Chapter Text
Catra’s trying to focus on the sound of the rain on the metal roof above her. It tends to relax her; blocks everything else out, anyway, and that’s the best she can have most of the time.
Trouble is, it’s more of a militant thunder than a patter, to match the headache that told her it was going to rain in the first place, and she’s starting to consider slinking away to skip dinner in favour of hiding in some corner deep in the Fright Zone, long untouched by the rain – or the sunlight, for that matter. Yeah, she could do without light.
Ah, too late: the door’s opened. Not much point slinking away if you’re seen. It’s just sulking, then.
“- but you should’ve just left it, Kyle.”, Lonnie’s saying. “Uh, what’s the time? Is the sink gonna be working?”
Kyle sighs miserably, and then yelps.
“Don’t touch it! Ow, is that burned? It looks burned to me. Owww, it hurts like it’s burned.”
Rogelio growls, and makes a great clatter of opening a locker.
“Seriously, Kyle? How would you react if I walked into a building on fire and asked you if I ‘looked burned’?”
The water runs for a moment, and Lonnie gives a little satisfied hum.
“Although I guess I wouldn’t, since I’m not stupid. Here. At least clean the stuff off you.”
“Walking into rain is not – ow – comparable to walking into a massive – ow – fire.”, Kyle insists, and he keeps on wincing periodically.
Lonnie chuckles, low and humourless.
“Yeah, ‘cause when you do something dumb like going into a burning building, you’ll at least have a good reason for it. But apparently the acid fucking rain is worth it to steal back your damn underwear?”
At that, Rogelio laughs. Catra’d laugh too if the constant voices and noises weren’t grating on the frayed ends of her nerves.
“They’re my only nice pair!”, Kyle protests weakly. “Anyway, if I didn’t – ow – if I didn’t do something about it, they’d just keep taking my stuff.”
“No, you idiot, it’s the other way around. They know they can get to you now, and that’s what they think is funny, so-“
Predictably, Lonnie cuts off into a suspicious glare when Catra drops down from where she was sequestered up in the roof beams.
But Catra really can’t be bothered with a fight right now, so she just fixes her with a what’s your problem? look.
“Where’s Adora?”
“Up your-“, Lonnie starts, but she’s interrupted by Kyle – “At an extra lesson with Shadow Weaver.”
“Right.”
Not right, actually, but Catra can’t do much about it. In fact, she can’t do much else now but sulk out and go and hide, and listen to Lonnie and Rogelio laughing again as she leaves.
“I put to you: twenty.”
“Convinced, huh? Thirty.”
“Uh, not very, but – forty.”
“Good, ‘cause I am. Fifty.”
Netty leans her head in her hand, and resists the temptation to laugh.
“Fifty it is.”
She’s not sure what got her in this spat, anyway, other than the habit of challenging everything Spinny says, and she knows she’s going to lose at any rate – Catra and Adora are about as obviously smitten with each other as strawberries and cream.
“We do share a bank account, though, darling.”, she points out, because she’s not got many other cards to play.
“It’s about the principle of the thing – you know, when you start a sentence with ‘I bet’, you’d better be prepared to commit. Anyway, you can owe me a dinne- oh!”
Putting a hand over her mouth, Spinny quite unsubtly gestures her head over at where Catra’s just coming into camp through the curtain of vines.
Luckily, she’s looking nowhere near their direction: her sighs are fixed, as they pretty often are, on Adora, who’s sitting on the floor by the sleeping area and polishing her boots. Catra’s fairly glowering as per usual, but Adora beams when she looks up and sees her.
Spinny nudges Netty and makes a silly face at her as Catra strides across the room to sit down, too, very much in Adora’s personal space. A quick, quiet exchange appears to take place, and then Catra goes into the sleeping area proper, and Adora announces to the camp at large, “It’s going to rain tomorrow, guys.”
“No, it’s not!”, Glimmer yells from behind a wall of crates. “Didn’t see a single cloud earlier!”
Adora just shrugs, and gets on with her polishing.
It starts to rain around three in the morning.
And it still is, by the time the sun’s up.
“C’mon. It’s safe, here. I promise.”
Adora looks absolutely ridiculous, standing there without her jacket on, getting progressively more and more soaked through but still grinning like the maniac she is.
Catra clears her throat, and shrugs. It makes her neck hurt. It shouldn’t be allowed – headaches should stay where they belong.
“I know that. It’s still cold and wet, though.”
Despite every fibre of her being clamouring against it, there’s a bizarre sort of gravitational pull towards the rain. (Not towards Adora, because Catra does not like Adora; it’s pure co-incidence.)
“It’s invigorating, though!”, Adora – now really quite soggy – declares. “So boring sitting around in camp all day with nothing to do. This is fun!”
It helps, admittedly, that she also chooses this moment to rearrange her now-ruined hair pouf into the messy fringe it sits as when her hair’s down.
Maybe joining the Rebellion has actually made Catra into a Princess – not a singe survival instinct on her – because then and there she sticks a hand out into the rain.
It’s cool, at first: delicate, not biting at Catra’s skin like the Fright Zone’s showers – better than she’d thought. And then it’s properly cold, and then it’s cold and wet, and she pulls her hand back inside so she can wipe it off on her shirt.
Adora has the audacity to look like a kicked puppy.
“You don’t like it?”
“My hand got wet.”, Catra complains, still trying a little in vain to get it completely dry again.
And then, because apparently Adora somehow managed to inherit the emotional range off the Princesses too, she smirks.
“And, uh… what were you expecting to happen, genius?”
Which is, in Catra’s opinion, unfair. (Not that she thinks a lot about how a smirk looks on She-Ra’s face. Not at all.)
“Oh, fuck you.”, Catra mutters under her breath, and elbows past Adora with more force than strictly necessary. The cold hits her like a tank, this time, but surprisingly it dulls the knife in her eye socket, and she’ll take the win.
And… as for invigorating? Maybe. But this strikes Catra more as calm.
The noise of the rain itself has faded to a background enough, by now, that she can pick out the slightly different sounds – the drum-like drip of water onto one huge leaf, and the high pitter-patter from there onto a rock, and the irritated buzz of an insect that clearly shares Catra’s opinion on the whole affair. On the whole, though, the entire Woods looks a little more serene under the cool cover of rainclouds, and anything exposed to the sky’s taken on either an attractive wet sheen or the distortion of rivulets flowing down it. There’s a different scent hanging in the air, too, quite a pleasant one, that Catra can’t place.
Suddenly, Adora tackles her from side-on, laughing, and Catra’d topple over if she hadn’t somewhere deep-down have kept a reflex to dig her heels in and smush her hand into Adora’s face.
“Asshole!”, Catra yells, and there’s a brief exchange of elbows and shoulders and shoves, utterly childish and utterly ridiculous and Catra utterly loves it. Then Adora tries for a weird backwards move, and ends up slipping in the muddy earth, and for some reason Catra catches her by the back of her shoulders, although by all rights she should just let her fall and then laugh at it.
Adora blinks.
“Oopsie.”
Yeah, oopsie, Catra agrees. She doesn’t say it, because she has a reputation to maintain, but.
Although for some reason, she doesn’t lift Adora back up, nor drop her into the mud. (It’s not because she likes the feeling of Adora’s excellent shoulders under her hands. Through just a single layer of wet shirt. No, definitely not.)
“… You gonna pull me up, or…?”, Adora asks eventually. She’s gone a bit pink in the face. But, then again, she always does in the cold, so it doesn’t mean anything.
Again, Catra clears her throat, and nods tersely, and lifts Adora back up to standing. And doesn’t move her hands, because she doesn’t see any reason to.
That, however, leaves Adora in the fairly awkward position of having a pair of arms situated under hers, and she holds them stupidly sideways for a moment before putting on her I’ve-had-a-genius-idea face, and draping her arms over Catra’s own shoulders, so her hands cross behind Catra’s neck.
Catra almost points out it feels a little like the All-Princess Ball, but she doesn’t, because it might ruin the moment. She settles for leaning closer – Adora looks briefly horrified, for some reason – and resting her forehead against Adora’s. It’s an old gesture of Catra’s, born out of probably older instincts, and she’s only ever shared it with Adora. She closes her eyes against the pain seeping through them into her skull.
It takes a second for Adora to lean back against her, but then she does, with a half-sigh of inexplicable relief.
“So, you like the rain?”
“Mm.”, Catra shrugs. “I could get used to it.”