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Queen Glimmer, in all her regality, stabs a piece of cake with a fork over and over again.
It wasn’t as good as she wanted it to be. Two bites in and the frosting became so overpoweringly sweet that she began to feel nauseous. But she took another two after that to give the impression that she didn’t notice the tension brewing in the infirmary room.
The slices she cut for Bow and Adora sit untouched on an end table. The former remains in bed, while the latter left an hour or so ago. The news of Glimmer’s budding partnership with Shadow Weaver had apparently made Adora… lose her appetite.
And, well, Bow probably hadn’t felt like cake even prior to that. What with the Horde’s pulse bot nearly killing him and all.
Glimmer squashes what remains of her dessert until it’s nothing more than paste on her plate. Then, she sets it off to the side and leans against the frame of Bow’s bed. His hand dangles off the side, and she gingerly takes it, twining and untwining their fingers together. He exhales a little heavier at that, but remains asleep.
No one else in Bright Moon has to know that their ruler has resigned herself to sitting on the floor, of all places— that she stayed there even as the sun set, even after there was nothing constructive left to talk about and Bow mentioned something about resting his eyes. She told him she would give him space to heal, but instead of walking to the door, had crumpled to the ground at the sight of him so battered and vulnerable.
It’s not something she can wrap her head around, Bow almost being gone. No matter how close they’d gotten to that reality, she just goes numb at the thought.
He had no pulse . He had no pulse. He had no pulse.
For a moment, sitting there in the dim light of Etheria’s moons, she thinks she’s going to cry. Her eyes strain with the desire to do so, but no tears form. She’d probably exhausted all that energy earlier when they weren’t sure whether or not She-Ra’s healing abilities would be enough to bring him back.
She’s a bit banged up herself, but can’t exactly go on and brag about why that is without being scolded even more so than she already was. Whatever, Glimmer thinks. Catra’s definitely got one less life now than when she woke up this morning.
Still, as much fun as it was to really let the Moonstone’s magic wreak havoc on the Horde’s stash of bots, said havoc did nothing to change the fact that she had essentially given Bow marching orders to his near-demise— and all from the comfort of her cushy throne room. Little queen curls in tighter on herself, squinting her eyes shut.
She never wants him to leave her side ever again. She’s never understood her mother so much.
Her thumb slides across the back of his hand, searching for his wrist. She presses it against his skin hard until she can feel his steady heartbeat.
Bow groans, stirring slightly. Glimmer shrinks back with guilt, but doesn’t let go of his hand. Instead, she sits up a little taller so she can get a good look at his face. The lack of light means she has to squint, but the shine of the moon casts a deceptively tranquil glow over his skin. Even if she wasn’t concerned for him, her gaze would be fixed there.
She silently pleads that this won’t be enough to wake him. To put it simply, she wasn’t thinking— wasn’t thinking about anything but needing to be close to him. But Glimmer knows from years of bed-sharing experience that Bow has never been a particularly heavy sleeper. Of course the slightest touch (or slightest finger digging into his wrist ) would be enough to pull him out of his much-needed rest. Stars, she could kick herself!
After a few tries, his eyes flutter open. Glimmer exhales and prepares for a conversation she was trying to avoid. When did Bow get so hard to talk to?
“Hey,” he murmurs. His voice still has that weak quality to it, like it’s fighting to be free from his chest.
“Hi.”
“Did you mean to wake me? Are you okay?”
Glimmer shakes her head. If his heart could bleed any more, not even She-Ra would be able to spike his vitals.
“No, I…” she starts. “I mean— no, I didn’t mean to wake you, but yes, I am okay. You should close your eyes and drift off while you’re still halfway there.”
“Gonna be kind of hard to do that with you here.”
Glimmer scoffs. “It’s nothing you haven’t done before .”
A ghost of a smile crosses his face. She can tell that he’s fighting with every ounce of strength he’s been able to build up to keep his eyes open. If she really had the will to do so, she’d reach forward and ease them shut, but she likes the way he’s looking at her. She likes it more than she thought she would.
“Yeah, but you’re not going to try and sleep.” Bow says. “You’re just going to keep on staring at me. And worrying about me.”
“Oh, well— excuse me. I’ll just be totally indifferent that you almost died today instead.”
The joke is almost impossible to get out. By the end of her sentence, she’s twined their fingers back together again, his hand held in hers like a vice.
“I’m going to be okay, Glim. I just need my rest.”
That’s his gentle way of saying that she’s kind of an obstacle to his recovery right now. That’s him trying to ease her out of the room without fully telling her to leave.
Glimmer swallows, staring down at the floor. Then, she turns so her back is to his bed, leaning up against the frame. His hand, still attached to hers, is left to drape over her opposite shoulder. She doesn’t say a word after that, opting instead to stare at a cluster of decorative crystals across the room that are winking at her in the moonslight.
“What are you doing?”
She doesn’t bother to turn her head. “I’m not staring at you anymore, am I? Now you can sleep.”
“Glimmer…” he sighs. Still, she feels his thumb rub against her knuckle.
“I just— I don’t want to leave you alone right now, okay? We’ve been apart all week, and then today, when I wasn’t there, you got hurt. So hurt that it almost… that we were almost apart forever. Just let me have this.”
It feels a little wrong to put him in this position when he’s drunk on a cocktail of pain and fatigue. But if she doesn’t— if she has to go back to her bedroom, the one she’s since cleaned out to appear more adult, more befitting a queen— she may just lose her mind. And Bow, in all his graciousness, lets her have this, just as she requested.
Glimmer hears him groan slightly and whips her head around to see what’s wrong. All she finds is that he’s scooted closer to the edge of the bed so she won’t have to stretch and bend her arm as tight to keep her grip on him. Their eyes lock for a moment, but Glimmer can’t bring herself to thank him. Not verbally, at least. She hopes her face says what needs to be said at that moment. Before she can ponder such a thing for long, she turns back around, settling in against the bed.
It’s silent for a few minutes after that, save for the gentle trickle of the waterfall in the corner. Glimmer thinks he may have fallen back asleep before he eventually speaks up again.
“It's not the same out there without you.” A beat passes before he clarifies. “On the front lines. I keep turning to grab you and… help you duck, or prepare to teleport, or something like that, even though you aren’t there.”
She shuts her eyes, tipping her head back. “That’s just the kind of person you are, Bow.”
“I don’t have those kinds of reflexes with the others. It’s like having a phantom limb, almost.”
“You don’t have to protect me,” she says. “Not anymore. I’m more powerful than I’ve ever been. So powerful that it feels like it’s… eating me from the inside out, really.” Her free hand clenches and unclenches. “And you’re the one in the infirmary right now.”
“Well, I don’t care how powerful you are,” Bow replies in a tone more matter-of-fact than she wasn’t expecting. “That’s always going to be my instinct. I’m glad you weren’t there today.”
“What? Why?”
But she knows the answer already. Better me than you , he would say— even though she’s the near-immortal angelic being and he’s only human. Glimmer shakes her head, not giving him a chance to respond.
“If I had been there, I would have been able to stop it. And then you wouldn’t be lying here. You wouldn’t have needed She-Ra, and you wouldn’t have… stupid notions like that. I’m not staying behind anymore, and that’s final. You won’t change my mind.”
“I know. I wasn’t trying to. No one’s ever able to change your mind.”
His tone is harder to read now. Reflecting on his words, she realizes he didn’t necessarily say he missed having her out there fighting alongside him. It just felt different, her not being there. Her head begins to spin again, thoughts ricocheting off one another so rapidly that they become more convoluted with each passing second.
A lot of things feel different for her nowadays. None of these differences are good, not even…
There goes his thumb again, tenderly running across the back of her hand right when she needs it— right when she begins to think that maybe she’s said her piece a little too forcefully and driven him off.
Her feelings for Bow are different nowadays. It scares her more than it excites her. Glimmer doesn’t let herself fully entertain the thoughts that dance through her head when he pulls out her chair for her in the war room, or when he flawlessly executes a shot, hitting his target dead-on. All of this and more had been mind-numbingly normal months ago. Now, even his mundanity sends a spark up her spine.
But there has been far too much in the way of change recently, and Bow has always been the one constant in her life. If he were to somehow slip through her grasp, whether it be because of death, or because of love, she doesn’t know if she could go on.
But, stars… moments like this make it so hard to ignore. She can’t live without him, that much she knows, but it’s getting harder and harder to live with him too.
Glimmer doesn’t realize she’s started to cry until she feels Bow’s grip on her hand grow significantly tighter. Then, a warm, damp sensation blooms on either side of her face. Apparently she wasn’t as cried-out as she thought she was.
“Glimmer,” Bow pleads. Has he been trying to get her attention this entire time? “Come here. I can scoot over. You can lay here with me. It’ll be like… like old times.”
Except it won’t be. Not ever again. Not now that she’s the Queen, and definitely not now that she’s fighting back love for him for the first time ever in her life. So even if she wants to, she can’t let herself give in.
She shakes her head, eyes still clamped shut. “No, Bow, you’ll hurt yourself. I heard you before. You’re still… you’re still in pain. And it’s all my fault.”
“I am not letting you blame yourself for this,” he says with all the conviction he can muster. “It doesn’t matter if you might have been able to stop the bot from going off, or if you might have been able to teleport me away from it— this is not your fault, Glimmer.”
“I gave the order! I’m the Queen, and I gave the order, which is why you were there! I almost got you killed!”
Bow doesn’t miss a beat, his voice louder than usual— matching her volume despite how it must make his chest ache. “It’s not like you forced me onto the front lines! I’ve been fighting the Horde my whole life, just like you. Yes, this was technically a mission you ordered, but that’s not why I went. That’s not why I approached the bot.”
She turns further away from him, not wanting to fully listen to what he has to say. Bow pushes back by rolling on his side and, as gently as he can, uses their twined hands to turn her around so she’s forced to look him in the eye.
Glimmer almost pleads. “You’re my soldier, Bow, my responsibility…”
“No,” he counters. “I’m your best friend, Glimmer. And you’re not just my queen. You’re my best friend too.”
He holds his current pose, half-upright and twisted to the side, as long as he can to punctuate the weight of his words. Still, Glimmer sees the way his muscles tremble. A groan escapes him moments later, and she helps ease him back down into a more comfortable position against his pillow.
One of her tears falls from her face to his, splashing against his cheek. He uses her hand, near-almost always held in his, to wipe it away.
It’s too much for her. Glimmer turns her gaze from him to the expanse of Etheria sat outside the window. Somewhere within the ever-warping treetops of the Whispering Woods is the place where he almost died. And beyond there, a battlefield where her father actually did.
“It’s all on my hands,” she eventually says, voice dismally soft. “Every victory, but also every failure. Every life we lose. I don’t expect you to get it. I didn’t get it either… until I took her place.”
“I’m not trying to minimize this for you, Glimmer. I’m just trying…” She tries to ignore the way his voice cracks and trails off before he continues. “I’m trying to help you shoulder this. You think you’re alone, but you aren’t. As long as I’m here, at least, you’ll never be.”
He seems to realize by the time he stops talking where her mind wanders. It would be beyond easy for her to say something to the effect of but you almost weren’t , but she refrains. Instead, Glimmer digs into a deeper well— one she’s been beating around since learning of what happened to him.
Her eyes wander to the Moonstone. The tears have stopped.
“My mom was the one that ordered the battle that my dad never came back from.” A beat. It feels like just yesterday her mother had broken down in front of her. “She never forgave herself. The guilt is what… well, that’s why the way she was.”
What would she have done if he had died? Would she have usurped her mother in full, closing off Bright Moon from the rest of the planet until the Horde arrived on their doorstep? Or would she have done the opposite and razed them all to the ground in the name of justice?
It’s easier to imagine a world without him now that she’s compared them to her parents.
“And you’re afraid that’s going to happen to us,” Bow offers. She doesn’t reply, keeping her cheek turned to him instead. “To… any of us, I mean. You’d feel responsible for us just like your mom did for King Micah.”
“I was horrible to her. This must be what she felt like whenever I ran off and did something stupid. But I had to do it. Otherwise, we would have never gained any ground.”
“Just like how all of us have to keep fighting.”
She turns to consider him then. It nags at her, the fact that he’s right. Her guilt is not all that is at play here. Just as much as she blames herself for his injuries, she yearns to be there throwing herself into danger alongside him.
“You’re right— I can’t imagine how you feel, or how your mother felt,” Bow continues. “But what I do know is that, in a situation like this, you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to place something like blame. If you send me on a mission and I get hurt, is that your fault as a Queen trying to protect her kingdom, or the Horde’s fault for being the aggressor in the first place?”
“I should have just sent… someone else.”
“And then you would have felt responsible for whoever was injured in my place.” He reaches forward to take her free hand so he’s holding them both. “Besides, you know me. I can’t stay back and watch this happen any more than you can.”
Her fingers twitch nervously in his grasp. Glimmer sighs. “I know you all don’t want me out there fighting with you anymore. But I’m not going to take a chance at living with my mom’s guilt. If I’m with you and something happens, at least I know I’ll have done more than just sit in the war room refreshing a tracker pad signal.”
“I miss fighting alongside you every day, Glim.”
“What?” she blinks. “But you said it’s not the same. And you guys didn’t leave me anyone to beat up in the Crimson Waste.”
“It’s not the same in an ‘I miss my best friend' way. Yeah, we got a little carried away with the thieves in the Waste, and the She-Ra cake in Elberon, and—”
“I’m waiting on that ‘but,’ Bow.”
“—but, it really doesn’t compare to… y’know, the old days. Like searching for First Ones tech in the woods.”
Glimmer’s memory sends her a brief play-by-play of the moments leading up to when they found the sword— to when they’d found Adora . She’d been short with him because his dumb tracker pad’s signal was absolutely cracked, and he’d been beyond patient as she clambered ahead through the bushes. Those were their last moments together as an actual duo. If she’d known that then, maybe she would have tried to take some deep breaths and actually consider what it was he’d been saying.
“I really miss you.”
“I do too. But if you’re, er, really going to come and join us on the front lines again—”
“No, I…” she huffs, sinking back down to the floor and leaning her head against the mattress. One of her hands falls free of his grasp. His eyes bore into her from above. “I just really miss you.”
He squeezes the one hand of hers he still has a hold on. “I’m right here, Glim.”
“I know.”
The all-consuming anguish that’s been sitting in her chest has officially dulled to a soft ache. Said ache is worse than anything she’s ever felt. It numbs her from her head to her toes. When she drags her thumb across his knuckle, she doesn’t even feel the ridges.
She barely feels anything at all. Maybe , she thinks, things are better that way. If she listens with her heart instead of her head, Etheria will surely perish.
Something settles on the top of her head. Something gentle, soft, and lingering. Glimmer turns just in time to see Bow lean back into bed, his lips still slightly puckered. From there, he offers her a sad smile.
Her hand slips from his, opting to press against her chest— directly over her heart— instead.
“Come here,” he says. “You can stay. I know you want to.”
And she does. Stars, she does.
“You need your rest, Bow.” She says as she stands. Her knees feel like they’re about to give out.
“I know, but—“
“Shhhhh.”
Her hand reaches for him. He extends his out to meet her halfway, but stops when he realizes she’s aiming for his face. Glimmer gently rests her fingers over his heavy eyelids, shutting them.
“Get some rest,” she murmurs, poised to turn away. “That’s an order.”