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She-Ra fights like she's held a sword all her life. Adora hasn't - she'd never seen one outside of an illustration before - but Adora isn't part of this.
It feels like the strangest dream, fuzzy around the edges, hazy as a poorly-programmed sim. She-Ra sends soldiers flying, slices open turrets, blasts beams of light through the gap in the armor covering the engine. When her reflection catches on the shiny side of a tank, Adora's first instinct is to look for the bot behind the princess hologram. Every minute that she doesn't wake up makes her feel dizzier.
It's getting late, part of her mind keeps saying. You're going to miss lights-out.
There's no reason why fear tightens her chest when she remembers that it doesn't matter.
The closest thing to reality, anymore, is her mission. Clear facts. She-Ra protects Etheria. She-Ra works through Adora's body. When Adora focuses on that, the sword doesn't threaten to glitch out of her hands.
Adora kneels before the Queen of Bright Moon, and when she speaks, it doesn't sound like her life has fallen apart in the last twelve hours. It's easy to do insane things when nothing's real.
Adora cracks Glimmer's door open, ready to close it again if she's too late, but Glimmer's lying down on her bed, writing. She smiles when she sees Adora and appears next to her in a pop of glitter.
"Hey," Glimmer says. Her eyes shift to the crystal in Adora's hand. "Did you... wash that?"
Adora tenses her other hand so she doesn't sound as frustrated as she is. "I don't think there's soap in my room." She still sounds pretty frustrated. "I've looked at everything, and I thought maybe - but it isn't this either, I guess."
"One sec," Glimmer says, before disappearing. Adora takes a deep breath in the empty room. Glimmer's going to get a bar of soap, and then she can figure out where the shower is if it isn't the waterfall, and then she can sleep. At least sleeping should be the same.
Glimmer reappears with a bottle in her hand. "Here. It was with the other stuff by the bathtub - the shampoo and conditioner and things."
Adora swallows every weakness that crawls up her throat. Bright Moon doesn't eat bars, Adora should've expected that they don't clean with them either. It's fine. "Oh," she says, wooden. "The - bathtub?"
Glimmer actually explains what the drum of bubbles is for, this time, and she doesn't say you idiot but she has to be thinking it. Adora's thinking it.
By the time Adora gets back to her room, she gives up on the bathtub and washes in the lukewarm waterfall, even if that isn't what it's for. It's late, and she still has to make her bed something bearable, and the world still feels like a hologram. She keeps waiting to put her hand through the gleaming walls and hit weathered metal. She keeps being unsettled by the silence, half-wondering where the rest of the unit is before she remembers. She keeps turning and expecting to see someone that isn't there.
If Adora's face is already wet, she isn't crying. That's a Horde rule that she's going to keep.
Once Adora has a normal bed and she's not alone, sleeping is the same.
(Other than waking with the panicked thought of where is she, and reaching down to empty air, and hearing two sets of breathing instead of a whole unit's, and feeling the universe warp when she remembers. Other than that.)
Adora pokes the shape on her plate, and it springs back suspiciously. It looks like... foam. Or insulation. And it's brown.
"It's amazing," Bow says, cutting another chunk. Glimmer scrapes crumbs from the edges of her plate. "Trust me. This is one of the best foods Etheria has."
Adora braces for the acrid brown sting, but the cake melts sweet in her mouth. Bow and Glimmer keep telling her about different flavors she should be tasting in 'real food,' and most of them blur together, but she has sweet figured out.
Glimmer laughs at whatever look is on Adora's face. "Bow told you. Chocolate cake is the best."
For the hundredth time, a corner of Adora's head puts together how she'd describe this in the dim after lights-out. It's something she has to keep stuffing down, a flame she has to keep snuffing out.
Adora takes another bite. After she swallows, she nudges a smile on her face and says, "Brown food that's good. Things really are upside-down in the Rebellion."
Bow frowns. "What?"
Adora pauses, stomach taut with the constant feeling that the ground's about to drop open under her. She should be used to the surprise, by now. She should be better at remembering what things only exist within the borders of the Fright Zone, and she shouldn't still feel-
When they were helping refugees in Plumeria, Glimmer said that missing where you had been from was called homesickness. The Fright Zone wasn't Adora's home anymore, and she shouldn't miss being part of something that left flames and twisted metal in its wake.
She shouldn't miss brown ration bars, and she shouldn't miss anyone anything else either.
Bow's still looking at her. Adora clears her throat until there's nothing there. "Never had anything like this. That's all."
Adora has always been told that she's a terrible liar. Either Bow chooses to let it go, or Adora left everyone who knows that about her in the Fright Zone.
Catra's here, and Adora doesn't understand the jump of fear in her chest.
Catra's here, and talking, and part of Adora is talking back. Part of her is trying to force magic into the Sea Gate, and part of her is tracking Catra's movements in case Catra tries to stun her again, and part of her is watching all of this on a grainy tape that glitches in and out.
Catra is someone Adora doesn't recognize anymore and someone that Adora knows in her bones.
"Come on, Adora," Catra says, "hasn't this all gone on long enough?
Adora doesn't know much, when the world unravels. She doesn't know why she left. She doesn't know why Catra didn't come with her. But she knows that she can't go back.
Catra finally fights her, slips under her clumsy defense and grabs her face. The layers of reality slide against each other.
"When did you get so weak?" Catra hisses in her ear, and Adora wishes she knew the answer.
Then Catra's gone. The Horde ship sinks under the waves, and any worry about what happened to all of the soldiers who must have been on the ship is far away, because the ship may or may not be real, and Catra may not have been on it because she may not have ever existed either.
She-Ra heals the Sea Gate, and hugs the people who are her friends now, and smiles while Bow and Sea Hawk sing. Adora puts her hand through the hologram and tries not to fall through the floor.
Adora wakes surrounded by people and steel, the smell of burning wires thick in the air, and thinks, the sim blew, where is-
Then Bow and Glimmer hug her, and the weight of the sword tugs down on her arm, and the past weeks spill back in. Bright Moon is an ephemeral haze, like the Weeping Princess, like chibbits and razorfins, thin and translucent as the bubbles foaming out of the bottle someone hands her.
She must make a face when she tastes the drink and it stings. "I guess that's off the menu for your birthday," Bow says, laugh in his voice.
Adora still hasn't asked what birthdays are. She thinks they have parties. "Yeah," she says, finding her smile. "I guess."
At least they have decent beds in Mystacor. Not that Adora can sleep. Not that sleep would help.
Adora can't stop seeing things. Shadows keep skittering in the edges of her vision, flickering, and Adora knows they're nothing. Her heart still races, and something itches and squirms under her skin.
Shadow Weaver isn't here, so it doesn't matter what she does to cadets who don't follow the rules, and it doesn't matter how many thousand rules Adora's broken by now. Adora has to stop the part of her attention that's always watching for her, ready with a excuse or distraction for whatever they shouldn't be doing. Because Adora hasn't seen Shadow Weaver in weeks.
The only Horde officer here is Adora. And now she's pointed her sword at Glimmer and smashed ancient artifacts and everyone wants her gone, because she's done nothing but damage since she set foot in Mystacor.
Maybe she is crazy. She's still only about sixty percent sure that anything around her is real. Any second, the sim buzzer will ring, and the holograms will fade, and Adora will have her old jacket and her old belt pin and familiar metal under her boots. She'll make jokes about mice, and the Horde will keep driving tanks through homes, and the nameless tension will stay between Adora's shoulders.
Adora wants to go home almost as much as she hates herself for it.
She isn't sure where she's walking, but she isn't sure it matters. When Bow comes, and Adora's hand passes right through him, it isn't the surprise it should be. The Bow that turns to shadow and vanishes feels about as real as the one that hugs her, and even Adora knows that's probably not normal.
Adora's never too scattered not to run towards screaming. Shadow Weaver throws more illusions around the room, but Adora barely blinks. She's been fighting on unstable ground for weeks, and this isn't any different. Adora's always been smart enough to be respectful, but there's no fear when she shouts at Shadow Weaver, now. It's easy to do insane things when nothing's real.
There's one thing that might be. "This is who I am," Adora tells Shadow Weaver, and believes it enough to not sound like a lie.
Pink waves wash up the shores of the beach. Adora watches them through slit eyes.
"It's okay if Mystacor just doesn't work for you," Bow says, from his towel next to her. Glimmer breathes slow as she sleeps. "We'll figure out how to get you to relax, even if it isn't here."
Adora shakes her head. "I've never relaxed in my life."
"You said that, but - really? Never?"
There was a tension to everything, in the Fright Zone. No matter what they were doing, there were consequences if they got caught, whether they knew they were breaking rules or not. Sometimes, the rules changed. "Never."
There's a rustle as Bow shifts on the sand. "That sounds awful."
"Yeah." The waves wash in, wash out. "You always had to be careful. Like, um, we would have sleepovers too. But we had to wait until after the night rounds, and if we'd hidden food from dinner we had to make sure that there weren't traces left over, and we had to be quiet. We would whisper half the night about nothing."
Adora doesn't remember why she started talking. She doesn't think she can stop. "There's a catwalk up one of the towers, for a factory that isn't being used anymore. You can see the whole Fright Zone and the woods from there. We still couldn't get caught, it wasn't safe, but we could - look out. Talk about what we would want the world to be."
For once, that feels more like a dream than the pink waves.
"Thank you," Bow says, "for leaving the Horde."
Adora sits up to look at him, pulse jumping in her throat. "They're evil. She-Ra's whole job is to protect Etheria from things like the Horde."
"Right, but still, it's hard to leave everything and start over." Bow scoops some sand in his hand and lets it trickle down. "Even if you know you have to."
Adora rolls onto her back again. The sand as firm as her bed. "I guess."
She wakes up with a start, murmuring overhead, and it takes too long to place the smash of waves. Glimmer's there, when Adora looks for her, and her hand in Adora's hair helps her heart settle down. It feels more real than the voice that's been whispering in her head for hours, for years.
Adora doesn't realize until they're halfway back to Bright Moon that she didn't reach for someone who wasn't there.