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It starts one afternoon out of the blue, just as the horizon takes to streaks of orange and pink and red. She leads you to the rocks that float high above the gem battlefield and you both peer down for just a moment over the sharp-drop edge. The land is barren now, save for the shards shattered and the weapons strewn as far as the eye can see. The fires had only just burnt themselves out. You’re assailed with scattered memories of war: the chaos, despair, destruction and then, suddenly, glorious, glorious victory.
She gently pulls your attention away, back to her. The breath catches in your throat as she lays you down, your shadows long and blue on the grass. She lowers herself onto you and her ringlets descend all around your head, like a thick veil, turning your whole world pink, and for just a fraction of a second everything smells of blood before roses. She kisses you, not for the first time, but experience can’t temper your reaction. She just pushes her lustrous, plump lips to yours and it’s far too much for you; you feel as though you’ll melt into the earth. You put every inch of your physical form up against her – like the Neanderthals do – and you wrap your arms around as much of her as you can. You wish that you weren’t so small, only so that there’s more of you to hold her.
You’re dear to her, you know; you’re special. You’ve seen her kiss many Pearls before – your sisters, she liked to joke – but she never kissed them quite the same way that she kisses you. She kisses you on the mouth; she only ever kissed them on their cheeks, their foreheads, their gems. She kisses you deeper, longer, she dips you back farther and holds your waist tighter. She twirls you about in her arms, not always for fusion but for fun, just for the hell of it, and you trill a happy laugh because there’s nothing else you’d rather do, nowhere else you’d rather be. You’d made the right choice to stay with her and fight. The stakes were high, but the reward was so, so worth it.
When you don’t kiss, you sit with her and talk. You survey the battle-scarred landscape below and you hear of her ventures with the humans. She often played and toyed with them while the sun was still up – particularly those males – but she comes back to you at the end of the day to laugh about them, and tell you how inadequate they were, how dependent and dim-witted and pathetic.
She assures you one last time, because sometimes you just need to hear it. You’re very much different to them. You’re special.
You’re her Pearl.
You let her touch you however she wants. Before Earth, it was all tender kisses and fingertips skimming the milk-white surface of your skin, a careful but heartfelt hand supporting your back as she dipped you low. It’s only since she spends so much time amongst the humans, observing their crude, unenlightened ways and their primitive needs, that she starts to touch you differently. In ways you didn’t know gems could be touched.
She starts in places that tickle. On your neck, just under your jaw; she moves her mouth there and you chuckle. She kisses and licks and nibbles at you as you laugh – “Rose, what are you doing?” – and then she bites a small mark on your skin; you instantly quiet and go still. Oh, you’ve been bitten plenty of times before, by beasts, by insects, by rogue and uncultured quartz warriors in the heat of battle, but you’ve never been bitten by Rose.
She goes straight back to licking you – is she pretending you’re her wounded cub? Is she pretending that there’s something of you to taste? – and kissing you, like nothing was ever amiss, and, tentatively, you wrap your arms around her. You let her continue. You don’t exactly like it, but you like Rose, and if it pleases Rose then…
You notice the marks on your neck in a rock pool the next day. They’re small but conspicuous bruises: black and green and rash-blue. They stand out on your pale skin, as clear as day, and you’re suddenly embarrassed. You put your hand over it as Garnet passes by and waves you a stoic greeting because you don’t want her to see. The bruises look dreadful. Ugly.
When Rose emerges, you’re still covering them. She tilts your head and removes your hand while you’re halfway through a sentence. She smiles at the bruises, hums low and satisfied and… proud.
She tells you that they look beautiful and your cheeks turn blue.
It’s a little routine the two of you have that emerged out of nowhere. Every evening, more or less of the same happens. She takes your hand, brings you to the rocks hanging above the battlefields – so many happy memories accumulate here – and dances you both around and around. She laughs with you, lies exhausted with you, and then she kisses you until sunrise. Each time it happens, she takes it a little bit further. She makes it a little more ‘human’.
She says the word like it denotes wonder, excitement, and discovery. You still mutter it like it’s a dirty word.
The first time she touches you over your shirt, you think that she’s perhaps made a mistake – maybe it was a heat-of-the-moment accident, a frenzied brush. But then she slides her hand back up to cup your breast and your mouth numbs under hers. She squeezes, just gently, and then a little harder, until your kisses have turned dry and slack and distracted. She just nuzzles your face out of the way and exhales loud and breathless into your ear; instantly that entire half of your body becomes paralyzed.
She pinches your nipple and it sends a small shock through your body.
You’d never tell her anything other than “Yes, I had fun too”, but you’re a little relieved to see the sun rise when you do.
You feel terrible for it.
When she lays you down, your muscles are taut, steeled and braced, and it softens the blow a little. Locked in place, you feel a little safer; you’re a little less open and a little more prepared for whatever will happen next.
And then she slips her hand underneath your shirt.
Your eyes open. You stare up into Rose’s shadowed face, backlit by a billion stars – your home – and you watch the little pleased smirk play at her face.
She sits back up, seated completely on top of you, but she’s always so careful not to crush you. She stares down at you, her face a hard mix of love and something incomprehensible – something ‘human’ – and you flash a tiny, modest smile back. You’d like to say something. But you don’t know what you’d say. You’re my everything; I hope I make you happy; Please, my Rose, don’t squeeze me too hard.
She takes the hem of your shirt – it seems so little pinched between her fingers, like it belongs to a doll – and slides it up and over your breasts. You shiver a little in the sudden cold, and it hardly escapes your notice how they wobble. You don’t know why she’d take such an interest in them; they don’t serve a purpose for you like they do mammalian species. But she doesn’t care; her hands just take a nipple each and pinch. After a while, they start to pull.
You flinch; your face cringes. You stare at her, confused and unnerved. You can’t understand why she’s smiling at you like this is supposed to be fun.
She rolls your breasts round and round beneath her huge hands. She presses them together, just a momentary illusion of cleavage, and she asks you, “Does this feel nice?”
You hesitate. “It’s nice being with you.”
You let her continue. You let her do whatever she wants to. If she wants to pinch you until your nipples are sore and hard and blue, you let her. If she wants to pin your arms above your head and make you flex your body as far as it can flex, you let her. If she wants to kiss you until you can’t feel your mouth anymore, you let her.
You’ve never been happier to see sunrise.
You feel even worse than you already do.
You don’t dance so much anymore. You just go through the motions; she holds you in her arms and twirls you and dips you and flies you above her like a bird, but you don’t put much enthusiasm or flare into it. In all honestly, you feel dread in those moments now. It’s hard to dance and dance well when your body is stiff, flooded with that much adrenaline – like you’re partway into battle and not partway into a beautiful ritual you yourself wanted from the very start.
She strips you. She sits you up and pulls your shirt up and over your head; you watch her toss it aside like she doesn’t particularly care where it lands, or if it blows off the rock only to be lost to the battlefield below. She straddles you, as she always does, but she sits lower on your thighs this time. Her fingers brush at your flat stomach, and her laugh is just a little bit cruel when she makes you quiver.
And then you feel her fingers pick at your shorts.
It had taken you this long to have pants – real pants, which actually end on the leg and not at your hips. But now she pulls them down too, just far enough that her eyes are transfixed at the place where your body splits.
You haven’t seen humans mate. You don’t want to. You don’t want to know anything about it.
The feeling that Rose is about to teach you anyway gnaws at you.
The hand on your stomach slides down your translucent skin and travels much lower than it ever has before. You open your mouth to ask her what she’s doing, but only a small croak comes out; even then, she doesn’t pay your face any mind. Her eyes are pinned on your crotch which you’ve never used – you barely have a sense of what it’s for – and her little smile is relentless. You wince as her cold fingers poke and prod you there, like she’s checking you’re anatomically correct, and then she works her fingers into it. You feel a keen, unfamiliar sensation slowly creep over you that you’ve never experienced before. That you’re not sure you want to experience.
You can’t look at that smile. You turn your head away, and you know that all she’s doing is a small, soft to-and-fro movement against a particularly sensitive part of you, but that’s all it takes to do your head in. It’s so simple and yet causes you so many complicated emotions. It’s not nearly as straightforward as pain. You wish that it would hurt more; you wish you could make sense of it. You wish you knew why Rose was doing this to you. Isn’t this what humans are for?
You feel your body start to quake on its own, and it scares you. Your entire pelvic region feels numb and tingly and odd; it throbs hard and fast, matching your heartbeat. You don’t know when another spike of – whatever it is – is going to shoot up through you, and it scares you about what will happen next, and you wish that Rose had more to say other than just “shhh, shhh, shhh,” and “relax, my Pearl.”
You don’t know what happened. There was a little friction before, but there’s not anymore. Her fingers slip and slide around you, inside of you, smooth and effortless, like you were as wet down there as inside your mouth. You suddenly notice that faint little squelches have filled the silence, and it doesn’t seem to alarm Rose but it certainly alarms you.
You feel something mounting. A feeling – you don’t know. All of this is building up to something, and you don’t know what, and you don’t know why, and you don’t know how, and you throw one last desperate look at Rose that she might let up on the little flicks of her wrist and talk to you, but she doesn’t. You’ve never seen her stare at you like that before – captivated and eager and full of yearning – and you don’t know if it’s what you’d call a very beautiful expression, but of course it must be. If it came from Rose, it’s beautiful. Every one of her thorns is just as beautiful as the centrepiece.
The strange new feeling mixed with dread escalates until it finally bursts free; it happens before you even knew that it was about to happen. You’ve lost all control of your body as your back arches and your mouth parts around a weak cry and your hips buck hard and furious with every little pressure Rose continues to apply to you. You feel hot and taut and twitchy and unpleasant, and the constant touch between your legs finally crosses over into more familiar territory; it suddenly becomes jarring, searing, wracking your body with jolts like you were in seizure. When she finally pulls her hand away, your body slumps, overwhelmed and exhausted. Terrified.
Your heart’s still pounding. Parts of you that had remained inactive until now are still throbbing. Rose drinks in every little last twitch and whimper from you, until the unpleasant sensation subsides. But it never fully does.
She doesn’t put your clothes back on for you; she doesn’t even let you retrieve them. She lies down beside you in the blue grass and puts her arms around you and keeps your uncomfortably hot body pressed firmly to hers. She closes her eyes and breathes out a whisper: “My Pearl.”
Your heart surges. Tears form in your eyes. Every little ounce of doubt tethering you just lifts away and you suddenly feel like you’re weightless, floating.
Your arms curl around her.