Chapter Text
It wasn’t like she wanted to kill stormtroopers. Or death troopers, or purge troopers, or whatever other idiotic name they’d been assigned this month. Some of her oldest friends were troopers.
Ex-oldest friends? Was she allowed to have friends in the Empire? After three years with the Rebellion, Adora still didn’t know; she really needed to get around to asking Glimmer about that.
She hesitated for a moment, lightsaber weaving azure streaks through the air as she mindlessly deflected blaster fire away from her X-Wing. Not Glimmer, but Bow, she eventually decided, wincing slightly as another anonymous armor clad figure exploded from an expertly reflected bolt. Bow’s probably the better person to ask.
Because if she asked Glimmer – Glimmer the newfound Queen, still grieving the loss of her mother – she would surely say no. And then Adora would have to give up on Catra.
She wasn’t going to do that. Ever since Razz had explained what Horde Prime’s return meant, Adora had been plagued with insidious thoughts of Catra’s grievously mauled corpse. She couldn’t let those nightmares become reality.
So here she was, defending a stolen X-Wing from the attacks of confusingly-named troopers. All because this station, floating in Tatooine orbit, was Catra’s last known location, and Adora had to get her attention and warn her. Before it was too late.
There was a slight tug somewhere past the side wall of the hangar. A minor disturbance in the Force. Adora’s focus returned abruptly to the battlefield, eyes locked ahead. She and Catra weren’t the only Force sensitive people trained by the Empire, but there weren’t many others. If she was feeling something, it could be Catra.
A ragged sheet of red lightning burst through the wall and put that hope in a coffin. The wordless jovial yell booming out over the battlefield heaped dirt atop it.
The lightning slice continued to burn, tracing out a rough rectangle – and then the entire panel, glowing edges and all, flew towards Adora. She reached her left hand out and flicked it dismissively. The metal shrieked from her Force push and shot rightward, crushing a trooper as it lodged into the far wall of the station’s hanger.
Adora glanced into the opening. Between the drips of molten metal, she could make out a hulking figure.
“Hello, Scorpia,” Adora said.
“I am so sorry about that!” the tall woman shouted back, clawed hand held regretfully over her mouth. “I didn’t realize you were here! I’ve actually been meaning to call and catch up, but we’ve been so busy pacifying Tatooine recently, and – ”
“You don’t have to apologize?” Adora said in a confused tone. She opened her mouth to say more, but saw a bolt coming out of the corner of her eye. A flash of her blue lightsaber bounced it harmlessly into the ceiling.
“Don’t shoot her!” Scorpia said loudly. “It’s probably not going to do much good, and I don’t think she’s here to cause trouble anyways.”
The trooper who’d fired at her turned towards Scorpia. Adora took a moment to try and decipher the meaning of the markings that coated his armor, but didn’t recall anything that corresponded to a particularly nauseating combination of puce and mustard. His speaker crackled a bit. “Apologies, Mistress Scorpia, but she is attacking an Empire station.”
“Wellll, not really,” Scorpia replied. “If she were attacking, you’d know. Let’s stop giving her a reason to.” She turned a bit to regard Adora fully. “Truce, at least for a minute or two?”
Adora gaped at Scorpia briefly, then turned off the saber. “Uh. Sure. Honestly, I am here just to deliver a message – ”
“Oh! To Wildcat!”
“…Yes,” Adora said after a tentative pause. “To Catra.”
“Well, if you wait a minute, she’ll be right out.” Scorpia strode forward, then lightly poked at the edge of the still-glowing cutout with her claws. “Ah! Nope, that is still hot. Still very hot.”
Adora reached out hesitantly, thumb on the activation stud of her lightsaber. “Do you want me to – I can widen it – ”
Scorpia turned her head quickly, raising a warding claw. “Oh, no, it’s fine! I’m good!” A few more careful moments served to maneuver her bulk carefully through the opening without burning herself. She unfolded herself and approached Adora, arms spread wide. “It really is wonderful to see you!”
“Thanks?” Adora said, while accepting a hug she had not asked for. Scorpia’s hospitality wasn’t entirely surprising, but that didn’t make it not confusing. In the years since Adora had fled the Empire that raised her, she’d fought them across countless battlefields, she’d killed troopers, and she’d seen fellow rebels die under the Empire’s boots – and yet this woman still seemed to think of her as a friend.
Maybe she could hope that Catra would do the same. Eventually.
“And you’re back to see Wildcat – she still talks about you!”
“Yeah, no, I – wait, what?” Catra still talked about her? Scorpia had to have meant that in a negative way. Catra hated her; this trip was just the first step in a long journey to repair that.
“Hey, Scorpia,” a familiar husky voice called from beyond the hangar wall, “I see you’ve remodeled the station again. Was that enough to take care of whatever moronic rebel just tried to invade us, or do you need me to – ”
Adora felt her adrenaline rising as a lithe figure wearing a skintight bodysuit strode into view, turning to look through the hole Scorpia left. It – she – stopped for a shocked moment, then rasped out, “Hey, Adora.”
Catra’s day had been decent, thus far. Yes, it had involved sand, which pretty much automatically removed any possibility of life being actually enjoyable – at least until she could find the time for the extra-long shower-and-dry cycle required to clean every last speck of Tatooine out of her fur – but she’d also had the chance to remind her trooper contingent exactly how capable she was with the Force.
Sure, Shadow Weaver’s eternal refrain might have been technically correct: she couldn’t match Adora in terms of raw power. But Adora frankly sucked at actually directing her abilities, and it wasn’t like Scorpia’s erratic lightning was the embodiment of precision either.
No, today was a day where Catra was needed. And she would have been even if Adora hadn’t ran off three years ago. Today, the Empire needed Catra and her decades of practice, spent scrounging and wheedling every last ounce of utility out of her stupidly ineffectual connection with the Force. For once, there was no spaceship to lift or wall to destroy; they just needed a smuggler to talk.
And once Catra had finished with him, he talked. And talked and talked and talked, until his throat went dry and his voice gave out. Anything to avoid another session with her.
All of her troopers had very carefully taken thorough notes while he babbled, and then even more carefully avoided meeting her eyes on the flight back to the station.
So yes, today had been decent, even considering the irritating bits of sand still clinging to her. Respect felt good.
And now, she had this wonderful chance to make her day even better. Just as their shuttle had begun to unload, a rebel X-Wing had careened into the docking bay next to theirs. Catra could already feel herself salivating a bit at the potential fight coming.
That being said, she of course needed to make an entrance. So while Scorpia had immediately begun to joyfully cut a hole into the wall – despite the perfectly good hallway not twenty feet away – Catra carefully dusted off her jumpsuit. As Scorpia delivered a Force assisted kick to launch the panel, Catra checked to make sure her blood-red lightwhip was ready to go. And once Scorpia’s crackling lightning had finally stopped, Catra strode down the long ramp, delivered a suitably biting line, and pivoted to see –
“Hey, Adora.”
The words slipped out before she could even try to swallow them down. But it didn’t matter, for once. Because Adora was standing in front of her. She was back. She’d come crawling back.
Today was a great day.
Adora blinked a few times and squeaked out, “Uh. Hi.”
Catra glowered a bit as she nimbly slipped through the glowing hole that Scorpia had made. Adora finally returned to her, and all Catra got was that reply?
Granted, Adora looked good. Well, better than good. She looked fantastic, actually. Flowing robe that utterly failed to conceal any of her muscles, hair somehow even blonder, face still irritatingly eye-catching. But looks aside, her whole stupid “searching for myself as a Jedi” quest had pretty clearly failed miserably if she could only choke out a “Hi.”
“Well?” Catra said haughtily. “Why are you here?”
“I’ve – I’m – ”
“She’s got a message for you, Wildcat!” Scorpia boomed.
Catra turned, looking up at Scorpia. “I’ve told you not to call me that. And we’ll talk about your failure to warn me of a Jedi later.”
“Of course, of course,” Scorpia said, then gestured back towards Adora. “Definitely my bad. Sorry, I just got excited! Adora’s back!”
“I can see that,” Catra said, claws tingling slightly. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly before glancing back towards Adora. “And why, exactly, is that?”
“I need to tell you something,” Adora said. Her eyes went slightly wider and she glanced at Scorpia and the troopers around them. “I think it might be good to be alone, though?”
Catra frowned at her for a second. If it had been back when they trained and ate and lived together, Catra would have been delighted with that request. But now, now that she commanded this station (and many others besides), it felt oddly hollow.
“Fine.” Catra looked away from her to glare at Scorpia and the surviving troopers. “Leave us.”
“But what if she – ”
Without thinking, Catra’s hand went to her lightwhip’s hilt. She unclipped it and danced it across her fingers, tiny touches with the Force bouncing it to and fro, then caught it with a full grip. “I’ve sparred with Adora my entire life. She wouldn’t be able to kill me before you could return, even if she wanted to.”
Scorpia nodded and started walking towards the hole she’d carved. “Okay then. I’m going to just – ”
“Use the actual door,” Catra said flatly, just because she could. “And don’t go into the other hanger, either.” At her words, Scorpia stopped in her tracks, then spun on her heel and headed out, muttered apologies trailing after her.
The troopers stayed put.
Catra tapped the firing stud on the whip. A long flexible line of plasma flowed out. Catra used the Force to carefully nudge it off the metal deckplate just a bit – nothing worse than pulling a lightwhip out only to look like a dipshit when it cut a hole straight through the floor.
Her careful ministrations resulted in a growling snarl of red forming beside her. A flick of the wrist and more subtle pokes with the Force converted that stationary curl into a roiling wave of crackling hate, dancing up and around her as she made eye contact with the troopers. “If you don’t want to get gelded, I suggest you leave. Like I asked.”
They left.
Catra tapped the firing stud again and the whip vanished. “They’re fucking useless at following orders sometimes. Takes a firm hand to keep them in check,” she said, turning back towards Adora. Her former… training partner? Bunkmate? Friend? looked back at her, expression attentive but otherwise unreadable. “Now, what is it you wanted to say, oh great Jedi Princess?”
A blush flowed across Adora’s face. “I’m not – ” She cut herself off in a huff, then made a strangled gesture at the corners of the room. “Look, are we actually alone? Or do we need to worry about cameras?”
Catra frowned at her a bit harder and waved a hand. Tiny sparks crackled out from her, seeking conduits. After a moment, she had a mental picture of what wires existed in the walls and floor and ceiling; another hand gesture severed all of them.
The hanger slammed into near-darkness. The only illumination came from the X-Wing’s navigation lights, the still glowing cuts in the walls, and the stars outside. Good groveling light, perfectly suited for the apology Catra knew was coming.
“What the shit,” Adora shouted, voice full of awe. “How did you – ”
“Traced the electrical signals, then cut them,” Catra said dryly as she sidled around Adora, casually inspecting her arms and shoulders and back. Adora’s muscles seemed more defined than she remembered, even under bland beige robes. “Same principle as with a nervous system, just on a bit bigger scale.” Her fangs flashed into a fleeting grin. “And probably a bit easier to repair.”
“A nervous system? Wait, repair?” While Catra still had most of her vision, Adora was obviously blind right now. She glanced back and forth, looking for some sign of Catra, then eventually addressed an entirely empty patch of decking. “Catra, is Shadow Weaver making you paralyze people?!”
“She’s not making me do anything, Adora!” Catra snarled, claws once again prickling. Her vision tinged red. “I wanted to see if I could. And I can.” Granted, the target had to be immobilized, and technically speaking she’d only tested it on a verminous womp rat, but –
“I’m sure you can,” Adora said, turning the wrong direction as she pleaded, “but you shouldn’t need to! That’s not what the Force should be used for!”
Catra glanced at the dark stain slowly spreading under the piece of wall Adora had clearly deflected. “What, because it should be used crush dewback troopers instead?”
“They were shooting at me!” Adora said – then, in a considerably more quizzical tone: “Wait, what’s a dewback?”
Catra let out a heavy sigh. “The sand keeps killing our speeders, so we’re trying out troopers riding animals now. A dewback is one of them. And don’t change the subject.”
“That seems – ”
“Backwards and awful? Yes. I hate Tatooine.”
“Because of the sand?”
“No, Adora, I hate it because of the lack of a quality podracing track. Yes, because of the fucking sand, you idiot,” Catra spat as she circled directly in front of Adora. “It’s coarse and rough – and you’re still changing the subject, so how about” – she flicked the whip on and shaped it into a hook, then immediately tapped it with the Force until it settled into a neat loop, crackling and spitting three inches from all sides of Adora’s neck – “how about you tell me why you dropped by.”
Intellectually, Adora knew that she was a bit fucked in the head. She’d been with the Rebellion long enough to grasp that her childhood had not been totally normal, a conclusion only reinforced by the deeply concerned looks Bow and Glimmer had given her whenever she told fun stories from her youth.
But she’d never quite emotionally understood how fucked up she was. Not until her vision was pulled from twilight by a glowing noose, suspended just off her skin by a woman who had apparently developed the control required to sever individual nerves with the Force.
Technically speaking, it wasn’t even the moment itself that made her realize. It was her reaction to it. Adora wasn’t exactly an expert on what the normal response to this situation might be, but she was pretty sure that her desire to smash her mouth into Catra’s was not it.
And frankly, that desire would still be fine – she’d happily forgive a little bit of (light)whip play from Catra, especially since it apparently made her feel like this – except for the slightly awkward fact that Catra definitely wasn’t doing this as foreplay.
(Not that Adora had much experience with that, either. She and Catra had nearly tried once or twice, back when they were both deep in the throes of puberty – but they had also simultaneously been deep in the throes of Shadow Weaver’s child-rearing process, which tended to put a damper on anything outside of learning how to be a Sith.)
No, Catra was clearly aiming for decapitation here. So Adora’s arousal was actually pretty fucking inconvenient.
After all, she should have been trying to figure out if she could slip out of this, backflip onto her X-Wing, and claim the high ground. Instead of doing that, though, her attention remained on Catra’s claws, flickering and crackling with reflected scarlet arcs. If Adora dragged her tongue dragged along the edge of that first claw, like she wanted to, would Catra lose control of the noose?
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
Adora flicked her eyes up towards Catra’s face, sunken and shadowed by scarlet. She pushed down her own feelings enough to stammer, “Like – like what?”
“Like – ” Catra cut herself off, exasperatedly pinching the bridge of her nose between the fingers of her off hand. “Nevermind. Just tell me why you’re here.”
“To talk to you,” Adora said. She took a slow breath in, mindful of the searing plasma held just off her skin, and consciously exiled all thoughts of her and Catra writhing pleasantly under each other’s touch. “To tell you that you’re going to get killed if you don’t stop this.”
“Forgive me if I’m not impressed by your eternal refrain.”
“No, this time you really are.” She exhaled carefully. “Listen to me. Somehow, Horde Prime returned.”