Chapter Text
It all happens very fast.
The woman is running toward Catra. Adora is running after the woman. The woman raises her sword.
Adora raises her sword.
Adora hits first, hammering the sword's hilt into the back of the woman's head. The woman just crumbles, without even a gasp, and behind Adora someone screams so loudly she thinks her own head will split.
Adora grabs Catra and tries to pull her up. Other people grab at her and she swings the sword and it hits and they let go but someone is still hanging on her and Adora tries to pull away and everyone keeps screaming.
Something rams her in the side and they go flying.
Landing hurts even more than getting hit.
But there's no one holding her down now and Catra is coming to, starting to support Adora's weight instead of the other way around.
"We have to run," Adora says.
And then she runs them blindly off a cliff.
They land in water. The people above don't follow them down. Instead, there's a sharp pain down the side of Adora's leg that stands out amid the aches and she sees red spooling away in the stream beside the shaft of an arrow.
Who even uses arrows?
"Adora, come on!" Catra screams, dragging her forward, and she stumbles out of the stream and toward the cover of the trees.
Maybe the people are satisfied that they've left. Maybe they just didn't hate her enough to jump off a cliff. Maybe they did but Catra and Adora lost them in the Whispering Woods, since it didn't seem like Bow or Glimmer were that good at navigating the maze of trees and vines either.
For whatever reason, they find when they've stopped running that there's no sign of pursuit.
She sits on a fallen tree and stares at the sword in her lap. "Stupid. I'm so stupid," Adora says.
"You think?!"
"Bow told me this would happen." She can hear the weakness in her voice. She tries to focus on the anger, on how it didn't have to be this way, how none of this had to happen if she didn't screw everything up. "But I wanted to go out. And then I scared Horsey, and got you hurt, and made everything worse because I panicked. I should've turned into She-Ra when they attacked you instead. Then they wouldn't-"
"You don't get it!" Catra shouts at her. "It doesn't matter! You want everyone to like you but this time they don't and you can't fix it!"
"I have to fix it!" Adora's voice cracks and she presses her hands against her eyes and tries to breathe.
Catra doesn't answer. Adora hears the leaves shuffle as Catra paces, and then Catra flops down next to her and leans against her side.
"This has to work," Adora tells Catra, managing to steady her voice. "What else are we supposed to do? We can't go back to the Horde."
"You could, though," Catra says. "Nobody but me saw the princess turn into you. You could leave the sword and go back home and Shadow Weaver would be so happy to see you she wouldn't even ask what happened."
"But even if we could we can't!" Adora shouts. "You don't know because Shadow Weaver only told me about it, right when she gave me my badge. Thaymor was supposed to be a rebel fortress and our attack would be my first mission as a force captain. It wasn't because they thought the people there captured me, it was already decided. If I hadn't left that night with you, if I hadn't seen the sword and gone back for it, it would have been me there in the tank instead!"
And she doesn't know what would have happened. She knows what she would have done. She'd have asked Shadow Weaver. She just doesn't know what Shadow Weaver would have said. If she'd have believed it.
But she's an idiot who believed everything else she was told.
Her throat closes up. She tries to hold her breath, cover her eyes again, but her chest heaves and the sob comes out of her mouth and tears follow. She's just letting everyone down today, isn't she?
"Adora. Hey. Hey. Adora," Catra says. She bangs her hand against Adora's head. "You weren't. You blew them up."
"And you came with me."
"Yeah."
"And it was right." She can't stop sniffling. "It was the right thing to do. I won't let anyone kill you over it. It'll be okay."
"Sure, Adora." Catra sighs. After a moment she adds, "It's not so bad being in the Whispering Woods. I'll catch you a big mouse."
"Thanks. ...Shadow Weaver was lying about the brain parasites too, right?"
"Of course she was! She just hates everything nice. How could a mouse mess up your head?"
"Yeah. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense." She watches Catra jump into the branch of a tree. "Be careful of bugs."
"I can handle a bug."
"They're really big bugs."
Then it's just Adora and the sword. She holds it up again, says the words again. Don't they need She-Ra now? Isn't this enough? If she's doing something wrong it could just tell her what she's supposed to do instead!
Nothing happens.
"What is wrong with you?!" she demands, because if you think about it, aren't they both screwing up? Isn't this as much the sword's responsibility as hers?
The sword doesn't answer her.
Something else makes a sound. Adora hesitates. "Horsey?" she calls hopefully. It doesn't sound like Horsey.
She could wait for Catra. But it's her fault Catra's stuck in a forest full of monsters hiding from people with swords and arrows instead of safe in a palace. Just like it's her fault Horsey panicked and ran and is probably also getting killed by monsters. She needs to figure out how to fix this and maybe whatever's making the sound is a solution. Maybe it's another giant bug and when it tries to bite her in half she'll finally manage to turn into someone useful.
Adora knows Catra won't have any trouble following her but she pauses and scrapes the sword along the ground to draw an arrow so Catra will know she did this on purpose and didn't get abducted.
Then she walks toward whatever's making the noise.
She finds...well, she isn't sure what, exactly. An old woman who's happy to see Adora, but only because she thinks Adora is someone else, some better person called Mara. Or maybe this Razz person is only pretending? How can Adora ever be sure?
She recognizes the sword, and Adora clutches to that. There has to be some reason for this. The sword was waiting for Adora so she would save people and do what's right. Now the sword isn't working, the people want her gone, and she doesn't know what right is. It can't have been waiting for nothing. Adora can't have done all this for nothing.
"I need you to tell me what to do," she pleads, and Razz laughs like she's saying something absurd and just keeps hopping away, unconcerned. "I left my whole life behind," Adora insists desperately, "looking for answers about where I came from and who I'm supposed to be. But the rebellion hates me and I'm dragging my best friend down with me and..." Since when was it so hard to do the right thing?
Razz stops and Adora catches up, hoping for answers.
Before them, the forest stops and it's just wasteland and abandoned Horde tanks.
Catra's laugh cuts through the haze. How long has Catra been there? Has she just been up there the whole time listening to Adora stumble around begging for answers that don't exist? Adora looks up in time to see her drop a trio of mice. She catches them, dropping the sword in the process. Catra jumps down from the tree and lands on top of the tank. "Look at this!" she says, walking alone the barrel. "Horde tanks!"
"Horde tanks," Adora repeats.
Adora had been there when they attacked Thaymor. She'd helped people. She'd tried to make the Horde leave, and then she'd fought them off when they wouldn't.
But she hadn't been here. When had this even happened?
"These don't even look weathered," Catra says. She hops to the next tank and giggles. "Adora, this wasn't too long ago!" She jumps to the dusty ground, circles around the bottom.
"No," Adora agrees. She tries to remember what missions she knew about, but cadets weren't told much that was specific. Just talk about destroying the Whispering Woods and the rebels bit by bit.
Adora looks back to Razz, hoping for...what? It's stupid. It's as stupid as when she was begging Glimmer to explain things yesterday, tell her that what was right in front of her face wasn't really that.
The woman looks down to break her gaze and shakes her head. "Ah, it's the same old story, dearie. Wicked people destroy what they cannot control."
"They can't just do this!" Adora says, as if she can't see exactly that's exactly what happened.
Catra bangs on the side of a tank and Adora flinches at the reverberating echo, the same one she's heard so many times before. "Not without a couple of these getting messed up, anyway."
"Once, the princesses would have protected us," the woman says sadly.
From underneath a tank, Catra calls, "There's sticks and rocks and bones and, just, all sorts of stuff jammed in the wheels here." She pops her head out. "Sticks! Sticks, Adora, can you imagine?"
She thinks about running up to the tanks at Thaymor as everyone else ran away, so certain they'd never hurt her because the Horde would never mean to hurt innocent people. What an idiot she was. "Yeah."
Catra climbs back up, pries off the top and shoves her head inside. Her tail waves madly and her voice echoes out, "We were always training to fight off scary princesses but even your crazy lady gets it, there were no princesses here! And nobody else has real weapons. The best a princess' guard had was arrows! And these people weren't even that! They're probably all dead." She pulls her head out and looks at Adora. "People with sticks!"
"There was no way they could win…"
Catra starts laughing again, hops down and grabs her by the shoulders. Her tail does another excited wiggle. "But this happened anyway! I thought you were just being a total idiot but - but look at all this!" She waves her arm over all the devastation.
Adora doesn't want to. She looks toward Razz, then down at her sword. She hadn't been here. And no one else had come.
Catra had accused, "You want everyone to like you." As if that should have mattered when she knew the Horde was hurting people. She was being so selfish.
If the rebellion didn't want them, if the rebellion hated them, that didn't change what she was needed to do. She takes a breath. "If the princesses won't defend Etheria from the Horde, then I will."
She looks to Catra. She can't ask-
"Yeah," Catra says. She laughs once more. "Sticks." She reaches out her hand and Adora grasps it, relief flooding through her. "Let's take on the Horde." Catra turns her head toward distant smoke. "Want to see how many gears we can jam?"
Adora nods.