goneawayworld | The monsters were never under my bed ♦ Closed

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The monsters were never under my bed ♦ Closed

Who: Catra and Setsuna
What: Sleep doesn't come easy to Catra; Setsuna notices.
Where: Catra and Setsuna's shared quarters
When: Night time, sometime during the first week on Piper 90.
Warnings/Notes: Mention of childhood trauma and abuse, emotional stuff.

Sleep didn't come easily to Catra. It never really had (except when she had had Adora nearby) and it was made worse for Catra because she had needed to become a naturally light sleeper. After a few midnight 'raids' to be punished for some perceived or merely imagined transgression when she was a kid, she'd learned it was better not to sleep where she was expected. Back home in the Fright Zone, that had meant either with Adora or crammed somewhere awkward and hard to get at. Here on the rig, that was harder. There were plenty of places one could go to avoid people, but what exactly punishment might be for being out of room during the night or whether they were being actively monitored, Catra wasn't sure.

Despite not making use of her room for the first couple nights, she had eventually come back to it, awkward and unsure of her roomamte, the Setsuna girl who had been... kind. Even friendly. It was weird. She'd tried one night sleeping in the bed properly, but it had not gone well--she'd not slept a minute, mind racing with the idea that at any moment someone might simply burst through the door to haul her away. Then she'dhad to get through training the next morning feeling like she'd been slammed through a wall by Adora the whole time during physical training. Another night of experimentation showed her that she could quite easily slip under the bed, thanks to being slender and flexible, and that had turned into her comforting space. It felt safe--like no one could sneak up on her. She liked that.

When Setsuna wakes in the middle of one night, she'll find that the bed across from her is empty and the blanket missing--Catra, at least at first glance, has simply vanished from the shared quarters without so much as a whisper. At least that's what one would think before giving the room a search. A glance under the bed, especially if aided by a light source, reveals luminous mismatched eyes glaring back at the searcher, and Catra's voice quiet and angry hisses from the shadows.

"Go away."

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Setsuna doesn't take to sleep easily. The Rig creaks, it's cold, the beds are functional but merely adequate, and the walls are ... so empty of personality and signs of anyone's life. It's a heart-punching reminder, and that's how it feels, too, the first few nights aboard it, too. Like a weight on her chest, driving in. The fact that they don't even appear to have a door to that works functionally like a door should - i.e., closing, instead of being, in theory at least, "able to be shut", at most - it makes her feel watched, constantly.

Of course, she knows the feeling isn't just in her head. She did look. She was raised under surveillance; it was one of the first things she did, being unobtrusively thorough in a search for places a prying eye or a listening ear might hide. She knows where they are. She just has to figure out how to obscure and obstruct them believably, somehow. Which she'll figure out as soon as she figures out how to get enough sleep to figure it out. She'll eventually get exhausted enough to simply rest, at some point, right?

The memory of red, laughing eyes burning into her through a dark fog sends her flung out of the top bunk bed to the floor, only rolling into a crouch at the last minute, sweat beaded on her brow, breath heavy in her throat. He's dead. He's not here. He's ... never, ever coming back, and he's gone, and she's ... here, and no longer walking in straight lines anywhere, not really.

So she's already on edge enough that the hissed "Go away" her unexpected tumble provokes only gets her eyes flicking out in the dark towards the source, to find who's watching. Her heart takes unsteady steps towards the possibility of not pounding like a jackhammer in her chest, as confusion overtakes nightmare-flushed panic.

"... Catra?" she says, wincing as her voice croaks the name out, hoarsely and burred about the edges with the fading spikes of paranoia. She leans forward in her crouch, balancing on the balls of her feet, splaying her fingers against the cool floor for support. "So -'" The word feels thick on her tongue, the "o" of it stuck like glue in her throat, as she sinks back into the half-awake muck of a misfiring brain swiftly burning through its last bursts of adrenaline. "Something wrong?"

Because she isn't obviously rattled to hell and back herself, or anything.

Catra instinctively tries to tuck herself further back under the bed, folding her body into a tight ball that wouldn't be doable for anyone without her unique physiology. That is, anyone who wasn't at least partially a cat. Her eyes flick from Setsuna to the rest of the room that she can see, the thin sliver of the slightly brighter outside world and the faint sounds of the rig and other sleepers beyond. She tugs the blanket closer around herself, trying hard to hide the tremble of adrenaline that had shot through her at Setsuna's sudden appearance. She's cool. This is cool. We're all fine.

"Nothing is wrong. I'm trying to get some sleep." As if curled up on the floor under your bed is a perfectly normal place to catch a few winks. As if she didn't wait for Setsuna to seem asleep before shoving herself under there, to avoid her being able to tell anyone where it is that Catra had gone.

"Why? What do you want?"

"It's too early for me to want anything," Setsuna says, somewhat dumbly. She sounds worn out enough that it actually carries a bit of strange, flat tone to it - as if, at her base level, pushed far enough, she forgets what 'wanting something' for herself even means.

She falls back onto the hard, cool ground, her legs gangly and awkwardly flung out in front of her, as she leaves her crouch, arms falling atop her legs, hanging there slightly limp. Her eyes narrow in perturbed and overly effortful concentration, as she tries to take in the situation she's currently faced with, rather than merely aggressively notice it. "Whuh," she says, eloquently, not even remotely awake or coherent or un-rattled by a bad dream enough for any of this.

"... and is being under the bed helping you sleep ...?"

Her brain is mashing 'x' for doubt, very insistently and very obviously, at this notion.

It is extremely early, that much is certain. Catra hasn't seen what time it is, but it must be somewhere between midnight and 3AM. She keeps herself shoved into her safe little nook, still looking at Setsuna with an uncertain suspicion. Sure, there were promises made but a promise has to be kept...

"Yes. Of course it is. Why else would I be down here?" It does. Usually. In that it lets her get some sleep instead of no sleep, which is an improvement if you ask her. "Why wouldn't it?"

Setsuna's eyebrow raises. "No room to run away if someone finds you down there?" leaves her mouth almost before any cognitive filter applies to the sentence. It's the kind of dryly caustic analysis she usually thinks better of and overcorrects away from in everyday conversation, but here and now, worn down by lack of sleep and lack of nerves, the edgy, conspiratorial awareness she was raised for. The kind of comment that takes into account almost as a matter of course that to anyone else's perspective she counts towards that hypothetical 'someone'-threat, too. But she's too tired to think of how to soften it, just this second. She decides to just let it hang there. No doubt the other girl's either ... still left her, or already put her, in that category, anyway. Whatever Setsuna thinks of her to the contrary.

(What Setsuna, who's already started putting two and two together to make four in her head because if there's one thing she's incredibly skilled at it's math, thinks of Catra is that she likes Adora a great deal and never expected to meet another person she could talk to so easily about anything but she thinks even Adora will agree with her that Catra needs someone to be her friend.

(And Adora can't understand what it's like to look someone in the eye offering nothing but friendship in their hand and want nothing more than to crush it beneath her heel until it breaks, but Setsuna can. Setsuna does. She has a half-formed suspicion that as much as she doesn't want to be here that this, in fact, is why she's here, because now that she's met them both she almost doesn't want to leave. It's too fitting to be coincidence, and Setsuna has learned a thing or two about stumbling into a destiny you didn't know was waiting.

(She's not Love; she's not indefatigable, nearly unflappable, perpetually open-hearted Love. She's herself, raw and a little raggedy and deeply clueless about too many things, easily flustered and easily riled, struggling to do many things but especially to be kind. And this, she suspects, is a kind of friendship only Higashi Setsuna can have.

(Most of those thoughts will have to wait until she's more awake before they really mean anything, to anyone. But they're still there, in the back of her mind, already being thought, already being plotted on.)

"Then again," she sighs, "who would be looking for you under there, anyway?" She slumps down, and lifts a hand so her head can plop itself into the palm of it. She feels so worn out and in need of some sense of security of her own, however fake, the thought of crawling in there beside Catra is honestly more tempting than it ought to be. "How ... is it comfortable, under there?"

"They won't find me if you don't sit there talking with me," Catra hisses in reply, her voice a harash, aggravated whisper. She doesn't want this girl to give her spot away (even if it's incredibly obvious on some level). She tugs her blanket closer. It's comforting, though she doesn't get why, not really. She doesn't want to talk about why she's here with this girl, she doesn't want to let someone else in when all that's done is hurt her in the past. Even with the kind-of mended relationship with Adora, she can't bear to think of someone else using what they know to hurt her. Because they will. Everyone does, eventually.

"...I don't know. Shadow Wea--Jorgmund?" She's quiet for a moment. Shouldn't have said that. Crap. She's just tired and stressed and it's the first thing that came to mind. Because that's who it had always been when she had been hiding before.

"It's not important who's looking for me anyway! And it's fine! Really comfortable!" Kinda. It's definitely not as cozy as a mattress, but the security of being surrounded on three sides makes up for it, in Catra's mind.

"Oh?" The half-indulged thought she'd just been entertaining as an idle notion glints sharply in the smile that steals across her face, like a knife in the dark, her eyes wry, flickering with sudden, prodding mischief. A metaphorical dig in the ribs. "Then maybe I should crawl under there with you, before they have a chance to notice."

But she doesn't mean it cruelly, and her face softens the blow, the mischief only enough to keep the dim ebb of her own exhaustion - her own panic, and misery, and memories - at bay for a flicker's span anyway. "I wish I could hide from all my fears that easily." She ducks her head, sagging in the dark. "Every time I notice one of these cameras comes on, it reminds me of home."

The implication being, if Catra bothers to pick up on it in her state of agitation, that right now they're not. Setsuna isn't trying to slyly insinuate anything by this, of course; she's just taken her hypervigilance about these things as a fait accompli and not even considered that someone else with more important things on her mind might not automatically clock these things on a semiconscious level no matter how exhausted or upset she is.

Her face twists. Not mockingly, just grief-stricken, temporarily. "So maybe I'm a little jealous. It must feel good, knowing they can't see you under there ..."

"It's my spot!" Catra hisses reflexively. "Go get your own--!" She bristles, immediately territorial. Plus if Setsuna gets under there, they'll inevitably end up touching and she doesn't want that. She doesn't think she wants that, anyway? She grits her teeth, her expression easing from anger to confusion as Setsuna's suggestion reveals itself to be a mere mischief. She blinks, not sure what ot make of what she's being told.

"They watched you a lot?" She asks after a moment. Of course they did. That's exactly what Setsuna just said. "I know what you mean." Not being found, not being seen? That's the important part of this whole game of hide-and-seek after all. She's quiet, the silence drawing out longer and longer after Setsuna speaks, until Catra speaks in a quiet, unhappy voice.

"If I don't sleep in my bed, they can't find me for punishment." The logic of a child, still firmly imprinted onto a young woman's mind after a lifetime of dodging abuse and hatred.

"So yeah. It does feel pretty... okay." Good is the wrong word. It doesn't feel good. It feels safe.

Edited 2020-04-24 23:45 (UTC)

"Hah," Setsuna laughs, a little fondly but also a little toneless. The noise tastes funny in her mouth. It doesn't seem like something she should have any sort of warm feelings for. "I never had to worry about being found. If I made an error, the watchful eyes and open ears of lord Moebius always knew. Whether I knew I'd made it, or not, it was always known."

Maybe 'warm feelings' is the wrong word. To consider what had been done to her, and remember it, is horrifying. What she'd grown up unable to imagine an alternative to was monstrous. The minute she'd been capable of grasping the weight of it and faced with the truth of everything it wasn't, she'd been unable to shake the ashen smell of all-consuming horror it had left in her nostrils. But even here, now, with the memories so close again, it's been long enough - she'd worked hard enough - they were almost just memories, still. Events she could remember, not feelings she couldn't escape. She'd built new memories atop them, literal and figurative.

They're memories that make her Labyrinthian. It's the life that made her. So she might not have warm feelings, but maybe she's ... accepting. And it is a little funny, imagining she could've gotten away with anything she wasn't encouraged to get away with ...

"But eventually I figured out if I could find someone else making bigger mistakes, maybe the attention paid to any punishments merited by their failures could lighten my own." The old bitterness cracks through for a minute, followed by the old bile. "It was kind of fun, for a while. And then it was just hollow."

She presses her lips together. "It's a terrible way to get by, if you ask me." With a grunt, she leans forward, muscles slightly stiff from sitting on the flat bedroom floor like she has been, then back, spreading her hands in front of her peaceably and reassuringly. "I guess what I'm saying is, if you want to sleep alone under your bed, that's fine with me. I'll do what I can to keep them from finding you out."

And so she starts to get back to her feet, sighing. "I hope you have a better night ahead, Catra. Maybe I should try and get back to sleep, too."

It's an awful sort of kinship. Catra can feel the connection, tugging between them. Making itself known in horrifying, awful ways. Both of them know the fear of being found, the horror of what comes after the knowledge of a transgression, perceived or real, is discovered. Catra grits her teeth. She's not letting anyone in. She's not. And yet she feels that Setsuna understands in a way that no one else she has ever met really does.

"I never got to do that." Catra's voice is cracked and scratchy, weak in the darkness. "It was always my fault when something happened. If Adora stepped out of line, I got punished. You know, for being a bad influence." She laughs, quiet and harsh and alone. Adora had been there to comfort her and it had been a relief. Knowing she would be there. Knowing she would comfort her. And then she had lost the one anchor she had in the world and everything since then had been tossed into a maelstrom of bad decisions and hurt feelings.

She almost invites Setsuna to stay. Almost. Her lips crack open briefly, then she just nods though she can't be seen in the dark. Her hand, almost involuntarily reaches out towards Setsuna, then is snatched back towards the blanket, Catra teetering between the awful comfort of loneliness and the terrifying prospect of opening herself and letting herself be known by others.

"Okay." A pause. "Thanks." And that's all she has left to say.

Edited 2020-04-25 01:55 (UTC)

And that's that. Setsuna drags herself up the rungs back into the top bunk, closing her eyes against the rejection she knows she offered the opportunity for and knows she doesn't deserve, and throws herself back atop the mattress with a huff, only half-comforted by the sheets as she pulls them once more over her tired frame.

Sleep doesn't come any easier, after all of that.

Not for Setsuna, and, though she can only guess outside herself, ... probably not for Catra, either. And whether that's from the past that still haunts them both or the fresh memories of the chance they both have missed to mend a gap they both know they could have closed if they actually wished to take the risk, only the unopened eye of an uncaring camera could truly say.

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The monsters were never under my bed ♦ Closed

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