WHO: Glimmer and Adora, then Catra and Scorpia join later WHAT: Glimmer and Adora have some BFF time the morning after Glimmer's whirlwind arrival WHEN: January 23, 2022 WARNINGS: None! STATUS: Complete.
Despite yet another late night, Adora was up with the sun to take Spirit out for his morning walk. She still felt like she was floating on air, living in this perpetual elated high (not literally, not yet); she couldn’t stop smiling.
The party Catra and Lance had thrown for her last night had absolutely blown her away. Not only had everyone been there and had an absolute blast (bumper cars, laser tag, arcade games, CAKE - what could a girl want more?), but the surprise was super effective. She was stunned to see how well her friends had kept this secret from her, but it was well worth it. If everyone from home they loved had been there with her, it would have far surpassed every Bright Moon party she’d ever attended.
But the best surprise of all was one that even Catra couldn’t claim to have planned.
Glimmer.
Glimmer.
Adora wasn’t afraid to admit that she had completely burst into tears. She had been missing Glimmer and Bow more than ever lately. Knowing they hadn’t been there for the wedding, had missed not one but two of her birthday now? It was hard. She had Catra and Scorpia, and obviously she was beyond grateful for her wife and a friend from home, but there was still a little hole in her heart that only her best friends could fill.
Unfortunately, Bow and Glimmer hadn’t come through as a package deal, but Glimmer was here and that was enough. That was incredible. It felt like some sort of miracle. For a long time, she had believed she and Catra would be the only ones here from their world, but something seemed to be shifting. Scorpia, now Glimmer? There was still hope to be had.
It was a little snowy outside, and she had to shake off her coat and let Spirit free from his coat to hang them up, before taking the elevator back up the main level. Spirit immediately went trotting out into the observation deck (which had been transformed into a cozy living room, complete with a giant sectional couch, a huge area rug, coffee table, a couple video game systems, and a SmartTV hooked up to the digital windows for a movie theater-like screen) and sat down right in front of the new person seated there, raising his paws to rest on her lap with his head cocked curiously.
“Spirit,” Adora chuckled, hurrying over to join her best friend and her nosy puppy. She sat down and gave his collar a gentle tug, just to make sure he gave Glimmer a little space if she needed it. “Sorry, he doesn’t understand personal space. Auntie Glimmer’s still adjusting, buddy.”
Glimmer wasn’t naturally an early riser. She also felt like, given the circumstances she now found herself in, she ought to be afforded some semblance of sleeping in until she was good and ready to crawl out of bed. But even as they’d all wound down the night before, she had found herself unable to really fall asleep. After a fitful night of tossing and turning, Glimmer had given up and just found her way toward the observation deck turned living room where she’d been sat for the past while. She hadn’t realized anyone else was even up yet, let alone out and about, but she supposed it shouldn’t have been too surprising that her best friend still didn’t quite know how to not wake up before any reasonable person ought to.
She’d been trying to process everything that had happened since she’d arrived. Though a good day to have shown up on, it was still a lot. She hadn’t even had a moment to really process everything that had happened back home yet, either. Between everything that had gone into defeating Prime and meeting her dad again for the first time since his chip had been overridden, she’d already been so emotionally exhausted and now here she was in a new world where Adora had an entirely different life that she had been missing from and where neither her father nor Bow existed. Add in the fact that she couldn’t feel the moonstone anymore and it was a recipe for a more troubled morning than she’d been planning on.
When Adora and Spirit returned, Glimmer had been sitting there staring at her hands, trying to make her powers work to no avail. The shimmer died as quickly as she could summon it, if it was activating at all. She still wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t a trick of the light that she saw something happen when she tried. So Spirit invading her personal space was a welcome distraction from her own introspection.
She laughed and shook her head. “No, no! It’s fine, really.” She reached out and scratched behind his ears, enjoying the look of joy on his face and trying to borrow some of it from him. She looked up and smiled at Adora. “Big day yesterday, huh? I can’t believe how good my timing was.”
“Better day when you showed up,” Adora asserted with a smile. She released Spirit’s collar, letting him push in a little closer to her best friend. He was a cuddlebug and much less puppy-sized than when she’d first gotten him over a year ago. She’d pull him down if he was being too much, but he hadn’t immediately tried to jump into Glimmer’s lap, so supervision was okay for now.
“I know last night was all kinda, you know, a lot. Showing up here, then the party, then the big sleepover. We didn’t really get a chance to talk, just us.” Scorpia and Catra were still asleep, but that was only because the sun had barely started to rise at this point. She knew Scorpia had that regimented Horde schedule still in her - just adjusted for living a less militant life. It was Adora’s wife who had become a total lazybones now that she was allowed. “How are you, after everything that happened? You just came from Prime, right?”
That seemed almost like another life to her and Catra at this point. To a certain extent, it was. Etheria was a universe away - multiple universes, maybe. They didn’t really have a way to know. But her life had definitely changed in the time she’d been here. She’d have a lot to go into, but Glimmer came first. Arriving here was always an upheaval.
Glimmer nodded, swallowing hard. “Yeah. It was pretty much right after? The four of us were talking about taking a Best Friends Squad road trip to bring magic back to the universe.” She laughed then as she patted her knees and motioned for Spirit to come up. She didn’t know if he was allowed on the furniture, but after Swift Wind’s insistence on always just being wherever the heck he wanted to be, she didn’t think Adora would mind. “Sorry, it’s just funny because you said that, and now I know you’re here and it’s kind of like you took that whole travel the universe thing way too literally. You even got a head start!”
Now that she thought about it, she really didn’t even know exactly what Adora remembered from home. Did she remember a lot more? How long had she been here exactly? The thought once again sobered her a little.
“Anyway, yeah. It was a lot? But it was good! If I had to land in an alternate universe, I’m glad I landed in one where everyone was celebrating your birthday,” she continued, not wanting to dwell in the thoughts she’d been sitting on all morning, and equally not wanting to bring Adora down, too. “You seem to have a lot of friends here,” she added. There was some small part of her that was at least a little bit worried that she’d been replaced in however long Adora had been there. No one, especially Adora, had given her any reason to suspect that there wasn’t a place for her here, but she couldn’t help the nagging feeling that that was a definite possibility.
Spirit took that invitation without a second of hesitation. He was allowed on the couch - Adora only shooed him off when they were eating there - and he settled down beside Glimmer and plopped his front legs and his head right into her lap, looking up at her with that big old puppy smile of his.
Adora took the same moment to move a cushion over so she could sit closer to Glimmer and wrap her up in a hug. She had hugged her so many times last night that she’d lost count, but she wasn’t going to stop. She’d missed out on over a year of time with her best friend, and now that she was here, she was going to soak up as much as she could. This place could be so fickle, bringing people back and forth multiple times, that it was hard to count on someone staying. Selfishly, maybe, she hoped to whatever insane Vallo Gods were out there that they intended to let Glimmer stay.
“No one else is you,” she insisted, because she knew Glimmer nearly as well as she knew herself. She knew that smidgen of insecurity when she saw it. “I’ve missed you so much. I was really looking forward to that space road trip with you guys!”
It probably wouldn’t have been immediate, she knew that. They had an entire planet that had been at war for years, decades, that they had to attend to before trying to deal with the universe at large. She hoped someday she’d get memories of the good they’d done at home, maybe even of finally taking that road trip - all of them together.
Glimmer deflated into the hug, having not even realized how much she’d really needed to hear those words that morning. No matter how long Adora had been here without her, at least the fact that she always seemed to know what Glimmer needed had not changed. She knew that part of that was the fact that Adora was pretty good at being what most people needed at any given time, but she also knew most of the credit went toward her still being her best friend. She hugged Adora back and let out a small, relieved sigh.
Pulling back, she said, “To be honest, I was hoping for a little downtime! I mean, how cool is it that we can say we got to go to space, but–” Glimmer dropped her gaze to her hands, so starkly dull in comparison to what they could be. “We’d just gotten home and it was nice being connected to the moonstone again. And, you know, my dad. And…Bow.”
She blushed slightly. They hadn’t even had a chance to talk about what had shifted between them mid-fight before she’d found herself here. And more importantly, she hadn’t had time to resolve the conflict that still existed even if she knew now that Bow loved her in spite of her mistakes. “Talk about whiplash, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Adora agreed with a nod, looping her arm through Glimmer’s and leaning into her side. “Definite whiplash. And this whole thing’s just a lot at first. Especially when so much is happening at home and now it feels unresolved.”
She still felt that way sometimes. Even after she and Catra got their memories of the war ending, of Prime finally being defeated, of She-Ra rebooting Etheria and starting on the path to setting things right, she worried. She wondered what their next moves were. She tried not to stress - worrying about things she couldn’t change from here in Vallo was only going to make her anxiety even worse. She just had to take comfort in knowing there was still a version of her out there doing her part, taking care of her friends and their people without interruption.
Then, for Glimmer, there was the literal disconnect. Without the moonstone, she couldn’t access her powers and it had a very real, physical effect on her. It could come through someday - like Darla had all those months ago - but the ‘when’ was impossible to say. They could work around that, though. Adora had power of her own; the memories of losing the war had come with the Failsafe and being filled to the brim with the Heart’s magic. She would use it all to protect the people she loved when it came down to it, Glimmer very much included.
“If it helps at all, you’re still there while you’re here.” Lance had probably told her that, but it never hurt to hear it again. She still had to reassure herself that way more often than she’d like to admit. “I don’t really know how to explain it, but it all just kind of…works out.”
That had been one small comfort she'd gotten between the spiel from the DOA and the conversation she'd had with Lance the day before. Even if she was here, at least she was also still back home even if thinking about the logistics of that made her brain hurt. At least Bow wasn't back home wondering where they both were, trying and failing to find them. At least she hadn't left Etheria without their queen. At least some version of her was actually reuniting with her father. At least the future was still possible for the version of themselves that never left.
She smiled and nodded once in concession. "That does help." Maybe it sucked for her, but as long as it didn't suck for the people she loved, then that was a comfort, at least. She tilted her head and rested it against Adora's shoulder as she ran her free hand over Spirit's coat.
"Anyway, we're totally not going to figure all of my stuff out in one morning," she said, changing the subject in part due to a sense of self-preservation, "so tell me about you. How long have you been here exactly? And you're married? What else have I missed?"
Gods, Adora felt her heart clench at the thought. If Bow and Glimmer had been frantically searching for her all this time, she’d never have forgiven herself. She hoped that wasn’t the case. So far, it seemed like everyone was coming from straight after the final battle with Prime - first Scorpia, now Glimmer, months apart. Whatever it was about Vallo that plucked them out of their world seemed to like that point in their timeline. Not necessarily a bad thing - Vallo was like a vacation after going through that, even when it decided to throw murderous birds or turning into a doll at them out of nowhere.
But she knew better than to push Glimmer to go any deeper before she was ready. She was a lot like Catra in that way; when she was ready to get into it again, she’d broach the topic. Until then, Adora was happy to fill her in.
“We’ve been here thirteen months as of my birthday,” she reported. “Catra and I got here on the same day, but we were from different points in time. Which is another fun thing Vallo does, sometimes. The last thing I remembered was getting her away from Prime, but the last thing she remembered was getting you away from Prime. That took a while to get through.”
That first little bit of time here - maybe the first month? - had been heard for them both. Even after Catra had heard Adora fill in the gaps from her end and accepted it as fact, she was still doing that self-flagellation thing. It had taken them time, but they’d gotten through it all together and come out stronger than ever.
“And yeah, we got married just last month, on the nineteenth. It was the first anniversary of when we got here, so it seemed right. But, Glim, seriously, you have no idea how much I wished you and Bow were here. You should have seen how crazy I went trying to make the wedding perfect.” She chuckled softly; she could laugh about it now that time had cleared out the stress, but at the time, she’d been a mess. “I wished you were there to clear out all the extraneous stuff, but Catra got us back on track.”
Thirteen months. That was insane. Adora and Catra had been there for over a year and Glimmer was still here trying to process being here for even a day. Her head was starting to hurt again. “Weird. So Vallo just…decides what you remember and when? Does it ever take memories away, or does it just randomly give you new ones?” She had a feeling that the longer she was here, the more she would simultaneously get it and have that many more questions. And then there was the fact that memories of the fight with Prime and his armies had happened at least months ago for them. It hadn’t been that long ago for her that Catra had saved her, that Catra had stayed with and saved Adora. Where did that leave them? She didn’t love the idea of not knowing where she stood with someone, especially when she’d only been tentatively confident in their new friendship last she remembered.
This place was going to take awhile.
Glimmer let out a groan that even Mermista would have been proud of. “I would have made such a good Maid of Honor, too. Wait, did you have a Maid of Honor? Did you have bridesmaids? I would have thrown you such an epic bachelorette party!” She was mostly put out that whatever weird magic Vallo had hadn’t seen fit to drop her in (and preferably Bow, as well) before the wedding had happened, but it was a nice distraction talking about it like this. Like it was just a thing she’d been stuck in her room for instead of a huge thing she should never have missed. “Did you at least take like five million pictures for me? I want all of the details, Adora. Don’t leave any out!”
“It doesn’t take old memories away,” Adora assured Glimmer, giving her arm a squeeze. Not that she knew of, at least. she was sure she’d have heard if that was the case after so long here, or maybe experienced it. She didn’t count Interitus - which had taken more than just her memories away. That was a different circumstance, nothing like the typical memory updates Outlanders experienced around here. “Just gives you new ones, sometimes. That’s how Catra and I remembered the end of the war. Where you just came from.”
Weird, but what wasn’t around here? They all adjusted with time, and this brand of weird became their normal.
“No Maid of Honor for either of us, I swear. Unless you count Spirit and Melog.” No matter how many people she loved here, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to have anyone else standing up beside her. It was supposed to be Glimmer and Bow, and without them, she was perfectly content with just her puppy, Catra, and their alien shapeshifter companion. “Lance was our Flower Guy, but that was just for fun. But! I got a professional photographer and videographer to film the whole thing! There’s like eight hours of footage and five million photos I can show you!”
With that said, she reached forward to pick up the remote and turned on the SmartTV hookup to navigate to their videos app. As soon as she clicked the ‘Wedding’ folder, the screen was filled with rows of videos. She handed the remote over to Glimmer. “It cost a lot, but I wanted to make sure we got everything. Mostly so I could make Catra sit and watch it with me on anniversaries, but I also kinda hoped…if you guys ever showed up, maybe it would help you feel like you hadn’t missed it.”
Mollified, Glimmer settled in to flip through the videos because whatever else was weird and difficult to process, this was something she really wanted to see. It took her two whole videos before she burst into tears though she'd honestly thought it would happen a lot sooner than that.
Sitting forward, she said, "Sorry! Sorry, I'm not sad crying, I promise. I mean, mostly not sad crying!" She sniffled, letting the video continue to play as she turned to her best friend. "It's just so beautiful and you were so beautiful and you just deserve really nice things, you know? And I'm just so happy that you're getting them even if I wasn't here for it." Glimmer wiped at her eyes, hiccuping. "I'm going to watch every single video. Like I hope you don't have anything planned today because I'm not missing any of it."
Seeing the way Glimmer reacted made Adora’s heart twist in her chest. It was exactly what she’d anticipated, and it made her feel so good that her best friend was genuinely happy for her. Especially because, in very recent history, Catra had been The Enemy, and they had only just started getting past that during this whole Prime debacle. But they had come so far, and she hated that Glimmer had missed seeing it in person. She wished there was some way she could turn back time so they could all be here and together on that day.
“You’re not going anywhere today,” Adora insisted firmly. “We can sit here as long as you want. I can’t guarantee Catra won’t be rolling her eyes in the background, but I bet Scorpia will totally sit with us, too. And Catra cooks now! So, she’ll probably make breakfast when she gets down here. Which—” She paused to check the watch on her wrist. “Shouldn’t be too much longer for either of them now.”
As Adora checked her watch, Glimmer both felt and heard her stomach growl. She had eaten the day before, but not much. Between sheer exhaustion from the battle she last remembered and the overwhelmingness of the day, she hadn’t had much of an appetite. Now, appetite or not, she was starving. “And by ‘not too much longer’ do you mean she might cook breakfast soon?” Glimmer asked hopefully, wiping at her tears. She was still tired, still processing, but could still eat her weight in just about anything put in front of her right now.
“We should definitely ask her before she realizes we’re marathoning your nuptials today,” she teased.
Adora knew those tears were good after what they’d just watched together, but she gave Glimmer’s shoulder a comforting rub, anyway. She had gone through so much in the last twelve hours? Twenty-four? It was all so overwhelming, and she was handling it super well. Better than Adora had - she had spent hours scrambling up mountaintops in the vain hope that somehow she’d be able to break free How, she wasn’t sure. Maybe she thought she’d be able to poke through the sky at some point.
Silly, upon reflection, but she’d been confused. And overwhelmed - so massively overwhelmed.
“Watch this,” she told Glimmer with a grin. “Hey, Darla?”
The AI’s pleasant female voice responded instantly. “Yes, She-Ra?”
“Can you turn on the alarm in the Captain’s Quarters, please?”
“Of course, She-Ra.”
Adora smiled widely. “She’s going to kill me,” she told Glimmer, not even stifling the giggle at the thought of her disheveled wife jolting out of bed. She would pay for it later, but she’d make it up to her and call it a sleepover prank. Those were allowed, right??
“That’s grounds for a divorce,” groused a cranky Catra after the doors to this deck hissed open, minutes after the alarm blared through the space of their bedroom. It wasn’t as if she’d been in a deep sleep or anything - Adora getting up usually stirred her up into some semblance of consciousness (more of a doze, really), and usually she was dragged out of the comfort of their bed with a little more due gentleness. And coffee.
That’s fine. Vengeance would be hers later.
Her hair was a funny, disheveled mess (not short) and those eyes were already greeting them with a glare. Melog was with her, a bit groggy themselves but seemingly okay - because while Catra dragged herself off to prepare herself some caffeine (also mumbling about looking up Vallo divorce lawyers), they went up to Glimmer with a happy little trot, sat in front of her and purred.
Loudly.
Was it Melog’s feelings alone? Was it Catra’s? Was it both? Hard to say. Catra preferred to keep it a mystery. “Hey, Sparkles - you want coffee? Adora, make your own breakfast. I don’t like you.”
Scorpia didn’t often sleep in, but she also didn’t often have sleepovers, and what was the point of staying up late with your friends if you couldn’t get an extra half-hour of sleep in the morning? And what a sleepover it had been. Between Adora’s birthday party, and Glimmer’s surprise appearance, it had been exciting and pleasantly exhausting. And so she soaked up her extra half hour, even took her time getting out of bed and abbreviated her daily wake-up checklist before following the voices.
“Good morning!” she said, coming into the room only a little behind Catra. “Oh, are you making breakfast? Can we have pancakes? It feels like a pancake kind of morning, doesn’t it?”
“I want coffee–” Glimmer started, pausing as Scorpia made her way into the room. She pointed toward Scorpia and added, “–and pancakes, definitely pancakes.”
She was still in awe of, well, everything. She had never pictured Catra as even remotely domesticated, and now she cooked? Everyone was happy? It was such a stark departure from just about everything Glimmer had known up until a little under twenty-four hours ago. But though it was surprising, it wasn’t unwelcome. There had been a shift in how she saw the other girl when Catra had essentially sacrificed herself to reunite Glimmer with Adora and Bow. Even if she’d done it for Adora, Glimmer could accept the lengths she was willing to go to for Adora.
It was nice watching this whole scene unfold. It was nice to see something like peace existing for them. It was nice to know they had a bright future here.
“If I help make the pancakes, do I get a pass for waking you up with alarms?” Adora proposed, standing up from the couch to go wrap her arms around her wife and kiss her disgruntled face. “I can at least mix things without being a fire hazard.”
Having never had to cook for herself, her culinary skills were dicey at best. That didn’t mean she couldn’t follow directions and be useful.
“Ughhhhhh,” was Catra’s reply to all the pancake nonsense, followed by a cat-like mrrrrp at getting her cranky face smooched. Her words packed zero heat - she didn’t resist against Adora crowding her space, and she had already succumbed to the fact that she was going to be responsible for breakfast this morning. Call it a hunch. “Make it up for me by staying out of my way and taking care of the coffee.”
She did give Adora a kiss, though - something sweet and entirely appropriate for public viewing (you’re welcome, for once) before flattening a hand onto her chest and shoving her back. That grumpiness had melted away into something more impish and with a smirk that revealed a tiny bit of fang. “Plus dish duty. Okay, losers, I’ll handle breakfast. Scorpia, you -”
Give her a moment to sigh.
“You want Mickey Mouse, don’t you?”
Scorpia very nearly sparkled. “If you don’t mind,” she said, in a tone that implied that if Catra did mind, Scorpia would be very, very sad. She turned to Glimmer, since she assumed Glimmer had no idea who Mickey Mouse was. “She can make them look just like a mouse’s head! Do you want fun shaped pancakes too? Catra’s really good at it!”
Yep, still fascinating. Glimmer wondered when seeing Adora and Catra like this would stop being awe-inducing and start being as normal as Scorpia getting excited over the shape of pancakes. She quirked a brow and said, “I mean, yeah? I do! But I can’t say I’ve ever eaten them in the shape of a mouse head before. Is that,” she chewed at her bottom lip and leaned forward to quietly add, “a Horde thing?”
“It’s not a Horde thing, Glim. It’s an American thing,” Adora told her with a laugh. Which may not be totally accurate - she wouldn’t say she knew the entire history of Mickey Mouse, despite doing her research - but close enough. He was a big American cartoon, apparently. “Here. Darla, play Mickey Mouse cartoons!”
Sure enough, Darla accessed the Disney app and immediately started playing some of the old black and white cartoons across the windows. “Get comfortable, guys. We’ll get breakfast going.”