entrancelogs | + Guilt Runs Deep

When this occurred, Peridot was in an escape pod that landed somewhere just outside Beach City and fleeing for her life to try and get into contact with Yellow Diamond. What she knows of this moment has just been talked about in vague terms. She's never ... watched it.

If she had a stomach, it would be churning. She lacks the figurative language to really define what it's like to see Lapis's wrist grabbed again and again by Jasper's grasping fist. Every time Jasper turns to the Crystal Gems (Peridot among them where she never was before, blending in with them seamlessly) and leers at them before the fusion takes proper shape, it fills her with such a strange sense of disgust. And it grows stronger the more she watches, uncertain of what to do, until finally, in a blind panic, she breaks and rushes out onto the beach just before Lapis extends her hand.

And before Jasper can take it, Peridot grabs it instead, shaking a bit because if this is real then she's just put her back to Jasper and she is going to get pulverized into the sand, but she can't just stand back and watch. She has to do something, and this is what she does. No turning back down. "Lapis, stop."

The startled noise Lapis makes is undignified and a bit feral. Forgive her if she's a wee bit preoccupied, but she didn't notice acquiring an audience. She would yank her own hand back the instant the little green one intercedes, only it turns out she can't, so she ends up tensed and taut against it like a trapped animal, staring at it in horror. She looks like she might consider chewing her own arm off.

The words get a different response, both distraught and a little defensive: "I can't!" She's been TRYING to stop, thanks. By now Lapis is in kind of a state, and frankly, as far as she's concerned, Peridot could easily just be an addition to the torment, but she's not even equipped to sort that out. Knee-jerk reactions are all she has. "What are you doing?! Get away!"

On the bright side, Jasper just laughs. Pulverizing may or may not still be on the table, but she's not real, and she knows exactly how much difference this interruption will make.

"No!" She shouts back, for all the good it does. She feels herself pushed aside, whether by Jasper or by whatever force is constructing this memory and forcing it to play out as it had. She hits the sand hard and the scene plays out again, uninterrupted and Peridot can only lay there helplessly and growl.

Stars, this would be a good moment to comprehend things like the burden of guilt and emotional stability, wouldn't it? All Peridot knows is what she thinks, which might not be precisely healthy.

She does know one thing though. "You're better than this now! I-I know it was bad. And you were scared and you didn't know how else to take control, but you wouldn't do that again, if you had the choice!"

Lapis also makes a noise when Peridot is flung away. She didn't want that either, but it's that kind of day. The pep talk does more to bring into focus the idea that Peridot is actually here, which is both a good and a bad thing. It should be a relief to see a friendly face by now, and it is, but -- but. Peridot didn't see this before. And Lapis really doesn't want her to. She has no faith that it's going to change anything, and that means it'll only be more painful. It means a whole new set of things that can go wrong.

"I know!" Lapis says frantically. It's not the most convincing affirmation in the world, but she's made enough progress that she can at least understand the point. Alas, this is going to take something more heartfelt than that. "I don't want you getting caught up in this --"

But Jasper isn't waiting any longer with that obstacle out of the way, and grabs Lapis's offered hand as usual. Except she's still chuckling, and now she speaks up, smug as ever. "You just keep fooling them, don't you?"

"Shut up, Jasper! No one wants to hear you talk!" Peridot is either getting out a lot of latent aggression at Jasper's general existence in a setting where she doesn't think she'll be retaliated against or she's trying to draw focus and save Lapis... Or both. Honestly, it could easily be both.

"She just wanted to get away from here and we brought her back, and you just couldn't let her go." She probably shouldn't be saying these things to Jasper, because it's not really her, but now she's on a roll with it. She forces herself back onto her feet, clenching her fists. "People like you who just want to use her are why she has to fight. If you want someone to fight with it, come over here and fight me."

She stamps her foot. Yes, it appears that tactic number two is make the illusory Jasper stop, if Lapis can't.

Jasper laughs more. She, for one, is having a great time with this, which would be decisive proof she's not real if anyone actually needed it; the real Jasper never knew how to have fun like this. While she seems generally unconcerned by the threats and taunts, she does turn partway to address Peridot, pointing with her free hand.

"You still don't get it if you're still trying to protect her. I'm not the one who's looking for a fight." Hmm, yeah, that's probably not something the real Jasper would ever say under any circumstances. She raises the hand that's still holding Lapis's wrist, dragging her in close, much too close, and gives a particularly mocking grin. "Unless you want to take her place here."

That gets an immediate "What?!" from Lapis, by the way. You know, she was already worried about things managing to get even worse, but she was not prepared for THAT much worse that fast, wow.

It takes Peridot a moment to even process what Jasper- illusory, out of character, and generally awful in impressively new ways- is saying to her right now, so the immediate response that comes out of her is also, "What?" but in a much duller, vapid way.

And then it hits her.

If she had a stomach, it would have knotted up into pretzel-like contortions. She slaps her hands to her mouth as if Jasper has asked her to do the unthinkable, all for Lapis's safety. This isn't real, but she still feels like anything that she says will and can be held up for scrutiny later.

"Take her place," she repeats, cautiously, like maybe she heard wrong or she's mistaken. Her lime green skin has gone a shade paler at the thought. "You mean fuse with you?"

Peridot doesn't know how to handle fusion on a good day. In theory, she's almost comfortable with it, but this is a concept that sets her back a good fifteen paces. She doesn't like Jasper at all, and knows on some level how visceral and horrible Malachite was for both of them- moreso Lapis, than Jasper, though given Jasper's reactions post-Malachite, it clearly did something to her, too.

"Trust me," Jasper says, "her place is better than mine." The hand still pointing at Peridot turns over, the start, perhaps, of a beckoning gesture.

But Lapis has had enough from this line of discussion. She doesn't know if there's seriously any chance of Peridot humoring the horrible suggestion, or how far Jasper will push it, but she's not stopping to find out. And while there's very little she can control in this scenario, she does quite specifically have a way to keep Jasper at bay.

"Just stop it!" she shouts, and dives for Jasper's free hand with a look of fury.

Ultimately, this is no more than what she's been doing all along; Lapis is at least used to it already. The details have been thrown off by now, though. After being forced through it so many times, or maybe because of the sheer anger, fusion comes easily, the pair barely needing to dance at all. And when Malachite forms, she doesn't even get to her monodialogue -- she only laughs and laughs as the ocean drags her down. It's as if Hell is accomodating Lapis's desire to get this over with. Or as if it's eager to encourage her plunge further in. One way or another, getting her to start doing this voluntarily has got to be the opposite of progress.

When she returns to the beach, she's still angry. There's been anger in Lapis's response to Peridot since she arrived, but it was outweighed by fear and shock and all that stuff. And those are still there too, but getting angry at anyone handy is an age-old Lapis pattern, isn't it? That's part of why she's here in the first place. She's nowhere near as mad at Peridot as she is at Wonderland and the awful fake Jasper, and by this point she actually is able to tamp it down and not explode -- she is in fact capable of self-awareness -- but things really did get even worse, she's more shaken than ever, and she's mad about that. "You need to leave," she says in an uneven, but very determined, voice.

Peridot is still processing the equation of her and Jasper fusing like it will actively make her blue screen if she doesn't solve why it bothers her so much, and so she misses most of the scene playing out. By the time it resets, however, she's realized that this isn't about her, which is a feat in itself to realize. Even at her most compassionate, Peridot is extremely bad at realizing that not everything is tied up in her own feelings, even when she's trying to be selfless. Lapis being happy makes her happy, so she has to keep Lapis happy, and then if anything Lapis decides or does makes her unhappy, she needs to suck it up, because it will even out, eventually. Or so went the logic before the wonders of settling communication disputes.

The crux of the problem- the end of the equation, the math that makes it all make sense- is that the Crystal Gems sat back and watched this helplessly. She can see them now, standing slack-jawed and vacant, gearing up for a fight. No one stepped in for her. No one protected her. And now it's Peridot who's angry.

"No!" She snaps back, more vehemently this time, fists clenched into tight balls at her side. "This isn't right. Why didn't they help you?" She points accusingly at the Crystal Gems- not Steven, never Steven, who does what he can. "They could have stopped this."

She glowers at them, but they all might as well be furniture for how much they react. "If they won't, I will."

She's scared and her entire form vibrates. She doesn't even know what will happen or if it will even work, but that's fine. She cares about Lapis. Lapis needs to understand she isn't alone, that there was a choice in here. She just needed to trust someone to have her back. Maybe the Crystal Gems didn't move to help her, but she didn't have enough faith in them.

That's fine, too. Peridot will pick up the slack.

She steps in front of Lapis, but she doesn't take Jasper's hand. Instead, she forms a tiny, physical barrier, a little under a foot and a half shorter than Lapis and ineffective, but there's fury in her eyes. "You're not alone, Lapis. You never have to be alone again."

Yeah, honestly, since this is not an accurate memory recreation but a setpiece twisted to specifically make things worse, the Crystal Gems are if anything more pointedly useless than ever. They look outright bored waiting for the Homeworlders to finish their inane business and get off the beach. Jerks. Lapis can't really speak for their actions or lack thereof, but she knows how thoroughly alone she did feel then; the Crystal Gems had never helped her before, and they weren't going to start now. The Homeworld she knew was long gone too. At this point, she had already lost everything.

If the rebels had tried to help, then, would it have mattered? It's impossible to know. Lapis wouldn't have felt much safer with them, but self-preservation was never the whole equation anyway. She would still be hurt and angry, pushed past her breaking point, and she would still hate Jasper.

She's not in quite such dire straits now, but hurt and angry are true enough; Lapis seems to always have a reserve supply of those. As for trust, well, she can certainly rely on Peridot to try, so that much is a difference. The problem is whether or not it can actually help, and if it doesn't, not being alone sorta seems more like a liability right now.

"What makes you think you can change this?!" she demands. "You're just making things harder!"

Jasper lazily rolls her shoulders, as though her muscles need to warm up after coming back into existence, which isn't remotely close to how anything actually works. "Seriously, how do you still think you need to protect her from me?"

"I'm not protecting her from you, you clod," Peridot snaps back, ignoring Lapis for the time being just to take advantage of the opportunity to call Jasper a clod and mean it in every sense of the word. "I'm protecting her from ending up stuck with you, because she thought she didn't have a choice."

Theoretically. With that in mind, she adds to Lapis, though she keeps her eyes on Jasper, with a much softer voice. "I'm not leaving you, Lapis. If I have to test a hundred ways to make you realize that this happened, but you'll never have to do it again, then I'll do it. Just trust me."

Please trust her, because, quite frankly, for all that confidence, she has no idea what she's doing.

Lapis glares at Peridot a good long moment. She's still mad and would like to argue about it more. Actually, right about now she'd ideally want to make Peridot leave, but even if she had any idea how to do that she wouldn't be able to try. No, the problem is they've been through too much shit together already, and she knows far too well how serious Peridot is about what she says. Lapis herself would probably be just as bad if the positions were reversed. It's something not wholly unlike their Agreement. Under normal circumstances she can out-stubborn most people, but this is kind of an impasse.

Lapis has a lot of experience already in yelling at people to stop helping and let her self-destruct in peace -- it never works out, but it's still an easy go-to. But she does need to be reminded that self-destructing isn't actually something she wants to do now. It's an option on the table, she'll do it if she has to, but that's another difference between now and back then.

"I'm not letting her do anything to you," she says eventually, still angry. This could be interpreted as a very grudging conditional acceptance if one is optimistic enough. It also sounds something like a warning or a threat; the intervention ended very badly a moment ago and can again, or worse, who knows? If Peridot is insisting on that risk, anything that happens is gonna have to be her fault. It's still not even clear whether Jasper actually can do anything to Peridot, despite her little offer, but it's the only area where Lapis has any control here, so that's where she's setting her boundaries.

"Then take my hand." Peridot whirls to face her again, putting her back once more to Jasper, and this time it doesn't even scare her to do so. She's decided Jasper is as much furniture as the slack-jawed Crystal Gems in their melodramatic uselessness. The scene will move on again, she knows. She feels like she's holding back the hand on a clock and every second that ticks by, it wants to keep moving and will if her grip slips even slightly.

"And let's go. Let it go. You don't have to feel bad about it anymore."

She just keeps pushing that clock back and it's starting to build like the pressure of an oncoming storm. You can feel herself needing to either step away or be pushed. She's a bit tearful now, her voice shaking. "I don't know what to do. I just don't want you to keep doing this to yourself. Let me help."

Dismissing Jasper as set dressing is a solid idea, the main downside being that she's not in on the memo. Sure she does seem to be all talk, but the purpose of her existence is to make things worse and she likes doing it, so she's not about to stop trying. This time she chimes in again when Lapis doesn't answer right away. "Oh, so you DO just want to fuse with her."

"Shut up!" Lapis snaps at her, but she was hesitating because she was already wavering, the anger having to weigh against a growing awareness that now she's just hurting Peridot herself. Again, she's gained far too much an understanding of why that is to dismiss it easily. And it's not fair at all when Lapis was trying to protect her, but then maybe protecting Peridot was still only a means to protect herself, in the end. Besides which, she does know better by this point, even if she has to be reminded of it. Peridot may very well even have the right answer for all she knows.

Lapis never wanted Peridot butting into these particular matters, which is something they've been over. This doesn't involve her. But it could if Lapis lets her in, in the same sense that any of their problems could become each other's concerns, because they're supposed to be a team and it's better to face things together than alone. And maybe, maybe that's the right thing to do. Still, if Peridot is to tie herself to all this baggage, that means it can get a hold on her too, and neither of them necessarily gets to choose how. Good or bad, what happened here was as intimate as anything can be.

And it's not like she gives any credence to what her illusory Jasper says, but she can't take Peridot's hand. She absolutely can't. Lapis finds herself clinically aware, like a glimpse through the eye of a storm, of how little control she has over herself right now, both emotionally and in a very literal sense. If she did that, she does not know what she would do next, and if it didn't free her from the loop... there is no amount of freedom or emotional well-being, ever, worth the tiniest iota of risk that she might still keep acting it out at that point.

"I know," she says to Peridot miserably, and the walls have at least crumbled enough for some proper honesty. "But it's not that simple. I don't know what to do either, but you can't just pull me out and fix this. And I want to listen to you, but you don't understand what you're getting into, and I don't..." She swallows. She can do better. "I'm scared of that."

Edited (eh, icons are hard) 2019-03-18 22:09 (UTC)

Peridot is trying so very, very hard not to turn a color not meant for a green gem. She doesn't need this after the stupid fusion room or after the dance at New Year's. She doesn't want this to be something that just keeps coming up as a point of issue that she and Lapis have to deal with. She just wants Lapis, and not in any way that Jasper is implying. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Maybe they'll never be ready for that.

Which is why she doesn't get angry or upset or despairing when Lapis speaks. She accepts it and takes a step to the side, no longer preventing the scene from moving on. Her ego is boundless, but she knows she doesn't understand, but just because she's stepping to the side doesn't mean she's giving up. "I want to understand, though. You don't have to be scared. Don't you realize that, after everything?"

Tell me what I need to do and I'll do it.

...Yeah. Yeah, she does know better. It's just really hard. But she has to trust Peridot, in the end. Because it's not only a fear of judgment or rejection; Peridot shouldn't have to be affected by something like this, she thinks. Peridot deserves so much better. And Lapis also knows by now that that isn't her decision to make. "Yeah," she says, and steps forward.

All right, then. Just get on with it. She closes her eyes as if to brace herself. "This is me. All of this is me. You can't pull me out of it because it's in me. And maybe it'll get better, but I can't... I'll never be someone who doesn't have this. Out of everything that's ever hurt me, this is the one I did to myself, as soon as I got the chance, and I can't take it back."

Many things have gotten better, but that specific detail bothers her more than it used to, not less. Ever since she got a little freedom, Lapis can rarely afford to look back and wish things had gone differently; the things that should have gone differently are too immense to start in on. But right now she wishes she could take this decision back, and that's new, or at least happening in a new way, and it hurts. The aftereffects ran so much farther than she ever could have guessed.

Another step forward, and rather than giving her hand to Jasper, Lapis reaches up to touch her face. (Jasper, for her part, just smiles, passive again and sorta generically smug.) "I probably know Jasper better than anyone now. And she knows me. And you saw how she ended up after this." She turns her head back to Peridot but doesn't meet her eyes. "That's in me too."

Edited (ennnnnnh writing is hard!!) 2019-03-22 14:57 (UTC)

"Not all of it." Peridot's usually whiny and very pointed when she makes her opinions known, but right now, she's surprisingly quiet, because yes, she did see Jasper. She saw Jasper putting corrupted gems in makeshift cages and turning them into her personal army. She saw her so desperate to win against Smokey Quartz that she'd fused with a corrupted gem and got corrupted in turn. She saw that look of despair when she couldn't force another fusion, like some part of her had become incomplete without Malachite.

"You may have done it and you may not be able to take it back and maybe Jasper didn't deserve... all of it." But this is Peridot, who hates Jasper, so she's not going to sit here and act like Malachite was one hundred percent not unjustified. "And maybe not right now, but... eventually, you can be okay with it. Maybe you learned something. There's plenty of awful things I've done that I felt awful for, but I learned things, and that makes them just as important as my many, many successes."

Lapis shakes her head. "Peridot, this... really messed me up. I did learn, but all I learned was not to trust myself. I wanted this, and I liked it, and it left me scared that if something feels good it just means I'm going to look up from it and realize I'm back here. And ,aybe I've gotten better, but I hate knowing everything could have been so much easier. It's like I ruined my chances at being happy before they ever existed."

She looks down at her hands and finds that they are holding one of Jasper's. Lapis frowns deeper at that, but it's not as surprising as it should be. It doesn't inspire so much horror anymore, just kind of a sick dread. "I guess... I don't want to be okay with it. I don't want it to keep being part of me. But she's a part of me too, and I still can't stand it. I don't know how anyone can be okay with that." She glances back up to Peridot, almost pleading. "How can you be okay with this?"

Peridot doesn't understand fusion. She's never done it. Although she has glimpsed at Malachite before, thanks to Wonderland, and even now Lapis still hardly knows what to make of that -- but it couldn't possibly make anything better, regardless. Peridot is a good gem who would never have this experience, and it really, really shouldn't be something she has to contend with. But Lapis still doesn't get to decide that.

She moves forward again, flowing like liquid. Once more fusion comes easily, as if they simply belong together. But that's not actually true. Malachite blossoms into existence low against the beach, glaring balefully down at Peridot with her unsettling four eyes. "This is ME!" she says. Her two-toned voice doesn't sound more like one side or the other right now, only like defiance, like she's announcing her mission statement. Whether she's Lapis or Jasper or an embellished memory construct or an embodiment of some dark bits of psyche or something else entirely, Malachite is consistent about some

Peridot drops to her knees in the sand as a sudden realization overwhelms her like the waves on the ocean they're standing in front of her, and that realization is that she will never truly understand this. She really doesn't get fusion- her experiences with it are secondhand and her fear of it is irrational and based on so much uncertainty of what happens to the individual when you're two people in one.

And that's the crux of the issue, isn't it? Because Lapis is no longer an individual in the strictest sense. She's a Lapis Lazuli, shot through with yellowing imperfections like scars from the time she spent with Jasper. Those scars can't be smoothed over. They'll linger. She'll be imperfect and off-color forever now.

Just like a crystal gem, then.

Peridot forces herself slowly back onto her feet. Malachite's shadow eclipses her, blocking out the moonlight on the beach. "I don't know how. I just am. I've always known this about you, even when I didn't understand it." No, that's not right. "Even though I don't understand it. You don't have to be okay with it, but you can be happy. You can be happy with me. It's not easy for either of us, but we'll figure it out."

Gingerly, hopefully, with tears in the corner of her eyes: "Can't we try, Lapis?"

Malachite lowers herself further, braced on her arms until she can bring her face to something approximating Peridot's level, although all that really does is underscore the sheer size of her. She looms. Her eyes narrow contemptuously. Jasper always liked to posture and intimidate, and Lapis knows how to play things for an effect. Whatever Malachite is right now, she makes an excellent scary monster.

"Do you have any idea who you're talking to?" she demands. The voice still isn't dominated by Lapis, but something in the tone resembles her. "Do you have any idea what I could do to you right now? Do you know how much I'd enjoy it?"

It's rude to address one half of a fusion. Whatever Lapis is right now, she might currently lack the ability to feel bad for making Peridot cry. But it would also be ridiculous to pretend that she's not still right here, having this conversation. It may or may not be only her and it's certainly not all of her. There are really a lot of questions to be asked about exactly what's going on inside this half-real recreation of a fusion with someone who isn't here. But even in the real course of things, even when Malachite was sometimes just Jasper, there was none of it that Lapis didn't also become.

Peridot can posture and be bold and brave all she wants, but she's still under five feet tall and not a fighter class gem, and she's still sweating and shaking and trying not to sob. Even a Peridot would get smashed by those disconcerting appendages Malachite's boasting- and it's Malachite, isn't it? She knows better.

She's running out of tactics, and that's about when it occurs to her that maybe the answer is just stop that. Malachite is Lapis is Jasper. This is all part of who she is, and Peridot needs to be aware of that, and she is and she isn't at the same time.

"Then do it," she snaps, as furiously as she once snapped at Yellow Diamond. This isn't even real. It's a stupid dream. If she gets hurt, then what's going to happen? Better than than walking away since nothing else is working. "What're you waiting for? I don't know what to say to make you believe me, but if you really think you can crush me, then prove it."

Every idea she has feels like the worst idea, but this one takes the cake as far as stupid goes.

Malachite growls, her fingers digging overlarge furrows in the sand, but she does not, in fact, proceed to tear Peridot into little bits. She shudders a bit. Enough of her is real that she could, and as things are she really might enjoy it as promised, but that's not the same thing as wanting it. Not in the slightest. Whatever it is that she's made of, the important parts are unyielding on that matter.

In other words, yep, bluff totally called. Malachite isn't happy about that either, though, so it'd probably be a bit much to hope she might admit it. She glares some more.

"And if I don't, what then? Do you think you can beat me down with kindness? Are you going to talk me out of being a monster?"

"I don't wanna talk you out of it." That's a lie. She knows it's a lie. Malachite knows it's a lie, too, which is worse. "I... know I can't talk you out of it."

Better.

"But it's okay. We're all messed up. I've done bad things too. I've been awful to you, and you were right. It really couldn't just be fixed by me apologizing and saying things are different now- we really did have to work at it to really understand each other. You can't erase who you were. You can't unmake those decisions. We're stuck with them forever, even when we change. I get that now, but I don't feel bad for it. I learned from it."

"And I'm not you! That's the PROBLEM, isn't it?!"

That's definitely not the main problem. Maybe it is a little of it, in a certain sense. But Peridot is again clearly talking to Lapis, only Lapis, putting things in the usual context of her, and it makes Malachite shudder again. Because again, of course she is Lapis, and therefore she can't pretend the words are meaningless to her.

"I did this to myself. I hurt ourselves for so long that we couldn't stop." Ah, fusion pronouns. "I'm still doing it, and now I'm hurting YOU with it! And you don't deserve to get dragged into this mess!"

It's in this moment that Peridot wishes her fusion lesson had gotten further than 'I'm Percy and Pierre,' because her brain keeps getting overwhelmed by the idea that she is talking to Lapis and not Malachite, who she has not met, who she only knows as an amalgam eldritch nightmare created by Lapis and Jasper's combined rage. She doesn't know how to communicate with that.

So she sighs and plops down on the sand. "You're not hurting anything but my head," she growls, stubbornly. "But if I didn't want to be here, I wouldn't be. No one drags me anywhere. I'm my own gem! I do what I want! And I want to be part of this mess." Another sigh, this one louder. "Even a mess that contains trace amounts of Jasper."

+ Guilt Runs Deep

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Yikes that last tag had a hard time... well, the important things got across

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