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Catra is the only person who has ever touched Adora’s soul mark.
She had probably thought Adora was asleep when she did it. They’d been eleven or so, and they’d both been in Adora’s bed. They’d been whispering about whatever, about nothing, and then lapsed into silence. Adora had been listening to Catra breathe, hoping that she wouldn’t sneak back into her own bunk before Adora fell asleep, when Catra shifted. Adora felt her lips purse in a disappointed frown before she realized that Catra was moving closer to Adora instead of away.
Then her hand brushed a few strands of loose hair away from Adora’s neck. Adora kept her breathing steady, not thinking about anything except how she didn’t want Catra to stop.
Catra touched each point on the mark gently, more gently than Adora had known her to ever do anything. It burned a little when the pad of her finger made contact with the mark, but in a nice way, like putting her hand just close enough to a furnace to feel the shift of the flames inside. She’d known as it was happening that she would never forget that night, that a part of her would chase that warmth until the end of time.
“You’re going to talk about it, right?”
Adora jumps at Bow’s voice from the doorway, then crosses her arms. Just because she’s sitting by Catra’s bed, staring openly at the matching mark on the back of her neck, doesn’t mean that she wants to talk about it.
“Sure,” Adora says, wincing at the obvious waver in her voice. She probably couldn’t fool Bow on a good day, but also, what he’s suggesting horrifies her to her core.
“Adora.” His tone says everything it needs to.
Adora tears her eyes away from Catra’s mark, not quite before she wonders if Catra’s ever let anyone touch it, what it had felt like.
She stands up and walks out into the hallway. The lights burn her eyes after however long she spent staring at Catra in the dark. Glimmer’s there, too, tucked behind Bow, gaze jumping between Adora and Catra.
“You have to talk about it,” Bow says, staring too intently at Adora, the way he does when he’s figuring out things that Adora doesn’t even understand about herself.
“Do you think she even knew?” Glimmer asks.
“She knew,” Adora says, not even exactly meaning to. She can’t resist bringing her hand to her neck, pressing down against the skin where she knows the mark is even though it doesn’t feel like anything special when she touches it herself. Still, she remembers the burning, alive feeling of Catra’s fingers against it like it had just happened. It’s easy to imagine what it would feel like if Catra’s hand were there instead, the mark searing against Catra’s palm as Catra pulls her closer -
She tucks her hands in her pockets. “We’ll talk about it.”
Bow raises his eyebrows, skeptical. “Soon?”
“Eventually.”
When Catra does wake up, the soul marks are far from the first thing on Adora’s mind. Soulmate or not, Catra is still Catra in all the same ways, wonderful and frustrating, that Adora remembers. That’s enough to deal with as they get Horde Prime’s ships off their tail.
Bow keeps shooting Adora significant looks whenever Catra’s back is turned, and Glimmer’s curiosity is probably visible all the way back on Etheria. They’re lucky Entrapta hasn’t flat-out asked. It’s distressingly easy to imagine the blank look on her face that would ensue from Adora attempting to explain.
The night after Entrapta removes Catra’s chip, Adora opens the door to the interior of the ship from the bridge and sees Catra standing on the other side.
She steps through the door and waits for it to shut behind her, before Bow notices and coughs significantly in their direction or something. “Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” says Catra.
Adora considers and passes on a dozen conversation starters, and comes up with nothing. Catra’s clearly braced for her to ask - she crossed her arms the moment she saw Adora, and her shoulders are tight, as if she wants to fold them in to hide the mark on the back of her neck.
Adora can’t think of what to say. Catra doesn’t say anything either, and the silence stretches.
“It was...good to see you!” Adora says, summoning a smile and stepping past Catra to continue down the hallway. Her heart is pounding like she’s just sprinted a mile and she has to shut her eyes as she walks away, just to keep from turning around to see how Catra’s mark looks against her new outfit. When she hears the door to the bridge open and close, she sags against the wall and covers her face with her hands.
It’s only a few seconds before she hears footsteps and jerks herself upright, only to immediately make eye contact with Glimmer. She presses her palms to her eyes again, already caught.
“What’s going on?” Glimmer asks, with the practiced patience of someone who knows quite well what’s going on.
The door to the bridge opens and shuts. Adora whirls around to see who’s entered the hallway and relaxes when she sees that it’s Bow.
Bow and Glimmer exchange a look that Adora can’t quite read. “Why is Catra brooding in silence on a windowsill when she was supposed to be learning how to fly the ship?” Bow asks.
Adora crosses her arms. “I don’t know.”
“Adora.”
“I don’t know,” she says, louder this time. Mindful of Catra on the bridge, she lowers her voice to an angry whisper. “I don’t know why she does anything, apparently! I don’t know why she didn’t tell me - before She-Ra, after She-Ra, whenever! I don’t know if she refuses to talk about it because she still hates me too much, or because - I don’t know!”
Bow takes a step closer. “I know a way for you to find out what she’s thinking,” he says.
Adora perks up. “Really? How?”
“Talk to her.”
Adora puts her head back in her hands and groans. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Well, let’s start with the basics,” Glimmer says. “Are you in love with her?”
Adora pulls her hands away to stare at Glimmer. “That’s the basics?”
“It’s a simple question,” Bow says.
He sounds earnest, so Adora tries to answer in kind. “I don’t know.”
Glimmer starts to roll her eyes and visibly stops herself at a glare from Bow. “How do you not know if you’re in love with her?” she asks.
Adora sits down, right there in the hallway, so she can wrap her arms around her knees. Bow and Glimmer sit down on either side of her. “I don’t know what being in love is supposed to feel like. In the Horde, no one - we weren’t supposed to feel things like that. Even these marks -” she gestures at her neck, for some reason unable to bear the thought of touching it, “They’re just dirty princess magic, put there to distract us. I know that’s not true, that you all don’t really understand them either. But that doesn’t exactly help me.”
“Then let’s try something different,” Bow says. “How do you feel about her?”
As soon as he asks, something steadies in Adora’s mind. It’s like she’s falling, but pleasantly, like everything’s okay and she can enjoy the thrill of it. She thinks about how it feels to look at Catra, the overwhelming joy at the fact that she’s alive and trying to make amends swamping her out of nowhere when Catra moves or smiles or laughs. She thinks about being near Catra, holding her, and realizes that the memories of those moments are rooted indelibly in her mind. She thinks about how much time she’s spent thinking about Catra, even when they were enemies. “I want to keep her close to me forever,” she says. It comes out a whisper.
Bow nods, then pokes her in the shoulder. “Talk to her.”
“Or we can lock the two of you in a closet until you’ve worked through all your feelings,” Glimmer says cheerfully.
“Who are we locking in a closet?” Entrapta asks, poking her head out of a vent above them. “It’s a good idea. Darla has very secure closets.” She pats the wall with a ponytail, beaming.
“Uh, no one. No closets necessary,” Adora says, climbing to her feet, trying to pretend that she hadn’t been seriously considering Glimmer’s idea. “I’ll, uh, see you later.”
“Good luck!” Glimmer calls after her.
Catra isn’t on the bridge anymore, which means that she left through Entrapta’s favorite vent, which means that she definitely doesn’t want to talk to Adora and Adora definitely shouldn’t go after her. Testing that argument against the versions of Glimmer and Bow that live in her head doesn’t go well, though, so she sets off to find her.
She checks Catra’s room first and isn’t surprised to find it empty. After that, she starts at the bottom level of the ship and works her way up. The lower level has plenty of nooks and crannies that Catra would probably love to hide in if it weren’t for the constant grinding and clanking noises from the engines. No one but Entrapta seems to spend much time down there. The main decks are too populated, so Adora climbs up the ladder that leads to the uppermost level, a wide room that looks like it’s meant for storage. Adora’s hair brushes against the ceiling when she stands upright.
Catra’s there, tucked against a window. She turns her head as Adora clambers up the ladder but looks back out at the stars before Adora manages to climb to her feet.
Adora’s mind goes blank when she notices the mark on Catra’s neck, barely more than a dark streak with the only light on this level coming from the stars outside. She steps closer. Catra tenses a little, but she doesn’t turn around.
Something inside Adora aches as she stares at the mark. At Catra letting her stare. She still isn’t convinced that talking about it will help, but she can’t ignore it any longer.
“How long have you known?” she asks.
Catra’s eyes flick to Adora, just for a second, and then return to the stars. “Not forever. How often do you actually look at the back of your own neck? We were eleven. Someone saw it when my hair got messed up during a sim. I threatened them to keep them quiet and went to check for myself. I wasn’t sure it actually matched yours, at first.”
“I remember you -” Adora reaches for Catra’s neck before she can talk herself out of it, but she pauses before making contact. Catra stays frozen for long enough that Adora nearly retracts her hand, then she nods.
Adora’s head swims as she reaches forward and touches the mark. The contact burns her fingertips, exactly like she remembers her own mark feeling on that night all those years ago - like she’s holding her hand up to a fire, warmth just shy of pain. Catra’s breath hitches, and Adora’s head swims as she takes in that Catra knows what she’s feeling right now, that Catra is feeling what Adora felt last time. That thought twists and burns through her mind as she traces the lines of the mark, just like she remembers Catra doing.
“I didn’t know what it meant, back then,” Adora says, still mostly focused on the mark. “But it felt like it meant something.”
“Really?” Catra turns to raise a skeptical eyebrow at Adora. Adora’s hand slides off the mark at the motion.
Adora takes the hint and pulls her hand back into her own space, then sits down next to Catra in front of the window. “Of course. It did mean something.”
Catra shakes her head, curling tighter around herself. “I was already - Shadow Weaver said I was already ruining you. Soulmate marks aren’t destiny, remember? There’s more important things.”
Adora tries to ignore the way her heart has started pounding in her chest. “Nobody says that outside the Horde.”
“That’s nice.”
“Catra -”
“What? Am I wrong?”
There’s a moment where Adora’s mind is empty except for the image of the light from the stars reflecting in Catra’s eyes. She’s glaring at Adora in a way she never quite did back when they were friends, but it’s softer than the way she’d looked at her when they were enemies.
Then Catra sighs and turns away. “Am I wrong?” she asks again.
“You weren’t ruining me,” Adora says. It’s not an answer to Catra’s question, but it’s better than I don’t know.
“I know that.” Catra’s curled up painfully small, gaze fixed out the window, and she doesn’t add anything else. Adora can’t tell if she really believes that - she’s told more convincing lies.
Adora starts a lot of sentences in her head, but doesn’t manage to say anything. If the answer to her questions - to does it mean anything to you? or do you love me? - is no, she doesn’t want to find out.
“So,” Bow says, when Adora steps into their bunkroom later. Beside him, Glimmer perks up. Adora sighs.
“We talked,” she says, collapsing across her own bunk.
“But you sound sad,” Glimmer says.
Adora turns to glare at her, at both of them, for how sure they had obviously been that the conversation would go differently. “Soulmate marks aren’t destiny,” she repeats.
It had sounded final to her when Catra had said it, but Bow just raises his eyebrows and Glimmer rolls her eyes. “Of course it isn’t destiny,” Glimmer says. “My mom always called hers and my dad’s their guides - the marks just let them know what they could have, if they wanted it.”
“Is that what you think?” Adora asks.
“Well, I don’t think it’s destiny, either, but it seems to me like it’s a little more than a guidepost,” Glimmer says. At Adora’s curious look, she continues. “I think it’s a responsibility - like being a princess, like being She Ra. Like, when you became She Ra, you decided to use the power to protect Etheria, just because you could. Soul marks aren’t superpowers, but if you think about it, you’re the only person who has a mark that matches Catra’s. And she’s the only person who has one that matches yours. Doesn’t that mean you have a responsibility to at least figure out what you are to each other?”
Adora stares at her, trying and failing to imagine how Catra would react to that speech. She would never have let Glimmer reach the end, probably.
“I’m with Angella, actually,” Bow says. “Even if falling in love isn’t a choice, it takes work to maintain and it becomes a choice, eventually. What you make of it is up to you. But...everyone knows they’re not random.”
Adora rolls to the side so she’s staring at the room’s metal ceiling. It’s worse, actually, to think about it as a choice than as her destiny. Responsibility resonates, but there’s no way that would go over well with Catra. She’s just as lost as before, only now she’s hyperaware of the places where her fingers had traced the lines of Catra’s mark.
“Whatever it is,” Bow says, “It has to go both ways. You went and talked to her, so now it’s her move.”
At the Heart of Etheria, Catra makes her move. It feels like destiny, then. It feels like a responsibility, and like a choice. It feels like everything.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Adora asks, later.
Catra turns toward her, gaze questioning until she seems to realize that Adora’s eyes were on the back of her neck. She sighs.
“I know it wasn’t because of anything Shadow Weaver said.”
That gets the faintest, briefest of smiles out of Catra. “Because you believed in it,” she says. “You already spent so much energy protecting me, helping me, I was terrified that if you knew, and you thought I was your destiny or whatever, you’d feel obligated to keep doing it, and you’d end up resenting me.”
“Oh.”
Catra really smiles at that - at the awkwardness, or something.
“Do you believe in it now?” Adora asks. It’s surprisingly easy, now that the answer doesn’t matter very much. She just wants to know.
“Honestly? I don’t know. If you want me to say that soul marks definitely aren’t just a meaningless trick of nature, you’re going to be waiting a while. But I love you so much it feels impossible, so who knows.”
Adora feels herself blush.
Catra grins. “What about you?”
“I love you,” Adora says.
Catra rolls her eyes. “I meant-”
“I know what you meant,” Adora says. Since breaking the sword, and especially since the failsafe, she’s had a bit of a fraught relationship with destiny. She doesn’t quite believe that the soul marks aren’t destiny, but she can tell it would be a relief to believe that. And being Catra’s soulmate doesn’t quite feel like a choice or like a responsibility - it’s an honor, and she can’t imagine turning away from it. “That’s my answer. I love you.”
Catra steps around Adora, who holds herself as still as she can.
She doesn’t touch the mark like it’s meaningless. She touches it like that patch of Adora’s skin is the most important thing in the universe. When she presses her lips to it, it’s the same. It doesn’t matter what it is, at least not anymore. What matters is Catra, and Adora, and love, and love, and love.