Chapter Text
//
//
//
I MEAN IT, I DO
Amethyst shows up one evening. It’s a few days before the end of Lapis’s grounding period, which means she snuck out. Maybe the gem monsters took a day off.
“Good thing you didn’t waste away waiting for me,” Amethyst jokes as she walks down the teleporter pad.
The usual thing to do would be to punch Amethyst’s shoulder.
“Hey,” Lapis says instead, not getting up from the rock she’s leaning against.
Deflating slightly from Lapis’s lack of a response, Amethyst sits down as well. “Miss me?”
Lapis leans to rest her head on Amethyst’s shoulder. “I was stupid.”
“Well uh, so was I.”
“Sorry,” Lapis says. It doesn’t sound any different from the times she hasn’t meant it, which makes her wonder if Amethyst can tell she’s sincere.
“Hey man, I just got back here, don’t kill the mood.”
“Can’t kill the mood if it was never there to begin with,” Lapis retorts. That earns her a weak laugh from Amethyst, the sound of which she hoards in her mind.
“Yeah, you’re just terrible,” Amethyst says.
They sit there for a while, simply enjoying the fact that they can actually do that again. Lapis should try something, anything, but even on a good day no one’s ever accused her of being cheerful.
“How was hanging out with Pearl?”
She could take a cheap potshot at Pearl’s many motherly mannerisms, but finds that she can’t. “It didn’t suck,” Lapis says.
“Yeah, she isn’t so bad these days,” Amethyst agrees, much to Lapis’s surprise. “What do the two of you talk about, anyway?”
“Um,” Lapis says, not wanting to talk too much about her little trip to space with Pearl, “Well, uh. It was typical Pearl stuff.” (Technically, nothing Pearl talked about was Typical Pearl Stuff, not that Amethyst understands that.) “She pointed out all the constellations and stuff. And sometimes we talked about Earth. Geology. Changing seasons.” Sometimes, talking with Pearl was like talking to an encyclopedia that talked back. It was, in a strange way, the opposite of when Pearl would ask the mirror for this image or that of Homeworld. The memory of it still hurt, but Pearl’s quiet contriteness whenever Lapis wants to take cheap shots at her makes Lapis feel like she’s the absolute worst afterwards.
She doesn’t want to tell Amethyst that part. It’s a feeling close to shame, which someone who has suffered as badly as Lapis shouldn’t have to feel.
//
//
//
They go through the lighter things to talk about: the comings and goings in Beach City, missions, complaining about the tourists on the boardwalk – but they run dry pretty quick. Suddenly all these things Amethyst likes to show off about Earth have fallen into the background in Lapis’s head.
“So is Vidalia pissed at you?”
“No,” Amethyst says, turning away from Lapis, to the other side of the rock they use as a pillow. She says no angrily, because Vidalia should be angry at her, but has probably already forgiven Amethyst before Amethyst can even forgive herself.
What do humans do when they feel… like this? Gems only seem capable of beating themselves up over things and trying not to think about it.
If she only knew her future, she’d have no regrets. Like Garnet. It’s cheating to know the future. Unfair.
“She’s still kinda pissed at you though, even though I told her not to be.”
Does she deserve the anger or not? And if she doesn’t feel guilty about it, why do Pearl’s reassurances help with how she feels? She shouldn’t have to feel bad, but she does, even if she tells herself it’s also that stupid human girl’s fault for laying an unwanted finger on her.
“I was thinking… we could go hang out with the Cool Kids sometime.”
“Aren’t they grounded to eternity?”
“They can hang out as long as there are ‘trusted adults’ around. Dewey’s idea, not Vidalia’s.”
Seriously? Lapis has only seen that kind of punishment with younger humans. But that’s on TV, what does she know? She does know Mayor Dewey; knowing him, ‘trusted adults’ probably mean those people in sunglasses.
“So Buck’s stuck at his dad’s house?”
“And his friends are stuck with him.”
That doesn’t happen on Homeworld. When you’re punished, no one wants to hang out with you. You’re at it alone, and everyone’s breathing a sigh of relief that it isn’t them in trouble.
Now that Lapis thinks about it, she’s never been left alone since she got freed out of the mirror. Amethyst hadn’t left her, Garnet hadn’t left her, Pearl hadn’t left her – and Steven hadn’t left her. It’s one of those sobering thoughts that she knows will eat at her. She wants to ask about that mid-season finale she was supposed to have watched with Steven, but she can’t bring herself to speak.
//
//
//
Earth doesn’t have a single, all-encompassing rule to deal with casualties of war. On the days that she can see beyond all the wrongs that have been done to her, she wonders how she’s gone from being a victim to – to having so much power. After all, Homeworld’s not made of water. She wasn’t wrong when she wrecked that house party, but she managed to hurt people, and worse still is that hurt is hurt, regardless of intent.
//
//
//
During the daytime, Lapis sifts through the remnants of the gem war. She flies up to the handle of a fusion’s axe, surveying her territory, thinking about the Jaspers that must have fused to be at this size, thinks about them being shattered into smithereens. Some days are spent picking strawberries, or nuts. She isn’t bored; there’s always company. Living things scurrying about, collecting shiny spearheads to impress their mates, making nests out of broken handles, that kind of thing. But Lapis only watches, she doesn’t interfere. And somehow, she’d never take a single piece out of this tableau. Maybe the Crystal Gems are over it, maybe to them all this is is a junkyard they occasionally pilfer for old weapons. Maybe that’s the right way of looking at this place. But Lapis sometimes imagines the battles going on and thinks to herself that the only creature with a claim to this carnage ought to be the Earth.
//
//
“You always show up at night,” Lapis says, on another evening with Pearl.
“Do you prefer mornings?”
“No,” Lapis says. She likes these evenings.
But is it the evening she likes, or the company?
“The month is almost up,” Pearl says. “Steven’s really missed you.”
“I missed him too.”
“By the way, you’re getting your TV privileges back today.” Light pours out of Pearl’s gem, followed by Lapis’s mini-TV.
“Thanks,” Lapis says when Pearl hands it to her. “Truth is, I’ve been watching a ‘show’ all month, too.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Y’know. Like, uh, it’s rabbit mating season, did you know?”
“Lapis,” Pearl says. “The breeding season for rabbits is more than half the year.”
“Oh. Well. I got to see some tadpoles come out of their eggs yesterday.”
“I see,” Pearl says.
She’s got this faraway look in her eyes.
“Earth to Pearl?”
“Nothing, just… you sounded familiar.”
“If you think I’m going to fall in love with this planet and go all Rose Quartz, you’re sadly mistaken.”
Pearl mutters something under her breath. Lapis catches it, but isn’t sure.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Pearl!” Lapis glares at her. “ ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ was it?”
Pearl shakes her head. Her words seem to have embarrassed her. She stands to leave, faster than it takes Lapis to understand that Pearl feels guilty about Steven for saying that.
“Oh no you don’t,” Lapis says irritably, fighting every instinct in her to just destroy the warp pad and worry about the consequences afterwards. “Look! I’m sorry, okay, sorry for bringing her up.” Lapis flies faster than Pearl can walk. She makes it to the warp pad, preventing Pearl from leaving.
“I’m not mad at you,” Pearl says irritably, staring at Lapis’s feet.
“Yes you are,” Lapis says.
“I’m not,” Pearl says. “What have I got to be mad about, and what right would I have to be?”
“So are you mad at Steven?” The minute the words fly out of her mouth, she wishes she could take them back.
“Never.”
“So you’re mad at yourself,” Lapis says, and somehow she comes off as smug despite how sorry she is to have brought this thing up.
“What a surprise,” Pearl mutters darkly. “I’m mostly over it,” she says. “But sometimes I’m not. Steven already feels awful enough as it is.” She sighs. “Lapis, can I go?”
“No way, I’m not stepping out of here.”
Pearl shrugs and, to Lapis’s surprise, steps up to the warp pad. Light engulfs them as Pearl warps them away. Lapis’s wings spring out just in time for her to fly away from the warp stream, leaving her annoyed at Pearl, but angry at herself.
Man, Amethyst would have said, you just had to go all out, huh?
//
//
//
On the day Steven warps Lapis to freedom, Lapis can barely summon a smile. She’s spent the entire morning failing at being grateful; she doesn’t have the energy for this. Steven seems to understand, though. They go no further than the boardwalk, and only because, out of all the answers Lapis could muster, when Steven asked her what she wanted, she said, “ice cream.”
Lapis had ordered something she couldn’t pronounce very well, simply because she hadn’t tried it.
“So… is it any good?” Steven asks.
“It’s sweet,” she says. At least, it tastes like what she thinks sweet means.
They try each other’s ice creams out. Steven agrees that hers is very sweet. Despite her earlier exhaustion (over what, really?), Lapis finds herself waking up a little more along with the rest of the town.
“Feeling better?”
“Yeah,” she says, wondering (as she always does), whether telepathy could be one of Steven’s latent gem abilities. “Kind of like… I can hear people talking now,” she says. And she notices the color of things now, too, and how Funland smells of food, and the sea breeze, and sweat.
“Thank you,” she says.
“No prob, Bob,” Steven says.
Lapis could talk about a lot of things that boil down to a mix of shame and anger and confusion, but the best thing about Steven is that he’s there scraping his paper cup clean, reminding her that, here and now, the only thing to do is to enjoy the ice cream.
//
//
//
It takes several days of wandering for Lapis’s resolve to crystallize itself. At the end of her long walk, she goes up to Steven’s room and knocks on Pearl’s door.
The door opens with the faintest admonition from Pearl: “Steven! I’ll be done in a few…” Pearl pokes her head out the door.
“Not Steven,” Lapis says.
“Can I help you?”
Frosty. Lapis expects that. “Can I come in?” She doesn’t know whether she ought to look contrite or determined.
Pearl wordlessly moves away from the door. Inside, Lapis can see a pocket dimension made of water, fountains of it cascading from a peak high above her, falling in curtains down to the bowels of the temple base. Pearl disappears into a curtain of water, only to reappear high above.
She expects you to fly yourself, obviously. Lapis follows to the top.
With a wave of her hand, Pearl erects two seats and a single table. Lapis takes a seat; Pearl doesn’t. “So?” Pearl asks.
Geez Pearl, sorry okay?
Look, I’m sorry, quit stabbing me with your eyes.
“Sorry,” Lapis says firmly.
“‘Sorry’”, Pearl echoes with faint raise of her eyebrows.
“Yeah,” Lapis Lazuli says.
“I half expected you to tell me that I’m overreacting.”
“I shouldn’t have pushed,” Lapis says, staring at the water cascading downwards.
“…Am I supposed to just tell you ‘okay’?”
“You’re gonna tell me to get out, I think,” Lapis replies.
“I just let you in,” Pearl says. “That would be silly.”
For a second, Lapis considers that Pearl might want to trap her. The thought jolts her for a sudden, violent moment. She could summon her wings, but wills herself to sit down on the chair.
There’s no one here who’d seal her away.
“When Steven was a baby,” Pearl says, “We tried to kidnap him from Greg. We wanted to get Rose Quartz ‘out’ as though we could just undo what she wanted to happen.” She turns away from the table. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, I don’t have the right to get angry. And truthfully I don’t want to be angry with you.”
Pearl’s answer extinguishes any desire to run on Lapis’s end.
So are you angry or trying not to be angry or what?
“How’d you make it up to Greg?”
It’s an oblique way of asking how do I fix this?
Pearl chuckles. “It was a lot of singing and crying over a fourteen-year period.”
“Is it going to take us that long?”
Pearl turns to her. “I hope not. But that’s really up to whenever you decide to forgive… us. For the mirror.”
“With how shitty I am, it won’t take too long for my list of fuckups to cancel yours out.”
“I doubt that.”
Pearl doesn’t sound like she’s looking for Lapis to say something gracious like “of course not.” She’s not fishing for forgiveness. She’s just saying it as it is.
“Anyway,” Pearl says. “If that’s all you came here for…don’t worry about my feelings. I’m not in the right here either, is what I’m trying to say.”
//
//
//
STALLED // MAYBE NEXT TIME
She’s hit a wall. Hanging out with Amethyst and Steven feels mechanical, like she’s trying the same motions of ‘being a human’ in the hopes that something will break through. She can tell they’re frustrated with her, too. “What do you want to do today,” can’t always be answered with “anything you want,” or “nothing.” She doesn’t want to go with them on missions and she hasn’t shown her face to the Cool Kids.
On a whim, she returns to the hospital. She doesn’t find her victim the first time she visits, or the second time.
On the third time, she finally finds the girl. Lapis spends the afternoon watching her try to walk. For someone as tall as a quartz, it’s taking her a long time to recover. Lapis has to remind herself that humans aren’t like gems: height has nothing to do with purpose or strength.
By the sixth visit, she knows the Girl’s schedule well enough to show up at lunch time, after the girl’s physical therapy. Lapis threads her way through the lunch crowd, ignoring the chatter of idle talk, the rap of plastic trays, the slop of sauce on a plate every time someone moves up the cafeteria line. Arriving at the girl’s lonesome table, she drags the empty chair across the girl and sits without any preamble. It’s when Lapis sits down that she realizes that the girl towers over her.
The girl could scream. Lapis is blue, after all. But Lapis also knows that humans go through great lengths to ignore the unusual. Instead, the human across Lapis starts fumbling around her pill box, muttering to herself about hallucinations.
“I’m not a hallucination,” Lapis says, after the girl dry-swallows. Truthfully, it could be Lapis who’s hallucinating. Tall as a Quartz, broad as a Quartz, Lapis has to tell herself that this girl is a human. The hair color isn’t white. The human’s hair is red, and Jasper’s was never –
“I’m having a flashback,” the girl tells herself.
“You’re not,” Lapis replies. She’s taking the words right out of Lapis’s mouth, it’s unfair.
“You’re fucking blue,” the girl mutters to herself. “Why the fuck is my mind so fucked up?”
“Because you keep taking that stuff,” Lapis says.
The girl ignores her. She starts shoveling food into her mouth. Lapis came here with the intent to apologize, but she would never, ever apologize to Jasper.
“Get over it,” Lapis almost says. “It’s your fault, you know,” but the words don’t leave her mind. It’s a dumb, short-lived human being in front of her, who looks as though she’d pass out. Not Jasper, not Jasper, not Jasper.
“I’m sorry,” Lapis says instead, thinking of Pearl.
The girl stands up and runs. One or two other humans take notice, but the sound of her fleeing footsteps is drowned out by everything else. Lapis walks away as well, slowly. They’ll remember a large girl running away, not the one that walks like everyone else.
She blends into the background, thinking about the abruptness of a slammed door.
//
//
//
Destroying rocks doesn’t do it, play-wrestling doesn’t do it, long walks don’t do it, and talking to Steven is far too shameful (he’s a human child, a friend, not a gem-powered mirror that ought to listen to her every whine about Earth). Lapis has gone around in a circle and ends up back where she started: the strawberry battlefield. She settles at her usual spot, just a few yards away from the warp pad.
Pearl isn’t magically there despite the stars out, which annoys Lapis so much she wants to destroy the floating islands just because.
“Pearl!” Lapis shouts. Why can’t Garnet just know the future and tell Pearl to come over? Why can’t somebody just get it?
If you want to be understood, you have to say something. If you want help, you have to ask someone.
“PEARL!”
Maybe she should clap two hands. Out of boredom, she does just that.
The warp pad lights up with a crystal burst of sound. Who else should step out but the person who’s been picking up after her.
“I thought you’d be here,” Pearl says.
“I should clap more often,” Lapis mutters to herself.
“Clap?”
“I believe in fairies,” Lapis says.
“I’m sure you do.” Lapis can’t tell if Pearl gets it or not. Did she ever watch movies with baby Steven?
“I thought I was a free gem,” Lapis says, because she can’t stop shooting herself in the foot.
“You are,” Pearl says. “Oh! Want me to… give you some space?”
She came here for you, idiot!
Not to like, brood over Rose Quartz.
Thinking that stray thought makes her wince.
Don’t waste it!
“Stay,” Lapis says, before Pearl mistakes her silence for a dismissal. “Please,” she adds.
Pearl chuckles.
“If you’re not mad at me, I mean,” Lapis adds hastily.
Pearl folds her knees to sit next to Lapis. She sits up straight with a bearing that is neither overwhelming nor an attempt to make herself smaller. She is. That’s all. It’s a statement not just any gem can make. Smaller gems have always tried to make themselves smaller; larger gems always try to make themselves larger.
“It’s difficult to stay angry at you,” Pearl says. “I’ve been angry at a lot of things.”
Before the pause can turn pregnant with awkwardness, Pearl adds, “I’ve brought cookies.”
She puts a hand to her gem. Light pours out with the beginnings of a tray. She pulls the entire thing out and sets it on the grass between them.
“Well, they aren’t fresh anymore.”
The cookies taste good regardless. Chewy. The kind Amethyst and Steven like hot.
“How long were they in there?”
“About three days.”
Lapis wonders if Pearl has been checking up on this place for that long.
“Woah, Pearl. Were you looking for me?”
“Truthfully, Steven and Amethyst were wondering where you disappeared to. You didn’t even say good bye. They came here the other day looking for you.”
“I… took a walk,” Lapis says. “To clear my head and stuff.”
Pearl hums. She lets Lapis eat the cookies in peace. She isn’t fidgety, isn’t waiting to disappear, isn’t in a hurry to go anywhere.
Lapis envies her that.
“How do you do that?” Lapis murmurs. “How are you so content on this planet?”
“It took a long time to get used to the idea.”
“It’s always time,” Lapis says, irritated. “‘If you wait, things will get better.’ But all I feel is stuck. Even when I walk for days, I only end up here again. Everyone else is either dead or gone or over the past and I know I shouldn’t chase after it. But I don’t know, it feels like – a door has closed, without me noticing. I want to open it again just to see everything I missed. Just to see if I could have changed things. You know I – I tried talking to that human.”
“And how did that go?”
“Well I tried to say sorry, but I don’t think she ever wants to see me again. And neither do I. It’s not saying sorry again I want to do, it’s… going back there and not wasting my shot. But I don’t even know what I could possibly say.”
She’s talking about too many things at once. She wants to somehow redo that unsatisfying talk she had with the human adolescent, but she also wants to go back to the past and rage at every gem responsible for her jailing. And she wants to shatter Jasper, sometimes, knowing she’ll gain no joy out of it. Other times, she wants to just see Jasper’s sorry state and maybe laugh or just stare. She doesn’t know, truthfully, what she’d do if she ever saw Jasper.
And, truthfully, she wants to go back to the time where she felt confident enough to fly Pearl out of Earth.
“I know how that feels,” Pearl says. She stares hard at the ground, fingers on her lips, in thought. “A friend returned to us,” she says. “And for some reason she’s now in a bubble at the temple. I ask myself ‘why is she there?’ all the time. And yet even if I ask that, I haven’t freed her. I don’t know how to make her understand,” Pearl says, looking at Lapis. “It’s funny how you can say sorry and beat yourself up asking yourself if the other person understood. Sometimes there’s just no time, or they disappear, or you drift away.”
“How do you live with it?”
“I don’t live with it alone.”
It’s an answer Lapis can’t say out loud with confidence. “Lucky you,” Lapis mutters.
Pearl’s long look at her makes her feel ungrateful.
“Geez, just say it.”
Pearl’s mouth opens and closes a few times before she finally speaks. “How does it feel to just wander around all the time?”
“Truthfully… a little empty.”
“I think you should find a place to stay. It’s just – I know you’d rather not stay in the temple. I’m trying to figure it out. The cove is no place to stay for a, a permanent residence. Or here, for that matter.”
And at Lapis’s expression, she adds, “I don’t want to let this door close, alright?”
Lapis nods, a little chastised.
“I’ll talk to Greg,” Pearl decides.
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m being a little selfish,” Pearl says. “It’s easier to know you’ll be coming home to a definite place. And I honestly think it’ll help, of course! At the very least, you’ll have fresher cookies.”
//
//
//
end chapter
//
//
//
AN:
Hi guys.
Yeah I know, it's been about a year since this story's last update. In the two years I've been picking away at this story on and off, nearly everything I wanted to resolve in fic has been resolved in the canon storyline. This chapter has been really difficult to write knowing that. Content-wise, the goal (for myself) of this chapter was to expose some flaws in the logic I applied when I wrote the story initially: a big part of Lapis Lazuli's untethered state of mind for the past 5 chapters in Just Breathe is because Peridot and the barn aren't there! It made me realize that in terms of solving story telling problems, the story beats of the canon storyline provide a far more 'neat' setup for Lapis to get better. (Well she has Pearl in this AU HAHA). It's always been off the table for Lapis to live with the CGs: she'd never. But Peridot had appeared in maybe 2-3 episodes by the time I was writing JB so I never expected her to settle on Earth first. I kind of enjoyed showing how difficult it is for Lapis to figure anything out without a home base. I'm not like, writing this to torture myself.
Canon Peridot and Just Breathe AU Lapis do share some interesting story beats though: they have an episode dealing with Human Culture (Camp Pining Hearts, television in general), and they are both friends with/'closer to' Amethyst (haha). It's been both funny and sad to see similarities and differences in canon/AU resolution handling.
Regarding the writing of this chapter, I feel that it is more jumpy than my usual. Lapis is 'stuck'. She goes through things again and again with some slight variation. It can be really unsatisfying. When I'm writing for Lapis, it is hard even for me to imagine a solution for her problem, because I'm writing in her shoes. Truthfully this is a function that Peridot in the canon storyline also resolves: you can't fix the kind of problem Lapis has by yourself.
At the end of the day JB is really a Lapis-centric story.
This chapter also has some unusually subtle bits in it (I don't write that way usually; I spell everything out.) It might seem that some lines are coming out of nowhere. I hope that they bridge together well enough. As for the subtle bits, you guys might have to reread some parts if this chapter doesn't bore you to tears.
TLDR: It's hard to write this story but thank you for your patience, insight into canon is fascinating, I had fun, this chapter is complicated and I hope I pulled it off well enough and I'll be back to fix stuff that's difficult to understand.
Thanks for sticking with this story.