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The sun-baked weeds between the paving stones of the train platform crunched under Adora’s shoes. She had spent the majority of the morning squished into a cramped window seat, and the opportunity to stretch out her limbs and breathe the fresh air was almost enough to calm the nervous fluttering in her chest. Adora pulled her roll-along suitcase up beside her and adjusted the straps of her backpack, squinting up at the directional signs on the platform and wishing fervently that she’d remembered to keep her sunglasses with her. Instead, they had been packed into one of several identical cardboard boxes, to be shipped on to her new lodgings before she arrived. Adora hoped that whoever was delivering them had a better sense of direction than she did—she was realizing that she had no idea which way she was supposed to go to get there.
Adora grimaced and stuck her hand into her pocket, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper and unfolding it to look once more at the address written there. She glanced up at the signs again, and abruptly gave up. She instead chose a direction at random and set off towards the stairs, her red suitcase banging off the edge of each step.
At the entrance to the station, Adora hesitated, trying to decide what street she should attempt going down first. She sighed and leaned on the handle of her suitcase, glancing around the deserted road for some sort of sign to help her. Out of the corner of her eye, Adora saw a flicker of movement. She turned to get a better look, and met the mismatched eyes of an orange-brown tabby cat, whose tail was swishing back and forth. It could have been a trick of the light, but Adora was sure that she saw an unusual flicker of intelligence in the creature’s eyes.
Reaching the end of her metaphorical decision-making rope, after once again confirming that there was absolutely nobody around to help her, Adora decided to consult the cat—who was possibly the only living thing for miles.
“I don’t suppose you would know where 12 Moonstone Court is, would you?” she remarked offhandedly, glancing towards the innocuous feline, who seemed surprised to be included in a conversation. “It’s where I’m supposed to be moving into, but of course I didn’t think to bring a map or anything.” Adora shifted her weight onto her other foot, and laughed a bit. “The heat must be getting to me, I’m talking to a cat,” she muttered.
She crouched down and held her fingers out in the direction of the tabby, who glanced at them suspiciously and met Adora’s gaze again with its piercing eyes. Amber-yellow and bright blue…an unusual combination. Adora continued the staring contest for a few more moments, before dropping her hand and straightening up.
“Well, kitty, I’ve got to get going. Hopefully I don’t get too lost before I run into somebody to ask for directions who can actually speak my language.” She turned away from the cat and started to walk in the opposite direction, when she was stopped by a furry presence against her shins. The cat was blocking her path, winding its tail around her ankle. Adora looked at it, confused, and watched as the cat started to walk away back towards where it had come from, stopping and looking back at her every few steps.
“Do you want me to…follow you?” Adora asked. The cat simply continued to stare, then let out a mrrow! that she could swear almost sounded frustrated.
Adora shrugged, and pulled her suitcase back around. Following the cat wasn’t going to be any worse than her original plan, after all.
After winding their way through back streets and alleyways, with Adora’s suitcase getting caught on numerous cobblestones along the way, Adora glanced up at a street sign to find that it, against all odds, read “Moonstone Court.” When she looked back at her feline guide, she was almost unsurprised to find it perched on a stone pillar outside a small cottage, tail dangling beside a tile with the number 12 inscribed upon it.
Adora hurried towards the building and stopped in front of the cat, staring at it in mild bemusement.
“I’m not sure how exactly you did that,” she began, as the cat started cleaning in between its toes, “but you somehow knew just where to bring me. So, um. Thank you.” Adora cautiously lifted a hand towards the cat, and, in the absence of a negative reaction, carefully scratched it behind its fluffy ears. Then she smiled, and dragged her suitcase through the gate of the house and towards the front door.
It was only when she looked back at the cat, watching it leap off the pillar by the gate, that she noticed the sunlight gleaming off of a key that was secured around the cat’s neck.
Later, as Adora sat in the middle of her new living room floor surrounded by boxes, she heard a rapping sound at her door. She shoved aside the cardboard cubes (why had she not labeled anything?) and picked her way across the floor towards the entrance.
“Coming!” she called, in response to the continued knocking. After narrowly avoiding tripping over her kitchen knife block, Adora managed to reach the door and wrench it open, wondering who on earth was coming to visit at 7PM.
She was met by two strangers around her age—a tall, dark-skinned boy in a crop top, and a shorter pink-haired girl who was bouncing on the balls of her feet with excitement. Adora raised a quizzical eyebrow at them.
“Can I…help you?” she asked. The pink-haired girl answered immediately, talking so fast Adora nearly had trouble understanding her.
“Oh, hi! You see, I heard somebody was moving in here—my mom owns all these houses, she’s your landlady—and I was going to come by tomorrow but I saw your light was on and I realized you probably hadn’t unpacked anything from the kitchen yet so I figured I could invite you around for dinner to welcome you to Brightmoon? That is, unless you’ve eaten already. Or aren’t hungry. Oh! And I haven’t introduced myself—sorry—hi. I’m Glimmer, and this is Bow—he also lives along this street, has done since I was little. What’s your name?”
Adora blinked, still a little overwhelmed from the amount of information she had just been presented with. “I’m, uh, Adora. Hi. Nice to meet you.” She paused. “And…yeah, I’d love to come to dinner—I was really just planning to order takeout.”
Glimmer smiled a blindingly bright grin, and Bow stepped forward. “Great! We can introduce you properly to Angella—Glimmer’s mom—and tell you everything you need to know about living here in Brightmoon! Is now a good time, or…”
Adora shrugged. “I mean, it’s not like I was getting very far with this unpacking. Might as well take a break…just let me grab a jacket and get some shoes on. And keys! Can’t forget the keys…” Realizing she was leaving her unexpected visitors out on the doorstep, she opened the door wider and beckoned to them. “You can wait in here if you’d like, I won’t be very long.”
Glimmer and Bow stepped inside, and Adora went off in search of her shoes.
She managed to gather all her things in nearly record-breaking time, studiously ignoring Glimmer and Bow’s muffled conversation from the hallway. After triple-checking to make sure she had her keys, Adora strode back out towards the entranceway, meeting her new acquaintances with a slightly-frenzied smile.
“Alright, I’m ready. Got everything. Especially the keys. Lead the way?” she said, with a gesture towards the door. Glimmer and Bow obediently turned and returned to the outside world, as Adora pulled the door shut softly behind them. The light was beginning to fade, and the amber glow of streetlights illuminated the pavement as the trio walked in silence.
Beneath a bush, a shadow moved. Adora swiveled her head to follow the motion, but was unable to catch more than a flicker of a glimpse of a tail as a small creature disappeared, further into the foliage. Bow, following her gaze, gave her an inquisitive look.
“I just…thought I saw something. Maybe a cat? I ran into one earlier, at the train station,” Adora explained, tilting her head in the direction of the bush. Glimmer turned to look, too, but saw nothing.
“It was actually the strangest thing—I was trying to figure out the way to my house, and the cat just…led me there? I’ve never met another one like it,” Adora continued, oblivious to the way Bow and Glimmer were exchanging glances out of her line of sight.
“What did this cat look like?” Bow asked.
“It was kind of orangey-brown? Very fluffy, with two different eyes. And it had—“
“—a key around its neck,” Glimmer finished Adora’s sentence for her. When Adora turned, wide-eyed, to look at her, Glimmer shrugged. “Only one cat around here that fits the description, and that’s the one belonging to Catra, our resident town mystery. Everyone’s dying to be the one to finally get her to come out of her shell and settle down with them—at least partially because she’s inherited enough money from her parents’ mysterious untimely demise to practically buy up all of Brightmoon. She lives in the house on the hill—the one that’s more a mansion than anything else.”
Adora craned her neck to look in the direction Glimmer was pointing; above the trees and rooftops, she could see some distant shadowy spires.
“But what’s with the key?”
“Ah. Well, Catra got so fed up with having all these well-dressed suitors showing up on her doorstep that she declared a challenge—the person who can get her front door key off of her cat’s collar will be the person she marries. Which is pretty dramatic, even for her. Though it seems like it’s been working—it’s been two years and nobody’s done it yet—but not for lack of trying. The second anyone gets near the key, the cat bolts.”
Adora couldn’t help but picture Catra, in some fanciful notion, as the kind of wealthy recluse who lounged about in elegant floor-length silk gowns, sipping red wine and feeding her cat filet mignon. At least, if Glimmer’s description was anything to go on, that was.
“So, she basically set up an impossible challenge to get people to stop bothering her? That’s kind of genius,” Adora commented. Glimmer shrugged.
“Yeah, I guess. Everyone here’s pretty used to it—though I’m surprised you were able to get the cat to help you out.”
“Maybe it was just my lucky day,” Adora mused. Bow chuckled.
“You won’t get a lot of those where that cat’s concerned. But that’s okay—we can show you how to get around from now on!”
Glimmer’s house, it turned out, was a massive multi-story affair, painted in a tasteful pale pink and complete with manicured gardens. If this was what Glimmer considered a house, Adora hated to think about how much more extravagant Catra’s “mansion” must be.
Glimmer flung the massive front door open carelessly, shouting into the echoey reaches of the cavernous foyer—“Mom, I’m back! I brought the new girl!” –before grabbing onto Adora’s wrist and dragging her down a maze of passages to a giant dining room.
Waiting for them there was a woman Adora presumed was Glimmer’s mother—they bore a striking resemblance to one another. Glimmer’s mom was tall, a full head taller than Adora, and carried herself with an air of refinement. Adora felt a bit as if she was being introduced to royalty.
“Um. Hello. I’m Adora, I just moved in…though you …probably knew that.”
“Ah yes. Charmed. I am Angella, though you may have already heard of me, thanks to my daughter’s…enthusiasm.” Angella gestured to the table, where plates of food already rested, steaming as if they hadn’t been out of the oven for more than five minutes. “Please, come sit. You must be hungry after your journey.”
Adora smiled slightly. “Thank you very much—that’s very generous of you.” She glanced over at Bow and Glimmer, who waved her towards the table. Slowly, the three sank into the tall-backed chairs and began to consume their meals.
Later, after Glimmer had walked her back to her house (and Adora was really going to have to start paying more attention to the street layout), she was fumbling with her house keys when she spotted a set of luminous, mismatched eyes watching her from the shadows near her porch.
“Heeeere, kitty,” Adora called quietly, extending a hand. The cat seemed to consider her offer for a moment, before turning its tail and darting off into the bushes. Adora let her hand drop, and exhaled softly.
“What an odd cat,” she murmured, before finally succeeding in letting herself into her new home. Not having the energy to contemplate the mystery of the cat and the enigmatic heiress of the village, Adora stumbled up the staircase in the dark and collapsed on the bare mattress in her tiny bedroom, asleep before she had even managed to remove her shoes.
The next time Adora encountered the cat, she had just managed to find her way to the local grocery store for the first time. Arms full of too many bags, she stepped out of the store just as the first few drops of rain started to fall from the sky. The rain rapidly increased in intensity, rhythmically drumming on the pavement and dripping into Adora’s eyes.
A soft, teasing mrrow? caught her attention, and Adora looked up at the nearby fencepost to find the cat there, perched on the three-inch square space, looking for all the world as if it were laughing at her misfortune.
“Of course you would find this funny,” Adora muttered, glancing back at the shop to be sure that it had, as the sign outside declared, closed for the night. “You don’t have to worry about groceries. I bet your mom feeds you the best cat food her infinite wealth can buy.”
The cat, predictably, did not respond, but licked one of its paws a couple times and tilted its head to the side as if contemplating something—and then leapt off the fence and disappeared through an overgrown gap in the fence. Taking a few hesitant steps in the same direction, Adora spotted a dirty “Public Footpath” sign nearly covered by branches, and followed the cat through the small gate to a sheltered walkway—lined with trees whose branches interlocked over her head to create a relatively dry path.
“Hey, thanks—I would have never known this was here!” Adora exclaimed, looking around for the cat, who emerged from the trees a few paces ahead of her. It approached her cautiously, and rubbed its body across her calves as Adora lightly stroked across its back and tail—and then vanished again, off into the undergrowth.
When Adora came to the end of the trail, she was unsurprised to find that it led to the end of her back garden. Somehow, the cat belonging to the mysterious Catra was just significantly more intelligent than one might expect.
She runs into Bow again the next time she uses the shortcut, emerging from the bushes to his startled yell.
“Whoa! I didn’t see you there—where did you even come from, Adora?” he exclaimed, hand to both his literal heart and the embroidered heart decal on his breast pocket.
“It’s a footpath—and it leads right to my garden!” Adora didn’t mention the cat—she still wasn’t quite sure that she wasn’t making its intelligence up. “Anyway, what are you doing here?”
Bow looked puzzled, glancing down at the bags he carried. “Just…needed some milk, and flour…I’m baking a cake, you know!”
“Any particular occasion?” Adora asked.
“Does ‘I was reading a book that mentioned cake and was struck by the sudden irresistible urge to bake’ count as an occasion?”
“You know…I’d count it,” Adora laughed. Bow grinned at her.
“Do you want to come help me eat it later? Glimmer’s coming too! It can be a Best Friends Squad cake party!” He glanced up at Adora, and then backtracked momentarily. “The Best Friend Squad is what I’m calling you, me, and Glimmer. Somehow, I just get the feeling that we’re gonna be a great team!”
Adora smiled. “I don’t mind! And yeah, I’d love to come over! What time is best?”
Bow frowned in thought. “Hmm, does 7 sound good? After dinner?”
“Yeah—I’ll see you then!” Adora turned back to face the shops, remembering why she had come in the first place. “And now, I have to go buy my groceries fro the week—or rather, what I forgot to buy a few days ago.” She waved at Bow, who gave her a blinding smile back, and headed towards the store—glancing over her shoulder to unexpectedly see a fluffy dark tail disappearing back into the entrance to the footpath she had so recently vacated.
A few hours later, Adora was cursing herself for not having asked Bow for his address, and for not having any other means of contacting him.
“Who just assumes that the new girl will know where they live? Honestly, this is his fault. But also I should have asked—it’s not like they get many newcomers here! Ugh Adora you idiot!” She paced her still barely-unpacked living room, waving her arms in frustration. Finally, Adora decided she should just head out anyway and hope she would stumble across Bow’s house through some sort of cosmic coincidence.
After pulling on a jacket, Adora stepped out into the cool evening—and almost tripped over her own feet when she was met with the piercing blue-and-yellow gaze of her feline friend.
“We have got to stop meeting like this,” Adora muttered, before pulling herself back together and addressing the cat directly. “What are you doing back here, kitty? This is a long way from your home.”
Adora had, the other day, finally seen Catra’s mansion, and it was certainly as impressive as Glimmer had made it out to be. Silhouetted against the early-evening sunset, the spiraling towers and tumbling ivy made the house resemble a castle—one that practically screamed, “keep away.”
The cat, for its part, continued to look unimpressed, and turned away from Adora—brushing its tail against her leg as it began to walk towards the sunset. Taking the hint, Adora followed the cat once again—and wondered when her life had become a series of incidents of a cat telling her where to go.
When the cat eventually led her to a medium-sized house on the edge of a thicket of trees, she didn’t even have to look at the stenciled heart by the window, or smell the aroma of cake wafting out of the open door to know it was Bow’s house. Adora paused at the gate, near the cat, and knelt down next to it. Tentatively, she extended a hand and, when the cat showed no sign of running, she carefully gave it a few scratches on the top of its head.
“Thanks, kitty,” Adora said, smiling as she looked in its mismatched eyes. Then, she stood up once again and headed into the house.
“Adora!” Bow exclaimed as she walked into the kitchen. “You found it! I realized after I left that I’d forgotten to tell you where I lived, but I had the cake to bake and my dog to take to the dog park and I just didn’t have the time—“
“Bow!” Adora cut him off. “Yeah, I got here in the end. Everything is fine! But now…I heard something about cake?” Her stomach grumbled, and Bow (and Glimmer, who had just arrived) laughed.
“Okay, okay, I get the idea—cake first, questions later!”
The next time Adora went to the shops, she came home with the fanciest cat food she could find.
Adora discovered the town park purely by accident—after taking a wrong turn, she stumbled across the empty stretch of grass and fell in love with the peace and quiet. She began to venture out to it often, and would take her lunch to eat near the winding brook at the edge of the park.
As she unwrapped her sandwich, Adora heard a faint crackling of branches underfoot, a ways away. She looked up, wondering who else was in the park—in all the time she’d spent here, she hadn’t encountered another person.
Adora looked around and eventually spotted a figure in the distance, seemingly lost in thought, wandering towards her. She squinted, trying to make out the details of the stranger’s appearance. They had a tangle of wild, dark hair, and wore dramatic dark clothing.
She shrugged and turned back to her sandwich. Public property was public property, right? There was a bench here and everything.
After a few bites, Adora became aware of a presence looming over her. She looked up, only to meet the narrowed eyes of the woman who she’d seen in the distance, who looked stunningly unimpressed.
“What are you doing here? Who are you?”
Adora spluttered around her mouthful of BLT. “I’m…um—well, I’m Adora, and I’m eating lunch?”
The woman did not seem particularly satisfied with Adora’s answer. “Look, I can have you removed, you know.”
“From what, the park? I don’t think that’s how this works.”
The woman let out a choked laugh. “How do you—this isn’t a park, Adora, it’s my property! Did you not see the fence? Or the signs?”
Adora had actually not seen any of these. “There’s a fence? Guess it doesn’t work very well if I was able to just walk in here. Who are you, anyway? Why do you have such ridiculous amounts of gardens that you clearly never use?”
“You really must be new here. The name’s Catra. Most people around here know who I am already.” She stuck out a hand towards Adora, evidently not quite as angry as she had seemed earlier. “And I do use the land! That’s what I’m doing now! Using it!”
Adora tentatively placed her hand in Catra’s, avoiding her sharp, long nails, and followed along with the ensuing handshake. She swallowed uncomfortably.
“Look, I am really sorry for trespassing—I didn’t actually see anything that said this wasn’t public land. I’ll eat lunch somewhere else from now on.”
Catra retracted her hand and placed it on her hip instead. “Oh, yeah. You should do that. I’m obviously super busy with everything I’m using this for.”
“Clearly.” Adora wasn’t going to disagree with the town billionaire.
“Anyway…glad that’s cleared up.” Was Catra looking a little disoriented? “I should be getting back to—all the important stuff I have to do. So. Don’t let me catch you around here again. Understood?” She turned to stare Adora straight in the eyes.
“Understood,” Adora muttered, glancing at Catra’s piercing gaze, and then moving to pack away her things. “It was…nice to finally meet you, though, Catra,” she added, before looking up to realize that Catra had moved on already.
As Adora gathered her things, one thought continued to float around her brain—
“She has really pretty eyes. They look familiar—one blue, one golden. I wonder where I’ve seen that before…?”
After a few weeks, a pattern emerged—Adora would sit out on her back steps with a glass of lemonade every evening, and, eventually, the cat would join her.
The first few times it happened, Adora wondered if Catra was going to come after her for stealing her cat, but when she addressed her concerns in the feline’s direction, she was sure it just smirked at her. Shrugging, Adora had scratched behind its ears and received a purr for her troubles.
These days, the cat often spent its time lazing out next to her, limbs splayed out, as Adora caught up on the book she’d been meaning to read, or rambled about her day. Sometimes, when Bow or Glimmer stopped by for a visit, the cat would vanish—but Adora would leave out a bowl of cat food and some water as sort of an apology. On occasion, Adora’s fingers tangled in the string fastening the key around the cat’s neck, and the thought would cross her mind that it would be so easy to just snip the cord, pull the key away—but she never followed through. She thought of the numerous people who she had heard about trying to catch the cat by force, and wondered how none of them had ever thought about befriending it instead. And she thought, sometimes, of Catra—wandering the halls of her big, empty house, and wondered what she would do when somebody finally took the key and let themselves in—holding her to a promise she had made out of a desire to be left alone.
And so the evenings passed, and the weeks went by, and somewhere in that time Adora stopped being “the new girl.”
It was the middle of the night, and Adora couldn’t breathe.
There was something heavy on her chest, a weight holding her down amidst a tangle of blankets. She gasped, her eyes flying open, struggling to find the switch for her bedside lamp, which illuminated the room to reveal…
…the cat, glaring at her from its perch on her sternum with sleepy mismatched eyes.
Adora frowned, and carefully slid her hands beneath the cat, transferring it to the empty duvet beside her despite its muted protests. In compromise, she gave it a few pats and scratched behind its ears.
“Sorry, kitty! But I really, really do need to breathe,” she murmured. “How did you even get in here?”
Adora’s eyes drifted towards the open window, which, despite Adora’s memory of having latched it before she went to sleep, was cracked about a quarter of the way open.
“Hmm…” she remarked, before deciding to worry about it in the morning and once more turning out the light. As she curled up under the blankets again, Adora felt the cat lean into the curve of her stomach, and drifted off to sleep amidst the soft purring of her feline companion.
In the morning, the cat was still there, curled up against Adora despite the sticky heat that promised a miserable summer’s day. She groaned and threw an arm over her eyes in a futile attempt to block out the sun, before remembering suddenly—
“Glimmer’s coming over!” Adora’s eyes flew open and she fumbled on her bedside table for her watch. Blinking blearily, she squinted until the hands came into focus—revealing the time to be almost 9:30 in the morning.
“Oh no,” Adora yelped, flinging the sheets back and receiving a yowl for her efforts. “Sorry, kitty! But Glimmer said she’d be here at quarter to ten and I haven’t even done the dishes yet! I’m not even dressed!”
Adora raced around the room, pulling clothes from her dresser drawers with her mouth full of suds and a toothbrush hanging out the side. Somehow, miraculously, she was ready by 9:40—all the while the cat, awake now, watched with what could almost be considered amusement.
“A lot of help you were,” Adora called, yanking open her door and taking the stairs two at a time to do some tidying in the spare few minutes she had before Glimmer’s ever-punctual arrival.
A knock on the front door drew Adora up short as she nearly skidded past it on her way to the kitchen, and she took a second to tuck her hair behind her ears before answering the door—when her efforts at looking presentable were defeated immediately as she was tackled by the shorter, pink-haired girl behind it.
“Adora! Good morning! How’s it going?” Glimmer asked, grinning.
“Great! Really! Everything’s fine here!” Adora replied with a near-manic smile. “How’re you?”
Glimmer cocked an eyebrow at Adora’s behavior, but didn’t pursue the issue. Instead, she took Adora’s question as a signal to drop her cheerful demeanor and collapse dramatically on Adora’s couch.
“UGH my MOM is just being the absolute WORST,” she groaned, hands clenching into fists. “She never listens to me! All I want is to be able to live my life without her breathing down my neck at every opportunity and criticizing everything I do—is that too much to ask?” Glimmer punctuated her laundry list of complaints by punching one of Adora’s cushions, before flopping back down and staring blankly out at the room.
“Adora?”
“Hmm—yes? “Adora looked up from where she was preoccupied by shoving a pile of assorted notebooks and envelopes behind the nearest chair.
“Is that…a cat?”
“It just shows up sometimes, I promise I didn’t steal it!”
“Noooot the question I asked, but good to know. Wait—I’ve seen that cat before. Is that…Catra’s cat?!” Glimmer sat up and squinted suspiciously at the feline, who had made its way downstairs and was cleaning between its claws with intense focus.
“I guess it must be—it’s the only cat around here with two-tone eyes and a key around its neck, right?”
“What is it even doing here?”
“Freeloading.”
“Adora!”
“Fine! It is, though. I dunno, it seems to like me? Or pity me. It’s weirdly smart—keeps guiding me to shortcuts around town and stuff. I woke up and it was here today—it doesn’t usually come inside.”
Glimmer frowned. “That’s still kinda weird—the cat’s supposed to be as prickly as Catra herself. But it doesn’t seem too bad, really.” She reached out towards the cat suddenly, aiming for its head. “Heeere, kitty…”
The cat hissed and batted Glimmer’s hand away, darting across Adora’s living room and perching on the newly opened windows. It turned a wide, betrayed gaze towards Adora, and jumped out into the garden.
“Glimmer! Are you okay?” Adora rushed to her friend’s side, reaching out for her injured hand. “Do you need anything? Bandages?”
Glimmer shook her head, grasping her scratched hand with her uninjured one. “Just a scratch. Sorry—I didn’t mean to chase it away. But really, it’s such a mean animal!”
“Not usually,” Adora replied, thinking about the soft, purring lump of fur that had curled up with her last night. Glimmer made a disapproving noise, but made no further comment.
“Oh, I finally met Catra!” Adora continued. “She’s….interesting.”
“You can say that again,” Glimmer grumbled. “Thinks she’s better than the rest of us because she owns half the town. I swear the marriage game thing is just so she could get everyone to shut up about who’s going to get her fortunes.”
“I don’t think she’s quite that bad. She just seems like a fairly private person,” Adora contributed. “And she had every right to be angry that I was eating lunch on her property.”
“Adora. You absolute wonderful idiot. How did you even manage that?” Glimmer had seemingly forgotten her earlier troubles, transfixed by the latest tale of Adora’s obliviousness.
“Well, I might have thought her garden was a public park…” Adora began.
From under a bush outside, a longhaired cat listened with interest to the laughter spilling forth from the living room window.
Adora leaves her window open, and finds the cat in her house at all hours of the day and night. She wonders, sometimes, if Catra misses her pet, but the cat seems happy and she hasn’t had any angry visits from the reclusive woman, so Adora figures she’s probably okay.
The summer stretched onward, days lengthening and the heat hanging oppressively overhead. Sometimes, walking through town on her way home, Adora would catch snippets of conversations—
“Caught that damned cat yet?”
“No, no, blasted thing got away again. Maybe next time I’ll use one of those real small cages…”
“…scratches all up my arm, can you believe it! Devil creature…”
“…stupid key, why does it have to be the key…”
“…heard somebody tried a bear trap, but I don’t think the aim is to kill the cat…”
Adora would usually just shrug and carry on, wondering why none of Catra’s frustrated would-be suitors ever seemed to consider that the cat didn’t need to be trapped—it was quite easy to get along with, if one only gave it a little effort.
The cat’s visits were regular as clockwork, and after a while even Bow and Glimmer had accepted that Adora just…hung out with Catra’s cat. She had started to be well aware of the cat’s odd habits, like its tendency to leave her mice at the back door (and once, memorably, on her pillow), and its desire to be the center of attention at any given moment. Adora had even adjusted to waking up with the cat in the crook of her legs—and uncomfortably arranging herself around the cat when she went to sleep.
However, what she still wasn’t accustomed to was running into the cat’s owner while out and about. Catra still sort of intimidated her, even though she was sure that there was more to her than met the eye. Their interactions, however, were never entirely comfortable, and Adora tried to avoid running into her when possible.
The late summer brought nightly thunderstorms, with downpours of rain and bright flashes of light. Adora was quickly adjusting to the rattling of her plates and dishes with each clap of thunder, and the leaky kitchen window.
She was also adjusting to the pattern of Catra’s cat bolting in through her window, half-soaked and wild-eyed, just before she was about to go to sleep. So when Adora heard the telltale rattle of the glass, she calmly unlatched the window and stood well out of the way of the orange-and-brown furball that shot into her bedroom.
“Honestly, I don’t see why you don’t come by before the rain starts,” she muttered half to herself, picking up the old towel she had begun to keep folded on top of her laundry basket and descending on the soggy feline with it. “Are you still trying to pretend that you won’t end up here at night?”
Suitably dry, the cat gave Adora a reproachful look and hopped up onto the bed, curling up into the divot in the covers that by now had a nice coating of cat hair. Adora rolled her eyes and dropped the towel by the door before slipping under the covers (legs uncomfortably askew to avoid the cat) and switching off the lights.
The last thing she heard before falling asleep was the contented rumble of the cat’s purr.
Adora woke slowly, to the feeling of being far more crowded than she should have been and the cozy scent of cinnamon. Groaning slightly in the morning sunshine, she stretched her arms out and straightened her spine and—
Her wrist made contact with something large and soft, and a muffled noise of protest followed.
Adora, startled, blinked her eyes fully open and turned her head to find—
--Wild, curly hair; soft tan skin, pointy black fingernails, and—
--the startlingly mismatched blue-and-gold eyes of Catra, resident town enigma, staring unimpressedly back at her from amidst her bedsheets.
Letting out a strangled cry, Adora half-jumped, half-fell out of bed, ending up tangled in her sheets in the narrow space between her bed, her bedside table, and the wall. Muffled snickering came from the bed.
“Well, I didn’t think you were that clumsy. Bad with directions, yes, but uncoordinated too?”
“Wha—how—why are you here? What about the cat?”
Catra’s head appeared, peering down at Adora over the edge of the bed. “Seriously? You still haven’t even figured that part out?” She leaned over a little more, folding her arms. As she did so, a silver chain swung forward, secured around her neck. Attached to the necklace was a very familiar key.
Adora narrowed her eyes. “You’re the cat? The cat was you? So the whole key thing was rigged?” Catra only grinned. “Wait, you’ve basically been living here for the past few weeks! You sleep in my bed! I---I changed clothes while you were in here!”
“Yeah, you did.” Catra grinned smugly, wiggling her eyebrows in a cartoonishly suggestive manner. Adora groped around in the mass of bed coverings and retrieved a pillow, which she promptly threw at Catra.
“Hey!” Catra yelped, clearly suppressing her laughter. “I never actually looked.”
Adora blushed, looked away, and met Catra’s eyes again. “So, okay. You’re the cat who I’ve basically been living with for the past few months. You helped me get around town, you’ve kept me company. Why? Why me?”
Catra looked thoughtful, and extended a hand to Adora, which she used to navigate her way back onto the bed. They arranged themselves so they sat cross-legged, amidst rumpled sheets and cat hair—the reminders of the situation they discussed.
“I guess…” Catra began, then paused, running her fingers through her disheveled hair. “At first, you just seemed sort of pathetic. Who asks a cat for directions? But then, even after you knew about the whole key thing, you never seemed interested in taking it—even though you could definitely use the money, I’ve seen the bills you leave on the kitchen counter. So I came back, and you were kind, and just…honestly, annoyingly good.” She leaned back on her arms, differently-colored eyes staring at the ceiling. “And…and I’ve never had the chance to just get to know someone like that, where the first impression they have of me isn’t me, you know? Or…maybe you don’t. But it was nice, and different, and so were you. So I came back.”
Adora hummed thoughtfully, and linked her fingers together in front of her. “But…what now? I mean, first of all—you can turn into a cat, which is…honestly the coolest thing I’ve seen. But where do we go from here?” She met Catra’s gaze, realizing distantly that they were both in pyjamas and that the straps of Catra’s loose tank top were precariously close to slipping off of her narrow shoulders. Adora felt heat rising in her cheeks, and quickly looked away.
Catra, for her part, hid a smirk and stared into Adora’s eyes.
“I guess this is the part where we get to know each other as people, rather than as a human and her cat.”
“You weren’t really my cat, you still belonged to…yourself,” Adora protested. Catra blinked slowly, then shook her head.
“Of course I was your cat. Still am.” She looked uncertain for a moment, and fiddled with the key around her neck. “I mean…if you’ll have me?”
Adora gasped, wide-eyed, and looked down at the key, then back up at Catra, as if wondering if this was some sort of joke. But seeing only sincerity, her gaze softened.
“Oh, you fluffy idiot—of course!” She laughed, and half-leaned, half-fell forwards, her and Catra meeting in the middle with soft laughter and hair twined in tentative fingers, lips brushing and slotting together as if they had always been intended to do so. The spell of silence had been broken—and somewhere in the midst of the longest and shortest moment of their lives, the chain with the key attached had been passed from around Catra’s neck to around Adora’s.
The blossoms of spring were in full force on the day of the ceremony, filling the air with a heady scent of perfume. In the quiet clearing that Adora had once mistaken for a public park, the whole town had gathered, gossiping and theorizing, to see the elusive heiress of the village finally married.
“How did she do it?” asked a tall, blonde woman, turning to the couple sitting beside her.
“Get the key from the cat, you mean?” piped up a child from the row in front. The two women initially addressed shrugged, and the one dressed in pink glanced over towards the small podium area that the soon-to-be-wed couple would stand at.
“Is the cat going to be here? I was promised a cat. And tiny hors d’oeurves!” A woman with unruly pigtails loudly proclaimed her wishes from the front row, before being shushed by several other bystanders. She looked embarrassed for a moment, before running off to tackle an unsuspecting tray-bearing caterer.
The swell of music alerted those gathered to the beginning of the ceremony, and they all craned their necks to see a sight none of them had expected to see in their lifetimes.
Hand-in-hand, Adora and Catra walked as equals through the milling crowd, both clad in white. Around Adora’s neck, the key still hung, as it had done for every day since she had awoken to find her cat had become the woman she would marry. They processed towards the front, where they were met by Angella, who had agreed to officiate after Glimmer had asked her, repeatedly, over the course of several days. Glimmer herself was among the several people trailing in the wake of the two brides, along with Bow, and Catra’s longtime friend Scorpia, with whom she had reconnected in the months past. Bow sniffed and took Glimmer’s proffered handkerchief to wipe his watery eyes, before passing the cloth along to Scorpia, whose tears were streaming in impressive rivulets down her cheeks.
The brides, for their part, only had eyes for each other, and did not relinquish their grasp on each other’s hands for the duration of the ceremony.
When they finally, finally were proclaimed as married, and shared a soft, quiet kiss, the townspeople erupted into cheers and applause, startling Catra and Adora—as if this was the first time they had noticed their audience. They smiled awkwardly, and embraced, and finally turned away from the crowd to ascend to Catra’s house on the hill, which they entered together, arm-in-arm, with both women turning the key as one.