Work Text:
Catra slams her pencil down on the coffee table, letting it roll over her finished homework. She lets out a sigh of relief, slumping back against the foot of their couch. How's that for getting her life together?
Once her head has stopped echoing with economic terms and statistics, she starts gathering her textbooks and loose papers. She grins to herself - she's actually looking forward to her Monday classes. Who's going to participate in the lesson because she's no longer failing in her academic life in order to punish herself due to her self-loathing issues? This gal!
It's as she's coming back to the living room to put on a show that the door bangs open and Adora bursts in like a hurricane.
"Catra!" She rushes forward, grabbing onto Catra’s shoulders like she'll fall down otherwise. "You gotta help me - Monday - I don't have enough time-!"
"Whoa, whoa, slow down." Catra carefully pulls Adora’s hands from her shoulders and holds them in both of hers. She's trembling. "Take a deep breath."
Adora glares at her. "I don't have time-"
"Take a deep breath," Catra repeats firmly.
Adora complies. Eyes closed, she breathes in and out the way Perfuma showed them. Catra rubs circles over her knuckles. Eventually, Adora stops panting.
"Now tell me what's wrong," Catra says.
"I got an assignment due Monday," Adora starts, and when panic creeps back into her voice Catra squeezes her hands. "I'm supposed to make a full outfit, and I've got the fabric and the design, but there was the student council and basketball and Scorpia needed help for the drama club and I just… kept putting it off."
Adora groans, throwing her hands over her eyes. Catra knows just what's going on in Adora’s head - she's been working on her hero complex and inability to say no to people in therapy, just like Catra’s working on her issues. Adora has been getting better at it too, but of course she would hold herself to impossibly high standards even with this.
"You have to help me, Catra, please! Maybe I can get it done if I'm quick enough… Ugh, I'm such an idiot!"
"Hey, shh, none of that," Catra says, taking hold of Adora’s hands again. Physical contact grounds her when she gets like this. "Don't be so harsh with yourself. You made a mistake, it's okay."
Adora nods slowly. She repeats the breathing exercises and smiles weakly at Catra. "Therapy is making you really mature."
"Thanks, it's the trauma."
Now Adora smiles properly, laughing. Their friends get uncomfortable when they make jokes like that, but Adora knows just as well as Catra how liberating they feel. How powerful it makes them feel to laugh about some things that caused them - sometimes still causes them - so much pain.
"Now tell me what you need me to do."
Adora nods, making that determined expression Catra loves so much. "Okay, right. I'm going to get the fabrics from the closet, you make space here."
Catra salutes. Once Adora has gone to the corridor, she sets to work. She pushes their beat, hand-me-down couch and their coffee table against the wall. The movements are familiar - Adora mostly works in her room, but sometimes a project is too big or needs to be done in too little time. When that happens, Adora’s sewing chaos spills into the rest of their small apartment. Catra’s more than happy to watch her command it.
She doesn't bother moving their dining table - Adora will need it there to plug in her sewing machine. With everything set, she walks into the corridor. Adora is kneeling in front of their tiny closet, sorting through bolts of fabric, her pattern folder next to her.
“The living room is ready. Do you need anything else?”
“Found it!” Adora’s fingers close around a bolt of dark fabric. She pulls it out triumphantly. “Uh, can you get the dressform and my sketchbook? It must be on my desk.”
“Got it.”
Adora’s room, like her own, fits a bed, a desk, and little else. Catra doesn’t see the use in having separate rooms - she spends as much time with Adora as possible, sprawled out with her on the couch or in Adora’s bed. She only goes into her own room to sleep, and even then, most nights she has to stop herself from crawling into Adora’s bed like when they were kids.
But you can’t tell your childhood best friend you want to share a bed indefinitely and still pretend you’re not hopelessly in love with her. She has finally fixed things with Adora after spending so much time wrecking them apart. She can’t ruin it.
She finds Adora’s sketchbook immediately, sitting in the center of her desk. Though she would have to try not to find it - Adora’s desk is painstakingly organized, every drawer labelled. And there are a lot of drawers.
She’s about to grab the dressform when the corkboard above the desk catches her eyes.
It’s covered with pictures upon pictures of clothes. Catalogue cut-outs, photos from fashion shows, pictures of their friends in things Adora made. She explained it to Catra once - how she gets very self-conscious in the middle of a project and starts questioning her abilities, her place in the fashion course. So she filled the space above her desk with everything that inspires her, everything she’s working towards.
And right in the middle is a picture of the two of them.
They’re young, maybe ten, and Catra is wearing the first thrifted shirt Adora ever altered for her. It’s how she got into sewing - mending and altering clothes for the other foster kids since Weaver would only get her new clothes. She always did Catra’s first, and in those first days of realizing what her feelings meant, it made her heart flutter.
It still does.
In the living room, Adora is sitting on the floor, shuffling through her patterns. A sloping rectangle piece of paper is singled out besides her, “Catra - Slim pants” written on it in Adora’s neat handwriting. Catra sets down the dressform and the sketchbook.
“So what’s the plan?”
“I’m making a suit,” Adora says, pulling out several more pieces of paper - Catra’s name is on them too. “Slimmer pants with an oversized blazer. I have a shirt I made that I never showed in class for you to wear under it.” She pushes the folder aside, worrying her lip as she examines the pattern pieces. “I’ll have to adjust the blazer pattern, it’s too small like this.”
Catra nods. “I’ll leave you to it then.”
Adora hums absentmindedly, already immersed in her work. Catra doesn’t know anything to help her at this stage, so she heads into the kitchen and starts dinner. If she knows one thing about Adora when she gets like this is that she won’t eat unless Catra reminds her to.
They have some leftover meat in the fridge from yesterday, so Catra decides to make arepas - she’s been craving them lately anyway. She plugs in her phone, hits play on whatever playlist she was listening to before, and gets to work.
Adora’s whispered comments to herself reach her over the music, too quiet to make out as she kneads the dough. By the time Catra looks again, waiting for the grill to heat up, Adora is pinning pieces of paper on the dressform.
“Here you go,” Catra says when she hands Adora her food.
Adora attacks her food immediately, gulping down half an arepa in one bite before she speaks. “Thank you.”
Her smile makes Catra melt. She feels the heat on her cheeks and looks away. “My cooking isn’t good enough for thanks, princess.”
Adora shakes her head. “I mean, thank you for helping me with this, and calming me down earlier. And yeah, the food too, cause I had forgotten.” She averts her eyes, a flush on her cheeks. “Just… thank you for taking care of me.”
“We look out for each other, right?”
Adora smiles. “Right.”
Catra would do anything for that smile.
Once they finish eating, Adora hands her a slim piece of soap and the pattern for the pants, showing her how to pin it in place and trace around it. Adora takes the altered blazer pattern and starts making a mock-up out of muslin - something about making sure that the fit is right. Catra won’t pretend to understand any of it.
Eventually, she puts down the soap with a sigh of relief. The pattern is traced out in soft, shaky lines on the fabric. Now she just needs to cut it.
Adora is using the first pair of scissors, so Catra stands to look for the second one. I’m sure we had another one somewhere - there! On the table is a pair of old scissors Catra remembers Adora had since their days with Weaver.
Now, what Catra should have done when carrying scissors, especially with the floor so cluttered, was watch where she was going. Unfortunately, she is a woman in love, and Adora is kneeling over her work, biting her lip in concentration, the flyaway hairs from her ponytail golden in the light of the setting sun that’s streaming through their window.
Beautiful, Catra thinks.
Then her foot hits a heap of fabric and the floor goes out from under her.
“Catra!”
The fall makes her head rattle, but for some reason it didn’t hurt as much as she expected. Catra lifts herself on her arms and realizes three things.
One: the scissors fell from her hands at some point and skitted across the floor.
Two: Adora must have run to catch her because she’s lying underneath Catra, staring up at her with those gorgeous blue eyes.
Three: the playlist she put on was accidentally her “pining mess” one and right at that moment, as she hovers above Adora, way too close for comfort and barely breathing, the lyrics “I don’t wanna be your friend, I wanna kiss your lips” blasts from the speaker.
Because somebody out there hates her.
“I, uhh,” Catra trails off. Despite her efforts, her eyes fleet downwards. How is she supposed to form a coherent sentence with Adora looking up at her like this, her cheeks a pretty pink? “I found the scissors.”
“That’s - that’s good,” Adora stammers out. She’s gazing into Catra’s eyes so intensely it’s like she’s trying not to look anywhere else. She slips just for a second, her gaze falling downwards. Catra’s heart might burst.
A long second passes where neither of them talks. Then the song changes to something more upbeat and Catra pulls herself away before she ruins their friendship.
“Right, um… I should cut the fabric.”
“Yeah,” Adora mumbles, but Catra doesn’t see her face. She has already turned away, kneeling over the fabric. Adora goes back to her own work. The silence between them is so thick Catra could cut it with her scissors. Or maybe they would break in the process.
By the time she has cut the pattern from the lining fabric, she can’t take it anymore. She wants them to go back to the easy banter they had before. To know she didn’t screw up.
“I don’t get how you can make this thing into actual pants,” Catra says, her voice trembling just a bit as she tries to feign nonchalance. Come on, Adora. Just pretend that didn’t happen.
I can’t lose you again.
“Like, what even is this?” She continues, pinching the sloping point of the rectangle. Oh god, why did my voice pitch so high?
Adora giggles. Catra’s tense shoulders relax. “That’s the crotch.” Catra must look as confused as she feels, because Adora laughs again. She has explained this to Catra before, but seeing clothes take shape under Adora’s hands still looks like magic to Catra.
“It’s strange to think in 3D at first, but you figure it out eventually.” She snorts, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “Do you remember that first t-shirt I made you? God, it was so wonky.”
Catra does. One sleeve was longer than the other, the shoulder seam on one side was too far in and none of the hems were even.
“I still have it,” she says before she can think about it.
“Wait, really? I thought you would have thrown it out when we were fighting.” Adora’s work lays forgotten as she stares at Catra in awe. “Why didn’t you?”
Catra’s cheeks burn. “You made it for me.” She bites the inside of her cheek to stop herself from saying any more. Like how the t-shirt is under her pillow right now, or how she snuggles with it if she’s had a bad day.
She musters the courage to steal a glance at Adora. She’s smiling that dumb, hopeful, beautiful smile Catra loves. It takes her breath away every time.
Adora knocks their shoulders together, leaning her head against Catra. “Aw, look at you being all sappy. So cute.”
“I’m not cute!”
"No, you're right. You're the cutest."
"S-shut up!"
Catra is frowning, but Adora giggles, and how is she supposed to be mad at her then?
They go back to work like normal after that. By the time Catra finishes all her cutting, Adora is done with the mock up.
It’s a strange thing to look at. It's obviously a blazer, but it's not quite right, its lines messy and not as tidy as Catra knows Adora’s end product to be. A little bit like a sketch to a painting, she decides. The rough start of something that's bound to be amazing.
At Adora’s instructions, Catra slips it on over her shirt. Adora circles around her, a pincushion strapped to her wrist, muttering to herself as she makes small adjustments.
This is ok, Catra tries to convince herself. Everything is fine. Being the sole thing under Adora’s attention does not make my insides feel funny. No, sir. Her hands against my nape doesn't make me think of pulling her in for a kiss.
I’d love to kiss her though.
As she pins something at the front of the blazer, the loose hair from Adora’s ponytail falls in her face. Catra knows it’s as soft as it looks - she’s spent countless moments playing with it when they were young. She can almost feel it between her fingers now, itching to tuck it behind Adora’s ear.
Would Adora’s skin be as soft as she remembers it? Would her cheek feel as warm as Catra’s own?
Catra can almost see it, her hand against Adora’s cheek, her blue eyes glistening as she looks up at Catra. And Catra would guide her up, cradle her face in her hands like she’s her whole world, Adora’s breath on her lips as they come closer-
“Ok, all done!” Adora wipes the sweat from her forehead, planting her hands at her hips. “Now I just need to cut the pattern.”
“No, you don’t.” Catra grabs her wrist before Adora can go back to her fabric. Her daydream flashes behind her eyes again and a spark goes through her. “You’ve been at this for hours. You need a break, and it’s already late. Just continue tomorrow.”
“I can't, Catra, I don’t have that much time!”
“You also don’t have time to redo everything if you fall asleep at your sewing machine.” Adora averts her eyes, a telltale sign that she knows Catra is right but doesn’t want to admit it. “Look, just,” Catra sighs. “Take a nap? And you can continue later.”
Adora’s pout is way too cute - Catra is trying to be firm here, why is she making it more difficult?
“Ok,” Adora sighs, plopping down on the couch. Catra shrugs off the blazer but before she can leave, Adora calls her name.
“Catra? Can you… can you lie down with me?”
It’s a bad idea, Catra’s last brain cell tells her, but she’s already joining Adora on the couch, lying behind her with an arm over her waist. She can’t say no to Adora. Not when she looks at her like that.
Like she wants me, too.
It turns out Adora was more tired than she thought. By the time her “nap” was over, it was morning. Catra won’t complain - Adora needed her rest, and she will never mind a night spent cuddling her.
They go back to work after breakfast, Adora sewing the garments and Catra cutting the pattern pieces. After several hours, a small mountain of discarded pins and multiple stretching breaks, the suit is done.
“So?” Adora asks, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “What do you think?”
But Catra can’t find the right words, her lips moving uselessly as she stares at herself in the mirror.
The pants fit her like a glove, snug to her body but still comfortable to move in. The blazer is just big enough for her that she feels safe in it, but not so much that it swallows her. When she moves, the lighter lining fabric peaks through, soft against her skin.
She looks… powerful. Confident. Like she has her shit together, like she’s not just a broken girl fighting to keep herself upright. The girl in the mirror is her, but also someone she could only ever hope to be.
Her eyes burn. Her throat is tight.
“I love it,” she finally manages to say. “You’re gonna have the best suit in class, no competition.”
Despite how tired she is, Adora’s smile is blinding. “Thank you! We didn’t have to make a suit specifically though, I just thought it would fit the theme better.”
“What was the assignment then?”
“It’s, um,” Adora mumbles, her cheeks flushed. “We have to make an outfit inspired by a person we love and try to express who they are through our design.”
The knot in her throat has grown, choking her. Her lips tremble. She looks back at the girl in the mirror. More than anyone, Adora should know the mess Catra is. She was there when the first fractures appeared, there when Catra dug her fingers in the cracks and pulled, and she got hurt by her jagged edges.
But even so, the girl Adora sees in her is whole.
There’s a hand on her shoulder. “Catra? Are you ok?”
“No!” Her voice comes out loud, scraping and rough. She pulls away and Adora’s hand falls off her. “You can’t make me feel like this and then say that-”
She stops herself. Bites her lip. Her heart is beating too fast, but she can’t let herself shatter again.
Can’t cut Adoa again.
But as much as she might try to distance herself, Adora is right there by her side. “Feel like what?”
Adora’s skin is warm against hers. She can’t look away from where their hands meet. “Like I’m ok,” Catra whispers, no louder than a pin dropping. “Like I’m worth being loved.”
Adora’s arms wrap around her, knocking the air from her lungs. “You are.”
A sob bubbles out of Catra and she buries her face in the crook of Adora’s neck. “It doesn’t feel like that sometimes.”
“Catra, I know you’ve made some bad decisions, but you’re more than your worst moments.” Adora pulls back, making Catra look at her. Her palm is soft as she cups her cheek. “Of course you deserve love.”
Catra can’t look Adora in the eyes. They’re too bright, too tender. “Even if…”
“If?”
There’s a warmth blooming in Catra’s chest under Adora’s gaze, and all she wants is to let it consume her.
“Even if it’s you I want to love me?”
Adora’s eyes widen, just for a moment, and Catra sees the warmth in her chest reflected back to her.
Adora rests her forehead against Catra’s, and when she speaks, Catra can feel her breath against her lips.
“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love you.”
The warmth spreads, from her chest to her limbs, to the very tip of her fingers. Catra is going up in flames, and so is Adora, their lips colliding.
They’re both smiling into the kiss.