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I knew / When you told me you don't wanna go home tonight / And you tried to just shrug it off when I asked you why / Somebody hurt you
Catra isn’t in bed when Adora wakes up.
Adora groans, stretches, reaches for her - but Catra’s side of the bed isn’t just empty, it’s cold.
She blinks a couple times, then groggily grabs her phone and checks the time. It’s unusual for Catra to be up before she is, but she’s got some suspicions about why.
Adora rolls out of bed and pulls on a pair of boxer shorts and wanders out into the apartment. She finds Catra in the living room, sitting on the sofa with her laptop in front of her.
“Hey,” Adora says, smiling sleepily.
“Hey,” Catra says, looking up and smiling back, if a little distantly.
“You’re up early.”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“Got the jitters?”
“Something like that.”
Adora doesn’t push, just stretches again and ponders how best to start the busy day.
She needs a shower, she needs coffee, she needs toast, and she needs a kiss from her girlfriend.
That last one definitely is highest priority in the queue.
She crosses the small living room and leans in, one hand bracing herself on the back of the sofa, and kisses Catra.
Catra hums happily into her mouth, kisses back once, twice, three times.
Three kisses is always a good start to any morning.
Especially with Catra’s palm settled softly against her naked stomach.
God, Adora loves her.
“I’m gonna hop in the shower,” Adora says, “Wanna join me?”
“I showered already,” Catra says, apologetically. “I can put coffee on while you do that, if you want. Or did you just want to wait and have coffee when we get there?”
“Coffee please,” Adora says, smiling because she already knows she’s going to steal kiss number four before she heads to their tiny bathroom, and here she goes - ah, kiss number four is nice too, because Catra moves that hand from her stomach to her face.
“Don’t take too long,” Catra reminds her, with a quick little parting peck to the tip of Adora’s nose. “We need to budget time for me to do your makeup.” Adora notices Catra’s already got her own makeup on. Sharp, perfect eyeliner, maybe just a tiny bit more dramatic than usual. Fresh black nail polish. Something pretty and slightly shiny about her cheekbones.
She’s nervous about today, obviously. They don’t need to leave for another hour and a half and she’s already ready to go out the door.
“You got it, boss,” Adora says. She understands why Catra’s nervous. She’s not going to make it worse by pointing it out.
And anyways, she really does need that shower.
But you're here by my side / And I knew / 'Cause I can recall when I was the one in your seat / I still got the scars and they occasionally bleed / 'Cause somebody hurt me
“Sunscreen on first,” Catra says, pressing past her in the bathroom to get to the cabinet, brushing their bodies together. She rummages through the various bottles and then tosses Adora the strongest SPF sunscreen they own. “I’m not letting you burn like you did when we went camping.”
Adora obediently slathers the thick cream over her face and works it into her skin.
“Aw,” she grins, “it’s like you care about me.”
Catra rolls her eyes, steals back the tube of sunscreen and spurts a dollop into her palm.
“Almost like I love you or something,” she says, and Adora watches her smile in the mirror.
She comes up behind Adora and kisses the back of her neck, and then without being asked to works her handful of sunscreen into the exposed parts of Adora’s back, her neck, her shoulders, the backs of her ears - anywhere she suspects Adora has missed.
“It needs five minutes to soak in before we do the makeup,” Catra says.
“Perfect. That’s five minutes to eat a piece of toast.”
“I thought we were getting breakfast there?”
“We are, but you know I’ll be cranky if I don’t start the day with food in my stomach.”
Catra laughs indulgently.
Adora doesn’t pressure her to have something to eat - Catra’s not a morning meal person to begin within, and she gets queasy if she’s worked up about something, which she is today.
After toast, Adora sits on the toilet and smiles happily as Catra takes her chin and lifts her head and holds her delicately while she applies eyeshadow.
“You decided on the lesbian flag, yeah?” Catra asks, dabbing a makeup brush at the wildly colorful palette she has out on the edge of the sink.
“Yeah,” Adora says, grinning. Last year she did the full rainbow flag, but this year - this year she’s going to get a little more specific.
It seems like a silly thing to be nervous about, but, well -
“Okay, you have to close your eyes, dummy,” Catra says.
“But you’re so pretty,” Adora says, without stopping to filter the first thought that comes to mind. It’s true. She just wants to sit here looking at Catra with Catra’s careful fingers on her face all morning.
“Flattery will get you nowhere. Shut your eyes.”
Catra is smiling.
Adora does as she’s told; each skillful touch of the brush to her skin feels like a whispered I love you, I love you, I love you.
But I'm staying alive / And I can tell / When you get nervous / You think being yourself means being unworthy / And it's hard to love with a heart that's hurting
Riding the subway to and from the parade is always the scariest part. She feels so exposed, somehow, and she holds her tote bag of essentials - refillable water bottle, spray-on sunscreen for reapplying throughout the day, the schedule and map of events - on her lap like a shield.
Exposed, nervous - will people know where she’s going and why, and will they recognize what it means about her that she’s wearing eyeshadow in stripes of pink and white and orange? To have that intimate, private truth about herself just out there for anybody to know?
And then Catra takes her hand, and the fear settles, goes away.
“Excited?” Adora asks quietly.
“Not yet,” Catra says, “But I think I’m getting there.”
She smiles, and Adora just wants to kiss her, and -
And so she does, just a shy, quick little kiss to the cheek, because fuck what everybody thinks, this is their day.
She meets eyes with a little old lady sitting across from them.
The woman beams at Adora, and then winks and gives a little thumbs up.
But if you want to go out dancing / I know a place we can go / Where everyone gonna lay down their weapon
“Catra! Adora! Over here!”
Glimmer’s voice carries over the crowds and the four of them collide in hugs.
Bow is shirtless except for the pastel pink and white and blue flag he’s wearing as a cape.
It makes Adora’s heart fill with an enormous kind of joy. She wonders how many young people will see Bow’s scars, see how completely unashamed of them he is, and feel full of their own kind of joy, one shaped like hope and possibility.
Glimmer is wearing what appears to be three tutus and several strings of repurposed Mardi Gras beads in the colors of the bisexual flag, and she is very, very glittery.
In this crowd, they both fit right in.
The little queer bakery they meet up at to start their day is packed, so they place their orders and take their food and coffee out into the street, sit on a curb to talk excitedly about the events of the day and sip their drinks as the cool morning air gives way to the impending heat of the summer sun.
Catra seems quiet, just looking around at the variety of people out and about, laughing and yelling and making noise.
She catches Adora looking.
“What?” Catra asks.
“Starting to get excited yet?”
Catra smiles. It’s a small, almost bashful smile.
“I’m starting to, yeah.”
Just give me trust and watch what'll happen / 'Cause I know / I know a place we can run / Where everyone gonna lay down their weapon / Lay down their weapon
Adora does her best to balance her desire to plan every second of their day with Catra’s natural dislike of rigid, unbendable structure. They wander hand in hand through the stalls as the morning ramps up excitedly towards afternoon, passing through vendors selling everything from knitted hats to bondage gear.
They stop to admire some handmade mugs, and then Adora excitedly drags Catra to look at a rainbow suit of chainmail on display at another stall.
Catra teases her for how impractical it is, and then surprises her five minutes later by slipping a rainbow chainmail keychain from the stall into her palm.
“When did you buy this?” Adora gasps delightedly, fishing her already bulky keys out of her cargo shorts pockets to add it to the jangling collection.
“While Bow pulled you over to look at the competitive archery tag booth.” Something about Catra’s grin says this distraction was deliberately planned.
“I love you,” Adora says, and kisses Catra right there, in the middle of the street, in the middle of the crowd, in the middle of the city. It thrills her so much that it feels like maybe it’s the first time they’ve ever kissed.
It feels so good not to be afraid.
“I love you too,” Catra laughs, bumping their foreheads together when Adora’s finished kissing her. “You nerd. Come on, Sparkles is about to vanish on us if we don’t keep up. And I want to go get one of those free frisbees that booth over there is giving out.”
Don't you be afraid of love and affection / Just lay down your weapon
Adora hollers at the top of her lungs - and she’s got pretty good lung capacity - as her team goes by. Scorpia waves excitedly with the hand that isn’t holding her end of the banner.
This time last year, Adora would have been marching right there with them, proudly representing the city’s best (okay, only) recreational queer women’s hockey league. Her heart sinks a little to be watching from the sidelines, but Catra squeezes her hand and she decides that she’d rather be in the crowd with Catra than in the parade without her.
“You’ll be back before you know it,” Catra whispers into her ear.
She’s right, of course. Her broken ankle is almost completely healed - it’s still so fucking stupid that of all the ways for that to have happened, it was by slipping on a wet step down into the subway, and not doing something badass during a game - and she’ll be back in time for the start of the next season.
Adora probably could have marched with the team, even if she’s technically off skates right now, but it would have felt weird.
And anyways, at least this way she doesn’t have to leave Catra alone.
“How are you holding up?” Adora asks, as the hooting and waving hockey team passes and moves on down the street, followed by a gay men’s football league and then a roller derby team doing stunt jumps on their skates to the delighted screams of the crowd.
“I think I’m going to be ready for a break soon, if that’s okay?” Catra says.
“That’s definitely okay. I’m starving, actually. Do you want to go check out the food booths and then find somewhere quiet to eat?”
Right now / It's like you're carrying all the weight of your past / I could tell all your bruises, yellow, dark blue, and black / But baby a bruise is, only your body / Tryna keep you intact
They have to walk about ten minutes to find a small little park with some open patches of grass and spots of shade, but they’re still close enough that they can hear the sounds of the parade and they have the reassuring safety of seeing people in bright colors meandering around.
“Holy shit, Bow, where did you get that?” Adora gasps excitedly, staring with open covetous jealousy as he and Glimmer join them in the grass.
Bow waves the deep fried spiralized potato on a stick back towards the way they came.
“The Potato Tornado booth!” He yells, clearly just as excited as Adora.
Adora pulls open her phone and shoots a message to the group chat telling everybody where they’re eating lunch, and Perfuma joins them a few minutes later followed shortly by Mermista and Sea Hawk.
“I can’t believe you actually bought an entire pie,” Catra drawls, rolling her eyes as Adora finishes her hot dog - dripping relish and fried onion toppings all over herself and not even caring - and then pulls out the pie.
“I had to buy the full sized one! They were out of strawberry rhubarb little pies!” Adora protests.
“I told you cherry is fine,” Catra scoffs.
“But strawberry rhubarb is your favourite,” Adora insists.
They don’t have any utensils, but that’s fine.
Catra giggles helplessly as Adora scoops pie directly from the tin with her hands and offers the first bite to Catra.
“Weirdo,” she murmurs, and then allows Adora to feed her the flaky, sticky, messy handful.
Later Adora checks the group chat again to see if Scorpia’s reached the end of the parade yet and is on her way to join them, and sees Perfuma has posted a picture of her feeding Catra a handful of pie and captioned it These two are so sweet.
The jokes about pie filling that follow are entirely predictable.
Adora puts her phone away, looks at Catra, and realizes she’s so, so, so damn in love.
“I want to go see more vendors,” Glimmer announces, jumping to her feet. “There are so many this year! I need to waste my money on more rainbow shit!! Are you guys coming?”
Adora has a gut feeling that Catra is still a little overwhelmed, since she’s starting to feel a bit overwhelmed herself.
“You guys go ahead without us,” Adora says, smiling. “I think I just want to chill for a bit.”
“Okay, we’ll meet up at the bar if we don’t see you before then!”
Once their friends leave, the heavy warmth of the summer afternoon hangs pleasant and soothing around them.
Adora lies back in the grass, and Catra curls up next to her.
“Is it weird that I want to have a nap?” Catra asks.
“Not at all - plus you were up way earlier than I was. Now is the perfect time to have a nap.”
It’s too hot for her long sleeved flannel shirt anyways, so Adora balls it up under her head as a pillow.
“Are you sure?” Catra asks. “You can go be with everybody else if you want. Or I can just have another coffee and push through it.”
“Take a nap,” Adora says, pulling Catra onto her chest and draping an arm around her. “I just want to be here with you.”
So they settle into each other to doze in the shade of a tree in the grass of a park, Adora’s arms around Catra, both their fingers slightly sticky with handmade strawberry rhubarb pie.
They can still hear the festivities from here, a muted cacophony of drums and whistles and dance music and cheering, and it seems to Adora that it makes it easier to drift off, not harder.
The sound of distant celebration is reassuring.
“Thanks,” Catra says, softly, “for bringing me here.”
“I’m glad you came,” Adora says, with tender fondness.
They don’t talk about how enormously different this is from what things were like for them in highschool.
They don’t talk about the way Catra turned cold and cut Adora out of her life when some jackass started spreading a rumor that the two of them were a gay couple.
They don’t talk about the fact that it took Adora another five years after that to figure out she actually was gay, or that it took Catra even longer than that to admit that she’d known she was all along.
“Hey,” Catra says instead, “sit up for a second.”
So Adora sits up, arms still around Catra, and Catra pulls out her phone and turns the camera towards them, leans in and tucks her face against Adora’s neck, and takes a photo.
Enjoying Pride with my extremely dorky girlfriend who bought an entire pie today for some reason, she writes, and posts it to all her social media accounts.
Even the one her deeply homophobic mom still follows her on.
“Okay,” Catra says, turning off her phone. “Now we can nap.”
So right now / I think we should go get drunk on cheap wine / I think we should hop on the purple line / 'Cause maybe our purpose / Is to never give up when we're on the right track
“It hasn’t started yet, has it?” Adora yells over the music of the bar, pushing her way through the crowds after Glimmer with Catra’s hand clamped tightly in hers.
“It’s just about to, come to the front for a good seat!”
“Ladies, gentlemen, distinguished guests of all genders and no genders at all,” the MC purrs into the microphone, “We’ve got a special treat for you tonight!”
“There’s a spot over there!” Adora hisses excitedly at Catra, and they squeeze in between Perfuma and Mermista and then plop down cross-legged on the floor. Catra wiggles herself into Adora’s lap, and Adora has precisely zero complaints about this even if it makes it marginally more complicated to take swigs of her bottle of beer.
“Tonight,” Double Trouble drawls happily, flicking their feather boa back over one shoulder, “we’ve got a newbie to christen our evening festivities! This is her first time doing burlesque, so let’s give her a very, very warm welcome. Pinch me once, shame on you, pinch me twice and I hope you’re prepared to buy me dinner, it’s Scorpia!”
Everybody crammed into the back of the bar around the short riser playing the role of a ‘stage’ cheers. Perfuma lets out a long, impressive wolf-whistle.
The sultry music that starts playing is no match for the playful silliness of Scorpia’s getup, which seems to be a cheap Halloween lobster costume with a dramatic leg slit cut down the side. She hits the stage and dances as sexually as a floppy felt lobster can, and then when the beat drops she rips the whole thing off and reveals the tight glittering cocktail dress she’s got on underneath.
Adora can’t stop looking at Catra, who is smiling so, so enormously and laughing so hard and seems happy and relaxed and just - beautiful. She’s so beautiful.
They will try to make you unhappy / Don't let them / They will try to tell you you're not free / Don't listen / I, I know a place where you don't need protection / Even if it's only in my imagination
When the dancing starts, their group clusters together in a giddy blur of color.
It’s perfect.
Adora can dance like a moron, because she loves and trusts every single face she sees around her. This isn’t about some performative sexy routine. It’s just a sheer, physical expression of the joy that’s been building in her chest all day.
It’s something she sees mirrored in Catra’s face.
It isn’t just happiness. It’s… comfort. It’s safety. It’s the rawness of realizing that for once in your life, all that defensive shielding you’ve built up around your heart isn’t necessary.
You can let it go, and just be.
“Do you need another drink?” She asks Bow, who is slurping down the dregs of his current glass.
“Aw, Adora, you’re so sweet! Sure!”
“Gonna grab Bow a refill!” Adora yells to Catra over the music.
“Sure,” Catra says, “First - “
And then she grabs Adora by the shirt, pulls her in, and kisses her hard.
Their friends howl and whistle and cheer, and Adora is sure very, very red by the time Catra pulls away smirking.
“Come back soon,” Catra purrs.
Adora rushes to the bar to order Bow another virgin strawberry margarita - he’s been sober for a couple years now and they all take turns expressing their love and support for him by ensuring he always has something delicious and alcohol-free to sip from - and another beer for herself.
She returns to the group, and her whole body just seems to light up with love as her eyes settle on them all.
Sea Hawk and Mermista are spinning each other around, laughing.
Perfuma and Scorpia are, somehow, managing to slow dance to the throbbing, upbeat pop remix Entrapta is currently playing from the DJ booth.
Catra is currently dipping Glimmer, who is flushed and giggling, and then when she pulls Glimmer back up Catra gracefully takes Bow’s hand and allows herself to be twirled.
So Catra twirls, and when she comes to a stop she opens her eyes and finds Adora’s gaze.
Her face splits open into a toothy grin.
Adora delivers Bow’s drink and then catches Catra up in her arms, bouncing to the beat.
Catra kisses her neck, her jaw, her cheeks, her eyebrows. It tickles, and Adora laughs, and everything feels good, so good.
'Cause I know / I know a place we can stay / Where everyone gonna lay down their weapon / Lay down their weapon / Don't you be afraid of love and affection / Just lay down your weapon
They make it to the subway station just in time to catch the last train home.
Exhausted, happy people dressed in rainbows all share unspoken solidarity in the subway car, finding one final moment of sanctuary in each others’ presence.
Adora puts an arm around Catra’s shoulders, and Catra leans into her with her eyes closed.
“Okay, you were right,” Catra says quietly against her, smiling as if reluctant to make this admission. “Pride is kind of fun.”
“Told you so,” Adora says, kissing her forehead.
It would be better if neither of them had ever been hurt, even if it’s good that they’ve both made so much progress towards healing from it.
Obviously things aren’t perfect.
But Adora holds on to that warm glow in her chest.
Hope.
Possibility.
She wants to feel those things, even if they scare her. Even if they make her feel vulnerable.
Maybe it isn’t so bad after all, being vulnerable.