Related to "Chille Tid" and thoughts about the two of them stuck together since "Jailbreak".
Here, have your one requisite.. whatever this is. 8D
Jasper was strong.
Her form was strong, her will stronger. She had commanded armies and fought in - no, won - the war, and countless battles before the war. She had single-handedly seen to the destruction of the forces of Rose Quartz, albeit not the destruction of the traitorous gem herself. She had seen death, and laughed in its face.
She was strong, a hot-blooded warrior. She lived to fight.
And now, she fought to live.
Living wasn't the right word. Existing. She fought for the right to exist. Every day spent trapped in this prison of light and water meant another piece of her identity slipping through her once-strong fingers, which clawed and tore at her shackles - were they real? they felt real - in a desperation she had never felt before.
It felt like losing.
Tiny, weak Lapis Lazuli - the coward, the elemental, the waif with water wings in lieu of an actual weapon that she knew of - easily kept her down. She could feel her struggles, true, but it was no different than someone keeping closed a particularly stubborn door.
Jasper threw her full strength at that door, and it only budged when the other was off-guard. It was getting harder for her to fight, and harder for Lapis to contain her.
The only thing that kept her strong, kept her Jasper was her hatred, boiling inside her even as she choked and drowned and crumbled. Hatred of her prison, hatred of her warden, hatred of Rose Quartz, hatred of Earth and all its inhabitants and anything she could think of, right down to the smell of salt water - it was beginning to drive her mad, that scent. If she faltered on that hatred, deigned to consider anything but vengeance, allowed herself to really think- she would lose herself, and she knew it.
They both knew it.
Her own name was beginning to feel unfamiliar to her. She only knew her captor's because it didn't feel right just to hate the idea of her. She had to curse something.
Malachite waited just beneath the surface like a shark in the ocean - the damned ocean - toxic and empty, biding her time to consume them both. The longer they struggled against each other, the more helpless they would be to her eventual attack. Malachite was the burning sickness that ebbed just beneath her hatred, an acrid, pungent taste in the back of her mouth that overpowered the saline dredges from her so-called partner's power.
She hated Malachite as much as any of them, and that hatred kept her from her clutches.
But, helpless and fighting, clawing her way towards the surface against her chains- on the other side she could feel more than see Lapis Lazuli beginning to submit to the twisted creature that should never have been formed. And Jasper knew exactly why- there were no illusions of selflessness, of protecting Earth or the Crystal Gems or some arbitrary Greater Good.
The coward was selfish and spiteful.
She would run into the arms of the monster and welcome her destruction, because it meant the destruction of the gem bound to her by her own making.
Selfish, spiteful Lapis Lazuli pulled her chains that much tighter, dragging her deeper into the abyss. It didn't matter how hard she fought, how desperately she wanted to escape. It didn't matter that the coldness of something - she didn't want to call it fear, she wasn't afraid of anything, she had laughed in the face of death, she didn't want to die - sliced through her boiling hatred like a sword through the back of her head, both encouraging and discouraging her struggles.
Jasper was not strong, and they both knew it.
