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Catra didn’t sleep in her bed every night. Even knowing her as well as she did, Adora couldn’t tell what specifically would prompt Catra to curl up at the foot of her bed instead of sleeping in the perfectly good top bunk (which she’d always insisted on having).
But for as long she could remember, she’d wake up some mornings with her feet and half her blanket trapped under a sleeping Catra. Sometimes she stole the blanket without even using it, or clawed holes in the mattress in her sleep, or snored a little too loudly.
It was a mundane surprise that Adora looked forward to.
The other cadets either didn’t notice, or they all turned a blind eye to it. It was an open secret, of course, that Adora and Catra were fond of each other and a little closer than Horde soldiers really ought to be. Still, that kind of behavior was in a sort of gray zone of acceptability; it didn’t interfere with normal operations, and no one was awake to see them displaying “signs of weakness”, anyways.
Besides, during the day she and Catra never really hugged each other, or anything. They did it more when they were kids. Adora thought about it a lot.
She’d brush up against Catra by accident when they passed each other in a cramped hallway. When one of them pinned the other down during a skirmish they might stay that way for a second longer than necessary.
Shadow Weaver would touch her face or her shoulder with a gentle hand, and a couple kind words, but that was the end of it. It was normal to avoid too much contact; it was important to not get used to it.
You could get addicted.
Catra was being indecisive about sleeping in her own bed that night.
This wasn’t new. She’d always felt like it would be…weird. If she did it too much. She would probably do it by default if she could, or if she felt like she could.
She reserved sleeping next to Adora for days when that pull was too strong; maybe they’d been training together, and Adora had made that one face where her lip quivered and her nose scrunched up and she tried to look mad while holding back a smile. Maybe they had been play-wrestling in the common area again, knocked over a table, gotten chewed out together.
Sometimes when Adora’s hair got mussed and she huffed and smoothed it back into place, Catra could just watch her all day.
These days, it became more about a creeping anxiety that would clutch at her stomach and drive her out of bed in the middle of the night. She’d wander around the Fright Zone, climbing on things and sulking about nothing in particular. When she came back, it was impossible to just go back into her own bed, which had turned cold and unfamiliar.
What was she even anxious about? She’d get promoted to Force Captain, or she wouldn’t. Adora would be around. They wouldn’t be able to sleep in the barracks together at some point, but that was just a fact of adulthood, of course. Adora would still be around.
Facts were facts. Occasionally, emotions were also facts.
Feeling sleepy and not wanting to debate with herself anymore, she decided to go for it. She slipped out from under her covers to quietly hop down onto the floor. Gracefully. Quiet enough to not wake up Adora or anyone else.
Well, she had intended to do that, anyways.
Her blanket snagged around her foot and she wasn’t able to stick the landing quite right (how embarrassing was that? Wasn’t landing on her feet the one thing she was supposed to be able to do?) and she stumbled around towards the wall. Before she could even blink she fell backwards, landing squarely on Adora with a soft thump.
Adora awoke to something heavy suddenly falling on her stomach, and she grunted in surprise. Wide awake now, she clenched her fists, grabbed onto whatever had landed on her, preparing for an attack—
“Sorry, sorry, I fell down. Let me just, uh…” Catra mumbled, squirming in Adora’s grip.
Catra was laid horizontally across Adora’s torso, their stomachs crossed together. Her face was flat against the bed, but her ears were drooped in what Adora recognized as embarrassment.
“Catra!” Adora whispered angrily, letting her grip relax, “Catra, that’s not funny. You gotta be more careful. You could’ve broken my ribs, or something.”
“Y-yeah, uh, that was totally my plan all along. I got up in the middle of night like, ‘I wanna break Adora’s bones when her defenses are down’.” She sighed. “I just fell, dummy. Let me up.”
Adora realized she was still holding on to Catra. Moreover, she was holding onto her very……gently.
She wondered why Catra wasn’t getting up, since she very easily could. Not that she wanted her to.
Those feelings were confusing, so she tried pushing Catra off in much the same way she did when they were wrestling, by shoving her head and neck to the side.
Unfortunately, her hands appeared to still be in “gentle” mode, because it ended up being more of an affectionate pat.
“Huh.” Catra said.
Her hand stayed on top of Catra’s head, which was weird. It made her feel something warm and buzzing in her chest and that was also weird. Her pinky finger just happened to be very close to Catra’s ear, which flicked when she accidentally touched it a little.
Very weird.
She was thinking about doing something.
“Hey, Catra?” Adora whispered.
“I was. You know. Thinking the same thing,” Catra whispered back, even quieter than Adora had. Her voice was shaky.
How come Adora had never done that before? Could she get her to do that again? Maybe for longer? Especially the ear thing?
Catra did an awkward, backwards army crawl before sitting up, gingerly repositioning herself to kneel on top of Adora.
This was very not allowed.
“Hey.” Catra smile-grimaced down at her. She had to hope it was too dark for Adora to see how red her face was.
“Hi,” Adora squeaked.
They stared at each other. The Fright Zone’s nighttime sounds of machinery and distant goings-on filled the air between them.
Adora was very pretty. Objectively. That wasn’t a new thought, and everyone else knew that, of course. It just wasn’t the sort of thing people talked about. Everybody else noticed her strength and confidence and her laugh and her face and her hair and her gorgeous grey-blue eyes. It was so obvious that no one had to mention it.
Right now, objectively speaking, she was extremely pretty. Her hair was undone and splayed across her pillow, eyes wide and a little watery. Nervous but curious.
She felt Adora’s hands over hers, a thumb running over her knuckles. Catra’s tail flicked back and forth slowly over Adora’s knees.
There was too much to think about, and Catra wasn’t very good at thinking. She was a more kinesthetic type.
With both of her hands, took Adora’s right hand, looked at it, gave it a little squeeze. She heard Adora breathe in sharply.
She put Adora’s hand back on top of head.
“Oh, this?” Adora blinked at her. “This is what you…?”
Catra didn’t have the faintest idea what Adora had expected her to do.
“Yeah huh.” she muttered. With a few seconds of hindsight felt extremely silly for having done it, but she couldn’t help herself. She had crossed some line she wasn’t aware of, and it was too late. There was no way to go back from asking Adora to…
Well, pet her.
Okay, this was new. Different. Unexpected.
Admittedly, Adora had thought about it before, but had always felt like Catra would be offended if she had asked. Or it would just be weird.
It wasn’t weird so much as…unknown territory. Now, though, Catra was leaning into her hand expectantly, her face flushed and her eyes screwed shut.
She started out small, just sort of little strokes, feeling out how Catra might react. Her hair wasn’t terribly soft. It was unkempt, a little scratchy. Warmth radiated into her hand. She combed through it with her fingers.
Catra kept leaning ever so slightly forward. Faintly, she heard the rumbling sound of her purring.
Oh, okay, Catra was cute now. Not that she hadn’t been before, at times. That was part of the reason Adora looked forward to seeing her in the mornings, curled up in a ball and her face relaxed in sleep.
Oh, and her ears.
Catra’s ears and tail always had a mind of their own and it was, well, endearing to watch her struggle to keep a straight face or look intimidating.
She’d always been kind of curious about what touching them might feel like. Based on what she knew, it could go either way—she might be receptive, or she could really hate it and get up from the bed and never come back.
“Uh, Catra?”
“Huh?” Catra sounded groggy, like she was half asleep.
“Can I touch your ears?”
Catra responded very casually, with zero hesitation.
“Yeah, do that.”
Really?
“Oh. Okay.”
Catra was leaning so far forward now that she’d switched to supporting herself with her elbows. With both hands, Adora reached up to both sides of Catra’s head and just…gave the back of her ears a scratch. Just a little one. She noticed immediately how the fur on her ears had a completely different texture to her hair. They were fluffed up, soft to the touch.
Catra purred very loudly.
Adora couldn’t help giggling at her.
“Shut uuup,” Catra groaned. She still pressed the left side of her head against Adora’s hand, which was where she had absently-mindedly decided to concentrate her efforts.
By now she was functionally laying on top of her, just barely pushing off the bed with her forearms. It made her breath hitch, this new sensation of the weight of another person. At least like this, not a stranglehold or a little moment snuck in between blows. Or maybe it was just that it was Catra?
Adora couldn’t say she’d ever seen Catra make a face like she was now; totally relaxed, unguarded, even more than when she was sleeping. She couldn’t say she’d ever seen Catra be relaxed and affectionate at the same time. Maybe the reason her chest felt so warm was because Catra was on top of her.
Adora couldn’t suppress a very goofy, undignified smile.
So this is what it was it like?
Catra’s mind had pretty much gone blank the exact second Adora had touched her. It was sort of meditative; she was completely present in that moment, like it was impossible to consider what was going on outside the lower bunk. Adora’s hands, and really just the presence of her—that was that.
Then Adora stopped, and for a second everything came back.
She’d done something wrong, or she’d made her uncomfortable. Which was fair, since she’d forced her to pet her ears or whatever, and was now pinning her down on the bed, with a dumb and stupid notion that Adora had actually wanted to do all of that.
Then her hands were then gently cupping her cheeks and it was all gone again.
Adora’s eyes were focused, maybe examining her. She looked…fascinated. It was as if she was looking at her like she’d never seen her before. Like she’d stumbled on something new and exciting.
“Are you…” Catra started. She sounded a little muffled because Adora was squishing her cheeks now, “…okay with this?”
“Huh?” Adora snapped out of whatever trance she had been in. She blushed. “Y-yeah, I’m okay with it.”
“You look super dorky,” Catra teased, which was hypocritical considering what she was currently allowing Adora to do to her face.
“Oh? Do I?” Adora smirked back at her.
Was this flirting? What counted as flirting? Did laying down on top of your best friend with your faces barely inches apart count as flirting?
She’d never flirted with anyone before and if she didn’t personally know Adora she would definitely never have been able to.
The weird new shifted into an exciting new.
“Hey, Adora, how does it feel to be the biggest dweeb on the planet?”
The both started laughing, but the sound of someone nearby turning over in their sleep made them stop dead in their tracks.
Nothing happened. They waited another minute.
Adora caught herself, then lowered her voice even more.
“ ‘Hey, Adora, I just woke you up by knocking the freakin’ wind out of you, do you wanna pet my ears and cuddle with me?’”
“Oh, w-what?” Catra lost her confidence immediately, “I mean, I never asked you to…uh…cuddle with me. I mean, right now we’re, you know. But I never--”
“You could ask.”
Catra felt like the wind had been knocked out of her.
“Get the blanket,” Adora whispered. Catra blinked at her.
Right. That meant they would have to get up.
Catra pointed at the blanket (which she inferred was the reason this had even happened) hanging off of the top bunk. It was far enough away that Adora had to reach it.
As she stretched over to pull it down, she felt Catra collapse her whole weight on top of her, her chin now resting on Adora’s chest. Looking at her.
She was being cute again, which made it very inconvenient to focus on anything else.
“Do you want to be, uh, where you are, are do you want to…” Adora really wanted to say (but she couldn’t) “please get closer”, even though they were already about as close as they could possibly get.
Whether or not she picked up on that, Catra pushed herself off a little, practically slithering up through Adora’s arms as she pulled the blanket up around them and they shifted to lay on their sides. A normal person couldn’t have managed that, but Catra was pretty much boneless.
“You’re going to uh, wake me up, right?” Catra asked.
It took her a second to remember that if people saw them curled up together the next morning there might be repercussions. And a lot of questions, many of which neither of them could answer. Catra slept hard and rarely woke up before midday.
“Yeah, I’ll make sure.” Adora didn’t like saying that, or having to do that. It felt wrong.
“Okay.”
She didn’t have much time to ruminate because Catra got very close after that. She buried her face in Adora’s neck, her nose pressing against her jawline, chest close enough that Adora could feel her pulse, her breath washing over her collarbone.
And just for a second, so faintly that she wasn’t sure if it had happened or not, she could have sworn she felt Catra brush her lips against the hollow of her throat.
Oh, wow.
Without even thinking about it Adora wrapped her arms around Catra, hands pressing against her shoulder blades, pushing her even closer. Catra started purring again, slightly nuzzling her, and It was almost too much. Adora buried her face in her hair, breathing in her scent.
A lock brushed against Adora’s nose and she sneezed.
After a brief moment of panic, they were able to confirm that yet again, no one else in the barracks had been woken up by the noise. They really needed to stop pushing their luck.
“Uh, gross?” Catra huffed, but she didn’t move away in the slightest.
Adora’s throat was dry but she still laughed a little bit.
“Sorry, you know, it’s—“ she sighed, “have you ever brushed your hair? Like, ever?”
She thought about offering to brush it for her, but it seemed like something Catra would object to.
“You could brush it for me,” Catra said.
“Huh? Like, now?”
“No. I’m kidding, doofus.”
She didn’t sound like she was kidding, but they could address that later, because it would involve moving, and it was pretty cold in here, wasn’t it? At least outside of the blanket, and the two of them underneath it. She could do that tomorrow morning, maybe. For now, this was more than enough.
Whatever it was, it was good.