Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Catra woke up that night to the sound of Adora slipping out of bed, pulling on her jacket and tiptoeing out of the room. It looked like she was trying to be stealthy, which would have been hilarious if it didn't mean that she was trying to keep her disappearance a secret from Catra. What did she think she was doing, sneaking out without Catra?

“Hey, where are you going?” Catra asked as loudly as she dared, and Adora startled.

“Back to the woods,” said Adora. “There’s something I need to figure out.”

The distant look on her face made Catra feel like something was deeply wrong with the world. Catra didn’t like that feeling one bit. “What? Why?”

A robot beeped as it rolled by, and Adora pulled Catra behind a doorway to hide.

“What’s wrong with you?” Catra demanded once the robot had passed. “You’ve been acting weird since we got back.”

“I know I saw something out there,” said Adora. “I just need to get another look. It feels… important.”

Catra was curious despite herself. She knew they’d get in trouble if Shadow Weaver found out, but honestly she didn’t really care. This would be an adventure, and if Shadow Weaver had a problem with that she could go fuck herself. “Sounds good, let’s go.”

“No,” said Adora. “I don’t want you getting in trouble on my behalf. Just stay here and cover for me, okay?”

Catra hissed under her breath. “What do you think will happen if Shadow Weaver finds you gone? If I’m going to get in trouble anyway, I might as well go on an adventure with you first.”

“But what if –”

“It doesn't matter anyway! I’m coming whether you want me to or not,” said Catra, crossing her arms. “Do you really think you could stop me?”

Adora considered this. “Fine. But you’d better not crash the skiff again.”

. . .

Catra could say definitively that she wasn’t the one who crashed the skiff this time. True, she’d been the one driving at the time, but Adora had distracted her. If Adora hadn’t tried to take the wheel back at the last minute, she could have avoided the tree that clipped the edge of the skiff, and maybe if Adora hadn’t elbowed her in the desperate scramble to keep their balance she wouldn’t have been thrown from the skiff, landing in a tangle of thorns that she just knew would be a nightmare to get out of her fur later.

Cursing Adora, mysterious glowing swords, and the forest in general, she climbed out of the bushes and looked around to see if she could find the skiff again. She could neither see nor hear it, but there was a trail of broken branches and torn up undergrowth that seemed to indicate the direction it had gone.

Catra had only been following this trail for about a minute when she saw the light. It was bright and white, coming from somewhere close to the ground about a hundred feet away. Before she could investigate, her ears perked up – there was someone else hiking through the forest, possibly multiple someone elses, and based on the unfamiliar voice she heard swearing loudly following the sound of a branch cracking, they weren’t Adora.

Catra picked a tree and scrambled silently up the trunk, crouching on the branch that the strangers seemed most likely to pass under based on their direction.

“Please tell me we’re not lost,” said the high-pitched voice that Catra had heard swearing in an exasperated tone. The owner of the voice came into view, a short pink-haired girl in purple clothing who literally sparkled. Catra wrinkled her nose. She had never seen anyone who looked more like a princess in her life.

“No, this thing’s just acting up.” The princess was followed by a tall dark-haired boy who was wearing a crop top with a heart on the chest and was tapping at some sort of electronic device. “It looks like it’s getting overloaded by the tech’s signal. We must be getting close!”

The princess noticed the light in the distance and tapped his arm. “I think it’s that way.”

“What makes you say that?”

The princess pointed wordlessly.

“Oh, yeah,” said the boy sheepishly. “That’ll do it.”

Catra knew that Adora had gone back into the woods to find a sword, specifically a glowing sword, and she supposed this sword could be the tech these princesses were after. Either way, if Adora was investigating the light as well she couldn’t let these princesses interfere. She smiled. Finally some real combat practice.

The boy yelped as Catra landed on his shoulders, knocking him over and swiping her claws across the device, which sparked and fell to the ground a few feet away. The princess yelled with a combination of surprise and fury, and her hands started to glow as she advanced on Catra. Catra wondered if she’d misjudged who was the more dangerous target as she dodged a blast of what felt like pins and needles when it grazed her cheek. She growled and leapt at the princess, who vanished in a cloud of sparkles, reappearing a few yards away with her fistfuls of glitter at the ready. Catra had definitely underestimated her.

“You want a fight, princess?” Catra asked to stall for time, getting back to her feet with her claws at the ready.

“Anytime, Horde scum,” the smaller girl spat, launching an uncontrolled volley of blasts at her. Catra laughed, dodging easily. If this was the best the princesses had to offer, the Horde really was weak to struggle against them.

Because Catra’s life was a joke, it was at this moment that something hit her in the back and expanded around her, rope tangling her arms and legs as she fell in a writhing, spitting mess on the ground. She looked up to see the heart boy holding a bow, looking smug as the princess stepped back to his side to glare down at Catra. Of course he had a bow, she should have noticed it the moment he walked into the clearing. Sloppy work, cadet, Shadow Weaver’s voice chided in her head, and she hissed both at the memory and at the princesses standing above her. She angled her claws to slice through the net.

“Not so fast,” said the boy, grabbing Catra’s wrists and holding her down as she squirmed. “Glimmer, I think I have some more rope in my pack, could you get it for me?” he asked, surprisingly amiably for someone Catra was currently trying her hardest to bite.

She paused in this attempt to stifle a laugh and glance up at the princess. “Seriously? Your name is Glimmer?”

The princess scowled at her. “We’ll see if you’re laughing when I give you a face full of sparkles.”

“Glimmer, the rope,” the boy reminded her, and Catra took advantage of his momentary distraction to bite his hand. To her disappointment, he neither swore nor let her go, merely shifted his hold on her arms so she’d have to crane her neck to try again.

“You’re terrible, did you know that?" Glimmer asked as she attempted to tie the rope around Catra's wrists.

“I’ve been told,” Catra said with a grin. She hoped Adora was somewhere far, far away where she couldn’t witness Catra’s humiliation.

Glimmer and the boy, whose name turned out to be Bow – “That’s your real, actual name? Who named you guys anyway?” – found that tying Catra’s wrists wasn’t enough, so she ended up with the rope wrapped around her entire torso, pinning her arms to her sides.

“This good?” Glimmer asked, tying the final knot.

“I think so,” Bow confirmed.

“Yeah,” said Catra, “I’m having the time of my life right now.” She wriggled, finding to her annoyance that the bonds were secure. Her wrists were secured too tightly for her to slice through the rope with her claws, and unless she wanted to try kicking one of them in the face she had no way to fight back.

“Time to get back to the rebellion so Mom can interrogate this Horde spy,” said Glimmer, grabbing one of Catra’s elbows and pulling her in what appeared to be a random direction.

Catra smirked, figuring that if she couldn't escape she might as well make herself a difficult prisoner. She flopped to the ground, blinking up at Glimmer innocently.

The princess’s scowl deepened. “Get up, Horde scum.”

“Wish I could, Sparkles,” said Catra sweetly, “but I’m afraid I’m sort of tied up at the moment.”

Glimmer groaned. Bow frowned at Catra and tried to pick her up, but she slithered out of his grip, sticking her tongue out at him.

“This is going to be a long walk back,” Glimmer muttered as Bow grabbed the end of the rope and began dragging Catra through the woods.

“Can’t you teleport us there, Sparkles?” Catra asked, leaning back and getting as comfortable as she could when her hair kept getting tangled in passing leaves and sticks. “I thought princesses didn’t like to get their hands dirty – or their feet.”

Glimmer opened her mouth to retort, then shut it again and glanced at Bow before glaring at Catra again. Catra was beginning to think she’d never get tired of glaring at Catra. “I’m not telling you anything.”

“Oh, you can’t teleport us there!” Catra was delighted. “What is it, too long a distance? Too many people to teleport? Ooh, did you run out of sparkles?”

“Shut up, Horde scum,” said Glimmer, turning her back on Catra.

“I have a name, you know,” said Catra, closing her eyes lazily. “Not that you bothered to ask.”

“What’s your name?” asked Bow politely. Catra didn’t trust how nice he seemed, but at least it was a change from being yelled at.

“Catra,” she said. It couldn’t do any harm for him to know her name, and she wanted to see if he’d actually use it.

Glimmer turned back to Catra, laughing. “You insulted our names when all the time your name was literally Catra?”

“I was named by a woman with the fashion sense of a goth caterpillar and zero creativity, cut me some slack,” Catra grumbled.

Bow raised his eyebrows. “Were you born in the Horde?”

Catra raised her eyebrows in mockery of his expression. “I didn’t realize we were answering personal questions.”

“You can ask me a question about myself, if you want,” Bow offered.

“Bow,” Glimmer said darkly.

“What? It’s not like she can do anything tied up like this, and as long as it isn’t information about the Rebellion it’s not going to help the Horde anyway.”

“Where’d you get the bow?” Catra asked, if only to see the furious look on Glimmer’s face when she was interrupted.

“The Bright Moon armory,” said Bow. “I made the arrows myself.”

Catra paused. “I wasn’t born in the Horde. I don’t think I was, at least. Shadow Weaver found me in a box as a toddler.”

“Shadow Weaver?” Glimmer asked. “Who’s that?”

Catra blinked. She hadn’t realized that Shadow Weaver wasn’t well known in Bright Moon. But then again, she never really left the compound, so it made sense if they’d never seen her. “If you don’t know, I’m not about to tell you. That’s not even personal information, that’s military intelligence.”

“Is she the one who named you?” Bow guessed.

“Shut up,” said Catra. “You want information, you’re going to have to give information.”

“Speaking of information,” said Glimmer, glancing around, “where the fuck are we?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” said Bow, handing Catra’s rope to Glimmer for a moment and shaking the damaged trackpad vigorously with no response. “If this thing was working, we’d be able to find our way back home pretty easily, but someone thought it was a good idea to break it.” It was the first time he had said something remotely mean, Catra thought. Good for him.

“In my defense, I didn’t realize I’d be coming with you when I broke that thing,” she said from the ground.

“When you attacked us unprovoked, you mean,” said Glimmer, grabbing the rope and starting to drag Catra along again.

“Can you blame me?” Catra asked. “You’re princesses, I’m a Horde soldier, you’d’ve attacked me anyway if you’d seen me first.”

“We wouldn’t have –” Bow began indignantly, then appeared to reconsider. “Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean you were justified in attacking us in the first place.”

“And you still haven’t given us a good answer for why you were in our woods to begin with,” said Glimmer smugly. “My mom’s going to have a lot of questions for you when we get back, and she’s not nearly as forgiving as we are.”

Catra snorted. “I’d say you’re pretty forgiving, considering you haven’t killed me yet.”

Bow looked shocked. “Why would we kill you?”

Catra shrugged as best she could while horizontal. “Why wouldn’t you kill me? I’m a cadet, it’s not like I have valuable military intelligence, and I’ve already attacked you. I’m a liability.”

“Are you… arguing for why we should kill you?” Glimmer asked, sounding confused instead of angry for once.

“We’re the good guys, we don’t kill people,” Bow said, almost at the same time.

“Of course you are,” Catra said sarcastically. “Listen, I don’t know what world you’re living in, but in my world, people never do things just to be nice. There’s no reason to help someone out unless they’re going to benefit you in the future.”

“That’s a terrible way to look at the world,” said Glimmer, going back to her usual snappishness, but Bow looked thoughtful.

“The Horde must really be terrible,” he said.

“Maybe it is,” Catra agreed. “But who says Bright Moon is any better?”

. . .

It took them the rest of the night to get to the rebel fortress of Bright Moon, which Catra knew enough about to recognize but not enough to prepare her for the sheer magnificence of the building. Glimmer teleported them into the building but not into the throne room, citing “politeness” and “rules about entry”, though Catra suspected Glimmer was just scared of the queen.

It was more of a palace than a fortress, she considered as she was dragged along the smooth stone floors, polished until they sparkled nearly as much as Glimmer’s hair. It was obvious that whoever had built it didn’t have military defense in mind, and there had been far too much effort squandered on delicate arches and jewel-studded window frames.

“Here we are!” said Glimmer as she deposited Catra outside of a pair of impressively large doors. “Now I just have to knock and we’ll see if Mom’s –”

Before she could knock, the doors swung open seemingly on their own, though Catra suspected there was someone hiding behind them. The room was almost disgustingly large, designed by someone who could afford to waste their space, and there was a tall golden throne on a dais at the end, barely in view from Catra’s awkward position. Bow and Glimmer walked to the base of the throne, then they both knelt, which Catra found hilarious.

“Glimmer,” said the tall winged figure sitting in the throne, “where have you been? I was worried sick! You’re gone for the whole night, and then you come back with leaves in your hair, Bow’s trackpad completely ruined, and…” she side-eyed Catra, “…whoever that is.”

“Hey,” said Catra from the floor. “I’d wave, but I’m a little tied up at the moment.”

“This is Catra,” Bow offered. “She’s a Horde soldier.”

“She tried to kill Bow,” Glimmer added.

“I did not!” Catra protested. “Incapacitate, maybe, but not kill.”

“We were tracking a piece of First Ones tech when she attacked us,” Bow continued. “We took her prisoner in case you wanted to interrogate her.”

Catra smiled up at the Bright Moon queen. Maybe she had wings, but otherwise she wasn’t any different from the authority figures in the Horde. Catra knew how to handle them – she could handle this one too.

The queen looked at Catra and failed to hide her tired sigh. “Very well.” She turned to one of the guards standing beside her throne. “Take her to the prison.”

The guard looked visibly confused.

“The spare room,” the queen hissed under her breath.

Catra’s ears perked up, and she started laughing. “It’s the middle of a war, and you don’t even have a prison? You’re weaker than I thought.”

The queen didn’t respond as the guard picked Catra up and started carrying her away. She was apparently concerned only with her wayward daughter. Catra heard “I would ground you again, but apparently grounding means nothing to you” and Glimmer’s answering “Mom!” before the doors slammed shut behind her.

~ ~ ~

“Can’t you send out a search party or something?” Adora knew Shadow Weaver was in a bad mood, but right now Catra was more important.

“I’ve told you before, we cannot afford to waste valuable time and resources chasing a single wayward cadet,” said Shadow Weaver sharply. “If she survives, she will face the consequences of her recklessness.”

“It was my idea,” said Adora, “but if she’d just done what I told her and stayed behind she never would have disappeared! I wanted to find the sword again, she didn’t have to come.”

“The sword,” Shadow Weaver repeated, glancing down at the weapon Adora was still carrying. “Where did you find it?”

“In the woods, I’m not sure exactly where,” said Adora. “It’s like it was calling to me or something–when I touched it I saw… a lot of things, it was very confusing, and there was someone saying I’ve got to bring balance to Etheria? It’s been normal since then, though.”

Shadow Weaver’s eyes widened behind her mask. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” She reached for the sword.

“It never really came up,” said Adora, handing it over.

Shadow Weaver tilted the sword, examining it from every angle. “This is a magical weapon,” she pronounced. “And ancient… I’ve never seen anything like it. Its connection with you may be unique – its secrets are guarded from me, and I cannot access any powers it might contain.” She handed it back to Adora, who looked at it in wonder.

“Would I be able to do magic with it?”

“Potentially,” said Shadow Weaver. “But given that you have never done so thus far, there may be something blocking you – perhaps a code word or a specific situation required to activate it. Keep it with you, train with it. I will attempt to discover what I can about its powers.”

. . .

“What’s that?” Lonnie asked when Adora returned to their room. “Is Shadow Weaver giving out swords now?”

“I found it in the woods,” said Adora. “Apparently it’s got some sort of magic powers.”

Lonnie inspected it. “Just looks like a normal sword to me.”

“When I first touched it it glowed and this weird robot woman told me to bring balance to Etheria,” Adora explained.

Lonnie raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure you weren’t high?”

“Shadow Weaver said it was magical, too,” said Adora defensively.

“And Shadow Weaver’s always right, isn’t she,” said Lonnie sarcastically.

“She is an expert in magic,” Adora shot back. “Maybe you don’t like her training style, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.”

“Maybe,” said Lonnie, drawing out the vowels. “Or maybe she’s just messing with you. She’s done it before, made you think you had magic powers for years when we were kids.”

“That’s different,” said Adora, then tried to think of a good reason why it was different. “I just didn’t realize she meant power metaphorically.”

“Right,” said Lonnie. “Well, let me know if the sword starts glowing or anything.”

Adora readied another retort, but Lonnie had already left, presumably to talk to one of the older cadets or to boss around Kyle and Rogelio. Adora glanced at Catra’s bunk, feeling a hollow ache somewhere in her ribcage. Catra was the one constant of her life in the Horde, the one person who always had her back, and now she was gone. Adora didn’t know what she’d do if Catra didn’t come back soon.

Chapter Text

Catra had given up trying to break the window (there were still claw marks in the glass from her previous attempts) by the time the queen of Bright Moon entered the room, flanked by her guards, who paused at the doorway to give her space as she came over to stand about six feet away from Catra.

“Hey,” said Catra, waving. “I guess it’s interrogation time, then?”

“Not exactly interrogation,” said the queen. “More like… questions to get to know you with.”

Catra grinned. “We’re using euphemisms here, I see how it is.”

“Your name is Catra,” said the queen.

“That wasn’t a question,” said Catra.

“My name is Angella,” said the queen.

Catra snorted. “Of course it is. Also not a question.”

“How old are you?”

Catra had to stop and think for that one. “Not sure. Probably around eighteen, if you take Ad– others’ ages into consideration.”

An emotion flickered across Angella's face at this, but it was gone too quickly for Catra to decipher it. “Yesterday you described yourself as a cadet. Are you still in training, then?”

“I wouldn’t be if someone hadn’t – well, if things had been at all fair, but… technically, yes.”

“And if you had been promoted, you would have been…” Angella raised her eyebrows.

“Still Catra,” said Catra, deliberately dense.

“What rank would you have had?” Angella clarified.

Catra shrugged. “Probably just an average soldier. Unless you’re in training or in charge of something, there’s not much difference between the ranks.”

“What rank would you have had if you were in charge of something?” Angella asked, very slowly.

Taking this as a sign that Angella had taken her previous density at face value, Catra blinked innocently. “Depends what I was in charge of. If I was in charge of the whole Fright Zone, I’d be Hordak.”

Angella put her face in her hands for a moment. Once she had recovered, she looked back to Catra. “Where does the Horde get food and supplies?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Catra said. “We steal them from you.”

“The Horde depends entirely on the princesses for sustenance?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Glimmer reported that you were put off guard by the food she brought.” Angella arched an eyebrow. “I assume you didn’t have much access to fruits or vegetables in the Horde?”

Catra shrugged. “When most of your food is in bar form, it’s not like there’s much variety.”

“In… bar form?”

Catra made a flattening motion with her hands. “Rectangles. The gray kind’s the best, the brown kind tastes like shit. I have no idea what on Etheria was in them, but I’m sure it explains a lot, whatever it is.”

“That’s what they feed the cadets?”

“And the low-level soldiers,” Catra clarified. “Some of the officers get real food when it’s around, and of course Lord Hordak can get whatever he wants.” She figured it couldn’t hurt to tell Angella the truth about this, at least. It was common knowledge, and since she didn’t have any specifics it wasn’t particularly valuable information anyway.

There was a lull in the conversation. Angella looked deep in thought. “You were brought up in the Horde, correct?”

“Yep,” said Catra.

Angella hesitated. “Who exactly raised you?”

“No,” said Catra. “I am not talking about that.” She wasn’t going to say anything about Shadow Weaver to this person.

Angella looked surprised at Catra’s flat refusal. “Why not?”

“It’s not important,” said Catra. “Next question.”

There was a moment of silence.

“You weren’t raised by Hordak, were you?”

Catra let out a startled laugh. “Hell no, what gave you that idea? Hordak has way better things to do than look after a pair of fussy gremlins.”

“A pair?” Angella asked, and Catra immediately wished she hadn’t said that. “Were you raised with someone else?”

“I told you, I don’t want to talk about it,” said Catra. “It’s not relevant to anyone except me, and it’s definitely not relevant to you.”

For a moment it looked like Angella would push the issue, but then she stepped back. “Very well,” she said. “I have other matters to attend to. I shall return tomorrow to continue this… conversation. Bow and Glimmer will bring you your dinner.”

“Great!” said Catra cheerfully. “And here I was thinking you were going to starve me.” She was, she considered, only about twenty percent joking.

Angella frowned, appearing to notice the eighty percent, but said nothing as she left the room, the guards shutting and locking the doors behind her.

. . .

Catra was reclining on the cushions in the spare room when Bow and Glimmer entered, carrying a tray of something that looked like food. She’d had real food in the Horde, of course, mostly contraband stolen from officers, but most of it had been dried, canned, or two weeks old. None of it had looked like this.

“What’s this?” she asked, trying to sound like she knew what the fuck it was.

“Soup and a salad,” said Bow.

“And a peach,” Glimmer added helpfully.

Catra surveyed her options and selected the peach, deeming it the least likely to be poisoned. Of course, Catra knew from personal experience that anything could be poisoned if you set your mind to it, but she was desperately hungry by now and she had to eat something.

She inspected it carefully and, goaded on by Glimmer’s scoff, bit into it as hard as she could. Her first impressions were of soft fuzzy skin and juicy flesh flooding her mouth with sweetness, and then her teeth hit something hard.

She recoiled, spitting out the bit of the peach she'd managed to get into her mouth and glaring at Glimmer, who was laughing her ass off, the bastard. “Who put a rock in this thing?”

Bow, to his credit, had mostly avoided laughter and was currently attempting to suppress his smile. “It’s called a pit,” he explained. “It’s like a big seed, it’s meant to be there.”

Catra wasn’t entirely sure what a seed was, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to be this hard. Nevertheless, she refused to be deterred by it, finishing the peach in a series of quick bites and then moving on to the soup, which was creamy and filled with chunks of some strange vegetable. The salad she left untouched – a tentative bite of one of the leaves that seemed to make up most of the dish determined that it was bitter, hard to chew, and unpleasantly crunchy.

“Are you done?” Bow asked as Glimmer stared, apparently dumbfounded by how fast Catra had eaten the soup.

Catra nodded, shoving the platter back towards him. “You should try finding nicer leaves sometime.”

Bow nodded seriously, though Catra had the distinct impression that he was messing with her. “I’ll ask Angella to look into it.”

. . .

“You know we don’t hurt people here, right?” Bow asked as he and Glimmer sat on the cushions next to Catra. They were eating dinner together in the spare room, which Catra thought was a strange way to interact with a prisoner, not to mention dangerous for them, but it wasn’t like she was going to attack them out of nowhere. They’d been delivering her meals for several days without injury, and even she knew trying to kill them at this point would be a stupid thing to do, not to mention pointless.

“I have no idea what happens here,” said Catra truthfully, considering a piece of bread. “For all I know you could catch Horde soldiers all the time for ritual sacrifices.”

Glimmer snorted. “Yeah, right. You just missed our last one, now we’ve got to light all the bonfires again.”

“That’s a terrible joke,” said Bow, but Catra was laughing.

“I wasn’t joking earlier, though,” she said after a moment. “Well, I was about the sacrifices, but not about the no-idea part. Bright Moon is all oh, we’re all keyed into the power of friendship and rainbows and bullshit, sure, but there are terrible people everywhere, and it’s really easy to lie when you look like a unicorn threw up on you. Not that it’s hard to lie when you’re ugly, but it’s definitely harder to make people listen to you without fearmongering.”

“That’s a very cynical way of looking at the world,” said Bow quietly, and Glimmer threw a pillow at him to lighten the mood.

This attempt failed. “I’m not sure why you’re surprised,” said Catra, too tired to put much acid into the words. “You know where I grew up.”

“Not really, though,” said Bow. “We know what it looks like, all dark and loud and metal, and we know what it does to us – some pretty terrible stuff, I might add – but we have no idea what it’s like to grow up there. Like you said, the aesthetic doesn’t really tell us anything.”

“Touche,” said Catra, swallowing the last of her bread and flopping down on the cushions. “It’s pretty personal stuff, though, asking someone what their childhood was like.”

“When you put it like that, maybe,” said Glimmer. “But it’s not exactly weird to ask someone what their parents are like.”

Catra blinked. “I don’t have parents.” Before Bow’s and Glimmer’s expressions could turn all weird and pitying the way they always did when she brought this up, she hurried on, “None of the kids at the Horde do. We’re orphans, that’s the point. The Horde takes in kids who have no one else, whose parents died or abandoned them or lost them, or kids whose parents got killed by the Horde when they were so young they don’t remember it. I guess there were some kids whose parents were Horde soldiers too,” she remembered seeing an adult soldier once who looked an awful lot like Rogelio, “but we’re all treated like orphans.”

“You got raised all together?” Glimmer asked, sounding like she didn’t believe it, or maybe like she was trying to imagine it.

“When we were really little, we were,” Catra clarified. “Then we got separated into squads of five or six when we were old enough to start training. Of course, it was a little different for me and –” she cut herself off. “It was a little different for me.”

“You… didn’t have a squad?” Bow guessed.

“Nah, I have a squad,” said Catra. “Five kids, each more bratty than the last.” She peered at Bow, trying to figure out how much she’d be able to say without him guessing more than she wanted him to. “But I was… well, there’s a woman called Shadow Weaver. An adult, probably human, maybe in her fifties. We used to guess her age as ridiculously high numbers when we were kids, because to us it was like she was born before the dawn of time, but there’s no one really old in the Horde. Too much of a liability.”

“She was the one who named you,” said Glimmer, sounding like she’d just solved a puzzle that had been giving her a hard time.

“Well, yeah,” said Catra, then decided to fuck it all and go on. “My best friend was her protege, Shadow Weaver doted on her. Shadow Weaver usually just thought of me as a burden, but… well, Adora was fond of me, and Adora always gets what she wants.”

There was silence for a moment. Then: “Adora's like your sister?” Bow asked.

Catra tried to remember how families usually worked. “That’s like, one of your parent’s other kids, right?”

“Yeah,” said Bow. “I’ve got some older brothers, which are the male equivalent, and we’re usually pretty close. We fight sometimes, but we love each other.”

“Maybe Adora is like that, then?” said Catra dubiously. “She was… different than that, though. More than that, I guess.” She shifted on the cushion, which suddenly seemed scratchy and uncomfortable. “It’s her fault I’m here. She’s such an arrogant bastard. Cover for me, Catra, you’ll be safe back here, who does she think she’s kidding?”

Both Bow and Glimmer looked confused. “You’re… angry at her?” Glimmer guessed.

“I hate her,” said Catra affectionately. “She’d be dead several times over if it weren’t for me, but she always has to be the one to protect me or whatever and she forgets it goes both ways.” She leaped to the top of the fancy dresser (empty and nailed to the floor, she’d checked) and glared down at them. “If she learned you were holding me prisoner, she wouldn’t let anything stop her from getting me back. But that would be incredibly embarrassing, obviously, so I’ll figure out how to escape on my own first.”

Bow and Glimmer exchanged a look. Catra thought they were going to comment on her mentioned escape plan, but instead Bow said slowly, “And this is your best friend?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I mentioned that already, right? She’s the only person who cares whether I live or die, to be honest. I’m not exactly a high-value prisoner.”

“Catra, you know it isn’t… normal to have only one person who cares about you, right?” Bow asked.

“You don’t have to rub it in,” Catra snapped. “I’m not some pathetic weakling, okay? I can take care of myself.”

“Maybe you can, but you shouldn’t have to,” said Bow, and Glimmer chimed in, “Maybe the friendship and rainbows thing is a bit ridiculous, but friends are important. I don’t know where I’d be without Bow.”

Catra scoffed. “Yeah, right.”

“Catra –” Bow started, but she cut him off.

“It’s not like it matters here, anyway. I’m your enemy! You can stop caring about me, alright, because I’m going to try my best to kill you as soon as I’m free.”

Glimmer looked like she was about to argue, but Catra bared her teeth and hissed.

Something shifted in Glimmer’s face, and she crossed her arms over her chest. “Fine,” she snapped. “Be that way. It’s not as if anyone would willingly be friends with you anyway. Your Adora must be a saint to put up with you.”

She dragged Bow out the door, leaving Catra staring blankly at the carved wood.

~ ~ ~

Adora had been training with the sword for over a week with no change. Her performance was suffering, the sword bulky and awkward in her hands when she was used to using a staff, and nothing remotely noteworthy had happened, much less anything magical. She’d tried as many different phrases as she could think of in the hopes of finding the code word – “sword!” “balance!” “Etheria!” “something something something!” “JUST DO SOMETHING ALREADY YOU USELESS PIECE OF SHIT” – but nothing had changed for either her or the sword.

She sighed, getting into position for yet another training simulation. Her shoulders ached as she hefted the sword, glancing at the empty space next to Lonnie where Catra should have been.

The simulation surprised her the moment it began. Her goggles didn’t appear to be working, showing the robots as they really were rather than as shadowy princess silhouettes. There were also several more robots than usual. I can handle this, Adora thought, ignoring the pang of foreboding in her stomach.

“Lonnie, you take the two on the right,” she directed. “Rogelio, the big one in the middle. I’ll deal with the others.”

“What’s my job?” Kyle asked, edging closer to Rogelio and blinking nervously.

Adora considered him for a moment. “Try not to get eliminated.”

“Will do, boss!” Kyle saluted, then yelped and fled as one of Adora’s robots moved towards him.

Adora chose one of the robots in front of her and charged, dodging a laser beam and taking a flying leap to land on top of it, hitting it as hard as she could with the sword. To her dismay, the blade skittered off, leaving only a scratch on the thick shell. The robot shifted to target Rogelio and she clutched at the smooth metal to keep from falling off, looking for a weak point to aim at.

Rogelio’s roar of pain diverted her attention for a moment, and she turned to see him clutching his arm, which was smoking slightly.

“The weapons on these things are real!” Lonnie shouted, dodging a blast and attempting to score a hit on a robot with her staff.

Adora swore under her breath and started hitting her robot over and over with the sword to distract it from Rogelio. Finally finding a chink in the armor, she used the tip of the blade to pry up the shell and stabbed the mess of wire inside. The robot shuddered and collapsed, powering down. Adora leaped to her feet and stabbed it again to make sure it was dead before turning to see how the others were doing.

As it turned out, the others were not doing well. Rogelio had dropped his own staff and was charging at his own robot to fight it with his bare claws despite his burned arm. Lonnie had been cornered by two of the other robots, and Kyle was still running, looking for somewhere to hide from the robot chasing him despite the complete lack of hiding places in the featureless room.

Adora ran towards Lonnie to help, but before she reached the other cadet she felt something gripping the back of her jacket, lifting her off the ground. The remaining robot had found her. She yelled and lashed out wildly with the sword, but she couldn’t reach the robot’s body and its leg was too sturdy to damage.

As the robot’s laser started powering up again, she glanced past it to see Lonnie on the ground, one of her legs badly burned as she deflected the lasers with her staff. But Lonnie was getting tired, and both of the others were too occupied to help her. If something didn’t happen right away, Adora realized, one of them was going to die. And Adora was powerless to stop it.

She opened her mouth to scream in frustration, and to her surprise words came to her. “For the Honor of Grayskull!” she screamed, and the world was made of light.

Chapter Text

“That was excellent, Adora,” said Shadow Weaver as Adora sipped from a glass of water and tried to ignore the ache that seemed to have suffused every one of her muscles. “I knew you had this sort of power within you from the moment I took you in as a child.”

“What were you thinking, sending in fully armed war machines?” Adora demanded. “My teammates could have died!”

“Precisely,” said Shadow Weaver. “I suspected that the sword might unlock your powers only in life-or-death situations, particularly those in which others are in peril, and you proved me correct. In quite spectacular fashion, I might add. I should have recognized the Sword of Protection the moment I saw it, though in my defense She-Ra has been considered a myth for centuries.”

“What are you talking about?” Adora was furious, and her aching body wasn’t helping.

“There is a legend among the princesses,” Shadow Weaver began.

“Among the princesses?”

“Don’t look so shocked,” said Shadow Weaver. “They may be backstabbing monsters, but the princesses have been around for a long time, and there is much to learn from your enemies. This legend tells of a being of incredible power, a warrior called She-Ra who would wield a magical weapon known as the Sword of Protection.”

“A really tall warrior with a skirt and a tiara, apparently,” said Adora. She was still unsettled by the tiara.

“Yes,” said Shadow Weaver. “This warrior was assumed to be an ancient myth, as she has not been seen in thousands of years – or had not been seen, I suppose, until fifteen minutes ago.”

“I looked like a princess,” said Adora with disgust. She’d destroyed the robots almost effortlessly, then had taken one look in the mirror and collapsed back into her normal body in horror.

“It is true that the Sword of Protection likely originated with the princesses,” said Shadow Weaver, “but She-Ra herself is not necessarily a princess. You were destined for greater things, Adora.” She placed her hand on Adora’s shoulder. “You are still a Force Captain, and with this new power I am sure you will win great victories for the Horde.”

Adora looked down at the sword again, tilting it so the gem embedded in the hilt caught the light. “Will I even be able to summon She-Ra again?”

“Try,” said Shadow Weaver, stepping back.

Adora blinked, caught off guard, then raised the sword. “For the honor of Grayskull!” she yelled. Nothing happened.

As Shadow Weaver watched, not blinking once, she tried to remember the way it had felt when she’d transformed into She-Ra before – warmth and light filling her limbs with strength. “For the honor of Grayskull!” she tried again. The sword glowed slightly for a moment, but she remained at her normal height, in her normal clothing.

Adora shook the sword. “Why isn’t it working?” she demanded.

“Perhaps it only works when those around you are in peril,” said Shadow Weaver, “or perhaps you merely require an incentive to excel.” She tapped Adora’s shoulder again. “If you cannot summon She-Ra again by tomorrow, prepare to face the same simulation every day for the rest of the week. With your teammates.”

She swept out of the room before Adora could say another word.

~ ~ ~

“I’m sorry,” said Glimmer.

“It’s fine,” Catra muttered. “Just forget about it.”

“I basically said you were unlovable,” said Glimmer. “That isn’t fine.”

“It’s true!” said Catra.

“No, it’s not!” said Glimmer. “I care about you, Bow cares about you, even my mom cares about you, and maybe that isn’t love, but we’ve only known you for, like, a week. That’s pretty impressive for somebody who constantly invites people to strangle her. So it wasn’t true, and it was a really hurtful thing for me to say, so I’m sorry and you don’t get to brush it off.”

“You’re only saying that because Bow told you to,” said Catra, staring at the ceiling, “and Bow only told you to because he’s so weirdly nice he’d probably shake Hordak’s hand. He’s an anomaly. A really polite anomaly.”

“I’m not,” said Glimmer, then paused. “Well, maybe he told me to talk to you, but I was sorry anyway. He didn’t have to tell me to say sorry. And maybe Bow’s nicer than most, but he’s still a person! He has people he hates. I think. And he likes you.”

“I guess,” Catra conceded. “You still don’t need to apologize for snapping at me, though. I was being a bit of an asshole.”

“More than a bit,” said Glimmer. “But you were just being… yourself, I guess, and I responded by insulting you personally.”

“I’ve insulted you personally plenty before,” Catra countered.

Glimmer groaned and threw her hands in the air, a few angry sparkles flying from her fingers. “Stop arguing with me! I am trying to be nice!”

“And I’m trying to be an asshole,” said Catra. “Somehow I think I’m doing a better job than you are.”

Glimmer blew out a breath. “Can we at least agree that I’m not angry at you and you’re not angry at me, at least not any more than usual?”

“Deal,” said Catra. She hesitated. “Sparkles, I know I give you a hard time, but you’re not half bad to talk to.”

Glimmer grinned. “Don’t let Bow know I said it, Horde scum, but you’re not either. We can unite over our shared talent of messing with my mom and giving Bow headaches.”

“Bow’s not the only one,” said Catra, and Glimmer threw a pillow at her.

“You are literally the worst!” she said, but she was laughing.

“I know,” said Catra with a grin, throwing a pillow back and dodging as Glimmer prepared to retaliate again.

The spare room had plenty of pillows, and almost half of them had burst by the time Glimmer surrendered, gasping for breath between giggles as she flopped down on a pile of pillows and feathers. Catra was sneezing uncontrollably while she dropped the pillow in her hands and started trying to untangle the bits of fluff that had gotten caught in her claws.

“Glimmer, we have to go – what on the moons is going on?” Bow poked his head into the room before closing his eyes and rubbing his temples, prompting another round of giggles from Glimmer and a sneeze that could have toppled a mountain from Catra.

“I took your advice,” said Glimmer when she was done laughing. “It worked!”

“Eh,” said Catra as best she could, “I’d still say the insults worked better.”

. . .

“Catra,” said Angella, “I want you to come eat dinner with us tonight, out in the dining room.”

Catra’s eyebrows rose. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” said Angella, and to Catra’s surprise she sounded serious. “Bow and Glimmer will both be there, along with me and two other princesses. I assure you, we are taking all possible precautions to ensure everyone’s safety. I assume you will do the same?” There was a subtle warning in her glance.

Catra considered making trouble at the dinner just because she could, but she knew what Glimmer and Bow were capable of and the two unknown princesses would probably have tricks up their sleeves as well. Catra wasn’t sure even she could escape a situation where it was five against one, and much to her annoyance she wasn’t sure if she’d want to, at this point. She’d been eating and sleeping better in the past few weeks than she ever had in the Horde, and though she’d never admit it, she did enjoy talking to Glimmer, Bow, and even Angella.

“Fine,” she muttered. “I won’t attack anyone.”

Angella paused, then asked point blank, “Will you try to make a run for it?”

Catra fought back the surprise that she knew was on her face and plastered on an easy grin instead. “If I did, would you follow me?”

“Only if you wanted to be followed,” said Angella, and Catra was startled into silence.

“Not that we would be able to, for lack of a better expression, keep a tail on you for very long, not with your proficiency in that particular skill set,” the queen added. “But even if we could, I think your… position here has changed enough that keeping you here against your will would go against my personal values and desires.”

“You’re saying I’m not a prisoner,” Catra said. It wasn’t a question, but she hadn’t quite grasped the concept.

“I’m saying you’re not a prisoner,” Angella agreed.

“Then… what exactly am I, here?” Catra asked, very carefully.

“That depends,” said Angella, “on what you choose to do next.”

“You’d really let me go back to the Horde?” Catra couldn’t seem to get past that part.

“You said it yourself, you aren’t a high value prisoner,” said Angella. “Several times, if I recall correctly. You’ve never done political or personal harm to Bright Moon aside from a brief skirmish with my daughter, all the information you are able and willing to give us has already been provided, and I believe Glimmer and Bow have developed a vested interest in your well-being. I would be honored if you would join our dinner tonight, but after that you are free to stay or go as you choose.”

“You’re serious about this,” said Catra, who realized she was doing a pretty terrible job at hiding her surprise but didn’t really care.

“I am,” said Angella.

They stood in silence for a moment. Angella’s wings rustled gently as she shifted.

“I understand that this is… news to you,” she said after a moment. “I will leave you to think until dinner.”

“Okay,” said Catra. She watched the queen of Bright Moon turn and leave, and she tried to remember when she’d stopped comparing Angella to Shadow Weaver. It was ridiculous to think that someone like her could have a place somewhere like Bright Moon. It was ridiculous to think that someone like her could want to have a place in Bright Moon. And yet….

She would go to dinner with the princesses, she decided. She would go to dinner with the princesses, and then she would make her choice. And if it was a trick, and she really was still a prisoner… well, she still had her backup plan. She could probably break her window if she had enough time to prepare, and from there it would be, if not easy, at least not overly difficult to climb down the wall and escape that way.

. . .

“Catra,” said Angella when she stepped silently into the room. “I’m glad you could join us.” She sounded legitimately pleased, Catra noted absently.

The table was far too large for the number of people sitting at it, of which there were only four – five, counting Catra. There was Angella, with Glimmer on her right hand side and an ornate but empty chair on her left, then Bow next to Glimmer and two unfamiliar women on the other side of the table. They were holding hands.

Catra hesitated, but Bow pulled out the chair next to him and she reluctantly sat down next to him. The two older princesses stared at her. She glared back.

“I suppose introductions are in order,” said Angella brightly. “Catra, these are Netossa and Spinnerella, princesses of Bright Moon. Netossa and Spinnerella, this is Catra.”

“She’s really from the Horde?” asked the one on the left – Netossa, Catra was fairly sure – as she began helping herself to some salad.

“I am literally right here,” said Catra.

“Sorry,” said Netossa, not sounding that sorry. “You’re really from the Horde?”

“Yes,” said Catra. “I’m not sure why that’s a difficult concept.”

“The Horde’s been at war with Etheria for decades,” said Spinnerella. “Netossa and I are just a little… cautious.”

“That’s fair,” said Catra. She shoved an entire roll into her mouth with no regard for table manners or her windpipe to give herself time to consider her approach. Maybe Angella was prepared to accept her, but that could be conditional, and from what she could gather these two princesses spent a lot of time in Bright Moon, so life would be pretty miserable if she got them on her bad side.

“We found her in the woods,” Glimmer announced, apparently under the impression that this was a helpful addition. “She tried to kill us.”

Catra shook her head, trying to swallow the roll all at once so she could retort and, failing this, coughing violently.

“Not to kill us,” said Bow, angel that he was. “Besides, she’s just a trainee. She’s barely our age.”

“I’ve never even visited the battlefield,” Catra supplied, having narrowly avoided an early death by bread roll.

“If you’re a trainee, why were you in the Whispering Woods?” Netossa asked suspiciously.

Catra shrugged. “My friend was being an idiot, chasing a glowing sword, you know how it is. I came along for backup and because I wanted an adventure, but we got separated.”

“And you decided to attack the princess of Bright Moon while you were out?” Netossa was leaning forward slightly now, her food forgotten. Spinnerella put her hand on her… friend’s? elbow in a calming manner, but Netossa ignored her.

“I thought she might be a threat to my friend,” said Catra, trying to keep her tone civil and failing. “Like you said, the Horde has been at war with Bright Moon for literally my entire life. Forgive me for being a little hostile when I think an enemy commander might be a threat.”

Netossa looked like she was going to say something rude, but Spinnerella gave her a Look. Bow and Glimmer were exchanging shocked glances, and Angella looked extremely uncomfortable.

“I think what my wife is trying to say,” said Spinnerella, “is that, well. Our queen trusts you, and we trust her, but you’re a Horde trainee. We’re just a little… unsure, why you would change sides, and whether we can trust that.”

Catra scoffed. “Why would I change sides? It’s a fucking hellhole in there, I don’t think you’d be surprised to hear that. I literally have nothing there for me except Ad – my friend, and she’s… well. Arrow Boy and Sparkles are incredibly annoying, but they are occasionally good company. Plus I get three meals a day here, which is an improvement.”

Glimmer made an expression of fake surprise and muttered, “I hadn’t realized you cared.” Catra glared at her but didn’t respond.

“May I add my observations?” Angella asked lightly. At Catra’s hesitant nod, she continued, “Aside from that first meeting, Catra has never hurt anyone in Bright Moon. The farthest her hostility has gone is justifiable anger at being imprisoned, and my daughter has eaten almost every meal with her for the past week – behind my back, but that’s beside the point – without Catra causing any sort of harm to her. Catra is intelligent and observant, and she has valuable information about the Horde’s strengths and weaknesses, especially their training system for cadets. If she chooses to stay, she will be a valuable ally to have.”

Catra noted the word ally rather than asset, and wondered if Angella meant it.

Angella met first Spinnerella’s, then Netossa’s eyes, holding them for an uncomfortably long silence. To Catra’s surprise, Netossa was the first to bow her head. “Understood, Your Majesty. Will we be… working with her, officially, in the future?”

“Not unless you and she are all willing to work together,” said Angella. “I understand that working with a group that despises each other is not the ideal setting.”

“I would be willing to work with Catra,” said Spinnerella after a moment. “Darling?”

“Fine,” said Netossa. “As long as she doesn’t try anything, I’m happy.”

They passed the rest of the dinner in silence, broken only by Bow asking Glimmer about an adventure story she’d read recently and Angella asking Spinnerella about a recent battle to protect a Bright Moon village. Catra remained uncharacteristically quiet, watching the two adult princesses and the winged queen who had offered her a choice for the first time she could remember.

“You doing okay?” Bow asked her in an undertone as they finished up the last of their dessert, some sort of pastry that Catra had never seen before in her life.

“Yeah,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

He hesitated for a moment. “Do you… do you think you’re going to stay?”

“I don’t know, okay?” said Catra. “It’s not exactly the easiest decision of my life.”

“Sorry,” he said. There was silence for another moment, then he started, “But Catra, I want you to know… well, I would miss you. If you left. And I know Glimmer feels the same way.”

“I can speak for myself,” Glimmer hissed from the other side of Bow.

“But I’m right, aren’t I?” Bow challenged.

Glimmer rolled her eyes. “Obviously. You’re really good at pissing me off,” she said to Catra, “but contrary to popular belief I can be angry at someone and still want them around. I’m constantly angry at my mom, and she’s like, the most important person in my life. Not that you’re anything like her, but it’s the same sort of thing.”

“You’re free to make whatever decision is right for you,” said Bow. “I just want you to know that… well, Adora isn’t the only one who cares about you.”

Catra blinked. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah!” said Bow. “You’re smart, and funny, and you’re really, really aggravating sometimes, but… well, if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be Catra.”

Catra put the rest of her pastry in her mouth to avoid having to respond to that unnervingly earnest declaration, and found excuses to avoid talking for the rest of the meal. She took the opportunity as Angella was telling a lengthy story about Glimmer’s childhood, something that distracted Glimmer because she was embarrassed and Bow because he was amused, to slip out of the dining room and find her way onto one of the balconies.

The air was crisp and cool as summer moved into autumn, the night sky tinted purple with the last rays of the sun. Catra perched on the balcony railing, relishing the feeling of sitting in a high place and of having the certainty that she wouldn’t fall, because she was more or less a cat and as such gravity was more of a suggestion than a rule. It felt almost like her safe haven at the highest point of the Fright Zone, except that Adora wasn’t here and anyone else could interrupt her if they had a mind to.

The sound of a door opening slowly behind her let her know that she wasn’t alone, and the faintest rustle of wings as the new person took their place next to her at the balcony told her who it was.

“Your Majesty,” said Catra, staring straight ahead. The sarcasm in her voice was less pointed than usual.

“Catra,” said Angella. “I hope dinner was enjoyable?”

“The food was good,” said Catra. “The company…” She trailed off, then twitched her ears to let Angella know that she was at least partially joking. “They’re fine. A bit paranoid, but I’d be more surprised if they weren’t.”

There was a pause.

“Have you made your decision?” Angella asked, very softly.

“Yeah,” said Catra, still looking down at the water below to avoid meeting the queen’s eyes. “I’m staying. At least for now.”

“Will you be staying in the spare room, or do you want a more permanent living space?” Angella asked. “If you’re keeping that room, I’d have to bring in a few more permanent items – a desk, perhaps, and maybe some more clothing storage if that’s something you’d want – but it would be no trouble at all.”

“Would you still lock the door?” Catra asked, and she could hear Angella’s frown.

“You’re not a prisoner, Catra.”

“But you still don’t trust me.”

“I trust you not to hurt us,” said Angella, “and I trust you to keep yourself safe, which is more than I can say for some of the other teenagers currently living in the palace. I would trust you with a room that does not lock, though perhaps not with one that can be locked from the inside.”

Catra thought about this for a moment. “I want a room with a balcony.”

“That can be arranged,” said Angella. “You can stay in the spare room again tonight, or perhaps in Glimmer’s room, but I will have another room prepared for you by tomorrow.”

They stood in silence again, Catra crouched on the railing, Angella leaning against it.

“Why are you still here?” Catra asked finally.

“I would like to invite you to a meeting tomorrow morning in the war room,” said Angella. “Netossa and Spinnerella will be away, but I wish to determine the specifics of your role here with you. Bow and Glimmer will also be present, and either of them can show you the way.”

“Fine,” said Catra. “I’ll be there.” She waited until she heard Angella leave before she leapt down from the railing, made one last glance towards the horizon, and went back inside to find Glimmer.

. . .

“I doubt you will have an official title,” said Angella on Catra’s first official day at the job. “Unless you want one?”

“Um,” said Catra, nonplussed. “No? It’s not like a title changes anything, right?”

“Not really,” said Angella. “I suppose what position you would hold depends on your desires – if you want to take a more active role in war planning, you could take a general-type position, or you could be more of an advisor. In either case you would work with Netossa and Spinnerella when they bring back reports from the front or participate in battle planning.”

“That’s acceptable, I guess,” said Catra. “Wait, is it literally just… you three? Doing the battle planning?”

“I help,” said Glimmer. “And Bow is usually around, at least.”

“I mean this in the best possible way, but how have we been struggling against you for so long?”

“Here’s a thought,” said Glimmer. “Maybe relying on traumatized child soldiers is not the ideal way to win a war.”

“You are literally a commander and you’re what, fifteen?” Catra knew Glimmer was her age, but she also knew the incorrect guess would piss her off. “You’re not exactly one to talk.”

“We have a number of trained soldiers, many of whom serve leadership roles among the groups of non-princesses who aid Bright Moon,” said Angella, “but Netossa and Spinnerella are the only princesses currently actively aiding Bright Moon.”

Catra tried to remember the maps of Etheria she’d seen occasionally during her training. “Isn’t there a princess in that watery place? Salineas?”

“There are a number of other princesses in Etheria,” said Angella. “They are currently neutral in the war.”

“They’re not helping you?”

“They used to be part of the war, but that was long ago, when Glimmer was still a young child,” said Angella. “Their losses became too great and they decided to withdraw from the Princess Alliance years ago. Now they each have responsibility only over their own domain.”

“That’s bullshit,” Catra pronounced. “The princesses each have some sort of power, right?”

“Not all of them,” said Angella, “but most, yes.”

“So the other princesses would be valuable both because they’re more powerful than regular soldiers, and because they have more resources from their kingdoms that they could give… us.” She wasn’t sure she’d ever get used to talking about Bright Moon like she was a part of it.

“That is correct,” said Angella. “If the other princesses joined Bright Moon once again, it would not necessarily win us the war, but it would make it much easier.”

Catra gestured across the digital map laid out in front of her. “Then why don’t you just ask them to reform the Princess Alliance?”

“It’s not that simple,” said Angella.

“And why is that?” Glimmer asked, on Catra’s side for once. “Because they got defeated one time a decade ago and decided helping us fight the war was too scary, now we’re not allowed to even ask if they’d be willing to help us?”

“It was not just a defeat,” said Angella, “it was a rout. Because of my personal decisions, many people died, including your father and several of our allies. I cannot ask them to take any more risks on my behalf.”

“Maybe you can’t,” said Glimmer. “But if I visited them with Bow and Catra, I’m sure we could convince them! We’re the next generation, same as Mermista and Frosta.”

“As your unofficial official advisor person,” said Catra, “I’m advising you to listen to Glimmer. If you want to win this war, you’re going to need more backup than two overworked princesses and your untrained daughter.”

“Hey!” said Glimmer, who had been about to give Catra a high five. “I’m plenty trained.”

Angella had her head in her hands. “I’m beginning to regret letting the two of you become friends.” She looked up at Bow, who had been quiet for the whole discussion. “Bow, what do you think?”

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to agree with Glimmer and Catra here, Your Majesty,” said Bow. “I know what happened with King Micah was bad, and it’s going to be tough to get the princesses on our side again, but we’ve got to at least give it a try. The Horde is going to keep ruining lives unless we can figure out a way to stop them, and I don’t think we can do that without the other princesses.”

Angella sighed. “You’re probably right. I’m showing my age again, I suppose – though I’m still reluctant to let a group of teenagers act as the diplomatic face of Bright Moon.”

“We can do it!” said Glimmer, with more optimism than Catra felt. “Perfuma is already partly allied with us, right? I know we take supplies to her sometimes. I’m sure it would be a piece of cake to convince her to join us, and once we have one princess, the others will be easy!”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that simple,” said Catra, “but I think we can do it. Glimmer’s got the enthusiasm, Bow’s got the people skills, and I’ve got… basic survival skills, I guess?”

“Yeah!” said Bow, sounding more excited. “Together, the Best Friend Squad can do anything!” He pulled both Catra and Glimmer in for a hug.

Catra pushed him away with a hiss. “I disagree with both that name and the whole touching thing, but I can do teamwork.”

“Very well,” said Angella. “I’m willing to let you try with Perfuma, and then maybe – maybe, if that goes well, you can visit some of the others.”

Glimmer really did give Catra a high five, which was only slightly less unpleasant than she’d expected, and then hugged Bow again. “We’re going to Plumeria!”

. . .

The preparations for their journey had barely begun when Angella received a notification through one of the comm systems that Bow had helped install. She called Catra and Glimmer in to see the message as well.

“We left as soon as we heard the distress call from Thaymor,” said Netossa as Spinnerella destroyed a cluster of bots with a gust of wind behind her. “Most of it is pretty routine stuff, nothing to worry about, but there’s… something unexpected.”

She dropped the device momentarily to drive back a group of soldiers with a set of projectile nets, and for a moment all that could be seen on the war room screen was a bright patch of sky streaked with the occasional jet of flame. Then Netossa’s face was visible again. “It’s someone who looks… sort of like a princess? When Spinny saw it, she said she almost thought – well, you should probably take a look yourself.”

The camera turned so they could all see the swarms of Horde bots and armored soldiers, the houses burning as the villagers screamed and ran in every direction. The few Bright Moon guards who could be spared to help were vastly outnumbered, and even with Spinnerella and Netossa lending their powers Thaymor was still in danger. Then the view shifted, and Catra caught her breath.

It really did look like a princess, superhumanly tall and dressed in white and gold. Blond hair cascaded out of something like a crown as the strange woman destroyed buildings and cut down Bright Moon soldiers with a glowing sword. The princess was glowing too, not as much but enough that the white light made the shadows around her move aside as she passed.

Then she turned, and Catra saw a set of eerily familiar blue eyes before a laser bolt shot straight at Netossa and the connection flickered out.

“She-Ra,” said Angella, her voice full of wonder.

“Mom, what’s going on?” Glimmer asked, sounding more scared than Catra had ever heard her.

“She-Ra was a legendary warrior from the time of the First Ones,” said Angella, still staring at the blank screen. “It was said that she would return when Etheria was in great need, to bring balance to the planet. I thought she was a myth, but the coincidence is too great – all the images, all the statues, all the stories match up. She-Ra is back, and she is on the side of our enemies.”

Chapter Text

Adora’s first mission hadn’t gone anything like she’d expected. For one thing, she’d always imagined that Catra and the rest of her cohort would be there by her side, providing snarky comments and taking down the princesses as a team the way they’d always trained for. For another, she had never in her wildest dreams imagined that she would be fighting the princesses in the form of an eight-foot-tall, glowing magical warrior.

When she finally transformed back into herself, she nearly collapsed. This was something she had quickly discovered about She-Ra during training: when in that form, she felt hardly any pain and was very difficult to harm, almost invincible, but as soon as she sank back into herself she felt every wound she should have gotten, not individually but as a dull pain suffusing her whole body.

“Are you… okay?” asked Scorpia, the other force captain Shadow Weaver had sent on the Thaymor mission to keep an eye on Adora. She hadn’t been much help in the fight, but then again She-Ra had dominated the field, taking center stage in the invasion.

“I’ll be fine,” said Adora, allowing herself ten seconds to lean on the older force captain’s shell-encrusted arm before straightening up. She reminded herself that Shadow Weaver would be pleased by her victory, and she’d be all the more impressed if Adora stayed strong and didn’t show signs of fatigue. “Just… a bit overwhelmed from the battle.”

“Yeah, it’s quite something when you’re not used to it!” said Scorpia cheerfully. “I remember my first battle – I think it was more of a skirmish, actually, there were only about ten people there to fight against, but it felt like a whole army! We won, of course, but it was pretty close.”

Adora let Scorpia’s chatter fade into the background as she described her previous combat encounters in exuberant detail. Adora was thankful that she was considered valuable enough she didn’t have to walk all the way back to the Fright Zone, and that Scorpia was too absorbed in her story to notice that Adora might not have been able to walk that far.

Thaymor wasn’t too far away from the Fright Zone, on the outskirts of the more southern branch of the Whispering Woods, so it took them a little more than an hour to return to the Fright Zone. Scorpia leapt out of the vehicle as soon as it came to a complete stop, and Adora followed more sedately. Shadow Weaver, who was usually never seen outdoors, was waiting for them at the unloading area, her hands clasped expectantly in front of her.

“I assume you were successful?” she asked.

“We were,” said Adora.

“Man, were we successful!” said Scorpia. “Adora was great, going out there with the big glowy sword and blowing stuff up. It was so cool!”

“I am glad to see that you used She-Ra to your advantage in the invasion,” said Shadow Weaver, placing a hand on Adora’s shoulder. “As long as you continue to excel, I have no doubt that the princesses will be powerless against us.”

Adora forced a smile, wondering why she didn’t feel happier at the praise. Maybe it was because Catra wasn’t here to share it, or just because the pain was distracting her. Maybe if she could just take a nap, things would get better.

“Can I go and rest with the team now?” she asked. Shadow Weaver had offered to move her to roomier barracks now that she’d been promoted, but she had refused, preferring to stay in the bunk that still felt like Catra to her, and where she was close to Lonnie, Kyle, and Rogelio.

“The rest of your team is still in training,” said Shadow Weaver. “But you may rest for a little while. Your victory has earned it.”

Adora dragged herself to her bunk, leaving Scorpia behind to try to strike up a conversation with Shadow Weaver. Too tired to crawl under the covers, she turned to the rough drawing Catra had scratched into the wall of the two of them, years ago when they’d only recently moved into this room. Maybe it was silly of her, but she still couldn’t believe that Catra was gone. Somewhere, somehow, she was alive out there, trying to get back to Adora. Adora hoped that wherever she was, she wasn’t in too much danger.

~ ~ ~

“I hate you and everything about you,” Catra concluded, folding her arms and leaning against a wilting tree.

Bow had his head in his hands, and Glimmer looked both fascinated and horrified. Catra wasn’t sure why; from her perspective, diplomacy was going great so far. She hadn’t hissed or attacked anyone or even bared her teeth.

The tall blonde princess in front of her blinked. “That’s not very nice,” she said. “Who are you again?”

“Catra,” Bow muttered. “Can we talk about this? Sorry,” he said in his normal voice to Princess Perfuma, smiling tightly, “just have to go discuss something among ourselves. Be back soon!”

He grabbed one of Catra’s arms and Glimmer grabbed the other, dragging her behind a tree. She hissed and shoved them away. “What?”

“Catra, that is Princess Perfuma,” said Bow. “She is an ally. You can’t just insult her like that!”

“I thought I just did,” said Catra snarkily.

While Bow took a moment to recover, Glimmer added, “I think what Bow is trying to say is that we can’t afford to hurt her feelings right now. If we’re going to reform the Princess Alliance, we need Perfuma on our side!”

“Fine,” Catra muttered. “It’s just hard, that’s all. She’s so annoying, with her whole peace and positivity thing and the oh the universe will save us all crap, when the only way that tree’s going to heal is if she goes out there and deals with the pollution herself.”

“I get that she sort of… gets on your nerves,” said Bow delicately, “but – wait, what did you say about the tree?”

“It’s obviously poisoned,” said Catra. “I don’t know much about trees, but I know about pollution. The Horde’s set up camp nearby, right? And where they set up camp, they always have chemical waste and trash and stuff to throw out. Sometimes they’ll even intentionally poison the plants nearby so it’s harder for the princesses to hide and feed themselves.” It was the sort of stuff that was glossed over in cadet training, but Catra had heard enough about the Horde’s battle plans to have a good idea of what went on outside the Fright Zone.

“This is the Horde’s fault?” Glimmer asked, then groaned. “I should have known. Everything’s the Horde’s fault.”

“So if we destroyed the Horde camp,” said Bow, “would that fix the problem?”

“Not immediately,” said Catra, “but if you did that and then found a safe way to dispose of the pollutants I bet the plants would grow back pretty quick.” She was fairly sure that was a thing plants did.

“We’ve got to tell Perfuma,” said Bow. “We could get rid of the Horde’s presence in her kingdom and heal the land at the same time.”

“And I bet if this works she’ll be bound to join the Princess Alliance if we ask,” said Glimmer with excitement.

“Okay,” said Catra, moving away from Bow so he wouldn’t grab her arm again. “Let’s go back out. No dragging this time.”

They came out from the trees and approached Perfuma again, Glimmer in the middle with Bow and Catra on either side. Bow was the one who spoke.

“Let’s start over, okay?” he said gently. Reasonably. Catra was still angry, but she let him speak.

“This is Princess Glimmer of Bright Moon,” he continued, “and this is Catra, one of Queen Angella’s advisors. I’m Bow, Bright Moon’s tech master.”

It was the first time Catra had heard Bow’s official title – she’d realized Bow did most of the tech work in the palace, but she hadn’t realized he was in charge of it.

“Well,” said Perfuma, “I’m glad you brought supplies.” She glanced at Catra. “Did you have anything else to say, before your friend so rudely insulted me?”

“We’re sorry about that,” Glimmer cut in, “but Catra had an idea about why your trees are dying and how you might be able to heal your land.” She gestured at Catra, who took a deep breath and tried to remember how not to snap at the flower princess.

“I’m familiar with the Horde’s process,” she began. “I think they’re poisoning your land, either intentionally or as a result of some weapons manufacture they’re doing. If you take over their camp and dispose of the pollutants, you should be able to fix the problem.”

Perfuma blinked. “The pollutants?”

Catra bit back several possible responses and said carefully, “The Horde is messy with the way they create tech. They don’t really care how much waste they make, and a lot of it is incredibly toxic. They dump it, sometimes along with literal poison, into the princesses’ land to make the plants die so it’s easier for them to take over. You have to go to the origin point and destroy their machinery, or your plants are never going to get better.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Perfuma vaguely. “We try to solve problems nonviolently here, as a general rule, and the universe has always stepped in to help.”

“Do you want to heal your stupid heart tree or not?” Catra snapped. “Nonviolence is great and all, but the Horde is literally killing you.” She fought the urge to shake the other woman.

Glimmer looked almost as angry as Catra felt, but Bow stepped forward and spoke in a calm voice. “Maybe this time the universe wants you to try your best to help yourselves first,” he said. “Maybe you can meet it halfway.”

Perfuma considered this. “Will you help us fight the Horde?”

“Maybe if you say please,” said Catra.

“Yes, absolutely,” said Bow.

“We’re looking to reform the Princess Alliance,” said Glimmer. “What better way to do that than by helping our allies?”

“You’re reforming the Princess Alliance?” Perfuma asked in surprise.

“Yes,” said Glimmer, giving the other princess a dazzling grin. “We need all the help we can get against the Horde, and we want to help the other princesses too!”

“I’m not sure if the other princesses will want to join,” said Perfuma, “but if you can help us… well, who’s to say we can’t work together in the future too?”

“Exactly,” said Bow, glancing over to the plume of smoke that had gotten thicker in the distance. “Now, about that pollution…”

. . .

“This is a terrible plan,” Catra announced as they surveyed the Horde camp from behind a bush that still had a few blackened leaves. It was fairly small as Horde camps went, but the uniformed soldiers bustling around everywhere vastly outnumbered the four young adults preparing to attack, and Catra doubted even Bow’s arrows and the princesses’ magic would be enough to tip the scale in their favor.

“Well, what would you suggest, then?” Perfuma asked, her tone slightly acidic. Catra suspected she still hadn’t gotten over Catra’s insults.

“For one, it would be good to actually have a plan,” said Catra. “We can’t just burst in and fight the entire Horde camp.”

“Maybe if we can find where the poison is coming from, we can sneak in and deal with it quietly?” Glimmer offered, giving each building in view a quick glance.

“But where is it coming from?” Bow asked. “All these buildings are identical.”

“There should be a main facility somewhere close to the center,” said Catra. “The Horde’s big on uniformity, so it’s going to look like the others but bigger.”

“The question is, how do we get in without being spotted,” Bow mused.

“Sparkles, can you teleport us inside?” Catra asked.

Glimmer looked doubtful. “Maybe one of you? I don’t think I could bring all three of you, though, and I’d have to at least see the outside first.”

“We’ll see if there’s a way to get line of sight on that building while still staying hidden,” said Catra. “If we find that, you could teleport me in there first so I can deal with anyone inside before going back to bring the others.”

“You?” Perfuma asks skeptically. “Are you sure someone else wouldn’t be more suitable?”

“The other options are Bow, and you,” said Catra. “You’re a pacifist, you wouldn’t be any use, and I know the Horde better than anyone else. There’s no one else I could trust to take down the guards without hesitation.”

“We wouldn’t have to kill them, though, would we?” Bow asked. “If we killed our enemies, would we be any better than they are?”

“Stop trying to pretend the princesses have never killed anyone,” hissed Catra. “This is a war. There are always going to be casualties, and we can’t risk the guards alerting anyone else to our presence.”

“We could always just knock them out,” Glimmer suggested.

“That’s easier said than done,” said Catra. “Do you know how hard it is to hurt someone hard enough to knock them out but not hard enough to kill them?”

“I could make a gag,” said Perfuma, opening her palm. Several thick stems of grass grew from it, and she twisted them together in something that Catra could vaguely imagine being used to cover someone’s mouth.

“Excellent idea, Perfuma,” said Bow.

“That’s the only helpful thing you’ve said so far,” Catra begrudgingly admitted.

Perfuma smiled at Bow and glared at Catra. “Princess Glimmer can teleport in with me, then, and we can disable the Horde soldiers inside peacefully before bringing you two in.”

“Sounds like a plan!” said Glimmer. “Now Catra, where did you say that central building would be?”

Once they’d gotten a good view of the building in question, Glimmer grabbed Perfuma by the arm and disappeared in a flash of sparkles. Catra and Bow glanced at each other, then settled down to watch the building intently.

There was a faint thud from inside the building and what might have been the sound of voices, then Glimmer reappeared and grabbed Catra and Bow each by an arm.

“A little warning next time, Sparkles?” Catra growled as she clutched at one of the vats of disgusting-looking liquid, trying to reorient. Next to her feet, two Horde soldiers were lying on the ground with vines tying their hands and feet together and covering their mouths. Catra glanced at the vats again and noted the complex network of tubes connecting them, taking an input of what might be some sort of chemical waste and altering it somehow before directing it into what looked like a set of underground tubes.

“They are poisoning our land,” said Perfuma furiously. She moved towards the nearest vat, a vine rearing up threateningly beside her.

“Wait,” said Catra. “We need to be careful about this. I don’t know much about how this works, but I don’t think we should just break everything – the waste is going to dump out everywhere. We need to disable the system.”

“But if we don’t destroy it all, they’ll just get it working again,” said Perfuma.

Catra sighed. “See, this is why it would be so much simpler if you’d just let me kill people. We can’t make sure they stop poisoning your land unless we drive them out of your land, and there’s so few of us we can’t really do that if we’re scared of hurting them.”

One of the Horde soldiers on the ground was squirming and making grunting noises from behind the gag. Catra frowned down at them. “I don’t suppose you have anything useful to add?”

To her surprise, they nodded.

Catra hesitated. “If you scream for help, I will kill you,” she promised, then sliced off the gag.

“You could negotiate for surrender,” the soldier gasped. Their voice was higher than Catra had expected – they looked like a teenager, maybe even younger than Catra.

Catra arched an eyebrow. “We could do what?”

“There aren’t many of us here,” said the kid. “Just a skeleton crew to make sure the machinery is functioning properly and to defend against any princesses.” They sent a wary glance at Glimmer and Perfuma. “We’re not exactly valuable hostages, but I don’t think they’ll want to start a fight against two princesses and…” They trailed off. “Against all of you.”

“What are you suggesting?” Glimmer asked. “That we just… go out there and ask everyone politely to surrender?”

“Not exactly,” said the kid. “But like… if you show them what you can do, I bet it would be pretty easy to drive them out.” They looked suddenly several times more nervous. “If you drive them out, will you let me go? I really don’t want to get stuck here without my unit…”

“Of course,” said Perfuma, glaring at Catra as if she expected her to object. “We’ll let anyone who wants to leave do so.”

“Shouldn’t we keep the leader or someone?” Catra asked. “For questioning, I mean. They might have valuable information for Queen Angella.”

“True,” said Perfuma reluctantly. “But everyone else gets to leave if they want. Who knows? Maybe some will want to join us.”

Catra snorted. “Good luck with that.”

“Come on!” said Glimmer, bouncing on her toes. “Let’s mess with these mechanical whatsits!”

Bow was examining the machinery closely. “There’s got to be a pump somewhere around here,” he said thoughtfully. “To get the poison through the tubes. If we broke the pump, the whole thing would shut down, and then if we drive everyone else out, we’d have time to neutralize the poison, if we can.” He glanced at Perfuma. “Perfuma, could you get a few vines to grow inside this section of the design? It doesn’t have to be too much damage, just enough to stop the process.”

Perfuma frowned, raising her hands. The vines snaked up the tubes and vats, finding entry wherever they could. “Right here?” she asked.

“That looks about right,” said Bow, craning his neck to get a closer look. “As long as you don’t break any of the tubes, it should be fine.”

The vines crept into the pump’s mechanism. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the entire structure shuddered. The liquid that was flowing through a few of the tubes slowed, then stopped, and a section of the machinery that had been synthesizing the poison ground to a halt as well.

“Okay,” said Bow. “That got some of it. Let’s see if there are other pumps in this thing.”

The Horde soldier was still watching from the floor. “You know you could have just asked me for help, right? I know you don’t trust me, but I know where the power sources are in that thing.”

“I suppose you’re going to ask me to untie them?” Catra asked Perfuma with a sigh.

“Why should I?” Perfuma asked, waving a hand. “I can just do it myself.” The vines fell away and the Horde soldier stood up, glancing nervously at Catra. They were taller than her, which annoyed her, but at least they seemed to respect her as the most deadly person in the room.

“Okay, so taking out the pumps like you were doing would definitely work, but it would be quicker to disable the contraption if you focus here instead,” they said, coming up very carefully beside Bow to point.

“Oh, that makes a lot of sense!” Bow gave the enemy soldier a genuine smile. “Thanks!”

Perfuma altered the course of the vines and the complex machinery slowed, then stopped, leaving the poison caught in the vats, neither being created nor disseminated through the ground.

Perfuma frowned. “There will still be long-lasting effects on the environment,” she said. “However, I will see if I can use a combination of magic and prayer to speed the land’s healing after our return home.”

“That sounds great,” said Catra. “Now, can we deal with the Horde soldiers who are literally everywhere in this camp?”

There were a few half-hearted attempts to develop an actual plan, but ultimately the four of them simply burst out of the facility with weapons drawn and a mass of plant matter advancing ahead at Perfuma’s direction. The Horde soldiers fought back, but Catra knew their tactics and the others had enough power to hold their own until, with several collapsed buildings and a number of injured Horde soldiers in their wake, the force captain in charge of the encampment agreed to withdraw to avoid suffering any more casualties.

She was someone Catra recognized as someone who had occasionally made presentations to the cadets during their training, a tall satyr with dark grey fur and long curving horns that marked her as one of the oldest force captains. While Catra and Glimmer argued about the terms of surrender, she watched Catra with a look that was less threatening than bemused.

Catra made a face at her as she concluded, “Fine, we’ll let them all go, but we need to at least take their stuff. It’s no use winning a fight if you don’t get anything useful from it.”

“Aren’t you Shadow Weaver’s…?” the force captain burst out before trailing off.

Catra smiled, more as a threat than anything else. “I’m not anyone’s anything.”

“You were one of us,” said the force captain, as if this meant something.

“Was I?” Catra inspected her claws.

“How can you work for our enemies?” the force captain asked, sounding genuinely confused.

“I work for no one,” said Catra. “I’m working with the princesses because this job pays better.”

“Fair enough,” said the older woman, inclining her head. “Just don’t forget where you came from, little one.”

Catra met her gaze for the first time. “Believe me, I’ve tried.”

Perfuma, Glimmer, and Bow were watching this conversation with varying degrees of confusion on their faces.

“You didn’t tell me your friend is a Horde soldier!” Perfuma turned to Bow with an expression of indignation.

“Was,” said Glimmer so quickly it sounded automatic. “Like she said, Catra’s working with us now.” She turned to the force captain. “Okay, tell your soldiers to drop their weapons and retreat slowly. You are officially under truce with the princesses until you meet up with other hostile parties.”

The force captain gave the order, and the Horde soldiers retreated, carrying their wounded with them. The young soldier who’d helped them destroy the machinery glanced back once as if they were about to say something, but one of their fellow soldiers called out to them and they continued on their way without a second glance.

“Well,” said Catra, once the Horde camp was empty except for the four of them. “That went surprisingly well.”

“No thanks to you,” Perfuma muttered.

Catra glared at her. “Yes thanks to me. Don’t forget I was the one who pointed out the problem in the first place.”

“But we could never have done it without all of us working together,” said Glimmer, giving Catra a just-go-along-with-it look.

Catra nodded reluctantly. “Right. Power of teamwork and all that.”

Bow grinned. “The Best Friend Squad strikes again!”

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we are not calling it that,” said Catra.

Perfuma elected to ignore both of them and instead turned to Glimmer. “I have to admit, I was… a bit skeptical when you proposed the idea of a new Princess Alliance. But I think you showed today that we can accomplish more together, and after all, we’re a new generation. Maybe we should give teamwork a try again.”

“Awesome!” said Glimmer, her face radiant. “We’ll visit some of the other princesses soon too, so you and Bright Moon won’t be the only members for long!”

“I’ve heard that the princess of Salineas has been having trouble with the Horde,” said Bow thoughtfully. “Maybe we can go help Princess Mermista with that next.”

“I’ll stay here with the rest of my people,” said Perfuma, inclining her head to them. “We still need to heal the land properly, but thanks to your help we’ve made an excellent start.”

“If you need help against the Horde again, just send us a message,” said Bow.

“We’ll be happy to help!” said Glimmer.

“Yes, what they said,” said Catra.

After they finished saying their goodbyes to Perfuma they set out back to Bright Moon, with the cart they’d used to bring supplies to Plumeria now full of Horde weapons and other tech, having chosen to leave behind the disgusting-looking rations.

As soon as they were out of earshot of Perfuma’s people, Glimmer laughed, spinning around giddily. “New Princess Alliance, here we come!”

Chapter Text

Catra was not a fool. She might not be the prodigy everyone said Adora was, but she could put two and two together as well as any kid who’d been taught basic addition in the Horde. Three weeks ago, Adora had gone looking for a glowing sword, and two days ago a legendary warrior had showed up with a glowing sword and Adora’s eyes, fighting on the side of the Horde. How much weirder a coincidence could you get?

Unfortunately, the solution to this particular addition problem had led to her standing in the stables, trying to get an embarrassingly large animal with hooves to cooperate with her.

“You’re going to get stomped on if you keep hissing at it,” said Glimmer, coming up behind her.

Catra swore loudly. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m going on a walk to spite my mom,” said Glimmer. “And because I couldn’t sleep. What are you doing here? You hate horses.”

“None of your business,” said Catra, kicking the stable door in frustration as the horse blinked down at her. It was probably gloating.

Glimmer came up to the horse and reached up to put her hands in its mane. “You’re not trying to run off or something, are you? I know you hate Perfuma, but I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

Catra groaned. “No, that’s not it. Look, I’m just going to go on a little trip, I’ll come back before anyone notices I’m gone, and everything will be fine as long as you don’t mess it up.”

She tugged at the horse’s head-harness-thing again. This time the great lump at least stepped forward a little, though not enough to dislodge Glimmer.

“If you don’t tell me where you’re going,” said Glimmer, her voice annoyingly sing-song, “I’ll tell Mom you tried to steal a horse to run away.”

“Fuck you,” said Catra.

Glimmer just smiled.

“Fine,” said Catra, after several more minutes of glaring. “I’m going to the Fright Zone.”

Glimmer’s eyes widened. “Wait, really?”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going back for good. I’m not that stupid,” said Catra.

“Then why–”

“Look,” said Catra, “I told you where I’m going. Now you hold up your end of the bargain. Go away. Shoo.” She waved her hands at Glimmer as if that would make her disappear.

“I never promised to leave after you told me,” said Glimmer sweetly. “I refuse to let you go on a stupid, dangerous mission without me.”

Catra groaned again, acknowledging the futility of telling Glimmer she couldn’t do something. “You’d better not slow us down, Sparkles.” “Slow us down?” Glimmer scoffed. “I have teleportation powers.” She glanced at the horse. “Not sure I could teleport a horse, though. Or teleport all the way to the Fright Zone.”

“Horses are pretty fast, right?” said Catra. “As long as it fits two of us, it’s good.”

“Do you know anything about horses?” said Glimmer skeptically, vanishing in a cloud of sparkles and reappearing on the horse’s back. Cheater.

“They can’t be that complicated, can they?” Catra asked.

Glimmer sighed. “Just… follow my lead, okay?” she said. “You’ll have to get on the horse first.”

“How much of an idiot do you think I am?” Catra demanded, jumping from the ground to the stable door to the horse’s back before uncomfortably settling down behind Glimmer. The horse huffed and moved slightly from side to side, forcing Catra to hold on to Glimmer’s waist to keep from falling.

Glimmer petted the horse’s neck and whispered something in its ear. “Come on, let’s go,” she urged, and somehow the horse followed her instructions, setting out at an easy walk that was still faster than Catra ever wanted to go when sitting on a sentient creature.

“This is great,” she said dismally, glad she at least had enough balance to stop holding on to Glimmer. “How long is this going to take, again?”

. . .

It was past midnight by the time the Fright Zone’s twisted metal spires came into view, most of the moons half-hidden beneath the treeline at this time of year. Catra gratefully jumped off the horse, allowing herself a moment to touch grass before striding purposefully towards the Fright Zone.

“Wait, wait,” said Glimmer, who had foregone teleportation in favor of dismounting in what Catra assumed was the “normal” way. “Where are we going?”

“I am going to the dorms,” said Catra. “I don’t care where you’re going.”

“Which of these spires is closest?” Glimmer asked. “I can teleport you there if it’s a place I can see or if I know what’s there.”

Catra considered declining the offer, but she didn’t have any time to lose and as long as Glimmer avoided teleporting where anyone could hear her, there wasn’t really a downside to letting her help. “Fine,” she said. “Teleport us to the highest point of the second-tallest tower. There’s a flat space on the roof with a railing, we – I used to spend a lot of time there.”

Glimmer grabbed Catra’s arm and teleported without warning, leaving Catra struggling to regain her balance on the top of the tower while Glimmer glanced around in fascination.

“This is where you used to live?” she asked. “It looks so ugly!”

“I’m pretty sure it was made out of spare parts a century ago,” said Catra, kicking a loose metal plate out of the way as she got up and prepared for the climb down to the dorms. “It’s constantly falling apart, there’s always something leaking, and no one does anything about it because the people in charge have more important things to worry about.”

“Why did you even stay?” Glimmer tried to follow Catra down, but gave up after the first ten-foot drop and just teleported to Catra’s destination instead, next to the door that led inside.

Catra shrugged. “There was nowhere else to go.” She leapt down to stand next to Glimmer, who reached over to take her arm again. She jerked away.

“You don’t know what’s on the other side of that door,” she hissed. “It’s usually pretty quiet at this time of night but there’s always someone up somewhere, and the little…” she waved her hands vaguely, “sparkle noises could get us noticed.”

“Wouldn’t opening the door also get us noticed?” Glimmer asked.

“This one’s quiet, and as for being seen… we’ll just have to risk it,” said Catra, pressing the button and pulling Glimmer inside. Now that she was here, Catra refused to let the princess out of her sight. She didn’t trust Glimmer not to do something stupid – or at least no more stupid than what Catra was already doing. Sure, Catra was reckless, but at least she knew her way around.

She crept inside, shoving Glimmer behind pillars or into closets whenever she heard footsteps, until she reached an uncomfortably familiar hallway. “Stay here,” she told Glimmer. It was dangerous to leave Glimmer by herself, but Catra refused to let Glimmer anywhere near the bunks she used to sleep in.

“But–” Glimmer started, but Catra’s glare was enough to silence her.

“I need to do this on my own,” she said, low but firm. “Trust me.”

Glimmer hesitated. “Okay.”

“And don’t move,” said Catra. “Unless you hear someone coming, then you can hide. I’ll be back in a moment.”

She slipped into the dorm, stepping carefully between the bunks and watching the sleeping cadets warily. The bunk she had shared with Adora was at the end of the room, tucked close against the wall to conserve space. At first she wondered if it was empty, but as she drew closer she could see Adora, sound asleep, her hair spilling out over the pillow. She was clutching the handle of a sword to her chest the way Catra had seen Glimmer holding stuffed animals when she thought no one was looking, the point slipping towards the floor. The round blue stone embedded in the hilt was unmistakable.

“Well, fuck,” Catra muttered under her breath. She stood there for a moment longer, contemplating the idea of stealing the sword, but Adora’s hold on it was tight, even in sleep, and Catra doubted that she’d be able to take it without waking her up. Maybe there was some part of her that wanted to talk to Adora, to hug her maybe or to shake her and demand explanations, but if Adora woke up and saw Catra there, she was sure to bring the whole Fright Zone running.

She crept back out into the hallway to find that Glimmer was already out of sight. She swore under her breath and looked back and forth along the hallway, trying to guess where the princess might have gone. She’d only been gone for a few minutes – Glimmer couldn’t have gotten far.

Catra glanced back the way they’d come, then set off in the other direction, aware that she was getting closer with each step to the center of the Fright Zone, to the Black Garnet Chamber and Hordak’s sanctum.

She caught up to Glimmer a few steps away from the Black Garnet Chamber. At least Glimmer was being quiet, creeping slowly up to the doorway in an attempt to peer inside.

“Sparkles, what are you doing?” Catra hissed.

Glimmer flinched, glancing at Catra guiltily. “I just wanted to see if I could find anything useful,” she said, thankfully keeping her voice at a whisper. “When else will I be able to look around the Horde’s evil lair? Look, I’ve already found something weird.”

“The Black Garnet?” Catra asked, relieved that she was able to keep her tone nonchalant. “That isn’t useful to you.”

“But it looks…” Glimmer peered through the door again, and Catra suppressed the memory of Adora standing in that exact spot years ago, just as curious. “It looks like one of the princesses’ runestones. That’s the only sort of gemstone that would be this big, and it looks… alive.”

“Look, I don’t know what the Black Garnet is,” said Catra, “but I know it’s bad news, and I know that you can’t destroy it, especially not alone, so can we please get out of here before anyone finds us?”

Glimmer frowned, the sparkles in her hair and eyes glinting in the faint red light. “What aren’t you telling me, Catra?”

Catra considered her options. “Fine, I’ll tell you what I know about the Black Garnet. After we get out of this hellhole and back to that demon animal.”

“That’s rude,” said Glimmer, moving away from the door and back towards Catra. “April would be offended.”

“The horse has a name?” Catra asked before being cut off abruptly as Glimmer grabbed her hand and teleported without warning back to the roof.

“Of course the horse has a name,” said Glimmer, as if this were obvious.

Catra groaned, getting up off the ground for what had to be the third time that night. “A little warning might be nice next time.” She glanced back the way they had come, grateful despite herself to see that the horse – April, apparently – was still grazing contentedly, barely visible from their distance. “Come on, let’s go on down. Unless you’ve run out of sparkle power?”

“It’s runestone magic, not sparkle power,” said Glimmer with the friendly annoyance of someone who had made the same argument at least a hundred times already and didn’t expect to be listened to. “We’re only teleported twice tonight and I was nearly fully charged before we left, we’re doing great in that department.”

“Okay, go ahead then,” said Catra with a long-suffering sigh, taking Glimmer’s hand again.

This time she managed to keep her footing, landing a few yards away from April and taking a moment to look around and make sure nothing from the woods was coming after them. Glimmer took this opportunity to pet the horse’s mane and talk to it some more.

Catra frowned at the horse. Without anything to jump off of, mounting was going to be more difficult here, at least not without possibly hurting the horse.

“Do you want help?” Glimmer asked.

Catra narrowed her eyes at her. “I don’t need your help.” She hesitated for a moment, then leapt for the horse, pushing off of Glimmer’s shoulder and landing lightly on April’s back. The horse snorted and twitched its ears, but otherwise did not react.

“When I said help, I didn’t mean you could use me as a launch pad!” said Glimmer, getting up from the ground and rubbing her shoulder.

“You were very helpful,” said Catra, moving back a bit as Glimmer teleported onto the horse’s back again. “Let’s get going, it’s only a few hours until dawn.”

As they set off into the Whispering Woods again, Glimmer turned around briefly to fix Catra with a curious stare. “Alright, now you have to tell me about that weird gemstone. The Black Garnet, you said?”

“Yeah,” said Catra. “That room is called the Black Garnet Chamber, and it’s… sort of like Hordak’s sanctum, just for Shadow Weaver.”

Glimmer was facing forward again to guide the horse around a particularly thick patch of undergrowth, but Catra heard her sharp inhale. “That’s the woman who raised you, right?”

“‘Raised me’ in quotation marks, yes,” said Catra. “She threatened to kill me more times than I can count.”

“That’s awful,” said Glimmer.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Catra. “You want to hear about the Black Garnet, I’ll tell you about it. The… other stuff, it’s not relevant.” Glimmer inhaled again as if she was about to object, but Catra cut her off. “I don’t know if it’s anything like the Princesses’ runestones, but the Black Garnet is definitely magical in some way. It’s where Shadow Weaver got – still gets, I guess – most of her power.”

“She’s a sorceress?” Glimmer asked.

“I think so,” said Catra. “I don’t know how those things work, but they called her that a lot in the Horde.”

“My dad was a sorcerer,” Glimmer explained. “They’re people who access magic with spells rather than through runestones like the princesses do. I’m technically both a princess and a sorceress, but I’m a lot better at runestone magic because I’ve trained with it more.”

“That tracks,” said Catra, thinking of the potions and intricate etchings Shadow Weaver devoted so much of her time to. “I’m not sure how she’d get magic from a runestone then, though. She’s definitely not a princess.”

“I’m not sure,” said Glimmer thoughtfully. “It might be possible for a sorcerer to steal magic from a runestone, but I’ve never heard of it actually happening.”

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Catra muttered.

“What does she do with the Black Garnet?” Glimmer asked. “I mean, what does she do with that magic?”

Catra shrugged, though she knew that Glimmer couldn’t see her. “It’s hard to tell which powers are hers and which are from the Black Garnet, but she mostly uses… shadow magic? Usually it’s incorporeal, just a trick of the light or whatever, but I’m pretty sure she can use shadows to spy on people. She also has…” Her jaw tightened. “Sometimes she’d use something like red lightning. It could trap or paralyze people, and it… hurt. A lot.”

“She… did that to y–”

“Not relevant,” Catra growled. “If you try to make sympathetic noises in my direction again, I swear I’m going to push you off the horse.”

Glimmer was silent for a while longer, staring straight ahead at the overgrown trail. “Shadow Weaver sounds… really powerful,” she said sometime after the point when Catra stopped waiting for a response. “I’m surprised I didn’t already know about her.”

“She never leaves the Fright Zone,” said Catra. “Open combat isn’t really her style. She usually stayed behind to bully children, micromanage promotions, and do her own weird experiments. Before you ask, no, I never learned what those were about. She never lets anyone in when she’s working unless she needs you to fetch something for her.”

“She sounds terrible,” said Glimmer.

Catra shrugged. “You get used to it when it’s life as usual. Like I said, there wasn’t anywhere else to go. As far as we were concerned, the world started and ended in the Fright Zone.”

“This is going to sound weird,” said Glimmer quietly, “but… I’m glad we captured you.”

Catra thought about Bright Moon, about the ridiculous spare room and the signs of wealth everywhere she looked and the inexplicable kindness of the people she’d met. Even Perfuma’s irritating passivity could never have been possible without the security of her life and her kingdom, a sort of safety that Catra had never thought possible.

“To be honest,” she said, barely audible over the sound of April’s careful footsteps, “so am I.”

~ ~ ~

The next mission Shadow Weaver had prepared for She-Ra was, apparently, an invasion of Salineas.

“Salineas has been under siege off and on for years,” said Shadow Weaver, pointing to the figurines that designated Horde troops on the map. “The main castle has an impenetrable magical gate, and is surrounded on all sides by fortified walls and towers. Most civilians live outside of the walls, but their evacuation system is quite effective and the amount of resources kept inside the castle is enough that starving them out is not a possibility.”

She turned back to Adora. “The gate is the weakest point in the wall, but it is impossible to destroy through ordinary means. However, I expect that She-Ra has the power to destroy it, if we plan the attack well.”

Adora frowned. “Are you sure that would work?”

“If anything could destroy the Salineas Sea Gate, it would be She-Ra.” Shadow Weaver took one of the figurines and turned it over in her fingers. “We do have several backup plans, but destroying the gate would be the surest, least costly route to success.”

“Okay,” said Adora hesitantly. “Would the team be able to come along this time?”

“This is a far greater enterprise than the invasion of Thaymor,” said Shadow Weaver. “Your team is not ready for such combat.”

“They’ve been training for as long as I have!”

“You have always been exceptional, Adora. They are… merely average, though the absence of Catra as a distraction has been improving their efficacy.”

“Catra was an essential part of the team,” Adora protested. “I know she doesn’t – didn’t – always follow the rules, but she’s an excellent fighter.”

“An insubordinate soldier is worse than an ineffective one,” said Shadow Weaver coldly.

Adora opened her mouth to protest, but before she could get another word in, one of the older force captains appeared at the door. “Sorry, is this a bad time?” she asked. “I have to talk to Shadow Weaver.”

Shadow Weaver put down the figurine and swept forward so that her mask was slightly above eye level with the satyr. “You may speak.”

“My crew was assigned to the camp in Plumeria,” said the force captain, looking Shadow Weaver directly in the eyes despite her intimidating posture. “We were attacked and driven out – with no casualties, I am glad to say – by a group of princesses. One was from Plumeria, I think, and two of the others were from Bright Moon.”

“All to be expected,” said Shadow Weaver. “What of the fourth?”

“Well,” said the force captain, glancing at Adora. “That one was unexpected. Being in Plumeria for such an extended length of time, I had not learned that your… other protege had gone missing, so it was especially disconcerting to see her fighting on the side of the princesses.”

Adora blinked, the world taking on a misshapen unreality for a moment before her voice outran her brain and said, “You saw Catra?”

“I think that’s her name,” said the force captain. “Pointy ears, mismatched eyes, a vendetta against the world?”

“Yeah, that’s her,” said Adora, very quietly. How could Catra be working for the princesses? Adora couldn’t imagine it.

Shadow Weaver had stepped back to the map, drumming her fingers on the table. “Is that all?”

“Is that all?” Adora asked. “How did Catra even – where did she – is there any way we can –”

“There’s nothing more to be done with her,” said Shadow Weaver dismissively. “Perhaps it would have been preferable if she had died, but I doubt her presence on the princesses’ side will be much of a blow.”

“She’s –” Adora struggled to articulate the feeling of need that told her that Catra’s presence in the Horde was absolutely crucial. “She’s important! She’s got inside information on the Horde and she could – she could have been coerced, or tortured, or something. We have to get her back!”

Shadow Weaver dismissed the other force captain with a wave of her hand, letting the door shut behind her before turning to Adora again, the shadows that crept up around her showing her impatience. “You severely overestimate the value of a single disobedient cadet, Adora. Catra had never left this section of the Fright Zone prior to your reckless decision to take a joyride through princess-infested woods. Her information is minimal at best.”

Her tone changed, turning softer, more coaxing. “You do not need her. You mistake affection for importance. She is only a weakness to you, even more so now that she is one of our enemies. The sooner you can let go of your attachment to her, the sooner you can achieve your full potential.”

But without that attachment, there will be nothing left, Adora thought. Without her, who am I? She had the rest of her team, but they were their own unit, just as Catra and Adora had been theirs. But Adora knew she could never say this in front of Shadow Weaver.

Shadow Weaver placed a hand on Adora’s shoulder. “Perhaps I could give an order for her to be captured if possible, but she cannot be our first priority if we are to be victorious. Focus on Salineas for now. If we gain Salineas, everything else will fall into place.”

Adora swallowed her protests and nodded. “Yes, Shadow Weaver.”

Shadow Weaver squeezed Adora’s shoulder and then withdrew, studying the map again. “I must continue planning the invasion,” she said. “You are dismissed.”

. . .

When Adora returned to her dorm, Lonnie was waiting for her, leaning against the doorway with one eyebrow raised. She could see Kyle and Rogelio through the door, sitting next to each other on one of the benches as Rogelio explained something to Kyle in his own language. They all understood the basics, but only Kyle had learned the more finicky elements of the grammar.

“Heard your girlfriend’s run off and joined the princesses,” said Lonnie, and Rogelio growled something at her that Adora thought meant something like give the girl a break.

“Lonnie –” Adora felt suddenly very, very tired.

“I can’t say I blame her,” Lonnie continued. “It’s not like her life was that great here.”

“At least here she was safe,” Adora retorted. At least here I could keep her safe.

Lonnie huffed. “Safe and constantly on Shadow Weaver’s bad side.”

“Maybe if she just tried sometime –” Adora felt like growling, which was such a Catra-like urge that it hurt. “Look, I don’t understand what’s gotten into you since she’s disappeared. You’re the only friend I have left, but you’ve been so angry at me and I don’t know why.”

Kyle peered around Rogelio’s shoulder with a hurt expression. “I’m your friend too, aren’t I?”

“You’re the only friend I have left other than Kyle,” Adora amended.

Lonnie sighed. “You really don’t get anything, do you? I’ll admit, Catra was far from my favorite person, but at least we knew how things worked when she was around. Shadow Weaver gets angry, she takes it out on Catra because she’s your favorite person and because she’s an easy target. And Catra isn’t around anymore.”

She glanced back at Kyle and Rogelio. “We’re the next in line, the only other people you’re close enough to for Shadow Weaver to take an interest. We’ve already gotten hurt because of it! Just look at the ‘encouragement’ she used to get your magic sword to work.” Lonnie made air quotes around the word encouragement before gesturing to the laser burns all three of her team had acquired over the past few weeks. “There’s not a lot I can control here, but I’m sure as hell not going to risk giving Shadow Weaver any more reason to view me as a target.”

Adora glanced at Kyle and Rogelio, but no help was coming from that quarter. Kyle looked slightly apologetic and more than a little intimidated by Lonnie’s lecturing voice, and Rogelio was looking at Kyle and completely ignoring the girls. “Lonnie, I’m sorry –”

“Don’t say that,” said Lonnie. “Not if you don’t mean it.”

“I do!”

Lonnie turned away from Adora. “Then prove it. You can do what you like, but you’re not welcome here anymore. Get a force captain room, move in with another team, whatever you want.”

Adora could only stare blankly, trying to figure out what she’d done wrong, how she could fix this. Lonnie went over to Kyle and put a hand on his shoulder. He flinched, but a softer look from Lonnie took some of the stiffness from his posture.

Shadow Weaver had been pushing for Adora to move into her own room since her promotion, Adora reflected. Maybe it was only a matter of time. “I need to get my sword,” she said flatly. “Then I… then I’ll go.”

Lonnie didn’t look at her, only moved aside so that Adora could walk over to her bunk and take the sword. Kyle looked like he was about to speak, but after a glance at Lonnie he only clasped his hands nervously together and turned back to Rogelio.

Adora felt the cold weight of the hilt against her palms, her fingers curled around the metal. She heard every step on the steel floor as she walked past Lonnie again and out into the hall. She didn’t let herself look back.