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~~
Bow stops thinking about Failsafes and Arxias and Friends of Mara the second he hears his tracker pad. He answers before it can ring a second time.
“Queen Glimmer,” The caller says quickly, immediately. “Requesting Queen Glimmer.”
Bow flinches. The sight of green, glowing eyes will never not bother him, even over a call, even after all their time aboard Darla together. But Bow sees other things. Her face and hair, absolutely sopping wet. Her perpetually content smile turned upside down, her ears hanging lower than their usual flatness in line with her eyes, and Bow notices these things, he sees them especially when they emerge from people like Catra.
And every time he does, nothing has ever stopped him from asking that next question. That instinct. That programming.
“Woah,” Bow answers, stupidly, as he turns to show the screen to his party. Is he so different? “Are you okay?”
“Your concern is irrelevant,” Catra yells back, voice calm but raised over the sound of rushing, hissing water. “Requesting immediate -“ She gets splashed in the face, “I say again, immediate evacuation. Requesting Queen Glimmer!”
“She’s here,” Glimmer says. She steps to Bow’s side, brushing his shoulder. Bow feels the way his dads exchange glances behind them but whether it’s because of them, or because of Catra-
“Prime caught us in a snare, and Adora is trapped in the sanctum,” Catra explains. “I cannot reach her, but I can play the distraction for the Salinean princess.”
Mermista, Bow thinks, heart thumping. She’s chipped, too. Mermista and the Fright Zone’s sewers are a bad combination.
He scans the background of the feed. Catra’s crouched on the control room’s centre console - in the detention level, Bow remembers, from his time imprisoned there - and so is Melog, body burning red. The console is barely peeking out of the water in the room, the water that’s slowly flowing in. The water that’s slowly rising.
“The water’s rising.”
“I cannot reach Adora,” Catra repeats, tone of voice always the same. “Save her. Acknowledge my request.”
“Catra-“
“Acknowledge,” Catra repeats again, green eyes glowering. Glimmer snarls.
“We’ll get her out, but not without-”
The call hangs up.
Message received. Bow catches Glimmer’s eye, and they both know what the other is thinking, but there’s no time to dwell. Glimmer slides off his shoulder and into the glow and glam of her powers, bursting into motes of pink light and vanishing into thin air. Like she has a thousand times before.
Bow shudders. He’s had dreams ever since Prime took her, of waking up alone and searching all over the castle. Room to room, parapet to balcony, meeting room to the throne room. He only ever found her sparks, or the green fade of Prime’s tractor beam. He only ever found the evidence that she was there, right there, and he had just missed her. Every time Glimmer vanishes he feels ten times more alone, and a part of him worries she’ll never come back.
The dreams changed when they got Catra back. Glimmer appears everywhere he looks now, quick to say she was searching for him herself, quick to assure him that she’s not going anywhere, and then he looks elsewhere and finds another Glimmer who says the same thing, then he searches and finds another Glimmer, and then another and another until countless Glimmers are blinking out of the dark, blinking in all around him. Hanging off his shoulders. Souls scooped out.
The windows to them tinted a sick green.
“Was that one of the Horde?” Someone asks, snapping him out of his thoughts. On either side of him, boxing him in and bickering, are his own parents.
“I fear you’re right, Lance. Her eyes.”
“Stars, George, you're right, her eyes! What is she doing helping us?! Unless she is-“ Lance turns, lays his hurting gaze on Bow, the one he was somehow always afraid of before he told them he was a rebel fighter. “She might put poor Glimmer in danger!”
Bow groans and rolls his eyes.
“Catra won’t,” he grumbles, ignoring the flash of dreadful color in his dads’ eyes, courtesy of his own imagination. “It’s a long story.”
~~
Glimmer’s hand feels like it’s about to explode.
She keeps it there anyway, circulation be damned. Netossa needs the comfort, needs someone’s hand to hold while her wife’s lie at her sides in the makeshift infirmary. A corpse's hands can’t squeeze back. Neither can a stress ball.
Adora could do with three stress balls and a punching bag. Glimmer watches, pain in her hand and boredom on her face, long suffering the sight of her best friend hopping around on the other side of the waiting room, whispering The Phrase and splaying her hand out at the open air. Wisps of magic do flicker, but in lieu of summoning a seven-foot tall warrior lady, absolutely nothing happens, and Glimmer tells herself that watching this is not at all frustrating.
If Adora starts stretching in the waiting room - as if limbering up will somehow be the answer to summoning her new She-Ra form - Glimmer will refuse to shout ‘Adora, not in front of the potential widow’, as much as that tiny impatient part of her that tried to set off the Heart wants to. Things are tense like never before, and she is still Queen, and she must be prim and proper and hold restraint and keep it together. They might need She-Ra's healing. Adora doesn't need any more distractions, she could barely summon the sword in Erelandia, where they first fought Spinnerella.
When Catra tried to reassure Netossa - right after they took the town back, green-eyed like her wife was at the time - She-Ra had to get between them. Catra’s on the other side of the cave now, under guard from Frosta and Melog, in case she tries to say Spinny’s happier again.
And because Glimmer heard Perfuma scream at her, vilely, for carving Scorpia’s eye out.
We don’t hurt our friends, she said, in many different ways, none of them calm, and Sea Hawk and Wrong Hordak had to hold her back. And now Perfuma’s on the other other side of the cave.
And her fury fell on deaf ears. Catra simply smoothed her wet hair back, praised the light for their survival and sat there, menacingly continuing to wait for her blonde deity or whatever it is that fucking chip's programmed into her. Glimmer remembers how Scorpia pleaded for her not to hurt Catra, back before Prime, back at the end of the last war that meant nothing and now Scorpia’s chipped, and missing an eye, because Catra’s chipped too and neither was ever going to hold back in an all-out fight.
Stars, what a fucking nightmare. Can it stop, maybe? What’s so hard about that? What the fuck needs to happen before things can start getting better again?
Glimmer squeezes Netossa’s hand even harder, causing her to turn and wince at Glimmer now, at the buzzing ball of energy that is the Queen of Bright Moon, actively wishing for one fucking thing to just turn out fucking right.
Just one.
Right now.
Please?
Bow answers her prayer by pinning the tent flap against the wall.
Netossa’s up on her feet and out of her grip before Glimmer can drop them both there herself. Glimmer lets her go, blinks, feels her power literally work its magic, and finds herself second at Spinny’s bedside. By the time Adora and Bow join them, Netossa is on her knees, clasping the wind princess’ hand, whispering something like a prayer.
Glimmer locks eyes with Entrapta - well, with the bug-eyes of Entrapta’s welding mask - looking up from her tracker pad.
And then Entrapta lifts up the mask.
And there’s a soft smile on her face.
And she holds out a tiny chip, poised in her pink-hair fingers.
Glimmer turns. The green veins across Spinny’s pink face are gone. Her deep blue pupils are visible, are back, and disbelieving, like she doesn’t know where she is, until she does.
Until Netossa wraps around her.
Spinnerella clamps her arms around her wife's shoulders, tight. She squeezes her eyes shut to keep the tears in. The wives weep into each others’ shoulders, and Glimmer finds a weight over her weary hand.
Bow’s hand.
She looks up and he's smiling, and she finds that it's because she's smiling, and Glimmer’s heart soars.
Something’s turned out right.
They can still save the others.
There’s still time.
Nobody notices the hand snatching the chip out of Entrapta’s hair. Nobody notices the scientist being dragged out of the room by the ends of her hair.
Glimmer only looks for Adora after she’s gone.
~~
“It's fascinating!”
“Huh?”
“Even permanently severed from Prime's control, scans show the chip’s connective fiber-optic nerve endings have intricately synchronised themselves with the synapses of the nervous-“
“Hey, you’re speaking too - um, can you -”
“Ohhhh, right. Sorry! It’s like fungus.”
“What?”
“You know about fungi, right? The chip’s not, actually like fungi, I am trying to make what Scorpia called a metaphor.”
“Uh-okay.”
“She came up with one when I explained my ideas for a paperwork bot. It helped her understand.”
“Right.”
"Metaphors help people understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Think of the spinal cord like a tree, with a fungus growing out of it - that’s the chip. It's a symbiotic relationship. The tree and the fungus will share nutrients, communicate, coexist together despite being two independent living entities-”
“So they can be separated? L-like you did with Spinnerella?”
“Nope!”
"W-why not?”
“Like the fungi, it's grown too far into the body of the tree. It has had the time to grow. The spinal cord and the chip are merged. Coexisting!”
“So you can’t deactivate the chip like with Spinnerella because-”
“-That would deactivate the spinal cord.”
"..."
"And extracting the chip would cause paralysis from the neck down."
"..."
"And the probability of her waking from the induced coma is approximately-"
“She-Ra can rip it out.”
"But her quality of life would drop dramatically if-"
"She healed her before, I could just-"
"She-Ra healed her body with the chip inserted. She-Ra recognises the chip."
"..."
"And she's completely healthy! Doing anything to remove it would only worsen her state."
"..."
"There's nothing to heal, Adora.”
“So what would you recommend?”
“Leaving the device in the - oh, right, metaphors, I mean - letting the fungus grow.”
Adora caught her eye for the first time in the whole conversation.
“But fungus kills trees.”
Entrapta was silent for a full, terrifying minute. She brought her mask down at the end of it.
“Not necessarily,” She said, low and soft. She always answered with a yes or a no in the past, with an unshakeable conclusion science cannot deny.
This sounded like a yes.
She’s probably still where Adora left her, back in the cave, rambling at her voice recorders about hive-minds. Or maybe she's in the field, figuring out a way to disconnect Mermista and Scorpia and Micah from them. Entrapta’s got Emily and Wrong Hordak to help her, and Glimmer’s got Bow, and Netossa’s got Spinnerella, and-
Adora isn’t watching where she’s going when she steps on the pressure pad.
She doesn’t realise she’s surrounded by fire until it’s already burning all around her.
Huh, she thinks. The first thing that hits her, after the initial confusion lifts, is sheer indifference.
Before she can even register that fur-covered arms are wrapped around her chest, she’s dragged out of the flaming air, tackled roughly to the ground. She lands flat on her back, sending a sharp lancing pain through her spine. She grunts, opens her eyes, and only then remembers that she was in danger.
That she should probably at least pretend to care about that.
“I’m okay! I’m okay,” She reassures, hollow but out loud, for everyone to hear. She can’t turn around to look at the others, pinned to the floor. She can’t move to look at anyone other than Catra.
Because Catra’s on top of her. Because Catra’s looking down at her with the green eyes, always the green eyes. With a look of concern Adora has to imagine.
Catra scans from Adora’s eyes to her unburnt ears, her nose, the tip of her ponytail. She sits up, straddles Adora to assess her functioning arms, stands for a view of her operational legs. Her assessment ended, smile unchanged, Catra holds out a hand.
“Come up off the floor, Adora,” Catra says, a gentle hum from her lips. “You are still whole,” Catra says.
Did you just jump into fire for me? Adora almost asks.
She doesn’t.
Adora complies, yanked up onto her feet with inhuman - inhybrid? - strength before Catra turns and follows the path through the chamber.
Just like that.
Melog brushes Adora’s side, red mane turning back to blue before following along, followed by Glimmer’s gentle touch to her wrist, and Bow’s on her bicep, and Castaspella gives her an apologetic smile and warns her about illusions and Adora watches them all go.
And Adora looks down at what she stole from Entrapta.
The spiked prongs on all sides of it had cut into her palm when she balled it up in her fist. The marble white body, the tiny translucent diamond at its centre.
It’s tiny. It’s changed everything. Adora imagines for a moment that the world is a fair and kind place, imagines that the device in her palm was Catra’s instead of Spinnerella’s, imagines her leading the party with a pair of mismatched eyes and a will of her own. Or on the other side of Etheria, razing an army to burn down Bright Moon. Or to help fight Prime.
So of course she jumped into fire for Adora. Without the chip, she’d let Adora burn. Or laugh at her burning ass. Or stop her from stepping on the pad in the first place and call her an idiot and roll her eyes. Maybe. Probably. Probably not.
There’s no way to know for certain. Adora can’t stop considering the possibilities. Can’t help but think and think and think.
Until a horribly familiar hand crawls up her back.
It settles just under the nape of her own neck. She shivers in its touch, at the wispy breaths and the superior voice from beneath her white-eyed mask. Adora can hardly look at her the whole time she speaks. She hears poison in place of words.
“Even tamed, she distracts you, she confuses you,” Shadow Weaver says, and Adora hates how the poison sounds right.
It spreads from her mind to her heart as they walk to the central chamber, as Adora sees the Failsafe, a thousand years in waiting, a giant crystal that floats and glows hot-blue, that splits apart in mid-air at her merely uttering a few words.
A code she can take into her body to absorb the power at the heart of the planet. A Failsafe that can defeat Prime, according to Shadow Weaver, once and for all.
Something for Adora to do.
A bear trap she staggers toward without question.
“Why must Adora let a curse loose upon herself?"
Catra asks the question flatly. She stands at Adora’s side, unmoving, hands and ears down, tail relaxed, not even the slightest mote of fury. Melog is at her back though, mane red, teeth long and sharp, mouth snarling with foam. Baring all of the bonded pair’s aggression.
Baring it directly at Shadow Weaver.
“You could have taken it, instead of passing it on like a parent’s sins to their child,” Catra continues, her head tilting, curious, Melog growling over her words. “You could have held the power. Why didn’t you?”
Only when caught and surrounded does Shadow Weaver explain, as Melog only growls louder, and the explanation is more poison. She-Ra’s the only one who can survive the Failsafe. Even if Adora cannot summon her, she can still release the power at Etheria’s heart. She can save her friends. She can still save everybody.
Adora wonders if she will die. Wonders whatever Shadow Weaver’s answer to that question would have been.
It feels like a yes.
Glimmer and Bow scream that she can’t possibly do this, or that she shouldn’t, Adora can’t tell. Castaspella wags her finger in Shadow Weaver’s face, protesting her lies, or something. Shadow Weaver drones and insists to the room that this is the only way forward, the only avenue of survival, probably, as Melog puts themself between her and Adora.
Adora takes in everything and nothing. The weight of the world bears down on her shoulders, steadily seeps into her brain, steadily broils to the tune of Melog’s hissing, steadily growing louder as the tension grasps the air and the Failsafe groans and everyone says her name and -
Adora screams for the world to just fucking stop.
Only Catra listens.
Since coming back from space and from Prime, Adora stayed up dutifully past her every bed-time, watching and waiting for the glow on the small of Catra’s neck to dim. Waiting for the green of her eyes to die. There are nights where it sleeps, moments where it flickers. But the light nary loosens its grip, not for long enough. Adora doesn’t dare mention when it does, doesn’t dare let Catra know that it can happen. She asks why she does not sleep, and Adora lies, and lies still, and stays up, and never sleeps, and hopes in every moment to talk to Catra.
Catra, who’s been in Adora’s life for longer than memory, who’s been a friend and a villain, who makes good decisions and bad ones. In every one of her hopes, Adora was on the other side of all of it, no matter how terrible a thing she could do, to greet her. Adora was always at the port with the setting moons ready to tie the boat off and catch Catra as she leaps from the bow and into her arms. Adora always dropped a rope to Catra, at the bottom of a well, waiting in endless time for a rope to pull her up.
Only Catra - but not Catra - stands silent and watchful with green-eyed indifference, ever-awaiting orders. Only Catra, but not the Catra who would probably try and drag Adora out of this place, all the way out of Etheria if things were different. Catra, but not the Catra stuck inside, feet in cement and the groundwater green and slowly filling in, slowly rising.
And Adora won't be there, later, to pull her out of that well. And something in Adora still feels hope.
So it has to be here.
So it has to be now.
Adora takes Catra’s limp hand. She pinches it, and the other, and squeezes them, and she shakes Catra’s shoulders as Micah appears, attacks her team with tendrils of dark magic. Adora takes Catra’s face in both of her hands and presses her forehead against hers, and Adora cries and says I need you and does everything short of screaming as the battle roars around her and the end of the world becomes more real.
Adora looks all over Catra, at her rigid ears and weighed-down tail, like how Catra assessed her after the fire, declaring Adora whole where she very much wasn’t because her throat is raw and her eyes are stinging wet, and Catra needs to open hers and show one blue and the other gold and she needs to do it now and Adora whispers pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease under her breath.
“Wake up,” She asks, she sobs, she begs, she orders. “Wake up, Catra.”
Catra answers with only the sweetest laugh Adora’s ever heard.
“Don’t be silly, Adora,” she says. “I’m wide awake.”
The poison spreads. The fungus grows, and there’s no more time. Adora shakes her head, squeezes her eyes shut, bites her own bottom lip instead of Catra’s.
She doesn’t know why she wants to do that.
She doesn’t get to do that.
They were doomed the moment the portal yawned open. They were doomed the moment Adora took up the sword. They were doomed the moment they first locked eyes in the barracks. They were doomed from the moment they were born.
“Don’t stop me,” Adora orders.
Adora can tell Catra to serve Melog from now on. Catra will listen. Catra’s place is at Adora’s side.
Adora’s place is with Mara and Angella. She walks into the failsafe, screams as it takes hold, lifting her into mid-air and into the nuclear blue of power.
It’s her primary function.
~~
In the night, she almost snaps at Melog to shut up.
She almost abhors the alien creature with every fibre of her ethereal body. She almost hisses at her constant companion, the shadow in the spotlight of her being. She almost wants to cast the beast away, rip the bond apart, silence the voice that questions her faith at every damnable moment of every day and even when they order her to sleep.
“Tell her how you feel,” they say again. They keep saying it again. She keeps resisting. She almost gives in this time.
Almost.
Instead she laughs, soft and quiet, and shakes her head at the notion. She doesn’t want. She doesn’t even almost want. She doesn’t hate Melog nor does she want them gone. She is indifferent to them. They exist, and so does she, like two roads in the same direction that never cross over.
No, of course she doesn’t want. There is nothing she desires, now that she has been graced. In service of the light, she has everything she could ever want.
“What is the light?” Melog asks, in a language only she can understand and a tone only she can hear, after they read her thoughts like a book on a lectern. “Why do you serve it?”
She hasn’t thought - doesn’t think - about that. It’s always blinding, always brilliant, washing away that poor girl that tried to burn everything in her fiery warpath. To make up for the hole in her being when she was left, alone, in a fight she could not tap out of.
"Who do you serve?"
The light is clarity. The light is images, a flashing slideshow of sun-coloured ponytails, turned golden in a flash of light. Of dark military uniforms, exchanged for armour of white and gold in a finger snap.
A mortal girl who is sometimes a goddess.
A mortal girl she has known her whole life, screaming bloody murder as she takes a curse upon her heart.
Screaming at her to stay there and not move.
The temptation is a test, and she passed. She still serves her. She will always serve her, even in-
She almost growls at the thought, replacing it with the customary laugh and shake of her head.
Which meant that she laughed, and it was loud.
“Catra?”
Adora shifts out of her bedroll, turning to look at her, zipped up tightly in her sleeping bag as she is. Adora's wheat-blonde hair is loose, splayed down the front and back of her shoulders, somewhat covering the glowing mark of her own sacrifice over her chest, even through her white compression top. A twinge of pain surges through her spine for waking Adora, fitful in her sleep as she has always been. Melog’s tail wags on the other side of Adora from her, mane brightening like a night lamp.
She tries to ignore Melog’s colours over Adora’s shoulder, despite being ordered to read them to tell her own mood. Orange apparently means that she is frustrated. That she is uncomfortable.
Heresy. She is neither.
“Go back to sleep, Adora,” she says, immediate, like a reflex. “Do not fret over your lowly servant.”
“Stop saying you're my-” Adora chastises, crossing her legs as she sits and looks at her, and examines her, dutifully lain down and rigid in her sleeping bag. As Melog ordered her to. "I am gonna fret if you're gonna be laughing to yourself all night.”
Curses. She can't say she wasn't, because that would be lying to Adora. She will never lie to Adora again. Except to serve and protect her.
"Is something funny?"
“I am only content with my faith,” she answers. Adora just stares, places an idle hand on the sleep sack. The touch of her alone is burning, for the second Adora leaves it there, even through the fabric.
She takes her hand away, then brings it back, warily, to her shoulder. Then to her forehead.
Adora's hand feels cold. Adora’s hand comes away damp. Adora turns to Melog, finds the colour of their mane for herself, and gasps.
“You’re overheating in that sleeping bag,” Adora realises out loud, jaw clenched. “Melog’s telling you to get out.”
She does as she is told as Adora rips the sack open, moving onto her knees instantly. The heat thrumming all over her body dissipates, feeling the cold air bristle over her unmoving fur. Adora clutches her own arms, heaves a great sigh.
“Catra, why can’t you just-“
She feels her tail want to tuck around something. She stamps down on the urge. She has no urge. She has no want. She just waits for Adora to summon her words.
“You’re really gonna have to listen to Melog from now on, okay?” Adora says, “Please? Otherwise you’re just gonna keep on- you know - and I can’t be there to - to-”
Adora scrunches her eyes shut, takes in another breath that wracks her chest. I can’t be there. Melog’s mane darkens like a dying sun just over the horizon.
“Say something,” Melog says. Listen to Melog rings through her ears, the recency of Adora’s renewed command building itself back. Her ear almost twitches. She doesn’t know what to say, not entirely, but it is not urge that compels her to speak. It's a command. She looks over Adora, at the pain on her face, the tightness of her shoulders.
“You need not be afraid for me, Adora,” She says, eventually, brushing a strand of hair out of her dry, red-eyed face. “My faith is not tested. I serve your every word. I feel so much joy when I do.”
Adora meets her gaze. Her grey-blue irises reflect back the pure green light of her own.
“What’s it like?” She asks. “The joy?”
“It simply is,” she answers, simply. Melog tells her to elaborate. It's another command. "I used to lash out, and cry. I used to feel so much hate. I feel none of that now. I just feel happy.
“I endure no more pain, cower from more fear. It is as if the heavens shone down upon me and burned all of that away.
"I am at peace, Adora. The kind you can't even imagine. The kind I never was, growing up with you.”
That causes Adora to squeeze her eyes shut again. Melog flashes a deeper colour.
“Do not be sad. I am lucky to always feel this way, Adora,” She adds, brushing another strand behind Adora's ear. “I am lucky to serve you.”
“I really doubt that,” Adora says, like she doesn’t believe her devotion. “When I’m - If you don’t have anyone to serve - if I'm not strong enough to-”
Adora’s fists clench, now sat on her own knees. Adora winces out a sound, one she recognises is close to actual pain.
Adora has something in one of her hands. Adora notices that she notices. She reverses her hand.
She opens her palm.
“I hate feeling like this.”
Melog’s mane spikes a hot red instantly. She takes the device from Adora’s open hand and inspects it, holding it up to the light of her own eyes. The evidence of how Princess Entrapta ripped Princess Spinnerella from the light sits between her clawed fingers.
“D’you think I could - join you?”
Catra doesn't flinch. She looks at the chip. Deactivated, expertly extracted, tendrils and body intact, deviously retracted. Contact with living skin, with the signals from a living being’s spinal nerves, will reinvigorate it. Separated from the hive mind, of course - Prime’s infernal voices of lies, innumerous shadows masquerading as the light, will not take hold in the body of its host.
“That I could feel the joy?" Adora continues, swallowing her next breath. "I-in the light?”
She considers Adora's words this time. There is no baptism Adora needs to endure, no shaving of her hair, no false ceremony. Simply place the chip at the base of her neck, and all will be right.
The bliss will take hold.
The bliss that made her pliant to Prime’s command, even if that command was to hurt Adora.
Catra blinks. A momentary flicker. Her ears do not flick all the way down, she doesn’t let them. She doesn’t move around to Adora’s back, place the chip to the nape of her neck, because Adora hasn’t ordered her to.
The thought of Adora following the words of another, so diligently, throb in her mind.
'I can't be there' throbs in the back of her neck.
“She asked you a question, sister," Melog says, using her preferred moniker. "What do you think?”
Stupid question. She doesn’t think, she acts. She will act when told to act or when necessary, not before, not after.
“Do you want to act?” The demon asks, curling around Adora’s side, forcing out a purr. Adora’s hand finds their mane, pets down their back.
She feels the soothing touch through the bond. She ignores it.
She doesn’t want anything.
“What does Adora want?”
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to know.
“You can ask.”
She can’t.
“Because you don’t want to?”
“Shut up.”
She growls, so quietly and quickly, like a fly slipping under a door. Adora’s eyes fly up.
“What did you say?”
She grabs Adora’s shoulder, she doesn’t know why, but she can’t back down, she commits to the action. Adora’s breath stills.
“Repeat last instruction,” she says. She doesn’t ask, she says. There’s a difference. Shut up.
Adora heaves a big shuddering breath, shoulders coming up and down, the lower part of her face lit up by the mark on her chest.
“I want to join you in the light, Catra, I-” Adora breathes out, makes her voice flat, emotionless, practicing. “I want my place to be at your side.”
And there it is.
Instruction.
She shifts slowly over the bedrolls, until she’s facing Adora’s backside, chip poised between thumb and fore-claw.
“Wait,”
Adora gathers her loose hair up with both hands, clearing the way to her neck. She doesn’t tie it up into her usual ponytail. She just holds it up, with one hand.
“I’m ready.”
Catra holds the chip, tentatively, in the air between her and Adora’s neck. Melog hovers at both their sides, mane glowing like drops of blood darkening in water, as her fingers hover against Adora’s bare skin.
Adora, who will soon join the light. Adora who will become one with her, like Catra had. Feel the joy Catra felt, the peace, reflected back at her like so many mirrors. Catra is happy. Adora should be happy, too. Adora wants this.
And then Adora will not want.
Adora will become a servant.
Adora will not need Catra.
Catra balls the chip up in her fist, brings it down to her side.
“No.”
“What?”
“No.”
Adora looks over her shoulder, her face in profile. She bares the angle of her jaw, the shape of her nose.
“Is the chip broken?”
“No,” She says. It’s all she can say, all she can breathe out in response, this close to the back of Adora’s neck.
She can’t serve her if she’s one with the light. She can’t follow Adora’s instruction without Adora to instruct. She can't sit around and wait for Adora to sacrifice herself at the Heart.
She can’t do this without Adora. She can’t follow this order. She can’t bring Adora into the light. She has failed her.
But she is still devoted.
She can still show her devotion.
Melog purrs as if urging her on, as if urging for her, their reddened body turning a lighter shade. She giggles, because she doesn’t want, she doesn’t, and before Adora can even respond, she closes the gap between her lips and Adora’s neck.
“I don’t want you to.”
Nothing in her faith snaps at the words, nothing bends under the pressure of any of the kisses she leaves up the side of Adora’s jaw. No tender cord that was supposedly holding her back rips apart at the taste of Adora's skin and nothing slackens around a harness that doesn’t exist at the sound of Adora's whimpering breaths. Has she forgotten her place? The temptation, it can’t have won, it doesn’t feel like it’s won, but a new joy rolls through Catra’s body from the base of her spine and she’s not supposed to feel it and-
Adora shifts around, pulling her cheek away from her chasing lips. Her hand stays on her head, still pinning her hair up.
“What are you-” Adora gasps, and she sounds so weak, green eyes reflecting in her grey. To Adora, she must look unchanged.
Almost.
The distance between them is the only sin left.
Catra destroys it.
Like a devil possessed she licks into Adora’s lips. Adora shudders back into hers. Adora's hands fly up to Catra’s ears, and Adora’s hair comes down, strands falling between them as she starts to kiss back, tongues tangling with wild hair, with equal fervour.
It’s a mess. It’s filth, plain and simple. Yet the joy Catra feels at this act, the high of it - it’s greater than the bliss. It doesn’t feel real, or long, or short.
Time passes too quick.
“Stop-” Adora tries to say, but Catra seals theirs lips once more so she shoves her back, “Catra, stop!”
She stops. She doesn’t want to stop but she stops and she shouldn’t want, but it’s too late. Adora looks at her, through the first tears she has spilled since yesterday, finally dripping from the faucet.
Catra has sinned. She has sinned. She has forsaken the sacred vow to serve, yet again, and even the light was not enough to cleanse her. Adora gathers her jacket onto her shoulders, and all the rest of her things into her arms, and storms out of the cave.
Into the night.
“That wasn’t you,” Adora tells herself. Catra can hear. “That wasn’t you.”
~~
She lifts the mask to take yet another delightful sip.
The chalice is empty.
She sighs - more a belch - out loud, for that was the last of her batch. The last piece of comfort she could bring to her lips.
There would be no more, now that Adora’s gone for the heart, racing against Prime to be the first incompetent to end the universe. Now that that child-queen Glimmer and all of her remaining subjects are battling to save their servile friends, even as they rip their throats out.
She could not prepare them. They would not listen. So that’s what they get.
The only thing that stops her from throwing the chalice across the cave, really, is the fact that there is nobody to throw it at.
You know what - fuck it. She does it anyway. Maybe she’ll hit a bat.
She doesn’t expect the cup to clap in a single outstretched hand. She almost falls backward at the sound. She can’t stand from the crates and turn her head to face the intruder, not without planting face-first into the ground, off guard and in the vice grip of the drink.
She doesn’t need to. The infernal beast that’s always at Catra’s heel is there. She can hear it, growling for her, and that means-
“She’s not here.” She slurs, slowly turning to face the mentally castrated cat that’s now back in the cave. “She’s gone to the Heart of Etheria to free the magic and become the hero she was born to be.”
Catra’s green eyes shine back, her ears flat like they’ve always been in her presence since the day she turned up to the Fright Zone on all fours. The chalice clenches in Catra’s clawed grip, vice-tight, as Melog growls behind her.
She’s never seen the poor brat look so obedient, and yet she stands there like she always used to when she wanted something. Orders. Ration bars. Attention.
Eugh.
She holds out her own hand, reaching for the chalice. Maybe there’s still a drip in it, or one last bottle somewhere in the cave, and if the tamed mongrel feels so inclined to fetch for her, she may as well-
Catra pounces, knocking her back with the bench. Head over heels, tumbling to the floor.
Dazed, she yowls in pain, feels the clench of the claws around her neck, the pinch of something harsh, sharp, biting into her neck-
And then the whites of her masked eyes green out.
She vaguely recalls leaving the cave. Facing down a monster, with a mouth of frothing tendrils. Adora, on the floor, bleeding from a green wound crawling up her side.
She doesn’t remember when she puts up a forcefield over the doorway the moment her newfound sister carries Adora through, not stopping to look back.
“Kill the beast,” were her sister's final orders to her. She can do the deed, simple enough. But not without a great cost, one that part of herself is screaming at her not to pay.
She stamps that part down. She is not used to this feeling, this... peace. The ambition, the overwhelming need to know, to have, to control is - for maybe the first time in her life - tempered. And it is glorious.
Ever-distancing itself, she hears Adora calling her name - the one belonging to who she once was, only mere hours ago - as she faces down the monster. She can hear Adora, still being yanked down the path, as she compels the air around her to spark.
That name isn't hers anymore. Nor was the name before that. Once, she would have smiled at that voice, at Micah's voice, at Catra's. She would have felt the reverent fear of her that those sounds always gave voice to.
Voices that gave her power.
Titles that made her great.
Sounds, that now feel empty.
She knows not the point of those feelings, not anymore. All she knows is that she embraces the fire, and the explosion, when it finally comes. She looks down the chamber corridors one last time and sees Adora, far away, one last time. Her glorious purpose, fulfilled.
In the light, she has never felt more welcome.
~~