Work Text:
When Adora and Catra were younger, sometimes they would list off to each other all the things they wanted to do. It was a hobby for both the worst and the best of days: on the worst, an escape, an impossible dream like a glimmer of hope in the distance reminding them that maybe someday, everything could be okay. On the best, it was a reminder of everything they might someday be able to do, a dream that felt closer to reality than ever before.
The list was never the same. Sometimes, it was filled with wondrous things. Magical, impossible, strange. Riding a dragon or living on a star or bursting into flames and rising from the ashes, reincarnated as something- someone - better. Other times, it was mundane and melancholy, their most quiet dreams spoken with the grandeur of a queen. Eating too much cake, writing a song, running far, far, far away, just to see what would happen.
Most often, it was a combination of both and something in between: a mishmash of everything they wanted, never simply one or the other. Those were the days when they still had the luxury of wanting things, the possibility of something other than their foretold destinies awaiting just past the horizon, if they dared to look.
Adora hadn’t thought about the lists in a long time. It had been even longer since she’d made one.
It was sort of funny, in a terrible, cruel way. Here she was, living out some of the most wild and improbable things in the world, and yet anything she wished still would not come true, and the things that did, no matter how dreamlike they appeared, were only demons masquerading as something prettier.
She’d given up on dreams a long, long time ago.
But, as Mara’s ship flew across the sky, she knew, deep in her heart, that there was nothing she could do. Adora stared out the window, knowing that Glimmer was almost certainly sealing all of their fates this very second, and with a single, deep breath, gave up on reality, too.
And then she made a list.
One: to never see Shadow Weaver again.
Two: to have time to stop and smell the roses.
Three: for everyone- Bow, Glimmer, Entrapta, Swifty, Perfuma, Mermista, Sea Hawk, Frosta, Scorpia, Micah, Spinerella, Netossa- to make it out alive.
Four: for Catra to live, too.
Five: if I died, to go to a place somewhere beyond the stars. There had to be an after.
Six: to eat cake one more time.
Seven: to travel through the universe with my friends by my side.
Eight: to see Mara somewhere in the after. To tell her that she tried, and I did too, and it wasn’t ever enough.
The list went on and on and on, a thousand dreams and wishes and hopes she’d never let herself think blooming in Adora’s mind before they were crushed by the reality that this would never be. And only when she had run out of dreams did she dare to remember the one thing she wanted above all the rest.
One: tell Catra I love her.
A sob wracked through Adora’s body and Bow rushed forward to comfort her, and though she loved him for it, everything felt empty.
Dreams were supposed to live. They had a lifeline, a heartbeat, entirely separate from anything else’s, and they were meant to breathe. Adora’s were suffocating. She’d let them into the world, for the first time she dared in years, and was met with cold silence from a universe that no longer cared. She’d let them into her heart, for the first time since Catra, and was met with panic overflowing into sadness, a blinding white terror that screamed none of it mattered when there were things she had to do, not for herself or the sake of dreams and wishes, but for Etheria.
She whispered them again anyway. Impossible dreams deserved a beautiful death at the very least, if they had to go.
One: Catra.
Two: me.
Adora wished so many things, for herself and for everyone she loved and the world she cared for so much, but in the end it didn’t matter.
There were no more stars on Etheria.