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Adora turns her staff on the noise behind her on instinct. Catra giggles.
She shuts the door behind her and walks past the extended weapon to peck Adora on the lips. Adora is too focused on that to remember that this is Catra, and in the next moment Catra spins Adora into an arm lock and disarms her one-handed.
“You should be more careful,” she says.
Two can play at this game. Adora twists out of the lock and snags the back of Catra’s shirt to tug her off-balance, then she tackles her, holding her hands above her head and pressing their hips together to hold her in place.
“I don’t need to be careful when I’m this good,” Adora says.
Catra lifts her head up, aiming to kiss Adora again. Adora knows that if she allows it, she’s going to lose all of her overdeveloped situational awareness and focus on nothing but kissing Catra, and Catra’s going to get one over on her again.
She allows it.
They lie there for quite a while. Every time Adora thinks about it, more of their bodies are pressed together. There’s less and less of Adora’s weight pinning Catra’s legs, more and more opportunity for her to flip them over.
Eventually Catra tugs one of her hands out of Adora’s hold to cup Adora’s jawline, and Adora leans into it for the split second until she remembers that she was supposed to be holding her down.
Catra’s already laughing. She doesn’t flip them, though, just kisses down the side of Adora’s neck as Adora scrunches up her face in annoyance. She grabs at Adora’s other hand, still pinning her other wrist above her head, and Adora lets her twine their fingers together.
“Well, today we’ve learned that I’m not very good at fighting my girlfriend,” Adora says. She adjusts Catra’s hair where it’s fallen into her eyes. “It’s not exactly a generalizable scenario.”
Catra kisses her one last time, then rolls Adora off her and stands up. “I’m bored. Let’s try again.”
It probably isn’t a good idea to spar. There’s too much unpleasant history there, always just one wrong move, one wrong touch, away from being brought back to the fore.
But Bow isn’t much of a hand-to-hand fighter, at least compared to Adora, and Glimmer’s power is dangerous to use inside the ship. Besides, neither of them grew up in the Horde. They don’t get antsy and anxious if they don’t train at least every few days.
After that first lovely but largely useless afternoon, which involved a lot more making out than sparring, Adora gets serious. The further they get from Etheria, the less of its magic is available to tap into. There’s every possibility that they’ll end up on a planet where she can’t transform, not because of any psychological block, but because there just isn’t enough ambient magical energy for her to use. A sparring buddy will keep her from getting too rusty to fight as Adora.
“Practice with me?” she asks Catra one day as she’s getting ready to go to the extra storage space she’s set up for this purpose.
Catra looks at her for a moment longer than Adora expected, a moment longer than she would have if she didn’t need to think it over. “Sure,” she says, and probably Adora should question it, but she doesn’t.
They warm up together, just like they used to, and something not quite like nostalgia twists in Adora’s chest. Then they pick up the staffs and face off.
Adora strikes.
There’s too much give in Catra’s parries, throwing Adora off-balance. Adora lands a hit way too easily on her first complex attack, forcing Catra back a half-step. She expects Catra to retaliate, but her next moves are just as halfhearted.
Adora backs her into a wall, locking her staff against Catra’s to keep them in place. “This the best you’ve got?” she taunts.
Catra smiles. Then she twists, catching Adora by the ankle and making her crash to the floor. She rolls to her feet just in time to block a strike that shakes Adora’s arms with its impact.
Adora remembers, with the full-body horror of it, that the last time she fought Catra was when she was being controlled by Horde Prime.
She knows that they’re on their ship, that Catra’s in control of her own mind and Horde Prime isn’t a threat anymore. But her body doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo - all that fear of having lost Catra forever, and being helpless to do anything about it, runs through her, catching her off guard.
Catra pins her to the ground in just a few moves. “What was that supposed to be?” she asks. “Thought you wanted a fight.”
“Catra.” Adora doesn’t have words for what she’s feeling. Catra will understand that.
“Hey, hey.” Catra tosses her staff to the side and pries Adora’s out of her hands, grabbing one of them to help her sit up.
“You okay?” Catra asks.
Adora nods, in case she means physically. “You just surprised me.”
Catra frowns into the distance. She hasn’t let go of Adora’s hand, though. “I didn’t mean to.”
“I know.” Calmer now, Adora can tell that if she’d just stopped the fight instead of egging her on, it would have been fine. It had been fine the first time they’d (sort of) done this. Catra had been nervous, not trying to trick her, but Adora has spent too much time trying to get into her head, disrupt her plans, and predict how far she’ll go. Even now, with all of that behind them, she can’t quite turn it off. Catra suddenly shifting the intensity of the fight like that hadn’t felt like Catra; it had felt like Catra following orders.
Catra‘s still glaring at the wall, and Adora wonders if maybe she thinks that Adora doesn’t believe her.
“I wasn’t thinking about you,” she says, which gets Catra’s head turned back toward her. “I...don’t know how much you remember, on Horde Prime’s ship.”
Catra’s hand tightens on Adora’s. “Enough, I think.”
“It kind of all came back. Like nothing since then had ever happened. Like we weren’t safe. Like I could lose you any second.”
Catra shifts to pull Adora into a hug. Adora wraps her arms around her as the last of the tension drains away, as her body finally remembers where she is.
“So, you’re saying that whenever someone tells me to do something, I definitely shouldn’t do it,” Catra says after they’ve sat in silence for a few minutes.
“Oh no. No no no,” Adora says, already laughing.
Catra stands up and shrugs dismissively. “You said it, not me.”
Adora puts her face in her knees and groans. Still laughing, Catra pats the top of her head. Everything feels almost alright.
When Catra joins her in the room they share later that night, she walks directly over to the bed where Adora is lying and curls herself around her. This isn’t exactly uncommon, but it’s nice. Adora always feels instantly safer when Catra is pressed against her, holding her in place.
“I’ve been thinking about today,” Catra says, which Adora had half-expected. Catra sometimes does this just because, but it’s also how she likes to start hard conversations.
Adora adjusts herself so that she can grab one of Catra’s hands. “What about today?”
“I messed up at the beginning. I wasn’t ready so I tried to go easy and it threw you off. Then you messed up by not telling me you needed to stop.”
“Okay.” Adora isn’t quite at the point of admitting that out loud, but she can’t exactly deny it either.
“Neither of those things are unfixable, right? So, if you still want to do this, I think we should try.”
Adora hadn’t actually considered it, but the chance to make new, better memories to layer over the old ones is very appealing. “Okay,” she says.
She can feel the smile Catra presses into her shoulder.
It feels better the next time. Good, even. Adora’s alert and focused like she always used to be when sparring, and Catra’s keeping things interesting, poking at the holes in Adora’s defense that both of them already know about. Adora’s staff breaks at one point, and Catra teases her about it as she fetches another one. It’s good.
Then Adora backs Catra against a wall, and Catra is trying to push them back toward the center when her foot slips on part of the broken staff, which Adora had thoughtlessly shoved into a corner. She crashes to the floor with a yelp.
“Are you okay?” Adora asks, leaning down.
Instead of answering, Catra lunges. She lifts herself up without, Adora notices, putting any weight on the foot that hit the staff, and tries to knock Adora to the floor. She only succeeds in backing her up a half-step, but when she loses her balance again, she grabs onto Adora’s staff to take her down with her.
This is ridiculous. From there, it takes approximately five seconds for Adora to disarm Catra and pin her to the floor.
“Are you done yet?” Adora asks. There’s no chance Catra can get out of this hold, but she’s still squirming, grinding her wrists against the floor where Adora is holding them down, shoulders tensed as if she’s going to try to buck Adora off, as if she hasn’t known better for years.
After a few seconds, though, she stops. She turns her head to the side and takes a shaky breath. Adora can see her eyes starting to water.
This had been a horrible idea.
“Catra?” She moves her hands from where they’re pinning Catra’s wrists to the floor to Catra’s hands. If Catra’s faking this and is about to kick her in the face, Adora will just call the whole thing off and yell at her.
Catra doesn’t, though, and Adora’s a little ashamed for even thinking about it. She wraps her hands around Adora’s, and Adora tries to ignore the fact that Catra’s breathing is getting faster even though they aren’t fighting anymore.
“I’m okay,” Catra lies. Adora takes it as permission, though, to give Catra’s hands one last squeeze and stand up, grabbing a water bottle and an ice pack from the first aid kit Bow had insisted on leaving at the side of the room.
Catra’s sitting up when she turns back around, uninjured leg tucked close to her with an arm wrapped around it. Adora hands her the water and the ice, then sits down behind her and wraps her arms around her waist.
Catra relaxes against her. Like this, Adora can feel her occasional shivers.
“It’s a small room. We both know that messes with your style,” Adora says. “It’s okay to lose.”
“You remember I was better than you when we were little, right?”
Yes, before you stopped trying, Adora thinks, but that’s Shadow Weaver talking, so she just says “Of course.”
“Remember how she built that water arena?”
“Yeah.” Adora had loved the days they trained there, splashing through water that covered uneven terrain. Catra had hated it. Adora can guess where this is going.
“Remember how every time I won a match, we’d be in there the next day?”
Catra had complained about it - Adora had insisted that she was making it up at the beginning, before it had happened enough times that she was forced to admit that it was a pattern. Then she had tried to assure Catra that Shadow Weaver was just trying to help her, putting her in an environment where she was at a disadvantage to keep her sharp even when she was regularly beating all her teammates.
Catra, like was probably fair, hadn’t listened to any of it. Instead she’d stopped winning matches, and traded in days at the water arena for sharp lectures about her laziness.
“I do.”
Catra turns her head to meet Adora’s eyes. Adora looks away then back, trying to convey that she doesn’t need to explain any further.
Catra laughs and leans back against Adora’s shoulder. “I thought I’d hacked it. Stay in second place, everything would be fine. Then you left, and between Hordak and Shadow Weaver, losing turned out to be way worse than winning.”
“I’m-”
“ Don’t say you’re sorry.”
“We don’t have to do this,” Adora says. “If it’s too - too anything. We don’t have to.”
“No,” Catra says with surprising force. “I don’t want to stop. I don’t want any of that to matter anymore.”
Adora could stop this anyway. She could draw the line at anything that made Catra this upset and never agree to do this again. But she trusts Catra. “Okay. When your ankle’s better, we’ll try again.”
They agree on stop signals. They talk about hard limits and endpoints and check-ins. And they try again.
They both start out a little slow and match each other’s energy as their moves get faster and more powerful. There’s an opening for Adora to kick Catra’s feet out from under her, but she uses one foot to tap her on the ankle to demonstrate, instead of actually taking advantage of it. When Catra lands a hit on Adora’s staff that makes her trip and stumble to the side, she waits instead of attacking from the back.
It’s still a tough workout this way, and a lot more fun. Adora is panting by the time Catra twists her staff out of her hands and pins her against the wall.
Once, Adora would have kneed Catra in the stomach to free herself and grabbed her weapon from the ground. But it’s now, and she’s disarmed, so they’re done.
Besides, it’s much better to lean back against the wall and say “So what are you gonna do with me now?”
Catra tosses her staff to the side to pull Adora closer, pressing their foreheads together. “I've got a few ideas."
There will be more times when they end up on the floor of this room, stumbling through conversations that neither of them really wants to have. There will be more missteps, more hurt. It feels like healing all the same.