Chapter Text
The world is breaking. Splintering apart, glitching at the edges like glass giving way under too much weight. Adora’s voice cuts through the noise; always Adora, begging her to stop, to listen, to come back.
Catra doesn’t. She can’t. She wouldn’t even if she could. She was too far gone for that.
The black energy’s already eaten half her face, chewing its way down her arm until her fingers curl into claws that don’t quite belong to her anymore. It is agony. It is poison. It is perfect. It drowns out everything else. It makes her stronger than the ache in her chest, the voice that keeps whispering she lost Adora long before this fight even started. A fight she had lost on a skiff too many months ago.
So she snarls and lunges instead of reaching out or surrendering, and Adora meets her, light against shadow, She-Ra’s brilliance straining against the dark unravelling at the edges of the world. Catra hits harder, because if she stops, she’ll fall apart, and she refuses to let Adora see her break.
But then…the floor is gone. The air is sucked from her lungs. Even Adora… gone.
Catra’s screaming before she knows it, a raw sound torn out of her throat, swallowed by the nothing she’s tumbling through. Maybe this is what losing really means: not death, not chains, just falling. Forever.
Until she slams into metal.
The impact knocks the breath out of her, pain sparking up her ribs and shoulder. She claws for grip, sparks skittering under her fingers, and blinks into the dim light; familiar dim light, reeking of rust and oil.
No. No, no, no.
The bars. The cot. The dent in the wall. She knows this place. Horde cell. Her Horde cell, and across from her, a kid. Skinny. Bruised. Tail wrapped tight around her legs. Ears trembling.
Her.
Six years old. Bandaged hand swollen to double its size, eyes glassy with terror. Catra remembers this day. Remembers the bone-deep throb of that hand, remembers Shadow Weaver’s disdainful silence, remembers how much she hated herself for being weak enough to get hurt in the first place.
But she doesn’t remember this. Doesn’t remember a broken, half-shadow version of herself crashing into the room, face split with dark cracks, eyes burning feral.
The kid stares at her like she’s a monster crawled straight from Beast Island into her living nightmare. Catra wants to snarl, to tell her to stop looking at her like that, to stop being afraid, but the words stick in her throat, jagged and bitter. Because maybe the kid’s right. Maybe that’s what she is now.
Or, maybe this is something else. A trick. A punishment. Or so help her; a chance.
*****
She had thought she knew pain. She really had.
Every punishment until now had been sharp, fleeting, almost clean in its cruelty; electric shocks that rattled her teeth, cuffs biting into her wrists, Shadow Weaver’s hand cracking across her face. She could endure those. She had endured those.
But this… The heavy book had come down once, twice, three times onto her hand, each strike echoing in Shadow Weaver’s study beneath the sullen glow of the Black Garnet. The sound had been worse than the pain at first: a sick, wet crunch, claws biting into her own fingertips as they were driven back into her flesh. She had felt bones splinter, felt her hand come apart inside itself. Through the haze of tears she had wondered if it was still a hand at all, or just dust and blood inside a bag of skin.
Then the pain caught up.
She had screamed. She hadn’t wanted to, but it had clawed out of her anyway, raw and helpless, a sound that made her hate herself even more than Shadow Weaver’s cold fury. Even Shadow Weaver had paused, back straightening just slightly, the mask unreadable but…something in it unsettled. Then, with a flick of her hand, she’d summoned the guards.
The child had thought of the infirmary, imagined clean sheets, bitter medicine, the sting of disinfectant. Instead she had been dragged down into the bowels of the Fright Zone, past corridors she barely knew existed, and thrown into one of the out-of-the-way cells that no one used. She’d landed hard, sobbing, clutching her ruined hand, humiliated by the sound of herself breaking.
Time blurred. Hours or days, she couldn’t tell. A medic had come once, silent and merciless, forcing her broken fingers straight enough to splint them, binding the swollen mess in bandages so tight she thought she’d faint. No words, no comfort. Just rough hands and silence.
The days after were worse. Her hand throbbed with fever, red skin burning through her fur. Infection took hold, thick pus oozing out between the stiff claws that no longer retracted. She could smell it, sour and rotting. Every heartbeat made the wound pulse. Each time she looked at it she wondered if she’d wake up one morning to find her hand simply gone.
They fed her, though. Regular meals, ration bars and bowls shoved through the forcefield slot. They’d given her a mattress, thin but hers. Even blankets. A pillow. Strange concessions. Shadow Weaver’s guilt, maybe. Or a punishment of another kind: here, nurse your own shame.
On the third day, she dragged the mattress under the cot and built a little fort, shoving blankets into a nest. It was cramped and stifling, but she could pretend she was hidden. Pretend no one could see her when she cried. The guards didn’t care.
By the fifth day, the fever was worse. She’d stopped trying to flex her fingers. Even thinking about it made her stomach lurch. When she crawled out of her nest to snatch the ration bar left just inside the field, she heard it: a sound more jarring than anything she’d heard before. A tearing noise, like the world itself had split its seams.
She froze. Ears pricked, tail lashing.
A body crashed into the cell. Large, crackling with an energy that made her fur rise on end, scattering the fragile safety of her fort like it was nothing. She stumbled back, food forgotten, ears flattening despite her desperate attempt to bare her teeth, to look dangerous.
The thing lifted its head and she saw her own face.
Older. Broken. One side split open by jagged black cracks, eye glowing, arm half-swallowed by something that looked like shadow given flesh. Her breath caught. Her claws ached against the bandages. She wanted to scream, but nothing came out. Because the face staring back at her was hers. And it was monstrous.
The kitten’s first instinct is always fear. It claws up her spine, prickling the fur at her nape, shoving her ears flat. She backs into the cot, injured hand cradled against her chest, teeth bared in a hiss that’s more shaky breath than threat. Her whole body screams small, cornered, breakable.
But she’s learned something in six short years: weakness gets you crushed. And if you’re going to get crushed, you might as well make it hurt for the other guy. So she straightens. Doesn’t quite hide the trembling in her legs, but sets her tail stiff behind her, bares her fangs properly this time. She’s used to being the smallest, the oddest. The magicat. The one no one wants to spar with, or eat beside, or even look at, except Adora. Adora, who’d defended her with words and wide-eyed certainty. But Adora isn’t here.
Here it’s just her. And the thing with her face.
The older one is watching her. Not like Shadow Weaver, cold and calculating, and not like the cadets who look at her like she’s diseased. This look is stranger. Curious. Almost sad. Almost pity. Catra hates it.
Yet… the longer they stare at each other, the less monstrous the older one seems. The blackness clinging to her skin begins to flake and fade, the crackling energy peeling away in whispers, leaving scarred flesh but flesh nonetheless. A girl, not a demon. A girl who looks like her.
The silence holds. Heavy, tense, ready to snap.
Then, careful, ears twitching, the kitten steps forward. Not close enough to be caught, but close enough to hold out a chunk of the hard grey ration bar, crumbling slightly in her bandaged fingers. Her voice is soft, but not weak.
“Did that hurt?” Her eyes flick to the older Catra’s arm, her face. The place where the shadows still cling. The older Catra lets out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Her mouth twists into something that isn’t quite a smile.
“Not as much as that,” she says, nodding at the swollen, oozing hand the child keeps curled against her body. He voice is low and scratchy, and the kitten isn’t sure if that is from lack of use or maybe just years of growling at the world. She doesn’t know if she wants to know.
The kitten hugs it closer, ears flattening again, but she doesn’t drop the offered food. The older one shakes her head, pushing it back toward her. “You eat.”
For a moment they just sit there, two versions of the same girl, both battered, both stubborn, neither willing to look away first. The child doesn’t lower the food right away. Her arm trembles faintly under the weight of holding it out, though the chunk of ration bar can’t weigh more than a few ounces. The tremble comes from somewhere else, nerves, fear, the kind of exhaustion that lives in your bones after too many days of fever and pain. Still, she doesn’t drop it.
Older Catra watches her, and something in her chest twists. It isn’t just pity, it’s recognition. She remembers this posture, this stubborn tilt of her chin, that desperate insistence on pretending she wasn’t afraid even when her tail betrayed her. It’s a stance that says: ‘I’m still here. I can still fight you if I have to’.
The black crackle crawling across her arm recedes another fraction, flaking away into nothing. She hadn’t noticed until now how heavy it had felt, how suffocating, as though she were wearing her bitterness on the outside. But under the kitten’s gaze, it peels back.
“You eat,” she says again, more firmly, and tries to soften it with something almost like a smirk. It feels alien on her face. “Trust me. I’ve had enough of those.”
The kitten’s ears flick, uncertain. She stares hard at the broken ration bar in her hand, then at the older girl’s face, as though trying to read her intentions in every scar, every strange shadow. Finally she huffs, sharp and small, and pulls it back to herself.
“Fine,” she mutters, biting off a crumbly corner with a snap of her teeth. She chews, glaring all the while, as though daring the older girl to laugh.
The older Catra doesn’t. She just watches, leaning back against the bars, her own claws drumming faintly against metal. Her chest pulses with a strange kind of ache, one that has nothing to do with bruises or the rawness of her throat.
The little one swallows, ears twitching and then, almost despite herself, edges a half-step closer. The mattress-fort is ruined, a spill of blankets and cot-legs, but she hovers near its wreckage as though it still offers some kind of shield.
“You look… weird,” she says finally, chin jutting forward.
The older Catra huffs, the sound half a laugh, half a sigh. “Yeah,” she says. “You don’t know the half of it.”
The child studies her, nose wrinkling as though weighing whether to press the question. Then she surprises them both, her good hand uncurls, resting on the shredded pile of blankets. Not touching, not yet, but closer. Close enough that if the older girl reached, their claws could brush.
And in the heavy silence of the Horde cell, they just… stay there. Two versions of the same girl, wounded in different ways, holding each other’s gaze.
Neither of them looks away.