Bad End of the World

Broken Promises

Adora

Healing Catra's leg had left Adora feeling exhausted and broken, both in body and spirit. She thought she could be stronger than this, thought that she would be able to handle whatever Catra might throw at her. But the incessant cruelty was too much to bear in the end, and now those words lingered, echoing around her tired mind.

I don't want you here. I could just kill you. I still hate you. Fuck you!

Adora paused to take a few long, controlled breaths, eventually tuning out the intrusive thoughts. She was so worn out that she could barely keep her head up, and it took all of her strength just to put one foot in front of the other.

She was half-way out of the central compound, and was about to step out of the current alley, but then she heard voices approaching. She leaned backwards and pressed herself closely against the nearest wall.

"-you hear? They got Adora holed up here somewhere."

"Seriously? So like, is she back?"

Adora didn't recognise the voices, so she remained hidden in the shadows while the patrol passed by. When they were out of earshot, she peered up and down the road that spanned the wide clearing ahead.

Once convinced that it was clear, she darted across to the narrow alley on the other side, where she suddenly felt her legs turn to jelly. "Shit," she muttered, slapping her hands against the wall to steady herself, taking a few deep breaths until the dizzy spell passed.

She was rapidly becoming exhausted, and she knew that if she passed out here, she'd be captured again, this time against her will.

Come on, you're almost there, she thought, forcing herself to press on. Just a few more minutes.

She needed time to rest, time to gather her thoughts and work out what to do next, and she knew the perfect hiding place to do so. She turned left and headed down the next corridor, a dead end with nothing but a mass of vertical pipes at the end of it. Adora knew better, though, so she slowly squeezed through the maze of tubes, breathing a sigh of relief when she found her destination.

It was their secret lair. A special place that she and Catra had stumbled across one day, and from then on made their own, like a second home. In reality it was just an unused, poorly located store room, but to them it had been some kind of paradise, at least in those sparse, precious moments when Hordak and Shadow Weaver weren't around.

Adora ran a hand along the dusty, grimy wall at the side of the entrance door, and brushed away some overgrown weeds to expose the panel beneath. She bit her tongue in concentration as she typed in the twelve digits of their secret number, and smiled to herself when the metal door smoothly wooshed open.

"Hah, unbelievable," she muttered, walking inside. She pressed a couple of buttons on the inner wall panel to close and lock the door behind her.

The room looked the same as they'd left it, with empty crates scattered around, and shelves stacked with cleaning equipment. Higher up there was a single round window with a fan lazilly rotating inside it, and dim lighting hung in thin strips across the ceiling.

Adora could tell from the undisturbed layers of dust that Catra hadn't been here since she left, and she wasn't particularly surprised at the revelation. It was their space, after all. She was only here out of sheer desperation.

The world started to blur around her, so she stumbled to the back of the room, relieved to find the same pile of blankets that they'd repurposed, as well as a small metal storage container full of ration bars, and bottles of water. Emergency rations, Catra had said, just in case.