Adam might have been the one of the only people in the universe who, instead of feeling a sense of dread, had felt a sense of relief when Teela said that they needed to talk. They did need to talk. They’d needed to talk for a long time.
Adam had tried to push it before. He’d tried to make Teela talk before she was ready to talk, and it hadn’t gone well. So he decided that he could wait until she was ready. No matter how long it took. Adam would wait for Teela until the end of time.
He loosened Cupid’s teeth from his boot and gave her a pat, then said good-bye to a very tired but equally pleased Cringer, and then left the Heart of Grayskull, walking up the long spiral staircase, away from the colourful, lush life of the Heart up into the greyness of the castle itself. Cringer, Clawdeen and the cubs would stay down there, he was sure, as he made his way to the kitchens.
He made a pot of tea for them, and pulled down the bottle of whiskey so that Teela could either add it to the tea or drink it straight. He arranged some pastries on the table, and for a minute debated whether or not he should cook them something more substantial. Probably not. He sent Teela a message letting her know where he was, and started nibbling on a turnover.
Against Catra’s protests, Teela had driven her and Melog back to Darla when she’d started feeling too tired to keep hanging out. Adora had joined them for lunch in the Heart, but she still had a few hours before her shift was over, and Teela wanted to make sure Catra made it home safely.
No sooner had her friend settled in onboard Darla, greeted by Spirit’s earnest barking and Ivy whining for treats, than Teela received Adam’s text. She said her goodbyes, giving the black cat a few extra ear rubs, then decided to save herself the walk. She had been anticipating this conversation all morning, and instead of sitting in the pool of dread in the pit of her stomach, it was best to get it over with – rip off the band-aid, as it were.
“Hi,” she greeted him, striding into the kitchen and pausing to kiss his cheek. She took up the chair next to him and immediately went for the whiskey. “The tea smells great, thank you.” She smiled and poured a helping of whiskey inside – not so much as to overwhelm but enough to be tasted.
“What kind of pastries did you get?”
“Let’s see,” Adam said. There were a variety of them on the table, even more on the counter. “I got some turnovers. We’ve got blueberry, apple, strawberry, and cherry. And then I got a couple pies, pumpkin and peach. There’s a few fresh-baked ginger cookies, if you want some. Or some cinnamon buns. Chocolate croissants?”
Maybe Adam had gone overboard, but he’d wanted to be sure that Teela had her pick. Besides, it wasn’t like there was such a thing as too much pastry.
“I’ll take a ginger cookie,” Teela decided, reaching for the plastic container and popping it open to snag one. She took a bite, using it as an excuse to gather her thoughts and try to figure out how to keep her cool. She had broached this topic – it was a conversation she wanted to have, that they needed to have, and she’d put it off for too long.
Knowing that didn’t mean it was going to be easy to get through. Or even start.
“Alright, well, I guess I should start, right?” The chuckle she let out was a little shy, very unlike her. But she had flubbed conversations like these badly in the past – recently, in her memories, further out in Adam’s – and she didn’t want to do it again. “I’m not sure how to begin other than… You know I love you, don’t you?”
She worried he didn’t know. They had sort of slid right back into being together, but there was a layer of hesitancy that had plagued them from both sides. She didn’t want him thinking she didn’t love him because she did. She always had, even when she was a standoffish kid who played like she wanted nothing to do with the too-eager Prince of Eternia.
“Yeah, of course I know that,” Adam said, smiling easily at her.
And he did know that. Sometimes he worried that she wasn’t in love with him, that she still saw him as the lazy prince, her best friend but not someone she wanted to be with. But he was usually pretty good at dismissing those thoughts, except those odd times when they cropped up in the middle of the night and kept him from sleep. They were married and had a son in at least two futures (though he couldn’t help but notice that neither of them had been this future, the future of the path they were on now, not nearly as certain as Finn had been for Adora and Catra).
He told himself that if Teela wasn’t in love with him, she wouldn’t just settle out of a sense of obligation or… or the sense that she knew how Adam felt about her, and knew that she loved him too, and that that was good enough or something. Teela would never settle for something like that, he knew that.
“I love you too,” he added.
Teela just smiled, small and brief. “I know that, too.” She finally lifted her whiskey-spiked tea to her lips to take a long sip. Even just the smallest hint of that liquid courage touching her tongue was soothing. Hearing Adam confirm he knew she loved him was a balm as well. They were on the same wavelength, at least right now.
There were a few long moments of silence before she spoke again. “I was a jerk the last time we tried to have this discussion,” she sighed. Probably the last few times – she vividly remembered the results of their visit to the Crystal Castle, and how standoffish she’d become after that. “I didn’t really give you the chance you asked for to make it right. I thought telling you I loved you, after everything that happened, was enough and I didn’t want to deal with the complications. It was a bandage.”
She rolled the cookie between her fingers and stared down at it for a moment. “I don’t think I’d forgiven you for keeping that secret from me. And please, don’t take that as your cue to apologize again,” she said, raising her gaze to look at him knowingly. She knew he would apologize until he was blue in the face if she didn’t insist otherwise. “I’m sorry. You were trying so hard to make things work, and I wasn’t as ready to let go as I thought.”
It had been so much to wrap her mind around, and as she was wont to do, she’d wanted to rush the process. She wanted to be over it, move forward, focus on what was coming with Skeletor and whatever madness was still coming their way. It was always something. But then she’d ended up in Vallo – not even Vallo, Serendipity Hills – and all the feelings had come bubbling up to the surface. She’d thought she’d had a handle on them, that she could still just move forward, but it hadn’t been that easy.
“But I am now,” she continued. “I’ve let go, and I’ve forgiven you, and I’ve… reconciled He-Man and Adam into one person.” It hadn’t taken much in the way of mental gymnastics; they were the same person, and if she thought back, she could see elements of He-Man in Adam and of Adam in He-Man. It made sense, and part of her would always be a little embarrassed she hadn’t noticed years before.
“I want to be with you and make this work if… you’re willing.” Her cheeks were a bit flushed, and she hurried to drink from her cup of tea again, but she had gotten it all out there. That was a big step. “That is if I haven’t sounded too self-centered and insufferable up to this point.”
Adam had, in fact, opened his mouth to apologize again, but he snapped it shut when Teela predicted the apology and told him not to. He wouldn’t interrupt her, not until she got everything out. As she spoke, he felt some of his anxieties easing.
He had always been in love with Teela, since they were kids. And when he’d become He-Man when he was sixteen, there was no one in the world he had wanted to tell more than he had wanted to tell Teela. He wondered then as he wondered now if he should have listened to the Sorceress when she told him he couldn’t tell Teela. And he wondered then, as he wondered now, who was he to question her: the Sorceress knew, well, everything. The Sorceress had been the keeper of the secrets of Grayskull, he was only her champion.
He’d apologized for keeping the secret from her already. He’d have kept apologizing forever, if he thought it would help. He suspected that it would do the opposite. The important thing, the really important thing, was that he promised not to keep anything from Teela again, and he was doing his best to keep that promise. He wondered, sometimes – a lot of the time – if that wasn’t enough. If there was something else he could do to help ease some of the pain he’d caused her. If there was nothing else he could do to make it up to her. Maybe there was no coming back to how they’d been after he’d lied to her for years, after she’d learned who he was and how he’d lied to her when she’d watched him die.
Maybe that was it. Maybe those futures where they’d been married would never come to pass, maybe she married him because she felt like she had to even though she’d still had that unforgivable hurt under the surface. Maybe he’d never be able to repair the damage he did to her, and their friendship.
But maybe she’d just needed more time, and a little space, to work through things.
“You could never be insufferable,” Adam said. “Trust me. I would suffer a lot if it meant I could make you happy, but I know that you’d never be the cause of it.” He reached for her hand so that he could hold it between both of his. “I am willing to make this work. I will always be willing to make this work. I’ll always fight for you, for us, so long as that’s what you want.”
Teela wasn’t so sure that was true. She was fairly certain she’d made him suffer plenty their first go at this and maybe the second had been better, but they’d still had sticking points. They’d still stuck to silence and ignorance instead of talking, which made this talk an emotional affair even if it was going well. Her breath shook a bit as she clasped his hand and smiled.
“You’re too forgiving,” she sighed, but the words were aching with fondness. “I’m sorry for how I’ve made you feel. I know I haven’t made anything easy for you while we’ve been here, and you deserve better. I plan on trying to give you better.”
“I don’t think there’s any such thing as too forgiving,” Adam said, and squeezed Teela’s hand.
And it was true: as far as Adam was concerned, people could never move forward if they weren’t forgiven first. It wasn’t always easy to forgive someone like Skeletor, to believe that they could do better, but Adam would always make the effort to do so, so that when the time finally came, he wouldn’t turn him away. After all, it had worked for Evil-Lyn, hadn’t it?
Forgiving Teela was nowhere near as deliberate a decision, nor as difficult to do. Forgiving Teela came as easily as breathing.
“We can both do better,” he promised her. “That’s what growing together’s all about, right?”
“Right,” Teela conceded easily. “We’ll both do better, then.”
She knew it wasn’t going to be without work. She knew that they would both struggle, and there were times she might fall back down those familiar rabbit holes of pain. But she would make the effort to express those thoughts candidly, to give Adam the benefit of the doubt he deserved instead of lashing out when she had bad days. It was truly the least she could do, and she wanted with everything inside of her to do the most.
Leaning in close, she kissed him, brief and soft, and pulled away with a smile, raising her free hand to brush a lock of his messy blonde hair back behind his ear. “This time, we’re going to get it right,” she declared. “Together.”