, always been willing to fight Shadow Weaver on, and she had no intention of stopping now.  Whatever has happened between them now, Adora is better for the time that she spent with Catra, the one thing that kept her from completely losing herself in the Horde.  It’s the most deeply-held conviction Adora has ever had about anything .

Something new in Adora’s heart bursts, finally, welling up until it spills out of where Glimmer cut her open, a previously untapped reserve of power flooding into her veins.  Where she had tried to fold in on herself before, she bursts forth now, her body moving before she could even try to command it to, as if she’s possessed by the sheer force of her emotions, and she could almost swear that she sees her eyes glowing in the diffused reflections of the room’s polished walls.  The next few moments come in flashes, like Adora is riding shotgun while someone- or some thing- else controls her body.

The war room in absolute disarray, papers and chairs scattered everywhere as if blown about by some great wind, Adora standing in the eye of the hurricane.

Shocked expressions on the faces of people who she dimly recognizes as her friends , pressing back against the walls and ducking to avoid the hail of debris.

The door bursting open and slamming against the walls as the full complement of royal guards that had been stationed outside pours through them at once, only to back away in confusion at the sight before them.

The look of abject horror on Glimmer’s face slowly tightening into fury as she looks up at Adora, shimmering pink magic beginning to swirl around her fists.

Someone— Bow, she thinks— is wrapping around her from behind, trying to pull her away from Glimmer, but he’s no match for her strength now.  Some of the other princesses have gotten it together enough to attempt to do the same to Glimmer, but it would be a futile attempt if she actually wants to get out.

She can feel herself starting to raise the sword now, the muscles in her arm tightening even if it’s not visible to anyone else yet, it will be when—

It’s a strange feeling, Adora thinks, to plead with yourself , to beg your own body to stop.  But that’s exactly what Adora does.

Please , she begs the golden, shimmering form of whatever force is animating her body, We don’t have to do this.  We don’t want to do this.   She grabs for its arm now, managing to arrest the sword’s motion and twist it into a defensive position, at least shielding her from any bolts Glimmer might decide to throw at her.

She’s wrong, but she’s hurting enough already.  Hurting her won’t help us.  Nothing.  Maybe a change of approach will help? Hurting her won’t help protect Catra now,  she tries.  That gets its attention.

The thing looks at her for a moment, tilting its head to the side and piercing straight through her with its glowing blue eyes for a moment as it weighs her words.  It feels like they stand there like that for an eternity before it nods its assent, evaporating into nothingness and allowing Adora to plummet back into her own body.  She lets the sword clatter to the floor, and then everything goes black.

By the time Adora comes to, the last stray bits of evening light are falling through the window as Etheria’s largest moon dips below the horizon, Casting the whole room in a strange, purple-tinted glow.

The first thing that she notices is that everything hurts .  Not like a cut, or the lingering afterimage of an impact— it’s that kind of deep, inexorable ache, the one that seeps into your bones and feels like it won’t ever leave, the kind that makes even thinking about doing anything painful.  It’s a feeling that Adora is unfortunately extremely familiar with, a frequent consequence of pushing herself past the point of overwork day in and day out.

But that doesn’t make any sense , because she clearly just slept.  Not that she really knows how that happened either, given that she’s still completely dressed, save for her red jacket and boots which she can make out carefully arranged by the door.  How did she get here?  The last thing she can remember is being in the war room, and that had been… mid-afternoon, sometime.  She remembers Scorpia and Entrapta showing up, at least.

She remembers being angry about something.  More explosively angry than she’s ever felt in her entire life.  And she knows it was important, even if she was horrified by the way that she had lashed out.  But in her half-awake, pained state she can’t place quite what it is.

She’s snapped out of her attempts at reconstructing the events of the day by a small rustling noise from her right, almost inaudible over the ambient noise of the waterfall in the corner for anyone who isn’t hopped up on lingering adrenaline and hypervigilance (in other words, people who are not Adora.).  She still can’t quite see in the dim natural light of the room, but she can squint her eyes enough to make out the outline of a high-backed armchair, the only other piece of furniture that she had kept in the room when she moved in.

Carefully, Adora starts to slide her hand towards the dagger that she keeps under her pillow for exactly this kind of situation, even the small movement sending shudders of pain through her body.  She doesn’t grab it, not quite yet.  Whoever it is also seems to be at least unaware of her waking up, if not asleep themself.  She lifts her head just a fraction, moving her hand to where she knows the knife should rest and—

It’s gone.  Which means that whoever is in her room knows about the knife and was smart enough to take it, which rules out everyone except about three people and one of them—

Adora sidelines that thought and wherever it might be leading for a moment as her eyes finally adjust enough to see Bow’s sleeping form curled in the chair.  Her muscles release their tension, allowing her to sink back into the bed (in as much as she can sink into the hard cot she had requested) as she racks her brain for reasons why Bow would have had to haul her to bed and stayed to keep an eye on her when she wakes up.  The war council.  Scorpia and Entrapta. Yelling, screaming at Glimmer, something about—

Catra.

The weight of her memories hits Adora like a direct blast from a tank, all of the air sucked out of her lungs in an instant.  The ache in her bones is so much worse now, smoldering embers stoked back into a forest fire that consumes her entire being.  Catra. Catra. Catra.

She wants to scream, wants to cry, wants to do something, anything to get this feeling out of her body before the stress of holding it in breaks her apart completely, but it catches on something in her throat, twisting itself into an awful, strangled noise as she fights for breath.  The edges of her vision start to blur again, white light creeping in as Adora feels herself sink, drowning in a feeling that she can’t— or won’t —name, thrashing desperately and scattering her bedspread about the edges of the cot.

It’s enough to rouse Bow, at least, waking with a start and muttering a quiet “ Adora? ” as he rubs the sleep from his eyes before turning to look at her.

“ Shit ,” he curses under his breath, and Adora watches his eyes go wide taking her in.  She must look absolutely pathetic like this, she realizes, but she’s well past any opportunity to suppress it at this point.  “Okay.  You’re gonna be okay, Adora, just try to focus on my voice and breathing with me okay?  Can you do that?”  He’s trying to keep himself together, but the crack that always creeps into his voice when he’s freaking out about something betrays him.  Adora must look even worse than she thought.

With a great deal of effort, Adora manages to flop her head over to the right to look at Bow’s face, praying that her eyes are able to communicate how her throat is constricted, how it feels like there’s a colossal weight pressing down on her chest.  It seems like he gets the message, pushing himself off the chair and crossing the short gap to the bed.  He hovers over her, hesitating for a moment like he’s not sure if touching her is the right move.  He’s never had to help her through one of these alone, she realizes.  She manages to push through her paralysis enough to give him a reassuring nod, but it takes just about everything she has in her.

With a gentle touch, Bow grips her shoulder and helps her up, his other hand reaching for the pillow that she had launched off the bed and pressing it into her lap as she draws her knees up to her chest, serving the dual function of being a soft buffer between the two and something for her to cling to and bury her face in.  It helps , at least a little, giving some of the energy in her body an outlet as she squeezes it so hard that she thinks it might burst.

“You’re gonna be okay,” Bow says, keeping his breathing steady for Adora to match, “I know it’s scary, but it’ll pass and you’ll be fine.  You’re just having a panic attack.”

A panic attack .  Adora still remembers the first time she heard the phrase, when Glimmer had found her curled up in a closet just a week after she had arrived here, immediately teleporting her to the doctors, demanding to know what was wrong with her friend.  The first time that anyone had put a name to the phenomenon she had been experiencing at least once a week  for her entire life, the one that she’d never dare voice to anyone.

Anyone except Catra, that is.  Adora feels a lingering warmth flood her chest as she remembers the way that Catra would always catch the change in her breathing the night before their weekly assessments, wordlessly sliding up from her position at the foot of the bed they shared to instead press her full weight onto Adora, letting Adora press her face to her shoulder as she purred, and Adora would, in turn, allow herself to be enveloped in warmth, to indulge in belonging to Catra and no one else, if just for a moment.  It’s one of the only unambiguously, completely happy memories of her childhood.  She always felt like nothing could hurt her when she was wrapped up like that.

And then Adora remembers what led her to this point in the first place.  She scrambles to dismiss the memory, to push it out of her head before it can cause any damage, but it’s too late.  It's already sunk its claws into her mind, and every push Adora gives only drives them deeper, tears her open even more.

All of her memories of Catra are sharp, dangerous things now, she realizes, even the good ones covered in a layer of thorns that threaten to draw blood if she allows them into her mind.  She almost wants them to destroy her, if she’s being honest.  The scars and the thorns are all she has left of Catra, and padding out the edges feels like letting her fall into that blinding chasm all over again.

But she has to. At least for a little while.

Adora was so lost in her own head that she didn’t even realize that she had started crying.  That was probably the only reason that she had allowed herself to start, in fact.  Regardless, the warm damp spot in the pillowcase is large enough to encompass her entire face now.   Her lungs are still working in short, sharp, breaths, but it’s more even now, the kind that comes from steady exertion instead of fighting for every gasp like she’s drowning.

Bow is still there when she finally lifts her head, holding a blanket and eyes looking like he was fighting off his own panic attack (which he probably is, knowing him).  Her first instinct, of course, is to reassure him.  I’m fine .  A simple, easy lie that she’s told hundreds of times before.  It won’t convince him, but it might calm him down slightly.

Instead, a broken, cracked sound emerges from her lips, followed quickly by a burning sensation in the back of her throat.  Okay, maybe she isn’t fine.

“Oh! Right!” Bow launches to his feet, occupying himself with picking out which of the cups on Adora’s desk is the closest to being acceptable for human use before passing it under the waterfall for a moment, filling it before returning to press it into her waiting hands.  Adora drinks readily, tipping the cup into her mouth and chugging the water until it runs dry before slamming it down on the table, leaving them to sit in awkward silence as it soaks into Adora’s throat.

“Did I hurt Glimmer?”  Adora asks once she feels up to talking.  It’s not the question that she most wants an answer to, but it has been nagging at her, and it’s safe , relatively speaking.

“No,” Bow says with a shake of his head, “how much do you remember?”

“I… I remember yelling at Glimmer and then hitting the ground, and nothing after that.  Everything before is pretty clear, though.”

“You were like a half-second away from taking a swing at her and doing some serious damage, and then you just dropped .  It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen.  And then I dragged you here, and I think you’re about up to speed after that.  Oh!”  Bow lights up, reaching down for his bag to dig for something before producing a long, narrow object wrapped in a cloth, “I took your knife, sorry!”

“Probably smart, considering that my first instinct when I woke up was to try to stab you,” Adora laughs as she takes it back and replaces it in its correct spot.  It feels nice to let a bit of the weight lift from her shoulders, if only for a moment before everything settles back in 

“I’m sorry, by the way,” Bow says, his voice quiet as he nervously rubs his arm, “She didn’t tell me either, or I would have said something. I know that she was… important to you.”  That’s new , to say the least.  Bow and Glimmer have never seemed the type to keep any secrets from each other.

“Yeah,” Adora sighs as she slumps back onto the bed, “she is.”

The past tense doesn’t escape Adora’s notice.  Has everyone else really moved on so quickly?  Glimmer said herself that there wasn’t a body, but... 

Adora’s mind doesn’t know how to accept a world without Catra in it, is the problem.  Catra, who’s been the only constant in her life for so long, steadier than the rise and fall of Etheria’s moons. For as long as Adora can remember, she’s orbited Catra and Catra has orbited her in turn, giving shape to the trajectory of her life whether as an ally or an enemy.  It doesn’t feel right, that she can just disappear and the rest of the world continues to turn as if nothing has happened, leaving Adora to careen into the unknown carried by nothing but her own momentum.  It feels even more incorrect for it to happen so quietly.

Adora bites back her grief.  Catra is gone , and Adora refuses to use any other word to describe it until she has solid physical proof. She just… Can’t accept that thing she saw in the portal as the last memory that she’ll ever have of her oldest friend.  And maybe if she had done things just a little bit differently she wouldn’t have to accept it.  Maybe she wouldn’t have to see Catra’s bruised face falling away every time she closes her eyes.

“You know it’s not your fault, right?” Bow interjects, snapping Adora’s attention back to reality.  Sometimes, her complete inability to hide things from him is a curse.

“I tried to stop her, but Catra made her own choices.  I know that.” 

The words are so familiar in Adora’s mouth that she almost believes them.

“Good.  I know it’s hard to accept that, but being able to say it is a good first step.  And you are allowed to miss her, no matter what some people say.  I’m always up for hearing about her if you need to talk, okay?”  

Adora wants to thank Bow.  She wants to tell him that she doesn’t deserve that kind of gift and to go find someone who does .  She wants to tell him dozens of stories about the two of them that she’s never been able to tell anyone else.  So many words fighting for space, blurring together in her brain.  Instead, she settles on launching forward and wrapping him in a hug in the hopes of getting her message across.  It works, thankfully.

“Do you need me to stay the rest of the night, or do you want to be alone?” he asks after a while.  Adora wants to keep her friend nearby, she would feel more comfortable with someone else there to keep an eye on her.  But she’s also acutely aware of the fact that all of the time she’s had to grieve has been extremely public.

“I think I’m good.  Thank you, though,”

“Okay.  You know where to find me,” Bow eyes her suspiciously as he makes his way to the door, “see you in the morning, okay?”

And then he’s gone, and the room is silent again.  Just Adora, sitting alone in the darkness, one hand reaching up to run a thumb over the scar on her left shoulder, the bump of tissue that had formed around a part of Catra that was, in a very literal sense, embedded too deep in her to remove.  It hadn’t been any kind of intentional attack.  Catra just… hadn’t even processed the fact that her claws were capable of hurting Adora yet, absentmindedly pawing at her when a layer had broken off inside, revealing a newer, sharper blade underneath.  Catra had been horrified when she smelled the blood, and insisted on cleaning and bandaging the wound herself from their cache of stolen medical supplies, in spite of Adora’s insistence that she had stolen them to use on Catra .

In those first weeks at Brightmoon, she considered just... healing it away, cleansing herself of any reminders that she had ever been anyone else.  She couldn’t bring herself to do it then, and she’s thankful for that now, as she gathers her blankets and tries to salvage some amount of rest from the night.  She can figure out how to exist in this strange new world in the morning, she thinks.

She still sees Catra drifting away from her when she closes her eyes.

The Horde falls apart the same way any structure does:  As each support is kicked out, more and more strain is placed on the others.  It’s gradual, at first. The roof starts to sag, the floor gets creaky, the whole thing sways worryingly in the wind.  And then it collapses all at once, leaving nothing but dust and rubble in the memory of where it once stood.  And without Entrapta to develop new weapons and Catra to deploy them effectively, precious few pillars remain to bear the weight.

The first one to fall after that is Dryl.

The mountainous landscape is nearly unrecognizable to Adora, the Horde’s factories and infrastructure spreading across it and winding up the cliffs like an infected wound.  It had never been a conventionally beautiful place in Adora’s memory of the one or two times that she’s been here, granted, but it had still been a place , one that felt largely natural, and it was hard to not gaze up at the mountain peaks in a mix of awe and slight terror at the prospect of ascending them.  Now those spires are wrapped in machinery, the sky choked by the same blanket of smog that Adora grew up under.

The signal flare goes up, and seconds later the thunderous roar of an explosives-induced landslide echoes out of the mountain pass and through the valley.  By the time the sound can reach them, the princesses have already dropped from their position on the cliff, teleporting straight into the heart of the horde’s base.  Showtime.

It feels good for Adora to be back in the field again, better to be working as a team with Bow and Glimmer for the first time in months.  Fighting is something that’s always come to her as natural as breathing, and she hadn’t realized just how starved for oxygen she had been until now.

They fall back into a familiar rhythm, Adora’s shining form barely flinching as she draws fire from dozens of bots at a time, her weapon flowing easily between sword and shield, while Bow and Glimmer flit around the battlefield to subdue the larger ones before they can pose an actual threat to her (and making some truly dreadful puns while they do so).

Making their way to the center of the complex feels almost trivial, even too easy.  The human guards were evidently all asleep or distracted when they attacked, many of them simply opting to drop their weapons and run when faced with the full might of the princesses.  And the bots feel far less intelligent than they ever have before, like whoever is controlling them now is content to simply throw them at the rebels in a straight line instead of attempting to flank or even use the heavier weapons appropriately.  Adora resolves not to think too hard about why that’s changed now .

That persistent feeling of something being off doesn’t abate as she kicks down the door of the control room, the glowing power conduit at the heart of the Horde’s bot production, and by extension their war machine as a whole—
And finds it empty.  Completely devoid of sound and life, save for the beeping of abandoned control consoles around the edges of the room.

Adora keeps checking over her shoulder on instinct.  Surely this is a trap.  The second she crosses the threshold, some previously unseen forcefield will glide over the door and lock her inside, and she’ll hear that voice taunting her again.  Variations on a scene that’s played out dozens of times over the past few years, comfort in familiarity.

Adora steps through the door.  She checks every direction for hidden pressure plates, nets primed to drop from the ceiling, guards waiting to stun her on either side of the entrance.  And she finds none of it, walking the completely unobstructed path to the power column.

She levels her blade and with cuts it clean through with a single strike, sparks flying as she tears through metal and wire as if it's paper, still completely unopposed.  Adora watches from the panoramic windows of the control room as the whole complex goes dark.

Everything happens so quickly after that.  With the Horde’s most vital supply line blocked and their ability to produce more bots crippled, the war is effectively over already.  Everything after that is just death throes, Hordak lashing out in a desperate attempt to do as much damage as possible before his life’s work bleeds out.

The next few months start to bleed together for Adora, a series of dozens of almost completely unmemorable skirmishes as they push the Horde farther and farther back towards their own territory.  It seems like every day they mount a futile attack on some isolated village, or a supply caravan, or just try to burn down whatever they can get their hands on.  It never works, the rebellion wins every single time.

The rebellion wins— Adora smiles; waves; makes awkward conversation at parties over and over again until it all feels just as rote as the battles themselves. She’ll never admit it to her friends, but it feels hard for her to call any of this a victory.  She knows that she should be happy.  She’s lost so much to this war, just like everyone else.  What’s broken so deeply inside her that she can’t just be excited for it?  (she knows, even if she’ll never admit it.)

Still, every win feels hollow now, a simple matter of routine.  Adora focuses on her goal like it's the only thing in the world.  She insists on spending all her time at the front now, her room in Brightmoon sitting empty for months at a time, only seeing occupation when Glimmer forces her back for a war council meeting.  The space feels strange and foreign, even more so than it had the first night that she stayed here three years ago.  So does Glimmer, in the brief moments they interact outside of a formal setting.

“We could do a memorial for her or something, if you wanted,”

Adora snaps to attention, hard enough that she shoots a few inches off the log she had perched herself on.  She hadn’t even realized she was drifting off, even though she knows she’s been pushing herself too hard the last few weeks.  She kicks herself once for allowing it to happen, twice for allowing anyone else to see it.  She twists around in time to see Bow ducking under a branch as he crosses the treeline, stepping out onto the ridge beside her.

They’ve been camped out here for days now,  an elevated section of the woods on the Plumerian border providing an ideal staging area.  Staging for what will, in all probability, be their final assault on the fright zone.  Here, they’re just about level with the tallest spire of the forge, although the sightline is blocked by the red smog that collects in the valley like blood filling a cup. 

 Adora had been skeptical, at first, of the soldiers praying to the woods and leaving offerings in a plea for safety and concealment, but something they’re doing has evidently worked, the entire rebel camp tucked safely out of sight behind the treeline, but close enough to make out the day-to-day happenings of the outlying sprawl below them.

“I don’t know if— if you had rituals for that or anything.  In the horde,”  Bow continues as he comes to a stop just behind her.  She had almost forgotten he was here again.

“We did, yeah.  Pretty different from yours, I think,”  Adora had received a crash course in Brightmoon mourning customs the first time She-Ra had been asked to make an appearance at a military funeral, thankfully given by Glimmer before the event.  That had been years ago, and part of her still couldn’t believe that they actually buried their dead.

She doesn’t have to look at Bow to know that his silence is an invitation to tell him more.  

So she does.

“Everyone gets cremated, of course.  Not really a lot of space to bury whole bodies down there,” She says, gesturing at the densely-packed sprawl of factories and living quarters below them.  In addition to the smog, the fright zone’s mountainous borders also meant that there was a hard limit on space, and it all had to be used as efficiently as possible,  “and for a single casualty their squad is usually allowed to do it themselves.  Official procedure says it’s to be done during your rec time, but most of the captains won’t actually make you train that day.”

Catra and Adora are twelve when their usual time chasing each other around the bowels of the forge is interrupted by the doors opening.  They throw themselves behind some boxes as a group of older cadets come in.  Two of them are carrying something long between them, concealed by a blanket while the other four flank them.  If they notice Catra and Adora, they pay them no mind, facing straight ahead as they march through the halls toward the fire at the building’s core.

Adora knows that she should return the favor.  Should take Catra and run, even.  But something keeps her rooted, compels her to stay and watch this strange ritual.  So they follow, sticking to cover and shadows as they carefully follow down the hallway .

“You can just do it in the incinerators in the buildings, but if you have the time to do it right you take them to the forge.  It burns a lot hotter and feels less like you’re just throwing them out with the trash.”

“From there it’s pretty similar, I think.  Anybody who was close to them gets invited to come, although the groups tend to be pretty small.  Unless you had somebody important outside your squad it’s usually just them.”

The group stops when they reach one of the access hatches for the incinerator, the ones usually used for maintenance.  Someone has been waiting for them, a girl with dark hair tied back in a low ponytail, the insignias on the full dress uniform she’s wearing marking her out as a force captain.  She’s been crying.  She’s also been trying to hide it, Adora notes.

Adora tries to suppress a gasp when they pull back the sheet and she sees the body for the first time, ducking behind the boxes and burying herself in Catra’s hair.  A few of them turn towards their position, but the captain waves them off and calls out to them.

“You can watch, you know. We’re not going to hurt you.” 

Catra and Adora aren’t quite brave enough to come any closer to the body than they already are, but they do pop out of their cover, standing at full attention like they do for inspection at the start of the day.  It just feels right for a reason they can’t quite articulate.

“You give speeches, tell stories… that part’s the same everywhere, I think.  And then you put them in the fire, and then you wait.” 

 Adora feels like she’s been doing a lot of that, recently, the waiting .

The words are quiet, much too low for them to pick out most of what’s being said, but the emotion carries, and it’s clear from what they can understand that whoever this was had died protecting the captain.  When she’s done, she reaches down to the body and slips the badge off their uniform. Her hand runs down their arm, clasping their fingers for a moment.  Now Adora can see the matching bracelets on their wrists forming an unbroken line, fire flickering off of them through the viewing holes in the maintenance hatch.

Adora doesn’t know why , can’t name any significance to the gesture.  But for some reason this is what makes tears pool in her eyes, makes her clutch Catra’s hand just a little bit tighter.

Bow is sitting next to her now, eyes also locked on the horizon.  He seems to understand that she’s in no condition for eye contact right now.

“What do you do with them afterwards?”  he asks, “I don’t know if you had any permanent markers or anything,”

It’s two weeks later, and Adora is running the halls of the fright zone herself,  their instructors keeping Catra after class to chew her out about something stupid again.  But running circles without Catra to chase her is boring, a way of burning off excess energy more than anything else.  So she gets distracted, letting her mind wander to all of the places she wants to visit with Catra some day: Plumeria, Salineas, maybe even Brightmoon— once they’ve conquered it, of course.  She’s so distracted that she doesn’t even see the corner coming.  She tries to turn down the hallway to her right, but she’s going too fast, her momentum throwing her into an uncontrolled slide, tripping over a low pipe and tumbling into the dark.

The world still feels like its tilting on its axis when Adora pushes herself up on unsteady arms, breath already starting to shake.  She’s never been in one of these maintenance corridors alone, and it’s far more frightening without the comfort of a companion with perfect night vision.  Finally, she pushes herself up, leaning her back against the wall to let the room stop spinning and allow her vision to adjust enough to find the way back out.

That’s when she sees the names.

There must be dozens of them, possibly even a hundred at a quick count, scratched into the wall from floor to ceiling and stretching all the way down the length of the corridor.  It’s not unusual for cadets to leave a mark somewhere in their barracks (Adora and Catra’s scrawled portraits of each other come to mind) but this is different, somehow.  More reverent, in a way that Adora can’t quite explain.  Something compels Adora closer, placing her limbs carefully to not disturb any of the mementos piled in front.

Some of the names are old, as old as she and Catra are at the least, a thin layer of the grime that permeates the fright zone settled into the gouges and claiming them as its own.  The oldest are at the edge of the corridor, just out of view from the main hallway, getting fresher as they work their way in.  Adora swallows her fear and walks further into the dark, one hand running over the scratches and divots at her side.

One name sticks out at the end on the lower part of the wall, extending further into the dark than any of the others, shining, uncorroded metal marking it out as the freshest addition to the memorial.  She knows that it must be the girl who’s funeral they stumbled on a few weeks ago, a suspicion confirmed by the badge and photo leaning against the wall under it. Kyran.   That was their name.  In the photo her hair is down, wearing casual clothes.  Her arms wrapped around the waist of the force captain they had seen burning her, wide grins on their faces in a way that's almost frighteningly reminiscent of her and Catra (although they clearly seem to be something more than that, but she can unpack those implications later).  Adora thumbs over the name, allows it to burn into her memory.  She may not have known them, but evidently someone cared for them, and they deserve to be remembered.

In truth, there’s nothing that Adora wants more.  She wants so, so badly to remember Catra in the way that she should be.  To put her in the fire, let her travel up the smokestacks of the forge, join the unmoving mass of smoke that had permeated their entire lives together where Adora can breathe in what’s left of her until she’s coughing on the hard ground.

But she can’t .  Not without a body.

Sure, she knows that there are plenty of people who have funerals and graves without their bodies being recovered.  Both of Glimmer’s parents have markers in the palace gardens, boxes of their personal effects buried in absentia, and she’s sure that similar practices had existed in the horde too.  But her physical reminders of Catra are few and far between, mostly just a rock and a piece of a claw embedded in her shoulder, both far too precious to give up.

But even more than that, carving Catra’s name into a wall would feel like giving up, as illogical as it sounds.  She knows that Catra being dead is the only logical conclusion.  It’s been almost a year since Adora watched that awful, twisted version of her get consumed by the portal, and there’s been no trace of her.  But equally, there have been no answers about where she went, why she didn’t come back with everyone else.

And maybe once she has those answers, she’ll allow herself to think about it.  But not now.  Right now, there’s work to do.

Besides, everything Adora has done is a monument to Catra, in her mind.  A promise, if you will: I am going to end this war, so that it will never hurt anyone else like it hurt you.

The next day, they march Hordak out of the Fright Zone in chains, Glimmer insisting on parading him all the way back to Brightmoon instead of just teleporting.  It’s over, just like that.

You and me, together at the end of the world .  That was what they had said.

And now here Adora is, at the end of the only world she and Catra ever knew.  Completely alone.  Watching as the rebellion raises the purple-and-black Scorpioni banners over the fright zone for the first time in a generation.

Adora leans against the rail of their old spot on the forge, the same rail that Catra had perched herself on so many times, and takes one last look out at the place that she called home for so much of her life, committing as many details as she can to her memory. (but it was never the place that was home, was it? Adora shoves down the voice in the back of her head before she can get too far down that line of thought)

It’s… strange, honestly, to think that so much of this will be gone soon.  The endless sprawl of factories and rusted metal, the noise of patrol bots sweeping the grounds night and day, the blaring noise of the alarm every morning.  So many of the things that had defined her life, washed away like nothing.  The horde has loomed so large over her, over everyone , for so long, and it’s impossible to imagine the fact that it’s simply going to just stop .

It’s a good thing ultimately, she knows.  Adora knows more than anyone just how much damage the horde has done.  But that doesn’t make the fact that it’s happening like this feel any less wrong.

“To victory!  To She-Ra!”  Glimmer’s shout echoes through the packed ballroom, earning raucous cheers in response that turn towards Adora as people process the second part of the toast.  It’s all Adora can do to force a small smile and an awkward wave, tipping the same glass that she’s been nursing all night, some amber-colored liquid that smells awful and tastes even worse.  Still, half the glass had been enough to dull the noise a little bit, and she was thankful for that, if nothing else.  (She wasn’t sure how much Glimmer had drunk already, but given that this was probably the fourth time she had made a toast to Adora, she was going to hazard a guess of “too much”)

And it was loud in here.  Adora’s sample size for parties was still pretty limited, but this one felt different than either of the two she had been to.  Princess prom had been very formal, everyone (save herself) trying to keep up appearances, every interaction laden with political tension and diplomatic maneuvering beyond the veneer of a social gathering.  

This? This was pure celebration.  Glimmer had even taken the measure of declaring the castle open to the citizens, and Adora is pretty sure that the whole of Brightmoon city has cycled through at some point during the night.  

It’s good.  It really is.  These people need something to celebrate.  Even the ones who live relatively safe inside the confines of the city walls have still spent their entire lives with the shadow of the Horde looming over them as they went about their lives.  She would be a pretty shitty hero if she let her personal hang ups get in the way of them being happy about that.  So she presses that perfect smile to her face, tries to drink at least a little every time someone toasts her, and generally tries to float around the edges of the room until someone pulls her into the middle.  

Adora feels her cape snag on something, and turns to see that a small brown-haired child has managed to trip and entangle herself in it.  She sets her drink to the side, carefully helping to unwrap it from the mess of limbs until she finds a pair of tiny, bright eyes staring up at her.  Sure, she could let the kid get up by themself.  But where’s the fun in that?  Instead, she reaches under them, one smooth motion bringing them back to their feet (but not before she lifts them several inches into the air) leaving those eyes looking up at her filled with absolute wonder for a second before they run off to rejoin the friend they had been chasing in the first place.

It’s the one thing that’s managed to bring a genuine smile to her face tonight, really.  Kids love She-ra, it turns out. Hardly 10 minutes has gone by without at least one of them clinging to her legs, or asking to ride on her shoulders, or asking if she’s strong enough to lift a whole table.  And she had indulged every single one of them.  How could she not?  The look of absolute awe on their faces as she used the First One’s greatest weapon as a party trick was, as far as she was concerned, the only real victory that she had won here, the fulfillment of a promise she had made a long time ago.

These kids would never have to live like they did.  Never have to spend their days doing combat drills over and over until they get their form exactly perfect.  Never have to live in fear of their already-insufficient rations being cut down for the slightest infractions.  Never be manipulated as a pawn in other people’s twisted schemes.  They get to live , get to be dumb and chase their friends around the woods and stay up too late and eat too much candy.  The ones who know any kind of military conflict in their lives will do so of their own volition at an appropriate age.  Even with all else lost, she can take comfort in that.

When we run the world, kids won’t get treated like this .  Adora’s own voice echoes in her memory, hundreds of miles and what feels like several lifetimes ago.  The memory is distant, not much left except for a crying girl wrapped in a blanket, but it’s important.  It’s a much, much different world than they had imagined then, but making good on it still feels like coming home.

Adora takes a deep breath and pulls herself together, wiping tears from her eyes and onto the back of her hand.  She’s a complete mess.  Really, she wants nothing more than to slip out of here and away, back to the quiet of her room or the palace gardens, but by her estimate she has at least an hour before it’s socially acceptable for her to leave.  She is the guest of honor, after all.

There’s another, more isolated explosion of cheering from the other side of the room, towards the dance floor.  Mermista is yelling for someone to “Get it!” and Adora is suddenly very glad that Frosta fell asleep and had to be carried back to her guest room about half an hour ago.  The source of the excitement becomes apparent quickly as she makes her way over.  The entire dance floor has been cleared out, save for two.  In the center, Scorpia effortlessly twirls Perfuma over her head, making use of all the available space as they spin from one side of the floor to the other, Perfuma’s green dress fluttering behind her.  They’re both blushing wildly, and Adora is pretty sure that only about 10% of that at a stretch is from the alcohol. 

Scorpia is wearing the same dress that she had worn to princess prom, when she had shown up with—

It seems like everything tonight is intent on trying its absolute hardest at leading Adora to thinking about the one person she’s trying very hard to not think about.

The wide-open room suddenly feels far too small, the noise of the crowd far more oppressive than it had been a moment ago.  Social acceptability be damned, she needs to get out of here now .  A quick check around the room confirms that most of them are distracted by the commotion, and Bow and Glimmer have practically passed out on top of each other at this point.  So Adora quietly lets she-ra fall away, slips the mask off, and escapes out the side door before anyone can notice that their great hero is missing.

Her first thought is to go to the palace garden.  The air there is nice and fresh, and it’s always been one of her favorite spots to sit and think by the edge of the waterfall.   But that's a no-go tonight, poking her head around a corner to find them also full of revelers, come to take in the beauty or pay their respects to the king and queen.  So that leaves her room.

Adora hangs a right, takes the winding spiral stairs up to the western wing of the castle, feet trudging along the same well worn path as always.  The door sticks in the frame when she tries to open it, requiring a few shoves with her knee before it gives way into her room.

The dust hits her nose as soon as the door falls open, and Adora feels a brief pang of regret at telling the cleaning staff to skip her room.  Adora had been used to the responsibility of keeping her own space tidy and organized, and she didn’t want anyone else going through her things and messing with her carefully constructed systems.  It was a choice that had made perfect sense in a time when this still felt like her room, before the dust had reclaimed the space in her absence.  It still looks like her room, of course.  But something about it feels strange now, unwelcoming in a way that she can’t quite place. Not that it had ever felt like home , really. 

Carefully, she pads across the space, taking in all the reminders of the last few years on the walls.  Photos of her with Bow and Glimmer, the plants Perfuma had given her after realizing how empty the space felt (thankfully enchanted to keep themselves healthy, because Adora couldn’t take care of them to save her life), a few seashells from Salineas that line the edge of her dresser.

She had never really put any thought to what she would do with herself after the Horde was gone, something that had seemed like a distant, impossible dream for so long.  Would she even continue to live in the castle? Would Glimmer let her, after she had outlived her usefulness?  With how tense things have been between them, Adora isn’t really sure she wants to know the answer to that.  Adora’s whole life has been governed by rigid structure, well defined goals issued to her by someone else.  Now it’s like her tether’s been cut, wide open ocean in front of her with complete freedom of where to go and what to do.

It’s the most terrifying thing she’s ever felt, somehow.

Adora staggers the last few steps to the window, which by some small mercy obeys her on the first try, swinging open and allowing the cool night air to wash over her.  It helps, at least a little, the gentle breeze on her skin at least giving her something else to focus on.  She goes to brace her hands on the sill, letting at least some of her weight be supported by the structure instead of her increasingly tired muscles.  That’s when everything crumbles.

She doesn’t have to look to know what’s poking into the skin of her hand.  Knows equally well that she should just pay it no mind, move to the other window or go lie down or anything other than what she’s about to do.

Instead, she turns her hand over.  The stone is small, small enough that it can be completely concealed in a closed fist, its surface polished to a mirror shine by water and then by years of Adora turning it over in her hands any time she was worried.  The pale blue shimmers beautifully in the traces of moonlight fluttering through the closed window, diffusing until it almost looks like the surface of her palm is glowing faintly.

The stream courses around her ankles, and somewhere distantly Adora knows that she’s going to regret wading in without taking her socks off later.  Not that it was enough to stop her, of course.  Not with Catra tugging her by the hand like that.

“This one’s really pretty, and it looks like your eyes,” Catra says, wiping her latest find dry on her shirt and holding it up to the light to examine it, “you should keep it.”

Adora leans in to get a look at it.  She isn’t sure if she agrees, but Catra spends a lot more time looking at Adora’s eyes than she herself does, so she’s willing to defer judgment on it.  She’s reaching out her hand to take it by the time the gears finish turning in her brain.

“Wait,” Adora raises an eyebrow, “does that mean you think my eyes are pretty?”  Her voice is teasing, but the implied compliment still struck its mark.  Adora had… never really thought her eyes were anything special, really, especially next to her friend.

“NO!!!” Catra can’t help the squeak creeping into her voice, or the way that her ears pin back, as she practically throws the rock at Adora, who catches it smoothly and slips it into her pocket before it can fall back to the creek bed.  

“Uh-huh, right,” Adora lunges after her friend, chasing her through the creek and thoroughly dampening the rest of their clothes as they splash water at each other until they collapse in a laughing heap at the edge.  There’s really nothing Adora would rather do than stay here like this forever, just the two of them in their own little world.  But Adora can already hear their instructor calling for them.  All good things must come to an end eventually, she supposes.

What Catra doesn’t know is that that rock lived in Adora’s jacket pocket for years afterwards, that it was one of the only physical possessions that she carried with her when she left the Horde.  She had placed it here when she moved in (she had been pretty sure at the time that carrying a reminder of Catra into battle with her wouldn’t exactly bring good luck anymore), but she had never forgotten about it.  And now she returns it to its rightful place, feeling how its weight alters the swing of her jacket ever so slightly.

You can’t stay here.  Not tonight .  Adora doesn’t know what exactly spurred the thought, but she agrees with it all the same.  The prospect of spending the night here, surrounded by a life that she doesn’t think belongs to her anymore, is too daunting, even if she doesn’t really know where else to go.  Anywhere will do, really, as long as it isn’t here.

Adora slides open the bottom drawer of her desk, confirming that the emergency survival kit she stashed there ages ago is still intact.  Bow and Glimmer had thought it was a little silly, but it  had felt so strange to her to not be living out of one bag for the first time in her life that she hadn’t been able to sleep properly until she had one within reach.  So she had assembled a small knife, some firestarters, stable rations to last her a few days at a stretch, and a water bottle, all conveniently wrapped and tied in a light blanket.  She fills the water bottle in her fountain and easily slides the whole bundle into her backpack.

Force of habit compels Adora to make her bed before she leaves, even in the absence of anyone to try and be presentable for, neatly tucking the corners in and straightening out the pillow.  She just doesn’t want her space to be any harder for them to clean up than it has to be.  Finally, she tears a page out of her notebook and scrawls a quick message to her friends in the most legible handwriting she can muster.

Glimmer,  Bow, etc.-

Needed some time alone.  I’m not sure when I’ll be back, but I wanted you to know that I’m safe.

Thank you. For everything.

Adora

She folds it up and leaves it placed neatly in the center of her desk before tossing the notebook and her pens into her bag as well.  She knows her friends well enough to know that it’s unfortunately inevitable that they’ll come looking for her (she and Glimmer had done it to bow, after all), but ideally she can at least keep them from being too alarmed.

With that, everything appeared to be in order, and there was no real point to delaying any longer.  Adora slips out the door to her balcony, hops the railing, and begins the long climb down Brightmoon castle, walking on narrow ledges and clambering down rocky outcroppings as she descends towards the lights of the city below.

Once she hits the street and has solid stone under her feet again, getting out of the city is easy.  Adora has never been more thankful that people don’t recognize her , maintaining her anonymity even as she stops to stare for a moment at a mural of she-ra that covers one entire wall.  Still, she keeps her head down and conceals the sword under her sleeve, letting the flow of the crowd carry her down the narrow streets carved into the cliff.

She breathes a sigh of relief when she crosses through the city gates, the crowds thinning dramatically as they pass into the meadows that separate Brightmoon from the whispering woods, most choosing to keep their partying confined to the city itself.  Most of the remaining people opt to follow the roads, carrying them back to homes in Thaymor or Elberon, or other farther-flung destinations.

Instead, Adora’s feet carry her straight ahead, cutting a path straight across the soft grass towards the treeline, towards the one place that might be able to give her even some semblance of an answer.

By the time Adora arrives at the crystal castle, dawn is starting to break, Etheria’s largest and brightest moon rising over the horizon and making the whole structure appear to glow unnaturally as the light bounces and scatters through its geometry before casting back onto the forest floor around it.

Adora pauses for a moment as the long shadow falls on her, staring up at the structure in a strange mix of reverence and fear, its ancient spire still just as imposing as it was the first time she stepped foot here.  The hallowed ground commands a certain kind of respect, after all, but she will not forget how deeply this place and its singular resident have hurt her, she promises herself.  She’s done with second chances, she decides as she raises the sword and allows the power to flow through her.

The darkened entrance hall flickers to life immediately as Adora crosses the threshold, light pouring in through the impossible stained-glass mural that dominates the back wall, the distorted reflection of herself stretching from floor to ceiling.

“ Administrator detected.  Welcome, Adora,” Light Hope’s voice echoes through the open hall, surrounding Adora and making her jump a few inches as her translucent form materializes on the dais in the center of the room, uncharacteristically pausing for a moment as she appraises the hero in front of her before continuing.

“ Your work in purging the Horde from Etheria has been commendable.  Now that princess Scorpia has been restored to her rightful place, it is time to move on to restoring balance to the planet.  You must help her forge a connection to her runestone.”

Genuine praise from Light Hope is a rarity, to say the least.  But of course it couldn’t come without some new task attached.

“And?”

Light Hope tilts her head to the side, a gesture she must have acquired from Adora at some point.  “ I am afraid I do not understand what you are asking. ”

“And then what ?” Adora feels the grip of the sword start to dig into her hand, her fist tightening as the words spill out, “What am I supposed to do with myself after that?”

“ And then you will continue to protect Etheria as needed, until such time as you can not.  Are you unclear on the nature of your duties?”

“Oh no, I’m very clear on that,” Adora practically spits the words out as she takes a step closer to the hologram.  “Do you know how much I’ve given up for this?  How much you’ve taken from me?”

And then, voice only slightly above a whisper, just barely choking out the words:

“Did you even realize that it’s your fault that Catra’s gone?”

Something flickers across Light Hope’s face that Adora would almost swear was pity, even regret, if she didn’t know any better.  But she does.  Enough to know that it can’t be anything more than a trick of the light, or a momentary glitch in whatever subroutine the AI is using to project herself.

“ I am sorry, Adora.  But Catra made her own choices, and sealed her own fate.  You must let go.” 

“And I could have convinced her to make different choices if you hadn’t been fucking with our heads!”  Adora snaps, anger flooding through her whole body like fire as she takes another step, reveling in Hope’s failure to muster a response, “Oh, I know all about your little memory projection trick now.  You really think that you’re the first person to try messing with them?  If you hadn’t— if you had just given me time she would— I could have made her—”  Adora bites down on her tongue and lets the taste of blood fill her mouth, swinging the sword out blindly until it gogues a deep mark into a nearby pillar.

“ No.  I did not alter your memories, I merely selected which ones to show.  The rift between you two had always existed, I simply sped it along,” she pauses, almost like an imitation of a person stopping for a breath, or to brace themselves, “ It is a shame that you and Mara could not meet.  You really are so very alike. ”

“Yeah,” Adora says, narrowing her eyes as she looks back at Light Hope, “I think I’m starting to understand her a lot better.  She might have had the right idea.”

Adora takes a deep breath.  She came here for answers , not to have a breakdown, she reminds herself as she reaches into her pocket and turns the rock’s smooth surface over in her hand.

“I just— “  Adora draws her arms across her chest like it can stop the shake creeping into her voice, “I want her back.  More than anything else.  I don’t even have a body , Hope.  How am I supposed to keep doing the hero thing if I don’t even get to mourn my best friend properly?”

“ You have previously expressed… discontent with the accuracy of my simulations.  So I presumed it was best to encourage you to move on.  Perhaps I was mistaken. ”

Adora doesn’t understand the implications of the statement until the new world starts to construct itself around her.  She’s back in the whispering woods, watching fireflies dart around her head on another perfect summer night.  And she’s herself .  She wants to shout, to open her mouth in some kind of protest, but she’s stopped in her tracks before she can.

“ Hey , Adora,”

Catra’s voice comes from behind her, soft in a way that she hasn’t heard since they were young.  She doesn’t even need to turn and see those mismatched eyes to feel like a weight has been lifted from her shoulders, to let out a breath that she didn’t even realize she was holding, letting her entire body slack out as the tension drains out of it.

“As much as I’d love to stay out here with you all night, we should probably get home before sparkles get mad at us again, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Adora laughs, :”we probably should,”  Adora chances a look over her shoulder now, and finds everything that she’s ever wanted and tried to keep down.  Not Catra as she remembers her, but… more , somehow.  Her mask is gone, her hair still long but full of soft curls instead of the frizzy, untamed mess it had been last time she saw it.  The image of the last time Adora saw her oldest friend rises in her memory, something in the back of her brain trying to scream out that this isn’t right before she manages to stamp it out.

“Hellooooooo,” Catra snaps her fingers in the air, pulling Adora back to the present, “Etheria to force captain Adora! You ok there?”

“I’m fine, just… spaced out for a second, I guess,” Adora says, rubbing her arm awkwardly as Catra takes a step forward, hopping over roots without a second thought.

“Guess I better keep you real close while we walk back then, huh?  Wouldn’t want everyone’s favorite princess to lose track of herself and trip like an idiot,” Catra teases, but there’s no heat in the words as she pushes forward.  They’re within reach of each other now, and Adora closes the gap first, extending a hand to tuck a stray strand of hair behind Catra’s ear.  Catra leans her head into the touch just a little bit too much, Adora’s fingers lightly brushing the side of her face.  And that’s when everything falls apart

The touch feels wrong , somehow, on a visceral, almost primal level.  Strange electricity dancing across her skin where Catra’s fur had always been so soft on it.  She staggers backward as the world halts around her, forcing herself to wrench her eyes from Catra’s soft gaze where she’s frozen in the midst of reaching for Adora’s hand.

“No, ” Adora barely gets the word out, her mouth suddenly feeling like she’s been in the desert for a week, “no no no no.  You don’t get to use her like that!”  She can feel the back of her throat cracking from the strain and the tears welling in her eyes.  She doesn’t know when the sword appeared in her hand.  But she swings it wildly now, turning her entire body with the strike, lashing out over and over again until the world falls out of existence, watching a horrible white light swallow Catra a second time. As the holograms fall away, Adora can see the extent of the damage she’s caused, deep slash marks in the floor, banks of machinery, pillars, anything in reach, marking her path across the room.  Huge chunks of the multicolored glass are missing, laying in pieces at her feet.

“ Adora, please.  You must calm down.  Regain control of yourself. ”  Hope’s voice fills the space again, her projector too damaged in Adora’s rampage to conjure an actual image.

Adora laughs at  that, harder than she has in months, throwing her head back and an arm across her stomach.  “You expect me to calm down ? After that?”  She straightens herself up a bit, turning as she speaks like she’s addressing the space itself, “you ruin people, you know that? You take any chance of them being happy and just… crush it. Just like that.  Have you even considered that you’re the reason Mara went crazy?”

Her question receives nothing but an all-consuming silence in return, and Adora shrugs her shoulders.

“It’s not like it matters, I guess.  Because this ends now .”

“So be it.  I am sorry, Adora.  I hoped that you could be better than this.” Hope responds, with something that almost sounds like a sigh.

The first spider appears from behind her, predictably, a panel of the wall fading out of existence to allow it to lunge at her.  She’s already turning on it when it does, bashing its face in with her elbow before dispatching it with a quick slash, turning back around just in time to see dozens of them flooding the rest of the room.

Adora realizes, for the first time, that she might not be able to win this on brute strength alone.  She didn’t really have much of a plan when she came here, after all.  That’s when it hits her.  The processing core.   She had put all that work into fixing it, and now that she knows where it is, destroying it should be a much easier task.

She breaks for the back wall, sprinting as hard as she can towards the rapidly-closing door.  She arrives just barely in time to wedge the blade of the sword between the two halves, using it as a lever to pry it open again providing her with just enough space to slip herself through to the other side before it snaps shut again.  She wants to stop for a moment and catch her breath, but the banging on the door puts that idea to rest.  Something tells her it won’t hold for long.  So she has no choice but to press forward.

She’s so close now, the illuminated bridge stretching out over the cavernous space before her.  The central processor can’t be more than a few hundred feet away now.

A few hundred feet, and equally as many spiders.  Adora really wishes she had managed to teach Hope to make anything else, if only for the sake of variety.

Adora lifts her sword and charges, bashing the first cluster of them off the bridge with her shoulder and watching them plummet to the darkness below.  From there it’s easy, swinging her sword with barely more effort than it would take her to cut through brush, not even breaking a sweat.  Before she knows it, she’s standing on the platform, face to face with the core.

“ Adora, please.  I must ask you to reconsider.  I know that you are hurting, but you are still she-ra. Your people still—”

“I’m hurting because of you .  I know that I can’t stop the sword from picking a new she-ra. Mara couldn’t and I can’t either.  But maybe, just maybe, I can stop you from hurting them.  Maybe the next one can actually be happy.”

“ Adora, please.  You must let go ,”

“Oh, is that what you want, hope?” Adora snarls, raising the sword to eye level and drawing the pommel back past her shoulder, “You want me to let go?  I’ll show you letting go!”  With all the force and rage she can muster, Adora plunges the sword into Light Hope’s glowing, beating heart, feeling the crunch of glass and circuitry shattering under her blade.

Her hands tremble as she releases her grip on the blade, feeling herself collapse back down to normal size, suddenly having to strain her neck to see where she had so easily pressed the sword in just a moment ago.

Everything flickers for a moment, the AI’s face frozen in some sort of horror as she fades away, the last traces of power coursing through her system.  And then, darkness.  The lights shut off with an abrupt clunk, leaving only the whir of machinery to fill the space.  But even that dies after a few seconds.

Leaving Adora completely, terribly alone in the cavernous space.

It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dark, for the world to take its shape again.  She can feel the bile rising in her throat as she stares down at her hands, still shaking like leaves in spite of her attempts to still them.

“Mara— The she-ra before you— She was… unstable.  Compromised.  She could not bear the weight of her duties, and so she collapsed under them.  You must not repeat her mistakes”

Adora snaps around, expecting to see something behind her.  But there’s nothing there except darkness and the bridge leading out of it.  The voice exists only in her memory now.

Where can she even go now?  She certainly can’t imagine facing Glimmer and Bow, now or maybe ever again.  Not when she failed in the way that she swore she wouldn’t.  So Adora resorts to her oldest coping mechanism: give herself a basic, attainable goal.  Right now, that’s getting out of the castle.  That’s easy.  One foot in front of the other, a finite distance that she has to cross.

She doesn’t even make it halfway across the bridge before she breaks out into a run, her head and her heart both pounding in her ears in time with her steps as she makes it across and into the debris of the destroyed front hall.

The moon is blazing when she bursts into the woods, everything that she’s ruined exposed to the full light of day.  She can feel the tears streaming down her face blown back towards her ears but she doesn’t care .  It doesn’t matter.  Nothing does anymore.

She doesn’t even know which direction she’s going, now that the castle has disappeared into the trees behind her.  All she knows is that she has to keep running, has to keep the adrenaline flowing as long as she possibly can to stave off the inevitable collapse.  One foot in front of the other, putting as much distance between herself and everyone else as she possibly can.

All it takes is a slight stumble, in the end.  A singular root that escaped her tear-stained vision as she crosses into a clearing, slowing her just enough for whatever she’s running from to catch up to her.  Adora doubles over and clutches at her arms before sinking to her knees, and finally, finally allows the sobs she’s been fighting all night to take her body, shuddering violently as the tears pour out of her.  Everything hurts so much, both body and mind, and for a moment Adora wishes that she could just lay down and die in the soft grass.  She wishes she knew how to stop .

That’s when she sees the house.

It’s small, probably not much more than a single bedroom and some living space, maybe a little bit of storage if it’s really cramped.  It’s also clearly been abandoned for years now.  Most of the windows are broken, the walls littered with holes.  But it seems to be structurally sound, at a glance.  There’s a small, clear stream running next to it, providing an ample source of freshwater.  And by some strange miracle, the ax lodged in a stump a few feet away from her still shines, somehow untouched by rust or rot.  Despite its state, it feels warm and inviting in a way that Adora can’t quite place.

She can hardly think of a better place to start over.

Chapter Text

?????

The first thing you’re conscious of is the bruise on your cheek and the taste of copper in your mouth, flooding in where it collided with your own fangs.  You shouldn’t be here, you know.  You shouldn’t be anywhere.

How long does it take, before you force your eyes open?  A minute? an hour? a day?  The only way you can mark time is the swelling on your face and the lingering feeling of betrayal that comes with it.  Once you can see again, you know that you’re laying on your back, sharp rock tearing into your flesh like the teeth of some great beast.  And that means that what you’re looking at is the sky, a sky scattered with pinpoints of light and flourishes of color like a painting on a temple wall.

Stars, something inside you supplies, although you can’t recall ever hearing the term.  These are stars.  And the fact that there are stars means that all is lost.  This you know intuitively.  You have lost, even though you will swear up and down that this is a victory, that you finally got what you wanted.

Maybe the best thing to do is to stay here, lay on your back and stare up at this foreign sky until you’re claimed by the morning frost that’s already sinking into your fur.  It probably wouldn’t even take very long.  But you’ve never been known for your smart and well-considered life decisions, have you?

So you pick yourself up on shaking legs, and you march.  You hadn’t been planning to live, really, but you sure as hell aren’t going to die here.

Two days

Glimmer opens her hand, allowing a ball about the size of Bow’s fist to float up until it’s hovering a few feet above them, casting both their faces in a soft, purple light.  It barely makes a dent in the darkness that consumes the cavernous space.

“Adora?” Glimmer calls into the darkness, “creepy hologram lady? Anybody home?”  she receives only an echo in return.

The light catches on an imperfection in the flawless, shimmering metal of the floor, drawing Bow’s eye to the ground as he drops into a crouch.  The cut is clean, so smooth that it would easily be mistaken for an intentional carving if not for the haphazard nature of the dozens of others like it, gouges in the floor ranging in depth from barely noticeable to a few that Bow could fit his whole hand into. 

“Well,” Bow says as he runs two fingers along the edge of one slash, “She was definitely here , at least.”

Two days.  It had been two days since Adora had slipped out of the castle without telling anyone, somehow managing to completely avoid the sight of both the royal guard and the city watch.  They hadn’t even realized anything was amiss until dinner, really, assuming that Adora was taking the much-deserved opportunity to sleep in like everyone else.  It was only the fact that she hadn’t come down for food all day that had alerted them that something might be wrong.  That was when they had finally kicked the door open, only to find the room abandoned, save for the note on the desk and curtains fluttering in the breeze from the open balcony.

At first, they thought it was a good thing, honestly.  Adora had… never really had any time to herself.  Maybe she just needed some time to think, to come to terms with what had happened and figure out what to do with herself now.  Besides, it’s not like she couldn’t handle herself in the woods.  So they waited.  And waited, until Bow was pretty sure that Adora would have run through the stash of rations that she had brought with her.

Evidently, it may have already been too late.

Glimmer takes a step forward, standing now in roughly the center of the latticework of slashes carved into the ground.  The silence is deafening in here, every footstep echoing off the metal walls of the cathedral and overlapping itself again and again, but neither of them can bring themselves to break it.  It’s the same feeling that Bow got on dozens of archeological digs with his dads, that innate sense of being on hallowed ground, somehow.  But this place shouldn’t feel like that, even as old as it is.  Bow has been here before, and although it was certainly creepy already, it was a place that was still serving its intended function, with working lights and a persistent hum of machinery all in recent memory.

Something flashes bright enough to illuminate the whole room for a split second, and Bow only has an instant to brace himself before Glimmer is appearing in his arms, the sudden weight sending them both sprawling to the cold floor.

“......spider.  Dead spider.” Glimmer says, letting out a breath and slumping back as she lifts a hand, allowing a beam of light to fall on the aforementioned dead spider.  It’s exactly as large and frightening as Adora had described when she talked about her training here… except for the singular, massive dent in the center of its face, caved in as if by one incredibly strong blow.

Glimmer pushes herself to her feet, with Bow close behind her, sweeping her beam of light through the room.  He’s barely managed to return his breathing to normal before it gets knocked out of him all over again, his heart dropping further into his stomach with every inch of that the beam covers.  Casting long shadows, it reveals dozens upon dozens of spiders, piled two or three high in some spots, all either smashed like the first one or sliced wide open, some kind of strange not-blood spilling out and flowing into the carved channels on the floor.  Some of them are completely intact, like something had suddenly flicked a switch and they had dropped where they were standing

“Do you think that she did this?” Glimmer says as she nervously reaches a hand up to smooth her hair back into place.

“Those marks looked about right for her sword, but…”  Bow lets his voice trail off into the darkness as they push forward, picking their way over and between the bodies.  He would really, really prefer not to think about the alternative.  That something else had done this, and that they would have to face it down without Adora’s help.  Or the far worse option: that something had been done to Adora (Bow tries not to shudder visibly as he remembers the First Ones artifact that Entrapta had been experimenting with the first time they met her, although he at least had the comfort of watching it shatter into pieces with his own eyes).  They cross the rest of the vast space in silence.  

The first indication that they’re close to the back wall is the crunch of glass under his boots.  Sure enough, several of the stained glass panels behind the altar are either smashed or simply missing completely, their contents instead scattered to the floor and tumbling down the steps, almost invisible if not for how the edges sparkled catching the dim light as they walked past..

Things don’t get any better when Glimmer teleports them past the jammed door and into the tunnels beyond, a part of the crystal castle that Bow has never seen.  If the front hall was cavernous, this room is unfathomably, impossibly vast, stretching so far beyond his vision that it feels like the darkness might collapse in on itself and crush him.

Out of curiosity, he draws a sonic arrow from his quiver and holds it out over the pit by its fletching before letting it fall into the abyss.  If it ever activates, whatever ground it hits is too far away for Bow to hear it, even as an echo.  Or maybe it simply disappears.  Either outcome is disconcerting, to say the least.  Bow walks very, very slowly down the center when he steps on to the bridge behind Glimmer, following the same trail of sword-strokes that had led them all the way through the building.

They make it about halfway across the bridge, by Bow’s estimate, when the central platform comes into view in the dim light, the monolithic tower at its center looming over them.  The core processor, he remembers.  Adora had told him about fixing it, maybe if it’s damaged again, he can do the same.  Maybe it can tell them what happened here.

It does tell them what happened, it turns out.  Just not in the way that they expect.

As they cross the threshold of the platform, Bow busies himself looking for any sign of controls on the raised sections around the edges, finding nothing but smooth stone.  It seems like an… oversight to say the least, that access to any kind of controls is reliant on the hologram projections working.  Apparently long-term planning and systems redundancy wasn’t the First Ones’ strong suit.

“Oh fuck. ”  Glimmer’s voice pierces the silence as she moves out of Bow’s line of sight, the towering processor blocking him from getting a read on her face.

“Yeah?” Bow moves quickly around the perimeter of the platform to catch up to her.  Glimmer, who’s staring up at something on the tower, “What’s━”

Bow doesn’t get more than that word out before he finds the point where Glimmer’s eyeline meets the tower.  Resting there, embedded so deep that only a few inches of mirror-polished blade are showing, is the sword of protection.

Bow wants to kick himself.  He had known that Adora wasn’t in a great place after what had happened with Catra, and then with Glimmer, but he thought… he thought that he had at least gotten through to her, given her something solid to lean on.  He thought that maybe , now that the war was over, she would have whatever resolution she needed to move on, to at least begin healing, even.

How had he been such an idiot?

Bow’s hands shake as he reaches up to pull the blade from its resting place, sliding it out of the wound with surprisingly little friction.  Glimmer has removed her traveling cloak now, opting to drape it over her hands in waiting as Bow carefully takes the weight of the sword and passes it to her so it's lying across her hands.

It’s a silent agreement.  No matter how tense things have been between them━ and he is going to have some words with Glimmer once things are sorted out━ they don’t need them for this.  It just feels wrong to leave it here.  Even just as a practical concern.  The castle isn’t terribly exposed, but still, someone could just… walk in and take it, and who knows what that could lead to?  Especially with Adora missing?  Carefully, Bow pulls the sides of Glimmer’s cloak over the blade, wrapping it snugly in the thick fabric and letting Glimmer clutch it to her chest.

The next agreement is equally silent: Bow takes Glimmer’s hand, and in a flash of light they’re standing in the woods again, a few feet outside the castle’s doors, sunlight warm on his skin and fresh air flooding his lungs again.

“Okay,” Bow starts after taking a moment to compose himself, refocusing on the task at hand.  “We should go back and get everyone.  Start the search from here since it's her last confirmed location and spread out.  I’ll see if Entrapta can━”

“No.”  Glimmer cuts him off flatly.

“Her bots can probably━ what do you mean no? ” 

“I mean, Bow, that I’m not going to devote time and resources to mounting a huge search party for someone who clearly doesn’t want to be found when we have an entire planet to rebuild.”

“Glimmer.  You saw what she did in there.  She’s clearly not ok and━”

“Yeah, she’s not,” Glimmer says with a shrug, “and if she thinks that abandoning everyone will make her feel better?  That’s fine .  You read that note, Bow.  She told us not to follow her.  So I won’t.”

“But━”

“That’s final, and also an order, ”  There’s a fire in Glimmer’s voice now that Bow isn’t sure he’s ever heard before, certainly never directed at him, and there’s nothing he can do but stare incredulously at the shell of his best friend.  “Come on, we’re going home.”

Bow takes one last look back at the woods as Glimmer grabs his hand.  If he squints, he can see a trail of broken branches and trampled underbrush leading out of the clearing and deeper into the trees, eventually vanishing into the darkness. It might be nothing.  But the whispering woods are rarely so careless.  That’s as far as his thought process gets before the world dissolves into pink light.

?????

So you walk.  And you walk and you walk until your legs collapse under your own weight, rocks scraping your knees open as they hit the ground.  It’s getting dark again, now, whatever desolate star has ensnared this barren planet sinking past the cliffs on the horizon.

You’ve had your eyes fixed on those cliffs for the entire day, however long that is here, the only remotely useful landmark in this wasteland of flat, identical rock.  You know that you must have pushed yourself a dozen miles at least, but you don’t seem to have made any measurable progress, nor have you found signs of any life on this planet save for your own tracks in the dirt behind you.

There probably was, once.  The planet can clearly support it, as evidenced by your continually not being dead.  And the entire place has a strange feeling to it, not haunted exactly, but… something close to that.  Maybe hallowed is more the word you’re looking for.  That inescapable sensation that you are standing in the shadow of something that once was.

It would be annoyingly fitting, you think, to be left to wander this place which is not quite enough to kill you.  A planet just as hostile and empty as you are, one that burned hot and bright until there was nothing left but a shell..  If there’s any home you deserve, this is it.

Your arm burns by way of response, fire climbing it like vines and winding up the side of your face.  A permanent mark of your failure on display for everyone to see.  Your anger has burned you out and left you hollow, and now you are this.  You would do anything, give anything to go home, if those warm arms would still take you.

The answer to your prayers comes in cold, white light.

One Month

It may have taken a whole month, but one of Adora’s snares finally worked.

She hears her success before she sees it, the snapping noise of the line coming unhooked and the branch swishing upwards disturbing her normal walk, followed quickly by small noises of distress ringing through the brush.  Weeks of failure, of coming back in the morning to find her anchors either pulled out of the ground or her line snapped from making them too strong, finally rewarded.

Adora moves quickly but carefully, pushing through bushes and stepping over roots as she makes her way to the spot where she had carefully hidden her line in the dense growth on the ground.

There.   Adora catches sight of it as she ducks under a low branch.  The creature is covered in soft, pure white fur, large enough that it should make at least one decent meal, two or three if she’s disciplined about it, but small enough to fit comfortably in her arms (it’s probably not fully grown, she realizes with a start.)  And it’s thrashing , hard enough that Adora would almost be worried about it slipping the cord looped around its front legs if she wasn’t so confident in her knotwork. 

Instead, it just kind of flails about and makes the line swing back and forth, the branch it’s tied to more than enough to bear whatever force the small creature could exert on it, small legs kicking uselessly into the air.  Its eyes are blown wide, looking frantically around like it's expecting help to show up at any moment.  It won’t.  Either this thing is alone out here, or whatever companions it does have are smart enough to know that its fate was sealed the moment the snare slipped from the anchor.

Now comes the hard part.

“Shhhhhhh, it’s okay. You’re okay,”  Adora keeps her voice low as she approaches and carefully slips the knife from her belt, “It won’t hurt, I promise.”

The creature’s ears swivel towards the sound of Adora’s voice, prompting a brief moment of renewed struggle that only serves to tighten the snare’s hold on its front legs.  And then it goes limp, either playing dead or accepting its fate, still swinging back and forth softly from the residual momentum and the breeze.  Adora stills it easily, the creature leaning to rub against the hand she’s cupped at the back of its neck to steady it, and she flinches just a bit when those black eyes swing up to meet her own.

This… really shouldn’t be that difficult.  Trivial for her, even.  No matter how much they avoided talking about what they were doing during the war, Adora is under no illusion that her hands are entirely bloodless.  She’s okay with that, she really is.  If she hadn’t done it, far worse things would have happened to people who were unable to defend themselves.  Bearing that burden was just as much a part of the job as any of the physical wounds she endured.  All things considered, it had really been one of the easier things for her to learn to live with. By comparison, this should be nothing , she just needs to bring her hand up a few inches and slide it across, one clean motion, and then it's over.

But she just… can’t .  Something stays her hand every time she tries to move in to end it.  Instead, she moves her hand up, works the blade between  the animal’s legs and the woven cord tied around them, resting the serrated part of the blade against it.  She adjusts her hold, bringing a hand under to support its weight, and pulls the knife back towards her, cutting through the rope with a snap as the small form tumbles into her arms.

It looks… confused, mostly, when she crouches down and sets it back on the forest floor, cocking its head to the side.

“I’m sorry,” Adora says as she turns away, “You can go now.  It’s okay.,”

She tries to tell herself that her vision is only cloudy from the light—the hood of her cloak had fallen back when she looked up, after all—but when she wipes them with her sleeve the grey fabric comes away streaked with tears.

Adora wants to kick herself.  It’s stupid to get so sentimental over this and let a perfectly good meal get away from her.  If she had stayed in Brightmoon, she would have eaten far more meat over the past month, anyways.  Doing it herself shouldn’t be any different.  It doesn’t—or shouldn’t — matter to her that it had looked scared.  That doesn’t change the fact that she needs to eat if she’s going to survive out here long term, and if she can’t do that then maybe she really is as useless as—

Adora squeezes the rock in her pocket as she breathes in, counting to five before releasing her grip in time with her exhale.  Living on her own terms was the entire point of coming out here, wasn’t it?  Yes, she’ll have to get comfortable with hunting eventually, especially once the fish season dries up in a few months.  Right now, she has a choice .  The woods have been kind to her, so far.  It feels right to repay that where she can.

--------------------------

The day-moon is already at its peak by the time Adora stumbles back through the door, arms laden with the edible plants and berries that she’s managed to forage.  It’s not a bad haul— they seem to be in the height of the season right now, and she’s had no trouble finding a plethora of them that are already perfectly ripe.

It’s also not nearly enough.  Try as she might, she can’t sustain herself on plants and berries alone (and the season won’t last forever, either).  There’s nothing she wants more than to collapse in a heap on the floor,  to give into the exhaustion that has made itself a home in her bones.  But she can’t.   It’s already noon, and she’s barely scratched the surface of what she needs to accomplish today.

It’s become a somewhat comforting routine over the past month.  Adora wakes up with the dawn, goes out to accomplish her foraging in the half-dark before returning home to set down her load and eat a small meal, barely stopping before she’s set out again, catching fish and gathering firewood until the light starts to die.  Any remaining time that she has before it’s fully dark is spent exploring the surrounding woods, adding to the scribbled map in the back of her notebook.

It’s not as regimented as the schedules that Adora is used to (she doesn’t even have a real clock out here, for starters), but it serves the same purpose, in effect.  It gives her direction, short term goals to keep her eye on.  It also, crucially, leaves her with a minimal amount of time to think, prevents her from being pulled under by the current of her own thoughts.

Adora cringes at the way the hinges screech when she shoulders her way into the bedroom, metal grinding against metal as the disused hinge travels through its arc.  She makes a mental note to fix that at some point, before the implications of that thought stop her in her tracks.  Fixing things means that she intends to stay , at least for a little while.

Then again, she already hadn’t planned to be here a whole month, and here she is.  There isn’t really anywhere on Etheria that feels like home at this point.  It’s possible that no place will ever be able to hold that title ever again.  But this is the closest thing she’s had in years, really.  A space solely for herself.

But even that is a foreign concept for her.  ‘Home’ had always been something that was meant to be shared , for her.  Home was darkened bunks and little worlds carved out of abandoned storage rooms, stolen rations and rough drawings carved into the walls where no one else could see.

This is normally the point where Adora would try to crush this train of thought.  Reach for the handhold.   Find a goal to focus on and use it to pull yourself up.

Not this time.

This time, Adora lets herself sink.

Catra would love it here, she knows.  She had always relished whatever time they were allowed outside, even the small taste of freedom to stretch her legs and indulge her desires to run and climb bringing that sparkle to her eyes that Adora had always loved so much.  How many hours had she spent watching Catra leap around the junkyards, so transfixed that her complete inability to keep up didn’t even register for her?

She would love the way that the cabin was quiet, but never silent , the river providing a softer alternative to the unceasing industrial hum of their youth.  She would love the endless amounts of free time, waiting to be filled up with drawing or exploring or just sleeping .

Adora can feel the tears in her eyes starting to spill over onto her face now.  So she lowers herself to the floor and takes a breath in an effort to steady herself.  Thinking about Catra still feels like prodding an open wound, most of the time. But it feels different the more she allows herself to do it.  It doesn’t hurt less.  But it feels cleansing , like she’s taking care of the wound instead of leaving it to fester.  That was the entire point of coming out here, wasn’t it?  To figure out how to make peace with this?

That feels like an impossible task, right now, to even begin to define herself without Catra.

But she has all the time in the world to try.

?????

Your arm is burning, again.

But this time, instead of letting it consume you, you allow it to flow outward , channeling the power through your claws and into the pale flesh that they’ve sunk themselves into.  The body on the ground seizes for a moment before it goes limp, a trickle of smoke emanating from its gaping mouth and reaching towards the sky.

Your hand tears free bloodlessly, leaving only the scorched flesh around the wound in its wake.  It feels so good to have an outlet for this again, to sink your claws into something other than your own flesh.

Not that it’s much use, really.  For every enemy you cast aside, it seems like two more identical copies take its place, sliding forward in unison to fill the gap in their ranks.  Still, you launch yourself forward again, into the center of another pack, weaving between their weapons as your claws find another throat to tear at.

There’s a split second before it happens, where you realize that, in all of your adrenaline and fury, you have severely miscalculated.  The rank of clones parts seamlessly as you hit your target, allowing you to tumble through as the jaws of the trap snap shut behind you.

The first blow hits you on your back, driving you into the ground so hard that you taste blood.  It’s over at this point, the logical part of your brain knows.  Blow after blow raining down on your back like artillery.  You lash out blindly, swiping for ankles and trying to flip yourself over, succeeding in cutting down a few.  But it's just as futile as before, more of them stepping in to fill the void as your limbs are restrained one by one.

“Stop.”

The clones freeze in place, your entire world suddenly returning to silence.

“Restrain her and bring her on board. I want her alive.”

Eight months

Adora’s bed is warm.  Warm and loud , in the best possible way, full of soft purring and the rhythm of a song that rests just outside the edges of her memory.  It’s perfect.  Adora feels like she could stay there forever.

Waking up feels like someone is twisting a knife in her chest, her perfect world disappearing in the blink of an eye and leaving her empty and cold.

The cold settling into her bones isn’t just her imagination, Adora realizes, the first winter breeze whistling through the house and piercing through even her carefully-constructed blanket cocoon.

Fuck.

She really, really thought that she had more time.  She had noticed the leaves turning, of course, the shifts in the air as fall had dragged on into its later weeks, bringing increased rain and barren trees with it.  There’s so much she had meant to do before now, between laying in supplies and patching up the house, things that had been put aside in favor of the day to day work required to survive out here.

Adora shrugs out of the blankets she’s wrapped herself in and pulls on her well-worn red coat, wrapping her cloak on top of it to provide an additional layer against the wind.  The first thing that she needs to do is take inventory, and then make a plan from there.  So she starts with that, training her ears and walking around the house  to identify where the wind is breaking through.

Thankfully it seems like they should all be relatively easy fixes, even with her rudimentary skills.  The seal on one window is bad enough that she might be better off just boarding it up, but everything else should be reasonably salvageable, even if it won’t be pretty .  

Next up: food.  She’s had some amount of success in her experiments with cooking and drying meat for storage, but most of her protein has still been from fresh-caught fish and game.  Her stores aren’t nearly enough to last her through the winter.  There are other, more minor problems (like obtaining more firewood), but those are by far the two biggest, and the ones that she’s least able to solve on her own.

There’s an obvious option, Adora realizes as she stares down at the scribbled attempts at maps laid out on the desk.  It’s also the one she’s most reluctant about taking, but she might not have a choice, she realizes as her fingers trace the winding path on the paper.

The town of Crystal Falls is close, as far as she can tell with the constantly shifting geography of the woods.  She occasionally hears travellers heading to or from it when she’s out in the forest, although they miraculously never seem to stumble on the house.  It’s a straight shot along the river, which seems to be another reasonably static landmark, and shouldn’t be more than an hour or two’s walk even loaded down with supplies.

Adora picks up the smooth blue stone that she had been using to weigh down the corner of the map, turning it over in her hands as she ponders.  It’s… daunting, honestly, to think about the idea of interacting with people for the first time in eight months.  She hadn’t meant to isolate herself forever when she came out here.  She hadn’t even expected to stay more than a month at most really, to give herself some space and time to think.  And part of that had meant having no one else around who she could let down or hurt or talk herself into doing things for.  But she knows that’s not healthy in the long-term, even if she never goes back to Brightmoon (not that she knows if they would take her at this point).  This will be a good thing, she tells herself.

If she is going to do this, however, she should put at least a little bit of effort into making herself presentable.  So for the first time since she arrived here, Adora walks to the bathroom and swipes her hand across the mirror, cutting a path through the thick layer of dust.

The girl she finds looking back at her in the cracked glass is… different than she expected, somehow.  Her hair a little more wild, the muscles in her face and neck a little leaner from months of physical exertion and smaller meals.  That strange, haunted look behind her pale-blue eyes.  But despite everything, Adora can still recognize herself underneath it all.

That’s when it hits her.  If she can still recognize herself, then everyone else will recognize her too.  Normally she wouldn’t be concerned, really.  Most people only knew her as she-ra , not Adora.  And she isn’t she-ra anymore.  But she’s also a formerly close associate of the queen who’s disappeared for the better part of a year now.  Somebody will be looking for her, which means she needs to disguise herself.

Makeup is right out.  She’s never been good at it, and she hated the way it felt on her face the one time Glimmer had tried some on her.  Besides, her options out here are limited, unless she wants to slather herself in mud.  Which she would rather not , frankly.  Wearing a mask would work , but would also attract so much attention that it would defeat the point.

That leaves one thing: her hair .  As nondescript as she thinks it is, it is one of her more distinguishing features, basically unchanged since she was a kid.  It’s kind of a mess now, honestly, she realizes as she releases it from its tight ponytail and allows it to fall down around her head, noticeably tangled and matted from neglect.  Most of it is probably beyond saving, even if she managed to acquire the proper care products for it.

Experimentally, Adora starts gathering her hair in her hands, adjusting sections and lengths in her grip as the plan crystallizes in her mind. It takes a few minutes, but eventually she settles on one that she likes, grabbing a few more hair ties and using them to secure the main part in the back and a few shorter ones closer to the front.

And then she picks up her knife.

Adora takes a deep breath and holds it, trying to still her quivering hands as she lifts the largest section of her hair and pulls it taut, resting the edge of the knife just below the point where it’s tied.  And then she closes her eyes and pulls, moving her hair and the knife in tandem as it cuts roughly, bundles of dirty golden strands falling to the floor.  She repeats the process for each section, her head feeling lighter as more and more of her hair falls away.  When the final cut is done, she raises her eyes to the mirror again and meets her own gaze.  

She’s nearly unrecognizable in exactly the way that she wanted to be.  A close friend would probably still know it was her, but a random civilian, comparing her to a blurry memory of a photo circulated on a missing poster?  If they put it together, it’ll be long after she’s gone.

Her hair is rough and choppy, looking exactly like it had been done in five minutes with a knife and no experience.  She can work on smoothing it out later.  It’s shorter on the front and the top, a few small strands sweeping back to frame her face.  A little bit longer in the back, just enough that it’s still satisfying to run her hand through the soft new growth that hasn’t been matted down by time or neglect.  In a strange way, she looks more like herself than ever, just not in a way that anyone else would notice.

----------------

It’s midday by the time she arrives in town, the moon directly overhead providing little in the way of warmth in the dry winter air.  Adora isn’t sure if she’ll ever get used to living somewhere with actual seasons after a lifetime spent in the fright zone’s invariably sweltering cauldron.

It’s also quiet , thankfully.  Not surprisingly for a weekday in winter, most people are opting to stay in their homes or places of work instead of congregating in the town square.  Those who are out seem hurried to get back to warm places inside, so the most interaction she has to do on her way in is return a few polite nods to some similarly-cloaked townspeople.  

Finding the general store is easy, thankfully— it’s kind of hard to miss the building with “STORE” painted in bright letters (although it does look more like a house in many respects, complete with a front porch strewn with chairs and benches. Maybe it serves as a gathering place in the warmer months?).  No point in waiting in the cold now, she thinks, ascending the stairs and pushing the door open, bell jingling as she crosses the entrance.

“Provisions are in the front, hardware’s in the back. Let me know if you need anything else,” the woman at the counter announces by way of acknowledging Adora’s presence, not even looking up from her book.

Hardware seems like a logical first step, so Adora proceeds back through the cramped aisles until she reaches the back half of the store.  Things widen out a bit here, walls lined with building supplies and tools hanging on pegboards.  Adora picks up a few hammers, testing the weight in her hands until she settles on one that she likes.  It’s simple, but the construction feels solid, and doesn’t seem like something she’ll have to replace for a while yet.  Next, she grabs a box of nails, before adding a few thick boards to her haul, which should be more than enough to patch up the gaps in the walls, along with something to seal the windows just in case, balancing it all on top of the lumber held in front of her.  Up front, she grabs as much stable food as she can carry, before staggering up to the counter.

Adora really, really should have picked up a basket at the door.  Regrettably, she doesn’t realize this until she trips, depositing the contents of her arms halfway between the counter and the floor.  She pushes herself to her knees, apologizing profusely as she reaches for her (thankfully intact) things.

“You new around here?” The woman asks, eyeing her up and down, “you look… familiar.”

Adora freezes like a deer in the headlights for a moment before she manages to kick herself back into motion, continuing to gather her things nonchalantly.  There are times when she really, really hates her inability to lie convincingly.  This is one of them.

“Yeah, I, uh, get that a lot, actually,” Adora sputters out, never once making eye contact, “I just moved here a few months ago, actually.  Little cabin out in the woods.  I just… wanted to get away from everything for a bit, I guess.”

It’s technically not a lie, even if she’s omitting some essential details.  It’ll have to do for now.

“Well, we take all kinds here,” the woman says, giving Adora a warm smile and running a hand through the longer side of her white hair, “Here’s your total, whenever you’re ready,”

Right, money is a thing. Adora slips her pack from one shoulder and pulls out the small coin-pouch from the outer pocket, full to bursting with the allowance that Angella had insisted on paying her.  The allowance that she had never actually used.   Adora dumps a small handful of coins on the counter, which should be more than enough to pay for her items.

And then she realizes that she has absolutely no clue what any of the coins are worth.  Are the big ones ten or twenty?  Why are the ones that are worth five larger than the ones that are worth ten?  Adora is acutely aware of the clerk’s gaze on her, face heating up as she struggles with what should be a simple task.

“I haven’t had to do this in a while, sorry,” Adora says, hunching her shoulders and trying to shrink in on herself as much as possible.

“It’s fine,” The clerk says, withdrawing the piece of paper and placing it in a folder, “how about this: I’ll just put it on your tab and you can figure it out next time, okay?”

“That’s—” Adora breathes a sigh of relief at the unexpected kindness, “thanks.  I appreciate it.”

“No problem,” They reply, helping to stuff things into Adora’s pack, “get home safe, okay?”

“I will,” Adora says with a nod as she steps out into the cold air again.

She gets halfway home before she realizes that they never even asked for her name.

One year

The anniversary celebrations are a significantly more muted affair than the victory party a year prior.

The public are still happy, of course, and Glimmer still opens the castle grounds to everyone for a beautiful day full of food and music.  But there’s something off in the air, and everyone in Brightmoon knows it, even if they don’t know why.

At first, it had been easy to maintain the official, and at least partially true , story: After working so hard to defeat the Horde over the course of the past few years, She-Ra was taking a well-deserved break and would be absent from public duties and appearances for the time being.  There had been some disappointment, of course, from people all over Etheria hoping to meet the legendary hero who saved their planet, but people were by and large understanding, the castle receiving cart after cart of fan mail wishing her a good rest.  

It worked for a while.  But then a week had stretched into a month, which had stretched into two, and then six, and now a whole year .  People have gotten restless, to say the least.  Netossa and Glimmer have both had to be held back from taking a swing at dignitaries from some of the farther-flung kingdoms who got just a little too curious.  Adora has been a ghost for nearly half as long now as she had been a presence in Glimmer and Bow’s lives, just another empty chair in the alliance meeting room.

Not that they’re short for empty chairs today.  Most of the princesses made at least a brief appearance at the unveiling of Angella’s statue in the palace gardens, but most of them had made their exit shortly after dinner, only Spinnerella and Netossa opting to stay overnight.  Scorpia (and Perfuma along with her) hadn’t even done that, instead opting to focus on her own newfound kingdom celebrating its first independence day and unveiling their own war memorial.

So that leaves just Glimmer and Bow, standing outside the door of their absent friend’s room, watching through the windows as the embers of the last few bonfires smolder in the meadow below.

“She’s not coming back, is she?” Glimmer asks quietly, her hand resting on the door’s handle.

“I don’t know,” Bow responds with a sigh, “I— I thought she would come around eventually, but…”

But she didn’t .  The unspoken words hang in the air, just another drop in the ocean that seems to separate them now.  She didn’t come back because you drove her away.

Glimmer banishes the thought as she grabs the handle and pushes the door open.  The room is empty, not that she expected anything else. But it’s different than the emptiness of her parent’s chambers, still filled from floor to ceiling with tiny reminders of them, a lifetime’s worth of trinkets and pictures on the walls, clothes that she can remember them wearing.

Save for the hard cot that she had requested on her first night in the castle, there’s nothing in the room to indicate that it had ever belonged to Adora, or to anyone really.  She had set down no roots, collected no mementos that couldn’t be carried on her person.  For anyone who didn’t know better, it would simply look like one of the dozens of other disused rooms in the castle, occupied only by the thick layer of dust that has made this place home.

But Glimmer does know better, is the problem.  They had shared so much in this room, two years worth of sleepovers and sneaking out Adora’s window to evade detection.  All of it precious, but equally ephemeral, disappearing from her life just as fast as she had come into it, leaving only this in her wake.

She knows also, on some level, that this is all her fault.  She should have looked harder, or at least allowed Bow to do it.  Maybe she could have found Adora, could have talked things out after they’d both had some time to calm down.  But… would Adora even want to see her after an entire year?

Glimmer’s eye catches on one of the few traces Adora had left in the room— the small figurines of the three of them that Bow had made for battle planning, laid out on the top shelf of Adora’s desk.  She picks one up, carving a path through the thick layer of dust with her thumb.

The facsimile of Adora is static, eternally smiling and holding the sword aloft like she’s about to transform (Bow had been insistent about molding her as Adora , Glimmer remembers).  It’s Adora exactly as Glimmer wants to remember her.  Not the burned-out wreck that she had become after Glimmer had fucked everything up, had decided to push Adora far harder than she could possibly sustain. 

But it worked .  Her kingdom was secure.  Her parents- and everyone else lost to the horde- had been avenged.  Etheria knew peace for the first time in a generation. It shouldn’t matter what it had cost her.

Wasn’t that exactly the kind of sacrifice a queen was supposed to make?

?????

They have to sedate you, ultimately.  You’re more than a little proud of that.  When you emerge from unconsciousness again, you’re in a bright, clean room, full of long tables and machinery.  It’s easy enough to deduce that you’re in some kind of lab, probably, although it’s very different from the two that you’ve spent time in previously, blinding white lights threatening in an entirely different way than the cluttered dark corners of Hordak’s sanctum.

There’s… something. At the back of your neck.  A throbbing pain deeper than anything else you’ve ever felt, coupled with the all-too-familiar sensation of your nerves being on fire.  If you angle yourself just right, you can press the back of your neck into a raised section of the wall you’re bound to, feel the cold metal press against a section of your fur that’s been shaved away and the outlines of whatever has been embedded under it.  What have they done to you?  You snarl around the gag as you test your restraints.

Then, footsteps.  You snap to attention as the automatic door slides open, making a mental note to find out later if they’re centrally controlled or not.  You’re going to get out of here no matter what it takes, you promise yourself.

“Ah, I see you’re finally awake, hm?”  It’s the same voice you heard before, the one that ordered the clones to drag you onto the ship.  He seems to be their leader, in at least some capacity, since he’s apparently the only one of these fucks allowed to have distinguishing facial features.  The clones are all made to stand a head shorter than him, which means he’s probably insecure about that.  You file that away for later as the half dozen clones array themselves around the room while the taller one—Horde Prime, you heard one of them call him—approaches you, gripping you by the jaw and forcing you to look up into his (immensely unsettling) face.

“I have brought so many into my light.  But none quite so… damaged,” he says as he examines your mismatched face.  He’s trying to bait you into a reply, you know, but you’re not giving these fuckers a word if you can help it.  Instead, you force yourself forward as much as you can, snapping your teeth and finding his face just out of your reach.

“I do hope you’ll forgive the discomfort,” he says in his best imitation of hospitality, talons digging into your skin as he brings some kind of cable to the back of your neck, “but it seemed prudent to arrange a small test before integrating you fully, given your condition.”

That’s when you see the matching cords strung between the glowing metal at the base of the clones’ skulls, snaking down and meeting at some kind of device that’s been placed on the floor.  Before you can even begin to process what that could mean, Prime has withdrawn from you, flipping a switch on the black box.

The ache at the base of your skull comes into sharp focus now, and you can feel the beginnings of panic start to take you as electricity floods your veins.  There’s a distinct pop as one of the chip’s capacitors bursts under the strain and then—

Everything is so, so loud.  More information than you can possibly process, flooding into your mind like a dam has been breached.  Fragments of sensory data, observations and connections that make absolutely no sense to you.  Your brain wants desperately to make sense of it all, take it in and synthesize it into something useful, but all that comes out is wave after wave of garbage in a format that you can’t understand.  It feels like you’re drowning, scrambling desperately for air only to be pulled under again and again.

And then it stops, just as suddenly as it had started.

You’re half-laying on the floor now, your right arm having melted clean through the metal that had been binding it.  The light is absolutely blinding now, your pupils blown out to their maximum size from the fear.  So you roll yourself over, in as much as you can, pressing your face to the cool metal and using your arm to shield any remaining light.  Count to ten. Give your heart and your breath a moment to slow to reasonable levels.  Whatever happened, it's over now, and all you can do is try to assess your current situation.  So you finally look up, giving your vision a moment to refocus itself. You can see a few of the clones, convulsing and spasming on the floor as smoke rises from small craters on the back of their necks.  The pure white floor is marred and blackened where the box had been sitting, remnants of its casing scattered around the room.  Whatever was being ‘tested’, it clearly went very, very wrong.

“How illuminating ,”  Prime steps forward, now, all four of his eyes feeling like they’re piercing into you as he looks down, “Too many shadows even for me, it seems.”

For a brief moment, you think you might have succeeded.  He’ll dump you out of the ship and you can get back to finding your way, or he’ll at least kill you and get it over with.  Your hopes shatter as a small smile pulls at the corner of his face.

“Still, I think I can find a use for you yet.”

Two Years

Something is different in the air today, but Adora can’t quite place it.  Even for a perfect, warm day in the spring, it’s not usually possible to hear the noise from town this far into the thick of the woods.

Adora slows her pace out of an abundance of caution.  There’s no reason for any kind of battle to be happening out here — Crystal falls sheltered too well by the woods to be of any interest to even the scattered groups of raiders that still exist, and nothing had seemed amiss last time she was in town.  Still, it's hard to suppress her instinctual response to the low rumble of voices punctuated by intermittent booming sounds that echo out through the valley.

She’s almost to the treeline now, creeping up to the edge of the forest as she tries to catch a glimpse of the town through the brush.  There’s a whole rainbow of pastel-colored banners strung up across the buildings that definitely weren’t there last week.  One of them bears a graphic of six pairs of interlocked hands surrounding a map of Etheria.  It certainly doesn’t look like anything a bandit group would run around waving.

It isn’t until she breaks through the treeline that everything starts to fall into place.

The constant rumble of noise that she’s hearing is music , different tunes coming from about a dozen people and nearly as many types of instruments scattered throughout the town.  The booming noises are cannons — she got that part right, at least — but they’re being fired in celebration, loaded only with colored powder and scraps of paper being launched high into the air.

This is a festival , just like the one she had stumbled into in Thaymor all those years ago.

“What’s the occasion?” She asks the first person she comes across.  They look startled, for a moment, like it would be impossible for someone to not know what was being celebrated.  Adora is suddenly very conscious of the fact that she looks like someone who’s spent the last two years in a cabin in the woods.

“It’s victory day?  Y’know, two years ago today the legendary hero she-ra drove the horde from our lands, before mysteriously disappearing until our next hour of great need? All that good stuff?”

There are about three separate parts of that sentence that completely stop Adora’s brain in its tracks as she stutters out a thank you and attempts to remove herself from the interaction as quickly as possible.

Two years ago today .  That… shouldn’t be possible, she thinks, pulling her journal out of her bag and checking the calendar that she’s been meticulously keeping since her first few days here.  Starting on the first page and counting every week that she’s marked out in rough pencil, counting out exactly twenty-four months.  How had the time slipped away from her?  For so long after she had run away, every day felt like a hard-fought victory just to survive without collapsing under the weight of everything that had happened.  It made keeping track of them easy, ticking off the box on the calendar each morning the only celebration she would allow herself.

And then two years had slipped by like it was nothing.

Adora ducks over to an at least slightly sheltered alley, taking a moment to recover from the shock.  Under normal circumstances, she would accomplish whatever she set out to do as quickly as she possibly could and then high-tail it back to her cabin.  She hasn’t dealt with this many people in… well, exactly two years, she supposes.  But all the shops seem to be closed for the day, so that scratches the first part.  And she did walk all this way already, so it would be a wasted effort to not stay for at least a little bit, right?  Adora adjusts her hood again, before slipping out of the alley and joining the crowd moving towards the town square.

The celebration is beautiful, honestly.  Adora has never seen the town so alive, usually doing her best to slip in and out during the least busy times of the day on her sporadic supply runs, rarely encountering more than four or five locals.  Everyone is out on the street now, and it’s a little overwhelming.  There’s so much happening in every direction.  Food, people playing music, a whole section of carnival games adorned with prizes, a stage still awaiting its performers.  Adora has no idea what to do first.

And then she smells something sweet, and the decision becomes very, very easy.  She follows the trail to its source, one of the stalls set up at the edges of the square, only to have it practically thrown at her before she can even think about reaching for her money.  It’s… some kind of fried thing, she thinks, wrapped around a stick and absolutely covered in sugar.  It’s easily the worst thing she’s ever eaten, and she loves it, the first few bites exploding in her mouth as she breaks away from the mob to find somewhere quiet to sit, eventually settling on some steps a few paces away from the buzz of the square itself.

It’s strange, Adora realizes as she watches some children negotiate an elaborate game in the street below her.  She’s still not sure that she would call herself happy, exactly.  But she’s… at peace in a way she hasn’t really felt before, if only momentarily.  Some of it is the celebration, she knows.  It feels better than she expected to be around people again, and the energy is completely different than the victory party she had made her hasty exit from.  There had been a bit of a cloud hanging over that event — everyone hopeful and excited for the future, yes, but also completely exhausted from years of fighting.  These people were never fighters, really, only trying to live their lives.  The festival is a celebration of them being allowed to do exactly that.

And… maybe she can do it too, if she’ll let herself.

Adora pushes herself off the stoop and moves back towards the crowds.  She feels good, but her food is done, and she knows better than to sit still and let herself keep thinking.

So she finds things to fill the time.  She returns to the square, watching people dance to the music (although she politely declines herself), she helps some children retrieve a ball that they managed to kick into a tree.   Eventually she finds herself in front of the stage that’s been sitting empty all night, watching as some local kids take the stage in a variety of homemade costumes.

It’s… surreal, to say the least, seeing her “heroic exploits” played out like this.  It’s also more amusing than she expected, to be honest, mostly because it’s almost completely inaccurate.  The broad strokes are there, of course — a young (thankfully unnamed in the play) horde cadet stumbles upon a magical sword in the woods, scurrying offstage to be replaced by a taller actor in the worst wig Adora has ever seen.  She joins forces with the princesses and bashes her way through a succession of faceless goons in paper-mache armor.  It’s cute, and largely free of any of the recognizable details that would have stuck out in her mind if she were to retell it.  Most of the major players on the horde’s side of things are absent too, and Adora is perfectly happy to let people like Shadow Weaver fall through the cracks of history.

The play reaches the battle of Brightmoon at the tail of its first act.  “She-ra” and her friends are arrayed on the high ground, waiting for the first sign of the horde’s assault.  When they show up, Adora feels like someone has knocked the breath out of her.

The fearsome horde commander is only shown in shadowy red light, at first, the actor remaining offstage for the time being.  But Adora knows .  The swooping tips of the headpiece, the wild mane of hair, the long, pointed claws — Adora would know those anywhere .  

She excuses herself as politely as she can under the circumstances, sliding out of her seat and through the standing crowd around the perimeter before she can see anything more.  Maybe one day,  it will be funny to sit here and watch a horribly misconstrued version of her oldest friend, and she’ll be able to giggle at the horrible fake cat ears that they’re surely wearing, and the way that everything about her personality is just slightly to the left of how it should be.

One day.

Not now, though.

Adora leans into the cool brick wall and catches her breath, fiddling with the rock in her pocket — it stays in the house most of the time now, when she isn’t going very far, but something always compels her to grab it when she’s going into town, and she’s glad for it now.

Something bumps into Adora from behind and sends her tumbling to the ground, managing to hit just about every part of herself on something as she falls.

There’s someone looking down at her when she manages to turn over, a young girl with blue hair who looks thoroughly mortified by the whole affair already, but also like she doesn’t quite know what to do .

They’re quickly joined by a second pair of footsteps and a sharp laugh, apparently belonging to the girl’s companion.

“I appreciate the enthusiasm, Callie,” The other girl switches the food she’s holding into her right hand so that she can hang off of the arm of the one who had knocked her over (Callie, she assumes), “But I don’t think you’re gonna have time to win me anything if you knock someone over like an idiot and we have to haul them to the doctor,”

Callie flushes bright red at the words, scratching nervously at the shaved section of her hair.  “Sorry! I just… got excited, I guess.”

Something terribly familiar tugs at Adora’s heart, but she can’t quite place it yet.

“It’s fine , you big dork, just be more careful next time,” the girl nudges Callie lightly with her head before handing off the food and turning to Adora, extending a hand to help her off the ground, “Sorry about my girlfriend, she promised to win me a stuffed Pooka from one of the games and got a bit overexcited,” she says, voice straining just a bit as she pulls Adora up.  “I’m Samara, by the way.”

Girlfriend .  Adora doesn’t know why the word throws her off so much.  It really shouldn’t.  It’s the natural conclusion from how the pair had been acting, really.  Why had she assumed otherwise?

Samara casts a look back at Callie, eyes softening out as a smile tugs at her lips.

Oh . 

Adora knows that look.  She’s seen it countless times, staring back at her from mismatched eyes in the little moments that they were able to steal for themselves.  And if these two are girlfriends, then that means…

“Hello? Are you sure you’re okay?” the girl asks, pushing a little closer to get a good look at Adora’s eyes, “Shit, Callie, did she hit her head?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine, just got distracted,” Adora responds, waving them off, “You two go have fun, okay? It sounds important,”  Callie flushes even deeper somehow at the knowing grin that Adora gives her.

And then they’re off, just like that, vanishing down the street in a storm of laughs and shouted thank yous .

The sun is hanging low in the sky now, Adora realizes with a start.  She can probably get home by dark if she leaves now, but she certainly doesn’t want to cut it any closer.  So she walks away from the dwindling crowds, back onto quiet, isolated trails.  The walk gives her plenty of time to turn the implications of the encounter over in her mind.

?????

The entire shuttle feels like it's going to shake itself apart as you pierce the atmosphere, every minute impact and rattle resonating deep into your bones, throwing you against the cold metal of your restraints.  The shuttle has no windows.  It’s unnecessary, when each of the half-dozen clones on board has a direct feed from the cameras being pumped into their brains, but you are afforded no such luxury, left to the mercy of this steel coffin and your silent captors.

There’s a new noise now, a great rumbling coming from directly underneath you, followed quickly by the sensation of your brain catching up to the rest of your body as the ship slows its descent.  You must be close, now.  You brace for the landing as much as your restraints will allow, screwing your eyes shut tight and digging your claws into the bench as you make impact.  The whole craft gives one last shudder as you make impact with the dirt, consuming everything in an enveloping, overpowering combination of noise and motion.

And then, stillness.

Your captors rise in unison, and you stumble as you’re dragged to your feet before being tugged back and forcibly leveled out, made to face the doors.  There’s nothing you can do but wait and wonder as the bolts retract.

Warm, humid air rushes in as soon as the pressure seals break, soaking into your fur and filling your lungs.  It’s a relief, almost.  The shuttle had been kept at the bare minimum pressure to sustain you, not dangerous but certainly not comfortable , either.  The air here is thick, heavy.  Not like the air you used to know, but closer to it than anything you’ve had in… who knows how long, really.

When the ramp lowers, you find that the shuttle has touched down in a dense jungle, hot sun filtering down through the trees.  It’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen.  (someone you knew once would have called it beautiful, you think).  You don’t get long to appreciate it, though, before you’re being pulled forward, marched out and down the ramp until you can feel the dirt under your feet.

The fortified line parts to allow your group through, giving you a glimpse of your target for the first time.  It’s a small structure, about three stories tall at most.  The walls are riddled with cracks and scorch marks, the windows fitted with improvised gun emplacements.  You’re new to this planet, but you know this kind of place well, if nothing else.  So many times you’ve watched your forces corner a group just like this, boxing them in with no hope of escape.  Usually you would just wait for them to surrender or starve.  That’s not good enough for Horde Prime, apparently.

Your chains disengage with a click , falling loosely to the forest floor around you as the clones step out of the way.

Everything seems frozen, for a brief moment, everyone standing around waiting for something to happen.  You’re confused, mostly, unsure what you’re meant to do, looking around and waiting for your cue.  If you weren’t so surprised, you might have taken the moment to try for an escape.

That’s when it happens.

It starts small, barely a whisper at the edge of your senses.  You’re only given a half second before it rises like a wildfire, sharp pain at the back of your neck arcing through your whole body.  The most awful, familiar pain in your whole life gripping your body.

Your reaction is so familiar that it feels almost rehearsed.  You collapse, fold in on yourself.  Your arms wrap around your torso in a futile attempt at grounding yourself, blood filling your mouth as you bite down.  Screaming only ever makes it worse, you know.

And then there’s something else, something new.  Adrenaline floods into your brain, melting away the fear and leaving only white-hot anger in its wake, a voice at the back of your mind telling you to slash and tear and destroy.

So you do.

You’re dimly aware of being shoved towards the building as everything goes black.  Your right side is burning again,  and you let it take and consume and destroy all that it wants to.  You know that this is your body, your claws, but it all feels detached, like you’re watching it through a camera feed as you tear through doors (among other things) as easily as paper.  It feels good.  So much better than being small and scared and fucking pathetic as the pain takes you.  This is what you’re made for, isn’t it?

It doesn’t last long, probably a few minutes at most.  But by the time your awareness returns you’re standing on the roof, claws caught mid-swipe as they try to restrain you again, the last traces of pain and energy running through you.  You’re covered in blood.  Only some of it is yours.

Four Years

Adora drives the final nail into the wood with a soft tap before standing up to survey her handiwork, wiping the dirt from her knees.  The planters have come together beautifully, flanking the stone path from the edge of the clearing to the door of the cabin, each nearly as long as Adora is tall.

Come next spring, they’ll be full of a plethora of fruits and flowers, in addition to the vegetable patch she’s dug out near the river, finally flourishing this year after many failed attempts.  (Perfuma would be proud of her, she thinks, both for her newfound gardening skills and her persistence)

That’s months away, however— Right now, mid-autumn leaves crunch under Adora’s boots as she walks up the path to home, dirty jacket pulled tight against the wind.  The cabin is a far cry from how it looked the first time that she stumbled through its door, when it had been all cracked windows and long-abandoned rooms, left to rot by some unseen prior resident.

The door glides open effortlessly, allowing Adora to step through into the warmth (properly sealing the windows does wonders, it turns out).  It’s mid-day already, but Adora shucks off her boots and sets to work lighting a fire.  She has been extraordinarily productive the last few days.

The single biggest change from the way the cabin had been four years ago isn’t anything physical that she’s done.  It’s the fact that it feels warm , lived-in in that indescribable way that even her room in the castle never felt.  If Adora looks around from her chair, she can see bits and pieces of herself scattered all over the space.  A teapot left on the counter, a rack of tools by the door, a whole wall covered in patched-together maps from her notebook, the pieces representing the nearest areas of the woods starting to yellow from the sunlight.

It still feels wrong, somehow, to call this place home . In all likelihood, she’ll never be able to use the word comfortably again.  But she can’t deny that this place is the closest to that feeling that she’s been in years.  It’s so much more than she ever thought she would get, more than she had ever expected to get out of a desperate, frantic run into the woods.

The fire crackles to life as Adora drops the starter into the wood, the small trail of smoke growing until the whole room is filled with warmth and flickering light as Adora pulls up her chair, pulling the blanket over herself as she opens up her notebook to fill out her journal for the day.  To her surprise, she finds all the pages filled when she flips through them, only the inside of the back cover stares back at her.  It never ceases to surprise her how fast time passes out here. 

Adora pushes out of the chair and walks over to her desk by the window, placing the now-filled notebook on top of the stack of identical ones on the top shelf, before crouching down to reach into the box where she keeps her spares, among other miscellaneous things that it doesn’t make sense to keep out on a shelf or a table.

Instead, her hand lands on cool metal, the corner of something poking into her skin.  Cautiously, she draws the object into the light.  The metal is a picture frame, she realizes, surrounding a square of dusty glass too obscure to make out the image underneath.  She doesn’t remember putting this here, nor does she have any idea where she might have acquired it.

At least, not until she runs her hand through the center, scattering the dust into the air around her.  It’s Glimmer and Bow, with her in the middle, collapsed under a tree and practically buried in strings of flowers, all smiling so wide that it looks like it must hurt.

Plumeria.   Her first proper mission, as the neatly-written caption (Bow’s handwriting.  Glimmer’s had always been awful ) reminds her.  Something about the image tugs at the deepest parts of her heart, the ones she’s tried to keep buried even out here.  They look like children —which, she supposes, they were .  She wouldn’t say she was in a good place then, necessarily, a month removed from leaving behind everything she had ever known.  But everything had been so much simpler .  There were bad people threatening a group who couldn’t defend themselves, and the three of them had shown up, done an unambiguously good thing, and then been celebrated for it.

She misses that, as much as she hates to admit it.  She misses them too.  Glimmer and Bow had accepted her so readily when she had nothing left, had helped to ease the shock of adjusting to her new life as well as they could.

Adora tries not to dwell on that as she places the picture over the fireplace.  It’s just that, a memory. Nothing more.  She misses the Glimmer in the picture , not the one that had lied to her, who had used her as a weapon just like everyone else had.  It’s something worth remembering, too precious to keep buried the way that she always has.  But it’s not something that she can return to.

The fire’s light bounces off the edge of the frame, dancing across the surface of the blue rock resting beside it.  The one thing that she had tried to bury deepest of all, and the one that she regrets most.

It took her an embarrassingly long time—even after the war was over— to realize that there was a word for that thing that happened to her stomach every time Catra smiled at her.  It hadn’t taken very long after that for her to realize that Catra might have felt the same way, though.

It still hurts to think about her, sometimes, but the memories don’t feel like dangerous, sharp-edged things anymore.  It’s the memory of pain, now, more than anything else, like pressing on the site of an old injury.  A lingering ghost, and nothing more.

It’s one that will haunt her for the rest of her life, she supposes.  She knows that she loved Catra, and she’s reasonably sure that her friend felt the same way.  It seems so obvious, now that she has distance and context, just as it must have been obvious to anyone else around them.  What would have happened if she had been just a little bit more honest with herself, back then?  If she had tried just a little bit harder to show Catra how much she mattered?  As cliché as it is to call someone your better half , it’s true in this case, she thinks.  Catra had always been Adora’s tether, the only thing keeping her from losing herself completely and becoming exactly what Shadow Weaver had wanted her to be.

As much as Catra would have hated to hear it, none of this would have happened without her.  No She-Ra, no winning the war, no cabin in the woods.  As counterintuitive as it may seem, Catra is the reason Adora left the Horde in the first place— not to get away from her, but because Catra had forced her to retain enough of her humanity to understand that what she was seeing was wrong .  That was how Catra had shown that she cared about Adora, even buried under a layer of this-isn’t-because-i-like-you s.

If she had managed to voice it sooner, how much could she have changed?  Would the two of them be like the couples that she sees at the market, wrapped up in their own little world?  Or would Brightmoon have felt enough like home that she wouldn’t have felt the need to leave?  If she had tried just a little bit harder—

Adora stops herself from going further down that line of thinking.  There’s a difference, she knows, between embracing her feelings and spiralling into a mess of questions that she knows she’ll never truly have closure on, a fine line between burying her past and drowning in it.

Catra would be proud of her, and of the life that she’s built, she thinks.  That’s the important part.  She’s spent the last four years doing what Catra had always been asking for her to do.  Learning to take time for herself, resting instead of pouring herself into whatever task someone else assigns for her.  Focusing on the things that matter to her , and no one else.  She’s softened out a little bit, even, no longer devoting every waking moment to keeping herself in peak physical condition.

It would be nice to have Catra here with her physically, yes.  She’s the one missing piece to make her life feel complete in the way that she knows it should.  But there wouldn’t be an Adora without Catra, and the fact that she's here at all means that she carries Catra with her.

That will have to be enough.

“I just— these readings don’t make any sense.  This shouldn’t be possible, ” Bow says as he reaches out for the hologram over the table, twisting and turning it like maybe he’ll find some new angle that will make it all fit together.  “Are you sure that your sensors are working properly?”

“Perfectly functional!” Entrapta declares with a disturbing amount of cheer, bouncing slightly on her hair.  “I thought it was a glitch at first too, but it showed up on three of them, which rules out a coincidence,” she says, flicking two new graphs into the air between them and casting the whole room in a strange blue glow.  The new graphs confirm what the first suggested, three massive spikes of energy sticking out like a sore thumb from the normal fluctuations below them.

“And there is… one point of historical data that matches,” Entrapta looks nervous now, dropping to the floor and rubbing the tips of her braids together as she avoids Bow’s eyes to stare at the controls.  She flicks backward, data scrolling faster and faster until her face is almost completely obscured.  She passes through weeks, months, and then years of readings, a steady ebb and flow of the planet’s rhythm splayed out over the table, before reaching out to stop it, slowly dragging the final point into view.  Bow glances down at the date, and he doesn’t even have to ask.

The portal .

“Ok, but how ?  What are they using as a power source and how did we not know about it?”  Whoever did this would need an absolutely massive amount of power.  Last time, it had required the sword, which is safely in the vault in Brightmoon.

“That’s the fascinating part!  In all of my explorations, I haven’t found any other artifacts that would be capable of that.  Combined with the, uh, stability issues , it should be impossible to open a portal from Etheria to the wider universe,” Entrapta says, gesturing at the graph, “but clearly, it happened .”

Bow gives a low hum in response.  It is undeniable, looking at the data.  But it makes no sense.  The last time that someone had tried to open a portal out of Etheria, it had become a massive, world-consuming cataclysm.  The data they’re looking at is already a few weeks old, so clearly the world isn’t ending (or at least it's taking its sweet time if it is).  And it also doesn’t appear that whoever opened the portal has done anything with it yet.  Try as he might, he can’t make the pieces fit together in his mind.  Unless…

The realization dawns slowly, the final possibility more frightening than anything else that Bow has faced before.  The kind of realization that shatters your entire conception of the world and how it works.

“If nobody is trying to get out — “

Entrapta confirms his suspicion with a grim nod.  “Then someone is trying to get in. ”

?????

You’ve seen so much of this place in your time here, dragged between labs and holding cells, hangers and medical bays, using what little mental energy you have left in you to commit every inch of these clean white hallways to memory.  It had started as an attempt to plan an escape, when you still thought such things to be possible.  It’s not.  You will walk these halls until your body falls apart, and possibly beyond that.  Still, memorization is comforting, a small way of clinging to the last scraps of your humanity, in spite of the fact that it would feel so much better to surrender it.  You can pretend, if nothing else.

Today, though, they bring you somewhere new.

You raise an eyebrow when they turn you left after exiting your battered holding cell, towards the corridors that will take you deeper, nearer to the heart of this place.  So far, all of the facilities you’ve seen have been in the outermost three of the concentric rings that form the ship’s structure, and those alone comprise a surface area far larger than the home you once knew.  You feel more awake, more alive than you have in years as they take you inward, grafting corridors and elevators onto the existing map in your mind as you work your way inwards.

Before you know it, you’ve reached the center, the curvature of the hallways getting steadily more dramatic until you reach a towering set of doors.  They open to a cavernous space, unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.  You hesitate for a moment at the threshold, the sheer scope of the place, the way the darkness seems to swallow the gleaming white platform like it intends to eat it whole, stopping you in your tracks for a moment before you’re shoved through the door.  It feels like a whole universe in miniature, thousands of glittering lights set into great black monoliths, a starfield filling the void.

He comes into view as you ascend to the dais, towering over you just as much as he did that first day.  The effect is only enhanced as you’re forced to your knees.  He smiles down at you in some pale imitation of warmth as he steps aside, allowing you to look at the viewscreen he had been observing.

Your heart feels like you’ve been thrown off the platform and into the abyss as you process the image on the screen.  The planet looks so small, from this angle, sweeping green land masses surrounded by a shimmering ocean.  If you squint, you can make out the scar that still runs straight down the middle of the continent, the open wound that you once called a home.

The one place that you’ve longed for, more than you’ve wanted anything (save for one other) in your life.

The one place that you absolutely can’t go back to.

You thrash against your restraints, pulling and snapping and succeeding mostly in pitching yourself onto your side and taking a bite out of one clone’s ankle before they’re pulled tight again.

“You see that, little sister?” he says, gripping you by the hair and forcing your eyes to the screen again.  “You’re going home.”

Chapter Text

"It never hurts to give thanks to the local gods

you never know who might be hungry

it never hurts to scan the windows on the upper floor

i saw a face there once before, when i was younger"

       —the mountain goats, younger

“We’re looking for a woman about this tall,” The man says, raising a hand a few inches above the top of his own head, “blonde hair, pale blue eyes?  Might have shown up here around five years ago, if that helps,”

The girl behind the counter raises an eyebrow, keeping her gaze firmly locked on examining her nails under the light.  “And if I do know this person, why , exactly, should I tell you?  If she’s been out here so long, maybe she just doesn’t want to see you, have you considered that?”

That jab almost draws a flinch out of him.  Almost.   She doesn’t know the half of it, he reminds himself.  Even if Adora had run around telling her life story to every random shopkeeper in this village (which she probably hadn’t ), they would have no reason to make a connection.

“She’s… a friend of ours,” he eventually settles on.  Not strictly a lie, just more than a little bit out of date.  “We’ve been worried about her, and we didn’t know that she might have come this way until a few weeks ago.”  That part is entirely true, at least.

The girl’s expression softens a little bit at that, and she throws a quick glance back into the depths of the store and another to the porch, finding both satisfyingly empty.  Still, she leans forward like she has something to hide.

“Remember: you didn’t hear this from me, and I never saw your face,” She whispers, waiting for a nod before she proceeds, “but there’s someone who sounds an awful lot like that living in a cabin a little bit to the north of town.  Go out the main gate and follow the river for a few miles and you should find it, assuming that the woods are in your favor.”

“Thank you,” the man says as he deposits an impressive amount of coin on the counter and makes for the door, “that’s all we needed.  We’ll be out of your hair now.”

Glimmer lets go of the illusion as soon as she hears the door swing shut behind her, letting out a breath for the first time in what feels like an hour (despite the fact that the interaction had lasted all of about two minutes).  Instead, she pulls the hood of her cloak over her hair and cinches it tight enough to hide most of her face in the shadows.  It won’t fool anyone up close, but with any luck, the next person who will be close enough to see her face won’t be someone she needs to hide it from.

Bow is there waiting for her, face similarly hidden as he leans against the wall in the blind spot of the window.

“It’s—” Glimmer stops to let out a hacking cough as her own voice settles back into her throat— “It’s definitely her.  Lines up exactly with what we saw on the scans.  Small cabin on the river, a few hours walk north.”

“You want to go for it now?” Bow asks.

“No point in wasting daylight,” Glimmer replies with a shrug. “Let’s go hiking.”

--------

The woods, as it turns out, are very much not in their favor.  Glimmer shouldn’t have expected anything less, honestly.  The woods have spent the last five years showing an absolutely unprecedented amount of dedication to keeping Adora’s hideaway out of view of prying eyes.

The flip side of that, however, is that the woods had equally chosen to reveal it to them when the house had appeared on a routine drone scan a few weeks ago, only days after Bow had reported Entrapta’s findings to her.  So clearly they’re supposed to come out here now, right?

That’s what Glimmer is going to choose to believe, at least.  What she has to believe.  Because maybe, just maybe, if some grand, cosmic force wants to reunite her with Adora, that means that she has a chance.  A chance to mend the friendship that she managed to fuck up so, so badly that she had thought it was irreparable.  A chance to fix her greatest mistake.

Glimmer suddenly becomes acutely aware of the weight in her pack, enough for the straps to cut into her shoulders even through the thick fabric of her traveling cloak, and she remembers that she shouldn’t get her hopes up.  Realistically, not having the door slammed in her face will be a resounding success.

Still, they push forward, picking their way over roots and dodging branches that seem to come out of nowhere to swipe at their heads.

It would be easier, of course, if they could talk.  Most things would be, really.  Holding a conversation with Bow used to be effortless, an instinctive back-and-forth warding off any moments of potential silence, coming as naturally as breathing for both of them.  Now, their words are sparse and measured, mostly constrained to warning each other of hazards or double-checking that they’re on the correct path.

In the end, it’s still mid-morning when the sun breaks through the treeline.  And that's when they see it: a break in the trees that can’t be much larger than the innermost ring of the palace gardens, and a path laid in broken stone winding between carefully-constructed garden beds until it meets the front door of the small cabin nestled against the river.

It’s picturesque, to an almost astonishing degree.  If Glimmer was here for any other reason, she would find it inviting, maybe a pleasant place to spend a weekend retreat away from her duties.  Instead, her hands tremble more than they ever have in her life, the approach to the door feels like walking into the jaws of some great beast.

And there’s nothing else that she can do except to step forward.

Adora is jolted from her slumber by a series of deep, rhythmic thuds at the front door.

Incredibly, this is one of the few situations that she isn’t prepared for.  As far as she’s aware, no one else has even made it within line of sight of the cabin the entire time that she’s been here, and at some point she had stopped even considering the possibility that they might.  The cabin has no fortifications, and she has no real weapons, either (even the dagger under her pillow has long since been moved to a more sensible place).

Then again… people who are trying to kill you don’t usually knock on the door, do they?

Still, she’s cautious.  Even after all this time, she still isn’t sure she knows how to be anything else.  So Adora creeps out from the bedroom, her mind mapping out the sightlines of every single window and easily ducking under them, keeping her weight evenly distributed as she steps over the creaking floorboards in the kitchen.  It’s a little disconcerting how naturally it comes to her, really, but she supposes that it would be ridiculous to expect a survival skill that she spent nearly two decades developing to disappear in a quarter of that time.

She’s at the door now, crouching down to peer through the crack where it doesn’t quite meet the frame.  The view isn’t great — she could get a better one if she moved her eye closer, but she doesn’t want the risk of jostling the door and giving away her position— but she can make out two figures, draped in heavy cloaks.  Neither of them appear to be armed, but that’s not a guarantee.

“Are you sure that she lives here?”  The voice is muffled by the door, but she can still hear the tell-tale strain of anxiety pulling at it.  It’s also… familiar, somehow.

“I mean it’s not like there are a lot of other cabins around here—” His companion snaps back at him, presumably addressing him by name, although Adora couldn’t quite catch the last word through the door.

The short one turns back to the door and raises her arm to knock a second time.  This time, Adora is ready , pulling the door open a half-second after her hand makes contact.  The surprise is enough to send her unexpected visitor jumping several inches into the air—

And then she’s gone , somehow, leaving nothing but empty air and the faint sound of chimes carrying on the breeze. That’s when the alarm bells really start to go off in Adora’s brain.

Sure enough, once she’s blinked the sparkles out of her eyes, she can see the woman clinging to her companion’s arm, her hood pooling around her shoulders and revealing pink hair underneath.

For the first time in years, Adora is filled with the sense of something being truly, deeply wrong in the universe, before it gives way to a flood of questions.  How had Glimmer and Bow managed to find this place?  Why had they come, after so long?

No one says anything for a long moment, the three of them locked in a tense standoff on the garden path.  It gives Adora plenty of time to study how her former friends have changed in the years since she last saw them.

Glimmer’s hair is longer now, for starters, shimmering pink strands reaching down to pool in the hood of her cloak.  She carries herself a little taller, and the lines of her face run a little deeper than they had the night Adora left, but she’s still recognizably Glimmer (even if the flat expression she’s wearing is almost frighteningly close to her mother, something about her gaze compelling Adora to straighten her back even after all this time).

Bow has also grown his hair out, although not as dramatically, the end result still able to be tied up in a small poof behind his head.  It looks good, though.  The same can not, unfortunately, be said about his attempts at facial hair.  Clearly, a certain pirate captain has continued to be a bad influence.

Not that Adora is in any position to throw stones here.  Her choppy, improvised haircut is passable under normal circumstances, but she got lazy with it over the last winter, making its uneven nature incredibly clear (while still not being enough to tie back in any effective way).  Her clothes aren’t exactly fit for a royal audience either.

Why are they here? The question rings through Adora’s mind.  She had given up any thought that they might try to come after her a few months into her stay, and again at the two-year mark—the point where they had officially been apart as long as they had known each other.  She has no right to complain, really.  She asked them not to follow her, and they respected that for far longer than she anticipated.  So if they’re here now … Adora tries not to think about what that means.

Part of her wants to slam the door on them, finally, properly close it on that part of her life.  The other part of her knows that wouldn’t give her the closure that she wants.  It’s been too long for her to be able to patch things up with them, sure.  But maybe she can get some answers before she sends them off.

She should probably let them in, in that case, unless they’re going to conduct this entire conversation out in the cold.  Adora steps aside and leaves the doorway empty, motioning for them to come inside.  Bow and Glimmer stand there for a moment, frozen like they’re expecting something more, before they get the message and follow her.  For the first time, Adora is thankful that this place came with entirely too many chairs.  She pulls two of them from the corner and gives them a quick wipe, suppressing a cough at the resultant cloud of debris as she moves them to the small table by the window.  This, they seem to understand, thankfully, settling themselves on one side of the table and throwing their cloaks over the back of their chairs while she returns to the kitchen and begins fiddling with the kettle.

“Tea?” Adora asks without looking up, her voice scratchy from disuse.  There’s a small noise of someone’s knee hitting the table, followed shortly by Glimmer swearing, before she gets a response.

“That would be great, yes,” Glimmer’s tone is polite, tight but diplomatic, and if she’s anything close to the kind of queen that her mother was, that means that something is very wrong.  But if she hasn’t said it yet, it can wait until tea is ready.  And so the house falls silent, save for the steadily-growing whine of the kettle as the water comes to a boil.  When it’s done, Adora grabs all three of her mugs from the cabinet (she’s already annoyed that she’ll have to wash them all tonight), carefully measuring out leaves from the tin on the counter before adding the water.

Glimmer looks uneasy when Adora steals a glance at them.  Good .  Adora has had nothing except time to let things settle out for the past five years, but she still can’t quite look at Glimmer and not see her standing up from her chair to look down at Adora, telling her that the only comfort she had for most of her life is gone , has been gone for months without anyone telling her, and—

Adora feels the flash of pain as the grip of the kettle starts to dig into her skin.

Breathe , she tells herself, focusing on the feeling of the warm steam from the tea flowing through her nose and into her lungs.  It’s been years .  She’s hardly the same person that she was then, and she doubts that Glimmer is either.  And really, neither of them had been in a good place, at that point. She has the perspective to recognize that, now.

She can’t forgive Glimmer.  Adora isn’t sure that will ever be possible.  But she can be polite, if nothing else.

“Nice place,” Bow says as she sets the tea down, “You build it yourself?”  His smile is just as warm as it is in her memory.  It takes her a moment to realize that she should probably return it.

“Found, mostly.  Put a lot of work into it, though,” Adora answers as she takes a sip of her tea.

“That—” Bow’s forehead scrunches up as he tries to puzzle something out in his head.  “That doesn’t make any sense.  This place didn’t show up on our scans until last week, so we assumed that it was new , but…”

Now that’s interesting.  Adora knew the woods could be tricky, but this feels… deliberate , almost.  

“We—” he looks at Glimmer like he’s expecting an agreement, but she continues staring intently at her reflection in the mug, “— I would have come sooner.  If I had known.  I’m sorry.”

The worst part is that Adora knows he means it.  Bow is even worse at lying than she is, and that makes what she’s about to do even worse.

“So, why now? What do you need from me?” Adora asks as she sets down her mug with a definitive click .  Bow and Glimmer both sink in their seats like someone has opened a valve and let the air out of them.

Of course there’s a catch.  She had been stupid to even hope otherwise.

Bow hands Glimmer a tracker pad from his bag and sets it in the middle of the table, springing to life and filling the air between them with holograms.  She swipes most of them off to the side, before pulling another up to full size; a graph of some kind, with a few regions with notable spikes highlighted in purple against the usual blue.

“You remember those probes Entrapta set up after the portal?” Glimmer asks.  Her voice is more solid now than it had been, closer to the one she remembers from mission briefings.

Adora nods.  She… vaguely remembers that, she thinks.  Everything between Entrapta coming back and the end of the war is a blur for her, a missing stair in her memory that she’s learned to avoid most of the time.

“A few months ago, they picked up some weird readings,” she continues, Adora’s eyes following her hand to the highlighted sections of the graph spiking high above the table.  “We thought it was a malfunction at first.  But it just… kept happening.”  She zooms out the graph so Adora can see the full view:  Dozens of highlighted spikes like the first one, tentative at first, slowly gaining steam until there’s barely a few hours between them.

Glimmer pulls the graph to one side, making space for her to pull up a map.  Adora recognizes the jagged outline immediately, the same one that had been the border of her existence for most of her life.

“That’s when something started attacking villages.”  Glimmer’s voice is low, her face falling to meet it.  It’s a manner of speech that she’s used to hearing over a much grander table, several dozen miles and a whole lifetime away.  It’s… incredibly strange, to say the least, to have it in her kitchen.

Glimmer raises a hand, swiping it to advance the timeline of the map.

The first one appears in isolation, a little red x nestled in the very northern tip of the fright zone, at the point where the mountainous terrain forms a natural border with the Northern Reach.  As she scrolls through, it’s joined by others, growing into a small cluster of identical markings before they begin to wind their way down, out of the mouth of the mountain range and onto the wide, scorched plains that Adora had spent so many years staring at.

“What about settlements north of the mountains?” Adora interjects, “Have they hit anything in Frosta’s territory?”

“She hasn’t reported anything out of the ordinary, and we haven’t picked anything up on scans.”

Adora chews the inside of her lip as she adds the information to the map that she’s drawing in her head, an increasingly elaborate map of red strings snarling together around a center that she can’t quite see yet.

Whoever this is, whatever they’re after, it’s clearly squarely located in the Fright Zone.  This is a surgical strike, not a mad grab for territory.  Their first move makes more sense with that context, she thinks— backing yourself against the mountains from the start gives you nowhere to run, but it also makes it significantly harder to attack from behind, especially when your opponent would have to get over them in the other direction first.

It’s a sound move.  It’s also a move that betrays two key pieces of information for Adora, new strings that begin to frame the center of the board in sharper focus.

First: it all but confirms that whatever force this is is coming from off-planet, or at least has the ability to move a substantial number of troops aerially.  She’s heard whispers of small local groups, either the last few die-hard Horde loyalists or loosely-organized groups of bandits, making plays for territory or resources.  But Adora knows what those kinds of insurgent tactics look like, from both sides.  This is too concentrated, too planned to be that.

Second: they’re confident that they have enough manpower or firepower that they won’t need to run.  This is a good thing, in Adora’s view.  They’re either overplaying their hand already, or will be easily provoked into doing it in the future.  It’s the first, foundational lesson that she’s been taught in her strategic planning classes before she was even able to tie her own boots: Find what your enemy is confident about.  They won’t be paying attention to it.

“Do you have pictures? Any idea what we’re— you’re up against?” Adora asks.

Glimmer nods, pulling up a series of high-angle images from drones and scout craft.  The first thing that strikes her is how clean everything is.  Every battle Adora had been involved in had been scrappy, messy and destructive, often leaving entire villages uninhabitable even on a good day.  Sleek white gunships settle in town squares and disperse ranks of identical soldiers, and the empty towns in the after pictures show little evidence that anything had happened save for some new banners and the occasional scorch-mark on a wall or makeshift barricade shoved to the side of a street.  There’s no indication where any of the people went, either.  It’s like they just… vanished.

“We think it’s the Horde,” Glimmer says as she props her hands on the table and pulls up a clearer image of one of the shuttles.  There it is, painted in an awful, eye-searing neon green: the same bat-winged sigil that had still adorned the back of her shirt for her first few days in Brightmoon.  “I had always assumed he was full of shit when he was yelling about his ‘big brother’, but…”

Now the picture is clear, the connections revealing something far, far bigger than Adora had expected, far bigger than she ever thought she would deal with again.   She had been so sure when she left that the job was done , that it wouldn’t hurt anyone, but…

Practical realities.  That’s what Adora needs to focus on.

“How many?” she asks tentatively, scratching absentmindedly at her hand.

“One large ship cloaked in orbit, which puts our rough estimate for the number of clones in the low thousands,” Bow answers, “We don’t know when they’re going to be able to get more through, but the good news is that it seems like they don’t either, based on how careful they’re being.”

“We’ve sent a few legions of the royal guard, along with some of Scorpia’s people, to slow them down.  It’s working for now.  We’re trying to keep it quiet for now but…” Adora watches as Glimmer pulls back, closing her eyes for a moment to take a breath before she reaches to pull something out of her bag.  Adora knows what’s coming.  It doesn’t make the blow any easier to take.

“I know you left for a reason.  And I’m sorry.  For everything.  But I don’t know anyone else who’s even remotely equipped to deal with this,”  Glimmer says as she lays the carefully-wrapped bundle on the table.  Adora doesn’t have to ask what it is. “And… I miss you.  I really do,” Glimmer adds, her face softening for a moment as her tone slips back to something that sounds almost like the version of her that Adora remembers, “But I’ll understand if you don’t want to stick around after this.”

Adora shifts the cloth to the side and takes the sword in her hand, feeling the cool metal pressing against her skin, the way her body instinctively shifts to support the weight.  It feels just as natural as it had the last time that she held it, like it was made for her, and she for it.  She supposes both are true, in a sense.

And when she turns the broad side of the blade towards herself, the spine neatly dividing her reflection, she can almost see the person who’s supposed to hold it.  Maybe she’s still in there somewhere, past the choppy hair and hollow eyes.  But when she tries to reconcile the two images, all she can see is the person that failed .  The one who got distracted , repeated her predecessor’s mistakes.  The one who decided to run .

Would she ever be worthy to hold this sword again, even if she wanted to?

She isn’t sure that she wants to find out the answer to that question.

“I’m… I’m not She-Ra anymore,” she says, setting the sword back on the cloth and pushing it towards Glimmer.  She tries not to pay attention to how her old friend’s face drops.  Disappointing people who are supposed to be able to count on her is the one thing that she’s consistently good at, really.

Adora has already started gathering the mugs when Glimmer stops her, Adora flinching just a bit as Glimmer lays a hand on her arm.

“There’s something you should see before we go,” she says, handing the tablet back across the table. “We didn’t start with it, because we didn’t want you to think we were using it to get you back, but…” her voice trails off for a moment as she squeezes Adora’s hand, before finally, finally lifting her head to look Adora in the eyes, “You deserve to know , Adora.  I’m not making that mistake again.”  When she takes the tablet in her hands, she finds a series of images queued up for her to view.

The first is unassuming enough, at least in context with the other images they had shown her.  It seems to be taken from some kind of high vantage point, likely a tree going by some of the obstructions in the foreground, and in a clearing just behind the enemy battle lines she can make out one of the same sleek, white dropships that she had seen previously, waiting with its ramp open.  This one has a few strange markings on it where the other ones had been uniform.  The picture is too blurry and distant for her to make any sense of them, though.

The next is where things start to get interesting.  She can see three of the identical soldiers coming down the ramp, each forgoing a weapon entirely and instead holding a heavy chain, like they’re dragging something behind them.  She tries to trace her eyes back, finding the point where the chains meet, but all that she can make out is a mess of sharp edges illuminated by a soft purple glow in the shadows.

And then Adora swipes to the third picture, and feels the world drop out from under her.

The chained figure has their head bowed, obscuring their face as they’re dragged down the ramp.  It doesn’t matter.  What Adora can see is a mess of dark hair almost as large as the body it’s attached to, gray tufts framing where the face would be on either side.  The quality is still terrible— there’s a strange distortion masking one side of them, like it’s actively refusing to be captured by the camera— but if Adora squints, she can just barely make out the tip of an ear poking through.

She has so many questions, thousands of them pouring into her at once, but each of them dies in the desert of her mouth before she can get them out .  It’s not like Glimmer and Bow would be able to answer them anyway.

It shouldn’t be possible.  None of this should be possible.  Catra is gone, and the only thing left is the parts that Adora carries with her— it’s the indisputable fact that’s governed her life for five years now.

This is someone else.  It has to be.  There obviously have to be more people like Catra somewhere, and although they’re extremely rare in Etheria, maybe they’re more common wherever these invaders are coming from?  Maybe if she keeps going through the rest of the images, she’ll spot something, some minute detail that would escape Glimmer’s notice that proves that this isn’t her oldest friend.

She swipes through the next few pictures.  They’re clearly struggling against the restraints, trails appearing in the soft ground where they’re trying to gain purchase with their claws, and a picture captures one of the clones mid-stumble as she rears back.  Still, they keep marching her forward, the battle lines parting to allow them through.  And then the chains drop.

Something in the figure’s demeanor changes, clearly reacting to something hidden by the gap between pictures.  She’s lower to the ground now, her tail bushy and sticking straight up behind her in a position that Adora recognizes as getting ready to pounce.  She launches forward, becoming a streak of dark colors and pixelated distortion as she outruns the camera’s shutter.  Successive images capture the impact as she tears into the soldiers taking one of them to the ground and doing something that Adora is very thankful she can’t see.  A few of their squadmates who aren’t smart enough to run raise their weapons, and Adora watches as they go down one by one.  None of their shots even seem to register, only causing the attacker to go at them in an even more brutal fashion until she finally collapses, alone in the middle of the carnage.

There’s one final picture, Adora realizes, and hesitantly swipes to see it.  She has to know .

The figure is on their knees now, looking like they’re suffering from a nasty (and extremely rapid) adrenaline crash.  Finally, finally, they raise their head enough for Adora to see the face.

Her eyes pierce straight through the camera, one a shining yellow and the other blackened by the strange void that’s claimed the entire right side of her body.  Behind the hair, Adora can just barely make out an edge of red metal encircling her face.

The tablet slips from her grip, a dull thud echoing through the room as it clatters onto the table.  Somewhere in the distance, she can hear Glimmer and Bow calling for her.

It can’t be Catra.

It has to be Catra.

Adora strains against Angella’s arms, reaching for Catra’s unconscious form as blinding pink light consumes everything around them.  She’s done giving second chances, yes, but Catra still doesn’t deserve to die like this. (Had some part of Adora known at the time that she wouldn’t see Catra again? She isn’t sure.)  But then they’re flying away, Catra becoming smaller and smaller as they gain altitude.  Adora can see her shift just before she disappears from view, one wide yellow eye staring up at her as she realizes that she’s finally, completely, alone.

She picks up the tablet again, zooming in on the face in the final image.  It’s difficult to make out an expression with so much of the face obscured, but Adora knows Catra better than she knows herself.  She spent years reading Catra based on just her eyes peeking out of a blanket, or glowing in the dark after a nightmare.

Catra looks afraid .  There’s no doubt in Adora’s mind.

“When were these taken?” Adora finally manages to choke out as she looks back at Glimmer.

“Two days ago,” she answers, handing Adora a glass of water. “There were sightings a week before that but… we wanted something solid.”

Adora looks back at the face on the screen, and then at the sword still resting on the table.  It’s the same feeling she had the first time she touched it: like the two halves of her are pulling her apart from the inside out.

She swore she would never go back.  She’s comfortable here, if not happy.  She has a life , one that belongs to her and exactly nobody else.  Is she really going to give that up to go chasing ghosts?  In spite of all the evidence, the rational part of Adora’s brain tells her that it can’t be Catra.  The odds are, after all, literally astronomical.

But if it is Catra… Adora would never be able to forgive herself for abandoning her.  It’s hard enough to think that she’s been out there the whole time while Adora has been moping the woods.

It’s an easy decision, as much as she needs to pretend otherwise.  It’s the only decision that Adora knows how to make.

She reaches out, lets her fingers brush against the cool metal of the sword’s handle, allows power to flow between herself and the weapon until they’re one again.  She focuses herself and then pushes outward again, searching until she can feel the edges of the runestone.  There .  There’s a bit of a stutter as she learns to direct the sword’s form again, but soon enough it’s flowing over her hand and settling on her arm, the runestone burning so bright on her wrist that it’s hard for her to look directly at it.  Her arm sags a bit under the weight now, but it’s okay.  She has time to get reacquainted.

She can feel Bow and Glimmer looking at her in amazement.

“Not for you.  For her.” Adora returns with a pointed glare.

“That’s fine,” Glimmer says, unable to help the small smile pulling at her mouth. “That’ll do just fine.”

It’s a start, at least.

----

“The war council is meeting in the Fright Zone tomorrow,” Glimmer says as Adora wipes off the dishes and sets them neatly back in the cabinet.  “Do you want to come back with us now?  Or should we pick you up on the way tomorrow.”

She isn’t eager to leave, of course.  It’s comfortable here.  She likes it.

Which is why she knows that she can’t give herself any time to reconsider.

“I’ll come back to Brightmoon tonight, if you can give me time to pack.”

“Assuming that getting out of here is easier than finding it, that should be fine.”

Adora finishes up the dishes and starts taking a quick mental inventory of what she’ll need to bring with her.  It’s… not much, she realizes as she piles clothes on her bed.  Even in the five years that she’s been here, her lifestyle is still fairly minimal, only allowing herself the tiniest bit beyond what she strictly needs (the worst part, of course, is that this is a significant improvement for her).

So, Adora carefully folds nearly every piece of clothing that she owns into the same backpack that she had brought it in.  She tosses in her little pouch of survival tools, more for good luck than anything else, and some of the tea that she likes, as both a treat and a reminder of what she has to come back to.

And… that’s it, at least for her bedroom.  Just barely enough to stuff her small backpack.

Bow is standing in the dining room looking at the pieced-together map on the wall when she emerges.  It’s noticeable that she did the parts closer to the house first, the cartography rough and imprecise compared to the clean lines of the outer portions, especially the edge of the map just past the town.  She should redo them when she gets back.

“Can I get a scan of this? It’s impressive work,” he asks.  It isn’t, really, but it makes her strangely happy that Bow can still read her well enough to know that she needed the compliment.

“Sure,” she answers with a shrug.  It’ll be good to have him distracted for this next part, if nothing else.

Carefully, Adora makes her way to the mantle over the fireplace.  It’s sparsely populated; a photo, a pretty but non-functional knife, a few other assorted knick-knacks.  But most prominently, her target: a smooth blue stone, and the tattered red jacket folded under it.

She wants to take the rock with her so badly, to keep its familiar weight in her pocket to run her hands over, the same grounding ritual she used for so long.  But she knows that she wouldn’t forgive herself if anything happened to it.  It’s stupid, she knows, but the risk is just too great.

The jacket, however, is a different story.  Anyone in their right mind would have thrown it out by now, of course.  It’s debatable whether it even counts as the same jacket at this point, at least half of the original red fabric overlaid by a web of mismatched patches and new zippers very visibly added on where the old ones had given way.  She hasn’t even worn it in… what, three years? Mostly out of fear that it would finally fall apart completely, but still she can’t bear to part with it.

Besides, it’s not entirely sentimental.  She has a plan .  If that is Catra, and there’s anything left of her Catra still in there (Adora tries not to think about the other possibility too much), then it’s something she’ll recognize, something familiar that she can maybe hold on to.

Catra had been the one to pick it out for her, after all.

Adora places the rock back on the mantle, and discretely tucks the jacket under her arm before making a few final sweeps of the place, looking for some reason to keep delaying the inevitable.  She finds none.

“You ready?” Bow asks after he finishes up taking pictures of the map.  Adora nods, and then watches as his eyes fall to the jacket she had been trying to hide, catching her (almost literally) red-handed.  “You know, we could probably get that patched up properly, if you want.”

“That… would be nice, actually.  Thank you.”

Glimmer is waiting for them on the front steps, but Adora insists on walking out to the end of the path, taking one last look back at her almost-home.  A silent promise to return, and a plea to the woods to keep it safe until she can do so.  Then, there’s a sound of chimes on the wind and a few stray sparkles drifting to the ground, and the woods are still and silent once more.

Chapter Text

“ Look into the Spanish moss

Let your mind conjure up old ghosts

Ride your bike through lost Florida streets

Everything we've said and done, can be so easily forgotten

You can always change who you are”

— Against Me!, Spanish Moss

Adora forces her shoulders into a slouch, pulling her hood down tight over her face as she walks behind Glimmer, just a tiny bit of gold glinting in the sunlight where her sleeve has fallen to reveal the end of her wrist.

It doesn’t do much, of course.  Adora can feel every eye in the city tracking her as she follows Bow and Glimmer up the winding pathways to the front of the palace.  She must look horrifically out of place, her disheveled traveling cloak and the pack slung over one shoulder a sharp contrast next to Glimmer’s flowing, shimmering robes and Bow’s finely-crafted armor.

The last time Adora walked this path, it had been at the head of a victory parade.  After they captured Hordak, Glimmer had insisted on marching him all the way up the cliffside for everyone to see.  Adora had been the one to lead the procession through the city, of course, her full battle armor absolutely blinding in the sunlight.  Most of the residents hadn’t even known the war was over until the parade marched past their houses—she still remembers how it took them literal hours to get through the markets, every single person wanting to stop and thank her personally for saving the world.  Not that Adora had complained , of course.  For once, she had wanted to draw things out as much as she possibly could, clinging to the stability of having a defined objective, being able to put one foot in front of the other.

None of that matters now, Adora reminds herself as she blinks the memories away.  Those are things that someone else lived through, once, a long time ago.  Nothing more.

She lets out a breath that she didn’t realize she was holding as they pass into the palace gardens, allowing the hood to slip off her head under the cover of the hedges and trees.  She had always loved this place, loved coming out here and getting “lost” for a few minutes during those times when everything just got to be too much.  The nostalgia is comforting, but not enough to outweigh the fact that the shadows and blind corners feel like a threat more than a hiding place, now.

“You okay?” Bow asks quietly, nudging her slightly with his elbow.

“Yeah,” she nods, trying to keep her voice flat, “it’s just… it’s a lot. Being back here.”  She hadn’t realized her discomfort had been so visible.  It only makes sense that she got sloppy, of course, spending years on her own with nobody to perform for.  She had promised herself that she wasn’t going to live like that anymore.  But if she’s going to do this, if she’s going to deserve this?  She doesn’t have a choice.  She just hopes that betraying herself will be worth it, in the end.

“It’s felt pretty weird without you, honestly,” Bow says, giving her arm a comforting squeeze, “things should be… familiar at least, if that helps.”  There’s a note of bittersweetness in his voice that Adora can’t quite place right now, but sticks out enough that she files it away for later.

“We kept your old room free, if you want it,” Glimmer adds, looking back at Adora with a small smile, “still has your weird little cot and everything!”

In spite of herself, Adora actually laughs .  It’s oddly touching, and such a deeply Glimmer thing to do, and for just a moment Adora allows herself to feel almost normal.  Maybe she had been too harsh, too hasty in putting distance between herself and the good memories that still reside here.

And then they step into the innermost ring of the gardens, and Adora sees Queen Angella looming over her.

The statue looks almost serene, its eyes closed and hair spread out across its shoulders, looking far softer than something cut from marble should be able to.  Her wings fold back in on themselves at the halfway point, creating a shadowed place in the center of the fountain which seems designed as a space for paying respects, or for quiet contemplation.  Adora thinks it would probably have the opposite of the intended effect on her.  The figure is probably half-again as tall as she had been in life, befitting the larger-than-life place that she occupies in Adora’s memory.  That’s when Adora sees what she’s holding .

Adora’s hand moves to her wrist involuntarily, gripping the cold metal that suddenly feels twice as heavy as a moment ago.  At her waist, the Queen’s hands are clasped over the hilt of the Sword of Protection, its point carefully balanced on the ground.  The very thing that Angella had died to give back to Adora.  The same thing that she had tried so, so hard to run away from, over and over again.

Glimmer steps into place next to her, straining to look at the statue’s face. Adora must have moved forward without realizing it, something compelling her to walk up to the steps at the edge of the fountain.  She doesn’t dare go any further than that.

“I’m sorry.  I never should have blamed you for what happened to her, Adora.  I was just—” Adora can hear the tears choking Glimmer’s voice, even though it’s barely above a whisper, “—I was so fucking angry at that point.  I didn’t want to believe that she would leave me, and it was just… easier, I guess, if I could blame someone else.” Glimmer pauses, takes a moment to gather herself before she continues, “but she made a choice .  I know that now. And she wouldn’t want me to blame you for it, or for you to blame yourself.”

It feels like a dam bursting, like Glimmer had been holding this in all day.  She probably had.  Adora still doesn’t think that Glimmer will ever be able to make up for what she did, to any extent, but she’d be lying if she said that hearing a genuine apology for it didn’t mean something .  She’s just… not sure what that is, yet.

“Thank you,” Adora whispers, settling on it as the least awkward possible response.  She already hadn’t been great at responding to outpourings of emotion, and living alone in the woods for five years certainly hadn’t done her social skills any favors.

Adora allows herself one look back at the statue as they continue towards the palace doors, swearing the exact oath she had made five years ago: I promise your sacrifice won’t be a waste.

Maybe this time she won’t break it.

—

“I wasn’t able to find an exact match for the fabric—the Horde used some… interesting synthetics to say the least— but I tried to get the color as close as I could,” the tailor says, barely looking up from the dress that they’re fussing over. “Try it on?  The fit shouldn’t have changed, but I want to make sure.”

Adora obliges, slipping the jacket onto her shoulders and turning to face the full-length mirror.  For a split second, it looks almost the same as it did when Catra had handed it to her for the first time seven years ago.

But it’s not.  As she turns, she reveals dozens of places where the light doesn’t quite touch the heavy fabric in the way that she remembers, the rough surface replaced by something far softer than it had been before, shimmering just the slightest bit when the light falls across it.  They’re right, though— the color is almost an exact match.  In all likelihood, anyone who didn’t spend a huge chunk of their life wearing it every single day wouldn’t be able to tell the difference at a glance.

She’s not the same either, though,  is she?  Adora stares herself down in the mirror, observing the way it hangs loosely off her leaner frame.  Even the slashes in the arms have collapsed, folding inward without the bulk to support them.  She looks like a pale imitation of the person she should be, like a child in a costume a few sizes too big (although the kid’s costume would probably be better, going by the one reenactment she’s seen).

“Are you sure it has to be that jacket?” the tailor asks as they come up to stand behind her, scrutinizing the reflection in the mirror, “I’m sure I could find something similar that isn’t half destroyed,”

“No,” Adora shakes her head and smiles as she fastens the buttons.  “This is perfect.  Thank you.”

In the uncomfortable absence of any commitments until dinner, Adora finds herself pacing the halls, still stealing glances at her out-of-place reflection in every polished surface.  She feels weightless, almost.  Any moment now, she’ll blink and wake up to the sound of wind whistling through the walls of her cabin, and none of this will matter.  Glimmer and Bow will still hate her.  Catra will still be gone.  And this palace will be nothing more than a reconstruction from half-forgotten scraps of her memory.

It easily could be, really.  It feels like Brightmoon paused the instant she took her eyes off it, waiting in a perfect stasis for her return.  Glimmer seems to have intentionally avoided leaving any mark on the place, fearful of erasing what remains of her mother’s presence.

It’s a state of mind that Adora is… more familiar with than she’d like to admit, as loath as she is to give Glimmer any amount of ground right now.  How many times, both during the war and after, had she held back from changing something because of that same fear?

–

If the rest of Brightmoon seems familiar, then Adora’s room is practically a time capsule.

When she left, she had expected to come back at some point.  It only makes sense that Glimmer would have expected it, too.  For a few weeks, even a few months maybe, keeping the space prepared for her would have been reasonable.  But five years?   That’s far longer than she had ever been here in the first place.  She’s surprised that Glimmer even remembered her, much less… this .

But here it is, all the same: a few hundred square feet of immaculately-polished floors and shining gold trim, stuck permanently out of time.   Not forgotten , there’s been far too much work put into the upkeep for that to be accurate, but… preserved , she thinks.  Crossing the threshold gives her the same feeling that she had when she looked at the artifacts under glass in the library— something deeply cared for , evidently, but excised from the world around it, the life it had once been a part of.

It’s dark now, save for the Moonstone’s soft light filtering through the curtains and pooling across the floor, casting the whole room in an unnatural glow.  The first night she had stayed here, the room had seemed almost incomprehensibly vast, every shadow ready to swallow her whole the second she took her eyes off them.  Adora doesn’t expect to find a smile pulling at her lips as she reminisces, but it comes all the same.  It is funny, isn’t it?  The girl who had spent her whole life dreaming of leading a planet-conquering army was scared of… a room being slightly too big.  Everything had been so much simpler then.

Something catches Adora’s eye, an object about the size of her thumb standing out against the perfectly-smooth surface of her dresser.  It’s the miniature that Bow had made to represent her in their battle-plans.  The one he had made to represent Adora , specifically, not She-Ra, her face stuck in an eternal smile as she holds the blade aloft.  Even disregarding the exaggerated proportions, it's a far cry from how she looks now.  Can she even be the Adora that they remember, even disregarding everything else?  Does she want to be?

It doesn’t matter , she reminds herself, because she doesn’t care .  She’s here for Catra, that’s it.

She should probably get some sleep before she spirals any further.  There’s something oddly comforting as she tosses her jacket over the chair and settles herself on the cot.  Maybe not comfort necessarily, but familiarity , settling back into old routines with a disturbing amount of ease.  Maybe nothing in this room has changed— least of all her.

As the world reassembles itself around her, the first thing that Adora notices is the sun on her face— or more to the point, the heat .

Growing up in the Fright Zone, the heat had always been an oppressive, heavy thing, the persistent smog from the forge trapping whatever sunlight and moisture managed to filter through it.  Nothing could ever escape the valley.  It was the kind of heat that would cling to your clothes, gradually seeping into your skin until it was just a part of you, something you barely even noticed anymore after living with it for your entire life.

But now it’s gone .  Adora stands at the gates of the Fright Zone and feels the sun warming her face and crisp air filling her lungs.  It’s a strange feeling, knowing that one of the defining features of her childhood now lives only in her memory.  But it’s not exactly one that she’s unfamiliar with, at this point.

When Adora opens her eyes, she barely has time to register the two people standing in front of her before one of them is charging forward, pulling her off her feet and into an absolutely bone-crushing hug.

“Adora!  It’s really you! Glimmer told us you were coming but I couldn’t believe it and now you’re here and—” Scorpia rambles on for several more seconds, probably, but Adora is too busy trying to breathe to catch any of it.  At least someone is unambiguously excited to see her.

“Okay,” Perfuma laughs as she lays a gentle hand on Scorpia’s back, “let’s give her some space, love?  This is probably a bit overwhelming for her,”  Adora mouths a silent thank you to her as Scorpia eases off, getting a soft smile in return.  “It is nice to see you again, Adora.”

“Sorry!” Scorpia steps back, nervously scratching the back of her head.  The familiar nervous tic is decidedly at odds with her regal appearance.  Her hair is long now, formed into an elaborate braid draped over her shoulder, nestled in the flowing purple-and-black robes that hang from her shoulders.  And, glinting in the morning sun, Adora sees a pair of mismatched earrings.  The one on the left, she recognizes— it’s a small jewel styled after the black garnet, part of the set she had worn to Princess Prom.  The pearlescent teardrop on her right ear, though? That’s new .  A quick glance at Perfuma confirms her suspicions.

“Congratulations on the wedding, by the way,” Adora says with a grin, sending both of them into an absolute blushing fit and a mess of muttered thank you s as Perfuma wraps an arm around Scorpia’s claw.

“So, um, welcome to the Fright Zone!  Frosta is probably around here somewhere, but everyone else shouldn’t be arriving until the afternoon, if you want me to show you around a bit?” Scorpia asks, after she recovers, stepping aside to finally give Adora a good view of the city in front of her.

And that’s what strikes her first— it’s a city .  Even here at what had once been the walls of the inmost ring of military bases, it feels like a place where people actually live .  The cold, monolithic steel of the wall is covered in a rainbow of murals, woven between the vines that climb it’s surface.  If she looks down the street, she can see a pair of children using it as a finish-line for their race, already arguing about which one of them had jumped the start.  At least some things will never change, clearly.

Adora ends up agreeing to the tour while Glimmer and Bow are taken to their rooms.  She does have time to kill, after all, and it might help the feeling of something coming unmoored deep in her stomach.

It takes forever for them to get anywhere.  If Scorpia and Perfuma aren’t stopping to say hello to someone every five steps, they’re being stopped so someone can ask for their input on construction projects or something as minor as decoration decisions, and… they don’t seem to mind at all.  Adora gets a few waves, a greeting here or there (she is a guest of the princesses, after all), but she’s largely allowed to fade into the background and silently observe.  If anyone recognizes her, they don’t say anything.

The sun is directly overhead by the time they stop for lunch, finding themselves on the patio of what Adora is pretty sure is a repurposed armory building.  She used to know this place by heart, every building and corridor as natural to her as her own veins.  Very little about the layout has actually changed, according to Scorpia, especially this close to the center where they’re boxed in by the wall.  Even so, it's unrecognizable: the same roads that had been used to move tanks now hold a bustling street market, the occasional transport skiff forced to weave between stalls selling all manner of goods, be it food, clothes, or purely ornamental things like jewelry and art.  

There’s a myriad of street performers, too— if Adora strains to hear it over the commotion of the market, she can hear the sound of someone plucking at a string instrument floating down the street.  She doesn’t even realize that she recognizes the tune until she’s finished her sandwich, humming along unconsciously as she sips her tea.  It’s an old song, the tune passed down between generations of cadets with a whole array of vulgar lyrics ascribed to it depending on who was leading the song  (the version Adora had learned revolved around what, exactly, Hordak was doing when he was holed up in his sanctum.  She assumes that whatever this person is singing is much more polite).

Scorpia gives her a fond smile when she catches on.  “Most of the residents in this part of the city are ex-Horde,” she explains, “We had expected that most of them would want to leave, even if they didn’t have another home they remembered, just to, y’know, get out of here.  Some of them did, of course, but most of them wanted to stay with their people, I guess.”

Adora can imagine that, all too easily.  A version of herself that had never found the sword, one that had happily swapped her rifle for construction tools given the opportunity.  One that had stayed here , stayed with—

Adora catches that thought and crushes it between her fingers before it can bloom any further.  “Yeah.  There’s a lot to be said for staying around people who understand it, I think,” she says, her voice bittersweet as she gazes up at the forge that still dominates the skyline.  It’s long since decommissioned, the smog that had once poured from it blown out of the valley with all the memories that it carried.  The structure, however, looms all the same, wrapped in vines and covered in vibrant, multicolored banners, but simply too imposing, too integral to be removed completely without damaging everything that’s sprung up around it.

“You could stay if you want, you know,” Perfuma offers, “I’m sure you’ve been living somewhere already, but we do have plenty of room.”

“If I didn’t already have a house, I might take you up on that.”

Perfuma nods, smiling as she places a warm hand over Adora’s.  “Just remember that the door is always open, okay?  You should come visit, at least, some time when there aren’t… other things happening.”

That , at least, she can take them up on.

The tablet in Scorpia’s bag beeps an alert, pulling them all out of their comfortable silence.  “Looks like they’re starting to arrive,” Scorpia says as she gathers up the dishes and returns them to the counter.  “We should make our way back, if you’re ready?”

Adora isn’t ready, not by several miles.  But she’s as ready as she ever will be, she thinks as she pulls her jacket back over her shoulders, running a finger across the runestone on her arm.  She has to be ready.

An elevated train carries them back towards the center of the city, shining metal gliding over the same streets that they had just walked through.  Adora peers out the window, watching as the bustling market transitions into a sleepy residential ring, and then again as they reach the administrative core, still housed in and around the Horde’s former command buildings in the shadow of the forge.  Thousands of people must live here, she realizes, the elevation throwing the scale of the city into sharp focus.

A few hours to the north, a war is brewing, and none of these people know it.  Adora thinks about the woman who made their sandwiches, about the children playing games by the wall, about the person seated across from her falling asleep on their partner’s shoulder; all of these people who have built lives for themselves without fear or conflict.  None of them are fighters.

Adora tries to suppress a shudder at the thought, suddenly very aware of the weight on her arm.  When she decided to leave with Glimmer, she saw her mission as singular, focused entirely on Catra, with the rest to be figured out later.  She hates herself for being so stupid, so selfish .  Doesn’t she have a duty to these people too?

The whine of electromagnetic brakes pierces through Adora’s thoughts as the train pulls to a stop, followed by the slight hiss of air rushing in as the doors slide open.  They mix in with the rest of the crowd as they descend from the platform to ground level, the sort of people who get off the train here paying very little attention to Scorpia and Perfuma, and only slightly more to her.  The buildings here are a little more recognizable, even with purple and black banners draped over the cold metal.  Adora can see the armory, the training complex.  She can see the vehicle bay that she and Catra stole the skiff from, the night that everything changed.

Adora’s breath catches in her throat when she sees where they’re headed.  It only makes sense, of course.  The command center had already housed the Black Garnet, the throne room, a communications hub, all of the infrastructure you could possibly need to run the Fright Zone housed in one nicely fortified shell.

The logic, of course, doesn’t stop the knot forming in Adora’s stomach as they approach, the whole street darkened by the shadow of the forge in the early-afternoon sun.  No matter what she does or where she goes, everything always seems to come back here , to the heart of the Fright Zone, its orbit pulling her back in over and over again in the absence of anything to pull her away.

“Adora?” Perfuma stops and turns to look at her, voice laden with concern, “Are you okay?  If you need more time we can—”

“I’m fine .” Adora snaps, immediately kicking herself when she sees the way Perfuma’s face falls.  

Stop.

Breathe.  

Grab for the handrail. 

Try again.

“I’m fine.  I just need to get it over with, I think.”

Perfuma nods in acknowledgement, but keeps one eye on Adora as they approach the door. She means well, Adora knows.  Still, she has to force her shoulders down and her head up and try to act like she’s not incredibly aware that she’s being watched.

They must have ripped the whole interior of the building out, Adora realizes as the guard pulls the door open.  She can take some comfort in that, at least.  The whole space feels… naturalistic , in a way.  Skylights have been added, for starters, giving a reminder of the outside world even in the deepest parts of the complex.  It seems like a deliberate effort has been made to move as far away from the old style as physically possible.  Corners rounded where they had been sharp enough to cut yourself on, metal floors replaced with multicolored ceramic tiles, and a million other small changes that would be almost imperceptible on their own.  Somewhere under there, though, the bones of the place remain.  Adora can feel it, as surely as she can feel her own breath.

Glimmer and Bow are waiting for them as they ascend the stairs to the fourth floor, just outside the doors to the conference room.  Adora splits off to join them while Scorpia and Perfuma continue in, the hum of nervous conversation pausing for a moment to accommodate their entrance.

“How was it?” Glimmer asks casually as Adora joins her by the door.

“Good,” Adora forces a smile.  It’s not a lie, exactly, just… leaving out the more complicated parts.  “It was good.”

Glimmer smiles for just a moment before she straightens up, smoothing out her clothes and tucking a few stray hairs behind her ear.  “Well, we shouldn’t keep them waiting, I guess,”  Adora raises an eyebrow at the note of resignation in her voice.  The Alliance meetings she remembered hadn’t been fun , of course, but they hadn’t been cause for anxiety either… at least, not until the end.

Still, she and Bow take up their positions at Glimmer’s side as she steps forward and pushes open the heavy wood doors to the room.

The muffled conversations she had heard just a moment ago screech to a halt as she enters, all the air rushing out of the room as everyone lays eyes on Adora.  For a brief moment, everything almost seems to float, suspended in some kind of liminal space between memory and reality, blurring together until they’re almost indistinguishable.  She’s breaking something, she knows, shattering the version of her that’s existed in these people’s minds for the past five years and reforming it into… whatever she is now.  She wishes she knew what that meant.

And then everything comes crashing back to the ground as the barrage of questions starts.  Adora tries to shrink herself as much as she possibly can, tucking her head between her shoulders as if they can shield her from the overlapping where were you s and why did you leave s (and one just plain what the fuck , courtesy of Mermista).

It’s too much.  Too many voices at once, more noise than she can handle, more attention than she’s had to cope with in years.  She shuts her eyes tight, her breaths coming shorter and shorter.  She’s drowning.  She hasn’t even been She-Ra again for a day and she’s already fucking it up and everyone is going to—

Something hits the war room table, slicing through the chaos with a resounding thud .  Then, a voice:

“Everybody, shut the fuck up! One person at a time, you assholes, and let her sit down first.”  It’s loud, and its pitch is just a bit shrill, but it’s one voice, so much easier for her to manage.  And it sounds like…  Frosta?

Sure enough, when Adora looks up, the whole room’s attention is on the ice princess, her chair kicked back to the wall and the remains of an ice-fist dripping onto the table.  Adora has to stifle the laugh rising in her throat as she observes.  It’s hard not to think of Frosta as the baby of the group, the one who had barely come up to Adora’s stomach by the end of the war.   She’s almost as tall as Adora herself now, though, her arms just a bit too long for the rest of her body as she grows into her frame.  Her deep blue hair is pulled back into an elaborate bun behind her head, revealing an undercut with a few thin lines shaved into it.

If she had been eleven (and three quarters!) at Princess Prom, plus another year and a half of war, plus five years of Adora being gone, she must be… eighteen or nineteen now, at a rough estimate.  Which means that she’s at least close to the age Catra had been when Adora had left.  A sad half-smile tugs at the corner of Adora’s mouth.  She had always seen so much of Catra in the girl.  That same fire, the need to prove something.  They would have gotten along well, she thinks.  She doesn’t dare to hope that it might still be a possibility.  Either way, she’s happy to see Frosta growing into herself with the support system that they were never afforded.

The commotion provides enough cover for Adora to slip into her seat, positioned just off the head of the table between Glimmer and Spinnerella.  The golden table is an exact replica of the one in the war room at Brightmoon (minus the dent that Adora had made in that one), which Adora suspects isn’t an accidental gesture.

“Good to have you back, kid,” Netossa whispers, leaning around her wife to give Adora a gentle hit to the shoulder. “We were worried about you.”

Adora just smiles warmly in return.  She’s not quite sure how to process the idea that any of these people had thought about her in the last five years, much less worried about her.  Should she feel bad about that?  She files that away to figure out later as a shuffling of papers redirects everyone’s attention back to the front of the room.

“I know you all have a lot of questions, and I promise that we’ll get to them soon,” Glimmer starts, her voice filling the room and commanding attention.  She’s started imitating her mother again after dropping the affect for most of the day, Adora notes, still unsure whether she’s even conscious of what she’s doing.  “But the short version is that, yes, Adora is back, but that’s her story to tell.  Not mine.  As much as I wish that had been the only reason to call the alliance back together after so long, it’s not.”

The explanation Glimmer launches into is largely the same one Glimmer had given over Adora’s table, albeit with added gravitas afforded by the setting and full-sized holoprojector.  Instead, Adora finds herself scanning the faces at the table, observing their reactions as well as the ways that they’ve changed in her absence.

She finds an odd one out immediately: Castaspella (and, by proxy, Mystacor) had traditionally been absent from the war table, the sorcerer's academy preferring to stay neutral in political matters in fear of someone like Shadow Weaver using their abilities to grab for power.  If her presence here is any indication, they now see that as insufficient.  Understandable, Adora supposes, considering the weaknesses the Horde had managed to show in their defenses.

Mermista keeps sneaking in suspicious glares at Adora as Glimmer runs down the timeline of events, the map of Scorpia’s kingdom obscuring most of her face.  She thinks she’s being stealthy, always turning her attention back to Glimmer by the time Adora gets a good look at her. That could be trouble later.

There are a few gasps around the table as Glimmer shows the photos, the full magnitude of the potential threat setting in.  She’s skipping past the ones with Catra in them, Adora realizes.  It’s probably for the best to avoid that particular argument, at least until they have more definitive proof that it’s her .  She can’t imagine that most of the people around the table are going to be particularly hospitable to the idea of chasing after her.

Entrapta keeps looking at her, too, but doesn’t even try to hide it.  Adora has always appreciated her honesty, even if she can be a bit… blunt at times, to say the least.  It’s far preferable to having to decode social cues from everyone else, and she’s sure that she’s giving the tech princess some absolutely fascinating data points, going by how often she looks down to prod at her tablet.

“Any questions?” Glimmer asks as the holograms fall away and the lights come back up.

“Yeah, actually,” Mermista starts, rounding on Adora with a piercing glare, “Why is she back?  How do we know she won’t flake out again when we don’t even know why she ran away in the first place?”  

Glimmer starts to say something, presumably stepping in on Adora’s behalf, but Adora waves her off. She was going to have to answer this eventually.

“After the portal I just… didn’t know what to do with myself, I guess,” she starts, carefully dancing around the real reasons. “I knew I still had to finish the war, and I did .  I just… needed some time alone after that.  I didn’t expect it to turn into five years , admittedly, but it did, and I’m sorry if I made you all worry about me.”

Adora pauses to take a breath, laying her hands on the table before she continues. “I’m back because, evidently, I didn’t finish the job the first time.  I’m supposed to protect this planet, and I have every intention of following through.  If you never want to see me again after that, you don’t have to.”

Mermista doesn’t look satisfied as she sits back down, necessarily, but she does sit back down.

“Anyone else have a problem?” Adora asks, the words coming out sharper than she means them to.  Apparently, no one does— at least not that they feel like voicing right now.

“I think we should see if Hordak knows anything,” Entrapta chirps up from the end of the table, seemingly eager to redirect the conversation, “If this is the ‘big brother’ he kept talking about, he might have some idea about their next move.”

“We can go interrogate him tomorrow morning,” Scorpia nods.  “He’s being held down in the mines right now,” she adds, more for Adora’s benefit than anything else.  That raises another question, one that Adora has been trying to avoid thinking about.

“What about Shadow Weaver?  What happened to her after I left?”

“She’s contained in Mystacor,” Casta answers, her words full of venom at the mere mention of the woman’s name, “I highly doubt she has anything useful to offer.  If Hordak was smart enough to conquer half the planet, he was probably smart enough not to let her in on the actual plans, and we already used truth spells to extract everything we could from her.”

The answer is good enough for Adora to put to bed one of the questions that had been nagging at her for the past five years.  Weaver had been trying to exert influence over Glimmer at the tail end of the war, and Adora had spent more than a few sleepless nights wondering if her leaving had been enough for it to work.  As mad as she was at Glimmer, nobody deserved that.  Being locked up where she can’t hurt anyone is still probably too kind of a fate for the witch, but Adora will take it.

The rest of the afternoon is largely consumed by political negotiations that fly straight over Adora’s head with her lack of context.  Mermista, after a not-insignificant amount of pressure (owing, apparently, to Brightmoon’s failure to help them against a spike in piracy last year), agrees to commit ships from Salineas’ royal navy and privateer forces if the invaders take to the seas.  She’s shocked to realize that Brightmoon and Salineas are the only kingdoms with standing armies of any use (Frosta’s support is largely symbolic, considering the difficulty of moving her forces out of her territory), with everyone else either reliant on those two or a civilian militia, like the Fright Zone.  Scorpia hasn’t actually activated those militias yet, either, wary of creating a premature panic in a kingdom where war is still very much in living memory, but she concedes to putting out the order tomorrow, pending the results of their interrogation with Hordak.

Adora chases sleep for hours, adding and removing blankets, trying every possible minute shift in her position, all for nothing.  She comes close a few times, feeling her mind start to slow before the magic is broken by a rattle from the air vent or the bed creaking under her own weight.  These buildings, these rooms, used to be filled with a constant whir of machinery at all hours of the day or night.  The noise had annoyed plenty of the other cadets, she knows, but for Adora silence had always been accompanied by a bubble of darkness and a flash of lightning following shortly after that.  The noise had been consistent, a blanket of safety and familiarity forcing her to stop tracking the more irregular noises and lulling her to sleep. (The purring at her feet had helped too, of course.)

It’s the middle of the night by the time Adora gives up on the concept of sleep entirely, pushing herself out of bed and tugging a shirt on, followed quickly by her boots and jacket.  She leaves the sword leaned against the nightstand, though, conscious of the way that she’s lapsed back into carrying it everywhere with her.

Each of the bunkrooms has been turned into a pair of single or dual-occupancy guest quarters now, but the general layout of the barracks is still the same.  Adora hangs right into the main corridor as she exits her room, knowing the building well enough to navigate it with her eyes closed.

The front door glides open at the tap of a button, and Adora shoves her hands in her pockets, pulling her jacket tighter against her as she steps into the cold night air.  The city is completely dead at this time of night, in that strange in-between when the late sleepers have all turned in but the early risers haven’t quite woken up yet.  Adora, for once, allows herself to wander aimlessly, no goal in mind besides clearing her head.  She allows herself to breathe in, focusing on the cold breeze sifting through her short hair, remembering how she used to run through these streets, ducking and weaving between boxes and narrowly dodging skiffs full of supplies.

Would she be able to find her old barracks, if she tried?  How much of her childhood has been burned away to make room for new growth?  It’s idle curiosity more than anything else, but she finds herself looking up at the forge every few blocks, trying to match the way it had looked when she and Catra had climbed to the roof of their barracks as children.  It’s the only consistent landmark amongst rows of identical buildings.

She thinks she sees it eventually, lining up the structure towering over her with the picture in her mind.  She turns inward, passing through the concentric circles of barracks and training facilities, some invisible string pulling her back towards the place she grew up.  She’s not sure she wants to find it, really.  She’s sure that all of their little worlds, faces and height charts scratched into the walls, stockpiled food and stolen blankets, are gone now.  Everything she ever loved is an artifact of a world that can’t exist anymore, that shouldn’t have existed in the first place, she knows, but it was theirs . It was all they had, and that meant it was the only thing that had mattered.  If it is gone, she wants to see it with her own two eyes.

Adora is about halfway to where her destination should be when she stops in her tracks, the buildings falling away as she emerges from a narrow alleyway.  The open space is roughly equivalent to one of the buildings in size, sectioned off by a waist-high stone wall, a ring of trees within that providing shelter and some measure of privacy as Adora finds the gap in the wall, stepping through onto the paved footpath.

Crossing the threshold feels like entering a completely different world than she had been in a moment ago, beams of moonlight streaming through the gaps in the canopy and bathing the garden in a strange, beautiful half-light.  It feels out of place in a completely intentional way, the jarring transition forcing a moment of contemplation even for those just passing through on their way to destinations unknown, like she had been until a moment ago.  Instead, Adora finds herself looking inwards, her feet tracing the paving-stones laid into the grass.

By the time she reaches the center, the outside world has almost completely disappeared from her perception, swallowed up by a blanket of trees and vines.  She can imagine that, during the day, this place is an oasis, a pocket of space set apart from the chaos inherent to running such a large city.  Deeper in yet, she can hear the trickle of an artificial (she assumes, at least) stream.  The steady noise might be exactly what she needs, she thinks.

She doesn’t find the stream, but she emerges into another pocket of open space, the footpath blooming out to encompass five slabs of polished black rock arranged in a semicircle in front of her, each standing about twice her height.

Adora tosses a glance back over her shoulder at the winding path she just emerged from.  She knows what this is.  She knows that she doesn’t need to see it, even if it’s nice to know that somebody thought to do it.  What she needs is to just go back to her room, lay her head on the pillow, and try to get some damn sleep.

Instead, her feet compel her forward, over the small bridge and into the monument’s shadow.  It looks beautiful in the night, soft moonlight diffusing as it hits the surface and streaking across it, drawing out a shimmering, sparkling quality to the material that she’s sure wouldn’t be visible when most people see it in the daylight.

It’s hard to make it out in the darkness, but by the flickering light of the eternal flame kept in the center of the plaza, Adora can see an inscription carved across the top of the central pillar:

IN MEMORY OF THE HORDE CONSCRIPTS LOST TO THE WAR

—

MAY ALL BE FORGIVEN, AND ALL BE REMEMBERED

Below that, there’s the names.  There must be thousands of them, Adora thinks as her fingers trace the indentations in the cool stone, spreading out from underneath the inscription.  She doesn’t know what she’s looking for— or she does, but won’t allow herself to admit it.  She finds other things, though.  A cluster of names on the leftmost pillar that she’s pretty sure is Scorpia’s family, some of the few that have a surname attached.  She finds a few of the older cadets that she remembers teaching her lessons, guiding her hands when she struggled to hold a staff far too large for her frame.  There aren’t a lot from her year, thankfully— the war had ended before most of them could see more than a year or two of service, and Catra had let bots handle most of the frontline attacks once she was in charge. She finds the force captain whose funeral she and Catra had stumbled into (did her partner make it out? Adora wishes she knew enough to check).

She doesn’t find the one name that she was secretly hoping to find, though.  She can’t hold it against anyone, really, though it leaves a bitter taste in her mouth.  Catra had taken a far more active role in the Horde’s crimes than most of the people eulogized here, even though she was a victim in turn.  She had cared about Catra, loved her , even, but not everyone had that perspective.  Remembering her is just another on the long list of burdens that Adora has accepted are hers alone to bear (and it’s not like she had ever been officially recorded as dead , either.  But even if she’s still alive somehow, it’s probably too much to hope that her Catra is still in there).

“Couldn’t sleep?”  The voice is gentle, but still makes Adora jump out of her skin before she turns around and realizes it’s just Scorpia.

“Yeah,” Adora shrugs, “something like that.”

“I had a feeling you’d find this place,” Scorpia says as she takes a step forward to join Adora in front of the monument, the moonlight illuminating the dark circles beneath her own eyes.  “Pretty, isn’t it?  Glimmer was worried about someone vandalizing it if we put them on the one in Brightmoon, so we did this instead.  We had a heck of a time making sure it was complete.  Turns out Hordak was terrible at keeping records of, like, anything.”

“Yeah,” Adora’s voice is flat, but she can’t help but smile at least a little at the attempt to cut the tension, “it’s nice.  I’m glad you were able to find a spot for it.”

“There’s, um, something I’d like to show you, if you’re up for a walk?” Scorpia asks, nervously rubbing her claws together and not quite meeting Adora’s eyes, “But it’s totally fine if you’d rather go back to bed! I’m sure we can find time while you’re here, but—”

“That sounds great, Scorpia.  Lead the way?”  It’s not like she’s going to get more than an hour of sleep tonight anyway.  She might as well have company, right?

Adora follows her between the pillars of the monument and down the path through the other side of the park.  Even in her sleeping clothes with her hair pulled back in a slightly-messy bun, Scorpia looks composed in a way that Adora never would have expected from the nervous, excitable woman she had known five years ago, throwing every moment of her absence into sharp focus. 

They walk in a mutual, comfortable silence as they emerge into the empty streets, winding their way inward between the clusters of administrative buildings.  Adora doesn’t know where Scorpia is going, not at first, but she’s content to follow behind her, careful to give her tail enough room to sway behind her (she’s been stung by it once, she remembers, and it’s not an experience she’s eager to repeat).  Adora doesn’t even begin to piece together their destination until she catches Scorpia glancing upward as they walk past the command center.  Adora follows her gaze to the forge looming over them, close enough now that she can see the scaffolding that’s been grafted along its height, winding all the way up to the lookout at the top. 

Her suspicions are confirmed a moment later when Scorpia enters a building, the door registering her presence and gliding open automatically before she can even slow down, leading Adora up a few sets of stairs before finally emerging on the roof.

She had forgotten, somehow, how incomprehensibly massive the spire feels when you’re standing close enough to touch the base of it.  Scorpia pauses at the base of the steps, giving Adora a moment to recover the breath that’s been sucked out of her lungs, before she begins the ascent, her boots clanging sharply against the metal.

That answers the where , Adora supposes, but raises several dozen more questions about what Scorpia wants to show her, plenty for Adora to ponder as her slightly out-of-sync footsteps join the chorus.  She only makes it a few flights up before something catches her eye.

Could she still do it?  Probably not all the way, she never could without her grappling hook… but it’s worth a try, right?

Adora takes a breath and steadies herself before vaulting over the railing, savoring the split-second of weightlessness between flight and free-fall before her hands find purchase on a ledge, carefully positioning her legs to absorb the impact as the rest of her weight swings toward the concrete and metal of the spire.  Scorpia lets out a shocked noise from behind her, and Adora tosses a look over her shoulder that she hopes conveys the message of ‘I know what I’m doing, don’t worry’.

And she does know what she’s doing, relying almost entirely on muscle memory as she clambers up the tower, pulling herself from handhold to handhold.  It’s a little more strenuous than she remembers, maybe, her arms already burning from supporting her weight, but her grip remains true, taking her up and around the mess of pipes and ventilation the same way she’s gone hundreds of times.  It’s unnecessary, maybe even a little gratuitous, but it feels good to remind herself that she can still do this, that the person who used to do it hasn’t been completely abandoned.

She makes it almost to the top before she reaches a jump that she’s not confident in her ability to make on her own.  She remembers watching, filled with jealousy and more than a little fascination, as Catra made this same leap look effortless , smirking down at her from the platform in a way that even she couldn’t bring herself to feel bad for staring at.

What’s the matter, princess?  Can’t keep up?

She couldn’t then, and she certainly can’t now.  Adora smiles warmly to herself as she drops back onto the stairs, leaning on the railing to catch her breath for a moment as Scorpia lets out a laugh that seems equal parts nervous and impressed.  If she still had the grappling hook that Catra had given her the next day, she could have made it to the top on her own easily .  Instead, she settles for following Scorpia up the final flight of stairs, twisting around the top of the spire and stepping through to the creaking metal platform of the lookout.

Adora isn’t quite sure what she’s meant to be looking at, at first.  The view over the moonlit city is beautiful, of course, intimately familiar and completely new all at the same time.  Even so, it hardly seems worth Scorpia dragging herself up all those stairs in the middle of the night to show off, she thinks as she walks out along the edge.

“It’s… I know it’s not much, but—” Scorpia starts rambling again as Adora keeps walking.

There’s a sudden, sharp pain as Adora’s foot collides with something solid, right as she approaches the tip of the outcropping.  When she looks down, she finds what Scorpia had been leading her to: it’s a block cut from the same smooth, black stone as the monument in the park, draped in garlands of hyacinth and zinnia (Perfuma’s handiwork, if she had to guess).  This one is much smaller, too- maybe three feet wide and comes up roughly to her knees, its front face cut into a slant to allow the singular inscription to be read from above through her rapidly-blurring eyes: FOR CATRA.

  Adora drops into a crouch, trying to ground herself as she runs a finger through the rough insides of the letters, the moonlight revealing the way that the flowers have grown up to encompass the railing, punctuated, appropriately enough, by a vine of forget-me-nots across the top.

“Thank you,” are the only two words Adora manages to choke out without revealing the extent of the lump forming in her throat, half-whispered like some kind of prayer.
“And it felt wrong to put her on the other one when we weren’t even sure if she was… y’know,” Scorpia continues as her voice returns to Adora’s perception, “But we weren’t sure at first if you might be coming back, and I thought if you did you might want somewhere to go to remember her, I guess?”

That’s when the dam finally fucking breaks , the cracks finally giving way as every tear that she’s held back for the past five years comes streaming down her face, an instantaneous sensation of heat flooding her face with every sob that wracks her body before the night air leeches the warmth from them.  She staggers backward, turning around to seize Scorpia in a hug before her legs can betray her too.  For now, Adora’s whole world is nothing but warmth as Scorpia lays gentle arms on her back, careful not to constrict her movement too much.

And for once, Adora lets herself take it freely, burying her face in Scorpia’s shoulder and allowing her legs a brief respite from their burden.  She cries for the Catra that she loved.  She cries for the Catra that might still be out there somewhere, and for the hope that those might be one and the same.  She cries for every version of Catra that she’s found and lost and loved and gone to war with, and she cries for herself, too, until she feels like every part of her has been hollowed out and there’s nothing left but dry sniffles and the absolute wreck that she’s made of Scorpia’s clothes.

Right.  Scorpia.

“You didn’t have to do this, you know,” Adora’s voice is hoarse when she pulls away, wiping her face on the back of her sleeve, “I know that she was… kind of awful to you.”

Adora didn’t think Scorpia was capable of pity, but she’s not sure there’s another word for the mixture of sadness and confusion in Scorpia’s eyes when she looks down.  It’s fair, she supposes.  Of course only Adora could find a way to feel guilty about this.

“Someone cared about her,” Scorpia says pointedly, smoothing out the shoulder of Adora’s jacket with one claw, “so she deserves to be remembered.  We’ve all hurt people, Adora.  Even me.”

“Thank you,”  Adora manages, still clinging to Scorpia’s arm for dear life even with her legs back under her, “I really can’t tell you how much this means to me.”

“I can stay up here with you if you want, but I know it’s getting late.  Do you need some time alone?”

“Please,” Adora answers with a small nod, “go get some rest, Scorpia.  I’ll see you in a few hours.”

Scorpia gives her one final squeeze before she departs, Adora lingering in place long enough to listen to her heavy footsteps disappearing before she takes up her familiar position on the rail.  She’ll go back and get a little sleep, of course.  Between the climbing and the crying, she can feel the familiar ache of exhaustion settling into her bones.

First, though, she’ll allow herself this: sitting with Catra and watching as the first blood-red streaks of daylight claw their way over the horizon, savoring the last moments of the Fright Zone being truly theirs as the city wakes from its slumber.

Adora buries her hands a little deeper in her pockets, pulling her jacket down tight around her shoulders as the freight elevator begins its shuddering descent.

The mines had been Shadow Weaver’s second favorite threat, after Beast Island, but Adora had always found it to be the more terrifying option of the two.  An island full of monsters is something tangible, something that you can fight, even if the odds would be nearly impossible.  The prospect of her— or Catra, more to the point— being thrown into the bottomless, endless dark had felt like the worst torture of all.  The helplessness had always been the worst part of everything she did to them.

Ten, twenty-five, fifty feet— Adora chews the inside of her lip and focuses on the faint taste of metal sliding across her tongue as the depth markers tick by.  All the light from the surface is long gone now, the only illumination provided by a small lamp at the top of the elevator and incandescent bulbs embedded in the walls every few feet, making the shadows move in a way that Adora has to work very, very hard to ignore.

There’s nothing down here that can hurt you now , she chides herself.  You’re not a scared little kid anymore.  Stop acting like one.

Still, Adora doesn’t release her breath until the elevator comes to a shaking, creaking halt, watching the vapor condense and dissipate in front of her face.  There’s a single helmeted figure waiting for them when the door slides open, armed and armored far more heavily than any other guards that she’s seen here.  If Adora squints in the dim light, she can make out a pair of gold stripes painted on their shoulder, but it’s too dark for her to make out the writing on their nametag.

“Adora,” Scorpia looks back and gestures at the guard, “This is our security chief—”

“Oh, believe me, we’ve met ,” she says, cutting Scorpia off harshly.  There is something familiar in the voice, Adora knows.  Something about the accent, a bit of intonation that distantly rings a bell.  But it’s too muffled by time and the helmet’s filtration system for her to pick it out decisively.

Adora gets her answer when they reach behind their neck to pull the helmet free with a slight hiss of air to reveal—

“ Lonnie?!”

“That’s Captain Lonnie, head of security to you, motherfucker,” she responds with a smug grin, moving around the side of the tunnel to give Adora a light punch on the shoulder.  “Where the hell have you been, Adora?”

Adora stumbles for a moment before she manages to get her feet under her and return the smile, although it falls away as she tries to formulate an answer to the question.

“I just needed some time alone, I guess,” Adora says with a shrug, her voice quiet, “After…” her voice trails off when Lonnie gives a small nod to signal that she doesn’t need to say anymore, and Adora lets out a quiet sigh of relief.  If anyone was in a position to understand how much Catra had meant to her, it’s probably the person who grew up in the same room as them, she supposes.  “What about you?” she asks, eager to smooth over the awkward falter in the conversation.

“Kyle, Rogelio and I got out pretty quickly after that whole mess,” Lonnie answers as she starts down the tunnel, waving to the group of princesses to follow her, “kicked around the wastes for a while until we heard the war was over and Scorpia was looking for people to help.  The two of them are running a bakery in the city, but I wound up doing this since I can’t cook to save my life.”

“Never thought I’d hear someone so eager to come back here after leaving.”

“Not like any of us remember living anywhere else,” Lonnie shrugs.

The tunnel is narrow enough that they’re forced to walk single-file down its length, Scorpia’s bulk almost entirely blocking Adora’s view of what’s in front of them.  It’s lit by the same type of bulbs as the elevator shaft had been, although thankfully stationary this time.  They’re placed at regular intervals along with the metal supports that keep the tunnel from collapsing, providing just enough flickering light that she can see the shimmering veins of the ores that this place had once been used to extract.  Unlike the other parts of the Fright Zone that she’s seen in the past day, this place serves exactly the purpose it had when she was a child: holding prisoners convicted of high treason, considered too dangerous for even the most secure parts of the central jail.

Ironic, of course, that the only person held here now is the same one who had ordered its construction in the first place.  Adora can smile about that without any qualifications, at least.

They’re greeted by another pair of guards flanking a heavy metal door as the tunnel opens up into a larger chamber, providing enough space for everyone to gather in a loose circle.  Everyone is looking at her, Adora realizes, her mouth running dry as she remembers what they’re all expecting.  Can she even do it anymore?  She hadn’t practiced since the sword had come back into her possession, some combination of procrastination and fear that the answer might be no stopping her from trying without someone forcing her hand.  Which is exactly what’s happening now, she supposes.

Adora closes her eyes and reaches out, feeling for the runestone’s magic until it's within her control again.  She allows it to flow like water off her arm, taking its natural form in her hand as Adora settles her grip around it.

From there, there’s nothing left for her to do but lift the blade and speak the words.  Her voice comes out in a hoarse whisper, closer to a prayer than the triumphant battle-cry that she’s used to using them as.  But she says them all the same.

And then, for a moment, absolutely nothing happens.

Adora feels like she’s falling again, but there’s nothing to grab for this time as her stomach leaps into her throat.  Her breath is coming faster and faster, and she can’t hear anything but her own pounding heartbeat and the panic threatening to pull her under.  She has to fight it, she knows.  It had been stupid of her to think that she could do this on the first try after so long, to think she could do it at all , even.   She shouldn’t have come here.

And then something catches her.

Adora has never really known what it looks like to other people when she vacates her perception for a moment while she transforms.  This is what it looks like to her : she sees herself from outside her own body, briefly inhabiting a radiant golden form that she assumes is the part of She-Ra that’s separate from herself.  Most of the time, it’s not for more than half a second, a slight lag as she makes the jump from one form to another, over before she can really process it.   She reaches out, closing the gap to the girl holding the sword aloft on shaky arms.  She looks so small, so scared .

Adora— or She-Ra, she’s never really been sure how to refer to herself during these moments, nor who’s in control— reaches out, laying a gentle hand on the girl’s forehead.

Then, there’s warmth, and a brilliant, blinding light as she feels the magic wash over her.

Adora breathes a sigh of relief as she opens her eyes and sees everyone looking at her with the same sort of reverence that she remembers.  If they had noticed her stumble, they’re not saying anything about it.

It takes the effort of both guards to turn the wheel keeping the vault door shut, moving smoothly out of the way on tracks set into the rocks.  The interior is much better lit than the claustrophobic tunnels they’d been walking through prior, strips of high-intensity lights set into the reinforced metal (presumably several feet thick, going by the wall that they enter through).  Most of the interior is sectioned off behind a clear plastic wall, solid except for a door and keypad at one end and a few holes for passing items back and forth.

Hordak doesn’t even look up as they enter, hunched over some papers at a plain wooden desk against the rear wall.

“I assume that, since my next meal is not scheduled for another three hours, you are once again here to ask if I’d like to apologize and negotiate the terms of my release,” Hordak says.  His voice is rough, but it’s quiet, a mere shadow of the one that had commanded so much fear for so long.  “The answer is still no .”

Glimmer opens her mouth to snap back at him before Adora cuts her off.

“Actually, we were hoping that you could answer a few questions for us,” Adora says, stepping forward to stand in front of the pane of glass.

That gets Hordak’s attention, his ears straightening as he pushes his chair back and limps over towards the glass to look at Adora, her grip on the sword tightening until her knuckles go white.  His skin looks even paler than she remembers, somehow, a plain black shirt and pants hanging off his near-skeletal frame.  In her peripheral vision, Adora watches Entrapta step back into the corner, her eyes fixed on the ground as she fidgets nervously with the ends of her hair.

“Finally decided to come back from the dead, hm?” he asks, his head tilting as he bares his teeth in some grotesque imitation of a smile.  “More than can be said of my former second-in-command, I suppose, although that’s not exactly a high bar.”

Adora’s vision goes red as she takes a half-step forward.  He’s so close.  It would be so easy to reach through one of the gaps in the glass and—

Adora’s motion is arrested by Spinnerella laying a warm hand on her arm.  She could break free easily, of course, but she allows herself to be stopped.  She hates that she needs the help with controlling herself, although it makes her feel a little better  that the wind princess also looks like she’s a half-second away from lunging for Hordak.

Instead, she motions for Glimmer to hand her the tablet from her bag, pulling up one of the photos Glimmer had brought to her and pressing the screen against the glass.

“Do you know anything about this?”

Say what you will about Adora, but she’s not stupid — at least, not stupid enough to expect Hordak to give them a straight answer.  Instead, she watches his face under the reflected ghost of the image.  He zeroes in on the insignia immediately, red eyes flaring out for just a moment before his mouth twists into a smile that Adora is very tempted to punch off his face.  

“I hope that you enjoyed your little peace while it lasted, princess, ” he says, snarling the last word, “Because Horde Prime will make me look merciful by comparison.”

That confirms what she had been dreading.  The singular legion in orbit around the planet was intimidating .  But knowing that somewhere out there is an incomprehensibly vast army on a scale that Adora can’t even conceptualize is… terrifying, as much as she doesn’t want to admit it.

Focus .  She needs to stay focused.  Right now, there’s one ship to deal with. Anything else can come later.  

“You said you were his right hand, didn’t you?  You must know how he thinks.  What’s he after?”  The question is purposefully vague and, combined with the flattery, perfectly designed to allow Hordak to talk himself into a trap.  Rule one of interrogation training: let them do your job for you .

Hordak hums quietly, bringing a hand up to his chin as he thinks.  “First of all, he would want to bring the full glory of his army to bear.  This little backwater poses a… unique challenge in that regard.  It’s the only reason you were all able to last as long as you did.”  Adora tries not to roll her eyes at that.  Only Hordak could find a way to gloat after being literally buried for five years.  That’s good, she reminds herself.  She wants him to think he’s in control of the situation.

“There are portals, of course, which is likely how he got into this dimension in the first place,” he continues, “but keeping a portal open long-term to sustain an army is… expensive .  Far easier to move something out than keep bringing things in , really.”

There.   That’s what Adora had been fishing for, and Hordak had practically served it up on a platter.

“How would he do that?  Are there backup controls for the planet somewhere?”

“Do you expect me to just hand them to you?  Maybe that witch overestimated you.” Hordak says with a shake of his head.  “A shame, really.  I had assumed at least one of you would be smart enough to understand my research,” he glares pointedly in Entrapta’s direction, and Adora watches as she folds in on herself even further.

Adora tries to ignore the jab and the ever-tightening coil of anger in her stomach, gritting her teeth and attempting to focus on the positive: he had still given her the confirmation that it exists .

“It’s funny, you know,” he starts talking again unprompted, “Catra looked so scared when I threatened to send her there.”  And then, almost offhandedly, “By the way, did you ever manage to find her body?”

That’s what draws Adora tight enough to snap completely.  She lunges again, and there’s no one close enough to stop her this time.  Hordak anticipates it, already pulling back from the gap in the wall, but Adora moves with just a bit more ferocity than he expects, snagging him by the collar of his shirt.  Then she pulls, dragging him forward until he hits the plexiglass, her own reflection distorting as the impact ripples across the material and Hordak’s head bounces in a very satisfying way that seems to make the ground itself shake.

The ground is shaking, Adora realizes a few seconds later.  She allows Hordak to crumple to the ground, forgotten as the princesses look at each other nervously.  It stops for a moment, a brief spark of hope that everything might be okay, before it returns with a vengeance.  There’s a series of muffled, distant booms from above them, growing closer and closer until it’s right on top of them and then trailing off into the distance.

Lonnie presses a hand to her ear and mutters something that Adora can’t make out, her face falling as she ushers the group out of the cell and helps roll the door shut behind them.

“I can’t raise any of my people on the ground,” Lonnie says, fiddling with something on her belt, “We’re safe down here, but working completely in the dark,”  Her voice is level on the surface, but Adora can detect the nervous strain under that.  She wasn’t anywhere near as close with Lonnie as she was with Catra, of course, but you learn to read people really well when you spend most of your life in the same room.

Everyone is looking at Adora, despite the fact that she’s one of the few people in this room without any actual authority.  Being eight feet tall and glowing will do that, she supposes.

“Is there another way up besides the elevator?”

“There’s some old stairs if you take a right at the end of the tunnel, yeah.”

Adora nods and adds that to her mental map of the situation as a sharper, smaller string of noises pass above them.  It’ll be slow, but it’s probably best to keep people out of the elevator if possible.

“Glimmer, you can move three people, right?” She asks, getting a nod in response, “Okay.  You take me, Lonnie, and Perfuma up.  Everyone else takes the stairs and gets out as fast as they possibly can.” 

She doesn’t like leaving anyone behind, and she likes splitting a couple up in a situation like this even less.  But as a simple matter of practicality, Perfuma’s abilities are the most versatile on offense and defense.  Scorpia grabs her wife in a hug and whispers something before releasing her hold.  Adora takes her hand, bringing her into the loose square where she stands opposite Glimmer, closes her eyes, and waits.

–

Adora scarcely has time to open her eyes before she’s closing them again, ducking as an explosion rips through the dirt a few feet away from her, arms coming up on instinct to shield her from the hail of debris.

If there’s anything Adora has forgotten in the past five years, it’s just how loud a war is.  Glimmer yells something to her, but it’s lost in the ringing of her ears and the muffled cracks of gunfire and explosions beyond that.  She figures it out a second later, though, as another shell hits the hastily-constructed plant wall that Perfuma has pulled over their heads.  At least somebody has situational awareness.

She’s finally able to get a good look around when the makeshift shield falls away.  The center of the city is in complete chaos, squads of armed guards pouring out of buildings to meet the clones that are already marching through the streets.  There’s something in the way that they handle their guns and the looseness of their formations that betrays that these people aren’t actually soldiers, or haven’t been in a long time.  They don’t stand a chance on their own, Adora realizes.

Something buzzes overhead, and Adora cranes her neck to look upwards.  It’s one of those shining white gunships, presumably the one that had just fired on them.  It turns sharply in the air and Adora braces for it to make another pass at them.  Instead, it rises, her eyes following it right up until it vanishes into the insides of a craft unlike anything that Adora has ever seen.

This must be the ship that Glimmer and Bow had talked about, she knows.  But if she didn’t have that grounding to work it out by process of elimination… she doesn’t even know if it would feel real.  It certainly doesn’t look like it is, impossibly vast planes of spotless white drawing to a sharp point in the front and flaring out to wings in the back.  It’s hard to gauge scale at this kind of distance, of course, but Adora realizes with a start that she’s been standing in it’s shadow ever since they emerged, the darkness blanketing the whole of the open space.

Lonnie is the first of their group to break off, charging across the square to take command of a group of soldiers and barely slowing her pace as she draws her sidearm to dispatch a pair of clones.  Perfuma zeroes in on another building nearby, using her magic to shield a group of evacuating civilians, even though she could probably take down a gunship blindfolded.

Adora turns to Glimmer, ready to ask what their plan is, or crack some stupid joke like they used to.  Instead, she finds empty space, whipping her head back around just in time to watch Glimmer rematerialize in the middle of a group of clones, swinging her staff wildly.

So Adora is on her own.

Fine.

Adora has never been great at improvising without help.  She had always relied on others for that, Catra first and then Bow and Glimmer later.  But she’s very capable of running around, hitting things, and making a general nuisance of herself.  So she settles on that, ramming through a flock of clones shoulder-first, sending several of them tumbling to the ground and scattering the rest.

She’s taking more hits than she should, the familiar sting of energy weapons glancing off her back and arms as she fights.  It doesn’t really matter, between the adrenaline and her healing factor, and based on the way the locals are cheering, she’s the only one who’s noticed the sloppiness in her movement.  Even so, she needs to do better.  She has to.

Adora picks up the pace as she continues clearing out the square.  She’s getting the hang of it again, but she can feel five years worth of rust every time she follows through just a little too hard, every time she finds herself out of breath.  Still, she presses forward.  Every time she feels herself slipping, she thinks about the couple on the train, about the children playing by the wall, and it’s more than enough to keep her pressing forward.

It’s not much use, though— every time she takes out a clone, more flood into the open space, likely pouring out of the transports that she can see flitting back and forth from the ship that still looms overhead.  She pushes and pushes, but every swing comes out just a bit slower than the last one, every breath just a bit more labored.  She’ll keep fighting until her legs collapse out from under her, of course— it’s not like Adora knows how to do anything else.  

Just as she’s thinking that, for the first time in ages, that might not be enough, her thoughts are pierced by the familiar whistle of an arrow flying over her head, making impact and burying a trio of clones in rapidly-hardening foam just a second later.

Adora grins as she turns around to see Bow (and the rest of the princesses) charging into the open space and spreading out.  She can’t stop fighting, unwilling to gamble on the odds of being able to keep going if she loses her momentum, but she falls back a bit to focus on drawing fire and catching a few stray clones, allowing herself at least some respite as the fresh reinforcements work on securing the space.

The princesses mostly choose to work alone, or with a partner who complements their abilities (Mermista and Frosta are a frankly terrifying combination, and Adora is silently thankful that they’re on her side as she watches Mermista break a series of pipes as fuel for Frosta’s ice walls and projectiles).  They’re far from the cohesive, unified force that Adora remembers working so hard to become.  As she absentmindedly brings her fist down on another clone, she finds herself turning over the same question that had been nagging her at the meeting the day before: what happened while I was gone?

Still, it’s enough.  With more people to bear the load they make quick work of clearing the square, even with the lack of coordination, allowing Lonnie’s troops to set up a makeshift base of operations. It frees up Adora to do the one thing that she’s always been good at: push forward .

She doesn’t intend for a few squads of soldiers to follow her as she begins her march down the street alongside the elevated train tracks, but she supposes she shouldn’t really be surprised. She’s not really going to complain, either.  Adora feels like she’s back in her element now, the sword’s weight growing more and more comfortable in her hands with every block that they clear, unearthing a whole host of skills and instincts that she could never forget no matter how hard she tries.

The adrenaline keeps driving her forward, slicing gracefully through clone after clone, leaving the rest of them for the soldiers to mop up.  She doesn’t realize at first how rapidly they’re falling behind her until she emerges into an intersection, only to find them just barely crossing the previous street.  She stops and ducks under an awning to catch her breath, in absence of anything to punch in her immediate vicinity.

There’s a flash of motion in her peripheral vision.  It’s the sort of thing that she’d normally filter out without giving it a second thought.  Maybe it's another long-buried instinct that allows this one into her perception.  Maybe she’s just tired.  It doesn’t really matter, does it?  Either way, she turns to her left just in time to watch something launch itself into a squad that had been travelling parallel to her own path.  She can hear the screaming and the whine of energy weapons and she knows she should run over to help but something keeps her frozen where she stands as she watches it happen.  The soldiers are bunched up too tight for her to see whatever is attacking them, save for the occasional glimpse of an arm lashing out at someone.  After what seems like an eternity, they back away enough for Adora to get a good look and—

It’s her .

Any lingering doubt in her mind vanishes as Adora watches the scene unfold, torn in half by the simultaneous confirmation of her wildest hopes and greatest fears.  Because while this is undoubtedly Catra, there’s so much wrong about her.  Catra’s movements have always been quick and graceful in battle, using her agility to pick her opponents apart with a flurry of smaller, lighter strikes instead of a singular overwhelming one (it was why she had always been better than Adora hand-to-hand, even if she refused to showcase it in training for some reason).  Now, she watches as Catra… staggers , almost, shrugging off the hits that scorch her clean white bodysuit.  Her wild mane trails behind her as she lunges for another soldier, her right arm seeming to melt right through his armor before launching him into a wall with a sickening crack as it deforms from the impact, implying a level of force that even Adora would struggle to muster up.  She still has that same, shimmering darkness that had consumed her entire right side the last time Adora saw her, glowing faintly purple as she lurches into the shade of a building.

Adora has seen her fight like this once in their entire lives together, when she was very young and backed into a corner by a few older cadets.  It confirms the same feeling she had gotten from the pictures: This is what Catra looks like when she’s scared .

“Catra?” She asks quietly, unsteadily; savoring the feeling of those two syllables settling into their old home in her throat.

There’s no hint of a response.  Catra remains frozen in the middle of the carnage, staring at her own claws like the rest of the world doesn’t even exist.  She just didn’t hear me , Adora tells herself.  There are other possibilities, of course, but Adora refuses to dwell on them.  She didn’t hear me.  That’s all.

“ Catra!” She’s louder this time, pouring every drop of strength she has into  the cry that itself from her throat and cuts through the noise of the battlefield.

Everything goes silent for a moment, still except for a near-imperceptible twitch in the tip of Catra’s ear.  Adora takes a single, unsteady step forward, already reaching out her free hand like it might be enough to close the distance between them.  Catra turns slowly, her legs shaking and her left arm gripping her right like she’s either in pain or trying to still its movement, and finally locks eyes with Adora, her only visible pupil blown wide in surprise, fear, sadness, or some mixture of all three.

Adora could almost swear that she sees a flicker of that perfect sky-blue in the darkness before everything comes crashing down around them.

She barely has time to dive out of the way as a missile hits the elevated track over her head, ducking and covering her ears against the thundering noise as it breaks apart and falls, huge chunks of concrete crashing indiscriminately through buildings and roads.  She’s coughing from the smoke and dust filling her throat, she can barely see two feet in front of her, but she doesn’t care.  Adora pushes ahead, blindly picking her way over the rubble purely on feeling in places where the smoke is too thick, calling out for Catra until her voice goes hoarse from the smoke and the shouting.

But when the air is clear again, there’s no sign of Catra save for the remains of her handiwork scattered across the ground.  Adora expects to see footprints, or a tail slipping around a corner, anything to prove to herself that she isn’t crazy and give her a trail to follow, but she gets nothing.

In her singular focus, it takes Adora a minute to realize that she’s truly, completely alone, no soldiers behind her nor clones in front of her.  Pulled by the gut feeling that something is off, Adora turns on her heel and starts running back towards the city center, her pulse pounding with her ears in time with her heavy footsteps.

She finally gets a clear view of the sky as she emerges from the narrow streets, watching all the transport craft swarm like insects around the ship before slipping inside one by one . The ship itself is getting smaller , she realizes, retreating into the upper atmosphere.  And then she blinks.  The ship is gone by the time she opens her eyes, likely using the same cloaking technology that’s allowed them to stay hidden in orbit for the past month.

It doesn’t make any sense.  Less than half an hour ago, they had been struggling to hold this one, tiny portion of the city, and now they’re just… retreating.  Adora turns to Glimmer, finding what she’s sure is a mirror of the visible confusion on her own face, as the other princesses mill around somewhat aimlessly.

“What the fuck ,” Glimmer asks quietly as Bow walks up to join them, all three still looking up at the sky like it might make the ship reappear.  “Were they after something specific, or—”

The thought hits Adora and Glimmer at the same time, judging by the beginnings of panic forming on her face and the way she reaches out to grab Adora and Bow by the arms before any of them have a chance to speak.

It takes a moment for Adora’s eyes to adjust to the darkness again, finding herself back at the bottom of the mines.  At first, she can only see a few feet in front of her, enough to make out the unconscious guards sprawled on the floor.

Glimmer is already swearing as she charges into the cell, or what remains of it.  They hadn’t even bothered opening the door, instead opting to simply cut straight through the metal.

And save for the shattered plexiglass crunching under Adora’s feet and a few papers on the desk, the cell is empty.

Chapter Text

Adora’s boots pound on the cobblestone in time with her frantic heartbeat as she runs down the street.  She’s alone, no sound reaching her ears except her own footsteps echoing up and down the canyon of shifting buildings.  She knows she’s in the Fright Zone— the forge looming in the distance is enough for her to determine that— but the details are… blurry, anything outside of her direct path seeming to change if she looks away or thinks too hard about it.

It feels like she’s been running forever, but she doesn’t know where she’s supposed to be going.  This is the only thing she knows, really, running block after block, her legs never seeming to tire.  She can’t do anything else.

Adora keeps running until the buildings on either side of her literally fall away, sinking into the ground to reveal an intersection that she could swear hadn’t been in her path a moment ago.  The ground feels more solid here, the sword heavier in her hands as some unspeakable dread in the back of her mind tugs her down, the crushing pressure of inevitability bearing down on her shoulders.

Her head snaps to the left before the motion has even entered her field of vision.  Catra lands in the middle of the street about a block away from her and pauses there, hunched over and frozen like a statue, her wild, matted hair obscuring most of her body just like it had when they were kids.  It looks like she’s waiting for something, and maybe she is.  The universe is empty save for the two of them, contingent on them playing the parts they know they have to.

This time, though, Adora doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t try to call out.  Adora summons all of the strength that she can possibly muster, scraping the bottom of the barrel until her feet tear free of their paralysis and propel her forward.  She runs harder than she ever has in her life, each shaking step carrying her home even as her legs threaten to give out from under her along with the ground itself.

She’s close now, lungs burning as her breath comes short and harsh.  If Catra can hear her, she doesn’t show it, still hunched over on her knees with her claws digging into the dirt.  This close, she can see the burn marks and streaks of blood that mar the unfamiliar white bodysuit Catra is wearing.  Some of them are old, sinking into the fabric like scar tissue.  Some of them are very, very fresh.

Catra still doesn’t react when Adora slows her pace, but at this distance she can see that Catra isn’t as still as she thought— she’s shaking, ever so slightly, her claws digging into the ground an attempt to brace herself against the tremors rolling through her body.

Adora can hardly breathe around the lump that forms in her throat at the realization.  Two years of war and five of grief have done nothing to dull Adora’s instincts, nor to soften the anger that boils in her stomach at the idea of anyone hurting Catra like that.  She’ll make them regret it, later.  But right now her focus is singular, a knife cutting through the fog of dissociation— Catra is scared, and hurt, and close enough to touch.

So Adora reaches out.

Adora loses focus for a moment as the frizzy edges of Catra’s hair scratch lightly across the tips of her fingers, marveling at the simple fact of physical contact with Catra after so, so long deprived of it, so many mornings waking up to the unshakeable feeling of emptiness.  Adora closes her eyes, allows herself to release a breath she didn’t realize she had been holding for five years.  For just a split second, all is right in the universe.

She doesn’t realize her mistake until the trap has already been sprung.  

Catra’s arm lashes out, gripping Adora’s wrist hard enough to bruise, and leverages her own momentum to drag her forward until she loses her footing.  It’s a classic mistake, really, the same way that she had always managed to beat Adora in hand-to-hand training.  Adora hits the ground hard, her head swimming from the impact and the breath rushing from her lungs as Catra scrambles on top of her and plants a knee in her gut.

Their surroundings have disappeared now.  No city, no soldiers, no clones.  The entire world narrows down to just Catra and Adora, cloaked in shadow.  She expects Catra to crack an awful, taunting pun, gloat about her inevitable victory, say anything , really— she would give anything just to hear her own name in those low, lilting tones again.  Catra says nothing, just grins down at her, teeth bared, as she shifts her grip to take Adora by the neck, the tips of her claws pressing just hard enough that Adora can feel the warm beads of blood forming in the wounds.

Catra’s blackened arm hangs at her side, hands flexed and claws extended like she’s contemplating a strike.  Why hasn’t she ended it yet? Adora wonders as she studies Catra’s features. She finds a spark of something— recognition, maybe— in her unobscured eye.  It’s not much, but it's enough for Adora to latch onto, to give her hope.  She’s too far gone to recognize the words pouring out of her own mouth, Catra’s claws drawing just a bit more blood from her neck with every plea. 

For a moment, she’s making progress, Catra’s grip loosening as her left eye softens.  Adora even allows herself to smile, watching Catra’s face twitch as she tries to mirror the gesture.  But the twitch grows until it takes her entire body, magnifying into a full-fledged convulsion as Catra screws her eyes shut and hunches her shoulders in an attempt to brace herself, claws digging into Adora’s neck with renewed strength.

Adora feels a pit open up in her stomach when Catra opens her eyes, revealing the same sickening neon-green that she had seen in the hordes of clones.  She wants to cry, to scream, but it takes all her effort to keep drawing shallow breaths that are barely enough to sustain her.  She’s forced to simply lay there and watch , helplessly, as the darkness slowly spreads and consumes Catra’s face, washing away all of her features into the black, a void in the shape of something Adora once knew better than she knows herself.

The darkness consumes Catra’s entire body, and then, with agonizing slowness, begins to creep down her remaining arm.  Adora’s gaze shifts down, watching it draw closer and closer until it's close enough that it passes out of her field of vision, forcing her to just imagine.  She can feel when it reaches the tips of Catra’s claws, the borders of her own mind going fuzzy as a strange burning sensation spreads through her, numbing her from the inside out.

Adora looks down at her own hands, her mouth going dry as she watches the corruption pass her elbows and climb up her wrists.  It’s a fight to stay conscious, now, every breath sapping just a little bit more of her strength as her vision begins to wobble.

She manages one last glance at Catra’s piercing, unfeeling eyes before she surrenders to the black.

Adora is drowning.  She gasps for air as she thrashes, struggling against the pressure weighing her down, but it’s too much, every motion consuming the meager amount of air that she managed to bring in with the preceding breath and then some.

She can hear muffled voices, somewhere above the water, but it's so, so far away.  If she focuses, wills herself to stop thrashing, maybe she can—

“Adora?” Bow’s voice is steady, calming in a way that Adora knows means he’s incredibly stressed, “Hey, it’s okay.  You’re safe.  Just breathe with me, okay?”

Breathing is… still a bit of a stretch, honestly.  But she manages to wrench her eyes open with no small amount of effort.  When she does, she finds the world tilting on its axis, the cold, hard surface of a table pressed against the side of her face.  She figures out which way is up and finds Bow, a visible wave of relief washing across his face as they make eye contact.

“I’m going to help you up, okay?”  Adora can’t muster a response, but a moment later she feels strong, gentle hands on her shoulders, easing her upright where she can slump against the back of her chair.  Someone shoves a hot mug of tea into her hands, the warmth giving her something to ground herself with, concentrating on the way that it feels against her palms, the steam drifting up to her face as she breathes in, spreading the warmth through her whole body.

“Nightmare again?”

Adora takes a sip of her tea and nods softly, earning herself a squeeze from Bow.

“I figured.   Come on, let’s get you upstairs so you can get some rest, okay?”

“No,” Adora’s voice feels rough in her throat, like she had been screaming for someone.  Which is probably exactly right, she realizes.  “I just… I’ll feel better when we solve this, okay?  I don’t think I can sleep until then.”

It’s true— Adora hasn’t been able to close her eyes without seeing Catra for the last week, the visions getting more and more distorted (and horrifying) every time.  Her attempts at real sleep have been even worse , rarely lasting more than a few hours before she wakes up with her sword in hand and Catra’s name lodged in her throat.

Passing out at the table is a new low, though.  She knows she’s running on fumes.  Even Adora can admit that she needs the rest.  It’s just her luck, of course, that the one time she’s able to acknowledge that is the time that she physically can’t.

“I’m gonna go pull some more records.” Adora shrugs his hand off her shoulder and tries to ignore the concerned look that he and Glimmer share as she pushes herself to her feet, shooting down their unvoiced objections with a pointed glare, “I’m fine .”

Adora doesn’t drop her carefully constructed expression until she’s shielded by one of the stacks of boxes hastily arranged around the table, turning her face up to let the sun streaming through the skylight wash over her.  Under different circumstances, she imagines that she’d find the library peaceful, a nice place to come and spend the night sometimes.  Bow’s fathers have done their best to make them all comfortable, of course, but there’s only so much they can do to shield the place from the constant, low-grade panic which has become the background radiation of the entire planet for the past week.

Adora didn’t really have a destination in mind when she got up — ‘getting more records’ was a transparent lie, and all three of them knew it.  Instead, she makes a winding circuit through racks of dusty scrolls and fading artifacts in an attempt to dislodge the lingering tension that still grips her muscles.

The worst part has been the silence, the waiting .  It almost would have been easier if the attack on the Fright Zone had been the first move in a sustained offensive, because that would at least give people something to fight, somewhere to direct their anxieties.  This feels… taunting, almost, to make a huge, visible move, catching civilians in the crossfire and then leaving them to stew in their fear for who knows how long.  The princesses, too, have all withdrawn to their own kingdoms, fearful of grouping up and falling into another trap. The only sign of anything is a few captains from the Salinean Navy who reported sightings of a few strange crafts on the fringes of their territory, but those are inconclusive, to say the least.

Adora makes her way back to the table, brushing past Glimmer and Bow as she goes to flip the whiteboard to the other side, giving herself a literal blank slate to work with.  She’s sure that they have the information they need, somewhere in the endless boxes of Horde files piled up around the table.  There’s just… some angle, some perspective that they’re missing.

How would Catra do this? The question comes to Adora’s mind unbidden, making her shudder as it dredges up the remnants of her nightmare.  It’s… not a bad approach to take, though.  Catra had always been the better tactician between the two of them, better at the kind of big-picture thinking that quickly overwhelmed Adora (and Adora, in turn, had a near-obsessive eye for the minutiae that Catra found too frustrating to deal with).

Adora can practically hear Catra’s voice in the back of her head, and she can’t help the small smile that tugs at her lips as she sifts through the mess of papers.  Despite everything, Adora can feel the tiny, long-buried spark of hope in her heart, ready to explode into a forest fire given enough kindling.  Catra is alive , the simple fact setting Adora’s body alight in a way that she hasn’t felt in years, and the best efforts of the darker corners of her brain are nowhere near enough to dull it.

Adora finds the piece of paper she’s looking for, affixing it in the upper-left corner of the board: a list of every place that the Horde had recovered First Ones artifacts, compiled by Glimmer from the absolute disaster that was Hordak’s personal archives.  Hordak had known about it, so it had to be on this list somewhere, right?

The next document she tapes up is a similar list, but from Bow’s fathers.  Adora thinks that she can safely eliminate all of the places that appear on both lists, striking them out in bright red slashes with her pen as she cross-references them.  When she’s done, they’re left with about six possibilities.  A much narrower field, to be certain, but still too many for them to check efficiently, especially with the unfathomable consequences of guessing incorrectly.

There are still two things nagging at Adora. There’s a lingering question in her mind, and a clue that she can’t quite square up with the rest of her information.  

First, the question: If Hordak knew about the controls this whole time, why didn’t he use them?   Adora’s first thought is that he needed her, or at the very least her sword… but when he got his hands on it, he tried to build his own portal.  She chews the inside of her lip as she thinks it over, writing the question below the lists so she can keep it in her view, and moves on.

Catra had been so scared when I threatened to send her there — Adora’s blood runs like fire in her veins, the plastic of the marker straining in her grip as she remembers Hordak’s voice.  She’s replayed it over and over in her head all week, her rage stamping every twist of his inflection into her mind in perfect detail.

Adora delves deep in her memory, sifting through the myriad of ghost stories that she and Catra had been told, passed down from older cadets under the dim glow of a flashlight.  She’s looking for a place , so she can discard most of them right off the bat.  The mines are obviously out, which leaves—

Oh.

Adora turns to look at the pin-covered map on one of the library’s central walls, zeroing in on something she had glossed over before: a swathe of ocean far off the southern coast of the Fright Zone, circled in faded marker and denoted only with a small question mark.

“I think I know where they’re going,” Adora says, Bow and Glimmer snapping to attention, “but we’re going to need a ship.”

“Blowtorch?” Entrapta asks, prodding Adora from her thoughts with a strand of hair.

Adora fumbles through the box of tools at her feet, her hands settling on a cylindrical object that she’s pretty sure is a blowtorch.  Just to be sure, she holds it at arm’s length, turning her face away as she nervously depresses the trigger.  She tries to suppress a yelp at the noise it emits as the flame rushes forth, but she doesn’t do a very good job of it.

Satisfied with the fact that she’s correct (and wanting to get it out of her hands as quickly as possible) she presses the tool into the still-dangling tail of Entrapta’s hair, watching as she fluidly curls around it, pulls it up, and tosses it into her hand.

“Thank you! I’ll let you know if I need anything else!” Entrapta calls, her cheerful, sing-song voice echoing out from the panel that she’s buried herself in, apparently (thankfully) too engrossed to notice Adora’s mishap.

At least somebody is having fun.  Adora pulls her jacket tight around her waist, taking a swig of water from the canteen at her side as she steps back out of the shade and into the blazing sunlight, sand crunching under her feet.

The first time that Adora had seen Mara’s ship, she hadn’t been able to comprehend how large it was, half-entombed in a millennia of sand.  It’s just as incomprehensible in its exhumed state, something that Adora would call impossible if that word hadn’t lost all meaning for her in the past week and a half, but it’s there all the same.

Adora paces through the sand, more for the sake of keeping herself moving than anything else.  She’s been doing a lot of that the past few days, assigning herself arbitrary objectives in an attempt to stave off the helplessness.  She knows that it’s fine, really, that there hasn’t been anything that she’d be remotely equipped to help with after she and Perfuma finished excavating the ship from the dunes, most of the remaining work falling squarely into Entrapta and Bow’s wheelhouse.

Adora takes some solace from the fact that Glimmer is in the same boat.  She’s been bouncing back and forth to Brightmoon, burdened with the heavy load of preparing a kingdom for a war that everyone thought was in the past.  But she spends every free moment here, dragging whatever administrative tasks she can handle remotely.  She and Adora have spent hours playing cards on the ship’s bridge, enjoying the tenuous peace that’s settled between them.  Adora doesn’t really know what they are, at this point— neither of them have really had the time or energy to talk about anything— but Adora would be a liar if she said she wasn’t happy for the company, the prospect of returning to her self-imposed exile becoming less appealing by the minute.

Glimmer isn’t here right now, though.  She’s tied down with some particularly contentious meetings in Brightmoon, leaving Adora unaccompanied save for her own thoughts and the already-fading tracks in the sand behind her.

Adora finishes her wide circuit around the ship and turns inward, the steel toes of her boots clanking against the metal of the boarding ramp, dread twisting deep in her gut and rising in her throat as she crosses the threshold into darkness.  She lays a hand on the cool metal of the wall to guide her way, fingers tracing the precisely-carved grooves that decorate its surface.  In the silence broken only by the sound of her own breathing, she still can’t shake the feeling that the ship is haunted, somehow, or maybe even a ghost unto itself, uncannily preserved against the ever-shifting landscape, an anomalous cluster of sharp lines against the endless smooth sand.

It’s as natural a place for her as any, Adora supposes.

Adora drifts into the kitchen, letting her eyes adjust to the lack of light as she observes the tools and supplies scattered over the long-forgotten countertops, a strange contrast in this place which has been almost perfectly preserved by the desert landscape for a thousand years.  It feels wrong, almost, like she’s intruding on a grave site, disturbing something that should have been left to rest beneath the sands for the rest of time.

In all practical terms, Adora knows it’s an utterly pointless thing to worry about.  Still, she can’t shake thoughts of the ship’s former occupant from her mind as she passes through to the bridge.  Unlike the pitch black hallways, the bridge is flooded with an uncanny half-light. filtering through the shades attached to the massive front viewport.  She steps forward past the command chair, the back of her eyelids still etched with the ghost that had occupied it last time she was here.

What would Mara think about her, if she was here?  Adora turns the question over in her mind as she settles in the chair, tipping her head back to meet the solid metal, eyes shut in a futile search for some hint of her predecessor’s presence.  She can see herself from several angles at once, a multitude of fractured interpretations of the arc of her life.  Maybe she would feel grief, watching another girl consumed by the inevitable, terrible weight of her role; anger, at how close Adora came to escaping, only to willingly throw herself back into its death-spiral orbit; or any other of the dozens of possible reactions.  It’s a stupid question, of course, one she could never possibly get an answer to.  So Adora finds a better one: What would she want Mara to think about her?

“I’m sorry,” Adora’s voice passes near-silently into the still air of the bridge, unable to stave off the sense that someone might hear her in the empty ship. “I— I hope you’re proud of me.”

The words have barely passed Adora’s lips before she gets an answer to her prayers: the abrupt, solid thunk of something falling into place in the engine room, light pouring through the veins on the floor as the holographic controls around the edges of the bridge flicker to life for the first time in living memory.

“ Administrator detected.  Welcome, She-Ra.”   The wobbly, synthesized voice seems to come from everywhere at once, Adora’s heart leaping into her throat for a moment at the familiarity.  Light Hope is dead , Adora reminds herself, hands twitching as she remembers the feeling of layers of silicon and crystal crunching under her blade. 

Adora has barely recovered before she’s startled again, this time by Entrapta’s excited shriek echoing through the halls, giving Adora a half-second to brace herself before she comes storming onto the bridge, followed quickly by Bow.

“That’s my girl,” Entrapta whispers as she gently pats one of the control surfaces, “I knew you could do it, Darla!”

Adora looks to Bow and raises an eyebrow, getting a shrug in return.  Having a name for the ship helps… an embarrassing amount, if Adora is being honest.  It makes it feel like it’s actually theirs , instead of belonging to the myriad of ghosts that haunt it.

Even with the newly-christened ship operational, there’s still so much to do.  Adora busies herself with loading supplies and re-installing the panels that are too heavy for anyone else to lift.  Glimmer arrives just in time to join Adora in supervising from the ground as Bow and Entrapta take Darla for a shakedown flight to make sure that all (or at least most ) of her systems are still working after so long.

Darla flies unlike anything Adora has ever seen, effortlessly swooping and turning over the desert landscape, pointed hull piercing through the air like it's barely been a day since the last time it flew, the only visible hint of her long slumber remaining in the sand caked into the recessed surfaces of the metal.

“Okay,” Bow says, letting out a visible sigh of relief as he descends the ramp, “I think it’s safe to say that it works fine ,” he glances fearfully at Entrapta, who’s still bouncing up and down from the adrenaline of putting Darla through her paces with a whole assortment of loops and barrel rolls which were probably entirely unnecessary.  “We can take off tomorrow morning.  Glimmer, if you want to go back to—”

“ No. ” Glimmer interrupts, taking a firm step forward.

“Glimmer,” Bow says her name gently, laying a hand on her shoulder, “we’re flying a thousand-year-old spaceship into the most dangerous place on the planet, and very possibly walking into another ambush.  I just… I can’t let anything happen to you.  Especially not right now, okay?”

“I know ,” Glimmer bites back as she shrugs his hand off, stopping herself to take a breath before she continues, “and that’s exactly why you need all the help that you can get.  The palace will be fine without me for a day, and it’s not like I’d get anything done while I’m worrying about you.”

Bow looks to Adora, silently pleading for her to help, but she can’t muster much more than a shrug in return.  Glimmer has a point, admittedly.  But more than that, there’s clearly history here that she’s missing, yet another thing slipping through the five-year chasm in Adora’s relationship with the pair.  Their voices are both soft, still.  Adora has heard them have worse fights, but the edge of exasperation in both of them tells her that this is one that they’ve had repeatedly .

“Okay,” Bow relents, not wanting to play the unmovable object to Glimmer’s unstoppable force, “okay.  Get some sleep and we’ll take off in the morning.”

Adora paces the bridge, turbulence-induced shudders passing from the ship’s frame to the floor to her bones as Darla pierces the fog like a needle through cloth..

It should be here.  Should, in fact, be directly under them, at the coordinates Entrapta had managed to pull from the logs of the skiff Catra had attempted to use to send her to her death (A twist of fate that Adora would think was incredibly amusing, under different circumstances).  Instead, there’s nothing .  Nothing but an endless expanse of ocean violently churning beneath them and the storm around them, both equally ready to swallow the ship whole without a moment’s hesitation.  Their sensors are completely useless with the interference, spectral flickers of hope appearing and disappearing in the blink of an eye over the navigation console.  

They’ve been at this for hours now, painstakingly crawling over every inch of water, the limited visibility forcing them down to the absolute slowest the ship can go and hold its altitude.  Hours of dreadful, tense silence punctuated only by the steady click click click of Adora’s boots against the metal.

The ship lurches again, a rogue burst of wind taking it by surprise and sending Adora stumbling off balance as the floor slips out from under her.  She catches herself at the edge of the window, no worse for wear except a mildly-sprained wrist and the metallic taste filling her mouth.  She closes her eyes for a moment, placing both palms flat against the cool metal and forcing herself to just breathe for a second or two—

And opens them just in time to see something in the distance, an already-receding bolt of lightning flashing off metal for the briefest possible moment.

“ Darla! ” Adora barks, Glimmer and Bow jumping in surprise as the tension shatters, “Alter our heading!  Thirty degrees to the west, now! ”

The ship’s AI responds with a simple chime, the whole hull banking slightly to the left as the correction is applied.

“Adora?” Bow asks gently once he’s regained his composure, making his way across the bridge to her.  “What’s going on?”

“I— I saw something,” Adora’s voice wobbles, and she’s distantly aware that she must look absolutely fucking insane, a mess of dark circles and disheveled hair as she practically smushes her entire face into the window, body suddenly completely rigid.  “In the fog.  It’s… it’s probably nothing.  We can—”

Bow places a hand on her shoulder, still looking like he’s not entirely convinced that she isn’t hallucinating.  Fair enough , Adora thinks.  She isn’t entirely convinced it was real, either.

“It’s okay, Adora.  If you think you saw something, we can go check it out.”

Adora relaxes just the tiniest bit, choking down the knot forming in her throat, but doesn’t move her feet an inch, eyes straining to see like she could pierce the fog all by herself.  Bow doesn’t move either, a steadying presence at her side as the ship makes its way along the newly-charted course.  At some point, Glimmer silently appears in her peripheral vision, a warm hand laying over Adora’s on the control panel.

If she doesn’t look at the reflection in the window, Adora can almost pretend things are still like they used to be.

Adora’s heart pounds in her chest, gripping the controls for stability as the turbulence gets more intense.  They’re getting close to something , Adora can feel it in her bones.  She just wishes she knew what.

Then, after what seems like an eternity, Darla’s bow finally cuts through to clear air.

Adora’s mouth goes dry as she surveys the island beneath them.  According to the documents that she had managed to scrounge up from the library, this had been some kind of spaceport, a transportation hub sending ships just like theirs to far-flung destinations throughout the First Ones’ galaxy-spanning empire.

It’s… hard to believe that, looking at it now.  In the intervening millenia, the small mass of land has been completely overtaken by dense jungle, save for the occasional piece of jagged metal breaking through the canopy and littering the waters around the island.  Even in the absence of the fog, the sky is still consumed by dark clouds, seeming to spiral outwards from the towering spire at the island’s center that she knows must be their destination: the warp generator that had once been the beating heart of the place, a severed vein that had once connected Etheria to the rest of the universe.  Whatever happens, they can’t let Horde Prime get his hands on it.

They might already be too late for that, though.  Adora feels a chasm opening in her stomach, swallowing her heart as she strains to make out the details: dozens of pure white gunships perched on the beaches, the mothership surely not far behind them.  But there’s something wrong, Adora realizes.  Why would they land the ships there, instead of—

The whole ship shudders violently again as lightning arcs across the hull, throwing the bridge into darkness and sending Adora tumbling to the ground.  Panic rises in her throat as she feels the sensation of free-fall set in, but she forces it down.  They’re losing altitude fast .  In the sunlight filtering into the bridge, Adora can see her goal, clear and defined as she formulates the plan.  She flails her arm blindly until she finds purchase on the ledge by the window and slowly, painstakingly dragging herself to her feet as she tries to ignore Glimmer and Bow screaming behind her.  The next part is, relatively speaking, easy.  Adora sets her feet wide, keeping her center of gravity low as she hauls herself forward, like she’s twelve again and trying to win a vicious game of tug of war.

Her goal is within reach, now: a set of emergency manual controls that have emerged from the polished metal.  Adora takes a deep breath, twists her body to face them and pushes off of the railing.  For a brief moment, it feels like she’s floating, her own stumbling momentum and the ship’s rapid descent combining to give the feeling that time itself has frozen, leaving everything hanging in the air.

And then Adora’s hands latch onto the controls, her whole body coming to an abrupt stop as she slams into the wall hard enough that she knows she’s going to wake up sore tomorrow, if at all.  But that’s a problem for future Adora, she reminds herself.  Current Adora has a spaceship to learn how to fly, and a rapidly-approaching ocean ready to break them against the rocks.

It takes a few false starts (Adora would like to have some serious words with whoever decided that pushing the stick forward makes the ship go down ), but after a few very, very tense moments, Adora manages to get Darla leveled out into something approximating a steady glide, her knuckles white around the stick as she guides the ship towards a reasonably-sheltered section of beach.  It’s not an ideal landing spot, but it’s close and unoccupied by anyone who’s likely to try to kill them, so it’ll have to do.  Adora threads the needle, silently pleading with Darla to work with her as she nudges them closer to the ground, engines passing a hair’s breadth away from the massive shards of metal embedded in the sand.

She finally lets go of the stick after they’ve skidded to a halt, collapsing over the controls as she takes in air in gasping, heaving breaths.  Her ears are ringing, her legs barely holding her up as she finally processes just how close they came to disaster.  She tries not to think about the fact that the last few minutes were probably the least dangerous thing they’ll do today.

Glimmer comes up behind her, saying something that Adora can’t quite make out in her dazed state.  Adora gladly leans on Glimmer’s shoulder when it’s offered, half-staggering through the darkened ship and down the ramp, meeting entrapta and bow on the beach.

“She thinks something at the center of the island is causing the storm that took out the electronics,” Bow says, inclining his head towards where Entrapta is half-buried in the ship, “She should be able to get them working again, but… there’s no guarantee it won’t happen again if we try to leave.”

“So we have no choice but to go in,” Glimmer fills in the implication that he had left unspoken, and Bow nods solemnly in return.

Adora slips herself free of Glimmer’s shoulder, recovered enough to stand on her own now.  Her whole body is buzzing with anxiety, dread twisting in her stomach as she turns to look inward.  The island had seemed so small from the air.  From down here, it feels incomprehensibly vast, the impenetrable forest opening up like a mouth before her.  There’s no way that all the stories she was told about this place are true, she reminds herself.  Even so, she has Glimmer, and Bow, and Entrapta with her.  She’ll be fine.  She’ll be fine .

Still, Adora takes the sword in her hand, letting the familiar weight ground her as she raises it to the sky, letting it flow over her like water until it solidifies and the whole beach is bathed in radiant, golden light.

“Okay,” Adora swallows, allowing She-Ra’s stronger voice to overtake her own, “Let’s get moving, then.”

Adora is the first one to step across the treeline, her empowered form unable to hide the goosebumps that spread across her skin as the cold darkness washes over her.  Glimmer follows immediately behind, pooling a small ball of purple light in her hands and holding it up.  It doesn’t do them much good, though, the thick blanket of shadow swallowing it up at a rate that Adora thinks shouldn’t be possible.  Bow lets Entrapta through and then takes up the rear, nervously twisting the arrow that’s already resting in his weapon.

Adora swings the sword in light, broad strokes, branches bending and snapping as she pushes through the brush.  The jungle isn’t silent by any means.  But something about the way that sound carries is… off, throwing Adora’s finely-tuned senses for a loop.  Entrapta’s chattering into her tape recorder sounds like she’s miles away, while something crunching through the underbrush on Adora’s right sounds entirely too close for comfort.  Adora tightens her grip on the sword and presses forward.  The faster she moves, the faster they can—

Adora’s head whips around before she can even consciously understand the noise of Bow firing an arrow, the rest of her body a half-step behind with the whoosh of it sailing past its target: a hovering white disc, no larger than a few plates, darting through the treeline and into the small clearing.  It turns on a dime, circling around them and surveying the group with a singular neon-green eye as Bow loads his next arrow, zooming back into the trees just in time to avoid the shot.

Fuck .

The rational part of Adora knows that the damage is already done, that the best thing they can do is keep pushing forward and be mindful of a potential ambush.  Maybe it's the lingering adrenaline from her near-death experience, maybe it’s the environment, or maybe it’s the fact that Adora’s brain is just starting to feel a little fuzzy, thoughts slipping through her fingers before she can process them (it’s probably just the stress, she thinks).  Either way, the result is the same: Adora bolts after the drone, bringing her arms up to push branches away from her face as she crashes through the treeline.  It’s not much of a chase.  She catches up barely a few paces beyond the clearing, snatching the drone out of the air and crushing it easily in her hand, shards of its casing falling to the ground as it sputters and dies.  Her prey dealt with, Adora turns around to rejoin her friends—

And finds only darkness staring back at her.

Adora’s breath is already coming short and rapid as she retraces her steps, or at least what she thinks are her steps, and finds herself in a clearing.  She thinks it’s the same one she left, but it’s empty, and she can’t shake the feeling that things have… shifted, slightly.

“Glimmer?” Adora tries not to let her voice shake as she calls out.  She knows that making this much noise is a risk, gives away her position to who— or what—ever happens to hear it.  But it’s all she has, right now.  “Bow?”

She doesn’t even receive an echo in return.  Instead, there’s only deafening, crushing silence, punctuated by the chittering of some small animal in the trees above, like the island itself is mocking her.

“Remember, if you’re separated from your squad in the wilderness, the most important thing you can do is sit and wait.  I know it’s hard, but trying to find them will make it harder for them to find you. ”  The voice of Adora’s survival training instructor echoes in her head.  It’s… sort of incredible to her that she still remembers, if she’s being honest.  But then again, how could she forget that day?  It was the first time she can remember being beyond the walls of the Fright Zone, dumped out in the border of the whispering woods with a compass and told to find her way back.

She hadn’t been alone that time, though. She had been with—

The sharp crack of a branch somewhere beyond her vision snaps Adora out of the memory, her hands clinging tighter to the sword’s hilt as panic rises in her throat.  Now isn’t the time to reminisce.  What Adora needs right now is a plan .

As much as Adora wants to stay put , to follow the most basic, fundamental rule that's been drilled into her for her entire life, she feels like this might be the one exception.  The stories she’s been told about this place are practically endless, full of dozens of contradictory details depending on who’s telling them.  The one consistent factor, it seems, is the fact that there’s no quicker way to get caught and killed than by making yourself a sitting duck.  If Adora wants to make it out of this, then she needs to move .

That leaves her with two choices.

She could try to make her way back out of the jungle, towards the beach where they had landed (or crashed , more accurately).  The rocky shore hadn’t exactly been pleasant, but relative to the rest of the island, it was the least threatening place she had ever seen in her life.  Undoubtedly the best option for her personal safety and ensuring her getting off the island in one piece.

It would be a great plan if she had any way of getting in touch with her friends and telling them what she was doing, but the tablet in her backpack is about as good as a paperweight right now.  And knowing Glimmer and Bow, they had probably begun mounting a search about five minutes after she ran off. (Not that they would be wrong to, she is, after all, extremely lost).

Stupid, stupid, stupid.   It’s her own damn fault that Glimmer and Bow have to look for her.  It was one drone, and it wasn’t like the Horde didn’t know they were there already, and now their entire mission and the whole planet is jeopardized because Adora never learned any impulse control.  And even further than that, they wouldn’t even be here if she hadn’t decided to go live in the woods for five years and leave the world completely unprotected.  If she could have just—

Focus.   Adora clenches her hands, folding her fingers in until the points of her fingernails rest on her palms, and digs , pressing evenly-spaced sets of crescent moons into each hand.  It’s not enough to draw blood, not even enough to leave a mark for very long with her healing, but she still revels in the way that the stinging pain sucks the air out of her lungs, draws her mind back into her own body.  It’s a bad habit she picked up from Catra years ago, just another among the hundreds of invisible, irrevocable ways that Catra has been imprinted across Adora’s very being.  Slowly, she eases her muscles, feeling her breathing slow to a steady rhythm.  Her palms still sting like a bitch, but the connection between sensation and action is enough for her to grab on to, dragging herself back into the real word

Adora’s stomach twists itself into a knot as she slowly processes what she has to do.  For the briefest of moments she entertains the idea of just… laying down, letting the forest claim her without resistance, a final completion of what she had tried and failed to do so many years ago.  It’s exhausting , after all, being so stubborn.  But she shakes the thought from her head almost as quickly as it arrives.  The only thing that she can do now is to push inward on her own, and hope that her friends know her well enough to expect that.

She doesn’t have a compass on her (not that it would do her much good, based on how the instruments on Darla had been acting), but she doesn’t need one.  Pushing up on her toes, she can just barely make out the multi-tiered pyramid at the center of the island looming over the treeline.

Tentatively, Adora starts forward, pushing herself into the darkness.  The impulsive side of Adora is telling her to start running, try to cover the distance as quickly as possible, but she knows that’s practically suicide here.  Instead she moves as lightly as she can in this form, one eye on the ground as she picks her way over anything that might give away her position.  It’s slow, tedious going, but it mostly works, her footfalls softened by whatever small patches of grass she can find as she keeps an ear open for threats.

She’s barely made it a hundred meters before she hears something rustle through the trees behind her, Adora’s whole body going rigid as she turns on her heel to look for the source of the sound.  She could swear she sees something glinting in the darkness, a few of the lower branches still swaying with residual energy. 

She’s probably just seeing things, she knows, the stress and the isolation finally getting to her.  Still, Adora straightens her back and squares her shoulders before she resumes her trek, hoping that whatever creature made the noise will decide to find some easier prey for lunch.

She still can't shake the feeling that she’s being watched as she moves on, some long-buried instinct screaming at her from the back of her mind, alarm bells ringing all through her body.  She can’t make out any sounds following her, or see anything in the darkness when she glances over her shoulder every other step.  But she’s flooded with an invisible, inalienable sense of presence , in a way she hasn’t felt since—

Adora physically shakes that line of thought from her head.  There’s no way.  Adora shoves it down and keeps moving forward, the sword’s blade wavering in front of her.

She doesn’t look when the sounds start again, doesn’t turn around as they draw closer.  She knows she’s being followed at this point.  Something has been stalking her through the forest since she got lost, and maybe even before that.  Adora looks up at the temple again— it’s barely grown on the horizon since she started, despite the fact that she’s been walking for at least an hour and a half, going by the position of the moon in the sky.  She tries to ignore the inconsistency and picks up the pace, fixating on her goal in an effort to calm her heart’s hammering against her ribcage as the tension in her body ratchets higher and higher.  It doesn’t work very well.

In the end, though, it’s not the sound that gives her pursuer away, or a flicker of shadow, or even a minute shift in the air.  In the end, Adora simply knows , twisting her body around and raising her sword just in time to block her attacker’s strike as they drop from the tree above her, few discernible features in the sharp-edged blur of motion.

She just barely manages to keep her guard up, the force of the blow resonating through her bones and sending her reeling.  Adora scrambles to get her feet under her again, spreading her legs to lower her center of gravity.  Once she’s recovered, she finally gets a good look at the thing that’s been stalking her for the past hour, and discovers that, no matter how improbable, her instincts hadn’t been lying.

Adora’s mouth goes dry as she finally takes in the sight of Catra up close and personal.  No amount of blurry photos or distant glimpses across battlefields could prepare her, really.  The corrupted side of Catra’s body seems to cast an unnatural purple glow in the darkness, and Adora realizes that her right arm has somehow been molded into a weapon, everything past the elbow tapering to a sharp-edged black spike.  From here, Adora can see everything : the streaks of blood matted into Catra’s fur (some of it likely her own, going by the tatters in her white uniform), the frayed, tangled mess of her hair, the frenzied look in her one unobstructed eye.

 There’s a moment of tense silence as they lock eyes while they both recover, Adora raising her sword anew and watching as Catra’s arm loses its shape, returning itself to something closer to what it should be, although still unnaturally sharp.  And then they’re charging, Adora using the half second before they collide to concoct her plan.  She knows how to fight Catra, how to read her.  She has, after all, been doing it her entire life.  It’s easy: Catra will feint to her right, try to get Adora to open up so she can get inside her guard with her dominant hand (although she’s impressively ambidextrous, Catra has always favored her left, ever since they were kids).  So Adora commits to Catra’s left, angling her body and counting her heartbeats, waiting for Catra to strike so she can—

Adora’s involuntary shriek echoes through the woods as a sharp pain— four sharp pains, really— lances through her body, followed quickly by a strange burning sensation on her left side just above her hip.  When she presses a shaking hand to the spot, it comes back wet, her costume already knitting itself back together.  It’s just a surface wound thankfully, and her healing should make quick work of it.   But if she had been just a few inches closer… Adora decides not to think about that.

She barely has a moment to recover before she hears Catra snarl, and then they’re launching at each other again.  Catra tries the same trick again, but Adora dodges, using the opening to drive a fist into Catra’s stomach.  She expects Catra to stagger from the force of the blow, maybe even open herself up to a followup strike big enough to subdue her, or at least to give Adora some space to formulate a better plan.

Instead, she regrets it immediately, her fist making contact just to the left of where the corruption has split Catra’s body.  Adora doesn’t know what she expected it to feel like— like nothing , maybe, as stupid as that sounds in retrospect.  But in the end, Adora feels like she’s rammed her fist into solid metal, a surprised hiss of pain escaping between her teeth as she pulls back, although the bruising in her fingers quickly recedes thanks to her healing.

Catra’s mouth pulls back, fangs bared in some vague approximation of a smile.  Adora half-expects Catra to take advantage of her surprise to strike again, but she makes a break for it instead, tail flowing behind her as she sprints deeper into the forest.  If Adora loses sight of her, she realizes, she almost certainly won’t be able to find her again.

Adora recovers at the last possible second, whispering an apology as she extends an arm and grabs Catra’s hair in her fist, earning a howl of pain in return.  It feels even worse than it looks, somehow, fraying pieces crunching like steel wool in Adora’s hand and thick mats preventing her from slipping her fingers in between.

Catra snarls when she turns around, ears pinning back and tail shooting up behind her as she tries to make herself look bigger.  Adora really, really doesn’t want to hurt Catra.  She pleads silently as she fights, begging Catra to give her even a hint of recognition, an offer of some way out of this that doesn’t require her to inflict more pain than Catra is clearly already suffering.  Instead, they just keep throwing themselves at each other again and again, neither of them landing more than a glancing blow.

Adora still can’t shake just how wrong this all feels, something in her heart snapping as she sees how much distance there is between the person in front of her and the one that she had known—  that she had loved —  growing up.  It’s Catra, yes.  She’s sure of that now.  But is anything left of the Catra she remembers?

Adora raises her sword to block another series of brutal, heavy strikes from Catra, her breathing becoming increasingly labored.  She can practically feel herself pulling apart at the seams, half her focus required just to keep her grasp on She-Ra while the other is consumed by making sure she doesn’t take a claw to anything vital.  It’s exhausting, unsustainable.  She’s bound to slip up sooner or later, and she does: Catra sees an opening and brings a vicious kick to Adora’s knee, sending her collapsing to the ground in a heap as she screams in pain.  And this time, Catra doesn’t hesitate, dropping to all fours and rocketing off into the jungle.

“ Catra!” Adora cries out involuntarily as she hits the ground.  If she didn’t know better, she could swear she hears Catra’s pace slow in response.  It’s only for a half-second, of course, but it’s enough , a tiny bit of kindling to keep the spark in Adora’s heart alive for a moment longer.

Adora scrapes the very bottom of her reserves, cutting through the ringing in her ears to conjure up a second wind of her own, her weakened leg wobbling underneath her as she pushes herself to her feet and takes off in a sprint of her own.  Catra has a significant head start on her— Adora can just barely make out her form slipping through the underbrush, more and more of her consumed by the shadows every moment— but she’s willing to gamble on beating her over the distance.

What she’s going to do when she does catch up, Adora isn’t sure.  All she knows is she has to keep going, no matter how much her legs ache or the rest of her is screaming that this is a terrible idea.  Catra is far enough ahead now that all Adora can see is her tail, almost invisible against the black.  Before long, even that disappears, leaving Adora nothing but the sound to follow as fire starts to spread through her lungs.

She slows a bit when the jungle goes silent except for her own footsteps, but she doesn’t stop , maintaining a steady jog as she follows the trail snapped branches and impressions in the foliage that marks Catra’s going.  Adora is tired, so tired, but she’s  kept herself going for far longer on far less, hasn’t she?

The ringing in Adora’s ears is almost deafening, now, the central pyramid that had seemed so distant when she started growing to tower over the treeline.  Adora knows she can’t possibly have covered that much distance, that the island must be playing tricks on her.  To anyone else, it would probably be… mildly disconcerting, to say the least.  For Adora, it’s a welcome reminder of the place she spent so long calling home, a small, much-needed bit of warmth spreading through her chest, if only for a moment.

Catra’s trail is getting fainter, now, the sparse clues requiring more and more of Adora’s effort to pick out from the noise.  She can feel herself slipping again, but all she knows how to do is keep running, the ache in her bones easily overpowered by the fear of letting Catra slip through her fingers again .  She can see a small clearing just ahead.  Maybe if she reaches it she can just—

Adora tries to pull back when she feels something catch around her ankle.  It’s already far too late, though, the vine pulling tight around her ankle and sending her falling for the second time today.  The second vine comes out of nowhere, seeming to move of its own accord, lashing around her wrist as she moves to break the fall and sending the sword flying out of her grasp, carried by its momentum.  And then she’s just Adora again, and she’s falling, coming down hard on her knees on the forest floor, more vines pulling her arms taut behind her back and leaving them to support her entire weight.

“Glimmer?” Adora calls out as loud as she can from her compromised position, completely abandoning any sense of caution. “Bow?” And then, desperately: “ Catra? ”

Her heart sinks when she doesn’t even receive an echo in response.  At this point, she would practically welcome a scruffer coming to make a meal out of her, or a horde of pookas, or anything, really.  Anything would be better than being alone right now.

Adora is aware, in some distant but unshakable way, that this is how it ends for her.  That this was always how it was going to end.  It had been stupid to try to run from it, really.

She makes one last desperate grab for the sword, contorting her arms and feeling her shoulders burning as she tries to reach the weapon that rests just a few short feet in front of her, runestone still glowing faintly in the darkness.  There’s a brief moment of hope as the tips of her fingers brush against the cold metal, coming tantalizingly close to salvation, but she fails to form any meaningful grip.  In the end, the only thing that she accomplishes is tightening the vines’ hold on her, a final one snaking into place around her neck and pulling tight, Adora’s own ability to stay upright the only thing standing between her and a swift, certain death.

Adora can feel the world start to get fuzzy around her as what’s left of the runestone’s glow fades, and she knows that it’s over.  She’s failed, in the most final and irreparable way possible.  There’s nothing she can do now, no possible way out, no point in continuing to fight.  Admitting it is… freeing, honestly.  Adora releases a long, slow breath as she lets the tension out of her muscles, her head sagging until all of her weight is on the makeshift noose.

It won’t be long now, she thinks.  She can see spectral images of Bow and Glimmer, conjured up by her own brain as her grasp on consciousness gets slippery, taking the opportunity to voice the last words that she’ll never get to say to them.  If she has one real, concrete regret, it’s that she lost so much time with them, never got the chance to repair their relationship in the way she would have liked.  Could she even have done it? It’s pointless to speculate now, really.  She hopes they don’t spend too long looking for her.

She sees the other princesses, too, and then Shadow Weaver (who she musters up just enough energy to spit at) and Angella.  And then, finally, Mara.  The older woman stands a few feet away, crouching down to run a hand along the length of the sword before she turns to look at Adora, tears pooling at the corners of her soft brown eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Adora mouths the words, although precious little air is passing her lips at this point, “I couldn’t finish what you started.  I hope— I hope the next one has it easier than we did.”

Just like that, Mara slips from her grasp too.  Adora can’t shake the feeling that there’s something, some one missing, but it’s probably just the lack of oxygen getting to her.  She feels light, unburdened, even her instinctual thrashing ceasing as her brain floods her bloodstream with endorphins.  Her vision has narrowed to a tiny point swimming in an all-consuming sea of black—

And in that point, she sees blue and gold shining in the darkness.

Adora can’t help the small, delirious smile that spreads across her face.  It’s only appropriate, she thinks, that Catra is the one to come carry her off.  She was always going to be the death of Adora one way or another, wasn’t she?

Catra moves lightly across the clearing, her head tilted inquisitively as her tail sweeps behind her.  There’s something… off about her compared to the previous visitors, but Adora writes it off.  Adora looks up as Catra approaches, hoping that her pleading eyes can communicate all the things that she doesn’t have the energy to say anymore, all the things that Catra deserved to hear.  She wants to tell Catra that she’s sorry, that she loves her too, that Catra was right about Shadow Weaver all along and she should have listened sooner.  This will have to do.

Catra is right in front of her now, stepping over the sword and dropping into a crouch.  Her eyes are narrowed, but soft as she looks Adora over, not predatory like they had been earlier.  A realization pierces through the ever-increasing haze in Adora’s brain, the inconsistency that she had noticed a moment ago finally falling into place— Catra’s body is still split down the middle, the corruption eating through her right side and half of her face, but both her eyes are clear , the same soft blue and gold that she fell in love with  That’s new.  This isn’t just an afterimage that her mind is projecting, which means…

Adrenaline floods through Adora’s system and sends her thrashing again, renewing her fight for breath.  She has to say something .

“Catra, please, I just— I’m so sorry, I can’t, I should have, I—” Adora bites her tongue before the incoherent rambling pouring from her mouth can reach the last two words.  She watches Catra’s ears go back, brow furrowing like they’re back in class and she’s trying to figure out a strategy problem.  Adora wants to kick herself.  One last chance to say something to Catra for real and she still can’t bring herself to do it.

Something changes in Catra’s expression then, a look of determination washing over her face as she raises an arm and reaches out, resting an upturned claw at Adora’s collarbone.

Adora feels that same resignation again— of course Catra wants to kill her.  It was foolish to expect anything else.  She seems intent on drawing it out, though, Adora’s breath hitching as the tip of her claw scrapes up past the hollow of Adora’s throat and along the centerline of her neck until she slows at the middle.  This is it.  Adora takes one last look at Catra and then screws her eyes shut tight, holding still and bracing for the sharp pain that she’s sure will end her at any moment.

Instead, she feels the blunt side of a claw press against her throat for just a moment before a heavy snap pierces the silence as the vine around her neck falls away.  Adora’s body kicks into overdrive, taking massive, gulping breaths as she tips her head back in relief.  She can feel her brain waking up again, slowly, all her senses returning to her, even more aware of them than she had been prior to her brush with death.

“ Thank you, ” Adora whispers, throat still hoarse from constriction, watching in awe as Catra’s lips turn up just a tiny bit into a smile that she thought she’d never see again.

Adora finds that tiny, flickering spark of hope in her chest and feels it explode , shoveling whatever kindling she can get into the ever-growing fire as Catra sets to work on the rest of the vines that wrap her body.  Catra is here, Catra is still Catra , and if Adora plays her cards right, she might be able to rescue her today.  They’ll still have to work out how to reverse whatever the portal (and Prime) did to her, of course, and figure out whether Catra even wants to go with her, but it’s a start, enough of a handhold for Adora to grab onto.

Adora opens her mouth to say something, but the words never make it out:  Catra senses the change in the air a half-second before she does, ears shooting straight up and her nose twitching as she pulls back from Adora abruptly.

Glimmer comes crashing through the air in a cloud of pink sparkles, bells echoing through the darkness and a high shriek grating against Adora’s ears as she throws bolts of magic with reckless abandon, one brushing close enough to Adora’s face that she can feel the heat on her skin as it passes.  Catra springs back up to a standing position, tail going bushy as she hisses at Glimmer before she slips back into the undergrowth.

Adora reaches out, tries to call out to her that it’s okay, but it’s already too late.  Glimmer picks up the sword in one hand, wraps the other around Adora’s free arm, and then suddenly she’s in the shade of a tree with Bow and Entrapta standing over her.

She remains like that for a moment, crouched in a dazed silence before the anger rising in her chest propels her to her feet. 

“What the fuck , Glimmer?” Adora’s voice is pure, unfiltered fury as she snatches the sword from Glimmer’s hand and returns it to her wrist, “I almost had her!”

Glimmer’s expression slips for a moment, her mouth falling open and her eyes widening in confusion, before solidifying into something harder, sharper.

“Oh, I’m sorry , Adora,” Glimmer sneers as she takes a forceful step forward, “I didn’t realize that saving your life would be so inconvenient for you,”

Adora holds herself rigid, stepping back in an attempt to avoid doing something she might regret later.  “I was doing just fine before you showed up,”

“Wh— she was trying to slit your throat!”

“She was cutting me free, Glimmer!” Adora blinks away the tears pricking at her eyes as she slumps against a tree, trying to focus on the feeling of the rough bark through her jacket, “If it wasn’t for Catra, I’d be dead right now.”

Glimmer’s face softens as she steps back, looking like she’s just finally starting to consider that she might have fucked up. “I’m sorry, I—”

“Forget it .”  Adora cuts her off through gritted teeth as she pushes herself off the tree and transforms again, “let’s get moving.  We still have a lot of ground to cover.”

Her slashes are heavier, now, every bit of pent-up anger and confusion tearing through branches and vines as the ringing in her ears gets stronger.  She had tried so hard to believe that Glimmer had changed while she was gone, that she might have learned literally anything .  Of course she hadn’t.  Adora came so, so close to the one thing that she’s ever truly allowed herself to want, and Glimmer took it from her.

Adora growls in frustration as she brings the sword down again, and immediately regrets it.  The last thing she needs is any of these people worrying about her.  It seems laughable now that she had thought she was ready to come back, that she could be anything more than what she was.  That’s all she’s ever been good at, isn’t it? Letting people down and getting herself hurt in the process.

“Wait,” Bow’s voice halts Adora in her tracks as the group’s footsteps fall silent, “what do you think did that ?” he asks, voice shaking just a bit as he nods towards something just off the path.

The clone is definitely, thoroughly dead, eyes drained of even the sickening green light that had once occupied them.  Adora briefly entertains the thought that she might have managed to pick up Catra’s trail again, but the corpse is far too intact for it to be her work.  The only signs of damage, in fact, are a pair of faintly glowing purple marks scorched into the fabric on its back, charred pieces of the uniform crumbling under Adora’s fingers.

“Can I get a closer look?” Glimmer asks from behind them, Adora and Bow parting to allow her through.  She approaches the corpse more hesitantly than Adora expects.  Glimmer clutches her staff in one hand so hard that Adora thinks it might snap, a dazed, unreadable expression on her face as she gently runs a finger along the length of the mark.  “It’s magic, but…”

Adora pulls back and glances at Bow, finding a mirror of her own concerned expression in his furrowed brow.  There’s something she’s not telling them, something falling into place in her head that they couldn’t even hope to understand.

“Whoever did this,” Glimmer says, voice flat as she rises to her feet, “I can track them.  Follow me?”

It’s phrased as a question, but Adora and Bow both know better than to challenge Glimmer after she has her mind set on something.  Glimmer holds her staff in front of her, adjusting her angle until it glows with a soft purple light, and then starts into the woods.  Adora and Bow fall in behind her, Entrapta running to catch up after she finishes prodding at the clone’s neck and muttering something into her recorder.

Adora looks to Bow again, raising her eyebrow and receiving a shrug in return.  It shouldn’t be too much of a detour, at least— they are still working their way inward, and it’s probably good to investigate if there’s a sorcerer powerful enough to do that running around (especially considering that this place was supposed to be totally deserted).  And there’s something that Adora can’t shake about the almost reverent way that Glimmer had examined the mark, something heartbreakingly familiar to Adora.  It would be selfish of her to not indulge Glimmer, just this once.

They find more bodies as Glimmer guides them, crouching down to examine each one in turn.  It has to be at least a dozen of them, by Adora’s count, perfect white uniforms all scored with the exact same purple marks as the first.  They’re so close to the center now that Adora can almost see the temple through the trees, the ringing in Adora’s ears building to a near-deafening crest and making it almost impossible to hear herself think.  It’s affecting Bow, too, even more visibly than Adora, although he might just be worse at hiding it.

“We’re close,” Glimmer whispers as she looks over her shoulder, meeting Adora’s eyes but seeming to look right through her, a fire in her eyes that Adora hasn’t seen since before Angella died.  In spite of everything, Adora feels a small smile pulling at the corner of her lips— this is the Glimmer that she remembers.

They pick up the pace as the trail of dead clones gets denser, the tip of Glimmer’s staff blazing like a torch in the darkness.  Whatever she’s feeling, Adora could swear that she feels it too, the faint electricity in the air almost imperceptibly lifting the ends of her hair as they get closer to the source of the magic, just like she remembers from—

Adora decides not to think too hard about why she knows that feeling so well.

Somewhere just beyond their vision, a burst of laser fire rips through the air and then falls silent as something smacks into a tree, the impact reverberating through the canopy over their heads.  Glimmer draws a sharp breath, and then slowly lets it roll out of her body as she squares herself and shifts the staff to a two-handed grip, extinguishing its guiding light and plunging them back into the cover of darkness.

Tension fills the air as they creep through the darkness.  Adora and Bow move up to cover Glimmer’s flanks without a word, weapons at the ready as they draw closer and closer (Adora doesn’t really know what Entrapta will do in a full-fledged battle without her bots to aid her, but she isn’t sure she wants to find out).  It’s louder now, Adora’s shoulders tensing when she hears the familiar crackle of magic, but it’s not quite the sound she remembers from her childhood, and not quite the sound that Glimmer’s makes.  Instead, it’s almost halfway between, the harsh snaps she remembers interspersed with the lighter, softer sounds she’s come to associate with the sorcerers she knows now.

The whole scene comes into view as they get close enough to see past the edge of the jungle, revealing the open space between the treeline and the massive, crystalline structure at the island’s heart.  Adora can’t make out the hooded figure’s face, but the way he moves is incredible , weaving effortlessly between laser fire and hurling bolts of purple magic in return without breaking his stride, occasionally cracking a clone over the head with his makeshift staff when they get too close for comfort.  She hasn’t seen anyone fight like that, except for…

Glimmer still has both hands on her staff, clutching it tight to her chest as she stands just barely in the shadow of the trees.  One of her hands has gradually worked its way up, thumb running over the shimmering crescent, the magical focus that gives the implement its entire purpose.  She can see the resemblance too, clearly, her eyes flickering back and forth as the fighter leaps into a backflip to avoid a slash from one of the more heavily-armored bots, the blade coming close enough to make his cloak ripple.

It shouldn’t be possible.  Glimmer was so young when he disappeared, and the odds of someone surviving on Beast Island for more than twenty years are… not great , to say the least. But that’s what she had said about Catra, wasn’t it?

Whoever it is, he might need a little help.  A new wave of reinforcements shows up while he’s distracted, slipping around the side of the overgrown temple to attack him from behind.  Adora shifts the sword’s weight in her hands as she turns the decision over.  She wants to call out, but… giving away their position is a risk , especially when they don’t know for certain if this is who they think.

A small blade springs forth from a clone’s arm as it sneaks up on him from behind, the cloaked fighter preoccupied with trying to push off another attack, a purple aura swirling around his staff.  His legs are shaking, clearly not used to a sustained battle like this, and he must not be able to hear the attack creeping up behind him, almost in stabbing range now.  They have to help him.  Adora turns to Glimmer, looking for a plan of action—

And finds that Glimmer is already gone.

She reappears a moment later, a high-pitched battle cry piercing the air as her momentum brings her staff down on the would-be assassin, stopping the sneak attack before it can even begin.  She doesn’t even bother stopping to recover before she’s teleporting again, reappearing in the middle of the reinforcement group and slamming her staff into the ground, releasing a magical shockwave that throws the rest of the clones into the crystalline wall hard enough that Adora thinks it might crack.

The cloaked man’s head whips around with enough force to dislodge his hood, revealing the flowing black hair beneath it, and everything falls silent, save for the scraping noise of the two clones slumping uselessly to the ground.  Glimmer has gone completely rigid, like she’s seen a ghost (which, to be fair, is kind of exactly what’s happening, Adora realizes).  Adora and Bow move fully into the light, trying to make as much noise as possible to avoid startling him, but he doesn’t take his eyes off Glimmer, not even when Entrapta starts humming to herself as she intently gathers… something from the dead clones.  Adora isn’t sure she wants to know.

Then, after what feels like an eternity: “ Glimmer? ”

“Dad?” Glimmer’s voice is a whisper, the syllables barely escaping from her mouth before she’s lunging forward, closing the rest of the distance with a teleport as she practically tackles Micah in a hug, sudden weight sending him staggering backward for a few steps before he recovers and wraps his arms around Glimmer in turn.  “I— I thought you were—”

“I know,”  he says with a small laugh, “but I knew I’d see you again, someday.”

“Oh! I should probably introduce you, shouldn’t I?” Glimmer says as she pulls out of the embrace and gestures to her friends, “Dad, these are my friends Adora, Bow, and Entrapta.  Adora is also an eight foot tall warrior goddess with a magic sword.  It’s… complicated.”

“I’m sure I’ve seen weirder,” Micah shrugs as he reaches out to shake Adora’s hand.

The exiled king of Brightmoon is… Adora would say he wasn’t what she expected, but she isn’t sure what she did expect, really.  She didn’t hear much about him as a person during the years she was living in Brightmoon, but he seemed to have a larger-than-life presence in the castle even in his absence.  He was gone, but he was there , in the way Angella would linger by his mural and in Glimmer clinging to the threadbare memories of him that she still had.  She knew he was important, of course, but he seemed distant.  He was unreal the same way that someone like Mara was, in spite of the fact that he had been a living, breathing person in her lifetime.

Of course, he’s a living, breathing person now too.  Adora looks him over as she reaches out to take his hand, the strong grip settling over her own.  Twenty years of living in such a harsh environment clearly hasn’t been kind to him, in many respects.  His face looks worn, the lines almost impossibly deep and the bags under his eyes giving him a perpetually tired appearance, in spite of the admirable fight he had put up (which might not be entirely contradictory— Adora knows post-adrenaline jitters when she sees them).  He’s shifting nervously, too, only meeting their eyes for a moment before his gaze flits back to the ground or to the jungle behind them, a habit Adora had to work hard to break herself of after her longer periods of isolation.

“I have so many questions, but first I just want to go home.  How did you even get here? Do you have a ship?”

Glimmer cuts him off with a shake of her head.  “We can’t leave.  Not until we get inside there ,” She says, gesturing towards the overgrown slope of the temple wall that looms over them.  

“ Glimmer .” Micah gently lays a hand on her shoulder, his voice softening, “I know you want to help, but I’ve never seen anyone come back from there, and it’s absolutely crawling with… whatever those are,” he stops to gesture to the clones on the ground, “If whatever is in there is so important, we can go home and I’ll send the whole army to get it for you.  Your mother and I never wanted this to become your war too, okay?”

“A little late for that,” Glimmer says, voice harsh as she steps back and folds her arms across her chest.  Even from this distance, Adora can see the fire roaring to life behind her eyes.  “I’ve been running the whole kingdom by myself for five years.  I think I can handle it.”

Micah recoils like he’s been hit, visible confusion washing over his face as he processes the implication of his daughter’s words.

“If you’re— is Angie…”

“The war ended a few years ago, but Mom…”  her voice trails off as she glances at Adora before continuing, the conflict playing out on her face, “Mom didn’t make it.  There isn’t time to explain everything right now, but if they get inside there before we do then everything she worked for goes to waste.”

Adora doesn’t have to see Micah’s face to know he’s absolutely shattered, his whole body sagging and his staff clattering to the ground at his side.  She remembers that feeling— remembers the exact way that a stray comment had torn her world apart at the seams.  She feels almost guilty for the sigh of relief she lets out at Glimmer’s decision to keep her out of the story.  He deserves to know the whole truth, and she promises herself that she’ll tell him, someday, when there isn’t an imminent world-ending threat hanging over their heads.

Glimmer finally looks up, hugging herself tighter and trying to blink away the tears pooling in her eyes.  “I’m sorry.  I… I didn’t want you to find out like that.”

“ I’m sorry,” Micah finally moves again, the distress on his daughter’s face enough to break him free of the shock, taking a step forward to pull her into a hug , “I should have been there.  You shouldn’t have had to do it alone.”

Adora shifts awkwardly as Glimmer collapses against her father and finally allows the sobs she’s been holding back to wrack her entire body, torn between the knowledge that she’s seeing something she’s not meant to and the complete lack of anywhere else to direct her attention.  She had known , of course, that Glimmer was collapsing under the stress after her mother died— they had all been hurting.  But she had never seen Glimmer come apart like this.  How many times had she cried like this seconds after she had been out of her sight?  How could Adora have been so fucking blind?

An abrupt metallic crash brings the reunion to a screeching halt, rumbling through the ground like thunder from somewhere distant, but still too close for comfort.

“Glimmer?” Adora asks hesitantly, receiving a small nod in return.  Glimmer lingers for a moment longer before she pulls back, straightening herself up and wiping the snot and tears off her face, settling her expression back into something much closer to what Adora is used to.

“I’m ready.  Let’s move.”

With their new addition in tow (and currently looking very unnerved by the way Entrapta keeps prodding at him), the group retreats back to the shelter of the jungle and begins their circumnavigation of the temple.  Early on in his time on the island, before he had learned to avoid whatever is emitting the signal coming from its core, Micah claims to have seen an entrance on the north side, although it was apparently sealed.  That part, they can figure out when they get there.

 Adora can’t help stealing glances at the structure as they work their way around— it’s absolutely massive , the top of the pyramid barely visible from this close to the base.  What is visible, though, is the toll that age has taken on it.  Unlike the Crystal Castle, which had looked like barely a day had passed between Mara’s departure and Adora’s arrival, the center of the spaceport (she doesn’t know why she keeps thinking of it as a temple, it just… feels right) wears every day of its abandonment on its sleeve.  The crystalline structure has had huge chunks taken out of it, exposing the raw material under the polished surface in scrapes and gouges large enough for Adora to fit herself in.

The temple isn’t immune to the island’s hostile flora either.  When the light hits just right, Adora can see roots running under the surface like veins through skin, claiming the once untouchable structure as part of a larger organism, something greater than itself.  It’s stupid, really, her mind taking a visual resemblance in the swooping, branching pattern and running with it, but the feeling that had been seeded hours ago finally snares somewhere deep in her stomach.  She can’t shake the fear that the island might be more animate than she had given it credit for.  She remembers the persistent feeling of being watched, the way that the vines had slithered across her flesh, the way that even their ship crashing hadn’t felt like an accident… and she wonders.  What would a place like this do with She-Ra, if it managed to absorb her, too?

Adora’s blood runs cold as her mind chases that thought to its possible conclusions, redoubling her grip on the sword as she tries to push the thoughts away.  You just have to stay focused a little longer , she reminds herself, you’re so close.  Close enough, in fact, that she can finally see around the corner of the temple.  Close enough that she can see the swarm of clones milling around outside.

Adora straightens up as her training kicks in.  She draws to a sharp halt, raising a fist at her side and listening for the footsteps of her squadron (her friends , she corrects herself) to fall silent behind her.  They hold the advantage here,  Adora knows, but they need to act .  It’s only a matter of time before the clones breach the door and get to the controls.

“What’s the plan?” Glimmer’s whisper breaks the silence from behind her, Adora glancing over her shoulder in surprise.  She hadn’t thought Glimmer trusted her enough to defer to her like that, but she appreciates it.

What is the plan, anyway?  Adora works her thumb over the grooves in her sword’s hilt as she turns back to observe.  There are so many of them, but there’s something… off.  She watches as two clones sweep a patrol route out to the edge of the jungle, walking ever so slightly out of step with each other, and that’s when it hits her.

When she had fought the clones that attacked the Fright Zone, and in the videos that Glimmer had shown her, they had moved in perfect sync, effortlessly coordinating flanking maneuvers and covering fire without a moment of lag, unified by some kind of central control network.  But whatever signal is emanating from the damaged warp core inside the temple has made communication nearly impossible— that’s how she had gotten so lost earlier, after all.  Why would the clones be any different?

It’s exactly the opening Adora needs.  The clones will be as vulnerable to disruption and panic as any human force.  Probably even more than humans, precisely because they’re used to having that kind of effortless coordination.  Adora hasn’t had the displeasure of meeting Horde Prime yet, but assuming Hordak's smugness runs in the family, she’s willing to gamble that he didn’t bother with a contingency plan.

“Teleport us right into the middle of them,” Adora says, turning to face her friends, “Scatter them, keep them distracted, and we cover Entrapta while she works on the door.”

“That sounds fucking terrible ,” Glimmer responds, words betrayed by the grin spreading across her face as she takes Adora’s hand, “let’s do it.”

Adora shuts her eyes, bracing herself as she feels Bow take her other hand to close the circle—

And when she opens them again, she hits the ground running.  They remateralize in front of the temple, facing the treeline, and Adora barely has time to get her feet under her before the three clones in front of her are whipping around to locate the source of the sound.  They’re disoriented, just like she predicted, fumbling with their weapons for just a second too long as she drops into a roll across the hard ground to close the distance.  The volley of lasers passes close enough that she can feel the heat on her skin as they crackle through the air, but do nothing to stop her forward motion.

She makes contact with the first clone, slamming into its legs with the full force of She-Ra’s body weight and feeling them snap and twist underneath her.  It’s the sort of move that she would never try on a human soldier, of course, but the clone gives no scream of pain as it crumples to the ground, not even a hint of shock in its rapidly-fading eyes.

Once the first clone hits the dirt, Adora turns her attention to the other two.  The momentum of the roll carries her forward as she springs to her feet between them, sweeping her blade in a wide arc as she rises.  The clones don’t even have time to swing their guns to face her before she makes contact, sending them to the same fate as their fallen comrade with a pair of sickening crack s.

She was right , Adora thinks to herself, smirking as she pivots to deflect a few stray shots from her left.  The clones are running blind, with no idea how to coordinate manually in a situation like this.  It’s almost too easy, really, Adora falling into a steady, mindless rhythm as the clones throw themselves at her.  She’s barely even paying attention to her surroundings at this point, really.

If she was, maybe she would have noticed sooner.

“ Adora! ” Entrapta calls at the top of her lungs, shrill voice rising above the chaos of the battlefield, “the door!”

Adora looks over her shoulder as her elbow makes an absolute mess of a clone’s face, expecting that Entrapta just needs her help prying it open, or something of the like.  A complication, to be sure, but ultimately an insignificant one.

Instead, she finds the door already gone, the jagged remnants of the metal blooming outward like a flower.  Adora’s heart kicks into overdrive, battering itself against her ribcage as she looks through the entrance to the impenetrable shadows of the temple.  How long have they been in there?  How long do they need ?  What if she’s already—

Adora shoves the thought down before she can spiral any further.  It doesn’t matter if she’s too late, she still has to try .  It’s the only thing she knows how to do.

“Keep them busy out here,” Adora says, turning to Glimmer, “I’m going for the core.”

Glimmer looks, for a moment, like she might put up a fight, and Adora can already feel the justification forming in her throat, her mouth already beginning to open to explain why it has to be her .  Instead, Glimmer gives her a small, solemn nod, and a barely audible whisper.  “Be safe, okay?”

Adora can only hope that the look in her eyes is thanks enough for Glimmer to understand.

And then she’s running, willing herself into the darkness.  She thinks Entrapta is following behind her, but it’s too dark to see, and the whine in her ears is too loud to listen for footsteps.  The sound is awful, seeming to worm its way into even the deepest corners of her mind, but she grits her teeth and tries to shut it out, tightening her grip on the sword as she presses forward.  She tries to focus on the fact that it means she’s close, if nothing else.

The initial corridor is eerily sparse, completely empty of clones.  Part of her had expected something more impressive, more reminiscent of the Crystal Castle and its grand, cathedral-like entrance hall, full of towering pillars of rock and impossible stained glass.  Instead, the hallway is narrow and utilitarian, the only notable feature a barely-perceptible downward slope as Adora descends further into the depths of the temple.  The incline is just enough that she can’t get a clear view through the doorway at the end, and something deep in Adora’s gut screams ambush .

She doesn’t slow down, though, momentum carrying her legs down the slope as she turns her weapon into a shield, raising it to protect her face.  Her instincts are almost immediately proved right as she passes through— she doesn’t even get a chance to look up before the first barrage of lasers is slamming into her shield.

The central space is cavernous, the pit Adora finds herself standing over deep enough that she can’t see the bottom in the dim light filtering through the opening in the roof.  On the center platform, across a narrow bridge swarming with clones, is her objective: a towering, ornately-carved metal frame, housing a crystal that pulses white with energy in time with the ringing in Adora’s ears.  She scans the room for visible controls, any way to shut it off from a distance, but she finds nothing.  But at its side, she can make out a pair of clones setting up some kind of machine on the platform, wires trailing from a hole in the base of the core.

Something changes then, panic rising in Adora’s throat as a thin stream of pure, white light bursts forth from the crystal and into the open sky through the opening in the roof, the rise and fall of the awful noise leveling out to something more steady as it springs to life.  She has to move fast .

Adora pushes forward, crossing the threshold of the bridge, switching between using her shield to block shots and throw clones over the side.  She never hears any of them hit the bottom.  Adora feels like she’s moving underwater, either from her proximity to the core or her exhaustion or both, but she keeps pushing forward, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in her heart as she watches the thin stream of lIght grow.

If she closes her eyes, she can pretend that she’s five years younger, wading through a mass of spiders in the Crystal Castle.  It’s funny, she thinks, how little things change.

She’s almost there now, maybe three-quarters of the way across the bridge, only a few clones between her and the platform.  But it might not be enough.  The light is almost blinding now, refracting endlessly off the polished walls of the temple but still barely penetrating the darkness below, and—

Adora could almost swear that the clone on the platform bares its teeth at her as it flips the switch.

The light spreads outwards , now, growing to encompass the entire platform and still not stopping as the ringing grows into a thunderous roar that reverberates through Adora’s bones and shakes the whole building, chunks of crystal coming loose from the sloped walls, and she’s still pressing forward even though her legs are buckling under the force, even though it’s almost certainly too late, because she doesn’t know how to do anything else.  She never has.

And then Adora’s whole vision goes white, and everything falls silent.

Late that night,  Adora sits alone in an isolated corner of camp and looks up at the stars.

She had seen the charts in Darla’s memory banks, and the projected imitations that Bow’s fathers had shown her, of course, but nothing could prepare her for the real thing: hundreds of brilliant jewels strewn across a sea of black, shimmering waves of color rippling through the space between like something out of the elaborate tapestries in the throne room. 

Under any other circumstances, she would find them beautiful, even staggeringly so— it’s almost unbelievable to think that this has existed the whole time just beyond her vision, only now being unveiled.

Instead, Adora looks up at the sky and the only thing she can feel is sick , acid rising in her throat in spite of her empty stomach, but she can’t bring herself to look away from it, either.  She sits up long after everyone else has retreated to their tents and lets the permanent reminder of her failure sear itself into her retinas in some kind of self-imposed ritual punishment.

And if she squints, she would swear that she can make out shapes moving in the black, just like she had in the shadows of Beast Island.  This time, though, she knows there is something out there: Horde Prime’s armada, coming to crush the entire planet under its heel.  And it’s all her fault.

She thought that she would be ready, this time.  That she could be better , be the hero that everyone needs her to be.  But the last week has done nothing but confirm her worst fears, over and over again: she isn’t worthy of the power that she’s been given.  She never was.  Briefly, she entertains the thought of running away again, starting over in the wastes or escaping to one of the port towns and finding a crew that will take her.  It’s nothing more than a fantasy, of course.  In a matter of hours nowhere on the planet will be safe.

And, besides: Catra is out there somewhere too.  Her Catra— she’s sure of that, now.  She’s turned the encounter over in her mind over and over again since they left the island, her brain desperately trying to rationalize any explanation other than what she knows is true.  It had come down to the two of them alone in the darkness, and even after everything Catra had chosen to save her life.  Adora’s hand drifts from the ragged edge of her hair to her throat, and if she closes her eyes she can still feel the scrape of Catra’s claw ghosting against her skin.

Adora’s blood boils, fingers digging into the log that she’s perched on as she remembers the first pictures that Glimmer had shown her.  Catra, who had always been Adora’s safety, Adora’s home , so soft and with so much love to give even if she would rather die than admit it, reduced to… that .  And she’s still Catra, as alone and scared and hurt as ever, and Adora has just been letting it happen for years now (she knows, logically, that there’s nothing she could have done. It doesn’t make her feel any better).

There’s nothing Adora wants more than to drop everything and go after her.  That had been the point of coming back, hadn’t it?  It was what she told herself, at least.  But she doesn’t know how she would even find Catra out there in the vastness of space, much less free her from Prime’s grasp.  And she has a duty to these people, too, even if she knows she’ll never be enough to fulfill it.  She hates herself for even thinking about abandoning them.  Everyone who had ever doubted her was right.  She’s weak, and impulsive, and selfish, and—

“Mind if I join you?” Micah asks from behind her.  Adora slides over to offer a space on the log by way of answering, trying to hide her shock at the unexpected visit and her gratitude for him inadvertently pulling her out of her spiral.

“Adora, right?  I guess you couldn’t sleep either?”

Adora nods, barely looking at him as she pulls her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around them to brace herself against the cold.

“Yeah, me neither.  It’s weird, really,” he says as he settles in next to her, head tilting to follow her gaze skyward, “I always believed I’d make it back somehow, but I just… never really thought about what I’d do once that happened.  Part of me wanted to think that the world would put itself on pause and I could just go back to my old life, I guess.”

Adora breathes in, letting the night air fill her lungs and the silence settle between them.  She remembers the disorientation she had felt when she saw what the Fright Zone had become in her absence, all of the ways both big and small that the world had shifted when she wasn’t looking.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Adora says, her voice surprising herself as much as Micah.  “I was on my own for a while too.  I did it by choice, though.”

Micah raises an eyebrow at that, clearly trying to square it with whatever mental picture he’s developed of Adora in the past twelve hours.  “Look.  I know it’s none of my business, and I won’t pry if you don’t want me to, but I can tell something is wrong.  I don’t know if it’s just about what happened on the island or if it’s something else, but you deserve to talk about it if you want to.”

Adora actually smiles at the offer, remembering the conversations that she had with Angella in the first nights after she came to Brightmoon.  There’s just… something less daunting about talking about these things with a complete stranger.  If nothing else, it might help her clear her head so she can focus on her duties.  There’s so much about Catra that she’s never been able to voice to anyone else, after all.

So, Adora starts at the beginning, sticks to the broad strokes even though it feels like she’s doing a disservice to just how deeply she and Catra are embedded in each other: They grew up together, they fought, Catra made her choices, Adora made hers, and she’s been dealing with the fallout ever since.  Even dancing around the finer points of the story (the depth of her feelings for Catra,and the portal, namely), it feels good to say it out loud, like a weight slipping from her shoulders with every word that pours out of her mouth.

“ — and I want to go find her but I can’t .  Everyone here needs me and I can’t abandon them.”  Adora finishes, blinking the tears from her eyes as the words run dry and silence settles over them again.

For a long moment, there’s no sound but the wind through the trees and Adora’s own ragged breaths as she watches Micah process the story.

“Angella was a pretty good leader, right?  I’m obviously… not exactly up to date, but I remember people liking her, last time I checked,”

“Yeah,” Adora raises an eyebrow at the apparent non-sequitur, “She was,”

Micah nods slowly, the warm smile spreading across his face enough for Adora to know she’s been drawn into a trap, but she doesn’t know how , yet.  “You know, I’m kind of glad that no one knew I was alive until the war was over,”

“Why’s that?” Adora asks, fully aware that she’s taking the bait.

“Because if she had known that it was even a slight possibility, I don’t doubt for a second that she would have dropped everything to come get me,” Micah leans back, turning to meet her eyes fully, “I mean, I don’t think anyone would have blamed her, honestly,”

Adora reels back, shrinking in on herself even further as she finally grasps what he’s trying to tell her.

“It’s not— I can’t just—” Adora sputters, scrambling for any reason to refute it, “That’s different .”

Micah shakes his head, placing a gentle hand on Adora’s shoulder as he looks back up to the stars.

“Go get her, kid.  No sense in waiting.”

Chapter Text

You thrash against your restraints again as they haul you back towards the ship, metal cutting into the few parts of you that remain soft as you fight harder than you have in years.  You can feel your mind clouding again, the moment of clarity slipping through your fingers like sand as the parasite at the back of your neck flickers back to life and the darkness begins to take hold, free of whatever force had held it at bay closer to the center of the island.

You turn the memory over in your mind even as the first surge of electricity arcs down its well-worn path through your body.  She had spoken your name so gently in the dark, like she could see past the blood and ash that stain your fur, like she thought the person she wanted you to be was still in there somewhere.  But you remember the way her breath hitched when you touched her, the way her unfocused eyes had gone wide with fear as you approached.  You’ve hurt her.  You’ve hurt her so much more than you could ever hope to make up for.

Because that’s what you’re good at, isn’t it?  What you’ve always been good at, even before you were this.  It was easy to mold you into a weapon because you’ve always been a knife, made to cut and tear and scar.

You howl with rage and sorrow and pain as you’re hit with another, more sustained shock, and you can taste blood in your mouth as your muscles convulse violently before going finally, blessedly limp, half-collapsing in the dirt as your captors drag you the rest of the way.  You give up far more easily than you did the first time, all those years ago (you think it’s been years, at least.  It could have been months, or only weeks, and you wouldn’t really know).  Even on this planet that used to be home, you wouldn’t have anywhere to run, no one that would be stupid enough to take you in.  Not even her— not once she understands.

The burning in your arm flares up again and swallows your thoughts as the shuttle pulls away from the island, and you’re almost thankful for it, dropping to the floor as it swallows up all the other, messier thoughts.  But when you close your eyes, you can still see that pale blue shimmering in the dark, piercing through the haze.

With your last coherent thought, you silently pray that she won’t try anything stupid.

Adora tips her head back to rest against the low rock and sucks in a breath, lets the night air clear her head, and prepares to do something really stupid.

She’s close, at least.  She’s been running herself completely ragged for the past week, leading the war effort as She-Ra by day and sneaking out to pursue her own objectives by night, but she’s so close, and that knowledge alone is enough to keep her whole body buzzing with energy in spite of the sleep deficit she’s been accruing.  She’ll have to pay it eventually, she knows.  But she supposes she’ll have plenty of time for that soon enough.

So for now, Adora looks up at the stars and waits, counting heartbeats until it’s time to dash to the next piece of cover on her carefully-planned route.  She sticks low to the ground, shifting her weight carefully to avoid giving herself away in a patch of dry brush, and feels a small smile tug at her lips as she watches a clone’s back disappear around the corner, right on schedule.  Her long hour of recon had paid off, revealing exactly what she had suspected: Prime’s forces move like clockwork, and that’s his single biggest weakness.  The gaps are miniscule— ten seconds here where a path isn’t being watched, five there where an entrance is unoccupied— but they’re exploitable all the same.

She makes another dash across the open space, tucking herself away in the shadow of a tree and trying to keep her breathing under control.  The spire is maybe ten meters away, now, one final ring of guards between her and the unnatural mass of white metal that’s embedded itself into the landscape and leeched the color from everything in its immediate vicinity.

She’s not in any real danger, she knows— her left hand moves instinctively to the sword’s cold metal at her wrist, tracing fingers along its grooves until it stops shaking— but she’d like to avoid going loud, if she can.  Using She-Ra will invariably attract attention and this, as well as the task that comes after this, will be so much easier if she doesn’t have to explain to her allies why she’s sneaking away in the middle of the night to infiltrate Horde Prime’s communications network in secret.

Adora draws a stone from her pocket (she probably could have found one here, but she likes the security of preparation) and draws her arm back,tossing it into a nearby bush with all the force she can muster, hoping that the rustling it produces is sufficiently close to movement for her plan to work.  She barely has to wait a second before she gets confirmation, uncomfortably even footsteps drawing closer to her position until—

  Adora swings the second she sees white, turning her body’s weight into the blow as her staff unfurls and makes contact with the clone’s legs with a sickening crack, sending it collapsing forward.  Adora scrambles to her feet, snagging it by the hood and arresting its motion just inches from the ground to avoid giving away her position before allowing it to fall the rest of the way silently.  Then, she grasps her weapon with both hands and drives it down with practiced accuracy, crunching through layers of metal and circuitry until the chip gives way to the soft flesh beneath as the clone spasms once, twice, and then finally goes limp.

Adora releases a breath she didn’t know she was holding, lets a little bit of the tension drain from her shoulders.  She doesn’t have the time to waste, though—  A minute before they realize something is amiss, if she’s lucky.  She’s moving on autopilot now, feet pounding against the dirt in a mad dash for the door and not slowing until she’s crossed the threshold into the sterile, alien space.

The spire’s hallways are impressively labyrinthine in spite of its small footprint (roughly the size of her cabin, if Adora had to guess), the formless, endless white walls and equally featureless floor blending together to create the impression of a space both endlessly vast and small enough that it could close in on her at any moment.  Adora grips her staff with one hand as she presses forward, the other anchoring her to the gentle curve of the inside wall to keep her sense of direction.

She lets out a sigh of relief as the hallways finally open up into the center chamber, the high-ceilinged room ringed with controls and monitors.  Adora moves to one of the stations, keeping an eye on the entrance over her shoulder as she reaches beneath it, fingers tracing the underside until they catch the edge of the maintenance panel she’s looking for.  Once she’s wrenched it open, she pulls Entrapta’s device from her pocket, slots it into the newly-exposed diagnostic port, and steps back.

A moment later, the screen flickers to life, and the whole galaxy unfurls in front of her.  Adora feels a strange sort of awe and more than a little fear as the map zooms out and Etheria fades into a barely visible dot in the display.  And for the first time, Adora sees the full scale of Horde Prime’s forces: dozens, even hundreds of fleets like the one hanging over their heads, engaged in conflicts across an equally vast number of solar systems, swarms of them moving over distances that she can’t even begin to put in scale.  It’s useful information, to be sure, and she takes some comfort in the fact that the device will continue transmitting it to the rebellion long after she departs, but it’s not what she’s here for.

Instead, her eyes are fixed squarely on the side of the screen, a stream of data scrolling by faster than she could possibly process as Entrapta’s program does its work.  She knows the broad strokes of what it’s doing, even if the technical details are beyond her reach: pulling the unique signature of every ship in Prime’s fleet and checking it against Darla’s logs from Beast Island, looking for—

There.   The device issues a series of cheerful beeps as the scrolling stops, one of the ships a few solar systems over suddenly highlighted in bright red against Adora’s reflection in the monitor.  She can feel the same invisible, unstoppable force that Catra has always exerted on her, compelling her to reach out and brush her fingers gently against the glass, millions of miles away but already so much closer than she ever thought she’d be ever again.  She watches her own face in the glass as her eyes narrow and her mouth sets in a hard line, shifting from awe to pure determination.  She’s coming for Catra. There’s nothing that Horde Prime, or anyone else, can do to stop her.

—

Adora pauses at the edge of the woods, closing her eyes and lingering for a moment before she breaks through to the sheltered clearing where the alliance has made its camp.

Soon, she’ll be lightyears away from here, farther from home than any Etherian has been in a millennium. 

Right now, she stills herself, allowing the whispering woods to wash over her and etch themselves into her memory, a tiny piece of home to carry in her heart.  She focuses on the way the dirt shifts under her feet, the distant sound of birdsong that filters through the trees even in the middle of the night, the way the wild magic hums through every single nerve in her body, making her feel more alert, more alive than she does anywhere else on the planet.

She’ll be back, she knows— she just wishes that made leaving any easier. But she’s come too far, gotten too close to her goal to turn back now and ever be able to forgive herself for it.

Then again, she’s not sure that she’ll ever be able to forgive herself for what she’s about to do, either.  The alliance is on the back foot, struggling to adapt to being a rebellion again, and Prime’s forces seem nearly limitless.  They had swept over the whole planet in a matter of hours after Adora failed to stop them at Beast Island, the planet’s defenses crumbling under a barrage of orbital weapons and an indisputable advantage in numbers.

Etheria needs her more than ever.  Her friends need her more than ever, too.  But ever since Beast Island she’s been… distracted.  Every time she closes her eyes, she sees Catra’s staring back at her from the darkness.  Adora’s hand comes up to her throat unconsciously, her thumb tracing the ghost of Catra’s claw cutting her free from the vines.  The nightmares that have been plaguing her since the Fright Zone have only intensified, too, becoming even more vivid now that she knows that the person she cared about so much is still in there and that she’s suffering.

Adora has been doing what she does best— pushing it down, compartmentalizing it to focus on her goals, trying desperately to be the hero everyone needs her to be and that she wants to be so badly.  The Adora of five years ago would have kept doing that, kept plowing through everything in front of her through sheer force, pushed until something inevitably gave out.  

But she knows now that it’s not sustainable.  Never was, in spite of her best efforts.  She can feel herself slipping, more and more of her thoughts lost somewhere out in the stars every day.  It’s only a matter of time before she gets someone hurt, or loses her hold on She-Ra at the worst possible moment or—

Adora forces herself to take a breath as she pushes through into the open space where they’ve made camp.  She has to do this, if she’s going to be of any use at all.

She hopes her friends will understand that.

“Is it ready?” Adora asks as she makes her way to the corner of camp where Darla rests.

“Almost!” Entrapta pops out from behind the engine, and Adora can practically feel the grin radiating from behind her mask as she motions for the princess to lower the volume a bit.  “I just need to run a few more tests, shouldn’t take more than… half an hour, I think!”

The rest of the camp is dead silent as Adora walks between the rows of hastily-erected tents, save for Entrapta’s distant humming as she works.  They got lucky, arriving back at Brightmoon just in time to be able to evacuate before the ships arrived.  Other kingdoms, like Salineas, hadn’t fared as well, she knows.

If Adora’s tent had already been sparse when they made camp, it’s practically empty now.  The essential supplies have been long since loaded onto the ship, and what few personal effects she had in the first place have been carefully tucked into the pack resting at the foot of the equally-bare cot by the far wall.

Once that’s gone, Adora knows, there will be no trace of her left in the space, and she feels a familiar pang of regret at the thought.  It’s not the same kind of trepidation that she felt when she prepared to leave the Fright Zone or Brightmoon or her cabin— there was never enough time, never enough warmth for this place to feel like home in the first place— but that almost makes it worse, doesn’t it?  Leaving is a well-practiced skill for her at this point.

She should leave at least something behind, she decides.  Her friends deserve so much more than that, she thinks, but it’s all she can give them.

So Adora rifles through her pack until she fishes out a notepad and a pen and starts writing, trying to shove down the sense of familiarity taking hold deep in her bones.

Her first few attempts don’t make it very far— barely a few scratchy words before she’s tearing the sheet away to start fresh, adding it to the ever-growing pile of false starts at her side.  There’s so much that she wants to say and no easy way to explain any of it.

In the end, she starts with an apology, as much as she hates herself for it.  It feels wrong, somehow, to say sorry for something like this, but she knows that she needs to if only to assuage her own guilt.

She isn’t happy with what she ends up with, not by a long shot.  But it’s serviceable, and she’s running out of both paper and time.  It’ll have to do.  She folds the paper into even, sharply-creased thirds and lays it on the pillow, trying not to think about how Glimmer is going to react when she finds it in a few hours. 

Desperate for any sort of excuse to delay the inevitable, she takes one last look around the small space as she shoulders her bag and steps out into the night again, goosebumps rippling across her skin in spite of her jacket.  Adora keeps her eyes fixed on the dirt as she trudges back through the rows of tents, somehow unable to shake the fear that the sleeping occupants are watching her, judging her for abandoning them as the guilt twists in her stomach.

She pushes it down, though, finally looking up as she arrives at the foot of Darla’s boarding ramp.  The ship is a far cry from the dusty relic it had been just a few weeks before, thanks to Entrapta.  The sharply-angled planes of the exterior shine like mirrors now, soft light diffusing across them from the veins cut into its surface that had once been caked with a millenia’s worth of sand.  Adora still feels like someone has knocked the breath out of her when she looks at it, but it feels more real now, somehow, less out of place than it had when they dug it up.

“I— thank you,” Adora whispers to Entrapta as she starts up the ramp, the steel toes of her boots clicking against the metal.  “There’s a note in my tent, can you make sure that Glimmer sees it?  I’m sorry, I know I’ve asked a lot of you, but…” Adora’s voice trails off as Entrapta tilts her head and furrows her brow in confusion.

“I mean, sure,” Entrapta’s hair shrugs as she steps forward to join Adora on the ramp, “It’s gonna be kind of difficult, given the whole being in space thing, but I’ll do my best!”

Adora takes a half-step forward before her brain manages to process the words fully.  “I can’t drag anyone else into this, Entrapta.  You’ve already done more than I ever could have asked, okay?” She says, trying not to choke on her words as she fidgets nervously with the strap across her shoulder.  “I just… I have to do this part alone.  I’m sorry.”

“Did you know that the hyperdrive is completely untested?” Entrapta asks with her usual disturbing amount of cheer, bouncing slightly on her coiled hair, “I mean, anything could happen the first time you use it!”

Adora’s shoulders slump in defeat as she realizes that, as much as she hates to admit it, Entrapta is right.

How could she have overlooked something so obvious?  All of her thinking, all of her justifications for doing this, had been balanced on the idea that it would be her mission and her mission alone, that she wouldn’t be putting anyone else at risk for what she knows is a stupid, selfish plan.

But she won’t be able to help anyone if the ship breaks down and she ends up stranded in space, will she?    Entrapta knows that just as well as she does.

“...you’re not gonna let me go alone, are you?”

“Nope!” Entrapta yells, grinning wildly at Adora as she bounds up the ramp ahead of her, “I loaded my stuff already!”

Adora lets out an exasperated sigh of defeat and tries, somewhat ineffectively, to rub the exhaustion out of her eyes as she stares up into the mouth of the cargo bay.  This isn’t how she wanted to do it, how she wanted to do any of this, really, but… She feels ready, or at least as ready as she ever thinks she will be.

No sense in waiting , right?

The first thin lines of dawn are on the horizon as Adora settles into the captain’s chair, filtering past the gaps in prime’s blockade and streaming in through the panoramic windows of the bridge to warm Adora’s face.  The ship still feels haunted, somehow— Adora doesn’t think she’ll ever shake that sense completely— but it doesn’t feel like a threat anymore, either.

This time, though, Adora doesn’t bother trying to talk to ghosts.  Part of her wants to, to try again for an answer to the same question she had asked back in the wastes, but she doesn’t need it.  As the holographic interfaces wash the bridge in purple light and she settles her grip in the same place where she had first gotten a glimpse of Mara, she just… knows, with more certainty than she’s ever known anything.

“Darla?” Adora asks, pausing to let the ship’s computer trill an acknowledgement as it spins up, “take us up, and then hand me the controls?”

“ Understood! Initiating launch sequence, ” the ship responds, the synthesized voice coming from everywhere around her and nowhere at the same time.  Adora breathes a sigh of relief at the fact that Entrapta has succeeded in making it sound less like Light Hope.  It’s still recognizably the same voice-synth, of course, but no longer close enough to throw Adora’s fight-or-flight instincts into high gear, the pitch just a little higher and the cadence no longer quite as stilted as Hope had been.

For a moment, nothing happens— the bridge remains completely silent save for the whirring of the air filtration and the high-pitched noise where Entrapta has pressed her face to the window.

  Just as she’s getting ready to reiterate her command, though, she realizes that they’re moving: the horizon swaying gently and the trees dropping away as the landing gear retracts and Darla silently lifts from the ground on its repulsors, almost unnaturally steady— or at least it feels that way, the artificial gravity keeping Adora firmly in place, fighting down nausea as the ship tilts back to point its nose skyward.  

Somewhere behind her, the engines flare to life, the steady, growing rumble carrying through the ship’s entire frame and deep into Adora’s bones.  From here, Prime’s fleet is nearly invisible against the sky, little more than long, long knives of black in the half-light where there should be stars.   They’ll be fine, Adora knows— between her lightweight frame carrying engines that are nearly enough to tear it apart and the way that the sharp angles of her hull slip past all kinds of sensors, Darla is practically built for running blockades like this.  

Besides that, they have the element of surprise: until a few days ago, nothing on Etheria was capable of leaving the planet's atmosphere.  With any luck, he doesn’t have any reason to think that’s changed.

Still, though, Adora watches her hands shake when she reaches for the holographic controls that have materialized in front of her and tries in vain to still them, the runestone on her arm glowing brighter as the ship acquiesces to her control.

The ship moves slowly at first, the roar of the engines growing in intensity as Adora inches the throttle forward, taking it easy until she’s more than certain that the backwash won’t burn the camp to the ground behind them. Once she’s confident that they’re clear and everything is still working properly, she takes one final, deep breath—

And slams the throttle forward.

The engines are deafening now, Darla’s voice lost in the noise as the acceleration slams Adora back against the solid metal of her seat and sucks the breath from her lungs.  The whole ship is rattling, the air pushing back and threatening to tear it apart, but the angles of its body slice right through, pushing faster and higher than anything on Etheria has gone in a thousand years.

Adora watches as the black splotches in the viewport grow, slowly gaining definition as they draw closer.  If she squints, she can make out the orbital cannons hanging beneath them, the recessed contours of the hangar bays near the stern.  Any second now, they’ll be inside the effective range of the fleet’s weapons.  Adora double-checks the instrument panel even though she knows the shields are working before pushing the throttle as far as it will go and locking it in place.

They’ll only have a few seconds of advantage before Prime figures out what’s going on.  Adora intends to make the most of it.

Sure enough, barely a moment later Adora watches as a block of the smaller guns lining the cruiser’s hull light up, the bolts of fire giving her a momentary glimpse of the sterile white surface before they’re streaking down towards the planet’s surface.  Adora grips the controls tighter, braces herself to make an evasive maneuver, but it's unnecessary— the volley passes well behind them, so far in their wake that it doesn’t even graze the deflectors.

Adora can’t help the grin that spreads across her face as she adjusts their heading slightly, aiming to thread Darla through the ever-nearing gap between a pair of cruisers.  She was right .  They’re not safe yet, of course: more of the nearby ships have activated their weapons now, attempting to catch Darla in the crossfire, but it’s not enough, the atmosphere thinning out as they get higher and allowing the ship to move even faster.  

“I’ve got the coordinates!” Entrapta yells from the side of the bridge, her shrill voice only barely audible, “We can jump as soon as we’re free of the gravity—”

The end of her sentence is cut off as a shot impacts the side of the ship and knocks her off her feet, held up by her hair’s grip on the console.  Adora isn’t so lucky, though, the hit rocking them violently enough for her to slam her hip into the metal hard enough that she can already tell she’s going to have a nasty bruise later.  It’s not enough to do any real damage, of course, traces of lightning crackling across the windows as the shields absorb the energy and spread it out, but it rattles her all the same.

They’ve almost made it, she reminds herself, reaching up to brush stray hair out of her face and finding it drenched in sweat before she corrects their course to account for the impact, drawing short breaths as she works the controls.  They take a few more hits as they get closer, but she’s prepared this time, holding the controls steady even as the impacts rattle her teeth.

As Adora threads the needle into the narrow gap between the ships, the guns fall silent for a moment.  Everything falls silent, the atmosphere out here at the very edge far too thin to put up a fight as they rise in the dawn light, passing close enough that she can see the evenly spaced dashes of light coming from the windows that line the ship's side.  She wonders if the clones ever look out of them, at the stars or the rest of the fleet or the planets they’re destroying.  They shouldn’t need to, she knows, when they have direct access to the ship’s full array of sensors, but they must have been added for a reason, right?

Whatever the answer, Adora is pulled from her thoughts by the shrill, piercing noise of a warning siren as the radar appears in her peripheral vision.  In the projection, she sees a pair of flashing red marks peel off from one of the larger cruisers and make a sharp, rising turn towards the sky, followed quickly by another pair from a nearby ship, and yet more that are still little more than blurry shapes out at the edge of the scanner’s range.

Adora swallows her fear, tips the controls a few degrees back to present the smallest possible target, and dismisses the scanner display with a wave.  There’s nothing she can do about it— Darla is designed for speed, not firepower— so there’s no point in worrying about it.  

Besides: the fighters may be fast, but they’re not fast enough. Not when they have this much of a head start.

“Is it ready?” Adora asks, glancing in Entrapta’s direction.  The princess is a blur of purple hair and manic energy as she bounces between consoles, still keeping one wide eye on the starfield out the window as she single handedly manages a bridge meant for a crew of at least four.

“Not quite, but we’re close!  Jump coordinates should be loaded… now! ” Entrapta yells louder than she needs to as the navigation system gives a cheerful ding.  “We can jump as soon as we’re out of the gravity well!”

Adora adjusts the controls again, noting how much lighter the ship feels under her hands than it did when they first lifted off, and lets herself smile just a tiny bit as she dismisses the proximity alarms ringing in her ear.

She doesn’t even have to ask to know it when it happens: even cushioned by the artificial gravity coming from the generator under her feet, Adora’s stomach still lurches as they break free of Etheria’s hold.  The difference is slight, of course— she’s not floating out of her seat, and she still has a solid sense of which way is down , relatively speaking— but it’s there , something that she had barely registered for her entire life suddenly glaringly obvious in its absence.  

She’ll adjust, of course— there will be plenty of time for that during the trip.  But that doesn’t change the fact that it feels wrong , her hand moving with a fraction more force than she expects it to when she raises it to the controls.

Adora’s hand wavers slightly as her finger hovers over the button to initiate the jump.  This is it, she knows: the point of no return.  One last chance to turn around, go back to the only planet she’s ever known and try to be what everyone needs her to be.

Adora looks out into the endless void stretching out around her in every direction, stars and swirling nebulas and an untold number of planets full of their own people and cultures and histories, and she looks right past all of it.  Somewhere out there in the darkness is Catra, alone and scared and hurt but alive .

  In the portal, she drew a line in the sand, said that she was done offering Catra second chances if she wasn’t going to reach out and take them. That hasn’t changed, but that doesn’t mean that she’s going to stand by and let someone use her as a weapon.  Adora, more than anyone, knows that she deserves better than that.

Adora presses the button.

She braces herself in her seat, letting the rising whine of the hyperdrive drown out the homesickness already taking root in her chest.  Outside the window, the vastness of space stretches and deforms into a blur of blue light, the sudden burst of acceleration squeezing the breath from her lungs before everything goes suddenly, disconcertingly still, save for the gentle sway of gravitational waves rocking the ship as they carve their way through space.

Now, there’s nothing she can do but wait.

By the time Glimmer scrambles out of her tent and into the early light of Etheria’s new sun, staff clutched firmly in one hand and a shimmer of magic flickering to life in the other, the thunderous roar that roused her has long since faded into the distance.

Instead, she finds nothing but a wide-open patch of scorched, smoking grass where there should be a spaceship.

Glimmer lets the magic dissipate harmlessly from her left hand before balling it into a fist so tight that her entire arm begins to shake.  Behind her, she can hear the rustle of tent flaps and whispered conversations as the rest of the camp emerges to look for the source of the commotion— they’re all light sleepers now, if they weren’t before— but Glimmer keeps her face forward, eyes fixed on a curling wisp of steam rising from the ground.

She wants to scream.  She wants to throw her staff on the ground and yell every obscenity she can come up with loudly enough that they’ll hear her all the way out in space and decide to turn the ship around and come back.  Most of all, she really, really wants to punch something.

But she can’t .  She knows that she has to keep her composure.  All of these people are looking to her to figure out how to handle this and show them exactly how much they should be freaking out about this.  The last thing that they need right now is more panic.

She should have known.  She should have seen this coming from a mile away.  It’s so obvious, in retrospect, how they got here, the way that all of this had been inevitable from the moment she knocked on that door in the Whispering Woods. 

Which means, of course, that it’s all her fault.

“Did you know?” Glimmer asks, not even having to look back to identify the footsteps coming to her side.

“No, I— She didn’t tell me either,” Bow says, lingering just outside her field of vision, “I’m sorry.” (Glimmer fills in the unspoken addendum for herself: but I knew this would happen. )

Glimmer just nods slightly, a long breath turning to fog in the morning air as she tries to force her expression into something presentable.  She appreciates the sympathy, even if she isn’t sure she deserves it.

By the time she manages to rip her eyes away from the horizon, most of the civilians have already filtered back to their tents for a few more hours of sleep.  Glimmer finds only the other princesses— wearing near-exact mirrors of her shocked expression— and her father, who looks almost guilty as he avoids meeting her eyes.

It takes her a moment to realize that Entrapta isn’t there.  This , she’ll let herself be mad about.  Although knowing Entrapta, she probably didn’t give Adora much choice in the matter.

What Glimmer wants to do is to go back to bed and cocoon herself in her sleeping bag for a few hours more, hide away until the sun has finished its ascent and revealed all of this as nothing more than a bad dream.  But she knows better than to expect that to bring her any rest.

A quick check of Adora’s now-empty tent and the note resting on her pillow confirms what Glimmer already knew in her bones: Adora ran off to rescue Catra and she doesn’t know when she’ll be back but she promises that she’s not going to disappear again and she’s sorry but there was no other way, et cetera et cetera.  Glimmer is crumpling the paper between her fingers before she’s even finished reading the final lines, because none of the words actually matter.  

Not in comparison to the fact that Adora didn’t feel like she could trust Glimmer enough to say them to her face.

With that lovely little thought planted in her head, Glimmer shoves the ruined paper in her pocket and heads off to breakfast.  Everything about her life has just gotten exponentially more complicated— her head is swimming with dozens of attack plans that she and Juliet will need to recalibrate, and then the way that those changes will affect their thinly-stretched resources, not to mention the fact that she’s going to have to decide how much to tell everyone about the sudden disappearance of the planet’s savior— but that can all wait, at least long enough for her stomach to stop screaming at her.

Glimmer collects her food, clutching the mug of coffee tight in her chilled hands and making her way past the other princesses to sit on her own.  She tries not to eavesdrop on the conversation that they’re having as she passes by, she really does, but she can’t help overhearing a snippet that stops her dead in her tracks.

“ —I mean, of course she ran away again, I don’t know why anyone expected anything else,” Mermista says, rolling her eyes so hard that Glimmer can practically hear it.

Glimmer abandons her food on the grass as the tension that’s been building in her chest all morning draws tight and finally snaps.  Before she even knows what she’s doing, she’s storming over to the group and grabbing Mermista by the collar, dragging the water princess to her feet and ignoring her noises of protest.

“You don’t get to talk about her like that,” Glimmer hisses through clenched teeth, “You understand?”

Mermista almost looks more confused than angry as she rips Glimmer’s hand away.  “What is with you this morning?  Are we not allowed to be mad that she left us to do all the work, now?”

Glimmer recoils and takes a half-step back as the words hit her.  Mermista isn’t right, but she’s not entirely wrong, either, Glimmer realizes as she scans the assembled group of weary faces, all of them looking back and forth between the pair in anticipation of having to break up a fight.  She’s right.  This is going to make things so much harder for everyone , not just Glimmer.

But she won’t make the same mistake she made five years ago.

“You’re allowed.  But if you want to blame anyone—” she pauses to ready herself, lets her shoulders drop before the next words come out in a whisper, “ —blame me, not Adora.  I don’t think I could have stopped her from leaving, but it’s my fault that she did it like this.”

There’s silence for a long moment as Glimmer’s words sink in, but no one rises to challenge her.  Mermista pulls back a bit, but Glimmer can see the newfound respect in her eyes, and knows that she won’t be a problem anymore.  “Yeah. I can work with that.”

Glimmer turns to walk away, ignoring both Perfuma’s invitation to join them and her own abandoned breakfast— her stomach is twisting itself in too many knots to even think about eating right now.

Instead, she keeps walking, away from the clusters of tents and the noise of the crowd until she approaches the edge of the woods, pausing for a moment at the treeline.  They’re not supposed to go beyond the perimeter of the camp alone, but who’s going to stop her?  It’s not like she can’t handle herself, either, and she just needs to clear her head for a moment.

Glimmer pushes a branch aside and steps into the shadows, letting the low rush of noise that gives the Whispering Woods their name swallow the worst of her swirling thoughts.  She doesn’t stray too far— just far enough for the camp to disappear fully behind the trees and leave her some privacy.

She doesn’t pay much attention when something rustles in the bushes behind her.  The whispering woods are tricky, and full of all manner of wildlife.  She’s still running hot, too. She’s probably just hearing things.

She pays slightly more attention when it happens a second time.  Glimmer stops, gathering magic in one hand and holding herself completely still, pushing past the hum of the woods to listen for—

There .

“ Who’s there?” Glimmer whips around and lifts her hand, illuminating the woods in pink light, and finds… nothing.

Instead, her answer comes in the form of a sharp blow to the back of her head, little noise managing to slip from her throat as she tumbles to the forest floor.

She gets a brief glimpse of a tall, pale form standing over her before everything goes black.

Chapter Text

One week later.

Adora has spent a week in space, and she still hasn’t gotten used to how quiet it is.

Not the lack of noise from outside the ship— that much, she had expected from Entrapta’s lectures as she prepared for the voyage.

But Darla is built to carry an entire squadron at least , the sleeping quarters big enough for ten people before you even start sharing beds.  With a crew of just two, one of whom spends half her time hiding in a vent or buried in the ship’s engines, it feels… lifeless, just as much as it had when it was buried in the sand.

Still, Adora snaps awake the second the ship’s lights start to come up, humming to herself just to fill the dead air as her eyes adjust.  Slowly, the room around her gains definition as she hauls herself off the mattress: the eight foot square of gray metal, the shelves lining the walls from floor to ceiling, the boxes of rations piled into the corner, the bedding scattered across the floor that she’ll have to pick up later (she must have had a bad dream again, although she’s already forgotten what it was).

For now, it’s home.

But not for much longer , she reminds herself as she pulls her arms across her chest and coaxes the tension from her aching muscles.  They’re almost there, and Adora could swear that she can feel it in her bones, her entire body thrumming with energy as the thought rockets her fully into wakefulness.  Five years of grieving, months of scrounging for clues with only blurry pictures and half-obscured glimpses to go on, a week of restless travel, and now—

Adora cringes as the intercom they hastily attached to the wall hisses with feedback, gritting her teeth as her hands shoot up to guard her ears from the noise.  She would definitely be awake now, if she wasn’t already.

“Hi Adora!” Entrapta’s voice crackles through the speaker, cheerful sing-song unabated by the static. “I hope you were up already, I just wanted to let you know that we’ll be out of hyperspace in about an hour!”

“Thanks, Entrapta.  I’ll be ready.”

One hour.

Adora slumps back against the wall as the comm clicks shut, hand drifting to the raised mark on her shoulder where a sliver of Catra’s claw has been embedded for nearly as long as she can remember.

For the past week, she’s had precious little else to do but think .  She spent hours staring out the window at the roiling blue storm of hyperspace and running through every possible scenario her mind could come up with, playing out the mission over and over again in her head until she felt sick and then doing it all over and over again.

Adora’s first instinct, of course, is to plan exhaustively, to collect every variable and organize them into neat little charts,  dissect the entire situation into decision trees and schedules and exhaustive lists of pros and cons that she can study until everything becomes solid , somehow.  Her plans rarely actually worked, of course (as Glimmer had been so fond of reminding her), but that never really mattered.

There’s no plan now.  Instead, she has a litany of thousands of things that could go wrong before she even gets within a hundred feet of Catra, and exponentially more potential disasters after that, each of them burned into her mind in painstaking detail. She tried , she really did.  But the truth, as much as Adora has been trying to avoid it, is that she has no idea what they’re going to be walking into when they surface.

Adora forces herself off the wall before she can begin to spiral fully, opting instead to fall into the comforting rhythm of her morning routine, her hands already beginning to steady out as she tugs her boots on and pushes her hair out of her face (it’s gotten just long enough to be annoying, but not quite enough to tie it back like she used to).

The lightstrips that line the corridors have come up to half brightness by the time Adora emerges from the storage closet, synced to a rough approximation of Etheria’s moon, providing a counterbalance to the persistent wash of cerulean light streaming through the viewports.  

The first “night”, before either of them had thought to set the light cycle up, she had paced the halls restlessly, failing to achieve anything remotely useful until she realized that she had been awake for thirty six hours (and hadn’t eaten in nearly that long, either).  The lights give her a tether to grab for, a rhythm to her days that keeps her connected to home, even from lightyears away.

(Adora spares the briefest of thoughts for the people she left behind as she warms up.  She’s been trying not to think about them too much, but… she has to admit it’s comforting to imagine Glimmer and Bow and the rest going through the same motions as she is.)

Adora lets out a sigh of relief as the thudding of her feet against the floor rises to a steady rhythm and fills the dead air.  The ship is too quiet when they’re traveling like this, the hyperdrive lacking even the distinctive rumble of the engines under her feet.

Darla’s utilitarian hallways are hardly the optimal environment for a morning run, but it’s serviceable enough, especially for someone who spent most of her life in the Fright Zone.  Adora focuses on the motion of putting one foot in front of the other, trying to keep her breathing steady as she picks up the pace.  She passes the sleeping quarters and the kitchen, listens to the echo of her footsteps in the cargo bay, waves to Entrapta as she carefully skirts around the spare parts sprawled out on the floor from whatever project the princess has undertaken this morning.

Then, as she passes the door of the storage room, she adds a mark to her mental tally and does it all again.

When she slows and eventually halts in the kitchen fourteen and a half laps later, Adora has managed to burn off the worst of her nervous energy, swirling thoughts purged by the endorphins coursing through her system.  Adora spares a quick glance to the clock on the wall as she leans against the counter to catch her breath— twenty minutes left, by her estimate.

The next part of her routine is just as methodical as the last.  Adora pierces the vacuum-sealed package and dumps the rations out into a bowl, placing it under the electric heater while she fumbles in the cabinet.  After a moment, she lays hands on a small, wooden box and drags it out into the light.

Adora’s lungs are still burning from the exertion, but she forces herself to draw a long, slow breath through her nose as she opens the lid, savoring the smell of mint and wildflowers in the otherwise sterile air.  The tea had been a small concession, maybe the only non-essential possession she had brought with her, and even that had felt frivolous enough that she had nearly left it— wasn’t she being selfish enough just by coming here?

Adora is very, very glad that she caved, in the end.  The tea is good, but the act of making the tea is better , the ritual forcing her to pause and demanding just enough attention that she can’t bring herself to do anything else while she waits.  Her hands move carefully as she opens one of the bags and carefully measures out a spoonful of the dried leaves and slowly lowers the metal strainer into the water.  She tears her gaze away from the clock—nothing she does is going to make the ship arrive any faster, she knows— focuses on the color blooming through the small gaps, the rising steam filling her lungs with every inhale.

By the time she finishes her meal and arrives on the bridge, Adora’s heart is still racing.  But she feels centered, now, about as clear-headed as she can reasonably expect of herself under the circumstances.

Adora waves hello to Entrapta (barely visible in a cocoon of holographic readouts) as she settles into the command chair. Outside the window, she sees the same streaking, swirling blur of colors that’s surrounded them for the last week, and now for only a few moments more.

The first night, Entrapta had tried to explain to Adora how it works.  They’re not moving fast in a conventional sense— instead, they’re tunneling just under the surface of normal space, effectively suspending themselves between portals and inducing energy fluctuations to push themselves along, like a needle passing under fabric.  The whole idea had made Adora feel vaguely nauseous, and she had decided to leave most of the shutters closed after that.

Now, though, Adora doesn’t look away.

She barely suppresses a flinch as the first thin line of white light appears outside, tightening her grip on the armrest and watching the spider web of cracks meet and widen into a singular maw, growing to occupy more of her vision as they draw closer—

And then they’re out, the noise and vibration of the engines rushing back as they slip back into reality, and Adora greets the rattle in her bones like an old friend that she hadn’t even realized she missed.

The calm, though, only lasts until the afterimage of the portal’s light fades from her vision.

Adora had known that Prime’s fleet was more present here than it was around Etheria, but she hadn’t expected this .  From their position along the outer edge of the system, Adora can see dozens of the same cruisers that had filled Etheria’s skies, undersides lit by the flash of explosions as they scour planets.  Groups of fighters move in perfect unison, flitting across their patrol routes like insects, making sure that nothing can escape.

And in the center of it all, gleaming white turned black against this sector’s sun, Adora sees a towering spire, more of a fortress than a ship, surrounded by concentric rings of outer decks large and launch bays that are easily large enough to hold one of the smaller battleships.

Prime’s flagship .  Adora knows without ever having to ask, her heart hammering against her ribcage proving that it’s already doing exactly what it’s meant to.  Even from so far out, the scale is unfathomable, leaving her to fight the ever-growing sinking feeling in her chest as Darla coasts on its momentum past a bluish-green planet crumbling under an orbital bombardment.  Adora closes her eyes, but snaps them back open just as quickly, unable to stop herself from imagining Etheria suffering the same fate.

Adora pulls up the controls and braces herself, preparing for the first barrage of lasers or to outmaneuver an interceptor.

It never comes.

They pass well within range of the battleship’s weapons, and nothing happens.  As far as Adora can tell, they’re being completely ignored.

It has to be intentional.  Darla is sneaky, but not that sneaky, and Adora isn’t nearly naive enough to think that Prime would make such an obvious mistake.

Adora catches the motion at the same time the long-range scanners ping, squinting and straining to see a tiny fleck of black break off from the flagship and pass across the sun before breaking away into the void.  Entrapta is saying something, trying to wave some readout or another in her face, but it all feels farther away than any of the distant stars outside.

She doesn’t need the scanners, not really.  Ever since they were kids, Adora has felt this unexplainable tug somewhere deep in her chest, an invisible string always guiding her back to Catra even in their worst moments, getting stronger when one of them was in distress.  Then, she had assumed it was just the kind of intuition you gained from knowing someone for such a long time.

Now, though, she knows it for what it is— magic — and the cord is pulled so taut that Adora’s heart threatens to tear free from her chest.

“That ship,” Adora manages to choke out, “follow it.”

Darla’s autopilot engages and follows her command, predicting the shuttle’s trajectory and sweeping in a gentle arc to meet it.  Adora keeps one hand on the runestone at her wrist, stomach twisting as she watches the cannons of the nearest battleship swivel around to follow them.

Every nerve in Adora’s body is on fire, screaming at her that she’s walking into a trap, doing exactly what Prime wants her to do.  Her instincts are right, of course, but what other choice does she have?

You look out for me, and I look out for you.  I promise.

Adora silently mouths along to the memory as she orders the ship to increase speed, the words just as clear in her mind as the day she spoke them.  On Beast Island, Catra had saved Adora’s life, reaching out in exactly the way that Adora had been hoping for years .

Adora has every intention of making good on her end of the bargain.

Finally, the shuttle’s destination comes into view: A pale, rocky planet along the outer edge of the system, far smaller than even Etheria.  Adora pulls Darla to a halt in low orbit as the shuttle breaks away to land.  If she’s going to spring a trap on purpose, she should at least be smart about it.

“Do we have any data on this place?” Adora says.

“Not much, and it’s… very out of date, but—”

“Give me whatever you’ve got.  It’s better than nothing,”

Entrapta rattles off everything stored in Darla’s ancient data banks: a rocky surface with little to no native life, breathable atmosphere, and a small weapons depot which had belonged to the First Ones a thousand years ago but is presumably under Prime’s control now.

But if the locals have anything to say about it, he won’t be holding onto it for very long— a low pass reveals a fierce battle spread across the entire planet, ragtag groups of rebels hiding out in the craters that pockmark the surface like dented armor, a sharp contrast to the neat, orderly battle lines of clones that they’re pushing against.

Adora mulls the situation over as she paces the bridge.  The biggest risk, she thinks, is something happening to the ship.  In an open battle, she can hold her own against clones all day without breaking a sweat, but if she doesn’t have a way to get off the planet afterwards…

Adora shakes the thought from her head, rolling a frayed edge of her jacket between her fingers.  She needs to assess the risks, yes, but she doesn’t have time to catastrophize right now.

“Drop me behind the rebel lines, take the ship somewhere safe, and wait for my signal,” Adora says as she inserts the earpiece Entrapta gave her, “At the first sign of trouble, you run , got it?”

“But what about—” Entrapta starts, before Adora cuts her off with a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“ Run .  I won’t let anyone else get hurt on my behalf, okay?  I promise I’ll try to be safe.”

Entrapta’s eyes narrow in concern as she looks up to study Adora’s face.  Whatever the princess is looking for, she must find it, nodding silently before withdrawing back to the console, her expression becoming unreadable behind a wall of instrument readouts and sensor data.

In the cargo bay, Adora stands alone amongst the dusty crates and listens as the synthesized voice recites their ever-descending altitude.  She feels… not exactly calm, but not nearly as unsteady as she feared she would be, either.

They’re close, now— fifty meters , the voice in her ear says before Adora taps the button to silence it— and Adora closes her eyes as she holds the sword aloft and lets the words roll off her tongue, echoing faintly in the silence (she’s pretty sure she doesn’t actually need to say them, but it’s a comfort regardless).

A heartbeat later, she can feel the power flowing through and then around her, forming and hardening like a cocoon around her body as it washes every nook and cranny of the bay in dazzling golden light.  Once Adora has opened her eyes again, she studies herself in the reflective surface, lit by the lingering embers of the glow.

It’s strange, she thinks— Adora has aged, of course, but She-Ra very much hasn’t , still the spitting image of what Adora had seen the first time she lifted the sword.  The lines of her face are still flawless, her eyes unhaunted, waves of golden hair cascading impossibly over her shoulders.  Once, Adora had seen the form as aspirational, herself but better than herself.  

That feels laughable, now; it’s so obviously a facade, even if the lingering resemblance is just enough to make her sick to her stomach if she looks too hard.  But it feels wrong to discard that part of herself entirely.  They’ve grown apart, yes— but that doesn’t change the fact that it was her, does it?

Whatever the answer is, she won’t find it now— her thoughts are pierced by the whine of servos and the hiss of pressure seals breaking, the light filtering through the growing opening erasing her reflection.  Adora walks slowly down the ramp, arms spread slightly to brace herself as the ship wobbles on its thrusters.  She pauses at the edge of the ramp, looking down to gauge the distance, takes a breath, and jumps.

The ship is already pulling away by the time she lands in a crouch, cape fluttering behind her.  Even through the plume of dust kicked up by the impact, she can feel the stares as she rises to her feet, everything around her falling silent save for the echo of the distant battle.

But none of them try to stop her, and she doesn’t turn to look, either.  Adora tightens her grip on the sword, searching for the same pull that she had felt earlier and surrendering herself to it fully, allowing it to guide her feet.  She walks past makeshift fortifications, past weary rebels who whisper in hushed tones as they try (badly) to hide the fact that they’re looking at her.

Somewhere beyond her singular focus, Adora feels a distant sense of shame.  She wishes she could help these people.  But as much power as she has, she’s still only one person— she’s mature enough to admit that, now— and she can’t save everyone.

Right now, though, she might be able to save Catra .

Adora is on open ground now, close enough to see the tight formations of her enemy’s battle line.  Just like the ships, though, they’ve stopped firing.  Every ounce of training in her body is screaming at her as she steps out into no man’s land, some long-buried instinct leaping into action to calculate sight lines and identify viable cover.  If they were going to attack her, she reminds herself, they would have done it already.

Still, it’s hard not to feel unnerved when the sea of white parts to let her pass, moving in perfect unison and opening a gap just barely wide enough for her to fit through.  Adora hurries her pace a little, vaguely aware of the ranks closing behind her.  She doesn’t release her breath until she’s made it through.

The pull is stronger than ever, but she doesn’t need it anymore— she can see the shuttle now, perched next to a rocky outcropping a ways away from the base.  If there was any doubt in her mind about this being a trap, it’s been thoroughly erased.  Adora will just have to give him more than he bargained for.

Adora shifts the sword to a two-handed grip as she approaches.  The shuttle is only guarded by a pair of clones, and they seem to be carrying the same rifles as the rest of them, but she has no idea what else might be lurking inside.  It can’t hurt to keep her guard up.

She flinches when one of the clones steps forward, suddenly incredibly aware of her heart hammering in her chest as she takes a single step back before getting herself under control.  The clone twitches almost imperceptibly at first before the convulsions intensify and ripple through its entire body, neck tipping backward with a sickening crack as Adora watches in horror.  When it recovers, its eyes open to reveal the same sickening green that’s haunted her nightmares for weeks.

“ Adora .  I’m truly sorry I couldn’t be there to greet you in the flesh, but I trust that this will suffice,” Prime says, his voice sounding far too imperious to be coming out of the mouth of a singular clone.“You know, when I heard that She-Ra had returned, I almost didn’t believe it at first.”

“I’m here for Catra,” Adora lets the words come out in She-Ra’s voice instead of her own, hoping that it’s enough to hide the tremor in her throat, “I don’t know what you’ve done to her, but—”

Prime cuts her off with a laugh full of barely-disguised contempt.  “Of course you are.  Always so focused with you, never bothering to look at the bigger picture.  But who am I to deny you?”

Adora’s heart skips a beat as the shuttle’s door glides open, the interior still cloaked in shadow.  The silence is broken by the scraping, grating noise of metal dragging against metal as a pair of clones emerge and descend the ramp, heavy chains dragging behind them.  They’re in tight formation, standing too close together for Adora to see through the gaps, but it doesn’t matter.  She knows what’s there, and it takes every ounce of restraint she has to keep herself still.

When they do fan out, pulling the chains loose and allowing them to clatter to the ground in a heap, what Adora sees is far from the grainy video that had shattered her entire world a month ago.  She doesn’t thrash against the restraints, doesn’t roar, doesn’t even look at Adora.  She just… stands there and hangs her head in defeat, wild mane veiling her face as the shuttle door closes behind her.

She looks broken , and Adora feels like she’s been stabbed in the heart all over again.

“ Catra! ” The cry comes in her own voice, shaking and broken and just as involuntary as it had been in the Fright Zone, two syllables echoing in the distance between them for what feels like an eternity.  It doesn’t feel like anywhere near enough.  There’s so, so much more that Adora is barely managing to hold back, enough words threatening to pour out of her that the flood would drown both of them if she let it, but this is the only place that she knows to start.

It gets her attention, at least.

Catra raises her head slowly, not even seeming to register that her arms are free, or anything else beyond Adora’s voice. Her fur is disheveled and matted, her hair just as unkempt as it had been on Beast Island.  She’s still fractured, a jagged edge splitting her down the middle, one side of her face taken by shards of all-consuming black, but her eyes —

Adora feels all the breath leave her lungs as she meets Catra’s eyes and finds something soft, a degree of vulnerability and clarity that she hasn’t seen since they were kids.  Adora tries not to take it personally when she reels back in surprise, mouth falling open and moving just slightly like she’s trying to respond but can’t put the words together.  Adora lowers the sword the tiniest bit as she takes a tentative step forward.  Catra doesn’t match the gesture, but she doesn’t run, either.

She’s mid-stride when Catra’s body tenses, arms shooting up to grip her sides.  A moment later, arcs of green lightning crackle across her skin, and she doubles over as she howls in pain.  Adora reaches out uselessly as she watches the darkness spill back into Catra’s eye like a pen dipped in water, but she moves no further.  It takes all her strength not to look away like she always has.

Somewhere in Adora’s chest, anger rises like a solar flare until it becomes hot and radiant in her throat.  She knew, of course, that Prime was controlling Catra through some less direct means than the rest of his armies, but this … Adora tightens her grip on the sword as the memories come flooding back— the flicker of red and the crackling of electricity, Catra screaming, shaking like a leaf for hours afterward as Adora tried desperately to comfort her— not one memory, but something they had repeated dozens of times, each instance blurring together until they become indistinguishable in her mind.  No wonder Catra has looked so afraid this entire time.

In that moment, one thing becomes crystal clear, piercing through the storm of emotions roiling in Adora’s mind: She’s going to make sure that Horde Prime pays for this.  Adora doesn’t want much, no violent revenge quest or glorious crusade, just to make Prime feel even a tiny fraction of the fear that he’s inflicted on Catra (and the entire universe, for that matter) before he dies at her hand.  Her present task excepted, it’s the most clearly she can ever remember wanting anything.

That will have to come later, though.

Catra snarls and bares her teeth as she lunges across the distance between them, her arm reshaping itself into a glowing spike.  This time, Adora is ready, twisting her body just in time to avoid the thrust and drive an elbow into Catra’s back, the force and her own momentum sending her staggering forward.

Adora seizes precious seconds while Catra recovers and scans their environment— they’re boxed in by silent rows of clones on three sides and a cliff at her left, the ground narrowing to a sharp point as it reaches the precipice of a drop steeper than she cares to think about.  

Adora already feels like her heart is plunging off of it.  She searches desperately for some advantage, some way she can get out of this without doing any more damage, but she finds nothing and she’s running out of time.

What would Catra do? The question comes as a surprise, but the answer doesn’t: fight dirty.   Even under the circumstances, Adora can’t help the smirk that flickers across her lips before she refocuses.

“ Please , Catra, I know you don’t want to do this.”

The words are honest, even though Adora doesn’t expect them to get through.  She doesn’t need them to— Catra’s movement hitches slightly as she turns around, her ear shifting somewhere under the mass of wild hair.

It’s just enough time for Adora to leap backward, swapping the sword for a coil of weighted golden rope.  She twirls the end in one hand to build momentum before letting it fly, glittering thread slipping off her arm as it arcs gently through the air.

The impact takes Catra off guard and catches her across her back, trapping her arms against her body as the rope encircles her.  Catra shrieks and convulses in distress, the chip administering another small shock as Adora pulls her off balance and drags her to the ground, and Adora winces sharply as a pang of regret lands in her stomach like a blow— Catra has always been touchy about having her movements restrained, and she can’t imagine that’s gotten any better as of late.  

But she doesn’t let go.  Adora approaches cautiously, inching one hand across the rope and coiling the excess over her free arm to keep it tight.  She whispers apologies as Catra thrashes, her hands burning from the friction of the abrupt movements.  Briefly, she considers tapping her earpiece and calling Entrapta to get them out of here, but she can’t bring Catra aboard until she knows how to make her Catra again, and not… this .

Catra goes still as Adora makes her way behind her, save for the heavy, rasping breaths that slip from her throat.  Adora drops into a crouch and reaches out, the steel wool texture of Catra’s hair grating against her fingers as she pushes it aside.  Underneath, she finds a gleaming metal spider latched onto Catra’s spine, straddling the line between soft fur and the half of her that was taken by the portal.

Adora stares transfixed at the green light thrumming softly in the center.  This is it, she thinks.  If she can get this… this thing off of Catra, maybe she can heal the rest of the damage on her own.

Which means that Adora just needs to figure out how to perform impromptu spinal cord surgery.  On her own.  Millions of miles from home.  Surrounded by an army that could try to kill her any second.  

No big deal.

She can hear her own breath going shallow and feel the tremor growing in her hand, the only visible symptoms of an imminent death spiral that she absolutely can’t allow herself to fall into right now.  Adora narrows her view to the task at hand, tracing one of the chip’s points down to its base and focusing on Catra’s fur under her fingers— it feels like breathing, like a weight being lifted from her chest.

Adora breathes a sigh of relief, muscles relaxing just enough for her hand to dip down and graze Catra’s warm skin.

Catra flinches away from the touch, hissing sharply.

The chip pulses as red as the blood running in the veins underneath it.

Everything comes crashing down.

Catra heaves her entire body up, slamming the back of her head into Adora’s face and sending her reeling back, only distantly aware of the warm trickle of blood streaking down towards her lip.  Adora tries desperately to maintain her hold, but the pain is blinding, and she can only do so many things at once.  Catra presses her arms outward, the rope straining under her newly restored strength until it begins to give way.

It’s hanging by a thread by the time Adora manages to get her legs under her and reform the sword in her hand, barely managing to raise her guard before Catra is on top of her again, raining down blows that resonate from the sword through to Adora’s entire body.  Fighting Catra like this still feels wrong — years of instinct are screaming at her to watch for an attack from the side, or for an attempt to sweep her legs out from under her, but Catra maintains the frontal assault, each blow chipping away at her endurance.

It makes Adora sick to her stomach all over again.  Catra is supposed to be quick, clever enough to more than make up for what she lacked in brute strength.  Fighting her had always felt like a dance, a careful, rhythmic exchange of feints and counters and near-misses.

Using Catra as a weapon is bad enough already, of course.  But using her like this just feels like adding insult to injury.

There’s a momentary gap in the flurry of strikes, and Adora charges into it for everything it’s worth.  The next time Catra swings at her, she’s ready— stepping aside and leveraging the flat of the blade to push the strike away from her face as Catra carries on past her, leaving her side wide open to an attack.  Adora seizes the upper hand, raising the sword and swinging at Catra’s right side with everything that she has—

And then Catra catches it, her arm deforming and flowing over the blade like liquid metal before hardening again, trapping the cutting edge several inches deep in her forearm.

Adora tries to pull back, but it’s too late.  Catra’s grip on the blade is like iron, her shattered face staring back in a distorted reflection of the smile that she remembers so warmly.  She doesn’t try to press the advantage, though, holding steady no matter which way Adora’s increasingly desperate movements take her.

Adora runs through her options: Letting go of the sword is out of the question, of course.  She could try to step forward, kick Catra’s legs out, but that means putting herself in range to get eviscerated by her opponent's free hand.

As spiderwebs of black grow across the surface of the blade, spreading from the point where it intersects with Catra’s flesh, she feels it: something pressing at the soft edges of her mind, her thoughts clouding over like she’s trying to read them through water.  Distantly, she remembers losing control in the Northern Reach, and a spike of panic cuts through the haze.  Whatever happens, she can’t let Prime get his hands on She-Ra.

Even if it kills her.

Even if it kills both of them.

Adora reaches inward and gathers the power running through her veins, concentrating as much as she can before pushing it outward into the sword, the blade glowing through the gaps in the corruption.

It isn’t enough.  Adora finds the tiniest degree of give when she moves the sword, but the darkness is still spreading, and she can feel her control slipping more and more every second, her movements becoming heavier and her thoughts more slippery.  The only consolation is that Catra is feeling the effects too, pulling in hard breaths through gritted teeth.

So she pushes again.  And again, and again until she’s heaving from the exertion, golden hair falling out of place and shrouding her face as the blade itself quivers from the amount of energy running through it, glowing like distant starlight even through the webbing that now covers its entire surface.

For a moment, Adora’s grasp on her form falters, her failing strength letting Catra’s claws come close enough to scrape her nose before she manages to recover.  If she’s going to end this, she has to do it now .  She scrapes the bottom of her reserves, finds stores of magic that she didn’t even know existed—

And with one final effort, Adora calls down the sun.

The sword becomes a supernova in her hands, casting their long shadows over the empty battlefield for a half-second before Adora is blinded by the light. She screws her eyes shut and keeps pushing as the radiant heat warms her face, her white-knuckle grip on the hilt barely enough to keep her steady as she passes the weapon’s limits and keeps going, even though her head is so light and her limbs are so, so heavy.

There’s a deafening, shattering crack before everything goes silent.

Adora opens her eyes, and for just a moment she could swear that she’s even taller than she was before, a sharper, more elegant blade erupting out of the one that she’s grown accustomed to.  But it disappears as the light fades, and she sees the truth: she’s just Adora again, and the sword in her hands lies in ruin, little more than a few jagged pieces of metal attached to a golden hilt as shards of the blade rain down around them, glowing like embers.

Before she can process what any of that means, she sees Catra, and suddenly nothing else matters.

Catra staggers backward, eyes already closed as she collapses in slow motion, and Adora can already see that the portal’s corruption has been banished from her face.  But as she looks downwards, she sees that the entirety of Catra’s right arm is gone , the familiar outline of her body coming to an abrupt halt at her shoulder.

She did this, Adora knows.  This is her fault.  She’ll deal with that later.

Right now, though, Adora casts the wreckage of the sword aside without hesitation and lunges forward to catch Catra before she can hit the ground, barely managing to keep herself upright when the weight hits her.

There’s blood.  Adora tries to keep pressure on the wound with one shaking hand as she supports Catra with the other, but there’s so, so much blood, already blooming across both their clothes and more of it pulsing through the gaps in her fingers with every heartbeat, mapping out the lines of her hand in red ink.

But that— along with the rattling breaths at her shoulder— means that Catra is alive , she reminds herself, that she still has a chance and a responsibility to get them both out of this.

She contorts her body to press the button on her earpiece, never once letting go of Catra.  “Entrapta? We need to get out of here now .  I’ve got her, but I—” she struggles for the words to explain anything that’s happened, and gives up.  “Prepare the medical room if you have time.  I’ll explain when you get here.”

“ Understood!  I’ll see you soon! ”

She can’t possibly be fast enough.  Adora clutches Catra a little tighter to her chest as she watches the endless rows of white close in on them and takes a half-step backward— towards the edge of the cliff.

It can’t end like this.  She’s come too far, sacrificed too much to let it end like this, but she doesn’t see a way out.  There’s water somewhere beneath the cliff, she knows.  But it’s a small target, and even if she managed to break the surface tension with her own body, Catra wouldn’t be able to make it out on her own in her present state.  Adora takes another step towards the edge as tears pool in her eyes and her throat ties itself in knots, burying her face in the warmth of Catra’s body.

She wants so badly to talk to Catra right now, to have a chance to say all of the things that she should have said years ago.   But one last chance to hold Catra is more than she ever thought she’d get, and it’ll have to do.  

Adora dips her forehead down to rest it against Catra’s, closes her eyes, and waits.

But the end never comes.

Instead, Adora listens as a high, distant whine grows into a colossal roar, opening her eyes to see a gray blur buzzing low enough over the enemy battle line to send clones tumbling to the ground in its wake.  She doesn’t recognize it until it turns toward them, overshooting slightly before swinging around so that its back is toward the cliff.

Adora is willing her legs to run before the cargo door is even open, Catra jostling against her and more blood slipping between her fingers with every pounding footstep.  They’re almost at the very edge by the time the ramp lowers enough to reveal Entrapta crouching at the end, hair spread wide to catch them.

Adora jumps, one foot already half-off the cliff, and for a moment she feels weightless before she lands in Entrapta’s arms, all three of them tumbling to the floor in a heap.  Adora wants to laugh and cry and lay on the cold metal forever, but the warmth trailing down her forearm presses her back into action.

“I’ll fly,” Entrapta says, glancing down at Catra before pulling her mask over her face and disappearing towards the bridge.

Adora thanks her breathlessly— she’s in no state to pilot right now, and she wouldn’t be able to bear letting Catra out of her sight even if she was— and hauls herself toward the medical room.  Just a little bit further.

She lays Catra down in the stark white light of the medical room and tries, on instinct, to summon her magic, stumbling for a moment when she finds emptiness in the space where it should be.  She’ll need to get used to that feeling, she knows.  She recovers quickly, though— the years spent treating her own injuries in the wilderness mean that she hasn’t gone too soft, and she’s thankful for it now.

Adora tears the battered uniform from Catra’s chest, barely bothering to look away as she lifts her off the bed so she can wrap the bandage around, pulling it tight and bracing it with another strip, crossing her body diagonally to her stomach.  Adora tries not to think about the scars that she finds hidden just under Catra’s fur— some old and familiar, some fresh— there’s nothing she can do about the past.

What she ends up with isn’t much.  She can already see the blood blooming under the layers of gauze, and she’ll have to change it sooner rather than later, but for now it will have to do.

Adora collapses into the chair in the corner and pulls her knees to her chest as the wave of adrenaline crests and breaks, the tears that she can no longer hold back pouring down her face.  She should go up to the bridge, she knows, but she doesn’t.  She’s too exhausted to even think about moving.  And, for the first time that day, she’s afraid.  

She figured out who she was without the sword once , she reminds herself, and that means that with time, she can do it again.  For now, she sits under the lights and grounds herself on the sound of Catra’s breathing, the rise and fall becoming steadier with every cycle.

If there’s one thing to be said about Adora’s oldest friend, it’s that she’s a survivor, above all else.  She’ll make it through this.  She’s already made it through worse.

Which means that there’s nothing for Adora to do but wait and hope.

This should not have been allowed to happen.

Horde Prime, in all his radiant glory, storms across the ruined ground, traces the shadows burned into the rocks, and tries to decide exactly which batch of clones he’s going to feed to the incinerator first.  He’ll admit that he made a mistake in underestimating just how far the girl would go, but that doesn’t matter.  What matters is that, somehow, all of his forces and all of their scanning equipment had failed to keep track of one singular ship, and now both his favorite weapon and his best chance at taking She-Ra off the field are gone.

But nothing will stop him from crushing the Etherians under his heel.  His spy will make sure of that.

And they won’t make it far, either.  Not now that he has their scent.  Prime closes his eyes and reaches out into the hivemind, letting the flood of information wash over him and block everything else out.  He sees through thousands of eyes at once, hears millions of thoughts.  It would drive a lesser being mad in a matter of seconds, but Prime alone is able to immerse himself and pull order from chaos.  He gathers everything that he knows about the ship— a very, very old model that he thought he had long since seen the last of— and blasts it across the entire network, from grunt clones to the monitoring stations tracking minor fluctuations in slipspace.

There will be nowhere for them to hide, now.

And when he opens his eyes he sees something else, a flash of gold in the setting sun as he approaches the epicenter of the blast.  He lifts the object in one clawed hand, his many eyes reflected in the cracked jewel at the center.  Around him, the scattered pieces of the blade glitter like jewels in the dying light, and Prime’s face twists into a cold smile as he surveys them before casting the hilt aside into the pile. By the time he turns to walk away, a trio of clones are already hurrying towards him, dutifully sweeping the shards from the ground into a small box, ready to carry them back to the Velvet Glove for further study.

This may have been a worthwhile trade after all, he decides.

Chapter Text

You are eighteen years old.  The sunset filters through the smog and glints off Adora’s new badge as the two of you sit on top of the forge, a future finally within your grasp.  At the same time, something is ending.  You know this, even if you don’t know why yet.

You are six.  You flatten your ears and pull the blanket tighter, like it can shield you from everything in this world that would try to hurt you, like it can shield you from the traces of red lightning that you can still feel arcing across your skin. A stubborn hand tugs at the corner in spite of your hissing, slowly working its way inside your armor.

You are fifteen. You close your eyes, savoring the feeling of Adora’s fingers brushing the sides of your face as she sets the mask in place.  Maybe it’s your imagination, but you could swear that Adora lingers a little longer than strictly necessary.

You are twelve.  Adora’s curled form shudders against you as she cries, trying to bury herself in your rolling purr and soft fur after being scolded for her “insufficient performance”.  All this for a perfectly respectable second place?  You never let yourself win after that.

You are fourteen.  You dig your claws into your hands every time she catches herself looking at Adora too long, trying to break the habit by force.  Maybe once they’re older, once they have power, then you can have Adora the way that you want to.  This will have to be enough for now.

You are eighteen, again.  You watch as the glow fades and Adora emerges from the smoke.  Adora, who you were here to rescue.  Adora, who was doing just fine and didn’t need you, just like always.  

Catra is drowning, the currents of her memory dragging her under and weighing heavy on her chest.

Somewhere above her, she can see light, diffusing and dancing across the turbulent surface.  She pushes towards it with everything she has, but she’s so, so tired, and there’s more water flooding into her lungs with every breath—

You are dancing with Adora.  If you close your eyes, you can almost forget why.

You are standing in the wreckage of a battlefield, covered with blood that is not your own.

You are waking up on the rocky surface of some desolate planet, even the peace of death evading you.

You are pulling the lever.  Everything hurts— you can’t remember a time when it didn’t —and you just want it to stop.

Catra is here and now (where- and when-ever that is).  But she’s all of those places too, her beginnings and her endings tangling into each other faster than she can undo the knot.  She works frantically, the mountain of unspooled thread piling ever higher around her.

Just when she’s ready to give up hope and let herself sink, she finds the center.

You are… young.  Young enough that you aren’t Catra yet, at least.  You’re not sure beyond that, but your body feels so small, the box you’re hiding in so large.  All you know is fear and the memories of a home buried so deep that all you have is the distant echo of a song which has long since lost its words.

Someone knows you’re here, the muffled noises from outside only becoming clearer, more insistent in response to her silence.  You try to brace yourself in the corner, but it’s no use: the world tips on its axis and spills you out onto the cold metal floor.

The first thing that Catra sees when she breaks the surface and emerges back into consciousness is… nothing.  Nothing but blinding, sterile white filling every inch of her vision and sending a stabbing pain through her skull.

Why had she expected anything different?  She knows the routine by now—  No matter how many hits she takes, no matter how much she leverages what little control she has and tries to make space for whichever poor fucker she’s been thrown at to strike a killing blow, no matter how much damage she causes to herself or to the clones or anything else, she always ends up right back here: laid out on a lab table so she can be stitched up and thrown back out to whatever backwater planet Prime needs to terrorize this week.

Death would be far too kind a fate for her after everything that she’s done.

Catra inhales sharply, a violent shudder rolling down the length of her body as she forces her head to the side, burying it in the sheets in a feeble attempt to return to the comfort of darkness.  Something feels… different this time, although she can’t quite place why — her head is still swimming and she feels like she’s been run over by a tank, but she’s focused enough to know that.  After so long (months? Years? A decade?) experiencing the world through a thick blanket, even the smallest sensation feels sharp enough to cut, even the feeling of the pillow rubbing against her ear making her pull away like a child touching fire for the first time.

“ Catra? ”

The voice is barely audible above the ringing in her ears, but it lands like a punch to the stomach.

No.  No no no no no.   It’s not possible, Catra tells herself, even though she knows that’s a lie.   She must be hallucinating (it wouldn’t be the first time, after all), or Prime finally pieced together who she is and he’s messing with her head, or—

“Catra? Can you hear me?”

It's clearer this time: the one voice that Catra never, ever wanted to hear again no matter how much she ached for it.  She can make out other noises now, too: the rapid beeping of a heart-rate monitor; the gentle hiss of filtered air; a high, electric whine coming from somewhere beyond the walls— none of it providing any substantial clue to where she is or how she got here.

She doesn’t want to look.

She has to look, has to know for sure before she lets herself spiral.  So she does.

The first thing Catra sees when she adjusts to the light is a pair of pale blue eyes looking down at her.  And she remembers, more clearly than anything else, the harsh, metallic taste of blood in her mouth.

Panic seizes her throat before she can process anything further.  Wherever she is, she’s certain now that it’s not safe— she can feel the room constricting around her, Adora’s too-soft gaze bearing down and squeezing the breath from her lungs.

She needs space .

So, Catra does what she’s always done: she lashes out, wildly swiping her claws upwards with little care for what she does or doesn’t actually hit , and—

Nothing.  There’s no response from her right arm, just empty static and a burning pain lancing through her side.  What happened to her?  She can see Adora’s lips moving as she talks into a panel on the wall, but the words are drowned out by her frantic heartbeat climbing ever higher in her chest.

Regardless, she accomplishes her goal— Adora flinches at the abrupt movement, taking a half-step backward and withdrawing her hands.  Catra seizes the opportunity before she can recover, lurching sideways with all her strength and rolling over until the crinkling white sheets drop away and doing what little she can to brace herself as she pitches over the edge of the bed.

The drop is only three or four feet, but the impact when she hits the hard floor is still enough to rattle her bones, adding fresh tallies to the litany of bruises hidden under her fur.  Her sense of balance is completely gone, even the smallest movements demanding both physical and mental effort to recalibrate them— she only barely remembers to shift her weight off her single, wobbling arm before it collapses, pushing herself back into a sitting position to take stock of her situation.

More than anything, Catra wants answers — about where she is; about what happened to her arm; about what, exactly, Adora is planning to do to her—  right now, though, the only thing she knows how to do is keep moving , because if she stops now she isn’t sure she’ll ever be able to start again.

But Adora stands between her and the doorway, and even if she somehow managed to slip past in her current state, she’d still be trapped, wouldn’t she?

That leaves Catra one other option: find a defensible position and hope that she can wait it out.  She scrambles backward just in time to dodge Adora’s attempt to grab her, ducking under the bed and allowing the shadows to wrap around her like a heavy blanket.  Her movement is awkward and halting, claws gouging shallow lines in the tile as she kicks and kicks until she’s managed to back herself into the corner.

“ Catra? ” Adora’s voice is quiet as she drops into a crouch just beyond the edge of the light.  “you’re safe now, okay?  No one is going to hurt you.”

She’s lying.

She has to be lying.  Catra wishes so badly that she could let herself believe it.  But every time she meets Adora’s faintly-glowing gaze, Catra feels dull, lingering pain blooming across her cheek, and reluctantly concedes to the fearful voice clawing at the back of her mind, pressing her back straighter against the cold metal.

What Catra wants to say is get away from me before I hurt you.

What flops pathetically out of her mouth is little more than a series of rhythmless, disconnected syllables that fail to congeal into either a threat or a warning.  She tries again and gets even less, the rising panic crushing what’s left of her voice.  Her arm is gone, she has no idea where she is, she can’t even talk properly, and yet the universe can’t seem to let her just die .

Adora shuffles forward, empty palms forward as she crosses the threshold and joins Catra in the darkness.  Catra’s ears pin back and she hisses sharply, wordlessly pleading with Adora to stay away , but it’s just as ineffective as it had been when they were kids.  She doesn’t want to hurt Adora, but she doesn’t trust herself not to do something worse if she lets the idiot get close.  So she shuts her eyes tight and flails with her remaining arm, claws out,, all the force she can muster barely enough to sustain the motion, and—

“ Hey!   I’m trying to help you, Catra,” Adora says as she catches her by the wrist and pins it to the wall with little effort, “I know you’re freaked out, but—”

Catra forces her eyes open as she twists uselessly against Adora’s grip, and the room goes completely silent save for the persistent electrical whine and the dull thudding of her feet against the metal.  Something in Adora’s expression softens, and she changes her approach, slipping her rough palm against the back of Catra’s hand and weaving her middle and ring fingers together with Catra’s own.

Then— never letting her eyes leave Catra— she squeezes, firm enough to be grounding but never crushingly so, Catra flinching once before going completely still.

I’ll protect you.

The gesture is etched so deep in Catra’s bones that she can’t even remember a time when translating it required conscious thought.  Across their years in the Fright Zone, it had only been natural that they would develop an arsenal of hand signals robust enough to carry entire silent conversations— some of them broad, some so specific as to be useless to anyone but the two of them— but this one had been the first, formulated on the fly when Adora had tracked her down to a tangled nest of pipes, red lightning still burning across her skin and snatching the words from her mouth.  The signal (improvised from one for covering fire that they learned in training) had remained the same over the years, but the meaning had shifted slightly, going from a ward against specific danger to a reassurance exchanged in darkened bunks after a nightmare, or when one of them was struggling with a training exercise, or any other time they needed a little bit of security.

And Adora… Adora remembers it, even after Catra had spent years thinking herself the last speaker of a language that would one day die with her.

It takes her a moment to realize that Adora is expecting her to provide the response to her call, but she gets there eventually, wrapping around Adora’s fingers and squeezing once, waiting a heartbeat, and then repeating the gesture— I trust you .  Her grip is weak, her hand still wavering even in the loose hold, but it’s enough .  A look of relief washes over Adora’s face, a soft smile tugging at her lips—

And Catra finally lets herself fall apart, collapsing against Adora’s side like someone has cut her strings, burying her face in the soft red fabric and clinging to her hand like a lifeline. Adora turns herself just enough to press herself against the top of Catra’s head and hum softly, but makes no move to embrace her further.

Catra is thankful for that, if she’s being honest.  Even this much contact is nearly enough to be overwhelming, and some part of her still doesn’t trust any of this enough to let herself be restrained.

But she trusts it enough to stay , breathing in Adora’s still-familiar scent and finally letting go of the tension she’s carried for so long, her tail encircling both of them as they huddle together in the darkness.  It feels like almost everything that Catra has never let herself want, all of the things that she thought had disappeared in the smoke a lifetime ago.

It feels like coming home.

They stay like that for a long time, neither wanting to break the fragile connection between them.  But they both know that it can’t last forever.

“When you’re ready,” Adora whispers, hot breath close enough to make Catra’s ear twitch, “we’d like to run some tests just to make sure you’re okay, and get a look at that thing on the back of your neck.”  Catra nods, biting back the soft noise that rises in her throat as Adora’s warmth pulls away from her face and slips from her hand.  She knows, logically, that neither of them are going very far, but everything between them is so tender that it hurts anyway.  She keeps her head ducked as she pushes forward, Adora’s hand waiting for her just past the edge.

Catra reaches for it, but she recoils as soon as the light falls across her fur.  Everything about the room suddenly feels too familiar for the irrational part of her brain to cede control— the blank walls, the cold floor, the slightly-too-thin air— none of it identical to the places she had been kept, but all of it just similar enough to kick her survival instincts into high gear.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Adora asks, dropping to a crouch.

Catra still doesn’t trust herself to speak without sounding like an absolute mess.  Instead, she gestures upwards, letting Adora follow her gaze to the long strips embedded in the ceiling and hoping desperately that she gets the message.  After a moment, she does.

“Is it the lights? You want them down?”  Catra nods once, sweeping her arm broadly to indicate the rest of the room as well.  Adora chews the inside of her lip for a moment before she appears to come to a decision, rising and turning as if she’s talking to the space itself.  “Darla?  Can you set the lights to fifty percent in this compartment please?”  The panel on the wall trills in acknowledgment, and Catra breathes a sigh of relief as the room slowly falls into darkness.

There’s no way that Adora came up with the name.  It’s not that Adora wouldn’t name a spaceship—it’s exactly the kind of ridiculous thing that Catra would expect from her, in fact—but she knows Adora would have picked something way worse than ‘Darla’.

Adora offers a hand again, but she doesn’t take it.  Instead, Catra hooks her claws into the edge of the bed and drags herself to her feet, shooting a glare at Adora when it looks like she might try to step forward and pull her up.  Catra is breathless by the time she finishes the ascent, and she still doesn’t entirely trust herself to stay upright, but that hardly matters to her.  There’s a moment of tension between them before Adora concedes, and Catra tries to ignore the look of disappointment on her face as she turns to lead the way.

It’s only when they emerge into the corridor that Catra finally understands where she is, and she grabs the door frame for support as the understanding lands like a blow to the stomach— She knows the channels carved into these walls, she helped ransack that medical room, and, if she closes her eyes, she can almost hear an echoing voice just around the corner, pleading with her to forget all of them , to stay here and be happy .

Even in the broken landscape of her memory, the words are sharp enough to draw blood. Everything from those final hours is perfectly clear in Catra’s mind, as much as she wishes it wasn’t— her hollow victory in the wastes; Entrapta trying to talk her out of activating the portal; the look of desperation on Adora’s face as Catra let herself sink—

How different would things have been if she had just listened ?

Catra forces the memories down and limps forward, keeping herself a half-step outside Adora’s reach as she leads them through the twisting nest of corridors.  The space is more than a little claustrophobic, and Catra is surprised to find that she appreciates it— Horde Prime’s ships (save for her transport shuttle) had been ostentatious to the point of obscenity, all arched doorways and cavernous halls.  The sharp contrast is reassuring, and the restricted sightlines help to calm her nerves, if only a little.

Nothing happens the first time Adora taps the wall panel, but after the third or fourth attempt the ship seems to get the message, the door parting to allow them through.  “In here.”    The room that Adora motions her into is a little bit larger than the medical room, but it sure doesn’t feel that way— the walls are lined with plain metal shelves, mostly empty except for a thick layer of dust, with what she assumes to be their former contents strewn across the floor and sorted into loose piles.  The exception to the rule, however, is an immaculately organized patch of floor at the far corner, half of it taken up by a barren mattress.  Next to it, she can make out an overstuffed backpack and a neatly-folded bundle of tattered red fabric that her mind eventually manages to resolve into the familiar shape of Adora’s jacket (or, at least, what’s left of it).  

Catra pushes herself off the wall, momentum carrying her as she stumbles across the room and collapses on the mattress.  Adora lingers in the hallway, apparently waiting for someone, and Catra’s ears strain to listen as a second voice appears just beyond her field of view.  Catra only recognizes it a second before the conversation stops, her blood running cold in her veins as Adora re-enters, and behind her…

Entrapta .  The tech princess lingers in the doorway, the ends of her hair tying and untying themselves restlessly behind her.  Catra does not meet her eyes, because if she looks she won’t see Entrapta standing in the doorway, she’ll see Entrapta’s crumpled body on the floor of the Fright Zone, being carried off to a slow, painful death on Catra’s orders.  Entrapta isn’t doing anything, really, just… standing there, clearly still thinking about a half dozen things Catra could never hope to understand, and she’s already the most terrifying thing that Catra has ever seen.

The worst part, really, is that Catra knows that she deserves to feel this way, that she deserves any retribution the princess decides she wants.  Entrapta could lay her out, unravel her piece by piece, and set up a mirror to make Catra watch as she did it, and she would still be unable to utter a word in her own defense even if she could speak.

Catra doesn’t run— she doesn’t think that there’s enough strength left in her battered legs to support another escape attempt— but she folds in on herself, tucking her knees against her chest like she might be able to escape notice if she can just make herself small enough.  Adora catches on to the tension in her body and drops to join her on the mattress, laying her hand over Catra’s and squeezing just enough to make her presence felt.  “She just needs to make sure you’re alright.  I’ll be right here the whole time, I promise.”

She’s not going to hurt you, and I won’t let her , Catra hears.

Catra risks a glance at Adora, and then another at Entrapta, who gives her a far-too-cheerful wave.  She still doesn’t trust any of this— why would Adora come for her after all this time without some kind of ulterior motive?  Even disregarding the way they left things, the Adora that Catra knew doesn’t do things just because she wants to, and she finds it hard to believe that that’s changed.  There has to be a catch, has to be some angle that she can’t quite see yet.

But if either of them wanted her dead, she knows that she wouldn’t have woken up in the first place.  Catra doesn’t know the full extent of her injuries, but a quick glance at the bandages that wrap her chest is enough to tell her that she’s only alive because Adora or Entrapta had intervened.  Whatever Adora is playing at, she needs Catra alive for it.  Which means that she probably wouldn’t let Entrapta dissect her and play haruspex with her remains.

Probably.

Catra tries to unwind her tightly-coiled body as Entrapta shuffles over and begins unpacking her tools, but she isn’t very successful at it, nor does she manage to suppress her desperate flinch when Adora’s hand pulls away to make space.

“It’s nice to see you awake, Catra!” Entrapta bounces as she attaches a small device to Catra’s finger, her tablet lighting up with the rapid, steady pulse of Catra’s heartbeat.  “How are you feeling?”

Catra… isn’t sure how to answer that.  She’s alive, and clearly improved from the semi-feral state she had been in previously.  Her entire body hurts, but she supposes that’s nothing new— she’s just aware of it now, freed from the thick blanket of magic and combat drugs.  Catra shrugs as much as she’s capable, Entrapta humming in acknowledgement.

If Entrapta even remembers what Catra did to her, she doesn’t seem interested in acknowledging it, and that’s almost worse than any of the nightmare scenarios her brain has come up with.  It would be easier if Entrapta would just hate her like she knows she deserves, instead of letting her wait for the blade to fall on her neck.  She should say something, she knows, even if she can’t bring herself to actually apologize — at least ask what happened, or thank her for coming, anything except sitting in silence like a scared child— but her tongue still refuses to obey her commands, her lips moving but never quite finding purchase, and she can do nothing but growl in frustration and watch as Entrapta’s face twists in concern.

“Why can’t she talk?” Adora’s voice is flat, but Catra still knows her well enough to hear the strains of panic around the edges.  “Is it going to get better, or—” or is she going to be stuck like this .

Entrapta doesn’t answer verbally, barely looking up as she pulls a flat-tipped wedge from her bag and swipes it past one side of Catra’s face and then the other.  If Catra cranes her neck, she can just barely see the diagrams that bloom across the screen, but whatever is so fascinating to Entrapta is completely inscrutable.

She performs the same scan a few more times—asking Catra to try speaking while it runs, to try thinking about different things or moving different parts of her body—muttering under her breath as the swirl of colors shifts into new patterns each time.

“You’ve definitely suffered a major shock,” Entrapta says when she looks up.  Her voice is slower and more balanced than Catra is used to— she’s choosing her words carefully—  “but it doesn’t look like anything is actually broken , or at least not permanently.  You might have forgotten how to do some things, but if you keep trying them your brain should be able to make the pathways work again.”

Great .  That’s just what Catra needs: more work, more things that she needs to practice without any defined end goal if she wants to get back to any semblance of normal, because losing an arm apparently wasn’t enough.  Catra has always prided herself on being adaptable, but for the first time, she wonders if the universe has finally found her limits.

She wants so badly to cry, or scream, or break whatever she can get her hands on, to do anything to get this feeling out of her and make it someone else’s problem, but she refuses to.  Not while Adora and Entrapta are there to see it.  Right now, she’ll cling to any small amount of control she can get, because even the illusion of it is better than allowing herself to be tossed around endlessly.  After everything she’s been through, the ability to hide her feelings again is practically a luxury.

So she doesn’t put up a fight when Entrapta asks her to turn around, in spite of her instincts telling her that exposing her back means leaving herself open for an attack.  She only flinches slightly when Adora lifts her hair to expose the back of her neck, even if her claw digs into the mattress at her side.

During the last battery of tests, Catra had the comfort of at least being able to see what Entrapta was doing, even if she didn’t understand it.  Now, though, she has to operate on blind faith as Entrapta pokes into the most critical, easily-damaged parts of her body.

The tech princess is uncharacteristically silent as she works, save for the sporadic scraping of metal against metal accompanied by spikes of pain that run down the length of her spine, only made worse by her body’s attempts to get away from the source.  Catra could have Adora call for a break, she knows, but she doesn’t—as tortuous as this is, it’s still far better than she deserves.  All she would achieve is drawing it out longer.

“Okay!” Entrapta pulls away, the sudden rise of her voice making Catra hiss between her teeth, “I have good news, bad news, and then more good news!  Which do you want first?”

Catra glances up and shares a nervous look with Adora, both of them knowing Entrapta well enough to be just slightly afraid.

“We’ll start with the good news, I think.”

“The chip is completely and totally fried, so it shouldn’t be able to hurt Catra any more or be used to track us.  It looks like it must have been severely overloaded, probably by the surge of energy when Adora—”

Catra raises an eyebrow as the stream of words cuts off abruptly, seemingly in response to some frantic head-shaking by Adora.  What are they trying to hide from her?

“Anyway, the bad news,” Entrapta reins herself in, looking at the ground and fidgeting with her hair again as she prepares to deliver the blow, “is that the chip has been there so long that it’s fused to Catra’s spinal column.  Any attempt to remove it would be incredibly invasive and carry a risk of doing further damage.”

Catra’s heart drops into her stomach.  She knew, of course, that she would be stuck with permanent physical scars, and she was fine with that— she had plenty of them already, after all.  But something about this feels worse, knowing that she’s going to live the rest of her life with this thing lodged in the back of her neck, knowing that it’s there even if she can’t see it.

Before she can spiral any further, Entrapta launches back into the rapid-fire enthusiasm that Catra never knew she would miss: “The really good news is that means that I can go ahead and use the interface when I make a replacement for Catra’s arm, which will be so much easier than installing one myself.”

The offer— or, more to the point, the fact that Entrapta is clearly planning on it whether she likes it or not— takes Catra off-guard.  Why?   Why are they being so nice to her? Why aren’t they scared of her, after everything she’s been made to do?

There’s more conversation after that, and Catra pays enough attention to nod along when she thinks it's expected of her, but the actual words feel distant, lost under a thick layer of static as she stares at the floor.  Eventually, though, Entrapta leaves without giving her a second look, and the two of them are alone in the room again.

Adora is looking at her softly, like she’s expecting something.

Catra can’t give it to her.   Whatever it is she wants, Catra knows she can’t give it, she can’t be the person who somehow clings to life in Adora’s memory.  The weight is unbearable against her chest, and she collapses underneath it, falling back against the mattress and rolling herself over to face the corner.  Adora hesitates when she reaches out, but she doesn’t pull back either, her hand still lingering a few inches away as Catra folds her legs and curls her tail inward.

“Do you want me to go?”

No , Catra thinks.  The idea of being alone is just as terrifying as it’s always been; maybe even more so considering her volatile state.  She wants so badly for Adora to never let her out of sight again, which is exactly why she can’t give into the desire: one day, Adora will realize that the Catra she found is not the same one that she lost so long ago, that this Catra has had her few redeeming qualities bled away until only the sharp edges remain; and she will conclude (correctly) that those edges are no longer worth cutting herself on.  One day, Catra will be alone again, whether she likes it or not.  She might as well get her practice in now.

Catra nods against the pillow, and she takes no pleasure in Adora’s sigh of defeat.

“Okay,” Adora slides off the mattress, the ancient thing still holding the impression of her weight, “Okay.  If you need anything, you can just tap the comm panel and I’ll come find you.  I hope you get some rest, Catra.”

Catra holds herself perfectly still except for her ears, swiveling to track the rustling noises as Adora gathers her things from the bedside, waiting for the soft whirring of the door opening and the solid click when it closes.

Once she knows with certainty that she’s on her own, Catra finally unfurls, stretching out and releasing a breath that she didn’t realize she was holding.  She had expected that she would completely fall apart the second she was out of Adora’s sight, but instead she just feels… numb, more than anything.

Catra tries to sleep, she really does— she lies on her back and closes her eyes, willing herself to sink into the exhaustion and let everything go black.  But it doesn’t work.  No matter how many times she tries, it always slips from her grasp just when she thinks she might actually get somewhere, sudden awareness of her body and what she’s lost jolting her back into consciousness. 

She tries again and again and again, watching as the clock display by the door ticks past minutes and into hours, time kept by the rotation of a planet that she never wanted to see again (and still doesn’t).

It takes exactly two hours and twenty-three minutes before she gives up.

Maybe, she thinks, it will help if she gets herself cleaned up a little bit— the persistent itch under the matted patches of her fur certainly isn’t helping matters, and if nothing else it’ll give her something to do other than lie here and wait for a breakdown that doesn’t ever seem to come.

Catra grabs the shelves above her for support, wincing as she pulls herself to her feet and suddenly becomes very, very thankful that she doesn’t have to make it any further than just across the hall.  She takes the long way around the perimeter of the small room, still relying on her makeshift handrail until it runs out.  Part of her doesn’t expect the door to respond to her touch ( she certainly wouldn’t trust herself with that much freedom), but it yields regardless, releasing her into the corridor.

Now comes the hard part.  Catra braces herself awkwardly in the doorframe, doing her best to line up with her target before pushing off, letting her momentum carry her across the open space.  It’s only a few meters, of course, but the effort feels like leaping across a canyon, and Catra nearly collapses in a heap before she figures out how to use her tail to correct her balance and compensate for her missing arm.

Catra lets out a sigh of relief as the door closes and the lock clicks behind her, keeping her gaze fixed to the rippling tile patterns on the floor as she makes her way toward the shower at the opposite end of the small room.  Her steps are still unsteady, but they belong to her alone now, her remaining arm stretched out to the left and her tail hanging to the right to distribute her weight— one foot in front of the other, each slightly easier than the last.

The shower’s controls, at least, are blessedly simple.  Catra slumps against the wall, cranking the singular knob clockwise until it will go no further, closing her eyes and turning her face upward in anticipation.  The pipe sputters a few times, the millenia-old plumbing lagging behind for a moment before it kicks in properly, the water rushing out with a pronounced hiss .

It’s hot— far hotter than Catra would prefer or even be able to withstand under normal circumstances, scalding trails splitting against her face and pouring down the rest of her body, but right now it’s perfect.  Right now, it’s a treasure just to be able to feel so clearly, and Catra allows herself to indulge, the heat and thrumming pressure keeping her firmly tied to reality as the steam rises in curls around her.

Once she’s soaked through much more thoroughly than she would usually allow, Catra reluctantly sets to work.  She flails at the soap dispenser until the soft gel pools in her hand—a  stark difference from the harsh, abrasive bars that she had grown used to in the horde— and does her best to lather it into her matted fur, repeating the process until most of her body is coated in a thin layer of foam.  The coverage isn’t perfect, especially across the left side of her body, but it’ll do for now. 

Next, she grabs a brush from the small nook carved into the wall, wondering distantly for a moment if Adora will be annoyed about the commandeering of her hairbrush for the task.

Adora can fucking deal with it, Catra decides.  She’s the reason that Catra is on the ship in the first place, after all.

Catra starts from her legs and works upward, the bristles scraping unpleasantly against her skin as she scrubs.  She winces occasionally when the brush catches on a crust of dried blood or a knot where the grime has set in too deep for the water to reach it but she never stops, yanking on the brush until the fur tears free and lodges in its teeth.  After what feels like forever, she finally reaches her neck, her whole body sanded raw and burning under the hot water.

It’s not enough.  She can still feel the blood and the dirt and the grease, even if no one else can see it.  So she starts from the beginning, repeats the process once, twice, three times, scrubbing and scrubbing like that alone might be enough to erase everything that’s happened to her and everything that she’s done, even as her skin screams for her to stop and tears pull at the edges of her eyes.

She only stops when the water supply gives out, leaving her with only the unsteady trickle against the hard floor for company as the steam collapses back to the ground.  Still dripping water as she makes her way to the sink, keeping her eyes closed and leaning against it for support as her hand cuts a swathe through the condensation gathered on the mirror.

Catra isn’t sure why she feels so intent on looking when she knows she won’t like the result, but she feels compelled to, regardless.

At first, Catra doesn’t even recognize the girl that she finds.  There had been no mirrors on Horde Prime’s flagship—you hardly need one when everyone looks like you, she supposes—so for the past few years, her grasp of her appearance has been limited to brief glimpses in polished metal floors or the fearful eyes of her targets as she sunk her claws into their flesh.  She knows logically that it’s her, of course, but she feels so thoroughly alienated from the image that she finds herself suppressing a flinch when it returns her movements.

She looks like shit.  She had expected as much, even with her efforts to clean herself up, but actually seeing it lands like a punch to the stomach nonetheless.  Her eyes are blown-out and bloodshot, with precious little light showing through the cracks.  The worst of her injuries are hidden by her fur and her bandages, but if she squints she can see the dozens of small, methodically-repaired cuts that fleck the right side of her body, running from her face all the way down to her stomach.

How did those happen?  Distantly, Catra remembers a singular point of heat singing her face, momentarily blinding her and blooming into shrapnel as her body went into shock, but she can’t recall what for the life of her.  She adds it to the innumerable list of questions to ask Adora if she gets the chance— somewhere a notch below why haven’t you killed me yet , but a few above when are you planning to .

Finally, she can avoid the elephant in the room no longer.  Catra’s gaze traces the lines of her own body until they come to an abrupt halt just past her shoulder, lingering on the void where her limb should be.  She isn’t quite sure what she had expected, but she’s still surprised to find that she feels… disoriented more than anything else, like when you try to scratch an itch only for it to disappear before your hand can arrive.  It’s undoubtedly bad, and she’d certainly prefer to have it back, but she finds her own muted reaction infinitely more disturbing than the injury itself.

Instead, she manages to hold it together until she gets a good look at her hair.  It’s always been a frizzy, barely tamed mess, of course, but it had been one of the only aspects of her appearance that she had been able to care about in the Horde, one of the few things that she had ever really chosen .

Now, though?

Catra’s claws scrape against the sink, a shrill noise echoing off the tile as it deforms under her hand, suddenly aware of the muscles of her neck straining against the waterlogged weight.  It’s completely unsalvageable, somehow pulling in every conceivable direction at once even as it's compressed so tight that the individual pieces seem to become a singular, impenetrable mass that reaches halfway down her back and spills out beyond the width of her shoulders.

Catra tastes the acid rising in her throat, but she can’t make herself look away: something keeps her frozen, locked to her own monstrous image even as the edges start to blur with tears.  Why shouldn’t she look like a monster; like some corrosive, awful thing that no one in their right mind would go anywhere near?  That’s what she’s always been, isn’t it?

She doesn’t even realize that she’s lunging forward until she makes contact.  The tips of her claws pass clean through the glass and carve neat, thin lines down and across the surface.  But the force of the impact is enough to shatter, the mirror devolving into a spiderweb of cracks and sending a few stray shards to the floor.

It’s not enough.

She swings again and again and again, her claws shredding through glass and tile and metal indiscriminately until she’s out of breath and there are tears streaming down her face, but it’s still not enough to relieve the choking pressure in her throat.

The same reflection is still there, still judging her— but it’s splintered, now, dozens of slightly different angles that find the same fundamental picture, even as they fail to cohere into anything meaningful.  There’s nothing she can do to escape it and no point in trying to hide.

But she needs control more desperately than anything else.

Catra leans against the remnants of the sink for support and raises her hand again, countless replicas wavering in imperfect unison as she threads her claws into the limp gray hair that tumbles down from behind her ears, gathering the mess between her fingers—

And then she pulls , biting back a scream as the hair stretches taut before giving way, coming off in small tufts that lodge themselves beneath her fingernails or drift slowly to the floor.

Catra glances at the mirror again, and finds that she’s barely even made a dent.

So she tries again, defaces the left side to match the right, and it’s still not enough.  The stinging pain races across her scalp like a wildfire, but she pushes through, each pull becoming more frantic, more damaging than the last as she loses control of the movements.  

It’s not going to make her feel any better, but at least later she’ll be able to look at the damage and know that it was a result of her own stupid decisions and nothing else.  It’s the only semblance of freedom she’s ever been able to get, really.

Once, she knows that the pain would have brought clarity.  Now, it only blinds her— she’s distantly aware of her legs giving out underneath her, heavy tears finally breaking free and leaving hot trails down the light fur of her face.  She thinks she feels blood, too, either from her scalp or from a few stray gashes that have opened up on her shoulder, but she’s less sure of that than she is of the cold tile pressed against her back, allowing her the leverage to continue her assault in spite of her body’s protests.

The rapid knocking at the door fails to pierce through the haze.

The sound of her name, however, stops Catra in her tracks— it should feel unfamiliar to her ears after so long spent without it, but the shape of those two syllables in Adora’s mouth is entrenched so deep within her that she would know it anywhere— her claw twisted uselessly in her hair as her body goes so tense that she couldn’t move it even if she wanted to.

Go away , Catra pleads silently, ears twitching as they strain to listen beyond the door, you want no part of this; run now before one of us does something worse than we already have .  She pulls again, but she’s unable to help the whimper that escapes her lips when her grip snags and jerks her head to the side—she’s too weak, too tired to break free of the knots, but she doesn’t know how to stop.

Distantly, she can hear Adora growl in frustration, and Catra isn’t sure if she regrets locking the door behind her or not.  She breathes a sigh of relief as the handle rattles—she wouldn’t describe herself as safe, but she at least knows she’s alone—

Until she hears something in the mechanism give way, the distinct sound of metal snapping and clattering to the floor her only warning before Adora throws the door open, her broad shadow spilling through the widening gap as the door hits the end of its track and reverberates with the excess force.

For a moment, Catra could swear that she sees the last embers of blue fire in Adora’s eyes.

Adora’s approach is more cautious this time, clearly learning from their last encounter— good , Catra thinks.  She should be scared.  But she doesn’t stop, because Adora has never known what’s good for her, has she?  Catra can see the picture come together for her as she surveys the wreckage, her face twisting from sadness to horror and all the way back again as she takes in the ruined sink; the blood; the mangled hair strewn across the floor.

She steps forward again, and Catra knows that she should lash out, dutifully step through her half of the same dance that they’ve performed time and time again—but she doesn’t.  She can tell herself that she’s just too tired, or too hurt, or too lost, or any number of other excuses, and those would all be somewhere close to the truth, but it doesn’t matter:

This time, when Adora offers her hand, Catra takes it willingly.

“Can I move you?” Adora asks, barely more than a whisper.

In spite of the weakness making its home through her entire body, Catra tries her best to give Adora two distinct squeezes.  She keeps her face down as she unfurls and allows Adora’s arms to slip underneath her— she knows she looks pathetic, especially after she had made such a show of not needing help earlier, but she refuses to make it any more obvious than she has to.

Catra hates not being strong enough to resist; hates the way that her traitorous lungs slow to a steady push and pull as strong arms wrap tight and lift; hates the way that Adora flinches when Catra throws her arm across her back for stability.

Most of all, though, she hates the way that she instinctively tucks her head into the warmth of Adora’s chest, and the way it makes her feel so close to the things she's still certain that she won’t ever get back.

But she doesn’t pull away.  Catra keeps herself nestled against the tattered red fabric well after they’re ensconced in the clutter and close walls of the storage room again.  It doesn’t escape her notice that Adora, too, holds on for just a moment longer than strictly necessary; but she knows better than to allow herself to ascribe significance to the gesture.

Neither of them says a word— Catra simply lies still on her back and waits, her arm hanging off the side of the mattress, knuckles tapping gently against the floor without rhythm.  Adora fumbles for something on the shelves just out of her view.  She brings the lights up, too, but only to a strange half-dark that Catra knows isn’t quite enough for her to see properly.

There it is again—that nagging part of her brain that Catra has been trying so desperately to silence: the one that makes her want to think that maybe, just maybe, she might not be the only one holding onto scraps of what they used to have; the one that makes her wonder if Adora is acting out of something deeper than obligation.  

She’s always had a talent for pattern recognition, hasn’t she?  If she squints, she can almost see it emerging, a signal rising out of noise and slowly becoming undeniable.  Once, this had been the only thing she wanted— proof that Adora cared about her, that what they had been had meant something, even if it was always going to mean so much more to Catra—but now the thought feels like salt in an open wound, a coil of barbed wire just waiting to ensnare flesh.

She just needs more information, she tells herself.

So, for the first time since she woke up, Catra allows herself to properly look at her oldest friend, without any consideration for hiding her face.

The first thing she notices, as Adora settles cross-legged next to her and begins pulling supplies from a small medical kit, is that she looks tired .  She always has, even when they were very young, but this is different—the years have clearly worn heavily on her, the lines of her face eroded to distinct rivers of shadow, even as her movements remain precise and controlled.  Adora had never truly been allowed to look like a child, but she looks like even less of one now, the last traces of the girl who found her in a box so many years ago long since buried in her absence.

Catra twists her body, straining to reach out and grab Adora’s forearm, stopping her short before she can begin her work.  It takes Catra a moment to figure out how to string the question together without the benefit of actual words, and the solution she settles on is rudimentary at best—pointing at herself, then at the clock on the wall, and finally at the place where her arm should be, before looking back at Adora, silently pleading for understanding.

Adora stares at her blankly for a second—Catra can almost see the gears turning behind her eyes—but she gets there eventually. “Are you asking how long you were gone?”

Yes , Catra signals, letting out a sigh of relief as she relaxes.  So much exertion for such a simple question.

Adora falters, her gaze plummeting in what Catra wants to identify as guilt, even though she knows that can’t be right.  “Five years.”

The words hang heavily in the air, saturating past Catra’s fur and clinging to her skin.

Five years .

Whatever the appropriate response to that revelation might be, Catra is pretty sure that she isn’t having it.  She’s upset, certainly, but at the end of the day, it’s just another addition to the long list of injuries that she may never fully recover from, and she greets it with a cold acceptance that never quite makes it to her face.  Maybe she’ll grieve for it later, crying once she’s alone again or resuming her quest to destroy whatever inanimate object she finds at hand; right now, the well has run dry.

Adora—also clearly disturbed by her muted reaction—continues, telling her about how quickly the Horde had collapsed after the portal; about how Scorpia had saved Entrapta from being sent to Beast Island (although she carefully dances around who, exactly, had ordered the punishment); about the death and rebirth of the place they had both called home .

Catra lets her talk, her only response the occasional hiss of pain when the disinfectant grazes a fresh wound, taking careful stock of the way Adora’s expression twists as her fingers slip past fur to trace faded scars.  Catra knows that some of them—like the jagged red lines that arc across her entire body—are still intimately familiar to her even after all this time, but Adora does little to hide the way her heart breaks every time she finds one she doesn’t recognize.

The one thing Adora doesn’t talk about is herself.  Every piece of information she divulges cuts carefully around the edges, offering the shape of the space she should occupy in the story without ever quite intersecting it.  Catra is certain that it’s intentional—she can see the flicker of sadness when Adora overplays her hand and pulls back suddenly, the way her grip falls away from Catra to twist nervously in her own jacket.  She knows there’s something there, something corrosive lingering beneath the surface, slowly but inexorably hollowing Adora out until she’ll implode.  Catra wants so badly to ask—she can feel the question burning in her throat, begging for release—

But she doesn’t.  She doesn’t have the words, and even if she did… Why would Adora answer her?  Even in the worst depths of the war, when whatever lay between them had become a twisted, mangled thing, there had still been an implacable intimacy to it.  They had both tried to run from it, only allowing the thorns to tear deeper into their flesh in the process.

But they’re strangers to each other now, no matter how hard Adora tries to pretend otherwise.

So Catra doesn’t ask, and Adora doesn’t answer.

The one-sided conversation trails off as Adora finishes her work.  Adora doesn’t leave—Catra can’t really blame her, after what just happened—leaning back against the wall and fidgeting with something in her pocket.  The silence isn’t comfortable by any means, but it’s the least tense she’s felt since she woke up, which she supposes has to count for something.

“Do you… do you want me to help with your hair?” Adora asks hesitantly, “I mean, I’m not exactly a professional, and it’s fine if you don’t, but—”

Catra startles, snapping her hand back to her side—she hadn't realized that she was playing with the ends again; hadn’t even expected Adora to figure out what had been the final straw for her breakdown.  She has to do something with it, she knows, but it feels impossible to picture anything except the untamed mane which has carved out her silhouette for as long as she can remember.

Yes.   She’s still reluctant to hand any sort of power over to Adora, but what other option does she have?

Adora disappears for a few minutes before she returns with a small bag of supplies, motioning for Catra to join her on the floor.

Inevitably, the second look arrives at the same conclusion that Catra had made earlier: save for the still-soft growth closest to the roots, there’s little to be done for any of it.  She could certainly try , but no amount of disgustingly fragrant shampoos or restorative treatments would ever make it what it once was—did she ever really want to return to that?

It only takes a moment for a growl of frustration to rise from her throat when she begins trying to translate the image in her head to gestures that Adora can make sense of.  It should be a trivial task.  She feels it again—that helplessness that she hates so much, that she’s always hated so much—just as pronounced as it had been when she woke up with the rocks slicing into her back, but this time without anything to numb it.  Maybe she can accept that Adora’s patience is a bottomless well, but what happens when her own runs out?

Catra tightens her fist at her side, letting her claws dig shallow trenches in the skin of her palms.  Adora catches the gesture, and for a moment Catra fears that she might try to intervene before she can drag herself back to a place of relative stability; but she remains thankfully still.  Catra adjusts the pressure, moves each finger individually and then in pairs.  It’s a stupid ritual, she knows, and reverting to it feels more than a little childish—but it undeniably works , the bright, clear line from action to sensation giving her an undeniable foundation to work outward from.

Adapt , Catra reminds herself, snatching the small black bag away from Adora and bracing it between her knees to pull the zipper open and scatter the contents across the floor.  She ignores the clippers themselves for now (although she knows she’ll have to face them soon enough).  Instead, she turns her attention to the assortment of plastic guards that accompany it,  taking each one in turn and running it against the side of her head, trying to imagine how the length would feel under her hands.

Catra sweeps the rest of the guards to the side until only the second-smallest remains—short, but long enough to not become unpleasantly scratchy as it grows back in—tapping it against the floor with a small click until she’s certain that Adora is paying attention.  After that, she brings the nail of her index finger to rest against her temple, blue eyes tracking the motion as she drags it back in a sharp, clean line a few inches above the top of her ears.

“Okay,” Adora nods gently as she clicks the guard into place before shifting around to sit behind Catra, “What about the top?  Do you want me to just leave it as long as I can?”  Catra only shrugs in response.  As attached as she’s been to her hair, she’s never really put that much thought into it—maybe she will, once it grows back enough to do something more interesting with it.

No matter how hard she tries to follow Adora’s movements by sound, Catra’s breath still hitches slightly when the clippers come to a rest at the base of her skull, her fur bristling at the touch. Distantly, she remembers a crushing grip against her scalp; the beginnings of resentment boiling in her stomach as she finally realized that the only value she would ever have to the Horde was as leverage to keep Adora in line.

The sudden change doesn’t escape Adora’s notice.  Catra doesn’t quite believe that she remembers the reason, but it hardly matters—the stream of reassurances that pour out of her are too low for Catra to even make out the words, but the tone is gentle enough on its own to draw the tension out of her body like unspooling thread.

“I’m going to start now,” Adora says, once Catra’s ears have fallen back to a more neutral position.  Her body isn’t relaxed , but it’s not agitated anymore, either.  “Let me know if you need me to stop, okay?”

Catra taps the floor twice in acknowledgment, trying to hold her back straight as Adora carefully gathers and lifts the first section.  She does her best to brace herself—she expects the clippers to feel harsh and overwhelming against her, but she refuses to show any more weakness than she already has.

Instead, almost as soon as Adora flips the switch, she realizes that she finds the sensation oddly soothing.  Maybe she shouldn’t be surprised—Shadow Weaver’s most effective threats had always been the ones she never had to follow through on, allowing Catra’s frantic mind to build up something far more terrifying than she could ever hope to inflict.

For a moment, all of that feels so far away.  Adora works in long, even strokes, the gentle buzz reverberating through her skull and down her neck to the rest of her body, almost reminiscent of the way she used to purr to calm her own racing heart (she doesn’t think she could do that anymore, either).  Maybe she’ll regret it later, but Catra can’t help letting herself sink back into it at least a little bit, soft noises slipping from her mouth as Adora’s steady hand traces around the base.

Adora laughs—just the tiniest bit, barely audible above the electric hum—slowly massaging Catra’s scalp with her supporting hand.  When she whispers “ I missed you ,” the words sound almost reverent, wrapped carefully in a long exhale like they weren’t meant for Catra to actually hear.

Catra wants to take the feeling and cradle it against her chest like she’s guarding a flame from the wind.  It’s the same one she used to get from smuggling contraband past the watchful eyes of the older cadets, like she’s getting away with something she doesn’t deserve—but that’s what being around Adora has always felt like, isn’t it?

Catra’s mind is still a pleasant haze long after Adora sets the clippers aside for more manual tools, in concession to the need for a slightly more careful approach.  Still, she moves quickly, vast swathes of history cascading down Catra’s shoulders and falling in a loose halo on the floor with every grating snip .  If she looks closely, follows a singular piece from end to end, she can almost see the years woven between the strands.  How long had this one been with her?  Since the portal?  Since before Adora left?

“Done!” Adora declares, snapping Catra out of her thoughts.  “You want to take a look?”

Catra hesitates for a moment.  She does want to look, but after what happened last time…

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Adora says, taking Catra’s hand in her own.  “I know you usually avoid it, but I just want to know if I should make any adjustments.”

No, Catra signals.  She moves to slip herself from Adora’s grasp, but she stalls for a moment, tapping the sign for thank you against the back of her hand.

She’ll look soon, she promises herself—she needs to, has to know whether the monster that she saw in her own reflection is still haunting her or if she has any hope of cutting herself free—but it can wait.  Whatever is happening right now is fragile, she knows, and Catra can’t bring herself to risk breaking it again.

Instead, she lifts her hand and works by feel, focusing on the way it gathers between her fingers without ever obstructing her movement; the way the shaved parts prickle gently against her skin as she swipes her thumb across.  

It’s not perfect, of course.  Even without looking, she can tell that it’s uneven in several patches, the length on the top noticeably choppy underneath her fingers.  But it hardly matters—she feels so much lighter now, the change undeniable even though she had never consciously noticed it before.  Every movement feels so much easier now, like she’s spent her whole life underwater and never known until she broke the surface.  If nothing else, it’s a start, something fresh for her to work from.  For now, that’s enough.

Adora is shifting nervously, keeping one eye on Catra’s expression even as she tries very hard to act like she’s cleaning up.  Of course she’s worried about whether or not Catra likes it.  It shouldn’t even be a concern, not when she’s already gone so far beyond anything that could be reasonably asked of her, but… this is Adora she’s talking about, after all.

Good , Catra signs, unable to help the warmth that takes root in her chest as she watches Adora try to hide her relief.  Catra does her best to help with the cleanup, but Adora pushes her back towards the bed, muttering something about her injuries and how she needs to rest.

Catra wants to protest—if Adora is anything like she used to be, she’s in no position to talk shit about other people’s self-care habits—but the moment she hits the blanket, the exhaustion comes roaring back to the forefront of her mind.  It’s almost six according to the clock, and some part of her still expects that time to correspond with the blaring horns of the Fright Zone coming back to life, but it’s been so long since she’s had anything approaching a regular sleep schedule.

“Can I—” Adora stops herself, biting her lip and glancing at the door before she continues, “do you want me to stay in here tonight?  I know you don’t like sleeping alone,”

Catra is perfectly used to sleeping alone by now, she thinks, the bitter taste of the memories rolling across her tongue.  But she caught that slip—she knows what Adora is really asking.  Twelve hours ago, Catra would have denied her, either out of paranoia or some stupid lingering desire to get even, somehow.

Her eyes already half-closed, she slips free of the blanket, fumbling blindly until she finds the warmth of Adora’s hand.  She squeezes twice, feeling Adora’s grip seize for a moment before whispering a small thanks that Catra isn’t entirely sure she’s earned.  Catra expects her to leave to fetch a sleeping bag and set it up next to the mattress, or maybe to just lie straight down on the floor like an idiot.

Instead, Adora casts aside her jacket and her boots and climbs into the bed with her, folding her body at the foot of the bed and pressing herself into the corner.  Is the familiarity intentional?  Catra still remembers every night that she spent in the same position, staying awake long after lights out, hating herself for wanting to stretch out and join Adora on the pillow, hating herself even more for not having the courage to do it.

Adora’s frame is a little too bulky for the arrangement to work the way it used to, though, Catra’s restless feet catching on her arms as she tries to find a comfortable position—or, at least, that’s the justification she gives herself when she pulls her knees to her chest, gathering the blanket around her as she turns her body to mirror Adora’s.

Adora’s eyes are glowing faintly.  She thought she had seen it earlier, too, but now she’s certain.  It’s comforting, just enough to make the darkness a little more manageable without being disruptive.  They’re both still, neither wanting to be the first to make the jump into the empty space between them—uncharted territory that Catra knows like the back of her hand.

But neither of them moves away.  Gradually, the rhythm of their breathing falls into sync until it’s indistinguishable to Catra’s ears, Adora’s eyelids dipping lower and lower as sleep drags them both down into the current.

Catra doesn’t let herself fall asleep first—it’s an old habit, one she’s never quite been able to kick.  So she forces herself to remain conscious just a moment longer, watching as Adora brushes her hair out of her face one final time before closing her eyes, her grip on the blanket going slack and her body unfurling slightly as she finally gives in.

The snoring starts a moment later.  Adora isn’t even aware that she does it.  Catra had always avoided telling her, fearful that she would get self-conscious about it and seek some kind of remedy—but no matter how much it annoyed some of the other cadets, Catra wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Catra finally allows her eyes to fall closed, the sound washing over her and lulling her to sleep with all the consistency of the Fright Zone’s heavy machinery.

It’s not quite what she wants—not yet—but it’s a start.  Right now, that’s enough.

Chapter Text

If Catra positions herself carefully on Darla’s bridge and looks at just the right angle, she can almost forget that she’s on a ship at all.  Once the ring of command consoles and instrument displays disappears from her field of view, there’s nothing but a disconcertingly thin window between her and the roiling blue storm that forms around them as they tunnel through space.

It doesn’t look like the portal that she remembers—she’s thankful for that, at least—but there’s something achingly familiar about the sensation.  The pocket of habitable space that they tear open in front of them and stitch closed in their wake is stable, according to Entrapta, but everything feels just a little bit lighter, time slowing just enough that half her brain still feels like she’s dreaming even when she’s awake.

So Catra sits on the bridge and watches, picking idly at her breakfast and trying not to think too hard about the incomprehensible amounts of distance that they’re crossing with every passing second.

She can appreciate the irony, at least—she never would have guessed that after all these years, a portal would take her home , too.

The hissing noise of a door opening behind her pulls her out of her thoughts, but she doesn’t bother turning to look as Adora steps onto the bridge.  She expects Adora to continue past her, settle into the command chair that had once served as Catra’s makeshift throne, but instead she lingers in the entrance, not even moving far enough for the door to slide shut behind her.

Catra rolls her eyes as she shifts herself to the right to make space.  She can practically feel Adora’s nerves from halfway across the bridge.  Maybe it’s not surprising, given the breathless string of apologies that had poured out of her when they woke to find themselves separated by only a few inches of mattress, but it still feels a little bit absurd—it is, after all, Adora’s ship.  If either of them should make way, it’s almost certainly Catra.

Adora smiles gently as she settles beside Catra, vaguely floral-scented steam pouring from the mug clutched in her hands.

Suddenly, Catra finds it very difficult to stay focused on the window, unable to stop herself from stealing brief glances at Adora when she thinks the other girl won’t notice.   Just enough light filters through the tinted glass that her skin practically seems to glow, the heat radiating from her drink making her face flush just the slightest bit.  There’s something uneasy in her posture that Catra still can’t quite place, but the silence that falls over them as they eat carries none of the tension of the previous night.

Catra is distracted enough that it takes a moment for her to realize Adora has caught her out—she flinches away from the sudden eye contact like she’s been hit, already berating herself for allowing those thoughts back to the surface.

“Do you want to try some?” Adora asks, offering Catra her mug.

For a moment, Catra doesn’t know how to respond, her spiral halted by pure confusion more than anything else—is that what Adora thought she was looking at?  If it were anyone else, Catra would assume the offer was just an attempt to give her an out and defuse the sudden tension, but she can’t find anything in Adora’s expression to indicate that she even registered Catra’s reaction.

If only because she isn’t quite sure what else to do, Catra reaches out and takes it, her fingers lacing together with Adora’s for the briefest of moments before they part.  The contents slosh perilously close to the mug’s edge without a second hand to steady it, forcing Catra to move cautiously as she brings it to her face.  The scent is clearer now, but it’s not as overwhelming as she expected it to be.  It feels light, like the woods coming back to life after a long day of rain.  Trying very hard to act like she isn’t acutely aware of Adora watching her, Catra closes her eyes, tips back, and immediately finds that she severely overestimated her tolerance.

The liquid burns almost the second it hits her tongue, sending Catra flinching back like she used to when she tried to climb on a steam pipe by accident.  Adora lunges, snatching the drink from Catra’s hands before she can spill the rest of it across her lap or all over her food, squeezing her arm gently to steady her.

Catra knows she must look like an idiot—it feels like her entire body is burning from her midsection up, either from the tea in her throat or the rush of embarrassment under her fur, her mouth hanging open in a futile effort to draw as much cool air as she can—

But then Adora is laughing, snorting and wiping tears from her face as she half-falls against Catra.  For a moment, she looks almost completely relaxed in a way that Catra hadn’t seen for years even before they started fighting; the way that had made her fall so hopelessly in love with Adora in the first place.  It’s only a brief glimpse, maybe a few seconds before Adora pulls herself back upright, but it melts the tension out of Catra all the same.

“Okay,” Adora says, still half-breathless from laughter, “maybe I’ll put some on ice for you later,”

That would be nice, Catra has to admit, and she appreciates the gesture.  But all Catra can think to want is more —she keeps playing that laugh over in her mind, trying to etch every perfect detail into her memory, but it isn’t enough.

So Catra’s only response is to narrow her eyes and flick her tongue out, twisting her hand into the universal sign for fuck off before jabbing at Adora with her elbow.

Adora takes the bait, swiping at Catra’s arm as she pulls away, the tips of her fingers just barely gaining purchase in the fur.  It’s not enough to stop her motion, but the sudden shift in momentum sends them both spilling backward in a tangled heap of flailing limbs, plates of food laying forgotten behind them. 

Catra shrieks and pitches sideways into a roll, her heart feeling practically weightless in her chest as she tries to kick Adora off her.  She knows she should still be cautious, still be trying to keep some amount of distance.  But it’s so, so easy to let herself fall back into this rhythm, surrender herself to the currents of the same familiar push and pull that’s always existed in the space between them no matter what they do to each other.

Maybe her instincts are right.  Maybe, eventually, this will get her hurt again, like letting her guard down always seems to.  Right now, she can’t find it in her to care—if the universe is set on punishing her no matter what she does, she might as well let herself have some fun, right?

Neither of them manages to score a definitive victory in the end, the struggle carrying them all the way from the corner to the base of the captain’s chair before they run out of breath, collapsing against each other and panting for air.

I missed you .  Catra doesn’t know how to say it with hand signals, so she does her best to say it with her eyes as she rolls off and tips her head back against the cold metal, the high collar of the shirt Entrapta made for her pressing into the back of her neck.  She hopes that Adora can still read her well enough to understand.

For a few minutes, there’s no sound on the bridge except for heavy breathing and the occasional convulsive fits of giggling that neither of them can bear to keep down, until a ping from the ship’s computer pulls them both back to reality.

“ Reentry is imminent.  Please prepare to exit hyperspace in ten— ”

The voice trails off into a countdown.  For a moment, Catra considers closing her eyes, but she keeps them fixed upward, even as the scars that mark the entire right side of her body begin to itch.

“ Three, ”

Adora takes her hand, hooking around her middle and ring fingers and squeezing.  Catra squeezes back, unsure of which of them is asking for the reassurance and which is giving it.

“ Two, ”

Catra holds her breath.

“ One, ”

Overhead, the sky cracks like an egg.  It’s a hairline fracture at first: a jagged, infinitely thin streak of light arcing overhead, somehow appearing to be pressed right against the window and impossibly far away, joined by dozens of siblings emanating from some point out of her view.  The electrical whine rises to a crescendo, pinning Catra’s ears back against her head, and then—

The fault lines tear open in unison, widening as if they’re being wrenched apart by the hands of some vengeful god, a spiderweb of new cracks spilling out of the maw until the blue has all but disappeared.  Catra glances at Adora, and finds her trembling slightly—is this what she had seen when the Fright Zone fell apart in the portal?  When Prime had dragged Etheria from its tomb?

The ship lurches underneath her, and Catra feels her stomach settle back into place as the laws of physics reassert themselves.  She breathes a sigh of relief as the electrical noise winds down, replaced by the low rumble of conventional engines.

When she blinks away the watery afterimage, she finds the entire galaxy unfolded above her, beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.

Right now, they have time to kill—they’re still a few days out from Etheria, and the ship needs time to recharge between jumps—but Catra can’t bear to sit still any longer.  So she slips her hand from Adora’s and pushes herself to her feet, pacing the bridge aimlessly as Entrapta comes in to talk to Adora about some maintenance question that goes entirely over her head.

Once she reaches the pointed front of the ship, the center line of the window swooping low over her head, Catra decides to try something, waving her hand in the air in imitation of the way that Adora summons the ship’s myriad of instruments.

At first, nothing happens, except for Catra’s own half-reflection repeating her motions back at her and making her painfully aware of how stupid she looks.  She could swear that this is exactly what Adora had done, but the ship refuses to respond to her.  Eventually, she gives up, leaning against the console and staring down at the panels in confusion.

She barely has time to register the flicker of light under her hand before the holographic display springs to life and expands right into her face, a small noise of surprise slipping from her throat as she leaps a half step backward.

Once Catra recovers from her surprise, she finds exactly what she was looking for: a map; a globe of light covering what she knows must be millions of kilometers of distance, with their ship represented as a tiny arrowhead in the center.  She turns it over in her hand, watching the miniaturized starfield spin with dizzying velocity, trying to get a feel for controls which were clearly built with the assumption that the operator would have two arms to work with.

Still, she manages; a few clever finger movements allow her to control the zoom level, moving in as close to the ship as she possibly can and staring upward, trying to match the spiraling nebula over her head to the flickering cloud hovering in front of her.  It helps more than she expected, bringing the nauseating scale of the universe down to something manageable, not much bigger than her own body.

Next, she moves outward: extending two fingers and swiping broadly allows her to detach the view from the ship and move to adjacent sectors, each containing its own array of stars and planets more impossibly vast than she ever could have imagined.

Except that when she swipes down, she finds nothing.

Almost nothing, at least— she can see the normal scattering of debris around the fringes, but it halts abruptly as it moves inward, disappearing over a jagged edge like someone hastily tore a page out of a book.  Her first assumption is that it’s nothing more than a glitch, the ship’s database suffering from millenia of disuse, but there’s something infuriatingly familiar tugging at the back of Catra’s mind.  She racks her brain as she traces the edge with a finger—she’s seen this shape before, she knows she has, but she can’t remember where .

And then it hits her all at once: she remembers being hauled into Prime’s cavernous throne room, held close enough that she could tear his throat out if not for the chains binding her hands; she remembers the way he had delighted in finally having a captive, external audience that he believed could pose no threat to him no matter what he allowed to slip out; she remembers fighting to stay present, trying to commit everything to memory and promising herself that one day she would make him pay for underestimating her.

She remembers Krytis , the way that he had practically spat the syllables out the singular time he had allowed himself to utter the name.

Catra barely has time to think any further before she’s marching toward the back of the bridge, grabbing Adora by the upper arm and dragging her back towards the display, releasing her grip to jab pointedly at the void.

“Catra,” Adora’s voice is gentle, her eyebrows knitting together in confusion, “what am I looking at?  It’s just empty space,”

Catra shakes her head.  She can feel the words she needs on the tip of her tongue—she can even imagine the shapes she would need to contort her mouth into to say them—but she doesn’t want to risk tripping over them now.  Instead, she points roughly at the center of the empty space again, making the wavy gesture they agreed on for Horde Prime before balling her hand into a fist and swinging it violently downward like she’s trying to smash something.

Adora’s eyes light up almost immediately.  “You think there’s something we can use against him,”

Adora reaches out, tapping one finger to the center of the darkness before flinching back as the whole projection flashes red, a grating noise emitting from the console.

“ Access denied.  Information about this sector requires administrator clearance, in accordance with directive— ”

Adora swears under her breath, stomping her boot once against the deck before composing herself.

In the back of Catra’s mind, she feels that same nagging sensation that had tugged at her the night before.  She’s only ever known the first ones to use administrator when they mean She-Ra —so why does Adora seem to have given up on accessing it?

“They’ve lied about so much,” Adora whispers, mostly to herself, “If they don’t want me to know about it, then it has to be important.  I say we go for it,”

It takes a moment for Catra to register that Adora is waiting for her confirmation before proceeding.  She’s so used to the silent expectation that she’ll follow wherever Adora goes—which, she’ll grant, was a correct assumption for most of their lives—that she almost isn’t sure how to handle the idea of being on equal footing now.

Almost .  Catra responds the same way she responded years ago, when Adora had dangled a set of stolen skiff keys in front of her face, the metal glinting red in the Fright Zone’s polluted sunset; grinning just enough to allow the tips of her fangs to do the talking for her.

“Entrapta?” Adora calls back over her shoulder, tapping at one of the visible points along the outer edge and beginning to calculate a course, “it looks like we’re making a small detour,”

It takes the remainder of the morning for them to reach the edge of the uncharted region—Catra finds that she keeps thinking of it that way, even though she knows it’s not entirely accurate: someone very much did chart it, once, and found something so terrifying that they felt the need to keep it a secret even from She-Ra.  What could possibly warrant being hidden from the warrior-princess-goddess that they built a literal temple for?

What did they think she would do if she knew about it?

Still, whatever explorer had mapped it and whoever made the decision to lock it away took their secrets to their graves a long, long time ago, and the ship’s computer doesn’t seem interested in divulging them no matter how much time Entrapta and Adora spend prodding at it.  For all intents and purposes, they’re running blind.

Catra is sitting in her room when she first hears it: a low, muffled noise, like someone dropped something heavy in another room.  She assumes that it’s exactly that at first, forcing herself to focus on the makeshift cycle of speech exercises that she’s set out for herself.  It’s nothing scientific—mostly just half-remembered tricks and routines left over from the last time she had to fight for control over her voice.  

In all honesty, she doesn’t even know if it’s directly helping , but it gives her something to focus on.  Catra pulls her back straight and draws a deep breath, her chest rising and ribs flexing slightly to make way for her expanding lungs.  It’s a strange feeling, being so aware of her body again.  She had always tried to avoid it when she was younger, only ever finding it a reminder of all the ways that her form would never truly be hers , never quite moving or responding in the ways that she needed it to.

Now, it’s strangely calming.  No matter what threats lurk in the darkness outside the hull, Catra has this one thing, this one small pocket of space which is completely and totally under her control.  No portal magic; no shock collars or watching clones; just Catra , sitting in the darkness.

She’s barely even started her routine when the noise comes back, half-formed whispers catching on her lips as the ship’s frame shudders beneath her.  It’s louder this time, the grating, scraping sound of metal against metal flattening her ears to her head— it’s coming from outside , she realizes.

Catra forces herself to keep breathing as she grabs for a shelf and drags herself to her feet.  If there was any serious danger then Adora would tell her, or the ship would sound an alarm.  If there was a hull breach, she would already be dead.  Still, she keeps her hand on the wall, fingers brushing against the metal as she makes her way through the corridors.  Just in case.

No one acknowledges her presence when she steps onto the bridge.  The first thing she notices is the shadows—jagged splotches of darkness drifting haphazardly across the floor and dipping into the ornately-carved channels of its surface as they crawl through the debris field.  Catra could almost swear that she can hear Adora’s heartbeat from across the room, her knuckles somehow going white around the holographic controls.

The whole ship rocks again, the deflector shield rippling around them like a form-fitting sheet of light as it tries to disperse the force of the impact away from the starboard engine pod.

“I know, I know !” Adora snaps as she moves to silence the piercing, rhythmic beep of the near-useless proximity alarm, and that startles Catra more than anything else—Adora has always gotten frustrated easily, of course, but it’s another thing entirely for her to actually show it.  Catra wants to step forward, to lay her hand on Adora’s shoulder or even just linger in her peripheral vision like she can absorb some of the stress by simply existing in the same space as her for a few minutes.

But she keeps herself pinned to the wall.  Adora might not hate her, might even begin to consider forgiving her eventually—but that doesn’t change the fact that Catra lost that right a long time ago.  She would do more harm than good.

The world outside spins weightlessly as Adora rolls the ship 90 degrees to slice through a barely-visible gap in the asteroid field, the disconnect between Catra’s eyes and her stomach threatening to tear her body apart at the seams.  For a moment, she doesn’t think they’re going to make it, but they pass through unobstructed, darkness swallowing up the whole bridge except for the glow of the instruments.

The engines are so low now that it feels like they’re barely moving at all.  Catra risks a small step forward and cranes her neck until she’s looking directly upward, squinting to make out details in the flickering light reflected from the engines.  There’s something strange about it that Catra can’t quite place: the surface is just a little more reflective than rock should be, the lines just a little too perfect to be a natural formation, long straight segments punctuated by sharp turns.

Catra blinks.  For a moment, she thinks she’s seeing a reflection of Darla’s bridge, but it’s more distant, more solid than her own half-image in the glass.  It hits her all at once—they’re inside of a ship.

This isn’t an asteroid field.  This is a graveyard .

Once they pass back into the light, Catra can see it all around them.  There must be dozens of ships here at least, the First Ones’ angular chunks of metal twisted together with the sleek white of the Horde until they become almost indistinguishable.  How many people had been on each of these ships?  A hundred?  A thousand?

“Entrapta?” There's a tremor in Adora’s voice as she dips under a Horde cruiser, skirting along the edge of a blooming tear that runs the entire length of its hull, a cross-section of veins and organs exposed to the vacuum like some kind of museum display.  “Are you seeing this?”

“I am!” Entrapta says cheerfully from her position at the side of the bridge, apparently entirely unperturbed by their surroundings, “don’t worry—whatever happened here, Darla’s scanners say it happened a long time ago!”

“That’s… good to know.  Thanks.”

The bridge falls back into silence after that, Adora fixing her gaze straight ahead and opening the throttle a little more.  She finally glances back at Catra with a small, forced smile on her lips.

They both breathe a sigh of relief as the field begins to thin out.  A few small pieces still drift past them caught in some slow, distant orbit, but they’re less tangible, in a way; easier to look at as what they are without seeing what they once were.

And at the center of it all, muted tones almost invisible against the black, is a single, barren planet.

“Is that the one?”

Catra nods, even though she has no reason to be certain (it’s not like there are any other planets in the sector) stepping up next to Adora to get a better view.  From here, growing larger and more defined in the viewport as Adora guides them into orbit, the jagged edges almost remind her of the place where the portal spat her out so many years ago—she knows that it isn’t, but that doesn’t stop the phantom pain that arcs across the right side of her body at the sight, spreading underneath her skin where she could never hope to quell it.

Catra almost jumps out of her skin when she feels something touch her hand, but it only takes her a moment of recovery to lean into the touch.  Adora is looking up at her, eyes soft and searching.

I’m okay , Catra tells her, conveying the message with nothing more than a glance and a slight tilt of her head, I’m okay.

Adora releases Catra’s hand, refocusing herself on the task.  “Anything down there we should be worried about, Entrapta?”

“No life forms that I can see,” Entrapta says, humming curiously as she taps at a keypad, “but I am reading… a lot of energy.  It’s coming from something on the surface but I don’t know what , maybe if I—”

“Good enough for me,” Adora cuts her off, “I’m taking us in.”

Catra grips the back of the chair to steady herself as the ship pitches downward, the horizon climbing and climbing until she can see is ground.  All at once, like she’s crossed some invisible threshold, she loses her grip on direction again; forward becoming down and down becoming backward as flames break against the nose of the ship.  The ground rushes up to meet them—they have plenty of clearance left, but they’re diving at an impossibly steep angle and—

Adora is grinning like a maniac by the time she levels the ship out, and she’s laughing , her face wrapped in the same expression that she had worn as they raced out of the Fright Zone on their stolen skiff so many years ago, and that alone is enough to make any thought Catra might have had of being mad at her vanish.  They swoop low past moss-covered cliff sides in the darkness, spikes of blue rock melting together into a blur underneath them as they survey the planet.

At first, they don’t find much—a few low clusters of shapes that seem unnatural enough that they might have once been settlements, long since buried and stripped of anything useful.  Catra can feel her heart sinking with every sign of long forgotten occupation that passes by outside, every painstakingly carved road reclaimed by nature.  

Coming here was a mistake , Catra tells herself as an oppressive air of disappointment settles over the bridge.  Adora had trusted her, and what did she do with it?  Waste their fuel, waste time that they could have spent getting home to go chasing after a bunch of scrapped ships and an empty planet.

Just when she thinks they’re about to cut their losses, they see it: a massive spike of battered, tarnished metal laid nearly parallel to the horizon, its base wrenched from the ground like a tree uprooted by the wind.

“Is that—” Adora’s voice is barely above a whisper as she backs off the throttle and pulls into a sweeping turn, “Is that one of Prime’s spires?  What happened to it?”

Catra almost doesn’t want to imagine the kind of force that must have been involved.  From the ground, the spires feel imposing, nigh- invincible, just like they’re supposed to—they’re a psychological weapon just as much as a practical base of operations.  

“I’m going to take us down, but it looks like the only viable landing spot is a few miles away,” Adora says, before turning to Catra, “You okay with walking?  I can go alone if you’re worried,”

Yes , Catra signs, thankful for both the distraction and the unspoken concern in Adora’s words.  It’s true that she isn’t looking forward to being around any reminder of Horde Prime’s reach, no matter how dilapidated.

It’s equally true, however, that whatever could do something like this is exactly what they’re looking for, and Catra has every intention of seeing it with her own eyes.  She can handle it, especially if she has Adora beside her.

The first thing that Catra notices when they leave the airlock is the quiet: no distant birdsong, no wind rushing through the valley, no ambient sound at all, really. Her first thought is that something is wrong with the microphones on her helmet, but that can’t be it—Adora’s crunching footsteps are clear as day, as is the sound of the door sealing behind them—the whole planet is just… still.

Catra tries to stay light on her feet as she steps off the ramp, cringing at the faint impressions that appear in her wake.  She can’t shake the feeling that she’s trespassing, somehow; that she’s disturbing something that would have been better left to rot.  Who does she think she is, waltzing into graveyards and cracking open tombs?  That’s what this planet is, isn’t it?

It’s a stupid thing to be worried about, and Catra wants to kick herself for even allowing the thought to enter her mind.  Ghosts aren’t real—hadn’t she always been the one to remind Adora of that, after the older cadets filled her head with another of the seemingly endless variations on the headless princess ?  Sure, hauntings are real, and monsters are real too, but ghost stories are just that— stories , meant to make them afraid so they’ll be easier to keep in line.  The dead don’t care what you do to their things.

So why does Catra still feel like she’s being watched, being judged ?

She forces herself forward, her tail curled closely around her leg.  The suit is a remarkable piece of engineering, which she supposes isn’t a surprise considering who designed it.  What is surprising, though, is how much of it seems to be designed for Catra specifically—the soft, flexible sleeve around her tail; the generous amount of space added onto her helmet to allow her ears to move freely—it’s all so… thoughtful, far more than Catra feels she has any right to receive.

There’s a wayfinding arrow floating in the corner of her vision, but she hardly needs it—the tower is somehow even more imposing as a ruin, looming over the landscape and demanding consideration, compelling reverence whether Catra wants to provide it or not.  

They walk in silence, Catra meeting Adora’s gaze when she occasionally glances over her shoulder, like she’s still afraid that Catra will disappear again when she’s not looking.  It isn’t a difficult journey, but it is a slow one, the two of them picking their way up the rocky slope.  Catra knows it would have been trivial, once—she would have cut a clean path to her destination, scrambling up ledges and leaping between handholds, arriving at the top with plenty of time to amuse herself watching Adora struggle to keep pace.  She doesn’t let herself dwell on that.

Catra’s nerves are wound even tighter by the time they crest the hill, finding themselves in one of the massive trenches carved when the spire’s roots were torn from the ground—from here, the foundation looks like a half-buried flower of metal.

“Entrapta?” Adora asks as they work their way around, “we’re here.  What do you need us to do?”

“ Great! ” Entrapta responds over the comlink, voice seeming to come from every direction at once, “ There should be a data port near the entrance, do you see it? ”

Catra steps back and scans the lower level until she finds a doorway and a panel set into the wall beside it, nudging Adora with her shoulder to get her attention.

“Yeah, we see it.  We’ll get you hooked up in just a moment,” Adora says, following her eyeline.  Then, to Catra: “you want to get it?”

Catra answers by snatching the small metal device from Adora’s hand, tucking it into a pocket as she scopes out a route to the door—There’s a mound of rubble, plowed up when one of the petals of the foundation was dragged through the earth and bound together by centuries of unchecked vines.  It won’t get her all the way there, but it should get her close enough to jump the rest.  

She starts cautiously, moving slowly and crouching to keep her center of gravity low.  But the gap between steps closes by increments, each coming just a little more confident than the last.  The ground drops away beside her as she rises to her full height, swinging her tail out to the right to balance herself when the ridge becomes too narrow for her to place her feet side-by-side.  She would have been faster once, she knows.  It doesn’t matter—right now, she’s happy with being able to do it at all.

Now comes the hard part: Catra finishes her brief ascent and finds herself staring at her objective, separated by a gap that feels nearly insurmountable even though it can’t be much more than six feet.    The spire’s door is recessed from the outer perimeter, the covered entryway providing just enough space for Catra to perch there and access the data port.

Catra steps back to give herself as much runup as possible before she charges forward, compressing her whole body like a spring, and then—

Right at the edge, the ground crumbles away under her feet as she pushes off.  Catra feels her trajectory wobble, and for the briefest of moments she panics.  It’s a small error, by no means her fault and hardly fatal , either, even if she does plummet all the way to the ground where Adora is waiting to break her fall.

But she can’t fail.  She won’t allow herself to fail.  Catra tucks her limbs in close, making herself small and twisting her body until she’s flying nearly backwards through the air.  She only barely makes it, her hip catching on the edge and sending her tumbling across the side of the entryway until she crashes into the doorframe, a startled noise slipping from her throat as the breath is shoved rudely out of her lungs.

“ Catra?! ” Adora calls frantically from the ground, “are you okay?”

Catra hisses with pain as she pushes herself unsteadily onto her knees.  Her bones ache, her muscles are battered, and her head is still swimming from the disorientation, but there’s nothing broken, no jagged edges screaming at her as she fumbles for the button on the side of her helmet and sends two bursts of static over the com to let Adora know that she’s okay.  

The panic strikes her as soon as she’s collected herself to remember why she’s up here.  She braces herself as she reaches into her pocket, expecting to find the device in pieces.  But the suit seems to have absorbed the worst of the impact—it emerges intact, and Catra breathes a sigh of relief as she forces it into the gap in the disused panel.  But something isn’t right: the light in the small plastic casing blinks green once, twice, before disappearing and returning as an unyielding red.

“ Hmmm.  I’m getting a signal, but the terminal doesn’t seem to be working. ” Entrapta says in her ear, Adora already making her way up the ledge to investigate what’s taking so long, “ There should be a main processing core on one of the upper levels, can you try that?  I’ll send you a map,”

Catra shifts over to make space as Adora leaps across the gap to join her in the doorway, making a far more graceful landing than Catra’s own.

“Do you want me to do this by myself?” Adora asks after she catches her breath, “I know that going inside might not be great for you, and I don’t want to—”

No , Catra signs, cutting her off before jabbing a finger at her own chest and then back at Adora— staying with you .

Adora’s worried face softens into a grin, her eyes shining even through the helmet’s tinted visor.  Catra barely has time to understand what she’s doing before she steps forward and disappears from view.  Her wild, snorting laugh spills out into the night in echoes as she grows more distant, and Catra holds to that sound like a lifeline, allowing a small bit of the tension in her chest to melt away.

Catra leans past the threshold and studies her surroundings, trying to join the schematic that appears in the corner of her vision with the fact of the place in front of her.  So far as she remembers, she’s never been inside a spire, but it hardly matters: Horde Prime’s design principles are so consistent that the place feels nauseatingly familiar regardless, all its nested circular corridors and arched ceilings becoming the flagship in miniature.  Catra closes her eyes, gripping the edge to steady herself for a moment before allowing them to open again.

It helps, she finds, that the whole structure is tipped on its side, the twisted perspective helping to bring out other details that differentiate this place from her former prison: the long-dimmed green lights set into the walls and machinery; the once-spotless white metal discolored and dusted by age, huge swathes of the interior walls blackened by a latticework of carbon scoring, scars of a battle that was ancient history before she was even born.

And most importantly, beckoning to her from the bottom of the slope: Adora.  Adora is here, and for the first time in years, Adora being here means that Catra is safe —whatever happens, she at least knows that she won’t have to face it alone.

Catra rolls her eyes warmly, giving Adora a brief glimpse of her fangs before pushing herself over the lip, stomach leaping into her throat as she plummets down the curve of the wall.  She’s laughing too now, the sound foreign to her own ears as she slides down to meet Adora in the center.

Another quick glance at the schematics and a burst of half-spoken conversation later, they find the way forward: A disused elevator shaft that runs the length of the building like a spine directly underneath their feet.  Assuming that it hasn’t collapsed or anything, it should be a straight shot to their objective.

It doesn’t escape Catra’s notice that Adora uses her staff to pry the door open, one foot planted on a support column as she strains for leverage.  Surely it would be a trivial task for She-Ra, wouldn’t it?  But Catra hasn’t seen the sword since she woke up, and she still doesn’t know why .  She knows Adora brought it with her—she still has the dreamlike impression of its heat next to her face, blinding light swallowing them both—and she sees how Adora withdraws herself whenever the subject comes up, even tangentially.

But she doesn’t think that Adora would abandon it, either.  Not for her.  The picture in the back of Catra’s mind is infuriatingly close to becoming clear, but it doesn’t quite look right from any angle she can find.  She must be missing a piece of the puzzle, but she knows better than to expect Adora to give it up willingly.

Just as Adora’s staff bends so far that Catra thinks it might actually snap, something finally gives way and the door grinds open with an awful, metallic screech.  Adora doesn’t look back, but she hesitates for a moment, keeping her staff extended in her free hand as she grips the edge and lowers herself into the darkness.

Catra follows her, landing with a splash in the half-inch of standing water collected along the length of the tunnel, and immediately understands the reluctance.  The darkness here feels… thick , somehow, smothering everything until even Catra can only see a few feet in front of her.

Adora glances back, her face only visible thanks to the dim glow reflected from her helmet-mounted light.  She’s not scared, exactly—Catra knows what that looks like—but there’s a slight twitch in her hands that Catra remembers so clearly from their time in the Horde, fingers playing uneasily along her staff as she tries to keep the rest of her body perfectly still.  Neither of them want to be here any longer than they have to be.

It’s slower going than Catra would like.  In addition to the water—still dripping in at an infuriatingly uneven rhythm somewhere in front of them—the shaft has collected its fair share of debris over the centuries.  They pick their way forward over rust-coated weapons and ruined bots; at one point, Catra’s foot hits something that she could almost swear is the skeletal remains of a clone.  She doesn’t let herself look any closer than that.  Instead, she tries to keep herself fixed on Adora, shutting out the rest of her perception and focusing on matching her pace.

And then the darkness at the edge of Catra’s vision moves, the absence of light taking form for the smallest moment before collapsing back into itself.

Goosebumps ripple underneath Catra’s fur, her body kicking itself into gear before she even understands why, bracing for the flash of red that some part of her still knows should come next even.  She doesn’t see anything when she whips her head around to look for the phantom motion, but that does nothing to relieve the tension pulling her shoulders up around her ears—she never did see anything.  That was always the trouble with Weaver.

Adora’s footsteps have fallen silent beside her.  Catra shrinks in on herself a little bit more, twinging with guilt at the thought of slowing their progress for something that she knows is entirely normal, unremarkable darkness, but she still can’t tear herself away, can’t shake the feeling that there’s something waiting to get its tendrils around her the second she isn’t giving it her full attention.

The logical part of her is well aware that it’s nothing, but on some compulsive level she needs to make sure .  Her fingers are shaking so much that they’re almost useless as she fumbles for the button at the side of her helmet.  When she finally finds it, the small beam of light reveals nothing more than bundles of wiring running along the curved wall and a scattering of rubble at the bottom.  She feels stupid for being paranoid enough to check, but at least she has an answer now.

But when she turns around to resume the journey, Adora is nowhere to be found.

The choking pressure in Catra’s throat comes back almost as quickly as it had alleviated a moment earlier as she lurches forward into a half-jog, the nearly-useless light making every panicked jolt of her head plain to see.  She only looked away for a second, right?  

She runs until she’s absolutely certain that she should have caught up to Adora, but finds no sign of her.  Instinct tells her to keep running until she’s safe or her legs give out underneath her, but that won’t help her here—she forces herself to a stop, fog collecting and receding on her visor as she takes sharp, shallow breaths.  Catra knows better than to expect herself to be calm , but she can try to collect herself, at least.

Catra reaches for the comlink again, sending a long burst followed by two short taps, the distress signal they had agreed on before leaving the ship.  She could almost swear that she hears something respond to her underneath the ambient layer of static.  Not words , but… something.

It’s only then that she notices her map has disappeared, too.  It’s not that surprising, really—Darla’s transmitter is literally ancient, and she’s encased in layers of metal and gods know what else—but it still drives the fire growing under Catra’s skin a little bit higher.  

“ Catra? ” Adora’s voice is somewhere in the darkness ahead of her, echoing and endlessly overlapping itself, refracting down the length of the tunnel until it swallows Catra like a wave.  Now she sounds scared. 

“ Catra, where are you?”

The second cry rips away any relief that the first might have brought: it's coming from behind her now.  She tries to tell herself its just an echo, a trick of this place’s alien geometry just like the impenetrable darkness—but then it’s coming from so close beside her that she swears she can feel the disturbance in the air through her suit, and then it’s coming from above her, and from below where she knows there’s nothing but solid rock.

The air feels heavy now, the darkness weighing on her limbs like she’s moving underwater and squeezing her ribs against her lungs.  Catra doesn’t care about the objective—she barely even remembers what they were here for, really—she just needs to get out .

That’s when she sees it: light pouring in through a thin crack in the ceiling, only twenty or thirty feet ahead of her.  That can’t be right, can it?  She knows that the light wasn’t there the last time that she looked, and something about it makes the fur underneath her suit bristle for reasons that she can’t quite pin down.

It feels like a trap.  This whole place feels like a trap—Catra should have listened to her instincts, should have never left the ship, and instead she walked them right into… whatever this is.

Something in the darkness scrapes against metal, piercing through the still-echoing mimicry of Adora’s voice and pulling Catra out of her spiral.  Instinct kicks in as she snaps to face the disturbance, setting her feet wide and digging her claws into the ground in a feeble effort to make herself look bigger than she is, her mouth twisting into something between a hiss and a growl.

But her stance is far too unsteady to intimidate anyone, and she’s even less confident in her ability to hold her own if they decide to call her bluff.  As adaptable as she is, as much as she’s already taught herself to work around her injuries, she knows better than to think she could win a stand-up fight, much less one where she’s starting on the defensive.  And whatever is stalking towards her sounds big , its heaving breaths drowning out Catra’s own as the scraping sound gets closer.

There isn’t another option.  Catra’s resolve crumbles, and she turns on her heel and breaks into a stumbling run.  She pushes everything down—the thing which sounds like Adora’s voice but isn’t; the lumbering footsteps matching pace with her own; the twisting feeling in her gut that she’s only going to make things worse—and focusing only on the small gap of light.  She leaps for it, barely managing to hook her claw over the edge.

Fear grips Catra’s throat as she tries and fails to pull herself up, her battered muscles leaving her dangling uselessly in the air.  In one final, desperate effort, she shuts her eyes and kicks her legs frantically back and forth, gaining just a little bit of height with each swing until—

It feels like a miracle when her feet manage to gain purchase on the other side of the tear.  Just as the monster passes below her, she manages to contort herself just barely enough to squeeze through and roll onto solid ground.

Catra allows herself a moment to catch her breath, burying her head in her arm as the adrenaline leeches out of her blood and the panic dies down.  Before she moves an inch, she needs a plan, even if it's only a rough idea (she’s never had Adora’s patience for fine detail.  The big-picture approach will have to do, here).  She needs to figure out where she is.  She needs to figure out how to get from here back to the ship, and hope that Adora will have the same idea.  Then, crucially, she needs to actually do it.

The plan goes out the window almost as soon as she opens her eyes: she finds dirt beneath her, not the metal walls of the spire.  The ground beside her is completely undisturbed, with no sign of the opening that she had hauled herself through just a moment before.

It shouldn’t be possible.

Nothing that’s happened in the last few hours should have been possible.

It doesn’t matter: what else can she do but pick herself up and keep moving, hoping that the illusion will eventually give way?

Catra has one small consolation, at least: she isn’t in the dark anymore.  When she emerges from the mouth of the small cave, she finds herself surrounded by the high, narrow walls of some kind of ravine, a gap of star-strewn twilight sky visible overhead.

But something about this place is different from everything that they saw from above, like someone cut it out of a different place entirely and pasted it on top of the landscape.  This place feels alive , luminescent moss flourishing across the rocks bathing the entire canyon in a soft glow.

There’s a distant noise, something like a branch giving way or leaves crunching underfoot, and Catra is suddenly acutely aware of the fact that there might be other things alive here, too.  The only way forward is a vulnerable one, narrow and vulnerable to attack from above, almost a textbook example of what every bit of training that had been drilled into her brain tells her to avoid at all costs.

It’s only for a little bit , Catra tells herself.  She just needs to follow it far enough to find a spot with good enough handholds to claw her way out.  It doesn’t help the incessant itch at the back of her neck where the ruined chip meets flesh, but she keeps repeating it anyway.  She keeps her claw ready at her side as she pushes forward, eyes up to scan for potential threats on the ridge.

Her resolve only lasts a few steps before she smells something burning, the metallic scent seeming to completely elude her air filters.  Catra pauses, against her better judgment, leaning against the rock and inhaling deeply.  There’s something nagging at her that she can’t quite place, a heavy, sweet note just behind the overwhelming taste of copper in her mouth—

It’s flesh .  The wave of nausea rolls through Catra like a physical blow, acid spiking into her throat as she remembers sinking her shattered claw past armor and right through skin, fat and muscle and spinal fluid cooking away from the inside out, remembers the way that she had always been allowed just enough time to see exactly what she had done before the sedatives kicked in.

She’s not there anymore, Catra reminds herself, touching the empty space where her corrupted arm used to be.  For the first time in her life, she’s nobody’s weapon, and all she can do is keep moving forward, both literally and figuratively.

But the reality she has to accept is almost more unsettling than the idea of the last few days being some kind of dream: not only is something fucking with her, but it knows , somehow.  Knows who she is, what she’s done.

It was stupid of her to think she would be able to run from it.

Keep moving .  Catra can feel herself sinking deeper the longer she stays in one place, and the least she can do is be a moving target.

Is this how Adora had felt on Beast Island?  Fighting the terrain itself, knowing something was hunting her but unable to do anything about it?  It’s a silly thing to wonder, she knows, but it’s a welcome distraction.

The path twists and turns, snarling back in on itself in ways that Catra knows should intersect but never quite do.  It widens until she feels almost insignificant and then narrows so drastically that she has to squeeze herself sideways to make progress.  Catra keeps her eyes up and forward, away from the sheen of illusory blood steadily dripping from her claws.

The rest of her senses, though, are elsewhere, tracking something even as it tracks her.  Most people think of magic as something invisible, undetectable to anyone except other practitioners who have developed an innate sense for it through careful study and nurturing of their talent.

Catra knows that it isn’t.  It isn’t quite a sixth sense, but it doesn’t fit neatly into any of them: there’s something between a sound and a smell to it, a low buzz at the base of her skull that she learned to assign meaning to the hard way.  She remembers the first time she felt it, sloughing off of Shadow Weaver in thick, crackling waves as she loomed in the doorway and Catra lay paralyzed in the upper bunk.  The next night, she had stopped sleeping in her own bed, choosing to curl herself between Adora and the room’s sole entrance instead.

What she feels now is recognizable, but… different .  A higher pitch, cleaner, somehow, but a little less sharp than what she’s accustomed to.  It almost reminds her of the sparkly princess, but that isn’t quite right, either.

More importantly, though, it’s getting closer .  Catra doesn’t let her stride break, tries to act like she’s still entirely unsuspecting prey—being underestimated is her only possible advantage, here—but it becomes harder and harder with every short burst of energy that she feels.  She distracts herself, tracing the lines of crystal that run through the slate-gray rock like fractal veins running all the way from the planet’s heart, slowing herself in a wider section of the passage.  Her would-be attacker is twenty feet away, and then fifteen, and then ten, and then—

Catra pushes herself off the wall and into a turning dodge just in time for a bluish-purple blur to cross her vision as the thing lunges at her.  She tries to keep the momentum and position herself to be ready for the next attack, but the movement is inelegant, and she stumbles just the slightest bit.

When she tries to regain her footing, the ground gives way beneath her.

Catra falls straight through the rock like it was never there, and she lands hard , the impact rattling her bones and leaving her head swimming.  By the time Catra opens her eyes, the creature is looming over her, glowing blue eyes boring right through her aching skull.

Catra yelps in surprise as she scrambles backwards, kicking her legs furiously in a semi-successful attempt to propel herself across the cave floor.  She expects the creature to give chase, especially when she suddenly finds herself pressed flat against the wall, but it just… stands there, hind legs wound like springs, spectral mane dancing like firelight around its head.  Its form is almost like the small, feral creatures that had made a home in the warmer nooks and crannies of the Fright Zone, only large enough to come up to Catra’s hip.

Something presses gently at the edges of Catra’s mind, snagging her breath in her throat.  When she closes her eyes, she remembers—the cold floor of Prime’s lab; the cables strung from the back of her neck; the rush of noise breaking as suddenly as it had started; smoking, convulsing white forms arrayed around her.

“ No, ” Catra breathes the word as much as she actually says it, pulling her knees toward her chest and trying to make herself as small as possible.

The creature tilts its head inquisitively with a small mrrp , its mane calming to a deep, soft blue.  If it registers Catra’s words as a warning, it certainly doesn’t care enough to heed it: she can still feel it, pushing as it takes a hesitant step forward but never quite prying.

Catra has had it all wrong: she’s the dangerous one here, isn’t she?  The one who hunts, who breaks into tombs, the one who ruins everything she touches.  She shoves back, tries to show the thing exactly what will happen if it comes closer—whether she’s trying to convince it to finish her off or to let her go, she isn’t quite sure—but it remains undeterred.

She shouldn’t be here.  Her whole life, Catra has only managed to survive by some cruel twist of fate that refuses to release her from its grasp, no matter how much she begs for it.  She shouldn’t have made it out of the portal, certainly shouldn’t have made it through everything she went through after that.  And yet she just keeps going, keeps finding new and exciting things to leave shattered in her wake.

“Catra?”

At first, she tries to ignore Adora’s voice, dismissing it as another trick.

This time, it isn’t: Adora bursts into the cave a half-step behind her shadow, her eyes wild and her staff already swung outward in an offensive stance straight out of a Horde textbook.  She locks eyes with Catra first, and then with the creature when it turns to look for the source of the noise, both of them winding up and preparing for a fight.

Catra waves her off frantically, words pouring from her mouth that even she doesn’t understand as Adora’s face twists in confusion. 

“I heard you screaming , Catra, I don’t—” Adora lowers her staff, approaching cautiously as the creature turns back to face Catra, “what’s wrong?”

Catra tries to explain, but the words come out in fragments no matter how much she tries to coax them out.  The creature’s mane flickers orange for a brief moment as she trails off in a growl of frustration before fading back to a steady, glittering blue.