Hordak wasn't sure what had stirred him. Perhaps it had been Imp squirming to get comfortable. Perhaps a sudden shift in his beloved as she tried to pull them even closer together (as she often did during the night) Whatever it had been, the former Lord of the Fright Zone found himself awake in the middle of the night. There was a time when this wouldn't have been unusual. A time when his condition had awakened him several times a night, if indeed it allowed him to sleep at all. He had spent countless restless hours desperately searching for a position that didn't aggravate the surges of discomfort that would surge through him at random intervals.But that time had passed. Entrapta had seen to that.

Not for the first time he wondered what he could possibly done to deserve her presence in his life. His entire existence before meeting her seemed to have been a decades long series of rejection,failure,struggle & suffering. From the moment he had been decanted he had felt different from his brothers. A creeping sense of something wrong that he couldn't detect anywhere else in the hivemind. This finally manifested as he inexplicably collapsed while giving a report to Prime on...Hordak could never recall what & in truth it didn't matter. What mattered was that he was subsequently declared a defect and sent to die on the battlefield of Krytis. That decision would shape his destiny and that of innumerable others.

He remembered hos arrival on Etheria, this lush vibrant air whose very air seemed to reject him. He remembered the first few soldiers to claim the banner of the Horde. He remembered the day they secured their control of the Fright Zone and allowed himself to think, for one brief moment, that his conquest of this world would be easy. That he would deliver Etheria to Prime in triumph before the end of the galactic year.

He remembered when the other kingdoms united in the first Princess Alliance determined to stop this strange force that had toppled a kingdom & claimed its Runestone. How his forces victory had convinced him, & indeed his soldiers, that their victory was assured. But that hope was fleeting. Etheria was too large, It's kingdoms to spread out, It's other Runestone Princesses too powerful to secure ultimate victory.

There hadn't been one single moment where he had realized what direction the war was taking. Time simply marched on. Weeks becoming months becoming years becoming decades. The rapid advance of the first campaigns giving way to a macabre back-and forth where his force would gain ground only to have it reclaimed in a counterattack sometimes merely days later. And when this wasn't the case, the relevant kingdom would simply increase their defenses around the next objective, limiting the Horde's advance to whatever they had manged to claim from their initial assault.

Eventually he decided on a change of plan. While he has originally planned to wait until after the planet was secure to construct the portal he determined that the more realistic option was to construct the device then bring the Galactic Horde through to complete the conquest. He had been ashamed at the time to admit he couldn't conquer Etheria with just his own forces. But he resolved that his Horde would at least take as much territory as they could in the interim.

But as with so much else in his life, his first portal had been a failure, succeeding it seemed only in bringing the infant Adora to Etheria, and even that wasn't truly his doing. He would then spend the better part of twenty years attempting to create a functioning portal. The war continued throughout this time, with both endeavors meeting with one bitter failure after another.

But then he met Entrpata. Her ceaseless brilliance had finished in one year the portal he had been slaving on for twenty. Her relentless optimism had reignited a spark within him that countless failures had reduced to a mere ember. But most importantly, her steadfast belief that imperfection, which every clone was programmed to see as the most dreaded thing in all existence, was beautiful had, in hindsight, been what had lead him down the path to true exceptance & love.

He remembered how she held him the first time it truly struck him how pointless it all had been. How the decades of war,suffering & loss, how he had nearly worked himself to death, how he had been responsible for so much pain and it had amounted to nothing because it had been done in the name of someone who had never cared for him in the first place. How she had shown him that no matter what he had done in the past, his future was his to decide. And her vow that she would be by his side no matter where that future took him.

And know here they were. Laying together in bed, warm, comfortable & content. Where his body had once been wracked with pain, years of her treatments and lessons in self-care had reduced him of the occasional "flare up". His health increased further by her insistence on him joining her for her daily meals. Her preference for tiny foods had proven beneficial in gradually discovering what Etherian foods had the ideal effect on him.

She rolled over and wrapped an arm & leg around him, pulling herself closer while letting out a small moan. With a smile he wrapped his arm around her back, placed a small kiss on her forehead & drifted back to sleep, but not before issuing yet another thank you to whatever power had brought him to this unexpectedly wonderful life.