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Lapis set down the glue gun. "No," she said. "This isn't going to do."
Pearl looked at the glue gun Lapis set into her hands. "Of course," she said. "How could it possibly? There's no accounting for..." Her gaze darted up and down Lapis's newest art project. She couldn't begin to guess how it fit together or why.
"The weather," Lapis said. "I need it to fit the mood I'm in if I want this morp to meep out right. You can put the glue gun down now."
"Oh, good to know," Pearl did, turning around and latching the glue gun onto its designated slot on the wall of tools. When Pearl first volunteered to help Lapis out at the barn while Peridot was away on unnameable Peri-business, there had been a large box full of tools that Lapis dug around in one-handed when she needed something. Pearl insisted on making a board with hooks and notches for everything in the box. Lapis had adjusted, though not happily.
"Come on," she said, scooping up Pearl. "Let's make it rain."
"Oh, that won't be--" Pearl said, and Lapis deployed her wings and thrust both of them out of the barn in one mighty flap.
The sky was between slate-gray and charcoal-gray, the wind had turned cool, and the air seemed to thrum with tension. The world desperately desired to suddenly erupt in a nice, noisy thunderstorm, and it just was not happening.
Lapis described the feeling in that exact fashion, in fact.
"Well!" Pearl said, "It's a pity that Rose Quartz never quite got around to finishing the... oh, wait. You said that because you can do something about that, can't you..."
Lapis pointed upward and a matching, much larger hand made of water hovered out of the pool. "Not a lot of water stuff I can't do. Admittedly, I only learned this one recently. A little harder to force the water cycle along instead of just pressure-cutting everything in sight."
"I would imagine!" Pearl said. "After all, destruction is fairly mindless, and..."
Lapis held her hands out, palms to the ground. Her wings split into many long tendrils of water pointed at the sky. Her hair began to float around her head, as if she were underwater.
"Should I be getting an umbrella...?" Pearl said.
"Nope," Lapis said, softly, and clenched her fists.
Lightning split the sky, striking somewhere far away, and a few moments later a bone-rattling, glass-shaking peal of thunder shook the Gems.
"Oh, goodness!" Pearl said, feigning calmness poorly. "It certainly seems like we should be going back indoors! Can we go back indoors, please?"
Lapis Lazuli gave her an impish smile. "When I say so. Okay?"
"Surely this can't be a necessary part of the artistic process," Pearl said, and it began to rain, a thin drizzle that rapidly built steam into a driving downpour, raindrops drumming along the earth and the roof of the barn. They were both soaked in an instant.
Lapis held her arms out and twirled. Her hair was plastered to her head, her dress soaked to her knees in an instant. "Ah..." she said. "Rain."
Pearl fidgeted with her skirt. "Do say when we can go back inside," she said above the pounding noise.
"Give it a minute," Lapis said, taking her by the collar and pulling her close. "Isn't this great?"
"Well... it's very wet!" Pearl said. "I can understand wetness! Maybe not drinking it, but washing with it--"
"You like to dance, right?" Lapis said. "So dance. You're not getting any wetter, and you're not catching any colds anytime soon. And if you want the motivation..." She gave Pearl a twirl, spinning her around on her heel in the rapidly-muddying earth. "Then think of it as practice, in case you have to fuse in a rainstorm."
Pearl took a deep breath. "Alright. Rain. You'd think I'd be used to it after this long."
"Never too late to make it a friend," Lapis said, taking her by the hand. "C'mon. Let's enjoy."
"Well... if you don't mind taking the lead."
"Not at all," Lapis said. She held out her other hand, and Pearl took it. "Alright. Let's do a little something like this..."
Hand in hand, chest to chest, they danced on the grass.
Eventually the rain became too harsh, the thunder and lightning too close, and they returned to the barn, Lapis first, Pearl just behind her.
They had danced out in the field, to no music and only each others' company--for nearly an hour.
Pearl nearly glowed for how the lights shone off her rain-soaked skin. She squeezed water out of her hair, trickling it onto the floorboards, and she felt... good. It had been cold and slippery and loud at first, and it was all of these things all throughout her time dancing in the field, but...
Well. Lapis had no problem moving out there, and with a little practice, a little experience, Pearl found she could move just as well, just as surely. The smell of the soaked earth, the plants, the old plant-oils expressing through the dampened rocks--well, it had been a posy she had never stopped to appreciate before.
"It was nice, right?" Lapis said, taking a seat on the wooden floor. She didn't bother wringing out anything, nor using her powers to dry herself off. She just sat there soaked and smiling.
"It was!" Pearl said, surprising herself. She wrung out her skirt. "It's very... sensuous. All those, sensations, all at once, it was, eheh, it was even a little bit overwhelming." She kicked rain from her shoes. "If I may ask, what was the mood you were hoping to invoke with the rain?"
She turned to Lapis and saw only a damp circle where she had been sitting, like someone had set a giant mug of coffee there. Of course, there were footsteps trailing away from the ring, and they were leading--
--and Lapis was in front of her with an enormous, plush towel unfurled. "Coziness," she said.
"Really?" Pearl said. "It'd be cozier to stay indoors, if I may be so presumptuous as to say."
"Oh," Lapis said, "it's decently cozy to be inside when it's raining. But you know what's cozier?" She twirled the towel around and deftly ensnared both of them in it, pulling them together tight. "When you're wet and happy and smelling amazing, and you're back indoors, where it's warm and dry, and you can be warm and dry together."
Pearl blushed, the charming cyan color staining her cheeks. "Ohh... why, yes. That is much, much cozier."
They tried to reach one of the hammocks, but settled for lying on the floor, on their sides, swaddled in warm, almost ticklish terrycloth, eye to eye, nose (pretty much inevitably) to nose.
"Welcome to the floor," Lapis said. "Pretty cool, isn't it?"
"It's stable, it's comfortable. This is a very fine floor," Pearl said, smiling. She bumped her cheek against Lapis's. "And I have some very fine company, too."
Lapis giggled, moving her hands under the towel to wrap around Pearl's midsection, one hand stroking her lower back, another between her thin shoulderblades and along her holo-spine.
Pearl made a surprised, but pleased, noise, and arched her back like a surprised kitten. In return, she locked her long, skinny legs around Lapis's somewhat more robust thigh, and clasped her own hands around Lapis's famous midsection, her skin damp and soft, taut but yielding, under her delicate fingers.
Wrapped together, wrapped around each other, they waited out the storm in the finest comfort.