Chapter Text
Building a life wasn’t easy.
He’d always known that it would be hard. He’d never been allowed to make decisions for himself before. The simple act of deciding what kind of sofa he was going to have in his living room had been both ridiculously intimidating and incredibly freeing.
Hordak stood, stretched, sat down on the aforementioned sofa, and thought over the events that had led him to a reasonably-sized apartment in midtown.
*
As the only son of Horde Prime, expectations had been laden on him from birth. Horde Prime, leader and founder of the Horde cult, considered himself immortal, but having a son running around gave him something of an ego-boost, so he named Hordak his heir even though he never thought he would die.
Hordak had never known his mother. She’d died in childbirth, and some nights he would lie awake and wonder if things would have been different with her around. If she would have loved him in a way that his father didn’t.
He’d spent his childhood the way all the other children in the cult had: attending the church where his father preached, going to lessons, and studying hard. As the only son of Prime, he had to live up to that legacy every day.
He had, as well. Perfect grades, an excellent memory for Prime’s sermons, and wholehearted dedication to his father’s teachings.
But when he was seventeen, disaster struck. The kind of disaster that came with multiple diagnoses, and braces on his back, arms, and legs. The kind of disaster that meant any Horde member who looked at him knew that he was weak. Defective.
His father had barely looked at him for weeks, until he’d thrown himself at Prime’s feet and begged an opportunity to make it right.
“Let me study,” he’d cried, looking up at his father through the tears. His legs had been aching from the position where he knelt, but he’d stayed down. “I’ll find a way to fix myself, I promise.”
He had excelled at college, his professors stunned by his determination. Far faster than most people would have done it, he had a PhD in genetics and his father was funding his research into the possibility of curing himself.
Except that he couldn’t do it. No matter what he tried, no matter how many experiments he ran, he couldn’t find an effective treatment.
He knew, on an intellectual level, that curing himself was impossible. He’d known it for years. But he hadn’t been able to admit it to himself, because if he couldn’t find a cure then he’d never be worthy in his father’s eyes.
Sometime around that time, after one of his father’s beatings, Hordak had given himself a name. Aside from Horde Prime, nobody in the Horde cult was allowed to have a name. There was a name on Hordak’s birth certificate, and a name on his degree, but he’d never been permitted to use it, and it had never felt like his own. But somehow, he’d found another name. Occasionally, late at night, he would lie in bed and whisper to himself: “My name is Hordak.”
Other days, he hated himself for so traitorously giving himself a name, and he begged his father for a purification ritual. Horde Prime had never asked why. He was only too glad to perform the ritual for his oh-so-defective son.
The ritual went like so:
First, Horde Prime would stand up in front of the congregation and declare that Hordak had asked to be purified.
Next, Hordak would beg his father for the ritual to happen. Prime would graciously grant his request.
Then the ritual proper began. It started with the brandings.
A circle of white-hot metal, a little bigger than a coin, would be pressed against his flesh.
The back of his neck. Two places on his upper spine. Against each shoulder blade. Twice on each side of his torso, just above where his ribcage stopped. The inside of his elbows.
He shuddered at the memory.
It was acceptable to scream during the branding. Hordak had never seen anyone be purified without screaming.
Then, he would step into the pool. Horde Prime claimed that it was holy water, but Hordak knew that the water was mixed with antiseptic to prevent infection from the burns, which was why it stung so much.
He’d found out about the antiseptic quite by chance; Prime told everyone that the stinging sensation was the washing away of sins.
Once he was out of the pool, he had to pretend that his memories had been erased. He was allowed to know how to speak and read and write, and he was allowed to remember the things he’d learned at university, but he wasn’t allowed to remember any connection to anyone other than Horde Prime. He was expected to begin his acquaintance with the other members of the cult anew.
After a purification, his father would point at him, turn to the congregation, and declare that Hordak was the purest one among them. It was the only time that his father seemed even remotely proud of him.
Hordak rubbed the back of his neck. The circular scar was still there, the mark of at least half a dozen purifications.
But all that was over, now. It was the past.
No matter how many times he was purified, no matter how much he hated himself, he couldn’t stop thinking of himself as Hordak. As a person with a name.
It had been late in the evening. After a long day at the lab and a short beating from his father he’d been sore all over, but he’d taken a walk anyway, to the edge of the Horde compound.
It was there that he’d seen two members of the Horde, a copper-skinned girl with long, messy brown hair and a blonde girl with a ponytail. They had been cutting a hole in the fence with bolt cutters. On the other side of the fence was a black boy wearying a crop top and a short girl with dyed-pink hair.
They had all turned when they saw him approach.
“Sisters,” he’d said, “What are you doing?”
The brown-haired girl had raised the bolt cutters towards him, threatening. “Don’t try to stop me leaving. I’m not your sister, I have a name. I’m Catra, and I’m getting out of here.”
His back and shoulders had been aching from his father’s belt. During the beating, Prime had briefly choked him, so his voice came out hoarse. “My name is Hordak,” he’d said. “Take me with you. Please.”
It had been a long time in the back of the car, crammed between Adora and Catra while Glimmer drove and Bow rode shotgun. He’d felt lightheaded the whole way, his newfound freedom not quite sinking in.
By the time they arrived at what turned out to be Glimmer’s mother’s house, his whole body had been cramping. Glimmer had let them in and he’d sat down on the sofa and hadn’t moved for about the next eleven hours.
Angella Moon had been beside herself when she saw them. She was surprisingly motherly for the head of a taskforce dedicated to dismantling abusive cults.
It turned out that Glimmer and Bow had reached out to Adora, and Adora and Catra had both decided to leave the Horde. Angella was going to provide them with resources to get a start in life, in return for information about the Horde’s inner workings which she hoped could be used to bring a court case against Horde Prime. She’d never dreamed that her daughter would return not only with Adora and Catra, but with the son of Horde Prime himself.
After spending the night on Angella’s sofa (he hadn’t slept much, and at one point he’d been weeping), she’d started asking him questions. About the Horde’s inner workings and how they recruited and the purification ritual, and would Hordak be willing to testify in court?
He was. He really was.
At lunch, Angella had noticed the bruises on his throat. Later that day she’d taken him aside, and after a moment’s hesitation he’d stripped off his shirt to show her the rest of the bruises. After asking for his consent, she’d photographed them.
No-one had ever asked him for any kind of permission before.
The fact that a cult member would ask Prime for the branding during the purification ritual meant that Angella wasn’t sure if she could get a charge to stick to Prime. But beating his son? That was something more tangible.
That, and the fact that Prime had almost certainly been laundering money added up to a nice long prison sentence.
A month later, and police had been breaking down the gates of the Horde compound. They’d found Horde Prime trying to make his escape through a tunnel under the church, exactly where Hordak said he’d go.
Upon examination of Prime’s documents, it turned out that he’d saved some of his money under Hordak’s birth name to avoid paying tax, which left Hordak with more money than he knew what to do with.
So, two months before his father’s court date, here he was.
Sitting on a sofa in his new apartment.
Midway through his thirties, and he’d only just started his life.
Hordak stared at the bird cage in the corner of his living room. He was somewhat tempted to pull the sheet off it and wake up Imp, his pet African Grey Parrot, just so that he could have something approaching a conversation and feel a little less alone.
It had been different while he was staying in Angella’s house. Sure, Adora and Catra had been staying in the spare room so he’d had to sleep on the sofa bed, but he hadn’t been on his own. Even when he wasn’t giving statements about the Horde to Angella, he’d either been walking around the garden making awkward conversation with Adora, or sitting at the kitchen table while Angella’s husband, Micah, offered him some of his home baking.
Hordak couldn’t keep doing this. Living with the Horde had been hellish, but he’d never been on his own. He needed a job. Well, he didn’t need a job, he had plenty of money. But he needed a reason to get out of the house and meet people.
Except that leaving his flat would mean stares.
In the Horde compound, everyone had been used to the way he looked. They stared at him because he was Prime’s disabled son, but they didn’t stare.
Out here, people stared. Hordak knew that it was partly his fault. Once they’d got free of the Horde, he and Catra had got experimental with self-expression. She’d cut her hair short and painted her nails black. Hordak had dyed his hair a dark blue and taken to wearing black eyeshadow. It made him look less like his father. He liked that.
In spite of the vitiligo in the middle of his face and the albino red of his eyes, Hordak had always been the spitting image of his father.
He shook himself. The last thing he needed was to get introspective at this time of the night.
After a day of unpacking boxes in his new apartment, his braces had rubbed his arms and legs raw, doing almost more harm than good. He pulled them off, then took off the one around his torso as well. He needed a break from them.
He stood, and went back to the pile of wood in what was going to be his bedroom. The bed was supposed to have been delivered that morning, but it had turned up several hours late, so he was building it in the evening instead of early afternoon. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to follow the instructions. They were clear instructions.
The problem was, as it always seemed to be, Hordak himself. The braces he wore made movement easier, but he simply wasn’t strong enough to lift the pieces of the bed when he needed to get them into position and put them together.
He tried to pick up a length of wood, his arm protested, and he dropped it, swearing. It was even harder without the braces, but he couldn’t face strapping the unforgiving pieces of metal and plastic back on.
He had never been permitted to swear while he was in the Horde. It was strangely freeing, so he did it a few more times.
About a minute later, someone was ringing his doorbell.
Hordak tensed. As illogical as it was, he felt suddenly paranoid that a member of the Horde had found him and decided to mete out some revenge on Prime’s traitorous son.
He went over to the door slowly, partly from caution and partly because his shins had decided that they hated him. And then he remembered what he was wearing; a plain black t-shirt and a long black skirt.
In the Horde, he’d worn the same uniform as everyone else: white and light grey and pale green. He’d hated it, and he was never going to wear those colours again.
Now that he was free, he stuck to clothes that were dark and comfortable. Trousers were hell to put on over his leg braces and never fitted quite right, so he’d settled for skirts. His vitiligo, red eyes, and braces mean that people would be staring at him whether he wore a skirt or not, so he might as well wear what he wanted.
But that didn’t mean that everyone was accepting of a man who wore skirts.
He looked through the spyhole.
The woman standing outside his door was shorter than him by at least a foot. Brown-skinned, in her late twenties or early thirties. Her hair was dyed purple, tied up in two pigtails. Her shirt was white, with a stain on it from some kind of dark grease, and she wore it under purple dungarees.
Definitely not a cult member, and probably not the sort to raise an eyebrow at his skirt, either.
Hordak opened the door.
“Hi!” she said, “I’m Entrapta.”
“I’m Hordak,” he said, perplexed at how friendly she seemed. A sudden wave of tiredness overtook him, and he leaned against the doorframe for support.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “I was just checking that you were okay, because I heard you shouting, and I know that you only moved in today, so I wanted to make sure that everything was alright.”
Hordak made to say that he was completely fine, but he knees gave out and the darkness rushed in.