Chapter Two: The Ocean
Tigereye Quartz looked herself over in the mirror of a fast-food restaurant bathroom. She was seven feet tall, with burnt orange hair and skin. Her hair fell in tightly kinked locks to her shoulders, and she had full lips that went well with the shape of her face.
I'm busty as hell, she thought as she went further down with her eyes. And those hips. Then she was pleased to find that she was stronger than the two of her components put together, with solid muscles and well-sized fists.
Then the fusion realized she was massively drunk. She made a mental note that blood alcohol levels are cumulative when fused. Then she remembered something that Steven had said when he first learned about fusion, about sharing a stomach. She laughed, a hearty, deep laugh. It sounded good, so she talked to herself for a minute to hear her voice. It was a warm, colorful contralto with a little bit of a gravel edge on it.
"Well, this is nice. I... We should have done this last time."
"We should have done this a long time ago."
"Ah, the fusion or the beer?"
"Both, of course."
She staggered back out and ordered a burger, at about the time Steven and Connie walked in. Their jaws dropped.
Turquoise's room was exquisite. A marble fountain was set in a courtyard with four wise, ancient trees-holographic, of course, but exuding a feeling of life, nonetheless. In the fountain, Turquoise was bathing, wringing out the water from her pale blue hair and humming a new song. The water was cool; it would have been too cold for Pearl but too warm for Sapphire.
She stood up, and a synthetic sunbeam from somewhere far above fell on her. She had four arms, turquoise skin with dark freckles, and long wavy hair. She most definitely had Pearl's nose. She had eyes in the normal places, and one that must have belonged to Sapphire, which had migrated to the palm of her left hand opposite Sapphire's gem.
Her future vision was muddled-she guessed that Pearl's anxiety about the future made it difficult to look into it objectively.
She thought back on her past lives, about Garnet, about the memories that Garnet and Pearl never shared, about Sapphire's life before Ruby, and many other things.
Suddenly, an all-too familiar panic seized both sides of her personality. Steven! We haven't seen him in hours! She toweled off and ran to the temple gate.
"So how did this happen?" Connie asked.
Tigereye Quartz was sitting on a stool, because she couldn't get her knees under the table to sit in the booth. Steven and Connie were sitting together on one bench, and some local teenage boy was leaning over the back of the opposite bench, gawking at Tigereye's cleavage.
Tigereye, for her part, was relishing the attention.
"Sapphie and Ruby are, like, totally working some things out right now," she said.
"Is this about Lion knocking down that restaurant again?" Steven asked. He looked sheepish.
Tigereye looked at him, uncomprehending.
Steven scrambled for a new topic. "So, uh, are we gonna go on any missions like this? I mean, with you and you as..."
Turquoise stepped in. Her hair was pulled back and she had a dark look in her eyes. She held her left hand in front of her, as though to burn holes in them with the gaze of her third eye. "Qu'est-ce que vous faites?" she snapped.
"What."
Turquoise blinked. "I said, what are you two doing?" She tilted her head to the side, as though to address only one half of the fusion. "Pay attention, Ruby, we learned that one a long time ago."
Tigereye thought back through Ruby's memories. Yes, indeed, Garnet had been to Paris centuries before and known a young writer who'd turned her exploits into a tale of knights and royalty. What had his name been? De Troye?
"Jenny parlay-paw the fransays, dude," she said, at last. "Sorry, it's been a long, long time."
A moment passed.
"It happens every time, Ruby. We split up and soon enough, I find you somewhere slacking off or getting in trouble-or teaching Steven bad things..." Ironically enough, she sounded more like Pearl.
"I think-" Steven began to say.
"I think," Tigereye said, "that we're two people who've never met, arguing about things that didn't happen to us, sis. Calm down."
Connie, for her part, watched in total fascination. It took her only a few seconds to spot the four gems and realize that Pearl was fused with Sapphire and Ruby with Amethyst. She began to speculate on what must have been going through the two fusions' minds.
Suddenly, it struck both the fusions that they were playing each other's parts. Tigereye realized that in her combined lifetimes, neither half of her had ever been the reasonable one, and Turquoise suddenly felt hot and winded from getting angry and shouting. Wasn't that Ruby's job?
They laughed at themselves and each other for a moment, and then Turquoise went back to the temple. "Don't let Steven get into trouble," she said in the doorway, without turning her head.
Tigereye got laughed out of the liquor store sometime later when she couldn't show an ID. So with the last of the alcohol glowing in her fingers and joints, she waded out after sunset and swam gracelessly in the sea. She kept trying to feel the Earth turning beneath her, but kept making herself dizzy instead. She'd stand up, and stretch out her arms, then fall over into the crashing surf. The salt taste would flood into her mouth and she'd have to pull herself up to spit it out.
Steven and Connie sat on top of Lighthouse Hill and watched the waves coming in, silver with moonlight, unable to see the drunken display far beneath.
Far off in a scattered debris belt near the Earth, the clockwork minglings of different gravities came together in the precise combination to produce a net effect. A chunk of ice was slung around like a coin on a string by the gravity of a human-sized rock. Escaping the pull of the other debris, it was flung towards the Earth.
As it fell through the mesosphere, it melted, revealing a dark grey sphere at its core-a Pearl, in fact.
Stretched out below was a continent, ringed with clouds and shining green in the springtime daylight. The Pearl fell, tumbling end over end, finally taking form among the clouds. She fell headlong towards the rebel world, knowing well what she would find.
On the other side of the temple, Turquoise too was swimming in the ocean, without knowing that Tigereye was doing the same. She made graceful kicks and strokes, making laps that no human athlete would ever beat. Somewhere deep inside her, Pearl felt exalted by the new and graceful form of the fusion, and Sapphire shared in the glow. Even the light of the tyrant's moon couldn't tarnish the night.
Suddenly, a flash came in her third eye. She could barely make it out, but a slender bipedal form was striding through a burning building in the vision. It had dark intentions, and it carried a long sword.
Two days passed, but the vision still made her shudder.
