Author's Note: So... time for some extended Catra character study, because this poor kitten has a lot to unpack.

As a forewarning, this story will most likely get dark- but never grim dark without hope. Nonetheless, I will provide content warnings as we go along for any sensitive content. Look after yourself, folks :)

Part One

The first people Catra lost were her parents.

Well, so she figures. She had to have come from somewhere, right? Shadow Weaver didn't just manifest her, fully-formed, into the Fright Zone. So out there, somewhere, is the couple who created her. Maybe she'd had siblings, too; whenever Catra imagined what they looked like, she saw blurry, fuzzy kittens who somehow had the faces of all the kids in her squad.

Whenever she pictured her parents, she saw even less. She couldn't imagine what they looked like, and why should she bother, anyway? One way or another, they'd given her up. Let her go.


So, her birth family had been the first. The second was Delray.

She'd been another member on the squad, built like a brick house, with an equally hard attitude to match. She'd took no shit. Delray and Catra might not have been best friends or anything, but Catra hadn't been able to help respecting her. She'd been the only kid who ever came close to matching Adora. Not the fastest, but she'd been methodical, unflappable, intense…

And then, one day on the aerial obstacle course, Delray had fallen. Broke a leg and three ribs.

She'd been taken out of commission, of course, but with time she would have been find. Everyone had said so. But then a particularly nasty flu had struck the Fright Zone. It had hit the medical wards the hardest. At her peak, Delray could have- would have - fought it off no problem. But she was injured and tired and her immune system just hadn't been up to the job.

The team was given a whole two minutes of silence to grieve. Delray was lumped in with every other loyal Horde citizen who was killed by the disease.

When the two minutes were up, a staticy voice over the intercom called all citizens to take up arms, to avenge their brethren's deaths by destroying the cruel princesses who had sent the wicked plague.

Everyone had raised their fists and yelled defiance. Even as she had wondered how, exactly, the princesses had sent a flu, Catra had yelled with them.


More kids flunked out after Delray, though none as dramatically (or fatally). Bullnia went blind in her left eye after getting hit by a laser, and was removed from military service. Jeffrey managed to fail a physical so bad that he got permanently stationed on janitorial duty. Abed managed the opposite. He did so well on some scientific aptitude test that he was moved to the brainiacs' program, to learn how to design better guns and ships and stuff.

Catra had missed him a lot when he'd left. Abed had one of the only people she could get a halfway intelligent conversation out of.

Not that Catra could admit any of that. Not without practically begging Shadow Weaver to paint an even bigger target on her back.

So Catra shut her mouth, and tried not to make friends, who could so easily been taken away.

Except Adora. Adora was solid as steel, unmovable, a dedicated soldier.

If Catra was sure of anything, it was that Adora wasn't going anywhere. She had promised.