Archive of Our Own

"I cannot love a hero. I do not want to see you being transformed into a statue. " - Christa Wolf

"When beggars die there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes." - Julius Caesar, Act II Scene II

1. birth

Catra is there when the new She-Ra is annointed, when she hears that battle cry again, when the stranger in front of her turns into the ghost of a memory.

Glimmer, in violet robes and a golden crown, orders the new She-Ra to rise.

She-Ra raises her sword. Catra and Bow mouth the words along with her from the pews like they’re music.

The first thing that catches Catra’s eye as the girl becomes She-Ra is that her hair shines silver in the light. Not like the gold of Adora’s, not like Mara’s before her—according to Adora’s visions, all those years ago—her hair was white, pure white.

“Not like she’s old,” Adora had told her once, her head in Catra’s lap outside the castle, the setting moon kissing her shoulders with its warmth. “But like she’s...I don’t know. Otherworldly.”

The new She-Ra doesn’t look like Adora, and maybe that’s disappointing, but maybe it’s easier. She isn’t the round eyes or pale hair or soft smile of her predecessor—she is deep-set brown eyes and thick eyebrows against brown freckled skin, a long face framed by auburn hair. When she turns, she is taller, mightier—but an imitation of someone Catra knew, loved, lost all the same. Gold traded for silver hair that glistens like opal against the light of the Sword of Protection’s runestone.

She-Ra eyes Catra, blue and just as bright as she remembers, as if she’s sought her out amongst the crowd of strangers.

As much as she wants to, Catra cannot look away.

When she’s young, she stands outside on the Fright Zone docks and stares right up at the first moon that illuminates the sky, bright and burning. Adora tells her not to, and so when it burns her eyes, she only laughs as Catra’s vision is blurred with tears.

It hurts, naturally.

“Shut up,” Catra pushes Adora away as she giggles with a hand to the chest.

Adora stumbles, tripping over herself until she’s sitting on the cool metal floor.

“I told you it would hurt,” she smirks.

“Know-it-all,” Catra mumbles. She closes her eyes, shoving the heel of her hands into the sockets and rubbing until the blurry spots of light fade from her vision.

She looks down—she offers a hand to Adora with a muffled “sorry” as Adora takes it, hobbling up to standing.

At Thaymor, the image of She-Ra is burned into her eyes like she’s made out of harsh light. And she is—she’s carved from some unearthly luminescence, obnoxiously vivid and blinding.

She-Ra melts into Adora. She meets her eyes.

Adora stares back, and it hurts. It burns.

It’s as if Adora is saying: “I told you to come with me.”

Catra looks away.

Months later: Catra’s claws shredding tender flesh. Adora’s eyes closing in pain, tears welling up and rolling down her cheeks.

“I told you not to leave,” she wants to say as she watches blood run down her back. “I told you it would hurt.”

They give her a few days, a courtesy, before the new She-Ra is given Catra’s information and is encouraged to reach out to her. She’d agreed all those years ago that if she were alive to see her named, she would volunteer whatever she could of herself as a resource to the new She-Ra, because it’s what Adora would have wanted her to do.

The only thing is, the promise was made somewhere between a moment of sad sentimentality in the midst of her grieving and an idle, half-formed idea that she never expected would come to fruition. Adora was the strongest of them, most cognizant of her body and health, least likely to cut corners—it was a surprise, and a surprise that Adora, even with all her careful planning, couldn’t prepare anyone for. Catra didn’t ask what she should do if Adora was gone and born into the body of a new She-Ra. Catra always figured that if Adora was the first of them to go down, she would be dead long before the new She-Ra is found.

But she lives another eighteen years, no health scare or battle wounds even to threaten her in all that time. And Catra doesn’t break her promises.

She’s told only a few details—she’d come visit her Wednesday afternoon, more to introduce herself than anything else. She’d come alone. She didn’t have a steed or—the terribly cringey, overly saccharine name Bow would call it—a Best Friends Squad to follow her around yet.

It must get lonely, Catra thinks, but doesn’t really sympathize. She’s been lonely for a while, after all—and this new She-Ra is a direct result.

In her mundane body, she’s underwhelming. When Wednesday comes, she stands on long lanky legs in front of Catra with both the awkwardness and keenness of a teenager, waving her an energetic hello with a slender hand.

“I was told you’d come find me here,” Catra says as she opens the door. “Petra, yeah?”

There’s something bright in her eyes, something hopeful—as if Catra will have all the answers. Answers to what, exactly, Petra is now looking to gain from her, she’s not sure. She got the sword not even a week ago. She doesn’t know anything about She-Ra yet. How could she already have questions?

“Yeah. You knew the old She-Ra?” Petra asks, practically yelps with enthusiasm as she follows Catra into the cottage.

“We met once or twice,” Catra replies nonchalantly, slumping into an armchair.

Petra walks slowly through the living room, eyeing decades’ worth of living through trinkets and furniture. Her fingers ghost a trinket on an end table—a ship in a bottle, complete with a note from Sea Hawk inside. ‘Adventure!”, it reads, along with smaller text buried underneath the gravel weighing the ship down that Mermista told her in a pointed monotone said ‘something dumb about how even he can’t set this ship on fire.’

(For the record, Sea Hawk was on boat number seventeen by then.)

“Uh,” Catra watches her. “You can look around if you want. Or sit and talk. Whichever, it doesn’t really matter to me”

Petra frowns at a picture frame on the fireplace, Adora in white and Catra in black. A ceremony, framed in thick, curling tendrils of gold and glass and by far the most extravagant item in Catra’s home. Maybe the most important.

“Once or twice, huh?”

“We were acquainted,” Catra snorts.

Petra picks up the frame, holding it between two unsteady hands.

“Hey!” Catra springs forward, snatching the photo from her hands. “Don’t touch that.”

Catra looks down. Adora smiles back at her, blonde hair braided down her shoulder, bangs pinned back. Catra can remember the feel of soft hair under her fingertips. She remembers hours after the photograph was taken, Adora sitting half-undressed on their bed as she attempted to undo her braid, a deceptively complex ordeal that required much work to keep itself in place and even more work to dismantle. Adora whined for Catra to help her hunt down all of the pins used to hold it together, and they laughed as they both fished out more and more of them from impossible places along her scalp.

She remembers giving up, cupping Adora’s chin and telling her in a low voice there are better ways they could be spending their night of their wedding than plucking pins out of her hair.

“Don’t make everything about you, Princess,” she teased.

“Fine,” Adora giggled in return, bunching the fabric of Catra’s dress shirt in her hands to pull her closer. “Just don’t complain in the morning when there are pins all over the bed. You know, they’ll hurt when they poke you.”

She remembers complaining.

“You already took her sword,” Catra grits her teeth as she places the photograph back where it was sitting. “If you break that, I’ll kill you and we’ll start the She-Ra search all over again.” She’s only half-joking.

Catra gives the photo one last glance, and Petra skirts her eyes between Catra and the floor. Catra pretends she doesn’t notice her watching.

“Uh,” Petra says shyly, voice quiet and hesitant. “I take it you knew her well.”

“No, actually, Glimmer sent you to some random old lady in the woods for shits and giggles. This was a test of character and congrats, you passed, you get to be She-Ra now.”

“Look, if I hit a nerve with the photo thing, I’m sorry—“

“It’s—“ Catra sighs, pinches the bridge of her nose, sitting back on the couch. “It’s not you. Don’t worry about it. You can sit somewhere, by the way. I don’t bite—okay, I rarely bite.”

“Excuse me?”

Catra snorts. “It’s a joke, kid.”

Petra’s gaze leaves the floor and falls back on Catra. She nods, joining Catra on the couch.

“So,” Catra asks, “Do you have any actual questions, or did you just come to look through our stuff?”

“Should I have questions? I’m kind of in the dark about this She-Ra stuff.”

“Dunno. But come back when you do.”

It’s late when Petra leaves, later than Catra had realized—it’s not a long walk back to Bright Moon from here, so she isn’t too concerned about Petra getting home or particularly sorry for keeping her so long to give her such little information.

“Sorry to keep you up,” Petra says as Catra walks her to the door. “I was just excited to meet someone who knew her—I just thought—“

“That I’d have all the answers?” Catra guesses.

Petra purses her lips, looking down at her feet. “That there would be something about being She-Ra to look forward to.”

“Well, being the world’s savior isn’t exactly a picnic.” Catra says. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

The truth is, she isn’t ready for this. She didn’t ever think she’d need to be. Not years ago, as she learned from Adora what being She-Ra entailed, learning that one day someone else would take up the mantle—but they were young, and ‘someday’ felt so laughably distant then. Not more recently, Adora gone and Catra asking herself how eighteen years could possibly pass, that ‘someday’ feeling both incredibly far away and right around the corner.

When Catra goes to bed, Petra long having returned to Bright Moon, she stares at the empty spot on the wall, the wooden prongs which once held up something precious and sighs.

Eighteen years, and the last trace of Adora is finally gone from their bedroom.

“Keep it,” Glimmer’s hands shake in tandem with her voice, the Sword of Protection braced between them. “Until we find the next one.”

“How would you find the next without the sword? Isn’t that how Adora figured it out?”

“There were hundreds of She-Ras before her,” Glimmer says. “They didn’t have the sword, and they all figured it out. This one will too, I guess.”

Catra takes the Sword of Protection home with her. At first she hides it, shoves it in a trunk in the living room which holds memorabilia of their children: Reyna’s dolls, Emilia’s science kit, both of their soft plush ponies. The memory—the knowledge that the last time it was used, its owner fell, never to rise again—hurts, a wound that’s open and raw still.

A year or so passes when Bow asks for the science kit for his grandson, ever the curious student, ever the more similar to Bow’s own fathers than to either Bow or Glimmer. Ever more likely to become the Bright Moon tech master than its heir apparent.

Catra’s hand hits the cold glass of the blade, and it’s like she were the one who touched the sword in the Whispering Woods all those years ago. She hears her voice, her laugh, her dying words. Once she hears them, she can’t go back.

She hangs the sword on the wall, a memorial between two wooden prongs.

Petra comes back a few days later with questions, so many questions that Catra wants to gouge her eyes out. When she arrives, she begs to be told everything and anything, how Catra’s She-Ra found the sword, how she defeated Hordak, all of the things she’d learn if she would just pick up a damn history book. Catra shows her age, having forgotten how insufferable teenagers could be, how much unbridled excitement they brought to everything they did, and how annoying unbridled excitement is.

She answers her questions as patiently as she can. But Petra keeps hitting the same sore spot, and Catra doesn’t care if she doesn’t mean to. Catra grinds her teeth each time Petra calls Adora ‘her She-Ra,’ as if she doesn’t know her name, as if her name doesn’t matter at all.

As if Adora is just a piece of history and not something that once lived and breathed.

“I saw a picture once of She-Ra riding a dragon. Did your She-Ra have—“

“Adora,” Catra cuts her off, harsh and quick, with a scowl. “Her name is Adora. Not She-Ra.”

Petra stares at Catra, lip quivering as if she’s about to speak. Or about to cry. Or both.

Catra takes pity on her. Their first encounter didn’t end on a particularly high note, and she has a feeling she’ll get an earful from Glimmer if she scares the new She-Ra away.

“She had a horse. He sucked, but Adora and our daughters loved him.”

“You have kids?”

Catra nods. “Two. Reyna’s a soldier, and Emilia’s a professor.”

Catra motions for Petra, who’s hovering close to the living room table, to sit down. She sits on the couch next to Catra with a straight back, posture meant as a show of politeness rather than for any sort of comfort.

“Grandkids?”

“One,” Catra answers. “Emilia’s. It’s a shame Adora never got to meet him. She even tried to get into knitting, she was made to be a grandma.”

Petra lifts a blanket draped across the arm of the couch. She studies it: the uneven loops of grey wool held loosely together by knots, the holes where the inconsistencies in the weaving pattern show. “Did she make this?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s awful.”

Catra chuckles. “Never meet your heroes, kid.”

Petra laughs, a laugh so very different than her predecessor’s. Where Adora’s was a throaty sound which lacked any grace, Petra’s is light and almost melodic. Catra allows herself to join in laughing before she sighs and leans back into the couch.

“I don’t know when you’ll find your steed,” Catra says. “Just...I don’t know, keep your eyes open. Point your sword at some random animals and see what sticks.”

“Thanks,” Petra glances toward the window, where one moon is setting and stars peek through, pale in the purple twilight. “I should get back to Bright Moon. It’s late.”

Catra watches her pick up the sword—as if she would need a weapon to visit an old woman far past her physical prime, as if she needed to shove it in Catra’s face once again that it belongs to a stranger when it should, in theory, still belong to Adora. The sword is heavy in Petra’s grip, her shoulder drooping ever so slightly, but she holds it with a confident, comfortable hand, like the hilt was melded specifically to her palm.

And, well, it was. The sword was made for her. Catra keeps needing to remind herself of that.

The sword, the castle, the name—that’s all Petra’s now, and she has to learn to live with it.

“Hold still, stupid.”

Catra presses the gauze to the bridge of Adora’s nose. Adora winces as the cool sting of alcohol runs into her wound, squirming under Catra’s hand.

“Do you think it’ll scar?” Adora worries, her nose crinkling. But that agitates the wound and makes her flinch, which, in turn, knocks the wound against the gauze at a new angle. “Ow.”

“Afraid I’ll think you’re ugly?” Catra squeezes the gauze, and Adora’s nose twitches underneath her hand. “Don’t worry, I think scars are kind of hot.”

Adora laughs, then sneezes. Catra jerks her hand away, and the gauze falls.

“Ugh! Gross,” she whines. “They don’t pay me enough to babysit you.”

“You’re only mean because you like me,” Adora sings the words, teasing her, light and airy like wind chimes.

“Prove it.”

Adora holds up her hand, pointing to the golden wing pinned over Catra's heart. As if to say, ‘you’re stuck with me forever, you big jerk.’

“Fine,” Catra concedes. “You got me there.”

Adora, still holding up her hand, grins triumphantly as she puts down all but her middle finger, for good measure.

She cackles, sticks out her tongue as if she were a child as Catra swats her hand away.

Catra hears what she can only describe as She-Ra-induced idiocy coming from the woods.

It’s close by, no more than a mile away from her. Catra’s hearing isn’t what it used to be, but it’s still leagues beyond what a human ear can hear. She can place roughly how far away it is by its volume, years of lurking in forests giving her the skill to locate it.

The unmistakable chime of the Sword of Protection radiating magic precedes a loud crash onto the ground. A shriek. A curse.

Catra hisses, debates leaving Petra to her fate, leaving her to learn the hard way—but ultimately she gives in. She runs into the woods to find She-Ra tangled within the branches of a felled tree, trunk split in a clean slice.

Catra grabs the sword, thrown yards away from Petra, and hacks at the branches that envelop her with a scowl. “What the fuck happened to you?”

“I couldn’t transform. I kept saying the Grayskull thing, but it just wouldn’t go,” Petra says as she wrestles with the part of the tree Catra hasn’t yet cut through. “And then...I transformed.”

“I can see that.” Catra frowns at the tangle of branches in front of her. Petra pulls them apart with thick, muscular arms, leaves and wood hitting her face as she walks.

A jagged end of a broken branch glides through She-Ra’s skin, and she shrieks again. The cut that forms bleeds, quick and bright on Petra’s cheek. If it doesn’t stop bleeding, if it’s more than a simple scrape, she’ll have to go back to the cottage for disinfectant, and the last thing she feels like doing right now is babying yet another of Etheria’s saviors.

Catra hasn’t always been so diligent. Adora would always admonish her for forgetting to wash out her wounds, citing a split on her thumb when they were twelve that got so infected, Catra ran a fever until she was put on two week’s worth of antibiotics.

Sometimes it was torture having someone there at all times to call her out, someone who knew her as far back as she can remember who could humble her with an anecdote of her own moments of idiocy. She misses it.

Petra touches her hand to her face and hisses when her fingers make contact. She pulls her fingers away, staring at the crimson that stains her hand. Catra groans with a roll of her eyes.

“You can’t touch it,” she says. “You get the wound infected. Haven’t you ever gotten a cut before?”

“It’ll heal as She-Ra, won’t it?”

Catra scoffs. “What, you think you get beat up as She-Ra and it magically goes away every time? You She-Ras are all the same. Stay here.”

As luck would have it, she ends up taking care of She-Ra yet again—and luck is hardly on her side, Catra thinks as she finds herself trekking to her home and back with gauze and rubbing alcohol.

Catra prepares a roll of cotton with disinfectant. She frowns when some spills on her hand and feels it sting her—she must have gotten a scrape somewhere while she hacked through the trees, nothing major. She could tend to herself later.

“Hold still,” Catra says as she places the roll on Petra’s cheek. “It’s going to sting.”

“Ah!”

“What did I say?”

“That it would sting!” Petra’s eyes water as her face contorts into a grimace, but she doesn’t move away from Catra’s hand. “Not that it would hurt!”

“Sting, hurt, same thing,” Catra says. “Toughen up, She-Ra.”

Petra sulks as Catra tapes a bandage to her cheek. She mutters a “thank you.” Catra nods.

“What were you even doing out here? You can prance around with the sword in Bright Moon.”

“I had another one of those dreams,” Petra says. “There was a voice, telling me there’s something in the woods I’m supposed to find.”

“Let me guess,” Catra says. “It was a building? Big, glowy?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“That’s the Crystal Castle,” Catra explains. “It’s where She-Ra is supposed to go train.”

“What’s in it?” Petra asks.

“How would I know? Do I look like I’m She-Ra?”

“I-” Petra frowns. “I mean, no, but you know more than I do.”

“Your thousands of past lives beg to differ, kid.”

“I thought you were supposed to be helping me,” Petra says. “Not make things more difficult.”

“Look, I’ve only been inside once,” Catra sighs, “It wasn’t a pleasant experience. If you’re not She-Ra that place does everything it can to chew you up and spit you out.”

Petra says nothing, only grabs the Sword of Protection from where it’s fallen on the ground. She inspects the blade, studies the engraved lines.

“That’s all great,” Petra fidgets, passing the sword by the hilt from one hand to another. “But I am She-Ra, so what am I supposed to do with that?”

Catra shrugs.

Petra settles the hilt between both hands, pointing it toward the ground. Catra watches.

She purses her lips, sucks in a deep breath. “You know, maybe it was a good thing the She-Ra before Adora didn’t leave anyone behind. I’m tired of you being short with me because you wish she were here.”

“Okay, that’s not—”

“Fair?” Petra asks. “It’s not fair, for either of us. I get that. But I can’t help being born, I can’t help it that Adora died, and you said you’d help.”

Catra studies Petra’s face as she looks toward her and sees the note of desperation that clouds her eyes, how tired she looks despite the glow, the height, the strength that She-Ra adds. Catra wonders how much of that exhaustion she’s responsible for.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Catra says. “But yeah. You’re right. It’s not fair for either of us. I don’t know,” she sighs, “maybe I’m just meant to annoy each new She-Ra to death. Maybe that’s my curse.”

“You, Glimmer, the Princesses at Bright Moon—you all knew her. And I get that she was important to you all. But—“

“But you want to be important, too?”

“Yeah.” Petra nods. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to speak out of turn. I’m just a little frustrated.”

Catra can understand. She can take some pity—she’d spent years in Adora’s shadow, too. The feeling isn’t pleasant.

It’s something ironic that She-Ra is Catra’s responsibility. She-Ra, who she once declared her enemy, who she once loathed so wholly and completely that it blinded her. She-Ra, who took her best friend away, in wartime and in peace. She-Ra, who—as hard as she tried—she could never shake the lasting remnants of resentment toward, not when an attack on Salineas from a rebel group woke Adora in the middle of the night or when the Alliance rushed her away to Bright Moon to settle their disputes, world’s greatest warrior forced to play politician.

She-Ra, who belonged to Etheria, never to her.

It takes every bit of strength she has not to repeat her own history and take out her rage toward the universe, her anguish over how unfair the world can be, on an unsuspecting kid. But it’s hard—Adora should be there, standing before her with the sword gripped tight in her fist, gold and glistening. Not her. She-Ra doesn’t have the right to take Adora away from her again.

But Catra knows She-Ra better than anyone, and from all angles: her enemy and her friend, lover and rival, assailant and confidant. She’s seen the hard parts, the parts Adora didn’t want anyone else to be privy to. That Adora wouldn’t want anyone else to go through alone.

“Hey,” Adora would say if she were watching her, if she knew how desperately Catra was dreading having to look the new She-Ra in the eye, blue and familiar and wrong. “I miss you too. But you know what the right thing to do is, so stop being a baby and do it.”

She-Ra is Catra’s responsibility now in the same way that Catra was once Adora’s responsibility, all those years ago under Shadow Weaver’s watch—they need each other, in this life and in the next.

It takes every bit of strength she has, but she turns to She-Ra, who stands in a familiar body wearing a face Catra doesn’t recognize.

“I know where to find the Crystal Castle. Let’s go, kid.”

Petra’s eyes light up. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They’re somewhere in the swamps of Beast Island when Catra hits a nerve she didn’t know existed.

It’s the first time they’ve seen each other since She-Ra was infected, and there’s...tension between them, to say the least, even on this asinine rescue mission that Adora’s conjured up for her sake. She thinks the rescue mission is pointless, that Catra could handle herself, and tells her as much. Leave it to Adora and her ridiculous hero complex to go out of her way to save her—her, of all people!—as if she needs saving.

(Actually, she very well might need a rescue, but it’s not like Adora needs to know that.)

Catra walks with She-Ra through the forest and thinks, as she watches her tear through thick underbrush with her sword and her muscles, that She-Ra may be strong and mighty, but she’s also a magical idiot.

“I’m not going to leave you here to die, Catra,” She-Ra says as they walk. “I’m not you.”

“Wow, we’re really going back there?” Catra pushes a stray branch out of her face, low enough to evade She-Ra’s freakishly tall shoulders but the perfect height to hit her square in the face.

“Yeah. We are.” She-Ra grunts. “Sorry I’m a little bitter about you sending me to my death. Crazy, I know.”

“Hey, you came here to save me—I didn’t ask you to. Can you ever just shut up and let go?”

She’s just close enough to She-Ra to see the way her face contorts—like there’s a panic beneath the surface, like the bits of worry she’s spent her childhood watching form in Adora’s eyes are being magnified by larger, bluer ones.

She-Ra turns on her heels and rounds the corner, stepping in front of Catra like a brick wall blockading her.

“You don’t think I’ve tried?” Her voice booms through the evening air. “You don’t think that’s all I’ve been trying to do?”

“I don’t know!”

“Yeah,” She-Ra narrows her eyes. “You don’t.”

The castle still freaks Catra out, even decades after she was forced on a deranged romp through her worst childhood memories within its walls. Adora would tell her, later, about Light Hope and her simulation, about being forced to fight against her in some virtual hellscape until she won, over and over again. She’d mentioned meeting Mara, learning to right her wrongs while drowning out the din that rang out and scolded her whenever she took a misstep.

But they’re not at war right now. Catra can’t imagine what hell Light Hope could possibly expose Petra to, or what fault she can find in her yet.

Still, before she entered the castle, she pulled Petra aside by the shoulder.

“Just so you know,” Catra said, “don’t take anything you hear in there at face value.”

Now she stands outside its walls, wondering, waiting. She didn’t tell Petra much—this is her journey to go on, not really Catra’s business despite her guiding hand. And call her unsympathetic, but she doesn’t know this She-Ra well enough to track that journey with a careful eye. One day, maybe, but Catra isn’t one for shallow interests in others. It’s an all or nothing feeling—she doesn’t know how to chart her relationships any different way, and she’s too old to learn now—and Petra hasn’t quite hit that mark yet.

But she sees Petra leave the castle, disoriented and stumbling, and she feels a tug in her chest. It’s tiring. She-Ra is tiring. Not just the castle, not Light Hope, but all of it, and she knows that.

Catra considers: two timelines meet in the Whispering Woods outside the castle, Catra caught somewhere between them.

One keeps her eighteen years in the past, chasing the dream of a person she once had in her actuality. The other follows a legacy passed down, a destiny not yet fulfilled. But both met right here in her grasp, both enemies of some sort.

But it’s more difficult than that. At this intersection all those years ago, she and Adora had time ahead, decades’ worth of time to close the rift between them, time she and Petra don’t have and will never have. In some small part, Catra hates her—no, that’s wrong. (She’s practically a child. Catra can’t hate her—she doesn’t deserve that). It’s all very complicated.

One road lies ahead, the other behind: one follows Adora, one Petra.

She sighs. She takes the latter. She knows she needs to.

Petra leans on the castle exterior, catching her breath with her back resting against the crystal wall. She looks up when Catra approaches her, looking small, scared.

Catra can’t follow this part of her journey, but she can at least offer her hand.

“You know, the She-Ra before Adora lived a thousand years ago,” Catra says. “Adora had to go through all this stuff alone, and regardless of what you think, it was hard.”

“That was Mara, right?” Petra asks, reciting history like she’s studying for a test

“Yeah.” Catra grinds her teeth. “Just...if she were here, she’d help you, but that’s not possible. And she’d kick my ass if she found out I didn’t try to help you.”

“So…”

“So,” Catra sighs, “if you need me—and you will—you know where to find me.”

Petra smiles. “Thank you.”

2. death

“What do I tell them?”

Catra doesn’t need to specify who she means by ‘them.’ She looks down—everything is red.

”That I’m sorry,” Adora says weakly.

She’s not denying it anymore—she can’t deny it. Her chest heaves, a deep inhale and a shuddering chain of joint exhales. Red covers everything: chest, hair, hands—soaks Adora’s clothes and rubs off onto Catra’s arms, hair, hands as she cradles her.

“They’ll need you,” Adora breathes in a voice colored by red, warm pain, stating the obvious as if Catra doesn’t already know.

“I’m gonna ruin their lives.”

How do you tell someone that their mother isn’t coming back? How do you tell two someones that?

Adora touches Catra’s jaw with light, shaking fingers. Blood drips onto Catra’s neck, stays hot and sticky on her face.

“Come on. I think I only have a few minutes,” Adora says, strained and thin like she’s using all the energy she has to speak. “Let’s talk about something else—what do you want my last words to be? You get to choose. You can make me say something really stupid if you want to.”

“Do not try to make me laugh right now, Adora.”

“Fine,” she says. “‘I love you’ are good ones to go out on, right?”

“’Good’ is one hell of a relative term,” Catra says in turn. She pauses—then remembers she doesn’t have the luxury of time.

“Yeah. Those are good.”

Petra is of relatively humble origins, Catra learns. The daughter of two physicians who began hearing voices and seeing visions of a palace in the woods, of a pink sky with stars over her head and three moons aligned.

She imagines the voices must be scary, but that’s a part of She-Ra’s journey that Catra can’t accompany her on.

No one in the village she’s from—a sizable one just outside of Plumeria—knew how to help her when they grew too frequent and fervent to ignore, but its reigning Princess, a daughter of Perfuma, suggested she go to Bright Moon.

She went, lifted the sword, and never came back. That part of Petra’s story feels familiar.

Being of humble origins, Petra has never had a reason to learn to defend herself, and it shows.

On one hand, isn’t this what the Rebellion fought for, a future where children didn’t need to be armed, didn’t need to learn to throw punches or balance swords in their fists?

On the other, She-Ra is a demigod being puppeteered by a gangly teenager who can hardly walk in a straight line.

Catra can often find Petra in the woods, training herself to parry, dodge, deflect on her own when she’s off the clock from her Bright Moon training. There’s more space in the woods to try (and especially, to fail) and less looming eyes taking inventory of how far she is coming along. Catra also suspects that she’s got a streak of sensitivity, a reluctance to criticism that reminds Catra of when she observed the early days of Reyna’s training years ago. She hears it in her voice, when her most declarative of statements trail with an upward inflection as if she’s searching for approval without having the courage to ask for it, in the frown on her face when she’s corrected on something there’s no reason she should have gotten right the first time anyway. She can’t blame either of them—maybe if she’d grown up under the watchful eyes of caring parents instead of in the Horde, she would have the luxury of having thin skin, too.

For her part, Adora asked for criticism, would challenge Catra or anyone else who praised her before offering her a suggestion of what she could, should, must do better. And as it turns out, refusing compliments is just as annoying as refusing criticism.

Usually when she walks from her home to the market, to Bright Moon, just to get some fresh air she’ll stroll past and pretend she can’t see Petra, but today as she walks home from an Alliance meeting, she humors herself.

Petra is lunging with the sword, wrist pointing downward, off balance with an awkward grip and uneven stance, when Catra saunters quietly behind her.

She taps Petra on the shoulder. “How’s it going?”

“Ah!”

Petra points the sword toward Catra’s chest. In a twisted way, it’s a fond memory having the Sword of Protection thrust at her, an enemy to its owner.

“Oh, please. I’ve had that thing pointed at me more times than you’ve even held it.”

“Oh,” Petra relaxes her shoulders, exhaling loudly. “It’s you.”

Catra cackles. “What were you gonna do with that thing? ”

“Uh, fight?”

“With that stance?” Catra bends her knees, planting her feet below her shoulder’s width apart. “Stand like this. It grounds you better.”

Petra frowns. “You didn’t have to come find me.”

“Well, I did,” Catra says. “The stance. Come on, try it.”

Petra rolls her eyes. “I was doing fine before. You just caught me by surprise.”

Catra raises her eyebrows, then wordlessly shoves her at the shoulders, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to disarm her. Petra stumbles backward with a groan.

“You were fine?” Catra scoffs. “Come on, no shame in not knowing.”

“Are you always like this?”

“Like what?”

“A know-it-all,” Petra says.

“Yeah, actually,” Catra says. “I am. And I’m, what? Sixty-something years older than you? Don’t call me a know-it-all. I do know it all, at least compared to you. Now, stance.”

Catra demonstrates, and Petra copies. Catra shoves at her again, and Petra doesn’t budge. “See?”

“Yeah,” Petra balances the sword between her hands, pointing it upward. “I see. You were right.”

“It’s not just fancy castles and a magic sword,” Catra says. “Someday, some dumbass is going to try and start trouble, and you’ve got to deal with it. If that weren’t the case, there wouldn’t need to be a She-Ra, and you would still be in Plumeria.”

Petra sighs. “I know. I just...I didn’t ask for all this.”

“Nobody does.”

“Mara was before me,” Adora leans on Catra’s chest, nineteen and basking in the glow of a feud overcome, a rift between the two of them closed. “And things went wrong.”

“How?”

Catra has a lot of catching up to do—history to learn of Etheria and its savior, personal disagreements to soothe and smooth over with aforementioned savior, inventory to take of the new scars lining Adora’s body (the ones that aren’t her doing, at least). She sees one on the outside of her wrist, thin and jagged, and a matching one that begins at the base of her thumb and disappears behind her shirt sleeve. She assumes there’s a story there that she hasn’t gotten around to asking about yet.

“She sent the planet into Despandos,” Adora says. “It was an accident. Light Hope won’t tell me, but I have theories why.”

Catra tangles a lock of Adora’s hair between her fingers. “How do you accidentally send a planet into a black hole?”

“I don’t know,” Adora replies. “But I think she was married. Or, you know, something like that.”

“So your theory is marriage makes you crazy?” Catra snorts. “Is it a red flag that my girlfriend is saying that?”

“No,” Adora says, rolling her eyes with a play at annoyance, “my theory is, she did it trying to save someone. Light Hope said she couldn’t let go of something. I met a woman in the woods who lived with her. I can put two and two together.”

“You saviors of Etheria are all the same,” Catra sighs. “Just promise me you won’t do something equally stupid for my sake.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Adora teases.

“I’m serious, Adora.”

Adora lifts her head to look Catra in the eye.

“I can’t promise that.”

Sometimes Petra will come by and ask for translations of jargon she hears from Glimmer or another member of the Alliance. Maybe it comes with the territory of being born from an immortal deity, but even in their older ages, Glimmer moves a mile a minute and speaks even faster. A long time ago, Catra would scoff to herself as she listened to Glimmer rattle off commands, strategy, whatever before a mission, all the reverence of a queen but the demeanor of a soldier. She can’t really blame Petra for being confused.

Years ago, she’d turn to Bow or Adora as they sat in briefs and say, ‘that’s what you get when you promote a commander to queen.’ Bow would chuckle quietly and insist she was just doing her job. Adora would elbow her in the ribs and tell her to stop wisecracking and pay attention, but then sigh in agreement once they were home.

“Okay,” Petra says, taking a sip of water. “So when they say ‘Salineas has been compromised,’ they really mean…”

“...that there are pirates doing something stupid,” Catra finishes. She pokes holes absently through a blanket on the side of her chair—one of Adora’s old projects from when she’d decided to take up knitting as ‘stress relief,’ then found a new source of stress once her projects went south, but became too stubborn to give up on them. This one was sloppy, but it was at least presentable, and Emilia liked the soft pink color of it when she was younger, so it made its way into the rotation of throw blankets placed around the house. “Well, granted, it could really be compromised, but ninety-nine percent of the time? It’s pirates.”

“There are that many pirates in Salineas?”

“Apparently,” Catra says. “You couldn’t pay me to get on one of those boats, though.”

“Scared of the water?”

“Are you stereotyping?” Catra flicks her tail. “Haha, very funny.” She adds, quietly: “But yeah, not a big fan.”

Petra laughs. Catra walks into the kitchen and finds a folder stuffed with scrap papers hidden in a cupboard, collected over the years. She cards through the contents—old notes on meetings (Perfuma’s neat script outlining new legislature to be passed in Plumeria, copied for each member in attendance), report cards (Reyna’s—all top marks in everything but math), and old grocery lists (Catra’s scrawl, ‘Eggs, Coffee grounds, Adora if you forget milk one more time I’m leaving you and taking the horse’). She fishes through papers to find what she needs, a crudely drawn map of Etheria’s kingdoms with a chart on back, edges yellowing with age.

“Adora was a big chart maker,” Catra sits back down by Petra, spreading the map on the table. “She made this shorthand thing years ago—it’s surprisingly comprehensive.”

Petra snorts. She flips the map over, different sized boxes with Adora’s small, neat handwriting taking up much of the back. “This is shorthand?”

“For Adora? This is brief.” Catra says. “Anyway, keep it. It’s a guide to what enemies come to which kingdoms, and the best defense tactic for each one.”

“And did this actually help prevent any attacks?”

Catra shrugs. “She brought it to meetings sometimes, it was more for making sure mission parties were prepared for threats when they went to other kingdoms.”

Petra studies the chart. “It’s divided by ‘nature,’ ‘animals,’ and, uh...‘evil.’”

“She had a way with words,” Catra says. “What can I say?”

“Hm.” Petra looks down and flips the paper over to look through the map of territories. “I’m guessing she wasn’t an artist, either?”

“Hey,” Catra protests, kidding mostly, “careful there. Making fun of her is my job. It’s my marriage-earned right.”

“It’s my birthright, isn’t it?”

“Fine,” Catra says. “You got me there.”

“But I guess I’ve never asked,” Petra says, “what else should I know? About Adora, I mean.”

“Huh?”

“I mean,” Petra twirls a lock of dark hair around her finger before tucking it behind her ear. “I’m learning the She-Ra stuff, but that’s not all there is.”

Catra stares at her blankly. “You’ve been coming to her house for what, weeks now and this is the first time you’ve thought to ask?”

“Yeah, sorry, I’ve been...caught up in things,” Petra says with a frown. “It’s been overwhelming, to say the least.”

“Sure, kid.” Catra leans back, crossing one leg over the other. “You still looking for some She-Ra thing to look forward to?”

“I guess,” Petra says.

“I don’t know if this helps you,” Catra says, “but if you can learn anything from Adora, know that the whole She-Ra thing gives you a free pass to being a total moron sometimes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Catra begins, “I could tell you the boring stuff, that she was brave, kind, whatever—you can hear that from anyone. But what they won’t tell you is that she was also an idiot.”

“An idiot?”

“Which you wouldn’t know from just meeting her, I mean,” Catra gestures to the map, “she looked like she had her shit together from the outside. And even if she didn’t, no one really had the nerve to call She-Ra stupid.”

“And you did.”

“Obviously I did,” Catra chuckles. “She was never a hero to me. She was just my friend.”

“What do you mean?” Petra asks.

“She was my best friend since we were kids,” Catra says. “I watched her cut herself bangs when we were fourteen and then cry about how bad they looked a day later. It’s hard to take She-Ra seriously after seeing her hit a low point like that.”

“Glimmer said you two ended up on opposite sides of the war,” Petra says.

“That’s how she phrased it?” Catra asks. “That’s an awfully nice interpretation of things.”

“Well, she said you used to be an ‘obnoxious murder child,’ but you’ve mellowed out.”

Catra snorts. “That sounds like Glimmer. And yeah, I only occasionally murder as an adult.”

Petra’s eyes widen. Catra cackles. “I’m kidding! Murder is bad, don’t do it. I mean, unless you have to.”

Petra grimaces. “Will I have to?”

“Dunno. Maybe.”

“Did Adora?”

Catra sighs. “Well, yes and no. You know she was with the Horde, right?”

“Did she—”

“Not like that. She never…she left before she was sent out on a real mission. But she had to beat them somehow, you know.”

Petra considers this. “Okay.”

“Here’s the thing,” Catra says, “all that senseless martyrdom and stuff they make you believe She-Ra needs to do? That ‘I-can-save-everyone’ attitude? She was always like that, and they don’t even talk like that in the Horde. And it was a hard habit to break.”

Petra only nods and fiddles with the map in her hands, rolling it up and wringing the scroll thinner and thinner.

“Even the woman who brought us up—she was a monster, and it was still hard for her.” Catra crinkles her nose, letting the unpleasant memory, the memory of a woman she hadn’t unearthed in years, of the scents of ash and blood and sweat mingled together as she lay dead at her and Adora’s feet pass through her.

“So she killed her.”

“It was a joint effort,” Catra shrugs off her question. “It was...complicated to say the least.”

“Isn’t all She-Ra stuff complicated?”

“Nah, this was before She-Ra,” Catra says, “Look, you need to understand, we didn’t have parents who cared about us or anything. We weren’t set up for success. We were raised by a lady who pit us against each other our whole lives, and I mean, saying we were ‘raised’ is a generous term.”

Catra sighs. She wishes it didn’t still hurt—Shadow Weaver’s hatred of her, Adora being the favorite, Catra having to learn she’d always come second regardless of how hard she tried, to curb her own ambition in favor of her safety—but the old wound runs deep, and it does. She’d molded armor around herself all those years ago because she’d had to, had to learn to cope if she wanted any sort of happiness, wanted to survive outside the Horde or look at Adora without feeling a burning sensation in her chest. It catches her off guard still when bits of old resentment creep through the cracks.

“I’m sorry,” Petra says quietly.

“Yeah, it’s old stuff. Just—if you have any shit to work out with your friends, family, whoever, go do it.” Catra rubs her temples with two fingers. “I mean, don’t kill anyone if you don’t have to. Murder is bad. But you’re not going to have a lot of time to work out your personal drama, so I suggest getting it all out of your system now.”

“I don’t really have any drama,” Petra shakes her head. “I have an older and a younger brother, but they’re, I don’t know. Pretty normal. Just regular middle child stuff.”

Catra snorts. “I can’t imagine She-Ra being a middle child. Or having an older brother, for that matter”

“Neither can he,” Petra says, “He’s convinced he’s in some fever dream where his little sister can beat him up.”

“Okay, well only do that if he deserves it.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen either of them,” Petra takes another sip of water, holding the cup with two hands in her lap once she’s finished, drumming her fingers along its side. “I miss them, more than I thought I would.”

“Your parents?”

“Yeah,” Petra sighs. “Them too.”

“Yeah, well, don’t let anyone get in the way of what matters.” Catra says. “You can take breaks from the She-Ra stuff sometimes, regardless of what that crazy hologram lady tells you.”

“What,” Petra asks, “did Light Hope have a problem with you?”

“Honestly?” Catra says. “Yeah, probably, but it didn’t matter. Adora had a problem with her. She finished training and didn’t really go back unless she could talk to Mara.”

Petra’s eyes light up. “So I can talk to her someday?”

“What, I’m not enough for you?” Catra folds her arms across her chest. “Some help I’ve been.”

Petra rolls her eyes, but she laughs—a good sport against Catra’s teasing. “It’s different.”

Catra’s considered it. But she can’t bank on it, and she closed the part of herself that wants Adora to exist somewhere in the aether off a long time ago. She’s used to being alone, and as tragic as that sounds, there’s some comfort in it. She can’t afford to hold on to some vain hope that one day, she’ll hear secondhand about the new She-Ra meeting her, about her being their guide in some other dimension that Catra doesn’t understand.

Besides all that, there’s something desperate in hoping she’s around, something that really keeps her wedged too far in the past. It’s been eighteen years—there’s a lot from their life together that’s missing, but she’s still had a life in all that time. It’s important she remember that.

Still, now that the possibility is there, she considers it for the first time. It’s allowed. It’s possible.

“I don’t know,” Catra shrugs. “But I hope so.”

The first time Catra sees stars is on top of the Bright Moon castle, a flattened alcove of its roof that Adora found before Catra ended up on the Rebellion’s side.

“I saw it months ago,” Adora says, sheepish, “I was riding Swift Wind and I passed it and thought…”

“...I’d like it here?” Catra guesses.

Adora nods. “Just reminded me of the Fright Zone roof.” She admits, quietly: “I didn’t want to keep thinking about you. It just kept happening.”

“I mean, I get it. I am quite the catch.”

“No, I mean, we were enemies,” Adora looks toward her. “So it—”

“—Hurt?” Catra takes her hand, lacing their fingers together.

“Yeah,” she says, her thumb tracing circles against Catra’s knuckles. “Hurt.”

“I get it.”

Catra rests her head on Adora’s shoulder and looks up into the night sky, pink bleeding into violet, freckled with twinkling lights.

It becomes her spot of respite amidst the busy castle throughout the years—sometimes Adora would join her up there, other times she’d come alone. It isn’t hard to climb up towards, even as she gets older. Eventually she teaches the kids how to climb—how to get in trouble, as Adora calls it—and lets them in on her secret, hidden away amidst pointy fixtures and moulded ornaments.

Even before Adora leaves them, she finds herself up there alone more and more frequently. Adora is getting older, her human body not quite as lithe or agile as that of a magicat, and Emilia was never quite so adventurous, so only she and Reyna frequent it by the time they’re teenagers.

Naturally, one summer day a few months after the battle, Catra finds Reyna looking up at the stars.

“You didn’t need to find me,” Reyna flicks her ear in annoyance.

“I didn’t,” Catra says, “we just have the same hiding spot.”

Reyna offers her a rueful smile. “Stole it from you.”

They sit together in silence, until Reyna lets out a sharp exhale.

“I just don’t get it,” Reyna stares out straight ahead, her voice strong, controlled. Catra knows that trick, the maneuver she learned long ago to keep her head still and gaze steady in order to stop her voice from wavering. “She always seemed so...I don’t know, indestructible, I guess.”

“You know she wasn’t.”

“Apparently not. You said she could be a dumbass sometimes. I guess I didn’t believe it.”

Catra puts a hand on Reyna’s shoulder, which Reyna shrugs off. Reyna looks up at her, the blue of Adora’s eyes boring into hers.

“No offense, Mom,” Reyna says with a scowl, “but I just want to be alone.”

Catra sighs. “Noted.”

It all tracks so well: Catra sees someone she used to be—someone she’s glad she’s not anymore, someone who didn’t see all the faults in someone she loved until they were almost irrevocably far away from her—in someone she’s raised, the best and worst of both her and Adora reflected back to her.

They sit in silence again. The stars hang above them—they once felt like a reward for a job well done, a planet saved, but now they sit as glowing reminders of easier days.

Emilia sends a wire—she’s coming to visit, and is dragging her sister by the oversized ear to see her mother if she has to.

Reyna comes of her own accord, but folds her arms across her chest and scowls on the sofa once she arrives.

“Come on, Rey,” Emilia prods at her ribcage with one finger like they’re children again, parents imploring them to stop picking on one another. “Cheer up.”

Catra sighs. Her and Reyna are cut from the same cloth—bad at hiding their feelings, reluctant to forgive, quick to assign blame to blameless happenstance.

“I see the sword’s gone,” Reyna mutters. The door to Catra’s room is swung open wide, the bare wall peeping through the entrance.

“There’s a new She-Ra,” Catra clicks her tongue. “What, did you think you were gonna get it when I drop dead?”

Before Reyna can respond, Emilia cuts in. “How is her training going, Mom?”

“Good, I guess,” Catra says. “I don’t really think there are benchmarks for this kind of thing.”

“As long as you’re taking care of yourself,” Emilia says.

“What does that mean?”

“Well,” Emilia grasps at the fingers of her left hand with her right—a nervous habit she inherited from Adora. “Training the new She-Ra could bring back some memories. Or, you know, keep you in the past.”

“I know what this looks like,” Catra interjects. “It looks like some old lady alone in the woods who never moved on, blah blah, something about romanticizing the past.”

“Mom, that’s not—”

“No, it’s fine,” Catra continues with a shrug. “I know what it looks like. But I have to do it. It’s what she’d want me to do. I’m the only one who can help her.”

“Glimmer?” Reyna challenges. “Bow?”

“You think the queen of Bright Moon and its tech master are gonna stop what they’re doing to help a dumb teenager hold a shiny sword?”

“Okay, but—”

“Emilia, please,” Catra says curtly. “Drop it.”

And she does.

They eat a civil, mostly silent dinner, and afterward Catra finds Reyna sitting outside, a cup of red wine in hand and the bottle resting on the ground.

“You come here, sulk on my couch, and then steal my booze?” Catra pulls up a chair and sits next to her, grabbing the wine bottle. “You really are my daughter.”

They chuckle together, tense, quick, no warmth underneath the sound. Reyna is Catra’s smattering of freckles against the palette of Adora’s pale complexion, the leering, burning eyes Catra uses to track down her prey dyed soft and blue. Looking at her feels both like an interrogation and a homecoming.

Reyna eyes Catra, mother and daughter staring one another down. “You know I don’t like this.”

“What?” Catra asks. “That there’s a new She-Ra, or that I’m helping her?”

“Both,” Reyna says. “The universe decides it can just replace Mom, and you let it? Just like that?”

“You can’t stop the universe, Reyna. I’ve tried.”

“Be honest with me—are you really helping this new She-Ra out of the goodness of your own heart, or is it because it’s the closest thing you have to her?”

“I—“ Catra stammers. “Don’t pull that. Don’t tell me I’m not over her when you clearly aren’t either.”

Reyna doesn’t respond, only takes a long drink of wine as Catra watches. When she’s done, she avoids Catra’s gaze, and looks outward toward the woods with a scowl.

“Do you think anything would have been different if you had been there?” Catra asks. “You think you would jump in and save her? You don’t think I tried?”

“I was a full-grown fucking adult when Bright Moon was under siege, Mom!” Reyna cries. “I was old enough. I was strong enough. You had no right to stop me.”

“Rey, look,” Catra rests her elbows in her lap, slouching forward. She massages her temple before continuing, soothing the crease in her forehead that aches. “We keep coming back to this. We’re too much alike. You think she’s perfect and I’m some monster who’s betrayed you forever because I did something you don’t like.”

Reyna glowers in Catra’s direction, as if to play at giving her the silent treatment. Stupid, on Reyna’s part—it’s a rule written down somewhere, Catra thinks, that children never win the Quiet Game when they initiate it.

“We knew the danger, weighed our options,” Catra continues. “We didn’t want you to see either of your moms die. How evil of me, I know.”

Reyna sighs. “I didn’t mean to bring all of this up again. It’s just that—”

“This is reopening some old wounds?”

“Yeah,” Reyna digs her nails into the pad of her palm—a nervous habit inherited from Catra, albeit without claws.

“Maybe we overreacted, I’ll give you that. Maybe I was being an idiot, maybe it was a knee jerk thing and we fucked up by not letting you go, but you’re gonna fuck up a lot of times in your life, kid,” Catra says, a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “And I’ll let you in on a secret, from one idiot to another.”

“Yeah?”

“Adora fucked up too,” Catra says. “A lot. She wasn’t a goddess, she was just a person, and you’ve got to start seeing her that way.”

She lets Reyna sit with that for a second. Reyna takes a sip of wine, chews at the inside of her cheek.

“You don’t think I see her that way?” Reyna asks.

“You don’t act like it.”

“Yeah,” Reyna says, “well, it’s complicated.”

“Oh, come on,” Catra eyes the bottle, considers taking a swig. She settles for taking Reyna’s cup out of her hands and stealing a sip. “I invented that trick. That moody ‘it’s complicated’ bit. Spill, Reyna.”

Reyna rolls her eyes as she takes the cup back. “It’s just—if I don’t see her that way, then. I don’t know. She’s the one who sacrificed herself. You were there, and you said no, but at the end of the day she was the one who sent the troops without me. Everything kind of becomes her fault.”

Catra sighs. “But it’s not. It took me my whole adult life to get it, but not everything has to be someone’s fault.”

“How did you learn?”

Catra says nothing. She gestures toward the open air. Reyna understands, nodding slowly.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Reyna says. “I just want to be over all this. I’m too old to have latent mommy issues.”

“Yeah, and I’m older,” Catra replies. “And they don’t go away.”

Catra takes a swig of wine from the bottle. It’s pathetic, really, so many years later and still thinking back to old hurts, to the damage caused to her when she was a child. She was taught to hurl accusations at the first target she could, an attempt to absolve herself of whatever guilt or bout of self-hatred she was feeling then and there. She thinks of how much she’d forced herself to blame Adora for as kids (her own mistreatment, the impossible standard she was held to and could never reach) and how much ire she’d held She-Ra with throughout the years (as Adora was thrust into political squabbles, battles that meant nothing to her, as she risked her life for some stupid reason or another).

It took Adora dying for her to realize that all of it was a waste of energy. Trying to blame She-Ra for Adora’s actions only made her blame Adora, and she couldn’t layer rage and grief on top of one another that way and come out of it sane of mind.

Reyna looks down at her hands.

“But Adora and my shit are different beasts entirely,” Catra says. “We tried to spare you two of mommy issues the best we could.”

“If it makes you feel better,” Reyna purses her lips, “you spared Emilia for the most part.”

“Well, she was smart. She wasn’t a soldier.” Catra scratches at her ear. “Anyway, there’s a lot—She-Ra or otherwise—she didn’t want you and your sister to see. She thought she was doing the right thing, but who knows, really? Maybe she wasn’t.”

Reyna frowns. “What do you think?”

Catra pauses. She considers for a moment, then says: “I think...that neither of us really want her to be wrong, so does it really matter?”

“I guess not,” Reyna says, giving her a small nod.

Neither of them are huggers, so Catra settles for rubbing an affectionate hand against Reyna’s forearm.

She smiles, an armistice between them.

The thing is, death isn’t noble. It isn’t a victory, like the Horde taught her years ago. Death is a vulture—it takes the rotting, broken thing in you and picks away at it until only the rawest, ugliest bits are exposed.

She feels it the first time she thinks Adora might die—even though she knows she won’t. That Crystal Castle was made for She-Ra a thousand eternities ago, it wouldn’t chew her up not to spit her back out in some form. But that doesn’t matter much. She can’t afford to show it, but she feels something inside her snap as she watches Adora dangle from the ledge below her.

She feels it the second time (on her rescue quest to Beast Island, caught between a monster and a Horde tank), the third (against Hordak, a monster and a Horde tank himself), fourth, fifth—she stops keeping count. Adora can be selfish in the name of being selfless, stupid for the sake of being noble, can fling herself straight into danger without thinking about the feeling Catra gets, like her guts are spilling out of her, when she imagines all the ways she could get killed.

The other thing—the thing that the just and fair She-Ra wouldn’t want anyone to see—is that Adora is a hypocrite. Catra long learned to give up on picking losing battles with her, but it’s the one fight she can’t resist starting, should Catra run into the fray herself. Adora will scold her, tell her off for doing something so stupid and reckless. Catra can’t take it.

“So it’s okay for you to be a martyr but not me?” Catra would ask, something ugly and biting in her voice.

“I don’t want to be a martyr, Catra,” Adora would say in response, equally charged.

It’s the one fight they always come back to, and Adora gets the final word.

“Can I ask,” Petra asks one January day, she and Catra sitting in the Bright Moon chamber hall, “what happened, exactly?”

“I thought you knew.”

“I only got the gist of it,” Petra says. “Not the full story.”

Catra shakes her head.

It’s sad, really—nearly nineteen years later, and it’s still hard to say, hard to put the words back into the world.

She imagines the words, the ‘she wanted to save me’ and ‘I couldn’t stop her’ floating around the empty air, imagines trying and failing to say them only to have them cling like a bile to the back of her throat.

She’s said them so many times, to so many different people—their kids, the other Princesses, Micah's quivering lip and Glimmer’s brow furrowed in both grief and anger—but something about today and something about speaking them to her successor makes it difficult.

“Someday,” she says. “Or from someone else. But I’m not up for it right now.”

Petra nods and covers the back of Catra’s hand with her own.

“I just hope I’m doing a good job,” Petra sighs quietly. “I hope I’m not messing anything up.”

“What, by being alive?” Catra asks.

She nods again, slowly. “I guess.”

Catra considers this, considers the voice in her head that would ask herself the same thing when she was her age.

Or rather, the one that rang the loudest then, when she was young. It never quite goes away regardless of how much she wishes it could.

“No, you’re not,” Catra says. “You can’t think like that.”

“No?”

“No,” she says again. “You’re doing fine.”

3. rebirth

With Adora, the challenge was to accept that there was a hero on top of the girl she already knew. With Petra, it’s the exact opposite.

Before, it was a challenge to merge the Adora of her childhood with an ethereal being, that the two could coexist in one body without either identity being compromised. But with her gone, the only thing left behind is the vague concept that there would be another She-Ra, and it’s hard to remember that just as Adora could be something greater than herself, She-Ra was only a woman at the end of the day. It’s been months or so since Petra has been named, and somewhere along the way, Catra’s realized that there’s a person somewhere beneath the She-Ra veneer.

Granted, if Catra were a softer person, Petra would have been her own person from the beginning. But, damn it, she’s not. It takes most of a year for her to accept that she‘s more than a magical idiot in training, and she realizes she knows next to nothing about her. Truth be told, she should feel guiltier about this than she does.

She’s picked up the basics—the middle child of three, Plumerian, never been the loud or athletic type, ironically enough. But it takes her a while to learn anything past that.

Petra begins to come over less and less for real She-Ra related inquiries, and more for advice. What to say to this councilor should they give her a hard time, how to respond to briefings where she doesn’t actually know what the hell is happening like she’s a credible source, how to appear confident at fancy dinners or delegate meetings where she’s the youngest in the room. It’s nice to have the company, Catra will admit.

“You got friends?” Catra asks one day as they sit at the kitchen table. Catra hadn’t expected or even wanted to serve her dinner, but a particularly unforgiving thunderstorm hails over the woods right now, and she isn’t quite mean enough to cast her out into the pouring rain.

“Do you think I don’t have friends?” Petra shrieks, offended.

Catra laughs, spooning meat and vegetables onto two plates.

“Anyone else?” Catra hands Petra a plate as she watches in amusement as Petra’s face goes blank.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s—it’s complicated,” Petra says.

“Complicated like, ‘I found out I’m She-Ra and I’m defecting from the Horde and leaving my best friend behind’ complicated, or just teenager stuff?”

“I went to school with her in Plumeria,” Petra stares down her dinner, furiously stabbing her fork through a chunk of meat. “But I don’t know, coming to Bright Moon put us out of touch. I don’t think she even knows I exist anymore.”

“Please, kid, I doubt that. You’re She-Ra,” Catra says idly, refilling her glass with water from a pitcher on the table. “You turn into an eight foot tall warrior woman, and you have great hair. That’s bound to make you a hit with the ladies.”

“Was your Sh—sorry, was Adora?”

“A hit with the ladies?” Catra smirks as Petra nods. “I don’t know. I was the only one.”

“Ever?”

“Why are you so surprised? You don’t think I was a catch?”

“No, I just—“ Petra stops, reconsiders. “It just feels hard. To get it all right the first time.”

“Well, we didn’t ‘get it right,” Catra says. “If anything, we just kept getting it wrong until we realized no one else could put up with each other’s shit.”

That was an oversimplification, probably. But there was history, too much history for either of them to erase or forget. So even when it felt like they’d never figure it out, there was something to fall back on. There were the moments of recognition of each other’s neuroses, the pushing of each other’s buttons, airing of each other’s grievances that they already recognized and accepted, honored and revered—ones that once they tolerated each other once again after their time apart, there was no point really in expecting someone else to learn.

It’s a consequence of growing up in a warzone. You don’t meet very many allies, and the ones that you do meet, you hold on to. You keep your friends close, enemies closer, the few you’d lay down your life for closest.

“And, I mean,” Catra says, her voice light, “I was a catch.”

“Sure,” Petra snorts.

“If Adora weren’t in the picture? I really would have been a hit.”

Petra groans. “You’re so lame.”

Catra laughs as Petra buries her face in her hands.

Emilia sits on the couch, almost fully grown and ready for the real world.

She asks about life outside their small world, about whether she should go to university or enlist in the coming fall, about Reyna’s training, about some classmate she’s been dating—the last draws a tortured groan from Catra and a playful roll of her eyes directed at Catra from Adora.

(She chooses university. After one fateful day that spring, being a soldier has lost its grandeur.)

“What happens if we disagree on things?” Emilia asks.

Adora snickers. “Do you think we haven’t disagreed on things?”

“That was different,” Emilia protests. “You were in a war.”

“Well,” Adora says gently. “We still disagree sometimes. All people do.”

“Like when?”

They stare at each other in silent debate. They were never the ‘we’ll tell you when you’re older’ type on anything—neither of them had mothers, how could they know the oldest trick in the mothering book? As a result, not very much went unsaid between them and their daughters, only the most dire of things.

They could reveal something dire, something that it would do no harm but certainly no good for her to know—that Adora’s hesitant to encourage either of their daughters to be soldiers, that she knows she can’t control them or tell them ‘no’ but wishes she could sometimes, that in her darkest moments that desire for control makes her think she’s no better than Shadow Weaver, that Catra didn’t think she wanted kids at all, didn’t think she was fit to have someone depend on her so wholly and irrevocably until a year or two before Reyna entered the picture.

Catra interjects with the first thing she can think of.

“Adora thought Swift Wind was lonely, so she wanted to get a second horse. I said no.”

Adora laughs, relaxing into her seat, no doubt relieved that Catra bailed her out.

“And I still hold it against her,” Adora pouts. “I had one picked out and everything.”

“You ever hear the phrase, ‘my kingdom for a horse?’” Catra asks. “Like, you’d trade something huge and important for something stupid that smells like manure?”

“Imagine that, but the kingdom is a marriage,” Adora says with a lilt to her voice. “Swift Wind almost wrecked our home.”

Emilia rolls her eyes, but she smiles as she says, “you guys are so annoying.”

Bow’s always been a good sport, and so maybe that’s why she’s tolerated him all these years. He was always a kind face, whether it were aboard Darla in the early days of her reconciliation with Adora or years later in the comfort of the Bright Moon castle, the first birthday gift either of the kids ever received—hell, the first birthday gift she’d ever received.

(Adora tried to get her one that same year: her twenty-first, the first birthday they’d spent together where they knew what birthdays were besides just a date. She failed, spectacularly, dangling a stuffed mouse toy in front of her eyes until she realized Catra was not pawing after it, rather staring unamused at her instead, then laughing as her face drooped with disappointment.)

In any case, the King of Bright Moon deigns Catra with his presence even when he doesn't really have the time to, and Catra appreciates that. It may be out of pity, but it's company nonetheless.

They sit in the library across from the war room, reading over treaties from the meeting earlier that day.

“That new Princess from Silverglade is no joke,” Bow says, circling a passage on his scroll in red ink. “These are some hefty requisitions. We’ll spend weeks trying to fill them.”

“You ever think about retiring?” Catra sits with her feet kicked up onto the table. “You’ve been at it for like, ever.”

“Me? No.”

“No? You’re old,” Catra says. “You’re not even on the field anymore.”

“Do you ever think about moving closer to Bright Moon, now that the kids are gone and you’re out of retirement?”

“Me? No,” Catra curls her tail against the leg of the table. Emilia’s brought it up before—that maybe she should live closer to her and Reyna in case she needs them, or in case they need her, but the thought of packing up their old home forever is never entertained. “Dumb question. Besides, I’m not out of retirement. It’s not my fault I’m so smart and useful people want to keep me around. But I’m not fighting anyone’s battles for them or anything.”

“Yeah, okay,” Bow laughs. “The new She-Ra’s doing better in meetings. I think she’s really starting to keep up.”

“She has a name, you know,” Catra clicks her tongue. ”And yeah. I just hope Petra’s ready for shit to really hit the fan.”

“You think it will?”

“Oh, it always does,” Catra says. “It’s just a matter of when.”

Bow isn’t dumb—blindly optimistic and wildly trusting, but not dumb. They wouldn’t be having meetings and kingdoms wouldn’t be requesting ridiculous requisitions from the Alliance headquarters if trouble wasn’t still brewing outside of their small bubble. Catra isn’t as well informed as she used to be—maybe she should be keeping up for Petra’s sake, but she’s not even technically an ambassador anymore.

She peeks over Bow’s shoulder at the requisitions request. “Stars. What could they possibly need this much shit for? I thought Silverglade was peaceful.”

Bow shrugs. “When they can afford to be, they are.”

Catra eyes the document, dragging a claw lightly along the dent created by Bow’s pen.

“You know,” Bow says, “the offer still stands. If the cottage ever gets lonely, Bright Moon could use you here.”

“I—Look. I appreciate it,” Catra crinkles her nose. “I do. But I’m good.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” Catra says. “Besides, I think Reyna would kill me in my sleep if I moved Adora’s stuff.”

“Maybe,” Bow observes with a chuckle. “She’s always been stubborn.”

“She’s a piece of work,” Catra snorts.

“I wonder where she got that from.”

“Hey,” Catra gives a dry laugh. “Watch it.”

It’s through Adora’s fruitless quest for information on Mara that Catra sees Light Hope for what she is.

It’s something of an obsession, a need for Adora to learn more about her, to learn where Mara went wrong to avoid the same fate. To have her cake and eat it too, as they say in Bright Moon—to have Catra, her friends, everything that makes Etheria worth saving and still succeed in actually saving it.

Adora enters their room in a huff one night, throwing her bag onto the floor and tugging violently at her shirt until she strips it off and trades it for a grey tank.

Catra is in bed, reading by the lamplight. “Rough day?”

“It’s Light Hope,” Adora groans as she peels off her leggings. “I just need to know—and she won’t tell me anything.”

Adora throws on a pair of shorts and plops face down onto the bed, squishing her face against the pillows. “Sorry. This is just driving me nuts. I was there for hours.”

“I can tell,” Catra says, folding the corner of the book into a dog-ear. Adora glares at her through narrow eyes. “What? I’m comfortable. I’m not getting out of bed to get a bookmark.”

“I get you to join the Rebellion and you start destroying our books? You’re making me look bad.”

“Adora, you are literally the only person who gives a shit. You were saying?”

“I keep asking where she went wrong,” Adora says. “I’ve asked Light Hope, I went through the library here and at Bow’s dads’ house, and I still can’t find out anything useful about her. And I’ve been looking for months.”

Catra runs an idle hand through Adora’s hair, spilling from its ponytail down her shoulder. She absently traces what peeks out of the pink scars down her back through her shirt—she’s not sure why she’s drawn to them. A guilty conscience, maybe. An unspoken treatise between them, a white flag that says ‘I’ve hurt you before, I won’t again.’

“Light Hope is the only one who knew her,” Adora sulks. “Everyone else died thousands of years ago.”

“And she won’t tell you.”

“Yeah. If it were up to her,” Adora says, leaning into the touch of Catra’s hand on her back, “I’d live alone in a castle for my entire life.”

She turns over, hugging a pillow to her chest. “She keeps saying Mara failed because her attachments got in her way. I want to do a good job, but I can’t just give everything up. I can’t live that way.”

“Loaded comment?”

“Huh?”

Catra suspects—knows, really—‘everything’ is code for her. She’s good at reading between lines, better at twisting her own words to leave what needs to be spoken unsaid. But they agreed they’d stop, that doublespeak and a fear of saying what’s on their minds to spare the others’ feelings is part of what drove them apart, that ‘you can tell me anything’ means ‘please tell me everything, don’t make me guess.’

“Oh. Yeah, I guess,” Adora sighs. “Sorry. It’s just...I love you. You know that. But it’s driving me crazy having someone breathe down my neck practically asking me to dump you, telling me ‘love is a weakness, it’s going to ruin me, I’d be better off if I didn’t care’—oh. Huh.”

She pauses, looking down at her hands, grasping the fingers of her left hand with her right and avoiding Catra’s gaze.

“You know who that sounds like,” Catra says softly, taking one of Adora’s fidgeting hands in her own. “I don’t have to tell you.”

Catra thinks back to snippets of conversation she’d caught when she wasn’t supposed to, Adora in Shadow Weaver’s chambers, young and impressionable, the Black Garnet glowing maroon against her cheeks.

“You can keep her around, Adora,” she heard Shadow Weaver say, tucking a lock of hair behind Adora’s ear, “but do not let her distract you. Don’t let her make you weak.”

“I do,” Adora’s lip quivers. “But I need her. She’s the only one who can train me.”

Catra says nothing, only runs her hand behind Adora’s ear to the point of her jaw. A gesture with baggage, the only tender hand they’d ever been dealt as children by anyone besides each other. One that Catra had only ever been dealt once. Catra doesn’t realize she’s doing it until her hand is already on Adora’s face.

But Catra cups her cheek now, and Adora doesn’t seem to notice, and if she notices, she doesn’t care. She settles into her touch without hesitating.

There is a threat coming from the north that’s already attacked a civilian town, a rebel group which has caused trouble for Bright Moon before. Nothing their army can’t handle, but it’s Petra’s first time in the front lines all the same.

Catra watches Petra learn this, watching her face fall as she realizes somewhere between war table discussions that whatever plans being made were her plans to execute. There’s a waver to her voice as she approves the final defense strategy and a nervous shaking of her leg against the table as they speak.

Petra is, understandably, scared shitless.

Catra feels a spot of tenderness, maybe pity—she has to remind herself, Petra’s not a soldier. She wasn’t bred to be one.

She wonders why the powers that be chose Petra, but then again, she’d wondered the same about Adora. Maybe it’s that she is wired so differently than Adora that made her a viable candidate. Petra is soft where Adora was hard, but as sensitive to those around her and as cautious of others’ safety. Catra hopes she can intervene before she learns Adora’s habit of thrusting herself into danger regardless of threat, but she supposes that’s not her battle to fight.

She knows enough about She-Ra to know that whoever they choose will meet the challenge and step toward greatness, but every She-Ra thing translates into supernatural gibberish to her. She’ll never understand how it all works on some intrinsic level, and she’s accepted that she’ll always be somewhat locked out of the She-Ra loop because of it.

Usually, she’s grateful for her own willful ignorance. This magical bullshit is exhausting, and just hearing Adora talk about Light Hope this, Mara that was an exercise in patience. Sometimes, though, it would be nice to believe in divine inspiration, to scream out into the void and be heard.

She guides Petra, nervous and babbling, to the Crystal Castle to plead for some advice, to ask what leading the forces into battle would entail. She’d been training with Light Hope, Catra knows, and she’s better than she was when she started, almost a year ago.

(Catra doesn’t pry—but she does wonder what deranged training exercises she puts Petra through, what evils her simulations conjure for someone who’s lived such a simple life. She almost feels responsible for whatever they are, though she knows she’d find her way to Light Hope eventually even if Catra didn’t lead her there.)

“It’s your birthday soon, isn’t it?” Catra asks on their way. “Don’t die before it. That’s an awful present.”

“You remembered that?”

“It’s been a year since you started hearing things, and I knew that was when you were coming of age,” Catra says, “And it’s been nineteen since...you know. I figured.”

“I’ll try my hardest. But you’d better get me a nice gift.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Catra laughs.

Petra laughs, too, but sobers up quickly. “Do you think I’ll be alright?”

“Come on,” Catra says, “don’t talk like that. Go find out what you need to know and worry about it later.”

Petra obliges her, grounding herself and pointing the Sword of Protection to the sky. She turns, drowned in light, emerging in a blur of silver and olive and white and gold.

She walks into the castle, giving Catra one last glance before she goes.

Catra waits.

What feels like ages pass before her. She sits, leaning against the castle wall, reading through plans from Bright Moon that Glimmer had sent her way. Her days of fighting are over—she’s too old, too jaded by what she’d lost to warfare—but she’s still consulted before battles, still okays the commanders’ plans to make sure they haven’t missed some obvious threat or made a crucial mistake somewhere.

Catra thinks it ironic that she’s being consulted about details now, Catra who liked to leap before she thought even once to look when she was younger.

All the same, she misses it—the battle itself was always her favorite part. A well-orchestrated battle felt like gliding, like a dance she’d choreographed and perfected despite the unpredictability of rival and circumstances. It was a challenge, and Catra can hardly resist a challenge.

And she was good at it. Really good—dangerously so, fast and scrappy and smart.

Eventually the moon begins to set, and Petra is running toward her, quick and desperate.

“Catra!” Petra cries as she runs. “Catra, I saw her!”

Petra folds over to rest her hands on her knees, panting. “In the Crystal Castle. I talked to her. I talked to Adora.”

“What?” Catra asks, quick and numb like a reflex being struck. She jumps to standing, she forgets to breathe for a second. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.” Petra says. “Tall, blond…”

“Yeah, I know what she looks like. What did she say?”

“That I shouldn’t be scared,” Petra says. “That I’ve got thousands of lives’ worth of battles under my belt, and I’ll be fine if I trust my gut.”

“And do you feel any better?” Catra asks.

Petra winces. “No, not really. I mean, Mara, Adora—they were both She-Ra. And they both went down, as She-Ra.”

Catra sucks in a breath. “Yeah, that’s fair. Anything else?”

Petra nods.

“She said thank you,” she says. “For taking care of me.”

Catra smiles. Her voice softens. “If you get out of this alive, tell her I said I owed her one.”

The forces are ready to move the next day, waiting for Petra’s command.

It’s her first battle, and no one is expecting her to be perfect, but Petra lies somewhere between the stalwart soldier she needs to be and a nervous wreck. She paces the fortress, the loud thud of She-Ra’s boots creating booming echoes where she walks.

Catra catches her wrist as she passes. “Petra. Stop. Your boots are gonna deafen me.”

“Sorry.” Petra looks to her and sighs. She kneels, eye level with Catra. “I’m just scared.”

“I know.” Catra puts a hand on her shoulder.

Petra hugs her, resting her head on Catra’s shoulder. Her arms are strong, tough and thick with muscle, her hair tickles Catra’s chin and the hard metal of her tiara grazes her cheek.

She has the impulse to stroke the silver hair, to push it away from her eyes as she’d done to Adora’s thousands of times, a silent show of support, a way of saying ‘don’t worry, it’ll all be fine’ that was subtle, sweet but not cloying. Neither of them ever did have a way with words.

She follows it, tucking a lock of Petra’s hair behind her ear. She lifts Petra’s chin with a gentle hand, and Petra looks in her eyes, blue and wide and strong, but scared and uneasy all the same.

“Give ‘em hell out there, Petra.”

“So you ready to go out there?” Catra asks as she watches Adora tend to her armor, materialized out of the She-Ra aether over her dress. She paces, if you could even call it that—stretching in low lunges toward the mirror, straightening out the plates against her chest, and then stretching again in the other direction.

“Yeah.”

Catra tilts her head. “Really.”

“Yeah, uh. Time to go rally the troops,” she says with a nervous chuckle.

Catra catches her wrist as she passes with her next set of lunges, pulling her back up to standing, all eight feet of her.

“You’ll be fine,” Catra laces her fingers with Adora’s, the claw of her thumb digging lightly into Adora’s knuckle. “People trust you. You’ll do good.”

“Yeah,” Adora takes a deep breath, like she’s trying to believe it. “Thanks.”

“And even if you don’t,” Catra says. “Everyone will be dead, and no one will remember.”

Adora kicks her foot with her own, hard, forgetting for a moment that just because She-Ra’s adorned in hard gold doesn’t mean Catra is.

Catra jerks her foot upward. “Ow!”

“Sorry!” Adora takes a step backward. “It’s been a while. I forgot you’d be barefoot.”

“So you kick me?”

“Most people in Bright Moon wear shoes,” Adora says. “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them, but they protect your feet.”

“You beg me to join your dumb rebellion, and then you injure me?” Catra clicks her tongue. “Adora, are you forgetting what the Horde taught us about friendly fire?”

“Yeah,” Adora answers. “It’s allowed if your friend is too dumb to put on shoes.”

Catra snorts. “Whatever.”

They stare at each other. Either of them could make a move, do something, do anything—they might die in hours, minutes even. If there’s something Catra needs to say to her (and there is, a something that’s been gnawing at her since joining the Rebellion), then now is the time.

But she doesn’t. Adora lets go of her hand.

“It’s time, huh?” Catra asks quietly.

Adora nods. She begins to walk away, but stops herself before leaving the hall. “Catra?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad we’re on the same side.”

“Don’t you dare go soft on me, Princess.” Catra says. And says, quieter: “Me too.”

The battle is won. Petra comes out of it exhausted, her limbs weak under the weight of the Sword of Protection once she’s back in her mundane body, but alive and victorious all the same.

She rests for a few days after—she deserves it.

In the following days, Bright Moon has something of a celebration in honor of their victory. It wasn’t even a dramatic battle, but Glimmer figures that fanfare is in order anyway. The last time She-Ra fought in battle on Bright Moon’s grounds, it didn’t end so well, which makes the new She-Ra’s first successful mission on the field a triumph.

Petra’s family, two parents and two brothers, visits, and there’s something delightful in seeing Petra act so normal. She stands between a shorter boy, not more than thirteen or fourteen, and a taller man. They all share her dark skin and eyes, though both brothers have hair a shade or two darker and duller than Petra’s.

They laugh at and with each other, and she watches as Petra’s older brother does that annoying thing to her that Adora would do to Catra when she hit her growth spurt earlier where she’d rest her elbow on top of her head like an armrest, and Petra shoves him off, threatening halfheartedly to beat him up with her ‘new She-Ra muscles.’

Catra studies Petra’s parents, her mother redheaded and her father brunette, and sees Petra’s features split between them both. Her mother’s nose. Her father’s eyes and freckles.

“She’s always been a bright girl,” her mother boasts after Petra introduces them. “Never took her for the sword fighting type, though.”

“Mom!” Petra whines.

“You should have seen her as a kid,” she continues. “Could hardly walk in a straight line without tripping over herself.”

Petra groans. “You’re so embarrassing. When I introduce you guys to Queen Glimmer, please don’t make me look bad.”

Her father laughs. “Can you go find Jonah? I think he’s wandered off into the big hall with the armor, and I don’t want him getting any big ideas.”

“Afraid he’s gonna turn into She-Ra, too?” Petra asks. “It’s not contagious.”

Her father raises an eyebrow at her, and she pouts. “Fine.”

Her mom turns to Catra when Petra leaves and asks, “how has she been adjusting?”

“How does she look to you?” Catra asks. “You know her best.”

“Good. It’s just,” her mother sighs, “she’s easily overwhelmed. And she’s our daughter, you know?”

Catra nods. “It’s hard. I get it. We weren’t thrilled when our daughter told us she wanted to be a soldier, either.”

“It’s not that we’re not proud,” Petra’s father says. “We are. Very. But—”

“—we worry,” her mother finishes.

“I’d be more concerned if you didn’t,” Catra says in turn. “If it makes you feel any better, she’s in good hands here.”

She finds Reyna somewhere in the middle of the festivities—Emilia is caught in the middle of a semester with papers to read and apologized about twelve times for not being able to make it, to which Catra shrugged and told her there will be other times to meet the new She-Ra and bother her in the name of Etherian academia.

Reyna offers Petra a curt hello, uncharacteristically reserved—nervous, maybe. She extends Petra her hand to shake.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Petra grabs her hand and shakes.

“Just don’t expect me to call you ‘mom,’” Reyna says.

Catra scowls. “Reyna, don’t be obnoxious.”

“Learned it from you,” Reyna smirks toward her mother. She turns back to Petra. “Uh, it’s nice to meet you, too.”

“I saw you on the battlefield,” Petra says. “You’re good. Did she teach you to fight like that?”

“Who, my mom? Ha,” Reyna snorts. “She wishes.”

“Careful, Reyna, I put you into this world…”

“...and you can take me out of it, yeah, yeah,” Reyna rolls her eyes. She looks toward Petra again, pointing a thumb backwards at Catra. “She talks a big game, you ever noticed? All bark, no bite.”

Catra stares up at the glass, stained with red and gold and the blue glint of She-Ra’s eye. She’s walked past the chamber hall before, and she’s been at the palace for a while, but she’s never stopped to really look at it before.

Catra squints. “Is that you?”

“Yeah, I posed for it last week,” Adora jokes. “Don’t you remember? I don’t think they got my nose right, though.”

“It doesn’t have a nose, dumbass.”

“Yeah,” Adora says, “and I do. Like I said, they got it wrong.”

Catra shoves her shoulder. Adora laughs, and her laughter fills the empty chamber. She backs up hard against the wall, the clang of glass ringing in both their ears.

Catra pulls her away from the mural wall, fragile glass vibrating ever so slightly. She grabs Adora by the waist.

She studies the mural again. “I don’t know, she might be prettier than you.”

“Oh, please,” Adora rests her arms atop Catra’s shoulders. “I have nicer hair.”

“Maybe,” she says with a playful roll of her eyes.

Adora grins. Catra presses her lips to Adora’s before she can say something stupid to ruin the moment, and Adora relaxes as she sighs into her touch.

There’s a more casual dinner later, where Catra sits in between Glimmer and Bow. They watch Petra speak with a woman around her age, brown skin and blonde hair and something so specifically Plumerian about her.

Petra rests a hand on her forearm, her gaze fixed on her. Glimmer frowns from across the hall.

“I think it’s sweet,” Bow says. “You never had a problem with Adora dating.”

“Uh,” Catra interjects. “Excuse me? I beg to differ.”

“That was different,” Bow points his fork toward Glimmer, now looking down into her plate of food. “You two had your own weird war going on.”

“We still do,” Catra snorts, and Glimmer elbows her in the ribs. It’s funny, she thinks, picking fights with the queen of Bright Moon like they’re still teenagers.

“Well, my dad didn’t love it,” Glimmer says, “not because it was you,” she drawls toward Catra. "But because you guys were all over each other, all the time."

“Right. You didn’t love it because it was me.”

Glimmer smirks. “I regret nothing. You deserved it.”

“Guys,” Bow groans. “Don’t start.”

“But come on,” Glimmer says, “it was a war. Not really great timing. At least we knew it wasn’t just some fun thing with you and Adora.”

“Yeah. It was terrible. We both had an awful time,” Catra deadpans. “We only got married for tax purposes.”

“You know what I mean,” Glimmer takes a long sip of wine. “Look. Bright Moon was just attacked, and the rebels might come back. What if there’s a real threat? She-Ra doesn’t exactly have time for,” Glimmer gestures toward Petra and her friend. “You know. At least we knew you were sticking around and fighting for the Rebellion.”

Catra laughs. “So you’re saying all of She-Ra’s potential suitors must have as big a deathwish as she does.”

“All I’m saying is, you know how things have ended for the past two She-Ras.”

Catra grimaces, staring down at her plate. Bow rests a hand on her forearm, which is annoying but well-intended, so she lets him. “I know.”

“If Bright Moon goes down on my watch—” Glimmer continues. “Catra, I loved Adora. And I tolerate you. I trust both your judgements, but I have to think rationally about this.”

“You know,” Catra says. “Most people mellow out in their old age, not go all totalitarian.”

“Catra.”

“Alright, alright,” Catra throws her hands up in surrender. “I’ll talk to her later.”

She doesn’t have to search far. After dinner, Petra runs toward her, light on her feet as she drags the other woman along by the wrist. She’s being a good sport about it—Petra’s gotten stronger, her grip tighter and muscles more developed. Catra had been dragged around plenty by Adora, and while the muscles were nice to look at, they hurt.

“This is Flora,” Petra gestures toward the girl. “Flora, this is Catra. She’s...she’s my mentor, I guess.”

“‘You guess?’” Catra snorts. “I see I’ve been a big help.”

Flora waves, shy and polite. “You knew the old She-Ra, right?”

“Adora,” Catra says, but with no malice as she corrects her. “And yeah, we were acquainted.”

She extends her hand. Flora shakes it.

“She was her wife,” Petra translates with a roll of her eyes. “She always starts off with that one. She only has about three jokes in her repertoire and that’s one of them.”

“Hey! I’ll have you know I have at least four or five.” Catra ruffles Petra’s hair, and Petra squirms and shrieks under her hand, firm and tender at the same time.

Truthfully, she forgets she told Glimmer she’d interfere in Petra’s love life until she’s pretty sure it’s too late for her to do anything about it. She’d stayed in the palace chatting with Bow until most everyone has gone to sleep, and she doubts she’ll catch Petra on the way to her room. She’s still recovering from battle—she’s sure Petra was one of the first ones to turn in for the night, despite it being a celebration in her honor.

She wanders into the chamber hall, where glass murals of King Micah and an anonymous She-Ra stare back at her. She finds Flora standing in front of She-Ra.

“Can’t sleep?”

Flora shrugs. “Not really. It’s a big palace. It’s not really...homey.”

“It takes getting used to,” Catra says.

She remembers her first few days in the palace, hovering awkwardly around Adora’s room. She hadn’t been given her own—no one in the Rebellion really trusted or liked her enough to want to give her a space of her own. She spent the first night in an armchair by Adora’s closet, curled up on the seat, her back aching in the morning.

Adora put her out of her misery as she attempted to settle down the next night. She watched from her bed, eyeing her from across the room.

“Don’t be dramatic, you can share the bed,” Adora said. “It’s nothing we haven’t done before.”

“You hate me. You don’t want to sleep with me.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Adora snorted. “How would it look if a Rebellion fighter threw her back out because She-Ra made her sleep on a chair?”

“Predictable of me, huh?” Flora asks sheepishly when Catra sees her staring up at the glass.

“I’m here too, aren’t I?” Catra shrugs. “Who am I to judge?”

Flora chuckles, a small and timid sound. They stand together in silence, not looking at the She-Ra gazing down at them and not looking at each other.

Flora is the first to speak. “I met one of She-Ra’s—or, your daughters.”

“Reyna?” Catra asks. “She’s an admiral. She’s around the castle a lot more than I am.”

“No, Emilia. My sister studies Etherian history, and when she found out I knew She-Ra she wouldn’t leave me alone until I met her.”

“And?”

“It was nice talking to someone who gets it,” Flora says. “Gives me a little bit of hope, you know?

“She’s a sweet kid. Stick in the mud like Adora, but that means she’s good.” Catra says. She stops, thinks like she’s planning for battle about how to divert the conversation. “So how are you holding up in all this She-Ra stuff?”

“Uh, it’s been okay.”

“Be honest.”

Flora sighs. “I don’t know. It’s a little overwhelming. But also it feels like I don’t have the right to be overwhelmed.”

“Not to pry,” Catra leans against the mural. She’s sure she’s not supposed to, sure she’s smudging the glass—Adora will forgive her, wherever she is. “But also, to pry, how far do you want this thing to go?”

“What?”

“You and Petra,” Catra folds her arms across her chest. “She-Ra doesn’t really have time to play the field, and if you hurt her I’m gonna have to hear about it, so…”

“I’m hoping for the best,” Flora says. “I, uh...don’t want to be presumptuous.”

“Look,” Catra says. “Here’s the thing: Bright Moon was just under siege, and it’s got Glimmer worried.”

“Glimmer? Like, Queen Glimmer?”

Catra nods. “Don’t say it like that. She’s not that scary—she’s like, four feet tall.”

Flora chuckles at that again, still quiet. “Sorry, it’s just weird, like, conceptually. The queen is just...another person Petra knows.”

“I know, it’s crazy. One day you’re trying to kidnap your girlfriend’s twerp friend, the next she becomes supreme leader.”

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Catra waves her hand. “Water under the bridge. But Glimmer’s got her eye on you guys, and honestly, I do too. Petra’s grown on me. I don’t want her getting her hopes up.”

“That’s sweet of you,” Flora says.

“Yeah,” Catra says. “I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. This She-Ra stuff? It’s hard. It’s gonna be a hard life for you—not just Petra. It just comes with the territory, and if you’re in it for the long haul, you’ve got to decide now if that’s all worth it.”

“It is,” Flora says quickly, definitively. “I think it is.”

“Think, or know?”

“I know it is,” Flora nods, slow and firm.

“Good. Just making sure you’re good enough for her.”

When they make that breakthrough, that so precious moment of realization that there is something strong pulling them together, something that keeps them at an axis around each other, there is silence.

They’re outside the battlements after the fight, staring at one another, doing nothing. Saying nothing. Adora’s lip is swollen and bleeding, Catra’s eye bruised and tender.

The moment is delicate, though the chaos around them is settling. So delicate, in fact, that it feels like the moment will shatter and cease to exist if one of them so much as breathes, only that means that it needs to be shattered. Catra only hopes she has the courage to be the one to do it.

Adora’s lip twitches, as if she’s about to do something. Make a move.

Catra takes a leap. She beats her to it.

It’s always been Adora who decided—always the one who set the pace, paved a way for her to follow however inadvertently she meant to. It feels important for Catra to make the decision now and silently implore Adora to follow instead of the other way around.

She closes the distance between them that first time. And yeah, it feels important.

Petra wants to check in with Adora after the battle, so she enters the Crystal Castle while Catra stays outside. She sits in front of glowing walls, pastel stones that pierce the evening sky and point toward the stars, lighting up the forest that lies behind it with soft pinks and blues.

She’s stood outside the castle walls so many times before, so many times on her own in the past nineteen years, but something about knowing for sure that Adora’s in there inspires Catra to speak. She’s inspired to do something weird and uncomfortably sentimental, though she’s not usually one for grand gestures. She’s worked in stealth and subtlety her whole life, from gaining advantage on the battlegrounds by being the smarter enemy to the unintentional shrine she’s made out of her home, of old trinkets and sources of comfort from a life that’s passed her.

What can she say? Her past year has been an adventure in sentimentality, in weird feelings she’s unaccustomed to, in overt shows of affection and the transfer of old memories and wisdom she didn’t realize she had to a younger She-Ra.

Still, it’s Adora, not that new She-Ra, that brings her back to the castle today.

“Hey, Adora,” she says the old words to the wall, the ground. “I know you’re in there, but I doubt you can hear me—ugh, this is stupid. I feel stupid.”

Catra sighs. She knows Adora is theoretically just beyond the castle walls, but not anything more than that. She’s never thought on the details—if She-Ra were some omnipotent force who could watch her. She supposes it doesn’t matter.

“I’ve never tried the whole symbolic ‘talking to you but not really’ thing, but Petra gets to talk to you for real, so...I don’t know, it only felt fair.”

Catra shakes her head, starting again. “Uh, I hope I’m doing right by you. They don’t really make a She-Ra training manual. Or,” she looks toward the castle entrance. “I guess that’s what this place is made for. Petra says you talked to her. She’s a good kid.” She laughs. “She’s gonna run circles around you some day.”

And she believes it—it’s what Adora would have wanted. Adora was the prototype for this era of She-Ras, after all. When Adora triumphed, it felt like a millennium's worth of victory. But when she failed she brought centuries of darkness down with her, the mistakes of her and those before her on her shoulders. Sometimes that weight broke her. Sometimes her legs gave out, and sometimes Catra didn’t catch her.

Petra doesn’t have that weight, no burden of She-Ras past to carry. She has the chance to understand, the chance to thrive from the very beginning, and Catra supposes some small part of that is her doing.

“She told me you thanked me,” Catra says. “So I guess I’m doing alright.”

She thinks of a fateful day, years ago: a stolen skiff, a sword, a light. Two Horde soldiers entered the woods, only one came back out. The world was cracked open into two by war, Catra and Adora on either side of the divide.

The gap is bridged. She-Ra lives on.

“You’re welcome.”