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day 6 of catradora week july 2019 - fantasy/reality
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Sometimes, Adora swears she can hear her voice.
She’d be sitting in the castle’s library, reading up on Etherian history, or beating the boxing bag in the training room, and she’d hear a fragment of a sentence coming from behind a shelf or from the hall, and for a moment, she forgets; for a moment, she swears she hears Catra .
In the back of her mind, she knows it’s impossible, but she entertains the thought anyway. It’s naïve, and childish, she knows this, but she can’t help imagining just what it would be like, if it really was Catra, if she really did come out from behind the shelves, came into the training room and leaned against the other boxing bag, nonchalantly, lazily, as if she had all the time in the world, her arms crossed over her chest as her sharp eyes track Adora’s movements.
She imagines how she’d study her claws with a bored expression as she talks, voice low and raspy, how she’d look up and meet Adora’s eyes with her own, one blue, one yellow, both glinting with mischief.
She imagines how Catra would walk up to her, fire off some smart remark about how she always works too hard, trains too much, how she needs to relax, live a little – usually, this was code for I’m bored. Pay attention to me. Stop being a stick in the mud and let’s do something fun .
And Adora would take the bait every single time, because Catra’s usually right, and Adora has a tendency to ignore her exhaustion, to push it away until she can barely keep her eyes open, ‘till her arms become as heavy as led and she can barely stand on her feet.
But it’s never Catra’s voice, and no matter how hard Adora wishes it was, it’s usually just the guards, or Glimmer or Bow coming in to tell her that it’s lunch, or dinner, or, on rare occasions, breakfast.
On nights when she’s in her bed and actively trying to fall asleep, she lets her mind wander back to Catra. Mindlessly, recklessly, without thinking about the consequences, without minding her own heart.
She imagines Catra lying next to her, looking at her like she did when they were still sharing a bunk, sharing a life, before the sword, before everything . A fond smile on her lips, a small dimple on her cheek, her usually cautious eyes soft as they look into Adora’s. Her fingers playing with Adora’s hair, without any other intent than just to touch it, just to do something with her restless hands, as Adora would talk about something trivial, and ignore the way her cheeks grow warmer by the second, the way her eyes keep wandering towards Catra’s smile.
If she feels particularly reckless, Adora imagines leaning in, close enough to feel Catra’s hot breath against her cheeks, and then close the distance between them, and meet Catra’s lips with her own.
She doesn’t entertain this fantasy often, for obvious reasons. Even back in the Horde, when she developed this “daydream”, she tried to push it back, pack it away, and only take it out when all the other daydreams couldn’t lull her to sleep.
Sometimes though, particularly after an intense sparring match with Catra, where she had pinned Adora to the ground, or Adora had pinned her, and they had looked at each other for a moment, one of them victorious, the other with a scowl, and Adora’d let her eyes wander, or when Catra had cuddled a little too close to her in the evening, her limbs possessively wrapped around Adora, making it impossible for her to ignore the heat rising in her face, the daydream would come out all on its own, and play in Adora’s head on repeat, long into the night.
Since she joined the Rebellion, though, and their sparring matches have been replaced by real fights, the tender touches in the evening replaced by hard words and even harder punches, the daydream had been packed away safely, almost forgotten, and only taken out on nights like this, when her chest aches so much it physically hurts, when her breathing is shallow, and her eyes sting with exhaustion, and she’s too tired, too weak, too reckless to stop it.
She lets it play out. Lets herself imagine kissing Catra, cupping her face, burying her hand in her frizzy curls. Lets herself imagine a small, content sigh escaping Catra’s lips, as she traces Adora’s side with her restless hand, her claws nibbling at the fabric, tucking impatiently at her shirt. Lets herself imagine pulling her shirt over her head, and Catra planting kisses down her exposed neck, past her collar bone, past her chest, her stomach, nimble fingers tucking the hem of her pants –
Her eyes open instantly and stare into the darkness. She can’t let it play further, she won’t . She can’t, not when Catra is on the other side of the war, not when she has tried to kill her so many times now – albeit, they were never serious attempts on her life, except maybe that one time in the Crystal Castle.
Adora sighs and turns over in her bed with more aggression than necessary. She packs the daydream away, and pushes the box into a far, far corner of her mind, where she won’t be tempted to unpack it again any time soon.
That’s her intention, anyway.