#baby witch getting started in 21st century techno-witchcraft

[kaikamahine]

hiii, oh gosh, for once online when you reblog one of these

SALV MY DARLING THE LIGHT OF MY LIFE. You are always welcome to leave me prompts even if we’re not online simultaneously!!

Also, did anyone ask for a witch!AU? Because here u go.

*

5: Nail polish, silver rings, boots made for jumping in puddles

When Peridot was younger, and hadn’t yet learned that her perfect, reasonable, logical, brilliant mother could be wrong, they had a square patch of dirt between their front porch and the fence where their neighbors – with their identical patches – all grew scrappy blue fescue and tried to squeeze in Fisher Price playsets.

“What are we going to do with it?” she asks, clinging to the arm of her mother’s chair and holding very still, both wanting attention and terrified of it, too.

Slowly, her mother pulls her head up. Everything she does is deliberate, precise, no movement wasted. “We’ll make it a weapon,” she decides.

And that’s how Peridot grows up with a garden.

(”Dude, how is a garden a weapon?” Amethyst goes.

“Ugh! Against the bourgeoise, Ames, don’t you know anything? Refusing to have a lawn and commit to the expense of its noisy, unproductive upkeep fights the capitalist agenda!”

“Wow, I didn’t know tomatoes were that powerful,” Steven says. “That adds a whole new meaning to the word ‘superfood’!”)

*

Monitoring the garden’s growth became Peridot’s job, year after year. She snipped buds, staked tomatoes when they got leggy, collected seeds into folding sachets to restart next spring, canvassed the neighborhood after heavy rain to collect earthworms to smash up in the compost, smeared the fence with rancid garlic and chilies to keep the rabbits and raccoons and opportunistic teenagers out.

“Are you a greenwitch?” the neighbor’s girl asks her, peering through the chainlink gate. She’s got a bicycle helmet with flames painted on the sides and two Power Rangers band-aids protecting a scrape on her elbow, and Peridot is painfully jealous of how cool both those things are.

She sits back on her heels. “No, I just work hard,” she says, and then, because it’s that time of year when everything happens at once, “Hey, does your mom want any zucchini?”

*

Her mother gets news from Blue’s coven the week of Peridot’s fourteenth birthday, two months into the new school year. She uproots them and moves them north that same week, a heaving disruption in Peridot’s life like it’s rolling over and sloughing its skin.

“But - “ she tries, and her mother’s knuckles whiten over a rune, eyes coming up to cut at Peridot in that familiar way; why can’t I whittle you to a convenient size.

She says, “Do you have something to say?”

“No, ma’am,” Peridot ducks.

She doesn’t know anything about the north. She doesn’t even own winter gear - just her worm-hunting galoshes, with the ladybugs on them. And her mother won’t let her take those.

There’s no room in the car for sentimentality, so don’t waste our time. Only take what can’t be repurchased.

The spellbooks go into boxes, the rowan rings into bins with the maps the other covens lent them, and the warded topaz bottles get wrapped in cheesecloth to keep their contents calm during the car ride. Her mother hires Jasper to pack the car; she’s the starting quarterback whose trophies are behind glass in the hall where Peridot has - had - her locker. She’s more Arizona-colored than Peridot imagines the entire state of Arizona to be, and whenever her mother has to touch her, she immediately wipes her fingers on the pleats of her pants after.

“I hate it when witches bury themselves in someone else’s grave,” is all she says, inspecting her fingertips like she expects them to still be slimy, like Jasper’s gone-off, rotten all the way through. “Such a waste.”

The night before they leave, Peridot sneaks out the front door.

She starts with a pair of pruners, but those aren’t fast enough, so she resorts to her bare hands; the beans come up first, then the peppers, and the tomatoes as tall as their house, the sunflowers as big as satellite dishes shedding seeds for the birds. It’s the end of September, and Peridot had been looking forward to the weeks of canning ahead of her, pickling everything that could conceivably be pickled and adding them to the neat rows of salsa she made the month before.

When she’s done, the cement is littered with clumps of soil, naked roots, stems jackknifed out of their plots, and she breathes hard, looks at her hands, thinks: gravedirt, and, more accurately: grief.

In the morning, her mother walks over the carnage and doesn’t once look up from her phone.

*

(“LEAVE ME ALONE,” she shouts through the door, then scrabbles across the tile and pulls the shower curtain closed. “GO. AWAY.”

A hasty discussion happens in the hallway.

“- and that makes her just like us,” Steven’s voice comes out the loudest. “Come on!”

More muttering, and then Steven’s back, politely rapping his knuckles on the bathroom door.

“Okay, Peridot, you can stay there,” he calls. “There’s towels in the cabinet over the toilet. They’re pretty fluffy to sleep on, it’ll be fun! Oh! And can you water the plant, maybe?”

“The plant?” Peridot blinks, and looks around, and blinks again.

A pot sits on a ledge over the sink, sprouting tendrils in every direction that trail green, arrowhead leaves half-way to the floor. Curious, Peridot crawls over to inspect it, keeping her one remaining boot tucked possessively under her arm.

“What’s its function?” she asks, caught despite her best efforts.

“Uhh, I don’t … know?” Steven tries. “We don’t use it for spells, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Peridot’s brows come down. “Then what’s the point?”

A pause.

“There doesn’t have to be a point, Peridot,” Steven tells her, treading very carefully. “It just likes it in there. The low light and the humidity from the shower are good for it, and in return, it recycles our air. That’s a function, I guess.”

“You need to be more productive than just recycling air.”

“I don’t know, I’m pretty good at it,” and then Steven laughs, and Peridot touches a fingertip to one soft, green leaf. Her stomach knots itself up so complicated it probably deserves a boy scout badge: homesickness, earned.)

*

(”You know what this means, right!” Steven flings himself bodily down on top of her, somehow managing to squeeze her in a hug despite her greatest attempts to dead weight him into letting her go. “You’re one of us! You’re a Crystal Gem now!”

“Whether you like it or not,” Garnet adds, and her smile somehow even manages to reach her third eye, faintly illuminated over the skin between her eyebrows.)

*

(Amethyst props her hands on her hips. Hanging from her neck, the deep-cut pendant from which she got her name still glows from use, nestled against her breastbone.

”Okay, what’s really wrong with it?” she demands.

“I can’t do it,” Peridot says flatly.

Steven and Amethyst exchange a look. Peridot can feel it, the nonverbal discussion happening. She hunches her shoulders.

Her feet are sandy from the boardwalk, the toes bright green. Amethyst and Pearl had been painting their nails while waiting for the witch hazel to steep, and Peridot wanted in - she’d never done it before, since the fumes always gave her mother a headache. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. With runny eyes, she scrunches up her toes and starts dragging them on the cement, trying to get the paint to chip.

“You can’t - “

“Do magic,” Peridot snaps. “I can’t. I’m not a witch at all. Not in any way that matters.”)

*

She can’t do charms and wards like Steven, or transfiguration like Amethyst, and she definitely can’t do that elite-class elemental spellwork Lapis fires off without giving a shit. She’s not a (renegade) white-witch like Pearl, or a battle-witch like Garnet. She can’t even do necromancy like Jasper, and any idiot with half a brain can do necromancy - Jasper went and swore an oath to some coven leader Peridot never met, then never bothered to sever that bond when she went and got her throat cut. Honestly, and you wonder why the Diamond covens want to control all magic.

*

She’s seventeen, living in the north. She sleeps under the window in the barn, and it’s the best place she has ever lived. 

There aren’t any herbs drying from racks suspended from the ceiling (honestly, she’d like to see you try to avoid banging your head into those when you’re returning several day’s worth of dishes to the kitchen at three in the morning) and no jars of fermenting spells on the shelves, no crystals recharging and no chalk lines to worry about accidentally scuffing and ruining when making that aforementioned shame-trip to the kitchen. The plastic bins aren’t full of rotten ingredients or misbehaving charms winding down their half-life, but perfectly reasonable things, like wrenches, toilet bowl cleaner, and Lapis’s twelve different pairs of the same black jeans. (Although not in the same bin.)

It’s not like anywhere Peridot’s ever been before.

It’s wonderful.

“You’re not a very witchy witch,” she says to Lapis.

Lapis lifts one cobalt-blue headphone off her ear, and from where she’s standing Peridot can hear the tinny feedback. She can’t make out the melody, but she’ll bet three dollars and half a donut that it’s Hybrid Theory. Theoretically, there’s a limit on how many times a person can listen to “Crawling,” but Peridot feels that if she pointed that out, Lapis would just take it as a challenge. She’s twice Peridot’s age and walks around with a near-permanent expression that says I have seen some shit, just try me.

“If I got a familiar,” Lapis says dryly. “Would that make you feel better?”

Peridot perks up.

*

She teaches herself how to play the recorder by watching YouTube, and the look on Amethyst’s face the first time she demonstrates convinces her she probably should have tried the harmonica instead. The look on Steven’s face tells her she probably shouldn’t have used his roaming data to do it.

“Here,” he says sympathetically, and plants his ukelele in her lap. “Do you think you can name the notes if we play a scale?”

“Of course I can,” Peridot responds haughtily, and touches her fingertips to the spellwork etched into the wood.

(Everything Steven owns comes steeped in generations’ worth of magic and love, all patiently waiting for Steven to grow into them.)

(She wonders if this is what having a family is like: a place you go where the love is already in your size, just waiting for you to pick it up and put it on: I am a person Steven loves. She wonders if they know she has it waiting for them, too, whenever they want to wear it: I am a person Peridot loves.)

She keeps herself busy - with music, with the barn, with the unusual breathless hitch in her chest at the way the heavy silver of Lapis’s thumb ring looks against her dark skin, with coming up with solutions to things that aren’t really problems. Steven and his dad take her to the mall to get her a phone, which turns out to be like her mother’s scry stone but with faster Internet connection. The common misconception about magic is that it’s somehow cheating, the lazy way out, but Peridot grew up in a witch’s house and knows exactly how much hard work it takes.

Furtively, she takes cuttings from Steven’s bathroom plant, and then from a monstrous leathery green thing in the laundromat, and an aloe plant sitting in a grocery store display with sunscreen and Solarcaine, and before long has several small pots lining the windowsill as the cuttings take root. The sight of them makes her feel better instantly.

“I still don’t feel like I’m doing anything productive,” she tells Amethyst, who’s got her tongue stuck between her teeth in concentration, picking at the stenciling of the tiny spaceships she’s painting on Peridot’s nails.

Amethyst snorts derisively. “You’re living, P-dot. Life is here to be consumed.”

“Easy for you to say,” Peridot fires back. “I saw you put mayo on your cereal the other day!”

“Exactly! And if I wasn’t here to do that, who would have done it? If you weren’t here, who would tell me everything there is to know about Camp Pining Hearts?”

Peridot swells up. “OKAY BUT - “

*

Here’s the thing about magic.

No wait.

*

Here’s the thing about love:

It comes up like a garden grown out of heartstrings and ribs, and you can spend so much time cultivating it, caring for it, but you’ll never really know if you’ll suddenly have to uproot it, or if you can trust its care to anyone else because so many people come in with good intentions but black thumbs.

But to try -

It’s so brave, just trying; the hope that you’ll get sunflowers as big as satellites turning their faces to the sun, and you’ll have enough love left over that you’ll have to go door to door just to share it all. Peridot grew up in a house with no room for waste. She never knew she had this capacity.

Her mother was wrong.

The earth was never a weapon.

*

Silence lands on them with deafening force.

Steven’s jaw hangs open, and Lapis’s eyes make shocked smears of blue in her face. Peridot trembles.

Amethyst recovers first, her voice revving up, “Perrrrrrr-i-doooooooooot!”

She whoops and pumps the air with her fist.

“LOOK! Look at what you did!”

Peridot tilts her phone towards her, disbelieving.

Spell charged, the screen reads. Would you like to share on Facebook? A minute vibration travels through the phone case into Peridot’s hand. 

Magic, she thinks. My magic.

“I did it,” she says softly, in wonder. Then, louder, “I did it! Wait, what did I do?”

“I think,” and that’s Garnet, materializing behind them in that premonitory way she has. She’s smiling. “You made something entirely new.”

*