"Oh my gosh, LAPIS! He's gonna say it again! Wait – I AM THE EGGMAN!"

"Peridot… you're too loud."

"I AM THE WALRUS! COO COO CACHOO!"

They had retained enough dexterity between the two of them to turn on the scrapped clock radio.

"Peridot… you're gonna wake up Phil."

"OH! Right!" Peridot hushed up. "I guess I got a bit floated away. I didn't know that music could be so MEANINGFUL."

"I told you it would be."

"But you're not a logical thinker so I didn't believe you."

Lapis smiled bemusedly.

"You haven't been acting very logical tonight yourself."

"What are you talking about?" Peridot held up one of the night's projects, a conglomerate item of red and gold and purple. "The Rigabamboo is a highly functional thing to have! Percy would have WON the canoe race if he'd had one, remember?"

"What about the… that thing, the paint can thing?"

"Oh well THAT is different, Lapis! It's the combination of logic and emotion into something that transcends both of them."

It was a paint can inside another paint can. One had to break to fit the other. It was "Emotion" that was seeping yellow all over the floor.

"Emotion holds Logic," Peridot explained. "When Emotion holds Logic, things are logically better."

"It's oozing."

"And I don't see YOU doing anything about it, Miss Mop-Fingers!" Peridot slurred.

"Just look at it, Peridot. Emotion can't FIT Logic." Lapis swept a finger through the puddle.

"Lapis, you don't understand this AT ALL. I came up with something great, and you're ruining it."

Lapis dotted Peridot's nose.

"No… I think it means more than you think it does," she said. "Just like music."

"It IS music, Lapis. It's music in solid form."

Lapis smiled. It was cute… a Peridot trying to wrangle with the abstract. Doing everything to make tangible an intangible concept.

"I think we should call it… meep morp."

"What a wonderfully descriptive word," Peridot approved.

Lapis absently dragged the paint across Peridot's face. Their Earth hands lay together on the ground, wet from the spreading tide that was Emotion.

The old clock radio warbled on with a prosaic interlude. "You're listening to WDMV, Delmarva's favorite radio station, bringing you back to the Sixties for your late-night stoning session…"

"Pff! Humans, thinking they know things about stones…" Peridot tittered.

"…about to hear from Peter, Paul, and the late Mary Travers…" the radio kept going.

"And of course the humans are NEVER on time, either."

"Oh, Peridot… you can't blame the humans for being bad with time." Lapis picked up the paint-dripping mop as the music started again. "They have so many moments to pick from but so few fingers to hold them with."

Peridot thought for a moment.

"I suppose their existence does have a certain tragedy about it."

The radio beside them agreed, humming with strings and human tragedy. It sang of trains and whistles and being in that unsettlingly familiar place called 'gone.' "…Lord, I'm three, Lord, I'm four, Lord, I'm five hundred miles from my home…"

Peridot wiped her chin to find Emotion dripping down, translucent yellow. It hadn't been like that before.

"I wish *I* was five hundred miles from home."

She looked over, suddenly tired. Lapis was staring through the ceiling, fingers squeezing the paint out of her Earth hand. Only when an audible sniff escaped Peridot did Lapis turn to her.

There were no words. There was only the mutual shame of being seen that way, weak, guardless. Lapis dropped the mop head and wrapped Peridot in her arms. The two of them became one quaking mess of yellow streaks.

"…Lord, I can't go home this-a way…" sang Peter, Paul, and the not-on-time Mary Travers. This was the hurting it took to taste the air, to turn your gem around. That specific brand of pain that only grew on the planet Earth. They had paid, but not in full. Peridot tightened herself around Lapis.

"Lapis… I don't think I like music after all."

"Hush now."

Lapis pressed her lips to Peridot's gem.

The thing that brought people together… it had more than one name, but one of those names was hurt. Yet, it wasn't without its worth. The very point of contact between them was a morp, their bodies together were another. They were a live piece colored with a liquid stain whose name was a secret to all but them. If there was no logic between them, at least there was something beautiful.

The song eventually went quiet, but they didn't let go.