#and sorry @ everyone else especially if you're on mobile this got kind of lengthy

[kaikamahine]

Set-of-thee-things story: Jasper with either 2) or 9) pretty pretty please?

I know it doesn’t seem like there’s much Jasper in this, but it circles back around to her, promise! :D 

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2: Tiles, clacking of high heels, herbal tea

By the time back-up arrives, Connie’s barricaded herself in the kitchen, crouched on top of an overturned soup pot in the manner of a particularly uncomfortable bird sitting in a nest much too small for it, knobby knees propped up by her armpits. She’s made a helmet out of a colander, and she’s using the Rose Quartz sword to pin the pot handle to the kitchen tile, balancing herself with it. Grim determination makes steel out of her face, her aquiline profile turned to a sharp cleaver’s edge.

“Hurry,” she says to them without preamble, as soon as Steven lets them in, calling, Connie, it’s us, we came as fast - “It hasn’t reformed yet, but I don’t know if my defenses will hold!”

“Never fear,” Peridot shouts in answer. “The Crystal Gems are here!”

She barrels through the door ahead of the others - the effect only slightly spoiled by the fact she’s on the wrong side of the kitchen island, which she isn’t tall enough to see over. 

Connie gingerly unfolds herself, keeping her sword point trained on the pot as her weight leaves it.

In one smooth movement, Peridot whips it off the ground, revealing a scaly honey-gold gem underneath, which Steven punts across the tile to Lapis, who claps her hands together and bubbles it.

A pause, and everybody expels the breath they’ve been holding, all at once.

“Well, I was expecting more of a fight,” Peridot says acerbically. 

“It was hiding under the shoes in my mom’s closet,” Connie tells them, fetching the sheath from the other room and returning, sliding the sword home and buckling it around her waist. “I mean, okay, they’re mostly my dad’s shoes since he needs to have every pair he’s ever owned in black and brown, it’s a thing with him, and Mom usually keeps hers by the door. But she needed her second-best pair of heels today, so she opened up the closet and started digging - fortunately, I was there, I don’t want to think about what would have happened if I wasn’t - ”

Steven looks alarmed. “Is Dr. Maheswaran all right?”

“Yes, she’s fine - she got it on the snout with a loafer - ”

“- looks like a Topaz,” Lapis comments, studying the gem through the dark membrane of her bubble. Even obscured, it’s obviously encrusted with calcified, bone-white growths. “Or. She was a Topaz.”

“- but then I got her and Dad to leave it to me.”

“Wow, Connie,” Steven goes, round-eyed. “You really vanquished a corrupted gem all by yourself?”

“Oh, no, I called you immediately, so I knew I wasn’t going to be all by myself, it was just…”

She trails off, and then peeks out from under the rim of the colander, suddenly looking uncertain, like she doesn’t know whether to be embarrassed or proud. 

“Yeah,” she says, and slowly starts to grin. “I guess I did.”

“- only in Yellow Court, but that didn’t change, I’ve never met a Topaz who’d turn down the chance to poke their nose into other people’s business,” Peridot’s saying dryly, studying the gem in Lapis’s hands. “So if she wasn’t in a closet with the Connie’s human feet-shirts, she would have been in someone else’s trash can.”

She draws breath, revving up to full-blown lecture mode, and then suddenly the line of her mouth snags.

Lapis glances up. “What is it?”

“Steven … ” Peridot calls, cutting through Steven’s rapt preoccupation with Connie’s tale. "Can you take a look at this?“

Obediently, he circles around the kitchen island. Peridot grabs his arm, and the two of them have a hasty whispered discussion behind cupped hands. Lapis waits, looking patient and bemused, as they surface to peer intently at the bubbled corrupted Topaz.

“Yeah,” Steven says, after a long pause. “That’s her.”

“That’s the third one we’ve found, just in this area!” Peridot flings her arms up. “Do you know how far they had to travel to get all the way back here, and what for?”

“We don’t really know why corrupted gems do what they do,” Steven answers. “And the Gems have been trying to figure them out for thousands of years.”

Connie hops up onto the counter, rearranging the sword as it bangs against the cabinets. The colander wobbles on top of her head.

“Where did she come from?” she asks.

Steven and Peridot exchange a look.

“Beta Kindergarten,” Peridot answers, simultaneous with Steven’s, “Arizona.”

Ding! Connie’s eyebrows spring up like toast.

“Oh,” she says, uncomfortably.

“What kind of place is that? Arizona?” Lapis interjects, letting the bubble float over her head and frowning up at it, like she’s trying to imagine why a gem would hike all the way to Delmarva if they didn’t have to.

“I don’t think you can really count Arizona as a place, ma’am,” Connie deadpans.

Lapis nods, like that makes perfect sense. “Like Jersey.”

“OKAY WELL,” comes out of Peridot at sudden top volume, and she edges towards Lapis and the bubble in her best attempt at casual, which lands three degrees off anything remotely resembling such. “We should send her to the temple and then move on with our day! The Connie can tell us all about how she managed to poof her - “

Lapis’s expression changes.

She snatches the bubble and holds it high out of Peridot’s reach.

“No fair!” Peridot complains, hopping on tiptoes.

“What aren’t you telling me?” And before anybody can say anything, a dawning suspicion steals across Lapis’s face, like she’s starting to see the giant, woman-sized shape paper-punched out of the conversation.

Her voice comes out cold. “What was she doing with them?”

Steven, Peridot, and Connie all flinch.

Peridot recovers first, and forces out a deliberate, offhanded laugh. 

“Oh, the usual crazy stuff,” she says with a shrug, ignoring Steven’s hissed, Peridot, we don’t say that word! “Collecting them, keeping them trapped in cages, some drivel about prisoners and purging, I wasn’t paying attention - I was busy and my powers were needed,” she buffs her nails on her uniform. “Ehh, I think she mostly she was taking her own inadequacies out on gems who couldn’t fight back, because it felt good.”

Lapis’s face goes very still.

Connie and Steven exchange miserable looks.

“Oh!” Peridot continues with a snap of her fingers, oblivious. She looks over at them. “But she didn’t start in Beta, did she? You said that after the mountains, she tried keeping those corrupted jaspers in the ocean, right? That’s where you fought her?”

Usually happy to recount how Amethyst and Stevonnie rescued one corrupted jasper from imprisonment and drove off Jasper herself, Steven now looks like he’d rather be anywhere but here.

His head turtle-ducks towards his collar. “Peridot …”

Her brows pinch together. “You’re using the ‘Peridot, you’re being insensitive’ voice. Why are you doing that? She’s bubbled - it’s not like she has any feelings in that state - she doesn’t care what we say!”

With an almost crystalline snap of something frozen forced into movement, Lapis releases the bubble and taps the top of it. It vanishes.

She leaves the kitchen without a word.

“What’d I say?” Peridot blinks, and then with dawning concern, “No, wait, doesn’t matter. I’m going to see if she’s all right.”

The door closes behind her, and at last, reluctantly, Connie takes off her colander helmet.

Steven makes a face at her. “Sorry, Connie.”

This should have been your day, is implied. Connie shrugs and says, “You better go after them.”

*

Peridot was right about one thing, though:

The corrupted Topaz is the third gem recently bubbled that they recognized from Beta Kindergarten, and they didn’t have a clue what could prompt a corrupted gem to trek all the way back to Delmarva from Arizona.

Honestly, without Lapis or Peridot, Steven wouldn’t even know that the gem was a Topaz - and neither would Amethyst, since any gems outside their immediate family are as unfamiliar to her as they are to him. When it comes up, Garnet and Pearl just call them corrupted - but he thinks that has more to do with grief than ignorance; if Garnet and Pearl avoid calling corrupted gems by their names, then they don’t have to confront the likelihood that they’ll look at a monster and see a friend.

Lapis and Peridot, while not as straight-up callous as they used to be, don’t suffer the same sentimentality.

Still, Peridot’s suggestion - put forth some two weeks after the Topaz incident - is met with an immediate icy silence.

“Bait,” Garnet echoes, a single reproving syllable.

Undaunted, Peridot pounds her fist into the palm of her other hand.

“Yeah!” she says. “We unbubble one of the Beta gems we have and see if that’s the common denominator.”

Steven glances back and forth, trying to slurp quietly from the top of his mug to see if his tea’s cooled enough to drink yet. He grimaces at the taste: Connie has a five-minute presentation on why herbal teas are good for you, but do they have to taste like suffering?

“That’s not much to go on,” Pearl points out reasonably.

“Sure it is! If we just - ”

“I can kinda see Perrie’s point,” Amethyst says, and when Garnet and Pearl both turn to look at her, she shrugs. “Nobody likes to be alone, guys. Not permanently.��You all remember Centipeedle? If all the Beta gems did used to be part of Jasper’s army thousands of years ago - assuming she wasn’t just crazy - “

“Amethyst,” Steven complains.

“ - then they’re gonna wanna be together. Like soldiers or whatever.” She spreads her hands, like, see? “This is our chance to round them all up.”

It’s a testament, Steven thinks, to how far they’ve all come that where once Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl would have balked at the idea of attracting any kind of attention from corrupted gems, now they’re confident that that between five weaponized gems and one Steven, not to mention Connie and Lion, they’ve got a good chance at handling whatever’s thrown at them. At least from this planet.

Garnet’s mouth makes the faintest upward twitch.

“Let’s try it.”

*

BAM!

The screen door bangs off its hinges, and Peridot comes barreling in already yelling.

“I’ve made a terrible mistake! You’ve got to come quick!”

With a low vrrrrrBMM, Garnet’s gauntlets crystalize over her hands. This, more than Peridot’s histrionics - which are often caused by other such distresses as an unpaid Netflix bill interrupting her streaming or some unknown species of spider hiding in her paint cans, convincing her it’s an invasion (”the more legs it has, the more likely it is to murder us, Steven!”) - alarm Amethyst and Pearl, who also come to attention.

“What’s wrong?” Garnet says.

“It’s Lapis! She went into the temple, and she - “

The tension in the room ratchets up so suddenly she stumbles, and frowns at them. Behind the counter, Steven sighs.

In his opinion, the civility that exists between the Crystal Gems and Lapis is nothing short of a miracle. It’s one thing to continually tell Lapis that the Gems never meant to keep her imprisoned, and another thing for Lapis to break a 5000-year habit of loathing and obsessing over how the Crystal Gems are cruel, heartless, trophy-hunting monsters. These days, Steven just shrugs off the ocean-theft, near-murder incident - so she had a villain moment, who hasn’t had a villain moment, they’re going to make a catchy musical number about it one day if Dad hasn’t already - but he sees the exact conclusion Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl leap to with that declaration alone.

“Guys - “ he starts reprovingly, but Garnet speaks over him.

“Where is she?”

“Uh.” Wrong-footed, Peridot blinks, then remembers what she was trying to say. “At the Greg-dad’s alternate housing facility?”

Whatever the Gems were expecting to hear, this wasn’t it.

“She’s where?” Pearl says blankly.

*

It’s easy to tell which storage unit belongs to Mr. Universe’s - even if it wasn’t the only one that’s open, the deep blue light pooling on the asphalt would be a dead giveaway.

At the sight, Peridot starts to dash forward, but Amethyst grabs her shoulder in a restraining hold, shaking her head, and so Peridot settles for cupping her hands around her mouth and calling out, sotto voice, “Lapis! Lapis, it’s okay, I’m here!”

“Shh,” comes the reply, and something in the storage unit makes a distinct whumph!

Pearl tightens her grip on her spear, expression grim.

Unable to stand it, Steven pushes forward until he’s almost at the garage door, wrapping an arm around Garnet’s leg and peering out.

At first, all he can make out is a mass of orange and white. Crouched in front of all that bulk, Lapis seems laughably small. The only light comes from the streetlight several paces back and Lapis’s gem, illuminating the edges of everything in a ominous, midnight glow. Somewhere back in the dark, something breathes.

Peridot speaks first.

“Lapis.” Her tone is tense, her hands fisted at her sides. “We could have used any of the Beta gems, you didn’t - “

“No,” Lapis says mildly.

At the sound of her voice, the monster shifts her chin along the cement, and Steven abruptly realizes what they’re looking at.

The corrupted gem that had once been Jasper lies on her belly in front of Lapis, her head lowered until it’s mere inches away from Lapis’s outstretched palm, the way Steven once saw the Pizza’s old dog behave with Nanefua, sitting poised and obedient as she held a piece of fish in front of its nose and made it wait. Jasper holds so still she’s almost shaking, a ripple of movement under her fur and the sickly, conical growths that encrust her head and shoulders. Steven can’t tell where her eyes are, but he can just make out her nostrils, flaring open and shut under the heel of Lapis’s hand.

She’s so big the sound of her breathing takes up the entire unit, an inhaling-exhaling rush like being trapped inside a seashell.

“You’re right, Peridot,” Lapis says.

The Peridot of a year ago might have brushed that off with a casual, I know, but now she narrows her eyes and says, “about … what?” with trepidation.

“They’ll hunt her down. All the Beta gems - she’s their common denominator. So if you’re right, if she was doing to them exactly what I did to her - “

“Lapis, no - “ Steven tries, loudly.

The next inhale comes as a low, warning growl, and his mouth snaps shut of its own accord.

“- then they’ll come to where she is.” Her calm and carefully moderated tone now drops, and Jasper’s chin inches along the cement like she’s trying to follow it. “They’ve been alone and frightened for thousands of years. They’ll leap at anything that isn’t that, even if it hurts. And then we can help them.”

“You can’t leave her unbubbled, Lapis,” Garnet says firmly.

“She won’t hurt me.”

Whumph! comes again, and Steven has a strange moment when he realizes that it’s Jasper’s tail, thumping against whatever it is his dad’s got back there. 

Is she … she’s wagging her tail! he thinks with sudden glee, and clamps down hard on the urge to smile. It’s not appropriate for the situation, Steven.

“Or you,” Lapis adds, like it’s an afterthought.

Garnet, Pearl, and Amethyst all exchange skeptical looks; absolutely nothing in their experience says Jasper’s ever tried to do anything but hurt them.

“You can’t know that,” Garnet insists. “Corrupted gems aren’t something to play around with. They’re a danger to themselves and to the lifeforms on this planet.”

“Not if she stays in here!”

A pause, and then all eyes swivel to Steven.

“Well,” he continues, carefully releasing his hold on Garnet, “it doesn’t have to be here, here, it’s probably not fair to keep her in a doghouse. Especially in the dark! But we’ve got something, don’t we? Like the Centipeedles on their ship!”

“Steven - “ Pearl clicks her tongue. “That’s different. They’re with their crew, that’s - “

Lapis stands and abruptly pivots to face them.

“What do you think I am?” Her voice is so flat you could skate across it.

Garnet’s mouth skews like she tastes something unpleasant.

Lapis meets her gaze and doesn’t flinch. She keeps one hand extended behind her, palm flat - Jasper stays where she is.

Steven wonders if they can tell how much it costs Lapis to confess that - that doing to Jasper what Homeworld had done to her, that Jasper in turn did to other gems, made Jasper hers in an unfortunate kind of way, the kind that takes bravery to admit to - but before he can say anything, Peridot jumps in, her expression apprehensive - this whole thing had been her idea. “And - if Amethyst’s right and the corrupted gems from Beta were part of her army, thousands of years ago, that means she’s their crew, too, right?”

Garnet shakes her head. “You’re asking us to let you release a proven enemy, without - “

“She won’t hurt us,” Lapis says again.

“Why not?”

And the answer, when it comes, surprises them all:

“Because of Steven,” says Amethyst.

Everyone looks at her. She looks at Lapis.

Then she folds her arms, looking grumpy. “Well? Am I wrong?”

A beat, and Lapis turns, once more crouching down in front of Jasper, who whoofs out a breath, thumping her tail in a manner that’s almost contented.

“You’re the Crystal Gems,” she says. “You’ve lived with Steven all his life, so you don’t know what it’s like, being so rock bottom you’ve got nothing else. There’s nowhere to go at that point - except there is, because the one thing you’ve got left is being what Steven sees when he looks at you.”

Steven starts to fidget, uncomfortable, but when he steals a look around, he sees Peridot nodding with perfect understanding, and - to his shock - Amethyst, too.

But how can I see something in you if it’s not already there! he wants to protest. You’re the ones who are so special, not me, and all I want is to show you that!

“The plan will work,” Lapis says confidently.

She sneaks a glance in Steven’s direction, tucking a stray fringe of hair away from her face, and he’s reminded suddenly of the shyness in Connie’s expression the day she vanquished the snooping Topaz without their help: I did good, right?

A hand descends, flattening the hair on top of his head: Garnet, conceding.

“We’ll try it once,” she allows, and Pearl heaves her this is a bad idea and I’m going to say I told you so later sigh. “And then we’ll decide where to go from there.”

The storage unit fills as Jasper draws in a huge breath and releases it gustily.

Then she tips her head forward, just barely, just enough that her nose bumps up under the palm of Lapis’s hand.

Lapis smiles.