Work Text:
It's too cloudy for the playground to be crowded, even for a Sunday. Razz never cares - she always says she's cold anyway - and she likes to sit and knit on a bench while Adora gets her running out. She likes to climb to the top of the jungle gym, where she can see everything, but today there's someone already there.
"Hey!" Adora waves. The girl doesn't wave back or even look up, but she's holding on with both hands, long brown hair hanging down by her face. Adora can't stand her hair down, tickling her skin. Mara helps make her ponytail when Razz's fingers are stiff in the mornings. Mara's fifteen, and her braid is neater than anything Adora's clumsy hands can manage.
When Adora gets to the highest bar of the jungle gym, the girl is watching something on the metal. "Watch your hands," she says, distracted. There's a bug crawling along the bar, legs rippling like a wave, light glinting off the black plates on its back.
Adora perches next to her, leans in close. "What is it?"
"Dunno."
Now that Adora can see the girl's face, she doesn't want to look away. Freckles, lips tight with focus, mismatched eyes. Adora wants to know if her freckles are smooth like the brown spots on Razz's hands or bumpy like the mole on Adora's arm.
The bug starts to curve under the bar, and the girl leans to watch it. Adora reaches out to pick it up, so the girl can keep looking at it, so Adora can keep looking at her. But her stupid fingers don't always do what she wants.
"Look what you did!" the girl says, red rising on her cheeks. "You killed it!"
"It just fell," Adora says, feeling like she spun on the swing too many times, unsteady. "It's a bug, I bet it-"
"It's little! It can't fall that far, it's squished." The girl looks down like she can see it from here, when Adora can barely make out the different wood chips.
Normally, Adora swings on the bar and jumps down. This time she climbs careful. "It's dead," the girl says again.
Adora crouches by the edge of the bars and peers at the ground. The girl drops down next to her, and her hair brushes Adora's arm. Adora picks up a chip of wood with dozens of legs crawling along it. "See," Adora says, "it's okay."
They put the bug in the grass at the edge of the playground, watch it disappear into the shadow under a dandelion leaf. "I'm Adora," Adora says.
"Catra," the girl says. She stopped frowning when they found the bug again.
Adora's never felt nervous asking someone to play before. It never felt like it mattered this much if they said no. "Do you want to be friends?" she asks.
Catra grins, blue and yellow eyes lighting, teeth pointed. "Only if you can catch me," she says, running for the playground equipment, hair streaming behind her.