[Fic] The Price of Anarchy, Part I of III

[lyrithim]

Title: The Price of Anarchy
Fandom: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
Pairing: Catra/Adora
Chapter Word Count: 4,827 (of ~12,000)
Note: My attempt at a “Adora followed Brightmoon way too easily” story.
[AO3 Link]

Summary: Adora tries to change Catra; Catra tries to change the Horde. Both fail; both succeed. (The Catra-starts-a-quiet-revolution-inside-the-Horde story.)

*

Nimbus, of the skies, known to outsiders as a sovereign kingdom, was more accurately a collection of five hundred rogue airships and its people, sailing as a fleet over the upper atmosphere jet streams under the protection of the Rippling Malachite. Despite many subtle and unsubtle attempts by the Horde to launch an attack, the Kingdom of Nimbus had withstood invasion for months, the Horde lacking airships that could fly as high or as fast as those blessed by the runestone of flight. Eventually it was agreed that the Horde would send two representatives to Nimbus for the first round of fuel negotiations: Scorpia, of course, being the Horde’s nominal princess; and Catra.

For Catra, the Nimbus mission had been a nightmare from the start. First had been the travel. Entrapta had sent Catra and Scorpia upward to neutral air with her latest airship prototype—a dandelion-inspired model, with self-centering technology, lovingly nicknamed “Danny”—that was about as human-focused as the rest of her designs. After Catra finished throwing up off the side of the Nimbian-sent airship, she had the pleasure of meeting the Nimbian princess, who was, again, a teenaged brat, settled this time atop a scrap metal throne.

This princess’s defining feature seemed to be how much she simply was not afraid of the Horde, what weaklings the other princesses and their kingdoms were to ever fear them, et cetera et cetera. Scorpia took all of it in stride, oohing and ahhing whenever the princess pointed to a ship and proclaimed its superiority over all others with detailed explanations of how and why to the great distress of her advisors. Catra, on the other hand, was very ready to kidnap a princess again, plan or not. It was then almost a relief when She-Ra and company stomped into the floating palace with their flying, talking unicorn.

“I’ll take Catra,” Adora called out from a distance. This was followed by glitter-princess’s usual, “Adora, no!” before Catra slunk behind the inner palace doors.

When Adora entered, Catra stuck out a foot, and all seven feet of She-Ra-the-warrior-princess-goddess landed flat on her face, sword sliding across the room. Catra pounced, and they grappled across the glass floor, clouds whipping past beneath them.

“I can’t let you do this, Catra,” Adora was saying.

“Glad to see you too.”

“You have to know, Catra— The Horde—Nimbus—”

Catra rolled backwards, heaving Adora off her. “Okay, look,” she said, on her feet now, as Adora skidded across the room and retrieved her sword. “The Riviere Town mission I get—the Aurorae wedding you caught us red-handed—but this? Can’t the Horde have peaceful diplomatic chats with other princesses now?”

Granted, she had been dropping off Entrapta’s mice bombs since arriving at Nimbus. But still.

“We know you’re after the Malachite,” Adora said, heaving herself up with the sword.

“Obviously, just like we know you’re trying to rebuild the Princess Alliance and destroy the Horde, ya-di-dah, what else have you got?”

“Catra,” Adora said, her voice going low now, almost confiding. “Ever since the Brightmoon invasion, I’ve been thinking—”

“Oh,” Catra said, “you’ve been thinking now—”

“Light Hope was manipulating you in the Beacon,” Adora said. The way her eyes rounded then might have been more convincing, Catra thought, if they weren’t also the most alien features in her in She-Ra form. “She was showing you those things—whatever she showed you—so that you would turn against me. It’s—I know it doesn’t make sense, Catra, but to continue with my training I needed to let go of my attachments, and you, she said—”

Catra, who had become quite tired of everything coming out of Adora’s mouth, back-flipped onto a chandelier and pressed the necessary buttons in Entrapta’s remote controller. When the bombs went off in the distance they made no noise. Instead, a low groan reverberated throughout the metal hull of Nimbus’s flagship. Adora looked up, past her, as the ship began to tilt. Catra dug her claws into the ground; Adora, who knew that doing the same with her sword would very well shatter the glass floor, was knocked all the way to the side.

“What did you do?” Adora shouted, clinging onto the railing with one hand.

“Nothing that the Princess Parade can prove.”

“Don’t—”

“How slow are you?” Catra snapped, because Adora, after all this time, still didn’t get it. “You really think that I didn’t know? I made my decisions in that First Ones ruin, and you have to get that through your head.”

“Catra—”

“And frankly,” Catra added, as the floor shifted another degree down, “it’s rich of you to talk about manipulation when you hadn’t figured out Shadoweaver’s mind games until two year ago—and then went off with the first people to offer you ponies and a golden tiara to crown yourself a hero. But that’s what you do, isn’t it? Point a sword wherever people tell you, never ask questions until you need to.”

Catra probably could have said more, but a ship had at that moment appeared by the railing that now swung below them both. Flying thousands of feet in the air, Scorpia waved cheerily. Before Adora could move an inch, Catra let go of her grip on the floor, sliding straight past Adora, through the window, and into Danny’s rocky embrace.

In her quarters, Catra paced the length of her bed in a terrible mood.

For an hour after she and Scorpia reported to the Command Room, Hordak had thundered and raged in his throne above, and Catra could hardly get a word in. They had failed terribly, he told them. Not only had they failed to steal the Malachite and destroy Nimbus’s flagship, they had let the Rebellion princesses succeed in rescuing the kingdom. The Rebellion had likely gained another princess now, thanks to their incompetence—the alliance was growing stronger by the week—this would take back the southern campaign by months, even years, and they had little time to lose given the recent loss of their western territories—

Not until a soldier brought in an urgent message from the Kingdom of Nimbus did Hordak pause in his tirade. Princess Claudia, the messenger had said breathlessly, sent her sincerest apologies to the princess and her cat-eared general. As a gesture of goodwill, Nimbus gifted Scorpia with the fastest of its new winged sailboats and sent an ambassador to the Fright Zone.

Catra watched as Hordak processed this news. It was true that Hordak had originally directed Catra to steal the Malachite. But she had promptly ignored that order, knowing—as well as he did, but refused to listen—that a runestone was useless when the bond with its princess remained intact.

Instead, with Entrapta’s mice bombs, Catra had done something simpler, and much more effective: created a minor engine failure by exploiting preexisting weaknesses in Nimbus’s flight system; casted doubt—as someone should have, anyway—on Nimbus’s complete reliance on a piece of technology made thousands of years ago; let them embarrass themselves. That the Rebellion came to trash their palace a little during negotiations was just a separate piece of luck.

But whereas Shadoweaver at least had the humor to take credit for Catra’s plan once it succeeded, Hordak’s face had still been dark during Catra’s explanations, still murderous and uncomprehending. She had to all but convince him that he had given them the idea in the first place. It was irritating, to say the least.

A knock at Catra’s door. Scorpia entered.

“Man,” Scorpia said, “Hordak did seem really mad at us even though everything worked out, didn’t he?”

“You were fine,” Catra said. “Lying and dodging questions are more my thing. You have other strong suits.” She flopped onto her bed, exhausted. “What did he want you to stay behind for?”

“Ah,” Scorpia said. “It’s, well, I—I think it’s good? But maybe it’s—I don’t know, I don’t know if it’s right to—how do I explain? Here.”

Scorpia handed her two pieces of paper in plain letterhead bearing the Horde’s seal. It was a new assignment, half a year long, for Scorpia and her garrison, in the old territories among the eastern deserts. She would be touring the cities and towns: Listen to the hearts and minds of the citizens in each. Distribute supplies. Reassure them of the Horde’s pledges for food, water, and shelter. It was an incredibly nonessential and time-consuming task for a major general.

Scorpia, for once, seemed to sense that there was more to this than met the eye, and was quiet. “What do you think?” she asked, rubbing her pincers together, a nervous gesture.

Catra read through summons carefully once more. The routes were fairly close to Scorpia’s homeland, and that made any dangers to Scorpia’s person less likely than what she initially suspected. Scorpia’s family was powerful in the Horde, but it was not because they held power in the Horde military—Scorpia was sent to the Fright Zone mainly as a token. The land that the family had originally occupied composed a good portion of the Horde territories. There were still many people more loyal to the royals in Scorpion Hill than the Fright Zone, sympathetic to the murdered king and queen and their living family. Nostalgia gave people all sorts of weird ideas about the ruling class, Catra thought, returning the summons to Scorpia.

“You’ll be fine,” Catra said. Most likely Hordak feared Catra’s influence over Scorpia and sought to separate them. Well, Catra wasn’t too much worried about that.

An idea came to her. With it, a plan began to form in her mind, unbidden.

“Really?” Scorpia asked.

“Yeah, take this time to visit your cousins, walk around your old towns.” Catra waved a hand. “Have fun, kiss babies, fix bridges—I don’t know what princesses do.”

“I wonder if anyone will still remember me,” Scorpia said. “I look different now. I work with the Horde.”

Catra folded her legs over Scorpia’s chair. “I don’t know,” she answered after a while, truthfully. “But you can always make a name for yourself in another way.”

Scorpia nodded.

Catra told Scorpia to write her, give her frequent updates. Scorpia agreed brightly. When asked about herself in these intervening months, Catra just gave a small smile, said that she would be busy.

—

Ignia at summertime sweltered under the boiling blue sky, Mt. Praevorius a smoldering giant at the corner of the eye, black smoke billowing incessantly from its clouded summit. Catra hid her Horde badges and uniform outside the city-state and covered her head and ears with a shawl. For a day and a half she wandered around the city temple, gathering intelligence, poking at the fortress for weaknesses here and there, and hissing at the locator beneath her pinned cloak. Entrapta had promised this new technology to be “Catra-proof,” but that didn’t make Catra like it any more.

It had taken Catra six weeks of cajoling and flattery to return to Hordak’s good graces. During this time—according to her letters—Scorpia had toured two towns and one minor city along the northern deserts, rescued five babies and two cats, fixed three wells, and built a bridge. Catra, on the other hand, had helped Entrapta rebuild old Horde gas and electrical infrastructure—meaning that she fixed up gas pipes and sewage drains in and out of the Fright Zone, and complained loudly about doing so to Entrapta. Only when Hordak finally ran out of competent operatives did he pass to Catra a new assignment: retrieve the Map of Etheria from the vaults of Ignia on the other side of the planet.

The pursuit for the Map had been in place since Entrapta cracked the code on the data crystal that Catra had stolen from the First Ones ruin, almost two years ago now. The Map, Entrapta had explained, was not a geographical map of the planet, but rather a blueprint into its fundamental workings: every slice of integrated circuit, every plot of diodes and triodes and semiconductors stretched over the fabric of this world. Entrapta had caught the name of the Map in the ancient tongue, repeated, in the thousands of metadata files that had suddenly become available to the Horde, and in the end determined its location to be Ignia, a volcanic hotspot in a planet without a liquid core.

When the sun hit the horizon on Catra’s second day in Ignia, there came three long and heavy gongs by the acropolis, where laborers had spent the day building a giant bonfire for the Festival of Praeva. All of the townspeople and nobles swept uphill, singing and laughing and dancing. Catra, cloaked, went the other way, slipping by two guards to enter the emptying temple.

Past the forecourt and the maincourt and their polished marble stones, past the statue of the anthropomorphized Praevorius in great beard and toga, Catra followed Entrapta’s contraption and found a hidden door marked with First Ones writing. The chamber on the other side was as warm as a furnace, though the only visible sources of heat were two candles lit at the entrance of a long, dark hall. As Catra walked down the hall, the heat grew more suffocating, and a curious muffled roaring, like falling water, grew louder. She emerged on the other side claws bared and defensive. A cascade of lava came into view, at least ten stories high, spitting curls of fire in its descent.

There was no other path forward save for a small platform that fed into a narrow bridge. The bridge itself shot straight through the magma-waterfall.

Catra stepped gingerly onto the platform. A holo-screen appeared, and the blocky outline of a woman stared back at Catra with hollow eyes. For a second Catra thought it was Light Hope again, but this projection was of a different color—a dull, staticky pink—though the silent contempt in her expression was the same.

“Of course,” Catra said. “Just great.”

“Access requested,” Light Hope Lite intoned.

“Alright, I get it,” Catra said. “Shut yourself down and I’ll come back—”

“Detected: Catra, the navigator, and She-Ra, the protector,” Light Hope Lite said. “Permission granted.” And the screen dissolved.

Catra whipped around just in time to spot Adora—all of two feet behind her, god Catra forgot how good she was at this—and tackle her to the ground. But Adora squirmed out of the grapple easily and clambered to the other side of the bare platform, panting as she stood. Behind them, there was a heavy metal groan, and the cascade of lava began to part.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Catra asked.

“Me?” Adora asked. She was all Adora this time, ponytail bunched up and dark brows furrowed, five-feet-seven instead of seven-feet-five. There was a satchel over her shoulder, and she looked to have been traveling. “I was here on vacation for the festival—because I like festivals—and then I saw you sneaking around and then breaking into the city’s sacred temple.”

“Alright,” Catra said, grinning. “I guess you have a point there.”

“Catra,” Adora said again, and Catra dropped her smirk. “I have been thinking about what you said last time, and I— I think there are things about the world outside of the Horde that I need to show you. It’s different out here, Catra. It’s—wait!” but Catra was already sprinting across the bridge.

“Save your speeches for the princesses, Adora!” Catra shouted behind her.

Past the parted magma curtains, past a low tunnel, Catra skidded into a rocky, cylindrical chamber. The walls there were engraved with First Ones’ script. The air was cooler. Catra could hear the drumbeats and songs of the Festival of Praeva above them. A small square opening in the ceiling allowed sunlight to illuminate the entire floor, and Catra could see vines webbing over the ceiling and spiraling down yellowed columns. On the other side of the chamber, a small, translucent orb bobbed gently above a stone dais.

Catra spent too long looking, and this time she was tackled to the ground. Above her, Adora said, “Listen to me—” then, after a pause, breathless, “The Map of Etheria.”

“That’s right,” Catra said. She kicked Adora off of her, but Adora was just as fast to roll and return a sweeping kick as Catra attempted to stand. Soon they found themselves in a fall-out brawl again—a sparring match, Catra thought, just like the old days.

But even though Catra had survived two years now of the Horde and Hordak without Adora, even though Catra had become a smarter fighter—a meaner fighter—for it, she still fell too easily into old patterns and was caught unawares when Adora switched up her attacks.

At least, that was how Catra explained the pastry that Adora had stuffed in Catra’s mouth.

“Mmfgh?” Catra managed, more confused than angry.

“Chew,” Adora commanded.

The pastry was fluffy and sweet and dolloped with cream. Even though it might very well be poisoned, instinctively—and stupidly—Catra swallowed.

“That’s called a cupcake,” Adora said, eyes still bright and angry, across her. “I bought it across the temple from a nice lady. It’s delicious.”

“The hell, Adora. I know what a cupcake is. Entrapta makes them all the time—”

This time when Adora pounced, she shoved a dark chocolate ball between Catra’s teeth. But it wasn’t just chocolate, Catra thought.

“Brigadeiro,” Adora said. “Glimmer’s mother prepared them for me before I left.”

Below her, Catra swallowed before saying, “Mind telling me why on earth did you just feed me something that Brightmoon’s queen mother made?”

“One more,” Adora reassured her, before popping a pink ball in Catra’s mouth. This pastry’s exterior was soft and sticky, but once Catra bit in—

“Mochi,” Adora said now, with a savage sort of triumph, “with the Kingdom of Snow’s never-melting ice cream as filling.”

—and it tasted like heaven.

With a heave from Catra, they switched roles, Catra on top holding Adora down.

“What,” Catra said, “the hell.”

“You asked me what made me leave the Horde,” Adora said. “When I left the Whispering Woods, there was a festival—a lot like this one—and the people there, they sat me down and fed me food that I had never tasted before—”

“Oh god, Adora. Food?”

“My point is that there are things outside of the Horde—really wonderful things—that you and I never got to see, Catra. There are things called birthdays and aunts and games that you play with friends just for fun, and every single day I look around and see them—”

“That’s not the point, Adora,” Catra said, all good mood evaporated. “Really? You thought you could bribe me over from the ‘dark side’ with desserts and, what’s next, flowers and horses? You really did leave me because of—”

“No, it’s not that, you’re not listening—”

“I hear you just fine,” Catra said. She leapt from Adora’s shoulders, caught a hanging length of vine from the ceiling, and swung herself toward the orb. When she grabbed the Map of Etheria from the dais, warmth coursed up her fingertips. The orb shone so bright that she almost missed the reappearance of Light Hope Lite in front of her.

“Transaction completed,” Light Hope Lite said, her voice caught up with static, distintegrating with each syllable. “Thank you for using our services. We will now begin the shutdown procedures.” And then she blinked out of existence once again.

Catra grabbed onto a column just as the stone floor beneath her began to rumble. From a corner of the chamber, the ground split open. A geyser shot up into the ceiling.

Catra caught the edge of the square ceiling opening just as Adora transformed into She-Ra below her. Before heaving herself over to the surface, into the sunlight, Catra saw the floor crumple beneath Adora’s feet. Adora, with a shield braced against the ground, surfed upward with the geyser, as practiced as everything else she had ever done.

After initial delight at the Map’s retrieval, Hordak found the progress of breaking open the Map’s secrets far too slow-moving and, losing interest, left that task to Entrapta in favor of pursuing a more aggressive military campaign against Plumeria. Entrapta was more than happy to study another piece of intricate First Ones technology and would spend hours telling Catra of all the “obvious bugs in First Ones infrastructure” that she could fix now.

“Before, it was like trying to put together a puzzle without knowing just what the heck the puzzle is supposed to look like,” Entrapta told Catra in her lab, after they determined that Hordak’s eavesdropping bat-baby-pet was not present. “Now I finally see bits and pieces of the right answer, do you know what I mean? The big picture.”

The clear sphere that was the Map of Etheria now sat prettily atop a plush red pillow. It was projecting a three-dimensional diagram of the planet’s south-southwestern hemisphere. They hadn’t reported to Hordak on this set of progress yet for the Map. If Catra had her way, they would never.

What they knew was that no other machinery except Catra’s presence was required turn on the Map—and no other piece of machinery that Entrapta produced could coax the Map into working. Entrapta had found this fact delightful, cooing over the orb and calling it a “fickle lady.” Catra was less delighted; this was another excuse for Hordak to keep her on a short leash.

She was slouching by Entrapta’s window now, watching rows of Hordak’s tanks riding to south. In the east, she knew, Scorpia had recently resolved a decades-long tribal conflict between the Arachnes and the Crustaces. Meanwhile Hordak was waging more wars. Beside Catra, the Map was projecting into the air a hologram of all the runestones in the world and their connecting networks in a giant, glowing web.

“Imagine now,” Entrapta continued happily. “Once we crack this thing we will be able to be able to redirect First Ones ley lines to—well, fixing Mermista’s Sea Gate was something Adora had already done. But also, discovering just why it was that, say, Sanditon has been hit by seven sandstorms in the last two years—now that’s a statistical anomaly if I’ve ever seen one. Or the drought around Scorpion Hall that Scorpia wanted us to investigate—and the strange seal migrations around the cryosphere too—”

“You and Scorpia,” Catra said, suddenly angry. Entrapta’s lab was the last place she thought she would be reminded of Adora, but here she was. “Don’t you think it’s a bit arrogant of you? Believing you can, what, just up and change things in the world? When so many other people have tried and failed, over and over again.”

After a moment Catra finally turned to face Entrapta. But Entrapta didn’t look furious. She had tipped up her welder’s mask, and her wide, curious eyes were fixed on Catra’s face. Catra was reminded, uncomfortably, of another time, closer to the start of Entrapta’s defection, when Entrapta had gazed upon her with similar fascination and pronounced her “a messy circuit of dismissal and fear running in series with only performed sociopathy as a means of resistance.”

“You have been trying to steal power from Hordak since—the Nimbus mission, I think. Maybe before,” Entrapta said, head cocked to one side. “Through me. Through Scorpia. But you’re planning on crowning Scorpia queen.”

“Yeah,” Catra said. Next to her, the glow of the orb dimmed then grew, dimmed then grew, as though in warning. “You caught me.”

“You will try to overthrow Hordak,” Entrapta said. “A coup, as they call it, is coming.”

“Yes.”

“Why stage this coup?” Entrapta asked. “What will you gain from it? To you, what would the difference be between Hordak and Scorpia?”

“Scorpia would take me seriously.”

“Hordak does take you seriously,” Entrapta pointed out. “But you disagree with his plans and disobey him. Just like how you promised you would keep the fact that I intend to fix other parts of Etheria—the parts not under Horde control—from Hordak.”

Catra, furious now, plucked the sphere from its pillow. The network of runestones faded from the room, and the space looked oddly small.

“Scorpia is dumb and naive,” Catra said, “but Hordak is a moron. That’s the difference.” Then she swung out the door.

—

Following a bad harvest and a wildfire, the Horde’s grain redistribution system broke down with the roads, most of which were hastily built more than a century ago for military use. By late fall there were a series of uprisings along the edge of the Horde’s occupied territory. People were hungry, people were trapped. Violence boiled across the border—save for the northern deserts, where Scorpia had been renegotiating trade with nearby pockets of Horde occupation and neighboring Brightmoon.

Kingdoms outside of Horde control took notice of Hordak’s weakness. In the south, the issue of Beast Islands, an archipelago of largely unsettled land between Salienas and Ignia, flared up again as Princess Mermista challenged the Horde for the territory. Hordak sent Catra and a fleet of thirty ships to the island chain. War was imminent.

When Catra met Mermista’s ships in the Bay of Pacalis, Salienas, under the banner of the Rebellion, asked for one last attempt at negotiation. Catra agreed. She and a small contingency of Horde soldiers gathered at the Pacalis Bay Lighthouse at dusk. In the topmost chamber, she waited alone.

The Salienas representative arrived on time. It was Adora, in She-Ra form. Her eyes were steely.

“Hi, Adora,” Catra said. “What, no little gifts for me this time?”

“Catra, stop this,” Adora said. “We can end it now, and no one will get hurt. Please.”

“So you’re saying that Salienas has rightful claim to this territory?”

“No, it’s—it’s not about the islands. Just, can’t you see? There’s no point to this—we’ll just be hurting the people who are sitting on those boats right now, willingly or not.”

“Up until eighty years ago,” Catra recited, “Beast Islands were part of Plumeria. Then the Continental Wars happened and Beast Islands switched hands to Salienas, before the islands were sold to the Horde after the fall of the first Rebellion to repay war debts. The islands have been with the Horde for almost a century now, peacefully. Is your friend Mermista claiming rights to the islands despite of this?”

“Tell me,” Adora said. “Tell me, please. Tell me what I’m not understanding.”

Catra lifted her head. She wanted to tell Adora that this was a peace talk between two military powers—a meaningless squabble over a few chunks of dead rocks, but a peace talk nonetheless—and Adora could at least try to focus on that instead of engaging in their personal histories. She wanted to tell Adora to fuck off, because Adora had never asked Catra what she wasn’t understanding about her, growing up in the Horde—and not until now, when Adora needed to help out her other princess friends.

And still she wanted to tell Adora the answer: that given the chance, if Catra was still that poor abandoned orphan child on the streets, and Salienas or Plumeria or whatever other kingdom Adora thought she was allied with had access to the same weapons and power that the Horde did now, they would not hesitate to do the same to Catra and others like her, or worse. The fundamental distinction between the Horde and the other lands was not good or evil, but the chance to fend for themselves and the failure to do so at their own expense.

Before Catra could give into another moment of weakness, however, and say anything else, there came a crowd of noise from the distance, crescendoing into a roar: panicked shouts and stampeding feet, Catra knew, from the decks of Salienas’ ships. Sure enough the door opened, and a Salienas sailor said, “Spies from the Horde have set our ships on fire—please, help us!”

“You look surprised, Adora,” Catra said, to the flash of hurt and betrayal across Adora’s face, with which Catra had gotten more than familiar. Catra stayed behind as Adora left the chamber.

Adora did manage to demolish a couple of Catra’s ships in the end, but it was no use. By dusk, the Horde sailed easily through the Bay of Pacalis with minimum casualty, and the fire-starters—which composed of Catra’s old squadron, led by Lonnie—returned safely to shore. Because Catra had ordered archers to shoot incendiary arrows as a first round of defense, and because the network of propaganda within the Horde was brutally efficient, none but Catra and the old squadron knew about the sabotage.

All throughout the Horde-occupied lands, people heard of Catra’s triumph: how Princess Scorpia’s closest comrade had earned them yet another victory, this time with just thirty ships against the Rebellion’s eighty.