Chapter 44: Hey, Catra…

Adora leaned heavy into Ly as they stumped forward through one of the industrial service coridors adjacent the landing bays, following two of Vasher's blue-coated men and Corynth's limp body they supported between them. Adora could barely focus, and several times during their jaunt she would have slipped and fallen face-first to the floor if Ly, amid a string of curses and strained words of encouragement, hadn't been there to keep her upright.

At last they reached the end of the hall, where two sentries—clad in armor of a color and design Adora had only before seen in educational reels on Etheria—were guarding a pair of sliding, reinforced steel doors. The halted Vasher's men, only to blink in surprise when they saw Ly bring up the rear and then scramble to get the door open.

"What are the Vanguard doing here?" Adora asked, as the doors slid open and they pushed through to the pitch black room beyond. "I thought this whole outpost was hidden from the Empire?"

"Curious, isn't it?" Ly asked, eyeing them as they passed by. "Why would the Emperor send his elite here to oversee a Vestamid black site?"

From her tone, Adora got the sense Ly knew exactly what she was implying. Was Horde Prime coordinating Beast experimentation with the Vestamid without anyone knowing? Even the implication seemed earth shattering, although in her rattled state she couldn't articulate why.

The lights cut on with a clang the next moment, robbing Adora of her train of thought. The room was huge and filled with countless tables and shelves filled with scientific equipment.

"It's a spare lab," Ly said, picking up on Adora's curiosity. "No need to look so confused."

"They just keep this stuff ready to go?"

"Correction, it's the spare lab the Vestamid have been trying to bully me into occupying for a while now. Do they just keep this stuff ready to go normally? No, but do they keep it ready to go for me hoping I'd come around and use it?"

Ly inflected the end of her sentence in a way that answered it as she asked. Suddenly it made sense why the Vanguard just let them in.

"Can you believe I actually considered taking them up on their offer?" Ly asked. "That was before I suspected they were working on creating Abominations." She scoffed. "I can only imagine what would have happened had I joined and finally realized what they were trying to do, but it doesn't seem like my abstaining did anything. They still managed to create one."

"That thing was terrifying…" Adora tried not to think back to her skirmish in the hangar, how it almost subsumed her entire consciousness inside itself even after powering up with a good chunk of She Ra's power.

"You stood your ground against it."

Adora shook her head. "I gave it a hard time, but it didn't seem to phase it much. Kal…Corynth…" She nodded her head in his direction ahead of them as they wound through the lab. "How he managed to immolate it, I have no idea."

"Yeah, and as you can clearly see, he's not doing so right now."

"Will he be okay?"

Ly pressed her lips together and knit her brow. "Don't ask me that…"

"But—"

"I don't know, Adora." She huffed, and when her voice shook, Adora realized she was terrified and trying not to show it. "I really don't know."

They pushed on soundlessly until their group came to lab's far back wall, where a floor to ceiling window looking into an operating room was installed. A team of doctors and nurses in full regalia were waiting for them, and they directed Vasher's men to bring Corynth inside and deposit him on the central table. Adora couldn't get a good look at him.

"Can you stand on your own for a bit?" Ly asked, pulling her attention away. When Adora nodded, Ly left her side and stopped the team before they could turn around and head inside after Corynth.

They spoke in hushed tones and Adora could hear almost nothing of their conversation, but judging by Ly's harsh undertones and jerky body language, she was conveying a stern message.

"What was that about?" Adora asked, when Ly returned to her side and guided her away.

"Cat's out of the bag, unfortunately," Ly said, pursing her lips with a rueful expression. "Those are Vestamid doctors. I threatened them hoping they'll keep their mouths shut about who they're treating, but I doubt they will, even after they promised me."

Adora remembered what little Corynth had told her of them, how they venerated him like a god, and she grimaced. "Well, at the very least I think they'll have plenty of incentive to get him healthy again," she said, forcing a tone she'd hoped would lighten the mood. "It's not every day you get to meet one of your personal deities, is it?"

Ly laughed under her breath in a way that made it clear she was not helping, and Adora sighed.

"He'll be okay," she said, voice turning serious. Ly looked up at her and Adora held her gaze. "He lived through the end of the last war and just ate an Abomination. This won't put him down."

Ly didn't say anything, but Adora liked to think she helped put her mind at ease, even a little bit.

The situation still baffled her. The Vestamid, one of the most powerful secret powers in the galaxy, venerated that guy? The legend of Corynth struck such a discordant note with who Adora had known as Kal for the majority of their time together that she still couldn't wrap her head around it.

They went through another door in the side of the lab once they reached it, where another figure dressed in doctor's robes helped her onto the examination table. Ly left them alone after promising she'd be back soon since she had to get her own injuries looked at.

The doctor was thorough, poking and prodding Adora in places she didn't realize could be prodded, doing quick full body scans with a wand-shaped device that beeped and hummed as it passed over particularly painful parts of her body, writing down notes on the pad of paper held to their clipboard.

"Have you seen any shadows?" they asked, after wordlessly going through many tests already.

"Pardon?"

"Shadows. Ghosts. Hallucinations. Have you seen anything moving around in the shadows that wasn't really there? Anything out of the corners of your eyes that disappeared once you turned to focus on them?"

"No, I don't think so." That sounded terrifying.

The doctor nodded and stood from their stool. "Well, your body is stitching itself back together faster than it has any right to, and I'm seeing nothing abnormal on the scans. If you're not experiencing any side effects either—"

"My whole body really hurts."

The doctor narrowed their eyes at her, as if trying to judge whether or not she were an intelligent lifeform or not. "Yes, well, that's to be expected given the fact you went up against subject seventeen. Let's just say the fact you are alive at all is abnormality enough." They checked their clipboard of notes, their eyes scanning the page. "Your enhanced healing factor is interesting as well, although given what biological abnormalities I attend to on a daily basis, it isn't worth my time to keep you for any further tests."

Adora knit her brow and scowled. The doctor was insulting her, although his tone of voice was nothing but clinical and offhand, like someone discussing the weather in an elevator. Still, she might have felt incensed if she weren't so spent, already.

"My suggestion is bed rest." The doctor gestured with his head to a door in the side of the room. "There's bedding in there. Get some sleep. We'll monitor you for any changes."

And with that, the doctor got up and walked right out of the room. Adora thought he might have at least stayed to help her, but it seemed he was too busy for even that.

With great effort, she lugged herself off the examination chair and into the other room, where a bed was indeed waiting for her. She left a crack in the doorway, not wanting to shut herself inside completely for some reason she couldn't grasp. Sleep took her the moment her head hit the pillow.


Adora had no idea where she was when she woke. It was so dark that, for a terrifying moment, she feared she was deep in one of her nightmares. Even when her memory of the preceding events finally returned, she had no idea for how long she had been asleep.

The only light source was a thin line that seeped through the crack in the doorway leading back to the examination room. It gave Adora's surroundings an eerie, liminal feel that set her on edge, so she rose from the bed and headed back out into the main lab as fast as she could, only feeling like she had fully returned to the world when she saw others there with her. She counted maybe a half-dozen of Vasher's crew milling about, but no sign of Ly.

She followed the far wall, letting her fingers trace the cracks and divots in the concrete. Sounds of machinery now on and working echoed around, mixing with the tones of Vasher's men and their various conversations, giving life to the lab where before there was none. Finally, she came to the emergency operating room where they had dropped Corynth off previously.

The window looking in was tinted dark and she couldn't see through. Adora took that to mean the Vestamid doctors were still hard at work inside, but she wanted to make sure. She approached one of the two guards nearby and asked how long they had been in there.

"About three hours now?" they said, glancing over to their partner to confirm.

"Three and a half, actually," they said.

That explains why I feel like I just rose from the dead, Adora thought. She hadn't just taken a quick nap.

"Vasher and Lysithea are inside as well," the first guard said. "Lysithea said she didn't want to wake you. I'm sure she'll be out soon enough. I'll let you know you came looking for her when she does."

Adora thanked them and wandered the lab, intent on finding a distraction from her mounting worries over Corynth's health. It surprised her how much she wanted him to pull through, how scary the thought of their last interaction with one another being him saving her from an eldritch, planet-eating monster was. When had he gone from an aggravating and barely trusted traveling partner to someone she'd imagine inviting to the Queen's Ball on Etheria?

Catra had taken an interest in him, that much she knew. She imagined sitting at the head table with the other princesses in Bright Moon with Catra at her side—them having already reconciled in this fantasy of hers—telling her these hilarious stories of her misadventures with him when he was still "Kal" to her.

"Oh yeah," she'd say, suppressing a giggle at Catra's bewildered expression upon learning Adora had caught him breaking into the Crystal Castle. "I gave him no choice but to take me aboard his ship, and then he walked in on me trying to eat the unprepared food-sand in those instant meal packages, since I was starving and didn't know what you were supposed to do with those.

Adora shook her head to clear the fantasy, returning to the hidden lab on a hidden station, deep somewhere in a likely hidden part of the galaxy, far from home. If Corynth didn't pull through, and if Catra ever allowed herself to come back into Adora's life (two very big ifs), then she'd likely be telling her of how he well and truly died in the end, saving her life. Or maybe she'd never bring it up and spare them both the pain. Maybe that was a better option…

She came across a large table pushed against a wall of computer servers. The Eye of Shukra was there, suspended in another gravity well maintained by a machine far larger than what Corynth used on the Dzivia to analyze it. Running diagnostics splayed across multiple screens surrounding the table, and another of Vasher's guards stood nearby watching over everything. He nodded at her as she came into view, and Adora only nodded back before moving on. She rationalized that, whatever Ly was doing to the Eye, she'd best leave it be.

Eventually, she came to what looked like a conference room in the far corner, built against the corner with walls of glass cordoning it off from the lab. Adora pushed inside and, mind still wandering listless, she pulled out the closest chair at the end of the boardroom table and sat. A holo-screen was mounted to the concrete there. Seeing it made her think of her own cracked PDA screen still strapped to her forearm opposite her runestone bracer.

She tried to reach Glimmer again, not really expecting to succeed. Still, when the error message came through again, she sighed and slumped forward on the table, resting her head sideways on her arm. Of course she still couldn't send any messages to her. She couldn't send messages to anyone.

And then, on a whim, she pulled up something else on the PDA she rarely ever did: the collection of photographs she had imported onto it when the Enclave first gifted the thing to her. Maybe it was because now felt like the first time in years she actually had a moment to herself, or maybe it was out of guilt that she had never made the time to reminisce over the photographs in the past, despite how important they were to her. Maybe it was the fact she had nearly died in the hangar bay several hours ago. Either way, as she flipped through image after image of her and Bow and Glimmer getting up to all sorts of trouble, she felt a part of her she hadn't realized she'd lost in the first place begin to come back to her.

There were no recent photographs, all of them having been taken in that short period of time after the Enclave first arrived where reconstruction was going full swing and no one had had left yet. Heck, they hadn't even reforged Adora's runestone yet, so most of Adora's worries had been contained to hypotheticals.

Catra was even in a number of them. Granted, neither Adora nor Catra looked particularly happy in any of the shots they shared together.

"Come on," Glimmer would say, any time Adora expressed her displeasure. "We're all on the same side. Catra did more for me up on Prime's citadel than I think I can even put into words. She's part of the Best Friend squad, and you'll thank me for including her later, Adora.

Adora hadn't realized it at the time, but Glimmer was right. Looking at the pictures now, even though she looked less than enthused to be within a hundred yards of Catra and Catra looked like she'd rather crawl under a rock than have her picture taken, Adora felt grateful. She hadn't seen Catra in years. It had been too long.

"That's a nice picture."

Adora jumped up in her chair and spun around, shutting off the PDA screen in a hurry. Ly was standing behind her with an apologetic look on her face.

"Sorry," she said. "Didn't mean to scare you. I thought for sure you heard me come in and call your name." Ly moved to the chair facing Adora's opposite the boardroom table. "You look much better than you did when we first got here," she said after a moment. "Did you sleep well?"

Adora checked in with herself, realizing for the first time that she felt fine. Enhanced healing factor, or whatever the doctor had termed it, really wasn't a joke. It might have taken a normal person months to recover from how she felt, but here she was, several hours later, feeling almost as good as new.

"I think so," she said. "Was out for three straight hours and completely forgot where I was when I finally woke up. I feel brand new."

"Lucky you. I was told I have several ribs with hairline fractures, among a number of other things. I think Vasher almost cried when he saw how bruised up my chest was." She pulled the chair out and sat, wincing with the movement to emphasize her point. "Saw you passed the fuck out though and figured it'd be better not to wake you."

"I was told I'm lucky to even be alive," Adora said, glancing back down at her cracked PDA screen a moment. Already she wished she were back staring at the pictures, tricking herself into reliving a point in time that was marginally better than her current situation. At least then she had her friends with her.

"You fought an Abomination directly trying to corrupt you," Ly said, leaning back in the chair. "I can chop off three of my fingers and my thumb from my left hand and still count how many people have done that and lived, aside from you. You probably won't feel back to normal for a little while longer."

Adora frowned at the imagery and Ly laughed. "How is Corynth?"

Ly smiled. "He'll live. I wouldn't be as chipper as I am with half my body turning black and blue otherwise."

Adora breathed a sigh of relief and actually slumped back against her chair. Well, at least now she won't have to struggle about bringing bad news to Catra. Now she just needed to get on speaking terms with her again, which arguably was the harder of the two issues.

"Be honest with me," Adora said, dampening the smile on Ly's face with the seriousness of her tone. "How close did we get to being completely obliterated?"

Ly's half-smile turned into a frown. "All of Eden was probably seconds away from being overtaken, if I'm to be honest. That Abomination was just a juvenile, and unleashed upon a much smaller populace than a planet, but even still…if Corynth hadn't stepped in and taken care of it, we would have become a new epicenter."

"I'm sorry…maybe if I had better control over—"

"You have nothing to apologize for," Ly said, cutting her off. "You bought us enough time for reinforcements to come. You might not have taken it down, but Corynth wouldn't have gotten to us in time if it weren't for you. You are just as much at fault for us still being alive as he is." Ly winked at her after that last statement.

Adora laughed through her nose and lapsed back into silence. She didn't feel very good about herself, despite Ly's obvious attempt to cheer her up. She Ra was still a problem, despite whatever progress she'd made. Progress she still couldn't reliable reproduce at will.

Ly nudged her under the table with her foot. "What's wrong?"

"Why didn't Corynth tell me who he really was?" Adora surprised herself with that response. Ly's question had pierced through the silence, and it sounded so genuine and raw that she responded before she could think through it.

Another beat of silence passed between them before Ly let out a breath and leaned back against her own chair. "There are a few reasons I could think might be the case, just off the top of my head. You'll have to ask him though, once he comes out of that operating room."

"Tell me what you think the reasons might have been." Really, Adora thought nearly having died was the thing on her mind, or maybe even Catra, still. Feeling lied to, or feeling upset at being kept in the dark? Yeah, that stung, but she hadn't realized it until her body spoke before her mind had caught up.

"Well, for one thing, everyone thinks he's dead. People finding out he's actually alive would…upend a lot of things."

"He's a galactic hero," Adora said. "Glimmer has mentioned on more than one occasion how many statues of him she's seen around different worlds, and one of my other…someone else I know has apparently watched every documentary and drama about him that's come out, and read the countless books they've put out about him too. Even on Etheria, we learned about what he supposedly did, when most everything else about the galaxy was kept secret trying to keep us ignorant. Nothing about him I've seen paints him in a remotely negative light. Hell, a whole religion apparently sprung up around him. Why would it be dangerous to reveal he's actually still alive?" She thought. "And how the hell is he still alive to begin with?"

"You forget that he inspired a revolt against Horde Prime's rule alongside Evelyn." Ly said. "One thing they definitely won't tell you is that he was firmly branded as terrorist threat number one for years until Archanas happened. It was only then, when Horde Prime thought he perished with everyone else, that he went back and declared Corynth a war hero. Prime shifted the collective opinion of the galaxy about him over the course of a few years. What do you think he'd do if he found out the very person who nearly toppled his regime was still alive?"

"The threat against his rule would be back and his control over the narrative would be lost…" Adora said, piecing things together. "Okay, maybe it makes sense not to reveal himself publicy, but why would he not tell me who he was? He saved my life…twice! I stopped being fully skeptical of him. I thought at the very least we were on friendly enough terms he'd be honest with me about his true identity."

Ly grimaced and looked away. Adora got the sense she had just stepped onto a mine.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Corynth chose a new name for himself after Archanas. Vasher and I broke through the fleet blockading the planet after the final battle because we were still picking up life signs from his tracker. When we got there ready to evacuate him, he didn't want to leave."

"What?"

"I'm serious. He was cradling Evie's head in her lap, saying he should have died with her and the other Shapers. That if the Beast didn't take him like it did the others when they shut it away, then he was going to wait to join them shortly thereafter anyways.

"'Then let Corynth die,' I said to him. 'Let him die and we'll rescue someone else from this rock. Whoever you want to be, just get on the ship and lets leave, already.'" Ly sighed again. "He placed his Shaper mask on Evie's body, got in the ship, and we just started calling him Kallanthe from that day on. It was supposed to help him cope. I didn't think it was going to be permanent."

Adora studied Ly's face, noticed the way she didn't meet her gaze as she spoke. "Why do I get the sense there's more to the story?"

Ly finally looked her in the eye, and Adora saw a great sadness in them. "Because I honestly don't think that's the answer, although that really did happen. I think he didn't tell you who he really was because the last time he revealed himself to someone he cared about, they accused him of tricking them and then tried to kill him. Then continued trying to hunt him down and kill him for years afterward."

"Why would…how does that even happen…?"

"The Daiamid were once the Emperor's secret police. Their reputation before the Beast war was that of a mythical organization of incredibly powerful sorcerers that could turn family and lovers into mortal enemies, could reshape reality around them to fit their will…could entrance even the strongest minds and literally explode bodies into a million pieces merely by looking their victims in the eyes.

"When Corynth revealed himself at Evie's trial…when he openly defied the Emperor and rallied his brothers and sisters to do the same…we were expecting Taline to follow suit. We thought if the rest of the Daiamid coalesced to back Corynth, then Taline, someone he had been seeing seriously for some time already, would almost without a doubt do the same."

"Wait…wait, wait wait." Adora's mind reeled. Ly had just dropped several successive metaphorical bombs on her in a row. "Taline and Corynth were together?"

Ly nodded. "For years. We thought she'd be on our side when Corynth made his move. Instead, she took the whole revelation about who he was…very poorly. She accused him of bewitching her, said their entire history was a lie…said that he was doing the same thing to Evie and that's why she refused to follow the Emperor's orders even in the face of death. Taline believed the mythos surrounding the Daiamid to the extent she believed Corynth actually had her under a spell and had been manipulating her and Evie the whole time they'd known him."

"That's horrible…I can't imagine how painful that must have been. For both of them." Truthfully, Adora could key into it just a little. The paranoia she felt surrounding Catra's final change of heart, the fear she felt wondering if she were just opening herself up to be duped yet again, seemed strangely similar to how Ly framed Taline's hesitations.

"You'll have to ask him, like I said, if you really want to know the truth. This is just what I could see the reason being from what I know."

"Thank you for telling me."

Ly nodded again, then gestured to Adora's PDA. "What were you looking at earlier?" Ly asked. "Those pictures…were those your friends?"

"Friends of mine from back home," she said, nodding and turning her PDA back on. She activated the setting that floating the screen as a holographic image above her wrist, and turned the transparency up so Lys could see it from across the table.

The picture she had left off on was one of the last ones they had taken before people started leaving: it showed her, Glimmer, Bow, and even Catra, who was pulled into the center with an uncomfortable look on her face that matched the aggravated one on Adora's. What she wouldn't give to have the four of them together again like that.

"I guess I was starting to get homesick," Adora said, finding the lamest possible way to explain the image and why she had been looking it over.

"I recognize that one," she said, pointing to Glimmer reflected in the picture. "That's Taline's mentee. She even has a nickname similar to hers after a botched campaign not long after she debuted." When Adora gave her a questioning look, Ly said, "I've been keeping track of her over the years. Wanted to at least make sure she didn't catch onto our trail well enough to actually show up and try to obliterate Corynth again out of the blue."

"Her name is Glimmer," Adora said, nodding. "She's one of my closest friends. And that's Bow. He's still on Etheria."

"And what about her?"

Ly had pointed to Catra and Adora's whole body tensed as if readying for a fight. She didn't even know where to begin to explain who Catra was in a rational, calm way. She'd not even said her name out loud likely more than a handful of times since their last conversation back home, years ago.

"That's my Taline," Adora said, voice coming out thick. "Or maybe I'm Taline and she's Corynth in the scenario, judging by how I reacted the last time we spoke to one another." She shrugged. "We've switched the roles we've played you could say, over the years. She smiled, more to herself than anything. "At one point, I was hoping she'd be my Vasher, if I were to pull you into the analogy."

Ly smiled. "You caught onto that, huh?"

"Believe me, I thought it was you and Corynth at first, judging by how strongly you slapped him back at the Garden."

Ly made a face. "He deserved that slap, no matter how you rationalize it. I love Corynth, and so does Vasher. We wouldn't have punched through Taline's fleet blockade on Archanas to get to him if we didn't, but we aren't together. Not like Vasher and I are." She laughed again as she leaned back and put her feet up on the desk. She barely winced this time as she did. "It was Corynth that got Vasher and I together to begin with, actually. I hated his guts at the start."

Adora's eyes widened. "Really? How did that happen?"

Ly waved her off and shook her head. "Story for another time. This is about you, girl. So, Catra's your special person, and I'm under the impression you two aren't on speaking terms. It's been, what, three years for you two, if I remember correctly from what you said back in the hangar?"

Adora frowned and slumped down in her chair.

"Do you want to talk to her again?" Ly asked.

"I really fucked up. And it's been a really long time since then. I'd be surprised if she'd ever want to hear from me again."

"But you do want to talk to her?"

"Yes. Of course I want to talk to her, I'm just…scared. She's more than just a friend to me, Ly."

Ly nodded, keeping a modest smile on her face as she did. "Then all the more reason to finally reach out. I meant what I said before the Abomination showed up, you know? Better late than never."

Adora gave a rueful laugh. "Yeah, well, even if I got the courage to, I haven't been able to contact anyone at all. Can't get a connection, and all my outbound messages error out."

"Yeah, that's because any unauthorized device is automatically blocked from doing anything on the network. This is a secret settlement. What, did you think they'd just let anyone connect and send outbound messages? You aren't even allowed to carry a gun around here unless the Vestamid say its okay."

Adora opened her mouth to respond, then shut it just as quickly. The fact she had never even considered that was embarrassing enough, she didn't want to say something that only made it worse.

Ly held her hand out and Adora passed her PDA over. As she fiddled with it she said, "this should let you send anything you want for the next hour. It's the best I can do, since I'm technically not an admin on the network. Even getting the allowances to do that much from the Vestamid was a pain in the ass."

A knock came at the door then, and they both looked up just as Vasher poked his head in the doorway.

"He's coming around," he said. "Seems stable, but I know you wanted me to get you the moment he opened his eyes."

Ly took her feet off the desk but didn't stand yet. "I'll be right there, give me another moment or two with Adora."

Vasher nodded and left. When Ly handed back the PDA, Adora said, "I really don't know what to say to her. Do I just…come right out and apologize? Talk about how much I fucked up and want to make it right? How do I even start?"

"Well, I would definitely put that apology in as close to the start as you could manage," Ly said, finally standing and heading to the door. She rested her hand on the doorknob and turned to look at Adora again. "Corynth's advice to me, back when I was still under thee impression I hated Vasher's guts, was to just be honest and forthcoming. Don't try to find the 'right' thing to say, just say what you intend, even if it doesn't come out as eloquently as you'd hope. In fact, it definitely won't, but if the other person still respects you enough and wants to give you another chance…wants to make things right…they'll get the message."

"And that worked?" Adora was already gearing up to make aa fool out of herself again.

"Well, it helped me realize that my unquenchable desire to punch Vasher in the face actually stemmed from the fact I was so attracted to him it pissed me off." Ly's face went pink and she cleared her throat. "So, yeah, I'd say it worked. We're still together."

"Yeah, except your situation and my situation couldn't be further apart from one another."

"You know, there are some points I could argue there being similarity, but that's beside the point. Adora, you'll do fine. Everything will work out, just take the plunge. And if it doesn't work out exactly how you hope, everything will still be fine, you'll see." She opened the door and said, "have some faith in yourself, for once," then stepped through and clicked the door shut behind her.

Adora watched her go, watched her disappear around one of the racks of equipment in the lab, no doubt returning to the operating room to meet up with Corynth and Vasher. She then took a deep breath, tried to calm her frantic heart and flush her mind of all its frantic, panicking thoughts. Then she turned on her PDA's record function, adjusted so her face was in the video frame, and began.

"Hey, Catra…"