Chapter Text
There is no emotion; there is peace.
Adora hears the wind first.
It rushes through her ears with a pulsing cadence that keeps in time with the pounding in her head as the draws of unconsciousness begin to fade. She lives content in the immaterial moment before animacy—before Adora comes forth. There’s a forceful burden and weightlessness that strike her in tandem as exhaustive waves of pain start to crest and break throughout her body. Then the abrupt realization that it isn’t the wind she hears but the sound of her blood surging with a deafness that would scare her if fear was an emotion she could focus on.
That profound sense of disconnect she can’t put a name to halts any panic or wonder from taxing her mind because while focus is almost impossible at the moment…Adora is a Jedi. And with nothing but the pounding in her head and the awareness of her blood, Adora begins to take stock of what she can sense; to reorient herself.
An uneven ground beneath her. Craggy stones digging into her back. The assaulting stench of heated burning metal and smoke makes conscious her chest and its unbearable tightness as she starts to cough. The action racks her so violently that she becomes increasingly aware of other parts of her body that do not feel right. There’s a burning sting on multiple areas of exposed skin; most notably her side and arms. One of her legs isn’t moving with intention. Adora can’t tell which one at the moment as the light behind her eyelids becomes unbearable to ignore and opening them takes more willpower than she’s used to.
She blinks rapidly; her vision slowly adjusts against the harsh light of a foreign sun until blinding colors coalesce into a wide green-hued sky with sparse clouds littered throughout without a pattern to them. The sight of the sky delivers a fear she can’t remember the means of careening into focus and her heart works double time without knowing its stake.
There’s a familiar touch on her arm when she tries to move.
“What happened?” Adora’s throat cracks with disuse and immediately answers her own question.
Space. She was in space.
No.
She’s still in space.
Gravity hasn’t caught up with her yet. Her mind continues to stumble in a void of black emptiness trying to answer a question she can’t remember.
“We crashed,” the voice of the familiar touch says.
The rushing in her ears makes her friend sound light-years away.
Catra.
The pounding increases with her growing awareness. It lolls to one side in the dirt, trying to catch a glimpse of her friend but the movement makes her head swim. She does catch sight of her cherished lightsaber placed neatly next to her along with her mostly intact cloak. Some new singe marks darken the sturdy cloth in a few noticeable spots. Grit and gravel press into the back of her skull. Her head hurts.
She’s still in space.
Warning lights blink behind her eyes.
“Crashed?” There’s a gentle breeze tickling her skin now and her back is uncomfortably heated by the hot sand and rock. Adora attempts to sit up and immediately regrets it. Catra gently pushes her back down. The extreme vertigo she experiences brings back a flash of memory: their ship’s alarms and the passing incandescent swirls of blue abruptly halting. “We...fell out of hyperspace?” Adora starts, slowly, trying to piece together the jumbled mess of her memory. “I was piloting the ship and then… I don’t—I don’t remember anything after that. Were we attacked?”
She’s still in space.
Her adrenaline spikes with the thought of a nearby threat. She tries to push through the vertigo again but it only makes the awareness of her pain worse. Adora falls back on the hard ground with a heavy thud. She bites back a slew of expletives as a knot starts to form at the base of her skull. A gentle hand lifts her head a bit and something soft is placed underneath. She sighs and turns to find her head now in Catra’s lap.
…if fear was an emotion.
“There was a…” Catra hesitates, the natural rasp to her voice is more prevalent and hoarse. “You passed out and knocked the controls. We spun out. Got caught in this planet's gravity well and blasted through the atmosphere.” She pauses, allowing Adora to paint the image in her head. “I couldn’t reach you until it was too late. Crashing here was the best I could manage.”
Her explanation is clipped and robotic. So unlike everything Adora has ever known about her friend.
“Passed out?” The association of that phrase feels foreign when said aloud in correlation with her.
She’s still in space.
Adora strains her body up as much as she can muster to look about her surroundings. She feels Catra’s hands steady her back.
A faint alarm in the distance grabs Adora’s attention through her daze. Buried in the side of a small cliff lies their starship, utterly destroyed, looking nothing like the Republic shuttle the two of them once called a temporary home. Adora is struck with an immense bout of gratitude that Catra was able to pull her out of that mostly unscathed.
“Did anyone else—,”
Catra’s quick shake of her head answers the question of their clone escort. She doesn’t see their bodies and less so wants to imagine what they look like inside the smoking ship.
Catra herself looks better than she feels. Same apparent burns as Adora but nothing else that seems obvious. Relief floods her system at their fortunate luck but the ache of her body suddenly flares and she groans with exhaustive pain.
“How could I have messed up this bad?” The whisper is harsh on her throat. “Did you send out a distress call?” The thought of failing their mission sinks in her stomach as the allowance of more coherent thought begins to trickle through.
Catra wordlessly shakes her head.
“What? Why not!?” Adora’s unfailing sense of duty wills her past the pain of getting up. She reaches for the communicator still in her pocket. “We need to tell the Ethe—,” A firm hand on her forearm stops her and she almost lashes out from pure reaction. It’s a startling emotion she immediately reigns in.
“Something is wrong,” Catra says with a measured tone. Her usually calm and unfettered face is troubled and frightened.
“What do you mean?”
Catra grounds her with a frown of anger and confusion. “You don’t feel it?”
Adora watches her mouth move with no sound. “You’re sss—.” Her words slur together and that’s when it hits her: a lingering disturbance in the Force so strong it knocks her breath out.
Gravity crashes around Adora. She’s falling through space. That ensuing burden and weightlessness come together, expanding itself all around her. She attempts to grasp at the Force like a lifeline but it falls apart like sand through her fingers. It’s an alarming sensation and all at once all she feels is fear. Then darkness and pain; formless and distant, stretching out across the entire galaxy. Black spots begin to overtake her vision threatening to have her pass out but she pushes through it, taking in the vastness of a change in the Force she can’t comprehend.
Adora turns to her partner, eyes wide and confused, mirroring the same confusion and anger that she now realizes is dread.
“What happened?”