Hey guys! I'm finally back with a new story! Read the notes at the end please, I don't want to write a lot here, hahahaha.

Chapter 1 – Two Sides of the Same Coin

Adora

What kind of inclination did stupid people have to say that, just because a day was sunny and fresh, it was an excellent day?

No tragedy in the entire history of humanity had ever happened in days like that?

Was that movie cliché in which everything bad happens at night or under the rain actually true?

Of course not! It was nonsense. The damned optimists wanting to find a reason to be happy despite their lives being a disastrous failure. Looking for reasons to smile despite any bad thing that could happen to them.

But no one had worse luck than Adora. So bad was her luck that she had even stopped believing in its existence long ago and had started hating everyone who, in the most stupid way, still believed in it.

But of course luck doesn't exist! It was all simply a reaction to another one of our actions, just as Newton had said centuries ago.

You couldn't win the lottery without having bought a ticket before. Getting a good job was not linked to luck, but to knowledge and contacts. Yes. Luck doesn't exist.

Or at least that's what she wanted to believe because, if luck really exists, then she had the worst luck of all, without reason and completely powerless to change it.

Long ago she stopped thinking about luck and started blaming herself for any and every bad thing that happened to her in her life. Everything had a logic explanation, as hurtful as it was sometimes.

Unfortunately, her life was filled with little bad moments that happened because of things she didn't do or in which she was not even present. Little ghosts from the mistakes her parents had made and that manifested to make her trip whenever she thought she could start running. And she couldn't blame her parents. It was not like they agreed to die in a car accident when she was barely five years old. No. It was something that simply happened. Bad luck, everyone said, but it was simpler than that; if her father had not been a very enthusiast alcoholic, they would both be still alive and her life would probably be a lot simpler. Maybe she would be able to actually live instead of surviving as she had been doing since they died.

Her grandmother (her mother's mom) Razz, had taken care of her in spite of what everyone told her about her old age to raise children and the fact that she didn't really have much money for herself even. She could still remember with sadness those days in which her grandma went to bed without having dinner just so she could have three meals a day. "I'm not hungry, dear", her grandma told her, but she knew the old woman was starving.

She remembered with mixed feelings the tears that ran down her grandma's eyes when she got home one day with the paycheck of her first job. It wasn't a big deal, but it was enough for them to have three meals a day both.

She would never forger, always remembering them with shame, those moments in which she threw a tantrum for a silly thing, without thinking about how her grandma gave everything she had for her.

And of course, she would never forget the worry her grandma had on her face when she told her she would be starting college.

Of course, after so many years of experience, even without knowing the theory as a college student might know, she had managed to get a pretty good position in the company, but not with a great paycheck as if she had that stupid paper to back up her knowledge. Still, it was enough for her to go to college. At a night school, but yet, she wanted to get her degree.

Probably paying for tuition would make it hard for her to have breakfast or dinner in next few years to save more money, just in case, but she knew it was worth it, and her grandma knew it too.

Even so, her grandma had tried to convince her to do something else.

She had been born in a different country where her father came from and she had the citizenship of that country, one that was way better than the one she lived in, or so everyone said. Her grandma had told her to find her dad's family and ask them for help, but her pride wouldn't allow it. After all, they never seemed to care about her.

Once her money had been enough to cover all her expenses, her grandma's retirement money was enough for her as well. Not enough to pay for luxuries, but it was enough for a life without needs. That was why, when she had told her about her idea of going to college, her grandma had suggested her to instead go to that country that had nothing for her.

"Find your family there." She had told her. "Don't worry about me. I'll be fine on my own." But it was impossible not to worry.

Yes, maybe studying at that "magical" country was actually better than doing it in Brightmoon, but she couldn't just leave alone the woman that had given everything for her. She couldn't leave her now. Not when she had started to have episodes of Alzheimer and they were getting more frequent by the day.

Maybe during the week she would only be home to sleep, but on weekends she would be there for whatever her grandma needed. She had to make the most of the time she still had with her, knowing that maybe it was not much. Not a lot of people lived past their nineties and she was way past them.

Of course she knew that the future would be difficult and that this was just the beginning of a long trip, that's why she couldn't say she wasn't terrified.

She thought about everything that could happen. She knew she could even get yelled at her job if she attempted to do homework there and she knew that she could get behind of schedule too.

Yet, despite adversity, she stood firm by her decision. Determined to succeed but ignorant to everything that was about to happen. Things far more complex than any school project or work and a lot more stressful than her boss yelling at her, but it was unavoidable.

Catra

The day was beautiful. Birds singing, sun shining and a perfect breeze.

Unfortunately, that was not enough for Catra, who couldn't stop thinking about the words a son of a bitch had told her at that party she had attended with her father the previous night.

"You're a really lucky girl." The overweight and completely bald man had told her. Well, at least she was luckier than him, she had thought with sarcasm.

What made that dumb ass think that luck even existed? That was something that dumb people invented to avoid the responsibility of their actions when things didn't go right or to try to be humble when something went right.

She hated the stupid idea that people had about luck. She hated the word itself. That damned word that took away the merit of everything she could accomplish in less than a freaking second. Those words that made her look as if she never had to do anything and everything would be there for her so that she could just take it.

Luck had not given her those excellent grades at school. She got them by studying hard.

Luck had not given her a standing ovation during her first piano recital. Long hours of practice to master the instrument had.

Luck had not given her anything and yet it took away everything.

Everything she set her mind to, she always accomplished it thanks to her hard work and perseverance, so much that people called it stubbornness.

Only once had she failed and that had been enough to shatter the image her parents had of her.

In the middle of her entrance exam to college she had left the room due to a pretty aggressive stomach infection and she obviously failed the test.

Dishonor painted her parents' faces as they whimpered loudly.

His father, Hordak, yelled endlessly for hours about how that had to be a bad joke. He didn't hesitate telling her about everything he had provided her. All the money he had spent in her and everything he expected in return. All the things she didn't really care about.

In the end, she didn't want to be a boring computer engineer. And yes, it would be the best if she wanted to inherit her father's company one day, but she didn't. She would rather live under a bridge than having a boring job like that one, she just couldn't oppose her father.

At least until that day, when she finally returned the treatment and yelled at him, which only made him angrier than before and it all ended in a senseless yelling that only ended once her father grew tired of it and just told her: "As long as you live in this house, you will live by my rules. Do as I say when I say."

From that day on, their parents lost that little toy they bragged about so much. She was no longer the topic of conversations, something she was grateful about, wondering sometimes if maybe now her father spoke about his alcoholism or if her mother told her friends about that dance teacher that gave him private lessons whenever Hordak wasn't home.

She didn't care about any of that, but she knew that her father had a point in telling her to keep studying.

Knowing that he would never let her study music as she had always wanted to, she decided to take the easies road to finishing a career and getting her degree, start working and finally leave her family aside, those hypocrites who only cared about you if you had money to burn. And so, she took the scholarship from a college that offered it to her thanks to a recommendation letter.

Obviously, money was not a problem. The scholarship was unnecessary. She just took the offer because, thanks to the recommendation, she would not have to take another exam. The easiest way.

Maybe it was not what her father wanted. Maybe it wouldn't give her money like her father had made, but without a doubt, it was something that gave her a strange feeling of freedom, being the first decision she had taken by herself without having to ask for permission to the patriarch whose word was absolute.

As she thought about it more, she couldn't hide the excitement that brought her to think about a future in which she would finally be completely free of her father's grip.

She wanted to feel what real freedom felt like and not that façade she lived for years. That one that didn't allow her to have a boyfriend when she wanted. That one that left her without real friends, since everyone she knew were just masks that stayed put as long as you had the money to sustain them.

Entering that small college of no renown would be a great opportunity to meet people with lives completely different than hers. People who could teach her thousands of things. Even though those thoughts came with a really awful truth: She didn't know how to get along with people in a "normal" way. She had never done that before. Her mask had always been there for everyone to see her strength and value without letting her be… well, herself.

She asked herself if maybe because of it she would be unable to make friends, maybe even a boyfriend. She really wanted to experiment all kind of normal feelings and not just the ones her father had made up and installed in her during her whole life.

With all that in mind, she kept thinking about college all day long, hoping that everything would go better than expected. Unaware of what was waiting for her there.

So, yeah. I'm finally writing a new story. I had a couple of ideas besides this one (I'm still thinking about making the second part for my previous story, "Pentagram", and I had another really dark AU) but I decided to go with this one because it's the shortest one (I have it all in my head, but I don't think it will take more than 10 chapters to finish it, we will have to wait and see how thoughts translate to words, hahaha).

This chapter is basically just a prologue for the story and it will be starting fully next week (or maybe even earlier if I find the time).

Also: I just recently made a twitter account for all that content I can't share in my real social media accounts (because I have my boss, coworkers and family there and I would like to avoid discussions about my life choices, hahahah) so, if you want to follow me, just search gloomy_autumn and you will immediately see my awful art (I recently started drawing again after 10 years of not doing so) and all the retweets I do about Catradora and other ships I'm into.

Also, also: I wrote this chapter while listening to "Kiss" and the name of it comes from their song "Two Sides of the Same Coin" from their album "Unmasked".

I hope you like the concept I'm making here! See you next week!