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“Ok, so the Red Horde and the Rebellion had to form an uneasy truce to face Prime and the Green Horde. We sorta want that peace to continue, but without Prime as a common enemy hostilities are rising again. Any ideas?” Glimmer said.
“Oooh, what about an arranged marriage!” Perfuma suggested. “I can marry Scorpia, and then there will be peace!”
“We all know you want to marry the bug girl, flower princess, and trust us, we get it.” Mermista argued. “But I didn’t even hear about her until she showed up at our doorstep with Entrapta’s pet ‘bot, so I doubt that the two of you smooching will do anything at all. Politically, I mean. So if anyone has any other ideas-”
“Well, I could marry Hordak, I guess,” Entrapta said. “But the fact that I was a major ally of the Horde would make it more like two Horde officials getting married, rather than the union of a Horde officer and a Princess, which is essentially the whole symbolic ‘thing’ an arranged marriage would have to achieve.
“Hey, what’s ‘marriage?’” Adora asked. “I know Spinnerella and Netossa have one, but I don’t really… understand what it is.” Everyone stared at her.
“HOW! How do you not know what marriage is?!” Asked Frosta.
“Maybe it’s just something that the Horde didn’t teach people about?” Glimmer said offhandedly.
“Adora was in the HORDE?!” That was Frosta, even more wide eyed than before.
“You didn’t TELL anyone?!” Bow screamed.
“I was busy! And besides, it freaked the people at Brightmoon out a lot, and I didn’t want to have to go through the whole “proving I’m not evil” thing all over again every time we met a new princess.”
“Ain’t that a mood,” Said Catra, who was lounging in Adora’s lap.
“... You know what? We can work with this. Adora, you’re a major player in the Rebellion. If she got in an married to, like, some big shot player in the Horde, we’d be set. So do you, like, know anyone?”
Dear reader, it is important to note that in this story, Catra had convinced Adora to keep their relationship a secret, so as not to tarnish her reputation as She-Ra or cause people to believe that she had been emotionally compromised by “the enemy.”
“But what’s marriage? I don’t… get it.”
“Neither do I, honestly.” Scorpia butted in. “I asked Perfuma about it once, and she said something vague about beauty and life and combination and I just sorta zoned out.”
“Wait, I thought this would be covered in Force Captain orientation or something. Are you telling me that I’m the only Ex-Horde here who knows about marriage?” Entrapta raised a hair-tendril. “Except Entrapta.” Entrapta lowered the tendril. “Okay. Marriage is…. The most goddamn confusing thing on this planet. Can someone else explain it?”
“So marriage is when two people decide to spend the rest of their lives together and make a promise to do that.” Bow tried to explain.
“Oh, like me and Catra!”
“WHAT.”
“Yeah, when we were kids in the Horde we promised we’d take look out for each other. Remember? ‘You look out for me and I look out for you?”’
“Yup. Still remember that.”
“Oh, that’s not marriage. That was just a friend thing. Married people live together and sleep in the same bed and stuff.” Mermista said.
“Like me and Catra! We shared the same bunk back in the Horde because it was very cold, and we’ve sorta gotten back in the habit.”
“Did ya boink?” said Mermista.
“Did we what?”
“Mermista, I’m surprised at you! Show some decorum for the love of god!”
“You commit arson for fun, you can’t lecture me.”
“So did you, once. Remember?”
“Ugh, don’t remind me.”
“What’s boink… ing?”
“We’ll explain this LATER! Marriage first, boinking second!” Glimmer interrupted.
“That’s a very old-fashioned way to look at it, Sparkles.”
“YOU! You’re NOT! HELPING!”
“So marriage has something to do with… boinking?” Adora asked with an eyebrow raised.
“Not always. But some people say boinking with someone you haven’t married is bad. Dunno why.”
“CATRA! How do you even know about marriage! Or boinking?!”
“So when I was a kid, Shadow Weaver called me a bastard. So I asked what that was. Then she gave me ‘the talk’ so that I could understand when she cussed me out. If she had a body to bury I’d deface her grave.”
“The talk?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“Oh-kay. Back to the topic at hand. Marriage has a lot of meanings for the common people, but between nations it is a major political move. If people important to two nations marry each other, that’s seen as a way to force those two nations to work together.”
“Okay, so if I marry Catra-”
“Aaaaa will someone please explain the real meaning of marriage before the She-Ra winds up in a marriage with someone she doesn’t love?” Said Perfuma, unaware that Catra and She-Ra were very much in love.
“Huh? Nobody mentionned love before. Is that an important part of this whole marriage thing?”
“YES! That’s the whole point. The whole marriage thing is all about love!” Said Perfuma, eyes welling up with tears. “It’s about promising to spend your life with the person you love. A person so special to you that nothing that happens will stop you from caring about them and wanting to protect them and keep them close to you. It’s about a bond so strong that war can’t break it, a bond so strong that even if you wind up stuck away from each other for years, you still love each other at the end of it, a love that can change the world!”
“So… Me and Catra?”
“No, actually. It seems that in Etherian custom, there’s a bit of a trial period during which the couple act as though they are married. They call this process ‘dating’, and it can last from days to years. It seems to act as an experiment of sorts, to test whether the two of them can withstand each other’s company and remain romantically interested in one another indefinitely. In other words, marriage is when the hypothesis of love become considered fact! At this point, many couples decide to mate and create offspring, but that's not neccecary. Unless it's a political marriage, in which case lack of a child could be seen as suspicious or-"
“NO! Marriage is about smooching! If you marry someone you can smooch them whenever you want!” Frosta interjected.
“No, it’s about politics!”
“Love!”
“Smooches!”
“Science!”
“Boinking!”
“Politics!”
“Love!”
“Smooches!”
“Science!”
“Boinking!”
“SEA HAWK!” Adora’s eyes were darting all over the room full of rebellion members shouting at each other. Catra decided to show her mercy.
“Alright, shut up. All of you. I’m going to explain to Adora exactly what marriage is.” She leaned in and whispered something into Adora’s ear. It went out for a long time, as Adora’s face got redder and redder. The princesses caught the phrases, “Don’t have to pretend”, and “also we get to boink, which means-” At the end of it, Adora was indistinguishable from a ripe tomato.
“Um. Yeah. So. Marriage. Uh, for the good of Etheria, I guess… um. Fuck it. Catra, do you wanna-”
“Hell yeah.” They smooched. Everyone’s jaw dropped. (Except Catra and Adora. Their jaws were busy.) Any doubt at all that they weren’t madly in love evaporated like Horde Prime’s soul when it became increasingly apparrant that they were doing thumb wars but with their tongues. Seriously, I know people talk about “tongues battling for dominance” or whatever but seriously? Gross. Mermista somehow managed to mimic the live slug reaction. Glimmer sighed in disappointment.
“Guess she’s taken.”
“Glimmer, you’re taken too! By ME!” Bow complained.
“... Oh right.”
“Alright, Spinnerella and Netossa. You know marriages, right? You’re like, the only people in this room who’ve had one. How do we-”
“Okay, so first you give your partner something that could only come from you.”
“Okay, I’m giving Catra this pin!”
“Okay, and I’ll give you this dead rat.” Everyone was baffled except for Adora.
“Oh my gosh, you remembered! That’s so sweet!”
“Of course I’ll have to go get a new one when this rots, but-” Adora hugged Catra tightly.
“Um, what the fuck?”
“Oh it’s an old thing she used to do to show she liked someone, but then people got mad at her.”
“That’s cute? I guess? Now we need to throw a party. It’ll take a few months to set things together, but yeah. For the good of Etheria, I guess.” Netossa said. “But if you ever hurt Adora… I know your weaknesses. The spray bottle was me going easy on you.”
“If I ever hurt Adora you have my express permission to take all of my nine lives. Do you want that in writing?”
“Nah, I’ll take your word for it. That sounded weirdly legit, coming from you.”
“Okay, now about the party…”