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There’s a brief lull in the chatter, when Force Captain Catra comes into the dining hall, but most everyone goes back to normal after a minute’s nervousness. Bob doesn’t. She likes to keep a track of who’s who around the Fright Zone, and the improbably tall lizard trailing Catra isn’t someone she recognises. They don’t look Horde.
“Oh, Roberta’s daydreaming again!”
A titter goes up around the table, and somebody waves a hand in her face, but Bob elbows them off and ignores the giggling rest.
Catra doesn’t take a tray – Bob’s heard rumours, which she isn’t inclined to disbelieve, that she eats only imports, like Shadow Weaver did – but the lizard person does. And, no, they’re clearly not Horde, because they act like the offering of a ration bar is an insult, and end up with just a cup of water by the end of the queue. The tray, therefore, is unceremoniously abandoned with the other returns, and the lizard takes their cup and goes and leans against the wall, right underneath the IF YOU ARE EATING YOU MUST BE SEATED sign.
Force Captain Catra doesn’t seem overly concerned with the rule, either, nor the one specifically against loitering, because she goes and stands near the lizard, arms crossed, face sour. A conversation is struck up, and it’s hard to tell the tone, because Catra’s expression is stormier than the West Mallet port on a bad day; but the lizard just seems a bit smug.
Slowly, though, the smugness twists into a restrained scowl, and the flicking of the lizard’s tail becomes more and more tense. At one point, they shrug exaggeratedly, and then Catra says something that raises the eyebrows of everybody nearby. Bob kind-of wishes she were close enough to hear – but mostly she’s glad she’s far enough to watch without being obvious.
Judging by the reaction of a Cadet going past, the lizard’s cup isn’t empty when they drop it, not carelessly in the least, on the floor. They shove themself off the wall and get very close to Catra, glaring down at her: and that, with the way her ears pin back, makes her look very small for just a moment.
But then she bares her teeth, and extends her claws – everybody close by becomes very focused on their dinner, all of a sudden – and says something sharp, and pokes the lizard in the chest.
They hit her, hard, across the face.
The hall falls silent. Staring, unabashedly, as the lizard steps back a little, and runs a hand through their hair; there’s a long cut on the back of it, from Catra’s mask, Bob thinks, and they’re doing nothing to stem the flow of cyan blood.
Quite abruptly, the lizard – are they a lizard? What are they? Is that magic? A Princess? – becomes Catra, like a three-dimensional mirror. Around the dining hall go little gasps of shock, and murmurs, and whispers, but Catra doesn’t seem surprised at all. She meets their gaze flatly.
“Oops.”, says the Catra-that-was-just-a-lizard, pitched to carry across the room; they raise the uninjured hand, and slowly, carefully, caress the side of Catra’s face they just hit. She does nothing to stop them.
Then, just as easily as they’d assumed Catra’s form, they seem to melt away. A second later there’s a little flurry of motion by the door, someone tripping and spilling their tray on somebody else, but it doesn’t distract most people’s attention from Catra, still standing, alone, over the other side of the hall. The impression of smallness the lizard left on her hasn’t quite disappeared.
She turns purposefully, and sets off at a quick march back towards the door. But one of the bigger, older Force Captains – Oskar, Bob’s pretty sure he’s called – stands up, and pushes through the people around him, and gets quite obviously in her way.
And this is the face of the Catra that everybody, Horde and Princess alike, is afraid of; that tricked and fought and, some say, murdered her way to the top – eyes dark and calculating, teeth sharp, claws sharper, and the air that she doesn’t care who she has to go through to get where she’s headed.
Oskar glances around at his friends, and they laugh the laugh of a bunch of brawny idiots, and he turns back to her. Waits a second, and smirks. Waits another second, and raises a hand, as if he’s about to hit her, too.
Almost quicker than Bob can see it, Catra grabs that hand and drags her claws down the inside of his arm, blossoming red from elbow to wrist, and she watches coolly as he screams and half-runs, half-is-dragged-out by his friends.
The hall is still pin-drop silent, but it’s as if Catra simply doesn’t notice how odd that is, and she strolls out.
Her mask is on her desk, amidst the piles of paperwork that realistically won’t get done. She’s not yet decided whether she wants to clean off the slight smear of DT’s blood on the corner.
She herself is at her mirror, wondering whether the red mark on her cheekbone will bruise – and that, too, she’s not sure if she likes the idea of wearing or not.
Although, she supposes, there’s a lot less choice in the matter.
. . .
Fuck.
Leaning against the wall next to the mirror, she presses her claws into her arms and shuts her eyes tight, and tries to stamp down the roiling mess spilling around her head, and fails, as usual. The images are slippery and blurred with static, true, but they seem to want nothing more than to plaster themselves to the front of her skull, and with them are the ghosts of hands: cold, and decisive, and so, so gentle. Tears gather at the corners of her eyes, but no they don’t, because she doesn’t let them fall.
Tap-tap-t-t-tap-t-t.
The noise startles her, for a moment, but it’s just Flutterina, rapping their knuckles against a bedpost. No indication as to how they got in here: that’s not a shock, though. They give her a little innocent smile, bouncing on their toes.
“Heya, Force Captain. Oh, does that hurt?”
She pointedly ignores the blue line on the back of their hand – and their question.
“Listen: you do not dare act like that in public. You may not have had much structure in your life, Double Trouble, but even to you it should be obvious that you show respect to your superiors. Is that clear?”
“Ah-ah-ah, watch what you’re saying. You’re implying I get to do it in private.”, DT murmurs, midway through transforming back into themselves, and then collapses gracefully onto her bed, and throws her a smirk.
Sighing, she turns back to the mirror. What was she… what had she been thinking about? Hiding the bruise? No; that won’t work; it’s painfully obvious. Especially with the rest of her face so pale.
DT appears up out of nowhere. Their arms drape easily around her waist, and their chin on top of her head.
“You’re cross, aren’t you? Aw. I’m sorry.”
She hisses briefly and shoves them off her.
“Get out. Go away.”
“Really?”
Still visible behind her in the mirror, and she’s sure they know it, they examine their cut hand boredly.
“We both know you don’t want me to, Kitten.”
Shut up.
Done with her reflection for now, she picks her mask back up; she taps one claw against the side of it, a few times. Perhaps it does look good with the blood.
But DT takes it out of her hands, and pushes her a little – and for some reason, her body offers no resistance, stumbling back a step or two.
They smile, at that, and, with a decidedly final, heavy thud, drop the mask back onto the desk.