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A satisfied smirk spreads across their lips, too-sharp teeth on full show as they slowly dig their fingers into their skin. Claw-like fingernails leave sickening trails of blood and stretched moving skin. Layer after layer of a plastic-like substance peels off and drops to the floor with a wet splash and a shudder from their audience. Spurting blood leaves long messy trails around them and on their audience and they let out a laugh. A sharp noise that comes from the back of their throat and seems to linger in the air, Somehow both light and musical and suffocating. More and more laughter bubbles through their throat and suddenly they’re in hysterics.
This is Double Trouble’s favourite method of shifting. Sure, it’s the most time-consuming and means that they are left out in the open with no sort of protective layer between the ground and their exposed muscle and bone for an undesirable amount of time in the middle of a battlefield. But there’s just something so addictive about the frozen masks of horror on the faces of the people surrounding them as they see someone essentially skinning themself.
With a final slop of fake skin onto the floor and into pools of blood surrounding them. They stand and relish the pure horror radiating from their audience. It would only take a few moments for their original skin to grow back, but the group of princesses didn’t have to know that.
You’d think, Double Trouble muses, that with this war and all, my shifting wouldn’t be that shocking, but hey, I’m not complaining. I get a free show, and they get to witness the death of their ‘friend’, which is a win-win if you ask me.
“Oh my,” they say out loud, “you should see the looks on your faces. It’s really quite a picture”
There is one unaffected, though. Adora. ‘Of course. She did grow up in the Horde. They’re renowned for being brutal with their soldiers. Especially their children. If the rumours are correct, this is probably the least gory scene she’s seen in a while, at the very least it’s the first time she’s seen something like this without having to lay a hand on someone.’ (It's well known that Horde children are raised to know how to torture and kill they can even talk. And if she was raised by Shadow Weaver then… well. Double Trouble almost feels sorry for her. Almost.)
It’s strange that the rest haven’t snapped out of their frozen state yet. It usually takes half this time. Maybe the Horde’s finally perfected that targeted sleeping gas, though it would be nice if someone had told them this in advance. Adora finally speaks.
“Why do you do this? Do you get some sort of a kick out of people being absolutely terrified? Do you like being a twelve-year old’s first proper view of real blood? Do you like seeing people watch their best friend being torn apart by themself? They aren’t like us,” she says, taking a step forward and removing her sword from her bracelet “they aren’t desensitized to blood and even if they are, they don't actively seek out bloody fights. So why can’t you just leave them be? Allow them to build up to watching things like that? Or is that too much for you to understand, Double Trouble.”
“Oh, dear. Where’s the fun in that, besides, we’re at war” they shift into Catra’s skin, smoothly this time, bones still cracking under the pressure of compressing themselves into her smaller stockier structure and skin bulging in places where it stretches too far, they lean in close- too close to her “Adora”- they say in her voice. She flinches, they don’t really know why. Maybe because they couldn’t perfect Catra’s voice. There was always something slightly off about it, as there is with all of their shifts between real people. Or maybe they got their voice a little too close to the originals. They shift back to their original form. “-And an unfortunate side effect of war is blood, so they'd best get used to it.”
“Stop that!”
“Stop what, Princess?”
“That.”
“Aw, you don’t like it? That kitten of yours loves it.” Double Trouble doesn’t know if Catra loves it, they leave the room before she can react and rip out their jugular, but they’re a good enough judge of body language to know that she is at least affected by double trouble becoming the other girl.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“What,” this time it isn’t a question, she’s genuinely confused and Double Trouble isn’t going to stick around to see it. As much as they adore seeing peoples confusion and outrage when they turn into their loved ones, they have a payslip with their name on it and a report to give. Unfortunately.
^_^
By the time Adora snaps out of her confusion, the former is long gone. She stands there for at least the next half hour contemplating what the shapeshifter had told her. Some small part of her brain, the logical side, tells her to not have this sort of thought train in the middle of an active warzone, but the rest simply shuts it down. She’d never been known for being the most logical.
The others are still frozen, I should probably find a way to reanimate them before they’re all killed on the front line, Adora thinks in a daze. Her legs move automatically and she’s walking towards her small powerhouse of a team. Her arm rises as if to try and shake them back into the real world, but she doesn’t move forwards. Adora's arm just kind of hangs in the air. They can wait. For now at least.
Somewhere a few miles away, a bomb goes off, the ground shaking with the impact and a large mushroom of smoke pushes through the clouds. The small team exit their trance. They’ll have to figure out what happened when they’re back at the base. But for now, they have to fight.
-_-
Double Trouble strolls down the grimy halls of the Horde’s main base, they need to visit Catra to hand in their report. A part of them wants to just ignore their duty, but they know what would happen should they do so and just how fast their superior officers are to hunt them down and keep them in solitary confinement, or worse, shove them down to the Investigation and Interrogation department. Honestly, they don’t know how they got into the business of The Horde. They decided to help them out on a three-week contract a few months ago, and now they can never leave. They'd gone in too deep- too naively, to think that they could just waltz in and waltz back out as if nothing had happened because it doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t fucking work like that and they hate it. They hate it with all their being. There’s just something so instinctually wrong in them being tied down to one place for too long. Their ancestors were travellers, so was everyone else in their admittedly small family and dying out. They’d spent their entire lives being free spirits, living harmoniously alongside the wind and ocean, travelling wherever their hearts would take them, and here Double Trouble is with a stolen name and a home among steel and smog. Hell, they even had a weekly pay – barely enough to survive on, like, but still. A weekly pay.
If only their ancestors could see them now they’d simply fall from the sky if their view weren’t blocked by endless plumes of smoke and large sheets of iron.
In conclusion, they hate it. Absolutely fucking despise it. They aren’t made for staying in one place for too long and doing so leaves a dark empty feeling in the chasm their heart should be, but they’d somehow signed a contract that overrides their own when Catra first hired them, not that Hordak cares for legalities. Or worker’s rights. Or anyone’s rights for that matter. In hindsight, they should probably get better at reading their own contracts before signing them in blood. In fact, they probably should have at least wondered why they were signing some sort of contract in their own blood. But it’s done now, and they can’t exit their contract to The Horde until their death day in which they will be allowed to return to their spiritual lands for one day to enter the process which allows them to return to the sea and sky, or they defect and are hunted down and killed with no respect for their culture.
They make their way to a large room, just a couple of doors away from the main hall, it isn’t the nicest but Catra adores it- something about not having anything of her own as a kitten- and if anyone ever says anything negative about it, you get a knife between the eyes and a Horde-typical funeral (burn the body and dump the ashes in a tip to be turned into pencils and jewellery for the few rare marriage ceremonies between superior officers). So they make a point to passively insult it every time they had to file a report, it’s their favourite pastime.
“Good evening, kitten.“
“I told you to stop calling me that!” Catra yells from her fur-covered iron throne.
“Why not, kitten?”
“Because it’s fucking annoying- and I’ve not been a kitten for well over six years!”
“As you wish, Kitten.” They say with a mischievous smirk painting their lips.
“Just give me your report,” she sighs, having given up on stopping Double Trouble's habit of calling her kitten for now.
“Sure thing. I arrived at the royal castle in the skin of a flower faerie who went by the name of Flutterina asking for refuge from a war-torn village in the grass country and slowly befriended the princesses inner circle over the next few months. At the four-month mark of my mission I was granted a proper room and access to the princesses war room- if I may, I would like to add that it wasn't all that impressive in my humble opinion, just a couple of thrones and a glass table- but that's beside the point. I was given access to their ‘round table’ of sorts and slowly began suggesting plans which would give the Horde the upper hand in various battles, as well this, I also gave you bi-weekly reports on their plans so I do not feel it is necessary to tell you them as well. I began to suggest that we fall back in various places instead of advancing and after a few strategic other shifts, such as taking the skin of various superior officers, they began to take my advice. In doing such, they saved a few hundred lives, but we gained control over the eastern and seafronts. After doing this for about six months, I deemed it necessary to reveal my position as a Horde spy as I had reached my mission deadline and felt that I would be unwillingly revealed as a spy in a situation that would not be in my favour later down the line. This is because my relationship with some of the princesses became a little strained after I said something they thought was out of line and as a result, they began to keep a closer eye on me. This is around the time that I began having to make my reports to you a lot shorter with less detail.” They paused, allowing Catra to process this information before continuing. It was times like this when they wished that the Horde allowed people to write down their reports instead of having to verbally give them. “I eventually decided that the best time to reveal myself was in the middle of a battle and did as such. Unfortunately, this also meant that I would have to reveal myself to all of the princesses, however, they had a very strong reaction to my shifting which left them completely frozen which they didn’t snap out of until after I left, I believe. I do not think that they will be able to get over this reaction and this should be acknowledged, kitten”
Double Trouble hates oral reports with a burning passion, but their gossip session with Catra afterwards makes them a little more bearable, it lets them live exist under the illusion that they aren’t trapped and are just carrying out favours for a friend instead for a few minutes at least.
“I swear to the spirits of the Waste stop fucking calling me that-” Catra takes a deep breath as so to not kill the best spy on her team. “Thanks for the report. Now the serious shit is out of the way, how was the big reveal?” Despite what most people observing them may think, Double Trouble and Catra have developed quite a friendship over the years after they'd figured out why Catra distances herself from everyone. She was one of the only reasons they stuck around. Well, her and the looming threat of death, but they don’t like to think about that.
“Oh, it was brilliant, truly. I started doing my long transformation, you know the one that takes ages and leaves me kind of vulnerable but it's normally worth it for the looks on people's faces?”
“You put yourself in that sort of danger in the middle of a battlefield? Jesus Christ, Double. Why do you do this to yourself?”
“I’m alive, aren’t I? Besides, I know what I’m doing, I was ready to stop the transformation at any time and just do it the regular way in case any of the Princesses decided to attack me, but they were all too frozen to do anything.”
“I worry about you, you know. You’re like a sibling to me and I don’t think I’d be able to deal with the idea of you dying just to get some weird kick out of some people’s negative emotions!" Catra exclaims. "Anyway, carry on."
They grin in the unsettling way that they love with too many sharp teeth and a genuine blush painting their green cheeks, “I’m glad to know you care, kitten. Anyway, so most of the team was like"- They mimic the other group’s horrified faces, “and then She-Ra was like”- they shifted into her skin “Why are you doing this, Double Trouble,” they say in a bad imitation of her voice. “And then I was like- because it’s fun, duh- and she was like- stop it- and I was like nah and I shifted into you and her face. Oh, you should have seen her face. It was hilarious!”
“It sounds like it! But on a more serious note, how is she? Adora? Is she doing okay? Does she ever talk about her time here” does she ever talk about me.
Double Trouble often forgets that Catra grew up with Adora in the Horde because they seem to have such different personalities, a part of them somehow doesn’t believe that someone who puts on such a goofy mask of the time was raised by the same person who created Queen Anger Issues herself.
“So” Catra prompts.
“She seemed okay, kitten, I think she’s happy there surrounded by The Rebellion. They’re good for her.” she hasn't, I don't think she wants to think about it
“Oh, okay, so she didn’t mention the Horde at all, nothing about how she grew up?”
“I think she might have mentioned a childhood friend or two once, but I didn’t talk to her that much outside of meetings so I really don’t know if she talked about her time here at all.”
“Oh, okay. You can go, by the way. Do whatever you need to before you’re sent out as a new person again, we might need you to infiltrate the earth sector, but I don’t know yet”
“Thank you, kitten”