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After burning through all the energy of a literal sunshine and rainbows happily-ever-afterparty, including that last bastion of strength Etherians apparently reserved solely for partying — at the beginning of the golden hour they returned to Bright Moon.
The first order of business was to take a well-deserved nap.
Once the lines in Adora's face smoothed out, her breathing was deep, and the slightly desperate grip she had on her arm relaxed, Catra disentangled herself. For a moment she just sat on the bed, massaging the feeling back into her arms. Then she padded over to the shards which lay prone and almost insultingly dull in the shadows on the far side of Adora's opulent quarters.
She-Ra's old sword was broken. That sword and shield; lasso and racket; umbrella and coffee mug. Three years ago Adora had used it to justify leaving her behind: proof of the duty she held to seemingly every poor Etherian soul except Horde scum. Two years ago she'd used it to drug Adora and turn her into a feral executioner (and then, allegedly, a tipsy mess). Some unmeasurable time ago, she'd stolen it to claw open the portal that ended the world. And then — forever after that — Adora broke it.
Catra closed her eyes.
Now Adora could turn into She-Ra with only the purposeful narrowing of her steely eyes and the solemn steeling of her steadfast and true heart, or some other flowery noble shit: the important thing was her transformation finally looked like her, and not like some chiseled kill-joy from literal ages ago. She kept the doofy hair poof — she had Bow's cutesy heart, Glimmer's fairy wings. She even had, framing her increasingly smug hero face, a hint of the mask she'd gifted Catra after she'd finally learned how to pilot a skiff.
She stretched out her fingers, suddenly tense. Her claws itched under her skin.
Of course that caused Melog to show up, materializing in a mosaic of fluid motion. It had ceased to truly startle her, but she wondered how long she'd been standing there like an idiot, just clenching her hands.
The cat swept close and bopped her wrist. She scowled. Stupid magic cats and their stupid emotional attentiveness. She turned away as Melog wrapped their tail around her leg.
So. The old sword was broken, her hair was short, and Shadow Weaver was dead. On this utterly perfect spring evening there were still birds cooing and Catra was taking a nap, with Adora, in Adora’s correctly rectangular bed, at Bright Moon. Even at dusk, the sky was broad with space debris rocketing into oblivion. Who the hell knew — maybe once there was actually somewhere to go, everything with any weight had just started floating off into space the moment they’d left Despondos. She wanted to remember this once night really set in and the anxiety she could feel crouching just beyond the moment threatened to overtake her.
On impulse she swiped the smallest shard from the middle of the broken sword. She tightened her hand around it, feeling the cool flat of it against the tips of her fingers and the edges fuzzy bright in her palm, like the glow around Adora’s transformation. Catra hadn’t even been there for it, and yet of all the things they had to break in order to get here, this was the only thing whose pieces she could still touch.
What was there worth keeping, when everything and everyone had changed? Magic must be some kind of momentum: the old crew was literally off in space somewhere, meaning Kyle must have finally mustered up the grit to see his old escape plan through; Scorpia had promised to see Frosta safely back to the Kingdom of Snows (a truly shameless excuse to procrastinate on rebuilding especially since Perfuma was coming along and her kingdom was in the opposite direction, but she couldn’t begrudge them); somewhere, undoubtedly, Bow was playing some kind of awful, earnest, newly historical ballad to Sparkle’s entire court while Hordak himself gave polite applause. Damn it, she could hear Entrapta's delighted cackles even now. The whole Whispering Woods seemed twice as bright and three times as cheerfully dangerous.
And — there was Adora's exhausted snoring, and there were her own nearly soundless breaths. Melog turned their head further into Catra’s open hand. There was the whole world to fit into new orders. The main thing was just figuring out what to build with all the extra pieces.