#cuz jasper and lapis are both my faves. and amethyst and peridot and pearl and garnet actually but

[dykejasper]

Crooked Trajectory [SU fanfic]

Chapter Two - "Destabilized" - Lapis POV (link to chapter 1) AO3 Chapter 2 Link Jasper's sudden, unannounced arrival to Little Homeworld throws Lapis mentally off-balance, and she struggles with guilt, fear of abandonment, and self hatred. Amethyst gets her high to cope and Peridot finally hears the ugly truth. Rating: Mature CW: abuse, confinement, torture, choking, drowning, suicidal ideation, substance use (gem weed, lol), discussions surrounding trauma

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Wide yellow eyes with pupils narrow as pins stared, unblinking, between wet tendrils of white hair that snaked over clammy skin. The beast was motionless for the first time in weeks. The tense calm was unnerving, and Lapis knew better than to let her mind wander for even a moment.

Jasper's tired voice cracked when she asked, "Why don't you end this?"

Lapis ignored her, focused on maintaining their bond while shutting off access to her mind. She already leaked too much when she got distracted, and she couldn’t risk giving Jasper any more of herself.

When they first fused, Jasper tried to split away, but Lapis quickly figured out how to apply water chains within Malachite to match those on the outside, binding their light so she couldn’t leave. She thrashed, yanked, bit the chains, twisted, kicked, roared violent threats and obscene insults; none of it mattered. Lapis always made it worse for her, getting creative with water gags that wouldn’t allow enough air for her to speak or a fist of water around her throat, yanking her into the foul green pool below with a cruel snap of force and holding her there. It was exhausting, but Lapis endured with grim satisfaction. All that flashy muscle meant nothing against the power of a planet’s ocean in her hands.

After Steven infiltrated their space, rage choked all other emotion out of Malachite. Lapis was distracted, disoriented -- worried that Steven was still near, somehow. Jasper yanked their chains with enough force to throw her forward, slamming her face into the pool floor and knocking the wind from her lungs.

She knew Jasper was only a few short strides away from ripping her apart and she scrambled to get up. Her legs slipped and slid as she kicked herself away, coughing and spitting out water. Jasper was smiling and had a crazed look in her eyes. Her voice was hoarse and soft when she said, “You’re not protecting Rose, you lying, traitorous brat.”

In her panic to fly away as far as their chains would allow, narrowly avoiding a swipe of deadly claws, Lapis let her guard down. Her mental barrier dropped, and she couldn’t control the flow of her memories.

In that brief moment, Jasper watched her emerge from the mirror in front of Steven, cracked and panicked and significantly limited in ability, but still more than capable of building an ocean tower into the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Still capable of destroying the Crystal Gems and multiple humans, had Steven not begged her to stop. She would have enjoyed destroying the gems that kept her prisoner and tried to stop Steven from releasing her and would have delighted in their shattering -- if Steven hadn’t cared about them so much. She owed him her freedom, and him alone.

Lapis shook her wet hair out of her eyes and glared up at Jasper with every bit of hate she could harness, allowing her shatter-lust to pulse through them both with every beat of their fused heart. Steadying the quiver in her voice and forcing it cold as ice, she said, “I’m protecting him from us. You deserve this just as much as I do.”

Something in Jasper changed after that. Lapis had no clue how many hours of quiet they’d had, but it was stressing her out more than fighting. It could all be an act to make her drop her defenses again, and Lapis wouldn’t be tricked. Though it was getting hard to ignore the prickling anxiety that made her stomach twist and the tiny voice in the back of her mind telling her she made the wrong choice.

"Shouldn't be hard for you to shatter me. I won't even fight back... unless you want me to."

Lapis felt hot venom flood her veins and she clenched her fists, tightening the chains that held Jasper. Their hearts raced like opposing war drums, out of sync and messy. It'd be very easy.

And then what? Go back to Homeworld? Run back to the Crystal Gems and beg for their forgiveness? This was her purpose now. This was where she belonged -- crushed under cold, dark, abrasive sea and locked to one of the few gems more pathetic than herself. The chains got even tighter as Lapis’ fingers involuntarily clenched.

"Just do it already, you pathetic coward.” Jasper stumbled forward, her eyes wide and a terrifying, manic smile on her face that turned her blood to ice. “You want to, I can feel it! I want you to—”

"Shut up!" Lapis shot a thick tendril of water down Jasper’s throat, coiling it down her neck and clenching her fist. Blind panic bubbled up in Malachite while Jasper thrashed against her chains, her lungs flooding.

She'd never lose consciousness like an organic life form from asphyxiation or drowning, of course. But a gem’s survival instincts were designed to suit colonizing predators likely to meet physical resistance. If you threatened a gem’s physical form, they could really feel it, and would react accordingly.

Lapis could feel it, too. She could feel every painful, oppressive, horrible thing she did to Jasper, but that was fine with her. She owed it to Steven to stay and atone for what she did. Jasper wouldn’t even be on Earth if wasn’t for Lapis running back to Homeworld, expecting it to be her home after all that time.

She felt a powerful pull to crush Jasper’s gem when she said “I want you to;” an impulse that came from Jasper herself. Was she really that desperate, that she could overpower Malachite for that...? No, just willing to do anything to make me lose focus. The gnawing anxiety in the pit of her stomach spiked.

She crouched next to Jasper, swallowing down an intense choking sensation and watching her thrash up close. Impressive how this one turned out, considering the careless job done with her Kindergarten. Lapis was the one who cut the canyon that became her kindergarten – a panicked order coming from the top demanding a canyon far from where the Crystal Gem home base was, ignoring all other structural factors. It was there that she was poofed during a raid by the Crystal Gems, the day the Beta Kindergartners began emerging. She knew that wasn’t Jasper’s fault, but… it sure felt like it was.

She released the coil and Jasper collapsed forward and heaved up water, gasping for air while Lapis gently swept the wet hair from her pained face. She was soft -- loving, almost -- as she said, "You could feel how much I loved doing that, couldn’t you? Don’t worry about your gem. I don’t make a habit of breaking my things.”

That memory made Lapis want to claw her own throat open. You're a fucking monster.

Jasper’s eventual arrival in Little Homeworld was something she tried to prepare herself for. She had a thousand conversations in her own mind, repeating scenarios on loop compulsively. It was exhausting how angry she’d get over imaginary confrontations and blowouts with a gem that only existed in her memory.

None of her obsessive rumination included Jasper getting shattered. Finding out about that horrified Lapis, forcing her back into foul memories that she’d managed to avoid for a long time. What’d she finally do that pushed Steven to shatter her?

They were totally different gems in a totally different timeline from when they were fused. She vividly remembered the urges to shatter her own gem that Jasper shoved down when they were Malachite. She usually had no reaction to the impulse, thanks to thousands of years of Homeworld conditioning. She was taught that her only value as a gem from a defective kindergarten was her overwhelming strength and tenacity in the face of extreme torture and isolation, and she believed it to the point of pride. She was very good at pretending it didn’t bother her.

But, sometimes, the crushing darkness of the ocean was too much for the both of them, and they dwelled on their worst desires and impulses. Jasper was interested in being shattered long before Malachite. Her agate often described how the other Betas were shattered, and Jasper was left wondering what it felt like, if it was freedom of any sort. She never seemed to consider her agate might have been lying – most of her Kindergarten was unshattered on the Zoo ship. It was ironic that she achieved her goal, just to be dragged back to deal with the life she objected to.

Did she feel differently, now that she’d experienced it? Overwhelmingly, repaired gems reported their time being shattered as utterly miserable, a state of painful disconnect. The light that holds a gem’s consciousness refracts all over with no ability to connect, unable to repair itself, and unable to split away from the shards themselves. Like the human myth of purgatory, or how some humans speak of distressed spirits unable to achieve peace after their body’s death.

As shitty as all of that was, Lapis wished she could deal with it somewhere far, far away from her. Another planet, maybe. Jersey, perhaps. She’d like it there.

But she wasn’t in Jersey, no. She was leaning up against the wall of Bismuth’s shop, for some reason – arms crossed, staring off at nothing. Where is Bismuth...?

Lapis had been watching her from behind a sign for a few minutes in a state of disbelieving dissociation. At first, she was worried maybe she was hallucinating, but she looked like an entirely different gem from when they were fused – certainly not the version of Jasper that haunted her nightmares. She looked broken. Her corruption scars reminded Lapis so much of Malachite in color. She gazed absently at the broken horn jutting from Jasper's wild mane and wondered if she ever thought the same. Lapis would never forget that sickly green hell they shared.

Maybe it wasn’t her place to wonder at all. But after Steven corrupted himself out of sheer despair, well… There was no reason to believe corruption was a physical contagion a gem could contract from fusion. Corruption was a manifestation of the deepest despair turned physical, and despite all Jasper had been through, all the centuries of Homeworld torture before they ever met, her corruption scars resembled Malachite more than anything.

Her stomach twisted and she was overcome with a sudden and confusing rage that threatened to boil over into something physical. Nobody even told Lapis she was supposed to show up that day, that she was there already, right outside of Bismuth’s shop! She tried shoving down the voice that screamed and Steven fucking shattered her!! It was too much too fast; she couldn’t even remember where she was headed or what she was doing. She formed wings and took to the sky, flying hard and fast for the warp pad with tears stinging her eyes.

Why couldn't Jasper have gone literally anywhere else?!

The precarious happiness and stability Lapis built after destroying the barn was crumbling, and she had nobody to blame but herself. They didn’t have to say it directly. She knew they all saw her as a victim deserving pity, and she hated that. More than that, though: she hated the thought of her friends learning to fear her true self and abandoning her. That would be so much worse. They’d struggle to accept that she enjoyed keeping Jasper fused to her, forced to endure torture for torture’s sake. Forced to atone for the sins of other gems while Lapis wallowed in her own self-serving guilt and misery, redirecting her hatred of them onto the first gem to get in her way.

She landed hard on the warp pad; stumbling, gritting her teeth and blinking away tears, she warped away without directional thought. Things are better now. I'm better now. But if that was true, why did seeing Jasper make her feel so unstable so fast? Maybe because she was fucking shattered! Her chest clenched and a sob slipped past her lips – she couldn’t inhale. Lapis just wanted to feel nothing about her, why couldn't she just feel nothing…?

The warp stream cleared, and she was in the beach house looking at the temple door. Her stomach dropped when she realized there was no Steven to talk her down – he went to the hospital with his humans after his corruption stabilized and would likely be there for a while.

Selfish of her to turn to him right then, anyway. What a horrible friend she was for trying to bother him about this during his time of need. She turned to collapse on the couch and nearly jumped out of her skin when she made unexpected eye contact with Amethyst. There were bags under her eyes as she lay with her neck bent badly; phone in one hand and lit blunt trailing smoke from the other; surrounded by a mess of snack trash with a tablet laying forgotten on her belly, looping the Stardew Valley menu music. She held out the blunt in offering, saying, “Dude. You need this more than me.”

“So, you knew? Why didn’t you fucking say something to me?” She hated how shaky her voice was. Pathetic. The rage that’d reared up in her slowly fizzled away and was replaced with festering shame and disgust. She moved forward and snatched the blunt from Amethyst’s outstretched fingers and took a long drag, savoring the grounding burn that tore at her throat. She hated this stuff – a hybrid of earth cannabis, altered with Blue Diamond’s essence to heavily impact gems – but she needed something. Her eyes slid closed as she resisted the need to exhale. The desperate impulse to take in clean air was deliciously familiar.

“Damn, Pearl said she was going to text-- you didn’t hear from her at all?” Amethyst snatched the blunt back and Lapis exhaled, watching the swirls of smoke trail away. Her insides felt like ice, and she had nobody to blame but herself.

“I blocked her two years ago,” she admitted, and Amethyst choked, coughing out the hit she just took until a laugh made it through the gagging.

“Bro! I’m sorry, that’s so funny!” Lapis smiled in spite of herself; she couldn’t be mad at Amethyst for her own inability to tolerate Pearl’s newsletter texts. Amethyst said, chuckling, “I wish I could block Pearl sometimes.”

She slipped the blunt from Amethyst and put it to her lips, standing up and pacing while vacuuming down the burning smoke, grateful for something physically distracting. She hated how sick she felt. The weed was kind of helping, but not enough. She kept smoking, hoping she’d level out eventually. Numb was ideal right now.

“I don’t think she’s going to, like, do anything stupid, you know?” Amethyst’s voice was suddenly tense -- serious. “I thought I had the past all sorted, and I know healing isn’t linear, or, whatever, but I can’t stop feeling like things are just as bad as they used to be. Y’know. Back then.”

Lapis passed back the blunt in stiff fingers, blowing out her own cloud of smoke and feeling her scalp begin to tingle, spreading a buzzing warmth down every nerve until her toes tingled. She slowly pieced together, “I think… I need Peridot.”

Amethyst mumbled, “You and me both,” and took a quick puff off the blunt, blowing the smoke out quickly and pulling out her phone, typing one-handed.

The smoke curling from the ashen tip was making Lapis’ eyes burn. I miss Peridot. She plucked the blunt back from Amethyst, nearly finishing it off in one long pull that burned her throat raw. The strain and ache and fire from holding it all in as long as she could tolerate was a beautiful distraction. She wished she had booze so she could add more types of burn to the mix. What if nothing terrible happens? What if something good happens?

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t ready for this,” Lapis said thickly, struggling to hold back tears now that she was high, inhaling deep and exhaling slowly.

“Listen… I feel you. Literally nobody in my life has come for me the way Jasper did, and I’m still fucked up about it. I don’t blame you for feeling messy right now,” Amethyst said, setting aside her phone and staring out the window.

Lapis didn’t know what to say. She was pretty sure she’d done far, far worse things to Jasper than Jasper did to Amethyst. Lapis hated that everyone saw her as a victim of Jasper’s and would likely assume that was the source of her distress. Jasper wasn’t anywhere close to the worst gem Lapis had encountered -- though she was one of the most pathetic. Aside from me.

She wiped her face, angry at herself. She felt like she was regressing into old thinking patterns, but she didn’t feel like she had the power to stop it. The warp exploded with light and Peridot tumbled towards her, panting; saying between heavy breaths, “I got here as fast as I could! Lapis, are you okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” Lapis said, irritated, suddenly wishing she was completely alone. Why?

“I can’t believe she just. Showed up here! And now Bismuth is on gemsitting duty, and soon we’ll all have to deal with her,” Peridot said, rolling her eyes.

“Must be terrible for you. I’m sure you know exactly how I feel,” Lapis said, any hint of humor behind the sarcasm gone and replaced with pure venom. She could see herself unraveling in real-time, and she was horrified that she couldn’t stop it. Amethyst looked up from her phone, her eyebrows raised, and Peridot looked suddenly terrified.

“I didn’t say that! I have no idea how you feel about this specific topic,” Peridot said, twisting her hands together. “You’ve never talked about this! And you don’t have to right now, but… Lapis, I’m afraid of losing you again.”

It’s like everything inside her was screaming for her to lash out at Peridot harder. Give her a reason to want Lapis gone before she finds her own reasons.

Peridot would never do that. She’s begging for you to stay in her life, even after everything you’ve done to her. And then Lapis broke down, her guilt overflowing; sobbing into her hands helplessly, repeating again and again, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”

And they were both comforting her, reassuring her, promising that they loved her; she believed them. She was still sorry to put them in this position at all -- of having to love a monster like her. She’d just hurt them again and again until they were worn down to a shell of who they once were. Isolation was the safest place for her, really.

In the deep dark of early morning, Lapis and Peridot sat together under the stars, listening to the soundtrack of some anime that Peridot kept begging Lapis to watch. They hadn’t spoken for some time, and Peridot was fiddling with an old Gameboy when Lapis finally spoke, her voice tight. “That was embarrassing. I haven’t lost control like that in… years. I’m sorry I scared you.”

Peridot put down the Gameboy immediately and said, “No, no, I’m sorry that I made it about me when it wasn’t. I just don’t know what’s okay to say about any of this, and that’s hard, because now we can’t just avoid the subject. The subject is too big and loud to avoid.”

“I feel insane that I can be in the same room as Blue Diamond and feel… nothing. Not bad, not mad, not sad -- not happy, either. But Jasper showing up throws me into a spiral worse than any I’ve had since... maybe the one where I took the barn? I can see why that messes you up,” Lapis said with a frown, misery churning in her belly like nausea.

Peridot shrugged and wove it off. “Can I ask questions? You can pass on any that are too hard.” She was nervous again – twisting the corner of the oversized T–shirt she was wearing today into a wrinkled mess. That made Lapis feel even shittier. Peridot, of all gems, was at least owed the ability to ask her any question she ever wanted.

“Shoot.”

“You’ve told me so much about the mirror, about your feelings for the Crystal Gems initially, especially Pearl. But almost nothing about this. Was this fusion really worse than the mirror?”

“Yes... and no,” Lapis said, staring at the shimmering stars, nearly blotted out by Earth’s light pollution. She’d thought about it a lot and was ready for that one. “The mirror is something that was done to me. Something I had no control over, just another casualty of insane Diamond drama. Another victim of the war. It was the worst – I was conscious the whole time, I – nothing compares to the mirror. But Malachite… was entirely in my control.”

“But you were just trying to stop Jasper from hurting the Crystal Gems. That’s what Steven told me, when you were still… with her,” Peridot said, seeming to doubt herself more with every word. Lapis’ heart raced; she felt sick.

“When he was still a kid? Garnet just beat her within an inch of poofing, and she begged me to fuse to save herself. She couldn’t have made me fuse against my will, which is why she used the Crystal Gems to try to persuade me. Take them down together, get revenge on the evils done to us both by them,” Lapis said, feeling it all pour out of her like Spinel’s injector poisoning the Earth. Talking about it felt good, but she knew the truth was terrible.

“I hated all of them, all of you -- everyone except Steven. And I couldn’t hurt the Crystal Gems if I didn’t want to hurt Steven, but I could take it all out on Jasper, easy. And she was stupid enough to bring up the mirror, and stupid enough to try to stop me from leaving. I wondered if she knew what being trapped so helplessly felt like.” Lapis paused, hating herself. “I could have poofed her, shattered her, punched her across the planet, flung her into space, any number of things -- but then what? Live with the gems who kept me in that mirror?”

She put her face in her hands, exhausted; afraid to see the horror in Peridot’s eyes whenever it clicked that she was an irredeemable monster. She felt like a shriveled-up husk and wondered, with a sense of irony, if throwing herself in the salty ocean would give back the energy that crying took out of her.

“And so, you feel… bad? That you did that?” Peridot sounded genuinely confused. Lapis nearly laughed but was too tired. At least she developed beyond her old habit of rattling off replies and advice fueled by assumptions. She looked her in the eyes, imploring; determined to make her understand. Still afraid to see her understand, but she needed to. Lapis needed her to.

“Peridot, if it had been you stopping me from leaving and begging me to fuse, it – yeah, I know you wouldn’t, shut up for a second and put yourself in these shoes – it would have been you, suddenly aware you can’t escape within seconds of us fusing and dragged to the deepest darkest trench of the Atlantic Ocean. I would have had access to your worst fears and memories while being too strong for you to shut me out, and I would have enjoyed using that to torture you.” There’s that flicker of fear in her eyes. Finally.

Lapis pressed on, steamrolling over the spark of panic that made her chest clench. “Every bit of suffering I put her through, I could feel as if I was doing to myself. I still get her war and Homeworld torture flashbacks as if they’re my own. It was only Jasper because she put herself in my way, and even at her strongest, she only had a fraction of my power! When we fought Alexandrite, it was because I wanted it! I wanted it so badly, and I knew Steven wasn’t there that time, and she called me on that weakness. She could never take control from me -- our fusion stabilized because we felt the same way in that moment. Bored, exhausted, and ready to shatter the Crystal Gems… whole, for the first time. Joined together without resistance or doubt, finally. And then we weren’t.”

Peridot’s shock slipped away, and she said, in all sincerity, “I’m glad I got the option to bond with you over Camp Pining Hearts instead of that option. Fusion sounds tedious.”

And Lapis laughed, feeling the hard stone shell that had formed around her heart that day burst, and she was flooded with affection for Peridot. She should have trusted the gem who called Yellow Diamond a clod to her face before Era Three to be relentlessly fearless.

Maybe her fearlessness stemmed from her youth and lack of exposure to true horrors. It was refreshing, regardless. Contagious, even. Smiling, Lapis said, “Me too, Pear. How would I understand the complexities of CPH without you?”

“Ugh, you wouldn’t! My expert analysis is fundamental to the experience,” Peridot said with an air of mock importance. Her voice slid back to her normal cadence as she said, “Thank you, also... for telling me about this. I’ve been misunderstanding your perspective for years. Understanding you is important to me.”

“Even if my perspective is really, really dark?” Who does she think I am, really?

“You’ve always been a little dark, I guess? The Lapis who did those things is the same Lapis that took the time to get to know me, even though she really didn’t want to. And sure, you took the barn and broke my heart, but you’re so important to me and I’d rather you remember that and always come back than leave forever out of fear or guilt.” Peridot had a warm little grin that made Lapis want to cry again. She didn’t deserve these gems. She crawled forward and kissed her gem, and then her mouth, and then her cheek.

“As long as you’re here, I won’t leave again,” Lapis promised, giving Peridot one more kiss on the gem. And she meant it, though her trust in herself was relatively low.