Chapter Text
The sky ran stark today. White cloudbank stretched from horizon to horizon, and midmorning sunlight diffused across the whole blanket of it. Bright, directionless, cold white radiated down into the city of Alden.
Every glass skyscraper and shop window carried the light further than it had any right to go. Commuters flinched against it, cars moved slower as they rounded corners, the light ricocheted around them all— down trunk roads and side roads and alleyways until it hit the frontage of Eli's and dispersed against the old glass festooned with branded beer stickers and reinforced by a set of wooden slat blinds older than most of the patrons.
It hadn't always been Eli's. Green neon above the store front had spelled out CEILIDH once upon a time, and now only spelled out E LI. Every time a tube failed, a new sweepstakes started, and there was a handsome $431 dollars ready to be split amongst everyone who guessed the next letter right.
The side wall was all bar. A long mirror, reflecting dull from forty years of being spattered with alcohol then cleaned with worse. In front of it, wooden racking and a legion of glass bottles organised first by cost, second by potency, third by content. In front of that, Netty, setting up for the day.
She took the barstools down, set them out in their row, swept the bar with a cloth, started placing out the myriad branded beer mats— and then came a tapping on the door. Two-one-two, spaced a little differently than anyone else who used that rhythm.
Netty opened the door. "Catra," she huffed. "Why did you have to tell me that was the Terminator theme? That's all I can hear now, every damn time you knock. Oh. Who's your friend?"
"Hey, Net." Catra looked exhausted. "This is Adora. Adora, Netty. She tends bar, and incidentally remembers every name and face she's ever seen."
The door closed behind them, and Adora— blonde, well built, two bags over her broad shoulders and with a smile that hid absolutely nothing— had her hand on Catra's waist. Netty smiled back, raised an eyebrow. "I still need to know who she is, Catra."
"Go get your meds," Adora murmured to Catra, then stuck a hand out to Netty as Catra disappeared behind the bar. "Hi. I'm the She-Ra. Catra saved me from some people who really don't like me right now, but then we got stuck in a utility closet for like... fifteen hours. Do you uh... have a shower here?"
"Oh you are going to have to be a lot less open than that," Netty grinned and gestured her over to the bar. "Have a drink first. When Cat gets back up, we'll hash out the rest."
"She said it was safe here, I figured it was okay..." Adora sat, pouting slightly, and ran her eyes along the bottles on the back of the bar— a whole skyline of them, arranged by some grammar she didn't have yet, a glass city the morning had got into and lit from behind. Then down to the fridges, which was where the real treasure always lived. "Oh, Kopparberg please!"
By the time Netty had popped the bottle, scooped some ice into a pint glass and passed it over, Catra was back— and she'd brought DT up with her, which told Netty everything and nothing all at once.
"Scotch single, please Net. Ice and lime."
"Is that safe?" Adora asked, her voice mostly neutral. To her credit, Netty thought, and glanced over to DT, and saw that same very slight lift of their brow that said cautious approval. She handed them their usual cranberry mocktail.
"For a sloppy drunk, no." Catra shrugged, took the glass. "But alcohol makes the meds run a lot stronger, my scrip's running low, I like scotch, and Netty has a hard limit for me. Two singles on any day."
"Oh," Adora said, and looked faraway for a moment. "Sorry about the scrip."
"Not your fault," Catra chuckled. "I never bought from any of Prime's dealers anyway." She raised her glass. "Here's to the uselessness of boycotting the bastards."
The clink of glasses, and Netty left them to it. She went back to the beer mats she'd abandoned at the knock, squaring each one to the edge of the bar as she worked her way down it, through the flat white stripes the morning laid across the wood like one more thing to wipe down. Their chatter kept the room warm, and she was good at cleaning things that were just close enough that she could still hear in case something was said that needed remembering.
"Right. So. Sorry. Introductions." Catra set her glass down, letting the ice swirl. "DT, this is Adora. Adora, DT."
Netty drifted back up her side of the bar, cloth in hand. That stretch of it didn't need her, but the mirror held all three of them from there, dull as it was.
Adora turned properly on her bar stool, and held out her hand. "Hi," she said. "I owe you thanks for keeping me out of Prime's clutches last night?"
"You do," DT said with a chuckle, shaking her hand without force. "But we can call it repayment for the damage you've done him this last month, hm? Rebuilding makes him run slower, which gives us more time to get sparks out of territory he plans to fight for."
Adora slowed, her mouth open for just a moment, and then she nodded. "Okay," she said. "Um. I didn't think of that. But I'm glad it helped."
"It did. Now, Cat tells me you need somewhere to sleep for a while."
"Yeah," Adora raised a hand behind her head, twisted her face in something like embarrassment. "Catra-" she said it with just a hint of correction in her tone, which Netty found she rather approved of- "said the bad pickup was too close to my apartment for comfort, so I should come stay here for a while if it was okay with you."
"Oh, she's absolutely correct, darling. That pickup gave him four blocks to search instead of a whole city." And there DT stopped, and turned their mocktail a slow half-turn on the bar top, and the yes that belonged after it didn't come. They glanced over to Catra instead, who was still slightly slumped in front of her drink. "You look rough, kitten."
Catra threw DT a glare, one that might not have had the energy to be murderous but could certainly manage a spot of grievous bodily harm. And then her shoulders dropped again. "Thanks for the gun pickup," she said.
"Of course," DT's edge dropped away immediately. "Thank you for telling me. I know those reads burn you out."
"Wasn't so bad this time. The mahou-shoujo's a service top— she had me hydrated and fed before bed."
"Of course she is," DT smirked, and looked Adora up and down again. "Of course she is."
"Uh," said Adora.
"You see, a mahou-shoujo is-" Netty started with a grin-
"You see, a service top is-" DT started with a grin-
"Alright, alright, take it easy on the dumbass," Catra grumbled, and set down her empty glass. "DT— I've been in her head and I'm vouching for her. Is that enough to get her one of the cots downstairs for as long as she needs it?"
"Darling. One in five sparks through here has a story of how the She-Ra helped them out sometime. Of course that's enough."
Adora downed the rest of her drink in one, and looked at the bar top with intent. Netty could see how flushed she was in the reflection on the dirty mirror behind the bar.
"You do good work, hero." Catra said, rough and tired and gentle, with a hand that Netty was pretty sure she wasn't supposed to see resting on Adora's thigh. "'bout time you knew that, yeah?"
"Who was it?" Adora managed, after a moment. "You said someone paid you to come get me."
"Guess I did, huh." Catra looked over at DT. "Can we tell her?"
"She didn't ask for anonymity," DT shrugged. "It was Farstep."
Adora blinked. "Oh. I haven't seen her in the field for months. I didn't... huh."
She went quiet, and slightly redder, and Catra leaned sideways to put her head on her shoulder. Something quiet passed between them, and she smiled, and Netty, who had been polishing the same glass for the better part of a minute, found herself smiling as well.
The cellar held the building over it like a breath. The bar sat on top through the boards, the day's trade coming down muffled— a stool dragged, the till, the low traffic of voices Adora couldn't pick words out of but could feel the shape of overhead. And below the bar, and around it, the rest: a cold draught off dead tunnels somewhere out past the wall, a drip a long way off, the iron quiet of a place built underneath a place that had been built and then forgotten. The cellar sat on the seam of the two. It ran a few degrees too cold for June. It smelled of three things and Adora had them sorted before she was down the last stair— damp brick, coffee, and a thin tin-and-ozone bite she didn't have a source for yet, the smell a battery makes just before it doesn't work— and she pocketed it like a pretty stone, to look at later and find the patterns in. An amber plastic shell sat over the strip light, and it turned the whole room the colour of an old photograph, so that she stood in the doorway in a light like something already remembered.
She set her bags beside the door and read the room the way a kid reads a new playground: where you'd hide, where you'd run, what the rules were and who'd made them.
To the left, home base.
A cubby with something approximating a kitchen— sink, microwave, toaster, kettle, a little upside down triangle of chipped mugs against the wall with the washed-out livery of whatever now-wound-down company they'd been scavenged from.
A pair of mismatched armchairs like sisters with three years, five missing milk teeth, and a little table with a standing lamp between them, all tucked away in a recess with an old orange-red curtain pulled to one side, and it said here's where you go when you've grazed your knee, and she knew immediately that it was Catra who administered the band-aids and cookies.
A grey curtain pulled aside with two bunk-cots behind it. She trotted over to them with a smile, which fell when she realised just how far the top mattresses were sagging under their own weight.
That's fine, she thought to herself. I bet I can find some pallet wood round here somewhere.
A wave of amusement travelled down the thread and lapped around her, like warm seawater round paddling feet on an evening beach.
What? she thought back with equal amusement. I'm thrifty and I get bored easily. And I like the top bunk.
Catra walked past her, chuckling, shoulder brushing against Adora's, then pushed her back gently and pulled the cot curtain closed behind her. Taking a nap. Half hour for the meds to kick in. Wake me on pain of death.
Adora smiled at the closed grey curtain. Sleep well, alleycat. A vague grumbling presence rolled once at the end of the thread, and settled down quick.
Adora continued her inventory. The other half of the room, then. A corkboard of pictures and headlines and maps and notes and string hung on the wall and the puzzle of understanding it pulled at her— but this was a careful place with careful people and DT had implied that if Farstep had asked for anonymity then she would have been given it, so the corkboard had to go into the same clouded place as household bills and delicate china for now— she could look with her eyes, not with her hands.
Catra was already asleep, and Adora counted her blessings. She wasn't sure she could have survived the wish you'd look at me with your hands that she could imagine Catra sending with wicked accuracy.
If Catra was asleep... that meant Adora could pause, and think about all of this without disturbing her, right?
She looked over at the grey curtain, and she could feel only a ball of warm static at the other end of the thread, and she sat in the bigger of the two armchair-sisters and she let herself wonder.
She'd fought Catra before, a couple of times. Catra had confirmed back in her apartment but she hadn't needed to— her voice, her eyes, Adora wasn't sure she'd ever be able to forget them.
She'd thrown fire back then— small, controlled bursts, never near anything flammable. Adora had noticed that in their first fight. It had been She-Ra and Frosta defending a cargo container full of sad, hurting people— holding it so nobody else could get to them before the authorities did.
Adora leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes, and let herself swing back over the fight from above. She remembered underestimating Frosta for about thirty seconds, until she realised that this kid somehow knew how to cool a gun fast enough to make the trigger jam and slow enough for the Triad members' reflexes to let them drop the gun before it damaged their hands. And that had been when they'd let loose. Frosta had blocked off entire routes, made their guns and metal weapons next to useless, and whenever there had been someone with gloves or fire powers Frosta had yelled and the She-Ra had knocked them down.
And in the middle of the fight there had been a woman, small, focused, moving like a scalpel-
Oh.
Oh.
Catra had borrowed the fire power. Of course. She'd borrowed it because she'd known Frosta would be on the field, and she'd needed to melt a path. Even watching her work in a memory was a delight. She hadn't helped the Triad— hadn't warmed their weapons back up or unfrozen their boots. No, she'd cut into the fight, and through, and Adora would place a solid bet right now that she had been there to save a spark before the trafficked people were picked up and before the police screenings caught them.
Adora looked over at the grey curtain, and smiled, and knew she wasn't keeping her admiration out of the thread, and she felt the static weight at the other end roll and... purr? in its sleep.
Okay, so what else did this place have? The corkboard loomed over the working side of the room. A broad table squatted underneath it, two folding lawn chairs framing it, and there was a laptop tucked down the side that went straight into Adora's "look but don't touch" reserves. There was a sort of hand-drawn poster off to one side titled DURESS, and it had a short list of codes and hand signs and rhythms, and how long was too long to wait for something after it was meant to have happened, and who to tell when you'd gotten away.
She read the whole of it once, top to bottom, hands clasped behind her back like she was at a museum rope. A skipping-rhyme for a game nobody had wanted to play, written out neat by somebody who'd had to play it anyway. There wasn't anything to say about it, so she didn't say anything. The poster had already said it better.
The exits she'd found before any of that, without deciding to, because that part of her was older than the rest of her put together: the stair she'd come down, and a second door at the back, painted shut by the look of it— except she'd bet her good boots it opened sweet as anything, because nobody who ran a place like this left themselves one way out.
Between the second armchair and the grey bunk-curtain, where the lamp gave up and the wall went cold, there was a stretch of floor with nothing on it at all. Room for a couple of sports bags and a pair of boots and maybe a little more. Dibs, she thought, before she'd decided to think anything— a kid claiming the den under the stairs before anyone had said the game was starting. She grabbed her bags from where she'd left them, and tucked them into that spare spot, and smiled at the fit of it.
At the far end of the thread, the ball of warm static turned over in its sleep and twisted, and Adora was halfway toward the grey curtain before she realised what she was doing. She tried to stop herself, and she would almost have called it valiant except for the memory of how warm it had been in Catra's saferoom— but she felt the thread twist again with a shock of panic, and a soft keening came through the grey curtain, and she twitched it aside just far enough to slip into the bunkroom and knelt down next to the bed and put her hand on Catra's which was clawing at her pillow.
"Shh, shh," she tried. "Bad dream. I'm here."
Catra shuddered, and Adora squeezed her hand and closed her eyes to check the thread more carefully. Still static, but with a core of something made of acid and heat. She brought her other hand to Catra's shoulder and stroked for lack of a better idea, and the flaring acid quelled by just the tiniest amount and that settled it.
She climbed into the bed slow and careful, tucked her arm under Catra's head, managed not to hiss in pain as her nails dug into her side. And then they were back to the saferoom, and Adora took that warm sleepy memory and tried to do what Catra had done to her a few times already: pushed the impression of warm and safe and sleep down the thread.
She looked up at the sad underside of the top bunk as Catra drifted back to relaxed and her breath came slow and warm against Adora's neck.
Maybe the bottom bunk was better after all, she thought.
Two days in, and the corner was hers now. Her things sat in it in a neat squared-off heap against the cold wall, and her boots stood at the end of the heap, side by side, toes to the wall, lined up the way she'd been taught to line them at eight and had never once managed to stop.
And she knew things about the room, and every one of them had felt like finding a coin in the couch. The nearer armchair had a bad leg and walked an inch to the left if you sat down too fast— the chair that didn't like to be surprised, so you had to say hello like greeting a cat. The kettle had two switch positions and only the lower one told the truth; the top one cut out early and handed you water that looked hot and wasn't, a small daily liar she'd caught out on the first morning and felt ridiculously clever about ever since. One of the chipped mugs in the little upside-down triangle was hers, by the oldest law there was: it was the one nobody else reached for. Two days, and she had the whole map of the place— which doors stuck, where the good spoons lived— the same satisfaction as knowing a holiday house by the second morning. She'd have had it in one day flat if she'd had a job.
That was the trouble with the nights.
The night before, she hadn't slept at all.
It wasn't the cold, though the cold turned up too. She'd lain in the dark and run down the list of what needed doing, and the list came back empty. No watch to stand. No door that was hers to hold. No round to walk. She'd had a job every night of her life that she could remember having, and nobody here had thought to give her one, and the dark got very big around a person with both hands empty. The sentry in her— the part that had stood post since before she'd had words for it, and had never quite learned the difference between standing down and deserting— walked her round and round the inside of her own head and would not sit down.
She got up at an hour with no number on it and stood in the amber dark, and her eyes went round the room once, and caught.
The corkboard had gone crooked. Somebody working fast had pinned a new card at an angle, the row underneath had drifted after it, and the bottom card hung by one corner, its pin gone, fetched up against the lip of the board. It wasn't a problem. It was better than a problem: it was a puzzle small enough to win, and it was the only thing in the whole room she was allowed to put right with her hands.
Look with your eyes, not with your hands. She turned the rule over, checked it from a few angles, and found the gap in it with the quiet delight of a kid finding the loophole in a bedtime: straightening didn't have to be looking.
She worked through the cards one-by-one without reading a single one of them— face-down, like shuffling somebody else's deck— found the dropped pin where it had rolled into the seam of the floor, and put everything back square. Top edge to top edge. Even gaps. The DURESS poster flush against the right hand side of the board, at eye level, because if it had to be a game then it deserved to be won properly. Then she stepped back and looked at the one true thing she'd made in a room full of nearly-true ones, and it was good— the plain gladness of a tidy shelf— and the sentry, satisfied at last that something somewhere was being guarded, stood down. She settled into the bottom bunk and was asleep before she'd finished deciding to be.
Catra came down a little after seven and stopped three steps from the bottom.
The board was square. Dead level, even gaps, the duress poster raised to eye level— where she never bothered to put it, because she didn't need to read it to know it. Somebody had stood there in the night and made the wall tidy.
She checked behind the grey curtain, and Adora had finally gone properly under— folded into the too-short bunk, one arm hung over the side with the hand open, boots toes-to-the-wall below her. First real sleep since she'd arrived, far as Catra could tell. Paradoxical, given the treacherous little voice in Catra telling her that the only real sleep she'd had in the last three days had been when she'd woken up two hours into a half-hour nap wrapped around the blonde on that same bottom bunk.
Catra looked at the board, and at the sleeping shape of Adora, and at the board again. The fact that she had straightened it in the middle of the night had a shape to it, but it was missing context, so Catra filed it away for later. She started the kettle on the lower switch and got on with the day.
Glenys had been brisk as a bus conductor from the moment she came down the stair, and Catra liked her for it.
"I won't keep you," Glenys said, settling into the good armchair— she'd found the good armchair on instinct— and setting a hard old handbag on her knees. "My grandniece is christened Sunday. I will not have the plate come home in my coat. The last three I've been to, that's what it tried to do. Twice the silver. Once the christening spoon, and you try handing that back at the door looking innocent. So." She folded her hands on the bag. "Whatever you can do. I'm seventy-one and this has been with me since the War and I am so very tired of it, and if the street says you're the one who can take it away, then I will ask you to try and we shall see what we shall see."
Catra sat across from her on the working stool and this wasn't a woman who wanted platitudes, so she nodded once and reached in for a look. Decades of small lost things finding this woman's pockets— a button off a stranger's cuff, the back of an earring, the one coin under the pew that four people couldn't reach. Decades of being the woman whose bag got looked in first. A thief by reputation who had never stolen a thing in her life. The pull was old, and shallow, and it ran all one way— outward, to her, down a groove worn smooth by decades.
"Twenty minutes," Catra said. "Sit back. You'll feel me poking around. I won't take it— I don't do that unless I absolutely have to— but I'll put a door on it. It doesn't hurt. If it does, you tell me, and I stop."
"I've felt worse than poking," said Glenys, and sat back.
It was patient work, not hard work. The gift had laid down dozens of little habitual pulls over a lifetime, each one a groove for the lost things to slide along, and Catra gathered them up one at a time and settled them back toward the well they rose from. Not closed— you didn't close a thing like this; closing was where people got hurt, forty years of reflex meeting a wall and tearing. Taught to wait, instead. Taught that nothing moved now until the word came, and that there was a word, and that the word was Glenys' to say.
Up through the curtain, while she worked, she could hear the anteroom. The kettle. A mug set down soft. The standing lamp had already been on when Glenys came down, and the crocheted throw had been folded ready over the arm of the waiting chair, and there'd been tea, and Catra hadn't asked anybody for any of that. She filed who must have done it, and went back to the threads.
Twenty minutes, near enough. When the last of it sat still and waiting, Catra opened her eyes.
"Alright," she said. "What would usually trigger it, if we were sat here right now? If I put a handful of change on the table, would the power take some?"
Glenys looked at her. "A test?"
Catra nodded.
"It likes small, and unusual, and valuable."
"How about this?" Adora said, and Catra just about managed to tamp down on the surprise.
She was holding out her hand, and in it was a silver dollar. "It's just a Morgan," Adora said. "But I keep it for good luck."
Something crossed Glenys' face slow and worried. "I hope this has worked," she said low to Catra. "Because that's the sort of thing it's taken before and driven people to tears with the taking."
"Cat knows what she's doing," Adora smiled.
Catra didn't let herself huff. "Your spark was what the ratings board would have called high Instinct," she said. "I've moved it to the other end— Intent only. You can still use it if you want— but learning the flex of it isn't something I can teach you."
"Like rehabilitation," Glenys said, still looking at the coin in Adora's hand.
"Yeah. So maybe in a few weeks, a few months, you'll be able to reach out and hoover up all the loose change down the back of your couch, or find someone's lost keys. But for now, as long as you don't try to use it, that silver dollar stays where it is."
Glenys stood, and held her purse in shaking hands, and her eyes didn't leave the coin.
"When I get to the top step..." she said. "It kicks in at thresholds. I'll step out, and then I'll need to know whether you've still got that thing."
"Will do," Adora said with an easy smile.
She reached the top of the stairs, stepped out through the doorway, turned back— and Adora held up her hand, and there was still a silver dollar in it.
Something quiet and complicated happened on the old woman's face then, and she looked at Catra.
"Don't thank me," Catra said, holding up her hand in farewell. "And don't come back. Go and lose things like everybody else."
"Gladly," Glenys said, and it didn't come out quite steady.
And the door closed, and Adora grinned.
Catra shoved her gently. "If that hadn't worked, you'd have lost your lucky coin."
Adora shrugged. "But it was you. So it worked, and I didn't, and it's all good."
Dumbass, Catra sent, and ignored the twist of something warm that echoed from both ends of the thread.
Exactly ten minutes later, Catra came through the curtain rubbing the heel of one hand into her eye, and the coffee was already made.
It sat on the low table by her stool, in her mug— the one nobody else reached for— and she didn't have to lift it to know the strength, because she could smell it from the curtain: black and mean and twice what anybody sane drank. She put the back of two fingers to the side of the mug. Not scalding. Not gone tepid either. The temperature she actually drank it at, which was a thing she had never told a living soul, and a window about ninety seconds wide, and you didn't hit it by accident. You hit it by standing at a kettle, and already knowing without having been told that Catra always took exactly ten quiet minutes after every round of the work.
Adora was in the second armchair, balanced and careful, which meant she'd already made friends with the bad leg. She had a paperback open in her lap, and for a moment it seemed like she was going to pretend the silver dollar hadn't happened— but then came her voice over the thread.
Coffee's going cold, it said.
Catra picked up the mug, and she sipped, and it was perfect.