"Hey, Glimmer, I came right away. Juliet said you needed- uh."

Adora wasn't sure what to expect when she heard her friends needed her for an urgent situation in the dining room but it sure wasn't… whatever this was.

For a moment, all she could do was gape into the dining room. A lot was going on with the flour everywhere and what appeared to be sprinkles and bits of berry stuck to the table and Glimmer pacing, so nervous her hands were sparking pink at the edge, but Adora immediately focused on the more obvious disaster in the center of the room.

Namely that Bow was now a cat.

And Catra... wasn't.

"Wha-"

"Oh, gods, Adora, thank goodness you're here!" Glimmer grabbed her arm, her hand fluttering nervously to her forehead. "We were just goofing around, making a cake, but the kitchen staff is busy prepping for dinner so we were trying to stay out of their way and do it in here. But then Catra got some flour in her nose and she sneezed and everything got all over so I started to do a quick spell to clean it up. But Bow starting going on about how cute Catra's sneeze was, you know how he does, and she got so mad her claws came out, completely forgetting that she was still holding the bag of flour. So then the bag shredded and it all floofed down in a big rush and then there was this big cloud of flour and it was all in the air and I sneezed halfway through the rune and, well, just look!"

Adora was looking. Adora was not really capable of doing anything else right now but looking. Looking and trying to figure out how to wake up for one of the weirdest dreams she'd ever had.

"Hey, Adora." Catra looked dazed and not just because she was covered with cake ingredients. Her usual mane had been replaced by a frizzy head of tight curls and when she smiled her teeth were as flat as Kyle's ass. She kept tilting her head and making a face like she had something stuck in her ear. Oh, gods, her ears! Adora shuddered.

"You... uncatted my girlfriend," she said dumbly.

"Well, yeah." Glimmer made a frustrated noise. "But the bigger problem is... look what I did to Bow!"

Her friend drew a rune in the air. In a flash, the bag flew back together, the flour jumping off Catra, Bow, and the rest of the room. And, wow, yeah, that was... not better. Now that the flour was clear, she could see Catra's arms, covered not with stripes and fur but with freckles and hair like she was some kind of horrifying... wait, she was supposed to be looking at Bow.

"Uh, Glimmer? What happened?" Her archery-inclined best friend looked bewildered. And furry. Very furry. His arms and face were covered with dark brown fur, striped golden on his arms. Instead of his usual muscular abs, his crop top ended in a fuzzy tan belly. "I feel... weird."

Bow turned his hands over in confusion. He startled when his claws extended, yowling and leaping to the top of one of the high-backed chairs where he stayed perfectly perched for half a second before falling backward head over tail.

Wow, he got the tail too, huh? Glimmer didn't leave them anything, did she?

"You need your feet for a perch like that, dummy. Like this!" Catra snarled and went to leap atop the chair like Bow had just done but she only managed to get about a foot off the ground. "What the-"

"Why is everyone talking so LOUD?" On the ground, Bow was gripping the sides of his head. "Wait a minute. Where are my ears?" He felt around until he found them, the triangular tips tipped purplish-brown like his hair usually was. "Are those... are those my ears?"

"You see?" Glimmer was on the verge of tears. Adora just blinked at her in reply. The queen clucked and pulled a compact mirror out of her pocket, handing it to Bow. "Sweetheart, I'm so sorry. We had some kind of... magical mishap and I may have accidentally, sort of, a little bit, turned you into a cat. But I'll get you back to normal as soon as I can, I promise."

"Whoa." Bow studied himself in the pocket mirror. He turned his head completely sideways in a very un-Bow-like way. "I'm ADORABLE."

"Well, I'm glad you have a sense of humor about it." Glimmer laughed, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. "Oh, wow, you're so soft!"

"Whatever. I'm cuter." Catra— or was it just Ra now?— had given up on getting onto the chair and was helping herself to a glass of water and a plate of cookies from the buffet table.

"I thought you didn't even like being called cute?" Bow shot back.

"I don't! But it's a fact. I'm fucking precious."

Glimmer giggled. "I don't know, Catra. He's really cute like this."

"Oh, yeah? You like it?" Bow grinned at his girlfriend, showing fang, Catra completely forgotten.

Glimmer blushed. "Maybe it's not… completely terrible."

"Glimmer! Stay focused! We've got to get them switched back!" Adora spat as Glimmer became completely consumed with nuzzling her face into the soft fur on her boyfriend's neck. "They can't stay like this!"

Adora looked over to Catra for support and nearly yelped when she saw her girlfriend sitting at the table. Not perched on all fours or draped over the seat an overcooked noodle just... sitting there, on her butt, upright and square like some kind of… of… completely unsexy rock! The sight was almost as chilling as when she'd seen Catra under Prime's control. Adora clapped trying to get everyone's attention. "OK, Best Friend Squad. Everybody! On your feet. We need a plan for dealing with this..."

"CATatrophe?" Bow offered as he and Glimmer got to their feet. Glimmer snorted a laugh and he wrapped his tail around her waist.

"It is not funny!" Adora shrieked. Bow flinched and covered his ears again. OK, Adora, get it together. Deep breaths. We're going to fix this. We have to. She forced herself to look over at her girlfriend who was scrunching her face at them. "Catra? Are you OK?"

"What?" She frowned, looking from her to the others. "Why is everyone so quiet today? You're all usually the loudest people in the world. Maybe I'm getting sick or something. I can't smell anything either. This cookie taste like nothing."

"Catra... I don't know how to break this to you but..." Adora choked back a sob. "You're... not a cat right now. But don't worry, Glimmer is going to-"

"Hey! What the hell, Bow?" Catra shouted, jumping up from her chair. Without warning, Bow had reached out and batted her water glass off the table where it smashed, wetting all of them. "Why'd you do that?"

"I have no idea," Bow deadpanned, not even looking a little remorseful. Catra glared at him. He glared back. Without breaking eye contact, he reached out and sent her plate of cookies smashing to the ground after it. "Oops."

"Are you making FUN of me?" Catra got up in Bow's face, but Cat!Bow only laughed.

"ANYWAY!" Adora shouted, trying to get this situation back under control. "Glimmer, what's the plan? Please tell me we have a plan?"

Glimmer glanced over from where she was watching Bow casually lick the back of his paw while Catra fumed and tried to salvage pieces of her snack from the floor. Adora increased the intensity of her glare, putting a little She-Ra in it, enough that Glimmer took a step backward. "OK! Calm down! We'll fix it. Let me just... here."

She disappeared in a poof of sparkles and reappeared a moment later with a large old book Adora recognized as the type Shadow Weaver used to teach magic from. She started paging through it. "See, the problem is, there are billions of possible spells, not all of which are even recorded. Because I botched the spell, I don't even know what I did! We'd have to figure that out first and only then can we work out the counterspell. It could take hours, days I have no way of- Excuse me!"

She giggled and turned to Bow who was batting the edge of her hair where it hung down over the book. "I'm sorry. Was I not paying enough attention to you?"

"Nope." Bow butted his head into Glimmer's arm. Glimmer seemed to forget what she was doing as she reached over to scratch his head.

Adora was at her limit. Catra had reemerged from under the table and just the sight of the love of her life all... different like this made her feel sick to her stomach. "GLIMMER! Reversing the spell?"

"Oh! Right!" Glimmer tore herself away from Cat!Bow and turned back to the book. "Let's see, it was trying to do a cleaning spell so the prefix should be the same if I could just-"

"GODSDAMNT IT, BOW!" Adora shouted as he flopped onto the table, laying belly up, directly on the open book they were trying to read. All these years she'd thought Catra was destructive and tortured because of their traumatic past but now she was forced to reconsider that maybe all her villainy stemmed from the fact that she was a cat and cats were just naturally evil.

"Come on! He'd just being obnoxious now!" Catra called from where she was throwing the remains of her plate in the trash. "Even I'm not that bad!"

"Hello! I'm trying to..." Glimmer tried halfheartedly to push him off but Bow was a large, muscular guy to begin with and now that he'd gone boneless she couldn't so much as budge him. "Oh my gosh, you are sooo adorable right now!"

Adora rubbed her face, trying to control the urge to turn into She-Ra, pick Bow up and lock him in the guest bathroom or something. "OK. Yes, Bow, you're very cute but you really need to move."

She gave him a small shove and he hissed at her. Hissed! At her! The savior of the universe!

"Wow, OK, being a cat is clearly a bad influence on you." Did Netossa still have that spray bottle? "Come on, Bow! Glimmer is trying to change you back because no one wants you to stay like this. Right, Glimmer? Glimmer!"

"Hmm? Oh, right, yeah." The queen looked up guiltily from where she'd been nuzzling her face into Bow's fuzzy belly. "The, uh... what were we... oh, the spell, right."

Catra headed for the door. "You know, if I'm stuck like this for a little bit, there's something I always wanted to try."

"Catra, wait, we-" She leaned out the doorway and watched as Catra... gods was that... was that how she ran now? Catra jogged down the hallway, on two legs, back straight, moving like someone had glued her butt cheeks together.

Be strong, Adora. She glanced over to Glimmer and Bow who were being completely disgusting. Bow was sitting in his girlfriend's lap, brushing his fangs against her neck, his tail sliding up under the edge of her shirt while Glimmer was running her fingers through the fur on his head making a sound that didn't sound anything like she was contemplating the right spell to undo this nightmare.

"Will you two knock it off! If we don't fix this soon, I'll-" Adora made an incoherent sound of rage and shut the door on her friends as petting got a little heavier.

Damn it! How dare they! Those were her sexy fangs and fuzzy belly rubs and tail gropes!

She found Catra in the kitchen, punching vegetables. If the kitchen staff was confused about why the former Horde officer was no longer a cat and was assaulting the salad ingredients, they didn't show it. She supposed they saw weirder things daily around here.

Catra was standing in the center of the kitchen, even though her favorite counter was Right There, strangling a green gourd. "Take that you fucking veggie demon. Not so tough now, are you!"

"Catra are you... are you beating up a cucumber?"

"Oh, hey Adora."

"Catra..." Adora swallowed. Gods, she looked even weirder up close. But this was still Catra, she reminded herself. The woman she loved. She put a hand on her girlfriend's arm. Her fleshy, fleshy arm. "Are you OK? I know this must be a big adjustment for you."

"Eh, it's weird, but I've been through worse." Catra shrugged. "Don't get me wrong. Being one of you is a downgrade in every possible way but I know Sparkles will get it fixed eventually. And, in the meantime, it's kind of cool to get a different perspective on my fears." She snapped her cucumber nemesis in half and tossed it into the sink. "Now where's that cleaning robot Entrapta made?"

(If you were reading this on AO3, there's be fanart right here)

It took Adora several hours to find Glimmer and Bow. When she finally did, they were in the library... but not the normal library, the magic one they'd build off the study Adora hadn't even known existed until five minutes ago. Glimmer was sitting on the couch, paging through some ancient tome with one hand and idly scratching behind Bow's ear with the other. Bow was curled up halfway in her lap, the tip of his tail twitching happily in his sleep.

"Any luck?" Adora asked.

Glimmer shook her head. "Nothing yet. I've been through almost every book we have here that could help. But they might have something at Mystacor. There's also a generic spell-reversing potion we could try."

"OK, so, that's something! Let's try the potion and if that doesn't work you can teleport to Mystacor and see if they... Well, don't just sit there!" Her friend was being exasperatingly calm. "Glimmer, you don't understand. Her ears are all... I don't know. Skin! Just this freaky little fur-less oval of skin like a dried apricot stuck to the side of her head."

Glimmer did not look impressed by her desperate plea. "That's what all our ears look like. That's what YOUR ears look like!"

"So you're just going to sit there and do nothing?"

"I'm still looking!" She gestured to her book. "But Bow just looks so cute and comfy, you can't expect me to get up and wake him, can you?"

Adora opened her mouth and closed it again. Because, OK, Bow did look sort of adorable curled up on her lap like that, as much as six feet of gigantic cat man can, anyway. He stretched in his sleep extending his claws. He'd was dressed only in his pajama pants and she could see an orange patch of fur on his chest that was almost in the shape of a heart. Actually, now that she thought about it, Glimmer had changed her clothes too, and did that mean since she'd seen them they'd... yeah, OK, she was finished thinking about that. But she knew exactly how perfectly peaceful it felt to have the fuzzy person you loved curled up on your lap exactly like that and, jealous as she was, she couldn't begrudge them the moment.

Adora sighed. "Yeah, OK. Why don't you two... enjoy your kitty cuddles and we'll... we'll get back to work on this later."

"Thanks, Adora."

She turned to go but Glimmer gasped. Adora spun around. "Did you find it? Did you find the solution?"

"No no, Listen! Oh my gods, that's the cutest thing I have ever heard." Glimmer's voice was an excited whisper. "He's purring!"

So he was. He was also smiling fainting which made Adora wonder exactly how much he was full of shit. But Glimmer squeaked with delight, her eyes tearing up.

Adora shook her head. "Good night you two."

She found Catra in the war room, looking at the laser pointer with a disgusted, betrayed expression on her face. Adora took stock of the emotions inside her. I mean, this was still Catra. Part of her was still incredibly attracted to her. But the rest was still feeling very eeeehhh about the fact that she looked like not just a completely different person but a completely different creature than the one she'd fallen in love with.

Catra noticed her and grinned. "There you are, dummy!"

She leaned up and kissed her and it was different… but maybe not in a bad way.

"Hey, babe so... we may not have a fix for this until tomorrow." Adora rubbed the back of her neck and thought about Glimmer and Bow all cuddled up. "Maybe later. I'm sorry."

"Eh, like I said, I've had worse. It's kind of nice, the quiet. Not being able to tell from 10 feet away what everyone ate for lunch or who's been going at it in the gardens." Catra tossed the pointer on the table and slid next to her. And now that Adora really looked at it, her hair was pretty cool. Might be kinda fun to run her fingers through it, get it all messed up. It wasn't forever, after all, just for a day or two. Catra leaned in, her body pressing Adora into the table. "You know, I was thinking. Since we're stuck with this whole situation, might as well use it to have a little fun."

"Oh yeah?" Adora experimentally touched her girlfriend's bare cheek. Oh, it was smooth and soft. Soft skin like that everywhere would certainly be... different.

Catra stepped away, acting casual. "I was messing around with the sink before and the water didn't bother me at all like this. So I was thinking, maybe we should see what all the fuss is about. The bathtub, the shower, the steam grotto. Hell, we could even try the waterfall in your room. Bet that would annoy Sparkles."

"Honestly, no one ever told me what the waterfall was for. For all I know, that's why it's there!"

"Well, there you go! So, what do you say?" Catra held out a fur-less hand, her nails rounded and smooth. Weird as it was, maybe this whole situation did have some… potential. I mean, she still wanted her catgirl back as soon as possible but, in the meantime…

"Yeah, OK." Adora took Catra's hand, pulling her in for another kiss. Yeah, definitely not different in a bad way. "Maybe this CATastrophe has some PAWssibilities."