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1.
Yeah, not to be crude and bother Glimmer's sensibilities or anything, but Catra's eaten a lot of shit in her life.
She's had her face slammed into all sorts of terrain at this point. And none of it's ever killed her before, but at some point she'd started to identify whether a grit of sand was from the Fright Zone or the Crimson Waste, or whether some mud at the end of someone's crusty boot was from the creature's latrine in the wayward end of the Whispering Woods.
The point is, Catra's had her face shoved into the ground a lot. This time, she thought it'd be a little different, but Dirt in Space(!) is still Dirt. And she still groans as she lifts her head up, rubbing at her ears to get some of the grit out.
"Really, Sparkles?"
"I didn't know you'd fall when I teleported us," Glimmer says with a huff, but there's an edge in her mouth that looks more like a smile than anything else. "I said to hold on!"
It makes Catra's stomach twist up a little, a flutter of warmth like the one she gets when Bow grins and hands her a new gadget he's put together, totally confident that it's not gonna spark up and wreck their whole ship again. Like the burst she gets when Adora pulls her closer in bed, arms wrapped tight around her waist as she sleep-talks and flails a little and still tries to shove her nose in between Catra's shoulder-blades even when arguing with a Dream Hordak over the principals of ice cream.
(Catra recorded it, it's legit.)
"What're we doin' here anyway?" Catra asks, pulling herself to her feet. Glimmer's finally stopped asking why Catra can't land on her feet every time they teleport. Glimmer still has a shit-eating grin on her face, though, and she grabs Catra's arm and leads her into the bustling market on this new planet they've landed on.
Space roadtrip or not, Catra still tastes the Woods in her mouth, and she feels a residual purr coming from Melog, from where they're prodding behind them. Melog's taken to being invisible during first steps into new places, but the creature lets out a pleased growl and catches up, reappearing from whatever glittery mist their powers manifest as.
"Y'know, I'm starting to think you have something in common with Sparkles," Catra says, petting one of Melog's ears affectionately, and letting herself grin when she hears Glimmer's telltale huff.
"Anyway, Catra, we're just gonna pick up some supplies while Adora helps Bow fix the ship." Glimmer twirls a spark of glittering magic around her fingertips, waving them as she talks, and seriously, she's just gotta be showing off now. "Besides! We haven't been sightseeing! It'll be fun to be a tourist."
"What the hell is sightseeing? What's a tourist—"
"Oh," Glimmer says. She has a look in her eyes that makes Catra think she might get dragged into more shit-eating nonsense. "This is gonna be fun."
"What?" Catra asks, and squeals when Glimmer grabs her arm and teleports them all again.
2.
It's natural to fall into hypervigilance in a new place, and Catra's done it all her life. The perked ears, trying to discreetly smooth out the tufts in her tail, silent steps on foreign ground.
Glimmer has never learned to walk quietly into anywhere in her life.
"Catra, look at this!"
Catra yelps as Glimmer shoves approximately two dozen bottles of small, shimmery liquids with long spouts and holographic labels. Glitter in a bottle. Of course she's picking them out.
"The locals have their own nail paints!" Glimmer's beaming, her hands still moving as she talks and picks up more and more bottles. "Well, I think they call it something different, and maybe they use it as paint for their walls but—look! It's so shiny and I used to do these things with my mom and Bow when I was little and—"
"How much are these?" Catra interrupts, asking the market keeper directly, who seems disinterested and is flipping through some kind of sappy comic book on their tablet.
"Two credits each," they drone, licking at an eyeball absentmindedly, and Catra gets a gut-crawling reminder of Double Trouble before she shakes it off and dumps half of the bottles back into the haphazard shelf they were kept on.
"Wait!" Glimmer is digging through her pockets and—yeah, yep, she's got the local currency, and Catra isn't even gonna question it anymore. "I got some coins thrown at me for showing people magic tricks in the street! Is this enough?"
The shopkeeper looks at the three coins, sighs, and lets them have about ten bottles, including some nausea-inducing glittery ones. Glimmer squeals, and in her excitement, forgets to warn Catra about teleporting again, so Catra squeals too.
3.
"This is silly," Catra observes, licking at her teeth to try to get at the marketplace mix-match of scents still clinging to her senses. The paints Glimmer has pulled out smell awful, and it's making her head hurt a little and her nose twitch, so it's all she can do to try and fixate on something else. "And it smells terrible. How is this not poison?"
"I'm pretty sure it is poison," Bow says, and he still has his hand out to Glimmer, anyway, and still allows her to paint his blunt nails with some kind of shimmering red varnish. "As long as you don't drink it."
"Oh, hush, no one's gonna drink it," Glimmer says, her tongue sticking out of her mouth in focus and it's kind of adorable and Catra would kill if anyone ever heard her say that out loud, except then Melog purrs and there's no hiding her fondness here, no shutting herself away into tiny dark corridors and run-run-running.
Catra sighs and leans against Melog's fur, their warmth, and watches the careful way Glimmer handles Bow's hands, calloused from archery and tinkering, and how strong fingers look a little bit more delicate with little hearts drawn into the nails with careful brush strokes and too much glitter.
Glimmer's, like, actually really good at that. It's almost pretty enough to distract Catra from the stench.
"Catra? Do you want me to do yours next?" Glimmer's already waving three bottles of polish in Catra's face, making her hiss and pull her face back.
"No way, it smells like the Fright Zone's locker rooms during cleaning day!"
"What does that even mean—the smell won't stay when it's dry! C'mon, please?" Glimmer makes big doe eyes and Catra is not weak not at all she's just still getting used to this friendship thing.
Catra grumbles under her breath, but says fine, and Glimmer squeals and takes a bottle of gold sparkle paint to her claws.
4.
"Whoa, what are these?" Adora asks, brows raised and that stomach-twisting smug smile on her face that makes Catra's cheeks feel hot and her guts feel weightless and her fur stand on end. But Adora's gripping her hand softly, warmth in warmth, and her fingertips brush over the tips of Catra's claws, and Catra scoffs a little, lets herself be pulled closer.
"I let Sparkles have at me." Catra grins crookedly and hooks a claw into Adora's collar. "What, you like it?"
"I'm just wondering, who are you?" But Adora is grinning too, wide and flushed in the cheeks just like Catra's feeling, and it has her on edge and on her tiptoes in all these good ways that don't really make sense because hypervigilance never felt this good and exciting, but then Adora pulls Catra's hand up to her lips and kisses it and Catra can't really breathe quite right when they're out here in the middle of space lightyears away from anything.
(Well. They're in a spaceship, not actually in open space but—whatever, that's not the point.)
"You're such a dork, Adora," Catra stammers.
"You look so happy," Adora says, eyes shining. "I'm so glad to see it, Catra." And that's a shake of the shoulders, a fleeting glassiness in her, fragile and crystalline before she pulls Catra even closer into a tight hug.
Catra hugs her back, because it's instinct and nature and impulse, but Adora's breath is warm in her hair and her stomach lurches again. "Adora?"
"It's nothing," Adora murmurs. "Can we go to bed?"
Catra doesn't fight it.
5.
Their room in the ship has a window. Well, it's more like the panelling in the wall can screen the cosmos around them with a push of the button, and it takes some learning to figure out how to do it, but, well, they get there.
They get here, with Adora and Catra in their pyjamas, with Adora sighing as she rests her head in Catra's lap, her breath ghosting up the skin of Catra's thigh. With Catra's fingers stroking through blonde hair, clawtips purposefully gentle, a shake in her hands as she tries not to remember each and every time she's broken Adora's skin with them and and and—
"Catra?" Adora sounds sleepy. Catra's ears flatten and she lifts her hand, almost jerks it away.
"Hi," she says. "Sorry, did I wake you up?"
"No," Adora says. She nuzzles her nose against Catra's thigh, right where the fabric of her shorts is riding up, and it's all so close and intimate and Catra lets out a purr without meaning to, feels the smile in her skin.
She looks down at her hands, hovering above Adora's head, black claws topped off with gold particles that shift and shine colors in the pale starlight thrumming through the ship walls.
"You're not gonna hurt me," Adora says, when she looks up and sees Catra staring at her hands. Adora pushes herself up on her arms, soft in the eyes and smiling in the mouth. "C'mon, you? Glittering princess kitten?"
Catra scoffs, gently pushing Adora's head back into her lap. "Oh, shut up—you just sleep, you idiot. You're never gettin' enough."
Maybe they both aren't getting enough, with the nightmares knocking at their mindscapes, but Adora laughs against her thigh again, says something like sure thing, boss, that has another burst of starlight and sunbursts in Catra's stomach, and she pushes her gold-tipped claws through Adora's gold hair, gentle, gentle, gentle.
( 6.
"Really? Gold?" Adora wrinkles her nose. "Also, why's it smell like that?"
"It's poison," Catra chimes. "Just pinch your nose and it'll be over in a bit. And I'm choosing gold so we match."
"Wow. You're a dork," Adora says, before she pulls Catra into a kiss like light rays. )