Cracks in the Walls
Bow was sitting alone on a bench in one of the gardens on the Bright Moon palace-grounds when Glimmer found him. It was uncharacteristic for him to disappear like he had, but Glimmer understood. She'd wanted to get away from the celebration and the endless chatter, too. She had, perhaps, celebrated their recent victory more than anyone, but even she'd grown weary of addressing the court, various civilians and dealing with her mother's fussing over her.
It had been days since the Battle of Bright Moon. Injured people were still being treated and repairs were being made. Queen Angella had given a rousing speech. The Princess Alliance was being kept in Bright Moon. They were aiding with cleaning up damage and preparing to make battle-plans, after some rest, of course.
There were cracks in the garden walls, the result of Horde destroyer-drones having overrun the place. Their scrap had been cleaned up and what was safe to be handled was taken to an armory for study.
Bow looked up from the magazine he was reading as Glimmer teleported beside him. "Oh, hi, Glimmer!" he said with a cheerful grin.
"I just had to get away from my mom!" Glimmer mock-complained. "One more question from a healer and I think I'm going to snap! I told her that I'm completely fine! My teleportation is better than ever!"
"Well, you were very sick," Bow insisted. "It's natural for a mother to worry."
"What are you reading?"
"Oh, this," Bow answered, flipping his magazine closed. "It's popular among the Etherian Maker's Community. This is a back issue, from about seven months ago. I have a few others that I think Adora might be interested in. Oh! Oh, there's this one issue where they did an article describing a scavenged Horde-tank! They dissected it entirely and I wanted to see if Adora knew how accurate their assessments were! Though… she was just a soldier…I don't know if she actually knew their hardware very well…"
Glimmer read the magazine cover. "Scientific Etherian" was emblazoned in bold letters over the image of the interior of some unidentified machine. Bylines on it promised "New Scientific Frontiers, First Ones' Tech and Engineering Marvels." Bow's thumb partially covered one byline: "This Issue: An exclusive interview with _ !"
"Do you save all of the back issues?"
"Well, yeah," Bow answered. "Well, maybe not all of them, just the most interesting ones. I was re-reading the interview in this one."
Bow parted the magazine down the middle, turning to a page with an unusual title: "Building a Better Mousetrap."
"Mousetrap? Huh?" Glimmer asked as she leaned over his shoulder to read.
"You don't know the old saying? 'Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door?' It's a reference to invention and salesmanship."
Glimmer squinted slightly and began to read the small print of the article. "Top Makers Jamie and Adam managed to snag an exclusive interview with the notoriously reclusive inventor, Princess…"
She paused. "Oh," she said.
"Yeah," Bow sighed. "It was her last interview – with anyone. She didn't talk to press much, not even in the Maker's Community."
Glimmer's eyes scanned on. "Okay, so the journalists just showed up to Castle Dryl like we did, but they brought a barrel of vanilla soda and carton of mini pizza-bagels and that's all it took to get her to come out of that tower of hers down to the safety of the courtyard? I wish we'd thought of that."
Bow gave her a small smile. "It is fun to think that we could have snagged Entrapta for the price of snacks, you know…instead of fighting a corrupted robot-army."
The two sat in silence for several minutes, both of their gazes drawn to the cracks in the garden walls.
"Nothing's ever going to be the same again, is it?" Bow said, breaking the long silence. He placed his magazine beside him on the bench.
"It's not," Glimmer concluded, looking down at her feet.
"Are you going to be okay?" Bow asked. "Not to risk sounding like your mom, but… Shadow Weaver hurt you when she held you. You were…well, you were tortured."
"It doesn't hurt anymore," Glimmer assured him.
"Hmm."
"You know the kind of pain that you sort of forget about once it's over because while you know it hurt, you actually can't quite gauge it anymore?" Glimmer asked. "It's…it's like that. "I think my brain must be protecting me."
"That's good, at least."
Glimmer frowned and there came the slightest of tremors in her shoulders.
"Most of what I remember was when that witch had Adora strapped down and was going to erase her memories of us! I just didn't think of anything else in that moment. I saw red. I can't believe she went down that easy – caught by surprise. Though, Bow… I wonder… if Adora and I hadn't needed to get out of there… if we'd stayed any longer… I wonder if I would have killed her. Shadow Weaver was downed, but I wanted her dead."
"Wow. It's okay, Glimmer. You and Adora got out."
"They…" Glimmer sniffled. "They didn't hurt you, did they? I feel like such an idiot… I never asked you everything that happened to you. I've been selfish and I'm sorry."
"No," Bow assured her. "You don't need to be sorry and, just like I told you on the skiff home, they didn't hurt me."
"You aren't just saying that… so I won't worry about you?" She gave him a pleading look.
"They just locked me in a cell." Bow explained. "I don't think I was that important. I was just bait for Adora, I guess, while you… you were the real bargaining-chip. I met someone… who could possibly be a defector, like Adora. It seems like not all of the people working for the Horde are really happy there. A skinny kid named Kyle. I was talking him up in hopes that he'd free me, himself and come with us, but Sea Hawk barged in and ruined it. I wonder if we'll meet him again. The way our conversation was going, I think he might sabotage things for us next time we're stuck in the Fright Zone, if there is a next time we invade their territory directly."
The thought of Kyle made Bow smile briefly before he went back to being straight-faced. It would be nice to take on more defectors, particularly people who seemed so inexplicably innocent. He wasn't someone that Bow wanted to face in a battle because he'd seemed like such a normal person – just one caught in bad circumstances. After all, from what Adora had told them, the Horde supped their children on multitudes of lies.
The two friends sat again in a long silence, letting the cool breeze play over their faces. The quiet between them was uncomfortable, but not overbearing. Just sitting side-by-side was enough to assure them that the world was still there and that there was hope.
Bow's hand played over his magazine. He heard the rustle of the cover beneath his fingertips and caught his grip before he damaged it. No… he definitely couldn't see any harm come to this issue. A realization hit him like a hammer to the skull. He'd been too busy to really think about it – he'd grieved, sure, but to really process what had happened hadn't quite occurred to him yet. He'd been dealing with trying to help Glimmer heal, with Adora trying to get a handle on her She-Ra powers and with the battle. Everything had been rushing to him all at once. He'd thought about it, but not in magnitude.
He gazed ahead, his eyes not meeting Glimmer's.
"I watched someone die," he said dully.
Glimmer grit her teeth and winced back tears. She, too, had been thinking too much of battle, vengeance, and, until recently, her own intense physical pain to fully process what had happened, either, nor what some of her friends must be going through. She and Adora had received bad news, but they hadn't seen it happen in front of them.
Bow picked up his magazine and held it in his lap, thumbs running along the edges of the cover. His voice cracked. "I watched her die. One moment, she was there, with us, the next, she was running back into that chamber for her pet robot and… gone… the rush of green flames and then nothing. No screams… just…nothing at all. At least…it was quick. If nothing else it was…it was… If only we'd run and tackled her or something… if I'd had the presence of mind to have grabbed her by the hand or the hair or just bum-rushed her…"
"Entrapta's… it's not your fault, Bow." Glimmer reached up and rubbed his shoulder.
"She was a hero of mine. I mean… creative-wise. I saw her work at Maker's Community meetups, even if she tended not to show up. I followed her interviews and articles in all of the engineering magazines. I'd analyze prints of her designs and wish I could be that genius. Tales of her castle were infamous. No one knew if her traps were to keep out burglars or just because she liked building them, maybe dodging them, too?"
Glimmer gave him a small, sad smile. "I think she just liked building them. Entrapta was… odd. I don't mean that as an insult…I mean… she was clever. She didn't think like most of us."
Glimmer folded her hands in her lap and looked at them, rubbing her thumbs together in slow circles. "She's the reason why we're both free and …why Mom didn't give herself up. She saved us all – the Alliance together, did, but… she was key. Adora told me of how she was able to hack into the Horde's systems – even she didn't know all of the codes, but Entrapta cracked them."
"She reprogrammed a robot, too, although I wish she hadn't. It was that thing getting stuck that…"
"Bow?"
Bow had his empty hands clawed out in front of them, as if he had been holding something that he had dropped.
"She was a friend… and I watched her die right in front of me."
Glimmer turned her head and looked up at him. "Perfuma told me that she made a monument."
"Really? So quickly?"
"She said she grew it out of flowers and plants – a statue, but more like topiary. She also said something about how the people of Plumeria will pass on stories about her to their children, like they do with 'The She-Ra." I think we should see the statue, when we can."
"I'm not sure I'm ready to yet."
He put his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands and hunched over. Glimmer traced his line of sight to one of the walls.
"The Horde nearly destroyed this place," she said. "What a mess! Perfuma's been fixing most of the damage to the gardens, but the walls… They can be patched, but cracks that big, there's always going to be some damage showing."
"That's the way it is," Bow said, drawing in breath.
"Hmm?"
"It's never going to be the same," he continued.
Glimmer sighed. "I'm never going to get my father back."
"We'll never see Entrapta again, and you're never going to be able to go back to a time when you didn't know what it was to be tortured."
Glimmer looked ahead at the cracks. "We aren't innocent anymore. It's why we're gonna fight. The Horde WILL pay for what they've taken from us!"
"We'll fix what we can… and move forward."
"It's getting a bit cold out here. I think I'm going to go inside."
"Yeah," Bow answered her, picking up his magazine. "It's almost evening. I think we both could use something to eat."
Glimmer and Bow smiled grief-laced smiles at one another as they stood up and walked back to the palace.
END.