Chapter Text
Adora wasn't meant to be there.
She wasn’t meant to be on the bus that morning, and she certainly wasn't meant to be standing around a bunch of artsy teenagers in the atrium of Bright Moon’s Gallery of Fine Art. She had learnt the word atrium from the six times Glimmer had mentioned it in the last two minutes.
Glimmer, exemplary artsy teenager N.1, was the sole reason Adora was here. Cutting budget from the tech department (cause: severe underattendence) meant that the customary Senior Year Art Class Field Trip had been opened to any senior in the school.
Adora and Bow had been held at a metaphorical gunpoint to hand in their permission slips.
“Alright! Year 12, listen up!” The art teacher, also known to Adora as Glimmer’s aunt, was rounding up the twenty or so students nestled near the reception.
“You have all been given a worksheet to complete. You will work in pairs- excuse me!” She scoffed at the audible groan coming from the group. “You will work in pairs, it’s non-negotiable. Now, you’re allowed to choose your partner, but you will have to keep the pair until the end of the day. Year 12. Are. We. Clear?”
She enunciated her last words in the ‘don't make me file a report please’ way Adora had heard from every teacher and coach she’d had in her life.
Glimmer looked at her friends with apologetic eyes, and shushed Adora when she suggested racing Bow all the way home.
Instead, she half-whispered to get Castaspella’s attention. “Aunt Casta, could we please work in three?”
“I don’t remember you failing Year 2 Maths, Glimmer. There’s six of you, make it work or I’ll assign you in pairs myself.”
There had been six of them.
A group of three girls was standing in front of them. Adora recognised the purple-haired one as Entrapta. She was known for being the reason the tech department hadn’t been cut off years before. On the other side, a tall girl with cropped white hair was smiling and waving at them. They had a few classes together. She was quiet most of the time, only trying to make friends with Adora at the start of the year, when they had been randomly paired in PE.
And in the middle of them, there she was.
Adora knew she’d be here.
She had come to the realisation late last night, sleepless eyes staring at the blue light of her phone screen. It was always at times like that, scrolling aimlessly through her instagram feed at 2 a.m., that Adora would remember things. That one too many times she had embarrassed herself in public, the Geography question she’d forgotten to answer, what to get for Glimmer’s birthday (wait– had she forgotten Glimmer’s birthday?). Whatever it was, Adora would lie awake, worrying about it.
Last night, she had been worrying about Catra D’Riluth. Which was silly, because they saw each other every day. They’d cross paths in the school corridors. Adora would see her in grocery store lines, with those big red headphones of hers, wandering through the snack aisle. She’d hear her laughter in the park in summer months. She’d even seen her miss a train or two, never chasing after it, just scowling and checking for the next departure.
The population of Etheria ranged less than two thousands, it was expected to see the same face from time to time.
And yet, Adora kept on worrying.
There was something different about this. Yes, Adora saw her at school everyday, but they didn’t share any classes. They would make eye-contact, on accident, from opposite sides of the yard. Catra hadn’t spoken to Adora in years. The last time she’d acknowledged her existence was a ‘cdriluth liked your photo’, only Adora had never found her account on her follower list.
The idea of being on the same bus for hours, to even be defined in the same group as her. It was different, and terrifying, and–
“HI BOW!” Entrapta yelled from the 2 metres distance that separated them, before being gently elbowed by the brunette in the middle. “Right, sorry. Museum voice. Hi Bow!”
“Hi Entrapta!” Bow greeted almost as enthusiastically. Bow and Entrapta sat together in Engineering, which provided a fun five-minute lunch anecdote every other day.
Adora stared, as Entrapta gave unnecessary introductions. “This is my friend Scorpia'' – (“Hi!”) – and this is my friend Catra!”.
“Entrapta, they know that.” Catra murmured.
There was something very distinct in the way Catra held herself. From far away, Adora had noted the elegance of her bearing, how she glided when she walked and how you could never hear her coming. Now, Catra was as noticeable as a grey mass about to downpour on everyone in the building. Her arms crossed tightly on her chest, and her leg bouncing uncontrollably. She seemed agitated. Impatient.
Glimmer was staring too, her temper at odds with Adora’s. She held her fists by her side. The pink in her hair blending with the blush of her ears.
“She was just being nice.” Glimmer remarked, because she just had to.
“No need to introduce yourself, Sparkles.” Catra retorted, because she just had to.
Even on those miraculous days, when Adora managed to avoid direct impact with Catra in the halls, she had no real way of escaping her. The Glimmer vs Catra feud was always on-going and, according to the rest of the world, useless and exasperating. It had started their first day of high school, when Catra had forgotten Glimmer’s name and Glimmer had declared war over it. Since then, Glimmer had hated Catra and Catra had expanded her lexicon of glitter-themed nicknames.
They all stood there, Adora and Bow side-eyeing each other, while Scorpia and Entrapta mirrored them. Adora really didn’t feel like wrestling Glimmer out of a fight today. She stepped forwards, her hand reaching Glimmer’s body like a mother pulling her child away from the road. Bow noticed, a sigh of relief reaching Adora’s ears.
Catra noticed too. And she looked at Adora, for a second. A glare so brisk that her brain barely registered it. A feeling started in Adora’s chest. Like the road down to her lungs had suddenly been overwhelmed with traffic. Not quite butterflies. Maybe she shouldn’t have had milk for breakfast.
Under her hand, she could feel Glimmer vibrating with broken spite. Her mouth opened to spit out whatever over-fabricated insult she thought might hurt Catra the most, but the shrill of her aunt’s voice sealed it behind her lips.
“Why are you still standing around? Did you decide on your pairs?” Castaspella asked.
No one moved or said a word. Catra and Glimmer were the only ones out of them who were actually taught by Castaspella. Adora only knew her as Glimmer’s fun aunt who knitted everyone a sweater for Christmas. She’d be comfortable speaking up around a dinner table, not in any type of school setting. And Bow, well, Bow had been acting weird all day. If he was sweating, Adora didn’t think it had anything to do with museum pairings.
The silence was interrupted by a long sigh and–
“Fine. D’riluth, you’re with Greyskull.”
Oh. Oh, no.
Adora was frozen in place. Hand still on Glimmer, who had promptly taken it off her shoulder and intertwined their fingers. She felt the squeeze of reassurance, but she wasn’t sure that was what she needed.
Catra shifted, stepping towards Castaspella. She held her bag tight on her shoulder, and Adora realised she was hanging onto her own bag too. She squeezed back, both the strap around her shoulder and the hand she was holding. Her body grew even tenser at the sound of Catra’s voice.
“But-”
“No buts,” Castaspella rebutted. She was already walking away from the group, looking for the next teacher duty to attend to.
“Miss, she’s not even in art!” Catra called, arms falling heavily down her sides.
“Well, I’d pair you with Glimmer, but I’d like to bring you both home alive.” Castaspella turned, and that was the end of discussion.
_____
“In the Renaissance section, find an exemplary piece and explain the use of cha-ki-something”
“Chiaroscuro”
“Yeah, that.” Adora folded back the worksheet in her hands.
The Renaissance section was a large square room on the last floor. Adora didn’t pretend to understand anything about museums, but even she thought the floorplan of the gallery was more than a little flawed. They’d been in rooms where modern sculptures were displayed next to paintings from the Romantic period. The new section had been the only coherent one so far, though she’d refrained the comment on the tip of her tongue.
Catra was pissed. She had been pissed the whole hour it took them to answer the 3 questions on Page 1. Adora wouldn’t go so far as calling her rude, but she clearly hadn’t been happy with the arrangements and wasn’t very good at hiding. Or she wasn’t trying to. She had given a brief explanation for Adora to write on the paper, and then scribbled on her notebook whatever artistic judgement she’d redeemed too highly intellectual for Adora to understand.
So, yeah, Adora thought it better to keep the criticism to herself, rather than being submitted to another one of Catra’s death stares.
“What’s a chiaroscuro, again?” Adora asked, looking around the room to spot a painting she found interesting enough to use.
“It’s a technique, using strong contrasts of light and dark so that objects look more dimensional”
“Got it. So, like this?” Adora pointed to the picture hung nearest the entrance. It looked to her like the rest of the paintings in the room. It had lights and shadows, perfect.
The death stare came anyway. It was similar to the look her mother would give her when she was disappointed in her and Adam, but they unfortunately were in public.
“Not like this?”, she raised her eyebrows in question.
“No, like that. It’s just…”, Catra’s words trailed off, her eyes darting from canvas to canvas, “There!”. She had wandered towards the other side of the room before Adora could guess which painting had caught her attention.
It was a small one, it turned out. One she wouldn’t have noticed if it hadn’t been pointed out to her. The idea of chiaroscuro was clearer to her now. The woman portrayed in front of them was not only enclosed by shadows, but her body was shaded in such detail that the whole figure looked like she was about to jump out of the frame.
“Are you sure this one is, um, school appropriate?” Adora asked.
Catra wasn’t listening. “Uh?”
“She’s naked.”
“What, you’re scared of boobs?” Catra grinned and Adora felt the tip of her ears turn red. “Nudity isn’t inherently sexual.”
“I know that,” Adora protested. She pleaded her eyes to look anywhere else, when her gaze fell on the informational card next to the frame.
Self-Portrait, circa 1567.
“Oh,” Adora said. “I’ve never seen a female renaissance painter before.”
“Yes you have.” Catra closed her notebook around the black pen she’d been using. “She was from Etheria.”
“Really?”
Catra nodded, pointing out the ‘retrieved in the town of Etheria, in 1834’ on the card. “The church on Rune Street, she painted the fresco above the altar.”
The church on Rune Street.
It wasn’t a question —you know that one church?— because Adora knew the church on Rune Street. Around the corner on the left, and then straight ‘till the end. The direction imprinted in her brain. The direction from her old house. And from Catra’s house.
The empty field behind the church had once been their playground. On that low hill where they’d been on top of the world.
“Oh,” Adora said again, the ghost of a sigh stuck in her throat.
Catra was looking at her. A puzzled look in her eyes, like she was looking for something and didn’t know where to start. Adora opened her mouth to answer. But Catra’s eyebrows scrunched away the question, and rolled back in the passive aggressive face Adora had grown accustomed to.
“What’s next?” Catra asked, notebook tossed back in her tote bag.
Whatever shred of normality Adora thought might’ve made the time pass easier left her cruelly. The air between them grew tenser with every step. Catra’s leg bouncing more impatient with every question Adora read out. A new death stare came Adora’s way, this time pointed at the loud ping of her phone.
BEST FRIEND SQUAD <3
Bow
how much do you have left? were gonna have lunch
Glimmer
pls come join us <33
You
idk
catra spends 20 min every question is2g
Glimmer
ughhhhhhh
leave her behind
You
maybe
isnt that rlly rude tho
Glimmer
so? shes rude
“You know you can just leave, right?” Catra’s voice brought her back to the real, tangible world. Adora hadn’t been paying much attention to where they were going, she had just followed the path of the black boots behind her phone screen. “Teacher’s not gonna notice. You don’t have to follow me around.”
“But how would you manage without my infinite artistic knowledge?” Adora asked, every shade of sarcasm painted on her smirk. Catra rolled her eyes, and Adora saw her lips twitch. She decided to bear the smile Catra had forced down.
Another ping, this time coming from the elevator doors in front of them. Their next question – something about prehistoric statuettes – required them to go all the way down the ground floor.
Catra pressed the GF button more times than necessary, and the doors closed. Adora had hoped a hand would catch the slit and someone else would come in. She could deal with awkward silence between strangers. Awkward silence with Catra D’Riluth was close to torture. But the doors closed and they were alone.
Going down.
Going down.
And then, they weren’t.
The elevator came to a halt, remaining shut in the middle of F3 and F2. What was it again, if it falls you jump? Or was it, lay on the floor and hope for the best?
“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Catra muttered under her breath, finger reaching for the Ground Floor button again. And again, and again.
“It’s not going to do anything.” Adora spoke up. The clicking sound was going to give her a headache. She would’ve noticed her own heartbeat quicken, her anxiety levels rising up. But Catra’s breathing became loud. Too loud for Adora to think about her own. Catra was panicking.
“Well, what the fuck are we meant to do?”
Adora reached out, her hand almost brushing Catra’s arm, before she flinched away from it. She tucked herself in the opposite corner, arms crossed tightly on her chest.
Adora reached out, instead, for the emergency assistance button. There was a number as well. Any problem? Call us at 056773498. Adora checked her phone. No service.
“It’s gonna be fine. It probably happens all the time.” Adora tried.
“How is that fine?!” Catra almost shouted.
Adora understood, sort of. She recognised the look in her eyes, she’d been there too many times to count. But Adora was also scared. She was also feeling the sweat on her palms and the air running out. And Adora wasn’t meant to be there anyway. She wasn’t meant to get up ridiculously early and look at ridiculous paintings all day, and she wasn’t meant to get stuck in a stupid elevator with her childhood ex-best friend who she wasn’t meant to be paired with.
Adora understood, but she wanted to shout back anyway.
“Just calm down!” Adora said, the worst string of words that could ever come out of her mouth.
“Don’t tell me to calm down,” Catra spoke back, “this is your fault!”
“How is this my fault?!” Adora felt heat rising in the back of her neck. She pressed the emergency button again, the clicking now a white noise between the shouting.
“Why are you even here?!” Catra questioned, “Why did you come to this? You clearly don’t care! You should’ve left me alone and go talk shit with your friends, I know you all hate me anyway.”
She felt blood pooling in her ears, the air caught in her throat. Not letting her breathe, not letting her speak any words other than the quiet, screaming sentence that escaped her lips, “I never hated you!”.
She had always thought about Catra’s eyes, in the days and weeks after the fight. The way they had turned cold, cruel. So quickly, so effortlessly. She’d refused to believe that the coldness had been there all along, just waiting for the right moment to freeze her eyes over. Because to Adora, Catra’s eyes had been nothing but warm. Brown and blue, perfect balance, perfect warmth. For a second, stranded with those eyes, Adora found them warm again. Looking at her, wide and distinct, and then down to the floor. Her eyebrows scrunched like they used to do, on a younger face.
The feeling in Adora’s chest rose again. It flowed through her, from her lungs to her head. Fogging her vision and weakening her knees. She became too aware of the air coming in and spilling out of her.
Catra faced the wall, avoiding her gaze. She rubbed her face, smoothed her hair and looked up. Adora couldn’t help but stare. There was something so mesmerising about her, even in her complete frustration. Adora felt compelled to reach out again, to help. That rush of urgency she’d had towards a scraped knee or a twisted ankle.
Catra pulled her phone out of her bag, presumably saw the same No service text at the top of her screen and let out another – this time whispered – “fuck”.
“It’s okay.” Adora tried, realising she didn’t know Catra enough anymore to know what words would soothe her.
“No it’s not okay! Stop saying it’s going to be okay! You just don’t get it. This is just another stupid school trip for you but it’s not for me, so don’t tell me it’s okay.”
“What could possibly be so important about this?” Adora asked.
Catra laughed under her breath. “I’m the one who suggested coming here. If I hadn’t bothered the Deputy for weeks, we’d be in Salineas looking at an old gate right now.” Adora had the overwhelming feeling that Catra was talking to herself. Every word was soaked in loathing. Her eyes refused to lay on a fixed point, instead hovering from hand to hand. The bracelets on her wrist jingled as she moved, an inappropriate noise for the speech she was giving. “I’m the reason we’re here. I thought, if I write a good report on this place, that I’d get a higher chance of getting into Uni. But now I’m here, and this gallery is shit, I have to work with someone who doesn’t even care about any of this and oh – right, yeah. I AM STUCK IN AN ELEVATOR WITH YOU.”
Adora absorbed every word, every drop of sarcasm and despair. She took in every piece of information Catra had just given her. She really, truly did. So when she said,
“We could’ve taken the stairs”, even she knew it was a dumb thing to say.
And when Adora thought one of Catra’s death stares could not get any worse, it did.
“I asked you, and YOU SAID NO!” It was brutal, it was murderous. Her eyes had almost widened out of her head.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did! I asked you, should we take the stairs?, and you said no!”
Adora frowned for a moment, before realisation hit her. “Oh… I thought you said, should we get upstairs?” She avoided mentioning that she had been way more preoccupied by Glimmer’s suggestion to desert her to pay any attention to what she was saying.
“I’m going to kill you.” Catra responded, going back to rubbing her face. Adora would’ve remarked she looked like a fly when she did that, but she wanted to get out of this elevator alive.
“It’s not my fault you mumble!” She said instead.
“It’S nOt mY fAuLt yOU mUmBlE!” Catra mumbled.
She felt her smile crack open before she could tell her lips off for it. She should’ve been affronted, she should’ve found it immature and provoking. But her smile turned to a laugh under her breath. And when she locked eyes with Catra, they were both chuckling.
Adora’s chest tightened, that same feeling overpowering every muscle in her body. It was strange, and it was right, and melancholic. In that moment, laughing with Catra, it felt like a new beginning. One she didn’t know she had been hoping for.
Minutes passed, after the giggling had stopped and the claustrophobia had taken over once again. Catra was slumped over the wall, her bag abandoned at her feet. Adora had tried her phone every other minute, waiting for No Service to turn into a signal bar.
In the time they’d been stuck in that cubicle, the tension had shifted from anxiety to resentment to anxiety again. Catra wasn’t hyperventilating anymore, but Adora recognised the panic in her movements. Her leg had never stopped bouncing, her eyes blinking erratically. She’d tilt her face to the ceiling, and Adora knew it was to dry threatening tears.
Adora had time to think, while observing her. She thought about who they used to be, what they used to mean to each other. She thought about all the times she’d seen her out in town. And how they’d inevitably bump into each other at school. She thought about how she’d always felt her heart jump every time it would happen. Out of fear, she had thought. Her friends had told her it was normal to feel so uneasy with someone you used to know, someone who's wronged you in any sort of way. She wasn’t sure of it anymore. She was with Catra now, she had been for hours. The feeling was there, burning a hole inside her. But she wasn’t afraid. She had been annoyed, frustrated. Maybe even upset. But she had also laughed, she had been glad to spend time with her, to make her smile. So, right then and there, Adora made a decision.
“You really care about this, uh?” she said.
Catra looked up, a confused expression painted on her face. As if she wasn’t expecting the question could be directed to her. She nodded. So slightly, Adora almost missed it.
Then, she crouched down to get something out of her bag. A notebook. The one she had been scribbling in all day. “You can’t laugh–”
“I’m not going to laugh,” Adora reacted before Catra could finish. “You can hit me if I laugh.”
“You bet I will.” she handed it to Adora, open on the last page she’d written in.
It wasn’t as neat as Adora imagined. It was quite the opposite. Messy sketches of the rooms they’d visited overlapped some of the answers to their questions. What Adora assumed could only be codewords – IMP 2, RL3 Y, ??? – were scrambled all over the page. As she flipped through, she saw more words and more drawings tangled with each other on the paper, but it still looked beautiful somehow. There was something fascinating about knowing she could only ever be lost in that chaos, knowing it wasn’t really meant for her to see. It made sense to someone else, to the person in front of her. Adora couldn’t make sense of it, but Catra did. And Adora understood it better that way.
“This is what I want to do. Working in a gallery like this.” Catra explained, in a tone Adora had never heard from her before.
“Like, a curator?” she asked.
Catra nodded, “I still want to make art, but– I don’t know.”
“Tell me more.” Adora said, and she meant it. She’d spent hours standing in front of old buildings, letting Glimmer spout architectural knowledge to her, and none of it had ever reached her long-term memory. But the way Catra had explained every question and every answer, the way she’d stop herself from spewing one fun fact after the other, it was different. It was new. While she flipped through the pages of sketches of statues and exhibits, she found she remembered most of them, and every correlated fact.
“Really?” Catra asked. Dreamy, that was the tone in her voice. Adora smiled and nodded, fingers working the paper. She focused on a drawing, as Catra talked. It was of the painting they’d seen in the Renaissance section, the one Catra chose to describe chiaroscuro. Except the date at the top of the page was of the day before. It made Adora smirk, for reasons she didn’t care to elaborate. Not to Catra, not to herself.
The remarked difference of blue ink on the next page caught her attention. Half the side of it was covered in tiny blue hearts. She felt the weight of the notebook closing on her fingers before she even heard the gasp. Catra looked at her, eyes wide again. Adora almost apologised. She didn’t mean to invade her privacy, she was so desperately sor–
But Catra wasn’t gasping at the book, despite her fingers still holding it firm on top of Adora’s. No, Catra gasped because they were moving. Going down again, and after being still for so long, the descent seemed frightently fast. Adora opened her mouth to speak. Anticipating their imminent death, she said–
“Jump?”
“What?”
Ping.
The metal doors opened. A man dressed in a black security uniform waited for them to open their eyes. “Girls, are you alright?”
They both let out a sigh of relief, as they crossed the threshold of the elevator and breathed in museum air. They answered routine security questions, told the guards what had happened and reassured them they weren’t in need of any medical assistance. They looked back as the emergency electrician taped a MALFUNCTIONING warning sign, picked up his canary yellow tool box and left.
“You can go find your friends if you want. Everyone’s probably having lunch.” Catra said. She kept glancing at her phone, held tight in her hand. She seemed worried time would slip away if she dared hold it looser.
“I want to help,” Adora said, surprising both of them, “I don’t know anything about art, I know. But it’s not fair for you to do it all on your own. I could carry your bag!”
Catra looked at her, examining every line and curve of her face. “You always need to play the hero, don’t you?”
And then she smiled. A genuine, bright smile. It infected Adora’s lips the moment she saw it. “What was that character you used to play? She-ra?”
“She-ra! Yes, Princess of Power!” She grabbed her own hips in a typical superhero stance.
Catra laughed, “It’s still ridiculous. You're so ridiculous.”
“At least I didn’t choose to play the evil military villain! What was that about?!” she rebutted, silently hoping for the conversation to never end.
“I ended up turning to the good side, didn’t I? Sorry you couldn’t understand the nuances of my character.” She dramatically flipped her hair over her shoulder, turned to Adora and said, “C’mon, Princess. We have work to do.”
Adora followed.
“I can’t believe you used to be a furry.”
“Shut up!”
_____
Glimmer checked her phone again, waiting for the double check marks under her last message to turn blue. But Adora hadn’t opened the chat for over an hour.
“Glim, she’s fine.” Bow said, holding the drinks they’d ordered and placing one in front of her. A pink strawberry refresher, with added honey blend.
“What if something happened to her? What if Catra has kidnapped her and is torturing her in a secret museum chamber?!” She said, loud enough that a dozen eyes fell on her, the room half quiet. She hid her blush with the hem of her jacket. Bow was looking at her, eyebrows arched in question. He gave her a typical-Bow smile, crooked to the left, showing off a dimple. “I don’t think Catra is capable of that.”
“She totally is!”
“Maybe your aunt is still wandering around the gallery and she doesn’t want to get in trouble. You know how strict Cast–” He said, as Glimmer’s aunt walked through the glass door of the cafè, waving happily at them as she found a place at the end of the queue.
“Okay, um,” he tried, “maybe she’s found a new passion for art. You never know!”
Glimmer hummed in response, checked her phone again before finally putting it down. Screen down, as not to be tempted. Bow was staring out the window, thinking too hard for someone who didn’t think their friend had been kidnapped and tortured.
“Adora is our best friend,” he started after a moment, “We’ve been hanging out with her for the past six years.” He didn’t even look sure of what he was saying. Glimmer knew all that, obviously. “Don’t you think– Do you think we could hang out today, just us? Since she's busy anyway.”
Oh.
“Yeah, sure.” Glimmer smiled.
“We could go walk around the Botanic Gardens? They’re only five minutes away.”
Glimmer agreed, put her phone in her pocket and grabbed her drink. It was a bit chilly for the time of year, but she didn’t mind it. Hot coffee would’ve made her stomach feel weird.
Her stomach felt weird anyway. When Bow sat next to her, on a white bench in front of one of the glasshouses, and said–
“I need to tell you something.”
_____
“Aaand done! We answered every question.” Adora cheered. It had taken them a lot longer than expected, even without adding up the half hour they’d been stuck in that elevator. They kept getting distracted, mostly by each other. A joke would turn into endless giggling, a passing comment into absurd games. They’d challenge the other to find the most ridiculous painting, and after countless ‘that’s you’, they had finally completed the worksheets.
Catra snapped one last picture of the whole room. “Thank you for letting me borrow your camera. I still can’t believe I forgot to bring mine.”
“It’s okay. My mum always asks us to take pictures for her. She’ll be happy someone finally did.” Adora said, smiling at her.
Click. The lens of the camera shut and opened back before she could realise, and she felt grateful for the gallery's ban on flash photography. “There. Now she’ll have a picture of you as well.” Catra said, looking into the small display in her hands. “Are you sure it’s okay if I keep the memory card for a few days?”
Adora wasn’t that sure, her parents weren’t exactly lavish people, and that camera certainly didn’t belong to her. “Yeah, don’t even worry about it. Take all the time you need!”
“ATTENTION TO ALL VISITORS. THE GALLERY WILL BE CLOSING IN FIVE MINUTES. PLEASE MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE EXIT ON THE GROUND FLOOR. WE HOPE YOU HAVE ENJOYED YOUR VISIT.”
The eerily robotic announcement voice went silent. Adora looked around, only a couple of people were in the room. One, a staff member rolling a cart of cleaning supplies, the other already walking towards the stairs. Catra’s phone was in her hands, they had been close enough for Adora to read the time on the screen. 3:55. They stared at each other for a second, knowing full well that their bus would leave at four.
Catra grabbed her wrist, and started running. They ran down the stairs, shouting “SORRY!” to every museum dweller who was calmly descending the same way. Adora tripped over the last step, saving her fall by holding onto the marble railing. She had never thought a museum visit could pose so many threats to her life. They sprinted through the atrium they’d been paired in that morning, pushed the impossibly slow revolving door and breathed fresh air for the first time in hours. At least Adora did. Catra wasn’t there, despite being ahead of her the whole time.
Adora turned around, and saw her darting towards the exit with four different pamphlets shoved half down her bag. “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” she said, the words trailed off in the wind as she ran past Adora, down the front steps of the building.
The air was completely knocked out of her, when they finally reached the parking space. The school rented bus was waiting to pull the gear. Castaspella was standing next to it, reading last names off a greenish sheet of paper.
“How can you–” Adora panted, “How can you run so fast in those boots?”
“How can you run so slow in those trainers?” Catra grinned, like the 300 metres had been an easy fix for her.
“D’Riluth?” Castaspella called.
Catra raised her hand. “Here!”
Adora spotted Bow and Glimmer in the small crowd. Bow pointed her out to Glimmer, who glared at her like Adora had just left her mum in a hole to die. They started walking towards her and– were they holding hands?
“HERE!” Entrapta’s voice came ear-splitting her way. She and Scorpia had reached Catra, who was now cradled into Scorpia’s arms.
“Are you alright, Wildcat? We were so worried about you! We called you so many times, I was going to come and find you myself bu–”
“Scorpia, I’m fine,” Catra said, detangling herself from her friend’s bear hug. “I just lost track of time.” She looked at Adora, and smirked. Like losing time was a secret they had promised to only share with each other. It didn’t last long, as one of Scorpia’s arms found its way back around Catra’s shoulder. “That’s our Wildcat! Always so focused on work! Oh, we are so proud of you. Aren’t we, Entrapta?”
“Where the hell have you been?!” Glimmer called, as they closed in on Adora.
She saw the angry look in her eyes, directed at Catra. Mortal enemies and all that, right. Adora wasn’t about to tell Glimmer about the games, and the jokes, and the way she had appreciated a painting for the first time in her life. “We got stuck in the elevator.”
“What?!” Bow asked.
“And you didn’t think of texting us?!” Glimmer followed. “We sent you like, a trillion messages! I thought you were dead! I thought sh–”
“I think what Glimmer means to say is, we were very worried about you. And we missed you a lot.” Bow said, before Glimmer could detonate a she bomb, in front of the she herself.
Adora looked down at Bow and Glimmer’s hands. Intertwined. Their bodies, closer than she’d ever seen them be, more comfortable, more intimate.
“I’m sure you did.”
_____
Glimmer had talked herself to sleep. They had passed the ‘YOU’RE NOW LEAVING BRIGHT MOON’ sign over an hour ago. The bus was quiet, exhaustion pervading the air.
Adora couldn’t sleep, despite her heavy eyelids. If she’d try to count on her fingers all the emotions she had felt today, she would’ve needed another pair of hands. Maybe more.
And now she was left alone to brood over them, with the soundtrack of Glimmer’s snoring in the back of her mind.
She finally took her phone out of her pocket. A wall of notifications filled her lockscreen. Messages from the group chat. A bunch of solo Glimmer texts, which mostly read ‘omgomgomgomgomgomg’. Adam had sent her a tiktok link and her mum had asked what time she’d be home.
And there, at the top, the most recent. 46 minutes ago.
cdriluth started following you.
She turned her head, spotting the red of her headphones. Six rows down, there she was. She was asleep, like everyone else. Mouth slightly open and arms crossed on her chest, rising up and down along with her breathing. Adora noticed the way her head fell on Scorpia’s shoulder. She noticed the way Scorpia’s head fell back on hers, at an angle her neck wouldn’t naturally fall to.
Something stirred inside her. The feeling that had overwhelmed her chest all day was pushed back, just to the side. A new, sick feeling making its way to the front. She threw her head back, put her earphones in and forced her eyes closed.
And while the music muffled the sound of everyone else’s snoring, Adora imagined a curly-headed girl asleep on her shoulder.