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Catra gets to know people by pushing their buttons.
It’s what she’s always done, all she knows how to do. She can admit these days that it isn’t kind or healthy or smart, but she doesn’t know how to trust anyone without knowing how far she can push them, how much it will take before they push back.
She knows, with Adora. She knows where the lines are and what Adora will do if she crosses them, and she knows that no matter how badly she screws up, Adora won’t really hurt her. Adora is exciting in every other way, but her anger is predictable, and that makes her safe.
It’s easy to figure it out, with Glimmer. Glimmer is quick to anger but even quicker to forgive, and anyway, Glimmer has already seen Catra at her most vulnerable and didn’t take advantage of it, which means more than Catra knows how to articulate. Glimmer will yell at Catra over a prank or a rude comment one minute and be laughing with her the next. It’s easy being around her, too.
Bow is harder to gauge. He’s too calm, too accepting. He has moments of self-doubt, but he never externalizes them, which makes him different from everyone else Catra has ever met. The whole time they’re in space, and hiding out with the rebels, and defeating Horde Prime, Catra is tense around him. She can’t figure him out.
She watches him, sometimes, at Bright Moon. For someone so kind, so wrapped up in his relationships with others, Bow spends a surprising amount of time alone. Catra sneaks looks through windows of him sharpening arrows, tinkering with tech, testing new inventions in an open courtyard. Even Glimmer, who’s not particularly sensitive about privacy and personal space and also attached to Bow’s hip, doesn’t bother him when he’s out there.
So Catra, of course, does.
He doesn’t even sound annoyed when Catra starts peppering him with questions about what he’s doing. Even when she grabs an arrow right out of his quiver, all he does is snatch it back with a gentle warning that it might explode. He laughs with her when she deliberately interrupts him practicing for the sake of “training.”
It’s unsettling.
Catra interrupts him in his room but all he does is hand her a stack of arrows and a whetstone when it becomes clear she doesn’t intend to leave. She almost stops after that - she doesn’t want to bother Bow, not really, but she can’t shake the feeling that the more he accommodates her tactlessness, her abrasiveness, her everything, the harder he’s eventually going to explode.
He finds her in her room one day, pushing open the door only after she tells him to come in. “Are you free this afternoon?” he asks, too respectful. He knows she doesn’t have any responsibilities here - no one trusts her enough. “I want to show you something.”
He takes her to a building, not far from Bright Moon but well-hidden in the woods, with similarly impractical architecture.
She finds herself following him inside unquestioningly.
“You must be Catra!” someone exclaims from the second level before Bow even has the chance to close the door behind them. Catra jumps, and Bow’s hand is suddenly in front of her, steadying without touching.
She pastes on a smile for George and Lance, who seem, against all odds, genuinely delighted to meet her. She’s nearing her limit on pleasantries when Bow makes an excuse and takes her to his childhood room, shutting the door behind them.
“So, that was my dads,” he says, his smile a little embarrassed but genuine.
Catra walks over to the window and crosses her arms. “Why am I here?” she asks. Bow’s trust and gentleness and patience itches at something under her skin. It keeps building and building and she doesn’t know how to handle it.
“A couple reasons,” Bow says, as if she’d asked something normal instead of invalidating his kindness like she’d been intending. “I wanted you to meet Lance and George, because you’re my friend and they love meeting my friends. I also could tell that you’ve been trying to get to know me, and I thought this might help.”
That’s an awfully generous way to frame what Catra has been doing. Logically, he shouldn’t even have put up with her for this long, but here he is, trying to accommodate her. “Why?” she asks. George and Lance are cool and all, but Catra doesn’t really get how they’re supposed to help her understand Bow.
Bow comes up next to her and looks out the window as well after Catra shies away from eye contact. “They’re my parents, and they’re really good parents. Growing up, the worst thing I could imagine was disappointing them.”
Catra just nods. She’s not learning anything. Nobody likes disappointing people, not really.
“Out of curiosity - what do you think I was afraid of, exactly?”
Catra actually has to think about that one. She can already tell that Lance and George have never even once threatened to murder Bow. “That they’d kick you out?”
Bow shakes his head. “Nah. They would never. I was afraid that they’d stop loving me.”
Catra’s arms tighten around herself. She’d never had any illusion that Shadow Weaver had loved her - Adora had, she always had, and Catra had lost that for a time, but that was different - she and Adora had chosen each other, over and over, even when Shadow Weaver had been trying to tear them apart. They weren’t supposed to love each other, not like families were.
“They didn’t do that either,” Bow says, gentle and smiling. “I know now that they wouldn’t have, no matter what. But a lot of the person I became started with that fear. I don’t know what it’s like to not have people in my corner I can fall back on, and I never want to.”
Catra’s tense, and somehow it’s on Bow’s behalf. He shouldn’t be sharing this with her, opening up his heart, exposing his vulnerabilities. That’s how people get hurt.
But at the same time, she knows that’s the point. He’s giving her what she wanted and needed and would never have dared to ask for - trust, so that she can trust him in return.
She could say something cutting now and see if he flinches. But she’s amazed to find that she doesn’t need to. She knows how to hurt him, because he’s told her. She trusts him.
“Thank you,” she says instead.
He bumps his elbow against hers, and her crossed arms loosen a little. “Anytime,” he says, his grin warm and full as ever.