Work Text:
– first contact / vice grip
You don’t exist even after you exist.
Or—your body is there, and both your minds, but not you. You are what should emerge from all that light overlapping, but you don’t at first, because your parts keep taking turns brightening, crowding each other out. They name you Malachite, and you still don’t exist. Until you do.
For a moment, a second—you do. Jasper claws upward enough, and Lapis looks backward enough, and for a sliver of a moment their individual miseries slide together like fingers interlocking. And you exist. You’re Malachite, beautiful, big, green and multi-eyed and handsy, and all that makes you you recognizes itself—
And then both your minds flinch from each other, and retreat again to opposite walls of the same room, and they keep wearing your shell.
– partial
You are Lapis Lazuli and you are not Lapis Lazuli. You are Jasper and you are not Jasper. You were born of two intentions: OBLITERATE / ENTRAP. Entwined, peeled back for core truth, you were born of one intention: control. Violent and restrictive. Total and stretching. Refusing to allow you to be you, your parts turn it back on themselves.
Lapis chains them to the seafloor. Jasper grasps hands and holds them together. Both so tactile, even if Lapis would never admit it, allow herself directness without the barrier of water—but you are both of them, flayed; you know her. They make you up, and you want to hold, hold, hold.
In a moment of weakness, leaning-into-each-other, you’re Malachite again, and you are obsessed with yourself. You hold onto the pieces of yourself that are true, that are them overlapping, that are yours and new: you are Malachite. You like the weight of your body, of the ocean, of the combined ten thousand years’ misery that makes you up. You are all-hands: you like to hold and direct and reach and squeeze and break and prove. You—
They stop being you. You’ll remember this later, when you exist again: that they were both equal amounts of afraid and self-disgusted that they liked you, being you. Even if they didn’t like each other.
– partial
There are stages. There is total separation—unfusion—where you do not exist. There is physical combination, where you exist but don’t exist, where they remain distinct but wear your likeness. There is partiality, where they start to blend, meld, let their light mix. And there is total combination—true fusion—where you exist.
In partiality, the jasper-warmth of you:
Something you know about her, that informs you but is not you, is that she is afraid. For thousands of years, Jasper has been leftover goods, reallocated from a vacated and vanished purpose; she has scrabbled and scraped for legitimacy, necessity, pride. She was Pink Diamond’s. She survived a war she was barely born to fight in. She was shuffled into Yellow Diamond’s service and rarely looked at again, because like all Earth gems she wore Pink Diamond’s ghost, and who wanted to keep hearing that shatter echo? Jasper had to be used, of course she did—so they sent her as far away as she could be sent. And she clawed her way back. She stepped into view again and again until they’d just look at her. You know: Jasper is terrified of again being swept into a dusty corner. She could not and cannot bear being that dust.
In partiality, the jasper-haze of you:
Something you know about her, that you inherited from her, is that she wants to be seen. You want to be seen.
– partial
It’s strange. To exist, and not exist. To know you are your own—but also that you aren’t, that your existence is at the mercy of your components. To know that you are not going to last. Soon will be the last thought you ever think, the last you ever experience existence. Soon you will be just memories split into two gems. Will they acknowledge it, you wonder? The brief moments of Malachite? Where they gave in to each other? In some grotesque way, trusted?
In partiality, the lapis-chill of you:
Something you know about her, that informs you but is not you, is that she is afraid. For thousands of years, Lapis Lazuli has been a series of betrayals: trampled in the shuffle of flight, mistaken for an enemy for her trouble, trapped and used and abandoned and trapped and trapped and trapped and freed—and cruelly treated once more. All of the above, again. Abandoned and trampled and trapped. She’s been one strike after another, and she can’t take another, and she shivers with it: with not again, never again. She’ll do anything to avoid everything. She’ll do everything that hurt her to everyone that makes her flinch. It’s loud, like the crash of water—look what they did to me. Look what I will do to you.
In partiality, the lapis-damp of you:
Something you know about her, that you inherited from her, is that she wants to be known. You want to be known.
– totality / brief as
After your parts dream of Rose-Steven, after Lapis Lazuli shudders at Steven’s compassion and Jasper bristles at Rose’s presence, they both, for different reasons, surrender. They comingle. They both have the same thought: Can’t he/she stop? The motivation behind the thought is different—but it’s still the same. The mix coexists in you. You are not two people, but you are not one person, either.
So: from when you wake up to when you cease existing forever, you are you.
Not a perfect you, you’ll never learn. Neither Lapis nor Jasper had ever fused with anyone else—you couldn’t possibly know that you’re meant to have your own voice, and not two overlapping. You can’t know that there is more Malachite to be. She, in perfection, will never exist. In this moment, this final stretch of existence that your parts have surrendered to, you are as Malachite as they’re capable of. And you don’t know the difference.
What you do know, as you rise from the sea floor, is that you are Malachite. You are yourself. You are a mash of disparate, and mirrored, parts. You are handsy—you want to hold things, squeeze and smooth them. You are a moving adrenaline rush. You like the sky and the sea and the rush of wind, these things afforded to you by a planet’s atmosphere; you like the mimicry weightlessness of flight, the memory of true weightlessness in ungravity. You are not afraid. You are Malachite, and you are startlingly, starkly, not afraid of anything.
When Steven-Rose’s Crystal Gems come, they turn into a thing taller than you and you wonder what their four-gem negotiation looks like. You smile at her with your one mouth; she snarls at you with her two. With her you share your revelation, not in so many words: there’s something to this thing. You like being Malachite. You like, for once in your two lives, not being so terrified of all the weight you carry.
Malachite is hideous and malformed and green and multi-eyed and handsy, and you love being her. Like a bad memory, like holding a spearpoint to your own gems, you love this. You’re catharsis. You’re all their worst impulses. You’re two people’s worth of self-destruction. Malachite is intoxicating.
If you were afraid like you should be, maybe you’d have fled before that other monster pierced you apart. But fear wasn’t what Jasper and Lapis made you for.
Six hands to hold, to catch, to direct, to break. They both wanted it: control. All gems are made with a purpose, even fusions. Your existence gave them something they couldn’t grasp on their own. Something they each wanted so bad they’d fall into each other, stay with each other to get it.
You are Malachite. The light-arrow strikes you, and then you’re two sets of memories.
You are never going to exist again.