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twenty-one: the new normal

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Training field.

First light.

No Adam.

Which was fine. Teela very much didn't want to see him that morning. Possibly never again. Same for Father.

Liars, the both of them.

There was no sign of Adora, either, which was a bit of a disappointment. Teela needed to hit something alive, something that could hit her back, and Adora would have been the ideal candidate. Adora probably wanted to hit something too, to judge by the overwhelmed look she'd been wearing as they'd all returned to the palace last night.

It was a terrible game of "would you rather". Would you rather learn that your best friend and father had been deceiving you for ages and letting you make an idiot of yourself (that stupid crush), or would you rather learn that you'd been kidnapped by an evil magician and your parents had been dead for five hundred years?

Teela brought her staff down on the battle orb with a little too much force. It sparked and died with a pathetic bleep bloop.

She stopped, breathing hard, and wiped the sweat from her forehead as she regarded the battle orb lying in the dirt. "Yeah," she told it. "Me too."

She collapsed her staff and stuck it back in its place on her belt, then walked over to where she'd left her canteen. The water tasted metallic. An improvement. Dinner had tasted like ashes, and breakfast - well, she hadn't even tried. Anger tended to kill her appetite.

She took another swig. She was completely right to be angry, of course, but she also knew that any reprieve from Hordak was going to be temporary. Sooner or later - definitely sooner, the way her luck ran - she was going to have to go into battle with Father and He-Man. Adam.

Who she'd mooned over in one guise and kissed in another.

Ugh! She needed to hit something.

"I know, I know, I'm late," Adam said behind her, cheerful as the bright morning sun. "But better late than -"

He didn't get to finish because she whirled around and brought her staff down, striking at the join of his neck and shoulders, and he was too busy jumping backwards.

"Hey!" he exclaimed. "What gives?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said acidly. "It's not like you've been lying to me."

He looked around, no doubt checking for eavesdroppers, but there weren't any; the only other people awake at this hour weren't crazy enough to be out training. "I couldn't tell you, okay? The Sorceress said I couldn't tell anyone."

"My father knew." And that hurt enough that she flinched away from thinking about it further.

Adam shrugged. "He knows everything."

As an attempt at humor, it fell flat, but it was the truth. She leaned on her staff. "Anyone else know?"

"Cringer, of course," he said. He rubbed the back of his head, wincing ahead of the next part: "And, um… Orko. But I didn't tell him! He found out by accident."

That was so purely Orko that Teela couldn't be upset about it. She wasn't going to let Adam off the hook for it, though. "So Orko got to know," she said. "But not me."

"Hey, I tried to tell you. More than once -"

"You did not!"

He shook his head vehemently. "You just don't remember because you were too busy calling me a coward!"

"Gee, I wonder why! Maybe because you were running away from every fight and lying to me about it!"

He scowled, then blew out a heavy breath, straightened his shoulders, and went back to being conciliatory. "Well, I'm here now, and I owe you a sparring session, so… maybe we can start over with that?"

She stared at him. Okay, that was the stupidest thing she'd ever heard.

He'd brought a staff, and expanded it now, turning it over in his hands to find his grip. "We're still friends, right?"

Wow. In the space of a minute, Whiplash and Clawful had just dropped out of the top three on the "dumbest things said aloud" list.

"I don't know," she said. She raised her staff to ready position. "Do friends lie to each other?"

"Yeah, sometimes. I was trying to keep you safe - to keep everyone safe," he said, mirroring her move. "And it's not some imaginary concern. I mean, Skeletor grabbed me the second he thought I knew anything about He-Man."

She struck, and they traded a few blows, settling into the rhythm of it. "Yeah, even bad guys get it right sometimes, huh?"

His eyes narrowed, but he decided to ignore her. "He's already tried to kill my father, and he's captured you lots of times. I'm not going to put more targets on people I - uh, you know, my friends. And family. And - you know."

She knew.

She wasn't blushing. Her face was red because she was angry and sweaty. Not because she was remembering kissing him. No. There was no reason to blush over a liar.

She jabbed the butt of her staff into his stomach. Not too hard. Just hard enough for an "oof!" and an "ow!"

"Poor you," she said, mocking. "It must be so difficult."

"It is," he said, one hand rubbing his stomach. No more ignoring; he was irritated with her, enough to let it show. "I don't like lying to people. Especially you."

"But you did anyway."

"Because I had to! C'mon, Teela, give me a break."

She aimed the staff at his head. He dodged, and the staff hit one of the field's wooden boundary poles instead. The pole splintered.

"Not the break I meant," he said.

Teela rolled her eyes. "You're not nearly as funny as you think you are."

He jumped on top of another pole to avoid her next move. "What else am I supposed to do? You're not listening to me."

"Oh, I heard you." She jumped onto the adjacent pole and pressed forward, forcing him to hop backwards one or forfeit the high ground. "You couldn't tell me. So you didn't."

"Then why are you still mad at me?" he demanded. He blocked her strike but lost his balance in the process, and the fight was back on solid, dusty earth. "I thought we'd be okay by now!"

"What part makes it okay? The part where you lied to me –" she swept the staff around in a low attack that would've broken his ankle if he hadn't leapt clear – "or the part where you felt really bad about it?"

He was angry now. She could see it in the dark scowl and tight jaw, not to mention the ferocity in his next strike. "It's not like that! I wanted to tell you!"

She blocked, attacked, dodged. "But you didn't."

"I couldn't." Their staffs met and locked, both of them straining to shift the advantage.

She met his eyes, wanting him to see – to really see – how angry she was. "That's the same thing!"

He pushed harder, a sudden forward surge which brought home the fact that he was going to be bigger than she was, someday very soon – that he already had the edge on her, strength-wise. The move broke their stalemate and now she was the one who leapt clear.

They eyed each other for a moment, both of them breathing hard, but before she could attack again, Adam dropped out of his stance.

Teela did, too, though she didn't lower her staff as he did. No: she kept hers up to guard against the next blow. Probably futile. The snake had never cared how many bruises her heart took.

"At least, it feels the same," she said, biting off each word. "It feels like… like my best friend – like you're not. Like you've never been."

And now there was that kiss hanging over the whole thing, just making it all more complicated and painful.

She didn't mention that.

He didn't mention it either, which somehow made it echo louder.

She waited another few heartbeats, then collapsed her staff, turned, and began walking off the training field.

Behind her, Adam said quietly, "I'm sorry."

She didn't look back. Instead she drew a deep breath. The oxygen seemed to inflame the fire in her gut, stoking it white-hot. "That's great," she said to the air in front of her, but loudly enough that he was sure to hear. "Keep doing that. I'll let you know when it's enough."

It'll never be enough, her anger hissed.

You'll regret walking away like this, another part of her warned. The stupid part. The one that wasn't sorry she'd kissed him. The one that dragged at her feet now, making her want to stay and talk about things.

Things. How about "lies and betrayal."

She stiffened her spine and picked up her pace.

Behind her, Adam called out, "Teela, wait –!"

She ignored that, and the running footfalls coming ever closer. She wasn't going to give that lying, betraying jerk the satisfaction of seeing her run from him.

But she couldn't ignore his hand grabbing her shoulder.

Without thinking about it – without pausing – as if she'd been doing it every day of her life – Teela spun around and pushed Adam away with a blast of magic energy from her open palm.

It sent him flying backwards, his blue eyes wide with fright, his fair hair whipped by the wind –

No, she thought. She might have yelled it.

But he was already landing, hard, sliding across the packed dirt of the training field and coming to a stop where it turned to grass.

She ran over to him, heart in her throat.

"Adam! I didn't –" She bit off I didn't mean to do that, too much like what he'd just been telling her, and went with, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," he said, climbing to his feet unaided. The arm he'd slid on was scraped (probably his ribs and leg, too) but he was otherwise unharmed. He dusted futilely at his clothes. Far from being angry, he looked… worried. Scared. "Since when can you do that?"

Teela looked at her hand, at the faint trace of green-colored magic still lingering there.

Positively overflowing with magical energy, Evil-Lyn had said at the beginning of all this. And Queen Angella had told her, The Crystal Castle will only open to a bearer of magic. And there was Queen Veena, and going inside spells, and warning buzzes down her spine, and each and every dream-vision.

So, okay. Maybe it wasn't a total surprise.

She clenched her fist and the magic flared weakly before dissipating altogether. Then she looked at Adam.

"I think I need to talk to the Sorceress."

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end

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Note: Thank you to everyone who's read this (much longer than I expected) story, whether you left a review or not. It was a tremendous amount of fun to write, and I'm frankly relieved to have this idea finally out of my head and fully onto paper. Whew!