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Because Catra is a coward, in the moment she realizes she can have it all, and also have none of it: stop the Horde, save Adora, be sealed away for forever in a portal and never have to speak to or see another Etherian again, she is relieved. It’s not quite dying, she thinks, but it’s the next best thing.
In fact it is a little more like dreaming. She falls for a little while, still thinking of how Adora had looked just a moment prior when they had still walked the same world: the sure certain set of She-Ra’s jaw as she stood before the watery portal-light, her eyes steady with the sad weight of someone who has just been told a very old and terrible secret. Catra could map the points back onto Adora’s face, and she could map Adora’s face back one year, two years, ten. She’d felt she couldn’t bear to look any longer at Adora in the moment before her sacrifice. Then she had realized she didn’t have to and that she could solve all her problems at once. She’d pounced, knocking Adora aside. For a moment she’d been the one limned in that terrible light, before she spread her arms and leaned backwards.
Brightness and gravity. For once she doesn’t immediately twist to land on her feet. Anything could happen to her and she could let it happen, she thinks, and then begins to turn anyway. But no sooner has she decided this (or had her body decide it for her?) than it becomes irrelevant. Her fall breaks abruptly but without harm, as in an aborted attempt at sleep. She smells pine needles and feels their hundred thousand pointed fingers pressing into her back.
When she raises her hand and turns it, it seems like a hand. Her shadow seems like a shadow. She doesn’t know what she was expecting.
Eventually she picks herself up off the ground to wander the woods. The trees grow up and down rocky peaks, here nearer together—there farther apart—but going on indefinitely in their misty close majesty. For a while she searches for water, but upon finding a little babbling brook she realizes that she’s not at all thirsty.
In every sense of the phrase not having anything better to do, she follows the brook upstream. It gains force as she goes, from babble to song to chorus. She reaches a pristine lake after some indefinite interval; in the half-light it forms a wavering reflective ovaloid, liquidly bright. Catra kicks a rock in and the ripples make their stately way to the opposite bank, as would the echoes of a gong.
When she lies down in the grass she falls almost immediately into a dreamless sleep, one without satisfaction.
She picks up the game when she wakes up, still strangely unthirsty, now even more strangely unhungry. She thinks of the world she had once created when she had signaled to the Horde, of the temple where she had first left Adora for dead and feels, obscurely, disappointed. Afterwards, she walks through the forest for a while longer, trying to find landmarks as of yet untraveled. Everywhere she goes the air lies so still that she eventually begins rooting around in the dirt for the comforting presence of some insects, or maybe some earthworms, and distressingly finds neither. An image comes before her, unthinking memory: she’s four or five, fishing a worm out of the dirt and considering its consumption. Adora floats in the background, not protector or protectee, only a worried and worrisome presence. Catra closes her eyes then, and walks directly into a tree.
There’s no one to hear her curse, except for the vaguely disapproving pine needles as they fall around her. Her voice sounds strange and disallowed in the quiet. She still feels Adora behind her, so she begins to run.
It doesn’t help. She reaches a craggy peak and then another, without the ozone drag of exertion in her lungs. She can only ever see as far as another copse of trees, another granite boulder, another winding stream. She is already bored without being bored yet; she scratches furiously at the bark of a tree in sudden furious pique.
It doesn’t hurt. Once her claws strike wrong, in a way that should jolt her arm down to the bone, should, she thinks, rend her flesh and open up her skin. But nothing happens and her wrist glides smoothly straight again by the end of her movement. She stumbles away for a moment, and by the time she turns back she has even lost the gouged-up tree among its brethren.
_
What can she do after that? She travels the woods by day and sleeps in them by night. She is as terribly bored as she thought she would be. But she learns to leave herself behind, body and spirit and mind. There is nothing here to hurt her, and there is nothing here for her to hurt. She could exist for forever in this nowhere world, neither blameless nor culpable.
She begins to build a shack by the lake. She starts idly, pushing together the detritus of branches and seeing where they might fit together. She’s not sure when exactly she realizes that she could build something, but eventually the thought has her absolutely seized in its grip. Weeks later, she’s trawling the water’s edge for reeds to thatch a roof. She’s never needed warming in this world, and her rough walls do not stop the light and pleasant wind. But it changes their shape, she thinks, the bright hollow of their sound.
And one evening she looks up and Adora is there, her hair spread out She-ra gold. “Catra”, she says, and then “Close your eyes.”
So Catra does, and world blurs bright.
_
She knows the waking world by the always pinprick of bodily pain. She cannot understand now how she could have ever not known what was different about the other place. She feels Adora’s hand on hers without knowing when Adora had taken it, and the giddy aching hurt in her feet and stomach and head sing real real real.
When she opens her eyes she’s on the Moonstone platform, level with the rounded purple cliffs and unconquered ivory spires of Bright Moon. In her variegated vision Glimmer swims into view, leaning on a column and looking unhappy. She doesn’t yet have the time to depart disorientation for embarrassment however, before she falls into a dead swoon. She feels Adora’s grasp tighten around her wrist and reach around to take her shoulder; the rest is a dark red heat.
The next thing she remembers is being in a bed, and after that, Adora mostly. Her face floats constantly in the space to Catra’s right, as bright as lamplight in her fever gloom. Occasionally she presses a cup of water to Catra’s lips, or takes her temperature, which Catra is still thankfully too helpless to do anything but acquiesce to. The drops of water roll slickly down the dry surface of her tongue, the rough chasm of her throat.
Adora holds her hand between both of hers, like one would hold a stone, or a dead thing. She resembles that distant memory that had come over Catra in the forest in that other world: omnipresent, worried and worrisome. Strange, Catra thinks dreamily, as if through water. In their childhood Adora had been the one with the great illness. She remembers fetching her cold towels and bowls of lumpy soup, as Adora had often done for her. But when four days in Adora’s fever had not yet broken, Shadoweaver had come to take her away. When Catra next saw her seventy-two hours later, she was well again; Shadoweaver had pet her head absently before tilting her chin with barely adulterated contempt towards Catra to indicate that Adora could go.
Now Adora’s fingers ghost through Catra’s hair, card against her scalp and untangle her hair. When Catra slits her eyes open in the darkness, it is with quiet horror that she finds she cannot read the set of Adora’s mouth, cannot parse the gentleness and the violence of her gaze.
_
When Catra comes to again her fever has broken. She opens her eyes and immediately finds Adora looking back. For some time they watch each other in an endless mirror-refraction moment of lucid observation. Adora looks—not exactly older, than she did, but time had carried on with her face and her eyes for however long Catra had been away. She seems tired, but not in the resigned way Catra hadn’t been able to bear, when she’d stood like a statue of a person in front of that portal.
“Do you feel okay?” Adora says.
In the morning light filtering into what she can only assume is a Bright Moon room—she couldn’t imagine a more candy colored palette if she’d wanted to—Catra feels as dry and light as an autumn leaf. Adora is sitting by her bedside (although strangely she is not in a bed at all but some sort of vaguely cocoon-like hammock?).
“Water?” she says. It comes out a little smaller than she’d wanted or expected, but Adora goes to pick up the cup as quickly as if she’d been rebuked. She waits for Catra to take it and for her to place it to her lips to begin speaking.
“I want you to know that you’re safe here. I mean, ever since we defeated the Horde we’ve taken in lots of refugees. Lonnie and Kyle are here too in between jobs for the Princess Alliance--which you can also join. I mean, only if you want to, because you don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to, I would never imply that?”
Almost out of pity, Catra does a dry little tilt of her head at Adora in a way that makes her stop talking abruptly. She lets the silence pool coolly between them for only a moment before speaking. “How long has it been?” she asks.
“Just a little over a year,” Adora says promptly. “So, um, I’ve had a long time to think about everything. I don’t know if you have, or where you’ve been--” Catra hears it again, the little hitch marking the divide between Adora, rehearsed, and Adora, rambling uncontrollably. “—well, I saw that forest of course, but. . . I don’t know where you’ve been.”
“No, you mostly got all of it,” says Catra. Adora looks at her; the distance does not unfurl itself between them. It sets like a pane of glass.
“I just wanted to say that I forgive you,” Adora says, and then for some reason cringes visibly. “Not that you needed that. I mean, did you need that? Why would you need that? We’re accepting reformed Horde soldiers basically all the time. They’re everywhere. We’re everywhere.”
Catra thinks about what she’s done and what Adora’s done, who she is and who Adora is. She thinks about the empty forest that lay at the pit of a dead-end portal, and Adora appearing in it, and says, “I actually would bet that I did need it.”
“No, you didn’t.” Adora says, weirdly earnest for someone saying something blatantly untrue. Catra doesn’t know if anyone else in the world could have gotten her back from that other place. She doesn’t know if anyone else would want to. Scorpia comes to her mind then, and something that she would like to wrest out with a knife curls in her gut.
She becomes suddenly aware that she’s still lying prone in her weirdly cradle-like hammock, with Adora sitting on a chair on the ground beside her. After a moment’s struggle in the smothering elastic trap of cloth surrounding her, she pulls herself into an upright crouch with only perfunctory complaint from her muscles.
“Sorry about the hammock,” Adora says. “All of the beds here are weirdly soft. I couldn’t get used to them at all at first, and I didn’t think you should sleep on the floor.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Catra intones with no little irony. She spots a tangle of blankets on the floor; Adora follows her gaze.
“I brought my bedroll though,” she says. “That’s what Bow and Glimmer did, when I couldn’t sleep. I can stay here too. If you’ll stay.”
Between now and waking up in the clearheaded afterimage of pain, she’s acquired enough swamp-sticky murk in her traitor throat and still-knifeless gut to sink a body in. This is exactly what one jumps into a portal to nowhere to avoid.
“I’ll stay,” Catra says.
_
Which finds her the next day getting raked over the coals by Glimmer in the throne room. It would be too much to ask to like Adora’s friends. Catra thinks she would settle just for wanting to like them.
Or for them wanting to like her, which she hadn’t even considered wanting before. There was her and Adora, and then Adora’s defection like a rupture in the memory, and on the other side Adora and the Princess Alliance, Adora and Bow and Glimmer. She’d never thought of the particulars of a world where she might be sided with these people with whom she had never even had a bridge to burn. She’d never thought of it even all those times when Adora had wanted Catra to join her. Which she supposes she has now, if from a sideways direction, and with a difficult-to-see agency.
She turns this all around in her mind while Glimmer glowers at her with what, if Catra is to begin to be fair to her, is some genuine imperiousness; she opens her mouth again to begin a spiel on making amends.
It is with almost giddy feeling Catra that realizes she’ll have to make amends to—well, to lots of people probably, Scorpia comes to mind again—but specifically amends to Glimmer. Even though she will never mention that now and will lecture only in the abstract, Catra can tell, by reading the proud tilt of Glimmer’s neck that she recognizes in her own self.
She turns thoughtlessly then to look at Adora, and has to almost stifle a laugh. Adora is watching what Catra dimly realizes must be a rather awkward tableau with a rictus grin. Which she still has afterwards, while they’re walking down the slick marbled Bright Moon floors that always clack just slightly louder than Catra she thinks they will.
Adora is insisting that she’s “glad the meeting went so well” even though “Glimmer can come off sort of strong when you first get to know her—and Catra, couldn’t you sort of count this as your first real meeting with Glimmer?” (you really couldn’t, Catra thinks) and “it’s wonderful so many people from the Horde are being brought into the fold”. Catra wants to say something mean and cutting; she wants to make Adora peel back the mask. But something stills her tongue, and then she remembers how it felt to see everything laid out on Adora’s face like oil on water and not be able to catch any of it.
“The Horde’s evil,” Adora had told her after defecting, wondrously and as if that meant something. Their childhood lies between them like a broken vessel waiting to be filled, and Catra thinks that maybe she never understood Adora at all. So instead, she leans backwards out a window to stare upside-down at a stupidly purple cliff and imagine Adora’s widening eyes.
_
That evening Adora gets word of some far-off village for whom the inopportune arrival of a flock of robot birds has made it impossible to get the yearly planting of fishing-berries in the ground. This does not seem like something that should be Adora’s problem, or frankly Catra’s, but apparently that’s not the shape of her new life.
Admittedly, the village is not so much “far-off” as it is several hours’ brisk walking, and Catra had developed a taste for fishing-berries while traveling around Etheria terrorizing the populace and generally wreaking havoc. She still isn’t happy about leaving Bright Moon the next morning at 8 am sharp, although Adora is weirdly enthused about it. “It’s just like old times,” she says in the morning as Catra climbs blearily out of her hammock. “Except now we help people instead of hurt them.” Catra thinks this is really misrepresenting the time they’d both spent in the Horde, wherein they hadn’t really help or hurt people, or in fact really gone anywhere outside of the Frightzone.
They stop at the kitchens to pick up packed meals for their daylong journey—golden-brown meat pies for breakfast, triple-decker sandwiches for lunch, some sort of delicious-smelling rice wrapped in leaves for dinner, juice and water and little dessert tarts. Everything gets put into a special enchanted sack that keeps it all at just the right temperature. Catra thinks it’s all almost unbelievably twee, but she isn’t complaining.
“Do you know why they’re called fishing-berries? It’s kind of a weird name,” Adora says.
The sun is just beginning to warm their backs as they walk; Catra is mid-bite into her meat pie, which turns out to include luscious chunks of scrambled egg as well as some sort of shredded summer squash. “Yeah,” she says, but it comes out pretty muffled. “Mmf—yeah,” she says, clearer this time. “It’s obvious if you’ve ever seen one. They’re pretty big for berries, maybe eyeball sized and shaped? But more spherical—”
“You could have just said it was a sphere,” Adora says, nudging her in the shoulder.
“You wouldn’t have gotten the size. Anyways, the skin is clear, and the flesh is tinted some color. I’ve seen blue and green and orange, and the seed-pulp is in this fish shaped pod inside the berry attached to the stem.”
“Do you like them?” Adora says.
“Huh? Yeah, they’re pretty good, I guess.”
Adora pumps her fist in the air. “Alright! Then we have to make extra sure to investigate these robot birds so that the villagers can plant them at the right time. If they have a bad crop the price will go up. I think. Glimmer tries to explain economics to me, but I don’t think she really understands them either.”
_
They reach the village, nestled in a little patch between river and mountain, a little past noon. Adora transforms into She-ra a couple minutes before they enter, and everyone runs out when they see her. “She-ra’s here,” they cry, and barely seem to notice Catra at all. Simultaneously she is grateful for this fact and it strikes her as slightly unfair.
“Where’s the problem?” Adora asks, and they are led out to it.
The birds—there are seven or eight of them, it’s hard to tell the exact number because of their constant, organically random circling pattern—are indeed flying directly above a large field of dirt. About the field there is not much to say except that it seemed quite damp and at one corner was precariously stacked an enormous pile of wood that seemed in imminent danger of collapse. The birds are strangely beautiful, which Catra was not expecting. For all that they are clearly robotic, they are shaped with rippling curves in their silver-and-black metal; they give off the impression both of heaviness and light. She wants to catch one.
The man who led them out says, “They’re harmless when you’re not on the field. But when you are—” he steps forwards ten paces or so onto the dirt, and immediately a bird swoops down to land on his head. It begins to peck at his skull rhythmically, and he lets it, yelping a few times in pain before retreating. “That’s not so bad either, although after awhile it gives you a nasty bruise. But no one can plant like this.”
“Don’t worry sir, you won’t have to,” Adora says. She reaches into her bag and pulls out two metal taser looking things and hands one to Catra. “Entrapta gave me these for my birthday last year. For trapping any medium or small sized robots, although she used more words than that.” Great, thinks Catra. More emotions to take out with a knife. She wishes for something to fight other than these awful, weirdly beautiful birds, which she probably will not even get to touch.
The contraptions have two buttons on the handles, unhelpfully labeled “capture” and “trap”. Adora aims hers at a bird and presses the top one; a blue beam zooms out of the tip and summarily misses the bird she was aiming at by several feet. She tries again, with the same result, and starts frowning.
The first bird they manage to trap occurs a dozen tries later, when Catra manages to capture one that was flying next to the one she can privately admit to herself she was trying to hit. It begins to be drawn downwards down the bean in glacially slow motion, and both she and Adora watch entranced. As it begins to reach the base though, Catra starts to panic. “What now?” she asks.
“Uh. . . to immobilize them you have to hit the button—the other button,” says Adora. But evidently Catra hits the wrong one, because abruptly the beam stops and the bird flies up and away again, barely ruffled.
“Fuck,” says Catra. But eventually not half an hour later they do get all their ducks lined up in a row. Afterwards, they sprawl down exhausted in the shade of a nearby tree, incongruously tired for the amount of work they’ve done. The farmers head on to the field to begin planting, and the man who had explained the problem gestures Adora over to talk to her. Catra watches a little girl a few feet away from her kick a ball around the treacherous-looking stack of timber, and then directly into the treacherous-looking stack of timber: with a hiss, she rises to push her aside just in time.
“Watch it,” she says, both her hands still on the girl’s shoulders, but the kid shrugs away her menacing posture guilelessly.
“Thanks,” she says with grubby sincerity. “I’m not supposed to play there actually,” she continues with a slightly conspiratorial smile, an expression that so nauseates Catra that she turns immediately to find Adora’s elbow and drag it away so that they can leave.
_
That night she lays in her drapey hammock, which she has regretfully begun to see the appeal of, and doesn’t sleep. Adora, still crashing on her floor until who knows when, doesn’t sleep either. This one fact comes easily, and she doesn’t have to count breaths to know. It’s all those years sleeping no more than three feet away from each other in the Horde that press down on her now, the discomfort like a foot that wants to twitch or a moored boat that wants to be lost at sea. She wants—to leap down and curl up in Adora’s warmth, like she used to. She wants not to be here anymore, trying so hard to do nothing at all. She wants to be in that forest again—no, that one’s pretty much a lie. Whatever she wants, she’s sure she’s not brave enough for it.
“Catra?” Adora says, softly enough to be a ghost.
“Yeah?” she says, just a little bit louder. She’d probably be a louder ghost than Adora, anyways.
“Oh good, I didn’t want to wake you up,” Adora says unnecessarily. Catra has nothing to say to that. After a moment, Adora continues, “I’m just glad you’re making so much progress.”
Catra is, as apparently ever these days, uncertain what exactly it is Adora is talking about. “What progress? Barely managing to sit through one measly meeting with Glimmer where she talked about amends? Obviously I tried that, when I jumped into that portal, but it wasn’t enough. I knew it wouldn’t be, but what am I supposed to do now? The Horde is gone. It’s not like I can be for or against it, even if I wanted to.”
“There’s always something else that needs doing,” Adora says gently. “Hey! I saw you today, when you saved that girl from being buried under piles of wood.”
“Wow, just one of the many things I don’t want to think about!”
“What do you want to think about then?” Adora asks. Finally, finally, there’s a thin edge to her voice.
“You started this conversation,” Catra says, and then feels a little bad. “Was it never like that for you? You never helped someone and something just felt—I don’t know. Wrong, but not like you should have done something different. Wrong like you’re supposed to be someone else.” She feels Adora turn to look at her. Adora was always like that, nothing said without eye contact. Catra had hated it when they had were kids. It always seemed like there would be something quiet and secret and unsayable in the air between them that Adora was going to break by looking at her, but then Adora would look and nothing would happen except that then she would be seen. For the second time that unfortunate night, she’s glad to be in this hammock where she couldn’t look back even if she tried. Well, unless she actually gets up from there, which she isn’t going to. So they lie apart in the dark.
_
The next morning when Catra wakes up, Adora is gone. She follows the trail of her scent, gone several hours cold, to the windowsill, and pauses for a moment there, balancing. Then she leaps out, darting from Bright Moon architectural feature to Bright Moon architectural feature. She’s only able to track Adora to the edge of the Whispering Woods, but she figures that even if she knew the exact path Adora had taken through the trees they’ve probably already uprooted themselves and done a little jig and she wouldn’t be able to follow it. There’s nothing to do but go forwards, wherever her feet will take her.
In that way it is like the woods she had spent so long in on the other side of the portal, but in very few others. The Whispering Woods are so alive it is intentful with it. Catra is also intentful, much as she lacks any sort of direction, and the woods seems to respect that. An enormous purple fly ambles in from off to her left to land on her tail and she heads the other way.
The visibility is so bad through the undergrowth that she doesn’t see Adora until she’s in the same clearing, not twenty feet away. Adora is sitting by a streambed, dipping her toes in the water one at a time, or trying to. Catra approaches, one careful foot after another, until she’s within striking distance. Adora doesn’t look up.
“You always were the one who ran,” Catra says, like she’s practicing her words. She runs her tongue over her teeth; they don’t taste right.
Adora doesn’t crumple, but folds. Her head goes down onto her knees. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“Why? It’s not like you were the one who did anything wrong.” If there is any bitterness in her voice, it is only in the gritty flatness of it, like the surface of a ceramic plate. Catra has never been more aware of all the rusted cutting things inside her throat and she thinks she could learn to see growth in being filed down a bit.
“I can’t believe that it had to be that way,” Adora says, as if the one thing followed from the other; that there was nothing she couldn’t have, shouldn’t have changed. Catra watches the bright moving lines the water throws onto Adora’s throat and wants to mourn. Instead she sinks down slowly to sit next to her on the rocks.
“Hey Adora,” she says, and stops. All that empty space she is holding back from grief coalesces. “What did you mean, when you said that you’d forgiven me?”
“I’m not angry anymore,” Adora says. Catra waits, patient as she never could have been in that other forest where there had never been anything to wait for, or anytime in her life before then. Adora turns to look at her then, finally, and for once Catra feels relief without anticipation. “Sometimes I don’t think you cared about the Horde.” A little softer, then: “You wanted to hurt me.”
“Yeah”, says Catra.
In the dappled light obscuring Adora’s face, she could be a child. “Everything I thought was true when I was a kid got proved wrong in the end,” she says. “Even you.” There’s nothing accusatory in it; the frown her mouth falls into when it closes could be as unwronged as an animal’s, as crimeless as the ocean floor. “What do I do with it all? All that time I never got right.” Catra feels it closing in on her again, two childhoods as if acted out by ghosts.
“Please,” she says. “You can’t put it away. Don’t pretend anything, okay?” She puts her hand over Adora’s on the stones between them. “Whatever you need to do with me, just do it.”
She processes the warmth before she processes anything else about Adora kissing her. She curls into it without thinking; she wants to dissolve into it; she wants to be formed again.
“Did I get it right?” says Adora.
“I have no idea,” Catra tells her.
Adora kisses her again then, which seems frankly unwise of her. Later, perhaps, they’ll figure it out. They’ll find the shades of themselves, drowned in a wishing well and washed up on a foreign isle, and lead them back to their bodies. But for now Catra closes her eyes, and an incandescently orange frog hunts through something blooming in the water as they learn to navigate the sharp edges of Adora’s teeth.