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lyrithim[AO3 Link] [Previous Chapter]
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.)
Chapter Summary: Showdown at the Dryl castle.
A sentence to the Tower normally equated isolation for life, and soldiers stationed near it would often report hearing the screeches of its maddened prisoners when the winds hit the surrounding deserts especially hard. But when Catra had asked for access to the Tower as his second-in-command, Hordak had agreed easily. Perhaps it amused him.
It was two weeks before Scorpia was due to return to the Fright Zone, triumphant, flushed with new towns and new people pledging loyalty to the Horde—through their loyalty to her and Scorpion Hall. It was then that Catra paid the Lightning Tower another visit.
“Shadoweaver,” Catra said now, lazy, from the other side of the cell door. “How have you been doing?”
There was no movement from the shadows in the cell. But Catra could hear the woman’s quiet breathing: thin, ragged, and shorter than the last time. Catra waited.
“What do you want now?” came the reply.
Catra paused, thinking. When she made her other visits she would circle the topics a little. But there was no point now.
“Hordak is going after She-Ra,” she said.
Shadoweaver leaned toward the bars slowly. A part of her gaunt, ashen face came into light. “Why?” she rasped.
“She had cut down seven ships on her own in a battle.”
“But you had burned down eighty.”
“You’ve heard.”
“Of course,” Shadoweaver said. “I am not helpless, no matter what you or Lord Hordak may think of me. I have my resources.”
Catra got over her surprise quickly and said, “You’re not afraid to tell me that?” She grinned. “That I would report back to Hordak, and he would take away those ‘resources’?”
“If Hordak has targeted Adora,” Shadoweaver said, “either he or you will not be standing soon. There is no point.”
Catra’s tail twitched at that. She did not like the implication in Shadoweaver’s words, especially since she had guessed her plan—even though the motives completely wrong, of course. But the surest way of falling into Shadoweaver’s traps was to rise to her bait, so Catra moved on.
“She-Ra’s been a thorn at his back for a long time. This was just the last straw,” Catra said. “And anyway, Hordak has always been more afraid of someone who looks good with a sword than someone who’s good with a knife.”
“Indeed,” Shadoweaver said, her beady eyes unmoving from Catra’s face. “And I suppose you’re interested in exactly where one should stick that knife? For curiosity’s sake.”
“For curiosity’s sake,” Catra agreed.
When Catra had first brought Entrapta forward to Hordak as an asset rather than a prisoner, Entrapta had babbled enthusiastically about any and all things that came to her mind. Even Hordak had to ask her to stop. But among the topics, Catra remembered, was the mention of a viral data crystal that had corrupted She-Ra when Adora had visited the Kingdom of Dryl. Catra, being who Catra was the time, had remembered this with searing detail, but she hadn’t expected Hordak to, and certainly did not expect him to spearhead its retrieval two weeks after the Battle of Pacalis Bay.
Now, with only ten days before Scorpia’s return, Catra stood behind Hordak at the helm of his ship as they glided up the rocky mountainside, the night air scarring her cheeks.
None of the members of the skeleton crew onboard were unfamiliar with Catra, and it occurred to Catra then that Hordak must have other crews in his pay, and if so what other secrets did he keep? So throughout the entire journey she had stayed silent, holding her back so straight that her muscles burned. Hordak had not informed even Entrapta of his plan. Catra suspected that she herself would have been left in the dark if it weren’t for her newfound usefulness with the Map, which now floated by her shoulder, gently illuminating the way.
When they arrived at the summit, the moon hung large and bloated overhead. Entrapta’s castle stood below, at the trough of two peaks, a mess of chimneys and metal plating. Though quieter and darker, empty now of its former inhabitants, it looked exactly as Entrapta had described, and that calmed Catra quite a bit. Hordak disembarked and called for Catra. She was to find the location of the crystal and report back to him. She entered the castle, alone.
Catra had let Entrapta know of Hordak’s plan as soon as she left the Command Room—without the suspicion of Entrapta’s betrayal having passed Catra’s mind, she later realized. But by then Entrapta had given Catra no reason to doubt her, setting Catra up with the usual suite of gadgets, as well as the blueprint of the castle and an override remote, which would allow Catra to control all of the Dryl automatons by voice. Entrapta’s only request was for Catra to save the attendants of the Dryl castle, if Catra should encounter them. A simple sweep of the castle now revealed it to be devoid of inhabitants. Most likely they had sought refuge with the Rebellion after Entrapta defected.
With Entrapta’s blueprints in mind, the metal plating and spartan dressing of the walls and floors were not ugly and foreign—the real thing seemed more to Catra like the paint strokes filling in an artist’s outline. The occasional ticking and mechanical rumblings only added character to the place, and Catra thought she could see the beauty of the design, and how it must have hurt Entrapta to have wanted to leave a place like this. The data crystal itself would be in the castle’s own central command room, on the fourth floor. Catra took her time looking for it—Hordak would be too suspicious, she thought, if she returned quickly.
The darkness here, too, was familiar to her. It had been in the darkness that she was torn away from her mother’s arms all those years ago when the Horde invaded the then-kingdom of Felino. Catra had fought hard enough against her captor to scar the Horde soldier’s cheek, and for that she had been sent—again in the dark—to a training facility in the southeast. There, while marching in the fields with dozens of other children all day with a dull bayonet strapped across her back, she had met a little blonde girl with round ears and no tail.
Catra opened the door to the central command room, the dim glow of the Map straining to reach the edges of the tall ceiling. At the other end of the room, the data crystal glinted green. She went to pick it up. It was heavier than it looked, and she could almost feel the malevolence humming in its wiring.
At once she heard soft, steady footsteps behind her.
“You found it,” Hordak said.
“I did, my lord,” Catra said, immobile. A chill ran up her spine.
“Very well done,” he said. And he was moving—not directly toward her, by the sound of his voice, but circling the room, perhaps admiring it. “Very well done indeed.”
“Thank you.”
“You know, I had my doubts about you after the Nimbus mission,” Hordak said. “But you have redeemed yourself with time. From the Pacalis Bay battle and from this, you have proven your loyalty to me, and your determination to the cause.”
Catra held the crystal tighter. On her shoulder, the orb glowed white and hot.
Catra had learned the name of Hordak sometime between the ages of four and fourteen, learned to love and worship and fear that name, learned to maim and kill and hate in his honor and for the honor of serving under him. She had learned to do so as other kidnapped children had. As Rogelio and Kyle and Lonnie had. As Adora had. Too bad for Hordak that, unlike Adora, Catra had also learned that Hordak himself, with all his commands to maim and kill and hate, was nothing more than a bad leader in a bad cape.
She reached down to her right thigh with her other hand and felt the grip of the dagger. With the other she held Entrapta’s robo-control remote. Calm spread over her.
She fitted the crystal into a box she had prepared for this occasion, then clipped it behind her belt.
There would be no better opportunity to depose of Hordak than this, she knew. In ten days Scorpia would be returning to the Fright Zone, victorious, her citizens newly energized behind her. With the Command Room empty, she would take over the Horde’s misshapen throne by default. Catra would live to see to it.
Scorpia will be a better queen than you ever could be, Catra thought, in Hordak’s direction, the freedom of it thrilling.
“Thank you, my lord.” Catra unsheathed her claws and faced Hordak at last. “I am honored.”
The end of the fight was Hordak—who, in a twist, was something like a robot/dark manifestation/First Ones bug/anti-Etheria virus/unholy freak of nature—lying, still, on the ground. Deactivated, hollow—and perhaps dead, but probably not. Entrapta’s valiant bots scatter across the floor, most of them in pieces. Catra, across the remnants of the room, leaned against the intact doorway. She was struggling to stay on her feet, struggling to breathe.
She could barely open one eye, and she wasn’t sure if the other was sealed over with blood, or because Hordak had gotten to it after all in one of their scrapes. There was a cut across one side of her chest, she was sure, and her left femur might be broken from one of her drops. It was all hard to tell. Her nervous system, overloaded, was signaling feeling in strange ways; there were so many parts of her body that were simply in pain.
Behind her, she heard footsteps. Likely from Hordak’s men, following the sound of explosions that had blown apart the ceiling minutes before. Above Catra, the same moon Catra had seen an hour before shone down on her. The orb that was the Map of Etheria floated before her nose. There was no glow from it now besides the moonlight. All the orb did was distort the world behind it, flipping its image upside down.
Someone very close was shouting—he had found the way to Hordak, it seemed. One of the lackeys on the ship.
More footsteps pattered closer. It was difficult to reach for the dagger again—Catra’s hands were so slippery with blood, her own, that she could barely hold onto the wall as it was. Still she managed, pushing herself upright, readying for another fight.
Catra, a voice was saying. The orb still did not glow, but—and this must be from her own imagination, her own fatigue—the space around it seemed to distort with the refracted moonlight.
There was pounding behind Catra. More shouts.
Navigator, the voice continued, the voice that Catra finally recognized as Light Hope Lite’s. Where do you wish to go?
Where did she want to go? Catra thought.
A split of light cut down the space in front of Catra, starting from the heart of the orb then expanding outward to both sides. A portal, Catra thought. She could feel it in her bones.
“It will give soon!” someone was saying.
With no way left, Catra stepped forward. With a tip of her tail, she let herself fall forward.
—
Somewhere in the world, Catra woke in fits and jerks, sixteen years of military training urging her against sleep, with her own body’s fatigue fighting for it. Nightmares twisted and braided with her sense of reality: she was back in the Fright Zone, safe in her own cot; she was in the Black Garnet Room, in the Brightmoon princess’s place; she was sneaking into Shadoweaver’s room with Adora; she was in the belly of the Lightning Tower’s guard-snake; she was facing Hordak all over again.
“You have failed, Catra,” Light Hope Lite was saying, before morphing into Scorpia, then Entrapta, then into Hordak’s little winged spy. It flew right at Catra’s face, jaws opened impossibly wide. She screamed into a sea of dough-like blackness.
Then, close to her, Adora’s voice said: “Catra, you’re safe—please. Catra, you’re safe.” And though Catra could not hear her, she could feel the warmth of her arms around Catra’s waist. Because this was a dream, Catra leaned in, and let herself breathe, and breathe.
Catra woke fully at last and found, as before, that only one of her eyes could open. But this time the other was wrapped over with heavy bandage, smelling of fresh linen and medicinal salve.
She was in a bed, one that was not wide but generously soft and smelled like lavender. The room itself was small as well, with two narrow windows set into the roughly plastered brick walls. The windows let in waning, orange afternoon light, and there was a clear vase of flowers on the window sill closest to Catra. Her face guard and belt, wiped clean of blood, rested atop a plain bedside dresser. The Map was placed upon a pillow next to them. On the other end of the bed, in a chair, Adora slept face-down over the duvet.
Catra jerked upright. The motion pulled at the stitches above her abdomen that she hadn’t known existed. She let out a sharp hiss.
At once Adora was awake and onto her, plying apart Catra’s hands. “Don’t move, you idiot—there are stitches—”
“I know that now—”
“Shh, let me see,” Adora said, tapping at the bottom of Catra’s shirt. Or rather, the shirt Catra was wearing—it wasn’t hers. Still Catra obliged. “Don’t move.”
With cool fingers, Adora tapped against the bandages around Catra’s waist. Catra didn’t dare to breathe, she kept so still. Catra rolled down her shirt when Adora was done.
“You’re clear,” Adora said, pulling back. Then, when Catra moved to leave the bed, Adora pressed her wrist down. “No, you are not going anywhere. You have at least two major bone fractures and needed sixty-seven stitches in total—and your eye— There were so many times I thought you wouldn’t— Catra, what happened to you?”
“I was—” She couldn’t think of a good lie quickly enough. “—playing with robots.”
Adora’s expression twisted into something unreadable. Catra didn’t have anything to respond to that either. So she looked away.
“What is this place?” Catra asked.
“It’s a house,” Adora said. “My house.”
Catra had figured as much with the décor. “I meant where are we?” she asked, impatient. “In relation to a kingdom, or the Horde, or whatever. Please don’t tell me you’ve brought me to Brightmoon.”
Adora looked at her carefully. “We’re near Thaymor. Where did you think we would be?”
Catra picked at the blanket over her legs and did not answer her. Thaymor was on the other side of the Horde’s area of occupation in relation to Dryl. No matter what had happened to Catra while she was unconscious, there was no way she had rolled, half-dead, all the way here. She looked at the Map. It sat daintily, innocently atop the dresser.
“Catra, what is going on?” Adora said. “I find you at my doorstep one night unconscious and bloody—with what are clearly combat wounds across your body. If you hurt anyone in the Rebellion—”
Catra had to laugh at that.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Catra said. “It definitely was not. Pretty sure that bastard won’t stay down for long anyway.”
“So there’s someone,” Adora said, face paling. “Who is it?”
Catra placed a finger on her lips. When Adora looked to argue again, Catra cut in: “Trust me, if anything, you’d approve. Besides,” she added, “are you going to tell me what’s going on with you? Why you are all the way out in Thaymor alone, without Princess Glitter and Bow Boy?”
Adora was silent.
“Thought so,” Catra said. “Sorry for bleeding all over your doorstep now. I’ll get out of your hair as soon as I can.”
“Catra—”
“And thank you for your concern. And help. Really, I do appreciate it,” Catra said. “But I think for now I think I’ll sleep.”
Then she rolled to her side. When Adora finally left the room, Catra opened her eyes and stared at the wall opposite for a long, long time.
Catra should be reveling in her good fortunes like anyone else would have done in her position—she had, after all, just survived a death brawl with a vicious dictator of the unfree world, and she was in a place as safe as any other to recover. Instead, over the next few days, Catra taunted Adora again about the She-Ra cape and tiara, attempted to climb out of the bed twice, sang a dozen of the Horde marching songs two notes off-key, and was generally so annoying that she thought Adora might strangle her in between meals.
There were certain things she couldn’t bring herself to say, though. The food, for one—because even though Adora was genuinely a bad cook (Catra thought the window-side flower wilted when Adora carried in the experimental potato-crab-venison dish), Catra could see her hopeful smile, and it reminded her of when they were both much younger, in the Horde, with a less colorful kitchen at Adora’s disposal. Adora would play house with Catra in what was retrospectively a desperately naïve and sad way at imitating the few families they would see within the Fright Zone: Catra had held rocks wrapped in blankets, which represented babies, and Adora chopped wood and stirred a pot of boiling water, calling it soup. Perhaps the whole ice cream mochi episode in the Ignia temple hadn’t been that crazy after all.
She also couldn’t bring herself to talk about Adora’s friends back in Brightmoon. The Brightmoon princess—Glimmer—Catra especially remembered for having suffered through a concentrated round of the torture Shadoweaver had usually inflicted on Catra. Catra hadn’t meant for that to happen. But it didn’t matter. She had brought the captives to Shadoweaver—she should have known. What had happened to Glimmer was one of the reasons that Catra made her own plans now.
Though Adora was clearly keeping Catra in her own house out of charity, she still took fairly rational precautions against Catra. After the first day, she was more careful in her answers to Catra’s questions, always looking for a trap—of which there were many, Catra would freely admit. Adora still kept mum on their exact location in relation to Brightmoon, as though Catra was going to launch a one-man coup against the Brightmoon queen.
“And the Map?” Catra asked, balancing the soup du jour—black sludge, ingredients uncertain—on her lap.
Adora arched up one eyebrow. “What about it?” The question had come after Catra tried to narrow the window of the Brightmoon castle’s guard shift times by asking Adora how often desserts arrived at the castle.
Catra waved to the orb that still resided, quietly, by her beside. “I know you’ve got a huge and obvious crush on me—” Adora flushed and, predictably, looked angry at her own flushing “—but even you can’t possibly let a high-ranking Horde officer get away with one of the First Ones’ sacred tech, or whatever that is.”
As she did whenever Catra reminded her that they were still on two sides of an ongoing cold war, Adora’s features folded back into neutrality. Adora was getting better at that now: presenting a blank face. She had always had that narrow-eyed Superior Officer’s Look down, but this was a diplomat’s face. It made her look older, until Catra realized, startled, that Adora was older—more angular at the cheekbones and jaws, a steadiness in her shoulders. Grown into herself. Grown into the person that she had always meant to become.
“I did try,” Adora began, then looked embarrassed, and this Adora was familiar to Catra again. “I touched it when I was taking you in the house, but it—the Map sort of, well. Zapped me.”
Catra’s tail thumped behind her in surprise. “Zapped you?”
“It was a light zap, like static,” Adora reassured. “It was floating, glowing—I had to more or less herd it into the room next to you, grab one of my pillows—it would only take my softest.”
“Really?” Catra said, giving the Map a side look.
“I think it’s imprinted on you.”
“Like a spoiled child,” Catra agreed. She reached out and tapped it on top. “Hey, wake up, won’t you?”
The Map was filled from the center with a starburst of yellow and orange light. It came to hover by Catra’s shoulder. Catra watched Adora watch the motion with astonishment.
“I’m the only one who can get it to do that,” Catra said.
“It’s beautiful,” Adora said.
Catra nodded absentmindedly. She flicked at the orb, which slid away then right back again in the air. She hadn’t even realized it, but she supposed she missed the little bugger. But it was sluggish now in its movement. Sleepy. Catra guessed the little stunt it pulled at Dryl wasn’t going to be a repeat performance anytime soon.
“You know in Ignia, the hologram guardian there called me by this weird name,” Catra said. She wrinkled her nose. “ ‘The navigator.’ Lame. At least you got to be ‘the protector.’ Probably because of your dumb sword.”
“Yeah,” Adora said. “It’s like my sword.”
Adora’s eyes were on the orb, with a look of concentration that Catra knew meant her mind was running at a hundred miles per hour. Then she noticed Catra looking.
“Did you guys—did you guys ever figure out how to activate it?”
Catra nodded. “Show us the Satellite View,” Catra said to the orb. “Current location. Expand to an eighth of the quadrant. Tag with preset labels: ENTRPA-38920.”
A three-dimensional map of the Whispering Woods, Thaymor, and parts of Brightmoon expanded to fill the entire room. Villages, forests, streets all appeared, in live view, where major landmarks were labeled with names Entrapta had carefully coded for a good three days one-by-one. They were near Thaymor after all, just as Adora had said. She looked at the edge of Brightmoon—what was supposed to be shielded to outsiders, to all Horde tech after the battle two years ago, there in plain sight.
Adora took all this in, wide-eyed. Then, smiling self-deprecatingly, she said, “So much for me trying to hide our location.” She still hadn’t realized.
“So much for that,” Catra agreed.
Finally, Catra pointed to the outline of Brightmoon, in a corner. “This Map will be able to show the location of anything that relies on First Ones tech to stay hidden. That means Mystacor—and that means Brightmoon, with the wards that you guys borrowed from Mystacor. You can’t rely on that. Entrapta has already designed new wards for the Fright Zone.” She spun the projection like a globe and turned to the center of the continent. Where the Fright Zone should have been was just a stretch of desert. “You can develop your own or just—I don’t know, ask her for it. If you do it discreetly enough she’d probably be able to send you the blueprints without anyone in the Horde getting suspicious.”
Tired, Catra moved to rest her back against the pillows. Adora was silent for a long, long time.
“Why are you telling me this?” Adora asked.
“Think of it as rent. Hospitalization fees,” she said. “Anyway, I was going to get someone to send an intimidating letter to you guys and slip this in, but I’ll just tell you now that there’s no reason for the Horde to invade Brightmoon anymore.”
Adora stiffened. “And I’m supposed to believe that Lord Hordak will just leave us alone?”
“Hordak,” Catra said. “Hordak doesn’t know. Don’t worry about Hordak.”
Adora lingered for a moment more, before nodding. Whether or not Catra was telling the truth about Hordak, Catra thought, the truth of the matter was that their old wards didn’t work, and they would need to invent their own without relying on First Ones tech. Adora would need to notify Brightmoon.
Adora took Catra’s plate and stood. Catra cut off the projections and directed the Map to its little pillow bed. As she was closing her eyes to sleep, however, Adora reached down and squeezed her hand.
“Thank you,” she told Catra, then left.
Full recovery was still eons away, but it was clear to Catra by the third day in bedrest that Adora was engaging in a ferocious internal debate about what to do with Catra after Catra would be able to run around on her own two feet again. The correct thing to do would be to bring Catra back to Brightmoon, of course. Catra wasn’t just some no-name cadet in the Horde army anymore. She was a general; she had won battles for the Horde; her name meant something now, meant respect for the people within Horde occupation, meant something vile for those outside of it.
On more than one occasion, Catra thought to suggest handcuffs to the bedframe, if it would make Adora feel better. The sex jokes that came with it might be enough for Catra to go through the hassle of struggling out of the handcuffs.
Catra spent much of her time awake figuring out what it was that drove Adora to live like a hermit at the edge of Thaymor. It couldn’t have been anything as serious as banishment—she couldn’t have lived this closely to Brightmoon otherwise, and anyway, Catra doubted that the Rebellion would expel their most powerful weapon even if She-Ra had cut down a Rebellion princess. Adora talked about her Brightmoon friends in the present tense as well, and had offhandedly mentioned a couple of times that she received and sent letters from them. But Adora had a sort of guilt written all over her face, and she would wear the saddest sets of clothes Catra had ever seen—gray tunic, beige shorts, both made of heavy fabric—whose drabness transcended even Adora’s usual asceticism fashion-wise. Like a monk. Or a pilgrim, seeking absolution.
But most of all, Catra’s thoughts stayed on the Horde.
Bedridden, it was impossible for her to leave and gather news herself. She knew little of what had occurred within the Horde after she had left Hordak lying hollow on the floors of the Dryl palace—and despite her certainty at the time, her worry that Hordak had survived and long returned to the Fright Zone to punish all of Catra’s known associates increased every day.
Entrapta had masked the Fright Zone from Catra’s Map. Catra had asked her to do so, in the case that Catra herself did not return to the Fright Zone. Entrapta would assume that Hordak had ownership of the Map, and take all measures to delay his return before Scorpia returned. It would also mean that Catra was presumed dead.
Catra could not risk asking Adora about the Horde. If Adora knew that the Fright Zone was undergoing internal turmoil, it meant that Brightmoon knew, and the Rebellion knew. True, Adora might want to handle things delicately—she was familiar with the Horde’s internal structure and could likely guess what a vacuum that a missing Hordak and his presumptive second-in-command would mean—but Catra had no assurances that the other princesses would want to. It would be a mess. A huge, bloody mess. The kind of mess Catra had been working from the start to prevent.
But not asking Adora about the Horde meant that Catra was cut off from her only source of communication to the rest of the world. All she had to draw on, now, was Adora’s silence.
There was another method to go about things, of course.
When it was nighttime, Catra slunk out of her bed and, inch by painful inch, moved over to the belt that Adora had placed on the dresser. From it she plucked out the small box that held the data crystal she had retrieved from Dryl, in what seemed like forever ago to her now.
She opened the box—and shut it at the first hint of a green glow.
Catra glanced out toward the half moon. Today was the day that Scorpia would return to the Fright Zone, she thought.
