Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The night the weight of the world settles in to weave its fingers around her neck, Adora goes to bed with glitter in her hair.  She had woken up the morning prior possessed of some dark sea-slippery mass that roiled in her stomach and made her movements angular and abrupt.  Catra had teased her about it on their way to school, bumping her shoulder as they walked and knocking her perilously close to the edge of the sidewalk.  “Adora,” she’d said, dragging out the vowels.  “Why so tense?  We’ve been back in school for a week.  I know for a fact you don’t have any tests yet.  Even if you did, we’re second semester seniors now.  We’ve submitted our college applications already, and nothing matters anymore.”

Adora had been ready to protest, but her mouth snapped shut on “college applications”.  Catra was smug.  “Worried that every school you applied to is going to be able to see what an idiot you are?”

“I’m not!”, said Adora.  “And you’d better hope they don’t, because if they think that I’m an idiot, then you must be—”

“I must be the one who knows just how to get you to loosen up.”

Warning lit up Adora’s mind in its long-practiced patterns.  “This isn’t going to be like the time you insisted that Mrs. Merengly wasn’t going to notice if we stole one of her hens, is it?”

“That was funny and you know it.  Anyways, you should trust me more,” Catra said, and dug around in the back pocket of her jeans.  With a flourish, she procured two only slightly crumpled slips of paper.

“Winter formal tickets?” said Adora, a little surprised.

“Don’t give me that tone.  I saw you looking at the flyers just yesterday when you thought I couldn’t see,” Catra said.  Adora had been looking, and she had thought Catra couldn’t see.

“Wait,” said Adora.  “The flyer that said that they’d stopped selling early-bird tickets on Wednesday?”

Catra only grinned.  “Nicked them off Kyle.”

“Catra!”

“What?”  Catra said.  “I’m saving him the trouble of getting rejected by whoever he was going to ask.”  Probably this was true.

“But—Shadoweaver?  You think she’d want us to go?” said Adora, although she could already feel something loosening under her skin.

Catra made a garbled sound that might have been a groan.  “Who cares about Shadoweaver?  Anyways, on Friday nights she’s always out of the house late at her Watcher’s Council meeting.  We can just get chores and training done early and be there and back before she even knows we’re gone.  Come on, Adora, I know you’ve wanted to go to a school dance since we were freshmen.”

“That’s right,” said Adora suddenly.  “Because when we were freshmen, I kept telling you about how much I wanted to go to one, and you kept telling me that they were stupid and you never would, huh?”  She finally bumped Catra back on the shoulder.

“People change!”  Catra said, a little too loudly for the early state of the morning.  “So you’ll go?  We’re not going to grow too weak to face the forces of darkness after just one dance,” she said, dry.

“Or at least I’m not,” said Adora.  “I guess beating you at sparring can wait until tomorrow.  I’ll go.  I mean, it would be pretty rude of me not to, since you’re doing it just for me and everything.”

“Shut up!”  said Catra.  They were reaching the last bend in the road before campus came into view, with the waist high-brick wall Catra always liked to hop on to walk across the top.  She leapt up and spread her arms out, which Adora privately suspected she did less because she really needed to for balance and more for the joy of the movement.  “Don’t make a big deal out of it.  This is not because I like you.”

But when Adora looks up at her, she’s smiling her wide, victorious smile.  The day is cold, and bright, and windy.  Adora feels so light she could blow away.

Catra’s still smiling that night when they pull up to the dance, Adora in her nicest blouse and Catra in her normal ripped black jeans.  Shadoweaver isn’t big on buying them party clothes.  It doesn’t matter: when Catra pulls her, laughing, past the photo-booth where Adora’s unfortunate glitter mishap with the badly taped tinsel snowflake is ultimately going to occur, she thinks that Catra looks like a million bucks.  Later, when Adora finishes brushing her teeth and tiptoes by habit back to their room, Catra is curled up already on Adora’s bed, the dim hallway light illuminating the little grin she’s making in sleep.

That night, the Slayer power, gone from the world two decades, comes back.  It slips down with the moonlight, through their winding street with the weedy lots of grass, and then past the crack between the floor and the door, to sink under Adora’s skin, sharp and strong as a blade.

Adora wakes in the early morning to the doorbell ringing at polite intervals of a minute between.  She opens her eyes tense, aware as she does of some electric difference in the tilt of her body towards the earth.  She had been dreaming, she knows, some kind of dream that had blood in it, and in the moment of waking she has an abiding conviction that that was why the marrow in her bones feels so strangely, and so charged.

Then familiarity sets in again.  She’s in bed, the doorbell’s ringing, and Catra’s hidden her head under her pillow in discontent; Adora reaches out to shake her awake.  Catra flinches and sits up immediately, brow wrinkling.  “Adora,” she says, “That hurt.”  She puts her hand on her shoulder, where Adora had touched her, just as the doorbell rings again.  “Fuck, what time is it?”

Adora reaches for her phone.  “6:17.”

“Whyyyy,” says Catra.  “Oh no, do you think this is going to be another one of Shadoweaver’s weird tests?”

Adora shudders.  “As long as it isn’t like—”

“When she woke us up in the middle of the night to drive us out to the woods and have you track me?  Yeah, that was an all-time low.”

“I was picking splinters out for a week.”  Adora’s getting out of bed now, pulling on jeans.

“Like you have anything to complain about.  You weren’t the one pretending to be a vampire being chased through the woods.  She didn’t enchant that stake to tase you when it touched your heart.”

Adora’s hands still as she puts on her shirt.  “I’m really sorry.  I didn’t know it would do that.”  She remembers the adrenaline of spotting a flash of Catra’s dark hair in the speckled moonlight.  Between then and when she had pressed the blunt tip of the stake against Catra’s chest and Catra had stiffened and begun to shake is an empty space.

Catra’s at the door already, rolling her eyes.  “Yeah, yeah, I know.  That was Shadoweaver, not you.  Anyways, you know I let you catch me in the end just so we could go home and go the fuck to sleep.”

There’s a stranger in the kitchen.  Shadoweaver, facing her, leaks her patented brand of simpering desperation like water off ice.  Her voice cuts off suddenly when the girls come in.

“Hello,” says the stranger, a tall, severely dressed woman with close-cropped hair.  “I’m Ms. Lighthope.”  She gives a miniscule pause before continuing on as flatly as she began.  There’s a hint of an English accent in her voice.  “But you may simply call me Lighthope, if that makes you more comfortable.  I’m from the Watcher’s Council.”  She’s holding a smooth white stone in her hands.  She glances over both girls before turning to Adora.  “Do you mind taking this stone?”

“Uh, no—Ms., I mean, Lighthope,” Adora says automatically, and takes it.  As soon as it touches her skin, it begins to pulse blue.  Adora scratches the back of her neck.  “Is it, um, supposed to be doing this?”

Lighthope’s gaze lights upon Adora in the way a match lit in a darkened room does, dimming all else.  “I very much hope so,” she says, taking the stone from her again and pocketing it.  She turns back to Adora, gravely.  Her eyes are still fixed upon Adora when she says the words, with the lilting rhythm of recitation.  “Into every generation a slayer is born—” Lighthope pauses here, considering.  “Well, every generation but the last, I suppose.  Where were we?  One girl in all the world, a chosen one.  She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and forces of darkness; to stop the spread of evil and the swell of their number.  She is the Slayer.”

“Yeah, we know,” says Catra, bored but wary.  “It’s what Shadoweaver’s been training us for, as Potential Slayers.  Even though the magic’s been all haywire and there hasn’t been one chosen since the last slayer twenty years ago.”

“Mara,” Lighthope says, her voice running over the name as one might run their fingers over a pressed flower in a dusty old book.  “Very true.  Well, until last night.  You were asking about the stone.  What the stone does is change colors in the presence of a Slayer.”  She hasn’t looked away from Adora.  “That’s you,” she says.

Adora is very aware, very suddenly, of the placement of everyone in the kitchen, Lighthope standing unbent in the very center on the dip in the floorboards where the water collects every time someone mops, Shadoweaver with her hands clenched by the cabinets.  Catra behind her and to her right, leaning against the doorway like a bracket: holding out and holding in.  As if by cataloguing the bodies Adora can place herself again in the world.  “You’re saying. . . you’re saying I’m the new slayer?” she says, stupidly.

“Yes,” says Lighthope.  “The world has need of the power again, and it returned as we knew it would.  I’m assigned to be your Watcher, and I came here today to retrieve you.  You’ll be staying with me from now on, as well as transferring schools to Bright Moon High.”

“Which is where we were when you girls came in,” Shadoweaver finally says in her thready voice.  She forces a smile at Lighthope.  “I’m a perfectly qualified Watcher as well.  I don’t see why Adora can’t stay in my care.”

Lighthope turns to Shadoweaver slowly, almost magnanimously.  “Your work thusfar in training the current slayer is much appreciated,” she said, as if speaking to a particularly charming bug.  But she continues on in her tone that brooks no disagreement.  “But the Council has made their decision.”

“What I simply don’t understand is—” Shadoweaver seems suddenly to realize her audience.  “Adora.  Catra.  In the yard, now,” she says.

They go.

She doesn’t realize that it's cold outside until she sees her and Catra’s breaths hanging lace-white in the winter-morning glare over the old dead grass.  Moved to where they can’t be seen through the kitchen windows, she begins to feel freed of her sticky bodilessness.  Alone with Catra, it can be sufficiently orienting to know that they’re facing each other, not quite three feet apart. “Adora?  Adora.  You aren’t seriously considering this, are you?” she says.

Catra’s got her feet shoved only halfway into her sneakers, and a loop of hair sticking apart from the rest that Adora wants to tuck away behind the shell of her ear.  “What do you mean?”  She can say it without feeling part reverie.

Catra bends her wrist, agitated, rotating it back and forth like a wrench on a leaking pipe.  “The slayer stuff.”

“What is there to consider?”  All her thoughts are returning to her head, heartbeat fast, clear and distant and multitudinous as a school of darting fish.

Catra’s brought her other hand around to clasp her wrist, holding it still.  “So you’d do it?  You’d go live with some Watcher we’ve never met, and transfer to Bright Moon High, and you’d leave me?”  There’s some bright peal to her voice, higher than censure and blunter than challenge.  Adora can feel the familiar turf of argument slipping away beneath her feet, sand into the sea.

Unbidden, she considers Adora-without-Catra, but the shadowy figure of her remains incoherent; inaccessible as an unmet stranger, treading though she may through some familiar grove. “She might not—Shadoweaver might be able to keep me.  And if she can’t, Bright Moon is a half hour bus ride away.  You’re still going to hear from me every day.  I’ll call you.  I’ll do whatever it takes.” She can’t force a smile, but she firms the line of her mouth.  “I can’t not be the Slayer, Catra.  It’s not a—choice thing.”

“Can’t you see anything that’s right in front of you?  Shadoweaver’s not winning this one."  Catra says, not quite looking at Adora.  She's angry enough to vibrate with it, like the shimmer of air before a growing fire.  A familiar heat, which Adora has been warmed and burned by in turns, with something new and mercurial slipping through as she continues.  "And it is a choice to buy into it.  Why do you trust them anyways?  What has the Watcher’s Council ever done for us?”

Adora steps closer to Catra, meaning to touch her shoulder.  She sees in her mind's eye, knowing the fantasy already, her hand on the stiff ridge of Catra's clavicle: the tension there dissipating like candy floss on her dampened tongue some sweaty summer day, leaving nothing but the sugar-salt residue.  Instead, when she gets too close Catra reaches out to shove her away.  Time does not slow as her hands close around Catra’s wrists, still inches from her chest.  There is only the honeyed ease of it, like plucking a fruit from the vine, or a note from a string.  Slayer reflexes, she realizes.  What dissipates then instead of heat is an entire childhood of evenly matched competition; is last week when they wrestled here on this very grass and had gotten tired and laughingly called a truce before either of them could stay on top for more than a minute.  Catra's looking directly at her now, eyes wide and mouth closed.  Both of them, having been caught by accident, are silent and still.  Distantly they hear from the kitchen the even hum of Lighthope's clipped mild tones and Shadoweaver's rising derision.

When Catra speaks again it is softer than it was, echoing from some lonely place where a plea had wandered in and gotten lost one violet evening long ago.  “Of course it's a choice.  You can do whatever you want, Adora. You could run away with me.”

"It's not, Catra."  There's something a little sharp in Adora now, suddenly.  It had been quiet in the kitchen, that moment after Lighthope had given her her destiny.  She doesn't know how to explain to Catra that what she had felt then had been vertigo, yes, but in the changeable instant before that, the clarion release of certainty.  She closes her eyes.  She tries.  “When she said I was the slayer it was—it was, I don’t know.  A relief,” she says, thinking of the absolute gratitude of it, but she knows already, feeling Catra tense under her palms, that she’s made a mistake.  She changes tacts, opening her eyes.  The anger that had absented itself, by will or by force, from Catra’s expression just a moment ago has returned in its entirety.  "You heard Lighthope back there.  I was called because the world needs a slayer again.  I can't just turn my back on people who need me."

Catra wrenches her hands free and Adora lets her.  They curl to fists at her sides as she hacks up curling laughs from somewhere deep in her chest.  Adora watches in horror.  "So you really believed all that crap about how you were the hero, huh?"  She's smiling now, bitter-edged.  "I guess it makes sense.  You were always—the golden girl who'd thank someone for lying to her.  I don't care.  You can go play toy soldier if that’s you want.  If that's really how it's going to be, you don't need to bother to write."

"Catra—"

"Adora."  Shadoweaver, from the kitchen door.

"Go on," Catra says, "Isn't that your cue?"

She goes.

“Ms. Lighthope here is going to be your new Watcher,” says Shadoweaver.  She’s smiling with none of her teeth; Adora watches carefully the fattening of her glamor-smooth cheek by degrees.  The woman in question is sitting calmly at the kitchen table, having acquired a cup of coffee since Adora had seen her last.  “Go pack your things, Adora.  I told her it wouldn’t take more than an hour.”

“Feel free to take your time,” Lighthope says placidly.  “Better than missing something and having to come back.”     

She doesn’t own a suitcase of any kind, so she makes do with big black trashbags. It’s fine, there’s not so much to take.  They had done laundry yesterday, so it’s easier than it normally would be to separate the stack of shirts that is hers from the stack that is Catra’s.   When she finishes with her clothes there’s the crate under her bed filled with old books and accumulated detritus, her backpack and all its contents, her hairbrush which she nearly forgets.

She leaves the big shared bottle of sunscreen that she’s always trying to convince Catra to use on their desk as a reminder, and stares without meaning to at the spot on her bed where Catra might be sitting, if she had come in with her.  Shadoweaver had only asked for Adora, but usually that didn’t stop her from at least trying.  Adora goes to the window and loosens the blinds just a little, peering through the slats to see Catra still in the yard under the trees, back squared to the house.  It’s been close to an hour already; she must be getting cold.  Adora can’t see her hands—crossed perhaps, or shoved into her pockets.

Maybe it’s better that Catra hadn’t come up; easier to dismantle her life without half of it looking on.  She puts her backpack on, and places her bag of clothes on top of her box of stuff.  They’re lighter than they should be in her arms.

Shadoweaver is waiting for her in the hall.   “Adora,” she says.  “It seems that you are to leave my care.”  She comes closer to cup her cheek like an egg in the palm of her hand.  She smells, as always, like the anise and wormwood she uses in her spells.  The familiar scent makes Adora tremble slightly.  She feels for a moment exactly like she did when she was very young, when she had lived in this house alone with Shadoweaver, before Catra had arrived.  “Do as I have taught you.  Be good.  Do not forget where you came from.”

“Yes, Shadoweaver,” Adora says.  “I will.  And I won’t forget.”

Shadoweaver nods once, unreadable, and drops her hand.

Adora walks out the door then and puts all her things in the back of Lighthope’s little blue sedan and climbs gingerly into the shotgun seat.  When she glances back, it’s still only Shadoweaver there, cutting a dark figure on the porch under the faded blue paint of the house Adora’s spent her entire life living in.  She looks away when the car starts to move, before the image can grow small.

Lighthope’s house is a quiet fifteen-minute drive away, but in most other respects it is very far from Adora’s childhood home.  Every room is spotlessly tasteful if austere, like a model home for a housekeeping magazine the day before the decorator is meant to come in and add the final softening touches.

There are two spare rooms.  Lighthope lets her pick between them; Adora chooses the smaller one, which approximates the size of the room she had shared with Catra up until that morning.  Lighthope tells her to take a minute to settle in, and to find her downstairs in the basement when she’s ready.

She puts her things down, opening the closet door experimentally.  A tree outside her window casts dappled patterns on the muted green-gray color of the walls.  The bed is larger than the one she has at—she cuts herself off before she can think home.  When she runs her hands over the blankets, they’re smooth and soft and soothing.

Lighthope had said “basement” but clearly actually meant “training facility.”  Racks of knives and swords and stakes line the walls.  There’s a punching bag and weights in one corner, and a pommel horse in another.  Before she can take in very much more however, Lighthope gestures for her to sit in one of the chairs at the side of the room.

“I was thinking that we would run some diagnostic tests on your reflexes and strength,” Lighthope says.  She’s rummaging around in a bin for something.  “And at the same time we can talk.  I’m sure you have questions for me.  I have questions for you.  Aha!” says Lighthope, seeming to find whatever it is she was looking for.  She tosses something to Adora which she catches on impulse, which is how Adora comes face to face with her second magical stone of the day.  Lighthope explains that it’s to measure her reflexes, and tells her what actions to take when it changes color or temperature.  Frankly, it seems not dissimilar to Adora to a more convoluted version of the popular children’s toy known as the Bop It.

Lighthope starts to speak as soon as Adora’s gotten the hang of the controls.  “I told you that you’d be transferring to Bright Moon High,” she said.  “But I’m afraid I didn’t explain that I’m actually the school librarian there.”

“That’s really cool.  I’ve always loved books.” says Adora, before becoming distracted by the orange flashing of the object in her hands.  “But aren’t you a Watcher?”

“I was assigned to the Bright Moon High because there are several Potential Slayers attending school there.  And it’ll be convenient to be able to easily contact you during the school day in the case of any emergency.  Furthermore, the Hellmouth is focalized under the school library.”

“The Hellmouth?”  Adora really wishes that Lighthope hadn’t given her such a distracting task.  The magic stone starts to burn her fingers before she quickly taps her chin against it.

“Oh, yes.  I suppose you might not know.  The city of Bright Moon happens to be built upon a Hellmouth, a place where the barriers between dimensions are particularly weak.  That’s why there’s an abnormal amount of demonic activity here.  For the past several decades it’s been relatively quiet, but recently there have been rumors of stirrings. . . and of course now you’re here.”

Adora’s changed her mind.  She’s grateful that the stone has started to emit a faint smell of grapes and she has to breathe on it, freeing her from the responsibility of responding to all that.

Lighthope continues on blithely.  “Now I’m sure you’re wondering about your schedule here.  From when school ends at three until dinner at six will be sufficient time to get your homework done and everything of that nature, I hope?”

“Yes,” says Adora haltingly.  She’s surprised; Shadoweaver had never blocked out free time like that.  You never knew when she would appear and commandeer four hours of your time for strength training, and simply had to plan schoolwork and other activities around the expectation of being suddenly interrupted.  There were certain times she would be out of the house, but even then she often left lists of tasks to complete.

“After dinner we’ll go over training until a little after sunfall, and then you’ll have patrol from then until eleven.  Later, maybe, depending on recent activity or any particular supernatural plots.  Then a brief debrief and bed.  Weekends you have free until lunchtime, and then training, once again until sunfall when patrol starts.  We can start there and adjust at will; flexibility is important for a Slayer, after all.”  Somehow Adora had heard the semi-colon.  Lighthope pauses expectantly.  “Any questions?”

Adora does in fact have many questions, but she doesn’t know where to begin, so instead she says “Maybe not, um, right now.  Can I ask them as they come?”

“Of course,” says Lighthope.  “Why don’t I start asking you some questions to establish general knowledge?  All things Shadoweaver should have taught you a long time ago, but it never hurts to be cautious.  What are a vampire’s weaknesses?”

Adora relaxes.  This really is an easy one.  “Sunlight,” she says.  “Can’t come in unless invited, of course.  They look human usually, but they have to bare their vampiric face before biting.  Fire, decapitation, holy water and symbols of any denomination.  A stake—well, anything wooden really, through the heart. . .”

She calls Catra that night.  It goes straight to voicemail, which doesn’t surprise her; quite probably she’s with Shadoweaver.  “I’m, um, sorry for how we left off.  I meant it when I said you weren’t getting rid of me so easily.  Please call me back and we can work it out, okay?  I’ll even turn my phone off silent,” she says, putting a little bit of a smile into the words.  I know you didn’t mean it, she wants to say.  But something other than sensing it wouldn’t go over well catches the sentiment before it can leave her throat.  After all, she herself had meant every word.

She has to get to school early on Monday to pick up her schedule from the registrar, but she otherwise faces shockingly little administrative hassle.  She supposes it helps that her new guardian is the school librarian; similarly, she’s sure the Watcher’s Council must have greased some wheels to get her wardship paperwork approved so quickly.  Bureaucracy: as ever, impenetrable until nepotism.

If there was any time that she had to transfer, second semester senior year is probably as good as any.  Bright Moon begins a week after Horde High, so she even gets to start at the very beginning of the semester.  Adora’s gotten all the classes she wanted, i.e. the ones that matched up best with the classes she’d been previously taking, much to her relief.  In general it seemed that all the classes she was taking at Horde were also offered at Bright Moon, and then some.  She pulls out the school map she’d printed last night from the website and notated with every possible classroom that she might have, and locates her first class, which is Physics.  She sighs.  She’s always nervous on the first day of school, meeting all her new teachers, and she’d thought that she’d already had that particular high school experience for the last time.  She’d also thought that she had been looking down the barrel of the last few months she had of her life as it always had been, expecting to slip easily, even sweetly, through the remaining dregs of her childhood.  Instead, she had woken up Saturday morning with everything having changed in the night.

She walks into the Physics classroom unreasonably terrified that the teacher won’t know why she’s there and will tell her there’s been some mistake and there isn’t room for her after all.  Instead, the woman smiles at her and pulls out an extra syllabus and a classroom copy of the textbook.  By stroke of luck, it’s the same textbook she was using at her old school, although they’re two chapters ahead that she’ll have to catch up.

This whole year, Catra had been the one explaining tricky physics concepts to Adora before tests, theatrically exasperated as she looked over her homework, playing at impatience it didn’t seem she actually felt.  Catra, who hasn’t returned any of Adora’s three missed calls and has left five of her texts on read.  Somehow, Adora doesn’t think that making her next plea about an upcoming physics lab is going to be the thing that breaks the silence.

Other than a few curious glances when she introduces herself, her new classmates seem to all ignore her, though in a way Adora senses is more polite than belligerent.  All her classes go much the same.  In AP U.S. History, she faces the exact opposite problem as she had encountered in Physics, finding that she’s been catapulted back in time to learning about the Great Depression.  There’s an art elective requirement here that there hadn’t been at Horde, and she’d decided to pick up Drama, where she quickly finds herself feeling out of place.  Oh well.  She can’t guarantee that her monologue is going to have “emotional verisimilitude”, but it’ll be really thoroughly memorized.

At lunch she heads to the library to pick up her new textbooks.  “Hello, Adora,” says Lighthope.  It’s nice to be talking to someone who already knows her name.  “First day going smoothly?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Adora, with slightly too much emphasis, and hands over her schedule.  “It’s going great.  Can you get me my textbooks, please?”

“It is my job.  Or so I’ve heard,” says Lighthope, and disappears into a backroom a moment later.  Adora takes a mint from the bowl on top of the counter as she waits.  Behind her, she hears the door swing open as several new people walk in.

“—can’t believe you forgot to return your book before break,” she hears someone say behind her.

“Shut up.  Anyways, you’ll never guess what my mom told me happened this weekend,” another person says.

“But I won’t have to, right?” the first person says warmly.

Some jostling, and laughter; the door jingling again as the group finds their way out.  The last words she catches before the door closes are, “she said that a new Slayer has been called!  And she’s in Bright Moon!”  Adora suddenly begins to sweat.  It’s not like being a Slayer is a tightly-kept secret—or at least to those in-the-know about the supernatural—but it doesn’t seem right for some random students from her school to know about her being called when she herself barely knows about it.

Lighthope appears again, with a thick stack of books.  “Here you are,” she says.  “And I’ve included some extracurricular reading from my private collection as well.”

“Thanks,” says Adora, and turns to beat a hasty retreat.  Instead, she runs directly into the group she had just been eavesdropping on—two people she’s pretty sure she recognizes from her Drama class—sending all of her books tumbling to the ground.

“Sorry!” she and the boy she’d collided with say simultaneously.

“Oh, hey,” he says, cheerfully.  “Aren’t you the new girl?  Mirabella?”

“It’s Adora,” says Adora.

“And I’m usually so good with names,” says the boy, with what seems like earnest regret.  “I’m Bow,” and gesturing to his friend, “and she’s Glimmer.”  He scrambles to help her pick up her books.  “Pearson Physics,” he says, reading the title off as he hands it to her.  He reaches for the big leather-bound book Lighthope had placed on top of the stack.  “And, uh, Rhythelyyke’s Fantasticke Codex of Demons?”

“Wait a minute,” says Glimmer.  “Transfer student, Demonology, it’s you, isn’t it?  You’re the new Slayer?”

“Um, no,” says Adora.  “That’s ridiculous.  Absolutely not.  I actually don’t know what a Slayer is, even.  Also, I have to go.  Right now.  I’m late for class.”  She turns and runs.

“It’s lunch!” Glimmer hollers after her.  It might not be her most graceful exit, after all.

The gibbous moon hangs plump and growing in the sky, the first night Adora sets out to parley with the forces of darkness.  Adora leans against the chilled white marble of a mausoleum and waits restlessly.  She can’t help fidgeting with the stake in her hands.  There’s a rustle from the undergrowth and she turns, poised to attack, but there’s nothing there but a squirrel chittering away with a nut.  Lighthope, several feet away, stands as isolate and stiff-backed amongst the rows of gravestones as she had, so few days ago, in the middle of Shadoweaver’s kitchen.

She hears the dim banging of it first: two furious fists against the inside of a coffin.  The indistinct break of the splintering wood, and then the  hard scrabble through six feet of dirt before emergence.  Adora remembers reading once that new vampires wake furious and with a burst of strength, as a survival mechanism.

“So?” Catra had said.  “Don’t you sometimes wake up furious?”

Surely not as furious as this.  Still covered in dirt and clothed in the nice tuxedo he must have been buried in, the vampire lunges at her with his fangs out already, the hard ridge of his brow wrinkled and protruding in his demonic form.  “Hey,” he growls, sounding somewhat offended when she dodges easily and aims a kick at his torso.

“Good form,” Lighthope says approvingly from three graves over.  Adora wishes she hadn’t; it distracts her from the wild headbutt the vampire makes that lands somewhere around her shoulder.

She hisses and backs away a moment, before intercepting his next punch and wrenching his arm to the side, resulting in a satisfying crack.  The vampire groans.  “Guess that would have been too convenient, huh?”  he rasps.

“You should have read his movement in the way his neck tensed. . .” Lighthope continues on in the background.  Adora tunes her out.

For wild minutes she and the vampire trade blows, his frenzied movements against her compact ones.  Her earlier restlessness has petered out against the bulwark of a whole lifetime of training.  He’s distracted for a moment, and she knows without quite understanding the mechanism of it the place where she can put her hands and throw him against the tombstone behind him.  She’s never done any such thing before.  It wouldn’t have been practical; she didn’t have the strength.

But now, she heaves, and he crashes against the stone skull first.  He’s just looking up, dazed, when she crouches above him and puts the stake through his heart.  His eyes haven’t yet had the time to widen, when he bursts haplessly into a cloud of golden dust.  Adora pants.

There is a thrill in it.  He’s not going to leave the graveyard, not going to happen upon a hapless woman stumbling home alone late tonight from a party.  Adora had done that, with her foreign strength.  That woman is going to wake up tomorrow morning, hungover but unharmed.  Adora feels, suddenly, good.

“Next one?” she says to Lighthope brightly. 

That night when she goes to sleep, there’s the cool shape of a bruise pressed dark against her collarbone.  She forgets it sometime in the small hours, mid-turn in the dell of a dream, and in the morning when she wakes it’s disappeared already.

In Drama the next day, the teacher tells everyone that as a warmup they’re going to pair up and tell each other stories with both true and made-up elements.  “Oh,” he says.  His brow wrinkles as he looks at Adora, a new problem occurring before his very eyes.  “But with our new student I’m afraid we no longer have even numbers.”

Bow raises his hand with a winning smile.  “Don’t worry, Mr. Haven.  Glimmer and I can take her.”

“Excellent,” Mr. Haven says.  His moustache looks like it should scratch his nose when he speaks.  “Please look after Adora well.”  Adora grits her teeth, already feeling badly looked-after.

The room fills immediately with the ambient hum of everyone beginning to tell their stories.  There are probably situations that would make it more difficult for Adora to avoid Bow and Glimmer than this one, but she’s having a hard time thinking of them right now.  Instead, she’s contemplating how disapproving Mr. Haven would be if on her second day of school she asked to go to the bathroom five minutes into a class taking place immediately after recess.

“Listen,” says Glimmer.

“Yes?” says Adora, clearly eyeing the exits.

“I’m really sorry about yesterday!  I know I maybe came on a little strong.  I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.  I guess I just got excited because I mean. . . my mom’s a witch, so I’ve known about the Slayer since I was a little kid.  The one girl with the strength and skill to go toe to toe with demons and vampires?  I always thought it was the coolest thing.  And, I want to help.  I’m a witch too.”

“Well, mostly she just levitates pencils and brews me potions she insists are going to make my skin glow.”

“Bow.”

“I said mostly!  And I think the potions are working.  I do have good skin.”

“Anyways, I made you a charm.  It’s a fire spell.  If you have it and you say the incantation, it’ll set whatever’s nearest to you just a little bit on fire.  I thought it would be useful, since, you know.  Vampires!”  Before Adora can protest, Glimmer thrusts what looks like a scrap of fabric with some sigils on it into her hands.

“Okay, the incantation is flameo.  Can you remember that?  You have to make sure not to say it until you want to use the charm.”

“Yeah, you don’t want to set something on fire accidentally,” says Bow.

“No, I wouldn’t want that,” says Adora, dubious, and shoves the thing into her pocket as Mr. Haven calls for the class to come back from their groups.

She doesn’t think of it at all that afternoon.  Later that evening, it’s the second vampire that does it.  Lighthope will chide her later for not paying enough attention to her surroundings; blindfold her and make her catch frisbees in the dark.  But in the moment, what she knows is that she’s on the precipice of beating the opponent in front of her when suddenly there’s a blur at the corner of her vision and she’s been caught in a chokehold.

She thrashes for a moment, jamming an elbow into the figure behind her and loosening the grip on her neck sufficiently for her to gasp in a breath, but not to ultimately free her.  She doesn’t know exactly what makes her remember—quite suddenly—the lights of the drama classroom, Glimmer pressing the fabric into her hand, telling her the incantation.  Make sure not to say it until you want to use the charm!

“Flameo,” gasps Adora, feeling foolish.  Almost immediately, the vampire behind her drops her arm.  She turns; it’s a dark-haired woman, who’d probably died in her mid-thirties.  Her shirt is definitely on fire: a very small fire, which she is even now starting to put out, but a fire nonetheless.  Adora takes the moment of distraction to stake her, and then the first vampire, luckily still down and out from his previous injuries.

“Huh,” she says.

“What was that?” says Lighthope.

“Oh!”  Adora’s tripping over her words suddenly.  “So there’s these kids at school who. . . know I’m the Slayer?”

“Who?” Lighthope asks, a little bit shortly.

“Bow and Glimmer?”

Lighthope seems to relax.  “Unsurprising.  Glimmer’s mother is a powerful witch.  She’s the leader of the major coven in Bright Moon.  Bow’s parents run the rare and historical bookstore in town.  They have an impressive stock of mystical sources.  I’ve bought some Akkadian texts from them.”

“And today in class Glimmer made me take this fire charm that I then totally forgot about and swear I wasn’t even going to use—but then when the vampire grabbed me I suddenly remembered it—”

Lighthope hums.  “It’s good,” she says finally, “As a Slayer, to have—contacts—among other supernaturally inclined folks.  It was clever of you to remember the charm, but in the future you must strive to never be put into such a position to begin with.  As a Slayer, you must remember that ultimately others are dependent upon you, not the other way around.  Understood?”

“Understood,” says Adora, feeling as if she’d just dodged something.

She hears Bow and Glimmer long before she actually gets to the table they’re eating lunch at.  Her hearing has changed since she became the Slayer.  It is not that things are louder, exactly, but sharper.  A fly she can hear buzzing from across the room, and know with strange certainty just whose desk it’s hiding behind.  The stutter in the breath of a stranger as she passes them by.  Details about her classmates’ love lives from halfway across the cafeteria.

“Do you know if Mermista and Sea Hawk are dating again?”  That’s Bow.

“I didn’t know they’d broken up.”

“I’ve been paired with him for our English project, which is awesome, because you know he and I are bros, but I just want to know what I’m getting into. . .”

“Hi,” says Adora.

Bow and Glimmer pause and turn to look at her in unison.  She suddenly feels strangely self-conscious, standing there and holding her lunch tray laden with rice and gray glop, even though similarly unappetizing selections of food are sitting in front of Bow and Glimmer as well.

“So, uh,” says Adora.  “I just wanted to thank you.  For the fire charm from yesterday.  It actually did come in handy.”

Glimmer gasps.  “It worked?  I mean, of course it worked.  Have I ever done a spell that didn’t work?”  She pauses.  “That’s a rhetorical question.”

The shape of an unfamiliar fondness begins to form in Adora’s chest.  “Yeah.  It worked.”

Bow cuts in.  “You probably don’t know too many people yet, right?  Since you just started school two days ago.  Why don’t you have lunch with us?”

“Oh!  Oh, sure.”  She scrambles to put her tray down and find a non-suspicious spot to rest her backpack.

There’s an awkward moment of silence when she finally manages to sit.  Then Bow mercifully pipes up again.  “So. . . ?”

“So?” says Adora.

“So, you can’t just say that the charm came in handy and then leave us in the dark, Adora.  You’ve got to give us the whole story!”

Adora takes a deep breath.  “Well, there was this vampire. . .”

Friday finds her sitting in the library with Bow and Glimmer at lunch as Glimmer desperately works through homework due the next period.  Adora’s browsing through Rhythelyyke’s Fantasticke Codex of Demons when Glimmer finishes, signing her name with a flourish.  “What day is it again Bow?” Glimmer asks, pencil hovering over the header section of her paper.

“January eighteenth,” Bow responds, without looking up from his laptop.

“January the eighteenth?” says Adora.

“Yeah, that’s what I said.”

“Hey, that’s my birthday,” says Adora.  And then, after a moment: “I mean, today’s my birthday.”

“Happy birthday!” says Glimmer.

“Happier birthday!” says Bow.  “Are you doing anything?”

“I didn’t know it was my birthday until thirty seconds ago, so no.” says Adora.  Then she rests her head in her hands.  “Oh, god, I’m an adult now.  Actually, I’ve been an adult all morning.  I was an adult this morning when I messed up the milk to crunch ratio on my cereal.”

It’s because she’s looking down at the table that she misses the glance that Bow and Glimmer exchange over her head.  “Well, we know what this means!” says Bow.  “Impromptu birthday party!”

“At my house!” Glimmer continues breathlessly.

“I’m busy tonight,” Adora says.  “You know, Slayer stuff.”  But by this time she’s realized she’s talking to the empty air; Bow and Glimmer are at the front desk of the library, turning up the wattages on their smiles at Lighthope.

“Oh, no,” says Adora, her chair scraping against the carpet as she rushes to intercept them.  They’re already talking though, and she’s left standing frantically aggrieved behind them as they make their pitch.

“. . . And that’s why Adora needs to come over for dinner,” Glimmer finishes.  There’s a moment of silence as everyone seems to catch their breaths.  Adora opens her mouth to protest that she doesn’t need to do anything for her birthday after all.  But then:

“Okay,” says Lighthope slowly.  And then, turning sternly to Adora, “But I’m picking you up for patrol right at eight.”

Bow drives them all to Glimmer’s house.  It turns out that Glimmer has a car, but he’s been picking her up and driving her back from home every day anyways because he “doesn’t approve of the way she treats turn signals.”

Bow is by all accounts an excellent driver, and he sees them safely into Glimmer’s driveway.  “First things first,” says Glimmer authoritatively.  “We’re going to bake cupcakes!  And then we’ll order takeout, and then—games.”

The cupcakes come out misshapen and slovenly, with great globs of purple frosting sliding off the sides.  By the time they finish, everyone has a streak of flour somewhere on their clothes or hair, but they are undeniably delicious, and there’s no harm in licking some wayward frosting off a finger or two.  Afterwards, they order-in tacos.

“Shouldn’t we have had dinner first?” asks Adora, idly.

“Nuh-uh,” says Glimmer.  “Dessert first.  Birthday rules.”

“Never heard that one,” Adora says.

Glimmer laughs.  “But you didn’t even remember your birthday, so I’m the expert.”

They sprawl across the floor of Glimmer’s room, eating their tacos off the styrofoam containers and playing Uno with their greasy hands.  They’re all startled when the 7:45 alarm goes off on Adora’s phone to indicate that Lighthope is arriving soon.

“And before anyone can win,” says Adora.

 “It’s probably for the best,” Bow replies.

 “You’re just saying that because you’re losing!”

“The joy of Uno is that it is a game where one can return from extraordinary setbacks,” Bow says.  And then, suddenly remembering, “Don’t forget to take the extra cupcake!”

Adora picks it up, dislodging a clump of frosting as she does, which she immediately licks away.  It’s sweet in her mouth as she thanks them.

“It’s our pleasure,” says Glimmer.

“Group hug!” calls Bow, and Adora barely manages herself to disentangle herself in time to make it out front the house as Lighthope pulls up.

She beats eight vampires that night, easy as anything, a new record for her.  She can still taste the rasberry-sweetness of frosting in her mouth the whole time.  For a birthday she hadn’t even known was happening, she feels satisfied with the way the day turned out.

But slipping back into her room after her shower, as a breeze slips through the open crack of the window and cools the damp nape of her neck, Adora recalls another birthday.  She’d turned twelve on a Saturday, and after lunch, Shadoweaver with unusual amiability had told them as she left the house that they had the afternoon to do with as they pleased.  Her mind had just begun to whirr with the unfamiliar freedom when Catra smiled secretively at her and told her she already had a plan.

Catra had taken her first on one bus and then on another and they’d ridden for what had felt like an interminable period of time.  She’d been starting to worry that Catra had gotten them lost, even though Catra had always been the one who was able to get them where they needed to go without double-checking every timetable half a dozen times like Adora did.  Adora was growing irritable when they finally reached the squat gray building in an unfamiliar part of town that appeared to be their destination.  “Where are we?” she’d asked, plaintively.

For a long time afterwards, she hadn’t thought she’d ever again feel such an exotic pleasure as when Catra had leaned over and whispered in her ear, “the ice rink, you dummy.”  At the counter when they’d gone in, Catra had forked over what had to have been a week of lunch money and requested two pairs of rental skates, rattling off both their sizes before Adora could open her mouth.

They’d started out hand in hand, clinging to the wall, but by the end of the afternoon they were zipping after each other across the center of the rink.  Adora liked the smooth gliding motion of it, the windy rush of speed. 

After getting kicked off the ice by the Zamboni for what the clock hung high on the wall dictated ought to be the last time, they sat together on the low perimeter bleachers.  They’d put their shoes on already, but neither of them made any move to get up.  Adora looked around, dragging out the moments until they’d have to go, eyeing first one or two girls waiting in their brightly colored figure-skating outfits and then a nearby claw machine filled with stuffed animals.

“Which one do you want?” Catra had asked, with sudden intentfulness.

“What?”

Catra elbowed her.  “Which stuffed animal?”

“The pegasus,” she’d said, without thought.

Catra had hummed and dug a few spare quarters out of her pocket.  Adora walked up to examine the controls, but Catra had snapped, “Hey!  They’re my quarters,” and then a bit more mildly, “Go help me look at it from the side.”

Catra slid in the quarters and pressed the button to start, moving the joystick to the side tentatively.

“Forwards a bit?” she’d said.

“Just—there,” Adora had told her, feeling suddenly anxious.

The claw came down, hooking around the leg and torso of a pegasus plush.  They watched, riveted, as it ascended—with the plush—and ambled slowly over to the drop area before the claw noticeably loosened, landing their catch halfway over the ledge and halfway not.

“Ugh!” Catra had exclaimed, and banged the flat of her hand against the machine.  Adora remembered her slow-motion wonder as the force of it tilted one hoof and then another down into the chute area.  She’d whooped, hugged Catra, and then bent to pick up her prize.

“Best birthday ever,” Adora had said.  “I’m naming him Swift Wind.”

Swift Wind had sat on her lap all the long way home, and then on her bed for years afterwards.  She’d finally taken him off when she’d started high school, figuring she’s grown beyond such childishness.  But he’d still had an honored spot in their closet, and on nights when she was up late studying for a test, she’d take him out and put him on her desk to keep her company.

Adora checks her phone on impulse.  Catra still hasn’t responded to any of her messages, even though it’s gotten to the point that, sending yet another one this morning, Adora had become suddenly aware that adding to the pile of texts left on read would have seemed on some stranger’s phone distinctly pathetic.  The thought rankled.  This was Catra.  It was foreign to think about her in those terms.

She wonders if Catra had remembered her birthday.  Adora herself hadn’t, after all, but somehow it seems more implausible to believe that Catra would have forgotten.  She’ll go visit her tomorrow morning, she decides, maybe early when she’s likely to still be in bed.  It would have been easier if Catra would text her back, and then Adora would know.  If she would tell Adora where to be, she’d be there.  Wasn’t there a song that went that way?  Adora shakes her head a moment to clear it, and goes after a moment of thought to open the wardrobe, where she’d put Swift Wind, still slightly mishapen from his journey in the plastic crate, probably in need of a good squish to even him out.

He isn’t there.  In his stead, a crisp fold of notebook paper.  thought i told you not to write, and then on the other side, regretted giving him to you so i’ve taken him back. 

Catra hadn’t signed it, and hadn’t needed to.

How had she done it?  Adora had texted her her new address, she remembers faintly.  She thinks of Catra—taking the bus here, or had she gotten someone to drop her off—bridging that distance between them.  Climbing the tree outside, probably, which she’d always been good at—the cracked-open window—sitting on Adora’s bed, maybe.  What else in her room had she touched, before or after finding Swift Wind?

Adora leans her head against the wall, slumping.  She’s angry, she realizes.  It hurts acutely, like a jagged crack in a cup that prevents it from holding water: a wound that makes itself known.  All that trouble, and she hadn’t even stayed to say anything to her face.  So, as Adora had sensed anyways was true, Catra hadn’t forgotten her birthday after all: had remembered well enough to give her twelve feet up the rough bark of a tree; thought i told you not to write; the cold that seeps in from under the window to stir the fine hairs brushing her forehead; and an absence.