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"As Many Lives As It Takes (To Be With You)" Fic Notes

After talking shit and increasing the chapter count like five times, AMLAIT is finally done at 13/5 chapters. You can maybe guess there’s a lot going on in these fic notes.

No playlist this time, I didn’t make one assuming it would be a quick fic and just listened to random shit, or watched baking videos, or put in earbuds and listened to silence when I had migraines.

Epilogue life:

So I pretty much put what would be this section in the fic’s actual epilogue, but Catra and Adora end up staying in the apartment for a while. After a couple months of living with a third wheel (who is more like the primary wheel they are tricycling considering who owns the place), it starts cramping on their couple moments. Adora gently prods Catra about the idea of getting their own place, which is an idea that takes several weeks to sink in before she’s willing to explore venturing beyond her safety bubble, but everything changed once and the world didn’t end, so she eventually decides she’s ready. Catra finally leaves that small room after four years. As scary as it is, it feels like the ultimate measure of her growth.

After a few years they move to the outskirts of Bright Moon when Adora switches hospitals, giving them a bit more air and the “best of both worlds” when it comes to being in the city but having a bit more of the freedom/relaxation from their childhood town back. They’re also closer to Thaymor which makes visiting a little easier, and closer to Glimbow and Scorfuma specifically, though they’re farther from some of their other friends.

They both learn to maintain their best friendships even not living together and they regularly visit Adora’s parents, though they never tell anyone else about Catra’s ability. Netossa seems like she suspects something at times, but she never directly implies or asks something, and whatever she suspects certainly couldn’t be the truth.

Chapter 1:

⦁ If you were expecting me to have ever forgotten that tweet ND made about Catra going through all nine of her lives over the course of She-ra and Adora healing her to reset them, then you’re wrong. In a way, this entire AU is ND’s fault. Did you think about that. I have No Responsibility for this.

⦁ Entrapta’s “nerd merchandise” is a premier ball from pokemon because for some reason that was the only thing I could picture for it. It’s not even a regular pokeball I don’t know why!! But that’s what they use.

⦁ Catra technically has binocular vision dysfunction in this due to her right eye being a little out of sync from her left.

⦁ Time paradox is, of course, a portal reference.

⦁ Entrapta’s blanket used to fall off her lap when she was working, which is how it ended up under the table the first few times, and then she noticed Catra balling up there and started leaving it there on purpose, even washing and rearranging it.

⦁ Entrapta’s room is always hot because of the equipment in it and the heat output from her computer and stuff. Luckily, all three occupants of the apartment like it when it’s warm.

Chapter 2:

⦁ Catra watching ice melt is a Booker reference. I love you Booker. But also a euphemism like “watching paint dry,” “watching grass grow,” etc.

⦁ The nightmares weren’t in the initial concept for the fic, but Entrapta helping Catra out with her “condition” was and I found they were a good way to showcase the backstory without actually showing flashbacks or having an entire prologue chapter of trauma after trauma that just would have felt miserable and spoiled everything.

⦁ Catra’s job isn’t necessarily real but is also heavily based on real things. Basically universities sometimes have special collections, archives, etc that are typically “open” during regular work hours, but only by appointment. They might have their own staff or just the librarians see to them. For this fic I basically made up something that might be real, where BMU also allows appointments after hours, but only from grad students, and then professors can come in after hours (or during hours) without appointment as long as there’s staff present. And of course they get away with that by hiring someone cheap so it doesn’t cost them a lot extra to keep it open. Catra has been paid more by other jobs, but she likes this one way better, and she doesn’t have a ton of money pressure living with Scorpia and Entrapta, so she’s planning to keep it. This is also heavily based on one of my first jobs where I did something similar for a university but it had nothing to do with collections or the library. Catra works the same hours I did then.

Chapter 3:

⦁ Bow would have offered Catra his own bed if he thought she would have taken it, but Entrapta — and Catra’s own reactions — made it pretty clear that she was going to make herself difficult to help, so he thought the couch might seem “less pitying,” but he didn’t account for the Adora factor. Everybody forgets about the Adora factor.

⦁ Scorpia mentioning “six years” immediately solidified in Adora’s subconscious that Catra’s injury was from the fall, which is why she jumped to saying she watched it happen. It didn’t even occur to Adora that Catra’s paralysis could have come from something other than the fall until she was in bed like two days later and thought, oh fuck, there could have been something worse.

⦁ Sneaking onto the school roof is the exact kind of shit Catra and Adora would do together, but since she was going up there to have A Moment™️ about one of her deaths, Catra wanted to be alone. It felt like this dark secret that she was harboring and would ruin her life at any moment.

Interlude:

⦁ “It helps a lot even without her talking back or looking at me” yeah sometimes Entrapta is listening and sometimes she isn’t even aware Scorpia is there. Scorpia can unload her whole problem, talk herself through a solution, say “Thanks!”, and then only after she has marched herself out of the room will Entrapta realize she has left and throw a goodbye through the door, still not looking away from her screens. The first time Catra witnesses this she immediately gets a clear picture of the apartment dynamic.

⦁ Catra wouldn’t say her name because it was part of her paranoia over being hunted down somehow.

⦁ “Maybe Scorpia isn’t used to people not immediately loving her.” Yeah could not be further from the truth she was kind of bullied in school, that’s how she and Entrapta became friends, because they were both bad at social cues and stuck together.

⦁ Obviously, Entrapta didn’t mean anything by her questions. When you don’t realize other people would treat someone differently over something, it can seem like innocent curiosity to ask about it. She learned very quickly after meeting Catra that those kinds of things have limits, it just wasn’t something that had come up in her life before and she hadn’t inferred it.

Chapter 4:

⦁ Honestly Adora had to have Mara as family to support her because any less and she might not have made it to be at all together after everything she thought happened with Catra.

⦁ Catra does wear her arm brace in other scenarios — when she’s going to be doing physical activity, for instance, though she might opt for a sling instead/in addition — but as far as wearing it while in the apartment, sleeping like that is the only one. The difficulty of putting it on by herself — and the pain of getting help — are why she almost never uses it, even though it would work for some (but not all) of the things the sling works for, and be less obtrusive too. That’s why Adora being able to help with it later is so helpful.

Chapter 5:

⦁ The thing Adora knows that Catra doesn’t is that she’s absolutely going to break and come back home with her, even if the driving thing was more up in the air.

⦁ I went back and forth on the language to use around Catra’s ears, specifically whether to refer to them as a pair or only reference her single fully-functional one. Ultimately I decided that Catra’s internal dialog would still think of it as her ears pinning back even if only one moves (at all for small movements, or all the way for larger). She spent her entire life thinking of them as a pair, and she can’t feel one not reacting, she just doesn’t feel anything over there, so she defaults to how she used to consider them unless she’s like, looking in the mirror and can see only one move. When it comes to other people addressing them, they see just one ear reacting for the most part and tend to refer to them singularly.

Chapter 6:

⦁ Scorpia got Adora’s number at the same event that she told her about arm-hugs, mostly to puff herself up when she realized Adora could pet Catra, however carefully.

⦁ Scorpia’s pillow said “Not to spoil the ending, but everything is going to be ok” which just irritated Catra every time she saw it, so she hid it. She can’t throw it out because Scorpia’s moms are the ones who got it, but she can do her damnedest to never see it again. It mysteriously reappears when Scorpia is moving out so she can take the dumb thing with her.

⦁ Like every chapter I had a scene that I was like “this is the most fun to write, I love this so much” (which like… really awesome from a writing perspective!) and the cuddling scene was that one for this chapter. I thought it was going to be the phone call, but Adora’s determination to cuddle, her diagram, and Catra’s fluster were just so fun to work with.

Chapter 7:

⦁ Mara calls her loved ones dear because Razz always called her dearie.

⦁ Mara and Adora went all-in on the driving thing because they know Catra well and knows she needs an excuse, or at least an extra push, whenever it comes to emotional stuff like coming home.

⦁ Originally the phone calls were outlined to be one singular phone call, with Catra eventually getting comfortable enough to turn on the video as the call went on, but spreading it out made a little more sense. In the version where it was all one call, though, Catra admitted that she didn’t want them to see her face paralyzed and Adora asked Mara to tell Catra that she didn’t care about her ear. Another reason I cut it is because I decided Catra wasn’t self-conscious about that aspect of her injury.

⦁ Entrapta is thorough. There were two-three months there were she was tracking and timing just about every single thing Catra did inside the apartment. She had monitoring devices she didn’t realize her roommates would want to know about because it just seemed more effective to her than following Catra around all day. Her presence would have skewed the experiment. It’s creepy, but it all came from a place of love and wanting to build a better understanding of what could be effecting Catra’s situation.

⦁ The restraint it took for me to not make a joke about Entrapta knowing when Catra… “takes time for herself” was immense but I kept reminding myself it was a T fic.

⦁ “I was there two months ago” Ha, yeah, this is set in December and… The anniversary……. Adora needed to be home. Her moms are the only ones who can really comfort her when she’s like that.

⦁ Mara really wanted a kid, and Hope did too but less so, and she had a lot more Concerns about it. When they started looking into adoption and found a kid who was human (so Hope was confident they were informed on taking care of her) and had been an orphan for ten years, Mara couldn’t stand to leave her there. They hadn’t really been intending on getting an older kid (I mean, ten is not old, but in Hope’s head they were looking for a baby because typically you Acquire Child at babyhood so that must be how it works) but Adora being older was another thing that made Hope go okay, we can do this (she’s also, to be quite honest, not a fan of babies or very small children). What that meant in the end though was that Mara, in her older twenties, had much less of an age gap with Adora then would be typical. Hope is like six years older and so her age gap with Adora is less noticeably off.

I think it’s a faceblind thing, but I’m absolutely awful with ages. You could tell me Mara is supposed to be early 20s or late 30s and I would have no choice believe you. Regardless, I roughly place Mara somewhere around the 20-30 mark in the show and as having a more “big sister”-like relationship with Adora, so that’s how things got set up in this AU.

⦁ It’s “Bow’s” senior year because Glimmer is a year younger and Adora’s college education was kind of weird so she doesn’t really consider herself as having anything but a freshmen year. Maybe sophmore.

Chapter 8:

⦁ Catra has two bags while Adora has one for two reasons: 1) Adora still has some stuff at home and doesn’t need to bring as much, and 2) Catra’s second bag was mostly dedicated to her adaptive devices and hybrid shit since she knew she might need them for any stuff Adora wanted to do and she couldn’t borrow the shampoo already at the house.

⦁ Perfuma’s nature hike actually originated in this chapter and then I added it in to chapter 6 since I was far enough ahead in writing to do that. Before that the vibe was just “Well obviously Scorpia got Adora’s number from Perfuma at some point,” but this gave a more solid throughline on that. Their interaction at the nature hike is also what led to Scorpia starting to turn around on Adora until she tested her with the phone call.

⦁ The “look” that passed over Adora’s face when Catra joked that she didn’t remember getting tangled in the ribbon was her briefly worrying that Catra actually didn’t remember due to her supposed memory issues following the fall.

⦁ The school where Catra fell is loosely based on the random high school I took my SATs at, where it was actually four buildings with a courtyard and a quad between the buildings and various sports fields. Adora was walking on one of the paths circling one of the buildings when she saw Catra fall from the roof of another.

⦁ Adora mentions hospitals plural because she checked every single one it was even semi-plausible for Catra to be taken to, though there was only one that made sense since it was more than twenty minutes closer than the next one.

⦁ Adora has her childhood twin bed at home and at the apartment Catra has a double bed to give her enough room to comfortably position her arm without worry. It also helps when she does have a nightmare bad enough for her to move around, and when she’s having a day where her fear of falling is intense. She can tuck into the corner between the bed and the wall and know there’s no way she’s going over the edge.

⦁ This fic was supposed to be set nebulously in the fall until I had the Winterfest ideas and lined everything up to make it happen. It still worked out with it starting literally right after Catra’s birthday, but I went back and edited in a line referring to it later so it would build the time of year out better before it got to the Winterfest stuff. Of course, that only matters if you reread chapter 2 after I did it or started reading the fic later on, but it’s there for rereads, at least. It’s one of those unique things about fanfic and how you (typically) post it as you write it, which doesn’t allow for much in the way of second drafts. I really like that about fanfic because of how it forces you to work the limitation (and also I hate rewriting), but I always have more ideas while I’m writing so sometimes it can get in the way of something good.

⦁ The original title of this fic was “As Many Lives As It Takes (To Be With You Again)” but at some point between creating the document and posting the “Again” got dropped. This isn’t relevant to chapter 8, I just happened to notice it while typing the notes for it.

Chapter 9:

⦁ There was a lot more stuff about Catra learning to drive in this chapter initially, but I wasn’t happy with it and found I was skipping right past it when I was trying to reread/edit what was going on in the chapter, so for the final version I cut it. Some things though: Catra’s entire first day of driving didn’t even involve leaving park, it was mostly spent on figuring out how to manage her arm (in the end, putting it in the arm brace was the best way to keep it still and out of the way, even though that was difficult with Adora helping her instead of Entrapta) and stuff like hitting the turn signal with her pinky while turning the wheel. The first day where they actually drove in the street Adora came along — just for fun and not in case you have a panic attack, promise! — but was sworn to being silent in the backseat. That lasted until Mara said Catra was learning faster than Adora did.

⦁ Adora’s not a bad driver, she’s just an anxious one, partially due to Catra’s accident making her all too aware of the dangers. She spent high school watching Catra deal with her paralysis which supposedly came from the car accident, after all, so she tends to be a meek driver.

⦁ When Catra sees things she wasn’t able to IRL in her dreams, like when she sees parts of the incidents that she was actually dead/unconscious for… sometimes that’s accurate. And that’s all I’ll say.

⦁ The dent stuff… with the bumper… might or might not have been inspired by the movie Underdog……… It’s a very comedic origin for something that is so traumatic in the fic but like. I saw that movie as a kid and never forgot that part.

⦁ Entrapta 100% hacked the DMV and canceled someone else’s permit test so Catra could be fit in immediately, she just didn’t tell Catra that. Not that she’s hiding it, exactly, but volunteering that information? No.

⦁ Oh that phone call from Adora’s perspective. Adora basically didn’t know shit about what they did in the logs. She was horrified by what Catra described, but also a little confused, and maybe even put out. Catra had never told her even half the details it was clear Entrapta knew off the top of her head, and she made it sound like it was all very clear and she remembered every second of what she was awake for. Which, well, she did. Because her body was totally fine. Adora was ruffled by Entrapta’s “bedside manner”, and then she heard the hacking stuff which had her like, wait, what? because Catra had mentioned Entrapta was a professional white hat hacker before (sometimes. Sometimes black hat. Sometimes she does other stuff and invents a new programming language) but the whole “instantly pulling up results from the DMV thing” threw her. She was very attentive when Entrapta was running diagnostics and stuff because she didn’t know about things like Catra still being able to slightly twitch her fingers or shoulder sometimes.

⦁ Catra specifies not mocking Scorpia during romcoms because there is no way, ever, no matter what she owes, that she won’t make fun of the dumb romance movie stuff that happens, especially het nonsense when that applies.

⦁ Catra’s fosters did get her “Winterfest gifts” but they were things like clothes and school supplies she would need anyway, just maybe a little nicer or at least less generic than usual.

⦁ Time to talk about what everybody thought happened to Catra! Obviously, people at school decided Catra had died within the first few weeks. At that time, Adora decided Catra must be in a coma or suffering memory loss, maybe awake but not lucid. She thought Catra’s condition being unstable might be why no one would talk to her, but she told herself she couldn’t be dead because then they would just say that. The longer it went with everyone remaining tight-lipped, however, the worse things Adora began to believe. About a year in, she came to “accept” that Catra was dead — outright, or brain dead even if her body was still breathing. Mara and Hope also didn’t know why anyone would “cover up” what was supposedly a very public suicide, so they also believed Catra “survived,” but knowing how far she fell and how bad it must have been, they knew pretty much right away she was likely to be brain dead or not remember anything. They didn’t really ever say what they thought, though, mostly focusing on comforting Adora when she went through disaster scenarios and occasionally reluctantly admitting which they thought was most likely when she got too frantic to be calmed by anything but an answer. Each member of the trio had a different opinion (each of which was an option that everyone else had considered individually): Kyle believed Catra was severely injured and sent away to a rehab facility to recover and perhaps help her overcome her “suicidal tendencies” but was basically cut off from them by the system, Rogelio believed she was in a coma and if she ever woke suffered memory loss (explaining why she never contacted them), and Lonnie thought that she was straight up brain dead before they eventually pulled the plug. Catra’s foster parents, knowing she had run from the hospital, thought she was dead in a ditch somewhere and after a few months decided they were just never informed when she was found.

⦁ Yes it’s late for chestnut season. No I do not care. Chestnut season is a few weeks later in Etheria, okay.

⦁ Both Mara and Hope cook usually, but around holidays Mara takes charge and it’s family recipes 24/7. Mara probably would have baked a pie for the final day of Winterfest anyway, but it wouldn’t have been that one. That one is the most special.

Chapter 10:

⦁ Even if Catra didn’t need her hand for the VR game, Bow’s headset wouldn’t have fit over her ears. There are headsets that would work, just not the one Bow built. It wasn’t a concern for him at the time.

⦁ Glimmer is terrified of horror games for herself, but she seems to forget that literally every time and is always really excited to play, just remembering the adrenaline rush and thinking this time she’ll redeem herself and be totally cool and composed.

⦁ The horror game was going to be the latest Resident Evil DLC (for the Village? I think? Or like the sequel?) but then I was like damn. I don’t know if that’s in VR. But it was literally the only horror game I could think of at the moment despite liking (let’s plays) of them, so I kind of co-opted and mangled the mom-mannequin-dolls section of that.

⦁ The Star siblings were actually at the barbecue in my first draft but it made the scene too crowded when half the attendees already didn’t have speaking roles.

⦁ I kept trying to figure out where to fit in Adora’s school shit and it just never didn’t slow the scene down. I’m not sure it doesn’t here, either, but somewhere in the fic proper I wanted to mention why Adora and Catra never bumped into each other on campus. I had already decided Adora’s school worked out this way before I decided on Catra’s job, but that just made it relevant. Basically, Adora came to Bright Moon intending to get a four year degree and then go into nursing. Mara and Hope were supportive, but a little insistent she go to a four-year instead of a community college for nursing because then she could explore more. They just didn’t want her to fall too into the martyr shit without them there as a support system, but Adora thought they were lowkey hoping she’d change her mind and decide to become a doctor instead of “just” a nurse. Adora was roommates with Glimmer freshmen year and met a few of their eventual friend group there, which she always says made it all worth it, but university was a disaster for her. She would have rather drop dead from exhaustion than drop out, but that was looking increasingly likely as her mental health combined with ADHD to make her a disaster. Her grades weren’t good, she spent time crying in the study rooms at the library, it was a mess. Eventually Glimmer called Mara to make sure she knew just how bad it was for Adora since she knew by then she would play it down. They’d only been friends for a few months and she was definitely overstepping, but Adora’s moms made her talk it out and they decided she would transfer to Bright Moon’s community college, where she could take one less class a semester and graduate with what she needed after only three years of school overall. Adora still kind of felt like a failure, but Glimmer just happened to decide at the same time that the dorms were insufferable and hey, we know we make good roommates already, why don’t we get an apartment between our campuses together? And living with Glimmer meant seeing Bow a lot too, so Adora didn’t have to “lose” the two good friends she had made at uni so far when she left (something she was really worried about). Glimmer and Bow wouldn’t let her hide in a shame corner over “not being cut out for it” either so she still saw their other friends from campus and even made more via mutual friends, eventually ending up with their current friend group, the exceptions being the Star Siblings (from community college), Frosta (from across the streets), and Netossa/Spinnerella (from work, Adora met Netossa during the course of her med studies).

⦁ Adora spent like an hour agonizing over her outfit and asking Glimmer for help, insisting it was just because she wanted to look nice for her birthday and not because she was thinking of putting the moves on someone or wanted to impress them. She undid the top two buttons, and then Glimmer undid two more and called it perfect.

⦁ Hey, guess what, this chapter was supposed to cover twice as much as it did (shocker) and then they took too long making out (shocker) ¯_(ツ)_/¯ This is where I had to update the chapter count AGAIN and when I did that I went back and filled out the scene during the party, which was only written in summary until that point, because apparently I had the fucking room for it in that chapter since the real confession clearly wasn’t happening.

Chapter 11:

⦁ Entrapta is playing Monster Hunter in the first scene, because I’ve had single monster fights last 40 fucking minutes in that game before. I was actually going to make it vaguely be like, a Souls game or something, but then I was like no, Monster Hunter is more her speed, leading to the jokes about how long the fight is.

⦁ Catra’s arm pain is both psychological and magic. Obviously the mechanics of how it hurts without her having any feeling are magic, but the pain comes from her mental state. The more comfortable she is with someone’s touch and the more she trusts them, the less it hurts. It also ties to her general emotional turmoil, which is why it’s still bad when she remembers stressful things, when waking up from a nightmare, etc and why it caused her such pain that first moment Adora touched her.

⦁ Tapetum lucidum is the thing that makes cats eyes glow in the dark (among other creatures) when hit correctly with light. Melog’s was not being hit correctly with light. I refuse to explain Melog.

⦁ The start of Catra’s speech was once the start of the fic, but instead of her telling it to someone, it was just the narration (“It all starts when Catra is eleven and decides to run away to find Adora, but she doesn’t understand it until later. Actually, she never understands it, but the first death she could pretend was a fluke.”). When I had this idea, I started just kind of writing with the idea of well, let me do a few paragraphs on each death and see how I feel about that. I had a few false starts, and then I wrote that beginning bit of Catra’s speech, and then it cut to a new scene to talk about the car. That paragraph ended up being heavily edited down and used in the scene in chapter 9 where she talks about the nightmare. I decided to change direction on that because 1) it wasn’t good, 2) it was wallowing, and 3) I wasn’t actually intending to start the fic that way anyway, it was just so much in its infancy that I was testing some stuff out to see what the backstory was and where I wanted to take it. Because of that false start, though, I then had trouble tracking what had been revealed/implied throughout the fic when it came to the later-revealed deaths and their fallout.

Chapter 12:

⦁ Adora lowkey moved in on a temporary basis, she just needed to be around Catra very badly between the new couple and “died four times” things. She did end up going back to (mostly) sleeping at her place and Glimmer and Bow were very insistent on them spending time together too when she relaxed again.

⦁ I didn’t want to do anything above a T rating with this fic, really, but I did kind of want to make allusions to other ways disability can effect intimacy, hence the allusions to Catra needing toy assistance since her left hand just can’t manage it and her insecurities about “contributing” when it’s time.

⦁ Catra’s ability was so unbelievable and confusing that it wasn’t the kind of thing Adora could just instantly accept as fact and help her work through, so a “trailing” ending was necessary to show Adora coming to that place of total belief with time, and trying hard to support Catra while she did so. And of course I wanted them to get time being totally honest with each other. I had a lot of the ideas for the Scorpia stuff and such that I thought would just be in the “epilogue” part of the fic notes, but then I went no, you know what, this is Important to how I envision the end here, so I made it an actual part of the fic, similarly to how I did the third fic in the Greys/Waiting For My Spaceship To Come Back For Me series. Why am I mentioning that here? Because all of the epilogue stuff was supposed to be part of chapter 12 too and then of course that didn’t work out. And I had to update the chapter count. Again.

⦁ It was really important to me that Catra’s disability didn’t magically get better. The only thing that changed was it caused her less pain, and even that is person-dependent. Her muscle response gets slightly better — sometimes — but that isn’t enough to hold a pen or be useful. There are temporary disabilities, of course, but that wasn’t the kind I was trying to show here and a disability doesn’t have to “go away” to get a happy ending. Catra’s happy ending was finding peace and love despite the things that haunt her, and she can have all that while still being disabled, she can just get hugs from at least one person now. The original outline had a point where Catra began kneading with both hands while cuddling with Adora around when she told her the truth, but I decided that was too much of a miraculous recovery. Even the sudden squeezing of the ball was something I was iffy on, but that was truly a once-in-a-lifetime thing, so I kept it and portrayed it as such, editing the kneading thing down to just twitching, because I did think it was cute.

Chapter 13:

⦁ WAILMER PAIL

⦁ I know I’ve talked a lot about how this fic ballooned, but I haven’t had fun on a project like I did this one, and Hurricane Adora, and the other smaller fics I’ve done recently, in a long time. Let Me Ride too, to a lesser degree, but I haven’t really had a project just flow out and build like this in the last year. The big difference on those last two was I just… did what I wanted. Which I know sounds obvious, but I didn’t sit and try to plot out okay, what is the whole arc for this fic going to be, what do I need to get done to get there. I did that a decent amount of Let Me Ride, which is why it’s a halfway fic here (and look at that, written slower than the others), but for these two I went well, they’re short fics, I don’t need to worry about that stuff and I can just let loose. And then neither ended up anywhere near where I thought they would, and I had an absolute blast. It’s hard to describe, but I just had a lot of fun and felt very liberated with my fics recently. I think I was treating them too much like novels, if that makes sense, and honestly the word count speaks for itself. I wrote less in November AND December combined than I did in January alone (working on LMR + oneshots), and that’s half as much as I’ve written for March alone (February being closer to March’s word count). I had my 4th highest ever word count day (since I started recording them in 2021) on this project at over 8k (for those curious, my highest ever was 12k the day I pumped out most of MNoHL in one sitting). Anyway, it ran away from me, but I was more than happy to go along on the ride, even if the fic notes alone are 7k.

Adora Interludes:

So, this fic was entirely from Catra’s perspective. Which was for three reasons: 1) Adora’s POV has no place in the first two chapters so at that point I was pretty committed, 2) she’s the most interesting POV by far for this fic, and 3) I thought this fic would be short. I don’t normally do long fics from just one character’s perspective, and you’re about to see why, but I thought it was only going to be 20k which was a fine amount for one POV. The longest fic I’ve done from one perspective before this was ASDLM, depending how you want to count it, and even then I included five fucking interludes of Adora’s POV. I don’t usually use one character POV since I find it interesting to go back and forth, but also, it’s so hard to stick to one POV. The reunion happened and I wanted to write Adora talking to Glimbow that night! Catra has her panic attack and I want to write out what Adora is thinking! But it doesn’t fit with the fic. So sometimes I did it anyway. None of these were fully written and polished and were more just me tracking where Adora was at with the big stuff, but I wanted to at least talk about them a little and they didn’t fit anywhere else in the fic notes. I just played it out in my head, sometimes, but I ended up writing down some rough scene outlines with intersperses of actual writing for:

Adora telling Glimmer and Bow everything Catra told her the night after she leaves. Glimmer starts off a little unsure of if they should be mad at Catra or not for never telling Adora she was alive, but eventually she “accepts” it (though she remains cautious of Catra for a few weeks).

Adora’s next call with her therapist, dumping the story onto her and talking a little about the guilt thing.

I don’t think I ever wrote anything down for the convo Adora had with her parents where she told them the story, but I sure thought about it a fucking lot.

Adora having a conversation with Hope over the break, while Catra and Mara are out driving. I would go into more detail, but there was a line that was originally drafted in a previous scene with Adora and Catra that didn’t end up happening, and then I put it in this scene that also wasn’t “real,” so…. At this point I’m just fucking sharing it. Because why not. The scene will be up tomorrow as a fic extra and linked in the meta section. Note that it is a detailed outline and NOT real writing, but I like it and can’t imagine just deleting it once this fic is done, so I’ll just post it here for anyone interested.

Original Outline:

I talked so much shit about the chapter count for this fic and it came back to haunt me. Here’s the thing: my initial chapter count wasn’t that wrong, which I know sounds insane when it was only like 5, but the contents for the fic I was imagining then did take up about 5 chapters. The intro, getting to the party, reintroduction, getting to know each other again, and then getting comfortable and confession.

The first two of those went exactly as I pictured. While I was writing chapter 3, though, the reintroduction went on longer than I imagined just because there was a lot to cover to do it right and it ended up taking up an entire chapter. Around then I started getting so many more ideas for the story. Initially it was supposed to be like, a nightmare/death per chapter, but then I started thinking about Adora telling her parents, and Catra going back home to visit them, and around then was when I accepted the vision for the fic expanded and bumped it to eight-ish with the vision that the visit would take two of those chapters roughly and another chapter would be fitted in for more bonding/growing closer before the confession.

Then I sat down and actually started doing my, like, one sentence outlines for scenes ([phone convo with Mara, rejects facetime], [entrapta/netossa collab], etc) and realized ohhhhh god this is more than three additional chapters worth of material. And maybe I always suspected that, because when I added more chapter headings to the document, I bumped it up to ten rather than eight. I had a detailed outline up to chapter nine, and by the time I was actually writing that far I was like this is going to be fucking eleven chapters isn’t it… but I was still unsure where it was going to fall in the 10-12 range. The epilogue was, once again, an addition, though a necessary one in my opinion, but those ideas weren’t part of the 10-12 chapter estimate.

I didn’t really have a strong vision for how the end was going to go until I got there, so the only thing about the final part of the fic that is different from the “original outline” is the remote log during the visit home (initially that was supposed to happen in person on a night when Adora slept over after they got back, but that just made less sense) and how they ran into the trio. My very initial idea for that was them driving (Catra driving, Adora teaching her, probably later on in the trip when maybe it isn’t all on Mara) and they drive past the trio walking on the sidewalk of a neighborhood and Catra nearly has a panic attack. Adora steers her through parking on the side of the road (ahead of where the trio are walking) and Catra gets ahold of herself as Adora glances back through the back window to see the trio eyeing the car, because they just saw it park a little erratically, and then they realize Adora is in the car. They can just barely see eartips around the headrest for Catra but can’t make much out.

They then watch Adora get out, wave to them sheepishly, make a motion for them to stay where they are, and then she walks around to the street side and opens up the backseat to get out the sling. This was before I had thought about anything and realized the arm brace was probably the best call for driving. Adora then opens Catra’s door, helps her put on the sling while still sitting in the driver’s seat, and holds her hand to help pull her to her feet out of the car, finally letting them see her. This made the conversation more of Catra’s choice, but when I pictured the whole exchange on the sidewalk, I had no intention of it actually being part of the fic. At that point, I hadn’t even decided if the Winterfest stuff was going to be part of it. But once I started writing that stuff, I decided the trio had to be in it too and switched it around to a run-in that made a little more sense and actually furthered Catra’s progression.

Meta:

Interlude: Three Years Ago

Fic Extra #2: Adora’s Interlude: A Conversation with Hope

Fic Extra #3: Timeline

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I had a plan for what fic was going to be next. Then another fic idea solidified and it was going to be that one. Then I had a new, but also returning, idea. What I’m saying is, I’m indecisive, but for the last month one AU in particular has been calling, and it’s honestly shocking I haven’t done it yet because I’m me and it's, well…

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