Chapter Text
Sometime the first week of December
“I hate the holidays,” Adora says with a harrumph, collapsing onto Bow and Glimmer’s couch.
“Adora…” Bow says and she hates the way he can just say her name and put so much care behind it.
Glimmer on the other hand, not even bothering to look up from her book, dismissively says, “No you don’t, you love Christmas.”
“Yes I do,” Adora groans, sinking even further into a pile of pillows she knows will leave glitter all over her hair and clothes. “It’s a new development.”
“What’s on your mind, Adora?” Bow asks first. He loves her, he really does. Bow might be the one man Adora loves most. He’s always kind, and caring, and thoughtful. He’s a great listener, and makes anyone talking to him feel like they are the only thing in the world that matters. And right now, none of that is helpful.
“Yeah babe,” Glimmer sets her book down and motions for Bow to turn off the television. “What’s cramping your holiday spirit?”
Adora looks at her friends in disbelief, her eyes so wide, they are nearly falling out of their sockets. Currently, Glimmer and Bow, her best friends in the whole world who she loves very dearly, are occupying the space normally taken up by one person in a chair, they are that closely cuddled. And it’s not like they are in the chair out of lack of options to sit, no. Adora let them know she was coming over, and this was where she found them. She walked through their front door, since she has her own key, to find them disgustingly gorging on each others’ faces. What is it with the holidays and making everyone so affectionate? She nearly slammed the door and walked out til she remembered she had nowhere better to vent.
“I am perpetually single and surrounded by lovey dovey couples,” she says, crinkling her nose as if she can still smell the foul air of romance lingering. “It makes it hard to enjoy the holidays when all your friends are a constant reminder of how lonely I am.”
She had thought about asking her friend and ex, Mermista, for advice. Having been romantically — at least, Adora assumes — interested in Adora makes her one of the few people she trusts to be direct with her about relationship things. However, Mermista was currently in her ‘On’ phase with Seahawk. And ‘On’, in this case, means On. Mermista’s house becomes off limits for anyone who doesn’t want to see anything obscene, or worse, hear one of Seahawk’s shanties. Scorpia and Perfuma were a non-starter for advice as far as Adora was concerned. Unless she wanted to bake, garden, or meditate her singleness away, which would be quite an admirable feat if she managed to accomplish it, she must admit. Though she reckons her problems need a bit more direct action to solve. Which is why she couldn’t go talk to Spinnerella and Netossa. Because as much as she loves the couple, all they’d do is encourage her to Talk to Catra, dear .
A bit too direct considering Adora has been in love with Catra since they became roommates sophomore year, and if Adora is keeping track, adding the five years since they graduated to that number, makes almost a decade. They are still roommates somehow, cohabitating a house in the neighborhood all the professors live in. Because they and most of their friends had the bright idea to go into academia, at the same university they attended.
And if Adora spoke a word of her festering love for her best friend, it would spell disaster for everyone involved.
So here she is, venting to some of the least single people she knows. Because she’s nearly 30 and lives with the woman she’s in love with and it’s gone on for so long that her friends have stopped pitying her and have started…
“Just ask Catra out already,” Glimmer says, plainly. Which elicits a a reprimanding shout of Glimmer! from her boyfriend (him being the one who still loves Adora, apparently.) Glimmer is silenced by Bow pressing a finger to her mouth, shushing her.
She bats him away, saying, “Don’t shush me, Bow! Adora should —”
He clasps a hand over her mouth, with a fear and panic stricken face. Glimmer continues to talk, muffled into his hand when Bow says, “I think what Glimmer means is…” He trails off, unsure of what to say, and Glimmer groans, aggressively rolling her eyes.
When Bow finally drops his hand, Glimmer dramatically gasps. “Ugh! Thank you! What Glimmer means is you should stop being one side of a useless lesbian coin and ask out Catra.”
Adora looks to Bow for some common sense and sees trepidation in his expression. “Bow?” She arches an eyebrow.
He chews on his lip before shrugging, “Yeah. Yeah, that.”
“Thank you Bow!” “No, Bow! No!” Glimmer and Adora both shout at the same time.
“Yes, Adora!” Glimmer leaps out of Bow’s lap to dance and gloat for a moment. “You need to hear this. Ask. Her. Out.”
Adora throws herself face down into the couch, choosing the comfort of suffocation over her friends’ insistence that she ruin her life.
“I think, and listen to me Adora, listen,” Bow urges her to sit up. Boo, and she was just getting to know her new best friend, Glimmer’s wool throw blanket. “I think… you have more of a shot than you think,” Bow says this cautiously, glancing to Glimmer for permission as he lies to Adora’s face.
“And if what you’re saying is true. A big if, I might add. Catra deserves more than being a bandaid for my seasonal affective pining.”
“Adora you clearly l— care deeply for Catra,” Bow is quick to fix his slip up, never mentioning the l-word and Catra in the same sentence. “I don’t think you’d be doing that.”
“Wait — ” Glimmer holds her hand out to get everyone to stop talking while she very visibly gets a bad idea. “You said, ‘ deserves more ’.”
“Yes, but I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Glimmer cuts a glance at Bow, whose eyes go wide with a sinister excitement.
“Big romantic holiday gesture?” He launches himself out of the chair and points a finger at Glimmer.
“Big romantic holiday gesture,” She points back.
They repeat the phrase like it’s not nonsense, dancing and jumping and making way too much noise for Adora’s ever increasing headache. They say it over and over again, pulling Adora off the couch to jump with them, like excited children at a sleepover, except they all hold several university degrees each and are closer to 40 than 10.
“What does that even mean?” Adora asks after they stop jostling her about.
“BIG ROMANTIC HOLIDAY GESTURE!” They both shout in unison.
Adora pinches the bridge of her nose, she’s definitely going to need a painkiller after this. “I hate the holidays.”