Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

1

It’s a perfect day.

The Grand Hall at Bright Moon Castle is a vision in white and gold and red and blue, covered over in flowers and ice sculptures and fluttering banners and filled to the brim with milling attendees. The wedding party is resplendent in their own matching colors, trailing shimmering flower petals in their wake as they process to an equally resplendent dais. Bow walks Adora down the aisle first, so she’s already at the end of it when Catra steps into the room on Glimmer’s arm, all bright sharp edges with her suit and her fanged grin and her mismatched eyes that fix on Adora like no one else matters at all.

Dowager King Micah’s voice booms pleasantly through the hall as he officiates, as he speaks of love and forever and promises and darkness and light. And, indeed, the crowd holds its breath as the hall goes dark, erupts in cheers as Adora and Catra hang a lantern together and their shared grip—with a little help from the magic of Bright Moon itself—sets the room aglow; a steady, brilliant gold illuminating them as they share first their vows and then a soft, brief kiss under its light.

There’s joy, then, and even more joy as the wedding party proceeds out the doors, gathers for a moment at the shining shore of Bright Moon’s lake to pose for a series of pictures, all laughter and affectionate jostling and inside jokes. When they finally arrive at the reception, there’s even more laughter—old friends and newer collected in celebration. Adora cries at Glimmer’s speech and then laughs as Bow cries through his and then hikes up her voluminous skirts to dance first with Catra and then with everyone else, keeps dancing until long after the sky above the courtyard has gone dim-bright with stars.

Spinnerella calls the day ‘charmed’, and considering the number of sorcerers in attendance, Adora thinks maybe it is. Spinny asks if it’s everything Adora had dreamed, and it doesn’t feel right to mention that growing up with the Horde didn’t lend itself to this kind of fantasy. So Adora says yes, because Adora knows enough to know that this is what you dream of if you dream of weddings, because Adora’s been hearing 'gorgeous' and 'amazing' and 'charmed' and 'perfect' all day, and because when Adora looks at Catra, eyebrows raised expectant and a cake knife twirling in one hand, she can’t imagine a better sight.

It’s full-night when they get around to dessert, but no one minds. Adora’s hand covers Catra’s, and they slice the cake together. They feed each other bits of it while someone behind them calls for a kiss, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to lean in, to taste the frosting on Catra’s lips, to grip her lapels and keep her close.

The world tilts on its axis. But then, it always does that when Catra kisses her, so Adora pays it no mind.

2

Catra wakes up alone.

She’s pretty sure that’s not how you're supposed to wake up the morning after your wedding night. Not that she can remember much after the reception—but Adora’s definitely supposed to be in bed with her, and the pyjamas she’s wearing strike her as an unlikely detail.

‘Catra!’

The yell is mostly muffled by the thick door of her room, but the pounding that follows makes the whole frame shake.

Come to think of it, she’s pretty sure she and Adora should be waking up together in their room, not in the guest room Bow and Glimmer insisted on stashing her in. That was a one-night only thing. Glimmer promised. The better part of a decade she'd shared a room with Adora, but Etherian tradition insisted on separation the night before a wedding.

(‘But,’ Catra reasoned at the time, ‘isn’t the Fright Zone in Etheria too?’

‘Oh!’ Bow replied, entirely serious and entirely genuine, ‘are there any Fright Zone traditions you want to include?’

Which had been the end of that discussion.)

‘Catra, you are not going to be late to your own wedding, and I will teleport in on top of you if I have to!’

Okay.

That’s weird.

‘You say that like it's a bad thing?’

She should say it teasingly, but the words feel strange in Catra’s mouth, come out uncertain instead. She remembers them so clearly, it feels less like having a conversation and more like reading from a script.

‘Ugh!’ Glimmer says through the door, just like she did in—in Catra's dream? ‘You know what you are?’

‘A nightmare,’ Catra whispers, too quiet for Glimmer to hear.

‘A nightmare!’

Catra can picture her affectionate eye-roll perfectly. It makes her feel better. In her dream, she spoke louder; Glimmer replied differently. Her subconscious is good at imitating her friends, that's all. Nothing weird about that.

‘I need to go check on Adora. Scorpia’s gonna be along any minute now, so try to be dressed by then?’

‘Yeah,’ Catra says, even as Glimmer’s footsteps move away. ‘Sure thing, Sparkles.’

*

The nice thing about Scorpia’s incessant chatter is that there’s so much of it, Catra finds it completely impossible to compare to the version in her dream.

‘—look absolutely gorgeous! Adora is going to lose her mind, it’s just like Princess Prom—’

She’s being unfair, she knows that. Scorpia is excited for her, and it’s not like Catra isn’t excited for herself… it’s just been a weird morning. It’s not the first time this has happened, that she’s dreamt a task complete only to wake and remember she hadn’t even started; she’s no stranger to being stressed and booked and a little off-kilter. Maybe this wedding shit really is getting to her, but that’s not Scorpia’s fault. Scorpia’s here to make sure Catra gets where she needs to be on time, and that’s a good thing, because there are so many moving parts Catra isn’t sure she could do it on her own.

She makes an effort to pay attention.

‘—and, you know, this is crazy, but I’m just gonna say it? I knew! I knew then! I knew there was something special between you! It was just a matter of time.’ And that does make Catra smile. She used to find it almost impossible to remember the early days without flinching, but time has gentled it all. Time and the knowledge that Scorpia was right. Scorpia continues, though this time it’s directed over Catra’s head: ‘Oh, hey, Entrapta! Did you get the tulle for the chairs?’

Catra turns and finds that Entrapta is exactly where Catra had known she’d be, walking through the doors and towards them with a tablet in one hand and the ceremonial lantern in the other, hair swarming around the latter like there were a dozen spare lanterns if she broke this one and not a single, ancient bit of Bright Moon tradition. Catra had dreamed she’d walked past them, and Scorpia hadn’t put any more work into flagging her down—all of which is reasonable, really. Entrapta ignores them for her work all the time, and they ignore her ignoring them all the time, and walking through doors is perfectly normal, it is. Still, Catra plants herself solidly in Entrapta’s path, crosses her arms, and says loudly, 'Hey, Etheria to Entrapta! The chairs. The, uh…’ she processes Scorpia’s words, ‘tulle? For… chairs? Scorpia, what the fuck are we doing with tulle and chairs?’

‘Bows,’ Scorpia says, then launches into an elaborate description while Entrapta stops at Catra’s blockade. She doesn’t look up, and she’s definitely not carrying any kind of fabric at all, and Catra’s starting to think stopping her was a mistake. Even moreso when Entrapta gives a distracted hum and presses the tablet into Catra’s hands, using her now free fingers to join her hair where it’s fussing with the lantern.

Catra glances down to see footage of what she desperately hopes isn’t the mass of wedding guests waiting outside. She immediately looks away because nope. ‘Scorpia,’ she says, ‘I really don’t care if the chairs have—hey, don’t fuck with that!’

Catra shoves the tablet at Scorpia (‘Oh, uh, okay, uh. Yeah, I got this. Ooh, fancy hat!’), and bats at where Entrapta is attempting to—as far as Catra can tell—unscrew the lantern’s top. Catra snatches it away and, after a brief wrestle, hugs the item to her chest with a glare. Entrapta looks at her imploringly. 'I just wanted to see how it—'

'Well, you can’t.'

Scorpia casts her a glance. 'Catra…'

'What? I don’t want her to break it.'

This distracts Entrapta from the lantern, but only so she can start scrutinizing Catra’s face. Annoyingly. 'Hmm,' she hums again, then produces a voice recorder from absolutely nowhere and tells it, 'Subject W-1—more commonly known as Catra—appears to be more invested in what she has previously called'—she turns the tablet Scorpia’s holding towards her, swipes her finger two or three times—‘this wedding shit than I had assumed. Must revisit wedding-related assumptions… twenty three, thirty five, sixty—’

'I’m not!' Catra insists. When both their eyes turn on her, she looks down and mumbles into the top of the lantern, 'It’s just… it’s Adora’s wedding.'

'It’s your wedding too, you know.' Scorpia’s voice is gentle.

Catra feels herself go red. 'Yeah, but it’s. That’s…' she trails off, and now she knows stopping Entrapta was a mistake.

‘Hey,’ Scorpia waits until Catra looks up, and her smile is gentle, too. 'I know this is all—uh, a lot, but I’m happy for you, you know? I’m so happy for you.’

It’s not exactly peaceful: two people choose that moment to walk by carrying a table, and someone is shouting about napkins, and Catra can hear Perfuma yelling instructions about the flower décor, her voice growing more strained with every sentence. But it is peaceful, too, because it’s maybe the first moment all day Catra hasn’t felt rushed.

‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘I know,’ and she doesn’t even tense up when Scorpia draws her into one of her signature bone-crushing hugs.

‘I should—’ There’s a loud crash from the back of the room. Scorpia winces. ‘Boy, that doesn’t sound—never mind, don’t you worry, I should just, uh, go make sure my wife doesn’t commit any flower crimes. Netossa should be here soon, are you gonna be okay—’

‘Yeah, Scorpia, I think I can handle standing around on my own for a minute.’

‘Right. Of course you can.’

Scorpia gives her one more bright, teary smile, hands the tablet back to Entrapta, and then she’s gone. Catra watches her manoeuvre around the tables, a perpetual half step from sending something fragile crashing to the ground.

When she turns away, Entrapta is, surprisingly, looking not at the tablet or the lantern Catra’s still clutching, but at Catra herself.

‘I was going to say that, too,’ Entrapta says. ‘That I’m happy for you. But now it sounds like I’m just doing it because Scorpia did it. But I mean it. So.’

And Catra can never admit it to Scorpia, but no matter how many years pass, no matter how often her friends draw her into their circles of enthusiasm, Catra will always prefer this: the uncertainty of never quite being sure if you’re saying the right thing, no matter how much you practice. Paradoxically, it makes her feel at ease. Her walls are tiny remnants of what they once were, but they only disappear completely around one person, and she’s not allowed to even see Adora until the ceremony.

‘Thanks, Entrapta,’ she says quietly. ‘I appreciate it.’

Entrapta smiles. Her tablet beeps, and she glances down at it and makes an irritated noise. ‘Oh dear. Netossa wants you outside’—she gives the next words air quotes with the ends of her pigtails—‘five minutes ago.’

‘No rest for the wicked,’ Catra says, and tries to forget that she already knew Netossa and her line of guests were waiting outside.

She’d dreamt it that way.

*

There are several hours’ worth of guests.

‘Who are these people?’ Catra demands the first time Netossa lets her take a break. ‘I haven’t met any of them before.’

‘Well, there was Bow’s brother, you met him at the ball last year—’

‘No, that was Roe. This one’s Chateau.’ Catra pauses. ‘I’ve never met one of Bow’s brothers twice. How does that happen? How many does he have? Are they coordinating their efforts? Do you think—’

‘They’re all here today. Look, there’s another group coming, it’s the diplomats from—’

‘They’re boring. I’m bored.’

Catra knows she’s being annoying. She’s doing it on purpose. She was perfectly behaved in her dream, though. That ought to count for something.

‘Catra…’ Netossa sweeps her hair out of her eyes. Catra has to give her credit: she seems a lot less stressed than anyone else involved in running the wedding. ‘I know this isn’t exactly your thing. It definitely wasn’t my thing. But, well, there’s just some stuff you have to put up with, you know? It’ll be worth it in the end. You’ll see, when you look back it’ll all be perfect, you won’t even remember this stuff.’ When Catra continues to look unconvinced, she adds, ‘Or just try and get through it for Adora.’

Get through it for Adora. Yeah. Okay. She can do that.

‘Besides, would you really rather be her right now?’

Catra imagines hours of mirrors and lights in her face, somewhere in a too small room filled with too many people. She can practically taste the hair product hanging in the air. She runs a hand through her own hair, cut short again, which she spent a grand total of five minutes on after getting dressed.

‘Fine. Let’s go meet some guests.’

*

For Adora gets her through two more hours of greetings, and another thirty minutes in which she sits still while Perfuma insists on covering her in painstaking makeup. For Adora she tracks down an itemized list of allergens in the hors d'oeuvres, and for Adora she only grumbles a little bit when she’s whisked away before she can eat any herself. For Adora she doesn’t rip Glimmer’s head off while they wait in a tiny room off the grand hall (and maybe a little because, fine, yeah, she likes Glimmer’s head. But she’s about at the end of her rope right now, what with the constant bustle and the endless déjà vu and the fact that she’s really fucking hungry, okay, so mostly it’s for Adora.)

And maybe, Catra concedes, it’s worth it. Maybe it’s worth all the hassle to see the look on Adora’s face when she finally sets eyes on Catra, all love and relief and disbelief. Glimmer would think that strange, maybe, but Catra gets it. Relief and disbelief are two emotions she knows very well, when it comes to Adora.

She fidgets through Micah’s speech—familiar, of course, but only because they’d practiced this, right? She fidgets through Adora’s vows, too, and she’s torn between being riveted and forcing herself not to pay attention, bothered as she is by the familiarity of the words. But she can’t not pay attention to Adora, not ever, and Adora’s words are sweet and meaningful, emotional even if they’re clearly over-rehearsed. They’re familiar, too, for all that Catra knows Adora worked hard to keep them secret. She can’t help it if there were nights Adora practiced in the mirror, thinking Catra marginally more asleep than she actually was; and odd as it was to remember the contents of a speech half-heard in the early hours of the morning, that must be why it’s so familiar. It must.

Catra sails through her own, much briefer vows, and then it’s time for the lantern. Catra doesn’t break eye contact even as the lights go out. She reaches out, trusting to the memory of her peripheral vision, and her hand wraps around one side of the lantern.

Indigo light erupts between them. She can’t see anything beyond Adora, soft and smiling and looking right at her, and the light playing along the panes of her face. Dimly she’s aware of the audience cheering, but the noise is distant, muted. It’s easy to forget anyone can see them.

It still reminds her of the Heart.

(Still?)

Catra’s breath hitches. Adora notices her hesitation, and whether or not she guesses the cause, her hands come up, cupping Catra’s face. She leans in close.

‘Okay?’

Catra kisses her.

She (once again) forgets this is the kiss, the one everyone’s been waiting for, until the lights suddenly come on again and the wave of noise from the audience washes over and she puts it all out of her mind and focuses on Adora in her arms, on the way her lips respond to Catra’s, soft and familiar.

And if anyone notices the tears on her face when she pulls away, it's surely normal to cry at your own wedding.

*

Afterwards, Catra can finally relax. The scripted parts are over. Adora is by her side again. Everywhere she goes there’s half a dozen choices to make: what photos to pose for, what food to put on her plate and then fail to find a moment to eat, which table to circulate to. It’s exhausting, but none of it is entirely prescribed. She can drink one glass of champagne, or seven. Sea Hawk sets a tablecloth on fire. Scorpia breaks half a dozen glasses, apologises more profusely for each one. Bow and Netossa spend the whole thing looking way too cheerful for a clean-up squad, and Glimmer even jostles Frosta out of her weddings-are-stupid glower long enough to hit the dance floor. It’s chaotic and it’s beautiful.

And she doesn’t plan on making a habit of kissing Adora on demand, but when someone heckles them from the crowd, it’s too easy to be drawn in by the speck of frosting on the tip of Adora’s nose, the blush on her cheeks. The last thing Catra hears before their lips meet again is the rattle of porcelain plates, shaking in time with the ground beneath their feet.

3

Catra wakes up alone.

She sits up in bed, blankly takes in the generic castle guest room. Draws her blanket around herself. Listens to the banging at her door as first Glimmer then Scorpia attempts to gain entry. The sound barely registers. Eventually they retreat.

Melog curls around her legs, mane flashing a confused, faded red.

‘I don’t know.’ Her voice sounds funny. Unused. ‘I don’t know.’

This time there’s no knocking. Glimmer simply appears in front of her in a burst of pink and purple, and she’s halfway through her speech before Catra even has time to look up.

‘I swear, if you're getting cold feet after putting me through years of being sickeningly, publicly in love with Adora, I'm going to throw you out this window and catch you by the tail and it’ll be the least you deserve for breaking my best friend’s heart—’

And there’s two Catras, now. There’s the one who rises to the occasion, calls Glimmer a hypocrite, reminds her of the hideously romantic wedding she and Bow inflicted on all their friends. And there’s the other Catra, the one who remembers two versions of her own wedding day, who spent one of those versions getting on everyone’s nerves because at least then it was different, who can’t pretend any of it was a dream any longer.

Glimmer freezes. ‘Whoa, hey, is everything...’

Catra knows Glimmer doesn’t mean it seriously, but the words bounce around in her mind anyway. She’s not going to break Adora’s heart. She’s not even going to bruise it. Keep it together. Get through it for Adora.

Because something is wrong. Catra has no doubt about that. But she has no idea what, and that means that this is still the day, maybe the one that sticks, the one that she and Adora will live with for the rest of their lives.

And she’s not going to ruin that day.

‘What are you,’ she says, and it’s easier to fake the cheer in her voice than she expects, ‘some kind of hypocrite?’

*

Scorpia, Entrapta, Netossa, the endless line of guests—Catra ticks them all off like one of Adora’s lists. It’s easier now she doesn’t have to pretend. She’s been here before. She can handle it. She knows what’s coming.

Glimmer leading her out of the closet, down the aisle, Micah beaming, the ceremonial lantern glittering on its cushion next to him, all their friends in the audience, crying, laughing, and Adora again, always Adora, radiant in a dress that must have taken longer to put on than anything Catra has ever worn in her life.

‘Okay?’ Catra whispers, after their vows, after the lantern’s light.

‘Perfect,’ Adora replies, and hesitates only a moment.

This time Catra doesn’t cry.

She sticks by Adora’s side the rest of the day, even more than she had before. Her arm is wrapped around Adora’s waist the moment the ceremony ends, holding her close all the way to the reception. She snags canapés from every passing tray, takes a bite and feeds the other half to Adora, because there’s still never time to sit and eat properly. She lets Adora hold her and lead her through dance after dance, and grumbles only a little when first Glimmer, then Bow and Scorpia and even Micah ask her for a turn around the ballroom.

She sits for a moment at a table filled with friends, leaves one hand lightly on Adora’s next to her, and closes her eyes. It’s perfect.

...and then Sea Hawk yowls, somewhere across the room. And then there’s Mermista’s ‘Can you not,’ and a burst of fire as their tablecloth goes up in flames, just like it had before (and before that, and before that).

‘I knew I forgot something!’ Adora says, this time, watching Mermista put the fire out and drag her boyfriend away. ‘Fake candles. We should have had fake candles.’

‘That and ten billion other details.’ Catra snorts, wondering how she’d missed Adora going all I must do better on this before. ‘Don’t beat yourself up. No one can think of everything.’

The look on Adora’s face argues otherwise, but the sound of a glass breaking startles her out of arguing the point.

‘Oops!’ Scorpia says, more than a little tipsy. Her left pincer is still raised, frozen in the eager gesticulation that had knocked her champagne flute to the floor. ‘I’m sorry, it just came out of nowhere!’ Her face falls. ‘It’s so small… so broken… so many little pieces…’

Perfuma, next to her, moves her own glass away. ‘Don’t worry! Remember how many glasses we broke at our wedding?’ This only makes Scorpia sniffle louder, and Perfuma adds, despairingly, ‘Look, there’s the cake!’

All seven precariously balanced tiers of the cake make their way through the crowd. They reach their destination unscathed by the rowdy party whirling around them. Bow, accompanying the cake, picks up the knife and holds it out in invitation, hilt-first, grinning at them. It’s more of a miniature sword. Catra squints. Is it modelled on She-Ra’s sword? She hadn’t noticed that before, either.

But she does know what’s about to happen. She tries to put it out of her mind; tries to put the right amount of swagger into her step as she accepts the knife from Adora, again. The blade sinks easily into the massive cake, again. She makes two cuts, again, just enough to carve out a slice for herself and Adora, who is watching her handiwork with a slight frown. That won’t do. Catra catches Adora’s eye, runs one finger through the frankly absurd layer of frosting at the top of the slice, and offers it to Adora.

Adora rolls her eyes. But she leans in anyway and licks the frosting off Catra’s finger, her tongue lingering just a little longer than it needs to, and when she looks at Catra again her eyes are so full of affection that Catra barely notices Adora’s hand on her collar, and then she’s being pulled into a heated kiss.

This is different. Catra feels a surge of hope. She barely gets the plate of cake onto a table before tangling her hands in Adora’s hair, heedless of the hours of effort she’s undoing. Adora tastes like cake frosting, same as always, but there’s something different about the kiss, something more desperate, passionate, and normally Catra would hunt down whoever is wolf-whistling in the background, but right now all she can think is, this is different.

Bow makes a sound of dismay, lunges for the table on which Catra left her slice of cake. Too late: the whole world is shaking, and the last thing Catra hears is the plate hitting the floor.

4

Catra wakes up alone.

She doesn’t stop to think, unsheathes her claws and undoes her restraint in a way she hasn’t let herself in years, and by the time Melog wakes up and pushes her away, the bedding—the stupid, more-familiar-than-it-should-ever-be bedding—is more tatter than whole cloth.

It does, at least, make her feel a little better.

‘I’m up,’ she snaps at the door a moment before Glimmer knocks.

Scorpia and Entrapta. Netossa. Guests.

Glimmer again. The ceremony. Adora, finally, and then the reception.

She goes back to the dream hypothesis, thinks she must be spending too much time with Entrapta, if she’s started hypothesizing. It certainly feels like a dream. It’s starting not to feel like a good one.

She ducks out right before the cake arrives. It’s childish, but maybe not being there will help. She pinches herself, but she doesn’t wake up, and then Adora comes to collect her, looking a little unsteady. She can’t ever resist Adora. That’s what this is all about.

Catra steels herself and follows Adora back inside.

‘You wanna do the honours?’

Catra eyes the knife. ‘Nah. Seems more like your thing.’

And Adora pauses, as if she’d been expecting Catra to say something else. Whatever it was, the smile is back on her face a second later. ‘Okay.’

Adora attacks the cake with characteristic precision. It would make Catra smile, were it not for the fact that she can already taste the cake frosting on Adora’s lips, the fact that every methodical slice sounds less like a knife and more like a clock ticking down to zero.

5

Catra wakes up alone.

Glimmer, Scorpia, Entrapta, Netossa, guests, ceremony, Adora, reception.

None of it feels real.

She drinks glass after glass of champagne. Why not? There’s no hangover to worry about, and it gives her an excuse to act how she likes, to snap and be surly. People begin to notice. She sees Bow whispering to Glimmer as she moves their table, so she detours towards the table Adora is sharing with Scorpia and Perfuma before either of them can intervene. She thinks for the billionth time about mentioning something, about saying hey, so, I’ve done this before, like four times, but then she looks at Adora over the space still separating them and she just looks so damn happy.

It’s almost over, anyway. There’s Sea Hawk’s yowl of disapproval, right on schedule.

‘There goes the tablecloth,’ Catra mutters, except then she hears Mermista saying, ‘Of course the candles aren’t real, Adora and Catra have met you before.’

Catra freezes, turns to look.

Not a single flame.

From her place next to Scorpia—still a few tables from Catra—Adora is grinning at Sea Hawk.

What the fuck.

‘I had Casta swap out the real candles.’ Adora’s voice. Catra stares at her cocky little smile. No, she would have— ‘Take that, Sea Hawk!’

What the actual fuck.

Catra can’t possibly have been so stupid. She can’t possibly have missed what was right in front of her.

And anyway, Adora would have—

‘Adora?’ Her voice is hoarse, carrying unsteadily across the space between them.

‘Hold on,’ Adora says, and catches Scorpia’s champagne flute in mid-air.

Catra stares, incredulous, and Adora flashes her a grin.

There’s a moment of utter silence, before ‘I know, I know,’ Adora says, smarmy, like the only thing wrong here is her ridiculous reflexes and not the fact that—the fact that she—

And then—and then—Adora has the gall to keep going with, ‘What can I say, I’m goo—’

‘You asshole.’ The words hiss out of Catra’s mouth, and now it’s Adora’s turn to stare, wide-eyed, hand clutching the still-full flute.

She’s not the only one staring. The tables between them are sparsely populated, but everyone at them is watching Catra now. There’s muttering, too, and Scorpia and Perfuma are exchanging a puzzled, concerned look.

Catra barely notices, voice louder as she repeats, ‘You absolute asshole!’ and then, as the thought crystalizes into words in her own mind, ‘You fucking knew!’

‘Uh, Catra?’ How dare Adora sound confused. Catra gets to be confused. Adora gets to be—

‘Five days, Adora!” Catra snarls now, storming forward. Anger has always come easy to her, she thinks distantly, in the miniscule part of her brain that isn’t a churning mass of built-up frustration and anxiety and is-this-real-this-can’t-be-real right now. All that is what comes tumbling out of her mouth, though, channelled into the furious injustice of ‘Five fucking days! I have been keeping it together for five fucking days and you—you were just—’

The champagne flute slips from Adora’s fingers, shatters on the ground. Her eyes, wide and shocked, don’t move from Catra’s advance.

Scorpia makes a horrified noise just as Perfuma stands up with a nervous, ‘Uh, uh, look! Cake!’ like anyone in the hall could be convinced to look anywhere other than the newlyweds screaming at each other. Or, well, Catra screaming—she barely even knows what she’s saying anymore, can barely hear herself over the ringing in her ears and the chatter of the crowd and Glimmer’s shrill, panicked voice and Adora, dress wine-splattered and expression awestruck.

‘Catra,’ Adora breathes. And then she’s in motion, closing the short distance left between them.

‘Oh no, no, you don’t—’

And Adora is laughing like an absolute asshole and Bow is shouting and Adora is grabbing her shirt and Catra is pissed and Adora is smiling wider and Catra is even more pissed and Adora is kissing her and kissing her and kissing her and the world shakes and—

6

Adora wakes up alone.

She doesn’t lean over to add a tally mark to the notepad by the bed; it’s no good if it’s the only thing on the page. She doesn’t pull out the bullet-pointed list of guesses at what’s happening to her (it doesn’t exist anymore) or the equally neat but unfortunately shorter list of potential ways to fix things (it doesn’t, either). She doesn’t feel nervous (like the first morning) or confused (like the second) or terrified (like the third). She does feel determined, which is what she’s settled on for the last two mornings, and what she plans to stick with for as long as it takes to make this stop.

What Adora does do, this morning, is the usual: she gets up early—nearly dawn early—and she makes an effort not to note the too-cold guest room bed, which she leaves as soon as she can. She brushes her teeth and her hair and tugs the latter into a ponytail with deft, practiced motions. She pulls on clothes—a quick, easy tank top and sweatpants—and walks briskly through the grand expanse of Bright Moon castle, avoiding more populated areas while she makes her way to a parlour she knows Castaspella has turned into a makeshift salon. She takes two quick detours—one to slide a list of allergens into Netossa’s guests folder, another to catch Casta on her way to the Grand Hall and put in a request about fake candles.

That’s just about all she has time for, she knows, unless she wants Bow to come looking for her. Which she doesn’t, not again, because then he gives her that look like he’s worried about her and asks her how she’s feeling and it’s incredibly sweet, but it also means she has to stop herself from telling him the truth. Because she wants to tell him, she does, but she also knows —from experience—that today can be perfect. And maybe, she thinks, hanging tight to her determination, this time she can get it to stick.

This morning, she also does two more things, which are new: she questions her sanity, and she stops at Catra’s room.

Catra’s room is not, in fact, Catra’s actual room, because Catra’s actual room is also Adora’s room and they’ve been banned from it for this one night, which was supposed to stay one night. Catra’s not-room has no lock, and Catra herself is burrowed under the covers in a way that’s just a bit too chaotic to be easily described as a ball. Her hair is a small tuft out the top and her nose is mashed into the mattress just above the sheets, one ear jammed flat under the pillow and the tip of her tail sticking out from the bottom, sleep-twitchy. She’s snoring, just a little, though she’d never admit it; probably drooling a bit, too. Adora doesn’t know for sure about that last bit, because she doesn’t leave the doorway, too aware that even a step inside would easily crumble her resolve.

There’s a reason she hasn’t come here, before now. And she knows, looking at the warm suggestion of Catra buried and cosy and so, so, tempting, that she was right not to, knows that the predictable longing to bury herself here beside her favourite person is almost too strong to resist. She searches what little is visible of Catra’s face for— something, Adora doesn’t know, anything, fury in the curve of her brow or a shout on the edge of her lips, anything to prove that that was real, to give a sign or a clue or a—

But there aren’t any clues here. Just the sleeping love of her life, cute and twitching and unaware and so very deserving of a few more hours of peaceful sleep before she wakes for what Adora’s planning to make the happiest day of her life, as many times as she has to. So Adora, determined, closes the door and continues down the hall.

She wonders, again, the way she did when she opened Catra’s door and when she stood outside Casta’s and when she brushed her teeth and when she woke up (heart pounding, breath shaking, a voice she loves angry in her ear and the ghost of a kiss on her mouth), if she’s going insane.

*

‘...and I was convinced—convinced!—I’d trip. It was all I could think of all week. I had dreams about it…’

Adora’s still wondering hours later when—half-listening to Bow tell a story she’s heard not only six times but at least twenty before that—it occurs to her that it’s maybe odd she hasn’t questioned her sanity before now.

‘...almost didn’t even go down the aisle! Glimmer would have killed me. Even when I was...’

Adora’s hand is already poised at her shoulder, accepting the hairpins she knows Spinnerella, behind and above her, is ready to hand over. As she takes them, she confronts the fact that, really, reliving her wedding day over and over feels exactly like the kind of ridiculous nonsense Etheria’s overenthusiastic magic might pull on She-Ra. The idea that she isn’t alone, though? That her fiancée—wife?—Catra might be right there with her— it feels too much like wishful thinking to be a real-life option. Quite literally too good to be true.

Around her, Spinny’s voice joins Bow’s, and Frosta’s, and Mermista’s, and Sea Hawk’s. It’s a loud room and a celebratory one, too, and by this time Adora knows what they’re saying without even listening. It’s Spinnerella and Bow swapping well-worn stories about their weddings, and Sea Hawk trying his hardest to compliment Mermista without comparing her to a fire, and Frosta grumping about how stupid she thinks weddings are even though they all know how much she’d loved Bow’s and Glimmer’s years before. Adora’s never part of the conversation, wasn’t even the first time, but she’s usually at least somewhat attentive. This time, she isn’t present at all.

Where she is is yesterday—or, today before, she supposes—thinking that she must be dreaming, or else she’s insane. Because the alternative is— is—

Adora shifts the hairpins from hand to hand—now holding them over her other shoulder for Spinny to take—and is already reaching with her newly free one when Sea Hawk appears dramatically with a flute of champagne. It’s the flute that does it, and Adora—who usually smiles now, says her thanks, takes a sip—stares at the crystal in her hand and imagines (remembers?) it shattering, tries to stave off a swell of hope. Because the alternative—

‘Adora.’

And there, once again, at the front of her mind where it’s lived all morning and far too good to be any kind of true, is Catra. Catra, vibrant with anger and glaring and shouting and the most utterly beautiful thing in Adora’s possibly less-than-sane mind’s eye. Catra who is always at once the most surreal and the most real thing in this recurring day, who is always amazing and attentive and different because she’s Catra so of course she is. Unless it’s because—

‘Adora!’

Adora jolts and a little champagne jumps out of her glass, splashes onto her sweatpant leg. She shakes herself, knowing she must have missed a cue, if only she could— ah, yes. ‘Oh, I’m not worried—’ She meets Bow’s eyes, concerned and confused, and realises he thinks she missed the question, and she did, at least this time she did, and that’s… that’s fine. She backtracks. ‘Uh, what? Did you say?’

‘I asked if you were also worried about tripping on the aisle—apparently it’s more common than I thought,’ Spinnerella says, then stage whispers, ‘Netossa was a wreck.’

Adora knows that, of course. She makes herself laugh anyway.

‘Really, Netossa?’ Bow asks.

From across the room, Frosta rolls her eyes and glares. ‘Of course she was, weddings make people dumb.’

‘Well, I’m not worried,’ Adora replies, and she’s aware her bravado sounds a bit fake, but—well, no more than it did the last five times. ‘Princess of Power, remember? I have great reflexes.’

She thinks of (remembers?) catching Scorpia’s glass, thinks of Catra’s voice first quiet and then raised in fury, thinks of ‘you asshole’ and ‘five fucking days.’ She shoves it all down, hard, and reminds herself that she’ll see Catra—the real one—soon enough, at the altar. She can wait until then, can steel herself, be subtle—try to be subtle, at least. She can play it safe before she ruins Catra’s day, too.

(Catra sometimes forgets, that she gets to have these things—nice days and parties about her and rituals to remind her that Adora is hers, hers, hers. Adora will make sure she gets it today, no matter what. She promises, even if only in her own head.)

‘Hey,’ Bow’s soft voice draws her attention, and when she meets his eyes, they’re kind. He’s picked a moment everyone’s distracted—Spinnerella teasing Frosta and Sea Hawk and Mermista wrapped up in each other, though Mermista would deny it—to sit down next to Adora, smiling gently.

She smiles back at him, but she knows it’s not her best one, and he puts a hand on her knee. ‘Look, Adora,’ he says. ‘I get it, this isn’t exactly your scene. But I promised Glimmer I’d keep you away from setup, because—and you can’t argue with me on this—you know you get… intense. With the whole organizing thing. And you deserve to relax. So just… try?’

Adora covers his hand with hers, works for a stronger smile. His earnest words would make her feel bad for her preoccupation this morning, except this happened the first time, too. Adora’s a bad liar, she knows, but she’s also realized that it’s not entirely… unexpected, for her to be a little off this morning. She didn’t notice it the first time or even the second, but she thinks now that Bow must have been helping her all along, covering for her, keeping the room engaged so she can breathe amidst the tumult.

It was nice, the first time, when nerves really did jangle through her, this whole day a bit too much of a show for her comfort. And it’s been convenient since then, has kept Bow—thoughtful, caring Bow—from recognizing that Adora’s a different brand of off than she should be. And this time it’s let her question her sanity in relative peace, which she supposes she’s grateful for.

She’s opening her mouth to say— something, she’s not sure, she usually says something bland and reassuring but she thinks maybe Bow deserves more than that, when she’s interrupted by a clatter in the hallway, the sound of raised voices, a crash.

‘What’s that?’ Frosta asks, hand limp where it was batting Spinnerella away from her hair.

‘I… I don’t know,’ Adora says, wide-eyed.

She’s telling the truth.

Which is odd, considering.

They’re all silent now, trying to make out the muffled voices in the hall as they get even louder. Bow’s nearly at the door when it flies open to a flurry of red and black and lavender and shimmer and blazing eyes and shouting voices and—

‘—will not explain myself! I need to talk to my absolute asshole of a— you! Yes, you! I have something to say to you! Five fucking days when you could have told me you knew and yet—’

And suddenly, like a week of dust wiped off a sword (a normal one, not a magic one), the world is vibrant and sharp and bright and glittering. Adora’s breath catches in her throat, a direct line to the catch in her gut. Because here, in front of her, with a shirt on backwards and her pants unzipped and some sort of food stuck in the messy nest of her hair, glaring meanly and snarling as Bow tries to ask her what’s going on, vivid and angry and calling Adora an asshole and the most beautiful thing Adora has ever seen in her life, is—

‘Catra,’ she breathes.

Catra’s eyes narrow, livid. ‘No.’ She hisses, ‘we are not doing that shit again, you fucking idiot. Now you are going to explain why the fuck you thought it was okay to— No! No!’ Catra throws her arms up at Glimmer, who is apparently saying something. Adora wouldn’t know, because the world may be vibrant but it’s also narrowed to just one person. ‘I will not stop shouting at my future wife, my future wife is an asshole!’

They’re bickering, Glimmer’s frustrated confusion against Catra’s barely intelligible outrage, but Adora doesn’t listen, just tracks the cadence of Catra’s voice up and down. She’s on autopilot as she stands, barely notices the scattering hairpins or another champagne glass shattered (because it is another, isn’t it? It happened, Catra happened, Catra’s here). And then she’s crossing the room in two long strides, throwing herself into Catra’s arms.

Catra catches her, of course, and she’s halfway through an angry mumble (‘you don’t get to pull this twice, asshole’) when Adora bursts into tears.

By the time she’s pulled herself mostly together, they’re the only ones in the room and they’re sitting down, Catra in one of the big armchairs and Adora tucked into her lap. She has a hazy recollection of hushed shuffles, a distant guilt over the concern and confusion in her friends’ voices, but those things pale against the scratchy-softness of Catra’s hair tickling her nose and the damp warmth of Catra’s breath against her neck.

‘I’m,’ Adora says. It comes out hoarse, so she tries again. ‘I’m okay. I’m okay, Catra.’ And then, reluctantly, but because it’s true, ‘Catra, you can let go.’

Catra’s face burrows deeper under Adora’s chin, arms pulling tighter where they’re wrapped around Adora’s waist. Her voice is thick and muffled when she mutters, ‘I really can’t.’ At the sound of it, it occurs to Adora just why the skin at her throat is wet, and she clutches Catra even closer.

They breathe together for a while, and Catra still doesn’t so much as lift her head when she finally mutters, ‘I’m still mad,’ into Adora’s neck.

Adora laughs wetly. 'Yeah, totally.'

'Like, really mad.'

'Okay.'

'You should have told me.'

'You should have told me.'

That gets Catra to rear back, finally, though she doesn’t go far and her arms don’t loosen. 'What do you mean I should have told you! You should have told me!'

'What makes that my job?'

'You’re a bad liar!'

'So? What does that have to do with it?'

'So. So, when you’re lying, I should get to know.'

'That makes no sense, Catra,' Adora says. And it doesn’t, but Adora can’t bring herself to care, or to stop smiling. She thumbs the wetness away from Catra’s cheeks and runs her fingers through Catra’s hair and—

'Catra, is this…?'

'The mini tarts, I think. I may have knocked over a waiter.'

Adora sticks her index finger in her mouth, pops it out. 'Mm, not bad.'

‘You’re so gross.’

'Like you care,' Adora says, ducking to kiss her—brief, casual, grounding. It’s a bad kiss, an I’d-kiss-you-better-if-I-could-stop-smiling kiss, one that dissolves quickly into giggles first on Catra’s end then Adora’s. And, this, Adora thinks between snorts, this. This is what the last few days—or one day, over and over—have been missing. If she can keep this, it’ll all be okay. It’ll have to be. Until they fix things.

Because they can fix things. Adora’s determined, and now she has Catra. She feels the grin on her face go even wider. For the first time since this all started, that determined conviction she’s been clinging to actually feels possible.

Things always feel more possible when she has Catra. She should have realised that five todays ago. Frosta might be right about weddings and dumb.

'Okay,' Adora says, sitting up straighter in Catra’s lap. 'Okay, we can do this. I haven’t been able to get away much, but now with both of us we can really get to work. I made a list of potential—'

'Whoa, there. Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, princess.' Catra presses a hand to Adora’s chest. 'Slow down. Let’s get Glimmer and Bow in he—'

'No!' Adora all but shouts. She knows she sounds a little frantic, but she feels a little frantic, because— no.

'No?' Catra throws her a confused look, 'What do you mean, no?'

Adora bites her own lip, tries to get her thoughts in order, tries to explain the very thing that’s been living in her head since the second time she woke up on her wedding morning. 'I just… we got to have a perfect day, you know? That first time? And everyone was so happy and I just… I want them to get that. Get to remember it, I mean.'

Catra stares at her, and then—in true Catra fashion—rolls her eyes. 'It’s just going to reset, Adora.'

'But what if it doesn’t?' Adora asks.

'Why would it stop? We haven’t done anything to make it stop.'

'We didn’t do anything to make it start, either! Not that we know of, anyway.' Adora takes a deep breath, tries to calm the frenzied tangle in her gut. 'I’ve thought about this, Catra. We don’t know why this started; it could end at any time. And I just— if this is the real thing, for all our friends, I want it to be like the first one, you know? They’re not… stuck in this.'

Catra huffs, blows out air through her nose, crosses her arms. Her tail is lashing against the overstuffed arm of the chair, and Adora tracks it a moment before pushing even closer, sliding one hand around the back of Catra’s neck, pressing their foreheads together and directing her most beseeching look right into Catra’s eyes.

'Look,' Adora murmurs, feels Catra’s breath hitch a little, 'here’s a deal. We figure this out together, just you and me.' Tt’s hard to look at someone shorter than her from under her lashes, but Adora’s had a lot of practice with Catra. She also knows that Catra’s not going to say no to something like that, and maybe she’s using that a little, fine.

Catra’s sceptical look makes it very clear that she knows she’s being manipulated, but she’s planning to let it happen anyway. She does ask, quietly, toying with the strap of Adora’s shirt, 'And if we can’t figure it out?'

Adora sighs, straightens, shrugs. 'Then we get Bow and Glimmer on board, of course. Do it Best Friend Squad style. But— let’s try. First. They’re just… they’re so invested in today.'

Catra smiles a little, and Adora knows she’s charmed despite herself when she says, 'Yeah, I know.' And then, 'Okay, fine. Deal.'

Adora claps her hands together. 'Wonderful! We can start tomorrow. Or, er. Today. When we do it again. This morning. But— the next one. Ugh, this is so confusing.'

'Don’t hurt yourself,' Catra says.

Adora sticks her tongue out at her and hops out of her lap. 'Okay! Next up, we have to apologise to our friends—'

'What? Adora.' Catra sounds exasperated. 'What part of the day resets did you not get?'

'We made them worried, Catra!' Adora says, 'I don’t care if they won’t remember it; we’re not letting that stand.' She reaches a hand out to help Catra up.

Catra, of course, takes it. 'Ugh. I guess you’re right.' She uses Adora’s grip to lever herself up, doesn’t let go once she’s up. 'Let’s do this.'

*

They do apologise, and it’s easy enough to blame the whole episode on unspecified wedding jitters. Their friends are still concerned, Adora knows—they don’t give Catra and Adora nearly enough of a hard time for seeing each other before the wedding, and Adora knows Bow and Glimmer watch them both more carefully than they otherwise would. Only a little, though—they stop, Adora thinks, when they realise that both Adora and Catra are deliriously happy.

It’s the sixth time Adora’s said her vows, but it feels like the first, new. She smiles at Catra across the lantern’s light and they promise to stay with each other forever, and that part feels old—but then, it did the first time, too.

They stay close all through the reception, and if they laugh a little louder and dance a little wilder and touch each other a little more than they typically would, if they whisper together almost constantly whenever they’re off the dance floor— well, it is their wedding.

When it comes time to cut the cake, Adora wraps her hand around the hilt of the silly tiny sword and Catra wraps hers overtop and they cut it together. And when they kiss, Adora holds her determination almost as close as she holds her hope, but she holds Catra even closer. She isn’t even bothered when everything starts to shake.

7

Catra wakes up alone.

She’s out of bed and in her clothes in time to open the door on Glimmer, fist raised to knock.

‘Morning, Sparkles!’

Glimmer narrows her eyes. ‘You seem... chirpy.’

‘I'm getting married today.’ Catra gasps in mock horror. ‘You didn't know? That's so embarrassing. There’s, like, a whole thing, with a lantern, and you're supposed to walk me down the aisle, and—' She lets her eyes widen, places a hand gently on Glimmer’s wrist. ‘I know this is difficult for you.’

‘What?’

‘But, Sparkles, it would never have worked out between us—'

‘Catra.’

Catra grins at her. ‘Yeah, I know, Scorpia’s looking for me. Tell her I'll be in the grand hall! Got some errands to run.’

She’s aware of Glimmer’s gaze following her the whole way down the corridor, and she fights down her snort of laughter until she’s around the corner. The look on Sparkles' face. That was the thing about expectations. Lower them far enough, and something as simple as being openly happy on your wedding day was cause for suspicion.

And she is happy. She’s giddy. And, sure, it's a little weird, but the revelation of Adora has in one fell swoop shifted doing the wedding again from horribly unthinkable to an opportunity. She could do this forever, she thinks, if she gets to do it with Adora.

Catra’s a good person, more or less. But if she’s going to be stuck reliving the same day for who knows how long? Well. It's only fair she get to have a little fun.

*

She doesn’t actually have errands to do. But she does have things she’d rather be doing, and so Catra spends the morning grinning, bucking Glimmer’s and Scorpia’s orders to annoy Netossa incessantly as she puts up the seating chart (because it’s funny) and see how mad she can get Perfuma about flower arrangements (because that’s funny, too). She sees how pleasantly she can make fun of each guest’s outfit—which Netossa does not appreciate—and doesn’t even give Entrapta a hard time when she finds her on the floor with the ceremonial lantern, muttering about how it can’t possibly be entirely magic and straining unsuccessfully with hair and hands to pull it apart.

Adora grins too when Catra joins her at the altar. Winks. It makes Catra laugh, and that makes Adora laugh, and it’s a full minute of Micah clearing his throat and giving them both disapproving looks before they can move on with the ceremony.

‘Make any progress?’ Catra asks, later, through the interminable wedding photographs, fully aware that she herself has done nothing useful at all. Her lips hurt. She’s not sure how Adora manages to keep her smile, wide and always so damn genuine, in place through half an hour of apologies from new-minted wedding photographer Kyle. Catra switches to a smirk five minutes in.

‘Not yet,’ Adora replies out of the corner of her mouth. ‘You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get away from the salon without making a scene.’

‘See, this is why you should be more like me.’

‘Flaky and unreliable?’

‘I was going to say dashing and unpredictable.’

‘Well,’ Adora murmurs, voice low and appreciative and leaving no doubt as to her meaning, ‘you’re definitely one of those things,’ and Catra blushes so hard she resolves on the spot to hunt Kyle down and shred that particular roll of film.

It’s been an emotional sort of day.

‘By the way,’ Adora says once they’ve finally been released from photography jail, ‘can you distract Glimmer for me? I want to try something.’

Catra rubs her hands together. ‘Sure. I can distract Sparkles. What’s your plan?’

It’s Adora’s turn to blush. ‘I thought—maybe this is a magic thing? So maybe I could. You know. Tap into Etheria’s magic. Through the—the Whispering Woods. See what’s up.’

‘Ooh, you’re gonna commune with nature!’

Adora punches her shoulder, just hard enough to stagger her. ‘It sounds stupid when you put it that way!’

Catra snorts. ‘Sorry to break it to you, but—’

‘And it’s just the first thing on my list, okay? I have a lot of other ideas!’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘What’ve you been up to, if you’re so smug?’

‘Uh… lots of things. Really helpful things. Really.’

‘Catra—’

‘Do you want me to run interference for you or not? Glimmer just walked in.’

Adora gives her one last, dirty look and beats a hasty retreat; on her way out, Catra sees her snag an extra box of tissues from under a table and hand it to George and Lance, a solid half hour before Catra knows their reminiscing will start to make them cry. Catra takes a moment to chuckle, then cuts a path through the gathering crowd to intercept Glimmer before she can make it too far.

‘Hey, Sparkles,’ Catra says, in the same sultry tone that, somehow, still works on Adora after years of hearing it, and why mess with what works?

Glimmer stops. Blinks. Shakes herself. ‘Catra! Have you seen Adora? Someone’s been messing with the seating—’

‘Aww, is that all you’ve got to say to me?’ Catra clutches a hand to her chest. ‘I thought we had something. But I see how it is. You’re just using me to get to Adora.’

Glimmer groans. ‘Really? Now? You’re doing this now?’

‘What better time?’ Catra bends down to whisper in Glimmer’s ear. ‘My last hours as a free woman… anything could happen.’

It’s a testament to the strength of the crush Glimmer once had on Catra—which Catra, by unanimous decision of the rest of the Best Friends Squad, is no longer allowed to bring up, and which Catra brings up at least once every few months—that it takes her five long, blushing seconds to notice the hole in Catra’s logic.

‘A, you’re already married. B, you haven’t been a free woman since Adora turned into She-Ra for you and carried you off Horde Prime’s ship. And C, I am officially cutting off your champagne.’

‘Hmm. Fair on all counts.’ Catra kisses her cheek, lingers a moment too long, laughs when Glimmer swats her away. She points at random, somewhere behind Glimmer’s shoulder. ‘I think she went that way.’

8

‘Uh… Etheria? Hi, it’s Adora, again. Or, er, She-Ra. Shit, should I do this as She-Ra? Uh, gimme a sec.

‘Okay, let’s try this again. Hi Etheria. It’s She-Ra. I know we tried the whole silent meditation thing yester… last today, and uh. Then I did the whole cake thing and the whole reset thing and so clearly that didn’t work, so here I am again!

‘This time I thought I’d just… ask. If you—this is so weird, I know, I know—but if you’re, uh, doing something? With time? To me. And to Catra, which is great! Not that it’s happening, I mean, but that it’s happening to both of us, because I really missed her. Like, not missed missed, but missed, you know? Or, maybe not. Do planets miss people?

‘I guess you can’t answer that. Unless you can? What if… how about you shake… that leaf! Yeah, the red one over there. Shake it once for no and twice for yes. So, do you miss—

‘You do! That’s so cool!... Ooor that might have been the wind, yeah, probably the wind. Darn. Sorry, sorry, I’m off topic anyway. I was wondering…’

9

Adora insists on consulting Swift Wind.

‘Stupid Adora,’ Catra mutters, but the words are soft and comfortable, like old leather. ‘Look at me, I'm so special, I gotta have my rainbow talking unicorn! With wings!’

‘It is not the same,’ she adds, in response to Melog's pointed comment. ‘Our bond is based on mutual respect. Not—sparkle magic or whatever. Plus you're, you know, not incredibly annoying. And—no, it does not have anything to do with my fear of flying! I don’t have a fear of flying!’

Melog looks at her, inscrutable, and then their mane ripples with the colours of the rainbow.

Catra groans. ‘If you give yourself wings, so help me—’

‘Catra?’

Catra freezes. Exchanges looks with Melog.

‘Catra,’ Adora repeats, long-suffering, ‘you might be invisible but I can still hear you.’

Melog shrinks down to the size of a housecat, makes themself scarce behind Catra’s legs, and drops the invisibility.

‘Hey, Adora!’ Catra says brightly. Less brightly, ‘Swift Wind. How's the sacred bond?’

10

The sacred bond does nothing.

11

Melog can’t help, either, it turns out. Not surprising, but Catra was planning to be really smug if it worked.

14

They’ve been married fourteen times (or not at all), when Adora turns up in a suit.

It’s not the easiest thing, to convince first Bow and then Casta and then everyone else she spends her morning with to let her—let her! As if it’s not her own wedding!—change her outfit on the day of. Which she understands, because she was there through the lengthy pre-wedding string of design decisions and fittings and refittings, and that’s not the kind of preparation she’d typically invalidate at the last minute. But nothing about this is typical, and Adora insists, and Bow might look at her like she’s gone mad, but he still helps her find a nice shirt.

It’s worth it. For a lot of reasons, but mostly Catra’s face.

'Dress?' She sounds a little choked, and it’s great.

'Eh.' Adora brushes fake dirt off her own white lapels, going for idle nonchalance and maybe even hitting it. 'Got boring.'

'Boring…' Catra repeats, pupils huge as her eyes move in a steady path from Adora’s head to toe for what must be the tenth time in the last minute. It’s really, really great.

Adora tries to sound innocent when she asks, 'What, you don’t like it?'

'You know I do.’ Catra wets her lips with her tongue; Adora tracks the motion.

'Anyway, the whole’—Adora tries to find the right word, but instead ends up using her hands to mime the volume and general everywhere-ness of her wedding dress—'was fun for a bit but— have you ever tried to pee in one of those? It’s ridiculous. I mostly just transformed into She-Ra; it’s the only time her outfit has been easier to deal with. And there was this stupid little hook in the back that takes like half an hour and four people to get right every single—'

'Uh.' Micah’s voice booms throughout the hall. He winces, then makes a glowing hand gesture to turn the amplifying magic off. In a more private voice he says, 'Do you think we could, uh… get started? With the ceremony?'

He’s looking at them with the same expression Bow had had earlier, which— fair. They certainly weren’t this casual the first time around; Adora can imagine it’s not what he expected. She gives him with her most winning smile, ignores Catra’s muffled snickers, and says 'Sure! Knock yourself out.'

He looks even more confused, if that’s possible. Whoops. 

16

‘You know, this cake is pretty good. Shame we don’t get to eat it most of the time.’

They’re right outside the reception hall, sitting with their backs to the wall, the cake—still minutes from its grand entrance, now missing two sizeable slices—on a wheeled table next to them.

‘I admit, it was worth scaring off the kitchen staff.’

Catra lets Adora feed her another piece of cake. ‘We’re the newlyweds. I think if we want cake early we should have cake early.’

‘What’s the point otherwise?’ Adora smiles, a little tearfully, and links their pinkies together on the floor between them.

‘Aren’t we a little past bashful hand-holding? Were we ever even at bashful hand-holding, you were always pretty obvious about how much you liked me—’

‘Catra?’

Catra shuts up.

‘I’m—I’m so fucking glad you’re here.’

It’s not every day that Adora uses that word.

Catra tilts her head to the side, ignoring the discomfort of her ear caught against the wall. Adora’s eyes are luminously grey, reflecting her own blue and yellow back at her. ‘Any second now.’

Adora’s hand comes up. She gets cake frosting on Catra’s cheek. Catra doesn’t care.

‘I love you,’ she breathes in the moment before the kiss.

17

'What if it’s the kissing?'

'Huh?' Catra’s been surly this time, and doesn’t even look up from where she’s meticulously scrutinizing each flower in one of the room’s elaborate arrangements.

'What if it’s the kissing?' Adora repeats, and the thought puts a tangle in her gut. 'We always kiss, when it resets, and what if that’s...it?'

Catra glances up at her, hand stilling on an orchid. 'I kiss you all the time.'

'I know, but, uh, you have to admit… it’s probably the only thing that’s always the same. I mean—what if it—'

'Well then, why do you kiss me every time?'

'Why do you kiss me every time?'

Catra shrugs and goes back to her work, shoving her finger almost lewdly into a tulip. 'I don’t know. I thought it was one of those little… ritual things you like. Like how you always have to brush your teeth before you do your hair and how the closet has to be in colour order.' 

'I don’t—' Adora starts, but Catra’s already walking away, flowers apparently done with. Adora follows her over to a table, which she proceeds to dive down underneath, completely heedless of the shocked guests sitting around it. ‘Catra, what are you doing?’

Muffled, from beyond the draping tablecloth: ‘Can’t hear you!’

‘I am so sorry,’ Adora says to the Lord Protector of the planet of Nuptia, who looks positively appalled to have a high-ranking Etherian bride—no longer visible in any way except the barest hint of a twitching tail—under their feet. Adora crouches down as best she can with her voluminous skirts and hisses, ‘Catra, what the fuck?’

The response is a terse, ‘Looking for buttons,’ which doesn’t answer anything at all.

‘Catra!’

‘What?’ Catra asks, poking her head out from under the tablecloth. It pools around her shoulders, her face up in Adora’s and flashing with annoyance. ‘You’re the one who thought it might be a hologram! So I’m looking for buttons.’ She retreats back under the tablecloth, and her voice floats back as a sharp, ‘You could help!’

Adora blinks a little, but—it’s not a bad idea, really. Still—‘Uh, okay. Thanks? I’m… not sure crawling under tables is the… best way to do that…’

Catra’s reply, when it comes, is a disproportionately vicious, ‘Not my fault that tent of yours gets in the way.'

Ah. Ah.

'Catra. Catra, are you… hiding under the table… because you don’t like my dress?'

There’s a long pause, and then, sulky, '...of course I like your dress.'

The Lord Protector of Nutia looks like they’d like to be absolutely anywhere else, but can’t decide how to extricate themself politely. Adora ignores them, because she can feel herself grinning. 'But you liked the suit better.'   

'I didn’t say that!'

The very end of Catra’s tail is fully puffed up, now; Adora is delightedly imagining the rest of her in a similar state, and starts to laugh. 'You did! You liked it better and I got sick of talking the morning crowd into it and now you’re pining!' On the last word, she grabs the visible floof and tugs it lightly.

That gets her Catra’s face in hers again, as well as a hiss that finally sets the Lord Protector jolting up from their chair and away. 'I am not pining!' Catra snarls.

Adora laughs harder.

*

They don’t find any buttons—or levers, or conveniently-shaped sword insert slots. Neither does Entrapta, who rises to the task of determining no one present is a hologram without question (well, actually, with lots of questions, but none of which are why do you need to know?), even if it means having to take a break from her continued obsession with the ceremonial lantern.

At the end of the day, they stand by the cake in dust-covered clothes, both their hair standing on end from Entrapta’s overenthusiastic electrical experiments, and when the crowd starts hollering for it Adora thinks not kissing Catra might be the hardest thing she’s ever done. It’s such a small thing, and it shouldn’t be a problem, and it’s worth it if it means fixing this, but when she meets Catra’s eyes she knows Catra feels the same way. There’s relief to that, and to the little bittersweet smile on Catra’s lips, but Adora has to look away or else ruin their plan entirely. So she’s watching the room when the tremors start: sees the flowers quake on their stems, sees Mermista turn to glare at Sea Hawk and Bow clutch Glimmer in alarmed panic and Rogelio give an accidental blurt of sound on his tuba before Kyle jumps into his arms.

It’s only been a few seconds, she knows, but it still feels longer than usual. Then again, she’s usually kissing Catra right now, and kissing Catra messes with time even on the best of days. It’s that thought, maybe, along with the sight of all her confused guests and the unsteadiness of the tremors that has her suddenly feeling so very alone. She’s just reaching out for Catra’s hand when—

18

Catra wakes up alone.

For once, she thinks that's probably a good thing. She’s not sure she likes the implications of magic trying to stop her and Adora kissing. It's... nosy.

Her day improves further when she sees Adora again. When she sees the suit again.

‘I was thinking,’ she says, all studied nonchalance, right before the cake-cutting. ‘Maybe we had it the wrong way around. We should try kissing a lot. Just in case.’

The smile on Adora’s lips is far too cocky for Catra’s liking. She reaches up to her collar with one hand, casually undoes one shirt button, another.

Catra’s pupils dilate. ‘Don’t start.’

‘You know,’ Adora says, in the smug tone of voice Catra absolutely loves hating, ‘if you want to make out with me while I'm wearing this suit, all you have to do is ask.’

‘I'm trying to fix this time loop we're stuck in—’

‘Uh-huh.’ Adora steps closer, and Catra is suddenly aware of every inch of difference in their heights. ‘Cake's nearly here.’

Catra’s face is burning. Her ears fold back. This isn’t how she planned it. But Adora is right there, smirking, willing, and there’s only so much time left, and—

‘Fine,’ she mutters. ‘The suit might have—something to do with it.’

‘There you go,’ Adora breathes, and then she closes the gap and somehow her lips are even softer than Catra expected, her hands on Catra’s body firmer, bolder, and Catra wraps her legs around Adora’s waist, lets herself be hoisted up onto a table, lets Adora swallow the noises she probably shouldn’t be making in public, but it’s not like any of it matters, not when Adora’s teeth graze her lower lip and her pulse jumps in her throat and she’s pushed back onto the table, back onto something soft and yielding and—

The cake hits the floor. Adora freezes, half on top of Catra, and Catra is suddenly aware, firstly, of the quantity of cake remnants caught in her hair and down the back of her jacket, and secondly, of the deafening silence all around them.

In the moment before Adora collapses into helpless giggles, Catra takes the opportunity to lick a line of frosting off her cheek.

21

‘Yeah, uh… Etheria? I’m, yeah. I’m back again. Just to… check in? I guess? In case you’ve… changed your mind. About talking.

‘Or not talking. I know we… talked… about how you might or might not… talk. Whatever is good for you, you know? Haha, yeah, I am a-ok with any way, shape, or form of communication. It’s just… I thought you might have… hints? Hints, maybe. Even if it’s not you doing this—I don’t want this to come out as an accusation, really, I don’t! It’s not! But I’m kind of running out of ideas, here. Like, if it’s not you, and it’s not holograms, and it’s not aliens—I asked all the aliens, by the way—and it’s not a dimension thing, and it’s not a…’

23

Catra can tell something’s wrong the moment she and Glimmer step into the hall. Bow looks like he’s barely holding himself together, and the awkward tension of a hundred people collectively not saying anything is palpable.

Adora looks much the same as usual. A little scruffier, maybe, her gaze wandering across the audience. Then she sets eyes on Catra—only halfway down the aisle—and says, much too loud, ‘Catra!,’ and Bow winces.

‘Just, uh, just one moment,’ Bow says to Micah, laughing nervously. Using small, frantic hand motions he hurries Catra and Glimmer into jogging their way down the rest of the aisle, then pulls all four of them into a huddle right there in front of the altar. ‘We have a problem,’ he says under his breath.

‘Catra!’ Adora says again, in a whisper nearly as loud as her speaking voice. ‘It's you. You're here! And you're—what’s 'here'? But for 'when'? You're hen! You're hen, Catra.’

It’s sort of novel, Catra reflects, to watch Glimmer direct her irritation elsewhere.

‘Bow, what the fuck?’

‘I don’t know!’ The last word ends in a squeak. ‘I left her alone for five minutes and she drank, like, five glasses of champagne!’

(‘Sparkle water,’ Adora says. ‘Bad sparkle water. Bad.’)

Catra can’t help laughing. ‘You know she's the lightest lightweight on Etheria, why do you even have champagne?’

‘You try getting through hair and makeup without it,’ Bow mutters, just before Glimmer’s quietly outraged, ‘I can’t believe she'd do this to herself! More importantly, I can’t believe she'd do this to me!’

(‘One glass! Was one glass. Not my fault it was always full.’)

‘What’s the plan?’ Bow says, his voice still high pitched but at least audible now. ‘We need a plan. We can’t let her do the ceremony like this.’

(‘I can do it!’)

‘I dunno, Bow, sounds like she can do it.’

‘How are you so calm!’ Bow hisses, ‘It’s your wedding!’

‘You have to admit. This is a little funny.’

Glimmer groans. ‘Okay, what if—’

Adora breaks away from the huddle, stands in front of Micah.

‘I can do this!’ she announces. Turns to Catra. ‘Have I ever told you that you’re a… a pretty kitty?’

Catra can’t help it. Her grin is getting wider and wider. ‘Once or twice.’

‘You’re my—kittycat.’ Adora’s in range of Micah’s amplification spell, now, and her words echo all around the hall. She giggles. ‘Kittycat. Prettycat.’

Bow is watching with the expression of someone who can’t look away from a catastrophe. Glimmer has her face in her hands. Catra steps up next to Adora and says, in the sweetest, most encouraging voice she can muster, ‘Keep going.’

‘I should call you that… more often. You’re… you’re hot.’ (‘Oh no,’ says Bow. ‘Not again.’) ‘It’s the suit. Suits you.’ Adora giggles again. ‘Wanna kiss you, Catra. Always wanna… wanted to kiss you. Remember Princess Prom? You were so… suit. Kissable. But mean.’ Adora frowns. ‘Glad you stopped. Being mean. Don’t stop kissing.’

The audience is still mired in awkward silence, except for an ‘Awwww!’ that Catra is pretty sure came from Scorpia. Micah makes an aborted motion to switch off his spell, stops when Catra glares at him.

‘Hi, Scorpia!’ Adora says brightly. ‘Ha, Scorpia. You’re a scopr—scorpti—scorpion lady and Catra’s a kitty and… it’s not fair! How come you all get cool names? I’m just Adora.’ Her gasp is so loud several people cover their ears. ‘Wait! Is it because I’m adorable?’

‘Yes, Adora,’ Catra says seriously. ‘That’s exactly right. You’re adorable and I am never, ever letting you live this down. Can that be my vow? I’m going on the record, I want that to be my vow.’

24

Adora wakes up alone.

25

Catra wakes up alone.

26

Adora wakes up alone.

27

Catra wakes up.

It's still the guest bedroom, she knows, because why the fuck wouldn’t it be. It's still the day of the wedding. Glimmer will be banging on her door any minute now.

She’s not alone.

A sob escapes Catra’s throat. Adora stirs beside her, says something too full of sleep to make out, and then Catra is pulling her in close, wrapping trembling arms around her with an urgency she hasn’t felt in years. Her face presses into Adora’s bed-styled hair. Her tears collect in it like dew.

‘You're crazy,’ she whispers, eventually, because this feels different than every other time they’ve counted on a reset. More genuine. More like breaking the rules. ‘You're supposed to be getting ready. Glimmer’s gonna kill you if she finds you here.’

‘Doesn’ matter,’ Adora says, voice slurred with sleep. ‘If we fix’t today, then...’ She yawns. ‘Y’know, great. We can explain. If not...’

She doesn’t have to say it. If not, Catra will wake up alone again, and Glimmer won’t know to care.

Still. It feels different.

‘Right now it's worth making Glimmer mad,’ Adora goes on, ‘if it makes things a little bit easier for you. You’ve been so frustrated the last couple of times…’ She runs a hand up Catra’s cheek, settles it around the softness of her ear. ‘I wanted to do something nice for you. You're the most important thing in my world, you know that, right?’

Catra presses into the touch, shuts her eyes tight against further tears. ‘I'm sorry.’

‘For what?’

‘For being lazy.’

‘Um. I... forgive you?’

‘You wake up hours earlier than me today! You can—you can do this for me. Sneak into my room. I'm sorry I can’t. I'm sorry you have to wake up alone every single day.’

Adora goes still in her arms. ‘I woke up alone in a bed in Bright Moon for three years. I got through that. I can handle one more day. And it is only one more day,’ she adds, more vehemently, ‘no matter how stubborn it is about admitting it.’

Banging at the door. Adora startles, dislodging Melog with a yowl of displeasure.

‘Catra? Are you awake? Please tell me Adora isn’t in there with you.’

Adora laughs ruefully. ‘Time to come clean?’ She unhooks Catra’s fingers from around her shoulders. ‘It's okay, Catra. We’re going to be okay. I love you.’

‘Adora?’

‘Yeah?’

Catra wipes the last of her tears away. Her own voice is a surprise to her, calm and firm and determined. ‘I love you, too.’

28

‘Hi, Etheria. This is… getting pretty old, okay? It’s… not fun anymore. If it ever was. So, if this is you. Please. If you care about me—about She-Ra—at all. Please, stop.’

30

‘Do I have to?’

‘Yes.’

‘He hates me.’

‘I know he does, but If there’s anything Entrapta doesn’t know about First Ones tech, he knows it.’

‘Why can’t you do it?’

‘Because I don’t want to, and also, remember how you, like. Let me. Make a drunk idiot of myself. In front of everyone.’

‘They don’t remember!’

‘Catra.’

‘Ugh. Fine.’

*

‘Hordak.’

‘Catra.’

‘What do you know about the time loop Adora and I are stuck in?’

‘Is this some kind of pathetic joke—’

‘Okay, good talk! Enjoy the party.’

31

Adora wakes up alone.

32

‘Hey Etheria. No, it’s not Adora this time. Look—I know I’m not someone you talk to, and I’m probably not your favourite, either. I know I’ve… ripped up your trees and burned your cities. Unwoven the threads of your reality and all. I’m… not sure I ever said sorry about that, to you. So… sorry about that.

‘This is so stupid, I’m apologizing to a tree. I don’t get how Adora can take herself seriously.

‘...Not you, you’re not stupid, I’m not calling you stupid, I’m calling me stupid. Also Adora. Your trees are… fine.

‘Anyway.

‘Adora… she puts a lot of faith in you, you know that? So if you don’t come through for her, I swear I’ll—oh for fuck’s—Melog, shut up, no! I’m not threatening the planet! I’m just saying, it’ll help if it knows what’s good for it! That’s not a threat!

‘No, it’s not!

‘Point is. We have this plan. And… if you were going to help, now would be the time. For Adora.

‘So that’s what I have to say. Thanks in advance, I guess.’

33

Finding sorcerers at their wedding doesn’t take long. It doesn’t even take long to find the right sorcerer, though it turns out there’s only one sorcerer at their wedding advanced enough to speak intellectually on the matter of time magic, even considering a many-year setback in his studies while he was banished to an evil island of doom-tech.

What takes days—or, what passes for days, right now—is actually talking to him.

Adora has tried to talk to Micah in the morning, but someone always interrupts, or at dinner, but he practically inhales his food and they get interrupted there, too. She’s even tried, once, at the ceremony itself—Micah had laughed, impossible to convince that Adora wasn’t trying to make a joke. The reception, of course, is the time they have the most freedom, and Adora had imagined cornering Micah at some point when he sits down, asking him some questions.

The thing is, at the reception, Micah never really sits down.

'...a dance called the upended seagull, quite popular in my youth!'

'You were telling me,' Adora says slowly, trying her hardest to keep her patience as he guides her into a sloppy spin, 'about anchors and catalysts.'

'Oh yes! See, anchors—'

'Are the times and people time magic impacts, and catalysts are whatever is causing it to happen in the first place. Now—'

'Adora!' Micah beams at her, whole body bouncing with a sort of hop-skip move that carries him farther than it should down the dance floor. 'You know so much about magic! I never knew!'

Adora keeps in a groan by force of will and flatly refuses to explain, once again, that she learned all this in a yesterday that was today. From him.

He’s already moved on, anyway, craning his neck. 'Ooh, did you see Mermista’s shoes? They are very good! Do you think she would tell me—'

'Micah, time loops.'

'Oh, right! Right, right, time loops! Time loops are like, are like—dancing.'

'Yes! Okay, how are they like dancing?'

'Well, you see, they go around and around and around and around!'

'Yes? ...and then?'

'Oh, that’s it. Ah, yes, please!' Micah takes a drink from a passing tray, tries to continue dancing while drinking and also while talking. 'These are so good, they taste like—'

'Micah!'

'Oh, dear, did you want one? I can get—'

Adora snatches the drink out of his hand and tries very hard to unsee her best friend’s father pouting.

'Time magic. Catalysts. What are they, like, magic objects? Do we have to find something?'

'Oooh, time magic! Catalysts! You know so much about magic, Adora!' Micah grins again; Adora reminds herself she loves him as he continues, 'I guess—I guess it could be an object? But that would have to be some sort of magic-tech or, or, whatever. Not natural. See, usually. Usually, catalysts are— oh! Oh, right! Bye Adora! Happy wedding!' 

'No, wait—' Adora groans, resisting the urge to follow Micah along as he’s twirled onto the next partner. It looks like his next partner is Sea Hawk, anyway, and as she catches the word seagull drifting from that direction she decides that patience is probably the better strategy.

Patience is really annoying.

But patience gets her through three more dance partners, five compliments on her outfit, way too many spins, and more ‘what a perfect wedding!’s than she can count.

(Scorpia in particular can’t seem to stop saying it. And crying. Patience.)

A concentrated attempt at patience is also what has her distracted when she’s finally spun into her fourth partner, who takes her—entirely out of step with the dance’s pattern—into an abrupt, low dip.

Adora maybe screams a little.

'Hey, Adora.'

'Was that necessary?' Adora hisses, still clutching and breathless when Catra drags her back up.

Catra’s smile is toothy and smug. 'You weren’t paying attention,' she notes, like it’s any excuse.

Adora huffs, but does not reply. Instead, she takes a moment to just dance with Catra, enjoying the ease of it, the way she doesn’t have to be pleasant or polite or engaging or anything, really, except Adora. She’s lost in that, this time—in Catra’s fingers on her wrist, her arm at Catra’s waist, Catra’s nose at her cheek when she pulls in closer than this dance ever calls for—when Catra snaps her out of it again. Adora explains her conversation with Micah.

'So, he was about to tell you what’s the usual catalyst?'

'And then the partner change, yeah. It’s so frustrating.'

Catra hums in agreement. 'What about this magic tech idea?'

Adora shakes her head. 'No, I had Entrapta scan the whole castle one time.'

'That explains so much. She got nothing, I take it?'

'All that pinged was the lantern—which, yeah, obviously, it’s a magic ceremonial lantern—and the presents table… but she said to ignore that. Apparently she made us a robot.' Catra looks at her with mild panic. Adora smiles sweetly. 'I wasn’t supposed to tell you.'

'Okay, we’re just going to pretend I never heard that, and possibly—once this whole thing is over—throw out Entrapta’s present without opening it—'

'Catra!'

'—anyway. That means we gotta figure out this other catalyst thing, right?'

'Right.'

'Great; I’m on it.'

'Catra!'

Adora nearly laughs as Catra is, abruptly, out of her arms, striding confidently across the dance floor to insert herself in place of Micah’s next dance partner.

Adora lets herself be spun (ugh, more spinning) on to her own next partner, a nice Horde clone with a yellow mohawk who doesn’t want to tell her how perfect the wedding is and doesn’t seem to mind that she keeps watching the other side of the floor. What she sees there would be funny if she didn’t have so many hopes riding on it. Under the circumstances, seeing Catra get more and more frustrated as she spins and is spun by a truly happy, drunk—has he gotten drunker? Adora can’t tell from here, but she thinks maybe he has—Dowager King Micah is only a little delightful.

Adora sees claws come out—just a little, reflexive, hidden at Catra’s side and then immediately retracted back—and excuses herself from her partner.

'Oh! Adora!' Micah brightens even further (if possible) when he sees her, reaching out a hand and tugging Adora into a sort of three-way, messy sway with himself and Catra. Catra gives her a wide-eyed help me expression. Since Adora can’t get what are you talking about, you were so cocky a minute ago onto her own face, she settles for a shrug. Micah continues, 'This is, it’s, this is the best wedding, Adora. Adora! We were just talking about, about feelings, me and your wife—your wife! Doesn’t that feel nice? You know, when Angella and I got married—

'Feelings?' Adora asks, casting a look at Catra, only to get a harried one in return.

'Every time I try to bring up time magic catalysts, he just gets all touchy-feely all over again.' Catra says, clearly exasperated. 'Feelings this, feelings that—'

'Well, yes!' Micah interrupts. 'Catalyst feelings! Feelings catalyst! You work out your feelings—'

'I keep telling him we all already did the whole therapy—'

'—if you are the anchor, you fix your feelings about the time! Or an event, sometimes you fix the event. And that fixes the spell! At least, that’s how time spells usually…'

He goes on, somehow relates it back to seagull dances or drinks or his own wedding or something, who knows. Adora doesn’t hear it. Her eyes are locked with Catra’s, and she knows their expressions are matching masks of shock and amazement.

‘Feelings.’ Adora says to Catra.

‘Feelings.’ Catra says back.

34

The Fright Zone doesn’t exist any more.

The framework is still there, but the halls Catra grew up in, the shells of metal that defined her childhood, are overgrown and groaning beneath the embrace of vibrant, squeezing plant life. Still there, but changed. People live in some of the outer areas: ex-Horde who never felt the need to go far, a contingent of Prime’s clones. They’re under Scorpia’s leadership, ostensibly, but for the most part they keep to themselves.

The core—what was Hordak’s inner sanctum and the buildings surrounding it—lies empty.

Darla deposits them at the very top. Even the sky is changed, marked now by the fourth moon of Horde Prime’s former flagship. But despite everything—despite the jungle encroaching, despite the giant tree floating above them in all defiance of gravity—the place is intimately familiar.

‘I haven’t been here since—’ Adora huffs out a quiet laugh. Behind her, Darla’s ramp retracts and the ship sinks out of sight, as if giving them privacy. ‘You know when.’

‘I never stopped coming here. Watching the sky, like we used to.’ Catra’s mouth twists into a frown. ‘I’d spend the whole time pretending there was nothing out there for me.’

Adora’s shoulder knocks against hers. ‘Hey. That was then.’

‘I know.’ Catra came to terms with that a long time ago. What remains of the Fright Zone isn’t a bad thing. It’s a memory, nothing more. Where she came from. Not who she is. ‘So. Feelings?’

‘Feelings.’ Adora grins. ‘You wanna go first?’

‘No.’

‘Catra,’ Adora says, sing-song.

‘Feelings about what, anyway? Fix the event, what does that mean? Maybe we should have interrogated Micah more.’

‘Really? You’d rather spend even more time trying to get information out of him?’

‘Well, no, obviously not. I’m just being annoying for the fun of it.’ Catra smirks at Adora, dodges her playful swat. It almost feels like— ‘It’s nice,’ she blurts before she can second guess herself. ‘Just—running away. It feels like… It almost feels like, y’know. Tomorrow. Do you think they’ve noticed we’re gone?’

‘Definitely. But Melog and Swifty’ll keep them busy for a while, I think.’ Adora’s still smiling, even as her voice takes on the quiet, serious edge Catra has learnt not to fear. ‘And I know what you mean.’ She perks up. ‘That’s a start! Running away feels good. Tell me more about that.’

‘Ugh, you sound like Perfuma.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

‘It’s just so stifling.’ Catra holds up her hands to forestall Adora’s objections, hesitates when none are forthcoming. ‘I know, I know, it means a lot to our friends, not just us, and it’s, you know, nice or whatever, but… So many times, Adora. I’m starting to hate it. Does that mean we’ve lived it too many times, or…’ Catra swallows past a sudden burst of nerves. ‘Or does it mean there’s something… wrong with it to begin with. The wedding.’

‘Do you think… you don’t want to get married?’

Trust Adora to jump to that conclusion. ‘No! I mean, I don’t know. I…’

‘Catra?’

Adora’s voice is too hesitant. Catra’s gaze snaps up, catches on the uncertain way Adora is standing, hands crossed defensively in front of her. It’s painfully familiar. How often has Catra sat with those same doubts on the tip of her tongue? How often has Adora recognised them, even unsaid, and talked Catra down from that habitual insecurity? It’s been a while, sure, but the start of their relationship was littered with those moments. Catra knows how to handle them.

‘Adora.’ Catra steps forward, hands on Adora’s shoulders, and pushes her gently against the wall. When she speaks again her words are quiet but fervent against Adora’s neck. ‘I’m yours, forever. You’re mine, forever. Agreed?’

‘Yeah.’ Adora takes the sort of breath that pulls a person back from the brink of tears. ‘Yes, obviously, sorry, I’m being silly—’

‘You’re not. It’s… hard. What’s happening. It…’ Catra trails off, frowns.

‘It feels fake?’ Adora suggests.

‘What does it even mean?’ The words burst out before Catra can stop them. ‘The whole—everything! I— I’m yours, and you’re mine, and just saying that to you, right now, it feels more real than anything that’s happened in any version of today. We don’t need a fucking lantern to know that!’

Adora blinks at her. Then, ‘I kind of like the lantern.’

Catra snorts. ‘So do I. Bad example. But—do you get it?’

‘Is it possible,’ Adora says slowly, ‘that we should have had this conversation before planning the wedding?’

‘Sure! Probably! But I didn’t think we needed to. I didn’t mind doing it the way you wanted once, but if I’d known this was going to happen—’

‘Hold on. Did you think I wanted three hundred guests and an excruciatingly long photo session and, and hours in the salon every morning?’

Catra stares. ‘Yes?’

‘I thought we were just doing what Bow and Glimmer did! I thought that was what a wedding was!’

‘Well, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know! I grew up in the Horde!’

In hindsight, Catra feels stupid. In the three years they were separated, her mind conjured up all sorts of stories about Adora: about the things she was learning in Bright Moon, the things she was doing, the things she was forgetting. She wasn’t privy to them, and that made it easy to put so much more weight on those years than the nearly two decades that preceded them. It made it easy to imagine that Adora had learnt everything there was to know about weddings, whereas Catra hadn’t even heard the word until years later.

‘Huh. So did I.’ Catra tries a lopsided grin. ‘Weird coincidence, right?’

Something snaps between them: a tension Catra wasn’t quite aware of. Adora makes a noise somewhere between a snort and a laugh and that sets Catra off, too, and then they’re holding onto each other, bodies wracked by laughter.

‘You,’ Adora says, fighting for composure, ‘are a dumbass.’

‘You’re the one who planned a massive wedding because you were too polite to ask if there was another option!’

‘It seemed like the right thing to do! There are traditions! Who knew you had to grow up with traditions for them to mean anything?’

‘I’m guessing: literally everyone else.’ Catra lets herself slide down the wall and wraps her arms around her knees. Adora joins her a moment later. Catra makes herself comfortable against her shoulder. ‘I didn’t know Bow was serious when he asked me about Fright Zone traditions.’

‘Not that we had any.’

‘We could have made them up. He’d never have known the difference.’

‘Tradition number one: no more than twenty people at a wedding.’

‘I was gonna say four.’

‘Ten at the ceremony, another ten at the party?’

‘Deal. And no more than two speeches.’

‘And everyone can wear whatever they like, provided it takes a maximum of half an hour to put on.’

‘Correction: everyone else can wear whatever they like. You wear the suit.’ Catra shuts Adora’s eyeroll down with a kiss, and she doesn’t know if it’s the breeze or something else that makes her shiver. ‘I still want to kiss you,’ she murmurs against Adora’s lips. ‘I like that part.’

‘It’s not all bad,’ Adora agrees.

For the next few minutes Catra lets her mind go blank, in the way she can only bring herself to do alone and safe in Adora’s arms. When Adora finally pulls away, Catra finds a thought has sprung up in her absence.

‘And—’ Catra’s voice is hoarse. She doesn’t care. ‘Bright Moon’s nice and all, but… can we do it here?’

Adora’s eyebrows go up. ‘Here here?’

‘Here here.’ It feels right. There’s no urge to backtrack, take back her words. ‘It’s where we came from. Both of us. And it’s— and we made it different.’ Catra nudges a flower, growing incongruously through the rusted metal of the Fright Zone, with her foot. ‘We made it new.’

Adora finds Catra’s tail, strokes it idly along its length. The look on her face is embarrassing: wonder, pride, infatuation. Is that what Catra looks like, when she looks at Adora? The thought makes her blush.

‘This isn’t hypothetical anymore,’ Adora says. ‘Is it?’

‘Micah did say feelings.’ Catra’s heart beats faster. ‘And look! Turns out we have feelings about this wedding. Do you think—’

‘This must be it,’ Adora interrupts, eagerness writ plain across her face. ‘It must be! We’ve been—we’ve been doing the wedding wrong, that’s why it keeps repeating! It should be perfect for us, not for everyone else.’

‘A selfish wedding? I like it. How do we do it?’

‘I don’t know, yet. But we have all day to decide,’ Adora smiles at her, and Catra feels lighter than she has on any version of today.

Catra smiles back. ‘Sounds like a plan. And until then—’ Catra gets up. Stretches. For once the day is spread out before them, amorphous and inviting. It’s not yet noon. The Fright Zone in all its strange newness sparkles in the light. No one knows where they are. She grins, turns around, offers Adora her hand. ‘Wanna go exploring?’

35

It’s surprisingly easy to do, once they know what they want.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, Adora thinks, but between everyone’s enthusiasm for this event and the legion of meticulous details on the wedding checklist, Adora had gotten it into her head that the wedding as it stood was something precarious. That their painstaking mediation between Castaspella and Swift Wind had produced the only possible colour scheme, that these specific flowers were the only ones that wouldn’t incite a war between Perfuma and Mermista, that after a whole night of trying samples with a fluctuating crowd of five-to-ten friends the resulting dinner menu was the only one everyone could ever like.

So Adora’s jittery when she wakes Catra up that morning (the same morning, the last same morning), and she’s nervous when they take Bow and Glimmer aside, and she doesn’t even know what she’s bracing for when she starts explaining the changes they want to make, but she knows it isn’t good.

What she gets are tears. Tears and hugs, followed by about ten rounds of increasingly emotional apologies as Bow and Glimmer lament that they could in any way have unintentionally strongarmed their friends into a wedding plan they didn’t want, Adora protests her own guilt for not expressing her feelings, and Catra pretends she’s annoyed rather than moved even though she can’t stop smiling and her eyes are definitely not dry.

And then: it’s easy. Bow and Micah gracefully explain the change of plans to the rest of their guests while Spinnerella and Netossa round up the closest of their friends. Glimmer starts teleporting groups to the former Fright Zone while Castaspella, Scorpia, and Perfuma gather what supplies they’ve decided are non-negotiable—which Mermista then picks over, weeding out what she calls the stupid unnecessary crap. Frosta and Entrapta end up in charge of sustenance, and Adora isn’t surprised at all to find that the food is all tiny and the drinks impeccably chilled. Melog sticks close to Catra and Adora, making them invisible almost aggressively at any threat of unnecessary socialising. Sea Hawk and Swift Wind compose a shanty about the whole endeavour, which is useless for logistics and even worse for morale.

Adora’s gotten used to having love in her life, she really has. But this—this is something else. Adora has a bit of a meltdown about it, but a happy one, and Catra spends the whole thing alternatingly laughing at Adora and sniffling a little herself while they pull themselves together.

There’s less than twenty people, but the former Fright Zone’s balcony is still too small for them to be anything but crammed in. And so there’s a cheerful clutter of bodies, and there’s a lantern, and Micah still does the ceremony, albeit with increasing confusion and awkwardness as Catra keeps insisting he skip 'boring bits' she is, as far as anyone but Adora knows, supposedly hearing for the first time. Most people forgo their fancy outfits, though no one argues when Scorpia still wants to wear her dress and Adora does, indeed, wear a suit.

Adora gets vetoed exactly once, and it’s on the subject of presents. Bow and Glimmer listen patiently as Adora and a reluctant Catra explain that they’re extravagant and unnecessary, then summarily dismiss that assessment with a firm we love you and you’re getting nice things, deal with it. When a haphazard pile of presents in brightly wrapped paper turns up piled in the corner of the balcony, Adora can’t find it in herself to argue the point.

They keep the kiss. Multiple, even.

It’s awkward and unrehearsed and simple and silly. It isn’t the day they started with, not at all.

It’s better.

Without all the pomp and circumstance they get to the cake early in the evening, and they’ve already polished off most of it by nightfall. Adora finds herself curled pleasantly on the floor between Catra’s legs, her ear to Catra’s purring chest and Catra’s back to a spare bit of wall, a spray of flower petals and half-empty plates teetering beside them. Before them, the party is still in full swing, and Adora can’t suppress her own smile as she watches their friends, laughing and dancing and casual.

She looks up at Catra, knows she’s grinning wide when she says, 'Catra, we’re married!'

Catra snorts, shoves a hand into her face. 'Yeah, doofus, we’ve been married,' she says, 'like, a billion times.'

'Uh-huh,' Adora agrees, 'but this time we’re really married.'

Adora expects more snark, and it’s all sweetness when Catra meets her eyes. 'Yeah,' Catra says, beaming.

Adora kisses her, then, and it’s perfect.