Archive of Our Own

A flashback, time-misted...

and fading to gray around the edges. It is the Princess Adora, a little child, dressed in a smart black and red jumper, surrounded by the bleak dimness of Hordak's Fright Zone, jumbled rising gray-black-brown in the background, belching smoke into a pale sky. She sits cross-legged, her hair shining like a new-minted gold coin on slender shoulders, on a rickety catwalk high above the training pits where Robot Troopers rush through their drills. A pile of slagged metal rubbish in the corner still smokes where Hordak, whom she calls "Papa," disposed of the less efficient of the robots with a blast of his robotic arm.

We know that one day she will be She-Ra; one day, in the dark of night, the song of the Sorceress's sword will call her from her bed, and she will lift it aloft and let the light of freedom into this dank, dark blemish of a fortress for the first time. She will save He-Man from imprisonment, thwart Hordak's plots, and return to Etheria as the new secret leader of the Great Rebellion.

Now she coolly watches the Troopers in "Papa"'s absence, and when a squad leader hesitates and his troops fall out of line, calls down, "You there! Robot!"

He looks up, quick and wary, blinking slanted green eyes at her, and answers, "Adora."

"Yes, you," she continues, "is there some problem? Can you not remember even the simplest orders? What would Hordak do with you in the field like this?"

"I--" he stammers, "I'm sorry, Adora." She hasn't stood, and her composure doesn't waver, but there is a little frown on her tiny face.

"You'd better be glad that Hordak isn't here, Trooper. You'd be on the slag heap for sure. It's very important," she says, with no softening of tone, "that you have them wheel about at the tenth step, not after it."

"I--uh. Right! Yessir, Adora. Yes. Thank you."

There has been the silent whisper of ghostly footfalls on the catwalk, and the child has not heard it; Shadow-weaver swoops in her blood-red dress and gathers Adora to her breast, lifts her into the air. "That was very good of you, Adoooora," she hisses in her throaty sibilants, glowing eyes fixed too sharply on the fine-sculpted little face from the gap in her head-wrap.

"Papa shows the troopers no mercy, Mama," Adora says, looking inquiringly at her: "but maybe if he can do it right, next time, he will not be wasted."

"Hordak will deal with him," says Weaver. "We shall ssssee." She turns to walk away, the child at her breast instinctively nestling closer before she recalls herself and sits erect without giving her "mother" the opportunity to recoil.

now: she-ra

You cannot live a normal life as She-Ra. There is the prickling premonition of danger, the rush for a hiding place, the slick slide of your sword ringing as you draw it and the roar, the fountain of light and the tearing pain as the magic of your birthright tears you apart and shuffles you back together. Every transformation is a birth.

There's the adrenaline and the cold clear power of fighting. There's one long whirlwind, and then it's over, and you're you again--Adora.

Except that now there's Frosta, and there has been for some time. Now sometimes when you point the gem in the hilt of the sword at
Spirit and the rainbow-hued wings sprout from his sides, all you can think of is the intangible caress of icy air on the deserted turrets of Castle Chill and the clever dampness of Frosta's red mouth.

"Where have you been?" Frosta purrs, "those Rebels keep so much of your time--" and she's not moving towards you, but facing away, dressed only in a transparent sleep-shift and the thick curtain of blue hair.

The Rebels do keep your time, but they only see She-Ra when danger calls.

You walk towards her, your hands itching and fire starting somewhere in your thighs, making them weak, anticipation flushing cold up your neck, suffusing your face and digging fingernails into your scalp--you can see the sweet swell of her rounded body from behind, and yes, you feel arousal sweep rosy down over your throat, skate the curves of your collarbones, and there it reaches your breasts and teases your nipples achingly erect inside your white dress.

When you bend your head to smell the fresh-wind coolness of her hair, she sways backward, pressing the firm-soft curves of flesh into you, and your mouth opens on a little cry, your hands shaping, spanning her waist, smoothing silk over the curves of her hips.

When you were a child, no one would touch you; if you'd grown up with Adam, your twin brother, in the Royal Palace of Eternia--but there is no use thinking that. You were kidnapped, a baby, and raised Hordak's protege, always Captain Adora in his head, even before he gave you your first blaster and your first troop at twelve. You were never hugged, never caressed, by Shadow-weaver or Hordak. You still do not know what, precisely, they feel for each other. You rarely saw them touch except in a sort of passion verging on anger.

When you open your lips on Frosta's neck you can feel her pulse so strongly it's like you taste her blood through the salt of cool skin, and maybe you do--what would sex be like without the magic flowing through you, the instincts that were meant for fighting?

"She-Ra," she sighs, turning in your arms and pressing close, close, so close, and you bury your face between her breasts.

She has never met Adora.

now: frosta

If you know that She-Ra will be coming, there are times you cannot control yourself. There's an ache of long hollowness in your breastbone, an ache that draws blood and nestles tight in your gut, and tries to cut you to ribbons with the sweet dry kiss of talons, raking your throat and your breast at the thought of her.

You have waited so long, for--this.

Your mother was a water-witch. You never knew your father, but you remember playing with Mermista when the two of you were babies, laughing and lifting pudgy white hands to the sky, watching water turn cartwheels for you there, freezing it into a tremendous snowflake to watch the wonder in her eyes when it fell and shattered. The taste of dirt under chill water--not quite like ice--on her shoulders, when you were just fourteen. Her hand on your leg, and the way the music of her water breathed through you from far away when you were apart again.

Your mothers must have known.

It is in the nature of water to seek its own kind. You and Mermista learned a long time ago, though, before you passed adolescent groping, that you were not for each other, and that water, to make love, longs for something--else.

It is not that your life has been all waiting.

You have fought, for most of it--fought for loyalty, and then for alliances, and then fought to win control of the Kingdom of Snows. In your exultation at the victory you raised Castle Chill in its icy splendor from thin air and earth in a dazzling burst of magic in one afternoon. For weeks afterward you were weak as a kitten.

That was before She-Ra came to Etheria.

When you wait for She-Ra, you do not only wait. Time presses inexorably around you; you give orders, fly around the kingdom, speak to Captain Brawn and the commanders of the guard. But part of you--a previously cold part--sits a little removed, crumbling apart with anxiousness, tensing and relaxing at a single thought, flushing and cooling with arousal and worry and all the desperate urgency that you sometimes worry you should not still feel.

She-Ra is as much yours now as you are hers--but how much is that?

There's a thirst that you never seem to slake. You feared from the first--perhaps even before you realized what she could be to you--that it would be this way. When she put her hand on your arm, those long dusky gold eyelashes drifting down in an inexpressibly haunting arc over tremendous black eyes--and you felt a startled lurch in your diaphragm, a yawning maw open in your belly, hungry and desperate. When she tugged you closer you were eager as the ice crystals tingling in the air, waiting for your call, liquid and smooth and slow, and when she crushed you against her you gasped, and wanted nothing more than to be crushed again, and more, and more, and more. Your mouth came open on a silent cry of want, a hitching sob of breath that admitted her hot clever tongue and the taste of it--

The back of your neck was alight, sensitized to the point of pain, all your awareness pushing out through the surface of your skin, your lips feeling clumsy and thick and salt-dry, parched for her kiss.

And now she is yours, and you can call her mouth to you with a lift of your chin or a twitch of your hips--when she is there. And when her arms come around you, so willing and eager to be held against the wall, pressed down into the vastness of your bed, you still lose the world for a dizzying moment of sheer devouring want and need and mind-blanking pleasure. Your breath comes short and hard in your chest and rasps, to your ears like the rough hissing of that witch, Shadow-weaver.

You hear her footfall in the door and you feel it at the bottom of your jaw, a rush of adrenaline and nerves and cautious darts arrowing through your gut, centering like an opening flower between your legs, hot, ripe and full. You're breathless, your smile open wide, red and brazen, your eyes fluttering obscenity in invitation. Your throat closes when her teeth scrape and stab the join of your neck and shoulder and your legs spread open around her, your belly lifting off the bed to press close, your hips curling around, rubbing wetness on her thigh.

You can't speak her name; the taste of her lines your teeth, coats your tongue sweet and slick, and your hands fumble for her narrow waist, the strong cords of her thighs, the wiry curls between them. Her belly tenses and jumps at the touch of your hand, and she grits between her teeth something you can't quite understand, but it might be "yes" or "mine."

Knowledge and hunger, now, after nearly a year of frequent fleeting trysts, here and in the Woods, and you know just what she wants, know where to press your tongue, when to slow, how to touch her with the slight roughness on the edge of the pad of your thumb to make her eyelids dark and heavy, her pupils lazy and dazed. When She-Ra brushes the side of her face across your chest, trailing the tip of her tongue along your collar bone, burying her nose in the center between its two wings, her hair flows and pools on your breasts, cool and maddeningly light of touch. Yes, yes, you know--and when her teeth close around the tip it is still a surprise, a deeply visceral shock of pleasure never anticipated, never remembered.

She pushes her face into your neck, blankets your body with her strength, her legs spread wide over you, a hand pushing up into you with clever fingers. The taste of blood on your lip alerts you that you've bitten through it, your eyes closed and leaking tears, all of you awash in light like melted snow in the sunshine. You twist and writhe and force yourself closer to her, panting, "Take me," and you can hardly speak. She laughs against your skin and her free hand strokes the curve of your waist, the pale tense dent of your stomach. When you cry aloud your pleasure, dissolving, wan rainbow in a prism of snowflakes, you see her alone, staring at you wide-eyed and dark and hungry. You do not weep only from the pleasure.

Again and again, you reach out and your hands close on nothing.

now: adora

Clenching around your stomach, a hard hand. You want her. You want to nestle against her, hold her so tightly--squeeze her until she's crushed as breathless as you can make her. You want to drink her, and lick her collar bone and down between her breasts and kiss behind her ear and suck on her nipples and the soft skin where her neck turns into her shoulder. You want to put your hands flat on her stomach and feel the pulse of life under them, and bite her lip and taste her blood. When she teases you you want to growl at her and climb on top of her and pin her to a chair, and hold her wrists so hard it hurts, and kiss her until she forgets. You want to have the right to call her name and have her answer no matter what she is doing. You want to go to sleep with your arms wrapped around her and your leg between her legs from behind, or wrapped around both of them, your hand resting in one of the secret hollows of her body, her fingers twined possessively with yours. You want to feel her hands on your breasts. You want her mouth on your throat. You want to surprise her, want her eyes to go wide and shocked. You want her to want you so much her mouth is open and her breath rushes in and out in fast disbelieving pants, and when you come to her, you want her to smile as though the smile might tremble and break off her face, and you don't want to lose the image of it even in your dreams.

Why, when you have what you want, do you persist in longing as though you want what you cannot have?

Ask Frosta whom she loves, and she will tell you. She-Ra, the Princess of Power, He-Man's twin sister, and Defender of the Crystal Castle. The leader of the Great Rebellion.

You are not She-Ra. You are Adora, and you were raised by a Papa who executed people every day, and a Mama who kept your will slave to a spell. The leadership of the Rebellion listens to you, but it does not depend on you, and when you appear in Castle Bright Moon one day, your cheeks still flushed from the wind of flight, your body tight-tuned and fine-wired from adrenaline, your best friend takes your arm, his cape swirling behind him, and says: "Adora! Where were you? You missed it all--all the wonderful things She-Ra did!"

And you smile at him, and say you're sorry you missed everything again, and you hope one day you will see She-Ra, and you feel sand slipping through your fingers. You pass She-Ra every day in a hall of mirrors; when you reach out for her you touch only glass.

Once when you were visiting Frosta, you held aloft your sword at sunset one day, let the power pour through you, knowledge and strength spilling so far over, you could feel the gem in the hilt of your sword pulse, could hear the faster drumming of Spirit's heart as the horn and wings grew and he became Swiftwind. You stayed She-Ra, never once returning to yourself, for six days and five nights of sweet sighs and whispers and smiles, brittle cold white sunlight on Frosta's downcast eyes lighting in her eyelashes, shining on the lower curve of her lip and the pink swell of cheekbone under her eye.

You dreamed you were Adora, lost in the Fright Zone, a small child, wandering through the Whispering Woods at night in search of a glass of wine--meeting Frosta for the first time, at Mermista's Crystal Falls, the first time for both of you, and you look at each other and smile, not two Queens, but two women.

Every night when you go to sleep in your tent at the Rebellion camp, on the ground anywhere, or in the guest bedroom at Castle Bright Moon, you dream. You have never dreamed of being She-Ra.

Looking at her makes you sad, makes you hungry, with something you cannot name--you only look at her as She-Ra. She and Adora may never meet, and you think--would she know me? And you know that if you could not feel the change, in She-Ra you would not recognize yourself. You sit in the Whispering Woods and in Angella's castle, surrounded by people, and yet alone, because when you look forward, you cannot ever see your lips on the sweet spot under her jaw, your lips in the small of her back, your hair--short and sleek, not She-Ra's tremendous mane--swinging against the sides of her face and trailing across her white skin when you rest your cheek on her stomach, her fingers resting on your cheek. You cannot imagine a day when, in ecstasy, she will say "Adora."

Trees tower so thick-clustered over this narrow stream that the sun barely penetrates, and when you look around cautiously, you can't even see a sign of animal life other than Spirit, who stands just behind your shoulder as always. You stroke his velvety nose and shed your boots and jumper to dive in.

Last night you stood on top of Castle Chill, your eyes closed, leaning with your legs spread against the crenellations with Frosta on her knees in front of you. She gave you a look of pure promise, lustful, eyes greedy and wicked, and pushed your skirt up around your waist. She licked daintily, delicately, and did things with her tongue that--you cannot imagine them without a hot flush seeping over all your skin under the cover of water. Your hands were buried in her hair, holding her head so tightly you fear your nails scored her scalp, and the warm damp wet of her tongue was everywhere, feather-light with its gentle thrust like the caress of the enveloping water on your skin. She claimed the right to a reward, so you let her suck and bite the skin under your collarbone until it was red and irritated, still easily visible this morning over the neck of your low-cut white dress.

You became Adora again in the Woods before you returned to camp, and the mark vanished.

Then...

Like a nightmare, life in the Fright Zone for the little Princess. She has gotten up as early as she could, and she sat for a long time, silent and solemn in her bed of pale silk, gazing solemnly at the clinical steel wall. Then she got up, unplaited her hair herself and brushed it out smooth on her shoulders. Her black and red jumper and her soft red boots, a present from her Papa, waited on her chair. Now she stands neatly dressed in the door of the throne room, where Hordak is alone on his throne but for Imp, Shadow-weaver's magical familiar, snarling wrathfully and smashing one heavy blue fist on the arm of his towering throne. Adora stands in the door, watching him calmly, and when his eyes focus normally again, she steps into the door.

"Yes," he growls, "what do YOU want?"

When she steps forward, dirt and grime from the ground drift over her red suede boots; they will be cleaned again that night by one of the many human menials kept in the Fright Zone dungeons, dressed in glaring yellow tunics with Hordak's bat insignia. "Papa."

"Yes, Adora," he says in an unpleasantly expectant tone.

"Yesterday you told me you wanted me to--"

"Yes," he interrupts with a snort, "I know what I told you yesterday! I don't want to anymore! Just--go away! Shadow-weaver will look after you."

Adora looks down and away and steps back from the door. Light comes from irregularities of the Hordak's haphazard junk yard architecture more often than from windows; the catwalks and halls alike are deep and dark with shadows, but she has long been accustomed to walking them alone.

Weaver is alone, crouched in a dark room lit only with flickering pale blue flame over a wide flat bowl of dark reflective substance--Adora would say ink but for the sharp-sweet metallic tang, like the stinging insidious song of a scrape on the side of your tongue. "Adooorrrraaa," she hisses, "what do you want, child?"

"Papa sent me to you," she says patiently, and sits down without being told to, to wait. She could leave; Weaver would forget her, would tell Hordak they had been together the whole day--unless she could not be found when he wanted her, and then she would become a disobedient brat who had snuck away.

She has had free reign of the Fright Zone since she was very small; Hordak could prevent it if he chose, but it is not in his nature. Perhaps he understands, somehow, that it would never be necessary with quick, clever, loyal Adora. She knows every nook and cranny, every hiding place, every hallway, every noisy pipe, every chink that lets in clean sunlight and fresh air. She knows the furthest reaches of the store rooms, the dungeons, Shadow-weaver's magical labs and Hordak's private chambers.

She knows that in the darkness of night, Weaver finds Hordak alone, barely silver-limned in the moonlight, and puts her pale clawed hands with their stench of decay on his harsh mechanical-organic cheeks. She knows the first time it happened, Hordak jerked his head around in startled anger, made to rise from his throne, halted by long green fingers closing on his left shoulder, a snarl choked off by a thready low whisper from the hollows of the vermilion hood.

She knows that in the darkness of Shadow-weaver's inner sanctuary, behind the corner bookcase, there is a hollow where an heating duct has no grate, and a small girl can crouch easily, and, if she breathes very carefully, remain unseen for many long slow hours, the slow relaxation of Hordak's defense and the removal of his black and silver armor. The whisper of robes over Shadow-weaver's spell-blistered skin was louder than the whisper of breath past her fingers, and when they joined together, their bodies writhing oddly as in pain on the floor, neither of them saw or heard her. She knows that Hordak seeks out the witch through all the levels of the fortress after a defeat, and doesn't listen when she protests, low and rough, "Hordak."
They vanish together, and they are far from sight, but never out of hearing.

Adora has seen Shadow-weaver bending over Hordak, fully clothed, like a bird of prey, her green eyes raking his form up and down, her fingers clenching in fists at her side, clutching above his throat, his cheeks, in a macabre parody of strangling and scratching.

She can't remember being born, or being left at the Fright Zone, or anything but Shadow-weaver and Hordak. She thinks neither of them has ever hugged her, though they carried her when she was very small. She remembers the feeling of power, a confusing rush, high on Hordak's shoulder. Later, when she is Force Captain Adora and carries her blaster in a holster on her hip, it is that feeling she will remember when she surveys her troops.

now: she-ra

"What I don't understand," Bow is saying between gritted teeth, his black brows drawn low over his nose, "is how the Horde can have levied an army so fast!"

"That's not what matters," Glimmer says; "we need to get these people to safety, and we're not even going to have time to pick up camp! Just think of what those troopers will do to the Whispering Woods."

"Yes," you interrupt, "but it can't be helped. Call the people together--I'll find somewhere for them to go, but for now get them out of here. Get them away."

"We need all our alliances," Bow says glumly, and that gives you an idea:

You snap, swinging your leg over Swiftwind's back, "I'm going to
Crystal Falls--the two of you bring the camp there when you can."

"Crystal Falls!" Glimmer marvels. "But She-Ra, Mermista will be in danger!"

"Every enemy of the Horde is in danger." You fly away.

Swiftwind hovers in the air over a tiny islet in the wide calm pool at the foot of the rushing water. Mermista surfaces, a smile dying on her lips, almost at once, water streaming back from the blue of her hair as a question grows in her eyes. "Hordak has raised an army; the rebels are fleeing camp. I've asked Bow and Glimmer to bring them here. Will you help us?"

"All the help I can offer is yours, She-Ra." Her lips firm, the fiery look of strength one you recognize from a few occasions in the past.

"We'll need to keep Hordak distracted when he's here--" you say. "We need--misdirection." You need water magic.

"Right, She-Ra."

As She-Ra, everything you suggest is obeyed. Sometimes you wonder how Adora might lead the Rebellion herself. If you remain like this until the crisis is over, Bow will come to you with that eager look, and move to seize your hand, call himself back at the last moment. "She-Ra," he'll say, "where's Adora?"

You will reply, "Don't worry about Adora; she's safe," and that will be the last anyone mentions of you, real you, until everything is over, when they marvel at all the excitement you/she have/has missed.

Where are you needed? Leading the Rebels to Crystal Falls--and Mermista urges you to go. You don't tell her your destination.

She-Ra isn't needed for this flight. Adora will lead it at her friends' side. "Good luck, She-Ra," Mermista says in her exotic trill as you turn to leave, and you force yourself not to pause, the chill breeze ghosting up your thighs under your skirt like the caress of ice-edged air on top of Castle Chill. You vault onto Swiftwind's back, gripping his mane as he dances, tossing his head, unfurling long shimmering rainbow pinions.

You only nod curtly to her, turn your eyes upward: She-Ra doesn't need luck, has never needed it. It is Adora who always has suffered and always will suffer. The sky stretches endless blue above you, and when Swiftwind arrows towards the clouds, no matter how fast your approach the clouds never come closer; you think you can taste them on the air when you fly so high the air is thin in your lungs, but you have never touched one.

And Adora never will.

now: frosta

Mermista's command of water is like your command of snow. You can feel it when she works it, when she throws herself on the ground weeping and calls a tempest of cold rain to echo her feelings--lines of water pull tight in the air across the world and your nose tingles, racings in your temples, lifting your face to the sky, and you wish you could weep.

She-Ra, incredibly, does not know how beautiful she is--that she makes your throat close and your breath stop when she turns to look at you seriously over her shoulder, dark-eyed, heavy-lidded, her lips ripe and full and just parted in inquiry. When she stops, shading her eyes to watch for Swiftwind, in a waterfall of sun, it turns thick around her and gilds her eyelashes, painting white gleams on the full parts of her cheeks, flushing her nose. Like waves of ice, the ebbing and flowing of energy with a great exertion of magic, the feeling comes washing up from your thighs through your gut, knotting and twisting, slippery-slick, rushes to your face and back down, and if she wanted to touch you in that instant you couldn't stand it.

You have never called an ice storm in fury or grief or joy. You make ice that will be useful, and you're as cool and precisely mathematical as the infinite geometric beauty of a perfectly symmetrical snowflake. You know what must be done, always, and you always do it, with reserve, with discipline. When She-Ra is away from you (all the time, seemingly), you press cold hands to your cheeks, lean on the icy walls you've created to feel the pulse of energy in them, the potential power of the water flowing out of the bonds of chill you weave with a whisper of your mind. You soothe yourself as you can.

Five sunsets and one slow ocean freeze after you first tasted the salt tang of sex in all the crevices of her body next to Crystal Falls, you led She-Ra up the winding stairs and down the hall to your bedchamber here for the first time. It was dark, flambeaux in sweeps of ice arching from the translucent walls, their heat confined in bubbles of distorting magic. She-Ra followed you silently. When you turned to face her next to your bed, fear seized you, as you couldn't read her face, and you looked up at her, your lips parting around something--you didn't know what you meant to say, and you only wanted her to smile, but you thought you might break apart if she did--and then there was the ghost of emotion on her face, in her eyes, a distant echo, you thought. The quick snap of her movements reaching for your arm, narrow fingers closing around your wrist in an unbreakable bracelet. Like a bubble of magic around you, flame roaring to life in between, and in a dizzy instant as she stepped forward with sinuous melting menace, you felt your constant hold on the ice around you unravel, backed up into your own bed and your chin forced up in a bruising grip by her other hand as her mouth descended fiercely.

You were lost in a blizzard of sensation that night, the slave of your body and hers, and there were the scalding gasps of drifting-swirling snow, ice on your nipples, the deep rush of soothing-healing chill, nearly as real as the weight of her on you. When you woke up, the window was white with snow, drifted feet high across the sill, frost like dense lace etched so deeply into your mirror you've never yet removed it all. It was still warm in the bed, fantastically so, with the press of her sharp hip against your stomach and her mouth a damp stain on your neck, burning a mark of possession on your skin. It's difficult to sleep, now, without the ghosts of her arms and legs tangled around you.

Some nights are harder than others, but this is a difficult one, swathed in uncomfortably warm memories. You keep waking and standing to press your cheek against the cold of the wall. You are not asleep when Mermista reaches for you in a panic, so urgently that she loses control of her power and rain, warm, not frozen, pelts rattling against your window. You breathe on the black pool in its silver salver on your dressing table and her face materializes, brows drawn together and looking to the side.

"Hordak has raised an Army, and he's moving in on the Rebel camp! She-Ra is bringing the Rebels here, but I don't know if I can protect them. Please--" She says, but you're already on your feet.

"Send Enchanta, darling," you say, reaching for your dress and leggings draped over the back of a chair. "I'll be there as soon as I can."

You can't communicate with Enchanta, but you talk anyway, speaking a mixture of human language and the keening tongue of the snows. You don't speak pure Water, at any rate, which she might understand--it's rather different from Snow. You caress her neck, bury your face in the fragrant clean-animal smell of the white feathers there.

And when you step off of her back to the thick, springy bed of moss on the banks of Mermista's pool, the first words out of your mouth come out in Snow: "Where is she?"

Mermista smiles, understanding the odd blurring between Snow and Water, and your inquiry and concern from your agitated expression.

"She-Ra has gone," she says, gently, "back to the Rebels." Of course she has. You belatedly step forward for an embrace, feeling stiff and cold in her arms, though the cool armor of Castle Chill is melting around you. She-Ra is in danger? Of course, you know this is always the case; and yet. And yet. Mermista is worried.

Then...

There is less mercy for Hordak's own in the Fright Zone than for the Rebels because his cruelty is mundane, and not particularly inventive. He jails them, feeds them poorly, works them hard, and flogs them. His own Troopers he kills without a second thought. After she flees to join the rebellion, after she becomes She-Ra (though of course, Hordak will not know that), her friend Glimmer will save the life of a Horde soldier. When he escapes and she follows him back, Hordak will have her thrown in jail, and the Corporal as well simply because he will protest the Troopers' rough handling of her.

Adora has seen Shadow-weaver offer Hordak succor and sustenance, revive him and save him any number of times--and she has seen Hordak grip the thin blistered arms hard enough to bruise, lift the witch from her feet and wrestle her through a door and pin her to the wall above her gasps of protest. Adora has heard Shadow-weaver's hoarse screams fade away to nothing with weariness, has seen the glow of hate battle in the slitted eyes with the glow of whatever else she feels, loyalty, fear, even love.

What she learns of love in the Fright Zone will remain even now in the back of her mind--and She-Ra, when she learns to fight Hordak, will learn to hate it.

Adora will simply not think about it.

Hordak values loyalty and obedience above all else except, perhaps, success. Adora never sets a foot wrong, growing up.

It will be in her best interest, then, to go to the Fright Zone, to confront Hordak, only as She-Ra, his arch-enemy, and not as Adora, his pet, his protege, his--possession. She-Ra will be the burning center of all his hate. Adora--Adora will be a traitor, a bug to be crushed.

Watching from afar, behind the mask of a cool face, the little Princess often wonders what the Robot Troopers are thinking in their last moments of consciousness when they have displeased her Papa, before his blaster arm is leveled at them and they become nothing. How might a Robot think--and does it feel pain? Or is there only the numbness of all the Fright Zone, pale and dim even to the sickly green of the sky?

now: adora

"Adora, you're back," says Glimmer, mounted on spirited dapple gray, Arrow's reins in her hands. You nod, smoothing a hand absently on Spirit's neck.

"How is it," you demand tightly; no time to be wasted on "where's She-Ra" or "where were you," so you have cut her off.

Glimmer blinks and says cautiously, "Bow's trying to get all the children mounted. We hope to get out in time." You glance around surreptitiously. Bow is far too interested in your and She-Ra's whereabouts.

You lean forward, weight shifting, and whisper, "Let's go." Swiftwind surges forward and it's like the first headlong flash into the bottomless inverted well of the sky, and your nerves are screwed so taut with courage and nervousness that you almost feel the humming of Grayskull and the Sorceress' magic after all.

Riding to the front tells you nothing; there are men on foot, and a few women and children on horses, dogs frolicking along, oddly silent as they must sense the tension in the air. The thunder of more hooves on the ground, and you know, of course, the rear is where you're needed. You see Bow and Arrow out of the corner of your eye, galloping forward with a child under each arm.

You bend closer to Spirit's neck, urging him silently forward with the tension and the change in balance.

Crunching of underbrush is a distant crackle at first, but then you can hear the hum of tanks, a sound you know too, too well--a sound you haven't heard as Adora since you commanded one. It serves to force you into your identity, a solid anchor in Etheria, in childhood, away from the Frosta-adrenaline rush of She-Ra. A small shape, and you pause. Spirit knows what you want and wheels--you snatch up the little girl under one arm and ride forward again, looking for another rider with an empty lap. Horse after horse bears a man and two children, or a woman and two children, or an adolescent balancing a toddler on his knees. Nera, pregnant, and her little sister, Lethia, hugging gingerly around her waist. The girl is sobbing in fright, though she obviously knows who you are, nestling closer, wetting the front of your red mini-jumper. You finally see Queen Angella, and risk a shriek to draw her attention. There is a gust of air as she folds her wings to dive for you, and you lift your warm, bulky bundle high for her. The sun dazzles you, glinting into your eyes from behind one of those elusive puffy clouds, and the hair blowing in your face is short, just barely shoulder-length. You are not She-Ra.

You still believe that you are pleased.

The heart of the Rebellion is fleeing past you, booted and barefoot, man, woman, and child, on horseback or not, but swifter than you'd dared to hope.

You know now that you must have known they would make it. They will reach Crystal Falls, and the rumble of tanks grows louder. You can hear the crash of Robot Troopers' feet, and streak back towards the sound; you want everyone to reach Mermista and, hopefully, safety. Bow was at the rear, but he was riding forward. You are still passing stragglers, none, of course, mounted, and you are reaching the end.

The sounds are growing louder, and you can see an ominous patch of sky through the trees. Soon enough you can see the fallen trees, the advancing ranks of soldiers. And the tank--

Not a tank. Hordak. But he never leaves the Fright Zone, and the robots alone would never have recognized you...! Your eyes meet, and your mind freezes and leaps into activity all at once. You feel dizzy, vertigo and deja vu spinning your head in a vortex of noise and Spirit's flanks are tensing under you as Hordak-the-tank becomes Hordak-the-man and his eyes narrow. The conversion is faster than you've ever seen him do it. "Adorrraaaaa," he drawls, with a snort and a snarl, "how nice of you to come see us--don't just stand there, you idiots, seize her!"

You draw your sword, but you're desperate--you can't become She-Ra now, in his sight, and Spirit is hemmed in. Even as he started to dance backwards the ring of Troopers drew tighter, more emerging from the trees. You slash at them, and damage or destroy quite a few before their mechanical hands close on you and your sword. Spirit rears and stomps, lashing out with teeth and hooves, but it is insufficient. Hordak stands with his arms crossed and his legs spread, seeming pleased and amused, if anything. His smile is cruel.

It is a nightmare you're lost in, surely, the sword ripped from you and with it, perhaps, your only chance of escape, for though there's no question Glimmer and Bow will attempt a rescue, whether they succeed is another matter altogether, and they will have all they can do to stave off the attack. "Take her to the Fright Zone," Hordak says, and a troop detaches itself under the command of another robot. "Don't speak to her and don't listen to anything she says. Adooorrra," he adds, "welcome home."

now: frosta

You stalk back and forth, the heels of your boots sinking into soft moss and mud next to the Falls. You've called the ice and Mermista has called the water; your fingertips are tingling with it, the air crystalline and dense. When you walk too close to a tree hanging over the water's edge, frost blossoms on the ends of the branches and leaves. "Where are they?" You growl for perhaps the tenth or twentieth time, just as the first sounds touch your ears, and then a bevy of heavily-laden horses stumble into the clearing, Glimmer at their head with two little boys in her lap.

The drumming of more hooves, and you can see others on foot, now. Mermista stands by the pool; you stride forward, your eyes seeking for She-Ra in their midst. Bow comes forward on his horse, his hair disarranged and out of breath, and Glimmer says urgently as you walk past, "Where's Adora?"

"I saw her and Spirit--"

They find you in a few minutes and ask you to follow the trail back to the Fright Zone, as Mermista cannot leave and of all of them there, you have the most useful powers. Certainly, you can do it; and when Glimmer offers, after a worried pause and a glance at Bow, to come with you, you reject the offer. You have been there before. You can do it.

When you ask them where She-Ra is, they give you blank looks, and Bow says, "She-Ra? She's probably battling Hordak right now. It's Adora we're worried about."

You can hear them from half a mile away. When you extend your senses cautiously to the air, there's a tremendous, overwhelmingly warm and dry drought of air. You seek out the water and the cold, struggling to encompass all the sensory data, struggling to keep a hold on your normal senses, your balance, your consciousness. But there: a foul taste, damp disturbed earth with mud like blood under splintered, fallen trees. It is child's play to circle the main group, walking through the silent part of the trees, sunlight filtering aquamarine and blue through the branches of the trees.

The trees are slender and gracious, twisting trunks and plumes of leaves. You see one that reminds you a great deal of your favorite at Crystal Falls, one you've lain under with She-Ra, clothed in nothing but the dappling of shadows and cool light. There is a mole low on She-Ra's back, close to the spine and a few fingers'-width above the smooth hollow indentation in the top of the swell of her left buttock. It fascinates you--you covered it with the pad of your thumb, trailed your lips around the edge of the digit, covered it with your open mouth to tease it with the tip of your tongue.

If you close your eyes you can smell her. You know the curve of her spine by heart and the shape of her face in three quarter profile, sunset or sunrise throwing long shadows of eyelashes, nose, and cheekbones across her face.

There! Another poison on the air, making your skin crawl with the messages minute ice crystals bring you: robots. Slime of pale metal, the heavy thump of booted feet, holstered blasters. Your nostrils flare, and you walk faster.

"Hold the prisoner!" Rumbles one voice, and you are careful to stay well out of their sight, which means that you cannot see them either.

"She's not struggling," says another.

"But if she trips and falls Hordak will be displeased."

"Hordak seemed angry with her--you! Where are you going?" There's a pause and a shuffle, muted voices, and then the same voice--the commander?--says grudgingly, "We will stop here, then. Don't be long!"

You creep closer. The back and sides of your tongue are tingling. Your boots don't make any noise. Power is running strong, crackling over you so you're surprised your hair doesn't freeze. You spread your hands and flex your fingers, walk closer still, expanding on the wave of adrenaline and the strength of your awakened birthright.

There's a trooper standing with his back to you, facing a rock where the prisoner must be--bound, you gather. You see a strand of blond hair glint in the sun. You raise your hands to chest height, freeze him from behind. He's motionless, encased in glittering ice, with not a sound uttered. You move forward. There are two more in the clearing, both of them facing away from both you and Adora, but they can still see each other. You wait for one to pace sideways, then extend your hand quickly. The force behind this one is so great that the air glows brilliant blue-white in afterimage. The sound of it, perhaps the flash of light, attracts the final guard's notice, and as he turns, you freeze him as well, your lips pursed in a grim line.

That passed Adora's field of view, and as you've stepped forward, you see the back of the golden head turn swiftly. Still, you don't wish to startle her, so you put out your hand carefully and touch her arm through your glove, and--

you know that it's her. A hasty scramble, no longer caring if you make noise, and you see tall, deep-cuffed red boots, the hair too short, but the curve of her cheek as she turns, startled, and when you tug the blindfold away and meet her--blue eyes, not black, hers nonetheless--, you let out a muffled sob. Her lips are open, pale pink and startled.

If you had words, now, you would not know how to use them to do her justice. The fragility of the moment is incredible, and then it is gone before you know it and you've drifted forward, almost against your will, and pressed your lips softly to the familiar curve of hers. Taste, oh, taste. Though there is something different, you know it, you feel it--more her now than ever before, and you feel your lips giving way before you have realized what you are doing, pressing close with all the worry and confusion fleeing from joy. There's a moment of hesitancy; her lips tremble against yours at first, and then her touch firms with confidence and she's taking rather than giving the kiss again, just as you've learned to expect and like. She tilts her chin, presses closer, takes possession of your mouth with slow, lascivious licks. When you come back to yourself you find that your hands are wrapped around her wrists in their rope binding, gripping almost too hard.

She mutely lifts her hands, and you freeze the ropes brittle with a touch of one gloved fingertip. She twists her arms in their white sleeves and red wrist-guards to shatter the binding, and the movement is quintessentially her. These are the arms, those the tapered fingers, but now she is standing, and there is no time to think what you're thinking.

"Thank you," she says quietly, and paces the perimeter of the clearing swiftly-- "I'm looking for my sword. I don't know if Hordak kept it, or if he--ah!" She points. The first guard was holding it; it's frozen with him. You frown. Melting ice is much more difficult than creating it--but in a moment she holds it again, and indeed, you can see the echo of She-Ra's magic weapon in this plain silver thing which can't hide its grace. She looks at you, seriously, and says: "It's time."

You nod, and she lifts it above her head, her eyes raised to the sky, and says, "For the Honor of Grayskull--" Her hair stirs in a breeze that wasn't there a moment before, and then the leaves around her dance up from the ground in a sudden frenzy of incandescent light, raining like fire and ice, liquid gold that hurts your eyes to look, dazzling.

And when it is over--there. She jerks her head sideways, and the now-long golden hair stirs and slithers on her shoulders, sun arrowing from the sky to pick up brilliant lines on the ridges of her crown. She leaves the clearing at an agile run and you follow a step behind.

now: adora

Bow introduced you to Frosta when the two of you showed up at Crystal Falls, after you'd sent Hordak back to the Fright Zone again with his tail between his legs. "Adora, you're alright," he'd said, "you missed everything!" Frosta had been smiling when he added, "And this is Frosta--I guess you two've met, but you haven't been formally introduced." You don't think Bow could see the hint of irony in her eyes and the set of her mouth as she said,

"Adora--the other, mysterious Rebel Leader."

You know that Frosta spoke to Mermista about you, about She-Ra, only because she has told you.

"Sometimes it scares me," Frosta said to her cousin, hesitant because she felt ridiculous for the violence of conflicting impulses and emotions. You see how she looks at you with tenderness--you feel the butterfly-kisses of her eyelashes on your face in the middle of the night and the touches so light that as Adora you might not feel them, tracing your upper lip, smoothing your hair back from your face. You see it, but until she told you the force of it, like, she said, "a blizzard that isn't hot or cold--and I can no more escape it than--than a wounded magicat can escape an avalanche."

You are grateful to Mermista for telling her not to be ashamed, that there is nothing wrong with feelings so powerful that you cry and don't realize you have shed tears until later, or with adoring you even as she fears you, sometimes, because you fear her, too, if only for her power over you.

Frosta put her hand out first to shake hands when Bow introduced you, and you smiled at her genuinely, with the strangest feeling as if you really were being introduced for the first time.

Now you walk deeper into the Woods together, away from Crystal Falls, side by side with your hands hovering close. You want so desperately to touch her, you feel it like a pounding throughout your body with each beat of your heart. You think a little hysterically, love at first sight.

She is saying, "Nice of Bow to introduce us like that," in the soft husk of her voice that makes you think of what it would sound like to hear her purr your name, yours, and you think you're blushing again. Certainly you can feel arousal folding your stomach into itself, hot and tight.

You look directly at her, and smile a smile that says something very different from your commonplace, "Oh, he's very conscientious, is Bow."

"Can you call Swiftwind--ah--Spirit--just to take us to Castle Chill, and then change him back?" She asks.

You smile, "I could," and stop walking entirely in the meager shade of a rather young tree, the wan evening light going slowly deeper, bluer, pooling like sapphire on Frosta's blue dress--in that hollow next to her hip, the inviting dip of the small of her back.

She seems to change her mind at that, because she says breathlessly, "Adora."

Your eyes must be strangely bright. You only nod.

A smile, tremulous, perhaps, but not without confidence, touches her mouth, twitches her cheek, and you feel yourself lick your lips. "Come here."

A muffled noise of protest comes from your throat, at what, you do not know, and you drift forward, seize her face between your hands and turn it up to meet yours. Slow, sweet, nuzzling kisses are not expressive enough for the hunger in you, though her lips part so willingly and she presses so pliantly into your arms, seeming all soft curves and a rich gluttony of painfully sweet flesh. You gasp her name in her ear and she chuckles slightly, and lowers her face to your neck, nudging impatiently at the white collar of your jumper. The seam's difficult to reach in the center of the back, but it comes undone without tearing, and she pushes it away with a small sound of satisfaction.

You feel the power of this deep-fast-sweet sex like a riptide, from your toenails to your scalp to the insides of your knees, the back of your ears, the skin of your cheeks and your arms. All of you aches with her, for her, and the exquisite harmony of her body finally against yours without the too-sharp intrusion of She-Ra's magical senses, like a thrilling chord progression struck again and again, making you vibrate in sympathy.

If you have known her as She-Ra for years and just met her today as Adora--perhaps She-Ra is not so much not Adora as an outer layer of her, a glassy shell through which she couldn't reach. For months you have been falling towards this without knowing it, the stark unapologetic inevitability of her mouth on your breast and the crease of your hip, the yielding of the softness at her waist to the desperate clutch of your fingers. Since she met you outside Castle Chill two years ago, the day you first lay together at Crystal Falls, you have been straining for this, rich and malleable and dark and demanding of all of the parts of you that don't like to accept demands.

When you sink your teeth into her earlobe, it is because you want to be possessed, the cool blush of danger when you look up into her eyes and realize you can't escape, her legs wrapping around you, the pungent taste and smell of her on your lips to be licked off only slowly, so distracted you don't want to.

"I--snow," she swears when you kneel between her legs, stroking her lazily with one finger to draw out the little shivers of pleasure you can still feel. When she finally manages to say "Iloveyou" it is all one breath, gasped and desperate, and she's reaching for you, spread suppliant before you and demanding greater force. Her fingernails bite red crescents into your arms that will still be there tomorrow.

"I think you really mean it," you whisper,

and she says "Adora" in the same tone, as you hoped she would. You lick your lips again, searching for more of her taste and the heady smell of sex, before you dip your head for another kiss and lower your weight onto hers. She has wrapped her arms tightly around you and traces the curve of your spine with a fingernail.

Frosta cannot know how you store up images of her, sifting them out of the everyday tides of life, picking over them carefully with a connoisseur's eye for the laughing sparkle in her eyes, the flush of her cheeks, the soft shadows in the corners of her mouth and the inviting curve of her torso from ribs to hip, the straight elongated aggressive line of leg in blue leggings and white boot. There's the shape of her skull, the pert inviting swells of her full breasts with their thick, sensitive nipples, the broad pale aureoles. The arch of her bare foot when she sits naked in bed, looking at you over her shoulder from behind a curtain of hair.

The sunset is always calm and obedient in the Whispering Woods, periwinkle and indigo, turquoise with illicit kisses of chartreuse under the trees, a rose that edges toward violet, a pale diluted orange like fruit juice. Frosta's skin is a sculpted, fine-grained silken canvas, accepting the tints of light with a grateful glow, flavoring your kisses citrus, her throat plum, spreading berry and clear water on her breasts and in the crease between them.

When she gets impatient she rises up on her elbows, tangles her hands in your hair and growls throatily, "Adora, stop teasing," and kisses you to blot out the sight of her. All you see is swirling black.

The Kingdom of Snows is as exotic as Frosta, silver-white and blue with ice and cold, and the only blue skies it sees are at night. Sunset is the brilliant orange of a tiger lily or the red of blood, of the swollen wet lips of the entrance to Frosta's body when she parts her legs plaintively. You taste her pulse there with your tongue, your thumbs describing soft arcs on the translucent skin of her inner thighs. She wants to say "now," but you have taken her beyond speech. Instead, she gasps, her fingers gouging earthen gashes in your bed of moss.

Finally she is sated, too languid to more than take tiny sips of your mouth that make you laugh at her kittenish weak movements. You bend over her in the gathering darkness, watching indigo shadows gather in the hollows around her black eyes, and she traces the line of your face, brow to cheek to chin, with a shaking finger. "You," she breathes, and for the first time you feel that she speaks to Adora and to She-Ra.

Then...

In another glimpse of the past, Shadow-weaver lifts her hands to begin the spinning spell that will hold Adora to her, and the Princess-Force Captain, now full-grown, sits calm and still, knowing what awaits her on more than one level, even if none of them is totally conscious.

Perhaps she doesn't want them to be. Weaver walked into the room in Hordak's wake with a familiar slowness to her movements that Adora has only recently fully come to understand, and when Adora's sharp eyes picked this out and she asked the witch "how are you?", Hordak turned and snarled,

"Weaver!" with a jerk of his head at Adora.

"Yes, Hordak," she said, subdued, and before he left the room he paused to tower over her menacingly and say,

"I expect better than this in the future, Shadow-weaver. Adora has needed your assistance in this way far too frequently of late. I hate to think that your efficiency is slipping."

Adora meets Weaver's eyes levelly, and she says nothing, but something must pass between them, because the witch gives a short start before she casts the spell that sends her "daughter" into the familiar blank-eyed, brainwashed trance. The truth is that with He-Man as a prisoner, and the mysterious swords in their force fields in the bowels of the Fright Zone, Weaver finds it difficult to concentrate to hold all her enchantments together at once.

Perhaps she is weakening; perhaps her efficiency suffers; and perhaps, when Adora slips again, her punishment will be more severe. She turns away with what the Princess's eyes can recognize as resignation. Adora will say nothing more today, but there will come a time when she will have to choose--and she will choose to leave.

She will owe it to herself, then, not to hesitate; but perhaps she will owe a thought of it to Shadow-weaver in the future.

now: yours

"Who are you?" Frosta whispers in the middle of the night, stroking the bright hair that seems to gather all the moonlight to it, kissing your collarbone, and you're fascinated by the silver on her profile when she does it.

You think, for a moment, but you are too content to worry overmuch about your identity, now. You say simply: "What do you make me?"

A smile that you feel curving against your neck. "Mine."

End