Fandom: She-Ra
Rating: T
Characters/relationships: Adora/Catra
Warnings: Loss of identity, blood mention, battle aftermath, grief/mourning, angst (with a happy ending)
Summary:
"It’s always the same." with those words spoken, even her wildly swinging tail suddenly comes to a halt and rests in the dust behind her feet. The realization is so harsh that she almost laughs out loud. Almost. "I win a battle, I lose the war. I win the war… I lose her."
Or Adora is gone and only She-Ra is left behind.
There’s a certain kind of silence that covers a battlefield after the fight is over. It’s thick and deafening, it falls over the scene as a heavy blanket, and it rings in your ears. It makes everything surreal and kind of hard to figure out if you’re even alive still.
For Catra, though, there’s not much doubt in the latter — because she hurts all over. Yes, there definitely was a second there when a thought crossed her mind that maybe, just maybe, she would not survive a fall from a crashing spaceship. That didn’t stop her from leaping, because staying in the ship was one hundred percent more lethal. It’s hard to figure out who to thank — sheer luck, alleged nine lives (which she pretty sure she doesn’t have, books be damned), her own skill? Catra chooses to thank herself. She’s used to being the only person she can thank.
Right now, laying down on the ground amongst impressive amounts of forest rubble, pieces of machinery, and deep tracks left by the fallen armada, her limbs spread wide like a starfish or whatever, Catra mostly thinks of other things. Her miraculous survival — she’s pretty sure she’s mostly intact, even though the “landing on all four” rule was proven to be utter bullshit — or pain circling through every inch of her body bother her the least. She’s mostly numb. Dumbfounded. It feels weird, being a…a hero?
"I think I have a plan." Adora is on the verge of hyperventilating, hiding it well under a layer of willpower and determination, but Catra, knowing her way too well, can’t help but roll her eyes from where she’s sitting at a large boulder a few feets away from the rest of the team. Glimmer may have vouched for her, and all of them might have welcomed her with varying degrees of reluctance, and Catra may have saved Adora from falling off a cliff at the last second possible, making quite an entrance and by extension triggering a couple of flashbacks for them both, and yes, Adora may have hugged all breath from her after they spent a good minute cautiously staring at each other...they may have this, they may have that, but nothing is that easy. Catra isn’t Scorpia. She can’t just merrily make friends with the first princess that showed her kindness. If anything — kindness makes her want to guard herself in preparation for a strike of a hidden knife. So she sits aside, her tail curled around her in a protective circle, and listens. And watches. Mostly watches.
"What’s there to have?" she says and cringes when all heads snap in her direction immediately, but what can you do. - We attack, you swoop in to save the world, we back you up. Probably some power of friendship or whatever you guys usually use happens. The end."
"It’s… Not quite like that." Adora nervously tries to remove a stray lock of hair from her forehead, only to find that there’s nothing to remove and jab her fingers in her hair puff instead.
"Well, then lay it out." Glimmer intervenes as if she’s afraid that Catra will say something else, but the former force captain just shrugs. Adora’s stare, however, lingers on her, and Catra isn’t really sure why. She settles on the thought that Adora probably still wants to punch her sometime, because that explanation is the most logical sounding to her brain right now.
That turns out not to be the case.
They go over Adora’s plan in painfully minor details, it’s in fact so thought-through that Catra can almost guarantee that it will go sideways, but she keeps quiet. Maybe too quiet, since Adora never mentions her once when giving out roles and missions. It isn’t too surprising, all things concerned — maybe she just wants her little sidekick back. They do make a good team, after all.
"That’s all well and good or whatever," Mermista butts in, "but what are we going to do about Horde Prime? Shouldn’t someone like, fight him? So that he doesn’t kill us while we are doing our thing?"
Well, that’s a stupid question. Obviously, that would be Adora.
"Yes. Catra will."
...Excuse me?
"What?" Catra asks automatically, looking at Adora like she just spawned a second head or something.
"You heard me." Adora rubs her neck in a clear sign that she does, in fact, feel everyone staring at her and not-so-secretly wondering if she went mad. Catra feels her ears going flat against her head and bristles.
"You’re giving me a death sentence here or something, Adora?"
"No!" Oh, that gets her, now she looks like the one punched. "I’m serious!"
Adora takes a deep and obviously shaky breath, before putting her hand on Catra’s shoulder and continuing.
"You’re the only one who won’t be affected if the world starts falling apart again. Well, besides Bow. But most importantly, you’re the only one who ever did that."
"Did what, princess? You’re the She-Ra, isn’t fighting the evil kinda your thing?"
"She-Ra didn’t do shit!" Adora yells, loud and forceful, and Catra almost bites her own tongue at the sudden outburst. Adora is breathing heavily now, looking both as if she’s going to scream or cry, but once again, she takes hold of herself. "She-Ra did not defeat Shadow Weaver. She-Ra did not defeat Hordak. Fuck, She-Ra did never even fight them. You know who did? You know who’s the only damn person here with an experience of actually fighting evil?"
Glimmer shuffles irritably in the back but seemingly comes to terms with the fact that punching Shadow Weaver unconscious once was lesser than cracking her mask and rendering her helpless.
Catra is stunned.
Out of all scenarios she ever imagined of Adora admitting her worth out loud, she’d never imagined it being like this — after losing all her hard work and status she fought tooth and nail for, sitting down at the ground in the middle of Whispering Woods, conspiring with fucking princesses. That description sounded like her actual lowest point, but instead, she was hearing… this?
"I know I’m asking a lot of you," Adora’s voice is firm but soft, so soft and Catra doesn’t really know how to process it. She’d prefer yelling or punching. That, at least, she would’ve understood. "Everyone will come to back you up as soon as they can."
"You're making no sense." Catra hates how hoarse her own voice sounds. "Why would you trust the most important part of the world-saving deal to your enemy?"
"You’re not my enemy." well that’s just dumb. "And I need you."
Looks like that’s all it takes for Catra to lose her ability to think clearly.
"...What will you do then?" she doesn’t say “yes”, but she can see by the way Adora smiles and lifts her hand from her shoulder that it came across as that. She wants to hate the other girl for hearing what wasn’t said. She can’t.
The ground shakes suddenly and violently, forcing everyone to gasp and making it painfully clear that the time for planning is over. That small smile falls from Adora’s face as she looks away from Catra, her voice suddenly going dry with painful determination.
"What I do best." she stands up and Catra follows by instinct, not quite understanding. Adora turns her head to her a bit, but doesn’t look back with her eyes.
"Play the damn hero."
Alien blood is caked dry under Catra’s claws. Huge white ships are laying down on the ground, scattered, broken, left. The ground doesn’t shake, and the flashing lights are all gone. The sky above her head looks so normal, minus the smoke, that it’s almost weird. She’ll have to get used to “normal” again. They all will.
They did it.
She did it.
Catra is honestly too stunned to feel a surge of pride even. It just feels… She doesn’t know, good? It feels like not being second best anymore. It feels like being trusted. Finally, it feels like winning.
And also it’s so quiet that she starts to wonder if she went deaf from the roar of the battle and just didn’t realize it yet.
Then she hears someone's scream at a distance and can safely assume that sounds are, in fact, still there.
What she doesn’t want to assume is why someone would be screaming after the end of a seemingly won war. Because that sound is not one of joy or victorious celebration. It is one of distress, of pain, of fear.
It feels like she hasn’t moved for an eternity, but Catra finally wills her body to respond and stands up. She almost topples over at first, because she aches like one whole big bruise, and her ribs are practically howling, making it harder to breathe, but she doesn’t let any of that stall her. She probably had worse at some point. And even if she hadn’t — it’s still nothing she can’t handle. For whatever it’s worth, the Horde did train its cadets to never let themselves be weak. So what if she’s limping and leaning to the left a bit as she walks in the sound’s direction? She walks, that’s all that matters.
It’s not even that far but by the time Catra reaches the place she feels so tired that she just has to rest her shoulder against a scrap of metal buried in the ground there. The scream she heard was coming from a valley below, and now that she sees the picture she can determine that it came from Glimmer. The freezing feeling of something being wrong curls itself in Catra’s stomach before she can even take the scene in.
No one is dead, not that she can see. All princesses are there, plus two dumb boys, plus the defected bunch. Even that stupid horse is flying somewhere above the treetops, she can hear it. They are all worse for wear, the battle did not take kindly to their royal butts, but if Catra is to be honest, she doesn’t feel any gloat at that. They all got dragged through hell and back and then spat out alive. The same can’t be said about Horde Prime and… Well. The Horde.
Huh. The Horde is really gone now, isn’t it.
The thought doesn’t really bother Catra as much as it probably should. What does bother her, however, is a figure standing in the middle of the clearing.
It’s She-Ra. It’s She-Ra, but that’s not what makes Catra’s hair stand at its end. She isn’t surprised that Adora managed to call on her heroic form. It always was Adora for her, after all, eight feet tall or not. Adora never needed a stupid sword to be a knight in shining armor, that came naturally to her.
But that’s the thing. That’s exactly the thing, Catra realizes.
She-Ra stands there, tall, blindingly shiny, unmoving, Bright Moon’s sword clutched in her hand instead of a broken one. And for what seems like the first time — Catra can’t feel Adora in there. She doesn’t see her. After all those times that she refused to call that figure anything but Adora — she can see only She-Ra. This woman down there doesn’t look like a human warrior. She doesn’t blink. It seems like she isn’t even breathing. Some godly glowing form, undamageable, unwavering, unbothered by any fleeting troubles of a human world.
The worst thing is - all the others feel it, too. Catra is too far away to see their eyes, but she can read it in their body language - stiff, tense, stressed out of their minds.
She can hear it as Glimmer screams something again.
Adora is…gone?
Slowly, very slowly, painfully, Catra sits down at the ground, sliding down the metal surface. Her ear twitches as she starts hearing actual words being said. Not that she wants to. Not that they matter. Not that anything matters anymore.
"No, nonono, that can’t be, that’s not how it fucking works, is it?!" Glimmer paces in short lines in front of She-Ra, frantically gesturing and trying to bargain with hell knows whom at this point. The tall warrior follows her movements with her eyes but remains silent.
"I don’t understand…" Bow winces a little from a flair of pain in his wounded shoulder but pays it no mind, trying to find something, anything in his tablet, painfully aware that his movements become more and more frantic as he finds no answers whatsoever. "I mean, this isn’t right. This is the same She-Ra, the same power, the only difference is that Adora called on her without a sword! That shouldn’t change anything, since the power was inside Adora all along, right?!" lost, he looks back at the others, all of whom are keeping a respectful distance from the trio. Glimmer casts one look back and scoffs immediately. All of them already have that look. That mournful look as if they were burying Adora already. It makes her sick. It makes her want to punch things. So she does — throwing a ball of shining energy to the side with a roaring scream. It smashes against an already broken tree but doesn’t do much damage. She’s exhausted. Everyone is.
She-Ra doesn’t even flinch.
"Maybe…" Entrapta starts, the only one to answer Bow’s pleading stare, "maybe the sword also kept She-Ra’s energy under some sort of a restraint! Ability to control their most powerful warrior even aside from an interplanetary weapon would certainly prove useful to the First Ones!" she hoists herself up by her hair as if to get a better look at She-Ra, even though still remaining uncharacteristically shy to approach her the full way. "Perhaps She-Ra is, after all, an entity separate from the carrier, and given a lack of control she can go rogue? Like a robot that managed to overcome its programming! Most of the time the inventor could try to override the newly born behavior algorithms, but then again, sometimes such cases may end up in a complete reset and erasure of a previous program…"
"Could you STOP talking about her like she’s a machine?!" Glimmer’s voice rings in the air for a couple of seconds, shrill with obvious pain. Entrapta reluctantly closes her mouth with a small mumbled “sorry”, then takes a new step forward, clearly breathing in and genuinely trying to choose her words in the right way:
"What I’m saying is… Maybe this…" she pointed at everything around them, "righting the planet… maybe it required so much energy and so much, well, so much She-Ra, that it… erased Adora?"
"WHAT?!" everyone winces at how Bow’s voice breaks. Everyone but She-Ra, of course, who remains coldly unbothered by anything or anyone, indeed like a robot who served its purpose. The boy stutters, tripping over his own thoughts, desperate to find some kind of prove that Entrapta can’t possibly be right. "How can She-Ra overpower Adora to the point where she’s… not Adora?! That has never happened before!"
“It has.” Catra thinks, her own thoughts so numb and muffled inside her own head. She absent-mindedly licks salty blood that drips slowly from her face — is her eyebrow split open? Probably. She doesn’t quite feel anything.
"It has." Glimmer says, interrupting Bow’s spluttering. "A couple of first times. In the forest. In the village. Don’t you remember, Bow? Adora was so freaked out when she’d come back to her senses. She clearly was out of it."
"...Yeah…yeah, you’re right." Bow slowly lowers his hands in defeat, looking up at She-Ra’s emotionless face with so much loss in his eyes. "But…"
And then Glimmer sobs. She full-on sobs and jams her fist against She-Ra’s chest. The glowing warrior looks down at the small hand but shows no reaction other than that. Not that Glimmer expects any, at this point.
"This is so unfair." her voice comes out raspy and heavy from a wave of emotion that’s clearly drowning her at the moment, open for everyone to witness. "The last thing I tell her when we properly talk outside the battlefield is how it’s her fault that my mom is gone? And then I fuck everything up, and then we meet in a fight while the world’s ending, and now she’s just gone without giving me a chance to say that I’m sorry ?" she hits She-Ra again, but gets the same reaction. Which is none. "I-- I know that I’m an awful queen - shut up, Bow - and a-an awful friend, b-but…"
There’s no “but”. Adora didn’t leave because it was a punishment for Glimmer’s mistakes. Adora left because it was the right thing to do. As Adora does.
“Some of us just have to live with our mistakes unforgiven, Sparkles.”
"Adora… Adora, I’m sorry." Glimmer is practically wailing at this point, but she doesn’t care. No one does. Bow rests a hand on her shoulder, lost, not willing to just admit that this story that started with a girl they found in a forest who didn’t know what a “party” was is now ending with that same girl gone. He’s an optimist, damn it. He has to be. "I’m so, so sorry. I’ll let you call me a butt for the rest of my days, it’s even okay if you won’t talk to me at all, ever, just… Come back."
“Did she ever come back when people asked her to? I warned you she’ll leave. And she did.”
Catra knows that thinking that isn’t fair to Adora. This is different from leaving the Horde. She hardly wanted to disappear into the abyss.
"I’m sorry, too!" of course, Bow jumps on the apology train. He doesn’t have anything to apologize for, and yet he still looks for something. It’s as if they actually believe that apologizing will bring Adora back. "I’m sorry I wasn’t as good of a friend as I could’ve been! I’m sorry I let you guys argue and hurt each other! I’m sorry I complained, I’m sorry I couldn’t save Glimmer in time, I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help and stop THIS from happening…" His voice breaks again. Damn. "I’m AWFUL!"
"No, you’re not! You’re just making it up now!" Glimmer turns around, looking furious even with her face clearly covered in tears and snot, and practically shakes Bow by his shoulders. "Bow, you can’t apologize for things out of your control!"
"Yes, I can!" He sniffles so hard it sounds actually painful, gesturing at She-Ra, who’s still looking at them with a blank expression. "I clearly did SOMETHING wrong, or it wouldn’t-- She wouldn’t--"
"Bow!"
It’s at this moment that She-Ra raises her head and tenses up so suddenly that both of them shut up immediately, looking up at her with a clear mix of hope and fear. There’s finally an emotion in those glowing bright eyes. And it’s not a kind one.
Following her stare that goes way higher than all of their heads, Bow and Glimmer turn around, and so does the rest of them, landing their eyes as Catra, who is walking down the hill, ragged and bloody, limping, but somehow still holding her head proudly high. She comes to a halt near the other princesses, and then slowly, reluctantly, with worried and pitying looks that she absolutely loathes but forces herself to ignore, they part before her, opening her a straight path to She-Ra. Even Bow and Glimmer, after considerable hesitation, step aside.
She-Ra’s fingers tense around the hilt of her sword. Oh. So she remembers Catra. Cool.
And she clearly remembers her only as She-Ra does. As an enemy on the field. As harsh claws raising her skin. Well, at least Catra can pride herself on the fact that even in this state she’s the only one who can elicit emotion in her without fail. She’d be more proud if it was Adora, not…this.
Her neck tingles with an unmistakable feeling of danger. This eight feet tall powerful creature looks at her and sees an enemy. There isn’t even a glint of Adora in those merciless eyes. Even in their worst moments, even back then at a threshold of a broken portal when Adora’s eyes became unforgiving, this stare never was so cold. It never promised to kill.
With all her instincts yelling, screaming, screeching for her to stay away from the woman, Catra takes a step forward. She-Ra doesn’t move.
For some reason, when you’re walking to your death, everything around you feels so overwhelmingly real, as if your body and soul are desperately trying to feel as much as they can in what is probably their last moments. Catra remembers being walked to what was supposed to be her prosecution. The Fright Zone’s smell of metal and oil had never been so strong. The iron beneath her feet had never been so cold.
The grass is warm and ticklish against her toes. The wind is rustling through the trees above her head. Her whole body hurts. The forest’s sweet smells are disgustingly intertwining with burnt metal and plastic and molten glass. The princesses are all silent — good. Finally.
Catra takes another step and She-Ra squares her shoulders, clearly ready to fight. Catra is honest with herself. She can’t fight anymore.
As she steps forward again, she raises her hands in front of her, ever so slowly, and retracts her claws. The unfamiliarity of the motion and the dried blood on her fingers both make the action actually painful, but she barely hisses. She can hear Bow gasp “she can do that?!” and fights back a smirk. Yeah, little archer, she can. Not that she ever does. Not that anyone actually ever saw her willingly defenseless before but Adora.
She-Ra follows her lowering hands, now bare, with her eyes, but doesn’t move a muscle.
Catra steps forward again, fully aware that she’s now in range of a sword strike.
The tension in the air is electric, but it’s not the same kind of tension that crackled between her and Adora whenever they fought. This lighting could kill her. She hates it, she hates it with a burning passion. Yet she walks steadily forward, open, vulnerable, betraying everything she learned to be. To be honest, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She doesn’t know what she intends to do.
All she knows is that she stops right in front of She-Ra, with no distance to pounce or do anything, really, an easy target to be impaled on a sword. And yet somehow she’s still standing, still breathing. She has to lift her head far back to look into She-Ra’s eyes, sparkling with justified hatred.
All it does is ignites a mutual feeling in her chest.
She lifts her hand, slowly, aware of every movement, counting every second that she still doesn’t have a hole in her stomach, until she presses a steady finger against the middle of She-Ra’s chest. It’s roughly the same place where Glimmer was pounding her fist a couple of minutes ago, but the gesture holds a completely different meaning.
Catra is done with kicking things and screaming her pain out. She has no more tears left to cry. She already mourned Adora a thousand times over.
"I hate you." it comes out hoarse from misuse and makes everyone around her stop breathing for a second. She-Ra doesn’t move. But she listens, Catra can see that in her eyes. Good. Let her hear it all while Catra is alive.
"You are supposed to be this legendary hero, but I’ve always hated you. Because you had taken Adora from me."
It’s so quiet that the loudest sound is a wild thumping of her heart in her chest. The only thing louder is an alarming absence of the same feeling against her finger.
"And now you took her again."
Catra doesn’t know why she’s telling all of this to the emotionless piece of heroic mass that obviously lacks any empathy that’s not dictated by some higher purpose. Maybe she doesn’t really care for as long as those words are said and not sent to earth with her remains.
"It’s always the same." with those words spoken, even her wildly swinging tail suddenly comes to a halt and rests in the dust behind her feet. The realization is so harsh that she almost laughs out loud. Almost. "I win a battle, I lose the war. I win the war… I lose her."
“Wanna talk about what’s ‘unfair’, Sparkles?”
"But you don’t care, do you, She-Ra? No one ever cares. ...she didn’t either, did she?"
This is not the time or place to scream all her frustrations with Adora at this pale fucking mockery of her. This is also not the time or place to apologize. Apologies won’t get her back.
The hot and bitter taste rises in her throat and before she knows it — Catra is digging all five of her fingers in, twisting She-Ra’s shirt in her fist.
Claws still hidden. Sword still not in her chest.
"You promised." She’s done talking to She-Ra. She-Ra can go fuck herself. Catra’s breathing is getting heavy as if she is crying, but no tears come. She just chokes on this dry tearless emotion, strains like a string ready to snap, she feels like falling apart but she doesn’t , because she never does. "You promised, Adora. It was supposed to be alright. We were supposed to have each others’ backs through everything. Even when we fought. Even when we were hurting each other. Even when I tried so hard to reject you. Even when you gave up on me. You were still there. We were together in this world. And now you’re gone. And nothing is alright. So, now -- what’s even the point."
It was always Adora, and even it wasn’t it still was. Loving her, hating her, fighting her, kidnapping her, saving her, forgetting her, whatever it was, it somehow always was her, even if Catra despised that. What is left now, however, is remembering her, at best. The war is over. The Horde is gone. And Catra is left with the task of creating a new meaning for her life from scratch and pieces. After defeating Horde Prime she felt for the first time ever like she was finally standing on her own with no Adora or hatred of Adora to fuel her, but now it all feels empty when she can’t share this moment with anyone. Because those princesses — they are hardly her friends, they are barely even allies. Because those who defected from the Horde are hurt by her. Because… It was always supposed to be them against the world. And now it’s only Catra, alone, and the world, frankly, doesn’t really care anymore to even be against her.
"I came to your damn Alliance." Catra’s voice rings way too loud even in her own ears. "I did what you asked of me. Now…" and then it breaks, like a traitor it is. "...why could you never do what I asked."
She looks so hard to find anything, anything in those painfully blue godly eyes and finds nothing, and she hurts, and she rages again.
"Stay. Stay with me."
And with that — all her words are gone. She’s empty. She’s emptier than when she was lying at the floor of Shadow Weaver’s cell, she’s emptier than when she was walking down to Crimson Waste, ready to die. Her shoulders slump. She doesn’t know what she’s still looking at this annoyingly beautiful face for.
Then She-Ra moves and for a split second Catra hopes that she’ll just deprive her of the need to fight an everyday battle inside her own head by ripping the said head off. But instead, a firm grip comes to rest on her hand, the one that’s still laying on She-Ra chest, although not gripping so harshly anymore. Catra tenses, not knowing what to expect - to have her arm broken, to be thrown across the field? But She-Ra’s touch lingers, even though her eyes are still unreadable.
Slowly, as if unsurely, She-Ra lifts Catra’s hand, making Catra unconsciously stand on her toes. As if aware of her height, She-Ra bows her head and then brings their joined hands to her face. Catra winces from reaching uncomfortably high, but mostly from an ungodly flashback to a harsh pep-talk from Double Trouble. She-Ra’s skin is softer than Adora’s. Or maybe that was Double Trouble’s skin, and Catra had just forgotten what Adora’s skin feels like when it’s not a fleeting poisonous touch in the middle of a fight. She doesn’t understand what She-Ra wants, what she does, but she waits silently, while everyone behind her back seems to have turned to stone.
Something happens and Catra struggles to register what was it in particular that made her breath hitch and her ears perk. And then she realizes.
She-Ra blinks.
She-Ra blinks and then a few moments later she inhales, sharply, hungrily, like a man pulled from underwater at the last second, and the shudder that rips through her body is so strong that it shakes Catra through her hand. The tall warrior shuts her eyes painfully tight and a flash of light blinds Catra who staggers backwards, disoriented, and then something heavy drops onto her with all its weight. Instinctively wrapping her hands around this something, this someone , Catra falls flat on her back, hitting the ground hard and losing all air from her lungs.
The light disappears, leaving her blinking furiously in an attempt to regain her vision, but she doesn’t need to look to hear the chorus of gasps around her and know, and feel who is laying on top of her, pressing her into the grass.
Adora is shaking wildly, as if from cold, and by sheer instinct not clouded by better or worse judgment, Catra hugs her closer, with her arms and with her tail, and she doesn’t care if others want to immediately rip Adora away from her just for the sake of making sure that it’s really her and she’s alive. Catra’s own brain feels short-circuited, in all honesty. She just accepted that Adora is gone and everything is shit, and then said Adora gets basically flung into her arms? That…doesn’t add up. Catra never gets what she wants. Least of all when she asks Adora to stay.
The blonde mumbles groggily, turning and coming back to her senses, and Catra is quick to release her grip. Too quick for her own liking, in fact, but what’s done is done. Adora groans, propping herself up by her arms and making it obvious that she hurts all over (boy, can Catra relate, especially after being smacked into the ground with a whole ass human just now), and pries her eyes open. Catra can’t help but smirk up at her, even if that smirk is rather wobbly.
"Hey, Adora."
Adora blinks, her eyes widening with recognition and probably too many thoughts at once — but she gets interrupted by Glimmer, who bumps into her with a mini-version of a bear hug, crying loudly again, but this time from happiness. The only one who outmatches her in gross wailing is Bow, of course, who immediately appears from the other side, effectively squishing Adora between them. Catra involuntary winces, imagining the pain in her hurt ribs way too well. She probably is in for the same amount once Scorpia finally gets her huggy pincers on her again. Clearly and obviously not a fan of such sappy and gross displays of affection, Catra tries to wiggle her way out from under Adora and escape this sloppy pile of tears, but alas, Adora and her friends are way too heavy, making her flop on the ground in an utter defeat and just hope that she could maybe die from a second-hand embarrassment before the rest of the princesses decide to jump on top and make a pancake out of her hairy ass.
"Adora, Adora I’m so sorry--" Glimmer clearly decides to get everything off her chest as fast as she can, just in case Adora disappears on the spot again, but the blonde, who’s barely done coughing her lungs out after the affectionate attack, suddenly hugs her back, successfully interrupting her speech flow.
"I know, Glimmer. I…I heard everything. Somehow." With a quiet giggle, Adora then adds, of course, "You butt."
Catra’s eyes snap wide open. She looks down at Adora, who’s currently trying to slap her hand across Bow’s mouth to stop him from his unnecessary apologies, and she doesn’t quite know how to feel. Leave it to Adora to actually fucking listen the only time when Catra was not, in fact, counting on her to hear anything at all.
"Catra…?"
Great, and now Adora’s looking at her again, and what do you know, her two little friends are actually moving back aside, and Catra feels positively suffocated and trapped.
"..Hey." she has already said that, but she honestly doesn’t know what to say anymore. She doesn’t know what to read in Adora’s eyes. She just feels relieved that at least she can see Adora in those eyes now, even if she can’t quite pinpoint what she thinks. Come to think of it, though, it doesn’t really matter what she thinks. Even if she hates her and refuses to forgive her — she will still exist somewhere in this world. That’s gotta be enough.
And then Adora is hugging her and once again Catra’s thoughts are all wiped blank.
"I’m sorry." Adora’s strained whisper rips down her spine and Catra has no strength or will to ask what for, or give any other coherent answer for that matter. They can pick each other apart later. They have a whole life left to clean their wounds and heal. What Catra can do, what feels like the only right thing to do right here, right now, laying in the dirt in the middle of a destroyed forest of a world born anew — is to hug Adora back, tightly, digging her still clawless fingers as deep into her jacket as she possibly can, and to force herself to choke out the very words she swore so many times to never utter in her life:
"I’m sorry."
The smoke and dust in the air slowly clear up. Hesitantly, birds and other small animals of the forest come out from hiding and resume their daily routines, filling the woods with life and sound again. The world is in ruins, but everyone is hopeful. Time to rebuild together is upon them, all of them, and in all honesty?
Everything will be alright.
Promise.