What would she know? More than Catra thinks. She almost bites back, points out that winning doesn't leave people broken and sobbing and alone--but then, apparently, she's wrong about that last part. Catra's found someone else who will bleed for her, and even if it's for a paycheque instead of love, maybe that's the sort of loyalty she's interested in now. The kind she can demand, instead of ask for; that she doesn't have to bother returning.

Catra pushes off her, and Adora straightens up, immediately a soldier again. She flinches at the final, insulting knee to her crotch, but her disdainful expression holds firm, as rigid as her pose. "Fine. Then I'm taking a skiff."

Swift Wind would be far, far too obvious a sight flying overhead. She needs distance, and she needs it fast, but subtle. Pressing a hand against her gashes to stem the bleeding, Adora steps backwards on legs unsteady with arousal more than pain, spouting some trite challenge that would be more at place on the battlefield than here, with Catra clutching her uniform together, Adora's shirt and jacket still hanging off her shoulders in ruins.

"This isn't over, Catra. You won't be so lucky next time."

Telling Catra outright not to bring this up again will only raise suspicion, so she has to rely on Catra's own obsessive paranoia and hatred to hold her tongue, and just hope that she can look her in the eye again after this mutual deception without giving herself away. Without thinking of Catra curled around her and crying, making Adora want to carry her home--a real home, the way the Fright Zone never was, the way Bright Moon became for her, only missing that one, all-important person; an open door waiting that slowly closed over the years. Etheria is more important than Catra, than Adora, than the two of them together. She made her choice, and she knows it was the right one.