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There is noise from the kitchen adjoining the small living room that echos over to Adora and results in her looking up from the carefully placed pieces of the jigsaw she’s building. The noise, she categorizes, as laughter and she is immediately on her feet wanting to be a part of it. Glimmer is busy with a spatula in her hand splashing remains of tomato sauce over to the countertop. She sees Bow laugh as he grabs a towel and slides up behind her to clean the mess.
“- that is false because it is a known fact that cracking the spines is the only correct way!” The volume of Glimmer’s voice has pitched up, her words more solid than ever, letting Adora know someone has already cracked into the bottles.
“I refuse to stay here and endure this slander and knowledge that people like you exist,” Catra rolls her eyes, sitting back on the opposite, nearby, counter. As her eyes roll back she sees Adora in the doorway and smiles wide enough for sharp teeth to make an appearance. Catra has always had sharper teeth than the others.
“Adora your friends are heinous,” she declares, pulling Adora into the small, alive, space of their kitchen. Adora naturally settles in the space in front of her on the counter where her legs hang off. Arms are around her shoulders in an instant and Adora is laughing in the next.
“I don’t think the people who helped you with putting your bed together should be the one you’re directing that to,” Bow chuckles, having taken the spatula from Glimmer to avoid any further damage to the already damaged kitchen, starts stirring the pot on the stove.
Glimmer wordlessly hands Adora glasses she already knows what to do with, having memorized every detail of how everyone takes their drinks and gets to work. “Also, you are the one to talk,” Glimmer raises a brow over her shoulder, throwing a round lettuce ball at Catra that she immediately catches and hisses back at her.
Tearing off a piece, Catra looks at Adora, “Nightmare, they are,” but there is a smile in her voice and a lack of crease between her brows that lets Adora know there is no heat behind those words. They all silently, routinely, get to work on their own unsaid assigned tasks that they’d agreed to years before. There is chatter, there is bickering, and there is the scent of the noodles being perfectly sauced and tabled. It smells like home to Adora. She has a special little part of her brain where she stores these kinds of nights. With the four of them functioning around each other like they’ve had it tattooed into their muscle memory.
There were so many worse nights, and she remembers Glimmer’s hard, stubborn, so sure , hold on her hand as she promised it would get better because they had each other and that would be everything they needed. Glimmer believed those words and Adore echoed them back to her when she was on sanitized white floors, sobbing like someone had ripped apart every string that tied her heart together when they gave her the news of her mother. She held Glimmer together when she couldn’t manage to on her own and if she tripped up, Adora was there for her trust fall.
Adora didn’t start believing her words until the picture started to form. Catra and her living in Bow’s guest room and working with his dads, assisting them in their teaching practices for long enough to save up. Adora hopped from different things, never consistent, trying everything she could get her hands on and hoping one stuck. She still isn’t so sure about that one, but she has come to better peace with not having clear-cut answers for herself better than she did at 17.
Their tiny apartment, definitely not big enough for the four of them and the whole of each of their personalities is the biggest achievement Adora has felt she’s ever made in all of her 22 years. She cleans the corners and makes the bed every morning after Catra has tossed and fussed around on it enough. She sorts her closet and she makes sure everyone gets all their laundry back from the machine. She does all these small things so these walls know that never does a day go by that she’s not so relieved she could give herself this.
17-year-old her has left bigger scars than uncertainty in the space under her skin where guilt lives. She knows too well that after nights like these if the exhaustion doesn’t hit first, the guilt will. And she will sit in the corner of the main room on a small couch cushion and look out the window to the brick wall of the side building and try to remember how to breathe.
She worried that the way she loves was tainted by just what she knew of it but she tries to remember that if someone takes the responsibility of taking in a stray puppy, they’re making a promise to give the puppy all the basic needs that include an unconditional amount of love. 17-year-old Adora thought unconditional was a hoax but then she saw Glimmer huff and puff at her for getting ill but still put warm rags on her forehead when she was asleep. And Bow bring back her favorite comfort ice cream without being told after she found out she couldn’t afford the pottery class she found out about a week ago. She saw the way Catra tries in the best way she knows by grabbing for her hand when Adora starts fiddling with her cuticles or giving Adora the bigger piece of pastry silently. Adora learned through these people that unconditional exists and she reminds herself that just because she can’t hold it, doesn’t mean it is a myth. She can create mental images to define the word to her.
She reminds herself that she doesn’t need to feel the guilt, she hacks at it with all she has, and she hopes it’s not her imagination that the sides give out and it feels less all-encompassing. When words like “I took you in and gave you a roof when no one else had and this is how you thank me?” and “ungrateful” and “self-pity” starts sinking in between the spaces in her brain, she reminds herself that she has the rights and will to not owe someone who had used her for their own gain anything. Especially everything she has. If the three people sleeping with the drool dripping down the corner of her mouth and their arms intertwined, taught her anything it would be that she now knows that family does unconditional and doesn’t throw her back out like an exchanged item bought at a cheap convenience store claimed to be broken when she doesn’t comply with their makeshift images.
Adora finds herself releasing long breaths every time she witnesses love in action that keeps her going, that keeps a little child in the very very very secured, sheltered, safe part of her smile. Catra once mumbled to her between tangled sheets at late hours when Adora was thinking too much that that child is allowed to exist, it’s never too late. So the next time Adora offhandedly mentioned it, Catra got her a small toy bubble machine that they spent the entire day in the park playing with and Adora had never been so in love with a person before. She takes all these moments and she reassures herself that she shouldn’t be sorry for leaving and growing up and putting softer hands on her wide-open wounds and letting them heal.
So at the end of the night, when the noodles have all been scraped off the bottom of the bowl and the dishes have been sorted, all the blankets in the house are gathered around the couch, and a movie playing away on Bow’s laptop on the coffee table, Adora stuffs her face in the space between Catra’s shoulder and hair and breathes in and knows with a certainty that these people make her home and she will always come back to them, wherever, in every timeline.