Forever Fallen (Catra x OC She-Ra Fanfic)

1. Forever Fallen

"There was always something odd about Harley, whether it be how her imperfections made her perfect or how there was something extraordinary about how ordinary she was. Harley was just like everyone else, except she was not of this world. She was a Princess, and she was born to bloom, not wither."

Harley smiled to herself and stretched her arms over her head, feeling smug over finishing the first chapter of her self-insert fan-fiction. It brought meaning to her dull and boring life-- to fill it with as much swords and sorcery as possible. In reality, Harley was nothing more than a nobody, working a dead-end IT job, barely scraping up enough rent money to survive.

Harley longed for something more; for adventure; for a purpose. Since she left school, she had felt like she had just been floating around in space with no guiding light. Just perpetual, endless, black void, but now, as she stared at the blue glow of her computer screen, something beyond the threshold was waiting for her, willing to make her dreams come true, even if for only a temporary amount of time and even if it wasn't real.

She stared at the screen before quickly turning away. Harley rubbed her tender, sore eyes and checked the clock above her front door.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

The girl got up from her desk and wandered to the other side of her apartment. She opened a beige door and flipped the switch to her left, one dim, blinking light flickering above her head and illuminating the darkness of the bathroom before her.

Harley stared at her reflection blankly. She sighed at the crack in the mirror that formed by her right eye and cut a rift across the length of her face, as if she was shattered in two, and she grunted at the violet bags under her eyes like bruises.

Such was her life; a slave to society; beaten and broken.

She turned the tap and splashed her face with water, hoping to wake herself for work in an hour. She hadn't slept at all, plagued with visions of fantastical landscapes and spell craft, so instead of crying herself to sleep, she decided to write what she saw in her mind's eye.

The girl tied up her thick, dark mane and hummed, looking down at her hands.

Oh, how she longed to be some hero with a sword between her hands and a crown tucked neatly into her rippling, raven locks, but alas, she was not. She was the real-world equivalent of the once-important side character that gets forgotten about after one chapter.

Once upon a time, she was important-- needed-- now she was unnecessary. 'A waste of money' to her employer, 'a waste of space' to her landlord, 'a waste of time' to the people who raised her.

Harley shook herself from her daze and lumbered back into the apartment, checking her bag.

Keys: Check. Money: Check. ID: Check.

And so Harley left, carefully locking the door behind her.

She took the elevator to the ground floor, listening as it creaked and hissed under her weight. Then, she checked her PO box for anything of interest, but left the building with nothing.

Outside, she was chilled to the bone. Heavy, dark overcast clouds obscuring the sun from reaching the city streets, the streets that reeked of piss and cigarette smoke.

'The sun doesn't shine where darkness abides', she supposed. Then she quickly reached into her satchel and retrieved a notebook, jotting those very words down to keep them safe for later.

Harley looked upwards at the grey, concrete skyscrapers above her and pictured neon-glazed screens projected from their faces, undulating like jellyfish in the sea as advertisements played and played and played, over and over again, and cast a violet hue over the gloomy strip.