[Table #2/Lively] Title: Predicated on the Incorrect Assumption of My Demise - She-Ra

[dreamerinsilico]

Title: Predicated on the Incorrect Assumption of My Demise
Fandom: She-Ra (2018)
Prompt: #001 Lively for Table 2
Character/pairing: Entrapta/Mermista
Rating: G
Word count: 1623
Summary: Entrapta accidentally finds out that Mermista is a prisoner in the Fright Zone, and decides to take the opportunity to get some answers.

Blink.  Entrapta had been about to navigate away from the cell block map screen she’d pulled up by accident while looking for a power grid schematic, but she pauses as her eyes catch on a name occupying one of the cells.

Blink blink.

Cell thirty-seven: Princess Mermista.

Blink.

“Good team, geek princess.”  The approval lights a brief, happy ember in her stomach, and she high-fives a cool-skinned hand with a small section of her hair, even though her eyes stay glued to the control panel in front of her.  

People do not usually think she makes a good team member.  Robots do, but robots are intrinsically sensible (except when running corrupted code).  She makes them that way.

Why had Mermista left her there, if she had liked working with her?

Catra does not like working with her; she only likes the results of Entrapta’s work.  Entrapta can tell, though she doubts the feline Force Captain realizes she can. People tend to assume she doesn’t ever notice how they feel about things, but she does, sometimes.  It doesn’t really matter, of course - almost everyone who likes Entrapta likes her for what she can do for them, at the end of the day, and her work is the most important thing, anyway.  And the Horde gives her plenty of resources and leeway for that.

But Mermista had said they made a good team and then left her behind when the rest of their crack rescue squad and their two rescuees had escaped the Fright Zone.  

Entrapta has no idea how Mermista was captured, or how long she has been there (probably not long, or there would have been another rescue squad, wouldn’t there?), and doesn’t particularly care.  But she does care to know why Mermista, specifically, had left her.  

“Ongoing social behavior experiment, day eight hundred thirteen: Discovered an opportunity to extract answers regarding former friends’ abandonment.  Subject Princess Mermista is being held on the premises,” she says into her recorder solemnly, before hauling herself up into the vent above her with a tendril of hair.  The vents are usually the fastest way to get around Hordak’s stronghold, and minimize chances of running into soldiers who don’t know that she works here, yet. Looking like a non-Scorpia princess in the Fright Zone can occasionally be inconvenient.  

The vent covers in the cell block aren’t the easiest to remove, but Entrapta’s multitool makes quick work of the screws, and she plops down before the sleeping Mermista, cat-like, and makes herself a chair from her hair.  

“Hello,” she says, lacing gloved fingers together and propping her elbows on her knees.  

Mermista startles awake, then scrambles into a sitting position, her eyes wide as regulator gauges.  “GAH! You can’t just - am I dreaming?”

“No, you’re in cell thirty-seven in the Fright Zone,” Entrapta reminds her helpfully.  

“You’re alive!”  Mermista’s voice is uncharacteristically effusive with this exclamation, and she pushes herself to her feet and scrambles to hug Entrapta tightly around the shoulders.  

Entrapta was not expecting this.  

“Yes, definitely alive,” she agrees.  Mermista is still squeezing her shoulders.  She supposes that if her still-alive status is a surprise, she ought to return the hug, so she does, wrapping a lock of hair around Mermista in turn, though she’s still rather perplexed.  

“How did you survive the gas in the tunnel?” Mermista asks after a moment, pulling away just enough to look Entrapta in the face again.  

“My mask isn’t airtight, but it does offer some occlusion, and stopping air intake temporarily allowed enough time to pry off a ceiling plate to access the main vent system before the poison gas could cause more than some superficial skin irritation.”  Her habit of wearing her heavy-duty coveralls half-unzipped and hanging at her waist had meant some unfortunate exposure to her shoulders, but it had been easy enough to ignore until it had healed.

“...So you… held your breath,” Mermista summarizes, blinking at her slowly.  

“...Yes.”  

“And you’ve been living in the vents ever since, without getting caught?”

“Oh, no, I got caught about hour forty-something.  Forty-five? Force Captain Catra has a very acute sense of smell.  She interrogated me and then gave me a lab and access to Horde technology!”  

This makes Mermista draw back from her completely and stare her down.  She seems angry about it, but what else was Entrapta supposed to have done?  They left her.

“So you’re working for the Horde now?” she demands, voice louder.  

“Yes, I’ve made so many strides in my research since you and the other princesses left me here.  I was sad about it because I’d thought you guys liked me, but really, it turned out to be a great opportunity!” Entrapta explains.  Really, she hadn’t thought this would be such a difficult thing to understand, but Mermista isn’t looking any happier.

“We did like you!”  Mermista is almost shouting, now.  “I liked you!  We thought you’d died in the tunnel!  We mourned you, heck, Perfuma made a statue of you out of plants, and all this time you’ve been back here happily tinkering away for the Evil Horde!”  She’s definitely shouting by the end of it.  

That… does seem like an entirely reasonable explanation for the abrupt abandonment despite prior overtures of friendship.  She flips on her recorder. “Abandonment by princesses apparently predicated on the incorrect assumption of my demise.  I need to update my models immediately to account for - “

“HEY!”

Entrapta stops talking and focuses her eyes back on Mermista, whose eyes are narrowed and brimming with tears.  

“If you’re just gonna treat this like one of your experiments or whatever, you can do it somewhere else.  I’m sorry we thought you were dead and left you stuck in the Fright Zone.  But you… you’ve been helping the people who are trying to destroy us.”

“Well, our arrangement is more that I do my experiments and they watch me and sometimes I have to explain them to Catra in smaller words….”  Okay, now she’s feeling a bit guilty.

“Your Force Captain Catra almost destroyed Brightmoon’s runestone!”  

Entrapta winces and taps a few fingers of hair together pensively.  Yeah, that would be bad. Especially if her friends hadn’t really meant to abandon her.  She had been more focused on the theoretical implications when she’d made that big breakthrough with the Black Garnet, but Catra didn’t care about the theory for its own sake at all.  Sometimes it’s hard to keep that in mind.

“Is… is everybody okay?” she asks, tentatively.  

“Yeah, no thanks to you.  The other princesses and I saw the distress beacon and were able to get there in time to turn the battle around.”  Mermista is quieter again, at least.

“So the Princess Alliance was a successful experiment, after all!”  That is a bright, shiny thought. Especially since they really liked her.  (She finds she’s a tiny bit sorry to have missed out on seeing the mourning Mermista alluded to.  Grief behavior patterns are dramatic and interesting. Then again, if she had been around to see it, it wouldn’t have happened at all.)

Mermista is rolling her eyes and smirking a little, possibly unwillingly.  “Well, we did break it up for a while when we thought we’d lost you. But I guess so, yeah.”  

“That doesn’t make much sense,” she points out thoughtfully, bouncing a bit on her hair-chair.  “You lost one but gained two. The mission was still a net success.”

“Well yeah, but that didn’t make us any less upset.”  Mermista is frowning again, crossing strong, smooth arms.  “You matter, you giant dork, okay?”  

Entrapta resists the urge to press the button on her recorder for the observations that are running through her mind, this time.  She can do a lengthy analysis on the warm and fuzzy feelings that admonishment evokes in her, later. For now, she settles for hopping off her hair to hug Mermista again, standing on tiptoes to get her actual arms around her shoulders, as well as a few hair tendrils.  

“Alright, alright, don’t make a big deal of it, or anything,” Mermista protests in a mutter, but she is hugging her back, fiercely, and Entrapta just smiles.  

“Come on.  Let’s get you out of here before the next patrol comes around,” she says after a moment, releasing the embrace and bouncing on her heels.  

“Um…  Won’t you, like, get in trouble for that?”  

“Not if no one sees us!” she replies happily, pointing up at the vent she’d arrived in.  

“But won’t you come with me?”  

“Would you rather I came with you, or would you rather I build backdoors into all of the Horde’s systems?” she asks with a grin.  

Mermista lets out a quiet laugh and rolls her eyes again.  “Well, it… sucks to think of you still being here.”

“It’s not so bad,” she says truthfully.  “If you’re not stuck in one of these. These are awfully boring.  The food’s no good, but their technology is - “

“I mean, I miss you, dork.”  

“Oh!”  Entrapta blinks, a pleased smile stretching at her lips again.  “I’ve missed you, too.”

She’s thought of good team, geek princess before today.  More than once.

“We’ll see each other again, though!  Now that you know I’m not dead and I know you still like me.”  She still likes me!  

“Yeah… okay.”  Mermista’s smile is still hesitant, but that’s okay, as long as she keeps doing it.  

“Perfect.”  Entrapta means it.  She gives another encouraging grin, grabbing up the vent grating before slithering back up into it, and then offering a whole ponytail’s worth of her hair to help Mermista follow her.  

When the next patrol does come by, Mermista is gone without a trace, and Entrapta is innocently tinkering away in her lab.