Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Catra wakes to the sound of the world ending.

Or, at least, it’s the best description her sleep-addled mind can come up with. She jolts in her seat, eyes wide, pulse racing with nauseating adrenaline. It’s an ear-piercing, nails-on-metal, hair-raising screech, seemingly coming from every direction at once and yet nowhere specific at all. For five time-stopping seconds, all Catra can do is sit there, frozen in pure terror.

And then, as suddenly as it’d started, it stops.

The report of the sound echoes in her ears, a faint ringing that she’s pretty sure isn’t about to fade any time soon. 

Heart still hammering in her chest, she stands gingerly. The control room is empty, blissfully so. Her neck hurts, probably because she’d dozed off sitting at the main controls. She’d not meant to fall asleep; she technically hasn’t been sleeping at all lately, but, well. Clearly that decision had caught up with her. A glance at the screens shows her it’s been at most a quarter of an hour. Maybe that’s why she feels like a literal toxic wasteland of a person right now.

She runs a hand over the controls, switching the screens to the Fright Zone surveillance. Everyone is standing in place, clearly stopped in the middle of their usual activities. She spots a few quizzical tilts of the heads, and some confused gestures.

Despite herself, she breathes a sigh of relief. At least it means everyone heard the sound — that it wasn’t just in her head. 

For a second, she hadn’t been so sure. It’d been too familiar, is the thing. Her unconscious mind had recognized it as the end of the world, because…

Because she knows what the end of the world sounds like. She’s heard it — the horrifying crack of reality splitting apart to reveal all-consuming, purple-tinged energy that hissed and shrieked and devoured everything in its path, bringing only one certainty: the knowledge that it was all her fault.

An alarm sounds and Catra shrieks, jumping about a foot in the air before she recognizes the sound as an incoming communication — Hordak. With a deep breath, she tries to get herself together, straightens her shoulders, and pushes the button to accept the call.

As expected, Hordak’s face fills the screen. “Force Captain.”

Catra nods shortly, and keeps her hands behind her back so he doesn’t notice the way they’re shaking. “Hordak.”

“Our sensors have picked up an unconventional energy signature, emitted just a few minutes ago.”

If by sensors, you mean everyone with ears, then yeah, Catra thinks, but does not say. Instead, she settles for a laconic “I’m aware.”

“The source was traced to the outskirts of the Whispering Woods, right alongside the edge of the Crimson Waste. It’s still emitting now, though along different frequencies, and it’s showing tremendous amounts of power.”

A prickle of unease runs through Catra. “Still emitting?” she repeats.

Hordak ignores her. “Based on the emission spectrum, it’s likely coming from a First Ones’ artifact. Recon data from the original planetary surveys confirms the location corresponds to a collapsed ruin.”

Catra is pretty sure she knows where this is going, and no fucking thanks. “So?”

“The ruin was believed to be destroyed and without interest, but this shows that’s not the case. There’s at least some technology that is still functional.”

“And again: so?” Catra can hear her pitch rising, but she can’t quite keep it under control. “We don’t need that technology anymore. With Horde Prime on the way—”

“With Horde Prime on the way,” Hordak interrupts sharply, “we must be ready to demonstrate complete and utter mastery of this planet and its technology. We cannot afford to let any advantage fall at the hands of the rebels while we are so close to success.”

There’s bullshit, and then there’s whatever Hordak is trying to sell her right now. She narrows her eyes. “An old dusty alarm in the desert doesn’t exactly count as an advantage.”

“Enough,” Hordak snaps, and Catra digs her claws into her palms to keep herself quiet. “Local outpost teams have already been deployed to the site. You’ll put together a strike team and head to the coordinates immediately. I want that artifact retrieved, or, if retrieval is impossible, destroyed before the rebels can get their hands on it. Is that understood?”

Yeah, so: fuck that. “I’m not dropping everything to go blow up a pile of rocks in the desert,” Catra seethes. “The technology isn’t important, and the operations we’re currently leading are—”

“— under my command until you return,” Hordak cuts her off, and if she wasn’t so pissed off, Catra might laugh. Of course.

Now that Horde Prime’s arrival could come any day, now that Catra’s served him the Rebellion on a fucking platter, now that Catra’s all but wrapped up Etheria in a starsdamned bow after Salineas’ destruction — Hordak’s realised what it’ll look like to Horde Prime. He’s swooping in, trying to take her command, trying to take credit for her work. Trying to get rid of her, now that he’s got no use for her anymore.

She knows how that goes very, very well.

“This is stupid,” she starts, resisting the urge to hiss. “I won’t—”

“Yes, you will.” Hordak’s eyes glow, the menacing red that’s haunted her childhood. “You are under my command, Force Captain, and this is a direct order.” His gaze, even through the screen, feels like a weapon trained on her. “And if there is one thing Horde Prime won’t take to, it is insubordination. If you wish to return to your operations, I suggest you handle this situation rapidly.”

And on that, he cuts the communication.

With a shout of frustration, Catra kicks out, sending a stray chair clattering a few feet away. But she’s too exhausted to hang on to her rage for long, and leans forward, hands braced on the edge of a console, head bowed.

Fine. Hordak wants to play those kinds of games? Let him. She’s spent four years playing every game they all threw at her — Adora, Shadow Weaver, Hordak himself — and she might not have won every round, but in the end? She’s still here. She knows how to play the long game, and she’s worked too hard, lost too much, and given way too much of herself to give up now. 

He wants to play? Fine. She’ll play to win. 

*

The ruin is more ‘pile of rocks’ than ‘actual building’. Wedged at the bottom of a sandy, red-rock ravine, it’s a ragged, chipped square thing, a few stories tall at the most; nothing like the towering spires of the Beacon. Really, it’s no wonder they’d not explored it before, what with how it’s half buried under sand, tree roots from the few desert plants that grow this far East, and collapsed boulders from the rock walls surrounding it. 

It’s also, as expected, crawling with rebels.

Catra had given orders to the local teams to secure the building, and by the time the military transport she shares with her team makes it within view of the ruin, that vanguard is well occupied — but definitely not securing anything. As she watches the images transmitted by the outside cameras, soldiers and bots battle local Etherians, sheets of ice, and flowering vines and ugh. Ugh.

This is not how she wanted today to go.

“How do you want to play this?” Lonnie’s tone is cooly professional, which is for the better because Catra is not in the mood to deal with — well, anything, really. Her head is pounding, she feels nauseous from the journey in the awful enclosed military transport, and she’s still seething over this entire thing.

She nods sharply towards the doors of the transport. “You take the lead on the ground troops. Keep the rebels distracted for as long as possible. When I give the signal, full immediate retreat.”

One of Lonnie’s eyebrows goes up, presumably at the ‘retreat’ part, but she wisely decides against commenting, probably because Catra’s bad mood has been obvious enough on the way here. Scorpia wouldn’t have—

Catra viciously stomps the thought out of existence.

“What are you going to do?” Lonnie asks.

With a thrill of vindictive satisfaction, Catra wrenches open the metal container strapped to the wall of the transport. She picks up a block of explosives and tosses it up, snatching it out of the air before it can fall. 

“I,” she says with a grin, “am going to blow this fucking rock out of the sky.”

*

On top of being really impractical for tanks to access, the location of the ruin also offers absolutely no starsdamned cover: it’s one long, narrow open space, closed off on three sides by steep rock walls and the building itself on the fourth. There’s almost no space to maneuver, and so projectiles and magic blasts fly everywhere in the chaos of the fight, slamming into rocks and dried out dead trees and sandy outcrops. The mess is made even worse with the way the whole place is constantly wracked with tremors — Catra isn’t sure where that’s coming from, though she assumes the building is to blame somehow. Each quake seems stronger than the last in intensity, and she’d swear she can see some cracks opening in the dried out ground.

Once again: ugh.

The only good thing about this is that the fight is so dense it ironically provides Catra some approximation of cover as she makes her way through the combatants and towards the actual building. She dodges and sprints and ducks, clutching the bomb to her chest.

Hordak had said to retrieve the technology if possible. Well, her expert opinion is that it is not. There’s no way she’s going to waste any more time by actually trying to find out what’s emitting the signal — which, much to her dismay, had continued transmitting during the entire journey. If anything, it had increased in strength. 

Whatever. It doesn’t matter what it is; they don’t need it. 

She could have sat this one out; supervised the actual offense from the transport and sent someone at least semi-competent to set up the explosive, but she hadn’t wanted to take any chances. She doesn’t want to have to spend so much as one superfluous second on this.

The plan is simple: get in, cross the battlefield without getting shot at by either side, set up the bomb, and get the hell out of dodge. No complications, no unnecessary delays, no—

Catra sighs. No complications, no delays — except for a glowy, much-too-tall, flowy-haired princess with a magic sword and a superiority complex.

She stops, her way blocked as Adora — no, She-Ra — makes quick work of dispatching four Horde soldiers in one go, tracing a wide arc of magic with her sword that sends them flying. Catra sighs; Adora's always been such a starsdamned show-off.

There’s something tight in Catra’s throat, or maybe in her chest, or at the pit of her stomach. Her arm itches under her sleeve as she watches the cold determination on her former friend’s face. She’s not seen Adora — She-Ra — since Elberon. That had gone well, all things considered: she’d fallen for the Evil Trap trick, hook, line, and sinker. 

But there’d been something, in the way she’d looked at Catra, something Catra hadn’t seen before. She’d been cold.

I’m done playing your games, Catra.

Of course Adora would think it was a game — when had she ever taken Catra seriously? When had anyone? Even Hordak doesn’t, when he’s the one who’s been profiting from her successes this entire time.

Adora tosses another soldier aside like a ragdoll and Catra sighs again.

Fuck but she does not want to do this.

But there are rules to this, and so when She-Ra’s gaze falls on her, her eyes narrowing, Catra forces a corner of her mouth up in an approximation of her usual smirk.

“Hey, Adora,” she drawls.

Her answer is a sword blast. Which, rude, honestly, but whatever. She leaps out of the way, and just like that, it’s their same old dance. 

There’s something about fighting Adora that’s always — that always will be — familiar; they trained together for too long for it not to be the case. Catra can anticipate where Adora will strike based on nothing more than a glance or the ghost of a gesture. It’s not even conscious, just something she knows, the same way she knows how to use her claws. And she can tell it’s the same for Adora, because no one can get quite so close to getting the jump on Catra as she can.

So close, but never quite there. Catra had spent more time than she’d ever willingly admit wondering whether that was because Catra was just a little bit too fast, or because Adora didn’t quite have it in her to actually take her out and so held back every time. The only thing she’d known for sure was that either way? She probably didn’t want to know the answer.

Unfortunately, she gets the feeling she’s about to.

There’s nothing held back about the way Adora is fighting her right now. Her strikes are powered by her usual righteous anger, of course, but there’s something else behind them too: that same cold that Catra had glimpsed in Elberon. It rings wrong in a way that has Catra off balance.

Adora always burns hot during a fight. Catra’s accustomed to the searing heat of her fury, the amusing warmth of her irritation, the scorching touch of her glares. But this? This is ice cold. 

You made your choice. Now live with it.

The echo of Adora’s voice, unbidden and unescapable, throws her balance. Catra hesitates, just for a second — but it’s enough.

A burning, slicing pain traces itself along her forearm. Catra yelps and leaps back, almost crashing to the ground before she can regain her balance. She glances down to find blood running down her arm from a long, narrow gash in her skin. When she looks up, Adora’s sword is wearing a matching red along its blade.

Frozen in shock more than pain, Catra meets Adora’s gaze.

Her eyes, blue and glowing and utterly alien, show no hesitation when she lunges at Catra again, forcing her to keep up best as she can. 

Just as Catra is starting to wonder how she’s going to get out of this, the ground rocks with an explosion, the sound of which makes her reach for her ears. Soldiers and rebels scatter around them and Catra looks up to find the upper floor of the building collapsing in a deafening screech of stone. Blocks the size of tanks crash into the ground, sending up dust clouds, and Catra scrambles back, just in time to avoid being crushed by what looks like a metric ton of dusty old rock.

By the time the collapse is over, she’s sitting on the ground, coughing up dust and sand, the closest bit of debris a whopping five inches away from her legs.

She looks over her shoulder and finds a Horde tank with its missile launcher still smoking. One moment later, the top hatch opens and Kyle pops his head out, scratching at his forehead with a wince.

Fucking Kyle.

Kyle’s incompetence has one silver lining, which is that in the chaos, She-Ra’s glowy stature is nowhere to be seen. Without wasting one more second, Catra springs to her feet and takes off at a sprint, dodging the last shots and rolling fragments of stone to finally, finally reach the starsdamned building.

There’s something that might be a door, traced into the facade, but no obvious way to open it. Thankfully, that doesn’t matter, because there’s no way in hell Catra is going inside a collapsing ruin. She doesn’t need to, anyhow — the explosive she has should be enough to bring down the entire ravine. It’s a variant on what they’d used with their new bots, one of Entrapta’s last—

Catra cleaves the thought in half and, with maybe a bit more force than necessary, sticks the explosive onto the maybe-door. All she has to do now is set up a five minute countdown and then she can finally be done with this stupid day.

A blast of pink sparkly energy slams into the wall, leaving a scorch mark just above her head.

Catra resists the urge to scream — just barely.

She spins on her heel, just in time to dive out of the way of another glitter blast as the starsdamned new queen of Brightmoon barrels towards her with way too much determination for Catra’s taste. She hasn’t seen Sparkles since the incident at the Whispering Woods base, which ended with Catra half crushed under a collapsed metal strut, and frankly, she’s not keen on repeating any of that.

Glimmer narrows her eyes at her. “What?” she says, fists aglow with building magic. “Didn’t get enough last time?”

“Oh you know me, Sparkles,” Catra drawls, trying to conceal the way she’s pressing her fingers into the device at her back as she programs the detonator, “I never get enough.” She feels the click of the countdown starting and grins. “Thanks for all the victories you guys have been handing us, lately, by the way. We couldn’t have gotten Salineas without your help, you know?”

Apparently done with the talking part of this interaction, Glimmer throws out both hands in her direction, shooting out a beam more powerful than anything Catra’s ever seen from the princess. It’s all Catra can do to scramble back, trying to duck out of the way, managing it just about — she can feel the heat of the energy on the back of her neck. Eyes wide, Catra looks up to find Glimmer bringing her arms back, clearly raring for another go, and she steps back —

Her back hits the sun-warmed stone of the wall. She has nowhere to go.

Three things happen at once:

Glimmer, eyes narrowed into something ruthlessly victorious, shoots another blast of energy in Catra’s direction.

Catra braces herself for the searing impact.

At Catra’s back, deep within the building, she feels more than hears the coming explosion.

It’s that last thing that steals all her focus. Even Glimmer’s very imminent threat can do nothing in the face of the dread that fills her at the sensation, because, again, it is familiar. She glances at the explosive device she’s just set, but is unsurprised to find it still cheerily counting down. Whatever this is, it’s not something any old bomb can create. It's coming from the building itself, or whatever is inside it.

It’s a cuh-thunk, a click, a tremor; it’s a void, the split second before a crack opens itself straight down the middle of reality. 

It’s the end of the world, just like she knew it would be from the moment she’d woken up that morning.

Catra squeezes her eyes shut, but it’s too late — the world fills with light, bright, and blinding, and searing reality away into nothing.

*

Catra wakes to the sound of the world ending.

She jerks back, the movement so violent it sends her out of her chair and crashing into the floor. She scrambles to right herself, claws screeching against the metal plating, pulse thundering in her ears, her body still braced for the explosion. It takes her a moment to realize it’s not coming, and a few more to understand what she’s looking at.

She’s… in the control room? In the Fright Zone?

What the fuck.

She stays there, sitting on the floor, eyes wide, breathing still ragged, trying to comprehend what the hell just happened. She was at the ruin — she’d set up the explosive — Sparkles had showed up — and…

And the ruin had exploded. She’s sure of it.

But now she’s… here? She reaches for her arm, looking for the gash Adora’s sword had cut into her skin — but there’s nothing.

She stares blankly at the unmarred skin, trying to understand what she’s looking at. Had she… dreamt the whole thing? She must have, but… 

With a shiver, she remembers the feeling of the incoming explosion at her back: the split second of deathly calm, the certainty of what was coming.

No. It’d been real. She knows it had.

The communications alarm trills and she jumps, biting back a shriek. Trying to blink away adrenaline induced bright spots, Catra stands on shaky legs and, hesitantly, accepts the call.

Hordak’s face fills the screen. “Force Captain,” he says, like everything is normal.

“Hordak,” she starts. “What just—”

“Our sensors have picked up an unconventional energy signature, emitted just a few minutes ago,” he speaks over her and um. What?

She blinks. Did she somehow survive the explosion but concuss herself so bad she’s hallucinating? “Uh,” she says slowly, “yeah. Yeah, I know…?”

“The source was traced to the outskirts of the Whispering Woods, right alongside the edge of the Crimson Waste. It’s still emitting—”

Ok, that’s enough. Catra speaks up, cutting him off. “What are you talking about? We just stormed that thing.”

Hordak pauses. His face isn’t easy to read, but it looks like Catra’s thrown him. “... Excuse me?”

Catra’s skull feels like it’s about to implode any second. She digs the heel of her hand into her eye, trying to make sense of… any of this. “The ruin in the desert? You asked me to lead a recovery or destruction mission. We got there, found a pile of worthless rocks, and…” She trails off, unsure what exactly had happened at that point. Whatever, the only thing that matters is the result, and that’s simple enough: “And the whole thing blew up.”

Hordak’s eyes narrow. “You’ve already investigated the signal?”

“Because you asked me to.” There’s a slightly hysterical lilt to her voice, but she can’t help it. 

“I issued no such order.” 

What? “Of course you—”

Hordak lifts a hand to cut her off. “I’m not interested in your delusions, Force Captain. Your assignment is to investigate and retrieve or, if retrieval is impossible, destroy the First Ones artifact. All relevant information has been forwarded, and local teams have been dispatched to the site. Report to me once it is done.” Without further ceremony, he cuts the connection, leaving Catra to stare incredulously at a blank screen.

Hordak’s a pain in the ass on a good day, but he’s not exactly the pranking type. It makes no sense for him to pretend not to remember an assignment, much less to send her on it twice in a row. 

Her hand finds her arm — her smooth, uninjured arm — and a pit of unease starts churning in her stomach. Swallowing hard, she spins on her heel and marches out of the room, towards the training grounds.

Soldiers and cadets stop as she passes, straightening up and saluting in a show of respect she’d normally bask in, but this time she doesn’t even see them, instead barrelling through the halls until she finds who she’s looking for.

Lonnie’s standing at the control console for the training circuit, intently monitoring the progress of a few cadets — just like she’d been the day before, when Catra had found her and told her to start assembling a team. The déjà vu only serves to turn Catra’s unease into lead.

Lonnie blinks up at Catra’s approach, chin coming up as she prepares to salute, but Catra doesn’t give her the time, instead nearly sprinting the remaining distance to grab her arm. 

“Tell me you remember yesterday,” she hisses.

“Uh—” Lonnie says, and trails off into a wince. 

Catra realizes she’s digging her claws into the girl’s skin and forces herself to retract them with more effort than usually required. “Well?” she pushes through gritted teeth.

Lonnie looks severely freaked out, but responds: “Yeah…? You had us go through everything the recovery teams brought back from Salineas, and then we reviewed the equipment in Skiff bay 3.” She gives Catra a once-over. “Are… you feeling okay? You look a little… revved up.”

Catra resists the urge to shake her — barely. “Tell me you remember that First Ones’ ruin,” she growls out. “Tell me you remember the fight with the rebels, and the explosion.”

“A ruin?” Lonnie repeats slowly. “Would that be the ruin that Hordak mentions in the assembly order he sent out, about that weird noise we just had? I was waiting for your orders on that.”

Catra lets go of her, taking a step back. “Fuck,” she mutters. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Catra, are you sure you’re alright?” Lonnie glances around, like she’s hoping someone else will appear to handle… whatever this is. “Do you… need me to take over on this one? You can sit it out.”

“No,” Catra snaps, sharp enough that Lonnie flinches.

She raises her hands. “I was just saying—”

“I know what you were saying.” Catra forces a deep breath and tries to summon some fucking self-control like the fucking commander she is supposed to be. Is she losing her mind? Maybe. But that’s not a reason to let anyone else know, and it’s certainly not a reason to give anyone an excuse to get rid of her. “I’m fine. Assemble a team and be ready. We leave in fifteen.”

She stalks out of the room, not bothering to wait for Lonnie’s answer. Dream or not, real or not — the answers must lie with that stupid pile of rocks in the desert. 

And even if they don’t, at least she’ll get to blow it up again.

*

Catra’s determination takes a hit when they get to the ruin’s site. 

It’s exactly as she remembers it, down to the chaos of the fight taking place for control of the building. She clutches the explosive device she’s not let out of her sight for the whole trip, and tries to ignore the way the transport seems to spin around her.

She’s vaguely aware of Lonnie asking her for the plan, but she can’t look away from the screens. This can’t be happening. It can’t be.

“O—kay,” Lonnie says eventually, when it becomes clear Catra isn’t going to answer. “Uh, I guess, everyone follow me? We need to retake control of that building.” She glances at Catra’s bomb. “Um, Catra, do you know the range on that thing, or…?” She clicks her tongue in the face of Catra’s silence, and then addresses the others. “Okay, so, when that thing goes off, everyone retreat. I guess.” She waits one more second with a glance at Catra, and then shrugs. “Alright, move out everyone.”

The rear doors of the transport open, letting in a gust of hot, dry desert wind, heavy with grit and sand. Lonnie’s team files out and, feeling not quite fully in control of her own legs, Catra follows.

She pauses, taking in the fight, the building, the way the sun reflects off the red rocks. Back in the Fright Zone, she’d almost managed to convince herself the whole thing was just a weird set of déjà vu, a product of her sleep-deprived mind, but here… With the sound of the fighting and the heat of the sun and the rumbles of impacts and tremors under her feet?

This isn’t déjà vu. She’s done this.

She marches into the fray, half dazed, feeling like she’s stuck in some kind of dream. More than once, she comes perilously close to getting hit by a stray projectile or magic blast, too stunned to properly keep track of her surroundings. 

“Catra.”

The voice, always so horribly familiar, snaps her out of it, at least partly. She blinks, and turns to find Adora in all her She-Ra flowing-cape glory glowering at her, hands braced on her sword. Her eyes are blazing blue, and her stance is one that spells business. 

A burning, slicing echo of pain resonates through Catra’s arm, and she takes a half step back reflexively. Yeah — Adora means business alright.

But something in Catra’s expression, or maybe her lack of retort, seems to throw Adora. She pauses, sword lowering a fraction, expression confused but still a little wary, like she’s wondering if this is some kind of trap.

“We’ve done this,” Catra says, even though she isn’t sure why she bothers — maybe it’s just that she’s always had so much trouble lying to Adora. Her voice cracks, but she continues anyway: “Don’t you remember?”

Adora’s mouth falls open, brow creasing. “What?”

Suddenly, the absurdity of the situation is too much to bear. Catra lifts her hands, gesturing at the chaos around them. “This,” she shouts. “We’ve done this. Hello? Why does no one remember this?”

There’s a flash of something Catra can’t decode on Adora’s face, but before either of them can say anything else, a deafening crack splits the silence as a Horde missile crashes into the upper floor of the ruin, collapsing it. Dust and sand fill the air as everyone scrambles to get out of the way of the massive stone chunks, each of them impacting the ground with so much strength the whole ravine seems to shake.

Catra doesn’t need to turn around. Kyle.

Adora’s vanished in the chaos, but this time, Catra doesn’t move. She stands there, amidst fighters, staring up at the ruin, unbothered by the smoke and the sand and the wind. She stands there, and she counts.

When she reaches 200, the ground under her feet shivers, and then stills, just enough that she can feel it, only barely.

Cuh-thunk.

This time, when the air fills with blinding light, she doesn’t close her eyes.

*

Catra wakes to the sound of the world ending.

She doesn’t move; keeps her head where it is, resting on her bent arm, over the surface of the desk. Her neck aches, her back hurts, and her head pounds. The air of the control room is cold and clean and clinical, sharp with the Fright Zone’s metallic scent. 

Okay.

So.

This might be a problem.

*

By the end of the sixth loop, she’s worked out that the ruin’s explosion is inevitable, and, most likely, responsible for the way time is repeating.

By the end of the ninth loop, she’s worked out that there’s nowhere she can go that’s out of its reach.

By the end of the fifteenth — or is it sixteenth? — loop, she’s starting to think she might be in real trouble.

Chapter Text

The trill of the communication alarm sends an icepick through her already excruciating headache. Without raising her head from where it’s buried in her arms, Catra reaches blindly for the controls and haphazardly slaps her hand down in the area where the Accept Communication button should be.

The alarm stops, blissfully. Hordak’s voice sounds, much less blissfully. “Force Cap—” He cuts off, presumably taking in the fact that she’s slumped face down on the console.

“Hordak,” she mumbles in vague acknowledgement.

There’s a beat. In other circumstances, this would probably be kind of funny. As it is, Catra’s just tired.

“Our sensors picked up an unconventional energy signature, emitted just a few minutes ago,” he says, still sounding a little thrown.

Catra grunts in acknowledgement.

“The source was traced to the outskirts of the Whispering Woods, right alongside the edge of the Crimson Waste.”

She shifts a little, so she’s pressing her closed eyes into her forearm, hoping against hope that the pressure will help with the way her skull feels about one light breeze away from imploding. “You don’t say,” she mumbles into the table.

“It’s still emitting now, though along different frequencies, and it’s showing tremendous amounts of power. Based on the emission spectrum, it’s likely coming from a First Ones’ artifact. Recon data from the original planetary surveys confirms the location corresponds to a collapsed ruin.”

Without looking up, Catra gives a thumbs up to the screen.

There’s another pause. “You’re to assemble a team and gain control of the ruin,” he continues eventually, and while it’s clear he’s trying for his usual I’m-in-charge vibe, he’s just not quite getting there. “By any means necessary.”

“Cool.”

“Rebel resistance is expected. If control cannot be obtained, then the ruin and all it contains must be destroyed.”

“Uh huh.”

Hordak’s tone hardens. “This is not to be taken lightly, Force Captain. Failure will not be permitted.”

“Okay,” Catra says and lifts her head to give him a bleary look. She wiggles her fingers vaguely in his direction. “Bye.” Without further ceremony, she cuts the transmission.

And, yeah. Hordak’s face just before the screen goes dark is a little funny.

The feeling doesn’t last long. She drops her head back down with a groan, already exhausted at the idea of everything she knows is coming.

*

Here’s what she’s figured out:

One: whether or not the Horde sends a strike team to the ruin doesn’t matter. Either way, precisely six hours and thirty seven minutes after the alarm-from-hell rings, an explosion shakes the entirety of Etheria, a blinding-white shockwave rushes across the planet, and Catra wakes up in the Fright Zone.

Two: no one else seems to realize this is happening. Everyone she’s spoken to or seen across all repeats has acted exactly the same way, barring her intervention, and no one seems bothered by the fact that this starsdamned day has been repeating for what is edging on weeks now.

Three: setting off the explosive before the time limit doesn’t help. The building might collapse, but whatever causes the reset is too deep inside to be affected.

Here’s what she’s worked out about the resets themselves:

One: every time she wakes up, everything has reset — her surroundings, everyone else, herself. Injuries disappear. Hunger disappears. Fatigue… doesn’t seem to, but she’s pretty sure that’s just because she’s always been so starsdamned tired.

Two: she wakes up every time. Doesn’t matter where she is when it goes up — at the ruin, as far from the ruin as she can get — she always ends up here.

(Two; b: this is also true if she is no longer technically alive by the time the ruin goes up — she finds that one out courtesy of loop twenty-one, when she tries to reach the left side of the building. Instead of getting there, she gets punted across the ravine by a water jet so powerful she doesn’t even feel the impact of her spine against the rockface before everything goes dark.)

(Two; c: Apparently, the water princess is still pretty mad about the whole invasion of Salineas thing. Go figure.)

Here’s what she strongly suspects:

She is absolutely fucked.

*

Catra takes in the chaos in front of the ruin with a sigh.

The fighting has lost some of its intimidation factor, but it is still a starsdamned mess. The sand is thin and suspended in the air and scratching at the back of Catra’s throat. The explosive in her hands feels stupidly inadequate, after failing so many times to actually do anything other than add to her headache.

But she’s yet to have a better idea when it comes to stopping this, and so, she advances into the fray, trying to find somewhere to set up the damn thing so that it will actually do something. The front of the building is a no go: not the sealed doors (loop 4), not the crumbling columns that criss-cross the facade (loop 12), not the shallow cave that a rock collapse has dug into the furthest wall (loop 27, and a really unpleasant experience when the cave in question had sealed behind her, trapping her with the explosive). Planting it along the back also didn’t work, and had the additional effect of forcing her to face even more princesses, so, no thanks. The higher floors seem more promising, with their multitude of cracks and crumbled walls, which might allow her to toss the bomb down into the inside of the building, but it’s also a tighter turn around, what with goddamn Kyle shooting a goddamn missile in that direction.

She did have him thrown into solitary before they set off on a few of the loops, but found that the delays and whining weren’t really worth it.

The good thing about having crossed this battlefield an uncountable number of times is that it takes Catra precisely zero effort to make it to the foot of the building. Dodging every attempted fight is a little dull, but honestly, fighting Adora is bad enough when she doesn’t know exactly what the girl will say and do ahead of time. With another wrenching sigh, Catra tucks the explosive under her arm and starts scaling the building, sharp edges digging into her palms.

She’s reached the first flat, roof-like section, a solid twenty feet above the ground, when she hears a scream.

She spins on her heels to look back at the fight below, eyes wide. That hadn’t been a scream of fear, or pain. It hadn’t been terror, or warning, or anything along those lines. It’d been a high-pitched, raw, eardrum-tearing sound, as shrill as it was loud.

It had been a scream of pure, unabashed fury.

It’s not difficult to spot its source.

Across the battlefield below, the brand new queen of Brightmoon is tearing through Horde and Rebel combatants alike, appearing and disappearing at random, launching beams and blasts of pink, glittery energy in every direction, and screaming like a fucking banshee as she goes.

What the fuck.

Catra watches in absolute dumbfounded shock as Sparkles forces everyone to dive out of the way of the unpredictable blasts, leaving scorch marks smoking everywhere. She appears on top of a Horde bot, crouches, and impales it with a blast of energy so strong it actually digs a hole into the ground beneath it — she vanishes to reappear in front of a Horde tank, and yells something incomprehensible before blowing its cannon clean off with a scalpel-like beam of energy — she blinks into existence on the shoulders of a Horde soldier, still yelling, and rips the energy weapon he’s holding out of his grasp, sending a wide burst of laser all around her.

This is… new.

Catra blinks, resisting the urge to rub her hands into her eyes to make sure she’s seeing this correctly. It certainly seems that way: everyone below has lost interest in their own fights, thrown into chaos by the random, destructive incursions of a queen who, simply put, seems to have completely lost her shit.

She materializes on top of a fallen column, and blasts the ground around her, forcing everyone within a fifteen-feet radius to scramble back. “THIS—”

She appears in the middle of a Horde platoon and crouches, pressing a wave of power into the ground that sends every soldier flying. “—IS—”

She blinks into existence in between Lonnie and the flower princess, ripping the blaster out of Lonnie’s hands and tearing through the princess’s vines. “—SO—”

She reappears ten feet in the air, shooting energy blasts at random towards the ground. “—FUCKING—”

She pops up on the ground in front of the building, just underneath Catra, leans her head back, throws her arms out to the side, and screams, even louder: “—STUPID!”

At the back of the battlefield, a loud clang sounds — the noise that announces that Kyle’s tank is revving up to shoot.

With another incoherent yell, Glimmer vanishes, and reappears by the tank in question. She throws her hands onto it and, in a flash of sparks, she and the tank vanish from view.

From her vantage point, Catra is perfectly situated to see the two reappear in the distance, far enough from the ravine that the tank looks about the size of a pebble. There’s a flash of light, a muted boom, and Kyle’s missile shoots out to crash in the Crimson Waste.

Glimmer rematerializes alone at the front of the building, hands on her knees, bent over in apparent exhaustion. However, it’s only seconds before she straightens, throwing her arm out in front of her, middle finger up. “And fuck your mom too!” she shouts.

Catra isn’t sure what does it. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s gone through the same fucking day for over three weeks. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s died on several of those days. Maybe it’s just the fact that witnessing a pink, glitter-covered princess absolutely lose her shit is really kind of hilarious. Maybe it’s just because part of her has finally accepted that she’s probably lost whatever grip she had left on sanity and that this whole thing is the resulting fever dream.

Whatever the reason, she breaks into loud, high-pitched, cackling laughter.

On the ground, Glimmer spins on her heel, so fast her hair and cape flare in a swirl of pink glitter. Her narrowed eyes land on Catra, and her mouth falls open.

Catra quite literally cannot breathe she’s laughing so hard. There are tears in her eyes, and yeah, this is definitely some kind of delayed, hysterical stress response, but also, who gives a shit, at this point.

“YOU.” Glimmer throws her finger up, pointing it straight at Catra in a way that implies that if she had any power left, there would have been an accompanying volley of sparks. “You— You— You’re doing this?”

Catra briefly considers defending herself, before dissolving into more laughter. The only other person who knows what’s going on is the fucking Rebel queen. Of course. Of course.

Glimmer looks like she’s maybe too shocked to be mad, but also like that problem will be quickly remedied. She straightens, brow furrowing, face twisting into an enraged scowl. “Oh, I am going to fucking—”

Whatever threat she’s about to issue is lost when the building beneath Catra shakes with the incoming explosion.

When Catra wakes up in the Fright Zone, she’s still laughing.

*

Glimmer finds her the second Catra steps off the Horde transport, which is both reassuring — it’d been difficult to shake the idea that maybe Catra had hallucinated her outburst and that she was still completely alone in this situation — and really fucking annoying, in the sense that Catra immediately gets a burst of searing pink sparkles to the chest.

She hits the ground hard, the air rushing out of her lungs on impact. Mercifully, she’d chosen to take off ahead of Lonnie’s team, which means there’s no one in the transport to witness the humiliation.

It’s the only mercy she gets, however: not even half a second later, she finds herself forced to roll away with a shriek to dodge another beam of energy.

“—to fucking kill you!” she hears a shrill, screeching voice shout — no doubt the second half of the queen’s interrupted threat. A little unimaginative, but Catra supposes it gets straight to the point.

Glimmer seems to mean it, too. Catra gets to her feet and leaps backwards in the nick of time to avoid getting hit again.

“Wait—” she starts, and that’s about as far as she gets before Glimmer, apparently not inclined to wait for anything, cuts her off with another volley of sparkles.

Catra ducks to dodge, feeling the hairs at the back of her neck sear at the proximity of the blast. It seems Glimmer is only getting more and more worked up, and that, correspondingly, her shots are getting more powerful as she goes. She’s pretty sure that it won’t be long until they border on lethal on impact which, on top of being painful as fuck, would also be such an embarrassing way to die — death by pink sparkles? No thank you. Catra wouldn’t be able to look in a mirror for the rest of time, reset or not.

“Of course this is your fault.” Glimmer is standing a few feet away, hands in the air in exasperation as she glares at Catra. Her voice rises in pitch, flirting with something that Catra’s inclined to call hysteria. “Who else would it be? Would it really kill you not to break reality for five minutes?”

Catra straightens to shoot her a look, and then promptly dives out of range with a yelp when she’s greeted by yet another pink blast. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about how you opened that stupid portal literally three months ago and almost destroyed the universe.” Glimmer stresses the words with pointed bursts of magic thrown at her head, forcing Catra to keep moving. “What, space wasn’t enough? You had to break time as well?”

“I’m not—” Her sentence cuts off into a swear when she has to dive and roll to avoid three quick successive bursts. “Cut it out!”

“No.” Glimmer stubbornly and pointedly tosses more blasts in her direction, the last of which brushes Catra’s arm in a searing hiss of pain.

Okay. Fuck this.

Tuning out whatever the princess might be yelling about, Catra launches herself at Glimmer, claws out, teeth bared. Not expecting the direct assault, Glimmer takes half a step back, eyes widened, hands up — and, instead of blasting Catra into next week, hesitates.

Her mistake.

Catra’s smiling when she collides with the princess. The impact sends them both rolling into the dirt, and for a second, everything is a blur of movement, hits, and dodges. Catra manages to roll them so Glimmer is trapped beneath her, but her claws catch on fabric, slicing through the sparkly cape, and she loses her grip. Glimmer’s fist connects with her face with a sickening crack, and Catra falls back, painful sparks floating in her vision, a tear of searing pain along her bottom lip that means it’s probably split. There’s something gripping her sleeve, pushing her back and down onto the ground, and, half dazed, Catra struggles to shake off the princess’s grip, blindly scratching at thin air until—

With a yell, Glimmer falls away, clutching her face — Catra’s claws have dug a long, deep scratch into her cheek. Using the momentary respite, Catra scrambles back in the sand, towards the nearby open military transport. Still on the ground, she reaches for one of the equipment cases, scrabbling for a weapon. Behind her, she can hear the telltale static-y noise of one of Glimmer’s energy blasts forming.

Her fingers wrap around the smooth handle of a Horde-issued energy weapon, and she spins, sitting and ducking her head to avoid the hit Glimmer’s just shot at her. Head ringing, she aims it at the princess and presses the switch with vicious satisfaction.

Caught off-guard, Glimmer doesn’t get the time to teleport away: the electrical discharge hits her full blast, and she collapses to her knees with a shout of pain, pink sparks disappearing from around her hands.

Out of breath, Catra stands over her, keeping the weapon securely pointed at her. “I,” she says through gritted teeth, and wipes her bleeding lip with the back of her free hand, “am not the reason why this is happening.”

Even with her features twisted in pain and blood dripping down her face, Glimmer manages to toss her an impressively disdainful look. “Right,” she spits out. “Like I’m going to buy that.”

Catra resists the urge to scream in frustration. “Why would I do this?” she all but shouts, gesturing vaguely at their surroundings with both hands. She quickly re-aims the weapon at Glimmer when the girl starts scowling. “Literally what would be the fucking point?”

“I don’t know, I’m not a Horde soldier, am I?” She shakes her head to shift the hair that has fallen over her face. “For all I know it’s part of your plans for world domination or the extermination of everyone or—”

“How would looping the same day over and over help with world domination?”

“I don’t know!”

They’re shouting at each other, increasingly high-pitched and, Catra suspects, increasingly ridiculous. She forces a deep breath and runs her free hand over her face. “Okay,” she says, trying for a reasonable tone. “Okay, just— I’m not doing this. The Horde isn’t doing this.”

Glimmer sniffs disdainfully but doesn’t reply.

“You’re the one with the—” Catra makes a vague gesture, wiggling her fingers in an approximation of Glimmer’s sparkles — “magic and shit. If anyone’s capable of doing this, then it’s you.”

Glimmer gives her an incredulous look. “Why would I make time loop and make it so everyone forgets about it?”

“I don’t know,” Catra grits out, her reasonable tone taking a hit. “You’re the one who thought I would be able to use it for controlling the galaxy or whatever.”

Glimmer scoffs. “Yeah, right. You couldn’t control a fish market.”

Holy. Shit. Catra’s grip tightens on the weapon as she tries to keep a hold of herself. This is important, too important to let herself get sidetracked by how insanely annoying the princess is — but damn if she isn’t making it difficult.

“My point is,” she forces out through clenched teeth, “is that if you’re not doing this, and I’m not doing this… Then what the fuck is going on?”

Glimmer’s hostility drops for a moment as she regards Catra with wide eyes. “Shit,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“You’re really not doing this?” Glimmer asks again, seriousness coloring her words.

Catra gestures at their surroundings with her free arm. “I’ve been stuck in this stupid day for… I don’t even know, three weeks? Four? I’m not even sure.”

Horrified realization dawns on the princess’ face. “Me too,” she says, and something heavy drops to the pit of Catra’s stomach.

Whatever this is, it isn’t a Rebel trick — and it’s not something magic can break easily, apparently.

Glimmer starts getting to her feet, and Catra thrusts the taser back in her face with a snarl.

The princess only rolls her eyes. “Calm down.”

Catra’s arm still hurts where Glimmer’s blast brushed her skin. “Send even one sparkle in my direction and I swear I’ll tase you straight into the next loop.”

Completely unfazed by the threat, Glimmer brushes herself off and puts her hands on her hips. There’s sand all over her torn cape, her hair’s a mess, and the scratch on her cheek is still bleeding sluggishly. From the pain blooming along her jaw where Glimmer clocked her and the throbbing in her lip, Catra’s pretty sure she’s no better off.

Reluctantly, Catra lowers her weapon. “What’s happening? For you, I mean. That loop thing, or whatever it is, what does it look like for you?”

“I wake up in Bright Moon. There’s this horrible, piercing sound, and we work out that it comes from a ruin at the edge of the Crimson Waste. We set off to find it before the Horde can get to it. We fight over it. It blows up.” Glimmer recites the words in mechanical exhaustion. “I wake up in Bright Moon. There’s this—”

“Okay, okay.” Catra holds up a hand to stop her. “Same here, pretty much. No one else remembers the previous loop?”

Glimmer shakes her head. “There are no traces of it anywhere else either. Injuries don’t stick.”

“Neither does dying,” Catra adds flatly.

That earns her a raised eyebrow. “O… kay. Dark, but okay.”

Catra shrugs. “And every time, it resets when this thing—” she points at the ruin at the other end of the ravine — “goes up.”

Glimmer nods. “And then it starts again.”

Catra lets her head drop back with a groan, closing her eyes briefly. “And nothing you do changes it. Great.”

Glimmer sighs, and then drops to sit cross-legged on the ground, all the fight apparently drained out of her. “I’ve tried shooting at it, I’ve tried stopping everyone from going here, I’ve tried teleporting as far away as I could… Nothing. There’s always that stupid flash and then I just—” She lets out a strangled noise of frustration. “Wake up again. And everyone thinks I’m crazy.”

Catra’s exhaustion falls over her like too-heavy Horde armor; she lets herself drop down next to Glimmer, forgoing sitting to simply directly lie on her back in the sand. Her burnt arm hurts like a bitch and her face throbs. “Bombs don’t do shit either,” she adds, letting her gaze lose itself in the cloudless blue sky.

There’s a huff next to her, and when she glances to the side, she finds Glimmer lying down too, eyes closed. “This is so fucking stupid,” she whispers, and Catra snorts.

“Yeah,” she agrees, closing her eyes. Underneath her, the ground shakes with tremors and impacts of the fight happening barely a few feet away.

Glimmer scoffs. “So… what? We have to…” She pauses, and when she completes her sentence, she sounds like she’s actually, physically disgusted, “work together now?”

Catra’s face twists into a scowl at the very idea of being on anything approaching the same side as the pink, sparkly rebel. “No thanks.”

“Well it’s not like I love the idea either,” Glimmer snaps. Catra opens her eyes to find her propped up on an elbow, glaring at Catra. “I would quite literally prefer working with anyone else.” She points at Catra, like she wants to make sure she understands how much she means it. “A-ny-one,” she repeats, enunciating each syllable. She shakes her head. “I’d prefer working with… With…”

“Hordak?” Catra offers when it looks like she’s blanking.

Glimmer jabs her finger in her direction again. “Hordak,” she repeats with emphasis. “I’d prefer working with Hordak. I’d prefer working with… with that fucking idiot who keeps shooting at the building.” She gestures vaguely in the direction of Kyle’s tank.

“Kyle?”

“Kyle,” Glimmer says, mouth twisted in disgust. “I’d prefer working with Kyle rather than you.”

Catra gives her a blank look. “You done?”

“No.” Glimmer’s gaze goes a little vague,  her forehead pinched in concentration, and then she jabs her finger straight into Catra’s arm — not the injured one, at least. “You remember those fucking… giant worm things?”

“What?” Catra isn’t sure what’s happening anymore.

Glimmer gestures passionately, clearly feeling very strongly about this. “You know. In the Northern Reach? Those giant, fuck-off worm bug things that almost killed us.”

Her words ring a bell, bringing back vague flashes of icy cold and desperation. “Right.”

“I’d rather work with those than you.”

Okay. “I get your point,” Catra says dryly, and closes her eyes again. “Don’t worry, feeling’s mutual.” It really is. The only person Catra can imagine being worse than Sparkles is Adora herself — and at least Adora doesn’t wear clothes with glitter on them. “Unfortunately for you and for me, though, we’re the ones stuck in… whatever this is.”

Glimmer lets out an inarticulate sound of frustration. Privately, Catra concurs.

“If you want to keep working this one out alone,” Catra continues. “Be my guest. I have my own leads, and I’m sure I don’t need a starsdamned princess to figure this thing out.”

“And how’s that working out for you so far?” Glimmer sneers, so snidely Catra feels her face twitch in annoyance.

“You can talk,” she bites back, opening her eyes and turning her head solely so she can glare at the other girl. “I don’t see you magic-ing your way out of this. Unless you’ve been stuck in this for weeks by choice?”

Glimmer rolls her eyes, but loses the disdain. “Ugh.” She drops back down onto her back and digs her fists into her eyes. “Fine. Whatever. Let’s work together. Sure. Why the hell not.”

“Great.”

“Great.”

Catra sighs, already preemptively exasperated over what the next loops are going to be like. She sits up, looking down at Glimmer. “So how do—”

She’s interrupted by a shout, relieved and urgent and insufferably familiar. “Bow, I found her!”

Catra turns her head to find Adora, in her She-Ra get-up, rounding the transport. Her sword’s brandished, her eyes riveted on Glimmer, and her posture all fight and determination.

“Glimmer!” she calls, quickly striding towards them. “Are you—”

And then she processes what she’s looking at and stops.

There’s an extremely funny moment where, for all the magic and the glowy-ness and the ten-feet-tall-ness, Catra finds herself looking at an expression that is pure Adora dumbfoundedness. Unfortunately, she’s too exhausted to really find the humor in it.

No one says anything for a little while.

“Uh,” Adora says eventually, sword slowly coming down. Her gaze, blue and glowy and extremely confused, goes from Glimmer to Catra and back again in a quick back-and-forth, like she’s not sure what she’s looking at. “Are you guys, like… hanging out, or?”

Glimmer, who has not so much as raised her head, heaves a long sigh and raises her hand, flashing an ok sign. Catra shrugs.

“Um,” Adora says. She grips the handle of her sword with both hands, not unlike the way she used to grip her pillow as a kid after a nightmare. “Do you… Uh. Like, should I, uh, go, or…”

Mercifully, this is the point at which the ground suddenly shakes with the now horribly familiar precursor to the ruin’s explosion. Catra and Glimmer trade quick, bland looks, and then everything is nothing but blinding white.

At least the resets are good for something.

Chapter Text

“O-kay,” Catra says slowly, eyeing the very solid-looking wall in front of them dubiously. “And this is supposed to help us get in… how, exactly?”

Glimmer huffs and crosses her arms. The scratch Catra dug into her cheek is gone, of course, as are Catra’s own injuries — though she’d swear she can still feel the ache in her jaw.

“I’m telling you,” Glimmer says, in that high-pitched, haughty way she has when she thinks she’s right, and that Catra can already tell is going to get very old, very fast, “that this is the way in.”

Catra makes a show of giving the, once again, very flat, very solid-looking, very no-door-holding-and-generally-featureless wall in front of them a once-over. “Uh huh.”

She hadn’t bothered to wait for Hordak’s communication this time, instead grabbing a set of explosives and a skiff and making her way to the ruin on her own. It wasn’t that she’d been particularly hyped to spend the loop with Sparkles, but the perspective of finally making some progress on this had been motivating enough. She’d expected they’d start by investigating the top of the building, but instead, upon Catra’s arrival at the site, Glimmer had immediately grabbed her, explosives and all, and teleported them to a deserted, narrow space between a side wall and the rock face of the ravine.

Catra had had to work pretty hard not to visibly shiver in disgust at the sparkly, almost static-y feeling of magic running over her. Even now, a few minutes later, she’d swear she can still feel aftershocks, like the glitter is clinging to her fur.

Glimmer stomps — actually stomps — her foot in annoyance. Like a literal four-year-old. A four-year-old in charge of an entire kingdom, but still.

“I told you,” she grits out. “I had Bow run a survey on the whole building during the other loops. This—” and she gestures at the exterior wall — “registered as the only thing that isn’t fifteen feet thick.” She slaps her hand on the dusty, red-brown stone. “It’s got to be an entrance.”

Catra still isn’t convinced. She points her thumb over her shoulder, in the vague direction of the front of the building. “What about the, you know. Massive, thirty-foot tall doors carved into the front facade.”

“Decoys, obviously,” Glimmer says, with a prim twist to her voice that makes Catra grind her teeth. “Whatever is in this building can loop time. The First Ones must have put up some security measures to keep it safe. Hiding the entrance is an obvious one.”

Catra raises a hand. “Okay, fine. Say you’re right—”

“I am right.”

Catra ignores her. “Say you’re right and this is some kind of hidden, secret door.” She pauses. “How do we open it?”

Glimmer keeps a dignified expression, her hand still on the wall. “I… am not completely sure.”

“You’re not completely sure,” Catra repeats flatly.

“Well, it’s First Ones technology,” Glimmer says in a very reasonable tone. “It’s not just going to open just because we ask nicely.”

Catra can smell the bullshit from over here. “How many loops have you spent trying to open this ‘secret door’ of yours?” she asks flatly.

“Um,” Glimmer says, and shifts a little in place.

“How many.”

“Maybe… most of them?”

Catra sighs. Okay. She gestures vaguely at the wall. “Can’t you just… teleport inside?”

Glimmer throws her an aghast look. “How?”

“How should I know? You’re the one who keeps—” and Catra makes a vague hand motion accompanied by a phew sound — “poofing in and out all over the place.”

Glimmer raises an eyebrow, giving her a look of regal disdain. “First of all,” she says, raising a finger, “I do not poof. Second,” and she raises a second finger, “I can’t just teleport into a place I’ve never seen.”

“Why not?”

“I need to know where I’m teleporting to!” Glimmer shakes her head, gesturing towards the building. “Teleporting blind is like… Do you want to be teleported into a wall? That’s how you get teleported into a wall, Catra.”

“Okay, fine.” Catra raises her hands. “No teleporting.” Her gaze drifts over the building, her grip on Entrapta’s explosive tightening a little. “How thick did you say this was?”

Glimmer’s gaze drifts down to the bomb Catra’s holding. “... You want to blow it up?”

“You’ve got a better idea?”

Glimmer is silent a moment as she regards the wall thoughtfully. “No,” she says eventually. “Actually, I kind of want to blow this fucker up.”

Catra does her best to suppress a smile. “I’ll let you press the switch if it makes you feel better. Let’s do this.”

They make quick work of setting up the explosive at the base of the wall, right where Glimmer remembers it being thinnest. Catra sets a fifteen second timer, Glimmer presses the detonator to launch it, and then she teleports them out of range to the back of the building, and back as soon as they hear the dull thud of it going off.

Catra grins at the gaping, ten-foot tall hole now open into the side of the building. “Blowing shit up, one; First Ones magical security, zero.”

Glimmer gingerly picks her way over the debris and shards of stones that litter the narrow passage and peers inside. From here, it just looks like featureless, dimensionless blackness. “So… I guess we just go inside?”

Catra skips over, pausing at the entrance to shoot her a sharp, sardonic grin. “Scared of the dark, princess?”

Glimmer scowls at her and, without bothering with a response, shoves Catra aside and strides forward. With a snicker, Catra follows.

As soon as they pass the threshold, the temperature drops a solid ten degrees. The floor is smooth and flat and at an incline, edging downwards steadily. With every meter of progress, it gets a little colder, and a little darker. The entrance and its daylight are nothing more than a distant prick of light when, without warning, the walls start to shake.

They spin on their heels, just in time to catch the way a floor-to-ceiling panel is rapidly sliding across the corridor behind them. Before they can so much as decide whether to run back, the corridor is sealed, leaving them in complete, utter darkness. The walls quiet, and for a moment, everything is silent.

“Okay,” Glimmer says and unfortunately, the sound of her voice is suddenly extremely reassuring in the icy pitch darkness. “That doesn’t have to be a bad sign.”

That is the precise moment at which the space behind them suddenly fills with high-pitched, very threatening hisses.

Catra swivels in the direction of the sound, claws extended, and falters a little when the darkness is suddenly studded with a multitude of tiny, red prickles.

No, not prickles — eyes. Way too many eyes that are much too close together and reach way too high.

“Okay,” Glimmer says again, though her voice is a little more faint. “That seems maybe slightly more bad.”

Catra opens her mouth for a sarcastic retort, but it vanishes into thin air when, with another threatening hiss, the eyes — or, rather, the creatures to which the eyes are attached — rush them.

Icy, metallic arms, thin and spindly, brush against Catra’s limbs, and she jumps out of the way with a snarl — but it’s pretty much impossible to jump away from something you can’t see and so she finds herself hissing in pain when her left arm is sliced into by something impossibly sharp and impossibly strong.

Glimmer starts tossing energy blasts in the direction of the attack and, in the fragmented, flash-filled light, Catra gets a look at what they’re facing. Horrified recognition sets in at the sight: dozens of creatures fill the corridor, at least fifteen feet tall, each made of a stocky body and narrow head studded with red eyes, the whole lot set atop eight spindly mechanical legs that crawl over the floor, walls, and starsdamned ceiling.

Fuck. She should have seen this coming.

She briefly considers shouting at Glimmer to retreat, to aim her attacks towards the wall behind them so they can get out, but before she can, she finds herself surrounded with menacing clicks and hisses. An appendage slices at her other arm, then her legs, and—

*

“Fucking spiders?”

Glimmer is yelling. It’s not exactly out of character for the princess, but it’s doing very little for Catra’s headache. She shifts on the uncomfortable dusty ground, her back to the newly-intact-post-reset wall-slash-door to the building, her forehead against her knees.

“Mechanical, giant, fuck-off spiders of death?” Glimmer sounds almost offended. “What the fuck. I mean, genuinely, what the fuck?”

Catra half sighs, half groans into her knees. “They’re First Ones defense systems,” she mumbles. “Adora’s… castle thing has them.”

“What?”

“You know.” She raises her head and makes a vague gesture that’s meant to represent the tall, spire-like building. “The tall thing she keeps going into to like, commune with dusty holograms or whatever.”

“The Crystal Castle?”

Catra snorts. Figures it’d be called something stupid like that. “Sure.” She rests the back of her head against the sun-warmed stone. “We fucked up its defense system once.” Well, technically, she had, by being there, but it’s not like the details matter. “We got attacked by a bunch of them.”

Glimmer drops cross-legged on the ground opposite her, her back to the rockface of the ravine. “Did you manage to switch them off?” There’s a vague thread of hope in her voice.

Catra promptly crushes it. “Nope. We had to take them out.” She tries to rid her mind of the memories of the sharp-edged legs and sticky, restricting goop they tended to shoot. “We weren’t in complete darkness, though.”

Glimmer lets out a long, plaintive noise of frustration. “Great.”

“Yeah.” Catra takes one last breath and stands. “Alright. Come on, then. At least we don’t need to blow this up, right? You can teleport us inside now you’ve seen the other side?”

Glimmer shoots her an appalled look. “You want to go back in there?”

“You have a better idea?”

“Yeah: not going back to the death spiders that just killed us. Violently. Painfully.”

Catra rolls her eyes. “Do you have a better idea that lets us get out of this damn day?” At Glimmer’s silence, she raises her hands. “No offense to you or anything, but I would in fact rather face the death spiders than spend the rest of my life with only you for company.”

“There is literally no world where that statement is not offensive,” Glimmer points out dryly, and stands hesitantly, walking to stop in front of the wall. “There has to be a way past them.”

“Yeah,” Catra says, and fishes in the bag she brought for her equipment. “It’s called tearing out their central processors.” She tosses Glimmer one of the two devices she’s grabbed.

Glimmer catches it and eyes it dubiously. “What’s that?”

“It’s a lamp,” Catra says, and affixes her own to her forehead, tightening the strap around her head. “Just because we have to fight them doesn’t mean we have to do it in the starsdamned dark.”

Glimmer lets out another whine, but puts it on anyway. Catra holds out her arm to Glimmer, bracing herself for the shower of static-like sparks of magic from Glimmer’s teleporting and the hiss of spiders — she’s honestly not sure which is worse.

Glimmer gives her a sidelong look. “You are way too chill about this whole about to be torn apart by death spiders thing.”

Catra shrugs. “Honestly, at this point, that’s not even the worst day I could be having.” The fact that it’s true is probably a little depressing, but, well.

With one last sigh, Glimmer grabs her arm, and, in a shower of sparks, they’re off into the icy, spider-filled depths.

*

It takes them seven tries. Seven miserable, spidery, goo-filled and razor-sharp-limbs-heavy tries.

With a vicious, claw-filled slash, Catra takes out the circuitry in the head of the spider she’s perched on. At almost the same moment, across the hall, surrounded by sparking mechanical parts, Glimmer tosses a fiery blast of energy right into the body of her own spider, leaving a smoking hole. The creature collapses on its side in a deafening crash of metal.

Out of breath, the two of them regard each other across the suddenly silent space. Their headlamps throw narrow beams of light over the dozens of destroyed spiders, creating shifting, ghostly shadows that keep tricking Catra into seeing movement where there isn’t any.

“Were those the last ones?” Glimmer calls out, and it turns out that exhaustion takes a lot of the infuriating arrogance out of her voice.

Catra slowly slides off the carcass of her last adversary, and scans their surroundings. No more eyes gleam, no more limbs click menacingly. “Looks like it.”

Glimmer makes her way over, making a face as she scrapes green, sticky goo off her shoulder. “Ew,” she says, and then pauses when her gaze falls on Catra. “Shit.”

“I’m fine,” Catra says reflexively, clutching her left arm to her chest.

Glimmer raises an eyebrow. “Sure,” she says slowly. “Fine. That’s definitely the word I would use to describe the fact that your arm is missing like, thirty percent of what makes it an arm.” She tilts her head, making a face as she looks at the injury. In the light of her headlamp, the blood that soaks Catra’s sleeve gleams an ominous dark red. “That has to hurt.”

“Yes,” Catra grits out. “It’s a massive gash that a giant spider cut into my arm. It hurts. Can we please get moving so we don’t have to do this again?”

Glimmer looks thrown at Catra’s hostility. “I was just saying—”

“I don’t care,” Catra snaps, and walks past her. “Let’s go.”

It’s simple: either they find what’s causing this, in which case the injury will have been worth it, or they don’t, in which case her arm will reset anyway. Either way, not worth making a fuss over.

As for the tearing, wrenching, searing pain… Well. It’s no worse than getting your arm erased out of existence inside a collapsing pseudo-reality, really.

Glimmer follows Catra, mercifully silent. After barely a few seconds of walking, they turn a corner and, just as quickly as the first time, the corridor seals shut behind them, a quiet wall sliding into place.

Catra lets out a slow, shaky breath. Even if they don’t fix this now, they at least won’t have to face the spiders again: Glimmer will be able to teleport them to this side of the passage.

“Is that light?” Glimmer’s voice snaps her out of her thoughts, and she follows the princess’ gaze, further down the corridor.

It is definitely light: a small, blue-white window of it — most likely an open door.

“Maybe it’s the room that holds the time device,” Glimmer says, eyes wide, and starts towards it at a rapid pace.

Catra doubts that the spiders were the only security, but follows all the same. But before they can make it much further than a few steps, they find themselves frozen in their tracks when the entire building is wracked with a violent tremor.

A loud, screeching sound echoes, followed by rumbles and the unmistakable noise of collapsing, colliding blocks of stone. Catra’s entire body tenses, and she braces herself for what must be, what is a caving in of the building, waits for the ceiling to come crashing down on them and bury them under tons of stone and dirt and rock.

But the avalanche never comes. After a moment, the noise fades and the shaking subsides.

Glimmer gives her a wide-eyed, alarmed look. “What was that?”

Catra opens her mouth to say she has no idea when it dawns on her. She blinks. “Kyle.”

“What?” Glimmer looks at her like she’s wondering if Catra’s finally lost it.

“It’s Kyle. The… the missile he shoots at the ruin. He collapses most of the upper floors. It has to be that.”

Catra sees the realization dawn on Glimmer’s face. “That means—”

With one last traded glance of horror, they take off at a sprint towards the room at the end of the corridor.

They don’t quite make it: just as they’re about to reach the threshold, Catra feels, down to her bones, the warning cu-thunk that comes before the deflagration — the end of the loop, as foretold by Kyle’s idiocy.

“Oh, come on!” Glimmer’s voice, loud and exasperated, is the last thing Catra hears before the white overtakes them.

*

Catra and Glimmer stand at the threshold of the blue-white room, staring in silence.

Catra rubs her hand against the now unmarred fabric of her sleeve. Her arm’s fine, of course, but she’d swear she can still feel phantom echoes of the tearing, burning pain. “Maybe we should just…” she says, and gestures vaguely at the room ahead of them, “walk in?”

Glimmer gives her a dry, unimpressed look. “Walk where?” She kicks at the doorframe, chipping off a small fragment of stone that clatters to the floor.

It’s a fair question, really, seeing as the room ahead of them is not so much a room as it is a seemingly bottomless pit. It’s circular, at least sixty feet in diameter and lined along the entire perimeter by ornate, yet crumbling columns that stick to the walls. Across it, they can just about distinguish a dark square set into the wall, from which a narrow ledge sticks out over a few feet over the gaping chasm, before crumbling to nothing — no doubt the door to the rest of the building, and whatever remains of the passage that used to lead there.

As far as rooms go, it’s not particularly promising. Nevertheless, Catra shrugs.

“Maybe we’re meant to fall in,” she says.

This time the look Glimmer shoots her isn’t so much dry as scathing. “Meant to fall in,” she repeats wryly.

“It might not even be a real hole,” Catra continues, stubbornly ignoring her.

Glimmer blinks, and kicks the small chip of doorframe off the edge and into the pit. It clatters a few times against the wall, echoing fainter and fainter as it goes. Catra can’t help but strain her hearing, but even then, she doesn’t hear any noise that signals it hitting the ground.

“Not real,” Glimmer repeats again, leaning over the edge slightly.

Catra rolls her eyes. “I’ve seen this before,” she says, trying not to sound defensive. “At that… What did you call it? Diamond turret?”

“Crystal Castle.”

“Whatever. They had one of those.”

“A pit?”

Catra nods. “With the crumbling columns and everything. Adora fell in—”

“She what?”

“— and she was fine,” Catra finishes, unperturbed.

Glimmer, on the other hand, does seem a little perturbed. “What the fuck do you mean, she fell in?”

Catra isn’t particularly interested in dwelling on the specifics. “It happens. The point is that she was just fine in the end.” She’s not technically strictly sure how that happened, but that’s not what’s important here. “It was just an illusion. A defense system, like the spiders.”

“The spiders did kill us. Multiple times.”

Catra ignores her, stepping up to the edge. “It’ll be fine,” she says again, peering down into the dark. “It’s got to be fake.”

“Ok, but, what if, and bear with me here, it isn’t fake, and is in fact a real pit due to the fact that this building is old as shit and therefore has started collapsing?” Glimmer’s pitch flirts with ultrasonic levels.

Catra turns her back to the precipice and exhales a long breath out. “It’ll be fine,” she says again.

The princess looks severely uncomfortable. “Catra, I really don’t think—”

But the air is already whistling in Catra’s ears as she falls.

*

“So.”

Catra closes her eyes and digs her forehead into the crumbling doorframe. “Let’s not.”

“I haven’t said anything yet.”

“Well, don’t.” She blinks her eyes open. “Whatever, I was wrong, you were right, it’s a real pit. You don’t have to rub it in.”

Unfortunately, Glimmer doesn’t seem to be gloating. In fact, she maybe seems like she’s… concerned? It’s much worse. “Do you want to like… talk about it, or—”

“Sparkles.”

“I’m just saying.” She makes a face. “You jumped in there, like, really fast.”

“And if you keep talking, I’ll do it again.”

“Are you… okay, or—?”

Catra knocks her forehead into the stone with a dull thud. “Please stop.”

Mercifully, she does. She gives Catra another horrifyingly solicitous look, and then turns to the chasm. “So. Real pit.”

“Real pit,” Catra echoes. “Definitely real.”

“So we need to get across.” Glimmer tilts her head, and then raises her eyebrow. “Hang on,” she says, and vanishes in a cloud of pink sparkles, leaving Catra to blink at the space where she had been.

It takes her several long minutes to rematerialize. When she does, it’s with ruffled hair, a torn cape, and—

“Is that a bow and arrow?” Catra asks incredulously.

Glimmer shrugs, turning the thing over in her hands like she’s not quite sure which way she’s supposed to hold it. “There’s a rope attached to the arrow,” she says, like that explains everything. “We can, I don’t know. Swing or something.” She tries to nock the arrow and swears when it clatters to the ground, tangling the long coiled rope it’s attached to. After a few more seconds of struggle, she thrusts the whole thing in Catra’s direction. “Do you know how to use this?” She makes a face. “I’d ask Bow, but, you know. Might take some time to explain.”

Catra rolls her eyes and takes the weapon, maneuvering it into position. “I don’t need Bow,” she mutters, full of scorn. She nocks the arrow and raises the bow, drawing the string. It pinches at her fingers, and generally doesn’t feel very steady, but… “How hard can it be?”

*

Turns out, kind of hard. Or, at least, twelve loops kind of hard.

(They both agree not to count the time they forgot to hang on to the rope when Catra managed to stick the arrow into the ceiling and the end slipped down into the pit.)

(Especially the second time it happens.)

*

“You have got to be joking.” Glimmer sounds more tired than angry, which is saying something.

Catra kind of agrees, which is saying even more.

They stand on a small platform, past the exit of the pit room. Below them stands another pit, though this one has one notable thing setting it apart.

It’s full of water. Not the nice, quiet lake-in-the-forest kind of water: angry, roiling waves of dark water, smashing into the walls with loud crashing sounds. The center of the room is somehow worse, a flatter, dark surface that only betrays the movement underneath with rippling, repeating motions that Catra knows indicate heavy currents.

There is, of course, no visible exit.

“We have to swim?” Glimmer asks, though it sounds like she’s addressing the building, or maybe the air itself.

Catra scans the walls of the room intently, until— there.

She points at the waterline on the other side of the room. “Must be the door,” she says, and feels a little nauseous at the sight of the waves constantly submerging the square panel. There’s a red, glowy button set into the wall next to it.

“With our luck, it’s going to be the ‘release-the-sharks’ door,” Glimmer grumbles.

Catra snorts. “Yeah, probably,” she agrees, and Glimmer laughs too, short and exhausted. “C’mon,” Catra says, and edges to the border of the platform. “Maybe the water’s warm, at least.”

*

The water is, predictably, not warm at all.

*

When Catra reaches the dusty, narrow space between the building entrance and the rockface, it’s to find Glimmer lying on the ground, one arm thrown over her face.

“What the hell, Sparkles?” Catra bends over, hands on her knees, out of breath after her sprint through the rebel encampment to make it there undetected. “Why didn’t you come and get me at the top of the ravine like usual?”

Her only answer is an inarticulate, muffled sound.

Catra walks over and nudges her arm with her foot. “C’mon, we’ve already lost ages on this loop. Let’s go.”

Another inarticulate sound, though this time sounding distinctly whiny.

“What?”

“I’m taking the loop off!” Glimmer removes her arm to glare at Catra. The effect is a little spoiled by how bleary she looks. “I’m taking a break.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“A break,” Glimmer says again, pointedly enunciating the word. “A pause, a recess, a—”

“I know what a break is,” Catra cuts in with a raised eyebrow. “Doesn’t answer my question.”

Glimmer sighs, long-suffering and exhausted. “I got skewered by giant robot spiders,” she says, counting off her fingers, “I fell to my death, and I just drowned three times.”

Catra gives her a look. “I know. I was there.”

“Ugh.” Glimmer throws her arm over her face again. “My point is, I need a break. I’m taking the loop off.” She gestures vaguely towards the wall. “If you want to keep going on your own, be my guest. I can drop you off in the stupid water room, and then I’ll see you next loop.”

Catra’s gaze goes from the building to Glimmer, and back again. Exhaustion coils tight around her bones, and her headache has, unsurprisingly, not shifted even a fraction.

Fuck it.

She drops onto the ground next to Glimmer, her back hitting the hard-packed sand with a thud. “Fine,” she says. “One loop off. One.”

Glimmer makes a vague noise of acknowledgement and then silence falls, broken only by the distant shouts and weapons’ fire from the fight on the other side of the building.

Catra’s just hovering on the edge of sleep — and when did she even close her eyes? — when Glimmer speaks, startling her: “D’you want to eat something? I know we don’t technically need to, with the resets and stuff but…” She trails off with a vague hand gesture.

Catra isn’t hungry per se, but she suddenly realizes she can’t quite remember the last time she’s had anything to eat at all. The realization is unsettling enough that the word escapes her before she can think better of it: “Yeah.”

Glimmer makes a noise of agreement, and sits up, eyeing Catra thoughtfully. “I want cake,” she decrees. “Do you want cake?”

Catra frowns. “What’s cake?”

Glimmer’s only response is a slowly widening grin.

*

“Okay,” Catra admits around a mouthful of cake, “this is pretty good.”

On the other side of the — massive, borderline-indecently-comfortable, way too pastel for Catra to take it seriously as a war room — tent, Glimmer widens her eyes and swallows.

“Right? I told you.” She looks around at the many, many plated cakes of all shapes, colors and sizes — she’d done a solid dozen teleports to and back from the Bright Moon kitchens to get them all — and pushes a plate that holds something round, brown, and studded with little white flowers in Catra’s direction. “Try this one.”

Catra takes the offered plate and sniffs it dubiously. The color doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, but in this area, she has to admit she’s at a severe disadvantage. “If this is some kind of trick, Sparkles…” she threatens, but her heart’s not really in it.

Glimmer snorts into her own plate, full of something flaky and gold. “It’s not a trick, it’s chocolate.” She shakes her head. “God, you and Adora both, I swear…”

Catra’s really not interested in ruining this perfectly fine afternoon by talking about Adora, so she takes a bite. The cake is soft, a little spongy, with a crumb that melts on her tongue, and—

Her eyes widen.

Holy shit.

Sitting on her nest of pillows, Glimmer bursts into laughter. “Your face.”

Catra doesn’t even care that she’s getting laughed at by a princess — that’s how good the cake is. She wolfs it down in three more bites, licking the corners of her mouth and her fingers. “What is that?” she asks afterwards, staring down at her empty plate a little mournfully.

“I told you: chocolate.” Glimmer looks around and reaches for a small, wrapped square thing. She tosses at Catra. “Catch.”

Catra does, surprised at how solid it is. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

Again, Glimmer bursts into giggles — there’s definitely a bit of post repeated-deaths hysteria in it, but Catra’s not going to mention it so long as she keeps supplying her with chocolate, whatever that is. “Just… try it.”

Still a little suspicious, Catra tears the wrapper and takes a bite.

The next time she blinks, she finds she’s flat on her back against the surrounding cushions. She’s not sure when or how it happened, but she’s not too concerned.

Damn. Vaguely, a part of her muses that if Adora had told her she was defecting because the Rebellion had this at their disposal, she might have been a little more understanding.

She holds up the half-eaten tablet and shakes it in Glimmer’s direction. “You guys just eat this? Whenever you want?”

“Honestly, I can’t believe that you guys don’t,” Glimmer counters. “How does anyone in the Horde manage to get up and fight every day without even the prospect of chocolate in their life?” She shakes her head. “Sad.”

Catra hates to admit it, but honestly? She kinda sees the princess’s point.

She’s considering suggesting to Glimmer that they turn this one-loop break into something more like a two- or three- or maybe four-loop kind of thing, when the drape of fabric that serves as a door flies open, letting an all-too-familiar silhouette stride inside:

“I’m telling you, Bow,” Adora says, thankfully not in full She-Ra garb, but definitely in full panicking-but-refusing-to-admit-it mode. “I’ve looked everywhere, she’s nowhere to be found. I think the Horde must have—” She cuts off abruptly, eyes wide as they land on Catra and Glimmer.

Catra can’t even begrudge her the complete freeze. This is a little weird, by… well, anyone’s standards.

“Adora—?” The archer strides into the room after her, stopping in his tracks just as fast. His mouth falls open, and his gaze goes from Catra to Glimmer to the array of pastries and cakes spread between them. “Um,” he says eventually. “So I guess she’s okay after all?”

Glimmer, mouth full of cake, slowly raises a hand. “Hi guys,” she says, the words a little indistinct.

Apparently in too much disbelief over her friend, Adora turns to Catra.

Catra makes a show of relaxing against the cushions, waving her fingers in a little cheery — and no doubt infuriating — wave. “Hey, Adora.”

Adora looks back at Glimmer, and then at Bow — presumably looking for anything that might make sense. She looks so dumbfounded Catra has to bite her cheek to keep from cackling.

Bow gives Adora an alarmed, why-do-I-have-to-be-the-one-to-say-something glance, but, at Adora’s unmoving insistence, ends up clearing his throat. “Um,” he says again. “Hi, guys. How are we… doing?”

Glimmer finishes chewing, swallows, and, with a poker face Catra can’t help but admire a little, smiles at them. “Good,” she says cheerfully. “You guys want some cake?”

“I— uh—” Bow seems at a loss for words, but Catra’s attention is on Adora who is, she’s pretty sure, slowly morphing away from shocked and into something much, much more entertaining.

“Glimmer,” she says, icy and sharp and oh yeah, Adora is pissed.

Catra distractedly reaches for another brown piece of cake, sits back into the cushions, and settles to enjoy the show.

“Hi, Adora,” Glimmer says, not losing a fraction of her composure. She pushes a plate in her direction. “I got some jam rolls, if you want.”

Adora does not seem to want jam rolls, whatever that may be. Her fists are clenched at her sides, and when she speaks, it’s with way too much neutrality to be anything but insanely angry. “Where have you been?”

Glimmer blinks. “Well, Bright Moon kitchens mostly.”

A muscle twitches in Adora’s jaw. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere. We thought you’d been captured by the Horde. Or worse.”

Glimmer points in Catra’s direction — like a complete asshole. “I didn’t get captured by the Horde,” she says, and rolls her eyes at Catra’s glare. “I’m… trying new diplomatic tactics?”

Catra snorts, loud and completely involuntary. Glimmer’s mouth is twitching, but she keeps her neutral expression, somehow.

Adora looks so scandalized that Catra can’t help but make it worse. She holds up the piece of chocolate cake. “Did you guys know about this chocolate shit? Game-changer, I’ll tell you that. Hordak’s going to be pulling his troops ASAP when he finds out about this.”

Glimmer lets out a cough that sounds suspiciously like a muffled shriek of laughter.

Bow raises his hands, maybe in a vague attempt to bring the situation back to some kind of normalcy. “Okay,” he says, clearly very not-okay with any of what’s going on. “Maybe we should—”

“I cannot believe you,” Adora cuts in, sharp and angry enough not to bother hiding it anymore. Catra reflexively opens her mouth to retort back before she realizes Adora’s talking to Glimmer.

Huh.

The princess doesn’t look fazed in the least. “Oh, loosen up, Adora.”

“You—” For a second, Adora seems in danger of choking to death on her own indignation. “What game do you think you’re playing? She—” and this time it’s an accusatory finger pointed straight at Catra — “cannot be trusted.”

“Rude,” Catra mutters under her breath, which earns her a brief glare, before the full force of Adora’s anger is once again directed at Glimmer.

Glimmer shakes her head. “I’m not trusting her,” she says pointedly. “I am having cake, because this is my break.” She takes a pointed bite, chews, and swallows. “She just happened to be around when I decided it was cake time.”

Catra raises an eyebrow. “Happened to be around,” she repeats dryly. “Thanks.”

Glimmer tosses a piece of candy at her head. “Whatever. Would you prefer happens to be stuck in the same time loop as me and spent the last — how long has it been? two weeks? — two weeks repeatedly getting murdered by First Ones security systems so I thought maybe she could find out about chocolate?”

Bow and Adora are now openly gaping. Catra makes an eh noise. “I mean, it’d be comprehensive, at least.”

Glimmer points her fork at her. “But also probably more confusing.” She gestures at Bow and Adora. “Look at them. They’re confused now, all because of you.”

“I’m pretty sure the cake thing had already confused them.”

“Enough.”

Adora’s voice is so shrill that both Catra and Glimmer stop, turning to look at her with wide eyes.

She takes a deep breath, holds up a hand, and says, “Someone explain. Right now.”

“Ugh.” Glimmer drops back down into her cushions. “You want me to explain? Fine. Either you have some cake, or you get out. How’s that for an explanation?”

Not good enough, Catra would wager, based on how red in the face Adora’s getting. Based on personal experience, she’d say her former best friend is approximately fifteen seconds away from doing something drastic to the cakes spread around the floor — or, possibly, to the queen of Bright Moon herself.

That certainty is why Catra can’t help a pang of very real disappointment when the air suddenly fills with the warning noise of an incoming deflagration. With a sigh, she takes one last bite of chocolate cake, and closes her eyes against the flash of white light.

Break time’s over.

Chapter Text

“What’s that supposed to be?”

As much as Catra hates to admit it, she agrees with Glimmer’s assessment.

The room ahead of them is square, and surprisingly small compared to the gigantic spaces they’ve been seeing so far. Every wall is covered in ornate carvings that mean precisely jackshit to Catra: it’s all sweeping arcs and lines crisscrossing into geometric shapes — First Ones writing. Above each wall is a blinking colored light: blue above the door they just walked through, green to their right, red opposite them, and yellow on their left. The floor is divided into squares, separated by thick dark lines, each of them holding symbols that seem, maybe, vaguely mathematical? The ceiling is flat and low and criss-crossed into narrow squares, which emit a white glow that lights the room. There are, of course, no exits to be seen.

Well. At least it’s not horrifying.

Catra shakes her head to get rid of the water that is still dripping from her fur courtesy of the previous room and, with a deep breath, takes a tentative step forward. She jumps back with a yelp when the square she’s stepped on depresses with a loud beep.

“What did you do?” Glimmer demands, high-pitched and frantic.

The square is now lined with blueish light, the symbol in the center glowing in the same color.

Catra tilts her head, watching the squares, then the walls. Slowly, she walks back onto her square — nothing more happens — and then onto one further. Much the same way, it depresses into the ground with another beep and lights up, this time in light green. Across from them, the red light on top of the carving shifts to yellow.

“I think it’s a code,” she calls out to Glimmer.

“A code?”

She turns, careful not to step out of her square. “Like a passcode? You probably have to step on the right squares in the right order, and then the door will unlock.”

Glimmer frowns. “How are we supposed to work out which ones to step on?”

“No idea.” Still careful, Catra steps onto the square to her right. Pale orange light glows from the new symbol, and another wall light switches to yellow.

Glimmer still hasn’t moved, shifting uneasily in place. “What happens if we get it wrong?”

Catra shrugs. “Probably the room resets and we have to try again.” Experimentally, she skips above one square, landing on another one a little nearer the center. It flashes purple, and the last non-yellow wall light shifts to yellow.

“Doesn’t that sound a little too easy to you?” Glimmer asks.

It kind of does. Unwilling to admit it, Catra shrugs again, and turns her gaze on the middle of the room. Smack in the center of the grid is a circular section, with an engraved four-point star.

Huh. Maybe a validation button?

With more than a little trepidation, Catra leaps onto it. It clicks, but doesn’t depress.

For a second, nothing changes, and then, one by one, the walls themselves light up in a bright, searing yellow.

“Catraaa?” Glimmer calls, anxiously stretching the last syllable.

Catra spins in the middle of the room, trying to work out what’s coming, but nothing appears. After three seconds of blinding, sustained glow, the light fades, leaving only the washed out light of the ceiling. The squares she’s stepped on blink once, and then switch off as well.

Catra breathes a sigh of relief. “It’s fine,” she calls. “Maybe yellow means I almost had it?”

This is the point at which the ceiling dissolves into a shower of flames.

With a shriek, Catra dives to the floor and rolls, scrambling the last few feet to the doorframe. By the time she makes it, the room is awash with fire, and her fur has a distinctly smoky smell to it.

Glimmer is staring at the fiery spectacle, eyes wide, frozen in place. “Okay,” she says slowly. “So I guess yellow maybe doesn’t mean you almost had it.”

Catra leans against the doorframe, pressing her forehead against the stone, feeling the wave of heat coming from the flames. At least her fur isn’t water-logged anymore. “Guess not.”

*

Catra isn’t sure how many loops it takes before she runs out of patience and says what they’re both thinking. What she does know is that she’s not interested in doing a single more.

“Okay,” she pants, leaping out of the way of yet another laser blast — courtesy of the left wall, turned to a bright green screen pockmarked with narrow laser cannons by Glimmer’s last choice of square. “You know what? I’m just going to say it. We need Adora.”

“What?”

Catra spins just in time to see Glimmer pause in her constant shooting of energy blasts at the projectiles coming from the rear wall, apparently solely so she can give Catra an indignant stare.

“Behind you,” Catra calls, and Glimmer turns with a yelp, disintegrating the sharp projectile flying straight at her head with a blast of sparkles.

“What do you mean we need Adora?” Glimmer shouts over her shoulder, resuming her constant shots.

Catra opens her mouth, but is forced to hold that thought when an unexpected laser burst forces her to leap backwards. She lands on a yet-unpressed square, and swears when she feels it depress beneath her. The wall to her right lights up in orange, and she calls, “Bugs incoming on your left!”

“Oh come on—”

Glimmer’s complaint is interrupted when, as Catra surmised, the bottom edge of the orange wall slides up, letting in a swarm of hand-sized mechanical bugs with way too many sharp legs that immediately rush them. With a snarl, Catra sends the first bugs crashing into the wall with a sweep of her quarterstaff, while Glimmer throws a sustained pulse of energy to fry some of the others.

“I’m thinking it, you’re thinking it,” Catra continues when most of the bugs have been dispatched. “This —” and she gestures at the room of traps that is actively trying to kill them — and has managed it every time so far — “is not going to work.”

“That doesn’t mean we need Adora.” Glimmer shoots the bug clinging to the bottom of her cape with a pointedly vindictive ray of sparkles.

“She can actually read the squiggly lines!”

“Who cares?”

“Are you serious?” Catra spins her quarterstaff and plants its end into the last remaining bug, essentially impaling it into the floor. “For all we know, one of these carvings says exactly where we’re supposed to walk. Hell, maybe it says how to end this stupid loop! Only we won’t know, because we can’t read them. We need Adora.”

Glimmer looks like she wants to argue more — unsurprising, considering everything about her, but kind of weird, considering Adora is supposed to be on her side — but before she can get started on that, the building shakes with the deep tremors of Kyle’s stupidity. They’ve run out of time.

Catra shoots the princess a pointed look and she lets out a groan of frustration that’s well on its way to a full-blown scream. “Fine,” she hisses eventually. “Fine.”

Even the blinding white flash isn’t quite enough to distract Catra from the uncomfortable feeling the thought of working with Adora causes.

*

“Are you sure we need—”

“Just go and get her already.”

A couple of pink, glittery blurs later, Catra is staring at her former best friend, watching as her expression slowly morphs into what Catra used to affectionately refer to as the fish dumped in the Crimson Waste: all open mouth and very round eyes. In her experience, it’s usually reserved for particularly bizarre situations — like, say, someone getting a better score than she did on the obstacle course — but Catra supposes this probably qualifies.

“Glimmer, what the hell is— Catra?” Her eyes get so wide they seem in danger of falling out.

At least she isn’t in full She-Ra mode. Catra leans back against the pillar that frames the entrance to the room with a lazy smile. “Hey, Adora.”

Something about the words seems to snap her out of her shock. She spins back towards Glimmer, forehead creased in anger. “What are you doing?” she hisses.

Catra’s a little thrown by the hostility — isn’t Glimmer supposed to be Adora’s new BFF, or whatever? — but Glimmer doesn’t look surprised at all. The princess rolls her eyes, looking particularly aggravated. “Oh for stars’ sake, Adora, please don’t start.”

“Don’t start?” Adora sounds scandalized in a way that Catra had always believed was solely reserved for whatever she’d been doing that Adora deemed not-good. Vaguely, Catra thinks back to the apparent hostility she’d witnessed between the two in the rebel war room during their break loop. Maybe it’d been more than just an impression. “Don’t start? You teleported me out of a battlefield just as the Horde was showing up with no explanation and now you’re with…” She gestures vaguely in Catra’s direction. “With her?”

“She has a name,” Catra mutters, and is roundly ignored.

“And you want me not to start?” Adora lets out a breathy, disbelieving laugh, sharp with exasperation. “Glimmer, you’re the one who started here.”

“If you just let me explain—”

“Explain what?” Adora interrupts, in typical infuriating Adora fashion — even back in the Horde, the angrier she got, the less she let anyone talk. “What, are you guys… working together now? Just like that?”

Glimmer crosses her arms and scowls in a way that tells Catra that a foot stomp is imminent. “So what if we are?”

“Glimmer.” Adora clenches her fists, blue eyes blazing. “She’s a Horde commander. She’s been systematically destroying all the coastal towns. She took Salineas down less than a week ago.”

“Thank you.” Catra smiles — it’s nice to have someone acknowledge all her hard work, even if she’s pretty sure Adora doesn’t mean it as a compliment.

The brief glare Adora tosses in her direction is confirmation enough, but Catra miraculously escapes the lecture on the greater good when Glimmer immediately steals Adora’s focus — and anger — back:

“I can handle her,” Glimmer grits out.

“Debatable,” Catra comments under her breath.

Glimmer scowls at her but keeps addressing Adora. “I know what I’m doing,” she continues through clenched teeth. “If you would just shut up for one second—”

“I can’t believe this.” Adora scrubs a hand against her forehead and looks up and away. “This is just another one of your plans where you don’t tell anyone what you’re doing—”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Glimmer cuts in — she’s actually yelling at this point. “Look, if you would just trust me for once—”

Well, what she’d noticed during the break loop definitely hadn’t been an illusion, then. “Good vibes in the rebellion,” Catra comments, making a show of examining the tips of her claws. “Trouble in paradise, is it?”

“Shut up,” Adora and Glimmer yell at her in unison.

Catra snorts. “Look, as entertaining as your little inter-personal issues might be — and believe me, they are very entertaining,” she says with a deliberately infuriating eyebrow raise, “we are on something of a timetable here.”

Glimmer closes her eyes briefly and takes a deep breath. When she speaks again, it’s at least 50% less shrill, which Catra will take as a victory for her headache. “Right. Yes.” She sets her shoulders, tips up her chin, and turns back to Adora. “What do these walls say?” she asks, gesturing at the carvings.

Catra winces.

“You cannot be serious,” Adora says after a moment of silence. “You want me to, what — help you? While you’re working with the enemy and pulling me out of the field where I’m needed with no explanation?” She raises her hands in exasperation. “I don’t even know what you’re doing! For all I know, you two are planning on… I don’t know, blowing up Etheria or something.”

“Bit dramatic,” Catra comments.

“Yes, because opening a portal to another reality and almost destroying the universe was so undramatic of you,” Adora snaps, turning a fiery gaze on Catra. “Because burning down the Sea Gate and sending a shape shifter to create chaos was so reasonable and well thought out.”

Ugh.

“So no,” Adora continues, now scowling at both of them. “I’m not going to translate anything or help you with anything until someone explains what the hell is going on.”

Glimmer sighs, heavy and long-suffering. “I’m not going to explain,” she says, and yep, the volume is already going back up, “because you already don’t believe me when what I say is perfectly reasonable, and this situation does not qualify.”

Adora gapes at her. “You think I can’t handle the truth?” She lets out a short, incredulous exhale. “Glimmer — I’m not a child.”

“I’m not saying you can’t handle it, I’m just saying—”

“So, what, I’m supposed to just blindly do as you say and hope that whatever it is you’re doing won’t destroy everything or kill anyone?”

Aaaand here comes the foot stomp. “Yes, Adora, you’re supposed to do as I say, because that’s what me being queen means.”

“No,” Adora snaps, shaking her head. “Not without all the information, not without any information. I can’t just—”

“Fine!” Glimmer cuts her off, only a few decibels short of a shout, walking right into Adora’s personal space. “You want the truth? Fine. The truth is that we have all been repeating the same day over and over for weeks. The truth is that this place—” and she gestures at their surroundings with a wide, dramatic wave of the arm— “is some kind of time technology that is malfunctioning and about to blow up, and when it does, we all reset back to this morning. The truth, is that for some fucking reason, me and her —” an accusatory finger pointed at Catra —”are the only ones who seem to realize that. The truth, Adora, is that we have been trying to get to the core of this building for weeks and getting repeatedly, gruesomely murdered by all the security systems, all so that we can stop it and finally move on with our lives, and that we are now stuck because of this starsdamned room and all its starsdamned carvings that we cannot read. The truth is that I am fucking tired. So please. Just. Tell us. What they say.”

No one says anything for a little while.

Adora blinks, mouth slightly open. She stares at Glimmer for a little bit, and then turns to Catra.

Catra shrugs. “If you think about it,” she says, “it’s more likely than us working together for any length of time by choice.”

Adora glances back at Glimmer, and then tilts her head, features pinched in a fair enough kind of expression.

Glimmer lets out a long, long breath. “Please,” she says again, all the fight drained out of her.

Adora clears her throat and shakes her head. “Uh. Yeah. Okay. Sure, I guess.” She turns back towards the room, frowning as she scans the walls.

“Um,” she says after a second, squinting as she, seemingly, deciphers the writing. “This says that this is the entry room for access to Project… Chronos, I think? And that only authorized personnel are allowed inside.”

“Yeah, they made that part pretty clear,” Catra breathes in exhaustion.

Adora gives her an odd look, but continues reading, her frown deepening as she goes. “It’s… pretty technical, I’m not getting everything. I think it’s… a list of warnings? For Project Chronos? This is talking about, I don’t know, radiation of some kind? Radiation equipment that’s needed in the device chamber?”

Oh great. Catra and Glimmer exchange an exhausted glance. “Radiation,” Catra drawls. “Just what we needed.”

“There’s a whole section about energy overload protocols… Evacuation procedures… Authorized personnel…” Adora trails off. “What is this place?”

“Some kind of First Ones science lab, apparently,” Catra hazards. She’d suspected it, but this more than confirms it.

“About… time technology?” Adora asks hesitantly, glancing at them like she’s still not sure whether they’re serious.

“Yup,” Glimmer says tersely. “Does it say anything about how to access the device chamber? A code, maybe?”

Adora shakes her head. “Nothing.” Her gaze falls on the star in the middle of the room and she frowns. “Did you guys try the—” she begins, and starts to take a step forward.

Catra and Glimmer launch themselves at her, each grabbing one of her arms and pulling her back with a simultaneous “No!”

Unbalanced by the sudden, double pull, Adora nearly falls over backwards, righting herself at the last second. “Okay!” she shouts, regaining her balance and glaring at them. “Okay, I get it. Well, I don’t, but—”

“You were about to step on the creepy bugs button,” Glimmer says flatly.

“The— what?”

“You don’t want to know,” Catra advises, and then leans back against her pillar, giving Glimmer an exhausted look. “No passcode.”

Glimmer lets her head fall back against her side of the doorframe with a sigh. “No passcode,” she repeats, slow and exhausted. “Ugh, this is going to take forever.”

Catra resists the urge to slide to the ground. “Forever and a half, yeah.”

“Um,” Adora says.

Glimmer waves a vague hand in her direction. “Don’t worry about it, Adora,” she says distractedly. “Thanks for your help.”

Catra turns her gaze to the edges the walls make where they meet the ceiling. “Maybe we can… break it somehow? Short-circuit it?”

Glimmer raises an eyebrow. “How would we do that?”

“Well, I don’t know, maybe there’s a panel somewhere we can open—”

“Um,” Adora says again, a little more insistently. “Guys—”

“A panel?” Glimmer repeats dubiously. “What panel?”

“I don’t know,” Catra says defensively. “Just… a panel. With circuitry inside.”

“A panel with circuitry inside,” Glimmer repeats flatly. “Well, good thing you guys have Entrapta working on all your robots—”

“Guys.” Adora cuts them off, a little louder. When they turn to look at her, she’s got her stupid magical sword in hand.

Catra feels the hairs on the back of her neck raise in apprehension — whatever Adora’s about to say, she’s sure it involves magic, and even more sure that she won’t like it.

“This is a First Ones building, right?” she asks, and Glimmer and Catra exchange a look.

“Yeah,” Glimmer says slowly. “Why do you—”

“If this is a security system, I can probably just switch it off?”

There’s a pause.

“You can what,” Glimmer asks, dangerously flat.

Adora shifts a little in place, clearly uncomfortable. “Switch it off?”

“How.”

“I’m an administrator?” Adora’s sentence almost sounds like a question, her intonation rising — probably in the face of Glimmer’s intensity, which is honestly a little scary. She clears her throat and continues. “Well, not me, but —” she lifts her sword — “She-Ra? First Ones buildings recognize her as an administrator, which means I can switch stuff on. Or off, I guess.” In the face of Glimmer’s silence, she turns to Catra. “Don’t you remember? It was this whole thing at the Crystal Castle.”

Catra closes her eyes. “Right.”

When she opens them again, Glimmer is staring at her with enough intensity to melt lead. “She-Ra can switch off security systems,” the princess grits out, “and you knew this? This entire time?”

Catra taps her claw against the wall behind her. “I didn’t know,” she corrects, “I just… Maybe vaguely was aware of She-Ra technically qualifying as an administrator? Marginally? It slipped my mind.”

“It slipped your mind?” Glimmer repeats, and honestly, Catra is surprised not to see literal sparks of magic coming out of her eyes. “And the Skewering-By-Giant-Spiders didn’t remind you? The falling to our deaths? The drowning? The Puzzle Room From Hell? None of that?”

Adora glances between the two of them. “So,” she says, a little awkwardly. “You guys have been… having an interesting time?”

“You could say that,” Catra mumbles, and then throws her hands up in the face of Glimmer’s continued glare. “Okay! Fine! I forgot, whatever, can we please do this now?”

Glimmer huffs, but nods. “Adora?”

Adora nods, and grips her sword with both hands. “For the honor of Grayskull!”

The light of her transformation is blinding, gold and warm in a way that makes Catra wish she had more space to recoil away. The sparks of golden magic linger in the air, and she has to force herself not to swat them away.

Back where her former best friend stood is now the ten-feet-tall warrior princess everyone seems so fond of. Her hair is glowing, which would already be enough for Catra to be against the whole thing, but honestly, the rest of the outfit doesn’t help — a cape? a tiara? Come on.

The glow fades, and there’s a short silence.

“... This is pretty much it,” Adora says eventually — Adora, not She-Ra, because the awkward, uncomfortable way she says it is so familiar Catra can see straight through the glowy magic and back to the girl she grew up with. She swings her sword a few times. “Usually the building just kinda… recognizes me.”

“Recognizes you,” Catra repeats flatly. This magic shit is honestly ridiculous.

Adora rolls her eyes, and tentatively takes a step forward into the room. Catra winces, bracing herself, but the square under her feet doesn’t depress. Nor does the next one, or the next one. She makes it to the star in the center, and turns to look at them, a hopeful glint in her blue eyes. “I’m guessing this is good?”

Before either of them can reply, the white faint light coming from the ceiling turns to a bright, blinking red. The air fills with an ear-piercing alarm, followed by a flat voice announcing: “Intruder detected. She-Ra. You are not authorized for access to Project Chronos. You are not authorized. Intruder Protocol engaged.”

Catra and Glimmer glance at each other in despair. “Nevermind,” Glimmer sighs.

*

“... Maybe the building can recognize me as an administrator if I—”

“Don’t!” Catra throws her hands up while Glimmer lunges at Adora’s arm, stopping it from raising her sword.

“No She-Ra-ing,” Glimmer pants, out of breath.

“Absolutely no She-Ra-ing of any kind,” Catra insists, and slowly, Adora puts her sword back in its scabbard at her back.

“O-kay…” She says, dragging out the word, looking at them like they’ve lost it — honestly, at this point, she might not even be wrong. Catra is pretty sure she’s lost a substantial amount of whatever was left of her sanity when this whole thing started, and it probably wasn’t that much to begin with.

Both she and Glimmer heave a sigh of relief, which does not seem to reassure Adora.

“So if you guys don’t want me to try and turn it off, and you already know what the walls say because —” and she scrunches her face in disbelief — “I already translated it for you during another… loop, I guess? Then why am I. Here?”

Glimmer points at the floor. “Do you know what the squares say?”

Catra rolls her eyes. It’d been Glimmer’s idea to bring Adora back after another uncountable set of loops where they’d gotten their asses kicked by the multitude of traps in the room. Catra, not particularly keen on reliving neither the princess-show-down nor the ‘intruder protocol’, had argued against it, but, as it turned out, Glimmer was not an easy person to argue with — and kind of did whatever she wanted anyway, considering she had the teleporting powers.

“Shut up,” Glimmer says, pointing at Catra without even looking at her.

Catra raises her hands. “I told you this was stupid.” They’ve already had to spend fifteen minutes convincing Adora yet again that this isn’t a ploy to blow up the planet.

“I said shut up,” Glimmer retorts, not giving an inch.

Adora raises her eyebrows. “Uh—”

“Squares,” Glimmer says, clicking her fingers at Adora, and then pointing back at the floor. “No walking, no touching. Just reading. Do you know what they say?”

Looking vaguely apprehensive — Catra can’t blame her; for a five-foot-tall princess with pink hair, Glimmer has a way of pulling off threatening that she can’t help but admire a little — Adora turns to look at the squares. She frowns a little, studying them for a moment, and then says: “Huh.”

“Huh?” Glimmer repeats, high-pitched, and, yeah, Catra’s pretty sure they’re going to need to take another break loop pretty soon. The queen of Bright Moon is starting to give off bomb about to explode vibes.

Adora shakes her head, apparently realizing how close to the edge Glimmer seems to be. “Sorry, it’s just… You guys said this was a keypad, right? Like for a passcode?”

At Glimmer’s nod, Adora turns back to the floor. She studies it for a few more seconds, and then, too fast for either of them to react, steps onto the leftmost square.

Catra braces herself — but the only thing that happens is a quiet chime as the square turns green.

Adora waits for one more second, and then moves to the next square, diagonal to the right. Again — nothing but a green-lit chime. As Glimmer and Catra gape at her, she slowly starts making her way to another square, and another, each time carefully selecting them based on no criteria that Catra can identify.

After a few more light chimes, she steps onto the star at the center.  There’s a moment of stillness and then, with a quiet, harmonic chiming, the walls light into a pale green. When the light fades, the rear wall splits down the middle, the two halves quietly sliding away from each other to reveal a corridor.

Adora turns to smile at them — her smile takes a bit of a hit when she catches sight of their expression. “Guys?”

“How—” Glimmer seems at a loss for words, which is something Catra hadn’t been sure could happen, ever. “How did you—”

“Um.” Adora wrings her hands together in a way that means she’s supremely uncomfortable. She points at the floor. “Well, I don’t know what most of these symbols mean but, this —” and she points at the first square she’d stepped on — “means one, this symbol —” second square — “means two, this one three, and four, five, and six.” She rocks back onto her heels, fidgeting with her sleeves. “So I thought I would just. uh. Try?” She pauses and then, at their lack of reaction, tries to summon a bit of enthusiasm — the result is magnificently awkward. “But hey! Looks like it worked! That’s good, right?”

Catra briefly considers sitting down on the floor and just waiting the loop out. Maybe several loops. Maybe she could stay there forever.

Glimmer looks like she’s thinking along those lines too. “One-two-three-four-five-six,” she repeats, voice breaking. She looks like she’s maybe about to cry. “One-two-three-four-five-six? That’s the code?”

Catra digs the heels of her hands into her eyes. She’s seen enough. “Yeah,” she says in a hoarse whisper.

“We just—”

“I know.”

“How many times did we—”

“Yeah.”

“Fire,” Glimmer says, and Catra feels her grabbing her arm, forcing it down, clinging to it. She shakes Catra a little. “Those stupid bugs. Catra, the lasers.”

Catra lets her head drop back, staring at the ceiling without seeing it. “Yeah,” she echoes.

“You guys okay?” Adora calls hesitantly from the doorway she’s opened. “Looks like this leads into some kind of chamber?”

With one last look of shared commiseration, Catra and Glimmer make their way across the now perfectly ordinary room, and into the quiet hallway beyond.

It’s short, narrow, and dark; but what really gets their attention is the windowed door at the end, through which bright white-blue light shines. They make their way over and, with more than a little trepidation, Catra brushes a hand over the button set into the wall.

“Wow,” Adora breathes from behind them.

That about sums it up: the room they find themselves in is cavernous, bigger than all the spaces they’ve seen in the building so far. It’s built as a sphere, without a single straight wall, walls blending into the ceiling into the floor, and the door opens on a narrow metal walkway suspended in the air, leading to a circular platform set into the center of the sphere. The room was clearly dug into some kind of special rock — the walls surrounding them are a light gray which gleams with a strange sheen that reflects the light in a surreal, rippling effect.

And in the middle, suspended over the central platform’s computer banks, is a fallen star.

Catra shakes her head: there’s no such thing as fallen stars. No such things as stars at all. They’re just stories, told by and for little kids after curfew. Catra had never really cared for them — she’d been much more into the stories about the gruesome murders of the Crimson Waste Lizard Butcher, who stalked his victims with nothing but his razor-sharp teeth and had a particular taste for Horde cadets who didn’t do well enough on the obstacle course.

But Adora… Adora had loved those stories, about the sparkling dots that had once filled the night sky, lighting the way for travelers and sailors, guiding them home and through danger. And so, because Adora had loved them, Catra had learnt them, told them, over and over, just to listen to Adora gasp and giggle in all the right places.

Catra can’t help but glance back at Adora, only to find the girl already looking at her. They both turn away immediately, and Catra feels her throat close up.

Fallen stars had been Adora’s favorites. The main story said that all the stars in the sky had gone at once, chased away by the arrival of the princesses of Etheria. Afraid they would be destroyed, the stars had run away and gone into hiding, and would return one day, when the threat had been defeated. But the fallen stars were special — they’d decided not to abandon the people of Etheria, instead choosing to fall to the ground to help them defeat the danger. They were rare, and often well-hidden — but finding one would be a guarantee of adventure and protection from danger, a sure way to help defend Etheria.

It’s nonsense, all of it. Of course it is; propaganda, seeping all the way down to kids’ stories. Catra had worked that out as young as ten years old. They’d grown up, and they’d started making rank, and they’d stopped telling the stories, because they were kids’ stuff, and that’d been that.

But…

But whatever is floating over the control consoles, kept in place under a thin, glowing containment field, looks a hell of a lot like what fallen stars were supposed to — a massive, twisting, writhing mass of light and sparks, spinning and sparkling and dizzying. It shifts from a silvery blue to a blinding gold, and back again, through a whole spectrum of iridescent colors that reflect off the surrounding walls.

Glimmer sags against the railing of the metal walkway. “Finally,” she breathes.

Catra shakes off childhood memories and stupid kids’ stories; Glimmer is right. This has to be the timeloop device.

They’ve finally made it.

Chapter Text

“Ow!” Catra throws her hand back from the console that just sparked under her fingers. The screen she’s been staring at flashes and dies, and she shakes her hand out, trying to rid it of the tingling.

“Could you please try not to short-circuit this entire room?” Glimmer’s voice is high and tight with exasperation.

Catra grits her teeth and resists the urge to kick at the console she’s been messing with. “It’s not like I’m doing this for fun,” she hisses, and turns to glance at Glimmer over her shoulder. “Are you making any progress at all?”

Glimmer sighs, short and annoyed. She doesn’t look up from her own set of screens, on the other side of the central platform. “I’m not going to if you keep asking me every two seconds.”

That’s a no, then. Catra slams her fist into the side of the console, and the screen comes back to life. “This is so stupid,” she mutters. “We’re not going to figure out how it works and you know it.”

Glimmer huffs, but she has to know Catra’s right. They’ve been at it for loops upon loops already, trying to parse the incomprehensible readings and pressing all the buttons and commands to precisely no avail. They’d even brought Adora in for a loop to avoid the passcode incident repeating itself, but she’d been completely baffled by the writing, which had made precisely zero sense to her beyond being somewhat scientific in nature.

“Why don’t we just—” Catra says, and drags a claw against the silver metal that encases the screen, listening to the resulting screech with more than a little satisfaction, “—blow it all the fuck up?”

“No.” Glimmer’s tone is intransigent, with more than a little royal authority thrown in. It makes Catra want to hiss a little. “We have no idea how this thing works. We have to switch it off properly. Otherwise—”

“—who knows what might happen, yada, yada,” Catra completes, and bites down on a yawn. Glimmer’s whole speech about the danger of contained magical energy had considerably lost its impact after the fifteenth repeat.

She walks away from her console — it’s not like it’s magically going to start making sense — and perches on the railing that circles the platform, looking up at the bright source of energy that hovers over them. It’s remained completely unchanged this entire time, save for the end of each loop, where it bursts into blinding white.

“You’ve never really struck me as the boring and careful type,” Catra comments conversationally, partly because it’s true, partly because she’s bored and knows that interrupting Glimmer will most likely annoy the shit out of her, which is always entertaining.

Glimmer doesn’t disappoint. She swivels to toss a death glare at Catra. “I’m not boring,” she hisses. “But this is extremely complex, extremely powerful magic. Do you know what happened the last time someone messed with extremely complex, extremely powerful magic without knowing what they were doing? They almost destroyed reality. Oh wait, that was you.”

Catra snarls at her, anger sharp and searing in her veins. “Whatever.”

“No! Not fucking ‘whatever’.” Glimmer clenches her fists, mouth twisted into a scowl. “Not everyone made it out, all because you didn’t think about what you were doing. My—” and she cuts herself off, mouth snapping shut with an audible clack of teeth. She shakes her head, and points at the machinery behind her. “If we mess with this thing the wrong way, who knows what could happen? Maybe the whole planet goes. Maybe the loop starts getting shorter. An hour. A minute. A second. Is that what you want?”

Catra clenches her jaw and looks away.

“Exactly,” Glimmer seethes viciously. “So stop distracting me and keep working.” She pauses briefly, and then adds. “You know, if you actually want to help…” She trails off.

Catra looks up, wary as hell — it’s never a good sign when Glimmer hesitates. “What?”

Glimmer doesn’t look angry anymore, just thoughtful. “Maybe next loop you should bring Entrapta,” she says eventually. “I mean, this is magic, but it’s also very much technology. Maybe she can work out what all these things do, and how to switch them off.” She makes a face. “We might have to stop her from blowing up Etheria because it looks fun, but it could work.”

Catra’s blood is rushing in her ears so loud she can barely hear Glimmer’s voice. Her heart pounds in her chest, and she finds she can’t quite breathe right.

Put her on the transport to Beast Island!

“Catra?”

She’d been so still, on the Fright Zone’s metal flooring. Catra had never seen Entrapta still before — the girl even wriggled when she fell asleep at her workstation.

“Catra?”

Glimmer’s hand lands on her arm, startling her. Catra flinches so violently she almost tips over the railing and into the empty space below.

Glimmer — and when the hell did she get over here? — is staring at her, eyes wide with…

Is that concern? Catra feels herself snarl reflexively and shakes herself out of Glimmer’s grip. “No,” she bites out. “We’re not bringing Entrapta into this.”

Glimmer takes a step back, clearly thrown by her sudden hostility. “But—”

“No.” Catra stands, and digs her claws into her palms, trying to control her breathing. “End of discussion.”

Her words land, just like she’d hoped they would: Glimmer straightens, features pinching in irritation. “End of discussion?” she repeats in disbelief. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

Catra grins, slow and snide. “The person who knows where Entrapta is.” She takes a deep breath against the wave of nausea the thought of where Entrapta is creates. “You won’t find her, so don’t even bother. We don’t need her.”

“We don’t— Catra, we have no idea what we’re doing!” Glimmer runs her hands over her face. “We could be at this for weeks! We have been at this for weeks! We need help.”

Of course they do. But it’s not like Catra can tell the queen of Bright Moon anything about where Entrapta is right now. She sneers at her, instead. “Not Entrapta’s help,” she snaps, and gestures at the glowy orb above them. “What’s she going to do? This is all magic bullshit anyway. Just figure it out.”

She expects Glimmer to come back at her even harder — possibly even physically, which, honestly, at this point, would be a welcome distraction. Instead, much more ominously, Glimmer pauses, mouth opening a little as her gaze sticks to the energy source.

“What?” Catra snaps eventually, nerves as tense as a bowstring.

“You’re right,” Glimmer mutters and wow, hold up a minute.

“Did you just say I’m right?” Catra repeats incredulously. Uncountable loops, yet this is a first.

Glimmer turns to look at her, eyes wide. “This is magic bullshit.”

“Uh.” Catra isn’t sure where she’s going with this. “Yeah?”

Glimmer bites her lip, and then, hesitantly, says: “I know who can help us.”

There’s a thread of unease slowly coiling in the pit of Catra’s gut, though she isn’t quite sure why. “You do?”

Glimmer nods and the thread turns to barbed wire, coiling tighter and tighter, cutting her up from the inside.

“Who?” Catra asks guardedly after a few seconds of silence.

It hits her: Glimmer isn’t looking at her. Is being very careful, in fact, to keep her gaze on anything that isn’t Catra — the energy source, the consoles, the walls, her own feet.

Catra feels her shoulders tense, and braces herself for whatever it is Glimmer doesn’t want to say.

Even with that, she’s not ready.

“Shadow Weaver,” Glimmer says, barely audible.

It takes a moment for her brain to process her words. A haze of static fills her ears, her vision. Distantly, Catra realizes her claws have broken skin — a thin, sticky film of blood coats the inside of her palms.

“What did you just say?” she asks, very, very quietly.

Finally, finally, Glimmer turns to face her. Her expression is hesitant, but her eyes are steely. “Shadow Weaver,” she says, louder. “She’s in Bright Moon.”

“I know.” Her fingertips have gone numb.

Glimmer takes a deep breath and continues — to her credit, she doesn’t turn away from Catra, even though Catra’s pretty sure she’s radiating enough hostility to set paper on fire. “This is magic-based. Very, very advanced magic. We need a sorcerer to figure it out.”

“So get a sorcerer,” Catra hisses, clinging to her self-control by the very tips of her claws. “Don’t you have a whole city of them?”

Glimmer shakes her head. “It’s not that simple.”

“Like hell it isn’t.”

“Catra—”

“No.” She can’t believe they’re having this conversation. “Are you serious? You want to give Shadow Weaver access to this? You want to trust her with this?”

“She’s highly skilled,” Glimmer counters, infuriatingly reasonable. “She’s studied this type of magic more than anyone else and she has experience with the way the First Ones used technology to control magic.”

“Yeah, and she’s also a lying, traitorous snake,” Catra hisses. “The second she’s out of whatever jail cell you’re holding her in, she’ll be out causing misery and making both of us regret it.”

Glimmer hesitates — just a second, but it’s enough.

For a moment, Catra is too disbelieving to speak. “You are keeping her locked up, right?” she snaps, and Glimmer looks away.

“That’s not what’s important right now—”

Catra laughs, sharp and hard and cutting. “Great. Just fucking great. I have to deal with Hordak’s bullshit and everything she’s left behind and meanwhile she’s just… Living the fucking life in the Rebellion.” The implications of that little tidbit of information suddenly hit her, with all the subtlety of a quarterstaff to the face. “Adora,” she says, a little hollowly. “Adora is just fine with Shadow Weaver, what. Working with you guys? She has no problems with that?” Catra’s always known Adora didn’t really care much about the way Shadow Weaver had treated Catra all her life, but this is driving the point home in a whole new way.

A flash of something unreadable crosses Glimmer’s face. “Adora — We’re not talking about Adora.”

“Fuck,” Catra breathes and has to brace her hands against her thighs for a beat. She forces a deep breath and tries to keep her voice level. “Look, I don’t care what stupid decisions the Rebellion makes. You guys want to trust a known traitor? Sure. You want to let a notoriously fucking evil sorceress roam around unsupervised? Your problem. But there is no way, no way, that I’m getting involved with anything related to Shadow Weaver. I would quite literally rather spend the rest of my life stuck in this fucking loop than work with Shadow Weaver. Do you get that?”

“It’s not like that,” Glimmer says, but she’s still not looking her in the eye. “She’s— She’s been helping me. With my magic.”

Another laugh bursts out of Catra’s lungs, full of glass shards. “Yeah. She’s really great as an educator. Maybe you should let her supervise the under 6 year-olds, next.”

“Oh, give it up,” Glimmer snaps, crossing the space between them in short, angry strides. “You think I like working with her? You think I enjoy having to let her teach me things? The only reason I have to is because the Horde drove me to it. Because you drove me to it. Because I need those skills if I’m going to save Etheria from you.”

Catra leans in, right into her personal space, barely restraining herself from baring her teeth as she hisses, “Don’t even think about putting this on me. You being a terrible leader is not my fucking fault.”

“A terrible leader? At least I’m not burning down villages for the hell of it! I’m not the one killing and capturing innocent people just for more power!” Glimmer shouts, not backing down — maybe if Catra was less angry, she’d score points for that. As it is, it does nothing to calm the rage flowing through her like a tidal wave.

“This is war,” Catra snarls. “If you can’t handle it, then feel free to surrender any time. It’s not like it’ll make a difference in the end anyway.” She leans back, sneering in contempt. “The Rebellion doesn’t stand a chance, and you know it. And certainly not with you to lead them.”

Glimmer clenches her fists, and a faint glow starts shining around her hands. “You have no idea what I’m capable of,” she spits out.

Catra smirks, lopsided and arrogant. “Oh,” she drawls. “But I think I do.”

For a heartbeat or two, Catra thinks Glimmer’s about to lunge at her. Tense with anticipation, she lowers her center of gravity — extends her claws — waits with baited breath.

But Glimmer lets the glow fade away. “I’m not having this conversation with you,” she spits, haughty as hell. “We need Shadow Weaver’s input to get out of this fucking loop. If you don’t want to see her, then I’ll go on my own. End of discussion,” she throws Catra’s words aback at her with vindictive satisfaction.

“Like hell you will,” Catra growls at her.

But Glimmer only tosses her a sharp, arrogant look. “Fucking try and stop me.” She smiles, sweet and poisonous. “That’s right: you can’t.”

She turns her back on Catra with a swish of cape and Catra is done. She is done with this loop, done with this stupid, endless day, done with the Rebellion and their insufferable, childish, selfish queen, done with all of it.

“Can’t I?” she says mildly, and waits for Glimmer to look back before she slashes at the nearest console, claws out.

The metal gives, deep scratches gauging themselves in the machinery with an earsplitting screech. The wires and circuitry underneath spark violently, releasing smoke, stinging against Catra’s hand but she is too far gone to even notice, much less care.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Glimmer shouts.

Catra throws her closed fist into a screen, and it shatters in a shower of sparks and glass shards. “What does it look like I’m doing?” she asks, cheery and feral. “I’m solving this.”

A burst of pink sparkles flies directly at her, but Catra sees it coming, dodges in the nick of time, and it crashes into the console instead. She pulls her hand free, hissing when one of the sharp leftover edges of the screen digs a deep, bleeding scratch into her forearm.

“You’re going to kill us both!” Glimmer sounds frantic, but her voice is drowned out when piercing alarms start going off, echoing around the cavernous room. Red lights start blinking, casting the whole space in an ominous dim glow.

“What’s one more time between friends?” Catra calls, and tears into the consoles around her with all the fury of dozens upon dozens of loops, of the last few months spent ignored and relegated to the back of the stage, of an entire life spent being treated like less than nothing.

Computers spark and die under her hands — screens flare and shatter — more alarms add themselves to the cacophony and Catra laughs, laughs and laughs as she wreaks destruction.

Her trance is shattered when Glimmer tackles her to the floor. She hits the grated metal hard, knocking the back of her head against a nearby computer bank hard enough that she sees stars. She regroups, just in time to find Glimmer holding her facedown to the floor, and she throws an elbow back, catching the princess under the chin and sending her reeling back. Catra scrambles away, flips onto her back, but before she can stand, Glimmer is throwing more fucking magic at her, and she has to roll, shielding her face with her hands, yelping when some of the sparks sear at her arms.

“You have caused enough problems,” Glimmer shouts, one more loud noise among too many that echo in Catra’s ringing skull.

Catra grins at her. There’s a telltale warmth at her lips and on her tongue that tells her she’s bleeding. “Haven’t you heard? That’s kind of my thing.” And she leaps backwards, crouches, stands, and lunges towards the base of the forcefield that keeps the glowing orb above them contained.

“Stop!” Glimmer’s voice roars in the cacophony and—

Everything explodes into light.

Thrown by the flash, Catra misses her target and crashes onto the platform, smashing her injured arm painfully into the grated floor. It takes her a second to remember which way’s up or down, and when she does—

Her jaw drops.

The room is awash with bright, pink-tinged streams of energy, flashing and sparking as they wrap around the computers, the forcefield, the walkway. The light spins around the glowing orb in the air, protective and impenetrable. It sparks over shattered screens, covering and repairing. It glitters over everything, blinding and dangerous.

Standing over Catra, Glimmer shines, bright and blinding. Her skin, her hair — everything is covered in the same dancing sparks. Her eyes glow, a fiery uniform white. She raises her fist, a clear, sparking warning. “I said,” she says, and her voice sounds wrong, echoey and like it belongs to something older than she is, “stop.”

Catra can’t breathe — this is more magic than she’s ever seen in her life, and it crawls over her, under her skin, into her lungs and her blood and she can’t— she can’t —

The light around them flares impossibly brighter, and Catra closes her eyes.

*

Catra wakes to the sound of the world ending.

She gasps, out of breath and out of her mind. The noise ends, like it always does, but she’d swear she can still hear it, echoing over the leftover report of the alarms from the device chamber. She blinks, trying to rid her vision of the afterimage the light had seared into it, and raises a hand to push the hair out of her face—

She stops with a hiss at the searing pain that runs through her arm at the movement. She looks down, and it takes her a moment to understand what she’s seeing. Her forearm has a deep, unforgiving gash dug into it, surrounded by more small cuts and burns. Slowly, she turns her hands over to find her palms littered with similar injuries. Tentatively, she prods her bottom lip with the tip of her tongue, only to flinch at the telltale spark of a split lip.

It takes her a second to understand what’s happened.

When she does, she scrambles to her feet, knocking over her chair in her haste. She takes off at a sprint to the skiff bay, resisting the urge to whoop in glee.

She has quite literally never been this happy to be injured before.

It takes her an infuriating hour to make it to the ruin’s site. The fights have already started, but she circles them, and makes straight for the building’s concealed entrance. The fact that Glimmer doesn’t materialize at any point to teleport her there is a little concerning, but Catra isn’t that surprised, after the words they’d exchanged — Glimmer does have a habit of making her walk when they’d argued in the previous loop, a move that is both petty and infuriating.

But none of that matters right now. Not when injuries are sticking between loops.

Whatever they did in that chamber? It did something to the loop, damaged it somehow. That’s the first sign of change, and, logically, bigger than any argument they could be having.

She makes it to the narrow space, out of breath and legs burning after her sprint. Glimmer is here, sitting on a low boulder, eyes focused on her hands.

“It worked!” Catra pants, skidding to a stop in the sand. She doesn’t wait for Glimmer’s reaction, instead shoving her still sluggishly bleeding forearm in front of her face — it still hurts like a bitch, but Catra will gladly take the pain if it means what she thinks it does. “What we did, it’s started undoing the loop.”

Glimmer holds up her own hand, her palm marred by a circular, narrow burn. “I know,” she says, and she’s much too calm about this.

Catra refuses to let her lack of enthusiasm deter her. “Come on then, let’s go back! If you do the whole…” she gestures vaguely — “glowy magic communion thing again, it might actually undo the whole thing.” She pauses. “Or maybe I just tear it to pieces again. Whichever.”

Glimmer sighs and doesn’t budge.

“What.” Catra does her best to keep her cool.

“You know what,” Glimmer counters, with none of the fight she showed in their previous discussion. She just sounds tired. “You just said it.”

“What are you talking about?”

Glimmer stands. “We don’t know what did it,” she says slowly. “We have no idea if it’s what you did, or what I did… I don’t even know what I did! Much less how to do it again!”

Catra stares blankly. “Getting pissed off seemed to do it pretty well. If you need a hand with that I am happy to help.”

“Catra.” Glimmer runs a hand through her hair, looking like she’s trying to pick her words carefully. “We both know we can’t go into this blind. We just got lucky — injuries stuck, but what if next time the explosion does too, and we both die for good? What if we start making it worse? We need help.”

“No.” Catra’s throat is closing, restricting her air flow. There’s no trace of the previous loop’s fury at the thought; just a horrible, cold feeling that spreads all the way to the tips of her fingers, and that she refuses to name. “Not from her.”

“I know you have a… complicated history,” Glimmer says hesitantly. “And you don’t have to come with me. But I am going to ask for her input. It’s too risky not to.”

“It’s too risky, period,” Catra snaps. “She can’t be trusted—”

“I’m not going to trust her.” Glimmer holds up her hands, clearly doing her best to be placating. “But I need to know if she knows anything about this. If she doesn’t know anything, if she starts trying to… I don’t know, wriggle her way into control — fine, next loop around, we tear this thing to pieces and damn the consequences. But I can’t do that until we’ve gone through all the other options, and that includes her.” Glimmer looks down, sounding miserable. “There are too many people relying on me. I owe it to them to try everything.”

She’s right. She’s right, and Catra knows it, has known it this entire time, probably, ever since Glimmer brought it up. Unfortunately, knowing it doesn’t make it any easier to accept.

It takes her several seconds to be able to breathe enough past the knot in her throat to say: “Fine.”

Glimmer sags in apparent relief. “Thank you,” she says. “I won’t be long. Wait here.”

But Catra shakes her head and takes a step closer. “No,” she cuts in. “I’m coming with you.”

Glimmer’s eyes widen in surprise. “You don’t have to—”

“Yes, I do.” Catra looks away. “Look, you might think you have her all figured out and the situation under control but… I know her, Sparkles. I’ll be able to tell if she’s trying to pull one on you, right away.”

Glimmer looks like she wants to argue. “I’m not an idiot, Catra,” she says, though she doesn’t sound angry, just thoughtful. “I’m not going to fall for—”

“Yes,” Catra cuts in, short. “Yes, you are, because that’s just who she is and making people fall for whatever bullshit she’s spinning is exactly what she’s good at.” She forces herself to meet Glimmer’s gaze, biting her lower lip to keep her expression neutral. “That’s my condition. You want to bring Shadow Weaver in on this? I want to be there.”

There’s a moment where Catra wonders if she and Glimmer are going to have to fight about this too, but in the end, Glimmer only nods and offers her arm. “Let’s go, then,” she says softly.

Despite the fact that her every cell is screaming at her not to, Catra takes it.

*

Bright Moon is as pastel, airy, and glittery as Catra always envisioned. Grand hallways with tall ceilings lead to rooms that are lined with floor-to-ceiling windows and filled with cushions and decorative fountains — fountains, for fuck’s sake.

The room where Shadow Weaver is “held” is no different — Catra can’t help but add the quotes in her mind, considering the extent of her restraints seems to be the presence of one singular guard at the door. Outside.

The room in question turns out to be a greenhouse. It’s all glass, making up the walls and the ceiling, letting in floods of light, and offering an unimpeded view of the surrounding landscape, all the way to the forested horizon.

Yet, somehow, the first impression Catra gets upon walking inside after Glimmer is one of oppression. Plants grow everywhere, thick and spindly, obscuring the light. Dark leaves weave together with black and purple flowers, and take up most of the space, until it seems like they’re almost sucking the oxygen out of the air. At the center, a round basin set on a pillar glows a faint, twitching purple, casting odd moving reflections on the plants surrounding it. Worst of all, the whole place reeks of magic, in a way that makes every hair on the back of Catra’s neck raise up — a thick, heady scent of smoke and too-sweet flowers.

Despite how different the circumstances are, Catra can’t shake the impression of being back in the Garnet Chamber, twelve years old at the most.

“Your Majesty.”

The voice, syrupy and obsequious, sends a shiver of disgust rippling down Catra’s spine. She turns towards the sound, and at least gets the pleasure of seeing Shadow Weaver stop in her slimy, waste-of-a-person tracks when she sees Catra.

“... And Catra,” she continues after a beat. She can’t quite hide her surprise. “What an… unexpected visit.”

Catra grins, sharp and utterly humorless. “Oh, I’ll bet.”

Shadow Weaver ignores her, in that icy way she has, pointedly turning towards Glimmer. “What can I do for you?”

Glimmer, who stopped a step behind Catra, hesitates briefly and glances at her. When Catra nods, she takes a step forward. “We need information.”

Shadow Weaver hums and makes her way to a flowering plant, delicately running a hand over the dark red blossoms. “I see. Would that be related to the temporal incident that we seem to be experiencing?”

Catra feels her jaw drop. “You know about—”

“Of course I know,” Shadow Weaver cuts in, dismissive in a way that sends icy shame through Catra’s gut before she can curb it. “What kind of sorceress would I be if I didn’t?”

“So you… remember the previous loops?” Glimmer asks, taking a step between her and Catra.

Catra twitches, but doesn’t make a scene about it.

“Loops?” Shadow Weaver repeats and sharply plucks a flower off the plant. “Interesting. No, no, I’m not aware of repeating time in the classical sense. But I can feel that something is off with the flow of time.” She observes the flower for a moment, then drops it on the ground. “Something to do with that First Ones ruin, at a guess.”

She steps on the flower, pointedly grinding it down to nothing against the floor. Catra looks away, feeling a little sick.

Glimmer nods, and takes another step forward. “There’s an artifact inside,” she explains, “that’s been reactivated somehow. It… builds up over a few hours and eventually explodes. And when it does… today restarts.”

Shadow Weaver moves to another plant, picking up a pair of gardening shears — the fact that she’s allowed sharp cutting objects makes Catra want to sit Glimmer down for an extensive lecture on how-to-keep-war-prisoners.

“And only you and Catra—” she says Catra’s name the way she always has: like she’d like nothing more than to crush it under her shoe the way she just did with that flower —” remember what happened?”

“Yes,” Glimmer says, sharp. “Do you know how to stop it?”

Part of Catra is grateful for how steely and to-the-point Glimmer is being. Another part of her is hissing to just get out of here.

Shadow Weaver laughs a little — Catra clenches her fists — and starts snipping at branches. “I am good,” she says, “but I’m not all-knowing.” Snip. “I can guess how it works from the irregularities in the flow of time and my knowledge of First Ones’ technology but…” Snip. “When it comes to dismantling it, well, I would have to see it.”

“Over my dead body,” Catra snaps.

The look in Shadow Weaver’s eyes suggest that that wouldn’t be too grievous an obstacle to overcome.

“You’re not going there,” Glimmer confirms, horrifically reassuring. “But you said you can guess how it works?”

Shadow Weaver puts down the shears and ruffles the leaves, eyeing her work critically. “To some extent,” she amends, and turns to Glimmer. “All First Ones technology functions following a similar principle. They were obsessed with capturing Etheria’s magic — they wanted to harness it through their technology, to use it for their own purposes.” She shakes her head, and drifts to her spellcaster’s basin. “They never quite managed it to the extent they wanted. Never quite had what it took to wield such power. Their machines couldn’t measure up.”

Catra resists the urge to roll her eyes — barely — but Glimmer drifts closer, eyes wide and interested. “So it hoards magic?”

Shadow Weaver hums in confirmation, and spins a finger lazily over the glowing surface of the liquid. In the wake of the movement, a trail of dark blue light rises, smoking into the air.

“Most likely, their device harnesses some of Etheria’s magic at baseline. After all the recent —” her gaze turns on Catra, her voice sharp as a blade — “interdimensional disturbances, however, there is a chance it will have reactivated, and started pulling in more power.” Slowly, the light trail coils into a sphere, which turns brighter and brighter. “At a certain point, the device isn’t capable of withstanding the amount of magic it has gathered, and releases it.” The sphere goes up in a small, controlled flash and vanishes.

“But why does it loop time like this?” Glimmer insists, knuckles white as she grabs the edge of the basin. “Why are we the only ones who notice?”

Shadow Weaver sighs. “The First Ones had many aspirations. I wouldn’t be surprised to find they attempted to construct a machine that would allow them to control time. They clearly didn’t succeed, as otherwise I’m sure we would find Etheria’s history to be quite different from the one we know. But I also wouldn’t be surprised to find they didn’t remove the traces of their attempts.”

“So this artifact is, what?” Glimmer asks. “A failed science experiment?”

“Not completely failed,” Shadow Weaver corrects with a raised finger. “Clearly, they mastered some of the temporal components. Presumably, proximity to magic — your magic, most likely, seeing as you’re aware of its work — reactivated those mechanisms. As for Catra…” She tosses a desultory glance in her direction. “Proximity, perhaps? Chance, certainly.”

Catra takes a deep, long breath. You’d think that after a lifetime of being reminded of how ordinary and unremarkable she is, she’d be used to it. Unfortunately, the contempt still lands like a slap.

“I shot at it when it exploded the first time,” Glimmer mutters, looking lost in thought. She turns to look at Catra. “Do you remember?”

It takes Catra a moment — the incident in question is very far in her memory now. But eventually, she seizes on it: her back to the stone, the fiery glow of Glimmer’s magic aimed straight at her.

Shadow Weaver makes a noise of confirmation. “All a question of timing,” she says simply, like they’re talking about the starsdamned weather.

Another thread of Catra’s patience snaps. “That doesn’t answer the question,” she grits out. “How do we stop it?”

Shadow Weaver shrugs. “The problem comes from the energy it’s gathered — there’s too much of it. If the amount of energy is stabilized, the device will presumably stabilize in turn, and time will stop resetting.”

“So we can destroy it.” Glimmer sounds relieved. She turns back to Shadow Weaver. “Right? If we destroy it, it’ll release the energy it’s stored and it won’t explode.”

Catra feels the knot in her throat release a little as relief settles over her.

Shadow Weaver, as is her habit, promptly crushes it to dust. “Destroy it?” she repeats incredulously. “Why would you want to destroy it?”

Glimmer blinks at her in surprise. “Well… Wouldn’t it work?”

Shadow Weaver makes a dismissive gesture. “Of course. The energy would release, probably through one last reset, and then the device would remain destroyed and time would carry on as normal. But your Majesty… think of the loss it would represent.”

“Loss?” Glimmer echoes. “I—”

Shadow Weaver glides to Glimmer’s side, reaching for the princess’ hands — Catra has to resist the urge to hiss. “Think of it, your Majesty,” the woman says, her tone breathy with something Catra knows very, very well — it’s the thirst for power she always displayed whenever she spoke to Adora. “With a device such as this, with time yours to control… Victory would be assured.”

Glimmer steps back, breaking Shadow Weaver’s hold — but there’s a frown on her face. “We don’t control it,” she says. “You said the device never worked.”

“The First Ones never managed it,” Shadow Weaver points out. “But they didn’t have your power or your skill at their disposal.”

“Me?” Glimmer sounds dumbfounded.

“Of course.” Again, her voice gains that syrupy quality that makes Catra want to slash at something. “With your connection to the runestone, and now, to the device itself… I have no doubt you could make it work.”

“Sparkles,” Catra says, low and tense — a warning.

But Glimmer holds up a hand to stop her. “How,” she says, features tense, voice hard. “How could I possibly—”

“You could channel the excess energy,” Shadow Weaver continues, a spider weaving its web. “Guide it out of the device to stabilize it. And once it is stable…” She shrugs. “With guidance, I’m sure you could make it yours to control.”

And there’s the catch. Catra snarls. “With guidance,” she repeats scathingly. “Yours, you mean.”

The sorceress shakes her head, like Catra’s just an annoying fly she’d like nothing more than to swat, but yet not important enough to bother with. “Think of it, your Majesty. Temporal magic is the most complex of all — even your father never reached the skill and power that would be required to control the flow of time. But… I truly believe you could. Your determination alone…”

“What does that mean?” Glimmer cuts in, sharp and defensive and not looking at Catra. “Control the flow of time?”

Shadow Weaver waves her fingers elegantly. “Anything you like. Pausing time — long enough to rescue bystanders from an attack. Slowing it for your enemies, to entrap them.” She pauses, and drops her bomb. “Reversing it, perhaps, even. Undoing the losses that have struck.”

Fuck. “Glimmer—” Catra says but she knows she’s too late. Glimmer’s eyes are sharp and narrowed, but there’s no mistaking the defiant, determined glow of hope in them.

“Reversing?” she repeats, like she can’t quite believe what she’s hearing. “You think I could reverse time if I stabilize this thing?”

Shadow Weaver inclines her head. “I see no reason why not.”

Catra grabs Glimmer by the shoulders and forces her to look at her. “Glimmer,” she says again, serious and intent. “Remember how I came here specifically to point out when she’d try to manipulate you into doing something stupid? This is that moment.”

Glimmer shakes her head and tries to break out of Catra’s grip. “I’m not stupid, Catra.”

Catra doesn’t let go. “Listen to me,” she grits out. “She is lying. She wants you to stabilize it so she can get access to this thing. She doesn’t know a thing about what you could do with it.”

“Ah, Catra,” Shadow Weaver breathes, her name heavy with disappointment. “Despite my best efforts, I never did manage to teach you to see the bigger picture, did I?”

Against her better judgment, Catra turns her head to face her, barely resisting the urge to bare her teeth. “Oh, you taught me about the bigger picture alright,” she hisses. “Especially the one where you use others for your benefit.”

“Hm,” Shadow Weaver says, managing to fill the sound with contempt. “As opposed to your own selfless, morally-motivated actions, I’m sure.” She shakes her head. “Your Majesty… She has no idea what you’re capable of. In fact, her best interest lies in your underestimating yourself. But a real queen doesn’t let anyone decide what’s best for her.”

It’s so transparent Catra doesn’t understand how Glimmer isn’t laughing in her face — but then again, even Adora, who grew up witnessing it, never really saw Shadow Weaver’s manipulation for what it was. “Glimmer—” she starts, but the princess shakes her head.

“If this thing can be stabilized,” she breathes, eyes wide, “then I have to try. I have to, Catra.”

The last shred of her patience snaps. “No you don’t. You have no idea what this will do. Even if it works, which it won’t, you have no idea what she’ll use it for. You can’t trust her, and you can’t control her.”

“I don’t have a choice!” Glimmer shouts. Her eyes gleam with unshed tears. “Catra, I don’t have a choice. The last few months—” her voice breaks. “I have to reverse it. I have to fix it. It’s my responsibility. If I don’t, Etheria will fall, and it will be all my fault.” She shakes her head. “This is my only chance, and I am taking it.”

It’s hopeless to even try and change her mind — Catra knows it, just as well as she knows that she has to do it. She may not be a sorceress, and she might not know all this magic bullshit, but she can see where this leads, and she has the feeling it’s not somewhere they’ll be coming back from. She opens her mouth, tightening her grip on Glimmer’s arms…

But before she can work out what to say, the air fills with the tremors of the now familiar explosion, and white light sears everything away.

*

Catra wakes to the sound of the world ending.

And this time, it doesn’t stop.

Chapter Text

By the time Catra makes it to the ruin, the whole thing is awash with a bright, pink-white glow that seems to radiate from the inside. Worse, the ravine is shaking, wracked with tremors that open up fault lines in the dry ground, from which more light breaks free, blinding and unforgiving.

Catra hops from her skiff, eyes wide as she takes in the spectacle. Beneath her feet, the ground is lit up in obscure patterns, lines and circles that look like First Ones’ writing, unreadable and searing away the sand laid atop them.

Whatever this is, it certainly doesn’t look like it’s stabilizing anything. Unsurprisingly, Shadow Weaver had gotten it wrong — or had gotten exactly right and lied her face off about it. Same result, in the end.

For once, there’s no fighting taking place in front of the building. Instead, it’s all shouts and chaos as Horde soldiers and rebels run away in the face of the increasing quakes and collapsing rubble. For some reason, she gets the feeling that soon, there’s not going to be anywhere to run to. She takes off into the fray, making straight for the building.

She’s almost made it to the side entrance when she’s stopped by a familiar voice, calling to her in just-as-familiar panic: “Catra!”

She turns, and it’s Adora, sprinting towards her through the mess of falling rocks and opening fissures. She stops in front of Catra, eyes wide, ponytail disheveled, breathing ragged.

“Adora—” Catra starts, not entirely sure where she’s going with this, really not in the mood to have to convince Adora that she’s not responsible for this and is in fact running out of time to stop it.

But Adora surprises her, eyes steely, voice steady. “It’s Glimmer, isn’t it?” Her gaze turns to the looming structure in front of them. “She’s in there. She must be. In that chamber.”

Catra’s jaw drops. “Wait,” she says, barely resisting the urge to grab her, scanning her face. “You remember? You remember the inside of that thing? You remember the other loops?”

“I don’t know.” Adora shakes her head, features creased in pain. “I… There’s so much of it.” She drives the heel of her hand into her temple. “And it’s all in flashes, and none of it makes sense. We’ve already done this, haven’t we? Today. This day.”

“Yeah,” Catra breathes, stepping back. Somehow, she gets the feeling that this is not a good sign. “More times than I can count.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Adora says, and she meets Catra’s gaze, her eyes blue and intense. “But… this is wrong.”

A spark of impatience catches in Catra’s chest. “Yeah,” she grits, and makes to turn back towards the entrance. “I’m aware.”

But Adora holds her back, a hand around her wrist — Catra has to work not to flinch at the contact. She can’t remember the last time Adora touched her outside of a fight.

“You don’t understand,” she says, and Catra knows her well enough to know she’s repressing very real panic. “The First Ones… They had a weapon of some kind.”

“A weapon?” Catra does not like the sound of that.

“I don’t know the specifics. I’ve been trying to work it out, but all the data I have is corrupted or missing.” Adora holds her gaze, steady. Her grip around Catra’s wrist burns. “But it’s why Mara — the original She-Ra, it’s why she put us in this dimension in the first place. Light Hope says it’s because she went crazy, but I don’t think so. I think she was trying to keep us safe, and I think maybe, whatever she was trying to keep us safe from had to do with something the First Ones did.” Adora tightens her grip, like she’s not sure Catra understands how urgent this is. “Catra, whatever it is, she thought it would destroy… everything. She died for this.”

Catra stares at her, eyes wide. “You think this is the thing? This machine?” She takes a step back, breaking Adora’s hold. Her skin still tingles. “It can’t be. The portal — The portal failed. We’re still in the empty dimension. It didn’t work.”

“I don’t know.” Adora’s gaze drifts to the symbols glowing on the ground. “But maybe having opened a portal even for a little bit was enough to reactivate it, somehow. Maybe this isn’t the weapon itself, but just a part of it. Whatever it is, no matter why it’s activating now, we have to stop it.”

A quake shakes the ground beneath them with a deafening rumble, almost sending them down a nearby fissure.

Catra can’t quite breathe right. “Shadow Weaver,” she manages, almost shouting to be heard above the cracks of breaking stone. “She said the artifact is… I don’t know, storing magic somehow. She’s the one who convinced Glimmer that she could stabilize it, instead of destroying it.”

Adora’s face turns hard, eyes like chips of ice. “She was lying,” she says. “Mara died for this — if it could be stabilized, then she would have done it. We have to destroy it before it’s too late.”

Catra nods and opens her mouth to reply, but she’s interrupted when, with an earsplitting crack and a world-shaking tremor, a section of the ravine collapses down. Screams echo, as people who’d been trying to flee the ruin start sliding down one of the glowing crevices.

“Go,” Catra says, and Adora, who’d been watching in horror, turns shocked eyes on her.

“What?”

Catra gestures at the trapped people. “You can help them, so go help them. I’ll fix this.”

“Catra—”

“I will.” Adora is still staring at her, and Catra forces herself to look her in the eye. “I know you have no reason to believe me right now, or to trust me, but…”

“That’s not—” Adora cuts her off, but Catra shakes her head.

“It is, and that’s fine. I get it. But I’m not… I’m not letting this happen again. I’ll stop her. You go get as many people as far away from here as you can.”

For a moment, she thinks Adora will argue. That she’ll turn that icy look on her, and tell her there’s no way she’ll trust Catra, of all people, to stop this before it’s too late. That she’ll say she’s going and saving Glimmer and all of Etheria, and that Catra shouldn’t stand in her way. Maybe she’ll remind her that this is probably all her fault, after the portal debacle, and push her into one of the open rifts just for good measure.

She’d have the right to, really — even Catra can see that.

But she doesn’t.

Instead, she looks at Catra — steady, and scared, and so familiar it hurts. She looks at Catra the way she did when they were kids, when she couldn’t sleep after the older cadets told them scary stories and sneaked into Catra’s bed because she knew Catra would laugh it off — even though deep down, she was just as scared. She looks at her the way she did when they made cadet: proud, anxious in the face of the unknown, but trusting that Catra would have her back, always.

The way she did, when she promised Catra they’d be there for each other, no matter what.

“Okay,” Adora says, and nods. “Good luck.”

“You too,” Catra breathes, and watches Adora walk away from her to save others, the way she always does.

But this time, Catra has her own saving to do.

Not wasting another second, she sprints to the side-entrance and, to her unease, finds the wall gone, a concealed door revealed and open, leading into a corridor sparking with bright pink flashes.

She doesn’t hesitate.

As she runs through corridors and chambers, she finds the whole security system is deactivated. Whatever Glimmer is doing seems to have overloaded the ruin entirely, every wall sparking with bright, magical energy, as Catra makes it past inexistent spiders; over a newly materialized — or always hidden — bridge over the pit; past a drained water vortex; through a deactivated puzzle room. She doesn’t stop until she reaches the device chamber.

Only once she’s made it through the door does she skid to a stop, horror freezing her in her tracks.

The room is almost too much to take, pink-tinged white flashes of lightning reflecting off every surface, coursing with sparks. The glowing orb is floating higher than ever before, angrily flashing and writhing, and for a moment Catra thinks it’s the source of the lightning, but then her eyes catch on what stands beneath it, so bright to be almost blinding.

Art by Kuurankaiho

Because beneath the orb is Glimmer, hovering in the air, cape floating behind her, head thrown back, her entire body lit to blinding by the same energy. Her eyes are glowing white and uniform, her hands radiate a continuous flow of energy to the orb, and her mouth is open in a silent scream.

Except — no. The flow of energy isn’t going to the orb, it’s coming from the orb, and streaming into Glimmer. It’s the source of her power, what’s driving the overload.

You could channel the energy. Guide it out of the device and stabilize it.

Shadow Weaver’s words come to mind, hissed and syrupy, and Catra feels her throat close. Glimmer is channeling the energy alright, but it doesn’t look like it’s stabilizing anything. The device doesn’t seem to be running out of energy at all; if anything, it’s glowing brighter than before, like it’s channeling as much as Glimmer’s taking, if not more.

Looks like Adora was right — this thing can’t be stabilized. And if she’s to be believed, it’s not just Glimmer who’s at risk. It’s everything.

Bracing herself, Catra takes a step forward onto the walkway. Magic swirls and whirls past her in bright, high-energy bursts and gusts of howling wind, pulling at her clothes, at her fur, at her hair, nearly sending her toppling over the edge. She has to cling to the railing, pulling herself forward with one hand over the other. It’s slow, laborious progress, that only increases in difficulty the closer she gets to the central platform.

“Glimmer!” she shouts, her words lost over the threatening whistles and crackles of magic. She grunts against a particularly strong gust of wind and tries again, her voice cracking: “Glimmer!”

Glimmer raises her head, blinking against too-white eyes. “You can’t stop me,” she says, her voice echoing over the cacophony, magical and wrong and somehow still audibly in pain.

“This won’t work!” Catra makes it another step, and another. “This thing is just going to keep channeling more magic the more you drain away. You’re not going to stabilize it!”

“I can do it.”

“No you can’t!” Catra’s struggling to breathe in the storm. “It can’t be done.” She throws her arm back towards the door. “Even the original She-Ra couldn’t do it! There’s no stopping it, and if you keep trying you’re just going to destroy everything.”

Glimmer blinks, and her eyes dim down, back to their usual color. “Mara? How can you—” she starts, and then shakes her head. “No. No, you have no idea— I can do it. I can.”

“Everything is already going to shit out there, and it’s only going to get worse!” Catra can hear the desperation in her own voice, but she doesn’t know how to make Glimmer understand. “You have to stop this. You have to destroy this thing before it’s too late.”

“You don’t understand,” Glimmer shouts, and her voice breaks on the word, the tears on her cheeks reflecting the light around her. “I have to make this work. I need this thing. I need it to win.”

And just like that, Catra understands.

She understands why Glimmer’s single-minded stubbornness hit her so hard — why she knew, instinctively, what the princess was going to do. Why she knew that even faced with the reality of the destruction she was causing, Glimmer wouldn’t stop. That there would be no stopping her, not through reason, not through pleading, not through anything.

She knows this. She knows what it’s like, to stand there, with victory within reach after so long, and she knows that no consequence, no matter how dire, no matter how real, can make a difference in the face of that.

Of all the ironic twists the universe could have thrown at her, this one might be the worst. Because suddenly, she might as well be Adora — Glimmer might as well be Catra — and this thing might as well be a portal on the verge of opening.

She stops, just at the edge of the platform, head craned up and back to look at Glimmer, claws digging grooves into the metal railing as she struggles to hang on.

“Listen to me,” she shouts, and her voice is raw, the words tearing right through her. “I’ve been where you are, right now. I know exactly what you’re talking about.”

Glimmer shakes her head. “You don’t—”

“I do. And I promise you, it is not worth it.” A tremor wracks the building and the walkway shakes, almost throwing her off, but she clings on. “If you keep going, you’re going to destroy everything.”

“What do you care?” Glimmer throws back, but her voice is broken, her features twisted in pain. “You’re still trying to destroy everything that matters.” She breaks off with a shout of pain when a particularly bright flash of light courses from the orb to her. “Maybe everything is better off destroyed than in your hands.”

“Yeah!” Catra yells back. “Maybe! Maybe it would be! And you’re right, I don’t particularly care about the world right now, or about being in it.” She shakes her head, ignores the way her eyes burn, and forces herself to continue. “But I’ve been where you are right now, and so I can tell you where it leads.” She gestures at herself, only to promptly grab onto the railing again. “This! This is what it leads to! Glimmer, you might win, but it will never, ever feel like winning. Not like this.” She swallows, past the choking weight in her throat. “Take it from someone who wishes she’d lost.”

Glimmer glances to the energy source, and back to her. “I—” she starts, and breaks off, squeezing her eyes shut. “I can’t—”

“You’re not me,” Catra continues, relentless. “You can make the right choice. You can win, the right way. You can change things.”

A flash of light flares, forcing her to close her eyes, but she continues anyway:

“I did what I did,” she shouts, “because that’s who I am. Because no matter what I do, it’s never going to be right. Because everything I do is for the wrong reasons, because I’ve never been more than that. It’s who I am. But you’re not like that — you’re not alone. You have people who care. People who need you. Who rely on you.” Catra lifts her chin and stares Glimmer down. “People you can’t let down. So don’t.”

The orb flares, as though angered by Catra’s words — light bursts, iridescent and blinding, and Glimmer screams in pain as it courses up her arms, through her chest, radiates out of her in a searing burst. The building shakes again, and Catra hears the echo of collapsing stone in the distance.

“Don’t let them down,” she whispers, and falls to her knees, holding Glimmer’s gaze until the princess closes her eyes with a sob.

For a moment, there’s nothing but the light, time suspended into nothing.

And then, with a scream, Glimmer brings her hands together, and reverses the flow of energy.

Catra ducks down onto the walkway, hands over her head, eyes squeezed shut — but even like this, the light sears itself across her vision, blinding and blazing as everything, reality itself, is wrenched apart. The magical winds ratchet up into a hurricane, screaming in her ears and almost tossing her off into the pit below and then —

Like a flipped switch, it’s over.

Slowly, Catra raises her head and opens her eyes. The room is a wreck, torn pieces of machinery thrown everywhere. The light is dim, coming only from what once was the shifting, glowing power source, but is now only a small pinprick of white light. The room is silent, save for a very faint, continuous whine that Catra can’t place.

She doesn’t need to be a sorcerer or an engineer to know what that means.

It’s over. The device is destroyed.

Gingerly, she stands, careful not to put too much weight on the now slightly ragged walkway. It creaks under foot, every noise echoing in the too-large, too-quiet room, but it holds, and she makes it to the central platform.

In the middle of the wrecked machinery, Glimmer lies unmoving. Her eyes are closed, and there are faint traces of blood that seem to have dripped from her ears, drying in her hair and along her neck.

Careful not to jostle the debris too much, Catra makes her way over and kneels next to the queen of Bright Moon. To her relief, Glimmer starts shifting immediately, squeezing her eyes shut tight with a groan of pain.

“Did it work?” she asks, slurring her words a little.

Catra glances up at what remains of the power source. It looks a little brighter, and the ambient whine is getting louder with every passing second. “Think so,” she says. “Definitely was a good lightshow, at least. Very dramatic.”

Glimmer smirks and opens her eyes. “I think you mean regal,” she corrects, though the primness in her voice is offset by how wrecked she sounds. She tries to sit up, but quickly gives up with another pained sound. She squints at the light above them. “Looks like power’s building. Must be that final reset Shadow Weaver talked about.”

“Or maybe we’re just about to die horribly for good this time,” Catra deadpans.

“Or that.” Glimmer sighs and glances at Catra. “Well, either way, I guess this is it when it comes to the two of us working together.”

“Looks like it.”

Glimmer studies her for a moment, and then, like she’s giving a major concession, says: “I take back what I said about preferring to work with the giant worms from the Northern Reach. It was better working with you.”

“Wow,” Catra says, one eyebrow up. “Don’t get sappy on me now, Sparkles.”

Glimmer huffs. “I still would have rather worked with — fuck, what’s his name again?”

“Kyle?”

“Kyle.” She pauses, and then adds: “But only a little.” She shrugs. “Guess it wasn’t… completely horrible to work with you.”

“Yeah,” Catra agrees mildly. “Maybe we’ll do it again one day?”

“Fuck no,” Glimmer says emphatically, and Catra laughs.

“Fuck no,” she agrees, and Glimmer laughs too, small and genuine and tired.

The whine is turning piercing now, the light edging closer to blinding.

“Catra,” Glimmer says, and something about her tone makes Catra’s shoulders tense. “About what you said—”

“Don’t—”

“Yes,” Glimmer interrupts, and grips Catra’s forearm — but her hold is lax, weak in a way that unsettles Catra more than she likes. “You’re wrong, you know.”

Catra rolls her eyes, but her heart’s not really in it. “That makes a change.”

Glimmer doesn’t take the bait. “You can do things right,” she says, her gaze intense. “Everyone can do at least one good thing in their life. If they want to.”

“Who said I want to?” Catra quips, but she’s no longer looking at Glimmer.

Mercifully, Glimmer lets it go, and releases Catra’s arm. “I guess that’s for you to decide.”

The light above them pulses once, and Catra squints, grateful for the distraction.

“Think we’ll remember this?” she muses, eyeing the remains of the power source warily.

“Probably not.” Glimmer tilts her head to glance at the wreckage around them. “The energy’s been released, but to clear everything out, it’s going to reset everything, and that will destroy the device for good. I think the only reason we remembered anything the first time was because my magic connected us to the machine at the exact second it went off, and kept us tethered to it through the loops.” She shrugs. “No more device, nothing to be tethered to.”

“Adora remembered,” Catra says, thinking back to the look Adora had given her up there, scared but trusting. “Some of it, at least.”

“Huh.” Glimmer thinks for a moment, squinting in the now too-bright light. “Maybe some of it bled through the resets when I started siphoning the excess energy. I guess that means we could remember some of it, too.” She pauses. “Nothing detailed though, I’m pretty sure. Maybe just… A sense of the biggest things, you know? Leftover instinct, or something.”

“Like a sixth sense that says try to avoid death spiders if possible?” Catra suggests and Glimmer snorts.

“Exactly.” She blows out a determined breath, and fixes her gaze on the power source above them. It glows bright as the sun by now, lighting the whole room into haziness. “Alright then. Let’s do this.”

“See you on the other side,” Catra breathes.

The last thing she sees before white overtakes them is Glimmer’s grin.

*

*

Catra startles awake.

For a disorienting, disturbing second, she has no idea where she is. Her mind supplies images of blinding white, of dust and sand, of bright pink magic, all nonsensical and confusing.

She shakes her head and her vision clears. She’s in the control center, in the Fright Zone. She must have fallen asleep waiting for the last shipment from Salineas.

Feeling weirdly out of place, she runs her hands over her face and then stares at them. They look… fine? Normal. She’s not sure why that’s as unsettling as it is.

The room is quiet — deafeningly so. Her head hurts, a pounding, drumming sort of pain she suspects is never going to completely go away.

She stands, and for a second, can’t help but stay in place. There’s a strange anticipation in the air, like maybe something is going to happen. Something important.

Seconds tick by, and the feeling passes. With another shake of the head, she heads for the door. Maybe Lonnie will have finished the first shipment review.

Without a glance back, Catra leaves the room.

Chapter Text

Horde Prime’s ship is cold and bright. Icy metal floor, icy metal bulkheads, all lit by clean, harsh white lights that make her flinch at every corner. The windows, large and impeccable, show only darkness, speckled with faraway dots of light.

Stars. Who’d have thought those were actually real?

Catra walks through the silent corridors, trying not to flinch at the click of her claws against metal. She’s allowed her freedom, to some degree. She can go almost anywhere — engine room, bridge, whatever other room a spaceship might have.

But somehow, her steps once again take her to the one place that’s been decreed to be off-bound.

The forcefield that seals off the cell glows a translucent green, reflecting off the surrounding deck plating. The area seems deserted enough, and so, Catra crosses the corridor to stand in front of the energy field.

Sparkles is there, of course, standing and staring mutely at her dinner. Catra had made a point not to be nearby during her little talk with Prime, not wanting to be caught eavesdropping so soon after being caught trespassing here, but whatever he told the queen can’t be good: her shoulders are hunched, her expression defeated.

Out of a reflex she can’t quite explain, Catra lifts a hand and turns the field transparent.

Sparkles raises her head and her features contort in anger — for a flash, the vision is strangely comforting. “What?” she snarls. “Come to mock me some more? You heard Horde Prime, I’m supposed to be alone. So leave—me—alone!” She throws her food tray at the forcefield, and Catra jolts back.

She blinks at the slowly dripping food, and then turns to walk away.

“Wait.”

Glimmer’s voice is small, barely audible — but Catra finds herself stopping anyway.

“I’m sorry. Can… Can you stay? Just a little.”

Catra should laugh. Catra should walk away, not even turning, not even acknowledging her. Catra should do anything other than what she does.

Without turning back around, she says, “Okay.”

Without turning back around, she sits cross-legged on the floor, back to the odd, humming warmth of the forcefield.

Without turning back around, she does as Glimmer asked, and stays.

For a moment, there’s only silence, and then she hears the shift of fabric. The next second, the hum at her back gets a little stronger, like it’s pushing back against her, and Catra knows it means the princess has sat down too, her back to Catra’s, nothing but green energy between them.

She should go. There’s nothing there for her. Glimmer and her aren’t friends, and even if they were, Catra’s exactly where she was supposed to be. She’s won. She shouldn’t be wasting her time with a defeated enemy.

But for some reason… She’d always thought winning would feel different.

The deck plating underneath her is icy cold.

She leans her head back against the forcefield with a slow, controlled exhale.

She should go.

Instead, she opens her mouth, and says, “Do you ever wonder—” She cuts herself off.

“Wonder what?”

Catra closes her eyes. “Nothing. It’s stupid.”

There’s a shift in the pressure at her back, and Catra feels Glimmer’s gaze on the back of her head like a laser. “Wonder what?”

Catra sighs, and finishes the thought. “If we could have worked together.” She shakes her head — she’s not sure where that one came from. “If the circumstances had been different, I mean. If we’d, I don’t know. Met differently.” She looks down at her hands without seeing them. “Been different people.”

Silence falls, and then the pressure comes back, presumably as Glimmer sits back against the forcefield. “Nah,” she says, light and airy. “No way in hell.”

Somehow, Catra is certain the princess is smiling.

She snorts. “Yeah,” she agrees in a whisper. “Agreed. No way.”