Chapter Text
On their third day on the street, with no food and deprived of sleep, Adora began to see things.
The alleys they passed would twist and bend away from her, only to snap back into sharp relief with a shake of the head. Grasping hands and peering faces teased at the corner of her eye, fleeing into nothing when turned her head to look, her heart pounding. Once she’d nodded off leaning against a rooftop air conditioner only to start awake with a scream at the sensation of something invisible crawling up her leg.
Catra was faring no better. Adora saw the haunted look in her eye, the way she flinched away from shadowed doorways, how she grabbed Adora’s hand ever more tightly as the sun inched its way toward the horizon.
At first, the hallucinations had terrified Adora. She’d thought she was losing her mind.
The knowledge that some of them were real was a cold comfort.
It wasn’t until the second day that they’d started to see Her servants. In the light of the sun, they were difficult to perceive. The pale shadow of a thin figure with nothing there to cast it. A blackbird, perched on a lightpost and so dark it might have been a hole in space. Thin fog that emerged from a subway tunnel and swam through the air like an eel seeking its prey.
They slept in shifts while the sun was still in the sky. As much as either of them could sleep.
Adora put her head down in Catra’s lap late in the afternoon of that third day, and finally exhaustion overwhelmed her fear of the shadows behind her eyes. She slipped into dark, restless unconsciousness, and the shadows followed her.
In her dreams she wandered the musty halls of their home. The ceiling above her stretched to infinity, a yawning void that tempted to swallow her in defiance of gravity. The path she followed seemed to pull away from her into the distance, but she was inevitably moving toward the Room. As much as she wished she wasn’t.
In reality she’d had to beat at the locked door, slam the latch with her tiny fists, screaming and begging until the ancient mechanism gave way.
But here the door was ajar.
Maybe she had always been meant to see what was inside.
Catra stood paralyzed, staring up at Ms. Weaver’s looming form. And behind Ms. Weaver stood the mirror. The portal. The black pit that was home to the oily, formless shadows that surrounded Catra, that threatened to swallow her whole.
Adora froze on the doorstep.
This was wrong.
In the waking world, she’d charged screaming into that miasma and taken Catra’s hand and dragged her away, and they hadn’t stopped running until they had left the house and those monstrous things far, far behind.
But there in the dream, Adora froze.
The shadows froze, too.
Ms. Weaver looked to the doorway, and the calm smile on her face filled Adora with a dread so deep and so cold it threatened to swallow her whole.
“There you are, child,” Ms. Weaver said.
And the portal behind her opened its eyes.
Adora woke with a scream.
So did Catra.
Exhaustion had finally taken its toll. They’d overslept. The orange glow of sunset was long dead. It was the night of the third day, and their luck had finally run out.
The servant that found them was unlike any they’d seen before. When it rose over the edge of the bodega’s roof, it was like a heavy curtain being pulled over the dull orange streetlights. It swallowed up the pale light of what few stars dotted the sky. The sound of traffic faded to nothing. It was as silent and dark as the bottom of a grave.
Adora wrapped her arms around Catra’s trembling body as the blood in her veins turned to ice. She didn’t move. She didn’t breath. She would have stopped her heart if she could, because she was absolutely sure that this thing would be able to hear its traitorous beating.
The shadow pulled itself onto the flat asphalt roof with claws like the wingtips of a bat. If it kept up like this it would swallow the roof whole, and their hiding place with it.
“Catra,” Adora said. Her voice was the barest, tiniest whisper, and it shook like a dead leaf in a storm.
Her friend’s mismatched eyes stared up at her through her unkempt mane of hair, glassy and blurred with tears. “I know,” she said.
The creature crept closer. It wasn’t just silent, it was a void that swallowed sound. It was a candle being snuffed out. It was a pillow pressed to the face of a dying man. And it was drawing ever closer.
Catra gave her a short, fervent nod.
The two girls sprang to their feet and bolted for the fire escape.
And with a shriek that seemed to tear the very night, the servant took to the air and followed them.