War Machine
“Garnet?”
Garnet is sitting and leaning against one of the few pillars in the sky arena that are still standing. Her arms rest on her drawn up knees. It’s quiet here, the air cold and devoid of the high strung emotion and energy that rampages through the war camp. Nobody’s been to the sky arena since that fateful altercation, Garnet figures, because the rebellion was officially declared here eight months ago, and nobody wants to be reminded of how damaging just that was. Garnet doesn’t mind how empty it feels here, though. She’s in need of solace and time to recoup—there was a skirmish over control of the lunar sea spire today, and she along with fusions Ametrine and Moonstone had been at the forefront for most of it. That was their job, of course, and they did it well, but for a gem who was birthed in love instead of artificially accelerated geological processes there is some level of dissociation that needs to be done, slowly and methodically, in the aftermath of each battle.
And, apparently, Garnet has underestimated other gems’ determination to find her.
Garnet glances over, but it’s only Pearl. All of her eyes close from behind her reflective visor, and she tilts her head back against the cool, steady stone of the pillar.
“Where is Rose?” she asks without moving. “Usually you would be with her.”
“She’s… fraternizing with humans again.” Pearl lets out a breath and sinks to a kneel beside Garnet. For whatever reason, she seems to be aiming to stay. “I don’t follow her there. I don’t see what she sees.”
“Ah,” is all Garnet says.
They sit in silence for a minute or so, but Garnet is just waiting. She knows from the slight tension surrounding Pearl that there is something on her mind.
“Garnet, may I ask you something?”
“Not like you to be so polite towards me,” Garnet remarks, though a part of her is teasing. By now they’re friends, long past the days when Pearl would shoot suspicious glares at Garnet’s glasses when she didn’t think anyone was looking.
“Nonsense,” Pearl huffs. “I show you plenty of politeness and respect!”
Garnet’s shoulders bounce with a small chuckle as she remembers a time where making other gems indignant used to be something Ruby and Sapphire did for sport. “What is it, Pearl? Just ask.”
“Do you… not feel safe?”
This question gives Garnet pause. She doesn’t move or open her eyes, but her entire body is stiff now. “How do you mean?” she wonders.
“Camp is less than a mile away. There are hundreds of gems there that would willingly go into battle to protect one of their own, even in between battles like this—and you are unequivocally one of our own. Do you not realize that?”
“I realize,” says Garnet slowly, but nothing can shake the feeling of dread that is coiling in her gut.
Garnet can feel Pearl staring hard, and finally she opens her eyes and turns her head to meet the pastel gem’s gaze.
“Do you, though?” asks Pearl with a furrowed brow of concern. “Because I think, if you actually felt safe, you would both be here.”
Garnet looks away and lets out a long, slow breath. She shifts her arms until the backs of her hands are resting on her knees, looks to the glinting jewels that make her. Most gems’ first exposure to fusion being its wartime application has left a peculiar, if somewhat predictable, impact. To these rebels fusion is, first and foremost, a way for outnumbered and outgunned battalions to turn the tides. Garnet’s own prowess on the battlefield—her tireless strength combined with her elemental affinities—is simply more proof of the same. Fusions are strong and useful. They are sentient war machines, and all the more formidable for that, but they’re still just that: machines. Tools.
And the fact that stoic, business-oriented Garnet never unfuses must mean that Sapphire and Ruby feel constant danger and persecution, otherwise why else would they maintain this form?
Garnet has always chalked her relatively small handful of friends up to the fact that she’s not very talkative or sociable. In hindsight, this explains a lot of gems’ reacting to her as if she struts around to flaunt the simple threat of her own existence.
“You’re not the only one who’s wondering this, are you?” she says it, but it’s not really a question.
“Rose says you two have always been this way,” Pearl confesses. “And while I certainly haven’t known you for the last two-thousand years like she has—it’s scarcely been four-hundred-and-ninety-nine—I still figure that you have to miss being yourselves sometimes, right? And then there’s the issue of gems losing themselves to their fusions if they stay fused too long… I suppose.” She pauses and shifts her weight awkwardly, trying to find the right words. Her hands, resting over her knees, grip them now in nerves. Then she says, “I suppose the rest of us are just wondering what you think is so important that you’d risk losing yourselves for it, and if you’re this scared then how much more worried should we be?”
Fledgling fusions are closer to being tools, Garnet supposes. They are new and powerful bodies to pilot, explicitly controlled by their counterparts, and Garnet knows from her own three- and four-gem fusions what that feels like. But Garnet has been around for nearly 2,000 years now, with only a handful of interruptions, and by this point her identity is as unique and complex as Pearl’s. Ruby and Sapphire are mostly dormant these days; Garnet has been autonomous for centuries.
She knows she’s an anomaly, but that doesn’t invalidate her personhood, does it?
“Pearl,” says Garnet quietly, not looking up from her palms. “If there was something that terrifying always lurking around the next corner, don’t you think I would have said something by now? When have I ever not passed on a warning?”
“I—” Pearl stops. Garnet can hear the problem in that one syllable: she comprehends intellectually, but she doesn’t understand. And if Pearl—one of her friends—doesn’t understand, then Garnet can only imagine what the rest of Rose’s troops are feeling.
It was her mistake to introduce the combative advantages of fusion before anything else, so perhaps Garnet has even more of a reason to stay herself, to prove that there are other applications for the technique—entirely new people to be discovered through it.
“Ruby and Sapphire are both here, Pearl. They’ve always been here,” says Garnet. She curls her fingers over her palms, and takes comfort from the two unique pulses of life that thrum against them. “I’m not afraid of anything more or less than anyone else, and neither are they. This is just who we are—this is who I am.” She looks to the smaller gem. “It has nothing to do with the power—that is incidental, but admittedly useful. I wish I knew how to make you understand the love that goes into keeping me whole.”
“Love?” Pearl is either incredulous or beside herself. Right now, Garnet isn’t sure that there is a difference between the two.
She gives the young gem a flat look. “What else did you think this level of constant intimacy stems from?”
Pearl, who has experienced fusion herself at this point, flushes blue. The conversation pinches off. Perhaps Garnet has convinced her, but she doesn’t think so.
Of course, even if she did manage to win Pearl over it wouldn’t make much of a difference, because there is still the rest of the rebel army, and this point their opinions cannot be changed wholesale. Not even by Rose.
It isn’t until Pearl’s own relationship with Rose deepens and the war is nearly won that she finally understands—and even then, it still takes decades of carefully worded questions for her to fully wrap her mind around the concept that becoming half of a whole is not an issue for Sapphire and Ruby. In Garnet they are not lost, they are found, and the mutuality of their relationship with their fusion has very little to do with their combined fighting power.
Nevertheless, the acceptance is hard won, and perhaps after having it so many centuries Garnet has come to take it for granted. After all, just because her closest friends understand and welcome her doesn’t mean the rest of gemkind can or will. It’s hard to see someone as ‘made of love’ when the raw power of the new fangled concept called fusion is what helped to win the war.
So it happens that when Peridot so glibly spits out the term “filthy war machine” through Steven’s bathroom door, a part of Garnet snaps like a cable that’s been pulled altogether too taut. Her gauntlets are out before she can blink, and she finds herself concluding “Okay, let’s kick her butt” with a level of gung-ho aggression that does no favors for the argument that she is so much more than a weapon.
She’s glad that Steven stops her, in the end. While Peridot is annoying as all get out, and Garnet doesn’t like her, that doesn’t mean Garnet should imitate the same brutal system she fought against five thousand years ago to prove her point. That would be flying in the face of everything she claims to believe in—everything she has become.
Garnet is more than just a useful tool that wins wars. She is her own person. A lot has been happening this last year—more than usually happens in five hundred—and perhaps she’s internalized more of Homeworld’s harmful dogma than she should, but as soon as she loses sight of who she is everything she’s worked so hard to prove becomes utterly moot. She can’t let that happen. She and the two gems she carries with her are worth so much more than that.
Being an anomaly doesn’t invalidate your personhood.
With the unbidden interjection comes a somewhat dusty memory of how Homeworld invalidates personhood regardless of whether or not you’re a fusion. It’s just what Homeworld does.
You’ve got something extra to share. You just have to show them.
That’s right. Garnet knows that, has for millennia, and Peridot doesn’t seem to—but how could she? She hasn’t been out from under Homeworld’s thumb for even a year, much less Garnet’s seven-thousand.
The old stigma of war machine caught Garnet off guard, it’s true, but she’s ready for it now. Peridot can’t shake her. Homeworld can’t shake her. And if she ever falters—well, she’s already been stopped from doing something she would regret once. Garnet supposes that that’s just was families are for.