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Wildflowers spread in every direction, waves of fuchsia, blush, lavender and bright yellow rippling in the breeze. Bursts of vibrant color spread across fields of verdant green like a scattering of celebratory confetti. Arcs of prismatic light and floating golden motes lit up the fields of unruly beauty, delicate and untamed at once. The heady scent of blossoms mingled with the sweetness of nectar and the fresh aliveness of it all.
Blossoming trees lined the way. Their branches lush with delicate pink flowers, each tiny bloom unfurling into a bit of fragile fluff. A light wind swept through and the whole meadow answered, petals spinning loose, the long grass whispering, everything in motion all at once.
Adora and Catra came up the winding path. The dirt gave gently beneath their feet. The daymoon’s glow was warm on their faces, the breeze a light rustle in their ears.
Perfuma met them at the edge of the village with her hands clasped and her eyes soft with a particular kind of gratitude that made Adora's chest ache a little, the gratitude of someone who had been holding worry and was only just setting it down.
"Thank you for coming," she said. "Both of you. Truly."
The village was beautiful, like all of Plumeria, flower-woven and open, but Adora could see the places where the beauty had been interrupted and grown back imperfectly. A wall rebuilt slightly too straight, too angular, not yet softened by climbing vines. A garden plot where the flowers grew sparse and pale at one end, the soil recovering from having once been broken open. Small signs, if you knew how to read them. Recovery everywhere. Beauty still in the act of mending.
Perfuma explained quietly as she walked them through. Most injuries had healed. But some of her people carried wounds that had resisted ordinary treatment, something in the weaponry, some residue that lingered in the body and wouldn't release. She had done everything she could.
Adora nodded in understanding. No hesitation, only the steady attention she always gave suffering as though it were something she could not bear to walk past.
“I’ll try,” she said.
She lifted her arm, fingers splayed, and a prismatic halo flared from her palm as a golden sword formed into her hand. For one suspended breath the world seemed to lean toward her, as if every living thing were listening. Her eyes glowed brightly as she exclaimed, “For the honor of Grayskull!”
When she spoke the words, the power answered like new growth bursting forth after the deepest cold. Golden white light bloomed around her, diffuse at the edges and radiant at the center. Her body lengthened into She-Ra’s taller form as golden armor rose from waves of rainbow light. Hair streamed out behind her as if lifted by a light breeze.
Catra felt her chest pull tight and warm at the same time. It was still weird sometimes, loving Adora without wanting to put her guard up. To let herself look for too long. To let that soft feeling in without covering it with a sarcastic comment, eye roll, or a quick snap before anyone could see too much.
Now here, with the mild gold light spilling through the trellis overhead, with petals drifting lazily on the breeze and Adora already turning toward the first person waiting for help, Catra found she didn’t want to tear the feeling apart before it could settle. She only wanted to stay near it.
The first patient was an older Plumerian man with a long scar across his forearm, the skin around it pale and stiff and healed all wrong. His hand shook when he tried to make a fist.
Adora knelt in front of him like she had nowhere else to be.
She didn’t tower over him. She brought herself down level with him and the injury, like that alone might take some of the hurt out of it.
“Can I?” she asked, and waited for his nod.
Her hands were careful when they closed around his arm. Strong, but not gripping. The sort of careful that said she understood pain could make even kindness hard to trust.
The stone at her chest lit, then steadied into a low glow. The light spread slowly, gold threads moving through her fingers and sinking under the skin, finding whatever inside his arm had healed twisted and wrong.
The man sucked in a breath. A second ago his arm had been locked tight and now it loosened little by little.
The air around Adora shifted.
Catra had seen She-Ra fight. Seen her cut through machines, tear impossible odds apart, blaze across battlefields bright enough to make her eyes hurt. This was not that. This was quieter and somehow it hit harder because of it. No flash. No show. The power moved through Adora steady and careful. Like she wasn’t forcing the wound to heal but coaxing the body into remembering how.
When Adora pulled back, the scar was still there, but less tight and angry. The man flexed his hand once, twice, then stared at his own fingers. His face crumpled with relief so fast Catra had to look away for a second, not because she didn’t want to see it but because she did.
The next was a woman with damage across one side of her neck and shoulder, leftover from Prime’s tech. His handiwork. Then a kid with a bad leg. Then another person, and another.
Adora gave each of them her whole attention.
She listened before she touched them. Asked where it hurt. Asked how long. Asked what made it worse. Her voice kept dropping into that low, steady tone Catra loved and had never once said out loud, the one that made people loosen up without even meaning to. When they flinched, Adora’s mouth went soft in that way it did. When they got scared, she smiled gently, like she was making room for them to set some of it down.
Magic poured out of her in slow, living currents. Gold shot through with white. Every so often there was green in it too, faint and fresh like new growth. The pavilion filled with the smell of wet earth and flowers after rain. The vines overhead stirred. Half-closed blossoms opened wider. Everywhere the power went, things remembered how to grow.
Catra stayed just outside the circle of healers and villagers and watched Adora press glowing hands over an injury at a woman’s ribs. Watched her stop to brush a scared kid’s hair back from their forehead before she started. Watched her steady someone with one hand even while the other poured light into a body that had been hurting too much.
Tender, Catra thought, and the word hit weird.
But it fit.
Not soft. Not fragile. Tender like something new pushing up through ground that had been frozen solid. There was strength in it.
Catra had spent most of her life surviving by keeping every soft part of herself locked down behind her teeth. So, standing there with her own heart weirdly open like this should’ve made her want to run or at least shove the feeling down.
But she didn’t.
She stopped pretending not to notice how beautiful Adora was when she did this.
Not only beautiful. That wasn’t the point, not really.
She looked true.
At some point Perfuma drifted up beside her, wearing that openly emotional look she never even tried to hide.
“She always does that,” Perfuma whispered.
Catra kept her eyes on Adora. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I know.”
But she kept watching. There was something else.
After the fourth or fifth person, Adora took a breath that fell short before starting the next one. After the seventh, the glow took longer to gather in her hands. Sweat showed at her temples even with the mild breeze. She still smiled when she spoke, knelt, and made each person feel as though they were the only one there.
But Catra started noticing the cost.
After fixing the kid’s leg, Adora flexed her fingers like they’d gone half numb. She pushed up from her knees, and there was a tiny hitch before she got all the way upright, like her balance got there a second late. Catra’s eyes narrowed. Adora’s shoulders had gone tight in a new way. Like the healing was getting harder to hold together.
Catra’s ears tilted back.
No one seemed to catch it yet. Or maybe they did and figured it was just concentration. But Catra knew Adora too well for that. She knew the difference between focus and strain. Knew the set of Adora’s jaw when she was hiding it. Knew the way her voice flattened when she had decided, stubborn as ever, to keep going no matter what it did to her.
The last patient was a teenage boy with damage at the base of his spine. Adora sat beside him on the low bench instead of standing over him. She talked to him for a bit. Catra couldn’t catch all the words from where she stood, but she saw Adora tilt her head, saw the boy’s face shift, wary at first then raw with wanting.
Then Adora set one hand carefully between his shoulders and another near the injury, and the light that rose from her came brighter than before and thinner, drawn out like it cost her.
Catra felt her whole body go sharp.
Adora’s breath hitched halfway in.
Not enough for anybody else to react. Not enough to stop the healing. But Catra saw it. Saw Adora’s mouth go tight at the edges. Saw her shoulders lock like the magic had dragged itself through something raw on the way out. The boy shuddered, then sagged with a broken little sound of relief.
And Adora, still smiling at him, looked suddenly too pale.
The smile stayed. That was the problem.
She kept giving it to people even as the color drained from her face, even as the stone at her chest flickered once before steadying again. She moved to stand, and one hand touched the bench beside her for half a second, a brace so quick most people wouldn’t even have clocked it.
Catra felt it like an alarm.
The tenderness in her chest changed. Not leaving, never that, but it pulled tight. Protective. Love with its teeth back in. Love that watched for weakness not to use it, not anymore, but to cover it before anyone, before Adora, could pretend it wasn’t there.
Catra moved before she’d fully decided to. She stepped through the ring of villagers and healers, not fast enough to startle anybody, but direct enough that Adora looked up right away.
Up close, it was worse.
Her lashes were damp. Her hands shook. Her eyes were too bright, and not just with magic. Her breathing had that careful sound it only got when she was forcing it under control.
The healing had worked. That was obvious in every stunned face, every relieved breath, every person testing out a body that hurt less than an hour ago.
But Catra could see just as clearly that it had a cost.
"Adora."
Catra's voice. Not loud. Not harsh. Just certain. The way it got when she had already made a decision and wasn't going to unmake it.
Adora felt a hand close around her wrist.
“Your hands are shaking.”
“They’re not…” but they were. She could feel it, now that she was paying attention. A fine tremor running through her fingers and up her arm. She-Ra's light around her edges was dimmer than it should have been, slightly unsteady, like the flickering of a candle in a draft.
She felt hollowed out in the particular way that healing left her, not painful, just very light, like something had been poured out of her and hadn't been replaced yet.
Adora nodded and let her transformation go, the light fading around her as she released her magic.
Catra had shifted her grip, and somehow without Adora quite tracking how it happened, they were walking hand in hand down the path that led toward the open fields, and Catra was acting like this was completely unremarkable, which made Adora feel warm all the way through.
"Where are we going?" Adora asked.
"Away from the village for a bit," Catra said. "You need space and fresh air."
The path opened onto the wildflower fields, and Adora stopped walking.
She had seen them from the hill on the way in, from a distance, the sweep of color catching the light. Up close they were something else entirely. The flowers were tall, high enough to brush her hands at her sides, and they pressed in close on both sides of the narrow path. The scent hit her all at once, a wave of both sweetness and freshness.
Something in her chest loosened.
"Go on, then," Catra said, from beside her. Perfectly dry. "I can hear you thinking about it."
"I wasn't…”
"You were vibrating."
Adora looked at the field. At the flowers, nodding in the soft breeze. At the wide sweep of open sky above them, blue and enormous and full of light.
She spun, because she couldn't help it, the sky wheeling overhead, and when she stopped spinning she was standing in a gap in the flowers, breathing hard, covered in pollen, and completely, helplessly happy.
Catra watched Adora. So unguarded. Not braced for a hit. Not even a little. Catra still wasn’t used to seeing that up close. To wanting it.
She stepped toward Adora and into the field. The flowers grew thick and high here, brushing their shoulders, closing them in until the rest of the world felt far away.
Adora watched Catra. The light through the flowers turned her face gold, catching in her eyes. Adora's chest tightened in that new fluttering way she was still getting used to being allowed to have.
"Hi," Adora said, for no particular reason.
Catra's mouth curved. "Hi."
Beautiful dual-colored eyes met her own. Catra looked at her for a moment, the way she sometimes did now, like she was still a little surprised by something. Then Catra reached up and brushed a smudge of yellow from Adora's cheek with her thumb, very carefully, and Adora felt it all the way down to her feet.
"You had some…” Catra said.
"Thank you."
Neither of them moved.
"Adora."
"Yeah?"
Catra's hand was still there, just at the edge of her jaw, barely touching. Her eyes had gone uncertain in the way they did sometimes now, the new uncertainty, the one that wasn't about danger or strategy, the one that was about something else entirely.
"I don't," she started, and stopped. Tried again. "I'm still figuring out…”
"Me too," Adora said.
Catra breathed out. "Okay."
"Okay."
She leaned in, just a little, and Catra stayed still and let her, and when Adora pressed her forehead against Catra's it felt like something settling, like a seed finally reaching the light.
They stood like that for a while, in the middle of the flower field, with pollen in Adora's hair and the whole world going quietly about its business around them.
Then they walked together through the long grass.
Catra stopped so suddenly that Adora walked two steps past her before noticing.
"What…”
"Shh." Catra was crouched in the long grass at the field's edge, very still, looking at something. Her ears were flat, attentive. Her voice had dropped to barely a murmur. "Come look. Slowly."
Adora crouched beside her.
Tangled in a rusted bit of wire left from a drone and half-swallowed by the grass was a baby Etherian rabbit, small enough to fit in two cupped hands. Its fur a light greenish blue, hardly more than newborn. It had got one back leg caught where the wire had looped back on itself, and it was very still now in the way small animals got when they had been frightened past the point of struggling.
"Oh," Adora said.
"I need to cut the wire." Catra was already examining it, careful not to touch, her eyes tracking the tangle. "It's not deep, it hasn't broken the skin. It's just wound around."
Catra extended a claw. She worked slowly, more slowly than Adora had ever seen her do anything, her hands perfectly steady, cutting away from the rabbit rather than toward it, easing the tension out of each twist of wire before moving to the next. The rabbit trembled once and she paused entirely and waited until it stilled again.
It took a few minutes. When the last piece came loose, the rabbit didn't move.
"Is it…”
"Exhausted," Catra said. She held her hands open beside it for a moment, letting it register the warmth, and then scooped it up with a gentleness that made something happen in Adora's throat. It sat in her cupped palms and its nose worked in quick, frightened twitches. Its heart was going very fast. Adora could see it.
"Can I…” she started, her hands coming up automatically.
Catra gave her a look.
"Just a little…”
"You healed nine people today."
"It's so small...”
"Adora."
Adora dropped her hands. "Fine."
"It doesn't need She-Ra," Catra said, more gently. "It needs to be safe and still for a little while." She glanced sideways. "Same as someone else I know."
Adora opened her mouth.
"Don't argue with me. You're exhausted."
"I was going to say you could be right."
Catra blinked. Then, unbelieving, “You were not."
"I was considering saying you could be right, which is basically the same thing."
They found a patch of long grass at the edge of the tree line. It was soft and sheltered from the breeze. Catra set the rabbit down between the roots of an old tree, tucked into a little hollow that felt, at least to Adora's hopeful eye, like it might be near where a burrow had been. They knelt beside it in the grass and watched it breathe.
After a while, the twitching slowed. The small body relaxed, incremental and tentative, like it was testing whether it was allowed to.
"Look," Adora said, quietly.
The rabbit's nose was still. Its eyes had half-closed. It was, improbably, simply resting in the grass, in the first warm morning of spring, the wire gone, the world safe for the moment.
"New things," Catra said softly, "just need a little time."
Adora looked at her.
Catra was watching the rabbit. But the tips of her ears had gone pink, just slightly, in the way they did when she'd said something she meant more than she was letting on.
Adora reached over and found her hand in the grass, and Catra let her, and laced their fingers together, and they crouched together in the warmth and the birdsong and the smell of flowers while the world went quietly, persistently, joyfully on around them.
New, Adora thought. Everything new.
She leaned her head against Catra's shoulder, and felt her breathe, and let herself rest.
