This was written a couple weeks ago as a fic giveaway for 2,000 followers on tumblr (yikes!) The prompt: Catra and Adora steal a vehicle and get outside the frightzone, they stumble upon a village or something and Adora can taste freedom for the first time, but while being Catra initial idea, she realizes that she could never really fit in like Adora seems to.
Steal a skiff, blow off some steam, come back before anyone noticed they were missing. It seemed like such a good idea, at the time. A chance to forget some of the pressure and fear that gnawed at her insides. A chance for Adora to relax, finally.
Maybe.
It was supposed to make them feel better, Catra thought, staring at the metal ceiling and feeling her claws scrape lightly along the edge of the bunk as her hand clenched. So why did she feel… like this?
"C'mon, Adora," she said, pulling her friend's hand to hurry her along the darkened hallway. "The engineering crew has some kind of training today-the skiff bay will be empty. It's the perfect time."
Adora kept casting worried glances behind her. "I don't know, Catra. I'm not sure it's a good idea right n-" she broke off with a violent flinch at a loud clunk-hiss from just around the corner. It was just the ventilation system settling, a sound with which Catra was intimately familiar from her time hiding from training sessions in the vents. But that jumpiness… that's why Catra got this idea in the first place. Adora had been jumping at her own shadow for the past week, coming back late from extended training sessions, muscles shaking, barely sleeping before the next day's training began. Then Shadow Weaver made one of her early morning visits to make sure the cadets could go from "asleep" to "battle-ready" in ten seconds or less (with a slight heart attack along the way), and then no one could sleep for the next two days.
Maybe it wasn't quite accurate to say Adora had been jumping at her own shadow.
Catra heaved a sigh, finally releasing Adora's hand. "Whatever. I didn't think a future Force Captain would turn down a little adventure, but if you're too scared, let's just skip it." She turned back toward the barracks and instantly felt Adora's hand wrap around her wrist.
"Wait."
They both knew the bait was obvious, but still, that glimmer of determination and… fun was back in Adora's eye. Finally. She swiped the skiff key from Catra's other hand.
"Give me that," she said belatedly, then stalked down the hall. She glanced over her shoulder after a few steps, a faint smile dancing in her gaze.
"You coming or what?"
Stealing a skiff was easy. It was fun, at first, laughing as the ground flew by beneath them, the wind rushing past their faces and through their wild hair as though it could reach into their minds and blow their troubles away.
Then she just had to steer them toward a village, and they had to get out and look at a tree that Adora thought looked cool, and some random villager had to be walking in the woods that day with his idiot son, and-
It was reflex. It's what she was trained for.
What she wasn't trained for was the look in Adora's eyes when she landed on the boy, knee pressed to his sternum and claws wrapped around his neck. He was their age. Old enough to be a soldier. Old enough to be a threat. She didn't realize until Adora's panicked call of her name that the thing the boy held in his hand, long and oddly shaped enough for her to mistake it for a stun baton, was simply a toy.
"I don't think they're soldiers, Catra."
It was painfully obvious that she was right. The way they held themselves-unguarded, vulnerable, soft. Baskets filled with some sort of fruit. She let the boy up, grudgingly, and the two apologized to them for startling them. Catra hissed in response to the boy's wide-eyed inquiry as to how she did that so fast.
The way Adora had looked at her while she crouched over the boy, claws to his throat-
It haunted her for the rest of the day. Through the prattling of the child, trying to learn how he could make a similar attack. (It was hopeless, he had even less muscle on him than Kyle.) Through the pointless questions Adora asked the father, first attempts to gather military intelligence, then devolving into pointless questions about the village, their life, the kind of berries they had picked. They were offered some, and took the gift first skeptically, then greedily.
Catra was ready to leave from the moment they realized the two were neither a threat nor of any military importance, but Adora was… reluctant. When she saw Adora standing there, berry juice staining the corner of her mouth, smiling as the man had the audacity to place a hand on her head and laugh-
She never thought there would be a world Adora belonged to and she didn't, but for an instant, she glimpsed one.
And still, the worst part of it all was the look in Adora's eyes when Catra had restrained the boy, that split second where Adora realized he wasn't a threat before Catra did. She hated it. Fear. Not fear for herself, or fear for Catra-fear of Catra. Fear of what she might do.
The sound of her claws creaking into the frame of the bunk bed startled her back to the present. Something quieter came to her ears, then; the sound of shifting underneath her bunk, a quiet sigh. Adora was still having trouble sleeping. Part of her wanted to climb down to the bunk below, curl up on the blankets and try to let the familiar comfort of their nearness wash away her concern, but another part, the part that held the fear in Adora's eyes and showed it to her whenever she closed her own, kept her frozen in place.
She waited.
"Adora?" The word slipped out without her meaning to speak, quiet, tentative.
The shifting stilled. "Yeah?" came the whispered response.
Well, she'd gotten this far. She rolled the words around in her mouth, but again they slipped out without her permission.
"You know I'd never hurt you, right?"
The shifting started again, and panic rose when she realized Adora was getting up. "Wait, don't-"
Before she could finish the sentence, Adora's head popped up beside her bed, hair falling out of her perfect ponytail, eyes tired but concerned. "Of course I do."
She didn't notice the moisture collecting in her eyes until the crease in Adora's forehead deepend.
"Hey, you okay?"
She blinked and nodded.
There was silence, and then Adora's arm was thrown over her shoulders and her blonde head tucked into the side of Catra's neck, as close as she could get to a hug while standing at the side of the bunk. "You know I'd never hurt you either, right?"
Another nod. Adora couldn't see it, but she must have been able to feel it.
"Not on purpose, anyway. If you keep messing up your footwork in the training sims..."
The light teasing garnered a shaky laugh from Catra.
"You wish you were good enough to land a hit on me."
Adora pulled back with a laugh of her own, then tapped her knuckles against Catra's arm in gentle reprimand.
"Yeah, well, we'll see whose scores are better at the end of the month, hotshot."
"Good luck. You'll need it."
"Better save some of that luck for yourself."
This, this was comfortable. This was normal. This was Catra's world, where nothing was perfect and some things were terrible but the others made up for it.
They had to.
Adora pulled back like she was going to return to her bunk, then hesitated. "I don't know what you were worrying about, but… don't, okay? Whatever it is, it'll be fine. We look for each other. Right?"
Catra closed her eyes, letting herself believe it was true. That it would always be true.
"Right."
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